"Inexcusable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... door," said Varney; "why, she is inexcusable, having had experience how to have ordered her matters better. But who were those, a man and a woman, I think, who rode so hastily up the hill before me even now? Do they ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... time, as the abbaye desires, and much as thou seest. The honorable Signor Grimaldi—who will pardon me that he gets no better treatment than he receives, and who will not fail to ascribe what, to all who know him, might otherwise pass for inexcusable neglect, to his own desire for privacy—he will tell us, should he be pleased to honor us with his real opinion, that the subject is none the worse for occasions to laugh and be gay. Now, there is Geneva, a town given to subtleties as ingenious and complicated as the machinery ...
— The Headsman - The Abbaye des Vignerons • James Fenimore Cooper
... been the only evil; Elinor would not have suffered, and all might have gone well. Gradually the idea gained upon him, that it was not impossible to repair the past. His conduct had been unpardonable, no doubt; yet, perhaps it might be forgiven. But even if Elinor could forget his inexcusable fickleness, would her friends ever consent to risk her future peace with one who had so recklessly trifled with her already? Mr. Wyllys had been deeply indignant at his conduct; his whole manner had changed, there had ...
— Elinor Wyllys - Vol. I • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... only to believe Christ and to call no man master but Him; let them leave claiming infallibility that have no title to it, and let them that in their own words disclaim it, disclaim it also in their actions. . . . Protestants are inexcusable if they do offer ...
— History of the English People, Volume VI (of 8) - Puritan England, 1642-1660; The Revolution, 1660-1683 • John Richard Green
... this subject would admit of no further questions. The man with the scar had committed some inexcusable offense, and Mrs. Sandford had crossed him off the list. He knew that the Italian officer is, more or less, a lady's man; and the supreme confidence he has in the power of brass buttons and gold lace makes him ...
— The Lure of the Mask • Harold MacGrath
... foregoing Percy Darrow was extensively blamed. It was universally conceded that his action in permitting Monsieur X to continue his activities up to the danger point was inexcusable. The public mind should have been reassured long before. Much terror and physical suffering might thus have been avoided—not to speak of financial loss. Scientific men, furthermore, went frantic over his unwarranted destruction ...
— The Sign at Six • Stewart Edward White
... Minister," still Savage adhered to it and the pension tenaciously, sharing the Queen's favor with Stephen Duck, the marvellous "Thresher,"[9] whose effusions were still more to her taste. That the yearly fifty pounds were expended in inexcusable riot, almost as soon as received, was a matter of course. Upon the demise of Queen Caroline, in 1738, Savage experienced another proof of Walpole's dislike. The pensions found upon her Majesty's ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... think he would condone many things that you would regard as inexcusable, even monstrous. Otherwise, he would scarcely have been ...
— The Keeper of the Door • Ethel M. Dell
... the city, in their ruin now they began to turn to those thoughts which, while safety was yet possible, they would not entertain; they acknowledged and bewailed their former errors and follies, and judged this second ill-usage of Alcibiades to be of all the most inexcusable. For he was rejected, without any fault committed by himself; and only because they were incensed against his subordinate for having shamefully lost a few ships, they much more shamefully deprived the commonwealth of its most valiant ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... of George Meredith—a Study) is almost incoherently angry with "the inexcusable and comical consistency of stupidity" manifested by all those who are not, in the fullest sense, "Meredith-men"—or women. She is, however, so dogmatic and disdainful, that one suspects her of a tendency to substitute for the judicial verdict of the ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, August 1, 1891 • Various
... of the strikers all was confusion and disorder. The outer offices and ante-rooms were filled with a vast crowd of men who idled about, smoked, swapped stories and swore; and some of them, I'm sorry to say, chewed tobacco and flooded the floor with inexcusable filth. Even Mr. Hogan's private office was not private. Leading strikers and men prominent in the Brotherhood loafed there as the others loafed outside. Not more than half the men about the building had ever been ...
— Snow on the Headlight - A Story of the Great Burlington Strike • Cy Warman
... kitchen windows, of the tremendous energy of the explosive with which the model-torpedo was charged, of the mass of combustibles of all kinds by which it was surrounded, of the thousand and one possibilities of the case, and of my own inexcusable madness in not being ...
— In the Track of the Troops • R.M. Ballantyne
... result of this constant intercourse with Eugenia may easily be anticipated. I do not attempt to extenuate my fault—it was inexcusable, and has brought its punishment; but for poor, forlorn Eugenia I plead; her virtue fell before my importunity and my personal appearance. She fell a victim to those unhappy circumstances of which ...
— Frank Mildmay • Captain Frederick Marryat
... standing in front of him had failed to remove his hat during the playing of "The King." It was an opera hat, and Vane removed it for him and shut it up. The owner turned round just in time to see it hit the curtain, whence it fell with a thud into the orchestra. . . . Quite inexcusable, but the fight that followed was all that man could wish for. The two of them, with a large chucker-out, had finally landed in a heap in Leicester Square—with the hatless gentleman underneath. And Vane—being fleet of foot, had finally had the supreme ...
— Mufti • H. C. (Herman Cyril) McNeile
... used to report on literature with a sympathy for authors strikingly in contrast with the tone of some of its contemporaries, in whom it would almost appear as if the saying of a kind word, or even the doing of simple justice towards a book, were felt as a piece of inexcusable weakness. He is now, at seventy, relieved from his cares, with little tangible result from his long and active career; but for this the readers of his autobiography will be at no loss to account. Jerdan has evidently ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 441 - Volume 17, New Series, June 12, 1852 • Various
... Venice," etc., which occurs not at the beginning, but near the end, of the sonnet, "lost" would be so contradictory to the sense that any editor who had found the word thus printed and had failed to substitute "last" would have betrayed inexcusable negligence. Spenser, writing while Venice, though declined from the height of her greatness, was still flourishing as well as fair, considers her as the marvel of his own age—the "last," i.e., latest, world—as ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XVII. No. 101. May, 1876. • Various
... thou eat bread." "If any man will not work, neither let him eat." It is also a sin against our nature; causing a slow movement, which is a serious disappointment; tardiness, which is like a dead fly in precious ointment; and, that loathsome disease, laziness. Like drunkenness it is an inexcusable shame, that dooms one to poverty and clothes him with rags. Shun idleness as you do the sting of a hornet, or the ...
— The Choctaw Freedmen - and The Story of Oak Hill Industrial Academy • Robert Elliott Flickinger
... Kedsty. "As you have described it, the crime was deliberate—horrible and inexcusable to its last detail. You were not moved by a sudden passion. You tortured your ...
— The Valley of Silent Men • James Oliver Curwood
... regarded the crossing of the Potomac as too perilous until he should reorganize the army with the additional hundred thousand recruits. In this we see the ever-recurring effect of his exaggeration of the enemy's force. We now know that this over-estimate was inexcusable, but we cannot deny that he made it, nor, altogether, that he believed in it. It constituted a disqualification for such a command, and led to what must be regarded as the inevitable result,—his removal. The political questions ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V1 • Jacob Dolson Cox
... document are the more inexcusable because their author ignored local names recognized in the earlier publications of the government and its agents. In such matters, too, the safe principle is to follow local custom where that is logical and established. ...
— The Mountain that was 'God' • John H. Williams
... was now shown a place of unpretentious dimensions where I could suspend my hammock, but, unluckily, things were so crowded that there was no room for a mosquito-net around me. Under ordinary circumstances, neglect of this would have been an inexcusable lack of prudence, but I lay down trusting that the draft created by the passage of the boat would keep the insect pests away, as they told me it would. I found that experience had taught ...
— In The Amazon Jungle - Adventures In Remote Parts Of The Upper Amazon River, Including A - Sojourn Among Cannibal Indians • Algot Lange
... into two, if not three, independent classes, if the children, whose ages range as a rule between eleven and fourteen, could be trusted to work by themselves. In many cases this over-grouping is wholly inexcusable, the headmaster having no class of his own to teach, and being therefore free to do what obviously ought to be done,—to separate the older and more advanced children from the rest of the top class, ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes
... On the Duty of Historians where he says, "One may cover over secret actions, but to be silent on what all the world knows, and things which have had effects which are public and of so much consequence is an inexcusable defect." ...
— Venus in Furs • Leopold von Sacher-Masoch
... district tempted disreputable woollen manufacturers to force on their operatives the products of the factory as part payment of wages. Combers were given pieces of cloth, workers in shoddy mills bundles of rags. But this utterly inexcusable fraud, no less than its more specious complement, the employer's store, was rooted out by inspectors and factory reformers. Therefore in 1854 the Government's Commissioner was able to say that in a factory district like Lancashire truck was not ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... can—you will be able. And you are not to stay here for my sake—you mustn't. I could never be sure that it would prove of any help to me to have you give up a plan which you have taken hold of with such enthusiasm. I think it would be inexcusable of you to draw back, and wicked of me to permit it. You must be happy at having found a way at last, by which you may reach all you have longed for. It makes me happy, too, Felix. If you missed this opportunity, you would regret it ...
— The Lonely Way—Intermezzo—Countess Mizzie - Three Plays • Arthur Schnitzler
... sometimes produces a great effect; an insult offered to a man of great talent and unconquerable perseverance has in many instances produced, in the long run, most tremendous effects; and it appears to me very clear that the inexcusable insults offered to Mr. Paine while he was in the Excise in England was the real cause of the Revolution in America; for, though the nature of the cause of America was such as I have before described it, though the principles were ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard
... exposed to the pain and insult of Lady Cayley's presence she had expected an immediate apology, and she inferred from its omission an unpardonable complicity. Any compliance with the public toleration of that person would have been inexcusable, and he had been more than compliant, more than tolerant; he had been solicitous, attentive, deferent. And deference to such a woman was insolence to his wife. Anne was struck dumb by the shameless levity of the proceedings. The two had behaved as if nothing had happened, or rather (she bitterly ...
— The Helpmate • May Sinclair
... them, so that the whole tribe could be punished for what they did to us, I never saw father so angry before. He declared that the Gypsies should be taught a lesson, and that their escape was most inexcusable." ...
— Ruth Fielding and the Gypsies - The Missing Pearl Necklace • Alice B. Emerson
... made way with most of my duck, and other things, and had had my coffee, and had lighted a cigar, I was entirely willing to sink back to disgraceful ease. But the Captain suddenly developed an inexcusable ...
— The Killer • Stewart Edward White
... balanced and sensitive condition of Illinois politics this ungracious outside interference may be said to have insured Lincoln's defeat. While it gave him pain to be thus wounded in the house of his friends, he yet more deeply deplored the inexcusable blunder of leaders whose misplaced sympathy put in jeopardy the success of a vital political principle. In his convention speech he had forcibly stated the error and danger of such a step. "How can he [Douglas] oppose the advances of slavery? ...
— Abraham Lincoln, A History, Volume 2 • John George Nicolay and John Hay
... curtain—the carnal fancy of a temporal kingdom for Christ, an earthly government for his Church—the Scriptures cannot be understood. As Paul says of the Jews (2 Cor 3, 14), the veil remaineth in the reading of the Scriptures. But this lack of understanding is inexcusable. That is gross and wilful blindness which will not receive the instruction and direction imparted by the apostles. The Jews continue to rave against the Gospel; they will hear nothing of the Christ, though even after crucifying him they receive the offer of repentance ...
— Epistle Sermons, Vol. II - Epiphany, Easter and Pentecost • Martin Luther
... But his conduct was inexcusable. He gave them a very unfriendly reception; and soon ordered them to depart. They had scarcely left the entrance gate, when he ordered several muskets to be fired, as if at them. They thought that they were treacherously fired upon, and ...
— The Adventures of the Chevalier De La Salle and His Companions, in Their Explorations of the Prairies, Forests, Lakes, and Rivers, of the New World, and Their Interviews with the Savage Tribes, Two Hu • John S. C. Abbott
... of inexperience. There are stronger interests in nature than boy-and-girl foolishness—unless one is idle. Where it results in that sort of thing, I agree that it is all wrong and prejudicial to scholarship and thoroughly unnecessary and inexcusable"—with these words a slow glance at Katharine that spoke of arguments in the past. "A man does not have to fall in love purely because he and a girl are in the country at ...
— Stanford Stories - Tales of a Young University • Charles K. Field
... said sternly, "you are lying to me! I know that your family are not in distress, and that you can make an honest living if you choose to be industrious and faithful to your employers. You were well paid here but lost your situation by inexcusable cruelty to ...
— Christmas with Grandma Elsie • Martha Finley
... paid out in 1875. In fact, the financial condition of the State during several years was such that the Legislature was obliged to authorize the issuance of bonds upon which to borrow money to meet current demands, thus adding materially to the bonded debt of the State. Can any thing more inexcusable and indefensible than this be imagined? That any one of the Reconstructed governments could possibly have been guilty of such maladministration as this is inconceivable. And yet, this administration typifies ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 3, 1918 • Various
... case, the selfishness, if I yielded to it, would be greater far than anybody else could be guilty of, and of all men who have sacrificed women's lives to their own career, I should feel myself to be the most guilty and inexcusable. My dear and beloved girl is nobly born, and lives in wealth and luxury, while I am poor—poor by choice, and therefore poor for ever, brought up as a foundling, and without a name that ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine
... is of a less creditable nature. After the terrible crossing of the Beresina, when, through faulty generalship and inexcusable want of forethought, thousands upon thousands of lives were needlessly sacrificed, the Emperor, during the wretched bivouac west of the river, was, like the rest of his regiment, suffering intensely from the bitter weather. His officers, ...
— The Letter-Bag of Lady Elizabeth Spencer-Stanhope v. I. • A. M. W. Stirling (compiler)
... mean deism, or infidelity as well as Christianity. They show us "where evolution and religion meet," provided deism or infidelity is religion, but not, if Christianity is religion,—an inexcusable confusion of terms. ...
— The Evolution Of Man Scientifically Disproved • William A. Williams
... labours, and, without personal ambition, yet thrown, despite himself, into the midst of a terrible revolution, exposed to a thousand unrestrained passions, had cruelly disappeared in the political effervescence—oh! then, any negligence, any delay in studying the facts would be inexcusable; the honourable contemporaries of the victim would soon be no longer there to shed the light of their honest and impartial memory on obscure events; an existence devoted to the cultivation of reason and of truth would come to be appreciated only from documents, on which, for my part, I would ...
— Biographies of Distinguished Scientific Men • Francois Arago
... company with the bears, dogs, and boars which the Ninevites were in the habit of keeping confined there. It would appear that Esarhaddon set himself to come to a final reckoning with Sidon and Phoenicia, the revolt of which had irritated him all the more, in that it showed an inexcusable ingratitude towards his family. For it was Sennacherib who, in order to break the power of Blulai, had not only rescued Sidon from the dominion of Tyre, but had enriched it with the spoils taken from its former rulers, and had raised it to the first rank among ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 8 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... head," for which he was using the new remedy of tar-water which Bishop Berkeley had made the fashionable panacea for all manner of diseases. At the end of July 1744 Smith says to his mother: "I am quite inexcusable for not writing to you oftener. I think of you every day, but always defer writing till the post is just going, and then sometimes business or company, but oftener laziness, hinders me. Tar-water is a remedy very much in vogue here at present for ...
— Life of Adam Smith • John Rae
... have sent you an answer on a separate piece of paper to your rather blowing-up letter about Borneo. You have been misled by Spencer's ignorance and Gladstone's very natural forgetfulness of the particulars. It was more inexcusable of me to have forgotten what it appears you told me about your and Rylands' previous action. When my liver does not act and official work becomes unusually irksome, I sometimes ask myself upon what question I should like to be beaten and turned out. The first would be fair trade. The second, which ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke V1 • Stephen Gwynn
... a delight. We shot merely the two or three specimens the naturalists needed for the museum. I killed a wood-ibis on the wing with the handy little Springfield, and then lost all the credit I had thus gained by a series of inexcusable misses, at long range, before I finally killed a jabiru. Kermit shot a jabiru with the Luger automatic. The great, splendid birds, standing about as tall as a man, show fight when wounded, and advance ...
— Through the Brazilian Wilderness • Theodore Roosevelt
... until Fergus, customer No. 2, sent in a mail order to the house. They, by mistake (and an inexcusable one— but what can you expect of underpaid stock boys?) shipped out to him some goods branded the same as those my first customer, Stack, had in his house. Fergus wrote in to me and told me about the mistake. He didn't wish to carry the branded goods any more than the other man wished for him to ...
— Tales of the Road • Charles N. Crewdson
... proceedings to the proceedings of the same nature in which Napoleon had for a long time been indulging on all seas. They had claimed to interdict the commerce of neutrals by imprudent and unjust "Orders in Council;" a still more inexcusable iniquity fettered at one stroke the commerce of Europe in all its branches, carrying annoyance into all families, and arbitrarily modifying the conditions of all existence. From henceforth, in the poorest household, no ...
— Worlds Best Histories - France Vol 7 • M. Guizot and Madame Guizot De Witt
... pause, he added, "Such an instance of disobedience in a wife would be inexcusable; and though submission may be only a duty after marriage, I own I think it ...
— Ellen Middleton—A Tale • Georgiana Fullerton
... either of them were a gambler it was not he. Mr. Wharton had resented this bitterly and had driven his son from his presence,—and now the quarrel made him very wretched. He certainly was sorry that he had called his son a gambler, but his son had been, as he thought, inexcusable in the retort which he had made. He was a man to whom his friends gave credit for much sternness;—but still he was one who certainly had no happiness in the world independent of his children. His daughter had left him, not, as he thought, under happy auspices,—and he was now, at this ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... in June, 1665, to Port Royal, with a rich booty. For this inexcusable attack on a country at peace with England, ...
— The Pirates' Who's Who - Giving Particulars Of The Lives and Deaths Of The Pirates And Buccaneers • Philip Gosse
... head. Thousands of years of comfortable domestic life have failed to rid it of this inconvenient heritage from the time when wild in woods it ran. Yet in this particular instance the terror of the swine does not seem wholly inexcusable, if we know a wild duck as well as a pig, especially the duck that takes to haunting a solitary woodland pool, who, when intruded on, springs up with such a sudden tremendous splash and flutter of wings and outrageous screams, that man himself, if not prepared ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... hold my tongue than to blazon it about publicly." How strange, however, that Milton had fallen foul of Morus at such a violent rate! Had he not been told two years ago, through Hartlib, that Morus was not the author of the book for which he made him suffer? It was the more inexcusable inasmuch as in the Joannis Philippi, Angli, Responsio ad Apologiam Anonymi Cujusdam—which work Milton had superintended, if he had not written it—there had been the same mistake of attributing a work to the wrong person. It would be for ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... simply inexcusable, and stands out a foul blot on the memory of every Rebel in high place ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... that it was an inexcusable waste of money—Judas, the thief, as Mark calls him, pretended concern about the poor. The poor have received immeasurably more from the use made of this ointment than they would have received had it been sold and the proceeds distributed then. It was an expression of love, ...
— In His Image • William Jennings Bryan
... immediately forthcoming. Now she is ill, and she naturally considers the doctors and nurses mere agents to secure her relief from discomfort. She is willing to pay any price for that—and still she is allowed to suffer. From her point of view it is utterly unreasonable, inexcusable. What are hospitals and nurses for, anyway? And she is carping, critical, and disagreeable. Her attitude is as sick as her body. How could ...
— Applied Psychology for Nurses • Mary F. Porter
... which, by drawing six or seven millions out of the country, deprives our people of employment and means of life to that amount. The next is the general inattention of Irish landlords to the state and condition of their own property, and an inexcusable want of sympathy with their tenantry, which, indeed, is only a corollary from the former; for it can hardly be expected that those who wilfully neglect themselves will feel a warm interest in others. The next is the evil of subletting, ...
— The Emigrants Of Ahadarra - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... same way as we work out any sum in arithmetic by addition and subtraction. But reason and logic should be the guiding principle in all we do. That which is bad in politics, even though in strict accordance with law, is inexcusable unless absolutely necessary, and whatever goes beyond that is criminal." These were briefly the general principles on which he shaped his ends, and they are pretty safe guides. His mentality, as I have said, ...
— Drake, Nelson and Napoleon • Walter Runciman
... ourselves to make up our opinions—we take and give them, we beg, borrow, and steal them. True, there are controversies involving matters so important in their consequences, so serious in their nature, that one might conceive either indifference or fanaticism equally inexcusable with regard to them; but there are also a thousand other subjects of discussion, at the present day, of that peculiar character which can only thrive when supported by passion and prejudice, and falling ...
— The Lumley Autograph • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... loss of so many of the imperial cities was severely felt by the Swedish party; as the friendship of these towns had so largely contributed to the success of their arms, indifference to their fate would have been inexcusable. It would have been an indelible disgrace, had they deserted their confederates in their need, and abandoned them to the revenge of an implacable conqueror. Moved by these considerations, the Swedish army, under the command of Horn, ...
— The History of the Thirty Years' War • Friedrich Schiller, Translated by Rev. A. J. W. Morrison, M.A.
... failings, peccadilloes, and asperities are strictly fined. The inevitable result is that either the family behaviour improves, or the parish charities benefit. I'm starting its operation in my parish to-day. Forgive any inexcusable rudeness in leaving the first box with you. I must hurry ...
— Dolly Reforming Herself - A Comedy in Four Acts • Henry Arthur Jones
... a minute I thought you had been guilty of an inexcusable act but upon second thought I begin to understand that it is impossible. There is ...
— The Circus Boys On the Mississippi • Edgar B. P. Darlington
... this mutiny, too, John Gough, is equally inexcusable," continued Mr Evelyn. "It was your duty to have stood by Captain Manvers and his officers; by which you would have earned their eternal gratitude, and a handsome provision from the owners ...
— The Little Savage • Captain Frederick Marryat
... sight of his relatives in London, and had made for them such modest provision as suited his view of the fitness of things. To leave wealth to young men of the working class would have seemed to him the most inexcusable of follies; if such were to rise at all, it must be by their own efforts and in consequence of their native merits; otherwise, let them toil on and support themselves honestly. From secret sources he received information of the capabilities and prospects of Joseph ...
— Demos • George Gissing
... these tragedies is their violation of the decencies of the stage. Manto, the daughter of Tiresias and a great prophetess, investigates the entrails in public. Medea kills her children coram populo in defiance of Horace's maxim. These are inexcusable blemishes in a composition which is made according to a prescribed recipe. His "tragic mixture," as it may be called, is compounded of equal proportions of description, declamation, and philosophical aphorisms. Thus taken at intervals it formed an excellent tonic to assist towards an oratorical ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... that when any officer has the inexcusable fault that he takes snap judgment on his own men, he will not be any different in his relations with all other people, and will stand in his own light for the duration of his career. Which leads to one other observation. ...
— The Armed Forces Officer - Department of the Army Pamphlet 600-2 • U. S. Department of Defense
... her lips; she was like a counterfeit beside a good coin. It was easy to conceive how others might be deceived by her tricks of resemblance—servants, ordinary friends, even the old lawyer in charge of the estate—but it was inexcusable for him to have thus become a plaything. Yet he had, and now the mistake was too late to mend. He had left Natalie alone on the cliff, and then blindly permitted this chit to lead him straight into Hobart's set trap. Angered beyond control at the memory, West swore, ...
— The Case and The Girl • Randall Parrish
... that an inexcusable error has been committed and repeated in several of the collections of records published by the Parliamentary Commission, who have, in numerous instances, and without any warrant, interpreted Osb. of the MSS. as "Osbert." Thus they have deprived ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 210, November 5, 1853 • Various
... the purport of borrowing money from the father, that might be a reason why, notwithstanding the splendour of his prospects, he should not be admitted to further intimacy at the villa. To borrow money from one's tradesman was, in the eyes of Sir Thomas, about as inexcusable an offence as a young man could commit. He was too much disturbed in mind to go home on the following day, but on the Thursday he returned to the villa. The following ...
— Ralph the Heir • Anthony Trollope
... neither markedly better nor markedly worse. I know many, and I have never met anything in the least like "Sludge," a poem which Browning might be excused for writing in some crisis of domestic disagreement, but which it was inexcusable to republish since it is admitted to be a concoction, and the exposure described to have been imaginary. The critic often uses the term medium as if it necessarily meant a professional, whereas every investigator ...
— The Vital Message • Arthur Conan Doyle
... that women have no characters at all. We find her every where, where she has no business to be; neither saying nor doing any thing of the least consequence, but whimpering and sobbing over the Matrimony in her prayer book, like a great miss from a boarding school; and all this is the more inexcusable, as she is altogether a supernumerary person in the play, who should atone for her intrusion by some brilliancy or novelty of deportment. Matters would have gone on just as well, although she had been left behind at Whitby till after the battle of Flodden; and ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... endurance seemed easy to Romola rather than a state of mind in which she would admit to herself that Tito acted unworthily. If she had felt a new heartache in the solitary hours with her father through the last months of his life, it had been by no inexcusable fault of her husband's; and now—it was a hope that would make its presence felt even in the first moments when her father's place was empty—there was no longer any importunate claim to divide her ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... me! But before you speak understand this: Not now, or through all eternity, do I forgive the inexcusable neglect that drove my mother to what I witnessed ...
— The Harvester • Gene Stratton Porter
... illustrated by a very serious episode in the history of the Pepys household, and have been fully and faithfully set down by the great diarist. The offence—an embrace of his wife's lady-help, as she might now be termed—was a slight one, but, as Pepys himself admits, quite inexcusable. He is writing, being in his thirty-sixth year, on the 25th of Oct., 1668 (Lord's Day). "After supper, to have my hair combed by Deb, which occasioned the greatest sorrow to me that ever I knew in this world, for my wife, coming up suddenly, did ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... more inexcusable than these murders. Whatever defense there might be for firing on men who touched the Dead Line in other parts of the prison, there could be none here. The men had no intention of escaping; they had no designs upon the Stockade; they were not leading any party to assail it. They were in every ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... in celebrating the distinguished merit of a contemporary, mixed with a certain degree of vanity not altogether inexcusable, in appearing fully sensible of it, where can I find one, in complimenting whom I can with more general approbation gratify those feelings? Your excellence not only in the Art over which you have long presided with unrivalled fame, but also in Philosophy and elegant ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... about these foreigners very differently from what I do about Americans. American men and women are inexcusable if they do not bring up children so as to be fit for vicissitudes; the meaning of our star is, that here all men being free and equal, every man should be fitted for freedom and an independence by his own resources wherever the changeful wave of our mighty ...
— At Home And Abroad - Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... of others, he was at last totally freed from that vexatious infirmity. After man has once done a woman right, he is never after in danger of misbehaving himself with that person, unless upon the account of a manifest and inexcusable weakness. Neither is this disaster to be feared but in adventures where the soul is over-extended with desire or respect, and especially where we meet with an unexpected opportunity that requires a sudden and quick despatch; and in these cases, there is no ...
— Aphrodisiacs and Anti-aphrodisiacs: Three Essays on the Powers of Reproduction • John Davenport
... cannot tell you. It is difficult for a woman to define her feelings in language which is chiefly made by men to express theirs. My treatment of you was thoughtless, inexcusable, wicked! I shall eternally regret it. If there had been anything I could have done to make amends I would most gladly have done it—there was nothing on earth I so longed to do as to repair the error. But ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy
... my part I agree with them. Francesco Carrara says: "There are blind passions, and others which are reasonable. Blind passions deprive one of free will, reasonable ones do not. Blind and excusable passions are fear, honor, love, reasonable and inexcusable ones are hatred and revenge." But how so? I have studied murderers who killed for revenge and who told me that the desire for revenge took hold of them like a fever, so that they "forgot even to eat." Hate and revenge can take possession of a man to ...
— The Positive School of Criminology - Three Lectures Given at the University of Naples, Italy on April 22, 23 and 24, 1901 • Enrico Ferri
... been travelling toward all this time is this: the first critic that ever had occasion to describe my personal appearance littered his description with foolish and inexcusable errors whose aggregate furnished the result that I was distinctly and distressingly unhandsome. That description floated around the country in the papers, and was in constant use and wear for a quarter of a century. It seems strange to me that ...
— Chapters from My Autobiography • Mark Twain
... Bourbon. Broken-up sky-line of volcanic mountains in the middle. Surely it would not cost much to repair them, and it seems inexcusable neglect to leave them as ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... western tobacco habit, selfish beyond excuse, filthy beyond measure, and unsanitary in its polluting and oxygen-destroying effect upon the air all are compelled to breathe. It has already become a greater and more inexcusable burden upon ...
— Farmers of Forty Centuries - or, Permanent Agriculture in China, Korea and Japan • F. H. King
... sufficient to deter him from going to market to the Irrawaddy steamer, where I accidentally met him. So far from being abashed when he saw me, he took the occasion to tell me what he will, I know, pardon me for thinking an inexcusable untruth. He had written, he said, to the poor woman telling her, dying as he believed her to be, to come down to Bhamo ...
— An Australian in China - Being the Narrative of a Quiet Journey Across China to Burma • George Ernest Morrison
... gentle moods, softer purposes. Shrewd little Beth, whose wide, blue eyes had seen right down into the depths of his heart. He had been clumsy, if nothing else, and he had always thought that clumsiness was inexcusable. He had a guilty sense that while Beth was still the little lady to her finger tips, born to a natural nobility, he, the Grand Duke Peter, had been the boor, the vulgar proletarian. The look in her eyes had shamed him as the look in his own eyes had shamed her. She had known ...
— The Vagrant Duke • George Gibbs
... "Your husband knew that he was running a great risk in keeping these letters and making a living out of them. His letter to you shows that he was perfectly aware of it. Of course, it is a very terrible, a very inexcusable thing that he should have been killed. But he knew perfectly well that he was in danger. Can't you sympathize a little with the poor woman whose life he made so miserable? Let her have her letters back. You will not ...
— The Avenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... her lips, her dimple came and went. She gazed absently at the curling flame. Suddenly she rose from her ottoman, and seated herself bolt upright on the sofa with one of the plumpest cushions behind her. "All the same it was inexcusable in me," ...
— The Little Red Chimney - Being the Love Story of a Candy Man • Mary Finley Leonard
... necessary to progress than the solvent power of new ideas. Most thinkers of his time were inclined to judge the past career of humanity anachronistically. All the things that had been done or thought which could not be justified in the new age of enlightenment, were regarded as gratuitous and inexcusable errors. The traditions, superstitions, and customs, the whole "code of fraud and woe" transmitted from the past, weighed then too heavily in France to allow the school of reform to do impartial justice to their origins. They felt a sort of resentment ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... departed sister in thinking—as he certainly had thought, and even had expressed on more than one occasion in writing—that in permitting her European movements to be shaped in accordance with her daughter's fancies she had exhibited an inexcusable weakness. ...
— The Uncle Of An Angel - 1891 • Thomas A. Janvier
... order of society; and that you will avail yourselves of every opportunity to convince your fellow-subjects that the blessings they enjoy under a truly free and happy Constitution can be preserved only by a due obedience to the laws, all breaches of which are the more inexcusable as the Constitution itself has provided for the safe and easy repeal or modification of such as may not answer the good intentions of ...
— The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 2 of 2 - From 1620-1816 • Edgerton Ryerson
... have thought that, after such a tragic experience and observing the mutual devotion of the young couple, their parents would have relented and given their approval of the union, however improvident and inexcusable it might appear to them. But, on both sides, they were obdurate; and Mr Sheridan carried his opposition to the extent of extracting from his son a promise that he would not even see ...
— Love Romances of the Aristocracy • Thornton Hall
... of animal life, which he carefully deposited in a little silver box carried for this special purpose. Nevertheless it must be admitted that there have been from time to time cases of brutality towards natives sufficiently gross and inexcusable to create a very deplorable impression. I have met educated Indians who, though they have had no unpleasant experiences of the kind themselves, prefer to avoid entering a railway carriage occupied by Europeans lest they should expose themselves even to the chance of insulting treatment. ...
— Indian Unrest • Valentine Chirol
... danced and coyotes howled the live-long night? Of course if there were quarters in which a woman could live with even reasonable comfort, that would be very different. Then their remaining at Scott would be inexcusable. Mrs. Flight and Mrs. Darling were women who were at variance on very many points of late, but openly in accord on this. Indeed, almost every woman at Scott had all of a sudden been seized by some strange lingual epidemic that manifested itself in the persistent ...
— Under Fire • Charles King
... names mentioned, if you please. You have simply misunderstood the character of one or two people to an almost inexcusable extent. Settle your quarrel with him, then, if you wish it, and I'll ignore my part in it entirely. But if ...
— All Aboard - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... conduct of Raleigh's was the more inexcusable, as there is in the State Paper Office a warrant dated 16th Nov., 1617, for the payment to Pett of 700 crowns "for building the new ship, the Destiny of London, of 700 tons burthen." The least he could have done was to have handed over to the builder ...
— Men of Invention and Industry • Samuel Smiles
... "Bride of Abydos" Evil reputation; loss of public favor Byron leaves England forever Switzerland; the Shelleys; new poems Degrading life in Venice Wonderful labors amid dissipation The Countess Guiccioli Two sides to Byron's character His power and fertility Inexcusable immorality; "Don Juan" "Manfred" and "Cain" not irreligious but dramatic Byron not atheistical but morbid Many noble traits and actions Generosity and fidelity in friendship Eulogies by Scott and Moore Byron's ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... manners, his manly virtues, and his prudential views, which mainly formed his taste, and enabled him to disseminate taste, Sir Joshua rescued art from this degrading prejudice, which, while it flattered vanity and excused vice, made the objects of the flattery contemptible and inexcusable. If genius be a gift, it is one that passes through the mind, and takes its colour; the love of all that is pure, and good, and great, can alone invest genius with that habit of thought which, applied to practice, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 53, No. 331, May, 1843 • Various
... the public discussion of it. It is impossible for me to give, within the narrow limits of this work, all that was then said upon it; and yet as the debate which ensued was the first which took place upon it, I should feel inexcusable if I were not to ...
— The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the - Abolition of the African Slave-Trade, by the British Parliament (1839) • Thomas Clarkson
... enthusiasm of the soldiers of the nation, and to prevent them from putting forth their whole force to dislodge the rebels from the different points of which they have possessed themselves." The president adds, "that this revolt is the more inexcusable, as his administration has always been gentle and moderate; that he has economized the public treasure, respected the laws, and that citizens of whatever opinion had always enjoyed perfect tranquillity under his rule—that constitutional reforms were ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca
... to one of the most inexcusable deeds with which Rationalism stands charged. We refer to the general destruction or alteration ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... doomed by a near descendant to the exposure inseparable from the revelations of this volume. That the treatment which she received at the hands of one whose duty it was to 'love, cherish, and protect' her, was equally undeserved and inexcusable, we can well believe; but that the 'platonic attachment,' which sprung up in a night, like the gourd of JONAH, and gradually waxed to 'passion at fever-heat,' was justified by these facts, or sanctioned by propriety, or that its history in detail is calculated ...
— Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, March 1844 - Volume 23, Number 3 • Various
... ignorant and vicious into the right path, and in not expending more of their wealth on those who are poor, in elevating their minds and their manners, and promoting their health, still the latter are inexcusable for their present neglect of their infant offspring, while they would not think of neglecting, on the same principle, the offspring of their ...
— The Young Mother - Management of Children in Regard to Health • William A. Alcott
... counterfeit, religion from the ministers of it. Hence his attacks on Christianity partake of the tone of blasphemy; and he manifests in reference to religion, which to most readers was the most sacred of subjects, a tone of indescribable scurrility, which was not only inexcusable and disgraceful if viewed merely in a literary point of view, but constituted politically a public outrage against the dearest feelings of others which no citizen has a right to perpetrate.(528) This tone too was mainly his own; and is not to be found, ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... assist in arranging the parts of a story. Use an outline. It will guard against the omission of any detail that may afterward be found necessary, and against the necessity of offering the apology, inexcusable in prepared work, of "forgetting to say;" it will help the writer to see the best arrangement of the parts, to know that causes have preceded effects. The outline in narration should not be too much in detail, nor should it be ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster
... institutions, and constantly pointing to our glorious political exaltation as an incentive to the perseverance of his own countrymen in their struggle against oppression, he has yet omitted no opportunity of rebuking our inexcusable slave system. An enthusiastic admirer of Jefferson, he has often regretted that his practice should have so illy accorded with his noble sentiments on the subject of slavery, which so fully coincided with his own. In truth, wherever ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... most blasphemous, for, according to that, God is a cruel, unrelenting, revengeful, malignant and utterly unreasonable tyrant. I propose now to pay a little attention to the creed. First, it confesses that there is such a thing as a light of nature. It is sufficient to make man inexcusable, but not sufficient for salvation; just light enough to lead man to hell. Now imagine a man who will put a false light on a hilltop to lure a ship to destruction. What would we say of that man? What can we say of a God who gives this false light of nature which, if its lessons are ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll
... incident, had by his order remained behind in the farm-house at Dahme with the escort from Brandenburg. Assuring the Elector of his most lively sympathy, and protesting that he had most bitterly reproached his wife for her inexcusable indiscretion in bringing about a meeting between him and this man, the Chamberlain went on to ask what could have occurred during the interview to affect his master so ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... have been inexcusable if I had forgotten you," he responded with a smile. "Still, I couldn't quite place you until a few moments ago, when you faced the light. But you were wrong in one thing: I'm no ...
— The Intriguers • Harold Bindloss
... to penetrate the mental processes of this handsome Mrs. Hallam. She seemed to regard him with a suspicion which he thought inexcusable. Did she suppose he had spirited Dorothy Calendar away and then called to apprise her of the fact? Or that he was some sort of an adventurer, who had manufactured a plausible yarn to gain him access to ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance
... instant, I had the pleasure to receive last post. Although my late long neglect, or rather delay, was truely culpable, I am tempted not to regret it, since it has produced me so valuable a proof of your regard. I did, indeed, during that inexcusable silence, sometimes divert the reproaches of my own mind, by fancying that I should hear again from you, inquiring with some anxiety about me, because, for aught you knew, ...
— The Life Of Johnson, Volume 3 of 6 • Boswell
... capricious nobles of Armenia; and they unanimously desired a Persian governor in the room of an unworthy king. The answer of the archbishop Isaac, whose sanction they earnestly solicited, is expressive of the character of a superstitious people. He deplored the manifest and inexcusable vices of Artasires; and declared, that he should not hesitate to accuse him before the tribunal of a Christian emperor, who would punish, without destroying, the sinner. "Our king," continued Isaac, "is too much addicted to licentious pleasures, but he has been purified in the holy ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 3 • Edward Gibbon
... the corner, her escapade suddenly presented itself to her as childish madness, silly, inexcusable; and she thought self-reproachfully, "How impulsive I am!" and sharply turned back towards Mrs. Maldon's house, which seemed to be about ten ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett
... been inexcusable in me, in our present circumstances and after all I have promised you, not to have written to you for this last month, if I had been in London; but I have been at Mount Edgecumbe, and so constantly upon ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... to his tragedy of Osorio was, we also learn, still fresh. He seldom, we are told, "recited any of the beautiful passages with which it abounds without a visible interruption of the perfect composure of his mind." He mentioned with great emotion Sheridan's inexcusable treatment of him with respect to it. At the same time, adds his friend, "he is a severe critic of his own productions, and declares" (this no doubt with reference to his then, and indeed his constant estimate of Christabel ...
— English Men of Letters: Coleridge • H. D. Traill
... girl of medium height, light of frame, with a face in whose sad beauty is blended the least perceptible trace of womanly resolution. She has borne the heaviest sorrow; for when she followed her father to the grave she buried the last object of her love. The long, inexcusable silence of Greenleaf had been explained to her; she now believed him faithless, and had (not without a pang) striven to uproot his memory from her heart. Courageous, but with more than the delicacy of her sex, strong only in innocence and great-heartedness, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various
... of view. It was bad enough to occupy so much time when already it was darkening and soon the lamps would have to be lighted; it was bad enough to pray in public for the rector and his wife; it was entirely inexcusable to hint at the presence of a sinner in their midst, at the very board now covered with the home-made dainties cooked and sent in by the ladies of Hawthorne. In itself perhaps the prayer, though trite and redundant (Ringfield was not in his best vein, no longer single-minded), ...
— Ringfield - A Novel • Susie Frances Harrison
... inexcusable. "I wonder we don't turn tigers with the education we receive," said one of the brothers of Louis XVI when upbraided for thoughtlessness and lack of consideration for the feelings of others—but Bernhardt seems ...
— Secret Memoirs: The Story of Louise, Crown Princess • Henry W. Fischer
... to the cruel anxiety which had contracted the features of Madame de Lucenay succeeded a kind of noble indignation. The inexcusable faults of this woman were at least palliated by the fidelity of her love, by the boldness of her devotion, by the grandeur of her generosity, by the frankness of her character, and by her inexorable aversion for everything ...
— The Mysteries of Paris V2 • Eugene Sue
... concession to France herein contained was wholly inexcusable. The latter country was in no position to refuse terms, and an absolute reservation of all fishing rights should have been insisted on in the interests of the colony. A culpable Ministry, short-sightedly regarding Newfoundland as little more than a fishing-station, ...
— The Story of Newfoundland • Frederick Edwin Smith, Earl of Birkenhead
... generals tried a ruse, a ruse they hoped would work on these beings; but they who never before had to plan a war in space, were not sure that their opponents had not had experience in the art. True, the Nigrans hadn't revealed any especially striking generalship—had, in fact, committed some inexcusable blunders—but they couldn't be sure. Though they didn't know it, the Solarians had the advantage of thousands of years of planetary warfare to rely on. This stood them in good ...
— The Black Star Passes • John W Campbell
... historic, save their names and their sites. They are standing witnesses to the essentially criminal and senseless character of the Revolution of 1789. The Jacqueries which Arthur Young found raging all over France during that year of ill omen were not much less brutal and they were much more inexcusable than the Jacqueries of 1357 for which the Comte de Foix and the Captal de Buch exacted the stern vengeance chronicled by Froissart. They were the cause and not the consequence of that emigration of the ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... not been in such deadly earnest his efforts to make reparation for what he considered his inexcusable short-sightedness and neglect, would have been funny, for, like most men when confronted by some problem involving femininity, he was utterly at a loss how to set about "his ...
— Peggy Stewart at School • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... so. Conscious of his state of irritability, he subdued his tones of voice, and restrained utterance when tempted to angry or inconsiderate speech. Not again during the day was he guilty of such inexcusable conduct as in the instances mentioned; yet the shadow remained upon his feelings, strive as he would to throw off ...
— Finger Posts on the Way of Life • T. S. Arthur
... mine, in a way. It's funny, but one had that feeling about Captain Anthony. To watch him was not so much worse than listening to Franklin talking him over. Well, it's no use making excuses for what's inexcusable. I watched; but I dare say you know that there could have been nothing inimical in this low behaviour of mine. On the contrary. I'll tell you now what he was doing. He was helping himself out of a decanter. I saw every movement, and I said to myself mockingly as though jeering at Franklin in my ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad
... a result of sickness, in about four weeks; but at that time the fact that nine tenths of all tropical diseases are caused by microscopic germs, and are therefore preventable, was not known. The progress made in sanitary science in the present century renders unnecessary and inexcusable in 1898 a rate of sickness and mortality that was perhaps inevitable in 1762. Northern soldiers, if properly equipped and cared for, can live and maintain their health now under conditions which would have been absolutely and inevitably fatal to ...
— Campaigning in Cuba • George Kennan
... to say that the present piece ranks among her best. In the intense fervour of the sentiment, and the felicitous choice of the imagery, the touch of the born poet is alike shown. Through an almost inexcusable editorial mistake of our own, the first word of this poem is erroneously ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... were undoubtedly sufficiently denunciatory, although they did not always seem to consider a bad deed sanctified because done by their friends. Nor have I any intention of denying that inexcusable excesses were committed at various times by men of Morgan's command. I freely admit that we had men in our ranks whose talents and achievements could have commanded respect even among the "Bummers." There were others, too, whose homes ...
— History of Morgan's Cavalry • Basil W. Duke
... wives and daughters, as various in their decorations as the insects, the birds and the shells, would believe that the community was staggering under a weight which almost paralyzes its movements? 'Everything is so cheap,' say the ladies, 'that it is inexcusable not to dress well.' But do they reflect why things are so cheap? Do they know how much wealth has been sacrificed, how many families ruined, to produce this boasted result? Do they not know enough of the machinery of society, to suppose that the stunning effect of crash after crash, ...
— The American Frugal Housewife • Lydia M. Child
... the nature and necessity of the new birth. Our Lord manifests something of surprise at the ignorance and stupidity of Nicodemus. Such ignorance as Nicodemus exposes in the presence of Christ appears to us as wholly inexcusable, when we look at what had already been taught on the subject of a change of heart, or regeneration, in the law of Moses ...
— Life and Labors of Elder John Kline, the Martyr Missionary - Collated from his Diary by Benjamin Funk • John Kline |
