"Unintelligible" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... as if he had been a file; halted him like a file, sang out to him as to a file, stentorian and unintelligible, after the manner ...
— White Lies • Charles Reade
... speed what spot you claim by birth. Or with this club fall stricken to the earth! This club hath ofttimes slaughtered haughty kings! Why mumble unintelligible things? What land, what tribe produced that shaking head? Declare it! On my journey when I sped Far to the Kingdom of the triple King, And from the Main Hesperian did bring The goodly cattle to the Argive town, There I beheld a ...
— Apocolocyntosis • Lucius Seneca
... sleep when Gwyn reached his side, but for a time his words were unintelligible. Then quite plainly ...
— Sappers and Miners - The Flood beneath the Sea • George Manville Fenn
... hero grew in the good graces of his school-fellows, he fell out of those of his masters, for lessons were brought only half-learned, and exercises only half-written, or blotted and scrawled so as to be nearly unintelligible; and after he had been a fortnight at school, he seemed much more likely to descend to a lower class than to mount a step in his own. Day after day saw Louis kept in the school-room during play-hours, to learn lessons which ought to have been done the night before, ...
— Louis' School Days - A Story for Boys • E. J. May
... partial, by Roth, Benfey, Langlois, Bergaigne; in English chiefly by Wilson, Mueller, Muir, Peterson, Griffith. Of these the German translation of Grassmann is often inaccurate;[8] that of Ludwig, often unintelligible. Benfey has translated a number of specimens, OO., BB., i, vii, and in Kleinere Schriften. The incomplete translation of Wilson has been carried on by Cowell; those of Peterson and Griffith are publishing in India; Langlois' ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... deposit their arms. As the inhabitants arose from their slumbers, and sallied forth into the streets to inquire the cause of the disturbance, they soon discovered that they had, in some mysterious manner, been entrapped. Wild Irishmen, with uncouth garb, threatening gesture, and unintelligible jargon, stood gibbering at every corner, instead of the comfortable Flemish faces of the familiar burgher-guard. The chief burgomaster, sleeping heavily after Sir William's hospitable banquet, aroused himself at last, and sent a militia-captain to inquire ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... till, at the usual time, he performed a probationary exercise by explaining a psalm. His diction was so poetically splendid, that Mr. Hamilton, the professor of divinity, reproved him for speaking language unintelligible to a popular audience; and he censured one of his expressions as indecent, if ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... clearness of intellect enough to pursue a truth to its limits, nor boldness enough to hold it in its simplicity; but he was always saying things and unsaying them, balancing his thoughts in impossible attitudes, and guarding his words by unintelligible limitations. As to the men and opinions of the day and place, he would in the main have agreed with them, had he let himself alone; but he was determined to have an intellect of his own, and this put him to great shifts when he would distinguish ...
— Loss and Gain - The Story of a Convert • John Henry Newman
... give no answer to this as regards the unintelligible clauses, for what we come to in the end is just as abhorrent to and inconceivable by reason as what they offer us; but as regards what may be called the intelligible parts—that Christ was born of a Virgin, died, rose from the dead—we say that, ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... dead to us, until experience vitalises them. The old Greeks used to send messages from one army to another by means of a roll of parchment twisted spirally round a baton, and then written on. It was perfectly unintelligible when it fell into a man's hands that had not a corresponding baton to twist it upon. Many of Christ's messages to us are like that. You can only understand the utterances when life gives you the frame round which to wrap them, and then they flash up into meaning, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chaps. XV to XXI • Alexander Maclaren
... English in a very hasty manner by the Editor and one of his friends who had the good nature to assist him, during his avocations of business. It was thought better to add these translations, such as they are; than to let the Work come out unintelligible to those who do not ...
— An English Garner - Critical Essays & Literary Fragments • Edited by Professor Arber and Thomas Seccombe
... prospects around me, still struck with new sense of pleasure; when I found by the voice of my friend, who walked by me, that we had insensibly strolled into the grove sacred to the widow. "This woman," says he, "is of all others the most unintelligible; she either designs to marry, or she does not. What is the most perplexing of all, is, that she doth not either say to her lovers she has any resolution against that condition of life in general, or that ...
— The De Coverley Papers - From 'The Spectator' • Joseph Addison and Others
... Papageno sets the blackamoors to dancing in "Die Zauberflote"), the orchestra talks of the matronly renunciation of the princess, enthusiastic Straussians of a musical parallel with the quintet from Wagner's "Meistersinger," and the opera comes to an end after three and one-half hours of more or less unintelligible dialogue poised ...
— A Second Book of Operas • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... all deliberation: and putting her finger under the line to keep the exact place of the word she was reading, she would strive in good earnest to read out the directions given; but when every fourth word had to be spelt, it was rather hopeless work, especially as all these words were unintelligible to the open-mouthed listener, however intent he might be. He had generally to fall back on his own experience; and, guided by that, things were not doing badly in his estimation, when, one day, Sylvia said to him, as they were in the hay-field, heaping up the hay into ...
— Sylvia's Lovers, Vol. II • Elizabeth Gaskell
... 24 languages each spoken by a million or more persons; numerous other languages and dialects, for the most part mutually unintelligible ...
— The 2001 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... glimpses into the internal world of Teufelsdrockh; his strange mystic, almost magic Diagram of the Universe, and how it was gradually drawn, is not henceforth altogether dark to us. Those mysterious ideas on TIME, which merit consideration, and are not wholly unintelligible with such, may by and by prove significant. Still more may his somewhat peculiar view of Nature, the decisive Oneness he ascribes to Nature. How all Nature and Life are but one Garment, a "Living Garment," woven and ever a-weaving in the "Loom of Time;" ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... as an epic poem. What rouses laughter cannot rank as high as what rouses tender emotion. Moreover, with the passing away of the generation familiar with the corruption it satirizes, the comedy often becomes unintelligible save to scholars. Hence the utter valuelessness to us of to-day of the comedies of Aristophanes as works of wit. Their only value to-day is as fragmentary records of Greek manners. The comedy is thus writ not for all times, but only for a time; while "Taras Bulba," though generations ...
— Lectures on Russian Literature - Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenef, Tolstoy • Ivan Panin
... pronunciation and the quantity, and disusing many words and terms of great significance. In consequence of these innovations, the works of our best poets, such as Chaucer, Spenser, and even Shakespeare, were become, in many parts, unintelligible to the natives of South Britain, whereas the Scots, who retain the antient language, understand them without the help of a glossary. 'For instance (said he), how have your commentators been puzzled by ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... their slippers. Harriet knew, too, that they had been sitting outside clad in their wrappers, for they got into bed immediately. There were a few whispered words, which she failed to catch, then silence settled over the tent, broken occasionally by Tommy's unintelligible mutterings. Tommy was dreaming again—giving promise of having a mild form of ...
— The Meadow-Brook Girls Under Canvas • Janet Aldridge
... advice when he discovered I was erring (Which is just the very favour which on you I am conferring), My story would have made a rather interesting idyll, And I might have lived and died a very decent indiwiddle. This particularly rapid, unintelligible patter Isn't generally heard, and if it ...
— The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan - The 14 Gilbert And Sullivan Plays • William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan
... Fleda thought now it was but half from ignorance of the mischief she was doing, and the other half from the mere desire of selfish gratification. The times and ways in which Lot and Abraham were walked into the conversation were incalculable, and unintelligible, except to the person who understood it only too well. On one occasion, Mrs. Evelyn went on with a long rigmarole to Mr. Thorn about sea-breezes, with a face of most exquisite delight at his mystification and her own hidden fun, till Fleda was absolutely ...
— Queechy, Volume II • Elizabeth Wetherell
... Yezidees. These sects, in their social intercourse, used only the Koordish language; but in their prayers, the Armenians used the ancient Armenian, the Jacobites the ancient Syriac, and the Koords the Arabic, all wholly unintelligible to them. And it was a new thought to them, that God could be ...
— History Of The Missions Of The American Board Of Commissioners For Foreign Missions To The Oriental Churches, Volume II. • Rufus Anderson
... antiquities or volumes of travel must damage the illusion which is the indispensable element of romance. In Moore's fantastic metrical romance of Lalla Rookh the system was carried to an extent that now seems ridiculous, for certain passages are loaded with outlandish phrases or metaphors that are unintelligible except by reference to the notes. Nevertheless the English public, being then quite ignorant of the true East, tolerated Moore's sham Orientalism, even though Byron's fine poems were just then exposing the difference between working up the subject in a library and wandering in Asiatic ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... of half an hour Jolnes had collected a few seemingly unintelligible articles—a cheap black hat pin, a piece torn off a theatre programme, and the end of a small torn card on which was the word "left" and the ...
— Sixes and Sevens • O. Henry
... the twilight stillness. A lamplighter passed, torching the grim lamps. A sauntering carrier threw the evening newspaper over the gate, with his unintelligible cry. A dog-cart rumbled by, and later, a brougham; people were not yet returned from driving on the country turnpikes. Once, some belated girls clattered past on ponies. But already little children, bare-armed, bare-necked, swinging lanterns, and attended by proud ...
— The Mettle of the Pasture • James Lane Allen
... of the night, came a call from the direction of the woods, and unintelligible at ...
— A Poor Wise Man • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... yellow oak, even to the polished floor, she took her place by her hostess's side. She had already been presented to the fashionable guests who sat around the ample table, and a good deal of the awe which she had felt in anticipation, had begun to ooze away. Although much was said that was unintelligible to her, she could see that this was not the result of intellectual deficiency on her part, but merely of an ignorance of the ground on which the conversation was founded. As Cornelia stole glances at the faces, pretty or pretentious, of the young ladies, or at the mustaches, whiskers, ...
— Bressant • Julian Hawthorne
... important is memory, that it has been justly denominated by the German philosopher, Kant, "the most wonderful of our faculties." Without it, the words of a book would be unintelligible to us, since it is memory alone which furnishes us with the several meanings to ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford
... scarlet; and, to Lancelot's astonishment, pulled off her slipper, and brandishing it daintily, uttered some unintelligible threat, in an Oriental language, ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... to the roots of the hair, bent forward to plead some unintelligible excuse; the fast Maria took hold of his finger as if she was cross; and at that instant another finger was pressed upon his shoulder, and looking up, he gazed into the eyes ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal Vol. XVII. No. 418. New Series. - January 3, 1852. • William and Robert Chambers
... midst of a tribe of savages, swarthy and of vicious appearance. Such yelling, hallooing, jumping, and cutting wild antics, you never saw before, nor could pen describe. Nobody could have understood their chattering, which was a species of growl and shortly accented muttering. Forsooth! it was as unintelligible as that language so generally diffused through diplomatic notes and protocols. Now hideous squaws ran one way, young children another. Dogs and cats brought up the rear, their music combining in most ungrateful medley. John's fears became excited as he saw the chiefs rushing furiously ...
— The Adventures of My Cousin Smooth • Timothy Templeton
... Benowm assured me that he could read the writings of the Christians: he showed me a number of barbarous characters, which he asserted were the Roman alphabet; and he produced another specimen, equally unintelligible, which he declared to be the Kallam il Indi, or Persian. His library consisted of nine volumes in quarto; most of them, I believe, were books of religion—for the name of Mohammed appeared in red letters in almost every page of each. His scholars wrote their lessons upon thin boards, paper ...
— Travels in the Interior of Africa - Volume 1 • Mungo Park
... and, before he could divine their intentions, they were lowering him down the slippery side. When his feet struck the cold water he struggled violently, shouting something which his splashing and the echo of the well made unintelligible. Presently they hoisted him, ...
— Stanford Stories - Tales of a Young University • Charles K. Field
... which appear here, the first was probably written early in the thirteenth century, while the rest all date from the early twentieth century. It might therefore be supposed that the earliest of these stories was written in a language more or less unintelligible to modern Icelanders, and that there was a gap of many centuries in the literary production of the nation. This, however, is not ...
— Seven Icelandic Short Stories • Various
... principles; nor is at all difficult of execution; but it must be so divulged as not to be understood by the vulgar, and yet be clear to the sharp-sighted.' After this, he proceeds to describe a mechanism the details of which are confusing and unintelligible, nor did it appear to bear any resemblance ...
— The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' • Thomas Orchard
... have made them think alike, it would have been necessary to melt up the two generations and pour them into one—a task as hopeless as an endeavour to blend the Dinwiddie Young Ladies' Academy with a modern college. Jenny's clearly formulated and rather loud morality was unintelligible to her mother, whose conception of duty was that she should efface herself and make things comfortable for those around her. The obligation to think independently was as incomprehensible to Virginia as was that wider altruism which had swept Jenny's sympathies ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... is that the character of Maximus is very indistinctly drawn, and that of Eudoxia nearly unintelligible. These two pure tragedies are contrasted with two comedies, The Little French Lawyer and Monsieur Thomas, which deserve high praise. The fabliau-motive of the first is happily contrasted with the character of Lamira and the friendship ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... his memory, or perhaps more properly, to discharge it. Dave had said first thing when he opened his eyes:—"The worty will be all over the hedge. Let me go to stop the worty." Of course, this had been quite unintelligible to his hearers. However, Mr. Alibone and Uncle Mo were au fait enough of the engineering scheme that had led to the accident, to supply the explanation. Dave's responsibility as head engineer had been on his conscience all through his ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... the threatening gaze of Ned Rector. He mumbled some unintelligible words, settled back in his chair and made himself as ...
— The Pony Rider Boys in the Grand Canyon - The Mystery of Bright Angel Gulch • Frank Gee Patchin
... the doctrines which he really delivered were defective as a whole, and fragments only of what he did deliver have come to us, mutilated, misstated, and often unintelligible. ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... syntactic anomalies and errors. In almost all cases this conscious and due to an editorial decision for the first Gutenberg edition to transmit transparently all but the most egregious flaws found in the source text Scribner edition of 1903. Furthermore, a number of sentences may be virtually unintelligible to the English reader due to the architecture of relative clauses, prepositions, and verbs as carried over from the original German. It is the preparer's ambition for a second Gutenberg edition of the History of Rome ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... She bends over her book with a look of intense interest, and as the forefinger of her left hand runs along the line, she spells out the words with the other hand; but often her motions are so rapid as to be unintelligible even to those accustomed to reading the swift and varied movements of ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller
... Mind divested of all those structural traits under which alone I am conscious of mind in myself, I cannot do it. I know nothing of thought save as carried on in ideas originally traceable to the effects wrought by objects and forces on me. A mental act is an unintelligible phrase if I am not to regard it as an act in which states of consciousness are severally known as like other states in the series that has gone by, and in which the relations between them are severally known as like past relations in the ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... something unintelligible and drove on. It was market day, and there were several farmers he wanted to interview before the excitement, or the local ale, or a combination of both, rendered their ideas a little more vague than ...
— People of Position • Stanley Portal Hyatt
... was, however, so absorbed in the information he had received—and so confident that the English, in which it had been told, would be unintelligible to anyone who might overhear it—that he paid no attention to the boys who—one of them limping badly—went slowly down the street; stopping, occasionally, to look in at the shop windows. It was not ...
— The Young Franc Tireurs - And Their Adventures in the Franco-Prussian War • G. A. Henty
... considered that there was harm in reading the Scriptures without notes: he replied that there was certainly no harm in it, but that simple people, without the help of notes, could derive but little benefit from Scripture, as the greatest part would be unintelligible to them; whereupon I shook hands with him, and on departing said that there was no part of Scripture so difficult to understand as those very notes which were intended to elucidate it, and that it would never have been written if not calculated of itself to illume the minds ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... thought that, on learning what important folk I was in the habit of mixing with, the Graps would no longer think it worth while to pretend to me). However, just as they were leaving, I invited Ilinka to come and see me another day; but he only murmured something unintelligible, and it was plain that he meant never to set foot in the ...
— Youth • Leo Tolstoy
... sweet as honey. The woman looked at her, and answered again with the unintelligible grunt, of unbelieving wonder, which Daisy had heard once before. Daisy thought on the whole the safest way was not to talk but to fetch her beautiful "Jewess" flowers to speak for themselves. So she ran off and ...
— Melbourne House, Volume 2 • Susan Warner
... Honourable Hilary, the name standing out in red letters before his eyes. He had never read a line of the philosopher's writings, not even the charge to "hitch your wagon to a star" (not in the "Book of Arguments"). Sarah Austen had read Emerson in the woods, and her son's question sounded so like the unintelligible but unanswerable flashes with which the wife had on rare occasions opposed the husband's authority that Hilary Vane found his temper getting the best of him—The name of Emerson was immutably fixed in his mind as the synonym for incomprehensible, foolish habits and beliefs. "Don't talk Emerson ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... young girls, one costumed as virgin priestesses of the Shinto cult, the other in modern European dress. The one set were climbing the mountain as a pilgrimage, the other as a lark; and they meet and exchange sharp dialectics (unintelligible to me, but not unguessable) on the lower slopes. The sympathies of the author, like those of Aristophanes, were with the old school. It is the pilgrims who reach the top and the modern young women who collapse. And the modern young man fares no better; he is beaten by a coolie and ...
— Appearances - Being Notes of Travel • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... does not mean that he is able to kill us, or consign us to eternal flames. The Divine Power is always interpreted in a completely human signification; but the Divine Goodness and Justice must be understood to be such only in an unintelligible sense. Is it unfair to surmise that this is because those who speak in the name of God, have need of the human conception of his power, since an idea which can overawe and enforce obedience must address itself to real feelings; but are content that his goodness should be conceived ...
— The Philosophy of the Conditioned • H. L. Mansel
... her, that was all she knew. When he touched her ever so lightly she felt a happiness so perfect, and yet so unintelligible, that she could have ...
— Bebee • Ouida
... by my custodians evidently afforded them great gratification, and though they spoke a patois which was quite unintelligible to me, the gesticulations which accompanied the closing portion of the narrative, and the shouts of laughter and applause with which it was received, showed me that the exploit of the amiable Guiseppe was duly ...
— Under the Meteor Flag - Log of a Midshipman during the French Revolutionary War • Harry Collingwood
... spirit of Athena in renewed life prevailing over ruin is embodied for the whole of futurity; while the Greeks, to whom, in a happier climate and higher life than that of Egypt, the vulture symbol of cleansing became unintelligible, took the eagle instead for their hieroglyph of supreme spiritual energy, and it thenceforward retains its hold on the human imagination, till it is established among Christian myths as the expression of the most exalted ...
— The Queen of the Air • John Ruskin
... advice. O brother, what think you? You was hardly gone out of hearing, when you set out for London, when who should arrive but that impudent fellow with the odious Irish name—that Fitzpatrick. He broke in abruptly upon me without notice, or I would not have seen him. He ran on a long, unintelligible story about his wife, to which he forced me to give him a hearing; but I made him very little answer, and delivered him the letter from his wife, which I bid him answer himself. I suppose the wretch will endeavour to find us out, but ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding
... contract. That was Rousseau's starting point, and it was Godwin's work (after Hume) to shatter this heritage which French and English speculation had been content to accept from Locke. There are passages in which Burke appears to accept the notion, unintelligible to modern minds, of the natural, or as he put it, "primitive," rights of man. He reserved his contempt for those who sought to tabulate or codify these rights, and he would always brush aside any argument based upon them, by asking the prior question, what in the given ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford
... will. I wish you had been more critical, and had pointed out the faults and defects of the book, of which there are no doubt some, if not many, to be found. I flatter myself that I have made more clear some passages utterly unintelligible in our A.V., such as, "He shall deliver the island of the innocent, yea," etc., chap. xxii. 30, and chap, xxxvi. 33, and the whole of chap. xxiv. and chap. xx. What a fierce, cruel, hot-headed Arab Zophar is! How the ...
— Juliana Horatia Ewing And Her Books • Horatia K. F. Eden
... eloquent flow of words, mostly unintelligible to me, comes to a close. A hymn is sung, and the New Testament blessing pronounced. Then the procession from the missionary benches files out through the schoolroom into the mission-house and the people disperse to their homes. ...
— With the Harmony to Labrador - Notes Of A Visit To The Moravian Mission Stations On The North-East - Coast Of Labrador • Benjamin La Trobe
... earth, never resting until they have extinguished every other race? It may be so, but long before they have dispersed the other inhabitants of the globe, they must themselves have become scattered, divided, opposed. Already, the English language is unintelligible in Germany, though Englishman and German are offshoots from the same stock, the German of the North can hardly understand the German of the South; Dutch and English vessels have fought desperately at sea, in the past, and to-day, ...
— A Comparative Study of the Negro Problem - The American Negro Academy. Occasional Papers No. 4 • Charles C. Cook
... agnostic was to be almost an outcast Whether every human motive was not selfish Whitman's public use of his privately written praise Wit that tries its teeth upon everything Women's rights Wonder why we hate the past so—"It's so damned humiliating!" Wonderful to me how it should remain so unintelligible Work would be twice as good if it were done twice Work not truly priced in money cannot be truly paid in money Work gives the impression of an uncommon continuity Wrote them first and last in the spirit ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... lines of light in the shutters, came the sound of voices, Lem's deep and insistent, and another, pitched in a high nasal key, deprecatory and protesting. There was still another, a harsh one that growled something unintelligible, and Wetherell guessed, from the fragments which he heard, that the judge before sitting down to his duty was trying to dissuade the stage driver from a step that was foolhardy. He guessed likewise that Lem was not to be dissuaded. At length a silence followed, then the door ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... blasts of a siren, unintelligible shouts from the steamer's bridge, a churning of propellers; foam; a waft of black smoke—then silence, the white, clammy veil again about us, and only the muffled throb of the liner's reversed engines and the uneasy lurch ...
— The Brassbounder - A Tale of the Sea • David W. Bone
... bad pronunciation. A native's pronunciation of his language is invariably incorrect. That is why the average Parisian is totally unintelligible to the intelligent foreigner. All foreigners are intelligent. Ah! here are our devilled kidneys. I suppose you and I are devilled, Reggie. People say we are so wicked. I wish one could feel wicked; but it is only good people who can manage to do that. It is the one prerogative of ...
— The Green Carnation • Robert Smythe Hichens
... attention from social and political philosophers—the tenacious and half-unconscious memories of a race. Injustice comes home to roost, sometimes after an astonishingly long interval. The disaffection of Catholic Ireland would be quite unintelligible without the massacres of the sixteenth century and the unjust trade-legislation of the seventeenth and eighteenth. The bitterness of the working class in England has its roots in the earlier period of the industrial revolution (about 1760-1832), when the ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... purify radically. The punishments it can inflict on itself, are rather gratifications and refreshments than otherwise. Indeed, the manner in which He corrects His chosen, must be felt, or it is impossible to conceive how dreadful it is. In my attempt to explain it, I shall be unintelligible, except to experienced souls. It is an internal burning, a secret fire sent from God to purge away the fault, giving extreme pain, until this purification is complete. It is like a dislocated joint, which is in incessant torment, until the bone is replaced. This pain is so severe, that ...
— The Autobiography of Madame Guyon • Jeanne Marie Bouvier de La Motte Guyon
... communication was opened between our shores and that part of Europe in which the traces of ancient power and policy were yet discernible. Many noble monuments which have since been destroyed or defaced still retained their pristine magnificence; and travellers, to whom Livy and Sallust were unintelligible, might gain from the Roman aqueducts and temples some faint notion of Roman history. The dome of Agrippa, still glittering with bronze, the mausoleum of Adrian, not yet deprived of its columns and statues, the Flavian amphitheatre, not yet degraded into a quarry, ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... in my eyes. A look of gratified spiteful complacency overspread her features, as she swept on ahead and descended the stairs before me. I followed her to the drawing-room door. She stopped suddenly, and murmuring something unintelligible hurried back again. ...
— The Lock And Key Library - Classic Mystery And Detective Stories, Modern English • Various
... girl passionately, but at the ancient woman's commanding gesture she fell mute, though she scowled in sullen defiance and I saw the knife glitter where she gripped it, half concealed by a fold of her petticoat. Here one of the men muttered some unintelligible word and pointed scornfully at me, whereupon the old woman rapped him smartly over the knuckles and fixed her uncomfortably shrewd gaze on my person, scanning me over very keenly, more especially ...
— Peregrine's Progress • Jeffery Farnol
... sun. In this last work the author refers to a few notes, which completely destroy the theory of gravitation in terms "perfectly intelligible as well to the unlearned as to the learned": to me they are quite unintelligible, which rather tends to confirm a notion I have long had, that I am neither one thing nor the other. There is an ambiguity of phrase which delights a writer on logic, always on the look-out for specimens of homonymia or aequivocatio. The author, as a physician, ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... words in some unintelligible dialect. He was, indeed, a strange being, with narrow shoulders, a sly look, and such an agitated air in my presence that I had no longer any real doubt that he was a spy. He seemed very aged and feeble. He kept staring at me from ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant
... unintelligible!! Surtur, according to Fin Magnusen, the invisible, unintelligible being whom the ancient Scandinavians regarded as "the great First Cause least understood" of ...
— The Elder Eddas of Saemund Sigfusson; and the Younger Eddas of Snorre Sturleson • Saemund Sigfusson and Snorre Sturleson
... relic of a once vigorous institution. They are the rocks and the sands which the flood of civilization is first isolating, then undermining, and at last overwhelming, and hiding from our view. They are (to change the figure) survivals of an earlier state of existence, unintelligible if regarded singly, made to render up their secret only by comparison with other survivals, and with examples of a like state of existence elsewhere. Taken collectively, they enable us to trace the evolution of civilization from a period before ...
— The Science of Fairy Tales - An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology • Edwin Sidney Hartland
... could not understand. The silence held; he could feel the Rhamda Geos at his side, and hear him murmur something which, in itself, was quite unintelligible: ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint
... special branches to meet the different conditions of the crowded Jurassic age. Even now they afford a most interesting page in the story of evolution, and their total disappearance from the face of the earth in the next geological period will not be unintelligible. We turn from them to the remaining orders of ...
— The Story of Evolution • Joseph McCabe
... fixed gaze, Raskolnikoff slowly advanced toward Elia Petrovitch. Resting his head upon the table behind which the lieutenant was seated, he wished to speak, but could only give vent to a few unintelligible sounds. ...
— The Most Interesting Stories of All Nations • Julian Hawthorne
... with them and barking tremendously. There is a dog residing in the Borough of Southwark who keeps a blind man. He may be seen most days, in Oxford Street, haling the blind man away on expeditions wholly uncontemplated by, and unintelligible to, the man; wholly of the dog's conception and execution. Contrariwise, when the man has projects, the dog will sit down in a crowded thoroughfare and meditate. I saw him yesterday, wearing the money-tray like an ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... States by the use of money. The translation of these cryptogramic messages by a working journalist, and their publication in the New York Tribune, was a great success, as it made clear what had previously been unintelligible. When a Committee of the House of Representatives undertook to investigate these cipher telegrams, the principal witness was Colonel Pelton, the nephew and private secretary of Mr. Tilden. His ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... when my ideas upon philosophy were well consolidated that I came to understand that I had been fortunate enough during my youth to contemplate a truly wise man. I had no difficulty in reconstructing his ideas by piecing together a few words which at the time had appeared to me unintelligible, but which I had remembered. God, in his eyes, was the order of nature, from which all things proceed, and he would not brook contradiction upon this point. He loved humanity as representing reason, and ...
— Recollections of My Youth • Ernest Renan
... stood with open mouth and eyes, and elevated eyebrows, looking at his young friend, who capered and danced round the fire in a manner that threw the cook's performances in that line quite into the shade, while he continued all the time to shout fragments of sentences that were quite unintelligible to anyone. It was evident that Harry was in a state of immense delight at something unknown save to himself, but which, in the course of a few minutes, was revealed to ...
— The Young Fur Traders • R.M. Ballantyne
... military virtue, was succeeded by a farce, that debased the dignity of human nature. A Moorish and a Scythian buffoon successively excited the mirth of the rude spectators, by their deformed figure, ridiculous dress, antic gestures, absurd speeches, and the strange, unintelligible confusion of the Latin, the Gothic, and the Hunnic languages; and the hall resounded with loud and licentious peals of laughter. In the midst of this intemperate riot, Attila alone, without a change of countenance, maintained his steadfast and inflexible ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 4 • Various
... jungle had been cleared, and we saw screens and houses of green thatch and palm leaves. A very brown Britisher came out of his tent as we passed, his face half white with soap lather, and his shirt sleeves rolled up; he did unintelligible semaphore signalling with both arms, a razor in one hand, paper in the other. He likewise spoke to us in words that were barely audible for the sound of the rush of the water. When we pieced together ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch
... like what they have in their churches, because I saw her do it—out of a candle, and then she got a great long pin and stuck it in the gas and runned it into the little dollie." As Cherry grew excited her speech became slightly unintelligible. "And I know it was Nurse Marg'ret 'cos she wrote a great big 'M' on a bit of paper and pinned it on to show who it ...
— Afterwards • Kathlyn Rhodes
... bitterly, her emaciated face for the second was convulsed with rage, and her sore lips writhed on the verge of unconsidered speech. But only a splutter of gasping, unintelligible sounds issued forth, and then, by a ...
— Smoke Bellew • Jack London
... into "Zanoni," which he had read in the days of his boyhood as one reads a fairy-tale, and he and Mrs Ray Jefferson, being the greatest enthusiasts, held long and learned and quite unintelligible discussions over these mysterious subjects, with a view to being able to hold their own with the beautiful proselytiser when she should deign to come amongst them all ...
— The Mystery of a Turkish Bath • E.M. Gollan (AKA Rita)
... All this was perfectly unintelligible to Henri, and was attributed by him to the frenzy of madness; but, in fact, there was truth in it. Denot's irregular spirit had been cowed by de Lescure's cold reasoning propriety, and he now felt it impossible to submit himself to the pardon of a man who, he thought, would forgive ...
— La Vendee • Anthony Trollope
... yet with eager impatience, I opened the packet and trimmed my lamp. Conceive my dismay when I found the whole written in an unintelligible cipher. I present the reader with ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... mood, In which the burden of the mystery, In which the heavy and the weary weight Of all this unintelligible world, Is lightened. ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett
... careless colloquial speech was incapable. Even the "Fifth Reader," with its imposing passages from the English classics carefully selected with a view of paralyzing small, hesitating, or hurried voices, in Cressy's hands became no longer an unintelligible incantation. She had quietly mastered the difficulties of pronunciation by some instinctive sense of euphony if not of comprehension. The master with his eyes closed hardly recognized his pupil. Whether or ...
— Cressy • Bret Harte
... that in his progress to the tea-table, Mr. Tiffany adopted a tottering and uncertain step, indicating a dilapidated old age, only kept together by the clothes he wore, which was altogether unintelligible to the Peabody family, seeing that Mr. Carrack was in the very prime of youth, till Mrs. Carrack remarked, with an affectionate smile ...
— Chanticleer - A Thanksgiving Story of the Peabody Family • Cornelius Mathews
... soul. She was out in the cedars when someone grasped her from behind. She felt the hands as the coils of a snake. Then she was ready to faint, but she must not faint. She struggled away, stood free. It was the man Bill who had caught her. He said something that was unintelligible. She reached for the snag of a dead cedar and, leaning there, fought her weakness, that cold black horror which seemed a physical thing in her mind, her ...
— The Border Legion • Zane Grey
... while these things are the most serious realities in the world, and undoubtedly more important than any other thing, little attempt is made by humanity to unravel or classify them. I cannot here enter into the details of these instructions, which indeed would be unintelligible, but they showed me at first what I had not at all apprehended, namely the proportionate importance and unimportance of all the passions and emotions which regulate our relations with other souls. These discourses were given at regular intervals, and much ...
— The Child of the Dawn • Arthur Christopher Benson
... should have warned "The Seven." But it did not. Under their orders the telegraph companies refused to transmit the letter. I got an injunction. It was obeyed in typical, corrupt corporation fashion—they sent my matter, but so garbled that it was unintelligible. I appealed ...
— The Deluge • David Graham Phillips
... anticipation, and yet puzzled by a doubt that it could not resolve. And I said to myself as I went along: How in the world can a queen like her, who laughs all other women to utter scorn, for beauty and understanding and gentleness and sweetness, and some unintelligible magic charm that is somehow spread all over her, and echoes in the tone of her delicious voice that makes every fibre of my heart tremble every time I hear it; how can such a queen as she show such extraordinary favour ...
— The Substance of a Dream • F. W. Bain
... Bada' valley, lie masses of ruin now become mere rubbish; bits of wall built with cut stone, and water-conduits of fine mortar containing, like that of the Pyramids, powdered brick and sometimes pebbles. We carried off a lump of sandstone bearing unintelligible marks, possibly intended for a man and a beast. We called it "St. George and the Dragon," but the former is afoot—possibly the Bedawin stole his steed. There was a frustum or column-drum of fine white marble, hollowed to act as a mortar; ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... remarkable, as it largely consisted of coining long and almost unintelligible words. This he laid great store by, and he speaks wrathfully of one who translated his "Piers Penniless," into what he calls "maccaronical language." In his "Lenten Stuffe or Praise of the Red Herring," i.e., of Great Yarmouth, he calls those who despised Homer in his ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 1 (of 2) - With an Introduction upon Ancient Humour • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... Meldola,— ... I am now reading a wonderfully interesting book—O. Fisher's "Physics of the Earth's Crust." It is really a grand book, and, though full of unintelligible mathematics, is so clearly explained and so full of good reasoning on all the aspects of this most difficult question that it is a pleasure to read it. It was especially a pleasure to me because I had just been writing an article on the ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences Vol 2 (of 2) • James Marchant
... feet six inches], clad in skins of wild beasts, darker-complexioned than would have been expected in that part of the world; and when some of our men went on shore and showed them bells and pictures, they began to dance round our men with a hoarse noise and unintelligible chant, and to excite our admiration they took arrows a cubit and a half long, and put them down their own throats to the bottom of their stomachs without seeming any the worse for it. Then they drew them up again, and seemed much pleased ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1803 • Emma Helen Blair
... about—I shouted loudly to attract their attention. On this, two men, dressed in skins, came out of the hut, and answered me in so extraordinary a dialect, that even I did not comprehend what they said. I then hailed them in Russian, but their answers were perfectly unintelligible. I next tried French, but they shook their heads, as was, I thought, but natural for Esquimaux who were not likely to have been sent to Paris for their education. I then spoke a little Spanish to them, but I was equally at a loss to understand their answers. Portuguese ...
— Marmaduke Merry - A Tale of Naval Adventures in Bygone Days • William H. G. Kingston
... noight and day with ancient history. She's after asking me now if Queen's ever run away!" To Polly's remorseful confusion here her good father equally proud of her precocious interest and his own knowledge, at once interfered with an unintelligible account of the abdication of various Queens in history until Polly's head ached again. Well meant as it was, it only settled in the child's mind that she must keep the awful secret to herself and that ...
— The Queen of the Pirate Isle • Bret Harte
... requisites? And then there was the disheartening fact that the situation was not a permanent one, but terminable from day to day, according to the terms of the advertisement. The more I pondered over it the more unintelligible did it become; but at the end of my meditations I always came back to the ground fact that, come what might, I had nothing to lose, that I was completely at the end of my resources, and that I was ready for any adventure, however ...
— Tales of Terror and Mystery • Arthur Conan Doyle
... second—the interval before another shoe-print formed in the rug in their direction. Jim gasped something unintelligible and started to back away; but no sooner did Partridge start to follow suit, than a compulsion to stand still came over them. Caught where they were, unable to move, they saw the shoe-prints come towards them. Slowly, step by step, twelve inches apart, they came, and did ...
— Astounding Stories, July, 1931 • Various
... opened a magical work and muttered some unintelligible words in a sepulchral voice, looked at the remaining millet-seeds, and watched the way in which the toad retired. Then after seven or eight minutes, she turned her white eyes on the ...
— Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac
... the house, for all that. Aided by the pony, I easily solved the mystery of the housekeeper's otherwise unintelligible narrative. Passing through the dining-room (where the supper-table was already laid for us), I looked ...
— The Law and the Lady • Wilkie Collins
... to be wholly admirable. I was reminded of this bit of ancient history when, some time ago, I read a criticism on George Meredith from the pen of Mr. George Moore. Mr. Moore represented his subject as a shouting, gesticulating man in a crowd, who, in spite of great efforts to be heard, remained unintelligible. As a description of a curiously calm sage who soliloquises for his own amusement in a study this is perfect. The enormous growth in the number of unthinking readers, and the corresponding increase in our ...
— My Contemporaries In Fiction • David Christie Murray
... commenced giving Maxwell a history of her mother,—which, however, we must reserve for another chapter. "And my mother gave me this!" she said, drawing from her pocket a paper written over in Greek characters, but so defaced as to be almost unintelligible. "Some day you will find a friend who will secure your freedom through that," she would say. "But freedom-that which is such a boon to us-is so much feared by others that you must mark that friend cautiously, ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... to be driven into a difficulty by my difficulty. But as he had a reputation to maintain, he was ashamed to admit before the company that he could not answer my challenge or determine the question at issue; and he made an unintelligible attempt to hide his perplexity. In order that the argument might proceed, I said to him, Well then Critias, if you like, let us assume that there is this science of science; whether the assumption is right or wrong ...
— Charmides • Plato
... after a few shuffles on the threshold, and an unintelligible murmur of words, walked in with painful awkwardness, and took a seat upon a corner of the chair which Pet offered him, as if the whole chair were more of a favor than he could conscientiously accept; He was a bony, strongly built stripling, with a record of anywhere from seventeen to nineteen ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... time, Locke Morgeson, Jr., took Mary Warren from her father's house as his wife. Grandfather Warren prayed a long, unintelligible prayer over them, helped them into the large, yellow-bottomed chaise which belonged to Grandfather Locke, and the young couple drove to their new home, the old mansion. Grandfather Locke went away in the same yellow-bottomed chaise a week after, and returned in a few days with a tall lady ...
— The Morgesons • Elizabeth Stoddard
... 1915 Mr. Maurice Baring was sent to Rome on business connected with aircraft, he records how he had speech with General Morris, who was in charge of Italian aviation. 'What I am going to say to you', said General Morris, 'will be absolutely unintelligible and unthinkable to you as Englishmen, but I regret to say that here, in Italy, it is a fact that there exists a certain want of harmony—a certain occasional, shall I say, friction?—between the military and naval branches of our flying service.' Mr. Baring was amused by this speech, ...
— The War in the Air; Vol. 1 - The Part played in the Great War by the Royal Air Force • Walter Raleigh
... specific unity, which is nothing but a logical notion, nor a collective unity, which is nothing but a company who are naturally many: but a true subsisting numerical unity of nature; and if the difficulty of explaining this, and his zeal to defend it, forced him upon some unintelligible niceties, to prove that the same numerical human nature too is but one in all men, it is hard to charge him with teaching, that there are three independent and co-ordinate Gods, because we think he has not proved that Peter, James, and John, are but one man. This will make very ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... oddly companioned, and my exit thence was equally so, though greatly in contrast. For a day or two I was storm-bound, and felt the depression natural in a remote solitude, wrapped in by rain and fog, with no society but an unintelligible mountaineer or two. At last it cleared and the revulsion was inspiring. I found myself in a little green vale hemmed in by magnificent heights whose rocky summits were covered with freshly-fallen snow. Close at hand rose the Watzmann, a soaring pyramid whose summit was cleft into two sharp ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer
... page it is uniformly spelled "Psalme." But after all, these typographical blemishes might be forgiven if the substance, the psalms themselves, were worthy; but the versification was certainly the most villainous of all the many defects, though the sense was so confused that many portions were unintelligible save with the friendly aid of the prose version of the Bible; and the grammatical construction, especially in the use of pronouns, was also far from correct. Such amazing verses ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle
... Virgie, and her mother all standing around her bed at once, exclaiming something unintelligible together. It was late morning, the whole family having slept long, after the several experiences of two such days, and the sun was shining through the great trees before Teackle Hall and burnishing the windows, so that Vesta could ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend
... upstairs, while Lane sat there trying to adapt himself to a new and unintelligible environment. His mother began washing the dishes. Lane felt her gaze upon his face, and he struggled against all the weaknesses ...
— The Day of the Beast • Zane Grey
... the last word was unintelligible to the hidden listener, who knew only that it veiled an insult and drew nearer to the door. The girl remained silent and Baudouin presuming on this continued in a tone still more aggressive, "Times are changed, mademoiselle, changed in the last month. You, living out of the world, ...
— In Kings' Byways • Stanley J. Weyman
... ordinarily termed a pantheist, and his theory, which in the light of much fuller knowledge I am advocating, Pantheism. I do not care to consider a difference of terms, where the only distinction resides in so unintelligible an idea as that of the creation of substance. It is more to the purpose to observe that in the mind of its first originator—and this a mind which was sufficiently clear in its thought to die for its perception of astronomical truth—the theory of Pantheism was but a sublime extension ...
— Mind and Motion and Monism • George John Romanes
... Democritus, Epicurus, and Lucretius. We may then, I believe, without missing a single step, skip 1800 years. Early last century we find in Malebranche's "Recherche de la Verite," the statement that "la durete de corps" depends on "petits tourbillons." [1] These words, embedded in a hopeless mass of unintelligible statements of the physical, metaphysical, and theological philosophies of the day, and unsupported by any explanation, elucidation, or illustration throughout the rest of the three volumes, and only marred by any other single sentence or word to be found in the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 460, October 25, 1884 • Various
... Madre Moreno's red cloak showing out brightly from behind the rank growths of nightshade, the tenderer leaves of which she seemed to be carefully gathering. She was muttering to herself words unintelligible to me, and did not seem to notice me, although I stood for a long time very near where ...
— The Beautiful Eyes of Ysidria • Charles A. Gunnison
... Relying on their memories, and, no doubt, aided by some manuscripts secretly preserved, many natives set to work to write out in this new alphabet the contents of their ancient records. Much was added which had been brought in by the Europeans, and much omitted which had become unintelligible or obsolete since the Conquest; while, of course, the different writers, varying in skill and knowledge, produced ...
— The Books of Chilan Balam, the Prophetic and Historic Records of the Mayas of Yucatan • Daniel G. Brinton |
