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Incompatible   Listen
adjective
Incompatible  adj.  (It was formerly sometimes written incompetible)  
1.
Not compatible; so differing as to be incapable of harmonious combination or coexistence; inconsistent in thought or being; irreconcilably disagreeing; as, persons of incompatible tempers; incompatible colors, desires, ambition. "A strength and obduracy of character incompatible with his meek and innocent nature."
2.
(Chem.) Incapable of being together without mutual reaction or decomposition, as certain medicines.
Incompatible terms (Logic), terms which can not be combined in thought.
Synonyms: Inconsistent; incongruous; dissimilar; irreconcilable; unsuitable; disagreeing; inharmonious; discordant; repugnant; contradictory. See Inconsistent.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Incompatible" Quotes from Famous Books



... alluding to the prevailing stupidity of the idea that genius and domestic happiness are incompatible, says: "We will live the real answer, will we not?... A man of genius mistreats his wife; well, take away the genius,—does he so ...
— The Brownings - Their Life and Art • Lilian Whiting

... shoemaker; and that of Byron, more on account of his vices, his peerage, and his domestic unhappiness, than for the sake of his poetry. And in Waller, too, you feel some supplemental interest, because he united what are usually thought the incompatible characters of a poet and a political plotter, and very nearly reached the altitudes of the gallows as ...
— Poetical Works of Edmund Waller and Sir John Denham • Edmund Waller; John Denham

... organ of the Austrian Foreign Office, the Fremdenblatt, expressed regret that the Slav parties in the Reichsrat "place obstacles in the way of peace." It also regretted that "some parties in the Austrian Parliament should take up an attitude incompatible with our state's self-preservation." On the next day, M. Stanek made a declaration in the delegations in the name ...
— Independent Bohemia • Vladimir Nosek

... Irish members who are returned to parliament will be Catholics. Add to these the Catholic members who are returned in England, and you will have a phalanx of heretical strength which every minister will be compelled to respect, and occasionally to conciliate by concessions incompatible with the interests of the Protestant Church. The fact is, however, that you are at this moment subjected to every danger of this kind which you can possibly apprehend hereafter. If the spiritual interests of the voters are more powerful than their temporal interests, they can ...
— Peter Plymley's Letters and Selected Essays • Sydney Smith

... only by their degradation; that the corruption which disgusts them, and the oppression against which their spirit rises up, are indispensable to your authority; that the freedom and purity of election are incompatible with the very existence of your House. Give them clearly to understand that your power rests, not as they have hitherto imagined, on their rational convictions, or on their habitual veneration, or on your own great ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... imperfect rhetoric; yet we have a right to ask some attention to the details of style in a literary critic. Professor Henry Reed has a delicate appreciation in poetry, but his remarks are nearly always marred by verbal infelicities incompatible with a knowledge of literary art. Thus, within a few pages of his Memoir of Gray, just published, he says of Jacob Bryant, who has been dead a century, that "he has recorded;" that "Gray retained a high admiration of ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various

... colored people to great practical persecution, in order to force them to emigrate; and, finally, is calculated to swallow up and divert that feeling which America, as a Christian and free country, cannot but entertain, that slavery is alike incompatible with the law of God and with the well-being of man, whether the enslaver or the enslaved." The solemn conclusion of the illustrious signers of this mighty protest was that: "That society is, in our estimation, ...
— William Lloyd Garrison - The Abolitionist • Archibald H. Grimke

... is incompatible with happiness. Those who depend for their comfort upon the admiration of others are subject to frequent disappointment. Somebody will criticise their appearance, or surpass them in brilliancy, or will receive more attention. Oh! the jealousy, ...
— The Abominations of Modern Society • Rev. T. De Witt Talmage

... their sanction. It is incapable of love, wrath, or any other passion. "I will add", writes M. Benda, "something else which theories of an impersonal deity have less often pointed out. Since infinity is incompatible with personal being, God is incapable of morality." Thus mere intuition and analysis of the infinite, since this infinite is itself passive and indifferent, may prove a subtle antidote to passion, to folly, ...
— Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy - Five Essays • George Santayana

... "There is a twofold liberty, natural ... and civil or federal. The first is common to man with beasts and other creatures. By this, man, as he stands in relation to man simply, hath liberty to do what he lists; it is a liberty to evil as well as to good. This liberty is incompatible and inconsistent with authority.... The other kind of liberty I call civil or federal, it may also be termed moral.... This liberty is the proper end and object of authority, and cannot subsist without it; and it is a liberty ...
— The American Mind - The E. T. Earl Lectures • Bliss Perry

... middle of August Jay drew up a letter, suggesting very ingeniously that it was incompatible with the dignity of the king of England to negotiate except with an independent power; also that an obstacle which meant everything to the States, but nothing to Great Britain, should be removed by his majesty. Franklin thought that the letter expressed ...
— Benjamin Franklin • John Torrey Morse, Jr.

... any, here grow oxen for beef alone, but for labor and beef, so that earliest possible maturity may be omitted and a year or more of labor profitably intervene before conversion to beef. Many cultivators of sheep, too, are so situated as to prefer fine wool, which is incompatible with the largest quantity and best quality of meat. Others differently situated in regard to a meat market would do well to follow the English practice and aim at the most profitable production of mutton. A great many farmers, not only of those in the vicinity of large ...
— The Principles of Breeding • S. L. Goodale

... an Anglo-American-German "pact," to deal not only with "disarmament, but other matters of equal importance to themselves and to the world at large." Page's response to this idea was consistent and characteristic. He had no faith in Germany and believed that the existence of Kaiserism was incompatible with the extension of the democratic ideal. Even at this early time—eight months before the outbreak of the World War—he had no enthusiasm for anything in the nature of an alliance, or a "pact," that included Germany ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume I • Burton J. Hendrick

... compromise between the means and the end, between the political and the military exigencies. But Clausewitz held that policy must always be the master. The officer charged with the conduct of the war may of course demand that the tendencies and views of policy shall not be incompatible with the military means which are placed at his disposal; but however strongly this demand may react on policy in particular cases, military action must still be regarded only as a manifestation of policy. It must never supersede policy. The policy is ...
— Some Principles of Maritime Strategy • Julian Stafford Corbett

... a matter of course, slavery and intellectual culture are incompatible, and education was therefore denied the slaves. The right to testify in the courts against a white man, and even the right to defend himself from the assaults of white men, except in defence of life in the last extremity, ...
— School History of North Carolina • John W. Moore

... to information given by another mind, whose sources of knowledge are beyond our own immediate reach, seems at first sight to be incompatible with the principles guiding all our studies hitherto; for in gaining insight into the How and Whence of a phenomenon of the sense-world we have up to now admitted only what is yielded by an observation ...
— Man or Matter • Ernst Lehrs

... did!" cried Staniford, cheerfully. "Social genius and sensibility are two very different things; the cynic might contend they were incompatible, but I won't insist so far. I dare say she may regret the natal spot; most of us have a dumb, brutish attachment to the cari luoghi; but if she knows anything, she hates its surroundings, and must be ...
— The Lady of the Aroostook • W. D. Howells

... and enabled me to skirt, without crossing, the sandy deserts of utter unbelief. That the system is capable of being converted into an irreligious Pantheism, I well know. The Ethics of Spinoza, may, or may not, be an instance. But at no time could I believe, that in itself and essentially it is incompatible with religion, natural or revealed: and now I am most thoroughly persuaded of the contrary. The writings of the illustrious sage of Koenigsberg, the founder of the Critical Philosophy, more than any other work, at once invigorated and disciplined my ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge

... perhaps, who have abandoned former habits. Another cause is operating, even with such as are wealthy: the squire or his lordship is not the all in all of his district any more; and he is educated now, in many cases, to enjoy intellectual pleasures, which he finds incompatible with so much society and numerous establishments with their endless staffs of servants to maintain. Many of the stately homes of England, therefore, are for rent, and their owners live more within themselves and in simpler ...
— Round the World • Andrew Carnegie

... enter the alliance without conditions, coupling her offer simply with "hopes to have the benefit of full solidarity with her allies, whence results a guarantee of her territorial integrity," and "entrusting the full protection of her vital interests to the three Entente Powers." The formula was not incompatible with the best construction which one chose to put upon it; and Prince George—who had returned to Paris directly after the first offer and acted as a personal representative of King Constantine, together with the official representative ...
— Greece and the Allies 1914-1922 • G. F. Abbott

... o' that," said the farmer. "No doubt I had business at the mill,—lots to do at the mill." Nor did he think that the fib he was telling was at all incompatible with the Holy Sacrament in which he had just ...
— The Last Chronicle of Barset • Anthony Trollope

... decided that his unsolicited mission was to induce or persuade Loring to arbitrate the question of grazing-rights. It was a strange idea, although not incompatible with Sundown's peculiar temperament. He felt justified in taking the initiative; especially in view of the fact that Loring's sheep had been trespassing on ...
— Sundown Slim • Henry Hubert Knibbs

... foreigners in China, and the pusillanimous character of the natives, what can be expected but contempt and aggression on one side, and mistrust and finesse on the other? What but a chronic discontent, wholly incompatible with healthful commerce and peaceful intercourse, can be expected from such a state of things? Consider further that this occurs among a people of the highest antiquity, with a history and a civilization of which they are justly proud; who, in political and moral science, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 5, November, 1863 • Various

... answered; "some who have not yet heard and heeded the call, 'Come out of her, my people, that ye be not partakers of her sins, and that ye receive not of her plagues.' We were talking, not of Papists, but of Popery. Sincere hatred of the system is not incompatible with sincere love ...
— Elsie at Nantucket • Martha Finley

... 1836, in preparing a religious literature. It is no longer true as in Mrs. Smith's day, "that we have no psalms or hymns adapted to the capacities of children." Nor is it longer true that "children's literature is incompatible with the genius of the ...
— The Women of the Arabs • Henry Harris Jessup

... trial of Charles I. If not one of the regicides, he was very near one, and he shared the doom from which the treacherous pardon of Charles II was never intended to save them. I suppose his fatuity was not incompatible with tragedy, though somehow we think that absurd people are not the stuff of ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells

... sleep" was evident, and he succeeded. Losing all note of time and place, I thought for a moment I was in London, and that this was a visit from the Christmas waits. But there was a liveliness in the tones incompatible with the season when the clarionet, trombone, and cornet-a-piston form a syndicate of noise, and parade the streets for halfpence. The bugle was in a jocular mood. Judge of my astonishment when I learned that this merry melody was the Carlist's ...
— Romantic Spain - A Record of Personal Experiences (Vol. II) • John Augustus O'Shea

... regions as remote as possible from their own, observes: "It is not that our reason absolutely rejects the possibility of the existence of the Nesnas (see vol. i. p. 206) or of the 'Angka, and other beings of that rare and wondrous order; for there is nothing in their existence incompatible with the Divine Power; but we decline to believe in them because their existence has not been manifested to us on ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa

... scaffolding inside of which he expected to fashion his life. The Presence and his partial surrender to its influence had been a matter of the heart, and until now it had not occurred to him that his allegiance to the Christ was incompatible with his former philosophy. The doctrine of the resurrection suddenly stood before him as something that must be accepted along with the Christ, or the Christ was not the Christ! Christ was the resurrection if He was at all! Christ had to be ...
— The Witness • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz

... letter rather than the spirit. Muddle-headed as Mathews seems to have been, what he was trying to do was clear enough; and the duty of a subordinate was to carry out his evident aim. An order does not necessarily supersede its predecessor, unless the two are incompatible. The whole incident, from Lestock's act to the Court's finding, is instructive as showing the slavish submission to the letter of the Instructions; a submission traceable not to the law merely, but to the added tradition that had then fast hold of men's minds. It is most interesting to note that ...
— Types of Naval Officers - Drawn from the History of the British Navy • A. T. Mahan

... roots fixed in the earth, and leaves innumerable waving in the air were necessary for the decomposition of water, and the conversion of it into saccharine matter, which would have been not only cumberous but totally incompatible with the locomotion of animal bodies. For how could a man or quadruped have carried on his head or back a forest of leaves, or have had long branching lacteal or absorbent vessels terminating in the earth? Animals therefore subsist on vegetables; that is, they take the matter so far prepared, ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin

... and science; its issue lies between Roman Catholic religion and science. Hear him: "Then has it, in truth, come to this, that Roman Christianity and science are recognized by their respective adherents as being absolutely incompatible; they can not exist together; one must yield to the other; mankind must make its choice—it can not have both. While such is, perhaps, the issue as regards Catholicism, a reconciliation of the reformation ...
— The Christian Foundation, April, 1880

... resolution of the 17th instant, requesting, "if not incompatible with the public service, the report recently made by a board of officers of the Engineer Department on the condition of the Mississippi River near Vicksburg, Miss., with such remarks, suggestions, ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Ulysses S. Grant • James D. Richardson

... at all, should have been unable, after a considerable lapse of time, to distinguish between incidents of his own imagining and those suggested to him by others. And, in any case, the "unnecessary scrupulosity," rightly attributed to him by Wordsworth with respect to this very poem, is quite incompatible with ...
— English Men of Letters: Coleridge • H. D. Traill

... would fain say probable—that the condition of the slave, under many conditions, under many circumstances, might be better than that of the free laborer of the world, that the condition of the slave owner was incompatible with the highest form of moral culture and highest ambition. I always think that question had political as well as moral and religious considerations, and that, through the unhappy condition of this continent, the question of slavery got so intermixed with the question of property that, however ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various

... the same character, and that instead of unity and harmony education may collect in the soul heterogeneous and warring elements which make it a battle ground for life. All such disharmony and contradiction lend inconsistency and weakness to character. Not only can incompatible lines of thought and of moral action become established in the same person, but even those studies which could be properly harmonized and unified by education may lie in the mind so disjointed and unrelated as to render the person awkward and helpless in spite of much knowledge. In unifying ...
— The Elements of General Method - Based on the Principles of Herbart • Charles A. McMurry

... seemed much given to staring out over the desert. Senor Johnson, appreciatively, thought he could understand this. Again, she gave much leisure to rocking back and forth on the low, wide veranda, her hands idle, her eyes vacant, her lips dumb. Susie O'Toole had early proved incompatible and had gone. ...
— Arizona Nights • Stewart Edward White

... opposed to the theory of descent, could any argument be fairly raised against that theory on the grounds of this testimony. In other words, if any of the fossils hitherto discovered prove the order of succession to have been incompatible with the theory of genetic descent, then the record may fairly be adduced in argument, because we should then be in possession of definite information of a positive kind, instead of a mere absence of information of any kind. But if the adverse argument reaches only to the extent of maintaining ...
— Darwin, and After Darwin (Vol. 1 and 3, of 3) • George John Romanes

... actions generally, because those better movements are absent in a class of cases which act peculiarly on an irritable form of his egoism? The mistake might be corrected by our taking notice that the ungenerous words or acts which seem to us the most utterly incompatible with good dispositions in the offender, are those which offend ourselves. All other persons are able to draw a milder conclusion. Laniger, who has a temper but no talent for repartee, having been run down in a fierce way by Mordax, is inwardly persuaded that the highly-lauded ...
— Impressions of Theophrastus Such • George Eliot

... believe nothing," said he, with calm dignity, "which is incompatible with virtue and propriety. I see that the most important of all sciences—that one on which the well-being and improvement of society mainly depends,—is in its infancy with you. But whenever you become as populous as we are, and unite the knowledge of real happiness with the practice ...
— A Voyage to the Moon • George Tucker

... that virtue ensures happiness for the exercise of some virtues implies suffering, and suffering is incompatible ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt

... shall then be enabled to give to France, and with justice, the appellation of a civic Empire; for its government will be the empire of laws founded on the great republican principles of Elective Representation, and the Rights of Man.—But Monarchy and Hereditary Succession are incompatible with ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine

... in metaphors and personification only that acts and qualities are ascribed to agents and objects that are incompatible with their nature; or do not properly belong to them."—Ib. Theo. & Lit. Jour., vol. 1, ...
— A Brief Commentary on the Apocalypse • Sylvester Bliss

... combination of the parts required, with those already irrevocably built, that we can hope for completeness. There is no necessary incongruity between what has been accomplished and what remains to be done. The moral glow of Socrates, which we all feel by ignition, has in it nothing incompatible with the physics of Anaxagoras which he so much scorned, but which he would hardly scorn to-day. And here I am reminded of one among us, hoary, but still strong, whose prophet-voice some thirty years ago, far more than any other of ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall

... state of affairs cannot continue without end; it cannot be God's intention to permit Christians thus to suffer continually while they live, to die because of it and remain dead. It would be incompatible with his eternal, divine truth and honor manifest in his Word. For there he declares he will be the God of the pious, of them who fear and trust him, and gives them unspeakable promises. Necessarily, then, he has planned a future state for Christians ...
— Epistle Sermons, Vol. III - Trinity Sunday to Advent • Martin Luther

... conditions which made such slavery possible; how it came to pass that a few toy-guns and a handful of soldiers had been deemed sufficient to protect Kimberley; and finally to vote the error of judgment incompatible with good administration. And then we remembered that the Bond was a powerful organisation, that a Bond Ministry was in Office. The needed scapegoat, in the person of the Prime Minister, was thus easily discovered. He it was who ...
— The Siege of Kimberley • T. Phelan

... ultimately on the local commanders. Rather than attack racial practices at particular bases, the unit decided to concentrate on the officers. It explained to these leaders the Navy's policy of equal treatment and opportunity, a concept basically incompatible ...
— Integration of the Armed Forces, 1940-1965 • Morris J. MacGregor Jr.

... to have been that a husband was bound not to dismiss his wife, except for a reason really sufficient; such as a thoroughly incompatible temper, an incorrigible "muteness," and a desertion like that of Mrs. Milton. But he scarcely liked to admit that in the use of this power he should be subject to the correction of human tribunals. He thought that the circumstances of each case depended upon "utterless ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various

... unlearned. 'Give the people,' said he, 'but their accustomed words, and they will call 16 a dozen; 120, 112, or any other number, a hundred.' He disapproved, likewise, of thrusting the decimal principle upon things incompatible with it. 'Decimal arithmetic,' said he, 'is a contrivance of man for computing numbers, and not a property of time, space, or matter. It belongs essentially to the keeping of accounts, but is merely an incident to the transactions of trade. Nature has no ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 437 - Volume 17, New Series, May 15, 1852 • Various

... renders the inhabitants of little towns prying and censorious. Idleness, rather than ill-nature, gives birth to scandal, and to the observation of little incidents which narrows the mind. It is frequently only the fear of being talked of which produces that puerile scrupulosity about trifles incompatible with an enlarged plan of usefulness, and with the basis of all moral principles—respect for the virtues which are not merely the virtues ...
— Letters written during a short residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark • Mary Wollstonecraft

... need to test more than one. Anyone who could live near any of you could not live on this planet. Nor will they attack you. Don't you know what the thought 'incompatible' means?" ...
— The Galaxy Primes • Edward Elmer Smith

... sensitive, too delicate, to yield itself to a woman of society; perhaps he thought best to let nature have her way, and keep his illusions by cultivating his ideal; perhaps he had laid aside love as being incompatible with his work and the regularity of a monastic life which love would ...
— The Secrets of the Princesse de Cadignan • Honore de Balzac

... kinds of animals and plants. The publication of Darwin's Origin of Species in 1859 is, therefore, a landmark not only in science but in the war between science and theology. When this book appeared, Bishop Wilberforce truly said that "the principle of natural selection is incompatible with the word of God," and theologians in Germany and France as well as in England cried aloud against the threatened dethronement of the Deity. The appearance of the Descent of Man (1871), in which the evidence for the pedigree of the human race from lower animals was ...
— A History of Freedom of Thought • John Bagnell Bury

... diversity of gases. Like his teacher, he was in revolt against the faculty, and he has bitter things to say of physicians. He got into trouble with the Church about the magnetic cure of wounds, as no fewer than twenty-seven propositions incompatible with the Catholic faith were found in his pamphlet (Ferguson). The Philosophus per ignem, Toparcha in Merode, Royenborch, as he is styled in certain of his writings, is not an easy man to tackle. I ...
— The Evolution of Modern Medicine • William Osler

... retire, as an ambush from the enemy; she has nothing to toss and whisk from side to side, expressing defiance without a word being uttered. The very weight of the pigtail is a sobering influence; its solemn, pendulum movement is incompatible with revolt. As for the slippers—well, try heel-less shoes yourself, and test their effect! They bring one to earth, indeed, in the deepest sense of the word. All very well to mince about in French shoes, and think "What a fine girl am I," ...
— Tom and Some Other Girls - A Public School Story • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey

... lieben Gott in Verlegenheit.' 'No one,' he adds, 'has so damaged Theism as Copernicus.' As if limitation and imperfection in the celestial mechanism would make for the belief in God; or, as if immortality were incompatible with dependence. Des Cartes, for one, (and he counts for many,) ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke

... profane language, not to get drunk, not to gamble, not to treat animals cruelly, and not to do anything incompatible with the conduct of a gentleman." They also had to swear to be loyal ...
— History of California • Helen Elliott Bandini

... threshold, would have sheathed their swords in the presence of the apostle and his successor. But this mystic circle could have been traced only by the wand of a legislator and a sage: this pacific system was incompatible with the zeal and ambition of the popes the Romans were not addicted, like the inhabitants of Elis, to the innocent and placid labors of agriculture; and the Barbarians of Italy, though softened by the climate, were far below the Grecian states in the institutions of public and private ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 5 • Edward Gibbon

... bolt upright on a straight-backed chair, convinced, such was her admirable sense of propriety, that a lounging attitude was incompatible with the performance of a duty. She held her hands on her lap, gently clasped; and her tight lips expressed as plainly as possible her conviction that though the way of righteousness was hard, she, thank God! had strength to ...
— The Hero • William Somerset Maugham

... gatherings. What she was celebrating was the feast of Chanukah—of the re-dedication of the Temple after the pollutions of Antiochus Epiphanes—and the memory of the national hero, Judas Maccabaeus. Christmas crackers would have been incompatible with the Chanukah candles which the housekeeper, Mary O'Reilly, forced her master to light, and would have shocked that devout old dame. For Mary O'Reilly, as good a soul as she was a Catholic, had lived all her life with Jews, assisting while yet a girl in the kitchen of Henry Goldsmith's father, ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill

... notwithstanding the fact that it has done so, the most plausible conclusion is that the inclination of Jupiter's axis is automatically changing, as we know the earth's has often done. There being nothing incompatible in this view with the evidence at hand, we can safely assume it correct for the time being at least. When farther south, you remember, we found no trace of ice action, notwithstanding the comparative slowness with which we decided that the ridges in the crust had ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds - A Romance of the Future • John Jacob Astor

... morning early, visible at a distance to all the world, risen betimes to gaze, the Queen-mother and her three sons were [45] kneeling there—yearning, greedy, as ever, for a hundred diverse, perhaps incompatible, things. It was at the beginning of that winter of the great siege of Chartres, the morning on which the child Guy Debreschescourt died in his sleep. His tiny body—the placid, massive, baby head still one broad smile, the rest of him wrapped round together like ...
— Gaston de Latour: an unfinished romance • Walter Horatio Pater

... chaos of discords, though the motive of the tune should be the first principle of nature—the passion of man for woman or the passion of woman for man. And the unhealthily demonstrative and obtrusive animalism of the Whitmaniad is as unnatural, as incompatible with the wholesome instincts of human passion, as even the filthy and inhuman asceticism of SS. Macarius and Simeon Stylites. If anything can justify the serious and deliberate display of merely physical emotion in literature or in art, ...
— Walt Whitman Yesterday and Today • Henry Eduard Legler

... of sorrow or discouragement—nothing to intimate that life had so utterly and absolutely changed for him—only a jolly, friendly badinage—an easy, light-hearted narrative, ending in messages to all and a frank regret that the pursuit of business and happiness appeared incompatible ...
— The Younger Set • Robert W. Chambers

... fellow, who, if all he heard was true, was very likely to have an early opportunity." I sighed again, and asked permission to retire to rest; but my tormentor did not grant it, until he had spoken for half an hour longer, when he dismissed me in a state of misery incompatible with rest, in bed, or out of it. My heart was bursting when I left him. He could not fail to mark it. To my surprise, he made another excursion to the parsonage on the following day; and, as before, he joined me in the evening with nothing on his lips but commendation ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 53, No. 331, May, 1843 • Various

... suppression of the slave trade," and also copies of the "instructions given by the British Government to their squadron stipulated by the same, if such instructions have been communicated to this Government," I have to inform the House of Representatives that in my opinion it would be incompatible with the public interests to communicate to that body at this time copies of ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Tyler - Section 2 (of 3) of Volume 4: John Tyler • Compiled by James D. Richardson

... I continued, "my course is 173clear; I leave my honour in your hands, certain that in so doing I am taking the wisest course; honourable men and men of spirit like yourselves will, I feel certain, never recommend anything incompatible with the strictest regard for my reputation as a gentleman; neither will you needlessly hurry me into an act, the consequences of which might possibly embitter the whole of my alter life. In order that personal feeling may not interfere any more with the matter, ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley

... in the same way, the hand, armed with a knife protected in its palm, being passed along the side of the flank or between the hind limbs. It should be added that moderate dropsy of the abdomen is not incompatible with natural delivery, the liquid being at first crowded back into the portion of the belly still engaged in the womb, and passing slowly from that into the advanced portion as soon as that has cleared the narrow ...
— Special Report on Diseases of the Horse • United States Department of Agriculture

... mechanism of the process of capitalist production itself. The monopoly of capital becomes a fetter upon the mode of production, which has sprung up and flourished along with, and under it. Centralization of the means of production and socialization of labor at last reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. This integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The ...
— Proposed Roads To Freedom • Bertrand Russell

... exaggeration to say that such a doctrine would lead to consequences absolutely incompatible with any life outside a hermitage or a monastery. It would strike at the root of all civilisation, and although many may be prepared to give it their formal assent, no human being actually believes it with the kind ...
— The Map of Life - Conduct and Character • William Edward Hartpole Lecky

... dangerous to my habits of economy and my spiritual welfare, to have a limited monthly allowance. I fear that, if I am allowed as much as I want, my wants will enlarge with their gratification, and finally embrace many things, which at first I should have thought incompatible with economical management, as well as with that character among the heathen which it becomes the professed followers of Him who for our sakes became poor, even to sustain. It is better for a missionary, especially a young man, to have rather too little than rather too ...
— The Life of William Carey • George Smith

... this fact sharpened their wits, and kept them perpetually on their guard against the possibility of arrest. Nor was this all. The very nature of the lawless and outrageous life they led, and their frequent exposure to danger, rendered habits of caution necessary—and those were altogether incompatible with habits of intemperance. Self-preservation rendered this policy necessary, and we believe there are but few instances on record of a Rapparee having been arrested in a state of intoxication. Their laws, in fact, however barbarous they were in other matters, rendered three cases of drunkenness ...
— Willy Reilly - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton

... efforts were so great as to "call into full and violent action the muscular powers of the head, throat, and chest." In the execution of rapid passages the under jaw was in a continual state of agitation, "in a manner, too, generally thought incompatible with the production of pure tone from the chest, and inconsistent with a legitimate execution. This extreme motion was also visible during the shake, which Catalani used sparingly, ...
— Great Singers, First Series - Faustina Bordoni To Henrietta Sontag • George T. Ferris

... serious Plays,' says ARISTOTLE, 'is to beget Admiration [wonderment], Compassion, or Concernment.' But are not mirth and compassion things incompatible? and is it not evident, that the Poet must, of necessity, destroy the former, by intermingling the latter? that is, he must ruin the sole end and object of his Tragedy, to introduce somewhat that is forced in, and is not of the body of it! Would you not think ...
— An English Garner - Critical Essays & Literary Fragments • Edited by Professor Arber and Thomas Seccombe

... thorough-going Republicans. Socialism, which aims at political and economic equality, is radically inconsistent with any other political form whatever than that of Republicanism, Monarchy and Socialism, or Empire and Socialism, are incompatible and inconceivable. Socialism involves political and economic equality, while Monarchy or Empire essentially ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker

... dependent on that city. He next proceeded against the governor of Kiangnan, the dual province of Anhui and Kiangsu, who had taken the title of Prince of Tang, and striven to propitiate the emperor at the same time that he retained his own independence. The two things were, however, incompatible. Taitsou refused to receive the envoys of the Prince of Tang, and he ordered him to attend in person at the capital. With this the Tang prince would not comply, and an army was at once sent to invade and conquer Kiangnan. The campaign lasted one year, by which time the Tang power ...
— China • Demetrius Charles Boulger

... bonum is the almost equally incompatible combination of a well-regulated family and the ...
— Hints for Lovers • Arnold Haultain

... colonel stuck out his lower lip, and looked far away with a peculiar glazed stare. This was the expression of his perplexity—an expression practically unknown to his regiment; for perplexity is a sentiment which is incompatible with the rank of colonel of cavalry. The colonel himself was overcome by the unpleasant novelty of the sensation. As he was not accustomed to think except on professional matters connected with the welfare of men and horses, and the ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad

... conversation. Carefully he stole round to the corner nearest to the door. For an instant the wife had left her station, to observe the progress of her husband's labor. The time had come, and the attorney was not the man to let the favorable moment pass unimproved. With a rapidity which seemed utterly incompatible with his rotund corporation, he flew to the door, and sprung the trap upon the hapless pair, in the midst of their vision ...
— Hatchie, the Guardian Slave; or, The Heiress of Bellevue • Warren T. Ashton

... elected as well as Garfield, and it was in Blair's case that the issue was made by those who objected to the legality of what they called a duplication of offices. Later in the session of Congress it was settled that the two commissions were incompatible, and that one must choose between them. Blair resigned his seat at Washington and returned to Sherman's army. Garfield, who had found camp life a cause of oft-recurring and severe disease of his digestive system, resigned his army commission ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V2 • Jacob Dolson Cox

... 1790, exception was made in favour of those engaged in public instruction and the care of the sick; but in 1792 all corporations, specially including the Christian Brothers, were abolished, on the ground that their existence was incompatible with the conditions of a really free State. During the Reign of Terror the Institute was broken up, the Brothers scattered, and many suffered. There was a revival under Napoleon, which lasted till the Revolution of 1830. At this time the Institute was ...
— The Quarterly Review, Volume 162, No. 324, April, 1886 • Various

... wits of the age of Louis XIV. had not that contempt for cookery which some idealists of our days affect to have. Boileau has described a bad repast like a man who has often seen better; he liked the pleasures of the table, which have never been incompatible with the gifts of genius, or the investigations of the understanding. "I cannot conceive," says Doctor Johnson, "the folly of those, who, when at table, think of every thing but eating; for my part, when I am there I think ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 13, - Issue 371, May 23, 1829 • Various

... and one daughter. The sons were sent to heder, like all respectable boys; and they were taught, in addition, writing and arithmetic, enough for conducting a business. With this my grandfather was content; more than this he considered incompatible with piety. He was one of those who strenuously opposed the influence of the public school, and bribed the government officials to keep their children's names off the register of schoolboys, as we have already ...
— The Promised Land • Mary Antin

... square was crowded with the Indians, waiting to see this military spectacle. The caciques were assembled in the house of Ovando, which looked upon the square. None were armed; an unreserved confidence prevailed among them, totally incompatible with the dark treachery of which they were accused. To prevent all suspicion, and take off all appearance of sinister design, Ovando, after dinner, was playing at quoits with some of his principal officers, when the cavalry having arrived in the square, the caciques ...
— The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (Vol. II) • Washington Irving

... connection. Mere partisan appointments and the constant peril of removal without cause very naturally lead to an absorbing and mischievous political activity on the part of those thus appointed, which not only interferes with the due discharge of official duty, but is incompatible with the freedom of elections. Not without warrant in the views of several of my predecessors in the Presidential office, and directly within the law of 1871, already cited, I endeavored, by regulation made on the 22d day of June, 1877, to put ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Rutherford B. Hayes • Rutherford B. Hayes

... we see, too, the influence of the study of Greek sculpture upon Keats's mind and art. This study had taught him that the highest beauty is not incompatible with definiteness of form and clearness of detail. To his romantic appreciation of mystery was now added an equal sense of the importance of simplicity, form, and proportion, these being, from its nature, inevitable characteristics of the art of sculpture. So we see that again and again the ...
— Keats: Poems Published in 1820 • John Keats

... Goldsmith's Essays and Tales into that language, for the benefit of those who had no English. It would be a great feat if one could impress on the modern Celtic mind the conviction that piety and diversion are by no means incompatible. Goldsmith's Auburn introduces us to the most delightful prospect on earth: a simple village community, unacquainted with luxury and uncorrupted by vice. The inhabitants are full of health and joy—they till the soil and gain ample satisfaction for their unambitious wants. Life passes along ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes

... heart to undeceive him. So we are still lovers; and, cynical though it sounds, I make him a great deal happier in my insincerity than I could if I really loved him, because I humor him with a cunning quite incompatible with passion. He, on the other hand, being still sincere, tries my patience terribly with his jealousies and importunities. As he has nothing to do, he is almost always with me; and a man who has no office to go to—I dont care who he is—is a trial of which you can have no conception. So much ...
— The Irrational Knot - Being the Second Novel of His Nonage • George Bernard Shaw

... parallel with the more collective apostolate of "the Twelve''—has proved itself by tokens of Divine approval, Peter and his colleagues frankly recognize the distinction of the two missions, and are anxious only to arrange that the two shall not fall apart by religiously and morally incompatible usages (Acts xv.). Paul, on his side, clearly implies that Peter felt with him that the Law could not justify (Gal. ii. 15 ff.), and argues that it could not now be made obligatory in principle (cf. "a yoke,'' Acts xv. ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... expected from him, and in the beginning of his reign the moderate liberals fondly hoped that Italy would unite in one great federation, with Pius IX. at the head of it; entirely forgetting how incompatible a theocracy or government by priests ever must be with all progress and with liberal institutions. Their hopes were soon blighted, and after all the well-known events of 1848 and 1849, a reaction set in all over Italy, except in gallant little Piedmont, where ...
— Personal Recollections, from Early Life to Old Age, of Mary Somerville • Mary Somerville

... the history of Mr. Sulivan's service from the time of his appointment; such were the qualifications, and such the proofs of assiduity and diligence given by him in holding so many incompatible offices, (as well as being engaged in other dealings, which will appear in their place,) when, after three years' desultory residence in India, he was thought worthy to be nominated to the succession to the Supreme Council. No proof whatsoever of distinguished ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VIII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke

... she perceived immediately. But she was resolved to let him think that she believed him in order that she might discover his true intents and purposes. Her knowledge of human nature was sufficient to enable her to conclude that one cannot unite the incompatible elements of truth and deception, the discernment of reality and the enjoyment of fiction for any great length of time. The ...
— The Loyalist - A Story of the American Revolution • James Francis Barrett

... within which it operates is supposed to be the narrow limits covered by a single specific affection. Daily experience, however, shows that the deviation from the primitive type is limited only by some conditions of structure. Any pathological result may be expected, not incompatible with the structure of the organ. And thus it is that the cerebral affection which fell upon the parent is represented in one child by insanity, in another by idiocy, in another by epilepsy, in another by gross eccentricity, in ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various

... Montgeron tells us:—"This philosopher maintained that the facts alleged could not be true, because they were physically impossible. He raised, among other objections, this,—that the flexible, delicate nature of the skin, of the flesh, and of the viscera, is incompatible with a force and a consistency so extraordinary as the alleged facts presuppose; and, consequently, that it was impossible, without ceasing to be what they are,—without a radical change in their qualities,—that they should acquire a force superior to that of the hardest ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various

... night at dinner among the priests as to the extraordinary spread of Freemasonry. It had been going on for many years now, and Catholics perfectly recognised its dangers, for the profession of Masonry had been for some centuries rendered incompatible with religion through the Church's unswerving condemnation of it. A man must choose between that and his faith. Things had developed extraordinarily during the last century. First there had been the ...
— Lord of the World • Robert Hugh Benson

... consequences of a War weigh upon my heart not less than on your Majesty's. I also know that the Emperor of Russia does not wish for it. He, none the less, demands from the Porte things which all the Powers of Europe—among them, yourself—have solemnly declared to be incompatible with the independence of the Porte, and the European balance of power. In view of this declaration and of the presence of the Russian Army of invasion in the Principalities, the Powers could not but be ready to confirm their word by action. If "the Turk" ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Volume III (of 3), 1854-1861 • Queen of Great Britain Victoria

... Byron, that "the poetic temperament is incompatible with matrimonial felicity." Fudge, fudge, Mr. Campbell, did ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume 19, No. 536, Saturday, March 3, 1832. • Various

... Fathers[61] have adopted this opinion, which is now given up by everybody, with the exception of some new writers, who desire to revive the idea of the corporality of angels, demons, and souls—an opinion which is absolutely incompatible with that of the Catholic church, which holds that angels are of a nature ...
— The Phantom World - or, The philosophy of spirits, apparitions, &c, &c. • Augustin Calmet

... that we can expect to find parallels of the instances of extreme longevity of former times. The inhabitants of the higher stations of life, the population of thickly settled communities, are living in an age and under conditions almost incompatible with longevity. In fact, the strain of nervous energy made necessary by the changed conditions of business and mode of living really predisposes to ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould

... word be introduced from a foreign language—let it have some resemblance in sound to a real English term: lastly, let the meanings of the two words be not absolutely incompatible. We may then have a word of foreign origin taking the appearance of an English one. Such, amongst others, are beef-eater, from boeuffetier; sparrow-grass, asparagus; Shotover, Chateauvert;[35] ...
— A Handbook of the English Language • Robert Gordon Latham

... moral and the religious life are summed up in the words "God" and "Love," and those who love one another are born of God. Love in action corresponds with a confession of the incarnation in the intellect (iv. 7-12). It is wholly incompatible with sin (iii. 6), and is therefore righteous towards God and man. Every one who, as a child of God, hopes to grow like God, purifies himself as Christ is pure. He cannot love the world, which is a system of selfishness. St. John speaks of the possibility ...
— The Books of the New Testament • Leighton Pullan

... of the reason will permit, all former meanings attached to the word righteousness. What is right is that for which a man's central self is ever ready to sacrifice immediate or distant interests; what is wrong is what the central self discards or rejects as incompatible with the fixed design ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... independent, yet wholly womanly spirit which Gilbert honored in her, and which (unless her father's influence were too powerful) would yet save her to him, if she but loved him. Then he felt that his nervous, inflammable fear of Barton was incompatible with true honor for her, with trust in her pure and lofty nature. If she were so easily swayed, how could she stand the test which he was still resolved—nay, forced by ...
— The Story Of Kennett • Bayard Taylor

... and above it, Dattatreya as his representative has come to include in his personality the nature of all the trio. There is, moreover, something curious in his character. His love of wine and woman is a singular trait, and is quite incompatible with the nature of an ideal saint. It smells of reality, and strongly suggests that he was not a figment of the religious imagination but an actual man; and this is supported by the tradition of his association ...
— Hindu Gods And Heroes - Studies in the History of the Religion of India • Lionel D. Barnett

... himself been truly in love once in his life, commonplace as he looked, this honest man did not believe it possible that Lucy Wodehouse's representative could be Rosa Elsworthy's seducer—the two things looked incompatible to the straightforward vision ...
— The Perpetual Curate • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant

... it seems to me, that, instead of being "a legitimate outgrowth of the fundamental principles of our government," woman suffrage is really incompatible with true republican forms. Pre- civilized conditions, aristocratic tendencies, the forces that would destroy government—these appear to be its natural allies. We must study more closely its connection with representative government the better to ...
— Woman and the Republic • Helen Kendrick Johnson

... to Brent by the managers, and he fell in with this plan delightedly, but after two or three elementary bouts with the vowel sounds, long and short, consonants, sonant and surd, he concluded that mere articulation could be made as laborious as sawing wood, and he discovered that it was incompatible with his dignity to be a pupil in an art in which he had professed proficiency. Thereafter his accomplishment rusted—to the relief of the management—although he required that Valeria should be described ...
— Una Of The Hill Country - 1911 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)

... the generall charge thereof to a Governour, Lieutenant, Praefect, or Vice-Roy: And in this case also, every one of that Province, is obliged to all he shall doe in the name of the Soveraign, and that not incompatible with the Soveraigns Right. For such Protectors, Vice-Roys, and Governours, have no other right, but what depends on the Soveraigns Will; and no Commission that can be given them, can be interpreted for a Declaration ...
— Leviathan • Thomas Hobbes

... is accompanied by the highest literary art. Nothing could be more surprising. The primitive conditions that preserve simplicity are apparently incompatible with technical perfection, which is a late-born child of literature and the creation of matured taste, long experiment, and patient work. But in Greek, and perhaps only in Greek, naïveté and art go hand in hand. There is something almost uncanny in Homer's union ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various

... them to come and stay a year or two at the Falls after their marriage? He always expected to be able to reconcile that plan with the Pasmer plan of going at once; to his optimism the two were not really incompatible; but he did not wish them prematurely confronted in Alice's mind. Was this her way of letting him know that she knew what his mother wished, and that she was willing to make the sacrifice? Or was it just some vague longing to please him by a show of affection toward his family, an unmeditated ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... emanation depends on a vulgar error, belonging to the infancy of philosophic thought, and inconsistent with some necessary truths. It implies that God is separable into parts, and therefore both corporeal and finite. Divisible substance is incompatible with the first predicates of Deity, namely, immateriality and infinity. Before the conception of the illimitable, spiritual unity of God, the doctrine of the emanation of souls from Him fades away, as the mere figment of a dreaming mind brooding ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger

... weakness, fits of heroic devotion to unworthy objects, enormous force applied to an end that was wretched in truth and fact, but sublime in her thought.' George Eliot had none of this facility. Nor was general benignity in her at all of the poor kind that is incompatible with a great deal of particular censure. Universal benevolence never lulled an active critical faculty, nor did she conceive true humility as at all consisting in hiding from an impostor that you have found ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol 3 of 3) - The Life of George Eliot • John Morley

... Governor-General and Council, and to vest the same solely and entirely in the said Warren Hastings. That the reasons assigned by the said Warren Hastings for constituting the said Committee of Revenue are incompatible with those which he professed when he abolished the subordinate Council of Revenue at Moorshedabad: that he has invested the said Committee in the fullest manner with all the powers and authority of the Governor-General ...
— The Works Of The Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IX. (of 12) • Edmund Burke

... the Kenton family, for which he continued to have the highest regard, became a little less difficult, a little less incompatible with his self-respect as time went on. His spirit, which had lagged a little after his body in stature, began, as his father said, to catch up. He no longer nourished it so exclusively upon heroical romance as he had during the past year, and after his return to Tuskingum he ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... heaven. His prayers, poured forth in the critical moments of his life, have been preserved to us, and they show us what the world ought to know, that our greatest men can also be our best men, and that freedom of thought is not incompatible with sincere religion. Those who knew Bunsen well, know how that deep, religious undercurrent of his soul was constantly bubbling up and breaking forth in his conversations, startling even the mere worldling by an earnestness that frightened away every ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller

... useless, but very pernicious, all complicated and expensive grates should be laid aside, and such as more simple substituted in the room of them.—And in the choice of a grate, as in every thing else, BEAUTY and ELEGANCE may easily be united with the MOST PERFECT SIMPLICITY.—Indeed they are incompatible ...
— ESSAYS, Political, Economical and Philosophical. Volume 1. • Benjamin Rumford

... state of your concerns, external as well as internal, no longer renders the pursuit of inclination incompatible with the sentiment of duty or propriety; and am persuaded, whatever partiality may be retained for my services, that, in the present circumstances of our country, you will not ...
— Key-Notes of American Liberty • Various

... lengthened, and to imply an esoteric something in their experience which younger sisters could not comprehend, and privileges which they might not share. But for them, the Madigans, though they were graciously willing to count Kate out of such outdoor sports as were incompatible with lengthened skirts, she might come no pretense of young-ladyhood over them. They were on the watch for the smallest affectation, the least sentimentality; and as for beaus per se—just let ...
— The Madigans • Miriam Michelson

... wanting in humility because they did not acquiesce in the state of things which they found around them, is a mere extravagance, arising out of a total misapprehension of the nature of humility, and of the merits of the feeling of veneration. All earnestness and depth of character is incompatible with such a notion of humility. A man deeply penetrated with some great truth, and compelled, as it were, to obey it, cannot listen to every one who may be indifferent to it, or opposed to it. There is a voice to which he already owes obedience, which he serves with ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXVIII. February, 1843. Vol. LIII. • Various

... names were Alfrig, Dvalin, Berling and Grer; they were skillful smiths. Looking one day into their stony dwelling, Freyja saw them at work on a beautiful golden necklace, or collar, which she offered to buy, but which they refused to part with, except on conditions quite incompatible with the fidelity she owed to Odin, but to which she, nevertheless, was tempted to accede. Thus the ornament became hers. By some means this transaction came to the knowledge of Loke, who told it to Odin. Odin commanded him to get possession of the ornament. ...
— The Younger Edda - Also called Snorre's Edda, or The Prose Edda • Snorre

... reciprocal action one over the other, and lastly that they ought to be united in an absolute and necessary manner. From this exclusion of feeling as long as there is thought, and of thought so long as there is feeling, we should on the contrary conclude that the two natures are incompatible, so that in order to demonstrate that pure reason is to be realised in humanity, the best proof given by the analysis is that this realisation is demanded. But, as in the realisation of beauty or of aesthetic unity, there is a real union, mutual ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various

... boldly protested that he had done nothing of the sort. He had merely made certain not very unusual concessions to the interests of his journal. In doing so he had of course set aside his artistic conscience, an artistic conscience being a private luxury incompatible with the workings of a large corporate concern. He was bound to disregard it in loyalty to his employers and his public. They expected certain things of him and not others. It was different in the unexciting ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair

... diametrically opposite, as it generally proceeds from the depravity of both, and almost certainly from the badness of the latter. Indeed, a little observation will shew us that fools are the most addicted to this vice; and a little reflexion will teach us that it is incompatible with true understanding. Accordingly we see that, while the wisest of men have constantly lamented the imbecility and imperfection of their own nature, the meanest and weakest have been trumpeting forth their own excellencies and ...
— Miscellanies, Volume 2 (from Works, Volume 12) • Henry Fielding

... character, therefore, of a man like Pausanias, risking so much glory, daring so much peril, strong indeed must have been this sanguine motive power of human action. Nor is a large and active development of hope incompatible with a temperament habitually grave and often profoundly melancholy. For hope itself is often engendered by discontent. A vigorous nature keenly susceptible to joy, and deprived of the possession of the joy it yearns ...
— Pausanias, the Spartan - The Haunted and the Haunters, An Unfinished Historical Romance • Lord Lytton

... sometimes the torrent, of eloquence ever at his command, nor of the lithe and sinewy force of his extraordinarily nimble, as well as massive, mind; nor need I say more than one word about the remarkable combination of qualities so generally held and seen to be incompatible, which put into one personality a genius for dry arithmetical figures and a genius for enthusiasm and sympathy with all the oppressed. All these things have been said far better than I can say them, and I ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren

... exclusively within the lines of his faith. The result of this was that his faith was intelligent, I mean, that he understood it, and had a clear, almost instinctive perception of what was compatible or incompatible with it. He defended his walls and he cultivated his garden. His position and his possessions ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana

... the same groove, with an immeasurable distance between them, but on parallel lines. They will never meet in the plane of their activities so as to coincide in capacity or performance. They are not identical, as some think, but unequal; they are distinct, but equal—an idea that is in no way incompatible with the Scripture truth that God hath made of one blood all ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner

... had ample proof; she warned the maid that the gruel "might do for her," she saw its virulent effects upon Gunnell and Emmet, as well as on her father from its first administration, while her concealment of its use from the physician, and her destruction of the remanent portion, are equally incompatible with belief either in its innocence or her own. Finally, her burning of Cranstoun's letters, which, if her story was true, were her only means of confirming it, her attempts to bribe the servants, and her statements to Fisher and the Lanes ...
— Trial of Mary Blandy • William Roughead

... of China has enabled residents to smile at the audacity of the too mendacious Huc. It has enabled them at the same time to view millions of human beings working out the problem of existence under conditions which by many persons in England are deemed to be totally incompatible with the happiness of the human race. They behold all classes in China labouring seven days in every week, taking holidays as each may consider expedient with regard both to health and means, but without the mental and physical demoralisation ...
— Chinese Sketches • Herbert A. Giles

... the adventurous attitude towards life: the being settled. Those who are born tired may crave for settlement; but to fresher and stronger spirits it is a form of suicide. Now to say of any institution that it is incompatible with both the contemplative and adventurous life is to disgrace it so vitally that all the moralizings of all the Deans and Chapters cannot reconcile our souls to its slavery. The unmarried Jesus ...
— Preface to Androcles and the Lion - On the Prospects of Christianity • George Bernard Shaw

... inward light, to which some methodists pretended, he said, it was a principle utterly incompatible with social or civil security. "If a man (said he,) pretends to a principle of action of which I can know nothing, nay, not so much as that he has it, but only that he pretends to it; how can I tell what that person may be prompted to do? When a person professes ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill

... take care to launch ourselves with as strong and decided an initiative as possible. Accumulate all the possible circumstances which shall reinforce the right motives; put yourself assiduously in conditions that encourage the new way; make engagements incompatible with the old; take a public pledge, if the case allows; in short, envelope your resolution with every aid you know. This will give your new beginning such a momentum that the temptation to break down will not occur as soon as ...
— Talks To Teachers On Psychology; And To Students On Some Of Life's Ideals • William James

... spiritual consciousness. The change is indeed so great, the transfiguration so complete, that they seize on the strongest language in which to state it. And in the good old human way, referring their own feelings to the universe, they speak of the opposing and incompatible worlds of matter and of spirit, of nature and of grace. But those who have most deeply reflected, have perceived that the change effected is not a change of worlds. It is rather such a change of temper and attitude as will disclose ...
— The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day • Evelyn Underhill

... course ye can come again. Did I not say exceptions prove the rule? The lower combe? Man, dear, anywhere ye please, so long as you do not disturb my pheasants. The two are not incompatible. Don't attempt to deny it. They're not! I'll never allow another gun, though. Come and go as ye please. I'll not see you, and ye needn't see me. Ye've been well brought up. Another glass of beer, now? I tell you a fisherman he was and a fisherman he shall be to-night again. He shall! Wish I could ...
— Stalky & Co. • Rudyard Kipling

... glimpse. This was Sempronia, the wife of an honest man and the mother of another;[235] but according to Sallust, who introduces her to us as a principal in the conspiracy of Catiline, she was one of those who found steady married life incompatible with literary and artistic tastes. "She could play and dance more elegantly than an honest woman should ... she played fast and loose with her money, and equally so with her good fame."[236] She ...
— Social life at Rome in the Age of Cicero • W. Warde Fowler

... rate while I am stationed here, as Assistant Resident—I cannot continue to receive pay from you. I should regard it as a disgraceful action, and absolutely incompatible with my duty." ...
— At the Point of the Bayonet - A Tale of the Mahratta War • G. A. Henty

... widening and in some respects the improvement of the social order; and in its earlier stages it favoured civic autonomy by suppressing local anarchy and feudal privilege. But the growth of centralization was in the end incompatible with the genius of civic independence, and perilous to such elements of political right as had been gained for the population in general as the result of earlier conflicts between the crown and ...
— Liberalism • L. T. Hobhouse

... our indolence and frivolity that make routine duties, however distracting or importunate, incompatible with the serious application which the work of self-culture demands; but we are by nature indolent and frivolous, and only education can make us earnest and laborious. None but a cultivated mind can understand that if the whole human race ...
— Education and the Higher Life • J. L. Spalding

... and prudent and revealed unto babes.' Yet, while feeling thus, it must be admitted that the existence of spirit and of a Creator do not yet seem capable of logical demonstration. The denial of their existence is not incompatible with a profound acquaintance with material forms and their operations; and, on the other hand, the belief in their existence and substantial nature, and in their powers as first causes, have never interfered ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce

... unrighteous, but how could he go back? He had mental exercises calling himself naught, laid hold on redemption and went on in his course of instrumentality." He was "carrying on two distinct lives"—a religious one and a wicked one. "His religious activity could not be incompatible with his wicked business as soon as he had argued himself into not feeling ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot

... and texture of parts they are, on which depend, and from which result those qualities which make our complex idea of gold, it is impossible we should know what OTHER qualities result from, or are incompatible with, the same constitution of the insensible parts of gold; and so consequently must always co-exist with that complex idea we have of it, or ...
— An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume II. - MDCXC, Based on the 2nd Edition, Books III. and IV. (of 4) • John Locke

... Tristan's honour; and on this the whole force of the musical torrent is concentrated. In the end love must prevail. Love, with Wagner, is the divine possession which dominates every noble heart, but here it is incompatible with the conditions of human life, and of that honour which is its very breath. And so at the end, as the lovers pass through their death-agony clasped in each other's embrace, the love-motive ...
— Wagner's Tristan und Isolde • George Ainslie Hight

... alleged, Mr. Keightley very justly observes that Mrs. Fielding must for some time have had a maid, since it was a maid who had been devotedly attached to her whom Fielding subsequently married. He also argues that "living in a garret and skulking in out o' the way retreats," are incompatible with studying law and practising as a barrister. Making every allowance, however, for the somewhat exaggerated way in which those of high rank often speak of the distresses of their less opulent kinsfolk, it is probable that Fielding's married life was one of continual shifts and privations. ...
— Fielding - (English Men of Letters Series) • Austin Dobson

... few instances of like disinterestedness, I doubt, in this tribe. Till now I always held it for gospel, that friendship and physician were incompatible things; and little imagined that a man of medicine, when he had given over his patient to death, would think of any visits but those of ceremony, that he might stand well with the family, against it came to their turns ...
— Clarissa, Or The History Of A Young Lady, Volume 8 • Samuel Richardson

... together. I am prepared, in time, to do everything, without, however, diminishing the Sovereignty of the Pontificate. That man would be grievously mistaken who should behold in the functions which devolve on you, or in your institution itself, his own Utopias, or the commencement of anything incompatible with the Pontifical Sovereignty." In concluding, he spoke in a still more determined tone, and reproached his people with the ingratitude which they had already begun to manifest. "There are some persons who, having nothing to lose, wish for disorder and insurrection, ...
— Pius IX. And His Time • The Rev. AEneas MacDonell

... of communal possession runs badly against the current economical theories, according to which intensive culture is incompatible with the village community. But the most charitable thing that can be said of these theories is that they have never been submitted to the test of experiment: they belong to the domain of political ...
— Mutual Aid • P. Kropotkin

... of animals— would sit for an hour stroking the head of Demon, his great Irish deerhound; but at other times would tease him to a wrath which touched the verge of dangerous. He was fond of practical jokes, and would not hesitate to indulge himself even in such as were incompatible with any genuine refinement: the sort had been in vogue in his merrier days, and Lord Lossie had ever been one of the most fertile in inventing, and loudest in enjoying them. For the rest, if he was easily enraged, he was readily appeased; could drink a great deal, but was ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald

... imagination combined to form the individual. Hence the poem is a true reflex of the author's mind: it dissolves and blends in harmonious union elements that appeared not merely heterogeneous, but wholly incompatible, and realises, with the concreteness of history, the seemingly unattainable idea which Lucretius had the mind to conceive but lacked the artistic hand to execute; in a word, it is the fruit of the intimate union of that ...
— The Sceptics of the Old Testament: Job - Koheleth - Agur • Emile Joseph Dillon

... the morning Hepburn, Michel, and myself, carried the ammunition, and most of the other heavy articles to the pines. Michel was our guide, and it did not occur to us at the time that his conducting us perfectly straight was incompatible with his story of having mistaken his road in coming to us. He now informed us that he had, on his way to the tent, left on the hill above the pines a gun and forty-eight balls, which Perrault had given to him when with the rest of Mr. Franklin's party, he took leave of him. ...
— Narrative of a Journey to the Shores of the Polar Sea, in the years 1819-20-21-22, Volume 2 • John Franklin

... some of the remarks in the opening chapter, Professor Butcher's Essay on The Dawn of Romanticism in Greek Poetry should be noticed. I do not think that the accomplished author's view is incompatible with mine; though I admit that I had not taken much account of the Greek writers whom we call "post-classical." But it is to be noted, as bearing on the question raised in the second footnote on p. 9, that most or all of the writers whom he cites were either Asiatics or nearly ...
— Dante: His Times and His Work • Arthur John Butler

... anything in the foregoing that may seem incompatible, the fact remains that the distinguishing feature of American society, as contrasted with the societies of Europe, is the greater approach to equality that it has made. It is in this sphere, and not in ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead

... one in four books and eighty chapters—yet its constructive power, its critical force, its large outlook impress the student. We have here none of Luther's scholasticism, or of Melanchthon's deft manipulation of incompatible elements; but we have the first thoughts on religion of a mind trained by ancient literature to the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 9 • Various

... Hebraists of his day for showing, as one obituary notice remarked, that the progress of modern scientific discovery, although necessitating modifications in many of the still prevailing ideas with which the Christian religion became encrusted in the times of ignorance and superstition, is in no way incompatible with a sincere and practical acceptance of its great and fundamental truths,—I like, I say, to picture this Oxford professor on one of his walks bending over pebbles, birds' eggs, and plants, with a troop of bright-eyed boys at ...
— The Story of Baden-Powell - 'The Wolf That Never Sleeps' • Harold Begbie

... supposed incompatible with my honour,' replied the priest, interrupting him; 'when such as I am confer favours, we expect that they shall be accepted with gratitude, or declined with thankful respect—not ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott

... whatever will serve as an excuse for throwing off the irksome restraints of moral discipline. That is why we repeat that the one real danger religion has to face to-day is the danger arising from the spread of a false philosophy, whose tenets are ultimately incompatible with Christian morals. The worst heresies are moral {63} heresies; and of the views we have been discussing we say roundly that their falseness is sufficiently proved by their ethical implications. "A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit; therefore by their fruits ye shall know them." Against ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer

... I respect and admire her. I am proud of her, too, and proud of myself that so fine a creature should find enough in me to be willing to mate with me. It will be a happy marriage. There is nothing cramped or narrow or incompatible about it. We know each other well—a wisdom that is acquired by lovers only after marriage, and even then with the likelihood of it being a painful wisdom. We, on the other hand, are not blinded by love madness, and we see clearly and sanely and ...
— The Kempton-Wace Letters • Jack London

... to graduate the payment according to the success of the work. The bookseller, as may well be supposed, soon repaid him in full with many acknowledgments of his disinterestedness. This anecdote has been called in question, we know not on what grounds; we see nothing in it incompatible with the character of Goldsmith, who was very impulsive, and prone to acts of ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving

... triumph of their ideas. He confessed to me that it was to counteract the possible influence of the Royalist committee that he showed himself so indulgent to those of the emigrants whose monarchical prejudices he knew were incompatible with liberal opinions. By the presence of emigrants who acknowledged nothing short of absolute power, he thought he might paralyse the influence of the Royalists of the interior; he therefore granted all such emigrants permission ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton

... truth about it? What is the Business of Being a Woman? Is it something incompatible with free and joyous development of one's talents? Is there no place in it for economic independence? Has it no essential relation to the world's movements? Is it an episode which drains the forces and leaves a dreary wreck behind? Is it something that cannot be organized ...
— The Business of Being a Woman • Ida M. Tarbell

... to Enjolras as to a spinal column. His moral backbone leaned on that firmness. Grantaire in the presence of Enjolras became some one once more. He was, himself, moreover, composed of two elements, which were, to all appearance, incompatible. He was ironical and cordial. His indifference loved. His mind could get along without belief, but his heart could not get along without friendship. A profound contradiction; for an affection is a conviction. His nature was thus constituted. ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo

... thumb of his left hand to his nose, and spreading out his fingers as wide as possible. I do not understand the exact significance of that action, but there is something in it so intensely insolent that it is quite incompatible ...
— The Young Trawler • R.M. Ballantyne

... love as we know it, if this loss be the price you have paid for your divine foresight, we think ourselves more favored of God than you. Confess that love, with its reserves, its surprises, its mysteries, its revelations, is necessarily incompatible with a foresight which weighs and measures every ...
— The Blindman's World - 1898 • Edward Bellamy

... privilege. Now, that our friendly alliance may be ratified for all eternity, we demand of you that you pull down those bulwarks of slavery, the walls of your town, for even wild beasts lose their spirit if you keep them caged: that you put to the sword every Roman on your soil, since tyrants are incompatible with freedom; that all the property of those killed form a common stock and no one be allowed to conceal anything or to secure any private advantage. It must also be open both for us and for you to live on either river-bank, as our forefathers could in earlier ...
— Tacitus: The Histories, Volumes I and II • Caius Cornelius Tacitus

... love to her? He should have borne it as Christians had even before now borne slander and false testimony for their faith! He might even have ACCEPTED it, and let the triumph of her conversion in the end prove his innocence. Or was his purpose incompatible with that sisterly affection he had so often preached to the women of his flock? He might have taken her hand, and called her "Sister Pepita," even as he had called Deborah "Sister." He recalled the fact that he had for an instant held her struggling ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte

... already become—the mirror of the polite society of the Italian courts. Thus it is that in the crowning jewels of Italian pastoralism, in the Aminta and the Pastor fido, we trace a yearning towards a simpler, freer, and more genuine life, side by side with such incompatible and antagonistic elements as the reproduction in pastoral guise of the personages and surroundings of the circle of Ferrara. Not content with the pure ideal, the poets endeavoured, like Faust at the sight of ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg

... observed with a terror which seemed not incompatible with the fulfillment of a natural expectation. It seemed to him that it was all in expiation of some crime which, though conscious of his guilt, he could not rightly remember. To the menaces and mysteries of his surroundings the consciousness ...
— Can Such Things Be? • Ambrose Bierce

... with passionate love of life. Except in fiction suicide and health do not go together, however superhumanly sensitive the sore beset hero or heroine. Susan was sensitive enough; whenever she did things incompatible with our false and hypocritical and unscientific notions of sensitiveness, allowances should be made for her because of her superb and dauntless health. If her physical condition had been morbid, her conduct might have been, would have been, ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips



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