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Insatiable   /ɪnsˈeɪʃəbəl/   Listen
Insatiable

adjective
1.
Impossible to satisfy.  Synonyms: insatiate, unsatiable.  "An insatiable demand for old buildings to restore" , "His passion for work was unsatiable"






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Insatiable" Quotes from Famous Books



... upon with distress, accosts Neptune, and thus pours forth her heart's complaint: 'Juno's bitter wrath and heart insatiable compel me, O Neptune, to sink to the uttermost of entreaty: neither length of days nor any goodness softens her, nor doth Jove's command and fate itself break her to desistence. It is not enough that her accursed hatred hath devoured the Phrygian city from among the people, and exhausted on it ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil • Virgil

... the early intercourse between the colonists and the aborigines of this country, is not over-drawn, nor is it at all inapplicable to the period which has elapsed since the formation of the federal government. With an insatiable cupidity and a wanton disregard of justice, have the lands and property of the Indians been sought by citizens of the United States. The great agent of success in this unholy business, has been ardent spirits, ...
— Life of Tecumseh, and of His Brother the Prophet - With a Historical Sketch of the Shawanoe Indians • Benjamin Drake

... sometimes connected with inflammation of the stomach, then called gastro-enteritis. The tongue is then red and pointed, the nausea and vomiting are more violent and constant, the thirst burning and insatiable. ...
— An Epitome of Homeopathic Healing Art - Containing the New Discoveries and Improvements to the Present Time • B. L. Hill

... retired from the Indian country, than the savages, in small parties, invaded the settlements in different directions, seeking opportunities of gratifying their insatiable thirst for blood. And although the precautions which had been taken, lessened the frequency of their success, yet they did not always prevent it. Persons leaving the forts on any occasion, were almost always either murdered or carried into captivity,—a ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers

... celebrated old Doctor, is consumed by an insatiable thirst for knowledge, but, having already lived through a long life devoted to the acquirement of learning and to hard work as a scholar, without having his soul-hunger appreciably relieved, is dissatisfied and in his disappointment ...
— The Standard Operaglass - Detailed Plots of One Hundred and Fifty-one Celebrated Operas • Charles Annesley

... maintained, be too much machinery or too much of any form of capital provided there exists labour to act with it; if this machinery, described as excessive, is set working, some one will have the power to consume whatever is produced, and since we know that human wants are insatiable, too much cannot be produced. This crude and superficial treatment, which found wide currency from the pages of Adam Smith and McCulloch, has been swallowed by later English economists, unfortunately without ...
— The Evolution of Modern Capitalism - A Study of Machine Production • John Atkinson Hobson

... his uncertainty of aim partly by a morbid physical condition. He searches, nothing satisfies him, tries everything, in vain; finding satisfaction at last in the Church, as in a haven of rest. Always it is the curious, insatiable brain searching. And he is always wretchedly aware that he ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons

... strange that nowhere, until lately, in city, town, or country, has it occurred to any one that the community owed anything to this insatiable thirst for joy. ...
— What eight million women want • Rheta Childe Dorr

... Ferrara, and skilled embroiderers were brought over from Spain. The duchess herself superintended these workers, selected the colours and patterns, and became an authority in the choice of hangings and decoration of rooms. While Ercole had an insatiable passion for gems and cameos, antique marbles and ivories, Leonora showed an especial taste for gold and silver metal-work. Silver boxes and girdles curiously chased and engraved were constantly sent to the ...
— Beatrice d'Este, Duchess of Milan, 1475-1497 • Julia Mary Cartwright

... being surrounded with the best efforts of the old and modern masters, denotes that you will have insatiable longings and desires for higher attainments, compared to which present success will seem poverty-stricken ...
— 10,000 Dreams Interpreted • Gustavus Hindman Miller

... the seizure of their lands? The Reformation owed nothing to the good intentions of K. Henry: He was only an instrument of it, (as the logicians speak) by accident; nor doth he appear through his whole reign to have had any other views than those of gratifying his insatiable love of power, cruelty, oppression, and other irregular appetites. But this kingdom as well as many other parts of Europe, was, at that time, generally weary of the corruptions and impositions of the Roman court and church, and disposed to receive those doctrines which ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. III.: Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Vol. I. • Jonathan Swift

... having robbed the treasures of the Church. The charge was not less insulting for its justice. The Cardinal of Amiens, instead of allaying the feuds of France and England, which it was his holy mission to allay, had inflamed them in order to glut his own insatiable avarice by draining the wealth of both countries in the Pope's name. "As Archbishop of Bari, you lie," was the reply of the high-born Frenchman. On one occasion such high words passed with the Cardinal of Limoges that but for the interposition of ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various

... do no more than refer to them, and indicate them as our starting-point. Ennoblement comes to man in the degree that his consciousness quickens, and the nobler the man has become, the profounder must consciousness be. Admirable exchange takes place here; and even as love is insatiable in its craving for love, so is consciousness insatiable in its craving for growth, for moral uplifting; and moral uplifting for ever is ...
— Wisdom and Destiny • Maurice Maeterlinck

... Guff at the age of 30 was both a Captain and a Professor, but his insatiable Ambition spurred him to go out and gather other Laurels. So he ran for Justice of the Peace, and was elected the third time he ran, because the other Candidate pulled out. As Magistrate he became custodian of a Law-Book, a Checker-Board, and ...
— People You Know • George Ade

... room which offended Waldo's sensitive taste—a spot needing a touch of yellow brass and a note of red—and the silk tassel completed the color-scheme. The result was a combination which delighted his soul; Jack had a passion for having his soul delighted and an insatiable thirst for the things that did the delighting, and could no more resist the temptation to possess them when exposed for sale than a confirmed drunkard could resist a favorite beverage held under his nose. That all of these precious objects of bigotry and virtue were beyond his means, ...
— The Underdog • F. Hopkinson Smith

... fire, and though gravity and courtesy marked every utterance there thrilled through every speech an ever deepening intensity of feeling. The fiery spirit of the red man, long subdued by those powers that represented the civilization of the white man, was burning fiercely within them. The insatiable lust for glory formerly won in war or in the chase, but now no longer possible to them, burned in their hearts like a consuming fire. The life of monotonous struggle for a mere existence to which they were condemned had from the first been intolerable to them. The prowess of their ...
— The Patrol of the Sun Dance Trail • Ralph Connor

... come from the self-contained countries of the world," he explained, "and China is one of them, come always with the desire and longing for new experiences, new sensations. My own appetite for these is insatiable." ...
— The Great Prince Shan • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... Farnese Theatre was, as we have seen, admired by Lasells; but Lord Corke found it a "useless structure" though immense. "The same spirit that raised the Colossus at Rhodes," he says, "raised the theatre at Parma; that insatiable spirit and lust of Fame which would brave the Almighty by fixing eternity to the name of a perishable being." If it was indeed this spirit, I am bound to say that it did not build so wisely at Parma as at Rhodes. The play-house that Ranuzio I. constructed ...
— Italian Journeys • William Dean Howells

... juice which she extracted from herbs. This process of drinking and barbecuing was repeated during five consecutive days, at the end of which my fever was gone. But my convalescence was not speedy. For many a day, I stalked about, a useless skeleton, covering with ague, and afflicted by an insatiable appetite, until a French physician restored me to health by the use of cold baths at the crisis ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer

... take off her white dress before starting. All dressed, we went to the northwest corner, as far as possible from the rest of the household, and sat in a splendid breeze for hours. It was better than fighting insatiable mosquitoes; so there we sat talking through the greater part of a night which seemed to have borrowed a few additional hours for our benefit. We'll have no Leap Year in '64; the twenty-four extra hours were crowded in on that ...
— A Confederate Girl's Diary • Sarah Morgan Dawson

... taken the way of Main Street, or further over still, toward the poorer class of shacks and dwellings, it might have been more interesting for him, for Jim's insatiable love of a change was being indulged to its full and he was busy making quite a good fellow of himself with all the orphans and poverty-stricken widows ...
— The Spoilers of the Valley • Robert Watson

... refused all aid, either because he is unjust or because the courts find no remedy for his troubles. He refuses to settle actual grievances, carries the case from one court to another and finally develops an insatiable desire to fight to the bitter end. The statutes appear to him inadequate and even the fundamental principles of law fail him. He cannot abide by the ultimate decision after all the usual means of justice have been exhausted. In his attempts to gain justice he writes to magistrates, ...
— Studies in Forensic Psychiatry • Bernard Glueck

... it so badly as all that?" he thought, "or was it only her insatiable desire never to ...
— Grace Harlowe's Sophomore Year at High School • Jessie Graham Flower

... the corn. Driving storms of rain in August laid the crops. On heavy land they were utterly spoilt, so that even by October the poor felt the pinch. From all parts there came the gloomiest reports. In Oxfordshire there was no old wheat left, and the insatiable demands from the large towns of the north sent up prices alarmingly. In November Lord Bateman wrote from Leominster that the wheat crop was but two thirds of the average, and, if Government did not import wheat directly, ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose

... and blinded by the artifices of those Jesuitical engineers, who have long conspired to sacrifice our religion to the idolatry of Rome, our laws, liberties and persons to arbitrary slavery, and our estates to their insatiable avarice, may possibly be deterred and amused with high threats and declarations, flying up and down on the wings of the royal name and countenance, now captivated and prostituted to serve all their lusts, to proclaim all rebels and traitors ...
— The Covenants And The Covenanters - Covenants, Sermons, and Documents of the Covenanted Reformation • Various

... Insatiable in his greed, he began to ask for cattle twice a week, always taking from ten to twenty animals, until one day, after exceptionally wet weather, I protested that it was not possible to round up the stock in the then state of the camp ...
— Argentina From A British Point Of View • Various

... Anderson. He proved a worker indeed. He had an insatiable appetite for work, and never knew when to quit. He was not popular at the farm, for he was too eager in the morning to start and too loath in the evening to stop. His unbridled passion for work was a thing to be deplored, ...
— The Fat of the Land - The Story of an American Farm • John Williams Streeter

... enketo. Inquietude maltrankvileco. Inquire demandi. Inquiry demando. Inquisition inkvizicio. Inquisitive sciama. Inquisitor inkvizitoro. Inroad ekokupo. Insalubrious malsaniga. Insane freneza. Insanity frenezeco. Insatiable nesatigebla. Inscribe enskribi. Inscription surskribo. Inscrutable nesercxebla. Insect insekto. Insecure dangxera. Insensible sensenta. Insert enmeti. Insert (print) enpresi. Insertion enpresajxo. Inseparable sendisigxa. Inside interne. ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes

... them follow in the traces of Shelley when he wrote in his youth: "I have been most of the night pacing a church-yard. I must now engage in scenes of strong interest.... I expect to gratify some of this insatiable feeling in poetry.... I slept with a loaded pistol and some poison last night, but did not die," Happy man if he had been able to ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana

... abundant share of liveliness and intelligence. His palate was as keen for good talk as for good wine. He was an admirable recipient, if not an originator, of shrewd or humorous remarks upon life and manners. What in regard to sensual enjoyment was mere gluttony, appeared in higher matters as an insatiable curiosity. At times this faculty became intolerable to his neighbours. "I will not be baited with what and why," said poor Johnson, one day in desperation. "Why is a cow's tail long? Why is a fox's tail bushy?" "Sir," said Johnson on another occasion, ...
— Samuel Johnson • Leslie Stephen

... would be far too mild a term to apply; while the goblin's successor, as king of the farm, seemed to have become so puffed up with pride at his succession to the throne, that the stick had to be applied several times in response to his insatiable ...
— Diamond Dyke - The Lone Farm on the Veldt - Story of South African Adventure • George Manville Fenn

... often envied man his carnal body and the possibilities that have been permitted him of eventually reaching a higher spiritual plane. It is envy, perhaps, that has made them mischievous, and generated in them an insatiable thirst to torment and frighten man. Another probable explanation of them is, that they may be inhabitants of one of the other planets that have the power granted, under certain conditions at present unknown to us, of ...
— Byways of Ghost-Land • Elliott O'Donnell

... admired, although her daughter was fifteen. The dream of Alfredo, Count Martellini, was to make a Nile voyage in her company. People would talk, of course. People always talk scandal about somebody. The pretty woman, with her insatiable vanity, was already drifting on a rapid current from which there was no escape. Well, she was not alone. All the gay ladies and men of her acquaintance were also afloat on the same perilous stream. By and by they would reach the Niagara brink; then, with a dash and a plunge, all would be ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 7 • Various

... tell you, that it is in offending in some of those six non-natural things, of which I shall [873]dilate more at large; they are the causes of our infirmities, our surfeiting, and drunkenness, our immoderate insatiable lust, and prodigious riot. Plures crapula, quam gladius, is a true saying, the board consumes more than the sword. Our intemperance it is, that pulls so many several incurable diseases upon our heads, that hastens [874]old age, perverts ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior

... I studied soldiers, agents, missionaries, traders and squaw-men with insatiable interest. My mind was like a sponge, absorbing not facts, but impressions, pictures which were necessary to make my stories seem like the truth. While in camp and on the train, I took notes busily and actually ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland

... letters forty pages long to the King, and send off another courier on the same day with two or three additional despatches of identical date. Such prolixity enchanted the King, whose greediness for business epistles was insatiable. The painstaking monarch toiled, pen in hand, after his wonderful minister in vain. Philip was only fit to be the bishop's clerk; yet he imagined himself to be the directing and governing power. He scrawled ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... wisdom alone which expels sorrow from our minds, and prevents our shuddering with fear: she is the instructress who enables us to live in tranquillity, by extinguishing in us all vehemence of desire. For desires are insatiable, and ruin not only individuals but entire families, and often overturn the whole state. From desires arise hatred, dissensions, quarrels, seditions, wars. Nor is it only out of doors that these passions ...
— The Academic Questions • M. T. Cicero

... lived many years among the wild tribes of the country and knew them as few men did, their insatiable love of liberty and intense dislike of the White man's civilization, looked upon her conversion and decision to remain with him as another direct intervention of Providence; for that which usually required years had been accomplished in as many weeks in her case. It was little short of a miracle, ...
— When Dreams Come True • Ritter Brown

... breed, I needn't say. Pampered hotel Philistines pretending to culture and profaning the sanctuaries, Ruskin in hand. Ruskin. Really, you know.... Well, anyhow, my mission in life for the present is to minister to their insatiable appetite for rhapsodising over what they feel it incumbent ...
— The Lee Shore • Rose Macaulay

... ("lady-cow" in Worcestershire) is the most important. It lays its eggs in clusters on the hop-leaf, and in a few days the larvae (called "niggers") are hatched, aggressive-looking creatures with insatiable appetites. It is amusing to watch them hunting over the lower side of the leaf like a sporting dog in a turnip field, and devouring the lice in quantities. I knew an old hop grower in Hampshire who had a standing offer of a guinea a quart for lady-birds, but it is scarcely necessary ...
— Grain and Chaff from an English Manor • Arthur H. Savory

... Englishman shoots for sport. Sport, being a mental impulse or appetite, is insatiable, and therefore far more deadly than hunger.... A boast is made that ninety millions of rabbits are reared for the consumption of our nation. Ninety million rabbits sent out at large to nibble the young shoots of the growing crops—each of whom destroys and wastes ten times what ...
— Memoir and Letters of Francis W. Newman • Giberne Sieveking

... the life at Sceaux. It was the habit of the guests to assemble at eight, listen to music or plays, improvise verses for popular airs, relate racy anecdotes, or amuse themselves with proverbs. "Write verses for me," said the insatiable duchess when ill; "I feel that verses only can give me relief." The quality does not seem to have been essential, provided they were sufficiently flattering. Sainte-Aulaire wrote madrigals for her. Malezieu, the learned and versatile preceptor ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason

... from the soil, or from humanity to greet us? This sense of want evoked by Southern beauty is perhaps the antique mythopoeic yearning. But in our perplexed life it takes another form, and seems the longing for emotion, ever fleeting, ever new, unrealised, unreal, insatiable. ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds

... naturally bring them into Charleston first; and, if you have watched the history of that corps, you will have remarked that they generally do their work pretty well. The truth is, the whole army is burning with an insatiable desire to wreak vengeance upon South Carolina. I almost tremble at her fate, but feel that she deserves all that seems ...
— The Memoirs of General W. T. Sherman, Complete • William T. Sherman

... even with her, Rowena would have kept silence if she had been allowed. Beyond an added touch of dignity, there was no change in her manner towards her younger sister, but, strange to say, the culprit was by no means satisfied to escape so easily. Maud suffered from an insatiable desire to be observed, and—so to speak—live in the public eye. If she could be observed with admiration, so much the better, but given a choice between being disgraced or ignored, she would not have hesitated for the fraction of a moment. ...
— Etheldreda the Ready - A School Story • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey

... as a typical Eastern monarch, a sort of Khalif or Sultan, or fairy-tale Rajah—the prodigious king at once polygamous, unbridled, insatiable by luxury, and learned, artistic, peace-loving, the wisest among men. In advance of the ideas of his time, he was the great builder in Israel, and the commerce of the country was of his making. He left such a reputation for wisdom ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans

... aspect that had yet met my eye. The banks were caving into the river day by day. Houses had fallen into the current, which was undermining the town. Here and there chimneys were standing in solitude, the buildings having been torn down and removed to other localities to save them from the insatiable maw of the river. These pointed upward like so many warning cenotaphs of the river's treachery, and contrasted strongly in the mind's eye with the many happy family circles which had once gathered at their bases ...
— Four Months in a Sneak-Box • Nathaniel H. Bishop

... incident had another consequence. Burr, disappointed in hopes which had almost achieved fulfilment, became from that moment a bitter enemy of Jefferson and his administration. Also, attributing the failure of his promising plot to Hamilton's intervention, he hated Hamilton with a new and insatiable hatred. Perhaps in that hour he already determined that ...
— A History of the United States • Cecil Chesterton

... Great War a new habit was born in the minds of the people, the habit of crises. Even then at first they came decently, in ordered succession—Mons, Ypres, the Coalition, Gallipoli. But the people's craving was insatiable; the people cried for ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, May 19, 1920 • Various

... had an insatiable appetite for the very young. "My little sweet," he said, "is devoted to music; she'll be a musician some day. You wouldn't give me your opinion ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... incredible valor and perseverance and endurance of Cortes; we front "new faces, other minds;" we discover the Amazon through perils and hardships so multitudinous and so severe as to tempt us to think these narrations a myth; we see rapacity insatiable as death, a bloody idol-worship pitiless and terrible; we read Prescott's history with growing avidity and increasing information; read Prescott, and become wiser concerning the aborigines of the Americas and the possibilities of human fortitude and prowess. A study of the ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle

... which should scan and rhyme as well, to search out and harmonise the measure of every syllable, and unite it to the swift, flitting, swallow-like motion of rhyme, to penetrate their poetry with a double music—this was the ambition of the Pleiad. They are insatiable of music, they cannot have enough of it; they desire a music of greater compass perhaps than words can possibly yield, to drain out the last drops of sweetness which a certain note or ...
— The Renaissance - Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Pater

... Vertraute Briefe, writes: "The beautiful quartets and evening concerts for the Archduke Rudolph still continue at Prince von Lobkowitz's, although the Prince himself is about to join his battalion in Bohemia." Reichardt, Vol. I. p. 182, calls Lobkowitz "an indefatigable, insatiable, genuine enthusiast ...
— Beethoven's Letters 1790-1826, Volume 1 of 2 • Lady Wallace

... women were horrid! Now that I am going to leave them they seem so kind and attractive. Every minute of my time is filled up with river-picnics, garden-parties, tennis tournaments, dinners and theatre parties; and my mornings are spent with G. raking in queer shops for curiosities. I am insatiable for things to take home, and Autolycus has packed and roped three large wooden boxes ...
— Olivia in India • O. Douglas

... insatiable heat, and the monotony of the smoky lilac mountains, ever the same and silent, everlastingly solitary, overwhelmed him with depression, and, as it were, made him drowsy and sapped his energy. He was perhaps very clever, talented, remarkably honest; perhaps ...
— The Duel and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov

... troops such places as the 'Eagle Tavern' and 'Grecian Theatre,' overcome popular rioting at Bath, Guilford, Eastbourne, and elsewhere; fill the United Kingdom with his War Cry and his fighting centres, and invade all Europe, and even the Far East. At home he plunged, insatiable of moral and social conquests, into his crusade for 'Darkest England,' being powerful enough to raise in less than a month as much as all England and the Colonies contributed for the Gordon College at Khartoum in response to another victorious general. For ...
— The Authoritative Life of General William Booth • George Scott Railton

... four-wheel cab, laden with luggage and drawn by a wheezy old horse rapidly approaching its last days. Inside was Anna, leaning a little forward to watch the passers-by, bright-eyed, full to the brim of the insatiable curiosity of youth—the desire to understand and appreciate this new world in which she found herself. She was practically an outcast, she had not even the ghost of a plan as to her future, and she had something less than five pounds in her pocket. ...
— Anna the Adventuress • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... had justified his act? He had argued that it was to be a kiss of farewell, and no sooner had he attained his wish than all thought of the stipulation vanished utterly from his mind, leaving only a more insatiable longing. The last vestige of his morality seemed to be swept away, and memory made the taste of stolen waters still sweet to his lips. When he judged Emmet so severely, he was proudly sure of his own standards, but now he felt he had none. Her husband's scornful and warning look, the day they encountered ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins

... old saw framed in ancient days In memories of men, that high estate, Full grown, brings forth its young, nor childless dies, But that from good success Springs to the race a woe insatiable. But I, apart from all, Hold this my creed alone: Ill deeds along bring forth offspring of ill ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris

... favorable hour; and probable, too, that no man of merely compelling magnetism has been interested in her. Mr. Winchell was kindly, a noble nature; he gave her a tender, but only a paternal love. But through him she had traveled; she had had the beauty of life for which her heart was insatiable. There were no children; there never would be children, and what lavish, ecstatic affection she bestowed upon my Reverdy! So day by day I learned that she was a teacher in Connecticut when Mr. Winchell ...
— Children of the Market Place • Edgar Lee Masters

... asked, beginning with the day when Jim showed me the passage in the Daily Occidental, and winding up with the stamp album and the Chailly postmark. It was a long business; and Carthew made it longer, for he was insatiable of details; and it had struck midnight on the old eight-day clock in the corner, before I had ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne

... is interesting to philosophize upon a distinction between a human being and the animal just below him in the scale, but it may serve the present purpose to distinguish the human being as that animal in whom there is an unquenchable and insatiable desire for independence. The effort to escape from the bondage of nature is not solely a human instinct; animals burrow or build retreats through the instinct of self-preservation. But this instinct in animals is soon satisfied, whereas in ...
— Artificial Light - Its Influence upon Civilization • M. Luckiesh

... life; and in no case are order and method more necessary to happiness, (and consequently to virtue,) than in that, where the preservation of health is connected with the satisfying of hunger; an appetite whose cravings are sometimes as inordinate as they are insatiable. ...
— ESSAYS, Political, Economical and Philosophical. Volume 1. • Benjamin Rumford

... their uneventful adventures, and racked her brains to invent more and more details, till her imagination felt like a dry sponge from which every possible drop of moisture had been squeezed. Amy was insatiable. Her interest in the tale never flagged; and when her exhausted friend explained that she really could not think of another word to say on the subject, she would turn the tables by asking, "Then, Miss Katy, mayn't I tell you a chapter?" whereupon she would proceed ...
— What Katy Did Next • Susan Coolidge

... Over the cool, crystal depths of "Hypatia" her thirsty spirit hung eagerly. In Philammon's intellectual nature she found a startling resemblance to her own. Like him, she had entered a forbidden temple, and learned to question; and the same "insatiable craving to know the mysteries of learning" was impelling her, with irresistible force, out into the world of philosophic inquiry. Hours fled on unnoted; with nervous haste the leaves were turned. The town clock struck ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans

... and looked into each other's eyes as if void of speech, of motion, held by the mighty yearning that must look and look with insatiable intensity, the half unreal reality ...
— The Maid of the Whispering Hills • Vingie E. Roe

... angrily. "It's only right to attend to business," said he; "but you think too much of money, Victor—altogether too much. You are insatiable." ...
— The Count's Millions - Volume 1 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau

... presence or excellent sightes whatsoeuer. My searching eyes commended one part aboue another, to bee more beautifull: but my appetite rapt into an other part of her heauenly body, esteeming that aboue the other. And thus my insatiable and wanton eyes, were the euill beginning of all thys perturbing and contentious commotion, whome I founde the seminaries and moouers of all so great strife and trouble, in my wounded and festering heart. Through theyr contumacy, ...
— Hypnerotomachia - The Strife of Loue in a Dreame • Francesco Colonna

... the Presbyterian Church. Now people lost their heads and ran hither and thither, screaming and praying incoherently, dragging their crying children about from one place to another, pumping water frantically to offer it, an impotent libation to an insatiable god. They knew that neither the beating of brooms nor the water from their wells could quench the enemy that was upon them. Red Judgment ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various

... guidance of his uncle, Mr. Edwin Morgan, a consulting engineer of high repute, he visited in process of time every industrial establishment in the neighbourhood—steel works, foundries, engineering shops and tinplate works. His insatiable curiosity, his desire to know the reason for everything, his alert interest in all the processes of manufacture, were noted with smiling admiration by managers and workmen. His last visit to Llanelly ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones

... damp ivory, and against the background of his immobility they moved with a certain amazing monstrousness, interminably. No, they were never still. One wondered what they could be at. Surely he could not have had enough work now to keep those insatiable hands so monstrously in motion. Even far into the night. Tap-tap-tap! Blows continuous and powerful. On what? On nothing? On the bare iron last? And for what purpose? To what ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various

... and we have thus descended four thousand four hundred and thirty feet, nearly a mile, from rim to river. And what a river it is! No one can form any idea of it, unless he stands on the very brink, almost deafened by the sound of its sullen roar and turbulent rapids. It is hungry, insatiable, murderous, cruel. Many a foolish mortal has had the breath dashed from his body by these powerful waves. Those who wish to cross to the other side can defy danger in the cable crossing, but only a skilled boatman should attempt to ...
— The Grand Canyon of Arizona: How to See It, • George Wharton James

... circumstances it can scarcely be expected that the character and habits of the minero should qualify him to take a high rank in the social scale. His insatiable thirst for wealth continually prompts him to embark in new enterprises, whereby he frequently loses in one what he gains in another. After a mine has been worked without gain for a series of years, an unexpected boya probably occurs, and an immense quantity of silver may be extracted. But a minero ...
— Travels in Peru, on the Coast, in the Sierra, Across the Cordilleras and the Andes, into the Primeval Forests • J. J. von Tschudi

... conciliating the popular feelings, have perhaps preserved the forms of monarchy while affording the requisite concessions to the national demands. But the Court was so steeped in the old sentiment of divine right, and moreover so distrustful of Mirabeau's honour and sagacity (the more so as he was insatiable in his pecuniary requisitions), that they would never place their cause frankly in his hands, nor indeed in anyone else's who was capable of discerning their best interests. Lafayette was regarded as an enemy almost (and was 'jaloused' by Mirabeau as ...
— Correspondence & Conversations of Alexis de Tocqueville with Nassau William Senior from 1834 to 1859, Vol. 2 • Alexis de Tocqueville

... coffee, sugar or tobacco; add to these, we have the luxury of newspapers, which is a high gratification to the well known curiosity of a genuine Yankee, by which cant term we always mean a New-England man. We have been laughed at, by the British travellers, for our insatiable curiosity; but such should remember, that their great moralist, Johnson, tells us that curiosity is the thirst of the soul, and is a never-failing mark of a vigorous intellect. The Hottentot has no curiosity—the woolly African has no curiosity—the vacant minded Chinese has no curiosity—but ...
— A Journal of a Young Man of Massachusetts, 2nd ed. • Benjamin Waterhouse

... with the needs of our insatiable, exacting soul, which craves at once for the small and the mighty, the quick and the slow; here it is of us at last, it is ours, and offers at every turn glimpses of beauty that, in former days, we could only enjoy when the ...
— The Automobilist Abroad • M. F. (Milburg Francisco) Mansfield

... far and who loves bully stew; Pryor who dislikes girls with thick ankles, Kore who makes wash-out puns, Bill who has an insatiable desire for fresh eggs, and Stoner—I see a blush on his cheeks and a sparkle in his brown eyes already—I repeat the name Stoner with reverence. I look on the mess-tins which held the confiture and almost weep—because it's all eaten. There's only one ...
— The Red Horizon • Patrick MacGill

... with as much horror as the Catholics themselves. Unfortunately, however, in every state of society and of law analogous to ours, a certain class of men, say rather of monsters, is sure to spring up, as it were, from hell, their throats still parched and heated with that insatiable thirst which the guilty glutton felt before them, and which they now are determined to slake with blood. For some of these men the apology of selfishness, an anxiety to raise themselves out of the struggles of genteel poverty, and a wolfish wish to ...
— Willy Reilly - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton

... Arthur Newcome was a most attentive lover. Lettice contented herself with scribbling two or three short notes a week, but every afternoon the postman brought a bulky envelope addressed to her in the small neat handwriting which was getting familiar to every member of the household. Norah had an insatiable passion for receiving letters, and was inclined to envy her sister this part ...
— Sisters Three • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey

... by Vienne he found another large store awaiting him which he had ordered on his outward journey. Benedict was able to set up a good library in his new Abbey at Wearmouth; but his zeal appears to have been insatiable. We find him for the fifth time at the mart of learning, and bringing home, as Bede has told us, 'a multitude of books of all kinds.' He divided his new wealth between the Church at Wearmouth and the Abbey at Jarrow, across ...
— The Great Book-Collectors • Charles Isaac Elton and Mary Augusta Elton

... trusted, and the Parliament which they even idoliz'd, in sum, the prey they had contended for at the expence of so much sin and damnation, seizd upon by those very instruments, which they had rais'd to serve their insatiable avarice, and prodigious disloyalty. For so it pleased God to chastise their implacable persecution of an excellent Prince, with a slavery under such a Tyrant, as not being contented to butcher even some upon the Scaffold, sold divers of them for slaves, and others he ...
— An Apologie for the Royal Party (1659); and A Panegyric to Charles the Second (1661) • John Evelyn

... Honour of God, or as Persons moved and merited thereunto by servent Zeal to the True Faith, nor to promote the Salvation of their Neighbours, nor to serve the King, as they falsely boast and pretend to do, but in truth, only stimulated and goaded on by insatiable Avarice and Ambition, that they might for ever Domineer, Command, and Tyrannize over the West- Indians, whose Kingdoms they hoped to divide and distribute among themselves. Which to deal candidly in no more or less intentionally, than by all ...
— A Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies • Bartolome de las Casas

... the appetite be obedient and subjected to the governing principle it will become very great: for in the fool the grasping after what is pleasant is insatiable and undiscriminating; and every acting out of the desire increases the kindred habit, and if the desires are great and violent in degree they even expel Reason entirely; therefore they ought to be moderate and few, and in no ...
— Ethics • Aristotle

... he wondered, seeing he was willing to make a covenant with death; and he that loves danger, shall fall into it. For whatever honour there be in the office of well-ordering a married life, and a family, moved us but slightly. But me for the most part the habit of satisfying an insatiable appetite tormented, while it held me captive; him, an admiring wonder was leading captive. So were we, until Thou, O Most High, not forsaking our dust, commiserating us miserable, didst come to our help, ...
— The Confessions of Saint Augustine • Saint Augustine

... he suspected the actions of his wife. Attaching herself to Napoleon, to dig a mine under the feet of the Colossus, that design at least afforded emotions sufficient to gratify the humor of the most insatiable. During some time, all went well. The princess was beautiful and spirited, dexterous and false, perfidious and seductive. She was surrounded by fanatical adorers, upon whom she played off a kind of ferocious coquetry, to induce them to run their heads into grave conspiracies. They hoped to resuscitate ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue

... grander meaning into them. Isaiah had sung of a time when the veil over all nations should be destroyed 'in this mountain,' and when death should be swallowed up for ever; and Paul grasps the words and says that the prophet's loftiest anticipations will be fulfilled when that monster, whose insatiable maw swallows down youth, beauty, strength, wisdom, will himself be swallowed up. Hosea had prophesied of Israel's restoration under figure of a resurrection, and Paul grasps his words and fills them ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren

... ways, the impertinence that he suffered most; for he had the magnitude of soul that hungered for placement, and the plague of two masters was on him. Huntress and "Hound" he had to choose between, beauty and the insatiable Prince; harsh and determined lovers, both of them, too much craving altogether for an artistic nature. The earth had no room for him and he did not want heaven so soon. He was not saint, even though his name followed him even, ...
— Adventures in the Arts - Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets • Marsden Hartley

... that could not be put out of sight, even by those most inclined to rely on the military prestige of France, acquired in wars of the old conventional European type. Brought year by year more and more into contact with the white man, and year by year more debased by an insatiable thirst for the deadly fire-water, the American Indian had indeed gradually become less and less formidable to his foes; he was, however, by no means an enemy to be despised. Many a well-conceived plan ...
— The King's Warrant - A Story of Old and New France • Alfred H. Engelbach

... of woman, combined with an all-transcending insatiable sensuousness, produced the peculiar sexually-mystic world-feeling which is so characteristic of him. Night deeply moves his soul, longing, the memory of the beloved woman, adoration for the Virgin, his fantastic conception of an incarnated universe ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka

... and plucking back the spear She tore him. Bellow'd brazen-throated Mars 1020 Loud as nine thousand warriors, or as ten Join'd in close combat. Grecians, Trojans shook Appall'd alike at the tremendous voice Of Mars insatiable with deeds of blood. Such as the dimness is when summer winds 1025 Breathe hot, and sultry mist obscures the sky, Such brazen Mars to Diomede appear'd By clouds accompanied in his ascent Into the boundless ether. Reaching soon The Olympian ...
— The Iliad of Homer - Translated into English Blank Verse • Homer

... midge, or sand-fly, which causes intolerable itching, and subsequent irritation, and is in this respect the most insufferable torment in Sikkim; the minutest rent in one's clothes is detected by the acute senses of this insatiable bloodsucker, which is itself so small as to be barely visible without a microscope. We daily arrived at our camping-ground, streaming with blood, and mottled with the bites of peepsas, gnats, midges, and mosquitos, besides ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker

... perhaps of New-York; but he was speedily given to understand that, on the contrary, Mr. Edwards was a gay bachelor of good family and large fortune, who, in addition to gambling, intriguing, and other pleasant little propensities, had an insatiable passion for the dance, and was accustomed to rotate morning, noon, and night, whenever he was not gambling, &c. as aforesaid. "And," continued Benson, "I'll lay you any bet you please, that the first thing we see on arriving at our hotel, will be Tom Edwards dancing the ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various

... respect the black bear and the grizzly were alike: they never seemed to have enough to eat, but had the insatiable appetites of growing boys; never showing any signs of being finicky, but devouring everything edible. Ants, hoppers, chipmunks, marmots and rabbits, comprised their fresh meat; while roots, shoots, bulbs, grass, berries and practically everything ...
— A Mountain Boyhood • Joe Mills

... degree—see if thou canst not compound matters, so as to keep a little nook apart for thy private life; that is, for thyself! Let the great Popkins Question not absorb wholly the individual soul of thee, as Smith or Johnson. Don't so entirely consume thyself under that insatiable boiler, that when thy poor little monad rushes out from the sooty furnace, and arrives at the stars, thou mayest find no vocation for thee there, and feel as if thou hadst nothing to do amidst the still splendors of the Infinite. I don't deny to thee the uses of "Public Life;" ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various

... is pleasing to observe an insatiable thirst for knowledge, and a quick perception of the relations of things. In her moral character, it is beautiful to behold her continual gladness, her keen enjoyment of existence, her expansive love, her unhesitating confidence, her sympathy with suffering, ...
— American Notes for General Circulation • Charles Dickens

... like a tiger his prey, and seized his mother's hand that held the bottle, and he furiously pumped the milk into that insatiable gulf of a stomach. But he found time to gaze about the room too. A tear stood in each roving eye, caused by the ...
— The Grim Smile of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett

... stop is saying "enough" to the insatiable. In cosmic punctuation there are no periods: illusion of periods is incomplete view ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort

... alike," I repeated, making, as I spoke, one mental entire reservation. "All vain alike, I mean; flatter their vanity ever so little and they are at your very feet, asking 'for more,' like Oliver Twist; more bread for amour propre, the insatiable! It was that sketch of mine that wrought the spell, though unintentionally, of course, and the sly fellow knew very well that it was no caricature—that is, if he peeped, as he pretends—but a tolerably correct likeness that might have satisfied Sall herself. By-the-by, ...
— Sea and Shore - A Sequel to "Miriam's Memoirs" • Mrs. Catharine A. Warfield

... with the petty affairs of men. It is difficult to say, whether it might not be better for men to be wholly without religion, than to have one of this kind, which is a reproach to its object. The vanity of man, and his insatiable longing after existence, have led him also to dream of a life after death. A being full of contradictions, he is the most wretched of creatures; since the other creatures have no wants transcending the bounds of their nature. Man is full of desires and wants that reach to infinity, and ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke

... sword of Republican France destroyed the independence of half of Europe, deluged the continent with tears, devoured its millions upon millions, and closed the long catalogue of guilt, by founding and defending to the last, the most powerful, selfish, and insatiable of military despotisms? ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick

... external characteristics and incidental references. Nevertheless, the very volume and mass of these secondary books witness to the fertility of the first-hand books with which they deal, and show beyond dispute that men have an insatiable desire to get at their interior meanings. If these great poems had been mere illustrations of individual skill and gift, this interest would have long ago exhausted itself. That singular and unsurpassed qualities of construction, style, and diction are present in "Faust" and the "Divine Comedy" ...
— Books and Culture • Hamilton Wright Mabie

... He observed that he'd been a prisoner of the invaders, and had escaped. Then the driver's curiosity became insatiable. He wanted to know every imaginable detail of that experience. He expressed almost incredulous disappointment that Lockley couldn't give even a partial description of the creatures. When convinced, he launched a detailed ...
— Operation Terror • William Fitzgerald Jenkins

... combinations of this international space lab crew. Yet it was perhaps even stranger that the delicate-looking blond youth was a top machinist, a trade that he had plied throughout his student days in order to economically support an insatiable thirst for knowledge. A trade that had led him to this newest center of man's search ...
— Where I Wasn't Going • Walt Richmond

... waters of the canal floated several gigantic swans, with insatiable and endless appetites. We used to feed them from the dining-room windows, which ...
— The Ghost - A Modern Fantasy • Arnold Bennett

... the neighbouring rooms through two or three partitions. There is a rumour afloat about Pasha, that she got into a brothel not at all through necessity or temptation or deception, but had gone into it her own self, voluntarily, following her horrible, insatiable instinct. But the proprietress of the house and both the housekeepers indulge Pasha in every way and encourage her insane weakness, because, thanks to it, Pasha is in constant demand and earns four, five times as much as any one of the ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin

... tendencies that later on made him great in his chosen field. His family possessed a distinct tendency toward conformity and respectability, but Carl was a companion of every 'alley-bum' in Vacaville. His respectable friends never won him away from his insatiable interest in the under-dog. They now know it makes valid ...
— An American Idyll - The Life of Carleton H. Parker • Cornelia Stratton Parker

... breakfast, though too rank and fishy-flavoured for unpractised palates. The goose has made some figure in English history. The churlishness of the brave Richard Coeur de Lion, a sovereign distinguished for an insatiable appetite and vigorous digestion, in an affair of roast goose, was the true cause of his captivity in Germany. The king, disguised as a palmer, was returning to his own dominions, attended by Sir Fulk Doyley and Sir Thomas de Multon, "brothers in arms," and wearing the same privileged garb. They ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 392, Saturday, October 3, 1829. • Various

... George declared, that as he had been able to drink nothing for the last three days, he'd make up for it now, and that he wouldn't allow himself to be disturbed to dress for the best ball that could be given in Ireland. Fred, however, was not so insatiable, and at about eleven he and Ussher dressed ...
— The Macdermots of Ballycloran • Anthony Trollope

... impregnable to Indian assault. This pueblo presented to the Spanish adventurers the extraordinary spectacle of an Indian society lying two ethnical periods back of European society, but with a government and plan of life at once intelligent, orderly, and complete. There was aroused an insatiable curiosity for additional particulars, which has continued for three centuries, and which has called into existence a larger number of works than were ever before written upon any people of the same number and of ...
— Houses and House-Life of the American Aborigines • Lewis H. Morgan

... are full of herds and horses, the woods well stored with swine and goats, the pastures with sheep, the plains with cattle, the arable fields with ploughs; and although these things in very deed are in great abundance, yet each of them, from the insatiable nature of the mind, seems too narrow and scanty. Therefore lands are seized, landmarks removed, boundaries invaded, and the markets in consequence abound with merchandise, the courts of justice with law-suits, and the ...
— The Itinerary of Archibishop Baldwin through Wales • Giraldus Cambrensis

... sovereign of Mantua, of the house of Gonzaga, created Matthioli supernumerary senator of Mantua, and gave him the title of Count. Towards the end of 1677 the Abb d'Estrades, ambassador from France to the Republic of Venice, conceived the idea, which he was well aware would be highly acceptable to the insatiable ambition of his master, Louis XIV., of inducing the weak and unfortunate Duke Ferdinand Charles to allow of the introduction of a French garrison into Casale, astrongly-fortified town, in a great measure the key of Italy. The cession of the fortress ...
— The South of France—East Half • Charles Bertram Black

... one corner and then the other, shaking hands with the principals and dropping down out of the ring. The challenges went on. Ever Youth climbed through the ropes—Youth unknown, but insatiable—crying out to mankind that with strength and skill it would match issues with the winner. A few years before, in his own heyday of invincibleness, Tom King would have been amused and bored by these preliminaries. But now he sat fascinated, unable to shake the vision ...
— When God Laughs and Other Stories • Jack London

... Jean Struys en Moscovie, en Tartarie, en Perse, aux Indes. Traduits du Hollandais. Amsterdam. 4to. 1681. Rouen, 3 vols. 12mo. 1730.—The Travels of Struys, who was actuated from his earliest youth with an insatiable desire to visit foreign countries, are especially interesting from the account he gives of Muscovy ...
— Robert Kerr's General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 18 • William Stevenson

... his people. The great rising of the Castilian commoners was finally crushed, thanks to class dissensions and the diplomacy of the sovereign. Thenceforward the revenues of Castile were at the mercy of the Emperor, whose needs for his world-wide responsibilities were insatiable; and the Indies of the West, being the appanage of the crown of Castile, were drained to uphold the claim of Spain and its Emperor-King to dictate to Christendom the form and doctrines of its religious faith. It is no wonder, therefore, that the despatches of the obscure ...
— Mexico • Charles Reginald Enock

... briskly out toward a certain quarter of the town, a complex of narrow streets and little houses with stuffy rooms, where glasses are filled and emptied freely, and men sit with half-intoxicated women on their knees, sacrificing to insatiable idols. ...
— The Song Of The Blood-Red Flower • Johannes Linnankoski



Words linked to "Insatiable" :   unsatiable, unsatiated, unsated, unsatisfiable, satiate, unsatisfied, unquenchable, insatiate, quenchless



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