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More "Incomprehensible" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... "Most incomprehensible, too," he pursued. "No cause, apparently. But it might have been overlooked, perhaps, except for one thing. It wasn't known generally, but Fortescue had just perfected a successful electro-magnetic gun—powderless, smokeless, flashless, noiseless and of tremendous power. To-morrow he was to have ...
— The War Terror • Arthur B. Reeve
... of the two peoples respecting each other. Mason and Dixon's line separated two civilizations as markedly unlike as the peoples that confront each other on either side the Vistula or the Baltic Sea. The hierarchy not only seemed to love war for war's sake; they possessed that feudal facalty, so incomprehensible in the middle ages, the power of making those who suffered most by it believe in it too, and ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... filled them first with amazement, then with a doubt of his genuineness, as men are wont to suspect the sincerity of every great passion. His Spanish, too, became so mixed up with German that the better half of his statements remained incomprehensible. He tried to propitiate them by calling them hochwohlgeboren herren, which in itself sounded suspicious. When admonished sternly not to trifle he repeated his entreaties and protestations of loyalty and ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... most strike one in French people, are the good-breeding with which they listen, without even a smile, to the almost incomprehensible attempts at speaking French made by many strangers, and the quickness of apprehension with which they seize their meaning, and assist them ...
— The Idler in France • Marguerite Gardiner
... the few words which she had had with Victor early that morning before breakfast. She had asked him, not pointedly, but in a general way arising out of their talk, what he would think if in some way she completely puzzled him, and acted in a manner that was incomprehensible. And ...
— Daisy's Aunt • E. F. (Edward Frederic) Benson
... Unitarians with regard to the teachings of Jesus. "No one sees with greater pleasure than myself," he wrote, "the progress of reason in its advance toward rational Christianity. When we shall have done away with the incomprehensible jargon of the Trinitarian arithmetic, that three are one, and one are three; when we shall have knocked down the artificial scaffolding reared to mask from view the simple structure of Jesus; when, in short, ...
— Unitarianism in America • George Willis Cooke
... the sermon of an Orthodox divine. He kept this one ready in his memory of brass, to confound all who accused him of irreligion:—"Do we want to contemplate His power? We see it in the immensity of the creation. Do we want to contemplate His wisdom? We see it in the unchangeable order by which the incomprehensible whole is governed. Do we want to contemplate His mercy? We see it in His not withholding His abundance even from the unthankful. In fine, do we want to know what God is? Search not written books, but ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various
... 1: As Gregory of Nyssa says (De Occursu Dom.): "It seems that this precept of the Law was fulfilled in God incarnate alone in a special manner exclusively proper to Him. For He alone, whose conception was ineffable, and whose birth was incomprehensible, opened the virginal womb which had been closed to sexual union, in such a way that after birth the seal of chastity remained inviolate." Consequently the words "opening the womb" imply that nothing hitherto had entered or gone forth therefrom. Again, for ...
— Summa Theologica, Part III (Tertia Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... own way of thinking, which is not ours, and which is to us almost incomprehensible. They are most indirect in their thoughts and deeds—a characteristic which is purely racial, and which they themselves cannot appreciate, but which often shocks Europeans. For instance, one of the most palatial buildings in the Avenida Central ...
— Across Unknown South America • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... she thought vaguely. She felt sure, too, that it was he who had given Aunt Mary the green diamond long ago, though why he had never married her was past Mollie's power of understanding. Grown-up people did—and left undone—the most incomprehensible things. In the meantime she felt that she would like to give her aunt some sort of warning of the surprise in store, otherwise Aunt Mary might be too much surprised. Mollie herself hated with all her might and main showing her feelings before people—but how to ...
— The Happy Adventurers • Lydia Miller Middleton
... Harney had come was authentic; Charity had seen the letter from a New York publisher commissioning him to make a study of the eighteenth century houses in the less familiar districts of New England. But incomprehensible as the whole affair was to her, and hard as she found it to understand why he paused enchanted before certain neglected and paintless houses, while others, refurbished and "improved" by the local builder, did not ...
— Summer • Edith Wharton
... Although much of the conduct of the mutineers is easily understood with regard to the captain, the wholesale crime of thrusting so many innocent persons out to the mercy of the winds and waves, or to the death from hunger and thirst which they must have believed would inevitably overtake them, is incomprehensible. ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... telepathically communicating with another; the latter receives the impression, and externalises it, and so "sees a ghost," to use the popular expression. Some hallucinations are auditory i.e. sounds are heard which apparently do not correspond to any objective reality. Incomprehensible though it may appear, it may be possible for sounds, and very loud ones too, to be heard by one or more persons, the said sounds being purely hallucinatory, and not causing any disturbance in ...
— True Irish Ghost Stories • St John D Seymour
... only willingly, but even gladly loose my life, though I should be sorry that Christians should take it from me. Propose me anything out of this book, and require whether I believe it or no, and secure it never so incomprehensible to humane reason, I will subscribe it hand and heart, as knowing no demonstration can be stronger than this, God hath said so, therefore it is true. In other things I will take no man's libertie of judgment from him; neither shall any man take mine from me. I will think no man the worse man nor ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... mysteries—the primary law of creation! All things are the proximate effects of a balance of immutable powers—those powers are results of a PRIMORDIAL CAUSE,—while that CAUSE is inscrutable and incomprehensible to creatures possessing but a relative being, who live only in TIME and SPACE, and who feel and act merely by the IMPULSE of limited senses ...
— A Morning's Walk from London to Kew • Richard Phillips
... that as these machines—we speak only, of course, of really good machines—are made, not only with the object of saving labour, but material, the original cost of them is in a short time repaid. As regards the second objection, it seems incomprehensible that servants should not use with care and thoughtfulness machines, which not only save time and trouble, but greatly help ...
— Nelson's Home Comforts - Thirteenth Edition • Mary Hooper
... President's assignment under the law, and the still graver error of judgment in leaving such an important question open until the eve of battle, in the "hope that there would be no necessity for making this decision." This error seems incomprehensible when it is considered that it in effect nullified the President's selection of army and department commanders at the most important of all moments, the crisis of battle, by making these commanders subject to the orders of any general of older commission ...
— Forty-Six Years in the Army • John M. Schofield
... bills, of varying dates, sent in once, twice, three times, and invariably tossed aside and forgotten—a mode of proceeding incomprehensible to Maurice, who had never bought anything on credit in his life. And not because she was in want of money: there were plenty of gold pieces jingling loose in a drawer; but from an aversion, which was almost an ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... and their captives rang clearly upon the stones in the ominous breathless silence which greeted their appearance. The fallen Autocrat and his servants walked with downcast heads, like men in a dream, for to them it was a dream, this sudden and incomprehensible catastrophe which had overwhelmed them in the very hour of victory and on the threshold of the conquest of the world. Three days ago they had believed themselves conquerors, with the world at their feet; now they were being marched, guarded and in shackles, to ...
— The Angel of the Revolution - A Tale of the Coming Terror • George Griffith
... to say, until to-day! But this fore-noon, at the very hour we were at church witnessing the confirmation of the prince, whom you wish to be as a new tie between France and Prussia, this stipulation was violated in as incomprehensible as mortifying a manner. Four thousand men of Grenier's division have marched this morning from Brandenburg to Potsdam, and have tried forcibly—do you understand me, your excellency?—forcibly to occupy this city. The municipal authorities vainly endeavored to assure ...
— NAPOLEON AND BLUCHER • L. Muhlbach
... been written of their family vendettas and private blood feuds. Their system of ethics, which regards treachery and violence as virtues rather than vices, has produced a code of honour so strange and inconsistent, that it is incomprehensible to a logical mind. I have been told that if a white man could grasp it fully, and were to understand their mental impulses—if he knew, when it was their honour to stand by him, and when it was their honour to betray him; when they were bound to protect and when ...
— The Story of the Malakand Field Force • Sir Winston S. Churchill
... not abrogate or nullify the monarchy. But neither this nor any other measure of reform, however well adapted to circumstances and the character of the people, could ever have satisfied the Italianissimi, whose hatred of every existing institution was boundless as it was incomprehensible. The Holy Father solemnly declared that he decreed the measures in question for the good of his people, and under the eye of heaven. "They are such," he adds, at the conclusion of the document, motu proprio, "as to be ...
— Pius IX. And His Time • The Rev. AEneas MacDonell
... subject. His extended experience and intimate acquaintance with the use of arms had fully impressed him with its importance, and no man ever lived whose opinions upon this subject should carry greater weight. As incomprehensible as it may appear to persons accustomed to the use of fire-arms, recruits are very prone, before they have been drilled at target practice with ball cartridges, to place the ball below the powder in the piece. ...
— The Prairie Traveler - A Hand-book for Overland Expeditions • Randolph Marcy
... other meate dothe: but turneth the eater contrariwise into the nature of it selfe. And yet being eaten, that it is rapte into heauen, vnhurte or vntouched. Seuenthly that in so smalle a syse of breade and wine, the infinite, and incomprehensible Christe, God and manne shoulde be comprehended. Then, that one, and the self same bodye of Christe, at one very instaunte, shoulde be in many places, and of many menne receiued at ones, and in sondrye ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries - Vol. II • Richard Hakluyt
... not even, as Rousseau did with his human offspring, habitually take them to the Foundling Hospital—that is to say, in the case of literature, the anonymous press. He left them in MS., gave them away, and in some cases behaved to them in such an incomprehensible fashion that one wonders how they ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... white with the rush of Alpine torrents, or hidden in the early morning fog. Then, finding I would not sleep, and with an expression as if she had finally resolved upon some definite action, and with a face in which every line showed the sincerest confidence and trust,—as unexpected as it was incomprehensible ...
— A Gentleman Vagabond and Some Others • F. Hopkinson Smith
... being (if I may so speak) Mechanically produc'd, there is no pretence to derive it from I know not what incomprehensible Substantial Form, from which yet many would have us believe that Colours must flow; Nor does this Green, though a Real and Permanent, not a Phantastical and Vanid Colour, seem to be such an Inherent Quality as they would have it, since not only each ...
— Experiments and Considerations Touching Colours (1664) • Robert Boyle
... incomprehensible summons has just reached me, and I obey, thereby proving my right to my name of Faith. I shall be with you almost as soon as this letter. I cannot help feeling anxious, as well as curious. I have money enough, and ...
— Ruth • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... yourself: you are a true and chivalrous knight to dread it for her. But now, candidly, how is it you cannot condescend to a little management? Listen to an old friend. You are too lordly. No lover can afford to be incomprehensible for half an hour. Stoop a little. Sermonizings are not to be thought of. You can govern unseen. You are to know that I am one who disbelieves in philosophy in love. I admire the look of it, I give no credit to the assumption. I rather like lovers ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... whose face an incomprehensible expression had passed more than once during the reading; "it will all come right. We ...
— Bay State Monthly, Volume II. No. 4, January, 1885 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... and attempted to shoot Stephen, with the intention of obtaining possession of the whole of the gold, the latter should have nursed him back to life instead of finishing him at once, seemed to them an incomprehensible piece of folly. ...
— With Cochrane the Dauntless • George Alfred Henty
... therefore absurd to ascribe to Him mental faculties and affections comparable in the remotest degree to those of men; He is in no way an object of cognition; He is [Greek] and [Greek] [33]—without quality and incomprehensible. That is to say the Alexandrian Jew of the first century had anticipated the reasonings of Hamilton and Mansell in the nineteenth, and, for him, God is the Unknowable in the sense in which that term is used by Mr. Herbert Spencer. Moreover, Philo's definition ...
— The Evolution of Theology: An Anthropological Study - Essay #8 from "Science and Hebrew Tradition" • Thomas Henry Huxley
... speech well. At that moment, the ornate Volga pulled up to a smooth stop before a large, richly decorated building that glowed brightly under the electric lights of a large sign. The sign said something incomprehensible in Cyrillic script. Under it, the building entrance was gilded and carved into fantastic rococo shapes. Malone stared at the sign, and was about to ask a question about it ...
— Supermind • Gordon Randall Garrett
... is as incomprehensible to me as if you'd tattooed yourself; but," he added philosophically, clasping his hands behind his head and staring up into the sky, "every man knows his own fun. There's a friend of mine who ...
— Nancy Stair - A Novel • Elinor Macartney Lane
... Heralds have been announcing his advent in language incomprehensible to man, but which woman understands as she does her alphabet. A dainty basket, filled with mysteries half hidden, half displayed; soft little garments, folded away in ranks and files; here delicate lace and cambric; there down and feathers and luxury. ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... the Alexandrian Mystics. Reason is the offspring of God, a ray of the Eternal Reason, but it is not to be identified with God. Reason attains to the Absolute Being indirectly, and by the interposition of truth. Absolute truth is an attribute and a manifestation of God. "Truth is incomprehensible without God, and God is incomprehensible without truth. Truth is placed between human intelligence, and the supreme intelligence as a kind of mediator."[68] Incapable of contemplating God face to face, reason adores God in the truth ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... Decalogue, shocked me. Why all the very very early pictures of the Virgin, and many of our blessed Saviour himself, done in the first ages of Christianity should be black, or at least tawny, is to me wholly incomprehensible, nor could I ever yet obtain an explanation of its cause from men of ...
— Observations and Reflections Made in the Course of a Journey through France, Italy, and Germany, Vol. I • Hester Lynch Piozzi
... Incomprehensible words of command are heard. The steamer starts, the devils give a creak.... "A-va-va!" shouts the captain; at the bows a bell is rung, on the black deck there are sounds of running, knocking, cries of anxiety.... ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... away a mist which had settled there, continued, "I remember now, Hester told me of the children; but one, she said, was a stepchild—that was the boy, wasn't it?" and her wild, black eyes had in them a look of unutterable anxiety, wholly incomprehensible to the peddler, who, instead of answering her question said: "What ails you woman? Your face is as white ...
— Maggie Miller • Mary J. Holmes
... had her incomprehensible moments," observed Hazen, with an ambiguous lift of his shoulders; then, as Ransom made an impatient move, added with steady composure: "I have candidly answered all your questions whether agreeable or otherwise, and the fact that I am as ...
— The Chief Legatee • Anna Katharine Green
... Marescotti's mission, but in order to set certain marriage-bells ringing. These marriage-bells were, it seemed, to be forever mute. Still, having demanded an explanation of what he conceived to be the count's most incomprehensible conduct, he was bound, he felt, in common courtesy, to listen to all he had ...
— The Italians • Frances Elliot
... it through again, for sheer enjoyment of those beautiful, incomprehensible words that disinherited her. How lovely of Uncle Fred! she thought. Of course, he'd forgiven Billy; who wouldn't? What beautiful language Uncle Fred used! quite prayer-booky, she termed ...
— The Eagle's Shadow • James Branch Cabell
... Antwerp against the "Spanish Fury" but two years before. They heard only the instigations of his enemies; they remembered only that he was the hated Granvelle's brother; they believed only that there was a plot by which, in some utterly incomprehensible manner, they were all to be immediately engaged in cutting each others throats and throwing each other out of the windows, as had been done half a dozen years before in Paris. Such was the mischievous intention ascribed to a petition, which Champagny and his ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... inhabitant of the New England States than this: 'What I do not understand, I reject as worthless and false;' so said one of the most learned men of Boston to me. 'Why occupy the mind with that which is incomprehensible? Have we not enough of that which appears clear and plain around us?' ... The greater part of the Bostonians, including every one of wealth, talents, and learning, have adopted this doctrine."—Arfwedson, ...
— The Conquest of Canada (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Warburton
... suddenly glad he was dead, gone for ever. She almost hated him once more. It was dreadful to live with people whom she did not understand, who knew things they kept secret, whose minds and thoughts and motives were incomprehensible to her, who believed horrible untrue things of her. It had been a fixed idea with Fay during her husband's lifetime that he believed horrible untrue things about her. But what they were she would have found it ...
— Prisoners - Fast Bound In Misery And Iron • Mary Cholmondeley
... Pleyel, and played Beethoven's last quartettes there. But these performances only attracted a small number of artists;[236] and so far as the general public was concerned the Societe des derniers quartuors de Beethoven had the reputation for devoting itself to a singular and incomprehensible kind of music that had been written ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland
... had hardly begun to grow before it was plucked hastily up by the roots again. The plantations of Mary's reign, and the still larger operations carried on in that of her sister, awakened a deep-seated feeling of distrust, a rooted belief in the law as a mysterious and incomprehensible instrument invented solely for the perpetration of injustice, a belief which is certainly not wholly extinguished even in ...
— The Story Of Ireland • Emily Lawless
... crawled up to the crest again, under cover of a low patch of juniper scrub. Confidently he peered through the scrub, his rifle ready. But his face grew black with bitter disappointment. The capricious beasts had gone. Seized by one of their incomprehensible vagaries—Pete was certain that he had not alarmed them—they were now far out on the white ...
— The Backwoodsmen • Charles G. D. Roberts
... to that effect. And even if that was so, it did not explain the flight of the prisoner. That still remained a mystery. Amongst twenty theories which sought to explain it, not one was satisfactory. Of the escape itself, there was no doubt; an escape that was incomprehensible, sensational, in which the public, as well as the officers of the law, could detect a carefully prepared plan, a combination of circumstances marvelously dove-tailed, whereof the denouement fully justified the confident prediction of Arsene Lupin: "I shall ...
— The Extraordinary Adventures of Arsene Lupin, Gentleman-Burglar • Maurice Leblanc
... said I, as I conned over the various addresses on this incomprehensible cover, "are you sure this ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Complete • Charles James Lever (1806-1872)
... Governor Gallman had performed his excellent and truly wonderful work among the Ifugaos, this scramble would have become a fight in which somebody would have lost his life. That such a thing could take place without danger was incomprehensible to the old women of Kiangan, who doubtless remembered sons or husbands, brothers or cousins, who had lost their lives in such an affair. With the memory of these old times in their minds they caught me by the ...
— The Head Hunters of Northern Luzon From Ifugao to Kalinga • Cornelis De Witt Willcox
... "It's incomprehensible," resumes Adolphe. "Somebody must have paid Chodoreille five or six hundred francs to insert it; or else it's the production of a blue-stocking in high society who has promised to invite Madame Chodoreille to her house; or perhaps it's the work ...
— Petty Troubles of Married Life, Second Part • Honore de Balzac
... invisible to the human eye. Suffice it to say, then, that it had an average effective surface temperature of about fifteen thousand degrees absolute—two and one-half times as hot as the sun of Tellus—and that it was radiating every frequency possible to that incomprehensible temperature, and let it go ...
— The Vortex Blaster • Edward Elmer Smith
... her mother's race—in which the love of solitude is almost an idiosyncrasy. But with her this forest-ranging is almost a new practice: only for a month or so has she been indulging in this romantic habit—so incomprehensible to the home-loving Lilian. Her father puts no check upon such inclinations: on the contrary, he encourages them, as if proud of his daughter's penchant for the chase. Though purely a white man, his nature has been Indianised by the habits of his life: and in his eyes, the chase is the ...
— The Wild Huntress - Love in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... breathing men. His success in this respect is the more striking because he began by offering us mere pasteboard heroes of the most conventional type. The male characters in his early books were, in fact, shuttle-cocks to be tossed hither and thither by the mysterious contradictions, the incomprehensible inconsistencies, of his heroines, whose scheme of existence was the indulgence of every whim, and whose notion of logic was that one paradox must educe another still more startling. Having finally made up his mind as to the insoluble nature of the female problem, he seems inclined ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, October 1885 • Various
... their enemies and smarting from continual Sophomoric oppression, had swarmed to the front like drilled collegians and given the arrogant foe the first serious check of the year. Therefore the tall Gothic windows which lined one side of the corridor looked down upon as incomprehensible and enjoyable a tumult as could mark the steps of advanced education. The Seniors and juniors cheered themselves ill. Long freed from the joy of such meetings, their only means for this kind of recreation was to involve the lower classes, and they had never ...
— Active Service • Stephen Crane
... infested his body were the forerunners of the human race. This sort of stuff, however, could only appeal to the illiterate; for intellectual and educated persons something more was required. And so it came about that a system, based originally upon the quite incomprehensible Book of Changes, generally regarded as the oldest portion of the Confucian Canon, was gradually elaborated and brought to a finite state during the eleventh and twelfth centuries of our era. According to this system, there ...
— The Civilization Of China • Herbert A. Giles
... wonderful revelation! It was the Spirit of God shining through the Man. And this spirit was a substance and a form. And what was its form?—that of a man, with a face radiant as the sun. Now know I how to think of God. He is no longer a vague, incomprehensible existence; an ether floating in space. But He is a living, breathing human form, a Man! in whose image and likeness we were created. Oh, how I thank God that He has revealed this to me! Now, I know what manner of Being I pray to; and like as the apostles saw Him, ...
— Words of Cheer for the Tempted, the Toiling, and the Sorrowing • T. S. Arthur
... Whistler, on Montaigne or Fielding, she was stimulated to know them. One day he sent her Whitman's Leaves of Grass, which he had picked up in New York on his way to England. This startled her. She had never heard of Whitman. To her he seemed coarse, incomprehensible, ungentlemanly. She could not understand how Gaston could say beautiful things about Montaigne and about Whitman too. She had no conception how he had in him the strain of that first Sir Gaston Belward, and was also the ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... suffereth not our feet to slide, rescuing me from perils, sicknesses, poverty, bondage, public shame, evil chances; keeping me from perishing in my sins, and waiting patiently for my full conversion. Glory be to Thee, O Lord, glory to Thee, for Thine incomprehensible and unimaginable goodness toward me of all sinners far and away the most unworthy. The voices and the concert of voices of angels and men be to Thee; the concert of all thy saints in heaven and of all Thy creatures ...
— Bunyan Characters - Third Series - The Holy War • Alexander Whyte
... knowledge upon a variety of subjects, without sitting down to read; and thus he may form habits of attention and application, which will be associated with pleasure. When he returns to books, he will find that he understands a variety of things in them which before appeared incomprehensible; they will "give him back the image of his mind," and he will like them ...
— Practical Education, Volume I • Maria Edgeworth
... well as the criminal law, has nothing to do with this question; it is purely a matter of the nature of state police which is to be solved by way of a special agreement. The reserved attitude of Serbia is therefore incomprehensible and on account of its vague general form it would ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume I (of 8) - Introductions; Special Articles; Causes of War; Diplomatic and State Papers • Various
... wandered through the corridor, and entered apartment after apartment, and found no one to address. It was nine o'clock in the morning, yet the master and mistress of the house had not left their room, and not a domestic was at his post. It was quite incomprehensible. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 53, No. 331, May, 1843 • Various
... the material is directed toward non-medical "family" members, but many passages are obviously copied from medical textbooks. The following glossary of unfamiliar (to me) terms is quite lengthy and does not include incomprehensible (to me) medical terms and many words and names I could not find in several reference books. The book's own 16 page ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... modest because they are so very common, because they are constantly being repeated in their noble monotony and springing up from every side, numberless as the essential actions of our daily life; and glorious because before this war they seemed so rare and almost legendary and incomprehensible. ...
— The Wrack of the Storm • Maurice Maeterlinck
... done what it was deemed impossible to do,—what even at the time it was thought unwise and unstrategic to do,—who had held a weak position, of apparently no importance, under the mandate of an incomprehensible order from his superior, which at best asked only for a sacrifice and was rewarded with a victory. He had decimated his brigade, but the wounded and dying had cheered him as he passed, and the survivors had pursued the enemy until the bugle called them back. For such a record he looked ...
— Clarence • Bret Harte
... curious," he replied; "in my case it is incomprehensible. I possess a diploma for modern languages. I won my scholarship purely on the strength of my French and German. The correctness of my construction, the purity of my pronunciation, was considered at my college to be quite remarkable. Yet, when I come abroad hardly ...
— Three Men on the Bummel • Jerome K. Jerome
... Scriptures. It was a grand idea thus to preserve indelibly on stone the whole Burmese Bible. Here it is for all time. Peep inside one and you will see the funny-looking Burmese writing, which all runs on without being divided up into words, and looks consequently so incomprehensible to us. ...
— Round the Wonderful World • G. E. Mitton
... Locke's Constitution for North Carolina, and Jeremy Bentham's conundrums on Legislation, to speak reverently of what we cannot speak irreverently of, a truly great and incomprehensible mind, whose thoughts are problems, and whose words—when they ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 97, November, 1865 • Various
... America, that I was to be very happy, and that I was to be much upon the sea, predictions which, in consideration of an uneasy stomach, I can scarcely think agreeable with one another. Two incidents alone relieved the dead level of idiocy and incomprehensible gabble. The first was the comical announcement that "when I drew fish to the Marquis of Bute, I should take care of my sweetheart," from which I deduce the fact that at some period of my life I shall drive a fishmonger's cart. The second, in the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of terror passed over the Indian's features as memory returned. He sprang to his feet, looking wildly round and saw Garman. Then he cowered, shrinking together as if striving to sink into the ground, to return to unconsciousness, terrified by some overwhelming, incomprehensible horror. ...
— The Plunderer • Henry Oyen
... dupe and traitor in one. Let a man be as great a fool as he likes, so that he does not set a bad example. Fools need only be civil, and in consideration thereof they may aim at being the basis of monarchies. The narrowness of Clancharlie's mind was incomprehensible. His eyes were still dazzled by the phantasmagoria of the revolution. He had allowed himself to be taken in by the republic—yes; and cast out. He was an affront to his country. The attitude he assumed was downright felony. Absence was an insult. He held aloof from the ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... authoritative tone; "I am your providence, am I not, dearest? Fate made me love you—fondly, hopelessly, as I thought. Yesterday you seemed as far away from me as those pale stars, shining up yonder—as incomprehensible as that faint silvery mist above the rising moon—and to-night ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... her blood and distorted her perceptions. Transparent frankness was incomprehensible to her, and it appealed to her romantic imagination that the King of France should come like the hero of some wonder-tale disguised as his own envoy extraordinary to see and woo ...
— Romance of Roman Villas - (The Renaissance) • Elizabeth W. (Elizbeth Williams) Champney
... outraged feeling of a parent, which says that it seems somehow wrong, almost indecent, for offspring to feel passion. It had been all right for her and her generation, but incomprehensible in her own parents, and now it was equally so when she saw it beginning to work out in her children. She supposed vaguely, confronted by the fact that the race went on multiplying, that everyone might feel like that about other ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... was possible. As the moments lessened, a restlessness and fear almost beyond the average assailed me. It was a day of winter east wind, and I had now for some time entered into that dreary fellowship with the winds and their changes, so little known, so incomprehensible to the healthy. The north and east owned a terrific influence, making all pain more poignant, all sorrow sadder. The south could calm, the west sometimes cheer: unless, indeed, they brought on their wings the burden of ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... created spirits are too insignificant to raise the glory of thy works! We lose ourselves in their immensity. To tell them one must resemble thyself on infinity. Humbly contented, I remain in my own prescribed circle. Incomprehensible Being! thy resplendent glories blind the presuming eye of man! and He from whom the earth receives its being, needs not the ...
— Translations of German Poetry in American Magazines 1741-1810 • Edward Ziegler Davis
... moment a note from him was handed to her: "Your majesty will have learned that the king refused your grant. It was incomprehensible, and I retired from ...
— The Queen's Necklace • Alexandre Dumas pere
... rationality a participator in eternal truth. A substantial justice was thus done both to the conditions and to the functions of human life, although, for want of a natural history inspired by mechanical ideas, this dualism remained somewhat baffling and incomprehensible in its basis. Aristotle, being a true philosopher and pupil of experience, ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... remained almost untouched and when a celluloid ball bounced on the top of my head I did not scream "Whoopee! Bullseye!" as my American neighbors did or "Voila! Touche!" like the French. There were plenty of Americans and English there, and they seemed to be having a good time, but their good time was incomprehensible to me. This was "gay Paris," of course, but somehow the gaiety seemed forced and artificial and silly, except to the proprietors of L'Abbaye. If I had been getting the price for food and liquids which they received I might, ...
— Kent Knowles: Quahaug • Joseph C. Lincoln
... terminus technicus for religious allegory. All religions have their mysteries. In reality, a mystery is a palpably absurd dogma which conceals in itself a lofty truth, which by itself would be absolutely incomprehensible to the ordinary intelligence of the raw masses. The masses accept it in this disguise on trust and faith, without allowing themselves to be led astray by its absurdity, which is palpable to them; and thereby they participate in the kernel of the matter ...
— Essays of Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... at old Matthew before, he could only stare now. That the calm, sensible old man should fall into so extraordinary a delusion, was incomprehensible. He might have believed it of Deerham in general, but not of ...
— Verner's Pride • Mrs. Henry Wood
... outcast. Sinners did wrong because they enjoyed the sin; but she had never been vicious, or even selfishly anxious for pleasure. Pleasure! She had never cared for that sort of thing. Girls of her own age used to talk to her about it, and what they said was almost incomprehensible. She had never had such ...
— The Devil's Garden • W. B. Maxwell
... fond of children, Alyosha? I know you are, and you will understand why I prefer to speak of them. If they, too, suffer horribly on earth, they must suffer for their fathers' sins, they must be punished for their fathers, who have eaten the apple; but that reasoning is of the other world and is incomprehensible for the heart of man here on earth. The innocent must not suffer for another's sins, and especially such innocents! You may be surprised at me, Alyosha, but I am awfully fond of children, too. And observe, cruel people, the violent, the rapacious, the Karamazovs are sometimes very fond of children. ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... from the people. [Footnote: Nowhere, perhaps, does Wycliffe express himself more strongly on this subject than in a little tract called The Wicket, written in English, which he issued for popular consumption about this time.] But, in the main, no dogma, however incomprehensible, ever troubled Protestants, as a class. They easily accepted the Trinity, the double procession, or the Holy Ghost itself, though no one had the slightest notion what the Holy Ghost might be. Wycliffe roundly declared in the first paragraph of his confession [Footnote: ...
— The Emancipation of Massachusetts • Brooks Adams
... continually venting horrible and obscene oaths, both in Spanish and Catalan. The woman was remarkably handsome, but robust and seemingly as savage as himself; her conversation likewise was as frightful as his own. Both seemed to be under the influence of an incomprehensible fury. At last, upon some observation from the woman, he started up, and drawing a long knife from his girdle, stabbed at her naked bosom; she, however, interposed the palm of her hand, which was much cut. He stood ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... back parlour. Sporting papers, beer-stained and thumb-marked, lie on the tables; framed portraits of racers hang on the walls. Burly men, who certainly cannot ride a race, but who have horse in every feature, puff cigars and chat in jerky monosyllables that to an outsider are perfectly incomprehensible. But the glib way in which heavy sums of money are spoken of conveys the impression that they dabble ...
— The Amateur Poacher • Richard Jefferies
... evening cloud. During the whole time Rip and his companion had labored on in silence; for though the former marveled greatly what could be the object of carrying a keg of liquor up this wild mountain, yet there was something strange and incomprehensible about the unknown, that ...
— Elson Grammer School Literature, Book Four. • William H. Elson and Christine Keck
... We visualised dimly through that dust and the grammatical difficulties, the spectacle of the chorus chanting grotesquely, helping out protagonist and antagonist, masked and buskined, with the telling of incomprehensible parricides, of inexplicable incest, of gods faded beyond symbolism, of that Relentless Law we did not believe in for a moment, that no modern western European can believe in. We thought of the characters ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... indolent to make money, he was by no means insensible to the pleasure of beholding it accumulate. The burghers of the town near which he lived regarded him with a sort of envy, as one who affected to divide himself from their rank in society, and whose studies and pleasures seemed to them alike incomprehensible. Still, however, a sort of hereditary respect for the Laird of Monkbarns, augmented by the knowledge of his being a ready-money man, kept up his consequence with this class of his neighbours. The country gentlemen were generally above him in fortune, and beneath him in intellect, ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... money-grubbing materialists, can, in the nature of things, have very little in common. There is a great gulf fixed between them. I beg your pardon for having so far forgotten myself as to ignore that fact, and talked on subjects incomprehensible to you. What follows, however, will be more in your line, I imagine, and it is this which has made me come here to-night. You realise that your investment has turned out an unfortunate one? You have lost, irretrievably lost, ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... cause of excitement in all cases; the nature and relation of conduction and insulation of the direct and lateral or transverse action constituting electricity and magnetism; with many other things more or less incomprehensible at present, would all be affected by it, and perhaps receive a full explication in their ...
— Experimental Researches in Electricity, Volume 1 • Michael Faraday
... the students who heard Phillips that night left confirmed abolitionists, and some were among the first to take up arms. To us, nowadays, the state of public opinion at that time seems almost incomprehensible. Few of the individual members of those mobs were in real sympathy with the South, but party affiliations were strong and, in the words of Judge Cheever, '63, who describes these troubles, they were held back from openly showing abolitionist principles ...
— The University of Michigan • Wilfred Shaw
... the residents of the town there is nothing abnormal in their condition. It is only to the observer from without that the horrors of the Pennsylvania town are apparent. That such a spot should develop in a State high in rank, and among the oldest of those comprising the greatest republic, seems incomprehensible. In the very State where the Declaration of Independence was sent to the world, proclaiming that men are created free and equal, and that the right of the majority is the supreme law, how comes it that a settlement can be maintained where the rights ...
— The Transgressors - Story of a Great Sin • Francis A. Adams
... effusion, I will divert you with a story that made me laugh this morning till I cried. You know my Swiss David, and his incomprehensible pronunciation. He came to me, and said, "Auh! dar is Meses Ellis wants some of your large flags to put in her great O." With much ado, I found out that Mrs. Ellis had sent for leave to take up some flags out of my meadow for ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... unsuccessful if practiced on the Sabbath-day. The Sambatyon, Rashi says, is a pebbly river which rushes along all the days of the week except the Sabbath, on which it is perfectly still and quiet. In the Machsor for Pentecost (D. Levi's ed. p. 81), it is styled "the incomprehensible river," and a footnote thereto informs us that "This refers to the river said to rest on the Sabbath from throwing up stones, etc., which it does not cease to do all the rest of the week." (See Sanhedrin, fol. 65, col. ...
— Hebraic Literature; Translations from the Talmud, Midrashim and - Kabbala • Various
... and to listen to the whole story of her passion, her tearful protests and her oaths never to take to any man again. In her contempt for those swine, as she called them, she could not, however, keep her heart free, for she always had some sweetheart round her, and her exhausted body inclined to incomprehensible fancies and perverse tastes. As Zoe designedly relaxed her efforts the service of the house had got to such a pitch that Muffat did not dare to push open a door, to pull a curtain or to unclose a cupboard. The bells did not ring; men lounged about ...
— Nana, The Miller's Daughter, Captain Burle, Death of Olivier Becaille • Emile Zola
... concerning "things present, (A.D. 96,) and things to come." We see, then, if this 13th verse, as we are told, does represent the departed saints any where, or time, since A.D. 96, and will be fulfilled at the resurrection, it is yet incomprehensible. Is it not clear that it only has reference to all the righteous saints in these messages from Oct. 1844? How can it mean the literal dead? Is it not clear that the dead know not any thing; therefore the blessing ...
— A Vindication of the Seventh-Day Sabbath • Joseph Bates
... honour to his idol, if he should keep Maria pretty short of cash, and so make her own its preciousness; triumphant would he feel, as a merely-moneyed man, to see troublesome, obtrusive Heart, with all its win-ways, and whimperings, and incomprehensible spirituality, with its sermons and its prayers, bending before him "for a bit of bread." Yes, poor loving disinterested Maria ran every chance of being disinherited, from the false witness of her brother, simply because she gave him antecedent opportunities, ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... of true civilisation in this unique, abnormal, diseased, unsatisfied, incomprehensible, and truly miraculous and supernatural race we call man, had been literally, and in actual fact, miraculous and supernatural likewise? What if that be the true key to the mystery of humanity and its origin? What if the few first chapters of the most ancient and most sacred book ...
— Historical Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... his power to foresee the day when she would have become to him a mere symbol of something that was. Suppose that some day, when married, he again met her? In spite of everything, he did not believe that she had ceased to love him; somewhere she still kept her faith, martyred by the incomprehensible fate which had torn her from his arms. To meet her again would be to forget every tie save that holiest which made one of ...
— A Life's Morning • George Gissing
... and uncertainty of life—the mystic chemistry of our being. Still others, taught roughly by life, or endowed with understanding or intuition, or both, see in this the latest manifestation of that incomprehensible chemistry which we call life and personality, and, knowing that it is quite vain to hope to gainsay it, save by greater subtlety, put the best face they can upon the matter and call a truce until they can think. We all know that life is ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser
... tree-frogs, small lizards, and other creatures. Walter stood by watching him, as with scientific skill he dissected the huge lizard, discoursing as he did so in technical language, which was perfectly incomprehensible to his young hearer, on the curious formation of the creature,—on its bones, muscles, and ...
— The South Sea Whaler • W.H.G. Kingston
... vivid and more troubled delights of feeling herself engrossed by a spell, to whose power she submitted with joy indeed, but also with trembling. Every time she now saw Bella, it appeared to her more entirely incomprehensible that any one could act as she was doing; the mere idea of a marriage where convenience, suitableness, common sense were the best words that could be used to account for it, began to seem revolting. She could not have explained why, yet she felt, at times, ...
— A Canadian Heroine, Volume 1 - A Novel • Mrs. Harry Coghill
... and pots; and graced with large water-jars, and baskets and the refuge of all beings; and echoing with the chanting of the Vedas; and heavenly: and worthy of being inhabited; and removing fatigue; and attended with splendour and of incomprehensible merit; and majestic with divine qualities. And the hermitage was inhabited by hosts of great sages, subsisting on fruits and roots; and having their senses under perfect control; and clad in black deer-skins; and effulgent like unto the Sun and Agni; and of souls ...
— Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa Bk. 3 Pt. 1 • Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa
... bees, the little Strelka brook bubbled and fretted like a tea-kettle, and the sun rose gloriously; its rays fell between the leaves of the lime-tree, and threw patches of light on the strange face of one of the strangest and most incomprehensible men ...
— Historical Miniatures • August Strindberg
... days in the hospital with their routine and monotony, creating an incomprehensible break in his life, his memory retained nothing; but the unchanging grief, weighing like a slab of stone on a grave, was ever present in his soul with inexorable and brutal force during these many months. He only half recalled ...
— Selected Polish Tales • Various
... man is readily stirred by every pretty face he sees, while another man can only be roused by intellectual qualities or by moral beauty. We know that sometimes we meet people possessing every virtue and grace under heaven, and yet for some unknown and incomprehensible reason we could no more fall in love with them than we could fall in love with the Ten Commandments. I don't, of course, for a moment accept the silly romantic notion that men and women fall in love only once in their lives, or that each one of us has somewhere on earth his or her ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... widely construed, are mines of information and delight. However, as there are no books wherewith a foreigner can inform himself on this subject, any attempt at details would not only seem pedantic, but would be incomprehensible without tiresome explanations and many illustrations, which are not possible here. I may remark, however, that Viollet-le-Duc and Fergusson do not understand the subject of Russian architecture, and that their few observations ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood
... serve," said Bickley, suddenly producing an electric torch from his pocket and flashing it into his face. It was his form of repartee for all he had suffered at the hands of this incomprehensible pair. Let me say at once that it was singularly successful. Perhaps the wisdom of the ages in which Oro flourished had overlooked so small a matter as electric torches, or perhaps he did not expect to meet with them in these degenerate days. At any rate for the first and last ...
— When the World Shook - Being an Account of the Great Adventure of Bastin, Bickley and Arbuthnot • H. Rider Haggard
... unfortunate lunatic, or even in other groups, one observed strange complaints, moanings relating to lesions which were not visible, inability to move notwithstanding the apparent integrity of the organs, contradictory and incomprehensible affirmations; in one word, abnormal behaviors, very different to normal behaviors, regularized by the laws and ...
— A Psychiatric Milestone - Bloomingdale Hospital Centenary, 1821-1921 • Various
... scientific consequences to which this anti-teleological monism leads, the advocates of it are in tolerable accord; although they are subject to the most incomprehensible illusions regarding the practical consequences of it, as we have seen in the above-quoted {166} concluding words of Haeckel's "Natural History of Creation." As to the scientific consequences, they express themselves ...
— The Theories of Darwin and Their Relation to Philosophy, Religion, and Morality • Rudolf Schmid
... was standing face to face with something illogical and irrational, and did not know what was to be done. Alexey Alexandrovitch was standing face to face with life, with the possibility of his wife's loving someone other than himself, and this seemed to him very irrational and incomprehensible because it was life itself. All his life Alexey Alexandrovitch had lived and worked in official spheres, having to do with the reflection of life. And every time he had stumbled against life itself he had shrunk away from it. Now he experienced a feeling akin to that of a man who, while ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... when he heard Rouletabille's prophetic sentence—"The presbytery has lost nothing of its charm, nor the garden its brightness." Certainly my friend knew how to make people understand him by the use of wholly incomprehensible phrases. I observed as much to him, but he merely smiled. I should have proposed that he give me some explanation; but he put a finger to his lips, which evidently signified that he had not only determined not to speak, but also enjoined ...
— The Mystery of the Yellow Room • Gaston Leroux
... Neverout and the Colonel, in Swift's famous dialogue, are a thousand times more entertaining and moral; and, besides, we can laugh AT those worthies as well as with them; whereas the "prodigious" French wits are to us quite incomprehensible. Fancy a duchess as old as Lady —— herself, and who should begin to tell us "of what she would do if ever she had a mind to take a lover;" and another duchess, with a fourth lover, tripping modestly among ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... time, James; and remain, as I do, incomprehensible. To be great is to be misunderstood.—Tout ...
— The Gentle Art of Making Enemies • James McNeill Whistler
... starts of civilization, or of barbarian monarchies, such as we see now in Africa, life in Europe took another direction. It went on on lines similar to those it had once taken in the cities of antique Greece. With a unanimity which seems almost incomprehensible, and for a long time was not understood by historians, the urban agglomerations, down to the smallest burgs, began to shake off the yoke of their worldly and clerical lords. The fortified village rose against the lord's castle, ...
— Mutual Aid • P. Kropotkin
... understanding to give them judgement and counsel? Even the kings of the Amorites, hearing that we desire to attack them, will say, 'Let us not set out against them, for there is now no longer among them the many-sided, incomprehensible and sacred spirit, worthy of the Lord, the ever-faithful master of the word, the Divine prophet of all the world, the most consummate master of this age. If now our enemies once more transgress before the ...
— THE LEGENDS OF THE JEWS VOLUME III BIBLE TIMES AND CHARACTERS - FROM THE EXODUS TO THE DEATH OF MOSES • BY LOUIS GINZBERG
... allowed to remain so is still, after all the explanations that have been given, incomprehensible. Two officers with sixty hussars, all well disposed and loyal, were in a side street of the town waiting for their arrival, of which they were not aware. Six of the troopers actually passed the travelers ...
— The Life of Marie Antoinette, Queen of France • Charles Duke Yonge
... Castle of Elsinore, for instance—that seem to have an amazing and incomprehensible gift of resisting civilization. They may be brought up to date, and trimmed, and filled with inappropriate people, and everything else done that should spoil them, but in spite of it all they do not for a moment look as if any modern extraneous objects had a meaning for ...
— Devon, Its Moorlands, Streams and Coasts • Rosalind Northcote
... the attempts at instruments of that kind from the beginning of the world are preserved, transformed and glorified. In our magnificent orchestras all the first feeble beginnings are developed until we have a conception of music to-day such as would have been utterly incomprehensible to the primeval man. What I wish you to note is and this is the use of my illustration that the advancing growth of the music of the world has forgotten nothing that it was ...
— Our Unitarian Gospel • Minot Savage
... "It is incomprehensible that we have not come in sight of them," said the captain. "I reckon that the Halbrane has made sixty miles since this morning, and the islands in ...
— An Antarctic Mystery • Jules Verne
... What an incomprehensible stretch of authority Christ put forth, if He were no more than a teacher, when He brushed aside the Passover, and put in its place the Lord's Supper, as commemorating His own death! Thereby He said, 'Forget ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... of the tiny street crowded with fishermen. And her thoughts travelled through a fascinating and delightful infinite, far, far away to the northern seas, where "La Marie, Captain Guermeur," was sailing. A strange man was young Gaos! retiring and almost incomprehensible now, after having come forward so audaciously, ...
— An Iceland Fisherman • Pierre Loti
... he had missed the spontaneity he had known in the little child, and, without being able to analyze it, felt that something was wanting in the girl. She had been sweet and winning, yet under it all had been a manner quite incomprehensible to him, as though she did not feel quite sure of her position in his affections. Her laugh had lacked the true girlish ring, and her conversation with him seemed guarded, as though she had never ...
— Caps and Capers - A Story of Boarding-School Life • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... Seysen fain have made me believe; but what he said in support of his assertion was to me incomprehensible. And yet he said that it was a part of the Catholic faith. It may be so—I am unable to understand many other points. I wish your faith were made more simple. As yet the good man—for good he really is—has ...
— The Phantom Ship • Captain Frederick Marryat
... of anglers were out on the reef, fishing for anything, and they decided to take a turn outside where I had been spending days after sailfish. Scarcely had these men left the reef when five sailfish loomed up and all of them, with that perversity and capriciousness which makes fish so incomprehensible, tried to climb on board the boat. One, a heavy fish, did succeed in hooking himself and getting aboard. I could multiply events of this nature, but this is enough to illustrate my point—that there is a vast ...
— Tales of Fishes • Zane Grey
... upon the clouds of the outward world. I mean that inward universe of goodness, beauty, and truth,—three worlds that are neither part, nor shoot, nor copy of the outward. We are less astonished at the incomprehensible existence of these transcendental heavens because they are always there, and we foolishly imagine that we create, when we merely perceive them. After what model, with what plastic power, and from what, could we create these same ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... called night for three reasons: the point of departure is privation of all desire, and complete detachment from the world; the road is by faith, which is like night to the intellect; the goal, which is God, is incomprehensible while we ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... quiet, vital man hadn't any limits, except those of the globe itself. A tall, fair man with a large head, decided features, chilly gray eyes, and an uncompromising mouth adorned with a short, stiff mustache, his square chin was cleft by an incomprehensible dimple. His wife declared she had married him because of that cleft; it gave her an object in life to find out ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler
... to formularise his position. With one's limited vision, one's finite inability to touch a thought at more than one point at a time, one must give up all hope of attaining to a perfected philosophical system. The end was dark, the solution incomprehensible. He must rather live as far as possible in a high and lofty emotion, beholding the truth by hints and glimpses, pursuing as far as possible all uplifting intuitions, all free and generous desires. It was useless to walk in a prescribed path, to frame ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... me the fact that I was necessary to her, and that she was keeping me for some end which she had in view. Consequently there became established between us relations which, to a large extent, were incomprehensible to me, considering her general pride and aloofness. For example, although she knew that I was madly in love with her, she allowed me to speak to her of my passion (though she could not well have showed her contempt for me more ...
— The Gambler • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... is written in the most unpractical and incomprehensible style: yes, I know it," interrupted ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. October, 1878. • Various
... awful, the inexpressible, the incomprehensible God. His terrible hand swirls, with unresting power, yonder innumerable congregation of suns in their mighty orbits, and yet stoops, with tender touch, to build up the petals of the anemone, and paint with rainbow hues the ...
— Caesar's Column • Ignatius Donnelly
... was served up to us on the long unpainted table that stood in the middle of the room. During the repast our host, the priest, sat with folded hands intently regarding us, while the rest of the people clustered around the door and open windows, eying us with indescribable and incomprehensible curiosity. If we had been visitors from the moon we could not have attracted more attention. Even the stolid Indians, a few of whom strolled lazily about, came and gazed at us until the pompous old man in faded Mexican uniform ...
— Stories by American Authors (Volume 4) • Constance Fenimore Woolson
... the ideals of any man alive? Why, not one thread of that dark hair, not one snap of those white little fingers, except when ideals irritate you by distracting a man's attention from Cynthia Allonby. Otherwise, he is welcome enough to play with his incomprehensible toys." ...
— O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 • Various
... equally superstitious? How is it possible that the souls of the dead should come and talk, and play the guitar? No! Some one is fooling them, or they are fooling themselves. And as to this business with Simon—it's simply incomprehensible. (Looks at an album.) Here's their spiritualistic album. How is it possible to photograph a spirit? But here is the likeness of a Turk and Leonid Fyodoritch ...
— Redemption and Two Other Plays • Leo Tolstoy et al
... master of prosody has been scandalously usurped under the falsest of pretences: a matter on which I am content to accept the verdict of Landor. His contribution to Sir Robert Chester's problematic volume may perhaps claim the singular distinction of being more incomprehensible, more crabbed, more preposterous, and more inexplicable than any other copy of verses among the "divers poetical essays—done by the best and chiefest of our modern writers, with their names subscribed to their particular ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... ear! Even dogs, which listen quietly to modern third and sixth passages, begin to howl lamentably if one plays before them on the violin the barbaric fourth passages of the Guido diaphonies! This historically verified alternation of the musical ear is indeed incomprehensible. It may serve, however, to help us to divine how horribly medieval dogs would have howled if one had been able to play to them—well, let us say, ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... sentence, between the relative pronoun and the demonstrative adjective pronoun, between the perfect and the preter-perfect tense, he is extremely dull and hazy. The region of abstract ideas is to him a region of ghosts and shadows. Yet his youth is mainly a dreary wilderness of uncomprehended, incomprehensible studies, of privations, tasks, punishments, with a sense of continual failure, disappointment, and disgrace, because his father is trying to make a scholar and a literary man out of a boy whom Nature made to till the soil or manage the material ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 92, June, 1865 • Various
... of action is incomprehensible unless we keep in mind the fact that Mr. Dafoe has long found it impossible to support either of the old parties. The Coalition was a new one which he consistently supported on its merits and up to a point. The point was reached. Unionism and Agrarianism ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino
... him. Such a being he identifies with God. But the ordinary idea of God can scarcely be identified with such a conception. "The majority of men," he says himself, "do not think of God as an infinite and incomprehensible being, and as the sole author from whom all things depend; they go no further than the letters of his name."[34] "The vulgar almost imagine him as a finite thing." The God of Descartes is not merely the creator of the material universe; he is also the father of all truth in the intellectual world. ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... accurate even to mathematical absoluteness, to the very arcana of what has been the inexplicable. To them the true, the beautiful, must be facts, defined, realized, and vigorously analyzed. Visible embodiments of an incomprehensible grace must be disintegrated, and the thinnest essences escape not the analytical rack whereon they confess the causal entity of their composition. 'Broad-browed genius' may toss his locks in the studio redolent of art; his eye ...
— The Continental Monthly , Vol. 2 No. 5, November 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... of the Bridge of Despair leant young Lackaday, gazing unseeingly down into the Rhone. His sudden misfortune had been like the stunning blow of a sandbag. His brain still reeled. What had happened was incomprehensible. He knew his business. He could conceive no other. He had been trained to it since infancy. There was not a phase of clown's work with which he was not familiar. He was a passable gymnast, an expert juggler, a trick musician, an ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... not know even one.... And when I am accused of passing by the institutions of the past with coldness and hatred in my heart, because I was one of the first to express the hope of a better future, a charge is laid at my door which is perfectly incomprehensible ... I am reproached with despising the history of law. It is a slander on me. Although I have only laughed at these reports, one man's mistake grieved me; for that man's name was Niebuhr.... When he [Niebuhr] returned from Italy ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... all are conclusions. This clearness of the "ready-made" is a superficial clearness—physical, outward, solar clearness, so to speak, but in the absence of a sense for origin and genesis it is the clearness of the incomprehensible, the clearness of opacity, the clearness of the obscure. We are always trifling on the surface. Our temper is formal—that is to say, frivolous and material, or rather artistic and not philosophical. For what it seeks is the figure, the fashion and manner of things, ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... copy of a notice exhibited at Welsh railway station. It is, perhaps, only a little more incomprehensible than Bradshaw. "List of Booking: You passengers must careful. For have them level money for ticket and to apply at once for asking tickets when will booking window open. No tickets to have after the departure of ...
— Railway Adventures and Anecdotes - extending over more than fifty years • Various
... matter to one another, which was seldom indeed, were divided in their opinions. That Dr. Bayard was "smitten" with Fanny Forrest was something they had seen from the start, but that brilliant and most incomprehensible young woman had on more than one occasion treated him with marked coldness and aversion. What was the matter? Had he been too precipitate in his wooing? Twice since Hatton returned with his little escort, bringing in the wounded, had Miss ...
— 'Laramie;' - or, The Queen of Bedlam. • Charles King
... transmission of light and sound; of the production of winds, and sun-spots, and of the method of development and dissemination of heat, are in point of fact, unphilosophical and incomprehensible. ...
— New and Original Theories of the Great Physical Forces • Henry Raymond Rogers
... sigh, and said "Women!" under his breath. Mutabile semper! No matter how much you knew about them, they remained incomprehensible. Their whims passed explanation. He was ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... But a few moments sufficed in which to realize that, for all my training, I knew as little of Chemistry—of Chemistry as understood by this man's genius—as a junior student in surgery knows of trephining. The process in operation was a complete mystery to me; the means and the end were alike incomprehensible. ...
— The Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer
... the inhabitants of the terrace, the dwellers in the opposite villas are seen returning to dinner. The lame match-man now hobbles along upon his crutches, with his little basket of lucifers suspended at his side. He is thoroughly deaf and three parts dumb, uttering nothing beyond an incomprehensible kind of croak by way of a demand for custom. He is a privileged being, whom nobody thinks of interfering with. He has the entree of all the gardens on both sides of the way, and is the acknowledged depositary of scraps and remnants of all kinds ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 448 - Volume 18, New Series, July 31, 1852 • Various
... is so strong, that it leads her to actions which must be entirely incomprehensible to her, and which can give her no other pleasure than the gratification of an internal faculty. She has been known to sit for half an hour, holding a book before her sightless eyes, and moving her lips, as she has observed seeing people do ...
— American Notes for General Circulation • Charles Dickens
... undisguised amazement. Her big gray eyes had grown larger, and the color left her cheeks as I finished. Then the rosy red rushed back, her lip quivered and the tears sprang to her eyes. A moment later she smiled, then laughed, and was serious again. How incomprehensible are these young girls! Poor child! she had never ...
— The Romance of an Old Fool • Roswell Field
... observations I conceive the test to be primarily one of youth, for honesty compels my middle-age to admit a personal failure. I saw the idea; for one thing no egg was ever a quarter so full of meat as the Martian existence of incomprehensible thrills, to heighten the effect of which Mr. BURROUGHS has invented what amounts to a new language, with a glossary of its own, thus appealing to a well-known instinct of boyhood, but rendering the whole business of a more than Meredithian obscurity to the uninitiate. I have hitherto ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, August 11, 1920 • Various
... is being, its essence is in the sun. On the other hand, the essence of the immortal is the person in the circle (of the sun). In man's body breath and ether are the immortal, the essence of which is the person in the eye. There is a visible and invisible brahma ([a]tm[a]); the real brahma is incomprehensible and is described only by negations (3. 4. 1; 9. 26). The highest is the Imperishable (neuter), but this sees, hears, and knows. It is in this that ether (as above) is woven (3. 8. 11). After death the wise man goes to the world of the gods (1. 5. 16); he becomes the [a]tm[a] ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... car off the road at the cottonwood canon, and was found with one bullet in his head, and the gun in his own hand, it was not for a coroner's jury to conjecture the impulse leading up to the act, or the business complications by which the act might, or might not, have been hastened. But incomprehensible though it might seem to all concerned there was only one finding on the evidence submitted, and that ...
— The Treasure Trail - A Romance of the Land of Gold and Sunshine • Marah Ellis Ryan
... Chaillu a "Mbwiri," they meant that the white man had been bleached by the grave as Dante had been darkened by his visit below, and consequently he was a subject of fear and awe. They have a material, evanescent, intelligible future, not an immaterial, incomprehensible eternity; the ghost endures only for awhile and perishes like the memory of the little-great name. Hence the ignoble dread in East and West Africa of a death which leads to a shadowy world, and eventually to utter annihilation. Seeing nought beyond the present-future, there is no hope for them in ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... of Christianity a great part of antiquity has become incomprehensible to us, for instance, the entire religious basis of life. On this account an imitation of antiquity is a false tendency . the betrayers or the betrayed are the philologists who still think of such a thing. We live in a period when many different conceptions ...
— We Philologists, Volume 8 (of 18) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... Manchuria. In this work, the author has painted vividly the peregrinations of his moving hospital, and also the terrible sufferings of the Russian army. By the thousands, the starved children of the campaign, the Russian foot-soldiers, stoics and fatalists, sacrificing their lives for a strange and incomprehensible cause, pass before the eyes of the reader. And in the background, detaching themselves from the crowd, in their gold and silver embroidered uniforms, are "the heroes of the war, these vultures of the advance and rear-guard, ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky
... difficulties of his work. In that uneasy solitude the supreme cry of Art for Art itself, loses the exciting ring of its apparent immorality. It sounds far off. It has ceased to be a cry, and is heard only as a whisper, often incomprehensible, but at ...
— The Nigger Of The "Narcissus" - A Tale Of The Forecastle • Joseph Conrad
... to have broken in upon the most incomprehensible romance!—Then you love the King? (CLARA nods her head.) He knows how to love, and make a woman happy! He is a dazzling creature!—We shall see now whether you are to suffer for all the hearts he has broken. You are not the first ...
— Three Dramas - The Editor—The Bankrupt—The King • Bjornstjerne M. Bjornson
... Darley, you are certainly the most incomprehensible fellow this afternoon," exclaimed Roy. ...
— Two Boys and a Fortune • Matthew White, Jr.
... Graham? Or had she been playing with him? Such conduct, for her, was unprecedented and incomprehensible. As he groped for a solution, he saw her again in the moonlight, clinging to Graham with upturned lips, drawing Graham's lips ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... striking a transformation as that of the newspaper into fragments has been effected by means of his own activity. Other occupations of this sort, which are taken up again and again with a persistency incomprehensible to an adult, are the shaking of a bunch of keys, the opening and closing of a box or purse (thirteenth month); the pulling out and emptying, and then the filling and pushing in, of a table-drawer; the heaping up and the strewing about of ...
— The Mind of the Child, Part II • W. Preyer
... with inconceivable hostility and disrespect in my bearing, towered over her, becoming for an instant at least a sort of second French Revolution, and delivered myself with the intensest concentration of those wicked and incomprehensible words. Just for a second I threatened annihilation. ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... Zwinglianism and says: "This is the summary of our doctrine, that the flesh of Christ is a vivifying bread because it truly nourishes and feeds our souls when by faith we coalesce with it. This, we teach, occurs spiritually only, because the bond of this sacred unity is the secret and incomprehensible power of the Holy Spirit." (C. R. 37 [Calvini Opp. 9], 162.) In this book Calvin also, as stated above, appeals to Melanchthon to add his testimony that "we [the Calvinists] teach nothing that conflicts ...
— Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church • Friedrich Bente
... taken as reliable examples of the true acid content of coffee; and though they seem very low, it is not at all incomprehensible that the acids which they indicate produce the acidity in a cup of coffee. They probably are mainly volatile organic acids, together with other acidic-natured products of roasting. We know that very small quantities of acids are readily detected in fruit juices and beer, and ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... periods, trying to think of some way to comprehend them, and then astronomical periods. Of course it's impossible, but I thought of a plan that seemed to mean something to me. I remembered that Neptune is two billion eight hundred million miles away. That, of course, is incomprehensible, but then there is the nearest fixed star with its twenty-five trillion miles—twenty-five trillion—or nearly a thousand times as far, and then I took this book and counted the lines on a page and I found that there ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... Katie. I have not the least intention of doing so. But all this is quite incomprehensible. Where is your mistress? She is never here?" ...
— Self-Raised • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... at least; but my curiosity is so raised, that I am determined that I will indulge it at the expense of my interest. I will turn the key, and then you will oblige me by unravelling, what, at present, is to me as curious as it is wholly incomprehensible." ...
— Japhet, In Search Of A Father • Frederick Marryat
... came to see our stove in full working order, yet we could not persuade them to adopt the American system of heating the whole house at an even temperature. They cling to the customs of their fathers with an obstinacy that is incomprehensible to us, who are always ready to try experiments. Americans complain bitterly of the same freezing experiences in France and Germany, and in turn foreigners all criticise our over-heated houses and places ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... on the strength of this remark, overheard by the stool-pigeon, Morgan, and afterwards reported to the prosecution, that Elmer Smith was hailed to prison charged with murder in the first degree. His enemies had been certain all along that his incomprehensible delusion about the law being the same for the poor man as the rich would bring its own punishment. It did; there can no longer be any doubt ...
— The Centralia Conspiracy • Ralph Chaplin
... or pain of it—taking a supreme delight, in fact, in melancholy. I have still a copy of Moore's poems, stained with tears and gingerbread. Some of the happiest hours of my childhood were spent in weeping over this book, especially over "Go Where Glory Waits Thee," which affected me with an incomprehensible but poignant woe. Accordingly it was I who rose cheerful in the morning and piloted a gloomy companion to breakfast and a barber, and so across Boston to the dingy station where dingy, dirty cars of ancient vintage awaited, and in one of which we rode, with innumerable stops, to a spot off the beaten ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton
... has unfortunately wrecked many a man and many a woman, while a little knowledge of a subject generally ignored by the masses would have enabled numbers of people to have understood many things which they believed to be quite incomprehensible, or which were not thought ...
— The Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana - Translated From The Sanscrit In Seven Parts With Preface, - Introduction and Concluding Remarks • Vatsyayana
... resist buying Barnum's Autobiography for one dollar—such a bargain as never was—is incomprehensible. I believe they can not. I believe they do their duty like men. As one man I resisted, because I belong to the press, and therefore am not mortal. Who ever heard of a journalist getting a bargain? With Spartan firmness I turned a deaf ear to the persuasive ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume II. (of X.) • Various
... possible they may have been stupefied by the appearance of that wonderful creation of man's ingenuity—a ship; in their eyes it must have seemed a being endowed with life walking the waters, for purposes to them incomprehensible, on a mission to the discovery of which they could not even apply the limited faculties they possessed. Fortunately or unfortunately for them—according as we determine on the value of civilization to the aboriginal races of the South—they did not possess the fatal, ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 2 • John Lort Stokes
... It is incomprehensible that a nation whose chief boast is its free public education, that a people always ready to respond to any moral or financial appeal made in the name of children, should permit this infamy against childhood to continue! Only the protection of all children ...
— A New Conscience And An Ancient Evil • Jane Addams
... mediaeval France, the marches and processions, the pomp and glitter of the court, and overlooked the weak points of the plot. To tell the truth, much of the libretto of 'Euryanthe' borders upon the incomprehensible. The main outline of the story is as follows. At a festival given by the King of France, Count Adolar praises the beauty and virtue of his betrothed Euryanthe, and Lysiart, who also loves her, offers to wager all he possesses that he will contrive to gain her love. ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... sensitive enough to understand it. "Oh, mother, I don't want to have us all go through the street with all these flowers, and me in my white dress," she had said. She had looked at her mother with a shrinking in her eyes which was incomprehensible to ...
— The Portion of Labor • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... book—the creation of a writer in the spring-time of his genius—the essence of fun, the unfailing source of merriment to countless readers past, present, and to come, came to be associated with the memory of a terrible and still incomprehensible tragedy. ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... This last incomprehensible remark drove me off the deck, and I retreated to the cock-pit, where I found Mrs Trotter. "Oh, my dear!" said she, "I am glad you are come, as I wish to put your clothes in order. Have you a list of them—where is your key?" I replied ...
— Peter Simple and The Three Cutters, Vol. 1-2 • Frederick Marryat
... child, and the topic of all her dreams was this mysterious mother whom she had never seen. Many a time, when Barbara only saw that she was quietly dressing or hushing her doll, Clare's mind was at work, puzzling over the incomprehensible reason of Barbara's evident dislike to her absent mother. What shocking thing could she have done, thought Clare, to make Bab angry with her? Had she poisoned her sister, or drowned the cat, or stolen the big crown off the Queen's head? For the romance of a little child is always ...
— Clare Avery - A Story of the Spanish Armada • Emily Sarah Holt
... new dispensation, we may indeed claim a deeper sympathy with the flower than is implied in a mere recognition of its pretty face. We know that this orchid is but the half of itself, as it were; that its color, its form, however eccentric and incomprehensible, its twisted inverted position on its individual stalk-like ovary, its slender nectary, its carefully concealed pollen—all are anticipations of an insect complement, a long-tongued night-moth perhaps, with whose life its own is mysteriously ...
— My Studio Neighbors • William Hamilton Gibson
... declarations of it. The scandalous jests of Eudoxius must have given deep offence to thousands; but the great novelty of the Anomoean doctrine was its audacious self-sufficiency. Seeing that Arius was illogical in regarding the divine nature as incomprehensible, and yet reasoning as if its relations were fully explained by human types, the Anomoeans boldly declared that it is no mystery at all. If the divine essence is simple, man can perfectly understand it. 'Canst thou by searching find out God?' Yes, ...
— The Arian Controversy • H. M. Gwatkin
... a note from him was handed to her: "Your majesty will have learned that the king refused your grant. It was incomprehensible, and I retired from ...
— The Queen's Necklace • Alexandre Dumas pere
... national dish. It takes pre-eminent rank in Southern Europe, and is certainly entitled to occupy a similar high position in the Australian food list. Unfortunately there is just the same story to tell, and the strange neglect of salads can only be expressed by the term incomprehensible. It is a waste-saving dish; it is wholesome, in that it is purifying to the blood; it is full of infinite variety; and its low price brings it within easy every-day reach even of the humblest dwelling. ...
— The Art of Living in Australia • Philip E. Muskett (?-1909)
... a sailor of the Spanish-American type; and being this, he takes crosses and disappointments coolly. Even the desertion of his crew seems scarcely to have ruffled him; he bears it with a patient resignation, that would be quite incomprehensible to either English or Yankee skipper. With a broad-brimmed jipi-japa hat shading his swarth features from the sun, he lounges all day long upon the quarterdeck, his elbows usually rested upon the capstan-head; his sole occupation rolling and ...
— The Flag of Distress - A Story of the South Sea • Mayne Reid
... flock and of the fat thereof. The firstlings and the fat thereof were to him the dearest things in the world; yet he gave them over that he might be on good terms with God. So it was with Abraham when he prepared to offer up his son Isaac on a stone. Isaac was very dear to him; but God, in incomprehensible ways, was yet dearer. It may be that Abraham feared the Lord. But whether that be true or not it has since been determined by a few billion people that he loved the Lord and desired ...
— The Faith of Men • Jack London
... are all ready to denounce it as 'turgid,' 'overladen,' 'strained for effect,' and 'hysterical sublime.' Heine's Reisebilder, which is one of the most exquisite poems in prose ever given to the world, is nearly incomprehensible to the majority of English minds; so much so, indeed, that the English translators in their rendering of it have not only lost the delicate glamour of its fairy-like fancifulness, but have also blunted all the fine points of ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... affair is incomprehensible to me," said Audrey at last, as she rose preparatory to taking her departure. There seemed no object in lingering to discuss so painful ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... made this introduction in order to show you that when you read the Puranas you consistently get the fact on the higher plane described in terms of the lower, with the result that it seems unintelligible, seems incomprehensible; then you have what is called an allegory, that is, a reality which looks like a fancy down here, but is a deeper truth than the illusion of physical matter, and is nearer to the reality of things than the things which you call objective ...
— Avataras • Annie Besant
... was always in want of money, and perpetually lamenting his inability, real or imagined, to get it, the last remark seemed rather odd, and the vehemence with which he spoke against me was altogether incomprehensible. ...
— To-morrow? • Victoria Cross
... "The cosmos is about the smallest hole that a man can hide his head in." He finds that the great popular thinkers—and it is right that he, a potent popular writer, should concern himself with these rather than with the systematic philosophers who observe conventions incomprehensible to the common mind—are each and all of them prone to follow exclusively some strange bent of thought, leading by pure reason to one of those awful conclusions which "tend to make a man lose his wits:" Tolstoy, for instance, reaching an unthinkable doctrine of self-sacrifice, ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... this fact could only be produced from the engineer's own lips, and they must wait for that till speech returned. Rubbing had re-established the circulation of the blood. Cyrus Harding moved his arm again, then his head, and a few incomprehensible ...
— The Mysterious Island • Jules Verne
... whole matter is plain and rational enough. It is, in fact, one of the many striking examples of adaptation in the English political system. A collection of rules that appear cumbrous and antiquated, and that even now are well-nigh incomprehensible when described in all their involved technicality, have been pruned away until they furnish a procedure almost as simple, direct, and appropriate as any one could devise." Government of England, I., 277-278. The procedure of the House of Commons on public ...
— The Governments of Europe • Frederic Austin Ogg
... servant can have suggested anything? Whether, in spite of all precautions, any idle story-book can have got into the house for Louisa or Thomas to read? Because in minds that have been practically formed by rule and line, from the cradle upwards, this is incomprehensible." ...
— Ten Girls from Dickens • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... suite, or a heretic English or American milord! But not for any daughter of Eve! And the makeshift room over a carpenter's shop, which is called the forestieria, has been devoted to the purpose only in consequence of the incomprehensible mania of female English heretics for visiting the disciples of St. Romuald. And there the food supplied from the convent can be brought to them. But for the night? I had warned my friends that they would have to occupy different quarters; and it now became ...
— What I Remember, Volume 2 • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... Saviour and Redeemer Christ Jesus. To Him alone I now look up for succour, in full hope that perhaps a few days more will open to the view of my astonished and fearful soul His kingdom of eternal and incomprehensible bliss, prepared only for the righteous ...
— The Eventful History Of The Mutiny And Piratical Seizure - Of H.M.S. Bounty: Its Cause And Consequences • Sir John Barrow
... best of tempers. For the next three weeks, at any rate, she would be free from the galling associations of straightened means—free to enjoy the luxury and refined comfort to which she had been accustomed, and for which her soul yearned with a fierce longing that would be incomprehensible to folk of a simpler mind. Everybody has his or her ideal Heaven, if only one could fathom it. Some would choose a sublimated intellectual leisure, made happy by the best literature of all the planets; some a model state (with themselves as presidents), in which (through their beneficent ...
— Beatrice • H. Rider Haggard
... McKay should make frequent and unfavorable comment on this state of affairs goes without saying; yet, had she been enabled to see her beloved brother but once a month and her cadet friends at intervals almost as rare, that incomprehensible young damsel would have preferred the Point to any ...
— Starlight Ranch - and Other Stories of Army Life on the Frontier • Charles King
... The boy's words were incomprehensible, but the vague sense that some danger might be threatening his mother's friend made Odo whisper: "What would her Highness ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... hall or on the walk in front, had made so deep an impression upon my sensibilities that I was never without the vision of her pale face set off by the aureole of reddish brown hair, which, since my first meeting with her, had become for me the symbol of everything beautiful, incomprehensible and strange. ...
— The Bronze Hand - 1897 • Anna Katharine Green (Mrs. Charles Rohlfs)
... whole of the said sentences, phrases, denials, promises, retractions, persuasions, explanations, hints, insinuations, and intimations, has escaped and fled, so that what remains is to plain understandings incomprehensible, and to many good men is matter of painful contemplation: now this is to promise to any person who shall restore the said lost meaning, or shall illustrate, simplify, and explain the said meaning, the sum of five thousand pounds, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XIX. No. 542, Saturday, April 14, 1832 • Various
... us for our sins," cries the chronicler of St. Denys in a passion of bewildered grief as he tells the rout of the great host which he had seen mustering beneath his abbey walls. But the fall of France was hardly so sudden or so incomprehensible as the ruin at a single blow of a system of warfare, and with it of the political and social fabric which had risen out of that system. Feudalism rested on the superiority of the horseman to the footman, of the mounted noble to the unmounted churl. The real fighting power of ...
— History of the English People, Volume II (of 8) - The Charter, 1216-1307; The Parliament, 1307-1400 • John Richard Green
... yet in existence. Having lived from hand to mouth, and in many countries, since he left Westminster School, he had now practically no class feelings. An attitude of hostility to aristocracy because it was aristocracy, was as incomprehensible to him as an attitude ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... the question, and the poor man, who was as completely off his balance by Christopher's incomprehensible reception of his tidings, as that young man ...
— Christopher Hibbault, Roadmaker • Marguerite Bryant
... which you might have used for yourself"? And what good reason have you to maintain that Paul is bound to render this especial service gratuitously; that he has no right to demand anything more in consequence of this requisition; that the State ought to interfere to force him to submit? Is it not incomprehensible that the economist, who preaches such a doctrine to the people, can reconcile it with his principle of the reciprocity of services? Here I have introduced cash; I have been led to do so by a desire to place, side by side, two objects of ...
— Sophisms of the Protectionists • Frederic Bastiat
... life if Helen Douglas was a coquette. If she knew Van Shaw as well as he and Walter knew him would she smile so sweetly at him, and on such brief acquaintance? To Felix Bauer the whole thing was incomprehensible. Even allowing something for the swiftness with which acquaintances can be made in the desert during a camping experience, especially under circumstances favoured by such an accident as had occurred, it still was not seemly that a girl like Helen Douglas should even in the slightest degree encourage ...
— The High Calling • Charles M. Sheldon
... to leave us alone together for an hour or two. I went down to the door with him, for he had made me a mysterious signal to follow him. In the hall he laid his hand upon my shoulder, and whispered a few incomprehensible sentences into ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma • Hesba Stretton
... course, and, at first, only the very simplest of their mechanisms could be analyzed. But the investigators learned from the simpler mechanisms, and found themselves able to take the next step forward to more complex ones. However, it still remained a fact that the majority of the devices were as incomprehensible to the investigators as would the function of a transistor have been ...
— Dead Giveaway • Gordon Randall Garrett
... revelation! It was the Spirit of God shining through the Man. And this spirit was a substance and a form. And what was its form?—that of a man, with a face radiant as the sun. Now know I how to think of God. He is no longer a vague, incomprehensible existence; an ether floating in space. But He is a living, breathing human form, a Man! in whose image and likeness we were created. Oh, how I thank God that He has revealed this to me! Now, I know ...
— Words of Cheer for the Tempted, the Toiling, and the Sorrowing • T. S. Arthur
... I look for high compliments from you and Charlotte on this very sage instance of my unfathomable, incomprehensible wisdom. Talking of Charlotte, I must tell her that I have, to the best of my power, paid her a poetic compliment, now completed. The air is admirable: true old Highland. It was the tune of a Gaelic song, which an Inverness ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... at the moment an incomprehensible puzzle had, as we afterward learned, a very simple explanation. One of the G.S. directors, Mr. Baldwin, who had come in on Mr. Camp's car, was the owner of a great cattle-ranch near Rock Butte. When the train ...
— Master Tales of Mystery, Volume 3 • Collected and Arranged by Francis J. Reynolds
... much to be desired. The unfortunate soldiers are almost starving, and often live for days together on raw carrots, turnips, herbs, or any other vegetable they can root up out of the ground. The doctors are puzzled because men have died of such seemingly slight wounds. One case seemed so incomprehensible that an autopsy was decided on, and a raw root with fragments of earth upon it was found in the poor creature's stomach. The Russians left at 5 a.m. this morning, men and women. It is more than hard that our poor men should be left behind. Lady M——, who has been ill, and her daughter, ...
— A War-time Journal, Germany 1914 and German Travel Notes • Harriet Julia Jephson
... many foolish things, but foremost among them all was, his having made a friend of a man who was as obscure and incomprehensible to him as the most ...
— Honor Edgeworth • Vera
... Buddhist Scriptures. It was a grand idea thus to preserve indelibly on stone the whole Burmese Bible. Here it is for all time. Peep inside one and you will see the funny-looking Burmese writing, which all runs on without being divided up into words, and looks consequently so incomprehensible to us. ...
— Round the Wonderful World • G. E. Mitton
... these practical teachings I would now speak; rather of the lessons of simple faith, of unwearied patience, of self-denial and cheerful endurance, which the old man himself seemed to have learned, strangely enough, from the very sport so often called cruel and murderous. Incomprehensible as it may seem, to his simple intellect the fisherman's art was a whole system of morality, a guide for every-day life, an education, a gospel. It was all any poor mortal man, woman, or child, needed in this world to make him or her happy, ...
— Fishin' Jimmy • Annie Trumbull Slosson
... her in the least. By this time he saw that her Berserker rage had worked itself clear as fermenting wine clears itself, and that she knew now with whom she was fighting; and he seemed now to understand the incomprehensible, and to sympathize with her joy in measuring her strength against his; and yet he knew that the combat was deadly serious, and that more than life was at stake. ...
— Moran of the Lady Letty • Frank Norris
... tottering forward, swaying to and fro in maudlin efforts to keep her feet. She took up her position directly behind Harry, and looked vacantly out. She was trying to ask what was the matter, with a tongue whose palsied utterance made language incomprehensible, when Harry's friend, whom he had been watching, and whose figure he had, with love's delicate discrimination, picked out from a score of similar figures, and known to be hers, when it was but a mere ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 5, No. 6, June, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... the reports of the subsequent week. Some said that the fierce dog had broken open the urn, and devoured the embalmed heart. Some told one story—some another; and before the week was over, all the stories had become incomprehensible. ...
— The King's Own • Captain Frederick Marryat
... understood with regard to the captain, the wholesale crime of thrusting so many innocent persons out to the mercy of the winds and waves, or to the death from hunger and thirst which they must have believed would inevitably overtake them, is incomprehensible. ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... they dressed, Minette again insisting on various squeezings and fondlings, which now produced on Ethel a most strange effect, perfectly incomprehensible to her, whilst Minette seemed also ...
— The Power of Mesmerism - A Highly Erotic Narrative of Voluptuous Facts and Fancies • Anonymous
... to PROVE all this by his interpretation of the Book of Revelation; by labored calculations based upon arithmetical principles, and algebraic formulae until then unknown, but which appeared mystical and appalling from the fact that they were incomprehensible. The book was written in a style well calculated to perplex, astonish, or terrify the readers, especially those who were not well stocked with intelligence. It is therefore not remarkable that it caused a commotion wherever it was ...
— Jack in the Forecastle • John Sherburne Sleeper
... live in a tent or dug-out," was the popular way of putting it, and people were still unable to understand how she could have ever found anything to enjoy in that wild life or to make her wish to see it again. It was, therefore, incomprehensible to society that she and her two bouncing boys were utterly overwhelmed with distress at having to remain in so charming a circle, so happy a home, when it came time for the captain to return. Society ...
— Under Fire • Charles King
... "The divine nature still remained incomprehensible. Of this Lucifer was a proof; for had he thoroughly comprehended it, he would not ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... had been the general opinion that before the end of the winter or the spring, the Count de Belle Chasse would be triumphant. Why Ormond did not enter the lists, when there appeared to all the judges such a chance of his winning the prize, seemed incomprehensible to the spectators, and still more to the rival candidates. Some settled it with the exclamation "Inoui!" Others pronounced that it was English bizarrerie. Every thing seemed to smooth the slippery path of temptation—the ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. IX - [Contents: Harrington; Thoughts on Bores; Ormond] • Maria Edgeworth
... twenty days in a month, and who surely ought to be allowed to use their time in a reasonable manner. Moreover, these are the teachers whom it is most difficult to comprehend. Though they use only seven tones, they are plunged in impenetrable mysteries, in incomprehensible knowledge and a multitude of so-called secrets, out of which, indeed, nothing can ever be brought to light. For this, however, they do not consider themselves to blame, not even their hobby-horses; but, as they say, "the higher powers." We will, for once, suppose ...
— Piano and Song - How to Teach, How to Learn, and How to Form a Judgment of - Musical Performances • Friedrich Wieck
... Glowry, "I do not know what he is going to do, or what anyone is going to do, for all this is incomprehensible." ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VII • Various
... adjacent hamlet, to the spot which had long been consecrated to rural sports and guiltless festivity, near the village of Ruthyn. The sun shone with unusual splendour; the Druidical temples, composed of immense and shapeless stones, heaped upon each other by a power stupendous and incomprehensible, reflected back his radiant beams. The glade, the place of destination to the frolic shepherds, was shrouded beneath two venerable groves that encircled it on either side. The eye could not pierce beyond them, ...
— Imogen - A Pastoral Romance • William Godwin
... of the thing to me," went on M'Nicholl, giving his experience with the utmost gravity, "was why English sounded so like French. If it was simple incomprehensible gibberish, I could readily blame the state of my ears for it. But the idea that my bothered ears could turn a mere confused, muzzled, buzzing reverberation into a sweet, harmonious, articulate, though unintelligible, human language, made me sure that I was fast ...
— All Around the Moon • Jules Verne
... some one is near, it is a fearful thought, that my spirit must enter that new state of existence quite alone. We are told of the infinite glories of that state, and I believe in them, though it is incomprehensible to us; but as I do comprehend, in some degree at least, the exquisite loveliness of the visible world, I confess I shall be sorry to leave it. I shall regret the sky, the sea, with all the changes of their beautiful colouring; the earth, with its verdure and flowers: ...
— Personal Recollections, from Early Life to Old Age, of Mary Somerville • Mary Somerville
... verbal imaginations, that retain nothing but words. Or their puny thoughts have dragon-wings, all green and gold. They soar far above the vulgar failing of the Sermo humi obrepens—their most ordinary speech is never short of an hyperbole, splendid, imposing, vague, incomprehensible, magniloquent, a cento of sounding common-places. If some of us, whose 'ambition is more lowly,' pry a little too narrowly into nooks and corners to pick up a number of 'unconsidered trifles,' they never ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... out imperfectly certain conjugal situations of an analogous kind, thus imitating the philosopher of ancient time who, seeking in vain to explain motion, walked forward in his attempt to comprehend laws which were incomprehensible. ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... depreciation of Chopin's works. Field called his "a talent of the sick chamber." Moscheles, while admitting Chopin's originality, and the value of his pianistic achievements, confessed that he disliked his "harsh, inartistic, incomprehensible modulations," which often appeared "artificial and forced" to him—these same modulations which to-day transport us into the seventh heaven of delight! Mendelssohn's attitude toward Chopin was somewhat vacillating. He defended him in a letter ...
— Chopin and Other Musical Essays • Henry T. Finck
... out of a window, wanted to know what the Artist was doing. I explained our interest in the arch. Had there been a gate in her grandmother's time? Why, when so much of a former age had disappeared, did this half-arch remain? The woman was puzzled. It was incomprehensible that anyone should be interested in the arch, which had always been there. I thought I would try her on ...
— Riviera Towns • Herbert Adams Gibbons
... uttered stronger things than she thought, and sometimes said, against what seemed to her to be keeping Archie in banishment; while the brothers' reluctance to expose Mr. Moy, and blast his reputation and that of his family, was in her present frame of mind an incomprehensible weakness. People must bear the penalty of their misdeeds, families and all, and Mrs. and Miss Moy did not deserve consideration: the pretensions of the mother had always been half scorn, half thorn, to the old county families, and the fast airs of the daughter had been offensive ...
— The Three Brides • Charlotte M. Yonge
... impossible to realize in life, which is termed dethronement, imprisonment and insult toward a sovereign who formerly wielded unlimited power. To be present at—an actual witness, too—of this bitterness of death; to float, undecisively, in an incomprehensible mystery, between resemblance and reality; to hear everything, to see everything, without interfering with a single detail of agonizing suffering, was—so the king thought within himself—a torture far more terrible, since it might last forever. "Is this ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas
... thoughts reverted to the aimless, blundering movements of the last two days, to Marshal MacMahon hurrying on their retreat and insisting on getting them across the Meuse at every cost, after wasting so many precious hours in incomprehensible delays. It was too late. Doubtless the marshal, who had stormed so on finding the 7th corps still at Osches when he supposed it to be at la Besace, had felt assured that the 5th corps was safe in camp at Mouzon when, lingering in Beaumont, it ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... time Rip and his companion had laboured on in silence; for though the former marvelled greatly what could be the object of carrying a keg of liquor up this wild mountain, yet there was something strange and incomprehensible about the unknown, that ...
— Legends That Every Child Should Know • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... the incomprehensible woman is past and gone,' said Miss Abingdon, and she sighed ...
— Peter and Jane - or The Missing Heir • S. (Sarah) Macnaughtan
... rest came thus to be invaded? Why, the Nightingale, on his way from the rose-leaf, had, perhaps somewhat inconsiderately, tapped at his door, to inform him that all he could get out of the Dewdrop was (a very incomprehensible sentiment to a sleepy bird), that he was a tear wept by the Sky when it lost the Sun; and he was bound in all sincerity to add, that it seemed rather a dull ...
— The Story of a Dewdrop • J. R. Macduff
... knowledge—history of the last hundred and fifty years, arithmetic, fortification; but nothing useless of Latin and the like. Spartan training, too, which shall make a soldier of him. Whereas young Fritz has vivacities, a taste for music, finery, and excursions into forbidden realms distasteful and incomprehensible to Friedrich Wilhelm. We perceive the first small cracks of incurable division in the royal household, traceable from Fritz's sixth or seventh year; a divulsion splitting ever wider, new offences super-adding themselves. This Fritz ought to fashion himself according to his ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XII. - Modern History • Arthur Mee
... and therefore the least guilty, of all the persons mentioned in this passage. He had probably never heard the name of Jesus till that day, and saw nothing but an ordinary Jewish peasant, whom his countrymen, like the incomprehensible and troublesome people they were, wished, for some fantastic reason, ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... half-child of the West. She fairly palpitated with joy and babbled away with the freedom of a sunny brook in the shadow of a grim forest. From the man's standpoint, he was not unkind; unrestraint was to him an incomprehensible factor in a young girl's make-up; and whatever was to follow, the first characters he meant her to learn must spell reverence ...
— The Lady and Sada San - A Sequel to The Lady of the Decoration • Frances Little
... that she was downright plain, but might probably be that mysterious and incomprehensible and dangerous creature, "a gentleman's beauty," which, to women, means no beauty at all, but a witch-like creature, that goes and hits foul, and eclipses real beauty—dolls, ...
— The Woman-Hater • Charles Reade
... was a prevailing belief in Scotland, and, in fact, the opinion still lingers there, that certain persons among the old Highlanders had what they called the gift of the second sight—that is, the power of foreseeing futurity in some mysterious and incomprehensible way. An incident is related in the old histories connected with Charles's infancy, which is a good illustration of this. While King James was preparing to leave Scotland, to take possession of the English throne, an old Highland laird came to bid him farewell. He gave ...
— Charles I - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... stayed at home. But with her suspicions of the former night, she had determined to watch the singular relative of her friend. Added to a natural loyalty to the Lanes, she was moved by a certain curiosity and fascination towards this incomprehensible man. ...
— Sally Dows and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... the proposition of the heroic enthusiast, I think, deals with the imbecility of human nature (ingegno) which, intent on the Divine undertaking, finds itself all at once engulphed in the abyss of incomprehensible excellence, and the sense and the imagination become confused and absorbed, and not knowing how to pass on, nor to go back, nor where to turn, vanishes and loses itself as a drop of water vanishes in the sea, or as a small spirit, becomes attenuated, losing its own substance in the space and ...
— The Heroic Enthusiast, Part II (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno
... served up to us on the long unpainted table that stood in the middle of the room. During the repast our host, the priest, sat with folded hands intently regarding us, while the rest of the people clustered around the door and open windows, eying us with indescribable and incomprehensible curiosity. If we had been visitors from the moon we could not have attracted more attention. Even the stolid Indians, a few of whom strolled lazily about, came and gazed at us until the pompous old man in faded Mexican uniform drove them noisily away from the window, where they shut out ...
— Stories by American Authors (Volume 4) • Constance Fenimore Woolson
... me," I said; "the thing is utterly incomprehensible." I switched off the light of the lamp. "I'll see if there's any sign of ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer
... divinity among many gods. These ultimately lost themselves in him so indistinguishably that there are litanies in which the names of seventy-five of them are used in addressing him. Regarded as the unbegotten begetter of the first beginning, he succeeded in achieving the incomprehensible. He became triune and remained unique. He was Osiris, he was Isis, he was Horus. At once father, mother, and son, he fecundated, conceived, ...
— The Lords of the Ghostland - A History of the Ideal • Edgar Saltus
... over the beautiful face. "You talk as foolishly as a child," she said with contempt. "You know nothing of the subject you are discussing, therefore anything I might say would sound incomprehensible. The grossness of the flesh stifles and kills the subtle workings of the spirit. To you life is only a pleasure ground, and the more your own personal satisfaction is obtainable, the more you cling to its spurious enjoyments. If you once cut yourself adrift from such follies, your eyes would ...
— The Mystery of a Turkish Bath • E.M. Gollan (AKA Rita)
... grew to have such regard for Pythagoras that he was given every opportunity to know the inmost secrets of the mysteries. He said he encompassed them all, save those alone which were incomprehensible. ...
— Little Journeys To The Homes Of Great Teachers • Elbert Hubbard
... perils, sicknesses, poverty, bondage, public shame, evil chances; keeping me from perishing in my sins, and waiting patiently for my full conversion. Glory be to Thee, O Lord, glory to Thee, for Thine incomprehensible and unimaginable goodness toward me of all sinners far and away the most unworthy. The voices and the concert of voices of angels and men be to Thee; the concert of all thy saints in heaven and of all Thy creatures in heaven and on earth; and of me, beneath their feet an unworthy and wretched ...
— Bunyan Characters - Third Series - The Holy War • Alexander Whyte
... St. Albans on such and such days; and when he replied as to his whereabouts with that easy grace of bearing which always characterized his dealings with men and women alike, they would shake their heads, flirt their fans, and call him by whimsical names incomprehensible to Tom, but which he knew implied that he was suspected of being concerned in very ...
— Tom Tufton's Travels • Evelyn Everett-Green
... as though the smile with which he told funny stories had not left his lips, as though a quiet tenderness still lay hidden in the corner of his eyes. But the wedding-dress they did not dare to take off; and they could not change his eyes—the dark, terrible eyes from out of which stared the incomprehensible There. ...
— Best Russian Short Stories • Various
... appeared in 1835. Strafford, Browning's first drama, had a little more vogue; it was acted for a while. When Sordello, that strange child of genius, was born in 1840, those who tried to read its first pages declared they were incomprehensible. It seems that critics in those days had either less intelligence than we have, or were more impatient and less attentive, for not only Sordello but even In Memoriam was ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... him. This stranger was William Losely, returned from penal exile; and while Darrell, on hearing this announcement, stood mute with haughty wonder that such a visitor could cross the threshold of his father's house, the convict began what seemed to Darrell a story equally audacious and incomprehensible—the infant Matilda had borne to Jasper, and the certificates of whose death had been so ceremoniously produced and so prudently attested, lived still! Sent out to nurse as soon as born, the nurse had in her charge another babe, and this ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... again, this fatuous intolerance! this incomprehensible provincialism! And the terrible part of it was that he had suddenly the sensation of being overwhelmed by the weight of it, of being smothered under a mountain of prejudice. The flame of his anger against Cyrus went out abruptly, leaving him cold. It was the world now against which ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... swiftly drawn, made to live. There are excellent sketches of people—a courtly hotelkeeper in some God-forsaken hamlet, his self-respect triumphing over his wallow; a group of babbling Civil War veterans, endlessly mouthing incomprehensible jests; the half-grown beaux and belles of the summer resorts, enchanted and yet a bit staggered by the awakening of sex; Booth pere and his sinister politics; broken and forgotten men in the Indiana ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... Mr. MacBorrowdale. I like to see my dinner. And herein I rejoice to have Addison on my side; for I remember a paper, in which he objects to having roast beef placed on a sideboard. Even in his day it had been displaced to make way for some incomprehensible French dishes, among which he could find nothing to eat.{1} I do not know what he would have said to its being placed altogether out of sight. Still there is something to be said on the other side. There is hardly one ...
— Gryll Grange • Thomas Love Peacock
... drama adorns its more varied pictures. Or, to express myself in other terms, the principle of the antique poetry is ideal; that of the romantic is mystical: the former subjects space and time to the internal free-agency of the mind; the latter honours these incomprehensible essences as supernatural powers, in which there is somewhat of ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... will be as incomprehensible to the democratic citizen as alchemy, but, in order to draw anything like true inferences or useful deductions, in order to understand the situation and to get a true likeness of the ruler, one must take this utterly unfamiliar and to us incomprehensible ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... arises from the purely intellectual and spiritual nature of the Christian God. It is as if Homer had had to deal with the divine unity of Plato instead of {157} with his family of loving, quarrelling, fighting gods and goddesses. A being who is Incomprehensible as well as Almighty and Omniscient can hardly be an actor in a poem written for human readers. The gods in the Iliad shock us because they are too like ourselves: Milton's God may sometimes shock us too: but He is more often in danger of fatiguing us by ...
— Milton • John Bailey
... overclouded him fitfully, without any apparent reason. While one external cause, and that a reference to his long lingering agony, would always—as on the trial—evoke this condition from the depths of his soul, it was also in its nature to arise of itself, and to draw a gloom over him, as incomprehensible to those unacquainted with his story as if they had seen the shadow of the actual Bastille thrown upon him by a summer sun, when the substance was ...
— A Tale of Two Cities - A Story of the French Revolution • Charles Dickens
... stars. I hold this to be more easily comprehensible than when the mind is confused by an almost endless number of circles, which is necessarily the case with those who keep the earth in the middle of the universe. Although this may appear incomprehensible and contrary to the opinion of many, I shall, if God wills, make it clearer than the sun, at least to those who are not ignorant ...
— A History of Science, Volume 2(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... the newspapers, or what the Czar expected to learn from such an agent, nobody undertook to explain. The phrase was a convenient one, and, like many others equally senseless, was currently adopted because it seemed to explain the incomprehensible; and certainly, to the multitude, no man was ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 109, November, 1866 • Various
... labor upon higher platforms. This was the case with Carlyle; and when he published that new Book of Job, that weird and marvellous Pilgrim's Progress of a modern cultivated soul, the "Sartor Resartus," in "Fraser's Magazine," strange, wild, and incomprehensible as it was to most men, they did not put it contemptuously aside, but pondered it, laughed at it, trembled over it and its dread apocalyptical visions and revelations, respecting its earnestness and eloquence, although not comprehending ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... had happened. But this one was a real event, publicly known, and by means of which it was sought to silence the Pharisees. All the enemies of Jesus were exasperated by the sensation it caused. It is related that they sought to kill Lazarus." It is incomprehensible why this should be if Renan were right in his opinion that all that happened at Bethany was the getting up of a mock scene, intended to strengthen belief in Jesus. "Perhaps Lazarus, still pale from his illness, had himself wrapped in a shroud and laid in the family grave. These ...
— Christianity As A Mystical Fact - And The Mysteries of Antiquity • Rudolf Steiner
... one place, sometimes in another. Hay-mows, river-banks, threshing-floors, these were the old places of resort for country boys. And nothing was so sweet to me, when I was a boy, as the newly cut clover-hay where I sat with two or three companions, watching the barn swallows chattering their incomprehensible gabble and gossip from the doors of their mud houses in the rafters. And what stories we told and what talks we had. In the city who does not remember the old-fashioned cellar-door, sloping down to the ground? These ...
— Queer Stories for Boys and Girls • Edward Eggleston
... opened the cab door for them himself, and gave them the gaze of wondering approval which he reserved for these fair daughters. To him their growth, development, and beauty seemed something magical, incomprehensible. He had left them in the lank, homely, tooth-shedding period, at the time he placed them in school, and when he returned to see them graduated, here were two blooming maidens on the very borderland of charming womanhood. The usual love and pride of a father was in him a rapture made ...
— All Aboard - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... "What an incomprehensible machine is man! Who can endure toil, famine, stripes, imprisonment, and death itself, in vindication of his own liberty, and the next moment be deaf to all those motives, whose power supported him through his trial, and inflict on his fellow-men ...
— Clotel; or, The President's Daughter • William Wells Brown
... us at the railway. I am afraid he resented papa's incomprehensible resolution not to give him a hearing. He was silent and sullen. I could not conceal that to see this state of feeling distressed me. He showed how truly he deserved to be loved—he begged my pardon, and he became his ...
— The Legacy of Cain • Wilkie Collins
... inexplicable, recondite, cabalistic, inscrutable, secret, dark, mystic, transcendental, enigmatical, mystical, unfathomable, hidden, obscure, unfathomed, incomprehensible, occult, unknown. ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... Parliament or not? Nothing. Not a tuppenny damn. You can't understand. It's the party and the country. For myself, personally, the whole thing can go to blazes. I'm in earnest, dead earnest," he continued, with a vehemence incomprehensible to Wilson. "If anybody doesn't think so, I'll clear out at once"—he snapped his fingers. "But while I'm candidate everything I say I mean. I mean it intensely—with all my soul. And I say that if there's a single insulting reference to Mr. Finn during this election, ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... of democracy incomprehensible after this? Ambitious and continually thwarted, he could not reproach himself. He had once already tried his fortune by inventing a purgative pill, something like Morrison's, and intrusted the business operations to an old hospital chum, a house-student who afterwards took a retail drug business; ...
— Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac
... the unfaltering tenacity with which the Mannheim dog, Rolf, remembers names, so that it would seem more reasonable to ascribe the spelling of the name to her excellent memory than to thought-transference, which would be quite as inexplicable and incomprehensible. ...
— Lola - The Thought and Speech of Animals • Henny Kindermann
... sadness and not of jubilee." As for General Valencia's congratulation to the president, in which he compares the "honourable troops" to the Supreme Being, the re-establishment of order in Mexico to the creation of the world from chaos, it is chiefly incomprehensible. Perhaps he is carried away by his joy and gratitude, and personal affection for Bustamante—perhaps he has taken a leaf from ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon De La Barca
... children had left off calling after him, and the tradesmen served him without a word. The slightest allusion to his clothing had the power to puzzle and frighten especially, as if it were something utterly unwarranted and incomprehensible. ...
— To-morrow • Joseph Conrad
... sympathy between the motions of the Kandyan potentate and our European enemy Napoleon. Both pitched into us in 1803, and we pitched into both in 1815. That we call a coincidence. How the row began was thus: some incomprehensible intrigues had been proceeding for a time between the British governor or commandant, or whatever he might be, and the Kandyan prime minister. This minister, who was a noticeable man, with large grey eyes, was called Pilame Tilawe. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various
... select society. The little one sang like a nightingale, thanks to Madame Dobson's expressive method. By the way, this Madame Dobson was another most excellent creature. There was just one thing that disturbed poor Risler, that was his incomprehensible misunderstanding with Sigismond. Perhaps Frantz could help him ...
— Fromont and Risler, Complete • Alphonse Daudet
... blue, and orange draperies, and loaded with gold and tinsel, and sparkling stones and spangles, all doubled in splendour by the reflection of a mirror in the background. The figures, set in motion by the same machinery which grinds the incomprehensible overture, perform a drama equally incomprehensible. At the left-hand corner is Daniel in the lion's den, the lion opening his mouth in six-eight time, and an angel with outspread wings, but securely ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 430 - Volume 17, New Series, March 27, 1852 • Various
... "It is verbiage," said Metternich; and his master, though unwillingly, signed the treaty. With England the case was still worse. As the Prince Regent was not in Paris, Alexander had to confide the articles of the Holy Alliance to Lord Castlereagh. Of all things in the world the most incomprehensible to Castlereagh was religious enthusiasm. "The fact is," he wrote home to the English Premier, "that the Emperor's mind is not completely sound." [243] Apart, however, from the Czar's sanity or insanity, it was impossible for the Prince Regent, ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... horizon of the plains or woods, was the unmistakable enemy.... But to-day you can no longer tell.... You have to acquaint yourself with a civilization of which you disapprove, to appear to understand a thousand incomprehensible things.... Thus, it seems evident that henceforth the whole world no longer belongs to the master, that his property conforms to unintelligible limits.... It becomes necessary, therefore, first of all to know exactly where the ...
— Our Friend the Dog • Maurice Maeterlinck
... measureless; innumerable, immeasurable, incalculable, illimitable, inexhaustible, interminable, unfathomable, unapproachable; exhaustless, indefinite; without number, without measure, without limit, without end; incomprehensible; limitless, endless, boundless, termless[obs3]; untold, unnumbered, unmeasured, unbounded, unlimited; illimited[obs3]; perpetual &c. 112. Adv. infinitely &c. adj.; ad infinitum. Phr. "as boundless as ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... as if you had been acquiring some penetration; you were not so explicit the last time you insisted on thanking me. Who can have been teaching you? It seems, however, that I'm still incomprehensible." ...
— Ranching for Sylvia • Harold Bindloss
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