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More "Incomprehensible" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Her faith burned dim; her trust in God himself was even a little shaken. She wondered why such a severe punishment was sent to her; why she, who wrote so little, should get a disease brought on by writing. It seemed all incomprehensible, unfathomable, too dark for any ordinary words, or ...
— Good Luck • L. T. Meade
... on the ground that they were young troops; it is likely that they had but little eagerness to fire on their fellow-countrymen. Being Italians, and above all being Romans, they assuredly were not sustained by one scrap of the mystical enthusiasm of the French: such a state of mind would have been incomprehensible to them. They knew that so far as dogmas went Victor Emmanuel was as good a Catholic as the Pope. It is surprising that with part of his force demoralised Lamoriciere was still able to hold his own for three or four hours. General Pimodan and many of ...
— The Liberation of Italy • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... inevitable that the clash for leadership should come. Buck wanted it. He wanted it because it was his nature, because he had been gripped tight by that nameless, incomprehensible pride of the trail and trace—that pride which holds dogs in the toil to the last gasp, which lures them to die joyfully in the harness, and breaks their hearts if they are cut out of the harness. ...
— The Call of the Wild • Jack London
... of the Church began to follow out what was involved in its belief in the actual sinlessness of blessed Mary, in its holding to the fact that her relation to God was of such a close and indeed unique character that her actual sinfulness would be incomprehensible; it was at length compelled to ask, What, in that case are we to think of original sin? If the first Eve was created in innocence and endowed with supernatural gifts, are we to think that she whom the Fathers of the Church from the earliest times have ...
— Our Lady Saint Mary • J. G. H. Barry
... strange, quite incomprehensible, yes, yes," said the doctor. "Well, well! I really can't—-well, never mind. Go on with your work, young gentlemen. I do not think it ...
— The Hilltop Boys on the River • Cyril Burleigh
... altars of sacrificial fire, and sacred ladles and pots; and graced with large water-jars, and baskets and the refuge of all beings; and echoing with the chanting of the Vedas; and heavenly: and worthy of being inhabited; and removing fatigue; and attended with splendour and of incomprehensible merit; and majestic with divine qualities. And the hermitage was inhabited by hosts of great sages, subsisting on fruits and roots; and having their senses under perfect control; and clad in black ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... full of constellations. There is in our hearts an inward, spiritual world, that breaks like a sun upon the clouds of the outward world. I mean that inward universe of goodness, beauty, and truth,—three worlds that are neither part, nor shoot, nor copy of the outward. We are less astonished at the incomprehensible existence of these transcendental heavens because they are always there, and we foolishly imagine that we create, when we merely perceive them. After what model, with what plastic power, and from what, could we create these same spiritual worlds? ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... publication, will you just let me know from your books how we stand. Drawing 10 pounds one day, and 20 pounds another, and so forth, I have become rather mystified, and jumbled up our accounts in my brain, in a very incomprehensible state. ...
— Pickwickian Manners and Customs • Percy Fitzgerald
... looked upon as a form of irresistible invocation for conquering the divine will, and a certain ridiculous sect came to be known as the Colorum, which term originated from the wrong pronunciation of secula seculorum with which many Latin prayers ended, prayers which were incomprehensible but used due to the ignorance ...
— The Legacy of Ignorantism • T.H. Pardo de Tavera
... infallibility in its teaching; and secondly, without such infallibility in its teaching no continuous unity can be maintained among vast multitudes of people, least of all concerning dogmas most abstruse, mysteries most sublime and incomprehensible, and laws and regulations both galling and humiliating ...
— The Purpose of the Papacy • John S. Vaughan
... the bride that he had chosen seem other than weak, frivolous, vain. She shrank heartsick from the contemplation of the future, repeating rather in sorrow and wonder, than in anger, "How could he be so blind, so mad?" To her it was incomprehensible, that with his eyes open he could have placed his happiness in the keeping of one who had been brought up with no fear of God before her eyes—one whose highest wisdom did not go beyond a knowledge of the paltry fashions and fancies of ...
— Janet's Love and Service • Margaret M Robertson
... "How incomprehensible the apathy with which the English regard the promulgation of Puseyism in their church! It is stealing silently but swiftly to the very heart of their ecclesiastical institutions, and total subversion will ultimately ensue. That Americans should contemplate ...
— Inez - A Tale of the Alamo • Augusta J. Evans
... knowing what new outbreak had marked the activities of the incomprehensible young lady, resumed his grim silence, his own interests suggesting that watchful waiting would be ...
— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day
... beloved, incomprehensible being but too early, I felt inducement enough to picture her excellence to myself; and so there arose within me the conception of a poetic whole, in which it might have been possible to exhibit her individuality: no other form could be thought ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... embroidered buckskin vest, the red scarf, the bright leather wristbands, the wide silver-buckled belt and chaps. Her glance seemed to run over him swift as lightning. But as she saw his face now she did not recognize it. The man's presence roused in her a revolt. Yet something in her, the incomprehensible side of her nature, thrilled in the look of ...
— The Light of Western Stars • Zane Grey
... place of worship. The minister ascended the pulpit, and the singers took their places in the choir. It was communion Sunday, and the table within the altar was spread for the holy feast. All these strange and incomprehensible proceedings filled the mind of Tidy ...
— Step by Step - or, Tidy's Way to Freedom • The American Tract Society
... the inexpressible, the incomprehensible God. His terrible hand swirls, with unresting power, yonder innumerable congregation of suns in their mighty orbits, and yet stoops, with tender touch, to build up the petals of the anemone, and paint with rainbow hues the mealy wings ...
— Caesar's Column • Ignatius Donnelly
... to this I will live, and for this I will not only willingly, but even gladly loose my life, though I should be sorry that Christians should take it from me. Propose me anything out of this book, and require whether I believe it or no, and secure it never so incomprehensible to humane reason, I will subscribe it hand and heart, as knowing no demonstration can be stronger than this, God hath said so, therefore it is true. In other things I will take no man's libertie of judgment from him; neither shall any man take ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... all our lively talk poor Charley was sadly out of spirits. His old bosom foe was at work; he feared that among new companions I might meet with some one who would supplant him in my affections. To one of my nature, this jealous exclusive disposition was something incomprehensible; later in life I learned to pity him for a defect of character, which in his case was hereditary, and which he could no more help than the drawing of his life-breath. I was to leave Elmwood by the early morning train so we were up betimes; but, early as it was, we found my mother already up ...
— Walter Harland - Or, Memories of the Past • Harriet S. Caswell
... those horrors, impossible to realize in life, which is termed dethronement, imprisonment and insult toward a sovereign who formerly wielded unlimited power. To be present at—an actual witness, too—of this bitterness of death; to float, undecisively, in an incomprehensible mystery, between resemblance and reality; to hear everything, to see everything, without interfering with a single detail of agonizing suffering, was—so the king thought within himself—a torture far more terrible, ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas
... any soul left in thee, canst know of a truth. The Universe, I say, is made by Law; the great Soul of the World is just and not unjust. Look thou, if thou have eyes or soul left, into this great shoreless Incomprehensible: in the heart of its tumultuous Appearances, Embroilments, and mad Time-vortexes, is there not, silent, eternal, an All-just, an All-beautiful; sole Reality and ultimate controlling Power of the whole? This is not a figure of speech; this is a fact. The fact ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... Alwyn, a tall black lad. (Bles, she mused,—now who would think of naming a boy "Blessed," save these incomprehensible creatures!) Her regard shifted to the green stalks and leaves again, and she started to move away. Then her New England conscience stepped in. She ought not to pass these students without a word ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois
... fortunes. It is the outside world that is pitying you. "Those poor girls," I hear on all sides, "after the very marked way in which old Miss Dane told everybody they would be heiresses at her death. It is most incomprehensible."' ...
— The Carved Cupboard • Amy Le Feuvre
... I insist that he is possessed and driven about by a demon. . . . By the bye, just keep that "article" for me; I have no other copy. Bryant commended it, and said he thought the argument against the Incomprehensible's being totally ...
— Autobiography and Letters of Orville Dewey, D.D. - Edited by his Daughter • Orville Dewey
... to be incomprehensible to Mackay and he was fascinated, so that he had considerable trouble at times keeping out of the way of Kennedy's elbow. Kennedy first washed the stem out carefully with a few drops of distilled water, then he ...
— The Film Mystery • Arthur B. Reeve
... hard to understand Doctor Gys, but the man's strange, abnormal nature was incomprehensible. When, half an hour later, Mr. Merrick went below, he found the doctor in the operating room, cool and steady of nerve and dressing wounds in his best ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces in the Red Cross • Edith Van Dyne
... equally careless of his language and cash, he will excuse a crooked beginning and accept a straight ending. Contemplating my crooked dream I confess I waked up without a straight idea in my head. The fact was, I was waked up with such an incomprehensible jingling, ringing, rumbling, and gonging, that I mistook its purport, and thought the Russians were bombarding the house. I was about looking out of the window to see if the White House was all safe, ...
— The Adventures of My Cousin Smooth • Timothy Templeton
... the previous starts of civilization, or of barbarian monarchies, such as we see now in Africa, life in Europe took another direction. It went on on lines similar to those it had once taken in the cities of antique Greece. With a unanimity which seems almost incomprehensible, and for a long time was not understood by historians, the urban agglomerations, down to the smallest burgs, began to shake off the yoke of their worldly and clerical lords. The fortified village rose against the lord's castle, defied it first, attacked it next, and ...
— Mutual Aid • P. Kropotkin
... must ETERNAL be, Dear sir, it can not fail, For 'tis incomprehensible, And wants ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... seemed to cower from his notice. These were not so imaginable after her family took to their berths and left her alone with him, but the touching mystery remained, a sort of bewilderment, as he guessed it, a surprise such as a child might show at some incomprehensible harm. It was this grief which he had refused not merely to know—he still doubted his right to know it—but to share; he had denied not only his curiosity but his sympathy, and had exiled himself to a region where, when her family came back with the fair weather, he felt himself farther ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... a reason why he did not wish the details of that affair on the upper Forty Mile to become public. Joe McCaskey was beginning to talk loudly about his outraged rights, his citizenship, international law, and such incomprehensible things—but stronger by far than any fear of consequences to himself, remote at best, 'Poleon felt a desire to help his friend, the Police lieutenant. Rock was deeply humiliated at his weak failure in living up to his reputation; he felt that ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach
... universe. Now, however, as she stood in the Promenade, it seemed to her that something uncanny had happened to the universe. Surely it had shifted from its pivot! Her basic conviction trembled. Men were not the same everywhere, and her power over them was a delusion. Englishmen were incomprehensible; they were not human; they were apart. The memory of the hundreds of Englishmen who had yielded to her power in Paris (for she had specialised in travelling Englishmen) could not re-establish her conviction as to the sameness of ...
— The Pretty Lady • Arnold E. Bennett
... this jeunesse, in spite of the clothes it wore, in spite of the memories these clothes evoked, was wildly gay. This seems incomprehensible, but it is true. Explain if you can that Dance of Death at the beginning of the fifteenth century, which, with all the fury of a modern galop, led by Musard, whirled its chain through the very Cemetery ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas, pere
... excitement and mental strain through which he had passed. M. Dantes forced him to swallow a glass of wine that partially restored him; then, turning to M. Lamartine, who had been an astonished spectator of this strange and to him incomprehensible family scene, ...
— Edmond Dantes • Edmund Flagg
... unbridled licentiousness. The whole community greeted the re-awakening vitality of the earth by an unrestrained abandonment to passion. Man aspired to be no more than the flower which scatters its seed to the winds. The incomprehensible lords of cupidity and rank vegetation did not suffer the individualisation of desire. The complete union of the male and female qualities, as manifested both in nature and man, was solemnised in the Orgies, and not by any means the relationship of an individual man to an individual woman, or ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... this period of bloodshed and alarms, the missionary stuck to his post. The obstinacy of hatred was being gradually overcome by the superior pertinacity of zeal in a good cause, and the invariable practice—so incomprehensible to the savage mind—of returning good for evil; the result was, that the Sabbath bell still sent its tinkling sound over the verdant slopes above Sandy Cove, and the hymn of praise still arose, morning and evening, from the little church, which, composed partly ...
— Gascoyne, the Sandal-Wood Trader • R.M. Ballantyne
... rank. Madame Francis Waddington did not even run upstairs to snatch her jewel case, and of course she never saw it again. Her dresses had been taken from the wardrobes and slashed from top to hem by the swords of these incomprehensible barbarians. The most valuable books in the library were gutted. But these outrages are almost ...
— The Living Present • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... certain details in Medenham's costume. There are conditions, even in England, in which a flannel suit is hard to obtain, and the manner of their coming to Symon's Yat seemed to preclude the buying of ready-made garments, a solution which would occur to an American instantly. Yet here was that incomprehensible chauffeur clad in the correct regalia of the Thames Rowing Club, though Cynthia, of course, ...
— Cynthia's Chauffeur • Louis Tracy
... his conscience and to the outspoken consciousness of the difficulties of his work. In that uneasy solitude the supreme cry of Art for Art itself, loses the exciting ring of its apparent immorality. It sounds far off. It has ceased to be a cry, and is heard only as a whisper, often incomprehensible, but at ...
— The Nigger Of The "Narcissus" - A Tale Of The Forecastle • Joseph Conrad
... names loom large out of Barbizon. Daubigny, Diaz and Rousseau are great painters, and they each have disciples and imitators who paint as well as they; but Corot and Millet stand out separate and alone, incomprehensible ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... separate God entirely from the world. Philosophic monotheism, in our day, separates God from man, by teaching that there is nothing in common between the two by which God can be mediated, and so makes him wholly incomprehensible. Christianity gives us Emmanuel, God with us, equally removed from the stern despotic omnipotence of the Semitic monotheism and the finite and imperfect humanities of Olympus. We see God in Christ, as full of sympathy with man, God "in ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... Soc. Journal," 1869, page 203.) on the style and stigma in the Goodenovieae, where he speaks of Mr. Darwin's belief that fertilisation takes place outside the indusium. This statement, which we imagine Mr. Bentham must have had from an unpublished source, was incomprehensible to him as long as he confined his work to such genera as Goodenia, Scaevola, Velleia, Coelogyne, in which the mechanism is much as above described; but on examining Leschenaultia the meaning became clear. Bentham writes of this genus:—"The ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin Volume II - Volume II (of II) • Charles Darwin
... tree-frogs, small lizards, and other creatures. Walter stood by watching him, as with scientific skill he dissected the huge lizard, discoursing as he did so in technical language, which was perfectly incomprehensible to his young hearer, on the curious formation of the creature,—on its bones, muscles, and ...
— The South Sea Whaler • W.H.G. Kingston
... street. A woman, leaning out of a window, wanted to know what the Artist was doing. I explained our interest in the arch. Had there been a gate in her grandmother's time? Why, when so much of a former age had disappeared, did this half-arch remain? The woman was puzzled. It was incomprehensible that anyone should be interested in the arch, which had always been there. I thought I would try her ...
— Riviera Towns • Herbert Adams Gibbons
... This incomprehensible escape redoubled the severity of the Arch-priest, till at last the prophets, feeling that their only chance of safety lay in getting rid of him, began to preach against him as Antichrist, and advocate his ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... endowment. An iron ring incloses him. He who does not allow his thought to be determined by experience falls a prey to fancy, that is, thought, which cannot be suppressed, assumes a mythological aspect: superstition takes the place of reason, dull gazing at something incomprehensible is regarded as the highest goal of the spirit's efforts, and every conscious activity of the spirit is subordinated to visionary conditions artificially brought about. But that every conceit may not be allowed to assert itself, the gradual exploration ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 1 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... reflections at that time it seemed to me that life was an incomprehensible enigma; that the creator had placed us on this earth, and left us entirely in the dark as to His purpose in so doing. We seemed to be cast upon the ocean of time, and left to drift aimlessly about, with ...
— Miscellaneous Writings, 1883-1896 • Mary Baker Eddy
... Hence, there is not, and there cannot be, any human knowledge, understanding, or faith whatever concerning God in so far as He has not revealed Himself. For while the fact that there are indeed such things as mysteries, unsearchable judgments, and incomprehensible ways in God is plainly taught in the Bible, their nature, their how, why, and wherefore, has not been revealed to us and no amount of human ingenuity is able to supply the deficiency. Hence, in as far as God is still hidden and veiled, ...
— Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church • Friedrich Bente
... enquired after their friend. On hearing from them that he was at Sais, he sent the three youths thither at once, charging them, if they met Prexaspes on the way, to send him back to Memphis without delay. This haste and the king's strange behavior were quite incomprehensible to the young Achaemenidae; nevertheless they set out on their journey with all speed, fearing ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... marvelling. What on earth were these revelations which Barthorpe hinted at—these unpleasant truths which would so wound and hurt Peggie Wynne? Could it be possible that there really was some mystery about that will of which only Barthorpe knew the secret? It was incomprehensible to Mr. Halfpenny that any man could be so cool, so apparently cocksure about matters as Barthorpe was unless he felt absolutely certain of his own case. What that case could be, Mr. Halfpenny could not imagine—the only thing really certain was that ...
— The Herapath Property • J. S. Fletcher
... "steadies" being to walk up and down Faber Street of an evening after supper, arm in arm with two or three other young ladies, all chewing gum, wheeling into store windows and wheeling out again, pretending the utmost indifference to melting glances cast in their direction. An exciting sport, though incomprehensible to masculine intelligence. It was a principle with Lise to pay no attention to any young man who was not "presented," those venturing to approach her with the ready formula "Haven't we met before?" being instantly congealed. She was strict ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... she runs to the back of it, she leaps over it, she turns and twists, and jumps and frisks, in all directions, in the vain attempt to reach the fair illusion; and, at length, turns away in weariness from that incomprehensible enigma—the image ...
— Reason and Faith; Their Claims and Conflicts • Henry Rogers
... on, in a manly, straightforward manner, to speak of his hopes and ambitions. Daniel listened, but the most of what he heard was incomprehensible. Increased output and decreased manufacturing costs were Greek to him. When the young man paused, he brought the conversation back to what, in his mind, was ...
— Cap'n Dan's Daughter • Joseph C. Lincoln
... not concerned with repeating thrilling tales, bloody almost beyond belief, and indicative of an incomprehensible depravity in human nature, so much as we are with the causes and effects of this wild civilization which raged here quite alone in the midst of one of the wildest of the western mountain regions. It will best serve our purpose ...
— The Passing of the Frontier - A Chronicle of the Old West, Volume 26 in The Chronicles - Of America Series • Emerson Hough
... that our only course will be to sketch out imperfectly certain conjugal situations of an analogous kind, thus imitating the philosopher of ancient time who, seeking in vain to explain motion, walked forward in his attempt to comprehend laws which were incomprehensible. ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... with the Infinite is the goal of man. To enter into perfect harmony with the Eternal Law is Wisdom, Love and Peace. But this divine state is, and must ever be, incomprehensible to the merely personal. Personality, separateness, selfishness are one and the same, and are the antithesis of wisdom and divinity. By the unqualified surrender of the personality, separateness and selfishness cease, and man enters ...
— The Way of Peace • James Allen
... yourself in my place for a moment. Walk with me a bit in my tender childhood, bed with me a night and imagine yourself dreaming such incomprehensible horrors. Remember I was an inexperienced child. I had never seen a wild boar in my life. For that matter I had never seen a domesticated pig. The nearest approach to one that I had seen was breakfast bacon sizzling in its fat. And yet here, ...
— Before Adam • Jack London
... play to pass the time. Partly to fill her lonely moments, but more because it was an instinct with her, Beatrice took an ever-increasing interest in her cave home. She kept it clean and cooked the meals, performing her tasks with goodwill, even at times a gaiety that was as incomprehensible ...
— The Sky Line of Spruce • Edison Marshall
... I sank into gloomy meditations on all human affairs. Ah! hapless man, said I in my grief, a blind fatality sports with thy destiny!* A fatal necessity rules with the hand of chance the lot of mortals! But no: it is the justice of heaven fulfilling its decrees!—a God of mystery exercising his incomprehensible judgments! Doubtless he has pronounced a secret anathema against this land: blasting with maledictions the present, for the sins of past generations. Oh! who shall dare to fathom the depths of ...
— The Ruins • C. F. [Constantin Francois de] Volney
... over the difficulty yet, for of all the wonderful truths we are commanded to believe, no one is so wonderful and so incomprehensible as the Love of God to the sinful ...
— The Fairy Godmothers and Other Tales • Mrs. Alfred Gatty
... it not incomprehensible that Royalty did not follow the advice indirectly given by Louis XI. to place the capital of the kingdom at Tours? There, without great expense, the Loire might have been made accessible for the merchant service, and also for vessels-of-war of light draught. There, too, the seat of government ...
— Catherine de' Medici • Honore de Balzac
... the most moderate charges. At his extensive establishment will also be found an assortment of shirt collars, cravats, braces, silk handkerchiefs, etc., etc., arranged according to the prevailing fashions. One of the most curious, ingenious and incomprehensible inventions of any I have seen is that of M. Paris, coiffeur to the Princes and Princesses, 25, Passage Choiseul, and 22, Rue Dalayrac, near the new Italian Theatre, relating to all descriptions of false hair, ...
— How to Enjoy Paris in 1842 • F. Herve
... remained, therefore, in spite of the presence of De Crussol, but redoubled my precautions. The pretended widowhoods of my wife, the frequent visits of the filibuster, the Caribbean, and the buccaneer, furnished a collection of facts so incomprehensible that it was impossible to distinguish the truth, which was in our favor. ...
— A Romance of the West Indies • Eugene Sue
... often said, until her sudden fame overwhelmed him with surprise as well as exultation. Only his friend, her beloved "Daddy Crisp" of the letters, appreciated her; himself a disappointed dramatic author, soured by what he felt to be an incomprehensible failure, yet of fine critical talent, with kind and wise suggestions for ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... strength of this remark, overheard by the stool-pigeon, Morgan, and afterwards reported to the prosecution, that Elmer Smith was hailed to prison charged with murder in the first degree. His enemies had been certain all along that his incomprehensible delusion about the law being the same for the poor man as the rich would bring its own punishment. It did; there can no longer be any doubt on ...
— The Centralia Conspiracy • Ralph Chaplin
... indescribable—almost unendurable to the ripe aged woman of the world who watched and heard her. It was as if she knew nothing of the meaning of things—as if some little spirit had been torn from heaven and flung down upon the dark earth. One felt that one must weep aloud over the exquisite incomprehensible remoteness of her. And it was so awfully plain that there was some tragic connection with the Wood and that her whole soul cried out to it. And she would not speak to any one in the world. Such things had been known. Was ...
— Robin • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... they left the hold. These were all brave men, but there are times when the invisible, the incomprehensible, will send a momentary chill to the heart of the ...
— The Cruise of the Jasper B. • Don Marquis
... coming of light, Eltham, Smith and I tested the electrical contrivances from every point. They were in perfect order. It became more and more incomprehensible how anyone could have entered and quitted Redmoat during the night. The barbed-wire fencing was intact, and bore no signs of having been ...
— The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... judge of all things yet a feeble worm; the shrine of truth, yet a mass of doubt and uncertainty; at once the glory and the scorn of the universe. If he boasts, I lower him; if he lowers himself I raise him; either way I contradict him, till he learns he is a monstrous, incomprehensible mystery." "Make yourself an honest man," says Carlyle sarcastically, "and then you may be sure there is one less rascal in the world." This remark sprang, ...
— The Golden Censer - The duties of to-day, the hopes of the future • John McGovern
... Anicza, she politely requested Clementina to be so good as to leave them to themselves, a request which Clementina very naturally regarded as incomprehensible; and, of course, the instant she had crossed the threshold, she diligently took up her position before the keyhole. She was, however, furious to discover that Henrietta proceeded, more prudently than speakers on the stage ...
— The Poor Plutocrats • Maurus Jokai
... announces the fact that the gentleman from the rural districts has been 'sold.' Pocketing, not his money, but his loss, the victim walks away disconsolate, painfully conscious that he has been 'done,' not only out of his cash, but has had the wool pulled over his eyes in a (to him) most incomprehensible manner." ...
— The Secrets Of The Great City • Edward Winslow Martin
... many of your actions are incomprehensible," Hamel replied slowly. "There are things here which I do not ...
— The Vanished Messenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... cheerfulness, and resignation, which is the duty of every member of the church of our blessed Saviour and Redeemer Christ Jesus. To Him alone I now look up for succour, in full hope that perhaps a few days more will open to the view of my astonished and fearful soul His kingdom of eternal and incomprehensible bliss, prepared only for the ...
— The Eventful History Of The Mutiny And Piratical Seizure - Of H.M.S. Bounty: Its Cause And Consequences • Sir John Barrow
... The paper was followed by others on the mathematical theory of electricity; and in 1845 he gave the first mathematical development of Faraday's notion, that electric induction takes place through an intervening medium, or 'dielectric,' and not by some incomprehensible 'action at a distance.' He also devised an hypothesis of electrical images, which became a powerful agent in solving problems of electrostatics, or the science which deals with the forces ...
— Heroes of the Telegraph • J. Munro
... and great ability, as well as for these lighter accomplishments, Baldy conceived an admiration for Dubby that would have been boundless but for one weakness that was absolutely incomprehensible—the huskie's devotion to ...
— Baldy of Nome • Esther Birdsall Darling
... boy of Rachael's, with his extraordinary intuitions, his unboyish brain, his sympathetic and profound affection for his mother, felt with her and criticised his father severely. To him failure was incomprehensible, then, as later, for self-confidence and indomitability were parts of his equipment; and that a man of his father's age and experience, to say nothing of his education and intellect, should so fail in the common relation of life, and break the heart and pride of the uncommonest ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... insight. She heard him, plunged in a foolish ecstasy, as one hears a traveller who has returned from far and dangerous countries, who has visited peoples of whose language the hearer is ignorant, and lived in the midst of manners and customs incomprehensible ...
— The Mystery of Orcival • Emile Gaboriau
... incomprehensible thing in the world! I have heard of ghosts—and, talking about ghosts, that child was in a tremor, last night, again—I'm sure he was. Brave little heart! he goes up to bed in the dark on purpose to break himself of the fear. I went in for them shirts missis told ...
— The Channings • Mrs. Henry Wood
... singular revelation that had momentarily escaped his childish lips. If Johnny had actually seen Seth fire at McKinstry, the latter's mysterious wound was accounted for—but not Seth's motive. The act was so utterly incomprehensible and inconsistent with Seth's avowed hatred of the master that the boy must ...
— Cressy • Bret Harte
... the sharpness was directed not to Miss Polly, but to herself—to her own incomprehensible childishness. The man interested her; already she had thought of him daily since she first came to the house; already she had begun to wonder about him, and she realized that she should wonder still more because of what Miss Polly had told her. When he had approached her in the yard, ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... the choice between two systems of explanation only: either to regard the infinitely complex (and thereby infinitely well contrived) organization as a fortuitous concatenation of atoms, or to relate it to the incomprehensible influence of an external force that has grouped ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs
... rest, in eager watchfulness and admiration, as the evolutions of the most perfectly drilled troops in the world went forward. The infantry marched and countermarched; plumes of all colors waved in the sunlight and kept time to the music; uniforms and men seemed but part of one grand incomprehensible automatic movement; battle-flags scarred with the history of all the wars fluttered their tattered shreds in the wind, waking memories of irrepressible pathos and joy; the artillery rumbled and thundered; the evolutions of the cavalry were like systematic whirlwinds; and the scarlet ...
— In and Around Berlin • Minerva Brace Norton
... seem that he is a capricious tyrant. How are we to explain the discrepancy? The discrepancy is the infallible result of the circumstances already stated.[614] The Deity has limitless power, and therefore is the natural object of our instinctive fears. The character of the Deity is absolutely incomprehensible, and incomprehensibility in human affairs is identical with caprice and insanity.[615] The ends and the means of the Deity are alike beyond our knowledge; and the extremes both of wisdom and of folly are equally unaccountable. Now, we praise or blame human beings in order to ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... of thinking, which is not ours, and which is to us almost incomprehensible. They are most indirect in their thoughts and deeds—a characteristic which is purely racial, and which they themselves cannot appreciate, but which often shocks Europeans. For instance, one of the most palatial buildings in the Avenida Central was built only a short time ago. In it, as became such ...
— Across Unknown South America • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... It also fully agrees with the claims of the early Unitarians with regard to the teachings of Jesus. "No one sees with greater pleasure than myself," he wrote, "the progress of reason in its advance toward rational Christianity. When we shall have done away with the incomprehensible jargon of the Trinitarian arithmetic, that three are one, and one are three; when we shall have knocked down the artificial scaffolding reared to mask from view the simple structure of Jesus; when, in short, we shall have ...
— Unitarianism in America • George Willis Cooke
... the United States improved, when winter put an end to most operations on the northern frontier. As in the Civil War a half century later, so in 1812, the power of the water over the issues of the land not only was not comprehended by the average official, but was incomprehensible to him. Armstrong in January, and Hull in March, had insisted upon a condition that should have been obvious; but not till September 3, when Hull's disaster had driven home Hull's reasoning, did Captain Chauncey receive orders "to assume command of the ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 1 • Alfred Thayer Mahan
... She had heard Abel in old days speak of Gabriel Bennet as a spooney—a saint in the milk—a goodsey, boodsey, booby—a sort of youth who would turn pale and be snuffed out by one of her glances. She found him incomprehensible. She owed him the first positive emotion of human interest she had ...
— Trumps • George William Curtis
... and revealed an entire world of feeling. Never shall I forget the simple expression of this newcomer, whose emotions on first feeling the solid earth beneath her tread, and touching a remembrance of the land she had left in quest of another home, will be incomprehensible to no one ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 1. • J Lort Stokes
... writhed under, he regarded him with mingled reverence and terror. "A strange person, your master," observed I. "Signor," replied the faithful Sancho Panza, "e veramente grand uomo, ma da non potersi comprendere." "He is truly a great man, but quite incomprehensible." It was edifying to observe the awful importance with which Antonio bore the instrument nightly intrusted to his charge to carry to and from the theatre. He considered it an animated something, whether demon or angel he was unable to determine, but this he firmly believed, ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... in 1835. Strafford, Browning's first drama, had a little more vogue; it was acted for a while. When Sordello, that strange child of genius, was born in 1840, those who tried to read its first pages declared they were incomprehensible. It seems that critics in those days had either less intelligence than we have, or were more impatient and less attentive, for not only Sordello but even In Memoriam was said to be ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... the snow-drifted fields, under the frosty brilliance of the winter stars. As he looked up at them, he felt more than ever that they must have something to do with the fate of nations, and with the incomprehensible things that were happening in the world. In the ordered universe there must be some mind that read the riddle of this one unhappy planet, that knew what was forming in the dark eclipse of this hour. ...
— One of Ours • Willa Cather
... they observed natives on the east shore of the river, and directed their course towards them. Their new guide began to call to them in an incomprehensible manner, and said that the natives did not belong to his tribe, but were a very wicked people, who would beat them cruelly, and pull out their hair, and maltreat them in various ways. Despite this warning Mackenzie advanced, and soon found them to ...
— The Pioneers • R.M. Ballantyne
... stared in breathless agony at her cousin. She seemed to hope to read in his pale face the explanation of this incomprehensible riddle; she expected him to command her husband to be silent, and to offer him some new insult. But Kindar did not speak, and Camilla came to a desperate resolution. She was determined to know why he stood so pale and trembling before her husband. She would force ...
— Frederick The Great and His Family • L. Muhlbach
... enough heard when he comes to speak and labor upon higher platforms. This was the case with Carlyle; and when he published that new Book of Job, that weird and marvellous Pilgrim's Progress of a modern cultivated soul, the "Sartor Resartus," in "Fraser's Magazine," strange, wild, and incomprehensible as it was to most men, they did not put it contemptuously aside, but pondered it, laughed at it, trembled over it and its dread apocalyptical visions and revelations, respecting its earnestness and eloquence, although not comprehending what manner of writing it essentially ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... him was a jungle of terrestrial and celestial globes, chemists' retorts, tubes, pipes, and all the indescribable apparatus that modern science has invented, and which, to the uninitiated, seems as incomprehensible as the ancient paraphernalia of alchemists and astrologers. The walls were lined with book shelves, and adorned along the upper portions with the most extraordinary photographs and drawings. Even the ceiling was covered with charts, some representing ...
— The Second Deluge • Garrett P. Serviss
... Greek tragedy, arose from the similarity of their characters. There are other tragedies, less scandalous and of a subtler poignancy, arising from irreconcilable differences and from that fear of the Incomprehensible that hangs over all our heads—over all ...
— Amy Foster • Joseph Conrad
... the whole system of matter. The will is the working and living principle in the world of Reason, as motion is the working and living principle in the world of the senses. I stand in the centre of two opposite worlds, a visible in which the deed, and an invisible, altogether incomprehensible, in which the will, decides. I am one of the original forces for both these worlds. My will is that which embraces both. This will is in and of itself a constituent portion of the supersensuous world. When I put it in motion by a resolution, I move and change ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... Pacific that the Olive Branch was now holding its course. We had seen Vihala happily united to Alea, with the full consent of the old king, and they had devoted themselves for missionary labour wherever they might be required. This was surprising to many, and to the heathen perfectly incomprehensible. It was as astonishing to them as it would be to people in England, if a young noble of high rank were to declare his resolution of going forth as a missionary of the gospel to these heathen lands. ...
— The Cruise of the Mary Rose - Here and There in the Pacific • William H. G. Kingston
... save for the girl, who, her eyes wide with horror, threw herself upon him and clung trembling, while she murmured incomprehensible endearments in her own tongue wherein his own name was mingled: "Dean, dear! My ...
— Two Thousand Miles Below • Charles Willard Diffin
... was incomprehensible to the bridegroom. Already irritated by the McKee incident, he took affront at the ...
— The Round-up - A Romance of Arizona novelized from Edmund Day's melodrama • John Murray and Marion Mills Miller
... the time the thing haunts me like a detective story—I can't find the solution! What does it mean? Why did he do it? It is so irrational—so impossible—so utterly incomprehensible! And shall I never know the truth ...
— The Journal of Arthur Stirling - "The Valley of the Shadow" • Upton Sinclair
... Barataria, and may be here at any moment. MAR. The Duke and Duchess are nothing to us. DON AL. But the daughter—the beautiful daughter! Aha! Oh, you're a lucky dog, one of you! GIU. I think you're a very incomprehensible old gentleman. DON AL. Not a bit—I'll explain. Many years ago when you (whichever you are) were a baby, you (whichever you are) were married to a little girl who has grown up to be the most beautiful young lady in Spain. That beautiful ...
— The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan - The 14 Gilbert And Sullivan Plays • William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan
... pursuing his object. He must believe in life and in the inherent goodness of the earth. He must be a stranger to the dyspeptic melancholy through which Carlyle saw the world as a "noisy inanity" and life as an incomprehensible monstrosity. Macbeth is called to denounce life as "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury," and "signifying nothing." Macbeth must be shunned by the reformer as the monk repels the visits of Satan in the desert. He must share the hopefulness of Sir Thomas ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... we had to take against these opposing forces, I cannot help associating them in my mind with those checks we are wont to receive in our dreams, as, for instance, when we imagine we are able to fly and yet feel ourselves held back by some incomprehensible power. ...
— On the Future of our Educational Institutions • Friedrich Nietzsche
... sun. On the other hand, the essence of the immortal is the person in the circle (of the sun). In man's body breath and ether are the immortal, the essence of which is the person in the eye. There is a visible and invisible brahma ([a]tm[a]); the real brahma is incomprehensible and is described only by negations (3. 4. 1; 9. 26). The highest is the Imperishable (neuter), but this sees, hears, and knows. It is in this that ether (as above) is woven (3. 8. 11). After death the wise man goes to the world of the gods (1. 5. 16); he becomes the ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... appreciate Aeschylus. Horace knew what he could himself do, and, with admirable wisdom, he confined himself to that; but he seems to have had a perfectly clear comprehension of the merit of those great masters whom he never attempted to rival. He praised Pindar most enthusiastically. It seems incomprehensible to me that a critic, who admired Pindar, should not admire Aeschylus ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... material existence to the simplest possible terms. He had no desire for possessions, which he regarded—at the best—as "only means to the end of his ultimate perfection."[5] To him, the white man's desire for wealth was incomprehensible and the white man's sedentary life was contemptible. He must be free at all times to commune with nature in the valleys, and at sunrise and sunset to ascend the mountain peak ...
— The American Empire • Scott Nearing
... things, She will bear with Gregory when you would turn from him in dismay, and when it's necessary she will not shrink from putting a little judicious pressure on him in a way you could not have done. It may sound incomprehensible, but that girl will lead or drive Gregory very much further than he could have gone with you. She doesn't regard him as perfection, but she ...
— Hawtrey's Deputy • Harold Bindloss
... reach them. Nor can we imagine an end to this stupendous universe, or an end to space, for is we try to do so the question immediately occurs, what is still outside and beyond that? And so on to incomprehensible and overwhelming infinitude. And these many millions of suns and worlds and systems and all their parts are clearly working together, like the most exquisitely designed clockwork. Look at the marvellous mechanism of the human brain, the human eye, the human hand, the human heart, and in ...
— Cole's Funny Picture Book No. 1 • Edward William Cole
... Owen, half-maliciously, "or she'll be thinking about her best boy all day instead of working. Of course that's a bit better than militancy, less upsetting; but women are so incomprehensible when they're in what they are pleased to call love that it's rather difficult to ...
— The Making of a Soul • Kathlyn Rhodes
... of Nature. Art was nothing to this. Art, in the time of her brief acquaintance with it, had baffled her, and given her a hint of her own feebleness; but Nature was the great Incomprehensible—and she was alone with it. Alone, in a lonely land, peopled mostly by the wild creatures of sea and shore, by peasants and fishermen, men and women who looked at her with strange eyes and spoke a strange language; whose ways were dark to her, and their thoughts unfathomable. ...
— Audrey Craven • May Sinclair
... now looking directly at her visitor with a fixed and hopeless melancholy which puzzled Mrs. Frankland, who had expected that she would seize gratefully upon any advice tending to relax the rigor of her self-sacrifice. Phillida's attitude was incomprehensible to her visitor. Could it be that she had resolved to break with her ...
— The Faith Doctor - A Story of New York • Edward Eggleston
... gathered direct from the lips of the illiterate story-teller, and set down with accuracy and good faith. Every turn of phrase, awkward or coarse though it may seem to cultured ears, must be unrelentingly reported; and every grotesquery, each strange word, or incomprehensible or silly incident, must be given without flinching. Any attempt to soften down inconsistencies, vulgarities or stupidities, detracts from the value of the text, and may hide or destroy something from which the student may be able to make a discovery ...
— The Science of Fairy Tales - An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology • Edwin Sidney Hartland
... us that the clearer our insight is into the reasonableness of a demand, the more hearty will be our surrender to it. One great cause of our remissness in prayer is that there appears to be something arbitrary, or at least something incomprehensible, in the call to such continued prayer. If we could be brought to see that this apparent difficulty is a Divine necessity, and in the very nature of things the source of unspeakable blessing, we should be more ready with gladness of heart to give ...
— The Ministry of Intercession - A Plea for More Prayer • Andrew Murray
... of this, which seemed to the multitude an incomprehensible speech, there were but few present who did not inwardly pronounce the king to be laboring under a ...
— The Young Captives - A Story of Judah and Babylon • Erasmus W. Jones
... Pez, from a fish which young Tobit holds in his hand. It is rather tawny in color, as if it had been painted on a pine board and the wood had asserted itself from below. It is a charming picture, with all the great Roman's inevitable perfection of design; but it is incomprehensible that critics, M. Viardot among them, should call it the first in rank of Raphael's Virgins in Glory. There are none which can dispute that title with Our Lady of San Sisto, unearthly and supernatural in ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... everything, in supposing in everything that shows signs of life—and even in inanimate objects—desires, passions, and acts of will analogous to ours, acting like ourselves in view of definite ends. This state of mind is incomprehensible to an adult civilized man; but it must be admitted, since there are facts without number that show its existence. We do not need to cite them—they are too well known. They fill the works of ethnologists, of travelers in savage lands, ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... goods; at another, that the men in their employ had struck for higher wages. Generally, the reason alleged for the new imposition on us was foolish and unsatisfactory, and to most women, who knew so little of merchandise and tariffs, quite incomprehensible. The whole drift was, that, as others laid it on the tailors, the latter must lay it on the sewing-women. But all the reasons thus set before us I turned over in my mind, and thought a great deal about. I never had the uncomplaining timidity of my mother, when ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... carvings; for the most part they were statues in bas relief. All were fantastic in the extreme, but whether purposely so or not, there was no way to tell. Certainly any such work on the part of an earthly artist would have branded him either as insane or as an incomprehensible genius. ...
— The Lord of Death and the Queen of Life • Homer Eon Flint
... "Whoopee! Bullseye!" as my American neighbors did or "Voila! Touche!" like the French. There were plenty of Americans and English there, and they seemed to be having a good time, but their good time was incomprehensible to me. This was "gay Paris," of course, but somehow the gaiety seemed forced and artificial and silly, except to the proprietors of L'Abbaye. If I had been getting the price for food and liquids which they received I might, perhaps, have ...
— Kent Knowles: Quahaug • Joseph C. Lincoln
... was served up to us on the long unpainted table that stood in the middle of the room. During the repast our host, the priest, sat with folded hands intently regarding us, while the rest of the people clustered around the door and open windows, eying us with indescribable and incomprehensible curiosity. If we had been visitors from the moon we could not have attracted more attention. Even the stolid Indians, a few of whom strolled lazily about, came and gazed at us until the pompous old man in faded Mexican uniform ...
— Stories by American Authors (Volume 4) • Constance Fenimore Woolson
... shouted something incomprehensible, and three of the black fellows bounded to the side and disappeared into the whale-boat ...
— King o' the Beach - A Tropic Tale • George Manville Fenn
... the invaders proofs of a civilization far superior to that of his own people. He intimated his apprehension that they would return, and that at some day, not far distant, perhaps, the throne of the Incas might be shaken by these strangers, endowed with such incomprehensible powers.1 To the vulgar eye, it was a little speck on the verge of the horizon; but that of the sagacious monarch seemed to descry in it the dark thunder-cloud, that was to spread wider and wider till it burst in fury ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... sect would not exist. The doctors, with their awful doses of nauseous and destructive drugs, went to one extreme. The reaction was the formation of a sect that has gone to the other extreme. The Christian Scientists are incomprehensible in spots to us mortals who believe in a body as well as a mind, but they have a cheerful and helpful philosophy which brings enjoyment on earth and they have done an immense amount of good by teaching people to cease thinking and ...
— Maintaining Health • R. L. Alsaker
... the relative pronoun and the demonstrative adjective pronoun, between the perfect and the preter-perfect tense, he is extremely dull and hazy. The region of abstract ideas is to him a region of ghosts and shadows. Yet his youth is mainly a dreary wilderness of uncomprehended, incomprehensible studies, of privations, tasks, punishments, with a sense of continual failure, disappointment, and disgrace, because his father is trying to make a scholar and a literary man out of a boy whom Nature made to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 92, June, 1865 • Various
... so, and then to stultify themselves by proceeding to talk a whole torrent. Mrs. Lawrence said a great deal in the course of this initial interview, and followed it up with a very great deal more. She considered Mr. Forrest's conduct worse than incomprehensible. What business had he to tell a girl his heart was buried in the past and pay her all lover-like attentions in the present? "He hasn't," said Miss Allison, promptly and flatly. "He has simply been kind and friendly. ...
— A Tame Surrender, A Story of The Chicago Strike • Charles King
... about the smallest hole that a man can hide his head in." He finds that the great popular thinkers—and it is right that he, a potent popular writer, should concern himself with these rather than with the systematic philosophers who observe conventions incomprehensible to the common mind—are each and all of them prone to follow exclusively some strange bent of thought, leading by pure reason to one of those awful conclusions which "tend to make a man lose his wits:" Tolstoy, for instance, reaching an ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... spoke the tunnel took a sharp turn to the right. He scrambled around the bend to stand petrified, for with the suddenness of lightning a flood of dazzling orange-red light sprang into being. Momentarily it blinded him, then revealed strange, incomprehensible scenes. It appeared that two short shafts of incandescent flame roared through transparent columns of glass on either side of the passage some fifty yards distant. Subconsciously Nelson realized that these columns began ...
— Astounding Stories, February, 1931 • Various
... as reliable examples of the true acid content of coffee; and though they seem very low, it is not at all incomprehensible that the acids which they indicate produce the acidity in a cup of coffee. They probably are mainly volatile organic acids, together with other acidic-natured products of roasting. We know that very small quantities of acids ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... tinge which it received from his own character and feelings. The present Poem, like the "Vita Nuova" of Dante, is sufficiently intelligible to a certain class of readers without a matter-of-fact history of the circumstances to which it relates and to a certain other class it must ever remain incomprehensible, from a defect of a common organ of perception for the ideas of which it treats. Not but that gran vergogna sarebbe a colui, che rimasse cosa sotto veste di figura, o di colore rettorico: e domandato non sapesse denudare le sue ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... trancxo. Incite instigi, inciti. Inclination inklino. Incline inklini. Incline (slope) deklivo. Include enhavi. Incoherent sensenca. Income rento. Incommode gxeni. Incomparable nekomparebla. Incompatible nekunigebla. Incompetent nekompetenta. Incomplete neplena. Incomprehensible nekomprenebla. Inconceivable neimagebla. Inconsistent nekonsekvenca. Inconsolable nekonsolebla. Inconstant sxangxema. Incontestable nedisputebla. Inconvenient maloportuna. Incorporeal spirita. Incorrect ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... cover of a low patch of juniper scrub. Confidently he peered through the scrub, his rifle ready. But his face grew black with bitter disappointment. The capricious beasts had gone. Seized by one of their incomprehensible vagaries—Pete was certain that he had not alarmed them—they were now far out on the white level, ...
— The Backwoodsmen • Charles G. D. Roberts
... Bella Donna, by Messrs. Robert Hichens and James B. Fagan, we have a murder-story of a not uncommon or improbable type. A woman of very shady reputation marries an amiable idealist who is infatuated with her. She naturally finds his idealism incomprehensible and his amiability tedious. His position as heir-presumptive to a peerage is shattered by the birth of an heir-apparent. She becomes passionately enamoured of an Egyptian millionaire; and she sets to work to poison her husband with sugar-of-lead, provided by her oriental lover. How ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... answer him. Quite needlessly! The impenetrable young woman went on with her master's beard. A machine could not have taken less notice of the life and the talk around it than this incomprehensible creature. ...
— The Law and the Lady • Wilkie Collins
... foolish understanding, does not see this. He who, casting his eyes on visible things, really seeth them, is said to have eyes and understanding. The faculty called understanding is so called because of the knowledge and comprehension it gives of unknown and incomprehensible things. He who is acquainted with the words of persons that are learned, that are of cleansed souls, and that have attained to a state of Brahma, succeeds in obtaining great honours. When one seeth creatures of infinite diversity to be all one ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... of time had been formed from these, some acquiring wings, others fins, and others claws, from their ceaseless efforts to procure food or to secure themselves from injury. He contends, that none of these changes are more incomprehensible than the transformation of caterpillars into butterflies; see Botanic Garden, Vol. ...
— The Temple of Nature; or, the Origin of Society - A Poem, with Philosophical Notes • Erasmus Darwin
... 'The etymological explanation of thy name is perfectly incomprehensible to me, in as much as the inflections which the original roots have undergone are unintelligible. Rio and plunge into this ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... best—and set out on my journey, thinking what a terrible thing it was I could not prevail on my men to view things as I did. Neither my experience with native chiefs, nor my money and guns, were of any use to me, simply because my men were such incomprehensible fools, though many of them who had travelled before ought to have ...
— The Discovery of the Source of the Nile • John Hanning Speke
... her incomprehensible moments," observed Hazen, with an ambiguous lift of his shoulders; then, as Ransom made an impatient move, added with steady composure: "I have candidly answered all your questions whether agreeable or otherwise, and the fact that I am as much shocked ...
— The Chief Legatee • Anna Katharine Green
... which leads us to rejoice at a birth; but, could Sarah have foreseen the destiny of her race, tears would have mingled with her smiles. Wonderful has been the past history of that people, strange their present condition, while the future may develop mysteries still more incomprehensible. ...
— Notable Women of Olden Time • Anonymous
... strange family; an utterly incomprehensible race. And Mr. Cardross says that it happened to his father's father; and his father before him died by ...
— The Firing Line • Robert W. Chambers
... epistle is read today because the festival of Holy Trinity, or of the three persons of the Godhead—which is the prime, great, incomprehensible and chief article of faith—is observed on this day. The object of its observance is that, by the Word of God, this truth of the Godhead may be preserved among Christians, enabling them to know God as he would be known. For although Paul does not treat of that article in this epistle, but ...
— Epistle Sermons, Vol. III - Trinity Sunday to Advent • Martin Luther
... brain of this tremendous, this incomprehensible, this complex man, lies at the base of all our literature and of all our modern progress and civilization. The world is hardly big enough for his fame, and the praises of mankind cannot fill the measure ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 3 of 8 • Various
... say is almost incomprehensible," I continued. "I trust you will forgive me, but can you substantiate what ...
— My Strangest Case • Guy Boothby
... me any of his; I had said everything I could in his favor, and if ever he has spoken of me it has been less publicly and in another manner. He has never either rendered or offered me the least service of any kind. How, therefore, was he my Mecaenas? In what manner was I protected by him? This was incomprehensible to me, ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... once there recurred to me the memory of Tom Cragg, the Pugilist; of how he too had winked at me, and of his incomprehensible manner afterwards beneath the gibbet on ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol
... the West. She fairly palpitated with joy and babbled away with the freedom of a sunny brook in the shadow of a grim forest. From the man's standpoint, he was not unkind; unrestraint was to him an incomprehensible factor in a young girl's make-up; and whatever was to follow, the first characters he meant her to learn ...
— The Lady and Sada San - A Sequel to The Lady of the Decoration • Frances Little
... principle, and before taking up the details. Stated in this way the whole matter is plain and rational enough. It is, in fact, one of the many striking examples of adaptation in the English political system. A collection of rules that appear cumbrous and antiquated, and that even now are well-nigh incomprehensible when described in all their involved technicality, have been pruned away until they furnish a procedure almost as simple, direct, and appropriate as any one could devise." Government of England, I., 277-278. The procedure of the House of Commons on public bills is described in Lowell, Government ...
— The Governments of Europe • Frederic Austin Ogg
... Chillingworth, I cannot and will not renounce the sublime truths of Scripture. They may be incomprehensible; they may be inconsistent; and some of them may look ridiculous; but still they are sacred and sublime, and I will not renounce them although my reason may not accord with them, because they are ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest
... of animal life—has developed the Martian mind in a direction very different from ours, since no inner life apart from the rest, no privacy, no concealment is possible except at a distance involving absolute isolation; not even thought is free; yet in some incomprehensible way there is, as a matter of fact, a really greater freedom of thought than is conceivable among ourselves: absolute liberty in absolute obedience to law, a ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... painfully obvious to Jurgis! It was so incomprehensible how a man could fail to see it! Here were all the opportunities of the country, the land, and the buildings upon the land, the railroads, the mines, the factories, and the stores, all in the hands of a few private individuals, called capitalists, for whom the people ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair
... kind-hearted coroner, who loved my father, had urged me to tell my tale, hoping that I would explain this act and give him some opportunity to indulge in a doubt. And I had failed to respond to the hint he had given me. The act itself must appear so sinister and the impulse which drove me to it so incomprehensible, without the heart-rending explanation I dare not subjoin, that I never questioned the wisdom of ...
— The House of the Whispering Pines • Anna Katharine Green
... blood, and went off in a sedan-chair, while I remained petrified, feeling that I did not deserve to live, and finding her conduct utterly outrageous and incomprehensible. ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... treat her as a sinner and an outcast. Sinners did wrong because they enjoyed the sin; but she had never been vicious, or even selfishly anxious for pleasure. Pleasure! She had never cared for that sort of thing. Girls of her own age used to talk to her about it, and what they said was almost incomprehensible. She had never had ...
— The Devil's Garden • W. B. Maxwell
... that neither I nor the regiment of Hussars of Conflans were at Moscow. We were left behind on the lines of communication at Borodino. How the Emperor could have advanced without us is incomprehensible to me, and, indeed, it was only then that I understood that his judgment was weakening and that he was no longer the man that he had been. However, a soldier has to obey orders, and so I remained at this village, which was poisoned ...
— The Adventures of Gerard • Arthur Conan Doyle
... father would not, therefore, press him to adopt a course of life for which he was unsuited, and encouraged him in the study of medicine, for which he early manifested a partiality. At the age of twenty-five he proceeded to the Continent; and being fond of the abstruse, the marvellous, and the incomprehensible, he became an ardent disciple of the school of Paracelsus, whom he looked upon as the regenerator, not only of medicine, but of philosophy. He remained six years in Italy, France, and Germany; storing his ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... Janet—now show her that we are good friends, Keith! And, for goodness' sake, don't say that you mean to give up your shooting this year, or she will wonder what I have made of you. Give up your shooting! Why, a woman would as soon give up her right of being incomprehensible and whimsical and capricious—her right of teasing people, as I very much fear I have been teasing you, Keith. But it will be all set right ...
— Macleod of Dare • William Black
... paper was followed by others on the mathematical theory of electricity; and in 1845 he gave the first mathematical development of Faraday's notion, that electric induction takes place through an intervening medium, or 'dielectric,' and not by some incomprehensible 'action at a distance.' He also devised an hypothesis of electrical images, which became a powerful agent in solving problems of electrostatics, or the science which deals with the forces ...
— Heroes of the Telegraph • J. Munro
... all is clear, I see the link in the chain; everything is explained, and I now understand why Arne Saknussemm, put out of court, forced to hide his magnificent discoveries, was compelled to conceal beneath the veil of an incomprehensible cryptograph, the secret—" ...
— A Journey to the Centre of the Earth • Jules Verne
... locality is small. Added to this condition is a very noticeable disinclination on the part of everybody toward over-exertion at the behest of others; coupled with a responsiveness to holidays that is incomprehensible to Americans who believe in making time into money. While the excessive proportion of holidays in the Russian calendar is deprecated by the more far-sighted and educated among the Russians, there is no hesitation ...
— The History of the American Expedition Fighting the Bolsheviki - Campaigning in North Russia 1918-1919 • Joel R. Moore
... follow from Mr. Spencer's view—already explained—as to how the higher warrant, by which we know the Indestructibility of Matter to be an axiom, a self-evident truth, originated. In his chapter upon "Ultimate Scientific Ideas" he says that Space and Time are "wholly incomprehensible," and that "Matter ... in its ultimate nature, is as absolutely incomprehensible as Space and Time." He affirms, as pointed out, that no experimental verification is possible without assuming what we set out to prove. If the chemical balance cannot demonstrate ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 19, June, 1891 • Various
... human body is the bicycle. And our individual and incomprehensible self is the rider thereof. And seeing that the universe is another bicycle riding full tilt, we are bound to suppose a rider for that also. But we needn't say what sort of rider. When I see a cockroach scuttling across the floor and turning up its tail I stand affronted, ...
— Fantasia of the Unconscious • D. H. Lawrence
... the sense, at least, of being ignorant as to where he was, or how far from the nearest human habitation: but he was acquainted with forest-life, knew the signs and symptoms of the wilderness, and could track his way through pathless wastes in a manner that was utterly incomprehensible to his companions, and could not be explained by himself. Moreover, he was a shrewd fellow, as well as bold, and possessed a strong sense of humour, which he did not fail at times to gratify at the ...
— Lost in the Forest - Wandering Will's Adventures in South America • R.M. Ballantyne
... his manner was scarcely that of a lover, but there most assuredly was a probability that it might alter and become more warm and less friendly and platonic. As to Mollie herself, she was growing a trifle incomprehensible; she paid more attention to her lovely hair than she had been in the habit of doing, and was even known to mend her gloves; she began to be more conscious of the dignity of her seventeen years. She complained less petulantly of the attentions of Phil's friends, and accepted them with a better ...
— Vagabondia - 1884 • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... to allow people in most cases unfit for adeptship to choose a life of celibacy and asceticism, or in other words, to pursue adeptship. This prohibition had an esoteric meaning before it became the prohibition, incomprehensible in its dead-letter sense: for it is not India alone whose sons accorded divine honours to the Wise Ones, but all nations regarded their adepts and initiates as divine.— ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... the most perfect health." "I have during these periods," he himself relates, "undertaken actions which I had to recognize as mine, merely because they could have been carried out by no one else. Thus one day it was incomprehensible to me why I had on no shirt when I awoke, and it remained so in spite of my utmost efforts to recollect myself, until the shirt was found in another room rolled together under a press. In my twenty-ninth year I was awakened from a night wandering by the question, What ...
— Sleep Walking and Moon Walking - A Medico-Literary Study • Isidor Isaak Sadger
... for high compliments from you and Charlotte on this very sage instance of my unfathomable, incomprehensible wisdom. Talking of Charlotte, I must tell her that I have, to the best of my power, paid her a poetic compliment, now completed. The air is admirable: true old Highland. It was the tune of a Gaelic song, which an Inverness lady sung me when I was there; and ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... Inexplicable, incomprehensible Being! I know that the imaginings Of my soul are unable Even to sketch thy shadow! But, if it be our duty to praise thee, Then it is impossible for weak mortals Otherwise to render thee homage Than, simply, to lift their hearts ...
— The Bakchesarian Fountain and Other Poems • Alexander Pushkin and other authors
... elderly women there ever got in her way. Frenchmen never ran after elderly women. She could not conceive of any young Frenchman doing what Craven had done if offered the choice between a girl of twenty-two and a woman of sixty. Englishmen really were incomprehensible. Was it worth while to bother about them? Probably not. But she was by nature combative as well as vain, and Craven's behaviour had certainly given him a greater value in her estimation. If he had done the ...
— December Love • Robert Hichens
... "It's the most incomprehensible thing in the world! I have heard of ghosts—and, talking about ghosts, that child was in a tremor, last night, again—I'm sure he was. Brave little heart! he goes up to bed in the dark on purpose to break himself of the fear. I went ...
— The Channings • Mrs. Henry Wood
... in panic terror of that ego which tenanted the shell of functioning, sensitive stuff called Michael Lanyard: he was afraid of the strange, silent, incomprehensible Self lurking occult in him, that masked mysterious Self which in its inscrutable whim could make him fine or make him base, that Self impalpable and elusive as any shadow yet invincibly strong, his master ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance
... of long-suffering SPEAKER breaks down at last. JEMMY LOWTHER did it. On Appropriation Bill moved incomprehensible Amendment, in unintelligble speech; SPEAKER came down on him "like cartload of bricks," as JOHN BURNS put it. JAMES only temporarily subdued; will probably ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, April 1, 1893 • Various
... as that. Gaston had sworn it, but it was incomprehensible. However, it led the new-born imagination to expand and wander, and when Joyce was at peace, and the sun shone, she went to that picture ...
— Joyce of the North Woods • Harriet T. Comstock
... the idea of quitting such a fascinating life was quite incomprehensible to him. What gorging dinner-party could compare with the thrill of feasting at midnight on crackers and cheese, deviled ham, boned chicken, mince pie and root beer, by the light of a solitary candle, with the cracks of the doors and windows smothered with rugs and blankets, ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Stories • Various
... of the Sword in the lagoon was due to chance the situation remains unchanged, and no power, not even England, will think of seeking for the Sword inside the cavern. If, on the other hand, as the result of an incomprehensible revelation, it has been learned that Back Cup is become the retreat of Ker Karraje, if the expedition of the Sword was a first effort against the island, another of a different kind—either a bombardment from a distance, or an attack by a landing ...
— Facing the Flag • Jules Verne
... all our sensuous knowledge. We do believe, the veriest skeptic believes in something behind that curtain of mystery; nor can he withhold his faith because it attaches to that which is unseen and incomprehensible, without, as has already been shown, cutting every nerve that binds us to practical life, and smothering every suggestion that speaks from outward nature. If he do not believe in a God, then, or in Christ, or in immortality, let him not sneer at others because they walk by faith and not by ...
— The Crown of Thorns - A Token for the Sorrowing • E. H. Chapin
... if you understand this amazing succession of incidents? To me, it is entirely incomprehensible. If you can explain it, I ...
— The Last Woman • Ross Beeckman
... of baskets and other articles occupying one side of the big room, dug out a heavy table with marble top, which was lying overturned there, and proudly placed it upright before me to be admired. That this piece of furniture had been brought so great a distance over the kihams was almost incomprehensible. ...
— Through Central Borneo: - An Account of Two Years' Travel in the Land of Head-Hunters - Between the Years 1913 and 1917 • Carl Lumholtz
... published the said newspaper, called the "Bee-hive," which contained articles literary, archaeological, and medical, written in the family. The advertisements paid expenses. The subscriptions, two hundred in all, made the profits. Every now and then melancholy verses, totally incomprehensible in La Brie, appeared, addressed, "TO HER!!!" with three exclamation marks. The clan Julliard was thus united to the other clans, and the salon of Madame Tiphaine became, naturally, the first in the town. The few aristocrats who lived in Provins were, of course, apart, and formed a single ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... the place of worship. The minister ascended the pulpit, and the singers took their places in the choir. It was communion Sunday, and the table within the altar was spread for the holy feast. All these strange and incomprehensible proceedings filled the mind of ...
— Step by Step - or, Tidy's Way to Freedom • The American Tract Society
... and had talked about sundry matters of business. He constantly perceived, however, that he could not impose upon Sir Arthur; but the idea that he could know all the mazes of the law, and yet prefer the straight road, was incomprehensible. ...
— The Parent's Assistant • Maria Edgeworth
... calm in appearance, but a tempest was in his brain and freezing cold in his heart. What he had just seen and comprehended seemed to him incomprehensible. ...
— An Eagle Flight - A Filipino Novel Adapted from Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... walk over to the lake," the girl suggested gently, as if anxious to humor some incomprehensible child. "There is a lovely ravine we can explore, all cool and shady, and ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... the tangled green, left there after the field had been abandoned, to drop slowly to pieces in the wind and rain. The grotesque figure, with its outstretched arms and hat set at a rakish angle, looked familiar for some incomprehensible reason. As Oliver clung to the wall, squinted through the leaves, and wondered why that should be, the mystery was suddenly solved. The door of the house opened with a squeak of rusty hinges and somebody came out on the step. ...
— The Windy Hill • Cornelia Meigs
... she keeps account of all His tenants. In sum, so great is her grace in the heavens as gives her glory above the earth, and so infinite are her excellencies in all the course of her action; and so glorious are the notes of her incomprehensible nature, that I will thus only conclude, far short of her commendation:—She is God's love, and His angels' light, His servants' ...
— Character Writings of the 17th Century • Various
... of "the one time and space," in the pluralistic truth of the innumerable company of living souls and the dualistic truth of the contradictory nature of all existence; so we have three further ultimate aspects of reality, in the incomprehensible "something" which holds all souls together; in the incomprehensible "something" out of which all souls create the universe; and in the incomprehensible "something" which forms the substratum both of the ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... my children, of my attachment to the family of Mediana. You can judge, then, of the grief which this news has given me—news the more incomprehensible, since one neither knows by whom, or for what reason such a crime should be committed. Alas, my children! I lose a powerful protector in the Countess de Mediana; and in me the heart of the old and faithful ...
— Wood Rangers - The Trappers of Sonora • Mayne Reid
... under the Constitution of 1865, refused to ratify the proposed 14th Amendment on December 20, 1866. This legislature was composed of Democrats, all of the master class, conservative and radical, and in view of this it is incomprehensible to me how intelligent Negroes could have thought of tendering the leadership to any men of the master class. The conditions were such that men of the master class could not have accepted the leadership had they so desired after repudiating ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 6, 1921 • Various
... watch a man who has the Incomprehensible in his grasp, does not know what to do with it, and sits playing with a toy called God." —Letter to ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... quickly dealt, and the fateful, to Chester the incomprehensible, words were quickly uttered. Chester saw that Sylvia, unknowing of the fact, had won—that five louis were added to her original stake. The fair-haired Frenchman in evening dress by whom Mrs. Bailey had been sitting looked round; not seeing her, he himself swept up the ...
— The Chink in the Armour • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... two nights ago when she stole softly into this room and saw him kneeling here beside the couch, clasping this wooden symbol between his fingers—intertwined in a gesture of passionate prayer. She had been puzzled because his actions of the day before had seemed incomprehensible to her: his attitude to my lord Hortensius Martius, an enemy whose life he saved at risk of his own, his loyalty to ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... what was the matter. So as Lars' wife could tell her nothing, she had to go for information out in the parish, where she obtained it, and of course was instantly of her husband's opinion, thinking Lars incomprehensible, not to say bad. But when she let her husband perceive this, she felt that, notwithstanding what had occurred, no friendship was broken between them; on the contrary, that he liked ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors • Various
... his hat to leave. I followed him out to the door, and shook hands with him cordially. The burden felt lighter on my shoulders already. For four long years that mystery had haunted me day and night, as a thing impenetrable, incomprehensible, not even to be inquired about. The mere sense that I might now begin to ask what it meant seemed to make it immediately less awful ...
— Recalled to Life • Grant Allen
... her for several minutes. It was true, then, that the old days had passed away. Isobel, the child whom we had known and loved so well, had disappeared. It was Isobel the incomprehensible who was taking her place. What might the change not mean ...
— The Master Mummer • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... as this be fixed on things above? Can such a man reflect that he hath the ineffable honour to be employed in the immediate service of his great Creator? or can he please himself with the heart-warming hope that his ways are acceptable in the sight of that glorious, that incomprehensible Being?" ...
— Amelia (Complete) • Henry Fielding
... far more than what we call a memory, for all that has happened in the past and all that will happen in the future is happening now before His eyes just as are the events of what we call the present time. Utterly incredible, wildly incomprehensible, of course, to our limited understanding; yet ...
— Clairvoyance • Charles Webster Leadbeater
... (ad Diognetum, c. vii.) says that the omnipotent, all-creating, and invisible God has fixed truth and the holy, incomprehensible Logos in men's hearts; and this Logos is the architect and creator of the Universe. In the first Apology (c. xxxii.), he says that the seed ([Greek: sperma]) from God is the Logos, which dwells in those who believe in God. So it appears that according to Justinus the Logos is ...
— Thoughts of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus • Marcus Aurelius Antoninus
... is an inebriated United States official, who flings his spectacles overboard, and sings a flippant and absurd song about his grandmother's spotted calf, with his ri-fol-lol-tiddery-i-do. After which he crumbles, in an incomprehensible manner, into the bottom of ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 4 • Charles Farrar Browne
... quiet village. Joan felt a slight cold sinking sensation at her heart. But this was only a magnificent threat of Jim's. He could not do such a thing. She would never let him, even if he could. But after the incomprehensible manner of woman, she did ...
— The Border Legion • Zane Grey
... pleasure to be devoid of heart. Behind her action there must have been some strange, illogical, feminine motive, for there was a deliberation in every move—one of those motives which are quite beyond the masculine comprehension. One notices that when a woman takes action in this incomprehensible way her lady friends are never surprised; they seem to have some subtle sympathy with her. It is only the men who look puzzled, as if the ground beneath their feet were unstable. Therefore there must be some influence at work, ...
— From One Generation to Another • Henry Seton Merriman
... announcement of a thorough knowledge had led me to expect. I felt interested at being about to hear from the lips of an intelligent Greek, quite remote from the influence of European opinions, what might seem to him the most astonishing and incomprehensible of all those results which have followed from the action of our political institutions. The anomaly, the only anomaly which had been detected by the vice-consular wisdom, consisted in the fact that Rothschild (the late money-monger) had never been the ...
— Eothen • A. W. Kinglake
... which I should afford him) to fill his vases with fresh, bright, and delicious summer flowers, in lieu of the very mummies of their race by which they were occupied. My work was in progress when Millington returned, but, oh! good heavens! the rage, the profane, diabolical, incomprehensible rage into which he burst! I shall never forget. Away went my beautiful, my fragrant flowers, into the court, and seizing upon the remnant of the mummies, as yet untouched by my sacrilegious fingers, he tossed them into a drawer, double locked it, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 13, - Issue 372, Saturday, May 30, 1829 • Various
... sharpness was directed not to Miss Polly, but to herself—to her own incomprehensible childishness. The man interested her; already she had thought of him daily since she first came to the house; already she had begun to wonder about him, and she realized that she should wonder still more because of what Miss Polly had told her. When he had approached her in the yard, ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... Mystery is at bottom only the theological terminus technicus for religious allegory. All religions have their mysteries. In reality, a mystery is a palpably absurd dogma which conceals in itself a lofty truth, which by itself would be absolutely incomprehensible to the ordinary intelligence of the raw masses. The masses accept it in this disguise on trust and faith, without allowing themselves to be led astray by its absurdity, which is palpable to them; and thereby they participate in the kernel of the matter so far as they ...
— Essays of Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... My child, tell me without fear how this necklace fell into your hands; conceal nothing of the matter from me. Then I told him plainly all that had passed, and declared I had chosen rather to pass for a thief, than to reveal that tragical adventure. Good God! said the governor, thy judgments are incomprehensible, and we ought to submit to them without murmuring. I receive, with an entire submission, the stroke thou hast been pleased to inflict upon me. Then directing his discourse to me, My child, said he, having now heard the cause of your disgrace, for which I am much concerned, I will give you an account ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Volume 1 • Anonymous
... and to treat him as all other persons of his household, His Eminence sent His Holiness as soon as possible packing for Rome. Though I am neither a cardinal nor a prophet, should you and I live twenty years longer, and the other Continental Sovereigns not alter their present incomprehensible conduct, I can, without any risk, predict that we shall see Rome salute the second Charlemagne an Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, if before that time death does not put a period to his ...
— Memoirs of the Court of St. Cloud, Complete - Being Secret Letters from a Gentleman at Paris to a Nobleman in London • Lewis Goldsmith
... from the galling associations of straightened means—free to enjoy the luxury and refined comfort to which she had been accustomed, and for which her soul yearned with a fierce longing that would be incomprehensible to folk of a simpler mind. Everybody has his or her ideal Heaven, if only one could fathom it. Some would choose a sublimated intellectual leisure, made happy by the best literature of all the planets; some a model state (with themselves ...
— Beatrice • H. Rider Haggard
... prevalent among these people, of flattening the head, we have already spoken. It is one of those instances of human caprice, like the crippling of the feet of females in China, which are quite incomprehensible. This custom prevails principally among the tribes on the sea-coast, and about the lower parts of the rivers. How far it extends along the coast we are not able to ascertain. Some of the tribes, both north and south of the Columbia, practice it; but they all speak the Chinook ...
— Astoria - Or, Anecdotes Of An Enterprise Beyond The Rocky Mountains • Washington Irving
... through the whole system of matter. The will is the working and living principle in the world of Reason, as motion is the working and living principle in the world of the senses. I stand in the centre of two opposite worlds, a visible in which the deed, and an invisible, altogether incomprehensible, in which the will, decides. I am one of the original forces for both these worlds. My will is that which embraces both. This will is in and of itself a constituent portion of the supersensuous world. ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... by showing them the truth that they can know their best interests and the real motives which will lead them to happiness. Long enough have the instructors of the people fixed their eyes on heaven; let them at last bring them back to the earth. Tired of an incomprehensible theology, of ridiculous fables, of impenetrable mysteries, of puerile ceremonies, let the human mind occupy itself with natural things, intelligible objects, sensible truths, and useful knowledge. Let the vain chimeras which beset the people be dissipated, and very ...
— Superstition In All Ages (1732) - Common Sense • Jean Meslier
... young creature on board the Catamaran,—even on that frail embarkation, which at any moment might be scattered to the winds, or whelmed under the black billows of the sea,—the sailor-boy no longer felt pain while gazing in her face, but only that sweet incomprehensible pleasure. ...
— The Ocean Waifs - A Story of Adventure on Land and Sea • Mayne Reid
... synagogue; a subaltern and a sovereign; a traitor and a tyrant; a Christian and an infidel; he was, through all his vicissitudes, the same stern, impatient, inflexible original; the same mysterious, incomprehensible self; the man without a ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... kinds; impetuous messages asking him when he would return; letters apologising for her selfishness—he had better remain with Mount Rorke until his consent had been obtained; resolutions and irresolutions, ardours, lassitudes, forgetfulness followed fast in strange and incomprehensible contradiction. And Frank was asked daily to perform some small task. There was always something; and Frank undertook all he was asked to do, for he loved to be as much as possible in that circle of life in which his ...
— Spring Days • George Moore
... Horng's mind envelope him. A torrent of thoughts, memories, pictures and concepts poured over him in a jumble; the sensory sensations of the alien came to him sharply, and memories that were strange, ideas that were incomprehensible, all in a sudden rush upon his mind. He fought down the fear that had leapt in him, gritted his teeth and waited for the ...
— Warlord of Kor • Terry Gene Carr
... 1. (pejorative) An exercise in tuning (see {tune}) in which incredible amounts of time and effort go to produce little noticeable improvement, often with the result that the code has become incomprehensible. 2. Aimless small modification to a program, esp. for some pointless goal. 3. Approx. syn. for {bit bashing}; esp. used for the act of frobbing the device control register of a peripheral in an attempt to get it back ...
— THE JARGON FILE, VERSION 2.9.10
... clear enough, certainly, that the former state of the Terranovans, their incomprehensible society and language and customs, simply had no practical importance. He was changing all that. When he was through, they would be what he had made them, no ...
— The Worshippers • Damon Francis Knight
... of Spain. Supposed to be an Aztec epithet, cac-chopina, that is, "prickly shoes," applied to the Spanish conquerors from their wearing spurs, which to the Indians were strange and incomprehensible appendages. ...
— Anahuac • Edward Burnett Tylor
... experienced a like sorrow can fully understand their grief as they entered their now lonely home, where a short time since they had been so happy. But the ways of Providence are, to our feeble vision, often dark and incomprehensible, and the only way by which we can reconcile ourselves to many trials which we are called to endure is by remembering that there is a "need be" for every sorrow which falls to our lot, in the journey of life. Emma was an only child and had been the idol of her father's heart, and no marvel if ...
— Stories and Sketches • Harriet S. Caswell
... may speak of God in two ways. First, with regard to His essence; and thus, since He is incomprehensible and ineffable, He is above all praise. In this respect we owe Him reverence and the honor of latria; wherefore Ps. 64:2 is rendered by Jerome in his Psalter [*Translated from the Hebrew]: "Praise to Thee is speechless, O God," as regards the first, and as to the ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... exercise, and a power of endurance utterly at variance with all other exhibitions of his strength; and he very soon acquired a degree of skill which made him an object of envy to all the cavalry-officers stationed in the neighborhood. So inconsistent and incomprehensible was ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 39, January, 1861 • Various
... precaution. When she did see him at last, lying on a sofa in a dressing-gown, and with his head and face as we have described, his appearance did not call to her remembrance the faintest resemblance to the confused, wild, and altogether incomprehensible youth, who had tumbled her over in the streets of London, and almost run her ...
— The Eagle Cliff • R.M. Ballantyne
... materialism; a system which could not but be patronized by the philosopher, if only it actually performed what it promises. But how any affection from without can metamorphose itself into perception or will, the materialist has hitherto left, not only as incomprehensible as he found it, but has aggravated it into a comprehensible absurdity. For, grant that an object from without could act upon the conscious self, as on a consubstantial object; yet such an affection could only engender something homogeneous ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... trying to read since his return, and copies of "The Egoist" and some of Swinburne's poetry lay on the table; but the first had seemed incomprehensible to him and the second indecent, and he had abandoned them; but he had made one discovery, thanks to Bethel, Walt Whitman's "Leaves of Grass"—it seemed to him the greatest book that he had ever read, ...
— The Wooden Horse • Hugh Walpole
... aspirations; it tells of the eclipse as well as of the dawn and meridian of faith. In fact, it is Tennyson's own religious life which is the life of uncounted numbers in these latter times. Before the supreme sad experience, the sudden, and to him incomprehensible, death of Arthur Hallam, the poet had agnostic leanings. He did then veritably fail and "falter" before the questions of life and death which beset him. His long years of comparative poverty, "the eternal want of pence," his failure ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... dips became fast and frequent. Two flags were placed in the water at the distance of 100 yards from the diving board; on this slender platform fourteen shivering specimens of humanity ranged themselves, and at the word of the starter plunged into the water with that downward plunge so incomprehensible to the uninitiated. A short, sharp struggle followed, the competitors swimming with the sidelong movement and obstreperous puffing which likens the swimmer so closely to the traditional grampus. Eventually one of the group is seen heading the others, ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... by my friend's words. We had only been a few hours in Devonshire, and that he should give up an investigation which he had begun so brilliantly was quite incomprehensible to me. Not a word more could I draw from him until we were back at the trainer's house. The Colonel and the Inspector were ...
— Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... An incomprehensible anomaly, this queen of the Llotta; a strange mixture of cruelty and tenderness, of cold hatred and the longing for love. A dual personality hers, susceptible to the deepest emotion or to utter lack of feeling as the mood ...
— The Copper-Clad World • Harl Vincent
... religious sentiment from the course of history, to place it by itself."[70] He recognized that all religion is, fundamentally, man's effort to put himself into harmonious relation with, and to discover an interpretation of, the forces of the universe. The more incomprehensible those forces, the greater man's need of an explanation of them. He could not fail to see that the religion of a people always bears a marked relation to their mental development and their special environment. He knew that at various stages ...
— Socialism - A Summary and Interpretation of Socialist Principles • John Spargo
... disgusted and indignant; but his indignation was neutralized by his astonishment at this incomprehensible brutality. He had no resource but to apply to some private house and state his predicament. As that luckless saddle had excited the derision of the girl, and drawn down on him the contumely of the tavern-keeper, he looked around for some safe ...
— The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... difficulty that has always been haunting me, and I shall never be able to give it up till a better one supplies its place,—and that I think hardly possible. You have now fairly beaten Spencer on his own ground, for he really offered no solution of the difficulties of the problem. The incomprehensible minuteness and vast numbers of the physiological germs or atoms (which themselves must be compounded of numbers of Spencer's physiological units) is the only difficulty; but that is only on a par with the difficulties in all conceptions of matter, ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... asking 'why,'" said the great doctor slowly, "you might as well ask, 'why not.' They're incomprehensible. For thirty years I've studied ...
— The Strange Cases of Dr. Stanchon • Josephine Daskam Bacon
... at that time it seemed to me that life was an incomprehensible enigma; that the creator had placed us on this earth, and left us entirely in the dark as to His purpose in so doing. We seemed to be cast upon the ocean of time, and left to drift aimlessly about, with no exact knowledge of what was required of us or how to attain ...
— Miscellaneous Writings, 1883-1896 • Mary Baker Eddy
... of an Orthodox divine. He kept this one ready in his memory of brass, to confound all who accused him of irreligion:—"Do we want to contemplate His power? We see it in the immensity of the creation. Do we want to contemplate His wisdom? We see it in the unchangeable order by which the incomprehensible whole is governed. Do we want to contemplate His mercy? We see it in His not withholding His abundance even from the unthankful. In fine, do we want to know what God is? Search not written books, but ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various
... calling for any pronouncement pertaining to the differences between England and France; for it is my determination yet to write a book on the comparative characteristics of the two people. I hold a theory that the English people are utterly incomprehensible to the rest of humanity, and this will be duly set out ...
— The Triumphs of Eugene Valmont • Robert Barr
... men made perfect;" in respect whereof, the Psalmist saith of God, "He humbleth Himself to behold the things that are in heaven." It is a condescension for that infinitely glorious being, who dwells in Himself, and is abundantly satisfied in the beholding of His own incomprehensible excellencies, to vouchsafe to look out of Himself, and behold the things that are in heaven; the best of those glorious inhabitants that stand round about His throne; who therefore, conscious of that infinite distance wherein they stand, make their addresses with the greatest self-abasements, ...
— The Covenants And The Covenanters - Covenants, Sermons, and Documents of the Covenanted Reformation • Various
... between us was locked on both sides. My old patron had said nothing to me on the subject, but I had found the door bolted and the key removed. I never was the man to intrude upon another's privacy, and respected the Vicomte's somewhat incomprehensible humour at this time. ...
— Dross • Henry Seton Merriman
... rapid punctuation of revolver fire. As they came into full view of the middle portion of the street, they saw it occupied by the entire population of Heart's Desire, all apparently gone mad with some incomprehensible emotion. ...
— Heart's Desire • Emerson Hough
... comfortably domiciled in a new log house, and were beginning to feel at home. The children were put to school; at least it was what passed for a school in those days: a place where tender young humanity devoted itself for eight or ten hours a day to learning incomprehensible rubbish by heart out of books and reciting it by rote, like parrots; so that a finished education consisted simply of a permanent headache and the ability to read without stopping to spell the words or take breath. Hawkins bought out the village store for a song and proceeded to reap the profits, ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 1. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... enthusiasm for liberty, and the radical political theories which were its most formal expression, were all the more incomprehensible to the average Briton inasmuch as they were the result of a conflict of interests in America quite as much as of English legislation. "The decree has gone forth," said John Adams, "that a more equal liberty than has prevailed in other parts ...
— Beginnings of the American People • Carl Lotus Becker
... his face in the green turf and burst into a convulsive passion of tears, such tears as come once or twice, perhaps, in the lives of most men, when they are passing through the awful years of adjustment to the incomprehensible and apparently chaotic experiences ...
— The Redemption of David Corson • Charles Frederic Goss
... at first incomprehensible to many of them. It was a ship tossing in a stormy sea; but some of those present had been down to the mouth of the river, and these explained to the others the nature of the phenomenon. In all there were twenty slides, all of which were provided with movable figures; the last two ...
— By Sheer Pluck - A Tale of the Ashanti War • G. A. Henty
... visualised dimly through that dust and the grammatical difficulties, the spectacle of the chorus chanting grotesquely, helping out protagonist and antagonist, masked and buskined, with the telling of incomprehensible parricides, of inexplicable incest, of gods faded beyond symbolism, of that Relentless Law we did not believe in for a moment, that no modern western European can believe in. We thought of the characters in the unconvincing wigs and costumes of our school performance. No Gilbert Murray ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... of McGurk stretched out and his arm stiffened but it seemed as though all the muscles of his back had grown stiff. He could not bend. It was strange. It was both ludicrous and incomprehensible. Perhaps he had grown stiff with ...
— Riders of the Silences • John Frederick
... other of Shakespeare's heroines, the poet has also given a completer characterization, in which every charm of the highest type of woman is delineated. The one trait which a too censorious audience might criticize, that meekness in unbearable affliction which makes Chaucer's patient Griselda almost incomprehensible to modern readers, is in Imogen completely redeemed by her resolution in the face of danger, and by a certain {202} imperiousness which well becomes ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken
... group his metaphorical beauties, or dainties of Webster, Walker, &c., but rushes them out in torrents—rattles them down in cataracts and avalanches—bewildering, astounding, and incomprehensible. He hits you upon the left lug of your knowledge box with a metaphor so unwieldy and original, that your breath is soon gone—and before it is recovered, he gives you another rhapsody on t'other side, and as you try to steady yourself, bim ...
— The Humors of Falconbridge - A Collection of Humorous and Every Day Scenes • Jonathan F. Kelley
... time will suffer his description, I'll give it you. He is one, the author calls him Carlo Buffone, an impudent common jester, a violent railer, and an incomprehensible epicure; one whose company is desired of all men, but beloved of none; he will sooner lose his soul than a jest, and profane even the most holy things, to excite laughter: no honourable or reverend personage whatsoever can ...
— Every Man Out Of His Humour • Ben Jonson
... words; yet, as there is a divinity in the theology of the Church, which those who feel cannot communicate, so is there also in the wonderful creation of sublimity and beauty of which I am speaking. To many men the very names which the Science employs are utterly incomprehensible. To speak of an idea or a subject seems to be fanciful or trifling, to speak of the views which it opens upon us to be childish extravagance; yet is it possible that that inexhaustible evolution and disposition of notes, so rich yet so simple, so intricate ...
— The Glory of English Prose - Letters to My Grandson • Stephen Coleridge
... of vast thickness, by which the earth's crust, through countless ages, has been formed, unquestionably constitutes a most extraordinary phenomenon of physical creation, but hardly so marvellous and incomprehensible as the beginning, progress, and end of the divers orders of marine and terrestrial beings that filled each world of life. It is to geologists, to PLAYFAIR, HUTTON, LYELL, BUCKLAND, SEDGWICK, OWEN, and other great names, native and foreign, ...
— An Expository Outline of the "Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation" • Anonymous
... German Empire, in its present desires of colonial extension, may be willing to absorb Holland, for the sake of her still extensive colonial possessions. Improbable as this may seem, it is scarcely more incomprehensible than the recent mysterious movements upon the European chess-board, attributed by common rumor to the dominating influence of the Emperor of Germany, which we puzzled Americans for months past have sought ...
— The Interest of America in Sea Power, Present and Future • A. T. Mahan
... were to us a never-ending source of amusement and interest, as we watched them working in their various ways and listened to their strange and incomprehensible gibberish. An old Hindoo one day raffled off a richly-embroidered silk pillow at a shilling a chance, and this, with my usual good luck I won and turned over to Mrs. ...
— A Ball Player's Career - Being the Personal Experiences and Reminiscensces of Adrian C. Anson • Adrian C. Anson
... really confounded. She had heard Abel in old days speak of Gabriel Bennet as a spooney—a saint in the milk—a goodsey, boodsey, booby—a sort of youth who would turn pale and be snuffed out by one of her glances. She found him incomprehensible. She owed him the first positive emotion of human interest she had known ...
— Trumps • George William Curtis
... will always possess a certain charm for two classes of people: habitual vagabonds who beg and are freely accused of stealing, and the literary, artistic, antiquarian, or scientific vagabonds who take to tramping by fits and starts. The latter class, being quite incomprehensible to the rustic mind in Guyenne, are regarded by it with almost as ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... rich collections which Requien had left by will to the town of Avignon. In spite of the meagreness of his salary, he asked for nothing more; and, what is more, by an inconsequence which is by no means incomprehensible, he avoided everything that might have resulted in a more profitable position elsewhere, and evaded all proposals of further promotion. Twice, at Poitiers and Marseilles, he refused a post as assistant professor, not regarding ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... table, handed him the timetable, a diabolical labyrinth of incomprehensible figures and words specially compiled by railroad managers to puzzle and befog the traveling public. But Brockton, from long practice, seemed familiar ...
— The Easiest Way - A Story of Metropolitan Life • Eugene Walter and Arthur Hornblow
... tragedy, attained to perfection only in Athens, and here it was exhibited only at a few festivals of a single god, Dionysus, while epic rhapsodies and lyric odes were recited on various occasions. All this is incomprehensible, if we suppose dramatic poetry to have originated in causes independent of the peculiar circumstances of time and place. If a love of imitation and a delight in disguising the real person under a mask were the basis upon which this style of poetry was raised, ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... Ruskinian doctrine, of which I made myself the apostle. On that study I spent such hours of the day as the light served, for three months, and then the coming of autumn stopped me. Any difficulty in literal rendering of a subject was incomprehensible to me, and in fact in that kind of work there is little difference, for it is but copying, and requires only a correct eye and infinite patience, both of which I had; and it was a puzzle to me rather than a compliment when the veteran Durand said to me of one of my studies, that ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... only that the Panama route is feasible, but that in the Nicaragua route we may encounter some unpleasant surprises, and that it is far more difficult to forecast the result with any certainty as regards this latter route. As for Colombia's attitude, it is incomprehensible upon any theory of desire to see the canal built upon the basis of mutual advantage alike to those building it and to Colombia herself. All we desire to do is to take up the work begun by the French Government and to finish it. Obviously it is Colombia's ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... led him to the consideration of the most subtle arguments raised against it. He was indeed the defender and champion of faith, having no sympathy for a mind which would lose itself in seeking the solution of the incomprehensible mysteries of religion. So he has ...
— Dante: "The Central Man of All the World" • John T. Slattery
... the surface of the water, being nearly round, then it slowly left the stream and rose till it was wholly in the air, and, notwithstanding the sunlight, it emitted a faint glow. "Ah!" exclaimed Bearwarden, "here we have one of our Jack-o'-lanterns. Let us see what it is going to do." "It is incomprehensible to me," said Cortlandt, "how it maintains itself; for it has neither wings nor visible means of support, yet, as it was able to immerse itself in the stream, thereby displacing a volume of liquid equivalent to its ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds • J. J. Astor
... done something more than has been accomplished by my predecessors, or contemporaries, with the significant language under consideration. I have written a purely flash song; of which the great and peculiar merit consists in its being utterly incomprehensible to the uninformed understanding, while its meaning must be perfectly clear and perspicuous to the practised patterer of Romany, or Pedler's French. I have, moreover, been the first to introduce and naturalize ...
— Musa Pedestris - Three Centuries of Canting Songs - and Slang Rhymes [1536 - 1896] • John S. Farmer
... either telling or writing; and if they were fictions, revelation could not make them true; and whether true or not, we are neither the better nor the wiser for knowing them. When we contemplate the immensity of that Being, who directs and governs the incomprehensible WHOLE, of which the utmost ken of human sight can discover but a part, we ought to feel shame at calling such paltry stories the word ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... in a certain sense, he is so; and it is his greatest charm. But incomprehensible!—no. The essence of all artistic poetry is in the perfect blending of matter and form, so that the meaning creeps in upon us, but with a certain vagueness, a certain indefiniteness, which reaches us more in the shade of a dreamy consciousness than through ...
— The New Tenant • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... know all that can be known by the dead concerning that which the living fear, hope, or forget; to plunge him into the pleasure or pain which there awaits him; to punish or reward him in a manner and in a degree incalculable and incomprehensible by us; to disrobe him at once from all that intertexture of good and evil with which Nature seems to have clothed every form of individual existence, is to inflict on ...
— A Defence of Poetry and Other Essays • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... is given by Mr. du Chaillu for such an apparently incomprehensible form of expression as, for example, 1-3, for 7. Some peculiar finger pantomime may accompany the counting, which, were it known, would enlighten us on the Mbousha's method of arriving at so anomalous a scale. Mere ...
— The Number Concept - Its Origin and Development • Levi Leonard Conant
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