|
|
|
More "Impossibility" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... two years' journey through wonderful countries, and reached the sea, from which many valuable articles would be sent to him in exchange for ivory, could I only discover the great lake. As a proof of this, I had brought him a few curiosities that I trusted he would accept, and I regretted that the impossibility of procuring porters had necessitated the abandonment of others that ...
— In the Heart of Africa • Samuel White Baker
... solid wall of impossibility," he replied. "You see, some of our other chaps may try the dodge. I gave them the tip and I don't want to spoil their chances. By-the-bye, do you know the man two places down on your left?" he added dropping his voice a little. "Looks almost like a waxwork ...
— The Kingdom of the Blind • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... bestowed in proportion to the industry and good conduct of those who receive them. If the offences of freshmen outside the walls be unvisited by the university from wariness in the offenders, or the impossibility of controlling them, they are certain to meet with a just estimation of their demerit here; and, as before noticed, this is perhaps the best mode of repressing them. The assistance derived by the industrious student from the university itself is invaluable. ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... again with my real daughter, in which I perforce must believe, is of itself enough to fever the very coldest feelings into madness; and need one marvel then at your talking of having encountered another impossibility, at your story about finding the dead Pietro come to life among the mountains, and not knowing him again, and about those almost farcical tricks of jugglery that were played you, all which you have related to us with the very same assurance? No, my good Antonio, pain ...
— The Old Man of the Mountain, The Lovecharm and Pietro of Abano - Tales from the German of Tieck • Ludwig Tieck
... came in slow comment from the watchful lawyer, "not to be too certain of your conclusions till doubt becomes an absolute impossibility. Instinct is a good thing but it must never be regarded as infallible. It may be proved that it is your wife who has fled, after all. In which case it would be a great mistake to put any faith in this gipsy ...
— The Chief Legatee • Anna Katharine Green
... century, by which time they suppose that the growth of means in favor of Greece would have concurred with a more than corresponding decay in her enemy. But, to say nothing of the extreme uncertainty which attends such remote speculation, and the utter impossibility of training men with no personal hopes to labor for the benefit of distant generations, there was one political argument against that course, which Mr. Gordon justly considers unanswerable. It is this: Turkey in Europe has been long tottering on its ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... unabsconded northwards, have actually not yet left our own shores. The war should naturally have run its course in one campaign. Assuredly it will, if confined within the limits of Yeh's command, even supposing that command to comprehend the two Quangs. Practically, then, it is a fantastic impossibility that any reversionary service to our British expedition, which is held out in prophetic vision as consecrating our French and American friends from all taint of mercenary selfishness, ever can be realised. I am not going to pursue this subject. But a brief application of it to a question ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... the poetry, might conceivably belong to an Elizabethan drama. The situation of Cleopatra and Antony is unconsciously reproduced without being bettered, or even equalled in point of majesty and musical expression. The loss of all simplicity and dignity, the impossibility of any credible scenic presentation of the incidents, and the extreme staginess of the conventions by which these impossibilities are got over, are no doubt covered from the popular eye by the overwhelming prestige ...
— The Perfect Wagnerite - A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring • George Bernard Shaw
... already proposed the objection formed upon the impossibility of these vampires coming out of their graves, and returning to them again, without its appearing that they have disturbed the earth, either in coming out or going in again. No one has ever replied to this difficulty, and ...
— The Phantom World - or, The philosophy of spirits, apparitions, &c, &c. • Augustin Calmet
... ruggedness of the mountains lower down the river, he would have been disposed to attempt them, but the depth of the snow with which they were covered deterred him; having already experienced the impossibility of forcing his way ...
— Astoria - Or, Anecdotes Of An Enterprise Beyond The Rocky Mountains • Washington Irving
... assured of the impossibility of procuring help nearer than Cairo he wasted no further time in discussion, but mounted his horse with a businesslike air and proceeded to take leave of Anstice with a heartiness which but thinly disguised his ...
— Afterwards • Kathlyn Rhodes
... once decided that we would never again permit the legislature to remand us to the rabble in a vain appeal for justice. We had demonstrated the impossibility of receiving a fair, impartial vote at the hands of the ignorant, lawless and unthinking multitude whose ballots outweigh all reason and overpower all sense. In pursuance of this purpose I went to the legislature of 1885 and found no difficulty in securing the aid ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... exceeding jealous, as appears from many passages in the Pentateuch. Lastly, he believed and taught that this Being was so different from all other beings, that He could not be expressed by the image of any visible thing; also, that He could not be looked upon, and that not so much from inherent impossibility as from human infirmity; further, that by reason of His power He was without equal and unique. Moses admitted, indeed, that there were beings (doubtless by the plan and command of the Lord) who acted as God's vicegerents—that is, beings to whom God had given the right, ...
— The Philosophy of Spinoza • Baruch de Spinoza
... squareness of outline, and impossibility of perspective, they are not unlike the woodcuts in old books; but they were oil-paintings, and the artist, like the painter of the Primrose family, had not been sparing of his colours. In one, a lady was having a toe amputated—an operation which a ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens
... heavier moccasins, and went quietly from the house. Three inches of fresh snow had fallen, and the air was thick with the white deluge. He hurried into the edge of the forest. A few minutes futile searching convinced him of the impossibility of following the trail made by Jean and the man he had pursued. Through the thickening darkness he ...
— God's Country—And the Woman • James Oliver Curwood
... protection, and carried him off to the palace. He was speedily conducted to the young prince's couch, whither a vast crowd attended him. The hour of noon not having yet arrived, Ananda discreetly protracted the time by a seasonable discourse on the impossibility of miracles, those only excepted which should be wrought by the professors of the faith of Buddha. He then descended from his pulpit, and precisely as the sun attained the zenith laid his hand upon the ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett
... for no one wishes to dispute with him. Only speaking words of comfort; more especially addressing them to Cypriano, who is, as ever, the impatient one. But he, as the gaucho himself, sees the impossibility of proceeding further, till they and their animals have had a spell ...
— Gaspar the Gaucho - A Story of the Gran Chaco • Mayne Reid
... I know, but I believe their absence is but temporary. We must have them back, and we will. As for the Border States leaving us in the present condition of affairs, with the present feeling of friendship for them, that I regard as an impossibility. Why should the Border States go out of the Union when three-fourths of the present Congress are ready to give them all the guarantees ...
— A Report of the Debates and Proceedings in the Secret Sessions of the Conference Convention • Lucius Eugene Chittenden
... moral impossibility. Mind in matter is pantheism. Soul is the only real consciousness which cognizes being. The body does not see, hear, smell, or taste. Human belief says that it does; but destroy this belief of seeing with the eye, and we could not see materially; ...
— Rudimental Divine Science • Mary Baker Eddy
... began to repent of having suffered herself to be prevailed on to consent so far to what she still pretended to believe was but a joke. On our hero quitting the coom, she represented to his friend the utter impossibility of proceeding further, and entreated that he would take means to have her re-conducted to town. The friend, however, who was too much interested in the success of a plot so well commenced, endeavoured to dissuade her, by every argument of which he was master, ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... sure, but only a little ahead of the times, perhaps, in that respect; Some of our cherished forms of speech have already been rendered obsolete by the Liberal Club. It used to be such a clincher to say, when one wanted to enforce a point by indicating an impossibility, "I will eat my boots unless"—etc., etc. That clincher has gone to the place whither good clinchers go, forever. At a late meeting of the Liberal Club, Professor VAN DER WEYDE contributed to the evening collation a pudding ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 2, No. 29, October 15, 1870 • Various
... This unworldliness—this impossibility, if you please—is characteristic of intellectual progression. Judge Methuen's second son is named Grolier; and the fact that he doesn't know enough to come in out of the rain has inspired both the Judge ...
— The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac • Eugene Field
... of the generals included in the capitulation of Ulm, had returned home to acquaint his sovereign with the disastrous event. He did not conceal, either from the Emperor Francis or the Cabinet of Vienna, the destruction of the Austrian army, and the impossibility of arresting the rapid advance of the French. M. de Giulay was sent with a flag of truce to the headquarters of Napoleon, to assure him of the pacific intentions of the Emperor of Austria, and to solicit an armistice. The snare was too clumsy not to be immediately discovered by so crafty ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... announced that he was a Papist. The King talked with delight of this triumph of divine grace. Courtiers and envoys kept their countenances as well as they could while the renegade protested that he had been long convinced of the impossibility of finding salvation out of the communion of Rome, and that his conscience would not let him rest till he had renounced the heresies in which he had been brought up. The news spread fast. At all the coffeehouses it was told how the prime minister of England, ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... revolve three times in that length of time. If we choose to have the watch run for 30 hours on a winding, and this leaves but a small safety factor, then we see that this will require 90 turns of the main spring, a manifest impossibility in view ...
— The Auburndale Watch Company - First American Attempt Toward the Dollar Watch • Edwin A. Battison
... longer believed in the existence of such a being as God—fate had taken pity upon him and, through no act of his own, he was going to be relieved of his intolerable burden. For he knew that, with that fighting mob of raging maniacs struggling madly round the boats, escape was a sheer impossibility, and that in a few minutes—or hours, at the outside—for he was a strong swimmer—he would go down inanimate into the dark depths, and his load of disgrace and humiliation would fall ...
— Dick Leslie's Luck - A Story of Shipwreck and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... only half through a fervent asseveration to the effect that such a catastrophe was a complete impossibility, when ...
— The Gold that Glitters - The Mistakes of Jenny Lavender • Emily Sarah Holt
... parents elect to take their children abroad during the school term, they must notify their intention, undertaking that a teacher shall accompany them and lessons continue while away. Shirking lessons is quite an impossibility for little Danes, as everybody thinks that education comes before all else, so parents do not encourage idleness or extra holidays during the ...
— Denmark • M. Pearson Thomson
... was broken and be sorry. He closed loftily by saying: "You advise me, my dear Arethusa—allow me to call you thus for the last time—to find a heart worthier and better. It was unkind in you to urge upon me an impossibility. None but Napoleon ever ...
— Hubert's Wife - A Story for You • Minnie Mary Lee
... the Alps this day," I thought, "there must be crouching and lying between half and a million of men, trying to inflict irreparable damage upon one another. The thing is idiotic to the pitch of impossibility. It is a dream. Presently I shall wake ...
— The World Set Free • Herbert George Wells
... hungers. It is crying for food!" Allan thought. He saw at once the impossibility of letting the boy come near its mother. Some other ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... utter impossibility of procuring corn, I was forced to take the horses out grazing a mile beyond the town for four hours in the morning and two in the afternoon. As one mustn't lose sight of them for a moment, this occupied me all day, ...
— Three Months in the Southern States, April-June 1863 • Arthur J. L. (Lieut.-Col.) Fremantle
... occupy the office that I now occupy the more I regret any lines of separation; the more I deplore any feeling that one set of men has one set of interests and another set of men another set of interests; the more I feel the solidarity of the Nation—the impossibility of separating one interest from another without misconceiving it; the necessity that we should all understand one another, in order that we may ...
— President Wilson's Addresses • Woodrow Wilson
... I am disposed to agree with him, although my impression at the time has been always that the diffracted colors rose out of the white, as a rainbow does out of the gray. But whatever the facts may be, in this respect the statement in the text of the impossibility of representing diffracted color in painting is equally true. It may be that the resolved hues are darker than the white, as colored panes in a window are darker than the colorless glass, but all are alike in a key which no artifice of painting ...
— The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century - Two Lectures delivered at the London Institution February - 4th and 11th, 1884 • John Ruskin
... the regiment moved down the steep hill, waded the stream, and moved up the rocky front of the rebel Gibraltar. How they got up there is a mystery,—for the ascent of that rocky declivity would now seem an impossibility to an unburdened traveller, even though there were no deadly enemy at the top. But up they went, clinging to rocks and bushes. The main rebel breastwork, which they were so confident of holding, was about ...
— The County Regiment • Dudley Landon Vaill
... reproduce in fiction the circumstances of a compact community in a way that illustrates the various oppressions which such communities put upon individual vagaries, whether viewed as sin, or ignorance, or folly, or merely as social impossibility. ...
— Contemporary American Literature - Bibliographies and Study Outlines • John Matthews Manly and Edith Rickert
... meaning also a peculiar form of circumcision, for which see Pilgrimage iii. 80-81. The Jew's condition was of course a trick, presenting an impossibility and intended as a mere pretext for murdering an enemy to his faith. Throughout the Eastern world this idea prevails, and both Sir Moses Montefiore and M. Cremieux were utterly at fault and certainly knew it when they declared ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... it, and the more interesting in view of the problem that awaited solution on the morrow; but yet not so engrossing but that I was able to find time to write a long, rather intimate and minutely explanatory letter to Miss Gibson, in which I even mentioned the hour of our return as showing the impossibility of my keeping my engagement. Not that I had the smallest fear of her taking offence, for it is an evidence of my respect and regard for her that I cancelled the appointment without a momentary doubt that she would approve of my action; but it was pleasant to write to ...
— The Red Thumb Mark • R. Austin Freeman
... the trees surrounding us, the children sat down with me. They were not a talkative group, and I was overcome by a sense of the impossibility of meeting them on any common ground of conversation. But they seemed to expect something—they were like a flock of little hungry birds waiting to be fed—and what do you think I gave them? Guess. But I ...
— Contrary Mary • Temple Bailey
... Nouvelle Yorck. As a cosmopolite, I claim this privilege, at least, though I can see defects in all. If you will recollect, Miss Effingham, that New York is a social bivouac, a place in which families encamp instead of troops, you will see the impossibility of its possessing a graceful, well-ordered, and cultivated society. Then the town is commercial; and no place of mere commerce can well have a reputation for its society. Such an anomaly, I believe, never existed. Whatever ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... tried to comprehend what had happened. That something had struck him was evident. What it was at first he was too bewildered to understand. Thinking the best thing he could do in this dazed condition would be to go back under the shelter of his little tent, he turned to do so, but found it an impossibility. The thunderbolt that had stunned him had struck the large birch tree, and so shattered it to pieces that, as it fell, it had crushed down the little wigwam into a ...
— Oowikapun - How the Gospel Reached the Nelson River Indians • Egerton Ryerson Young
... which took place were those of the siege of a fortress; as when at length St. Elmo fell the Turks turned their attention to the fortress of Il Borgo. The time-honoured method of the attack on a fortress, of approaching it by sap and mine, was here almost an impossibility, as the island of Malta is composed of solid rock through which it was practically impossible to drive trenches. It is true that the rock is of an exceptionally soft nature, easily cut through with proper tools; but you cannot cut through rock, no matter how soft it may be, when your ...
— Sea-Wolves of the Mediterranean • E. Hamilton Currey
... and use very sparingly. They assure me that they catch and kill game of all kinds, by watching at the water holes or setting snares around them. That would be the time for me to make my collections; but the want of water would be a terrible annoyance, and the impossibility of getting away before another whole year had passed made ...
— The Malay Archipelago - Volume II. (of II.) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... will of God may be said to be perfect when our will is lost and resolved up into His: when we rest in His will as our end, as being itself most just and right and good. And where is the impossibility of such an affection to what is just, and right, and good, such a loyalty of heart to the Governor of the universe as shall prevail over all sinister indirect desires of our own? Neither is this at bottom anything more than faith and honesty and fairness of mind—in ...
— Human Nature - and Other Sermons • Joseph Butler
... Colonel Kenton, "I have talked to you as I would not have talked to anyone else, but even so, I would not have talked to you as I have, were not your escape an impossibility. You are unharmed, but to leave this camp you ...
— The Guns of Shiloh • Joseph A. Altsheler
... resumed Coeur de Lion, "thou hast shown that the Ethiopian may change his skin and the Leopard his spots, though clerks quote Scripture for the impossibility. Yet I have more to say to you when I have conducted you to the presence of the ladies, the best judges, and best rewarders, ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education
... settled, the widow found herself with a little less than $3,000, all she possessed in the world. To attempt to live on the interest alone of such a slender capital was obviously an impossibility, so it was decided that they would move uptown, where they would not be known, and open a little millinery shop. This was a bright idea that had occurred to Fanny. She had always been clever at trimming hats. Why not put her skill to commercial profit? She and her mother could very well attend ...
— Bought and Paid For - From the Play of George Broadhurst • Arthur Hornblow
... Phil. is getting angry by this time) to which I object. He describes the doctrines held by all the separate Protestant churches as doctrines of Protestantism. I would not delay either Phil. or myself for the sake of a trifle; but an impossibility is not a trifle. If from orthodox Turkey you pass to heretic Persia, if from the rigor of the Sonnees to the laxity of the Sheeahs, you could not, in explaining those schisms, go on to say, 'And these are the doctrines of Islamism;' for they destroy each other. ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey
... of leniency was not entirely successful, for the Cornishmen imagined it merely meant that the King recognised the impossibility of dealing sternly with every one who thought as they did. Warbeck, now in Ireland, where he was not finding the sympathy for which he had hoped, received messages to the effect that if he came to Cornwall ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... beat—or, if that be a physiological impossibility, she thought it did. So he was here, after all. She had concluded he was not coming—not that it mattered in the least. Would he see her? Would he take any notice of her? Of course, he wouldn't ask her to dance—that couldn't be hoped for. He thought her just a mere child. He had ...
— Rilla of Ingleside • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... released from their handcuffs. The young man stared in astonishment at the individual who a minute before had been his companion in bonds, and was about to thank him, but the other grasped him firmly by the wrist, as though to warn him of the impossibility of flight, and led him out of the police station. In the street they met the sergeant with a gendarme bringing in the unfortunate man with the guitar, who was just breathing, and in whom the officials had recognised a detective-inspector. Without letting go of the youth, the ...
— Fantomas • Pierre Souvestre
... man too. Brahmanism loves God, but not man; it has piety, but not humanity. Buddhism loves man, but not God; it has humanity, but not piety; or if it has piety, it is by a beautiful want of logic, its heart being wiser than its head. That which seems an impossibility in these Eastern systems is a fact of daily life to the Christian child, to the ignorant and simple Christian man or woman, who, amid daily duty and trial, find joy in both heavenly ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... notoriety, all were rushing into print. The booksellers' shops were crowded from morning until night. The price of printing was doubled. One collector is said to have got together twenty-five hundred different political pamphlets in the last months of 1788, and to have stopped in despair at the impossibility of completing his collection.[Footnote: Droz, ii. 93. "Thirteen came out to-day, sixteen yesterday, and ninety-two last week." A. Young, i. 118 (June 9, 1789). Cherest, ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... the supposed influence of sexual abstinence in the causation of insanity. There is a certain underlying basis of reason in such beliefs, though in an unqualified form they cannot be accepted, for they take no account of the complexity of the factors involved, of the difficulty and often impossibility of effecting any complete transformation, either in a desirable or undesirable direction, and of the serious conflict which the process often involves. The psycho-analysts have helped us here. Whether or not we accept their elaborate and often shifting conceptions, ...
— Little Essays of Love and Virtue • Havelock Ellis
... calculated to carry a heavy cargo rather than to make fast time. He must have been in politics at some time or other, for he made orations to all the "Secesh," in which he explained to them that the United States considered and treated them like children, and enforced upon them the ridiculous impossibility of the Rebels attempting to do anything against such a power as ...
— Pages From an Old Volume of Life - A Collection Of Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... toward supper-time, hungry and happy; but now a difficulty arose—hostile Indians could not break the bread of hospitality together without first making peace, and this was a simple impossibility without smoking a pipe of peace. There was no other process that ever they had heard of. Two of the savages almost wished they had remained pirates. However, there was no other way; so with such show of cheerfulness as they could muster they called for the ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... satisfactorily, and with more than moral certainty, that an exception occurs to the general law of not speaking untruly, viz. when it is impossible to observe a certain other precept, more important, without telling a lie. Some persons indeed say, that in the cases of impossibility which are above drawn out, what is said is not a lie. But a man who thus speaks confuses ideas and denies the essential characters of things. What is a lie? It is 'locutio contra mentem;' this is its common definition. But in the cases of impossibility, a man speaks contra mentem; that is clear ...
— Apologia pro Vita Sua • John Henry Newman
... on her duties at the ambulance hospital,—purposely absent, for she shrank from the bitter task of making clear to the friends of her betrothed the impossibility of continuing the aid to their support which their son had neglected to contribute; and still more from the comment which she knew they would make on his conduct, in absenting himself so wholly of late, and in the time of such trial and pressure, both from them and from herself. Truly, she ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... detestation and scorn. It is in this marvelous power in men to do wrong (it is an old story, but none the less true for that),—it is in this power to do wrong—wrong or right, as it lies somehow with ourselves to choose—that the impossibility stands of forming scientific calculations of what men will do before the fact, or scientific explanations of what they have done after the fact. If men were consistently selfish, you might analyze their motives; if they were ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VI (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland IV • Various
... their ideas of marriage. According to Orthodox doctrine, marriage is a sacrament which can only be performed by a consecrated priest, and consequently for the Priestless People the celebration of marriage was an impossibility. In the first ages of sectarianism a state of celibacy was quite in accordance with their surroundings. Living in constant fear of their persecutors, and wandering from one place of refuge to another, the sufferers for the Faith had ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... week or so he had thought it would be an easy thing to find employment; a few rebuffs where he had looked for a helping hand, a curt refusal or two, seemed to show him it was an impossibility. He had no knowledge of book-keeping, he could not take a clerkship; business men, with a mere glance at his handsome, delicate features, at the shrinking, deprecating glance of his eyes, at his white, nervous ...
— A Sheaf of Corn • Mary E. Mann
... air of reflection, "we won't admit that it's an impossibility. If you can take that for granted, it simplifies ...
— The Gold Trail • Harold Bindloss
... impossibility of explaining ultimate principles should be esteemed a defect in the science of man, I will venture to affirm, that it is a defect common to it with all the sciences, and all the arts, in which we can employ ourselves, ...
— Hume - (English Men of Letters Series) • T.H. Huxley
... would she, ever marry again? She knelt on at the priedieu with her fair head bowed, and then there came over her a strong sense of the impossibility of it. The shock she had had was too great, too lasting in its effects. She did not know it was that, she did not tell herself that once humiliated, once misled, she could not trust again. She did not say that the past married life which ...
— Great Possessions • Mrs. Wilfrid Ward
... on the embryology of the lower animals are held to afford direct proof of this theory of heredity, but they are too technical to be made clear to ordinary readers. A logical result of the theory is the impossibility of the transmission of acquired characters, since the molecular structure of the germ-plasm is already determined within the embryo; and Weismann holds that there are no facts which really prove that acquired ...
— The Humour of Homer and Other Essays • Samuel Butler
... and a short distance in the woods seems so far, that one is by no means master of the situation after reaching the summit. And then there are so many spurs and offshoots and changes of direction, added to the impossibility of making any generalization by the aid of the eye, that before one is aware of it he is very wide ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... upon each, suited to circumstances; while the very wide inferences and applications which can be extracted from many of them, render the adapting of a brief and satisfactory note, in many cases, an impossibility. As it is, however, little merit is claimed for them; and if they are found to be of no aid in facilitating an interpretation, they will, at least, tend to relieve the monotonous or catalogue effect, ...
— The Proverbs of Scotland • Alexander Hislop
... fundamental truth that conflicts between men, and therefore principles of right and justice, can be rightly settled only through the mediation of mind, and that every effort to settle them by force is not only illogical, a psychological impossibility, but is the way of the brute, not the way of man, whose nature touches the divine. All the more important must this work with the undergraduate be considered when we reflect that it is the young men in our colleges and universities to-day who will mold ...
— Prize Orations of the Intercollegiate Peace Association • Intercollegiate Peace Association
... happens between two friends of the same sex, who are much associated in their daily life: and it would be a common, if not the commonest, case in marriage, did not the totally different bringing-up of the two sexes make it next to an impossibility to form a really well-assorted union. Were this remedied, whatever differences there might still be in individual tastes, there would at least be, as a general rule, complete unity and unanimity as to the great objects of ...
— The Subjection of Women • John Stuart Mill
... labour, and apart from division of labour certain great work can never be done. To do away with such division, supposing an impossibility to be possible, would simply mean reversion to the state of the primitive savage. But we have no call to attempt the abolition of even the minutest division of labour. What is necessary is to understand and guard ...
— The Healthy Life, Vol. V, Nos. 24-28 - The Independent Health Magazine • Various
... of a similar nature might be mentioned! Enough to say that, after so many ages, in which, thanks to barbarous persecutions, all ecclesiastical and monastic traditions were lost to Ireland, through the sheer impossibility of following them up, the Irish still show a marked predilection for the holy austerity of penance, though the rest of the Christian world seems to have almost totally ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... is true a fortiori of salvation. If it is impossible to construct a satisfactory scheme of education on the basis of distrust of human nature, it is even more impossible (if there are degrees in impossibility) to construct on the same basis a satisfactory scheme of salvation. I have already contended that if education is to be reformed, the doctrine of original sin must go; and I now contend that if our ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes
... pledge that nothing shall ever break it, and that death is powerless. The fact of religion—true, heartfelt religion, with its communion, its prayer, its consciousness of possessing and of being possessed, makes the idea that death ends a man's conscious existence an absurdity and an impossibility. ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... Helen returned from her walk, Mr. Collingwood, in the gentlest and kindest manner he was able, informed her of the confusion in her uncle's affairs, the debts, the impossibility of paying the creditors, the total loss of all ...
— Helen • Maria Edgeworth
... but the time was spent in vain. They were close to the rocks which rose above the ground in the vicinity of the quarry, but it seemed an utter impossibility for anyone ...
— Frank Merriwell's Cruise • Burt L. Standish
... banished the heroism into which his subject had wrought him: he feared he had done me an injury, and consequently incurred my displeasure. I re-assured him on this head, but gave him much pain by representing the impossibility of my remaining in Radack, as my duty called me elsewhere. After some minutes of silent consideration, he led his son to me, and begged I would take him with me to Russia. I was then obliged to explain to him that I should never ...
— A New Voyage Round the World in the Years 1823, 24, 25, and 26. Vol. 1 • Otto von Kotzebue
... I am quite with you there," the son said to the father, who had desired him to explain to the young man the impossibility of such a marriage. "I think it would be a misfortune to them both, which should be avoided,—if they can get over their ...
— Marion Fay • Anthony Trollope
... speaker. In April, 1725, when Lechmere had finally exhausted his legal remedies, he addressed a petition to the legislature, where he had this strong support, and which was not to meet till May, stating the impossibility of obtaining relief by ordinary means, and asking to have one of the judgments set aside and a new trial ordered, in such form as to enable him to maintain his writ of partition, notwithstanding the solemn decision against him ...
— The Emancipation of Massachusetts • Brooks Adams
... has informed the German Commander that the French Government has declared to the Belgian Government the impossibility of giving them any offensive assistance whatever, as they themselves are forced to ...
— A Journal From Our Legation in Belgium • Hugh Gibson
... other men went also, and understood the ropes far better. He fought on, but a sickening feeling began to creep over him of impending failure. It was soon not merely how Leonore treated him; it was the impossibility of getting her to treat him at all. Even though he was in the same house, it seemed as if there was always some one else calling or mealing, or taking tea, or playing tennis or playing billiards, or merely dropping in. And then Leonore took fewer and fewer meals at home, and spent ...
— The Honorable Peter Stirling and What People Thought of Him • Paul Leicester Ford
... could be issued, the question as to whether the authorship of the translation should be publicly owned, arose. Babu Pratapa Chandra Roy was against anonymity. I was for it. The reasons I adduced were chiefly founded upon the impossibility of one person translating the whole of the gigantic work. Notwithstanding my resolve to discharge to the fullest extent the duty that I took up, I might not live to carry it out. It would take many years before the end could be reached. Other circumstances than death might ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... the little silver box holding those papers; I rushed from the house meaning to go to my lawyer. And I was a half dozen blocks away when I came out of the state I was in, realized the hour and the impossibility of the whole situation, and ...
— Ashton-Kirk, Criminologist • John T. McIntyre
... or that England should be separated from the Catholic Church. To the Pope and to Henry he had addressed his remonstrances and petitions in turn, but events had reached such a climax that mediation was almost an impossibility. The interview arranged between the Pope and Francis I. took place at Marseilles in October 1533. Regardless of all the rules of diplomatic courtesy and of good manners, Henry's representative forced his way into the presence ...
— History of the Catholic Church from the Renaissance • Rev. James MacCaffrey
... she and I were sitting with our sketchbooks in the shade on the beech at Ilfracombe, while the rest had gone, some to bathe, the others to make purchases in the town. We had been condoling with one another over the impossibility of finding anything among our water-colours that would express the wondrous tints ...
— Chantry House • Charlotte M. Yonge
... abound in useful information on this topic. Writing to French correspondents, he complains weekly of the impossibility even in Venice of obtaining books. See, for instance, Lettere, vol. i. pp. 286, 287, 360, vol. ii. p. 13. In one passage he says that the importation of books into Italy is impeded at Innsbruck, Trento, and throughout ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... Until the river traffic began the purchase of food was almost an impossibility. She saw Jim's face tighten, as it had tightened every time she had broached the subject. A week before he had insisted that the remaining food be equally divided, since they now both engaged in the search for gold—that eternally elusive ...
— Colorado Jim • George Goodchild
... came. It would not be the same thing if they were to be referred to a dusty office in a distant town. Some wise people say that all registers should be sent to London, to the Record Office or the British Museum. That would be an impossibility. The officials of those institutions would tremble at the thought, and the glut of valuable books would make reference a toil that few could undertake. The real solution of the difficulty is that county ...
— Vanishing England • P. H. Ditchfield
... the Catholic Church was founded and was beginning to grow, the Roman Army was still theoretically an army of true Roman citizens. [Footnote: A soldier was still technically a citizen up to the very end. The conception of a soldier as a citizen, the impossibility, for instance, of his being a slave, was in the very bones of Roman thought. Even when the soldiers were almost entirely recruited from barbarians, that is, from slave stock, the soldiers ...
— Europe and the Faith - "Sine auctoritate nulla vita" • Hilaire Belloc
... the overthrow of the domestic habitation. Amidst so many aspects of death, and the apprehension even of approaching judgment, the suspicion that friends were yet alive under the ruins was the most excruciating affliction, since the impossibility of assisting them rendered their death—(miserable and terrible consolation)—a matter of preference and of hope. Fathers and husbands were seen wandering amidst the ruins that covered the objects of their affections, and, wanting the power to move the superincumbent masses, ...
— The Book of Enterprise and Adventure - Being an Excitement to Reading. For Young People. A New and Condensed Edition. • Anonymous
... looks sadly in need of sea air. I suppose Theodore Loos, who played the part, was coached by the dramatist, so I dare not criticise the validity of his interpretation. I only know that he did not make the character sympathetic; perhaps that were an impossibility. In a word, with his mixture of vapid idealism and old-fashioned fatalism, he proved monotonous to me. The sculptor is a formidable bore, the antique raisonneur of French drama, preaching at every pore every chance he has. The actor who played him, Hans Marr, made up ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... beautiful compositions are very brief. Poe claims that there is no such thing in existence as a "long poem." Since a poem only deserves the name in proportion to its power to excite and elevate the soul, and a sustained condition of soul excitement and elevation is a psychic impossibility, the oft-used phrase is a contradiction in terms. Applying this idea to the familiar piano compositions of MacDowell, they have every right to be called "tone poems." Poetry is the color-work of the mind, as distinguished from its sculpture and architecture, which represent ...
— Edward MacDowell • Elizabeth Fry Page
... natural order of things. I do not flatter myself with the immortality of our governments; but I shall think little also of their longevity, unless this germ of destruction be taken out. When the society themselves shall weigh the possibility of evil, against the impossibility of any good to proceed from this institution, I cannot help hoping they will eradicate it. I know they wish the permanence of our governments, as much ...
— The Writings of Thomas Jefferson - Library Edition - Vol. 6 (of 20) • Thomas Jefferson
... he came staggering down the wharf, rolled himself into the stern seats of the boat, and ordered us to shove off and pull towards the sloop. We represented to him that the night was dark and cloudy, and it would be next to an impossibility to find the sloop in the broad bay at that hour; that the attempt would be attended with risk, and consequently it would be wiser to wait until morning ...
— Jack in the Forecastle • John Sherburne Sleeper
... (1785).... The union of the States was crumbling into ruins, under the old Confederation. Agriculture, manufactures, and commerce were at their lowest ebb. There was infinite danger to all the States from local interests and jealousies, and from the apparent impossibility of a much longer adherence to that shadow of a government, the Continental Congress. And even four years afterwards, when every evil had been greatly aggravated, and civil war was added to other calamities, the Constitution of the United States was ...
— The Theory of Social Revolutions • Brooks Adams
... spectre he was, he noiselessly vanished from the veranda. Heyst stumbled into the room and looked around. All the objects in there—the books, portrait on the wall—seemed shadowy, unsubstantial, the dumb accomplices of an amazing dream-plot ending in an illusory effect of awakening and the impossibility of ever closing his eyes again. With dread he forced himself to look at the girl. Still in the chair, she was leaning forward far over her knees, and had hidden her face in her hands. Heyst remembered Wang suddenly. How clear all this was—and how extremely ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... confidence and love? Trust and love are based upon the perception of the true and the good. If I find a man who is destitute of these qualities of character, to love him with approval is, as I am constituted, an impossibility. But to ordain the "acts of the wicked," as Hodge says that God did, in order to spread Christianity, was neither just nor good. It was doing evil that good might come. Instead of being wise it was, if it were so, an exhibition ...
— The Doctrines of Predestination, Reprobation, and Election • Robert Wallace
... manufactures carried on in the house; and so effectual are the means adopted, that during more than five years since the establishment was instituted, no one fraud of the least consequence has been discovered; the evident impossibility of escaping detection in those ...
— ESSAYS, Political, Economical and Philosophical. Volume 1. • Benjamin Rumford
... The charge borne by an insulated body, independent of surrounding objects. Theoretically it is an impossibility. A charge always has its compliment somewhere in surrounding objects. As a matter of convenience and convention, where the complimentary charge is so distributed that its influence is not perceptible the charge is called a free charge. ...
— The Standard Electrical Dictionary - A Popular Dictionary of Words and Terms Used in the Practice - of Electrical Engineering • T. O'Conor Slone
... us to the conclusion that the two-horned beast is the prophetic symbol of the United States, is hedged in on either side by walls of adamant that reach to heaven. To make any other application is an utter impossibility. The thought would be folly, ...
— The United States in the Light of Prophecy • Uriah Smith
... is one good thing in sight, and that is that it will not be the old-fashioned seedling that they will push this time. I think that you people of the East have got to make another determined effort to drive home the impossibility of seedlings ever being satisfactory. Outside the association a nut tree is a nut tree regardless of seedling and grafted trees, and one is expected to bear just as many fine large nuts as the other and just as soon. After losing twenty to thirty thousand dollars ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Fifteenth Annual Meeting • Various
... your Knowledge; but only mention these Things, that from the Nature of the Dissentions, and the mischiefs that ensued upon them, we might see the Impossibility, that either Party should have acted from a Principle of Christianity. I shall now endeavor to demonstrate to you Two Things; the First is, that Clergymen, by a small Deviation from the Gospel, may so ...
— An Enquiry into the Origin of Honour, and the Usefulness of Christianity in War • Bernard Mandeville
... varied from five inches to five feet deep in mud; in one a Dorset man was literally almost drowned and drawn forth with great difficulty. Many cases occurred of semi-submersion, and as for moving up the communication trenches during the winter, it was generally an impossibility, for they were either knee-deep in water or in mud, and simply refused to be drained. So men preferred the risk of a stray bullet to the certainty of liquid mud to the knees and consequent icy discomfort for ...
— The Doings of the Fifteenth Infantry Brigade - August 1914 to March 1915 • Edward Lord Gleichen
... of special school has its own particular difficulties. One great drawback is the impossibility of adequate classification. In a small three-class centre, there will be children from five years old up to sixteen years. That, of course, in physically defective schools means that the work usually divided among all the ...
— Women Workers in Seven Professions • Edith J. Morley
... Platon's nose, and Platon—wretched man—was done for. Now if Peter had only been able to step in at this moment with a red bouquet, his little hopes might have made gigantic strides. A woman's gratitude under such circumstances would have been boundless—but it was practically an impossibility. ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... share (if any) which the pupil had in completing the work of his master. The credit of invention must indubitably rest with Giorgione, but the damage which the picture has sustained through neglect and repainting in years gone by, renders certainty of discrimination between the two hands a matter of impossibility. ...
— Giorgione • Herbert Cook
... was due largely to the shortness of the seasons; for while the grass grew with remarkable rapidity, the underlying roots decayed much more slowly than in lower latitudes, and in time made the turf a tough mass of twisted roots that it was almost an impossibility to separate. Hence it was much better ...
— The Boy Scouts on the Yukon • Ralph Victor
... very close inspection of the outer buildings, soon became convinced of the utter impossibility of attacking the place by any ordinary means. They shot some arrows, and once fired with a fusil at the loop-holes, to ascertain if there were any men within capable of fighting; but as we kept perfectly quiet, their confidence augmented; and some followed ...
— Monsieur Violet • Frederick Marryat
... table which had been prepared for him, ate but little, and then lay down, hoping that sleep would calm him and perhaps bring to him some fortunate idea of how to escape. He had recognized with chagrin the impossibility of escaping by the window of the chamber he occupied; the two sentries of the governor's residence paced constantly at the foot of ...
— A Romance of the West Indies • Eugene Sue
... that. It was a horrible case, full of abominable allegations and suggestions such as he would have hated to discuss with Rosamund. As he stood in the little hall of their house, which was delicately scented with lavender and lit by pale sunshine, bidding her good-by, he realized the impossibility of such a woman as she was ever being "mixed up" in such a trial. Simply that couldn't happen, he thought. Instinct would keep her far from every suggestion of a possible impurity. He felt certain that Mrs. Clarke was innocent, ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... that they could get on very well with a real Duke among them. It was thus that the matter had at first struck him. But he was a brave man, and, when he came to look at it all round, he did not see that there would be any impossibility. It would be a nine days' wonder, no doubt. But the man would be there just the same,—the Post Office clerk inside the Duke. The work would be done, and after a little time even he would become used to having a Duke among his subordinates. As to whether the Duke ...
— Marion Fay • Anthony Trollope
... own inks in varying degrees of greyness, and even of different colours, and then set them before the cutter (not the engraver, mind) to translate into black-and-white. Yet there are some who blame the craftsman for not reproducing what it was an absolute impossibility to reproduce by printer's ink and graver! But Keene was engrossed in his art; and I have seen a drawing, at Mr. Birket Foster's house at Witley, which was the seventh attempt he made before he was satisfied. This was the drawing entitled "Ahem!" representing a man kissing ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... substance of His body and blood: (1) From the words by which He promised the Holy Eucharist; (2) From the words by which He instituted the Holy Eucharist; (3) From the constant use of the Holy Eucharist in the Church since the time of the Apostles; (4) From the impossibility of denying the Real Presence in the Holy Eucharist, without likewise denying all that Christ has taught and done; for we have stronger proofs for the Holy Eucharist than for any other ...
— Baltimore Catechism No. 3 (of 4) • Anonymous
... Men say the golden age is a fable; it always will be for those whose feelings and taste are depraved. People do not really regret the golden age, for they do nothing to restore it. What is needed for its restoration? One thing only, and that is an impossibility; we ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... of Louis. Considering closely the pecuniary difficulties under which this Alain d'Albret was labouring and his notorious avarice, one is tempted to conclude that such difficulties as he may have made were dictated by his reduced circumstances, his impossibility, or unwillingness, to supply his daughter with a dowry fitting her rank, and an unworthy desire to drive in the matter the best bargain possible. And this is abundantly confirmed by the obvious care and hard-headed ...
— The Life of Cesare Borgia • Raphael Sabatini
... industries of the people, on all of which subjects much ready information was given in fluent, good English, with perhaps rather unnecessarily fine words. It was only towards the end of the dinner that a personal experience was mentioned about the impossibility of getting work done on great feast days, or of knowing which were the greater—-and the great dislike of the ...
— Beechcroft at Rockstone • Charlotte M. Yonge
... of influence. The New York State Legislature recently passed a bill making attempted suicide no longer a punishable offense. If successful, it is, like virtue, its own reward. Indeed, it has to be, for as the Penal Code distinctly states, owing to the impossibility of reaching the successful perpetrator no forfeiture is imposed. But the new law lifts the ban from futile efforts in the matter of self-destruction, and one need not pay the hitherto exacted fine of a thousand dollars by way of a luxury ...
— Ptomaine Street • Carolyn Wells
... above the ramparts of the keep, and even if he could reach them, and escape the notice of the sentinels, he should have to make a second descent into the fosse. And supposing all this accomplished how was he to return? The impossibility of answering this latter mental interrogation compelled him to give up all idea of ...
— Windsor Castle • William Harrison Ainsworth
... anywhere in his long-skirted blue coat and blue trousers, without holding converse with everybody within speaking distance, was a sheer impossibility. So the captain fell to talking with the fishermen, and to asking them knowing questions about the fishery, and the tides, and the currents, and the race of water off that point yonder, and what you kept in ...
— A Message from the Sea • Charles Dickens
... immediately hanging all the fishmongers within the bills of mortality; and, however it might have been some time ago the opinion of mild and temporizing men that the evil complained of might be removed by gentler methods, I suppose at this day there are none who do not see the impossibility of using such with any effect. Cuncta prius tentanda might have been formerly urged with some plausibility, but cuncta prius tentata may now be replied: for surely, if a few monopolizing fishmongers could defeat that excellent scheme of the Westminster market, to the erecting which ...
— Journal of A Voyage to Lisbon • Henry Fielding
... as to admit a Biblical scholar into the extreme advanced list; and when a man has spent the whole of his childhood in a sectarian family, and his youth and early manhood in a University, it is an impossibility to throw off at one struggle the whole of his past ideas; he may be unfettered in thought, and valiant in speech, still there is the encyclopaedia of years hanging upon him as a drag to that extreme development which ...
— Ancient and Modern Celebrated Freethinkers - Reprinted From an English Work, Entitled "Half-Hours With - The Freethinkers." • Charles Bradlaugh, A. Collins, and J. Watts
... there is no doubt, I believe, that monkeys—at least the South American—do use stones to crack nuts; and I have seen myself a monkey, untaught, use a stick to rake his food up to him when put beyond the reach of his chain. The impossibility in this case would lie, not in want of wits, but want of strength; and the monkeys must have too often to wait for these feasts till the rainy season, when the woody shell rots of itself, and amuse themselves meanwhile, as Humboldt describes them, in rolling ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... circumstances as he demands, and then he produces an example of that very kind of evidence. Having done this, he abandons (as Mr. Wallace observes) his original assertion that the evidence does not exist, and takes refuge in alleging 'the absolute impossibility' of the events which the evidence supports. Thus Hume poses as a perfect judge of the possible, in a kind of omniscience. He takes his stand on the uniformity of all experience that is not hostile to his idea of the ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang
... to the implied homage of the adorer of his cross; so that, though the buzz of talk and the clatter of knives and forks roared louder than it had ever seemed to do since she had been a child, listening from the outside, the immediate sense of hurry and confusion, and the impossibility of seeing or hearing anything plainly, began to diminish. She could not think, but she began to wonder whether any one knew what had happened; and, above all, she perfectly dreaded the quiet sting ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... — N. impossibility &c. adj.; what cannot, what can never be; sour grapes; hopelessness &c. 859. V. be impossible &c. adj.; have no chance whatever. attempt impossibilities; square the circle, wash a blackamoor white; skin a flint; make a silk purse out of ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... terminated with his mysterious disappearance. Might not the same fate await me?—a fate too dreadful to think of. Stimulated by these considerations, I urged anew my request to Marnoo; but he only set forth in stronger colours the impossibility of my escape, and repeated his previous declaration that the Typees would never be brought to consent ...
— Typee - A Romance of the South Sea • Herman Melville
... her friends justified her course was somewhat cruder and less complex than her own elucidation of the matter, both explanations led to the same conclusion: John Arment was impossible. The only difference was that, to his wife, his impossibility was something deeper than a social disqualification. She had once said, in ironical defence of her marriage, that it had at least preserved her from the necessity of sitting next to him at dinner; but she had not then realized at what cost the ...
— The Descent of Man and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... the seeming impossibility of getting "tone" on plaster, that I determined to try paper for the last cast or model; to this end I took lessons at a theatre in the art of "making (paper) faces," with the result that I now employ paper whenever practicable, and ...
— Practical Taxidermy • Montagu Browne
... cap-it was a moral impossibility that she could fail to see it—yet she sank into her chair without word or sign. Mr. Selwyn, on the contrary, stood with the empty ice plate in his hand, staring at it ...
— My Lady Caprice • Jeffrey Farnol
... that prevailed was awful! It proved that each mind saw clearly the impossibility of anything being devised, and that a deadly struggle ...
— The Lighthouse • Robert Ballantyne
... time to read, we rush to the moving picture theatre to get our mental pabulum—often a season's best seller—boiled down, served in rapid-fire order and bolted in the twinkling of an eye. For all such Dante's Paradiso is an intellectual as well as a spiritual impossibility and the poet begs such not to follow him on his voyage ...
— Dante: "The Central Man of All the World" • John T. Slattery
... in the hive-bee, wherever kept, may probably be accounted for by the great difficulty, or rather impossibility, of bringing selection into play by pairing particular queens and drones, for these insects unite only during flight. Nor is there any record, with a single partial exception, of any person having ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication - Volume I • Charles Darwin
... everything constituting a memory-belief is happening now, not in that past time to which the belief is said to refer. It is not logically necessary to the existence of a memory-belief that the event remembered should have occurred, or even that the past should have existed at all. There is no logical impossibility in the hypothesis that the world sprang into being five minutes ago, exactly as it then was, with a population that "remembered" a wholly unreal past. There is no logically necessary connection between events at different times; therefore nothing that is happening now or will happen ...
— The Analysis of Mind • Bertrand Russell
... northern side also, and steep heights rose directly above the little gray church and village; and especially I remember a rocky cliff which ascends into a rounded pyramid, insulated from all other peaks and ridges. But if I could perform the absolute impossibility of getting one single outline of the scene into words, there would be all the color wanting, the light, the haze, which spiritualizes it, and moreover makes a thousand and a thousand scenes out of that single one. Clarens, however, has still another interest ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... regarding flattening and expanding bullets; attitude of the British and American delegates. Difficulties regarding the Monroe Doctrine; special meeting called by our delegation to obviate these, apparent impossibility of doing so; project of an American declaration; private agreement upon it among leaders of the Conference, agreement of the Conference to it. Final signing of the conventions; seal used by me; reservation in behalf of the Monroe Doctrine attached to ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... animal made of gold was an impossibility, yet Rama suffered himself to be tempted by a (golden) deer. Indeed, the minds of men over whom calamities hang, became deranged and out of order. Yudhishthira, therefore, having said these words, retraced his steps along with his brothers. And knowing full well the ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Part 2 • Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa
... the knowledge of the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs that the Royal Government, with two letters and several oral declarations, had informed the French admiral of the impossibility of delivering the war material they were summoned to give away. Despite these warnings the admiral decided to land a certain number of detachments which in several columns proceeded from Piraeus to the capital, which was under military control. The ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume VI (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... was ever justified by its fruits, it was in Greece. The brilliant civilization of the Greeks was its product, and could never have existed without it. As one truthfully says, "Without the slaves the Attic democracy would have been an impossibility, for they alone enabled the poor, as well as the rich, to take a part in public affairs." Relieving the citizen of all drudgery, the system created a class characterized by elegant ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... serious apprehension that the coach would be blown over. Sweeping gusts of rain came up before this storm, like showers of steel; and, at those times, when there was any shelter of trees or lee walls to be got, we were fain to stop, in a sheer impossibility of continuing ...
— A Book of English Prose - Part II, Arranged for Secondary and High Schools • Percy Lubbock
... tending slowly toward the brink of some indefinable horror, more awful to their imaginations than the great cataract itself, thought not so much upon the means by which they were brought into their present painful position, as upon the impossibility of escape from it. To the eye of a casual wayfarer these handsome young people, driving abroad through the dewy freshness of the morning, with the long lovely day before them, could not be considered objects ...
— An Algonquin Maiden - A Romance of the Early Days of Upper Canada • G. Mercer Adam
... other evils resulting from this system may be put forward. What I want to point out now is the impossibility of our attaining to attractive labour under this system, and to repeat that it is this robbery (there is no other word for it) which wastes the available labour-power of the civilized world, forcing many men to do nothing, and many, ...
— Signs of Change • William Morris
... crowd was busily working to "save" Mr. Saunders' property. A dozen of the members had turned the biggest pool table over on its back and were unscrewing the legs, heedless of the fact that to attempt to get the table through the front door was an impossibility and that, as the back door was in the thickest of the fire, it, too, was out of the question. A man appeared at the open front window of the second story with his arms filled with bottles of various liquids, "original packages" ...
— Cap'n Eri • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... the Mountain had continued for four or five generations suggested no fears or suspicions. Tilling of vineyards, building of new houses, sinking of wells, went on apace as cheerfully as though an eruption were an impossibility, till certain unmistakable portents that occurred towards the close of the year 1631 roughly dissipated this spell of fancied security. Earthquakes, more or less severe, began at this time to be felt along the whole of the volcanic line stretching from Ischia to ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... he could not get rid of the idea that he was under an obligation to Del Ferice. Once, at least, he thought of going directly to Ugo and asking for a clear explanation of the whole affair. But Ugo was not in town, as he knew, and the impossibility of going at once made it improbable that Orsino would go at all. It would not have been a very wise move, for Del Ferice could easily deny the story, seeing that the paper was all in the bank's name, and he ...
— Don Orsino • F. Marion Crawford
... his voice low, no hint of boastfulness in his tone, no hint of doubt. He spoke as a man who has studied his ground and who knows both the difficulties which lie ahead of him and the possibilities. Conniston, seeing only the impossibility, the madness of such a project, looked questioningly from him to the girl. Argyl's face was flushed, her eyes were very bright with an intense ...
— Under Handicap - A Novel • Jackson Gregory
... usurpation thus ostentatiously displayed. The seclusion in which she lived encouraged deep musings upon these vast inequalities of life. Piety had not taught her submission. Philosophy had not yet taught her the impossibility of adjusting these allotments of our earthly state, so as to distribute the gifts of fortune in accordance with merit. Little, however, did the proud grandees imagine, as in courtly splendor they swept by the plebeian maiden, enveloping her ...
— Madame Roland, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott
... practical impossibility of suppression that interested both the guild of publishers and the government in the conditions of the book trade. The former were always harassed, often kept poor, and sometimes ruined, by systematic piracy and the invasion of their rights. The government, on the other hand, could not help seeing ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley
... while they are the natural topics of such persons' conversation, would, one might have thought, be the last which an inventor would have introduced into a pretended narrative betwixt the dead and living. In short, the whole is so distinctly circumstantial, that, were it not for the impossibility, or extreme improbability at least, of such an occurrence, the evidence could not but ...
— The Best Ghost Stories • Various
... (Grabholz's) talent,—for genius will never let itself be discovered by "a man." Then the world may ask "Can the one true national "this" or "that" be killed by its own discoverer?" "No," the country replies, "but each discovery is proof of another impossibility." It is a sad fact that the one true man and the one true art will never behave as they should except in the mind of the partialist whom God has forgotten. But this matters little to him (the man)—his business is good—for it is easy to sell the ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... absorbing and inexpressible as it is, to precipitate your ruin. I speak not of myself, nor of what I may suffer. When we reflect, however, my beloved girl, upon the state of the country, and of the law, as it operates against the liberty and property of Catholics, we must both admit the present impossibility of an elopement without involving you in disgrace. You know that until some relaxation of the laws affecting marriage between Catholics and Protestants takes place, an union between us is impossible; and this fact it is which would attach ...
— Willy Reilly - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... creed at the present moment as they were on the day when the ordinance of secession was unanimously adopted. When the rebel armies ceased to exist, and there was no longer any force that could be invoked for waging war against the nation, the insurgents accepted that fact simply as proof of the impossibility of their establishing an independent government. This sentiment was almost immediately followed by a general desire to save as much property as possible from the general wreck. To this state of the public mind, ...
— Report on the Condition of the South • Carl Schurz
... from France." It is evident from this letter that Lord North had proposed some plan of conciliation which did not meet with the monarch's views; and it seems clear, also, that his lordship, in expressing a wish to retire, had urged the impossibility of obtaining unconditional submission, which he erroneously thought was the only ground on which his majesty would listen to terms of peace. But though it was the king's opinion on the last day of January that no conciliatory measures should be adopted or proposed out of deference to ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... not brave; and either put them aboard their ships or place them on the walls of their towns, that being so posted they may find no opportunity of flying away; and thus either shame, the heat of action, or the impossibility of flying, bears down their cowardice; they often make a virtue of necessity and behave themselves well, because nothing else is left them. But as they force no man to go into any foreign war against ...
— Ideal Commonwealths • Various
... How the land continues to grow them is more than I can understand. As an example of permanent agriculture, that has everything I have ever heard of beaten out. Those people had not fertilized the trees, as it would be a physical impossibility to carry anything up those slopes; everything comes down. They have been taking off wood and nuts always, nothing has gone back. I have not been present at harvest time but I have consulted with the representatives of the Department of Agriculture in France and they tell me this ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association, Report of the Proceedings at the Fourth Annual Meeting - Washington D.C. November 18 and 19, 1913 • Various
... she walked again towards the parlour, finding by her shaking frame, the impossibility of getting ...
— Cecilia vol. 3 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)
... whether a single copy of the analysis of a condemned tragedy was ever sold. And yet this critical analysis was such an admirable and demonstrative criticism, that the author assures us that it proved the absolute impossibility, "and the most absolute too," that his piece could not suffer the slightest curtailment. It demonstrated more—that the gradation and the development of interest required necessarily seven acts! but, from dread of carrying this innovation too far, the author omitted one act, which passed ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... of the channel; so we must turn entirely around in the puddle—and the wind blowing as described. It was done, and beautifully. It was done by help of a jib. We stirred up much mud, but did not touch the bottom. We turned right around in our tracks—a seeming impossibility. We had several casts of quarter-less 5, and one cast of half 4—27 feet; we were drawing 26 astern. By the time we were entirely around and pointed, the first buoy was not more than a hundred yards in front of us. It was a fine piece of work, and I was ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... opened and clear, and you see her as she is, the marvel of the world. Yet, though so difficult of comprehension, no man, nor woman, nor child, must plead ignorance of her excellencies. To be ignorant of any one of them is an impossibility as palpable as that "the Queen can do no wrong," or any other admirable fiction which the genius of our ancestors has bequeathed us. We all must know the law, or be continually whipped! A hard rule, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, August 14, 1841 • Various
... me—and Effie, if Owen marries her, and I leave my child with them! Don't you see the impossibility of what you're asking? We're all ...
— The Reef • Edith Wharton
... the impossibility of making a correct estimate of the loss of revenue that would accrue. One witness before the committee stated that there would be no deficiency; another said it would be small; while Lord Ashburton declared that it would amount ...
— Cheap Postage • Joshua Leavitt
... enough to say that he couldn't possibly make it any mouldier than his own. This was a slander. In the high dry Greek atmosphere which surrounded and enclosed his mind, mould, which requires dampness before it can exist, was an impossibility. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885 • Various
... opposed to allowing any man to take part in this work who is not in thorough sympathy with the rest of the committee. It would be a manifest impossibility for this very dangerous and unprecedented undertaking to be launched with the possible danger of there being a spy in ...
— The Transgressors - Story of a Great Sin • Francis A. Adams
... the affair off, to treat with Russia or Saxony. I formally declared that I had full power to give the most positive assurances that the propositions of marriage would be favorably received by my court; but that if I was not ready to sign a contract, it was only on account of the impossibility in which my minister found himself of supposing that a matter scarcely touched upon should so soon come to a head. I beg of you, my dear friend, to arrange that there shall be no obstacle to this important ...
— The Happy Days of the Empress Marie Louise • Imbert De Saint-Amand
... personal element, in fact, predominated everywhere. The only possible check on the will of the sovereign lay in successful rebellion. But if the sovereign were capable, successful rebellion was almost an impossibility. If he were just as well as capable, he discerned that the enforcement of justice constituted his surest ...
— Rulers of India: Akbar • George Bruce Malleson
... were all cooked," Paula told him. "Cleaning up the North in two days seemed like an impossibility, too. ...
— Ullr Uprising • Henry Beam Piper
... yea it is impossible to set caveats to keep them. I appeal to all your consciences, Is it possible to set caveats to their pride and avarice? Their pride and avarice will break through ten thousand caveats. I will clear this impossibility by similitudes. Tell me, if a fountain in the town of Edinburgh were poisoned, whether were it more safe to stop up the fountain, than to set a guard to keep it, that none draw out of it, for there is hope the poison would do no harm? There is no man of a sound judgment, but ...
— The Covenants And The Covenanters - Covenants, Sermons, and Documents of the Covenanted Reformation • Various
... each knew that the other was in some nervous crisis that rendered action almost an impossibility. And while they thus hesitated there came a loud, repeated, and unsteady knock at the door. Julian opened it. Valentine's man was ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens
... hardly happen if the preliminary choice made was consistent with the magnetic requirements. It is known that Chelas otherwise promising and fit for the reception of truth, had to wait for years on account of their temper and the impossibility they felt to put themselves in tune ...
— Studies in Occultism; A Series of Reprints from the Writings of H. P. Blavatsky • H. P. Blavatsky
... and a burst of melody drowned the suppressed giggles of Rose and Mac, who found it impossible to keep sober during the latter part of this somewhat remarkable service. Fifteen minutes of repose rendered it a physical impossibility for the company to march out as quietly as they had marched in. I grieve to state that the entire troop raced home as hard as they could pelt, and were soon skirmishing briskly over their lunch, utterly oblivious of what Jamie ...
— Eight Cousins • Louisa M. Alcott
... Ned, "let us suppose an impossibility: if Captain Nemo should this day offer you your liberty; would ...
— Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea • Jules Verne
... father in the old house when she returned from her travels. To her, in her own great troubles, the absence from London would be as serviceable as it could be to Lady Glencora. Indeed, she had already begun to feel the impossibility of staying quietly at home. She could lecture her cousin, whose faults were open, easy to be defined, and almost loud in their nature; but she was not on that account the less aware of her own. She knew that she too had cause to be ashamed of herself. She was half afraid to show her face ...
— Can You Forgive Her? • Anthony Trollope
... I look sickly?' she asked, turning up her face to show the impossibility of his gazing on it and holding such a belief for ...
— Wessex Tales • Thomas Hardy
... now being waged between the tribes of the locality, which made any thought of progress, so long as they lasted, an impossibility. Speke, having successfully endeavoured to negotiate a peace between the chief Mouwa and the Arabs of the region, resolved upon the bold enterprise of pushing on without Grant and the supplies towards Buzina, the nearest ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 12 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... was overcome by a feeling of utter impotence. Hitherto, his strength had lain in his relentless hatred; and now, what had become of it? It was gone—transformed into another feeling infinitely more potent. Something of the all-conquering force of love—the impossibility of escape from it—was borne in upon John McIntyre's soul. For an instant the veil of mystery that shrouded human suffering seemed to grow transparent, and behind it shone Divine Love in the agony of Calvary. Inevitable, all-pervading, like the voice of the Apocalypse thundering ...
— Treasure Valley • Marian Keith
... telegraphic arrangement came hardest on poor Quimby, who, between his jealousy when the two were communicating, his inability to understand what was being said, and the impossibility of sleeping with such a clatter in the room, lost his appetite, and invoked anything but blessings on the head of "that Morse man," who had made ...
— Wired Love - A Romance of Dots and Dashes • Ella Cheever Thayer
... Sandy Foundation Shaken; or those... doctrines of one God subsisting in three distinct and separate persons; the impossibility of God's pardoning sinners without a plenary satisfaction, the justification of impure persons by an imputative righteousness, refuted from the authority of Scripture testimonies and right reason, etc. London, 1668." It caused him to be imprisoned in the Tower. "Aug. 4, 1669. Young ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... surface of gadding about, and eager efforts to attach myself to influential kinsmen, or to people likely to be useful to us. My relaxations were lawsuits, and memorials still furnished the staple of my conversation. Hitherto my life had been blameless, from the sheer impossibility of indulging the desires of youth; but now I became my own master, and in dread of involving us both in ruin by some piece of negligence, I did not dare to allow myself any ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... have reconciled himself to the hardships of the kala-pani, or ocean, with an exceedingly good grace; and we find none of the complaints which fill the pages of the Mirza against the impurity of his food, the impossibility of performing his ablutions in appointed time and manner, and sundry other abominations by which he was so grievously afflicted, that at a time of danger to the vessel, "though many of the passengers were much alarmed, I, for my own part, was so weary of life ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various
... even if the succeeding Number bears no proof of it. He is convinced that the want of specific acknowledgment will only be felt by those who have no idea of the labour and difficulty attendant on the hurried management of such a work, and of the impossibility of sometimes giving an explanation, when there really is one which would quite satisfy the writer, for the delay or non-insertion of his communication. Correspondents in such cases have no reason, and if they understood an editor's position they ...
— Notes and Queries, No. 2, November 10 1849 • Various
... at Magenta and Solferino in 1859, Austria began to see the impossibility of a continued rule of terrorism and absolutism. Bach was obliged to resign, and on March 5, 1860, a state council was summoned to Vienna. Bohemia was represented only by the nobility who had no sympathy with the ...
— Independent Bohemia • Vladimir Nosek
... despite the impossibility, Charles seemed to remember quite clearly. As a child he had heard his sisters talk so often of the fire at Epworth Rectory that the very scene—and especially Jacky's escape—was bitten on the blank early pages as a real memory. He had half a mind now to question his mother ...
— Hetty Wesley • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... law which he was trying to demonstrate had been pronounced an impossibility by professors of science, should weigh as nothing in the mind of any man who remembered how every great invention of the age had in turn been stamped "impossible" by those dogmatizers in their academical chairs, their books, ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... man knowing the broken range country a whit less intimately than Shandon knew it, the trip that night down to the bridge, across it, across the Leland ranch and to the cliffs where the cave was would have been a sheer impossibility. The storm, howling and snatching at him, would have taken the heart out of a man less grimly determined than he had grown to be. The snow, while it befriended him, covering his trail in the rear, drove its shifting wall of opposition across his ...
— The Short Cut • Jackson Gregory
... poise. Faced by that terrible, impenetrable wall of impossibility he stood helpless, his misery eating in upon his soul, but there still remained the fact that there was nothing, absolutely nothing, which he could possibly do. At times the truth rose to the surface, the wretched truth, that Kate was at fault, that having ...
— Marcia Schuyler • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz
... respectively, the religious Protestant type, the Roman Catholic type, and the secular or mixed type, of Collegiate discipline and training. Any person of education acquainted with Ireland knows the impossibility of fusing such distinct elements in a common crucible; and yet each system, in its way, is excellent, and will produce good fruits, if left to develope itself, and not forced upon those who conscientiously dissent ...
— University Education in Ireland • Samuel Haughton
... Drummond Hay, and Monsieur and Madame Cremieux. Colonel Hodges said he had given the Pasha time till Monday at twelve o'clock for his reply, failing to receive which he would strike his flag. Sir Moses informed Monsieur Cremieux that he felt convinced of the impossibility of obtaining anything more from the Pasha, owing to the present serious state of politics. The Consuls, he said, were making every preparation for leaving Alexandria, and as our proceeding to Damascus at that time was considered to be not ...
— Diaries of Sir Moses and Lady Montefiore, Volume I • Sir Moses Montefiore
... them, and enforce those of Siuil to giue him way. Which hee performed vpon divers of the formost, who, as the Mariners terme it, sprang their luffe, and fell vnder the lee of the Reuenge. But the other course had beene the better, and might right well haue bene answered in so great an impossibility of preuailing. Notwithstanding out of the greatnesse of his minde, he could not be perswaded. In the meane while as hee attended those which were nearest him, the great San Philip being in the winde of him, and comming towards him, becalmed his sailes ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of The English Nation, v. 7 - England's Naval Exploits Against Spain • Richard Hakluyt
... Baron Thugut was all yesterday under the greatest uneasiness concerning the event which he had reason to apprehend, but which was not yet certain. He still retained, however, a slight hope, from the apparent impossibility of anyone's committing such an act of infamy and folly. I never saw him or any other man so affected as he was when he communicated this transaction to me to-day. I said that these fortresses being demanded as pledges of sincerity, the Emperor should have given on the same principle ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... duck; he's yours. You won him in a raffle and adopted him. I suspect it's a physical impossibility for him to lay eggs; but look here, Felicite, dear, kind, good Felicite, don't go back on me. Man and boy I've known you these eighteen months, and you've never failed me yet. Don't fail me now. I depend on you, you know, and you must do ...
— My Friend the Chauffeur • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... mentality and love of power of the queen; yet though he unceasingly opposed Leicester's projects and ambitions, wherein they threatened his own political supremacy, or the good of the State, he seems to have recognised the impossibility of undermining the Queen's personal regard for her great favourite, which continued through all the years of his selfish, blundering, and criminal career, down to the day of his death. While Leicester also in time appears to have realised the impossibility of seriously impairing Burghley's ...
— Shakespeare's Lost Years in London, 1586-1592 • Arthur Acheson
... affecting to laugh, "as if I felt the impossibility of putting half a volume into two words. It is a ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. III - Belinda • Maria Edgeworth
... or two later Herbert Bayliss and I had our delayed interview. He had called several times, but Hephzy had kept him out of my way. This time our meeting was in the main street of Mayberry, when dodging him was an impossibility. He hurried up to me and seized ...
— Kent Knowles: Quahaug • Joseph C. Lincoln
... body as he hovered in the hot air, his eyes fixed on the distant sky line. He gazed like a famished animal, for it seemed to him that at last a cloud must appear above that hopeless shore of land and sky and bring renewed life to him and his. Yet he fully realized the impossibility of such a thing. Slowly his great, dark eyes roved around the horizon. He loathed its dreary monotony, and still it fascinated him. Beyond that dead line of land and sky lay nothing but ghastly death. His many ...
— Omega, the Man • Lowell Howard Morrow
... very well for the Walrus to shout "Come back!" but that was a matter of utter impossibility, for down—and down—and down the children sped at a terrific rate, so quickly indeed that after a moment or two they must have lost their senses completely, for not one of them could remember anything about the marvelous journey through the ...
— Dick, Marjorie and Fidge - A Search for the Wonderful Dodo • G. E. Farrow
... amuse all cricketers, and while from the male point of view it may serve as a good illustration of the fickleness of woman and the impossibility of forecasting what course she will take, the fair sex will find in it an equally shining proof of the ...
— A Wodehouse Miscellany - Articles & Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... to make both ends meet with the cut of ten per cent. I will make it five instead of ten per cent., although I shall actually lose by so doing unless business improves. I will, however, try it as long as possible. If the hard times continue, and it becomes a sheer impossibility for me to employ you on these terms without abandoning the plant altogether, I will approach you again, and trust that you will support me in any measures I am forced to take. And, on the contrary, should business improve, I promise that your ...
— The Portion of Labor • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... particular, he must remember that the ship was a sixth of a mile long, with passengers on three decks open to the sea, and port and starboard sides to each deck: he will then get some idea of the difficulty presented to the officers of keeping control over such a large area, and the impossibility of any one knowing what was happening except in his own immediate vicinity. Perhaps the whole thing can be summed up best by saying that, after we had embarked in the lifeboats and rowed away from the Titanic, it would not have surprised us to hear that all passengers ...
— The Loss of the SS. Titanic • Lawrence Beesley
... in August: "It is up to us to win the war," and the North American Review talked of "virtually impregnable positions," and the impossibility of "anything like conclusive results from the present campaign"—the capture of those "impregnable positions" by the British Army, and thereby the winning of the war, were only a few weeks away! Similar ...
— Fields of Victory • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... to substantials than to sweets. Half the energy spent by many housekeepers upon cake would insure the perfect bread, which, nine times out of ten, is not found upon their tables, and success in which they count an impossibility. If cake is to be made, however, let it be done in the most perfect way; seeing only that ...
— The Easiest Way in Housekeeping and Cooking - Adapted to Domestic Use or Study in Classes • Helen Campbell
... the van. Two young men took advantage of this, and jumped over a wall, and lay snug under it; but being observed, the guard fired, which alarmed those in front, when some soldiers pursued them, and seeing the impossibility of escaping, the young men jumped over the wall again, and mixed in with their companions without their being able to identify their persons. Our driver was extremely perplexed and ...
— A Journal of a Young Man of Massachusetts, 2nd ed. • Benjamin Waterhouse
... want and that I have a right to and that I would have if I had time to stop work, study them and find them. Very often the way we don't go to the polls in America is to our credit. It is the protest of our intelligence against the impossibility of being intelligent toward so many subjects and detectives ...
— The Ghost in the White House • Gerald Stanley Lee
... were fully convinced that the craft in sight was a slaver, yet we had no thought whatever of attempting to take her just then, for the very simple reason that to do so under the circumstances would be a manifest impossibility. In such an awful sea as was then running we could only work our guns at very infrequent intervals and with the utmost difficulty, while, if we were to hit her, we would do so only by the merest accident. And even if we could contrive by any means to compel ...
— A Middy in Command - A Tale of the Slave Squadron • Harry Collingwood
... right, if indeed yours can be the same as that usually accepted amongst honourable people. I have long felt some mysterious barrier existed between you and me. I have only an hour ago discovered its disgraceful nature, and the impossibility that it can ever be removed. You cannot wonder at my not returning home. Stay there as long as you please, and be assured I shall not enter that house again. You will not probably wish to see or hold any communication with me in future, but ...
— M. or N. "Similia similibus curantur." • G.J. Whyte-Melville
... from its mighty clutches by which it had dragged me from one pitfall to another so ruthlessly? My deliverance came from a source where you would perhaps least expect it. It was through the study of John Stuart Mill's "System of Logic." In it I learned "that inconceivability is not a criterion of impossibility," as rationalism claims. On the other hand, that we know things to be true that are just as inconceivable as that there can be two mountains ...
— To Infidelity and Back • Henry F. Lutz
... man who now stood up at the head of that splendid table, and drank such a draught as though the port were porter. It was a feat to hold it with one hand, and therefore Carew did so; but to empty it at a draught was, even for him, an impossibility, for it held three bottles of wine. Though the Squire could be acquitted of entertaining reverence for any thing human or divine, he had a sort of superstitious regard for his beaker, and believed that so long as ...
— Bred in the Bone • James Payn
... One. Ben was deeply interested. He and Joe talked over clairvoyance and mesmerism,—a curious power developed by a learned German, Dr. Mesmer, akin to that of some of the old magicians. Ben was very fond of abnormal things; but Joe set down communication with another world as an impossibility. Still, a good many people ...
— A Little Girl of Long Ago • Amanda Millie Douglas
... have been excited by any attempt to enforce this order, could be easily imagined by those familiar with Hohenlo and with the powerful party in the Netherlands of which he was one of the chiefs. Wilkes stood aghast as he deciphered the letter. Buckhurst felt the impossibility of obeying the royal will. Both knew the cause, and both foresaw the consequences of the proposed step. Wilkes had heard some rumours of intrigues between Parma's agents at Deventer and Hohenlo, and had confided them ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... but lowered topsail was now distended in a manner that threatened to drag after it the only mast which still stood. Wilder saw the necessity of getting rid of the sail, and he also saw the utter impossibility of securing it. Calling Earing to his side, he pointed out the danger, and gave the ...
— Great Sea Stories • Various
... federal unions justify Mill's remark on the impossibility of meeting the conditions of such polities where the communities are separated by half the globe; nor does the fact that New Zealand is now only forty days from the Thames make any difference. The districts ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 9: The Expansion of England • John Morley
... as now, the Gibraltar of our difficulties was the impossibility of making the best men feel that woman is aggravated by the endless petty distinctions because of sex, precisely as the most cultivated man, black or white, suffers the distinctions of color, wealth, or position. Take a man of superior endowments, ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... the bull by a short breadth, and are well defined and recognised by all connoisseurs. The bull has now given up those wild rushes from a distance, and fences warily, evidently much annoyed at the fruitlessness of his charges, and the impossibility of driving his horns home in solid flesh. So out comes the picador on his halting steed, and plants himself well away from the barrier, so that he may not be thrown against it in the fall. His legs are cased beneath the yellow leggings with sheet iron, for he cannot shield them from the ...
— The Harmsworth Magazine, v. 1, 1898-1899, No. 2 • Various
... unsuccessfully attempted during the Kerensky regime, had been accomplished to a large extent. This has been partly the result of famine and of the stoppage of factories, which in its turn is due to the impossibility of bringing fuel and raw material to Petrograd. A very large proportion of Russian factory hands have not, as in other countries, lost their connection with their native villages. There was always a considerable annual migration backwards and ...
— Russia in 1919 • Arthur Ransome
... horrid cuss-word, jumps up, bolts away into his room, and George hears him there banging things around. After a while he goes to the door and says in a trembling voice: You ask me for an impossibility. . . Cloete inside ready to fly out like a tiger and rend him; but he opens the door a little way and says softly: Talking of hearts, yours is no bigger than a mouse's, let me tell you. . . But George doesn't care—load off the heart, anyhow. And just then Captain ...
— Within the Tides • Joseph Conrad
... by a merging and interplay of identities between himself and his beautiful room, he might be preparing a ghost for the future; it had not occurred to him that there might have been a similar merging and coalescence in the past. Yet with this staggering impossibility he was now face to face. Something did persist in the house; it had a tenant other than himself; and that tenant, whatsoever or whosoever, had appalled Oleron's soul by producing the sound of a woman ...
— Widdershins • Oliver Onions
... debts and undertaking new activities with serf labor, to which Pierre did not agree. On the other hand, Pierre demanded that steps should be taken to liberate the serfs, which the steward met by showing the necessity of first paying off the loans from the Land Bank, and the consequent impossibility of a ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... of the Iliad and the Odyssey, is an aesthetic judgment. It is, however, by no means affirmed against the poet of these epics that he was merely the imaginary being of an aesthetic impossibility, which can be the opinion of only very few philologists indeed. The majority contend that a single individual was responsible for the general design of a poem such as the Iliad, and further that this individual was Homer. ...
— Homer and Classical Philology • Friedrich Nietzsche
... hand, first explains a design which it is notorious was entertained by the Duke d'Ossuna to convert his viceroyalty of Naples into a kingdom, the crown of which, wrested from Spain, should be placed on his own head. And hence he establishes the impossibility that d'Ossuna should at the same moment be plotting the overthrow of Venice; that power whose assistance, or at least whose connivance was one of the weapons most necessary for his success. On these grounds, Comte ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 559, July 28, 1832 • Various
... I wish to explain why a separate peace was a sheer impossibility for us. In other words, what were the reasons that prevented us from ending the war and becoming neutral—reasons which only left one possibility open to us: to change our adversary, and instead of fighting the Entente, together with Germany, to join the Entente ...
— In the World War • Count Ottokar Czernin
... admission would be contrary to both fact and doctrine, I trust, my dear sir, you will see the utter impossibility of a Professor in the University of Leaphigh making the concession, even in this remote part of the world. As I was about to observe, the people began to betray uneasiness at the increasing and constant inclemency of ...
— The Monikins • J. Fenimore Cooper
... of laughter among the young men. The matter of fact way in which Francis proposed, what seemed to them an impossibility, amused them immensely. ...
— The Lion of Saint Mark - A Story of Venice in the Fourteenth Century • G. A. Henty
... and to love and to devote herself and be a loyal and happy wife to this clutching, hard-breathing little man who had got her, and it was the insatiable excesses of his demands quite as much as any outer influence that made her realize the impossibility ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... a tale of sound and fury, signifying nothing. It is impossible for any student of literature, for any interested reader, not to indulge in some forecast as to what rank in the poetic hierarchy Robert Browning will ultimately occupy. The commonplace as to the impossibility of prognosticating the ultimate slow decadence, or slower rise, or, it may be, sustained suspension, of a poet's fame, is often insincere, and but an excuse of indolence. To dogmatise were the height of presumption ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... Mustapha, holding the money in his hand, ready to return it, "I assure you I cannot; and you may believe me, on my word. I was taken to a certain place, where I was blinded, I was then led to the house, and afterwards brought back again in the same manner; you see, therefore, the impossibility of my doing ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Complete • Anonymous
... roomier crevice or nook within, and finding there a due supply of air, along with a dietary consisting chiefly of insects, the animal would grow with tolerable rapidity, and would increase to such an extent that egress through its aperture of entrance would become an impossibility. Next, let us suppose that the toleration of the toad's system to starvation and to a limited supply of air is taken into account, together with the fact that these creatures will hibernate during each winter, and thus economize, ...
— Young Folks' Library, Volume XI (of 20) - Wonders of Earth, Sea and Sky • Various
... and individuality under Socialism; and so Thyrsis discussed the liberty and individuality of the hundred thousand wage-slaves of the Steel Trust. They sought to tangle him in discussions as to the desirability of competition, and the impossibility of escaping it; but Thyrsis would bring them back again and again to the central fact of exploitation, which was the one fact that counted. They insisted upon knowing how this, that, and the other thing would be done in the Cooperative Commonwealth; to which Thyrsis answered, "Do ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... inclined to think that there is more probability of being able to effect the passage, by sailing from Behring's Strait, eastward, than from Baffin's Bay towards the west. But, in this case, it would be an impracticable passage for British ships. The great length of the voyage, the impossibility of taking out a sufficiency of provisions and fuel, and the severe trial to which the health of the crews would be subjected, by suddenly passing from the heat of the torrid zone, into the intense cold of a long winter, seem to render hopeless all our efforts to effect ...
— Travels in North America, From Modern Writers • William Bingley
... actually been sent by the aforementioned lady familiarly known as "Mama." I then showed her another biscuit, saying "Is this too from Mama?" but she answered "no!" "Do you dogs always know by smell?" I said—and she rapped "yes!" On this same day another test failed owing to the impossibility of ascertaining the true name ...
— Lola - The Thought and Speech of Animals • Henny Kindermann
... enough. In his lucid intervals, he was accustomed to be almost abnormally solemn and respectable. When not promoting some unholy rag, Shoeblossom resembled an elderly gentleman of studious habits. He liked to sit in a comfortable chair and read a book. It was the impossibility of doing this in the senior day-room that led him to try and think of some other haven where he might rest. Had it been summer, he would have taken some literature out on to the cricket-field or the downs, and put in a little steady reading there, with the aid of a ...
— The Gold Bat • P. G. Wodehouse
... of the powers the impossibility of storming these gates was fully made clear. The number of soldiers was carefully estimated—American, Japanese, Russian, German, French, and Italian, Sikh and Sepoy, Bengalese, Scotchman, Welsh, and Royal Englishmen. All had suffered ...
— Winning the Wilderness • Margaret Hill McCarter
... is nothing so hard for a human mind to grasp as the impossibility of grasping the meaning of infinity. It can't shake off its own limitations. But all the same, if I was to tell anyone except you, dearest, that I had seen and held a conversation with the spirit of a Pharaoh who lived before Moses, what would ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer
... detected in herself a strange undercurrent of relief at the thought that Gilbert could never marry Anna now! She could not understand it. Had not that marriage been her dearest wish for years? Why then should she feel this strange gladness at the impossibility of its fulfilment? Altogether, Alma feared that her condition of mind and morals must be sadly askew. Perhaps, she thought mournfully, this perversion of proper feeling was her punishment for the deception she had practised. She had deliberately done evil that good might come, and now the very ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1907 to 1908 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... it seemed an utter impossibility that Billy should ever find them, though they said nothing, and Jim obediently lifted up his voice and coo-ee'd in answer to the Hermit's words. For himself, Jim was free to confess he had quite lost his bearings, and the other boys were as much at sea as if they had ...
— A Little Bush Maid • Mary Grant Bruce
... experience, in fact, was to encourage the belief that, unless the intestine was struck in such a direction as to render lateral displacement an impossibility, the ...
— Surgical Experiences in South Africa, 1899-1900 • George Henry Makins
... that directs our life—love, indeed, which is born of knowledge. We do not, it is true, love anything before we have some knowledge of it; this would be an impossibility; but once the soul has caught the vision, it is love that drives the life and stimulates and enriches the knowledge. The objects of our affections are the interpreters of our life and actions. If we ...
— The Shepherd Of My Soul • Rev. Charles J. Callan
... struck eight. Had it been ten, Elinor would have been convinced that at that moment she heard a carriage driving up to the house; and so strong was the persuasion that she did, in spite of the almost impossibility of their being already come, that she moved into the adjoining dressing-closet and opened a window shutter, to be satisfied of the truth. She instantly saw that her ears had not deceived her. The flaring lamps of a carriage were immediately in view. By their uncertain light ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... were now without any Christian rivals, it does not appear that their position was a satisfactory one. The reader may refer to Law's remarks on this subject, during the Emperor's unsuccessful attempts to the eastward. The isolation and impossibility of trusting native colleagues, of which that gallant adventurer complained, were still, and always must be, fatal to the free exercise of civilized minds serving an Asiatic ruler. All the accounts that we have of those times combine to show that, whoever was ...
— The Fall of the Moghul Empire of Hindustan • H. G. Keene
... additions had seemed only to extend its primitive ugliness over a larger space. Its roofs were roughly shingled or rudely boarded and battened, and the rafters of some of its "lean-to's" were simply covered with tarred canvas. As if to settle any doubt of the impossibility of this heterogeneous mass ever taking upon itself any picturesque combination, a small building of corrugated iron, transported in sections from some remoter locality, had been set up in its centre. The McKinstry ranch had long been an eyesore to the master: even ...
— Cressy • Bret Harte
... removed the problem of the existence of a God and the immortality of the soul from the domain of science, and made both propositions a matter of faith. William of Occam, more uncompromising than Duns Scotus, maintained the absolute impossibility of acquiring knowledge of supernatural things, and taught—on this point, too, anticipating Kant—that objective knowledge acquired through the senses should precede abstract knowledge. The last conclusion ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... greatest thing in the world because without it human life would not be worth the living, or even possible; but, paradoxical as the assertion may seem, freedom or liberty is greater because without it morality would be an impossibility. ...
— Communism and Christianism - Analyzed and Contrasted from the Marxian and Darwinian Points of View • William Montgomery Brown
... we come back to the marvel, to me, of the man's variousness. I can plead guilty to having written the words of a dozen songs or so in as many years, but to put two notes of music together is beyond me, and to sing anything in tune would be an impossibility, even if I had the assurance to stand up in public for that purpose. Yet Harry Clifton, who, in the picture on the cover of the song which the gentleman in Ireland sent me, does not look at all like some brazen lion comiques, not ...
— A Boswell of Baghdad - With Diversions • E. V. Lucas
... casually, giving way to their natural impulses, drifting in and out as the whim took them, careless of the convenances or actively despising them. In London, at any rate if one is English and cursed by being well known, one lives in a strait waist-coat. Lady Sellingworth felt the impossibility of speaking to a stranger without an introduction in spite ...
— December Love • Robert Hichens
... Rigi-Kulm, the thing that above all suffocated Tartarin, agonized him, froze him, even more than the cold rain and the murky sky, was the utter impossibility of talking. True, he had again met faces that he knew—the member of the Jockey Club with his niece (h'm! h'm!..), the academician Astier-Rehu, and the Bonn Professor Schwanthaler, those two implacable enemies condemned to live side by side for ...
— Tartarin On The Alps • Alphonse Daudet
... winter, and the few they were able to secure were so much reduced in flesh as to be unfit for food. They could only push forward. On the 15th they came to the foothills of the Bitter Root Range; and on the 17th they were well into its heart, ascending the main ridges. But here they soon discovered the impossibility of proceeding in their situation. The snow lay everywhere to a depth of twelve or fifteen feet, completely hiding the trail. To delay until the snow melted would defeat the intention of getting to St. Louis ...
— Lewis and Clark - Meriwether Lewis and William Clark • William R. Lighton
Copyright © 2025 Dictionary One.com
|
|
|
