"Incomprehensible" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... has some trouble that nobody knows about," he said. "What a splendid creature she is!" impetuously—"and how incomprehensible!" ...
— That Lass O' Lowrie's - 1877 • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... covert, whining in its eagerness, until it comes across the lost scent. For twenty minutes or more he continued his researches, measuring with the most exact care the distance between marks which were entirely invisible to me, and occasionally applying his tape to the walls in an equally incomprehensible manner. In one place he gathered up very carefully a little pile of grey dust from the floor, and packed it away in an envelope. Finally, he examined with his glass the word upon the wall, going over every letter of it with ...
— A Study In Scarlet • Arthur Conan Doyle
... will always possess a certain charm for two classes of people: habitual vagabonds who beg and are freely accused of stealing, and the literary, artistic, antiquarian, or scientific vagabonds who take to tramping by fits and starts. The latter class, being quite incomprehensible to the rustic mind in Guyenne, are regarded by it with almost as much suspicion as ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... hoping that I would explain this act and give him some opportunity to indulge in a doubt. And I had failed to respond to the hint he had given me. The act itself must appear so sinister and the impulse which drove me to it so incomprehensible, without the heart-rending explanation I dare not subjoin, that I never questioned the wisdom of ...
— The House of the Whispering Pines • Anna Katharine Green
... "he owed his victory at Gravelines mainly to the opportune arrival of ten English ships of war" is patriotic, but foolish. That "Catholicism alone united the burgher of the Netherlands to the noble of Castille, or Milanese and Neapolitan to the Aztec of Mexico and Peru," would be an incomprehensible statement even if Peru had been inhabited by the Aztecs. Such errors, however, cannot seriously impair the value of Mr. Green's work. Its merits, as regards both matter and form, are solid and varied. The scale on which it was planned adapts it ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various
... day, that the enemy may have so perfected their systems of rays that they will be able to detect us and destroy us, even in our underground and heavily shielded retreats, by means of forces even more incomprehensible than those they are ...
— Spacehounds of IPC • Edward Elmer Smith
... khat, the ba, the sahu, the khaybat, and the various other entities which constituted man. To carry forward similar refinements concerning the Divine Nature was as congenial to such minds as it was incomprehensible to the Western. And the dispute finally rested on the question of whether 'before time' was the same as 'from eternity.' Such was the struggle which Arius and Athanasius thrust upon the Church; a dispute ...
— The Religion of Ancient Egypt • W. M. Flinders Petrie
... his son were far away from Woodcrych at one of their newer possessions some forty miles distant, and in their absence Lady Vavasour felt doubly helpless. She shook off Joan's hand, and recommenced her agitated pacing. Her daughter's calmness was incomprehensible apathy to her. It fretted ...
— In the Days of Chivalry • Evelyn Everett-Green
... his merits deserved), approached a sofa on which Miss Helstone was seated, and depositing his great Irish frame near her, tried his hand (or rather tongue) at a fine speech or two, accompanied by grins the most extraordinary and incomprehensible. In the course of his efforts to render himself agreeable, he contrived to possess himself of the two long sofa cushions and a square one; with which, after rolling them about for some time with ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... business, I should have put you off for three or four days, at least; but my curiosity is so raised, that I am determined that I will indulge it at the expense of my interest. I will turn the key, and then you will oblige me by unravelling, what, at present, is to me as curious as it is wholly incomprehensible." ...
— Japhet, In Search Of A Father • Frederick Marryat
... speculate. I knew that though the intellect of an Indian can embrace the idea of an all-wise, all-powerful Spirit, the supreme Ruler of the universe, yet his mind will not always ascend into communion with a being that seems to him so vast, remote, and incomprehensible; and when danger threatens, when his hopes are broken, when the black wing of sorrow overshadows him, he is prone to turn for relief to some inferior agency, less removed from the ordinary scope ...
— The Oregon Trail • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... retained each time in his grasp for a moment, ere he recommenced operations), "I highly disapprove of the absurd practice, so common with young men of the present day, of expressing their ideas in that low and incomprehensible dialect, termed 'slang,' which, in my opinion, has neither wit nor refinement to redeem its vulgarity, and which effectually prevents their acquiring that easy yet dignified mode of expression which should characterise ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... "Because that mysterious and incomprehensible power of Free Will stands in your way. In the exercise of your free will you have rejected God, therefore the responsibility rests with yourself. If you will now call upon Him, life will, by His Holy Spirit, enable you to accept salvation ...
— Twice Bought • R.M. Ballantyne
... their habit of scattering filth about their writings. Both of them had genius enough and wit enough to do without any such expedient, even for the amusement of those persons who look more to the laugh to be got out of a book than to what is admirable in it. Rabelais especially is incomprehensible. His book is an enigma,—one may say inexplicable. It is a Chimera; it is like the face of a lovely woman with the feet and the tail of a reptile, or of some creature still more loathsome. It is a monstrous confusion of fine and rare morality ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... round on laughing House; quite incomprehensible what they should be guffawing at. Marvel increased when he introduced Father GILLIKAN on ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, August 1, 1891 • Various
... had taken a brace three and a half miles from Verdun, it seemed that the Crown Prince must give up the effort. It appeared incomprehensible that the useless sacrifice of men could continue. But the attempt was not given up; rather, it was pressed with ...
— The Boy Allies At Verdun • Clair W. Hayes
... proposed excursion had been the topic of conversation for the last fortnight, and Charles and Frank had both manifested the liveliest interest in it. And now that the whole scheme had been abandoned, the anticipated pleasure voluntarily resigned, was strange and incomprehensible. At first he was disposed to believe some more agreeable plan of spending the day had been devised, and it seemed questionable to him whether the plan which must be kept ...
— The Boat Club - or, The Bunkers of Rippleton • Oliver Optic
... saturated with transfused moonbeams, that gave forth a mellow radiance, which flashed at times like brilliants, and burst into flame and played like lightning along the almost invisible rims and ridges. The unspeakable, the incomprehensible light throbbed through and through; and was sometimes bluish green and sometimes greenish blue; but oftenest with the one was the other, both at once, and with a perfectly bewildering tint added,—in a word, it was frozen moonlight and no mistake. O my friend, ...
— Over the Rocky Mountains to Alaska • Charles Warren Stoddard
... capable of. They had deliberately closed their eyes to all nature, and had gone on inquiring, "Where do you put your brown 'tree'?" A vast revelation was made to them at once, enough to have dazzled anyone; but to them, light unendurable as incomprehensible. They "did to the moon complain," in one vociferous, unanimous, continuous "Tu whoo." Shrieking rose from all dark places at the same instant, just the same kind of shrieking that is now raised against ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... are compared with the love and wisdom of men. It is well known that the wisdom of angels, when thus compared, is ineffable; also it will be seen in what follows that to men who are in natural love, this wisdom is incomprehensible. It appears ineffable and incomprehensible because it is of ...
— Angelic Wisdom Concerning the Divine Love and the Divine Wisdom • Emanuel Swedenborg
... her body was full of strange sensations, of involuntary recoil from shock. She was tired, but restless. All the time Siegmund lay with his hot arms over her, himself so incomprehensible in his base of blue, open-eyed slumber, she grew more breathless ...
— The Trespasser • D.H. Lawrence
... made a movement of yourself, or if it be chance that has met with you—a chance has come, which has opened my eyes, just as we were about to make each other unhappy; and I have recognized there must be something more incomprehensible than the beauty of the most beautiful soul or the most beautiful face; and mightier, too, since I must needs obey it.... I do not know if you have understood me. If you understand, have pity on me.... I have said to myself all that could be said.... I ...
— Pelleas and Melisande • Maurice Maeterlinck
... are perplexed at this. Therefore, I will tell thee about action (so that) knowing it thou mayst be freed from evil. One should have knowledge of action, and one should have knowledge of forbidden actions: one should also know of inaction. The course of action is incomprehensible. He, who sees inaction in action and action in inaction, is wise among men; he is possessed of devotion; and he is a doer of all actions. The learned call him wise whose efforts are all free from desire (of fruit) and (consequent) will, and whose actions have all ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... he was obliged to be helped by a horse. Poor man! I pitied him; and yet I never for a moment hesitated to acknowledge him as my master; for, with all his detects, I felt that he was in possession of some faculty incomprehensible to me, but which overpowered a thousand and a thousand times the ...
— Cat and Dog - Memoirs of Puss and the Captain • Julia Charlotte Maitland
... the prisons on the horrible 2nd of September. How many executioners were there within? Two hundred; probably not two hundred. And without, how many spectators could be reckoned drawn thither by truly incomprehensible curiosity? At most, twice the number. But, it is asked, why, if the people did not assist in these murders, did they not hinder them? Why? Because Petion's tutelary authority was fettered; because Roland spoke in vain; because Danton, the minister of justice, did not speak at all,... ...
— History of the French Revolution from 1789 to 1814 • F. A. M. Mignet
... past experience might have given him, he felt that native and original horror of the excellent Judge which is proper to a weak, delicate, and apprehensive character in the presence of massive strength. Strength is incomprehensible by weakness, and, therefore, the more terrible. There is no greater bugbear than a strong-willed relative in the circle of ...
— The House of the Seven Gables • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... this is not the worst; he goes even so far as to say, "a reasonable propriety of thought he cannot for any time uphold." This is nearly as offensive as Voltaire's "drunken savage."—TRANS.] which laid the foundation of their national greatness, is incomprehensible. Shakspeare flourished and wrote in the last half of the reign of Queen Elizabeth and first half of that of James I.; and, consequently, under monarchs who were learned themselves, and held literature ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... gazed at old Matthew before, he could only stare now. That the calm, sensible old man should fall into so extraordinary a delusion, was incomprehensible. He might have believed it of Deerham in general, but not of ...
— Verner's Pride • Mrs. Henry Wood
... de la Rougierre broke down altogether. She sobbed, she wept, she gabbled piteously, all manner of incomprehensible roulades of lamentation and entreaty; coyly, penitently, in a most interesting agitation, she produced the very key from her breast, with a string tied to it. My father was little moved by this piteous tempest. He coolly took the key and tried it in the desk, which it locked and unlocked quite ...
— Uncle Silas - A Tale of Bartram-Haugh • J.S. Le Fanu
... proper objects of thy rational intellectual faculty currently to go on without any fall or stumble? As for the things of the world, their true nature is in a manner so involved with obscurity, that unto many philosophers, and those no mean ones, they seemed altogether incomprehensible, and the Stoics themselves, though they judge them not altogether incomprehensible, yet scarce and not without much difficulty, comprehensible, so that all assent of ours is fallible, for who is he that is infallible in his conclusions? From the nature ...
— Meditations • Marcus Aurelius
... manner of guesses as to how a woman could resemble a pistol. It seemed so inconsistent to be told in one breath that a woman wounds from afar, and in another that to touch her is perdition. All this was so incomprehensible that I immersed myself in study, and so contrived to clear ...
— Recollections of My Youth • Ernest Renan
... Yoeders' place with him, and came back across the snow-drifted fields, under the frosty brilliance of the winter stars. As he looked up at them, he felt more than ever that they must have something to do with the fate of nations, and with the incomprehensible things that were happening in the world. In the ordered universe there must be some mind that read the riddle of this one unhappy planet, that knew what was forming in the dark eclipse of this hour. A question hung in the air; over all this ...
— One of Ours • Willa Cather
... to the lake," the girl suggested gently, as if anxious to humor some incomprehensible child. "There is a lovely ravine we can explore, all cool and shady, and this sun ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... "Incomprehensible being!" replied the Englishman, "I would leave the life you have preserved in your own hands; but what I have seen this night has swept even Viola from my thoughts. A fiercer desire than that of love burns in my veins,—the desire not to ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... and terror. "A strange person, your master," observed I. "Signor," replied the faithful Sancho Panza, "e veramente grand uomo, ma da non potersi comprendere." "He is truly a great man, but quite incomprehensible." It was edifying to observe the awful importance with which Antonio bore the instrument nightly intrusted to his charge to carry to and from the theatre. He considered it an animated something, whether demon or angel he was unable ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... possibility; upon which will come the question—whence arose their incapacity for seeing it? In the meantime, that the same condition which constitutes the bliss of a child, should also be the essential bliss of a man, is incomprehensible to him in whom the child is dead, or so fast asleep that nothing but a trumpet of terror can awake him. That the rules of the nursery—I mean the nursery where the true mother is the present genius, not the hell ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald
... often finds expression in miracles—that is, in the suspending or reversing of the general laws which He has Himself laid down for the regulation of the universe and human destinies. He is inscrutable and incomprehensible; yet to be deceived as to the nature of His being is the greatest of all sins against His majesty. The goal of the religious life is personal communion with Him, the intuitive apprehension and spontaneous acceptance ...
— Medieval Europe • H. W. C. Davis
... themselves. When they do, it betokens luck to him that sees them, and brings it, if he quietly fulfill their wishes. These are certainly often out of the way, just like the people, who are strange and incomprehensible enough. Thank Goodness, they never crossed my path! but your godmother Helen, she had many, many years ago, a curious adventure with ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 344, June, 1844 • Various
... thought no more of after they had happened. But this one was a real event, publicly known, and by means of which it was sought to silence the Pharisees. All the enemies of Jesus were exasperated by the sensation it caused. It is related that they sought to kill Lazarus." It is incomprehensible why this should be if Renan were right in his opinion that all that happened at Bethany was the getting up of a mock scene, intended to strengthen belief in Jesus. "Perhaps Lazarus, still pale from his illness, had himself wrapped in a shroud ...
— Christianity As A Mystical Fact - And The Mysteries of Antiquity • Rudolf Steiner
... impossible to write a naturalistic novel as to revive the megatherium. Where is Hennique? When Monet is dead it will be as impossible to paint an impressionistic picture as to revive the ichthyosaurus. A little world of ideas goes by every five-and-twenty years, and the next that emerges will be incomprehensible to me, as incomprehensible as Monet was to Corot.... Was the young generation knocking at the door of the Opera Comique last night? If the music was the young generation, I am sorry for it. It was the second time I had gone. I had ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... to me that you have probably had many affairs. A fellow of your coolness and dash couldn't fail to appeal to the incomprehensible sex. I'm thirty-four but I've loved only one woman—that's the solemn truth, Archie. Occasionally small indiscretions, I confess; and I sometimes weakly yield to the temptation to flirt, but with my ...
— Blacksheep! Blacksheep! • Meredith Nicholson
... authors, journalists, artists, and men of the world. She knew his nerveless nature, his laziness, his utter penury, his indifference and disgust for all things, and yet by the way she was now conducting herself she seemed inclined to marry him. She explained her conduct, incomprehensible to her friends, in various ways,—by ambition, by the dread she felt of a lonely old age; she wanted to confide her future to a superior man, to whom her fortune would be a stepping-stone, and thus increase her own importance in the ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... eyes of a man whose appearance recalled his crime and inspired him with fear of punishment. Madame de Saint-Laurent preferred a charge against George, but though he was sought for everywhere, he could never be found. Still the report of these strange deaths, so sudden and so incomprehensible, was bruited about Paris, and people began to feel frightened. Sainte-Croix, always in the gay world, encountered the talk in drawing-rooms, and began to feel a little uneasy. True, no suspicion pointed ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - THE MARQUISE DE BRINVILLIERS • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... thin, adust old man, with a large, well- developed forehead, a keen, bright hazel eye, and bristling, iron- grey hair, which had once been black, and a beard to match, which seemed as if the barber entrusted with the care of it were always two or three days in arrear with his work. By some incomprehensible combination of circumstances it seemed as if Signor Fortini's face were never seen fresh shaven. His sharp chin and lanthorn jaws appeared to be perennially clothed with a two days' old crop of grisly stubble,—two ...
— A Siren • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... volume which consigns to oblivion all that scientific bodies have hitherto published on that subject."[3112] Anterior to his treatise on "Man," the relationships between moral and physics were incomprehensible. "Descartes, Helvetius, Hailer, Lecat, Hume, Voltaire, Bonnet, held this to be an impenetrable secret, 'an enigma.'" He has solved the problem, he has fixed the seat of the soul, he has determined the medium through which the soul communicates with the body.[3113]—In ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... pig further along the village, followed by a few enthusiastic backers. They drove it into Granny Fleming's hen-house in the middle of the square, put out the hens, who protested loudly against this rude and incomprehensible interruption of their slumbers, and then they proceeded to slaughter ...
— The Underworld - The Story of Robert Sinclair, Miner • James C. Welsh
... sense can work with such acuteness. The organ by which woman instinctively, as it were, know and feel how other women are regarded by men, and how also men are regarded by other women, is equally strong, and equally incomprehensible. A glance, a word, a motion, suffices: by some such acute exercise of her feminine senses the signora was aware that Mr Arabin loved Eleanor Bold; and therefore, by a further exercise of her peculiar feminine propensities, ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... over the binder carefully. The various reports were unsigned, but appeared to have been compiled by at least four or five persons—McAllen among them; his writing style was not difficult to recognize. Leaving out much that was incomprehensible or nearly so, Barney could still construe a fairly specific picture of the association project of which he was now an unscheduled and unwilling part. Selected plants and animals had been moved from Earth through the McAllen Tube to a world consisting of sand, rock ...
— Gone Fishing • James H. Schmitz
... Alexandria at least, the cup was now full. In the year 640 the Alexandrians were tearing each other in pieces about some Jacobite and Melchite controversy, to me incomprehensible, to you unimportant, because the fighters on both sides seem to have lost (as all parties do in their old age) the knowledge of what they were fighting for, and to have so bewildered the question with personal intrigues, spites, and quarrels, as to make it nearly as enigmatic as that famous ...
— Alexandria and her Schools • Charles Kingsley
... disappointment in the village, and most of the people went back to their houses. It was raining heavily, and it is foolish to get wet through when there is no prospect of any kind of excitement. The soldiers, such was the general opinion, were merely practising some unusual and quite incomprehensible ...
— Lady Bountiful - 1922 • George A. Birmingham
... approaching the table, handed him the timetable, a diabolical labyrinth of incomprehensible figures and words specially compiled by railroad managers to puzzle and befog the traveling public. But Brockton, from long practice, seemed familiar ...
— The Easiest Way - A Story of Metropolitan Life • Eugene Walter and Arthur Hornblow
... boy uttered a howl, and ran, still howling. I looked for blood, but there was none visible; I came to the conclusion, with satisfaction, that he was bleeding internally. I spent a gloomy evening at home uttering dire predictions which were incomprehensible to the members of my family, and reread Brutus, ...
— Confessions of a Book-Lover • Maurice Francis Egan
... extinction of this "middle class" touches the point of our inquiry is in affording an explanation of a circumstance in the history of the Lombard subjugation of the Italian towns, which without consideration of this fact would appear almost incomprehensible. I refer to the utter passivity of the inhabitants, not only in the matter of resistance to attack, which the greater strength and courage of the invaders perhaps rendered useless, but in what is more surprising, the fact that after the easy conquest was completed, ...
— The Communes Of Lombardy From The VI. To The X. Century • William Klapp Williams
... to account for most of the physiological characteristics of species, and I not only think that they are competent to account for them, but I think that they account for many things which otherwise remain wholly unaccountable and inexplicable, and I may say incomprehensible. For a full exposition of the grounds on which this conviction is based, I must refer you to Mr. Darwin's work; all that I can do now is to illustrate what I have said by two or three cases ...
— A Critical Examination Of The Position Of Mr. Darwin's Work, "On The Origin Of Species," In Relation To The Complete Theory Of The Causes Of The Phenomena Of Organic Nature • Thomas H. Huxley
... in the hospital with their routine and monotony, creating an incomprehensible break in his life, his memory retained nothing; but the unchanging grief, weighing like a slab of stone on a grave, was ever present in his soul with inexorable and brutal force during these many months. He only half recalled the strange wonders that had been worked on him: ...
— Selected Polish Tales • Various
... are so very common, because they are constantly being repeated in their noble monotony and springing up from every side, numberless as the essential actions of our daily life; and glorious because before this war they seemed so rare and almost legendary and incomprehensible. ...
— The Wrack of the Storm • Maurice Maeterlinck
... Acosta that to Tici-Uiracocha they assigned the chief power and command over all things; Montesinos that Illa-tici-Uiracocha was the name of the creator of the world; Molina that Tecsi-Uiracocha was the Creator and incomprehensible God; the anonymous Jesuit that Uiracocha meant the great God of "Pirua"; Betanzos that the Creator ...
— History of the Incas • Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa
... glowed and shone through his inspired language that soared every moment on freer and stronger wings. Melting into pathos, exulting in rapture, he praised the splendor of nature; and the words flowed from his lips like a limpid crystal-clear stream as he glorified the eternal order of things, and the incomprehensible wisdom and care of the Creator—the One, who is one alone, and great and ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... to be able to toss himself about on the bed, and, in mind, so far as to be able to speak. And these manifestations of returning strength became each day more and more decided. When he spoke, however, it was to give utterance, in short and broken sentences, to wild and incoherent fancies, incomprehensible to those who listened, taking, as they did, shape and color from his present experiences; first, as an object of Manitou retribution, now as an object of Manitou regeneration. But always, the moment Bertha, returning all odorous from the glades, ...
— The Red Moccasins - A Story • Morrison Heady
... the most moderate charges. At his extensive establishment will also be found an assortment of shirt collars, cravats, braces, silk handkerchiefs, etc., etc., arranged according to the prevailing fashions. One of the most curious, ingenious and incomprehensible inventions of any I have seen is that of M. Paris, coiffeur to the Princes and Princesses, 25, Passage Choiseul, and 22, Rue Dalayrac, near the new Italian Theatre, relating to all descriptions of false hair, which he contrives to arrange in such a manner ...
— How to Enjoy Paris in 1842 • F. Herve
... had, at the same time, far different apprehensions about the thing signified. If they say that the variety of deities worshipped by the heathen world were but figurative ways of expressing the several attributes of that incomprehensible Being, or several parts of his providence, I answer: what they might be in the original I will not here inquire; but that they were so in the thoughts of the vulgar I think nobody will affirm. And he that will consult ...
— An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume I. - MDCXC, Based on the 2nd Edition, Books I. and II. (of 4) • John Locke
... suns lighting different systems of worlds, may possibly appear but as a few atoms opposed to the whole earth which we inhabit? Can a man who by divine meditations is admitted as it were into the conversation of this ineffable, incomprehensible Majesty, think days, or years, or ages, too long for the continuance of so ravishing an honour? Shall the trifling amusements, the palling pleasures, the silly business of the world, roll away our hours too swiftly from us; and shall the pace of time seem sluggish to a mind exercised ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding
... of this incomprehensible man had been strangely successful. Not a shadow of reverse had met him. What he really intended no one knew. As his enemies decreased he increased his forces. Was it the absolutism of the emperor or of himself that he sought? Several of the princes ...
— Historical Tales, Vol 5 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality, German • Charles Morris
... the feet of both; where the whole mass of your constituents have condemned this work in the most unequivocal manner, and are looking to you as their last hope to save them from the effects of the avarice and corruption of the first agent, the revolutionary machinations of others, and the incomprehensible acquiescence of the only honest man who has assented to it. I wish that his honesty and his political errors may not furnish a second occasion to exclaim, 'Curse on his virtues, they have undone his country.' Cold weather, mercury at twenty degrees in the morning. Corn fallen at Richmond ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... no soap at all. Well, there are some queer ways of utilizing wealth; but I contend that, of all of them, to deny oneself the commonest comforts of existence is the queerest and the hardest to understand. A philosophy of living is involved utterly incomprehensible to me. ...
— The Paternoster Ruby • Charles Edmonds Walk
... in it; while Brahman as self-luminous is not perceived by means of any other light. Brahman manifests everything else, but is not manifested by anything else; according to such scriptural passages as, 'By the Self alone as his light man sits,' &c. (B/ri/. Up. IV, 3, 6), and 'He is incomprehensible, for he cannot be comprehended ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Sankaracarya - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 1 • George Thibaut
... a son. He promised himself to settle down for good; but the fog of London choked lungs used to soft airs; he heard the call of the sun and was away again to seek adventure in the broiling reaches of the Caribbean. A man of restless, wild spirit, breathing inconsistencies incomprehensible to the conventions of Whitehall! And his son had turned a Cromwellian, who, in poverty, sought refuge in America when Charles II. came to the throne; and from him, in the vicissitudes of five generations, the ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... its currents, mark its direction, but to go farther is to condemn oneself to utter confusion in this medley of impulsive, passionate, fantastic movements which were born, shot upward, and fell to earth again, at the caprice of a thousand incomprehensible circumstances. In certain counties of England there are at the present day villages having as many as eight and ten places of worship for a few hundreds of inhabitants. Many of these people change their denomination every three or four years, returning to ...
— Life of St. Francis of Assisi • Paul Sabatier
... appears to me very judicious," Scapin said; then, with a low bow to the pedant, "and is sustained by unquestionable if incomprehensible authority; but the mark is so long that this nocturnal beauty of yours, dead or alive, must have had in her lovely mouth that famous tooth which the three Gorgon sisters owned among them, and passed about from ...
— Captain Fracasse • Theophile Gautier
... that he knew more of those stories than mere hearsay. Day after day their conjectures concerning him grew more and more wild and fearful. The strangeness of his arrival, the strangeness of his manners, the mystery that surrounded him,—all made him something incomprehensible in their eyes. He was a kind of monster of the deep to them; he was a merman, he was a behemoth, he was a leviathan,—in short, they knew not ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... find that incomprehensible," he observed. "I do not blame you. At present, however, I have only one object in life, and that is to succeed in the business I have on hand. Whatever I may find it necessary to do to attain my ends, I ...
— The Box with Broken Seals • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... "success lying easily upon him"—said one; "at the very summit of his career," said another—and all agreed it was "queer," "strange,"—unless, they argued, he was really ill. Even the most acute students of human affairs among his friends wondered. It seemed incomprehensible that any man should want to give up before he was, for some reason, compelled to do so. A man should go on until he "dropped in ...
— A Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward Bok
... his hat to leave. I followed him out to the door, and shook hands with him cordially. The burden felt lighter on my shoulders already. For four long years that mystery had haunted me day and night, as a thing impenetrable, incomprehensible, not even to be inquired about. The mere sense that I might now begin to ask what it meant seemed to make it immediately less awful and less ...
— Recalled to Life • Grant Allen
... time, on which we based our whole existence, itself no longer exists. It is no longer the swiftest of our gods, known to us only by its flight across all things: it alters its position no more than space, of which it is doubtless but the incomprehensible reflex. It reigns in the centre of every event; and every event is fixed in its centre; and all that comes and all that goes passes from end to end of our little life without moving by a hair's breadth around its motionless pivot. It is entitled to but one ...
— The Unknown Guest • Maurice Maeterlinck
... the transmission of light and sound; of the production of winds, and sun-spots, and of the method of development and dissemination of heat, are in point of fact, unphilosophical and incomprehensible. ...
— New and Original Theories of the Great Physical Forces • Henry Raymond Rogers
... stranger, received their congee from the countess herself from the threshold of her own door. The planters' wives were stunned! Each was a native queen, in her own little domain, over her own black subjects, and to meet with a repulse from a foreign countess was an incomprehensible thing! ...
— Ishmael - In the Depths • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... "this polyglot gentleman, who went through Spain disseminating Bibles." If Miss Martineau were alive now she would hear the works of "this polyglot gentleman" praised on every hand, and would find that a cult had arisen which to her would certainly be quite incomprehensible. In that large, dismal book—the Life of James Martineau, again, there is but one mention of Dr. Martineau's famous schoolfellow whose name has been linked with him only by a silly story. Do not let it be thought that I am complaining ...
— Immortal Memories • Clement Shorter
... to me an immense knowledge of Himself, and I was so overpowered with admiration, that I exclaimed: 'Who art Thou, Lord, and who am I?' For nothing has tended more to my knowledge of what I am, than the contemplation of the infinite and incomprehensible abyss of the perfections of God, although from afar, and under ...
— The Life and Legends of Saint Francis of Assisi • Father Candide Chalippe
... was to visit America, that I was to be very happy, and that I was to be much upon the sea, predictions which, in consideration of an uneasy stomach, I can scarcely think agreeable with one another. Two incidents alone relieved the dead level of idiocy and incomprehensible gabble. The first was the comical announcement that "when I drew fish to the Marquis of Bute, I should take care of my sweetheart," from which I deduce the fact that at some period of my life I shall drive a fishmonger's ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... politicians, who have a way of taking ethics under their wing and even conceive themselves the active promoters of good, are apt to seek it in morals. One might have supposed that a message was to be found as easily in new forms of art as in old; but, unluckily, new forms are to most incomprehensible. And though to a hardened sinner here and there what is incomprehensible may be nothing worse than disconcerting, to him who seeks good in all things, and is constantly on the look-out for uplifting influences, whatever disappoints this longing ...
— Since Cezanne • Clive Bell
... not even remember later how she effected her escape at last, but she had a vague impression that Tots managed it for her. It was all very dreadful and incomprehensible. She felt as if she were suddenly caught in a trap from which there could never be any escape. And she was terrified ...
— The Swindler and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... now deserted by the fair, will ere long glitter with the brilliant throng, and our sidewalks be swept once more by the gracefully flowing silk. Taper fingers shall condescendingly be extended to us, the smile of beauty beam on us, and witty speech banish our resentful remembrance of incomprehensible jargon. ...
— Autumn Leaves - Original Pieces in Prose and Verse • Various
... passing every day more or less together, whose sayings and doings would bear to be exactly chronicled. The literary diversions and poetic ideals of this circle, too, gave a certain color to the charge of affectation, among people of less refined instincts, who found its esprit incomprehensible, its manners prudish, and its virtue a tacit reproach; but the dignified and serious character of many of its constant habitues should be a sufficient guarantee that it did not greatly pass the limits of good taste and good sense. ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason
... friend!" she cried out, "and I know that your mother never wished you to find it like this. How unhappy you must have felt when you entered these walls after so many years! You cannot help feeling miserable here, and it is all quite incomprehensible to me." ...
— Maezli - A Story of the Swiss Valleys • Johanna Spyri
... an "adios" and the old man kissed my hand, while the younger, pointing to his friend said "Sangre, Senor, sangre" (Blood, sir, blood.) Vigorously they told the story of the old man's misfortune, but in incomprehensible Spanish. While they spoke three others like them, each bent under his burden came up onto the ridge. These kissed my hand and then, excitedly pointing to the old man, all talking at once, tried to tell his story. Having expressed our sympathy, we left the five looking after ...
— In Indian Mexico (1908) • Frederick Starr
... an uncomplimentary adjective. But this did not convince me that his position was more logical than that of the man who declared he would never take another bath because a watch had been stolen from his pocket while he was in bathing at some beach resort. It is incomprehensible that any one could imagine that our paper currency system is fraudulent because there are a few "green-goods" men in the country, or because counterfeit bills appear every ...
— Book-Lovers, Bibliomaniacs and Book Clubs • Henry H. Harper
... said the Judge, jesting affectionately, "to what purpose is all this unquiet, this incomprehensible anxiety? I grant that it would be a happiness to us all, and a piece of good luck, if Henrik could obtain the solicited situation—but if he do not get it—well, what then?—he can get another in a little while. He is yet a mere youngster, and can very well wait for ...
— The Home • Fredrika Bremer
... from lake to lake, and the whole scene as placidly beautiful and reposeful as the most vivid imagination could desire. War, contention, suffering, even the law, trade, politics, or any acute state of feeling, seemed incomprehensible excrescences upon the normal state of man's being, which there, indeed, appeared to be an endless floating over placid waters, with the tinkling of oars and the even song of birds for all needful sounds, and those long, low, slanting rays of golden light forever stealing through half-closed lids, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No. 6, December 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... filling that snowy chamber of the dead from edge to edge; and, for the first time in life, he felt things beyond mankind and the senses. His breast, which had breathed with pride; his head, which held one faith, the might of reason, and that which reason can accomplish, were struck now by an incomprehensible secret, which roused in him for the first time a feeling of his own inconceivable insignificance. He felt as small as an earth-worm must feel when on the grass along which it is crawling—the shadow of a vulture falls as it sweeps through the azure sky—and as the ...
— The Argonauts • Eliza Orzeszko (AKA Orzeszkowa)
... town of La Ferte, Jeanne rode between the Archbishop of Rheims and Dunois. The Archbishop had never been friendly to the Maid, and now it was clear, watched her with that half satirical, half amused look of the wise man, curious and cynical in presence of the incomprehensible, observing her ways and very ready to catch her tripping and to entangle her if possible in her own words. The people thronged the way, full of enthusiasm, acclaiming the King and shouting their joyful exclamations of "Noel!" though it does not appear that any part of ...
— Jeanne d'Arc - Her Life And Death • Mrs.(Margaret) Oliphant
... Palace, which is the parable of a ruined mind, or in the Raven, the most popular of all Poe's poems, originally published in the American Whig Review for February, 1845. Sometimes the meaning is more obscure, as in Ulalume, which, to most people, is quite incomprehensible, and yet to all readers of poetic feeling is among the most characteristic, and, therefore, the most ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... rapid motion, some moving one way and some another. It is their tremendous distance from us that makes this motion inappreciable. The sun seems far away from us, but the nearest star is 200,000 times as far away from us as is the sun. Expressed in miles, the figure is so huge as to be incomprehensible. A special unit has, therefore, been invented—a unit represented by the distance traversed by light in one year. In one second, light travels over 186,000 miles. In 8-1/3 minutes, light reaches us from the sun and, in doing so, covers the distance that would take the Vaterland ...
— Lectures in Navigation • Ernest Gallaudet Draper
... I attributed these momentary fits of hostility to her shattered health, to her unhappiness.... These hostile sentiments might have been evoked, it is true, in a certain measure, by some strange outbursts, which were incomprehensible even to me myself, of wicked and criminal feelings ...
— A Reckless Character - And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... and the parasites which infested his body were the forerunners of the human race. This sort of stuff, however, could only appeal to the illiterate; for intellectual and educated persons something more was required. And so it came about that a system, based originally upon the quite incomprehensible Book of Changes, generally regarded as the oldest portion of the Confucian Canon, was gradually elaborated and brought to a finite state during the eleventh and twelfth centuries of our era. According to this system, there was a time, almost beyond the reach of expression in figures, when ...
— The Civilization Of China • Herbert A. Giles
... interest in my ally's flight was so great that I near fell from my perch. It was incomprehensible that my little friend could dust the road at such speed. He seemed only to touch the ground from time to time. In a moment or two he was literally gone, like an arrow ...
— The O'Ruddy - A Romance • Stephen Crane
... as infinite, suffers no predicate beyond that of existence. It is therefore absurd to ascribe to Him mental faculties and affections comparable in the remotest degree to those of men; He is in no way an object of cognition; He is [Greek] and [Greek] [33]—without quality and incomprehensible. That is to say the Alexandrian Jew of the first century had anticipated the reasonings of Hamilton and Mansell in the nineteenth, and, for him, God is the Unknowable in the sense in which that term is used by Mr. Herbert Spencer. Moreover, Philo's definition ...
— The Evolution of Theology: An Anthropological Study - Essay #8 from "Science and Hebrew Tradition" • Thomas Henry Huxley
... "It's simply incomprehensible after all he's seen of the world," replied Bessie. "Did you notice how he enjoyed our discomfiture? How it was all he could do to keep from laughing ...
— When Dreams Come True • Ritter Brown
... beings should never re-enter here. And then our thoughts must naturally wander to the formation and creation of those mighty ships of the desert, that alone could have brought us here, and by whose strength and incomprehensible powers of endurance, only are we enabled to leave this desert behind. In our admiration of the creature, our thoughts are uplifted in reverence and worship to the Designer and Creator of such things, adapted, no ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles
... stopped here, but, as it was, she perceived only two sides to the question, and this that Ruth had just presented seemed infinitely more convincing than the one Miss Blake had tried to make clear to her. Ruth's logic she could understand; the governess' seemed vague and incomprehensible. In one case she had been coerced into making a promise from which she had later been absolved; in the other she had given her word of her own free will, and she was being stoutly held to it. There were other influences at work, ...
— The Governess • Julie M. Lippmann
... stand we had to take against these opposing forces, I cannot help associating them in my mind with those checks we are wont to receive in our dreams, as, for instance, when we imagine we are able to fly and yet feel ourselves held back by some incomprehensible power. ...
— On the Future of our Educational Institutions • Friedrich Nietzsche
... less ridiculous to say we must be born of stones, after the idea of the heathen poets." To the world there is no birth but physical birth. Hence such doctrine as our lesson sets forth will ever be strange, unintelligible, incomprehensible, to all but Christians. But the latter speak with new tongues, as Christ in the last chapter of Mark (verse 17) says they shall, for they are taught and enlightened by ...
— Epistle Sermons, Vol. II - Epiphany, Easter and Pentecost • Martin Luther
... Mary responded. "If you men only put one little thought into giving a woman what she wants, instead of giving her what you think she ought to want; if you kept as up-to-date in your love-making as you do in your law practise, women wouldn't be the incomprehensible riddle you always ...
— 32 Caliber • Donald McGibeny
... history, to place it by itself."[70] He recognized that all religion is, fundamentally, man's effort to put himself into harmonious relation with, and to discover an interpretation of, the forces of the universe. The more incomprehensible those forces, the greater man's need of an explanation of them. He could not fail to see that the religion of a people always bears a marked relation to their mental development and their special environment. He knew that at various stages the Yahve of the Hebrews represented ...
— Socialism - A Summary and Interpretation of Socialist Principles • John Spargo
... sufficient for acting, and that consents are superfluous. For if, knowing that the imagination gives us not an instinct to work without consent, he ministers to us false and probable fantasies, he is the voluntary cause of our falling and erring by assenting to incomprehensible things. ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... of a beauty which I could now perceive, and drawn towards her by an attraction irresistible as incomprehensible, I suppose I stretched out my arms towards her, for she drew back a ...
— Phantastes - A Faerie Romance for Men and Women • George MacDonald
... ascent or descent or terminating wall in space, but equal motion illimitably in all directions; and no absolute standard of duration, only a relative and variable one from the insect of an hour, to man, to an archangel, to that incomprehensible Being whose shortest moments are too vast to be noted by the awful nebula of the Hour Glass, although its rushing sands are systems of worlds. The soul emerges from earthly bondage emancipated into eternity, while "The ages sweep around him with their wings, Like anger'd eagles cheated ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... special cases. The paper was followed by others on the mathematical theory of electricity; and in 1845 he gave the first mathematical development of Faraday's notion, that electric induction takes place through an intervening medium, or 'dielectric,' and not by some incomprehensible 'action at a distance.' He also devised an hypothesis of electrical images, which became a powerful agent in solving problems of electrostatics, or the science which deals with the forces of electricity ...
— Heroes of the Telegraph • J. Munro
... were disposed about the dressers and collar beams with great glee; the chimneys were swept amidst songs and laughter; many bad voices, and some good ones, were put in requisition; whilst several who had never been known to chaunt a stave, alarmed the listeners by the grotesque and incomprehensible nature of their melody. Those who were inclined to devotion—and there is no lack of it in Ireland—took to carols and hymns, which they sang, for want of better airs, to tunes highly comic. We have ourselves often ...
— The Hedge School; The Midnight Mass; The Donagh • William Carleton
... of Spain. Supposed to be an Aztec epithet, cac-chopina, that is, "prickly shoes," applied to the Spanish conquerors from their wearing spurs, which to the Indians were strange and incomprehensible appendages. ...
— Anahuac • Edward Burnett Tylor
... nations being considered, one would think there could have been no just grounds to fear an invasion of Great Britain or Ireland, especially when other intelligence seemed to point out much more probable scenes of action. But the last resolution is still more incomprehensible to those who know not exactly the basis on which it was raised. The number of ships of war in actual commission amounted to two hundred and fifty, having on board fifty thousand seamen and marines. Intelligence and repeated information ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... grew into a dismal panic, and Uncle Silas—polished, mild—seemed unaccountably horrible to me. Then it was no longer an accidental fascination of electro-biology. It was something more. His nature was incomprehensible by me. He was without the nobleness, without the freshness, without the softness, without the frivolities of such human nature as I had experienced, either within myself or in other persons. I instinctively felt that appeals to sympathies ...
— Uncle Silas - A Tale of Bartram-Haugh • J.S. Le Fanu
... only the slave of physical necessity, while he had found no issue to escape from the narrow circle of his appetites, and while he as yet felt none of that superior liberty which connects him with the angels, nature, so far as she is incomprehensible, could not fail to impress him with the insufficiency of his imagination, and again, as far as she is a destructive force, to recall his physical powerlessness. He is forced then to pass timidly towards one, and to turn away ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... it be unknown in the family as long as it may. And of "mouth-religion" what fatal abundance! To a child, it is no more than the creaking and rattling of a vehicle, which is of a certain worth, doubtless, to the weary, sinful adult,—but to one who feels his life in every limb, incomprehensible, and an offence. Of the vulgar superstition which would confuse the nursery with creeds and vain prayer-repetitions of the heathen there is far too much. We have known parents, reputed pious and church-going, who delighted to pour crushing ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various
... surrounded by trophies of the chase; partly also of a necromancer's cavern, as from the ceiling hung curious stuffed animals, skulls, bones, dried plants, and other objects of natural history, in what, I had no doubt, seemed to the occupant perfect order, but which was somewhat incomprehensible to us. When dish after dish was put on the table, Frau Ursula lifted up ...
— In the Eastern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston
... uncommunicativeness extended below the level of speech, and his mother, reduced to the helplessness of dead-reckoning, had not even the solace of adapting her sympathy to his needs. She did not know what he felt: his course was incalculable to her. She sometimes wondered if she had become as incomprehensible to him; and it was to find a moment's refuge from the dogging misery of such conjectures that she had now turned ...
— The Descent of Man and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... inland post feel the savagery, the utter savagery, had closed round him—all that mysterious life of the wilderness that stirs in the forest, in the jungles, in the hearts of wild men. There's no initiation either into such mysteries. He has to live in the midst of the incomprehensible, which is also detestable. And it has a fascination, too, that goes to work upon him. The fascination of the abomination—you know, imagine the growing regrets, the longing to escape, the powerless disgust, the ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad
... main control board. It was divided into ten stations. Each section had its rows of dials, whose slender indicators pointed to incomprehensible readings. Each had its switches, wheels ...
— The Status Civilization • Robert Sheckley
... more at so many orders of infinites than at the so well-known proposition, viz., that curve lines may always be made to pass between a circle and a tangent; or at that other, namely, that matter is divisible in infinitum. These two truths have been demonstrated many years, and are no less incomprehensible than the things we have been ...
— Letters on England • Voltaire
... a preoccupation of the victim's mind, that resistance to it was hopeless, how, and under what profound ignorance of English society, had such a preoccupation been possible? To the accused, and to the incomprehensible accusation, therefore, belonged the whole weight of the interest; and it was a very secondary interest indeed, and purely as a reflex interest from the main one, which awaited the prosecutress. And yet, though so ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... employs no reason; she knows no logic. She knows that the adornment of her body is all that she has to match the other woman and outdo her, and to attract the male, and nothing that you can say will influence her a particle. I know this all seems incomprehensible to you as a man, but that is the feminine nature. You are trying to fight something that ...
— The Americanization of Edward Bok - The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward William Bok (1863-1930)
... been frustrated by what appeared to him Tisquantum's incomprehensible partiality fur Henrich, which had so entirely prevented his wreaking his vengeance on the innocent son of the slayer. But his was not a revenge that could expire unsatiated, or change to friendship, and expend itself ...
— The Pilgrims of New England - A Tale Of The Early American Settlers • Mrs. J. B. Webb
... believed that of a man who is so skillful in finishing up Ural Mountain bears. Is it the case that a man can be courageous at one time and a coward at another? It is quite incomprehensible." ...
— Michael Strogoff - or, The Courier of the Czar • Jules Verne
... master paced the terrace alone, that idea of the necessity of the Creator's being incomprehensible to the created, recurred to him. The hour that succeeded was probably the most important in Roswell Gardiners life. So intense were his feelings, so active the workings of his mind, that he was quite insensible to the intensity of the cold; and his body keeping equal motion with ...
— The Sea Lions - The Lost Sealers • James Fenimore Cooper
... person who presumes to see any physical evil involved in these exercises to the men who practice them, or any moral obstruction in the exhibition itself to those civilizing influences on which the true greatness of all nations depends, is a person without a biceps, who is simply incomprehensible. Muscular England develops itself, and ...
— Man and Wife • Wilkie Collins
... when he heard the tinkle of silver anklets and the bleating of the goat, something, just as curiously incomprehensible, had urged him to walk to the ruined mass of stones which hid the priest's entrance and exit; and he had walked across the sun-stricken court without let or hindrance, or covering to his head, and had found on the other side a low doorway almost ...
— Leonie of the Jungle • Joan Conquest
... persecution of which history has preserved the memory."[192] The belief of the Primitive Christians, and consequently that the Templars, with regard to the miracles of Christ is that He "did or may have done extraordinary or miraculous things," and that since "God can do things incomprehensible to human intelligence," the Primitive Church venerates "all the acts of Christ as they are described in the Gospel, whether it considers them as acts of human science or whether as acts of divine power."[193] Belief in the divinity of Christ is thus left an open question, ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster
... always beloved, and never had known for a day what it was to be neglected; yet love had never appeared to her as it did now, so sweet, nor life so beautiful. What strange delusion! what a wonderful incomprehensible mistake! or so at least the mother thought, looking at her beautiful girl with a ...
— The Marriage of Elinor • Margaret Oliphant
... the other. This view of things could not be so lightly thrown aside. There were too many suspicious circumstances to warrant this, now that my attention was fixed on it and my intelligence recognised the possibility. Hereupon there began to come into my mind all the strange incomprehensible matters which had whirled through our lives in the last few days. At first they all crowded in upon me in a jumbled mass; but again the habit of mind of my working life prevailed, and they took order. I found it now easier to control myself; for there ...
— The Jewel of Seven Stars • Bram Stoker
... other shore. The Greek sprang from it and went swiftly toward the palace garden. Sometimes he staggered, stopped, and seized his head, but after an instant he went forward again, as if drawn by some incomprehensible attraction. ...
— The Pharaoh and the Priest - An Historical Novel of Ancient Egypt • Boleslaw Prus
... miracle. Thus matter is made into something radically different from representation, something of which, consequently, we have no image; over against it they place a consciousness empty of images, of which we are unable to form any idea. Lastly, to fill consciousness, they invent an incomprehensible action of this formless matter upon this matterless thought."[Footnote: Matter and Memory, ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn
... duty to others to take this course. Great men do the world much good, but not without some harm, and we have no business to be troubling ourselves with their dreams if we have duties which lie nearer home amongst persons to whom these dreams are incomprehensible. Many a man goes into his study, shuts himself up with his poetry or his psychology, comes out, half understanding what he has read, is miserable because he cannot find anybody with whom he can talk about it, and misses ...
— The Autobiography of Mark Rutherford • Mark Rutherford
... remained close to the door: revealing in various parts of his form many surprising, confounding, and incomprehensible buttons. ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... Alfred's voice, and his amused statement in regard to her picture and the name Majesty—something made up of all these stung Madeline Hammond's pride, alienated her for an instant, and then stimulated her intelligence, excited her interest, and made her resolve to learn a little about this incomprehensible West. ...
— The Light of Western Stars • Zane Grey
... I am jealous of her, jealous of all of which I am ignorant in her incomprehensible heart. I am always wondering: 'Is she a charming youngster or a wretched jade?' She says things that would make an army shudder; but so does a parrot. She is at times so indiscreet and yet modest ...
— Yvette • Henri Rene Guy de Maupassant
... meant that he taught everything freely; but equally certain is it that the real basis of the Dharma can only be understood by him who has perfected his powers of comprehension. It is, therefore, incomprehensible ...
— The Buddhist Catechism • Henry S. Olcott
... survived, but would have had their place filled by others that stood in no need of crossed fertilisation; and the non-existence of the first would have been perceived by none, nor would the life that vibrates on the earth have seemed less incomprehensible to us, ...
— The Life of the Bee • Maurice Maeterlinck
... of any locality is small. Added to this condition is a very noticeable disinclination on the part of everybody toward over-exertion at the behest of others; coupled with a responsiveness to holidays that is incomprehensible to Americans who believe in making time into money. While the excessive proportion of holidays in the Russian calendar is deprecated by the more far-sighted and educated among the Russians, there is no hesitation on ...
— The History of the American Expedition Fighting the Bolsheviki - Campaigning in North Russia 1918-1919 • Joel R. Moore
... seemed to freeze—to become cold and hard as marble. He could not understand her, he feared her somewhat, and his pride took alarm. At the least he could keep his feelings to himself, he need not expose them to be trampled upon by this incomprehensible girl. ...
— The People Of The Mist • H. Rider Haggard
... Toinette had spent with him he had missed the spontaneity he had known in the little child, and, without being able to analyze it, felt that something was wanting in the girl. She had been sweet and winning, yet under it all had been a manner quite incomprehensible to him, as though she did not feel quite sure of her position in his affections. Her laugh had lacked the true girlish ring, and her conversation with him seemed guarded, as though she had never quite spoken all ...
— Caps and Capers - A Story of Boarding-School Life • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... It is incomprehensible, in a human way, that the love of a shepherd for his flock, the love of God for His creatures, should be so extraordinary as to provide the wondrous benefits which Christ in the Eucharist has wrought for ...
— The Shepherd Of My Soul • Rev. Charles J. Callan
... which Harney had come was authentic; Charity had seen the letter from a New York publisher commissioning him to make a study of the eighteenth century houses in the less familiar districts of New England. But incomprehensible as the whole affair was to her, and hard as she found it to understand why he paused enchanted before certain neglected and paintless houses, while others, refurbished and "improved" by the local builder, did not arrest ...
— Summer • Edith Wharton
... men were enslaved by grand dresses and by rouge, poisoning themselves with debauchery and dying of infectious diseases. They have freed themselves from a great many useless bonds and have realized a higher enjoyment of life. All the comfort which makes life so delicious to-day would have been an incomprehensible secret to the nobility of past centuries. It is ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... be taken as reliable examples of the true acid content of coffee; and though they seem very low, it is not at all incomprehensible that the acids which they indicate produce the acidity in a cup of coffee. They probably are mainly volatile organic acids, together with other acidic-natured products of roasting. We know that very small quantities of acids are readily detected in fruit juices and beer, and that variation ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... of foreboding, doubly terrible because at first so vague and incomprehensible, swept her. She saw Kayak's eyes looking into Boreland's. They were tense, half-closed and glittered coldly, not at Shane, but at some vision induced by Shane's words. Then the old man nodded twice, slowly, approvingly, decisively. . ...
— Where the Sun Swings North • Barrett Willoughby
... hand as regards the law they administered. The old Anglo-Saxon customs which had done duty for law had degenerated into antiquated formalities, varying in almost every shire and hundred, which were perforce ignored by Henry's judges because they were incomprehensible. So much as they understood and approved they blended with principles drawn from the revived study of Roman law and with Frankish and Norman customs. The legal rules thus elaborated by the king's court were applied by the justices in eyre where-ever their circuits took them, ...
— The History of England - A Study in Political Evolution • A. F. Pollard
... feeling for you should have died, is quite as incomprehensible to me as to you. No other man has ever claimed a corner of my heart. In a word, having considered the question all round, I am suffering simply from a nervous malady—alas! it ...
— The Dangerous Age • Karin Michaelis
... to the analysis, utterly incomprehensible to her, of Lutwyche's plan for intertwining love and hate; and with every word the malice deepens, becomes directer in its address. If any one should ask this painter who can hate supremely, how his hate can "grin through Love's rose-braided mask," and how, hating ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... wonderful the operations of time, and the changes of the human mind!" And following the latter train of thought, she soon afterwards added: "If any one faculty of our nature may be called more wonderful than the rest, I do think it is memory. There seems something more speakingly incomprehensible in the powers, the failures, the inequalities of memory, than in any other of our intelligences. The memory is sometimes so retentive, so serviceable, so obedient; at others, so bewildered and so weak; and at others again, so tyrannic, so beyond control! ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... at the moment Philippa was suffering acutely, she was by no means prepared to permit this vile thing to conquer. She would fight it and root it out. It had come upon her so suddenly. What was the cause? Was it merely a freak of that incomprehensible phenomenon the human mind that had twisted the chain of her affection into so mischievous a knot, or merely a figment of the brain springing from inner consciousness to torment her with devilish ingenuity? or did the fault lie with her in some simpler, ...
— East of the Shadows • Mrs. Hubert Barclay
... met the black, who said something incomprehensible, to which Nic answered with "good morning," and hurried on to the bank, down in the hollow along ...
— First in the Field - A Story of New South Wales • George Manville Fenn
... built. Thou wouldst overturn the temple built by human endeavors, with so much care and industry, in order as it were miraculously to erect a divine structure, a house not built with hands, eternal in the Heavens. Secrets of the incomprehensible wisdom of God, unknown to any besides Himself! Man, sprung up only of a few days, wants to penetrate, and to set bounds to it. Who is it that hath known the mind of the Lord, or who hath been His counselor? Is it a wisdom only to be known through death to everything, ...
— The Autobiography of Madame Guyon • Jeanne Marie Bouvier de La Motte Guyon
... is that by which his nature is expressed, and since he naturally is so glorious and incomprehensible, his name must needs be the object of our fear; and we ought always to have a reverent awe of God upon our hearts at what time soever we think of or hear his name; but most of all when we ourselves do take his holy and fearful name into our mouths, especially in a religious manner; that ...
— The Riches of Bunyan • Jeremiah Rev. Chaplin
... to woman she could understand, but that a man who admittedly did not love her and had no other apparent desire than to rid himself of the incubus of a wife as soon as he was wed, should wish to marry her was incomprehensible. That he had already published the banns of her marriage left her gasping at his audacity. Strange how her thoughts leapt all the events of the morning: the wild rush to escape, the struggle with the hideously masked ...
— The Green Rust • Edgar Wallace
... and how they are looked up to, and that some of them are gentlemen and not idlers and loafers. Mother will listen to you, I know, and maybe then when I tell her it won't be such a shock to her. Do you know it is incomprehensible to me, all this contempt for people who don't do just the same things that their grandfathers did. And how do I know, too, that they are right about it all? It seems to me that when a man is born a gentleman and is a gentleman he can follow any occupation ...
— The Fortunes of Oliver Horn • F. Hopkinson Smith
... civilians of the darker ages have established an absurd and incomprehensible mode of quotation, which is supported by authority and custom. In their references to the Code, the Pandects, and the Institutes, they mention the number, not of the book, but only of the law; and content themselves with reciting the first words of the title ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon
... Emphatic pathos, incomprehensible even to the diviner himself; this is a satire on the obscure style of the oracles. Bacis was a ...
— Peace • Aristophanes
... obtain redress from her grievous oppression by pettifogging clerks—it was just a miserable dispute between the Commissioners of Inland Revenue and the Lessor of Property under the Act. It was full of incomprehensible jargon about Increment Value, Original Site Value, Assessable Site Value, Land Value Duty, Estate Duty, Redemption of Land Tax, and many more such terms among which the names of Donkey Street and Little Ansdore appeared occasionally and almost ...
— Joanna Godden • Sheila Kaye-Smith
... patch of soil, but was wedded to the all-embracing idea of the United States, with the emphasis on the epithet. They thought of themselves first of all as American citizens, and only in the second place as citizens of this State or of that. This habit or instinct is still incomprehensible, and almost contemptible, to the Southerner of the older generation; but the Time-Spirit was clearly on ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... incomprehensible, by way of reply, and rose to let Giovanni out. He noticed that the latter had brought nothing but the lamp with him. When the door was open Pasquale looked across at the house, and saw that although there was still light in ...
— Marietta - A Maid of Venice • F. Marion Crawford
... something existed in Rosanne that was foreign to her family. And the cruel streak in her character which betrayed itself in cutting comments, as bright as they were incisive, and tiny acts of witty malice were incomprehensible to her kindly-natured mother and sister. Furthermore, her hatred, when it was aroused, seemed to possess the mysterious quality of a curse. For instance, it appeared to be enough for her to give one dark glance ...
— Blue Aloes - Stories of South Africa • Cynthia Stockley
... to his idol, if he should keep Maria pretty short of cash, and so make her own its preciousness; triumphant would he feel, as a merely-moneyed man, to see troublesome, obtrusive Heart, with all its win-ways, and whimperings, and incomprehensible spirituality, with its sermons and its prayers, bending before him "for a bit of bread." Yes, poor loving disinterested Maria ran every chance of being disinherited, from the false witness of her brother, ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... when she would have become to him a mere symbol of something that was. Suppose that some day, when married, he again met her? In spite of everything, he did not believe that she had ceased to love him; somewhere she still kept her faith, martyred by the incomprehensible fate which had torn her from his arms. To meet her again would be to forget every tie save that holiest which made one of his spirit and ...
— A Life's Morning • George Gissing
... you're in love with him!" he exclaimed, and beneath the coldness of his manner, his heart suffered an incomprehensible pang. Undoubtedly he had permitted himself to drift into a feeling for Molly, which, had he been wise, he would have strangled speedily in the beginning. The obstacles which had appeared to make for his safety, had, he realized now, merely afforded shelter to the flame until it had ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... kinds; impetuous messages asking him when he would return; letters apologising for her selfishness—he had better remain with Mount Rorke until his consent had been obtained; resolutions and irresolutions, ardours, lassitudes, forgetfulness followed fast in strange and incomprehensible contradiction. And Frank was asked daily to perform some small task. There was always something; and Frank undertook all he was asked to do, for he loved to be as much as possible in that circle of life in which ...
— Spring Days • George Moore
... for a life of toil. You were made for love, for homage and adoration. Yet when one offers you these you turn to your nameless 'something' and, like the martyrs of old, suffer torture and death rather than accept what is your due. It is incomprehensible, truly!" ...
— For Gold or Soul? - The Story of a Great Department Store • Lurana W. Sheldon |
