"Unforgivable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... realised how easily he could slip into that life and be engulfed. No one would mind; his position would be the same; no one would think worse of him. Unless, of course, he was caught. Then probably everyone would turn round upon him; that was the one unforgivable sin—to be found out. But it was rarely that anyone was caught; and the descent was so easy. In his excitement he ...
— The Loom of Youth • Alec Waugh
... direct result of the now declared affection of his brain), which prevented him from saying exactly what he wished in a connected manner; and the results of this are in part evident in the book. But it must always remain a blot, quite unforgivable and nearly inexplicable, on the memory of Wilson, that 'Christopher North' permitted himself to comment on some lapses in logic and style in a way which would have been rather that side of good manners and reasonable criticism in the case of a mere beginner in letters. ...
— Sir Walter Scott - Famous Scots Series • George Saintsbury
... fell. Six months previously that creature had stolen Wilkins, the best cook I ever had. Mere man may not understand the enormity of this offence; but every woman knows there is no crime more heinous, more despicable, more unforgivable. She might find it in her heart to condone larceny, think lightly of arson, or even excuse murder; but there is not one who would extend even a deathbed pardon to the person who had robbed her ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, April 7, 1920 • Various
... the blood-bay's flank and rode straight for the Great House. The boy stood staring after him; he did not notice the trickle of blood from the cut in his ear; he was not even conscious that he was still in life. He remembered only the unforgivable affront which this man had put upon him, the mark which was the infamous badge of the bondman, the slave. Quinton Edge! Ah, yes; he would remember that face ...
— The Doomsman • Van Tassel Sutphen
... one form of theft utterly unforgivable it is the theft by a writer of another writer's undeveloped ideas. Borrow the plot of Sir J. M. Barrie's last play, and you do him no harm; you only write yourself down a plagiarist. But listen to the ...
— Once a Week • Alan Alexander Milne
... the corridor he could see the interior of the room and all that went on there during the next few moments. A candle burned on the bureau, exposing the feminine neatness and delicacy of the furnishings. The presence of the three men was a desecration; what they were about to do, an unforgivable act of vandalism. ...
— The Abandoned Room • Wadsworth Camp
... affair was committed to an incorrigible snob, and he decided that a young lady who earned her own living was not a fit theatrical associate for the patrician daughters of successful soap-boilers and pork-packers, thereby offering an unforgettable and unforgivable affront to all the legions of labor. I do not approve of Miss Whitney's sale of her photo to a cigarette firm; but I do say that the act is infinitely more excusable than the practice among high-fly society ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... I think our love for Dr. Hemingway in itself would have kept the Sabbath sacred. He never found fault with our Sunday visiting. All days were holy to him, and his evening sermons taught us that frivolity, and idle gossip, and scandal are as unforgivable on week days as on the Sabbath Day. Somewhere in the wide courts of heaven there must be reserved an abode of inconceivable joy and peace for such men as he, men who preach the Word faithfully through the years, whose hand-clasp means ...
— The Price of the Prairie - A Story of Kansas • Margaret Hill McCarter
... Scandinavian languages, and of the Celtic, abound in our midst. Borrow was a forerunner with Bowring of much of this 'useless' learning. Borrow came to consider Bowring's apparent neglect of him to be unforgivable. But that time had not arrived, when in 1842 he wrote to ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter
... Hazlitt was consciously the aggressor, but his attacks were never wanton. He denounced Wordsworth and Coleridge and Southey because they were renegades from the cause which lay nearest to his heart. Their apostasy was an unforgivable offence in his eyes, and his wrath was proportioned to the admiration which he otherwise entertained for them. It is true that he treated their motives hastily and unjustly, but none of his opponents set him the example of charity. ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... living at too great a distance to see her; the other was kept out of her reach, for a considerable part of the time, by her father. In addition, a third member of the Barrett family, her brother Alfred, earned excommunication from his father's house by the unforgivable offence of matrimony. Altogether it was not without a certain feeling of relief that, in the middle of October, Mrs. Browning, with her husband and child, left England for Paris. The whole visit ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... smiled at him serenely. "I would not bury myself with you in an Ionian island for more than two months in a year for anything on earth. On my part, it would be the unforgivable sin. No woman has the right, however much she loves him, to ruin a man, any more than a man has the right to ruin a woman. But if you won't marry me, I'm perfectly willing to spend two months a year in an Ionian island with you," and she ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... most dissevered the people from the Pope,—the unforgivable thing,—the breaking point between him and them,—has been the encouragement and promotion he gave to the officer under whom were executed the slaughters of Perugia. That made the breaking point in ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... gentle reproof, as to a child caught in some trespass well-nigh unforgivable, but to whose offense he had closed his eyes out of considerations which only the forgiving understand. He looked her full in the eyes as he spoke, the disappointment and pain of his discovery in his face. The color blanched out of her cheeks, ...
— The Duke Of Chimney Butte • G. W. Ogden
... life (or he were not human, but an angel) it dawns on a man that he has done the unforgivable. It dawns on most men oftener than once a week. ...
— King—of the Khyber Rifles • Talbot Mundy
... it just now don't count. I'm going to let you alone a while to think it over, and then I'm coming back to tell you more about it," and with that Sam stalked from the room, leaving Miss Josephine Stevens gasping, dazed, quite sure that he was unforgivable, indignant with everything, still rankling, in spite of all Sam had said, with the thought that she had been made a mere part of a commercial transaction. Why, it was like those barbarous countries she had read about, where wives are bought ...
— The Early Bird - A Business Man's Love Story • George Randolph Chester
... inhabit it is found absolutely essential that the father and the mother, three daughters, two maidservants, the nurse, and even, I believe, the infant son, should rise from their beds at 5 o'clock when reveille is, at the whim of the G.O.C., put at that unforgivable hour. It is only myself who may lie ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, December 2, 1914 • Various
... could not see her because it was so dangerous for him to look round, but he could imagine her indignant and pitiless. He felt an unspeakable idiot. One had to be so careful what one said to Young Ladies, and he'd gone and treated her just as though she was only a Larky Girl. It was unforgivable. He always WAS a fool. You could tell from her manner she didn't think him a gentleman. One glance, and she seemed to look clear through him and all his presence. What rot it was venturing to speak to a girl like that! With her ...
— The Wheels of Chance - A Bicycling Idyll • H. G. Wells
... Indian talks of food, or discusses it while taking it. He must neither commend nor condemn it, and a child who remarks upon the meals set before him, however simple the remark may be, instantly feels his disgrace in the sharpest reproof from his parents. It is one of the unforgivable crimes. ...
— The Shagganappi • E. Pauline Johnson
... life—the simplest life ignored,—removes what never will reappear through the eternity of eternities,—since every being is the sum of a chain of experiences infinitely varied from all others.... To some Cyrillia's happy tears might bring a smile: to me that smile would seem the unforgivable sin against the Giver ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... of his absence the girl had never been out of his mind, and he had striven hard to reconcile his unconquerable love for her with the sense of his own unworthiness. His unforgivable cowardice was a haunting shame, and the more he dwelt upon it the more unspeakably vile he appeared in his own sight; for the Blakes were honorable people. The family was old and cherished traditions common to fine Southern houses; ...
— The Net • Rex Beach
... robust, hearty, brutal in a way, and its morality is none too lofty. Daudet's is French, softer, more enervating, and with an almost complacent dwelling on the sins of the flesh. But neither Fielding nor Daudet is guilty of sentimentality, the one unforgivable crime in art. In his treatment of the relation of the sexes Daudet was above all things truthful; his veracity is inexorable. He shows how man is selfish in love and woman also, and how the egotism of the one is not as the egotism of the other. He shows ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... fallen even on their young hearts; the tiny children, who, young as they are, know that some great sorrow has come to every one; the children of the war countries, with their terror-stricken eyes and pale faces; the unspeakable, unforgivable wrong that has been done to youth ...
— The Next of Kin - Those who Wait and Wonder • Nellie L. McClung
... He felt sure that the head-master would consider such an escapade by boys of the Sixth Form an unforgivable crime, and that expulsion would follow discovery; and knowing the hot temper of his uncle, he feared that the latter would view the matter in the most serious light. It was therefore with a light heart that he went across to the Black Dog and placed the note ...
— Captain Bayley's Heir: - A Tale of the Gold Fields of California • G. A. Henty
... talk without any learning, being Cap'n Jack Prince's grand-darter," said old Goodsoe; for Captain Parish had removed himself to a little distance, and was again investigating the condition of the ship's galley, which one might suppose to have been neglected in some unforgivable way, judging ...
— A Country Doctor and Selected Stories and Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett
... to do, you say?—when at a word I might have had all the help I needed in guarding the pay-money? No; it wasn't altogether foolhardiness; it was partly weakness. For, twist and turn it as I might, there was always the unforgivable thing at the end: the fact that by calling in help and betraying Dorgan to others, I, once his prison-mate, and even now, like him—though in a lesser degree—a law-breaker, would become a "snitch," an informer, a traitor to my ...
— Branded • Francis Lynde
... eagerness in pursuit of an object that could not possibly be attained; never was heard such a tremendous outbreak of growling, snarling, barking, and snapping,—as if one end of the ridiculous brute's body were at deadly and most unforgivable enmity with the other. Faster and faster, round about went the cur; and faster and still faster fled the unapproachable brevity of his tail; and louder and fiercer grew his yells of rage and animosity; until, utterly exhausted, and as far ...
— The Snow Image • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... greatly in fault she had ascribed it to the recoil of a proud man from the dread of social humiliation. But it took another aspect under the strong light just thrown upon his early life by her discovery in the room below. Nothing but some act, unforgivable and unforgettable would account for that black mark drawn between a father's eyes and his son's face. No bar sinister could tell a stronger tale. But this was no bar sinister; rather the deliberate stigmatising ...
— Dark Hollow • Anna Katharine Green
... his eyes fell, "please tell me. I suppose I have been unforgivable, but—well, there's nothing to say!" Northrup bowed his head to take whatever ...
— At the Crossroads • Harriet T. Comstock
... it were simply a case of teasing me, I could let it pass, for I can take care of myself; but you have done your sister a wrong, and that is unforgivable. ...
— A Comedy of Marriage & Other Tales • Guy De Maupassant
... compare an Italian church with a French cathedral would be to compare two altogether different things, a fault in logic, and in criticism the unforgivable sin; for a work of art must be judged in its own category, and praised only for its own qualities, and blamed ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton
... anything for him now. As he opened his eyes, one at a time, he thought of Boyd. Once, long ago, ages and ages ago, he had had to wake Boyd up, and he recalled how rough he had been about it. That had been unforgivable. ...
— The Impossibles • Gordon Randall Garrett
... even known that he was coming down last night. And worst and most unforgivable of all, she had not been told that Make-Way-There was ...
— Boy Woodburn - A Story of the Sussex Downs • Alfred Ollivant
... promise me, too, that you'll forgive the absolutely unforgivable way I've acted all summer, and give me a chance to show ...
— The Old Gray Homestead • Frances Parkinson Keyes
... the unforgivable sin. Had my mother discovered me poring over the half intelligible but wholly fascinating story of Adam and Eve and the Devil, she would have beaten me with the first implement to her hand. I had a moment's terror lest the possession of a work of literature ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... cared for old pictures—the National Gallery, and all that; and read no novels but French—Balzac and George Sand—and that only for practice for he was a singularly pure young man, the purest in all Cambridge, and in those days I thought him a quite unforgivable prig. ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... self-ownership of soul and body. Respectability could easily forgive the teaching of theoretic Anarchism; but Emma Goldman does not merely preach the new philosophy; she also persists in living it,—and that is the one supreme, unforgivable crime. Were she, like so many radicals, to consider her ideal as merely an intellectual ornament; were she to make concessions to existing society and compromise with old prejudices,—then even the most radical views could be pardoned in her. ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman
... practice of the Jesuits to stir up strife in families, to resort to espionage, to abuse the confessional, to make the Seminary priests their puppets, and to deny the king's right to license the brandy trade. What seemed to the Jesuits an unforgivable affront was Frontenac's charge that they cared more for beaver skins than for the conversion of the savages. This {55} they interpreted as an insult to the memory of their martyrs, and their resentment must have been ...
— The Fighting Governor - A Chronicle of Frontenac • Charles W. Colby
... is simplicity of heart and life; that one's relations with others should be direct and not diplomatic; that power leaves a bitter taste in the mouth; that meanness, and hardness, and coldness are the unforgivable sins; that conventionality is the mother of dreariness; that pleasure exists not in virtue of material conditions, but in the joyful heart; that the world is a very interesting and beautiful place; ...
— From a College Window • Arthur Christopher Benson
... bridge with the great skill and sweet temper which were natural to her, excused herself, went to her room, and cried half the night. It was not the shame of having been forcibly kissed that sickened her of herself, but the unforgettable, unforgivable fact that toward the last of that furious kissing she had found a certain low feline pleasure in the kisses. She wished that she might die, or, infinitely better, that ...
— The Penalty • Gouverneur Morris
... I realise the position of those poor devils I have seen in lunatic asylums and who believed they have committed the unforgivable sin. It came upon me suddenly in Waterloo Place this evening, that I had done so; and I went straight to the Royal Institution to make confession, and if possible get absolution. But I heard you had gone to Hindhead, and so ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2 • Leonard Huxley
... Mademoiselle Olivia," said Count Victor with an inclination; "he might have been indifferent to your charms, and that were the one thing unforgivable. But soberly, I consider his folly scarce bad enough for the punishment of ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro
... behest of all his clear insight into this Universe, the message of Heaven through him, which he could not suppress, but was inspired and compelled to utter in this world by such methods as he had. There for him lay the first commandment; this is what it would have been the unforgivable sin to swerve from and desert: the treason of treasons for him, it were there; compared with which ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... I was ignorant, the mysteries of the human mind were a sealed book to me as yet, and I stupidly looked upon myself as a tough and unforgivable criminal. I wrote to Dr. Holmes and told him the whole disgraceful affair, implored him in impassioned language to believe that I had never intended to commit this crime, and was unaware that I had committed it until I was confronted with the ...
— Chapters from My Autobiography • Mark Twain
... the first time in his guileless life Septimus met it face to face. To read of human depravity in the police reports is one thing, to see it fall like a black shadow across one's life is another. It horrified him. Mordaunt Prince had committed the unforgivable sin. He had stolen a girl's love, and basely, meanly, he had slunk off, deceiving her to the last. To Septimus the lover who kissed and rode away had ever appeared a despicable figure of romance. The fellow who did it in real life proclaimed himself ...
— Septimus • William J. Locke
... the very start, had committed the unforgivable sin of being born a female. Therefore, no pet-seeker wanted to buy her. Even when she was offered for sale at half the sum asked for her less handsome brothers, ...
— Bruce • Albert Payson Terhune
... staggered sharply, and choked back a cry. For out of her recollections leaped two sentences of his—the first careless, imprudent, unforgivable; the second pregnant with meaning. "Ah, a star shoots!" he had said. "That means a kiss!" and again, to the clergyman, "I came here without the slightest expectation of getting what I asked for. There is another way, but I ...
— Conjuror's House - A Romance of the Free Forest • Stewart Edward White
... glass. The drink he mixed and swallowed contained little soda. It increased the fire in his heart and throat. He paced the long room in crazy indignation. Every nerve in his body quivered with a sense of unforgivable insult and deadly outrage. Austin's face loomed before him like that of a mocking devil. He had hell in his throat, and again he tossed down a dose of whiskey, and threw himself into the arm-chair. The daily paper ...
— Viviette • William J. Locke
... he said almost hopelessly. "You must stick to your belief, and I to mine. All I hope, Miss Kate, is that when I've done with this matter the pain I've inflicted on you will not be unforgivable." ...
— The Law-Breakers • Ridgwell Cullum
... said Winter. "They disagreed, and she divorced him, thinking he would remain poor. The whirligig of time changed their relative positions, and to a jealous-minded woman that was unforgivable." ...
— The Strange Case of Mortimer Fenley • Louis Tracy
... to the letter of Knox's work. The unforgivable offence in him is, that he wished to set-up Priests over the head of Kings. In other words, he strove to make the Government of Scotland a Theocracy. This indeed is properly the sum of his offences, the essential sin; for ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... she very nearly "took a lot out of us," if one may borrow a phrase from "Mr Hopkinson." Obviously anything that reminds one of the ghastly horrors at the Royal College of Surgeons or the Polyclinic Institute is quite unforgivable. ...
— Our Stage and Its Critics • "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette"
... composed, that it should be judged as so much more precious than the Body?—the dear Body, which we pamper and feed and clothe and cosset and cocker, till it struts on the face of the planet, a mere magnified Ape of conceit and trickery, sloth and sensuality, the one unforgivable anachronism in an otherwise perfect Creation! For Body without Soul is a blot on the Universe,—a distortion and abomination of nature, with which nature by and by will have nothing to do. Yet I freely grant that while ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... when anything particularly disagreeable occurred to the latter. An ironic smile used to light up Rhodes' face and a sarcastic chuckle be heard. But still, whenever one attempted to explain to him that the Raid had been an unforgivable piece of imprudence, or hazarded that Jameson had never been properly punished for it, Rhodes invariably took the part of this friend of his younger days, and would never acknowledge that Doctor Jim's desire to enter public ...
— Cecil Rhodes - Man and Empire-Maker • Princess Catherine Radziwill
... some mad zealot—and, by all the Saints! I believe I can name him, too," he suddenly broke out, wheeling eagerly round upon his fellow hostages and excitedly addressing them. "What say you, senores; does not the whole complexion of this unforgivable outrage point your suspicions almost irresistibly toward one particular man? Are we to believe that our worthy alcalde is capable of imperilling the lives of his fellow townsmen, as ours have been imperilled this night, by an act of such base, wanton betrayal as all ...
— The Cruise of the Nonsuch Buccaneer • Harry Collingwood
... action. The Countess was flushed with triumph. Be that meeting never so innocent—and Madame von Platen could not, being what she was, and having seen what she had seen, conceive it innocent—it was in an Electoral Princess an unforgivable indiscretion, to take the most charitable view, which none would dream of taking. So the Elector, fiercely red in the face, hurried off to the pavilion with Madame von Platen following. He came too late, despite the ...
— The Historical Nights Entertainment, Second Series • Rafael Sabatini
... "Honey, the unforgivable thing, to a woman, is not the sin, but the deceit. And, besides, Eleanor loves him enough to forgive him. She would die ...
— The Vehement Flame • Margaret Wade Campbell Deland
... sun is high or the moon is blown across heaven, she demands that they should pay her long homage at the sun's rising. The initiate may not enter lightly upon her mysteries. For, if a bad complexion be inexcusable, to be ill-painted is unforgivable; and, when the toilet is laden once more with the fulness of its elaboration, we shall hear no more of the proper occupation for women. And think, how sweet an energy, to sit at the mirror of coquetry! See the dear merits of the toilet as shown upon old vases, or upon the walls of Roman ...
— The Works of Max Beerbohm • Max Beerbohm
... the East Lancashire area—Manchester, Oldham, Bury, &c., and they looked upon us rather as intruders. The Northumberlands were of course not the people to let slip so admirable an opportunity of accepting a feud: and in October 1918 they committed the unforgivable sin of winning the Divisional Association Football Cup, which completed ...
— Q.6.a and Other places - Recollections of 1916, 1917 and 1918 • Francis Buckley
... loomed momentous, unforgivable, incalculable. It assumed to her the proportions of a murder. Bigamy, perjury, deceit—what hadn't she done! Richard, in her estimation, was not what he thought himself, a somewhat ordinary man in ...
— Harriet and the Piper - (Norris Volume XI) • Kathleen Norris
... necessities of the popular song go, rhymes may occur regularly or irregularly, with fine effect in either instance, and the rhymes may be precise or not. To rhyme moon with June is not unforgivable. The success of a popular song depends on entirely different bases. Nevertheless, a finely turned bit of rhyming harmony may strike the ear and stand out from its fellows like a lovely symphony of fancy. If you have given any ...
— Writing for Vaudeville • Brett Page
... stenographic report, was in excellent form, and committed a good deal of unforgivable syntax. He was somewhat apprehensive when he saw the bill of fare inscribed "Ye Olde Chop House," for he asserts that the use of the word "Ye" always involves extra overhead expense—and a quotation from ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... to keep reminding herself, it seemed, of Lawford Tapp's most glaring faults. Improvidence and a hopeless leaning toward extravagance were certainly unforgivable blemishes in the character of a young man in the position ...
— Cap'n Abe, Storekeeper • James A. Cooper
... Whitefield and the Scottish Covenanters. No, Cary, she will not survive that. I never yet knew a worldly woman forgive that one crime of crimes—Calvinism. Anything else! Don't you see why, my dear? It sets her outside. And she knows that I know she is outside. Therefore I am unforgivable. However absurd the idea may be in reality, it is to her mind equivalent to my setting her outside. She is unable to recognise that she has chosen to stay without, and I am guilty of nothing worse than unavoidably ...
— Out in the Forty-Five - Duncan Keith's Vow • Emily Sarah Holt
... wife runs. Well, as he has had to study to work up his side, why let hers be such a "jump in the dark," for him? Let the home become a study, even a science, and let not so many wives reach a forgivable level of domestic excellence on the "dead bodies" of so many unforgivable "bloomers." Remember that in matrimony, as in everything else it is the premier "bloomer" which blows up les chateaux en Espagne. Afterwards you have to use concrete—and ...
— Over the Fireside with Silent Friends • Richard King
... I think it's only fit for sick folks myself; but I suppose, as the saying is, we must eat by the card;" at which everybody laughed good-naturedly, her worried feeling wore off, and she began to think it would not, perhaps, be an unforgivable offence if one of them did commit a blunder ...
— Sara, a Princess • Fannie E. Newberry
... me.' I cannot trust myself to a love which has no standard of right and wrong. We look at it from different points of view. You see only the man and his temptation. I knew the priceless treasure of the love; therefore the sin against that love seems to me unforgivable." ...
— The Mistress of Shenstone • Florence L. Barclay
... although if she would, she could exterminate them with her wit. And some could so easily be spared. It seems, too, that she is great enough to be a target, so she is under fire continually. This, while it causes her exquisite suffering, is from no fault of her own—save the unforgivable one of being original. "A frog spat at a glow-worm. 'Why do you spit at me?' said the glow-worm. 'Why do you shine so?' said the frog." And as to Percival—the man I used to know was Percival in embryo. He is maturing now, and is radiant in Rachel's ...
— The Love Affairs of an Old Maid • Lilian Bell
... an unforgivable error of tact I might have stood by the old brontosaurus to the bitter end. One evening he and I were listening to a concert given by the "Fluffy Furbelows" in the camp Nissen Coliseum, and a Miss Gwennie Gwillis was ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, January 28th, 1920 • Various
... had not been sure before Stephen arrived whether he should reveal the situation or not. But the temptation was too great. That the son's mind and soul should finally have escaped his father, "like a bird out of the snare of the fowler," was the unforgivable offence. What a gentle, malleable fellow he had seemed in his school and college days!—how amenable to the father's spiritual tyranny! It was Barron's constant excuse to himself for his own rancorous feeling—that Meynell had robbed ...
— The Case of Richard Meynell • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... or Saturday unnecessarily;" not confessing and communing at Easter, a mortal sin which "deprives one of the grace of God and merits eternal punishment" as well as "to slay and to steal something of value." For all these crimes, unforgivable in themselves, there is but one pardon, the absolution given by the priest, that is to say, confession beforehand, itself being one of the observances to which we are bound by strict obligation and at the very least once ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 6 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 2 (of 2) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... educated and large-minded, are estimating the same thing: one judges as disgusting, odious, revolting, and bestial what the other judges to be delicious, exquisite, ineffable, divine. What, for one, is in Christian phraseology, an unforgivable sin, is, for the other, the state of true grace. Acts that for one seem a sad and occasional necessity, stains that must be carefully effaced by long intervals of continence, are for the other the golden nails from which all the rest of conduct and existence is ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... else there haunted me the fear of the "Unforgivable Sin." What this was I was never able to discover. I dreaded to enquire too closely, lest I should find I had committed it. Day and night the terror ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... not, with equal brilliance, plausibility and success, according to his desire to dispose of you or the subject. He either finessed with the ethical basis of his intellect or had none. This made him unintelligible to the average man, unforgivable to the fanatic and ...
— Margot Asquith, An Autobiography: Volumes I & II • Margot Asquith
... trouble, and after committing some unforgivable offense against the United States, Running Bear rallied his young men, and they fled the reservation and the ways and protection of the white men, and took to the mountains, where they lived by raiding the ranches in the neighborhood, and maintaining ...
— Ted Strong in Montana - With Lariat and Spur • Edward C. Taylor
... be more than a match for a mace and a majority." All the fuel for a conflagration was ready. There was race hatred, there was party hostility, there was commercial depression and there was a sincere, though exaggerated, loyalty, which regarded rebellion as the unforgivable sin, and which was in constant dread of the spread of ...
— George Brown • John Lewis
... Billiard bounced through the kitchen, slammed the door of his room, turned the key in the lock and—stood still in the middle of the floor. Whipped by a girl not four years his senior! Whipped by a girl! It was an unforgivable outrage. He would get even for that. But what was he to do? Would could he do? She had beaten him at every turn, she had set Toady against him, she had made him the laughing stock of his cousins. He—he—he would do ...
— Tabitha's Vacation • Ruth Alberta Brown
... the night that Mrs. Gallant had displayed her antipathy for her. He realized also that his mother would not be able to comprehend why Consuello met him in Gibson's absence and would probably consider it an unforgivable breach of etiquette. ...
— Spring Street - A Story of Los Angeles • James H. Richardson
... seriously wounded of all in the ward, who never failed with his unending requests to the patient orderlies and his eternal complainings, until a public dressing-down from me brought him to heel. And Glover who wept that I had lost his bullet, that unforgivable carelessness in a surgeon that allows a bullet, removed at an operation, to be thrown ...
— Sketches of the East Africa Campaign • Robert Valentine Dolbey
... them arrive together. With great strides he crossed the strip of desert between the two tents, and thrust his red face close to the blanched face of Max. His eyes spoke the ugly thing that was in his mind before his lips could utter it. But Sanda gave him no time for words that would be unforgivable. ...
— A Soldier of the Legion • C. N. Williamson
... God grant your powers of forgiveness may never be put to the test!" he ejaculated fervently. "The one unforgivable sin according to our Lord, is treachery;—may THAT never come ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... a good citizen should be are all at sixes and sevens. No two people will be found to agree in every particular of such an ideal, and the extreme divergences upon what is necessary, what is permissible, what is unforgivable in him, will span nearly the whole range of human possibility and conduct. As a consequence, we bring up our children in a mist of vague intimations, in a confusion of warring voices, perplexed as ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... she answered. "Do you not know that to speak disrespectfully of the ancestors of a Chinaman is unforgivable? To all appearances Prince Shan never moved from his wonderful palace in Pekin, many thousands of miles away. Yet he lifted his little finger and ...
— The Great Prince Shan • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... sullenly at her, fearful, in the face of her relationship to Carl, of committing still another unforgivable offense. ...
— Diane of the Green Van • Leona Dalrymple
... upbringing and popularity, even though he said it rather scornfully in the fewest words. The scorn was really for himself, and I could well understand it. Nay, I was glad to have something to forgive in the beginning, I with my unforgivable mission, and would have laughed the matter off without another word if Bob had ...
— No Hero • E.W. Hornung
... her eye—a light of such desperate satisfaction as betokened one gladly driven to commit the unforgivable Sissy moved toward the sensitive-plant in ...
— The Madigans • Miriam Michelson
... of bliss out of a lifetime! Would it be a terrible sin, Theodora wondered, a terrible, unforgivable sin to let him kiss her—to let him hold her just once in ...
— Beyond The Rocks - A Love Story • Elinor Glyn
... was beginning to think they were real. And although he had found himself at liberty to say to her things that were harder to hear, he felt a curious repugnance to giving her any inkling of what he thought about this. It would be a hideous thing to do, he concluded, an unforgivable thing, and an actual hurt. Kendal had for women the readiest consideration, and though one of the odd things he found in Elfrida was the slight degree to which she evoked it in him, he recoiled instinctively from any reasoned action which would distress her. But his sense ...
— A Daughter of To-Day • Sara Jeannette Duncan (aka Mrs. Everard Cotes)
... was lodged in his mind. And when he found this country critical of the Shantung settlement, that doubt became a conviction; the British through social attentions, had wheedled House into a position favorable to their allies, the Japanese. The loyal House was convicted of the one unforgivable offense, disloyalty. ...
— The Mirrors of Washington • Anonymous
... of conduct at the musicale is to maintain absolute silence during the selections. It is an unforgivable breach of etiquette to speak, fidget or otherwise disturb the guests while the numbers are being performed. Encores are permissible, but loud applause is undeniably vulgar. Silence, interest and attention characterize the ideal ...
— Book of Etiquette • Lillian Eichler
... Victorian phrenologists. They speak and write with ineffable profundity about the "criminal" ear, the "criminal" thumb, the "criminal" glance. They gain access to gaols and pester unfortunate prisoners with callipers and cameras, and quite unforgivable prying into personal and private matters, and they hold out great hopes that by these expedients they will evolve at last a "scientific" revival of the Kaffir's witch- smelling. We shall catch our criminals ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... last word, did an unforgivable thing. He laughed and laughed, while the match he had just lighted flared, sent up a blue thread of brimstone smoke, licked along the white wood and scorched his fingers painfully before ...
— The Lonesome Trail and Other Stories • B. M. Bower
... to follow, but it was not her command which held him back. It was the command laid upon him by himself. In a light merciless as the crude glare of electricity he saw himself standing stricken, a fool who had done an unforgivable thing, a clumsy and brutal wretch who had broken a crystal vase in a sanctuary. For the blinding light showed him a new image of Mary, even as she had suddenly revealed herself to Hannaford: a perfectly innocent creature whose ways were strange as a dryad's way would be strange ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson |
