"Impassible" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... was evidently very opportune, for the visitor let himself fall heavily into an arm-chair. Great drops of perspiration were on his forehead, his lips were pallid: at intervals he looked at the journalist, whose impassible countenance did not seem to invite confidences. The poor trooper lost countenance more and more: ...
— A Nest of Spies • Pierre Souvestre
... poignant and silent like the terrible questioning of one's conscience. Outside the court the sun blazed—within was the wind of great punkahs that made you shiver, the shame that made you burn, the attentive eyes whose glance stabbed. The face of the presiding magistrate, clean shaved and impassible, looked at him deadly pale between the red faces of the two nautical assessors. The light of a broad window under the ceiling fell from above on the heads and shoulders of the three men, and they were fiercely distinct in the half-light of the big court-room where the audience seemed ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... had not gone over three or four miles before I came to a large stream of water which was past fording; yet I could see that it had been forded by the road track, but from high water it was then impassible. As the horse seemed willing to go in I put him through; but before he got in far, he was in water up to his sides and finally the water came over his back and he swam over. I got as wet as could be, but the horse carried me safely across at the ...
— Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, an American Slave, Written by Himself • Henry Bibb
... space, they grew confused, as from much trampling. But they did not return; they did not go elsewhere. There was a clear distance of a rod over the sand to the rocky ground where the trees grew. On the other side lay the deeps of the pool. Before them reared the impassible wall of the precipice. And there the ...
— Heart of the Blue Ridge • Waldron Baily
... latitude 71 degrees 10', longitude 106 degrees 54' W., the navigators were stopped, as before, by an immense frozen expanse, which filled the whole area of the southern horizon. The northern edge of this expanse was ragged and broken, so firmly wedged together as to be utterly impassible, and extending about a mile to the southward. Behind it the frozen surface was comparatively smooth for some distance, until terminated in the extreme background by gigantic ranges of ice mountains, the one towering ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... were roaring, the pipe was yelling, blown by the frantic demon with his hood full of latch keys, the impassible, bearded faces were watching the painted women who, in their red garments and their golden crowns, promenaded down the earthen floor, between the divans, fluttering their dyed fingers, smiling grotesquely like idols, bending forward their greasy foreheads to ...
— Desert Air - 1905 • Robert Hichens
... and down the room, casting a searching look from time to time at Manicamp, who remained motionless and impassible in the same place. At ...
— Louise de la Valliere • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... mountains. There was a daily mail in that direction, except when the roads and the weather hindered; and it seemed that these would now be hinderances. The threatened storm came, and with it high wind which piled the snow into deep, hard drifts, making the mountain road nearly impassible. Dorian found the mail-carrier who told him that it would be impossible to make a start until the storm had ceased. All day the snow fell, and all day Dorian fretted impatiently, and was tempted to once more go out to Mr. and Mrs. Whitman; but he did not. Christmas was only three days off. He ...
— Dorian • Nephi Anderson
... Christian God is there room for spontaneous feeling, springing from His own nature, the necessary concomitant of thought and will. Impassibility is a comprehensive attribute. Originally negative, it soon acquired a rich positive connotation. An impassible God is one who is outside space and time. The attribute connotes creative power, eternity, infinity, permanence. A passible God is corruptible, i.e. susceptible to the processes of becoming, change, ...
— Monophysitism Past and Present - A Study in Christology • A. A. Luce
... face. English departed from her. 'Je ne le regrette pas du tout, du tout!' she cried with a flood of words. 'Madame—ah! je me jetterais au leu pour madame—une femme si charmante, si adorable! Mais un homme comme monsieur—maussade, boudeur, impassible! Ah, non!—de ma vie! J'en avais par-dessus la tete, de monsieur! Ah! vrai! Est-ce insupportable, tout de meme, qu'il existe des types comme ...
— Trent's Last Case - The Woman in Black • E.C. (Edmund Clerihew) Bentley
... cris de douleur aussi aigus que ceux d'un malheureux qui subit une opration chirurgicale. Tantt il se roulait sur le pont en appelant sa chre Aych; tantt il se frappait la tte contre les planches, comme pour se tuer. Toujours impassible, le capitaine, en lui montrant le rivage, lui faisait signe qu'il tait temps pour lui de s'en aller; mais Tamango persistait. Il offrit jusqu' ses paulettes d'or, son fusil et son sabre. Tout ...
— Quatre contes de Prosper Mrime • F. C. L. Van Steenderen
... L'impassible froideur de Julien redoubla le malheur de Mademoiselle de la Mole. Elle etait loin d'avoir le sang-froid necessaire pour chercher a deviner dans ses yeux ce qu'il sentait pour elle en cet instant. ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... personality involves a communicatio idiomatum (antidosis idiomaton). The human nature taken up into the Divine received the glory of the Divinity: the Divine "imparts to the human nature of its own glories, remaining itself impassible and without share in the passions of humanity." S. John Damascene taught then that our Lord's humanity was so enriched by the Divine Word as to know the future, though this knowledge was only manifested progressively as He increased ...
— The Church and the Barbarians - Being an Outline of the History of the Church from A.D. 461 to A.D. 1003 • William Holden Hutton
... to show to strangers wonders that throw them into perfect ecstasies of admiration! He gets so that he could not by any possibility live in a soberer atmosphere. After we discovered this, we never went into ecstasies any more—we never admired any thing—we never showed any but impassible faces and stupid indifference in the presence of the sublimest wonders a guide had to display. We had found their weak point. We have made good use of it ever since. We have made some of those people savage, at times, but we have never lost ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... she is wretched and miserable and bleeding, has she anything but what she richly deserves, and has brought down upon her own head? By Spain we of course mean the Spanish nation—for as for the country, it is so much impassible matter, so much rock and sand, chalk and clay—with which we have for the moment nothing to do. It has pleased her to play an arrant jade's part, the part of a mula falsa, a vicious mule, and now, and not for the first time, the brute has been ...
— A Supplementary Chapter to the Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... furieux, fait un vacarme effroyable, et l'hotelier impassible lui porte sur sa carte: ...
— French Conversation and Composition • Harry Vincent Wann
... descendible destructible digestible discernible distensible divisible docible edible effectible eligible eludible enforcible evincible expansible expressible extendible extensible fallible feasible fencible flexible forcible frangible fusible gullible horrible illegible immiscible impassible intelligible irascible legible miscible negligible partible passible (susceptible) perceptible permissible persuasible pervertible plausible possible producible reducible reflexible refrangible remissible reprehensible ...
— Division of Words • Frederick W. Hamilton
... paralyze, deaden, hebetate^, stun, stupefy; brutify^; brutalize; chloroform, anaesthetize^, put under; assify^. inure; harden the heart; steel, caseharden, sear. Adj. insensible, unconscious; impassive, impassible; blind to, deaf to, dead to; unsusceptible, insusceptible; unimpressionable^, unimpressible^; passionless, spiritless, heartless, soulless; unfeeling, unmoral. apathetic; leuco-^, phlegmatic; dull, frigid; cold blooded, cold hearted; cold as charity; flat, maudlin, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... live in the spirit of any other understanding you will court social disaster. I suppose it is a particularly intolerable state of affairs to us Strattons because it is in our nature to want things to seem what they are. That translucent yet impassible purdah outrages our veracity. And it is plain to me that our social order cannot stand and is not standing the tensions it creates. The convention that passions and emotions are absent when they are palpably present broke down between ...
— The Passionate Friends • Herbert George Wells
... thrust itself out from underneath the floor, opened its wide mouth full of fire, and breathed on us with heat and stared at our endless work through the two black air-holes above the forehead. These two cavities were like eyes—pitiless and impassible eyes of a monster: they stared at us with the same dark gaze, as though they had grown tired of looking at slaves, and expecting nothing human from them, despised them with the cold contempt of wisdom. Day in and day out, amid ...
— Twenty-six and One and Other Stories • Maksim Gorky
... had half expected worse—he found that the boiler-explosion of the previous night had really made the way impassible, from the third story downward. These lowest flights of steps had been so badly broken, that now they gave no ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... breast. I never saw a finer action of tragic woo, or heard sounds more pitiful than those old passionate groans of hers. What was your prayer, poor old wretched soul? The gendarmes hemmed her round, and hustled her away, but rather kindly. The Padishah went on quite impassible—the ...
— Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo • William Makepeace Thackeray
... stunned by the cymbals of the Sat-yrs, and to be conquered with the love of women; and at last, being unable to take the cloak off of Nessus, he kindled his own funeral pile and died. Such are specimens of the ancient myths. Their character is such as to leave an impassible gulf between them and the character of the God revealed in our religion. No development theory, seeking the origin of our religion in the old mythical system, can bridge across this chasm. It is as deep and broad as the ...
— The Christian Foundation, April, 1880
... Italy preceded by an immense reputation; religious, strenuous, unwearied, impassible, loving with the simplicity of a Tartar and fighting with the fury of a Cossack, he was just the man required to continue General Melas's successes over the soldiers of the Republic, discouraged as they had been by the weak ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - VANINKA • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... time to quell her emotion in this earnest speech, and he shuddered as he met the look of impassible and contemptuous determination with which she answered him—"Why will you weary me with proposals which I have a hundred times rejected, and will reject again, as often as it shall please you to amuse yourself by making them. I require no ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... could not be moved. The figures of atoms cannot be incomprehensible, but they are not infinite. These figures are neither hooked nor trident-shaped nor ring-shaped, such figures as these being exposed to collision; but the atoms are impassible, impenetrable; they have indeed figures of their own, which are conceived only by reason. It is called an atom, by reason not of its smallness but of its indivisibility; in it no vacuity, no passible affection is to be found. And that there is an atom is perfectly clear; for ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... mill-sites and for generating power, on account of the directness with which they receive the sun's rays and their freedom from clouds. Mile after mile Africa has been won for the uses of civilization, till great stretches that were considered impassible are as productive as gardens. Our condensers, which compress, cool, and rarefy air, enabling travellers to obtain water and even ice from the atmosphere, are great aids in desert exploration, removing absolutely the principal distress ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds - A Romance of the Future • John Jacob Astor
... sometimes an inverted one, in the Rops etchings. Order Reigns at Warsaw is a grim commentary on Russian politics quite opportune to-day. La Peine de Mort has been used by Socialists as a protest against capital punishment. Les Diables Froids personifies the impassible artist. It is a page torn from the book of hell. Rops had read Dante; he knew the meaning of the lines: "As the rill that runs from Bulicame to be portioned out amid the sinful women"; and more than once he explored the frozen ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... contrary, in the Western world, the characteristic tendencies are all different. Pantheistic theories are rarely held, and the dreams and emotions which those theories are fitted to feed are foreign and repulsive. An impassible barrier is imagined separating humanity from every other form of being. Speculative reason, imagination and affection, are chiefly employed in scientific studies and social pursuits, or personal schemes, external rather than internal. This absorption in ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... hereafter. Who can but pity the merciful intention of those hands that do destroy themselves? The devil, were it in his power, would do the like; which being impossible, his miseries are endless, and he suffers most in that attribute wherein he is impassible—his immortality. ...
— Sir Thomas Browne and his 'Religio Medici' - an Appreciation • Alexander Whyte
... impassible, but his calm exterior was an indication of violent emotion. Monsieur Bourbonne alone had fathomed the secret of that apparent tranquillity. The priest ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... that moment the Chief's countenance had been impassible. No look either of admiration or dislike had appeared upon that grim and war-painted visage. But now, as Louis spoke, Tatua's face assumed a glance of ineffable scorn, as, bending his head, he ...
— Burlesques • William Makepeace Thackeray
... "Their impassible fortitude and endurance of suffering are, after all, in my mind, the result of a greater degree of physical insensibility. It has been told me, and I believe it, that in amputation and other surgical operations, their nerves do not shrink, do not show the same tendency to spasm with those of ...
— The Conquest of Canada (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Warburton
... to sit down again; his legs refused to bear his weight; he turned pale; and that nature, ordinarily so impassible, seemed about to give way under the shock ...
— The Lesser Bourgeoisie • Honore de Balzac
... at the bar of Westminster Hall,—when the Methodist preacher walked through a line of men, each of whom greeted him with a brickbat or rotten egg,—they had some preparation for the crisis, though it might be very difficult to meet it with an impassible brow. Our little girl was quite unprepared to find herself in the midst of a world which despised her, and triumphed ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... read in "Leon Leoni" the account of the jeweller's daughter's life with her mother, passed in dressing, and learning to be looked at when dressed, "avec un front impassible," it reminded me of —— and her mother. What a heroine she would be for Sand! She has the same fearless softness with Juliet, and a sportive naivete a mixture of bird and kitten, unknown ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... fertile valley, surrounded on all sides by high mountains, lived a community or body of people who had never been outside the valley. To them the mountains proved an impassible barrier and they had no wish or desire to penetrate beyond. For generations they had lived in this peaceful retreat happy and content. The ground yielded sufficient for their wants and needs. No one in this little world was richer than his ...
— Bohemian Society • Lydia Leavitt
... existence is such that he can not live without a continual supply of food, which the nutritive process continually provides in order to make up for the wastage consequent upon disintegration of parts. But there are impassible limits fixed to the nutritive process by the most certain of all laws, viz: those of gravity and chemical action. To abolish these laws would insure the destruction of all organic existence, because it would be the abrogation of the essential conditions of organized being. Yet it is true that ...
— The Christian Foundation, March, 1880
... her wait in the hackney-coach and bide her time to come forward at the right moment. Elisabeth saw through the window-panes the two faces of Gobseck and Gigonnet (her uncle Bidault), which stood out in relief against the yellow wood-work of the old cafe, like two cameo heads, cold and impassible, in the rigid attitude that their gravity gave them. The two Parisian misers were surrounded by a number of other old faces, on which "thirty per cent discount" was written in circular wrinkles that started from the nose and turned ...
— Bureaucracy • Honore de Balzac
... invincible curiosity, the old mulatto followed the ever increasing throng into the peristyle; then passing through a double row of footmen, in resplendent blue and silver liveries, and standing as impassible as soldiers, he finally reached the reception room, where another army of servants in blue coats, black silk breeches and white silk stockings, stood in array. Although the modest appearance of the guests seemed little befitting the princely ...
— A Cardinal Sin • Eugene Sue
... anything of a nature to cause sovereigns to reflect, it is that, more or less impassible spectators of human calamities, they are, by the very constitution of society and the nature of their power, absolutely powerless to cure the sufferings of their subjects; they are even prohibited ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... countenance, and gait of this personage seemed to have undergone a sudden change. He appeared to have increased in dimensions. He was no longer an automaton, moved by the mechanism of humble obedience. His features, till now impassible, his glance, hitherto subdued, became suddenly animated with an expression of diabolical craft; a sardonic smile curled his thin, pale lips, and a look of grim satisfaction relaxed ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... feelings were I do not know. As he was a man of much dignity, with an impassible face, it was impossible to say whether he felt inwardly glad that the end had finally come, or felt sad over the result, and was too manly to show it. Whatever his feelings, they were entirely concealed from my observation; but my own feelings, which had been quite jubilant on the receipt of ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... to San Angelo, one of the prettiest villages in the environs of Mexico, and spent the day at the hacienda of Seor T—-e, which is in the neighbourhood. The rain has rendered the roads almost impassible, and the country round Mexico must be more like Cortes's description of it at this season, than at any other period. One part of the road near the hacienda, which is entirely destroyed, the owner of the house wished to repair; but the Indians, who claim that ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca
... Osiris, no transfer of human love and hate, passions and hopes, to the powers above; all here is ascribed to disembodied agencies or principles, and their works are represented as moving on in quiet order. There is no religion [!], no imagination; all is impassible, passionless, uninteresting.... It has not, as in Greece and Egypt, been explained in sublime poetry, shadowed forth in gorgeous ritual and magnificent festivals, represented in exquisite sculptures, nor preserved in faultless, imposing fanes ...
— Myths and Legends of China • E. T. C. Werner
... de Waterloo aujourd'hui a le calme qui appartient a la terre, support impassible de l'homme, et il resemble a toutes les plaines. La nuit pourtant une espece de brume visionnaire s'en degage, et si quelque voyageur s'y promene, s'il regarde, s'il ecoute, s'il reve comme Virgile dans les funestes plaines de Philippes, l'hallucination de la catastrophe le ...
— Ponkapog Papers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... appearance was much more soldierlike and respectable than when I first saw them. After the exercise was ended, the men gathered around a small brass band, of half a dozen Germans, which began to play in front of General Walker's quarters. The little General himself sat in his door, and looked out with impassible countenance upon the crowd in the street. It was an excellent conglomerate to study, for any one who could have the head and feeling there. What General Walker made of it, not even his staff-officers, who sat beside him, could tell,—if it were ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various
... little late at the lawyer's, and they are all assembled. He gives a quick glance toward Wilmarth. The impassible face has its usual half-sneer and the covert politeness so baffling. Lindmeyer has been explaining something, and stops short ...
— Floyd Grandon's Honor • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... a Brahmana, the manly, the noble, the hero, the great sage, the conqueror, the impassible, ...
— The Dhammapada • Unknown
... the inn, the weather, which had been threatening for some time past, became very tempestuous. It rained for three successive days and the roads were almost impassible. To continue my journey was wholly out of the question. I determined therefore, to take a seat in the coach for Halifax, and defer until next year the remaining part of my tour. Mr. Slick agreed to meet me here in June, and to provide ...
— The Clockmaker • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... betwixt the flights and emotions of the soul or a resolute and constant habit; and very well perceive that there is nothing we may not do, nay, even to the surpassing the Divinity itself, says a certain person, forasmuch as it is more to render a man's self impassible by his own study and industry, than to be so by his natural condition; and even to be able to conjoin to man's imbecility and frailty a God-like resolution and assurance; but it is by fits and starts; and in the lives of those heroes of times past there are sometimes miraculous ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... her little glittering eyes. It seemed to him that those gray orbs directed at him were two balls, which struck him in the heart; he quivered from head to foot and asked himself confusedly whether he were dead or living. He soon perceived that he was still living; the princess had remained impassible—not a muscle of her face had moved. She ended by bestowing upon Samuel a smile that was almost gracious, and addressing to him some insignificant words, which he only half understood, but which seemed to him exquisite—delicious. He fancied that she was saying ...
— Samuel Brohl & Company • Victor Cherbuliez
... all the disabilities and pains and absence, 'yet believing,' you can put out a long arm of faith across the gulf that lies, not only between to-day and eighteen centuries ago, but the deeper and more impassible gulf that lies between earth and heaven, and clasp Christ with a really firm grasp, which will fill the hand, and which we shall feel has laid hold of something, or rather has laid hold of a living person and a loving heart. That is faith. The Apostle uses a very strong ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... The impassible chief agent made no answer. Some new noise in the street struck his quick ear. He ran to the window and ...
— After Dark • Wilkie Collins
... Lord Loddon pottered about, making a feeble attempt, in which he was seconded by no one. Lord Alfred stood, stock-still, stroking his grey moustache with his hand. That much greater man, Augustus Melmotte, put his thumbs into the arm-holes of his waistcoat, and was impassible. The bishop saw at a glance the hopelessness of the occasion, and made no attempt. The master of the house shook hands with each guest as he entered, and then devoted his mind to expectation of the next corner. Lady Pomona and her two ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... introduction unto hell here- after. Who can but pity the merciful intention of those hands that do destroy themselves? The devil, were it in his power, would do the like; which being im- possible, his miseries are endless, and he suffers most in that attribute wherein he is impassible, his im- mortality. ...
— Religio Medici, Hydriotaphia, and the Letter to a Friend • Sir Thomas Browne
... same centrifugal forces were at work in northwestern Virginia and western Pennsylvania, a region which felt its isolation keenly. "Separated by a vast, extensive and almost impassible Tract of Mountains, by Nature itself formed and pointed out as a Boundary between this Country and those below it," the settlers of this trans-Alleghany region besought Congress to recognize them as a "sister colony and fourteenth province ...
— Union and Democracy • Allen Johnson
... between God and Man must be fully divine, since an intermediate Being would be in touch with neither side. The victory of Athanasius was in no sense a defeat for Hellenism. The only difficulty for a Greek thinker was that an Incarnate God ought to be impassible. This was a puzzle only for philosophers; popular religion saw no difficulty in a Christus patiens. The doctrine of the Logos brought Christianity into direct affinity with both Platonism and Stoicism, ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... times, always kept in Mecca during peace, and never since the conquest of Constantinople lost in battle before. The King was at vespers in the Escorial. Entering the sacred precincts, breathless, travel-stained, excited, the messenger found Philip impassible as marble to the wondrous news. Not a muscle of the royal visage was moved, not a syllable escaped the royal lips, save a brief order to the clergy to continue the interrupted vespers. When the service had been methodically concluded, the King made known the ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... Ebensburg that evening ten teams were secured after much trouble and the supplies sent overland seventeen miles to the desolated valley. The night was an awful one for the committee in charge. The roads were badly washed and all but impassible. The hours dragged on. At last, Sunday morning, the wagons drove into desolate Conemaugh. There were no cheers to greet them, no cries of pleasure. The wretched sufferers were too wretched, too dazed for that. They simply ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker
... mouth seemed cut in his face; when he smiled in a wicked and sinister manner, the ends of his teeth could be seen, black and decayed. Closely shaved to his temples, this man's countenance had an expression austere, sanctified, impassible, rigid, cold and reflecting; his little black eyes—quick, piercing, restless,—were ...
— The Mysteries of Paris V2 • Eugene Sue
... Grenadiers—do you take account that these items go to make up the amount of the triumph you admire, and form part of the duties of the heroes you fondle? Our chief, whom England and all Europe, saving only the Frenchmen, worshipped almost, had this of the godlike in him, that he was impassible before victory, before danger, before defeat. Before the greatest obstacle or the most trivial ceremony; before a hundred thousand men drawn in battalia, or a peasant slaughtered at the door of his burning hovel; before a carouse of drunken German lords, or ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... presented by Mr Martin Harvey, or formidably as in most works, he never seems at all different from any commonplace man put into the like circumstances. Exactly that in which he differed from all others is exactly what cannot be put upon the stage. We have had Nelson, and of course it was quite impassible to get any suggestion of the qualities that made ...
— Our Stage and Its Critics • "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette"
... Talleyrand, a dull, wan glance, without warmth, a species of impenetrable veil, beneath which a strong soul hides profound emotions and close estimation of men and things and events. Not a fold of his face quivered. His mouth and forehead were impassible; but his eyes moved and lowered themselves with a noble, almost tragic slowness. There was, in fact, a whole drama in the ...
— Ferragus • Honore de Balzac
... Only don't absolutely shake her in her bed before her thirteenth hour of rest, and you may say what you please. It cannot be implied that she is hardened, for no such quality is compatible with her character. But she smiles every joke and every advice aside with such an air of impassible benignity, that you see it is of no use to think of reforming ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 450 - Volume 18, New Series, August 14, 1852 • Various
... others insensitive; of sensitive substances, some are rational and others irrational.[58] Similarly of incorporeal substances, some are rational, others the reverse (for instance the animating spirits of beasts); but of rational substances there is one which is immutable and impassible by nature, namely God, another which in virtue of its creation is mutable and passible except in that case where the Grace of the impassible substance has transformed it to the unshaken impassibility which belongs to angels and to ...
— The Theological Tractates and The Consolation of Philosophy • Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius
... both fleshy and spiritual; made and not made; God incarnate; true life in death; both of Mary and of God: first passible, then impassible; ...
— The Forbidden Gospels and Epistles, Complete • Archbishop Wake
... father;" again replied the impassible Fleming; "pray therefore as much as you will. I will content myself with fasting, which will come whether I will or no."—At this moment a horn was heard before the gate.—"Look to the portcullis and the gate, ye ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott
... in the galley to put the kettle on—and 'pose you wanted to burn the tip of your little finger just now, it's not in the galley that you find a berth for it—and den the water before seven bells. I've a notion it's just impassible." ...
— Mr. Midshipman Easy • Captain Frederick Marryat
... paid up," said Gigonnet, drawing from his wallet a pile of bank-bills. Du Tillet looked furious. "You should never frown at money," said his impassible associate; "it ...
— A Daughter of Eve • Honore de Balzac
... Monsieur Grandet was something between a tiger and a boa-constrictor. He could crouch and lie low, watch his prey a long while, spring upon it, open his jaws, swallow a mass of louis, and then rest tranquilly like a snake in process of digestion, impassible, methodical, and cold. No one saw him pass without a feeling of admiration mingled with respect and fear; had not every man in Saumur felt the rending of those polished steel claws? For this one, Maitre Cruchot had procured the money required for the purchase of a domain, but ...
— Eugenie Grandet • Honore de Balzac
... with ignominy and scorn. Thus they treat all their domestic laws and constitutions, and even what they had considered as a law of nature; but whatever they have put their seal on for the purposes of their ambition, and the ruin of their neighbours, this alone is invulnerable, impassible, immortal. Assuming to be masters of everything human and divine, here, and here alone, it seems they are limited, "cooped and cabined in;" and this omnipotent legislature finds itself wholly without the power of exercising its favourite attribute, the love of peace. In ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... hardly say that they were devoid of expression, any more than that a perfectly drilled soldier is incapable of activity; but you got puzzled in making out what their natural expression was: it was not sternness, far less ferocity—the face was much too impassible for either; and yet its listlessness could never be mistaken for languor. The thin short lips might be very pitiless when compressed, very contemptuous and provocative when curling; but the enormous ...
— Sword and Gown - A Novel • George A. Lawrence
... government of Ireland by England is impossible, not so much by reason of natural obstacles, but because of the radical, essential difference in the public order of the two countries. This, considered in the abstract, makes a gulf profound, impassible—an obstacle no human ingenuity can ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... stars grew darkened by clouds above the impassible horizon, his reflections turned more gloomy and deadly. Was it impious for him to arrogate the right to substitute his justice for that supreme, and wield its dreadful sword? But he shrank from acting as his father had done, and mainly because he saw that, if ever the world ...
— The Son of Clemenceau • Alexandre (fils) Dumas |
