"Conceivable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... a causeur, but he was also a martyr. No, after all the Beautiful is not so important as you imagine you are. No doubt for a few billion years painters and musicians and epigrammatists will remain the centre cf creation; but when the sun grows cold it is conceivable that invaluable canvases may be used up as fuel, and that humanity may sacrifice even your printed paradoxes to keep warmth a little longer in its decrepit bones. The fact is, you are too borne, too one-sided, to ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... conceivable how Boaz Negro could have come through this much of his life still possessed of that unquenchable and priceless exuberance; how he would sing in the dawn; how, simply listening to the recital of deeds in gale or brawl, he could easily forget ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... assert, that there is scarcely a conceivable mode of applying tobacco to the human body, which has not been thought of and practised. In former times, it was used by the oculists. Howell says "that it is good to fortify and preserve the sight, the smoak being let in round about ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... jokes about religion; and they have almost always invoked the authority of that very sensible commandment which says, "Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain." Of course, I pointed out that I was not in any conceivable sense taking the name in vain. To take a thing and make a joke out of it is not to take it in vain. It is, on the contrary, to take it and use it for an uncommonly good object. To use a thing in vain ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... as author. The producer is up against realities. He, first, renders the play concrete, gradually condenses its filmy vapours into a solid element.... He suggests the casting. "What do you think of X. for the old man?" asks the producer. The author is staggered. Is it conceivable that so renowned a producer can have so misread and misunderstood the play? X. would be preposterous as the old man. But the producer goes on talking. And suddenly the author sees possibilities in X. But at the same time he sees a different ...
— The Author's Craft • Arnold Bennett
... own authorities. The world has never seen a quicker blow struck; it has seldom seen a blow so crushingly severe; it has not often seen one so aggressively unjustifiable. And, be it noted, that down to the last halter and the least fragment of detail, the German Army was provided with every conceivable ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson
... said, "I know. I see." She was living for the moment which should exhale itself somewhere about midnight, after the lights had gone out on her last appearance, living for it as a Carmelite might live for the climax of her veil and her vows if it were conceivable that beyond the cell and the grating she saw the movement and the colour and the passion of a wider life. All Hilda's splendid vitality went into her intention, of which she was altogether mistress, riding it and reining it in a straight course through the encumbered hours. It keyed her to ...
— Hilda - A Story of Calcutta • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... and kept a little store, in which, with the assistance of a shop-girl, she served customers, who called from morning to night. She dealt principally in groceries and vegetables, but besides these, every conceivable thing was found piled up in her shop: knitting-yarn, sheets of pictures, slate-pencils, cheese, pen- knives, balls of twine, herring, soap, buttons, writing-paper, glue, hairpins, cigar-holders, oranges, fly-poison, brushes, varnish, gingerbread, tin soldiers, corks, tallow candles, ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: German • Various
... 1855, and heard the guns of Sebastopol booming six miles away. The cold was bitter, men were daily frozen to death in the trenches, food was very scarce, and the streets of Balaclava were full of 'swell English cavalry and horse-artillery carrying rations, and officers in every conceivable ...
— The Red Book of Heroes • Leonora Blanche Lang
... and it is true, I have no doubt; but, good God, to think that a man, so richly dowered as I am with every conceivable blessing, should yet have so small a reserve of faith and patience! Even now I can frame epigrams about it. "To learn to be content not to be content"—that is the secret—but meanwhile I stumble in dark paths, through the grove nullo penetrabilis astro, where men have wandered ...
— The Altar Fire • Arthur Christopher Benson
... ears; tongues of flame leaped from street to street; and in this baleful glare were to be seen, as of demons, the figures of busy plunderers, moving, pushing, rioting through the black smoke, bearing away every conceivable ...
— A Brief History of the United States • Barnes & Co.
... might say where there is no view at all, he erects an Aussichtsturm. These outlook towers are a bane of existence to a stranger. One goes out to dinner and is taken for a walk round the island. At every conceivable point is an outlook tower, generally only a summer-house, but, alas, there are usually some steps leading to the top which one toils up, and has the fatigue of doing so without any reward, as they are not high enough ...
— Through Finland in Carts • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... will write "No thorn" upon their envelopes too; and you open the case, and presently out flies a poisoned stiletto, which springs into a man's bosom, and makes the wretch howl with anguish. When the bailiffs are after a man, they adopt all sorts of disguises, pop out on him from all conceivable corners, and tap his miserable shoulders. His wife is taken ill; his sweetheart, who remarked his brilliant, too brilliant appearance at the Hyde Park review, will meet him at Cremorne, or where you will. The old friend who has owed him that money these five years ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... later years essays have come to be of the most highly finished type of literature and some of the most beautiful passages, the noblest thoughts, the most inspiring utterances, are to be found in them. Almost every conceivable topic is treated: there are biographical essays which do little more than narrate the facts of a man's life; there are descriptive essays whose only function is to make their readers see something as the ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... Papal justice seems to have been executed with unexampled promptitude. With what the report justly calls "laudable celerity," the case was got ready for trial in a week, and on the 30th of July, the civil and criminal court of Civita Vecchia met to try the prisoner. There could be no conceivable question about the case. The murder had been committed during broad daylight, in a crowded room, and indeed, the prisoner confessed his guilt, and only pleaded gross provocation as an excuse. There was no proof, however, that Avanzi ...
— Rome in 1860 • Edward Dicey
... restorer of childhood to men—dreams, not like Galahad's or Guenevere's, but full of happy, childish wonder as in the earlier world. It is a world in which the centaur and the ram with the fleece of gold are conceivable. The song sung always claims to be sung for the first time. There are hints at a language common to birds and beasts and men. Everywhere there is an impression of surprise, as of people first waking ...
— Aesthetic Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater
... well-lighted music room, where the Herr received his pupils, Dorothy found the things of greatest interest. Half a dozen violins were scattered about on the shelves, or lying on the old-fashioned piano, while clocks of every conceivable size and shape, bronze statues from the Far East, and queerly woven baskets from the Pampas, mingled with the Mexican pottery and valuable geological specimens from her own ...
— Dorothy's Triumph • Evelyn Raymond
... literary competition, to obtain novelty of material. The varieties of aspect and color in healthy fruit, be it sweet or sour, may be within certain limits described exhaustively. Not so the blotches of its conceivable blight: and while the symmetries of integral human character can only be traced by harmonious and tender skill, like the branches of a living tree, the faults and gaps of one gnawed away by corroding accident can be shuffled into senseless change like the ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... exemplification of the first truths of Pere Bouffier[1386], or the original principles of Reid and of Beattie; without admitting which, we can no more argue in metaphysicks, than we can argue in mathematicks without axioms. To me it is not conceivable how Berkeley can be answered by pure reasoning; but I know that the nice and difficult task was to have been undertaken by one of the most luminous minds of the present age, had not politicks 'turned him ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... had resolved, being now freed from legislative cares, to seize the opportunity for a visit to England, whither he was drawn by feelings which every educated and impressible American feels, in a degree scarcely conceivable by the English themselves. And being here (but he had already too much experience of English self-sufficiency to confess so much) he began to feel the deep yearning which a sensitive American—his mind full ...
— Doctor Grimshawe's Secret - A Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... melted, his voice had an impersonal note that crushed her, making her feel as if she were dealing with a cosmic force, rather than a human being;—one of his own detestable mountains, for instance. But for that, it is conceivable that there might have been something approaching a 'scene'; that she might have obeyed her unreasoning impulse to plead with him, and exhort him not to push his test of her to such pitiless lengths. As it was, she sank into a chair without answering; and he turned towards ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... at first. He wore a dark-brown velvet jacket with a high, black, linen-lined collar turned up about his neck. The thick black hair, escaping as it could below and between the cross bandages, projected in curious tails and horns, giving him the strangest appearance conceivable. This muffled and bandaged head was so unlike what she had anticipated, that for a ...
— The Invisible Man • H. G. Wells
... and, going up to her, stroked her cheek with her loving little hands. "Are you hurt, Cousin Lucy?" she asked wonderingly; and as her cousin shook her head, she asked in a lower tone, "Were you naughty, Cousin Lucy?"—these being to her the only conceivable causes for sorrow. ...
— Lucy Raymond - Or, The Children's Watchword • Agnes Maule Machar
... disgust the reader by dragging him through every conceivable horror, physical and moral, to depict with lurid excitement and with offensive minuteness the life in jail and brothel—all this is to overreach the object.... Even things actually terrible may become distorted when a writer screams them out in a sensational ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair
... reason besides this, however. Lenine—and he personifies Bolshevism—was, and is, a doctrinaire Marxist of the most dogmatic type conceivable. As such he believed that the new social order must be the creation of that class which is the peculiar product of modern capitalism, the industrial proletariat. To that class alone he and his followers pinned all their faith and hope, and that class was a small minority of the population and bound ...
— Bolshevism - The Enemy of Political and Industrial Democracy • John Spargo
... therefore is not its, but merely an, antecedent,—or an incausative alien co-incident in time; as if, for instance, Jack's shout were followed by a flash of lightning, which should strike and precipitate the ball on St. Paul's cathedral. This would be a miracle as long as no causative 'nexus' was conceivable between the antecedent, the noise of the shout, and ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... been put away for the four years since I left college. They must be about the most hopelessly ancient cut conceivable to eyes like hers. Shall I risk looking like a rustic in such a house as that?" But Stuart's eyes were eager as ...
— Under the Country Sky • Grace S. Richmond
... of "cotton rock" in the bluff is flint in great quantities, and in every conceivable shape, that these people could have resorted to had they been so disposed, and why they used the softer material I will leave to some archaeologist to determine. The tools themselves are made after no pattern, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 841, February 13, 1892 • Various
... facts like these, we may surely say, that the existence of the infusory animalcules, and even of the entozoa, is conceivable, supposing they could only have been produced by parents of their own kind, and without having recourse to the anomalous and hypothetical doctrine of equivocal generation. We may not be able to trace their line of parentage, for our imperfect vision cannot follow the ...
— A Theory of Creation: A Review of 'Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation' • Francis Bowen
... and write observations, such as I find in the writings of many men of great attainments and of great influence, of which the following might be a general type: If the statesmen could attain to the requisite knowledge and wisdom, it is conceivable that the State might perform important regulative functions in the production and distribution of wealth, against which no positive and sweeping theoretical objection could be made from the side of economic science; but statesmen never can acquire the requisite knowledge and ...
— What Social Classes Owe to Each Other • William Graham Sumner
... thing to live in Manitoba than in North Dakota, or to live in North Dakota than in Manitoba; but worse than almost any conceivable place of residence would be a status which might change in the future, so that one could not tell say five years ahead in what country he was going to live. A frontier is not merely a line drawn on a map or demarcated on the ground; a frontier ...
— The Geneva Protocol • David Hunter Miller
... had the patience to keep on at his strenuous task unremittingly for, perhaps, twenty-four hours or more, it is conceivable that this fierce digger might have succeeded in making his way into the chamber. There was no such implacable purpose, however, in his attack. In a very little while he would have desisted from what he knew to be a vain undertaking. Even had he succeeded, the beavers would have fled before he ...
— The House in the Water - A Book of Animal Stories • Charles G. D. Roberts
... in one of Buffon's works on the question as to whether or not a crocodile was to be classified as an insect; and the instructive feature in the disquisition was this, that although a crocodile differs from an insect as regards every conceivable particular of its internal anatomy, no allusion at all is made to this fact, while the whole discussion is made to turn on the hardness of the external casing of a crocodile resembling the hardness of the external casing of a beetle; and when at last Buffon ...
— The Scientific Evidences of Organic Evolution • George John Romanes
... is in effect just a big church, a religious hive, whose every cell is a temple, a shrine or a mosque, and whose every conceivable earthly and heavenly good is procurable under one roof, so to speak—a sort of Army and Navy Stores, ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... from crisis to catastrophe, in its very conception, is the most Elizabethan, though perhaps the most impressive of the tragedies. Twelfth Night is suited to any stage, but Troilus and Cressida and Pericles are hardly conceivable except on the Elizabethan. Despite such variations, however, Shakespeare's relations to the contemporary drama were manifestly constant and immediate. If it was rarely a question with him what the ancients had written, it was always a question what ...
— The Facts About Shakespeare • William Allan Nielson
... became respectable, and returned to an office where there were no Kings and no incidents outside the daily manufacture of a newspaper. A newspaper office seems to attract every conceivable sort of person, to the prejudice of discipline. Zenana-mission ladies arrive, and beg that the Editor will instantly abandon all his duties to describe a Christian prize-giving in a back slum of a perfectly inaccessible village; Colonels who have been ...
— Stories by English Authors: Orient • Various
... when Darwin published his "Origin of Species," the theory of evolution has become so generally accepted that to-day it is little more assailed than the doctrine of gravitation. And yet, while the average man of intelligence bows to the formula that all which now exists has come from the simplest conceivable state of things,—a universal nebula, if you will,—in his secret soul he makes one exception—himself. That there is a great deal more assent than conviction in the world is a chiding which may come as justly from the teacher's table as from the preacher's pulpit. Now, if we but catch ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - Invention and Discovery • Various
... of denying it. He was cleverer and better read, had he not mastered the contents of every known romance—high-souled works which Foy bluntly declared were rubbish and refused even to open? Was he not a poet? But remembering a certain sonnet he did not follow this comparison. In short, how was it conceivable that a woman looking upon himself, a very type of the chivalry of Spain, silver-tongued, a follower—nay, a companion of the Muses, one to whom in every previous adventure of the heart to love had ...
— Lysbeth - A Tale Of The Dutch • H. Rider Haggard
... Is it conceivable that the reporter of a law, that is about to exile or imprison forty thousand priests, should employ in an argument such silly bombast as ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 3 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 2 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... the Dyaks of the south; the Idaan of the north; the Kagins; and a race little better than monkeys, who live in trees, eat without cooking, are hunted by the other tribes, and would seem to exist in the lowest conceivable grade of humanity. If we may trust these accounts, these latter people resemble in many particulars the Orang Benua, or aborigines of the peninsula; but the Dyaks and Idaans are far superior, living in villages, cultivating ...
— The Expedition to Borneo of H.M.S. Dido - For the Suppression of Piracy • Henry Keppel
... stay-sails out of the bolt-ropes, followed by nearly all the canvas, which, ill furled in our hurry, broke loose from the gaskets, and, fluttering away with loud flaps, was soon reduced to ribbons, knotted and twisted in every conceivable way. As the ship fell off into the trough of the sea when her sails rent, a foaming billow came roaring up, and striking her, made a clean breach over us. There were shouts and cries fore and aft. Jerry and I ...
— A Voyage round the World - A book for boys • W.H.G. Kingston
... Polling in 1735 and devoted the rest of his life to the revival of learning in Bavaria. He died at Polling on the 5th of February 1775. Amort, who had the reputation of being the most learned man of his age, was a voluminous writer on every conceivable subject, from poetry to astronomy, from dogmatic theology to mysticism. His best known works are: a manual of theology in 4 vols., Theologia electica, moralis et scholastica (Augsburg, 1752; revised by Benedict XIV. for the 1753 edition published at Bologna); a defence of Catholic ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... CONCEIVE a God?—But let this mean Will to Truth unto you, that everything be transformed into the humanly conceivable, the humanly visible, the humanly sensible! Your own discernment shall ye follow ...
— Thus Spake Zarathustra - A Book for All and None • Friedrich Nietzsche
... Peking. Yuean-ming Yuean, or the "Bright Round Garden," to give it its proper name, had been laid out by the Jesuit fathers on the plan of the Trianon at Versailles, and was packed with valuable porcelain, old bronzes, and every conceivable kind of curio, most of which were looted or ...
— China and the Manchus • Herbert A. Giles
... finds me at one with all. The Silence, this day, finds me at peace with God, Man and Nature. The Silence, this day, finds me in at-one-ment with God and all, in unity with every conceivable thing in the universe. Therefore, my unity, my at-one-ment with the Father, my wholeness of spirit with God brings into my life everything ...
— The Silence • David V. Bush
... see Dr. Herrick had prepared everything. And much of what we are about to do is merely symbolical, of course. Most people undervalue symbols. They do not seem to understand that there could never have been any conceivable need of inventing a periphrasis ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... of evidence we can have upon this matter, it will resolve itself into two kinds. We may have historical evidence and we may have experimental evidence. It is, for example, conceivable, that inasmuch as the hardened mud which forms a considerable portion of the thickness of the earth's crust contains faithful records of the past forms of life, and inasmuch as these differ more and more as we go further down,—it is possible and conceivable ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... of steam and gunpowder. An engine bored holes in the rock fifteen feet deep and twelve inches in diameter; and these were so placed, and in such numbers, that at a single blast 170 tons of granite were blown into the air—an operation hardly conceivable. This canal leaves the town in a westerly direction—being, at its outset, about a quarter of a mile from the Merrimac, but gradually approximating for a quarter of a mile, until it touches and unites with that river. Between ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 429 - Volume 17, New Series, March 20, 1852 • Various
... of rubble, which filled the streets to a depth of a dozen yards, burying everything beneath them. Yet here and there could be seen the forms of dead pedestrians, motor-cars emerging out of the debris, lying in every conceivable position; horses, horribly mangled, were shrieking as they tried to free themselves. And yet, despite this ruin, the general impression upon Dick's mind, as he beat to and fro, signaling to his flight to spread, was that ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, October, 1930 • Various
... task, may be accepted as the two varieties who are continually present with us—the vicious, lazy lout, and the toiling slave. They, too, have lost all faith of life being other than it is and has been. As in Africa, it is all trees trees, trees with no other world conceivable; so is it here—it is all vice and poverty and crime. To many the world is all slum, with the Workhouse as an intermediate purgatory before the grave. And just as Mr. Stanley's Zanzibaris lost faith, and could only be induced to plod on in brooding sullenness of dull despair, so the most of ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth
... conceivable that anything pertaining to the development of chemical science in America would fail to interest its chemists. The response to the needs of the Nation in the last few years has shown how marvelously they wrought and the wonderful ...
— James Cutbush - An American Chemist, 1788-1823 • Edgar F. Smith
... from our own movement in an opposite direction; or, again, from our both moving in the first direction, the object more rapidly than ourselves; or, finally, from our both moving in an opposite direction to this, ourselves more rapidly than the object. There is thus always a variety of conceivable explanations, and the action of past experience and association shows itself very plainly in the determination of the direction of interpretation. Thus, it is our instinctive tendency to take apparent movement for real movement, except when the fact of ...
— Illusions - A Psychological Study • James Sully
... day of the general conflagration will be at hand. In the mean time, it remains, like the top of Mount Meru, covered with clouds, or, like the inside of a Chinese puzzle, a work of unrivaled art, conceivable but intangible ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 341, March, 1844, Vol. 55 • Various
... a negative picture, in a time varying from half an hour to five or six hours, according to the intensity of the light; and the impression produced varies in apparent force from a faint and hardly perceptible picture to one of the highest conceivable fulness and richness both of tint and detail, the color being in this case a superb velvety brown. This extreme richness of effect is not produced unless lead be present, either in the ingredients ...
— The History and Practice of the Art of Photography • Henry H. Snelling
... opposite side of the chancel, and apparently reading most diligently the Ten Commandments, the Creed, and the Lord's Prayer, which were on the wall there. I was in a general state of mild but ever-increasing surprise, and endeavored to find some conceivable reason for such very ...
— The Lady of the Ice - A Novel • James De Mille
... jumbled mass of the remains of a departed race I cannot imagine, and what made it even more dreadful was that in this dry air a considerable number of the bodies had simply become desiccated with the skin still on them, and now, fixed in every conceivable position, stared at us out of the mountain of white bones, grotesquely horrible caricatures of humanity. In my astonishment I uttered an ejaculation, and the echoes of my voice, ringing in the vaulted space, disturbed a skull that had been accurately balanced for many ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard
... evidence of this—she had deliberately concocted a story to fit those of Elizabeth Francis and Agnes Brown, and that her daughter, hearing her mother's narrative in court—a very possible thing in that day—had fitted hers into it. It is conceivable too that Mother Waterhouse had yielded merely to the wish to amaze her listeners. It is a more probable supposition that the questions asked of her by the judge were based upon the accusations already made by Agnes Brown and that ...
— A History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718 • Wallace Notestein
... before them." The appearances and disappearances of Jesus after his resurrection may have been mysterious or miraculous as was his walking upon the sea in the days of his previous ministry; but he gave his disciples to understand by every conceivable, sensible sign that he had risen from the dead in his actual, physical, human body. The theory that the resurrection can be explained as a hallucination, a vision, or an apparition is forever silenced ...
— The Gospel of Luke, An Exposition • Charles R. Erdman
... moment in my stressed career, Amid no memory-moving urgencies, Have I, sir, felt so gravely set on me The sudden, vast responsibility That I feel now. Few things conceivable Could more momentous to the future be Than what may spring from counsel here to-night On means to meet the plot unparalleled In full fierce play elsewhere. Sir, this being so, And seeing how the events of these last days ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... of Eternity without any conceivable beginning and conceivable end was so thoroughly realised by the Hindu sages that the chiefdom of Heaven itself was to them the concern of a moment. Nothing less than unchangeable felicity for all times was the object ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... Angouleme upon my bicycle, and I was at that age when all human beings think themselves immortal. I had desired to get off the main high road into the hills upon the left, to the east of it, and I was at an age when the cessation of mundane experience is not a conceivable thing. Moreover, this innkeeper had been pointed out to me as a man who could give very useful information upon the nature of the roads I had to travel, and it had never occurred to me that he would switch me off after ...
— On Nothing & Kindred Subjects • Hilaire Belloc
... irksome; and when he discovered that he had no aptitude for it, he began to hate it. Often, when he should have been doing something that was given him, he wasted his time drawing little pictures on the office note-paper. He made sketches of Watson in every conceivable attitude, and Watson was impressed by his talent. It occurred to him to take the drawings home, and he came back next day with the praises ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... with almost every conceivable atrocity that man is capable of perpetrating. Whether these brutalities are perpetrated with the sanction of the German authorities, or are merely the expression of individual hatred, one is not prepared to ...
— Over the Top With the Third Australian Division • G. P. Cuttriss
... reservation must be cast far, far away, to snatch the victory from him and to save Hiram. Every fair weapon she might use; only this treachery she could not, might not have recourse to. He must be made to feel that she was more magnanimous than he; that she, under all conceivable circumstances, kept her word. That was settled; her bosom once more rose and fell, and her eye brightened again; still it was some little time before she could find the right words with which to ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... Traverse Rocke, for no conceivable reason, unless it was that the young private was a perfect contrast to himself, in the possession of a handsome person, a well cultivated mind, and a gentlemanly deportment—cause sufficient for the antagonism of a mean ...
— Capitola the Madcap • Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... sleep that night. Sleep would not come. Hour after hour passed, and her wrath refused to be quelled. She tried every conceivable method, but time hung heavily. It was not quite peep of day, however, when she laid her well-worn family Bible aside. It had been her mother's, and amid all the anxieties and tribulations incident to the life of a woman who had free negroes ...
— The Best American Humorous Short Stories • Various
... conceivable that it is to some occasion in this campaign that Vaughan refers when he calls Dr. Powell his "fellow-prisoner" (vol. ii., p. 178). The poet may even have been the Captain Vaughan whose name appears in the official list of prisoners taken ...
— Poems of Henry Vaughan, Silurist, Volume II • Henry Vaughan
... did more. Up to the point where the assailants conquered, or died, it secured and maintained during the most critical moment of all the integrity of the allied line. For the trench was not only taken, it was held thereafter against all comers, and in the teeth of every conceivable projectile, until the night of Sunday, the 25th, when all that remained of the war-broken but victorious battalions was relieved by ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 3, June, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... the windows. All at once, he got up, and from the rack fastened across the beamed ceiling he took an old black book, his friend and evil counsellor, the Grand-Mele which had been in his family for generations. It was a book of magic, containing spells to be used on every conceivable occasion, and Dominic Le Mierre was past-master in the black art. Turning over the pages with knitted brows, he searched for a spell to be used against Perrin Corbet. ...
— Where Deep Seas Moan • E. Gallienne-Robin
... them by their hair, and then set fire to them; moisten their wounds with quicklime, boiling pitch, or molten lead; make them sit on red-hot iron stools; burn their sides with torches; break their bones on wheels, and torture them in every conceivable way. And, with all this, physical pain counts for nothing; indeed, it seems to be desired. Moreover, a continual miracle protects them. John drinks poison but is unharmed. Sebastian smiles although pierced with arrows; sometimes they remain in the air at the right or left ...
— The Dream • Emile Zola
... the "Spring and Autumn," all military commanders were statesmen as well, and the class of professional generals, for conducting external campaigns, did not then exist. It was not until the period of the "Six States" [27] that this custom changed. Now although Wu was an uncivilized State, it is conceivable that Tso should have left unrecorded the fact that Sun Wu was a great general and yet held no civil office? What we are told, therefore, about Jang-chu [28] and Sun Wu, is not authentic matter, but the ...
— The Art of War • Sun Tzu
... parts pass their lives in the saddle. Horses are used for almost every conceivable employment, from hunting and fishing to brick-making and butter-churning. Even the very beggars ride about on horseback. I have seen a photograph of one, with a police certificate of mendicancy hanging round his neck. Every domestic servant has his or her own horse, as ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams
... representing over 125,000 residents of Maryland. They were from many State labor associations, patriotic societies, the Grange, Federation of Women's Clubs, Women's Trade Union League, Teachers' Association, Graduate Nurses, Goucher College Alumnae, clubs for every conceivable purpose. She was followed by Mrs. Edward Shoemaker, chairman of the women's State branch of the National Council of Defense, who made an eloquent appeal for the proposed amendment. Judge J. Harry Covington, member of Congress, gave a strong legal and political ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume VI • Various
... fourth social letter to v. Kirchmann, entitled "Capital," Rodbertus says: "The dissolution of all capitalist property in land is no chimera; on the contrary, it is easily conceivable in national economy. It would, moreover, be the most radical aid to society, that, as might be put in a few words, is suffering of rent-rising—rent of land and capital. Hence the measure would be the only manner of abolishing property ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel
... fifty such structures. All the fashionable citizens, including the royal family, come here for the enjoyment of their afternoon drive or horseback ride. The sight presented on these occasions is one of the very gayest conceivable, recalling the brilliancy of the Chiaja of Naples, the Maiden of Calcutta, or the Champs Elysees of Paris. One does not see even in Hyde Park, London, more elegant vehicles and horses, or more striking liveries than on ...
— Foot-prints of Travel - or, Journeyings in Many Lands • Maturin M. Ballou
... attractive was in the circle in which he moved and to which his presence contributed. In 1595 he appeared in the lists at a tournament in honor of the Queen; in 1596 and 1597 he joined in dangerous and successful naval and military expeditions; in 1598 he was married.[35] Is it conceivable that two thousand lines of adulatory poetry could have been written to and of him, and no hint appear of incidents like these? It is simply incredible. What is omitted rather than what is said clearly indicates that the life of the poet's friend presented no such incidents,—indeed no incidents ...
— Testimony of the Sonnets as to the Authorship of the Shakespearean Plays and Poems • Jesse Johnson
... other words, "Prakriti, Swabhavat, or Akasa, is SPACE, as the Tibetans have it; Space filled with whatsoever substance or no substance at all—i.e., with substance so imperceptible as to be only metaphysically conceivable. Brahman, then, would be the germ thrown into the soil of that field, and Sakti, that mysterious energy or force which develops it, and which is called by the Buddhist Arahat of Tibet, FOHAT. That which we call form ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... and it was evident that he was continually brooding over the fate of the youth he had loved. It seemed to the girl that the men were even more cheerful and thoughtless than usual, that they concerned their minds with every conceivable topic except that which was uppermost in her own. The death of Bangs had affected ...
— The Settling of the Sage • Hal G. Evarts
... the gulf separating him and his quarry, there seemed but one conceivable reason why a human being should have sought to win a way to that rocky aerie. From its nature it was all but unscalable; from its position it commanded in limitless, sweeping view all possible paths of approach. Did Sefton's party seek a hiding place where defence even against great numbers would ...
— Wolf Breed • Jackson Gregory
... were so many jokes from the superannuated bank clerk, and Tim Linkinwater himself was in such tiptop spirits, and little Miss La Creevy was in such a comical state, that of themselves they would have composed the pleasantest party conceivable. Then, there was Mrs Nickleby, so grand and complacent; Madeline and Kate, so blushing and beautiful; Nicholas and Frank, so devoted and proud; and all four so silently and tremblingly happy; there was Newman so subdued yet so overjoyed, and there ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens
... Mr. Pedagog from behind his newspaper. "Then your parents would have you shut up in a nursery, and it is even conceivable that you would be receiving those disciplinary attentions with a slipper that you seem to me so frequently to deserve, were you at this present moment in the nursery stage ...
— The Idiot • John Kendrick Bangs
... determined that no man shall take it from him. He is not in the least degree determined that he shall not take away another man's loaf; but that is a different question. England is the one country in the world which can, under existing circumstances, or under circumstances easily conceivable, seek to send any appreciable number of new people into the colony. Therefore England is to be feared and hated, and any scheme which may be promulgated in favour of further emigration is to be resisted to the uttermost. Men talk of war as the answer to an attempt to deplete ...
— Recollections • David Christie Murray
... remember the extreme unwillingness that Rome had ever shown to accept a position of permanent responsibility in the East, we can hardly imagine the plan to have received the direct sanction of the senate. It is conceivable, however, that many leading members of the government were growing doubtful of the success of merely diplomatic interference with the troubled politics of the East; that they desired a nearer point of vantage from which to watch the movements of its turbulent rulers; and ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... pullet on his conscience yet, unless he has paid for it. He was of a race which elsewhere has so immemorially plundered hen-roosts that chickens are as free to it as the air it breathes, without any conceivable taint of private ownership. But the spirit of New England had so deeply entered into him that the imbecile broiler of another, slain by pure accident and by its own contributory negligence, was saddening him, while I was off in ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... Mary Damer called. She knew that a letter from Cornelia was possible, and she knew also that it would really be as fateful to herself, as to Hyde. If, as she suspected, it was Rem Van Ariens who had detained the misdirected letter, there was only one conceivable result as regarded herself. She, an upright, honourable English girl, loving truth with all her heart, and despising whatever was underhand and disloyal, had but one course to take—she must break off her engagement with a man so far ...
— The Maid of Maiden Lane • Amelia E. Barr
... after breakfast in the buggy. It is the first time I have been up, and I am glad to have seen the sight. The church[39] is of brick, in a grove of very beautiful live-oak trees wreathed with grapevines and hanging moss, under which were tied every conceivable description of horse and vehicle, from Mr. Pierce's six-seated carriage and pair of fine Northern horses to the one-seated sulkies, and mules saddled with cotton-bags. Just as we arrived the people were all pouring out of church after Sunday School, for a ...
— Letters from Port Royal - Written at the Time of the Civil War (1862-1868) • Various
... door, a tempest of chattering words and laughter, shrill and bursting forth in something like shrieks, making the student start, that is altogether a different business. The lady outside, who evidently had multiplied herself—unless it was conceivable that the serious Simmons had made himself her accomplice—had taken the cleverest way of showing that she was not to be beat by any passive resistance of busy man, though not even an audible conversation with Simmons would have startled or disturbed his master, to whom it would have been apparent ...
— The Marriage of Elinor • Margaret Oliphant
... squatty, ugly arm-chairs, upholstered in the ugliest and coarsest conceivable scarlet plush; two hideous sofas of the same —uncounted armless chairs ditto. Five ornamental chairs, seats covered with a coarse rag, embroidered in flat expanse with a confusion of leaves such as no tree ever bore, six or seven a dirty white and the rest a faded red. How ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... invasion and slaughter. From the days of Innocent their history becomes one long harrowing tale of papal plots, interdicts, excommunications, of royal proscriptions and perfidies, of attack, of plunder, of rapine, of massacre, and of death in every conceivable and horrible way,—by the sword, by fire, and by unutterable tortures and torments. The Waldenses had no alternative but to submit to these, or deny their Saviour. Yet, driven to arms,—ever their last resource,—they waxed valiant in ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie
... ever-increasing financial burden, for Train had sailed for England when the first number was issued, had been arrested because of his Irish sympathies, and had spent months in a Dublin jail, from which he sent them his thoughts on every conceivable subject but no money for the paper. He had left $600 with Susan and had instructed Melliss to make payments as needed, but this soon became impossible, and she had to face the alarming fact that, if the paper were to continue, she must raise the necessary money herself. Because ...
— Susan B. Anthony - Rebel, Crusader, Humanitarian • Alma Lutz
... greater intellect, even of the same order, may be able to mirror the whole past and the whole future; if the universe is penetrated by a medium of such a nature that a magnetic needle on the earth answers to a commotion in the sun, an omnipresent agent is also conceivable; if our insignificant knowledge gives us some influence over events, practical omniscience may confer indefinably greater power. Finally, if evidence that a thing may be, were equivalent to proof that it is, analogy might justify the construction of a naturalistic ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... me the highest conceivable compliment, by what you say of your work in relation to my chapters on distribution in the 'Origin,' and I heartily ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin
... Sir, as a practical question. I rest my opinion on no general theory of government. I distrust all general theories of government. I will not positively say, that there is any form of polity which may not, in some conceivable circumstances, be the best possible. I believe that there are societies in which every man may safely be admitted to vote. Gentlemen may cheer, but such is my opinion. I say, Sir, that there are countries in which the condition of the labouring classes is such that they may safely be intrusted with ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... this field of blood, after twelve hours of the most frightful carnage, a scene was presented horrid enough to appall the heart of a demon. More than twenty thousand human bodies were strewn upon the ground, the dying and the dead, weltering in gore, and in every conceivable form of disfiguration. Horses, with limbs torn their bodies, were struggling in convulsive agonies. Fragments of guns and swords, and of military wagons of every kind were strewed around in wild ruin. Frequent piercing cries, which agony extorted ...
— Napoleon Bonaparte • John S. C. Abbott
... point of fact he did not speak until he saw his superiors rushing blindly into the pit digged for their feet by the astute young tyrant of the pipe foundry. If they could have fallen without carrying him with them, it is conceivable that the bookkeeper might have remained dumb. But their immunity was doubly his, and the end of it was a bad quarter of an hour for him, two of them, to be precise: the first, in which he told the president and the treasurer the story ...
— The Quickening • Francis Lynde
... agreeable to Peter. As soon as Jesus rebuked the fever, she was able without delay to rise and to wait on Jesus and his disciples. These displays of the power of Christ in performing miracles, according to the text, are varied, in almost every conceivable way of beneficence; but he wrought no miracles of vengeance, even the destruction of the swine was doubtless intended in mercy and conducive to much good—so say the commentators. He not only healed the sick and cast out devils, but he ...
— The Woman's Bible. • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... was an object of the insatiable jealousy of Lord Stratford de Redcliffe, who gave him no support, and, in spite of the entreaties—and, at last, of the commands—of the English minister for foreign affairs, thwarted Colonel Williams in every conceivable way. Supported, however, by the decision, perseverance, and intelligence of Lord Clarendon, the English commissioner held his ground in spite of the coldness, and even opposition, of the ambassador, and was ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... beautiful in its fleeting beauty than the Chicago of the stock-yards and the Pit which had provided the money for its beauty. The millionaires did not interfere with the artists at all. They gave their thousands—and stood aside. The result was one of the loveliest things conceivable. Saint-Gaudens and the rest did their work as well as though the buildings were to endure for centuries instead of being burned in a year to save the trouble of pulling down! The World's Fair always recalled to me the story ...
— The Story of My Life - Recollections and Reflections • Ellen Terry
... had come to see that the power of a magazine might lie more securely behind the printed page than in it. He had begun to accustom his readers to writing to his editors upon all conceivable problems. ...
— A Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward Bok
... Mr. Beecher is mistaken or not, people know that honesty is a good thing, that gratitude is a virtue, that industry supports the world, and that whatever they believe about religion they are bound by every conceivable obligation to be just and generous. Mr. Beecher can no more succeed in reconciling science and religion, than he could in convincing the world that triangles and circles are exactly the same. There is the same relation between science and religion that there is between astronomy ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll
... weeks, months, or years of experiment. It cost him, for example, several years of most expensive trial to obviate the objection to India-rubber fabrics caused by the liability of the gum to peel from the cloth. He tried every known textile fabric, and every conceivable process before arriving at the simple expedient of mixing fibre with the gum, by which, at length, the perfect India-rubber cloth was produced. This invention he considered only second in value to the discovery ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton
... quadruped and mashed it to pulp. But the Atlamalcan tugboat, if tied by a hawser to the reptile could not have drawn it forth, for it will allow itself to be pulled asunder before yielding. Nor can any conceivable power induce the serpent to let go, its unshakable resolve being to draw its prey within its folds, instead of meeting ...
— Up the Forked River - Or, Adventures in South America • Edward Sylvester Ellis
... than to the turn of one's ideas; but here the subtler obstacles of taste and pride intervened. Not even Bessy's transparent manoeuvrings, her tender solicitude for her friend's happiness, could for a moment weaken Justine's resistance. If she must marry without love—and this was growing conceivable to her—she must at least merge her craving for personal happiness in some view of life in ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... has been compared with Dumas' famous 'Monte Christo.' The extraordinary character of its adventures, indeed, would render it dramatic and powerful as fiction; as human truth, it is simply overwhelming. No one can read this book unmoved. From every conceivable standpoint, physiological, sociological, and literary, ...
— Bidwell's Travels, from Wall Street to London Prison - Fifteen Years in Solitude • Austin Biron Bidwell
... not argue, Is not pathetic, has no arrangements, Does not scream, haste, persuade, threaten, promise, Makes no discriminations, has no conceivable failures, Closes nothing, refuses nothing, shuts none out; Of all the powers, objects, states, it notifies, ...
— Poems By Walt Whitman • Walt Whitman
... so-called fantasy, they also easily understood, because they felt it true. To be 'out' of the body was merely to think and feel away from self. As they listened they realised themselves in touch with every nation and with every time, with all possible beliefs and disbeliefs, with every conceivable kind of thinking, that is, which ever has ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood |
