Free translatorFree translator
Synonyms, antonyms, pronunciation

  Home
English Dictionary      examples: 'day', 'get rid of', 'New York Bay'




Inextricable   Listen
adjective
Inextricable  adj.  
1.
Incapable of being extricated, untied, or disentangled; hopelessly intricate, confused, or obscure; as, an inextricable knot or difficulty; inextricable confusion. "Lost in the wild, inextricable maze."
2.
Inevitable. (R.) "Fate inextricable."






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








Advanced search
     Find words:
Starting with
Ending with
Containing
Matching a pattern  

Synonyms
Antonyms
Quotes
Words linked to  

only single words



Share |





"Inextricable" Quotes from Famous Books



... murder of his son. This consisted of seven youths and seven maidens whom the Athenians were compelled to send every nine years to Crete, there to be devoured by the Minotaur, a monster with a human body and a bull's head, which Minos kept concealed in an inextricable labyrinth. The third ship was already on the point of sailing with its cargo of innocent victims, when Theseus offered to go with them, hoping to put an end for ever to the horrible tribute. Ariadne, the daughter of Minos, became enamoured of the hero, and ...
— A Smaller History of Greece • William Smith

... so huge that it did not give the impression of a barracks, but had rather the character of a fantastic village—as though a hundred hamlets had been swept together in one inextricable heap. Originally it had been a little frame building of one story with a gabled roof. Then it had gradually become an embryo town; it budded in all directions, upward as well, kaleidoscopically increasing to a vast mass of little bits of facade, high-pitched roofs, ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo

... on his class or order from hatred to the aristocracy. I believe the adjournment is principally on account of the affairs of Canada, regarding which the Government is in a difficulty that appears inextricable. I have heard a great deal on the subject, enough to show the magnitude of the embarrassment, but not enough to ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. III • Charles C. F. Greville

... jovial and a merry world would this be, may it please your worships, but for that inextricable labyrinth of debts, cares, woes, want, grief, discontent, melancholy, large jointures, ...
— The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman • Laurence Sterne

... of surprise, confusion, and delight that followed were impossible. The questions put that were never answered; the answers given to questions never put; the exclamations; the cross purposes; the inextricable conglomeration of past, present, and future history—public, personal, and local; uttered, ejaculated and gasped, in short, or incomplete, or disjointed sentences—all this baffles description. After a few minutes, however, they quieted down, and, while the ...
— Over the Rocky Mountains - Wandering Will in the Land of the Redskin • R.M. Ballantyne

... could not with propriety do so to Lady Emily; but what at a distance appeared to be a matter of easy accomplishment, now, upon a nearer approach, and when the immediate impulse which had prompted the act had subsided, appeared so full of difficulty and almost inextricable embarrassments, that he involuntarily shrunk from the task day ...
— The Purcell Papers - Volume II. (of III.) • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

... investigation which my friend had on hand, there was something in his masterly grasp of a situation, and his keen, incisive reasoning, which made it a pleasure to me to study his system of work, and to follow the quick, subtle methods by which he disentangled the most inextricable mysteries. So accustomed was I to his invariable success that the very possibility of his failing had ceased to enter into ...
— The Lock And Key Library - Classic Mystery And Detective Stories, Modern English • Various

... by their variety. The "Almanack" of 1838 introduces us to the inevitable row which forms the wind-up of a Hibernian festa; chairs, sticks, shovels,—anything that comes to hand is used without fear or favour; men, women, children struggle together in inextricable confusion amidst the debris of wrecked furniture, broken glass, and battered pewter; high above the din drone the nasal tones of the piper; while amidst the infernal clatter "the praist" vainly endeavours to re-establish order and make himself heard. ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt

... natural and unalterable powers seemed to be conspiring against the success of Lee's modest and inoffensive hopes, an event was taking place which was shortly to reverse the entire settled arrangement of persons and affairs, and involved Fow Hou in a very inextricable state of uncertainty. For, not to make a pretence of concealing a matter which has been already in part revealed, the Mandarin Chan Hung had by this time determined to act in the manner which Ming-hi had suggested; so that on a certain ...
— The Wallet of Kai Lung • Ernest Bramah

... or hotels, quite unconscious of anything that is outside Baedeker, their one anxiety to get 'done' or 'through' and go on somewhere else. The result is, they mix up towns, rivers, palaces in one inextricable whirl. You know the American girl in Punch who says: 'Say, poppa, what did we see at Rome?' And the father replies: 'Why, guess Rome was the place where we saw the yaller dog.' There's travelling for ...
— A Room With A View • E. M. Forster

... not be in actual or immediate connexion, is nevertheless in some possible or mediated connexion, with every other part however remote, through the fact that each part hangs together with its very next neighbors in inextricable interfusion. The type of union, it is true, is different here from the monistic type of all-einheit. It is not a universal co-implication, or integration of all things durcheinander. It is what ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James

... struck right into the depths of the virgin forest, pursuing a narrow path which ran along the bank of a little stream. Palms, with their lordly crests, soared high above the other trees, which, intertwined by inextricable boughs, formed the loveliest fairy-bowers imaginable; every stem, every branch was luxuriously festooned with fantastic orchids; while creepers and ferns glided up the tall, smooth trunks, mingling with the boughs, and hanging ...
— The Story of Ida Pfeiffer - and Her Travels in Many Lands • Anonymous

... it by the throat. There was a shrill scream from Peter as he fluttered across the room, wheeling round in circles that ever descended, borne down under the weight that clung to him. The bird dropped at last quite suddenly, and Eustace saw fingers and feathers rolled into an inextricable mass on the floor. The struggle abruptly ceased as finger and thumb squeezed the neck; the bird's eyes rolled up to show the whites, and there was a faint, half-choked gurgle. But before the fingers had time to loose their hold, Eustace had them ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Ghost Stories • Various

... had scarcely taken his seat upon the throne ere he found himself involved in apparently inextricable embarrassments. Legitimists and Republicans were alike hostile to his reign. That he might conciliate the surrounding dynasties, and save himself from such a coalition of crowned heads as crushed Napoleon I., ...
— Louis Philippe - Makers of History Series • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott

... army from total destruction. This line or division of the Araucanians being broken and routed, fell back tumultuously upon the other two divisions, then nearly victorious, and threw them into such inextricable confusion, that being utterly unable to restore his troops to order, after repeated ineffectual efforts, Caupolican was reluctantly constrained to sound a retreat, and yielded the victory to his enemies which he had fondly imagined was already secured to himself. In their retreat, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 5 • Robert Kerr

... Kafir lad called a "forelooper," who tugs at a rope fastened to the horns of the leading oxen, and in moments of general confusion invariably seems to pull the wrong string and get the whole team into an inextricable tangle of horns and yokes. Sometimes of a quiet Sunday morning these teams and wagons I see "out-spanned" on the green slopes around Maritzburg, making a picturesque addition to the sylvan scenery. Near each ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, April, 1876. • Various

... vana. Ineligible neelektebla. Inert senmova. Inertia inercio. Inestimable netaksebla. Inevitable neevitebla. Inexact malgxusta. Inexhaustible nekonsumebla. Inexpedient nenecesa, nekonvena. Inexperience malsperteco. Inexplicable neklarigebla. Inexpressible neesprimebla. Inextricable nemalplektebla. Infallible neerarebla. Infallibility neerarebleco. Infallibly neerareble. Infamous malglora, malfama. Infamy malgloro, malfamo. Infancy infaneco. Infant infaneto. Infantile infana. Infantry infanterio. Infatuation ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes

... of the poet of "Giovanni and Annabella;" they look on grim and hopeless spectators at the world of fatalistic and insane wickedness which they have created, in which their heroes and heroines and villains are slowly entangled in inextricable evil. The men and women of Tourneur and Marston are scarcely men and women at all: they are mere vague spectres, showing their grisly wounds and moaning out their miserable fate. There is around them a thick and clammy moral darkness, ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee

... as a nun, who, more astonished even than myself, does not utter one word or make a movement. I throw myself in an arm-chair in order to breathe and to recover from my surprise. The sight of C—— C—— had annihilated me, and my mind was as much stupefied as my body. I found myself in an inextricable maze. ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt

... affirms, "that, in those desert countries, nothing was left except the sky and the earth; that, after the destruction of the cities, and the extirpation of the human race, the land was overgrown with thick forests and inextricable brambles; and that the universal desolation, announced by the prophet Zephaniah, was accomplished, in the scarcity of the beasts, the birds, and even of the fish." These complaints were pronounced about twenty ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon

... bewildered my head to such a degree, that I was hardly capable of doing, seeing or comprehending anything. I fortunately perceived, at length, that I was in the wrong road, which would entangle me in an inextricable labyrinth, and quitted it ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau

... press too hard, to exert their fierce and savage strength for a good purpose, and fling it off at once! This feeble and most sensitive of spirits could do neither, yet continually did one thing or another, which intertwined, in the same inextricable knot, the agony of heaven-defying guilt and ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... had been raised from every lip; even the daughter and eleve of Ruth repeated it, as they fled wailing through the buildings; and, for a moment, terror and surprise appeared to involve the assailed in inextricable confusion. But the promptitude of the young men in rushing to the rescue, with the steadiness of Content, soon restored order. Even the females assumed at least the semblance of composure, the family having been too long trained to meet ...
— The Wept of Wish-Ton-Wish • James Fenimore Cooper

... which gives so grand and terrible a character to this drama, is the circumstance which, however, is for the most part overlooked; that to the very Oedipus who solved the riddle of the Sphinx relating to human life, his own life should remain so long an inextricable riddle, to be so awfully cleared up, when all was irretrievably lost. A striking picture of the arrogant pretension of human wisdom, which is ever right enough in its general principles, but does not enable the possessor to make the ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel

... of teeth, the bellowing, the rolling and blind tossing and pitching, the labor with the mighty limbs, the snapping of the net, the burrowing into the sand, the further and more inextricable entanglement of the enraged brute may be left to imagination. Almost before the spectators realized the altered condition, Nilo was stabbing him with ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 2 • Lew. Wallace

... "But," quoth she, "there is nothing that He who is almighty cannot do." "Nothing," quoth I. "Can God do evil?" "No," quoth I, "Wherefore," quoth she, "evil is nothing, since He cannot do it who can do anything." "Dost thou mock me," quoth I, "making with thy reasons an inextricable labyrinth, because thou dost now go in where thou meanest to go out again, and after go out, where thou camest in, or dost thou frame a wonderful circle of the simplicity of God? For a little before taking thy beginning from blessedness, thou ...
— The Theological Tractates and The Consolation of Philosophy • Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius

... is single, but this is double, The mind in pain, and the hands in trouble. The life men live is a weary coil, There is no rest from woe and toil; And if there's aught elsewhere more dear Than drawing breath as we do here, That darkness holds In black inextricable folds. ...
— Ionica • William Cory (AKA William Johnson)

... brevity the contrast between the visible and the invisible presences that may stand about a man's last hour; for he may feel with the desolate Oedipus that "all I am has perished"—he may sink like Dion through inextricable sadness to a disastrous death, and then in a moment the transitory shall disappear and the essential shall be made plain, and from Dioa's upright spirit the perplexities shall vanish away, and Oedipus, in the welcome of that unknown companionship, shall find his expiations ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers

... thick and covering an area which matches the sort of house-front formed by the perpendicular soil. From the tumultuous heart of the cloud rises a monotonous, threatening murmur, while the bewildered eye strays through the inextricable evolutions of the eager throng. With the rapidity of a lightning-flash thousands of Anthophorae are incessantly flying off and scattering over the country-side in search of booty; thousands of others also are incessantly arriving, laden with honey or mortar, and keeping up the formidable ...
— The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles • Jean Henri Fabre

... I know it's bad enough. Perhaps you're right—I oughtn't to have spoken to Diana, I hoped things would right themselves eventually, but you and Baroni have put another complexion upon matters. It's all an inextricable tangle, whichever way one looks at it—come good luck or bad! . . . I suppose I was wrong—I ought to have waited. But now . . . now . . . Before God, Adrienne! I ...
— The Splendid Folly • Margaret Pedler

... more hopeless and inextricable dilemma was ever an unfortunate man involved!" Such was the tenor of his reflections.—"If we now fall to pieces by disunion, there can be little doubt that the government will take my life as the prime agitator of the insurrection. Or, grant I could stoop ...
— The Black Dwarf • Sir Walter Scott

... effect of any political phenomenon, we should notice how far its influence tends to the production of abundance or scarcity, and not simply of cheapness or dearness of price. We must beware of trusting to absolute prices: it would lead to inextricable confusion. ...
— What Is Free Trade? - An Adaptation of Frederic Bastiat's "Sophismes Econimiques" - Designed for the American Reader • Frederic Bastiat

... the scene of the interrupted feast seemed inextricable, while Verus hurried off to Sabina to inform her of what had occurred. But Balbilla had been the first to discover the fire and quite at the beginning, for after sitting industriously at her studies, and before going to bed, she had looked out toward ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... have been done when the two races first came in contact at the Fish River, but it could not be done now. Since then they had been developing the country with the labour of these people. They had been advancing by our aid. They had mixed themselves up with these people in an inextricable fashion and then some said "Haul your native policy out of the drawer and begin with a policy of separation." He was sure that the hon. member who had brought in the Bill had no idea of that sort in his mind. ...
— Native Life in South Africa, Before and Since • Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje

... any perfect idea of the LEAST EXTENSION OF MATTER, nor of INFINITY, we are at a loss about the divisibility of matter; but having perfect, clear, and distinct ideas of NUMBER, our reason meets with none of those inextricable difficulties in numbers, nor finds itself involved in any contradictions about them. Thus, we having but imperfect ideas of the operations of our minds, and of the beginning of motion, or thought how the mind produces either of them in us, and much imperfecter ...
— An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume II. - MDCXC, Based on the 2nd Edition, Books III. and IV. (of 4) • John Locke

... is only sixty miles in width, it is divided into two parts by a chain of high mountains; at the foot of these the alluvial soil is marvellously fertile, and the vegetation far more luxuriant than any European can imagine. It consists of an inextricable mass of tropical plants, creepers, and ferns, among trees of gigantic size which completely hide the sun, a truly virgin forest, interspersed here and there with patches of stagnant water, where live multitudes of birds, insects, ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part I. The Exploration of the World • Jules Verne

... remark, and fairly deducible from the conversation, he could not avoid referring to some peculiar origin, the youth rose, and bowed with respectful courtesy as she retired. His eye followed her form for an instant, while his meditations momentarily wrapped themselves up more and more in inextricable mysteries, from which his utmost ingenuity of thought failed entirely to disentangle him. In a maze of conjecture he passed from the room into the passage adjoining, and, taking advantage of its long range promenaded with steps, and in a spirit, equally moody and uncertain. In a little time ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms

... more disgusting than a bird that sings out of season' is a proverb which is as current among the sons of wisdom as a bill of exchange among merchants, and as valuable as an unpierced pearl. If you are so infatuated as to permit the enchanting melody of your voice to draw you into this inextricable labyrinth, the gardener will instantly awake, rouse his whole caravan of workmen, hasten to this garden and convert our music into mourning; so that our history will be like ...
— Flowers from a Persian Garden and Other Papers • W. A. Clouston

... out accordingly in the train of the viceroy Blasco Nunez, and found himself, through the passions of his imprudent leader, entangled, soon after his arrival, in the inextricable meshes of civil discord. In the struggle which ensued, he remained with the Royal Audience; and we find him in Lima, on the approach of Gonzalo Pizarro to that capital, when Zarate was deputed by the judges to wait on the insurgent chief, and require him to disband his troops and withdraw ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott

... capitals, bristling with a fantastic vegetation of pinnacles, canopies, foliated niches and statues, are like venerable trunks crowned with delicate and pendent mosses. They spread out in great branches meeting in the vault overhead, the intervals of the arches being filled with an inextricable network of foliage, thorny sprigs and light branches, twining and intertwining, and figuring the aerial dome of a mighty forest. As in a great wood, the lateral aisles are almost equal in height to that of the center, and, on all sides, ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Vol VIII - Italy and Greece, Part Two • Various

... bee[A] in the inextricable frame of the prudent Dedalus, or of Porsena, so full of wayes and winding turnings, one entring into another, to deceiue the intent of the goer out, or in the romthie denne of the horrible Cyclops, or the hollow Caue of the theeuish Carus. In such sort, ...
— Hypnerotomachia - The Strife of Loue in a Dreame • Francesco Colonna

... o'clock when Mr. Balfour rose. The assembly was brilliant in its density, its character, its pent-up emotion, and in many respects the speech was worthy of the occasion. He was wise enough not to entangle himself in the inextricable network of clauses and sub-sections. In broad, general lines he assailed the policy of the Bill and of the Government, and now and then worked up his party to almost frenzied excitement. The cheers of the Tories were taken up by the Unionists, who thronged their benches with unusual density of attendance. ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor

... say that I have given some year or two of more or less profane contemplation to this question, and have now engaged a large corps of men, under the direction of Mr. Frank Lyon as attorney for the Commission, to seek a way out of the inextricable maze of express company figures. Whether we will be able to find the light before the Infinite Hand that controls our destinies cuts short the cord, is a question to which no certain answer can be given. ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane

... pain and conflict, which all the efforts of his reason could not subdue. How to be a Christian and yet defy the authorized Head of the Christian Church, or how to be a Christian and recognize foul men of obscene and rapacious deeds as Christ's representatives, was the inextricable Gordian knot, which his sword could not divide. He dared not approach the Sacrament, he dared not pray, and sometimes he felt wild impulses to tread down in riotous despair every fragment of a religious belief which seemed to live in his heart ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 46, August, 1861 • Various

... plane. As it was, it rained heavily on the 19th and, after a very heavy march in the dark, we reached our new quarters about ten o'clock. The groves were separated by a narrow lane, and here the entire transport of the Brigade had contrived to get itself into the most inextricable confusion. There was no room for two limbers to pass abreast, and they could be turned only by separating the two halves and turning one ...
— The Fifth Battalion Highland Light Infantry in the War 1914-1918 • F.L. Morrison

... Commons, Whigs and Tories, had agreed to treat as calumnies, were, in the main, true. Was it impossible to prove that they were true, to cross the wise policy of William, to bring disgrace at once on some of the most eminent men of both parties, to throw the whole political world into inextricable confusion? ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... re-enunciation of this idea has been attended; it is this assumption of the allness of God which underlies and colours quite a number of modern movements, and will be seen to lead those who accept it into endless and inextricable tangles. ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer

... Spaniards, Hungarians, Arabs, Jews, soldiers, Bohemians, jesters, poets, monks, courtesans, swarmed and clustered here, and hustled one another in the streets. There was confusion of tongues, customs, and costumes, an inextricable mixture of splendour and rags, riches and misery, debasement and grandeur. The austere poets of the Middle Ages stigmatised the accursed city in their writings under the ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere

... contracts, because his method of work raised this item to an unreasonable sum. For one of his short stories, Pierette, Balzac demanded no less than seventeen successive revised proofs. And his corrections, his additions and his suppressions formed such an inextricable tangle that the typesetters refused to work more than an hour at a time ...
— Honor de Balzac • Albert Keim and Louis Lumet

... that wages must generally be adjusted to the value of the commodities upon which they were spent; and the answer was in effect that wages were determined by the value of commodities. And thus the mind was entangled in this inextricable circle—that the price of commodities was determined by wages, and wages determined by the price of commodities. From this gross Diallelos (as the logicians call it), or see-saw, we are now liberated; for the first step, as we are now aware, is false: the value of commodities is ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey

... cruel to Mr. Atwood to trace with minuteness the further details of this affair. It is impossible to withhold from him a certain sympathy, or to avoid feeling that a very worthy man, as the world goes, had entangled himself in an inextricable knot of duplicity and tergiversation, by an ill-advised effort to be two opposite things at once. For the sake of true manhood, we gladly turn to consider the course adopted ...
— Sketches and Studies • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... Meredith nobly wrote, during the tragic and fatal illness of his wife, "Here I am in the very pits of tragic life.... Happily for me, I have learnt to live much in the spirit, and see brightness on the other side of life, otherwise this running of my poor doe with the inextricable arrow in her flanks would pull me down too." The spirit, the brightness of the other side, that is the secret which beauty can communicate, and the message which she bears ...
— Joyous Gard • Arthur Christopher Benson

... made all manner of schemes for his cousin's family as well, yet seemed to have accomplished little. Their muddled life defied disentanglement, their difficulties were inextricable. With one son at a costly tutor, another girl in a Geneva school, the younger children just outgrowing the local education, the family's mode of living so scattered, meals in one place, rooms in several others,—it was all too unmethodical and dispersed to be covered by ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood

... The Vitellian line was more ragged now, for, having no general to marshal them, their ranks now filled, now thinned, with each alternation of courage and fear. As soon as Antonius saw them waver, he kept thrusting at them in massed column. The line bent and then broke, and the inextricable confusion of wagons and siege-engines prevented their rallying. The victorious troops scattered along ...
— Tacitus: The Histories, Volumes I and II • Caius Cornelius Tacitus

... the fortress was dreadful. All was inextricable confusion. It was a hand-to-hand fight. Wooden swords fell harmless upon helmet, cuirass and buckler. But the keen and polished steel of the Spaniards did fearful execution upon the almost naked bodies of the Indians. ...
— Ferdinand De Soto, The Discoverer of the Mississippi - American Pioneers and Patriots • John S. C. Abbott

... quarter of the field, and rushed madly up the hillsides and into the shelter of the trees. The magnificent army that had hailed the rising sun with hopes of victory was soon pouring along the road in inextricable confusion and disorderly retreat. Foot soldier and horseman, field-piece and wagon, caisson and ambulance, teamster and cannoneer, all were mingled together and rushing backward from the field they had half won, ...
— Fort Lafayette or, Love and Secession • Benjamin Wood

... all fair flowers, which lovest thou best? The Rose? She is a queen more wonderful Than any who have bloomed on Orient thrones: Sabaean Empress! in her breast, though small, Beauty and infinite sweetness sweetly dwell, Inextricable. Or dost dare prefer The Woodbine, for her fragrant summer breath? Or Primrose, who doth haunt the hours of Spring, A wood-nymph brightening places lone and green? Or Cowslip? or the virgin Violet, That ...
— International Weekly Miscellany Vol. I. No. 3, July 15, 1850 • Various

... they are formed; on the future life, and the other world. And every sect, every school, every individual, differing on all these points, and each assigning plausible reasons, and respectable though opposite authorities for his opinion, they fell into an inextricable ...
— The Ruins • C. F. [Constantin Francois de] Volney

... distinctly, how the Deity can be the mediate cause of all the actions of men, without being the author of sin and moral turpitude. These are mysteries, which mere natural and unassisted reason is very unfit to handle; and whatever system she embraces, she must find herself involved in inextricable difficulties, and even contradictions, at every step which she takes with regard to such subjects. To reconcile the indifference and contingency of human actions with prescience; or to defend absolute decrees, ...
— An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding • David Hume et al

... which an unwarrantable hypothesis forms an essential part, carries its condemnation within itself; but, even supposing such a definition were, in form, tenable, the physiologist who should attempt to apply it in Nature would soon find himself involved in great, if not inextricable, difficulties. As we have said, it is indubitable that offspring 'tend' to resemble the parental organism, but it is equally true that the similarity attained never amounts to identity, either in form or in structure. ...
— The Origin of Species - From 'The Westminster Review', April 1860 • Thomas H. Huxley

... to arrange the chapters according to "schools," but it soon became evident that such a plan would lead to inextricable confusion, and it was found best to follow the chronological order ...
— Famous Violinists of To-day and Yesterday • Henry C. Lahee

... the insistent noises without; or, on the other hand, if they are of the nobler sort, lose heart and hope, and even forfeit their own delight in things that are sweet and generous and pleasant and pure. A mournful and inextricable dilemma! ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson

... distinguish was a star-like blaze, from the midst of which, with visionary whiteness, emerged the statue of the Virgin in its niche. The hanging foliage assumed an emerald sheen, the hundreds of crutches covering the vault resembled an inextricable network of dead wood on the point of reflowering. And the darkness was rendered more dense by so great a brightness, the surroundings became lost in a deep shadow in which nothing, neither walls nor trees, remained; whilst all alone ascended the angry and ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola

... his present condition. He wrestled with the facts in vain. It became an inextricable tangle. He saw the sky through the ventilator pink with dawn. An old persuasion came out of the dark recesses of his memory. "I must sleep," he said. It appeared as a delightful relief from this mental distress and ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells

... varieties, by which means each minute part can be examined by itself in connection with the whole; the memory and the judgment are assisted in their references and application; and order reigns through the whole subject, which otherwise would have been involved in inextricable confusion. ...
— A Practical Enquiry into the Philosophy of Education • James Gall

... in Shanghai, he saw a Taoist priest conducting Confucian worship in a Buddhist temple. Even if inconsistency were proved to the Chinese, he would not be in the least disturbed for he cares nothing for such considerations. "Hence it is that the Chinese religion of to-day has become an inextricable blending of the three systems.''[17] "The ancient simplicity of the state religion has been so far corrupted as to combine in one ritual gods, ghosts, flags and cannon. It has become at once ...
— An Inevitable Awakening • ARTHUR JUDSON BROWN

... whom they addressed thus, and their voice was sweeter than the music of the song-sparrow—"Who are ye?" The hunters replied that they were men of the Creek-nation who had ventured into the marsh Ouaquaphenogan, and were bewildered in its inextricable mazes. Two days, they said, they had been without food; they were faint and weary, and demanded refreshments, such as they would have given, had a hungry traveller come to their door, and said, "Food I have none, give me or I faint." ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 3 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones

... these we went very gladly; giving our horses the bridle at the door, which went off of their own will to their stables, through the dark inextricable labyrinths of streets, archways, and alleys, which we had threaded after leaving the main street from the Jaffa Gate. There, there was still some life. Numbers of persons were collected at their doors, or smoking before the ...
— Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo • William Makepeace Thackeray

... exception of certain of the Psalms, certain portions of Job and of the prophets, there seemed to Hugh to be little in the Old Testament that did not merely hamper and encumber the religion of Christ. What endless and inextricable difficulties arose from trying to harmonise the conception of the Father as preached by Christ, with the conception of the vindictive, wrathful, national, local Deity of the Old Testament. How little countenance did Christ ever give to that idea! ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson

... but his sleeping hours were still more painful. To sleep was to be the feverish fool of vague wild visions, in which Charlotte and Dr. Doddleson, the editor of the Cheapside, the officials of the British Museum reading-room, Diana Paget, and the Sheldons, figured amidst inextricable confusion of circumstances and places. Throughout these wretched dreams he had some consciousness of himself and the room in which he was lying, the July moon shining upon him, broad and bright, through ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon

... independent impulses, she seized a hooded waterproof cloak, and slipped out of the house unperceived. The rain was falling steadily along the descending trail where she walked, but beyond, scarcely a mile across the chasm, the wintry distance began to confuse her brain with the inextricable swarming of snow. Hurrying down with feverish excitement, she at last came in sight of the arching granite portals of their domain. But her first glance through the gateway showed it closed as if with a white portcullis. Kate remembered that the ...
— Snow-Bound at Eagle's • Bret Harte

... better course of conduct for the girl. But the girl is gone—the past is past, the life is lived. I was full of the humours and delusions of nineteen years, and I saw the glory and delight of my youth wrecked. Existence was merely inextricable confusion in the dark. I never dreamt of a path appearing, of a return of sunshine, of a story like this to ...
— The Late Miss Hollingford • Rosa Mulholland

... was; the baulks had gathered about it in an inextricable mass. The shores were dark with men gathered ...
— The Song Of The Blood-Red Flower • Johannes Linnankoski

... can assure you; sometimes Barrow Strait was closed to one of them, and the next year another found it open; sometimes the vessel was irresistibly drawn towards Regent's Passage, so that we have ended by becoming acquainted with these inextricable seas." ...
— The English at the North Pole - Part I of the Adventures of Captain Hatteras • Jules Verne

... attic-salt as the rasher of BACON'S essays. And to him who pays his bill there, ere he straggles weakly forth to repair his shattered health by frenzied flight, shall be given in change such hoary ten-cent shreds of former postal currency as he has not hitherto deemed credible, sticking together in inextricable conglomeration by such fragments of fish-scales as he never before believed could be gathered by handled small-money from palms not sufficiently washed after ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 22, August 27, 1870 • Various

... interdependence, between the flower and the insect, which is its ordained companion, its faithful messenger, often its sole sponsor—the meadows murmuring with an intricate and eloquent system of intercommunings beside which the most inextricable tangle of metropolitan electrical currents is not a circumstance. What a storied fabric were this murmurous tangle woven day by day, could each one of these insect messengers, like the spider, leave ...
— My Studio Neighbors • William Hamilton Gibson

... scientific truth, of an action successfully achieved, and of a moral action: thus we talk of an intellectual beauty, of a beautiful action, of a moral beauty. Many philosophers, especially aestheticians, have lost their heads in their pursuit of these most varied uses: they have entered an inextricable and impervious verbal labyrinth. For this reason it has hitherto seemed convenient studiously to avoid the use of the word beautiful to indicate successful expression. But after all the explanations that have been given, and all danger ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce

... method of ransom by auction, unless it be universally accepted, will plunge you into great and inextricable difficulties. In what year of our Lord are the proportions of payments to be settled? To say nothing of the impossibility that colony agents should have general powers of taxing the colonies at their discretion, consider, I implore you, that the communication ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. II. (of 12) • Edmund Burke

... the sophistry woven by her betrayer might seem inextricable, though Imogen had no sentiments more predominant than the love of virtue, and the fear of the Gods, yet her heart involuntarily resisted his persuasions, and she felt the yearnings of affection still active in her bosom towards those, to whom ...
— Imogen - A Pastoral Romance • William Godwin

... nombre considerable de tranches s'etaient succede dans l'estomac complaisant de ce nouveau Gargantua, quand on vint lui annoncer que la cavalerie de Henri IV, emportee par sa folle audace, s'etait engagee dans un taillis inextricable. "Il faut, sans delai, lui courir sus, declarerent aussitot tous les lieutenants du duc.—Attendez au moins que j'aie[1] fini mon melon," repondit Mayenne. Et il fallut attendre. En vain insistait-on; en vain, a chaque minute, un officier accourait-il, la mine inquiete, ...
— French Conversation and Composition • Harry Vincent Wann

... of knowledge must take account of these two faculties, intellect and intuition, and how also, for want of establishing a sufficiently clear distinction between them, it becomes involved in inextricable difficulties, creating phantoms of ideas to which there cling phantoms of problems, we shall endeavor to show a little further on. We shall see that the problem of knowledge, from this point of view, is one with ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson

... a worthless, ignorant youth, and a profligate and illiterate old man. When young, the best that can be said of him is that he had occasionally springs of courage, invariably at the wrong time and place, which merely served to lead his friends into inextricable difficulties. When old, he was loathsome and contemptible to both friend and foe. His wife loathed him, and for the most terrible of reasons; she did not pollute his couch, for to do that was impossible—he had made it so vile; but she betrayed it, ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow

... of Virtue lie strait before them, whilst Interest, or some malicious Demon, still hurry'd them out of the Way. I was at once touched with Pleasure at my own Happiness, and Compassion at the sight of their inextricable Errors. Here the two contending Passions rose so high, that they were inconsistent with the sweet Repose I enjoy'd, and awaking with a sudden start, the only Consolation I could admit of for my Loss, ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele

... my landlord had told me, rose sheer from the water to the height of at least twenty-five feet, bristling and formidable. Back of it pressed the volume of logs packed closely in an apparently inextricable tangle as far as the eye could reach. A man near informed me that the tail was a good three miles up stream. From beneath this wonderful chevaux de frise foamed the current of the river, irresistible to any force less mighty than the ...
— Blazed Trail Stories - and Stories of the Wild Life • Stewart Edward White

... contraction travelling down both the main stem and the branches, all of them, one after another, were ultimately brought into contact with the stick. They then wound themselves round it and round one another, until the whole tendril was tied together in an inextricable knot. The tendrils, though at first quite flexible, after having clasped a support for a time, become more rigid and stronger than they were at first. Thus the plant is secured to its ...
— The Movements and Habits of Climbing Plants • Charles Darwin

... river bank before entering the town freshened me up so much that the night did not matter. One march to the north of Lu-ku, up the valley of the Anning, lay the district town of Mien-ning, reached by a rough trail that finally wandered off into the inextricable gorges of the Ta Tu Ho. It was in these wild defiles that the last contests of the Taiping rebellion were fought. I looked longingly up the valley, but my way turned off to the right, following the pack-road ...
— A Wayfarer in China - Impressions of a trip across West China and Mongolia • Elizabeth Kendall

... the station. Five such installments came, with their absurd air of disorderly flight with the loot of innumerable outfit shops and provision stores, that, one would think, they were lugging, after a raid, into the wilderness for equitable division. It was an inextricable mess of things decent in themselves but that human folly made look like ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad

... series of conjectural historical events, proves them to be mistaken from A to Z. They know that one single wrong figure in an arithmetical progression will always throw the whole calculation into inextricable confusion: the multiplication yielding, generally, in such a case, instead of the correct sum something entirely unexpected. A fair proof of this may, perhaps, be found in something already alluded to— namely, the adoption ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various

... Boswell together have pretty well let me into the secret of what passed through his mind. He and other writers like him are sufficiently explicit: my friends, whose repose I should be tempted to disturb, (were it in my power) are implicit, inextricable, inscrutable. ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin

... summit. I concluded that at high water this part of Cataract Canyon would probably annihilate any human being venturing into it, though it is possible high water would make it easier. Where there was driftwood it was in tremendous piles, wedged together in inextricable confusion; hundreds of tree-trunks, large and small, battered and cut and limbless, with the ends pounded into a spongy lot of splinters. The interstices between the large logs were filled with smaller stuff, like boughs, ...
— The Romance of the Colorado River • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh

... the sun of his fortunes began to set. Calamity rapidly followed calamity. Wou Sankwei had not known the meaning of defeat in his long career of fifty years, but now, in his old age, he saw his affairs in inextricable confusion. His adherents deserted him, many rebel officers sought to come to terms with the Manchus, and Kanghi's armies gradually converged on Wou Sankwei from the east and the north. Driven out of Szchuen, ...
— China • Demetrius Charles Boulger

... whose stiff and cheerless aspect bespoke the lack of a woman's humanizing touch for the Reverend Mr. Prentice was a widower. Overwrought with anxiety and strain, the clergyman, as soon as he had taken his coat, began a hurried, inconsequential narrative, broke off, tried again, fell into an inextricable confusion of words, and, dropping his head in his ...
— Average Jones • Samuel Hopkins Adams

... dissensions, arising greatly from the perverseness of his mother, drove his father to a foreign land, where he soon died; and his mother having quarrelled with all her relations, the affairs of the family were involved in inextricable disorder. Notwithstanding these calamities, Kepler took his degree of Bachelor on the 15th September 1588, and his degree of Master in August 1591, on which occasion he held the second place at ...
— The Martyrs of Science, or, The lives of Galileo, Tycho Brahe, and Kepler • David Brewster

... of the same kind may be urged against the opinions mentioned. Nor are the views that are entertained of the offices and pulse of the heart, perhaps, less bound up with great and most inextricable difficulties. The heart, it is vulgarly said, is the fountain and workshop of the vital spirits, the centre from which life is dispensed to the several parts of the body. Yet it is denied that the right ventricle makes spirits, which is rather held to supply nourishment ...
— The Harvard Classics Volume 38 - Scientific Papers (Physiology, Medicine, Surgery, Geology) • Various

... like all the best of Hood's puns. To the ear it is perfect, but so soon as you attempt to realize it to yourself, the mind is involved in an inextricable confusion of comical non sequiturs. And yet observe the gravity with which the forms of reason are kept up in the "and so." Like this is the peddler's recommendation of ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell

... Generation, they are to be husbanded by another kind of seed, even so it is with Wit which if not applied to some certain study that may fix and restrain it, runs into a thousand Extravagancies, and is eternally roving here and there in the inextricable labyrinth ...
— The Present State of Wit (1711) - In A Letter To A Friend In The Country • John Gay

... becomes inextricable. The military and naval authorities of the Entente foment and encourage in the country a revolution and armed sedition, and they favour by every means the {124} Salonica movement by continuing the vexatious measures and restricting all freedom of thought and action. The Entente ...
— Greece and the Allies 1914-1922 • G. F. Abbott

... inward eye to a proper focus with the outward organ. Grapevines here and there twine themselves around shrub and tree and hang their clusters over the water within reach of the boatman's hand. Oftentimes they unite two trees of alien race in an inextricable twine, marrying the hemlock and the maple against their will and enriching them with a purple offspring of which neither is the parent. One of these ambitious parasites has climbed into the upper branches ...
— The Old Manse (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... street and crossed the Pozeluief bridge at a gallop. At the same moment a troika, with three horses abreast, turned sharply into the Glinki and the two collided with a crash, the occupants flung out on the snow, the frightened animals plunging and rearing in a tangled, inextricable heap. ...
— The Black Cross • Olive M. Briggs

... in my own person, to an extent which would justify any philanthropic stranger in clapping me into a strait-waistcoat without further inquiry, endeavouring to goad H. into some dim and faint understanding of a prompter's duties, and struggling in such a vortex of noise, dirt, bustle, confusion, and inextricable entanglement of speech and action as you would grow giddy in contemplating. We perform "A Roland for an Oliver," "A Good Night's Rest," and "Deaf as a Post." This kind of voluntary hard labour used to be my great delight. The ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 3 (of 3), 1836-1870 • Charles Dickens

... zigzag line, and emitting those peculiar doleful notes invented for them, automobiles were mixed up in apparently inextricable confusion with all this hurly-burly of vehicles, while the trams clanged their bells, and passengers stood waiting on the edge of the sidewalks, desirous of boarding them, yet afraid to risk their lives in the turmoil and bustle of the intervening space. All ...
— A Little Garrison - A Realistic Novel of German Army Life of To-day • Fritz von der Kyrburg

... neology and nehushtan, when he speaks of "spiritual experiences," uses the adjective in its purely mystic sense; while Bernard of Cluny, in his once famous hymn, "Hic breve vivitur," mingles the two conceptions of the unseen world in inextricable confusion. Between these two extreme poles, in fact, we have every variety of thought; and it is good for us that we should have them; for no one man or school of men can grasp the whole truth, and every intermediate modification supplies some link in the great cycle of facts which ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley

... which is like a little red pea. But there were peduncles and ventricles, arches, columns, strata, ganglions, and fibres of all kinds, and the foramen of Pacchioni and the "body" of Paccini; in short, an inextricable mass of details, enough to wear their ...
— Bouvard and Pecuchet - A Tragi-comic Novel of Bourgeois Life • Gustave Flaubert

... himself endeavored to repair the disaster; he rode with lightening speed hither and thither, commanding, ordering, nay imploring too; but already the night was falling, the confusion became each moment more inextricable, and the effort was a fruitless one. A regiment of the Guards, and two batteries were in reserve behind Planchenoit; he threw them rapidly into position; but the overwhelming impulse of flight drove the mass upon them, ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education

... planets revolve around the sun, though the system carried out and perfected by Kepler, Newton, Halley, Laplace, and others is by no means perfectly identical with the theory of the German astronomer. But the inextricable interweaving of his name with opinions sanctioned by the entire scientific world, is one of the noblest conceivable tributes to the magnitude ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 3 of 8 • Various

... we conceived ourselves in the high road to La Palud, and likely to be soon indemnified by dinner and rest, for the joltings of the day; but our driver, instead of taking the proper direction, lost himself in a series of inextricable cross roads, which terminated in a quagmire. In this slough of despond the unfortunate patache, from which we had descended, might have stuck for ever, but for the assistance of two shepherds, as wild in their attire, and as civil, as Don Quixote's friendly goatherds. By dint of their exertions ...
— Itinerary of Provence and the Rhone - Made During the Year 1819 • John Hughes

... painfully excited. I thought of Dominguez, and wondered whether he and his companions had escaped the hurricane; then I thought of Morillo and his fiendish hatred of me; and so my thoughts and fancies chased one another until they became all mingled together in an inextricable jumble; and through it all I heard myself singing, shouting, laughing, arguing upon impossible subjects with wholly imaginary persons, and performing I know not what other mad vagaries, until finally, I suppose, I must have become so utterly exhausted as ...
— A Pirate of the Caribbees • Harry Collingwood

... appear, a member of a good Shropshire family which had passed into Warwickshire. He was educated at Coventry School, and at Brasenose College, Oxford, and passed early into London literary society, where he involved himself in the inextricable and not-much-worth-extricating quarrels which have left their mark in Jonson's and Dekker's dramas. In the first decade of the seventeenth century he wrote several remarkable plays, of much greater literary merit than the work now to be criticised. ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury

... or again, when hockey was under discussion, so that handicaps, and sliced balls, and American services, and good forearm drives, and double faults, and poor passing, and good shooting, and half-volleys, were terms that were all jumbled up in absolutely inextricable confusion, her expression of rapt attention as she jotted them down on the tablets of her mind, resolving to acquaint herself with the meaning of each when occasion served, convinced Maud that she had a properly appreciative listener. ...
— The Rebellion of Margaret • Geraldine Mockler

... Addison should, in the first line of his travels, have misdated his departure from Marseilles by a whole year, and still more strange that this slip of the pen which throws the whole narrative into inextricable confusion, should have been repeated in a succession of editions, and never detected by Tickell or ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... hospital," he observes. "Oh, it's from that professor who was here some time since. I thought from his remarks and careless manner he was a likely man to lead his violin into danger, if not into inextricable difficulties; let us see what is the matter. Open the box, James, take the fiddle out, there is probably a letter placed with it to save postage." James dutifully proceeds with the work while his chief retires to make a short note concerning ...
— The Repairing & Restoration of Violins - 'The Strad' Library, No. XII. • Horace Petherick

... my Camarados! I have no delicatesse as a diplomat, but I go blind on Libertad! Give me the flap-flap of the soaring Eagle's pinions! Give me the tail of the British lion tied in a knot inextricable, not to be solved anyhow! Give me a standing army (I say 'give me,' because just at present we want one badly, armies being often useful ...
— The Battle of the Bays • Owen Seaman

... great mind to punish that love of mischief in you, by burying the whole affair in profound secresy. It is fortunate for him that you are not here, or you would surely indulge your propensity, and with malicious invention put the whole parish, with the Curate, into inextricable confusion. It is bad enough as it is. There!—it cannot be helped—I must tell you at once the condition we are in, if I would have you read the rest of my letter ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various

... the manuscript which Father Theobaldi, keeper of the records of Assisi, mentioned to them, and of which he offered them a copy (A. SS., Oct., t. ii., p. 546f). Father Suysken was thus thrown into inextricable difficulties, and exposed to a failure to understand the lists of biographies of St. Francis arranged by the annalists of the Order; he was at the same time deprived of one of the most fruitful sources of information upon the acts and works of the Saint. Professor Mueller (Die ...
— Life of St. Francis of Assisi • Paul Sabatier

... and system, no school could have more than ten scholars, as I intend hereafter to show. The great reliance of the teacher is upon this art, to reduce to some tolerable order, what would otherwise be the inextricable confusion of his business. He must be systematic. He must classify and arrange; but after he has done all that he can, he must still expect that his daily business will continue to consist of a vast multitude of minute particulars, from one to another ...
— The Teacher - Or, Moral Influences Employed in the Instruction and - Government of the Young • Jacob Abbott

... aware, into another avenue, leading apparently far into the interior, Gregory was left once more in total darkness. He heard the sound of retreating footsteps, but not a glimmer was visible, and he feared to follow lest he might be entangled in some inextricable labyrinth. He recollected to have heard a vague sort of tradition, that a subterraneous passage once led from the hall to the Ribble bank, whereby the miners had in former days kept their ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby

... continu'st such, owe to thy self, That is, to thy obedience; therein stand. This was that caution giv'n thee; be advis'd. God made thee perfet, not immutable; And good he made thee, but to persevere He left it in thy power, ordaind thy will By nature free, not over-rul'd by Fate Inextricable, or strict necessity; Our voluntarie service he requires, Not our necessitated, such with him 530 Findes no acceptance, nor can find, for how Can hearts, not free, be tri'd whether they serve Willing or no, who will but what they must By Destinie, and can no other choose? ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton

... came. They interpreted Psalm 110 as Messianic, and David in it called Messiah 'my Lord.' How can He be both? Jesus' question is in two forms,—'If He is son, how does David call Him Lord?' or, if He is Lord, 'how then is He his son?' Take either designation, and the other lands you in inextricable difficulties. ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren

... dollar, madam," said the broker. "I would have spared you this explanation to-night, but you have brought it on yourself. This is our last night of factitious splendor—my affairs are in inextricable confusion—losses have this day come to light which complete my ruin—and to-morrow the world will know ...
— The Three Brides, Love in a Cottage, and Other Tales • Francis A. Durivage

... not heard of the inextricable confusion into which the Chamber of Deputies was thrown last year, while discussing the question of colonial and native sugars? Did they leave these two industries to themselves? The native manufacturer was ruined by the colonist. To ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon

... revelation of his supposed misconduct to Madame Granson; and Suzanne, at the risk of not getting a penny from the society, was possessed with the desire, on leaving Alencon, of entangling the old bachelor in the inextricable meshes of a provincial slander. In all grisettes there is something of the malevolent mischief of a monkey. Accordingly, Suzanne now went to see Madame Granson, composing her face to an expression ...
— The Jealousies of a Country Town • Honore de Balzac

... that can be established, for the attempt to prescribe for such a commander a special course of conduct in every case that may arise, when these cases may be infinitely varied, would involve him in an inextricable labyrinth of instructions. As the object and limits of this Summary do not allow me to enter upon the consideration of such details, I can only refer my readers to the best works which do treat ...
— The Art of War • Baron Henri de Jomini

... in distress like the vessel, but after another fashion, had, in the inextricable intersection of shadows which rose up before him, no resource but the footsteps in the snow, and he held to it as ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo

... her mainsail, that was split into fluttering rags. All the rest of her canvas so recently set being carried away, and floating alongside in a tangled wreck of spars and sails and ropes and rigging, matted together in an inextricable mass, Captain Blowser now gave orders to have cut away, without further delay, as the men could be ...
— Picked up at Sea - The Gold Miners of Minturne Creek • J.C. Hutcheson

... attention may be called to the significant fact that the name of Macedonia, the heart of the Balkan peninsula, has been long used by the French gastronomers to denote a dish, the principal characteristic of which is that its component parts are mixed up into quite inextricable confusion. ...
— The Balkans - A History Of Bulgaria—Serbia—Greece—Rumania—Turkey • Nevill Forbes, Arnold J. Toynbee, D. Mitrany, D.G. Hogarth

... that Lionel Verner may also have been asking in his inmost heart. As yet he could not look his situation fully in the face. Not from any want of moral courage, but because of the inextricable confusion that his affairs seemed to be in. And, let his moral courage be what it would, the aspect they bore might have caused a more hardy heart than Lionel's to shrink. How much he owed he could not tell; nothing but debt stared him in the face. He had looked to the autumn ...
— Verner's Pride • Mrs. Henry Wood

... anxiety to avoid the French battery, could come to their assistance. Beaumont pressing gallantly with his horse upon the flank, and Napoleon's infantry forming rapidly as they passed the bridge, and charging on the instant, the Austrian line became involved in inextricable confusion, broke up, and fled. The slaughter on their side was great; on the French there fell only 200 men. With such rapidity, and consequently with so little loss, did Buonaparte execute this dazzling adventure—"the terrible passage," as he ...
— The History of Napoleon Buonaparte • John Gibson Lockhart

... swaggering with great swords, bailiffs chasing some impecunious poet, cutpurses, funerals, christenings, weddings, and street fights, would seem from some contemporary accounts to be invariably mixed up together in helpless and apparently inextricable confusion. The general bewilderment was made more bewildering by the very babel of street cries bawled from the sturdy lungs of orange-girls, chair-menders, broom-sellers, ballad-singers, old-clothes men, and wretched representatives ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume I (of 4) • Justin McCarthy

... received. I have called the Secretary of the Navy, Secretary of War, and General-in-Chief together, and submitted it to them, who promise to do their very best in the case. I cannot take it into my own hands without producing inextricable confusion. ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln



Words linked to "Inextricable" :   extricable



Copyright © 2024 Free Translator.org