"Unthinkable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... out in such a Quixotic and fanatical enterprise. This feature of Schiller's plot, which has for us something of the burlesque about it, has been taken more than any other to prove his inexperience of life. But the fact is that the thing was after all not so unthinkable. Outlawry on a large scale was by no means unknown, and the romance of outlawry was familiar in literature. The Thirty Years' War had familiarized Germany with marauding bands who recognized no authority save that of their leader. Even in the ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... will always find heroic—the story of a small nationality. The business of the Armada was to her what Bannockburn was to the Scots, or Majuba to the Boers—a victory that astonished even the victors. What was opposed to them was Imperialism in its complete and colossal sense, a thing unthinkable since Rome. It was, in no overstrained sense, civilization itself. It was the greatness of Spain that was the glory of England. It is only when we realize that the English were, by comparison, as ...
— A Short History of England • G. K. Chesterton
... over the valley like a pall. It brought with it the terrible night, under cover of which unthinkable things might be done. With no appetite, she sat down to supper opposite her captor. To see him gloat over her made her heart sink. Her courage was of no avail against ...
— Brand Blotters • William MacLeod Raine
... strange beings, a race so young that its age could readily be counted in millennia, but withal a strong, intelligent form of life. And to a race that had not known war for so many untold ages, it was an unthinkable thing that they must kill other living, intelligent beings in ...
— The Black Star Passes • John W Campbell
... bloodthirsty space-marauders who would presently send single ships to collect loot—which must be yielded without resistance. Such looting expeditions were to be looked for regularly and must be submitted to under penalty of unthinkable retribution from the monster fleet ...
— The Pirates of Ersatz • Murray Leinster
... its crime would be the legitimate child of that lack of self-respect which caste systems engender. Such a solution of the Negro problem is not one which the saner sense of the nation for a moment contemplates; it is utterly foreign to American institutions, and is unthinkable as a future for any self-respecting race of men. The sound afterthought of the American people must come to realize that the responsibility for dispelling ignorance and poverty, and uprooting crime among Negroes cannot be put upon their own shoulders unless they are given ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... shoddy-looking European Jap, he was more frightening still. For his face—he was not tattooed above a certain ring low on his neck—was yellow and flat and basking with one eye open, like some age-old serpent. She felt he was smiling horribly all the time: lewd, unthinkable. A strange sight he was in Woodhouse, on a sunny morning; a shabby-looking bit of riff-raff of the East, rather down at the heel. Who could have imagined the terrible eagle of his shoulders, the serpent of his ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... hell of the spirit. It is here and now. How could it be otherwise? Can you imagine a God of Love devising hideous tortures hereafter, for the punishment of the pigmies who had offended Him? Tortures that were never to do them any good, but just to keep them in misery for ever and ever? It is unthinkable—it's almost ludicrous. What is the good of suffering except to purify? That we can understand and thank God for. But the other—oh, the other is sheer imagery, more mythical than Jonah and the whale. It just ...
— The Bars of Iron • Ethel May Dell
... They were not due, however, to the New Year's Honours, which made a belated appearance this morning, for not a single Member of Parliament has been ennobled. The notion that not one of the seven hundred is worthy of elevation is, of course, unthinkable. But ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, May 7, 1919. • Various
... they cannot deny the evidence of their own senses! If you cure that which they cannot, they certainly must heed you. Anything else is unthinkable," exclaimed the Count. ...
— Doctor Jones' Picnic • S. E. Chapman
... the man with the gun. For strangely coupled with the desire to kill is the instinct to save, in human nature and in all nature—to preserve a remnant, that no line perish forever from the earth. As the unthinkable ages of geology come and go, animal and vegetable forms arise, change, and disappear; but life persists, lines lead on, and in some form many of the ancient families breathe our air and still find a home on this small and ...
— The Hills of Hingham • Dallas Lore Sharp
... had been mainly personal and selfish—the dread of being left alone. But lately it had altered and become more acute. Dick had changed in her eyes, and the fear was now for him. Her own personality had suddenly and strangely become merged in his. The idea of life without him was unthinkable, yet the trouble remained, a menace in ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... These words of Colonel Lewis rang in my ears as I rode to Salem. They had sounded fantastic when he uttered them. Now that I was alone they repeated themselves most ominously. The flying hoofs of my horse pounded them into my ears. War with England was unthinkable, and yet the colonel's speech lifted me up to a dreary height and I was gazing over into a new and ...
— A Virginia Scout • Hugh Pendexter
... her Christmas dinner with Derry and Emily and Margaret. It was an early dinner on account of the children. They ate in the big dining room, and after dinner there was a tree, with Ulrich Stoelle playing Father Christmas. It had come about quite naturally that he should be asked. It had been unthinkable that Derry could enter into the spirit of it, so Emily had ventured to suggest Ulrich. "He will make an ...
— The Tin Soldier • Temple Bailey
... for me unthinkable, because I saw it would be a sudden and catastrophic incursion upon a cosmos of ...
— Seen and Unseen • E. Katharine Bates
... Rand, you must not judge by what you have seen since you came here. When Lane Fleming was alive, such scenes as that in the library last evening would have been unthinkable. Now, this family is like a ship ...
— Murder in the Gunroom • Henry Beam Piper
... Dona Mercedes, repeats the talk of the town to Teodora, and turns her imagination inward, till it falters in self-questionings. Similarly the great Gallehault,—which is the word of all the world,—whispers unthinkable and tragic possibilities to the poetic and self-searching mind of Ernesto. He resolves to seek release in Argentina. But before he can sail away, he overhears, in a fashionable cafe, a remark which casts a ...
— The Theory of the Theatre • Clayton Hamilton
... commends itself to every thought of justice and mercy; for sin must be cleansed from a perfect universe. But the unscriptural view of everlasting conscious torment that never reaches the point of full punishment, is unthinkable. Yet it is urged as a doctrine, and contended for as vital ...
— Our Day - In the Light of Prophecy • W. A. Spicer
... tempests, must be in heart and character a sailor—and yet he who fights the scientific war-craft of the present day cannot be merely a sailor, like him of the olden kind, but must be what the New York Times, a few years ago, laughingly declared to be a combination quite unthinkable, "a scientific ...
— The Navy as a Fighting Machine • Bradley A. Fiske
... forth into imprecations. He was, he vowed, the most accursed and miserable of men that such a task as this should have fallen to his lot. And he was a poor man, too, he would have his cousin remember. It was unthinkable that he should use the knowledge he had gained to attempt to frustrate Sir Walter's plans of escape to France. And this notwithstanding that if Sir Walter escaped, it is certain he would lose his office of Vice-Admiral and the six hundred pounds he ...
— The Historical Nights Entertainment, Second Series • Rafael Sabatini
... Happy, that's all the present I want. I love you because you're the handsomest man in the world"—yes, it was me she meant, only o' course that was some years ago an' the child was unthinkable young—"an' cause you tell me the nicest stories, an' train pintos, an'—an' I'm goin' to marry ...
— Happy Hawkins • Robert Alexander Wason
... his shoulders. Plainly, Warde had discovered the fact of the debt. Probably that fool Beaumont-Greene had applied to his father, and the father had written to Warde. It was unthinkable that Warde knew more than this. Having reached this conclusion, Lovell turned over in his mind two or three specious lies ...
— The Hill - A Romance of Friendship • Horace Annesley Vachell
... strictly orthodox Victor and his family are. Of course I don't agree with them—perhaps I have broader views—(with a shrug) but I understand how they feel. They consider that any union without a church marriage is—well, to put it mildly, unthinkable. ...
— Redemption and Two Other Plays • Leo Tolstoy et al
... to have shown first of all that He is conscious? No, for the greater includes the less, and purpose is unthinkable apart from consciousness. In saying this we are aware that a philosopher like Eduard von Hartmann speaks of "the wisdom of the Unconscious," of "the mechanical devices which It employs," of "the direction of the goal intended by the Unconscious," etc., etc.; but ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... be done for him—that's flat!" declared Raymonde. "You don't suppose we can allow him to be taken to the workhouse? It's unthinkable! He'd break his poor old heart. And we'd miss him so, too. Won't the landlord change his ...
— The Madcap of the School • Angela Brazil
... I were in a trap. To have to live and treat with daughterly deference a woman who I knew so disliked me that she refused to attend her son's wedding was unthinkable. ...
— Revelations of a Wife - The Story of a Honeymoon • Adele Garrison
... diluted into the verse is a possibility which we know to be not only possible but likely, from a thousand more unfortunate examples. That the contrary process should have taken place is practically unexampled and, especially at that time, largely unthinkable. At any rate, whosoever did it had a much ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... betray her mistress was unpleasant. To betray herself—as she would if she confessed that she had most carefully and thoroughly read the voucher—was unthinkable. ...
— The Green Rust • Edgar Wallace
... as that which separates the scholar, the artist, or the aristocrat of modern Europe from the pale toiler of a New York sweating-room, or the coal carriers of Zanzibar or Aden. When Jesus bade the young ruler sell all that he had and give it to the poor, He proposed an entirely unthinkable condition of discipleship. He bade him discard all the privileges of his order. He proposed instead real comradeship with the poor, He Himself being poor. For two thousand years the pulpit has denounced the young ruler ...
— The Empire of Love • W. J. Dawson
... a cryptic speech. In another it might have signified a spitefulness unthinkable in Sylvia Armytage; therefore it puzzled him very deeply. He stood silent, wondering what precisely she might mean, and thus in silence they continued for a spell. Then slowly she turned and the blaze ...
— The Snare • Rafael Sabatini
... might have thought perhaps, Mariana, that I put an end to myself merely because I was afraid of going to prison, but believe me that is not true. There is nothing terrible about going to prison in itself, but being shut up there for a cause in which you have no faith is unthinkable. It was not fear of prison that drove me to this, Mariana. Goodbye! goodbye! my ...
— Virgin Soil • Ivan S. Turgenev
... overthrow the new work at the school because somewhere down beneath his heart a pity and a wonder were stirring; pity at the perfectly useless struggle to raise the unraisable, a wonder at certain signs of rising. But it was impossible—and unthinkable, even if possible. So he squared his jaw and cheated Zora deliberately in the matter of the cut timber. He placed every obstacle in the way of getting tenants for the school land. Here Johnson, the "faithful nigger," was of incalculable assistance. He was among ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois
... could hardly grasp the vast and abysmal catastrophe that without warning had swept from space. How could the dark star have traversed three thousand light-years of space in a week's time? It was unthinkable! So stupendous a control of power, so gigantic a manipulation of cosmic forces, so annihilating a possession of the greatest secrets of the universe, was an unheard-of concentration of energy and knowledge of stellar mechanics. ...
— Raiders of the Universes • Donald Wandrei
... the irrelevant to partial or total oblivion. From this psychological standpoint ignorance and obliviscence are seen to be achievements of the intellect. The presence of all facts in a human consciousness is unthinkable. If it were possible, it would paralyse action. If we exempt Christ from the law of ignorance and obliviscence, we ipso facto dehumanise his cognition. When we say that Jesus was ignorant of much scientific truth, or that his ...
— Monophysitism Past and Present - A Study in Christology • A. A. Luce
... if he should sometime begin to chafe? What if they two should, in days to come, degenerate into just the ordinary, everyday married folk, whom she saw about her everywhere, and for whom just such horrid books as this must be written? It was unbelievable, unthinkable. And yet, that man ...
— Miss Billy Married • Eleanor H. Porter
... notoriety and sale to its title, and it is not easy to find a title that will attract attention without being too sensational. The title chosen was paradoxical, for while a nun might be a puritan, it was unthinkable that a Puritan should ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... political stature, was reuniting the East and the West after Actium, Vergil was writing the last pages of the Georgics. The battle that decided Rome's future also determined the poet's next theme. The Epic of Rome, abandoned at the death of Caesar, unthinkable during the civil wars which followed, appealed for a hearing now that Rome was saved and the empire restored. Vergil's youthful enthusiasm for Rome, which had sprung from a critical reading of her past career, seemed fully justified; he began ...
— Vergil - A Biography • Tenney Frank
... beyond the bounds of reason, beyond the bounds of possibility, beyond the realm of possibility; from which reason recoils; visionary; inconceivable &c (improbable) 473; prodigious &c (wonderful) 870; unimaginable, inimaginable^; unthinkable. impracticable unachievable; unfeasible, infeasible; insuperable; unsurmountable^, insurmountable; unattainable, unobtainable; out of reach, out of the question; not to be had, not to be thought of; beyond control; desperate &c (hopeless) 859; incompatible ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... explanation could we have given to the worthy but uncomprehending man? He would have called in doctors to minister to a mind afflicted with a disease beyond their power of diagnosis. Unless, of course, we made public the facts of the tragedy; which was unthinkable. Barbara's instinct pierced surely through the gloom. The first coherent ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... all the worlds were made it is at least not unthinkable that in all the worlds of which our own atom is one, there has ruled a Force illimitable, unconquerable and inexplicable and whichsoever its world and whatsoever the sign denoting or the name given it, the Force—the Thing has been the same. Upon our own atom of the universe it ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... all. What—a General Staff ceasing to function even for a minute? It was unthinkable. The news would be flashed through to all concerned and become the subject of conversation in ten thousand messes that evening. It must not be. Never was there such a kneading and gnashing of teeth. But to no purpose. You cannot hurry ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Dec. 19, 1917 • Various
... should give laws for the right mating of all his creatures except man—leaving men and women, alone, with no guide to lead them aright in this relationship that is most vital to the species—is unthinkable. Deeply implanted in the hearts of men and women there is, also, an instinct; an instinct that is superior to the dictates of the social, financial, or ecclesiastical will. And it is this natural instinct ...
— Their Yesterdays • Harold Bell Wright
... very simple then. She wanted to go to Manon. The Federation—or something else, something quite unthinkable at the moment but comparable to the Federation in power and influence—wanted ...
— Legacy • James H Schmitz
... newspaper crystallizes public sentiment, promotes local pride, and tries to be the social and intellectual centre of the community. A community of twenty-five thousand without a newspaper—and we found that this community never had supported a newspaper—was unthinkable to us in terms of any civilization that we knew. How do they know about the births, deaths, and marriages, we asked; and they told us that the churches recorded those things. How do they know about the scandal? And we remembered that scandal was older than ...
— The Martial Adventures of Henry and Me • William Allen White
... physical body as the centre of it. But even this is not complete. In fact it is extremely far from complete, directly we think closely about it. For not only does such a picture omit the real centre, that indescribable "something" we call the "soul," it also loses itself in unthinkable darkness when it considers any one of its own ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... doubled—having wrecked and humiliated him and driven him to despair, they then killed him. After that they could enjoy each other's society openly, unmolested, and without fear of detection or punishment. Besides, they might marry and both be happy. This was unthinkable. He must be killed, he must die like a dog, and he must go to his death with a ...
— The Ape, the Idiot & Other People • W. C. Morrow
... leave with much difficulty, arrived a few days later, to find a piteous Cecilia, white-faced, stunned and bewildered. She pleaded desperately against leaving France; amidst all the horror and chaos that had fallen upon her, it seemed unthinkable that she should put the sea between herself and Bob. But to remain was impossible. Aunt Margaret's English maids wanted to go back to their friends, and a girl of seventeen could scarcely stay alone in a country torn by two years of war. Besides, ...
— Back To Billabong • Mary Grant Bruce
... of Farmer Dupay, and a widow—had lived upon her little place since her marriage over half a century before. Without her little garden and her small fields, and her cow and pig and chickens, she would scarcely know how to live. And to be uprooted and carried to some other place! It was unthinkable! ...
— Ruth Fielding at the War Front - or, The Hunt for the Lost Soldier • Alice B. Emerson
... me to have patience with the slow processes of nature," said Erica, smiling a little. "If you allow unthinkable ages for the perfecting of a layer of rocks, do you wonder that in a few hundred years a church is ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... at him a moment, and then flushed in her turn. To let her cousin ride Bobs seventeen miles was unthinkable. She had the profoundest regard for her pony's back; and she knew that even Brown Betty's seasoned hide was giving way under the unskilled horsemanship of the city boy. It was very doubtful, moreover, that it would be safe to mount him ...
— Mates at Billabong • Mary Grant Bruce
... of horror. Exposure to disease, unthinkable brutality, degradation never before dreamed of—these were her portion in a full cup; and the alluring prospect of pay that had baited the trap faded away and she received in return for all this nothing but the barest, ...
— Fighting the Traffic in Young Girls - War on the White Slave Trade • Various
... only in one of three ways. All these different languages may have hit on the same word or phrase to express an idea, or these words and idioms may have been borrowed from one language by the others, or they may come from a common origin. The first hypothesis is unthinkable. The second is almost as impossible. Undoubtedly French, for instance, borrowed some words from Spanish, and Spanish from Portuguese. It would be conceivable that a few words originating in Spain should pass into France, and thence into Italy, but it is quite beyond belief that the large ...
— The Common People of Ancient Rome - Studies of Roman Life and Literature • Frank Frost Abbott
... Genis was speaking—or rather screaming—for his voice, pitched high, seemed to fill the entire room—every glance was fixed upon de Marmont. Every one of course expected a contradiction as hot and intemperate as was the accusation. It was unthinkable, impossible that what St. Genis said could be true. They all knew de Marmont well. Nephew of the Duc de Raguse who had borne the lion's share in surrendering Paris to the allies and bringing about the downfall ...
— The Bronze Eagle - A Story of the Hundred Days • Emmuska Orczy, Baroness Orczy
... show-down for them. Carton himself, not one of his assistants, was to conduct the case. If Dopey Jack, who had violated almost every law in the revised statutes and had never suffered anything worse than a suspended sentence, could not get off, then no one could. And it was unthinkable that Dopey should not only be arrested and held in jail without bail, but even be convicted on such a trivial matter as slight irregularities that swung the primaries in a large section of the city ...
— The Ear in the Wall • Arthur B. Reeve
... if this had taken place ten years ago, and the French Commandant had been an English Major? The situation, of course, simply could not have arisen; it would have been unthinkable. But if it had arisen the train would certainly have stopped for good; probably the world would have come to an end. As it was, what did happen? Let me say at once that both the Corporal and the Commandant ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Sept. 19, 1917 • Various
... They could hardly be maintained out of the public funds as mere mementoes of the past. Besides, there were too many of them. The tax-payer would naturally grumble. As Town Halls, Assembly Rooms? The idea was unthinkable. It would be like a performance of Barnum's Circus in the Coliseum at Rome. Yes, they would disappear. Though not, she was glad to think, in her time. In towns, the space would be required for other ...
— All Roads Lead to Calvary • Jerome K. Jerome
... many of these servants were foreigners, and Samuel was pained to discover that they were for the most part without any ennobling conception of their calling. They were much given to gluttony and drinking; and there was an unthinkable amount of scandal and backbiting and jealousy. But it was only by degrees that he realized this, for he had one great motive in common with them—they were all possessed with a sense of the greatness ...
— Samuel the Seeker • Upton Sinclair
... that it proceeds from a superior being—the highest ruler. And in order to secure the full advantage of authority, the supreme ruler must be raised to the highest possible pinnacle, must be apotheosized. That national laws should be the product of the unvalued units which compose the nation was unthinkable in an age when the worth of the individual was utterly unrecognized. The apotheosis of the Emperor was neither an unintelligible nor an unreasonable practice. But now that an individualistic, democratic organization ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... themselves to patience, expecting that in time he would cast off the strange mask and take to himself his power and reign. But it was too much for the late confessed and very genuine faith of Peter to hear that the Messiah must die. So unthinkable was the idea, that he assumed that Jesus had become unduly discouraged by the relentlessness of the opposition which had driven him first out of Judea and later out of Galilee. Accordingly Peter sought to turn his Master's mind to a brighter prospect, asserting that ...
— The Life of Jesus of Nazareth • Rush Rhees
... presence, but were none the less the true companions of his mind. She saw herself a moment as Elsa, and her husband as a modern Lohengrin, coming spiritually she knew not whence, bound on some quest mysterious and unthinkable. ...
— Lady Rose's Daughter • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the beautiful, which these hideous things outraged. Whatever may have been the cause, he could not look upon a dead body without a loathing which had in it an element of resentment. What others have respected as the dignity of death had to him no existence—was altogether unthinkable. Death was a thing to be hated. It was not picturesque, it had no tender and solemn side—a dismal thing, hideous in all its manifestations and suggestions. Lieutenant Byring was a braver man than anybody knew, for nobody knew ...
— Can Such Things Be? • Ambrose Bierce
... may have been embarrassed by their too close attendance. If he had been able to do so he might have spoken harshly to his dogs, but he could not; it was unthinkable that he should; and the boy might have spoken harshly to him if he had dared to do it. For this was the order of Fionn's affection: first there was the boy; next, Bran and Sceo'lan with their three whelps; then Caelte mac Rona'n, and from him down through the champions. ...
— Irish Fairy Tales • James Stephens
... Jean all the things that she has never had and which money can buy. I admit I am horribly disappointed about it, but I'm not at all sure that this odd trick of fortune's won't help you. Her attitude was that marriage with you was unthinkable; you had so much and she had so little. Well, this evens things up. Don't come. Don't write. Leave her alone to try her wings. She will want to try all sorts of schemes for helping people, and I'm afraid the poor child will get many bad falls. ...
— Penny Plain • Anna Buchan (writing as O. Douglas)
... Renaissance, Reformation and Revolution, accomplished results which must endure to all time; they marked the great stages in humanity's onward march. To-day, when systems and schemes of religion are going to pieces like the dust of the dead, when mystery and miracle are becoming unthinkable things in a world where all is law; when the most imposing pretensions are subjected to so minute and pitiless an analysis; when every dogma of council or creed can be tracked and traced with an unerring precision to root ideas which govern the human mind in its ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... into that land of oppression. That very day, when I went down into the Swiss village, I heard that the Austrian mobilization had been ordered. I could not believe that war would come. I returned to the land I hated and in two days I had joined my class. We were to fight Russia. This was unthinkable. Better to mutiny against our German and Magyar officers than murder ...
— World's War Events, Volume III • Various
... at this moment means? The thing is all over, Miss Carstairs—all past and done with an hour before you ever saw your mother. I gave it up voluntarily. When the time came, just now on the yacht, I found out that it was impossible—unthinkable—I couldn't do it. The game was up then. That is one thing that your mother could not tell you, and it was to tell you this, and all the rest of it, that I ...
— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... officials of this state—supported institution Strindberg submitted his work—hopefully, as we know from his own statement. It was scornfully and ignominiously rejected, the main criticism being that a serious historical drama in prose was unthinkable. I shall make no comment whatever on that judgment, having in mind how several years later Edmund Gosse bewailed the failure of Ibsen to give a metrical form to his ...
— Master Olof - A Drama in Five Acts • August Strindberg
... could gain any education from contact with boys of his own age. To her mind, one fusty old professor out-valued one hundred eager undergraduates, as source of inspiration to the young. Education, to her mind, lay in the desk-end of the classroom; it was unthinkable to her that Scott had lost the best of Andover, by reason of his solitary life there. As for college, the students, all but Scott, were bound to be full of the wiles of the devil. Scott's safety lay in his books, and in his keeping too busy ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... that it was largely on this ground that it was counted sacred. Licht has also published a learned study of paiderastia in Attic comedy (Anthropophyteia, vol. vii, 1910), and remarks that "without paiderastia Greek comedy is unthinkable." Paiderastia in the Greek anthology has been fully explored by P. Stephanus (Jahrbuch fuer sexuelle Zwischenstufen, vol. ix, 1908, p. 213). Kiefer, who has studied Socrates in relation to homosexuality (O. ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... whom the lawfulness of re-marriage for an innocent divorcee is, like the rest of their religious beliefs, a matter of opinion, the scruple of a character like Madge Riversdale is unthinkable and incredible. Such women do not trouble their heads about theological points; still less, make heroic sacrifices for their private and peculiar convictions. But those for whom the Church is a definite concrete reality—almost a person—governing ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... that your pride would have me. I would please the world for your sake, conquer it both with mind and person. And you must endeavour to better yourself, day by day, nobly and with high aim, so that the source of my inspiration remain ever pure and fresh, and I attain to heights unthinkable save for your faith in me and ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... thought it most regrettable that serious and ethical Thinkers like ourselves should go scuttling through space in this undignified manner. Is it seemly that I, at my age, should be hurled, with my books of reference, and bed-clothes, and hot-water bottle, across the sky at the unthinkable rate of nineteen miles a second? As I say, I don't at all like it. This universe of astronomical whirligigs makes me ...
— More Trivia • Logan Pearsall Smith
... of the vaguest. The new possibility was almost unthinkable by him at the moment. He was what was called at Hintock "a solid-going fellow;" he maintained his abeyant mood, not from want of reciprocity, but from a taciturn hesitancy, taught by ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... proud to consider getting whipped in a war that was forced on us. One way and another, no matter what we privately think of our politicians and industrial barons and our institutions generally, it is becoming unthinkable to the Anglo-Saxon that the German shall stalk rough-shod over us. We are beginning—we common people—to hate him and his works. Look at you and me. We were aloof at first. We are intelligent. We have learned ...
— Burned Bridges • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... There was no moon. And below there was only utter, unrelieved darkness, from which now and again beast-sounds arose. They were clearly audible on board the silent air fleet. Roarings, bellowings, and hoarse screamings. Once the ships passed above a tumult as of unthinkable monsters in deadly battle, when for an instant the very clashing of monstrous jaws was audible and a hissing sound which seemed filled with ...
— The Fifth-Dimension Tube • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... our ideas of what constitutes an act of rudeness have been modified. Then it would have been unthinkable that a woman should remain standing in a coach while men were seated. Now it is possible for a man to keep his place while a woman swings from a strap and defend himself on the grounds that he has ...
— The Book of Business Etiquette • Nella Henney
... into my clothes, eyes and ears, but also mixed with the crop was a large proportion of barley or bearded wheat, which took a truly fiendish delight in slowly but relentlessly making its way up my sleeves or down my back. In this predicament it seemed almost unthinkable that I should ever have been so foolish in my schooldays as to pick barley heads and deliberately put them a little way up my coat-sleeves, the barbs downwards, expressly for the pleasure of feeling them crawling up my arms. Most of us do curious ...
— 'Brother Bosch', an Airman's Escape from Germany • Gerald Featherstone Knight
... Laevsky went soon after one o'clock next day to Samoylenko to ask for the money that he might be sure to get off on Saturday. After his hysterical attack, which had added an acute feeling of shame to his depressed state of mind, it was unthinkable to remain in the town. If Samoylenko should insist on his conditions, he thought it would be possible to agree to them and take the money, and next day, just as he was starting, to say that Nadyezhda Fyodorovna refused to go. He would be able ...
— The Duel and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... thousand manifestations of the great democratic movement which is developing all about us. Certainly we are safe in predicting that when the solidarity of human interest is actually realized, it will become unthinkable that one class of human beings should be sacrificed to the supposed needs of another; when the rights of human life have successfully asserted themselves in contrast to the rights of property, it will become impossible to sell the young ...
— A New Conscience And An Ancient Evil • Jane Addams
... away. It was naturally unthinkable that he should leave another human being on a supposedly uninhabited planet, with the knowledge that it might actually be uninhabited, and the future knowledge that any visitors would have the strongest of possible ...
— This World Is Taboo • Murray Leinster
... light. Is this efficiency of conversion of the visual apparatus everlastingly fixed? For the answer it is necessary to turn to the physiologist, and doubtless he would suggest the curbing of the imagination. But is it unthinkable that the visual processes will always be beyond the control of man? However, to turn again to the physics of light-production, there are still several processes of ...
— Artificial Light - Its Influence upon Civilization • M. Luckiesh
... to the lost would be altogether unthinkable if men were believed to be spiritually dead. For dead men are helpless to adopt principles and strive after ideals. Dead men do not need education, ...
— The Church, the Schools and Evolution • J. E. (Judson Eber) Conant
... indeed unthinkable that we should turn Mindanao over to the Moros. Abandonment of it by us would in the end result in this, as they would take possession of the entire island in the course of time. Neither the other wild tribes nor the Filipinos could stand ...
— The Philippines: Past and Present (vol. 1 of 2) • Dean C. Worcester
... by which I can flee to your far-distant universe, where not even the powers of the Council of Three can follow me. That way lies through the door of inter-dimensional Space. In Space as you know it, the almost unthinkable distance of a million light years separates Xollar from the dwarf star you call your Sun. Yet, traveling between Space, the two planets nearly touch each other. The same situation of being near neighbors ...
— Zehru of Xollar • Hal K. Wells
... is too much revealed. It leaves the peasant no choice. The fate gleams transcendent above him, the brightness of eternal, unthinkable not-being. And this our life, this admixture of labour and of warm experience in the flesh, all the time it is steaming up to the changeless brilliance above, the light of the everlasting snows. This is ...
— Twilight in Italy • D.H. Lawrence
... sick child. He had made friends with them, made toys for them; and now he saw dull eyes brighten at his approach and pale faces try to smile; languid and fever-hot hands were held out to him. All the force of the affection of young children, their dazzling faith, the almost unthinkable power upon their plastic minds of those whom they trust, came home to him. He could not, in such an hour, accept lightly, with a careless smile, the fact that children loved him. And once or twice a small hand that clung to him grew cold in his clasp, ...
— Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man • Marie Conway Oemler
... ontology which aims at a knowledge of the Absolute[AA] [Greek: kat' exochen], of the unconditioned first principle of all things. If the mind, in every act of thought, imposes its own forms on its objects, to think is to condition, and the unconditioned is the unthinkable. Such was the logical result of Kant's principles, but not the actual result. For Kant, by distinguishing between the Understanding and the Reason, and giving to the latter an indirect yet positive ...
— The Philosophy of the Conditioned • H. L. Mansel
... While the teeth are moulded by machinery, they are set up on a model of the individual's mouth by hand. And can you conceive a human pair of hands setting up two sets of teeth precisely alike? It is unthinkable." ...
— Death Points a Finger • Will Levinrew
... definite shape in my mind. The printer one could, of course, dismiss. He could examine the papers in his own office. The Indian I also thought nothing of. If the proofs were in a roll, he could not possibly know what they were. On the other hand, it seemed an unthinkable coincidence that a man should dare to enter the room, and that by chance on that very day the papers were on the table. I dismissed that. The man who entered knew that the papers were there. ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes • Arthur Conan Doyle
... and the relation of double degree, which we have already found existing between aesthetic and logical activity, is repeated between these two on a larger scale. Knowledge independent of the will is thinkable; will independent of knowledge is unthinkable. Blind will is not will; ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... out from time to time in the form of cattle drives and attacks on "land grabbers."[31] Hitherto we have, broadly speaking, kept the peace. That we should now forsake this duty, and, washing our hands of Ireland, leave the Protestant and the landowner, at or small, to his fate is unthinkable. ...
— Against Home Rule (1912) - The Case for the Union • Various
... grandfather Walker's household, and an ever-increasing desire to relinquish it. Not that he was afraid or ashamed to work; he had sufficiently demonstrated that he was not. Not that he ever expected to return to Bannerhall, for he had no such thought. To beg to be taken back was unthinkable; that he should be invited back was most improbable. He had not seen his grandfather Butler since he came away, nor had he heard from him, except for the vivid and oft-repeated recital by Grandpa Walker of the spruce tree episode, and save through ...
— The Flag • Homer Greene
... one's lips; forbid the banns. Adj. prohibitive, prohibitory; proscriptive; restrictive, exclusive; forbidding &c v.. prohibited &c v.; not permitted &c 760; unlicensed, contraband, impermissible, under the ban of; illegal &c 964; unauthorized, not to be thought of, uncountenanced, unthinkable, beyond the pale. Adv. on no account &c (no) 536. Int. forbid it heaven!, &c (deprecation) 766. hands off!, keep off!, hold!, stop!, desist!, cease and desist!, avast!, Phr. that will never do; don't you dare; forget it; don't even think about doing it; go ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... won. You can afford to be generous. That you can deny me in this the hour of my desolation is unthinkable. I'm not pleading for myself. I can live on a rat's allowance. I'm begging for my little girl. I need two thousand dollars immediately to complete her musical studies. You know what her love means to me. I have put myself in your power. Suppose I've wronged you? Now is your chance ...
— The Root of Evil • Thomas Dixon
... the country. They had gone into training camps like Bill, very tired, anaemic, with a shop and office pallor; and they came out of the war like Bill,—new, virile, interested, placing a value on themselves which would have been unthinkable prior ...
— The Story of The American Legion • George Seay Wheat
... by a confession that at least she preferred him to any other man of her acquaintance. On the strength of this admission the boy had simply stood aside and waited: hoping, as only the young can hope, because the fervour of their desire renders the possibility of non-fulfilment unthinkable. Then Maurice had entered the field, carrying all before him, with the inimitable assurance that was his; and by now Kenneth had reached the agony-point in a painful, if educative experience. Standing aside was no longer endurable. By some means he must secure ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... that their deductions far outrun the positive facts at their disposal. He rejects the theory of natural selection entirely, on the ground that evolution, like development, must have an end or purpose (Ziel)—"A becoming without a purpose is in general unthinkable" (p. 231); he points out, too, the difficulty of explaining the correlation of parts upon the Darwinian hypothesis. His own conception of the evolutionary process is that it is essentially zielstrebig or guided by final causes, that it is a true evolutio or differentiation, ...
— Form and Function - A Contribution to the History of Animal Morphology • E. S. (Edward Stuart) Russell
... obedience of fear, and God does not desire such obedience. It would be impossible that testing could go on at all if at every instant the whole of the consequences of our actions were being realised. Such a condition of things is unthinkable, and would be as confusing, in the moral sphere, as if harvest weather and spring weather were going on together. Again, the great reason why sentence against an evil work is not executed speedily lies in God's own heart, and His desire to win us to Himself by benefits. ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... the American personality. Whether in information or materials-related technology or for that matter in other areas too numerous to count, the nature of competition is driving both product breadth and improvement at rates perhaps unthinkable a decade ago. One sign of these trends is the reality that virtually all new jobs in this country are being created by small business. In the areas of commercial information and related management information systems, these changes ...
— Shock and Awe - Achieving Rapid Dominance • Harlan K. Ullman and James P. Wade
... in the way of fines, imprisonments and death were enacted from time to time to maintain its circulation at fixed values, there was a steady depreciation in value until it reached zero point and culminated in repudiation. The aggregate of the issues amounted to no less than the enormous and unthinkable sum of $9,500,000,000, and in the middle of 1797 when public repudiation took place, there was no less than $4,200,000,000 in face value of assignats and mandats outstanding; the loss, as always, falling mostly upon the poor and ...
— Fiat Money Inflation in France - How It Came, What It Brought, and How It Ended • Andrew Dickson White
... At least it was unthinkable that he shouldn't. What object else would these sacrifices ...
— The Indian Lily and Other Stories • Hermann Sudermann
... his efforts in that direction had been rendered useless by this last terrible step, and the policy to which, as I knew, he had devoted himself since his accession to office had tumbled down like a house of cards. What we had done was unthinkable; it was like striking a man from behind while he was fighting for his life against two assailants. He held Great Britain responsible for all the terrible events that might happen. I protested strongly against that statement, ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume I (of 8) - Introductions; Special Articles; Causes of War; Diplomatic and State Papers • Various
... urged upon the company the desirability of the silk-hat mode. If tall hats, he said, went out of fashion, what would become of conjurers? Rabbits could be satisfactorily extracted only from tall hats. (Prolonged cheering.) An omelette made in a sombrero was unthinkable. (Renewed cheering.) ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, June 18, 1919 • Various
... confusion he almost forgot Elizabeth, until suddenly the whirl of his thoughts was pierced by the poignant realization that his outcry of dismay at his mother's confession had practically told Elizabeth that he was willing to let her do what he found unthinkable in his mother. His whole body winced with mortification. It was the first prick of the sword of shame— that sword of the Lord! Even while he reddened to his forehead the sword-thrust came again in a flash of memory. ...
— The Iron Woman • Margaret Deland
... for yourself, now that you are face to face with the thing, that it is impossible. It's quite unthinkable that you can wander for the next month all alone in the desert with those damned niggers. Though my legal guardianship over you terminated last September I still have some moral obligations towards you. Though it has ...
— The Sheik - A Novel • E. M. Hull
... these insults from the canaille fell upon the ears of William. That slanders so atrocious could soil the universal air seemed unthinkable. ...
— Seventeen - A Tale Of Youth And Summer Time And The Baxter Family Especially William • Booth Tarkington
... Italy. And just as we have no sources of information upon her origin, neither have we any elements from which to paint her portrait. Gregorovius rests the probability that she was beautiful upon the known characteristics and fastidious tastes of the cardinal. Since it is unthinkable that such a man would have been captivated by an ugly woman or would have been held by a stupid one, it is fairly reasonable to conclude that she was beautiful ...
— The Life of Cesare Borgia • Raphael Sabatini
... Michelangelo did so much for Florence as he. Michelangelo was no doubt the greatest individualist in the whole history of art, and everything that he did grips the memory in a vice; but Florence without Michelangelo would still be very nearly Florence, whereas Florence without Brunelleschi is unthinkable. No dome to the cathedral, first of all; no S. Lorenzo church or cloisters; no S. Croce cloisters or Pazzi chapel; no Badia of Fiesole. Honour where honour is due. We should be singing the praises of Filippo Brunelleschi in every quarter of ...
— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas
... Catherine's courage, though for a moment she had weighed the possibility. "Why, they might take a photograph of my child AND PUT IT IN THE PAPERS!" Mrs. Welland exclaimed when her mother's last plan was hinted to her; and from this unthinkable indecency the clan recoiled with a collective shudder. The ancestress had had to give in; but her concession was bought only by the promise that the wedding-breakfast should take place under her roof, though (as the Washington Square connection said) with the ...
— The Age of Innocence • Edith Wharton
... friendship. Once in that time the Professor crossed my fields with his tin box slung from his shoulder; and the only feeling I had, born of crowded cities, was that this was an intrusion upon my property. Intrusion: and the Professor! It is now unthinkable. I often passed the Carpentry Shop on my way to town. I saw Baxter many times at his bench. Even then Baxter's eyes attracted me: he always glanced up at me as I passed, and his look had in it something of a caress. So the home of Starkweather, standing aloof among its broad lawns and ...
— Adventures In Contentment • David Grayson
... or in glen, can I hope to feel that the Lord God is more near, more visibly walking and talking with men, than under that humble cottage roof of thatch and oaken wattles. Though everything else in religion were by some unthinkable catastrophe to be swept out of memory, or blotted from my understanding, my soul would wander back to those early scenes, and shut itself up once again in that Sanctuary Closet, and, hearing still the echoes ...
— The Story of John G. Paton - Or Thirty Years Among South Sea Cannibals • James Paton
... significant, perhaps, was the transformation of the former conceptions of the nature and meaning of the world and life, through the discoveries of science. Geology and astronomy now gradually compelled all thinking people to realize the unthinkable duration of the cosmic processes and the comparative littleness of our earth in the vast extent of the universe. Absolutely revolutionary for almost all lines if thought was the gradual adoption by almost all thinkers of the theory of Evolution, which, partly formulated ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... fashion. The great mass of human misery meant nothing to him. That was part of the everlasting order. He had no patience with the organized charities and the professional charity mongers. Nor, on the other hand, was what he gave a conscience dole. He owed no man, and restitution was unthinkable. What he gave was a largess, a free, spontaneous gift; and it was for those about him. He never contributed to an earthquake fund in Japan nor to an open-air fund in New York City. Instead, he financed Jones, the elevator boy, for a year that he might write a book. When ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London
... in recent years. Of course in those days, a bride went into deep retirement for a week before the fateful day, not going out into the street at all, and as for seeing the groom on the day until she met him at the altar, that was simply unthinkable! ...
— A Portrait of Old George Town • Grace Dunlop Ecker
... She, Sarah, felt that henceforth she would be in the way of everybody; she would have no home. Leah married to Rochez; a new and young Mme. Goldberg ruling in the old house of the Rue des Medecins! Ah, it was unthinkable! ...
— Castles in the Air • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... him to speak, and yet he was utterly at a loss for words. He was not moved at the news he had received, so much as dismayed. It dictated a course that would interfere with all his plans, and therefore a course unthinkable. So he remained puzzled how to act, how to deal ...
— The Lion's Skin • Rafael Sabatini
... and pomp. In the abysmal void between the disappearing star and the aspiring glowworm men tramp upon, there seems to be sufficient latitude for the play of gratitude or grief. A Napoleon exiled by the French or a Ney shot down by Frenchmen is unthinkable today. In like manner, when the revolutionary passions of Russia have subsided, there may be men and women of the humblest estate who will wonder how it happened that their Emperor, whose darkest sin, apparently, was loyalty ...
— Rescuing the Czar - Two authentic Diaries arranged and translated • James P. Smythe
... give them bread so long as they remain free, so long as they refuse to lay that freedom at our feet, and say: "Enslave, but feed us!" That day must come when men will understand that freedom and daily bread enough to satisfy all are unthinkable and can never be had together, as men will never be able to fairly divide the two among themselves. And they will also learn that they can never be free, for they are weak, vicious, miserable nonentities born wicked and rebellious. Thou has promised to them the bread ...
— "The Grand Inquisitor" by Feodor Dostoevsky • Feodor Dostoevsky
... one; the absolutely self-existent could not be thought in conjunction with attributes which either admitted any external influencing Him, or any external influenced by Him. The prevailing dualism he considered to be, as an ultimate theory of the universe, unthinkable and therefore false. Outside the Self-existent there could be no second self-existent, otherwise each would be conditioned by the existence of the other, and the Self-existent would be gone. Anything ...
— A Short History of Greek Philosophy • John Marshall
... delicately he must be handled. If St. George's pride, or his love for his favorite chattels—things personal to himself—should overcome him, the whole scheme would fall to the ground. That any gentleman of his standing had ever seen the inside of a pawn-shop in his life was unthinkable. This was what Gadgem faced. As for Todd, he had not drawn a full breath since Gadgem opened ...
— Kennedy Square • F. Hopkinson Smith
... of speech seemed to desert me. It was unthinkable that Deeping, with whom I had been speaking less than an hour ago, should now be no more; that some malign agency should thus murderously have thrust him into ...
— The Quest of the Sacred Slipper • Sax Rohmer
... I go among people and see every standard I set up, ignored. I go to the theatre and see plays that embody everything I supposed was unthinkable, let alone unutterable. But the actors utter everything, and the audience thinks everything—and sometimes laughs. I can't do that—yet. But ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... another and the logs, he cut them down to such an extent that no one of them or of the others rose against him again. For the Gauls, who are unreasonably insatiate in all respects alike, know no limits in either their courage or their fear, but fall from the one into unthinkable cowardice and from the ...
— Dio's Rome • Cassius Dio
... called this unthinkable Li Faa the Silvery Moon Blossom," Mrs. Tai Fu rejoined, quite illogically and femininely, but with utmost success in so far as she deflected her son from continuance of the thrust he had so ...
— On the Makaloa Mat/Island Tales • Jack London
... gratify it remains at least for some years. With the less knowledge of surgery of earlier times, a social condition in which such a practice might be rationally considered, is conceivable, but with the present state of our profession, such measures would be unthinkable. ...
— The Fertility of the Unfit • William Allan Chapple
... of woman, without which the spirit of classical Greece, too, is unthinkable, formed a ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... savour of cynicism," replied Jay, "but I fear there is much truth in them. It is only in the millennium, I suppose, that we shall have the unthinkable happiness of seeing on all sides of us an ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... among the children of Noah know themselves so certainly lords of the earth that they can treat women, mules, prisoners, Jews, and bulls according to the caprices of appetite? That an Italian should make public display of his property in a woman, or his scorn of her, was a thing unthinkable; yet, if you came to consider it, so it was that a Spaniard should not. Set aside, said he to himself, the grand air, and what has the Spaniard which the brutes ...
— The Spanish Jade • Maurice Hewlett
... going to the point of being willing to give him the widow of Nero in marriage, he never really expected to take him as his colleague or to designate him as his successor. Tiberius was a Claudian, and that a knight without ancestry should be placed at the head of the Roman aristocracy was to him unthinkable; after the exile of Nero he had cast his eyes upon Caius, another son of Germanicus, as his possible successor. Nor had he hidden his intention: he had even clearly expressed it in different speeches to the senate. Therefore Sejanus must finally have come to the conclusion that if he continued to ...
— The Women of the Caesars • Guglielmo Ferrero
... tales—more double exposure. A man emerges from the water with a splash, ascends feet foremost ten yards or more, makes a graceful curve and lands on a spring-board, runs down it to the bank, and his clothes fly gently up from the ground and enclose his person—all unthinkable in real life, but readily possible by running the motion-picture film backward! The fairy prince commands the princess to appear, consigns the bad brothers to instant annihilation, turns the witch into a cat, confers life on inanimate things; and ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... content of life. This implies a different literature, a different philosophy, and a different history, and so soon as I come to talk to him I find that though it remains unavoidable that we should assume the correspondence of the two populations, man for man—unless we would face unthinkable complications—we must assume also that a great succession of persons of extraordinary character and mental gifts, who on earth died in childhood or at birth, or who never learnt to read, or who lived and died amidst savage or brutalising surroundings ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... death ends the struggle. The other characters are ordinary people: Charlotte and the Captain ordinary in their good sense and self-control, Edward ordinary in his moral flabbiness and his foolish infatuation. His death, to be sure, is unthinkable for such a man and does but testify to the unearthly attraction with which the girl is invested by Goethe's art. The figure of Ottilie, like that of her spiritual sister Mignon, is irradiated by a light that never was on sea or land. She is a creature of romance, and we learn without ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... better to cancel the preceding paragraphs. Is not any savor of banter out of place in the reception we are bound to accord to an alleged solution of the unthinkable problem which underlies creation and man's position therein? If the impulse which first controlled us is not denied expression, it is because it implies at once the worst that can be said of a very extraordinary performance. Let this worst be written roughly, and in a single ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... were, must have been spoken between the three in the parlour before dinner; and they spoke now of harmless usual things—news of the countryside and tales from Derby; gossip of affairs of State; of her Grace, who, in a manner unthinkable, even by now dominated the imagination of England. None of these three had ever seen her; the squire had been to London but once in his life, his two guests never. Yet they talked of her, of her state-craft, of her romanticism; they told little tales, one to the other, as if she ...
— Come Rack! Come Rope! • Robert Hugh Benson
... ... The snowy steppes and the inky rivers.... His servant enters the room in the inn ... Why ... "Where has Jon found Castilian roses in this barren land?" ... "and his unconquerably sanguine spirit flared high before a vision of eternal and unthinkable happiness" ... Castilian roses! Concha Arguello waits among them, immortal, sainted in her purity and fidelity, ministering to her poor Indians, her face alight with unquenchable memory and with surety of an eventual everlasting tryst. Those Castilian roses! They ...
— Rezanov • Gertrude Atherton
... The number of shares they owned was not very large: for the most part, the men were rich and not disturbed about their money. They valued a high place in business and social circles and their good name. To be entangled by a bankruptcy was unthinkable. ...
— Lister's Great Adventure • Harold Bindloss
... a development would gravely prejudice the lasting interests of Italy, for she would forfeit her political independence by so doing, and incur the risk of sinking to a sort of vassal state of France. Such a contingency is not unthinkable, for, in judging the policy of Italy, we must not disregard her relations with England as ...
— Germany and the Next War • Friedrich von Bernhardi
... would discourage a world war—would not permit it. There were increasing millions of people who had never seen a soldier, never seen a battleship. Would they want to pay the cost in blood and billions of treasure? It was unthinkable. ...
— Villa Elsa - A Story of German Family Life • Stuart Henry
... enough, it has happened. Yesterday it was September 8, Sunday; to-day, per the bulletin-board at the head of the companionway, it is September 10, Tuesday. There is something uncanny about it. And uncomfortable. In fact, nearly unthinkable, and wholly unrealizable, when one comes to consider it. While we were crossing the 180th meridian it was Sunday in the stern of the ship where my family were, and Tuesday in the bow where I was. They were there eating the half of a fresh apple on the 8th, and I was at the same time eating ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... was as annoying as it was intolerable to the land-hungry statesmen of Downing Street and the Quai d'Orsay. That a small and defenseless Oriental nation should be permitted to block the colonial expansion of two powerful and acquisitive European nations was unthinkable. ...
— Where the Strange Trails Go Down • E. Alexander Powell
... consciousness, and confessed a reluctance to assume at his age another kind of work. Furthermore, the parish of Christ Church and the city were by now so deeply embedded in his very soul that even a change, if not a severance, of such ties was unthinkable. He put forward the name of Dr. Howard Chandler Robbins, who later refused the election. The selection of Dr. Robbins, important as it was, nonetheless seemed secondary to the insistent attempts of leaders to place this humble servant in the office of Bishop. Upon Mr. Nelson's ...
— Frank H. Nelson of Cincinnati • Warren C. Herrick
... is an unthinkable calamity. It means that the very process of capitalistic development is hindered, stopped. It means a setback of ten years in the process. It means work, endless work, to overcome the setback. ...
— Theft - A Play In Four Acts • Jack London
... on his lips and never in his heart? I ascribe these illuminating flashes to Falstaff, and not to Shakespeare, for no imagination in the world has yet accomplished such a miracle; as a miracle of representment Falstaff is astonishing enough, as a miracle of creation he is simply unthinkable. I would almost as soon believe that Falstaff made Shakespeare as that Shakespeare made Falstaff without a living model. All hail to thee, inimitable, incomparable Jack! Never before or since has poet been blessed with such a teacher, as rich and laughterful, as mendacious ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... staff's views ran contrary to the Gillem Board policy and the public utterances of the Secretary of War. Robert Patterson had consistently supported the policy in public and before his advisers. Besides, it was unthinkable that he would so quickly abandon a policy developed at the cost of so much effort and negotiation and announced with such fanfare. He had insisted that the quota be maintained, most recently in the case of the European ...
— Integration of the Armed Forces, 1940-1965 • Morris J. MacGregor Jr.
... "Unthinkable or not, I'm afraid it's true," said Everard bitterly. "Bowden wouldn't have told me otherwise. I suppose he drew up the will, so he knows what's in it. Nice position to be in, isn't it? Turned out to make room for some ...
— The Princess of the School • Angela Brazil
... as if alarmed. Charnock lay close in the hollow between two logs, but his coat was snowy and it was possible that the other had noticed the white patch. He turned and began to move back, not fast but with caution. Charnock felt it was unthinkable that he should get away, and raising himself, swung the drill round his head and let it go. It flew over the other man and vanished without a sound because the turmoil of the water drowned the splash, but Charnock lost his balance and rolled off the logs. He fell ...
— The Girl From Keller's - Sadie's Conquest • Harold Bindloss
... these things should continue to walk the sod, that the man who had these things on his black heretic conscience should continue to haunt the scene of his crimes and lord it over those whom his misdeeds had sullied, was to the common mind unthinkable—nay, incredible: a blot on God's good day. To every potato-setter who, out of the corner of his eye, watched his passage, to every beggar by the road whose whine masked heart-felt curses, to the very children who fell back from the cabin door to escape his evil eye, this was plain and known, ...
— The Wild Geese • Stanley John Weyman
... Anything else was unthinkable; meant quick and lonely and useless death. Shouts and laughter and drunken shrieks were echoing from outside. No one ...
— Hawk Carse • Anthony Gilmore
... metaphorically to push him towards Miss Van Tuyn. It was inexplicable. Lady Sellingworth was a woman of the world, past mistress of all the convenances, one in whom any breach of good manners was impossible, unthinkable! And yet she had asked him to go back to the restaurant, and to thrust himself into the company of a girl and a man who were dining by themselves. She had even asked him, a young fellow, certainly younger than Beryl ...
— December Love • Robert Hichens
... so unthinkable that they only continue because people refuse to think of them. Sweating and slums are two such things, but the supreme example in the ...
— Men, Women, and God • A. Herbert Gray
... such as the Cretaceous, or the Oolite, or the Triassic; and the Secondary period, once more, though itself of positively appalling duration, seems but a patch (to use the expressive modernism) upon the unthinkable and unrealisable vastness of the endless successive Primary aeons. So that in the end we can only say, like Michael Scott's mystic head, 'Time was, Time is, Time will be.' The time we know affords us no measure at all for even the nearest and briefest epochs of the time we know not; ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... a trip! Where in the world do you want to go?" Such a thing as Mary going on a trip, and, above all, unaccompanied by himself, was unheard of and unthinkable. ...
— The Homesteaders - A Novel of the Canadian West • Robert J. C. Stead
... said Lafayette, "America without her Thomas Paine is unthinkable." The words were carried to England and there did Paine no especial good. But England was now giving Paine a living—there was a market for the product of his pen—and he was being advertised both by his loving friends ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard
... surely lost Thy hold of Thine own, or Thy care for Thine own property.' The psalmist said, 'Thou wilt not suffer him that is devoted to Thee to see corruption.' And what his faith felt to be impossible in regard to the bodily life is still more unthinkable in regard to the spiritual. It cannot be that that which belongs to Him should pass and perish. 'We are called by Thy name, and Thou, Lord, art in the midst of us'—not a Samson shorn of his locks; not a wayfaring man ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... are always longing. It does not matter whether they are ministers or actors, lawyers or doctors—they are all tarred with the same brush. Their common characteristic is their rootlessness. They have no real home, because to Hamsun a home is unthinkable apart from a space of soil possessed in continuity by successive generations. They are always despising the surroundings in which they find themselves temporarily, and their chief claim to distinction is a genuine or pretended knowledge of life on a large ...
— Pan • Knut Hamsun
... is now made up of varied sects, and the practical dominance of one religious idea would let loose illimitable passions, the most intense the human spirit can feel. The way out of the theocratic State was by the drawn sword and was lit by the martyr's fires. The way back is unthinkable for all Protestant fears or Catholic aspirations. Aristocracies, too, become impossible as rulers. The aristocracy of character and intellect we may hope shall finally lead us, but no aristocracy so by birth will renew its authority over us. The character of ...
— National Being - Some Thoughts on an Irish Polity • (A.E.)George William Russell
... There had been so much correspondence between Philip and myself, so many notes had passed touching the death of Escovedo, and there was that habit of Philip's of writing his replies in marginal notes to my own letters and so returning them, that it was unthinkable he should have kept them all in his memory, and the abstraction of three or four could not ...
— The Historical Nights' Entertainment • Rafael Sabatini
... much is certain, however: that Wagner did take part in the rising, and that a warrant was issued for his arrest. The fiasco resulted in a great gain to music, and, as far as Wagner was concerned, there was no political loss. Had the insurgents by some unthinkable chance succeeded, he would soon have been on worse terms with them than ever he was with Kings and Imperial personages. They tried revolt because they wished to alter all the conditions under which ...
— Wagner • John F. Runciman
... couldn't even go across for some time yet, but her father's folks have died off, and there's nothing to be expected from her mother's relatives. Any way, she can't be left to face the blow alone. It's unthinkable. Well, there's only one course open to me, and that's to raise as many dollars on a mortgage as I can, fit the place out with fixings brought from Winnipeg, and sow a double acreage with borrowed capital. I'll send ...
— Hawtrey's Deputy • Harold Bindloss
... to refuse an order is unthinkable, though to muster a case showing why some other order would serve in its place is not undutiful in an individual subordinate, any more than in a staff. By the same rule, insistence that an order be carried out undeviatingly, simply because it has been given, does not of itself win respect ...
— The Armed Forces Officer - Department of the Army Pamphlet 600-2 • U. S. Department of Defense
... conditions.'' (Liszt). Each particular deed is thinkable only when a determinate character of the doer is brought in relation with it—a certain character predisposes to determinate deeds, another character makes them unthinkable and unrelatable with this or that person. But who thinks to know the character of a man without knowing his view of the world, and who talks of their world-views with his criminals? "Whoever wants to learn to know men,'' says Hippel,[1] "must judge ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... part of May he observed that Nan came to church alone. He wondered if Donald was at home ill and a vague apprehension stabbed him; he longed to drop into step beside Nan as she left the church and ask her, but, of course, that was unthinkable. Nevertheless he wished he knew and that afternoon he spent the entire time on the terrace at The Dreamerie, searching the Sawdust Pile with his marine glasses, in the hope of seeing Donald moving about the little garden. But he did not see him, and that night his ...
— Kindred of the Dust • Peter B. Kyne
... United States and unquestioned fidelity to duty justly entitle them to the command of a vessel of this character, instead of utilizing the services of men of questioned loyalty and doubtful allegiance to command our naval vessels? For such an act of base and unpardonable treachery is unthinkable to a Negro. Rather would he most willingly have seen his last drop of rich loyal blood flow in torrents of effusion than to leave to his progeny such a record of shame ...
— Kelly Miller's History of the World War for Human Rights • Kelly Miller |
