"Incommunicable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... all other changes in my dreams were accompanied by deep- seated anxiety and gloomy melancholy, such as are wholly incommunicable by words. I seemed every night to descend, not metaphorically, but literally to descend, into chasms and sunless abysses, depths below depths, from which it seemed hopeless that I could ever reascend. Nor did I, by waking, feel that I had ...
— Confessions of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas De Quincey
... God his Father in a peculiar and incommunicable sense. He never said, "Our Father," by which he would have classed himself with other men, but always, "My Father," showing that thus he stood alone in his relation to God. As the son has the same nature with the father, ...
— Companion to the Bible • E. P. Barrows
... we already possess. But in that bow of the boat is the gift of another world. Without it, what prison wall would be so strong as that "white and wailing fringe" of sea. What maimed creatures were we all, chained to our rocks, Andromeda-like, or wandering by the endless shores; wasting our incommunicable strength, and pining in hopeless watch of unconquerable waves? The nails that fasten together the planks of the boat's bow are the rivets of the fellowship of the world. Their iron does more than draw lightning out of heaven, it ...
— The Harbours of England • John Ruskin
... less or more than that of inferior animals—like or unlike theirs, still the human art is dependent on that first, and then upon an amount of practice, of science,—and of imagination disciplined by thought, which the true possessor of it knows to be incommunicable, and the true critic of it, inexplicable, except through long process of laborious years. That journey of life's conquest, in which hills over hills, and Alps on Alps arose, and sank,—do you think you can make another trace it painlessly, ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... What sprightly talk! The fine flavour of that party is quite incommunicable. Just dear old friends, ...
— The Summons • A.E.W. Mason
... similar state of feeling to that which produced among the ancients those perfect specimens of poetry and sculpture which are the baffling models of succeeding generations. There is a unity and a perfection in it of an incommunicable kind. The central figure, St. Cecilia, seems rapt in such inspiration as produced her image in the painter's mind; her deep, dark, eloquent eyes lifted up; her chestnut hair flung back from her forehead—she ...
— Among the Great Masters of Music - Scenes in the Lives of Famous Musicians • Walter Rowlands
... commonly, with not even a hush of tone, as one would say "a brick house" or "a gold watch," or anything. She, promptly detecting his disappointment at her coldness, tried to simulate the fervour of an initiate, but this may never be done so as to deceive any one who has truly sensed the occult and incommunicable virtue of the candy cane. For one thing, she kept repeating the words "candy cane" baldly, whenever she could find a place for them in her soulless praise; whereas an initiate would not once have uttered the term, but would have looked in silence. Another initiate, equally silent by his side, ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... beings,' 'the art of behaving in society,' 'the science of human happiness,' were various modes of expressing the final end of conduct.[5] Sokrates clearly indicated the difference between an unscientific and a scientific art; the one is an incommunicable knack or dexterity, the other is founded on ...
— Moral Science; A Compendium of Ethics • Alexander Bain
... falsify whatever thing it touched upon. This study of Fillippino's has all the singular charm of the romantic school. . . . The clear form has gone, the old beauty dropped out of sight . . . but the mediaeval or romantic form has an incommunicable charm of its own. . . . Before Chaucer could give us a Pandarus or a Cressida, all knowledge and memory of the son of Lycaon and the daughter of Chryses must have died out, the whole poem collapsed into romance; but far ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... shall be his relief Who hath no power to seek, no heart to pray, No sense of God, but bears as best he may, A lonely incommunicable grief? What shall he do? One only thing he knows, That his life flits a frail uneasy spark In the great vast of universal dark, And that the grave may not be all repose. Be still, sad soul! lift thou no passionate cry, But spread the desert of thy being bare To the full searching of the All-seeing ...
— The Teaching of Jesus • George Jackson
... presents himself as a quite inexplicable Sphinx-riddle. A rich poverty of Latin and Greek,—so far is clear enough, even to eyes peering myopic through horn-lensed editorial spectacles,—but naught farther? O purblind, well-meaning, altogether fuscous Melesigenes-Wilbur, there are things in him incommunicable by stroke of birch! Did it ever enter that old bewildered head of thine that there was the Possibility of the Infinite in him? To thee, quite wingless (and even featherless) biped, has not so much even as a dream of wings ever come? 'Talented young ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... attractions, unless the pit may be supposed to have an advantage for the purposes of the critic or the dramatic reporter. But the critic or reporter is a rarity. For most people, the sole benefit is in the price. Now, on the contrary, the outside of the mail had its own incommunicable advantages. These we could not forego. The higher price we would willingly have paid, but not the price connected with the condition of riding inside; which condition we pronounced insufferable. The air, the freedom of prospect, the proximity ...
— The English Mail-Coach and Joan of Arc • Thomas de Quincey
... work of an intelligent Divine Being; or we may disbelieve it; but we can never prove it. If we do believe it, innumerable confirmations of it meet us at every turn: but no such confirmations, and no multiplication of them, can persuade a disbeliever. For belief is ever incommunicable from without; it can be generated only from within. The term "belief" cannot be applied to our recognition of a physical fact: we do not believe in that—we are only sensible ...
— Confessions and Criticisms • Julian Hawthorne
... of Destiny; had taken us to those early accidents of fortune which predetermined for us all that we can ever be. Now I understood that the same road was to bring us together again. Whatever we had missed, we possessed together the precious, the incommunicable past. ...
— My Antonia • Willa Sibert Cather
... relief had come to her. So that their laughter and high spirits jarred upon her strangely. She had said to herself upon leaving them the evening before that never again could they be the same to her or she the same to them. But then she had expected to return isolated by incommunicable happiness; now she had returned isolated by incommunicable grief. Nevertheless she glided Into her seat with feigned cheerfulness, taking a natural part in their conversation; and she rose at last, ...
— The Mettle of the Pasture • James Lane Allen
... side pale lights sparkled from the windows of the mills, while down the deepened blue of the waters came floating iridescent suds from the washing of the wools. It was given to her to know that which an artist of living memory has called the incommunicable thrill of things.... ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... tact, is a curious social development of the same faculty. Taste is the child of the mind and soul; tact, of the soul and heart. Both are incommunicable. ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 5, November, 1863 • Various
... melancholy. The author of the "Amusement Philosophique" would have us believe that animals can speak. Nothing makes more for his opinion than the exquisite variety of lyrical howl in which a shut-out dog expresses every phrase of blighted affection, incommunicable longing, and supreme despair. Somehow he never, literally never, wakens his owners. He only keeps all the other people in a four-mile radius wide awake. Yet how few have the energy and public spirit to get up and go for that dog with sticks, umbrellas, ...
— Lost Leaders • Andrew Lang
... ("pyramids of truth," he calls them) and then stuffs them into his pockets where they "become round hard balls" soon to be discarded. What Dr. Reefy's "truths" may be we never know; Anderson simply persuades us that to this lonely old man they are utterly precious and thereby incommunicable, forming a kind of blurred ...
— Winesburg, Ohio • Sherwood Anderson
... joined Mrs Trevor, who embraced her nephew with a mother's love; and, amid all that nameless questioning of delightful trifles, that "blossoming vein" of household talk, which gives such an incommunicable charm to the revisiting of home, they all three turned into the house, where Eric, hungry with his travels, enjoyed at leisure the "jolly spread" prepared for him, luxurious beyond anything he had seen for his last year at school. When he and Vernon went ...
— Eric, or Little by Little • Frederic W. Farrar
... clothes. They were doing the right thing by him in reducing him to the ranks of the proletariat in name as well as in fact. English people, insisted Townsend, never seem to realise that the distinction of birth is so valuable because it is incommunicable. That, of course, is quite true. English people, happily, as I think, never have, and never will, regard mere birth with any veneration or even interest. What affects them is that potent, if rather indefinite, thing, position—the aura of distinction which surrounds great office, great ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... institution and invites comparison with that remarkable feature of Indian social life, the Brahman caste. At first sight the two seem mutually opposed, for the one is a hereditary though intellectual aristocracy, claiming the possession of incommunicable knowledge and power, the other a corporation open to all who choose to renounce the world and lead a good life. And this antithesis contains historical truth: the Sangha, like the similar orders of the Jains and other Kshatriya sects, was in ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... lecture, and then the discovery, the illumination, the gleam of lightning which you saw before your eyes descend into a man of genius,—all this was Emerson. He invented this style of speaking, and made it express the supersensuous, the incommunicable. Lowell wrote, while still under the spell of the magician: "Emerson's oration was more disjointed than usual, even with him. It began nowhere, and ended everywhere, and yet, as always with that divine man, it ...
— Emerson and Other Essays • John Jay Chapman
... shall fill, 'T is not within the force of fate The fate-conjoined to separate. But thou, my votary, weepest thou? I gave thee sight—where is it now? I taught thy heart beyond the reach Of ritual, bible, or of speech; Wrote in thy mind's transparent table, As far as the incommunicable; Taught thee each private sign to raise Lit by the supersolar blaze. Past utterance, and past belief, And past the blasphemy of grief, The mysteries of Nature's heart; And though no Muse can these impart, Throb thine with Nature's ...
— Poems - Household Edition • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... to the skies from the Beyond Do come those particles which make the clouds And flying thunderheads. For I have taught That this their number is innumerable And infinite the sum of the Abyss, And I have shown with what stupendous speed Those bodies fly and how they're wont to pass Amain through incommunicable space. Therefore, 'tis not exceeding strange, if oft In little time tempest and darkness cover With bulking thunderheads hanging on high The oceans and the lands, since everywhere Through all the narrow tubes ...
— Of The Nature of Things • [Titus Lucretius Carus] Lucretius
... and interests and talk and ideas and natural relations with others. One knows of houses where some trifling omission of detail, some failure of service in a meal, will plunge the hostess into a dumb and incommunicable despair. The slightest lapse of the conventional order becomes a cloud that intercepts the sun. But the right attitude to life, if we desire to set ourselves free from this self-created torment, is a resolute avoidance of minute ...
— Where No Fear Was - A Book About Fear • Arthur Christopher Benson
... Reflection, melancholy introspection, that sweet disease of youth, from which it is so difficult to escape, have not yet found me. There is as yet little consciousness of any thing beyond external and material things save a faint incommunicable magic which hangs like a veil over the bounds of a small farm. From those bounds my feet will not disengage me. On very still days I hear sounds far away and feel something within me that wishes to follow them, does indeed follow over a great space and leaves my body behind. ...
— Confessions of Boyhood • John Albee
... remind him if he looked long enough, and then threw it abruptly away as though he gave it up as a bad job. "No," he said, falling back on his own memory. "It wasn't what he said. It was the way of saying it. Manner is incommunicable. And he said so little about her. He talked a good deal about Philippa in a chaffy sort of way—said she was exactly his idea of a Countess—why had one such firm convictions about Countesses and Duchesses and Baronets and so on? It led to great injustice, causing us to condemn nine samples ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... deep in their bosoms, which soothed the girl more than a distincter utterance might. And sometimes Hilda moaned quietly among the doves, teaching her voice to accord with theirs, and thus finding a temporary relief from the burden of her incommunicable sorrow, as if a little portion of it, at least, had been told to these innocent friends, ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume II. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... gets older, the critical ability grows, and becomes at length formidably complete;—whereas the power of originating, or, what is the same thing, of acting wisely, and on the spur of the moment, in new and untried circumstances, is an incommunicable faculty, which genius, and genius only, can possess. And genius is as rare now as it ever was. Any man of talent can be converted, by dint of study and painstaking, into a good military critic; but a Wellington ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... back is a painting on the wall, very similar to that in Agellius's cottage. The ever-blessed immaculate Mother of God is exercising her office as the Advocate of sinners, standing by the sacrifice as she stood at the cross itself, and offering up and applying its infinite merits and incommunicable virtue in union with priest and people. So instinctive in the Christian mind is the principle of decoration, as it may be called, that even in times of suffering, and places of banishment, we see it brought into ...
— Callista • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... to this, that he could not furnish one with any consolation out of the armoury of reason, that he himself found this consolation, but in a way that did not at all depend upon his own effort or will, and was therefore as incommunicable as the advantage of having a large appetite or being six feet high. The reader of Rousseau becomes accustomed to this way of dealing with subjects of discussion. We see him using his reason as adroitly as he knows ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... ibid., article Regales. "The great 'regales,' majora regalia, are those which belong to the King, jure singulari et proprio, and which are incommunicable to another, considering that they cannot be divorced from the scepter, being the attributes of sovereignty, such as... the making of laws, the interpretation or change of these, the last appeal from the decisions of magistrates, the creation of offices, the declaration ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 5 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 1 (of 2)(Napoleon I.) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... a row of semi-transparent teeth, with a gleam in the depths of them. She was certainly most attractive. She had that indefinable, incommunicable, unanalysable personal quality which we know as CHARM. "No, not as far BACK," she repeated. "Though, indeed, I often seem to remember things that happened before I was born (like Queen Elizabeth's visit to Kenilworth): I recollect so vividly all that I ...
— Hilda Wade - A Woman With Tenacity Of Purpose • Grant Allen
... a peculiar justice, intuitions remain highly private and largely incommunicable. But social intercourse depends on communication, and while a person can often steer his own life with the utmost grace by virtue of his intuitions, he usually has great difficulty in making them real to others. ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... the rites and traditions of the past, and expresses through it its own national character and aspirations. Each nation as well as each individual must necessarily have a faith specially its own, arising out of its own character and experience and in great part incommunicable to others. No two ...
— History of Religion - A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems • Allan Menzies
... scattered congregation of sailors, and sailors' wives and widows. A muffled silence reigned, only broken at times by the shrieks of the storm. Each silent worshipper seemed purposely sitting apart from the other, as if each silent grief were insular and incommunicable. The chaplain had not yet arrived; and there these silent islands of men and women sat steadfastly eyeing several marble tablets, with black borders, masoned into the wall on either side the pulpit. ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... would like to be a peer. The child's impulse need not be explained to the police, for the simple reason that it could not be explained to anybody. But does any one believe that the laborious political ambitions of modern commercial men ever have this airy and incommunicable character? A man lying on the beach may throw stones into the sea without any particular reason. But does any one believe that the brewer throws bags of gold into the party funds without any particular reason? This theory ...
— All Things Considered • G. K. Chesterton
... in primordial forest, of whose makers there is now no human memory. With La Perouse he linked "The Island Nights Entertainments," and it never palled upon him that in the dusky stabbing of the "Island of Voices" something poured over the stabber's hands "like warm tea." Queer incommunicable joy it is, the joy of the vivid phrase that turns the statement of ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... emperors, who were invested with the titles of Caesar or Augustus, he governed the universe in obedience to the will of his Father and Monarch. II. In the second hypothesis, the Logos possessed all the inherent, incommunicable perfections, which religion and philosophy appropriate to the Supreme God. Three distinct and infinite minds or substances, three coequal and coeternal beings, composed the Divine Essence; and it would have implied contradiction, that any of them should not have existed, or that they should ever ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... referred to, the Meno, was the teachableness of Virtue; in that dialogue he comes to the conclusion that Virtue is teachable, but that there are none capable of teaching it; for the {192} wise men of the time are guided not by knowledge but by right opinion, or by a divine instinct which is incommunicable. Plato is thus led to seek a machinery of education, and it is with a view to this that he constructs his ideal Republic. Aristotle took up this view of the state as educative of the individual citizens, ...
— A Short History of Greek Philosophy • John Marshall
... great heart of affection understands our manifold and seemingly contradictory needs. Life would be intolerable if we had no one who knew us perfectly, not simply the outside part of our life, but that inside and apparently incommunicable part. Those who are least able to express themselves in words, or who (if they did express themselves) fear that they would be misunderstood, find in Him an unspeakable consolation. But I must not look at ...
— Letters to His Friends • Forbes Robinson
... sweet, And live a century while in the dark The dripping wheel of silence slowly turns; To watch the window open on the night, A dewy silent deep where nothing stirs, And, lying thus, to feel dilate within The press, the conflict, and the heavy pulse Of incommunicable sad ecstasy, Growing until the body seems outstretched In perfect crucifixion on the arms Of a cross pointing from last void to void, While the heart dies ...
— Georgian Poetry 1920-22 • Various
... not finish. It was not worth while. George Cannon had not understood. He did not feel as she felt, and her emotion was incommunicable to him. A tremendous misgiving seized her, and she had a physical feeling of emptiness in the stomach. It passed, swiftly as a hallucination. Just such a misgiving as visits nearly every normal person immediately before or immediately after marriage! She ignored it. She was engaged—that was the ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... he thinks for himself: When a merchant he allows others to think for him. A certain great manufacturer made "kid" gloves his specialty, and so well did he succeed that to-day his trade mark imports to manufactured ratskins a value incommunicable by any other talisman. It is a poor kind of enterprise which thus depends upon the judgment of others. What can be more absurd than for a man to hope to rank as a thundering Jupiter when he borrows all his thunder. Remember that the world only crowns him as truly great who has ...
— Hidden Treasures - Why Some Succeed While Others Fail • Harry A. Lewis
... sciences. Genius in the Arts must commonly be more self-conscious, but in whatever field, it will always be distinguished by its perpetual, steady, well-directed, happy, and faithful labor in accumulating and disciplining its powers, as well as by its gigantic, incommunicable facility in exercising them. Therefore, literally, it is no man's business whether he has genius or not: work he must, whatever he is, but quietly and steadily; and the natural and unforced results of such work will be always ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... Darrell has relaxed his watch over the patient. He never now enters his guest's apartment without previous notice; and, by that incommunicable instinct which passes in households between one silent breast and another, as by a law equally strong to attract or repel—here drawing together, there keeping apart—though no rule in either case has been laid down;—by virtue, ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... do evil. But he did not reflect that a power to do good is, ex necessitate rei, a power to do evil. Surely, a good Being would bestow on his creature the power to do good—the power to become like himself, and to partake of the incommunicable blessedness of a holy will. But if he would bestow this, he would certainly confer power to do evil; for the one is identical with the other. And sin has arisen, not from any power conferred for that purpose, but from that which constitutes the brightest element ...
— A Theodicy, or, Vindication of the Divine Glory • Albert Taylor Bledsoe
... an unfinished statue in the gloom of the shadowy vault, suggests the unknown beauty of the soul which attains Nirvana's supremest height, for the supernal exaltation of purified humanity to Divine union may not be interpreted or expressed by mortal hands, but must for ever remain incommunicable and incomprehensible. From the central dagoba, ascended by a winding stair, the intricate design of the spacious sanctuary discloses itself with mathematical precision, and the changing glories of dawn, sunset, and ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... glass-blowing has the conspicuous advantage, from the point of view of literary presentation, of being to a great extent incommunicable. As in the case of other delightful arts—such as those treated of in the Badminton Library, for instance—the most that can be done by writing is to indicate suitable methods and to point out precautions which experience has shown to be necessary, and which are not always ...
— On Laboratory Arts • Richard Threlfall
... race of beings. I should not, without the most extreme reluctance, admit that nothing can be done; that with respect to them alone the doctrines of Christianity must be inoperative, and the advantages of civilization incommunicable. I cannot acquiesce in the theory that they are incapable of improvement, and that their extinction before the advance of the white settler is a necessity which it is impossible to control. I recommend ...
— Journals Of Expeditions Of Discovery Into Central • Edward John Eyre
... was once speaking to me of the personality of Gladstone. He related with unusual fervour that the effect of this personality was incomparable, a thing quite unique in his experience, something indeed incommunicable to those who had not met the man; yet, checking himself of a sudden, and as it were shaking himself free of a superstition, he added resolutely, "But I was reading some of his speeches in Hansard only the other day, and upon my word there's ...
— Painted Windows - Studies in Religious Personality • Harold Begbie
... understandings, and still have any intelligent meaning in his mind, when he asserts that they are yet one person. For, as he now uses the term, the very idea of a person is that of an essential, incommunicable monad, bounded by consciousness, and vitalized by self-active will; which being true, he might as well profess to hold that three units are yet one unit. When he does it, his words will, of necessity, be only substitutes for sense." ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... scattered congregation of sailors, and sailors' wives and widows. A muffled silence reigned, only broken at times by the shrieks of the storm. Each silent worshipper seemed purposely sitting apart from the other, as if each silent grief were insular and incommunicable. The chaplain had not yet arrived; and there these silent islands of men and women sat steadfastly eyeing several marble tablets, with black borders, masoned into the wall on either side the pulpit. Three of ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... rainbow from the three white vessels to this island!... And behold, a figure steps from it. She is robed to the feet in palest watchet blue, and her face is like a rosy star, and she waves her violet wings in the incommunicable speed of her ascent. My children, it is Iris, our lost daughter, our ineffable messenger. Let us await in silence the tidings which ...
— Hypolympia - Or, The Gods in the Island, an Ironic Fantasy • Edmund Gosse
... Then, again, of those whom we know best and love best on earth, and who know and love us best too, oh, what mutual ignorance must necessarily exist of innumerable thoughts and feelings lying deep clown in our inner man, half hidden, half revealed, even to ourselves, but altogether incommunicable and unutterable by word or sign to others! We may at times be conscious that we stand with them on the same lofty summit, and gaze on the same prospect, but the atmosphere is too rare to permit of any heard communication between us. And thus in no case can there be, not the meeting, but ...
— Parish Papers • Norman Macleod
... chime Of incommunicable rhyme, He shall chase the fleeting camp-fires Of the Bedouins ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 3 (of 4) • Various
... Arnold—is a poet, and the author of much good verse, which I appreciate and hold dear. But he was not a naturalist—all men cannot be everything. And I, a naturalist, hold that the wishes, thronging the restless little feathered breast are not altogether so incommunicable as the melodious mourner of "Poor Matthias" imagines. The days—ay, and years—which I have spent in the society of my feathered friends have not, I flatter myself, been so wasted that I cannot small my ...
— Birds in Town and Village • W. H. Hudson
... Hubert's work of faith cannot be written. It is incommunicable. One may point to after effects in a life transformed, but of that supernatural witness which comes to men's souls, stamping the words of God as very truth indeed, no description can be given. As jealously ...
— The First Soprano • Mary Hitchcock
... the breast of Reuben Bourne an incommunicable thought—something which he was to conceal most heedfully from her whom he most loved and trusted. He regretted, deeply and bitterly, the moral cowardice that had restrained his words when he was about to disclose the truth to Dorcas; but pride, ...
— Mosses from an Old Manse and Other Stories • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... may find our profit in applying a test suggested by Lowell—the test of imitability. "No poet of the first class has ever left a school, because his imagination is incommunicable," whereas "the secondary intellect seeks for excitement in expression, and stimulates itself into mannerism." The greater geniuses may have influenced those who came after them by their thoughts, by what they have contributed to the sum of human knowledge; but ...
— Inquiries and Opinions • Brander Matthews
... within him a realisation of Rome's incommunicable greatness. He perceived at last the nature of the pax romana, that peace, compounded of power, which welded the continents together, made the seas into serviceable highways and held all men secure within the barriers of law and justice. Was it possible that a nation which ...
— Roads from Rome • Anne C. E. Allinson
... most inglorious, coward tears From brutal eyes have ran: Smiles, incommunicable smiles! Are ...
— The Poetical Works of Edward Young, Volume 2 • Edward Young
... they are not French? And those have made the best use of their travels who have observed most to speak against. Most of them go for no other end but to come back again; they proceed in their travel with vast gravity and circumspection, with a silent and incommunicable prudence, preserving themselves from the contagion of an unknown air. What I am saying of them puts me in mind of something like it I have at times observed in some of our young courtiers; they will not mix with any but men of their own sort, and look upon us as men of another world, ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... And walked as now among a throng of men, Pondering things that lay beyond my ken, Questioning death, and solacing my fears. Ofttimes indeed strange sense have I of this, Vague memories that hold me with a spell, Touches of unseen lips upon my brow, Breathing some incommunicable bliss! In years foregone, O Soul, was all not well? Still lovelier life awaits thee. Fear ...
— The Sisters' Tragedy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... 'depots,' railway-lines, signals, and locomotives and trains that wander on the tracks up and down and across streets, pushing their way through the pedestrians, and tolling, as they go, in the American fashion, an immense melancholy bell, intent, apparently, on some private and incommunicable grief. Higher up are the business quarters, a few sky-scrapers in the American style without the modern American beauty, but one of which advertises itself as the highest in the British Empire; streets that seem less narrow than Montreal, but not unrespectably wide; "the ...
— Letters from America • Rupert Brooke
... There is no workmanship of Art in which this holds more true than in the English Drama. Now the religious culture of Christian England was essentially different from that of Classic Greece; the two being of quite diverse and incommunicable natures; so that the spirit of the one could not possibly live in the dramatic form of the other. In other words, the body of the Classic Drama was not big enough nor strong enough to contain the soul of Christian England. The thing could no more be, except ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... found that I hadn't any matches, that—hang it!—there wasn't a box of matches anywhere, then, with this vexation, life came flooding back—the warm, familiar sense of my own existence, with all its exasperation, and incommunicable charm. ...
— More Trivia • Logan Pearsall Smith
... came to sift His meaning, and to note the drift Of incommunicable ways That make us ponder while we praise? Why was it that his charm revealed Somehow the surface of a shield? What was it that we never caught? What was he, and ...
— The Second Book of Modern Verse • Jessie B. Rittenhouse
... containing a revelation of the most awful secrets, they cannot for a moment listen to the pretence that the Bible has benefited by God's inspiration only as other good books may be said to have done. They are confident that, in a much higher sense, and in a sense incommunicable to other books, it is inspired. Yet, on the other hand, as they will not tell lies, or countenance lies, even in what seems the service of religion, they cannot hide from themselves that the materials of this imperishable book are perishable, frail, liable to crumble, and actually ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey
... entire compositions, like the Stanzas on Resolution and Independence, and the Ode on the Recollections of Childhood, sometimes, as if at random, depositing a fine crystal here or there, in a matter it does not wholly search through and transform, we trace the action of his unique, incommunicable faculty, that strange, mystical sense of a life in natural things, and of man's life as a part of nature, drawing strength and colour and character from local influences, from the hills and streams, and from natural sights and sounds. Well! that is the virtue, the active principle ...
— The Renaissance - Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Pater
... citizens at the date of the Treaty of Peace which closed our revolutionary war; and whether ignorance of our laws, and natural partiality to the countries of their birth, are not reasonable causes for declaring this to be one of their rights incommunicable in future to adopted citizens."—Jefferson's Writings, Vol. ...
— Americanism Contrasted with Foreignism, Romanism, and Bogus Democracy in the Light of Reason, History, and Scripture; • William Gannaway Brownlow
... the vast variety of shades, the multiplicity of imperceptible differences, which is to be found in their modes of seeing and thinking. Each man, then, has, to say thus, a language which is peculiar to himself alone, and this language is incommunicable to others. What harmony, what unison, then, can possibly exist between them, when they discourse with each other, upon objects only known to their imagination? Can this imagination in one individual ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 1 • Baron D'Holbach
... bright orange, which was reflected over all the visible landscape with a warm and vivid glory. That strange sense of beauty and mystery which thrills the air with the approach of evening, made all the simple pastoral scene a dream of incommunicable loveliness,—and the two youthful figures, throned on their high dais of golden-green hay, might have passed for the rustic Adam and Eve of some newly created Eden. They were both very quiet,—with the tense quietness of hearts that are too full for speech. A joy in the present ...
— Innocent - Her Fancy and His Fact • Marie Corelli
... stirred and quickened with that incommunicable thrill of the desert, and their eyes turned and sought each other in silence. The gold of the sun was on Arlee's hanging hair and the morning-blue of the sky in her eyes; her face was flushed from sleep and a tiny tendril still clung to the pink cheek on ...
— The Palace of Darkened Windows • Mary Hastings Bradley
... of gentry, expressing a secondary class distinct from a nobility, it flashed upon them that our important body of a landed gentry, bearing no titular honours of any kind, was inexpressible by any French, German, or Italian word; that upon the whole, and allowing for incommunicable differences, this order of gentry was represented on the Continent by the great mass of the "basse noblesse;" that our own great feudal nobility would be described on the Continent as a "haute noblesse;" and that amongst all these perplexities, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... calls the Moral Sentiment, they must in some way act as symbolic mouthpieces of the Universe's meaning. To know just which thing does act in this way, and which thing fails to make the true connection, is the secret (somewhat incommunicable, it must be confessed) of seership, and doubtless we must not expect of the seer too rigorous a consistency. Emerson himself was a real seer. He could perceive the full squalor of the individual fact, but he could also see the transfiguration. He might ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... of saints is another of these developments: "Those who are known to be God's adopted sons in Christ are fit objects of worship on account of Him who is in them.... Worship is the necessary correlative of glory; and, in the same sense in which created nature can share in the Creator's incommunicable glory, do they also share in that worship which is His property alone." But a "new sphere" was yet to be discovered in the realms of light, to which the Church had not yet assigned its inhabitant. "There was 'a wonder in heaven;' a throne was seen, far above ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan
... again. It will be enough for us to recall with what ease it mocks at space, time and all the obstacles that beset our poor human knowledge and understanding. We believed it, like all that seems to us superior and marvellous, the intangible, inalienable and incommunicable attribute of man, with even better reason than his intelligence. And now an accident, strangely belated, it is true, tells us that, at one precise point, the strangest and least foreseen of all, the horse and the dog draw more easily ...
— The Unknown Guest • Maurice Maeterlinck
... when the form is lost which the creations of this great genius took, in their native French, under his own master hand. A satisfactory metrical rendering is out of the question. The sense, at least, if not the incommunicable spirit, of the original is very well given in Mr. C. H. Wall's version, ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... verses. Here was my opportunity. I was interested in this boundary man, and resolved to know his history. Rejecting Alf Jones as an assumed name, Nomenology would be at fault here; yet knowing already, by a kind of incommunicable intuition, that he was a Sydney-sider, and had been in some way connected with the drapery-business, I expected to have my knowledge so supplemented by the character of his songs, that—counting reasonably ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... or communicate, you can lower the price of, but this mental supremacy is incommunicable; you will never multiply its quantity, nor lower its price; and nearly the best thing that men can generally do is—to set themselves, not to the attainment, but the discovery of this; learning to know gold, when we see it, from iron-glance, and diamond from flint-sand, being ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou
... profoundest peace. His study had a strange fascination for him. He never wrote anything about it; he never set himself up as a professional expert; he could not preach much about it; most of what he acquired was incommunicable at Marston-Cocking, or nearly so, and yet he was never weary. It was for some inexplicable reason the food and the medicine which his mind needed. It kept him in health, it pacified him, and contented him ...
— Miriam's Schooling and Other Papers - Gideon; Samuel; Saul; Miriam's Schooling; and Michael Trevanion • Mark Rutherford
... look for it without any manner of prepossession or prejudice. What is the reason that a great body carries off a little one? The thing might as naturally happen quite otherwise; for it might as well happen that the most solid body should never move any other body—that is to say, motion might be incommunicable. Nothing but custom obliges us to suppose that Nature ought to ...
— The Existence of God • Francois de Salignac de La Mothe- Fenelon
... for an evening stroll through the town, a stroll never omitted by us at that hour in Oban, a delightful and essential sedative after the fatigues or excitements of the day,—strolls the charm of which I could never quite define, and the impression from which is incommunicable. There would seem to be little that was pleasant or memorable in our perambulations of the main street of a little fishing-town,—the Bailie, with his stump of a pipe for company, always choosing the esplanade, while Christie and I as frequently idled along the opposite pavement, pausing now and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 93, July, 1865 • Various
... have equal friends and foes with them, and hear CHRIST'S law of kindness from their mouth. The idol of jealousy was thus set up in the house of GOD, and our LORD JESUS CHRIST sacreligiously robbed of his incommunicable supremacy and headship over his church by the state; whereby the Pope's supremacy was well nigh claimed, and Spanish inquisition cruelty almost acted, by this abominable court; and all at the instigation and for the gratification of these monsters ...
— Act, Declaration, & Testimony for the Whole of our Covenanted Reformation, as Attained to, and Established in Britain and Ireland; Particularly Betwixt the Years 1638 and 1649, Inclusive • The Reformed Presbytery
... a long time silent. Was she horror-stricken at the story of a danger she had never fully comprehended till now? Or were her thoughts busy with her own past, and its possible incommunicable secrets of blood and horror? The cry she gave at last betrayed anguish, but did ...
— The Forsaken Inn - A Novel • Anna Katharine Green
... His goodness gave it an early termination on this occasion and lessened the number of victims which have usually fallen before it. In the course of the several visitations by this disease it has appeared that it is strictly local, incident to cities and on the tide waters only, incommunicable in the country either by persons under the disease or by goods carried from diseased places; that its access is with the autumn and it disappears ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Thomas Jefferson • Thomas Jefferson
... at Pisa, where we stopped on our way from Leghorn after our accident in the Maremma, and spent an hour in viewing the Quattro Fabbriche. The beautiful old town, which every one knows from the report of travellers, one yet finds possessed of the incommunicable charm which keeps it forever novel to the visitor. Lying upon either side of the broad Arno, it mirrors in the flood architecture almost as fair and noble as that glassed in the Canalazzo, and its other streets seemed as tranquil as the canals ...
— Italian Journeys • William Dean Howells
... his verse, compared to his prose, is tame and fettered; it never reaches the glow and splendor of expression which mark the finest passages of the Journal. It has ability, thought—beauty even, of a certain kind, but no plastic power, none of the incommunicable magic which a George Eliot seeks for in vain, while it comes unasked, to deck with imperishable charm the commonplace metaphysic and the simpler emotions of a Tennyson or a Burns. Still as Amiel's work, his poetry ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... charged, heretical views as to the Trinity, holding, among other things, that the Godhead is "instrumentally three—three simply as related to our finite apprehension, and the communication of God's incommunicable nature." Attempts, indeed, were made to bring him to trial, but they were unsuccessful, and in 1852 his church unanimously withdrew from the local "consociation," thus removing any possibility of further action against ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... alike in the night. Here is the Wild of the West. 'A vast silence reigned,' Jack London tells us. 'The land itself was a desolation, lifeless, without movement, so lone and cold that the spirit of it was not even that of sadness. There was a hint in it of laughter—the masterful and incommunicable wisdom of eternity laughing at the futility of life and the effort of life. It was the Wild—the savage, frozen-hearted Northern Wild!' Here, I say, is the Wild. And here is the life of the Wild: 'Bill opened his mouth to speak, but changed his mind. Instead, he pointed ...
— Mushrooms on the Moor • Frank Boreham
... Platonist are matters of theoria, of immediate intuition, of immediate vision, or, as Plato sometimes fancied, of an earlier personal experience; and which, as matter of such intuition, are incapable of analysis, and therefore, properly, incommunicable by words. Place, then, must be left to the last in any legitimate dialectic process for possible after-thoughts; for the introduction, so to speak, of yet another interlocutor in the dialogue, which has, in fact, no necessary conclusion, and leaves off only because time is up, ...
— Plato and Platonism • Walter Horatio Pater
... limitation which must always attach to religion of the purely mystical type. In so far as it is an experience of the inward type, it is indescribable and incommunicable. That does not mean or imply any lessened value in the experience itself, it only means that it is very difficult to mint it into the universal coinage of the world. The recovery of faith, after some catastrophic ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... not so with dogma. People have believed in polytheism in all climates; and it is as easy for a Crimean Tartar as for an inhabitant of Mecca to recognize a single God, incommunicable, non-begetting, non-begotten. It is through its dogma still more than through its rites that a religion is spread from one climate to another. The dogma of the unity of God soon passed from Medina to the Caucasus; then the climate ...
— Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary • Voltaire
... to the window. What remembrances, bitter or sweet, came over the widower's heart, Heaven knows! But he kept them between himself and Heaven, as he did all things that were incommunicable and inevitable, and especially all things that could have given pain to any human being. He ...
— Christian's Mistake • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... Martineau is not only a believer in the mysteries of mesmerism (and she wrote to me the other day that in Birmingham, where she is, she has present cognisance of three cases of clairvoyance), but she is a believer in the personal integrity of her witnesses. She has what she has well called an 'incommunicable confidence.' And this, however incommunicable, is sufficiently comprehensible to all persons who know what personal faith is, to place her 'honour,' I do maintain, high above any suspicion, any charge with the breath of man's lips. I am sure you agree with ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... that a wish to avoid a possible recognition from some passenger had influenced her in taking this seat, and he dared to hope also that she shared his appreciation of the further opportunity to be alone together. Their conversation, however, was fragmentary, as if each were deep in incommunicable thoughts. From time to time, as the car swung swiftly around a curve, she swayed against him softly, so that he began to look expectantly ahead for a change in the straight line of the track, laughing happily to himself at her involuntary apology. ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... the end, That at the very top of being, The battle spirit shouting in my blood, Out of very reddest hell of the fight I may be snatched and flung Into the everlasting lull, The Immortal, Incommunicable Dream. ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... to His essence, an immutable being can not have himself? Miracles, far from doing much honor to God, far from proving the Divinity of religion, destroy evidently the idea which is given to us of God, of His immutability, of His incommunicable attributes, and even of His omnipotence. How can a theologian tell us that a God who embraced at once the whole of His plan, who could make but perfect laws, who can change nothing in them, should be obliged to employ miracles to make His projects successful, or grant to His creatures ...
— Superstition In All Ages (1732) - Common Sense • Jean Meslier
... kai andron]. Even he knew not the full greatness of his own enterprise. He underrated the vastness and the subtlety of nature. He overrated his own appliances to bring it under his command. He had not that incommunicable genius and instinct of the investigator which in such men as Faraday close hand to hand with phenomena. His weapons and instruments wanted precision; they were powerful up to a certain point, but they had the clumsiness of an unpractised time. Cowley compared him to Moses on Pisgah surveying the ...
— Bacon - English Men Of Letters, Edited By John Morley • Richard William Church
... God. The notion and expression of it imports some strange thing. How could man be like God, who is infinite, incomprehensible, whose glory is not communicable to another? It is true, indeed, in those incommunicable properties he hath not only no equal, but none to liken him. In these he is to be adored, and admired as infinitely transcending all created perfections and conceptions, But yet in others he has been pleased to hold forth himself to be imitated and followed. And that this might be ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... such was its prince—mysterious, solitary, unique. Each was to the other an adequate counterpart, each reciprocally that perfect mirror which reflected, as it were in alia materia, those incommunicable attributes of grandeur, that under the same shape and denomination never upon this earth were destined to be revived. Rome has not been repeated; neither has Caesar. Ubi Caesar, ibi Roma—was a maxim of Roman jurisprudence. And the same maxim may be translated into a wider meaning; in which ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... key's grate in the lock, the sticky pull of the slow-rending oilskin, and a quick shuffling of papers. He had been annoyed out of all reason by the knowledge that they lay below him through the sick idle days—a burden incommunicable. For that reason the blood tingled through his body, when Hurree, skipping elephantinely, shook ...
— Kim • Rudyard Kipling
... dawns upon the spectator that, great though the tragedies in themselves are, they owe their peculiar, their incommunicable beauty largely to this element of the chorus which seemed at first ...
— Ancient Art and Ritual • Jane Ellen Harrison |
