"Improbability" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... laughed together over this letter—the tenderest laughter and the happiest tears. It seemed by turns the wildest improbability that she should be well off, and the most natural thing in the world. Susie was out. Never had her absence been terrible before. Anna could hardly bear the waiting. She walked up and down the room, for sitting still was impossible, ...
— The Benefactress • Elizabeth Beauchamp
... of French prisoners on board a vessel in which the plague existed, the improbability of the circumstance alone, but especially the notorious facts of the case, repel this odious accusation. I observed the conduct of Sir Sidney Smith closely at the time, and I remarked in him a chivalric spirit, which sometimes hurried him into trifling eccentricities; but I affirm that ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... the narrative of Mrs. Stowe untrue; it now devolves on me to show the improbability of some of her statements. An old negro man, whom she calls Uncle Tom, is the hero of her tale. Uncle Tom was the servant of a gentlemen, by name Shelby, who resided in Kentucky. She represents this old negro, Uncle Tom, as a very remarkable character. She tells us that Tom was pious and ...
— A Review of Uncle Tom's Cabin - or, An Essay on Slavery • A. Woodward
... being loosely applied to any type of prose fiction in contrast with the short story or tale. But here, at an early date, the severance is plainly indicated between the study of contemporary society and the elder romance of heroism, supernaturalism, and improbability. It is a difference not so much of theme as of view-point, ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... much of their power either to irritate or to soothe; and the first perception of her diminished influence produced in her an immediate depression of spirits, and a consequent sadness of demeanour, that rendered her very interesting to Mr Glowry; who, duly considering the improbability of accomplishing his wishes with respect to Miss Toobad (which improbability naturally increased in the diurnal ratio of that young lady's absence), began to reconcile himself by degrees to the idea of ...
— Nightmare Abbey • Thomas Love Peacock
... D'Avenant to Betterton; but Rowe, to whom Betterton communicated it, made no use of it. The two regular theatres of the time were both reached on horseback by men of fashion, and the owner of The Theatre, James Burbage, kept a livery stable at Smithfield. There is no inherent improbability in the tale. Dr. Johnson's amplified version, in which Shakespeare was represented as organising a service of boys for the purpose of tending visitors' horses, ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... I believe, Fred Oakes and I betrayed ourselves genuine adventurers. Any fool could have talked glibly about setting the town on fire; any coward could have yelped about the danger of it, and improbability of success. It needed adventurers to size up instantly all the odds against the idea, recognize the one infinitesimal chance, and plump for it. And ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy
... was preposterous. In examining the late lord's private papers, he discovered the letter which I typed and signed. He said very coldly that the fact that I had waited until everyone who could corroborate or deny my story was dead, united with the improbability of the narrative itself, would very likely consign me to prison if I made public ...
— The Triumphs of Eugene Valmont • Robert Barr
... our Lord in His Agony sweat great drops [of blood], can there be a doubt but that he made use of St. Luke, especially since he mentions two or three other matters connected with our Lord's Death, only to be found in St. Luke? Or, again, why should we assume the extreme improbability of a defunct Gospel to account for all the references to, and reminiscences of, St. John's Gospel, which I have given in Sections VIII. and IX. of ...
— The Lost Gospel and Its Contents - Or, The Author of "Supernatural Religion" Refuted by Himself • Michael F. Sadler
... manifestation of grateful regard which a woman of fine quality always returns for elevated and unexacting admiration I was still left with such privilege of access as is granted to the family-gossip, or to an innocuous uncle, and it is of such a passion, rashly nurtured under this protection of an improbability, that I propose to ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol. XXXII No. 2. February 1848 • Various
... treated neither better nor worse than any other has done, as by the details of roads, bridges, marsh-draining, canals, railways, coal, coke, and the like, which were dead-weights on Thalia's light robe; and the improbability of the plot was not so much the marriage of a noble girl to the son of an apple-dealer as was the perfection given to the young engineer: every virtue and every grace were showered on him. The piece was unanimously pronounced successful. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... the hand that for seven years passed the prisoner his food through the small opening. The young custodian pointed to this memento of suffering, without effusion, and he drew my attention to other remarkable things in the cell, without troubling himself to palliate their improbability in the least. They were his stock in trade; you paid your money, and took your choice of believing in them or not. On the other hand, my portier, an ex-valet de place, pumped a softly murmuring stream of enthusiasm; and expressed the freshest delight in the inspection ...
— Italian Journeys • William Dean Howells
... cast and all was over. Alas! nothing was over until Mr. Micawber's pecuniary liabilities were over, and the perfect comedy turned into dulness, the joyous impossibility of a figure of immortal fun into cold improbability. ...
— Hearts of Controversy • Alice Meynell
... made her in most things, she was still young enough to build high hopes on a romantic improbability. And nothing was more improbable than that "Slim" Naudain, even if he had lived, ever would ...
— The Man from the Bitter Roots • Caroline Lockhart
... place, we object to the extreme and monstrous improbability of almost all the incidents which go to the composition of this fable. We know very well that poetry does not describe what is ordinary; but the marvellous, in which it is privileged to indulge, is the marvellous of performance, and not of accident. One extraordinary ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... That there had been already great miracles, as those of Scripture, as the Resurrection, was a fact establishing the principle that the laws of nature had sometimes been suspended by their Divine Author; and since what had happened once might happen again, a certain probability, at least no kind of improbability, was attached to the idea, taken in itself, of miraculous intervention in later times, and miraculous accounts were to be regarded in connection with the verisimilitude, scope, instrument, character, testimony, and circumstances, with which they presented themselves ...
— Apologia pro Vita Sua • John Henry Newman
... before them, he had some unexpected disclosures to make about the prisoner's personal culpability. The first point which he desired to emphasise was that human intelligence should hesitate before no improbability, however improbable, provided that some explanation was humanly conceivable, and no definite material object rendered the improbability an impossibility. His whole statement would be based on the principle that the probable is incontestable and true, until ...
— Fantomas • Pierre Souvestre
... were now two. They followed the Trail; they looked for the caribou herds. After a time the improbability became tenuous. They actually expected the impossible, felt defrauded at not obtaining it, cried out weakly against their ill fortune in not encountering the herd that was probably two thousand miles away. In its withholding the North seemed to play unfairly. She denied ...
— The Silent Places • Stewart Edward White
... contempt—had been false to her honour as the sworn friend of France, and that it was her business to go back to Germany and eat humble pie. Whatever the audience may have felt about these reflections on the conduct of England, they must at least have been irritated by the fantastic improbability of the girl's motive. Very fortunately at this juncture the voice of the paper-boy is heard in the street conveying the thrilling news of our tardy entry into the quarrel; and a glad Margaret, having recovered her respect for her native land, consents to return ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, March 22, 1916 • Various
... from quoting M. Du Chaillu's work, then, it is not because I discern any inherent improbability in his assertions respecting the man-like Apes; nor from any wish to throw suspicion on his veracity; but because, in my opinion, so long as his narrative remains in its present state of unexplained and apparently inexplicable ...
— Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature • Thomas H. Huxley
... of her lover; when a rich uncle in a farce dies to oblige a starving author in a garret; when, two rivals duellise with toasting-forks; when such things are plotted and acted in the theatre, hypercritics murmur at their improbability; but compare them with the haps of the drama off the stage, and they become the veriest of commonplaces. This is a world of change: the French have invaded Algiers, British arms are doing mortal damage in the Celestial Empire, Poulett Thomson has gone over to ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari. Vol. 1, July 31, 1841 • Various
... that, despite its seeming improbability, it might be important for him to see this queer creature who came to strange ...
— Fran • John Breckenridge Ellis
... to Be Done" is the story of a young girl who, with the greatest improbability, is represented as being of the purest, most lofty character and sentiments, yet the daughter of two phenomenally (almost impossibly) degraded people. Instead of marrying the rich and not otherwise undesirable ...
— A Survey of Russian Literature, with Selections • Isabel Florence Hapgood
... of the prosecution and verdict, qualified as it is, there is a difficulty in perceiving any foundation, except the improbability that a Government should have conspired to obtain the capital condemnation of an illustrious Englishman on no better testimony than that which it vouchsafed or dared to offer. That even Cobham had engaged in plots for the deposition ...
— Sir Walter Ralegh - A Biography • William Stebbing
... and, as the rain never ceased for an instant, we were by this time drenched to the skin, and looked with no very agreeable feelings to the prospect of passing the night in wet clothes. At length the night began to close in, and the guides talked of the improbability of reaching the English station before night. It was still raining hard; but we dismounted, and took our dinner as cheerfully as possible, and hoping for clearer weather the next day. On remounting, we soon discovered that the road was no longer so steep ...
— The Rain Cloud - or, An Account of the Nature, Properties, Dangers and Uses of Rain • Anonymous
... sometimes respectful, sometimes derisive.[914] But the known cases are not numerous enough to establish a general rule—the origin of names of clans and tribes is largely involved in obscurity.[915] There is no improbability in either theory of the method of naming, native or foreign—both modes may have existed, one in one region, one in another, and one group may at different times have been called ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy
... replied Caillette, "in view of the improbability of your tale and the undoubted credentials held by this pretender. For my part, to look at the fellow was almost enough. But to the ladies, his brutality signifieth strength and power; and his uncouthness, originality and genius. Marguerite, even, is prepossessed ...
— Under the Rose • Frederic Stewart Isham
... at first sight mysterious enough," Henshaw returned, his keen eyes fixed on Morriston. "But even that does not reconcile me to the monstrous improbability of my brother, Clement, taking his own life. I knew him ...
— The Hunt Ball Mystery • Magnay, William
... off! Here was the prominent creature absolutely on board asking for the favour of a cup of coffee! And life not being a fairy-tale the improbability of the event almost shocked me. Had I discovered an enchanted nook of the earth where wealthy merchants rush fasting on board ships before they are fairly moored? Was this white magic or merely some black trick of trade? I came in the end ...
— 'Twixt Land & Sea • Joseph Conrad
... which the history of the transmission of his orders is buried in utter darkness. And whether he be a priest by succession from the Apostles depends on the question, whether during that long period, some thousands of events took place, any one of which may, without any gross improbability, be supposed not to have taken place. We have not a tittle of evidence for any one of these events. We do not even know the names or countries of the men to whom it is taken for granted that these events happened. We do not know whether ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... situation for a perfectly innocent man, week-ending at a country house. I should have been ashamed to face the critics if I had made so improbable a situation the crux of a play. But the improbability of life constantly outruns the mechanical inventions of the playwright and the novelist. Where life, with all its extravagances, fails, is in its refusal to provide the apt and timely coincidence that shall solve the problem of the hero. As I walked on slowly ...
— The Jervaise Comedy • J. D. Beresford
... consciousness. Spellbound, she stood above her victim watching the spectacle. It seemed incredible that a human being could best the king of beasts in personal encounter and yet before her very eyes there was taking place just such an improbability. ...
— Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... celibacy. Rumour has been busy upon this theme, but here again I must refer to the lady of the store, and say, that if many of the sister Shakers resemble her, I treat all such slander as bearing on its face the strongest marks of wild improbability. But that they take as proselytes, persons so young that they cannot know their own minds, and cannot possess much strength of resolution in this or any other respect, I can assert from my own observation of the extreme juvenility of ...
— American Notes for General Circulation • Charles Dickens
... seats or benches converged. In this double character, as constituent parts, and yet at the same time as spectators, of the drama, the chorus could not but tend to enforce the unity of place;—not on the score of any supposed improbability, which the understanding or common sense might detect in a change of place;—but because the senses themselves put it out of the power of any imagination to conceive a place coming to, and going away from the persons, instead of the persons changing their place. Yet there ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge
... our terrestrial faculties are sufficiently limited, but this reason and these faculties suffice none the less to make us feel the improbability, the absurdity, of this hypothesis, and we reject it as incompatible with the sublime grandeur of the ...
— Astronomy for Amateurs • Camille Flammarion
... being cut off? If this was the case, it would be easy for the Grand Duke to defend Irkutsk, and any time gained against an invasion was a step towards repulsing it. Michael sometimes let his thoughts run on these hopes, but he soon saw their improbability, and felt that the preservation of the Grand ...
— Michael Strogoff - or, The Courier of the Czar • Jules Verne
... reading an appropriate passage of Scripture. . . . Mr. Dickens says that while they were kneeling at prayer Mr. Cruikshank whispered to him what he relates. Mr. C. denies it; and I believe him. . . . In addition to the improbability, one of the company remembers that Mr. Dickens and Mr. Cruikshank did not sit together, and could not have knelt side by side." The reader must be left to judge between what is said of the incident in the text and these recollections of it ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... lived in this manner, high aloft, with all that improbability which is in nature; neither at the nadir nor at the zenith, between man and seraphim, above the mire, below the ether, in the clouds; hardly flesh and blood, soul and ecstasy from head to foot; already too sublime to walk the earth, still too heavily charged with humanity ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... flavour, when read, makes us overlook their inherent improbability in the mouth of the character that utters them, take on, when spoken, an air of artifice. Such are the lines in which Miriam describes her old ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, July 22, 1914 • Various
... thought, it was the simplification that had come about. There had been so many confusing and bewildering complications in the affair; improbability piled on the impossible; the ridiculous ...
— Ten From Infinity • Paul W. Fairman
... outwitted by more clever brains than my own, and now when I fancied I had wealth and power within my grasp, it was snatched from me in a moment. I did not remember the probability that the supposed treasure was no treasure at all, for the improbability of any one hiding a box of great value at such a place had never occurred to me. To my mind the whole business had been plain enough. Granfer Fraddam knew of such a thing, and had kept its whereabouts ...
— The Birthright • Joseph Hocking
... call at a house on East Fifty-fifth Street. Suppose he should walk up there this very afternoon and ring the bell, and say that he had come to call! What would happen then? Whereupon he laughed aloud. The fancy seemed to him so utterly preposterous. The idea of his making a call! The utter improbability of his ever seeing the inside of one of the East Fifty-fifth ...
— Ester Ried Yet Speaking • Isabella Alden
... Hotel de Hollande. These two incidents—the recognition of a ruined man by a well-to-do friend, and a German innkeeper interesting himself in two penniless fellow-countrymen—give, no doubt, an air of improbability to the story, but truth is so much the more like fiction, since modern writers of fiction have been at such ...
— Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac
... from his eyes. Innumerable dim corners of memory had been flooded with light by that one quick glance of the aide-de-camp's: things he had heard, hints he had let pass, smiles, insinuations, cordialities, rumours of the improbability of the Prince's founding a family, suggestions as to the urgent need of ...
— The Glimpses of the Moon • Edith Wharton
... if so many, themselves. I think I understood them clearly, that this youth was killed there; and not brought away prisoner, and afterwards killed. Nor could I learn that they had brought away any more than this one; which increased the improbability of their having killed so many. We had also reason to think that they did not come off without loss; for a young woman was seen, more than once, to cut herself, as is the custom when they lose a friend ...
— A Voyage Towards the South Pole and Round the World, Volume 1 • James Cook
... brought from New Bond Street to Fauncey Court, and then substituted for the Duchess's maid, is at no point actually improbable; and yet we feel that a vast effort has been made to attain an end which, owing to the very length of the sequence of chances, at last assumes an air of improbability. There is little doubt that the substructure of the great scene might have been very much simpler. I imagine that Sir Arthur Pinero was betrayed into complexity and over-elaboration by his desire ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... But, as it stands, the book no doubt exhibits the usual faults, that languishing of the middle action, for instance, which injures The Bride of Lammermoor and The Monastery, together with the much more common huddling and improbability of the conclusion. But we know that this last was put on hurriedly, against the grain, and after the author, disgusted by the grumblings of others, had relinquished his work; so that ...
— Sir Walter Scott - Famous Scots Series • George Saintsbury
... the storm. An attempted alibi was feebly supported, although Oates was so indefinite in regard to time that to attempt to convict him of falsehood was of little avail. The chief points of his defence were the improbability of the whole story, and the fact that Oates on his examination before the council had said that he did not know him. Oates thus excused himself: 'My lord, when Mr. Coleman was upon his examination before the council board, he saith I ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, May 1844 - Volume 23, Number 5 • Various
... if the King should fail, your situation in his family, and your age, naturally recommend you to an equal place in the new household. I am the more desirous of seeing you at court, because, when I consider the improbability of our being in a situation to make war, I am earnest to have you have other opportunities of being one of the first men in this country, besides being a general. Don't think all I say on this subject compliment. I can have no view in flattering you; and You have a ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... Koordish women waylaying and capturing them on the roads through Koordistan, and subjecting them to barbarous treatment. I have smiled, and thought them merely "travellers' tales;" but I can see plain enough, this morning, that there is no improbability in the stories, for, from a dozen pairs of female eyes, behold, there gleams not one single ray of tenderness: these women are capable of anything that tigresses are capable of, beyond a doubt. Almost the first ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... you have a good hand at the turn-up, and are very strong at next, it is better to order, since the stronger you are at next, the greater the improbability that your partner will be ...
— The Laws of Euchre - As adopted by the Somerset Club of Boston, March 1, 1888 • H. C. Leeds
... without Christ is not an improbability, but an impossibility. As well expect the natural fruit to flourish without air and heat, without soil and sunshine. How thoroughly also Paul grasped this truth is apparent from a hundred pregnant passages in which he echoes his ...
— Beautiful Thoughts • Henry Drummond
... to move. He kept looking steadily in her pretty face, speculated as to the nature of the charm that rendered it so sweet, wondered what was the cause of the lines of care that at times rippled her smooth white brow, longed to become the sharer of her grief, and her comforter, and pondered the improbability of his ever being in a position to call her Nita—darling Nita—sweetest Nita—exquisite Nita! He was still engaged in creating adjectives at Chamouni when he was brought suddenly back to the Alpine ...
— Rivers of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... Procopius. A rehabilitation of Theodora is not a theme calculated to provoke enthusiasm, and is impossible besides from the entire want of adequate evidence. But a thoughtful writer would not have lost his time, if he referred to the subject at all, in pointing out the moral improbability of the current accounts. He might have dwelt on the unsupported testimony of the only witness, the unscrupulous Procopius, whom Gibbon himself convicts on another subject of flagrant mendacity. But he would have been especially slow to believe that a woman who had led the life of incredible ...
— Gibbon • James Cotter Morison
... even more visible than it was when she was seated; and it took all my nerve and power of will to take the measure of the mis-shapen shoulders without shrinking from the touch. And then I saw the improbability, I might say the impossibility, of finding in any ready-made-clothing store, a dress which would fit the twisted form. One must be made on purpose; one which would set at defiance all rules of symmetry; ...
— Uncle Rutherford's Nieces - A Story for Girls • Joanna H. Mathews
... order to account for the sudden outbursts of those stars, the light from which has probably occupied not much less than one hundred years in its passage hither. It has been suggested that the collision of two suns, or of two great masses of matter, would create such phenomena; but, apart from the improbability of such a catastrophe occurring among the celestial orbs, the rapid subsidence in the luminosity of the observed objects would indicate that the outburst was produced by causes of a more rapidly transitory ...
— The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' • Thomas Orchard
... the Iliad; and that if so, this poem could not have been committed to writing during the time of such its composition; that in a question of comparative probabilities like this, it is a much grosser improbability that even the single Iliad, amounting, after all curtailments and expungings, to upwards of 15,000 lines, should have been actually conceived and perfected in the brain of one man, with no other help but ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, No. 476, Saturday, February 12, 1831 • Various
... to explain the foregoing laws of geographical distribution, on the theory of allied species having a common descent Improbability of finding fossil forms ...
— The Foundations of the Origin of Species - Two Essays written in 1842 and 1844 • Charles Darwin
... but she is skilled in throwing a poetical charm over the quiet narrow circle of domestic life. She is almost invariably successful in her female characters, but when she attempts to draw those of men, her creations are mere caricatures, full of emptiness and improbability. Her habit of indulging in a sort of aimless and objectless philosophizing vein, a propos of nothing at all, is also found highly wearisome. For my part, it has often given me an attack of nausea. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various
... representative of the modern secular and rationalistic spirit. The strong predisposition of Montaigne was to regard witchcraft as the result of natural causes, and therefore, though he did not attempt to explain all the statements which he had heard, he was convinced that no conceivable improbability could be as great as that which would be involved in their ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... to his Shakespeare and in his edition as a whole shows allegiance to Pope. Anonymous, on the contrary, decisively, though urbanely, rejects Pope's edition in favor of Theobald's text and notes. The fact that Theobald was at that time still the king of dunces in the Dunciad, adds to the improbability that an admirer of Pope's, as Hanmer certainly was, ...
— Some Remarks on the Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, Written by Mr. William Shakespeare (1736) • Anonymous
... displeased and annoyed that she durst not discuss the subject with him, lest she should rouse him to take some strong authoritative measures against it. He had always trusted to the improbability of her meeting with a situation before his departure, when, between entreaty and command, he had reckoned on inducing her to go home; and this engagement came as a fresh blow, making him realize what ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... time; so that there were probably among the flying savages other murderers to be dealt with. This idea was strengthened by another thought, namely, that the savage who stabbed and scalped Dupont might not have been the savage who shot him. The complication and aggregate of improbability amounted, in Bertram's mind, so nearly to a certainty, that he dismissed the digressive question as to whether there might or might not be a murderer among the Indians, and returned to the original proposition, as to whether it was right in him ...
— The Wild Man of the West - A Tale of the Rocky Mountains • R.M. Ballantyne
... generally something ridiculous in it, their bodies were often produced after their death, which has always in it something melancholy or terrifying; so that the killing on the stage does not seem to have been avoided only as an indecency, but also as an improbability. ...
— The Palmy Days of Nance Oldfield • Edward Robins
... cannot have failed in impressing readers with the reality of the character. The delicacy of du Maurier's psychology in this portrait of a middle-aged man of the period is in marked contrast with the improbability of so many of his renderings of elderly people wherever he went outside of his stock types. It justifies his realism and mistrust of memory drawing. Through his failure to sustain his interest in life ...
— George Du Maurier, the Satirist of the Victorians • T. Martin Wood
... me as if fortune had given me a stage-box at another and grander spectacle, and I had been suffered to see this VENICE, which is to other cities like the pleasant improbability of the theatre to every-day, commonplace life, to much the same effect as that melodrama in Padua. I could not, indeed, dwell three years in the place without learning to know it differently from those writers who have described it in romances, poems, ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... America, through which I mean not to follow him. It is a circumstance sufficiently striking, without being commented on, that the former union of America with Britain, produced a power, which, in her hands, had was becoming dangerous to the world: and there is no improbability in supposing, that had the latter known as much of the strength of former, before she began the quarrel, as she has known since, that instead of attempting to reduce her to unconditional submission, would have proposed to her the conquest of Mexico. ...
— A Letter Addressed to the Abbe Raynal, on the Affairs of North America, in Which the Mistakes in the Abbe's Account of the Revolution of America Are Corrected and Cleared Up • Thomas Paine
... were far from joining in these fears. The utter improbability of such a movement was obvious to all who considered the nature of the country to be traversed, and the efficient and numerous body of whites by whom they must be opposed on their entrance into that neighborhood. There were some, however, who could not be persuaded that ...
— Wau-bun - The Early Day in the Northwest • Juliette Augusta Magill Kinzie
... knowledge, or events yet to come, which require to be foretold or announced; since it is the privilege of the Gods to know everything. There should be nothing improbable among the actual incidents. If it be unavoidable, however, it should be outside the tragedy, like the improbability in the Oedipus of Sophocles. But to return to the Characters. As Tragedy is an imitation of personages better than the ordinary man, we in our way should follow the example of good portrait-painters, who reproduce the distinctive features of a man, and at the same time, without ...
— The Poetics • Aristotle
... submarine campaign increasing here with prolongation of war and improbability of decisive military blow, without, ...
— My Three Years in America • Johann Heinrich Andreas Hermann Albrecht Graf von Bernstorff
... remarkable that none of the great painters have, in the course of years, been subjected to so much criticism as Rembrandt. And notwithstanding all the things which have been said about the improbability of the scene, and the exaggeration of the dark background, the "Night Patrol" is now, as it ever was and ever will be, the "World's wonder," as ...
— Rembrandt • Josef Israels
... exposed to the same conditions, it might have been expected that those which varied would tend to vary in the same manner. As a general rule only a few individuals of a species vary simultaneously in the same manner; and there is no improbability in the assumption that some few individuals might produce larger seeds than the average, better stocked with nourishment. If the production of such seeds were highly beneficial to a species, and on this head there can be little doubt, ...
— The Different Forms of Flowers on Plants of the Same Species • Charles Darwin
... and because of the improbability of the physiological discovery, and of the moral 'reform' which enforced it; and again, because the law is not of the sort which people acquainted with near degrees of kinship would make; and once more, because the law fails to effect its presumed ...
— Custom and Myth • Andrew Lang
... the example of G. B. Niebuhr, Gutschmid admitted here, as Oppert did, 45 Assyrians; he based his view on Herodotus, in which it is said that the Assyrians held sway in Asia for 520 years, until its conquest by the Medes. Upon the improbability of this opinion, see ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 3 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... sufficient under existing circumstances to account for his fall on that occasion. But it is inconcievable that a person of established piety should remain for a whole year stupid and unconcerned under the guilt of such transgressions; and the utter improbability of such an event will be further ...
— Sermons on Various Important Subjects • Andrew Lee
... competent scholars, no further questions need be raised. In any case the prima facie presumption must be held to be enormously against the genuineness of the fragments. Such a presumption rests on the improbability of finding manuscripts older by at least sixteen centuries than any extant manuscripts of the same text, on the comparative ease with which such fragments can be forged, and on the powerful motives to such forgery attested by the price placed by ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 401, September 8, 1883 • Various
... faith in this axiom, expressed after his own paradoxical fashion, that he partly owed some of those brilliant successes which had stamped him as one of the foremost criminal investigators of his day. He never rejected a story on the score of its improbability. He had seen so many unusual things in his career that he once declared that it was the unforeseen, and not the expected, which occurs most frequently in this strange world of ours. That was, perhaps, partly due to the wide gulf between human ideals and actions, but, whatever ...
— The Hand in the Dark • Arthur J. Rees
... manifestation, at length displayed a faith which shines with peculiar brightness, when brought into comparison with the sentiments of the aged priest Zacharias, when the same angel appeared to him a few months before, to communicate a prediction of far less apparent improbability. ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. II • Francis Augustus Cox
... the study of their best authors. In the chapter "Of unprofytable Stody," above mentioned, which contains proof how well he at least had profited by study, he cites certain continental seats of university learning at each of which, there is indeed no improbability in supposing he may have remained for some time, as was the custom ...
— The Ship of Fools, Volume 1 • Sebastian Brandt
... fifty of the fiercest, bravest, and most formidable savages in Africa, who, to make matters worse, were protected by a stone wall. It was, indeed, a mad undertaking, and what made it even madder was the exceeding improbability of our being able to take up our positions without attracting the notice of the sentries. Of course if we once did that — and any slight accident, such as the chance discharge of a gun, might do it — we were done for, for the whole camp would be up in a second, and our ...
— Allan Quatermain • by H. Rider Haggard
... is drowned.' 'How drowned?' 'He shot himself.' 'Why did he shoot himself?' 'Because I had married his ward.' 'But his partner is gone too.' 'He is murdered.' 'Why murdered?' 'Because he interceded for me.' 'Where is your witness?' 'He has disappeared.' I saw the wild improbability of this tale, and thought of past notorious quarrels with my father ended by my voluntary absence. There were but two points that seemed to stick in my nervous mind: 'It never would do to tell our marriage at that moment, and I must find that ...
— Bohemian Days - Three American Tales • Geo. Alfred Townsend
... was a proud girl, and was not accustomed to being dictated to. All the same, she felt much interested in what he had said, and she found herself thinking of him again and again. There was something romantic, too, in his story which, in spite of its improbability, she could not help believing, and although she felt very angry with him, she sympathised with the feelings he had expressed. Months before she had been annoyed at the thought that her father should have been opposed by one who was little removed from the working classes. ...
— The Day of Judgment • Joseph Hocking
... flew upon him like a dragon, got him down, the Devil being strong in him, and gave him bastinado on bastinado, and buffet on buffet, which the poor Colonel, being prostrate, suffered with a most Christian patience. The improbability of the fact never fails to raise mirth in the audience; and one may venture to answer for a British House of Commons, if we may guess from its conduct hitherto, that it will scarce be either so tame or so weak ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... week or day," and another one, "Furnished rooms to let," showed it to be an ordinary boarding-house. Chip had fully decided within himself, during the ride, that the men who had left the parcel had also left St. Louis. While it was not so much an improbability that the men would still be in the city, it was far more probable that they would put some distance between themselves and the scene of their exploit. For this reason, Chip decided that a plain course ...
— Jim Cummings • Frank Pinkerton
... hardly have been accidental. It is a sound maxim in criticism that what is simply difficult of explanation is likely to be authentic. An awkward reading in a manuscript is to be preferred to one which is easier. But an historical improbability, especially if no corroboration of it is to be found in a better authority, may be set aside, and in this case we are justified in neglecting the kiss. Whatever may have been the exact shade of darkness in the crime of Judas, it was avenged with singular swiftness, and he himself was the ...
— Pages from a Journal with Other Papers • Mark Rutherford
... man of some experience in such matters, I fully recognized its improbability, but beyond relating the circumstances leading up to my possession of the pigtail and the events which had ensued, I could do no more in the matter. The weird relic had not been found on the dead woman, ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer
... character to those which I am trying to point out are present in the minds of Englishmen, about the character of a considerable section of the people of Great Britain; and if Americans can be thus mistaken about England, there is no inherent improbability in the suggestion that Englishmen may be analogously mistaken about the ...
— The Twentieth Century American - Being a Comparative Study of the Peoples of the Two Great - Anglo-Saxon Nations • H. Perry Robinson
... she could never perceive the prodigious improbability of the arrival of that boat. She did not seem to be thinking of it. Perhaps she had already forgotten the fact herself. And Heyst resolved suddenly to say nothing more of it. It was not that he shrank from alarming her. Not feeling anything definite ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... literary arguments which hardly admit of this form of expression—such as the improbability that the Preface or Prologue was not part of the original Gospel, but a later accretion; or, again, from Marcion's treatment of the Synoptic matter in the third Gospel, both points which might be otherwise worth dilating upon. I pass over these, and come ...
— The Gospels in the Second Century - An Examination of the Critical Part of a Work - Entitled 'Supernatural Religion' • William Sanday
... Errors.—Mistaken identity (which the Elizabethans called "Error") is nearly always amusing, whether on the stage or in actual life. The Comedy of Errors is a play in which this situation is developed to the extreme of improbability; but we lose sight of this in the roaring fun which results. Nowadays we should call a play of this type a farce, since most of the fun comes in this way from situations which are improbable, and ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken
... present that combined plot, (the object of every skilful novelist), in which all the more interesting individuals of the dramatis personae have their appropriate share in the action and in bringing about the catastrophe. Here, even more than in its various and violent changes of fortune, rests the improbability of the novel. The life of man rolls forth like a stream from the fountain, or it spreads out into tranquillity like a placid or stagnant lake. In the latter case, the individual grows old among the characters with whom he was born, and is contemporary,—shares precisely the sort of weal and woe ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... slaughter of a single Pomeranian grenadier. For instance, take the Militarist view that we must fight Potsdam because if the Kaiser is victorious, it will be our turn next! Well: are we not prepared to fight always when our turn comes? Why should not we also depend on our navy, on the extreme improbability of Germany, however triumphant, making two such terrible calls on her people in the same generation as a war involves, on the sympathy of the defeated, and on the support of American and European public opinion when our turn comes, if there is nothing at stake now but the difference between defeat ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... chronicler, confirm these authorities as to Edward's choice of Harold as his successor. William of Malmesbury, who is not partial to Harold, writing in the reign of Henry the First, has doubts himself as to Edward's bequest, (though grounded on a very bad argument, viz. "the improbability that Edward would leave his crown to a man of whose power he had always been jealous;" there is no proof that Edward had been jealous of Harold's power—he had been of Godwin's;) but Malmesbury gives a more valuable authority ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... have already occupied too much space in details necessary to make the geographical nature of the question well understood; and we shall content ourselves with remarking, that the discovery of the termination of the Quorra, or Niger, tends to throw a degree of improbability upon the narrative of that individual, which it will require much ingenuity to explain away. It is certain that the latitude given to Timbuctoo by the editor of those travels, and upon which sufficient ridicule has already been thrown in the Edinburgh Geographical Journal, may be considered ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, - Issue 495, June 25, 1831 • Various
... Italian Government naturally regards such action as the primary and, indeed, the most essential element in the disposal of the Tallulah incident, I advise that, in accordance with precedent, and in view of the improbability of that particular case being reached by the bill now pending, Congress make gracious provision for indemnity to the Italian sufferers in the same ...
— Messages and Papers of William McKinley V.2. • William McKinley
... Bride of Lammermuir, Ivanhoe, the Monastery, the Abbot, Kenilworth, and the Pirate.[167] The marks of broken health on all these are essentially twofold—prevailing melancholy, and fantastic improbability. Three of the tales are agonizingly tragic, the Abbot scarcely less so in its main event, and Ivanhoe deeply wounded through all its bright panoply; while even in that most powerful of the series, the impossible archeries and axestrokes, the incredibly opportune appearances of Locksley, ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... colour was high, and his expression, indeed, a little idiotic; and he declared afterwards that he felt like a sandwich-man, with the news printed in red letters before and behind. Honora knew that the intense improbability of the truth would save them, and it did. Mrs. Holt remarked, slyly, that the game of golf must have hidden attractions, and regretted that she was too ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... decrepitude, and weakness of Mrs Sliderskew; the great improbability of her having any accomplice or even acquaintance: taking into account her secluded habits, and her long residence in such a house as Gride's; the strong reason there was to suppose that the robbery was not the result of a concerted ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens
... Mrs. Mervale, "but I don't see the improbability of the thing, Angila, nor, indeed, the disagreeability even. The Constants are young people with a small family, and I think a woman is quite sufficient for them. Their house ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 3 September 1848 • Various
... question that in that climate decomposition would be well advanced. Utter human impotence and impossibility was in its last degree. Man stands utterly powerless, utterly helpless in the presence of death. It is not the last degree of improbability. There is no improbability. It's an impossibility. The thing is in a class by itself, the hopeless class. And the four days give death its fullest opportunity. And death never fails in ...
— Quiet Talks on John's Gospel • S. D. Gordon
... supplications we address to our Father in Heaven: we cannot think of His being moved by our mere importunity, or by the mechanical repetition of set phrases; but that the fulfilment of some wish of ours may be conditioned by our humility and confidence in expressing it, presents no improbability. In any case, what is necessary on our part is that we should have faith, not only in God's power to grant our petitions, but in His wisdom in granting or refusing them as may be most expedient for us. We ourselves can, within limits, fulfil most of our ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... Church. For what can he say or do against the other miracles if he be powerless against the Resurrection? He can make sentences which sound plausible, but that is no great feat. Can he show that there is any a priori improbability whatever, in the fact of miracles having been wrought by one who died and rose from the dead? If a man did this it is a small thing that he should also walk upon the waves and command the winds. But if there is no a priori difficulty with regard to these miracles, there ...
— The Fair Haven • Samuel Butler
... Decameron, only written at greater length, and in verse. Chaucer, the "great translator," took Boccaccio's poem and treated it in his own way, not as he had dealt with the Teseide. The Teseide, because there was some romantic improbability in the story, he made into a romance. The story of Troilus he saw was strong enough to bear a stronger handling, and instead of leaving it a romance, graceful and superficial as it is in Boccaccio, he deepened it and filled it with such dramatic imagination and such variety of life as had never ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... unique, full of wit, a veiled sarcasm that is rich in the extreme, it will all be found in this charming little book. The air of perfect sincerity with which they are told, the diction, reminding one of 'The Vicar of Wakefield,' and the ludicrous improbability of the tales, give them a power rarely met with in 'short stories.' There is many a lesson to be learned from the ...
— The Man Without a Country and Other Tales • Edward E. Hale
... The inherent improbability of the German contention is shown by the fact that after the first few days of the invasion every possible precaution had been taken by the Belgian authorities, by way of placards and handbills, to warn the civilian ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 3, June, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... arrangement of my facts—now become considerable enough to stand in need of those threads of theory without which large accumulations of fact refuse to hang together in the memory. There was one special hypothesis which he had heard broached, and the utter improbability of which I was not yet geologist enough to detect, which for a time filled my whole imagination. It had been said, he told me, that the ancient world, in which my fossils, animal and vegetable, had flourished ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... this wonderful improbability according to natural circumstances. These trains never connected with each other, nor were intended to. There was no message sent ahead to stop. There was not the slightest business reason for waiting, yet the second conductor, ...
— The Wonders of Prayer - A Record of Well Authenticated and Wonderful Answers to Prayer • Various
... most unphilosophically credulous, is to treat the supposition as a certainty, notwithstanding that the chances against its representing real facts are as infinity to infinitesimality; for not less is the preponderance of improbability that the laws of nature were not intentionally prescribed, and that the wondrously complex and wondrously useful harmony that has been established between organic structure and natural law was not designedly established. In considering this point, it ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... as it seemed, to proceed to extreme severities, offered him his choice, either of being executed on the island, or set ashore on the mainland, or being sent to England to be tried before the council; of which, after a day's consideration, he chose the first, alleging the improbability of persuading any to leave the expedition, for the sake of transporting a criminal to England, and the danger of his future state among savages and infidels. His choice, I believe, few will approve: to be set ashore on the mainland, was, indeed, only to be executed in a different manner; ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 6 - Reviews, Political Tracts, and Lives of Eminent Persons • Samuel Johnson
... doubtful. Claudius, during all his reign, is represented as emperor on the medals of Alexandria, which are very numerous. If Zenobia possessed any power in Egypt, it could only have been at the beginning of the reign of Aurelian. The same circumstance throws great improbability on her conquests in Galatia. Perhaps Zenobia administered Egypt in the name of Claudius, and emboldened by the death of that prince, subjected it to her ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... my forest cabin I have an assortment of the best wines and whiskies, notwithstanding the improbability of being able to offer a glass to my friends, but those bottles remain well corked, waiting for their legitimate owner to feel indisposed, when a draught of their contents will restore his lost strength ...
— My Friends the Savages - Notes and Observations of a Perak settler (Malay Peninsula) • Giovanni Battista Cerruti
... between Frederick Mainwaring Scott, the alleged foster-father of the proponent, and the members of the Mainwaring family,—the deceased Hugh Mainwaring and the contestant in particular; and also to show the implacable anger of Ralph Maxwell Mainwaring against his elder son and the extreme improbability of his ...
— That Mainwaring Affair • Maynard Barbour
... idea of the Peninsular cycle being borrowed direct from any French original is hopelessly absurd. There is, notoriously, no external evidence of any such original ever having existed, and there is an immense improbability against any such original ever having existed. Further, the internal characteristics of the Spanish romances, though, undoubtedly, they might never have come into existence at all but for the French, and though there ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... having broken out; and the consequence was that the Boers counted on intervention or help from the Powers, instead of depending on their own strength and perseverance. The most sensible among us recognised the improbability of intervention. It was not to the interest of any foreign Power to intervene in South Africa where it had no firm footing, particularly as Chamberlain had, by most cunning artifices, forced us ...
— On Commando • Dietlof Van Warmelo
... spiritual religion, rather than as a final stern rebuke closing his effort to win his people. Against the conclusion commonly held that Jesus cleansed the temple both at the opening and at the close of his course is the extreme improbability that the traders would have been caught twice in the same way. The event fits in closely with the story of the last week, because it actually led to the beginning of opposition in Jerusalem to the prophet from Galilee. At the first the opposition was ...
— The Life of Jesus of Nazareth • Rush Rhees
... with marvellous stories,—stories that we should at once reject from their intrinsic improbability, not to say impossibility, if we should find them in any other book. But, among all the stories, there is none that equals the account of the deluge, as given in the sixth, seventh, and eighth chapters of Genesis. It towers above the rest as ...
— The Deluge in the Light of Modern Science - A Discourse • William Denton
... I had gone, I suppose, and my brain had been very active the while, when something occurred to me which placed a new complexion upon this second summons. I thought of the falsity of the first, of the improbability of even the most hardened practical joker practising his wiles at one o'clock in the morning. I thought of our recent conversation; above all I thought of the girl who had delivered the message to ...
— The Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer
... when it had elapsed, and with their usual love of evil augury tormented us by their melancholy forebodings. At one time they conjectured that the whole party had fallen through{1} the ice; at another, that they had been way-laid and cut off by the Dog-ribs. In vain did we urge the improbability of the former accident, or the peaceable character of the Dog-ribs, so little in conformity with the latter. "The ice at this season was deceitful," they said, "and the Dog-ribs, though unwarlike, were treacherous." These assertions, so often repeated, had some effect upon the spirits ...
— Narrative of a Journey to the Shores of the Polar Sea, in the years 1819-20-21-22, Volume 2 • John Franklin
... of you—hearts the best, minds the noblest, of human kind—unfortunate, even in the shades of life—when I think I have met with you, and have lived more of real life with you in eight days, than I can do with almost any body I meet with in eight years—when I think on the improbability of meeting you in this world again—I could sit down and cry like a child!—If ever you honoured me with a place in your esteem, I trust I can now plead more desert.—I am secure against that crushing grip of iron poverty, ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various
... that they were too young to take any part in political matters, they vented by tumultuous shouts their dissatisfation at this somewhat ill-timed interference. Now, not only was there such an inherent improbability about this story, to any one at all acquainted with Roman feelings or Papal policy, that it scarcely needed refutation, but subsequent events proved it to be entirely devoid of foundation in fact, and ...
— Rome in 1860 • Edward Dicey
... was always vaunting, under the title of the "good old times," some undiscoverable past which he perpetually lamented as his deceased Millennium. And finally—as large as life, and as real—Alderman Cute. As in the original Christmas book, so also in the Reading, the one flagrant improbability was the consumption by Alderman Cute of the last lukewarm tid-bit of tripe left by Trotty Veck down at the bottom of the basin—its consumption, indeed, by any alderman, however prying or gluttonous. Barring that, ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent |
