"Endurable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... be right, John,—yes, I know that you are right. But it is no such easy matter to leave your home and country, and the dear friends whose society renders life a blessing and poverty endurable—to abandon a certain good for an uncertain better, to be sought for among untried difficulties. I would rather live in a cottage in England, upon brown bread and milk, than occupy a palace on the other ...
— Flora Lyndsay - or, Passages in an Eventful Life • Susan Moodie
... more endurable for that," said the lady, with a smile. "Oh! the anxiety of the last three days and nights! Dearest, I do believe I have not slept three hours during the whole of those ...
— Edmond Dantes • Edmund Flagg
... the colourist, whether he paints pictures, or dyes textiles, or embroiders them, to reduce the tints of the prism to an endurable and delightful lowness of tone, while preserving as far as possible all ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford
... shape before to-night. That child must be saved; her father's feelings must be respected. She must stay here and be under your wing, and I will go and have a chat with Sharston and see if I cannot make life endurable to the poor little girl, even though he ...
— A Bunch of Cherries - A Story of Cherry Court School • L. T. Meade
... (1) To be endurable a government must be more or less permanent, must have time to initiate and, partly at least, to carry out its policy. Constantly shifting governments would be intolerable. But if the government depends on the will of a majority, then that majority must also be more ...
— The Tribune of Nova Scotia - A Chronicle of Joseph Howe • W. L. (William Lawson) Grant
... more the long lists of gifts that ushered in the matrimonial happiness of Mrs. John Westover nee Miss Arabella Granger; this time, however, stimulated by the pleasure she was giving, to find it an endurable task. ...
— Five Little Peppers Midway • Margaret Sidney
... comfort, the luxury of her home, the relief from constant dread, such as she had known for years, the quiet at night—these had been so welcome, so saving, that her burden of sorrow seemed endurable. Yet in time she came to see that the finding of a father and a home had only ...
— The U.P. Trail • Zane Grey
... not been wasted. Puck was much more endurable now. Scolding and growling he set himself to rights. He smoothed down his feelers and wings and the minute hairs on his black body—which were fearfully rumpled; for the girl-bee had laid on good and hard—and concluded ...
— The Adventures of Maya the Bee • Waldemar Bonsels
... greater and men's manners gentler, the ranks of slavery are less and less liable to be recruited through the agency of war.(410) It then becomes necessary to have recourse to the family to keep up their number, which makes their condition much more endurable, and which supposes that it has been made more endurable in other respects beforehand. Modern states, are, as a rule, larger than the ancient were. The Germans had, long before the time of Charlemagne, treated prisoners of war of German ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... sanitary water supplies, cheap illumination, and, above all, due provision for universal education, parks, museums, and opportunities for recreation,—in short, all possible improvements of environment that can make life in our cities not merely endurable but beneficial for the people. Here, then, is furnished a great field for the definite and conscious aspirations of the successful man of business. Here lies a great many-sided work for social and moral as well as physical and material progress which the business man, in the quality of good citizen ...
— The business career in its public relations • Albert Shaw
... utensils of wire or wrought iron, stood on tall, spindling legs, or were carefully shaped to be set up on trivets. They usually had, also, long, adjustable handles, which helped to make endurable the blazing heat of the great logs. All such irons as waffle-irons had far longer handles than are seen on any cooking-utensils in these days of stoves and ranges, where the flames are covered and the housewife shielded. Gridirons had long handles ...
— Home Life in Colonial Days • Alice Morse Earle
... forgiven her anything. But I heard, instead, an incredulous exclamation: my statement was really too preposterous! I saw that her mind had flashed back to our last talk, and that she charged me with something too nearly true to be endurable. ...
— The Descent of Man and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... which little pictures of horror flashed after each other as though his brain were a cinematograph recording some melodrama. Queer bits of philosophy jerked out between this narrative. "This war is only endurable because it is for a final peace in Europe." "Men will refuse to suffer these things again. It is the end of militarism." "If I thought that a child of mine would have to go through all that I have suffered during these last weeks, ...
— The Soul of the War • Philip Gibbs
... thing I want to talk to you about now," said Mrs Macmichael. "Since old Ann's death, six months ago, she says she has been miserable, and if she goes on like this, it will shorten the few days that are left her. Effie, the only endurable servant she has had since Ann, is going to leave at the end of her half-year, and she says the thought of another makes her wretched. She may be a little hard to please, but after being used to one for so many years, it is no wonder ...
— Gutta-Percha Willie • George MacDonald
... now was one long torment. As a result of the intense cold, she became a victim to acute rheumatism; for the Rule of Saint Theresa, which prohibits the lighting of a fire anywhere but in the kitchens, if it is endurable in Spain, is simply murderous in the frozen ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... such an existence, especially with that wife of mine downstairs, who cannot endure the country, and is only a companion for a town-life. Now, if it had been Olivia—you could imagine life in the country endurable with Olivia?" ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma • Hesba Stretton
... again that little ripple of thought and sympathy, like shadow and flame. One fear was removed from him. Whatever happened Miss Harden would never misunderstand him. At the same time he realized that any prospect, however calamitous, would be more endurable than ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... My solemn friend evidently preferred the dropping-down-deadness of manner, which he had been accustomed to find in Hervey's "Meditations," and other kindred authors, where it always seems to be urged that life would be endurable but for its pleasures. A person once commended to my acquaintance an individual whom he described as "a fine, pompous, gentlemanly man," and I thought it prudent, under the circumstances, ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... ecclesiastical and civil, of the early Christians of the North were, as we have seen, made of wattles or wicker-ware. The skill, therefore, of the architectural decorator took the direction of the variations in basket-work. We know that in the Gothic age those forms which were found the most endurable and graceful in which stone could be placed upon stone, became also the ruling forms which guided the carver and the painter; so that all wood-work, metal-work, seal-cutting, illumination of books, ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... first importance to get away as soon as she could, and the little place in Florence, which held her past in every fold of its curtains and between every page of its books, seemed now to her the one spot where that past would be endurable ...
— Autres Temps... - 1916 • Edith Wharton
... on my head until to ease my heart I called him aft one moonlight night and told him I was no stone-mason, and begged him to forgive me for having sought to deceive one of God's own gentlemen." Meantime, every day our emigrant turned out a little good copy, and this made life endurable, for was it not Robert Louis himself who gave us this immortal line, "I know what pleasure is, for I have ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... Papist, but took especial care not to acknowledge his religion, at which he frequently scoffed, till just before his last gasp, when he knew that he could lose nothing, and hoped to gain everything by it. He was always in want of money, but took care not to tax the country beyond all endurable bounds; preferring, to such a bold and dangerous course, to become the secret pensioner of Louis, to whom, in return for his gold, he sacrificed the honour and interests of Britain. He was too lazy and sensual to delight in playing the part of a tyrant himself; but ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... before morning was freely discussed. The instinct of the horses could be relied on to find the way to their stable, but return would be impossible before daybreak. The brothers were so elated over holding the cattle that any personal hardship was endurable, and after a seeming age, a lull in the elements was noticeable and a star shone forth. Joel mounted his horse and rode out of the cove, into the open valley, and on returning announced that the storm had broken and that an attempt to reach ...
— Wells Brothers • Andy Adams
... And therewith suddenly descended upon her a farther something she had never known; it was as if the loneliness, or what is the same thing, the presence of her own being without another to qualify and make it reasonable and endurable, seized and held her. The silence gathered substance, grew as it were solid, and closing upon her, imprisoned her. Was it not rather that the Soul of Nature, unprevented, unthwarted by distracting influences, found a freer ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... Tables littered with books, chairs and sofas strewn with gloves and ribbons, and even a floor encumbered with a prostrate doll or two, are cheerful; a trail of leaves and mosses from a basket of woodland treasures is endurable dirt. But dust in the corners which shows the dirt to be chronic and not accidental, unwashed windows, dingy mirrors, etc., etc., have no redeeming quality. It is a good thing for the mother of the family to love order, but there is ample scope for that in keeping every closet ...
— Girls and Women • Harriet E. Paine (AKA E. Chester}
... double chins, paunches. To him all old people were Struldbrugs. We smile at the insolence of youth, because we know it will pass with the beauty and strength that support it. Ogniben says, "Youth, with its beauty and grace, would seem bestowed on us for some such reason as to make us partly endurable till we have time for really becoming so of ourselves, without their aid; when they leave us ... little by little, he sees fit to forego claim after claim on the world, puts up with a less and less ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... drifted into the endless moralizing of their race, but it held no criticism or condemnation of Cissie. From the tone of the negroes one would have thought some impersonal disaster had overtaken her. Every one was planning how to help Cissie, how to make her present state more endurable. They were the black folk, the unfortunate of the earth, and the pride of righteousness is only to the well placed ...
— Birthright - A Novel • T.S. Stribling
... sufferings refused to yield to the magic of sweet sounds; when they did so, she was oppressed by sorrow, that came from excess of tenderness and regret; and there were times, when music had increased such sorrow to a degree, that was scarcely endurable; when, if it had not suddenly ceased, she might have lost her reason. Such was the time, when she mourned for her father, and heard the midnight strains, that floated by her window near the convent in Languedoc, on the night that followed ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe
... "I will leave him whether he consents or not. If this boy becomes his heir, I have made an atonement." But neither in darkness nor in daylight could she imagine the scenes which must carry out those determinations with the courage to feel them endurable. How could she run away to her own family—carry distress among them, and render herself an object of scandal in the society she had left behind her? What future lay before her as Mrs. Grandcourt gone back ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... by their own business, it followed that the Uitlanders were not ardent politicians, and that they desired to have a share in the government of the State for the purpose of making the conditions of their own industry and of their own daily lives more endurable. How far there was need of such an interference may be judged by any fair-minded man who reads the list of their complaints. A superficial view may recognise the Boers as the champions of liberty, but a deeper insight must see that they (as represented by their elected rulers) have in truth ...
— The War in South Africa - Its Cause and Conduct • Arthur Conan Doyle
... be endurable as long as these people remain rude and poor; but only wait for a thousand years and you will see, father, with what powerful weapons you have endowed the daughters of Alca. If you will allow me, I can give you some idea of it beforehand. I have some old ...
— Penguin Island • Anatole France
... duty. In the prison he met with his old comrades of the Army of Northern Virginia, and was prompt to welcome all of the "Morgan men" who "happened in," and to initiate them in the art of making life in a prison endurable. A few months before, I had visited his father, one of the most hospitable men in Huntsville, famed for that virtue, and he charged me with a message to "Charlie," which I delivered in the barracks at Johnson's Island. Lieutenant Donegan remained in prison more than twenty ...
— History of Morgan's Cavalry • Basil W. Duke
... to explain his absence at her pleasure. He could ruin her ruined life by exposing her. Then would come the divorce court, the publicity, the leer of the mob, the pointed fingers of scorn. Impossible! Why could he not leave the matter untouched and keep up appearances before the world? Least endurable of any scheme. He knew that he could never meet her again without killing her, unless this problem was settled. When he had determined on what he should do, he might get courage to look on ...
— The Art of Disappearing • John Talbot Smith
... By and by his life was too busy to permit him to watch those about him, or to pronounce judgment on their aims or character. Uncongenial as he had at first found the employment which his uncle had provided for him, he pursued it with a patient steadiness, which made it first endurable, then pleasant to him. At first his duties were merely mechanical; so much writing, so much computing each day, and then his time was his own. But this did not continue long. Trusted always by the firm, he was soon ...
— Janet's Love and Service • Margaret M Robertson
... with their sympathetic curiosity, but there are such women as Astar Gager, and Lala Snackoll, and Thyra Peterson, and Jorunna Flett. No one can keep them away from a house in trouble. Thora must marry. I see no endurable way ...
— An Orkney Maid • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... speak of my temper. I am melancholy, and I have hardly been seen for the last three or four years to laugh above three or four times. It seems to me that my melancholy would be even endurable and pleasant if I had none but what belonged to me constitutionally; but it arises from so many other causes, fills my imagination in such a way, and possesses my mind so strongly that for the greater part of my time I remain without speaking a word, or ...
— Reflections - Or, Sentences and Moral Maxims • Francois Duc De La Rochefoucauld
... along the line. At home he would run through the countries of Europe, the States of the Union, the chief cities of our Indian Empire, the provinces of France, the Prime Ministers of England, or the chief writers and artists of any given century; striking off puns, admirable, endurable, and execrable, but all irresistibly laughable, which followed each other in showers like sparks from flint. Capping verses was a game of which he never tired. "In the spring of 1829," says his cousin Mrs. ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... except at first," said the lady. "Too much horror numbs, you know. And one thing made it endurable—he has spared me the intimacy of marriage. It is true, dearest; I am as much a maid as I was five years ago. He is that kind of a man, Roy. It is not women he lusts for, it is—oh, it is blood. There is something horrible in his ...
— The Blood Ship • Norman Springer
... of Bunyan and Spenser, the great masters of allegory. But it is apt to spoil two good things—a story and a moral, a meaning and a form; and the taste for it is responsible for a large part of the forcible-feeble writing that has been inflicted upon the world. The only cases in which it is endurable is when it is extremely spontaneous, when the analogy presents itself with eager promptitude. When it shows signs of having been groped and fumbled for, the needful illusion is of course absent and the failure complete. Then the machinery alone is visible, and the end to which it operates ...
— Hawthorne - (English Men of Letters Series) • Henry James, Junr.
... been preserved, except in fragments, and we know but little of their exact contents. The position of the debtor was apparently made more endurable. The absolute control of the pater familias over his family was abolished. The close connection heretofore existing between the clients and patrons was gradually relaxed, the former became less dependent upon the latter, and ...
— History of Rome from the Earliest times down to 476 AD • Robert F. Pennell
... does not extenuate its importance. Questions of constitutional morality are of no less practical moment than those relating to the constitution itself. The very existence of some governments, and all that renders others endurable, rests on the practical observance of doctrines of constitutional morality; traditional notions in the minds of the several constituted authorities, which modify the use that might otherwise be made of their powers. In unbalanced governments—pure ...
— Considerations on Representative Government • John Stuart Mill
... the English weather to be reported endurable in order to set out. Mrs. Streatfield, who has been in England these twelve days, writes to certify that it is past the force of a Parisian imagination to imagine the state of the skies and the atmosphere; yet, even in ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... civilisation: they proceed PARI PASSU. A taste of comfort begets a love of comfort. And this kind of love militates, not impotently, against the other; for self- interest is a persuasive counsellor, and gets a hearing when the blood is cool. Life must be more than possible, it must be endurable; man must have some leisure, some repose, before his brain-needs have a chance with those of his belly. He must have a coat to his back before he can stick a rose in its button-hole. The worst of it is, he begins - in Bethnal Green ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... infers that her structure must have undergone a change, although he cannot say in what respect He dwells also on the "subjection" of woman, which "the religion of Revelation" has made by degrees more endurable; probably forgetting that the Teutonic women of ancient times were regarded with veneration, long before Christianity originated. Besides, the subordination of the female is not peculiar to the human race, but is the general law throughout the ...
— Bible Romances - First Series • George W. Foote
... less, its melodious sweetness is more; if he has less passion, he has more sensibility; if moral and physical grandeur are not so attractive to him, ideal and natural beauty are the only elements in which his life is endurable. We might pursue these contrasts to the end of our magazine; but if we have called the reader's attention to them, ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... bite of a gnat; the more we scratch the more we want to scratch; the more we define the more we shall have to go on defining the words we have used in our definitions, and shall end by setting up a serious mental raw in the place of a small uneasiness that was after all quite endurable. We know too well what thought is, to be able to know that we know it, and I am persuaded there is no one in this room but understands what is meant by thought and thinking well enough for all the purposes of this discussion. ...
— The Humour of Homer and Other Essays • Samuel Butler
... domestic life; nor is his mind capable of appreciating that respect for a wife which makes her an ornament of her circle. Saloons, race-courses, and nameless places, have superior attractions for him: home is become but endurable. ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... over-due bills, of bills coming due, of accounts overdrawn, of tradesmen unpaid, of general money cares, is very dreadful at first; but it is astonishing how soon men get used to it. A load which would crush a man at first becomes, by habit, not only endurable, but easy and comfortable to the bearer. The habitual debtor goes along jaunty and with elastic step, almost enjoying the excitement of his embarrassments. There was Mr. Sowerby himself; who ever saw a cloud on his brow? It made one almost in love with ruin to be ...
— Framley Parsonage • Anthony Trollope
... him only the after-sense of the vehemence with which he had embraced Madame de Cintre. He remembered her words and her looks; he turned them over and tried to shake the mystery out of them and to infuse them with an endurable meaning. What had she meant by her feeling being a kind of religion? It was the religion simply of the family laws, the religion of which her implacable little mother was the high priestess. Twist the thing about as ...
— The American • Henry James
... relieved, but only a little. The thought of the woman wandering in the dark and the fog and the night, was a sickness at their hearts. Was it impossible to gather such under the wings of any night-brooding hen? That Gibbie had gone through so much of the same kind of thing himself, and had found it endurable enough, did not make her case a whit the less pitiful in his eyes, and indeed it was widely, sadly different from his. Along the deserted street, which looked to Donal like a waterless canal banked by mounds of death, and lighted ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... votary of Mammon, but he is never loved. On his vast possessions, mainly in coal-fields, he was even more detested than the ordinary run of capitalists. The cottages and farmhouses on his estates were dilapidated and insanitary beyond what is endurable. Of his many mansions, some were kept in decent repair, because he drew many shillings from tourists admitted to view them. But his favourite abode was almost as ruinous as his cottages, and an artist in search of ...
— The Disentanglers • Andrew Lang
... the heat was hardly endurable: bright sunshine, blue sky,—snow-tipped Alps in the distance. No place, I think, ever suited my needs, bodily and ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... degrees Reaumur, a coachman's life is not one altogether to be envied in Russia, but apparently custom will make anything endurable. ...
— His Hour • Elinor Glyn
... enough. No matter what becomes of the rest. Christianity has no consolation for a generous man. I do not wish to go to heaven if the ones who have given me joy are to be lost. I would much rather go with them. The only thing that makes life endurable in this world is human love, and yet, according to Christianity, that is the very thing we are not to have in the other world. We are to be so taken up with Jesus and the angels, that we shall care nothing ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll
... Typees would never consent to my leaving the valley. Although what he said merely confirmed the impression which I had before entertained, still it increased my anxiety to escape from a captivity which, however endurable, nay, delightful it might be in some respects, involved in its issues a fate marked ...
— Typee - A Romance of the South Sea • Herman Melville
... time the anguish had lost something of its poignancy, the light of earlier and happier memories had begun to struggle with and to soften its thick darkness, and even that duty which he had confronted with such an effort had become an endurable habit. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... know how life will pass, but I certainly do feel confidence in Him who has upheld me hitherto. Solitude may be cheered, and made endurable beyond what I can believe. The great trial is when evening closes and night approaches. At that hour, we used to assemble in the dining-room—we used to talk. Now I sit by myself—necessarily I am silent. I cannot help thinking of their last ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... father was gone while I spoke. Heavy as the news might be—this ill news which had struck me with apprehension the moment I saw Lord Ravenel—it was still endurable. I could not conjure up any grief so bitter ...
— John Halifax, Gentleman • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... supply of skates, found hidden away amongst the Dobryna's stores, was speedily brought into use. The Russians undertook the instruction of the Spaniards, and at the end of a few days, during which the temperature was only endurable through the absence of wind, there was not a Gallian who could not skate tolerably well, while many of them could describe figures involving the most complicated curves. Nina and Pablo earned loud applause by their rapid proficiency; Captain Servadac, an adept in athletics, ...
— Off on a Comet • Jules Verne
... What would Lady Lufton say, or think, or feel? What would she say, and think, and feel as to that parsonage from which so deadly a blow would fall upon her? Would she not accuse the vicar and the vicar's wife of the blackest ingratitude? Would life be endurable at Framley ...
— Framley Parsonage • Anthony Trollope
... appearance. Instead of the handsome Roman head, with its dark, shining, braided hair, which is so elegant when uncovered, I saw on two of the children the deforming bonnet, which could have been invented only to conceal a defect, and which is never endurable, unless it be perfectly fresh, delicate, and costly. Nothing is so vulgar as a shabby bonnet. Yet the Romans, despite their dislike of the French, are beginning to wear it. Ten years ago it did not exist here among the common people. I know not why it is that the three ugliest ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 27, January, 1860 • Various
... bridges across the streams. The weather had attained the summer heat; the thermometer standing about fifty-seven degrees in the morning, early, but rising to about ninety degrees at noon. The incessant breezes, however, which sweep these vast plains render the heats endurable. Game was scanty, and they had to eke out their scanty fare with wild roots and vegetables, such as the Indian potato, the wild onion, and the prairie tomato, and they met with quantities of "red root," from which the hunters make a very ...
— The Adventures of Captain Bonneville - Digested From His Journal • Washington Irving
... posses your soul with patience for a few short weeks, just until the ship the Governor sends can return. Then all must needs be as your lordship wishes. In the meantime, you may find existence in these wilds and away from that good company which is the soul of life endurable, and perhaps pleasant. You may have daily sight of the lady who is to become your wife, and that should count for much with so ardent and determined a lover as your lordship hath shown yourself to be. You may have the pleasure of contemplating your rival's grave, if you kill him. If he kills ...
— To Have and To Hold • Mary Johnston
... months' vexation, though not a bean of them all should have lost in freshness and value! He could scarcely write, he said, for the chilblains on his hands, and was in utter destitution of shirts and sheets. Oh! I have very good hopes that for the future Wimpole Street may be found endurable. ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... charge scattered the hordes. All this replaced the plumes, the shining armour, and the chivalrous knights. Ruskin, however, was a subtle improvement even on the last stand with the shot-riddled banner. He anticipated those who have been most popular because they made our War entrancing and endurable. He went to the heart of the matter. He knew that the audience which would the more readily agree with him when he made an emotional case for the ennobling nature of war would be mainly of reclused women. He addressed ...
— Waiting for Daylight • Henry Major Tomlinson
... park strolled one of those new-crop, smooth-faced young policemen that are making the force more endurable—at least to the eye. He saw a woman with an expensive fur coat, and diamond-ringed hands crouching down against the iron fence of the park sobbing turbulently, while a slender, plainly-dressed working girl leaned close, trying to console her, but ...
— The Trimmed Lamp and Others • O Henry
... Innocent as a clownish symbol, he is simply disgusting as an ideal of art. In the last century, they set him up in Beatrice recalls her Germany and in France as befitting an era of enlightenment, the light of which came too manifestly from the wrong quarter to be long endurable. ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... Especially in the colony of New South Wales, during the summer season, the westerly wind, which blows probably over immense deserts of sandstone, or over miles of country set on fire by the natives, is scarcely endurable at certain times, but feels like the heated air at the mouth of a furnace, and is then far from wholesome or pleasant. However, this blast of hot wind is said never to endure very long, and it is less oppressive than the same heat would be elsewhere, because in New Holland the ...
— Australia, its history and present condition • William Pridden
... find a draught of the waters of Lethe. His affections,—if it be a pure and deep love that impels him, and not insanity or mental intoxication,—may be turned into other channels, and the remnant of his life prove, after all, an endurable evil. He may be directed to a companion, who will render his lot far more agreeable than it could be, had you, with the feelings under which you separated, ...
— The Young Maiden • A. B. (Artemas Bowers) Muzzey
... Said had displayed great friendship towards them, or at least had pretended to display it. At any rate he was not so wild as the other Dongolese of the Sudan, and captivity in his house would be more endurable. ...
— In Desert and Wilderness • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... a disputant across the table than with pen in hand. Yet an angry man must be very angry indeed before he could be angry with this adversary. He disarmed his enemies with an amiable grace that made defeat endurable ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 3 • Leonard Huxley
... He let the passion or the sentiment do its own work without prop or bolstering. He would have scorned to mountebank it; and betrayed none of that cleverness which is the bane of serious acting. For this reason, his Iago was the only endurable one which I remember to have seen. No spectator from his action could divine more of his artifice than Othello was supposed to do. His confessions in soliloquy alone put you in possession of the mystery. There were no bye-intimations to make the audience fancy their ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... inequalities of life without repining insolence. They were humble, and felt that there were actually some people in the world superior to themselves. I do not paint their condition as desirable or interesting by our standard, but as endurable. They were doubtless very ignorant; but would knowledge have made them any happier? Knowledge is for those who can climb by it to positions of honor and usefulness, not for those who cannot rise above the condition ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume V • John Lord
... the entertainment of those readers only who have formed their taste on the French drama. His tragedies are some of the most endurable we have in what a lively modern critic[4] has termed the rhetorical style. Yet he had some skill ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary
... of the question, and boating equally uninviting. The playground had been left deserted to bake and scorch under the fierce sun, and the swings and poles in the gymnasium had blistered and cracked in solitude. The only place where life was endurable was down by the river, and even there it was far too hot to do anything but sit and dabble our feet under the shelter of the ...
— Parkhurst Boys - And Other Stories of School Life • Talbot Baines Reed
... good things promised by "Infallibility," but even to bear the bad things which it prophesies; content to follow reason and fact in singleness and honesty of purpose, wherever they may lead, in the sure faith that a hell of honest men will, to him, be more endurable than a paradise full of ...
— Darwiniana • Thomas Henry Huxley
... aspirations and definitions. Mankind, in the process of adapting itself to external circumstances, has perforce evolved a certain amount of intellectual and moral quality; but that intellectual and moral quality is, so far, merely a means for rendering material existence endurable; it will have to become itself the origin and aim of what we must call a spiritual side of life. In the meanwhile, human beings do not get any large proportion of their enjoyment from what they admit to be ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... the paper scarce visible as he wrote on it, and the inexorable necessity drove on the pen. What man among us has not had nights and hours like these? But to the manly heart—severe as these pangs are, they are endurable: long as the night seems, the dawn comes at last, and the wounds heal, and the fever abates, and rest comes, and you can afford to look back on the past misery with feelings that are any ...
— The History of Pendennis, Vol. 2 - His Fortunes and Misfortunes, His Friends and His Greatest Enemy • William Makepeace Thackeray
... agreeable, we inspire forcibly, to enjoy them; but, if they are offensive, our inspirations are more cautious, or we close our nostrils. This sense is likewise modified by habit; odors which, in the first instance, were very offensive, may not only become endurable, but even agreeable. ...
— A Treatise on Anatomy, Physiology, and Hygiene (Revised Edition) • Calvin Cutter
... silence, curbing her heart; but throughout Zeus' palace the gods of heaven were troubled. Then Hephaistos the famed craftsman began to make harangue among them, to do kindness to his mother, white-armed Hera: "Verily this will be a sorry matter, neither any more endurable, if ye twain thus fight for mortals' sakes, and bring wrangling among the gods; neither will there any more be joy of the goodly feast, seeing that evil triumpheth. So I give counsel to my mother, though herself is wise, to ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer (Lang, Leaf, Myers trans.)
... intoxication. Its current beat against her heart until she could have cried out from the mere physical pain, the clamping grip of her trouble. She withered and grew cold under the torture of it all—the ruthless spoliation of everything which made life worth while or the past endurable. ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... mix themselves up with our very blood, so that one cannot get rid of their taint for many a miserable day after—this to me is the very trance of madness; and if I could ever bring myself to think dancing endurable, it must be dancing to the ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... believe governments in America did in your day, would be regarded as a curious anachronism indeed. Possibly you had reasons for tolerating these infringements of personal independence, but we should not think them endurable. I am glad you raised this point, for it has given me a chance to show you how much more direct and efficient is the control over production exercised by the individual citizen now than it was in your day, when what you called private initiative ...
— Looking Backward - 2000-1887 • Edward Bellamy
... always going to be! Life would hardly be endurable were it not for dreaming, hoping, believing. I could stand any loss better than that of my faith in humankind." I sat upright, my hands locked in my lap. "I'm not here to do things for the people you have so little patience ...
— People Like That • Kate Langley Bosher
... sneered the Spartan, "in one year the most patriotic Hellene will be he who has made the Persian yoke the most endurable. Don't blink ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis
... over a great barn-like, abandoned factory building that stood on the shore of an artificial lake—which, in his wife's honour, he re-named after her, Lake Emily ... his wife was a fussy Canadian woman who interfered in everyone's affairs beyond endurable measure. I was told she used to steal off the chair the old clothes Barton used to wear by preference—paddling along the winding creek in a canoe to his work each morning, his pants rolled up to the knees—and put in their stead a new, ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... assurance, which had the same effect as one of those horrible streamers of cobweb that catch the face as one walks unwarily along a dusky lane. Only her native resoluteness enabled her to show Gaga a false patience. Only her insensitiveness made his constant caress endurable. Sally blinked sometimes at his grabbing sentimentality; but she already began to slip neatly aside and avoid his carefully-planned contacts. She was not yet ...
— Coquette • Frank Swinnerton
... their desire renders the possibility of non-fulfilment unthinkable. Then Maurice had entered the field, carrying all before him, with the inimitable assurance that was his; and by now Kenneth had reached the agony-point in a painful, if educative experience. Standing aside was no longer endurable. By some means he must secure Elsie, if only for ten minutes, and ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... in their demands on the horses' endurance. And gradually I came to see that after all the horses probably would have given out before this, under the cumulative effect of two days of it, had they not found things somewhat more endurable to-day. ...
— Over Prairie Trails • Frederick Philip Grove
... Bothwell. I had solemnly resolved that I would see her never again, and that I would turn my back upon the evil life I had led for so many years, and would seek to acquire that quiescence of nature which is necessary to an endurable old age. A tumultuous soul in the breast of an old man breeds torture, but age, with the heart at rest, I have found is ...
— Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall • Charles Major
... ever expects to be happy with Amy Belden, let him reconsider the determination of which he speaks. Not only would he by such an action succeed in destroying the happiness of her he professes to love, but run the greater risk of effectually annulling the affection which makes the tie between them endurable." ...
— The Leavenworth Case • Anna Katharine Green
... Fay terrified him. He hardly understood now how he could have told his father and mother. He would never have done it if Thor hadn't been behind him. As it was, both his parents were so discreet concerning his confidence that neither had mentioned it since that night—which made his situation endurable. So he changed the form of his question to—"bee ...
— The Side Of The Angels - A Novel • Basil King
... morning the devilry began again, but I made short work of it, and threw the heavy settle at B (another servant), after which we had peace for the remainder of the day." "Come Friday or Sunday," he writes Holz. "Better come on Friday, as Satanas in the kitchen is more endurable on that day." This advice to come on Friday when purposing to dine with him, is repeated in a subsequent letter to Holz. "If I could but rid myself of these canaille," he writes to another person, when complaining of the hostility and insolence of ...
— Beethoven • George Alexander Fischer
... sadly destitute of many of the commonest necessaries of such an institution. But everything will get better in a week or so, and while I can not exactly promise you the comforts of a home, I can assure you that life will be made more endurable than it seems to be ...
— The Red Acorn • John McElroy
... 'Is endurable by most folk more easily than a hungry one? True, Bailie, very true; and I believe there may even be some who would be consoled by such a reflection for the loss of the whole existing generation. But there is a sorrow which knows neither hunger nor ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... Pheeny consented to the engagement of a cook. They tried five or six before they found one who combined the traits of being both enduring and endurable. ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... sufficiently trodden upon; but that, too, was useless. My tormentor held me in a grip of steel. Worse than all, the dog's life she was leading me caused me to lose all sense of proportion. As a choice between two evils, a return to prison would have been far more endurable than this indefinite sentence of degradation Agatha Geddis was making me serve. But I could not see this: all I could see was that this woman had the power to make a total wreck of all that I had builded. The larger fact that I was myself the principal contributor ...
— Branded • Francis Lynde
... man to whom she had sold herself, but in thought it was hardly possible for her to give him anything but tolerance, or to feel much beyond the callous indifference she purposely cultivated, to make their life together endurable. The things that at first only irritated her grew almost ...
— Winding Paths • Gertrude Page
... difficulties, and in the midst of this almost overwhelming calamity down came the Kafirs on the Albany District, and the Bergenaars, of whom we have just been speaking, not, like men, to fight openly—that were endurable,—but like sly thieves in the dead of night, to carry off sheep and cattle from many of the farms—in some cases even killing the herdsmen. Now, what think you must be the feelings of the settlers towards these Kafirs and ...
— The Settler and the Savage • R.M. Ballantyne
... pupil's surgery, of which she highly approved, though she had no words to express her indignation at the folly of traveling so soon. Indeed, nothing but the passiveness of fatigue could have made her despotism endurable to Philip; but he cared for nothing so long as he could see his father's face, and hear his voice—the full tones that his ear had yearned for among the sharp expression of the French accent—and Sir Marmaduke seemed to find the same perfect satisfaction in the sight of him; indeed, all were ...
— The Chaplet of Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... leave the place and open of her own accord a new chapter in life. She had to escape at once from the dislike of some and the still less endurable liking of others. She was determined to go, and yet as she looked around upon the place, and all its dear sweet memories filled her, it is no wonder if she envied the calmness of the face that symbolized eternal rest. At last she broke down, and covered ...
— The Galaxy, Volume 23, No. 2, February, 1877 • Various
... fish, chewed it viciously, swallowed it in a hurry, and felt very sick. The ice was broken, however, and he got on better than he had expected. But when hunger was appeased, there came gradually upon him the far less endurable condition of thirst. He really felt as if he should choke, and once or twice he dipped his baling-dish over the side, but restrained himself on remembering the journal of the skeleton, wherein it was recorded that one of the men had gone ...
— Philosopher Jack • R.M. Ballantyne
... used to badger you! We were little fools to think such a thing ever went on when one came to years of discretion. Only I believe we were afraid the elder and idiotic Darcy might foist his son on some college. I must say Yerbury has become quite endurable now that party lines have been set up;" and Mrs. Eastman crumbed her ...
— Hope Mills - or Between Friend and Sweetheart • Amanda M. Douglas
... stairs to the hideous drawing-room. Her spirits had been very low; but, somehow, Tildy had managed to revive them. Tildy was plain, and very much lower than Maggie in the social scale; but Tildy admired her, and because of that admiration made her life more or less endurable in the fusty, musty lodgings. She had always cultivated Tildy's good will, and she thought of the girl now with a strange ...
— The School Queens • L. T. Meade |
