"Incomprehensibility" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... The Man who was Thursday is not its incomprehensibility, but its author's gradual decline of interest in the book as it lengthened out. It begins excellently. There is real humour and a good deal of it in the earlier stages of Syme. And there are passages like this one on the ...
— G. K. Chesterton, A Critical Study • Julius West
... in this lava world of ashes and canker, he waited for this terrible strangeness of nature to come to him with the secret. He seemed at once a little child and a strong man, and something very old. What tortured him was the incomprehensibility that the vaster the space the greater the silence! At one moment Gale felt there was only death here, and that was the secret; at another he heard the slow ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey
... free advancement all along the line? Suppose the proposal were made to women to exchange being mysterious for the ballot? Would they do it? Or have they a sense of power in the possession of this conceded incomprehensibility that they would not lay down for any visible insignia of that power? And if the novelists and essayists have raised a mist about the sex, which it willingly masquerades in, is it not time that the scientists should determine whether the mystery exists in nature or ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... then my Latin, and finally my German. Should the times become greatly depressed and failures and assignments become frequent, I begin to lop off the large words in my own language, beginning with "incomprehensibility," "unconstitutionally," etc., etc. ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye
... the nature of his belief in a supreme being, his observations were confused and perplexed, having no perspicuous conception of his attributes or perfections, but an indistinct combination of incomprehensibility; and to sum up the whole, he remarked, "that he pass all men, and was not born ...
— Observations Upon The Windward Coast Of Africa • Joseph Corry
... remembering that the best knoweth but in part, 1 Cor. xiii. 9. The more true knowledge we attain to, the more will we see and be convinced of our ignorance; because the more we know, the more will we discover of the vastness and incomprehensibility of that object, which is proposed ...
— Christ The Way, The Truth, and The Life • John Brown (of Wamphray)
... in 'Timus' the best of Eternal Intelligences, the Noetic Partaker and Digester of Reason", said Clarian in his tract,) with some corollaries for the purpose of reconciling Geist and Freiheit, all sauced down, l'Allemagne, with numerous capitals and a proper degree of incomprehensibility,—Mac bluffly interrupted the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... and no other mention was made of her, until I went with Steerforth into his room to say Good night. Then he laughed about her, and asked me if I had ever seen such a fierce little piece of incomprehensibility. ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... about "broken sentiency" and "elemental strategies," why should not Mrs. Aitken aspire to hear the silences bend? To do her justice, she does not use such expressions very often—her style is usually simple and comprehensible—but she does sometimes make the mistake of confounding incomprehensibility and power. She has some pretty descriptions of Nature here and there, and one or two of her ballads are very good, especially that called "A Story of Tours;" but her sonnets are none of them constructed after the genuine Italian ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XVII. No. 101. May, 1876. • Various
... to desist from the demand of a dogmatical answer to our questions, if we understood beforehand that, be the answer what it may, it would only serve to increase our ignorance, to throw us from one incomprehensibility into another, from one obscurity into another still greater, and perhaps lead us into irreconcilable contradictions. If a dogmatical affirmative or negative answer is demanded, is it at all prudent to set aside the probable grounds of a solution which lie before us and to take into ...
— The Critique of Pure Reason • Immanuel Kant
... indestructible; that splendid phenomenon, the finest, perhaps, of all our interior marvels, did Javert understand this? Did Javert penetrate it? Did Javert account for it to himself? Evidently he did not. But beneath the pressure of that incontestable incomprehensibility ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... fact renders the visible objects of Nature complete as a type of the human nature. We have, observe, first, Subordination; secondly, Individuality; lastly, and this not the least essential character, Incomprehensibility; a perpetual lesson, in every serrated point and shining vein which escapes or deceives our sight among the forest leaves, how little we may hope to discern clearly, or judge justly, the rents and veins of the human heart; how ...
— The Elements of Drawing - In Three Letters to Beginners • John Ruskin
... Julia Carson was kept in too, because she wriggled in her seat—you know how girls do. I had to choose a word and write it a hundred times and I didn't want to get through too soon, because I wanted to get out the same time she did. So I chose the word incomprehensibility, and I—" ...
— Pee-wee Harris • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... Miracles. Littleness of human Science: Divine incomprehensibility of Nature. Custom blinds us to the miraculousness of daily-recurring miracles; so do Names. Space and Time, appearances only; forms of human Thought: A glimpse of Immortality. How Space hides from us the wondrousness of our commonest powers; and Time, the divinely ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... the lake came singing—some "coon song" anglicized into quaint incomprehensibility. ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 6, July 1905 • Various
... should not have told her what the negro had heard and seen, and let her own judgment decide her fate. But I was not in my right mind in those days. I was too much a part of all this misery to be a fair judge of my own duty; and then the mysterious nature of Miss Leighton's remark, the incomprehensibility of the words—'I shall give you nothing till I am dead, and then I shall give you everything'—added such unreality to the scene, and awakened such curious conjectures, that I did not know where any of us stood, or to what especial ...
— The Forsaken Inn - A Novel • Anna Katharine Green
... "Postscript as Preface," thus clearly and simply characterizes these still unfilled blanks in the evolution theory: "There are, as is well known, three points in the rising development of nature, to which the appearance of incomprehensibility especially adheres (to speak more categorically: which have not been explained thus far by anybody). The three questions are: How has the living sprung from that which is without life? the sentient (and conscious) being from that which is without sensation? ...
— The Theories of Darwin and Their Relation to Philosophy, Religion, and Morality • Rudolf Schmid
... thereby infinitely well-contrived) organization as a fortuitous concatenation of atoms, or to relate it to the incomprehensible influence of an external force that has grouped its elements together. But this complexity is the work of the understanding; this incomprehensibility is also its work. Let us try to see, no longer with the eyes of the intellect alone, which grasps only the already made and which looks from the outside, but with the spirit, I mean with that faculty ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson |
