"Irrecoverable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... for which he toil'd." Shakespeare's Sonnets.] as in his first, risk the loss of that particular battle, is inseparable from the condition of man, and the uncertainty of human means; but that the loss of this one battle should be equally fatal and irrecoverable with the loss of his first, that it should leave him with means no more cemented, and resources no better matured for retarding his fall, and throwing a long succession of hindrances in the way of his conqueror, ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... thenceforwards be confounded with the similar memorials, past all numbering, which every year accumulates as the wrecks from household remembrances of generations that are passing or passed, that are fading or faded, that are dying or buried. It is well, therefore, amongst so many irrecoverable ruins, that, in the portrait at Aix-la-Chapelle, we still possess one undoubted representation (and therefore in some degree a means for identifying other representations) of a female so memorably adorned by nature; gifted with capacities so unparalleled ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... wife and mother. And I shall take care that neither you nor your son, whom you have taken such successful pains to educate, shall suffer by the folly and imprudence in which you had no share. As to the ready money which your husband has lost and paid to these sharpers, it is, I fear, irrecoverable; but the goods in your shop, and the furniture in your house, I will take care shall not be touched. I will go immediately to my attorney, and direct him to inquire into the truth of all I have been told, and to prosecute these ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. 2 • Maria Edgeworth
... putting our gear in order, when, just as we were going to make fast to it, the huge mass sunk from our sight! We looked at each other with blank disappointment. It was gone—there can be no doubt about it, and was utterly irrecoverable. "Don't grumble, my lads. We should have been worse off had we been fast to it with a gale blowing, and unable to cut ourselves adrift," exclaimed Mr Brand. "Let us thank the Almighty that we have escaped so great a danger. We'll run ...
— A Voyage round the World - A book for boys • W.H.G. Kingston
... over the absence of my honest merchant but slowly at first. It was with infinite regret that I let him go at all; and when I read the letter he left I was quite confounded. As soon as he was out of call and irrecoverable I would have given half I had in the world for him back again; my notion of things changed in an instant, and I called myself a thousand fools for casting myself upon a life of scandal and hazard, when, after the shipwreck of virtue, honour, and principle, and sailing at the utmost risk in the ...
— The Fortunate Mistress (Parts 1 and 2) • Daniel Defoe
... Elector, Ferdinand believed that a sincere reconciliation was not to be hoped for. The violent course he had once begun, must be completed successfully, or recoil upon himself. What was already lost was irrecoverable; Frederick could never hope to regain his dominions; and a prince without territory and without subjects had little chance of retaining the electoral crown. Deeply as the Palatine had offended against the House of Austria, the services of the Duke of Bavaria were no less meritorious. If the House ...
— The History of the Thirty Years' War • Friedrich Schiller, Translated by Rev. A. J. W. Morrison, M.A.
... into one of my usual fits, I should be buried before my real condition could be ascertained. I doubted the care, the fidelity of my dearest friends. I dreaded that, in some trance of more than customary duration, they might be prevailed upon to regard me as irrecoverable. I even went so far as to fear that, as I occasioned much trouble, they might be glad to consider any very protracted attack as sufficient excuse for getting rid of me altogether. It was in vain they endeavored to reassure me by the most solemn promises. I exacted the most sacred ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... sometimes troublesome, and he brought back a great cough, which, however, is much abated. I think him so much better, that I ventured to talk very freely to him upon his own state; and though I allowed him mended, I told him plainly that I was convinced his case would be irrecoverable, if he did not go abroad. At times he swears he will, if he falls back at all; at others he will not listen to it, but pleads the confusion of his affairs. I wish there is not another more insurmountable cause, the fury, who not only torments ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... swallow Sentiment-mongers State your difficulties, whenever you have any Studied and elaborate dress of the ugliest women in the world Sure guide is, he who has often gone the road which you want to Talk of natural affection is talking nonsense Nothing so precious as time, and so irrecoverable when lost Unguarded frankness Whatever is worth doing at all, is worth doing well Wrapped up and absorbed in their ...
— Widger's Quotations from Chesterfield's Letters to his Son • David Widger
... it, he should endeavour still to survive. I would quote the letter but I cannot find it—no doubt for the reason that all my correspondence is carefully filed on the most modern filing system. I did not read The Casement for a long time. Why should I consecrate three irrecoverable hours or so to the work of a man as to whom I had no credentials? Why should I thus introduce foreign matter into the delicate cogwheels of my programme of reading? However, after a delay of weeks, ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton
... sang well, and the evening went off very happily. After the performance we were invited by Mr. Harris to a supper of some thirty persons, where we were the special guests. The manager toasted me, and I said something,—I trust appropriate; but just what I said is as irrecoverable as the orations of Demosthenes on the seashore, or the sermons of St. Francis to the beasts ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... when done, they are done with. They pass, as far as outward seeming goes, and their distinguishable consequences in the outward world, in the vast majority of cases, soon apparently pass. All seems evanescent and irrecoverable as last year's snows, or the water that flowed over the cataract a century ago. But there is nothing more certain than that all which we do leaves indelible traces on ourselves. The mightiest effect of a man's actions is on his own inward life. The recoil of the gun is more powerful than ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... next driving, having now acquired the knack, I rendered several more denizens of the air the hors de combats, though—either on account of their great ingenuity in running out of the radius, or creeping into holes, etc., or else the stupidity of the retrieving dogs—their corpses remained irrecoverable. ...
— Baboo Jabberjee, B.A. • F. Anstey
... about to enumerate all the Works of this worthy Gentleman, I should run my self into an irrecoverable Labyrinth. Nor is he less happy in his Verse than Prose, which for Elegancy of Language, and quickness of Invention, deservedly entitles him to the honour of a Poet; and therefore I shall forbear to write more of him, since what ...
— The Lives of the Most Famous English Poets (1687) • William Winstanley
... as long as the story itself, and that has long since fallen by the wayside. Perhaps that is because the story is too clear to need the "Moral." Here are a few sentences from it: "The present is all we have to manage: the past is irrecoverable; the future is uncertain; nor is it fair to burden one moment with the weight of the next. Sufficient unto the moment is the trouble thereof. . . . One moment comes laden with its own little burden, then flies, and is succeeded by another no heavier than the last; if one could be sustained, ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... forbearance by the demonstration of iniquity which Othello in his agony demands of Iago, declared loudly his purpose of divulging every thing to the king?—was it, we say, the fury or the shrewdness of despair which then drew from the lady a reply of outrageous and coarse effrontery? The irrecoverable words being spoken, we think, with M. Mignet, that "the ruin of Escovedo, whose indiscretions were becoming formidable, was doubtless sworn, from this moment, by Perez and ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 366, April, 1846 • Various
... breakfast, loaded with occupations for the day, I was lifted off my feet, and deposited in a drift, and all my things, writing book and letter included, were carried in different directions. Some, including a valuable photograph, were irrecoverable. The writing book was found, some hours afterwards, under three ...
— A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains • Isabella L. Bird
... the hostess' eye involuntarily rested longer on the slim Natasha. She looked at her and gave her alone a special smile in addition to her usual smile as hostess. Looking at her she may have recalled the golden, irrecoverable days of her own girlhood and her own first ball. The host also followed Natasha with his eyes and asked the count ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... dreams remoulds itself continually the trance in my sister's chamber,—the blue heavens, the everlasting vault, the soaring billows, the throne steeped in the thought (but not the sight) of 'Who might sit thereon;' the flight, the pursuit, the irrecoverable steps of my return to earth. Once more the funeral procession gathers; the priest, in his white surplice, stands waiting with a book by the side of an open grave; the sacristan is waiting with his shovel; the coffin has sunk; the dust to dust has descended. ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... the faculties of sense, locomotion, construction, as, for instance, webs, hives, nests, &c. Then the functions; as of instinct, memory, fancy, instinctive intelligence, or understanding, as it exists in the most intelligent animals. Thus the idea (henceforward no more idea, but irrecoverable by its own fatal act) commences the process of its own transmutation, as 'substans in substantiato', as the 'enteleche', or the 'vis formatrix', and it finishes the process as 'substans e substantiato', that is, ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge
... in Men is Courage, and in Women Chastity. If a Man loses his Honour in one Rencounter, it is not impossible for him to regain it in another; a Slip in a Woman's Honour is irrecoverable. I can give no Reason for fixing the Point of Honour to these two Qualities, unless it be that each Sex sets the greatest Value on the Qualification which renders them the most amiable in the Eyes of the contrary Sex. Had Men chosen for themselves, without Regard to the Opinions of the Fair Sex, ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... man are numbered, and his life-time short and irrecoverable; but to increase his renown by the quality of his acts, this is ...
— Georges Guynemer - Knight of the Air • Henry Bordeaux
... chest voice with all the might of his colossal organ, it was all over with the fame of all his predecessors. Nourrit, till then the favourite of the Parisians, a distinguished tenor singer, recognized the rival's power. His day was over, and in despair over his lost and irrecoverable glory, he flung himself from an upper window upon the pavement, and so made an end of his life. Duprez may justly be considered one of the greatest dramatic singers of our time, and the main features of his method soon spread themselves all over Europe. After hearing of ...
— The Mechanism of the Human Voice • Emil Behnke
... poignard, as if about to make his purpose good. Robespierre still struggled hard to obtain audience, but the tribune was adjudged to Barrere; and the part taken against the fallen dictator by that versatile and self-interested statesman, was the most absolute sign that his overthrow was irrecoverable. Torrents of invective were now uttered from every quarter of the hall, against him whose single word was wont to hush ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... regret, with the editor, that compositions of such interest and antiquity should be now irrecoverable? But it is the nature of popular poetry, as of popular applause, perpetually to shift with the objects of the time; and it is the frail chance of recovering some old manuscript, which can alone gratify ...
— Minstrelsy of the Scottish border (3rd ed) (1 of 3) • Walter Scott
... that shop debts were pronounced after a certain date irrecoverable at law. The effect would be that no one would be able to ask credit at a shop except where he was well known, and for trifling sums. All prices would sink to the scale of cash prices. The dishonourable system of fashionable ...
— Personal Recollections of Birmingham and Birmingham Men • E. Edwards
... year of our Lord, 1609, on a Saturday morning, the five-and-twentieth day of March, old style, did that "worthy and irrecoverable discoverer (as he has justly been called), Master Henry Hudson," set sail from Holland in a stout vessel called the Half Moon, being employed by the Dutch East India Company to seek ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... the whole levelled to the ground. The very fields were as far as possible injured—the intention of Edward being, as Fordun says, to blot out the people, and to reduce the land to a condition of irrecoverable devastation, and thus to stamp out for ever ...
— In Freedom's Cause • G. A. Henty
... ruined tabernacles lie at no great distance from the complete one, which has just been described. One of them is so injured that its plan is irrecoverable; but M. Renan carefully collected and measured the fragments of the other, and thus obtained sufficient data for its restoration.[619] It was, he believes, a monolithic chamber, with a roof slightly vaulted, like that of the Maabed, having a length ...
— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson
... Faith and Word, betraying the Truth and Tyrannically contrary to all Law and Justice, destroying them and the whole Country, inflicting on them great Injuries and Losses, were more reay to prepare themselves for Death, than still to fall at once into such great and irrecoverable Miseries. ...
— A Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies • Bartolome de las Casas
... has an ear for harmony and a heart for feeling must be touched! There is a desponding melancholy in the run of the last line! an air of tender regret in the addition of "quite away!" a something so expressive of irrecoverable loss! so forcibly intimating the Ad nunquam reditura! "They never can return!" in short, such an union of sound and sense as we rarely, if ever, meet with in any author, ancient or modern. Our feelings are all ...
— English Satires • Various
... third party, and miserable outsider? No; the best that could happen to him was now happening; let the coming day once be past, let a very few weeks have run their course, and the parting would have lost its sting; he would be able to look back, regretfully no doubt, but as on something done with, irrecoverable. Then he would apply himself to his work with all his heart; and it would be possible to think of her, and remember her, calmly. If once an end were put to these daily chances of seeing her, which perpetually fanned his unrest, ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... persecution,' said Masham. 'Now, my opinion of Cadurcis is, that his egotism, or selfism, or whatever you may style it, will ultimately preserve him from any very fatal, from any irrecoverable excesses. He is of the world, worldly. All his works, all his conduct, tend only to astonish mankind. He is not prompted by any visionary ideas of ameliorating his species. The instinct of self-preservation will ...
— Venetia • Benjamin Disraeli
... summons, they would be in danger of being besieged, and compelled to submit by force, since their Duke was defeated, and his dominions utterly unprovided with means of defence, upon account of their irrecoverable losses in the three late battles. The lords returned answer by their speaker Monsieur John de la Vaquerie that the county of Artois belonged to the lady of Burgundy, daughter of Duke Charles, and descended to her in a right line from Margaret, Countess ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 8 - The Later Renaissance: From Gutenberg To The Reformation • Editor-in-Chief: Rossiter Johnson
... temperance, and equity have been preserved, all strength, and peace, and joy have been preserved also;—that where lying, lasciviousness, and covetousness have been practised, there has followed an infallible, and, for centuries, irrecoverable ruin. And you know, lastly, that the observance of this common law of righteousness, commending itself to all the pure instincts of men, and fruitful in their temporal good, is by the religious writers of every nation, and chiefly in this venerated Scripture of ours, connected with some distinct ...
— Time and Tide by Weare and Tyne - Twenty-five Letters to a Working Man of Sunderland on the Laws of Work • John Ruskin
... for farther use) to keep hold of their tails, that they may be withdrawn as soon as they begin to shew signs of uneasiness; but if the air be thoroughly noxious, and the mouse happens to get a full inspiration, it will be impossible to do this before it be absolutely irrecoverable. ...
— Experiments and Observations on Different Kinds of Air • Joseph Priestley
... the coveted garb, on the afternoon of their admission took a country walk in it, together flaunting their new finery. But, the day being gusty, on their return across the bridge, a puff of wind caught the biretta of one and blew it into the river. The loss was irrecoverable, since neither could swim. The poor fellow looked at his friend. His friend looked at him. 'Between us two,' he said, 'it is all or naught,' and cast his own cap to float and sink with the other ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... herself by botanising among the bushes, and the expedition ended in transports of tenderness and effusion."[101] This is one of such days as the soul turns back to when the misery that stalks after us all has seized it, and a man is left to the sting and smart of the memory of irrecoverable things. ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... by, over, passed away, bygone, foregone; elapsed, lapsed, preterlapsed^, expired, no more, run out, blown over, has-been, that has been, extinct, antediluvian, antebellum, never to return, gone with the wind, exploded, forgotten, irrecoverable; obsolete &c (old) 124. former, pristine, quondam, ci-devant [Fr.], late; ancestral. foregoing; last, latter; recent, over night; preterperfect^, preterpluperfect^. looking back &c v.; retrospective, retroactive; archaeological ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... Another unrecovered and possibly irrecoverable fragment about Yuba Bill, I recall in a story about his visiting a lad who had once been his protege in the Wild West, and who had since become a distinguished literary man in Boston. Yuba Bill visits him, and on finding him ...
— Varied Types • G. K. Chesterton
... immediately. For three hundred years the trees have been cut down faster than they could grow, first to clear the land, next for fuel, then for lumber and lastly for paper. Consequently we are within sight of a shortage of wood as we are of coal and oil. But the coal and oil are irrecoverable while the wood may be regrown, though it would require another three hundred years and more to grow some of the trees we have cut down. For fuel a pound of coal is about equal to two pounds of wood, and a pound of gasoline to three pounds of wood in heating value, so there would be a great loss in ...
— Creative Chemistry - Descriptive of Recent Achievements in the Chemical Industries • Edwin E. Slosson
... done? Nothing! I could only look idly at the receding boat with reeling brain. The full blast of the wind was upon her, and helping the driving action of the billows. I perceived that she was irrecoverable, and yet I stood watching, watching, watching! my head burning with the surgings of twenty impracticable schemes. I cast myself down and wept, stood up afresh and looked at the boat, then cried to God for help and mercy, bringing ...
— The Frozen Pirate • W. Clark Russell
... stretches of sandy country; and in the autumn and winter months when they were wild-fowling in the great level flooded lands where the geese and all wild-fowl came in clouds and myriads. And now he laughed and now his eyes grew moist at the recollection of the irrecoverable glad days. ...
— Dead Man's Plack and an Old Thorn • William Henry Hudson
... dedication, we have seen, was so favourably accepted by Rochester, that the reception called forth a second tribute of thanks from the poet to the patron. But at this point, the interchange of kindness and of civility received a sudden and irrecoverable check. This was partly owing to Rochester's fickle and jealous temper, which induced him alternately to raise and depress the men of parts whom he loved to patronise; so that no one should ever become independent of his favour, or so rooted in the public opinion as to be beyond the ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott
... ruth toward earth. Men and women of whom the world was not worthy—at the hands of those old painters they have received the divine grace, the dovelike simplicity, whereof Italians in the fourteenth century possessed the irrecoverable secret. Each face is a poem; the counterpart in painting to a chapter from the Fioretti di San Francesco. Over the whole scene—in the architecture, in the frescoes, in the coloured windows, in the gloom, on the people, in the ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... silence. But presently there was a stifled sob in the darkness; and Hester knew that Nelly was thinking of those irrecoverable weeks of which Bridget's cruelty had ...
— Missing • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... had been gradually declining until nothing was left but a formal repetition of conventional outlines. The so-called Romanesque and Byzantine styles were but the dotage of second childhood, fumbling with the methods and materials of an irrecoverable past. It is true, indeed, that unknown mediaeval carvers had shown an instinct for the beautiful as well as great fertility of grotesque invention. The facades of Lombard churches are covered with fanciful and sometimes forcibly dramatic groups of animals and men in combat; and contemporaneously ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... that nerve trunks may escape severe or irrecoverable injury by lateral displacement. The mere fact that the trunk itself may be perforated by a slit in its long axis would suggest the possibility of displacement of the whole structure, and this no doubt occurred with some frequency. Displacement would naturally ...
— Surgical Experiences in South Africa, 1899-1900 • George Henry Makins
... ten thousand pounds in the Three per Cents., of which Sir Ulick had obtained possession a month ago, that was irrecoverable, if his bank should break—"If."—The clerks all spoke with due caution; but their opinion was sufficiently plain. They were honestly indignant against the guardian who had thus attempted ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. IX - [Contents: Harrington; Thoughts on Bores; Ormond] • Maria Edgeworth
... tendencies, at heart what I value most, that which is most native and dearest to me is the simple undisturbed life, full of friendliness, piety and humble amusements into which I was born. What this life was, as reflected in a happy childhood, a neglected youth and idealised by its irrecoverable loss the following ...
— Confessions of Boyhood • John Albee
... peril. It was on this occasion that he explained away, or put a new interpretation on, his action with regard to the opium surrendered for destruction, which most of the merchants thought represented an irrecoverable loss. It will be best to give the precise words used in his notice of the 22d of May, 1839. "Acting on behalf of her Majesty's Government in a momentous emergency, he has, in the first place, to signify that the demand ...
— China • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... and who administered to her the last comforts of his function, declares, that the small-pox with which she was seized, was of the confluent sort; and that the gentleman of the faculty, who attended her, had pronounced her irrecoverable ...
— Apparitions; or, The Mystery of Ghosts, Hobgoblins, and Haunted Houses Developed • Joseph Taylor
... God:—all this violence, arbitrariness, severity, dreadfulness, and unreasonableness, has proved itself the disciplinary means whereby the European spirit has attained its strength, its remorseless curiosity and subtle mobility; granted also that much irrecoverable strength and spirit had to be stifled, suffocated, and spoilt in the process (for here, as everywhere, "nature" shows herself as she is, in all her extravagant and INDIFFERENT magnificence, which is shocking, but nevertheless noble). That for centuries European thinkers only thought in ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... taken away by Pareea's people, very probably in revenge for the blow that had been given him, and that it had been broken up the next day. The arms of the marines which we had also demanded, he assured us had been carried off by the common people, and were irrecoverable; the bones of the chief alone having been preserved, as belonging to Terreeoboo ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 16 • Robert Kerr
... Jeremiah is here unmistakable; and (as I have said) a Divine answer to his expostulations must have been given him, though now perhaps irrecoverable from among the expansions which it has undergone, verses 26-44. Two things are of interest: the practical carefulness of this great idealist, and the fact that the material basis of his hope for his country's freedom and prosperity was his own right to a bit of property in land. ...
— Jeremiah • George Adam Smith
... composition so laden with formidable memories—begun it without thinking and without apprehension—showed how far I had lost my self-control. Not that the silver sounds which shimmered from the Broadwood under my feverish hands filled me with sentimental regrets for an irrecoverable past. No! But I saw the victim of Diaz as though I had never been she. She was for me one of those ladies that have loved and are dead. The simplicity of her mind and her situation, compared with my mind and my situation, seemed unbearably piteous to me. Why, ...
— Sacred And Profane Love • E. Arnold Bennett
... knew well that her age was plainly written beneath her eyes, at the corners of her mouth, under her chin, at the roots of the hair above her ears, and in her cold, confident gaze. Youth! She would have forfeited all her experience, her knowledge, and the charm of her maturity, to recover the irrecoverable! She envied the woman by her side, and envied her because she was lightsome, thoughtless, kittenish, simple, unripe. For a brief moment, vainly coveting the ineffable charm of Ethel's immaturity, she had a sharp perception ...
— Leonora • Arnold Bennett |
