"Inscrutable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... With a muttered ejaculation, expressive of annoyance, he sprang to the door and endeavoured to open it; but it was fast, and, as he listened, he heard the sounds of hastily retreating footsteps in the passage outside. And in that same moment the truth flashed upon him that, for some inscrutable reason, he was trapped and ...
— Harry Escombe - A Tale of Adventure in Peru • Harry Collingwood
... the dark riddles of the inscrutable Power which rules over life that the good man can go under like that, while the evil ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... in undis—we should be glad to dwell, but we are not reviewing the "Rise of the Dutch Republic," and in Mr. Motley's present volumes the hero of toleration appears no longer. His antagonist, however,—the Philip whom God for some inscrutable purpose permitted to afflict Europe during a reign of forty-two years,—accompanies us nearly to the end of the present work, dying just in time for the historian to sum up the case against him, and pronounce final ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... soberly down upon the quiet face of the dead. Some new dignity had touched the smooth forehead, and the closed eyes, a little inscrutable smile hovered over the sweet, firmly closed mouth. Susan's eyes moved from the face to the locked ivory fingers, lying so lightly,—yet with how terrible a weight!—upon spotless white satin and lace. Virginia had put the ivory-bound prayer-book and ...
— Saturday's Child • Kathleen Norris
... supposed wife to John Flint of this parish, forswore herself; whereupon the ground opened, and she sunk over head, March 23, and being found dead, she was buried, March 25.' Thus fully confirming the facts, as stated by Bunyan. Solemn providences, intended, in the inscrutable wisdom of God, for wise purposes, must not be always called 'divine judgments.' A ship is lost, and the good with the bad, sink together; a missionary is murdered; a pious Malay is martyred; still no ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... so. There was never the slightest pomp or pride about him. "A small, insignificant Irishman," so some one has described him. Is he small? I dare say he is, but one never notices it. One notices only the long face still further lengthened by a beard, the domed forehead, the bright eyes, very inscrutable usually, very sympathetic when he chooses to make them so; and when he speaks, a soft voice, quiet and even-toned but often indistinct. Not given to demonstrativeness, he appears the same under all conditions—silent when depressed, silent too when cheerful; he may smile, ...
— Sir Robert Hart - The Romance of a Great Career, 2nd Edition • Juliet Bredon
... convey us warnings, which would only be understood if we were guilty, that we were playing an idle and perilous game, and had better desist. But in one respect we had had the advantage, and that was in the version Davies had given of his stranding on the Hohenhrn. Inscrutable as our questioner was, he let it appear not only that the incident was new to him, but that he conjectured at its sinister significance. A little cross-examination on detail would have been fatal to Davies's version; but that was where our ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... arid countenance revealed no emotion. He was accustomed to understanding his clients a trifle better than they understood themselves, and inscrutable though Mr. Gunning's original motive in buying the mare had been, he had during this interview yielded to treatment and followed a ...
— All on the Irish Shore - Irish Sketches • E. Somerville and Martin Ross
... that any of us resist such drawing, and make the wretched choice of perishing without, rather than find safety within? The deepest reason is an alienated heart, a rebellious will. But the reason for alienation and rebellion lie among the inscrutable mysteries of our awful being. All sin is irrational. The fact is plain, the temptations are obvious; excuses there are in plenty, but reasons there are none. Still we may touch for a moment on some of the causes which ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... could not fail to understand. She bridled a little, wrapping herself closer in her soft shawl as in an impenetrable husk of reserve, and began nervously buttering toast. The whole thing was very odd; but then the ways of Audrey were inscrutable. ...
— Audrey Craven • May Sinclair
... imperative that the walls of the Abbaye should appear inscrutable, of great thickness, and yet subtilized by the mists of coming night. ...
— A Mummer's Tale • Anatole France
... did not try to underbid each other, and they were perfectly good-humored; as soon as he had made his choice, the rejected multitude returned to their places on the curbstone, pursuing the successful aspirant with inscrutable jokes as he drove off, while the horses went on munching the contents of their leathern head-bags, and tossing them into the air to shake down the lurking ...
— A Chance Acquaintance • W. D. Howells
... window the snowy ridges of the mountain, inscrutable, caught and held his eye; a ...
— The Planet Savers • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... of the form and whiteness of a shoulder, the supple fulness of the arm's muscle, the brightness of eyes increased by kohl! Scent is burning on silver dishes, and through the fumes appear the subdued colours of embroidered stuffs and the inscrutable traceries of bronze lamps. Or, maybe, the scene passes on a terrace overlooking a dark river. Behind the domes and minarets a yellow moon dreams like an odalisque, her hand on the circle of her breast; and through the torrid silence of the garden, through the odour of over-ripe fruit ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... greatly tempted to go away at once to diminish his sufferings, but conquered this weakness. The next evening he passed at the chateau of M. des Rameures; and though his heart was bleeding, he piqued himself on presenting an unclouded brow and an inscrutable smile to Madame de Tecle. He announced the brief absence he ...
— Monsieur de Camors, Complete • Octave Feuillet
... in St. James's Park On every day from dawn to dark Pursue, inscrutable of mien, A fixed unvarying routine. Whatever be the wind or weather They spend their time in peace together, And plainly nothing can upset ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, November 3, 1920 • Various
... from the choral celebration of the god Dionysus. But the new spirit imported by the genius of Aeschylus into the early drama was religious in a profounder meaning of the term. The sadness of human lot, the power and mysterious dealings of the gods, their terrible and inscrutable wrath and jealousy (aga and pthonos), their certain vengeance upon sinners, all the more fearful it delayed.—-Such are the poet's constant themes, delivered with strange solemnity and impressiveness in ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... was regarding William Pressley with rather an inscrutable look. But his estimate and understanding were fairer than Ruth's, for the reason that he could come nearer to giving the young man his due. He knew that William Pressley was honest and sincere in his vanity and conceit, and was assured that these traits ...
— Round Anvil Rock - A Romance • Nancy Huston Banks
... system, and if the mutual confidence on which it is based were to collapse, it must itself collapse immediately. Just or unjust, it lives by faith; it is based on vague and impalpable opinion that by some inscrutable process passes into will and action, and is made manifest in matter and in flesh: it is meteoric—suspended in mid-air; it is the baseless fabric of a vision so vast, so vivid, and so gorgeous that no base can seem more broad ...
— The Humour of Homer and Other Essays • Samuel Butler
... and various questions, all of great interest to the county; but it did not say one word of the Duke of Omnium, though every one knew what the duke was supposed to be doing in the matter. He was, as it were, a great Llama, shut up in a holy of holies, inscrutable, invisible, inexorable,—not to be seen by men's eyes or heard by their ears, hardly to be mentioned by ordinary men at such periods as these without an inward quaking. But, nevertheless, it was he who was supposed to rule them. Euphemism required ...
— Framley Parsonage • Anthony Trollope
... implicas lacertis, my Elinor? Nay," George added, a faint smile illumining his wan but noble features, "why speak to thee in the accents of the Roman poet, which thou comprehendest not? Bright One, there be other things in Life, in Nature, in this Inscrutable Labyrinth, this Heart on which thou leanest, which are equally unintelligible to thee! Yes, my pretty one, what is the Unintelligible but the Ideal? what is the Ideal but the Beautiful? what the Beautiful but the Eternal? And the Spirit of Man that would commune with these ...
— Burlesques • William Makepeace Thackeray
... much of an answer to my mind, which in some inscrutable way seemed to be at this moment groping among fragments of thoughts that had come unbidden from the forgotten past. I felt helpless in the presence of the Captain; I could not presume to press his good-nature. Perhaps he saw my thought, for he added: "A man is distinct from ...
— Who Goes There? • Blackwood Ketcham Benson
... instanced Rosebery; the Aliens Act; Tariff Reform, in spite of Chamberlain's galvanizing efforts. Of Campbell-Bannerman, then alive and well, he said that all his work was done for him by his subordinates: "he had only to read novels, prepare jokes, look inscrutable and fatherly." ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, Vol. 2 • Stephen Gwynn
... the infinite realms of starry space, and fathoms the inscrutable depths of the minutest life, finding nowhere any limit, but everywhere law, which is the immediate expression ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... in the doorway leading to the bedroom. I could feel the perspiration on my forehead and at the back of my neck. I fronted the inscrutable white face of Lord Clarenceux, the lover of Rosetta Rosa; I met its awful eyes: dark, invidious, fateful. Ah, those eyes! Even in my terror I could read in them all the history and the characteristics ...
— The Haunters & The Haunted - Ghost Stories And Tales Of The Supernatural • Various
... Bengal Virden, who had begun to look upon Miss Peckham—that was her name—with extreme disapproval from the moment of their introduction. Bengal was a girl whose every feeling was written plainly upon her face; she could not mask her emotions under an inscrutable countenance. Her dislike of Miss Peckham was so evident that Migwan and Gladys had expected an outbreak before this; but Bengal had merely stood scowling while the beds were being moved about. With ...
— The Campfire Girls at Camp Keewaydin • Hildegard G. Frey
... schemes of benevolence. The "Colonization Society may be a part of the grand system of the Ruler of the Universe, to provide for the transfer of negroes to their mother country. Their introduction into this land may have been one of the inscrutable ways of Providence to confer blessings upon that race—it may have been decreed that they shall be the means of conveying to the minds of their benighted countrymen, the blessing of religious and civil liberty. But I fear ...
— An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans • Lydia Maria Child
... having further learnt, that on the tolling of the midnight bell at my own gate, or at the citadel, a chosen minister of vengeance passed to pilot the accused, I went, and you, through paths most dangerous and inscrutable, have brought me to the spot where justice reigns; if so, give the first proof of justice, trial. By that I am prepared to ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 6, June 1810 • Various
... (for I did not feel well enough to undergo some twenty or thirty hours' sea-sickness in the packet that offered the Saturday after my arrival,) I took a morbid and eager pleasure in awaiting the visits and observing the motions of those inscrutable beings. Sainsbury and his son were amused, but not surprised, at the anxiety I evinced to obtain a nearer insight into Maunsell's history. My curiosity and vigilance were, however, fruitless. The Pair performed ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... his attention. Animal spirits themselves are too often but a counterbalance to the most thoughtful melancholy; and one fit of jaundice or hypochondria might have enabled the poet to see more visions of the unknown and the inscrutable in a single day, than perhaps ever entered the imagination of the elegant Latin scholar, or ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 • Leigh Hunt
... aloof, leaning on a stout cane, looking on with an inscrutable expression on his dry old face. He noted everything; he saw Rose talking to Barney; he saw his son William eating cherries with Rebecca Thayer out of one basket; but his expression never changed. The predominant trait ...
— Pembroke - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... By some inscrutable turn of affairs, lady Feng begins to feel the pangs of jealousy. Pao-y experiences joy, beyond all his expectations, when P'ing Erh (receives a slap from lady Feng) and has to adjust ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... men's manner and men's necessity. How intermittent is our good Jocelin; marking down, without eye to us, what he finds interesting! How much in Jocelin, as in all History, and indeed in all Nature, is at once inscrutable and certain; so dim, yet so indubitable; exciting us to endless considerations. For King Lackland was there, verily he; and did leave these tredecim sterlingii, if nothing more, and did live and look in one way or the ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... fair-haired "Find" are still in doubt, but this signifies little. Child-life is always a miracle more inscrutable than the resurrection ...
— Oswald Langdon - or, Pierre and Paul Lanier. A Romance of 1894-1898 • Carson Jay Lee
... dear," said Mrs. Linden, gently, "the unrestrained indulgence of grief is always wrong. Have you never thought how selfish it was to wish your mother back again, as I have so often heard you? God's ways are inscrutable. But though his children cannot always see what is best for themselves, He never errs. Your mother was a good woman, a faithful wife, and loving parent, but a life of uninterrupted prosperity had left her a stranger to the peace that cometh only from obedience to the ...
— Clemence - The Schoolmistress of Waveland • Retta Babcock
... however, elapsed, when, rising also from his seat with a hasty exclamation of surprise, he threw down the volume and followed her into the room where she sat pensively meditating over thoughts and feelings as vague and inscrutable to her mind, as they were clear and familiar to her heart. With a degree of warm impetuosity, even exaggerated beyond his usual manner, which bore at all times this characteristic, he approached her, and, seizing her hand passionately ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... about the mildness of that particular October! A sublime tranquillity reigned over the scene. A liveried keeper was locking the gate of the garden in the middle of the Square as if potentates had just quitted it and rendered it for ever sacred. And between the sacred shadowed grove and the inscrutable fronts of the stately houses there flitted automobiles of the silent and expensive kind, driven by chauffeurs in pale grey or dark purple, who reclined as they steered, and who were supported on their left sides by footmen who reclined as they ...
— The Regent • E. Arnold Bennett
... individual's development as the specializing medium of the Universal Spirit will depend entirely upon his own conception of his relation to it. So long as he only regards it as an arbitrary power, a sort of slave owner, he will find himself in the position of a slave driven by an inscrutable force, he knows not whither or for what purpose. He may worship such a God, but his worship is only the worship of fear and ignorance, and there is no personal interest in the matter except to escape some dreaded punishment. Such a worshipper would gladly escape from his divinity, and his worship, ...
— The Dore Lectures on Mental Science • Thomas Troward
... that chair, Eugene. (She indicates the easy chair. He fetches it silently, even with something like cold strength, and places it next Morell, a little behind him. She sits down. He goes to the sofa and sits there, still silent and inscrutable. When they are all settled she begins, throwing a spell of quietness on them by her calm, sane, tender tone.) You remember what you told me about yourself, Eugene: how nobody has cared for you since your old nurse died: how those clever, fashionable sisters ...
— Candida • George Bernard Shaw
... face to face with the sheer difficulty of living on at all. He even concluded in a kind of lethargy that if nothing had occurred, no 'change,' he might still be sitting here, Arthur Rennet Lawford, in his best visitor's room, deciding between inscrutable life and just—death. He supposed he was tired out. His thoughts hadn't even the energy to complete themselves. None cared ...
— The Return • Walter de la Mare
... apparatus? No man can answer this question: it is wrapped in deep mystery. Why be offended, then, because the way of salvation revealed in the Bible has like mysteries—mysteries concerning not your duty, but God's secret and inscrutable methods of acting? ...
— Companion to the Bible • E. P. Barrows
... decisive resolve, oppresses even the hearts of heroes, appeared now for a moment to overshadow the great mind of Gustavus Adolphus. "If we decide upon battle," said he, "the stake will be nothing less than a crown and two electorates. Fortune is changeable, and the inscrutable decrees of Heaven may, for our sins, give the victory to our enemies. My kingdom, it is true, even after the loss of my life and my army, would still have a hope left. Far removed from the scene of action, defended by a powerful fleet, a well-guarded frontier, and a warlike ...
— The History of the Thirty Years' War • Friedrich Schiller, Translated by Rev. A. J. W. Morrison, M.A.
... The smile on Randerson's face was inscrutable. And now the pallor left Masten's cheeks and was succeeded by a color that burned. For he now was convinced and frightened. He heard Randerson speaking to Hagar, and so gentle was his voice that it startled him, so great was the contrast between it and the ...
— The Range Boss • Charles Alden Seltzer
... paper—a good one, s'entend; but there is no blot of heart's blood and the Old Night: there are no harmonics, there is scarce harmony to his music; and in Henley—all of these; a touch, a sense within sense, a sound outside the sound, the shadow of the inscrutable, eloquent beyond all definition. The First London Voluntary knocked me wholly.—Ever ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... has eaten of the tree of knowledge. He will not, I think, be a sceptic, and still less, of course, a cynic; but he will be, without discredit to his well-known capacity for action, an observer. He will remember that the ways of the Lord are inscrutable, and that this is a world in which everything happens; and eventualities, as the late Emperor of the French used to say, will not find him intellectually unprepared. The good American of which Hawthorne was so admirable a specimen was not critical, and it was perhaps for this reason that Franklin ...
— Hawthorne - (English Men of Letters Series) • Henry James, Junr.
... Providence," said he, "are indeed inscrutable, else why should there be such things in the world as lobsters, gutta-percha, ballet-dancers, and Englishmen? These four objects, and some others—notably water, tram-cars, and warts—I can find no necessity for in nature; but there must be some reason for such, or else they could not have arrived ...
— Here are Ladies • James Stephens
... great deal too good for me," says Beatrix, dropping her head on her beautiful breast,—"so are you all, all!" And when she looked up again, as she did in a moment, and after a sigh, her eyes, as they gazed at her cousin, wore that melancholy and inscrutable look which 'twas always ...
— The History of Henry Esmond, Esq. • W. M. Thackeray
... rose, and as he turned (the doctor noted) he bent an inscrutable look of pain on Nora. He sat down at the piano and struck a wild, sad chord. Instantly it became as if the people in the room were the instrument upon which he played,—as if the throbbing human hearts around him were directly ...
— Master of His Fate • J. Mclaren Cobban
... the interior of the empire, to take supreme command of the active forces, and to share with the army the fatigue of war, and to safeguard with it Russian soil from attempts of the enemy. The ways of Providence are inscrutable, but my duty and my desire determine me in my resolution for the good of ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume IV (of 8) • Francis J. (Francis Joseph) Reynolds, Allen L. (Allen Leon)
... spectator, arose and joined him. Orde looked at his new companion a little curiously. He was a very slender young man, taut-muscled, taut-nerved, but impassive in demeanour. He possessed a shrewd, thin face, steel-gray, inscrutable eyes behind glasses. His costume was quite simply an old gray suit of business clothes and a gray felt hat. At the moment he held in his mouth an unlighted and ...
— The Riverman • Stewart Edward White
... upon each cheek a festal rose, she stood before the duke's plaisant, inscrutable, as was her fashion, the scarf about her shoulders just stirring from the effects of the dance, and her lips ...
— Under the Rose • Frederic Stewart Isham
... With this inscrutable artifice, Toby withdrew to purchase the viands he had spoken of, for ready money, at Mrs. Chickenstalker's; and presently came back, pretending he had not been able to find them, at first, ...
— The Chimes • Charles Dickens
... been on the point of falling asleep again. She got up and opened the window, and once more the air acted as a restorative. She watched the activities of the street with a distant interest. They, too, seemed dreamlike and unreal. People were hurrying up and down on mysterious errands. An inscrutable cat picked its way daintily across the road. At the door of the apartment house an ...
— The Adventures of Sally • P. G. Wodehouse
... head the very slightest, as if she understood, as if she were grateful; then letting her eyes rest on his with an inscrutable look, she spoke softly to the horse and rode away, with Donald and Bess clamouring joyously after her, as if they had found the proceedings ...
— At Love's Cost • Charles Garvice
... only to die. It was a terrible ordeal for him to stand along and realize that he was only a man facing eternity. But that was what gave him strength to endure. Somehow he was a part of it all, some atom in that vastness, somehow necessary to an inscrutable purpose, something indestructible in that desolate world of ruin and death and decay, something perishable and changeable and growing under all the fixity of heaven. In that endless, silent hall of desert there was a spirit; and Cameron felt hovering ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey
... He was a horrid desperado; and like a wild Indian, whom he resembled in his tawny skin and high cheek bones, he seemed to run amuck at heaven and earth. He was a Cain afloat; branded on his yellow brow with some inscrutable curse; and going about corrupting and searing every heart that beat ...
— Redburn. His First Voyage • Herman Melville
... guardians. When she had taken the gift, she suddenly feigned death, and fell like one lifeless. Her servants asked the reason why she fell so suddenly; and she declared that the refuge of the sons of Harald was inscrutable; for their wondrous might qualified even the most awful effects of her spells. Thus she was content with a slight benefit, and could not bear to await a greater reward at the king's hands. After this Ragnar, finding that the belief concerning himself and ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... girl paused and greeted the official. Still the Chinese Minister regarded her gravely with his inscrutable Oriental eyes that seemed to look her through and through. He seemed always about to ask ...
— The Automobile Girls At Washington • Laura Dent Crane
... he again began, and again the pipe was laid down, for Robinson was much honoured. "I come here hot from a scene of domestic woe, which has robbed me of all political discretion, and made the paper duty to me an inscrutable mystery. The worthy Geese here assembled see before them a man who has been terribly injured; one in whose mangled breast Fate has fixed her sharpest dagger, and poisoned the blade before she fixed it." "No—no—no." "Hear—hear—hear." "Yes, my Grand; she ...
— The Struggles of Brown, Jones, and Robinson - By One of the Firm • Anthony Trollope
... the Esbekiyeh Gardens, cigar in mouth and hands in pockets, looking on the scene and behaving in it as if the whole place were but a reflex of Earl's Court Exhibition. History affects the cheap tripper not at all; he regards the Pyramids as "good building" merely, and the inscrutable Sphinx itself as a fine target for empty soda-water bottles, while perhaps his chiefest regret is that the granite whereof the ancient monster is hewn is too hard for him to inscribe his distinguished name thereon. It is true that there is a punishment inflicted on any person or persons ...
— Ziska - The Problem of a Wicked Soul • Marie Corelli
... was leaving, Sam called out, "Say, Yan, if you want to stay there to dinner it'll be all right—we'll know why you hain't turned up." Then he stuck his tongue in his cheek, closed one eye and went to the barn with his usual expression of inscrutable melancholy. ...
— Two Little Savages • Ernest Thompson Seton
... Spaniard had scarcely altered, except perhaps that the pallid scar had a bit more shine about it. His eyes moved around the cabin, darting often at the pistol, halting upon the knob of the forecastle-door in the fear that others might be concealed there; inscrutable black brilliants, these eyes, and to the woman at the wheel the cabin was evil from their purgatorial restlessness.... Suddenly ...
— Fate Knocks at the Door - A Novel • Will Levington Comfort
... Dave, whose face was inscrutable, and then the bladder seemed to be motionless, and as if Tom's "bob" was all imagination. Once more it seemed to move slightly, but it was nothing more than the bait ...
— Dick o' the Fens - A Tale of the Great East Swamp • George Manville Fenn
... Lanzi the moonlight fell among the statues, and in that fairy light I seemed to see in those ghostly still figures of marble and bronze some strange fantastic parable, the inscrutable prophecy of the scornful past. Gian Bologna's Sabine woman, was she not Florence struggling in the grip of the modern vandal; Cellini's Perseus with Medusa's head, has it not in truth turned ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton
... theory there is an inscrutable element which in the heyday of that theory goes unexamined. Behind the appearances there is a Fate, there are Guardian Spirits, or Mandates to a Chosen People, a Divine Monarchy, a Vice-Regent of Heaven, or a ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... facts in his environment have a quasi-personal individuality. They are conceived to be possessed of volition, or rather of propensities, which enter into the complex of causes and affect events in an inscrutable manner. The sporting man's sense of luck and chance, or of fortuitous necessity, is an inarticulate or inchoate animism. It applies to objects and situations, often in a very vague way; but it is ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... doorway. He was serene and calm as ever. Neither the discovery of the plot by the abstraction of the messenger's letter, nor Ruth's strange conduct—of which he had heard from Lord Gervase—had sufficed to ruffle, outwardly at least, the inscrutable serenity of his air and manner. He paused to make his bow, then advanced into the room, with a passing glance at Richard still spurred and booted ...
— Mistress Wilding • Rafael Sabatini
... down to the dingle, A coppice in arabesque gleams Whose traceries melt and commingle, Like ghost trees in moon-fretted streams, As the tremulous glamour sweeps o'er it And skirts the inscrutable sky; Then, Fairyland flitting before it, The ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 158, April 28, 1920 • Various
... nothing superior to himself, but nothing except himself. I am not concerned to say that this will be unfortunate or blameworthy; the moralist of the future must attend to that. But I can believe that this unyielding and inscrutable attitude may produce some fine artistic effects. I can believe that both intensity and dignity may be gained by this sacrifice of the plainer human responsibilities, although I am not prepared to say at what loss of other qualities. It is clear that such a writer will not allow the public ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... that none can discern. He was always near nowadays, on the fringe of their lives, just beyond the radius of their preoccupations, the silent witness of this strange love affair, in the humble station that Allah, for some inscrutable reason, had ...
— Sacrifice • Stephen French Whitman
... added that the doubts and ignorance of those who take upon them to expound the designs of nature and her internal progressions, and the many false prognostics of their art, ought to give us to understand that her ways are inscrutable and utterly unknown; there is great uncertainty, variety, and obscurity in what she either promises or threatens. Old age excepted, which is an indubitable sign of the approach of death, in all other accidents I see few signs of the future, whereon we may ground our divination. ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... rationalistically. Reason and science make him deeply uncomfortable. His point accordingly is not merely that mechanism is a hypothesis, but that it is a wrong hypothesis. Events do not come as if mechanism brought them about; they come, at least in the organic world, as if a magic destiny, and inscrutable ungovernable effort, were driving ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... forty-one years ago: is it necessary to search out what somebody or other,—not improbably a jealous adherent of Macready, 'the only organizer of theatrical victories', chose to say on the subject? If the characters are 'abhorrent' and 'inscrutable'—and the language conformable,—they were so when Dickens pronounced upon them, and will be so whenever the critic pleases to re-consider them—which, if he ever has an opportunity of doing, apart from the printed copy, I can assure you is through no motion ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... is, that the method in which God answers the prayers of His people may be, in many respects, mysterious or even inscrutable; but no objection to "the efficacy of prayer," which is founded on our ignorance of His infinite resources, can have any weight, especially when there are several hypothetical solutions, any one of which is ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan
... with inscrutable stolidity as we shook hands, and at once handed me over to a tall, ungainly man whom he addressed as Ernest, but whose surname I never learned. Ernest in turn introduced me, with a shy and clumsy courtesy, to the two remaining ...
— A Thief in the Night • E. W. Hornung
... the hall that evening she ran upstairs and brought down the framed photograph wrapped lovingly in a white silk scarf. Mr. Donovan surveyed it with inscrutable eyes. ...
— The Trimmed Lamp and Others • O Henry
... return, or to give information of her whereabouts. I have tried to serve my God all my days," said the Reverend Saunders; "I do not know why this should have been visited upon me. But His ways are inscrutable. His ...
— The Visioning • Susan Glaspell
... soak the earth on that day—and the formidable artillery that had swept the plateau of Austerlitz, the vales of Marengo, the cemetery of Eylau, was rendered useless for the time being because up in the inscrutable kingdom of the sky a cloud had chosen to burst—or had burst by the will of God—and water soaked the soft, spongy soil of Belgium and the wheels of artillery wagons sank axle-deep ...
— The Bronze Eagle - A Story of the Hundred Days • Emmuska Orczy, Baroness Orczy
... magnifying of what then was going on. "Just as" to quote Mr. Chesterton's admirable Dr. Pelkins, "just as when we see a pig in a litter larger than the other pigs, we know that by an unalterable law of the Inscrutable, it will some day be larger than an elephant...so we know and reverently acknowledge that when any power in human politics has shown for any period of time any considerable activity, it will go on until it reaches ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram
... bronze-skinned creature shining in the sun! What a past the little glass bits had at their command, and what a more magnificent past hung yet behind them! Who would value a diamond, the product of any laboratory, were such a possibility, so much as that one which, by its own unknown and inscrutable process, defying philosopher and jeweller, has imprisoned the sunshine that moss or leaf or flower sucked in, ages since, and set its crystals in the darkness of the earth,—a drop of dew eternalized? What tree of swift and sudden springing, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 107, September, 1866 • Various
... manner changed. After all that I had seen I had expected that she would take the earliest opportunity of claiming the man she believed to be her old-world lover, but this, for some reason of her own, which was at the time quite inscrutable to me, she did not do. All that she did was to attend to his wants quietly, and with a humility which was in striking contrast with her former imperious bearing, addressing him always in a tone of something very like respect, and keeping him ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard
... buried her face in her hands; the princess had knelt again and prayed; the king leaned his head against the back of the chair, pale as a corpse, and with his eyes closed. Napoleon alone stood erect; his face was calm and inscrutable; his glances were turned toward the windows, and he seemed to listen eagerly ...
— NAPOLEON AND BLUCHER • L. Muhlbach
... explanation which has a seeming feasibility, science substitutes an explanation which, carrying us back only a certain distance, then leaves us in the presence of the avowedly inexplicable. The truth must grow ever clearer—the truth that there is an inscrutable existence everywhere manifested to which the man of science can neither find nor conceive either beginning or end. Amid the mysteries which become the more mysterious the more they are thought about, there will remain the one absolute certainty, that he is ever in the presence ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... powerful Deity, dwelling, according to common belief, above the human circle; or, as others define her, she is a substantial protection, presiding over the particular destinies of individuals, and feigned by the ancient theologians to be the daughter of Justice, looking down from a certain inscrutable eternity upon all ...
— The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus • Ammianus Marcellinus
... was such a thorough Chinaman of the good old stamp. A wealthy man, sir, a very wealthy man. The family are clients of mine, and they have just rung me up, asking me to cast a horoscope to ascertain the wishes of the stars with regard to the date of burial of our poor friend. How inscrutable are the decrees of the heavenly bodies! They may recommend the immediate interment of our friend: on the other hand, they may wish it deferred for two, five, ten, or even twenty years, in which case our friend would be one of the fortunate tenants ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton
... real thing, and there are several others whose names escape me; but, speaking for myself alone, I wish to say that this is about as far as I can go at this writing. I must admit that I have never been held spellbound and enthralled for hours on a stretch by a contemplation of the inscrutable smile on Mona Lisa. To me she seems merely a lady smiling about something—simply that and ...
— Cobb's Bill-of-Fare • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... last two months, Patrick's face seemed to have grown more waxen, worn a little finer, and now, as he sat quietly watching the slender figure on the opposite side of the hearth, it wore a curious, inscrutable expression, as though he were mentally balancing the pros and cons of some ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... interview soon took place in the middle of the road, and Almira reentered the room with the expression of one who had penetrated the inscrutable and solved the riddle of the Sphinx. She had been vouch-safed one of those gleams of light in darkness which ...
— The Village Watch-Tower • (AKA Kate Douglas Riggs) Kate Douglas Wiggin
... doesna lie! And he is not a hypocrite either. If your father was half as—" She stopped abruptly, her face going red when she saw Tom sitting on his horse beyond the shoulder of rock, regarding her with that inscrutable smile which never had failed to make her squirm mentally and wonder what he thought of her. She stood up, trembling ...
— Rim o' the World • B. M. Bower
... "He's dead!" awaked a peal Of frenzied bells along the vacant ways Of thy poor earthly heart; waked thee to steal, Like dawn distraught upon unhappy days, To prove nought, nothing? Was it Time's large voice Out of the inscrutable future whispered so? Or but the horror of a little noise Earth wakes at dead of night? Or does Love know When his sweet wings weary and droop, and even In sleep cries audibly a shrill remorse? Or, haply, was it I who out of dream Stole but a little where shadows course, Called ...
— Collected Poems 1901-1918 in Two Volumes - Volume I. • Walter de la Mare
... Amaryllis' brain; she felt how limited had been all her thoughts and standpoints in life. She had been willing to drift on without speculation as to the goal to be reached. Indeed, even now, had she any definite goal? She looked at the Russian's strong, rugged face, his inscrutable eyes narrowed and gazing ahead—of what was he thinking? Not stupid, ordinary ...
— The Price of Things • Elinor Glyn
... and deftly shaking her foot at him. Midnight and morning merging into one. Sunday, to Richmond, probably, with Poppy and some others. Monday, up the river with Himself. Not for worlds, that is to say, not for any amount of Poppies, would he have broken his appointment with that brilliant and yet inscrutable companion who is so eternally fascinating at twenty-three. Monday was indistinct but luminous, a restless, shimmering background for ideas. Ideas! They swarmed like motes in the blue air; they loomed, they floated, vague, and somewhat supernaturally ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... deep it was, and if any overladen soul had ever flung its weight of mortality in thither, and if it thus escaped the burden, or only made it heavier. And perhaps the skeleton of the drowned wretch still lay beneath the inscrutable depth, clinging to some sunken log at the bottom with the gripe of its old despair. So slight, however, was the track of these gloomy ideas, that I soon forgot them in the contemplation of a brood of wild ducks, which were floating on the river, and anon took flight, leaving each ...
— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... whose words rang so hollow in his ear, but he could see no sign of guile or satire on the face of the Secretary of War. On the contrary, it bore every appearance of earnestness, and he became convinced that the appearance was just. Then he cast one swift glance at the inscrutable Mr. Sefton, who still sat in the shadow and ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... a war or a revolution. The periods of the strengthening and weakening of the warlike excitement of the European nations represent a wave strikingly regular in its periodicity, flowing incessantly, as if propelled onward by some fixed inscrutable law. This same mysterious law seems also to connect these events with the astronomical wave or cycle, which governs the periodicity of solar spots. The periods when the European powers have shown the most ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... indebted to your thoughtfulness, sahib," said the old man, with something of mockery in his tone. Gerrard would have given much to know what was passing behind those inscrutable eyes. Was that long curved dagger, with the handle of which the Sirdar's fingers were continually playing, destined to be sheathed in his heart at the moment that an attack was made upon the camp from without? It almost looked like it, and yet why had the old ...
— The Path to Honour • Sydney C. Grier
... evidence their existence by their effects, are perfectly inscrutable in their nature; they elude all our powers of observation. The transcendental object which forms the basis of phenomena, and, in connection with it, the reason why our sensibility possesses this rather than ...
— The Critique of Pure Reason • Immanuel Kant
... barbarian—which needs only a due admixture of pride, ambition, and selfishness, to be a perfect ideal of the devil. Amongst men of such stamp are found the greatest scourges and devastators of the world—those elect scoundrels whom Providence, in its inscrutable designs, permits to fulfil their mission of ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles
... that if not "on with the new love," he was, at any rate, satisfactorily "off with the old," Blake drove his spanking ponies off to Tarrong, while Ellen Harriott went about her household work with a face as inscrutable and calm as though no stone had ruffled ...
— An Outback Marriage • Andrew Barton Paterson
... of three successive crews from the stout ship "Laughing Lass" in mid-Pacific, is a mystery weird and inscrutable. In the solution, there is a story of the most exciting ...
— The Free Range • Francis William Sullivan
... Westminster Abbey,—his object, an eager pilgrimage to the newly tenanted grave of his hero, and in the Miscellany he pays a double tribute. In the prose we hear sonorous things about meridian splendour, premature extinction, and inscrutable wisdom; about falling, like his great master Pitt, a victim to his proud and exalted station; about being firm in principle and conciliatory in action, the friend of improvement and the enemy of innovation. Nor are the versified reflections in ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... punishment of Mattioli were well known to European diplomatists and readers of books. Casal, moreover, at this time was openly ceded to Louis XIV., and Mattioli could not have told the world more than it already knew. But, for some inscrutable reason, the secret which Dauger knew, or was suspected of knowing, became more and more a source of anxiety to Louvois and Louis. What can he have known? The charges against his master, Roux de Marsilly, had been publicly proclaimed. Twelve years had passed since ...
— The Valet's Tragedy and Other Stories • Andrew Lang
... had suddenly been shown the real Silas—or rather the something light and evil and dangerous, the something inscrutable and allied to insanity that ...
— The Ghost Girl • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... that quality from his admirable self, and De Chaucombe was an original thinker, who did not purchase ready-made ideas from other people. Barkeworth invariably agreed with the last speaker in public, but kept his private views an inscrutable mystery; while all that could be said of Gernet's notions was that he had "un ...
— A Forgotten Hero - Not for Him • Emily Sarah Holt
... gentleman in a suit of linen 'ducks,' whom I did not know either, stared at me with eyes which seemed to be starting from his head; the little girl's smile abruptly faded, and, seizing her trowel, she made off without turning to look again in my direction, with an air of obedience, inscrutable ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... women were scanning his face, holding their breaths, but Mrs. Papineau had the lamp and held it so as to cast some light on Hugo. The doctor's expression, however, was quite inscrutable. ...
— The Peace of Roaring River • George van Schaick
... all over by the bites of mosquitoes and flies, and we smothered ourselves under blankets to get rid of them. At times we fished, and one evening, after we had passed the expanse of water at the mouth of the Ohio, Nick pulled a hideous thing from the inscrutable yellow depths,—a slimy, scaleless catfish. He came up like a log, and must have weighed seventy pounds. Xavier and his men and myself made two good meals of him, but Nick ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... marry these ill-agreeing words—the swarthy whiteness of Judge Pyncheon's face. The features are all gone: there is only the paleness of them left. And how looks it now? There is no window! There is no face! An infinite, inscrutable blackness has annihilated sight! Where is our universe? All crumbled away from us; and we, adrift in chaos, may harken to the gusts of homeless wind, that go sighing and murmuring about, in quest of what ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IX (of X) - America - I • Various
... rage. The sight of Lucille standing by Mr. Sabin's side, her hand lightly resting upon his, her dark eyes full of inscrutable tenderness, maddened him. He was flouted and ignored. He was carried away by a storm of passion. He tore a sheet of paper from his pocket book, and unlocking a small gold case at the end of his watch chain, shook from ...
— The Yellow Crayon • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... marked consideration by a civilian and a stranger. This was a man of the middle age; he had a face of a mulberry colour, round black eyes, comical tufted eyebrows, and a protuberant forehead, and was dressed in clothes of a Quakerish cut. In spite of his plainness, he had that inscrutable air of a man well-to-do in his affairs. I conceived he had been some while observing me from a distance, for a sparrow sat betwixt us quite unalarmed on the breech of a piece of cannon. So soon as our eyes met, he drew near and ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... quite believe that the One you had waited for had really come?" His voice was low and tinged with some inscrutable meaning. ...
— The Mystics - A Novel • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... flourishing financial state of his republic, which, it was called to mind, was next door to bankrupt when England declared its independence in 1884. If such articles were translated and read out to that wily old President, as he sipped his coffee on his stoep, with his bland and inscrutable smile, it must have added zest to his evening pipe. I read in Mr. Seymour Fort's "Life of Dr. Jameson" that the Raid cost the Chartered Company L75,000 worth of material, most of which passed into the hands of the Boer Government, while the confiscated arms at Johannesburg amounted ...
— South African Memories - Social, Warlike & Sporting From Diaries Written At The Time • Lady Sarah Wilson
... implicitly in Mr. Pallinson's gray powders when their little ones' digestive organs had been impaired by injudicious diet, and confided in Mr. Pallinson's carefully-expressed opinion as the fiat of an inscrutable power. ...
— Fenton's Quest • M. E. Braddon
... the ground around Kenilworth, when Custance granted a second interview to her cousin Isabel. There was more news for her by that time. Edward had been once more pardoned, and was again in his usual place at Court. How this inscrutable man procured his pardon, and what sum he paid for it, in cash or service, is among the mysteries of the medieval "back-stairs." He had to be forgiven for more than Custance knew. Among his other political speculations, he had been making love to the Queen; a fact which, though there can be little ...
— The White Rose of Langley - A Story of the Olden Time • Emily Sarah Holt
... to talk to his travelling companion, but was somehow unable to find words. Panawe glanced at him with an inscrutable smile—stern, yet enchanting and half feminine. He then broke the silence, but, strangely enough, Maskull could not make out whether he was singing or speaking. From his lips issued a slow musical recitative, exactly like a bewitching adagio from a low toned ...
— A Voyage to Arcturus • David Lindsay
... coach announced the departure of Preston's high and illustrious ruler and his learned clerk: one to dream of swords, knights, and drawing-rooms; the other to soar through those mystic regions, sublime and incomprehensible—the awful, inscrutable forms, fictions, and ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... deals exclusively with their relations, consequences, or sequences. It can never tell us what a thing really and intrinsically is, but only why it has become so; it can only, in other words, refer us to one inscrutable as the ground and explanation of another inscrutable." "A science," says Schopenhauer, "anybody can learn, one perhaps with more, another with less trouble; but from art each receives only so much as he brings, yet latent within him.... Art has not, like science, to do merely with the reasoning ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... with him, we read to him, we watched with him, we blessed his miserable sleeps, and met his more wretched awakings. In the presumption of our pity, we would cleanse that white, in the world's eye, which God had, for inscrutable purposes, ordained should seem to the last murky as hell. We would paint visibly upon him the outward and visible sign of sin washed away, and mercy found. That that intended triumph may not have helped to add or to retain one feather's ...
— Tales from Blackwood, Volume 7 • Various
... in his book of fate, he bent his keen gray eyes on mine and proceeded to relate in all its minute particulars what was then the most singular event of my life. It was one which I had no purpose to disclose till the general unfolding of all secrets, nor would it be a much stranger instance of inscrutable knowledge or fortunate conjecture if the beggar were to meet me in the street today and repeat word for word the page ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne |
