"Unintelligible" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... fact, when we had afterwards occasion to say Phrygum and Phrygibus, it was rather absurd to adopt the Greek letter without adopting their cases, [Footnote: This passage, as it stands in the original, appears to me unintelligible: I have therefore taken the liberty to give it a slight alteration.] or at least not to confine it to the nominative; and yet (in the accusative) we say Phryges, and Pyrrhum, to please the ear. Formerly ...
— Cicero's Brutus or History of Famous Orators; also His Orator, or Accomplished Speaker. • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... measured rhetoric a charm of which her careless colloquial speech was incapable. Even the "Fifth Reader," with its imposing passages from the English classics carefully selected with a view of paralyzing small, hesitating, or hurried voices, in Cressy's hands became no longer an unintelligible incantation. She had quietly mastered the difficulties of pronunciation by some instinctive sense of euphony if not of comprehension. The master with his eyes closed hardly recognized his pupil. Whether or not she understood what she read he hesitated to inquire; no doubt, ...
— Cressy • Bret Harte
... at Edinburgh, at a school, without distinction or expectation, till at the usual time he performed a probationary exercise by explaining a psalm. His diction was so poetically splendid, that Mr. Hamilton, the professor of divinity, reproved him for speaking language unintelligible to a popular audience; and he censured one of his expressions as indecent, if not profane. This rebuke is reported to have repressed his thoughts of an ecclesiastical character, and he probably cultivated with new diligence his blossoms of poetry, which, however, were in ...
— Lives of the Poets: Gay, Thomson, Young, and Others • Samuel Johnson
... letter, Mr. Salame says, that it is the worst of the African papers which he had seen, both as to its ungrammatical and unintelligible character. Indeed, his Yaourick majesty seemed to be sadly in need of words to make himself intelligible. It must be remarked, that the words between parentheses are not in the original, but supplied by the translator for the ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... in his sleep when Gwyn reached his side, but for a time his words were unintelligible. ...
— Sappers and Miners - The Flood beneath the Sea • George Manville Fenn
... dangers), addressed him in these words. The learned Vidura, conversant with the jargon (of the Mlechchhas), addressed the learned Yudhishthira who also was conversant with the same jargon, in the words of the Mlechchha tongue, so as to be unintelligible to all except Yudhishthira. He said, 'He that knoweth the schemes his foes contrive in accordance with the dictates of political science, should, knowing them, act in such a way as to avoid all danger. He that knoweth that there are sharp weapons capable ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa - Translated into English Prose - Adi Parva (First Parva, or First Book) • Kisari Mohan Ganguli (Translator)
... matter and of space are inseparable. We derive the notion of space from matter and form. But we have no adequate conception either of matter or space. Matter in its ultimate resolution is as unintelligible as what men call mind, spirit, or by whatever other name they may express the power which makes itself known by acts. Anaxagoras laid down the distinction between intelligence [Greek: nous] and matter, and he said that intelligence impressed motion on matter, and so separated ...
— Thoughts of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus • Marcus Aurelius Antoninus
... not here examine how much truth there may be in my friend's contention. But one fact must certainly strike the readers of M. Bourdon's book. The present position is as ominous as it is bewildering and unintelligible. ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... wild speech and rude song were unintelligible to his stupid, drink-bemused audience; but the keen brain of the schemer lurking near the door picked up their sense at once. Dr Pendle was the priest who was to drop the money on Southberry Heath, and Jentham the knave who was to pick it up. As certainly as though the man had given chapter ...
— The Bishop's Secret • Fergus Hume
... at her lover, and murmured some unintelligible words, but they did not save her. Montgomery crossed himself over the stool, and, after running his fingers ...
— A Mummer's Wife • George Moore
... desire was to quit the field she had so rashly ventured upon. Her answer to Mr. Stoutenburgh, if made, was too unintelligible to be understood or remembered; and meanwhile she was as the Squire had hinted, looking very well, and a picture of dainty confusion. It might not help the confusion, though it did put her face more out of sight, to be rescued from the Squire's ...
— Say and Seal, Volume II • Susan Warner
... so, a resonant meaning, or a meaning resonance. If you read the line, 'The sun is warm, the sky is clear,' you do not experience separately the image of a warm sun and clear sky, on the one side, and certain unintelligible rhythmical sounds on the other; nor yet do you experience them together, side by side; but you experience the one in the other. And in like manner when you are really reading Hamlet, the action and ...
— Poetry for Poetry's Sake - An Inaugural Lecture Delivered on June 5, 1901 • A. C. Bradley
... which we may be again identified. It may be by a pug nose, a hare lip, red hair, no hair or squint eyes. They never ask one's name, for they can neither pronounce nor write it when it is given. The ticket is an unintelligible tracery of lines, curves, dots and dashes, made by a brush dipped in India ink on a shred of flimsy Chinese paper. It may teem with abuse and ridicule, but you must pocket all that, and produce ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, No. 23, February, 1873, Vol. XI. • Various
... is supposed to have been made for this great occasion. Songs, we know, were chanted at religious festivals of Rome from an early period, indeed from so early a period that some of the sacred verses were popularly ascribed to Numa, and were utterly unintelligible in the age of Augustus. In the Second Punic War a great feast was held in honor of Juno, and a song was sung in her praise. This song was extant when Livy wrote; and, though exceedingly rugged and uncouth, seemed to him not wholly destitute of merit. A song, as we learn from Horace, was part ...
— Lays of Ancient Rome • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... cottage—my own four walls. They simply admit that I am Herr im Hause, and act on this conviction. There is no grumbling about my habitudes and whims. If I choose to dine on fire and brimstone, they will cook it for me to their best skill, thinking only that I am an unintelligible mortal, facheux to deal with, but not to be dealt with in any other way. My own ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... unintelligible how a man should prefer being the slave of blind helpless Law to being the child of living Wisdom, should believe in the absolute Nothing rather than in the perfect Will, were it not that he does not, can not see the Wisdom or the Will, except he ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald
... with Lambernier, but the consideration due Mademoiselle Gobillot's honor imposed numberless circumlocutions and concealments which ended by making his story rather unintelligible to his auditors, and in the midst of it his head became so muddled that he was ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... thoughts in the dead language that befitted one cut off from life, to whom Dutch was never aught but the unintelligible jargon of an unspiritual race, he was leaving his house on a bleak evening when one clapped him on the shoulder, and turning in amaze, he was still more mazed to find, for the first time in fifteen years, ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... was his complacency to woman that caused his first debasement; let him not, therefore, glory in his shame; let him not worship the fountain of his corruption." Learning and accomplishments were alike discouraged; and women confined to a knowledge of cooking, family medicines, and the unintelligible theological discussions of ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... important—the condition in which the ingredients are present. Since these facts can alone be determined by a chemical analysis, it is obvious that manures should always be purchased with a chemical analysis. It is unfortunate, however, that very often a chemical analysis, even when procured, is unintelligible. It may be of advantage, therefore, to say a word or two on the correct interpretation of the significance of the data furnished in the ordinary ...
— Manures and the principles of manuring • Charles Morton Aikman
... Episode henceforth. What to do with such a War; how extricate the Episode, and leave the War lying? The War was at first a good deal mad; and is now, to men's imagination, fallen wholly so; who indeed have managed mostly to forget it; only the Episode (reduced thereby to an UNintelligible state) retaining ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... we have characteristic unintelligible dispatches from Mississippi. They say, up to third instant, yesterday, everything is encouraging; but the Memphis papers say Grant's losses have not been so large as was supposed. Then it is reported that Grant has retired to ...
— A Rebel War Clerk's Diary at the Confederate States Capital • John Beauchamp Jones
... commission of treason. Despard made a speech on the scaffold, declaring himself innocent, and that he was put to death simply for being a friend to truth, liberty, and justice. How he could have made this declaration after the evidence that had been given, is wholly unintelligible except on the ground of insanity, though of that there was no symptom, except in the design itself. What prompted the design except narrow circumstances, bad habits, and the temptations of a revengeful ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 366, April, 1846 • Various
... string, he carried a little monkey, perched upon his shoulder. George was eager to join the group and see the antics of Jacko, who sat grinning and holding a little cap for money, into which a boy flung a halfpenny, and then asked the Italian where he came from. But the answer was unintelligible to him, for it was given in a strange tongue, and George was soon tired of listening to the music ...
— Georgie's Present • Miss Brightwell
... unintelligible story of Prince Odenathus, who defeated the Goths, and who was killed by ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... that, although it was the view almost universally entertained of the subject by the Norwegians, it nevertheless was not his own. As to the former notion, he confessed his inability to comprehend it; and here I agreed with him—for, however conclusive on paper, it becomes altogether unintelligible, and even absurd, amid the thunder of ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 8 • Charles H. Sylvester
... architecture, or more sharply distinguished their varying moods from period to period in their palaces and temples. He believed that he could not only supply that brief historical sketch of Florence which Mrs. Bowen had lamented the want of, but he could make her history speak an unintelligible, an unmistakeable tongue in every monument of the past, from the Etruscan wall at Fiesole to the cheap, plain, and tasteless shaft raised to commemorate Italian Unity in the next piazza. With sketches from his own pencil, illustrative ...
— Indian Summer • William D. Howells
... as she heard this jargon. It was quite unintelligible to her, but she felt sure it conveyed extreme approval. She turned to look at Truesdale just as he ...
— With the Procession • Henry B. Fuller
... "general science" of grammar, or "the philosophy of language," the author seems to exempt, and in some sort to commend; and at the same time his proposition of exclusion is applied not merely to the school-grammars, but a fortiori to this science, under the notion that it is unintelligible to school-boys. But why should any principle of grammar be the less intelligible on account of the extent of its application? Will a boy pretend that he cannot understand a rule of English grammar, because he is told that it holds good in ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... transposing various passages in his latest score. Now and then he would hesitate, finger the carefully thought out bar on his knee, and again his stub of a pencil would fly on through a maze of hieroglyphics that were to the cure and myself wholly unintelligible. ...
— A Village of Vagabonds • F. Berkeley Smith
... liked to have wandered about Oxford with you, if I had been well enough; and how still more I should have liked to have heard you triumphing over the Bishop. I am astonished at your success and audacity. It is something unintelligible to me how any one can argue in public like orators do. I had no idea you had this power. I have read lately so many hostile views, that I was beginning to think that perhaps I was wholly in the wrong, and that — was right ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin
... was for his chum. Charley was tossing restlessly on his blanket, his face and hands flushed and hot with fever. All of Walter's attempts to rouse him met only with unintelligible words and phrases. The exertion of the previous day in his weak state, the opening of his wound afresh, and the unhealthy river water he had drank, had all combined to bring him to ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... alien tongues of Continental streets that reminded them of their own polyglot cities. In England all men spoke one tongue, speciously like American to the ear, but on cross-examination unintelligible. ...
— Actions and Reactions • Rudyard Kipling
... took back her hand at once and stammered some unintelligible words. Orso thought he ...
— Columba • Prosper Merimee
... little injuries of that sort there should be no end of bearing on the part of a husband. Sometimes he would endeavour to explain to her the motives which actuated him; but he had come to fear that they were and must ever be unintelligible to her. But he credited her with less than her real intelligence. She did understand the nature of his work and his reasons for doing it; and, after her own fashion, did what she conceived to be her own work in endeavouring to create within his bosom a desire for higher things. "Surely," she said ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... in Jesus Christ's own words. The silence is not as absolute as is alleged, as the quotations which I have made, and which might have been multiplied, do distinctly enough show. Even if it were more absolute than it is, the silence is by no means unintelligible. Christ had to offer the Sacrifice before the Sacrifice could be preached. He Himself warned His disciples against accepting His own words prior to the Cross, as the conclusive and ultimate revelation. 'I have many things to say unto you, but you cannot carry them now.' There was need that ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... that aesthetic, social, and intellectual mean, in which single women are thought soonest to wither and decline. With a little more power, and in our later era, they would be writing stories full of ambitious, unintelligible, self-devoted and sudden collapsing young girls and amazing doctors; but as they are, and in their time, they must do what they can. A sentimentalist may discern on these vases not only the gay designs with which they ornamented them, but their own dim faces ...
— Suburban Sketches • W.D. Howells
... that supposed lie of Raleigh's, had not taken the trouble to find out what the words mean. In their virtuous haste to prove him a liar, they have overlooked the fact that the words, as they stand, are unintelligible, and the argument self-contradictory. He wants to prove, we suppose, that he does not go to sea for fear of being forced to marry Miss Throgmorton. It is, at least, an unexpected method of so doing in a shrewd man like Raleigh, to say that he wishes to marry no one at all. 'Don't ...
— Sir Walter Raleigh and his Time from - "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley
... way up-stairs. The Sergeant went softly all over the Indian cabinet and all round the "boudoir;" asking questions (occasionally only of Mr. Superintendent, and continually of me), the drift of which I believe to have been equally unintelligible to both of us. In due time, his course brought him to the door, and put him face to face with the decorative painting that you know of. He laid one lean inquiring finger on the small smear, just under the lock, which Superintendent Seegrave had already noticed, when ...
— The Moonstone • Wilkie Collins
... of that growing proportion of readers who belong entirely to the new order, who are growing up with only the vaguest early memories of the old world, I find the greatest difficulty in writing down the unintelligible confusions that were matter of fact ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... violence and revenge which we are hearing from the little villages the young footman's knees doubled right up and nearly let him down while he was serving the table and he is getting greener and greener from day to day. He becomes absolutely petrified when the officers address him and whispers out an unintelligible something as he vanishes ...
— Lige on the Line of March - An American Girl's Experiences When the Germans Came Through Belgium • Glenna Lindsley Bigelow
... spirits there is one speech, which flows from thought, and consists of ideas which are heard as vocal expressions in the spiritual world. I was told that those spirits have a certain method of forming ideas, expressed by the lips and face, unintelligible to others, and that they at the same instant skilfully withdraw their thoughts, guarding particularly lest anything of the affection should manifest itself, because if anything of the affection were perceived, the thought would appear, ...
— Earths In Our Solar System Which Are Called Planets, and Earths In The Starry Heaven Their Inhabitants, And The Spirits And Angels There • Emanuel Swedenborg
... deplores his inability to get on terms with his author. The English public indeed is curiously ready to accept whatever is said to be funny and comes from America as being in truth humorous even if largely unintelligible; but few Americans would give credit for the existence of humour in those parts of an English book outside their ken. Yet I think, if it were possible to get the opinion of an impartial jury on the subject, their verdict would be that the number of humorous writers of approximately ...
— The Twentieth Century American - Being a Comparative Study of the Peoples of the Two Great - Anglo-Saxon Nations • H. Perry Robinson
... said my father. An unintelligible sound was heard; but Catalina understood and her eyes moistened with happiness. "Oh, father," she said, "I know; she's crying on my account, she doesn't want to leave me alone here." "Is that it, Paula?" questioned my father. "Yes, please leave me here, uncle, I shall be so happy ...
— Paula the Waldensian • Eva Lecomte
... of human improvement, it is probable, that that calamity will be in a manner unintelligible, which in the present instance contributed to tarnish and wither the excellence of one of the most elevated and amiable of human minds. If Mr. Falkland had reflected with perfect accuracy upon the case, he would probably have been able ...
— Caleb Williams - Things As They Are • William Godwin
... aspect. His eyes were downcast; he was motionless; his respiration became hoarse, like that of a man in the agonies of death. Carwin seemed unable to say more. He might have easily escaped; but the thought which occupied him related to what was horrid and unintelligible in this scene, and not to ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... that Mr. Grandcourt had returned to Diplow; knowing no more than she did that Leubronn had been the goal of her admirer's journeying, and feeling that it would be unkind uselessly to revive the memory of a brilliant prospect under the present reverses. In his secret soul he thought of his niece's unintelligible caprice with regret, but he vindicated her to himself by considering that Grandcourt had been the first to behave oddly, in suddenly walking away when there had the best opportunity for crowning his marked ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... but few words, for his ideas are few. He learns even these few with difficulty, and employs the same to express many different things; he generally articulates them indistinctly, often indeed so imperfectly as to be almost unintelligible. ...
— The Mother's Manual of Children's Diseases • Charles West, M.D.
... rendered obscure by our not being acquainted with the local circumstances to which they applied at the time they were used, have been erected into prophecies, and made to bend to explanations at the will and whimsical conceits of sectaries, expounders, and commentators. Every thing unintelligible was prophetical, and every thing insignificant was typical. A blunder would have served for a prophecy; and a ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... devours and destroys, I shut myself up in solitude and seem to delight only in myself and to be sufficient for myself. Pride and delicacy of soul, timidity of heart, have made me thus do violence to all my instincts and invert the natural order of my life. It is not astonishing that I should be unintelligible to others. In fact I have always avoided what attracted me, and turned my back upon the point where secretly I desired ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... 172 (308, 8) [ignorance itself is a plummet o'er me] Though this be perhaps not unintelligible, yet it is an odd way of confessing his dejection. I should ...
— Johnson's Notes to Shakespeare Vol. I Comedies • Samuel Johnson
... Gujarati, Malayalam, Kannada, Oriya, Punjabi, Assamese, Kashmiri, Sindhi, and Sanskrit; 24 languages spoken by a million or more persons each; numerous other languages and dialects, for the most part mutually unintelligible; Hindi is the national language and primary tongue of 30% of the people; English enjoys associate status but is the most important language for national, political, and commercial communication; Hindustani, a popular variant of Hindi/Urdu, is spoken ...
— The 1991 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... words upon the thought, I felt that I loved them both. The tenth day (since our removal to Mr. Hanson's) arrived, and then came our departure. I cried every minute, and only because I was glad. Mr. and Mrs. Hanson and Louis thought it due to over-exertion, and when I tried to explain I made an unintelligible murmur, and only succeeded in bringing out one thought—my gratitude to them and the hope that I might one day repay it. Oh, how kind they were! Everything to make the transit easy for Hal was cared ...
— The Harvest of Years • Martha Lewis Beckwith Ewell
... sought Carroll's face. Both men knew that something vitally unexpected was about to be disclosed. They waited for the girl to speak—and when she did her voice was so low as to be almost unintelligible. ...
— Midnight • Octavus Roy Cohen
... never, at that period, grew weary of watching my fellows, for it was my constant idea that some day one of them would be able to raise me to a higher level, and to bring me to an understanding of this unintelligible and complicated existence of ours. Hence I kept asking myself ...
— Through Russia • Maxim Gorky
... he redescended the steps at the back of the Green Box, to enter the inn, Master Nicless let fall this profound reflection, so deep as to be unintelligible,— ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... of human problems, but in the individuals who face the problems. In this point Browning is sharply distinguished from his poetic contemporaries as a class. They felt deeply "all the weary weight of this unintelligible world," so deeply that while they gave much thought to ideals of social amelioration, few of them presented individuals with any dramatic distinctness. Browning stands practically by himself in ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... kisses and caresses. Presently he said to her, "By Allah, O Princess, my uncle Salih set forth to me not a fortieth part of thy charms; no, nor a quarter-carat[FN331] of the four and twenty." Then Jauharah pressed him to her bosom and pronounced some unintelligible words; then spat on his face, saying, "Quit this form of man and take shape of bird, the handsomest of birds, white of robe, with red bill and legs." Hardly had she spoken, when King Badr Basim ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 7 • Richard F. Burton
... domain of its inquiries, much knowledge has been acquired regarding the nature and condition of those bodies, forming, it might be said, a science apart, and disembarrassed from immediate dependence upon intricate, and, except to the initiated, unintelligible formulae. This kind of knowledge forms the main subject of the book now offered to ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... of the things stood guard with the mysterious tubes, another unbound them. A whole shower of high pitched, piping syllables was hurled at them, speech which sounded threatening and contemptuous but was otherwise, of course, entirely unintelligible, and then the creatures withdrew. The heavy metal door was slammed shut, and they ...
— The Red Hell of Jupiter • Paul Ernst
... the city were strange. The shops on the narrow streets were plain and unattractive, and the signs unintelligible. The windows of the lower floors of the dwellings were grated with iron bars like a prison. Beneath a bridge over a walled ravine that kept a rushing stream within bounds in the rainy season, women washed clothes and spread them ...
— A Trip to the Orient - The Story of a Mediterranean Cruise • Robert Urie Jacob
... all unintelligible to me," answered Mabel. "What is right in King George, it would seem, ought to be right ...
— The Pathfinder - The Inland Sea • James Fenimore Cooper
... guttural language these people spoke was unintelligible to the boy, but he could guess they were intensely curious about him from the way they pointed and stared. It seemed to him that some of them could never have seen a white child before, they were so excited, especially the children, ...
— Queensland Cousins • Eleanor Luisa Haverfield
... Anaximander, and, like him, one of the great founders of mathematics. He held that the only permanent reality in the cosmos was the principle of order and harmony, which prevented the universe from becoming a blank, unintelligible chaos; and he expressed this idea in his mystic doctrine: "Numbers are the cause of the material existence of things." The movement which he spread by means of a vast, secret confraternity ended, however, in a barren symbolism, and it is impossible ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... mythological, in the true sense of the word, is what is utterly unintelligible, absurd, strange, or miraculous.' But he explained these blots on the mythology of Greece, for example, as the result practically of old words and popular sayings surviving in languages after the original, harmless, symbolical meanings of the words and sayings were lost. What had been ...
— Modern Mythology • Andrew Lang
... system of the mental fabric is exceedingly obscure, and without more attention than will be willingly bestowed, is unintelligible. The Ideas of Beauty will be more easily understood, and are often charming. I was delighted with the ...
— An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Taste, and of the Origin of - our Ideas of Beauty, etc. • Frances Reynolds
... the church were bitter-sweet indeed. It belonged to the Methodist denomination, and Holcroft had been taken, or had gone thither, from the time of his earliest recollection. He saw himself sitting between his father and mother, a round-faced urchin to whom the sermon was unintelligible, but to whom little Bessie Jones in the next pew was a fact, not only intelligible, but very interesting. She would turn around and stare at him until he smiled, then she would giggle until her mother brought ...
— He Fell in Love with His Wife • Edward P. Roe
... fifty men, and had but ten to do it, himself and Mr. Skead making twelve, Smart and Benjie fourteen. And yet every voice pronounced, "we must go and explore." The good captain was sorely puzzled, and in his perplexity talked Scotch to an unintelligible degree. Every day was of consequence until he had discovered what injury the ship had received. We, on our parts, declared it was impossible to sleep or rest in peace while we were subjected to any unknown enemy rushing ...
— Yr Ynys Unyg - The Lonely Island • Julia de Winton
... followed by some words unintelligible to Peleg, though he concluded that they were spoken ...
— Scouting with Daniel Boone • Everett T. Tomlinson
... young Mortimer wince, and his nerve palpably weakened. He muttered some unintelligible reply—whether a threat or ...
— The Boy Broker - Among the Kings of Wall Street • Frank A. Munsey
... of those discussions in which words were used that were unintelligible to the mother. The dinner was already at an end, but they still continued a vehement debate, flinging at each other veritable rattling hailstones of big words. ...
— Mother • Maxim Gorky
... my furniture until she left the centre of the room clear; she squatted down, and hanging her head began muttering in an unintelligible dialect. Presently her voice ceased and we heard from beside her a most peculiar whistling sort of voice, to which she responded, evidently interrogating. Again the whistling voice from further away. Bootha then told me she had ...
— The Euahlayi Tribe - A Study of Aboriginal Life in Australia • K. Langloh Parker
... clothed with fresh beauty in their sight. They tasted as it were for themselves and us, of all that there ever was pure in human bliss. "In them the burthen of the mystery, the heavy and the weary weight of all this unintelligible world, is lightened." They stood awhile perfect, but they afterwards fell, and were driven out of Paradise, tasting the first fruits of bitterness as they had done of bliss. But their pangs were such as a pure spirit ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt
... this time, Locke Morgeson, Jr., took Mary Warren from her father's house as his wife. Grandfather Warren prayed a long, unintelligible prayer over them, helped them into the large, yellow-bottomed chaise which belonged to Grandfather Locke, and the young couple drove to their new home, the old mansion. Grandfather Locke went away in the same yellow-bottomed chaise a week after, and returned in ...
— The Morgesons • Elizabeth Stoddard
... to Hermas. They disturbed him a little, but they took no hold upon him. It seemed to him as if the messengers spoke in a strange language. As he read the letters there were words blotted out of the writing which made the full sense unintelligible. ...
— The Lost Word - A Christmas Legend of Long Ago • Henry Van Dyke
... shook out the canvas, and they scudded off up the river like mad. The great difficulty was the steering; but it was rip-roaring fun, the Boy said, and very soon there were natives running down to the river, to stare open-mouthed at the astounding apparition, to point and shout something unintelligible that sounded like "Muchtaravik!" ...
— The Magnetic North • Elizabeth Robins (C. E. Raimond)
... differences still exist. Take, for instance, their language, from which ours has so far departed and become so much more pure English, and has been enriched by so many clean-cut and descriptive adjectives that certain sentences in English and in American will be totally unintelligible to each other. On one occasion, going with a party of eight English people to the races, Bee looked out of the car window ...
— Abroad with the Jimmies • Lilian Bell
... pronunciation and the quantity, and disusing many words and terms of great significance. In consequence of these innovations, the works of our best poets, such as Chaucer, Spenser, and even Shakespeare, were become, in many parts, unintelligible to the natives of South Britain, whereas the Scots, who retain the antient language, understand them without the help of a glossary. 'For instance (said he), how have your commentators been puzzled by the following expression in the Tempest — He's gentle and not fearful: ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... resistance but sank down limply where Jarrold left her and watched him as he slouched over to the fire. She sought to hear their words, to read the looks on their faces. But she caught only a monotonous mutter, unintelligible but evil, and saw only the bottle passing from one to the other. Brodie finished it and hurled it from him so that it broke noisily. A few times she heard them laugh; she could distinguish Brodie's throaty, bull tone and Benny's nervous cackle. Jarrold did not appear made ...
— The Everlasting Whisper • Jackson Gregory
... act of theirs, with their rulers, or elders, or chief sorceresses—all three titles seem to apply. They ask questions, I answer as best I can, but sometimes we appear to have no common meeting ground. Then I ask some questions, they evade gracefully, or reply in a kind of unintelligible double-talk, and that's as far as our communication has progressed ...
— Storm Over Warlock • Andre Norton
... Bishop of Meaux that Margaret of Angouleme was first drawn into sympathy with the reformatory movement. Unsatisfied with herself and with the influences surrounding her, she sought in Briconnet a spiritual adviser and guide. The prelate, in the abstruse and almost unintelligible language of exaggerated mysticism, endeavored to fulfil the trust. His prolix correspondence still exists in manuscript in the National Library of Paris, together with the replies of his royal penitent. Its incomprehensibility may perhaps forever preclude the publication ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... half an hour Jolnes had collected a few seemingly unintelligible articles—a cheap black hat pin, a piece torn off a theatre programme, and the end of a small torn card on which was the word "left" and ...
— Sixes and Sevens • O. Henry
... in the boldest and most enduring sense, to have imagination. But it is immeasurably easier to pretend to have imagination than to pretend to have wit. A man may indulge in a sham rhapsody, because it may be the triumph of a rhapsody to be unintelligible. But a man cannot indulge in a sham joke, because it is the ruin of a joke to be unintelligible. A man may pretend to be a poet: he can no more pretend to be a wit than he can pretend to bring rabbits out of a hat without ...
— Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton
... he added something unintelligible about them all going to a terminus not on that road, while Captain Champion, coming to his rescue, proclaimed that the Suez section would be brought back, "expectin' to arrive hyeh an hou' by sun. An' now, ladies and gentlemen, I propose ...
— John March, Southerner • George W. Cable
... shook his head angrily, but lifted the picture from the shelf and examined more closely the doctor's delicately-cut nose, and the noble arch of the brow. While so doing, he muttered unintelligible words, and when at last, with little show of care, he restored the modest work of art to its old place, Ulrich awoke, and, with a ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... contrary, after having received the presents, we cannot avoid expressing our approbation of his conduct in bringing them to the credit of the Company,—yet we must confess the statement of those transactions appears to us in many points so unintelligible, that we feel ourselves under the necessity of calling on the Governor-General for an explanation, agreeable to his promise voluntarily made to us. We therefore desire to be informed of the different periods when each sum was ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. X. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... star chamber, the king's power of binding the people by his proclamations was indirectly abolished; and that important branch of prerogative, the strong symbol of arbitrary power, and unintelligible in a limited constitution, being at last removed, left the system of government more consistent and uniform. The star chamber alone was accustomed to punish infractions of the king's edicts: but as no courts of judicature now remained except those in Westminster Hall, which take cognizance ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part E. - From Charles I. to Cromwell • David Hume
... with R. H. C. as to the importance of correct punctuation; and it may easily be supposed how it must puzzle readers of works whose language is in great part obsolete, to meet with mistakes of this kind, when we find modern writers frequently rendered almost unintelligible by similar errors. To take those whose works have, perhaps, been oftener reprinted than any others of this century, Byron and Scott, the foregoing passage in Childe Harold is a signal instance; and as another, the Sonnet translated ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 238, May 20, 1854 • Various
... cast in the same heroic mold. They formed a massive pair of children indeed, and, as in her case, a sullen distrust of strangers was inherent in him. He stared coldly, resentfully, at Gray, mumbled an unintelligible greeting, then rudely turned his back upon the visitor and ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach
... the king himself. Hence, notwithstanding her struggle to keep her heart to its allegiance, such a rapid change took place in her feelings, that ere long she began to confess to herself that if the puritans could have known what the king was, their conduct would not have been so unintelligible—not that she thought they had an atom of right on their side, or in the least feared she might ever be brought to think in the matter as they did; she confessed only that she could then ...
— St. George and St. Michael • George MacDonald
... right down," cried the Steel King. "Here, Jack,"—this to the aged garcon, "smoke up! and ask the ladies what they'll have"—all of which was unintelligible to the two little Parisiennes and the garcon, but quite clear in meaning ...
— The Real Latin Quarter • F. Berkeley Smith
... said, stooping lower to catch the unintelligible answer. "You ought to go home to bed; little boys have no business out of doors at night; you'll be quite frozen! Give me your hand and jump up like a man! Where do ...
— The Gadfly • E. L. Voynich
... emphasis, 'We are the working classes! we are the lower orders!' It was exactly what Hewett would not bring himself to understand. What! His Clara must be robbed of chances just because her birth was not that of a young lady? Nay, by all the unintelligible Powers, she should enjoy every help that he could possibly afford her. Bless her bright face and her clever tongue! Yes, it was now a settled thing that she should be trained for a schoolteacher. An atmosphere of refinement must ...
— The Nether World • George Gissing
... tongues I don't know something about—I shouted loudly to attract their attention. On this, two men, dressed in skins, came out of the hut, and answered me in so extraordinary a dialect, that even I did not comprehend what they said. I then hailed them in Russian, but their answers were perfectly unintelligible. I next tried French, but they shook their heads, as was, I thought, but natural for Esquimaux who were not likely to have been sent to Paris for their education. I then spoke a little Spanish to them, but I was equally at a loss to understand their answers. Portuguese was as great ...
— Marmaduke Merry - A Tale of Naval Adventures in Bygone Days • William H. G. Kingston
... and in some cases tragic. A crew that had aged only six weeks would return to find that Earth had grown nine years older. Customs had changed; new slang words made language unintelligible. ...
— Starman's Quest • Robert Silverberg
... which pleases us in foreign women is their accent. As soon as a woman speaks our language badly we think she is charming, if she uses the wrong word she is exquisite and if she jabbers in an entirely unintelligible jargon, she ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... steep rise. The driver with some trouble started the engine, but soon after they had crossed the crest of the hill it stopped again, and he looked grave as he supplied Bland with some details that Sylvia found unintelligible. ...
— Ranching for Sylvia • Harold Bindloss
... future communication, it far more nearly meets the difficulty, than abstruse speculations respecting the Deity, which can scarcely be apprehended even by philosophers, and which are to the mass wholly unintelligible. ...
— Thoughts on a Revelation • Samuel John Jerram
... sorts indeed. He accepted his mother as he accepted everything else, with a simple-heartedness which never looked below the surface nor concerned itself with motives; and if any one had suggested to him that she was inexplicable he would have considered such a judgment quite unintelligible. He enjoyed a visit to her more than almost anything else in the world. She had always been devoted to him ever since he was a boy, and for the life of him he could not see that she ...
— Peter and Jane - or The Missing Heir • S. (Sarah) Macnaughtan
... old haunting voices whispered to him out of the river shadows—deeper, different, strangely more unintelligible than ever before, ...
— The Day of the Beast • Zane Grey
... this book is the worst of all. It is simply this: that if all goes well this book will be unintelligible gibberish. For it is mostly concerned with attacking attitudes which are in their nature accidental and incapable of enduring. Brief as is the career of such a book as this, it may last just twenty minutes longer than most of the philosophies that it ...
— All Things Considered • G. K. Chesterton
... And now, unintelligible from sheer breathlessness, Roy's voice is heard. The grave, silent Rajput leaps out to ...
— The Adventures of Akbar • Flora Annie Steel
... instrumentation would have seemed less surprising to Sally had she known the lengths her mother had gone in the proffer of a substantial guarantee for Fenwick's personal honesty. This seeming rashness did not transpire at the time; had it done so, it might have appeared unintelligible—to Sally, at any rate. She would not have been surprised at herself for backing the interests of a man nearly electrocuted over her half-crown, but why should her mother endorse ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... conversation which prevented her enjoying it, was not now even in her power: for these gentlemen, though as negligent as the young ladies had been whom they disturbed, were much more cautious whom they instructed: their language was ambiguous, and their terms, to Cecilia, were unintelligible: their subjects, indeed, required some discretion, being nothing less than a ludicrous calculation of the age and duration of jointured widows, and of the chances and expectations of ...
— Cecilia Volume 1 • Frances Burney
... records upon earth can furnish an example of more unintelligible jargon; yet these attributes are believed to be indisputably true by the Malays and others residing at a distance from his immediate dominions, who possess a greater degree of faith than wit; and with this addition, that he dwells in a palace without covering, free ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... the main use of the outline is to affirm the whole more clearly; to do away with little accidental roughnesses and excrescences, and especially to mark where boughs cross, or come in front of each other, as at such points their arrangement in this kind of sketch is unintelligible without the outline. It may perfectly well happen that in Nature it should be less distinct than your outline will make it; but it is better in this kind of sketch to mark the facts clearly. The temptation is always to be slovenly and careless, ...
— The Elements of Drawing - In Three Letters to Beginners • John Ruskin
... from the social impulse, in which, as much as Mr. Darwin, he recognises the base and foundation."—"Pall Mall Gazette," April 12th, 1871.) How the mistake which I have made in speaking of greatest happiness as the foundation of morals arose, is utterly unintelligible to me: any time during the last several years I should have laughed such an idea to scorn. Mr. Lecky never made a greater blunder, and your kindness has made you let me off too easily. (242/2. In the ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... could not be understood, as we are assured by [1062]Plutarch? He says, that in the reign of Agesilaus of Sparta, a written tablet was found in the tomb of Alcmena, to whom it was inscribed: that the characters were obsolete, and unintelligible; on which account they sent it to Conuphis of Memphis in Egypt, to be decyphered. If these characters were Phenician, why were they sent to a priest of a different country for interpretation? and why is their date and antiquity ...
— A New System; or, an Analysis of Antient Mythology. Volume II. (of VI.) • Jacob Bryant
... perfectly regular Hexagons, to find myself in the midst of a crowd of rotating Polygons of the higher classes, is occasionally very perplexing. And of course to a common Tradesman, or Serf, such a sight is almost as unintelligible as it would be to you, my Reader, were you suddenly transported to ...
— Flatland • Edwin A. Abbott
... and even to maintain that hearty sympathy with them and that kindly interest in their temporal welfare which its best men in its earlier days had shown. It continued to have its services in a language which had for ages been unintelligible to the bulk of the laity, and was but partially intelligible to not a few of its ordinary priests. It had no catechisms or hymn books bringing down to the capacities of the unlettered the truths of religion, and freely circulated among them.[4] It did not, when the invention of printing put ...
— The Scottish Reformation - Its Epochs, Episodes, Leaders, and Distinctive Characteristics • Alexander F. Mitchell
... attempt to deduce a settled scheme of philosophy from these discourses among the mountains. I would urge only that as a guide to conduct Wordsworth's precepts are not in themselves either unintelligible or visionary. For whereas some moralists would have us amend nature, and others bid us follow her, there is apt to be something impracticable in the first maxim, and something vague in the second. Asceticism, quietism, enthusiasm, ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers
... Bois offered any counsel (which his guest pretended to imagine he did), the impediment in his speech increased to such an extent that his suggestions were unintelligible. His perturbation might have passed for surprise at the startling intelligence so abruptly communicated; but it could hardly be translated into sorrow or sympathy, and was a ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... No part of the name of our Church, peculiar to our denomination, can be translated and applied to the church in Chinese without inconvenience or great detriment. The words, Protestant and Reformed, would be to the Chinese unintelligible, consequently inconvenient. The only translation we can give to the name Dutch Church, would be Church of Holland. This, besides conveying in part an incorrect idea, would be very detrimental to the interests of the Church among the Chinese. The Chinese know but little ...
— Forty Years in South China - The Life of Rev. John Van Nest Talmage, D.D. • Rev. John Gerardus Fagg
... is this same publication. He hasn't the remotest idea of what it is. Not a word uttered by the adjutant is understood by him. He stands and wonders what it is. A perfect jargon of words, unintelligible and meaningless to him! I remember distinctly how I used to wonder, and how I was laughed at when I asked for information concerning it. We "plebes" used to speak of it often, and wonder if it was not French. When we were better acquainted with the rules and customs of the ...
— Henry Ossian Flipper, The Colored Cadet at West Point • Henry Ossian Flipper
... It must be remembered that the dominant race in Esthonia is German, and that the gentry, even if not fairies, would be expected to speak a language unintelligible to the people. It is significant that the very word for lady in Esthonian is proua, a corruption of Frau. Everything particularly fine is ...
— The Hero of Esthonia and Other Studies in the Romantic Literature of That Country • William Forsell Kirby
... merely, but also of darkness or ignorance respecting all stable facts. That darkening of the foreground to bring out the white cloud, is, in one aspect of it, a type of the subjection of all plain and positive fact, to what is uncertain and unintelligible. And, as we examine farther into the matter, we shall be struck by another great difference between the old and modern landscape, namely, that in the old no one ever thought of drawing anything but as well as he could. That might not be well, as we have seen in the case of rocks; ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... amused myself in the best way I could. I helped Mademoiselle Madeleine in her poultry-yard and dairy, looked in on the old lady employed in her culinary affairs, walked over the farm with the old man, and chatted in my somewhat unintelligible French, with every one I met. Happening to go into my own room in the evening, I found the window open, and looking out, I saw that the height from the sill to the ground was not more than ...
— Salt Water - The Sea Life and Adventures of Neil D'Arcy the Midshipman • W. H. G. Kingston
... consolidated stratum, arising from the contraction of the mass, distended by heat, and contracted in cooling. It is not an argument of greater or lesser probability; it is a physical demonstration; but, so far as I see, it would appear to be for most mineralists an unintelligible proposition. Time, however, will open the eyes of men; science will some day find admittance into the cabinet of the curious. I will therefore now give another proof,—not of the consolidation of mineral bodies by means of fusion, for there ...
— Theory of the Earth, Volume 1 (of 4) • James Hutton
... Abbe says is that he is sure the money would have been well spent, because the translation was carefully done, and he knew the subject better than any of the other translators. Everything that was abstract in the theory of Smith was, he says, quite unintelligible in Blavet's translation, and even in Roucher's subsequent one, and could be read to more advantage in his own; but after a good translation was published by Garnier in 1802, the Abbe gave up all thought of ...
— Life of Adam Smith • John Rae
... the Mohammedan conquest of Northern Africa from Egypt westwards, is unintelligible until it is seen how great a part sea-power played in effecting it. Purely land expeditions, or expeditions but slightly supported from the sea, had ended in failure. The emperor at Constantinople still had at ...
— Sea-Power and Other Studies • Admiral Sir Cyprian Bridge
... not disturb me; his voice was low, though tense, and his words unintelligible. Gradually his murmurings became a familiar sound, as the call of the lark ...
— Chit-Chat; Nirvana; The Searchlight • Mathew Joseph Holt
... offered to reward him if he would act as my guide. The man kept his gleaming eye fixed upon me, but answered not a word. Beginning to look at the matter in rather a serious light, I mounted my horse, when he grunted at me in an unintelligible way, which showed me plainly that he was without the power of speech. He turned in the direction I had asked him to take, and we started off at a breakneck speed, which his fiery horse kept up. I cannot say he followed his ...
— Through Five Republics on Horseback • G. Whitfield Ray
... the "unintelligible authorised version," I must premise that no version has yet had so large an amount of learning bestowed on it as the English one; indeed it has fairly beaten out of the field all the versions of all other sections of Christians. The difficulty of the English version ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 218, December 31, 1853 • Various
... a minute before I was able to understand that such an unintelligible and astounding thing had happened, as that our community had actually chosen me—me, of all people!—to execute the highest office in the house, next to my Lady Prioress herself. Mother Gaillarde and Mother Ada came up to me, to lead me ...
— In Convent Walls - The Story of the Despensers • Emily Sarah Holt
... on board the Francesca, demanded to know what they wanted. I saw Mendouca rise in the stern-sheets of his boat, and heard him make some reply, but I could not distinguish what it was, perhaps because he had intentionally made it unintelligible. Whatever the words may have been, they were clearly unsatisfactory; for the figure in the rigging waved its hand ...
— The Pirate Slaver - A Story of the West African Coast • Harry Collingwood
... Washington concoction, and does not at all bear the marks of Parisian origin. I find in it whole phrases which, for months past, I have repeatedly heard from the French minister here. Perhaps Mr. Mercier, in his turn, may have caught many of Mr. Seward's much-cherished generalities, unintelligible, very probably, even to himself, and quite certainly so to every one but himself. Perhaps, I say, Mr. Mercier may have caught up some of them, and making them up at hap-hazard into a macedoine, a hash, a hotch-potch, has served up the second-hand ...
— Diary from November 12, 1862, to October 18, 1863 • Adam Gurowski
... touching to see the untiring devotion of her father, and the pleasure he took in every new evidence of mental growth. He went over the alphabet with her, letter by letter, many times each day, encouraging her and holding her thought down to the unintelligible signs with a patient tenderness sad yet beautiful to see; and when she began to combine letters into words, and at last to put words together, his delight ...
— Cast Adrift • T. S. Arthur
... of des aram, we find "veult dire en francois Diex Terrien," or Terrestrial God. This may have been substituted, in the correction of the original rough dictation, from a perception that the first expression was unintelligible. The new phrase does not indeed convey the meaning of Mulahidah, but it expresses a main characteristic of the heretical doctrine. The correction was probably made by Polo himself; it is certainly ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... and invisible, unintelligible!! Surtur, according to Fin Magnusen, the invisible, unintelligible being whom the ancient Scandinavians regarded as "the great First Cause least ...
— The Elder Eddas of Saemund Sigfusson; and the Younger Eddas of Snorre Sturleson • Saemund Sigfusson and Snorre Sturleson |
