"Irresistibly" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... desired, if possible, to put an end to this intolerable and unceasing hunt which had worn us all out, no matter what that end might be. The second and more powerful, however, was, I believed, and rightly, that the idea of this stealthy, midnight blow appealed irresistibly to the craft of his half-wild nature in which the strains of the leopard and the snake seemed to mingle with that of the human being. For be it remembered that notwithstanding his veneer of civilisation, Hans was a savage whose forefathers for ...
— She and Allan • H. Rider Haggard
... symphony and the slow movement of the Ninth, Wagner both the Valkyries' Ride and the motherhood theme in "Siegfried," Handel "Worthy is the Lamb" and "Waft her, angels"; while your little malicious musical Mimes are absorbed in self-pity, and can no more write a melody that irresistibly touches you than they can build a great and impressive structure. And if Mozart is tenderest of all the musicians, Handel comes very close to him. The world may, though not probably, tire of all but his grandest choruses, while his songs will always be sung as lovely expressions ...
— Old Scores and New Readings • John F. Runciman
... to "The Enchanted Sea" as a reflection of "The Lady from the Sea," it can be replied that the call of the sea that may not be resisted is as old as the heart of man. Sea fairies, mermaids and mermen, and the voice of the waters tugging as irresistibly on the tired spirit as the undertow on the body tired with long swimming, are in Gaelic literature from the beginning, and before Mr. Martyn had written of the sea enchantment it had lent its charm to many of the stories ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... illustrated it by sending a stone skimming over the water in the most scientific manner. Mr. Joe was painfully aware that this was not at all "the thing," that his sisters never did so, and that Seguin would laugh confoundedly, if he caught him at it; but Debby looked so irresistibly fresh and pretty under her rose-lined parasol that he was moved to confess that he had done such a thing, and to sacrifice his gloves by poking in the sand, that he might indulge in ...
— A Modern Cinderella - or The Little Old Show and Other Stories • Louisa May Alcott
... in the south. It is true that in the towns of Holland also the highest products of the human mind germinated, but those towns themselves were still too small and too poor to be centres of art and science. The most eminent men were irresistibly drawn to one of the great foci of secular and ecclesiastical culture. Sluter, the great sculptor, went to Burgundy, took service with the dukes, and bequeathed no specimen of his art to the land of his birth. Dirk Bouts, the artist of Haarlem, ...
— Erasmus and the Age of Reformation • Johan Huizinga
... my age, who has studied human nature for a long time, comes to know the weaknesses of boys, even while believing in them to the utmost. At times the temptation may be more than their powers of resistance can stand, and they are irresistibly impelled to take something that excites their cupidity. I am prone to believe most of them find it possible to resist such an inclination. Still, alas! I have known of occasions where the temptation carried the day. This seems to be one of them. My heart is feeling very sore ...
— The Chums of Scranton High - Hugh Morgan's Uphill Fight • Donald Ferguson
... from Mrs. Hopper was not less than that of the woman herself. With difficulty persuaded to sit down, he showed a countenance in which the gloom he thought decorous struggled against jubilation on his own account: and Warburton had not talked long before his listener's features irresistibly expanded in a ...
— Will Warburton • George Gissing
... tumbling about her shoulders. In her eyes there were the old pride and the old love, the love and pride of what seemed to Jan to be, years ago, the old, childish pleading for his comradeship, for the fun of his strong arms, the frolic of his laugh. Irresistibly they called to him, and in the old glad way he tightened his arms about her shoulders, his eyes glowing, and life leaping back, flushed and full, ...
— The Honor of the Big Snows • James Oliver Curwood
... effort at acuteness of discrimination, an adroitness to exaggerate shades of difference practically imperceptible, and an aptitude to give and take offence, not so evident under the preceding Administration. These suggest irresistibly the absence, over Madison the President, of a moderating hand, which had been held over Madison the Secretary of State. It may be due also to the fact that both the President and his Cabinet were somewhat less indisposed to war ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 1 • Alfred Thayer Mahan
... me," said Lord Orville, "to dispute the magnetic power of beauty, which irresistibly draws and attracts whatever has soul and sympathy: and I am happy to acknowledge, that though we have now no gods to occupy a mansion professedly built for them, yet we have secured their better halves, for we have goddesses to whom we all most willingly bow down." And then with a ...
— Evelina • Fanny Burney
... turn aside for a moment from the nebulae in the sky to the conclusions to which philosophers had been irresistibly led by a consideration of the features of the solar system. We had before us in the sun and planets obviously not a haphazard aggregation of bodies, but a system resting upon a multitude of relations pointing to a common physical cause. From these considerations Kant and Laplace ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 819 - Volume XXXII, Number 819. Issue Date September 12, 1891 • Various
... in premonitory measures. Then there was the other fancy that life was a procession to an unknown goal. Jerry had read very little, except in the works of Ruth Bellair and her compeers, and the imaginings he wrought in had a way of seeming new and strange. The talk went on, drifting back irresistibly by the familiar way they were taking to the spring of their own lives, not, it seemed, in search of a lost youth, but as if they had it with them, an invisible third, ...
— Country Neighbors • Alice Brown
... hour after hour, and now their efforts were beginning to tell. No more came the rumbling, treacherous falls; but perceptibly, irresistibly was the passage gradually cleared, and the way opened up, until it seemed as if these men were literally eating their way into ...
— The Underworld - The Story of Robert Sinclair, Miner • James C. Welsh
... movement by the scent of a human being, wafted to their nostrils by an errant draught of air, were even more startling to the nerves than the distant roar of the jaguar, or the call of the bell bird which irresistibly suggested the incongruous idea that at no great distance in those gloomy forest depths would be found ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... artisans and cottages, village shopkeepers, and merchants from small towns, all rushed there like the inflowing tide. It made one think of a number of moths blindly fluttering round a candle, or of the magnetic rock of Eastern fairy tales, irresistibly attracting ships to wreck themselves. It recalled to one the stories of California at the time of the gold fever. People's excited imaginations saw a veritable gold-mine in Berlin. The French indemnity flew to people's heads like champagne, and in a kind of drunken frenzy every ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau
... riding-boots. On hearing us, he turned his head with a startled air, and dropped in his confusion one of the ivory cylinders he was using; while his aspect, and that of the persons who stood round him, reminded me irresistibly of a party of schoolboys ...
— A Gentleman of France • Stanley Weyman
... is always agreeable to gratify, had an air of openness and generosity, a frankness, a warmth of manner, which, with good breeding, but with something beyond it and superior to its established forms, irresistibly won the confidence and attracted the affection of those with whom he conversed. His manners were peculiarly agreeable to a person like Mr. Salisbury, tired of the sameness and egotism of men ...
— The Absentee • Maria Edgeworth
... back, pushing with both hands against his chest; but he swept her irresistibly up to him and kissed her clumsily. A cold rage possessed her. She stopped struggling; yet there was no need to continue—he released her immediately ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer
... the congealed streams, we had the blue sky, the vernal zephyr, and the genial sunshine; the stream murmuring with a broader wave, as if making up for the season spent in the fetters of congelation; and that luxurious flow of the spirits, which irresistibly comes over the heart, at the re-assertion ...
— The Life of Mansie Wauch - tailor in Dalkeith • D. M. Moir
... feeling that had so possessed her in the mountains was wholly absent from her now. She felt vividly alive, almost painfully conscious of the quick blood pulsing through her veins. She was aware of an intense longing to escape even while the magic of the night yet drew her irresistibly. Deep in her heart there lurked an uncertainty which she could not face. Up to that moment she had been barely aware of its existence, but now she felt it stirring, and strangely she was afraid. Was it the call of the East, the wonder of the moonlight? ...
— The Lamp in the Desert • Ethel M. Dell
... older movements of the world, that sees all pre-existing formulae and political constitutions and political parties and organizations rather as instruments or obstacles than as guiding lines and precedents for its new developing will, its will which will carry it at last irresistibly to the conscious and deliberate making of the future of man. "We are here to get better births and a better result from the births we get; each one of us is going to set himself immediately to that, using ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... in vast bodies, sometimes consisting of many thousands, with the speed of the wind, the men flourishing their sabers and rending the air with the most unearthly cries, those in advance being driven irresistibly on by the weight and impetus of the masses behind. The dreadful torrent bears down and overwhelms every thing that attempts to resist its way. They trample one another and their enemies together promiscuously in the dust; the foremost of the column press on with the utmost fury, ...
— Cyrus the Great - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... considered the ringleaders, to twenty-five years of cellular confinement. But against Don Silverio it was found impossible even to make out the semblance of an accusation, the testimony event of those hostile to him being irresistibly in his favour in all ways. He had done his utmost to defend the poor peasantry who had been misled by Adone to their own undoing, and he had defended also the motives and the character of the dead with an eloquence which moved to tears the public who heard him, and touched even ...
— The Waters of Edera • Louise de la Rame, a.k.a. Ouida
... Roosevelt went on vigorously preaching preparedness against war; and the Great War had been raging for a scant seven months when he was irresistibly impelled to utter open criticism of President Wilson. In April, 1915, in The Metropolitan Magazine, to which he had transferred his writings, he declared that "the United States, thanks to Messrs. Wilson and Bryan, has signally failed in its duty toward Belgium." He ...
— Theodore Roosevelt and His Times - A Chronicle of the Progressive Movement; Volume 47 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Harold Howland
... the remarks of some irreverent spectator, on a work which the former gravely contemplates, because he feels the design of its maker, and is familiar with the antique mode of expression. Thus the early Greek figures of Minerva, whether statues or upon coins, have occasionally an irresistibly ludicrous expression: but, as art improved, this expression softened, and ultimately disappeared, the grotesque element taking a more positive form and walk ...
— Rambles of an Archaeologist Among Old Books and in Old Places • Frederick William Fairholt
... large Genie-gift of Imitation as he had. With him the excess of this power took a very natural turn, for though he possessed through its aid, considerable facilities for music and the study of languages also, the course of events led him irresistibly to what is usually called "the fine arts." And if the old dream of the royal chariot and the twelve jet black horses was never realized to him, a higher happiness by far was his, when some years after, he and ...
— The Fairy Godmothers and Other Tales • Mrs. Alfred Gatty
... a character so widely expanding beyond the customary sphere of human action irresistibly arrests the attention of the heart that glows into admiration at striking examples of virtue, and of the head that feels interest in tracing the motives which influence ...
— A Walk through Leicester - being a Guide to Strangers • Susanna Watts
... the obliging Mr. Webster. As if struck by something irresistibly funny, he suddenly put his hand to his mouth and got very red in the face. After an illy-suppressed snort or two, he coughed violently, and then stammered: "Excuse me. I was just thinking about—er—about something funny. I'm ...
— Quill's Window • George Barr McCutcheon
... kind. The fact is, I felt irresistibly impressed with a presentiment of some vast good fortune impending. I can scarcely say why. Perhaps, after all, it was rather a desire than an actual belief;—but do you know that Jupiter's silly words, about the bug being of solid gold, had a remarkable ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... had been made by any other girl in the school, it would not have seemed half so ridiculous, but whatever Gay did was irresistibly funny. A laughing crowd gathered around her, as she sat with the red slipper and the white one stretched stiffly out in front of her, ...
— The Little Colonel's Christmas Vacation • Annie Fellows Johnston
... his knees before a woman he adores must appear to her either sublime or ridiculous. Unfortunately, the attitude of Vautrot, at once theatrical and awkward, did not seem sublime to the Countess. To her lively imagination it was irresistibly ludicrous. A bright gleam of amusement illumined her charming countenance; she bit her lip to conceal it, but it shone out of her ...
— Monsieur de Camors, Complete • Octave Feuillet
... shaping this interestingly rugged, wild and picturesque basin as we find it to-day. How many centuries of cutting and gouging, beveling and grooving were required to accomplish this, who can tell? Never resting, never halting, ever moving, irresistibly cutting, carving, grinding and demolishing, it carried away its millions of millions of tons of rocky debris in bowlders, pebbles, sand and mud, and thus helped make the gigantic moraines of Fallen Leaf Lake. The ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
... road, gipsy-heart, thou and I! 'Tis the mad piper, Spring, who is leading; 'Tis the pulse of his piping that throbs through the brain, irresistibly pleading; Full-blossomed, deep-bosomed, fain woman, light-footed, lute-throated and fleet, We have drunk of the wine of this Wanderer's song; let us follow ...
— Dreams and Dust • Don Marquis
... a matter of this sort he was by far the quicker. In an instant he had caught her by the wrist, at the same time drawing her irresistibly round the table toward him. His grasp was not rough, only firm. She ...
— The Lure of the Mask • Harold MacGrath
... being ended, the young ladies conducted me to their own sleeping-room. Here we found a slave at work. She was a negress, for whom I was told Sidi Mahmoud had paid 600 francs. I suppose this negress saw something irresistibly droll in my appearance, for as soon as I appeared she burst into an immoderate fit of laughter, and it was some time ere she recovered ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... wrong in that; she had forgotten! As she spoke, and as Basterga with a scowl repeated the order to stand aside, Claude put her gently but irresistibly by, and took her place. The young man's eyes were bright, his colour high. "You will not go up!" he said, a mocking note of challenge, replying to Basterga's tone, in his voice. ...
— The Long Night • Stanley Weyman
... Jamie, who hobbled bravely forward on his crutches, his little white face pinched by pain, full for once with happy glow, and, as he placed them against the table, irresistibly Mary Cary's hand went out to his ...
— Miss Gibbie Gault • Kate Langley Bosher
... sailors, ever proved themselves more quickly ready for the test of battle or acquitted themselves with more splendid courage and achievement when put to the test. Those of us who played some part in directing the great processes by which the war was pushed irresistibly forward to the final triumph may now forget all that and delight our thoughts with the story of what our men did. Their officers understood the grim and exacting task they had undertaken and performed with audacity, ...
— Kelly Miller's History of the World War for Human Rights • Kelly Miller
... within the hour he had pledged his manhood, his life to a feud which could be blotted out only in blood. If he had understood himself he would have realized that the pledge was no more thrilling and unintelligible in its possibilities than this instinct which drew him irresistibly. ...
— To the Last Man • Zane Grey
... done, but it had. It was a kind of secret exercise that had not had any definite aim at the time, but which now recurred to him with extraordinary force. He couldn't think of anything in the world that wasn't the gambit to a proposal. It was almost irresistibly fascinating to think how immensely a few words from him would excite and revolutionise Minnie. She was sitting at the table with a workbasket among the tea things, mending a glove in order to avoid her share ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... future and less to the present than is wise; but such is the constitution of my mind that when I see before me the indications of causes calculated to effect important changes in our political condition, I am led irresistibly to trace them to their sources and follow them out in their consequences. Language has been held in this discussion which is clearly revolutionary in its character and tendency, and which warns us of the approach of the period when ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... over the bank, which took them as much by surprise as it had us. Morton's lamentable figure, as he stood motionless in the midst of the pool, drenched with water, and with a great patch of black mud plastered over one eye, together with Max's look of consternation at his own narrow escape, were irresistibly ludicrous, and provoked a laugh, in which, after a moment, they both ...
— The Island Home • Richard Archer
... be no evidence that Napoleon III. himself desired to attack Prussia so long as that Power should strictly observe the stipulations of the Treaty of Prague which provided for the independence of the South German States. But the current of events irresistibly impelled Germany to unity. The very Treaty which made the river Main the limit of the North German Confederacy reserved for the Southern States the right of attaching themselves to those of the North by some ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... noble adjustment of things, that, while there is infection in disease and sorrow, there is nothing in the world so irresistibly contagious as laughter and good-humour. When Scrooge's nephew laughed in this way, holding his sides, rolling his head, and twisting his face into the most extravagant contortions, Scrooge's niece, by marriage, laughed as heartily ...
— A Christmas Carol • Charles Dickens
... their great inertron shields, which served them well against the weak rays of the Hans, pressed forward irresistibly every time they made a contact with a Han unit, their short-range rocket guns sending a hail of explosive ...
— The Airlords of Han • Philip Francis Nowlan
... like a furnace kept up to an uncommon ardour by the force of art: in Shakspeare it strikes before we are aware, like an accidental fire from heaven: but in Homer, and in him only, it burns everywhere clearly and everywhere irresistibly. ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... Carroll! Please, please, don't be so irresistibly absurd! Why in the world should Hazel kill the man ...
— Midnight • Octavus Roy Cohen
... this statement of M. Bayle's (ch. 165, p. 1071): 'The means most appropriate for attaining an end is of necessity one alone' (that is very well said, at least for the cases where God has chosen). 'Therefore if God was prompted irresistibly to employ this means, he employed it by necessity.' (He was certainly prompted thereto, he was determined, or rather he determined himself thereto: but that which is certain is not always necessary, or altogether irresistible; the thing might have ...
— Theodicy - Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil • G. W. Leibniz
... staple areas the plantations waxed and waned in a territorial progression. The regime was a broad billow moving irresistibly westward and leaving a trough behind. At the middle of the nineteenth century it was entering Texas, its last available province, whose cotton area it would have duly filled had its career escaped its catastrophic interruption. What would have occurred ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips
... greatest value as to lost stages in the path. We can, as it were, see the actual track through which evolution may have proceeded. "Thus," says Professor Huxley, "if the doctrine of evolution had not existed, palaeontologists must have invented it, so irresistibly is it forced upon the mind by the study of the remains of the Tertiary mammalia which have been brought to light since 1859;" and again, "so far as the animal world is concerned, evolution is no longer a speculation, but a statement of ...
— Life of Charles Darwin • G. T. (George Thomas) Bettany
... dreaded most of all was having to pass the chemist's at the corner of Sixth Avenue. She had meant to take another street: she had usually done so of late. But today her steps were irresistibly drawn toward the flaring plate-glass corner; she tried to take the lower crossing, but a laden dray crowded her back, and she struck across the street obliquely, reaching the sidewalk just opposite the ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... it was not these details which interested Tahoser, although the contrast of this concealed luxury with the external poverty of the dwelling had at first somewhat surprised her. Her attention was irresistibly ...
— The Works of Theophile Gautier, Volume 5 - The Romance of a Mummy and Egypt • Theophile Gautier
... had a tussle with myself; but I could think of no decent excuse for deserting the old place, and so came back. My intention was to sit up the greater part of the night arranging papers in the library. The days are long now, and I thought I might go to bed when morning broke. I was irresistibly sleepy, however, and went up to my room soon after one o'clock. I was determined to think of nothing unpleasant, and got quickly into bed, taking the precaution first to lock the door. I placed the key under my pillow, and, being very tired, soon fell into a heavy sleep. I awoke suddenly, after ...
— A Master of Mysteries • L. T. Meade
... was hot and red, and the spectacle of him trying to unwind the line from the struggling and exasperated farmer was so irresistibly comic to Nancy that she ...
— Teddy's Button • Amy Le Feuvre
... hands went out to her irresistibly, in the old impulsive fashion, that seemed an echo from ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... pause of unlocking, Betty again turned upon her father, her eyes glowing in the dim light of the corridor with wide, sorrowful gaze, large and irresistibly earnest. Bertrand glanced from her to his wife, who slightly nodded her head. Then he said to the surprised jailer: "We will wait here. My daughter may be able to recognize him. Call us quickly, dear, if you have reason to change your mind." The heavy door was closed ...
— The Eye of Dread • Payne Erskine
... the western horizon, a crescent of deep blue sea, sharply defined under a lighter blue sky and fringed landwards with a straggling border of foam, advanced slowly to the daily conquest of the golden bay. In the midst of that frame the eye was irresistibly drawn, as to the chief object in the picture, to the distant rock of Scarthey—a green patch, with the jagged red outline of the ruins clear cut against ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... hinting at interference with the freedom of men. Men are to be saved as free men or not at all. We might conceivably imagine the Almighty as granting such indubitable vision of the material rewards of righteousness and the material loss of unrighteousness as would irresistibly draw masses of a certain grade of men into the Kingdom without a morally free consent to righteousness. Or we might conceive of the Almighty as so weighing this or that factor of environment as to diminish almost to the vanishing point the free choice of men. This ...
— Understanding the Scriptures • Francis McConnell
... the causes of the Revolution in America, both the general fundamental cause, consisting in the factor newly introduced into social evolution by the enlightenment of the masses and irresistibly tending to equality, and the immediate local causes peculiar to America, which account for the Revolution having come at the particular time it did and for its taking the particular course it did. Now, briefly as ...
— Equality • Edward Bellamy
... with the review of Adrian's book before me, looking out at my Pleasant garden, and my mind went irresistibly back to the old days and then wandered on to the present. Tom was dead: I flourished, a comfortable cumberer of the earth; Jaffery was doing something idiotically desperate somewhere or the other—he was a war-correspondent by trade (as regular an employment as that of the maker of ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... is, however, to the second letter of Hotspur, dated Caernarvon, May 3rd, 1401, that any one who takes a lively interest in ascertaining the real character of Henry of Monmouth will find his mind irresistibly drawn; he will meditate upon it again and again, and with increasing interest as he becomes more familiar with the circumstances under which it was written; and comparing it with the prejudices almost universally adopted without suspicion and without inquiry, will contemplate ...
— Henry of Monmouth, Volume 1 - Memoirs of Henry the Fifth • J. Endell Tyler
... saddle and hung in its support while her feet had not yet touched the earth. Her warm breath was on Gilbert's forehead; her bosom swept his breast, and the arm that until then had supported, now swiftly, tenderly, irresistibly embraced her. Trembling, thrilling from head to foot, utterly unable to control the mad impulse of the moment, he drew her to his heart and laid his lips to hers. All that he would have said—all, and more than all, that ...
— The Story Of Kennett • Bayard Taylor
... more beautiful than Eudoxia. An infinite magic of youth and loveliness, of purity and energy, was shed over her regular features. She had the traits of a Hebe, and the form of a Juno. When she smiled and displayed her dazzlingly white teeth, she was irresistibly charming. When, in a serious mood, she raised her large dark eyes, full of nobleness and spirit, then might people fall at her feet with adoration. Countess Lapuschkin had often been compared and equalled to the Princess Elizabeth, and yet nothing could be more dissimilar or incomparable than these ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach
... summoned his congregation, he ascended the desk, and after sitting some time with no other auditor than his clerk Roger, he rose up and with a composure and gravity that, upon this occasion, were irresistibly ridiculous, began—"Dearly beloved Roger, the Scripture moveth you and me in sundry places," and so proceeded to the end of the service. The story is not quite complete. But the fact is, that when he went into the church he found Roger alone, and exclaimed with ...
— Irish Wit and Humor - Anecdote Biography of Swift, Curran, O'Leary and O'Connell • Anonymous
... of the finite alone. The danger of arguing from the former kind of infinitude to the latter can not be overstated. God alone possesses Qualitative Infinity, which is strictly synonymous with absolute perfection; and the neglect of the distinction between this and Quantitative Infinity, leads irresistibly to pantheistic and materialistic notions. Spinozism is possible only by the elevation of 'infinite extension' to the dignity of a divine attribute. Dr. Samuel Clarke's identification of God's immensity with space has been ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... unexpectedly soft in the scout's voice, and so tender in his touch, that the little brown maid was irresistibly comforted. When one falls into the grasp of Goodness and Strength, relief of mind, more or less, is an inevitable result. David thought so when he said, "Let me fall now into the hand of the Lord." The Indian child evidently thought so when ...
— Charlie to the Rescue • R.M. Ballantyne
... week before our departure from Khartoum that Mrs. Baker and I were at tea in the middle of the court-yard, when a miserable boy about twelve years old came uninvited to her side, and knelt down in the dust at her feet. There was something so irresistibly supplicating in the attitude of the child that the first impulse was to give him something from the table. This was declined, and he merely begged to be allowed to live with us and to be our boy. ...
— In the Heart of Africa • Samuel White Baker
... these repeated disappointments, for the very aspect of these dreaded deposits, if I may so call them, withered hope. To whatever point of the compass I turned, whether to the west, to the north, or to the east, these heart-depressing features existed to damp the spirits of my men, and irresistibly to depress my own; but it was not for me to repine under such circumstances, I had undertaken a task, and in the performance of it had to take the country as it laid before me, whether a Desert or an Eden. Still whatever moral convictions we may have, ...
— Expedition into Central Australia • Charles Sturt
... of the most universal powers at work in the world. In every sphere of life you can feel the constant pressure of this tremendous influence. It may well be named the "current" of public opinion. Draining to its profit the latent and loitering powers of the individual thinker, silently, irresistibly it moves on; checked, it becomes an angry whirlpool of confused and gyrating waters; harnessed to the wheels of national life, it will transform its energies into ...
— Catholic Problems in Western Canada • George Thomas Daly
... the Clubs that Mr. Henry James innocently went to Ramsgate, in order to possess his soul in peace. 'T was the height of the rougher Ramsgate season, and there is something irresistibly incongruous in the juxtaposition of the rarefied American novelist and the roaring sands of Albion. In the which juxtaposition the story leaves him; and we are ignorant of whether he turned tail and fled back to quieter London, or whether he stayed ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... its shipping interests grew, immigration flowed in, and its manufacturing establishments soon outstripped those of any other industrial center; the great printing and publishing, banking and commercial firms were drawn irresistibly to the most populous city, and Wall Street became the synonym for the financial center of ...
— The United States Since The Civil War • Charles Ramsdell Lingley
... church, the ugly column to Petrarch's memory, the inn, with its caricatures of Laura, and its excellent trout, the bridge and the many-flashing, eddying Sorgues, lashed by millwheels, broken by weirs, divided in its course, channelled and dyked, yet flowing irresistibly and undefiled. Blue, purple, greened by moss and water-weeds, silvered by snow-white pebbles, on its pure smooth bed the river runs like elemental diamond, so clear and fresh. The rocks on either side are grey or yellow, terraced into oliveyards, with here and there a cypress, ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... he himself bore a part; for when he came upon his shy, suspicious boy clasped in the kind arms of the woman whose brown eyes, once seen, had haunted his thoughts ever since, he gathered them both to him irresistibly. As he laid his cheek against hers, he felt that it was wet ...
— In The Valley Of The Shadow • Josephine Daskam
... and addicted to tea. Surely not one person in a thousand would advocate such a diet under any circumstances. Is it not astonishing, therefore, that innutritious fare of this land is still tolerated in Australia? Facts such as these call for the most serious consideration, since they must irresistibly affect the national life; but though it may seem strange, these matters have never received the notice they stand in need of, if, indeed, they have ever received ...
— The Art of Living in Australia • Philip E. Muskett (?-1909)
... was uncanny, standing there, to see these swarming little creatures, like ants whose hill had been desecrated by the foot of some stray passer-by. They were enraged, and with an ant's unreasoning, desperate courage they were ready to fight and to die, against an enemy irresistibly strong. ...
— The Girl in the Golden Atom • Raymond King Cummings
... gate; Loud the barbican leaped on its hinges; and the hollow porch and the vacant hall And the roof of the long resounding corridor echoed the advent of unknown feet, The feet of a stranger approaching the threshold step by step irresistibly: Till opened yonder door and through it strode to this Table the Virgin Knight— Strode and stood ...
— A Celtic Psaltery • Alfred Perceval Graves
... time-discoloured stone, and dust-encrusted mortar, and rusty, dank iron, and tarnished brass, and clouded silver-plating gave back the feeble glimmer of a candle, the effect was more miserable and sordid than could have been imagined. It conveyed irresistibly the idea that life, animal life, was not the only thing ...
— Dracula • Bram Stoker
... confined to Connecticut, but the time was ripe for its mission, and it soon spread rapidly throughout New England. In 1896 it began to attract the attention of Catholic young men in other parts of the nation, and during the next few years its appeal was made irresistibly in almost every State. It now exists in all the States of the Union, the Dominion of Canada, Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, Panama, Porto Rico, Mexico, Cuba, and the Philippine Islands, with a total membership of 328,000, of whom 108,000 are insurance members and 220,000 associate members. Its ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... the contagion of a great scene. Esther's illegitimate child is born, and the mother, who has temporarily left him for his own sake, to accept a position as wet-nurse, is inspired by a hungry maternal longing, which drags her irresistibly from warmth and comfort to a poverty whose bitterness has but a single solace—the joy of satisfied motherly love. There are writers who have not a hundredth part of Mr. Moore's industry who would have moved the reader deeply with such a ...
— My Contemporaries In Fiction • David Christie Murray
... idea seems to be that, as men start a huge fire with worthless straws or shavings, so Caesar is using the degenerate Romans of the time to set the whole world a-blaze with his own glory. Cassius's enthusiastic hatred of "the mightiest Julius" is irresistibly delightful. For a good hater is the next best thing to a true friend; and Cassius's honest gushing malice is surely better ...
— The New Hudson Shakespeare: Julius Caesar • William Shakespeare
... talking about the Spy, as though there were something in his remembrance of the lady which attracted him irresistibly to the subject. He had always boasted that in his interview with her he had come off with the victory, nor did he now cease to make such boasts; but still he spoke of her and her powers with an awe which would have ...
— The Claverings • Anthony Trollope
... commercial value, free from disturbing fluctuations, is hardly attainable, and without it an unlimited legal tender for private transactions assigned to both metals would irresistibly tend to drive out of circulation the clearer coinage and disappoint the principal object proposed by the legislation in view. I apprehend, therefore, that the two conditions of a near approach to equality of commercial value between the ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Rutherford B. Hayes • Rutherford B. Hayes
... Shairp, Arnold wrote, a few days later: "Thyrsis is a very quiet poem, but, I think, solid and sincere. It will not be popular, however. It had long been in my head to connect Clough with that Cumner country, and, when I began, I was carried irresistibly into this form. You say, truly, that there was much in Clough (the whole prophetic side, in fact) which one cannot deal with in this way.... Still, Clough had the idyllic side, too; to deal with this suited my desire to deal again with that Cumner country. Anyway, ...
— Matthew Arnold's Sohrab and Rustum and Other Poems • Matthew Arnold
... an old toper of a top-man about this daily dram-drinking; when I told him it was ruining him, and advised him to stop his grog and receive the money for it, in addition to his wages as provided by law, he turned about on me, with an irresistibly waggish look, and said, "Give up my grog? And why? Because it is ruining me? No, no; I am a good Christian, White-Jacket, and love my enemy too much ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville
... bolt, Field went to work as a reporter on the St. Louis Evening Journal. He was not much of a success as a reporter for the simple reason that his fancy was more active than his legs and he was irresistibly disposed to save the latter at ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... always remains. Thus, as Dr. COCKE declares, Hypnotism has not succeeded in cases suffering from what are called imperative conceptions, or irresistible belief. "Cases suffering from various imperative conceptions are, while possessing their reasons, either irresistibly led by certain impulses or they cannot rid themselves of erroneous ideas concerning themselves and others." This means, in fact, that they had been previously hypnotised to a definite conception which had become imperative. As ...
— The Mystic Will • Charles Godfrey Leland
... among the most agreeable recollections of my sojourn in Berlin. The personality and the art of this singer are as irresistibly bewitching ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 2 • Rupert Hughes
... difficult to avoid falling on the face. In some cases, when this state of the malady is attained, the patient can no longer exercise himself by walking in his usual manner, but is thrown on the toes and forepart of the feet; being, at the same time, irresistibly impelled to take much quicker and shorter steps, and thereby to adopt unwillingly a running pace. In some cases it is found necessary entirely to substitute running for walking; since otherwise the patient, on proceeding only a very ...
— An Essay on the Shaking Palsy • James Parkinson
... either of the two Spanish monarchs to liken him to the Knight of La Mancha it is difficult to see. Those who have looked upon that wonderful equestrian picture of Titian's in the Museo at Madrid, with its weird, weary, far-off expression, are irresistibly led to think of Don Quixote; but the converse is by no means so clear that on looking at Don Quixote we are tempted to think of that most unromantic of monarchs, Carlos Quinto.[15] His son is still more unlike his supposed portrait. As to ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... here, child, two is company, and three is trumpery, as the saying goes. It isn't that your sister loves ye less," seeing a pained look cross her face, "but she has her husband, don't ye see?" And Eva did see. She fell in love, was drawn irresistibly to her old minister, and it is his voice, with its pleasant Scotch accent, that is now rousing her from her reverie at ...
— The Empire Annual for Girls, 1911 • Various
... unmistakably English in features, though strongly suggestive of the Boadicea. She was a large, heavily-boned woman, enormously covered with flesh, and she dandled across her knees that very unfeminine sceptre, an English cavalryman's sword. But the eye neglected these details, and was irresistibly drawn by the strongness of her face. Even Kettle was ...
— A Master of Fortune • Cutcliffe Hyne
... of good life could never have hesitated between the two. It was plain to me that Mrs. Falchion was bent upon making a conquest of this girl who so delicately withstood her; and Belle Treherne has told me since, that, when in her presence, and listening to her, she was irresistibly drawn to her; though at the same time she saw there was some significant lack in her nature; some hardness impossible to any one who had ever known love. She also told me that on this occasion Mrs. Falchion did not mention ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... all night; yet she could not prevent herself from returning to the same spot on the following day; she felt irresistibly led thither, dreading, and yet wishing, to meet ...
— The Fairy Book - The Best Popular Stories Selected and Rendered Anew • Dinah Maria Mulock (AKA Miss Mulock)
... that Eileen was not having the attention she desired, so she drew gently out of a very interesting discussion she was having with Major Evelyn and turned to little Earnshaw, an agreeably impudent boy, with cheeks like a Winter apple and an irresistibly jolly smile. He seemed to have got over his first shyness with Stella and was conducting his veiled love-making with a rather charming audacity. Lady O'Gara had glanced a little anxiously once or twice at Terry, but there was obviously only amusement at young Earnshaw's way in Terry's ...
— Love of Brothers • Katharine Tynan
... homes because they must, or because they will. The Hebrew has experienced both motives for travelling. Irresistibly driven on by his own destiny and by the pressure of his fellow-men, the Jew was also gifted with a double share of that curiosity and restlessness which often send men forth of their own free will on long and arduous journeys. He has thus played the part of the Wandering Jew ...
— The Book of Delight and Other Papers • Israel Abrahams
... a concealed hereafter, a culmination in the human body, hitherto withheld from our curious gaze. I thus strove to suggest an ideal, left for a time incomplete; to foster an impetuous impatience, that, stimulated by the great acquisitions of the past, should reach forward irresistibly for the greater prize of the future. I trusted that among all my auditors would be found one that should divine the cipher, and quicken over its subtle secret—one intellect, that, carried unconsciously along the current of my ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 2 • Various
... the Russians at this stage still threatened from the south, where the archduke and Mackensen had pushed forward irresistibly in their advance to the east of the Vistula toward the railway running from Warsaw through Ivangorod, Lublin, Cholm, and Kovell to Kiev ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume V (of 12) - Neuve Chapelle, Battle of Ypres, Przemysl, Mazurian Lakes • Francis J. Reynolds, Allen L. Churchill, and Francis Trevelyan
... the life and color compassed between the four walls of Moorish tiles and arches, Benton felt the magnet of the group irresistibly ...
— The Lighted Match • Charles Neville Buck
... transform it into beneficence, and its opposite into the idea of maleficence. A man is happily or unhappily born; people are irresistibly drawn on by the general torrent that conducts one to glory, ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... delicacies would stop. She enjoyed herself immensely; her unaccustomed personal adornment, the cosy room, the shaded lights, the lace table-cloth, the manner in which the food was served, above all, the manly, admiring personality of Mr Williams, all irresistibly appealed to her, largely because the many joyous instincts of her being had been ...
— Sparrows - The Story of an Unprotected Girl • Horace W. C. Newte
... ocean itself, with its immensity, its mystery, its moods, the danger in it, and the man's work in mastering it, was almost irresistibly ...
— Out of the Fog • C. K. Ober
... death itself irresistibly suggests the duality of flesh and spirit. It is the removal of the energizing mind that leaves the frame so empty and meaningless. Think of the undreaming sleep of a corpse which dissolution is winding in its chemical embrace. A moment ago that ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... reckless. Mdlle. Perier fired indignant French at her across the table. Annie answered respectfully, and became demure in a moment; but even in the short instant in which the governess was obliged to lower her eyes to her plate, she had thrown a look so irresistibly comic at her companions that several of them had tittered aloud. Not once did she glance at Hester, although she occasionally looked boldly in her direction; but when she did so, her versatile face assumed a blank expression, as if she were seeing nothing. When tea was over, Dora ...
— A World of Girls - The Story of a School • L. T. Meade
... other modern artists, more, perhaps, than any other artists known to us, and their painting and sculpture were the greatest of the modern world. Yet the fact remains that Florentine art declined suddenly and irresistibly, and that all the Florentine intellect, which still remained remarkable and produced men of science like Galileo, could not arrest that decline. Indeed the Florentines themselves seem not to have been conscious of it. They thought that the dull imitators of Michelangelo were greater ...
— Progress and History • Various
... tone of one who is half-quoting and half-improvising, was irresistibly funny, and I laughed ...
— The House of a Thousand Candles • Meredith Nicholson
... of the scene. This being promised, he left the room, and presently brought in Helen. She was precisely as Homer has described her, when she stood by the side of Priam on the walls of Troy, looking on the Grecian chiefs. Her features were irresistibly attractive; and her full, moist lips were redder than the summer cherries. Faustus shortly after obliged his guests with her bust in marble, from which several copies were taken, no one knowing the name of ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin
... can reasonably be drawn from this strange fact is that we are here dealing with a fossilized structure, a functionless survival. It leads irresistibly to the inference that man has descended from a quadruped ancestor, and that when his body took the upright position the structure of the veins, not being seriously detrimental, remained unchanged. Those which had been vertical became horizontal, and retained ...
— Man And His Ancestor - A Study In Evolution • Charles Morris
... when the German armies had broken their way across France, and when the shattered forces of the young Republic had been swept away to the north of the Aisne and to the south of the Loire. Three broad streams of armed men had rolled slowly but irresistibly from the Rhine, now meandering to the north, now to the south, dividing, coalescing, but all uniting to form one great lake round Paris. And from this lake there welled out smaller streams—one to the north, one southward, to Orleans, and a third ...
— The Green Flag • Arthur Conan Doyle
... this record of their labors, some acquaintance with science is requisite, and not less a knowledge of quaker modes of thought. The adventurous and buoyant spirit of the writer, which carried him into odd situations, is sometimes irresistibly droll, in contrast with formal phrases. He was a gentleman of prudence and sagacity: "he lifted up his heart to God; took his pocket compass," and thus escaped some perils, both by sea and land; and carried to England a reputation, from which detraction has taken nothing, ...
— The History of Tasmania , Volume II (of 2) • John West
... singers who possessed no guiding notes of music is difficult to comprehend. Small wonder that Judge Sewall was forced to enter in his diary, "In the morning I set York tune and in the second going over, the gallery carried it irresistibly to St. Davids which discouraged me very much." We can fancy him stamping his foot, beating time, and roaring York at the top of his old lungs, and being overcome by the strong-voiced gallery, and at last sadly ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle
... girl a look which plunged into the depths of her heart. He read there her resolve that she would act loyally, but that at the same time she would never forget him who had so irresistibly gained her heart. ...
— Serge Panine, Complete • Georges Ohnet
... for the culture which makes its possession possible is not rightly felt by the heart of boy or of youth; it is the man's passion, and its power over him is most irresistibly asserted when outward restraint has been removed, when escaping from the control of parents and teachers he is left to himself to shape his course and seek his own ends. When his companions have finished their ...
— Education and the Higher Life • J. L. Spalding
... her so irresistibly comic that she laughed until she was fairly obliged to seat herself upon the floor and give way to her enjoyment. She then owned that it was for one of the boys that she wanted the little mirror. When her Father had given it to her, ...
— Wau-bun - The Early Day in the Northwest • Juliette Augusta Magill Kinzie
... care—she had made the barrier of her own free will. The person who was blameless and should not suffer was Henry. Then he began to look at Sabine furtively, and caught the outline of her sweet, averted head. How irresistibly attractive she was! The exact type he admired; not too intellectual-looking, just soft and round and babyish; there was one little curl on her snowy nuque that he longed to kiss there and then. What a time she was talking ...
— The Man and the Moment • Elinor Glyn
... usual spotless, he wore a flower in the ribbon of the hat carried jauntily in his hand, and about his person in the form of handkerchief and faja were those touches of bright colour by means of which he so irresistibly attracted the eye ...
— In Kedar's Tents • Henry Seton Merriman
... bend they saw ahead a high bank of water, extending across the entire river, and toward this they were being irresistibly carried. There being no way to arrest the progress of the raft they clung fast to the logs and let the river sweep them on. Swiftly the raft climbed the bank of water and slid down on the other side, plunging its edge deep into the water and drenching ...
— The Patchwork Girl of Oz • L. Frank Baum |
