"Irreclaimable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... she has ever put forth, with most energetic distinctness, those other great elementary truths, which either are an explanation of her mission or give a character to her work. She does not teach that human nature is irreclaimable, else wherefore should she be sent? not, that it is to be shattered and reversed, but to be extricated, purified, and restored; not, that it is a mere mass of hopeless evil, but that it has the promise upon it of great things, and even now, in its ...
— Apologia Pro Vita Sua • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... Mr. Bull of the Circulating Library at Bath (if Mr. Bull it were) was constitutionally insensible to the charms of that master-spell which Mrs. Slipslop calls "ironing"; the other, that he was an impenitent and irreclaimable adherent of the author of ...
— Jane Austen, Her Life and Letters - A Family Record • William Austen-Leigh and Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh
... impassively anatomised by Science is a voice from the Unseen, pregnant with meaning beyond translation. A mere ripple of sound-vibration, called into existence by human touch; a creation, vanishing from its birth, elusive, irreclaimable as a departing soul, yet strong to sway heart and hand as the tornado sways the pliant pine. It is a language peculiar to no period, race, or caste. Ageless and universal, it raises to highest daring, or suffuses with tenderness, to-day and here, as once on Argo's ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... particular reasons for appearing zealously inclined to serve the Protector and his friends. He advised Lady Bellingham to state the loss of her son to His Highness, and procure his order for the Doctor's arrest, adding, that even if innocent of this accusation, the imprisonment of one, who as an irreclaimable royalist, deserved punishment, was no breach of justice. He assured Her Ladyship, that her son's long residence in a disaffected family, had not occasioned the smallest change in his opinions, but that he showed his zeal for the good old cause, by informing him of all the proceedings and councils ...
— The Loyalists, Vol. 1-3 - An Historical Novel • Jane West
... be in our time," said the man sadly. "I confess I am rather anxious for it to come off. Europe is a dull place at present, given up to Jews and old women. But I am an irreclaimable wanderer, and it is some time since I have been home. ...
— The Half-Hearted • John Buchan
... fashionable game of that era, and was early initiated in the mysteries of "stocking the papers." The vicious habits of Simon were, of course, a sore trouble to his father, Elder Jedediah. He reasoned, he counseled, he remonstrated, and he lashed; but Simon was an incorrigible, irreclaimable devil. One day the simple-minded old man returned rather unexpectedly to the field, where he had left Simon and Ben and a negro boy named Bill at work. Ben was still following his plow, but Simon and Bill were in a fence corner, very earnestly engaged at "seven up." Of ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume V. (of X.) • Various
... of repose for this brief season of intoxicating splendour. The barbed arrow was in her heart, and the more she struggled, the more irreclaimable it grew. Doubtless that unlucky dream had rendered her more susceptible to ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... of herself; not tortured into frizzles, or fringes, or artificial shapes, but winding its lustrous lengths about her head, just high enough to show the beautiful nape of her neck, "where this way and that the little lighter-coloured irreclaimable curls run truant from the knot,— curls, half curls, root curls, vine ringlets, wedding-rings, fledgling feathers, tufts of down, blown wisps,—all these wave, or fall, or stray, loose and downward in the form of small, silken paws, hardly any of them thicker ...
— Penelope's Postscripts • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... sure of it," said the doctor. "Your experience strikingly confirms the chapter of revolutionary history which tells us that when the present economic order was established those who had been under the old system the most irreclaimable loafers and vagabonds, responding to the absolute justice and fairness of the new arrangements, rallied to the service of the state with enthusiasm. But talking of what you are to do, why was not my former suggestion a good one, that ...
— Equality • Edward Bellamy
... 'Now a third time,' cried Kant: on which for a third time the unhappy Lampe would howl out—'not Hartmann, but Hartung.' And this whimsical scene of parade duty was continually repeated: duly as the day of publication came, the irreclaimable old dunce was put through the same manoeuvres, which were as invariably followed by the same blunder on the next. In spite, however, of this advantage, in the new servant, and his general superiority to his predecessor, Kant's nature was too kind and good, ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... driven to despair must create a hotbed of the most dangerous anarchistic and revolutionary epidemics, the spreading of which cannot easily be limited to the spot of their origin. Lastly, even the most irreclaimable pessimist will admit at least the possibility that governments may not be entirely inaccessible to purely humane sentiments of pity and justice, and may regard the treatment of the Jews of Russia and Roumania as an indictment ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... called Don Ivaldi, who taught him writing, arithmetic, Cornelius Nepos, and Phaedrus. He soon discovered, however, that the worthy priest was an ignoramus, and congratulates himself on having escaped from his hands at the age of nine, otherwise he believes that he should have been an absolute and irreclaimable dunce. His mother and father-in-law were constantly repeating the maxim then so popular among the Italian nobility, that it was not necessary that a gentleman should be a doctor. It was at this early age that he was first attacked by that melancholy which gradually assumed ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... blinking the whole questions B and C. He it is that has settled the question A, so that it will never be re-opened by a man of sense. A man who doubts, after really reading Mr. Taylor's work, is not only a blockhead, but an irreclaimable blockhead. It is true that several men, among them Lord Brougham, whom Schlosser (though hating him, and kicking him) cites, still profess scepticism. But the reason is evident: they have not read the book, ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey
... occasion to which I have referred these difficulties had been overcome, and I had made my way into the interior of one of the dens I have described in the company of a lady friend who is a confirmed and irreclaimable lace-hunter, and who in pursuit of her game would have confronted worse obstacles than any that we had to encounter. For, in truth, the exterior appearance and the entrance-chambers are the worst part of the Ghetto ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various
... indecision (when the animal spirits seemed utterly in abeyance) to that species of energetic concision—that abrupt, weighty, unhurried, and hollow-sounding enunciation—that leaden, self-balanced and perfectly modulated guttural utterance, which may be observed in the lost drunkard, or the irreclaimable eater of opium, during the periods of his most ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... for it. You might get tired of me calling you a mug, and bossing you and making a tool or convenience of you, you know. You might go in for honest graft (you were always a bit weak-minded) and then I'd have to wash my hands of you (unless you agreed to keep me) for an irreclaimable mug. Or it might suit me to become a respected and worthy fellow townsman, and then, if you came within ten miles of me or hinted that you ever knew me, I'd have you up for vagrancy, or soliciting alms, or attempting to levy blackmail. I'd have to fix ...
— On the Track • Henry Lawson
... are hard!" she said. "Is no one to help a girl who will soon become irreclaimable? Why, already I ...
— A Modern Tomboy - A Story for Girls • L. T. Meade
... her. But I would not hear tell of such a thing, for which Miss Sabrina owed me a grudge that was not soon given up. At the same time, I was grieved to see the testimonies of joyfulness for a holy victory, brought into such disrepute by the ill-timed demonstrations of the two irreclaimable naturals, that had not a true conception of the cause for which ...
— The Annals of the Parish • John Galt
... the screen, adorned with candles and artificial flowers, and incense-sticks are perpetually burning on it. What with the incense-sticks and abundant red silk streamers, an atmosphere is created which must be thoroughly uncongenial, even to the most irreclaimable devil. The outer chapel always contains two or four large chairs for the ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton
... however prove otherwise, the United States will, whenever they choose, be able to bring the whole of the Sioux force (the hereditary and irreclaimable enemy to every other Indian) to bear against the hostiles; or vice versa, should our difficulty be with the Sioux nation. And the suggestion is made, whether prudence does not require, that those hereditary ...
— Diary in America, Series Two • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... a burglar, and one of Fagin's associates. Bill Sikes was a hardened, irreclaimable villian,[TN-178] but had a conscience which almost drove him mad after the murder of Nancy, who really loved him (ch. xlviii.) Bill Sikes (1 syl.) had an ill-conditioned savage dog, the beast-image of his master, ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... at a corner of the door-way for her to pass him into the house, and doated on her cheek, her ear, and the softly dusky nape of her neck, where this way and that the little lighter-coloured irreclaimable curls running truant from the comb and the knot—curls, half-curls, root-curls, vine-ringlets, wedding-rings, fledgling feathers, tufts of down, blown wisps—waved or fell, waved over or up or involutedly, or strayed, loose and downward, in the form of small silken paws, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... that Korah was irreclaimable, he directed the rest of his warning to those other Levites, the men of Korah's tribe, who, he feared, would join Korah in his rebellion. He admonished them to be satisfied with the honors God had granted them, and not to strive for priestly dignity. He concluded his speech with a last ...
— THE LEGENDS OF THE JEWS VOLUME III BIBLE TIMES AND CHARACTERS - FROM THE EXODUS TO THE DEATH OF MOSES • BY LOUIS GINZBERG
... them—bear a conscience, and have felt the sublime prompting to do the painful right; they have their unspoken sorrows, and their sacred joys; their hearts have perhaps gone out towards their first-born, and they have mourned over the irreclaimable dead. Nay, is there not a pathos in their very insignificance—in our comparison of their dim and narrow existence with the glorious possibilities of that human nature which ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot
... looked to me in the Pullman; then—once in Los Angeles—I allowed myself to get hot telling the Hicks people what I thought of them, explaining how I'd have run the chase, and wound up by giving seven days to it—seven precious, irreclaimable days—while everything lay wide open there in the north, and I couldn't get any satisfactory word from the office, and none of ...
— The Million-Dollar Suitcase • Alice MacGowan
... for his workshop, Margaret, with womanly officiousness, had swept it and dusted it and demolished the cobwebs; but since then she had not been able to obtain so much as a glimpse of the interior. A ten minutes' sweeping had sufficed for the chamber, but the passage-way seemed in quite an irreclaimable state, judging by the number of times it was necessary to sweep it in the course of a few days. Now Margaret was not an unusual mixture of timidity and daring; so one morning, about a week after Richard was settled, she walked with quaking heart up to the door of the ...
— The Stillwater Tragedy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... misdemeanors and crimes, and of the patient and persevering, but fruitless efforts which he himself had made to reclaim him, and announced his determination to cut him off from the succession to the crown as wholly and hopelessly irreclaimable. This manifesto was one of the most remarkable documents that history records. It concluded with deposing Alexis from all his rights as son and heir to his father, and appointing his younger brother Peter, the little son of Catharine, ...
— Peter the Great • Jacob Abbott
... suppress his contempt for the resigned and hopeless predestinarian. "That fate should have clogged me with such confederates!" he muttered, as he left the apartment—"this bigoted fool is now nearly irreclaimable—I must to Zarah; for she, or no one, must carry us through these straits. If I can but soothe her sullen temper, and excite her vanity to action,—betwixt her address, the King's partiality for the Duke, Buckingham's ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... not be abated without some caution. The zeal of our worthy friend now involved in great distress sundry personages whose idle and mendicant habits his own lochesse had contributed to foster, until these habits had become irreclaimable, or whose real incapacity for exertion rendered them fit objects, in their own phrase, for the charity of all well-disposed Christians. The "long-remembered beggar," who for twenty years had made his regular rounds within the neighbourhood, ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... considered as ranking but little above the members of the brute creation. Savages have always many vices, but I do not think that these are worse in the New Hollanders, than in many other aboriginal races. It is said, indeed, that the Australian is an irreclaimable, unteachable being; that he is cruel, blood-thirsty, revengeful, and treacherous; and in support of such assertions, references are made to the total failure of all missionary and scholastic efforts hitherto made on his behalf, and to many ...
— Journals Of Expeditions Of Discovery Into Central • Edward John Eyre
... his feet on them. He might walk unarmed and unattended through Ireland from end to end with perfect safety. But which of the Nationalist members could do that? Not one. The city scum, the criminal, irreclaimable class, shout 'Hell to Balfour,' but these poor readers of the Freeman's Journal and such-like prints, prepared for their special use and written down to their level, must not be classed with the people of Ireland at all. Every country has its ruffian element, ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... has inherited a taint; and I am the one unfortunate in whom that taint has broken forth. Let me tell you a secret; since my first potation, my mother has never once remonstrated with me; never once upbraided; my proud, high tempered mother. She knows the folly of trying to reclaim the irreclaimable. But," lowering his voice, sadly, ...
— The Diamond Coterie • Lawrence L. Lynch
... He next depicts the horrors of the slave trade, and shows how inefficient have been the laws enacted for its suppression. He finally expatiates upon the evils and dangers of slavery; and is particularly minute in describing the degradation of the free people of color, which he declares to be irreclaimable in this land of gospel light. 'Now, my christian brethren and friends,' he continues, 'the object of the American Colonization Society is to stay the effusion of blood, to give light to them who sit in ...
— Thoughts on African Colonization • William Lloyd Garrison
... are very nice, my dear,' protested Lady Willow gently, with a deep sigh, for she thought of her own husband, who, having been all his life an irreclaimable reprobate, had commanded her utmost affection while he lived, and was the object of her tenderest regret now that he had taken his departure from a world that had never appreciated his talents; although ...
— A Woman Intervenes • Robert Barr
... degree of hopeless and irreclaimable vagabondage expressed in this epithet, which may not be generally understood. Only those who are familiar with the roving nature and predatory instincts of boys in large cities will appreciate its strength. ...
— Urban Sketches • Bret Harte
... Mrs. Churton's cup resulted from the conduct of her irreclaimable husband. Even Fan, who had never regarded any living soul with contempt, had soon enough learned to experience such a feeling towards this man. But it was a kindly contempt, for after repulsing him two or three times when he had attempted to ...
— Fan • Henry Harford
... young Neal saw at the houses whither his father carried him, filled him with such a liking to debauchery and such an irreclaimable passion for sensual pleasures, as was the source from whence his following misfortunes flowed. For what, as he himself complained, first gave him occasion to repine at his condition, and filled him with wandering inclinations of pursuing an idle and extravagant ...
— Lives Of The Most Remarkable Criminals Who have been Condemned and Executed for Murder, the Highway, Housebreaking, Street Robberies, Coining or other offences • Arthur L. Hayward
... profitable to themselves and the community. Those who rejected, continued slaves to themselves, and a nuisance to everybody. Again we remark that the same may be said of white men everywhere. White unbelievers continued to pronounce the "red" Kafir an "irreclaimable savage," fit for nothing but coercion and the lash. Black unbelievers continued to curse the white man as being unworthy of any better fate than being "driven into the sea," and, between the two, missionaries ...
— The Settler and the Savage • R.M. Ballantyne
... sincere and honest effort was to be made to bring about peace, although St. Clair himself had but little faith in an amicable adjustment and expressed the opinion that the Miamis and the renegade Shawnees, Delawares and Cherokees, lying near them, were "irreclaimable by gentle means." The heart "dried like a piece of dried venison" was ample proof that St. ...
— The Land of the Miamis • Elmore Barce
... the weapons I've used are sighs and brine, And now that I'm nearly forty-nine, Old age is my chiefest bogy; For my hair is thinning away at the crown, And the silver fights with the worn-out brown; And a general verdict sets me down As an irreclaimable fogy. ...
— Fifty Bab Ballads • William S. Gilbert
... ornament. To those who plant for profit, and are thrusting every other tree out of the way, to make room for their favourite, the larch, I would utter first a regret, that they should have selected these lovely vales for their vegetable manufactory, when there is so much barren and irreclaimable land in the neighbouring moors, and in other parts of the island, which might have been had for this purpose at a far cheaper rate. And I will also beg leave to represent to them, that they ought not to be carried away by flattering promises from the ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... through the very centre of the county, near the foot of which stands the populous neighbourhood of Bolton-le-Moors. Rivington Pike, an irregularly conical hill rising like a huge watch-tower from these giant masses of irreclaimable waste, is a conspicuous and well-known object, crowned by a stone edifice for the convenience of rest and shelter to those whom curiosity urges to the fatigue and peril of the ascent. The view from this elevated spot, should the day be favourable, certainly ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... to imagining mysteries here. This is a man who has been on my hands a good many years. He is an irreclaimable spendthrift. He was in other days a man of repute and station. I am interested in him, through old ties, since the days we ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... a round pace; one, objectless, loitering, and purely vagabond. In the latter state, no gipsy on earth is a greater vagabond than myself; it is so natural to me, and strong with me, that I think I must be the descendant, at no great distance, of some irreclaimable tramp. ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... drop of water from every cup, and moved away for the bitter water I found yesterday. I thought to sweeten it by opening the place with a shovel, and baling a lot of the stagnant water out; but it was irreclaimable, and the horses could not ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles
... friends, among the principal men in Rome, that "messages and letters were sent by Hannibal to Antiochus, and that envoys came secretly from the king to him. That, as some wild beasts can never be tamed, so the disposition of this man was irreclaimable and implacable. That he sometimes complained, that the state was debilitated by ease and indolence, and lulled by sloth into a lethargy, from which nothing could rouse it but the sound of arms." These accounts were deemed probable, when people recollected the former war, ...
— History of Rome, Vol III • Titus Livius
... him taught, but he is a hopeless idiot. I tried to make his life less hard. He is an irreclaimable drunkard, and spends in drink all the money one gives him, and knows enough to sell his new clothes in order to ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... in practical affairs, and just ideas formed a portion of his dreams. Nature had made him an irreclaimable optimist; all that is base and ugly in life passed out of view as he soared above earth in his luminous ether. Sadness and doubt indeed he knew, but his sadness had a charm of its own, and there were ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... the mountains" formed a frontier as plain and intelligible as that which defines the limits of the sea. To the south lay the British Empire in India; to the north were warlike tribes, barbarous, unapproachable, irreclaimable; and far beyond these, lay the other ...
— The Story of the Malakand Field Force • Sir Winston S. Churchill
... all, of them were confined in this way. There is a space at the stern, and another in the center of the ship, heavily barred with iron, where those who were considered utterly irreclaimable were huddled together. It would almost seem as though the authorities deliberately put them there in order that they should kill each other, as fights among them were very frequent and not a few were murdered by their companions. They did not work, they were ...
— The Land of the Kangaroo - Adventures of Two Youths in a Journey through the Great Island Continent • Thomas Wallace Knox
... sleep than if you had passed weary hours tossing and tumbling about in bemoaning your hard luck and picturing to yourself what might have been if you had done so and so. All rot. Let the other fellow do the worrying. Remember, my boy, the past is irreclaimable, the present the life we are struggling in, and the future what we make it, or rather try ...
— A Pirate of Parts • Richard Neville
... that he saw, in the forced humility of his countenance, certain gleamings of a triumph that should not properly be traced to the fall of Quebec. The habit of appearing meek had, however, united with a frugal regard for the precious and irreclaimable minutes, in producing this extraordinary diligence in a pursuit of a character that was so humble, when compared with his ...
— The Red Rover • James Fenimore Cooper
... necessary for the preservation of this interest in statu quo. It did not extend slavery. It kept it where it already was, and where it could not have continued if every slave who escaped North was at once free and irreclaimable. The members of the confederacy from the South saw this distinctly, and deliberately declared that they could not and would not enter a union with States who would tempt away their slaves with the prospect ...
— A Letter to the Hon. Samuel Eliot, Representative in Congress From the City of Boston, In Reply to His Apology For Voting For the Fugitive Slave Bill. • Hancock
... ecclesiastical authority, conditional proposals of submission to the Pope upon conviction of error in his theses, or conscientious belief, Luther in time arrived at the conclusion that the church of Rome was irreclaimable, giving publicity to his deep convictions in a treatise De Captivitate Babylonica,—"The Captivity of Babylon." In the 18th chapter of this book, he discovered that Babylon is doomed to destruction. He considered the church ...
— Notes On The Apocalypse • David Steele
... State is about 3,750 square miles. With this, deduct 5,550 square miles for irreclaimable wastes, and there remains 50,000 square miles, or 32 millions of acres of arable land in Illinois,—a much greater quantity than is found in any other State. In this estimate, inundated lands, submerged by high waters, but which may be reclaimed at ...
— A New Guide for Emigrants to the West • J. M. Peck
... sunlight. Had he been a mere labourer in a workman's rough clay-stained clothes, one would have stood still to look at and admire him, and say perhaps what a magnificent warrior he would have looked with sword and spear and plumed helmet, mounted on a big horse! But alas! he had the stamp of the irreclaimable blackguard on his face; and that same handsome face was just then disfigured with several bruises in three colours—blue, black, and red. Doubtless he had been in a drunken brawl on the previous evening and had perhaps been thrown out of some low public-house ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... with which she heard him wish her ladyship health and happiness at Weymouth, or wherever she went, for an instant convinced her of the truth. But obstinate vanity recurred to the hope that he was not yet irreclaimable, and under this persuasion she hurried on the preparations for her departure, impatient for ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. VII - Patronage • Maria Edgeworth
... whilst inflicting upon him the lightest of punishments: 'Between me and Aziz is a river of milk, which I cannot cross.' The spirit of these words animated him in all his actions towards those connected with him. Unless they were irreclaimable, or had steeped their hands in the blood {178} of others, he ever sought to win them back by his gentleness and liberality. He loved forgiving, reinstating, trusting, and though the exercise of these noble qualities led sometimes to his being imposed upon, they told in the long run. He was a good ...
— Rulers of India: Akbar • George Bruce Malleson
... year, soon withers under the aridity of the atmosphere, and leaves nothing but dreary wastes. An immense belt of rocky mountains and volcanic plains, several hundred miles in width, must ever remain an irreclaimable wilderness, intervening between the abodes of civilization, and affording a last refuge to the Indian. Here roving tribes of hunters, living in tents or lodges, and following the migrations of the game, may lead a life of savage independence, where there is nothing to tempt ...
— The Adventures of Captain Bonneville - Digested From His Journal • Washington Irving
... judge from the embarrassed look and manner with which he met me, the matter was one of no small difficulty. The encumbrances upon the estate had been incurred with an unsparing hand; and except where some irreclaimable tract of bog or mountain rendered a loan impracticable, each portion of the property ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 2 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... English picked up about the agencies; had influential friends and, in some clandestine way, received occasional supplies of money that enabled him to take French leave when he felt like it. He was sent back from Carlisle to Dakota as irreclaimable, and after a year or two on his native heath, reappeared among the haunts of civilization as one of Buffalo Bill's warriors. Bill discharged him at Cincinnati and, at the instance of the Indian Bureau, he was again placed at Carlisle, only to repeat on a larger scale his earlier exploits ...
— A Daughter of the Sioux - A Tale of the Indian frontier • Charles King
... escape of Dick Haddon and Ted McKnight, and nobody—according to everybody's wise assurances—was the least bit surprised. The fathers of the township (and the mothers, too) had long since given Dick up as an irresponsible and irreclaimable imp. One large section declared the boy to be 'a bit gone,' which was generally Waddy's simple and satisfactory method of accounting for any attribute of man, woman, or child not in conformity with the dull rule of conduct prevailing ...
— The Gold-Stealers - A Story of Waddy • Edward Dyson
... constantly changing the geographical limits—incessantly confounding the natural boundaries! At first sight, the whole period, the whole state of the world, seems to offer no more secure footing to an historical adventurer than the chaos of Milton—to be in a state of irreclaimable disorder, best described in the language of ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... him that there was a regular time for visiting every day, and that if any of his friends came to see him, he would be fetched down to the grate, and that he was lodged apart from the mass of prisoners, because he was not supposed to be utterly depraved and irreclaimable. Kit was thankful for this indulgence, and sat reading the Church Catechism, ...
— Ten Boys from Dickens • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... hands, and written with corroding ink on the fleshly tables of his heart. As he turned over the well-thumbed pages he made many mental calculations, sometimes smiling and sometimes sighing as his eye fell on an irreclaimable debt. Then, taking up his pencil, he entered an account on the fly-sheet of the Bible, and seemed satisfied when he discovered that his illness would not involve him in the loss which he had anticipated; and smiling the smile of selfish gain, ...
— Lancashire Idylls (1898) • Marshall Mather
... Christianity in its relation to slavery, and to inferior and down-trodden races. Christianity has no belief in the existence of 'irreclaimable outcasts,' but proclaims and glories in the possibility of winning any and all to the love which makes godlike. There is one Saviour, and so there is only one Gospel for ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... stream, or sat in the garden of the palace on a great cane chair, his long legs extended, his head thrown back and his hat pulled over his eyes. He felt cold about the heart; he had never liked anything less. What could he do, what could he say? If the girl were irreclaimable could he pretend to like it? To attempt to reclaim her was permissible only if the attempt should succeed. To try to persuade her of anything sordid or sinister in the man to whose deep art she had succumbed would be decently discreet only in the event of her ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 2 (of 2) • Henry James
... serenity. He had been intensely interested and appreciative and admiring; but emotionally unmoved; but now, as this troubling music of Hughie's seemed to express the dominion of unsuspected but potent earth-forces, primitive, savage and forever irreclaimable, his calm became strangely disturbed. Dimly he realized that should every desert on the globe finally be subdued by the plow, the irrigating ditches and the pruning hook, they would still remain as realities in the mind of man, forever clouding his aspirations ...
— The Black Pearl • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... said to be worse than a wicked man. If so, partly because women, being more solitary, brood more unceasingly over cherished ideas, whether good or evil; partly also, for the same reason that makes a wicked gentleman, who has lost caste and character, more irreclaimable than a wicked clown, low-born and lowbred, namely, that in proportion to the loss of shame is the gain in recklessness: but principally, perhaps, because in extreme wickedness there is necessarily a distortion of the reasoning faculty; and man, ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... ears attached. Your regular Young Person is a living nuisance, whose every act is a provocation to exterminate her. We say "her," not because, physically considered, the Y. P. is necesarily of the she sex; more commonly is it an irreclaimable male; but morally and intellectually it is an unmixed female. Her virtues are merely milk-and-morality-her intelligence is pure spiritual whey. Her conversation (to which not even her own virtues and intelligence are in any way related) is three parts rain-water ...
— The Fiend's Delight • Dod Grile
... it may be when they receive you! How much they do make of us! and what a goodly sight at their own table they are! They are capable in themselves of making any place charming, though the man must have been enterprising who sat down five-and-twenty years ago to reclaim this park from irreclaimable down. I asked where were the maples? and where was the wood? and was shown five stunted ones in a cage to defend them from the sheep, the only things that thrive here, except little white snails, with purple lines round their ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... several readers of my Sketch from Childhood have lodged complaints against me for not having pursued it to what they can regard as a satisfactory close. Some may have done this in a gentle tone, as against an irreclaimable procrastinator, amiably inclined, perhaps, to penitence, though constitutionally incapable of amendment; but others more clamorously, as against one faithless to his engagements, and deliberately a defaulter. Themselves they regard in the light of creditors, and me as a slippery ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey—Vol. 1 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... very persons whom he was exciting to action, his exertions with my "cousin Gortuleg," and his delight to find that "honest Kilbockie," whom he had been vilifying, had not stirred, and would do nothing without his consent, might be amusing if they were not traits of such wanton irreclaimable falsehood in an aged man, soon to be called to an account, before a heavenly tribunal, for a long career of crime ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745 - Volume II. • Mrs. Thomson
... I ponder over the capers my son is cutting, and the life and habits the thoughtless lad is plunging headlong into, the more worried, and the more fearful I get at the danger of his becoming an irreclaimable rake. I know, I was young once myself, and did all those things, but I showed some self-restraint. The attitude I see in the general run of parents toward their sons doesn't ...
— Amphitryo, Asinaria, Aulularia, Bacchides, Captivi • Plautus Titus Maccius
... intersected by many wide valleys, and the trees, now changed into silex, were exposed projecting from the volcanic soil, now changed into rock, whence formerly, in a green and budding state, they had raised their lofty heads. Now, all is utterly irreclaimable and desert; even the lichen cannot adhere to the stony casts of former trees. Vast, and scarcely comprehensible as such changes must ever appear, yet they have all occurred within a period, recent when compared with the history of the ...
— A Naturalist's Voyage Round the World - The Voyage Of The Beagle • Charles Darwin
... a proportion of the cases are quite irreclaimable. They come and consult the Army, then depart and do the deed. Six that can be traced have been lost in this way during the ...
— Regeneration • H. Rider Haggard
... next morning we entered the vast Colorado desert. This was verily the desert, more like the desert which our imagination pictures, than the one we had crossed in September from Mojave. It seemed so white, so bare, so endless, and so still; irreclaimable, eternal, like Death itself. The stillness was appalling. We saw great numbers of lizards darting about like lightning; they were nearly as white as the sand itself, and sat up on their hind legs and looked at us with their pretty, beady black eyes. It seemed very far off from everywhere ...
— Vanished Arizona - Recollections of the Army Life by a New England Woman • Martha Summerhayes
... from home and parents, and fell a victim to the temptation which brought her to shame and desperation. Many thus fall every year who are never counted. They fall into the ranks of those whom the world abandons as irreclaimable. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 107, September, 1866 • Various
... Irreclaimable, Sir,—irreclaimable!—said the little gentleman.—Cheaper to breed white men than domesticate a nation of red ones. When you can get the bitter out of the partridge's thigh, you can make an enlightened commonwealth ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various
... relation in the country. I embarked my capital in the wine trade, and, could I have restrained myself from drinking, should have been successful, and in a short time might have doubled my property, as I stated to Mr Evelyn; but now, I had become an irreclaimable drunkard, and when that is the case, all hope is over. My affairs soon became deranged, and, at the request of my partner, they were wound up, and I found myself with my capital of L1500 reduced to L1000. ...
— The Little Savage • Captain Marryat
... (which by the Way I think I have not) it belongs to the Candid to overlook it; the Opinion of others I very little regard, & have a thorough Contempt for all men, be their Names Characters & Stations what they may, who appear to be the irreclaimable Enemies of Religion & Liberty. Had I not thought it would have been rather an Inconvenience to you, I should have sent you the last Week the Votes & proceedings of your native town; If I can be informd by you that ...
— The Writings of Samuel Adams, volume II (1770 - 1773) - collected and edited by Harry Alonso Cushing • Samuel Adams
... atmosphere; and one of our poets, Coleridge, I believe, says that 'Carnage is God's daughter'! a bold figure of rhetoric, not without its apparently sufficient apologies. Why not let the Sioux and Chippewas, or any other of the wild, irreclaimable brood, fight their bloodiest, and do their prettiest to help Nature, who seems bent on the extermination of all inferior races? They have got to die, any way!—that is a great consolation!—and if the philanthropists ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... infidel, an unbeliever. Had he been an infidel, there would have been no room at all for hope of him; but (priding himself as he does in his fertile invention) he would have been utterly abandoned, irreclaimable, and a savage.'* And it must be observed, that scoffers are too witty, in their own opinion, (in other words, value themselves too much upon their profligacy,) to aim at ...
— Clarissa Harlowe, Volume 9 (of 9) - The History Of A Young Lady • Samuel Richardson
... malecontents, both enabled William to gratify farther the rapacity of his Norman captains, and gave them the prospect of new forfeitures and attainders. The king began to regard all his English subjects as inveterate and irreclaimable enemies; and thenceforth either embraced, or was more fully confirmed in the resolution of seizing their possessions, and of reducing them to the most abject slavery. Though the natural violence and severity of his temper made him incapable of feeling ...
— The History of England, Volume I • David Hume
... astonishment he addressed me in the best Irish I ever heard spoken. 'Now,' said he, still smiling, 'you perceive that I understand Italian nearly—I will not say so well—as you do.' Now, as I am a sinner, that, I say, was ungenerous treatment. He was perfectly irreclaimable." ...
— Willy Reilly - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... removal of incurable idiots and lunatics, incorrigible criminals and irreclaimable drunkards from this vale of tears Dr. W. Duncan McKim provoked many a respectable but otherwise blameless person to throw a catfit of great complexity and power. Yet Dr. McKim seemed only to anticipate the trend of public opinion ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce
... "Irreclaimable, sir. Hopeless! A confirmed drunkard, who has soaked away all self-respect, who has been cautioned and warned and fined a score of times, by myself and other magistrates. Dr. de Boursy-Williams, our leading practitioner here, has taken the fellow ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... Douglas, with cold disgust, perfunctorily veiled by a conventional air of sympathy. "But if she is irreclaimable, ...
— The Irrational Knot - Being the Second Novel of His Nonage • George Bernard Shaw
... own color. Among the ever-recurring: tragedies of the frontier, not the least sorrowful was the recovery of these long-missing children by their parents, only to find that they had lost all remembrance of and love for their father and mother, and had become irreclaimable savages, who eagerly grasped the first chance to flee from the intolerable irksomeness and restraint of civilized life. [Footnote: For an instance where a boy finally returned, see "Trans-Alleghany Pioneers," p. 119; see also pp. 126, 132, 133, for ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Two - From the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, 1777-1783 • Theodore Roosevelt
... consolation against the ills of this world. Instead he merely chanted the old refrain, harped on the scandal brought on Samoncho[u] by the continued bickering of the married pair. Husband and wife had mutual duty toward each other; but also there was a duty toward their neighbours. Iemon was irreclaimable.... This stranger! O'Iwa San should deign to take the active part herself; not afford this ill spectacle and example to the ward. Like most parsons he was convinced by the noise of his own voice, and spoke with the intense conviction of long rehearsal. ...
— The Yotsuya Kwaidan or O'Iwa Inari - Tales of the Tokugawa, Volume 1 (of 2) • James S. De Benneville
... refuge? If Robinson Crusoe had been a social Duffer, he and Friday would not have been on speaking terms in a week. People think the poor Duffer malignant, boorish, haughty, unkind; he is only a Duffer, an irreclaimable, sad, pitiful creature, quite beyond the reach of philanthropy. On my grave write, not MISERRIMUS (though that would be true enough), ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 102, January 23, 1892 • Various
... commander, and was only this the plea Detain'd you in that islet angle of the west, To gorge the shrunk seducer irreclaimable With haply twice a million, add a million yet? What else was e'er unhealthy ...
— The Poems and Fragments of Catullus • Catullus
... Bland convinced me that he was an organic and irreclaimable scoundrel, who did wicked deeds as the cattle browse the herbage, because wicked deeds seemed the legitimate operation of his whole infernal organisation. Phrenologically, he was without a soul. Is it to be wondered at, that the devils are irreligious? What, then, thought I, who is to blame ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville
... appeared worthless. They did not realize that stocking would force the waters into natural channels, and that the stock would bring fresh grasses in their train, getting accustomed to and, after a while, fattening on the despised bushes and herbs. To them it was the embodiment of a desert—irreclaimable. ...
— The History of Australian Exploration from 1788 to 1888 • Ernest Favenc
... shabby and how ragged it was Hugh never ventured to tell her—there was a cheap little photo of Leah, taken when she was eighteen, and in the first bloom of her young beauty; and on the soiled envelope was written, "My little sister Leah," and the date of her birth. For no nature is wholly evil and irreclaimable, and perhaps, in spite of his tyranny and cruel tempers, there was a spark of affection in the man's heart for the young sister dependent on him. Leah always believed this, and she wept the saddest, tenderest tears over the little photo. "My poor Saul," she said, "his nature was strangely warped, ...
— Herb of Grace • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... contrasted colonial systems of the two states, the results, on the one hand of political aptitude, on the other of political obtuseness and backwardness, which cannot struggle from the past into the present until the present in turn has become the past—irreclaimable. ...
— The Interest of America in Sea Power, Present and Future • A. T. Mahan
... long Calabria was purged. Ever since the Bruttians, irreclaimable plunderers, had established themselves at Cosenza, disquieting their old Hellenic neighbours, the recesses of this country had been a favourite retreat of political malcontents. Here Spartacus drew recruits for his band of rebels; here "King Marcene" ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... Godless and wholly irreclaimable as Mr. Gibney and Mr. McGuffey might have been and doubtless were, each possessed in bounteous measure the sweetest of human attributes, to-wit: a soft, kind heart and a forgiving spirit. Creatures of impulse both, they found it absolutely impossible ...
— Captain Scraggs - or, The Green-Pea Pirates • Peter B. Kyne
... is a millstone about our necks; that it would be better for us if Ireland were sunk at the bottom of the sea; that the Irish are a nation of irreclaimable savages and barbarians. How often have I heard these sentiments fall from the plump and thoughtless squire, and from the thriving English shopkeeper, who has never felt the rod of an Orange master ...
— Political Pamphlets • George Saintsbury
... chains upon his lands in the country or in a sort of prison-factory—or he may punish them with blows of the rod, the lash, or the knout; he can brand them upon the forehead if they are thieves or runaways, or in the end, if they prove irreclaimable, he can crucify them. Branded slaves who afterwards became free and rich sought to conceal the marks by wearing patches. There were inevitably some instances in which masters proved so intolerably cruel that their ...
— Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul • T. G. Tucker
... country. I embarked my capital in the wine-trade, and, could I have restrained myself from drinking, should have been successful, and in a short time might have doubled my property, as I stated to Mr Evelyn; but now I had become an irreclaimable drunkard; and when that is the case, all hope is over. My affairs soon became deranged, and, at the request of my partner, they were wound up, and I found myself with my capital of 1,500 pounds reduced to 1,000 ...
— The Little Savage • Captain Frederick Marryat
... held that a national Church, governed by any central authority whatever, Pope, Patriarch, King, Bishop, or Synod, was an unscriptural institution, and that every congregation of believers was, under Christ, a sovereign society. The Baptist was even more irreclaimable than the Independent, and the Quaker even more irreclaimable than the Baptist. Concessions, therefore, which would once have extinguished nonconformity would not now satisfy even one half of the nonconformists; and it was the obvious interest of every nonconformist whom ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... of not more than from three shillings to four shillings an acre. Mr. Forster could not bear so barren a property, and determined to attempt the improvement of an estate of five thousand acres till then deemed irreclaimable. He encouraged the tenants by every species of persuasion and expense, but they had so ill an opinion of the land that he was forced to begin with two or three thousand acres in his own hands; he did not, however, turn out the people, ...
— A Tour in Ireland - 1776-1779 • Arthur Young
... ticket, married and thoroughly reclaimed 14 Ditto, ditto, single men 49 Free from expiration of sentence, but worthless 7 Returned home to England after becoming free 1 Well-conducted men, as yet under sentence 62 Indifferent, not trustworthy 29 Depraved characters, irreclaimable 7 Sent to iron gangs and penal settlements 11 Escaped 1 Died 3 Given up at request of Government 2 Returned to Government hospital from ill health ...
— Australia, its history and present condition • William Pridden
... pastor. Humbled and degraded, rendered desperate by his unhappy situation, the miserable man abandons himself yet more recklessly to the vice; his self-respect is gone, the finger of scorn is pointed at him, and to drown all consciousness of his downfall, he becomes a constant tipple and an irreclaimable sot. ...
— City Crimes - or Life in New York and Boston • Greenhorn
... he enticed other "swells" to buckle on official armour, it might interfere with the prospects of some who had never been "fast," but on the whole, society would benefit by the change. I maintain that that would be the correct method to adopt with some of those thieves who are totally irreclaimable by our present system of prison discipline. With regard to the casual and petty thieves, their case is somewhat different. Many of them could not be raised above the lowest class of common labourers, but by adopting a system of individualization, that is studying ...
— Six Years in the Prisons of England • A Merchant - Anonymous
... widow, "that she, who has once erred, is irreclaimable. Do not believe it, Madam. It is not so. The poor wretch, driven by desperation to the commission of a crime which her soul abhors, is no more beyond the hope of reformation than she is without the pale of mercy. ...
— Jack Sheppard - A Romance • William Harrison Ainsworth
... of favour herself. She had tried to make Jan what she called a gentleman, to beat into him suavity, gracefulness, tact, gloss of speech and bearing, something between a Lord Chesterfield and a Sir Roger de Coverley; and she had been obliged lo give it up as a hopeless job. Jan was utterly irreclaimable: Nature had made him plain and straightforward, and so he remained. But there was many a one that the world would bow down to as a model, whose intrinsic worth was poor compared to unoffending Jan's. Lady Verner would tell Jan he was undutiful. Jan tried to be as dutiful to her as ever he could; ...
— Verner's Pride • Mrs. Henry Wood
... one of the results of the stupidly cruel system of transporting persons from England to the colonies for petty offences which in these days are punished by a slight fine, and his sons are types of a class who were far from being as irreclaimable as their offences made them appear. 'Men like us,' Dick Marston is once made to say, 'are only half-and-half bad, like a good many more in this world. They are partly tempted into doing wrong by opportunity, and kept ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne
... water in California as he can 160 acres elsewhere. There is left little available Government land. There is plenty of government land not taken up and which may never be occupied, that is, inaccessible mountain and irreclaimable desert. There are also little nooks and fertile spots here and there to be discovered which may be pre-empted, and which will some day have value. But practically all the arable land, or that is likely to become so, is owned now in large tracts, under grants or by ...
— Our Italy • Charles Dudley Warner
... ourselves and our descendants by sturdily fighting it. But the effects of right living through a hundred generations are not overcome by the criminal life of one or two. Evil surroundings weigh more in producing criminals than heredity, and their children are not irreclaimable. ...
— The Whence and the Whither of Man • John Mason Tyler
... strange boy at Koeleapoor, hastened to the place from her own village of Chupra, and by means of indubitable marks upon his person, recognised her child, transformed into a wild animal. She carried him home with her; but finding him destitute of natural affection, and in other respects wholly irreclaimable, at the end of two months she left him to the common charity ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 446 - Volume 18, New Series, July 17, 1852 • Various
... making the room look lovely. It is quite an impromptu affair, quite informal. Dicky Browne, altogether in his element, is flitting from flower to flower, saying beautiful nothings to any of the girls who are kind enough or silly enough to waste a moment on so irreclaimable a butterfly. ...
— April's Lady - A Novel • Margaret Wolfe Hungerford
... in mitigation of punishment the imperious mandate of heredity. To a mesalliance of that kind every globule of my ancestral blood spoke in opposition. In brief, my tastes, habits, instinct, with whatever of reason my love had left me—all fought against it. Moreover, I was an irreclaimable sentimentalist, and found a subtle charm in an impersonal and spiritual relation which acquaintance might vulgarize and marriage would certainly dispel. No woman, I argued, is what this lovely creature seems. Love is a delicious dream; why should I ...
— Can Such Things Be? • Ambrose Bierce
... Maharajah of India, sent to Behram Gour, a ruler of the Sassanian dynasty in Persia, ten thousand minstrels, male and female, called Luri. Though lands were allotted to them, with corn and cattle, they became from the beginning irreclaimable vagabonds. Of their descendants, as they now ...
— The Gypsies • Charles G. Leland
... the past scenes were enacted, Mr. Springrove had ploughed, harrowed, and cleaned a narrow and shaded piece of ground, lying at the back of his house, which for many years had been looked upon as irreclaimable waste. ...
— Desperate Remedies • Thomas Hardy
... I will not mention; I would I could forget it! his prejudices are irremediable, his resolutions are inflexible. Who or what has worked him into an animosity so irreclaimable, I cannot conjecture, nor will he tell; but something darkly mysterious has part in ...
— Cecilia vol. 3 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)
... all logic and all candour, to argue against the use of any thing from its abuse. Of what mischief can the moderate gratification of this appetite be the source? It does not indeed romantically seek to reclaim a class of women, whom every sober man acknowledges to be irreclaimable. But with that benevolence that is congenial to a comprehensive mind, it pities them with all their errors, and it contributes to preserve them from ...
— Italian Letters, Vols. I and II • William Godwin
... follow virtue? LAUR.—Apollo will say to him perhaps: Know, my poor Sextus, that the Gods make each one as he is. Jupiter made the wolf ravening, the hare timid, the ass stupid, and the lion courageous. He gave you a soul that is wicked and irreclaimable; you will act in conformity with your natural disposition, and Jupiter will treat you as your actions shall deserve; he has ...
— Theodicy - Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil • G. W. Leibniz
... he reasoned within himself, if Monk and Danvers were doing anything, it was probably something wrong, and ought to be stopped. Gethryn always had the feeling that it was his duty to go and see what Monk and Danvers were doing, and tell them they mustn't. He had a profound belief in their irreclaimable villainy. In the second place, having studies of their own, they had no business to be in the senior day-room at all. It was contrary to the etiquette of the House for a study man to enter the senior day-room, and as a rule the senior day-room resented it. As to all appearances ...
— A Prefect's Uncle • P. G. Wodehouse |
