"Hard-and-fast" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... they've eaten out of the same dish, as it were, all their days, and had the same opportunities, they should be so totally unlike one another physically, mentally, and morally. It's impossible to lay down any hard-and-fast rule for them now, as one could ...
— The Opinions of a Philosopher • Robert Grant
... precept is false. My principles have been various, among various men; I had to change them with every change of latitude. Things that we admire in Europe are punishable in Asia, and a vice in Paris becomes a necessity when you have passed the Azores. There are no such things as hard-and-fast rules; there are only conventions adapted to the climate. Fling a man headlong into one social melting pot after another, and convictions and forms and moral systems become so many meaningless words to him. The one thing that always remains, ...
— Gobseck • Honore de Balzac
... if the Cavalry Divisions are constantly drilled together under the same Leader in Peace, there is at least a very great risk that this certain degree of drill control, which we recognise as indispensable, will degenerate into hard-and-fast prescription, since the Leader has always the same number of units at his disposal, and will thus by degrees habituate himself to consider these as invariable quantities in the solution of ...
— Cavalry in Future Wars • Frederick von Bernhardi
... evidently, experience in training war pilots, and the practical results obtained by these men at the front, have been proof enough to the French authorities of the folly of setting rigid standards, making hard-and-fast rules to be met by prospective aviators. As our own experience increased, we saw the wisdom of a policy which is more concerned with a man's courage, his self-reliance, and his powers of initiative, than with his ability to work out theoretical ...
— High Adventure - A Narrative of Air Fighting in France • James Norman Hall
... travellers who now visit (like those who for the past century have visited) South America come in three categories— although, of course, these categories are not divided by hard-and-fast lines. ...
— Through the Brazilian Wilderness • Theodore Roosevelt
... watched the vessel a long time, and they determined to run down on her as near as might be safe. As they drew on her it appeared that she was not actually hard-and-fast, but she was bumping apparently, and they guessed she had her anchors out. There is nothing in the way of close shaves that a smacksman will not venture, and the Esperanza was soon ...
— The Chequers - Being the Natural History of a Public-House, Set Forth in - a Loafer's Diary • James Runciman
... made our plans, but they were very elastic, for it was impossible for us to keep to any hard-and-fast line. ...
— Bunyip Land - A Story of Adventure in New Guinea • George Manville Fenn
... he declares that he does not wish to attack anything, but, on the contrary, is opposed to any use of force, and, far from plotting in secret, he seeks every opportunity of saying and doing all that he says and does in the most open manner. And the gendarmes, though they are bound by no hard-and-fast rules, still find no ground for a criminal charge in the young man, and, like the clergy, they send him back to the army. Again the authorities deliberate together, and decide to accept him though he has not taken the oath, and to enrol him among the soldiers. They put him into the ...
— The Kingdom of God is within you • Leo Tolstoy
... breaking up of the old hard-and-fast boundaries on the musical map is due to Chopin. A pioneer, he has been rewarded as such by a polite ignorement or bland condescension. He smashed the portals of the convention that forbade a man baring his soul to the multitude. The psychology of music is the gainer thereby. Chopin, like ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... he cannot change his clothes, or get near a fire, unless in the farmer's kitchen. In some places the kitchen is open to the men, and on Sundays, at all events, they get a breakfast free. But the kindly old habits are dying out before the hard-and-fast money system and the abiding effects of Unionism, which, even when not prominently displayed, causes a silent, ...
— Hodge and His Masters • Richard Jefferies
... same thing; but I do assert that genius is simply talent raised to a slightly higher power; it differs from it not in kind but merely in degree: it is talent at its best. There is no drawing a hard-and-fast line of demarcation between the two. You might just as well try to classify all mankind into tall men and short men, and then endeavour to prove that a real distinction existed in nature between your two artificial classes. ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... me, Miss Ross," Mr. Withells continued, looking with real admiration at her downcast, rosy face—she must be quite healthy he thought, to look so clean and fresh always—"I lay down no hard-and-fast rules. I do not say should my wife desire to kiss me sometimes, that I should ... ...
— Jan and Her Job • L. Allen Harker
... last chapter is incapable of any lasting and far-reaching industrial deliverance. But it provides a way out, hitherto untried. With an account of this way as it appears to-day our book ends, as a testimony to living facts can only end, not with the hard-and-fast wall of dogma, but ...
— Making Both Ends Meet • Sue Ainslie Clark and Edith Wyatt
... have drawn out this hard-and-fast line of life for yourself, and think you will be happy in stifling all your natural instincts?' ...
— Dwell Deep - or Hilda Thorn's Life Story • Amy Le Feuvre
... the Captain, "can deny that it is marked with all the lines, and waves, an eddies of a rollin' river, an' yet as little can they deny that it seems as hard-and-fast as the rock ...
— Rivers of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne |
