Online dictionaryOnline dictionary
Synonyms, antonyms, pronunciation

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




Irremediable   Listen
adjective
Irremediable  adj.  Not to be remedied, corrected, or redressed; incurable; as, an irremediable disease or evil.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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

Synonyms
Antonyms
Quotes
Words linked to  

only single words



Share |
Add this dictionary
to your browser search bar





"Irremediable" Quotes from Famous Books



... His Shepherd's Hands with which alone He could gather His sheep to His Breast, and the Feet that alone could bear Him into the wilderness to seek after that which was lost. Was there ever a Suicide such as this, such a despair of high hopes, such a ruin of all ambition, a dying so complete and irremediable as the Dying ...
— Paradoxes of Catholicism • Robert Hugh Benson

... notice with regret and apprehension, that, as he grew physically better and mentally clearer, a darkening cloud settled over his whole being, until he seemed on the point of drowning in the depths of an irremediable dejection and despair. Besides this, he was ever on the point of telling us something, which he yet failed of courage to put into words; and Thorne, noticing this, when, one day, we were all seated ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860 • Various

... of things is very hard both upon mistresses and servants, but it is not irremediable, and the remedy must come from the upper of the two classes. Schools are as necessary for servants as they are for other people; they must be taught their calling before they can practise it; and ...
— Some Private Views • James Payn

... person inside. But he did not go far. To what purpose should he, since it was vain to hope to overtake the Captain or Paul de Roustache? Some one was left behind; then, successful or unsuccessful, the Captain would return—unless Paul murdered him, a catastrophe which would be irremediable, but was exceedingly unlikely. Guillaume mounted to the top of the eminence and flung himself down in the grass; thence he crawled round the summit, descended again with a stealthiness in striking contrast to his ...
— Captain Dieppe • Anthony Hope

... profound remarks made to others! I could no longer be content with bourgeois receptions whence he rescued me, upon finding me distinguee, wealthy, young, beautiful and witty. There lies the evil, and it is irremediable. ...
— Petty Troubles of Married Life, Second Part • Honore de Balzac

... What was the use of going farther? He had fallen too low. His degradation was abject. It was hopeless, irreparable, irremediable. "End it all—end it all." The words clamoured in his ...
— The Manxman - A Novel - 1895 • Hall Caine

... Forest King had gone the last plank that saved him from ruin; perhaps the last chance that stood between him and dishonor. He had never looked on it as within the possibilities of hazard that the horse could be defeated; now, little as those about him knew it, an absolute and irremediable disgrace fronted him. For, secure in the issue of the Prix de Dames, and compelled to weight his chances in it very heavily that his winnings might be wide enough to relieve some of the debt-pressure upon him, his losses now ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]

... beauties of earth and deaf to the mercies of heaven, until a great Voice called me to come out of the sepulcher of myself; and I came—alive again, and free, of a strong spirit, but with youth gone from it. Out of the void of an irremediable disaster God had called me to His service, chastened ...
— Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man • Marie Conway Oemler

... arches the throng still pressed and shifted. But here there was quietude. The clatter of voices had died down. A band playing somewhere near at hand could be heard. Violet Oliver for the first time in her life had been brought face to face with a real tragedy. She was conscious of it as something irremediable and terribly sad. And for her own share in bringing it about she was full of remorse. She looked at Shere Ali as he sat beside her, his eyes gazing into the courtyard, his face tired and hopeless. ...
— The Broken Road • A. E. W. Mason

... he went on. "I've done a thing I loathe, and to atone for it you ask me to do another. What sort of satisfaction would that give you? It would put something irremediable ...
— The Reef • Edith Wharton

... now set in, but up here among the hills she was May by courtesy only: or if she was May, she would never be Might. She was, indeed, only April, with her showers and sunshine, her tearful, childish laughter, and again the frown, and the despair irremediable. Nay, as if she still kept up a secret correspondence with her cousin March, banished for his rudeness, she would not very seldom shake from her skirts a snow storm, and oftener the dancing hail. Then out would come the sun behind her, and laugh, and say—"I could not help that; but ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald

... of time a great leap of flame from her decks lit all the scene and showed her in her might; it was followed by a frightful explosion, and the great ship, torn from her anchorage, wrecked forever, a flaming hulk, a torch, a pyre, a potent of irremediable ruin, bore down the swift current and struck the Phoenix.... Once more the Mere Honour's cannon thundered loud appeal and warning. In the red light cast by her destroyer the galleon began to sink, and that so rapidly that her ...
— Sir Mortimer • Mary Johnston

... terrific logic of the thing smote him. His wife hating him, himself on the scaffold, his little Zoe disgraced and dishonoured all her life; and himself out of it all, unable to help her, and bringing irremediable trouble on her! As a chemical clears a muddy liquid, leaving it pure and atomless, so there seemed to pass over Jean Jacques' face a thought like ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... altercation in the night went on, over the irremediable. He arguing, "What's the hurry? Why clear out like this?" perhaps a little sorry for the girl and as usual without a penny in his pocket, appreciating the comfortable quarters, wishing to linger on as long as possible in the shameless enjoyment of this already ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad

... St. Aubert requested to speak with him alone; and Emily, being left with Madame Quesnel, soon learned that a large party was invited to dine at the chateau, and was compelled to hear that nothing which was past and irremediable ought to prevent the festivity ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe

... his Ma^tie. did, how much he priseth and loveth that blessed sweetness in you, and you in it. But I must tell your Grace his Ma^tie. prays you, not to thinke it a little distemper which carryed him to those publique actes, and publique places, and to consider how irremediable it is, when his intemperance hath carryed him to do some act of dishonour to himselfe, which may, and must, reflect upon his most noble Brother, beyond the follies and disprofits which he dayly practiseth. And that your Grace will not only bee to suffer some sure course to bee taken ...
— The Curious Case of Lady Purbeck - A Scandal of the XVIIth Century • Thomas Longueville

... months had passed since the wedding-day at Aldborough, and the penalty for that day was paid already—paid in unavailing remorse, in hopeless isolation, in irremediable defeat! Let this be said for her; let the truth which has been told of the fault be told of the expiation as well. Let it be recorded of her that she enjoyed no secret triumph on the day of her success. The horror of herself with which her ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins

... the misfortune was not irremediable. Another kite, you will be saying, might be constructed out of similar materials as those used in making the one carried away. But to say this, would be to speak without a ...
— The Cliff Climbers - A Sequel to "The Plant Hunters" • Captain Mayne Reid

... and the accrued interest, amounting to about forty-two thousand francs. His other creditors, prosperous, rich, and intelligent merchants, had easily born their losses, whereas the misfortunes of the Lorrains seemed so irremediable to old Monsieur Collinet that he promised the widow to pay off her husband's debts, to the amount of forty thousand francs more. When the Bourse of Nantes heard of this generous reparation they wished to receive Collinet to their board before ...
— Pierrette • Honore de Balzac

... stumbled on board. When I looked back again they were gone, but through the grey shadows there seemed to come back to me a cry of heartache and irremediable loss. ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service

... a situation similar to that of the unhappy gentleman, whose wife informed him, on her death-bed, that one of their reputed children was not his; and, when he eagerly begged her to declare which of them it was, she answered, 'That you shall never know;' and expired, leaving him in irremediable ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell

... as its ally, inspiring a generous resolution of not adding to the burden of our fellow-pilgrims, who like us toil heavy-laden through the wilderness of life. On the other hand those, who, when visited by irremediable affliction, give up their whole souls to the indulgence of grief, may dignify their passive dejection with the name of finer feelings, and more tender sensibility, but they will at last find, that they ...
— The Loyalists, Vol. 1-3 - An Historical Novel • Jane West

... of people and of their opinions, but of their modes of life and their natures. From this it has resulted that those who have undertaken to conduct affairs by the rules current here have committed irremediable blunders. But the principal thing which is necessary there is that he should be a good public man, for the basis and fundamental need is good government, and efforts for the increase of the land, and directing all one's care ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 • Emma Helen Blair

... settled, but it was not the cheerful impulse that predominated. Out of the multitude of thoughts concerning Clara, one had fixed itself as the main controller of his reflection. Characteristically, John hit upon what seemed an irremediable misfortune, and brooded over it with all his might. If only Sidney Kirkwood were in the same mind ...
— The Nether World • George Gissing

... your fatherly office require you to administer it. If, however, your Holiness will not do this, or if you choose longer to delay to do it, our condition hitherto will have been so much the more wretched, that we have so long laboured fruitlessly and in vain. But it will not be wholly irremediable; extreme remedies are ever harsh of application; but he that is sick will by any means be rid of his distemper; and there is hope in the exchange of miseries, when, if we cannot obtain what is good, we may obtain ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude

... Now he understood the inevitable repugnance, the arrogance he had felt as he came into contact with the obsequious and humble Don Benito. Those sentiments were unconquerable, and his aversion irremediable. It was imposed upon him by others stronger than himself. The dead command, and they ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez

... vices of a different climate, along with what they in their pride called civilization, amongst a rich and happy people, whose descendants, impoverished and debased as they are, have not even the recollection of their ancient prosperity to console them in their irremediable decay? ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part I. The Exploration of the World • Jules Verne

... Hamilton bowed down beneath the conduct of her child, humbled to the dust by the reflections which would be cast upon her when the elopement of Caroline should be made public; at that very time the letter of Lord Alphingham arrived, and told her of defeat, complete, irremediable. Scorn, bitter scorn curled her lip, as she glanced over Caroline's epistle, thus dishonourably transmitted for her perusal. Severe disappointment was for the time her portion, and yet, amid all these violent emotions, attendant on one of her disposition, there was one of a very ...
— The Mother's Recompense, Volume I. - A Sequel to Home Influence in Two Volumes. • Grace Aguilar

... sufficiently for me on the promised word of the Banyans of Kaole and Zanzibar, and waited eleven months before he received the promised articles. As I did not expect to be much over that time on my errand altogether, it would be ruin, absolute and irremediable, should I be detained at Unyanyembe so long a time by my caravan. Pending its arrival, I sought the pleasures of the chase. I was but a tyro in hunting, I confess, though I had shot a little on the plains of America and Persia; yet I considered myself ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley

... but a case of life and death can justify the deed. If the ground is hard and even, a collected canter may be allowed; but if hard and uneven, a moderate trot at most. One hour's gallop on such ground would do the soundest horse irremediable mischief. Those who boast of having gone such a distance in such a time, on the ground supposed, show ignorance or inhumanity. Such feats require cruelty only, not courage. Nay, they are performed most commonly by the very horsemen who are too cowardly or too unskilful to dare to ...
— Hints on Horsemanship, to a Nephew and Niece - or, Common Sense and Common Errors in Common Riding • George Greenwood

... could not be satisfied with sitting still. The more wants Frederick had, the better she was pleased; and he understood all this by instinct. It was a joy snatched in the house of mourning, and the zest of it was all the more pungent, because they knew in the depths of their hearts what irremediable sorrow awaited them. ...
— North and South • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell

... of the common spring mattresses of the country in the little room which opened from the living room, but nothing upon it. This was remedied by making a large bag and filling it with hay. Then there were neither sheets, towels, nor table-clothes. This was irremediable, and I never missed the first or last. Candles were another loss, and we had only one paraffin lamp. I slept all night in spite of a gale which blew all Sunday and into Monday afternoon, threatening to lift the cabin from the ...
— A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains • Isabella L. Bird

... their arms and some provisions. I saw them embark to pass the mighty river, and never will that solemn spectacle fade from my remembrance! No cry, no sob was heard among the assembled crowd: all were silent. Their calamities were of ancient date, and they knew them to be irremediable. The Indians had all stepped into the bark that was to carry them across, but their dogs remained upon the bank. As soon as these animals perceived that their masters were finally leaving the shore, they ...
— American Scenes, and Christian Slavery - A Recent Tour of Four Thousand Miles in the United States • Ebenezer Davies

... territory staked out for her, so to speak, by some mysterious master. This they felt was correct, certain though they were that to have gone beyond the allotted limit would have brought swift and irremediable ruin. The money was paid out with such studied caution, and taken in with such a sense of victory! There was something touching about it all. This daily life of these small people seemed so strange, so very strange, and at the same time so in ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann

... aria? How long will it be before your voice, already weakened, and almost always forced beyond the limits of beauty, shall degenerate into a hollow, dull, guttural tone, and even into that explosive or tremulous sound, which proclaims irremediable injury? Is your beautiful voice and your talent to disappear like a meteor, as others have done? or do you hope that the soft air of Italy will in time restore a voice once ruined? I fall into a rage when I think of the many beautiful voices which have been spoiled, and have dwindled ...
— Piano and Song - How to Teach, How to Learn, and How to Form a Judgment of - Musical Performances • Friedrich Wieck

... second Richard. To Christ were her meek virtues devoted: His poor she freely fed from her treasures; Strife she assuaged, and swelling feuds appeased; Beauteous her form, her face surpassing fair. On July's seventh day, thirteen hundred ninety-four, All comfort was bereft, for through irremediable sickness She passed ...
— Richard II - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott

... grew toward manhood, my bashfulness got no better. It was confirmed; it had become a chronic disease, as irremediable as the rheumatism, and a thousand ...
— The Fatal Glove • Clara Augusta Jones Trask

... man. But at the last moment it occurred to him that suspicion might turn toward so obvious an opportunity, and he decided on a more tortuous course. Another friend, Carrick Venn, a student of medicine whom irremediable ill-health had kept from the practice of his profession, amused his leisure with experiments in physics, for the exercise of which he had set up a simple laboratory. Granice had the habit of dropping in to smoke a cigar with him on Sunday afternoons, ...
— The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton, Part 1 (of 10) • Edith Wharton

... province of interests, is it easy to imagine an irremediable rupture between New York and Charleston, between the valley of the Mississippi and New Orleans? What would the valley of the Mississippi be without New Orleans, and New Orleans, isolated from the vast country of which it is the natural market? ...
— The Uprising of a Great People • Count Agenor de Gasparin

... daughters—die of——Who can foresee their fate? Are you willing that this discovery should wreck and destroy your home and your family, root and branch, and leave nothing of you but the memory of one dishonored name behind? Are you ready to incur all this irremediable woe and ruin? For be sure that in refusing me your daughter's hand, you ...
— Her Mother's Secret • Emma D. E. N. Southworth

... followed the same course in opposition to his own moral convictions. The former he contends might be reclaimed by argument; but the latter he considers as incurable. In such a state of mind, therefore, it follows, by an induction which cannot be controverted, either that the evil is irremediable and hopeless, or that we must look for a power from without the mind which may afford an adequate remedy. We are thus led to perceive the adaptation and the probability of the provisions of Christianity, where an influence is indeed ...
— The Philosophy of the Moral Feelings • John Abercrombie

... sympathy, is like blessed balm to the sufferer from a profound grief or mortification. Counsel is good, friendliness precious, while anything remains to be done to avert an impending calamity. But pitying words over an accomplished and irremediable misfortune, serve only to revive useless pain, and blunder, like a man who should try to force open the eyelids of a corpse. Nature, wiser than officious human tenderness, takes the sorrow coolly, as a matter of course, and ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 2 • Various

... members present," he said solemnly, "the House is now adjourned." That was the result of Dr Kenealy's first essay and in his second he came to final and irremediable grief. In a crowded House, he arose to impeach his enemies and traducers. He was ploughing along and I was fighting after him in my own gouty, inefficient shorthand, when one of the strangest premonitions ...
— Recollections • David Christie Murray

... on green figs between Bethany and Jerusalem, his religion walks abroad at eight, and leaves his kind entertainer in the shop, trading all day without his religion." This is a startling passage. We should have pronounced hitherto that Milton's one hopeless, congenital, irremediable want, alike in literature and in life, was humour. And now, surely as ever Saul was among the prophets, behold ...
— Life of John Milton • Richard Garnett

... possible to have a short-lived peace but such a period of peace is usually intermingled with periods of disturbances, during which the unduly ambitious people may rise and struggle with each other for the control of power, and the disaster which will follow will be irremediable. ...
— The Fight For The Republic In China • B.L. Putnam Weale

... mists of Tolstoyianism and then he ended by suggesting that England would attend to these matters in self-defence. He could not satisfy Henry's superficial enquiries about the possibilities of trade conducted in Gaelic ... but he was positive about the need for separation, complete and irremediable ...
— Changing Winds - A Novel • St. John G. Ervine

... enfeebled by long marches, sleepless nights, and lack of food, inducing a mental torpor that left them doubtful even if they were alive; and the thought that so much suffering was to end in another and an irremediable disaster maddened him, made of that cultured man an unreflecting being, scarce higher in the scale than a very little child, swayed by each passing impulse of the moment. Anything, everything, destruction, extermination, rather than pay a penny of French money or yield an inch of French soil! ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola

... some of the early work of Holman Hunt. The head of the victim bound with blood-stained linen, a frightened girl hiding her eyes, a mother weeping, a jester with the laugh withered on his lip by this sudden vision of death and irremediable woe—and in the distance a frail, fainting form, sweetheart or sister—each figure and group, rendered often with very unequal technical merit, had yet in it something harshly, intolerably true. The picture was too painful to be borne; but it ...
— Fenwick's Career • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... my faith, sir. The history of the ephemeral insect is the history of a day,—that of a man means a whole life; the history of nations means centuries, that of the world eternity; and in eternity justice comes to each one in irremediable and ...
— Debts of Honor • Maurus Jokai

... form is an ideal institution destined to endure forever, whether it is in need of radical reforms before it can be considered ideal, or whether it has fundamental irremediable defects, are questions which we are not going to discuss here. The fact is that at the present time the greatest part of the adult population of the world is married; and the part that isn't would like to be. And the greater part of civilized humanity living in a state of monogamic ...
— Woman - Her Sex and Love Life • William J. Robinson

... shocked and sickened. The facts, without any of her corroborating statements, bore tolerable witness to the hardships of her existence. I promised to attend to her ailments and give her proper remedies; but these are natural results, inevitable and irremediable ones, of improper treatment of the female frame—and though there may be alleviation, there cannot be any cure when once the beautiful and wonderful structure has been thus made the victim of ignorance, ...
— Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation - 1838-1839 • Frances Anne Kemble

... traversed the Sila in order to appreciate the manifold charms of the mountain town—I have revelled in them since my arrival. But it has one irremediable drawback: the sea lies at an inconvenient distance. It takes forty-five minutes to reach the shore by means of two railways in whose carriages the citizens descend after wild scrambles for places, packed tight as sardines in the sweltering heat. Only a genuine enthusiast ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas

... that are more foreign and indifferent to him than the variations of temperature in Sirius or Aldebaran are to us. It really seems, when we consider our preconceived ideas, that there is not in the animal an organic and insurmountable inability to do what man's brain does, a total and irremediable absence of intellectual faculties, but rather a profound lethargy and torpor of those faculties. It lives in a sort of undisturbed stolidity, of nebulous slumber. As Dr. Ochorowicz very justly remarks, "its waking state is ...
— The Unknown Guest • Maurice Maeterlinck

... unfortunate young people, by the indulgence of their own wishes, and the attainment of what they supposed could produce only gratification and happiness, reduced to a state of apparently irremediable distress. Even Claribel shared in the general misery. Not that the gift of the fairy had lost its influence upon her; the lily was fresh as ever. She was contented in her own person, and formed no wishes for herself; but she could ...
— The Flower Basket - A Fairy Tale • Unknown

... speech. Doggie wondered, but held his peace. The deadly stupidity and weariness of it all! And when the talk stopped and they settled to sleep, the snorings and mutterings and coughings began and kept poor Doggie awake most of the night. The irremediable, intimate propinquity with coarse humanity oppressed him. He would have given worlds to go out, even into the pouring rain, and walk about the camp or sleep under a hedge, so long as he could be alone. And he would think longingly of his satinwood bedroom, with its ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke

... been of opinion that the first great error committed in the political history of this country was the ordinance of 1787, rendering the Northwest Territory free territory. The next great error was the Missouri compromise. But they are both irremediable. There is no remedy for them. We must submit to them. I am prepared to do it. It is evident that the Missouri compromise cannot be re-pealed. So far as that question is concerned, we might as well agree ...
— American Eloquence, Volume III. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1897) • Various

... battery is fearful. Headed by their Commander, the whole body of Cuirassiers and Dragoons again charge with renewed energy and concentrated force. The Infantry are thrown into the greatest confusion, and commence a rout, increased and rendered irremediable by the Lancers and Hussars, the former vanguard, who now, seizing on the favourable moment, again rush forward, increasing the effect of the charge of the whole army, overtaking the fugitives with their lances, and ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield

... for him. Wounds heal rapidly in a heart of two-and-twenty; hopes revive daily; and courage rallies, in spite of a man. Perhaps, as Esmond thought of his late despondency and melancholy, and how irremediable it had seemed to him, as he lay in his prison a few months back, he was almost mortified in his secret mind at ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray

... their range of expression, amid doubts and derisions and buffets, even sometimes amid stones of stumbling quite self-invited, that might at any moment have made the loss of the precious clue really irremediable. Which moral, so pointed, accounts assuredly for half our interest in the poetic character—a sentiment more unlikely than not, I think, to survive a sustained succession of Victor Hugos and Rostands, or of Byrons, Tennysons and Swinburnes. We quite consciously ...
— Letters from America • Rupert Brooke

... punishment is unjust. (a) Its mistakes are irremediable. (b) Many men are criminals from force of circumstances. (1) From heredity. (2) From environment. (c) Inequalities in administration are marked. (1) In some states men are hung, in others ...
— Public Speaking • Clarence Stratton

... right path, what will he do to the darkness of this our age, in which, besides all the huge and heinous sins, which it has common with all the wicked of the world committed, is found an innate, indelible, and irremediable load of folly and inconstancy?" "What, wretched man (I say to myself) is it given to you, as if you were an illustrious and learned teacher, to oppose the force of so violent a torrent, and keep the charge committed to you against such a series of inveterate crimes which has spread ...
— On The Ruin of Britain (De Excidio Britanniae) • Gildas

... three. We remembered, all three of us, the times when no such things were done in Europe, and yet men hung well together, and a nation was vaguer and yet more instinctive and ready. We remembered also—for it was in our common faith—the gross, permanent, and irremediable imperfection of human affairs. There arose perhaps in their minds a sight of the man they had sent to be the spirit and spokesman, or rather the very self, of that golden plateau which the train was crawling through, and certainly in my mind there rose the picture of ...
— Hills and the Sea • H. Belloc

... circumstance connected with Miss Dartle I must not omit; for I had reason to remember it thereafter, when all the irremediable past was rendered plain. During the whole of this day, but especially from this period of it, Steerforth exerted himself with his utmost skill, and that was with his utmost ease, to charm this singular creature into a pleasant and pleased companion. ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens

... stunned silence. Her face was parchment-pale but she was hardly able yet to grasp the sudden turn of events to irremediable tragedy. ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck

... prosperity of those now impoverished and oppressed possessions? The above observations do not apply exclusively to Trinidad, but to the whole of the islands, which scarcely differ in degree in the causes of ruin which seem irremediable by any authority except the legislature of the parent State. I am persuaded that the chief of the Colonial Department at home would endeavour to counteract the causes of widely-spread and increasing ruin, were he in possession of correct information; but popular representations of grievances, ...
— The Life of Thomas, Lord Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald, Vol. II • Thomas Lord Cochrane

... those aged women; they come back to me in dreams; their puckered faces shape themselves in my memory whenever I meet an old woman who puts me in mind of them by some faint resemblance of dress or feature. And whether it is that misfortune has initiated me into the secrets of irremediable and overwhelming disaster; whether that I have come to understand the whole range of human feelings, and, best of all, the thoughts of Old Age and Regret; whatever the reason, nowhere and never again have I seen among the living or in the faces of the dying the wan ...
— The Collection of Antiquities • Honore de Balzac

... decision from the pope were not ruled by truth. For had his Holiness well understood all the circumstances, how could he have issued an order from which would follow the inference of injuries terrible and irremediable to the holy orders? If those religious, in so far as they are curas, were to become subject to the bishops, they would not hold their curacies as a reward after serving his Majesty so much, but would regard their position as lower than that of those who remain free from responsibility in their communities. ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume XXXVI, 1649-1666 • Various

... specially fatal to crowned heads, and to heads that have once been crowned? During the whole twelve months of 1872 the only European sovereign who died was Charles XV. of Sweden, while none suffered irremediable misfortune; and in European royal families the only two losses by death were Archduke Albrecht and the duke of Guise. But within the first six weeks of 1873 no less than three persons died who had at some ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - April, 1873, Vol. XI, No. 25. • Various

... hardly out of his mouth when there was a terrific crash. The car stopped suddenly and canted over, and the girl was jerked forward to her knees. Every pane of glass in the car was smashed, and it was clear, from the angle at which it lay, that irremediable damage had been done. The man scrambled up, kicked open ...
— The Man Who Knew • Edgar Wallace

... forever. If you were to send him to the other end of the world, he could not be further from your mind, from your heart; for you would have, in this case, means of drawing together again, whereas social distances are irremediable. You will see. The day will come when you will be ashamed of your child, when you will find his hands rough, his language coarse, his sentiments totally different from yours. He will stand one day before you, before his mother, as before a stranger of higher rank than himself,—not ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various

... agitation of life in a vast city, was damp and stifling; a noise of traffic—as loud but not so terrible as a breaking storm—destroyed the peace of night; there were foot passengers of every age and description moving like rooks in the wind, over the pavement, and vehicles filled with men and women—an irremediable pilgrimage bound, for the greater part, on pleasure. Robert felt that he would have given gladly the treasures of a universe for just the time to think a little while of his own love. So far that great attachment had brought him aberrations, sorrow, and perplexities; all its sweetness ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes

... end of that time he was forced to retire. Of Ocampo's 300 Spaniards, 40 survivors were, with their gallant leader, taken prisoners; O'Donnell at length arrived, and drove back a wing of the English cavalry; Tyrrell's horsemen also held their ground tenaciously. But the rout of the centre proved irremediable. Fully 1,200 of the Irish were left dead on the field, and every prisoner taken was instantly executed. On the English side fell Sir Richard Graeme; Captains Danvers and Godolphin, with several others, were wounded; their total loss they stated at 200, and the Anglo-Irish, of whom they seldom ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee

... upon Harry Baggs, a sense of irremediable loss. He had considered his voice a lever that might one day raise him out of his misfortunes; he instinctively valued it to an extraordinary degree; it had resembled a precious bud, the possible opening of which would flood his being with its fragrant flowering. He gazed ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer

... arose, as the President of the Republic has so well said, which will throughout history remain an honor to the country. It is the cry which all Frenchmen will repeat after having put an end to the disagreements that have so often embittered our hearts and which a blind enemy took for irremediable division. It is the cry that rises from the glorious trenches into which France has thrown all ...
— Current History, A Monthly Magazine - The European War, March 1915 • New York Times

... a gigantic evil, but surely not irremediable. By adding more European officers to the force; by educating the people and making them more intelligent, independent, and self-reliant, much may be done to abate the evil, but at present it is admittedly a foul ulcer on the administration of justice under our rule. The menial who serves ...
— Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier - Twelve Years Sporting Reminiscences of an Indigo Planter • James Inglis

... the metropolis, large libraries of useful books; which, it is to be hoped, will eventually suppress the establishment of what are called Circulating Libraries—vehicles, too often, of insufferable nonsense, and irremediable mischief!] ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin

... a public worship of Baal, but they even shut their ears to church music, as a demoniacal howling. If their ascendency had been maintained much longer, England must infallibly have been plunged in an irremediable barbarity. The oppression of the drama continued down to the year 1660, when the free exercise of all ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel

... enterprise so hopeless, as that of missions among the Indians, by sending accounts to the east, that might induce philanthropic individuals to contribute to their support. In fact, the whole experience of his intercourse with them, seemed to have convinced him of the irremediable degradation of the race. Their fortitude under suffering, he considered the result of physical and mental insensibility; their courage, a mere animal excitement, which they found it necessary to inflame, before daring to meet ...
— Summer on the Lakes, in 1843 • S.M. Fuller

... freedom established in the Peninsula, he is obliged to confess that Spain is not fit for such a boon, and that the materials do not exist out of which such a social edifice can be constructed. He regards with dismay and sorrow the tendency towards irremediable confusion and political convulsions, and sees no daylight through the dark prospect. He appears to regret Zea, to whose removal he contributed, and finds more difficulties in dealing with the present Ministers than he ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. III • Charles C. F. Greville

... this is the best choice both in life and after death. A man must take with him into the world below an adamantine faith in truth and right, that there too he may be undazzled by the desire of wealth or the other allurements of evil, lest, coming upon tyrannies and similar villainies, he do irremediable wrongs to others and suffer yet worse himself; but let him know how to choose the mean and avoid the extremes on either side, as far as possible, not only in this life but in all that which is to come. For this is ...
— The Republic • Plato

... with the worst, the most sudden, the most painful, the most mortal, and the most irremediable of all diseases; I have already had the trial of five or six very long and very painful fits; and yet I either flatter myself, or there is even in this state what is very well to be endured by a man who has his soul free from the fear of death, and of the menaces, conclusions, ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne

... are told with great truth and develope the extraordinary powers of this celebrated writer. The divorce of Josephine, and marriage of Maria Louisa, commence the succeeding volume. The sterility of Bonaparte's wife was now an irremediable evil; and political motives were to supersede the ties of endearment, affection, talents, and virtue. Fouch the minister of police, made Josephine the means of suggesting to Napoleon, the measure of her own divorce, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Supplementary Number, Issue 263, 1827 • Various

... at this speech; "Yes," said she, "he long since said 'tis suspence, 'tis hope, that make the misery of life,— for there the Passions have all power, and Reason has none. But when evils are irremediable, and we have neither resources to plan, nor castle-building to delude us, we find time for the cultivation of philosophy, and flatter ourselves, perhaps, ...
— Cecilia vol. 3 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)

... neighbourhood of this huge blank staircase, mouldering away in disuse, the weeds thick in its crevices, and climbing to the rudely solemn facade of the church. The sunshine glares on this great unfinished wall only to light up its featureless despair, its expression of conscious, irremediable incompleteness. Sometimes, massing its rusty screen against the deep blue sky, with the little cross and the sculptured porch casting a clear-cut shadow on the bricks, it seems to have even more than a Roman desolation, it confusedly suggests Spain and Africa—lands with no latent risorgimenti, ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James

... Give that back to me and then come and talk about forgiveness. Had the act and the motive been as loathsome, but the injury, the actual injury, the positive loss to me been less, I could have forgiven; but the blow was so sharp, the damage so irremediable, I could not. Even at his words I seemed to see staring me in the face the months of toil awaiting me before I could rebuild—if I could ever—the fabric he had destroyed ...
— To-morrow? • Victoria Cross

... gracious God, I have a new occasion of thanks, and a new occasion of prayer to thee from the ringing of this bell. Thou toldest me in the other voice that I was mortal and approaching to death; in this I may hear thee say that I am dead in an irremediable, in an irrecoverable state for bodily health. If that be thy language in this voice, how infinitely am I bound to thy heavenly Majesty for speaking so plainly unto me? for even that voice, that I must die now, is ...
— Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions - Together with Death's Duel • John Donne

... But I have a difficulty in believing that the responsible statesmen by whom they are led, and by whom we think they are controlled, would not hesitate as patriotic men before they plunged the finances of the country into what would be a largely irremediable confusion. And still more I find it difficult to believe that Party leaders, anxious no doubt for office on the most secure terms and at the shortest notice, would voluntarily run unusual risks in order to be able to fight a decisive battle upon exceptionally unfavourable ground. In common with ...
— Liberalism and the Social Problem • Winston Spencer Churchill

... products influence every tissue of the body) cannot doubt, "secondary sexual characters"; or, as the suffragist contends, "acquired characters." It will be plain that whether defects are "secondary sexual characters" (and therefore as irremediable as "racial characters"); or whether they are "acquired characters" (and as such theoretically remediable) they are relevant to the question of the concession of the suffrage just so long as they ...
— The Unexpurgated Case Against Woman Suffrage • Almroth E. Wright

... 'Instead of a gray head waiting to go down into the pit of perdition.' Yes, it was a terrible blunder that I was not allowed to die in my infancy; but it can't be helped now, and I wish you would not fret yourself into a fever over the irremediable. Why will you persist in tormenting yourself and me about my want of resignation and faith, when you know that exhortation and persuasion have no more effect upon me than the whistle of the plover down yonder in the sedge ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson

... Lord Howe's efforts to crush him, he succeeded in escaping into New Jersey with a small remnant—some six thousand men—of his original army. The year 1776 thus closed in disaster which seemed to be irremediable. It showed that the British, having awakened to the magnitude of their task, were able to cope with it. Having a comparatively unlimited sea-power, they needed only to embark their regiments, with the necessary provisions ...
— George Washington • William Roscoe Thayer

... blood in cold waves to her throbbing heart? The sketch represented the head and shoulders of a man, whose cowl had fallen back, exposing the outlines and moulding of a face and throat absolutely flawless in beauty, yet darkened by the reflection of some overpowering and irremediable woe. The features were youthful as St. Sebastian's; the expression that of one prematurely aged by severe and unremitting mental conflict; but neither shaven crown, nor cowl availed to disguise Bertie Brentano, and as his ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson

... faith in the girl I am going to marry, and have made her such vows of love, that I should certainly kill myself without a moment's hesitation if anything were to happen to separate us, to force us to a correct but irremediable rupture, or if Elaine were seized by some illness which carried her off quickly; and yet I hesitate, I am afraid, for I know that many others have made shipwreck, lost their love on the way, disenchanted their ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume II (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant

... to the organization of Nebraska, unless the Missouri Compromise were repealed.[436] The motives which prompted this recantation can only be surmised. Presumably, for some reason, Atchison no longer believed the Missouri Compromise "irremediable." ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson

... in certain fields of literature. I by no means would wish to water Emerson; yet it will not do to lose sight of the fact that mass and inertia are indispensable to the creator. Considering him as poet alone, I have no doubt of his irremediable deficiency here. You cannot have broad, massive effect, deep light and shade, or a torrent of power, with such extreme refinement and condensation. The superphosphates cannot take the place of the coarser, ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs

... as the faithful follower of Christ supposes is there awaiting him? It is not to be thought by us that death is a frowning enemy thrusting us into the gloom of eternal night or into the flaming waves of irremediable torment, but rather a smiling friend ushering us into the endless life of the spiritual world and into the unveiled presence of God. According to the arrangement and desire of God, for us to die is gain: every personal exception to this if there be any exception is caused ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger

... no one found to reward them for their meritorious services." The tribunes replied, "that, considering the nature of their complaints, what they requested was just, and that they would lay it before the general; that they were happy that there was nothing of a more gloomy and irremediable character; that both Publius Scipio, by the favour of the gods, and the commonwealth, were in a situation to requite them." Scipio, who was accustomed to war but inexperienced in the storms of sedition, felt great anxiety on the occasion, lest the army should run into excess ...
— History of Rome, Vol III • Titus Livius

... legendary and marvellous French basilica, to bid it farewell, before its fall and irremediable crumbling to dust, I had made my military auto make a detour of two hours on my return ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 5, August, 1915 • Various

... and with a rough incoherent sound he gathered and held her in that refuge. A rising fear and a great solicitude laid a finger upon his craving embrace of her; he had a sense of something strangely different in her, of the unknown irremediable. Yet she was there, in his arms, as she had never been before; her plight but made her in a manner sweeter; the storm that brought her barricaded them in the empty spaces of the street with a divinely ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan

... him as an acquaintance of her father's, and he represented to her that he had been an officer of the man-of-war in which her father had served; that he had lately encountered her father, and pitied his poverty—in poor Shields, an irremediable condition. The father, so he declared, had spoken to him often and anxiously about Margaret, and with dislike and distrust about Maitland. According to Mr. Cranley, Shield's chief desire in life had been to see Margaret ...
— The Mark Of Cain • Andrew Lang

... greater than anything that she had ever felt before, had surged over Dosia at the sight of him, as his eyes, with a sort of quick, veiled questioning in them, had for an instant met hers—resentment as for some deep, irremediable wrong. Her cheeks and lips grew scarlet with the proudly surging blood, she held her head high, while Mr. Sutton looked at her as if bewitched—though he turned from her a ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. 31, No. 1, May 1908 • Various

... combined to acclaim her as the most trusted of all the constitutional monarchs whom the world had then seen. How could she be all that they justly claimed for her, if the whole female sex laboured under the disabilities which, according to Mrs. Humphry Ward, were imposed by nature and therefore irremediable? Nevertheless, it must not be supposed, genuine as were these tributes to Queen Victoria's political sagacity, that her example immediately cleared out of the minds of the opponents the notion that women were fitly classed with aliens, felons, idiots and lunatics, as ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume VI • Various

... this. The minds to whom it commended itself were cast in a different mould and drew their inspiration from other traditions. In their view the system which the Church had been the main agency in organising, had fallen quite as much from its own irremediable weakness as from the direct onslaughts of assailants within and without. The barbarians had rushed in, it was true, in 1793; but this time it was the Church and feudalism which were in the position of the old empire on whose ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Essay 4: Joseph de Maistre • John Morley

... in yours! A small 'cure of souls' would have put my mental fibre to less torture, than the crowding cares of my diocese, which depress me more and more as they increase. Many things seem to me hopeless,- -utterly irremediable! The shadow of a pre-ponderating, defiant, all-triumphant Evil stalks abroad everywhere—and the clergy are as much affected by it as the laymen. I feel that the world is far more Christ-less to-day after two thousand years of preaching and teaching, ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli

... sufficiently sure of what might have been enacted to destroy by his own words her pleasing idea that a mere dash of the pen, on her father's testimony, was going to be sufficient. But he had never suspected the sad fact that the position was irremediable. ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy

... events, he said, a trade founded in iniquity, and carried on with so many circumstances of horror, must be abolished, let its policy be what it will. The wickedness of the trade was so enormous, so dreadful, and irremediable; that he could stop at no alternative short of its abolition. His mind had been harassed with the objections of the West India planters, who had asserted that the ruin of their property would be ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan

... is irremediable; the best hope for a restoration in the future to the pristine purity and fraternity of the Union, rests on the opinions and character of the men who are to succeed this generation: that they maybe suited to that blessed work, one, whose public course is ended, invokes them ...
— The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government • Jefferson Davis

... there are irremediable pains there are none which may not be at once elevated and softened, when we endure them at the side of those ...
— Life of St. Francis of Assisi • Paul Sabatier

... his character, while yet so closely connected with the fine sense and exacting spirit of the artist, that one is tempted to wish that he could himself have viewed them with more indifference, accepting this thorn in the flesh as a slight but irremediable misfortune, instead of making it the constant subject of penitence and self-abasement. But such a course would have been still more foreign to his nature, ever aiming at perfection, moral and artistic, ever summoning his faculties and actions to the stern inquest of conscience, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various

... not to look back unless it is to derive useful lessons from past errors, and for the purpose of profiting by dearly bought experience. To enveigh against things that are past and irremediable is unpleasing; but to steer clear of the shelves and rocks we have struck upon is the part of wisdom, equally as incumbent on political as other men who have their own little bark or that of others to navigate through the intricate paths of life, or the trackless ocean, to ...
— Washington's Birthday • Various

... cases in which bodily punishment can occasion irremediable damage, not suspected by the person who administers it, though he may triumphantly declare how the punishment in the specific case has helped. Most adults feel free to tell how a whipping has injured them in one way or another, but when they take up the training ...
— The Education of the Child • Ellen Key

... proportion, much of it would be but a weary record of human misery, and through even the most decorous and conventional of chronicles there appear constantly unpleasant glimpses of the terrible under-strata that sometimes upheave and make ruin. So long as this apparently inevitable and irremediable discord does not appear to affect the general march of events, it is glozed over. The condition of the middle and lower classes in Paris through the Middle Ages was that common to all mediaeval cities, and would seem to modern ideas all but unendurable. To the ...
— Paris from the Earliest Period to the Present Day; Volume 1 • William Walton

... The damage was irremediable. The steel frames of the racks, the cheaper metal of the boxes, the residue of the burning film, all constituted a hideous, shapeless mass clinging against the sides and in the corners and about the floor. Only one section of the room retained ...
— The Film Mystery • Arthur B. Reeve

... this," cried he, "a return for services so unwearied and sincere as mine? Foolish and ungrateful youth! Rut I will point you to a remedy. Had you not been blinded with fury and impatience, you would have seen that your situation was not yet irremediable, by means the most obviously in your power. Did I not at your birth bestow upon you a ring, that communicates to the wearer the power of assuming what form he please? I gave it, in order to elude the curse of the malignant goblin, to subdue the most obdurate female, and to evade the most subtle ...
— Imogen - A Pastoral Romance • William Godwin

... animate virtue, and retard the progress of vice. And even indigence and obscurity, though without power to confer happiness, may at least prevent misery, and apprize those who are blinded by their passions, that they are on the brink of irremediable calamity. ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson - Volume IV [The Rambler and The Adventurer] • Samuel Johnson

... "Nothing irremediable, but you must admit that now and then I have been at no small pains to—er—assist you. But there, I don't intend to speak of the past; and to tell the truth, I suspect that we are of one mind. ...
— Under the Andes • Rex Stout

... dead boy, so fair and so gentle, and on the red sea of blood, beginning to congeal, that was lying around him, kindled with a thought, after a long sleep of twenty-two years. This final lesion of madness, this irremediable darkness of the mind, was evidently not so complete but that some memory of the past, lying hidden there, might awaken suddenly under the terrible blow which had struck her. And the ancestress, the forgotten one, lived again, emerged from her oblivion, rigid ...
— Doctor Pascal • Emile Zola

... extreme state of collapse would have shown us another result. Even as it was, and caught at this enormous disadvantage, Heraclius taught the robbers to tremble, and would have exterminated them, if not baffled by two irremediable calamities, neither of them due to any act or neglect of his own. The first lay in the treason of his lieutenants. The governors of Damascus, of Aleppo, of Emesa, of Bostra, of Kinnisrin, all proved traitors. The root of this evil ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 348 • Various

... why she did not write to him, something stopped in her mind—a cog did not catch; the thought eluded her. When this happened—as it had happened again and again in these last days; she would fall to thinking, with vague amazement, that this irremediable catastrophe was out of all proportion to its cause. It was monstrous that a crazy minute should ruin a whole life—two whole lives, hers and David's. It was as if a pebble should deflect a river from its course, ...
— The Iron Woman • Margaret Deland

... was brought on by continuing, spite of the pain, to use a knee after it had been slightly injured. And to-day we are told of another who has had to lie by for years, because he did not know that the palpitation he suffered under resulted from overtaxed brain. Now we hear of an irremediable injury which followed some silly feat of strength; and, again, of a constitution that has never recovered from the effects of excessive work needlessly undertaken. While on every side we see the perpetual minor ailments which accompany feebleness. Not to ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer

... earth, like a disembodied spirit. It was impossible to exist. But at first he reacted from sheer incredulity. This could not be. He waited for thunder, earthquakes, natural cataclysms; but nothing happened. The leaden weight of an irremediable idleness descended upon General Feraud, who having no resources within himself sank into a state of awe-inspiring hebetude. He haunted the streets of the little town, gazing before him with lacklustre eyes, disregarding the hats ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad



Copyright © 2024 Dictionary One.com