"Pardonable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... extent of that redemption. The Catholic said, Christ's atonement wiped off the whole score of original sin, and thus enabled man to win heaven by moral fidelity and the help of the Church. The Lutheran said, Christ's atonement made all the sins of those who have faith, pardonable; and all may have faith. The Calvinist said, God foresaw that man would fall and incur damnation, and he decreed that a few should be snatched as brands from the burning, while the mass should be left to eternal ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... a grave truth is spoken jestingly. I have no doubt that, allowing for the pardonable exaggeration of a raconteur, Vance was narrating an episode ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... to rush forward and pull him from the place of danger; but I had the pardonable selfishness to ...
— New Arabian Nights • Robert Louis Stevenson
... exclaimed, joyfully looking around her with pardonable pride, for the splendid old house they were about to enter was her own, and every corner of it held the ...
— Polly's Senior Year at Boarding School • Dorothy Whitehill
... a pardonable mistake for the old-time "freshman" to think the Pitt Press in Trumpington Street was a church, but no one does this now, because the gate tower, built about 1832, when the Gothic revival was sweeping the country, is now known as "the Freshman's Church." The Pitt Press was established ...
— Beautiful Britain—Cambridge • Gordon Home
... what he had accomplished with pardonable pride and satisfaction. He had frustrated the plans of two daring thieves, caused the arrest of one of them, and the probable speedy arrest of the other, arranged for the restoration to the owner of a valuable property, ...
— The Tin Box - and What it Contained • Horatio Alger
... should be so earnest and desirous to enter themselves into it. In the younger sort who by their sulphurous instinct, are subject to the tickling desires of nature, and look upon that thing called Love through a multiplying glass, it is somewhat pardonable: But that those who are once come to the years of knowledge and true understanding should be drawn into it, methinks is most vilely foolish, and morrice fooles caps were much fitter for them, then wreaths of Lawrel. Yet stranger it is, that those who have been for the first time in that horrible ...
— The Ten Pleasures of Marriage and The Confession of the New-married Couple (1682) • A. Marsh
... the natural requirement of Germany, that there shall be completest guaranty against future aggression, constituting what is so well known among us as "Security for the Future." Count Bismarck, with an exaggeration hardly pardonable, alleges more than twenty invasions of Germany by France, and declares that these must be stopped forever. [Footnote: Circular of September 16, 1870: Foreign Relations of the United States,—Executive Documents, 41st Cong. ...
— The Duel Between France and Germany • Charles Sumner
... facts in regard to the German pilgrims of the New World, thus closes his notice of Pastorius:— "No tombstone, not even a record of burial, indicates where his remains have found their last resting-place, and the pardonable desire to associate the homage due to this distinguished man with some visible memento can not be gratified. There is no reason to suppose that he was interred in any other place than the Friends' old burying-ground ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... which had attended its erection. He conducted the Royal party to near the margin of the sea, and, after describing to them the incident of the fall of the tube, and the reason of its preservation, he pointed with pardonable pride to a pile of stones which the workmen had there raised to commemorate the event. While nearly all the other marks of the work during its progress had been obliterated, that cairn had been left standing in commemoration of the caution and ...
— Lives of the Engineers - The Locomotive. George and Robert Stephenson • Samuel Smiles
... my party, watching, with pardonable curiosity, the adroitness with which a party of French were plundering a house; and by the time my curiosity had been satisfied, I found myself quite alone, my retinue having preceded me by some few hundred yards. This ...
— Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands • Mary Seacole
... had something pretty in my trunk for each of them)—could not afford a carriage, but had posted themselves on the road near the village; and there was such a waving of hands and handkerchiefs: and though my aunt did not much notice them, except by a majestic toss of the head, which is pardonable in a woman of her property, yet Mary Smith did even more than I, and waved her hands as much as the whole nine. Ah! how my dear mother cried and blessed me when we met, and called me her soul's comfort and her darling boy, and looked at me as if I were a paragon of virtue and ...
— The History of Samuel Titmarsh - and the Great Hoggarty Diamond • William Makepeace Thackeray
... elsewhere is there evidence that in his conscience he was "ill at ease" or "his mind not at peace". Here as elsewhere, Mr. Lodge's biography, written over forty years ago, reproduces anti-slavery bitterness and ignorance of facts (pardonable in 1850) and seriously misrepresents Webster's character and the situation in ...
— Webster's Seventh of March Speech, and the Secession Movement • Herbert Darling Foster
... tresses of her crown of hair, and wrapped her dress around the well-proportioned limbs until she looked the draped statue of a classic age. There was that, too, within her breast which filled her with lofty and pardonable pride, for she awaited her husband's return to communicate to him the royal ...
— Lancashire Idylls (1898) • Marshall Mather
... college student can run a motor car, take a gasoline engine to pieces, fix a washer on a kitchen tap, mend a broken electric bell, and give an expert opinion on what has gone wrong with the furnace. It is these things indeed which stamp him as a college man, and occasion a very pardonable pride in the minds of ...
— My Discovery of England • Stephen Leacock
... this time; had learned to distinguish it from all others in the world. There are some footsteps which, by a pardonable poetical license, we say "we should hear in our graves," and though this girl did not think of that, for death looked far off, and she was scarcely a poetical person, still, many a morning, when, sitting at her school-room window, she heard Mr. Roy ...
— The Laurel Bush • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... easily, because she said she was sure that Heaven must deal politely with a person of her quality;—I suppose Lady Kew had some such notions regarding people of rank: her long-suffering towards them was extreme; in fact, there were vices which the old lady thought pardonable, and even natural, in a young nobleman of high station, which she never would have excused in ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... would have been so touched to believe that a man he deeply admired should care a straw for him that he wouldn't play with such a presumption if it were possibly vain. In a single glance of the eye of the pardonable Master he read—having the sort of divination that belonged to his talent—that this personage had ever a store of friendly patience, which was part of his rich outfit, but was versed in no printed page of a rising scribbler. There was even a relief, a simplification, ...
— The Lesson of the Master • Henry James
... rule of law and peace in a distracted country, fancied that the corruption of the legislature might be counted a low price to pay for protecting the mass of the population from the rule or the vengeance of a faction, they committed a grave moral error. But their mistake was more pardonable than it seems to modern critics, and the lesson which it teaches—that you cannot base a just policy upon a foundation of iniquity—is one which the modern censors of Pitt may well lay to heart. However this may be, the transactions which discredited the passing of the Act of Union give ...
— England's Case Against Home Rule • Albert Venn Dicey
... perceived that the two middle strokes had a slight curvature, a tendency to approach the shape of an S, which distinguished them from the two exterior lines. The date was, in fact, 1551; yet so small was the difference of the figures, that the mistake was really a pardonable one. ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 22., Saturday, March 30, 1850 • Various
... they were to go on at this Rate, the Language of Shakespear, Milton, Dryden, Addison and Pope, would soon become quite superannuated. And why avoid an Expression in use, to introduce one which says precisely the same Thing? A new Word is never pardonable, but when it is absolutely necessary, intelligible and sonorous; they are forc'd to make them in Physics: A new Discovery, or a new Machine demands a new Word. But do they make new Discoveries in the human Heart? Is there any other ...
— Essays on Wit No. 2 • Richard Flecknoe and Joseph Warton
... observing, what that gentleman must be sensible is the undoubted fact, that he was indebted for a reconciliation with his father-in-law, shortly after, to the kind interference of Sir William and Lady Hamilton; who, very properly representing it as solely the effect of a young man's pardonable inebriety on so joyous an occasion, again introduced him to favour at their rural villa in the vicinity of Naples. The fact, in itself, is trivial; but, on subjects of domestic or family delicacy, the minutest thread of verity may chance to have it's use ...
— The Life of the Right Honourable Horatio Lord Viscount Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) • James Harrison
... they hurry us into the great kitchen to a round table, loaded with cake and bread-and-butter and enormous bowls of tea. The angelic beings in white veils wait on us. We are hungry and we think (a pardonable error) that this meal is hospital supper; after which some work will surely be found for ...
— A Journal of Impressions in Belgium • May Sinclair
... admiration and attention, could not be concealed. We may reply to this, that Shakspeare, who apparently was liked by every one, did not conceal it from his friends, and that they supported him in this pardonable assumption—the members of the theatre for their own sakes, and ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 449 - Volume 18, New Series, August 7, 1852 • Various
... against both hunger and cold between then and spring. Now they turned their attention to a house, and, with only their ready axes for tools, they had one finished two weeks later that they surveyed with genuine pleasure and pardonable pride. It was of logs, notched and fitted together at the corners, twelve feet square and with walls six feet high. It was chinked with moss, had a tight floor of hewed cedar planks, a roof of hemlock bark, a chimney and fireplace of stones cemented with blue ...
— At War with Pontiac - The Totem of the Bear • Kirk Munroe and J. Finnemore
... with me. So a time of meeting was appointed, and a note sent to the young lawyer desiring his presence at the house of Mrs. Montgomery. He seemed very much gratified at the successful result of his visit to England, and referred to it with something of pardonable pride in his manner. ...
— The Allen House - or Twenty Years Ago and Now • T. S. Arthur
... brag, which was perhaps pardonable tinder the circumstances, Douglas reminded the Senate of his efforts to secure the admission of California and of his prediction that the people of that country would form a free State constitution. A few months had sufficed to vindicate his position at the last session. And ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson
... the United States? Is it not a fact that relations between capital and labor on the basis of collective bargaining are much further advanced in Great Britain than in the United States? It is perhaps not strange that the conservative British press has told us with pardonable irony that much of our New Deal program is only an attempt to catch up with English reforms that go back ten ...
— The Fireside Chats of Franklin Delano Roosevelt • Franklin Delano Roosevelt
... madam, I never once thought of it; and as to my brother, when my mother only hinted it to him, he was quite angry. But though I don't mean to vindicate what has happened, you will not, I hope, be displeased if I say my mother is much more pardonable than she seems to be, for the same mistake she made with you, she would have been as apt to have made with a princess; it was not, therefore, from any want of respect, but merely from thinking my brother might marry as high as he pleased, and believing no lady would refuse ...
— Cecilia vol. 2 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)
... rule, and not, as there, the exception, certain pairs, especially "wip" and "lip" ("wife" and "body"), "sach" and "sprach," "geben" and "geleben," "tot" and "not," recur perhaps a little too often for the ear's perfect comfort. But this is natural and extremely pardonable. The language is exceedingly clear and easy—far nearer to German of the present day than Layamon's own verse, or the prose of the Ancren Riwle, is to English prose and verse of the nineteenth century; the differences being, as a rule, ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... lambs. Indeed, it was sufficient to look at their faces to be at once struck by the cruel expression upon them. They prided themselves greatly on having killed members of rival tribes, and more still upon doing away with Brazilians. In the latter case it was pardonable, because until quite recently the Brazilians have slaughtered the poor Indians of the near interior regions in a merciless way. Now, on the contrary, the Brazilian Government goes perhaps too far the other way in its endeavour to protect the few Indians ...
— Across Unknown South America • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... air that showed he did it rather to perform the rule of the lists, than expose his enemy; however, it appeared he knew how to make use of a victory, and with a gentle trot he marched up to a gallery where their mistress sat (for they were rivals) and let him down with laudable courtesy and pardonable insolence[67]. I don't know but it might be exactly where ...
— The De Coverley Papers - From 'The Spectator' • Joseph Addison and Others
... companions in a few strange enterprises in the war, but I doubt whether any have equalled in strangeness, and I might say almost uncanny, adventure that which I am about to record. In cold type it would be pardonable for anyone to disbelieve some of the facts set forth, but, as I have proved for myself the perfect application of the well-known saying that "truth is stranger than fiction," I merely relate the facts in ...
— How I Filmed the War - A Record of the Extraordinary Experiences of the Man Who - Filmed the Great Somme Battles, etc. • Lieut. Geoffrey H. Malins
... letters, a polished, easy, and graceful style, with a very considerable faculty of humorous observation. Those ingenious letters to his uncle (they usually included a little hint about money) were, in fact, a trifle too literary both in substance and in form; we could even now, looking at them with a pardonable curiosity, have spared a little of their formal antithesis for some more precise information about the writer and ...
— Goldsmith - English Men of Letters Series • William Black
... not elude the pardonable glances cast upon her by the strangers—glances which left in their memories the form and face of a dainty brunette with large and very brilliant black eyes. Her waist was slender, her hands and feet were nimble and delicate, ...
— A Dream of Empire - Or, The House of Blennerhassett • William Henry Venable
... everything was ready and the girls looked at the table with pardonable pride. "My, but I'm hungry," sighed Ruth, "and ...
— Glenloch Girls • Grace M. Remick
... been insane; but to consent was unhappily to feed the resentment of the Germans by a fresh sign of intelligence with their enemies, and to widen the breach between the races by a fresh and a scarce pardonable mark of their division. The same day again the Germans repeated one of their earlier offences by firing on a boat within the harbour. Times were changed; they were now at war and in peril, the rigour of military advantage might well be seized by ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 17 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... pardonable disposition, on the part of the younger officers to indulge in mirth, was interrupted by the General, desiring a young aid-de-camp to procure the necessary billet and accomodation ...
— The Canadian Brothers - or The Prophecy Fulfilled • John Richardson
... la douceur, de la douceur"! Even in the least pardonable of light loves he demands this tenderness—demands it from some poor "fille de joie" with the same sort of tearful craving with which he demands it from the Mother ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... With a pardonable curiosity to learn if I were right, I opened conversation with the young man. He was not unwilling to respond, and after a few questions I learned, to my chagrin, that he was a photographer. Alas for my deductions! ...
— The Gold Bag • Carolyn Wells
... indirectly,—that its glory is not to persist in its finiteness, not to hold on to its form, but to be transformed. The figure of Thersites would be very unsuitable for Achilles, but is suitable enough for a saint; it was a pardonable exaggeration to make it even ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various
... Clavering. My falsehood, if you should choose to call me false, is of a very different nature, and is pardonable by all laws known ...
— The Claverings • Anthony Trollope
... and fable—Spain, Greece, Asia Minor, and Italy; and what Athens and Constantinople were to us a few years ago, Venice and Rome have been more recently. The poem also, or the pilgrim, or both, have accompanied me from first to last; and perhaps it may be a pardonable vanity which induces me to reflect with complacency on a composition which in some degree connects me with the spot where it was produced, and the objects it would fain describe; and however unworthy it may be deemed of those magical and memorable abodes, however short it may ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... thirteen years in searching musty German histories to produce. Carlyle says, "One of the reasons that led me to write 'Frederic' was that he managed not to be a liar and charlatan as his century was"; and indeed his adoration for Frederic is quite pardonable. He had spent thirteen years of his life in the supreme effort of making him a hero, and his great work, contained in eight volumes, is a matchless piece of literature; but there is nothing in it to justify ...
— The Tragedy of St. Helena • Walter Runciman
... boldly up in your own national characteristics, and show by your perseverance and industry, your honor and purity, that you are men, colored men, but of no inferior quality. The greatest lack I see among you, is unity of action, pardonable, to be sure, in the eyes of those who have seen your oppression and limited advantages; but now that many of you have resolved to gain your rights or die in the struggle, let me entreat you to band yourselves together in one indissoluble ...
— Twenty-Two Years a Slave, and Forty Years a Freeman • Austin Steward
... toilsome years perish before your eyes. You cannot rebuild your fortune, raise the dead, recover your lost toil, and in the face of the inevitable, your arms drop. Then you neglect to care for your person, to keep your house, to guide your children. All this is pardonable, and how easy to understand! But it is exceedingly dangerous. To fold one's hands and let things take their course, is to transform one evil into worse. You who think that you have nothing left to lose, will by that very thought lose what ...
— The Simple Life • Charles Wagner
... chapter immediately preceding this one I said the English had no night life. This was a slight but a pardonable misstatement of the actual facts. The Englishman has not so much night life as the Parisian, the Berliner, the Viennese or the Budapest; but he has more night life in his town of London than the Roman has in his town of Rome. In Rome night life for the foreigner consists of going indoors ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... men, think you, that those delicate nuances and tints and shades are harmonised and put together? Such a conceit is only pardonable in a set of beings who possess not the delicate faculty of "detail," and who, with a limited knowledge of even cardinal colours, describe the graces and beauties of a toilette by saying the wearer had ...
— The Mystery of a Turkish Bath • E.M. Gollan (AKA Rita)
... pardonable not to laugh at what is amusing, but sudden guffaws at bad jokes is the test of ...
— My Impresssions of America • Margot Asquith
... the Pilgrim Fathers had been told that the haven of refuge they had selected would, within two or three hundred years, be part of a great English-speaking nation with some 70,000,000 of inhabitants, and with its center some 1,500 miles westward, they would have listened to the story with pardonable incredulity, and would have felt like invoking condemnation upon the head of the reckless prophet who was ...
— My Native Land • James Cox
... rather late at school; but could not resist the temptation of displaying, with pardonable pride, a moist brown-paper parcel before she consigned it to the inmost recesses of her desk. During the next few minutes the rumor that Amy March had got twenty-four delicious limes (she ate one on the way), and was going to treat, circulated through her "set" and the attentions ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... unsatisfactory landowners, and are kept going by the offerings of their followers. They are mostly Shias. It is not necessary to believe that they are all descended from the Prophet's son-in-law, Ali. A native proverb with pardonable exaggeration says: "The first year I was a weaver (Julaha), the next year a Shekh. This year, if prices rise, I ...
— The Panjab, North-West Frontier Province, and Kashmir • Sir James McCrone Douie
... people had shut up their country houses and come into town, and now that it was announced that Mrs. Washington would make a brief stop on her way to Cambridge, there was a curious feeling pervading the community in spite of a very pardonable interest. What if the war should be ...
— A Little Girl in Old Philadelphia • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... on certain destruction, nevertheless the Arab held on, with compressed lips and a frowning brow. Yoosoof looked quite like a man who would rather throw away his life than gratify his enemy, and the Englishmen, who were fully alive to their danger, began to feel rather uneasy—which was a very pardonable sensation, when it is remembered that their arms being fast bound, rendered them utterly unable to help themselves in case of ...
— Black Ivory • R.M. Ballantyne
... of but fifteen treats sent upon the stage, pale and choking with apprehension, in an attempt to do that, without instruction, which he came purposely to learn; and furnishing amusement to his classmates, by a pardonable awkwardness, which should be punished in the person of his pretending but neglectful preceptor with little less than scourging. Then visit a conservatory of music; observe there the orderly tasks, the masterly ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... hard labour for blasphemy. Mr. Rogers, therefore, who made this translation, not in the Athens of Plato, but in the London of Podsnap—in 1878, to be exact—is not much to be blamed for having allowed it to bear the mark of its age. Nevertheless, though pardonable, his compromise is deplorable, since it robs this translation of precisely that quality which gives to most of the others their high importance. For Mr. Rogers is one of those who during the last five-and-twenty years have been busy awakening us to a new sense ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... being blind, he was in total darkness. When he was carried down, the surgeon—in the midst of a scene scarcely to be conceived by those who have never seen a cockpit in time of action, and the heroism which is displayed amid its horrors,—with a natural and pardonable eagerness, quitted the poor fellow then under his hands, that he might instantly attend the admiral. "No!" said Nelson, "I will take my turn with my brave fellows." Nor would he suffer his own wound to be examined till every man who had been previously wounded ...
— The Life of Horatio Lord Nelson • Robert Southey
... as I intimated in a former letter, it seems he was at that time rather allured by the vanity of making a speech that should be applauded, than by any real desire of injuring the King. Such vanity, however, is not pardonable: a man has a right to ruin himself, or to make himself ridiculous; but when his vanity becomes baneful to others, as it has all the effect, so does it merit the punishment, ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... strong accent, had been done for in a motor-car smashup. One morning the man from Ohio gave us a kind of danse macabre on the deck; rolling his trouser leg high above his artificial shin, he walked, leaped, danced, and ran. "Can you beat that?" he asked with pardonable pride. "Think what these will mean to the soldiers." Meanwhile, with slow care, the Virginian explained the ...
— A Volunteer Poilu • Henry Sheahan
... an end to such heresies as the following, from the Rochester Democrat, that all women should most earnestly labor. That paper begs us not to forget, "that what may be pardonable in a man, speaking of evils generally, may and perhaps ought to be unpardonable in one of the presumably better sex; because there can not and must not be perfect equality between men and women when the disposition to do wrong is under discussion. Women are permitted to be as much better than men ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... this letter was received by the English with gibes and jeers, which was pardonable; but what was not so was the bad treatment of the messenger who had brought it to the English camp. He was kept prisoner, and, if some rather doubtful French writers of the day are to be believed, it was seriously debated whether or not he should be burnt. Let us ...
— Joan of Arc • Ronald Sutherland Gower
... him was his age, and as that is a crime of which we may all hope to be guilty, we will not bear heavily on it. May he rest in peace! But though the great age of an expiring dean cannot be made matter of reproach, we are not inclined to look on such a fault as at all pardonable in a dean just brought to the birth. We do hope the days of sexagenarian appointments are past. If we want deans, we must want them for some purpose. That purpose will necessarily be better fulfilled by a man of ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... and let live" was their motto. For all that they did get a trifle de trop sometimes; he himself had lost his temper when he awoke one morning to find a brawny rat sitting on his face combing his whiskers in mistake for his own (a pardonable error in the dark); and, determining to teach them a lesson, had bethought him of his old friend, the noble fert. He therefore sent home for two ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 152, March 21, 1917 • Various
... themselves the subjects of ridicule or contempt; and the pain is the greater, when it is given by those whom they admire, and from whom they are ambitious of receiving any marks of countenance and favour. Yet we must allow, that affronts are pardonable from ladies, as they are often ...
— The Young Gentleman and Lady's Monitor, and English Teacher's Assistant • John Hamilton Moore
... demolish more conclusively the arguments of either form of intemperance; for he considers total abstinence as almost, if not quite, on a level with over indulgence. One's instinct of course shrinks at first from the idea of a deliberate clouding of the senses being ever pardonable, but the more one examines the matter the more innocent does it appear; and I freely admit that I have come to regard an offence against morals committed in the interest of science as not only excusable, but in some ...
— A Romantic Young Lady • Robert Grant
... when the sermon was particularly awakening, she mentally debated the serious question as to whether new bonnets, and a pair of Jouvin's gloves daily, were not sinful; but I think she decided that the new bonnets and gloves were, on the whole, a pardonable weakness, as ...
— Henry Dunbar - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... fair and square," he announced with pardonable pride, as the snowball cleared the top of the barn by ...
— The Rover Boys at Big Horn Ranch - The Cowboys' Double Round-Up • Edward Stratemeyer
... Philadelphia with almost as much Formality as if he was on his dying Bed soon after resolving to visit them once more. In [your] horrid Catalogue of evil Dispositions with which Age is infested we do not find Vanity. This perhaps may be common to the old & the young, tho I confess it is the more pardonable in the latter. It is difficult for a Man in years to perswade himself to believe a mortifying Truth that the Powers of his mind whether they have been ...
— The Original Writings of Samuel Adams, Volume 4 • Samuel Adams
... This is only allowable in writing, and not then except when the foreign word or phrase expresses more clearly and directly than English can do the desired meaning. In familiar conversation this is an affectation, only pardonable when all persons present are particularly familiar with ...
— Our Deportment - Or the Manners, Conduct and Dress of the Most Refined Society • John H. Young
... that man sees so much evil in the least transgressions, as that it would break the back of all the angels of heaven should the great God impute it to them. And he that sees this is far enough off from thinking of doing to mitigate or assuage the rigour of the law, or to make pardonable his own transgressions thereby. But he that sees not this, cannot confess his transgressions aright; for true confession consisteth in the general, in a man's taking to himself his transgressions, with the acknowledgment of them to be his, and that he cannot stir from under them, nor do anything ...
— The Pharisee And The Publican • John Bunyan
... on Burnet i. 393. Dartmouth says that it was from Fagel that the Lords extracted the hint. This was a slip of the pen very pardonable in a hasty marginal note; but Dalrymple and others ought not to have copied so palpable a blunder. Fagel died in Holland, on the 5th of December 1688, when William was at Salisbury and James at Whitehall. The real ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... the hope of continuing to be useful while I continued to live. I had believed that the course and circumstances of my life had placed within my power some services favorable to the outset of the institution. But this may be egoism; pardonable, perhaps, when I express a consciousness that my colleagues and successors will do as well, whatever the legislature shall ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... in the first Line are represented as created Beings; and that, in the other, Adam and Eve are confounded with their Sons and Daughters. Such little Blemishes as these, when the Thought is great and natural, we should, with Horace [2] impute to a pardonable Inadvertency, or to the Weakness of human Nature, which cannot attend to each minute Particular, and give the last Finishing to every Circumstance in so long a Work. The Ancient Criticks therefore, who were acted by a Spirit of Candour, rather than that of Cavilling, invented certain ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... induced him to print, in his old age, what he called, to the best of my recollection, "A Continuation of the Deserted Village." He always brought a copy with him of an evening, and was fond of referring to it, and passing it round for the company to look at—a weakness pardonable in a garrulous old man. On revisiting the house, for old acquaintance sake, after an absence of some years from London, I missed him from his accustomed place, which I observed to be occupied by a stranger. On inquiry, I found that he was departed to where ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 392, Saturday, October 3, 1829. • Various
... in advance of the animals. Each wore a capacious cloak of brown cloth—a favourite colour among the Pyrenean Spaniards; and what with their swarthy complexions, bearded lips, and wild attire, it would have been pardonable enough to have mistaken them for a band of brigands, or, at all events, ...
— Bruin - The Grand Bear Hunt • Mayne Reid
... in the matter of his rise. He thought, with pardonable exultation, of how he had confuted them, one after another. Cressey had doubted that one could be at the same time a successful journalist and a gentleman; Horace Vanney had deemed individuality inconsistent with newspaper ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... had kept his diary for fourteen years, it seemed to a pardonable vanity so amusing, that he persuaded himself to give part of it to the world. The experiment, no doubt, was a very dubious one. After much hesitation, and in an evil hour, perhaps, he wrote: "I am induced to submit to the indulgence of the public the idlest work, probably, that ...
— Gossip in a Library • Edmund Gosse
... invited to dine with the family. I was treated as a prospective member. With the soup, the fish, and the heavy meats, they dealt out the virtues of their Gerome, seriously and earnestly. With the sweetmeats and the coffee they smilingly touched upon his lightest and most pardonable faults. My heart trembled for its safety. It was a well planned effective process. That night he told me of his love with the air of a man who fully expects a warm response and affirmative answer. Both were bravely denied him. I told him that ...
— The Inner Sisterhood - A Social Study in High Colors • Douglass Sherley et al.
... returning after the loss of his wife, who had now become the sweetest creature in the world; but Sir Philip's decision that the measure was wise, and the secrecy under the circumstances so expedient as to be pardonable, prevented all public blame; Mr. Fellowes, however, was drawn apart, and asked whether he suspected any other motive than was here declared, and which might make his pupil unwilling to face the parental ...
— A Reputed Changeling • Charlotte M. Yonge
... species of pardonable egotism, Mr. Jorrocks—who in addition to the conspicuous place he holds in the Surrey Hunt, as shown in the preceding chapter, we should introduce to our readers as a substantial grocer in St. Botolph's Lane, with an elegant residence in Great Coram Street, Russell ...
— Jorrocks' Jaunts and Jollities • Robert Smith Surtees
... of himself; and, sure, for one man to conquer an army within the city, and another without the city, at once, is something difficult; but this flight is pardonable to some we meet with in Granada: ...
— Lives of the Poets, Vol. 1 • Samuel Johnson
... art present; wake for thee when I should sleep; and even dream of thee when I am awake; sigh much, drink little, eat less, court solitude, am grown very entertaining to myself, and (as I am informed) very troublesome to everybody else. If this be not love, it is madness, and then it is pardonable. Nay, yet a more certain sign than all this, I give ...
— The Comedies of William Congreve - Volume 1 [of 2] • William Congreve
... the writer appears favourable to myself, and be judged apocryphal, it may, however, weigh in the opposite scale to some things less obligingly said of me; false praise being as pardonable ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... We fancy even native tourists pausing before the greater part of the effigies, and, after reading the names, asking desperately, "Who was he?" Nay, if they should say, "Who the devil was he?" it were a pardonable invocation, for none so fit as the Prince of Darkness to act as cicerone among such palpable obscurities. We recall the court-yard of the Uffizj at Florence. That also is not free of parish celebrities; but Dante, Galileo, Michael Angelo, Macchiavelli,—shall the inventor of the sewing-machine, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various
... have to tell to the people of Stockholm," continued my father, while a look of pardonable elation lighted up his honest face. "And think of the gold nuggets ...
— The Smoky God • Willis George Emerson
... is pardonable, when any one suffers greater misfortunes than he can bear, for him to be desirous to ...
— The Tragedies of Euripides, Volume I. • Euripides
... of the garden during vacation, gathered the vegetables as they ripened, and with pardonable pride carried them home to their parents. The parents, in turn, were gratified and as much interested as the children. Several of the boys had individual appliances made by their fathers for use in the garden. Often on Monday mornings would come the account of the Sunday walk with ...
— Construction Work for Rural and Elementary Schools • Virginia McGaw
... make us live after its guidance and direction, and fulfil its lusts. Then, by due consequence, we owe so much to the Spirit, as that we should live after the Spirit, and resign ourselves wholly to him, his guidance and direction. There is a twofold kind of debt upon the creature, one remissible and pardonable, another irremissible and unpardonable, (so to speak,) the debt of sin, and that is the guilt of it, which is nothing else than the obligation of the sinner over to eternal condemnation by virtue of the curse of God. Every sinner cometh under this debt to divine justice, the desert of eternal wrath, ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... last he painted, you know," Mrs. Gisburn said with pardonable pride. "The last but one," she corrected herself—"but the other doesn't count, ...
— The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton, Part 2 (of 10) • Edith Wharton
... striking made me more passionately eager to learn, but I was informed by one of the private pupils who exercised considerable authority over the younger boys, that although I might study the violin with the dancing-master, I was never to practise it by myself. This restriction was pardonable in one who might reasonably dread the torturing attempts of a beginner, but it was certainly not favorable to my progress. However, in course of time it came to be relaxed; that is, as soon as I ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... corner for me under some pathetically empty fowl-roosts. Sergeant Henderson in his captain's absence had claimed me from a distracted adjutant who wanted to know where the devil I had come from, and why, and if I would kindly make myself scarce and leave him in peace—a display of temper pardonable in a man who had just come in wet to his middle from fording the river ...
— The Adventures of Harry Revel • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... modernisms were out of tune with the strain of my aspirations at that moment, and I did not find the unexpected word and the eccentricities of expression which were, and are still, so dear to me. I am not a purist; an error of diction is very pardonable if it does not err on the side of the commonplace; the commonplace, the natural, is constitutionally abhorrent to me; and I have never been able to read with any very thorough sense of pleasure even the opening lines of "Rolla," that splendid ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... devastation?" the girl asked quietly. "Is it not pride rather than honor? The prince regent made a pardonable blunder. Do not you, my father, make an unpardonable one. The king is without blame, for you appeal to his imagination as a man who deeply wronged his father. I harbor no ill-feeling against him or his uncle, ...
— The Goose Girl • Harold MacGrath
... inns on the outskirts of Paris, and who come not unfrequently to their ends at Montfaucon, were tippling and playing cards at a table near the door. They looked up sullenly at my entrance, but refrained from saluting me, which, as I was plainly dressed and much stained by travel, was in some degree pardonable. By the fire, partaking of a coarse meal, was a fourth man of so singular an appearance that I must needs describe him. He was of great height and extreme leanness. His face matched his form, for it was long and thin, terminating ...
— Stories By English Authors: France • Various
... in his various writings that the careful reader sees his nature just as it was in all its essentials, and has little more to learn than those human accidents which individualize him in space and time. About all these accidents we have a natural and pardonable curiosity. We wish to know of what race he came, what were the conditions into which he was born, what educational and social influences helped to mould his character, and what new elements Nature added to make him Ralph ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... Charles's Isle was perhaps in some degree influenced by not unworthy motives; such as prompt other adventurous spirits to lead colonists into distant regions and assume political preeminence over them. His summary execution of many of his Peruvians is quite pardonable, considering the desperate characters he had to deal with; while his offering canine battle to the banded rebels seems under the circumstances altogether just. But for this King Oberlus and what shortly follows, ...
— The Piazza Tales • Herman Melville
... vanished. To the enemy they could present a united front; in the privacy of their apartment, they were five headstrong men. They promptly fell upon Adams's draft tooth and nail. Adams described the scene with pardonable resentment. ...
— Jefferson and his Colleagues - A Chronicle of the Virginia Dynasty, Volume 15 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Allen Johnson
... proprietors of some other furnaces that they could not afford to employ a chemist. Had they known the truth then, they would have known that they could not afford to be without one. Looking back it seems pardonable to record that we were the first to employ a chemist at blast furnaces—something ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie • Andrew Carnegie
... this false simplification is the complete subversion of that scale of dignity or excellence upon which we range the various kinds of living creatures, putting ourselves at the top—not merely in obedience to a pardonable vanity, but, as has hitherto been supposed, in obedience to a trustworthy intuition which, without attempting to apply a common measure to things incommensurable, judges life to be higher than death; consciousness than unconsciousness; mind than mere ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... Lagrange," he says, "who frequently asserted that Newton was the greatest genius that ever existed, used to add—'and the most fortunate, for we cannot find MORE THAN ONCE a system of the world to establish.'" With pardonable exaggeration the admiring followers of the great ...
— A History of Science, Volume 2(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... with a show of pardonable pride; and he continued: "Wait until you see where we live and how ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: The Tribesmen • Roger Finlay
... the growing of a soul, nevertheless, is an almost Divine act of faith. How pardonable, surely, the impatience of deformity with itself, of a consciously despicable character standing before Christ, wondering, yearning, hungering to be like that! Yet must one trust the process fearlessly and without misgiving. "The Lord the Spirit" will do His part. The ...
— Addresses • Henry Drummond
... rail not at these scholarly grave-diggers because I can not interest myself in their work; that were unwise and unfair. But truly, I abominate this business of 'cashing,' as it were, the ruins and remains, the ashes and dust, of our ancestors. Archaeology for archaeology's sake is pardonable; archaeology for the sake of writing a book is intolerable; and archaeology for lucre ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... a fixed idea, I guessed by several observations he let fall, that, as his nephew resembled him in person, he would resemble him in mind; for Linton's letters bore few or no indications of his defective character. And I, through pardonable weakness, refrained from correcting the error; asking myself what good there would be in disturbing his last moments with information that he had neither power nor ...
— Wuthering Heights • Emily Bronte
... Still less will he give you one of those speeches which are the supreme achievement of this faculty, where the speaker's philosophy is not reasoned out liked Falstaff's, but revealed in a flash of the onlooker's insight. Is it pardonable to quote the account of Falstaff's death as the hostess ...
— Irish Books and Irish People • Stephen Gwynn
... public judgment, to set up a weight of moral evidence in his own behalf, and behind this in turn, and showing through it, might be sensed the shy pride of a shy man for labour undertaken with good motives and creditably performed. With no more than a pardonable broadening and exaggeration of the other's mode of speech, the reporter succeeded likewise in reproducing not only the language, but the wistful intent of what Uncle Tobe said to him. From this interview I propose now to quote to the extent of a few paragraphs. This is Uncle Tobe ...
— From Place to Place • Irvin S. Cobb |
