"Incommunicable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... meaning three consciousnesses, wills, and understandings, and still have any intelligent meaning in his mind, when he asserts that they are yet one person. For, as he now uses the term, the very idea of a person is that of an essential, incommunicable monad, bounded by consciousness, and vitalized by self-active will; which being true, he might as well profess to hold that three units are yet one unit. When he does it, his words will, of necessity, be only substitutes for ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... to an assassin his faithful vizir, at the age of ninety-three, who for thirty years had been the servant and benefactor of the house of Seljuk. After obtaining from the Caliph the peculiar and almost incommunicable title of "the commander of the faithful," unsatisfied still, he wished to fix his own throne in Bagdad, and to deprive his impotent superior of his few remaining honours. He demanded the hand of the daughter of the ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman
... it; but we can never prove it. If we do believe it, innumerable confirmations of it meet us at every turn: but no such confirmations, and no multiplication of them, can persuade a disbeliever. For belief is ever incommunicable from without; it can be generated only from within. The term "belief" cannot be applied to our recognition of a physical fact: we do not believe in that—we are only ...
— Confessions and Criticisms • Julian Hawthorne
... other day that in Birmingham, where she is, she has present cognisance of three cases of clairvoyance), but she is a believer in the personal integrity of her witnesses. She has what she has well called an 'incommunicable confidence.' And this, however incommunicable, is sufficiently comprehensible to all persons who know what personal faith is, to place her 'honour,' I do maintain, high above any suspicion, any charge with the breath of man's lips. I am sure you ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... find our profit in applying a test suggested by Lowell—the test of imitability. "No poet of the first class has ever left a school, because his imagination is incommunicable," whereas "the secondary intellect seeks for excitement in expression, and stimulates itself into mannerism." The greater geniuses may have influenced those who came after them by their thoughts, by what they have contributed to the sum of human knowledge; but "they have not infected contemporaries ...
— Inquiries and Opinions • Brander Matthews
... who does not observe, but is gradually aware that he knows. Sometimes he does not learn that he is wise till long years have passed, and then perhaps the mechanical maxim of a mechanical eye-server of Nature shall startle him into a sense of deep abiding, but perhaps incommunicable, knowledge. So comes the knowledge of mountain, moor and stream; so rises the Aphrodite truth of the sea, born from the foam that surges round the Horn, or floats silently upon the beach of some lonely coral island; and so grows the knowledge of ...
— A Tramp's Notebook • Morley Roberts
... exercise them, in the nature of things, are not many. These high tragic acts of superior, overbearing tyranny are privileged crimes; they are the unhappy, dreadful prerogative, they are the distinguished and incommunicable attributes, of ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. X. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... their intellectual vision of the world incommunicable to those who were not born with it. It came to the public simply as Materialism; and Materialism lost its peculiar purity and dignity when it entered into the Darwinian reaction against Bible fetichism. Between the two of them religion was ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... one evening, as the men sat smoking after dinner, after the servant had brought in the whisky and seltzer, between eleven and twelve, in that happy hour when the spirit descends and men and women sitting together are taken with a desire to communicate the incommunicable part of themselves—"did it ever occur to you," Owen said, blowing the smoke and sipping his whisky and seltzer from time to time, "that man is the most ridiculous animal on the ...
— Sister Teresa • George Moore
... and still, and sweet, And live a century while in the dark The dripping wheel of silence slowly turns; To watch the window open on the night, A dewy silent deep where nothing stirs, And, lying thus, to feel dilate within The press, the conflict, and the heavy pulse Of incommunicable sad ecstasy, Growing until the body seems outstretched In perfect crucifixion on the arms Of a cross pointing from last void to void, While the heart dies to a mere ...
— Georgian Poetry 1920-22 • Various
... the cabin on the Dakota plain these stage pictures were of almost incommunicable beauty and significance. They justified me in all my daring. They made any suffering past, present, or future, worth while, and the knowledge that these glories were evanescent and that I must soon return to the ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... ("pyramids of truth," he calls them) and then stuffs them into his pockets where they "become round hard balls" soon to be discarded. What Dr. Reefy's "truths" may be we never know; Anderson simply persuades us that to this lonely old man they are utterly precious and thereby incommunicable, forming a kind ...
— Winesburg, Ohio • Sherwood Anderson
... into spiritual being by contact with Him. The ground of the idea of Gnosis does not seem to be very different from that of the later "Mystical Theology," "which originally meant the direct, secret, and incommunicable knowledge of God received in contemplation" (Dom John Chapman). The revelation sought for was not so much a dogmatic revelation as a revelation of the processes of "transmutation" of Rebirth, of Apotheosis or "Deification." ...
— The Gnosis of the Light • F. Lamplugh
... all the novels, from Sir Philip Sidney[374] to Sir Walter Scott,[375] paint this figure. The word gentleman, which, like the word Christian, must hereafter characterize the present and the few preceding centuries, by the importance attached to it, is a homage to personal and incommunicable properties. Frivolous and fantastic additions have got associated with the name, but the steady interest of mankind in it must be attributed to the valuable properties which it designates. An element which ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... recognize at the same time a good god, incommunicable to man and consequently without symbolic representation, and a bad god, to whom they give the features of an idol ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster
... its needs, its sufferings, its joys, its inexpressible desires. Wonderful is human speech, for its complexity, its delicacy, its power. But the pine-tree, under the visitations of the heavenly influence, utters things incommunicable; it whispers to us of things we have never said and never can say,—things that lie deeper than words, deeper than thought. Blessed are our ears if we hear, for the message is not to be understood by every comer, nor, indeed, ...
— The Foot-path Way • Bradford Torrey
... about them. Why barbarous, because they are not French? And those have made the best use of their travels who have observed most to speak against. Most of them go for no other end but to come back again; they proceed in their travel with vast gravity and circumspection, with a silent and incommunicable prudence, preserving themselves from the contagion of an unknown air. What I am saying of them puts me in mind of something like it I have at times observed in some of our young courtiers; they will not mix with any but men of their own sort, and look upon us as men ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... calls the Moral Sentiment, they must in some way act as symbolic mouthpieces of the Universe's meaning. To know just which thing does act in this way, and which thing fails to make the true connection, is the secret (somewhat incommunicable, it must be confessed) of seership, and doubtless we must not expect of the seer too rigorous a consistency. Emerson himself was a real seer. He could perceive the full squalor of the individual fact, but he could also see the transfiguration. He might easily have found himself ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... of consciousness known only to himself and incommunicable, the poor fellow sustained an all but continuous hand-to-hand struggle with insanity, more or less agonized according to the nature and force of its varying assault; in which struggle, if not always victorious, ...
— Heather and Snow • George MacDonald
... congregation of sailors, and sailors' wives and widows. A muffled silence reigned, only broken at times by the shrieks of the storm. Each silent worshipper seemed purposely sitting apart from the other, as if each silent grief were insular and incommunicable. The chaplain had not yet arrived; and there these silent islands of men and women sat steadfastly eyeing several marble tablets, with black borders, masoned into the wall on either side the pulpit. Three ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... the beauty of the Whole of which it is a part and an interpretation. It was not really lost or vain. All must come back in time to feed the world. He had known gracious thoughts of Earth too big to utter, almost too big to hold. Such thoughts could not ever be really told; they were incommunicable. For the mystical revelation is incommunicable. It has authority only for him who feels it. A corporate revelation is impossible. Only those among men could know, in whose hearts it rose intuitively and made its presence felt as innate ideas. Inspiration ...
— The Centaur • Algernon Blackwood
... the city, such was its prince—mysterious, solitary, unique. Each was to the other an adequate counterpart, each reciprocally that perfect mirror which reflected, as it were in alia materia, those incommunicable attributes of grandeur, that under the same shape and denomination never upon this earth were destined to be revived. Rome has not been repeated; neither has Csar. Ubi Csar, ibi Roma—was a maxim of Roman jurisprudence. And the same maxim may be ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... phantom chime Of incommunicable rhyme, He shall chase the fleeting camp-fires Of ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 3 (of 4) • Various
... sons in Christ are fit objects of worship on account of Him who is in them.... Worship is the necessary correlative of glory; and, in the same sense in which created nature can share in the Creator's incommunicable glory, do they also share in that worship which is His property alone." But a "new sphere" was yet to be discovered in the realms of light, to which the Church had not yet assigned its inhabitant. "There was 'a wonder in heaven;' a throne was seen, far above ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan
... so poor that he could express all he has in him by words, looks, or actions; his true knowledge is eternally incommunicable, for it is a knowledge of himself; and his best wisdom comes to him by no process of the mind, but in a supreme self-dictation, which keeps varying from hour to hour in its dictates with the ...
— The Pocket R.L.S. - Being Favourite Passages from the Works of Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of the "Amusement Philosophique" would have us believe that animals can speak. Nothing makes more for his opinion than the exquisite variety of lyrical howl in which a shut-out dog expresses every phrase of blighted affection, incommunicable longing, and supreme despair. Somehow he never, literally never, wakens his owners. He only keeps all the other people in a four-mile radius wide awake. Yet how few have the energy and public spirit to get up and go for that dog with sticks, umbrellas, and pieces of road-metal! The most enterprising ...
— Lost Leaders • Andrew Lang
... that lay beyond my ken, Questioning death, and solacing my fears. Ofttimes indeed strange sense have I of this, Vague memories that hold me with a spell, Touches of unseen lips upon my brow, Breathing some incommunicable bliss! In years foregone, O Soul, was all not well? Still lovelier life awaits thee. Fear ...
— The Sisters' Tragedy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... feeling to that which produced among the ancients those perfect specimens of poetry and sculpture which are the baffling models of succeeding generations. There is a unity and a perfection in it of an incommunicable kind. The central figure, St. Cecilia, seems rapt in such inspiration as produced her image in the painter's mind; her deep, dark, eloquent eyes lifted up; her chestnut hair flung back from her forehead—she ...
— Among the Great Masters of Music - Scenes in the Lives of Famous Musicians • Walter Rowlands
... institution and invites comparison with that remarkable feature of Indian social life, the Brahman caste. At first sight the two seem mutually opposed, for the one is a hereditary though intellectual aristocracy, claiming the possession of incommunicable knowledge and power, the other a corporation open to all who choose to renounce the world and lead a good life. And this antithesis contains historical truth: the Sangha, like the similar orders of the Jains and other Kshatriya sects, was in its origin a protest ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... is a curious social development of the same faculty. Taste is the child of the mind and soul; tact, of the soul and heart. Both are incommunicable. ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 5, November, 1863 • Various
... upon Christ's rights, who alone must bear the glory of ruling His own kingdom, the Church; and in particular, against this absolute power, usurped by this usurper, that belongs to no mortal; but is the incommunicable property of Jehovah; and against this toleration flowing from this absolute power." Here he was compelled to leave off speaking, and to go up the ladder. He then prayed again, and said, "Lord! I die in the faith that Thou wilt not leave Scotland, but that Thou will make the blood of thy witnesses ...
— The Life of James Renwick • Thomas Houston
... wrapped him in lambent flame. When he went below, figured out his observation, and then returned on deck and announced our latitude and longitude, there was an authoritative ring in his voice that was new to all of us. But that was not the worst of it. He became filled with incommunicable information. And the more he discovered the reasons for the erratic jumps of the Snark over the chart, and the less the Snark jumped, the more incommunicable and holy and awful became his information. My mild suggestions that it was about time that ...
— The Cruise of the Snark • Jack London
... girl's arrival, Darrell has relaxed his watch over the patient. He never now enters his guest's apartment without previous notice; and, by that incommunicable instinct which passes in households between one silent breast and another, as by a law equally strong to attract or repel—here drawing together, there keeping apart—though no rule in either case has been laid down;—by virtue, I say, of that strange intelligence, ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... with the Epilogue really began with The Master Builder." As the last confession, so to speak, of a great artist, the Epilogue will always be read with interest. It contains, moreover, many flashes of the old genius, many strokes of the old incommunicable magic. One may say with perfect sincerity that there is more fascination in the dregs of Ibsen's mind than in the "first sprightly running" of more common-place talents. But to his sane admirers the interest of the ...
— When We Dead Awaken • Henrik Ibsen
... leaped into life within him a realisation of Rome's incommunicable greatness. He perceived at last the nature of the pax romana, that peace, compounded of power, which welded the continents together, made the seas into serviceable highways and held all men secure within the barriers of law and justice. Was it ...
— Roads from Rome • Anne C. E. Allinson
... affection understands our manifold and seemingly contradictory needs. Life would be intolerable if we had no one who knew us perfectly, not simply the outside part of our life, but that inside and apparently incommunicable part. Those who are least able to express themselves in words, or who (if they did express themselves) fear that they would be misunderstood, find in Him an unspeakable consolation. But I must not look at things from the ...
— Letters to His Friends • Forbes Robinson
... sculptors that the world ever saw, appeared soon after the birth of these arts, and lived in a state of society which was, in other respects, comparatively barbarous. Those arts, which depend on individual genius and incommunicable power, have always leaped at once from infancy to manhood, from the first rude dawn of invention to their meridian height and dazzling lustre, and have in general declined ever after. This is the peculiar ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt
... until the end, That at the very top of being, The battle spirit shouting in my blood, Out of very reddest hell of the fight I may be snatched and flung Into the everlasting lull, The Immortal, Incommunicable Dream. ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... remove us farther from it. When a man happens to be born with that happy combination of qualities which enables him to renew this simple and natural relation with the world about him, however little or however much, we call him a poet, and surrender ourselves gladly to his gracious and incommunicable gift. But the renewal of these conditions becomes with the advance of every generation in literary culture and social refinement more difficult. Ballads, for example, are never produced among cultivated people. Like ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... we came to sift His meaning, and to note the drift Of incommunicable ways That make us ponder while we praise? Why was it that his charm revealed Somehow the surface of a shield? What was it that we never caught? What was he, and ...
— The Man Against the Sky • Edwin Arlington Robinson
... evil. But he did not reflect that a power to do good is, ex necessitate rei, a power to do evil. Surely, a good Being would bestow on his creature the power to do good—the power to become like himself, and to partake of the incommunicable blessedness of a holy will. But if he would bestow this, he would certainly confer power to do evil; for the one is identical with the other. And sin has arisen, not from any power conferred for that purpose, but from that which constitutes the brightest element in the sublime structure and ...
— A Theodicy, or, Vindication of the Divine Glory • Albert Taylor Bledsoe
... has,' he answered. Then to himself he said: 'She can't translate herself into language. She is incommunicable; she can't render herself to the intelligence. So she is alone and a law unto herself: she only wants me to explore me, like a rock-pool, and to bathe in me. After a while, when I am gone, she will ...
— The Trespasser • D.H. Lawrence
... The ever-blessed immaculate Mother of God is exercising her office as the Advocate of sinners, standing by the sacrifice as she stood at the cross itself, and offering up and applying its infinite merits and incommunicable virtue in union with priest and people. So instinctive in the Christian mind is the principle of decoration, as it may be called, that even in times of suffering, and places of banishment, we see it brought into exercise. Not only ...
— Callista • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... critical ability grows, and becomes at length formidably complete;—whereas the power of originating, or, what is the same thing, of acting wisely, and on the spur of the moment, in new and untried circumstances, is an incommunicable faculty, which genius, and genius only, can possess. And genius is as rare now as it ever was. Any man of talent can be converted, by dint of study and painstaking, into a good military critic; but a Wellington or a Napoleon had as certainly to be born what they were, as a ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... which soothed the girl more than a distincter utterance might. And sometimes Hilda moaned quietly among the doves, teaching her voice to accord with theirs, and thus finding a temporary relief from the burden of her incommunicable sorrow, as if a little portion of it, at least, had been told to these innocent friends, and been ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume II. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... shadowy vault, suggests the unknown beauty of the soul which attains Nirvana's supremest height, for the supernal exaltation of purified humanity to Divine union may not be interpreted or expressed by mortal hands, but must for ever remain incommunicable and incomprehensible. From the central dagoba, ascended by a winding stair, the intricate design of the spacious sanctuary discloses itself with mathematical precision, and the changing glories of dawn, sunset, and moonlight idealize the sacred hill, rising amid the palm-groves and ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... pin, has oftener than once convulsed us with laughter. But John's humorous confessions, based as they always were on a strong good sense, that always saw the early folly in its most ludicrous aspect, never lowered him in our eyes. Of his wonderful skill as a workman, much was incommunicable; but it was at least something to know the principles on which he directed the operations of what a phrenologist would perhaps term his extraordinary faculties of form and size; and so I recognise old John as ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... immediate intuition, of immediate vision, or, as Plato sometimes fancied, of an earlier personal experience; and which, as matter of such intuition, are incapable of analysis, and therefore, properly, incommunicable by words. Place, then, must be left to the last in any legitimate dialectic process for possible after-thoughts; for the introduction, so to speak, of yet another interlocutor in the dialogue, which has, in fact, no necessary ...
— Plato and Platonism • Walter Horatio Pater
... criticism, those privileges will never be pleaded in vain. But they are limited in the same manner in which, fortunately for the ends of justice, the privileges of the peerage are now limited. The advantage is personal and incommunicable. A nobleman can now no longer cover with his protection every lackey who follows his heels, or every bully who draws in his quarrel: and, highly as we respect the exalted rank which Mr Bentham holds ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 2 (of 4) - Contributions To The Edinburgh Review • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... find a way to do it. This something that they have said, like the something that they have lived, has come to them they know not how, and it has gone from them they know not how, sometimes not even when. It has been incommunicable, incalculable, infinite, the subconscious self of each of them, the voice beneath the voice, calling down ...
— The Lost Art of Reading • Gerald Stanley Lee
... the windows of the mills, while down the deepened blue of the waters came floating iridescent suds from the washing of the wools. It was given to her to know that which an artist of living memory has called the incommunicable thrill ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... thing of the sort, should constitute the reality of a human soul, the process of a human life, the accumulated treasures of a human experience, all preserved at command and traversed by the moral lines of personal identity. The things lie in different spheres and are full of incommunicable contrasts. However numerously and intimately correlated the physical and psychical constituents of man are, yet, so far as we can know any thing about them, they are steeply opposed to each other both in essence and function. Otherwise consciousness is mendacious and language ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... all crooked lines, they seem to go forth in obedience to God, but they have a secret unseen reflexion into its own bosom. And this is the greatest act of enmity, to idolize God, and deify ourselves, we make him a cypher and sacrifice to ourselves his peculiar, incommunicable property of Alpha and Omega, that we do sacrilegiously attribute to ourselves, the beginning of our notions, and end of them too. This is the crooked line, that nature cannot possibly move out of, till a higher Spirit come and restore ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... numerous attributes forms the basis of the supernatural communication made to the soul in the bestowal of grace, is a question on which theologians differ widely. The so-called incommunicable attributes, (self-existence, immensity, eternity, etc.), of course, cannot be imparted to the creature except by way of ...
— Grace, Actual and Habitual • Joseph Pohle
... language to her as it was to Radowitz, though her gift was so small and slight compared to his. But she understood and followed him; and there sprang up in her, as she sat turning her delicate face to the musician, that sudden, impassioned delight, that sense of fellowship with things vast and incommunicable—"exultations, agonies, and love, and man's unconquerable mind"—which it is the glorious function of music to kindle ...
— Lady Connie • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... rather than accept it. This is the real reason why Christianity has not been received and will never be received by the Semitic race. When Mahomet reorganized and perfected the Arab creed, he preserved intact the Semitic principle of the absolute and incommunicable nature of God: the Semitic religion has ever held that there is ...
— Myth and Science - An Essay • Tito Vignoli
... such word or idea as that of gentry, expressing a secondary class distinct from a nobility, it flashed upon them that our important body of a landed gentry, bearing no titular honours of any kind, was inexpressible by any French, German, or Italian word; that upon the whole, and allowing for incommunicable differences, this order of gentry was represented on the Continent by the great mass of the "basse noblesse;" that our own great feudal nobility would be described on the Continent as a "haute noblesse;" and that amongst ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... on John 1:31: "I knew Him not," Augustine says (Tract. v) that "he did not know that our Lord having the authority of baptizing . . . would keep it to Himself." But John would not have been in ignorance of this, if such a power were incommunicable. Therefore Christ could communicate His power ...
— Summa Theologica, Part III (Tertia Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... and a man whose friendship was not lightly won or lavishly expressed. He stands easily at the head of Latin poets of the second order. In delicacy, in refinement, in grace of rhythm and diction, he cannot be easily surpassed; he only wants the final and incommunicable touch of genius which separates really great artists from ...
— Latin Literature • J. W. Mackail
... almost invariably handsomer than those fortunate daughters of Mammon whom she is called upon to serve, and who often treat her with such top-lofty hauteur. And how stylish she frequently is, and how difficult it is to describe this incommunicable quality of style, which those artful setters of baits—the dealers in ready-made fabrics—understand so well! Who has not noticed how the tall, slender-framed girls, with their graceful movements and flexible spines, their long, smooth throats and curved waists, are drafted ...
— Danger! A True History of a Great City's Wiles and Temptations • William Howe
... 1869, some weeks before he began to work at his tale, Dickens, in a letter, told Forster, "I have a very curious and new idea for my new story. Not communicable (or the interest of the book would be gone), but a very strong one, though difficult to work." Forster must have instantly asked that the incommunicable secret should be communicated to HIM, for he tells us that "IMMEDIATELY AFTER I learnt"—the secret. But did he learn it? Dickens was ill, and his plot, whatever it may have been, would be irritatingly criticized by Forster before it was fully thought out. ...
— The Puzzle of Dickens's Last Plot • Andrew Lang
... great body carries off a little one? The thing might as naturally happen quite otherwise; for it might as well happen that the most solid body should never move any other body—that is to say, motion might be incommunicable. Nothing but custom obliges us to suppose that Nature ought to ...
— The Existence of God • Francois de Salignac de La Mothe- Fenelon
... will consequently be incommunicable to foreigners. You would, then, have us be trading with tokens instead of a precious currency? Yet I cannot perceive the advantage of letting our ideas be clothed so racy of the obscener soil; considering the pretensions ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... spectator that, great though the tragedies in themselves are, they owe their peculiar, their incommunicable beauty largely to this element of the chorus which seemed at first ...
— Ancient Art and Ritual • Jane Ellen Harrison
... must therefore be associated with whole groups, delimited classes, of experience rather than with the single experiences themselves. Only so is communication possible, for the single experience lodges in an individual consciousness and is, strictly speaking, incommunicable. To be communicated it needs to be referred to a class which is tacitly accepted by the community as an identity. Thus, the single impression which I have had of a particular house must be identified with all my other ...
— Language - An Introduction to the Study of Speech • Edward Sapir
... I had had the presumption to try to translate into words, and make others feel a thrill of sacred living human feeling, that should not be touched save by worthy hands. And what had I produced? A trivial, paltry, complicated tale, with certain cheaply ingenious devices in it. I heard again the incommunicable note of profound emotion in the old man's voice, suffered again with his sufferings; and those little black marks on white paper lay dead, dead in my hands. What horrible people second-rate authors were! They ought to be prohibited by law from sending out their caricatures ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... shall dare to search in what sad maze Thenceforth their incommunicable ways Follow the ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... well as philosophers of great note, have, from the difficulty they found in conceiving either limits or annihilation of space, concluded it must be divine. And some of late have set themselves particularly to show the incommunicable attributes of God agree to it. Which doctrine, how unworthy soever it may seem of the Divine Nature, yet I do not see how we can get clear of it, so long as we adhere to ...
— A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge • George Berkeley
... Jack London tells us. 'The land itself was a desolation, lifeless, without movement, so lone and cold that the spirit of it was not even that of sadness. There was a hint in it of laughter—the masterful and incommunicable wisdom of eternity laughing at the futility of life and the effort of life. It was the Wild—the savage, frozen-hearted Northern Wild!' Here, I say, is the Wild. And here is the life of the Wild: 'Bill opened his mouth to speak, but changed his mind. Instead, he pointed towards the wall ...
— Mushrooms on the Moor • Frank Boreham
... overflowing Love shall fill, 'T is not within the force of fate The fate-conjoined to separate. But thou, my votary, weepest thou? I gave thee sight—where is it now? I taught thy heart beyond the reach Of ritual, bible, or of speech; Wrote in thy mind's transparent table, As far as the incommunicable; Taught thee each private sign to raise Lit by the supersolar blaze. Past utterance, and past belief, And past the blasphemy of grief, The mysteries of Nature's heart; And though no Muse can these impart, Throb thine ...
— Poems - Household Edition • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... little book should be left for an account of his work in that field. No doubt Defoe's chief claim to the world's interest is that he is the author of Robinson Crusoe. But there is little to be said about this or any other of Defoe's tales in themselves. Their art is simple, unique, incommunicable, and they are too well known to need description. On the other hand, there is much that is worth knowing and not generally known about the relation of these works to his life, and the place that they occupy in the sum total of his literary activity. Hundreds of thousands since ...
— Daniel Defoe • William Minto
... the Brera at Milan whose zeal in displaying the merits of Mantegna's foreshortened Christ is as unforgettable as a striking piece of character-acting in a theatre. There is a more reserved but hardly less appreciative official in the Accademia at Bologna with a genuine if incommunicable passion for Guido Reni. And, lastly, there is Alfred Branconi, at S. Croce, with his continual and rapturous "It is faine! It is faine!" but he is a private guide. The Bargello custodians belong ...
— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas
... of art is first cloudily conceived in the mind; during the period of gestation it stands more clearly forward from these swaddling mists, puts on expressive lineaments, and becomes at length that most faultless, but also, alas! that incommunicable product of the human mind, a perfected design. On the approach to execution all is changed. The artist must now step down, don his working clothes, and become the artisan. He now resolutely commits his airy conception, his delicate Ariel, to the touch of ...
— The Art of Writing and Other Essays • Robert Louis Stevenson
... he found May awaiting him. Across his surprise and joy there came an intense admiration of her, a heart-pang of passionate gratitude. As she moved towards him her incommunicable grace of person and manner completed the charm. The radiant gladness of the eyes; the outstretched hands; the graceful form, outlined in silver-grey; the diadem of honey- coloured hair; something delicate ...
— Elder Conklin and Other Stories • Frank Harris
... sense du theatre, my friend,' said Pilgrim, turning over the leaves of the manuscript. 'That precious and incommunicable gift—you have it. But you are too fond of explanations. Now, the public won't stand explanations. No long speeches. And so whenever I glance through a play I can tell instantly whether it is an acting play. If I see a ...
— A Great Man - A Frolic • Arnold Bennett
... light, and, like the sons of the Romans emperors, who were invested with the titles of Caesar or Augustus, [50] he governed the universe in obedience to the will of his Father and Monarch. II. In the second hypothesis, the Logos possessed all the inherent, incommunicable perfections, which religion and philosophy appropriate to the Supreme God. Three distinct and infinite minds or substances, three coequal and coeternal beings, composed the Divine Essence; [51] and it would have implied contradiction, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... my fingers are enervated; my ideas are vivid, but my language is faint: now know I what it is to entertain incommunicable sentiments. The chain of subsequent incidents is drawn through my mind, and being linked with those which forewent, by turns rouse up agonies and sink me ...
— Wieland; or The Transformation - An American Tale • Charles Brockden Brown
... be wary on the one hand, of confounding these in ourselves with ultimate conclusions of taste, and so forcing them upon all as authoritative, and on the other of supposing that the enjoyments of others which we cannot share are shallow or unwarrantable, because incommunicable. I fear, for instance, that in the former portion of this work I may have attributed too much community and authority to certain affections of my own for scenery inducing emotions of wild, impetuous, and enthusiastic characters, and too little to ...
— Modern Painters Volume II (of V) • John Ruskin
... enumerate its virtues again. It will be enough for us to recall with what ease it mocks at space, time and all the obstacles that beset our poor human knowledge and understanding. We believed it, like all that seems to us superior and marvellous, the intangible, inalienable and incommunicable attribute of man, with even better reason than his intelligence. And now an accident, strangely belated, it is true, tells us that, at one precise point, the strangest and least foreseen of all, the horse and the dog draw more easily and perhaps more directly than ...
— The Unknown Guest • Maurice Maeterlinck
... come the allies of the dragon, the beast out of the sea, which is imperial pagan Rome; and the beast out of the earth, which is the priesthood of Asia appointed to promote the worship of the emperor (xiii.). Then there is seen on Mount Zion the Lamb with His bodyguard of 144,000, singing the incommunicable chorus. An angel proclaims the eternal gospel; another tells that Babylon, i.e. pagan Rome, has fallen; another proclaims the eternal punishment of those who worship the beast. Then a voice from heaven announces the blessedness of the dead in Christ. ...
— The Books of the New Testament • Leighton Pullan
... "Faust" of Gaelic poetry, incommunicable except to the native reader, and, like that celebrated composition, an untranslatable tissue of tenderness, sublimity, and mocking ribaldry. The heroine is understood to have been a young person of virtue and beauty, in the humbler walks of life, who was quite unappropriated, except by the imagination ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various |
