"Foregone" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... listened pompously to the conversation. Sometimes he joined in and took sides, and on these occasions it was a foregone conclusion that the side he espoused would win. No matter how reasonable the opponent's argument or how gross his personalities, Mr. Ketchmaid, in his capacity of host, had one unfailing rejoinder—the man was drunk. When Mr. Ketchmaid had pronounced ...
— Light Freights • W. W. Jacobs
... should please themselves with such grim representations and varieties of murder, or why murder itself should be considered so eminently sublime and poetical. It is good at the end of a tragedy; but, then, it is good because it is the end, and because, by the events foregone, the mind is prepared for it. But these men will have nothing but fifth acts; and seem to skip, as unworthy, all the circumstances leading to them. This, however, is part of the scheme—the bloated, ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... theology. He was no casuist nor pretender to holiness: but in those days every man was devout, and Alexander looked with honest horror upon the impiety of the heretics, whom he persecuted and massacred. He attended mass regularly—in the winter mornings by torch-light—and would as soon have foregone his daily tennis as his religious exercises. Romanism was the creed of his caste. It was the religion of princes and gentlemen of high degree. As for Lutheranism, Zwinglism, Calvinism, and similar systems, ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... from the whole human race. He who obtains this insight and perceives how sorrow is shadow to life, who weans his thirst for existence, seeks not, strives not, wrongs not, starves out his passions, resigns himself wholly to pain and suffering as to "ills that flow from foregone wrongfulness" and asks for no clue from the Silence which can utter naught, he is truly blessed and released from all misery forever. He glides "lifeless to nameless ...
— The Sceptics of the Old Testament: Job - Koheleth - Agur • Emile Joseph Dillon
... strange, too. Giovanni had once told her of his love, and she had silenced him. He was to tell her again, and she was to accept what he said. He was to ask her to marry him, and her answer was a foregone conclusion. It seemed as though this greatest event of her life were planned to the very smallest details beforehand; as though she were to act a part which she had studied, and which was yet no comedy because it was the expression of her life's truth. The future had been, as it were, prophesied ...
— Saracinesca • F. Marion Crawford
... number of years editor of the Atlantic Monthly; an excellent journalist, poet, and critic, it is yet as a novelist—witty, graceful, and acute—that he is best known; "A Chance Acquaintance," "A Foregone Conclusion," "A Modern Instance," "An Indian Summer" are among his ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... off. I might have trusted Heaven. The getting off was a foregone conclusion, for we went along the south-east road, which had not worked its mysterious fascination ...
— A Journal of Impressions in Belgium • May Sinclair
... on the bridegroom's side. In fact, that nobody less in the social scale than the representative of an old territorial family ought, in the nature of things, to have aspired to the hand of Agnes Townley, appeared to have been a foregone conclusion with everybody. This will give the reader a truer and more vivid impression of the bride, than any words or colours ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 438 - Volume 17, New Series, May 22, 1852 • Various
... privileged classes, the gentlemen, whose interests were on the side of privilege and irresponsible mastery. Here as in the French case it was the habits of thought of the common man, not of the class of gentlemen, that made the obsolescence of the dynastic State a foregone conclusion and an easy matter—as one speaks of easy achievement in respect of matters of that magnitude. It is now some two and a half centuries since this shift in the national point of view overtook the English-speaking community. Perhaps it would be unfair to say that that ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen
... of gingerbread nuts, but above all a little dicky-bird in a tiny wooden cage made her extremely happy. Hans was allowed to carry it all, whilst she and Wolfgang rushed along on the walk home from Schildhorn, chaffing each other. Her sweetheart did not disturb them. Hans had foregone the pleasure of having his Frida on his arm from the commencement; everybody might easily have thought the well-dressed young gentleman was her lover. But when she lost her breath entirely and was red and dishevelled, ...
— The Son of His Mother • Clara Viebig
... waves to yield faintest trace of the lost steamer. Every naval man knew what had happened. The vessel had met with some mishap to her machinery, struck a derelict, or turned turtle, during that memorable typhoon of March 17 and 18. She had gone down with all hands. Her fate was a foregone conclusion. No ship's boat could live in that sea, even if the crew were able to launch one. It was another of ocean's tragedies, with the fifth act ...
— The Wings of the Morning • Louis Tracy
... as nothing to what they must suffer if the Pope now had his way and if Pier Luigi Farnese were to become their duke—an independent prince. He would break the nobles utterly, to remain undisputed master of the territory. That was a conclusion foregone. And yet our princelings saw the evil approaching them, and cowered irresolute to await ...
— The Strolling Saint • Raphael Sabatini
... was, that, upon the whole, we were inclined to come to an opinion that the words he so uttered were but the result of the mental disturbance that at such a moment might well be supposed to be ensuing in the mind, and that they related really to no foregone fact any more than some incoherent words uttered by a man in a dream might be supposed ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest
... group of tribes belong these two nationalities no ethnographer can define, save perhaps a German. The traditions of the people themselves are generally denied, because they are not in harmony with foregone conclusions. The meaning of ancient manuscripts is disfigured, and, in fact, sacrificed to fiction, if only the latter proceeds from the mouth ...
— From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan • Helena Pretrovna Blavatsky
... was, he could not have saved himself. It did not occur to him that Jean Jacques had acted weakly. He would not have done what Jean Jacques had done, had Jean Jacques spoiled his home. He would have sprung the lever; but he was not so mean as to despise Jean Jacques because he had foregone his revenge. This master-carpenter had certain gifts, or he could not have caused so much trouble in the world. There is a kind of subtlety necessary to allure or delude even the humblest of women, if she is not naturally bad; and Masson had had experiences with the ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... it worth a tear, is it worth an hour, To think of things that are well outworn; Of fruitless husk and fugitive flower, The dream foregone and the ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... study; and the dilettante (and it is for dilettanti, like myself, that I principally write) must be content to tread in the tracks of greater men who have preceded him, and accept at second or third hand their foregone conclusions. ...
— Glaucus; or The Wonders of the Shore • Charles Kingsley
... after all, we none of us do exclusively things for which we wish to escape being blamed; there is hardly anyone who could not name some occasion on which he has made some sacrifice, foregone an unfair advantage, declined to listen to selfish promptings, or held some baser impulse in check. None of these things were done for the sake of receiving praise; nevertheless, and quite inevitably, the doer felt praiseworthy, conscious of an inner accord whose self-attesting ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... lawyer is all very well, but it has no special potency to restrain the nocturnal activities of the burglar. All such discussions are, for the present behalf, utterly puerile. Secession, revolution, the bloody destruction and extinction of the whole nation, were for years before the war foregone determinations in the Southern mind, to be resorted to at any instant at which such extreme measures might become necessary; not merely to prevent any interference with the holy institution; but equally to secure that absolute predominance of the slaveholding interest over the whole political ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol IV, Issue VI, December 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... the pious fathers, his majesty has foregone his original intention of stripping the Vicomte de Talizac of ...
— The Son of Monte-Cristo, Volume II (of 2) • Alexandre Dumas pere
... become tired of the griefs of Jamaica, and reconciled itself to her wretchedness as a foregone conclusion, when the events of last October lent a fresh and terrible interest to her history. An insurrection, including in its purpose the murder of every white man on the island, has been quenched in the blood of its leaders, say the Governor of Jamaica and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... been done. Few words of Scripture are more plain; and yet few have been more grievously misunderstood and wrested. At the entrance of the inspired explanation, the expositor, bent on the defence of his own foregone conclusion, takes his stand, like a pointsman on a railway, and by one jerk turns the whole train into the wrong line. "The field is the world," said the Lord: "The field is the Church," say the interpreters. ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... copper. To have made it exemplify the Method of Residues, the effect of the resistance of the air and that of the rigidity of the silk should have been calculated a priori, from the laws obtained by separate and foregone experiments. ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... soldiers was raised in New England, and a British fleet gathered in Boston Harbour. On October 5 (New Style) this expedition arrived before Port Royal. The troops landed and laid siege once more to the much-harassed capital of Acadia. The result was a foregone conclusion. Five days later preliminary proposals were exchanged between Nicholson and Subercase. The starving inhabitants petitioned Subercase to give up. He held out, however, till the cannonade ...
— The Acadian Exiles - A Chronicle of the Land of Evangeline • Arthur G. Doughty
... with old woes new wail my dear time's waste: Then can I drown an eye, unused to flow, For precious friends hid in death's dateless night, And weep afresh love's long since cancell'd woe, And moan the expense of many a vanish'd sight: Then can I grieve at grievances foregone, And heavily from woe to woe tell o'er The sad account of fore-bemoaned moan, Which I new pay as if not paid before. But if the while I think on thee, dear friend, All losses are ...
— The Hundred Best English Poems • Various
... concern yourself—he is by this time," said Lord Dalgarno, "playing at hustle-cap and chuck-farthing with the most blackguard imps upon the wharf, unless he hath foregone ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... our lives for many years before. As the forged bills were all sent by mail it was necessary to convict us by circumstantial evidence. The evidence was all very weak, save only in that remarkable matter of the blotting paper. Our conviction was a foregone conclusion. ...
— Bidwell's Travels, from Wall Street to London Prison - Fifteen Years in Solitude • Austin Biron Bidwell
... pomposity of diction. It was only when he had waded through the chaos which he set himself to survey, that he could lay aside his borrowed stilts, and stand on his own feet in the Tintoret descriptions—rather stiff, yet, from foregone efforts. ...
— The Life of John Ruskin • W. G. Collingwood
... Othello. Shakespeare was faced by no easy problem. Desdemona was dead, Emilia dead, Iago wounded and doomed to the torture; how was Othello to die without merely satiating the audience with a glut of blood? How was his death to be made, not a foregone conclusion, a mere conventional suicide, but the culminating moment of the tragedy? In no single detail, perhaps, did Shakespeare ever show his dramatic genius more unmistakably than in his solution of this problem. ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... law of love gives you the right to withhold an answer. But, sir, we must nevertheless learn for the sake of what fairest fair we have each foregone sleep." ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... "The birch, most shy and ladylike of trees, Her poverty, as best she may, retrieves, And hints at her foregone gentilities With some saved relics ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster
... evidence, the parade of fairness, was being gone through in a spirit of mockery, as a mere formality; that the judges and the assessors, and the man with the goitre took no interest whatever in my case. It was a foregone conclusion. ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... is needless here to enter into details of this matter; of the second rising which preceded it; of the dead blank which followed it; of the heartless and disgusting cruelty which made the prisoners death a foregone conclusion at his mock trial; or of the deeds worse than butchery which characterized the last scene. Still, before quitting the revolting subject, there is one point that deserves remark, as it seems to illustrate ...
— The Great Lone Land - A Narrative of Travel and Adventure in the North-West of America • W. F. Butler
... tender years; and such was my sense of propriety, that I mustered up a tear for each eye, which, I hope, answered the intended purpose. We say at sea, "When you have no decency, sham a little;" and I verily believe I should have beheld my poor mother in her coffin with less regret than I could have foregone the gay and lovely scenes ...
— Frank Mildmay • Captain Frederick Marryat
... a foregone conclusion, but he never winked a lash at the ringing challenge of his opponent. He met his defiance with an eye cold and steady ...
— Ridgway of Montana - (Story of To-Day, in Which the Hero Is Also the Villain) • William MacLeod Raine
... the ball was therefore a foregone conclusion. In French fiction there is invariably a murmur of applause when the heroine enters a room full of people, which fact serves, at all events, to show the breeding and social status of persons with whom ...
— The Sowers • Henry Seton Merriman
... when she heard at Alexandria that the Mukaukas was lately dead, she regarded the game as won. Now they were in Memphis, Orion was sitting before her, and the young man had invited her and her following of above twenty persons to stay in his house. It was a foregone conclusion that the travellers were to accept this bidding as prescribed by the laws of hospitality, and preparations for the move ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... days M'Cord began to take the famous shoot trophies. Time came when this sort of thing was no longer a gamesome event, but a foregone conclusion. His rifle work was a revelation of genius—like the work of a prodigious young pianist or billiardist in the ...
— Son of Power • Will Levington Comfort and Zamin Ki Dost
... sudden and heavy, and drove our columns back upon the main body. The assault had been resolute, as the casualties testify, "one regiment alone losing sixty-four men in as many seconds" (Wheaton); but the darkness, and uncertainty of our officers with regard to the position, made its failure almost a foregone conclusion. This was about daylight. "The force displayed by the enemy was sufficient to show that the intrenchments could not be carried ...
— The Campaign of Chancellorsville • Theodore A. Dodge
... revealed in him.... Christ is in every man.... All may call upon God as a reconciled Father. Human beings are redeemed, not in consequence of any act they have done, of any faith they have exercised; their faith is to be grounded on a foregone conclusion; their acts are to be the fruits of a state ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... us consult a little.' 'Consult! Why should I consult? You have settled everything, you have agreed to everything. You do not come here to consult me; I understand all that; you come here to break a foregone conclusion to ...
— Tancred - Or, The New Crusade • Benjamin Disraeli
... attitude towards the truth, danger to the moral fibre, danger to the progress of man? Take as a hint of it the way the Bible has been treated. People have said that the Bible was absolutely infallible: they have taken that as a foregone conclusion; and then, when they found out beyond question that the world was not created in six days, what have they done? Frankly accepted the truth? No, they have tried to twist the Bible into meaning something different ...
— Our Unitarian Gospel • Minot Savage
... that the suit was a mistake in the first place, and that it was a foregone conclusion the government would be defeated. Also, he offered $5,000 to any one who could explain the ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... awful fate of one Shadow who rebelled against his nature, and sought to remember the past. He said, 'I will remember this eve.' He fought with the genial influences of kindly sleep when the sun rose on the awful dead day of light; and although he could not keep quite awake, he dreamed of the foregone eve, and he never forgot his dream. Then he tried again the next night, and the next, and the next; and he tempted another Shadow to try it with him. But at last their awful fate overtook them; for, instead of continuing to be Shadows, they began to ...
— Cross Purposes and The Shadows • George MacDonald
... Grijalva had found the natives friendly, Cortes found that the Yucatans had resolved to oppose him, and were presently assembled in great numbers. The result of the fighting, however, was naturally a foregone conclusion, partly on account of "the astonishment and terror excited by the destructive effect" of the European firearms, and the "monstrous apparition" of men on horseback. Such quadrupeds they had never seen before, and they concluded that the rider ...
— The Story of Extinct Civilizations of the West • Robert E. Anderson
... instinct and of action. The multitude had sufficiently served his purpose; but their own passions were not appeased, and the queen personified to them all the antagonistic and unpopular forces. The submission of the king was a foregone conclusion: not so the reconciliation of the queen. He said to her, "What are your Majesty's intentions?" She answered, "I know my fate, I mean to die at the feet of the king." Then Lafayette led her forward, in the face of the storm, and, as not a word could be ...
— Lectures on the French Revolution • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... officialdom. His successor, Van Buren, brought the system to a perfection that only the experienced politician could achieve. Van Buren required of all appointees partizan service; and his own nomination, at Baltimore, was made a foregone conclusion by the host of federal job-holders who were delegates. Van Buren simply introduced at Washington the methods ...
— The Boss and the Machine • Samuel P. Orth
... had not been to college never entered her head. There was something in his speech and manner that made it a foregone conclusion. ...
— A Voice in the Wilderness • Grace Livingston Hill
... at present, Juliette represented the perfect embodiment of his most idealistic dreams. She stood in his mind so far above him that if she proved unattainable, he would scarce have suffered. It was such a foregone conclusion. ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... and Alfred Vail joined with Morse in entrusting their interests to Mr. Kendall's care, but F.O.J. Smith preferred to act for himself. This caused much trouble in the future, for it was a foregone conclusion that the honest, upright Kendall and the shifty Smith were bound to come into conflict with each other. The latter, as one of the original patentees, had to be consulted in every sale of patent rights, and Kendall soon found it ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume II • Samuel F. B. Morse
... magical name Thrills to the heart like electric flame; The home of my childhood; the haunts of my prime; All the passions and scenes of that rapturous time When the feelings were young, and the world was new, Like the fresh bowers of Eden unfolding to view; All, all now forsaken, forgotten, foregone! And I, a lone exile remembered of none, My high aims abandoned, my good acts undone, Aweary of all that is under the sun, With that sadness of heart which no stranger may scan, I fly to the desert ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... Milton's 'motes that people the sunbeams'; sometimes in concentrating into a word the main history of any person or thing, past or even future, as in the 'starry Galileo' of Byron, and that ghastly foregone conclusion of the epithet 'murdered' applied to the yet living victim in ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... because Eve was to come, and it was a foregone conclusion even in that early age that when she did appear she would want some one to hold her bouquet, open the door for her, button her gloves, tell her she was pretty and sweet and "I never saw a woman like ...
— Fair to Look Upon • Mary Belle Freeley
... the tenth of March, that miserable moaning noise, which had both foregone and accompanied the rigour, died away from out the air; and we, being now so used to it, thought at first that we must be deaf. And then the fog, which had hung about (even in full sunshine) vanished, and ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... Puritan in his manner or conversation, he seemed to be as strange to the vices of civilization as he was to its virtues. That such a man should offer little to and receive little from the companionship of women of any kind was a foregone conclusion. Without the dignity of solitude, ...
— A Millionaire of Rough-and-Ready • Bret Harte
... more favourable circumstances would be as plain as the other: namely, that our deepest interest is after all to live, and we could not live if all acquisition, assimilation, government, and creation had been made impossible for us by their foregone realisation, so that every operation was forestalled by the given fact. The distinction between the ideal and the real is one which the human ideal itself insists should be preserved. It is an essential expression of life, and its disappearance would ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... unsurpassed. His performances in debate are no concern of mine, for I am speaking of conversation only; but most Members of Parliament will agree that he is the best companion that can be found for the last weary half-hour before the division-bell rings, when some eminent nonentity is declaiming his foregone conclusions to an audience whose whole mind is fixed on the chance of finding a ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... finance the road. It would be better, they urged, to have the control in the hands of men who knew the province rather than in the hands of outsiders. The Grand Trunk Company, seeking incorporation, was only a {75} sham company, under the thumb of the contractors, formed to ratify a foregone contract with them. If the Montreal and Kingston Company was given control, it would invite the Brassey firm to tender on the same basis as other contractors: no more could honestly ...
— The Railway Builders - A Chronicle of Overland Highways • Oscar D. Skelton
... filled not with white-robed ecclesiastics, but with an armed earl and his retainers. Neglected is the little oratory dedicated to Our Lady of Whalley, where night and morn the abbot used to pray. All the old religious and hospitable uses of the abbey are foregone. The reverend stillness of the cloisters, scarce broken by the quiet tread of the monks, is now disturbed by armed heel and clank of sword; while in its saintly courts are heard the ribald song, the profane jest, and the angry brawl. Of the brethren, only those tenanting the ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... candidate to whom a special injustice has been done, and in the case of a popular favorite like Jackson, this might have been foreseen to be irresistible. His election four years later was almost a foregone conclusion, but, as if to make it wholly sure, there came up the rumor of a "corrupt bargain" between the successful candidate and Mr. Clay, whose forces had indeed joined with those of Mr. Adams to make a majority. For General Jackson there could be nothing more ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 4 of 8 • Various
... one of them was a Napoleon; all of them together were not, for that matter. Would the luster of Wellington's fame, which extended from the Ganges to the Ebro, be tarnished when he met the Emperor? It was a foregone conclusion, of course, that Schwarzenberg would command the Austrians; Bluecher, the "Hussar General," the hard-fighting, downright old "Marshal Vorwaerts," the Prussians; and the Emperor Alexander, with his veteran captains, ...
— The Eagle of the Empire - A Story of Waterloo • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... touch with Police Headquarters, so that the Peace Fleet can be armed as we ourselves are, or shall be, armed; for a large and highly efficient fleet will be necessary to do that which must be done. It is, of course, a foregone conclusion that Interplanetary humanity will support the humanity of Callisto ...
— Spacehounds of IPC • Edward Elmer Smith
... himself to be insulted, with worse than impunity to the insulter, by the childish daughter of that chit Susan—an afternoon on which he had raised his hat to Mrs. Prockter—a Saturday afternoon on which he had foregone, on account of a woman, his customary match at bowls—this afternoon was drawing to a close in a manner which piled ...
— Helen with the High Hand (2nd ed.) • Arnold Bennett
... your mind to return," she replied. "What is the use of consulting me with a foregone conclusion? I suppose you think ...
— Endymion • Benjamin Disraeli
... independence was from the first a foregone conclusion to all who impartially studied the geography of this country and the social progress of its inhabitants. The West, with its growing millions vigorously working out the problem of free labor, and of Republicanism, will inevitably ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. VI, June, 1862 - Devoted To Literature and National Policy • Various
... ask is clear evidence, Mr. Dewey. Foregone conclusions have nothing to do with the matter," replied Mr. Wallingford, "If you know yourself to be innocent, you may trust yourself in my hands; if not, I counsel you to look beyond me to some ...
— The Allen House - or Twenty Years Ago and Now • T. S. Arthur
... become subtler, and more rapid, and more absolute in conviction, at the line where reason begins to falter. Take the case of Shakespeare. His surpassing greatness was never acknowledged by the learned until the nation had ascertained and settled it as a foregone and questionless conclusion. Even now, to the most sagacious mind of this time, the real ground and evidence of its own assurance of Shakespeare's supremacy, is the universal, deep, immovable conviction of it in the public feeling. There have been many acute essays ...
— Washington's Birthday • Various
... forebodings of the collapse of the houses of Constable and Ballantyne. In a time of universal confidence and prosperity, the banks had supported them to an extent quite unwarranted by their assets or their trade, and as soon as the banks began to doubt and to enquire, their fall was a foregone conclusion. In December, Scott borrowed L10,000 on the lands of Abbotsford, and advanced that sum to the struggling houses; on January 16, 1826, their ruin, and Scott's with them, were complete. Scott immediately placed his whole affairs in the hands of ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol X • Various
... almost too good to keep, and he laughed softly to himself as he mused upon it. It was truly an inspiration; just the sort of thing to hand out to one of Newport's smart-set. Although he had not yet proposed to her, he regarded their marriage as a foregone conclusion; an event of the near future. She certainly had led him to infer as much, and the plan he had conceived regarding it was highly ingenious—one worthy of his fertile imagination. Directly they were ...
— When Dreams Come True • Ritter Brown
... was a foregone conclusion that if Casper Blue attempted the difficult feat of flying across the lake, after being in the air several long hours, the two Bird boys were determined to keep following after him. It seemed like a game of "conquer," which Andy ...
— The Aeroplane Boys Flight - A Hydroplane Roundup • John Luther Langworthy
... allowing, however. He might object, and did; but he was no match for her either in diplomacy or in fight, and her cajoleries were usually sufficient for her ends, without calling out the reserves behind them. In any contest between selfishness and unselfishness, the result is a foregone conclusion. ...
— Sisters • Ada Cambridge
... commission, before the desired low rates should be secured; that the present Board of Commissioners was only the beginning and that too great results were not expected from them. All this he contrived to mention casually, in the talk, as if it were a foregone conclusion, a matter understood ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... should represent the school and read the address was never even thought of. Hal Bennington was the head boy of the whole college, he was the most popular, the best beloved, he had not an enemy in all the scores of boys within its gates, so of course it was a foregone conclusion. ...
— The Shagganappi • E. Pauline Johnson
... all opposition. At the organization of the new Council for 1869, he was unanimously re-elected president, a fact as complimentary as it is rare, it being the almost invariable custom for each party to vote for its own candidate, even where the result of the election is a foregone conclusion. He was in the same year suggested as the Republican candidate for Mayor, and would undoubtedly have been chosen to that office had he not considered it incompatible with proper attention to the large and rapidly increasing business ...
— Cleveland Past and Present - Its Representative Men, etc. • Maurice Joblin
... acquaintance of the Edes. There it was necessary to hesitate. She did not wish to tell an absolute lie, but was yet desirous to convey the impression that her marriage with Mr. Ede had been forced upon her; but Montgomery had already accepted it as a foregone conclusion. With his fingers twisted through his hair, and his head thrust forward in the position in which we are accustomed to see composers seeking inspiration depicted, he listened, passionately interested. And when it came to telling of the mental struggle she had gone ...
— A Mummer's Wife • George Moore
... Blackburn changed his mind and let him remain. At last the jury was empanelled, containing one man who had loudly proclaimed that he "didn't care what the evidence was, he would hang every d——d Irishman of the lot". In fact, the verdict was a foregone conclusion. The most disreputable evidence was admitted; the suppositions of women of lowest character were accepted as conclusive; the alibi for Maguire— clearly proved, and afterwards accepted by the Crown, a free pardon being issued on the strength of it—was rejected ...
— Autobiographical Sketches • Annie Besant
... with him as a self-made man; Hugh Miller has met with an amount of applause which, little as we wish to diminish it, must not be allowed to blind the public to his defects as a man of science. The truth is, he was so far committed to a foregone conclusion, that he could not become a philosophical geologist. He might be aptly described as a theologian studying geology. The dominant idea with which he wrote, may be seen in the titles of two of his books—Footprints ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... Montcornet. Montcornet would be the embodied ideal of bravery, the type of the cavalry officer, of courage a la Murat. Yes, yes; at the mere sight of that statue all the Emperor's victories were to seem a foregone conclusion. And then such workmanship! The pencil was accommodating and answered ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... jointly with that sight there arose a shrieking, biting, fearful north wind. It blew upon them in cruel menace of conquest, in piercing inclemency. It struck a freezing terror to their hearts, and grew in violent attack until, as if repenting that it had foregone its power to save, the sun suddenly grew red and angry, and spread out a shield of blood along the bastions of the west. The wind shrank back and grew less murderous, and ere the last red arrow shot up behind the lonely western wall of white, ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... Vigorous action against recalcitrants followed, and with such pliant tools as those perjured wretches, Scroggs and Jeffreys, for judge and prosecutor, convictions and the 'extremest punishment of the law' became a foregone conclusion. Doubtless there were many vile scribblers who deserved to have the severest penalties inflicted upon them, but no discrimination was used, and good and bad alike experienced the vengeance of 'divine right.' The aim of the abandoned monarch and ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, Issue 2, February, 1864 • Various
... torturing hand and seized me. My mother had hoped that his miserly nature would have disposed him to let me go, if he could thereby escape the cost of my maintenance. But revenge was too sweet to be foregone. I was dragged away. He did not want her back. He hoped her lover would desert her after awhile, and so accomplish her punishment; but he was true! No, I can never forget my mother's agony when I was torn from her!" he rose and walked to the window, and ...
— A Crooked Path - A Novel • Mrs. Alexander
... him. For her safety he would have given his soul. The term of his guardianship was drawing to an end, in a few months his legal control over her terminated. Miss Craven who had surrendered her independence for two years would be returning to her own home, to her old life; it had seemed a foregone conclusion that ...
— The Shadow of the East • E. M. Hull
... next see them passing down State Street. The clock on the old State House points to high noon, when the Exchange should be in its glory and present the liveliest emblem of what was the sole business of life, as regarded a multitude of the foregone worldlings. It is over now. The Sabbath of eternity has shed its stillness along the street. Not even a newsboy assails the two solitary passers-by with an extra penny- paper from the office of the Times ...
— The New Adam and Eve (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Horace Fewbanks had been caught, he had pointed out sufficient flaws in the police case to shake Rolfe's previous assurance of the legal conviction of Birchill for the crime. The way in which Crewe had pulled the police case to pieces had shown Rolfe that the conviction of Birchill was by no means a foregone conclusion, and had left him a prey to doubts and anxiety which Inspector Chippenfield's subsequent depreciation of the detective's views ...
— The Hampstead Mystery • John R. Watson
... Olcott, the President Founder of Theosophy, in 1907, Mrs. Besant became his successor. So far as the Indian vote was concerned, this was a foregone conclusion; since her avowed sympathy with Hinduism in all its forms had gained for her a strong place in the ...
— India, Its Life and Thought • John P. Jones
... precaution had been taken to give the Maid the fairest trial. But at the same time a trial which is conducted under the name of the Inquisition is always suspect. The mere fact of that terrible name seems to establish a foregone conclusion; few are the prisoners at that bar who have ever escaped. This fact is almost all that can be set against the high character of the individuals who composed the tribunal. At all events it is no argument against the English that they permitted the best men in ...
— Jeanne d'Arc - Her Life And Death • Mrs.(Margaret) Oliphant
... refresh their best purposes, and to learn how more effectively to serve the great ends to which they were pledged. There, liberty of opinion and speech was unlimited, and a refined complacency aimed at; here, loyalty to certain foregone principles and institutions was expected, and a tacit spiritual direction maintained: but in both were found the same delightful moderation, repose, and gracious forbearance; the same reconciling skill; the same indescribable art of ruling and ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... such as Cromwell and Caesar planned for, he was incapable of. His idea of statesmanship was that his kingdom was a cask, into which he should insert a spigot and draw. This was government of an ideal order, Philip being judge. The divine right of kings was a foregone conclusion, antagonism to which was heresy. Here let us not blame Philip; for this was the temper of his era, and to have anticipated in him larger views than those of his contemporaries is not just. To this ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... to all this trouble," spoke up the fair and spirited Mollie, "only for that silly letter my friend in Harmony wrote me, saying that it was a foregone conclusion Harmony would sweep the earth this year because their team had been terribly strengthened. In fact she gave me to understand that everything, even to the crepe, had been ordered for poor ...
— Jack Winters' Gridiron Chums • Mark Overton
... arguments, the voices of the disputants now rising almost to a shout, then laughter, then outbursts of anger from the mistress, a gay retort from him, then dead silence, the sign of restored tranquillity. Vikentev had won the victory, which was indeed a foregone conclusion, for while Vikentev and Marfinka were still uncertain of their feelings, Tatiana Markovna and Marfa Egorovna had long before realised what was coming, and both, although they kept their own counsel, had weighed and considered the matter, and had concluded that the marriage ...
— The Precipice • Ivan Goncharov
... earliest stages of the Southern Rebellion, to judge and announce the hopeless partition of our Union, as an event accomplished and irrevocable. The way in which this judgment was reached and pronounced, the time and circumstances of its utterance, and the foregone conclusions which were drawn from it, gave to it a threatening and mischievous agency, only less prejudicial to our cause, we verily believe, than would have been an open alliance between England and the enemies of the Republic. This haste to announce the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 49, November, 1861 • Various
... now a foregone conclusion that Mr Neeld would fall before temptation and come to Blentmouth. There had been little doubt about it all along; his confession to Iver removed the last real obstacle. The story in Josiah Cholderton's Journal had him in its grip; on the first occasion of trial his resolution ...
— Tristram of Blent - An Episode in the Story of an Ancient House • Anthony Hope
... matters, this seemed not very difficult of accomplishment, as it was a foregone conclusion upon the part of the hunters that the savages would endeavor to ford the river at the point where they lay in ambush for them. It only remained for the Riflemen to bide their time, and, at the proper moment, rush upon and scatter them, and rescue ...
— The Riflemen of the Miami • Edward S. Ellis
... and Olive Fremstad, work and rework their material in the closet until it approaches perfection, when they expose it. To say that there are bad actors following in the footsteps of both these types of geniuses is to be axiomatic and trite. It would be a foregone conclusion. Just as there are musicians who write as easily as Mozart but who have nothing to say, so there are other musicians who write and rewrite, work and rework, study and restudy, and yet what they finally offer ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten
... was drawn from the men's hut and rabbiters' tents; and after a prolonged but inconclusive investigation, the inquest was adjourned for a week. But the seven days were as barren as the first, and a verdict against some person unknown a foregone result. This did not satisfy the many who were positive that they knew the person; for Stingaree had been seen a hundred miles lower down, doubtless on his way back to Victoria, and with his appearance altered in a telltale manner. But the coroner thought he knew ...
— Stingaree • E. W. (Ernest William) Hornung
... she!" they shrilled. "See how they meet, see how they greet! Ah, sweet, sweet, sweet, to meet in the spring!" And that we two would immediately set to nest-building, they considered a foregone conclusion. ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... think of her?" inquired Elfreda Briggs the following morning, poking her head in at Grace's door, a quizzical smile on her round face. Grace and Anne had left the breakfast table a few minutes before Elfreda, who had foregone finishing her breakfast and rushed upstairs to hear her friends' opinion of the tall freshman, who had seemed taller than ever as she stalked uncompromisingly into the dining room that morning in Kathleen West's wake. The newspaper ...
— Grace Harlowe's Fourth Year at Overton College • Jessie Graham Flower
... news was the countdown in process at Canaveral to put a functioning "dome" on the moon. If the dome could be landed successfully, complete with live animals, a man would follow shortly. That was foregone. The question was landing the dome, just a small spaceship body, but completely equipped to keep a man alive for two years, in case anything went wrong with plans ...
— Prologue to an Analogue • Leigh Richmond
... speculations, and so far as they enter into my book, they do so as atmosphere and aim only; they are not permitted to mold the character of the narrative, so that it may illustrate a foregone conclusion. I have related the historical story as simply and directly as I could, making use of the best established authorities. Here and there I have called attention to what seemed to me the significance ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... had taken a great deal of pains with the house—for David's sake—not for hers. They did not care to have her deluded by the idea that they had done it for her sake. David was to them a young god, and with this one supreme idea of his supremacy they wished to impress his young wife. It was a foregone conclusion in their minds that no mere pretty young girl was capable of appreciating David, as could they, who had watched him from babyhood, and pampered and petted and been severe with him by turns, until if he had not had the temper ...
— Marcia Schuyler • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz
... trial, but the facts of the case were not brought out, as the men who were with Cannon were too drunk to remember what had happened the previous night. It was a foregone conclusion that the poor woman was to be hanged, and the leaders of the mob would brook no interference. A physician examined Juanita and announced to the mob that she was in a condition that demanded the highest sympathy ...
— Death Valley in '49 • William Lewis Manly
... tenor of mention, but much more pronounced, by men of the party, and Mr. Arthur's nomination previous to the assembling of the next Presidential Convention seemed a foregone conclusion. ...
— Shadow and Light - An Autobiography with Reminiscences of the Last and Present Century • Mifflin Wistar Gibbs
... and fully discharge their duties." From these last words the Emperor appeared to have forgot that when there are duties to be fulfilled prayer alone will not suffice. His speech at the opening of the legislative session, 7th March, 1860, showed that either irresistible illusion or a foregone conclusion of complicity guided his Italian policy. He accused the Catholics of becoming excited without grounds, and of ingratitude towards him. The logic of events, so plain to all besides, was a dead letter to the imperial ...
— Pius IX. And His Time • The Rev. AEneas MacDonell
... self-stereotyped thinking is unfavourable to revelation, whether through his fellows, or direct from the divine. If there be a divine quarter, those must be opener to its influences who are not frozen in their own dullness, cased in their own habits, bound by their own pride to foregone conclusions, or shut up in the completeness of human error, theorizing beyond their knowledge ...
— There & Back • George MacDonald
... arrival here a most pressing and cordial invitation from Sydney Smith (I cannot call him Mr.) to Combe Flory, which, like many other pleasant things, must be foregone. Pray, if you are with him when or after you receive this, thank him again for his kindness and courtesy to us. I did not quite like him, you know, when first I met him at Rogers's; but that was Lady Holland's fault; even now, ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... State alone, but the Nation—and thus so accentuate and enhance his availability as a candidate for the Democratic Presidential nomination of 1860, as to make his nomination and election to the Presidency of the United States an almost foregone conclusion. ...
— The Great Conspiracy, Complete • John Alexander Logan
... all his good spirits, or fail in his part of a conversation composed chiefly of what we now call chaff, both of them for a time avoiding all such topics as might lead to dispute, the one from a sense of wrong already done, the other from a vague feeling that he was under the protection of the foregone injury. ...
— St. George and St. Michael • George MacDonald
... in masses and holy water, the option offered to the will by Pascal is not a living option. Certainly no Turk ever took to masses and holy water on its account; and even to us Protestants these means of salvation seem such foregone impossibilities that Pascal's logic, invoked for them specifically, leaves us unmoved. As well might the Mahdi write to us, saying, "I am the Expected One whom God has created in his effulgence. You shall be infinitely happy if you confess me; otherwise you shall be cut off from the ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... Unionists 273, the Nationalists 82, and the Laborites 41. The Asquith government found itself still in power, but absolutely dependent upon the co-operation of the Labor and Nationalist groups. Upon the great issues involved there was no very clear pronouncement, but it was a foregone conclusion that the tax proposals would be enacted, that some reconstitution of the House of Lords would be undertaken, and that free trade would not yet ...
— The Governments of Europe • Frederic Austin Ogg |
