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Damnable

adjective
1.
Deserving a curse.  Synonym: execrable.






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"Damnable" Quotes from Famous Books



... a man in such a damnable situation? My dear Miss Beaver, ask the doctor to tell you how much influence I have in this household, before you blame me for not taking a firm stand with a woman as nervous and temperamental as Mrs. Wiley. I'd give my life willingly to bring my ...
— Old Mr. Wiley • Fanny Greye La Spina

... to conclude that the civil law does not found upon the prohibitions and penalties in Scripture; although it condemns the ars mathematica (for the most mystic and uncertain of all sciences, real or pretended, at that time held the title which now distinguishes the most exact) as a damnable art, and utterly interdicted, and declares that the practitioners therein should die by fire, as enemies of the human race—yet the reason of this severe treatment seems to be different from that acted upon in the Mosaical institutions. The weight of the ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott

... first well enough, but is at a damnable doubt in the second part of her resolution; for by the way, in the Church, and in the streets, she hath continually observed severall children, and the most part of them dressed up in severall sorts ...
— The Ten Pleasures of Marriage and The Confession of the New-married Couple (1682) • A. Marsh

... his reader, instead of leaving them to play out their part alone. This trait offends some of Thackeray's audience, to whom it seems like the manager's hand thrust into the box to help out the play of the puppets. They resent not "the damnable faces" of the actors, but the damnable sermonizing of the author, and exhort him to permit the play to begin. Thackeray frankly acknowledged his tendency to preach, as he called it. But it was part of the man. ...
— Literary and Social Essays • George William Curtis

... alluded to current sayings, as that he "habitually took counsel of his horse on the field when a movement was entrusted to his discretion." Numerous were the journalistic sentences running under an air of eulogy of the lordly warrior purposely to be tripped, and producing their damnable effect, despite the obvious artifice. The writer of the letter from Bombay, signed Ormont, was a born subject for the antithetical craftsmen's ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... young and old priests had already come to confess to me; and that, with the exception of two, they had all told me that they could not put those questions and hear the answers they elicited without falling into the most damnable sins. ...
— The Priest, The Woman And The Confessional • Father Chiniquy

... them and the smoke of explosions which burst on board them. It was not the British who needed his prayers that day, but the Germans. Personally, I think the Germans are more in need of prayers at all times because of the damnable way ...
— My Year of the War • Frederick Palmer

... whether the faithful would not believe in it. Who can doubt that," he added, "seeing that they believe in the reality of the five propositions of Jansenius? The Jesuits, wishing to ruin the Jansenists, induced a pope to declare that such and such damnable opinions, which they called five propositions, were to be found in a book written by Jansen, though in reality no such propositions were to be found there; whereupon the existence of these propositions became forthwith ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow

... the banke of Etilia, into the foresaid countrey of Bulgaria. [Sidenote: Astrscan.] All which way there is no citie, but onely certaine cottages neere vnto that place where Etilia falleth into the sea. Those Bulgarians are most wicked Saracens, more earnestly professing the damnable religion of Mahomet, then any other nation whatsoeuer. [Sidenote: The description of Baatu and his court.] Moreouer, when I first behelde the court of Baatu, I was astonied at the sight thereof; for his ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries - Vol. II • Richard Hakluyt

... intimation. I mean only that it has a value. I mean you are a man, and the game to you is the large one of statecraft. It is really you who rule this Kingdom. Ah, yes, you remonstrate, but I tell you it is true, and the damnable shame is that it is not a Kingdom worthy of your genius! You, Von Ritz, are the engine, the motive force—but I—in God's ...
— The Lighted Match • Charles Neville Buck

... to believe things like that," he said. "I was afraid, too. That was the damnable part of it. I could not help her. I have changed since then—I have changed through knowing you. As children we had always been threatened with the just God! The most successful preachers gained their power by painting pictures ...
— In Connection with the De Willoughby Claim • Frances Hodgson Burnett

... my unhappy situation! My wife is an adulteress, and my servants in league with villains to rob me! These two letters confirm the first—and my last night's adventure in the Dark Vaults convinced me of the second. And then the woman just now had the damnable effrontery to request me to take her rascally paramour into my service, in place of my faithful Dennis! She wishes to carry on her amours under my very nose! And that scoundrel Davis—how demure, how innocently ...
— City Crimes - or Life in New York and Boston • Greenhorn

... own moralities. For them it is not easy to see where wisdom ends and guile begins—what wiles are justified to honour, and what partake of the genius of the robber, and where lie the delicate boundaries between legitimate diplomacy and damnable lying. I am not sure that Lawyer Larkin did not often think himself very nearly what he wished the world to think him—an 'eminent Christian.' What an awful abyss is ...
— Wylder's Hand • J. Sheridan Le Fanu

... clock with wonderful animation and detail, something of the pulpit manner, and the spirit of one possessed. "O hellish compliance!" she exclaimed. "I would not suffer a complier to break bread with Christian folk. Of all the sins of this day there is not one so God-defying, so Christ-humiliating, as damnable compliance": the boy standing before her meanwhile, and brokenly pursuing other thoughts, mainly of Haddo and Janet, and Jock Crozer stripping off his jacket. And yet, with all his distraction, it might be argued that he heard too much: his father and himself being ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume XXI • Robert Louis Stevenson

... the solemn league and covenant; that they should leave the settlement of all questions to the parliaments of the two nations; that there had been no treaty between the king and them; and that the assertion in the letter published by Ormond was "a damnable untruth."] ...
— The History of England from the First Invasion by the Romans - to the Accession of King George the Fifth - Volume 8 • John Lingard and Hilaire Belloc

... "Ask him, my dear Comte, ask the miserable traitor who with lies and damnable treachery has stolen his way into your house, has stolen your regard, your hospitality, and was on the point of stealing your most precious treasure—your daughter! Ask him! He knows every word of that infamous message by heart! I doubt not but a copy of it is inside his coat ...
— The Bronze Eagle - A Story of the Hundred Days • Emmuska Orczy, Baroness Orczy

... 327). It is needless to remark that this uncertainty about the text destroys the scholarly value of the translation" (p. 180). The scribe characteristically forgets to add that I have invariably noted these excised passages which are always the merest repetitions, damnable iterations of a twice-, and sometimes a thrice-told tale, and that I so act upon the great principle—in translating a work of imagination and "inducing" an Oriental tale, the writer's first duty to his readers ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton

... you I must know the truth! I cannot rest until I find out. Something warns me he has done something ... damnable!" ...
— Juggernaut • Alice Campbell

... is an enthusiast, i. e sincere, and thorough-going in his religion. I have no doubt that he or she will avow, without hesitation, to the enquirer, and glory in it, that chastity is more honourable than marriage; that faith is every thing; that doubt is damnable, and a proof of "an unregenerated mind;" that all the goods and pleasures of this world are "trash;" that human institutions are mere "carnal ordinances;" and that human science and learning is a snare to faith and an abomination to a ...
— The Grounds of Christianity Examined by Comparing The New Testament with the Old • George Bethune English

... Reader, were we really romancing, we should here dilate of the lovely ride in the lovely moonlight on the lovely road to Baalbek. But truth to tell, the road is damnable, the welkin starless, the night pitch-black, and our poor Dreamer is suffering from ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani

... ruin!" he shouted. "Talk about one man's villainy! This damnable village deserves to be razed off the face of the earth! ... But I meant to forgive them. I was willing to call ...
— An Alabaster Box • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman and Florence Morse Kingsley

... education which ignores its existence, and much more than fails to provide the best environment for it, is condemnable. But the scheme of education which derides and despises the emotional nature of woman, looking upon it as a weakness and seeking to suppress it, is damnable, and has led to the damnation—or loss, if the reader prefers the English term—of this most precious of all ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby

... possess me. The man hated me insanely. That incredible fact I suddenly knew. But the face had told me—it would have told anybody—more than that. It was a face of hatred gratified, it proclaimed some damnable triumph. It had gloated over me driving away to my fate. This too was plain to ...
— The Woman in Black • Edmund Clerihew Bentley

... over. I hoped I was no longer to spend my evenings alone. Alone! Looking round at the things that are yours, and among which I feel so out of place, except when you are there to make me forget. God! What damnable evenings I've spent there—feeling as if you were slipping further and further out of my life—as if you were gone, and I had only the clothes you had worn, an odor about me somewhere to convince me that I had not dreamed you! Sometimes that faint, ...
— Told in a French Garden - August, 1914 • Mildred Aldrich

... edition of 1715 declares that edition to be: "The Protestant Tutor, instructing Youth and Others, in the compleat method of Spelling, Reading, and Writing True English: Also discovering to them the Notorious Errors, Damnable Doctrines, and cruel Massacres of the bloody Papists which England may expect ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY

... to convince him of the impiety of his scepticism; while he remained cool, but unshaken; and I left him with mingled emotions of pity, for his adherence to doctrines so damnable; and of admiration, at the amenity and philanthropy with which they ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft

... was a-dying So whip! at the summons, old Satan came flying; But when he approached where poor Francis lay moaning, And saw each bed-post with its burthen a-groaning, Astonish'd, confounded, cries Satan—"By God, I'll want him, ere I take such a damnable load!" ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns

... so sweetly, and yet with words that had so little of sweetness in them and no fear at all, teased Messer Simone's black blood till it bubbled like boiling pitch, and his voice had got a kind of silly scream in it, as he cried: "Why, you damnable reader of books, you pitiful clerk, do you think I will bandy words with you? Give me that rose instantly, or I will cut out your heart and ...
— The God of Love • Justin Huntly McCarthy

... Gertrude's hair and eyes. I had never seen her." He turned fiercely upon his companion. "And you have kept this from me all these years? You have kept my only brother's child from me? By God, sir! I—But perhaps this is all one of your damnable tricks. What proof have you that this is so, and if it is, why have ...
— The Winning of Barbara Worth • Harold B Wright

... productions; but I am determined to try and [work] very slowly, so that, if possible, I may keep in a somewhat better state of health. I had not thought of illustrations; that is capital advice. Farewell, my good and admirable agent for the promulgation of damnable heresies! ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin

... the while the damnable chime sounds in their ears, like those little bells put on the post-horses to make them gallop more swiftly. Believe me, under such conditions a low Mass is ...
— In the Yule-Log Glow, Book I - Christmas Tales from 'Round the World • Various

... still something of medieval stiffness, of the monastic thoughts also, that were born and lingered in places like Borgo San Sepolcro or Citta di Castello. Chef-d'oeuvre! you might exclaim, of the peculiar, tremulous, half-convinced, monkish treatment of that after all damnable pagan world. And our own generation certainly, with kindred tastes, loving or wishing to love pagan art as sincerely as did the people of the Renaissance, and medieval art as well, would accept, of course, of work conceived ...
— Miscellaneous Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater

... of silver to one who wailed in the ditch,—a forlorn stranger from Hai-nan, lamenting the broken shells and empty baskets of his small venture.—"Contribution, you chaps. A bad day for imported cocoanuts. Wish I carried some money: this chit system is damnable.—Meanwhile, doctor, won't you forget anything I was rude enough to say? And come join me in a peg at the club? ...
— Dragon's blood • Henry Milner Rideout

... his annual address, declared that there were American vivisectors who "seem, seeking useless knowledge, to be blind to the writhing agony and deaf to the cry of pain of their victims, AND WHO HAVE BEEN GUILTY OF THE MOST DAMNABLE CRUELTIES, without the denunciation of the public and the profession that their wickedness deserves."[1] And that vivisector of to-day, who suggests that if anaesthetics had been known to Magendie or Brachet, they would invariably have been used, is either ...
— An Ethical Problem - Or, Sidelights upon Scientific Experimentation on Man and Animals • Albert Leffingwell

... In this damnable confusion (I beg pardon) I have lost all my possessions, or near about, and quite lost all my wits. I wish I could lay my hands on the numbers of the REVIEW, for I know I wished to say something on that head ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson

... was a hard customer. He'd been a spieler, fighting man, bush parson, temperance preacher, and a policeman, and a commercial traveller, and everything else that was damnable; he'd been a journalist, and an editor; he'd been a lawyer, too. He was an ugly brute to look at, and uglier to have a row with—about six-foot-six, wide in proportion, and stronger than ...
— While the Billy Boils • Henry Lawson

... inconvenient diversion. Those who had to do so regretted the necessity, and those who had not, praised Providence. Many "persons of quality," to use Dr. Johnson's phrase, have written narratives of their adventures and experiences in "the most damnable country." No man of position, even early in the nineteenth century, would dream of travelling threescore miles from his residence without having signed and sealed his last will and testament. The highways were beset by "Gentlemen of the Road," such as that fascinating felon, ...
— The Sunny Side of Ireland - How to see it by the Great Southern and Western Railway • John O'Mahony and R. Lloyd Praeger

... members of Parliament swear?—that the king was supreme in Church and State, the only rightful king of the realm and of all other his dominions, and that from their hearts they abhorred, detested, and abjured the damnable doctrine that princes, excommunicated or deprived of the Pope, might be murdered by their subjects. They proceeded to pass a very useful Act of Indemnity and Oblivion, agreeing to let bygones be ...
— Andrew Marvell • Augustine Birrell

... Assembly. He threatened war; but the threat proved fruitless, and even the Scotch Council pressed Charles to give fuller satisfaction to the people. "I will rather die," the king wrote to Hamilton, "than yield to these impertinent and damnable demands"; but it was needful to gain time. "The discontents at home," wrote Lord Northumberland to Wentworth, "do rather increase than lessen"; and Charles was without money or men. It was in vain that he begged for a loan from Spain on promise of declaring war against Holland, ...
— History of the English People, Volume V (of 8) - Puritan England, 1603-1660 • John Richard Green

... nationalities. Mr. Griffith has a gift for the making of epigrams; and indeed he has studied concision in all his work. It may be that this is a result of his long years of training in journalism; he must have silently implored the writers of manuscripts he was forced to read to leave their damnable faces and begin. Certain it is, that although he can write smoothly flowing music, there is hardly a page in his whole book that does not contain some idea worth thinking about. His wine of Cyprus has both ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps

... time I felt the cord relax, and, although the veins in my head seemed to be bursting, I managed to get my fingers under that damnable rope. To this very hour I can hear Vadi's shriek of pain as I broke his thumb, and it brings the whole scene ...
— Fire-Tongue • Sax Rohmer

... of Illinois, declared the proposition, as reported by the committee, to be "wholly untenable, is monstrous, absurd, damnable in its provisions, a greater wrong and outrage on the black race than any thing that has ever ...
— History of the Thirty-Ninth Congress of the United States • Wiliam H. Barnes

... the mental suffering, and the icy chill of the preceding night, caused her death. I have often been accused of taking her life. Before my God, I swear this is untrue! Do you think a man would be such a miscreant, such a damnable fiend, such a caricature on humanity, as to kill this lone woman? There were plenty of corpses lying around. He would only add one more corpse to ...
— History of the Donner Party • C.F. McGlashan

... Brooks's, standing by himself, and addressing the air after much thought. "Don't you consider," he abruptly asked a fellow-guest at Lady Holland's, leaning across the dinner-table in a pause of the conversation, "that it was a most damnable act of Henri Quatre to change his religion with a view to securing the Crown?" He sat at home, brooding for hours in miserable solitude. He turned over his books—his classics and his Testaments—but they brought him no comfort at all. He longed for the return of the past, for the ...
— Queen Victoria • Lytton Strachey

... [Sidenote: mistake your] Begin Murderer. Pox, leaue thy damnable Faces, [Sidenote: murtherer, leave] and begin. Come, the croaking Rauen doth ...
— The Tragedie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark - A Study with the Text of the Folio of 1623 • George MacDonald

... and 3 are a little contradictory," I said, "and it will require no slight ingenuity to form a combination of letters which shall be pronounceable (Rule 5) and yet avoid the damnable appearance of a word (Rule 4). The concession about Russian names reminds me of something I have read about shaking hands with murder. In any case it is a barren concession, because, as we have seen, telegraphic addresses must be pronounceable. There is something sinister ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, April 14, 1920 • Various

... not tell me yet, O kind friend!" he said dully, "what the traitors mean to do once they have murdered their Caesar. Whom would they set up as his successor? They cannot all be emperors of Rome. For whose sake then do they intend to commit this damnable treachery?" ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy

... he pursued, to recover his game; And now to attack her again he prepares: But the company stood in defence of the dame, They cudgell'd, and cuff'd him, and kick'd him down stairs. His deanship was now in a damnable scrape, And this was no time for committing ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift

... brands with a hot iron and designates by the term "mauvais sujets"; men who are for the most part misunderstood; whose existence may become either noble through the smile of a woman lifting them out of their rut, or shocking at the close of an orgy under the influence of some damnable reflection dropped ...
— Juana • Honore de Balzac

... yesterday; he wanted to see the papers, and he had spent, by what his friend could make out, a succession of hours with the papers. He spoke of the establishment, with emphasis, as a post of superior observation; just as he spoke generally of his actual damnable doom as a device for hiding from him what was going on. Europe was best described, to his mind, as an elaborate engine for dissociating the confined American from that indispensable knowledge, ...
— The Ambassadors • Henry James

... fellow, I grieve to see The sleeve hanging loose at your side The arm you lost was worth to me Every Yankee that ever died. But you don't mind it at all; You swear you've a beautiful stump, And laugh at that damnable ball— Tom, I knew ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various

... simple, natural character. How can a man be simple and natural who is known to have a hundred thousand a year? That is the supreme curse. It's bad enough to have it: to be known to have it, to be known only because you have it, is most damnable. I suppose I am too proud to be successfully rich. Let me see how poverty will serve my turn. I have taken a fresh start. I have determined to stand upon my own merits. If they fail me, I shall fall back upon my millions; but with God's help I will test them, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various

... thought would lead him, and in a panic wildly fought against going on. He had tried to hold himself resolute and steady, but he was nothing now save a flame of resentment. "Happy! She won't be happy that way! She can't love that man! She's being carried away by that damnable sensibility of hers. It would be the most hideous, insane mistake. What am I thinking of . . . all these words! What I must do is to keep her from ruining ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher

... is for poor old Tom! It's most damnable hard luck being kept there without leave such a long time. And I expect that he also has rather lost interest. At first the men were a great source of interest, and the horses and everything. Then France and the front were very interesting. Lastly, being under fire was very interesting. ...
— Letters to Helen - Impressions of an Artist on the Western Front • Keith Henderson

... not altogether regular in law. "And yet," he said gravely, "it is incumbent on us to rid the community of him. We all know that from the porch of Snyder's store he has been preaching doctrines that are not only revolutionary but, if the ladies will pardon me, I will call damnable. What good is it for us to have Mr. Pound in the pulpit for one day of the week, and this glib-tongued man contradicting him for seven. Yet no statute forbids him to do this. What can you suggest, ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd

... considering how busie the priestes and Jesuits are in these dayes (especially in these quarters) not only laboring to corrupt his ma^ties subjects in their religion but also infecting them with such damnable posiciones and Doctrine touching the valew ... (?) unto his ma^ties sacred person where upon the said bishop made offer unto the boarde that he would forthwith (?) remove the vicar now there present and place in his roome ...
— The Evolution Of An English Town • Gordon Home

... days of snow-white purity all political delinquency is abominable in the eyes of British politicians; but no delinquency is so abominable as that of venality at elections. The sin of bribery is damnable. It is the one sin for which, in the House of Commons, there can be no forgiveness. When discovered, it should render the culprit liable to political death, without hope of pardon. It is treason against a higher ...
— Doctor Thorne • Anthony Trollope

... other women? Were he to marry her now, would not that deceit be worse than the other deceit? Or, rather, would not that be deceitful, whereas the other course would simply be unfortunate—unfortunate through circumstances for which he was blameless? Damnable arguments! False, cowardly logic, by which all male jilts seek to excuse their own treachery to ...
— The Claverings • Anthony Trollope

... write a play—a play about the army! Now what do you think of that? Darrett found out about it. Oh just the man, you see, to write a play about the army! And some sensationalists here are going to put it on. It's the most damnable insolence I ever heard of! ...
— The Visioning • Susan Glaspell

... condemnation of mob rule everywhere. Every pulpit North and South should speak out against mob rule and lynch law. The eloquent divine in Greenville, Miss., who recently denounced with righteous indignation the damnable outrages of mob violence in that state, was as a voice crying in the wilderness. For some reason his brethren of the cloth have not seen fit to join him in a crusade against this abominable sin. If the Southern clergy could only be induced to preach against this evil ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various

... than have you spreading a piece of damnable gossip over the village— Of course you ...
— An Alabaster Box • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman and Florence Morse Kingsley

... sir, y'are welcome: Too few such visitants, nay none at all, Have I seen in this damnable Limbo. ...
— A Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. II • Various

... minute's dispute he came so near me, that he touched me as I glided from him; but not being acquainted very well with the chamber, having never seen my way, I lighted in my passage on Dormina's pallet-bed, and threw myself quite over her to the chamber-door, which made a damnable clattering, and awaking Dormina with my catastrophe, she set up such a bawl, as frighted and alarmed the old Count, who was just taking in a candle from his footman, who had lighted it at his flambeau: So that ...
— Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister • Aphra Behn

... Nancy men, are most of them "ismizers" of the rankest stamp, Abolitionists of the most frantic and contemptible kind, and Christian(?) sympathizers with such heretics as Wm. Lloyd Garrison, Parker Pillsbury, C. C. Burleigh, and S. S. Foster. These men are all Woman's Righters, and preachers of such damnable doctrines and accursed heresies, as would make demons of ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage

... seem to exonerate him from such a charge: "My God, whom I have so often offended, be merciful to me; and I beseech you, O Virgin Mother, and you, divine Stephen, to intercede with God for me a sinner." The Parliament of Paris condemned his works as containing "damnable, pernicious, and heretical doctrines." The Faculty of Theology censured very severely Dolet's translation of one of the Dialogues of Plato, entitled Axiochus, and especially the passage "Aprs la mort, tu ne seras rien," which Dolet rendered, "Aprs ...
— Books Fatal to Their Authors • P. H. Ditchfield

... background, and by a process only known to themselves veneer it with a Turkish towel, and put it in brine to soak. The unsuspecting boarding house keeper, or restaurant man buys it and cooks it, and the boarder or transient guest calls for tripe. A piece is cut off the damnable tripe with a pair of shears used in a tin shop for cutting sheet iron, and it is handed to the victim. He tries to cut it, and fails; he tries to gnaw it off, and if he succeeds in getting a mouthful, that settles ...
— Peck's Compendium of Fun • George W. Peck

... I do," said Mr. Enfield. "Yes, it's a bad story. For my man was a fellow that nobody could have to do with, a really damnable man; and the person that drew the cheque is the very pink of the proprieties, celebrated too, and (what makes it worse) one of your fellows who do what they call good. Black-mail, I suppose; an honest man paying through the nose for some of the capers of his youth. Black-Mail ...
— Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde • ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

... "floundered all the summer among the extinct mine-shafts of Scotch politics—the most damnable set of pitfalls mortal man was ever set to blunder through in the dark." His study opened on the garden, from which the sea-view is one of the finest in England. Froude loved Devonshire folk, and ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul

... tell Godfrey what I thought of him; but words were not easy to find. I was still searching for a noun to go along with "damnable" when Clithering came back. He seemed ...
— The Red Hand of Ulster • George A. Birmingham

... you foolishly imagine that my soul is so completely sour milk that in youth I couldn't feel the same drives that you feel, now, for the limited opportunity there was, then? But under some damnable pressure toward conformity, I took a desk job in a bank. I am now eighty-one years old... How much does your 'Bunch' need—at minimum, mind you—for the opportunity to ride in space-armor till the rank smell of their ...
— The Planet Strappers • Raymond Zinke Gallun

... honeymoon will be that tour—with reservations; only... only I didn't realise that the sea was so strong. I didn't feel it so much when I was with Maisie. These damnable songs did it. ...
— The Light That Failed • Rudyard Kipling

... establishment of King's College, in the university of Cambridge, a decree was sent down there by King Henry VI., admonishing the scholars, that is to say, in the language of the present day, the fellows of that college, against the damnable and pernicious errors (so it styled them), of John Wickliffe and Richard Peacock, and denouncing the pains of expulsion from college, and perjury, against those of them who should show any favour to those doctrines. Yet, in two years after this, this very king's college became what, at that ...
— Maxims And Opinions Of Field-Marshal His Grace The Duke Of Wellington, Selected From His Writings And Speeches During A Public Life Of More Than Half A Century • Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington

... get loose from you. Even then you had acquired by instinct that damnable woman's trick of heaping obligations on a man, of placing yourself so entirely and helplessly at his mercy that at last he dare not take a step without running to you for leave. I know a poor wretch whose one desire in life is to run away from his wife. She prevents him ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw

... sentence Ale, is all included: Meat, Drink, and Cloth; These are no ravening Footmen, no fellows, that at Ordinaries dare eat their eighteen pence thrice out before they rise, and yet goe hungry to play, and crack more nuts than would suffice a dozen Squirrels; besides the din, which is damnable: I had rather rail, and be confin'd to a Boatmaker, than live amongst such rascals; these are people of such a clean discretion in their diet, of such a moderate sustenance, that they sweat if they but smell hot meat. Porredge is poison, they hate a Kitchin as they hate ...
— The Scornful Lady • Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher

... they contained. The "De Jure Regni" was again prohibited in Scotland, in 1664, even in manuscript; and in 1683, the whole of Buchanan's political works had the honour of being burned by the University of Oxford, in company with those of Milton, Languet, and others, as "pernicious books, and damnable doctrines, destructive to the sacred persons of Princes, their state and government, and of all human society." And thus the seed which Buchanan had sown, and Milton had watered—for the allegation that Milton borrowed from Buchanan is probably true, and equally honourable to both—lay ...
— Historical Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley

... scholar, a critic, a wit, a politician, and a Jacobite; and then, perhaps, eternal opposition would keep up our spirits; and, wishing one another daily at the devil, we should make a shift to drag on a damnable state of life, without much ...
— Amelia (Complete) • Henry Fielding

... obviously under excitement. His face was flushed; he moved his free arm violently—even the Gladstone bag swung to and fro; he punctuated his sentences with sharp, angry nods of the head, insisting and protesting and insisting, while the other, saying much less, maintained his damnable stupid disdainful grin. ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett

... sure of the same modest sum. 'Owing to Aunt Grizel I'll just not starve,' said Helen, with the faint grimace, half bitter, half comic, that sometimes made her strange face still stranger. 'One hundred and fifty pounds a year: think of it! Isn't it damnable? Yet it's better than nothing, as Aunt Grizel and I often ...
— Franklin Kane • Anne Douglas Sedgwick

... and that the old rag on which the picture is painted is really a part of the cloak of Saint Thomas, is, by a very verbose proclamation of the Archbishop of Mexico, dated 25th March, 1795, pronounced a damnable heresy. I have in my possession a copy of this precious document, bearing the signature of Don Alonzo Nunez ...
— Mexico and its Religion • Robert A. Wilson

... angel," Mrs. Presty answered; "and I won't contradict you. But do pray hear how my experience looks at it. I remember what a life she has led, and I ask myself if any human creature could have suffered as that girl has suffered without being damaged by it. Among those damnable people—I beg your pardon, my dear; Mr. Norman sometimes used strong language, and it breaks out of me now and then—the good qualities of that unfortunate young person can not have always resisted the horrid temptations and contaminations about her. Hundreds of times she must have ...
— The Evil Genius • Wilkie Collins

... and as conveniently admissible in this place as afterwards;—namely, the account of the manner in which Scott—whom we shall always find, as aforesaid, to be in salient and palpable elements of character, of the World, worldly, as Burns is of the Flesh, fleshly, and Byron of the Deuce, damnable,—spent ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin

... history and write the whole thing up anew, and make dashing free-hand pictures of the sack, and of Richards's house, and the bank, and the Presbyterian church, and the Baptist church, and the public square, and the town-hall where the test would be applied and the money delivered; and damnable portraits of the Richardses, and Pinkerton the banker, and Cox, and the foreman, and Reverend Burgess, and the postmaster—and even of Jack Halliday, who was the loafing, good-natured, no-account, irreverent fisherman, hunter, boys' friend, stray-dogs' friend, typical "Sam Lawson" of the ...
— The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg • Mark Twain

... enthusiasm to their pupils, and underlying that enthusiasm was a tacit assumption that the end justified any means; that provided the goal were attained, the manner in which it had been arrived at was a matter of quite secondary importance. I maintain that the damnable spirit of modern Germany is mainly due to the teaching profession, and to the doctrines it consistently instilled into ...
— The Days Before Yesterday • Lord Frederick Hamilton

... is damnable to be always firing at things and never hitting them," said the young man. "But, truly, I'll put restraint on myself, no matter how hard it may be to do it, and not a single shot shall fly out of these barrels as long as ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various

... ladies set up a cry of such indignation, that both Roland and myself endeavored to appease their wrath by hasty assurances that we utterly repudiated that damnable doctrine of Metellus Numidicus. ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various

... to weary the reader with such damnable iteration, but when a Cabinet Minister is unable in this discussion to distinguish between the folly of a thing and its possibility, one must make ...
— Peace Theories and the Balkan War • Norman Angell

... getting better, as I have noticed that at a particular stage of my convalescence from any sort of illness I pass through a condition in which things in general appear damnable and I myself an entire failure. If that is a sign of returning health you may look upon my ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 3 • Leonard Huxley

... artist-mind, lit with the Infinite, alone confronts his manifold and oceanic qualities—but taste, intelligence and culture, (so-called,) have been against the masses, and remain so. There is plenty of glamour about the most damnable crimes and hoggish meannesses, special and general, of the feudal and dynastic world over there, with its personnel of lords and queens and courts, so well-dress'd and so handsome. But the People are ungrammatical, untidy, and their sins ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman

... fall apart as might a bad building, or be diffuse as a poorly written essay. And yet, with this coherence, there must always be stimulating and refreshing variety; for a too constant insistence on the main material produces intolerable monotony, such as the "damnable iteration" of a mediocre prose work or the harping away on one theme by the hack composer. In no art more than music is this dual standard of greater importance, and in no art more difficult to attain. For the raw material ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding

... most likely place, for that iron-bound coffer. There may be nothing in it; it may be full of musty love-letters, or old sermons, or receipted bills of a hundred years ago; but it may contain what will be worth to you an estate of five thousand pounds a year. It is a pity the old woman with the damnable decoction is gone off. Look it up, ...
— Septimius Felton - or, The Elixir of Life • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... at it from my point of view, as well as your own. What did your cousin Noel do? Your cousin Noel fell a victim, poor fellow, to one of the vilest conspiracies I ever heard of, and the prime mover of that conspiracy was Miss Vanstone's damnable sister. She deceived him in the most infamous manner; and as soon as she was down for a handsome legacy in his will, she had the poison ready to take his life. This is the truth; we know it from Mrs. Lecount, who found the bottle locked up ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins

... be written. That is [that] thou first seke out [the] law/ what god will haue the to doo/ interpretinge it spiritually with out glose or coueringe the brightnesse of Moses face/ so [that] thou fele in thyne hert/ how that it is damnable synne before god/ not to loue they neyboure that is thyne enimie/ as puerly as Christ loued the/ and [that] not to loue thy neyboure in thyne herte/ is to haue committed all ready all synne agenst him. And therfore ...
— The prophete Ionas with an introduccion • William Tyndale

... Scriptures, and orders the Bible to be accepted in accordance with the views of the theologians of Trent; she openly avows her hatred of free institutions and constitutional systems, and declares that those are in damnable error who regard the reconciliation of the pope with modern civilization as either possible ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper

... room to yourself, sir; and since the most extraordinary coincidence"—he emphasized the words—"has brought you to this damnable village, I hope you ...
— The Ink-Stain, Complete • Rene Bazin

... conformation of decayed double-teeth, offered the only means of access. The house itself was one storey high; dark red bricks, and darker tiles upon the roof; windows very scarce and very small, although built long before the damnable tax upon light, for it was probably built in the time of Elizabeth, to judge by the peculiarity of the style of architecture observable in the chimneys; but it matters very little at what epoch was built a tenement which was rented at only ten pounds ...
— Jacob Faithful • Captain Frederick Marryat

... Marescotti? Some one had said she had accepted him. Nobili was sure he had heard this. He, Marescotti, must have approached her nearly by her own confession. He had celebrated her in sonnets, amorous sonnets—damnable thought!—gone with her to the Guinigi Tower—then rejected her! A mist seemed to gather about Nobili as he thought of this. He grew stupid in long vistas of speculation. Had Enrica not dared to meet him—Nobili—clandestinely? Was not this ...
— The Italians • Frances Elliot

... he asked, and added without waiting for an answer, "I don't like cards, but I find my mathematics works well.... My old problems—I can concentrate on them, and stop this eternal, damnable thinking, thinking—" ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, December 1930 • Various

... unbearable in the heat, but it was better to swathe the head in a fly-net and roll a blanket round the outlying portions of the body, than to strip to the buff and lie exposed to the attacks of those damnable flies. ...
— With Our Army in Palestine • Antony Bluett

... I am, I usurp the right. What damnable infatuation can bind you to that miserable poltroon, who skulks in safety, knowing that the penalty of his evil deeds falls on you? One explanation has suggested itself: it haunts me like a fiend, and only you can exorcise it. Are you married to that ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson

... He was like an awful rotting disease. He ruined everyone he came near. Everything he touched went bad." He paused a moment. Then, with a sudden boyishness, "There, it's done with, darling," he said. "Will you forget it all—and let me start afresh? I've had such damnable luck always." ...
— The Top of the World • Ethel M. Dell

... and gathered together her paraphernalia, and he saw that she was wearing the damnable white apron. The close atmosphere of the home enveloped and stifled him once more. How different was this exasperating interior from the large jolly freedom of the Empire Music Hall, and from the whisky, cigarettes and masculinity of that private ...
— The Regent • E. Arnold Bennett

... have." He spoke with low-voiced vehemence. "Do you suppose I like playing the sneak any better than you do? It's damnable." ...
— The Greater Inclination • Edith Wharton

... frailty! What mighty ills have not been done by woman? Who was't betray'd the capitol?—a woman! Who lost Mark Antony the world?—a woman! Who was the cause of a long ten years' war, And laid at last old Troy in ashes?—Woman! Destructive, damnable, deceitful woman! Woman, to man first as a blessing given; When innocence and love were in their prime. Happy awhile in Paradise they lay; But quickly woman long'd to go astray: Some foolish new adventure needs must prove, ...
— The Orphan - or, The Unhappy Marriage • Thomas Otway

... mean by his extraordinary rigmarole about the newspaper, and that crazy old woman? he thought suddenly. It was a damnable presumption, anyhow, something that only an Englishman could be capable of. All this was a sort of sport for him—the sport of revolution—a game to look at from the height of his superiority. And what on earth did he mean by his ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad

... could the Colonel manage to free himself from his wife? Would it be long? Could he not go into some State where it would not take much time? He could not say exactly. That they must think of. That they must talk over. And so on. Did this seem like a damnable plot to Laura against the life, maybe, of a sister, a woman like herself? Probably not. It was right that this man should be hers, and there were some obstacles in the way. That was all. There are as good reasons for bad actions as for good ones,—to ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... separated from the crown in any way whatsoever, but must remain united, annexed, and conjoined thereto inseparably. Further, any arrangement of the Duke of Brittany with the English is a thing damnable, pernicious, and of most evil consequences, and one which is not to be permitted, suffered, or tolerated in any way. Lastly, if Sir Charles, the Duke of Brittany, or others, did make war on the king our sovereign lord, or have any treaty or connection with his enemies, ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume III. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot

... with external retribution, but with character, and the laws which determine its own proper ruin or perfection. The punishments described in the "Inferno" are accounts of the state of guilt itself, implications of the will that has chosen the part of brutishness. Sin itself is damnable and deadening, but the knowledge that the soul that sinneth shall die is the first way of emancipation from sin. The guidance of Virgil through hell and purgatory signifies the knowledge of good and evil, or moral insight, as the ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry

... opposite neighbours. Moreover it seems to me atrocious that we who insist on seven millions of Catholics supporting a church they call heretical, should dare to talk of our scruples (conscientious scruples forsooth!) about assisting with a poor pittance of very insufficient charity their 'damnable idolatry.' Why, every cry of complaint we utter is an argument against the wrong we have been committing for years and years, and must be so interpreted by every honest and disinterested thinker in the world. ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon



Words linked to "Damnable" :   cursed, execrable, curst



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