"Ineffable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... all the preceding by the solemn announcement of the coming of the Son of Man as Judge. Mark the dignity of the words. He is to come 'in the glory of the Father.' That ineffable and inaccessible light which rays forth from the Father enwraps the Son. Their glory is one. The waiting angels are 'His.' He renders to every man according to his doing (his actions considered as one whole). ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... rarer, for the husband and wife who had been blessed with children would feel that their union had been dignified, made truly indissoluble. The father and mother who had embraced for the first time over the form of their first-born could never forget that ineffable moment. The man and woman who had shared a baby between them, taught it to talk and to play and guided its first faltering steps, could never lightly set aside the vows that bound them. The soft hands of little children were made to link men and women's hearts together, and wonderfully ...
— Modern marriage and how to bear it • Maud Churton Braby
... flimsy trelliswork. He wore a brown holland suit in summer, in colder weather a fustian one of like colour, and at first glance you might mistake him for a Quaker. His snow-white hair was gathered close beside the temples, back from a face of ineffable simplicity and goodness—the face of a man at peace with God and all the world, yet marked with scars—scars of bygone passions, cross-hatched and almost effaced by deeper scars of calamity. As Miss Plinlimmon wrote ...
— Poison Island • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (Q)
... of rescuing the fluffery, the owner of the suitcase had to sacrifice her hauteur and help her husband and son block up the aisle, while the other matron had the ineffable satisfaction of being kept waiting, at last being enabled to say, sweetly and ...
— The Best American Humorous Short Stories • Various
... man does not love through human reason; rather through a reason, hidden even to him, deeper than humanity. Then Gloria had put her hand into his; Gloria had married him; Gloria had elected to come with him. After that he had seen nothing in its true light; Gloria had remade the world into paradise ineffable. ...
— The Everlasting Whisper • Jackson Gregory
... the Hebrew poet and his present wife, and more especially the fact that I had been thrilled by it in Antomir, threw a halo of ineffable ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... God? What can approach more nearly to a rendering of that which cannot be rendered—the idea of an essence omnipresent in all things at all times everywhere in sky and earth and sea; ever changing, yet the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever; the ineffable contradiction in terms whose presence none can either ever enter, or ever escape? Or rather, what convention would have been more apt if it had not been lost sight of as a convention and come to be regarded as an idea in actual correspondence with a more or less knowable ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler
... question has been answered, Allan, as well as I can answer, who am not the architect of this great globe of dreams, and as yet cannot clearly see the ineffable gem within, whose prisoned rays illuminate their substance, though so dimly that only those with the insight of a god can catch their glamour in the night of thought, since to most they are dark as glow-flies in the glare ...
— She and Allan • H. Rider Haggard
... "Beautiful city! So venerable, so lovely, so unravaged by the fierce intellectual life of our century, so serene! And yet, steeped in sentiment as she lies, spreading her gardens to the moonlight, or whispering from her towers the last enchantments of the Middle Age, who will deny that Oxford, by her ineffable charm, keeps ever calling us near to the true goal of all of us, to the ideal, to perfection—to beauty, in a word, which is only truth seen ...
— The Grand Old Man • Richard B. Cook
... within? Ah! who can tell? What glory and glow of light Ineffable; What peace in the very air, What hush and calm, Soothing each tired soul ...
— Verses • Susan Coolidge
... "We have heard the story." And Ali said: "What became of that genie after he was safely thrown back into the sea is not properly spoken of by any save those that pursue the study of demons and not with certainty by any man, but that the stopper that bore the ineffable seal and bears it to this day became separate from the bottle is among those things that man may know." And when there was doubt among the great ones Ali drew forth his bundle and one by one removed those many silks till the seal stood revealed; and some of ...
— Tales of Wonder • Lord Dunsany
... to those delightful scenes so full of gentle joy, of ineffable sweetness, and hallowed peace, when first you cast your all on ...
— The Faithful Steward - Or, Systematic Beneficence an Essential of Christian Character • Sereno D. Clark
... during his sojourn in Breslau, thus runs his version, Elsner went, on the day of the Holy Trinity in the year 1789, for the first time to church, he was so deeply moved by the sounds of the organ that he fainted. On recovering he felt his whole being filled with such ineffable comfort and happiness that he thought he saw in this occurrence the hand of destiny. He, therefore, set out for Vienna, in order that he might draw as it were at the fountain-head the great principles of his art. Be ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... dead; and as he looked at her immovable features, hallowed to solemnity by sorrow and suffering, his heart was touched with an ineffable solicitude, sympathy and pity; and, as a brother might bend over a sleeping sister, he bent over Selene and kissed her forehead. She moved, opened her eyes, gazed into his face—but her glance was so full of horror, so vague, glassy and bewildered, that he drew back with a shudder, and with ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... relieve the poor Pariah from his ignominious destiny; accordingly I set seriously to work on reform. I insisted upon the iniquity of abandoning men from their birth to an irremediable state of contempt, from which no virtue could exalt them. The Brahmins looked upon my Brahmin with ineffable horror. They called me the most wicked of vices; they saw no distinction between Justice and Atheism. I uprooted their society—that was sufficient crime. But the worst was, that the Pariahs themselves regarded ...
— The Pilgrims Of The Rhine • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... sudden dense guffaw was heard from the senior captain—a big-headed man, with little round eyes and monstrously fat cheeks which never moved. The old major, tall and fantastically ragged like a scarecrow, walked round the body of the late Senor Hirsch, muttering to himself with ineffable complacency that like this there was no need to guard against any future treacheries of that scoundrel. The others stared, shifting from foot to foot, and whispering short remarks to ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... for his heart was sad. Death had bereaved him of his bride, while youth, And looming years of future trust and truth, Knit them together, till their souls were clad With joy ineffable. Love's great High Priest Sacrificed in their hearts to Him that doeth All things well; and such rare, perpetual feast Of love and truth no mortals ever had, To keep their memories green, ...
— Hesperus - and Other Poems and Lyrics • Charles Sangster
... face, against the woman's knee, Blythe felt a sharp pang of compunction and pity. The child looked even more pathetic than when seen from above, and the young girl involuntarily stooped in passing, and touched the wan little cheek. Whereupon one of those ineffable smiles which are the birthright of Italians lighted the little face, and the small hand was lifted with so captivating a gesture that Blythe, clasping it in her own, dropped on her knees ...
— A Bookful of Girls • Anna Fuller
... slain him, Luke had fallen lifeless at the lady's feet. With a smile of ineffable disdain, she replied, "I know not why I hesitate to resent this indignity, even for an instant. But I would see how far your audacity will carry you. The name you ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... with an ineffable tone of contempt, just like the original Nuttie, who seemed to be recalled by association ...
— Nuttie's Father • Charlotte M. Yonge
... he love her; he worshiped her, as the devotee worships his god. She was all the constellations of the sky to him. Universal nature had nothing that could displace her for a moment from his heart. Night and day she filled his soul with her ineffable image; and the birds and the breeze and the whispering trees seemed to be all forever speaking her beloved name in ...
— Caesar's Column • Ignatius Donnelly
... to him, stirring tremendously that faculty of his of seeing more clearly, visioning life more poignantly, with his mind than with his eye. She spoke to him of preparation for winter, and beyond winter with ineffable assurance for spring, bring winter what it might. He saw her dismantling all her house solely to build her house again. She packed down. She did not pack up, which is confusion, flight, abandonment. She packed down, which is resolve, resistance, ...
— If Winter Comes • A.S.M. Hutchinson
... of the plains, knew exactly how to deal with these childlike souls. Like those who live their lives upon the sea, the Hungarian peasant sees only immensity around him, and above him that wonderful dome which hides its ineffable mysteries behind glorious veils of sunset and sunrise, of storm and of fantastic clouds. The plain stretches its apparently limitless expanse to a distance which he—its child—has never reached. Untutored and unlearned, he does not know what lies beyond that ...
— A Bride of the Plains • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... the Raccoon hard, and a terrible fear was slowly eating its way to the heart of the redoubtable Hainteroh, chosen warrior of the Wyandots, the bravest of all races. Sooner or later this demon white youth would tread upon his heels. He could feel already the scrape of his moccasins, the ineffable disgrace. He shuddered from head to foot. Such a thing could not be endured. He fairly leaped through the air, and once more a new impulse ...
— The Riflemen of the Ohio - A Story of the Early Days along "The Beautiful River" • Joseph A. Altsheler
... being rude, because everyone else in the carriage has their eyes fixed with a straight unwinking stare upon us. It is difficult to realise that we are more entertaining to them than the gentleman who is disrobing himself with ineffable dignity in public, ...
— Round the Wonderful World • G. E. Mitton
... this in a quiet style, as putting a mute upon his voice, and the observer forgot his part; he followed the entrancing melody as far as it would lead him into the realms of the ineffable whence he returned with the fascination of memory and the sorrow ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... lady stole a quick glance at him, and immediately looked up at the moon again, because the eyes that could burn so fiercely could hold such ineffable ...
— The Amateur Gentleman • Jeffery Farnol et al
... genius of the Old Testament is the absence of any description of the divine appearance. The prophet saw things 'which it is not lawful for a man to utter,' and his silence is not only reverent, but more eloquent than any attempt to put the Ineffable into words. Even in this act of manifestation God was veiled, and 'there was the hiding of His power.' The train of His robe can be spoken of, but not the form which it concealed even in revealing ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... about love came out of novels. Beyond a doubt, her calm, vulgar husband did not fill up the emptiness of her soul, because the Countess was discontented and had a vague hope that somewhere, above or beneath the commonplaces of the day, there was a mysterious region where the ineffable reigned. ...
— Caesar or Nothing • Pio Baroja Baroja
... houses, mark you, were Croat property. But the Allied officers knew very well (and the C.N.I. knew that they knew) that more than thirty of the large buildings on the front belonged to Croats, whereas under half a dozen were the property of Italians or Italianists. The ineffable Mr. Edoardo Susmel, in one of his pro-Italian books, entreats certain French and British friends of the Yugoslavs to come for one hour to Rieka and judge for themselves. But twenty minutes would be ample for a man of average intelligence. ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein
... that you read about yesterday; it fades and flits out of your grasp, as you travel toward it. When we go home I will read you something which Emerson has said concerning this same lovely ignis fatuus; for I can remember only a few words: 'What splendid distance, what recesses of ineffable pomp and loveliness in the sunset! But who can go where they are, or lay his hand, or plant his foot thereon? Off they fall from the round world forever.' Felix, I suppose it is because we see all the imperfections and ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... this morning, Mary," he continued, "attending with such ineffable sweetness and patience to all the demands of her aunt's stupidity, working with her, and for her, her colour beautifully heightened as she leant over the work, then returning to her seat to finish a note which she was previously engaged in writing for that stupid ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... never heard; in terms which are intensely vernacular, it seems, and which do at this day astonish the foreign mind: 'We will for him something, WIR WOLLEN IHM WAS—' But the powers of translation and even of typography fail; and feeble paraphrase must give it: 'We will for him SOMETHING INEFFABLE CONCOCT,' of a surprisingly contrary kind! 'WIR WOLLEN IHM WAS' (with ineffable dissyllabic verb governing it)! growled one indignant Pommerner; 'and it ran like file-fire along the ranks,' says Archenholtz; everybody growling it, and bellowing ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... first-born with the love, Which breathes from both eternal, the first Might Ineffable, whence eye or mind Can roam, hath in such order all dispos'd, As none may see and fail to enjoy. Raise, then, O reader! to the lofty wheels, with me, Thy ken directed to the point, whereat One motion strikes on th' other. There begin Thy wonder of the mighty Architect, ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri
... in ineffable surprise. "But the Lord Giovanni is brave and valiant," she cried, and down in my heart I laughed ...
— The Shame of Motley • Raphael Sabatini
... with the haunting strains of the half-sad, half-glad "LeichenMotiv," until the Vorspiel ends abruptly with a single note of ineffable meaning, thus: ...
— Bluebeard • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... women have to bear are (a) the stupid masculine disinclination to admit their intellectual superiority, or even their equality, or even their possession of a normal human equipment for thought, and (b) the equally stupid masculine doctrine that they constitute a special and ineffable species of vertebrate, without the natural instincts and appetites of the order—to adapt a phrase from Hackle, that they are transcendental and almost gaseous mammals, and marked by a complete lack ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... Of if an angel from the heavenly sphere In his ineffable goodness by the Lord, Dispatched, as to Tobias's aid whilere, A medicine for his blindness to afford. But good or evil angel — whatsoe'er He was that him to liberty restored — Him thanked and praised Rinaldo, for a heart Healed only by his help of ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto
... breath of wind stirred; the trees, grain, and grass were motionless. The leaves hung on the trees as if rocked to sleep; the birds had ceased their noises, and the moment of rest had come. But this rest seemed to come from an ineffable sweetness, and all nature seemed to meditate. Only the great expanse of heaven seemed to smile, and somewhere, high in the unknowable depths of its blue, the great and beneficent God was glad with the gladness of the fields, the woods, the meadows, ...
— Sielanka: An Idyll • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... under your nose. There is no real peace but the peace of the whole world, and that is only to be kept by the whole world resisting and suppressing aggression wherever it arises. To anyone who watches the American Press, this realisation has been more and more manifest. From dreams of aloofness and ineffable superiority, America comes round very rapidly to a conception of an active participation in the difficult business of statecraft. She is thinking of alliances, of throwing her weight and influence upon the ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells
... soul of a young god should. It cannot and never will grow old; the everlasting life is in it that makes the green buds shoot. To realise the immortal youth of Purcell's music, let us make a comparison. Consider Mozart, divine Mozart. Mixed with the ineffable beauty of his music there is sadness, apart and different from the sadness that was of the man's own soul. It is the sadness that clings to forlorn things of an order that is dead and past: it tinkles in ...
— Purcell • John F. Runciman
... silence of a few minutes, he asked the Comanche chief what he could answer to that? The chief looked at him and replied, with the most ineffable contempt: "What should I answer?" said he; "I have heard nothing but the words of a fool abusing other fools. I have heard the howl of the wolf long before the buffalo was wounded; there can be no answer ...
— Monsieur Violet • Frederick Marryat
... so venerable, so lovely, so unravaged by the fierce intellectual life of our century, so serene! ... Her ineffable charm keeps ever calling us to the true goal of all of us, to the ideal, ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... teeth.... Ah! how kind and tender is that smile! All his heart is tenderness from it! How good it is to love! Again! Smile upon me again! Do not go!... Alas! it is gone!... But it leaves in his heart sweetness ineffable. Evil, sorrow, are no more; nothing is left.... Nothing, only an airy dream, like serene music, floating down a sunbeam, like the gossamers on fine summer days.... What has happened? What are these visions that fill the child with sadness and sweet ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... most sublime enjoyments which Nature can bestow: that of following the natural development of the child, and seeing the man evolved. If the opening rosebud has become a commonplace of poetry, how much greater is the poetry of the infant soul in its manifestations? Now this ineffable gift which was placed beside us, in order that the miracle might accompany us and comfort us, we trample under foot in our wrath, blaspheming ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... waited in a reception room for him to come. When he did come, treading softly in his sandals, both Eyres and Gilliam looked at him in perplexity and astonishment. It was Johnny Bellchambers, but he had a different look. Upon his smooth-shaven face was an expression of ineffable peace, of rapturous attainment, of perfect and complete happiness. His form was proudly erect, his eyes shone with a serene and gracious light. He was as neat and well-groomed as in the old New York days, but how differently was he clad! Now he seemed clothed in but a single garment—a long ...
— Strictly Business • O. Henry
... intruded beneath the bed-clothes. One dream was so exquisite in its tenderness, so illusive was the enchanted image that lay upon his brain, that fearing to lose it, he strove to fix his dream with words, but no word pictured her eyes, or the ineffable love they expressed, and yet the sensation of both was for the moment quite real in his mind. They were sitting in a little shady room; she was his wife, and she hung over him, sitting on his knee. Her eyes were especially distinct and beautiful, and her arms—those ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore
... float, while a dense red ring lay around the base of each of them as a fitting border. The peaks, too, in the distance, and the snow-fields and glaciers and fleecy rolls of mist that lay in the hollows, were flushed with a deep, rosy alpenglow of ineffable loveliness. Everything near and far, even the ship, was comprehended in the glorious picture and the general color effect. The mission divines we had aboard seemed then to be truly divine as they gazed transfigured in the celestial glory. So also seemed our bluff, storm-fighting ...
— Travels in Alaska • John Muir
... Pandara, if not to introduce, at any rate to tame, the third, Roxelane, a French girl of no very regular beauty, but with infinite attractions, and in particular possessed of what Mr. Dobson elegantly calls "a madding ineffable nose" of ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... the dog with its foolish drum. They longed to sink through the ground in their mortification—they, the serious students of yesterday, to be caught to-day playing like silly children in the open street. But how ineffable is the condescension of the great! The ...
— Nights - Rome, Venice, in the Aesthetic Eighties; London, Paris, in the Fighting Nineties • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... factitious about her tranquillity. What he had said in the moment before their first embrace had been on that same note. He had been afraid to touch her for fear that—as in a fairy story, or a dream,—she wouldn't be there. All that afternoon and evening, despite an ineffable security in their miracle, she had walked softly and so far as the future was concerned, avoided ...
— Mary Wollaston • Henry Kitchell Webster
... resumed this loquacious voice, "although there is so much talk and dispute about evil, very few people know what evil essentially is. Now, there are some things, the mere doing of which by the most involuntary agent would at once stamp his soul with the conviction of ineffable sin. He would have touched the essence of evil. And if a wise man has done that, he has had in his ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... history puts before us many and serious defects; but there is much more to approve and admire: and while a feeling or sorrow lingers over the one, the other is so marked and prominent that it secures your sympathy, and you are drawn towards the man with an ineffable affection. There is a candour, and honesty, and generosity, and heroism, which gives to his character a most healthy tone. The qualities of his mind and heart, when sanctified by grace, become really noble; and if it were right, you would like to forget his failings in presence of so much ...
— The Wesleyan Methodist Pulpit in Malvern • Knowles King
... Hemlock Farm at stated periods during the summer. He had, to be plain, sat down before Jane's heart to besiege it with the same ponderous benign calm with which he ate an egg or talked of death. There was a bronze image of Buddha in the hall at the Farm, the gaze of the god fixed with ineffable content, as it had been for ages, on ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, October, 1877, Vol. XX. No. 118 • Various
... still discern for millions and millions of miles, till at length distance and vastness overcame it, and it ceased. It ceased, this song of the earth, but a new song began, the song of the rushing worlds. Far away she could hear it, that ineffable music, far in the utter depths of space. Nearer it would come and nearer, a ringing, glorious sound, a sound and yet a voice, one mighty voice that sang and was answered by other voices as sun crossed the path of sun, and caught up and re-echoed by the innumerable ...
— The Ghost Kings • H. Rider Haggard
... mountains around;" but once more in pianissimo it tells us "the Lord was not in the tempest." The earthquake and the fire pass by, each treated in a similar manner; but the Lord was not in those elements. Then, in gentle tones of ineffable sweetness, it declares, "After the fire there came a still, small voice, ... and in that still, small voice onward came the Lord;" and onward sings the chorus in low, sweet, ravishing tones to the end: "The Seraphim above Him cried one to the other, Holy, holy, holy, ...
— The Standard Oratorios - Their Stories, Their Music, And Their Composers • George P. Upton
... art. He was already seen to grow pale under that love of beauty and of glory which swallows up all other loves. On his return from a journey to Antwerp, his friends were astonished at the enthusiasm with which he spoke of the wonders of art. He had beheld the masterpieces of Rubens and Vandyke, the ineffable grace of Murillo's Virgins, the ingenuously-grotesque pieces of Teniers and Van Ostade, the beautiful landscapes of Ruysdael. He returned with head bent and eyes fatigued, and his mind filled ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... the roll of the earth as it turned lumberingly on its axis—a faint shaking which did not affect me. Still, I was in the bedroom, near the windows. And I had a glimpse.... The heralds of a new vitality swept trumpeting through me, and a calm, intense, ineffable joy followed in their train. I had a glimpse.... And my eyes were not dazzled. I yearned and strained towards what I saw, towards the exceeding brightness of undreamt companionships, hopes, perceptions, activities, and sorrows. Yes, sorrows! But what noble ...
— The Matador of the Five Towns and Other Stories • Arnold Bennett
... high order, particularly the noble "Trisagion and Sanctus," with its "Holy, Holy!" now hushed in reverential awe and now pealing in exultant worship. But of all his songs, I like best his "When Love is Gone," fraught with calm intensity, and closing in beauty as ineffable as a last glimmer of ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... named true zeal and divine charity. I promise thee better things than drunkenness crowned with flowers or the dreams of a brief night. I promise thee holy feasts and celestial suppers. The happiness that I bring thee will never end; it is unheard-of, it is ineffable, and such that if the happy of this world could only see a shadow of it they ...
— Thais • Anatole France
... their uncloying freshness. They are not sweet, they are oftener bitter, they are penetrating and lyrical. I know well the odors of May and June, of the world of meadows and orchards bursting into bloom, but they are not so ineffable and immaterial and so stimulating to the sense as the ...
— A Year in the Fields • John Burroughs
... smiles around, Sustaining all yon orbs, and all their suns, From seeming evil still educing good, And better thence again, and better still, In infinite progression. But I lose Myself in Him, in Light ineffable; Come then expressive Silence, mine ...
— Love and Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... done with the ineffable FUSSELL. By this time he was on the top of a step-ladder. Slowly he selected six tomes, and began his perilous descent. Our eyes were riveted upon him. Crash, bang! His arms were empty, and the unconscionable books fluttered and clattered to the floor. Slowly and ruefully did FUSSELL descend ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, September 10, 1892 • Various
... allowing him a circle of about fifteen yards in circumference, in which he can he made to march round his pole. They knead tough clay on his head to secure the cranium from the effects of the blaze, that it may not inflict immediate death. Under the excitement of ineffable and horrid joy, they whip him round the circle, that he may expose each part of his body to the flame, while the other part is fanned by the cool air, that he may thus undergo the literal operation of slow roasting. During this abhorrent process, the children ...
— The First White Man of the West • Timothy Flint
... we have been in the habit of meaning. I have already said-I fear, too often-that no conception of God can have any value or meaning for us which does not involve his existence as an independent Living Person of ineffable wisdom and power, vastness, and duration both in the past and for the future. If such a Being as this can be found existing and made evident, directly or indirectly, to human senses, there is a God. ...
— God the Known and God the Unknown • Samuel Butler
... but as different endowments—the one of nature, the other of grace. “Behold the new and surprising union which God alone could teach and alone accomplish, and which is only an image and an effect of the ineffable union of two natures in the one ...
— Pascal • John Tulloch
... as this; it was a pearl of great price, for which a man might be prepared to part with all he possessed, if only to obtain it. There was an indefinable majesty, a moral glory, a tender grace, an ineffable attractiveness in this Man, which was immediately appreciated by the greatest of woman-born, because of his own intrinsic nobility and greatness of soul. It needed a Baptist to recognise the Christ. He who had never quailed before monarch or people, directly he came in contact with Christ, ...
— John the Baptist • F. B. Meyer
... a friend of my boy, young Lord Magnus Charters, a chum of my scapegrace, etc., would make a greater figure in the world than even their fathers had done before them. He asked permission to bring Arthur to a grand fete at Gaunt House; saw him with ineffable satisfaction dancing with the sisters of the young noblemen before mentioned; and gave himself as much trouble to procure cards of invitation for the lad to some good houses, as if he had been a mamma with a daughter to marry, and not an old half-pay officer in a wig. And he ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... them in a dread suspense; His very soul seemed poised upon the word Which left at last his trembling lips,—"Rachel!" She raised her head, and their bright, ardent eyes Exchanged the voiceless language of the soul; A joy ineffable diffused its flush O'er both their faces; yet she did not speak, But only clung the closer to her sire, As if in fear to lose her self-control. At length Emanuel spoke in tones so charged With deep emotion that the ...
— Poems • John L. Stoddard
... desires within you, what share and what proportion go out and up to Christ? You know what beauty is. You know and you love the beauty of a child, of a woman, of a man, of nature, of art, and so on. Do you know, have you ever seen, the ineffable beauty of Christ? Is there one saint of God here,—and He has many saints here—is there one of you who can say with David in the text, One thing do I desire? There should be many so desiring saints here; for Christ's beauty is far better and far fairer, far more captivating, far more ...
— Bunyan Characters - Third Series - The Holy War • Alexander Whyte
... in containing all the virtues requisite for his redemption. Man could no longer sin when once she had thought pityingly of him. Every deed must be noble if rooted in love of her. All that one asked was to worship her ineffable superiority. How grievously should one affront her virtue if ever one dreamed of kisses! But should one dream of them, pray God she might never stoop that far in mercy! No, passion must never mar this shrine at which ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... like manner, if we suppose God to be the first of all beings, we must, unavoidably, therefrom conclude his unity. As to the ineffable Trinity subsisting in this Unity, a mystery discovered only by the Sacred Scriptures, especially in the New Testament, where it is more clearly revealed than in the Old, let others boldly pry into it, if they please, while ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... describing the glories and beauties of the external world, is forgetful of the existence and attributes of the Most High. That thought, and that feeling, animate all his strains; and though he dare not to describe Him the Ineffable, he cannot prevent his poetry from being beautifully coloured by devotion, tinged by piety—in its essence ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... the boundless sky empurpled with fire. Sometimes I would distinguish her at the bottom of a valley, walking quickly, with an English, elastic step; and I would go towards her, attracted I know not by what, simply to see her illuminated visage, her dried-up, ineffable features, which seemed to glow with ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... the little kitchen, the light ineffable was shining in their faces, but Mrs. McGuire called them back to ...
— Sowing Seeds in Danny • Nellie L. McClung
... and scarcely stirring, she turned and laid her lips again where they had rested all night long and, lying so, dreamed of miracles ineffable. ...
— Athalie • Robert W. Chambers
... more than the words, their tone of ineffable disdain, aroused the passion that never ...
— Captain Blood • Rafael Sabatini
... intimidated by his overbearing looks: and being sensible that I could maintain my ground, I combated his assertions, exposed his mistakes, and laid about me in the best manner I was able. He thought to silence me at once with St. Augustine, St. Gregory, and the rest of the fathers, but found, to his ineffable surprise, that I could handle these almost as dexterously as himself; not that I had ever read them, or he either, perhaps, but I retained a number of passages taken from my Le Sueur, and when he bore hard on ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... Enclosed within the furtive fervent gaze, Heating his arrows at their beauteous rays, For war with Pallas and with Dian cold. Fairer than mortal mould, She moved majestic with celestial gait; And with her hand her robe in royal state Raised, as she went with pride ineffable. Of me I cannot tell, Whether alive or dead I there was left. Nay, dead, methinks! since I of thee was reft, Light of my life! and yet, perchance, alive— Such virtue to revive My lingering soul possessed thy beauteous face, But if that powerful charm of thy great grace Could then thy loyal ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... Marie left him. As the door slammed behind her, the young man drew a deep breath. On his face was the expression of ineffable relief. ...
— Somewhere in France • Richard Harding Davis
... danger could possibly be conceived, by the most immoderately pessimistic and sinister imagination, as even vaguely threatening. And for the rest, you have seen a happy young mother teaching first steps to the first-born— that was Amedee. Radiantly tender, aggressively solicitous, diffusing ineffable sweetness on the air, wreathed in seraphic smiles, beaming caressingly, and aglow with a sacred joy that I should be looking so well, he greeted me in a voice of honey and bowed me to my repast with an unconcealed fondness at once ...
— The Guest of Quesnay • Booth Tarkington
... suffer, and from your standpoint (not mine) you raise a vain cry; for compatibility, like everything else, is illusory. The illusions of love are a strength, and the ways of love are divine; through them we come to that feeling of completion which is compatibility and which is as ineffable as the white-lipped promise of waves heard by those who have also listened to weeping. Love is not responsible for institutionalism. There would be no fewer marriages if people married for convenience, nor would the ...
— The Kempton-Wace Letters • Jack London
... use. It was not a school language, to acquire which was considered an imperative duty; no, no; nor was it a drawing-room language, drawled out occasionally, in shreds and patches by the ladies of generals and other great dignitaries, to the ineffable dismay of poor officers' wives. Nothing of the kind; but a speech spoken in out-of-the- way desolate places, and in cut-throat kens, where thirty ruffians, at the sight of the king's minions, would spring up with brandished sticks and an 'ubbubboo, like the blowing ...
— The Pocket George Borrow • George Borrow
... sickened, and her end visibly approached. While a number of her friends were standing around her couch, she suddenly exclaimed, looking upwards, "Stand aside, stand aside, Jesus is coming;" and with a look of ineffable love, she presently expired. This story ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 33, June 15, 1850 • Various
... be many months before you can revisit Paris, or disclose our place of residence to anyone: and our passports—arrange all that; in what names, and whither, you please. And now, dear Richard" (she leaned her arm fondly on my shoulder, and looked with ineffable passion in my eyes, with her other hand clasped in mine), "my very life is in your hands; I have staked all on ...
— The Room in the Dragon Volant • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... when an account was given of special services, gratifying mention was invariably made of Miss Buff as having presided at the organ with her usual ability. Bessie hardly knew whether to laugh or cry as she listened. Lady Latimer wore a countenance of ineffable patience. She had fought the ground inch by inch with the choral party in the congregation, and inch by inch had lost it. The responses went first, then the psalms, and this prolonged the service so seriously that twice she walked out of the church during the pause before sermon; but being pastorally ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr
... and individual idiosyncrasies of bears. But if the Tribune man expects a homily upon the sin of feeding oneself in courses to wild animals, he is informed that we waste no words upon the senseless wretch who is given to that species of iniquity. We regard him with ineffable self-contempt. ...
— The Fiend's Delight • Dod Grile
... eyes and fixed them upon me. I read in them an anguish altogether ineffable. Never had I witnessed a like demeanour in Pleyel. Never, indeed, had I observed an human countenance in which grief was more legibly inscribed. He seemed struggling for utterance; but his struggles being fruitless, he shook his head and turned ...
— Wieland; or The Transformation - An American Tale • Charles Brockden Brown
... vigorous commercial life of the Company shows no evidence whatever of its previous urgent importance. Founded in the time of the Commonwealth as a symbol for the Company's men who, when in rare moments they looked up from the engrossing business of their dominant hours, desired a reminder of the ineffable things beyond ships and cargoes, the Chapel has survived all the changes which destroyed their ships and scattered the engrossing business of their working hours into dry matter for antiquaries. So little do men really change. They ...
— London River • H. M. Tomlinson
... Truly we are fearfully and wonderfully made! The soul is touched with the strong necessity of loving; and its power becomes intense and inappeasable in proportion to the capacity of the heart; and yet some of the greatest of those have reposed so supremely in the innate and ineffable Ideal that to the uninitiated they have seemed in their serenity as pulseless as pearls. Through this sublime influence lovely women have become nuns, and have lived and died saints, that they might continually indulge and constantly ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 62, December, 1862 • Various
... to the purple-striped variety which grew to eight inches and sometimes fought cats, the dinies were in motion. They ran in the wake of the chief justice, enthralled and entranced by the smell of hot sheet iron. They were fascinated. They were bemused. They were aware of nothing but that ineffable fragrance. They hopped, ran, leaped, trotted and galloped in full cry after the head of the ...
— Attention Saint Patrick • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... over the hill as the messenger came up from Cana, faith was as simple as an exact science. Here Gabriel had descended on wide feathered wings from the Throne of God set beyond the stars, the Holy Ghost had breathed in a beam of ineffable light, the Word had become Flesh as Mary folded her arms and bowed her head to the decree of the Eternal. And here once more, he thought, though it was no more than a guess—yet he thought that already the running of chariot-wheels was audible—the tumult of ...
— Lord of the World • Robert Hugh Benson
... I love, His praises aloud I'll proclaim, And join with the armies above, To shout His adorable name. To gaze on His glories divine Shall be my eternal employ; To see them incessantly shine, My boundless, ineffable joy. ...
— The Story of the Hymns and Tunes • Theron Brown and Hezekiah Butterworth
... rain, the long unheard familiar call-note of some newly-returned migrant, the first sight of some flower in spring, would bring back the old emotion and would be like a sudden ray of sunlight in a dark place—a momentary intense joy, to be succeeded by ineffable pain. Then there were times when these two opposite feelings mingled and would be together in my mind for hours at a time, and this occurred oftenest during the autumnal migration, when the great wave of bird-life set northwards, and all through March and April the birds were visible in flock ...
— Far Away and Long Ago • W. H. Hudson
... Divine Justice in satisfaction for the sins of the world, caused his divinity to return, in some sort, into the bosom of the Holy Trinity, concentrated himself, so to speak, in his pure, loving and innocent humanity, and strong only in his ineffable love, gave it up to ...
— The Dolorous Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ • Anna Catherine Emmerich
... here. I went out of the room. I could only preach and preach, so I mused, and get my effigy burnt for my pains. I had not yet been able to bring back a single soul from the path of death. They who have the power, can do so by a mere sign. My words have not that ineffable meaning. I am not a flame, only a black coal, which has gone out. I can light no lamp. That is what the story of my life shows—my row of lamps has ...
— The Home and the World • Rabindranath Tagore
... far down the purgatory fire; his brightness was so great that Alvira could follow him even through the flames. There the angel found a young, beautiful soul, deep in agony, clothed with crimson fire. A smile of ineffable joy lit up the countenance of the sufferer—the message from heaven was understood. The angel lifted this soul from the fire, and, pausing for a moment on the peak of a lambent flame, the angelic deliverer and the liberated ...
— Alvira: the Heroine of Vesuvius • A. J. O'Reilly
... beyond, blazing with countless lights, which filled the warm air with the scents of frankincense, of jasmine, of violets, of myrrh; all that the most odorous flowers, all that the most costly spices could distil, seemed gathered into one ineffable and ambrosial essence: from the light columns that sprang upwards to the airy roof, hung draperies of white, studded with golden stars. At the extremities of the room two fountains cast up a spray, which, catching the rays of the roseate light, glittered ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... "demonstration" of His existence is to be found. This he places in the life and teaching of Jesus Christ, who, as God incarnate, furnishes the "evidence" which "is common to Understanding and Sensation," and thus translates the "Infinite" and "Ineffable" into terms of the finite and comprehensible. In this paradox Christian theology has ever since been content to rest as one of the fundamental mysteries of ...
— The Basis of Early Christian Theism • Lawrence Thomas Cole
... of an immortal—the robe of glory due to genius, and which the ages hand on—I, a frail mortal! When I wandered through the fields of light where the happy souls play, I was borne up by the love of a woman, the wings of an angel; resting on her heart, I could taste the ineffable pleasures whose touch is more perilous to us mortals than are the torments of the ...
— The Exiles • Honore de Balzac
... the whole Art of Creation has been employed, and where God has chosen to show himself in the most magnificent manner? What must be the Architecture of Infinite Power under the Direction of Infinite Wisdom? A Spirit cannot but be transported, after an ineffable manner, with the sight of those Objects, which were made to affect him by that Being who knows the inward Frame of a Soul, and how to please and ravish it in all its most secret Powers and Faculties. It is to this Majestic Presence of God, we may apply those beautiful Expressions in holy Writ: ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... began to condense and take on forms that startled her with their wonderful splendor and beauty. These she saw all the time, sleeping or waking; they made bright summer of the frozen stream and snapping gale, the snowdrifts and the sleet. In her brave young heart, swelled the ineffable song—the music never yet caught by syrinx or flute or violin, the words no tongue ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson
... as all life is beautiful when we are in health. She has no quarrel with the world—she loves and she is loved again. No vain longing fills her heart, no feverish unrest disturbs her dreams, for her no crouching fear haunts the passing hours—that ineffable smile which plays around her mouth says plainly that life is good. And yet the circles about the eyes and the drooping lids hint of world-weariness, and speak the message of Koheleth and say, "Vanity ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... anticipated the omission of herself and was prepared for it; but persecution had rendered her courageous, and she did not give Madame the pleasure of seeing on her face the impression of the shock her heart had received. On the contrary, smiling with that ineffable gentleness which gave an angelic expression to her features—"In that case, madame, I shall be at liberty this evening, I suppose?" ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas
... the recital his companion rose softly, flung his cigarette end into the little water-bowl, and passed into the further swelter room. Cornelian Valpy was left, still clothed in a look of ineffable complacency, still engaged, in all probability, in reclothing himself in the finery ...
— When William Came • Saki
... months of 1727 as a holy, calm, sabbatic season, when one and all were quickened and stirred by the power of the Spirit Divine. "The whole place," said Zinzendorf himself, "represented a visible tabernacle of God among men." For the next four months the city on the hill was the home of ineffable joy; and the very men who had lately quarrelled with each other now formed little groups for prayer and praise. As the evening shadows lengthened across the square the whole settlement met to pray and praise, and talk with each other, like brothers ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton
... fragments mutiles, j'ai essaye d'expliquer ces choses qui dorment, sans doute, au fond de notre instinct et qu'il est bien difficile de reveiller completement. J'y constatais d'abord, qu'une inquietude nous attendait a tout spectacle auquel nous assistions et qu'une deception a peu pres ineffable accompagnait toujours la chute du rideau. N'est-il pas evident que le Macbeth ou l'Hamlet que nous voyons sur la scene ne ressemble pas au Macbeth ou a l'Hamlet du livre? Qu'il a visiblement retrograde dans le sublime? Qu'une grande ...
— Pelleas and Melisande • Maurice Maeterlinck
... from their sockets, their knees shook under them, and then, with a wild shout of horror they began to scatter and fly, making a wide pathway for the Man of Mystery who now strode through their ranks with that awful gaze which seemed to pierce the veil of mortality and to peer at things ineffable and beyond human ken. And with His eyes refusing to look again upon the familiar scenes of His youth, He departed from Nazareth, forsaking it forever as His home place. Verily, indeed, the Prophet hath no honor in His own ...
— Mystic Christianity • Yogi Ramacharaka
... break thy brazen tables; forget thy lofty science, Cabalist, and read the stars no longer.[11] But last night I stood upon the gulf which girds my dwelling: in one hand, I held my sacred talisman, that bears the name ineffable; in the other, the mystic record of our holy race. I remembered that I had evoked spirits, that I had communed with the great departed, and that the glowing heavens were to me a natural language. I recalled, as consolation ...
— Alroy - The Prince Of The Captivity • Benjamin Disraeli
... truth ineffable!—I set my soul In hazard to a farthing, that you kept The faith, with pride ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... words passed {22} between them till nine years had sped and he chanced to come upon her in all the radiance of her womanhood. She was "between two gentle ladies who were older than she; and passing by in the street, she turned her eyes towards that place where I stood very timidly, and in her ineffable courtesy saluted me so graciously that I seemed then to see the heights of all blessedness. And because this was the first time her words came to my ears, it was so sweet to me that, like one intoxicated, I left all my companions, and retiring to the solitary refuge of my chamber I set ...
— Heroes of Modern Europe • Alice Birkhead |
