"Inconceivable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Visible, as opposed to that which has no bones, no body, no form, the Invisible, while "breath, blood, and self of the world" are but so many attempts at finding names and concepts for what is by necessity inconceivable, and therefore unnamable. ...
— India: What can it teach us? - A Course of Lectures Delivered before the University Of Cambridge • F. Max Mueller
... younger. What magnificent physical improvements, we may suppose, will then aid the powers of the soul! The old world would then be subdued, nevermore to strike a blow at its lithe conqueror, man. The department of the newspaper, with inconceivable photographic and telegraphic resources, may then be extended to the solar or the stellar systems, and the turmoils of all creation would be reported at our breakfast-tables. Men would rise every morning to take an intelligible ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... proceeded by Elgin, Forres, and Nairn, to Culloden, where he arrived the day before the castle of Inverness surrendered to Charles. Lord George Murray then gave the Prince an account of his march, of which even this hardy General speaks as of a journey of inconceivable trouble and fatigue. Here discussions took place, in which, as usual, the Prince differed in some important points from his Lieutenant-General. The plan which Lord George proposed was, to procure five thousand ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745 - Volume III. • Mrs. Thomson
... for a fixed time; and that there may be some appearance of marriage in the business, the intended wife, under the name of a dowry, offers a spear and a tent to her husband, with a right to quit him after a fixed day, if she should choose to do so. And it is inconceivable with what eagerness the individuals of both sexes give themselves up to ...
— The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus • Ammianus Marcellinus
... what is it; oh, what is it?" they exclaimed, while visions of every possible and impossible misfortune—a telegram with bad news of papa or Ralph taking front place as the worst of all—rushed before their imaginations with the inconceivable rapidity with which such speculations picture themselves at such times of excitement. ...
— A Christmas Posy • Mary Louisa Stewart Molesworth
... bearing. From this point, as from the narrow point of a funnel, streams of light, resembling brightly illuminated vapour or smoke, appeared to be incessantly issuing, increasing in breadth as they proceeded, and darting with inconceivable velocity, such as the eye could scarcely keep pace with, upwards towards the zenith, and in the same easterly direction which the former arch had taken. The sky immediately under the spot from which the light issued appeared, ...
— Journal of the Third Voyage for the Discovery of a North-West Passage • William Edward Parry
... romantic scenery of Clifton are the attractions of the Bristol Hot Wells, in the vicinity; upon which fashion has conferred too great celebrity to render description needful. The richness and grandeur of the scenery of the Hot Wells are almost inconceivable; in some places the rocks, venerably majestic, rise perpendicularly, or overhanging, craggy and bare; and in others they are clothed with luxuriant shrubs and stately trees. From the bottom of these cliffs, on ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 390, September 19, 1829 • Various
... Battalion, and the necessity of waiting for the last Mormons who were driven out of Nauvoo. But after their experiences in a winter march from the Mississippi, with something like a base of supplies in reach, it is inconceivable that the Council would have led their followers farther into the unknown West that same year, when their stores were so nearly exhausted, and there was no region before them in which they could make purchases, even if they had the ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn
... regularly and irresistibly as the moon makes our tides. Here is richness. The breathless impetuosity of the whole narrative, the inconceivable truculence of the man, fascinates me, who am so different. When I looked at that "Perseus" in Florence, when I leaned over the medal-cases in South Kensington and stared hard at the work of his murderous ...
— An Ocean Tramp • William McFee
... sister, not heeding her, "if they want to marry, why not take the proper means? It is inconceivable to me how women, after thinking about it all their lives, blunder into it in the end, just as if it was an entirely unforeseen event. A little good sense is requisite in ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 86, February, 1875 • Various
... exists in the cases of countless criminals whose crimes seem at bottom due to apparently inconceivable brutality. In all such cases, especially when the facts do not otherwise make apparent the possible guilt of the suspect, the story of the crime's development has to be studied. Gustav Strave asserts that it is demonstrable that young men become surgeons out of pure cruelty, ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... interior arrangement of the shop, imitated with the most perfect exactness. There is also a horrid representation, frightfully correct, of a dead body in a state of corruption, which it makes one sick to look at, and which it is inconceivable that any one can have had pleasure in executing. In short, there is scarcely anything in nature upon which her talent ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon De La Barca
... It is inconceivable, the agony with which this public veneration tortured him. It was his genuine impulse to adore the truth, and to reckon all things shadow-like, and utterly devoid of weight or value, that had not its divine essence as the life within their life. Then what was he?—a ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... so monstrous, so inconceivable, that of Leonard Astier-Rehu 'taking his fling,' that his wife could not help smiling in spite of herself. No, on that point she thought there was no need for uneasiness. 'Only, you know, he has turned suspicious and mysterious, ...
— The Immortal - Or, One Of The "Forty." (L'immortel) - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet
... motion of the very leaves of Spring, in the blue air, there is then found a secret correspondence with our heart. There is eloquence in the tongueless wind, and a melody in the flowing brooks and the rustling of the reeds beside them, which, by their inconceivable relation to something within the soul, awaken the spirits to dances of breathless rapture, and bring tears of mysterious tenderness to the eyes, like the enthusiasm of patriotic success, or the voice of one beloved singing to you alone. Sterne says that if he were in a desert ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 344 (Supplementary Issue) • Various
... a small State in which everybody was the effectual inspector of everybody, is entirely beside the mark under modern conditions, in which we are to have an extraordinarily higher standard of individual privacy and an amplitude and quantity of migration inconceivable to the Academic imagination. We may accept his principle and put this particular freedom (of the use of wine) among the distinctive privileges of maturity, and still find all that a modern would think of ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... described in Acts 2, and we know that there was a large Jewish population there amongst whom the seed would be sown. Some critics have thought "that a note addressed to Ephesus lies embedded in the 16th chapter," because, they say, it is "inconceivable that Paul could have intimately known so many individuals in a Church like that in Rome to which he was personally a stranger." But this is by no means demonstrated, nor is there evidence that the Church there was founded ...
— Weymouth New Testament in Modern Speech, Preface and Introductions - Third Edition 1913 • R F Weymouth
... obviously fantastic were it not supported by solid facts which cannot be explained otherwise. Indeed it would be inconceivable if we were thinking of a whole people, consisting of free and varied individuals. But in Prussia the governing class is really a governing class: and a very few people are needed to think along these lines to make all the other people act along ...
— The Appetite of Tyranny - Including Letters to an Old Garibaldian • G.K. Chesterton
... master-stroke—and this was pure genius, for it was almost inconceivable—was when he traced the development of his 'nontelepathic civilization' to the point where he predicted criminals, criminal and moral codes of unbelievable complexity, and a great multitude of harmful ...
— The Short Life • Francis Donovan
... and the heats of fever, the mind of Wolfe dwelt on the capture of Quebec. His illness, which began before the twentieth of August, had so far subsided on the twenty-fifth that Knox wrote in his Diary of that day: "His Excellency General Wolfe is on the recovery, to the inconceivable joy of the whole army." On the twenty-ninth he was able to write or dictate a letter to the three brigadiers, Monckton, Townshend, and Murray: "That the public service may not suffer by the General's indisposition, he begs the brigadiers ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... wrote: "The whole power of Government was directed against Thomas Hardy: in his fate seemed involved the fate of the nation, and the verdict of Not Guilty appeared to burst its bonds, and to have released it from inconceivable miseries and ages of impending slavery." The reaction, indeed, was restrained; but so also was the movement of reform. The subsequent history of its leaders is one of unheroic failure, and of an unpopularity ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford
... 13. There are no shrines covered, as usual, with colored hieroglyphics. The whole of this passage is of extreme importance, showing that, apart from all objects of idolatrous worship, the old Egyptian recognized the existence of a supreme god, unknown and inconceivable, the true source of all power and goodness. Compare the oldest forms of the 17th chapter of the funeral Ritual in Lepsius's ...
— Egyptian Literature
... before this revelation of an inconceivable wickedness, yet steadily resolved to probe it to the very depths. "What did you hope to gain by this deliberate plan of destruction? The girl's ...
— The Mill Mystery • Anna Katharine Green
... are inconceivable, and have contributed to bring about what you could never expect to see, a force almost equal to the enemy in number, and you know that less would do our business. Besides, never men were so transported as to be brought in such ...
— The Bravest of the Brave - or, with Peterborough in Spain • G. A. Henty
... myself, if I could have removed my doubts by so simple a step as that of becoming an atheist, I should have done it, no matter what scandal or punishment had followed. I studied the subject thoroughly, and found that for one doubt removed, another was raised, only to reach at last a result more inconceivable than that reached by the church, and infinitely more hopeless besides. What do you gain by getting rid of one incomprehensible only to put a greater one in its place, and throw away your only hope besides? The atheists offer no ...
— Esther • Henry Adams
... me to be cured of ophthalmia. I got out of my portmanteau for them some sugar of lead; but it is inconceivable the difficulty I had to get a vessel for making it into a lotion—bottles or phials were totally unknown, not even cups were to be procured. At one time I thought of a gourd-shell, but there was not one dried in the town; so they told me. I might have lent ...
— Byeways in Palestine • James Finn
... compelled to part with her. Nothing serious? No, but totally unfit to be a nurse. She had some good qualities certainly—cheerfulness, brightness, tenderness—and for the sake of these, and his own interest in the girl, they had put up with inconceivable rudeness and irregularities. What had become of her? She really could not say. Nurse Allworthy might know—and the ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... again restore it; although of course much could be done to prevent the still further eastward extension of the Mongolian Desert if the Chinese Government would act at once. The accompanying cuts from photographs show the inconceivable desolation of the barren mountains in which certain of these rivers rise—mountains, be it remembered, which formerly supported dense forests of larches and firs, now unable to produce any wood, and because of their condition a source of danger to the whole country. ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... subjects and Persians, it is stated, are allowed to travel on this route, and some quaint instances of inconceivable official formality on the part of the Government of India are cited. For instance, a German was allowed to travel by the route from Quetta to Sistan, but another German who wished at the same time to travel from Sistan to Quetta was arrested at the frontier, detained some two ...
— Across Coveted Lands - or a Journey from Flushing (Holland) to Calcutta Overland • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... allude to individual instances whom we both know, but does it not remind you, on the whole, of the tone of French manners previous to the revolution—that "decence," which Horace Walpole so admired,[2] veiling the moral degradation, the inconceivable profligacy of the higher classes?—Stay—I have not yet done—not to you, but for you, I will add thus much;—our modern idea of delicacy apparently attaches more importance to words than to things—to ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... was content to sing of Norse themes in a key of grave, universal beauty. Of the new note that came into the Norwegian lyric with Bjoernson, I can discover no hint in his predecessors. Such a poem as, for instance, "Nils Finn," with its inimitably droll refrain—how utterly inconceivable it would be in the mouth of Wergeland or Welhaven! The new quality in it is as unexplainable as the poem itself is untranslatable. It has that inexpressible cadence and inflection of the Norse dialect which you feel ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... in a sharp clipping tone of voice, at times harsh and rasping, that carried with it an inconceivable effect of autocratic power. As he finished he made a gesture of dismissal, but as the minister was about to withdraw ...
— The Rose of Old St. Louis • Mary Dillon
... it good. He complains of the slowness of the narrative, as if that were not the art of the Poet. W. he says has great thoughts, but here are none of them. He has no interest in the Ass. These are to me inconceivable judgments from C. L. whose taste in general I acquiesce in and who is ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... hanging high over all. Nowhere, of its kind, could you see a grander prospect on a bright summer day, with the set of the air going southward,—southward, and so draping with the city-smoke not you but the city. Here for hours would Coleridge talk, concerning all conceivable or inconceivable things; and liked nothing better than to have an intelligent, or failing that, even a silent and patient human listener. He distinguished himself to all that ever heard him as at least the most surprising talker extant in this world,—and ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... was imperative to load them as lightly as possible, and discard all luxuries, especially heavy or bulky luxuries. Travelling through a wild country where there is little food for man or beast is beset with difficulties almost inconceivable to the man who does not himself know this kind of wilderness, and especially to the man who only knows the ease of civilization. A scientific party of some size, with the equipment necessary in order to do scientific work, can only go at all if the men who actually handle ...
— Through the Brazilian Wilderness • Theodore Roosevelt
... chasm that separates man from even the highest of the lower orders. His radical unlikeness to all the forms below him, as if he moved in a world apart, into which they could never enter, as in a sense he does, is where the difficulty lies. Moreover, evolution balks us because of the inconceivable stretch of time during which it has been at work. It is as impossible for us to grasp geological time as sidereal space. All the standards of measurement furnished us by experience are as inadequate as is a child's cup to measure ...
— Time and Change • John Burroughs
... show a polite interest. I knew the answer would be an indignant negative. You're an Englishwoman, and you're nice. Oh, one can see with half an eye that you're nice. But that a nice Englishwoman should have a lover is as inconceivable as that she should have side-whiskers. It's only the reg'lar bad-uns in England who have lovers. There's nothing between the family pew and the divorce court. One nice Englishwoman is a match for the whole Eleven ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume X (of X) • Various
... Farragut was giving orders to cast off the last moorings holding the Abraham Lincoln to its Brooklyn pier. And so if I'd been delayed by a quarter of an hour or even less, the frigate would have gone without me, and I would have missed out on this unearthly, extraordinary, and inconceivable expedition, whose true story might well meet ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... summer day it was not there. Where precisely it came from, or who these men were who knew the rocks and soundings better than we who bathed there, we could never tell. We knew some river's bay only, but they took rivers from end to end. They were a sort of fabulous river-men to us. It was inconceivable by what sort of mediation any mere landsman could hold communication with them. Would they heave to, to gratify his wishes? No, it was favor enough to know faintly of their destination, or the time of their possible return. I have seen them in the summer when the stream ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau
... actually is. One party, then as now, only cared for it because it was Catholic, and the other only cared for it because it was Protestant. Now, something had certainly happened to the English quite inconceivable to the Scotch or the Irish. Masses of common people loved the Church of England without having even decided what it was. It had a hold different indeed from that of the mediaeval Church, but also very different from the barren prestige of gentility which clung to it in the succeeding century. ...
— A Short History of England • G. K. Chesterton
... remains of fowl are found until a later period. Now the carboniferious period alone, according to Sir William Thompson, covers many millions of years; so that instead of fish and fowl being contemporaneous, we find them geologically separated by inconceivable spaces of time. Here again the ...
— Bible Romances - First Series • George W. Foote
... promised to do all she could for the cause of temperance. She could certainly do something, in the way of trying at least. She must. To try, is in everybody's power. But now she found as she thought about it, that it would be very difficult even to try. It is inconceivable how unwilling she felt to say one word to Norton on the subject; and as for David!—Well, she need not think of David at present; he was a stranger. If she could get Norton to listen— But she could not get Norton to listen, she was sure; and what was the use of making ...
— The House in Town • Susan Warner
... dynamically, should have been greater than all its surrounding orbs taken together. The question might then have been asked—"Why do we not see it?"—we, especially, who occupy the mid region of the cluster—the very locality near which, at least, must be situated this inconceivable central sun. The astronomer, perhaps, at this point, took refuge in the suggestion of non-luminosity; and here analogy was suddenly let fall. But even admitting the central orb non-luminous, how did he manage ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... straight off grass and backing him to win you a stake at even weights with trained horses. The millions of the public money which lie wantonly strewed over the South African veldt would appal even the most phlegmatic of financiers. The waste in horse-flesh is inconceivable; and the man with the stiff upper lip who refused to realise that it takes gentle breaking to bring the troop-horses to the perfection which enables them to cover for six consecutive days thirty miles a-day with ...
— On the Heels of De Wet • The Intelligence Officer
... stamping out my cigar—a circumstance highly agreeable, I should think, to the mosquitoes, if I may judge from the state of my face next morning. But that was a trifling inconvenience in comparison with the brutal proceedings I became victim of on the part of Sotillo. Something utterly inconceivable, sir; more like the proceedings of a maniac than the action of a sane man, however lost to all sense of honour and decency. But Sotillo was furious at the failure of ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... Baba took these measures to prevent the public from knowing how he came by his riches in so short a time, the captain of the forty robbers returned to the forest with inconceivable mortification; and in his confusion at his ill success, so contrary to what he had promised himself, entered the cave, not being able, all the way from the town, to come to any resolution how to revenge himself of ...
— The Arabian Nights - Their Best-known Tales • Unknown
... from all sides in wild confusion flew The dust and leaves, the branches and the stones, With hideous tumult, inconceivable. ...
— The Poems of Giacomo Leopardi • Giacomo Leopardi
... paid to his prisoner, in order that the queen might treat her as his son's betrothed. When they arrived at the palace, and entered the vast hall in which her majesty was seated, Isabella's escort halted at the lower end, and she herself advanced alone in all her inconceivable beauty, producing an effect like that of a brilliant meteor shooting through the sky on a calm clear night, or of a sunbeam darting at the first dawn of day through a mountain gorge. A comet she seemed, portending a fiery doom to the hearts of many in that presence hall. ...
— The Exemplary Novels of Cervantes • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... the marriage party; refused to eat with it or sit with it at all. Day after day, for six days, flatly refused; and after nightfall of the sixth, glided out with her foster-brother into the woods, into by-paths and inconceivable wanderings; and, in effect, got home to Denmark. Brother Svein was not for the moment there; probably enough gone to England again. But Thyri knew too well he would not allow her to stay here, or anywhere that ...
— Early Kings of Norway • Thomas Carlyle
... the American people the last possible doubt as to the essential barbarity of the German Government. No other Government pretending to be civilised has ever shocked the entire world by such a sickening crime against humanity. It is utterly inconceivable that the American nation could descend so low in the scale of humanity as to order the deliberate destruction of an English ship bearing hundreds of innocent German women and children across the seas. But if such a thing were conceivable, ...
— Plain Words From America • Douglas W. Johnson
... with ugly extremities. His nose, about which he gave special directions to David when his bust was taken, was well cut, rather long, and square at the end, with the lobes of the open nostrils standing out prominently. As to his eyes, according to Gautier, there were none like them.[*] They had inconceivable life, light, and magnetism. They were eyes to make an eagle lower his lids, to read through walls and hearts, to terrify a wild beast—eyes of a sovereign, a seer, a conqueror. Lamartine likens them to "darts dipped in kindliness." ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... fire, and smoke and flames met them at every turn; for the conflagration spread with incredible speed. An inconceivable confusion succeeded: one sought for another; one called on another; mother and children, ...
— The Home • Fredrika Bremer
... Bohemian board, to celebrate whatever our fancy painted. Now it was an imaginary birthday—a movable feast that came to be very popular in our select artistic circle; again it was the possible—dare I say probable?—sale of a picture at a quite inconceivable price. There were always occasions enough. Would it had been the case ...
— In the Footprints of the Padres • Charles Warren Stoddard
... brown sugar. The character of his stock varied according to the time of year, for nature and Belgravia are less stable in their seasons than the Jewish schoolboy, to whom buttons in March are as inconceivable as snow-balling in July. ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... to see Mr. Faringfield now stride forth at all risk and inflict upon Master Ned some chastisement inconceivable; and Ned himself took a backward step or two. But his father, after a moment of dark glowering, merely answered, though in a voice ...
— Philip Winwood • Robert Neilson Stephens
... seen, Ptolemy himself felt the extraordinary difficulty involved in the supposition that so stupendous a fabric as the celestial sphere should spin in the way supposed. Such movements required that many of the stars should travel with almost inconceivable velocity. Copernicus also saw that the daily rising and setting of the heavenly bodies could be accounted for either by the supposition that the celestial sphere moved round and that the earth remained at rest, or by the supposition that the celestial sphere was at rest while the earth ...
— Great Astronomers • R. S. Ball
... and graceful transitions from one subject to another, he has very diligently imitated his master; but he, unhappily, pleased himself with blank verse, and supposed that the numbers of Milton, which impress the mind with veneration, combined as they are with subjects of inconceivable grandeur, could be sustained by images which, at most, ...
— Lives of the Poets, Vol. 1 • Samuel Johnson
... which, to most eyes, concealed the negligence and fallacy of the details, Mr. Whitbread, on the contrary, with an unrelenting accuracy, laid open the minutiae of every transaction, and made evasion as impossible to others, as it was alien and inconceivable to himself. He was, perhaps, the only person, whom Sheridan had ever found proof against his powers of persuasion,—and this rigidity naturally mortified his pride full as much as it thwarted ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan Vol 2 • Thomas Moore
... committed the murder made a noise in following Miss Vaughan and her father so that she should think it was Swain who was following them; he picked up the blood-stained handkerchief, which Swain had dropped perhaps when he fled from the arbour, and placed it beside the body; and in some way inconceivable to me he pressed the prints of Swain's fingers on the dead man's robe. Now, to do that, he must have known that Swain was injured—the blood-stained handkerchief would tell him that; but he must also have known that it was his right ...
— The Gloved Hand • Burton E. Stevenson
... peroration was inconceivable. Here was the first word of hope publicly uttered since the debacle! People in the galleries who had seen Cavour usually silenced by clamour and howls heard the applause with astonishment, and then joined in it. All the ministers rose to shake hands ...
— Cavour • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... the Gothic entrance of the ancient prison, which, as is well known to all men, rears its ancient front in the very middle of the High Street, forming, as it were, the termination to a huge pile of buildings called the Luckenbooths, which, for some inconceivable reason, our ancestors had jammed into the midst of the principal street of the town, leaving for passage a narrow street on the north; and on the south, into which the prison opens, a narrow crooked lane, winding betwixt the high and sombre walls ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... it now, it seems inconceivable that we said as little to each other as we did, of this horrible catastrophe. That night we did not pretend to sleep. We sat in one of the deserted cabins, now talking fast, now sitting and brooding, without speaking, ...
— The Brick Moon, et. al. • Edward Everett Hale
... the refusal of his next work. Messrs. Antonio, the eminent photographers of Regent Street, had written offering to take his portrait gratis, and asking him to deign to fix an appointment for a seance. The editor of Which is Which, a biographical annual of inconceivable utility, had written for intimate details of his age, weight, pastimes, works, ideals, and diet. The proprietary committee of the Park Club in St. James's Square had written to suggest that he might ...
— A Great Man - A Frolic • Arnold Bennett
... before them? What better than stewed fowls and squirrels, boiled rice, Indian hoe cake and yams smoking hot from the ashes, squashes, pumpkin pies and apple dumpling, and all this followed by a course of fruit, peaches and apples, musk and water-melons, all of a flavor and size inconceivable by any but the inhabitants of the sunny climes which brought them to maturity. Her ladyship could not help making the contrast with a service of fruit upon an extra occasion in her home circle, which cost ...
— An Historical Account of the Settlements of Scotch Highlanders in America • J. P. MacLean
... God, that he should do wickedness; and from the Almighty that he should commit iniquity." An evil God, one that could commit evil would be a contradiction in terms, an impossible, inconceivable idea. Job seemed to doubt that the principle on which the universe was conducted was one of absolute equity. He must know that God is free from all evil-doing. However hidden the meaning of His dealings, He is always just. God never did, never ...
— The Great Doctrines of the Bible • Rev. William Evans
... "It is inconceivable that such stuff should be printed, and that people should buy it," she said. "But you see it is so vague that it might refer to any one at any place, and even if we knew who was meant, it is too insignificant a piece of small malice to receive anything ...
— Jewel Weed • Alice Ames Winter
... kill enemies. It seemed equal to taking a tiger laboriously and at much risk in a net, then next day letting him go. Strange it is to say, but it really requires an express experience to show the true practical working of the case, and this demonstrates (inconceivable as that would have been to the Tartars) that the capture is quite equal (quoad damage to ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... together revealed the intruders, and all the monkeys, except pink-face, crowding the trees above the spot where they stood, gazed down upon them with expressions in which unparalleled indignation and inconceivable surprise ...
— Blown to Bits - or, The Lonely Man of Rakata • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... that are you acquainted. You are perfectly correct in concluding that certain persons are laughing in their sleeve. But at what? At the success of their own machinations? Not at all! They are laughing at the inconceivable fatuity which induces those whom they once dreaded to destroy themselves and their own labours. The stone with immense toil is rolled up to the brow of the mountain, when they see it recoil, not ...
— Letters of George Borrow - to the British and Foreign Bible Society • George Borrow
... been three general kinds: the CHIEF, both in antiquity and excellency, which they that did imitate the inconceivable excellencies of God; such were David in the Psalms; Solomon in the Song of Songs, in his Ecclesiastes, and Proverbs; Moses and Deborah in their hymns; and the writer of Job; which, beside others, the learned Emanuel Tremellius and Fr. Junius do entitle the poetical part ...
— A Defence of Poesie and Poems • Philip Sidney
... children into a public-house and give them beer, and on a Sunday of all days, and immediately after a sermon! That a local preacher should go direct from the vestry to the gin-palace and there drink ale with a strolling player! These phenomena were simply and totally inconceivable! And yet Jock was in presence of them, assisting at them, positively acting in them! And in spite of her enormities, Mrs Clowes still struck him as a most agreeable, decent, kindly, motherly woman—quite apart from her handsomeness. And her offspring, each hidden ...
— The Matador of the Five Towns and Other Stories • Arnold Bennett
... servants," added Fouquet, throwing himself on his knees. The king let the rude weapon fall from his grasp. Fouquet approached him, kissed his knees, and took him in his arms with inconceivable tenderness. ...
— The Man in the Iron Mask • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... inconceivable that such a man should err flagrantly in the use of the ideographic script. Ieyasu, however, despatched to Kyoto two rival prelates, Soden and Tengai, with instructions to convoke a meeting of the priests ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... forward rake. They must laugh or, at any rate, smile sometimes, I thought. This is where Punch comes from. It is the land of Dickens. It is, in short, Merry England. But, as I regarded the dingy, set faces from the railway's carriage window, it seemed inconceivable that their owners ever could have laughed, or screwed up the skin around their eyes to look out happily under sunny blue skies ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... returns to Spain as an arch-traitor,—with his pockets full of letters which if discovered would cost him his head. When one learns this and then thinks back in the light of this knowledge, his conduct throughout the play appears absolutely inconceivable; so that one is driven to the conjecture that Schiller did not think of him all along as an out-and-out traitor, but added this touch at the last, along with others, for the purpose of accenting his ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... exactly the same arguments apply to the Northampton trials of 1705. Hutchinson had been at extraordinary pains to find out not only about Jane Wenham, but about the Moordike case of 1702. It is inconceivable that he should have quite overlooked the execution of two ...
— A History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718 • Wallace Notestein
... have been there. If I had properly valued my life, I should have been there. But it seemed so inconceivable that things should have reached a worse pass than when I crossed the frontier! It seemed so incredible that I should not be able to preserve any wreck of my property for my children, that I have lingered on, staying month after month, till now I cannot ...
— The Hour and the Man - An Historical Romance • Harriet Martineau
... this seems inconceivable, but it proved to be absolutely true. I went in, expecting to be turned back ignominiously before I had crossed the hall, but there was positively no one there! The place was like a City of the Dead. Yet within an hour, a banquet ...
— Seen and Unseen • E. Katharine Bates
... stupendous batteries of accumulators drove into the middle frequency of the attacking band, and Brandon's heart was in his mouth as he stared into the plate to see what would happen. He saw! Everything in the Sirius held fast, and under the impact of the inconceivable plane of force, the screens of the enemy vessel flared instantly into an even more intense incandescence and in that same fleeting instant went down, and all defenses vanished as the metal sphere fell apart into ...
— Spacehounds of IPC • Edward Elmer Smith
... It was inconceivable that mankind would become extinct. The whole vast resources and pooled intelligence of surviving humanity were focused upon Thurston's Disease. And the disease would yield. Humanity waited with childlike confidence for ...
— Pandemic • Jesse Franklin Bone
... her yashmak was not gathered at the ankles, but hung loose like occidental trousers; and the day we met she wore simply her own hair. There was not much of it on top, and she had it cut short in the neck. She was rather a terrible figure. Her having ever been married would have been inconceivable, except for her son." ...
— The Minister's Charge • William D. Howells
... order of nature and the order of knowledge are identical and that things must exist as they are thought, so that when two things can not be thought together they are supposed not to exist together, and the inconceivable is supposed to be identical with the non-existent. But what they do not succeed in conceiving must not be confused with the absolutely inconceivable. The difficulty or impossibility of conceiving may be subjective and conditional, and may prevent us from understanding ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... opinion of the Mercantilists, money. Notwithstanding what may be called the tangible absurdity of this doctrine, it remained unquestioned for generations; nay, to be candid, most men still cling to it—a fact which would be inconceivable did not the doctrine offer a very simple and plausible explanation of the enigmatical phenomenon that increasing capacity of production does not necessarily bring with it a ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka
... "Approach, Vishnu; Raghava, thou hast happily arrived, with thy godlike brothers. Enter thine own body as Vishnu or the eternal ether. For thou art the abode of the worlds: no one comprehends thee, the inconceivable and imperishable, except the large-eyed Maya thy primeval spouse." Hearing these words, Rama enters the glory of Vishnu with his body and his followers. He then asks Brahma to find an abode for the people who had accompanied him from devotion to his person, and ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... the engagement began, and the protestant camp was attacked in three places with inconceivable fury. The fight was maintained with great obstinacy and perseverance on both sides, continuing without intermission for the space of four hours; for the several companies on both sides relieved each other alternately, and by ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... anyone were to tell Captain Johns that he—Bunter—had a tail, Johns would manage to get himself to believe the story in some mysterious manner. He would. He was suspicious and credulous to an inconceivable degree. He would believe any silly tale, suspect any man of anything, and crawl about with it and ruminate the stuff, and turn it over and over in his mind in the most miserable, inwardly whining perplexity. He would take the meanest possible ...
— Tales Of Hearsay • Joseph Conrad
... elevated ground, with a fine view of a part of the Bamangwato chain of mountains before us. Here the trees were large and handsome, but not strong enough to resist the inconceivable strength of the mighty monarchs of these forests. Almost every tree had half its branches broken short by them, and at every hundred yards I came upon entire trees, and these the largest in the forest, uprooted clean out of the ground, or broken short across their ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 6 • Charles H. Sylvester
... indorse the decrees of the Powers, whose interests are unlimited like their assurance, they will withhold from us the supplies of food, raw materials, and money without which our national existence is inconceivable. Necessarily we must give way, at any rate for the time being." Those words sum up the relations of the ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... are brothers and have equal rights, and that God clothes the soul with freedom,—is a truth taught by Christ, is a truth proclaimed by the Church; and the faith of Christians in this principle, in spite of hesitations and misgivings, of oppositions and obstacles and inconceivable difficulties, has finally given to it its modern vigor and beneficent power. The spirit of love and mercy, which is the spirit of Christ, breathes like a heavenly zephyr through the whole earth, and under ...
— Education and the Higher Life • J. L. Spalding
... and in some cases seems rendered only the more intense by the admitted unworthiness of its object. When it is not the reason for marriage, it can hardly fail to grow from the conjugal relation between one man and one woman, if the mutual duties belonging to that relation be held sacred. It is inconceivable that a mother should not love her child, inevitably cast upon her protection from the first moment of his being; the father who extends a father's care over his children finds in that care a constant ...
— A Manual of Moral Philosophy • Andrew Preston Peabody
... course, be modified and even contradicted if it means that they never differed; that Mr. Browning never thought an Act of Parliament good when Mrs. Browning thought it bad; that Mr. Browning never thought bread stale when Mrs. Browning thought it new. Such unanimity is not only inconceivable, it is immoral; and as a matter of fact, there is abundant evidence that their marriage constituted something like that ideal marriage, an alliance between two strong and independent forces. They differed, in truth, about a great ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton
... Armies? Gorman was unreasonably annoyed by King Konrad Karl's certainty that the Emperor would win the war and by Donovan's passive neutrality of sentiment. For Gorman neutrality in any quarrel was no doubt inconceivable. As a younger man he might have been a rebel and given his life in some wild struggle against the power of England; or he might have held the King's commission and led other Irishmen against a foreign foe. He could never, if a great fight were going on, have been content to stand aside ...
— The Island Mystery • George A. Birmingham
... half an hour with inconceivable fury. It had become almost like night. At moments the wind weakened, the black clouds pushed apart; in the sky was a bloody sun, on the earth an ominous light of ruddy color. The hot stifling wind grew more violent, the clouds of sand thicker. The ghastly light was extinguished, ...
— The Pharaoh and the Priest - An Historical Novel of Ancient Egypt • Boleslaw Prus
... views of others are just as dramatic, for the phenomenon is actuated by will of some sort anyhow, and wills give rise to dramas. The spiritist view, as held by Messrs. Hyslop and Hodgson, sees a "will to communicate," struggling through inconceivable layers of obstruction in the conditions. I have heard Hodgson liken the difficulties to those of two persons who on earth should have only dead-drunk servants to use as their messengers. The scientist, for his part, sees a "will to deceive," watching its chance in all ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... of life is not confined to the existing world. Whatever their minor differences, geologists are agreed as to the vast thickness of the accumulated strata which compose the visible part of our earth, and the inconceivable immensity of the time of whose lapse they are the imperfect, but the only accessible witnesses. Now, throughout the greater part of this long series of stratified rocks are scattered, sometimes very abundantly, multitudes ...
— The Darwinian Hypothesis • Thomas H. Huxley
... can assuredly change them within a not unreasonable time and adapt their covering to their own will and convenience, and to that of none other; thus what is commonly conceived of as direct creation by God is moved back to a time and space inconceivable in their remoteness, while the aim and design so obvious in nature are shown to be still at work around us, growing ever busier and busier, and advancing from day to day ...
— Selections from Previous Works - and Remarks on Romanes' Mental Evolution in Animals • Samuel Butler
... grossness of speech which even the ladies of the party permitted themselves cannot be reproduced in the decorous print of our age. It is nothing less than inconceivable to us how Diderot can have brought himself to write down, in letters addressed to a woman of good education and decent manners, some of the talk that went on at Grandval. The coarsest schoolboy of these days would wince at such shameless freedoms. But it would be wrong to forget the allowance ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley
... inquiries in that region at one time. Not directly, of course. At second and third hand. It isn't inconceivable, if we conceive of a life after this, that a man should forget, in its more important interests and occupations, just how he quitted this world, or at least the particulars of the article of death. Of course, we must suppose a good portion ...
— Between The Dark And The Daylight • William Dean Howells
... of small drops; that such changes were but minute local phenomena of a world infinitely higher in order than their own; that that world in turn was but one of the least of the worlds forming a yet higher system; and so on ad infinitum. Such ideas would seem to them not merely inconceivable, but many degrees beyond the widest conceptions of space and time which they could ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... captives, also followed. It looked like a caravan, a wandering nation, or rather one of those armies of antiquity returning loaded with slaves and spoil after a great devastation. It was inconceivable how the head of this column could draw and support such a heavy mass of equipages in so ...
— History of the Expedition to Russia - Undertaken by the Emperor Napoleon in the Year 1812 • Count Philip de Segur
... a result which looks absurd, and is really inconceivable by us, can be treated as possible in geometry, we must have recourse to analogy. Suppose a world consisting of a boundless flat plane to be inhabited by reasoning beings who can move about at pleasure on the plane, but are not able to turn their heads ...
— Side-lights on Astronomy and Kindred Fields of Popular Science • Simon Newcomb
... With inconceivable ingenuity, the victim is seized and thrown to the ground, and the wasp plunges her sting, not at random into the body, which would involve the risk of death, but at determined points, exactly into the seat of those invisible nervous ganglions whose ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... itching to get her hands on the balcony, which reminded her of Mrs. Jellyby's closet, full to overflowing with every conceivable and inconceivable thing. The floor was strewn with coats, dresses and hats while the shoes were neatly hung on a row of hooks. Very pretty, well-shaped shoes they were, too, as it seemed Jo's feet were her ...
— Molly Brown's Orchard Home • Nell Speed
... boat had come to give notice of the change and call the passenger aboard, and the boat's crew had stumbled on him lying in his blood. Nay, and there was more behind. This pre-arranged departure shed some light upon his inconceivable insult of the night before; it was a parting shot, hatred being no longer checked by policy. And, for another thing, the nature of that insult, and the conduct of Mrs. Henry, pointed to one conclusion, which I ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition, Vol. XII (of 25) - The Master of Ballantrae • Robert Louis Stevenson
... "The inconceivable impudence! A bellringer carrying off a wench, like a vicomte! a lout poaching on the game of gentlemen! that is a rare piece of assurance. However, he paid dearly for it. Master Pierrat Torterue is the harshest groom that ever curried a knave; and ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... attributes of kingship. It is fundamentally because the English people have discerned that kingship is not necessarily incompatible with popular government that the monarchy has persisted. If royalty had been felt to stand inevitably in the path of democratic progress, it is inconceivable that all the forces of tradition could have pulled it through the past seventy-five or eighty years. As it is, while half a century ago there was in the country a small republican group which was fond of urging that the monarchy ...
— The Governments of Europe • Frederic Austin Ogg
... He who committed the most atrocious actions, and such as no human creature would have imagined, was the most applauded and considered as the greatest man among them. I dare not write the horrible and inconceivable atrocities they committed on the persons ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... time the lines were out, the dun sou'westerly clouds all around had raised themselves like a vast down-hanging fringe, a tremendous curtain, ragged with inconceivable delicacy at the foot, between which, and the water-line, the peep o' day stared blankly. The whitish light, which made the sea look deathly cold, was changed to a silvery sheen where the hidden cliffs stood. From ...
— A Poor Man's House • Stephen Sydney Reynolds
... objection, that the theory attributes an almost inconceivable rapidity to some of our mental operations, it may be answered, in the first place, that there is no reason, surely, why mind should not be capable of as rapid action as its handmaid, matter; and, in the second place, that our ideas of time are ...
— In the School-Room - Chapters in the Philosophy of Education • John S. Hart |
