"Indestructible" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... grinding and crunching them under foot fought the skeletons. Everywhere charged the bone-gaunt white steeds; everywhere on foot or on wind-blown misty battle-horses, raged and ravened and raved the indestructible spectres; weapons and hoofs clashed and crushed; while skeleton jaws and phantom-throats swelled the deafening tumult with the war-cry of every opinion, bad or good, that had bred strife, injustice, cruelty in any world. The holiest words went with ...
— Lilith • George MacDonald
... implement, but it was not carefully finished like the interior, nor was it treated like the latter with a specially prepared material. The material employed for the walls was admirably suited for the purpose, being when dry almost as hard as sandstone and practically indestructible. The manner in which such walls disintegrate under atmospheric influences has already been set forth in detail in this report. An inhabited structure with walls like these would last indefinitely, ...
— Casa Grande Ruin • Cosmos Mindeleff
... of his daily allowance,[153] has been obscured by the invention of an imaginary Fr. *beaufetier, waiter at the side-board. Professor Skeat attributes the success of this myth to its inclusion in Mrs Markham's History of England. But the most indestructible of all these superstitions is connected with the word cabal. It comes from a Hebrew word meaning hidden mystery, and is found in the chief Romance languages. The word is of frequent occurrence in English long ...
— The Romance of Words (4th ed.) • Ernest Weekley
... is therefore a parable of the impotent yearnings of the Middle Ages—its passionate aspiration, its conscience-stricken desire, its fettered curiosity amid the tramping limits of imperfect knowledge and irrational dogmatism. The indestructible beauty of Greek art,—whereof Helen was an emblem, became, through the discovery of classic poetry and sculpture, the possession of the modern world. Mediaevalism took this Helen to wife, and their offspring, the Euphorion of Goethe's drama, is the spirit of the modern world.—J.A. ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... the law, that man is capable of self government, and possesses the inherent and indestructible right of altering, amending, and changing his form of government at his pleasure, and in furtherance of his happiness. We have sworn hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man. These truths we have made a part of the laws of nations. Despots ...
— Select Speeches of Kossuth • Kossuth
... environment; his heritage is immutable. To suppress an undesirable trait the germ-cell must unite with one that has never shown it—one from a sound stock. An unsuitable mating in a later generation, however, may bring it out again (for factors are indestructible), and the individual showing it will have ...
— Epilepsy, Hysteria, and Neurasthenia • Isaac G. Briggs
... purpose, from the sole of an infant's boot to the roof of a cathedral. There are times when genius must stoop to pick up its daily pittance; and for twelve months the elegant Horatio Paget was content to devote his best energies to the perpetual praise of the Incorrodible and Indestructible and Incombustible India-rubber, in consideration of a very modest percentage on his commercial transactions in that material. To exert the persuasive eloquence of a Burke or a Thurlow in order ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... indestructible specks of cosmic intelligence, lighting up and animating one material body after another—never destroyed—or do we play on this earth the passing part of the microbe in the Brie cheese, which gives that ...
— Editorials from the Hearst Newspapers • Arthur Brisbane
... days, however, events had happened which had bound him by indestructible fetters to the old faith. He had vowed to his dying mother to remain faithful to the Holy Church and loyally to keep his oath. It was not difficult for one of his modest temperament to be content with the ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... best type of orthodox piety, and zealous to vindicate his master from the charge of irreligion,—Xenophon, in all the story of the master's life and death, gives not a hint of any future hope. But Plato developed the idea that in man there resides an essential, indestructible principle, superior to the physical frame which is its home and may be either its servant or master—a principle which manifests itself in thought, aspiration, virtue; which has existed before the body and will exist after it; which chooses for itself an upward or downward path; and which ...
— The Chief End of Man • George S. Merriam
... keep on living, you poor little shrimp? Why don't you die? Why can't both of us die? Many people die who want to live! Why should we live who want to die? Tell me that, little miserable!" But the baby defiantly sucked his thumb, as if it held the elixir of life, and looked indestructible vitality from his great, ...
— Ishmael - In the Depths • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... perpetual bet. Yes—the very same teasing, now moody, now reckless, always astute Johnny Dromore, with a good heart beneath an outside that seemed ashamed of it. Truly to have shared a room at school—to have been at College together, were links mysteriously indestructible. ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... Pharisee, a man and a policeman who were first on the spot lifted Banker McRamsey and carried him into Hinkle's restaurant. When the aged but indestructible banker opened his eyes he saw a beautiful vision bending over him with a pitiful, tender smile, bathing his forehead with beef tea and chafing his hands with something frappe out of a chafing-dish. Mr. McRamsey sighed, lost a vest button, gazed with deep gratitude ...
— Strictly Business • O. Henry
... writers of this narrative heard him remark during a discussion on ancient buildings: "Wood will rot, stone will chip and crumble, bricks disintegrate, but a cement and iron structure is apparently indestructible. Look at some of the old Roman baths. They are as solid as when they were built." With such convictions, and the vast fund of practical knowledge and experience he had gained at Edison in the crushing and manipulation ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... me tell a trivial Riviera tale. There was an Englishwoman here, one of those indestructible modern ladies who breakfast off an ether cocktail and half a dozen aspirins and feel all the better for it, and who, one day, found herself losing rather heavily at the tables. "Another aspirin is going to turn my luck," she thought, and therewith swallowed ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... his guest, so that he might lecture about them at his ease. Mrs. Simpson often told me of the horror she felt as a girl lest she should throw a spoonful of soup over a Raphael or by an accident run a knife or a fork into the immortal canvas! She had not learnt that pictures are about the most indestructible things ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... corollary or accompaniment of an infinitely more important revelation and expansion in the spiritual sphere. What we are to expect is an awakening of the soul; the re-discovery and re-habilitation of the genuine and indestructible religious instinct. Such a religious revival will be something very different from what we have hitherto known under that name. It will be a spontaneous and joyful realization by the soul of its vital relations with its Creator. Ecclesiastical forms and dogmas will vanish, and nature will ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 19, June, 1891 • Various
... before. He had never read any history. When he wanted to know any fact he asked Henry, who read everything obtainable. Now, however, there arose within him a deep compassion for the gentle Maid of Orleans, a burning resentment toward her captors, a powerful and indestructible interest in her sad history. It was an interest that would grow steadily for more than half a lifetime and culminate at last in that crowning work, the Recollections, the loveliest story ever told ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... white-heat of their own hurry. But now there's a crop of something better than stones, I can promise you! It goes on gathering, and being garnered and mingled and sifted and winnowed—the precious, indestructible harvest of how many ...
— Peter Ibbetson • George du Marier et al
... to fix our attention—it is the scene of a romance which we may still study, of a mystery which is of our own time. Even to this little hidden nook, even to this quiet bower of Nature's building, that vigilant and indestructible Papal religion, which defies alike hidden conspiracy and open persecution, has stretched its stealthy and far-spreading influence. Even in this remote corner of the remote west of England, among the homely cottages of a few Cornish peasants, the imperial Christianity ...
— Rambles Beyond Railways; - or, Notes in Cornwall taken A-foot • Wilkie Collins
... place in the prodigious scheme, as much as the vast and fiery globe of the sun on the one hand, and, on the other, the smallest atom of dust that welters deep beneath the sea. All that is, exists; indestructible, august, divine, capable of endless rearrangement, infinite ...
— The Thread of Gold • Arthur Christopher Benson
... it is found in the Mediterranean, the sponge is surrounded with a thick glutinous matter, which is its vital part; like coral, it is a zoophyte: it propagates in the same manner, and its life is indestructible till it is removed from its proper element, and the glutinous matter which makes its vitality has been boiled out of its pores, leaving the soft and beautiful skeletons, of which these cases contain many specimens. Here ...
— How to See the British Museum in Four Visits • W. Blanchard Jerrold
... that very account is the less to be excused for indulging in repletion. The temptation, I confess, is greater, because for the brain the banquet stands ever spread before our eyes, and is, unhappily, as indestructible as the widow's ...
— On The Art of Reading • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... events. We are as old as the world, our birth was before the hills. We are the cup that holds the sea And the framework of the peak that parts the sky. When Chaos shall again return, And endless Night shall spread her wings upon a rained world, We alone shall stand up from the shattered earth, Indestructible, invincible witnesses of ...
— The Song of the Stone Wall • Helen Keller
... Porter, he forbore to quote in his published article; but as the good old gentleman (unless he has lived to be more than one hundred and twenty years old) must have gone to the place where treasures are indestructible, I will reproduce it now. "This tassel," says my father, "Mr. Porter told us (with a quiet chuckle and humorous self-gratulation), he had personally stolen, and really, for my part, though I hope I would not have done it myself, ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... pleasure-loving wife who had buoyed herself with dreams of gaiety and delight which her life in the North had denied her, had driven her back upon the elemental that was only latent in her. Coqueline was her all now. Nita clung to her baby as the one indestructible link with that purity of life which no woman, however fallen, can ever wholly disregard, or forget. The child was a sheet-anchor for all time. Whatever the future had in store, little Coqueline was her child, born in wedlock, the pledge ...
— The Heart of Unaga • Ridgwell Cullum
... of the times in regard to stopping haemorrhage, was, however, accompanied by a large mortality, and it finally evolved into the simple removal of the gland, or its obliteration by pressure or violence. Bergmann conveys the idea that circumcision was at one time the indestructible marking and the distinctive feature of the slave, the mind of the period not being able to emancipate itself from the idea that the genitals must in some manner be mutilated, not being able to conceive any other degrading mark of manhood which ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... all things. They, as Alger says, "conceived of God as a pure artistic force or seed of universal energy, which exhibits its history in the evolution of the cosmos, and, on its completion, blossoms into fire and vanishes. The universal periodical conflagration destroys all evil, and leaves the indestructible God alone ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (First Series) • George W. Foote
... all the elements are derived. These elements are the result of atomic arrangement. The atoms have various vibrations, the extent of which is called the mean free path of vibration; greatest in hydrogen and least in the densest element. All matter is indestructible, but at the same time convertible, and these facts, together with the absolute association of matter and force, lead to the conclusion that every change of matter implies a change of force. Matter, therefore, is ever living and active, and there is no such thing as dead matter anywhere. ...
— Second Sight - A study of Natural and Induced Clairvoyance • Sepharial
... of modern construction, proper proportions of. Marine engines. See Steam Engines, marine. Mastic cement for setting marine boilers. Maudslay, Messrs., boilers of "Retribution" and "Great Western," by, Mechanical powers, misconceptions respecting. Mechanical power, definition of, indestructible and eternal; the sun the source of mechanical power. Metallic packing for pistons. Metallic packing for stuffing boxes. Meyer, expansion valve by. Miller, Ravenhill & Co.'s mode of fixing piston rod to piston. Modern locomotives. ...
— A Catechism of the Steam Engine • John Bourne
... She was very white and she looked as old as a young actress who has been doing one night stands for three months. Behind the drawn mask of her face there was her indestructible youth, but so faint that it ...
— The Avalanche • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... anything that is just: it is something other than particular things, which particular things partake of. Not being particular, it cannot itself exist in the world of sense. Moreover it is not fleeting or changeable like the things of sense: it is eternally itself, immutable and indestructible. ...
— The Problems of Philosophy • Bertrand Russell
... place them (the dead) in the earth, but in coffins of very hard, indestructible wood * * * Male and female slaves were sacrificed to them, that they should not be unattended in the other world. If a person of consideration died, silence was imposed upon the whole of the people, and its duration was regulated by the rank of the deceased; and under ...
— The Former Philippines thru Foreign Eyes • Fedor Jagor; Tomas de Comyn; Chas. Wilkes; Rudolf Virchow.
... Fenelon. His argument on the "Being of a God" was prepared as a duty of his preceptorship to the prince. But the one book of Fenelon which was an historical event when it appeared, and which stands an indestructible classic in literature, is the "Telemachus." It remains for us briefly to give some idea of ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... destined to a Restoration, if the Jewish Mission is the propagation of an idea, on what ground is the continued existence of Israel as a separate organisation defensible or justified? Israel is indestructible, said Jehuda Halevi in the twelfth century; certainly Israel is undestroyed. When Frederick the Great asked what should make him believe in God, he received in answer, 'the survival of the Jews.' Dr. Guttmann ...
— Judaism • Israel Abrahams
... There is that indestructible god-side to everything; especially, behind and above this city on the seven hills, there is divine eternal ROME. So, after the Gaulish conquest, they rejected proffered and more desirable Etruscan sites, and came back and provided Dea Roma with a new out-ward being; the imperial ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... and blackened; glared at each other across a three-mile expanse that had now turned to cinders. And that was all. Practically indestructible, and evenly matched, they had fought to a standstill. Neither ship ...
— Hunters Out of Space • Joseph Everidge Kelleam
... a young Republican deputy, who had just made a most brilliant debut in the Chamber, and for whom the future reserved the most splendid destiny, for the Republic was now established in France on the most indestructible basis. ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... and the mind of man can never wholly escape it. Familiarity may temper, but inborn human superstition is indestructible. The brooding silence will shadow the lightest nature. The storms must ever inspire wonder. The gloom hushes the voice. And so the growing dread. Man may curse the hills in his brutal moments, the thoughtful may be driven to despair, the laughter-loving ...
— The Golden Woman - A Story of the Montana Hills • Ridgwell Cullum
... him, he began to tremble, and he said: "Ah, verily, God hath found me unworthy to erect His sanctuary." But God replied with these words: "Nay, the blood shed by thee I consider as sacrificial blood, but I do not care to have thee build the Temple, because then it would be eternal and indestructible." "But that would be excellent," said David. Whereupon the reply was vouchsafed him: "I foresee that Israel will commit sins. I shall wreak My wrath upon the Temple, and Israel will be saved from annihilation. However, thy good intentions shall receive their due reward. The Temple, ...
— THE LEGENDS OF THE JEWS VOLUME IV BIBLE TIMES AND CHARACTERS - FROM THE EXODUS TO THE DEATH OF MOSES • BY LOUIS GINZBERG
... his hands. "Why not?" he murmured, "why not? There is no such thing as chance. The law of probabilities is not a mere fancy, but an austere need. Matter is ever in evolution. Energy alone is indestructible. Radium has revealed this to us. In eternity when the Infinite throws the dice, double-sixes are sure to come up more than once. Miracles? But why miraculous? Infinity of necessity must repeat itself, ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... initiation became a link in the magic chain, he himself became a Kabir. He was admitted into an indestructible association and, as ancient inscriptions express it, joined to the army of the higher gods" (Schelling, Philosophie der Offenbarung). And the revolution that took place in the life of one who received initiation cannot be more significantly described than in the ...
— Christianity As A Mystical Fact - And The Mysteries of Antiquity • Rudolf Steiner
... men a new revelation of the splendour of the human soul, the true divinity that dwells in man, the God made manifest in the flesh by acts of valour, heroism, and self-sacrifice which transcend the instincts and promptings of the flesh, and bear witness to the indestructible life of the spirit. ...
— The Glory of the Trenches • Coningsby Dawson
... and then it fell, and lay face to the sky and arms outspread. You might have thought it dead. But it was a thing almost indestructible. It lay motionless, but it was alive ...
— The Pools of Silence • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... being like themselves, more powerful than themselves. Behind every phenomenon, behind every thought as well, every feeling, every institution—behind everything, no matter what it be, Plato perceived an idea, immortal, eternal, indestructible, and incorruptible, which existed in the bosom of the Eternal, and of which all that comes under our observation is only the vacillating and troubled reflection, and which supports, animates, and for a time preserves ...
— Initiation into Philosophy • Emile Faguet
... after the atoms of earth and sun and all his attending planets of our system shall have amalgamated themselves with other systems in the boundlessness of space; destroyed, obliterated, annihilated, they shall never be, for matter is indestructible. When it passes from one form it enters another; the dead animal that is cast into the earth lives again in the trees and shrubs and flowers and grasses that grow in the earth above where its body was cast. Our earth shall die in course of time, that is, its particles will pass ...
— Marvels of Modern Science • Paul Severing
... as if in consternation at possibilities. Ethelberta, having already become an influence in Christopher's system, might soon become more—an indestructible fascination—to drag him about, turn his soul inside out, harrow him, twist him, and otherwise torment him, according to the ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy
... through the columns of a newspaper, my attention was arrested by an article of particular interest. This set forth the great and increasing demand for a substitute for glass, one which would answer the purpose in every respect, and at the same time be indestructible and a good conductor of sound. The article concluded with an enumeration of the many uses for which such a substitute would be invaluable, hinting at the enormous financial possibilities which would be open to the inventor. The ...
— Zarlah the Martian • R. Norman Grisewood
... come right up against the hard facts of Nature sometimes. They've got to be stripped of their top layer and see it stripped off other people, and to recognize the fact that every one has got a core of Primitive Man or of Primitive Woman in them; a perfectly unalterable, indestructible core. And the people who refuse to recognize that aren't elevated and refined, but simply stupid and obstinate ...
— The Invader - A Novel • Margaret L. Woods
... can mock at the fury of the elements, for they are less terrible than the passions of the heart; at the devastations of the awful skies, for they are less desolating than the wrath of man; at the convulsions of that surrounding nature which has no peril, no terror to the soul, which is more indestructible and eternal than itself. Falkland turned towards the house which contained his world; and as the lightning revealed at intervals the white columns of the porch, and wrapt in sheets of fire, like a spectral throng, the tall ...
— Falkland, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... brought him in contact more than very infrequently with people of this sort, and his personal interests never could be made to do so with results perfectly satisfactory to himself. There it was,—the thing those lucky elect possessed without a thought or an effort. It was an indestructible possession, apparently, too. You couldn't throw it away. Dissipation, dishonesty, even a total collapse that brought its victim down to the sink that he himself had sprouted from, seemed powerless to efface ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... the ramparts towards Nervi, from the height of the Via Corsica or from the hills. From there, with the whole strength and glory of the sea before you, these palaces, which in the midst of the city are so indestructible and immortal, seem flowerlike, full of delicate hues, fragile and almost as though about to fade; you think of hyacinths, of the blossom of the magnolia, of the fleeting lilac, and the lily that towers in the moonlight ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton
... of the year 1860, there existed in the city of Montgomery, Alabama, a strong, active, and apparently indestructible Union party. Three months after the close of the year there remained in the city no trace of Union sentiment. To show how this feeling was destroyed, sinking slowly, and with many reactions, under influences in themselves insignificant, and to narrate, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 3 No 3, March 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... Energy, like matter, is indestructible, and just as matter exists in various forms so does energy. And we may add, just as we are ignorant of what the negative and positive particles of electricity which constitute matter really are, so we are ignorant of the true nature of energy. At the same time, energy is not so completely mysterious ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson
... everywhere they are distractingly crooked, and in many places they are plentifully bestrewn with boulders of varying sizes. Instead of spending money in making roads, the Chinese have applied their ingenuity to making an indestructible cart. They build it of heavy timbers, with massive wheels, thick spokes and ponderous hubs, and as no springs could survive the jolting of such a vehicle, the body of the cart is placed directly ...
— An Inevitable Awakening • ARTHUR JUDSON BROWN
... assigns to that vast congeries of islands stretching from Asia toward South America in latitude 25 deg. south. These islands, closely clustered as far as the Paumota group, straggle along with widening spaces between, through Easter Isle, which carries the indestructible memorials of a strange civilization, through Sala-y-Gomez, San Felix, and St. Ambrose almost to the threshold of the Peruvian coast. It is to be noted that these islands lie just outside the westward-bearing Equatorial Current and ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... was no longer the mere performer who wrests a cry of desire and of passion from an old man by a perverted twisting of her loins; who destroys the energy and breaks the will of a king by trembling breasts and quivering belly. She became, in a sense, the symbolic deity of indestructible lust, the goddess of immortal Hysteria, of accursed Beauty, distinguished from all others by the catalepsy which stiffens her flesh and hardens her muscles; the monstrous Beast, indifferent, irresponsible, insensible, baneful, like the Helen of antiquity, fatal ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... quality in emotional affairs which is characteristic of advanced middle-age, when there are no great joys or sorrows to look back on, and no expectation for the future. She had always had something of the indestructible quality of frail things like thistledown or cottonwool; violence and explosion that would blow strong and distinct organisms to atoms only puffed her a yard or two away where she alighted again without shock, ...
— Michael • E. F. Benson
... detected by Mr. Dallinger. He found among the lower forms of life the most surprising and indestructible vitality. Many animals could survive much higher temperatures than Dr. Bastian had applied to annihilate them. Some germs almost refused to be annihilated—they ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... with the new sight of man's maturity and soberness that he now saw his mother, feeling the intangible and indestructible feminine majesty of her; feeling her fragility which had brought forth her living soul in its beauty and impressionableness as a link with the cause of his Odyssey; believing that she was rejoicing in his strength ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... recent outrages at the Royal Academy the Council is reported to be testing "unbreakable glass." No doubt the Indestructible Paint Company is also ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, May 20, 1914 • Various
... unlike. It was Honora's face which was ravaged, though Mary had sinned the sin. True, pallor and pain were visible in Mary's face, even in the disguising light of that strange hour and place, but back of it Kate perceived her indestructible frivolity. She surmised how rapidly the scenes of Mary's drama would succeed each other; how remorse would yield to regret, regret to diminishing grief, grief to hope, hope to fresh adventures with ...
— The Precipice • Elia Wilkinson Peattie
... scanty crops. But if the evil is once understood, and the means of its removal are within his reach, he has reason to rejoice that his soil was so constituted as to be preserved from the effects of the improvidence of his forefathers, who would have worn out any land not almost indestructible. The presence of acid, by restraining the productive powers of the soil, has, in a great measure, saved it from exhaustion; and after a course of cropping, which would have utterly ruined soils much better constituted, ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... discouraging, but absolutely insurmountable. They will not yield to argument; for as they were not reasoned up, they cannot be reasoned down. They are higher than a Chinese wall in truth's way, and built of materials that are indestructible. While this remains, it is vain to argue; it is vain to say to this mountain, Be thou cast into the sea. For, I ask of the men of knowledge of the world whether they would not hold him for a blockhead that should hope to prevail in an argument ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... together. We must believe all through that good is stronger than evil, that justice and mercy are stronger than hatred and destruction, just as life is stronger than death. We women who have worked together for a great cause have hopes and ideals in common; these are indestructible links binding us together. We have to show that what unites us is stronger than what separates us. Between many of us there is also the further link of personal friendship cemented by many years of work ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume VI • Various
... always be such? Have there been, in all times, males and females? Was there a first man, from whom all others are descended? Was the animal anterior to the egg, or did the egg precede the animal? Is this species without beginning? Will it also be without end? The species itself, is it indestructible, or does it pass away like its individuals? Has man always been what he now is; or has he, before he arrived at the state in which we see him, been obliged to pass under an infinity of successive developements? ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 1 • Baron D'Holbach
... practically every simple necessity known to Spain. There was nothing left but the crumbling church and its neglected graveyard, alone in a waste of sand. The graves of the priests and grandees were overrun with periwinkle, and the only other flower was the indestructible Castilian rose. The heavy dull green bushes with their fluted dull pink blooms surrounded by tight little buds, were as dusty as the memory of ...
— Sleeping Fires • Gertrude Atherton
... of it. The present vanished, and we were restored to our citizenship in that Rome of the imagination which is greater than any material Rome, and which it needs no archaeologist to discover in its indestructible integrity. ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... degradation and wear away, and with them the metallic veins which they contain. The hardest rock is worn into impalpable mud, the ordinary metals oxidate, and both are removed; but gold, platina, and a few others are nearly indestructible, and from their weight, sinking to the bottom, are left behind. After whole mountains have passed through this grinding mill, and have been washed by the hand of nature, the residue becomes metalliferous, and man finds it worth his while to complete ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin
... Plato describes the soul, and explains its immortality. He teaches that man has a material body which is subject to constant change, and subject to death and disintegration; and also an immaterial soul, unchangeable and indestructible, and akin to the divine. At death this soul was severed from its physical companion, and rose, purified, to the higher regions, where it rendered an account of itself, and had its future allotted to it. If ...
— Reincarnation and the Law of Karma - A Study of the Old-New World-Doctrine of Rebirth, and Spiritual Cause and Effect • William Walker Atkinson
... landscape—a mountain there, a river here, wind-streaming trees over there—and right away it exists, it is, it has solidity, mass, life. Then suddenly comes a flash of lightning, a second of light, and he is astounded, absolutely astounded to see the real landscape different from that indestructible thing that his mind had built. Thus it was with me. I had judged, oh, I had judged him thoroughly, sized him up to a certainty, and bang, came the flare of this new fact, this extremely commonplace fact, and I was all off. I must begin to judge again, only it would ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... emergency brake, and skidding up till the car came softly to rest against the cushion-like mass—a much quicker stop than any horse-drawn vehicle could have made. A few sheep were crushed somewhat, but it is well known that a sheep is practically indestructible by violence. Whatever Alfred's faults were, he certainly ...
— Three Elephant Power • Andrew Barton 'Banjo' Paterson
... this morning awoke to find that nothing was left but a mass of ashes, calcined human bones, stoves, old iron and other approximately indestructible matter, from which only a light blue vapor was arising. General Hastings took precautions to prevent the extension of the fire to another huge pile, a short distance away, and this will be rummaged to-day for ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker
... well grounded in Latin, if not in Greek, or that the person who at fifteen is able to read Virgil and Livy, no matter what may be his subsequent neglect of Latin authors, is not already imbued with the essential and indestructible rudiments of the ...
— Patrick Henry • Moses Coit Tyler
... its inseparable associate. Sometimes the relation was founded on clearly intelligible grounds, like a resemblance between the thing and the being, as where, to kill an enemy, one pierced a waxen figure supposed to represent him. Or a contact, even merely passing by, was believed to have created indestructible affinities, for instance where the garments of an absent person were operated upon. Often, also, these imaginary relations were founded on reasons that escape us: like the qualities attributed by astrology to the stars, they may have ...
— The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism • Franz Cumont
... is more imperishable than ever; it is volatile, irresistible, indestructible. It is mingled with the air. In the days of architecture it made a mountain of itself, and took powerful possession of a century and a place. Now it converts itself into a flock of birds, scatters itself to the four winds, and occupies all points of ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... has a fragrance about him, such as no other human being is gifted withal; it is indestructible, and clings forevermore to everything that he has touched. I was not impressed, at Blenheim, with any sense that the mighty Duke still haunted the palace that was created for him; but here, after a century and a half, we are still conscious ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 48, October, 1861 • Various
... other continents have long feared this propaganda, it is to be hoped that she will carry out her program of love and of fraternization, because thus America will have established international and economic relations with the entire world upon indestructible foundations. ...
— Latin America and the United States - Addresses by Elihu Root • Elihu Root
... whole matter may be forecasted thus: The Negro element in this country is permanent and indestructible. So great are the numbers of the Negroes, and so intimate their relations with the white people, that it is safe to say without fear of contradiction that the status of the Negro element will determine ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... man. Nature, i. e., substance, changes according to the impulses that go out from God, but God remains unchanged. All that possesses form, all organization must be destroyed in the incandescent process of forming world-bodies, but the divine, the intellectual principle is indestructible; and when matter under the impulses that went forth from God, has reached the grade of development at which organization is possible, then the divine principle steps into force as the positive element, and that ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, August 1887 - Volume 1, Number 7 • Various
... that water was the primal element from which all had been derived; Anaximenes guessed air; Heraclitus fire; Pythagoras held that number was the essence of all things; Empedocles thought that fire and heat, accompanied by "indestructible forces," formed the basis; Xenophanes had guessed air, fire, water, and earth, and had worked out a complete scheme of creation. For an interesting discussion of these early attempts to explain creation, see J. W. Draper, History ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... kuras, and when skins must be taken to Sarufuto to pay for sake. The women seem never to have an idle moment. They rise early to sew, weave, and split bark, for they not only clothe themselves and their husbands in this nearly indestructible cloth, but weave it for barter, and the lower class of Japanese are constantly to be seen wearing the product of Aino industry. They do all the hard work, such as drawing water, chopping wood, grinding millet, and cultivating ...
— Unbeaten Tracks in Japan • Isabella L. Bird
... footsteps of the poor have obliterated the record in many a noble house abandoned by history; even the fated steps of the Queen save in one bloodstained closet have left but little authentic trace. But Knox is still present with all the force of an indestructible individuality—in the existing life of the country which took so strong an impression from him, and in the absolutely personal facts of the church in which he preached, the house in which he lived, the stone ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... destiny of the individual, his weal or woe, his good or bad hap, here or hereafter, as it may be. Rooted infinitely deep in the sense of personality, religion was recognized at the beginning, it will be recognized at the end, as the one indestructible ally in the struggle for individual existence. At heart, all prayers are for preservation, the burden of all litanies is ...
— American Hero-Myths - A Study in the Native Religions of the Western Continent • Daniel G. Brinton
... poverty of the people and empire, the edifice had not been rebuilt. This lesser unpretentious structure was the Chapel of Blacherne which the flames had considerately spared. He recognized it instantly, and remembered it as full of inestimable relics—amongst them the Himation, considered indestructible; the Holy Cross which Heraclius, in the year 635, had brought from Jerusalem, and delivered to Sergius; and the Panagia Blachernitissa, or All Holy Banner of the Image of the Virgin. Then rose another reminiscence, and though to reach him it had to fly across a chasm of hundreds ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 1 • Lew. Wallace
... that is almost indestructible is the preparation sold at art stores as modeling clay. This clay is as easily worked as a putty and is spread into the tray, which may be of wood or tin, and the surface leveled by pounding with a mallet or hammer, then by drawing a ...
— The Boy Mechanic: Volume 1 - 700 Things For Boys To Do • Popular Mechanics
... infinite could not have been created. It is indestructible and that which cannot be destroyed was not created. I am ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll
... the Republicans opened the door for their destruction. "They [the Republican leaders] have apparently believed the people would submit to anything and everything," said the Times, "and that the party was indestructible. If a newspaper warned them in a friendly but firm spirit against the policy of blundering, it was treated with a mixture of the insolence and arrogance which they exhibited ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... for this reason the tribe of Dan is not numbered among those who are sealed in the Apocalypse... Now, I think no one can consider the dispersion and providential preservation of the Jews among all the nations of the world and the indestructible vitality of their race without believing that they are reserved for some future action of His judgment and Grace. And this is foretold again and ...
— Eminent Victorians • Lytton Strachey
... the defects as if they were beautiful additions. Personal love (for we are not speaking of the reverence which is gained by authority) cannot be won by a man of genius, unless the gods have endowed him with an indestructible cheerfulness of temper, a glance that makes the world look beautiful, or unless he has succeeded by degrees in taking men exactly as they are; that is to say, in making a fool of the fools, as is right and proper. On the heights we must ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; The Art of Controversy • Arthur Schopenhauer
... reason which anybody ever ventured for this amazing assertion is this, that "all philosophers agree that matter is naturally indestructible by any human power. You may boil water into steam, but it is all there in the steam; or burn coal into gas, ashes, and tar, but it is all in the gas, ashes, and tar; you may change the outward form as much as you please, but you can not destroy the substance of ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... expression of putting their best foot foremost and feeling quite sure that they made a brave show. They had lace curtains in their front parlour windows, and outside of the curtains were large red and yellow pots of artificial flowers and indestructible palms and vulcanised rubber-plants. ...
— The Blue Flower, and Others • Henry van Dyke
... but a well-sized bubble. Men of another order labor but to provide for some practical need; and their work, humble, perhaps occasional, in its design, is found to contain the elements that make human toils indestructible." ...
— Report Of Commemorative Services With The Sermons And Addresses At The Seabury Centenary, 1883-1885. • Diocese Of Connecticut
... had brought wicked people into their country. The wicked people were gone, but fear remained. Fear always remains. A man may destroy everything within himself, love and hate and belief, and even doubt; but as long as he clings to life he cannot destroy fear: the fear, subtle, indestructible, and terrible, that pervades his being; that tinges his thoughts; that lurks in his heart; that watches on his lips the struggle of his last breath. In his fear, the mild old Gobila offered extra human sacrifices to all the Evil Spirits that had taken possession ...
— Tales of Unrest • Joseph Conrad
... picture done by a dying painter, full of a beautiful colour. Even if all these orchids died to-night yet their beauty is an indestructible memory. ...
— Plays of Gods and Men • Lord Dunsany
... observe the proprieties. But the proprieties vary; and, let a work be ever so beautiful, it will not be always irreproachable. There is, however, a beauty which is indestructible, and of whose laws we are ignorant, ...
— Bouvard and Pecuchet - A Tragi-comic Novel of Bourgeois Life • Gustave Flaubert
... have an object, a task, let me say the word, a passion. The profession of writing is a violent and almost indestructible one. [To Jules ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... will be strong. And because you are strong, and almost indestructible, you suddenly decide that you can now get your revenge on the people who ...
— Pagan Passions • Gordon Randall Garrett
... to the despot's power! When the oppress'd for justice looks in vain, When his sore burden may no more be borne, With fearless heart he makes appeal to Heaven, And thence brings down his everlasting rights, Which there abide, inalienably his, And indestructible as are the stars. Nature's primaeval state returns again, Where man stands hostile to his fellow man; And if all other means shall fail his need, One last resource remains—his own good sword. Our ...
— Wilhelm Tell - Title: William Tell • Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller
... the count, "and may God reward you for the sacrifice you are so generously disposed to make for us! Anna, your friend Julia is our good angel. To her we shall owe it if our happiness is henceforth indestructible and indissoluble. Do you know the immense sacrifice this young maiden ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach
... of the immense importance of race unity. So, very honestly, with all our hearts we greet you as a kindred people, many of you of the same colonial lineage with ourselves, having many things in your public and private experience identical with our own, still bound to us by antique and indestructible bonds of fellowship in faith, in sympathy, in aspiration, in humane effort, all coincident with the beginnings of English civilization in North America, nay with the beginnings of civilization itself in that fast-anchored isle ...
— Glimpses of the Past - History of the River St. John, A.D. 1604-1784 • W. O. Raymond
... that this body must droop and die, and return to dust, yet death cannot touch the soul. It is immortal, it has been created in the image of God. He is a spirit, and a spirit is indestructible. The essence of the soul is spiritual. From the hour of the new birth, the soul of man begins to ripen for glory. All its powers and capacities are gradually developed and made meet for the inheritance of ...
— Gathering Jewels - The Secret of a Beautiful Life: In Memoriam of Mr. & Mrs. James Knowles. Selected from Their Diaries. • James Knowles and Matilda Darroch Knowles
... indestructible mountain upon our left hand, one of a noble range which, rising from the green plain, runs eastward. The last peak there is the mountain of which I speak, whose foot is in the Ictian sea and whose head ...
— The Coming of Cuculain • Standish O'Grady
... with its thirteen rows of menhirs made up of 570 individual stones, we come to the end of the avenue and gaze backward upon the plain covered with these indestructible symbols of a ...
— Legends & Romances of Brittany • Lewis Spence
... the first she had needed him more than he had wanted her, and the power that had swept them together had been as far beyond resistance as a great gale loosening the leaves of the forest.... Only, there stood between them, fixed and upright in the general upheaval, the indestructible figure of Annabel Balch.... ...
— Summer • Edith Wharton
... tissue with the tradition of the Gaelic peasantry. Hanging and burning, torture and oppression, poison and Penal Laws, bribes and blackguardism so far from exterminating the Irish people actually hammered them into a nation, one and indestructible, proud of its past and confident of ...
— The Open Secret of Ireland • T. M. Kettle
... same families and the same names from which God chose his martyrs in Italy three centuries ago are again coming forward, and offering themselves to the dungeon, and the galleys, and the scaffold, in the cause of the Gospel. Does not this finely illustrate the indestructible nature of truth, which enables it to survive a long period of dormancy and of apparent death, and to flourish anew from what seemingly was its tomb? And does it not also shed a beautiful light upon the order of the providence of God, whereby ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie
... protesting that evil was sure to befall. A minute's exploration showed that the cave did not extend 30 feet, and that it was dry, and resonant with "the whispering sound of the cool colonnade," with no suggestion of unwholesomeness or weirdness. But the blacks still pass it by. The legend is as indestructible as the odour of attar of roses. Although the boys persist in their account of the origin of the cave, it is known to them as "Coo-bee co-tan-you," which signifies "that hole made by the ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... a class of laws which it is impracticable to ascertain by any of the three methods which I have attempted to characterize: namely, the laws of those Permanent Causes, or indestructible natural agents, which it is impossible either to exclude or to isolate; which we can neither hinder from being present, nor contrive that they shall be present alone. It would appear at first sight that we could ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill |
