"Incomprehensible" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... out and his arm stiffened but it seemed as though all the muscles of his back had grown stiff. He could not bend. It was strange. It was both ludicrous and incomprehensible. Perhaps he had grown stiff with cold ...
— Riders of the Silences • John Frederick
... authors, journalists, artists, and men of the world. She knew his nerveless nature, his laziness, his utter penury, his indifference and disgust for all things, and yet by the way she was now conducting herself she seemed inclined to marry him. She explained her conduct, incomprehensible to her friends, in various ways,—by ambition, by the dread she felt of a lonely old age; she wanted to confide her future to a superior man, to whom her fortune would be a stepping-stone, and thus increase her own importance ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... repealed, is a marvel which no one not acquainted with Mr. Sumner can comprehend. First of all, though he was learned, he was not a lawyer. He was impractical in the affairs of government to a degree that is incomprehensible even to those who knew him. He was in the Senate twenty-three years and the only mark that he left upon the statutes is an amendment to the law relating to naturalization by which Mongolians are excluded from citizenship. The object of his amendment was to save negroes from the ...
— Reminiscences of Sixty Years in Public Affairs, Vol. 2 • George S. Boutwell
... Nothing, to Mrs. Archer's mind, would have been more "undignified" than to force one's self on the notice of a "foreigner" to whom one had happened to render an accidental service. But Mrs. Carfry and her sister, to whom this point of view was unknown, and who would have found it utterly incomprehensible, felt themselves linked by an eternal gratitude to the "delightful Americans" who had been so kind at Botzen. With touching fidelity they seized every chance of meeting Mrs. Archer and Janey in the course of their continental travels, and displayed a supernatural acuteness ...
— The Age of Innocence • Edith Wharton
... over the binder carefully. The various reports were unsigned, but appeared to have been compiled by at least four or five persons—McAllen among them; his writing style was not difficult to recognize. Leaving out much that was incomprehensible or nearly so, Barney could still construe a fairly specific picture of the association project of which he was now an unscheduled and unwilling part. Selected plants and animals had been moved from Earth through the McAllen Tube to a world consisting ...
— Gone Fishing • James H. Schmitz
... "Most incomprehensible, too," he pursued. "No cause, apparently. But it might have been overlooked, perhaps, except for one thing. It wasn't known generally, but Fortescue had just perfected a successful electro-magnetic gun—powderless, smokeless, flashless, noiseless and of tremendous power. To-morrow he was to have ...
— The War Terror • Arthur B. Reeve
... of the two peoples respecting each other. Mason and Dixon's line separated two civilizations as markedly unlike as the peoples that confront each other on either side the Vistula or the Baltic Sea. The hierarchy not only seemed to love war for war's sake; they possessed that feudal facalty, so incomprehensible in the middle ages, the power of making those who suffered most by it believe in it too, and ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... filled them first with amazement, then with a doubt of his genuineness, as men are wont to suspect the sincerity of every great passion. His Spanish, too, became so mixed up with German that the better half of his statements remained incomprehensible. He tried to propitiate them by calling them hochwohlgeboren herren, which in itself sounded suspicious. When admonished sternly not to trifle he repeated his entreaties and protestations of loyalty and ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... most strike one in French people, are the good-breeding with which they listen, without even a smile, to the almost incomprehensible attempts at speaking French made by many strangers, and the quickness of apprehension with which they seize their meaning, and assist them ...
— The Idler in France • Marguerite Gardiner
... the few words which she had had with Victor early that morning before breakfast. She had asked him, not pointedly, but in a general way arising out of their talk, what he would think if in some way she completely puzzled him, and acted in a manner that was incomprehensible. And ...
— Daisy's Aunt • E. F. (Edward Frederic) Benson
... Unitarians with regard to the teachings of Jesus. "No one sees with greater pleasure than myself," he wrote, "the progress of reason in its advance toward rational Christianity. When we shall have done away with the incomprehensible jargon of the Trinitarian arithmetic, that three are one, and one are three; when we shall have knocked down the artificial scaffolding reared to mask from view the simple structure of Jesus; when, in short, ...
— Unitarianism in America • George Willis Cooke
... the sermon of an Orthodox divine. He kept this one ready in his memory of brass, to confound all who accused him of irreligion:—"Do we want to contemplate His power? We see it in the immensity of the creation. Do we want to contemplate His wisdom? We see it in the unchangeable order by which the incomprehensible whole is governed. Do we want to contemplate His mercy? We see it in His not withholding His abundance even from the unthankful. In fine, do we want to know what God is? Search not written books, but ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various
... 1: As Gregory of Nyssa says (De Occursu Dom.): "It seems that this precept of the Law was fulfilled in God incarnate alone in a special manner exclusively proper to Him. For He alone, whose conception was ineffable, and whose birth was incomprehensible, opened the virginal womb which had been closed to sexual union, in such a way that after birth the seal of chastity remained inviolate." Consequently the words "opening the womb" imply that nothing hitherto had entered or gone forth therefrom. Again, for ...
— Summa Theologica, Part III (Tertia Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... own way of thinking, which is not ours, and which is to us almost incomprehensible. They are most indirect in their thoughts and deeds—a characteristic which is purely racial, and which they themselves cannot appreciate, but which often shocks Europeans. For instance, one of the most palatial buildings in the Avenida Central ...
— Across Unknown South America • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... she thought vaguely. She felt sure, too, that it was he who had given Aunt Mary the green diamond long ago, though why he had never married her was past Mollie's power of understanding. Grown-up people did—and left undone—the most incomprehensible things. In the meantime she felt that she would like to give her aunt some sort of warning of the surprise in store, otherwise Aunt Mary might be too much surprised. Mollie herself hated with all her might and main showing her feelings before people—but how to ...
— The Happy Adventurers • Lydia Miller Middleton
... Harney had come was authentic; Charity had seen the letter from a New York publisher commissioning him to make a study of the eighteenth century houses in the less familiar districts of New England. But incomprehensible as the whole affair was to her, and hard as she found it to understand why he paused enchanted before certain neglected and paintless houses, while others, refurbished and "improved" by the local builder, did not ...
— Summer • Edith Wharton
... Although much of the conduct of the mutineers is easily understood with regard to the captain, the wholesale crime of thrusting so many innocent persons out to the mercy of the winds and waves, or to the death from hunger and thirst which they must have believed would inevitably overtake them, is incomprehensible. ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... telepathically communicating with another; the latter receives the impression, and externalises it, and so "sees a ghost," to use the popular expression. Some hallucinations are auditory i.e. sounds are heard which apparently do not correspond to any objective reality. Incomprehensible though it may appear, it may be possible for sounds, and very loud ones too, to be heard by one or more persons, the said sounds being purely hallucinatory, and not causing any disturbance in ...
— True Irish Ghost Stories • St John D Seymour
... only willingly, but even gladly loose my life, though I should be sorry that Christians should take it from me. Propose me anything out of this book, and require whether I believe it or no, and secure it never so incomprehensible to humane reason, I will subscribe it hand and heart, as knowing no demonstration can be stronger than this, God hath said so, therefore it is true. In other things I will take no man's libertie of judgment from him; neither shall any man take mine from me. I will think no man the worse man nor ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... mysteries—the primary law of creation! All things are the proximate effects of a balance of immutable powers—those powers are results of a PRIMORDIAL CAUSE,—while that CAUSE is inscrutable and incomprehensible to creatures possessing but a relative being, who live only in TIME and SPACE, and who feel and act merely by the IMPULSE of limited senses ...
— A Morning's Walk from London to Kew • Richard Phillips
... that as these machines—we speak only, of course, of really good machines—are made, not only with the object of saving labour, but material, the original cost of them is in a short time repaid. As regards the second objection, it seems incomprehensible that servants should not use with care and thoughtfulness machines, which not only save time and trouble, but greatly help ...
— Nelson's Home Comforts - Thirteenth Edition • Mary Hooper
... President's assignment under the law, and the still graver error of judgment in leaving such an important question open until the eve of battle, in the "hope that there would be no necessity for making this decision." This error seems incomprehensible when it is considered that it in effect nullified the President's selection of army and department commanders at the most important of all moments, the crisis of battle, by making these commanders subject to the orders of any general of older commission ...
— Forty-Six Years in the Army • John M. Schofield
... bills, of varying dates, sent in once, twice, three times, and invariably tossed aside and forgotten—a mode of proceeding incomprehensible to Maurice, who had never bought anything on credit in his life. And not because she was in want of money: there were plenty of gold pieces jingling loose in a drawer; but from an aversion, which was almost an ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... and their captives rang clearly upon the stones in the ominous breathless silence which greeted their appearance. The fallen Autocrat and his servants walked with downcast heads, like men in a dream, for to them it was a dream, this sudden and incomprehensible catastrophe which had overwhelmed them in the very hour of victory and on the threshold of the conquest of the world. Three days ago they had believed themselves conquerors, with the world at their feet; now they were being marched, guarded and in shackles, to ...
— The Angel of the Revolution - A Tale of the Coming Terror • George Griffith
... to say, until to-day! But this fore-noon, at the very hour we were at church witnessing the confirmation of the prince, whom you wish to be as a new tie between France and Prussia, this stipulation was violated in as incomprehensible as mortifying a manner. Four thousand men of Grenier's division have marched this morning from Brandenburg to Potsdam, and have tried forcibly—do you understand me, your excellency?—forcibly to occupy this city. The municipal authorities vainly endeavored to assure ...
— NAPOLEON AND BLUCHER • L. Muhlbach
... been written of their family vendettas and private blood feuds. Their system of ethics, which regards treachery and violence as virtues rather than vices, has produced a code of honour so strange and inconsistent, that it is incomprehensible to a logical mind. I have been told that if a white man could grasp it fully, and were to understand their mental impulses—if he knew, when it was their honour to stand by him, and when it was their honour to betray him; when they were bound to protect and when ...
— The Story of the Malakand Field Force • Sir Winston S. Churchill
... not abrogate or nullify the monarchy. But neither this nor any other measure of reform, however well adapted to circumstances and the character of the people, could ever have satisfied the Italianissimi, whose hatred of every existing institution was boundless as it was incomprehensible. The Holy Father solemnly declared that he decreed the measures in question for the good of his people, and under the eye of heaven. "They are such," he adds, at the conclusion of the document, motu proprio, "as to be ...
— Pius IX. And His Time • The Rev. AEneas MacDonell
... subject. His extended experience and intimate acquaintance with the use of arms had fully impressed him with its importance, and no man ever lived whose opinions upon this subject should carry greater weight. As incomprehensible as it may appear to persons accustomed to the use of fire-arms, recruits are very prone, before they have been drilled at target practice with ball cartridges, to place the ball below the powder in the piece. ...
— The Prairie Traveler - A Hand-book for Overland Expeditions • Randolph Marcy
... other meate dothe: but turneth the eater contrariwise into the nature of it selfe. And yet being eaten, that it is rapte into heauen, vnhurte or vntouched. Seuenthly that in so smalle a syse of breade and wine, the infinite, and incomprehensible Christe, God and manne shoulde be comprehended. Then, that one, and the self same bodye of Christe, at one very instaunte, shoulde be in many places, and of many menne receiued at ones, and in sondrye ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries - Vol. II • Richard Hakluyt
... not even, as Rousseau did with his human offspring, habitually take them to the Foundling Hospital—that is to say, in the case of literature, the anonymous press. He left them in MS., gave them away, and in some cases behaved to them in such an incomprehensible fashion that one wonders how they ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... white with the rush of Alpine torrents, or hidden in the early morning fog. Then, finding I would not sleep, and with an expression as if she had finally resolved upon some definite action, and with a face in which every line showed the sincerest confidence and trust,—as unexpected as it was incomprehensible ...
— A Gentleman Vagabond and Some Others • F. Hopkinson Smith
... being (if I may so speak) Mechanically produc'd, there is no pretence to derive it from I know not what incomprehensible Substantial Form, from which yet many would have us believe that Colours must flow; Nor does this Green, though a Real and Permanent, not a Phantastical and Vanid Colour, seem to be such an Inherent Quality as they would have it, since not only each ...
— Experiments and Considerations Touching Colours (1664) • Robert Boyle
... incomprehensible summons has just reached me, and I obey, thereby proving my right to my name of Faith. I shall be with you almost as soon as this letter. I cannot help feeling anxious, as well as curious. I have money enough, and ...
— Ruth • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... yourself: you are a true and chivalrous knight to dread it for her. But now, candidly, how is it you cannot condescend to a little management? Listen to an old friend. You are too lordly. No lover can afford to be incomprehensible for half an hour. Stoop a little. Sermonizings are not to be thought of. You can govern unseen. You are to know that I am one who disbelieves in philosophy in love. I admire the look of it, I give no credit to the assumption. I rather like lovers ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... whose face an incomprehensible expression had passed more than once during the reading; "it will all come right. We ...
— Bay State Monthly, Volume II. No. 4, January, 1885 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... and attempted to shoot Stephen, with the intention of obtaining possession of the whole of the gold, the latter should have nursed him back to life instead of finishing him at once, seemed to them an incomprehensible piece of folly. ...
— With Cochrane the Dauntless • George Alfred Henty
... therefore absurd to ascribe to Him mental faculties and affections comparable in the remotest degree to those of men; He is in no way an object of cognition; He is [Greek] and [Greek] [33]—without quality and incomprehensible. That is to say the Alexandrian Jew of the first century had anticipated the reasonings of Hamilton and Mansell in the nineteenth, and, for him, God is the Unknowable in the sense in which that term is used by Mr. Herbert Spencer. Moreover, Philo's definition ...
— The Evolution of Theology: An Anthropological Study - Essay #8 from "Science and Hebrew Tradition" • Thomas Henry Huxley
... speech well. At that moment, the ornate Volga pulled up to a smooth stop before a large, richly decorated building that glowed brightly under the electric lights of a large sign. The sign said something incomprehensible in Cyrillic script. Under it, the building entrance was gilded and carved into fantastic rococo shapes. Malone stared at the sign, and was about to ask a question about it ...
— Supermind • Gordon Randall Garrett
... is as incomprehensible to me as if you'd tattooed yourself; but," he added philosophically, clasping his hands behind his head and staring up into the sky, "every man knows his own fun. There's a friend of mine who ...
— Nancy Stair - A Novel • Elinor Macartney Lane
... Heralds have been announcing his advent in language incomprehensible to man, but which woman understands as she does her alphabet. A dainty basket, filled with mysteries half hidden, half displayed; soft little garments, folded away in ranks and files; here delicate lace and cambric; there down and feathers and luxury. ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... the Alexandrian Mystics. Reason is the offspring of God, a ray of the Eternal Reason, but it is not to be identified with God. Reason attains to the Absolute Being indirectly, and by the interposition of truth. Absolute truth is an attribute and a manifestation of God. "Truth is incomprehensible without God, and God is incomprehensible without truth. Truth is placed between human intelligence, and the supreme intelligence as a kind of mediator."[68] Incapable of contemplating God face to face, reason adores God in the truth ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... Decalogue, shocked me. Why all the very very early pictures of the Virgin, and many of our blessed Saviour himself, done in the first ages of Christianity should be black, or at least tawny, is to me wholly incomprehensible, nor could I ever yet obtain an explanation of its cause from men of ...
— Observations and Reflections Made in the Course of a Journey through France, Italy, and Germany, Vol. I • Hester Lynch Piozzi
... Incomprehensible words of command are heard. The steamer starts, the devils give a creak.... "A-va-va!" shouts the captain; at the bows a bell is rung, on the black deck there are sounds of running, knocking, cries of anxiety.... ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... away a mist which had settled there, continued, "I remember now, Hester told me of the children; but one, she said, was a stepchild—that was the boy, wasn't it?" and her wild, black eyes had in them a look of unutterable anxiety, wholly incomprehensible to the peddler, who, instead of answering her question said: "What ails you woman? Your face is as white ...
— Maggie Miller • Mary J. Holmes
... had her incomprehensible moments," observed Hazen, with an ambiguous lift of his shoulders; then, as Ransom made an impatient move, added with steady composure: "I have candidly answered all your questions whether agreeable or otherwise, and the fact that I am as ...
— The Chief Legatee • Anna Katharine Green
... Marescotti's mission, but in order to set certain marriage-bells ringing. These marriage-bells were, it seemed, to be forever mute. Still, having demanded an explanation of what he conceived to be the count's most incomprehensible conduct, he was bound, he felt, in common courtesy, to listen to all he had ...
— The Italians • Frances Elliot
... it through again, for sheer enjoyment of those beautiful, incomprehensible words that disinherited her. How lovely of Uncle Fred! she thought. Of course, he'd forgiven Billy; who wouldn't? What beautiful language Uncle Fred used! quite prayer-booky, she termed ...
— The Eagle's Shadow • James Branch Cabell
... Antwerp against the "Spanish Fury" but two years before. They heard only the instigations of his enemies; they remembered only that he was the hated Granvelle's brother; they believed only that there was a plot by which, in some utterly incomprehensible manner, they were all to be immediately engaged in cutting each others throats and throwing each other out of the windows, as had been done half a dozen years before in Paris. Such was the mischievous intention ascribed to a petition, which Champagny and his ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... inhabitant of the New England States than this: 'What I do not understand, I reject as worthless and false;' so said one of the most learned men of Boston to me. 'Why occupy the mind with that which is incomprehensible? Have we not enough of that which appears clear and plain around us?' ... The greater part of the Bostonians, including every one of wealth, talents, and learning, have adopted this doctrine."—Arfwedson, ...
— The Conquest of Canada (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Warburton
... suddenly glad he was dead, gone for ever. She almost hated him once more. It was dreadful to live with people whom she did not understand, who knew things they kept secret, whose minds and thoughts and motives were incomprehensible to her, who believed horrible untrue things of her. It had been a fixed idea with Fay during her husband's lifetime that he believed horrible untrue things about her. But what they were she would have found it ...
— Prisoners - Fast Bound In Misery And Iron • Mary Cholmondeley
... Pleyel, and played Beethoven's last quartettes there. But these performances only attracted a small number of artists;[236] and so far as the general public was concerned the Societe des derniers quartuors de Beethoven had the reputation for devoting itself to a singular and incomprehensible kind of music that had been written ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland
... had hardly begun to grow before it was plucked hastily up by the roots again. The plantations of Mary's reign, and the still larger operations carried on in that of her sister, awakened a deep-seated feeling of distrust, a rooted belief in the law as a mysterious and incomprehensible instrument invented solely for the perpetration of injustice, a belief which is certainly not wholly extinguished even in ...
— The Story Of Ireland • Emily Lawless
... crawled up to the crest again, under cover of a low patch of juniper scrub. Confidently he peered through the scrub, his rifle ready. But his face grew black with bitter disappointment. The capricious beasts had gone. Seized by one of their incomprehensible vagaries—Pete was certain that he had not alarmed them—they were now far out on the white ...
— The Backwoodsmen • Charles G. D. Roberts
... to that effect. And even if that was so, it did not explain the flight of the prisoner. That still remained a mystery. Amongst twenty theories which sought to explain it, not one was satisfactory. Of the escape itself, there was no doubt; an escape that was incomprehensible, sensational, in which the public, as well as the officers of the law, could detect a carefully prepared plan, a combination of circumstances marvelously dove-tailed, whereof the denouement fully justified the confident prediction of Arsene Lupin: "I shall ...
— The Extraordinary Adventures of Arsene Lupin, Gentleman-Burglar • Maurice Leblanc
... said I, as I conned over the various addresses on this incomprehensible cover, "are you sure this ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Complete • Charles James Lever (1806-1872)
... Governor Gallman had performed his excellent and truly wonderful work among the Ifugaos, this scramble would have become a fight in which somebody would have lost his life. That such a thing could take place without danger was incomprehensible to the old women of Kiangan, who doubtless remembered sons or husbands, brothers or cousins, who had lost their lives in such an affair. With the memory of these old times in their minds they caught me by the ...
— The Head Hunters of Northern Luzon From Ifugao to Kalinga • Cornelis De Witt Willcox
... "It's incomprehensible," resumes Adolphe. "Somebody must have paid Chodoreille five or six hundred francs to insert it; or else it's the production of a blue-stocking in high society who has promised to invite Madame Chodoreille to her house; or perhaps it's the work ...
— Petty Troubles of Married Life, Second Part • Honore de Balzac
... invisible to the human eye. Suffice it to say, then, that it had an average effective surface temperature of about fifteen thousand degrees absolute—two and one-half times as hot as the sun of Tellus—and that it was radiating every frequency possible to that incomprehensible temperature, and let it go ...
— The Vortex Blaster • Edward Elmer Smith
... her mother's race—in which the love of solitude is almost an idiosyncrasy. But with her this forest-ranging is almost a new practice: only for a month or so has she been indulging in this romantic habit—so incomprehensible to the home-loving Lilian. Her father puts no check upon such inclinations: on the contrary, he encourages them, as if proud of his daughter's penchant for the chase. Though purely a white man, his nature has been Indianised by the habits of his life: and in his eyes, the chase is the ...
— The Wild Huntress - Love in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... breathing men. His success in this respect is the more striking because he began by offering us mere pasteboard heroes of the most conventional type. The male characters in his early books were, in fact, shuttle-cocks to be tossed hither and thither by the mysterious contradictions, the incomprehensible inconsistencies, of his heroines, whose scheme of existence was the indulgence of every whim, and whose notion of logic was that one paradox must educe another still more startling. Having finally made up his mind as to the insoluble nature of the female problem, he seems inclined ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, October 1885 • Various
... their enemies and smarting from continual Sophomoric oppression, had swarmed to the front like drilled collegians and given the arrogant foe the first serious check of the year. Therefore the tall Gothic windows which lined one side of the corridor looked down upon as incomprehensible and enjoyable a tumult as could mark the steps of advanced education. The Seniors and juniors cheered themselves ill. Long freed from the joy of such meetings, their only means for this kind of recreation was to involve the lower classes, and they had never ...
— Active Service • Stephen Crane
... infested his body were the forerunners of the human race. This sort of stuff, however, could only appeal to the illiterate; for intellectual and educated persons something more was required. And so it came about that a system, based originally upon the quite incomprehensible Book of Changes, generally regarded as the oldest portion of the Confucian Canon, was gradually elaborated and brought to a finite state during the eleventh and twelfth centuries of our era. According to this system, there ...
— The Civilization Of China • Herbert A. Giles
... wonderful revelation! It was the Spirit of God shining through the Man. And this spirit was a substance and a form. And what was its form?—that of a man, with a face radiant as the sun. Now know I how to think of God. He is no longer a vague, incomprehensible existence; an ether floating in space. But He is a living, breathing human form, a Man! in whose image and likeness we were created. Oh, how I thank God that He has revealed this to me! Now, I know what manner of Being I pray to; and like as the apostles saw Him, ...
— Words of Cheer for the Tempted, the Toiling, and the Sorrowing • T. S. Arthur
... Whistler, on Montaigne or Fielding, she was stimulated to know them. One day he sent her Whitman's Leaves of Grass, which he had picked up in New York on his way to England. This startled her. She had never heard of Whitman. To her he seemed coarse, incomprehensible, ungentlemanly. She could not understand how Gaston could say beautiful things about Montaigne and about Whitman too. She had no conception how he had in him the strain of that first Sir Gaston Belward, and was also the ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... incomprehensible machine is man! Who can endure toil, famine, stripes, imprisonment, and death itself, in vindication of his own liberty, and the next moment be deaf to all those motives, whose power supported him through his trial, and inflict on his fellow-men a bondage, ...
— Clotel; or, The President's Daughter • William Wells Brown
... suffereth not our feet to slide, rescuing me from perils, sicknesses, poverty, bondage, public shame, evil chances; keeping me from perishing in my sins, and waiting patiently for my full conversion. Glory be to Thee, O Lord, glory to Thee, for Thine incomprehensible and unimaginable goodness toward me of all sinners far and away the most unworthy. The voices and the concert of voices of angels and men be to Thee; the concert of all thy saints in heaven and of all Thy creatures ...
— Bunyan Characters - Third Series - The Holy War • Alexander Whyte
... knowledge upon a variety of subjects, without sitting down to read; and thus he may form habits of attention and application, which will be associated with pleasure. When he returns to books, he will find that he understands a variety of things in them which before appeared incomprehensible; they will "give him back the image of his mind," and he will like them ...
— Practical Education, Volume I • Maria Edgeworth
... well as the criminal law, has nothing to do with this question; it is purely a matter of the nature of state police which is to be solved by way of a special agreement. The reserved attitude of Serbia is therefore incomprehensible and on account of its vague general form it would ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume I (of 8) - Introductions; Special Articles; Causes of War; Diplomatic and State Papers • Various
... wandered through the corridor, and entered apartment after apartment, and found no one to address. It was nine o'clock in the morning, yet the master and mistress of the house had not left their room, and not a domestic was at his post. It was quite incomprehensible. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 53, No. 331, May, 1843 • Various
... the material is directed toward non-medical "family" members, but many passages are obviously copied from medical textbooks. The following glossary of unfamiliar (to me) terms is quite lengthy and does not include incomprehensible (to me) medical terms and many words and names I could not find in several reference books. The book's own 16 page ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... modest because they are so very common, because they are constantly being repeated in their noble monotony and springing up from every side, numberless as the essential actions of our daily life; and glorious because before this war they seemed so rare and almost legendary and incomprehensible. ...
— The Wrack of the Storm • Maurice Maeterlinck
... done what it was deemed impossible to do,—what even at the time it was thought unwise and unstrategic to do,—who had held a weak position, of apparently no importance, under the mandate of an incomprehensible order from his superior, which at best asked only for a sacrifice and was rewarded with a victory. He had decimated his brigade, but the wounded and dying had cheered him as he passed, and the survivors had pursued the enemy until the bugle called them back. For such a record he looked ...
— Clarence • Bret Harte
... curious," he replied; "in my case it is incomprehensible. I possess a diploma for modern languages. I won my scholarship purely on the strength of my French and German. The correctness of my construction, the purity of my pronunciation, was considered at my college to be quite remarkable. Yet, when I come abroad hardly ...
— Three Men on the Bummel • Jerome K. Jerome
... Scriptures. It was a grand idea thus to preserve indelibly on stone the whole Burmese Bible. Here it is for all time. Peep inside one and you will see the funny-looking Burmese writing, which all runs on without being divided up into words, and looks consequently so incomprehensible to us. ...
— Round the Wonderful World • G. E. Mitton
... Locke's Constitution for North Carolina, and Jeremy Bentham's conundrums on Legislation, to speak reverently of what we cannot speak irreverently of, a truly great and incomprehensible mind, whose thoughts are problems, and whose words—when they ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 97, November, 1865 • Various
... America, that I was to be very happy, and that I was to be much upon the sea, predictions which, in consideration of an uneasy stomach, I can scarcely think agreeable with one another. Two incidents alone relieved the dead level of idiocy and incomprehensible gabble. The first was the comical announcement that "when I drew fish to the Marquis of Bute, I should take care of my sweetheart," from which I deduce the fact that at some period of my life I shall drive a fishmonger's cart. The second, in the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of terror passed over the Indian's features as memory returned. He sprang to his feet, looking wildly round and saw Garman. Then he cowered, shrinking together as if striving to sink into the ground, to return to unconsciousness, terrified by some overwhelming, incomprehensible horror. ...
— The Plunderer • Henry Oyen
... dupe and traitor in one. Let a man be as great a fool as he likes, so that he does not set a bad example. Fools need only be civil, and in consideration thereof they may aim at being the basis of monarchies. The narrowness of Clancharlie's mind was incomprehensible. His eyes were still dazzled by the phantasmagoria of the revolution. He had allowed himself to be taken in by the republic—yes; and cast out. He was an affront to his country. The attitude he assumed was downright felony. Absence was an insult. He held aloof from the ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... authoritative tone; "I am your providence, am I not, dearest? Fate made me love you—fondly, hopelessly, as I thought. Yesterday you seemed as far away from me as those pale stars, shining up yonder—as incomprehensible as that faint silvery mist above the rising moon—and to-night ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... her blood and distorted her perceptions. Transparent frankness was incomprehensible to her, and it appealed to her romantic imagination that the King of France should come like the hero of some wonder-tale disguised as his own envoy extraordinary to see and woo ...
— Romance of Roman Villas - (The Renaissance) • Elizabeth W. (Elizbeth Williams) Champney
... outraged feeling of a parent, which says that it seems somehow wrong, almost indecent, for offspring to feel passion. It had been all right for her and her generation, but incomprehensible in her own parents, and now it was equally so when she saw it beginning to work out in her children. She supposed vaguely, confronted by the fact that the race went on multiplying, that everyone might feel like that about other ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... was possible. As the moments lessened, a restlessness and fear almost beyond the average assailed me. It was a day of winter east wind, and I had now for some time entered into that dreary fellowship with the winds and their changes, so little known, so incomprehensible to the healthy. The north and east owned a terrific influence, making all pain more poignant, all sorrow sadder. The south could calm, the west sometimes cheer: unless, indeed, they brought on their wings the burden of ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... created spirits are too insignificant to raise the glory of thy works! We lose ourselves in their immensity. To tell them one must resemble thyself on infinity. Humbly contented, I remain in my own prescribed circle. Incomprehensible Being! thy resplendent glories blind the presuming eye of man! and He from whom the earth receives its being, needs not the ...
— Translations of German Poetry in American Magazines 1741-1810 • Edward Ziegler Davis
... moment a note from him was handed to her: "Your majesty will have learned that the king refused your grant. It was incomprehensible, and I retired from ...
— The Queen's Necklace • Alexandre Dumas pere
... rationality a participator in eternal truth. A substantial justice was thus done both to the conditions and to the functions of human life, although, for want of a natural history inspired by mechanical ideas, this dualism remained somewhat baffling and incomprehensible in its basis. Aristotle, being a true philosopher and pupil of experience, ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... remained almost untouched and when a celluloid ball bounced on the top of my head I did not scream "Whoopee! Bullseye!" as my American neighbors did or "Voila! Touche!" like the French. There were plenty of Americans and English there, and they seemed to be having a good time, but their good time was incomprehensible to me. This was "gay Paris," of course, but somehow the gaiety seemed forced and artificial and silly, except to the proprietors of L'Abbaye. If I had been getting the price for food and liquids which they received I might, ...
— Kent Knowles: Quahaug • Joseph C. Lincoln
... terminus technicus for religious allegory. All religions have their mysteries. In reality, a mystery is a palpably absurd dogma which conceals in itself a lofty truth, which by itself would be absolutely incomprehensible to the ordinary intelligence of the raw masses. The masses accept it in this disguise on trust and faith, without allowing themselves to be led astray by its absurdity, which is palpable to them; and thereby they participate in the kernel of the matter ...
— Essays of Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... at old Matthew before, he could only stare now. That the calm, sensible old man should fall into so extraordinary a delusion, was incomprehensible. He might have believed it of Deerham in general, but not of ...
— Verner's Pride • Mrs. Henry Wood
... outcast. Sinners did wrong because they enjoyed the sin; but she had never been vicious, or even selfishly anxious for pleasure. Pleasure! She had never cared for that sort of thing. Girls of her own age used to talk to her about it, and what they said was almost incomprehensible. She had never had such ...
— The Devil's Garden • W. B. Maxwell
... fond of children, Alyosha? I know you are, and you will understand why I prefer to speak of them. If they, too, suffer horribly on earth, they must suffer for their fathers' sins, they must be punished for their fathers, who have eaten the apple; but that reasoning is of the other world and is incomprehensible for the heart of man here on earth. The innocent must not suffer for another's sins, and especially such innocents! You may be surprised at me, Alyosha, but I am awfully fond of children, too. And observe, cruel people, the violent, the rapacious, the Karamazovs are sometimes very fond of children. ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... from the people. [Footnote: Nowhere, perhaps, does Wycliffe express himself more strongly on this subject than in a little tract called The Wicket, written in English, which he issued for popular consumption about this time.] But, in the main, no dogma, however incomprehensible, ever troubled Protestants, as a class. They easily accepted the Trinity, the double procession, or the Holy Ghost itself, though no one had the slightest notion what the Holy Ghost might be. Wycliffe roundly declared in the first paragraph of his confession [Footnote: ...
— The Emancipation of Massachusetts • Brooks Adams
... continually venting horrible and obscene oaths, both in Spanish and Catalan. The woman was remarkably handsome, but robust and seemingly as savage as himself; her conversation likewise was as frightful as his own. Both seemed to be under the influence of an incomprehensible fury. At last, upon some observation from the woman, he started up, and drawing a long knife from his girdle, stabbed at her naked bosom; she, however, interposed the palm of her hand, which was much cut. He stood ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... back parlour. Sporting papers, beer-stained and thumb-marked, lie on the tables; framed portraits of racers hang on the walls. Burly men, who certainly cannot ride a race, but who have horse in every feature, puff cigars and chat in jerky monosyllables that to an outsider are perfectly incomprehensible. But the glib way in which heavy sums of money are spoken of conveys the impression that they dabble ...
— The Amateur Poacher • Richard Jefferies
... evening cloud. During the whole time Rip and his companion had labored on in silence; for though the former marveled greatly what could be the object of carrying a keg of liquor up this wild mountain, yet there was something strange and incomprehensible about the unknown, that ...
— Elson Grammer School Literature, Book Four. • William H. Elson and Christine Keck
... We visualised dimly through that dust and the grammatical difficulties, the spectacle of the chorus chanting grotesquely, helping out protagonist and antagonist, masked and buskined, with the telling of incomprehensible parricides, of inexplicable incest, of gods faded beyond symbolism, of that Relentless Law we did not believe in for a moment, that no modern western European can believe in. We thought of the characters ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... indolent to make money, he was by no means insensible to the pleasure of beholding it accumulate. The burghers of the town near which he lived regarded him with a sort of envy, as one who affected to divide himself from their rank in society, and whose studies and pleasures seemed to them alike incomprehensible. Still, however, a sort of hereditary respect for the Laird of Monkbarns, augmented by the knowledge of his being a ready-money man, kept up his consequence with this class of his neighbours. The country gentlemen were generally above him in fortune, and beneath him in intellect, ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... money-grubbing materialists, can, in the nature of things, have very little in common. There is a great gulf fixed between them. I beg your pardon for having so far forgotten myself as to ignore that fact, and talked on subjects incomprehensible to you. What follows, however, will be more in your line, I imagine, and it is this which has made me come here to-night. You realise that your investment has turned out an unfortunate one? You have lost, irretrievably lost, ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... cause of excitement in all cases; the nature and relation of conduction and insulation of the direct and lateral or transverse action constituting electricity and magnetism; with many other things more or less incomprehensible at present, would all be affected by it, and perhaps receive a full explication in their ...
— Experimental Researches in Electricity, Volume 1 • Michael Faraday
... the students who heard Phillips that night left confirmed abolitionists, and some were among the first to take up arms. To us, nowadays, the state of public opinion at that time seems almost incomprehensible. Few of the individual members of those mobs were in real sympathy with the South, but party affiliations were strong and, in the words of Judge Cheever, '63, who describes these troubles, they were held back from openly showing abolitionist principles ...
— The University of Michigan • Wilfred Shaw
... the residents of the town there is nothing abnormal in their condition. It is only to the observer from without that the horrors of the Pennsylvania town are apparent. That such a spot should develop in a State high in rank, and among the oldest of those comprising the greatest republic, seems incomprehensible. In the very State where the Declaration of Independence was sent to the world, proclaiming that men are created free and equal, and that the right of the majority is the supreme law, how comes it that a settlement can be maintained where the rights ...
— The Transgressors - Story of a Great Sin • Francis A. Adams
... effusion, I will divert you with a story that made me laugh this morning till I cried. You know my Swiss David, and his incomprehensible pronunciation. He came to me, and said, "Auh! dar is Meses Ellis wants some of your large flags to put in her great O." With much ado, I found out that Mrs. Ellis had sent for leave to take up some flags out of my meadow for ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... unsuccessful if practiced on the Sabbath-day. The Sambatyon, Rashi says, is a pebbly river which rushes along all the days of the week except the Sabbath, on which it is perfectly still and quiet. In the Machsor for Pentecost (D. Levi's ed. p. 81), it is styled "the incomprehensible river," and a footnote thereto informs us that "This refers to the river said to rest on the Sabbath from throwing up stones, etc., which it does not cease to do all the rest of the week." (See Sanhedrin, fol. 65, col. ...
— Hebraic Literature; Translations from the Talmud, Midrashim and - Kabbala • Various
... and to listen to the whole story of her passion, her tearful protests and her oaths never to take to any man again. In her contempt for those swine, as she called them, she could not, however, keep her heart free, for she always had some sweetheart round her, and her exhausted body inclined to incomprehensible fancies and perverse tastes. As Zoe designedly relaxed her efforts the service of the house had got to such a pitch that Muffat did not dare to push open a door, to pull a curtain or to unclose a cupboard. The bells did not ring; men lounged about ...
— Nana, The Miller's Daughter, Captain Burle, Death of Olivier Becaille • Emile Zola
... concerning "things present, (A.D. 96,) and things to come." We see, then, if this 13th verse, as we are told, does represent the departed saints any where, or time, since A.D. 96, and will be fulfilled at the resurrection, it is yet incomprehensible. Is it not clear that it only has reference to all the righteous saints in these messages from Oct. 1844? How can it mean the literal dead? Is it not clear that the dead know not any thing; therefore the blessing ...
— A Vindication of the Seventh-Day Sabbath • Joseph Bates
... honour to his idol, if he should keep Maria pretty short of cash, and so make her own its preciousness; triumphant would he feel, as a merely-moneyed man, to see troublesome, obtrusive Heart, with all its win-ways, and whimperings, and incomprehensible spirituality, with its sermons and its prayers, bending before him "for a bit of bread." Yes, poor loving disinterested Maria ran every chance of being disinherited, from the false witness of her brother, simply because she gave him antecedent opportunities, ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... of true civilisation in this unique, abnormal, diseased, unsatisfied, incomprehensible, and truly miraculous and supernatural race we call man, had been literally, and in actual fact, miraculous and supernatural likewise? What if that be the true key to the mystery of humanity and its origin? What if the few first chapters of the most ancient and most sacred book ...
— Historical Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... his power to foresee the day when she would have become to him a mere symbol of something that was. Suppose that some day, when married, he again met her? In spite of everything, he did not believe that she had ceased to love him; somewhere she still kept her faith, martyred by the incomprehensible fate which had torn her from his arms. To meet her again would be to forget every tie save that holiest which made one of ...
— A Life's Morning • George Gissing
... and uncertainty of life—the mystic chemistry of our being. Still others, taught roughly by life, or endowed with understanding or intuition, or both, see in this the latest manifestation of that incomprehensible chemistry which we call life and personality, and, knowing that it is quite vain to hope to gainsay it, save by greater subtlety, put the best face they can upon the matter and call a truce until they can think. We all know that life is ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser
... tree-frogs, small lizards, and other creatures. Walter stood by watching him, as with scientific skill he dissected the huge lizard, discoursing as he did so in technical language, which was perfectly incomprehensible to his young hearer, on the curious formation of the creature,—on its bones, muscles, and ...
— The South Sea Whaler • W.H.G. Kingston
... vivid and more troubled delights of feeling herself engrossed by a spell, to whose power she submitted with joy indeed, but also with trembling. Every time she now saw Bella, it appeared to her more entirely incomprehensible that any one could act as she was doing; the mere idea of a marriage where convenience, suitableness, common sense were the best words that could be used to account for it, began to seem revolting. She could not have explained why, yet she felt, at times, ...
— A Canadian Heroine, Volume 1 - A Novel • Mrs. Harry Coghill
... and pots; and graced with large water-jars, and baskets and the refuge of all beings; and echoing with the chanting of the Vedas; and heavenly: and worthy of being inhabited; and removing fatigue; and attended with splendour and of incomprehensible merit; and majestic with divine qualities. And the hermitage was inhabited by hosts of great sages, subsisting on fruits and roots; and having their senses under perfect control; and clad in black deer-skins; and effulgent like unto the Sun and Agni; and of souls ...
— Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa Bk. 3 Pt. 1 • Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa
... bees, the little Strelka brook bubbled and fretted like a tea-kettle, and the sun rose gloriously; its rays fell between the leaves of the lime-tree, and threw patches of light on the strange face of one of the strangest and most incomprehensible men ...
— Historical Miniatures • August Strindberg
... days in the hospital with their routine and monotony, creating an incomprehensible break in his life, his memory retained nothing; but the unchanging grief, weighing like a slab of stone on a grave, was ever present in his soul with inexorable and brutal force during these many months. He only half recalled ...
— Selected Polish Tales • Various
... man is readily stirred by every pretty face he sees, while another man can only be roused by intellectual qualities or by moral beauty. We know that sometimes we meet people possessing every virtue and grace under heaven, and yet for some unknown and incomprehensible reason we could no more fall in love with them than we could fall in love with the Ten Commandments. I don't, of course, for a moment accept the silly romantic notion that men and women fall in love only once in their lives, or that each one of us has somewhere on earth his or her ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... widely construed, are mines of information and delight. However, as there are no books wherewith a foreigner can inform himself on this subject, any attempt at details would not only seem pedantic, but would be incomprehensible without tiresome explanations and many illustrations, which are not possible here. I may remark, however, that Viollet-le-Duc and Fergusson do not understand the subject of Russian architecture, and that their few observations ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood
... serve," said Bickley, suddenly producing an electric torch from his pocket and flashing it into his face. It was his form of repartee for all he had suffered at the hands of this incomprehensible pair. Let me say at once that it was singularly successful. Perhaps the wisdom of the ages in which Oro flourished had overlooked so small a matter as electric torches, or perhaps he did not expect to meet with them in these degenerate days. At any rate for the first and last ...
— When the World Shook - Being an Account of the Great Adventure of Bastin, Bickley and Arbuthnot • H. Rider Haggard
... unfortunate lunatic, or even in other groups, one observed strange complaints, moanings relating to lesions which were not visible, inability to move notwithstanding the apparent integrity of the organs, contradictory and incomprehensible affirmations; in one word, abnormal behaviors, very different to normal behaviors, regularized by the laws and ...
— A Psychiatric Milestone - Bloomingdale Hospital Centenary, 1821-1921 • Various
... scientific consequences to which this anti-teleological monism leads, the advocates of it are in tolerable accord; although they are subject to the most incomprehensible illusions regarding the practical consequences of it, as we have seen in the above-quoted {166} concluding words of Haeckel's "Natural History of Creation." As to the scientific consequences, they express themselves ...
— The Theories of Darwin and Their Relation to Philosophy, Religion, and Morality • Rudolf Schmid
... was standing face to face with something illogical and irrational, and did not know what was to be done. Alexey Alexandrovitch was standing face to face with life, with the possibility of his wife's loving someone other than himself, and this seemed to him very irrational and incomprehensible because it was life itself. All his life Alexey Alexandrovitch had lived and worked in official spheres, having to do with the reflection of life. And every time he had stumbled against life itself he had shrunk away from it. Now he experienced a feeling akin to that of a man who, while ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... when he heard Rouletabille's prophetic sentence—"The presbytery has lost nothing of its charm, nor the garden its brightness." Certainly my friend knew how to make people understand him by the use of wholly incomprehensible phrases. I observed as much to him, but he merely smiled. I should have proposed that he give me some explanation; but he put a finger to his lips, which evidently signified that he had not only determined not to speak, but also enjoined ...
— The Mystery of the Yellow Room • Gaston Leroux
... Neverout and the Colonel, in Swift's famous dialogue, are a thousand times more entertaining and moral; and, besides, we can laugh AT those worthies as well as with them; whereas the "prodigious" French wits are to us quite incomprehensible. Fancy a duchess as old as Lady —— herself, and who should begin to tell us "of what she would do if ever she had a mind to take a lover;" and another duchess, with a fourth lover, tripping modestly among ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... time, James; and remain, as I do, incomprehensible. To be great is to be misunderstood.—Tout ...
— The Gentle Art of Making Enemies • James McNeill Whistler
... starts of civilization, or of barbarian monarchies, such as we see now in Africa, life in Europe took another direction. It went on on lines similar to those it had once taken in the cities of antique Greece. With a unanimity which seems almost incomprehensible, and for a long time was not understood by historians, the urban agglomerations, down to the smallest burgs, began to shake off the yoke of their worldly and clerical lords. The fortified village rose against the lord's castle, ...
— Mutual Aid • P. Kropotkin
... understanding to give them judgement and counsel? Even the kings of the Amorites, hearing that we desire to attack them, will say, 'Let us not set out against them, for there is now no longer among them the many-sided, incomprehensible and sacred spirit, worthy of the Lord, the ever-faithful master of the word, the Divine prophet of all the world, the most consummate master of this age. If now our enemies once more transgress before the ...
— THE LEGENDS OF THE JEWS VOLUME III BIBLE TIMES AND CHARACTERS - FROM THE EXODUS TO THE DEATH OF MOSES • BY LOUIS GINZBERG
... allowed to remain so is still, after all the explanations that have been given, incomprehensible. Two officers with sixty hussars, all well disposed and loyal, were in a side street of the town waiting for their arrival, of which they were not aware. Six of the troopers actually passed the travelers ...
— The Life of Marie Antoinette, Queen of France • Charles Duke Yonge
... Castle of Elsinore, for instance—that seem to have an amazing and incomprehensible gift of resisting civilization. They may be brought up to date, and trimmed, and filled with inappropriate people, and everything else done that should spoil them, but in spite of it all they do not for a moment look as if any modern extraneous objects had a meaning for ...
— Devon, Its Moorlands, Streams and Coasts • Rosalind Northcote
... the attempts at instruments of that kind from the beginning of the world are preserved, transformed and glorified. In our magnificent orchestras all the first feeble beginnings are developed until we have a conception of music to-day such as would have been utterly incomprehensible to the primeval man. What I wish you to note is and this is the use of my illustration that the advancing growth of the music of the world has forgotten nothing that it was ...
— Our Unitarian Gospel • Minot Savage
... "It is incomprehensible that we have not come in sight of them," said the captain. "I reckon that the Halbrane has made sixty miles since this morning, and the islands in ...
— An Antarctic Mystery • Jules Verne
... What an incomprehensible stretch of authority Christ put forth, if He were no more than a teacher, when He brushed aside the Passover, and put in its place the Lord's Supper, as commemorating His own death! Thereby He said, 'Forget ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... of the tiny street crowded with fishermen. And her thoughts travelled through a fascinating and delightful infinite, far, far away to the northern seas, where "La Marie, Captain Guermeur," was sailing. A strange man was young Gaos! retiring and almost incomprehensible now, after having come forward so audaciously, ...
— An Iceland Fisherman • Pierre Loti
... he had missed the spontaneity he had known in the little child, and, without being able to analyze it, felt that something was wanting in the girl. She had been sweet and winning, yet under it all had been a manner quite incomprehensible to him, as though she did not feel quite sure of her position in his affections. Her laugh had lacked the true girlish ring, and her conversation with him seemed guarded, as though she had never ...
— Caps and Capers - A Story of Boarding-School Life • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... Seysen fain have made me believe; but what he said in support of his assertion was to me incomprehensible. And yet he said that it was a part of the Catholic faith. It may be so—I am unable to understand many other points. I wish your faith were made more simple. As yet the good man—for good he really is—has ...
— The Phantom Ship • Captain Frederick Marryat
... of anglers were out on the reef, fishing for anything, and they decided to take a turn outside where I had been spending days after sailfish. Scarcely had these men left the reef when five sailfish loomed up and all of them, with that perversity and capriciousness which makes fish so incomprehensible, tried to climb on board the boat. One, a heavy fish, did succeed in hooking himself and getting aboard. I could multiply events of this nature, but this is enough to illustrate my point—that there is a vast ...
— Tales of Fishes • Zane Grey
... upon the clouds of the outward world. I mean that inward universe of goodness, beauty, and truth,—three worlds that are neither part, nor shoot, nor copy of the outward. We are less astonished at the incomprehensible existence of these transcendental heavens because they are always there, and we foolishly imagine that we create, when we merely perceive them. After what model, with what plastic power, and from what, could we create these same ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... called night for three reasons: the point of departure is privation of all desire, and complete detachment from the world; the road is by faith, which is like night to the intellect; the goal, which is God, is incomprehensible while we ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... quiet, vital man hadn't any limits, except those of the globe itself. A tall, fair man with a large head, decided features, chilly gray eyes, and an uncompromising mouth adorned with a short, stiff mustache, his square chin was cleft by an incomprehensible dimple. His wife declared she had married him because of that cleft; it gave her an object in life to find out ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler
... to formularise his position. With one's limited vision, one's finite inability to touch a thought at more than one point at a time, one must give up all hope of attaining to a perfected philosophical system. The end was dark, the solution incomprehensible. He must rather live as far as possible in a high and lofty emotion, beholding the truth by hints and glimpses, pursuing as far as possible all uplifting intuitions, all free and generous desires. It was useless to walk in a prescribed path, to frame ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... me the fact that I was necessary to her, and that she was keeping me for some end which she had in view. Consequently there became established between us relations which, to a large extent, were incomprehensible to me, considering her general pride and aloofness. For example, although she knew that I was madly in love with her, she allowed me to speak to her of my passion (though she could not well have showed her contempt for me more ...
— The Gambler • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... is written in the most unpractical and incomprehensible style: yes, I know it," interrupted ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. October, 1878. • Various
... awful, the inexpressible, the incomprehensible God. His terrible hand swirls, with unresting power, yonder innumerable congregation of suns in their mighty orbits, and yet stoops, with tender touch, to build up the petals of the anemone, and paint with rainbow hues the ...
— Caesar's Column • Ignatius Donnelly
... was served up to us on the long unpainted table that stood in the middle of the room. During the repast our host, the priest, sat with folded hands intently regarding us, while the rest of the people clustered around the door and open windows, eying us with indescribable and incomprehensible curiosity. If we had been visitors from the moon we could not have attracted more attention. Even the stolid Indians, a few of whom strolled lazily about, came and gazed at us until the pompous old man in faded Mexican uniform ...
— Stories by American Authors (Volume 4) • Constance Fenimore Woolson
... the ideals of any man alive? Why, not one thread of that dark hair, not one snap of those white little fingers, except when ideals irritate you by distracting a man's attention from Cynthia Allonby. Otherwise, he is welcome enough to play with his incomprehensible toys." ...
— O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 • Various
... equally superstitious? How is it possible that the souls of the dead should come and talk, and play the guitar? No! Some one is fooling them, or they are fooling themselves. And as to this business with Simon—it's simply incomprehensible. (Looks at an album.) Here's their spiritualistic album. How is it possible to photograph a spirit? But here is the likeness of a Turk and Leonid Fyodoritch ...
— Redemption and Two Other Plays • Leo Tolstoy et al
... master of prosody has been scandalously usurped under the falsest of pretences: a matter on which I am content to accept the verdict of Landor. His contribution to Sir Robert Chester's problematic volume may perhaps claim the singular distinction of being more incomprehensible, more crabbed, more preposterous, and more inexplicable than any other copy of verses among the "divers poetical essays—done by the best and chiefest of our modern writers, with their names subscribed to their particular ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... ear! Even dogs, which listen quietly to modern third and sixth passages, begin to howl lamentably if one plays before them on the violin the barbaric fourth passages of the Guido diaphonies! This historically verified alternation of the musical ear is indeed incomprehensible. It may serve, however, to help us to divine how horribly medieval dogs would have howled if one had been able to play to them—well, let us say, ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... sentence, between the relative pronoun and the demonstrative adjective pronoun, between the perfect and the preter-perfect tense, he is extremely dull and hazy. The region of abstract ideas is to him a region of ghosts and shadows. Yet his youth is mainly a dreary wilderness of uncomprehended, incomprehensible studies, of privations, tasks, punishments, with a sense of continual failure, disappointment, and disgrace, because his father is trying to make a scholar and a literary man out of a boy whom Nature made to till the soil or manage the material ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 92, June, 1865 • Various
... of action is incomprehensible unless we keep in mind the fact that Mr. Dafoe has long found it impossible to support either of the old parties. The Coalition was a new one which he consistently supported on its merits and up to a point. The point was reached. Unionism and Agrarianism ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino
... him. Such a being he identifies with God. But the ordinary idea of God can scarcely be identified with such a conception. "The majority of men," he says himself, "do not think of God as an infinite and incomprehensible being, and as the sole author from whom all things depend; they go no further than the letters of his name."[34] "The vulgar almost imagine him as a finite thing." The God of Descartes is not merely the creator of the material universe; he is also the father of all truth in the intellectual world. ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... accurate even to mathematical absoluteness, to the very arcana of what has been the inexplicable. To them the true, the beautiful, must be facts, defined, realized, and vigorously analyzed. Visible embodiments of an incomprehensible grace must be disintegrated, and the thinnest essences escape not the analytical rack whereon they confess the causal entity of their composition. 'Broad-browed genius' may toss his locks in the studio redolent of art; his eye ...
— The Continental Monthly , Vol. 2 No. 5, November 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... of the Bridge of Despair leant young Lackaday, gazing unseeingly down into the Rhone. His sudden misfortune had been like the stunning blow of a sandbag. His brain still reeled. What had happened was incomprehensible. He knew his business. He could conceive no other. He had been trained to it since infancy. There was not a phase of clown's work with which he was not familiar. He was a passable gymnast, an expert juggler, a trick musician, an ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... not know even one.... And when I am accused of passing by the institutions of the past with coldness and hatred in my heart, because I was one of the first to express the hope of a better future, a charge is laid at my door which is perfectly incomprehensible ... I am reproached with despising the history of law. It is a slander on me. Although I have only laughed at these reports, one man's mistake grieved me; for that man's name was Niebuhr.... When he [Niebuhr] returned from Italy ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... all are conclusions. This clearness of the "ready-made" is a superficial clearness—physical, outward, solar clearness, so to speak, but in the absence of a sense for origin and genesis it is the clearness of the incomprehensible, the clearness of opacity, the clearness of the obscure. We are always trifling on the surface. Our temper is formal—that is to say, frivolous and material, or rather artistic and not philosophical. For what it seeks is the figure, the fashion and manner of things, ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... copy of a notice exhibited at Welsh railway station. It is, perhaps, only a little more incomprehensible than Bradshaw. "List of Booking: You passengers must careful. For have them level money for ticket and to apply at once for asking tickets when will booking window open. No tickets to have after the departure of ...
— Railway Adventures and Anecdotes - extending over more than fifty years • Various
... matter to one another, which was seldom indeed, were divided in their opinions. That Dr. Bayard was "smitten" with Fanny Forrest was something they had seen from the start, but that brilliant and most incomprehensible young woman had on more than one occasion treated him with marked coldness and aversion. What was the matter? Had he been too precipitate in his wooing? Twice since Hatton returned with his little escort, bringing in the wounded, had Miss ...
— 'Laramie;' - or, The Queen of Bedlam. • Charles King
... transmission of light and sound; of the production of winds, and sun-spots, and of the method of development and dissemination of heat, are in point of fact, unphilosophical and incomprehensible. ...
— New and Original Theories of the Great Physical Forces • Henry Raymond Rogers
... sigh, and said "Women!" under his breath. Mutabile semper! No matter how much you knew about them, they remained incomprehensible. Their whims passed explanation. He was ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... But a few moments sufficed in which to realize that, for all my training, I knew as little of Chemistry—of Chemistry as understood by this man's genius—as a junior student in surgery knows of trephining. The process in operation was a complete mystery to me; the means and the end were alike incomprehensible. ...
— The Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer
... the inhabitants of the terrace, the dwellers in the opposite villas are seen returning to dinner. The lame match-man now hobbles along upon his crutches, with his little basket of lucifers suspended at his side. He is thoroughly deaf and three parts dumb, uttering nothing beyond an incomprehensible kind of croak by way of a demand for custom. He is a privileged being, whom nobody thinks of interfering with. He has the entree of all the gardens on both sides of the way, and is the acknowledged depositary of scraps and remnants of all kinds ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 448 - Volume 18, New Series, July 31, 1852 • Various
... is so strong, that it leads her to actions which must be entirely incomprehensible to her, and which can give her no other pleasure than the gratification of an internal faculty. She has been known to sit for half an hour, holding a book before her sightless eyes, and moving her lips, as she has observed seeing people do ...
— American Notes for General Circulation • Charles Dickens |
