"Adamantine" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... truth of Mr Whittlestaff, he was a man very open to such shafts of ridicule. The "robur et aes triplex" which fortified his heart went only to the doing of a good and unselfish action, and did not extend to providing him with that adamantine shield which virtue should of itself supply. He was as pervious to these stings as a man might be who had not strength to act in opposition to them. He could screw himself up to the doing of a great deed for the benefit of another, and could as he was ...
— An Old Man's Love • Anthony Trollope
... them, and wickedly denied. But indeed old Mrs. Verrall was no more capable of doubting the perfection of her family's right to dominate a wide country side, than she was of examining the Thirty-nine Articles or dealing with any other of the adamantine pillars upon which her ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... and blossoms He insures the ultimate protection of the fruit. What protection, analogous to this, has He established for animals; or, taking up the question in the ideal case, for man, the supreme of His creatures? We perceive that He has relied upon love, upon love strengthened to the adamantine force of insanity or delirium, by the mere aspect of utter, utter helplessness in the human infant. It is not by power, by means visibly developed, that this result is secured, but by means spiritual and 'transcendental' in the ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... feeling of love, was bound in adamantine chains to her sister. Time and fortune, that shatter all human institutions and prove human feelings, consolidated the union of their hearts and their destinies. A stranger on stronger proof of the influence of sisterly affection could not be adduced; it dragged the beautiful, blushing Aloysia ...
— Alvira: the Heroine of Vesuvius • A. J. O'Reilly
... Huntingdon could not leave before then. On the day before that fixed for the journey the bond was to be sealed and signed between them, so that no power of man could part them. Mr. Huntingdon might storm ever so loudly, his anger would break against an adamantine fate. "Those whom God has joined together no man can put asunder"—words ...
— Wee Wifie • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... manliness, besides those associations of sentiment and imagination which, if there must be an aristocracy, lend it an artistic consistency. But here, where everybody says that all men are equal, and everybody is afraid they will be; where there are no adamantine barriers of birth and caste; people are anxiously exclusive. And though the forms of aristocracy flourish more gorgeously in their native soil, the genuine virus can be found in New York almost ...
— Humanity in the City • E. H. Chapin
... Alexander Crummell, the finished scholar, the magnetic preacher, the brave, uncompromising idealist, who was dreaded by imposters and fakirs and time-servers and flunkies. He was one of those rugged, adamantine spirits, who could stand against the world for a principle, but he was gracious, courteous, tender and sympathetic withal. Tall, slender, symmetrical, erect in bearing, with a graceful and elastic walk, with a refined and aristocratic face that was lighted up by keen ...
— Alexander Crummell: An Apostle of Negro Culture - The American Negro Academy. Occasional Papers No. 20 • William H. Ferris
... righteousness can urge against it. His throne can no more be shaken by the puny attacks of men or devils than the everlasting mountains can be disturbed by the storm-blasts which howl around them. What more, then, is needed, than to shut up the wicked in a prison-house, through whose adamantine walls the accusing cry can never pierce, and whose doors are for ever barred by the holy decree of the Almighty? Ah! were it so, even this thought might possibly gratify pride and enmity, could a condemned, though ...
— Parish Papers • Norman Macleod
... could issue forth. Beyond this fierce horizon, farther yet Than vision's wing could bear my gaze, I knew Hell's desolate kingdoms stretched their iron wastes, Hell's burning mountains waved their brands of flame, Hell's lava rivers plunged in fury down Their adamantine beds. ...
— Pan and Aeolus: Poems • Charles Hamilton Musgrove
... you enter here On this sacred Ring must swear, [Puts it on his Finger, holds his Hand. By the Figure which is round, Your Passion constant and profound; By the Adamantine Stone, To be ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. III • Aphra Behn
... and in saying that I might be accused or put to death or boxed on the ears with impunity. For I may repeat once more, that to strike is worse than to be stricken—to do than to suffer. What I said then is now made fast in adamantine bonds. I myself know not the true nature of these things, but I know that no one can deny my words and not be ridiculous. To do wrong is the greatest of evils, and to suffer wrong is the next greatest evil. He who would avoid the last must be ...
— Gorgias • Plato
... me you have made up your mind," cried the lady hysterically, who knew from a twelve years' experience that John Temple's made-up mind was like an adamantine wall to all her ...
— Hubert's Wife - A Story for You • Minnie Mary Lee
... they are bound by the adamantine chain of destiny is most certain, if it be proved that they are never to exercise their own reason, never to be independent, never to rise above opinion, or to feel the dignity of a rational will that only bows to God, and often ...
— A Vindication of the Rights of Woman - Title: Vindication of the Rights of Women • Mary Wollstonecraft [Godwin]
... concerning volition, or the governing determinations of the mind, all will agree in the fact, that the energies of the human soul, when aroused, may be strung like fibres of steel, giving and adamantine firmness and indomitable force to the will. We have seen this exemplified in the fortitude with which one sometimes endures surgical operation; in the heated courage of the soldier, rushing with ...
— The Faithful Steward - Or, Systematic Beneficence an Essential of Christian Character • Sereno D. Clark
... once to build the depot; the snow here was excellent for this purpose — as hard as glass. In a short time an immense erection of adamantine blocks of snow rose into the air, containing provisions for five men for six days and for eighteen dogs for five days. A number of small articles were also ...
— The South Pole, Volumes 1 and 2 • Roald Amundsen
... people and the tenor of their laws. The Ironside quality of their creed showed itself in the cruelties with which they visited the Indians; the severity of their tenets was felt by all who could not readily adapt themselves to the adamantine ethics of men of the type of Endicott and Mather. There was not wanting, too, a spirit of lawlessness in the English America, curiously in contrast with the law-abiding character of the Non-conformist colonizations. Along the seaboard wild pirates nestled, skimmers ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume II (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... words, and murmurs made to bless, 60 But els in deep of night when drowsines Hath lockt up mortal sense, then listen I To the celestial Sirens harmony, That sit upon the nine enfolded Sphears, And sing to those that hold the vital shears, And turn the Adamantine spindle round, On which the fate of gods and men is wound. Such sweet compulsion doth in musick ly, To lull the daughters of Necessity, And keep unsteddy Nature to her law, 70 And the low world in measur'd ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... lost in doubts below, But guess by rumour, and but boast we know,) O say what heroes, fired by thirst of fame, Or urged by wrongs, to Troy's destruction came. To count them all, demands a thousand tongues, A throat of brass, and adamantine lungs. Daughters of Jove, assist! inspired by you The mighty labour dauntless I pursue; What crowded armies, from what climes they bring, Their names, their numbers, and their chiefs ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... the palace three beautiful females, clothed in cerulean robes spangled with stars, and their heads adorned with golden crowns, were at work together. One held a distaff, from which the second spun; and the third wielded an enormous pair of adamantine shears, with which she perpetually severed the labours of her sisters. Tall were they in stature and beautiful in form. Very fair; an expression of haughty serenity pervaded their majestic countenances. Their three companions, however, though ...
— The Infernal Marriage • Benjamin Disraeli
... anything. She simply CLOUDED UP, if I may so express the effect that came and remained upon her countenance, which was now the countenance she had shown me the first evening I saw her, when I saw the Deerings cowering in its shadow. I had no need to look at the adamantine little man before her to know that he was softening into wax, and, in fact, I felt a sort of indecency in beholding his inteneration, for I knew that it came from his heart, and had its consecration ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... not experienced this overmastering infatuation, and they know that even supposing the object becomes perfectly unworthy, unfaithful, abusive, and with every vice indulged openly before them, they may wince, they may thoroughly despise her, but the chain holds them fast in adamantine bonds, which neither the persuasion of friends nor their own knowledge of the perfect unworthiness of ...
— The Romance of Lust - A classic Victorian erotic novel • Anonymous
... to you, Adelbert, that your wife made a mistake also? Did it ever bore itself through your adamantine skull that it is not an unbroken round of gayety for a young girl to shut herself up in a lonesome house for three years, gradually acquiring children, and meantime being "sassed" by her husband because she is ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye
... seemed my family, the office, the world, as I listened to my guru in the high Himalayan solitudes. Yet adamantine truth rang in his words; I submissively agreed to leave this blessed haven of peace. Babaji instructed me in the ancient rigid rules which govern the transmission of the yogic art ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... vault that faery hall, As heaven low resting on the wave it spread Its floors of flashing light, Its vast and azure dome; And on the verge of that obscure abyss 225 Where crystal battlements o'erhang the gulf Of the dark world, ten thousand spheres diffuse Their lustre through its adamantine gates. ...
— The Daemon of the World • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... man's creation, it is not his handiwork. It is no mere provincialism of this dwindling sphere of ours, but a fact and a law supreme, holding sway beyond the uttermost star, valid in infinity and eternity, at this hour, the sovereign law of life for whatsoever or whomsoever lives and knows, the adamantine foundation upon which all law, civilisation, religion ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... Creator remained in his own nature. And his children, receiving from him the immortal principle, borrowed from the world portions of earth, air, fire, water, hereafter to be returned, which they fastened together, not with the adamantine bonds which bound themselves, but by little invisible pegs, making each separate body out of all the elements, subject to influx and efflux, and containing the courses of the soul. These swelling ...
— Timaeus • Plato
... and at the sacred shrines Kneel to adore? Good, easy dupes! What win we From faith and pious awe? to touch with prayers The tenants of yon azure realms on high, Were hard as with an arrow's point to pierce The silvery moon. Hid is the womb of time, Impregnable to mortal glance, and deaf The adamantine walls of heaven rebound The voice of anguish:—Oh, 'tis one, whate'er The flight of birds—the aspect of the stars! The book of nature is a maze—a dream The sage's ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... was the chequered countenance of his character, a smile while he was writing, a tear when he had published! "I know," he exclaims, "that this book will live and escape the havoc that has been made of my literary fame." Again—"Before I die, I think my literary fame may be fixed on an adamantine foundation." Our old acquaintance, Blas of Santillane, at setting out on his travels, conceived himself to be la huitieme merveille du monde; but here is one, who, after the experience of a long life, is writing a large work to prove himself that ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... opinion. I, for my part, should have said that Winifred's story proclaimed her aunt to be a worthy member of a flunkey society like this of ours—a society whose structure, political and moral and religious, is based on an adamantine rock ...
— Aylwin • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... four or five times more, and passed between rocks, and broken land, through a very uncultivated and romantic vale, we began to ascend the Pyrenees upon a noble road, indeed! hewn upon the sides of those adamantine hills, of a considerable width, and an easy ascent, quite up to the high Fortress of Bellegarde, which stands upon the pinnacle of the highest hill, and ...
— A Year's Journey through France and Part of Spain, 1777 - Volume 1 (of 2) • Philip Thicknesse
... in the rock," Saint Bernard said, "Grave it on brass with adamantine pen! 'Tis God himself becomes apparent, when God's wisdom and God's ...
— Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... of the central figure in the book. Carlyle mixed with all sorts and conditions of men and women, from the peasants of Annandale to the best intellectual society of London. He was always, or almost always, the first man in the company, not elated, nor over-awed," standing on the adamantine basis of his manhood, casting aside all props and shoars." From snobbishness, the corroding vice of English society, he was, though he once jocularly charged himself with it, entirely free. He judged individuals on their merits with an eye as piercing and as pitiless as Saint Simon's. On ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... all the Rakshasas together bear the strength of my arms. Behold these strong arms of mine, each like unto the trunk of an elephant. Behold also these thighs of mine like unto iron maces, and this broad and adamantine chest. O beautiful one, thou shall today behold my prowess like unto that of Indra. O thou of fair hips, hate me not, thinking that I ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... for his resolution and success in rebuffing would-be patrons eager to pamper me. Also, all winter, I dreaded that he would he less lucky or less adamantine when ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... thrusts him down from heaven. He, wandering here, In mournful terms, with sad and heavy cheer, Complained to Cupid. Cupid for his sake, To be revenged on Jove did undertake. And those on whom heaven, earth, and hell relies, I mean the adamantine Destinies, He wounds with love, and forced them equally To dote upon deceitful Mercury. They offered him the deadly fatal knife That shears the slender threads of human life. At his fair feathered feet the engines laid Which th' earth from ugly Chaos' den upweighed. These he regarded not ...
— Hero and Leander • Christopher Marlowe
... that, when described, it was too late to alter the helm. Its giant shape filled the foreground, towering high above the masts, grim and gaunt and ghastly, immovable as the adamantine buttresses of a frowning seaboard, while the liner lurched and staggered like a wounded thing in agony as her engines slowly drew her back from the rampart against ...
— Sinking of the Titanic - and Great Sea Disasters • Various
... with an avaricious light at sight of the roll of yellow banknotes which Smith flung carelessly upon the bar, but he had earned his living by his wits too long to betray eagerness. He masked the adamantine hardness of his grasping nature beneath an air ...
— 'Me-Smith' • Caroline Lockhart
... laughs again; and stricken hard, Turns to his stroke his adamantine scales, That fear no discipline of ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... stood amidst a field of the ghastly dead and shrieking wounded, when the tide of a great battle raged fiercest and strongest, his foothold bathed in the life-blood of his comrades. Such scenes ever tend to pervert the kinder tendencies of our nature, and to render the mind adamantine in its manifestations; nor were his less susceptible to these influences than others. When first he entered the ranks of the army, and joined in the death-dealing battle, he saw the daily commission of crimes which made ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 6 June 1848 • Various
... submit the question of her guilt or innocence to twelve individuals of the opposite sex; and permits the female complainant to rehearse the story of her wrongs before the same collection of colossal intellects and adamantine hearts. ...
— Courts and Criminals • Arthur Train
... kindly laid upon him, and has enslaved himself with a thousand superstitious observances which to us appear absurd; but his sincerity should awaken in us an affectionate interest in his behalf, not engender the bitter hatred which at present forms an adamantine barrier between us. If the Protestant would give up a little of his bigotry, and the Catholic a part of his superstition, and they would consent to meet each other half way, as brothers of one common manhood, inspired by the same Christian hope, and bound to the same heavenly country, we should ...
— Life in the Clearings versus the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... Pelops: while diffidence, and the Muse who presides over the peaceful lyre, forbid me to diminish the praise of illustrious Caesar, and yours, through defect of genius. Who with sufficient dignity will describe Mars covered with adamantine coat of mail, or Meriones swarthy with Trojan dust, or the son of Tydeus by the favor of Pallas a match for the gods? We, whether free, or ourselves enamored of aught, light as our wont, sing of banquets; we, of the battles of maids ...
— The Works of Horace • Horace
... face had taken upon itself that appalling and exasperating calmness of very good people who never get angry, but drive others to frenzy by the simple occlusion of an adamantine veil between their own feelings and their opponents'. "I'll tell you all about it after I've put up the horse," he said hurriedly, glad to escape until the veil was lifted again. "I suppose the hired ...
— The Argonauts of North Liberty • Bret Harte
... freshness? Fetters thee that lovely mien? That glance so full of truth and goodness, With an adamantine chain? Vain the hardy wish to tear me From those meshes that ensnare me; For the moment I would flee, Straight my path ...
— The Youth of Goethe • Peter Hume Brown
... mine no more—Time hath them all, Time and his adamantine gaoler Death: Despoilure vast—yet seemeth it but small, When unto thee I turn, thy bloom and breath Filling with light and incense the last shrine, ...
— The Lonely Dancer and Other Poems • Richard Le Gallienne
... to love and hate, and plot and scheme of their own accord. There was unalloyed pleasure in the composition of that first story, and the knowledge that it was to be actually printed and published, and not to be declined with thanks by adamantine magazine editors, like a certain short story which I had lately written, and which contained the germ of "Lady Audley's Secret." Indeed, at this period of my life, the postman's knock had become associated ...
— The Idler, Volume III., Issue XIII., February 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly. Edited By Jerome K. Jerome & Robert Barr • Various
... religion as a serious scourge, and by the simple process of reducing it to a petty nuisance. For men become civilized, not in proportion to their willingness to believe, but in proportion to their readiness to doubt. The more stupid the man, the larger his stock of adamantine assurances, the heavier his load of faith. When Copernicus proved that the earth revolved around the sun, he did not simply prove that the earth revolved around the sun, he also proved that the so-called revelation of God, as contained in the Old Testament, was rubbish. The first fact was relatively ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... the gloomy North bid proud defiance, in their solitude, to man's triumphant daring. Who shall pierce the ancient prison-house where Nature's might, in mightier chains of adamantine frost, lies fettered, since Creation? Who shall live where promontories huge, of piled ice, like monstrous fragments of primeval worlds tossed on the surge of Chaos, over the waves rear their triumphant heads, and laugh to scorn the undreaded ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... literature. He had formed his mind by Helvetius, whose system he deemed irrefutable, and in whom alone he had faith. Armed with the principles of his great master, he believed he could pass through existence in adamantine armour, and always gave you in the business of life the idea of a man who was conscious you were trying to take him in, and rather respected you for it, but the working of whose cold, unkind, eye ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... as child Goeth with his prayer to bed; Dungeon-beams, from quenchless head; Poets, making earth aware Of its wealth in good and fair; And the benders to their intent, Of metal and of element; Of flame the enlightener, beauteous, And steam, that bursteth his iron house; And adamantine giants blind, That, ...
— Captain Sword and Captain Pen - A Poem • Leigh Hunt
... nick of time, at the moment that those matters herein recorded were about entering into the widespread insatiable maw of oblivion—if I had not dragged them out, as it were, by the very locks, just as the monster's adamantine fangs were closing upon them for ever! And here have I, as before observed, carefully collected, collated, and arranged them, scrip and scrap, "punt en punt, gat en gat," and commenced in this little work, a history to serve as a foundation on ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... Power Hurled headlong flaming from the ethereal sky, With hideous ruin and combustion, down To bottomless perdition; there to dwell In adamantine chains and penal ...
— The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' • Thomas Orchard
... the unanimity which prevails on matters in general, both above decks and below. 'But your ship,' says Carlyle, 'cannot double Cape Horn by its excellent plans of voting: the ship, to get round Cape Horn, will find a set of conditions already voted for, and fixed with adamantine rigour, by the ancient Elemental Powers, who are entirely careless how you vote. If you can by voting, or without voting, ascertain these conditions, and valiantly conform to them, you will get round the Cape: if you cannot, the ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... illustrious through the sable curtain of my ink, and in sublimity transcend the galaxy itself, though wafted on the pinions of a gray goose quill! But, ah! celestial enchantress! the necromancy of thy tyrannical charms hath fettered my faculties with adamantine chains, which, unless thy compassion shall melt I must eternally remain in the Tartarean gulf of dismal despair. Vouchsafe, therefore, O thou brightest luminary of this terrestrial sphere! to warm, as well as shine; and let the genial rays of thy benevolence ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... Mrs. Siddons, about whom all the world has been talking, exposed her beautiful, adamantine, soft, and lovely person, for the first time at Smock Alley Theatre in the bewitching, melting, and all tearful character of Isabella. From the repeated panegyrics of the impartial London newspapers, ...
— English as She is Wrote - Showing Curious Ways in which the English Language may be - made to Convey Ideas or obscure them. • Anonymous
... side, the Markrute brother and sister were of very noble lineage; even with his bar sinister the financier could not brook the disgrace of Elinka. He had loved her so—the one soft side of his adamantine character. Her disgrace, it seemed, had frozen all the ...
— The Reason Why • Elinor Glyn
... physical resistance to the Fugitive Slave Law by his non-resistant doctrine, it seemed that all the energy and belligerency of the man went into the most tremendous verbal expressions. They were like adamantine projectiles flung with the savage strength of a catapult against the walls of slavery. The big sinners, like Webster and Clay, he singled out for condign punishment, were objects of his utmost severities of speech. It ...
— William Lloyd Garrison - The Abolitionist • Archibald H. Grimke
... by trying to expunge the sacred memory of the fourth of July? Shall we help them to obliterate the associations that cluster around the glorious struggle for independence, or stultify the labors of the patriots who erected this magnificent political edifice upon the adamantine base of human liberty? Shall we surrender the fame of Washington and Laurens, of Gadsden and the Lees, of Jefferson and Madison, and of the myriads of heroes whose names are imperishably connected with the memory of a ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... victory on the belief that, under the strain of war, the far-flung British Empire, with its heterogeneous elements and racial jealousies, would promptly crumble. It was a vital error. Instead of crumbling it hardened into a unity which is adamantine. Canada has already contributed half a million men to the British armies, Australia three hundred thousand. South Africa, by undertaking her own defense, released the imperial regiments stationed there. She not only suppressed the German-fomented rebellion, ...
— Italy at War and the Allies in the West • E. Alexander Powell
... and sing, for only thus couldst thou rightly guard the golden knowledge, Truth, the delicate pearl and the adamantine jewel of the Law. ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. II. (of II.), Jewish Poems: Translations • Emma Lazarus
... at her, felt as one does who has been reading a fairy-tale and is called to the family meal. All the things he had meant to say, that had seemed so eloquent, now seemed foolish. He awoke her hastily in case his courage should fail before that most adamantine thing—an unsympathetic atmosphere. ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb
... Captain Godfrey Peasley relieved the situation; she had a habit of relieving situations—when she did not make them tenser. She had gotten into the Shakespeare Reading Society purely by persistence and the possession of adamantine self-confidence. From that shot-proof exterior snubs, hints and reproofs glanced like blown peas from the hull of a battleship. "Heaven knows," confided Mrs. Captain Wingate to Miss Taylor and the Reverend Mrs. Dishup, "why Amelia Peasley ever wanted ...
— Fair Harbor • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... names of sutras, especially those whose contents are metaphysical in their nature. The Vajrasan, Diamond Throne or Thunderbolt seat, was the name applied to the most sacred part of the great temple reared by Asoka on the site of the bodhi tree, under which Gautama received enlightenment. "The adamantine truths of Buddha struck like a thunderbolt upon the superstitious of his age." "The word vagra has the two senses of hardness and utility. In the former sense it is understood to be compared to the secret truth which is always ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... it. Surely the adamantine barrier of marriage with another could not be pierced like this! It did violence to custom. Yet a new law might do anything. But was it at all within the bounds of probability that a woman who, over ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... left the Lizard Head. You no longer look on variously shaped and variously coloured "serpentine" rocks; it is granite, and granite alone, that appears everywhere—granite, less lofty and less eccentric in form than the "serpentine" cliffs and crags; but presenting an appearance of adamantine solidity and strength, a mighty breadth of outline and an unbroken vastness of extent, nobly adapted to the purpose of protecting the shores of Cornwall, where they are most exposed to the fury ...
— Rambles Beyond Railways; - or, Notes in Cornwall taken A-foot • Wilkie Collins
... the widow cried out in her agony, "Well, sir, well; the day of reckoning will come;" and that the murderer replied, "To man I can answer for what I have done; and as for God, I will take him into mine own hand." Yet it was rumoured that even on his seared conscience and adamantine heart the dying ejaculations of his victim made an impression which was never ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... that appealed, the almost savage vigour in the arms that he folded on his breast. She had succumbed less to his gentleness than to the knowledge that it was she alone who evoked that gentleness out of a nature almost adamantine, wholly masculine. His faults she knew to be the faults of one who had hewn his own road in life—a rugged surface—a strain of rigidity beneath—at worst a tendency to dogmatise—and knowing as she did her own control over them, they attracted ...
— The Voice of the People • Ellen Glasgow
... of our castle,' he said. And the Duchess replied by an angry outburst, a hailstorm of reproaches, before which Eberhard Ludwig remained silent, cold, rigidly self-contained. The Duchess paused; it was like beating one's hand against some adamantine barrier. She had the sensation that all she said, felt, suffered, passed unnoticed; the man before her was waiting for information, that was all. It was intolerable, and the hopelessness of any pleading came ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay
... fellow of twenty-five, he was scenery, magnificent and compelling. Furthermore, he had been in the public eye for years, first as a precocious child and, later, as a brilliant young scientist. Yet, for all his experience with hero worshippers to put an adamantine crust on his sensibilities, he grew warm-eared under the gaze of these two strangers—this hunchback with a face like a grotesque mask in a Greek play, this other who, even handsomer than himself, ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science February 1930 • Various
... immediate simplification of houses. It was odd to observe how, once a man became infected, his former interests and anxieties fell away from him like an old garment. In Harley Street an attitude of stubborn disbelief continued amongst those still mortal. There is something magnificent in that adamantine spirit which refuses to recognize the new, even though it moves with ever-increasing distinctness before the very eyes of the deniers. I was not surprised. I was familiar with ...
— The Blue Germ • Martin Swayne
... conviction to disobey all, and pursue my own way." He told Emerson so, whereupon they went and dined together. The independence of the poet probably impressed Emerson more than his yielding would have done, for had not he preached the adamantine doctrine of self-trust? "To believe your own thought," he says, "to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true ...
— Whitman - A Study • John Burroughs
... myself) enjoyed the advantage of a severely intellectualistic training in the classical philosophy of Oxford University, and in its premier college, Balliol. The aim of this training is to instil into the best minds the country produces an adamantine conviction that philosophy has made no progress since Aristotle. It costs about L50,000 a year, but on the whole it is singularly successful. Its effect upon capable minds possessed of common sense is to produce that contempt for pure intellect which ...
— Pragmatism • D.L. Murray
... Mrs. Siddons, about whom all the world has been talking, exposed her beautiful, adamantine, soft and lovely person for the first time, at the Smock Alley Theatre, in the bewitching, tearful, and all melting character of Isabella. From the repeated panegyrics in the impartial London newspapers, we were taught to expect ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... bound and limitary land, The Scythian steppe, the waste untrod of men! Look to it now, Hephaestus—thine it is, Thy Sire obeying, this arch-thief to clench Against the steep-down precipice of rock, With stubborn links of adamantine chain. Look thou: thy flower, the gleaming plastic fire, He stole and lent to mortal man—a sin That gods immortal make him rue to-day, Lessoned hereby to own th' omnipotence Of Zeus, and to repent his ...
— Suppliant Maidens and Other Plays • AEschylus
... the request of the District Attorney, Drake was to be taken "dead or alive," but according to an adamantine principle of the Force, he must be taken not only alive, but unscathed if that were humanly possible. This meant that he must not be given an opportunity to run and so render shooting necessary. If, however, he should break away, his chance of escape would be small, as each Trooper ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... expression which the latter's countenance could assume. It had seemed interesting and even admirable to him then—but then he had not foreseen the possibility that he himself might some day confront its adamantine barrier with a sinking heart. All at once he could bear ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... God's management for destroying routine within the law of stated revolution, and for bringing the mind constantly into contact with fresh influences. The soul, encased by a wall of adamantine circumstances, and driven around a track of unvarying duties, shrivels, or gets diseased. But these circumstances need not imprison the farmer, nor these duties become the polished pavement of his ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... frozen to adamantine hardness, precluded the possibility of digging a grave during the winter season. Therefore, after the manner of her people, a platform of poles, high raised above the snow, was built among the spruce trees ...
— The Gaunt Gray Wolf - A Tale of Adventure With Ungava Bob • Dillon Wallace
... than pahoehoe, and that they advance very slowly, being full of solid points, or centres of cooling: that a- a, in fact, grains like sugar. Its hardness is indescribable. It is an aggregate of upright, rugged, adamantine points, and at a distance, a river of it looks like a dark ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... Life's dull coils unwind, Will he, in old love, hitherward escape, And the eternal essence of his mind Enter this silent adamantine shape, And his low voicing haunt its slipping snows When dawn that calls the climber ...
— Satires of Circumstance, Lyrics and Reveries, with - Miscellaneous Pieces • Thomas Hardy
... prig of the first water. He had been reared altogether in convention. Home life and Eton and Christchurch had taught him many things, wise as well as foolish; but had tended to fix his conviction that affairs of the heart should proceed on adamantine lines of conventional decorum. It never even occurred to him that a lady could so far step from the confines of convention as to take the initiative in a matter of affection. In his blind ignorance he blundered brutally. He ...
— The Man • Bram Stoker
... sternly set, Did seem to say how vain to knock At thy heart's door, for all within Was hard, as adamantine rock. ...
— Canada and Other Poems • T.F. Young
... the forehead hardens the brain into a state of obstinacy perhaps. Anyhow, with whitewash from the wall on my forehead, my obstinacy was adamantine. I reflected for some time, and then answered as if I had discovered a new idea, "I ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... whenever she thought of him. She was vaguely alarmed at his uncompromising adherence to the position he had assumed. She had never failed yet to work her will with men—young and old—by a pretty persistence, a steady flattery, a subtle pleading manner. But Sir John had met all her wiles with his adamantine smile. He would not openly declare himself an enemy—which she argued to herself would have been much nicer of him. He was merely a friend of her aunt's, and from that contemplative position he never stepped down. She could ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman
... shuddered at my friend. In my recollection of his dark and impressive countenance, the features grew more sternly prominent than the reality, duskier in their depth and shadow, and more lurid in their light; the frown, that had merely flitted across his brow, seemed to have contorted it with an adamantine wrinkle. On meeting him again, I was often filled with remorse, when his deep eyes beamed kindly upon me, as with the glow of a household fire that was burning in a cave. "He is a man after all," thought I; "his Maker's own truest image, a philanthropic man!—not that steel engine of the Devil's ...
— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... sleepy poppy nods its red-cowled head, and the weak-eyed mole plies his dark work; but thy soaring is even unto heaven. Or let me add (for my appetite for similes is truly canine at this moment), that as the Italian nobles their new-fashioned doors, so thou dost make the adamantine gate of Democracy turn on its golden hinges to ...
— Biographia Epistolaris, Volume 1. • Coleridge, ed. Turnbull
... they might know salvation who in Hades' prison were pent, In His mercy condescending through Hell's gloomy gates He went; Bolt and massy hinge were shattered, adamantine portals rent. ...
— The Hymns of Prudentius • Aurelius Clemens Prudentius
... the verge of a crag, where one step more is destruction. Strange is the heart of man, with its quick, mysterious instincts! 570 Strange is the life of man, and fatal or fated are moments, Whereupon turn, as on hinges, the gates of the wall adamantine[38] "Here I remain!" he exclaimed, as he looked at the heavens above him, Thanking the Lord whose breath had scattered the mist and the madness, Wherein, blind and lost, to death he was staggering headlong. 575 "Yonder snow-white cloud, that floats in the ether above me, Seems like a hand that ...
— Narrative and Lyric Poems (first series) for use in the Lower School • O. J. Stevenson
... herself, happily putting things away and humming an air. Queed watched her in annoyed silence. His adamantine gravity inspired her with an irresistible impulse to levity; so the law of averages ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... tureen of Spartan soup, and now requiring the accompaniment of a satellite tongue, or friendly slice of Lamego bacon, to impait a dull relish to it; potatoes of leaden continuity; dumplings of adamantine contexture, that Carthaginian vinegar itself might fail to dissolve; with offensive vegetables, and something in a round shape, said to be imported from Holland, and called cheese, but more like the unyielding rock of flint in the tenacity of its impenetrable substance; ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 560, August 4, 1832 • Various
... now. But they would be much worse if any thirty or forty advocates for this gun or that gun could make a motion in Parliament, beat the department, and get their ships or their guns adopted. The "Black Breech Ordnance Company" and the "Adamantine Ship Company" would soon find representatives in Parliament, if forty or fifty members would get the national custom for their rubbish. But this result is now prevented by the Parliamentary head ...
— The English Constitution • Walter Bagehot
... might of England flushed To anticipate the scene; And her van the fleeter rushed O'er the deadly space between. "Hearts of oak!" our captains cried; when each gun From its adamantine lips Spread a death-shade round the ships. Like the ...
— MacMillan's Reading Books - Book V • Anonymous
... Adamantine as was the lichen-covered heap of granite, it was of far more mutable a quality than were the dispositions of those who had so stubbornly let it fall into decay. Time's hand had softened the harsh stone ...
— The Wall Between • Sara Ware Bassett
... beneath its feet, upon that green pavement which every breeze broke into new fantasies of rich tessellation; when first, at the extremity of the bright vista, the shadowy Rialto threw its colossal curve slowly forth from behind the palace of the Camerlenghi; that strange curve, so delicate, so adamantine, strong as a mountain cavern, graceful as a bow just bent; when first, before its moonlike circumference was all risen, the gondolier's cry, "Ah! Stali," [Footnote: Appendix I, "The Gondolier's Cry."] struck sharp upon the ear, and the prow turned aside under the mighty cornices that half ...
— Stones of Venice [introductions] • John Ruskin
... what name you will, Gabriel Tar, or Gibraltar, that infinitesimal scrap of territory over which the Union Jack floats, is supremely unpalatable and insolently insulting to the Spaniard. It is a bitter pill to swallow, an adamantine nut to crack. I suppose he is welcome to take it—when he can; but he knows better than to try. It is the gate of the Mediterranean. Logically, it is an injustice that a stranger should sit in the porter's lodge and swing the key at his girdle; but it is as well that the porter is one who ...
— Romantic Spain - A Record of Personal Experiences (Vol. II) • John Augustus O'Shea
... duties,—while men are torturing and denouncing their fellows, and while we can hear day and night the clinking of the hammers that are trying, like the brute forces in the "Prometheus," to rivet their adamantine wedges right through the breast of human nature,—I have been ready to believe that we have even now a new revelation, and the name ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... which you are independent: you will not have the bay rum; you are a teetotaller. You say so in a weak voice which nevertheless has some adamantine quality that impresses him. He humors you; or perhaps your preference appeals to his sense of ...
— The Perfect Gentleman • Ralph Bergengren
... and natural history. We know no reason of internal or external probability which should induce us to believe that such matters could ever have been the subjects of direct revelation.' Is that all? There is no reason, certainly, for expectations so foolish; but is there no adamantine reason against them? It is no business of the Bible, we are told, to teach science. Certainly not; but that is far too little. It is an obligation resting upon the Bible, if it is to be consistent with itself, that it should refuse to teach science; and, if the Bible ever had taught ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey
... Deville's adamantine boron burns in the same manner, but with more difficulty, becoming fluoride or boron. The small quantity of carbon and aluminum which it contains impedes the combination. Arsenic and antimony in powder combine with this gaseous body with incandescence. Sulphur takes fire in it, and ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 561, October 2, 1886 • Various
... our times avow, The ancient Sphinx still keeps the porch of shade; And comes Despair, whom not her calm may cow, And coldly on that adamantine brow Scrawls undeterred his bitter pasquinade. But Faith (who from the scrawl indignant turns) With blood warm oozing from her wounded trust, Inscribes even on her shards of broken urns The sign o' the cross—the spirit above ...
— John Marr and Other Poems • Herman Melville
... Candy, Candy'd Eryngo Root & Carroway Comfits;" and a few sweetmeats came to port in foreign vessels, "Sugar'd Corrinder Seeds," "Glaz'd Almonds," and strings of rock-candy. Whole jars of the latter adamantine, crystalline, saccharine delight graced the shelves of many a colonial cupboard. And I suppose favored Salem children, the happy sons and daughters of opulent epicurean Salem shipowners, had even in colonial days Black ...
— Customs and Fashions in Old New England • Alice Morse Earle
... and I had ever met, I had fluttered around Fanny Meyrick for a season, attracted by her bright brown eyes and the gypsy flush on her cheek. But there were other moths fluttering around that adamantine candle too; and I was not long in discovering that the brown eyes were bright for each and all, and that the gypsy flush was never stirred by feeling or by thought. It was merely a fixed ensign of health and ...
— On the Church Steps • Sarah C. Hallowell
... recollection of Liszt is a vivid one: to me he was iron; Tausig, steel; Rubinstein, gold. This metallic classification is not intended to praise gold at the expense of steel, or iron to the detriment of gold. It is merely my way of describing the adamantine qualities of Liszt and Tausig—two magnetic mountains of the kind told of in Sinbad, the Sailor, to which was attracted whatever came within their radius. And Rubinstein—what a man, what an artist, what ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker
... the slow, solemn boom of a brazen-tongued bell struck midnight. Then Theos, raising his eyes, saw that all further progress was impeded by a great wall of solid rock that glistened at every point with flashes of pale and dark violet light—a wall composed entirely of adamantine spar, crusted thick with the rough growth of oriental amethyst. It rose sheer up from the ground to an altitude of about a hundred feet, and apparently closed ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... Mantuan muse, of the Grecian soldier remembering in the last struggles of death his pleasant Argos. It is this which makes us revert, with ever verdant freshness, to our homes and native places, and binds us to the land of our birth with adamantine links. From the burning desarts of sunny Africa—from the wild tornados of the gusty West—from the mountains of ice piled by a thousand ages, like impassable barriers round each frozen pole—from the fertile ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 14, - Issue 402, Supplementary Number (1829) • Various
... centuries a single word of rebellion against tyranny, or of shedding blood for the rights of man? Not one of them has, as yet, come down to hell in glory; a proof that these people have no distinguished heads among them. Those are to my mind who wish to clear up every thing, who fight with the adamantine shield of individuality, against which all prejudices, earthly or heavenly, are shivered. Show me such a man who is willing to become great on earth at the expense of his soul, ...
— Faustus - his Life, Death, and Doom • Friedrich Maximilian von Klinger
... she would have cracked like a nutshell against those adamantine walls. But to get into the harbour it was the only way, and as the skipper said afterwards, when I remonstrated on his apparent foolhardiness, "Needs must, when ...
— Labrador Days - Tales of the Sea Toilers • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... will make us victors over the world and ourselves. If we can grasp Him by our faith and keep ourselves near Him, then union with Him as of the Vine and the branches, which will result inevitably in suffering here, will result as inevitably in joy hereafter. For He will never relax the adamantine grasp of His strong hand until He raises us to Himself, and 'if so be that we suffer with Him we shall also ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chaps. XV to XXI • Alexander Maclaren
... it; when he is seized with an irresistible desire to go forth in the world and by his prowess dazzle all mankind for the purpose of attracting one pair of eyes. The same occurs to the lady, and she determines to make all men fall at her feet by way of illustrating to one adamantine heart that he was a dullard to have passed over her charms. And this young lady of the rose and lily complexion, and knight of the bright-hued locks and herculean muscles, being young—sufficiently young to be downcast by imaginary stumbling-blocks—had ...
— Some Everyday Folk and Dawn • Miles Franklin
... does. Symptoms of too great interest bore one. I enjoy more the men who are impervious to me. Now there's my father. He comes nearer understanding me than anybody else, but he's quite adamantine to my wiles." ...
— The Vision Spendid • William MacLeod Raine
... was taxed by military individuals, eager to secure incriminating evidence, but although they cajoled, coaxed and threatened I could not be induced to betray my secret. Indeed, at last, I point-blank refused to furnish any information upon this matter whatever, and with this adamantine decision they were forced to remain content. Doubtless they had their suspicions but it was impossible to bring anything home to me and so I was ...
— Sixteen Months in Four German Prisons - Wesel, Sennelager, Klingelputz, Ruhleben • Henry Charles Mahoney
... domestic life had become so completely embittered that every vestige of old-time happiness had fled. The agency of the Police Magistrate was sought to decree terms of separation, as there was an adamantine resolve on the part of each to no longer live with the other. Thus, in a frame of mind altogether repelling the notion of conversion to gentler views, or the idea of laudable endeavor, on the part ...
— A Treatise on the Six-Nation Indians • James Bovell Mackenzie
... afforded To the man whom men know me, or deem me, to be. But, far down, in the depth of my life's mystery, (Like the siren that under the deep ocean dwells, Whom the wind as it wails, and the wave as it swells, Cannot stir in the calm of her coralline halls, 'Mid the world's adamantine and dim pedestals; At whose feet sit the sylphs and sea fairies; for whom The almondine glimmers, the soft samphires bloom)— Thou abidest and reignest forever, O Queen Of that better world which thou swayest unseen! My one perfect mistress! my all things ...
— Lucile • Owen Meredith
... spirit, bound in avenging fire by adamantine chains, lying vanquished nine times the space that measures night and day to mortal men; of the darkness visible of the eternal prisons and the burning ocean where the fallen angels float. Then, his voice, now powerful, began the address of the fallen angel. "Art thou," ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... an important characteristic due to reflection, and of which there are six varieties:—([alpha]) adamantine (which some authorities, experts and merchants subdivide as detailed below); ([beta]) pearly; ([gamma]) silky; ([delta]) resinous; ([epsilon]) vitreous; ([zeta]) ...
— The Chemistry, Properties and Tests of Precious Stones • John Mastin
... bounds With ceaseless roar the foaming deep surrounds. The thoughts which roll within my ravish'd breast, To me, no seer, the inspiring gods suggest; Nor skill'd nor studious, with prophetic eye To judge the winged omens of the sky. Yet hear this certain speech, nor deem it vain; Though adamantine bonds the chief restrain, The dire restraint his wisdom will defeat, And soon restore him to his regal seat. But generous youth! sincere and free declare, Are you, of manly growth, his royal heir? ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer, translated by Alexander Pope
... hide nothing from your sight, (We, wretched mortals! lost in doubts below, But guess by rumour, and but boast we know,) Oh! say what heroes, fir'd by thirst of fame, Or urg'd by wrongs, to Troy's destruction came! To count them all demands a thousand tongues, A throat of brass and adamantine lungs. ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... the established order of things—that fetish which has ruled Pan-Americans for two centuries, and which is based upon a blind faith in the infallibility of the prescience of the long-dead framers of the articles of Pan-American federation—and ending in an adamantine determination to defend my honor and my life to the last ditch against the blind and senseless regulation which assumed the synonymity of ...
— The Lost Continent • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... ordered in those stormy hours His adamantine chains for one and all, Brute "Force" and soulless "Strength" the only Power On which ...
— A Wreath of Virginia Bay Leaves • James Barron Hope
... laws were adamantine. Her rule was as Procrustean as her thin-lashed eyes were inquisitive. She daily inspected both her lavishly distributed lambrequins and her "gentleman roomers'" mail, with an occasional discreet excursion into their unlocked trunks. ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... repairs the compass, or malice or stupidity disarranges it, the ship mistakes her course, the waves swallow a Caesar, and a new chapter is written in the history of a world. What we call accident is but the adamantine chain of indissoluble connection between all created things. The locust, hatched in the Arabian sands, the small worm that destroys the cotton-boll, one making famine in the Orient, the other closing the mills and starving the workmen and their children in the Occident, with riots and massacres, ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... was so well amused that few were driven away by the cold—and it was an intensely cold night The ringing of the skates on the almost adamantine ice revealed the fact that Jack Frost had a tight clutch on the ...
— The Girls of Central High Aiding the Red Cross - Or Amateur Theatricals for a Worthy Cause • Gertrude W. Morrison
... and old, and wrinkled, but her face was stamped with a species of beauty which never fades—the beauty of a loving look. Ah! the brow of snow and the peach-bloom cheek may snare the heart of man for a time, but the loving look alone can forge that adamantine chain that time, age, ...
— The Dog Crusoe and His Master - A Story of Adventure in the Western Prairies • Robert Michael Ballantyne |
