"Inconceivability" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... theme, De Quincey was arrested somehow by that extraordinary transmigration of a Kalmuck horde across the face of Asia in 1771, which had also struck Gibbon; he inserted his hands into the vague chaos of Asiatic inconceivability enshrouding the transaction; and he tore out the connected and tolerably conceivable story which we now read. There is no such vivid version of any such historical episode in all Gibbon, and possibly nothing truer essentially, after all, to the substance ...
— De Quincey's Revolt of the Tartars • Thomas De Quincey
... to ask, How much does this inconceivability signify? In most cases, when we say that a statement is inconceivable, we practically declare it to be untrue; when we say that a statement is without warrant in experience, we plainly indicate that we consider ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... for "falling in love" with each other at school. It is not impossible that the inconceivability of eventual rivalry ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... it set up a purely subjective standard of truth, and a standard—as he was easily able to show—varying according to the psychological history of the individual. Such thinkers as Dr. Whewell and Mr. Herbert Spencer had to be met in intellectual combat. Dr. Whewell held, not that the inconceivability of the contradictory of a proposition is a proof of its truth co-equal with experience, but that its value transcends experience. Experience may tell us what is; but it is by the impossibility of conceiving it otherwise that we know it must be. Mr. Herbert Spencer, ...
— John Stuart Mill; His Life and Works • Herbert Spencer, Henry Fawcett, Frederic Harrison and Other
... divert her mind," my friend replied, reddening again, I thought, a little. "We shall go next week: I've only waited, to start, to see how your mother would be." I expressed to her hereupon my sense of her extraordinary merit and also that of the inconceivability of Flora's fancying herself still in a situation not to jump at the chance of marrying a man like Dawling. "She says he's too ugly; she says he's too dreary; she says in fact he's 'nobody,'" Mrs. Meldrum pursued. "She ...
— Embarrassments • Henry James |
