"Indestructible" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and parted from her, leaving her in the company of William Rodney. She could not blame him for loving Katharine, but that, when he loved another, he should ask her to marry him—that seemed to her the cruellest treachery. Their old friendship and its firm base upon indestructible qualities of character crumbled, and her whole past seemed foolish, herself weak and credulous, and Ralph merely the shell of an honest man. Oh, the past—so much made up of Ralph; and now, as she saw, made up of something strange and false and other than she had ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... Pirithous remained in undisturbed possession of his bride, and on the following morning Theseus departed, bidding farewell to his friend. The common fight had quickly welded the fresh tie of their brotherhood into an indestructible bond. ...
— Myths and Legends of All Nations • Various
... rhythm, you have the genesis of the whole thing. It may not be worked out that night, nor even by the men who first made it. The fire may long have died before the ballad is completed, and tall trees may stand over the men and women who were the first to tell the tale. But rhyme and rhythm are indestructible, if they are based on reality. "Not marble nor the gilded monuments of princes shall ...
— Book of Old Ballads • Selected by Beverly Nichols
... while the newsboy cries his monotonous advertisement, or his servant hands to him a telegraphic dispatch; and he is right. The body in which Grecian art existed, is indeed dead, but the spirit which animated it is indestructible. There will be poets to worship and reproduce it, there will be scholars to admire and preserve it, when every man's field is bounded by a railway, when every housetop is surmounted by a telegraph wire, and when the golden calf is again set ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... same age. Meanwhile, a Homeric scholar so eminent as Mr. T. W. Allen, says that "the linguistic attack upon their age" (that of the Homeric poems) "may be said to have at last definitely failed, and archaeology has erected an apparently indestructible buttress for their defence." [Footnote: Classical ...
— Homer and His Age • Andrew Lang
... productions to the mere realities that flutter and bloom for their brief hour, and then die. There is nothing in entomology so beautiful as a well-busked trout or salmon fly. And then it is comparatively indestructible. Take a natural May Fly and squeeze it in your hand. It is reduced to a pulp. Try the same experiment with an artificial one, and its plumage remains unruffled—which is more than you do, since the chance is that you will have to employ ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 6, May 7, 1870 • Various
... deepest intensity of His love,—a love which is similar to that of a father towards his son. (Compare remarks on Ps. ii. 7.) Sonship to God has this significancy here also, as is shown by what immediately follows, where, in explanation of it, the promise of indestructible love is connected with it. But this relationship, in its highest and closest form, cannot exist betwixt God and a mere man. It is only when the Davidic family is viewed as centring in Christ, that the words can acquire their full truth. To this, the ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions, v. 1 • Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg
... who imagine and express this indestructible order, are not only the authors of language and of music, of the dance, and architecture, and statuary, and painting; they are the institutors of laws, and the founders of civil society, and the inventors of the arts of life, and the teachers, who draw into a certain propinquity with the ...
— A Defence of Poetry and Other Essays • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... mute and closed churches, where imperishable mosaics glisten in the awful damp, and beautiful pillars of most precious marbles gleam through a humid mist, of mausoleums empty but indestructible, of tottering campanili, of sumptuous splendour and incredible decay, is the sepulchre of the great civilisation which Christianity failed to save alive, but to which we owe everything and out of ...
— Ravenna, A Study • Edward Hutton
... down, our philosopher discoursed to us of the principle of fire, which he holds, with the ancients, to be an independent element that comes and goes in a mysterious manner, as we see flame spring up and vanish, and is in some way vital and indestructible, and has a mysterious relation to the source of all things. "That flame," he says, "you have put out, but where has it gone?" We could not say, nor whether it is anything like the spirit of a man which is here for a little hour, and then vanishes away. Our own philosophy of ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... cartilage of the nose. They seem generally to be in good spirits, and spend their time in everlasting talk, funeral ceremonies, and marriages. This flow of animal spirits must be one reason why they are such an indestructible race. The habitual influence on their minds of the agency of unseen spirits may have a tendency in the same direction, by preserving the mental quietude of ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... savage, violent, and ignorant creature—had been revealed clearly in that moment the tremendous fact of our isolation, of the loneliness impenetrable and transparent, elusive and everlasting; of the indestructible loneliness that surrounds, envelopes, clothes every human soul from the cradle to the grave, and, ...
— An Outcast of the Islands • Joseph Conrad
... each of our frail, trembling spirits has its place in the prodigious scheme, as much as the vast and fiery globe of the sun on the one hand, and, on the other, the smallest atom of dust that welters deep beneath the sea. All that is, exists; indestructible, august, divine, capable of endless rearrangement, infinite ...
— The Thread of Gold • Arthur Christopher Benson
... obliterated the record in many a noble house abandoned by history; even the fated steps of the Queen save in one bloodstained closet have left but little authentic trace. But Knox is still present with all the force of an indestructible individuality—in the existing life of the country which took so strong an impression from him, and in the absolutely personal facts of the church in which he preached, the house in which he lived, the stone ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... every organ intact by means of... process... rendered indestructible. Tcheriapin as he was in life may be seen by the curious ten thousand years hence. Incomplete... one respect... ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer
... the bare ledge, with here and there six-inch shelves and eroded gullies, offered a somewhat uneven surface to the wheels. A well built Studebaker will stand a lot of this kind of banging, but it is not wholly indestructible. So it happened that half-way down the hill the left hind axle snapped at the hub. Thereupon some two hundred dozen ears of early green-corn were strewn along the flinty face of the highway, while Uncle Enoch was hurled, seat and all, accompanied by four dozen eggs and ten pounds ...
— Horses Nine - Stories of Harness and Saddle • Sewell Ford
... writer that I read when I was a boy, said that the desert went into the heart of the Jews in their wanderings and made them what they are. I cannot remember by what argument he proved them to be even yet the indestructible children of earth, but it may well be that the elements have their children. If we knew the Fire Worshippers better we might find that their centuries of pious observance have been rewarded, and that the fire has given them a little of its nature; and I am certain that the ...
— The Celtic Twilight • W. B. Yeats
... to someone why he had overcharged. Jimmy's intelligence told him that countermen in a joint like this didn't expect tips, so he saved himself that hurdle. He left the place with a stomach full of food that only the indestructible stomach of a five-year-old could handle and now, fed and reasonably content, Jimmy began to seek his next ...
— The Fourth R • George Oliver Smith
... confess her sins to Heaven, that he may not kill her soul with her body! Here, at the moment of the most intense excitement, in the desperate mood of a murderer, his love still breaks forth, and we again see the indestructible nobility of his soul." ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... she had been of that unchangeable, drab quality in emotional affairs which is characteristic of advanced middle-age, when there are no great joys or sorrows to look back on, and no expectation for the future. She had always had something of the indestructible quality of frail things like thistledown or cottonwool; violence and explosion that would blow strong and distinct organisms to atoms only puffed her a yard or two away where she alighted again without shock, instead ...
— Michael • E. F. Benson
... did the obelisk lend itself to its symbolical purposes! There was a most wonderful harmony between the idea and the object which expressed it. Being composed of the most durable of all materials, the hard indestructible granite, the eternal sun was thus fittingly represented by an object that lifts its stern finger in unchangeable defiance of the vicissitudes of the seasons and the ages. Its highly polished surface and rich rosy red ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... oxidizes and thus helps make tight margins, and is very useful at cervical margins; generally discolors, but not always, and does not discolor the tooth unless a carious portion has been left, and then only discolors that portion. In oral fluids it is indestructible if well condensed, otherwise it is crumbly. There is no change of form, except a slight expansion, which does no harm. A weak electric current is set up between the gold and tin, and tin oxid is formed. The hardening and discoloration both depend ...
— Tin Foil and Its Combinations for Filling Teeth • Henry L. Ambler
... Galloway's army, commanded, as it was, by a heretic condottiere? Outside the official spheres, the isolation was therefore complete, and during that three months' crisis the errant royalty of Philip V., represented by his courageous consort, struck indestructible roots in the hearts of his subjects. The northern shores and the great province of Andalusia, joining to those divers motives the hatred with which England inspired the maritime population, resolutely declared for the House ...
— Political Women, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... sometimes makes one catch one's breath. For it is not true to manners, which are constantly false, or to facts, which are almost always false; it is true to the only existing thing which is true, emotion, the irreducible minimum, the indestructible germ. It would not matter a single straw if a Bronte story were a hundred times more moonstruck and improbable than 'Jane Eyre,' or a hundred times more moonstruck and improbable than 'Wuthering Heights.' It would not matter if George Read stood on his head, and ...
— Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton
... Ribbonmen, and holds up the craft to contumely and scorn. The acceptance by Mr. Gladstone of the principle of Home Rule seems to rejoice the Papist heart. "Never was it more clear than it now is that the indestructible Papacy exercises an authority over the hearts and minds of humanity which nothing, neither fraud, nor oppression, nor misrepresentation, can weaken or destroy. How near may be the day of its inevitable triumph no man ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... dug up this nutty inventor with his milk container scheme. Oh, it listens good, the way he put it. Just a two-ounce, woodpulp, mailin' cartridge lined with oiled paper, that could be turned out for a dollar a thousand, pint and quart sizes, indestructible, absolutely sanitary, air tight, germ proof, ...
— Shorty McCabe on the Job • Sewell Ford
... days can pass through a door without any need to widen it for their hoops. The Empire saw the last of gowns with trains! I am still puzzled to understand how a sovereign who wished to see his drawing-room swept by ducal satin and velvet did not make indestructible laws. Napoleon never guessed the results of the Code he was so proud of. That man, by creating duchesses, founded the race of our 'ladies' of to-day—the indirect offspring ...
— Another Study of Woman • Honore de Balzac
... and the red light died out; if the brain were paralyzed, that energetic mind smitten into idiotcy, and the azure light wandering objectless as a meteor wanders over the morass,—still that silver spark would shine the same, indestructible by aught that shattered its tabernacle. And I murmured to myself, "Can that starry spark speak the presence of the soul? Does the silver light shine within creatures to which no life immortal has been ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... which had been exposed to the heat, began to crumble away, and they have now almost disappeared, while those of the lower portion of the road, which had not been touched by the fire, have remained uninjured, and seem to be indestructible. A further proof of the terrible catastrophe is furnished by a stratum of scoriae of melted lead and copper, from one fifth to one and one fifth of an inch thick, which extends nearly through the whole hill at a depth of from 28 to 29-1/2 feet. That Troy was destroyed ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... honest response to the demand for shelter; but this demand included a Home for the Soul, not less than a roof over the head. Even in this response to primary need there was something spiritual which carried it beyond provision for the body; as the men of Egypt, for instance, wanted an indestructible resting-place, and so built the pyramids. As Capart says, prehistoric art shows that this utilitarian purpose was in almost every case blended with a religious, or at least a magical, purpose.[1] The spiritual instinct, in seeking to recreate types and to set up more sympathetic ...
— The Builders - A Story and Study of Masonry • Joseph Fort Newton
... Master bore the cross to show his power over death; then relinquished his earth-task of teaching and dem- [5] onstrating the nothingness of sickness, sin, and death, and rose to his native estate, man's indestructible eternal life ...
— Miscellaneous Writings, 1883-1896 • Mary Baker Eddy
... got to be stripped of their top layer and see it stripped off other people, and to recognize the fact that every one has got a core of Primitive Man or of Primitive Woman in them; a perfectly unalterable, indestructible core. And the people who refuse to recognize that aren't elevated and refined, but simply stupid and obstinate and ...
— The Invader - A Novel • Margaret L. Woods
... face which was ravaged, though Mary had sinned the sin. True, pallor and pain were visible in Mary's face, even in the disguising light of that strange hour and place, but back of it Kate perceived her indestructible frivolity. She surmised how rapidly the scenes of Mary's drama would succeed each other; how remorse would yield to regret, regret to diminishing grief, grief to hope, hope to fresh adventures with life. Here in all ...
— The Precipice • Elia Wilkinson Peattie
... done by a dying painter, full of a beautiful colour. Even if all these orchids died to-night yet their beauty is an indestructible memory. ...
— Plays of Gods and Men • Lord Dunsany
... with the new sight of man's maturity and soberness that he now saw his mother, feeling the intangible and indestructible feminine majesty of her; feeling her fragility which had brought forth her living soul in its beauty and impressionableness as a link with the cause of his Odyssey; believing that she was rejoicing in his strength and understanding gloriously that it had only ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... contrivance?" he asked, proudly. "Not that I take any credit to myself, though. Far be it! I got the idea out of the comic supplement. But it works all right, and the beauty of it is that you can use the nail over and over again. It is practically indestructible. ...
— Andy at Yale - The Great Quadrangle Mystery • Roy Eliot Stokes
... fulfil his promise to the gods by slaying the Rakshasas, and that he would destroy them even if they fled to Patala. These Rakshasas, Agastya says, were more powerful than Ravana, and, could only be destroyed by Narayana, i.e. by Rama himself, the eternal, indestructible god. Sumali with his family lived for along time in Patala, while Kuvera dwelt in Lanka. In section 9 it is related that Sumali once happened to visit the earth, when he observed Kuvera going in his chariot to see his father Visravas. This leads him to consider ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... to use them as the instruments of their own ruin. No immediate advantage must blind us to the real objects of the war,—the securing our external power and our internal tranquillity, and the making them inherent and indestructible by founding them upon ...
— The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V - Political Essays • James Russell Lowell
... government, the principle that the will of the majority shall rule, be maintained or abandoned? Shall state sovereignty be recognized? Shall states be suffered to leave the Union at will, or shall the United States continue to exist as "an indestructible Union of indestructible States"? As Mr. Lincoln said, "Both parties deprecated war; but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive; and the other would accept war ...
— A School History of the United States • John Bach McMaster
... More than twenty-five years ago one of the writers of this narrative heard him remark during a discussion on ancient buildings: "Wood will rot, stone will chip and crumble, bricks disintegrate, but a cement and iron structure is apparently indestructible. Look at some of the old Roman baths. They are as solid as when they were built." With such convictions, and the vast fund of practical knowledge and experience he had gained at Edison in the crushing and manipulation of large masses of magnetic iron ore during the preceding ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... philosophy tends, after all, to unsettle what appear to be permanent convictions of the common mind and the presuppositions of science much less than is sometimes imagined. Our intuitions of external realities, our indestructible belief in the uniformity of nature, in the nexus of cause and effect, and so on, are, by the admission of all philosophers, at least partially and relatively true; that is to say, true in relation to ...
— Illusions - A Psychological Study • James Sully
... because the general reason, ever progressive, continually denies the completeness and sufficiency of its prior ideas. Thus it is that, competition being one of the periods in the constitution of value, one of the elements of the social synthesis, it is true to say at the same time that it is indestructible in its principle, and that nevertheless in its present form it should be abolished, denied. If, then, there is any one here who is in opposition to ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... from the pulpit and the press; to raise it up with all the food of the inner man, from infancy to gray hairs; to give 'line upon line, and precept upon precept,' till it forms one of the foundation principles and parts indestructible of the public soul. Let those who contemn this plan renounce, if they have not done it already, the gospel plan of converting the world; let them renounce every plan of moral reformation, and every plan whatsoever, which does not terminate in the gratification of their ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... placidity. His frigidly haughty dignity, his mocking smile, the mute shrug of his shoulders, caused Monsieur Jausion frequent annoyance. But there were times when, carried away by impatience, he interrupted the judge outright, and attacked, boldly and eloquently, the frail yet indestructible ...
— The German Classics, v. 20 - Masterpieces of German Literature • Various
... Alasco, "that the elixir thou hast there in the flask will not prejudice life! I swear it by that immortal and indestructible quintessence of gold, which pervades every substance in nature, though its secret existence can be traced by him only to whom Trismegistus renders ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... Union a more impressive place in the American political imagination can scarcely be over-estimated. Had the other Whig leaders joined him in refusing to compromise with the Nullifiers and in strengthening by legislation the Federal government as an expression of an indestructible American national unity, a precedent might have been established which would have increased the difficulty of a subsequent secessionist outbreak. But Henry Clay believed in compromises (particularly when his own name was attached to ...
— The Promise Of American Life • Herbert David Croly
... one more point in reference to force which must be noticed. It is indestructible, but it is capable of what is termed "degradation." It may exist in various intensities and quantities, and a small quantity of force of a higher intensity may be changed into a larger quantity of force at a lower intensity. In the instance above given of the union of oxygen and hydrogen, ...
— The Story of Creation as told by Theology and by Science • T. S. Ackland
... deceitful. The great plague, indeed, returned no more; but what it had done for the Londoners, the great fire, which broke out in the autumn of 1666, did for London; and, in September of that year, a heap of ashes and the indestructible energy of the people were all that remained of the glory of five-sixths of the ...
— On the Advisableness of Improving Natural Knowledge • Thomas H. Huxley
... ravaging a whole territory, or sweeping the coffers of the rich, or invading the cottages of the poor—all this material wealth may easily be repaired. If the nation remains with its moral and intellectual strength, brighter and larger and more indestructible possessions than the first will soon replace them. On the three great pillars of American society—equality of right, community of interest, and reciprocity of duty, rests this great Republic. Riches and honor and length of days will mark the ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... We have presumed that we could trace the history of man back to the time when he began to practice the art of writing, as distinguished from the transference of thought by crude pictorials—that our prehistoric progenitor was simply a savage. It now appears that people may build indestructible temples, and kings and priests write intelligently on imperishable material, and the nation be as utterly forgotten as though it had never existed. With these facts in mind, it were curious to speculate on what the world 11,000 years hence will know of our ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... their eternal beauty, for he sees them as they are; he feels them in their universal interest, for he feels them as they affect the first principles of his and our common nature. Such was Homer, such was Shakspeare, whose works will last as long as nature, because they are a copy of the indestructible forms and everlasting impulses of nature, welling out from the bosom as from a perennial spring, or stamped upon the senses by the hand of their maker. The power of the imagination in them, is the representative power of all nature. It has its centre ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt
... pursued the sober and even tenor of her own way. Whilst James lashed out, to use the local phrase, in robes and "suits," Miss Pinnegar steadily ground away, producing strong, indestructible shirts and singlets for the colliers, sound, serviceable aprons for the colliers' wives, good print dresses for servants, and so on. She executed no flights of fancy. She had her goods made to suit her people. And so, underneath the foam and froth of James' ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... also involves the mysterious principle or activity which we call life. Life comes and goes, but the physical and chemical orders remain. The vegetable and animal kingdoms wax and wane, or disappear entirely, but the physico-chemical forces are as indestructible as matter itself. This fugitive and evanescent character of life, the way it uses and triumphs over the material forces, setting up new chemical activities in matter, sweeping over the land-areas of the earth like a conflagration, lifting the inorganic elements up into myriads of changing and beautiful ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs
... children whom the time commands to try all things in the place of the unquestioning faith of earlier and simpler-hearted generations? We too have need of Thee. Thy martyrs in other ages were cast into the flames, but no fire could touch their immortal and indestructible faith. We sit in safety and in peace, so far as these poor bodies are concerned; but our cherished beliefs, the hopes, the trust that stayed the hearts of those we loved who have gone before us, are cast ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... and evil, from the belief in the Mass. There again, how little the Protestant understands what he reviles! In one sense he understands it well enough. Catholicism would have disappeared long ago but for the Mass. Marvellous indestructible belief!—that brings God to Man, that satisfies the deepest emotions of ...
— Helbeck of Bannisdale, Vol. II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... it made an instant appeal to her. She knew he was a man she could trust within doors as fully as she had trusted him without. His frame was spare but suggestive of the long muscles of the New Englander which do not show but which work on and on with seemingly indestructible energy. He looked to her ...
— The Web of the Golden Spider • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... moved, The soul that with a strong and constant calm Takes sorrow and takes joy indifferently, Lives in the life undying! That which is Can never cease to be; that which is not Will not exist. To see this truth of both Is theirs who part essence from accident, Substance from shadow. Indestructible, Learn thou! the Life is, spreading life through all; It cannot anywhere, by any means, Be anywise diminished, stayed, or changed. But for these fleeting frames which it informs With spirit deathless, endless, infinite, They perish. Let them perish, Prince! and fight! He who ...
— The Bhagavad-Gita • Sir Edwin Arnold
... little in common with the recent conception of change in certain types of matter. The discovery that a process of disintegration may take place in some at least of the chemical atoms, previously believed to be indestructible and unalterable, has modified our view of the physical universe, even as Darwin's scheme of the mode of evolution changed the trend of thought concerning the organic world. Both conceptions have in common the idea of change throughout ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... extravagant hope is that people will some day learn something of art, and so long for more, and will find, as I have, that there is no getting it save by the general acknowledgment of the right of every man to have fit work to do in a beautiful home. Therein lies all that is indestructible of the pleasure of life; no man need ask for more than that, no man should be granted less; and if he falls short of it, it is through waste and injustice that he is kept out of ...
— Hopes and Fears for Art • William Morris
... beds, a few bands of a buff-colored non-columnar trap, described by M'Culloch as of a texture intermediate between a greenstone and a basalt, and which, while the pitchstone around it seems nearly indestructible, has weathered so freely as to form horizontal grooves along the face of the rock, from two to five yards in depth. One of these runs for several hundred feet along the base of the Scuir, just at the ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... influence, so strong, yet so invisibly produced. I thought of her mildness, her dreamy habits, her indifference, and her incapacity of comprehending natures unlike her own. Would endowment of character explain it—that faculty which we could not change, give, or take? Character was a mysterious and indestructible fact, and a fact that I had had little respect for. Upon what a false basis I had gone—a basis of extremes. I had seen men as trees ...
— The Morgesons • Elizabeth Stoddard
... fathomless with mud. Almost everywhere they are distractingly crooked, and in many places they are plentifully bestrewn with boulders of varying sizes. Instead of spending money in making roads, the Chinese have applied their ingenuity to making an indestructible cart. They build it of heavy timbers, with massive wheels, thick spokes and ponderous hubs, and as no springs could survive the jolting of such a vehicle, the body of the cart is placed directly upon the huge ...
— An Inevitable Awakening • ARTHUR JUDSON BROWN
... by all the tremendous operations of nature, so far as they are known to man, matter is wholly indestructible. No instance is known, from the beginning of creation, in which a single particle of matter has been annihilated. Can anything more be said of the soul? Or should we not rather feel relieved, and freed from much doubt, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 1, July, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... came. Instead the gorp drew in upon itself until it resembled an unwieldy ball of indestructible ...
— Plague Ship • Andre Norton
... have spent treasures of piety on the inscriptions and decorations of the graves. Fresh flowers are brought up from the valleys to cover them, and when some favourite comrade goes, the men scorning ephemeral tributes, club together to buy a monstrous indestructible wreath with emblazoned streamers. It was near the end of the afternoon, and many soldiers were strolling along the paths between the graves. "It's their favourite walk at this hour," the Colonel said. He stopped ...
— Fighting France - From Dunkerque to Belport • Edith Wharton
... gold all the way down. At the sharpest hazards of trail and river and famine, the message was that other men might die, but that he would pull through triumphant. It was the old, old lie of Life fooling itself, believing itself—immortal and indestructible, bound to achieve over other lives and win to its ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London
... given to war. We are dealing with early ages; nation-MAKING is the occupation of man in these ages, and it is war that makes nations. Nation-CHANGING comes afterwards, and is mostly effected by peaceful revolution, though even then war, too, plays its part. The idea of an indestructible nation is a modern idea; in early ages all nations were destructible, and the further we go back, the more incessant was the work of destruction. The internal decoration of nations is a sort of secondary process, which succeeds when the ...
— Physics and Politics, or, Thoughts on the application of the principles of "natural selection" and "inheritance" to political society • Walter Bagehot
... in the grip of the hideous disease. Of hope for either there was little. The aged sisters looked white and worn, but they would not give up their posts. Their hearts were breaking, poor old things, but their grit was steadfast and indestructible. All the twelve days the mother had pined for the child, and the child for the mother, but both knew that the prayer of these longings could not be granted. When the mother was told—on the first day—that her disease was typhoid, she was frightened, and asked if there was danger ...
— The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories • Mark Twain
... the physical theologians seem to have divided into several classes; one class, grounding itself on these principles resulting from observation; that nothing can be annihilated in the world; that the elements are indestructible; that they change their combinations but not their nature; that the life and death of beings are but the different modifications of the same atoms; that matter itself possesses properties which give rise to all its modes of existence; that the world is eternal,* or unlimited in space ...
— The Ruins • C. F. [Constantin Francois de] Volney
... frivolous gossip over blighted human lives, the same feeble sense of that Unknown towards which we have sent forth irrepressible cries in our loneliness. Let us rather be thankful that our sorrow lives in us as an indestructible force, only changing its form, as forces do, and passing from pain into sympathy—the one poor word which includes all our best insight and our best love. Not that this transformation of pain into ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot
... rather difficult argument to show that the world is, in itself, eternal. The former discussion on this point had only shown that the gods would not destroy it. This shows that its own nature is indestructible. The arguments are very inconclusive, though clever, and one wonders why the author is at so much pains. Indeed, he is so earnest that at the end of the chapter he finds it necessary to apologize to the Kosmos in case his language should have been indiscreet. The reason, I think, is that the Christians ...
— Five Stages of Greek Religion • Gilbert Murray
... confessing it, are susceptible in varying degrees to impressions of this sort. And do not such people often, because of an old stone wall, a garden known and loved since childhood, an old terrace which has become in indestructible part of their memory, or an old tree that has not changed form within their lives, seek a warrant for their own ...
— The Story of a Child • Pierre Loti
... purity of Christ were not present in His sufferings and death as a quiescent attribute, but were in full action in the indestructible life-power of the Spirit, as He sanctified His own self to God for us ("through the eternal spirit," Heb. ix. 14—therefore, in Rom. i. 4, hagiosune, the habit of holiness in its action or sanctity, not hagiotes, only an inner attribute, ...
— Holy in Christ - Thoughts on the Calling of God's Children to be Holy as He is Holy • Andrew Murray
... is true, and he does indeed possess what for convenience is called an immortal soul, that may manifest itself in one shape or another; that may sleep for ages, but, waking or sleeping, still remains itself, indestructible as the matter of ...
— Smith and the Pharaohs, and Other Tales • Henry Rider Haggard
... caused by fear. In An Outpost of Progress is the following: "Fear always remains. A man may destroy everything within himself, love and hate and belief, and even doubt; but as he clings to life he cannot destroy fear: the fear, subtle, indestructible, and terrible that pervades his being, that lurks in his heart; that watches on his lips the struggle ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... these objective perceptions of matter, and to whom do they belong? This question leads us to speak of the circumstance which renders the metaphysical doctrine of perception so truly valuable. This doctrine is valuable chiefly on account of the indestructible foundation which it affords to the a priori argument in favour of the existence of God. The substance of the argument is this,—matter is the perception of matter. The perception of matter does not belong to man; it is no state of the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 • Various
... and without a God. Far more probable is it, in seeking for analogies to his mythology and cosmogony, to resort to the era of that primal reconstruction of the theory of a Deity, when the human philosophy in the oriental world ascribed the godship of the universe to the subtile, ineffable, and indestructible essences of fire and light, as revealed in the sun. Such were the errors of the search for divine truth, power, and a controllable Deity, which early developed themselves in the dogmas of the Assyrians, Egyptians, Persians, and wandering hordes ...
— The Myth of Hiawatha, and Other Oral Legends, Mythologic and Allegoric, of the North American Indians • Henry R. Schoolcraft
... molecular structure, as we phrase it—that is to say, the ultimate particle of which water is composed, is not changed, and this is precisely the explanation which Anaxagoras gave of the same phenomena. For him the unit particle of water constituted an elementary body, uncreated, unchangeable, indestructible. This particle, in association with like particles, constitutes the substance which we call water. The same particle in association with particles unlike itself, might produce totally different substances—as, for example, when water is taken up ...
— A History of Science, Volume 1(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... inconceivable and impossible to a child than the possibility of his parents dying or doing wrong. When he awakens to consciousness he finds around him eternal things,—rocks, hills, rivers, stars, parents! They all seem to belong to the same order of indestructible existence, and he would as soon expect to see the sun blotted from heaven as a parent removed from earth! And when his ethical perceptions awake, he has another experience of a similar character. His father and mother stand ...
— The Redemption of David Corson • Charles Frederic Goss
... with Whewell's sketch of the contributions to science made by Cuvier: "I may observe, that he is allowed by all to have established on an indestructible basis many of the most important generalizations which zooelogy now contains; and the principal defect which his critics have pointed out has been that he did not generalize still more widely and boldly. It appears, therefore, that he cannot but ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 4 of 8 • Various
... and obelisks characterize this architecture. Everything is massive, compact, and, above all, immense. Hence these monuments appear clumsy but indestructible. ...
— History Of Ancient Civilization • Charles Seignobos
... but apparently indestructible cable had been affixed to our stern by means of a metal plate at its end which I guessed to be magnetic. I saw that the cable vanished under lashing waves which broke on a not distant shore, and that we were being drawn irresistibly ...
— The Winged Men of Orcon - A Complete Novelette • David R. Sparks
... my wounds by doubting, Seltanetta. Till now you have known only how to bloom like a rose—to flutter like a butterfly; till now your will was your only duty. But I am a man, a friend; fate has forged for me an indestructible chain—the chain of gratitude for ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 53, No. 331, May, 1843 • Various
... while you will be alone in shoreless space, to wander its limitless solitudes without friend or comrade forever—for you will remain a thought, the only existent thought, and by your nature inextinguishable, indestructible. But I, your poor servant, have revealed you to yourself and set you free. Dream other ...
— The Mysterious Stranger and Other Stories • Mark Twain
... reform issue when men were intent upon smashing rings, the Republicans opened the door for their destruction. "They [the Republican leaders] have apparently believed the people would submit to anything and everything," said the Times, "and that the party was indestructible. If a newspaper warned them in a friendly but firm spirit against the policy of blundering, it was treated with a mixture of the insolence and arrogance which ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... if these molecules, indestructible as they are, turn out to be not substances themselves, but mere affections of ...
— Five of Maxwell's Papers • James Clerk Maxwell
... world came through the windows, hundreds of feet aloft, and fell upon the beautiful inlaid pavement. . . . . Against a pillar, on one side of the nave, is a mosaic copy of Raphael's Transfiguration, fitly framed within a great arch of gorgeous marble; and, no doubt, the indestructible mosaic has preserved it far more completely than the fading and darkening tints in which the artist painted it. At any rate, it seemed to me the one glorious picture that I have ever seen. The pillar nearest ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... the disorder left by Caesar. One is reminded by it of the impotency of a reckless heir to bring to absolute ruin the princely property of a great nobleman brought together by the skill of many careful progenitors. A thing will grow to be so big as to be all but indestructible. It is like that tower of Caecilia Metella against which the storms of twenty centuries have beaten in vain. Looking at the state of the Roman Empire when Cicero died, who would not declare its doom? ...
— The Life of Cicero - Volume II. • Anthony Trollope
... factor of Judaism, there is another generally considered which has perhaps exercised a still more profound and cumulative influence on the civilisation especially of the West. This lies in the intense indestructible nationality of the race. Eighteen centuries have passed since they became a people, "scattered and peeled," their "holy and beautiful house" a ruin, their capital a desolation, their land proscribed to the exile's foot. During these centuries deluge after deluge of so-called barbarians ...
— The Ethics of George Eliot's Works • John Crombie Brown
... themselves. But the two parties reasoned their way to this conclusion by different roads. The Democrats deduced the view from the State's intrinsic sovereignty, the Republicans from the national Constitution as ordaining "an indestructible Union of indestructible States." This class of thinkers, in whichever party they were found, naturally preferred ...
— History of the United States, Volume 4 • E. Benjamin Andrews
... these facts, That there is a Treaty of Warsaw and that this is the Austrian-Saxon temper and intention towards him and it, Friedrich learned from the Menzel Documents. And if the reader will possess himself of these two facts, and understand that they are of a germinative, most vital quality, indestructible by the times and the chances; and have been growing and developing themselves, day and night ever since, in a truly wonderful manner,—the reader knows in substance ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVII. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Seven-Years War: First Campaign—1756-1757. • Thomas Carlyle
... which the real and permanent ethereal organism is individualized and perfected, somewhat as 'the full corn in the ear' is reached by means of its husk, for which there is no further use. By means of this indestructible ethereal body and the corresponding ethereal spheres of environment with the social life and relations in the spheres, the individuality and ...
— In Tune with the Infinite - or, Fullness of Peace, Power, and Plenty • Ralph Waldo Trine
... vulgarity, and steal a furtive glance or two towards the East, to see, whether, by diligently raking in the ashes of ancient oriental creeds, she might not discover here and there a spark, at which to rekindle the expiring candle of her own. For there seems to be some curious indestructible asbestos, some element of perennial, imperturbable tranquillity and calm, away in India, which is conspicuous only by its absence, in the worry of the West. Where does it come from? What does it consist in? Is there a secret which India has discovered, ...
— Bubbles of the Foam • Unknown
... this one hour, let me be such as he imagines me. To-morrow will be time enough to come back to my reality. My reality! what is it? Is the past so indestructible? the future so immitigable? Is the dark dream, in which I walk, of such solid, stony substance, that there can be no escape out of its dungeon? Be it so! There is, at least, that ethereal quality in my spirit, that it can make me as gay as ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume I. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... natural temper and exercise of reason are able to free them from the servitude of a delusive imagination. For the mass of mankind, the germ of superstition, prepared to assume always a new shape and sometimes fresh vigour, is indestructible. The severest assaults are ineffectual to eradicate it: hydra-like, far from being destroyed by a seeming mortal stroke, it often raises its many-headed ...
— The Superstitions of Witchcraft • Howard Williams
... keep off the excess of cold or heat. The roofs of all the buildings shed from the front, except two of which are of gable shape. The roofs are to be made of solid, close-fitting planks, covered with fine ticking and coated with the patent indestructible fire-proof paint, and applications which our citizens have just begun to use here, and which they have, found ...
— The Adventures of a Forty-niner • Daniel Knower
... ancient world, a victory gained without physical force, by the moral power of faith and perseverance, of faith and love, is one of the sublimest spectacles of history, and one of the strongest evidences of the divinity and indestructible life of ...
— The Revelation Explained • F. Smith
... persons and things do not suffice, whose love is vital, elemental, and indestructible. It has no beginning and no end; it simply is. With this the Grey Angel has no power; the grave is robbed of its victory ...
— The Spinster Book • Myrtle Reed
... of legends around a man is the very best proof you could have not only of his existence but of the fact that he was an origin and a beginning, and that things sprang from his will or his vision. There were some who seemed to think it a kind of favour done to the indestructible body of Irish Catholicism when Mr. Bury wrote his learned Protestant book upon St. Patrick. It was a critical and very careful bit of work, and was deservedly praised; but the favour done us I could not see! It is all to the advantage ...
— First and Last • H. Belloc
... yet if of good picked quality, dry and sound, and properly tongued and framed, there is not much to fear, and its light and elegant appearance is a great gain in a large room, added to this it improves by age and is practically indestructible. ...
— Practical Taxidermy • Montagu Browne
... which the magnitude even of democracy, art, literature, &c., dwindles, becomes partial, measurable—something that fully satisfies, (which those do not.) That something is the All, and the idea of All, with the accompanying idea of eternity, and of itself, the soul, buoyant, indestructible, sailing space forever, visiting every region, as a ship the sea. And again lo! the pulsations in all matter, all spirit, throbbing forever—the eternal beats, eternal systole and diastole of life in things—wherefrom I feel and know that death ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... of the rise and development of prostitution shows us how indestructible and essential an element prostitution is of the marriage system which has long prevailed in Europe—under very varied racial, political, social, and religious conditions—it yet fails to supply us in every respect with the data necessary to reach a definite ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... his Vicarage and he was at last supreme. He was supreme over his daughter Gwenda. The stubborn, intractable creature was at his feet. She was his to bend or break or utterly destroy. She who was capable of anything was capable of an indestructible devotion. His times, the relentless, the monotonously recurring, were her ...
— The Three Sisters • May Sinclair
... knowledge is this by which the Indestructible is apprehended. That which cannot be seen nor seized, which is without origin and qualities, without eyes and ears, without hands and feet, the eternal, all-pervading, omnipresent, infinitesimal, that which is imperishable, that it is ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Sankaracarya - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 1 • George Thibaut
... profession had not brought him in contact more than very infrequently with people of this sort, and his personal interests never could be made to do so with results perfectly satisfactory to himself. There it was,—the thing those lucky elect possessed without a thought or an effort. It was an indestructible possession, apparently, too. You couldn't throw it away. Dissipation, dishonesty, even a total collapse that brought its victim down to the sink that he himself had sprouted from, seemed ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... dismissed, and have re-appeared amongst thinkers or dreamers in the upper world,—so I may perhaps appropriately conclude this reference to the belief of the Vril-ya, that self-conscious or sentient life once given is indestructible among inferior creatures as well as in man, by an eloquent passage from the work of that eminent zoologist, Louis Agassiz, which I have only just met with, many years after I had committed to paper these recollections of the life of the Vril-ya which I now reduce into something like arrangement ...
— The Coming Race • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... Adieu, my cherished one. Your poor Pink of Fashion is blown away by stormy winds, but—the wings of his good luck shall waft him back to you. No, my Ninie, I am not bidding you farewell, for I shall never leave you. Are you not the soul of my actions? Is not the hope of returning with happiness indestructible for YOU the end and aim of my endeavor? Does it not lead my every step? You will be with me everywhere. Ah! it will not be the sun of India, but the fire of your eyes that lights my way. Therefore be happy—as happy as a woman can be without her lover. I would ...
— The Marriage Contract • Honore de Balzac
... challenged. It is a twofold theory—first that the delight of achievement will compensate for the rigours and self-denials of the route, and second that the misery of non-achievement would outweigh the immediate pleasures of dallying. If this theory were not indestructible, for reasons connected with the secret nature of humanity, it would probably have been destroyed long ago by the mere cumulative battering of experience. For the earth's surface is everywhere thickly dotted ...
— The Plain Man and His Wife • Arnold Bennett
... another? Is my love then in the power of fortune, or of her caprice? No, I will have it lasting as it is pure; and I will make a Goddess of her, and build a temple to her in my heart, and worship her on indestructible altars, and raise statues to her: and my homage shall be unblemished as her unrivalled symmetry of form; and when that fails, the memory of it shall survive; and my bosom shall be proof to scorn, as hers has been to pity; and I will pursue her with ...
— Liber Amoris, or, The New Pygmalion • William Hazlitt
... undeniable and the mind of man can never wholly escape it. Familiarity may temper, but inborn human superstition is indestructible. The brooding silence will shadow the lightest nature. The storms must ever inspire wonder. The gloom hushes the voice. And so the growing dread. Man may curse the hills in his brutal moments, the thoughtful ...
— The Golden Woman - A Story of the Montana Hills • Ridgwell Cullum
... principle-(or Jiva)- 2. Ushtanas-Vital heat a form of force indestructible, (or force). and when disconnected with one set of atoms, becoming attracted immediately ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... broke in Clarke. "We are just that much more certain of the indestructible life of the soul—every wave of this spirit-sea leaves a deposit of fact on the beach of time, makes death that much less dreadful. We make gains each decade. Sir William Crookes, Sir Oliver Lodge, Alfred Russel Wallace, Lombroso have all been convinced ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... blowing above. Down there they never hear of these things. Their idol may be painted clay, up then at the surface, and fade and waste and crumble and blow away, there being much weather there; but down below he is gold and adamant and indestructible." ...
— Chapters from My Autobiography • Mark Twain
... own grounds, those of expediency, it might be objected that a bargain which on one side you allow to be discreditable leaves the legacy of an indestructible desire on that side to wipe out the discredit by tearing it up. Though Cavour became great by his connection with a movement which, before all things, was swayed by sentiment, he never entirely recognised the part that sentiment plays in politics. He blamed O'Connell ...
— Cavour • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... is covered with the softest green turf. Not a lawn, mind you, such as one may see in almost any immaculately kept northern town, with artistic flower beds dotting it, and a carefully trimmed border of foliage plants surrounding it. No, this circle has real Virginia turf; the thick, rich, indestructible turf one finds in England, which, as an old gardener told the writer, "we rolls and tills it for a thousand years." Nature had been rolling and tilling this green plot of ground for a good ...
— A Dixie School Girl • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... immortality, and placed beside her Son, in all "the sacred splendour of beneficence," she came to be regarded as our intercessor before that divine Son, who could refuse nothing to his mother. The relative position of the Mother and Son being spiritual and indestructible was continued in heaven; and thus step by step the woman was ...
— Legends of the Madonna • Mrs. Jameson
... this laurel which came from the grave of one of their greatest poets. My sister sends it to me, accompanied by some beautiful verses of her own. An old fable says that these laurels grew spontaneously upon Virgil's grave, and that they are indestructible. May this be a blessed omen for me! I greet you, Virgil's holy shadow! I bow down before you, and kiss in all humility your ashes, which have been ...
— Frederick The Great and His Family • L. Muhlbach
... majestic magnitude of a cathedral; the man of culture is roused to enthusiasm by the contemplation of its grand proportions, or graceful outlines, or bewitching details, because he sees in them the realization of his ideas of beauty, grace, and majesty, which shine forever in unutterable glory,—indestructible ideas which survive all thrones and empires, and even civilizations. They are as imperishable as stars and suns and rainbows and landscapes, since these unfold new beauties as the mind and soul rest upon ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... planet, and as far beyond as the power of gravitation may extend. It is precisely so with all social events, even those of the most insignificant character. Every one of them has its appropriate influence, which is indestructible; and they all combine to make up the great whole of human action, the results of which at any specific period are only the necessary and inevitable consequences of ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 1 January 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... work as a consolatory example illustrating the fate of our classical music in the hands of our conducting musicians. Classical music retains its warmth, and continues to exist in spite of the maltreatment they subject it to. It appears truly indestructible: and the Spirit of German art may accept this indestructibility as a consoling fact, and may fearlessly continue its efforts in future. It might be asked: But what do the queer conductors with celebrated names amount to, considered simply as practical musicians? ...
— On Conducting (Ueber das Dirigiren): - A Treatise on Style in the Execution of Classical Music • Richard Wagner (translated by Edward Dannreuther)
... the Navigator Islands, during our stay, consisted partly of cordage of different degrees of thickness, made from a plant peculiar to those islands, the nature of which is such that, we were assured, it is almost indestructible by water and the humidity of the atmosphere; whilst its toughness makes it ...
— The Life of Captain Matthew Flinders • Ernest Scott
... as indestructible as these: "The Tempest," "The Winter's Tale," "Julius Caesar," "Coriolanus"? What monument sublimer than "Lear," sterner than "The Merchant of Venice," more dazzling than "Romeo and Juliet," more amazing ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard
... The next morning, so indestructible is the happiness of youth, she awoke with her hope as fresh as if it had not been blighted the evening before. As she lay in bed, with her loosened hair making a cloud over the pillows, and her ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... French traders well knew and the latter-day discoveries of Cobalt prove—and there is also heavy timber; but north of the Great Clay Belt, between the Clay Belt and the Bay, lies the impenetrable and—I think—indestructible game ground. Swamp and rock will prevent agricultural settlement but will provide an ideal fur preserve similar in ...
— The Canadian Commonwealth • Agnes C. Laut
... destitution, his loneliness, the essential desolation of his futile wanderings. For months—for years—his life hadn't been worth a day's purchase; and there he was gallantly, thoughtlessly alive, to all appearance indestructible solely by the virtue of his few years and of his unreflecting audacity. I was seduced into something like admiration—like envy. Glamour urged him on, glamour kept him unscathed. He surely wanted nothing from the wilderness but space to breathe in and to push on through. His need was ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad
... forces of earth, converted to beneficent energy the burden of corruption thrust upon it. Active at first because she dreaded the self-communings of idleness, she found in her labour and her endurance sources of stern inspiration; her indestructible idealism grasped at the core of spiritual beauty in a life even such as this. She did not reason with herself hysterically of evil passions to be purified by asceticism, of mysterious iniquities to be washed out in her ...
— A Life's Morning • George Gissing
... holiday has been simply a friendly sign of the survival of the love of letters amongst a people too busy to give to letters any more. As such it is precious as the sign of an indestructible instinct. Perhaps the time is already come when it ought to be, and will be, something else; when the sluggard intellect of this continent will look from under its iron lids and fill the postponed ...
— Emerson and Other Essays • John Jay Chapman
... machine-gun emplacements were set up in every available corner. Concrete dugouts of the strongest description were provided for the protection of garrisons and machine gunners, and nothing that labor and skill could devise was neglected to make the position indestructible. Yet all this laboriously constructed defense work that had taken many months to complete and the strength and skill of thousands were swept away in ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume VI (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... he wanted to know any fact he asked Henry, who read everything obtainable. Now, however, there arose within him a deep compassion for the gentle Maid of Orleans, a burning resentment toward her captors, a powerful and indestructible interest in her sad history. It was an interest that would grow steadily for more than half a lifetime and culminate at last in that crowning work, the Recollections, the loveliest story ever told of ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... indestructible: Its holy flame for ever burneth, From Heaven it came, to Heaven returneth; Too oft on Earth a troubled guest, At times deceived, at times opprest, It here is tried and purified, Then hath in Heaven its perfect rest: It soweth here with ...
— The Rocks of Valpre • Ethel May Dell
... and shake their heads when he presented this case to their consideration, but he would make his account so accurate and particular and so well witnessed that they would have to admit the truth of all he said. And science, which proclaimed that matter was indestructible and that the mind was matter and that the brain needed nourishment like any other muscle—science would have to hang the head ...
— The Night Horseman • Max Brand
... expect of the literature of such times? Popular poetry preserved some of its indestructible charms. The Meistersaenger went on composing according to the rules of their guilds, but we look in vain for the raciness and honest simplicity of Hans Sachs. Some of the professors wrote plays in the style of Terence, or after English models, and fables became ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... and to legitimate in an emphatic manner, the more powerful of our emotional and practical tendencies. Fatalism, whose solving word in all crises of behavior is "all striving is vain," will never reign supreme, for the impulse to take life strivingly is indestructible in the race. Moral creeds which speak to that impulse will be widely successful in spite of inconsistency, vagueness, and shadowy determination of expectancy. Man needs a rule for his will, and will invent one if one be ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... save yourself; of course all your instructions fly out of your head, and you whirl your wheel AWAY from the curb instead of TOWARD it, and so you go sprawling on that granite-bound inhospitable shore. That was my luck; that was my experience. I dragged myself out from under the indestructible bicycle and sat down ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... Israel is not destined to a Restoration, if the Jewish Mission is the propagation of an idea, on what ground is the continued existence of Israel as a separate organisation defensible or justified? Israel is indestructible, said Jehuda Halevi in the twelfth century; certainly Israel is undestroyed. When Frederick the Great asked what should make him believe in God, he received in answer, 'the survival of the Jews.' Dr. Guttmann of Breslau not long since put forward a similar plea in vindication of the continued significance ...
— Judaism • Israel Abrahams
... that he might lecture about them at his ease. Mrs. Simpson often told me of the horror she felt as a girl lest she should throw a spoonful of soup over a Raphael or by an accident run a knife or a fork into the immortal canvas! She had not learnt that pictures are about the most indestructible things in the world. ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... and one defeat wrests the diadem of the seas from the brows of "The Violet Queen;" scanty indeed the ruins that attest the glories of "The Propylaea, the Parthenon, the Porticoes, and the Docks," to which the eloquent orator appealed as the "indestructible possessions" of Athens; along the desolate site of the once tumultuous Agora the peasant drives his oxen—the champion deity [377] of Phidias, whose spectral apparition daunted the barbarian Alaric [378], and the gleam of whose spear gladdened the mariner beneath the heights of Sunium, has vanished ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... young German in a thousand unconscious expressions between sleeping and waking. Divine truth and the image of her loving hero both at once sank deep within Zelinda's heart, and struck root there with tender but indestructible power. Heimbert's presence and the almost adoring admiration with which his pupil regarded him did not disturb these feelings, for from the first moment his appearance had something in it so pure and heavenly that no thoughts of earthly ...
— The Two Captains • Friedrich de La Motte-Fouque
... expression of the hereditary needs of the race for them not invariably to abide by it. Their incessant mobility only exerts its influence on quite superficial matters. In fact they possess conservative instincts as indestructible as those of all primitive beings. Their fetish- like respect for all traditions is absolute; their unconscious horror of all novelty capable of changing the essential conditions of their existence is very deeply rooted. ...
— The Crowd • Gustave le Bon
... treasure carried south across the Shamo would be 'gold wheat' (dust, we'd call it), packed in green skins... you couldn't find that. But the caravans crossing the El-Khali would carry this gold in bricks for the great west trade. Now a gold brick is indestructible; you can't think of anything that would last forever like a gold brick. Nothing would disturb it, water and sun are alike without effect ...
— The Sleuth of St. James's Square • Melville Davisson Post
... while, of the chairmanship of the "Civil Service Advisory Board." As has been well said by George Parsons Lathrop, "The idea often occurs to one that he, more than any one else, continues the example which Washington Irving set: an example of kindliness and good nature blended with indestructible dignity, and a delicately imaginative mind consecrating much of its energy ...
— Bay State Monthly, Vol. II. No. 5, February, 1885 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... fisherman, and the like. To these fall to be added, lastly, the parts delineative of character in the strict sense, such as the superstitious man of Menander and the miser in the -Aulularia- of Plautus. The national-Hellenic poetry has preserved, even in this its last creation, its indestructible plastic vigour; but the delineation of character is here copied from without rather than reproduced from inward experience, and the more so, the more the task approaches to the really poetical. It is a significant circumstance ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... Are we indestructible specks of cosmic intelligence, lighting up and animating one material body after another—never destroyed—or do we play on this earth the passing part of the microbe in the Brie cheese, which gives ...
— Editorials from the Hearst Newspapers • Arthur Brisbane
... jealousy, wherever there was any political activity. The history of Southern Italy, indeed, is mainly a foreign one—the history of modern Rome merges in that of the papacy; but Northern Italy has a history of its own, and that is a history of separate and independent cities—points of reciprocal and indestructible repulsion, and within, theatres of action where the blind tendencies and traditions of classes and parties weighed little on the freedom of individual character, and citizens could watch and measure and study one another with the minuteness of ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... Jews, "sated with contempt," these shrewd eager fanatics, these sensual ascetics, these human paradoxes, adaptive to every environment, energizing in every field of activity, omnipresent like sonic great natural force, indestructible and almost inconvertible, surviving—with the incurable optimism that overlay all their poetic sadness—Babylon and Carthage, Greece and Rome; involuntarily financing the Crusades, outliving the Inquisition, illusive of all baits, unshaken by all persecutions—at once the greatest ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... steadfast for being but a few. They stand for an individual right that is inalienable. A majority has no right to annul it, and no power to destroy it. Tyrannies may persecute, slay, or banish those who defend it; the thing is indestructible. It does not need legions to protect it nor genius to proclaim it, though the poets have always glorified it, and the legions will ultimately acknowledge it. One man alone may vindicate it, and because that one man has never failed it has never died. ...
— Principles of Freedom • Terence J. MacSwiney
... things which line the walls on either side of us as we pass also seem to be in the nature of receptacles for the dead. For the most part they are sarcophagi of granite, proud and indestructible: some of them, in the shape of gigantic boxes, are laid out in line on pedestals; others, in the form of mummies, stand upright against the walls and display enormous faces, surmounted by equally enormous head-dresses. Assembled there they look like a lot of malformed giants, with oversized ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti
... Energy, like matter, is indestructible, and just as matter exists in various forms so does energy. And we may add, just as we are ignorant of what the negative and positive particles of electricity which constitute matter really are, so we are ignorant of the true nature of energy. At the same time, energy is not so completely mysterious ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson |
