Online dictionaryOnline dictionary
Synonyms, antonyms, pronunciation

  Home
English Dictionary      examples: 'day', 'get rid of', 'New York Bay'




More "Inflexible" Quotes from Famous Books



... receive them in; and when they took leave, insisted on treating them to a double bowl of punch, which they were now discussing with the upper jailer, Mr. Ireton, and his two satellites, Austin and Langley. At a little distance from the party, sat a tall, sinister-looking personage, with harsh inflexible features, a gaunt but muscular frame, and large bony hands. He was sipping a glass of cold gin and water, and smoking a short black pipe. His name was Marvel, and his avocation, which was as repulsive as his looks, was that of public executioner. By his side sat a remarkably ...
— Jack Sheppard - A Romance • William Harrison Ainsworth

... of her mind, (much as she endeavoured to conceal it) entreated, nay implored of her, to permit her to be a mediator; to suffer her to ask for a private interview with Lord Elmwood, and if she found him inflexible, to behave with a proper spirit in return; but if he appeared not absolutely averse to a reconciliation, to offer it in so cautious a manner, that it might take place without farther uneasiness on either side. But Miss Milner peremptorily forbade this, and acknowledging to her friend ...
— A Simple Story • Mrs. Inchbald

... to verify himself, but which men of greater ability have sought out, or which the world adopts. On this groundwork he raises for himself the structure of his own thoughts; nor is he led to proceed in this manner by choice so much as he is constrained by the inflexible law of his condition. There is no philosopher of such great parts in the world, but that he believes a million of things on the faith of other people, and supposes a great many more truths than he demonstrates. This is not only necessary but desirable. ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 2 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville

... the means of obtaining it, he had the misfortune, at the outset of the contest, to clash with another who was ambitious for the glory of France, and as courageous but less able a politician than he; their rivalry, their love of power, and their inflexible attachment to their own ideas, under the direction of a feeble government, thenceforth stamped upon the relations of the two great European nations in India a regrettable character of duplicity: all the splendor and all the efforts of Dupleix's ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume VI. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot

... after she had gone slowly twenty yards down the path. The hermit had begun to twist the lid off his can, but he hid it again under his sacking robe. He could see her great eyes shining sadly through the twilight; but he stood inflexible in the doorway of his shack ...
— Options • O. Henry

... migrated to the Far East. He has been adopted by Buddhism, though no explanation is given of his status. But he is introduced as a vague but effective figure—and yet hardly more than a metaphor—whenever it is desired to personify the inflexible powers that summon the living to the other world and there make them undergo, with awful accuracy, the retribution due for their deeds. In a remarkable passage[735] called Death's Messengers, it is related that when a sinner dies he is led before King Yama who asks him if ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot

... objected that this proposed method of analysis assumes that religions begin and develop under the operation of inflexible laws. The soul is shackled by no fatalism. Formative influences there are, deep seated, far reaching, escaped by few, but like those which of yore astrologers imputed to the stars, they potently incline, they do not ...
— The Myths of the New World - A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America • Daniel G. Brinton

... affairs. He asked me much about young H. E., 'that bastard,' as he called him; doubting my lord's intentions respecting him. I reassured him on this head, stating what I knew of the lad, and our intentions respecting him, but with regard to Freeman he was inflexible." ...
— The History of Henry Esmond, Esq. • W. M. Thackeray

... least for whom he made these ornaments, he would refuse to come, since he would probably fear it was some commission; and he never will make anything for me on any account. And yet he has, it seems, dropped something of his inflexible obstinacy some time ago, for I hear that he now labours more industriously than ever, and delivers up his work at once, though still not without much inward vexation and turning away of his face." De ...
— Weird Tales, Vol. II. • E. T. A. Hoffmann

... himself thoroughly for the onerous duties of the office to which he had been appointed. Of its nature, importance, and far-reaching results, he had a distinct, vivid perception, and clearly realized and fully felt the responsibilities it imposed. He steadfastly prosecuted his work with a firm, inflexible will, unrelaxing tenacity of purpose, an amazing fertility of expedient, an exhaustless amount of information, a most wonderful skill in adaptation, a matchless ability in unfolding and vindicating his plans, a rare adroitness in meeting and removing difficulties—great ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson

... nearly as inflexible as that of the ante-bellum plantation, the South suffered disproportionately in years when cotton was low. Depression in the later eighties and the early nineties intensified the suffering of the debtor class and produced an inflation movement that allied the South ...
— The New Nation • Frederic L. Paxson

... accordingly. Rive made no other reply than that of taking the suspicious Benedick in his arms, and throwing him headlong out of the window. Luckily he fell upon a dunghill! In the year 1789, upon a clergyman's complaining to him of the inflexible determination of a great lord to hunt upon his grounds—"Mettez-lui une messe dans le ventre"—repiled [Transcriber's Note: replied] Rive. The clergyman expressing his ignorance of the nature of the advice given, the facetious Abbe replied, "Go and tear a leaf from your mass book, ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin

... first his mother treated his theories as the wild ravings of inexperience. But they were so systematically arranged, and his arguments so well supported, that though still in appearance incredulous, she began to fear him. She tried to reason with him, and finding him inflexible, learned to hate him. ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley

... was inflexible. "She must either allow her son quietly to leave this miserable life, or allow him to ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V1 • William Mienhold

... churches and thrones was soon made manifest. A systematic political opposition, vehement, daring, and inflexible, sprang from a schism about trifles, altogether unconnected with the real interests of religion or of the state. Before the close of the reign of Elizabeth this opposition began to show itself. It broke forth on the question of the monopolies. ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... herself. The strong love, kept down by a stiff, unbending manner, so, for years—resisting almost its own growth—would no longer be denied or concealed. Faith Gartney had nestled herself into the very core of this true, upright heart, unpersuadable by anything but clear judgment and inflexible conscience. ...
— Faith Gartney's Girlhood • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney

... Church at the expense both of the people and of secular authorities, and the further separation of the Church from the ties and sympathies of common life that bound it to humanity. To accuse Hildebrand of personal ambition would be but shallow criticism, though it is clear that his inflexible and puissant nature found a savage selfish pleasure in trampling upon power and humbling pride at warfare with his own. Yet his was in no sense an egotistic purpose like that which moved the Popes of the Renaissance to dismember Italy for their bastards. Hildebrand, like ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds

... of her religious life, she frequently felt called upon to rebuke those about her. She did it unhesitatingly, and as a righteous and an inflexible judge. ...
— The Grimke Sisters - Sarah and Angelina Grimke: The First American Women Advocates of - Abolition and Woman's Rights • Catherine H. Birney

... about that Henry Clay, the great Compromiser, left the Senate, going out at one door, on the very day that Conscience, in the person of this Puritan, entered it by the other door. John C. Calhoun, inflexible, iron to the end, adhering tenaciously to his doctrine of secession, had just died, quite unconscious of the fact that his speeches held the explosives that were to shatter the South and destroy half a million of his beloved people. ...
— The Battle of Principles - A Study of the Heroism and Eloquence of the Anti-Slavery Conflict • Newell Dwight Hillis

... ship-fever while caring for the imprisoned Americans at Charleston. Left destitute, young Jackson tried various employments, but finally settled down to the law, and in 1796 was elected to Congress. His imperious temper and inflexible will supplied him with frequent quarrels. He first distinguished himself as a military officer in the war against the Creek Indians. His dashing successes in the war of 1812 completed his reputation, and ultimately won him the Presidency. His nomination was at ...
— A Brief History of the United States • Barnes & Co.

... That he was very much mistaken, if he thought to intimidate you by such menaces: for that, though your disposition was all sweetness, yet I knew not a steadier temper in the world than yours; nor one more inflexible, (as your friends had found, and would still further find, if they continued to give occasion for its exertion,) whenever you thought yourself in the right; and that you were ungenerously dealt with in matters of too much moment to be indifferent about. Miss Clarissa Harlowe, ...
— Clarissa, Volume 2 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson

... gone she went away upstairs, telling herself at every step that she hated, hated, Edward Macleod; that he was in all things and in every way detestable. She did not weep nor bewail. The tears showed as seldom in her eyes as the blood in her cheeks, and her pride was of the inflexible sort that scorns to relax when its possessor is alone. She dropped into a heavy troubled sleep, and dreamed that she was solitary in a frozen land, whose only sunshine was the golden head of her lover. In the ...
— An Algonquin Maiden - A Romance of the Early Days of Upper Canada • G. Mercer Adam

... emotion something stronger than grief, to see a pastor of the flock of Christ thus cherish the spirit of persecution. On me the scene made but little impression. I had no apprehension that the day was coming, when this inflexible guide of Christians would find his prayers effectual, and his prophecies of vengeance fulfilled. How could I know that there was so hateful a vice as malignity? The holy seer did not indeed indulge his wrath quite so far as Elisha, at least not openly; he did not curse me in ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft

... is an arrangement analogous to that with the aid of which Tintoretto later on, in the Crucifixion of San Cassiano at Venice, attains to so sublime an effect. There the spears—not brandished but steadily held aloft in rigid and inflexible regularity—strangely heighten the solemn ...
— The Later works of Titian • Claude Phillips

... the new spirit and policy of the Roman Church, as they had been created and moulded by the great Jesuit order, and by reforming bishops like Ghiberti of Verona, and Carlo Borromeo of Milan. Devout and self-denying as a saint, fierce and inflexible against abuses as a puritan, resolute and uncompromising as a Jacobin idealist or an Asiatic despot, ruthless and inexorable as an executioner, his soul was bent on re-establishing, not only by preaching and ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church

... scanned them with a roving eye, till catching sight of an orderly two files from the left he had begged him, almost as a personal favour, to get his hair cut. To an untutored mind the orderly's hair was about one-eighth of an inch in length, but the O.C. was inflexible. He was a colonel in that smartest of all medical services, the I.M.S., whose members combine the extensive knowledge of the general practitioner with the peculiar secrets of the Army surgeon, and he was fastidious. Then he said ...
— Leaves from a Field Note-Book • J. H. Morgan

... may think mysterious about me I cannot unravel until you are indissolubly mine." It was a point of no slight difficulty; Emily entrusted its decision entirely to her mother. Her mother saw that the stranger was inflexible in his purpose, and she saw also that her child's happiness was inextricably linked with him. What could she do? It had been better perhaps they had never known him; but knowing him, and thinking of him as they did, there was ...
— Fifty-Two Stories For Girls • Various

... "but I think also of my fellow-countrymen who died here as a consequence of Spanish treachery, and also of those others who are at this moment lying captive and pining in your dungeons; and the latter thoughts render me inflexible. I will not fire a single shot at your town if I can help it; and it must be your task, senor, to so conduct matters and represent them to the Viceroy, that it shall be unnecessary for me to resort to such ...
— The Cruise of the Nonsuch Buccaneer • Harry Collingwood

... and Gneisenau and the protected cruisers Leipzig, Dresden and Nurnberg, accompanied by two colliers — the British admiral, besides the Sylph, would go into battle with eight ships of war — the battle cruisers Invincible and Inflexible, the former Admiral Sturdee's flagship, the cruisers Kent, Cornwall, Carnarvon, Bristol and Glasgow, and the ...
— The Boy Allies Under Two Flags • Ensign Robert L. Drake

... wild. She declared that he would take all the milk. And he did. For the next two months she was unable to make any butter, and her opinions on the subject were expressed without reserve. But Jabe was inflexible, in his taciturn, backwoods way, and the calf, till he was old enough to pasture, got all the milk he wanted. He grew and throve so astonishingly that Jabe began to wonder if there was not some mistake in the scheme of things, making cows' milk the proper ...
— The House in the Water - A Book of Animal Stories • Charles G. D. Roberts

... and gone in that Island of Cards. The Kokil, the bird of Spring, had sung its song year after year. But it had never stirred the blood as it stirred it now. In days gone by the sea had sung its tireless melody. But, then, it had proclaimed only the inflexible monotony of the Rule. And suddenly its waves were telling, through all their flashing light and luminous shade and myriad voices, the deepest yearnings of the heart ...
— The Hungry Stones And Other Stories • Rabindranath Tagore

... But his bloodstained, maltreated, crippled form standing in the way of her criminal advance towards the throne—is that not a symbol of maltreated humanity revolting against monarchy at the very moment when monarchy wishes to atone! Its guilt through thousands of years is too black. Fate is inflexible. ...
— Three Dramas - The Editor—The Bankrupt—The King • Bjornstjerne M. Bjornson

... unequal, but he has no right to consent to a sacrifice of the interests of his client while he is paid to protect them. The questions of professional ethics arising out of the relations between the engineer and the contractor are much too complex to be decided by an inflexible rule of professional conduct, but the engineer cannot make a mistake in refusing to remain in responsible charge of work when, by remaining, he must give consent to that which his judgment tells him involves a wrong to his client. With equal confidence may it be asserted that the engineer who secretly ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 530, February 27, 1886 • Various

... then, come, and cutting it—a condition he immediately observes. So the sensation dies off for the time; and the unmoved policeman (to whom a little opium, more or less, is nothing), with his shining hat, stiff stock, inflexible great-coat, stout belt and bracelet, and all things fitting, pursues his lounging way with a heavy tread, beating the palms of his white gloves one against the other and stopping now and then at a street-corner to look casually ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens

... his looks and manner bespoke the magnitude of the sacrifice he was making to vengeance, thereby giving a deeper colouring to the inexorable vindictiveness of his nature, and more forcibly illustrating the inflexible firmness of his soul. All other actors that we have ever seen reduce Zanga to a mere slavish croucher in all points; and destroy the very basis of the character by an overacted humiliation, highly improper ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol. I. No. 3. March 1810 • Various

... can be so happy as to cover its enterprises, even to the person himself, under the appearance of principle, it is the most incurable and inflexible of all human passions.—Hume. ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou

... and pleasures of life, and their frequent predictions of impending calamities, inspired the Pagans with the apprehension of some danger, which would arise from the new sect, the more alarming as it was the more obscure. "Whatever," says Pliny, "may be the principle of their conduct, their inflexible obstinacy appeared deserving ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon

... rich assemblage of amiable qualities, which the Editor cannot do better than display in the following extract, from the before-mentioned sketch, by the Rev. Samuel Greatheed. 'Hayley retained, I believe, throughout his life, a high sense of honour, inflexible integrity, a warmth of friendship, and overflowing benevolence. The last was especially exerted for the introduction of meritorious young persons into useful and respectable situations; and it was usually efficient, ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary

... to be inflexible. At last they came to a capitulation. Mormon promised to keep his hands off Sam, and the latter vowed he would gibe no more about Mormon's matrimonial affairs, past, present ...
— Rimrock Trail • J. Allan Dunn

... SOAPINGTON, the accomplished hostess, and the lovely Miss CLARA SOAPINGTON, all greeted me with that hearty welcome, so dear to the traveller. SOAPINGTON said he was glad to see me, and, seeing that it was me, he would be willing to infringe on his inflexible rule, and ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 24, September 10, 1870 • Various

... his pockets, which appeared to contain as great a variety of small cordage as a boatswain's storeroom, and proceeded to lash the arms of the conquered soldier to the posts of his bed, with a coolness that had not been disturbed since the commencement of hostilities, a silence that seemed inflexible, and a dexterity that none but a seaman could equal. When this part of his plan was executed, Tom paused a moment, and gazed around him as if in quest of something. The naked sword caught his eye, and, with this weapon in his hand, he deliberately approached his captive, whose alarm prevented ...
— The Pilot • J. Fenimore Cooper

... the amount of what might be saved from the fruits of their united industry. Sometimes, but indeed upon rare occasions, his temper appeared inclining to be irascible or impatient; but in general it was grave, cold, and inflexible, without any outbreaks of passion, or the slightest disposition to mirth. His wife's mind, however, was by no means so firm as his, nor so free from the traces of that secret regret which preyed upon it. She both murmured and repined, ...
— Fardorougha, The Miser - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton

... proud and inflexible in this breath!" said Estella, opening her hands. "And in his last breath reproached me ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens

... stern officials. One by one they were turned out from the well-filled pockets of David and Clive. Slowly and reluctantly, the two boys turned out those precious treasures. Sadly and mournfully they laid them on the table, under the stern, the inflexible, the relentless gaze of the three inexorable custodians, who, to David's mind, seemed the impersonations of Minos, Aeacus, and Rhadamanthus. Yea, all these, and many more,—fragments from houses, ...
— Among the Brigands • James de Mille

... good man in his virtuous and amiable conduct, in his unfeigned piety to God, in his inflexible fidelity to his trust, that we may welcome the grim tyrant Death, and receive him as a kind messenger sent from our Supreme Grand Master, to translate us from this imperfect to that all-perfect, glorious and celestial lodge above, ...
— Masonic Monitor of the Degrees of Entered Apprentice, Fellow Craft and Master Mason • George Thornburgh

... didn't know that. There was only once when she was really firm with me, making me do what she considered was best; I did not want to return to school after the unpleasant episode which I have related, and she was inflexible. ...
— The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man • James Weldon Johnson

... himself better in a moderate Fortune that is gained with honour and Reputation, than in an overgrown Estate that is cankered with the Acquisitions of Rapine and Exaction. Were all our Offices discharged with such an inflexible Integrity, we should not see Men in all Ages, who grow up to exorbitant Wealth with the Abilities which are to be met with in an ordinary Mechanick. I cannot but think that such a Corruption proceeds chiefly from Mens employing the first ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele

... headstrong, mulish, resolute, decided, heady, obdurate, resolved, determined, immovable, opinionated, stubborn, dogged, indomitable, persistent, unconquerable, firm, inflexible, pertinacious, unflinching, fixed, ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald

... and the physical expression of it were unique, and yet made up of the most complex elements;—simple, yet incomprehensible; strong, yet gentle; inflexible, yet conciliating; human, yet most rare; the strangest, and yet for all in all the most lovable, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 109, November, 1866 • Various

... point of style, the author had found something better to do this time than to cultivate the flowers of perfect speech. "Laura" was a triumph of intimate characterisation. And the brutal touches that disfigured his former work were absent from this; he had shown us that the boldest, most inflexible realism is compatible with a delicacy worthy of the daintiest ...
— Audrey Craven • May Sinclair

... rarer; and perhaps about the end of the third or fourth year, they altogether cease; and pass merely into the formal character. In which state they continued fixed, liable to no uncertainty; and were transacted, to the end of Friedrich's life, with inflexible regularity as the annual reviews were. This is a curious section of his life; which there will be other opportunities of noticing. But there is yet no thought of it anywhere, nor for years to come; though ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle

... pupil a virtuous and an accomplished man, and he knew very well that the system of laxity and indulgence which Sophia recommended would end in his ruin. After a considerable contest, Sophia, finding that Menesius was inflexible, manoeuvred to cause him to be dismissed from his office, and to have another arrangement made for the boy, by which she thought her ends would be attained. So Menesius bade his young charge farewell, not, however, without giving him, in parting, most urgent counsels to persevere, as he had ...
— Peter the Great • Jacob Abbott

... was to save his fellow-men from sin and error, sitting in judgment upon their belief and actions with the authority of a divinely appointed high priest. His laws, found on the statute books of the colony, or divulged in the records of court proceedings, exhibit the salient points in his stern and inflexible character, as a self-constituted censor and a conservator of the moral and spiritual destiny of his fellow-mortals. A fine was imposed on every woman wearing her hair cut short like a man's; all ...
— The Real America in Romance, Volume 6; A Century Too Soon (A Story - of Bacon's Rebellion) • John R. Musick

... dishearten or deter him in working out his purpose; if he said it, he did it; for his word was a sufficient guarantee that he would; his integrity was consequently respected, and his resolution, when he expressed it, was seldom disputed by his companions, who knew that in general it was inflexible. After what we have said, it is scarcely necessary to add that he was both courageous ...
— Phelim O'toole's Courtship and Other Stories • William Carleton

... labor market inflexibility resulting from the 35-hour workweek and restrictions on lay-offs. The tax burden remains one of the highest in Europe (43.8% of GDP in 2003). The lingering economic slowdown and inflexible budget items have pushed the budget deficit above the eurozone's 3%-of-GDP limit. Finance Minister Herve GAYMARD has promised that the 2005 deficit ...
— The 2005 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency

... P. Dunster, even in unconsciousness, had something in it of strength and purpose. The shape of his head, the squareness of his jaws, the straightness of his thick lips, all seemed to speak of a hard and inflexible disposition. His hair was coal black, coarse, and without the slightest sprinkling of grey. He had the neck and throat of a fighter. But for that single, livid, blue mark across his forehead, he carried with him no signs of his accident. He was a little inclined to be stout. There ...
— The Vanished Messenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... abstract entities was a kind of instinctive conciliation between the observed uniformity of the facts of nature, and their dependence on arbitrary volition; since it was easier to conceive a single volition as setting a machinery to work, which afterwards went on of itself, than to suppose an inflexible constancy in so capricious and changeable a thing as volition must then have appeared. But though the regime of abstractions was in strictness compatible with Polytheism, it demanded Monotheism ...
— Auguste Comte and Positivism • John-Stuart Mill

... knowledge, demands a different study and a fuller understanding. What changes, therefore, experience and suffering had wrought in those early, untried speculations! The ideals remained, but they made for swords, not peace; the sweetness of the dream had become an inflexible law of conscience; the doctrine of a transcendent disdain of this world, accepted in solitude by the obscure youth brought up in a provincial town, had exacted its tax to the uttermost farthing from the man who struggled now with the rich ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes

... say nothing further; the woman's eyes wavered before his and a little sob of terror forced itself between her shut teeth. Kirkwood smiled grimly, with a face of brass, impenetrable, inflexible. And suddenly she turned from ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance

... his bed with the sense of bereavement that had punished him all the preceding week: desperately sad, all but heart-broken, and feeling almost like a culprit, although his conscience, whatever that was worth, was thoroughly at ease, and his intent inflexible. ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier

... lips to speak of Edith Carr's despair. Twice he looked into the stern, inflexible face of Mr. Ammon and could not betray her. He ...
— A Girl Of The Limberlost • Gene Stratton Porter

... absorbed by increased prices. While some of our people have received raises in income which exceed price increases, the great majority have not. Those persons who live on modest fixed incomes—retired persons living on pensions, for example—and workers whose incomes are relatively inflexible, such as teachers and other civil ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Harry S. Truman • Harry S. Truman

... spite. He never allowed himself to be troubled by these unpleasantnesses, but went on his way without giving his enemies the pleasure of noticing the measure of success which, unhappily, attended their campaign. He remained inflexible in his conduct, and, disdaining any justification, went on doing what he thought was right, and which was right, as events proved subsequently. Although Milner had at last to give up, yet it is very largely due to him that the South African Union was ultimately constituted, and ...
— Cecil Rhodes - Man and Empire-Maker • Princess Catherine Radziwill

... question a remarkable man. In the qualities that endow a successful leader in a desperate cause he has never been surpassed. He had an iron will that was directed by an inflexible conscience. "To him," says James Freeman Clarke, "right was right, and wrong was wrong, and he saw no half lights or half shadows between them." He was a natural orator. I never heard him talk, either on or off the platform, but I have heard those who had listened to him, speak of the singular ...
— The Abolitionists - Together With Personal Memories Of The Struggle For Human Rights • John F. Hume

... it is to be observed that regulations are a general guide to conduct, and though they mean what they say they are not utterly inflexible. One must not be like the half-wit described by Col. George F. Baltzell to his trainees during World War I. Joe had attached himself to the Confederate command of the Colonel's father, whose last chore before turning in was to post the boy. One night in a Virginia Tidewater operation, Joe was ...
— The Armed Forces Officer - Department of the Army Pamphlet 600-2 • U. S. Department of Defense

... that a man who finds out that he is to die by a steel point can escape the doom by shutting himself up? Not he. Fate will take him out hunting, and there will be his steel: Adrastus will hurl his spear at the boar, miss the brute, and get Croesus's son; Fate's inflexible law directs his aim. The full absurdity of the thing is seen in the case ...
— Works, V3 • Lucian of Samosata

... up the matter purely out of friendship to the young man, and almost against his will, invoked every consideration of justice, delicacy, honour, and even plain figures; in vain, the ex-patient of the Swiss lunatic asylum was inflexible. All this might pass, but the sequel is absolutely unpardonable, and not to be excused by any interesting malady. This millionaire, having but just discarded the old gaiters of his professor, could not even understand that the noble young man slaving away at his lessons was ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky

... that paper made no further allusion to the subject. As for myself, I remained silent, following a rule that I had formed early in life, to avoid public controversy concerning my own acts. This rule, however, was not an inflexible one. ...
— Reminiscences of Sixty Years in Public Affairs, Vol. 1 • George Boutwell

... his cause— and to return to Plymouth, where a safe and a happy home might yet be afforded to them, and where no persecution for conscience' sake, need be feared. But all her arguments and her persuasions were alike ineffectual. On this one point she found her Roger firm and inflexible—for on this point he felt that his honor and his conscience were both concerned; and, even for Edith's sake; he could not act contrary to their dictates. He knew that danger hung over his head; and, though he would not shrink from it himself, he besought ...
— The Pilgrims of New England - A Tale Of The Early American Settlers • Mrs. J. B. Webb

... disunion with impunity, the mere suggestion that the existence of slavery was incompatible with freedom in the Union would hazard the political chances of any public man in the North. But Lincoln was inflexible. "It is true," said he, "and I will deliver it as written.... I would rather be defeated with these expressions in my speech held up and discussed before the people than be victorious without them." The statesman was right in his far-seeing judgment and his conscientious statement of the ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln

... conformity with one of the colonel's inflexible rules,—every guest under his roof, within one week of his arrival, was to be honored by a personal call ...
— Colonel Carter of Cartersville • F. Hopkinson Smith

... harangue to the Cousinry, with all its passion and flashing scorn, is true rather to her generic character as the injured champion of her dead lord than to her individual variety of it—the woman of subtle, inflexible, yet calculating devotion. Miranda's soliloquy before he throws himself from the Tower is a powerful piece of construction, but, when the book is closed, what we seem to see in it is not the fantastical goldsmith surveying the motives of his life, but ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford

... than most men in holding my tongue as to what is told me in confidence. I am most particular as to my word, and I would never fail, whatever might be the consequence, to do what I had promised; and I have made this an inflexible law during the ...
— Reflections - Or, Sentences and Moral Maxims • Francois Duc De La Rochefoucauld

... pangs which their inflexible behaviour gave them, ever since you had begun to write to them in so affecting and humble ...
— Clarissa, Or The History Of A Young Lady, Volume 8 • Samuel Richardson

... de Gourmont is that the liberty of the individual to follow his intellectual and psychological tastes unimpeded by any sort of external authority is much more important for civilisation at large and much more conducive to the interests of posterity than any inflexible rules, whether they be laid upon us by ecclesiastical tradition, by puritanical ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys

... firm belief in Providence, confirmed by his long life of varied experience and thoughtful observation. Proverbially courteous and urbane, he was, at the same time, inflexible in the withdrawal of all confidence when once deceived or disappointed in character. Clear and strong in his religious convictions, he was none the less free from intolerance; he enjoyed communion with a Quaker neighbor as well as correspondence with clerical ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 3, September 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... Cross; and, in his worst of humors, when all is fire and faggots with him, if I turn round and coolly say, 'Lord, sir, has anything ruffled you?' he'll burst out into an immoderate fit of laughter, and exclaim, 'Curse that inflexible face of thine! Though you never suffer a smile to mantle on it, it is a figure of fun to the rest of the world."—Cherry, The Soldier's ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer

... the only near relative he had in the world. Keswick himself, like most men, would have been willing to have this tearing take place for the sake of uniting himself to such a charming creature as Roberta March. But the lady on one side was as inflexible as the lady on the other, and the engagement ...
— The Late Mrs. Null • Frank Richard Stockton

... interest, discovers the impossibility of his escape, as well when he considers the obstinacy of the gaoler, as the walls and bars with which he is surrounded; and, in all attempts for his freedom, chooses rather to work upon the stone and iron of the one, than upon the inflexible nature of the other. The same prisoner, when conducted to the scaffold, foresees his death as certainly from the constancy and fidelity of his guards, as from the operation of the axe or wheel. His mind runs along a certain train ...
— Hume - (English Men of Letters Series) • T.H. Huxley

... animosities. The natural severity of his temper appeared in a rigorous administration of justice; and having found the happy effects of this plan of government, without which the laws in those ages became totally impotent, he regarded it as a fixed maxim, that an inflexible conduct was the first duty of a sovereign. [FN [w] W. Malm. p. 95. Gul. Gemet. lib. 7. cap. 1. [x] ...
— The History of England, Volume I • David Hume

... grand and solemn eloquence, and the devout appeals, which render immortal the controversial works of Milton. But he, too, has left his foot-prints on his age; he, too, has written for posterity that which they "will not willingly let die." As one of the inflexible defenders of English liberty, sowers of the seed, the fruits of which we are now reaping, he has a higher claim on the kind regards of this generation than his merits as a poet, by no means ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier

... espied his friend and fellow-artisan in the colonnade, and therefore let the inflexible Hebrew go. The latter hastened towards the sycamore avenue of ...
— Historical Miniatures • August Strindberg

... noble brow, regular features, black, crisp, wiry hair, planted on his head with that symmetry which gives a charm to these brown faces, bronzed by toil in the open air. It was easy to see that the rector's appeals were powerless against that inflexible will. ...
— The Village Rector • Honore de Balzac

... more to Lois and Mrs. Dale than that John Ward was inflexible, and he wished no further discussion upon the subject; he also forbade any urging that Helen should return to ...
— John Ward, Preacher • Margaret Deland

... offered him three piastres, but he was inflexible, and replied, that were it not for his friendship for Hamd, he would not take less than a hundred piastres. I rose to eight piastres, but on his smiling, and shrugging up his shoulders at this, I rose, and declared that we ...
— Travels in Syria and the Holy Land • John Burckhardt

... her. But the intense, unutterable, withering scorn, with which, after looking upon him, she dropped her eyes, as if he were too worthless and indifferent to her to be challenged with a syllable—the ineffable disdain and haughtiness in which she sat before him—the cold inflexible resolve with which her every feature seemed to bear him down, and put him by—these, he had no resource against; and he left her, with her whole overbearing ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens

... only way. I will plant certain inflexible prohibitions which will forever destroy your self-will in regard to certain courses of action—they will be ones which you might at some time feel to be wise, but which I know to be ultimately destructive. In return, I can give you a measure of sanity greater ...
— The Short Life • Francis Donovan

... causing her to drop, half-hysterical, by the wayside. Some counselled her to go back, saying they would come for her before long; but pride, shame and exhaustion made it almost as difficult to go back as to go forward, and so she was left lamenting. With stern, inflexible faces, master and mistress watched their property depart, then returned to the house, while Uncle Lusthah mended the harness temporarily and took the carriage back to its place. Standing aloof, Zany had watched the scene, wavering between her intense desire to go and her loyalty to Miss Lou. The ...
— Miss Lou • E. P. Roe

... is not arguing for the reduction of all to a dead level, as is so often absurdly claimed. It is arguing that the inequalities which exist at the present day are not held securely in place by agreement with the inflexible laws of justice and right. Instead they are abrupt and uneven, and contrary to these laws; and there is great danger that the readjustment, which must inevitably take place to bring them in accord with these laws, will come, not as a gradual change, but as a series of terrible ...
— Monopolies and the People • Charles Whiting Baker

... little, but not much, of the war. They were both for fighting on till final victory, whatever the cost, and both spoke with admiration of the inflexible and stubborn spirit of the British nation. Very wonderful too is the spirit which animates the Alpini. My Alpino friend had been wounded in the leg last August at Rombon, and still walked lame. He told me of incidents which he had ...
— With British Guns in Italy - A Tribute to Italian Achievement • Hugh Dalton

... Antoine's wife!" The strange woman whose back had been turned towards the door when I opened it, looked round at the words, and her face met mine. She was a brunette, with sharp black eyes and an inflexible mouth, a face which beside Noemi's seemed like a dark cloud beside clear sunlight. "Yes indeed!" she cried; and her voice was half choked with contending anger and despair, "I am his wife; and what then is she? I tracked him here. He is always away from me now. I found a letter of hers signed ...
— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford

... supplication; then he may see the day of return. Herein we may behold in general, the honored place of the mother as the center of the Family, its heart, as it were, full of the tender feelings of compassion and mercy. In the father and king, on the other hand, is the man of the State with its inflexible justice, often putting aside sympathy and commiseration with misfortune. The woman's heart may indeed be called the heart of the world, recognized here by the old poet and ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider

... have been the endeavors for harmony. Committees of Conference have been appointed, have met and conferred; enthusiastic public meetings have been held; communion services have been celebrated jointly, and great feasts have been spread to welcome visiting delegations. But the South has been inflexible on the color-line. The Northern leaders have made concessions, and in some instances have been ready to surrender the main point, but the mass of Northern Christians seem unwilling to deny the Saviour in the person of the man whose ostracism is ...
— American Missionary, Volume 43, No. 10, October, 1889 • Various

... los pedazos. Aparece Vicenta por la 410 puerta del patio. Viste traje para la fiesta.) Su proceder duro, casi brbaro, es para m un aviso del Cielo. Admiro en ese hombre la severidad de un maestro inflexible. ...
— Heath's Modern Language Series: Mariucha • Benito Perez Galdos

... restructuring and growing capital markets are setting the foundations that could help Germany meet the long-term challenges of European economic integration and globalization, although some economists continue to argue the need for change in inflexible labor and services markets. Growth may fall below 2% in 2008 as the strong euro, high oil prices, tighter credit markets, and slowing growth abroad take ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.

... carry out. It seems such a waste of time and material to select for actual presentation so small a part of all you have carefully gathered. There is always the temptation to "get it all in somehow." Yet the direction must remain inflexible. You can use only part of it. You must carefully select what will serve your purpose. What is the purpose of your speech? What is the character of your audience? These two things will determine to a large extent, what and how much you must relinquish. ...
— Public Speaking • Clarence Stratton

... were organised in Calcutta and all over the province. The native press teemed with denunciatory articles. The wildest rumours were set afloat as to the more concrete mischiefs which partition portended. Never had India seen such popular demonstrations. Government, however, remained inflexible, and the storm abated when it was announced that Lord Curzon had resigned and was about to leave India—the last and perhaps the ablest and certainly the most forceful Viceroy of a period in which efficient ...
— India, Old and New • Sir Valentine Chirol

... likely, nor was it destined, to be realised. The Porte remained inflexible, and would grant no armistice; indeed, it had summoned a contingent of ships from Egypt, and a fleet of twenty-eight sail under Ibrahim Pasha was lying in the Bay of Navarino awaiting further reinforcements. ...
— The Political History of England - Vol XI - From Addington's Administration to the close of William - IV.'s Reign (1801-1837) • George Brodrick

... was now become incapable of maintaining himself, and therefore that he could accept of no offers, however advantageous they might appear, which would interfere with the discharge of this duty. The officer replied, and ridiculed the scruples of the young man; but, finding him inflexible in his resolution, he at last turned from him with an air of contempt, and called his men to follow him, muttering, as he went, reflections on the stupidity and cowardice ...
— The History of Sandford and Merton • Thomas Day

... it like. But at 4 of the afternoon, the batteries awaken worse than ever; from seven to nine bombs going at once. Universal rage, of noise and horrid glare, making night hideous, till 10 of the clock; Roth continuing inflexible. This is the last night of ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle

... her own municipal militia.[1264] In vain did he offer to make his entry with but one or two followers, and promise that, when they had duly submitted, he would secure them from injury at the hands of the royal troops, and would relieve them of the presence of a fleet. The citizens were inflexible. The experience of Castres, where lately the credulous inhabitants had inconsiderately admitted a governor sent them by the king, and had paid for their folly with their lives, confirmed them in the resolution rather to die with sword ...
— History of the Rise of the Huguenots - Volume 2 • Henry Baird

... indeed, it be not long ago "fathoms deep" under water. One of Mrs. Finn's red hackles would cut but a sorry figure as an appendage to some six yards of whip-cord, more especially after the said whip-cord should have been fastened, as my friend's was, to the extremity of a hazel wand, as thick and inflexible as the ...
— Germany, Bohemia, and Hungary, Visited in 1837. Vol. II • G. R. Gleig

... justice. We shall occupy ourselves above all with that vague but inevitable justice, intangible and yet so effective, which accompanies and sets its seal upon every action of our life; which approves or disapproves, rewards or punishes. Does this come from without? Does an inflexible, undeceivable moral principle exist, independent of man, in the universe and in things? Is there, in a word, a justice that might be called mystic? Or does it issue wholly from man; is it inward even ...
— The Buried Temple • Maurice Maeterlinck

... of a character requiring genius, pens, ink, and paper, rather than ready cash. Whenever Tiffles's resources ran short, as they did occasionally, he always borrowed, and paid on the next interest day. In this policy he was inflexible; and he flattered himself on the sternness ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton

... the signs of greatness in an artist is his knowledge of what environment, what way of life, is necessary to his talent. No one can know that for him. Every really great artist is as inflexible as the Grand Rocher." ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens

... with her eyes rather wide and her eyebrows raised as though she mutely confided to it her infinite astonishment. This was the last thing she had expected. She would have to go to some hotel. Can a woman stay alone at an hotel? Her heart sank. Inflexible forces seemed to be pointing her back to home—and Sir Isaac. He would be a very triumphant Sir Isaac, and she'd not have much heart left in her.... "I won't go back," she whispered to herself. "Whatever ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells

... revived the distressed and drooping. Everyone seized the opportunity to stretch the limbs, to inhale some fresh air, and to obtain some slight refreshment. The Customs officials were unusually alert, harrying, and inflexible. There was the eternal wrangling between the passengers and the officials over articles liable to duty and it was somewhat amusing to me, even with war beating the air, to follow the frantic and useless efforts of old and experienced ...
— Sixteen Months in Four German Prisons - Wesel, Sennelager, Klingelputz, Ruhleben • Henry Charles Mahoney

... on the love of God, and thought he was doing so with some power. What he did was to take the Fatherhood of God and use it as a stick to beat Pharisees with, and under Pharisees he let it be seen that he included every person who still believed in the inflexible action of the moral laws and the austere majesty of God. Many good things he no doubt said, but each had an edge, and it cut deeply into people of the old school. Had he seen the Rabbi, it would not have been possible for him to continue, but he only was conscious of Lachlan Campbell, with whom ...
— Kate Carnegie and Those Ministers • Ian Maclaren

... she detected that momentary swerving from the serious consideration of her light words? Her own eyes turned to the window where they saw nothing but rain. She smiled vaguely, stood with her hands behind her; it was he now who regarded her, straight, slender, lithe. There was also something inflexible appearing in that young form, though so replete ...
— Half A Chance • Frederic S. Isham

... expense of other natural objects, such as stones, plants, animals, which the primitive Semitic faith considered equally divine. The stars always retained this character, even at Rome. They were not, as to us, infinitely distant bodies moving in space according to the inflexible laws of mechanics, and whose chemical composition may be determined. To the Latins as to the Orientals, they were propitious or baleful deities, whose ever-changing relations determined ...
— The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism • Franz Cumont

... pronounced, was distinctly sad and set. A pair of large eyes looked out upon the world unwaveringly and serenely, if a little sorrowfully, beneath a pair of finely pencilled, level brows, which formed, as it were, a little bar of inflexible resolve. A mass of dark hair was coiled upon the girl's head after the manner of early Victorian heroines. It was a face at once striking and wistful ...
— High Noon - A New Sequel to 'Three Weeks' by Elinor Glyn • Anonymous

... no reply. Maurice would doubtless be more rational after he should have slept; and sleep he did, all that day and all the succeeding night, for more than twenty hours, and never stirred hand or foot. When he awoke next morning, however, he was as inflexible as ever in his determination to go away. The fever had subsided; he was gloomy and restless, in haste to withdraw himself from influences that he feared might weaken his patriotic fervor. His sister, with many tears, made up her mind that he must be allowed to have his way, and Doctor Dalichamp, ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola

... them go—and smiled. These men carried word to their fellows in Madrid for the seizure of the little Queen. But before they could reach the capital the Queen Regent herself would be there—a woman in a thousand, of inflexible nerve, of infinite resource. ...
— In Kedar's Tents • Henry Seton Merriman

... at the point of her flight, to attempt, a little hopelessly, to make her impulse real to them. She spoke of the inflexible honor of the McCraes, of the great respect which had for generations attached to their name. Then suddenly, as if she saw the utter hopelessness of making them understand, she seemed with a gesture to give up abstractions and ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various

... must be to-wunst set at liberty and Sumner hung, ez proof that the North is really consilliatory. On this pint I am inflexible, and on ...
— "Swingin Round the Cirkle." • Petroleum V. Nasby

... at Madrid and at Paris. On returning to the United States he had been appointed Secretary of Foreign Affairs, in which station he had conducted himself with his accustomed ability. A sound judgment improved by extensive reading and great knowledge of public affairs, unyielding firmness, and inflexible integrity, were qualities of which Mr. Jay had given frequent and signal proofs. Although for some years withdrawn from that profession to which he was bred, the acquisitions of his early life had not been lost, and the subjects ...
— Life And Times Of Washington, Volume 2 • John Frederick Schroeder and Benson John Lossing

... watching his cousin, saw a sudden change in his face. His lips turned white, his eyes moved uneasily in their sockets. It seemed almost as if he glanced backwards and forwards in order to look for a way of escape. But no escape was possible. Richard stood waiting, severe, inflexible, with that ominous gleam in his eyes. Hugo rose and followed like a dog at his master's call. From the moment that Brian marked his sullen, hang-dog expression and drooping head, he gave up his hope of proving Hugo's innocence. He would gladly have absented himself from the interview, ...
— Under False Pretences - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant

... elsewhere. She was generally kind on these occasions, but always very firm. The determined chin gave no hope that she might yield to importunity. The eyes that backed up the message of the chin were pleasant, but inflexible. ...
— The Coming of Bill • P. G. Wodehouse

... you. I have been very patient—for me," he added, with an odd smile flitting across his face, "but my patience is exhausted. Choose quickly." Insensibly he drew her closer to him till his arm felt like an inflexible steel band about her, and she thought with a shudder of the coils of a great serpent closing round its victim. She made a final effort to conquer herself, but between her and the broad chest so close to her she seemed to see a horse's head held low in agony, blood and foam dripping from his ...
— The Sheik - A Novel • E. M. Hull

... to preach the Gospel, they boldly answered, "We must obey God rather than men." (Acts v. 29.) This same authority the holy Fathers of the Church have been careful to maintain by weighty reasonings as occasions have arisen; and the Roman Pontiffs have never ceased to defend it with inflexible constancy. Nay, more, princes and civil governors themselves have approved it in theory and in fact; for in the making of compacts, in the transaction of business, in sending and receiving embassies, and in the interchange of other offices, it has been ...
— Donahoe's Magazine, Volume 15, No. 1, January 1886 • Various

... upon hero-worship as no better than any other idolatry and upon the attitude of mind of the hero-worshipper as essentially immoral; who think it is better for a man to go wrong in freedom than to go right in chains; who look upon the observance of inflexible justice as between man and man as of far greater importance than even the preservation of social order, will believe that Mr. Eyre has committed one of the greatest crimes of which a person in authority can be guilty, and will strain every nerve to obtain a declaration that their ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley - A Character Sketch • Leonard Huxley

... to Napoleon; took part in the Revolution of 1830, became again commander-in-chief of the National Guard and a supporter of Louis Philippe, the citizen king; characterised by Carlyle as "a constitutional pedant; clear, thin, inflexible, as water turned ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood

... provinces was commenced, in which the people of New Haven maintained their right to a separate government with inflexible perseverance, and with a considerable degree of exasperation. They appealed to the crown from the explanation given by Connecticut to the charter; and governor Winthrop, the agent who had obtained that instrument, and who flattered himself with being able, on his return, to conciliate the contending ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 1 (of 5) • John Marshall

... idiosyncrasies of the men left him undismayed. He perceived the steel of inflexible purpose beneath the windy egotism of Phinuit. The pompous histrionism of Monk, he knew, was merely a shell for the cold, calculating, undeviating selfishness that too frequently comes with advancing years. Nevertheless these two were factors whose ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance

... his mind traversed the years between his marriage and this unexpected assumption of paternity, he saw, in the light of an overheated imagination, many signs of unwonted crassness. It was not that he had ceased to think his wife stupid: she was stupid, limited, inflexible; but there was a pathos in the struggles of her swaddled mind, in its blind reachings toward the primal emotions. He had always thought she would have been happier with a child; but he had thought it mechanically, because it had so often been thought before, because it was in the nature ...
— The Descent of Man and Other Stories • Edith Wharton

... goodness, her delicacy, her kindly love for the old and the young, for the humble and the poor, for animals and plants, at the bottom of her nature she is heathen. In life's last moments, with death and revenge in mind, she can still pretend, invent, dupe. Such profound and exquisite womanhood, such inflexible masculine will, have hardly ever been seen combined ...
— Hadda Padda • Godmunder Kamban

... provided boar-hunts and tourneys and masquerades and fetes. Philip's life of simplicity faded off into dressing in black—all else went on as before. Philip glided into the line of least resistance and signed every paper that he was told to sign by his gracious, winning, inflexible Minister—the true type of the iron hand in the velvet glove. From his twentieth year, after that first little flurry of pretended power, the novelty of ruling wore away; and for more than forty years he never ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard

... loving sire than by all the praises he had heard lavished upon himself during the past hours. For there was no one in the wide world that the child so reverenced as his dark-browed father, who seldom praised his children, and was inflexible in his punishments whenever they were deserved. To be told by him that he had done his duty, and would be a credit to his house, was happiness far beyond his deserts, he thought; and he registered a mental vow, deep down in his brave little heart, that he would never in ...
— In the Wars of the Roses - A Story for the Young • Evelyn Everett-Green

... in Paris, and finally refused point blank to pay the debt. My grandmother gave him a box on the ear and slept by herself as a sign of her displeasure. The next day she sent for her husband, hoping that this domestic punishment had produced an effect upon him, but she found him inflexible. For the first time in her life, she entered into reasonings and explanations with him, thinking to be able to convince him by pointing out to him that there are debts and debts, and that there is a great difference ...
— Best Russian Short Stories • Various

... conquest, excited by avarice, and, as he complains, encouraged by impunity. In these honorable contests his spirit soared above the consideration of danger, and perhaps of prudence; and we may learn from the example of Cato, that a character of pure and inflexible virtue is the most apt to be misled by prejudice, to be heated by enthusiasm, and to confound private enmities with public justice. The disciple of Plato might exaggerate the infirmities of nature, and the imperfections of society; and the mildest form of a Gothic kingdom, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon

... was read, and the inflexible countenance of the leader turned towards Cornbury—who saw ...
— Snarley-yow - or The Dog Fiend • Frederick Marryat

... questions of human rights he has stood inflexible. The successor of Joshua R. Giddings, he is the man on whom his mantle may be said to have descended. Still he is no blind partisan. The best arguments in favor of civil service reform are found in the speeches of Gen. Garfield. He is liberal and generous in the treatment ...
— From Canal Boy to President - Or The Boyhood and Manhood of James A. Garfield • Horatio Alger, Jr.

... fine one in its way. The capacity for self-command and self-denial was tremendous, his sense of honour keen, his adherence to that which he conceived the right inflexible, his will immutable; but of the subtler sweetness of the human ...
— Six Women • Victoria Cross

... that his will, indomitable, inflexible, was holding her fast, heedless of all the longing of her heart to escape. Then she knew that he, and only he, was the unknown power that kept her back from peace, forcing her onward in that dread circle, compelling her to live in torment. And in that ...
— The Keeper of the Door • Ethel M. Dell

... to fiction. When the conviction first dawned upon pragmatists that there was no absolute or eternal truth, what they evidently were thinking of was that it is folly, in this changing world, to pledge oneself to any final and inflexible creed. The pursuit of truth, since nothing better was possible, was to be accepted instead of the possession of it. But it is characteristic of Protestantism that, when it gives up anything, it transfers to what remains ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana

... partner's share of the business or that Burwell buy out the other. The man was more than fair in the financial proposition he made; he was generous, as he always had been, but his determination was inflexible; the two must separate. And ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery - Riddle Stories • Various

... than over hosts in the field; and here taught to make it, the husband of the princess of England, the proud Earl of Gloucester, consents to live to be a monument of Scottish nobleness, and of the inflexible fidelity of English soldiers." ...
— The Scottish Chiefs • Miss Jane Porter

... time of sorrow. Everything about those few minutes of suspense remains fresh in my recollection. I remember how they loitered and came to a halt at the corner of the oak passage leading to the study, and how the Rector patted the marble head and smoothed the inflexible tresses of William Pitt, as he listened to Mr. Danvers' details about the presentment; and then, as they went on, I recollect the boisterous nose-blowing that suddenly resounded from the passage, and which I then referred, and still ...
— Uncle Silas - A Tale of Bartram-Haugh • J.S. Le Fanu

... restore it to us, but he was inflexible; and as he was in the right we had to submit. The only thing he could do was to have an embargo laid on the trunk at Rome, the said embargo to last for a month. A notary was called, and our claim properly drawn up. The ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt

... it—reined his steed; dismounting, stood Calm and inflexible. "Old chap! you see There is but ONE escape. You know it? Good! There is ONE man to take it. You are he. The horse won't carry double. If he could, 'Twould but protract this bother. I shall stay: I've business with these devils, they with me; I will occupy them till you get away. ...
— Complete Poetical Works of Bret Harte • Bret Harte

... their grumblings with the utmost good-humor and remained inflexible. Susan listened with eyes down and burning cheeks. She knew Burlingham was "leaving the best cow unmilked," as Connemora put it, because he wished to protect her. She told him so when they were alone on the ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips

... even their services were combined with the recollection of the absurd and humiliating circumstances of personal degradation,[A] to which their pride and folly had subjected him, while they professed to espouse his cause. As a man of pleasure, he hated their stern and inflexible rigour, which stigmatised follies even more deeply than crimes; and he whispered to his confidents, that "presbytery was no religion for a gentleman." It is not, therefore, wonderful, that, in the first year of his restoration, he formally reestablished prelacy ...
— Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, Vol. II (of 3) • Walter Scott

... the case than, at a first glance, met the eye; it quickly resolved itself, in fact, into a struggle between the priesthood and the laity; and it needed but a single glance at the fanatical high priest's stern, inflexible expression to assure oneself that he was not at all the sort of person to yield without a struggle. To add to the difficulty, Earle had no means of knowing what sort of a backing the priests would be likely to have, should the struggle for supremacy ...
— In Search of El Dorado • Harry Collingwood

... beneath it a layer of fat, also an inch or more thick. On examining the fins, or fore-limbs, as they should properly be called, we found bones exactly corresponding to those of the human arm, with five fingers at the extremity, every joint distinct, although completely encased in a stiff inflexible skin. The manatee feeds on the grass growing at the borders of the lakes and rivers. It swims at a rapid rate, moved on by the tail and paddles. The female produces generally only one at a birth, and clasps it, so Naro told us, in her paddles while ...
— On the Banks of the Amazon • W.H.G. Kingston

... be no more talk in the future of inflexible justice, there where reigns a bureaucratic hatred of audacious feats. The nations have need of audacious men who believe in themselves and overcome every obstacle without concern for their personal safety. Genius cannot be prudent; by dint of prudence it could never ...
— The Crowd • Gustave le Bon

... all the actions he had seen in the last two wars, the English, knowing the weakness of the single line, had almost always concentrated on part of it without regular order. The radical defects of the line he points out are: that it is easily thrown into disorder and easily broken, that it is inflexible, and too extended a formation to be readily controlled by signals. He then proceeds to lay down the principle on which a sound battle order should be framed, and the fundamental objects at which it should aim[6]. His postulates ...
— Fighting Instructions, 1530-1816 - Publications Of The Navy Records Society Vol. XXIX. • Julian S. Corbett

... come from Mrs. Buller's, having left a very pleasant set at Lady Herries'(776)—and for such a collection Eight or ten women and girls, not one of whom I knew by sight: a German Count., as stiff and upright as the inflexible Dowager of Beaufort: a fat Dean and his wife, he speaking Cornish, and of having dined to-day at Lambeth; four young officers, friends of the boy Buller,(777) who played with one of them at tric-trac, ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole

... a great many attempts, and twisted and turned in every direction to get the shoe; but when he found the farmer inflexible, he agreed to what John desired, and swore to the performance of it. Cunning John believed him, and gave him up the glass shoe, for he knew right well with whom he had to do. So, the business being ended, away went the merchant with his ...
— Folk-Lore and Legends; Scandinavian • Various

... on the deserted road that leads to Aumale Station. There could be no doubt about the issue of the contest. With d'Albufex and Sebastiani prisoners; it would be an easy matter to make one of them speak. D'Albufex had shown him how to set about it; and Clarisse Mergy would be inflexible where it was a ...
— The Crystal Stopper • Maurice LeBlanc

... coil herself into her husband's heart, but kept in check by an awestruck reverence for his exalted intellectual qualities and his majestic personal appearance. JULIA. Oh, that is your idea of a good part? LUD. Yes—a wife who regards her husband's slightest wish as an inflexible law, and who ventures but rarely into his august presence, unless (which would happen seldom) he should summon her to appear before him. A crushed, despairing violet, whose blighted existence would culminate (all too soon) in a lonely and pathetic death-scene! ...
— The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan - The 14 Gilbert And Sullivan Plays • William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan

... her trouble would be useless. She tried to insist, saying that Dusaussay would take the money to the royalist treasurer in Paris, that Le Chevalier was waiting for it in order to go to Poitou where his presence was indispensable. But Mme. de Combray was inflexible on this point; the entire sum should be delivered to d'Ache's banker, or she would withdraw her assistance. Mme. Acquet was obliged to yield with a heavy heart, and they began at once to consider the best means of transporting it. The Marquise sent Jouanne, ...
— The House of the Combrays • G. le Notre

... Chevalier St. George, or, as he was termed, the Old Pretender, held his exiled court, as his situation compelled him to shift his place of residence.] The accession of the near relation of one of those steady and inflexible opponents was considered as a means of bringing over more converts, and therefore Richard Waverley met with a share of ministerial favour more than proportioned to his talents or his political importance. It was, however, discovered ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott

... maidenly frankness, so transparent—without shallowness, that he was thrown into despair when she dismissed him. He was singularly ignorant of the nature of women, and more especially of young girls. His mother's proud, upright, rather inflexible character, conjoined with great warmth of affection and rare nobility of mind, had given him a high standard by which to judge other women. He had never had a sister, and was not particularly observant of young girls. It was therefore a greater disappointment ...
— A True Friend - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant

... to bring eastern productivity and wages up to western standards, with mixed results. Unemployment—which in the east is nearly double that in the west—has grown over the last several years, primarily as a result of structural problems like an inflexible labor market. In January 1999, Germany and 10 other members of the EU formed a common European currency, the euro, and the German government is now looking toward reform of the EU budget and enlargement of the ...
— The 1999 CIA Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.

... plumage of any of our birds, and, with all its speed and marvelous evolutions, the effect of its flight is stiff and wiry. There appears to be but one joint in the wing, and that next the body. This peculiar inflexible motion of the wings, as if they were little sickles of sheet iron, seems to be owing to the length and development of the primary quills and the smallness of the secondary. The wing appears to hinge only at the wrist. The barn swallow lines its rude masonry with feathers, but the swift ...
— Bird Stories from Burroughs - Sketches of Bird Life Taken from the Works of John Burroughs • John Burroughs

... theological system to which his family was attached, and regarded that system with even more than the partiality which men generally feel for a hereditary faith. He had ruminated on the great enigmas which had been discussed in the Synod of Dort, and had found in the austere and inflexible logic of the Genevese school something which suited his intellect and his temper. That example of intolerance indeed which some of his predecessors had set he never imitated. For all persecution he felt a fixed aversion, which he avowed, not only where the avowal was obviously politic, but on occasions ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... some armies already yielding and ready to fly, have been by women restored, through their inflexible importunity and entreaties, presenting their breasts, and showing their impending captivity; an evil to the Germans then by far most dreadful when it befalls their women. So that the spirit of such cities as amongst their hostages are enjoined ...
— Tacitus on Germany • Tacitus

... maintained that 'he had only sustained the rights of his family, and that a Conde could never enter France but with arms in his hands. My birth,' said he, 'and my opinions must ever render me inflexible on this point.'"—"The firmness of his answers," continues Hullin, "reduced the judges to despair. Ten times we gave him an opening to retract his declarations, but he persisted in them immovably. ...
— The History of Napoleon Buonaparte • John Gibson Lockhart

... Madam le Vasseur, I told her we must part; her daughter attempted to make me renounce my resolution, but I was inflexible. I sent her off, to Paris in a carriage of the messenger with all the furniture and effects she and her daughter had in common. I gave her some money, and engaged to pay her lodging with her children, or elsewhere to provide for her subsistence as much as it should be possible for me to do it, ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau

... his presidency. Whenever apportionments, dates, and credits were questioned, he was liberal in making temporary, and sometimes permanent allowances, preferring that any error in exactions should be in the way of moderation. But in the main business he was inflexible; and at last it came to a direct issue between himself and the malcontents, whether the draft should go on or stop. In the middle of July the mob in New York city tested the question. The drafting began there on Saturday morning, July 11. ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. II • John T. Morse

... spoke French very indifferently—as indifferently, indeed, as Mademoiselle spoke English, but that did not prevent them from getting on very well together. As I have explained, Barraclough was a tall, handsome fellow, lean and inflexible of face, with the characteristic qualities of his race. His eyes admired the lady profoundly, and he endeavoured to keep pace with her wits, a task rendered difficult by the breaches in two languages. This vivacity was crowned by exhibitions of ...
— Hurricane Island • H. B. Marriott Watson

... woman made no reply to this, but her manner betrayed both contempt and irritation, her brow was clouded with a wrathful expression, and her lips were drawn into a straight, rigid line, denoting some cruel and inflexible purpose. ...
— Virgie's Inheritance • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon

... produced an extraordinary physical result. The attendant anxiety and excitement relaxed the sluices of the system that were already physiologically open, and determined a hemorrhage as the concomitant of a recitation. Subjected to the inflexible rules of the school, unwilling to seek advice from any one, almost ashamed of her own physique, she ingeniously protected herself against exposure, and went on intellectually leading her companions, and physically defying nature. At the end of a year, she went home with a gratifying ...
— Sex in Education - or, A Fair Chance for Girls • Edward H. Clarke

... three rooms on the second floor of No. 2 Brick Court, which he straightway proceeded to decorate sumptuously with mirrors, Wilton carpets, moreen curtains, and Pembroke tables. It was an unfortunate step; and he would have done well to remember the 'Nil te quaesiveris extra' with which his inflexible monitor, Johnson, had greeted his apologies for the shortcomings of some earlier lodgings. One of its natural results was to involve him in a new sequence of task-work, from which he never afterwards shook himself free. Hence, following hard upon a 'Roman ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith

... tenacity of his temper. He was long afterwards consulted whether means might not be found to engage the commander of the Italian armies in the royal interest. "It will be but lost time to attempt it," said Pichegru. "I knew him in his youth—his character is inflexible—he has taken his side, and he will not ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Supplementary Number, Issue 263, 1827 • Various

... there in the days of our childhood," he said slowly. "Maybe it was only a boy's dream—then—but now it's a man's dream—a life dream. You will have to be won out of battle, every wonderful reward does—but victory will come to me." His voice rose vibrantly. "Because winning it is the one inflexible purpose of my life, dominating ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck

... a fine one in its way. The capacity for self-command and self-denial was tremendous, his sense of honour keen, his adherence to that which he conceived the right inflexible, his will immutable; but of the subtler sweetness of the human heart he ...
— Six Women • Victoria Cross

... rule in many parts of Australia—though by no means an inflexible rule—a reef running east of north and west of south will underlie east; if west of north and east of south it will go down to the westward and so round the points of the compass till you come to east and west; when if the strike of the lodes in the neighbourhood has come round from ...
— Getting Gold • J. C. F. Johnson

... Bonaparte had answered one of this gentleman's memorials by subscribing it with a sentence in his own writing: "We cannot re-purchase the nation." This gentleman spoke highly, but perhaps unjustly, of the vigour of Bonaparte's government, of his inflexible love of justice, and his personal attention to the administration. I compelled him, however, to acknowledge, that in his own immediate concerns, the justice of the French Chief was not proof against his passions. I mentioned the Duke of Enghien; the gentleman ...
— Travels through the South of France and the Interior of Provinces of Provence and Languedoc in the Years 1807 and 1808 • Lt-Col. Pinkney

... The inflexible honesty and fine sense of honor which lay at the foundation of Lincoln's character are nobly exhibited in the following letter to a former friend but now political opponent, ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne

... all the effect of the most powerful acting:—"Saunders Macivor, the mate of the 'Elizabeth,' was a grave and somewhat hard-favoured man, powerful in bone and muscle, even after he had considerably turned his sixtieth year, and much respected for his inflexible integrity and the depth of his religious feelings. Both the mate and his devout wife were especial favourites with Mr. Porteous of Kilmuir—a minister of the same class as the Pedens, Renwicks, and Cargils of a former age; and on one occasion ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller

... peludo, however, is nocturnal, while the others wander by day over the open plains, feeding on beetles, larvae, roots, and even small snakes. The apar, commonly called mataco, is remarkable by having only three moveable bands; the rest of its tesselated covering being nearly inflexible. It has the power of rolling itself into a perfect sphere, like one kind of English woodlouse. In this state it is safe from the attack of dogs; for the dog not being able to take the whole in its mouth, tries ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin

... Finding Anne thus inflexible, the Duchess rose up in a towering rage at having vainly humiliated herself, and gave vent to her passion in a storm ...
— Political Women, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Sutherland Menzies

... each other: they had nothing of that open-handed geniality so common in Germany, where it is apt to become a nuisance. Among these young men there was one especially who attracted Christophe because he divined him to be a man of exceptional force: he was a writer of inflexible logic and will, with a passion for moral ideas, in the service of which he was absolutely uncompromising and ready in their cause to sacrifice the whole world and himself: he had founded and conducted almost unaided a review in which to uphold them: he had sworn to impose ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland

... the dull resonance of the locker to his voice, supplementing the stifling quality of the air, set going a new train of ideas. He lifted up his hands and feet, and met an inflexible resistance. He was in a coffin, he thought! He had been buried alive! He gave way at once to wild panic. "'Elp!" he screamed. "'Elp!" and drummed with his feet, and kicked and struggled. "Let ...
— The War in the Air • Herbert George Wells

... the two provinces was commenced, in which the people of New Haven maintained their right to a separate government with inflexible perseverance, and with a considerable degree of exasperation. They appealed to the crown from the explanation given by Connecticut to the charter; and governor Winthrop, the agent who had obtained that instrument, and who flattered himself with ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 1 (of 5) • John Marshall

... deposited his riding gear at the saddle-hut, limped to the steps and stood with his sunny smile upon his face and his sombrero brim trailing the dust. It seemed to Valencia that the don was displeased; he read it in the set of his head, in the hardness that was in his glance, in a certain inflexible quality ...
— The Gringos • B. M. Bower

... as it was, the barons felt themselves bound by the award. It was only the exclusion of aliens—a point which they had not purposed to submit to arbitration—which they refused to concede. Luckily Henry was as inflexible on this point as on the rest, and the mutual distrust ...
— History of the English People, Volume II (of 8) - The Charter, 1216-1307; The Parliament, 1307-1400 • John Richard Green

... employment through increased labor market flexibility; however, the population has remained opposed to labor reforms, hampering the government's ability to revitalize the economy. The tax burden remains one of the highest in Europe (nearly 50% of GDP in 2005). The lingering economic slowdown and inflexible budget items probably pushed the budget deficit above the eurozone's 3%-of-GDP limit in 2006; ...
— The 2007 CIA World Factbook • United States

... her hands together. There was something unapproachable about Garth as he stood there—quiet, inflexible, waiting to hear what she had to ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler

... resolution and earnest desire, however, kept him standing continually on one spot for seven days and nights with beads of the frozen drops of tears on his breast. At last he cut off his left arm with a sharp knife, and presented it before the inflexible teacher to show his resolution to follow the master even at the risk of his life. Thereupon Bodhidharma admitted him into the order as a disciple fully qualified to be instructed in the ...
— The Religion of the Samurai • Kaiten Nukariya

... doctor named Gates, although her address at the club was given as Pension Schwarz. She determined to do her shopping early and then to visit the house in the Siebensternstrasse. She was not a hard woman, for all her inflexible morality, and more than once she had had an uneasy memory of Harmony's bewildered, almost stricken face the afternoon of her visit. She had been a watchful mother over a not particularly handsome family of daughters. This lovely young girl needed mothering and she ...
— The Street of Seven Stars • Mary Roberts Rinehart

... the bow will be twisted in the grasp and deflect the shot. Then fully drawn, set the grasp of the left hand without disturbing the position of the bow, make the left arm as rigid as an oak limb; fix the muscles of the chest; make yourself inflexible from head to toe. Keep your right elbow up and rivet your gaze upon your mark; release in a direct line backward. Everything must be under the greatest tension, any ...
— Hunting with the Bow and Arrow • Saxton Pope

... quiet but inflexible decision which silenced him. Then she gave him ten francs and went into the dark house, from which the burning noonday sun was carefully excluded. She intended to rest after dejeuner, and towards sunset to go to the ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens

... paper, and it still continues to be paid for in money. Another argument in favour of encouraging lace-making is, that it cannot be usurped by men: you may have men-milliners, men-mantuamakers, and even ladies' valets, but you cannot well fashion the clumsy and inflexible fingers of man to lace-making. We import great quantities of lace from this country, yet I imagine we might, by attention, be enabled to supply other countries, instead of purchasing abroad ourselves. The art of spinning is daily improving in England; and if ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady

... to have forestalled the modern style, of which the superiority and grace is in the agility of the hands and immovability of the body. He stood erect and firm, with a wrist at once strong and supple, and with a sword which seemed a flexible reed from the point to the middle of the blade, and an inflexible steel from thence to ...
— The Forty-Five Guardsmen • Alexandre Dumas

... and inflexible to her prayers. Then she tried threats. He laughed at them. Said he, "The time is gone by for that: if you wanted to sue me for breach of promise, you should have done it at once; not waited eighteen months and taken another sweetheart first. Come, come; you played ...
— A Terrible Temptation - A Story of To-Day • Charles Reade

... natural consequences of death.[328] But when we find that the same writers who use compromising phrases about the change that comes over the elements,[329] also use the language of symbolism, and remember, too, that a "miracle" was a very different thing to those who knew of no inflexible laws in the natural world from what it is to us, we shall not be ready to agree with those who have accused the third and fourth century Fathers of degrading the Lord's Supper into ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge

... Mary's inflexible hatred of the cruelty of the court and the nobility, which had led to the present horrors, though great, did not prevent her from seeing the tyranny and brutality in which the people indulged so soon as they obtained the mastery. Her treatment of ...
— Mary Wollstonecraft • Elizabeth Robins Pennell

... duty, and feared no consequences. He did nothing reluctantly, no matter how disagreeable; always at his post, never inconsistent. He never promised but to fulfil. He was, in a word, a man of the most inflexible firmness and stone-like coolness. ...
— The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass - An American Slave • Frederick Douglass

... I was inflexible; I wouldn't let one of the Morgans into my house. Miss Letitia wrote a letter of four pages, and Miss Sophia enclosed a sonnet. Nothing would do. I resolved to keep Martha all to myself; and, for ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 364, February 1846 • Various

... spread upon the table before the stern officials. One by one they were turned out from the well-filled pockets of David and Clive. Slowly and reluctantly, the two boys turned out those precious treasures. Sadly and mournfully they laid them on the table, under the stern, the inflexible, the relentless gaze of the three inexorable custodians, who, to David's mind, seemed the impersonations of Minos, Aeacus, and Rhadamanthus. Yea, all these, and many more,—fragments from houses, bits of mosaic stone, little chips,—all were seized, and all were confiscated. ...
— Among the Brigands • James de Mille

... the great questions of human rights he has stood inflexible. The successor of Joshua R. Giddings, he is the man on whom his mantle may be said to have descended. Still he is no blind partisan. The best arguments in favor of civil service reform are found in the speeches of Gen. Garfield. He is liberal and generous in the treatment ...
— From Canal Boy to President - Or The Boyhood and Manhood of James A. Garfield • Horatio Alger, Jr.

... implored him for mercy; adducing whatever reasons they could suggest for sparing the offenders, besides those motives of honour and decency which might persuade him to conceal from the public so scandalous a deed. But his rage made him inflexible, and, on the instant, he commanded that the sentence should be put ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Vol. 3 (of 7) • Lord Byron

... time during the interview, the widow's inflexible countenance was mildly moved, though ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... President of the American Federation of Labor, with several members of its Executive Council, called upon him to protest. The President was courteous but inflexible. He answered their protest by declaring that, in the employment and dismissal of men in the Government service, he could no more recognize the fact that a man did or did not belong to a union as being for or against him, than he could recognize the fact that he was a Protestant or a Catholic, ...
— Theodore Roosevelt and His Times - A Chronicle of the Progressive Movement; Volume 47 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Harold Howland

... cursed, but Scipio Africanus was inflexible. His master had given him orders, and the boy had learned, at no little cost, that it was the wisest and safest policy to obey. Finding that neither threats nor persuasion availed, Burke took a stride or two in the direction ...
— In Clive's Command - A Story of the Fight for India • Herbert Strang

... spite of every silvery voice that woos him aside—will be a weak and a wretched man till he dies. In such a world as this, with such hearts as ours, weakness is wickedness in the long run. Whoever lets himself be shaped and guided by anything lower than an inflexible will, fixed in obedience to God, will in the end be shaped into a deformity and guided to wreck and ruin. Dreams however rapturous, contemplations however devout, emotions however deep and sacred, make no man pure and good without hard effort, and that to a large extent in the direction ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... expected, has to—purpose a fortnight's delay till he consult in England! Absolutely would not and could not sign, till a Courier to England went and returned. To Landgraf Wilhelm's, to Klinggraf's and the Kaiser's very great surprise, disappointment and suspicion. But Carteret was inflexible: 'will only take a fortnight,' said he; 'and I can hope all will yet ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIV. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle

... 5, being farther away from Miss Jones's bedroom, afforded greater opportunities for laughter and jokes without so much danger of being pounced upon. Her fish, however, refused to swallow the tempting bait, and Beatrice Elliot, whom she also sounded on the subject, was equally inflexible. ...
— A Patriotic Schoolgirl • Angela Brazil

... slightest alteration from their intercourse in peace and war with the unknown strangers of the West. The Greeks, who thought themselves proud, but who were only vain, showed a disposition somewhat less inflexible. In the efforts for the recovery of their empire, they emulated the valor, discipline, and tactics of their antagonists. The modern literature of the West they might justly despise; but its free spirit would instruct them in the rights of man; and some institutions ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon

... would have been considered limited for these days, yet she was a woman of fine sense and quick intellect. She possessed great delicacy of feeling, an inflexible will, an unusual energy (for a woman) in carrying out what she esteemed right, and an uncontrollable aversion to whatever was mean or cowardly. The training of their children devolved mostly up her, ...
— A Biographical Sketch of the Life and Character of Joseph Charless - In a Series of Letters to his Grandchildren • Charlotte Taylor Blow Charless

... genius, pens, ink, and paper, rather than ready cash. Whenever Tiffles's resources ran short, as they did occasionally, he always borrowed, and paid on the next interest day. In this policy he was inflexible; and he flattered himself on ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton

... to be allowed to remain at home instead of attending the lecture, but on this point Mrs. Waltham was inflexible. The girl could not offer resolute opposition in a matter which only involved an hour or two's endurance. She sat in pale silence. Then her mother broke into tears, bewailed herself as a luckless being, entreated her daughter's ...
— Demos • George Gissing

... under the nose of the godlike dead. Other personages offered to the funeral genii lotus in bloom or in bud, bulbous plants, birds, pieces of antelope, and vases of liquors. Acephalous figures of Justice brought souls before Osiris, whose arms were set in inflexible contour, and who was assisted by the forty-two judges of Amenti, seated in two rows and bearing an ostrich-plume on their heads, the forms of which were borrowed ...
— The Works of Theophile Gautier, Volume 5 - The Romance of a Mummy and Egypt • Theophile Gautier

... distinctly sad and set. A pair of large eyes looked out upon the world unwaveringly and serenely, if a little sorrowfully, beneath a pair of finely pencilled, level brows, which formed, as it were, a little bar of inflexible resolve. A mass of dark hair was coiled upon the girl's head after the manner of early Victorian heroines. It was a face at once striking and wistful ...
— High Noon - A New Sequel to 'Three Weeks' by Elinor Glyn • Anonymous

... last sovereign prince of the hated Suabian line that Gregory twice anathematized. Beneath the cold forbidding eye of the last of the Hohenstaufen and his friend and avenger here rest, strangely enough, the ashes of that "great and inflexible asserter of the supremacy of the sacerdotal order: the monk Hildebrand, afterwards Pope Gregory the Seventh." Born the son of a poor carpenter in the Tuscan village of Soana, this extraordinary man rose to eminence as a monk of Cluny, where he became famous for his extreme asceticism ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan

... but she grew more inflexible in her purpose. "He shall be convinced," said she to herself. "I will give him her letters to me, and then he will know that he never ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach

... would overtake half a dozen poor families, though the bulk of the loss would fall upon his senior partner, who was a hard man, of unbending sternness and integrity. If old Marlowe proved a man of the same inflexible stamp, he was lost. ...
— Cobwebs and Cables • Hesba Stretton

... before the madrono, that belle of the forest, with her robes of scarlet and her crown of bronze. The yellow lilies clung to her skirts, and the buckeye flung his flowers at her feet. The last redwoods were there, piercing the blue air with their thin inflexible arms, gray as a dusty band of friars. Out by the willows, whereunder crept the sluggish river, then between the hills curving about the valley of San ...
— The Splendid Idle Forties - Stories of Old California • Gertrude Atherton

... Harriet." Drayton's voice was inflexible. "It would upset all arrangements to have a woman present. It cannot be ...
— Peggy Owen and Liberty • Lucy Foster Madison

... grand experiment which the Weldon Institute had been preparing for so long was at last to take place. The "Go-Ahead" was the most perfect type of what had up to then been invented in aerostatic art—she was what an "Inflexible" or a "Formidable" is in ships ...
— Rubur the Conqueror • Jules Verne

... with creation, and constitute an inflexible, irrepealable law of the universe. In stir and push we have light and life, but in idleness, and superstitious clinging to fossilized ideas and bygones, we have ...
— The Jericho Road • W. Bion Adkins

... engaged, and to the indignation of Madam Esmond, who ordered the young negro off to the proper officer for a whipping. In vain George implored and entreated—burst into passionate tears, and besought a remission of the sentence. His mother was inflexible regarding the young rebel's punishment, and the little negro went off beseeching his young master not ...
— McGuffey's Fifth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey

... steam-engine, the lever and counter-balance weight are fixed upon the wiper-shaft, to form an equipoise to the valves. There is one on each side of the cylinder. (See SPANNER.)—Also, an inflexible bar of iron or wood to raise weights, which takes rank as the first and most simple of the mechanical powers.—To lever. An old ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth

... and thrones was soon made manifest. A systematic political opposition, vehement, daring, and inflexible, sprang from a schism about trifles, altogether unconnected with the real interests of religion or of the state. Before the close of the reign of Elizabeth this opposition began to show itself. It broke ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... the stage. Solicitation and remonstrance were tried in vain. Lady Coventry, drooping under that malady which seems ever to select what is loveliest for its prey, could render no assistance. The manager's language was civilly evasive; but his resolution was inflexible. Crisp had committed a great error ; but he had escaped with a very slight penance. His play had not been hooted from the boards. It had, on the contrary, been better received than many very estimable performances have been-than ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 1 • Madame D'Arblay

... cliff and looked stubbornly into vacancy. From his attitude it was plain that he was inflexible. ...
— The Adventure League • Hilda T. Skae

... up, therefore, a show of courage, he demanded in stammering accents, "Who are you?" He received no reply. He repeated his demand in a still more agitated voice. Still there was no answer. Once more he cudgelled the sides of the inflexible Gunpowder, and, shutting his eyes, broke forth with involuntary fervour into a psalm tune. Just then the shadowy object of alarm put itself in motion, and with a scramble and a bound stood at once in the middle of the road. Though the night was dark and dismal, ...
— Legends That Every Child Should Know • Hamilton Wright Mabie

... not struck. Miss Howe's next letter may blow thee up. In policy thou shouldest be now at least honest. Thou canst not live without her. Thou wouldest rather marry her than lose her absolutely. Thou mayest undoubtedly prevail upon her, inflexible as she seems to be, for marriage. But if now she finds thee a villain, thou mayest never more engage her attention, and she perhaps will refuse ...
— Clarissa, Volume 6 (of 9) - The History Of A Young Lady • Samuel Richardson

... perceived by Christopher Columbus, in that transcendent voyage of discovery which gave a new hemisphere to the industry and intelligence of civilized man;—an incident then so alarming to him and his company, that, but for the inflexible and persevering spirit of this intrepid and daring mariner, it would have sunk them into despair, and buried the New World for ages upon ages longer from the knowledge of the Old. Centuries have again passed away, disclosing gradually new properties ...
— Memoir of the Life of John Quincy Adams. • Josiah Quincy

... of their greatest problems was the passing of time. The nights were interminably long, but they had to be passed in work or play or dream—anything except sleep. That was Ladd's most inflexible command. He gave no reason. But not improbably the ranger thought that the terrific heat of the day spend in slumber lessened a wear and strain, if not ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey

... ended—with each of us going his own gait. In this instance his way led back to Chicago. "I must return to my plumbing," he protested. "I've got some renters who are complaining of their furnaces," and that was the end of his visit. We knew better than to argue for delay. He was as inflexible as ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland

... woman cry never failed to wring a sympathetic tear from Jimmy. Though he was a man of hard common sense, possessed of an inflexible determination to make money, there was a soft spot inside of him which was reached only by the distress of one of the opposite sex. The suffering—particularly the financial suffering—of men left him unmoved. He could foreclose a mortgage or press a debt (as long as the debtor's ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow

... strength in England. They are supported by the whole body of the Quakers, who maintain them with that degree of inflexible perseverance and never-dying activity which have rendered the benevolent actions of that body so efficient. The object that they are aiming at is one most certain to be accomplished, infallible as the prediction ...
— Sunny Memories Of Foreign Lands, Volume 1 (of 2) • Harriet Elizabeth (Beecher) Stowe

... give the Emperor regarding the numerical strength of the "Chasseurs a Cheval" at Austerlitz, to consent to be engaged once more in some underhand business: so I flatly refused. To be sure I would have liked to please the Empress, but I was aware of the inflexible severity with which Napoleon treated those found guilty of smuggling, and after facing so many dangers, and shedding so much of my blood in battle, I had no wish to sacrifice whatever merit I had gained in the eyes of the Emperor ...
— The Memoirs of General the Baron de Marbot, Translated by - Oliver C. Colt • Baron de Marbot

... regular and energetic and knew how to act rationally when it was necessary to do so. By dint of entreaties he obtained a large sum one night from her; but when he urged her to give him another sum a few days later, she showed herself inflexible, and did not give way to ...
— A Comedy of Marriage & Other Tales • Guy De Maupassant

... bridge which it was necessary for the soldiers to cross on the homeward route. The inflexible General, supposing that the regulars would be obedient to military discipline, and that it would be for their interest to retain in the camp those whose departure would endanger all their lives placed them upon ...
— David Crockett: His Life and Adventures • John S. C. Abbott

... far as unbelievers are concerned, I do not see that more need be said except to tell them that this rule is inflexible, and that it is by another way that they must look to find God, and not by the way that they insist on choosing. But believers who are in the same case need to be warned of some very real dangers that always attend a faith ...
— The Relations Between Religion and Science - Eight Lectures Preached Before the University of Oxford in the Year 1884 • Frederick, Lord Bishop of Exeter

... begged that he would not contend again. Accidents sometimes happened, she knew, in these rough encounters; and, at any rate, it terrified her to see her husband exposed to such dangers. The other lords and ladies, and Francis and Queen Mary particularly, joined in these expostulations. But Henry was inflexible. There was no danger, and, smiling at their fears, he commanded Montgomery to arm himself with his ...
— Mary Queen of Scots, Makers of History • Jacob Abbott

... mystic, he appealed to her in his enthusiasm and zeal. He set in vibration in her soul the chord of religious poetry that all women possess. His unyielding austerity, his disgust for ordinary human interests, his love of God, his youthful and untutored inexperience, his harsh words, and his inflexible will, gave Jeanne an idea of the stuff martyrs were made of; and she let herself be carried away, all disillusioned as she was, by the fanaticism of this child, the ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant

... and I used to talk it over when you and Margaret were children," she continued, in the inflexible tone with which she was accustomed to carry her point. "Even then ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow

... the fading characters in dying faces, unflinchingly, with an austere curiosity; and looks closely into the eyes of shame, not dreading what she may find there. She is always arguing with herself, and the answers are inflexible, the answers of a clear intellect which rebels but accepts defeat. Her doubt is itself an affirmation, her defiance would be an entreaty but for the 'quenchless will' of her pride. She faces every terror, and to her pained apprehension birth and death and life ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons

... been one of his particular friends. The affair soon made a great stir; the friends of both parties mixed themselves up in it. The King tried in vain to make M. d'Orleans listen to reason; the prelate was inflexible, and when he found he could gain nothing by clamour and complaint, he retired in high dudgeon into his diocese: he remained there some time, and upon his return resumed his complaints with more determination than ever; he fell at the feet of the King, protesting that he would rather ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre

... to murmur words of prayer, whilst her thoughts were with her husband on his way to the chemist's in Gnesen. But suddenly she pressed her lips tightly together. Her mouth looked very inflexible. She forgot that she was praying—her heart was filled with fierce curses and accusations. Her mother, who had sold her—sold her like one sells a young calf (why not call ...
— Absolution • Clara Viebig

... yet living, and as warm with life and heroic aspirations as their inimitable portraits had represented them. Here was Tilly, the "little corporal" now recently stretched in a soldier's grave, with his wily and inflexible features. Over against him was his great enemy, who had first taught him the hard lesson of retreating, Gustavus Adolphus, with his colossal bust, and "atlantean shoulders, fit to bear the weight of mightiest monarchies." He also had perished, and too probably by the double crime of assassination ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey

... at all times in a position that he could not have been surprised by any assault upon the Camp. The Colonel is at all times perfectly cool and self-possessed, prudent in the highest degree, and inflexible in purpose, when once resolved upon a line of action. His arrangements were made with all celerity and completeness, and though his little force was quite too small to offer great resistance in case of surprise had not the facts been ...
— The Great North-Western Conspiracy In All Its Startling Details • I. Windslow Ayer

... Advertiser, and induce it to suspend its attacks. This he did, I presume, as that paper made no further allusion to the subject. As for myself, I remained silent, following a rule that I had formed early in life, to avoid public controversy concerning my own acts. This rule, however, was not an inflexible one. ...
— Reminiscences of Sixty Years in Public Affairs, Vol. 1 • George Boutwell

... have withdrawn without a word. But the sight of you recalled the honest words you spoke to the usurper this afternoon. Sirs, I envied you then; and just now an insane longing took hold of me to set myself right with two such inflexible friends of ...
— The Blue Pavilions • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... Polynikes was buried. But the sentinels whom Creon had posted detected her in the act, and she was seized and dragged before the tribunal of the tyrant. Here she defended her action with an earnestness and dignity that should have gained her release, but Creon was inflexible in his anger. She had set at naught his edict, and should suffer the penalty for her crime. He condemned her to be ...
— Historic Tales, vol 10 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris

... prominent ideas are present in the disposition of armor upon the battleships of Great Britain, as well as in that of the battleships of France. But, while in our country these two ideas follow one another in the natural sequence of development, from the Inflexible to the Royal Sovereign, the citadel being gradually extended into two redoubts, and space being left between the redoubts for an auxiliary battery—this latter being, however, singularly placed above the armored ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 822 - Volume XXXII, Number 822. Issue Date October 3, 1891 • Various

... reduction of fifty pounds a year might have been accomplished. But as soon as Mr. Smithson touched on larger economies, such as either affected the welfare of others, or the honour and standing of the great House of Hanbury, she was inflexible. Her establishment consisted of somewhere about forty servants, of whom nearly as many as twenty were unable to perform their work properly, and yet would have been hurt if they had been dismissed; so they had the credit of fulfilling duties, while my lady paid and kept their substitutes. Mr. Smithson ...
— My Lady Ludlow • Elizabeth Gaskell

... should be applied to every character in sacred and secular history, there would be little left among the world's great heroes to admire. So we ask permission to retain the old ideal, and remember the discoverer of our hemisphere as a man of human weaknesses but of stern purpose, inflexible will, undaunted courage, patience, and professional theories most of which modern science has demonstrated to ...
— Christopher Columbus and His Monument Columbia • Various

... talks with them revealed the sweet charities of a soul unwarped by the tyrannous prohibitions under which she had been "born and raised" and to which she was still loyal; and she had crowned the conquest by a gentle, inflexible refusal to "brother" John the Baptist. In their lively minds she reawakened the age-old issue between artist and ...
— Gideon's Band - A Tale of the Mississippi • George W. Cable

... offence by calling things by their right names. But much as he desired to have his friends and followers organized for associated action, where a principle was at stake he was with them as with slavery itself absolutely inflexible and uncompromising. He was for organizing on the principle of immediate emancipation. A few deemed that ground too radical and revolutionary, and were for ranging themselves under the banner of Gradualism, thinking to draw to their ranks ...
— William Lloyd Garrison - The Abolitionist • Archibald H. Grimke

... we have turned aside the inflexible decree. It seems that we have averted the fate that was about to be accomplished. It was bearing down upon us with the weight of the ages, with all the weight of all the vague but irresistible aspirations of the past and, perhaps, the future. Thanks ...
— The Wrack of the Storm • Maurice Maeterlinck

... accomplish this, he will, and he must succeed; whereas, if he allow an exercise to be prepared where this act of the mind is absent, he may rest assured that he is deceiving both himself and the child.—The laws of Nature are inflexible; and while she will undoubtedly countenance and reward these who act upon the principles which she has established, she will as certainly leave those who neglect them to eat the "fruit of their own doings."—But the pupil, more than the Teacher is the ...
— A Practical Enquiry into the Philosophy of Education • James Gall

... sustain. Suddenly her bearing and expression changed. The few remains of sweetness in her face vanished, and even the allurement which often lasts when the sweetness is gone, disappeared in the energy which now took possession of her whole threatening and inflexible personality. ...
— Agatha Webb • Anna Katharine Green

... vertebrates. Even in the lower order of this sub-kingdom, which is the highest of animals, bone does not exist, as is the case in some tribes of fishes, such as sharks, etc., and in all classes below that of the cartilaginous fishes, the inflexible substance which sustains the soft parts is either shell or some modification of bone, and is usually found on the outside of the body. True bone, on the contrary, is found in the interior, and, therefore, in higher animals, the skeleton is always internal, ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce

... spirit, that would sooner break than bend, it must be essential to your happiness to have a wife of a compliant, gentle temper; not fond of disputing the right, or attached to her own opinions; not one who would be tenacious of rule, and unseasonably inflexible." ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. V - Tales of a Fashionable Life • Maria Edgeworth

... above his originally humble position to the highest in the land. His great decision of character, his clear, logical intellect, his lucid, incisive style of speaking, his great fidelity to principle, his inflexible honesty of purpose, made him a force in the Liberal party, who gladly welcomed him as the leader of a government. When he appealed to the country in 1874, he was supported by a very large majority of the representatives ...
— Canada under British Rule 1760-1900 • John G. Bourinot

... pledged to work for the civic betterment of Denver, pledged to fight the corrupt politicians, determined that the city government shall be well administered even if the women have to take over the offices themselves. The League is, in effect, a secret society of women. It has an inflexible rule that its proceedings are to be kept inviolable. There is a perfect understanding that any woman who divulges one syllable of what occurs at a meeting of the League will be instantly dropped from membership. No woman has ...
— What eight million women want • Rheta Childe Dorr

... basis who has come to exercise rule. He is a god of whom reason can thoroughly approve—no absurd legends cling to him; he is from the first great, mighty, and moral; and he rules the world in righteousness by inflexible standards. This religion is coming to the surface even ...
— History of Religion - A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems • Allan Menzies

... et lui seul pouvait les tirer de la situation horrible o il les avait placs. Un vieillard s'approcha de lui, porteur de propositions de paix. Il le pria de venir donner son avis; mais Tamango, inflexible comme Coriolan[1], fut sourd ses prires. La nuit, au milieu du dsordre, il avait fait sa provision de biscuits et de chair sale. Il paraissait dtermin vivre seul ...
— Quatre contes de Prosper Mrime • F. C. L. Van Steenderen

... Matilda Merston watched the departure of her unwelcome visitor, enduring the dust that rose from his horse's hoofs with the patience of inflexible determination. Then, when she had seen him go and the swirling dust had begun to settle again, she turned inwards and proceeded to wash the glass that the Boer had used with ...
— The Top of the World • Ethel M. Dell

... day when he felt conscious of his inability to succeed. Nature has fixed a boundary, beyond which extravagant enterprises cannot be carried with prudence. This boundary the Emperor reached in Spain, and overleaped in Russia. Had he then escaped destruction, his inflexible presumption would have caused him to find elsewhere a ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various

... even when fallen, above all when fallen, these men, who at every point of the universe, with their eyes fixed on France, are striving for the grand work with the inflexible logic of the ideal, are august; they give their life a free offering to progress; they accomplish the will of providence; they perform a religious act. At the appointed hour, with as much disinterestedness as an actor ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo

... General Vertessy, that rigorous, inflexible man, whom his admirers and his detractors alike called 'the man of iron,' who has never relaxed the rule of discipline to favour friend or kinsman, will do everything in his power to make an exception for once in his ...
— The Day of Wrath • Maurus Jokai

... moonlight to-night ... shall we?" whispered Gaga. Sally nodded, making her voice quaver by the motion. Gaga could not see her face; but Sally knew that even if he had done so he would have been quite unable to read her thoughts, which were dry and inflexible. He remained by her side until she had finished the song, and then fiercely pressed her head back until he was able by stooping to kiss her lips from above. His hand was under her chin. He kissed her many times, oppressively—little ravenous pecks that were febrile rather than loving; and assertive ...
— Coquette • Frank Swinnerton

... have this advantage in maintaining with easy-minded wives a rigid and inflexible behaviour, viz. that if they DO by any chance grant a little favour, the ladies receive it with such transports of gratitude as they would never think of showing to a lord and master who was accustomed to give them everything they asked for; ...
— Men's Wives • William Makepeace Thackeray

... no doubt, reckoned it honourable to hire assassins for the good of the state and would presumably have ridiculed the act of Fabricius towards Pyrrhus as unpractical knight errantry, but he was an inflexible administrator accessible neither to fear nor to corruption, and a judicious and experienced warrior. In this respect he was so far free from the prejudices of his order that he selected as his lieutenants ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen

... turn ascertained truth into a dead letter, to make us all the phlegmatic servants of routine. The relative spirit, by its constant dwelling on the more fugitive conditions or circumstances of things, breaking through a thousand rough and brutal classifications, and giving elasticity to inflexible principles, begets an intellectual finesse of which the ethical result is a delicate and tender justice in the criticism of human life. Who would gain more than Coleridge by criticism in such a spirit? We know how his life has appeared when judged by absolute standards. ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater

... interfered with slavery in the District of Columbia, he would apply the veto to their bills. Mr. Van Buren, in his inaugural address, quotes the following expression from his letter accepting his nomination: "I must go into the Presidential chair the inflexible and uncompromising opponent of every attempt on the part of Congress to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia against the wishes of the slave-holding States; and also with a determination equally decided to resist the slightest interference with it in the States where it exists." He then ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster

... "You are inflexible in your cruelty," said Hilda at length, as she made one last and almost hopeless effort. "I have done. But will you not ask me something? Have you nothing to ask about your father? He loved me as a daughter. I was the one who ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille

... of beauty. There isn't a sweeter soul on earth; she has entreated her father to change his decision; she assures him that she has no wish to marry, and that her only desire is to remain with him to care for his old age, and to help rear her sister's children. But the old man is inflexible; when once he takes a stand, that's ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: Polish • Various

... quite well, and all the while she is secretly preparing a refutation of their confident prophecies. Under these average boyish physiognomies that she seems to turn off by the gross, she conceals some of her most rigid, inflexible purposes, some of her most unmodifiable characters; and the dark-eyed, demonstrative, rebellious girl may after all turn out to be a passive being compared with this pink-and-white bit of masculinity with the ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot

... moment a chang ce courage inflexible. Le lion rugissant est un agneau paisible. Dieu, notre Dieu sans doute a vers dans son coeur ...
— Esther • Jean Racine

... thickness. The fins of the fore-limbs consist of bones exactly corresponding to those of the human arm, with five fingers at the extremity—every joint distinct, although completely encased in its thick inflexible skin. ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston

... hand for hope, but he did not notice it. She was softening to him—if she had ever steeled herself against him—and a single summons to her faith would have vanquished the feeble resistance. But he did not make it—the inflexible front which she had seen turned to others she now saw presented to herself. He looked at her with an austere tightening of the ...
— The Voice of the People • Ellen Glasgow

... his friends bore evidence to his honesty. Jefferson said, "his integrity was most pure, his justice the most inflexible I have ever known, no motives of interest or consanguinity or friendship or hatred, being able to bias his decision. He was indeed in every sense of the words, a wise, a good, and a great man." Pickering wrote ...
— The True George Washington [10th Ed.] • Paul Leicester Ford

... curious, inflexible laugh of his. "Lord, I know all about that," said he. "I had some once. First one thing and then another came up to hinder the working of the mine and the payments of dividends. First there wasn't any water, an unprecedented dry season in those parts, oldest inhabitants for evidence. Then there ...
— The Portion of Labor • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman

... stood very high, and Bernadotte's firmness appeared inflexible. Generally speaking, Bonaparte might have reckoned among his devoted partisans the companions of his glory in Italy, and also those whom he subsequently denominated "his Egyptians." But brave men had distinguished themselves in the army of the Rhine; and if they did not ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne

... your refined convenience to proceed elsewhere, O meritorious Yuen Yan, for your unassuming qualities have won our consistent regard; but an insatiable sponge has already been laid upon the well-spring of our benevolence and the tenacity of our closed hand is inflexible." ...
— Kai Lung's Golden Hours • Ernest Bramah

... towards an agreement on the points of difference between the two governments had been made. A long and intricate negotiation between the secretary of foreign affairs, and Don Guardoqui, the minister of his Catholic majesty, had terminated with the old government; and the result was an inflexible adherence on the part of Mr. Guardoqui to the exclusion of the citizens of the United States from navigating the Mississippi below their southern boundary. On this point there was much reason to fear that the cabinet of ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 4 (of 5) • John Marshall

... when they took leave, insisted on treating them to a double bowl of punch, which they were now discussing with the upper jailer, Mr. Ireton, and his two satellites, Austin and Langley. At a little distance from the party, sat a tall, sinister-looking personage, with harsh inflexible features, a gaunt but muscular frame, and large bony hands. He was sipping a glass of cold gin and water, and smoking a short black pipe. His name was Marvel, and his avocation, which was as repulsive ...
— Jack Sheppard - A Romance • William Harrison Ainsworth

... some twinges, which I was blasphemous enough to saddle on the universal dissolvent and the new-fangled diet. I stated my symptoms to my master, in the hope that he would relax the rigor of his regimen and qualify my meals with a little wine; but his hostility to that liquor was inflexible. "If you have not philosophy enough," said he, "for pure water, there are innocent infusions to strengthen the stomach against the nausea of aqueous quaffings. Sage, for example, has a very pretty flavor; and if you wish to heighten it into a debauch, ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII (of X)—Continental Europe I • Various

... was the king," says the chronicle of St. Denis, "that he thrust from their sees all the prelates of his kingdom, because they had assented to the interdict." "I had rather turn Mussulman," said Philip; "Saladin was a happy man, for he had no pope." But Innocent III. was inflexible; he claimed respect for laws divine and human, for the domestic hearth and public order. The conscience of the nation was troubled. Agnes herself applied to the pope, urging her youth, her ignorance of the world, the sincerity and purity of her love for her husband. Innocent III. was touched, ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume II. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot

... senlima. Infinitive (gram.) infinitivo. Infinity multego. Infirm malforta. Infirmary malsanulejo. Infirmity malforteco. Inflame flamigi. Inflammable bruligxema. Inflammation brulumo. Inflate sxveligi. [Error in book: sveligi] Inflect fleksi. Inflexible nefleksebla, rigida. Inflict punon doni. Influence influi. Influence influo. Influenza gripo. Inform informi. Inform sciigi. Informed, to be sciigxi. Infrequent malofta. Infuze infuzi. Ingenious sagaca. ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes

... apt to cast general discredit on religion. When we make the discovery that so many events which excited religious apprehension in the minds of our forefathers are governed by inflexible laws which we know all about, we not only smile in pity at their superstitions, but make the mental inference that the diminished emotion of this kind we yet experience is equally groundless. If at the bottom of all displays of power lies a physical necessity, ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton

... as little liable to destruction, as any other large mass of masonry. This was the most remarkable work performed under the immediate care of Mr. Matthew Davidson, our superintendent at Clachnaharry, from 1804 till the time of his decease. He was a man perfectly qualified for the employment by inflexible integrity, unwearied industry, and zeal to a degree of anxiety, in all the operations committed ...
— The Life of Thomas Telford by Smiles • Samuel Smiles

... moved onward. I could see that his fists were tightly clenched and that he held his head rigidly upright. All horrors, real and imaginary, which I had ever experienced, culminated in the moment when I saw this man of inflexible character, I could have sworn of indomitable will, moving like a puppet under the ...
— Bat Wing • Sax Rohmer

... of Gyges was cold, soft, and small; nevertheless those slender fingers clasped it with a bruising force, as the fingers of some statue of brass animated by a prodigy would have done. The rigidity of an inflexible will betrayed itself in that ever-equal pressure as of a vice—a pressure which no hesitation of head or heart came to vary. Gyges, conquered, subjugated, crushed, yielded to that imperious traction, as though he were borne along by the mighty ...
— King Candaules • Theophile Gautier

... with a vague uneasiness What was she thinking? What did she mean to do? He began to have faint doubts of her coming down to him. He began to be aware of something in her nature that was unlike those other women; something more inflexible, more silent, something that troubled him even while he told himself that she was like all the rest and he would ...
— The Heritage of the Sioux • B.M. Bower

... Pagans with the apprehension of some danger, which would arise from the new sect, the more alarming as it was the more obscure. "Whatever," says Pliny, "may be the principle of their conduct, their inflexible obstinacy ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon

... his doctrines by saying that he was the most perfect incarnation, save perhaps Saint-Just, of the Jacobin faith, in all its narrow logic, its intense mysticism, and its inflexible rigidity. He has admirers even to-day. M. Hamel describes him as "the martyr of Thermidor.'' There has been some talk of erecting a monument to him. I would willingly subscribe to such a purpose, feeling that it is useful to preserve proofs of the ...
— The Psychology of Revolution • Gustave le Bon

... night let me be sheltered from the winter's piercing cold." The kneeling figure of Charlotte in her affecting situation might have moved the heart of a stoic to compassion; but Mrs. Crayton remained inflexible. In vain did Charlotte recount the time they had known each other at Chichester, in vain mention their being in the same ship, in vain were the names of Montraville and Belcour mentioned. Mrs. Crayton could only say she was sorry for her imprudence, ...
— Charlotte Temple • Susanna Rowson

... Inflexible determination is one of the qualities which the truly great leader of men shares with the domestic pig; though in the case of the pig it is generally spoken of as obstinacy. But the leader—General, Prime Minister or Captain of Industry—is distinguished from the pig by a certain intellectual ...
— General John Regan - 1913 • George A. Birmingham

... perilous knowledge of the debaucheries of Perez and the Princess of Eboli, and had avowed his still more perilous resolution of publishing their frailty in a quarter where detection was ruin, that Perez plied with inflexible diligence artifice and violence, poison and dagger—to satisfy, coincidently, himself and his sovereign. By a similar infusion of emotions, roused by later occurrences, the feelings of Philip towards Perez ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 366, April, 1846 • Various

... notice. Although a "conservative" in his advocacy of the maintenance of the old-time curriculum, based upon the ancient languages and mathematics, and in his opposition to the free elective system, he proved an inflexible reformer as regards methods of instruction, the efficiency of which he was determined to establish. He showed a ruthless resolution to eliminate what he looked upon as undemocratic social habits among ...
— Woodrow Wilson and the World War - A Chronicle of Our Own Times. • Charles Seymour

... sorrow would never win a sigh; the sight of a downcast visage, a pale and gloomy countenance, eyes which can weep no longer, would never draw a tear from them. The sufferings of the mind are as nothing to them; they weigh them, their own mind feels nothing; expect nothing from such persons but inflexible severity, harshness, cruelty. They may be just and upright, but not merciful, generous, or pitiful. They may, I say, be just, if a man can indeed be just ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau

... whatever his mode of expression, and whichever of the muses he has chosen to serve; it is only the wedded life of the man incessantly in search of the ideal, and never relaxing in the strain of his struggle with the inflexible material from which he must shape his vision of existence. Not only in this book, but in many another has Daudet shown that he perceives the needs of the artistic temperament, its demands, its limitations and its characteristics. ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet

... Newell's conditions were inflexible. He would "see the thing through" for his daughter's sake; but he stipulated that in the meantime there should be no meetings or farther communications of any kind. He agreed to be ready when Garnett called for him, at the appointed hour on the wedding-day; but until then ...
— The Hermit and the Wild Woman and Other Stories • Edith Wharton

... turn to education as it stands to-day, the same self-satisfied, inflexible smile of the crowd is upon it all. We see little but the massing of machinery, the crowding together of numbers of teachers and numbers of courses and numbers of students, and the practical total submergence of personality, except by accident, in ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee

... that the great city had shown itself less inflexible against the army augmentation, and that it had set off this augmentation against unlimited and effectual convoys. I am not of this opinion. I think they would thereby put a dangerous weapon into the hands ...
— The Diplomatic Correspondence of the American Revolution, Vol. IX • Various

... delegated governor of the land, in the highest favor with the King, and himself a priest, it is probable that Joseph was initiated into the esoteric wisdom of the priesthood. He was undoubtedly stern, resolute, and inflexible in his relations with men, as great executive chieftains necessarily must be, whatever their private sympathies and friendships. To all appearance he was a born Egyptian, as he spoke the language of Egypt, had adopted its ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume II • John Lord

... the slightest notice of the chorus of protestations. She merely turned away with such an air of inflexible determination that even the ardent Lily refrained from ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 1, January, 1891 • Various

... his part; he ought to have been more careful and attentive." But he insisted on immediate correction of his error, on the restoration of the Powhatan to the Sumter fleet. Seward struggled hard for his plan. Lincoln was inflexible. As Seward had directed the preparation of the Pickens expedition, Lincoln required him to telegraph to Brooklyn the change in orders. Seward, beaten by his enemy Welles, was deeply chagrined. In his agitation he forgot to be formal, forgot that the previous order had gone out in the President's ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson

... inadequate to express our sense of the transcendent importance of preserving in their integrity our Canadian possessions. No declaration of her Majesty since her accession gave greater satisfaction to her subjects, than that of her inflexible determination to preserve inviolate her possessions in Canada. We are of opinion that Lord Durham did incalculable, and perhaps irreparable, mischief there. We have no time, however, to enter into details ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various

... PINDAR, his father, enters, lower right. He is a tall, strongly built man of about sixty, with iron grey hair and beard. His eyes are keen, shadowed by bushy brows, and his New England features bear the stamp of inflexible "character." He wears a black "cutaway" coat and dark striped trousers; his voice is strong and resonant. But he is evidently preoccupied and worried, though he smiles with affection as he perceives GEORGE. GEORGE'S fondness for him is ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... the most brilliant of the conversations recalled by Boswell. The hero of a hundred fights puts off his armour, and becomes a wise and tender confessor." Latterly, the style of Johnson's essays has been subjected to a closer scrutiny than ever before. What Taine found as inflexible and inert as a pudding-mold is now seen to be charged with life and movement, vibrant with light and shadow and color. More particularly, Wimsatt has shown how intimately connected is the vocabulary of The Rambler with Johnson's reading for the Dictionary, and how, having mastered the words ...
— The Vanity of Human Wishes (1749) and Two Rambler papers (1750) • Samuel Johnson









Copyright © 2025 Dictionary One.com




Advanced search
     Find words:
Starting with
Ending with
Containing
Matching a pattern  

Synonyms
Antonyms
Quotes
Words linked to  

only single words



Share |
Add this dictionary
to your browser search bar