"Breaking point" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... was among the prisoners. He was tried by court-martial and shot, "a victim of the new interpretation of the principles of constitutional government." While this act of Walker's was certainly stretching the theory of responsibility to the breaking point, its immediate effect was to bring about a hasty surrender and a meeting between the generals of the two political parties. Thus, four months after Walker and his fifty-seven followers landed in Nicaragua, ...
— Real Soldiers of Fortune • Richard Harding Davis
... Brayley's, had the ring of a man strained to the breaking point. I could appreciate how Halsey must feel, forced to remain at his desk with its encircling banks of instruments; holding all the network of his farflung activities centralized; his decisions, his commands in a hundred places almost simultaneously, while his ...
— Wandl the Invader • Raymond King Cummings
... moral need of one individual. There is an abiding necessity to equate the personal problem to the whole philosophy within which a command operates. To keep in mind that every individual has his breaking point is everlastingly important. But to remember that the unit is also made of brittle stuff is ...
— The Armed Forces Officer - Department of the Army Pamphlet 600-2 • U. S. Department of Defense
... it. Close to the breaking point, she was ready now to give up to him more than he might care for—the only shred left which she had shrunk from letting him think was within his reach for ...
— The Firing Line • Robert W. Chambers
... any steps to complete the rupture; and at the Mi-careme dance, given by the Siowa Hunt, Quarrier, who was M. F. H., took up the thread of their suspended intercourse as methodically and calmly as though it had never quivered to the breaking point. He led the cotillon with agreeable precision and impersonal accuracy, favouring her at intervals; and though she wasted no favours on him, she endured his, which was sufficient evidence that matters were still in ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... named Honduras, the currents were so violent that his boats could hardly make headway against them. All July and August thunder and lightning were incessant. Timbers creaked and strained till each minute it appeared as if they must have reached the breaking point. Meanwhile the Admiral was enduring the tortures of rheumatism and could not leave his bed; and so, up on deck where the gales and the waves swept free, he ordered them to rig a little cabin of sailcloth; there ...
— Christopher Columbus • Mildred Stapley
... borrowed or stolen by the Greeks, and still betraying its traces in the Bible and Talmud was more than welcome to the enlightened spirits of the time. And they worked this unhistorical belief to its breaking point in their Biblical exegesis. ...
— A History of Mediaeval Jewish Philosophy • Isaac Husik
... occupation of the city. Something about her had made them treat her with respect, although I have been told that the Prussian officers were always vaguely uncomfortable in her presence. There was, perhaps, not enough humility in her clear eyes, and they worked her to the breaking point. Yet so impeccable and businesslike was her conduct that they could never convict her of any infringement of rules. Little did these pompous invaders suspect how this slender capable girl with the hazel eyes was ...
— Where the Sabots Clatter Again • Katherine Shortall
... the fortress surrender, and the historic answer of Duchambon, the French commander, that they should have their answer from the cannon's mouth. It is not my purpose to tell of it in detail, for it lasted forty-seven days and strained the nerves of everyone to the breaking point. But one or two things happened in the time which, to my mind, make our Captain seem a very human person. There was, for instance, his amazing kindness, as unfailing to his captives as to his own men. When the great French man-of-war Vigilant ...
— Greenwich Village • Anna Alice Chapin
... cursing lowly, but none the less viciously. It was quite by accident that when his patience was strained almost to the breaking point, he struck his hand against a board that formed part of the partition between his building and the courthouse next door, and tore a huge chunk of skin from the knuckles. He paid little attention to the injury, however, for the agitating of the board disclosed ...
— 'Firebrand' Trevison • Charles Alden Seltzer
... been dragooned and disciplined under Japanese and European—influence into an acquiescence with sanitary methods, police controls, military service, and wholesale process of exploitation against which their whole tradition rebelled. Under the stresses of the war their endurance reached the breaking point, the whole of China rose in incoherent revolt, and the practical destruction of the central government at Pekin by a handful of British and German airships that had escaped from the main battles rendered that revolt invincible. In Yokohama appeared ...
— The War in the Air • Herbert George Wells
... voice, so oddly gentle, the compassionate expression in her usually cold blue eyes, were too much for Anstice, whose endurance was nearly at the breaking point; and he turned to her with a look in his face which dismayed her, so ...
— Afterwards • Kathlyn Rhodes
... came to Sister Ursula unsought. She must go through that window in order to give her invalid his medicine. Her head must go first, and her feet, and the bursten shoe, must go last. It was the very breaking point in the strain, and here her saint, mistaking the needs of the case, sent her a companion. Her head was level with the window of the fourth story, and she was rejoicing to find that that also was empty when the door opened, and there entered a man something elderly, of prominent figure, ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III, June 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... cares that must be faced again on the morrow had, for a brief space, fallen from them. They had bent to the strain to the breaking point, and now it had gone, everything was forgotten but the love each bore the other. All senses were merged in it, and while the exaltation lasted there was no room for thought or fear. It was, however, the man who remembered first, for a few dark patches caught his eye when they ...
— The Cattle-Baron's Daughter • Harold Bindloss
... admitted, even to himself, the strain the wounded man had been and was on their nerves. Under his seeming indifference Buck was near the breaking point; Jock, victim of a thousand worries, was bent under his burdens. Grell, having fought the all-night fight for a human life, was still weak with weariness from the effort. Rasba, a newcomer, brought welcome reserves of endurance, ...
— The River Prophet • Raymond S. Spears
... sure the Princess had so far walked triumphantly along the high-road to success, but it was not always a good beginning which led to a good end; and the Grand Duchess felt, as she rang for Ernestine, that her nerves would be strained to breaking point until matters were definitely settled, for better ...
— The Princess Virginia • C. N. Williamson
... and his looks are intolerable—a coarse worthless brute. Drop him head first over the rock, and catch another. But take care your rod does not bend to breaking point. ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... reef without difficulty, then turned to swim along it. The trough just seaward of the breaking point of the waves was the most comfortable swimming position and they went in single file, ...
— The Wailing Octopus • Harold Leland Goodwin
... respect to theory the hanging of the Quakers was a confession, in the realm of practical politics it was but a Pyrrhic victory. The authority of magistrate and clergy, strained to the breaking point, never quite recovered its old security. The capital law was itself passed by a bare majority, and the successive executions carried popular opposition to the verge of insurrection. Nor did the executions achieve the desired end. The last sentence was never carried into effect, ...
— Beginnings of the American People • Carl Lotus Becker
... 1918, just on the eve of the armistice, when German resistance was already shaken almost to breaking point, President Wilson gave it the coup de grace by his message on the post-bellum economic settlement. No special or separate interest of any single nation or group of nations was to be taken as the basis of any settlement which did not concern the ...
— Peaceless Europe • Francesco Saverio Nitti
... love at that moment would be an insult. It did not dawn on him that he was putting himself in the position of one who was proffering silence for affection. All he knew was that everything in the world seemed against him, and, overstrained to the breaking point, ...
— The Plunderer • Roy Norton
... seemed strained to breaking point, and Archy lay with his heart beating painfully, watching till it seemed as if the case was hopeless, and that if Dick, now nearly off the cliff, could grip hold of the fallen man, they would never be able to get him and his ...
— Cutlass and Cudgel • George Manville Fenn |
