"Finality" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... practically demonstrate to friends and to opponents what sort of a revision seemed desirable under existing circumstances. After it had been completed we described it "as a tentamen, a careful endeavour, claiming no finality, inviting, rather than desiring to exclude, other attempts of the same kind, calling the attention of the Church to the many and anxious questions involved in rendering the Holy Scriptures into the vernacular language, and offering some help towards the settlement ...
— Addresses on the Revised Version of Holy Scripture • C. J. Ellicott
... the literary audience has its sense of humour—they amused themselves for a while by recommending the book to their friends, and the sales crept steadily up to four thousand, and there stayed with an unmistakable air of finality. If the book had had any real literary merit its life would have started at that point, for the weary comments of reviewers and the strident outcries of publishers tend to obscure rather than reveal the permanent value of a book. But six months after publication ...
— The Ghost Ship • Richard Middleton
... quarrel," he said, wistfully, slipping to his knees with one arm still encircling her waist. "You and I have gone through too much for harsh words or thoughts to ever shadow our life. But you must give me more of your time, and other men less. A growing uneasiness and the loss of the sense of finality in life are robbing me of my ...
— The One Woman • Thomas Dixon
... an oot-an'-oot Leeberal—nane o' your finality Whigs that took ae bit step in the richt direction, and then durstna venture further. Ye maun vote for the five-pound vote if ye are to be ...
— Mr. Hogarth's Will • Catherine Helen Spence
... with a finality in his tone that caused Daphne to go with him meekly, if unwillingly; "Daphne must return ...
— Drusilla with a Million • Elizabeth Cooper
... There is such a finality about death; however interesting it may be as an experience, one cannot discuss it afterward with one's friends. I have thought it a great pity that Mark Twain could not discuss, with Howells say, or with Twichell, the sensations and the particulars of the change, supposing there be a recognizable ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... are brothers at any rate, whether citizens of Massachusetts or subjects of Virginia—I am a minister—and, fellow-citizens of Boston, there are two great laws in this country; one of them is the LAW OF SLAVERY; that law is declared to be a 'finality.' Once the Constitution was formed 'to establish justice, promote tranquillity, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.' Now, the Constitution is not to secure liberty; it is to extend slavery into Nebraska. And when slavery is established ...
— The Trial of Theodore Parker • Theodore Parker
... There was a finality to this that was uncanny. Janice became sure, right then and there, that Mrs. Bridget Burns would never clear up the wreck Olga Cedarstrom had made of the back kitchen. The girl wished with all her heart that she had boxed ...
— Janice Day, The Young Homemaker • Helen Beecher Long
... becomes interested in questions of social uplift and thinks of becoming a surgeon. Taken as a whole Wilhelm Meister moves with a slowness which is quite out of tune with later ideals of prose fiction. It also lacks concentration and artistic finality. But it is replete with Goethe's ripe and mellow wisdom, and it contains more of his intimate self than any other work ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... is strong in adolescence, but it is stronger still when the turnstile of years is reached and there is finality in the air. Hartley was built for platonics; Fate gave him the necessary touch of the commonplace that dispels romance and replaces it with a kind of deadly domesticity; and yet Hartley was unaware ...
— The Pointing Man - A Burmese Mystery • Marjorie Douie
... how he will reach it, matters not to him. He rests in calmness, knowing he has done his best. If his best seem to be overthrown or overruled, then he must still bow his head,—in calmness. To no man is permitted to know the future of his life, the finality. God commits to man ever only new beginnings, new wisdom, and new days to use the ...
— The Majesty of Calmness • William George Jordan
... Criticism no longer assumes to ascertain an author's place in literature. It is very well satisfied if it can say something suggestive concerning the nature and quality of his work, and it tries to say this with as little of the old air of finality as it can manage to ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... general disquisition to the table, at last turned to Arthur Balfour and said, with an air of finality: ...
— Margot Asquith, An Autobiography: Volumes I & II • Margot Asquith
... instantly at work, for there are still "things to be done" on board, and when all improvements shall have been completed then vacant hours like these will be tedious enough; but never fear, there is no finality in a sailing-boat, if the brain keeps inventing ...
— The Voyage Alone in the Yawl "Rob Roy" • John MacGregor
... he did the work. Then, when the last pencil-mark had been made, and the tablets had been closed with a snap of finality, the Rough Red ...
— Blazed Trail Stories - and Stories of the Wild Life • Stewart Edward White
... ought to be abolished at any price. When you ask the objector to go to war, you invite him to commit a flagrant sin. The English literature of pacifism is full of this moral and religious protestation against war which in the minds of the objectors becomes a finality beyond which it is futile to ask ...
— The Psychology of Nations - A Contribution to the Philosophy of History • G.E. Partridge
... was threatening to prolong itself into an "r" of excruciating length and disgraceful finality, an "r" that is terminated neatly by no one but hardened hotel-clerks. Then a miner saved the day. "Mr. Bines," he said, coming up hurriedly behind Percival with several specimens of ore, ...
— The Spenders - A Tale of the Third Generation • Harry Leon Wilson
... Feather and she stammered because even her lack of perception saw something in the woman's face which was new to her. It was a sort of finality. ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... was much younger than the majority of her father's guests—a man not made but still early in the making, the glamour of promise rather than the stark light of finality upon him. This affected her; for at eighteen, a career, be it never so distinguished, which has reached its zenith, in other words reached the end of its tether, must needs have a touch of melancholy about it. With the heat ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... "last word" to be spoken, that his reports contain all the returns that can be expected, or that this method is the only way of approach to truth and reality. Such claims to the rights of eminent domain and such dogmatic assertions of exclusive finality always reveal the blind spot in the scientist's vision. He sees steadily but he does not see wholes. He is of necessity dealing with a reduced and simplified "nature" which he constantly tends to substitute for the vastly richer whole of reality that boils over and inundates the ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... so old and other-worldly, that he seemed already of their circle rather than ours; and he spoke in a voice of feeling for us, but with a simple and courageous finality that sounded the very note of fate. He had called the brethren together (he said) to submit a decision to their consideration, and he desired from them an expression of their willingness to accept and abide by it. He knew what a trial it would be to the "whole household of Israel." "We ...
— Under the Prophet in Utah - The National Menace of a Political Priestcraft • Frank J. Cannon and Harvey J. O'Higgins
... such thing as finality in army reform. There will be reformers in the future, as there have been in the past. There will, without doubt, be vested interests and conservative instincts to be overcome in the future, as there were at the time ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... thing as human infallibility. There is no finality in human knowledge and human progress. Fixed authority in matters of knowledge or belief is an ...
— God and my Neighbour • Robert Blatchford
... The finality in her voice belied her face, which beamed without a ray of stubbornness or perversity. He did not know how to interpret her; but he felt that he had begun wrong. He half regretted that he ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson
... plunged into the thicket. MacRae did not try to follow. He did not even move. He looked after her a minute. Then he sat down on the log again and stared at the steady march of the swells. There was a sense of finality in this thing which made him flounder desperately. Still, he assured himself, it had to be. And if it had to be that way it was better to have it so understood. Betty would never look at him again with ...
— Poor Man's Rock • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... I saw that the struggle between us had begun—the struggle against her timidity and conventionality. "No, not tonight." This in her tone for finality. ...
— The Deluge • David Graham Phillips
... born a propounder of questions, and a smiler at the answers she received. I daresay she used to ask questions—without result—long before she could talk, but I am quite sure she was not embittered by the lack of result. Nothing ever embittered Jay, not even her own pessimism. There is a finality about bitterness, and Jay was never final. Her last word was always on a questioning note. Her mind was always open, waiting for more. "Oh no," she would tell her pillow at night, "there must be a ...
— This Is the End • Stella Benson
... in the 19th century in E. Geoffroy St Hilaire's loi de balancement and also in Goethe's writings on morphology. For Aristotle it meant that Nature was limited by the nature of her means, that finality was limited by necessity. Thus in the larger animals there is an excess of earthy matter, as a necessary result of the material nature of the animal; this excess is turned by Nature to good account, but there is not enough to serve both for teeth and for horns (loc. cit., iii., ...
— Form and Function - A Contribution to the History of Animal Morphology • E. S. (Edward Stuart) Russell
... across the camp-smoke, sighed, and resumed work on the fur mitten she was sewing. "Well," she announced with finality, "I shall never ...
— Smoke Bellew • Jack London
... which Hinduism has drawn of the finality of life to its followers? After the weary fugue of births and rebirths, with its interludes of many heavens and hells, the "self" passes on into final union with the Divine Soul. It loses all consciousness and self-knowledge; every vestige of personality and all that this implies is swept away; ...
— India, Its Life and Thought • John P. Jones
... of Clay, became President; the Cabinet was reorganized, Webster becoming Secretary of State. One by one during the month of August all the features of the "Omnibus Bill" became law. The great majority of the Southerners indicated their ready acceptance of the compromise as a "finality"; and radicals like Jefferson Davis, Robert Barnwell Rhett, and William L. Yancey retired from public life, either voluntarily or by compulsion of the people. The big cities of the East and the Northwest ...
— Expansion and Conflict • William E. Dodd
... parts of the new cathedral at its rebuilding, and may be seen exquisitely carved by Grinling Gibbons over the entrance to St. Dunstan's Chapel; but with the arms of the City it was very different, and, in fact, they do not appear even now to have reached finality. When, early in the seventeenth century, the seal of 1380 became too worn for further use, a new one was made, which reproduced on the obverse all the essential features of the earlier one, the details being somewhat classicised, the shield in the base was repeated, ...
— Memorials of Old London - Volume I • Various
... infamous. The leaders in Congress, both Whig and Democrat, feared now, therefore, nothing in the world so much as the outbreak of a new political party, which might disorganize this nicely adjusted compromise, put an end to what all politicians were fond of calling the "finality" of the arrangement, and so bring on, if not an encounter of armed forces, if not a rupture of the Union, at least what to them seemed almost as bad, the disintegration of the two great parties of the day, ...
— The Purchase Price • Emerson Hough
... son's hand and stepped back. They bowed formally to each other. And then M. de La Tour d'Azyr bowed to Mlle. de Kercadiou in utter silence, a bow that contained something of utter renunciation, of finality. ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini
... said the young woman, with the tone of finality. "You can't eat me, Dorman, and I'm the only thing that looks good enough ...
— Her Prairie Knight • B.M. Sinclair, AKA B. M. Bower
... last of his keepsakes for the money to buy the revolver. But he had yet to learn that there is no supreme crisis in the human span, save that which ends it; that all the wayfaring duels with fate are inconclusive; conflicts critical enough at the moment, but lacking finality, and likely to be renewed indefinitely ...
— The Price • Francis Lynde
... pretension made by certain sects of dogmatic Christianity that it is the last word of religion, that all saving truth was once for all revealed some nineteen centuries ago. History, says the Jewish controversialist, teaches no such lessons of finality. Forces appear, work their destined course, and then make way for other forces. The world does not stand still; it moves on. Then how can Judaism claim for itself a permanence, a finality, which it must deny to every other system, to ...
— Judaism • Israel Abrahams
... jumped up simultaneously. 'What a good idea,' said Ephraim. 'There you have hit it!' said Solomon. Their simultaneous popping-up had an air of finality—like the long ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... had read the girl wrong after all! She was, as he had at first suspected, of the demi-monde. Thus her sophistication, the ease with which she had penetrated his pretensions, the cool finality with which she had catalogued and placed him, were all explainable. Her worldly wisdom, which he had found so baffling, was that of the ...
— Little Lost Sister • Virginia Brooks
... by side for two or three minutes, and then he spoke again; his voice was gentle, but firm and resolved, and there was a sort of finality about his words which clinched into ...
— A Woman's Will • Anne Warner
... opponent might say, 'resolve your intellect into a kind of slush.' 'Even so,' I make reply,—'if you will consent to use no politer word.' For humanism, conceiving the more 'true' as the more 'satisfactory' (Dewey's term), has sincerely to renounce rectilinear arguments and ancient ideals of rigor and finality. It is in just this temper of renunciation, so different from that of pyrrhonistic scepticism, that the spirit of humanism essentially consists. Satisfactoriness has to be measured by a multitude of standards, of which some, for aught we ...
— The Meaning of Truth • William James
... him; in the next place, Lancelot's uncle the banker, was a stanch Whig ally of his in the House. 'In the rotten-borough times, Mr. Smith,' he once said to Lancelot, 'we could have made a senator of you at once; but, for the sake of finality, we were forced to relinquish that organ of influence. The Tories had abused it, really, a little too far; and now we can only make a commissioner of you—which, after all, is a more useful post, and a more lucrative one.' But Lancelot had not as yet 'Galliolised,' ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... fundamental fact of melodic sequence may be said to be the primacy of 2 in vibration rates. But 2n, in a scale containing 3, 5, etc., is always what we know as the tonic. The tonic, then, gives a sense of equilibrium, of rest, of finality, while to end on another tone gives a feeling of restlessness ...
— The Psychology of Beauty • Ethel D. Puffer
... here. Whenever it had become necessary for him to be firm with those he loved, it had rarely been possible for him to do right in the right way; he had usually been forced to do right in the wrong way—to hide himself from them behind a manner of cold and silent finality, and, so, to prevent them from forming an alliance and a junction of forces with the traitor softness within him. Besides, gentle, roundabout, gradual measures would require time—delay; and he must "put his ...
— The Second Generation • David Graham Phillips
... childhood, there comes their second age, wherein there will be seen infinite improvement in everything; invention more abundant in figures, and richer in ornament; more depth and more lifelike reality in design; some finality, moreover, in the works, which are executed thoughtfully and with diligence, although with too little mastery of handling; with more grace in manner and more loveliness in colouring, so that little is wanting for the reduction of everything to perfection and for the exact imitation of ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol 2, Berna to Michelozzo Michelozzi • Giorgio Vasari
... never be your friend, Elizabeth"—there was a sad finality about Malcolm's tone that made Elizabeth shrink ...
— Herb of Grace • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... sauntered away with an air of finality, while Balcom shrugged his shoulders and gave orders to ...
— The Master Mystery • Arthur B. Reeve and John W. Grey
... changing the course of the old Nile, so as to water the earth and make it more productive, have brought hither the humidity of their own misty isle. And this strange cold, this mist, light as it still is, seem to presage the end of ages, give an added remoteness and finality to all this dead past, which lies here beneath us in subterranean labyrinths haunted by a ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti
... upper, under, and lateral, as in the plant,—then, organization of these into members. Form is the self-assertion of the thing as no longer means only; this makes its attractiveness to the artist. The root of his delight in ideal form is that it promises some finality amid the endless maze of matter. But this higher completeness, which is beauty, whether it happen to exist or not, is never the immediate aim of Nature. It is everywhere implied, but nowhere expressed; ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various
... had recognized the finality in Miss Susan's tone. "Do you know of any one who would like a dog," she asked, "a very ...
— Patricia • Emilia Elliott
... famous men of our generation, and I have always observed that this is profoundly true. Like all other 'moral' satisfactions, this soon palls by custom, and as soon as one end of distinction is reached, another is pined for. There is no finality to rest in, while disease and death are always standing in the background. Custom may even blind men to their own misery, so far as not to make them realize what is wanting; ...
— Thoughts on Religion • George John Romanes
... hanging upon the words which follow, or as being a step leading up to the main idea. The vocal indication of this connective principle is the circumflex inflection. The tone will be raised, as in the principal emphasis, but instead of being allowed to fall straight to a finality, it is turned upward at the finish, to hook on, as it were, to the following. The weight of voice will be less marked, the inflection less long, and the pause usually less decided, than in the case of the primary emphasis. "Recall romance, recite the names of heroes of legend and song, ...
— Public Speaking • Irvah Lester Winter
... guessed his reason. He taught her coon-can, two-handed whist and Chinese solitaire before a gray lightening outside proclaimed that the night was over. Miss Bridger, heavy-eyed and languid, turned her face to the window; Billy swept the cards together and stacked them with an air of finality. ...
— The Long Shadow • B. M. Bower
... lovable, possessed a strength of character incredible in one of her years and appearance. He realized that he was only distressing her by his presence. The timidity of her manner was no sign of weakness, and there was finality even in that earnest look which she had ...
— The Governors • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... cannot allow either Germany or Russia to know how effectually she has been robbed, for no one could tell what either of these nations might do under the circumstances. The Government fears to let even its own people know what has happened. It is a stroke of vengeance marvellous in its finality. Austria is crippled for years to come, unless she finds the stolen ...
— Jennie Baxter, Journalist • Robert Barr
... finality in her voice, that the poor confidant's expansiveness withered up within her beyond even ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... voice, dying of its own utterance, gave him a sense of things past and done with, sunk into the ultimate oblivion. No voice of her energy and defiance could have touched him so. Her indifference troubled him like passion; in its completeness, its finality, it stirred him to decision, to acceptance of its terms. She was ready to fall from his grasp by her own dead weight. There was only one way in ...
— The Immortal Moment - The Story of Kitty Tailleur • May Sinclair
... my stomach; I swayed dizzily. The utter brutality, the finality of the thing! "And any more of you carrion that I catch slacking will get the same thing," the Russian said. "You, Renaud, I've got my eye on you. Watch out!" The sergeant's voice rasped through the mist about me. I shoved ...
— Astounding Stories, May, 1931 • Various
... and in one's knowledge of the particular subject being handled. The leader must not only know but must know that he knows. This makes quick judgments possible, and the leader and organizer must always be capable of making such judgments, and of doing it with finality. The baseball player must decide instantly whether to throw the ball to "first," "second," "third," or "home," and he must repeatedly make such decisions correctly before he can become a strong and respected baseball captain. The same thing holds true of the ...
— Essentials in Conducting • Karl Wilson Gehrkens
... for Pauline, in which he has skirted the infinite and known that his soul cannot accept finality—he finds that in him which ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... two years after the termination of the Great European War form a period of transition in which the commercial type of aeroplane was gradually evolved from the fighting machine which was perfected in the four preceding years. There was about this period no sense of finality, but it was as experimental, in its own way, as were the years of progressing design which preceded the war period. Such commercial schemes as were inaugurated call for no more note than has been given here; they have been experimental, and, ...
— A History of Aeronautics • E. Charles Vivian
... with a business man. He listened attentively, approved the plans, agreed upon the great need, and then settling back in his chair with the same air of finality, used exactly the same words, with the same emphasis, "It can't be done in this town." I got that same reply from several men that day. And I said to myself, "They are right; it can't be done with them; but it can be done ...
— Quiet Talks on Service • S. D. Gordon
... short engagement is perhaps the best combination. A prolonged engagement is the most trying relationship between the sexes possible to conceive. For the woman it means the drawbacks of matrimony without its charm of restful finality, or any of its solid worldly advantages. On the man's side it means the irksomeness of the marriage yoke without any of its satisfactions and comforts. On the man, indeed, a long engagement is especially hard, as at least the woman is spared the burden of ordering his food and coping ...
— Modern marriage and how to bear it • Maud Churton Braby
... explicit intellectual process, by falling back on divine illumination which enables it to see through those well-ordered phenomena the Divine Actuality that lies behind, informing them with its own finality and using them both as types and as media of transmission and communication. So men are enabled by philosophy "to put things in their right order" and by religion "to control them well," thus becoming indeed worthy to ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram
... it hurts me," said Anne softly. "Perfect things like that always did hurt me—I remember I called it 'the queer ache' when I was a child. What is the reason that pain like this seems inseparable from perfection? Is it the pain of finality—when we realise that there can ...
— Anne's House of Dreams • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... I suggested. "These gray November days with their depressing atmosphere of finality may be held responsible ...
— The Gates of Chance • Van Tassel Sutphen
... conversation had ceased to interest him. So, evidently, had his letters, for he thrust them from him with an air of finality as he rose to his feet and glanced at his watch. It was not yet very late, but with the waning of summer the days were growing perceptibly shorter and the light in the office where the two men ...
— The Monk of Hambleton • Armstrong Livingston
... swords," said D'Arnot. "He will be satisfied with wounding you, and there is less danger of a mortal wound." "Pistols," said Tarzan, with finality. ...
— The Return of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... a kind of grim finality, "either some one else who didn't have any feet has been here or else that animal knows ...
— Tom Slade on Mystery Trail • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... The finality of her despair silenced him. He could feel it like fingers tightening on his throat. He realized in a flash that this was how he, too, would be tempted to speak were he to lose Terry—that, having lost the best, any careless makeshift would ...
— The Kingdom Round the Corner - A Novel • Coningsby Dawson
... of the world will be on you, Patricia, and nothing short of a silk tailor suit will be suitable for you to wear to sustain yourself in such a position," declared Miss Elvira, with a positive degree of finality in ...
— Blue-grass and Broadway • Maria Thompson Daviess
... of letters some startling developments are also threatened on similar lines. Mr. WELLS, always remarkable for his refusal to commit himself to any finality in the formulation of his opinions, has, it is said, decided to devote his talents in future exclusively to the composition of educational works in words of one syllable, and where possible of three letters. He ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, May 28, 1919. • Various
... of a poet and an unusual sense of melody, where was he lacking in what makes a great poet? In power of expression. He never attained, except in a few poems, that union of sound and sense which is characteristic of the best poetry. The touch of finality is not in his words; the subtle charm of verse outside of the melody and the meaning is not his — he failed to get the last "touches of vitalizing force." He did not, as Lowell said of Keats, "rediscover the delight and wonder that lay enchanted in the dictionary." He did ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... swung back to his desk, tore from the pad before him the piece of paper on which he had been scrawling, crushed it, and tossed it into the wastebasket with an air of finality. ...
— Roast Beef, Medium • Edna Ferber
... should not be accepted as a finality. What Emerson and other friends have said concerning her should also be considered in order to obtain a just impression of a woman who combined more varied qualities than perhaps any other person of that time. Hawthorne says of Zenobia, that she was naturally a stump ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... turbine does not appear to have by any means reached finality in its form, such questions as the angle of impact which the jet should make with the surface of the vane, and the size of the orifice through which the steam should be ejected, being still debatable points. But on one matter there ...
— Twentieth Century Inventions - A Forecast • George Sutherland
... the Lambeth Conference." Whether it is a new mind in Lambeth Conferences we need not consider; it is certainly no new mind in the Anglican Church, but is precisely its characteristic attitude of not claiming perfection or finality for itself, but of looking beyond itself to Catholic Christendom, and longing for the time when reunion of the churches which now make up its "broken unity" will enable it to speak with the same voice of authority with which it did in its primitive ...
— Our Lady Saint Mary • J. G. H. Barry
... The present moment of the soul has to live on itself; and such a life remains alien to depths of reality which have been plumbed by the great personalities of history in the past. It is a want of conviction in truth and reality that makes us seek finality in the past. It may be that the highest personalities of our day are not able to scale such spiritual heights as were scaled by the Christians of the primitive Church; but unless they believe that the same power is present in their souls they will never have courage ...
— An Interpretation of Rudolf Eucken's Philosophy • W. Tudor Jones
... them, you do not take them from me. You receive them. He?" And Madame pressed back the slippers, opening her plump jewelled hands in a gesture of finality. ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... should go back to the time of Cromwell to discuss the rights of property rather than to that of the early Kings of Ireland. If there is to be a returning, why not at once put in a claim on the part of the Irish Elk? No! there must be some finality in human affairs.' And on this phrase the conversation came to ...
— Muslin • George Moore
... as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life and rest in unvisited tombs." But some who read her books feel an underlying tone of sadness—a melancholy whisper as of a finality, an inevitable end to all future development, even of the greatest personalities. Many other writers have believed that men live in the world's memory only by what they have done in the world, but George Eliot is definite that this memory is all, that personality has no other chance of surviving. ...
— Cobwebs of Thought • Arachne
... matter of fact, the letter was probably not "hurled" more suddenly or swiftly than the most ordinary invitation to dinner: nor can its contents have been particularly surprising to any one. It was probably the conclusiveness, the finality, of the announcement that struck these writers as "dramatic." The letter put an end to all dubiety with a "short, sharp shock." It was, in fact, crisp. As a rule, however, "dramatic" is employed by the modern journalist simply as a rather pretentious ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... jurisdiction to try the case, the Court divided, five-to-four, as to the grounds of the decision. The point on which the Justices differed was which department of the Government had authority to say with finality what regions lie within the theatre of military operation. Claiming this as a function of the courts, the majority held that the theatre of war did not embrace an area in which the civil courts were open and functioning.[1295] The ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin
... now repeated, twirling his mustache. The morning paper lay across his knees, and, as he spoke, with an air of finality and disapproval, ...
— What Two Children Did • Charlotte E. Chittenden
... Lucia agreed. And there was finality in her voice, too. It was as if Destiny had come into this house, and an unheard voice ...
— The Bad Man • Charles Hanson Towne
... allowed himself to listen for a moment—to overbalance all his preconceived plans, but just then his past life, Jordan Morse, his own near approaching end, sank into his mind, and the fire in his eyes went out. There was finality in the shake ...
— Rose O'Paradise • Grace Miller White
... great sweep of his shoulders, his solid legs, his red neck and close-cropped, wiry hair were visible to her strangely. She had a peculiar feeling of acquaintedness and of aloofness, intimate knowledge and a separation of sharp finality caused her to stare at him with so intent a curiosity ...
— Mary, Mary • James Stephens
... with a finality which but increased the laments of the King, "the State demands successors, and since I have only given you a daughter, it will urge you to beget sons who resemble you; but I ask you earnestly not to give way to the persuasions of your people until you ...
— The Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault • Charles Perrault
... the way," said the doctor, with an air of finality. "There is not a moment to waste, and although I fear that we are too late, it is just possible we may be in time to prevent ...
— Brood of the Witch-Queen • Sax Rohmer
... more submissive to the Slave Power. Conjointly, they enacted those measures that became known as the compromises of 1850, the principal ones being the Fugitive Slave Law and the act repealing the Missouri Compromise. Both of them pronounced these acts to be "a finality," and both of them in national convention declared there should be no further agitation of the subject. They set out to muzzle all the ...
— The Abolitionists - Together With Personal Memories Of The Struggle For Human Rights • John F. Hume
... wind seeming to hail from very far, the wings of it laden less with hopeful promise than with rare unspoken farewells, gentle yet penetrating regrets; so that Dominic, even while welcoming the refreshment of it, was moved in spirit with impressions of impending finality as though it spoke to him of things finished, laid aside, not wholly without sorrow relinquished and—so ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... tell your wife that I'm a bold, bad man and I won't come." Ford, to prove his sincerity, sat down upon the stout manger there, and crossed his legs with an air of finality. ...
— The Uphill Climb • B. M. Bower
... be understood as accepting either the girl's present economic position or the absorption in purely domestic occupations of the workingman's wife as a finality. It is a transitional stage that we are considering. I look forward to a time, I believe it to be rapidly approaching, when the home of the workingman, like everyone's else home, will be truly the ...
— The Trade Union Woman • Alice Henry
... its 1963 agreement with Kuwait, ending earlier claims to Bubiyan and Warbah Islands or to all of Kuwait; a United Nations Boundary Demarcation Commission is demarcating the Iraq-Kuwait boundary persuant to Resolution 687, and, on 17 June 1992, the UN Security Council reaffirmed the finality of the Boundary Demarcation Commission's decisions; periodic disputes with upstream riparian Syria over Euphrates water rights; potential dispute over water development plans by Turkey for the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers Climate: mostly desert; ...
— The 1992 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... there was nothing to be said. He had fallen very low even in this girl's estimation and the fact was almost intolerably galling, but he could make no effective defense. She went from him slowly, but with a suggestive deliberation, without looking back, and there was a hint of finality in the way she ...
— The Long Portage • Harold Bindloss
... detailed and authoritative, embodied the results. It was succeeded, in 1837, by a descriptive volume bearing the imposing title, Der Mond; oder allgemeine vergleichende Selenographie. This summation of knowledge in that branch, though in truth leaving many questions open, had an air of finality which tended to discourage further inquiry.[927] It gave form to a reaction against the sanguine views entertained by Hevelius, Schroeter, Herschel and Gruithuisen as to the possibilities of agreeable residence on the moon, ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... him, in dumb sorrowful appeal. She closed the ivory fan, clasping her hands upon it. The unquestioning finality of her patient silence, goaded Jim Airth to madness, and let loose the torrent of his fierce wild protest against ...
— The Mistress of Shenstone • Florence L. Barclay
... in method. If I may put into my own words the form of thought which seems to animate them, it is something of this kind. They feel that the world in which we live is the expression of some great plan or purpose or pattern which is not yet complete, which shows no sign of finality, but is ever growing in complexity; which resolves itself again and again into simplicity, and then spreads out again on a yet wider scale. The plan or purpose is not a dead mechanical thing; the life ...
— Landmarks in the History of Early Christianity • Kirsopp Lake
... can go to-morrow," answered Sobrenski in the accents of finality. He had never cared about the girl's inclusion in their plots, and took his revenge in exacting from her considerably more ...
— The Hippodrome • Rachel Hayward
... what I should instantly say, were I called on to plead for gnosticism; and its real friends, of whom you will presently perceive I am not one, would say without difficulty a great deal more. Regarded as a stable finality, every outward good becomes a mere weariness to the flesh. It must be menaced, be occasionally lost, for its goodness to be fully felt as such. Nay, more than occasionally lost. No one knows the worth of innocence till he knows it is gone forever, and that money ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... if some satisfying finality had been brought about. Such was the Mixer. That sort of thing would never do with us, and yet I suddenly saw that she, like Cousin Egbert, was strangely commendable and worthy. I mean to say, I no longer felt it was ...
— Ruggles of Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... finality, the dreariness, of that announcement angered the older woman. Calmness fell from her. She came away from the window slowly, her hands clasped tightly at her back, the upper part of her body bending forward a little, her thin ...
— No Clue - A Mystery Story • James Hay
... a prince—or a mere man for the matter of that—leave a room with greater suavity, discretion, or aplomb. It was a revelation of breeding, of race, of long slavery to caste. And yet, with it all, it seemed to have a touch of finality about it—a hint that the entire proceeding was deliberate, planned, not to be altered by circumstance. He ...
— Frenzied Fiction • Stephen Leacock
... slightly cast down, although he had previously realised that football would be beyond him for at least a week. It is sometimes one thing to acknowledge a fact oneself and another to hear the same fact stated by a second person. There's a certain finality about the latter that is convincing. But if Don was downcast he didn't show it to his companion. Don had a way of concealing his emotions that Tim at once admired and resented. When Tim felt blue—which was ...
— Left Guard Gilbert • Ralph Henry Barbour
... man must wear something! My fellow has the deuce of a time getting me into 'em, confound 'em. Oh, for ease, give me boots and buckskins!" Hereupon the Viscount having walked round Barnabas three times, and viewed him critically from every angle, nodded with an air of finality. "Yes, they do you infinite credit, my dear fellow,—like everything else;" and he cast a comprehensive glance ...
— The Amateur Gentleman • Jeffery Farnol et al
... convinced that uncertainty is essential to the spiritual life; and his works are saturated by the idea that where uncertainty ceases, stagnation must begin; that our light must be wavering, and our progress tentative, as well as our hopes chequered, and our happiness even devoid of any sense of finality, if the creative intention is not to frustrate itself; we may not see the path of progress and salvation clearly marked out before us. On the other hand, he believes that the circumstances of life are as much adapted to the guidance of each separate soul as if each were the single object of creative ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... stolen my word," she said with an accent of finality. "'No'" is the word you force me to speak. I am going on to Washington ...
— The Precipice • Elia Wilkinson Peattie
... wouldn't alter the case if he did. I am the best judge of what is good for me." There was a certain finality in her cadences that repelled all further discussion. He remembered having heard ...
— Kennedy Square • F. Hopkinson Smith
... I ride over to the claim, some day, you ought to have a horse of your own," he announced in his manner of finality. "So your horse and outfit are over ...
— The Furnace of Gold • Philip Verrill Mighels
... that he had everything to gain thereby and not much to lose. The irrepressible Foote of Mississippi gave all his colleagues a chance to mar their reputations, by injecting into the deliberations of the Senate a discussion of the finality of the compromise measures.[377] It speedily appeared that fidelity to the settlement of 1850, from the Southern point of view, consisted in strict adherence to the Fugitive Slave Act.[378] This was the touchstone by which Southern statesmen proposed to test ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson
... conclusion, with the minor events which lead up to it, is scarcely less remarkable as exhibiting in the original author, whoever he was, a sense of art, a sense of finality, the absence of which is the great blot on Romance at large, owing to the natural, the human, but the very inartistic, craving for sequels. As is well known, it was the most difficult thing in the world for a mediaeval romancer to let his subject ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... have an end, even the most unpleasant—though it must be confessed their finality is generally lingering. Thus our desolate voyage through that seething cauldron, known to geographers and schoolboys as the Red Sea, at length ...
— In Eastern Seas - The Commission of H.M.S. 'Iron Duke,' flag-ship in China, 1878-83 • J. J. Smith
... said Mrs. Elmore, with finality, and possessed herself of the note. She ran it through, and then flung it on the table and dropped into a chair, while the tears started to her eyes. "What a cold, cutting, merciless ...
— A Fearful Responsibility and Other Stories • William D. Howells
... Elisha Boone had hurried at once to Washington, charged by all the fathers, mothers, brothers, and sisters of the regiment to make swift report of the absent darlings. Kate was besieged in the grand house with tearful watchers, waiting in agonizing impatience for the fatal finality. Olympia, to spare her mother the distress of the vague responses her telegrams brought from Washington, spent most of the time at the Boones', where, thanks to the father's high standing with the ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan |
