"Ineffable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... prosaic enough, could always be re-illumined if someone let fall the word 'Oxford' or 'Cambridge,' so that they themselves came to surmise an aura about the name as of a land very far off; and then say if the ineffable spell of those two words do not lie somewhere in the conflux of generous youth with its rivalries and clash of minds, ere it disperses, generation after generation, to the duller business of life. Would you have your mother University, Gentlemen, undecorated by ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... "I 'll thank you to drop that air of ineffable fatigue of yours, and to sit up and listen. I don't suppose you wish to be deliberately discourteous, do you? And as those ladies happen to be new-comers, and your immediate neighbours, not to say your tenants, I ...
— The Lady Paramount • Henry Harland
... and with a gesture of ineffable contempt, Good swept his hand across his mouth. Then he grinned again, and lo, there were two rows ...
— King Solomon's Mines • H. Rider Haggard
... assemble in my mind. How can it be that a good distributed makes more possessors richer with itself, than if by few it is possessed?"[6] And he to me, "Because thou fastenest thy mind only on earthly things, from true light thou gatherest darkness. That infinite and ineffable Good which is on high, runs to love even as the sunbeam comes to a lucid body. As much of itself it gives as it finds of ardor; so that how far soever charity extends, beyond it doth the eternal bounty increase. And the more the people who are intent on high the more there are for loving well, ...
— The Divine Comedy, Volume 2, Purgatory [Purgatorio] • Dante Alighieri
... about the Universities on Morningside Heights and on the banks of the Harlem, nor in Brooklyn, nor anywhere he looked, did he find the face he sought. He could always see it when he closed his eyes. At night he dreamed of it continuously—of meeting it on the subway and looking into eyes of ineffable kindness. ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... untrammelled and free; she saw long vistas of lives in the past through which she had come to the present; she saw long vistas of lives in the future through which she must pass to gain the experience which would lead her back to God. An ineffable peace and serenity enveloped her. The divine Presence seemed to irradiate the place in which she stood—she felt herself illuminated, transfigured, sanctified by the holy ...
— An Ambitious Man • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... putting in the plea of necessity, and defending the government and measures of Mr. Pitt, on the ground of policy. This used to enrage their audience, which consisted of the farmers of the parish and neighbourhood, among whom was frequently some upstart puppy, some ineffable coxcomb, one of their sons, perhaps, apprenticed at the neighbouring town, who came home on a Sunday, at Easter, Whitsuntide, Michaelmas, or Christmas, on a visit, and who had imbibed a double portion of the mania, in consequence of his having licked up the froth and ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 1 • Henry Hunt
... the most cutting way of designating his adversaries, either by the most vehement abuse or the light petulance that expressed his ineffable contempt. He says to one, "Though your teeth are short, what you want in teeth you have in venom, and know, as all other creatures do, where your strength lies." He thus announces in one of the prefaces to the "Divine Legation" the name of the author of a work ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... to float, while a dense red ring lay around the base of each of them as a fitting border. The peaks, too, in the distance, and the snow-fields and glaciers and fleecy rolls of mist that lay in the hollows, were flushed with a deep, rosy alpenglow of ineffable loveliness. Everything near and far, even the ship, was comprehended in the glorious picture and the general color effect. The mission divines we had aboard seemed then to be truly divine as they gazed ...
— Travels in Alaska • John Muir
... Jabaster; break thy brazen tables; forget thy lofty science, Cabalist, and read the stars no longer.[11] But last night I stood upon the gulf which girds my dwelling: in one hand, I held my sacred talisman, that bears the name ineffable; in the other, the mystic record of our holy race. I remembered that I had evoked spirits, that I had communed with the great departed, and that the glowing heavens were to me a natural language. I recalled, as consolation to my gloomy soul, that never had my ...
— Alroy - The Prince Of The Captivity • Benjamin Disraeli
... word "JEHOVAH." Here the Revisers have thought it advisable to follow the usage of the Authorised Version, and not to insert the word uniformly in place of "LORD" or "GOD," which words when printed in small capitals represent the words substituted by Jewish custom for the ineffable Name according to the vowel points by which it is distinguished. To this usage the Revisers have steadily adhered with the exception of a very few passages in which the introduction of a proper name seemed ...
— Addresses on the Revised Version of Holy Scripture • C. J. Ellicott
... the horrible house of Hades.[1] First Hesiod and next Stesichorus discover his name to be Kerberos. The latter seems to have composed a poem on the dog. Hesiod[2] mentions not only the name but also the genealogy of Kerberos. Of Typhaon and Echidna he was born, the irresistible and ineffable flesh-devourer, the voracious, brazen-voiced, fifty-headed ...
— Cerberus, The Dog of Hades - The History of an Idea • Maurice Bloomfield
... do find their way into the Fijian Elysium are blest indeed. There the sky is always cloudless; the groves are perfumed with delicious scents; the open glades in the forest are pleasant; there is abundance of all that heart can desire. Language fails to describe the ineffable bliss of the happy land. There the souls of the truly good, who have murdered many of their fellows on earth and fed on their roasted bodies, are ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... girl of twenty summers whose faith has been wrecked by clerical croquet looks with amazement on the implicit faith which the buttercup retains in the clergy. Even on the curate, shy and awkward as he is, she looks as on a being sacred and ineffable. Perhaps his very shyness and awkwardness creates a sympathy between the two, and rouses a keener remorse for her yawns under his sermons and a keener gratitude for the heavenly generosity with which he bestowed on her the confirmation ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... grew radiant, and her lips parted in a smile of ineffable content. In bitter disappointment I saw that my artifice had succeeded, and that I had touched the key-note of her being. To my horror, she reminded me of a pleased, purring kitten that had been stroked in ...
— A Day Of Fate • E. P. Roe
... night, to whose moonlight they bared their shirt-sleeves or their tulle dresses, came from thousands of miles away to calculate the height of this rock, to observe the depth of this chasm, to remark upon the enormous size of this unsightly tree, and to believe with ineffable self-complacency that they really admired Nature. And so it came to pass, that, in accordance with the tastes or weaknesses of the individual, the more prominent and salient points of the valley were christened; and there was a "Lace Handkerchief Fall," and the "Tears of Sympathy ...
— Tales of the Argonauts • Bret Harte
... aspect upon going to bed early, and having seen his short, chubby stocking dangling with a long, slender one of Amy's by the chimney-side, Ned closed his eyes with ineffable content and faith. Amy then returned to the sitting-room, whither she was soon followed by Maggie, and after some further light and laughing talk the conversation naturally drifted toward those subjects in which the family ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe
... express the higher moods of his subject, and show him with his better qualities brought to the surface. So the forms of nature should be idealized in the direction of their primitive tendency, and thus art help to express that ineffable longing of the soul, that reaching upward for a perfection that is approximated on earth, but never attained. This idealization is like the humor of Dickens, something more than nature in its grotesqueness, yet a stimulated growth of the natural quality. Palmer always takes nature for ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol V. Issue III. March, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... with an ineffable tenderness in its slow drawl, reached her even through the thrumming ...
— The Moon out of Reach • Margaret Pedler
... such a spring day as breathes into a man an ineffable yearning, a painful sweetness, a longing that makes him stand motionless, looking at the leaves or grass, and fling out his arms to embrace he knows not what. The earth gave forth a fainting warmth, stealing up through the chilly garment in which winter had wrapped her. It was ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... to myself, Berenice, and I fear that it must sound to you very commonplace, even perhaps cold! Yet, believe me when I tell you that I have passed through a very fire of suffering, and if I am calm now it is with the calm of an ineffable despair! In my life at Oxford, and later, here in London, women have never borne any share. Part of my scheme of living has been to regard them as something outside my little cycle, an influence great indeed, but one which ...
— Berenice • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... idea of happiness is eating, and they naturally suppose that everybody eats as much as he can possibly afford to buy. Some of them have known hunger, and food and strength are coupled together in their experience—the more food the greater the strength; and people who eat roast meat (oh, bliss ineffable!) every day of their lives can bear an amount of washing and airing that would surely kill such as themselves. But how useless to try and discover what their views really are. I can imagine what I like about them, and am fairly certain to imagine wrong. ...
— The Solitary Summer • Elizabeth von Arnim
... mad; this is not aberration nor insanity; this is Europe; this seeming Terrible is the real soul of white culture—back of all culture,—stripped and visible today. This is where the world has arrived,—these dark and awful depths and not the shining and ineffable heights of which it boasted. Here is whither the might and energy of ...
— Darkwater - Voices From Within The Veil • W. E. B. Du Bois
... ineffable ache, a darting neuralgia of spirit, too cunning and quick for diagnosis, was shooting through Lilly her last two years at ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... conscience-stricken. To kill a priest was a serious crime. Moreover, that priest had been his father's friend and favorite adviser, and Loris had much to fear from parental wrath. The mischief was done, however, and bestowing upon the dead body a parting glance of ineffable hatred, he set to work to reunite his ...
— Rabbi and Priest - A Story • Milton Goldsmith
... on all sides that Brother Crafts was a powerful preacher. Other men had wrestled mightily in Zoar, but none to such heart-shaking purpose. When he expatiated on the ineffable glories of Heaven and the joys of the redeemed, which was not too often, the reflection of the celestial effulgences could be seen rippling like sunshine on the sea of faces spreading away from the shore of the pulpit steps. When he spoke of hell and its terrors, which was frequently and with ...
— The Quickening • Francis Lynde
... forty times finer than the reality, and is therefore a great deal better and more valuable than the reality; and so, I ought never to hunt up the reality, but stay miles away from it, and thus preserve undamaged my own private mighty Niagara tumbling out of the vault of heaven, and my own ineffable Taj, built of tinted mists upon jeweled arches of rainbows supported by colonnades of moonlight. It is a mistake for a person with an unregulated imagination to go and look at ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... Fitzgerald took it into his wise head to endeavor to make me jealous of a little pert French-woman, the wife of a Croix de St. Louis, who I know he despises; I then thought myself at full liberty to play off all my airs, which I did with ineffable success, and have sent him home in a humor to hang himself. Your brother stays the evening, so does a very handsome fellow I have been flirting with all the day: Fitz was engaged here too, but I told him it was impossible for him not to attend Madame La Brosse to Quebec; he ...
— The History of Emily Montague • Frances Brooke
... understood if not my words, but she made no reply; and still she remained standing motionless, twisting and untwisting her fingers, and regarding me with a look of ineffable grief and compassion. ...
— Green Mansions - A Romance of the Tropical Forest • W. H. Hudson
... With drooping spheres about him, and his eye Fixed steadily upward, through its mortal cloud, Seeing the glories of Eternity! The sense of the invisible and true Still present to his soul, and in his song; The consciousness of duration through all time, Of work in each condition, and of hopes Ineffable, that well sustain through life, Encouraging through danger and in death, Cheering, as with a promise rich in wings! A godlike voice that, through cathedral towers Still rolls, prolonged in echoes, whose deep tones Seem born of thunder, that subdued to music Soothe when they startle most! ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 3 September 1848 • Various
... such as she had never known, stole into Winifred's heart. Some One seemed to be welcoming her with ineffable tenderness. She was not out in the dark, but was at home with God. The awful presence she had dreaded was infinitely sweet. At last she stood in the Holy Place, still foolish, weak, unworthy, but with the glory of Another's name covering her as with priestly ...
— The First Soprano • Mary Hitchcock
... of idleness, that parent of vice. It, moreover, becomes one of the most fruitful sources of happiness to the man whom God permits to come out of the crowd and take his place at the head of science and art. It is with ineffable delight that he looks behind, and says, in thinking of his cold and comfortless garret, "I came out of that place, single and unknown." George Cuvier, that pupil of poverty, loved to relate one of his first observations of natural history, which ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... did not answer, and Isabel cast an involuntary glance upon him from her white face. His was impassive, save that a cast of ineffable scorn marred the delicate beauty of his lips. If humiliation for the past had never wrung Lady Isabel's heart before, it ...
— East Lynne • Mrs. Henry Wood
... lordship's younger brother, pretends to be Lord Foppington, gains admission to the family and marries her. When the real Lord Foppington arrives he is treated as an imposter, but Tom confesses the ruse. His lordship treats the knight with such ineffable contempt, that Sir Tunbelly's temper is aroused, and Tom is received into high favor.—Sheridan, ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... me with a most ineffable expression of pity and surprise. "Depend on it, sir," said he, with a most philosophical air, "this Province is much behind the intelligence of the age. But if it is behind us in that respect, it is a long chalk ahead on us in others. ...
— The Clockmaker • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... an ineffable charm in his conversation. He was a delightful companion, ever ready in wit and repartee, versatile and resourceful in debate, with the wide knowledge that is gained by travel and garnered from many fields of study. He reminded me of Wendell Phillips as an orator, with the impression of having ...
— Alexander Crummell: An Apostle of Negro Culture - The American Negro Academy. Occasional Papers No. 20 • William H. Ferris
... in thy dreams, fair unbeliever! And leave me unto mine, if they be dreams, That take such shapes before me, that I see them; These effable and ineffable impressions Of the mysterious world, that come to me From the elements of Fire and Earth and Water, And the all-nourishing Ether! It is written, Look not on Nature, for her name is fatal! Yet there are Principles, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... at once assumed a look of concern and lifting her head she pondered far-off possibilities. "Zeke, he home so little," she began, and her voice had an ineffable sadness, "I likes to be ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... bullies at the table knew well enough, and savage, masterful AEsop at the window knew well enough, that the swaggering Gascon was the first fencing-master in Paris, and that his colleague, the Norman, for all his air of ineffable timidity, was only second to him in skill with the weapon and readiness to use it. There was a moment's silence, and then Cocardasse observed: "I'm afraid of just ...
— The Duke's Motto - A Melodrama • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... uttered the dread, forbidden Name of God. For an instant the turbaned figures stood rigid with awe, their blood cold with an ineffable terror, then as they became conscious again of the stars glittering on, the sea plashing unruffled, the earth still solid under their feet, a great hoarse shout of holy joy flew up to the shining stars. "Messhiach! Messhiach! ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... negro fought, where danger was greatest and death surest—and tell me, if you can, that 'this is the white man's Government.' And then go to Salisbury and Columbia and Andersonville, and as you shudder at the ineffable miseries of those dens, and think of those who ran the dead-line, and were not shot, but escaped to the woods and were concealed and fed and piloted by the black men, and never once betrayed, but often enabled to escape and return to their ...
— History of the Thirty-Ninth Congress of the United States • Wiliam H. Barnes
... mountains. He was ever feared. He made the Great Dark terrible. But when the night became bright with the love-lorn glamour of the moon, Perdlugssuaq was for the time forgotten; in their hearts men felt a vague, tender, and ineffable stirring—the lure of a passion stronger and stranger even than death. They gazed upon the moon with instinctive, undefined pity. So, as the years passed, and ages melted and remade the snows, the long day was golden with the Beauty that is ever desired, the Ideal never attained; ...
— The Eternal Maiden • T. Everett Harre
... will grow old; the everlasting life is in it that makes the green buds shoot. To realise the immortal youth of Purcell's music, let us make a comparison. Consider Mozart, divine Mozart. Mixed with the ineffable beauty of his music there is sadness, apart and different from the sadness that was of the man's own soul. It is the sadness that clings to forlorn things of an order that is dead and past: it tinkles in the harpsichord figurations and cadences; it makes one think of lavender scent and of the days ...
— Purcell • John F. Runciman
... solicitation, however artful—no talent, however commanding—can seduce it from its allegiance. In proportion to the humility of our submission to its rule, do we rise into some faint emulation of that ineffable and presiding Divinity, whose characteristic attribute it is to be coerced and bound by the inexorable laws of its own nature, so as to be all-wise and all-just from necessity rather than election. ...
— Irish Wit and Humor - Anecdote Biography of Swift, Curran, O'Leary and O'Connell • Anonymous
... and the boundless sky empurpled with fire. Sometimes I would distinguish her at the bottom of a valley, walking quickly, with an English, elastic step; and I would go towards her, attracted I know not by what, simply to see her illuminated visage, her dried-up, ineffable features, which seemed to glow ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... place in history, communion with God comes through Jesus Christ. It is an ineffable mystery, but it is still a fact of experience. Only through Jesus do we know God, His interest in us, His desire for us, His purpose with us. He not only shows us in His own example the blessedness ...
— Friendship • Hugh Black
... recorded in Tennyson's Life that he used to recommend to a younger brother the thought of the stellar spaces, swarming with constellations and traversed by planets at ineffable distances, as a cure for shyness; and a lady of my acquaintance used to endeavour as a girl to stay her failing heart on the thought of Eternity at such moments. It is all in vain; at the urgent moment one cares very little about the stellar ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... labor of love, and Kittrell suddenly realized how good it was. He had put into it all of his belief in Clayton, all of his devotion to the cause for which Clayton toiled and sacrificed, and in the simple lines he experienced the artist's ineffable felicity; he had shown how good, how noble, how true a man Clayton was. All at once he realized the sensation the cartoon would produce, how it would delight and hearten Clayton's followers, how it would please Hardy, ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... had not made himself indispensable to both sisters simultaneously. Surely even he had not so far forgotten that Ham Lake was in the middle of a country called England, and not the ornamental water in the Bois de Boulogne! And yet.... The delicious possibility of ineffable indiscretions on the part of Simon Fuge monopolized my mind till the train stopped at Knype, and I descended. Nevertheless, I think I am a serious and fairly insular Englishman. It is truly astonishing how a serious person can be obsessed ...
— The Grim Smile of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... of uncompromising monism. The last traces of dualism have been eradicated. God, for Plotinus, is true being and the only being. He is all and in all. God is an impersonal Trinity, comprising the One, the cosmic reason and the cosmic soul. The One is primal, ineffable, behind and beyond all human experience. All we know of Him is that He is the source and union of reason and soul. Creation is effected by a continuous series of emanations from God. Emanation is not an arbitrary act of divine will; it is a necessary consequence of the nature of the One. God must ...
— Monophysitism Past and Present - A Study in Christology • A. A. Luce
... She was trying now to remember who he was, what had happened, and why she was in such misery and pain. Sometimes she knew that he was her father and that she was at home in that wretched shack up Lone River, and an ineffable satisfaction would relax her cramped mind; sometimes, just as clearly, she knew that he was Pierre who had taken her away to some strange place, and, in this certainty, she was even more content. But always the horrible flame on her shoulder burnt her again to the confusion ...
— The Branding Iron • Katharine Newlin Burt
... the same subject, as systems of human philosophy have made them, but as different endowments—the one of nature, the other of grace. “Behold the new and surprising union which God alone could teach and alone accomplish, and which is only an image and an effect of the ineffable union of two natures in the one person of ...
— Pascal • John Tulloch
... Priam's people. Thus high in hope they sat through the livelong night by the highways of war, and many a watchfire did they kindle. As when the stars shine clear, and the moon is bright—there is not a breath of air, not a peak nor glade nor jutting headland but it stands out in the ineffable radiance that breaks from the serene of heaven; the stars can all of them be told and the heart of the shepherd is glad—even thus shone the watchfires of the Trojans before Ilius midway between the ...
— The Iliad • Homer
... perfect keeping with the almost oriental exaltation of her words. Her pure, red lips half smiled; her serene and candid brow became troubled, at intervals, under her thoughts, like a mirror under the breath; and from beneath her long, drooping, black eyelashes, there escaped a sort of ineffable light, which gave to her profile that ideal serenity which Raphael found at the mystic point of intersection ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... that whenever old simple-hearted George Holland sowed this seed, and reared his crop of broader charities and better impulses in men's hearts, it was just as acceptable before the Throne as if the seed had been scattered in vapid platitudes from the pulpit of the ineffable Sabine himself. ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... upon the incense-laden air, and the vast masses of the spectators were still grouped in their listening and various attitudes, as the devoted reformer looked forth upon the church. Even he, stern as he was, seemed for a moment subdued by the ineffable enchantment of the scene; but ere long, as if displeased with his own involuntary emotions of admiration, his brow contracted, and he sighed heavily, as (still followed by the attentive spies) he sought the ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... the pure in heart can see God; and he may thus fit himself for 'illumination'—the stage in which the glory and beauty of the spiritual life, now clearly discerned, are themselves the motive of action and the incentive to contemplation; while the possibility of a yet more immediate and ineffable vision of the Godhead is not denied, even in this life. There is reason to think that this conception of religion appeals more and more strongly to the younger generation to-day. It brings an intense feeling of relief to many ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... better as a band leader—so he spent the war entertaining celebrities behind the line with a headquarters band. It was not so bad—except that when the infantry came limping back from the trenches he wanted to be one of them. The sweat and mud they wore seemed only one of those ineffable symbols of aristocracy that were ...
— Flappers and Philosophers • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... with new powers Will rising wonders sing. I cannot go Where Universal Love not smiles around, Sustaining all yon orbs, and all their suns, From seeming evil still educing good, And better thence again, and better still, In infinite progression. But I lose Myself in Him, in Light ineffable; Come then expressive Silence, ...
— Love and Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... through a series of earth and "other-world" existences, until finally it attained such a degree of purity that it was relieved of the necessity for further incarnation, and thenceforth dwelt in the region of ineffable bliss—the region of light eternal. The teaching also held that just before entering into the state of bliss, the soul was able to review its previous incarnations, seeing distinctly the connection between them, and thus gaining a store of the wisdom of experience, which would aid it in its future ...
— Reincarnation and the Law of Karma - A Study of the Old-New World-Doctrine of Rebirth, and Spiritual Cause and Effect • William Walker Atkinson
... turning round she saw it was Ned who held her hand. They stood by the harbour side again and she loved him. Again her whole being melted into his as he kissed her. Again they were alone in the Universe, conscious only of an ineffable joy. ...
— The Workingman's Paradise - An Australian Labour Novel • John Miller
... morning found himself little better than a child, both physically and mentally, for the disease not only prostrated his great strength—as it had that of his equally robust companion—but, at a certain stage, induced delirium, during which he talked the most ineffable nonsense that his tongue could pronounce, ...
— Black Ivory • R.M. Ballantyne
... to say nothing further about, even to Loring, who was most concerned. It was a matter that gentle and gracious woman herself never referred to when the Engineer at ten the next morning presented his card and was ushered into her presence. She was most courteous. There was peace and loving kindness ineffable in her placid face. There was infinite sympathy in her manner when she presently met and led in to him a pallid little maid, who put a long slim hand in Loring's as he smiled upon her downcast, red-rimmed eyes. Struggle as she might for composure and strength, Pancha had evidently ...
— A Wounded Name • Charles King
... stupid masculine disinclination to admit their intellectual superiority, or even their equality, or even their possession of a normal human equipment for thought, and (b) the equally stupid masculine doctrine that they constitute a special and ineffable species of vertebrate, without the natural instincts and appetites of the order—to adapt a phrase from Hackle, that they are transcendental and almost gaseous mammals, and marked by a complete lack of certain salient mammalian characters. The first imbecility has already concerned ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... ordinary bell, but a deep-throated one that could have been heard for miles—and as the vibrations of the last stroke died away, the first high-pitched, sweet notes would ring out, to fade away in the ineffable sadness of the ...
— A Woman's Impression of the Philippines • Mary Helen Fee
... inarticulate passion of this soul who believed herself His wedded spouse; and that the worship of the saints and the Blessed Mother instead of distracting the love of the Christian soul rather seemed to augment it. The King of Love stood, as she fancied sometimes, to Catholic eyes, in a glow of ineffable splendour; and the faces of His adoring Court reflected the ruddy glory on all sides; thus refracting the light of their central Sun, instead of, as she ...
— By What Authority? • Robert Hugh Benson
... Name of pleasure, By this tongue ineffable Name of sweetness passing measure To the ear delectable, 'Tis our safeguard and our treasure, 'Tis our help ...
— The St. Gregory Hymnal and Catholic Choir Book • Various
... young and only love clustered the sole impressions of the outer world that had ever stirred his heart: the grandeur of the ocean, of the storm, the glory of sunrise over a dishevelled sea, the ineffable melancholy of twilight rising from an unknown strand; then the solemn coldness of moonlight watches, the scent of the burnt land under the fierce sun, when all nature was hushed save the dreamy buzz of insect-life: the green coolness of underwood ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... likely down that road will come the bearer of news to make an end of it," rejoined Fosbrook sententiously. Mr. Jerkley looked at him with a sudden upspringing of hope, and Sir Charles nodded with ineffable mystery, never guessing how these lightly spoken words were to return to his mind with the strength of ...
— Ensign Knightley and Other Stories • A. E. W. Mason
... question has been answered, Allan, as well as I can answer, who am not the architect of this great globe of dreams, and as yet cannot clearly see the ineffable gem within, whose prisoned rays illuminate their substance, though so dimly that only those with the insight of a god can catch their glamour in the night of thought, since to most they are dark as glow-flies in ...
— She and Allan • H. Rider Haggard
... replied casually; "I haven't seen him lately. But then I've had something better to think about than that ineffable bounder. He was here all right in the early part of the evening. One couldn't ...
— The Hunt Ball Mystery • Magnay, William
... The turf was still wet with dew and the young leaves gleamed in the glow of morning. Far up the stream rose the grim hills which hem the mosses and tarns of that tableland, whence flow the greater waters of the countryside. An ineffable freshness, as of the morning alike of the day and the seasons, filled the clear hill-air, and the remote peaks gave the needed touch of ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan
... which, floating invisibly in the atmosphere, strongly predisposes to that disgust of existence, which, in half an hour after sailing, begins to come upon you; that disgust, that strange, mysterious, ineffable sensation which steals slowly and inexplicably upon you; which makes every heaving billow, every white-capped wave, the ship, the people, the sight, taste, sound, and smell of every thing a matter of inexpressible loathing! Man cannot ...
— Sunny Memories Of Foreign Lands, Volume 1 (of 2) • Harriet Elizabeth (Beecher) Stowe
... to the energy of speech, the gifts imparted by the Gods, and perfecting the whole of our operations prior to our intellectual conceptions. And the third and most perfect species of prayer is the seal of ineffable Union with the divinities, in whom it establishes all the power and authority of prayer; and thus causes the soul to repose in the Gods, as in a never failing port. But from these three terms, in which all the divine measures are ...
— Esoteric Christianity, or The Lesser Mysteries • Annie Besant
... his regard from a face which bespoke a character of singular originality and force, not wanting either in womanly pride or tenderness,—a face in which beauty itself was so subordinate to something higher, more ineffable, that one could scarcely define feature or color through the illuminated and changeful atmosphere of soul which hung about it,—the shadows of great thoughts, the light mists ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... expedition is one of tremendous importance, therefore his exceeding amount of thought. When he is in the ineffable presence, he is there as an actor in a tragedy, or as a tenor in an opera. He has almost counted his hairs; he certainly counts the winkings of his eyelids! Can any detail be unimportant in an undertaking of such measureless ...
— The Golden Censer - The duties of to-day, the hopes of the future • John McGovern
... that what the ordinary man expresses in such childish language regarding these lofty problems, what he calls the Absolute and the Manifested, God and the Universe, the soul and the body, are more vitally true than he imagined; he sees that these words are dense veils that conceal the supreme, ineffable, infinite Being, of whom manifested beings are illusory "aspects," facets ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal
... he lay sick, but save that Masouda seemed to tend him in his sickness he knew no more, for all the past had gone from him. There she was always, clad in a white robe, and looking at him with eyes full of ineffable calm and love, and he noted that round her neck ran a thin, red line, and wondered ...
— The Brethren • H. Rider Haggard
... sacred Paschal feast, The Word, the might of God,— His wisdom most ineffable By Thee is shed abroad; O may we feast on Thee for aye In Thy blest ...
— Hymns of the Greek Church - Translated with Introduction and Notes • John Brownlie
... to answer which would have required an exhaustive exposition on the nature of man, the nature of the universe, the science of physics and of metaphysics, the Macrocosm and the Microcosm—not to speak of the Ineffable and the Unknowable. Then she drew out of her pocket her little Saint- George, who had suffered most cruelly during our flight. His legs and arms were gone; but he still had his gold helmet with the green dragon on it. Jeanne solemnly pledged herself to make a restoration of him in honour ...
— The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard • Anatole France
... Owen Davies," thought Elizabeth, as she looked after him with ineffable bitterness, not to say contempt. "Your prayers shall be answered in a way that will astonish you. You shall not marry Beatrice, and you shall marry me. The fish has been on the line long enough, now I must begin to ...
— Beatrice • H. Rider Haggard
... centuries ago. I do not know what he was in life; but in death, as this effigy represents him, it is something beautiful to look upon. I forget at this minute the name of the sculptor; his work I shall never forget. It is wonderfully fine. The gravity, and the sweetness, and the ineffable repose of the figure, are beyond praise. I stood looking, studying, thinking, I cannot tell for how long—or rather feeling than thinking, at the moment. When I left the chapel and came out again into the glare and the rush and the confusion, then I began to think, mother. I went off to ...
— A Red Wallflower • Susan Warner
... short distance in front of him, a cluster of gables and of chimneys shown in relief by the snow. The reverse of a silhouette—a city painted in white on a black horizon, something like what we call nowadays a negative proof. Roofs—dwellings—shelter! He had arrived somewhere at last. He felt the ineffable encouragement of hope. The watch of a ship which has wandered from her course feels some such emotion when ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... float over bluish hills and fathomless age-old lakes" are eminently present in him. He is in almost heroic degree the spirit forever searching blindly through the loud and garish city, the hideous present, for some vestige, some message from its homeland; finding, some sundown, in the ineffable glamour of rose and mauve and blue through granite piles, "le souvenir avec le crepuscule." He, too, one would guess, has dreamt of selling his soul to the devil, and called upon him, ah, how many terrible nights, to appear; and has sought a refuge from the world ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... Palpitating like the bird in the hand of a child, she drew back, and looking at Jacques with ineffable love ...
— Within an Inch of His Life • Emile Gaboriau
... of my will to Thine, O my God, and this ineffable presence was so sweet and powerful, that I was compelled to yield to its delightful power, power which was strict and severe to ...
— The Autobiography of Madame Guyon • Jeanne Marie Bouvier de La Motte Guyon
... slain him, Luke had fallen lifeless at the lady's feet. With a smile of ineffable disdain, she replied, "I know not why I hesitate to resent this indignity, even for an instant. But I would see how far your audacity will carry you. The name you bear ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... fancies, with delicate, lofty, and noble sentiments, and therefore that he resolved to shut it up in his heart, so as to preserve its freshness amid the withering atmosphere of the world; and in order to draw thence those exquisite images that so often shed ineffable grace and tenderness over his poems. It may, then, be said that, by maintaining alive in his mind scenes passed at Annesley, which recall the chaste, unhappy loves of Romeo and Juliet, and Lucy, he thereby satisfied an intellectual want of ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... words were spoken, or whether she read them as in a book, or whether it was only a remembrance of what she knew to be true, she could not tell, but it brought peace ineffable. ...
— Christie Redfern's Troubles • Margaret Robertson
... anything else but a form of the Beautiful—I have carried over that article of creed from the decks of ships to the more circumscribed space of my desk, and by that act, I suppose, I have become permanently imperfect in the eyes of the ineffable company of pure esthetes. ...
— A Personal Record • Joseph Conrad
... perceiving he was in his agony, imparted to him the last sacramental absolution; which he, bowing his head to receive, instantly raised it again; opened, for the last time, his eyes, now swimming in joy, and inebriated with heavenly delight; fixed them, just as they were closing, with a look of ineffable tenderness, upon the image of Out blessed Lady, and composing his lips to a sweet smile, without farther movement or ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... her face and agate in her eyes. The lips were straight and pale, the chin aggressive, the nose indomitable. She was, by certain signs, charged with anger, but she saw upon the faces of these two young fools the look of angels and an ineffable kindness breathed upon her ...
— The Ragged Edge • Harold MacGrath
... life. Yet it was almost well so transcendent a moment should have its pin prick of annoyance. With a "No" of ineffable scorn, Jim—or Christopher—the name was immaterial to him—clambered up into the high carriage and wedged himself between the elderly gentleman and the inquisitive driver, who had regained ...
— Christopher Hibbault, Roadmaker • Marguerite Bryant
... cloak of an immortal—the robe of glory due to genius, and which the ages hand on—I, a frail mortal! When I wandered through the fields of light where the happy souls play, I was borne up by the love of a woman, the wings of an angel; resting on her heart, I could taste the ineffable pleasures whose touch is more perilous to us mortals than are the torments ...
— The Exiles • Honore de Balzac
... the chambers at Meurice's or Claridge's," responded Bertie solemnly. "Those sublime creatures with their silver chains round their necks and their ineffable supremacy over every other mortal!—one would feel in a superior region still. And when a snob came to poison the air, how exquisitely one could annihilate him with showing him his ignorance of claret; and when an epicure ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... Acolyte, "my most excellent, though blunt- witted Hereward, this Caesar of ours hath had the extravagance to venture his tender wit in comparison to that of Achilles Tatius. He stands upon his honour, too, this ineffable fool, and is displeased with the idea of being supposed either to challenge a woman, or to receive a challenge at her hand. He has substituted, therefore, the name of the lord instead of the lady. If the Count fail to appear, the Caesar walks forward challenger and successful combatant ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... dreamed a thousand times, by night and by day, of the ineffable bliss of rescuing Pet from a mad dog, from a runaway horse, from the assault of ruffians, from drowning, from a burning building. He had his plans all laid for doing every one of these things. He would have coveted the pleasure of whipping three times his weight of any well-dressed, ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... had done herself a violence in receiving me. Next day I found her armed with affected high spirits, and it took two months of habit before I saw her in her true character. But then it was like a delicious May, a springtime of love that gave me ineffable bliss; she was no longer afraid; she was studying me. Alas! when I proposed that she should go to England to return ostensibly to me, to our home, that she should resume her rank and live in our new residence, she was ...
— Honorine • Honore de Balzac
... went down the stairs his strength seemed to leave him. He lay down next to Esperance. He crossed his arms on his breast. Upon his lips was a smile of ineffable peace. His eyes closed. He ...
— The Son of Monte Cristo • Jules Lermina
... said. "It is true." His voice was altogether passionless, but something had come into his face, into his whole attitude, which denied the calm passivity of his reply. The soul of the man—a soul in ineffable extremity of suffering—was struggling for expression, striving against the rigid bonds of the motionless body in which his ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... in light and glory unapproachable, parent of angels and of men! next thee I implore omnipotent king, redeemer of that lost remnant, whose nature thou didst assume, ineffable and everlasting love! and thee the third subsistence of the divine infinitude, illuminating spirit, the joy and solace of created things! ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume II • Theophilus Cibber |
