"Conceivable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... in the person of his friend. Only a great man could so worship another, choosing him for such qualities; and hereby Shakspere shows us his Hamlet—a brave, noble, wise, pure man, beset by circumstances the most adverse conceivable. That Hamlet had not misapprehended Horatio becomes evident in the last ...
— The Tragedie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark - A Study with the Text of the Folio of 1623 • George MacDonald
... faithfully throughout, and like men of conscience and honour, whose highest aim is to behave like faithful citizens of this universe, and obey the eternal commandments of Almighty God, who made them. The second thing is, that a sadder object than even that of the coal strike, or any other conceivable strike, is the fact that—loosely speaking—we may say all England has decided that the profitablest way is to do its work ill, slurily, swiftly, and mendaciously. What a contrast between now and say only a hundred ...
— Thrift • Samuel Smiles
... enormous, one had only to get a sheet of this substance beneath it, and one might lift it with a straw. My first natural impulse was to apply this principle to guns and ironclads, and all the material and methods of war, and from that to shipping, locomotion, building, every conceivable form of human industry. The chance that had brought me into the very birth-chamber of this new time—it was an epoch, no less—was one of those chances that come once in a thousand years. The thing unrolled, it expanded and expanded. Among other things I saw in it my redemption as a business ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells
... alone with Karl Johan, and tied a very white scarf round his neck, and Karna, who wanted to be motherly to him, went over his face with a corner of her pocket-handkerchief, which she moistened with her tongue. She was rather officious, but for that matter it was quite conceivable that the boy might have got dirty again since ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... the indispensable accessories of wealth and glory. Palaces and castles were hung with them, the tents of military encampments were made gorgeous with their richness, and no joust nor city procession was conceivable without their colours flaunting in the sun as background to plumed knights and fair ladies. Venice looked to them to brighten her historic stones on days of carnival, and Paris spread them to ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee
... conceiving, e.g. that matter cannot think; that space is infinite; that ex nihilo nihil fit. Leibnitz's tenet that all natural phenomena must be explicable a priori, and the further assumption by some that Nature always acts by the simplest, i.e. by the most easily conceivable means (and that, therefore, e.g. the heavenly bodies have a circular movement), exhibit vividly ...
— Analysis of Mr. Mill's System of Logic • William Stebbing
... and, on the other hand, that which seemed opposed to the selection theory was often held to be a weakening of the evolution and descent theory; and this was done, not only by amateurs, but often enough by the highest authorities also. In reality, however, it is quite conceivable that the idea of a descent may prove correct, and possibly the idea of an evolution of the species will have to be replaced by that of a heterogenetic generation, or by the theory that certain groups in the organic ...
— The Theories of Darwin and Their Relation to Philosophy, Religion, and Morality • Rudolf Schmid
... the cave within issued a flood of light. As we guessed at once, the place was her laboratory, for about it stood metal flasks and various strange-shaped instruments. Moreover, there was a furnace in it, one of the best conceivable, for it needed neither fuel nor stoking, whose gaseous fires, like those of the twisted columns in the Sanctuary, sprang from the womb of the ...
— Ayesha - The Further History of She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed • H. Rider Haggard
... unexpected in her scheme of life as it was in his; but there was on her part no reason why she should not yield to it. There was every reason in her nature and in her theory why she should, for, bounded as her vision of life was by this existence, love was the highest conceivable good in life. It had been with a great shout of joy that the consciousness had come to her that she loved and was loved. Though she might never see him again, this supreme experience for man or ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... deck the sky presented a really magnificent spectacle, the vast masses of heavy, electrically-charged cloud being piled one above the other in a fashion that resembled, to me, nothing so much as a chaos of titanic rocks of every conceivable shape and colour, the forms and hues of the clouds being rendered distinctly visible by the incessant play of the sheet-lightning among their masses. Not only the whole sky, but the entire atmosphere seemed to be a-quiver with the silent electric discharges, ...
— The Pirate Slaver - A Story of the West African Coast • Harry Collingwood
... themselves up they show a human face. And, as a fact, they are human beings." The Ancien Regime, which had reduced them to that, and was to continue reducing them worse and worse for another hundred years by every conceivable tax, tithe, toll, servage, and privilege, did so mainly to pay for amusements. Amusements of the Roi-Soleil, with his Versailles and Marly and aqueducts and waterworks, plays and operas; amusements ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... he spoke. "It is not the view of the materialists, but it is conceivable that the materialists may be wrong," he responded. "In this case, however, it is the concrete and practical we have to grapple with, my friend. You say you are going inland to search for that man, and for a while I go that way, but though I have my base camp there is ...
— Masters of the Wheat-Lands • Harold Bindloss
... deposed their king, and incarcerated him for three months, until he declared himself ready to execute with determination what they had resolved upon, and he sought to bring about the ruin of the children of Israel by every conceivable means. Such was the retribution they had drawn down upon ...
— The Legends of the Jews Volume 1 • Louis Ginzberg
... have her educated by a couple of old nuns who still survived in Derby, and then to bring her out suitably at Babington House last year. The father had cordially approved, and joined in the sacrifices, which included an expenditure which he would not have thought conceivable. The result was, of course, that Marjorie, under cover of a very real dutifulness, ruled both her parents completely; her mother acknowledged the dominion, at least, to herself and her husband; her father pretended that he did not; and ...
— Come Rack! Come Rope! • Robert Hugh Benson
... the record should be transmitted with such exactness, as that an honest inquirer should be able to ascertain its authenticity, and understand its meaning, so far as God designed that he should know it. We say—so far as God designed that he should know it,—because it is quite conceivable that there might be mysteries in a revelation, the meaning of which would not be made clear till the time determined beforehand by God ...
— Thoughts on a Revelation • Samuel John Jerram
... There is something quite undemocratic in all men calling each other by the special and affectionate term "comrade"; especially when they say it with a sneer and smart inquiry about the funds. Democracy would be quite satisfied if every man called every other man "sir." Democracy would have no conceivable reason to complain if every man called every other man "your excellency" or "your holiness" or "brother of the sun and moon." The only democratic essential is that it should be a term of dignity and that it should be given to all. To abolish all terms of dignity is no more specially democratic ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... the difficulty in the simplest manner conceivable. It is merely a very long rope which is suffered to trail from the car, and the effect of which is to prevent the balloon from changing its level in any material degree. If, for example, there should be a deposition of moisture upon the silk, and the machine begins to ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... continuance in well doing shining so clearly through all the long, years of toil. Love, self-crucifixion, Jesus Christ closely followed in adversity, in loneliness, in manifold perils, under almost every conceivable form of trial and hindrance and resistance both active and passive—these are the seeds James Gilmour has sown so richly on the hard Mongolian Plain, and over its Eastern mountains and valleys. 'In due time we shall reap if we faint not.' His work goes on. He is now doing the Master's ...
— James Gilmour of Mongolia - His diaries, letters, and reports • James Gilmour
... a part of Lord Raby's and General Cunningham's regiments of English dragoons, although the Portuguese strenuously opposed this being done. Their conduct, indeed, at this time was very similar to that which they adopted a hundred years later toward the Duke of Wellington, throwing every conceivable obstacle in the English commander's way, and opposing every plan of action which he suggested. Many of the dragoons were without horses, but Lord Peterborough mounted them on animals which he bought with some of the money he had procured ...
— The Bravest of the Brave - or, with Peterborough in Spain • G. A. Henty
... not stand the journeys. There were black, white, brown, chesnut, or piebald, but we did not see a single roan amongst them; a very quaint group they made standing quietly there, laden with every conceivable kind of saddle or pack. Many of the smaller ones were almost hidden by the size of the sacks, filled with goods, which were strapped on their backs. The pack ponies are never groomed, and badly fed, while the best riding ones are well ...
— A Girl's Ride in Iceland • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... tiresome, very dull business—was over at last over or almost over. For the Colonel and certain remote authorities behind the Colonel believed in working the battalion hard up to the last moment. Therefore day after day there were "stunts" and "shows," field exercises of every conceivable kind. The weather was hot, as hot as weather ought to be in the first week of August Long marches became dusty horrors to the men. Manouvres meant hours of desperate toil. Officers thought longingly of bygone summers, of the cool shade of trees, of ...
— Our Casualty And Other Stories - 1918 • James Owen Hannay, AKA George A. Birmingham
... extremer instances of Dickens's character sketches in this respect, namely: that they are both studies of the eccentric, the abnormal, the whimsical, rather than of the typical and universal—studies of manners, rather than of whole characters. And it is easily conceivable that, at no distant day, the oddities of Captain Cuttle, Deportment Turveydrop, Mark Tapley, and Newman Noggs will seem as far-fetched and impossible as those of Captain Otter, Fastidious Brisk, and ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... had had enough, they just burnt the house over themselves, and ... hara-kiri.... Of course, it was all very wicked; it is impossible to justify them in any way. In Bayswater and all other haunts of unbridled chastity they were tortured, burnt alive, stewed in oil, and submitted to every conceivable penalty for their saucy effrontery. Yet, somehow, there was a touch about it, this spectacle of four men defying the law and order of the greatest country in the world, which thrilled every man with any devil in him. Peter the Painter is a hero ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... It is readily conceivable that Ramiro, under torture, or in the hope perhaps of saving his life, may have betrayed the alleged plot to murder Cesare. And it is perfectly consistent with Cesare's character and with his age that he should have entered into a bargain to learn what Ramiro ...
— The Life of Cesare Borgia • Raphael Sabatini
... men in hospitals. There is nothing to distract him; he has made his last will and testament; his affairs are quite in order; he has said au revoir to his friends with what cheeriness he can muster. Looking back, it seems to me that during two months every conceivable contingency has been anticipated and weighed and that the means of dealing with it as it may arise is now either:—embodied in our instructions to Corps Commanders, or else, set aside as pertaining to my ...
— Gallipoli Diary, Volume 2 • Ian Hamilton
... main division, that, namely, between speculative and practical knowledge. With the latter we have no concern. Speculative or theoretic knowledge is divided into abstract and concrete. The former is concerned with the laws that regulate phenomena in all conceivable cases; the latter is concerned with the application of these laws. Concrete science relates to objects or beings; abstract science to events. The former is particular or descriptive; the latter is general. ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 10: Auguste Comte • John Morley
... a desert of dreary and obscure respectability, and it burst, it blossomed into Poppy before your eyes. Portraits of Poppy on the walls, in every conceivable and inconceivable attitude. Poppy's canary in the window, in a cage hung with yellow gauze. Poppy's mandoline in an easy chair by itself. Poppy's hat on the grand piano, tumbling head over heels among a litter of coffee cups. On the tea-table a pair of shoes that could have belonged ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... that lends enchantment, but it is Washington's proud pre-eminence that he can bear the microscope. Having read thousands of his letters and papers dealing with almost every conceivable subject in the range of human affairs, I yet feel inclined, nay compelled, to bear witness to the greatness of his heart, soul and understanding. He was human. He had his faults. He made his mistakes. But I would not detract a line from any eulogium ...
— George Washington: Farmer • Paul Leland Haworth
... have happened," Rafael snapped boldly, and imitating her sarcastic smile. "It's humanly conceivable that even you should wind up by falling in love with even me—out ...
— The Torrent - Entre Naranjos • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... structures. All the fashionable citizens, including the royal family, come here for the enjoyment of their afternoon drive or horseback ride. The sight presented on these occasions is one of the very gayest conceivable, recalling the brilliancy of the Chiaja of Naples, the Maiden of Calcutta, or the Champs Elysees of Paris. One does not see even in Hyde Park, London, more elegant vehicles and horses, or more ...
— Foot-prints of Travel - or, Journeyings in Many Lands • Maturin M. Ballou
... hinged at present on Mac's refusal to go unless Nance could be induced to accompany them. The question had been argued from every conceivable angle, and gradually a conspiracy had been formed between Mac and his mother to overcome ...
— Calvary Alley • Alice Hegan Rice
... like most of the plays in this volume, by a churchman; and he must have been a man of profound imagination, and of the tenderest human soul conceivable. His ecclesiastical habit becomes clear enough before the end of the play, where he bids Everyman go and confess his sins. Like many of the more poignant scenes and passages in the miracle-plays that follow it, this morality too leaves one exclaiming on how good a thing was the plain ...
— Everyman and Other Old Religious Plays, with an Introduction • Anonymous
... were you master to see nothing in it, but what can be seen in every tree, such a picture would no longer resemble any tree. Beings perfectly abstract are perceivable in the same manner, or are only conceivable by the assistance of speech. The definition of a triangle can alone give you a just idea of that figure: the moment you form a triangle in your mind, it is this or that particular triangle and no other, and you cannot avoid giving breadth to its lines and colour to its area. We must therefore ...
— A Discourse Upon The Origin And The Foundation Of - The Inequality Among Mankind • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... modified when the Lutherans, after reaching Augsburg, heard of and read the 404 Propositions published by Dr. John Eck, in which Luther was classified with Zwingli, Oecolampadius, Carlstadt, Pirkheimer, Hubmaier, and Denk, and was charged with every conceivable heresy. In a letter of March 14, accompanying the copy of his Propositions which Eck sent to the Emperor, he refers to Luther as the domestic enemy of the Church (hostis ecclesiae domesticus), who has fallen into every Scylla and Charybdis of iniquity; who speaks of the Pope as ...
— Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church • Friedrich Bente
... Every conceivable theory has been offered to account for the novels that came so swiftly and incredibly from these three sisters. It has been said that they wrote them merely to pay their debts when they found that poems did not pay. It ...
— The Three Brontes • May Sinclair
... wall carvings on the tomb of Khosroes come to life. I mention Darius because he fits in with the most plausible hypothesis. When Alexander the Great smashed his empire he did it rather thoroughly. There wasn't much sympathy for the vanquished in those days. And it's entirely conceivable that a city or two in Alexander's way might have gathered up a fleeting regiment or so for protection and have decided not to wait for him, but to hunt ...
— The Metal Monster • A. Merritt
... no language for my mortification and disgust, though neither was as yet quite so great as my surprise. I had foreseen almost every conceivable consequence of the mad act which brought all this trouble to pass, but a voluntary division between Raffles and me had certainly never entered my calculations. Nor could I think that it had occurred to him before our egregious doctor's last visit, this very morning. ...
— Raffles - Further Adventures of the Amateur Cracksman • E. W. Hornung
... was the possibility of further pain, sorrow, or sin; and that which was attained was perfect peace; his mind directed itself exclusively to this joyful consummation, and personified the negation of all conceivable existence and of all pain into a positive bliss. This was all the more easy, as Gautama refused to give any dogmatic definition of Nirvana. There is something analogous in the way in which people commonly talk of the "happy release" ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... is hardly conceivable as a parent's obligation once in a lustrum, to be repeated within the half ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... pages of the English magazines; had been through a very bad cholera year, seeing sights unfit to be told; and had wound up her experiences by six weeks of typhoid fever, during which her head had been shaved; and hoped to keep her twenty-third birthday that September. It is conceivable that her aunts would not have approved of a girl who never set foot on the ground if a horse were within hail; who rode to dances with a shawl thrown over her skirt; who wore her hair cropped and curling ...
— The Kipling Reader - Selections from the Books of Rudyard Kipling • Rudyard Kipling
... were going down, and away flew the stay-sails out of the bolt-ropes, followed by nearly all the canvas, which, ill furled in our hurry, broke loose from the gaskets, and, fluttering away with loud flaps, was soon reduced to ribbons, knotted and twisted in every conceivable way. As the ship fell off into the trough of the sea when her sails rent, a foaming billow came roaring up, and striking her, made a clean breach over us. There were shouts and cries fore and aft. Jerry and I held on for our lives. Happily the stanchions we ...
— A Voyage round the World - A book for boys • W.H.G. Kingston
... human nature and more of the logic of possible events than it revealed to the general reader, their own experience in those days having led them to grave doubts as to the accuracy of the philosophic theory that not all conceivable things are possible. At that time it stood to reason that the kind of literature popular in Southern camps would not appeal forcibly to the approval of the Northern army, and a Federal officer captured and burned all the copies of "Macaria" that he ...
— Literary Hearthstones of Dixie • La Salle Corbell Pickett
... those offered to them in so cheap and attractive a form by our enterprising publishers. Now, either their energies will be wasted in a desultory course of reading, by which they will gain only a superficial knowledge of almost every conceivable subject, or they must be furnished with the means, which they are so well prepared to use to advantage, of going to the bottom of whatever subject interests them, and having exhausted the wisdom of past generations, of adding ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... be entered in writing in a diary that is always lying ready. If this is not done, details of the observations are often forgotten; a thing easily conceivable, because these details in themselves are in many ways uninteresting—especially the meaningless articulations—and they acquire value only in ...
— The Mind of the Child, Part II • W. Preyer
... open indiscretion of Lady "Pat" Rourke might lead to trouble with her husband, was conceivable enough; but this was rather a matter for underhand private inquiry than for the attention of the Criminal Investigation Department ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer
... physical phenomena of mediumship cannot be, and ought not to be, considered trivial. It was the spasmodic movement of a decapitated frog that resulted in the discovery of the Voltaic Pile. Furthermore, I intend to try every other conceivable hypothesis before accepting that of ...
— The Shadow World • Hamlin Garland
... again, more and more vividly, and the thought that these features could not have deceived him—that Nitetis must be innocent—took a firmer root in his mind; he had already begun to hope. If Bartja could be cleared, there was no error that might not be conceivable; in that case he would go to the hanging-gardens, take her hand and listen to her defence. When love has once taken firm hold of a man in riper years, it runs and winds through his whole nature like one of his veins, and can only ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... sounds, that by conventional arrangement communicate to others the Immaterial, Intangible, Eternal Thought. The fact that Thought continues to exist an instant, after it makes its appearance in the soul, proves it immortal: for there is nothing conceivable that can destroy it. The spoken words, being mere sounds, may vanish into thin air, and the written ones, mere marks, be burned, erased, destroyed: but the THOUGHT itself lives still, ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... of the French, had it not been for the untoward enterprise of Garibaldi,' p. 283. I certainly have not the slightest ground for believing any such thing; nor do I understand to whom the settlement referred to would have been 'satisfactory.' Does Mr. Layard suppose that any conceivable arrangement would be satisfactory both to the Papacy and to Italian Liberals out of Rome? The Government of Italy, which changes as often as the moon, might have accepted something which would have satisfied Louis ...
— What I Remember, Volume 2 • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... the blood, through its toxic action upon the liver cells, impairs the hepatic oxidation capacity and thus permits toxic substances to pass unoxidized. (3.) A combination of these conditions may represent the real situation. It is hardly conceivable that the relation of alcohol to the liver activity is not covered in the ...
— Alcohol: A Dangerous and Unnecessary Medicine, How and Why - What Medical Writers Say • Martha M. Allen
... variety of subjects. With John Clark he compares experiences of ministerial work; with John Nelson he discusses European politics as these have been affected by the events of the "year of revolutions," 1848; with George Wilson he discourses on every conceivable topic, from abstruse problems of philosophy and theology to the opening of the North British Railway; while his mother and his brothers, William and David, the latter of whom about this time left his work in the Dunglass woods ...
— Principal Cairns • John Cairns
... a few simple experiments to amuse her—made crystal trees, a shower of snow, a heavy stone out of two empty-looking bottles, spilt mercury and set her to gather it up again, showed her prisms, and made her look through a bit of tourmaline, and in every way conceivable to him strewed the path of learning with flowers—then she began to feel a little interest in the place and left off making wry faces at the dirt ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 17, - No. 97, January, 1876 • Various
... the water's edge, others scattered in small flocks a little farther from the shore on the grass, where they by turns play with each other with a frolicsomeness like that of young dogs, by turns he down to sleep at a common signal in all conceivable positions. ...
— The Voyage of the Vega round Asia and Europe, Volume I and Volume II • A.E. Nordenskieold
... to in future time. There are none in the language more quotable. Even where impulsiveness and want of patience have left them most fragmentary, this rich compensation is offered to the reader. There is hardly a conceivable subject, in life or literature, which they do not illustrate by striking aphorisms, by concise and profound observations, by wisdom ever applicable to the deeds of men, and by wit as available for their enjoyment. Nor, above all, will there anywhere ...
— Contributions to All The Year Round • Charles Dickens
... the best for such an exceptional purpose. Dismissing considerations of cost, goldbeaters' skin would doubtless have been more suitable. The military balloons at Aldershot are made of this, and one such balloon has been known to remain inflated for three months with very little loss. It is conceivable, therefore, that the chances of the voyagers, whose ultimate safety depended so largely upon the staying power of their aerial vessel, ...
— The Dominion of the Air • J. M. Bacon
... feared lest it should have been destroyed or disfigured, and regretted having wished to drive too keen a bargain, but on finding it intact, I am ashamed to say the collector's instinct got the better of the woman, and I used every conceivable argument to persuade him to come to my price. The old fellow ...
— With Those Who Wait • Frances Wilson Huard
... contradictory, and mutable; but one steady, uniform, unchangeable result of infinite Wisdom and Benevolence, extending to, and including All his Works. So that Sin, or disobedience to our Maker is manifestly the greatest Nonsense, Folly and contradiction conceivable, with regard purely to the immutable perfection of the Divine Nature; and to the Natural constitution of things, independently upon any positive command of God to us, or his irresistible ...
— Occasional Thoughts in Reference to a Vertuous or Christian life • Lady Damaris Masham
... about the time of the agreement, between ourselves and Louis Napoleon, in reference to the invasion of the Crimea. It is conceivable, that the French Emperor took advantage of the opportunity to lay hands on New Caledonia. Anyhow, I feared that the alliance might counteract my despatch to London. Most likely it did, for I was instructed that the French were to ...
— The Romance of a Pro-Consul - Being The Personal Life And Memoirs Of The Right Hon. Sir - George Grey, K.C.B. • James Milne
... organization pretty closely, and I can imagine no State enterprise west of Turkey or Persia presenting even to the passing eye so deplorable a spectacle of ruin and inefficiency. The South-Eastern Company's estate at Seabrook presents the dreariest spectacle of incompetent development conceivable; one can see its failure three miles away; it is a waste with an embryo slum in one corner protected by an extravagant sea-wall, already ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells
... him it had been a little slack, on account of its being so hard to get money. We staid there a week longer, and tried every conceivable plan to force the landlord to ask us for money, but he never mentioned it during our stay. We sold our team and carriage for three hundred dollars cash, and put the money in our pockets, without ever mentioning our hotel bill, or acting as though we considered ...
— Twenty Years of Hus'ling • J. P. Johnston
... she had every right to do, for she was an exceedingly pretty girl. It is natural that handsome young women should attire themselves with extra care, and although Jennie would have been beautiful under any conceivable condition of dress, she nevertheless did not neglect the arraying of herself becomingly on that account. All that was remarkable on this occasion consisted in the fact that she took more than usual pains to make herself presentable, and ...
— Jennie Baxter, Journalist • Robert Barr
... words. "I, a peaceful, law-abiding citizen of this glorious Commonwealth, a free an' equal member of a liberty-loving nation, a nation whose standard is, now and forever, 'Gimme liberty or gimme det', a nation that stands for all the conceivable benefits that mankind may enjoy, a nation that scintillates pyrotechnically over the ...
— Bar-20 Days • Clarence E. Mulford
... in making it clear to her father that it would be highly advantageous to her, as the nearest relative, to show Herr Carovius every conceivable favour. Andreas Doederlein baulked at first; but he could not refuse recognition to the far-seeing ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... spring and summer of 1871, Cowperwood had actually, without being in any conceivable danger from any source, spread himself out very thin. Because of his great success he had grown more liberal—easier—in his financial ventures. By degrees, and largely because of his own confidence in himself, he ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser
... to which he put questions. He then embarked in a gilded galley, and sailed past the prows of the twelve hundred ships moored four hundred feet from the shore. That such a vast force could be resisted was not even supposed to be conceivable by the blinded monarch. But Demaratus, the exiled king of Sparta, told him he would be resisted unto death, a statement which was ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... specify and rebuke idolatry. Here is another of the Professor's sophisms. The fact, that the Apostles preached against idolatry, is no reason at all why, if slavery is sin, they would have preached against that also. On the one hand, it is not conceivable that the gospel can be preached where there is idolatry, without attacking it: for, in setting forth the true God to idolaters, the preacher must denounce their false gods. On the other hand, gospel sermons can be preached without number, and the ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... for some part, and the things about him began to take form. He saw that the ground in the deep shadows was cluttered with men, sprawling in every conceivable posture. Glancing narrowly into the more distant darkness, he caught occasional glimpses of visages that loomed pallid and ghostly, lit with a phosphorescent glow. These faces expressed in their lines the deep stupor of the tired soldiers. They made them appear like men drunk with wine. This ...
— The Red Badge of Courage - An Episode of the American Civil War • Stephen Crane
... in this part of the world, would surprise me," returned Meschines. "The Colorado might break its barriers; or it is conceivable that some huge stream, taking its rise in the heights hundreds of miles north and east of us, may be flowing through subterranean passages into the sea, emerging from the sea-bottom hundreds of miles to the westward. ...
— The Golden Fleece • Julian Hawthorne
... there still remains, in this instance, an alternative source of power which is usually sufficiently elastic to serve all purposes, and this is of course the total variable load procurable from the station bus-bars. It is conceivable that one out of a number of machines running in parallel might carry a perfectly steady load, the latter being a fraction of a total varying quantity, leaving the remaining machines to receive and deal with all fluctuations which might occur. Even in the event of there being only ...
— Steam Turbines - A Book of Instruction for the Adjustment and Operation of - the Principal Types of this Class of Prime Movers • Hubert E. Collins
... rare experience of a moment at daybreak, when something in nature seems to reveal all consciousness, cannot be explained at noon. Yet it is a part of the day's unity. At evening, nature is absorbed by another experience. She dislikes to explain as much as to repeat. It is conceivable, that what is unified form to the author, or composer, may of necessity be formless to his audience. A home-run will cause more unity in the grand stand than in the season's batting average. If a composer once starts to compromise, his work will begin to drag on ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... actually sat down with him cheek by jowl, had the liver-wing of a fowl, and given Moliere the gizzard; put his imperial legs under the same mahogany (sub iisdem trabibus). A man, after such an honor, can look for little else in this world: he has tasted the utmost conceivable earthly happiness, and has nothing to do now but to fold his arms, look up to heaven, and sing ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... immortals. One deed so done that in it is no mortality; and in that deed the meaning of man's history,—the meaning, indeed, and the glory, of existence itself,—are declared. Easy, therefore, it is to see how any action may be invested with universal significance and the utmost conceivable charm. The smaller the realm and the humbler the act into which this amplitude and universality of spirit are carried, the more are they emphasized and set off; so that, without opportunity of unusual occasion, or singular opulence of natural power, a man's life may possess all that majesty ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 43, May, 1861 • Various
... composition for the voice do not encourage the display of florid execution, a singer would be ill-advised indeed to neglect this factor, on the plea that it has no longer any practical application. No greater error is conceivable. Should an instrumental virtuoso fail to acquire mastery of transcendental difficulties, his performance of any piece would not be perfect: the greater includes the less. A singer would be very short-sighted who did not adopt an analogous line of reasoning. Without an appreciable amount of agilita, ...
— Style in Singing • W. E. Haslam
... les Cours de la Sorbonne, as a preparation for L'Agregation d'Anglais; and in December Stephen asked for a year's leave of absence from his post, in order to pursue his English studies in London. It is therefore conceivable that the father's health should have been impaired by anxiety and his brain overtaxed by the numerous works he had undertaken to meet his responsibilities. He was at the same time writing "Human Intercourse" for Messrs. ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... respectable, and returned to an office where there were no Kings and no incidents outside the daily manufacture of a newspaper. A newspaper office seems to attract every conceivable sort of person, to the prejudice of discipline. Zenana-mission ladies arrive, and beg that the Editor will instantly abandon all his duties to describe a Christian prize-giving in a back slum of a perfectly inaccessible village; Colonels who have been overpassed for ...
— Stories by English Authors: Orient • Various
... It is the appropriate time for the Hallelujah chorus. The stage is set. The trumpeters with their trumpets take their places, and the psaltery and the harp are brought forth. The timbrel, the stringed instruments, the organ, the cymbals, and every conceivable instrument of praise is in the hands of the heavenly host. There is a breathless silence. Then the trumpeters peal forth their paeans of praise, and all the other players and singers of the heavenly hosts join in. This entrancing music is caught up by the multitudes of earth and wafted ...
— The Harp of God • J. F. Rutherford
... the entire sixteen. When we come to Michel Angelo, his Sonnets and Letters must be read, with his Life by Vasari, or, in our day, by Mr. Duppa. For the Church, and the Feudal Institution, Mr. Hallam's "Middle Ages" will furnish, if superficial, yet readable and conceivable outlines. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... could give no pleasure to this audience, and would add nothing to my present argument. It is sufficient to say that, with real estate almost immeasurable, with personal property incalculable, with a wealth of material resources of every conceivable description, absolutely unknown and unknowable, she yet contrives to support her costly establishment by a system of oppressive taxation almost unparalleled in the annals of the human race. Some of you must remember the graphic but ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... a woman bears to a child because he is a child, regardless of whether he be her own or another's. It is that they may learn to love thus, that women have children. Some women love so without having any. No conceivable treasure of the world could have once entered into comparison with the burden of richness Mrs. Porson bore. She told afterward, with voice hushed by fear of irreverence, how, as they went down one of the hills, she slept for a moment, and dreamed that ...
— A Rough Shaking • George MacDonald
... material, to erect a mass of masonry like the Great Pyramid, solely to receive his own body after death. Far less have we any reason for supposing that many monarchs in succession would do this, each having a separate tomb built for him. It might have been conceivable, had only the Great Pyramid been erected, that the structure had been raised as a mausoleum for all the kings and princes of the dynasty. But it seems utterly incredible that such a building as the Great Pyramid should have been erected for one king's body only—and that, not in the way ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... the Royal Engineers in this war, more particularly of their deeds in such places as Salonica, Mesopotamia, East Africa, and Egypt; where, in addition to the usual shortage of tools and material, they had to wrestle with every conceivable kind of geographical obstacle that a bountiful Nature could place in their way. The present scribe can only write of what they did in Egypt and Palestine, and not half of that ...
— With Our Army in Palestine • Antony Bluett
... interfered with her own plans. They engineered her off on to their beloved professor at every conceivable turn. And Gene, who nearly haunted the house, had a savage gleam in his eyes quite out of accord with his usual chatty good humor. Fairy knew she was being adroitly managed, but she had promised to help the twins with ...
— Prudence Says So • Ethel Hueston
... the little minx herself, she was inscrutable. She teased them all in turns, Frank, perhaps, less than the others. Aldous, as usual, found her a delightful companion. She would walk all over the estate with him in the most mannish garments and boots conceivable, which only made her childish grace more feminine and more provocative than ever. She took an interest in all his tenants; she dived into all his affairs; she insisted on copying his letters. And meanwhile, on either side were Miss Raeburn, ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... to dismiss the whole thing from her mind. She courted sleep in every conceivable way. But it was all useless. The man's fine eyes and great body haunted her. They pursued her to her last waking thought. And, at last, she fell asleep, thinking of the strong supporting arms that had held her safe from ...
— The Man in the Twilight • Ridgwell Cullum
... prospect for humanity if we were not able to discover causes in operation which would ultimately render the system of Philip II. impossible in any part of the globe. Certainly, were it otherwise, the study of human history would be the most wearisome and unprofitable of all conceivable occupations. The festivities of courts, the magnificence of an aristocracy, the sayings and doings of monarchs and their servants, the dynastic wars, the solemn treaties; the Ossa upon Pelion of diplomatic and legislative rubbish by which, in the course of centuries, a few individuals or ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... letter from her, in which she would ask him for money to take the house at Bayreuth, but with the warning that he was not to come there himself, as she had promised Forcheville and the Verdurins to invite them. Oh, how he would have loved it, had it been conceivable that she would have that audacity. What joy he would have in refusing, in drawing up that vindictive reply, the terms of which he amused himself by selecting and declaiming aloud, as though he had actually received ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... his first passion, fought it; and being small by comparison, and finding no giant of the Philistines disposed to receive a stone in his fore-skull, pummelled the obmutescent mass, to the confusion of a conceivable epic. His indifferent England refused it to him. That is all I can say. The greater power of the two, she seems, with a quiet derision that does not belie her amiable passivity, to have reduced in Beauchamp's career the boldest readiness for public action, and some good stout efforts besides, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... sound of the rushing feet there was added the baying of many pariah dogs which, from every conceivable corner and from miles away, raced like a pack of wolves upon the Steppes, to ...
— The Hawk of Egypt • Joan Conquest
... company operated by and for Negroes. In his efforts to raise the $100,000 initial capital required by the law of his State—Georgia—Mr. Perry had tramped all over the United States at least three times. Finally, having tried every conceivable source without securing the required amount, he returned to all the subscribers of capital stock the money they had paid in plus 4 per cent. interest. This action so inspired the confidence of the subscribers that almost ...
— Booker T. Washington - Builder of a Civilization • Emmett J. Scott and Lyman Beecher Stowe
... amnesty; not even of the omnivorous question, The War, do I propose to treat under the head of 'Our Domestic Affairs;' but of a subject which, though scarcely ever discussed except flippantly, and with unworthy levity, in that broad arena of public journalism in which almost every other conceivable topic is discussed, is yet second to none, if not absolutely first of all in its bearings upon our domestic happiness. I refer to the question of domestic ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 3, September 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... mock-moons and auroras. To the south and east, about a quarter of a mile from the tent, the pressure of the floes had thrown up an enormous ridge of shattered ice-cakes, a mound, a long hill of blue-green slabs and blocks huddling together at every conceivable angle. It was nearly twenty feet in height, quite the highest point that Bennett could discover. Scrambling and climbing over countless other ridges that intervened, he made his way to it, ascended it almost on hands and knees, and, standing upon its highest point, looked ...
— A Man's Woman • Frank Norris
... immense. It extends to all our outward acts; and having covered the whole of this great surface, it then strikes inward and reaches to every thought of the mind, and every emotion of the heart, and every motive of the will. We discover that we are under obligation at every conceivable point in our being and in our history, but that we have not met obligation at a single point. When we see that the law of God is broad and deep, and that sin is equally broad and deep within us; when we learn that we have never thought one single holy thought, nor felt one single ...
— Sermons to the Natural Man • William G.T. Shedd
... It is conceivable that if a third man of any trade come along the character of business in Burunda may entirely change. But while there are but two of each, the chances are that any day the visitors may have the quiet monotony of the place broken up ...
— In the Mist of the Mountains • Ethel Turner
... formed on the retina has nothing in common with the sense of hardness, coldness, and weight experienced by touch, the only impression on the retina being that of colour or shade, and an outline; it is, however, hardly conceivable that even the outline of form would be recognised by the eye until touch had proved that form comprised also solidity and that the two ideas had certain motions in common both in duration in ...
— Science and the Infinite - or Through a Window in the Blank Wall • Sydney T. Klein
... newspapers for the same price as one, as they have no coins smaller than a nickel. For a nickel you can ride for miles to the Cliff House which is at the Golden Gate, where are acres of giant flowers of every conceivable variety, all beautiful, but odorless; you watch the sea lions nearly the size of oxen, and who roar and fight on the boulders. Then we enter a bath-house, acres in extent, covered with glass, where you can swim in sea water ...
— The Gentleman from Everywhere • James Henry Foss
... only conceive the help of change at all by the help of flat contradiction in terms. It comes, therefore, to this, that if we are to think fluently and harmoniously upon any subject into which change enters (and there is no conceivable subject into which it does not), we must begin by flying in the face of every rule that professors of the art of thinking have drawn up for our instruction. These rules may be good enough as servants, but we have let them become ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler
... "fashionable" quarter of the dead city by the united sneers of all the ghosts who haunt the undistinguished graves below. In this aristocratic quarter there is of course no monotonous uniformity. The monuments, some of freestone and some of marble, are of every conceivable form and degree of splendor, and death is made to look pretty and coquettish by the introduction of numerous weeping willows and other such botanical helps to sentiment. The great majority of the inscriptions are in Latin, for Pius IX., so long as his power lasted, absolutely forbade the use of ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 86, February, 1875 • Various
... interest in the subject of securing Indian Territory. No other interpretation can possibly be given to his suggestion that a battalion be raised from Indians that more strictly belonged to Kansas [Official Records, vol. iii, 581]. It is also conceivable that the force he had reference to in his letter to Benjamin, November 27, 1861 [Ibid., vol. viii, 698] was to be, in ...
— The American Indian as Participant in the Civil War • Annie Heloise Abel
... a moment's call, we could so overawe any attempt to expel us from our lands that such an attempt would not be made until the cases pending before the Supreme Court had been decided. If when the enemy appeared in our midst yesterday they had been met by six hundred rifles, it is not conceivable that the issue would have been forced. No fight would have ensued, and to-day we would not have to mourn the deaths of four of our fellow-citizens. A mistake has been made and we of the League must not be ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... done it—and why, pray? What conceivable good was there in it? I suppose you know that Nicholas has driven him to the frontier? Nicholas is probably more dead than alive by this time; you know his state ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... the democratic idea? That is the question now very earnestly put to the reader. We are so terribly under the spell of established conditions, we are all so obsessed by the persuasion that the only conceivable way in which a man can be expressed politically is by himself voting in person, that we do all of us habitually overlook a possibility, a third choice, that lies ready to our hands. There is a way by means of which the indisputable evils of democratic ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... jungle, and muskiness, and decay, and flowers, and every conceivable discordant odor. Flashes of insane colorings formed themselves in his eyes. He heard the chaotic uproar which meant that his auditory nerves, like the nerves in his eyes and nostrils and skin, were stimulated to violent activity, reporting ...
— Operation Terror • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... La Beche goes even further, and adduces conclusive evidence to show that the different parts of one and the same stratum, having a similar composition throughout, containing the same organic remains, and having similar beds above and below it, may yet differ to any conceivable ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... draft, roared and snapped. It was midnight, as the sharp strokes of a wooden clock declared from the kitchen, and they were alone together, and all the other inmates of the house were asleep. The situation, scarcely conceivable to another civilization, is so common in ours, where youth commands its fate and trusts solely to itself, that it may be said to be characteristic of the New England civilization wherever it keeps ...
— A Modern Instance • William Dean Howells
... aghast at the brutes we men can be, if I wasn't more amazed that we're as good as we are, when the best and gentlest of your sex—the moulders of our childhood, the desire of our manhood—demand so little for all that you alone can give. There were conceivable uses in women preferring the biggest brutes of barbarous times, but it's not so now; and boys will be civilised boys, and men will be civilised men, sweet sister, when you do expect it, and when your grace and favours are the rewards of nobleness, and not the ...
— Melchior's Dream and Other Tales • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... good, which ever was framed by religious or philosophical fanaticism, can the government of Nature be made to resemble the work of a being at once good and omnipotent."[55] Now there can be no question that physical nature gives the lie to that shallow optimism, which prates of the best of all conceivable worlds, and hardly consents to recognize evil, save as "a lower form of good;" unquestionably recent researches of physicists have brought out with quite startling clearness what St. Paul calls the subjection of the creature to vanity. ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various
... no danger now, Kelly. In fifty years we have encountered every conceivable danger, every imaginable kind of world or ...
— Has Anyone Here Seen Kelly? • Bryce Walton
... before Slavery!" may be applicable—when "Slavery" becomes a conceivable, proximate probability, or "Death" a possible alternative. Then let us have "Death before Slavery," by all means. At present, Punch would say, "Common-sense ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, March 25, 1893 • Various
... and many a night, when the rain and sleet were driving across the prairies, Richard had left the warm fireside and gone out in the storm after the erring Andy, who had more than once been found by the roadside, with his hat jammed into every conceivable shape, his face scratched, and a tell-tale smell about his breath which contradicted his assertion "that ...
— Ethelyn's Mistake • Mary Jane Holmes |
