"Irreclaimable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... perceived that Korah was irreclaimable, he directed the rest of his warning to those other Levites, the men of Korah's tribe, who, he feared, would join Korah in his rebellion. He admonished them to be satisfied with the honors God had granted them, and not to strive for priestly ...
— THE LEGENDS OF THE JEWS VOLUME III BIBLE TIMES AND CHARACTERS - FROM THE EXODUS TO THE DEATH OF MOSES • BY LOUIS GINZBERG
... interfere with the prospects of some who had never been "fast," but on the whole, society would benefit by the change. I maintain that that would be the correct method to adopt with some of those thieves who are totally irreclaimable by our present system of prison discipline. With regard to the casual and petty thieves, their case is somewhat different. Many of them could not be raised above the lowest class of common labourers, but by adopting a system of individualization, ...
— Six Years in the Prisons of England • A Merchant - Anonymous
... eh? But we made such a night of it. Fancy! It was most amusing. EJLERT read his book to me—think of that! Astonishing book! Oh, we really had great fun! I wish I'd written it. Pity he's so irreclaimable. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 100, May 2, 1891 • Various
... had been intersected by many wide valleys, and the trees, now changed into silex, were exposed projecting from the volcanic soil, now changed into rock, whence formerly, in a green and budding state, they had raised their lofty heads. Now, all is utterly irreclaimable and desert; even the lichen cannot adhere to the stony casts of former trees. Vast, and scarcely comprehensible as such changes must ever appear, yet they have all occurred within a period, recent when compared with the history of the Cordillera; and the Cordillera itself is ...
— A Naturalist's Voyage Round the World - The Voyage Of The Beagle • Charles Darwin
... after I'd stoushed you for it. You might get tired of me calling you a mug, and bossing you and making a tool or convenience of you, you know. You might go in for honest graft (you were always a bit weak-minded) and then I'd have to wash my hands of you (unless you agreed to keep me) for an irreclaimable mug. Or it might suit me to become a respected and worthy fellow townsman, and then, if you came within ten miles of me or hinted that you ever knew me, I'd have you up for vagrancy, or soliciting alms, or attempting to levy blackmail. I'd have to fix you—so I give you ...
— On the Track • Henry Lawson
... children who were left to him, grew up, and were children no longer. The father remained the same—poorer, shabbier, and more dissolute-looking, but the same confirmed and irreclaimable drunkard. The boys had, long ago, run wild in the streets, and left him; the girl alone remained, but she worked hard, and words or blows could always procure him something for the tavern. So he went on in the old course, and a merry life ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... youthful character, he would have had you believe that school was to him a place of semi-purgatorial probation,—which nothing but love of his mother, and desire to meet her wishes, prevented him, as an irreclaimable antischoliast, from obstinately renouncing at a time when he had learned little Latin, ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine
... To a mesalliance of that kind every globule of my ancestral blood spoke in opposition. In brief, my tastes, habits, instinct, with whatever of reason my love had left me—all fought against it. Moreover, I was an irreclaimable sentimentalist, and found a subtle charm in an impersonal and spiritual relation which acquaintance might vulgarize and marriage would certainly dispel. No woman, I argued, is what this lovely creature seems. Love is a delicious dream; why should I bring ...
— Can Such Things Be? • Ambrose Bierce
... strength for ourselves and our descendants by sturdily fighting it. But the effects of right living through a hundred generations are not overcome by the criminal life of one or two. Evil surroundings weigh more in producing criminals than heredity, and their children are not irreclaimable. ...
— The Whence and the Whither of Man • John Mason Tyler
... sunlight. Had he been a mere labourer in a workman's rough clay-stained clothes, one would have stood still to look at and admire him, and say perhaps what a magnificent warrior he would have looked with sword and spear and plumed helmet, mounted on a big horse! But alas! he had the stamp of the irreclaimable blackguard on his face; and that same handsome face was just then disfigured with several bruises in three colours—blue, black, and red. Doubtless he had been in a drunken brawl on the previous evening and had perhaps been thrown out of some low ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... that has inherited a taint; and I am the one unfortunate in whom that taint has broken forth. Let me tell you a secret; since my first potation, my mother has never once remonstrated with me; never once upbraided; my proud, high tempered mother. She knows the folly of trying to reclaim the irreclaimable. But," lowering his voice, sadly, ...
— The Diamond Coterie • Lawrence L. Lynch
... cane chair, his long legs extended, his head thrown back and his hat pulled over his eyes. He felt cold about the heart; he had never liked anything less. What could he do, what could he say? If the girl were irreclaimable could he pretend to like it? To attempt to reclaim her was permissible only if the attempt should succeed. To try to persuade her of anything sordid or sinister in the man to whose deep art she had succumbed would be decently ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 2 (of 2) • Henry James
... heavily of Mr. Taylor, the very able unmasker of Junius, for blinking the whole questions B and C. He it is that has settled the question A, so that it will never be re-opened by a man of sense. A man who doubts, after really reading Mr. Taylor's work, is not only a blockhead, but an irreclaimable blockhead. It is true that several men, among them Lord Brougham, whom Schlosser (though hating him, and kicking him) cites, still profess scepticism. But the reason is evident: they have not read the book, they have only heard of it. They are unacquainted ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey
... tones, the marriage service. The vows were pronounced by the weeping brides in voices more distinct and audible than if they had been uttered amid the gay crowds that usually throng a bridal; for though they were the irreclaimable words that bound them forever to the men whose power over their feelings they thus proclaimed to the world, the reserve of maiden diffidence was lost in one engrossing emotion of solemnity, created by the awful presence in which they stood. When the benediction was pronounced, ...
— The Pilot • J. Fenimore Cooper
... wholly irreclaimable as Mr. Gibney and Mr. McGuffey might have been and doubtless were, each possessed in bounteous measure the sweetest of human attributes, to-wit: a soft, kind heart and a forgiving spirit. Creatures ...
— Captain Scraggs - or, The Green-Pea Pirates • Peter B. Kyne
... drowned herself,—a young girl only fifteen, who came to the city, far from home and parents, and fell a victim to the temptation which brought her to shame and desperation. Many thus fall every year who are never counted. They fall into the ranks of those whom the world abandons as irreclaimable. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 107, September, 1866 • Various
... observer might, however, have seen, or fancied that he saw, in the forced humility of his countenance, certain gleamings of a triumph that should not properly be traced to the fall of Quebec. The habit of appearing meek had, however, united with a frugal regard for the precious and irreclaimable minutes, in producing this extraordinary diligence in a pursuit of a character that was so humble, when compared ...
— The Red Rover • James Fenimore Cooper
... The irreclaimable depravity of this man could not excite any urgent feeling of sympathy in his behalf, and our two friends took no further notice ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... embarked my capital in the wine trade, and, could I have restrained myself from drinking, should have been successful, and in a short time might have doubled my property, as I stated to Mr Evelyn; but now, I had become an irreclaimable drunkard, and when that is the case, all hope is over. My affairs soon became deranged, and, at the request of my partner, they were wound up, and I found myself with my capital of L1500 reduced to L1000. ...
— The Little Savage • Captain Marryat
... was a regular time for visiting every day, and that if any of his friends came to see him, he would be fetched down to the grate, and that he was lodged apart from the mass of prisoners, because he was not supposed to be utterly depraved and irreclaimable. Kit was thankful for this indulgence, and sat reading the Church Catechism, until the man ...
— Ten Boys from Dickens • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... offended him, he said, whilst inflicting upon him the lightest of punishments: 'Between me and Aziz is a river of milk, which I cannot cross.' The spirit of these words animated him in all his actions towards those connected with him. Unless they were irreclaimable, or had steeped their hands in the blood {178} of others, he ever sought to win them back by his gentleness and liberality. He loved forgiving, reinstating, trusting, and though the exercise of these noble qualities led sometimes to his being imposed upon, they told in ...
— Rulers of India: Akbar • George Bruce Malleson
... discovered. And after years of deference to ecclesiastical authority, conditional proposals of submission to the Pope upon conviction of error in his theses, or conscientious belief, Luther in time arrived at the conclusion that the church of Rome was irreclaimable, giving publicity to his deep convictions in a treatise De Captivitate Babylonica,—"The Captivity of Babylon." In the 18th chapter of this book, he discovered that Babylon is doomed to destruction. He considered ...
— Notes On The Apocalypse • David Steele
... punishments, all irreclaimable thieves or murderers are killed and disposed of in the same manner as these sorcerers; whilst on minor thieves a penalty equivalent to the extent of the depredation is levied. Illicit intercourse being treated as petty larceny, a value is fixed according to the value of the woman—for it must be ...
— The Discovery of the Source of the Nile • John Hanning Speke
... was very near the borders of these two mighty forces. An hour's easy ride would carry him to a region as barren and apparently as irreclaimable as that through which Childe Roland journeyed in quest of the Dark Tower; lying, too, in a temperature so fiery that it coagulated the blood in the veins, and stopped the beating of the heart. Underfoot ...
— The Golden Fleece • Julian Hawthorne
... ever put forth, with most energetic distinctness, those other great elementary truths, which either are an explanation of her mission or give a character to her work. She does not teach that human nature is irreclaimable, else wherefore should she be sent? not, that it is to be shattered and reversed, but to be extricated, purified, and restored; not, that it is a mere mass of hopeless evil, but that it has the promise upon it of great things, and even now, in its present state of disorder and excess, ...
— Apologia Pro Vita Sua • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... reward for the scalps of Young Persons with the ears attached. Your regular Young Person is a living nuisance, whose every act is a provocation to exterminate her. We say "her," not because, physically considered, the Y. P. is necesarily of the she sex; more commonly is it an irreclaimable male; but morally and intellectually it is an unmixed female. Her virtues are merely milk-and-morality-her intelligence is pure spiritual whey. Her conversation (to which not even her own virtues and ...
— The Fiend's Delight • Dod Grile
... an extent previously unknown since the system of forced convict-labour in the colonies was introduced. All persons practically acquainted with the subject were aware of the result in which their experiment would terminate, and the fearful multiplication of irreclaimable criminals to which it would lead in the heart of the empire. But unfortunately the persons practically acquainted with the subject had scarcely a voice in the legislature—the current ran strong in favour of lengthened imprisonment, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 343, May 1844 • Various
... their ticket, married and thoroughly reclaimed 14 Ditto, ditto, single men 49 Free from expiration of sentence, but worthless 7 Returned home to England after becoming free 1 Well-conducted men, as yet under sentence 62 Indifferent, not trustworthy 29 Depraved characters, irreclaimable 7 Sent to iron gangs and penal settlements 11 Escaped 1 Died 3 Given up at request of Government 2 Returned to Government hospital from ill health 4 ...
— Australia, its history and present condition • William Pridden
... the world. . . . Only two suppositions are possible: one, that Mr. Bull of the Circulating Library at Bath (if Mr. Bull it were) was constitutionally insensible to the charms of that master-spell which Mrs. Slipslop calls "ironing"; the other, that he was an impenitent and irreclaimable adherent of the author of ...
— Jane Austen, Her Life and Letters - A Family Record • William Austen-Leigh and Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh
... in practical affairs, and just ideas formed a portion of his dreams. Nature had made him an irreclaimable optimist; all that is base and ugly in life passed out of view as he soared above earth in his luminous ether. Sadness and doubt indeed he knew, but his sadness had a charm of its own, and there were consolations in maternal nature, in love, in religious faith ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... her the better. She was a coarse and, it is to be feared, a very sinful woman. But at that time she was the only woman in Roaring Camp, and was just then lying in sore extremity, when she most needed the ministration of her own sex. Dissolute, abandoned, and irreclaimable, she was yet suffering a martyrdom hard enough to bear even when veiled by sympathizing womanhood, but now terrible in her loneliness. The primal curse had come to her in that original isolation which must have made the punishment of the first transgression ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... the red tribes have resisted all attempts to lift them to the civilized level and keep them there. Roger Williams, and the "apostle," John Eliot, were their friends, and won their regard; but neither Williams' influence nor Eliot's Bible left any lasting trace upon them. The Indian is irreclaimable; disappointment is the very mildest result that awaits the effort to reclaim him. He is wild to the marrow; no bird or beast is so wild as he. He is a human embodiment of the untrodden woods, the undiscovered rivers, the austere mountains, the pathless ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... thinks she must be his—'This one consolation, however, remains; he is not an infidel, an unbeliever. Had he been an infidel, there would have been no room at all for hope of him; but (priding himself as he does in his fertile invention) he would have been utterly abandoned, irreclaimable, and a savage.'* And it must be observed, that scoffers are too witty, in their own opinion, (in other words, value themselves too much upon their profligacy,) ...
— Clarissa Harlowe, Volume 9 (of 9) - The History Of A Young Lady • Samuel Richardson
... These latter were engraved on the palms of his hands, and written with corroding ink on the fleshly tables of his heart. As he turned over the well-thumbed pages he made many mental calculations, sometimes smiling and sometimes sighing as his eye fell on an irreclaimable debt. Then, taking up his pencil, he entered an account on the fly-sheet of the Bible, and seemed satisfied when he discovered that his illness would not involve him in the loss which he had anticipated; and smiling the smile of selfish ...
— Lancashire Idylls (1898) • Marshall Mather
... yet, and it's never too late to mend. There is still time for reformation. I can't help you now; it would only demoralize you altogether. To think, after the way I trained you, you can't battle round any better'n this! I always thought you were an irreclaimable mug, but I expected better things of you towards the end. I thought I'd make something of you. It's enough to dishearten any man and disgust him with the world. Why! you ought to be a rich man now with the chances and training you had! To think—but I won't talk of that; it has made ...
— While the Billy Boils • Henry Lawson
... the Protector and his friends. He advised Lady Bellingham to state the loss of her son to His Highness, and procure his order for the Doctor's arrest, adding, that even if innocent of this accusation, the imprisonment of one, who as an irreclaimable royalist, deserved punishment, was no breach of justice. He assured Her Ladyship, that her son's long residence in a disaffected family, had not occasioned the smallest change in his opinions, but that ...
— The Loyalists, Vol. 1-3 - An Historical Novel • Jane West
... scorpions, give them no chance to be anything but that, and then wonder they are not doves and butterflies. Things like this gangster are infernal spirits, irreclaimable; but we gain nothing by extirpating the individuals; the black stream which carries them must be dammed at its source. Of the conditions which generate them, a part is the prisons and their keepers. But we are not yet at the root of the matter—the keepers are not primarily to blame. It ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... of my Sketch from Childhood have lodged complaints against me for not having pursued it to what they can regard as a satisfactory close. Some may have done this in a gentle tone, as against an irreclaimable procrastinator, amiably inclined, perhaps, to penitence, though constitutionally incapable of amendment; but others more clamorously, as against one faithless to his engagements, and deliberately a defaulter. Themselves they regard in the light of creditors, and me as a slippery debtor, who, ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey—Vol. 1 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... Wales, were chosen chiefly from amongst men employed on the roads, who had acquired good recommendations from their immediate overseers; but, on this last occasion, the men forming the party were for the most part chosen from amongst those still remaining in Cockatoo Island, the worst and most irreclaimable of their class. ...
— Journal of an Expedition into the Interior of Tropical Australia • Thomas Mitchell
... usual serenity. He had been intensely interested and appreciative and admiring; but emotionally unmoved; but now, as this troubling music of Hughie's seemed to express the dominion of unsuspected but potent earth-forces, primitive, savage and forever irreclaimable, his calm became strangely disturbed. Dimly he realized that should every desert on the globe finally be subdued by the plow, the irrigating ditches and the pruning hook, they would still remain as realities in the mind of man, ...
— The Black Pearl • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... concerning it. In the old Indian war days there were several massacres at this point, in which the Indians occasionally outdid themselves in deeds of blood. About twenty years ago, the old fort was turned into an Indian prison, and to it were taken some of the worst and apparently most irreclaimable members of Indian tribes. This included Mochi, the Indian squaw who seemed to regard murder as a high art and a great virtue, "Rising Bull," "Medicine Water," "Big Mocassin" and other red ruffians who had proved themselves beyond all hope of reformation. ...
— My Native Land • James Cox
... he take refuge? If Robinson Crusoe had been a social Duffer, he and Friday would not have been on speaking terms in a week. People think the poor Duffer malignant, boorish, haughty, unkind; he is only a Duffer, an irreclaimable, sad, pitiful creature, quite beyond the reach of philanthropy. On my grave write, not MISERRIMUS (though that would be true enough), ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 102, January 23, 1892 • Various
... that species of energetic concision—that abrupt, weighty, unhurried, and hollow-sounding enunciation—that leaden, self-balanced and perfectly modulated guttural utterance, which may be observed in the lost drunkard, or the irreclaimable eater of opium, during the periods ...
— The Haunters & The Haunted - Ghost Stories And Tales Of The Supernatural • Various
... next morning we entered the vast Colorado desert. This was verily the desert, more like the desert which our imagination pictures, than the one we had crossed in September from Mojave. It seemed so white, so bare, so endless, and so still; irreclaimable, eternal, like Death itself. The stillness was appalling. We saw great numbers of lizards darting about like lightning; they were nearly as white as the sand itself, and sat up on their hind legs and ...
— Vanished Arizona - Recollections of the Army Life by a New England Woman • Martha Summerhayes
... in the features of Collatinus for the loss of his Lucretia. These sort of illusions are not uncommon. I would not maintain that the features of good men do not bear the impression of their character, like irreclaimable villains that of their depravity; but that there are many which have at least a doubtful cast. In short, I won a little upon old Schiller; I looked at him more attentively, and he no longer appeared forbidding. To say the truth, there was something in his language which, spite of ...
— My Ten Years' Imprisonment • Silvio Pellico
... the industrious and irreclaimable hours continued their labours. The sun, which had been struggling through such masses of vapour throughout the day, fell slowly in a streak of clear sky, and thence sunk gloriously into the gloomy ...
— The Prairie • J. Fenimore Cooper
... demolished the cobwebs; but since then she had not been able to obtain so much as a glimpse of the interior. A ten minutes' sweeping had sufficed for the chamber, but the passage-way seemed in quite an irreclaimable state, judging by the number of times it was necessary to sweep it in the course of a few days. Now Margaret was not an unusual mixture of timidity and daring; so one morning, about a week after Richard was settled, she walked with quaking ...
— The Stillwater Tragedy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... Sharp,' he replied, 'but what you predicted, and which, had I not been the most conceited dolt in existence, I, too, must have foreseen. You know that good-looking, idle, and, I fear, irreclaimable young fellow, ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 440 - Volume 17, New Series, June 5, 1852 • Various
... Koeleapoor, hastened to the place from her own village of Chupra, and by means of indubitable marks upon his person, recognised her child, transformed into a wild animal. She carried him home with her; but finding him destitute of natural affection, and in other respects wholly irreclaimable, at the end of two months she left him to the common ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 446 - Volume 18, New Series, July 17, 1852 • Various
... would have said that Kedzie's poll was illustrated in that wonderfully coiffed hair-like sentence picturing Clara Middleton and "the softly dusky nape of her neck, where this way and that the little lighter-colored irreclaimable curls running truant from the comb and the knot-curls, half-curls, root-curls, vine-ringlets, wedding-rings, fledgling feathers, tufts of down, blown wisps—waved or fell, waved over or up to involutedly, or strayed, loose ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... tossing and tumbling about in bemoaning your hard luck and picturing to yourself what might have been if you had done so and so. All rot. Let the other fellow do the worrying. Remember, my boy, the past is irreclaimable, the present the life we are struggling in, and the future what we make it, or ...
— A Pirate of Parts • Richard Neville
... face to face with a fine, tall, lithe man, in the prime of his health and strength. Here were the bright blue eyes, the winning smile, and the natural grace of movement, which find their own way to favour in the estimation of the gentler sex. This irreclaimable wanderer among the perilous by-ways of the earth—christened "Irish blackguard," among respectable members of society, when they spoke of him behind his back—attracted attention, even among the men. Looking at his daring, finely-formed face, they noticed (as an exception to a general ...
— Blind Love • Wilkie Collins
... name memorable in the traditions of Edinburgh, as well as in the records of criminal jurisprudence, was the son of a citizen of Edinburgh, who endeavoured to breed him up to his own mechanical trade of a tailor. The youth, however, had a wild and irreclaimable propensity to dissipation, which finally sent him to serve in the corps long maintained in the service of the States of Holland, and called the Scotch Dutch. Here he learned military discipline; and, returning afterwards, in the course of an idle and wandering life, to his native ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... merely chanted the old refrain, harped on the scandal brought on Samoncho[u] by the continued bickering of the married pair. Husband and wife had mutual duty toward each other; but also there was a duty toward their neighbours. Iemon was irreclaimable.... This stranger! O'Iwa San should deign to take the active part herself; not afford this ill spectacle and example to the ward. Like most parsons he was convinced by the noise of his own voice, and spoke with the intense conviction ...
— The Yotsuya Kwaidan or O'Iwa Inari - Tales of the Tokugawa, Volume 1 (of 2) • James S. De Benneville
... in the esteem of Benigna than her indiscreet cousins, and felt ready to sink under her reproving eye; but, resuming her benevolent aspect, the fairy continuing her discourse, said, "take courage, my children, you are none of you irreclaimable, and may hope, by your future conduct, to make some amends for past transgressions. The fault has not been so much in yourselves, as in those whose duty it was to have prepared you for the trials and temptations, that you had little chance of passing through the world ...
— The Flower Basket - A Fairy Tale • Unknown
... desperate by his unhappy situation, the miserable man abandons himself yet more recklessly to the vice; his self-respect is gone, the finger of scorn is pointed at him, and to drown all consciousness of his downfall, he becomes a constant tipple and an irreclaimable sot. ...
— City Crimes - or Life in New York and Boston • Greenhorn
... water from every cup, and moved away for the bitter water I found yesterday. I thought to sweeten it by opening the place with a shovel, and baling a lot of the stagnant water out; but it was irreclaimable, and the ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles
... human species, and is generally considered as ranking but little above the members of the brute creation. Savages have always many vices, but I do not think that these are worse in the New Hollanders, than in many other aboriginal races. It is said, indeed, that the Australian is an irreclaimable, unteachable being; that he is cruel, blood-thirsty, revengeful, and treacherous; and in support of such assertions, references are made to the total failure of all missionary and scholastic efforts hitherto made on his behalf, and to many deeds of violence or aggression ...
— Journals Of Expeditions Of Discovery Into Central • Edward John Eyre
... bluely, rueful, dueful, shoeless, eyeless. 2. The word wholly is also an exception to the rule, for nobody writes it wholely. 3. Some will have judgment, abridgment, and acknowledgment, to be irreclaimable exceptions; but I write them with the e, upon the authority of Lowth, Beattie, Ainsworth, Walker, Cobb, Chalmers, and others: the French "jugement," judgement, always ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... the Chef d'Escadron, with a shrug of his shoulders, as of one who explained, by that sentence, a whole world of irreclaimable eccentricities. ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... I; "I should be afraid to say what I think lest your husband should account me a hopeless and irreclaimable unbeliever." ...
— Laicus - The experiences of a Layman in a Country Parish • Lyman Abbott
... color. Among the ever-recurring: tragedies of the frontier, not the least sorrowful was the recovery of these long-missing children by their parents, only to find that they had lost all remembrance of and love for their father and mother, and had become irreclaimable savages, who eagerly grasped the first chance to flee from the intolerable irksomeness and restraint of civilized life. [Footnote: For an instance where a boy finally returned, see "Trans-Alleghany Pioneers," p. 119; see also pp. 126, 132, 133, for ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Two - From the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, 1777-1783 • Theodore Roosevelt
... probably something wrong, and ought to be stopped. Gethryn always had the feeling that it was his duty to go and see what Monk and Danvers were doing, and tell them they mustn't. He had a profound belief in their irreclaimable villainy. In the second place, having studies of their own, they had no business to be in the senior day-room at all. It was contrary to the etiquette of the House for a study man to enter the senior day-room, ...
— A Prefect's Uncle • P. G. Wodehouse
... have said a moment ago that you will not, but now I say you cannot. Kurzbold has just shown what an irreclaimable beast he is, and on that account, because birth, or training, or something has made you one of different caliber, you cannot thus desert him to the reprisal of that ...
— The Sword Maker • Robert Barr
... a contingency as it would appear to be in the eyes of those foreign critics for whom Lord Halifax is the type of every English Churchman and the English Church co-extensive with the nation—save for a small irreclaimable ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... tree out of the way, to make room for their favourite, the larch, I would utter first a regret, that they should have selected these lovely vales for their vegetable manufactory, when there is so much barren and irreclaimable land in the neighbouring moors, and in other parts of the island, which might have been had for this purpose at a far cheaper rate. And I will also beg leave to represent to them, that they ought not to be carried away by flattering promises from the speedy growth of this tree; because in ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... have him taught, but he is a hopeless idiot. I tried to make his life less hard. He is an irreclaimable drunkard, and spends in drink all the money one gives him, and knows enough to sell his new clothes in order to ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... initiated in the mysteries of "stocking the papers." The vicious habits of Simon were, of course, a sore trouble to his father, Elder Jedediah. He reasoned, he counseled, he remonstrated, and he lashed; but Simon was an incorrigible, irreclaimable devil. One day the simple-minded old man returned rather unexpectedly to the field, where he had left Simon and Ben and a negro boy named Bill at work. Ben was still following his plow, but Simon and Bill were in a fence corner, very earnestly ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume V. (of X.) • Various
... Irreclaimable, Sir,—irreclaimable!—said the Little Gentleman.—Cheaper to breed white men than domesticate a nation of red ones. When you can get the bitter out of the partridge's thigh, you can make an enlightened commonwealth of Indians. A provisional race, Sir,—nothing ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... happiness is congenital and irreclaimable. "Cosmic emotion" inevitably takes in them the form of enthusiasm and freedom. I speak not only of those who are animally happy. I mean those who, when unhappiness is offered or proposed to them, positively refuse to feel it, as ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... if an absolutely average man were constructed, every single living individual contributing his characteristics to the result, the result would be edifying, encouraging, or inspiring. Hugh feared that the type would but sink the most tolerant philosopher in a sense of irreclaimable depression. And yet if, guided by prejudice and preference, one made up a figure that one could wholly admire, how untrue to nature it would be, how different from the figure that other human beings would ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... Those who rejected, continued slaves to themselves, and a nuisance to everybody. Again we remark that the same may be said of white men everywhere. White unbelievers continued to pronounce the "red" Kafir an "irreclaimable savage," fit for nothing but coercion and the lash. Black unbelievers continued to curse the white man as being unworthy of any better fate than being "driven into the sea," and, between the two, missionaries ...
— The Settler and the Savage • R.M. Ballantyne
... the door's thickness from where he stood, there arose a tumult of sound, shouts, cries, imprecations, entreaties, as though the walls of some asylum for the unfortunate had broken away and allowed its inmates to escape unrestrained, irreclaimable, ...
— The Mississippi Bubble • Emerson Hough
... corner of the door-way for her to pass him into the house, and doated on her cheek, her ear, and the softly dusky nape of her neck, where this way and that the little lighter-coloured irreclaimable curls running truant from the comb and the knot—curls, half-curls, root-curls, vine-ringlets, wedding-rings, fledgling feathers, tufts of down, blown wisps—waved or fell, waved over or up or involutedly, or strayed, loose and downward, in the form ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... which it can impose, and is bankrupt of motives that it can adduce to prevent it from its madness. Now I do not believe, for my part, that any man in this world is so all-round 'sold unto sin' as that the seeking love of God gives him up as irreclaimable. I do not believe that there are any people concerning whom it is true that it is impossible for the grace of God to find some chink and cranny in their souls through which it can enter and change them. There are no hopeless cases as long as ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... step of his, coming after the events of yesterday. If it should be known that he had visited her thus, terrible consequences might ensue. She rose, and with Mademoiselle de Knesebeck's aid made ready to receive him. Yet for all that she made haste, the precious irreclaimable moments sped. ...
— The Historical Nights Entertainment, Second Series • Rafael Sabatini
... facts of the shameful acts of insubordination at the school and the escape of Dick Haddon and Ted McKnight, and nobody—according to everybody's wise assurances—was the least bit surprised. The fathers of the township (and the mothers, too) had long since given Dick up as an irresponsible and irreclaimable imp. One large section declared the boy to be 'a bit gone,' which was generally Waddy's simple and satisfactory method of accounting for any attribute of man, woman, or child not in conformity with the dull rule of conduct prevailing at Waddy. Another section ...
— The Gold-Stealers - A Story of Waddy • Edward Dyson
... of repose for this brief season of intoxicating splendour. The barbed arrow was in her heart, and the more she struggled, the more irreclaimable it grew. Doubtless that unlucky dream had rendered her ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... nice, my dear,' protested Lady Willow gently, with a deep sigh, for she thought of her own husband, who, having been all his life an irreclaimable reprobate, had commanded her utmost affection while he lived, and was the object of her tenderest regret now that he had taken his departure from a world that had never appreciated his talents; although its influence was, in the estimation of the ...
— A Woman Intervenes • Robert Barr
... thus impassively anatomised by Science is a voice from the Unseen, pregnant with meaning beyond translation. A mere ripple of sound-vibration, called into existence by human touch; a creation, vanishing from its birth, elusive, irreclaimable as a departing soul, yet strong to sway heart and hand as the tornado sways the pliant pine. It is a language peculiar to no period, race, or caste. Ageless and universal, it raises to highest daring, or suffuses with tenderness, to-day ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... the results had not after all been so instantaneous as had been hoped. The Western Engineers raised their eyebrows when they read of the puny shocks by which these men had perished, and they vowed in Los Amigos that when an irreclaimable came their way he should be dealt handsomely by, and have the run of all the big dynamos. There should be no reserve, said the engineers, but he should have all that they had got. And what the result of that would be none could predict, ...
— Round the Red Lamp - Being Facts and Fancies of Medical Life • Arthur Conan Doyle
... living her last days, in an agonised memory of the past. But as they crossed the bridge she recognised all round her the massive towers of the great city: Notre Dame, the grateful spire of La Sainte Chapelle, the sombre outline of St. Gervais, and behind her the Louvre with its great history and irreclaimable grandeur. How small her own tragedy seemed in the midst of this great sanguinary drama, the last act of which had not yet even begun. Her own revenge, her oath, her tribulations, what were they in comparison with that great ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... young Brooks has dared to tell you I promised him work in the greenhouse. He is irreclaimable; the worst character that ever came under my notice; he shall not set foot on the premises. If he is in want, he has only himself to blame. I do not like to think of his wife suffering, but it is the attribute of sins such as his that they involve the innocent ...
— The Emancipated • George Gissing
... shoplifting had practically ceased since a number of petty thieves had been put on probation under maximum suspended sentences. It would be impossible for me adequately to describe the gratifying surprises that came almost daily in my experience with these supposedly irreclaimable men and women. I found that they invariably grasped with desperate eagerness at a chance to reform, and the joy which they exhibited at the night sessions was oftentimes very pathetic. "We are happier than for years," and "We're having our honeymoon over" ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. XXXI, No. 3, July 1908. • Various
... admitted nuisance, of ancient standing, should not be abated without some caution. The zeal of our worthy friend now involved in great distress sundry personages whose idle and mendicant habits his own lochesse had contributed to foster, until these habits had become irreclaimable, or whose real incapacity for exertion rendered them fit objects, in their own phrase, for the charity of all well-disposed Christians. The "long-remembered beggar," who for twenty years had made his regular rounds within the neighbourhood, received rather as an ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... her opportunity. Her mind becomes so trained in the mystery of this pleasure that she experiences no thrill of delight in giving away only the things her husband does not want. Her office in life is to teach him the joy of self-sacrifice. She and all other habitual and irreclaimable givers soon find out that there is next to no pleasure in a gift ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... ignorance, they have no letters or any numbers above a thousand, they are clothed in the bark of trees and the untanned skins of beasts, they worship the bear, the sun, moon, fire, water, and I know not what, they are uncivilisable and altogether irreclaimable savages, yet they are attractive, and in some ways fascinating, and I hope I shall never forget the music of their low, sweet voices, the soft light of their mild, brown eyes, and the wonderful sweetness ...
— Unbeaten Tracks in Japan • Isabella L. Bird
... State is about 3,750 square miles. With this, deduct 5,550 square miles for irreclaimable wastes, and there remains 50,000 square miles, or 32 millions of acres of arable land in Illinois,—a much greater quantity than is found in any other State. In this estimate, inundated lands, submerged by high waters, but which may be reclaimed at ...
— A New Guide for Emigrants to the West • J. M. Peck
... looked to me in the Pullman; then—once in Los Angeles—I allowed myself to get hot telling the Hicks people what I thought of them, explaining how I'd have run the chase, and wound up by giving seven days to it—seven precious, irreclaimable days—while everything lay wide open there in the north, and I couldn't get any satisfactory word from the office, and none of any ...
— The Million-Dollar Suitcase • Alice MacGowan
... ways, too. Think how he started to beat poor Owen up that night; yes, and for years back he's been a big bully, trying to have things his own way, and ruling by might of his fists. Why, nearly everybody in Scranton believes him to be utterly irreclaimable. What makes you say ...
— The Chums of Scranton High - Hugh Morgan's Uphill Fight • Donald Ferguson |
