"Indestructible" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... down under his chin with a handkerchief, the side rims over his ears like flaps, and, for the rest, presenting the appearance of a coal-scuttle bonnet behind, as well as in front. We followed its peculiar aspect. Driving on under this indestructible headgear, he flickered in and out of the world, while, with entwined arms and leaning back against the wind with all our might, Seraphina and myself were borne along in his train. He knew of a shelter; ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... life of the body ceases and the body itself is burned and its ashes scattered to the winds and waves, the infinitesimal, imponderable, and indestructible something we call the soul is known to lose itself in a sunbeam and make for the sun, with all its memories about it, that it may then receive further development, fitting it for other systems altogether beyond conception; and the longer it has lived in Mars ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... she has turned from me to another? Is my love then in the power of fortune, or of her caprice? No, I will have it lasting as it is pure; and I will make a Goddess of her, and build a temple to her in my heart, and worship her on indestructible altars, and raise statues to her: and my homage shall be unblemished as her unrivalled symmetry of form; and when that fails, the memory of it shall survive; and my bosom shall be proof to scorn, as hers has been to pity; and I will pursue her with an unrelenting ...
— Liber Amoris, or, The New Pygmalion • William Hazlitt
... the Soul, not less than a roof over the head. Even in this response to primary need there was something spiritual which carried it beyond provision for the body; as the men of Egypt, for instance, wanted an indestructible resting-place, and so built the pyramids. As Capart says, prehistoric art shows that this utilitarian purpose was in almost every case blended with a religious, or at least a magical, purpose.[1] The spiritual instinct, in seeking to ...
— The Builders - A Story and Study of Masonry • Joseph Fort Newton
... days of youth, he saw in memory not only Frederica but the scenery around her. He said (Wahrheit und Dichtung): 'Her figure never looked more charming than when she was moving along a raised footpath; the charm of her bearing seemed to vie with the flowering ground, and the indestructible cheerfulness of her face with the blue sky.' In Alsace ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese
... life of nations, and terminates in the equal claim of every man to be unhindered by man in the fulfilment of duty to God[34]—a doctrine laden with storm and havoc, which is the secret essence of the Rights of Man, and the indestructible soul of Revolution. ...
— A Lecture on the Study of History • Lord Acton
... could pay for this great affection which all the men ran after. After the speaker has declared never from any man loved by her, to have solicited any present or gift, and that she rested perfectly contented to live in their hearts, that she would there curl herself up with indestructible and ineffable pleasure, finding herself richer with this heart than with anything, and thinking of no other thing than to give them more pleasure and happiness than she received from them. But in spite of the iterated refusals of the speaker her lovers persisted in graciously rewarding ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 2 • Honore de Balzac
... her dreamy habits, her indifference, and her incapacity of comprehending natures unlike her own. Would endowment of character explain it—that faculty which we could not change, give, or take? Character was a mysterious and indestructible fact, and a fact that I had had little respect for. Upon what a false basis I had gone—a basis of extremes. I had seen men as trees ...
— The Morgesons • Elizabeth Stoddard
... pale and crushed Peace Shall take the color of the living rose, Hearing the voice of his protecting love That comes to lift her beauty from the dust And on that ground volcanic nobly build Her temple indestructible! There shall his kingly mind find outward means To write sublimity upon the world, And like old Egypt speak in pyramids To nations unbegot in dream of Time! And can you shock the hour with hesitation? Ask all the waiting world,—ay, ...
— Semiramis and Other Plays - Semiramis, Carlotta And The Poet • Olive Tilford Dargan
... sunshine of the outward world came through the windows, hundreds of feet aloft, and fell upon the beautiful inlaid pavement. . . . . Against a pillar, on one side of the nave, is a mosaic copy of Raphael's Transfiguration, fitly framed within a great arch of gorgeous marble; and, no doubt, the indestructible mosaic has preserved it far more completely than the fading and darkening tints in which the artist painted it. At any rate, it seemed to me the one glorious picture that I have ever seen. The pillar ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... are not to be mistaken; the changes in him caused by age bring into clearer light the indestructible individuality, and no difference of circumstance or position has any effect upon this distinctive character: whether he is the lover, Romeo; the murderer, Macbeth; the courtier, Hamlet; or the warrior, ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... man may not be compared to a lyre and his soul to its harmony, a harmony which ceases to exist when the instrument is broken. Using more modern terms, we may ask whether the soul is the resultant of the forces of the bodily organism, or whether it is the indestructible and mysterious motor which produces the ...
— Mrs. Piper & the Society for Psychical Research • Michael Sage
... have ever known,—and not only industrious, but neat, conscientious, and rapid. Machines, with iron frames and wheels, had not then been invented; but since they have, I have never seen a better one than my mother. Her frame, if not of iron, seemed quite as indestructible, even if it did turn out fewer stitches. Times without number has she sat up till midnight, plying her needle by the dull light of a common candle: for there was no gas in our suburban district. While we children were sound asleep, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865 • Various
... the girl grew in health and stature, she tried, tenderly, strenuously, to discipline the sensitive nature, bursting her heart with grief at times because she knew that these high feelings and delicate powers came through a long line of ancestral tendencies, as indestructible as perilous and joyous. ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... than first-class mahogany, yet if of good picked quality, dry and sound, and properly tongued and framed, there is not much to fear, and its light and elegant appearance is a great gain in a large room, added to this it improves by age and is practically indestructible. ...
— Practical Taxidermy • Montagu Browne
... given to war. We are dealing with early ages; nation-MAKING is the occupation of man in these ages, and it is war that makes nations. Nation-CHANGING comes afterwards, and is mostly effected by peaceful revolution, though even then war, too, plays its part. The idea of an indestructible nation is a modern idea; in early ages all nations were destructible, and the further we go back, the more incessant was the work of destruction. The internal decoration of nations is a sort of secondary process, which succeeds when the main forces that create nations have principally ...
— Physics and Politics, or, Thoughts on the application of the principles of "natural selection" and "inheritance" to political society • Walter Bagehot
... which particular things partake of. Not being particular, it cannot itself exist in the world of sense. Moreover it is not fleeting or changeable like the things of sense: it is eternally itself, immutable and indestructible. ...
— The Problems of Philosophy • Bertrand Russell
... was it treated like the latter with a specially prepared material. The material employed for the walls was admirably suited for the purpose, being when dry almost as hard as sandstone and practically indestructible. The manner in which such walls disintegrate under atmospheric influences has already been set forth in detail in this report. An inhabited structure with walls like these would last indefinitely, provided occupancy ...
— Casa Grande Ruin • Cosmos Mindeleff
... disappeared, nay after the atoms of earth and sun and all his attending planets of our system shall have amalgamated themselves with other systems in the boundlessness of space; destroyed, obliterated, annihilated, they shall never be, for matter is indestructible. When it passes from one form it enters another; the dead animal that is cast into the earth lives again in the trees and shrubs and flowers and grasses that grow in the earth above where its body was cast. Our earth shall die in course of time, that is, its particles ...
— Marvels of Modern Science • Paul Severing
... learned judges to conclude it wise and prudent to refer this whole matter to the Supreme Court. And the generous offer of the entire bar of New-York City to assist, in turns, in every trial, should remain evermore an indestructible monument to their unselfish devotion to their city, the existence of which was threatened by less than a score of ...
— History of the Negro Race in America From 1619 to 1880. Vol 1 - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George W. Williams
... Norsemen above other nations is, generally speaking, an indestructible self-respect and force of individuality. The old Norse sagas abound in illustrations of this untamable vigor and ruthless self-assertion. It was the looseness of the social structure, resulting from this sense of independence and consequent jealousy and internecine ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... was carefully spread out before the fire, and over this a plain tablecloth was laid. Then the dishes, which were all indestructible, were placed in position, and the fat meat, strong tea, and hot rolls or buns were vigorously attacked by Mr Ross and the boys. While they were thus enjoying their meal the rest of the party, not ...
— Winter Adventures of Three Boys • Egerton R. Young
... soon break, and projecting in every direction, make it difficult to handle. We had an abundance of this palm growing on the hill-side, as it prefers higher land than the cocoa-nut. Its most valuable property is, being almost indestructible in water. Among the fibres there are some coarser ones, with which the Dyaks of Borneo manufacture arrows for their blow-pipes, and occasionally the Malays use them for pins. Interwoven with them is a mass of small fibre almost as soft as cotton. This, from its combustible nature, is used ...
— In the Eastern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston
... victories had by this time marked him out in the eyes of the Egyptians as the favourite of Heaven, their predestined monarch and ruler. Accordingly, Heliopolis received him gladly, hailing him as "the indestructible Horus"—he was allowed to bathe in the sacred lake within the precincts of the great temple, to offer sacrifice to Ra, and to enter through the folding-doors into the central shrine, where were laid up the ...
— Ancient Egypt • George Rawlinson
... profession had not brought him in contact more than very infrequently with people of this sort, and his personal interests never could be made to do so with results perfectly satisfactory to himself. There it was,—the thing those lucky elect possessed without a thought or an effort. It was an indestructible possession, apparently, too. You couldn't throw it away. Dissipation, dishonesty, even a total collapse that brought its victim down to the sink that he himself had sprouted from, seemed powerless ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... cocoon cannot be reeled. But it can be carded, and if the Chinese can make excellent silk goods from it, why cannot we? I suspect, too, that Cynthia silk can be worked in with cotton, or, perhaps, woolen goods, adding to their beauty and durability (for it is indestructible in wear), and thus open up ...
— Scientific American, Volume XXIV., No. 12, March 18, 1871 • Various
... tumultuous bosom at high tide, leaves it in peace at ebb, rushes back to it eagerly again, plays with it in sunshine, surges round it in storm, almost crushing the massive thing. But the pledge once given is never withdrawn. Buildings may rise and fall, but a solid wharf is almost indestructible. Even if it seems destroyed, its materials are all there. This shore might be swept away, these piers be submerged or dashed asunder, still every brick and stone would remain. Half the wharves of Oldport were ruined in the great ...
— Oldport Days • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... be taught to be careful of books and toys. The indestructible book, generally falsely so called, is often responsible for the immediate dissolution of all others less protected which come to hand. The sympathy which little children have with the sufferings of all inanimate objects and their habit of endowing them with their own ...
— The Nervous Child • Hector Charles Cameron
... sweeping the coffers of the rich, or invading the cottages of the poor—all this material wealth may easily be repaired. If the nation remains with its moral and intellectual strength, brighter and larger and more indestructible possessions than the first will soon replace them. On the three great pillars of American society—equality of right, community of interest, and reciprocity of duty, rests this great Republic. Riches and honor and length of days will mark the nation which rests on ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... a part of the great cosmic system of things, and that all the material and all the forces that make up my being are as indestructible as the great Cosmos itself—all that is physical must remain in some form. But consciousness, the real Me, is not physical, but an effect of the physical. It is really no more a thing than "a child's curlicue cut by a burnt stick in the ...
— The Last Harvest • John Burroughs
... seeking for analogies to his mythology and cosmogony, to resort to the era of that primal reconstruction of the theory of a Deity, when the human philosophy in the oriental world ascribed the godship of the universe to the subtile, ineffable, and indestructible essences of fire and light, as revealed in the sun. Such were the errors of the search for divine truth, power, and a controllable Deity, which early developed themselves in the dogmas of the Assyrians, Egyptians, Persians, and wandering ...
— The Myth of Hiawatha, and Other Oral Legends, Mythologic and Allegoric, of the North American Indians • Henry R. Schoolcraft
... Porter, he forbore to quote in his published article; but as the good old gentleman (unless he has lived to be more than one hundred and twenty years old) must have gone to the place where treasures are indestructible, I will reproduce it now. "This tassel," says my father, "Mr. Porter told us (with a quiet chuckle and humorous self-gratulation), he had personally stolen, and really, for my part, though I hope I would not have done it myself, I thought it no sin in him—such valuables being attracted by ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... difference between these two illustrious men in the excessive difficulty one had to conquer and the abundance with which the other carried on his work to the end. Bolivar, during several periods of the war, had no resources at all, nor did he know where to get them; his indestructible love for his country, the sense of honor active in his breast, the fertile imagination, the supreme will, the prodigious activities which formed his character, inspired in him wisdom to turn the impossibility into a reality.... North America was rich, civilized and powerful even ...
— Simon Bolivar, the Liberator • Guillermo A. Sherwell
... is to say, the present lifeboat—differs from all other boats in four particulars:—1. It is almost indestructible. 2. It is insubmergible. 3. It is self-righting. 4. It is self-emptying. In other words, it can hardly be destroyed; it cannot be sunk; it rights itself if upset; it empties itself if filled. Let us illustrate these points in succession. Here is ...
— Saved by the Lifeboat • R.M. Ballantyne
... however, has been marked by certain great romantic passions that seem endowed with indestructible vitality. The romance of discovery, the fascination of the forest and sea, the sense of danger and mystery once aroused by the very word "redskin," have all moulded and will continue to mould the national imagination. How completely the romance of discovery may be fused with the glow of humanitarian ...
— The American Mind - The E. T. Earl Lectures • Bliss Perry
... have got to come right up against the hard facts of Nature sometimes. They've got to be stripped of their top layer and see it stripped off other people, and to recognize the fact that every one has got a core of Primitive Man or of Primitive Woman in them; a perfectly unalterable, indestructible core. And the people who refuse to recognize that aren't elevated and refined, but simply stupid and obstinate ...
— The Invader - A Novel • Margaret L. Woods
... own grounds, those of expediency, it might be objected that a bargain which on one side you allow to be discreditable leaves the legacy of an indestructible desire on that side to wipe out the discredit by tearing it up. Though Cavour became great by his connection with a movement which, before all things, was swayed by sentiment, he never entirely recognised the part that sentiment plays in ...
— Cavour • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... been a necessary condition of its susceptibility to pleasure; a supposition which avails nothing on the theory of an omnipotent Creator, but is an extremely probable one in the case of a Contriver working under the limitation of inexorable laws and indestructible properties ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... human body...in miniature... every organ intact by means of... process... rendered indestructible. Tcheriapin as he was in life may be seen by the curious ten thousand years hence. Incomplete... one respect... here ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer
... aroused Macker's sense of humor. "Why don't we give the creature an entirely new body? We could replace the flesh and viscera, as well as the cartilaginous structure, with our own type substance. It would probably be an indestructible being as far as its own world is concerned. And it would be as powerful as their mightiest machines. We'd leave behind us a superman that could change the course of this world's history. You could do it, couldn't ...
— Vital Ingredient • Charles V. De Vet
... and will know the future, the far, far future. Perchance the dream is true, and he does indeed possess what for convenience is called an immortal soul, that may manifest itself in one shape or another; that may sleep for ages, but, waking or sleeping, still remains itself, indestructible as the ...
— Smith and the Pharaohs, and Other Tales • Henry Rider Haggard
... will explain: When the king saw that our actions had life, and that there was much virtue in them and much vice, and that the soul and body, although not, like the Gods of popular opinion, eternal, yet having once come into existence, were indestructible (for if either of them had been destroyed, there would have been no generation of living beings); and when he observed that the good of the soul was ever by nature designed to profit men, and the evil to harm them—he, seeing all ...
— Laws • Plato
... permanent thing in life; and if truth, beauty, goodness, and love, are to have permanence they must depend for their permanence not upon some imaginary law in a universe half-created by personality but upon the indestructible nature of personality itself. ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... they be uttered in a humble spirit. The common lot of man is, after death—oblivion. Yet genius, however small its sphere, if conversant with the conditions of the human heart, may vivify with indestructible life some happy delineations, that shall continue to be held dear by successive sorrowers in this vale of tears. If the name of the delineator continue to have something sacred in its sound—obscure to the many as it may be, or ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... patient outline breathed only wakefulness and expectation,—a long-deferred, yet constant expectation,—a hope that would have been despair, save that it was just within hope's limits,—a monotonous, reiterate, indestructible chord in the creature's mystic existence, that, once struck by some mighty, shrouded Hand of Power, still reverberated, and trailed its still renewing echoes through every fibre of its secret habitation. Nor yet ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... Scott was re-creating the novel; Lamb was re-creating the human document; and Hazlitt, Coleridge, Leigh Hunt, and others were re-creating criticism. Sparks are flying all about the place, and it will be not less than a miracle if something combustible and indestructible in ...
— Literary Taste: How to Form It • Arnold Bennett
... man is a triplicity of persons; that is, he contains in his indestructible unity, three principles or aspects, which he calls life, soul and mind; in other words, ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... as if in consternation at possibilities. Ethelberta, having already become an influence in Christopher's system, might soon become more—an indestructible fascination—to drag him about, turn his soul inside out, harrow him, twist him, and otherwise torment him, according to the stereotyped form ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy
... here described, appears to be the terra puzzuolana or terras, a compound of lime and oxid of iron, which forms an indestructible cement, even under water; and the remarkably light stones ejected from the volcano, and used in the construction of their vault, were ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 1 • Robert Kerr
... dissolution of any living organism is but one stage in the process of its further development; and whether it passes into a new form of self-conscious life, or is reabsorbed into the infinite, it still forms an indestructible element in the vast sum of Being. We may, therefore, or, rather, we must, leave our future state to be determined by Nature's inexorable laws, and we need, at least, fear no Being higher than Nature, ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan
... oppressors," we ought not to wonder that some of the Greeks should be mean, perfidious, and dissembling, but rather that any (as Mr. Gordon says) "had courage to adhere to their religion, and to eat the bread of affliction." But noble aspirations are fortunately indestructible in human nature. And in Greece the lamp of independence of spirit had been partially kept alive by the existence of a native militia, to whom the Ottoman government, out of mere necessity, had committed the local defence. These were called Armatoles (or Gendarmerie); their available ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... the best type of orthodox piety, and zealous to vindicate his master from the charge of irreligion,—Xenophon, in all the story of the master's life and death, gives not a hint of any future hope. But Plato developed the idea that in man there resides an essential, indestructible principle, superior to the physical frame which is its home and may be either its servant or master—a principle which manifests itself in thought, aspiration, virtue; which has existed before the body and will ...
— The Chief End of Man • George S. Merriam
... dead. Every word she uttered—every idea she formed and expressed, was an inexhaustible and indestructible impulse." He paused, considered a little further, and relapsed into gloom, adding, "and the dozen others whose names will be with hers in the 'Times' to-morrow? Their words too are still in the air, to endure ...
— An Unsocial Socialist • George Bernard Shaw
... doubt of Thy children whom the time commands to try all things in the place of the unquestioning faith of earlier and simpler-hearted generations? We too have need of Thee. Thy martyrs in other ages were cast into the flames, but no fire could touch their immortal and indestructible faith. We sit in safety and in peace, so far as these poor bodies are concerned; but our cherished beliefs, the hopes, the trust that stayed the hearts of those we loved who have gone before us, are cast into the fiery furnace of an age which is fast turning to dross the certainties ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... to deal with them and went back to Brussels as a pupil teacher, alone. She went in an agony of self-reproach, desiring more and more knowledge, a perfect, inalienable, indestructible possession of the German language, and wondering whether it were right to satisfy that indomitable craving. By giving utterance to this self-reproach, so passionate, so immense, so disproportioned to the crime, the innocent ...
— The Three Brontes • May Sinclair
... ardent love, be blotted out and die. Within my soul I feel the end of thy distracted power, heavenly freedom, hailed return. In wild sorrow I recognise thy distance from our home, thy hostility towards the ancient glorious heaven. In vain are thy tumult and thy rage. Indestructible remains the cross—a victorious banner ...
— Peter Schlemihl etc. • Chamisso et. al.
... Buddha and receives full intuitive knowledge. In this respect the Tantric school resembles the teaching of Bodhidharma but not in detail. It teaches that Vairocana is the whole world, which is divided into Garbhadhatu (material) and Vajradhatu (indestructible), the two together forming Dharmadhatu. The manifestations of Vairocana's body to himself—that is Buddhas and Bodhisattvas—are represented symbolically by diagrams of several circles.[848] But it would be out of place to dwell further on the dogmatic theology of the school, ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, An Historical Sketch, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Charles Eliot
... wandering Jews, "sated with contempt," these shrewd eager fanatics, these sensual ascetics, these human paradoxes, adaptive to every environment, energizing in every field of activity, omnipresent like sonic great natural force, indestructible and almost inconvertible, surviving—with the incurable optimism that overlay all their poetic sadness—Babylon and Carthage, Greece and Rome; involuntarily financing the Crusades, outliving the Inquisition, illusive of all baits, unshaken by all persecutions—at once the ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... be strong. And because you are strong, and almost indestructible, you suddenly decide that you can now get your revenge on the people who have ...
— Pagan Passions • Gordon Randall Garrett
... haemorrhage, was, however, accompanied by a large mortality, and it finally evolved into the simple removal of the gland, or its obliteration by pressure or violence. Bergmann conveys the idea that circumcision was at one time the indestructible marking and the distinctive feature of the slave, the mind of the period not being able to emancipate itself from the idea that the genitals must in some manner be mutilated, not being able to conceive any other degrading mark of ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... steady glance of his keen eyes, and a sense of some indestructible force within me gave me ...
— A Romance of Two Worlds • Marie Corelli
... me admiringly. With three hundred almost indestructible androids on the loose I was the big brave hero. I grinned at them and hoped they couldn't see the sweat on my face. Then I walked over to the ...
— Robots of the World! Arise! • Mari Wolf
... line the walls on either side of us as we pass also seem to be in the nature of receptacles for the dead. For the most part they are sarcophagi of granite, proud and indestructible: some of them, in the shape of gigantic boxes, are laid out in line on pedestals; others, in the form of mummies, stand upright against the walls and display enormous faces, surmounted by equally enormous head-dresses. Assembled there they look like a lot of malformed giants, with ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti
... says that war is a recrudescence (and a mastery over us) of a more primitive life than our own. The child and the primitive man, as we have long known them in the Freudian theories, live still in us and are indestructible. We have supposed ourselves to have overcome these primitive impulses, but we are far from being so civilized as we thought. The evil impulses, as we call them, which we supposed had at least been transformed are changed only in the ...
— The Psychology of Nations - A Contribution to the Philosophy of History • G.E. Partridge
... substances; in its own way and time it dissipates all things that are not harmonious with itself. No lesser or feebler principle would have survived the tests to which this has been subjected; but this is indestructible; even we could not destroy it if we would, for it is no inalienable possession of our own, but a gift from on High to the whole of mankind. But let us piously and proudly remember that it was through ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... of feeling the steady pulse of the Spirit of the Universe throbbing through one's own veins and arteries,—the quiet yet exultant sense of knowing instinctively beyond all formulated theory or dogma, that one is a vital part of the immortal Entity, as indestructible as Itself. And a great calm was gradually taking possession of his soul,—a smoothing of all the waves of his emotional and nervous temperament. Under this mystic touch of unseen and uncomprehended heavenly ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... us love can die; With life all other passions fly, All others are but vanity. . . . . . Love is indestructible, Its holy flame forever burneth; From heaven it came, to heaven returneth. . . . . . It soweth here with toil and care, But the harvest-time of ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett
... consequence of recent outrages at the Royal Academy the Council is reported to be testing "unbreakable glass." No doubt the Indestructible Paint ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, May 20, 1914 • Various
... last surviving backbiting of the Faubourg Saint Germain. As a bond of union between the past and the present, she brought not to France alone, but to all Europe, stability and repose, and rendered the foundations of the Imperial edifice firm and indestructible. The Emperor's marriage seemed his greatest triumph. For her part, Marie Louise was pleased with her new throne. Surrounded as she was by a chosen society, having in her service the proudest names of the French, the Belgian, the Italian nobility; ...
— The Happy Days of the Empress Marie Louise • Imbert De Saint-Amand
... preserved, through all his minor adventures, his faith in the great adventure to come. It was this faith that made him so easy a victim when love had at last appeared clad in the attributes of romance: the imaginative man's indestructible dream of ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... catch one's breath. For it is not true to manners, which are constantly false, or to facts, which are almost always false; it is true to the only existing thing which is true, emotion, the irreducible minimum, the indestructible germ. It would not matter a single straw if a Bronte story were a hundred times more moonstruck and improbable than 'Jane Eyre,' or a hundred times more moonstruck and improbable than 'Wuthering Heights.' It would not matter if George Read stood on his head, and ...
— Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton
... then become the wires over which there passes into form a finer substance, and our body is rebuilt and fashioned from the indestructible substance of ...
— Freedom Talks No. II • Julia Seton, M.D.
... is the test of what virtue there is in it. False men leave no mark. It is truth alone which does the masonry of the world,—which founds empires, and builds cities, and establishes laws, commerce, and civilization. And in private life the same law abides, indestructible as God. Carlyle's teaching tends altogether in this direction; and whilst he belongs to no church and no creed, he is tolerant of all, and of everything that is heartily and unfeignedly believed in by his fellows. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... trees over there—and right away it exists, it is, it has solidity, mass, life. Then suddenly comes a flash of lightning, a second of light, and he is astounded, absolutely astounded to see the real landscape different from that indestructible thing that his mind had built. Thus it was with me. I had judged, oh, I had judged him thoroughly, sized him up to a certainty, and bang, came the flare of this new fact, this extremely commonplace fact, and I was all off. I must begin to judge again, only it ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... dreams of gaiety and delight which her life in the North had denied her, had driven her back upon the elemental that was only latent in her. Coqueline was her all now. Nita clung to her baby as the one indestructible link with that purity of life which no woman, however fallen, can ever wholly disregard, or forget. The child was a sheet-anchor for all time. Whatever the future had in store, little Coqueline was her child, born in wedlock, the pledge ...
— The Heart of Unaga • Ridgwell Cullum
... who, anticipating such intolerable feelings, in order to avoid all partial resignations, resign themselves universally once for all. Such persons convince themselves with regard to the eternal, necessary, law-governed order of things, and seek to acquire ideas which are indestructible and are only confirmed by the contemplation of that which ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... too, that she would find but sleep. And now it was otherwise, for in her heart she did not believe that she was about utterly to perish. What, could the body live on in a thousand forms, changed indeed but indestructible and immortal, while the spiritual part, with all its hopes and loves and fears, melted into nothingness? It could not be; surely on some new shore she should once again greet her love. And if it was not, how would they meet her in that under world, coming self-murdered, ...
— Beatrice • H. Rider Haggard
... my point of view; from the point of view you pretend to have been serving for the last eleven years. I will try not to talk above your head. The sensibilities of the class you are attacking are soon blunted. Property seems to them an indestructible thing. You can't count upon their emotions either of pity or fear for very long. A bomb outrage to have any influence on public opinion now must go beyond the intention of vengeance or terrorism. It must be purely destructive. It must be that, and only that, beyond the faintest ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad
... Therefore, although the other continents have long feared this propaganda, it is to be hoped that she will carry out her program of love and of fraternization, because thus America will have established international and economic relations with the entire world upon indestructible foundations. ...
— Latin America and the United States - Addresses by Elihu Root • Elihu Root
... perceptions of matter, and to whom do they belong? This question leads us to speak of the circumstance which renders the metaphysical doctrine of perception so truly valuable. This doctrine is valuable chiefly on account of the indestructible foundation which it affords to the a priori argument in favour of the existence of God. The substance of the argument is this,—matter is the perception of matter. The perception of matter does not belong to man; it is no ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 • Various
... the other hand many factories make only the heavy, indestructible china used in hotels and restaurants. This variety is a business in itself. The ware is non-absorbent and is considered very hygienic. Toilet sets as well as dishes are made from this especial sort of clay. So you see each plant has its own particular specialty which ...
— The Story of Porcelain • Sara Ware Bassett
... undeniable and the mind of man can never wholly escape it. Familiarity may temper, but inborn human superstition is indestructible. The brooding silence will shadow the lightest nature. The storms must ever inspire wonder. The gloom hushes the voice. And so the growing dread. Man may curse the hills in his brutal moments, the thoughtful may be driven to despair, the laughter-loving may seek solace ...
— The Golden Woman - A Story of the Montana Hills • Ridgwell Cullum
... became a link in the magic chain, he himself became a Kabir. He was admitted into an indestructible association and, as ancient inscriptions express it, joined to the army of the higher gods" (Schelling, Philosophie der Offenbarung). And the revolution that took place in the life of one who received initiation cannot be more significantly described than ...
— Christianity As A Mystical Fact - And The Mysteries of Antiquity • Rudolf Steiner
... "Living beings are made up of these molecules, which exist in countless numbers, which may be separated but cannot be destroyed, which pierce into brute matter, and, working there, develop, it may be animals, it may be plants, according to the nature of the matter in which they are lodged. These indestructible molecules circulate throughout the universe, pass from one being to another, minister to the continuance of life, provide for nutrition and the growth of the individual, and determine the reproduction of ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... father? Wilt thou not haste past the things which haste pass thee, and attach thyself to that which endureth? Wilt thou not prefer a home land to a foreign land, light to darkness, the spirit to the flesh, eternal life to the shadow of death, the indestructible to the fleeting? Wilt thou not escape from the grievous bondage of the cruel prince of this world, I mean the evil one, the devil, and become the servant of the good, tenderhearted, and all merciful Lord? Wilt thou not break away from serving thy many gods, falsely so called, ...
— Barlaam and Ioasaph • St. John of Damascus
... who, without confessing it, are susceptible in varying degrees to impressions of this sort. And do not such people often, because of an old stone wall, a garden known and loved since childhood, an old terrace which has become in indestructible part of their memory, or an old tree that has not changed form within their lives, seek a warrant for their own ...
— The Story of a Child • Pierre Loti
... answer shows the nobler influence of the Church in maintaining the rigid rule of law as opposed to arbitrary government, and its large sense that general order was to be preferred to private good. He laid down that an archbishop's spiritual rights are indestructible; that in all cases submission to law was the highest duty; and that it was better humbly to accept even a harsh sentence than to set an evil example of disobedience by which others might be led to their ruin. In 1167 the clergy had been called to London to swear fealty to ...
— Henry the Second • Mrs. J. R. Green
... often told me of the horror she felt as a girl lest she should throw a spoonful of soup over a Raphael or by an accident run a knife or a fork into the immortal canvas! She had not learnt that pictures are about the most indestructible things in ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... earth, of the Gandharvas and the Rakshasas. It also contains the life and actions of the one God, holy, immutable, and true,—who is Krishna, who is the creator and the ruler of this universe; who is seeking the welfare of his creation by means of his incomparable and indestructible power; whose actions are celebrated by all sages; who has bound human beings in a chain, of which one end is life and the other death; on whom the Rishis meditate, and a knowledge of whom imparts unalloyed happiness ...
— Indian Poetry • Edwin Arnold
... was ravaged, though Mary had sinned the sin. True, pallor and pain were visible in Mary's face, even in the disguising light of that strange hour and place, but back of it Kate perceived her indestructible frivolity. She surmised how rapidly the scenes of Mary's drama would succeed each other; how remorse would yield to regret, regret to diminishing grief, grief to hope, hope to fresh adventures with life. Here in all verity was "the eternal feminine," ...
— The Precipice • Elia Wilkinson Peattie
... one another, listening to the beating of their hearts, mingling their love with the sweet clearness of the summer nights, and so united that by the simple power of their love, they would easily divine each other's inmost thoughts. And that would endure indefinitely, in the serenity of an indestructible affection. ...
— The works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 5 (of 8) - Une Vie and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant 1850-1893
... other distinguished personages. Crowding footsteps of the poor have obliterated the record in many a noble house abandoned by history; even the fated steps of the Queen save in one bloodstained closet have left but little authentic trace. But Knox is still present with all the force of an indestructible individuality—in the existing life of the country which took so strong an impression from him, and in the absolutely personal facts of the church in which he preached, the house in which he lived, the stone ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... uniformly dense plenum, the properties of which are those of a perfect fluid, the molecule itself being nothing but a certain motion impressed on a portion of this fluid, and this motion is shewn, by a theorem due to Helmholtz, to be as indestructible as we believe a ...
— Five of Maxwell's Papers • James Clerk Maxwell
... mind, that intelligence is a self-development, not a quality supervening to a substance, we may abstract from all degree, and for the purpose of philosophic construction reduce it to kind, under the idea of an indestructible power with two opposite and counteracting forces, which by a metaphor borrowed from astronomy, we may call the centrifugal and centripetal forces. The intelligence in the one tends to objectize itself, and in the other to know itself in the object. It will be hereafter my business to construct by ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... Mohammedans (I forget which), believe that there is one little bone of our body,—one of the vertebrae, if I remember rightly,—which will never decay and turn to dust, but will lie incorrupt and indestructible in the ground until the Last Day: this is the Seed of the Soul. The most depraved have also their Seed of the Holiness that shall one day overcome their evil; their one good quality, lurking hidden, but safe, among all the corrupt ...
— Mary Barton • Elizabeth Gaskell
... the fortitude, inspiration, enthusiasm, exalted purpose, indestructible hope, and unconquerable faith of the Covenanters under the cruel treatment and prolonged persecution they endured, we must reach the conclusion that their strength lay in their Covenanted union with the Lord ...
— Sketches of the Covenanters • J. C. McFeeters
... osteology of the elephant, materials are of course abundant in the indestructible remains of the animal: but the study of the intestines, and the dissection of the softer parts by comparative anatomists in Europe, have been up to the present time beset by difficulties. These arise not alone from the rarity of subjects, but even in cases where elephants have died in these countries, ...
— Sketches of the Natural History of Ceylon • J. Emerson Tennent
... It is, in one form or another, almost a universal burner, as it can be readily adapted to almost any purpose, from tempering a row of needles to making steam for a 200 horse power steam engine. It is easy to make, easy to manage, practically indestructible, and for commercial purposes has, I think, a general adaptability which will bring it, in one form or another, into almost universal use. I may say that when we are in a special fix, this has in every case landed ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 430, March 29, 1884 • Various
... be almost indestructible, while others, made practically in the same manner, deteriorate within a very short time. It is, consequently, very difficult to exactly and fairly place a limit on the life of the positive plates as yet. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 829, November 21, 1891 • Various
... with Whewell's sketch of the contributions to science made by Cuvier: "I may observe, that he is allowed by all to have established on an indestructible basis many of the most important generalizations which zooelogy now contains; and the principal defect which his critics have pointed out has been that he did not generalize still more widely and boldly. It appears, therefore, that he cannot but be placed among the great discoverers ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 4 of 8 • Various
... from Asia toward South America in latitude 25 deg. south. These islands, closely clustered as far as the Paumota group, straggle along with widening spaces between, through Easter Isle, which carries the indestructible memorials of a strange civilization, through Sala-y-Gomez, San Felix, and St. Ambrose almost to the threshold of the Peruvian coast. It is to be noted that these islands lie just outside the westward-bearing Equatorial Current and trade-winds, ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... hills, in the mysteries of the unfathomed ocean, and their ears are opened to the message that he brings; for they know that in all beauty—be it of earth, or sea, or sky, or human souls—there is something indestructible, immortal, and that those who have once looked upon it shall never see death. Such of us as make our dwelling-place in the world of the three dimensions, grow weary of the sameness and the staleness of it all, and drearily ...
— The Farringdons • Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler
... crucifixions there would come to men a new revelation of the splendour of the human soul, the true divinity that dwells in man, the God made manifest in the flesh by acts of valour, heroism, and self-sacrifice which transcend the instincts and promptings of the flesh, and bear witness to the indestructible life of ...
— The Glory of the Trenches • Coningsby Dawson
... that this body must droop and die, and return to dust, yet death cannot touch the soul. It is immortal, it has been created in the image of God. He is a spirit, and a spirit is indestructible. The essence of the soul is spiritual. From the hour of the new birth, the soul of man begins to ripen for glory. All its powers and capacities are gradually developed and made meet for the inheritance of the ...
— Gathering Jewels - The Secret of a Beautiful Life: In Memoriam of Mr. & Mrs. James Knowles. Selected from Their Diaries. • James Knowles and Matilda Darroch Knowles
... itself is a confession of weakness, to a certain extent an admission of defeat. The presence of hate in a nation or an individual may be explained as resulting from the desire to remove or destroy an obstacle, which has proved to be immovable and indestructible. A healthy, well-balanced mind admits defeat and endeavours to make a compromise—to adjust itself ...
— What Germany Thinks - The War as Germans see it • Thomas F. A. Smith
... summer-house that I have to do principally, for it is to it that the terror of blood has clung through the lapse of years, as the scent of the Turkish Atar is said to cling, indestructible, to the last fragment of the vessel which ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 1 January 1848 • Various
... erstwhile compacted towards the western horizon, in an island form, began to break up on high and send its fragments over the surface. It seemed indestructible, for vainly did the winds stretch it, pull and toss it asunder, continually tearing away dark strips, which they waved over the pale yellow sky, gradually becoming intensely and icily livid. Ever more strongly grew the wind that threw all things ...
— An Iceland Fisherman • Pierre Loti
... Chymist appears to have ever done it; and without Examining whether it may not hence be as well said that sulphur is but compacted Fire, as that Fire is but diffus'd Sulphur, I shall leave you to consider whether it may not hence be argu'd, that neither Fire nor Sulphur are primitive and indestructible Bodies; and I shall further observe that, at least it will hence appear that a portion of matter may without being Compounded with new Ingredients, by having the Texture and Motion of its small parts chang'd, be easily, by the means of the Fire, endow'd with new ...
— The Sceptical Chymist • Robert Boyle
... class of laws which it is impracticable to ascertain by any of the three methods which I have attempted to characterize: namely, the laws of those Permanent Causes, or indestructible natural agents, which it is impossible either to exclude or to isolate; which we can neither hinder from being present, nor contrive that they shall be present alone. It would appear at first sight that we could by no means separate ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... certain inevitable results. These mutual selections are indestructible. If they provoke anger in the least favored class, and the excluded majority revenge themselves on the excluding minority by the strong hand and kill them, at once a new class finds itself at the top, ...
— Essays, Second Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... off, that the author becomes immortal. Nay, his works may perish like those of Orpheus or Pythagoras; but he himself, in his name, in the footprint of his being, remains, like Orpheus or Pythagoras, undestroyed, indestructible. ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... very noticeable relaxations of the existing prerogative, were, as respected the temper which dictated them, no more than everyday manifestations of the emperor's perpetual benignity. Fortunately for Marcus, the indestructible privilege of the divina domus exalted it so unapproachably beyond all competition, that no possible remissions of aulic rigor could ever be misinterpreted; fear there could be none, lest such paternal indulgences ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... according to his appointment, it is mighty in its power over the human heart; but the moment worldly men take it under their patronage, that they may make it subservient to their worldly ends, they bind it in fetters, and would kill it, had it not a divine and indestructible life. ...
— Companion to the Bible • E. P. Barrows
... most attenuated vapours, the most stable and resisting inorganic bodies, and the unstable tissues of living bodies—to be alike in restless, orderly motion, to be, in fact, motion itself and not the thing moved, to be changeable but indestructible, passing through phases but eternal, there seems less difficulty in assuming it to be the ultimate reality, and mind and consciousness to be its most highly specialised qualities. Huxley, while stating this ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work • P. Chalmers Mitchell
... warrior of the Bhagavad Gita between two armies coming to the grapple. He, too, sees the turbulence of mankind as a dream that seems to veil the higher order and the Divine unity. He, too, puts his faith in that 'which knows neither birth nor death,' which is 'not born, is indestructible, is not slain when this body is slain.' This is the perpetual life that moves across all the shapes it calls up, striving in each one to rise nearer to light, to knowledge, and to peace. And that aim is a law and a command to every thinking being ...
— Letters of a Soldier - 1914-1915 • Anonymous
... goes his way he will not fail to find guides who will give him the directions which passing doubts and difficulties may render necessary. The world's great books stand out as the old stone walls of some great feudal fortress—prominent and indestructible. Their original uses have been superseded by the world's advance; but time and change add greatly to their interest. He, however, who finds himself entangled in the dense jungle of books that are not 'masterpieces,' and are so plentiful ...
— The Quarterly Review, Volume 162, No. 324, April, 1886 • Various
... elemental forces of earth, converted to beneficent energy the burden of corruption thrust upon it. Active at first because she dreaded the self-communings of idleness, she found in her labour and her endurance sources of stern inspiration; her indestructible idealism grasped at the core of spiritual beauty in a life even such as this. She did not reason with herself hysterically of evil passions to be purified by asceticism, of mysterious iniquities to be washed out in her very life's blood; but the great principles of devotion ...
— A Life's Morning • George Gissing
... and longest and oldest of my collection. He laughed: it was a hoary canopy which we had used beside the Neckar and in Heidelberg—"a pleasant town," as the old song says, "when it has done raining." We sealed a compact over the indestructible German umbrella. I agreed to defer for a fortnight my departure for Marly: on his side he made a solemn vow to come there on the first of May, and there receive in full and without wincing the particulars of my Progressive Geography. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 28. July, 1873. • Various
... Wigalois, a story is told of a cavern in Asia full of everlasting flames, where costly fellat was made by the Salamanders, which was fireproof and indestructible. ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford
... we expect of the literature of such times? Popular poetry preserved some of its indestructible charms. The Meistersaenger went on composing according to the rules of their guilds, but we look in vain for the raciness and honest simplicity of Hans Sachs. Some of the professors wrote plays in the style of Terence, or after English models, and fables became ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... are like children that are born to us; they live and act apart from our own will. Nay, children may be strangled, but deeds never: they have an indestructible life both in and out of our consciousness; and that dreadful vitality of deeds was pressing hard on Tito for ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... tree, belonging to the mallow family. The inner bark of the young branches yields a tough fiber, fit for cordage, and used in Demerara for making coffee bags, and the finer pieces of it for cigar envelopes. The wood is considered almost indestructible under water, and its hardness and durability render it valuable for various purposes. The flower buds and unripe fruits yield a viscid yellow juice, useful as a dye, and a thick, deep, red-colored oil is ...
— Catalogue of Economic Plants in the Collection of the U. S. Department of Agriculture • William Saunders
... indeed, sent down among us, and, for periods longer or shorter, may be seen to exercise an ennobling influence on mankind. Perhaps what is gained on these occasions is never entirely lost. The historical monuments of their effects are at least indestructible; and, when the spirit which gave them birth reappears, their dormant energy ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... reference volumes, and Dickens read them faithfully. But the more he read the more he was astonished to find how the facts had passed through the alembic of Carlyle's brain and had come out and fitted themselves, each as a part of one great whole, making a compact result, indestructible and unrivalled; and he always found himself turning away from the books of reference, and re-reading with increased wonder this marvellous new growth. There were certain books particularly hateful to him, and of which he ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... Behind them they could see, on the horizon, the city itself, the smoke from its chimneys, the spires of its churches. Both, homes and churches, they had meant to destroy, but behind both there was the indestructible. They had failed. ...
— A Poor Wise Man • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... horses perished from starvation and thirst, after tearing deep out of the soil every trace of vegetation, including the wiry roots of the pampas-grass. Under such circumstances the existence of an unprotected tree is impossible. The only plants that hold their own, in addition to the indestructible thistles, grasses, and clover, are a little herbaceous oxalis, producing viviparous buds of extraordinary vitality, a few poisonous species, such as the hemlock, and a few tough, thorny dwarf-acacias and wiry rushes, which even ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... I take any credit to myself, though. Far be it! I got the idea out of the comic supplement. But it works all right, and the beauty of it is that you can use the nail over and over again. It is practically indestructible. ...
— Andy at Yale - The Great Quadrangle Mystery • Roy Eliot Stokes
... Sylvia's face made Judith's seem unresponsive, and when it lighted up in talk and laughter, it seemed to give out a visible light. In contrast Judith's beautiful countenance seemed carved out of some very hard and indestructible stone. ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... easily snatch a pebble from gravitation's grasp as you can separate the minutest act of life from its inevitable effect upon character and destiny. "Children may be strangled," says George Eliot, "but deeds never, they have an indestructible life." The smirched youth ...
— Architects of Fate - or, Steps to Success and Power • Orison Swett Marden
... kill the Self?" How can the immortal Soul ever be destroyed? It cannot be destroyed, it can only be obscured. Those who hold themselves under the sway of ignorance, who serve the flesh and neglect the Atman or the real Self, are not able to perceive the effulgent and indestructible nature of their Soul; hence they fall into the realm where the Soul light does not shine. Here the Upanishad shows that the only hell is absence of knowledge. As long as man is overpowered by the darkness ...
— The Upanishads • Swami Paramananda
... higher knowledge is this by which the Indestructible is apprehended. That which cannot be seen nor seized, which is without origin and qualities, without eyes and ears, without hands and feet, the eternal, all-pervading, omnipresent, infinitesimal, that which is imperishable, ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Sankaracarya - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 1 • George Thibaut
... indestructible: Its holy flame for ever burneth, From Heaven it came, to Heaven returneth; Too oft on Earth a troubled guest, At times deceived, at times opprest, It here is tried and purified, Then hath in Heaven its perfect rest: It soweth here with toil and care, Bat the harvest-time of Love ...
— The Rocks of Valpre • Ethel May Dell
... be looked at from the outside. It is, if it is anything, the most considerable and most universal interest in the complex aggregate of human interests. It grows out of the deepest moral roots, out of the most characteristic and most indestructible spiritual elements, out of wants and needs and aspirations and hopes, without which man, as we know him, would not be man. When a man, in asking whether Christianity is true, leaves out all this side of the matter, when he shows that it has not come before him as a serious and importunate reality, ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church
... find that ardent belief in a future life that lifts its head so often and so resolutely in Browning's poetry, and on which, as we shall see later, his optimism is founded. Science tells us that the matter of which the universe is composed is indestructible; Browning believes even more strongly in the permanence of spirit. Aspiration, enthusiasm, love would not be given to us to have their purposes broken off, not if this is a rational and economic universe; the important thing is not to have our hopes fulfilled ...
— Robert Browning: How To Know Him • William Lyon Phelps
... being lifted up to stand by the organ, lest she should be hurt in the throng. First Helen held her charge up to be confirmed, and then she had to hold him while he was knighted, with a richly adorned sword bearing the motto "Indestructible," and by a stout Hungarian knight called Mikosch Weida, who struck with such a good will that Helen felt the blow on her arm, and the queen cried out to him not to hurt ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... democratic-republican government, the principle that the will of the majority shall rule, be maintained or abandoned? Shall state sovereignty be recognized? Shall states be suffered to leave the Union at will, or shall the United States continue to exist as "an indestructible Union of indestructible States"? As Mr. Lincoln said, "Both parties deprecated war; but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive; and the other would accept war ...
— A School History of the United States • John Bach McMaster
... intercalated with the columnar beds, a few bands of a buff-colored non-columnar trap, described by M'Culloch as of a texture intermediate between a greenstone and a basalt, and which, while the pitchstone around it seems nearly indestructible, has weathered so freely as to form horizontal grooves along the face of the rock, from two to five yards in depth. One of these runs for several hundred feet along the base of the Scuir, just at the top of the talus, and greatly resembles a piazza, lacking ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... plane of life than any with which she was as yet familiar. Some precious truths concerning the love of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the happiness of serving him, were woven into it, and served as the indestructible seeds which were yet to ripen in the girl's spiritual life. At about four o'clock she put on her hat, and full of mingled anxiety and hope, made her way to the corner house which seemed to her so much ...
— Katie Robertson - A Girls Story of Factory Life • Margaret E. Winslow
... lest his wife justly accuse him of extravagance, and practises cunning in getting rid of them afterward; for to a conscientious gentleman throwing away a razor is a responsible matter. It is hard to think of any place where a razor-blade, indestructible and horribly sharp as it is,—for all purposes except shaving,—can be thrown away without some worry over possible consequences. A baby may find and swallow it; the ashman sever an artery; dropping it overboard at sea is impracticable, to say nothing of the danger to some ...
— The Perfect Gentleman • Ralph Bergengren
... power of action, the subtle management of color and light, are all subordinated to the ideas of defeat and endeavor. Energy, the irrepressible strength of the spirit upheld by a divine light of indestructible youth, shines out from the canvas. The boy who cannot catch the butterfly is transmuted as we stand into the Soul of Beauty reaching out in vain for satisfaction, and ready to follow its aspiration to ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 11, - No. 22, January, 1873 • Various
... reconnaissance. In the following summer, however, he returned in force, indeed with a very considerable army, and with the intention of bringing us, too, within that great administration which he and his adoptive son Augustus were to do so much to make a final and in many ways an indestructible thing. ...
— England of My Heart—Spring • Edward Hutton
... was deceitful. The great plague, indeed, returned no more; but what it had done for the Londoners, the great fire, which broke out in the autumn of 1666, did for London; and, in September of that year, a heap of ashes and the indestructible energy of the people were all that remained of the glory of five-sixths of the city ...
— On the Advisableness of Improving Natural Knowledge • Thomas H. Huxley
... danger of the master's peculiarities became apparent by the lapse into affectation and frivolity. 'His Madonnas are empty and condescending, his female saints like ladies in waiting.' Still there were certain indestructible beauties of the master which yet clung to the scholar. He had clear warm colouring, decision, and good conception of human life. He was highly successful in portraits. There is a splendid portrait by Parmigianino, said to be Columbus, in Naples. Among his celebrated pictures is 'The Madonna with ...
— The Old Masters and Their Pictures - For the Use of Schools and Learners in Art • Sarah Tytler
... character and genius were more conspicuous in the formation of our government and in putting it on indestructible foundations than leading armies to victory and conquering the independence of his country. "The Union in any event" is the central thought of the "Farewell Address," and all the years of his grand life were devoted to ...
— Washington's Birthday • Various
... senoria was an "ideologue" of immense talent, but ever removed from reality; he would govern peoples in accordance with theories dug out of books, without paying any attention to practical considerations, to the individual and indestructible character ...
— The Torrent - Entre Naranjos • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... for handles, the bowls being symmetrical and well finished. Then there were rice-bowls, double and single, some of them stained black and varnished. Excellent baskets were seen, so solidly and strongly made of bejuco as to be well-nigh indestructible under ordinary conditions. Mr. Maimban got me a pair of defensive spears (so-called because never thrown, but used at close quarters) with hollow-ground blades of tempered steel, the head of the shaft being wrapped with ...
— The Head Hunters of Northern Luzon From Ifugao to Kalinga • Cornelis De Witt Willcox
... same uniform pattern we have to remember that we are touching the most subtle, intimate, and incalculable springs of action. It is useless to apply the crude methods of "suppression" and "annihilation" to these complex and indestructible forces. When Charles V retired in weariness from the greatest throne in the world to the solitude of the monastery at Yuste, he occupied his leisure for some weeks in trying to regulate two clocks. It proved very difficult. One day, it is recorded, he turned ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... so eminent as Mr. T. W. Allen, says that "the linguistic attack upon their age" (that of the Homeric poems) "may be said to have at last definitely failed, and archaeology has erected an apparently indestructible buttress for their defence." [Footnote: Classical Review, ...
— Homer and His Age • Andrew Lang
... spoke she seemed to be transfigured, and to have indeed no part with refinement or unrefinement any longer. Out of this wreck there was revealed to him something indestructible—something which she, who had given ...
— Where Angels Fear to Tread • E. M. Forster
... Charles V. and completed by Herrera for Philip II. Its north and south facades are very fine. The Alcazar seems to have been marked by fate. The Portuguese burned it in the last century, and Charles III. restored it just in time for the French to destroy it anew. Its indestructible walls alone remain. Now, after many years of ruinous neglect, the government has begun the work of restoration. The vast quadrangle is one mass of scaffolding and plaster dust. The grand staircase is almost finished again. In the course of a few ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... fane he has reared is as indestructible as the soul of him who lifted its lofty summit to the skies. "Time, the Avenger," has redeemed the builder's fame; and even the men of his own nation now believe that a prophet and a seer ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 1 July 1848 • Various
... the human senses to establish a violation of nature's laws. When the Hebrews threw down sticks before Pharaoh, and they became snakes, did he believe? No; because he was there. After the Jews had been lead through the desert and had been fed with bread rained from heaven, had been clothed in indestructible pantaloons, and had quenched their thirst with water that followed them over mountains and through sands; when they saw Jehovah wrapped in the smoke of Sinai they still had more faith in a calf that they could make than anything Jehovah ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll
... of Education was counted as nought from the Christian standpoint. Rather it itself had outgrown the limits which, though suitable enough for its early stage, could no longer contain its true idea. This is sure to be the case in the fact that the national individualities become indestructible by being incorporated into Christianity—a fact that contradicts the ...
— Pedagogics as a System • Karl Rosenkranz
... particolored rags, his destitution, his loneliness, the essential desolation of his futile wanderings. For months—for years—his life hadn't been worth a day's purchase; and there he was gallantly, thoughtlessly alive, to all appearance indestructible solely by the virtue of his few years and of his unreflecting audacity. I was seduced into something like admiration—like envy. Glamour urged him on, glamour kept him unscathed. He surely wanted nothing from the wilderness but space to breathe ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad
... are able to do this you have not reached your limit in the use of your forces. This great universe is interwoven with myriads of forces. You make your own place, and whether it is important depends upon you. Through the Indestructible and Unconquerable Law you can in time accomplish all right things and therefore do not be afraid to undertake whatever you really desire to accomplish and are willing to pay for in effort. Anything that is right is possible. That which is necessary will inevitably ...
— The Power of Concentration • Theron Q. Dumont
... roused to enthusiasm by the contemplation of its grand proportions, or graceful outlines, or bewitching details, because he sees in them the realization of his ideas of beauty, grace, and majesty, which shine forever in unutterable glory,—indestructible ideas which survive all thrones and empires, and even civilizations. They are as imperishable as stars and suns and rainbows and landscapes, since these unfold new beauties as the mind and soul rest upon them. Whenever, then, man creates an image or a picture which reveals these eternal but indescribable ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... great, firm-based, indestructible mountain upon our left hand, one of a noble range which, rising from the green plain, runs eastward. The last peak there is the mountain of which I speak, whose foot is in the Ictian sea and ...
— The Coming of Cuculain • Standish O'Grady |
