"Irrefutable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of Jimmie Dale's mouth grew a little more pronounced. Nor should the Pippin be long in returning! A man could not very well lose a cuff link and be unaware of that fact for any extended length of time. And that cuff link was damning, irrefutable, incontrovertible evidence, exactly the evidence the police required to convict the guilty man! Yes, undoubtedly, the Pippin would be back—and at any moment now. Figuring that the Pippin had left Bristol Bob's half an hour before he, Jimmie ...
— The Further Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... literature it has had untold significance. That the Talmud has been the conservator of Judaism is an irrefutable statement. It is true that the study of the Talmud unduly absorbed the great intellectual force of its adherents, and brought about a somewhat one-sided mental development in the Jews; but it also is true, as a writer says,[4] ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... from magnifying their importance by police squabbles. Besides, a clever lawyer might prove the exclusion illegal. What was done was done. The dignity of the hero of a hundred dramas was best served by private beefsteaks and a rumoured version, irrefutable save in a court of law. It was bad enough that the Heathen Journalist should supply so graphic a picture of the midnight melodrama, coloured even more highly than Goldwater's eyes. Kloot had been glad that the Journalist had left before the ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... with vehemence so that the stars of Heaven might hear, for there was no human being at hand, these sentiments sounded satisfactorily irrefutable. Rodney quieted down, and walked on in silence, until he perceived some one approaching him, who had something, either in his walk or his dress, which proclaimed that he was one of William's acquaintances before it was possible to tell which of them he was. It was Denham who, having parted from Sandys ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... enterprise, municipality, or government, and with each step in concentration the working-class gets relatively less and the master class gets richer, more corrupt, and more bestial, as recent events in Berlin and elsewhere show."[166] The "Iron Law of Wages" is irrefutable and irresistible. "Economists have come to talk about the 'Iron Law of Wages' with as much assurance as if it were an irreversible law ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... persons were claiming the song "Dixie." Alfred furnished the New York Herald with irrefutable proof that to Emmett belonged the honor. That paper sent a man from New York City. He spent several days at the home of Emmett. The feature story and the subsequent proofs published by Col. Cunningham, editor of the Confederate ...
— Watch Yourself Go By • Al. G. Field
... good-temperedly. "Could it in any way better be given the lie?" he asked, and before that irrefutable logic ...
— The Rhodesian • Gertrude Page
... essence of Butt-in; the refined, intrinsic extract of Rubber; the concentrated, purified, irrefutable, unavoidable spirit of Curiosity and Inquisitiveness. A new sensation is the breath in his nostrils; when his experience is exhausted he explores new fields with ...
— The Four Million • O. Henry
... corn interest, made it important to confute the arguments they addressed to the public. Mr. Mather addressed a letter to the editor of the Shipping Almanack and Gazette, which produced a great impression where the arguments of the Lancashire leaders had been accepted as irrefutable. It is desirable to reproduce this document, as the controversy was one of the most important in its day, and the policy ultimately adopted remained longer open to question than any other of the anti-protectionist ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... and most of the apostolic fathers practiced it. Among others, St. Jerome lived his whole life among women and never lost his purity. He answered his enemies who reproached him with his very great intimacy with the Saintly Sisters, that the irrefutable proof of his chastity was that he stank. That stinking of St. Jerome, which is not a veritable article of faith in the Church, is, however, an object of pious belief; and my readers will very gladly assent ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... frittered away piecemeal, what with eating your dinner, and taking a wholesome walk, and checking up your bank account, and dovetailing scraps of parish registers and land-patents and county records into an irrefutable pedigree, and seeing that your clothes were pressed, and looking over the newspapers—and what with other infinitesimal avocations, each one innocent, none of any particular importance, and each consuming ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... his monograph on Heredity had demonstrated with a detestable logic that much of Elmer's treatise on Eugenics was based on evidence that must be viewed with the gravest suspicion. Not that Grossmann had directly attacked that treatise; he had made no kind of reference to it in his own book; but his irrefutable statements had been quoted by every reviewer of "Eugenics" who chanced to have come across the English translation of "Heredity and Human Development," to the confounding of Elmer's somewhat too optimistic prophecies concerning the possibility ...
— The Wonder • J. D. Beresford
... he could have denied Fran—if he could have joined Grace in declaring her an impostor! But she possessed proofs so irrefutable that safety lay in admitting her claim, lest she prove more than he had already admitted. "I know it, absolutely. She is the daughter of one who was my ...
— Fran • John Breckenridge Ellis
... the decision of our will at any given moment. The idea of a free will, however, is a denial of the law of cause and effect, both in the field of philosophy and theology. Saint Augustine and Martin Luther furnish irrefutable theological arguments for the denial of a free will. The omnipotence of God is irreconcilable with the idea of free will. If everything that happens does so because a superhuman and omnipotent power wants it (Not a single leaf falls to the ground without the will of God), ...
— The Positive School of Criminology - Three Lectures Given at the University of Naples, Italy on April 22, 23 and 24, 1901 • Enrico Ferri
... many men will there be who will dare, in face of the universal deluge which will be at the end as it was in the beginning, to get up and cry "No!" who will pronounce the terrible and irrefutable issue:— ...
— Light • Henri Barbusse
... but it was not political economy," we commented. "You should have held to your irrefutable argument that he could get along without his overcoat. You should have told him that he would not need it ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... flew like lightning in the great vastness, and reached the confines of Heaven, opposite the five great red pillars which are the boundaries of the created universe. On one of them he wrote his name, as irrefutable evidence that he could reach this extreme limit; this done, he returned triumphant to demand of ...
— Myths and Legends of China • E. T. C. Werner
... of Newfoundland, have also some earnest advocates. It is, however, generally admitted that the Cabots, in the second voyage, sailed past the shores of Nova Scotia and of the United States as far south as Spanish Florida. History here, at all events, has tangible, and in some respects irrefutable, evidence on which to dwell, since we have before us a celebrated map, which has come down from the first year of the sixteenth century, and is known beyond doubt to have been drawn with all the authority that is due to so famous a navigator as Juan de la Cosa, the Basque pilot. ...
— Canada • J. G. Bourinot
... that "Het boeck van Tondalus visioen" was, as has been stated, printed at Antwerp in 1472, by Mathias Van der Goes, the claim of Antwerp to be regarded as the first place in the Low Countries in which printing was introduced would be irrefutable. Unfortunately there is very little doubt but that the date is an error, although Goes is still rightly regarded as having introduced printing into Antwerp, where he was issuing books from 1482 to about 1494 in Dutch and Latin. ...
— Printers' Marks - A Chapter in the History of Typography • William Roberts
... this is an accurate estimate of the ratio of food increase is immaterial. Malthus's famous progressions, the geometrical ratio of increase in the case of animals, and the arithmetical ratio of increase in the case of food, contain the vital and irrefutable truth of the immense disproportion between the power of reproduction in man and the ...
— The Fertility of the Unfit • William Allan Chapple
... right of men to be free, maintained that negroes were men, and offered himself as a proof of his assertion,—an argument that few had the temerity to deny. If it were answered that he was only half a negro, he would reply that slavery made no such distinction, and as a still more irrefutable argument would point to his friend, Samuel R. Ward, who often accompanied him on the platform,—an eloquent and effective orator, of whom Wendell Phillips said that "he was so black that, if he would shut his eyes, one could not see him." It was difficult for an auditor to avoid ...
— Frederick Douglass - A Biography • Charles Waddell Chesnutt
... the world was another idea that sprang simultaneously into the minds of thousands. The successful realization of this idea was a surprise to many, but as a surprise it was nothing to that received by the mildly protestant sociologists and biologists when irrefutable facts exploded the doctrine of Malthus. With leisure and joy in the world; with an immensely higher standard of living; and with the enormous spaciousness of opportunity for recreation, development, and pursuit of beauty and ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... had been ready to doubt every other testimony, the report of the child passed as irrefutable, and no one concerned himself as to how it had been concocted, how the ignorant young thing had been courted, bribed, how she had been intoxicated by fondling, applause, or, it may be, even by fear. She was dragged from her sleep at night, in order ...
— The German Classics, v. 20 - Masterpieces of German Literature • Various
... white race descended from Gehaz, the leper, upon whom the leprosy of Naaman fell when the latter returned by Divine favor to his original blackness. "And he went out from his presence a leper as white as snow," said Mrs. Johnson, quoting irrefutable Scripture. "Leprosy, leprosy," she added thoughtfully,—"nothing but leprosy ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume I. (of X.) • Various
... to think intently whether she would agree. And it seemed to me she would. I heard myself speaking to her in a persuasive, irrefutable manner:— ...
— Without Dogma • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... Chancellor has declared that there was irrefutable proof that if Germany did not march through Belgium, her enemies would. This proof, as now being produced, is of the strongest character. So the Chancellor was right in appealing to the law of necessity, ...
— Current History, A Monthly Magazine - The European War, March 1915 • New York Times
... grouped in lower life. The relation of the sexes, even when the human was reached, seems not to have carried with it a sense of the double obligation of parenthood. "Marriage was brittle in the early times," says Sir John Lubbock. The obvious relationship of mother and child, the lack of such irrefutable testimony to parenthood in the case of man, and other elements of primitive experience lending confusion to the situation, made it a process of time and a test of growing intelligence for men to learn that babies take two ...
— The Family and it's Members • Anna Garlin Spencer
... due in a great measure to the manner in which he had been taught what little he knew. Everything his teachers taught him was looked upon by them as something immutable and irrefutable. Twice two is four, Prince so-and-so is a hero, good children go to heaven, God is great, the Reform Church represents the true faith, etc., etc. It was never hinted to him that there was any room for doubt. Indeed, he was led to believe that his desire ...
— Walter Pieterse - A Story of Holland • Multatuli
... forms of teleology are apt to be baffled, or indefinitely postponed, by the retorts that suggest themselves to the modern child, there remains the subtle and indisputable witness borne by art itself: the body of man composes with the mass and the detail of the world. The picture is irrefutable, and the picture arranges the figure amongst its natural accessories in the landscape, and would not ...
— The Rhythm of Life • Alice Meynell
... the cultivation of land would present no interest. Destroy the rights of property and we lapse into barbarism." Rogozhinsky uttered this authoritatively, repeating the usual argument in favour of private ownership of land which is supposed to be irrefutable, based on the assumption that people's desire to possess land proves that they ...
— Resurrection • Count Leo Tolstoy
... reconstruction affected the hearts and heads of most of the Southern whites. To admit that they were honest in holding such views as they did is only to give them the benefit of a presumption which, when applied to the acts and motives of whole peoples, becomes irrefutable. A mob may be wrong-headed, but it is always right-hearted. What it does may be infamous, but underlying its acts is always the sting of a great evil or the hope of ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee
... Severe, sunburnt faces were propped meditatively on tattooed forearms. Veined, brown fists held in their knotted grip the dirty white clay of smouldering pipes. They listened, impenetrable, broad-backed, with bent shoulders, and in grim silence. He talked with ardour, despised and irrefutable. His picturesque and filthy loquacity flowed like a troubled stream from a poisoned source. His beady little eyes danced, glancing right and left, ever on the watch for the approach of an officer. Sometimes Mr. Baker going forward to take a look at the head sheets ...
— The Nigger Of The "Narcissus" - A Tale Of The Forecastle • Joseph Conrad
... then. Bernadotte then almost bent down to the ear of the empress and said to her, whisperingly, the Directory of France were in possession of papers that would compromise Minister Thugut and furnish irrefutable proofs that Minister Thugut was by no means a reliable and honest adviser of his majesty, inasmuch as he was in the pay of foreign powers, England and Russia particularly, who paid him millions for always fanning anew the flames of Austria's hostility against ...
— LOUISA OF PRUSSIA AND HER TIMES • Louise Muhlbach
... was magnificent; there were sturgeons, sterlets, bustards, asparagus, quail, partridges, mushrooms. The flavour of all these dishes supplied an irrefutable proof of the sobriety of the cook during the twenty-four hours preceding the dinner. Four soldiers, who had been given him as assistants, had not ceased working all night, knife in hand, at the composition of ragouts and ...
— Taras Bulba and Other Tales • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... upon proof and persuasion. It is addressed to the reason or to the emotions. Burke and Webster endeavor to establish their respective positions by irrefutable arguments. When Beecher addressed the people on the slavery question he appealed strongly to their emotions and sought to make them act because of their intense feeling. One characteristic of all literary masterpieces is unity, ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... in Erasmus which made him unable to understand the real grounds of the resistance of Catholic orthodoxy. How was it possible that so many, and among them men of high consideration, refused to accept what to him seemed so clear and irrefutable! He interpreted the fact in a highly personal way. He, the man who would so gladly have lived in peace with all the world, who so yearned for sympathy and recognition, and bore enmity with difficulty, saw ...
— Erasmus and the Age of Reformation • Johan Huizinga
... restoration of Poland; and further, she visited the confessional of a celebrated Jesuit priest, who made an absolute fanatic of her. The supposed fortune of the count had dwindled to a mere nothing, although he had given almost irrefutable evidence of its existence to ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... heard these words, and saw the steadfastness, and unbuxomness of his son, who yielded neither to flattery, nor persuasion, nor threat, he marvelled indeed at the persuasiveness of his speech and his irrefutable answers, and was convicted by his own conscience secretly assuring him that Ioasaph spake truly and aright. But he was dragged back by his evil habit and passions, which, from long use, had taken firm grip on him, and held him in as with bit and bridle, and suffered him not to ...
— Barlaam and Ioasaph • St. John of Damascus
... symbolical, more like the hieroglyph of its maker's mind, than any finished work can be. We may discover a greater mass of interesting objects in a painted picture or a carved statue; but we shall never find exactly the same thing, never the involuntary revelation of the artist's soul, the irrefutable witness to his mental and moral qualities, to the mysteries of his ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... convinced, satisfied, undoubting; undeniable, irrefutable, indubitable, incontrovertible, incontestable, sure; inevitable, unavoidable; unfailing, infallible, inerrable; fixed, stated, specified. Antonyms: indefinite, uncertain, doubtful. ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... there. She went over again the incident of Dozia's tack hammer. That she could depend absolutely on Dozia, and knew this strange girl had done more than sit in the path of the showering tack hammer was irrefutable. ...
— Jane Allen: Junior • Edith Bancroft
... every single thing I saw? Astronomy, Biology, Geology—in these things I discovered a new and marvellous interest: here at last I found my natural bent. History had small attraction for me: it spoke of the doings of people mostly vain or cruel, and untruthful. I wanted truth—irrefutable facts! No scientific work seemed too difficult for me; but I never, then or later, read anything upon the subject of religion, philosophy, or psychology. I had a healthy, wholesome young intelligence with a voracious appetite: it would carry me a long way, I thought. ...
— The Prodigal Returns • Lilian Staveley
... not forget to declare the fundamental fact of his entire position in Romper. It is irrefutable that in all affairs outside of his business, in all matters that occur eternally and commonly between man and man, this thieving card-player was so generous, so just, so moral, that, in a contest, he could have put ...
— The Monster and Other Stories - The Monster; The Blue Hotel; His New Mittens • Stephen Crane
... privileged player is alleged to have proceeded to satirize Leicester as well. Hatton was a frequent butt for fierce sarcasms upon royal favouritism. The phenomenon in Ralegh's unpopularity is that proof absolutely irrefutable of the grandeur of his powers, and all the evidence of his exploits, should never have won him an amnesty for the original sin of his sovereign's kindness. Pride itself, it might have been thought, would have been pardoned at last in the doer of such deeds. His inexpiable ...
— Sir Walter Ralegh - A Biography • William Stebbing
... he found the Mompesson and Somerset cases material to his hand and that he seized upon them eagerly as irrefutable proof of demoniacal agency. His first task, indeed, was to prove the alleged facts; these once established, they could be readily fitted into a comprehensive scheme of reasoning. In 1666 he issued a small volume, Some Philosophical Considerations touching Witches and Witchcraft. Most of the ...
— A History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718 • Wallace Notestein
... artless, mouldering gods, who have given ease to so many troubled minds, who have gladdened so many simple hearts, who have heard so many innocent prayers—how gladly would I prolong their beneficent lives in spite of the so-called 'laws of progress' and the irrefutable philosophy ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan - First Series • Lafcadio Hearn
... undertook her father's conversion; and her influence was so effective that the old watchmaker promised to attend high mass at the cathedral on the following Sunday. Gerande was in an ecstasy, as if heaven had opened to her view. Old Scholastique could not contain her joy, and at last found irrefutable arguments' against the gossiping tongues which accused her master of impiety. She spoke of it to her neighbours, her friends, her enemies, to those whom she knew not as well as to ...
— A Winter Amid the Ice - and Other Thrilling Stories • Jules Verne
... we look upon as irrefutable, as complete and perfect. The man who can thus travel freely in his finer body knows that the physical body is only a vehicle adapted to the physical world and necessary for life in this world; he knows that consciousness does not cease to function, and that the universe by no means ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal
... image of the Scriptures suddenly came back to my mind. It seemed to me that I had tasted of the Tree of Knowledge, that all the mysteries were unveiled, so much did I find myself under the sway of a new, strange, and irrefutable logic. And arguments, reasonings, proofs, rose up in a heap before my brain only to be immediately displaced by some stronger proof, reasoning, argument. My head had in fact, become a battle-ground of ideas. I was a superior being, armed with invincible intelligence, and I experienced a huge ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant
... miracles that dispose realists to belief. The genuine realist, if he is an unbeliever, will always find strength and ability to disbelieve in the miraculous, and if he is confronted with a miracle as an irrefutable fact he would rather disbelieve his own senses than admit the fact. Even if he admits it, he admits it as a fact of nature till then unrecognized by him. Faith does not, in the realist, spring from ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... the great asset which he has established for the Companies, in so completely winning the confidence of the people at large as well as those who hold high positions of trust. We should stultify ourselves were we to take any such stand, for the profits of the Companies are an irrefutable argument. The question before us, then, is not one of fact, but rather of degree. Why should we spend these further millions to gain that which we have already secured? We should still so administer the affairs of the Companies as to hold this great advantage, but ...
— The Lever - A Novel • William Dana Orcutt
... wound up by screaming himself hoarse in trying to convince his audience that the abundant supply of wheat was an irrefutable proof that the problem of over-population did not exist; that the doctrine of Malthus was not only false, but criminal, socially as ...
— Married • August Strindberg
... actors in that awful tragedy, one whose part was the most perfidious and execrable, and see whether his crime was not before ordained, and he the individual predesignated as its perpetrator." He proceeds to the proof of this proposition. But, when it becomes necessary to meet the palpable and irrefutable objections that this doctrine makes God the author of sin, and takes away the responsibility of the creature, he is compelled to change entirely his ground. He substitutes permission for foreordination, ...
— The Calvinistic Doctrine of Predestination Examined and Refuted • Francis Hodgson
... who have tried to deny to our race the share that is ours in the glory of Matzeliger's achievements. These declare that he had no Negro blood in his veins; but the proof against this assertion is irrefutable. Through correspondence with the mayor of Lynn, a certified copy of the death certificate issued on the occasion of Matzeliger's death has been obtained, and this ...
— The Colored Inventor - A Record of Fifty Years • Henry E. Baker
... the deep disquiet, but the laugh was an effort of one who was confronted by demolished fortunes. His whole look was that of a man who has been shown some structural smallness of his own, shown beyond doubt—his ranges of personal limitation, made clear and irrefutable. He recognized his master in the woman opposite.... Yet powerful natural elements within him were bearing upon the hateful revelation. They sought to cover the puny nakedness, and make an hallucination of it all. He was not evolved enough to ...
— Fate Knocks at the Door - A Novel • Will Levington Comfort
... line of the letter you wrote me. It is there—there in every word, in its very atmosphere. You are lying to yourself under the influence of this other—who lies to you. Prove what you say if you want me to believe. The scientific mind must have proof, undeniable, irrefutable proof. Statements, mere statements of unbelief are meaningless things which do not convince even their authors. If you need to convince yourself, and convince me, then engage yourself to some man, marry him, and I tell you ...
— The Golden Woman - A Story of the Montana Hills • Ridgwell Cullum
... Frazer, a canting, astute, and unscrupulous ruffian. Queensberry conceived that in a letter given to him by Lovat he had irrefutable evidence against Atholl as a conspirator, and he allowed Lovat to return to France, where he was promptly imprisoned as a traitor. Atholl convinced Anne of his own innocence, and Queensberry fell under ridicule and suspicion, lost his office of ...
— A Short History of Scotland • Andrew Lang
... been published in America the telegrams exchanged between the German Emperor, the Emperor of Russia, and the King of England, containing the history of the events that preceded the outbreak of the war, and which bears irrefutable testimony of how the Emperor, until the last moment, strove hard ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War from the Beginning to March 1915, Vol 1, No. 2 - Who Began the War, and Why? • Various
... I should say if I belonged to that school. It all forms a chain of very logical deductions and proffers itself with a certain air of likelihood which we should be glad to find in a host of evolutionist arguments put forward as irrefutable. Well, I will make a present of my deductive views, without regret, to whoever cares to have them: I don't believe one word of them; and I confess my profound ignorance of the origin of ...
— More Hunting Wasps • J. Henri Fabre
... Schreiber's Rheinsagen. The crusades, the Sankt-Wernerskirchen, Lorch, the Fischfang, Hatto's MAeuseturm, the maelstrom at Bingen, the Kedrich, the story of the Kecker Reuter who liberated the maid that had been abducted by dwarfs, and again, and this is irrefutable, the story "von dem wunderlicheft Wisperthale drUeben, wo die VOegel ganz vernUenftig sprechen," all of these and others play a large role in Schreiber's sagas and in Heine's Rabbi. No one can read Schreiber's Handbuch and ...
— Graf von Loeben and the Legend of Lorelei • Allen Wilson Porterfield
... be remembered about Boswell, and to be set against his detractors. His book is admittedly one of the most living books in existence. That life can have come from no one but the author. It is the irrefutable proof of his genius. Life and power do not issue, here any more than elsewhere, out of folly and nonentity. The Life of Johnson is the result of the most intimate and fertile union between biographer and his subject which has ever occurred, and it ...
— Dr. Johnson and His Circle • John Bailey
... absence of all leisurely dignity on the part of those controlling their movements, and of the almost unnatural self-opinionatedness which led them to persist in starting at a stated and prearranged time, even when this person had courteously pointed out to them by irrefutable omens that neither the day nor the hour was suitable for the venture, I have already written. It is enough to assert that a similar want of prudence was maintained on every occasion, and, as a result, when actually within sight of the walls of this city, we were ...
— The Mirror of Kong Ho • Ernest Bramah
... authorized spokesman, yet he is as truly a representative thinker in the German military system as Admiral Mahan was in the Navy of the United States. Of the acceptance by Prussia of Bernhardi's teachings there is one irrefutable proof. It is Belgium. The destruction of that unoffending country is the full ...
— The Evidence in the Case • James M. Beck
... could I not find the rings? If my present reasoning were correct, this woman should have those evidences of guilt about her. But had I not searched for them in every available place without success? Annoyed at my failure to fix this one irrefutable proof of guilt upon her, I took up the knitting-work I saw in Miss Oliver's basket, and began to ply the needles by way of relief to my thoughts. But I had no sooner got well under way than some movement on the part of my patient drew ...
— That Affair Next Door • Anna Katharine Green
... and but for the irrefutable records of the Court, few would credit the fact that every one of these letters was in the French language! And the dupe a highly educated mathematician ...
— The Detection of Forgery • Douglas Blackburn
... learning, that the American Regular makes tactics as he needs them; that the rules of war established by pen soldiers do not form the basis of actual operations in the field; that theories must go to the wall before the stern logic of irrefutable facts; and that deductions based on the drill-made automatons of European armies are not applicable to an army composed of American Volunteer Regulars, led by our ...
— The Gatlings at Santiago • John H. Parker
... things—this subtle insight into feminine nature that marks the successful selling letter to the woman. They are not things that can be set down and numbered in a text book; they are qualities of mind that must be understood and delicately handled. Rightly used they are more powerful than irrefutable arguments ...
— Business Correspondence • Anonymous
... mine in too eagerly grasping the obvious as proof.—My dear Wil—my dear girl, I am profoundly grieved, but it has been brought to our attention that—that there are grave doubts as to your identity! In fact, belated but seemingly irrefutable documentary evidence appears to prove that ...
— The Fifth Ace • Douglas Grant
... parts of this declaration was quite evident and irrefutable, for education, as Miss Miner understood it, was destined to make every slave a man and every man free. This, of course, increased the difficulty of Miss Miner's task but her faith was abiding and her courage unabated. Miss Miner realized fully that the lot of the eight thousand free people of ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 5, 1920 • Various
... inner coat pocket a photograph and handed it to me—the most amazing photograph I ever gazed upon. Astounded, almost convinced I sat looking at this irrefutable evidence in silence. The smoke of his cigar drifting into my face aroused me from ...
— Police!!! • Robert W. Chambers
... had been the usual rumours. One officer in one prison camp had heard of Harry Luttrell in another. A sergeant had seen him wounded, not mortally. A bullet had struck him in the foot. Joan lived upon these rumours. Finally proof came—proof irrefutable. ...
— The Summons • A.E.W. Mason
... ascertained. inevitable, unavoidable, avoidless^; ineluctable. unerring, infallible; unchangeable &c 150; to be depended on, trustworthy, reliable, bound. unimpeachable, undeniable, unquestionable; indisputable, incontestable, incontrovertible, indubitable; irrefutable &c (proven) 478; conclusive, without power of appeal. indubious^; without doubt, beyond a doubt, without a shade or shadow of doubt, without question, beyond question; past dispute; clear as day; beyond all question, beyond all dispute; undoubted, uncontested, unquestioned, undisputed; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... race. As long as there is a Charles W. Chestnut, or a Paul Lawrence Dunbar, a T. Thomas Fortune, and others, whose writings are read by the thousands of literary people of this country and England, so long will there be an irrefutable argument for the intellectual worth of the ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... phenomena of comets' tails he writes:[1] "Beyond a doubt, the widest and most interesting prospect of future discovery, which this study holds out to us, is, that distinction between gravitating and levitating matter, that positive and irrefutable demonstration in nature of a repulsive force, co-extensive with, but enormously more powerful than the attractive force we call gravity which the phenomena of their tails afford." I premise that this prophecy of Herschel's will be fully demonstrated and ...
— Aether and Gravitation • William George Hooper
... which sounded logical enough, was based on the irrefutable truth that as air has some weight—to be exact 14.70 pounds for a column one inch square and the height of the earth's atmosphere—a vacuum must be lighter, as it contains nothing, not even air. Accordingly in the seventeenth ...
— Aircraft and Submarines - The Story of the Invention, Development, and Present-Day - Uses of War's Newest Weapons • Willis J. Abbot
... are just as inadequate as the old ones, but as they are new their futility cannot immediately be recognized by the majority of men. Besides this, those who enjoy power propagate these new sophistries and support them so skilfully that they seem irrefutable even to many of those who suffer from the oppression these theories seek to justify. These new justifications are termed 'scientific'. But by the term 'scientific' is understood just what was formerly understood by the term 'religious': just as formerly everything called 'religious' ...
— A Letter to a Hindu • Leo Tolstoy
... to decide. Gentlemen, I have listened attentively to the evidence, and have perceived that the weight of it, the overwhelming weight of it, is in favor of the plaintiff Hyde. I have listened also to the remarks of counsel, with high interest—and especially will I commend the masterly and irrefutable logic of the distinguished gentleman who represents the plaintiff. But gentlemen, let us beware how we allow mere human testimony, human ingenuity in argument and human ideas of equity, to influence us at a moment so solemn as this. Gentlemen, it ill becomes ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... perhaps an irrefutable condemnation of the modern wedding display that many a young girl has had to refuse the joy of being in the wedding party because a complete bridesmaid outfit costs a sum that parents of moderate means are quite unable to ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... seen Alba's beautiful eyes veiled with a sadness inexplicable, as if he had just given her another blow? He did not know that since the day on which the word insanity had been uttered before her relative to Maud's husband, the Contessina was the victim of a reasoning as simple as irrefutable. ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... cruel and irrefutable place where the throat will wattle, was almost interchangeable with eighteen's. Indeed, Bon Ton grandmothers with backs and French heels that were twenty years younger than their throats and bunions, vied with ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... opened and read to the court, after all the witnesses have been heard. Arrange it with Monsieur Darzac's counsel. Monsieur Darzac is innocent. In this letter is written the name of the murderer; and—that is all I have to say. I am leaving to get my proofs—for the irrefutable evidence of the murderer's guilt.' Our reporter departed. For a long time we were without news from him; but, a week ago, a stranger called upon our manager and said: 'Act in accordance with the instructions of Joseph Rouletabille, if it becomes necessary to do so. The letter ...
— The Mystery of the Yellow Room • Gaston Leroux
... irrefutable fact that the work with the children pays the best dividends to the state and nation. There is a Doric oracle which says, 'If the Athenians want good citizens let them put whatever is beautiful into the ears of their sons.' If we Americanize this oracle it would read, 'If ...
— Home Missions In Action • Edith H. Allen
... learned Moguls were invited, in order to offer explanations, and, if possible, to terminate the discussion. The newspapers were full of virulent articles, pamphlets appeared in great numbers, and the people in some cases seemed disposed to settle the question by the right of might, an irrefutable argument. ...
— Les Parsis • D. Menant
... for the fourth time) a living daughter, and during the next twenty days ninety-four other daughters; and that all of them went on to reproduce in the same way without any contact with males. It seemed as if this furnished an irrefutable proof of the truth of the scatulation theory, as it was held by the Ovulists; it is not surprising to find that the theory then ...
— The Evolution of Man, V.1. • Ernst Haeckel
... and felt his heart sink. Persis' eyes were lowered. Her face was grave and a little sad as befits one who has been tendered irrefutable proof of a friend's unworthiness. Thomas gulped. Well, it was only what he had expected all along. A woman like Persis could not be asked to ...
— Other People's Business - The Romantic Career of the Practical Miss Dale • Harriet L. Smith
... had seemed to Lansing as mad as it was enchanting: it had thoroughly frightened him. But Susy's arguments were irrefutable, her ingenuities inexhaustible. Had he ever thought it all out? She asked. No. Well, she had; and would he kindly not interrupt? In the first place, there would be all the wedding-presents. Jewels, and a motor, and a silver dinner service, did she mean? Not a bit of it! She could ...
— The Glimpses of the Moon • Edith Wharton
... had offered a similar reward for the capture of any vessels of the Chilian squadron—and kept it. Fortunately, his own letters prove these matters, which otherwise I should have hesitated to mention, unsupported by testimony so irrefutable. ...
— Narrative of Services in the Liberation of Chili, Peru and Brazil, - from Spanish and Portuguese Domination, Volume 1 • Thomas Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald
... in a chair opposite her] Yes, you are here, that is irrefutable. You are here. Now we must consider the situation and then decide on what to do. First, let me ask you how you came to mention ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... did not know what "irrefutable" meant, but he did know that Mr. Pennypacker intended to ...
— The Young Trailers - A Story of Early Kentucky • Joseph A. Altsheler
... 1816. The three chevaliers have all been condemned as culpable of aiding a state-criminal to escape, but not accused of any conspiracy against the French government. They Page 388 are therefore, sentenced merely to three months' imprisonment.(293) Certainly, if their logic were irrefutable, and if the treaty of Paris included the royal pardon with the amnesty accorded by the allied generals, then, to save those who ought not to have been tried would have been meritorious rather than illegal; but the king ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 3 • Madame D'Arblay
... is a developer of health and vigor, a sure road to grace, poise and personal beauty of form and face—in a word, a maker of beautiful and attractive women—I am making a statement of fact that is irrefutable, based on actual and frequent occurrence. You never saw a properly trained dancer who was not ...
— The Art of Stage Dancing - The Story of a Beautiful and Profitable Profession • Ned Wayburn
... new step before he had planted his foot firmly in the one that went before; but once he knew where he stood, he did not hesitate to question any scientific dogma that opposed him, always in his own quiet way, backed by irrefutable facts. In a remarkable degree he had the faculty of getting down through the husk to the core of things, but he rejected nothing untried. The little thing in hand, he ever insisted, if faithfully done might hold the key to the whole problem; only let it be done ...
— Hero Tales of the Far North • Jacob A. Riis
... obvious simplicity of the doctrine; but now when the subject begins to be tedious and the discussion lags, the interest consequently abates and the Zeitgeist suddenly grasps the old objections, presented in a new garb, and what was hitherto truth, clear and irrefutable, now sinks into the dreary, gray mists of myth. Sic ...
— At the Deathbed of Darwinism - A Series of Papers • Eberhard Dennert
... then, takes its stand upon the observed trend of human history, upon a scrutiny of the facts of nature, and upon an examination of the origin and contents of the god-idea. And upon these grounds it may fairly claim to be irrefutable and inevitable. Circumstances may obstruct its universal acceptance as a reasoned mental attitude, but that merely delays, it does not destroy the certainty ...
— Theism or Atheism - The Great Alternative • Chapman Cohen
... and cheerful throughout the evening. He repeated to himself, "I shall not be hanged," and it seemed to him so convincing, so wise, so irrefutable, that it was unnecessary to feel uneasy. He had long forgotten about his crime, only sometimes he regretted that he had not been successful in attacking his master's wife. But ...
— The Seven who were Hanged • Leonid Andreyev
... considered conclusive, and which is stubbornly upheld as irrefutable by the representatives of the status quo—to the effect that the existing family-form has existed since time immemorial, and, lest the whole social fabric be put in jeopardy, must continue to exist forever, turned ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel
... millionaire, with the impressiveness of a logician drawing a conclusion from two irrefutable premises—"in consequence, Count Bunker, I demand—and my daughter demands—and my son demands, sir, that the nobleman should possess an unusual number of high-class, fire-proof, expert-guaranteed qualities. That is only fair, you ...
— Count Bunker • J. Storer Clouston
... children. In each community the pastor appointed the catechism to be taught in the school, and joined the teacher in drilling the children in its questions and answers. Indeed, the answers were regarded as irrefutable in those uncritical days, and hence a strong shield and buckler against manifold temptations provided by "yt ould deluder Satan." To offset the task of learning these doctrines of the church, it is probable that the mothers regaled the little ones with ...
— Forgotten Books of the American Nursery - A History of the Development of the American Story-Book • Rosalie V. Halsey
... hanging around his villa. Went lovemaking with her in the moonlight up to a quiet place on the hillside. Then, had her live with him in the Villa Clementine. Finally, took her to Wiesbaden. These are all facts for which I can bring you irrefutable evidence. I had my secretary shadowing him from the moment ...
— Swirling Waters • Max Rittenberg
... believe in astronomy?' When he wanted to overwhelm his opponent completely, he said: 'All that is nothing but words.' It must be admitted that to many persons remarks of that kind seemed (and still seem) irrefutable arguments. But Nikolai Artemyevitch never suspected that Augustina Christianovna, in letters to her cousin, Theodolina Peterzelius, called ...
— On the Eve • Ivan Turgenev
... world. The necessity for constant reconsideration of them is from this standpoint at once evident. The Greek view of the world is as classic as the plastic art of Phidias and the epic of Homer; the Christian, as eternally valid as the architecture of the Middle Ages; the modern, as irrefutable as Goethe's poetry and the music of Beethoven. The views of the world which proceed from the spirits of different ages, as products of the general development of culture, are not so much thoughts as rhythms in thinking, not theories but modes of intuition saturated with feelings of worth. We may ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... though quantitatively impaired, are more highly developed than those of the countryman, so it is with his "morals." In positive attainments of conscience, virtue, and vice, the townsman shows considerable advance. This point is commonly misunderstood. The annals of crime afford irrefutable evidence of the greater criminality of the towns. London, containing less than one-fifth of the population of England and Wales, is responsible for more than one-third of the annual number of indictable crimes.[284] In France the criminality of the urban population is just double that of the rural ...
— The Evolution of Modern Capitalism - A Study of Machine Production • John Atkinson Hobson
... sound-conducting properties of the rifle. Normally of good hearing he failed to detect what to Private Brass Pot was an accepted and irrefutable fact. ...
— Wilmshurst of the Frontier Force • Percy F. Westerman
... edition of his book. And there is perhaps a certain humor in the remembrance that it was to Locke's economic tracts that Bolingbroke went for the arguments with which, in the Craftsman, he attacked the excise scheme of Walpole. That is irrefutable evidence of ...
— Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham • Harold J. Laski
... 'take.' Gantt took 'rendering service' as an axiom; my observation, shared with many others, is that our civilization had quite another axiom, 'we preach give, we practice take.' The problem which interested me, was how to find a way out of this contradiction that would be irrefutable. If one of them is true and natural law for humans, then the other is not; if our words are true, then our deeds are not true, or if our deeds are true then the words are camouflage. I found the solution, by applying mathematically rigorous thinking. Mathematics, ...
— Manhood of Humanity. • Alfred Korzybski
... of childish things; but the romance of his birth, the romance of his high destiny, remained a vital part of his spiritual equipment. His looks, his talents, his temperament, his instincts, his dreams had been irrefutable confirmations. His mere honesty, his mere integrity, had been based on this fervent and unshakable creed. And now it had gone. No more romance. No more glamour. No more Vision Splendid now faded into the light of common and sordid day. Outwardly listening, ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... wherever its emissaries traveled "The Thoughts" confronted and confounded them. So that Mr. Garrison was warranted in saying that "all that sophistry or misrepresentation could effect to overthrow its integrity has been attempted in vain. The work, as a whole, stands irrefutable." The attempts made to maintain its hold upon the British public were characterized by duplicity and misrepresentation beyond anything practiced in America. The work of deceiving the philanthropy of Great Britain was conducted by the emissary of the society, Elliott Cresson, a man ...
— William Lloyd Garrison - The Abolitionist • Archibald H. Grimke
... I cried out, 'the widespread growth of economic reaction against which we Western Liberals are waging a ridiculous Quixotic war with all our apparently irrefutable arguments. We present to the people as an argument against protection exactly that after which they are—unconsciously, it is true—eagerly longing. Protective tariffs, trade guilds, and whatever else the ingenious devices of the last decades may be called, I now understand and recognise ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka
... manifested in consciousness and depending on this the D@r@s@tis@r@s@tivadins asserted that our experience was inexplicably produced under the influence of avidya and that beyond that no objective common ground could be admitted. But though this has the general assent of Vedanta and is irrefutable in itself, still for the sake of explaining our common sense view (pratikarmavyavasatha) we may think that we have an objective world before us as the common field of experience. We can also imagine a scheme of things and operations by which the phenomenon of our experience may be interpreted ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta
... indeed, been projected in the earliest age of philosophy, and proposed anew in the seventeenth century.[245:14] Nevertheless, the structural and functional teleology of the organism remained as apparently irrefutable testimony to the inworking of some principle other than that of mechanical necessity. Indeed, the only fruitful method applicable to organic phenomena was that which explained them in terms of purposive ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... should say if I were a "transformist." All this is a chain of highly logical deductions, and it hangs together with a certain air of reality, such as we like to look for in a host of "transformist" arguments which are put forward as irrefutable. Well, I make a present of my deductive theory to whosoever desires it, and without the least regret; I do not believe a single word of it, and I confess my profound ignorance of the origin of the ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre
... cursed P. F., in case any one condescended to think of him after the disgrace we fastened upon him the other evening at the house of Madame d'Argeles." P. F.—these initials of course meant Pascal Ferailleur. Then he was innocent, and she held an undeniable, irrefutable proof of his innocence in her hands. How coolly and impudently Valorsay confessed his atrocious crime! "A bold stroke is in contemplation which, if no unfortunate and well-nigh impossible accident occur, will throw the girl into my arms." Marguerite shuddered. "The girl" ...
— Baron Trigault's Vengeance - Volume 2 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau
... Sainte-Hermine, and so with the others. The result was a confusion in the testimony of the innkeepers, which the entries in their books only served to increase. The arrival of travellers, noted on the registers an hour too early or an hour too late, furnished the prisoners with irrefutable alibis. The judges were morally convinced of their guilt; but their conviction was ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas
... of this kind on a symbolic personality is rare enough to be clearly remarkable, and every author has a weakness for the striking and irrefutable example. The vivisection of war reveals such examples, but it does not make them out of nothing. In a more normal public life, symbolic pictures are no less governant of behavior, but each symbol ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... sake of Giovanna's salvation; one would think that even the hardened old Queen must have been touched with the intense and tender solicitude of the following letter, even if she were not convinced by its irrefutable reasoning. As a matter of fact, Giovanna, after having for a time sided with Clement, did temporarily change her base and espouse the cause of Urban. Soon, however, she reverted to her former position. ...
— Letters of Catherine Benincasa • Catherine Benincasa
... him—and mine was only under reprieve until sufficient time to obviate suspicion should have elapsed after father's death. We had no proof that would stand in any court—even if we should have been given the chance to adopt that course. And without absolute, irrefutable proof, it was all so cleverly woven, stretched over so many years, that our charge must have been held to be too visionary and fantastic to ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... cannot be supernatural after Christ which was natural before him, nor that sent down from heaven which was already on earth as the product of human reason. The Rev. Mr. Lake fairly says: "We have evidence—clear, conclusive, irrefutable evidence—as to what this doctrine really is. We can trace its birth-place in the philosophic speculations of the ancient world, we can note its gradual development and growth, we can see it in its early youth passing (through Philo and others) from ...
— The Freethinker's Text Book, Part II. - Christianity: Its Evidences, Its Origin, Its Morality, Its History • Annie Besant
... with the Jewish Christ as a convenient label. Just why Christians should worship a Jew, and pray to a Jewess, and yet despise Jews, is a matter so subtle that it has never been explained. Gibbon in this connection says at least one irrefutable thing, and that is, that the Jewish people are men and women. Christians are men and women, also. All are human beings, and it is quite likely that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, but time and chance happeneth ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard
... who ran away to sea when a boy some thirty odd years ago and was lost track of entirely. Lost his case at that first trial, and got sent to prison for conspiracy Is out again now. Claims to have new and irrefutable refutable evidence, and is going to have a second try for the title and estates. A Colonel Goshen, of the Australian militia, was one of his strongest witnesses. Wonder if there is ...
— Cleek, the Master Detective • Thomas W. Hanshew
... a lack of mental equipoise. We find scattered throughout his works the most brilliant, irrefutable, and logical truths side by side with the most inane, illogical, and stolid crudities. Among other men of genius who showed signs of degeneration we may include Alexander Stevens, Joel Hart, Adams, Train, Breckenridge, Webster, Blaine, Van Buren, Houston, ...
— Religion and Lust - or, The Psychical Correlation of Religious Emotion and Sexual Desire • James Weir
... high-minded Governor of Massachusetts wrote a memorable address to the Legislature; the Joint Committee of the Legislative Assembly, after a careful and candid consideration of the subject, not only concurred in the views of the Executive government, but elucidated them in a report, the irrefutable logic and elevated statesmanship of which will for ever endear the name of Hazewell to oppressed nations; and the Senate of Massachusetts adopted the resolutions proposed by the Legislative Committee. After such remarkable and unsolicited manifestations of conviction, ...
— Select Speeches of Kossuth • Kossuth
... a lull, and with the lull a sense of her position: she sat in the very, jaws of slander! Any moment mistress Watson or another might enter and find her there, and what then more natural or irrefutable than the accusation of having liberated him? She sprang to her feet, and darted to the ...
— St. George and St. Michael • George MacDonald
... that words are akin to the matter which they describe; when they relate to the lasting and permanent and intelligible, they ought to be lasting and unalterable, and, as far as their nature allows, irrefutable and immovable—nothing less. But when they express only the copy or likeness and not the eternal things themselves, they need only be likely and analogous to the real words. As being is to becoming, so is truth to belief. If then, ...
— Timaeus • Plato
... the Church, born at Saint Lo. He was a Court preacher under Henry III of France and denounced Elizabeth of England in a funeral sermon on Mary Stuart. It is told of him that he once demonstrated before the king the existence of God, and being complimented upon his irrefutable arguments, replied that he was prepared to bring equally good arguments to prove that God did not exist. He became ...
— Immortal Memories • Clement Shorter
... in a reliable financial paper prophesying the failure of the Universal Credit Company, and basing its statements on irrefutable calculations. Serge took the paper and looked over it. He turned pale and crushed it ...
— Serge Panine, Complete • Georges Ohnet
... of the Constitutional Democrats, popularly known as the "Cadets," furiously lashed Premier Sturmer and quoted the irrefutable evidence of his pro-Germanism and of his corruption. Sturmer reeled under the smashing attack. In his rage he forbade the publication of Miliukov's speech, but hundreds of thousands of copies of it were secretly printed and distributed. Every one recognized that there ...
— Bolshevism - The Enemy of Political and Industrial Democracy • John Spargo
... partizans of Dryden to name another species of composition, in which the former excells so as to throw the ballance again upon the side of Dryden. This species is the Lyric, in which the warmest votaries of Pope must certainly acknowledge, that he is much inferior; as an irrefutable proof of this we need only compare Mr. Dryden's Ode on St. Cecilia's Day, with Mr. Pope's; in which the disparity is so apparent, that we know not if the most finished of Pope's compositions has discovered such a variety and ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753),Vol. V. • Theophilus Cibber
... thought of connecting Mosk with the crime; and even on his seizure by warrant many declined to believe in his guilt. Nevertheless, when the man was brought before the magistrates, the evidence adduced against him by Baltic was so strong and clear and irrefutable that, without a dissenting word from the Bench, the prisoner was committed to stand his trial at the ensuing assizes. Mosk made no defence; he did not even offer a remark; but, accepting his fate with sullen apathy, ...
— The Bishop's Secret • Fergus Hume
... appalled. This last statement seemed to be irrefutable. They were captives on the island, which seemed itself to be in ...
— Doubloons—and the Girl • John Maxwell Forbes
... more practical in its bearings than even Jonathan Oldbuck's great Essay on Castrametation. A Three Rivers antiquarian had attempted to establish that it was Ives Cholette who had been the sculptor of the statue in question, but our old friend (through the church registers—and through ancient and irrefutable records) showed it could neither be Ives Cholette, aged, in 1771, 10 years, nor his younger brother Hyacinthe, aged then but 8 years, who had designed this great work of art, but ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... this world are thus written by his own finger in the fossils and coal, and engraved on the everlasting granite of the earth's foundation stones. Dumb beasts and dead reptiles start forward to give their irrefutable testimony to the repeated supernatural acts of their Creator in this world which he had made. Every distinct species of plants and animals is proof of a distinct supernatural overruling of the present laws of nature. The experience of man is not the limit of ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... bridegroom. "Besides," said Aunt Petherick, "a nice hash you'll make of it if you go and label yourself damaged goods before you're fairly started. Why, it would be just giving Dale the whip-hand over you for the rest of your days." Looking back at it all, Mavis felt that this argument was irrefutable. ...
— The Devil's Garden • W. B. Maxwell
... antique and had let themselves be seduced by it, despite their civilization and their religion. Let us only rejoice thereat. There are indeed some, and among them the great English critic who is irrefutable when he is a poet, and irrational when he becomes a philosopher;—there are some who tell us that in its union with antique art, the art of the followers of Giotto embraced death, and rotted away ever after. There are others, more moderate but less logical, who would teach us that in ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... irrefutable thing. Why you wanted Brian to paint pictures," went on Whitaker, ignoring Kenny's outraged sputter, "when he couldn't, is and always has been a matter of considerable worry and mystery ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... the Secret Service agents of the States, aided by the agents of other nations, were unravelling German plots and collecting data of treachery so irrefutable that it had to be accepted. When all was ready the first chapters of the story were divulged. They were divulged almost in the form of a serial novel, so that the man who read his paper to-day and said, "No doubt that isolated item is true, but ...
— Out To Win - The Story of America in France • Coningsby Dawson
... immediately ordered for the woman's trial. The word and the inscription upon it were irrefutable proofs of guilt, and she was sent to a prison for females in Massachusetts. The affair was inexcusably gross, considering the condition of war—so much, I think, will be generally conceded—still, ...
— Between the Lines - Secret Service Stories Told Fifty Years After • Henry Bascom Smith
... Mr. Goose, thank you, for placing the thing in such a lucid and irrefutable light," answered Mr. Allgood, who seemed to be in mist all the time Mr. Goose ...
— Talkers - With Illustrations • John Bate
... last reference to the Bombos that my Aunt ever made in my hearing. Of course it is preposterous to suppose that she traces her descent from a king through a mere bowl of punch, and her being still the president of the Selected Salic Scions is proof irrefutable that her claim rests upon a more ...
— Lady Baltimore • Owen Wister
... development. I do not mean romance in the sense in which Mr. Wells takes it, that is to say, the dramatic assembling and clever cooerdination of unsubstantiated theories, personal preferences, prejudices and aversions, under the guise of solemn and irrefutable truth attested by all the exact sciences known to man, but romance which aims like any other art at communicating from one person to another something of the inner and essential quality of life ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram
... quite well that Citizen-Deputy Droulde was not a man to be lightly dealt with. No mere suspicion or anonymous denunciation would be sufficient in his case, to bring him before the tribunal of the Revolution. Unless there were proofs—positive, irrefutable, damnable proofs—of Paul Droulde's treachery, the Public Prosecutor would never dare to frame an indictment against him. The mob of Paris would rise to defend its idol; the hideous hags, who plied their knitting at ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... no negro had, or ever would have, a just conception of the binding force of a contract, and that this system of free negro labor was bound to be a failure. If some negroes shirked, or did not perform their task with sufficient alacrity, it was produced as irrefutable evidence to show that physical compulsion was actually indispensable to make the negro work. If negroes, idlers or refugees crawling about the towns, applied to the authorities for subsistence, it was quoted as incontestably establishing the point that the negro was too improvident ...
— Report on the Condition of the South • Carl Schurz
... matter?" "Rather a poseur, is he not?" "A question, that, of temperament," or "A matter of the definition of words"; and other charming generalities, which sound well, and seem to go far, and are pleasingly irrefutable. Sometimes the discussion turned on Art—on points of colour or technique; whether realism was quite justified; and should we be pre-Raphaelites? When these discussions started, Christian's eyes would grow bigger and clearer, with a sort of shining reasonableness; as though they were trying to ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... comment on all these marginal notes, let it be understood that I hold the far greater part—the only not all of what our great Author urges, to apply with irrefutable force against the doctrine and practice of the Romish Church, as it in fact exists, and no less against the Familists and ...
— The Literary Remains Of Samuel Taylor Coleridge • Edited By Henry Nelson Coleridge
... most in repute were all but the most foolish; and that others less esteemed were really wiser and better. I will tell you the tale of my wanderings and of the 'Herculean' labours, as I may call them, which I endured only to find at last the oracle irrefutable. After the politicians, I went to the poets; tragic, dithyrambic, and all sorts. And there, I said to myself, you will be instantly detected; now you will find out that you are more ignorant than they are. Accordingly, ...
— Apology - Also known as "The Death of Socrates" • Plato
... which she carried so proudly—how would she look and what kind of figure would she cut among the shaggy, stunted, sedate-looking nags of the Sognefiord district? But the captain, though what he said was irrefutable, had to suspend all argument when he saw how utterly wretched Erik became at the mere thought of losing Lady Clare. So he took his chances; and, after having ordered blankets of three different thicknesses for three different kinds of weather, shipped ...
— Boyhood in Norway • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... is now impending over it. And since some men are of opinion that the welfare of Italy depends upon the Church, I wish to put forth such arguments as occur to my mind to the contrary; and of these I will adduce two, which, as I think, are irrefutable. The first is this: that owing to the evil ensample of the Papal Court, Italy has lost all piety and all religion: whence follow infinite troubles and disorders; for as religion implies all good, so its absence implies the contrary. Consequently, ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... conspicuous in this play.... (This) coarseness, so repulsive to ourselves, was introduced, it is impossible to doubt, for the express purpose of counter-balancing the extreme earnestness and gravity of the play. It seems so logical, so irrefutable; and so completely misinterprets every creative force of Aristophanes' Psyche that it certainly deserves a little admiration. It is in the best academic tradition, and everyone respects a man for writing ...
— Lysistrata • Aristophanes
... enthusiasm for classical mythology may well have, later on, gone the way of her admiration for Spinoza, whom she read with Shelley that winter (1820-1), as Medwin notes, [Footnote: I. e. ed. H. Buxton Forman, p. 253.] and 'whose arguments she then thought irrefutable—tempora mutantur!' ...
— Proserpine and Midas • Mary Shelley
... enough for us to know them, doctor; we want evidence against them,—clear, positive, irrefutable evidence. This evidence we will get from Crochard. Oh, I know the ways of these rascals! As soon as they see they are overwhelmed by the evidence against them, and feel they are in real danger, they hasten to denounce their ...
— The Clique of Gold • Emile Gaboriau
... instance in which a man's decision tended to be contrary to God's foreknowledge of its outcome. Just as we should refuse to answer the question whether an actual case of injustice on the part of God would prove his ignorance or dependence, because we know through irrefutable proofs that God is wise and without need; so here we say man has freedom though God knows he will act thus and so, and refuse to say whether in case the unbeliever turned believer it would prove God's ignorance or ...
— A History of Mediaeval Jewish Philosophy • Isaac Husik
... to-day in the air as on land it is the Germans who have the initiative and the Allies who are condemned to the defensive. Yet experts had pointed out over and over again what should be done and what avoided. Their advice was obviously sound and their criticism obviously irrefutable. But the men in power fumbled and floundered on until we had forfeited our mastery in the air to our enemies. And ever since then the nation has been paying the penalty. Yet it is to the men responsible ...
— England and Germany • Emile Joseph Dillon
... pastiches, have been encumbered with Impressionist pastiches. It would be unfair to blame the Impressionists for it. They have shown by their very career that they hated teaching and would never pretend to teach. Impressionism is based upon irrefutable optic laws, but it is neither a style, nor a method, likely ever to become a formula in its turn. One may call upon this art for examples, but not for receipts. On the contrary, its best teaching has been to ...
— The French Impressionists (1860-1900) • Camille Mauclair
... with irrefutable demonstrations of the truth, there are some people who either cannot, ...
— Tyranny of God • Joseph Lewis
... evidence, that we have two of the strongest sorts of evidence in the world for the kind of religion which least suits Mr. Muller's argument—(1) the undesigned coincidences of testimony, (2) the irrefutable witness and sanction of elementary criminal law. Mr. Muller's own evidence is that much-disputed work, where 'all men see what they want to see, as in the clouds,' and where many see ...
— Custom and Myth • Andrew Lang
... drove at Magda with the force of utter certainty. It was true, then—quite true! The fact that the Spaniard had been a dancer gave an irrefutable reality to the tale; Michael so worshipped every form ...
— The Lamp of Fate • Margaret Pedler
... of the Papacy. The arts come, in their turn, to lay their homage at the feet of your Holiness, and to proclaim to the world that this power is to them indispensable. Their voice must be heard and listened to. For when the tide of generations recedes, the arts remain as the irrefutable witnesses of the power and splendor of the civilization amid which these generations lived. The sovereigns who encourage and develop them acquire immortal renown; those who neglect or oppress them ...
— Pius IX. And His Time • The Rev. AEneas MacDonell
... prefers the knight Ariolant. She thereby so enrages her noble suitor that he finally bribes her maid to personate her and admit him by night to her chamber by means of a rope ladder. With fiendish cunning he has advised Ariolant to watch Ginevra, so this true lover, witnessing what he considers irrefutable proof of his lady-love's unchastity, departs in despair to commit suicide. His brother, deeming him already dead, denounces Ginevra, who, brought before the judges, is sentenced to die unless some champion ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... The peasant is irrefutable. He has devised a complete explanation. To refute him someone would have to prove to him that there is no devil, or another peasant would have to explain to him that it is not the devil but a German, who moves ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... they had nevertheless, on the basis of what was heard during the reading, drawn up a "counter-plea, or reply;" this he was now holding in his hands, and he requested that it be read publicly; from it every one might learn "with what strong, irrefutable reasons of Holy Scripture" the Augustana was fortified. (Foerstemann, 2, 479.) Duke Frederick took the Apology, but returned it on signal from the Emperor, into whose ear King Ferdinand had been whispering. Sleidan relates: "Cumque ...
— Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church • Friedrich Bente
... road white before him, leading away into the empty, half-translucent shadows of starlight. Father Delancey had said it was only the faery nonsense in his head that made him miserable, and had marshaled before him the irrefutable blessings of his life. Had he not been cared for from the first minute of his landing from Ireland, a penniless piper of nineteen, as though the holy saints themselves were about him? Had he not gone direct to Father Delancey, sent by the priest in Donegal, and had not ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield
... it, that ever since the days of Daguerre photography has been regarded as the one infallible means of portraying faithfully any object, scene, or action. Indeed a photograph is admitted in court as irrefutable evidence. For when everything else fails, a picture made through the photographic lens almost invariably turns the tide. However, such a picture upon which the fate of an important case may rest should be subjected to critical examination for it is an established fact that ...
— The Poisoned Pen • Arthur B. Reeve
... servitor of Fleet Street, the Law Courts clock, had just finished striking seven. It boomed out the hour, stroke by stroke, solemnly, inexorably, like a grim old judge summing up and driving home, point by point, an irrefutable charge. The heavy strokes broke in upon the fitful doze into which Robin Greve, stretched out in an armchair ...
— The Yellow Streak • Williams, Valentine |
