"Inexorable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Alexander von Humboldt, has yielded to the great law of humanity, as inexorable as any that he found in nature. His researches in South America, though mainly confined to the valley of the Oronoco, were most thorough, and his array of facts and observations are of inestimable value. ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, Issue 2, February, 1864 • Various
... word. Her heart was filled with a strange horror at the idea of that sudden and unprovided death. She could have cried out with anguish for that soul, which, in the midst of its careless pride and criminal indifference, had been summoned by an inexorable decree to the tribunal of judgment! where it appeared alone—alone—alone, to be weighed in the balance of justice. "But, perhaps, sweet Jesus!" she whispered; "oh, perhaps, Thou didst in the last struggle hear it from its abyss of misery plead for mercy; perhaps, through ...
— May Brooke • Anna H. Dorsey
... Nubian who belonged to Honain. His former minister informed him that he was at hand, that the terms he offered in the dungeon might even yet be granted; that if Alroy would, as he doubted not, as he entreated him, accept them, he was to place the scroll in his bosom, but that if he were still inexorable, still madly determined on a horrible and ignominious end, he was to tear the scroll and throw it in to the arena. Instantly Alroy took the scroll, and with great energy tore it into a thousand pieces. A puff of wind carried the fragments far and wide. ...
— Alroy - The Prince Of The Captivity • Benjamin Disraeli
... another, kneeling, presses his wound with one hand, and stretches the other out toward the spectators; some of them have a suppliant look, others are stoical, but all will have to roll at last upon the sand of the arena, condemned by the inexorable caprice of a people greedy for blood. "The modest virgin," says Juvenal, "turning down her thumb, orders that the breast of yonder man, grovelling in the dust, shall be torn open." And all—the heavily armed Samnite, the Gaul, the Thracian, the secutor; the dimachoerus, with his two swords; ...
— The Wonders of Pompeii • Marc Monnier
... and to spend his time in spinning flax, instead of in deeds of arms. Radigund fell in love with the captive knight, and sent Clarinda as a go-between; but Clarinda tried to win him for herself, and told the queen he was inexorable (canto 5). At length Britomart arrived, cut off Radigund's head, and liberated the captive (canto 7).—Spenser, Fa[:e]ry ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... neighbor on the east, dragged on its secluded existence of backwardness and stagnation. Indians and half-castes vegetated in ignorance and docility, and the handful of whites quaked in terror, while the inexorable Francia tightened the reins of commercial and industrial restriction and erected forts along the frontiers to keep out the pernicious foreigner. At his death, in 1840, men and women wept at his funeral in fear perchance, as one historian remarks, lest he come back to life; and the priest ...
— The Hispanic Nations of the New World - Volume 50 in The Chronicles Of America Series • William R. Shepherd
... large colored population composed of so many people of culture, the gentler sex are only behind the other, in possessing a knowledge of music, to that extent which has been caused by those unreasonable, unwritten, yet inexorable rules of society, that have hitherto forbidden women to do more than learn to perform upon the piano-forte and guitar, and to sing. But among the ladies of New Orleans there are many who may be called excellent pianists, and those who, possessing good voices, sing the choicest music of the day ...
— Music and Some Highly Musical People • James M. Trotter
... having been completed, and a sacrifice of three precious weeks having been duly offered to the inexorable genius who presides over public correspondence, we reduced our impedimenta to the smallest possible compass, and with about a hundred pounds to commence life with, all in two shilling pieces, that being the only available coin of the realm in this our ...
— Diary of a Pedestrian in Cashmere and Thibet • by William Henry Knight
... through her spectacles with a forcible composure, calculated, I could not help thinking, to increase his antagonism, pulled out a good book as if it were a constable's staff and took the whole family into custody. I mean into religious custody, of course; but she really did it as if she were an inexorable moral policeman carrying them all ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... would think of her. She had decided, in advance, that she would like Miss Alathea, aunt of her woodland instructor; she knew positively that she would like the doughty colonel, lover of god horses, barred from racing by his love for Frank's inexorable aunt. ...
— In Old Kentucky • Edward Marshall and Charles T. Dazey
... that cannot withstand the assaults of truth—that replies to arguments with threats—that cannot be "talked about"—that flourishes in secrecy and darkness, and dies when brought forth into the light and examined, must in this time of inexorable scrutiny and relentless agitation, be a dangerous one. If justice be done, all necessity for the extirpation of any part of the people will at once be removed. Baptisms of blood are seen only when humanity has failed ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... to be an inexorable law of Nature that no man shall shine at both ends. If he has a high forehead and a thirst for wisdom, his fox-trotting (if any) shall be as the staggerings of the drunken; while, if he is a good dancer, he is nearly always petrified from the ears upward. No better examples of ...
— The Man with Two Left Feet - and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... woman is the loveliest flower that blooms under Heaven; and that we look with love and wonder upon its silent grace, its pure fragrance, its delicate bloom of beauty. Sweet and beautiful!—the fairest and the most spotless!—is it not pity to see them bowed down or devoured by Grief or Death inexorable—wasting in disease-pining with long pain-or cut off by sudden fate in their prime? We may deserve grief—but why should these be unhappy?—except that we know that Heaven chastens those whom it loves best; being ...
— The History of Pendennis, Vol. 2 - His Fortunes and Misfortunes, His Friends and His Greatest Enemy • William Makepeace Thackeray
... could obtain what one wanted, whether the deed might be an act of justice or of wrong; that there was room for favour and good offices; that he could be angry, and forgive; that he knew the difference between a friend and an enemy; that the laws were a deaf, inexorable thing, more beneficial and advantageous for the poor than for the rich; that they allowed no relaxation or indulgence, if one transgressed due bounds; that it was perilous, amid so many human errors, to have no security for life but innocence. While their minds were already of their own accord thus ...
— Roman History, Books I-III • Titus Livius
... is deep. Is not the main-truck higher than the kelson is low? Delight is to him—a far, far upward, and inward delight—who against the proud gods and commodores of this earth, ever stands forth his own inexorable self. Delight is to him whose strong arms yet support him, when the ship of this base treacherous world has gone down beneath him. Delight is to him, who gives no quarter in the truth, and kills, burns, and destroys all sin though he pluck it out from under the robes ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... bright at this time was doomed to set in misfortune, were in the field at the same time. Charles Sturt, fated once more to meet and be defeated (if such a gallant struggle can be called defeat) by the inexorable desert and the stern denial of its climate. Thomas Mitchell, again the favoured of fortune, to wend his way by well-watered streams and grassy downs and plains. And Ludwig Leichhardt, to accomplish his one great journey through the country permeated by the rivers of the eastern ...
— The History of Australian Exploration from 1788 to 1888 • Ernest Favenc
... proportion to the humility of our submission to its rule, do we rise into some faint emulation of that ineffable and presiding Divinity, whose characteristic attribute it is to be coerced and bound by the inexorable laws of its own nature, so as to be all-wise and all-just from necessity rather than election. You have seen it in the learned advocate who has preceded me, most peculiarly and strikingly illustrated. You have seen even his great talents, perhaps the first in any country, ...
— Irish Wit and Humor - Anecdote Biography of Swift, Curran, O'Leary and O'Connell • Anonymous
... assured them that, if this programme were literally carried out, we would straightway return and burn the town, or what was left of it, for our share. It was essential to show my officers and men that, while rigid against irregular outrage, we could still be inexorable against the enemy. ...
— Army Life in a Black Regiment • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... 'the chase.' I do not know what you have sought, and I do not wish to know. I counsel you though, as a friend, to give up the pursuit. I have placed the two alternatives before you, and you have made your choice—you will be a brave soldier. Now, then, from this time onward, I will be inexorable against even your smallest neglect of duty. In this way only can I make of you what you resolve to be—a gallant and stainless officer. I will tell your captain to watch you and report every fault; I will myself observe and ...
— Berlin and Sans-Souci • Louise Muhlbach
... the admiral was unwilling that he should take with him to France two Indian girls who had been presented to him a year or two before, and whom he had been carefully instructing in religion and manners, and whom he loved as his own daughters. Kirke, however, was inexorable. Neither reason, entreaty, nor the tears of the unhappy maidens could move him. As he could not take them with him, Champlain administered to them such consolation as he could, counselling them to be brave and virtuous, and to continue to say the ...
— Voyages of Samuel de Champlain, Vol. 1 • Samuel de Champlain
... for all things earthly and pertaining to his own worn-out old body grew upon him. Then he suddenly ceased to think of himself. The sound of the rain in his ears seemed to be boring into his brain. Steady, inexorable, unanswerable as fate, it weighed upon him like a giant hand, and it came to him that he was comparing that roar to the death that was approaching ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. XXXI, No. 3, July 1908. • Various
... and fed the dark and narrow mind of that tyrannical recluse. They had formed and fed the minds of her people, quenched in blood every spark of rising heresy, and given over a noble nation to bigotry, dark, blind, inexorable as the doom of fate. Linked with pride, ambition, avarice, every passion of a rich, strong nature, potent for good and ill, it made the Spaniard of that day a scourge as dire as ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 73, November, 1863 • Various
... free; one might say that this eternal slave is wreaking its vengeance; it would seem as though the evil in what we call inanimate objects had found vent and suddenly burst forth; it has the air of having lost its patience, and of taking a mysterious, dull revenge; nothing is so inexorable as the rage of the inanimate. The mad mass leaps like a panther; it has the weight of an elephant, the agility of a mouse, the obstinacy of the axe; it takes one by surprise, like the surge of the sea; it ...
— Great Sea Stories • Various
... delinquents. Mr Anson was not displeased to have caught the Chinese in this dilemma; and he entertained himself for some time with their perplexity, rejecting their money with scorn, appearing inexorable to their prayers, and giving out that the thief should certainly be shot; but as he then foresaw that he should be forced to take shelter in their ports a second time, when the influence he might hereby acquire over the magistrates would be of great ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 11 • Robert Kerr
... below the ford, and opposite another Indian village in which a most mournful medicine song was going on, timed to the beating of drums. Dogs joined with the mourning of the people with cries of almost human anguish, to which the beat of the passionless drum added solemnity, and a sort of inexorable marching rhythm. It seemed to announce pestilence and flood, and made the beautiful earth a place of hunger ...
— The Trail of the Goldseekers - A Record of Travel in Prose and Verse • Hamlin Garland
... years ago. the first Csar found a Brutus on the Ides or 15th of March. May be that the Ides of March, 1853, will see the last of the Csars fall under the avenging might of a thousand-handed Brutus—the name of whom is "the people"—inexorable at last after it has been so long generous. The seat of the Csars was first in the south, then from the south to the east, from the east to the west, and from the west to the north. That is their last abode. None was lasting yet. Will the last, ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... pronouncing from her own half wit. Then the great shears came out, and the instinct of grace and beauty in the child was pitilessly outraged, and her soul mutilated, as it were, in every clip of the inexorable shears. ...
— Faith Gartney's Girlhood • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... mind nothing else but a suspicious espying and prying into the secret deportments of their wives, and how to coop, shut up, hold at under, and deal cruelly and austerely with them by all the harshness and hardships that an implacable and every way inexorable jealousy can devise and suggest, conform to the sacred ordinances of the afore-mentioned sacrifices and oblations, he should be continually favourable to them, should love them, sociably converse with them, should be day and night ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... night-watches, I arose, and came on deck; the vessel was not, methought, pitching much; and yet—and yet Neptune was inexorable. The placid stars looked down, but they gave me no peace. Lavinia Milliken seemed asleep, and her Horace, in a death-like torpor, was huddled at her feet. Miss Fanny had quitted the larboard side of the ship, and had gone to starboard; and I thought that there was a gentleman beside ...
— The Christmas Books • William Makepeace Thackeray
... call them villa, park, or chase). Alas, my Bathurst! what will they avail? Join Cotswold hills to Saperton's fair dale, Let rising granaries and temples here, There mingled farms and pyramids appear, Link towns to towns with avenues of oak, Enclose whole downs in walls, 'tis all a joke! Inexorable death shall level all, And trees, and stones, and farms, and farmer fall. Gold, silver, ivory, vases sculptured high, Paint, marble, gems, and robes of Persian dye, There are who have not—and thank heaven there are, ...
— Essay on Man - Moral Essays and Satires • Alexander Pope
... something more to be said about Tom in order that the attempt to show what manner of man he was may be as complete as the inexorable regulation of ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... well-earned fame. "Goods perish, friends perish, a man himself perishes, but fame never dies to him that hath won it worthily." "One thing I know that never dies, the judgment passed on every mortal man." Over all man's life hung a blind, inexorable fate, a lower fold of the same gloomy cloud that brooded over Odin and the AEsir. Nothing could avert this doom. When his hour came, a man must meet his death, and until his hour came he was safe. It might strike in the midst of the highest happiness, and then nothing could avert ...
— The story of Burnt Njal - From the Icelandic of the Njals Saga • Anonymous
... universe. In the organic world all Nature seems to be praying in one form or another, and only those that pray with efficacy, based upon the above two conditions, survive in the struggle for existence. The economy of Nature is founded upon that inexorable law the "Survival of the Fittest"; every organism that is not in sympathy with its environment, and cannot therefore derive help and nourishment from its surroundings, perishes. Darwin tells us that the colours of flowering plants ...
— Science and the Infinite - or Through a Window in the Blank Wall • Sydney T. Klein
... the great popular orator, Mr. Turnbull, found himself compelled to rise in his seat, and ask whether the noble Duke at the head of the Government thought himself strong enough to rule without attention to Parliamentary details. The question was asked with an air of inexorable severity, and was intended to have deep signification. Mr. Turnbull had disliked the Coalition from the beginning; but then Mr. Turnbull always disliked everything. He had so accustomed himself to wield the constitutional cat-of-nine-tails, ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... and groans daily with the thought that she is useless to her country in its hour of bitter need. Let all such females raise up their drooping heads, cheer up their hearts, and take courage. Neither God nor her country requires a woman to act in the face of circumstances which are inexorable. But this work of reforming the spirit and remodelling the customs of society on a simple democratic basis, is one in which every woman—no matter what her condition, nor how circumstanced—is capable of doing loyal service ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 1, July, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... We went to the side door, and were sent to the back door. At the back door, to our indignation, we were sent up-stairs. In vain Jimmie expostulated, and said that these seats were well in the middle of the house on the ground floor. The doorkeepers were inexorable. On the second floor, they sent us to the third, and on the third they would have sent us to the roof if there had been any way of getting up there. As it was, they permitted us to stop at the top gallery, and, to our ...
— Abroad with the Jimmies • Lilian Bell
... not for vengeance, long delayed, Alone, did Alp, the renegade, The Moslem warriors sternly teach His skill to pierce the promised breach: 180 Within these walls a Maid was pent His hope would win, without consent Of that inexorable Sire, Whose heart refused him in its ire, When Alp, beneath his Christian name, Her virgin hand aspired to claim. In happier mood, and earlier time, While unimpeached for traitorous crime, Gayest in Gondola or Hall, He ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Vol. 3 (of 7) • Lord Byron
... was moved, but said the law was strict, and the town must conduct the funeral unless she could find the sad courage to give the necessary instructions. With this he was going out, inexorable, when all of a sudden I observed something that sent my heart into my mouth, and I cried 'Arretez!' ...
— The Woman-Hater • Charles Reade
... palace-front Alive with fluttering scarfs and ladies' eyes, And highest, among the statues, statuelike, Between a cymballed Miriam and a Jael, With Psyche's babe, was Ida watching us, A single band of gold about her hair, Like a Saint's glory up in heaven: but she No saint—inexorable—no tenderness— Too hard, too cruel: yet she sees me fight, Yea, let her see me fall! and with that I drave Among the thickest and bore down a Prince, And Cyril, one. Yea, let me make my dream All that I would. But that large-moulded ...
— The Princess • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... triumphant martyr. His portmanteau and hat-box were carried by an admiring throng down to the Cordwainers' Arms,—a house not, indeed, of the highest repute in the town,—and here a separate committee was formed. Mr. Westmacott did his best to avert the secession; but his supporters were inexorable. The liberal tradesmen of Percycross would have nothing to do with a candidate who declared that inasmuch as a man's mind was more worthy than a man's money, labour was more worthy than capital, and ...
— Ralph the Heir • Anthony Trollope
... can imagine that these abbesses are charming, but also terrible women. Saint Teresa was goodness itself, but when she speaks in her 'Way of Perfection' of nuns who band themselves together to discuss the will of their mother, she shows herself inexorable, for she declares that perpetual imprisonment should be inflicted on them as soon as possible and without flinching, and in fact she is right, for every disorderly sister infects the flock, and gives the rot ...
— En Route • J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans
... man's heart in him but must own that their inspiration to such a degree, with such an idea and sentiment in the time, place, and circumstances in which they stood, was magnificent? Was the inexorable unrelaxing determination with which they, being so few and so poor, maintained their point somewhat wrought into their faces? Very probably. Strange if it had not been. Of course, it was. But if they were stern-visaged in their day, it was that we in our day, which in vision ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... something clutch her heart. What was that figure in blue? Priestess? Prophetess? And for a moment the girl felt herself swept into the vision those dark glowing eyes were seeing; some violent, exalted, inexorable, flaming vision. Then something within her revolted, as though one had tried to hypnotize her into seeing what was not true; as though she had been forced for the moment to look, not at what was really there, but at what those eyes saw projected ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... for years. At last, for some reason, he is induced to withdraw this support; or, perhaps, the girl thinks her allowance insufficient. At any rate, after, let us suppose, ineffectual appeals by letter, she does the desperate thing of calling at his office to protest in person. She finds him inexorable—we know his reputation for obstinacy when he had once made up his mind. She reproaches him—she is already desperate, remember—and he answers with that stinging sarcasm for which he was noted. In an ecstacy of anger, she snatches up the knife and stabs him; then, in an agony of remorse, ...
— The Holladay Case - A Tale • Burton E. Stevenson
... on parting from Farfrae when they drew near the workpeople. He had some business with them, and, though he entreated her to wait a few minutes, she was inexorable, ...
— The Mayor of Casterbridge • Thomas Hardy
... should have gone with you, Heaven knows where, far from the world! But I should have made you most unhappy; for I am jealous. I see lions lurking in the path, and monsters in drops of water. I am made wretched by trifles that most women put up with; inexorable thoughts—from my heart, not yours—would poison our existence and destroy my life. If a man, after ten years' happiness, were not as respectful and as delicate as he was to me at first, I should resent the change; it would abase me in my own eyes! ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... Narth stared again, all the gloating gone as he saw, at last, the quick and inexorable end. "Now—before we can stop you—before we can ...
— Space Prison • Tom Godwin
... close to each other, without perceiving that our conversation had lasted more than the space of a single aspiration; quite surprised to find that the minutes had flown as swiftly as our words, and that the clock struck the inexorable hour of parting. ...
— Raphael - Pages Of The Book Of Life At Twenty • Alphonse de Lamartine
... thousands of sick along with them, were ever setting out, from one end of the year to the other, it was because the Grotto yonder was shining forth in its glory like a beacon of hope and illusion, like a sign of the revolt and triumph of the Impossible over inexorable materiality. Never had a more impassionating romance been devised to exalt the souls of men above the stern laws of life. To dream that dream, this was the great, the ineffable happiness. If the Fathers of ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... as evolving themselves from long series of antecedent causes, and bound up with many widely operating forces and distant events. Here, too, we find ourselves in the full stream of evolution, heredity, survival, and fixed inexorable law. ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol 3 of 3) - The Life of George Eliot • John Morley
... confront it again with the penalty still unpaid was for a long time more than he could calmly contemplate. But as the minutes crept on and still Dick did not come, it was gradually borne in upon him that this, and this alone, was the thing that must be done. It was his job, forced upon him by an inexorable fate. Dick would probably be much more angry with him for doing it, but somehow in a vague, unreasoning fashion he realized that it had got to ...
— The Obstacle Race • Ethel M. Dell
... the nation's legislative halls of those charged with the duty of making laws for the benefit of a generous and free people impressively suggests the exacting obligation and inexorable responsibility involved in their task. At the threshold of such labor now to be undertaken by the Congress of the United States, and in the discharge of an executive duty enjoined by the Constitution, I submit this ...
— Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Volume 8, Section 2 (of 2): Grover Cleveland • Grover Cleveland
... alone unhappy mortals live, But ah! the mighty bliss is fugitive; Discolour'd sickness, anxious labours come, And age, and death's inexorable doom.' ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell
... Walpole says 'the criminal was raised to the dignity of a confessor in the eyes of the people—but an inexorable judge had already pronounced his doom. Lord Mansfield, who never felt pity, and never relented unless terrified, had indecently declared for execution even before the judges had given their opinion. ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 3 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... which were flying round me; I asked only a day, a single day, to talk to him once more, to excite his compassion; I envied those forest trees whose existence is prolonged for centuries; but the inexorable silence of the grave has something in it which confounds the human intellect; and although it is the truth of all others the best known to us, the strength of the impression it leaves can never be effaced. As I approached ...
— Ten Years' Exile • Anne Louise Germaine Necker, Baronne (Baroness) de Stael-Holstein
... means of investigation should be brought to bear on them, ample opportunity given for defence, and a reference then made, if needful, to the Bishop in his proper capacity. But the majority of laymen in the Council were inexorable. It was only, as I have said, after mature reflection that I came to perceive the bearing of the case on that of 1836, and to find that by my resistance I had condemned myself. I then lamented very sincerely that ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... flaw of the modern world, to keep life and religion apart," protested Raphael; "to have one set of principles for week-days and another for Sundays; to grind the inexorable mechanism of supply and demand on pagan principles, and make it up out of ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... dignity of its periods, at once claimed respectful attention; while its perfect candor, and its wealth of accurate scientific detail exacted the homage of belief from all but cross-grained and inexorable skeptics. ...
— The Humbugs of the World • P. T. Barnum
... least; and may they shorten the tedious hours, at the hour when, having accomplished thy time, thou shalt be invoking Ilithyia,[30] who presides over the trembling parturient women; her whom the influence of Juno rendered inexorable to myself. For, when now the natal hour of Hercules, destined for so many toils, was at hand, and the tenth sign {of the Zodiac} was laden with the {great} luminary, the heavy weight was extending my womb; and that which I bore was so great, that you might ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Copious Notes - and Explanations • Publius Ovidius Naso
... dispense and daily change other laws which are most excellent, yet, in regard to this one law of celibacy, they are as iron and inexorable, although, indeed, it is manifest that this is simply of human right. And they are now making this law more grievous in many ways. The canon bids them suspend priests, these rather unfriendly interpreters suspend ...
— The Apology of the Augsburg Confession • Philip Melanchthon
... Incur the prophet's curse and in all things in this sublunary world "make yourselves like unto a wheel." Mount into your railways; whirl from place to place at the rate of fifty or, if you like, of five hundred miles an hour; you cannot escape from that inexorable, all-encircling ocean moan of ennui. No; if you could mount to the stars and do yacht voyages under the belts of Jupiter or stalk deer on the ring of Saturn it would still begirdle you. You cannot escape from it; you can but change your place in it ...
— The Map of Life - Conduct and Character • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... hours. She was not restless, though she was wakeful. Indeed, she felt like a woman to whom an injection of morphia had been administered, as if she never wished to move again. She lay there counting the minutes that made the passing hours, counting them calmly, with an inexorable and almost cold self-possession. The process presently became mechanical, and she was able, at the same time, to dwell upon the events that had followed upon the discovery of the murdered woman by the tent: ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... understand. It has taken several generations before people would admit it as regards organism even after it was pointed out to them, and those who saw it as regards organism still failed to understand it as regards design; an inexorable "Thus far shalt thou go and no farther" barred them from fruition of the harvest they should have been the first to reap. The very men who most insisted that specific difference was the accumulation of differences so minute as to be often hardly, if at all, perceptible, ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler
... sums up the theory: "When we perceive that the negation of the belief is inconceivable, we have all possible warrant for asserting the invariability of its existence: and in asserting this, we express alike our logical justification of it, and the inexorable necessity we are under of holding it.... We have seen that this is the assumption on which every conclusion whatever ultimately rests. We have no other guarantee for the reality of consciousness, of sensations, of personal ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... paw-strokes of the wilderness, the preliminary trifling before the more serious onslaught which came in due course. Yes; I looked at them as you would on any human being, with a curiosity of their impulses, motives, capacities, weaknesses, when brought to the test of an inexorable physical necessity. Restraint! What possible restraint? Was it superstition, disgust, patience, fear—or some kind of primitive honour? No fear can stand up to hunger, no patience can wear it out, disgust simply does not exist where hunger is; and as to superstition, beliefs, and what you ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad
... upon the clearer knowledge of Lord Hurdly's character which had come to her since marriage. She had found in him an inexorable resolution to have what he wanted in life, which had rendered him, more than once within her knowledge, unscrupulous as to the means he used in the securing of his ends. This it was which had planted in her mind the awful though remote possibility of his having been, in some manner, ...
— A Manifest Destiny • Julia Magruder
... first, he was merely proud of being acquainted with a lady of Miss Maude Germaine's importance, and contented himself with boasting of it to all his acquaintance; by degrees, he became more audacious; he began to fancy himself in love with her, and to flatter himself she would not prove inexorable. The raillery of some of his companions piqued him to make good his boast; and he determined to pay his addresses to a lady, who, they all agreed, could never think of a ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. 2 • Maria Edgeworth
... to take this step, or at least to defer it to the beginning of the next term. But he might as well have pleaded with a lamp-post. The Parrett's captain was inexorable. ...
— The Willoughby Captains • Talbot Baines Reed
... on, the law became ever harsher, and the meshes of its inexorable net grew closer. Alas for our Chinese people, who crouched in corners and listened with startled ears, deprived of power of utterance, and with tongues glued to their mouths, for their lives were past saving. Those ...
— China and the Manchus • Herbert A. Giles
... things a humorist, and not at all a droll. He is neither a politician nor a reformer, nor even, if properly understood, a satirist. His aim is to show men and things as they really are, seen through a curtain of fun and raillery—not as they might or ought to be. Yet the essence of his work is inexorable truth, and his version of life is depicted to a delighted public with the unerring pencil of a laughing philosopher. And, moreover, his greatest quality is the astounding excellence of his draughtsmanship, which, so far from being germane ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... though I don't know why, exactly. He has a right to spare his own feelings if he's sparing hers at the same time. Of course he's afraid she'll plead with him to stay, and he'll have to be inexorable with her; and if I understand the yielding nature of Phillips he doesn't like ...
— The Daughter of the Storage - And Other Things in Prose and Verse • William Dean Howells
... with our present embarrassing situation as related to this subject we will be wise if we temper our confidence and faith in our national strength and resources with the frank concession that even these will not permit us to defy with impunity the inexorable laws of finance and trade. At the same time, in our efforts to adjust differences of opinion we should be free from intolerance or passion, and our judgments should be unmoved by alluring phrases ...
— U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses • Various
... deathly lethargy, and arise, torn with struggling pain, to behold the light of a new spiritual morning. All that he could do he was prepared to do, regardless of entreaty, regardless of torture, anger, and hate, with the inexorable justice of love, the law that will not, must not, dares not yield—strong with an awful tenderness, a wisdom that cannot be turned aside, to redeem the lost soul of his father. And he strengthened his heart for the conflict by saying that if he would do thus for his father, ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... defects, with more hastiness and less ability. The two great poets of Italy in that century, Dante and Petrarch, who were both very much opposed to Philip the Handsome, paint Boniface VIII. in similar colors. "He was," says Petrarch (Epistoloe Ramiliares, bk. ii. letter 3), "an inexorable sovereign, whom it was very hard to break by force, and impossible to bend by humility and caresses; "and Dante (Inferno, canto xix. v. 45 57) makes Pope Nicholas III. say, "Already art thou here ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume II. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... sentiment, and who are not wearied by the excessively minute scale, as of a moral miniature-painter, on which the author designs his work, there can scarcely be recommended a more thrilling and affecting book. The author is entirely inexorable, and the reader must not hope to escape until he is thoroughly purged with terror ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... Guise with a bitter laugh, "you are inexorable! Let the man live, and do not seek to emulate his bloodthirstiness. His exile will content me, provided that it be accompanied by the confiscation of his ill-gotten wealth." "So, so; you are indulgent, Monsieur ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... again and again pleaded, supported by their mamma and the colonel; Jack was inexorable. The remains of the waggons burnt on the banks of the river having been cleared away, the colonel's carriage was escorted to the ferry-boat, which conveyed it across to the opposite bank. Here, however, so many more ...
— The Three Commanders • W.H.G. Kingston
... majority sustains the infamous law that makes criminals of the innocent and takes not into consideration the rights of the minority. And what is more, the religious press is so dominated by bigotry and ancient prejudice that it is blind alike to the Golden Rule and the inexorable demands of justice. If in any State the Adventists, the Hebrews, or any other people who believed in observing Saturday instead of Sunday should happen to predominate, and they undertook to throw Christians into dungeons, and after branding ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 23, October, 1891 • Various
... was inexorable. She grasped Kitty very firmly by the arm, turned abruptly in the direction of home, and walked forward with a firm step. There was no help for it; Kitty Malone must accompany her. They soon found themselves back again at the Denvers' house. Mr. and Mrs. Denvers were out, but ...
— Wild Kitty • L. T. Meade
... certain that sins forgiven shall be sins abhorred; and that a man once restored shall cleave to his Restorer as to his Life. That work is the only way by which a man can be absolutely certain that there is forgiveness, in spite of all the accusations of his own conscience; in spite of all the inexorable working out of penalties in the system of the world which seems to contradict the fond belief; in spite of all that a foreboding gaze tells, or ought to tell, of a ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... now, and have become sacred. But remember, oh! remember, that it is to the crimes of a few that are due the deaths of so many, and let us help to hasten the hour when the criminals, whoever they be, and to whatever party they belong; will feel the weight of the inexorable Nemesis of ...
— Paris under the Commune • John Leighton
... condition was that both Lady Glencora and I should be there. We put our heads together to try to avoid this; as, of course, the Prince would not want to see me particularly,—and it was altogether so grand an affair that things had to be weighed. But the Duke was inexorable. Lady Glencora at such a time would have other things to do, and I must be there, or Gatherum Castle should not be opened. I suggested whether I could not remain in the background and look after the Duke as a kind of upper nurse,—but Lady Glencora ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope
... real life, if he could have his desire, would select a picturesque background for his figures; but events have an inexorable fashion for choosing their own landscape. In the present instance it is reluctantly conceded that there are few uglier or more commonplace towns in New England than Stillwater,—a straggling, overgrown village, with whose rural aspects are curiously blended something ...
— The Stillwater Tragedy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... Van der Pyl's was possessed of a puritanical conscience, and would not allow any two people to dine alone in his private salons. So strictly did he adhere to his rule on this subject, that when a well-known man-about-town insisted on his right to dine in the petit salon alone with his wife, the inexorable proprietor turned him out of the restaurant. There was, however, another well-known member of Hague society who succeeded where the gentleman who thought that matrimony overrode all rules had failed. The hero of the little story ...
— The Gourmet's Guide to Europe • Algernon Bastard
... will at the worship of stone idols, but mark ye this, ye breakers of images, that in one regard the stone idol bears awful semblance of Deity—the unchangefulness in the midst of change—the same seeming will, and intent for ever and ever inexorable!... And we, we shall die, and Islam will wither away, and the Englishman straining far over to hold his loved India, will plant a firm foot on the banks of the Nile and sit in the seats of the Faithful, and still that sleepless rock will lie watching and watching ...
— The Treasury of Ancient Egypt - Miscellaneous Chapters on Ancient Egyptian History and Archaeology • Arthur E. P. B. Weigall
... he unsuccessfully tried to conceal his anxiety. "Here we are with a half-completed airplane, a race staring us in the face for next summer, and two of our workmen snatched away for the whole winter by the inexorable demands of school life, leaving only one lone fellow to ...
— Around the World in Ten Days • Chelsea Curtis Fraser
... not mention old John Poindexter to me. And now, if you will be so good, tell the coachman to drive me to my home in Gramercy Park. I have put my finger in the police pie for the last time, Mr. Gryce—positively for the last time." And she sank back on the carriage cushions with an inexorable look, which, nevertheless, did not quite conceal a quiet complacency which argued that she was not altogether dissatisfied with herself or the result of her interference in matters usually considered at variance with ...
— The Circular Study • Anna Katharine Green
... once known as Dunpender, a mountain in East Lothian. A kindly fate watched over the princess, however, and she fell so softly from the eminence that she was uninjured. Such Christian subjects as Lot possessed begged her life. But if her father might have relented his Druids were inexorable. They branded her as a sorceress, and she was doomed to death by drowning. She was accordingly rowed out from Aberlady Bay to the vicinity of the Isle of May, where, seated in a skin boat, she was left to the mercy of the waves. In this terrible situation she cast herself upon the grace of Heaven, ...
— Legends & Romances of Brittany • Lewis Spence
... the edge of the pavement, I waited for a word or a look from you. You had forgotten my very existence. Your coachman whipped his horses; they started at a gallop; and soon I lost sight of you. And then a voice, the inexorable voice of fate, cried to me, 'Never more shalt thou ...
— Other People's Money • Emile Gaboriau
... "Tito" (who, having posed as a rich and noble gentleman, being unexpectedly confronted with his plebeian father, on the spur of the moment disowned him with the merciless words, "Some madman, surely!") "Was experiencing that inexorable law of human souls, that we prepare ourselves for sudden deeds by the reiterated choice of good or evil that gradually determines character."] Can we say, with Kant, that the only good is the Good Will? ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... everyone who was fit for la commission had enjoyed the privilege of examination by that inexorable and delightful body—one evening very late, in fact, just before lumieres eteintes, a strange planton arrived in The Enormous Room and hurriedly read a list ...
— The Enormous Room • Edward Estlin Cummings
... would have termed the sloping ground between the cliff and the sea, was certainly not an extensive one; for, in the event of their wishing to expand their little settlement, in the fashion of squatters out West, by "borrowing" land from adjacent lots, the inexorable wall of volcanic rock to the rear of the plateau and on its right and left flank forbade the carrying out of any such scheme; still, the place was big enough for their house, besides affording room for a tidy-sized garden—that ...
— Fritz and Eric - The Brother Crusoes • John Conroy Hutcheson
... combination, and, except for himself, no South had ever been a coward. He knew a certain glitter in their eyes. He knew it was apt to presage death, and this girl, trembling in her knees but holding that muzzle against his chest so unwaveringly, as steady as granite, had it in her pupils. Her voice held an inexorable monotony suggestive of tolling bells. She was not the Sally he had known before, but a new Sally, acting under a quiet sort of exaltation, capable of anything. He knew that, should she shoot him dead there in her house, no man who knew them both would blame her. His life ...
— The Call of the Cumberlands • Charles Neville Buck
... of race prejudice that retards the progress of the colored people of our own generation, cannot, except by reading the painful records of the past, conceive of the mental and spiritual darkness to which slavery, as the inexorable condition of its existence, condemned its victims and, in a less measure, their oppressors, or of the blank wall of proscription and scorn by which free people of color were shut up in a moral and social Ghetto, the gates of which have yet ...
— Frederick Douglass - A Biography • Charles Waddell Chesnutt
... acquiring them by subscription or by purchase: they begged or borrowed or stole, they delegated one of the party perhaps to commit the volumes to memory and repeat them, like the bards of old, to listening multitudes. Some ingenious theory was required at any rate to account for the inexorable limits of his circulation. It wasn't a thing for five people to live on; therefore either the objects circulated must change their nature or the organisms to be nourished must. The former change was perhaps the easier to consider first. Limbert considered it with extraordinary ...
— Embarrassments • Henry James
... ruin, confides to his fellow-guest at the banquet that the bitterest pain which man can know is [Greek: polla phroneonta mdenoss krateein],—complete, but helpless, prescience. In the grasp of a more inexorable necessity, the champion of Greek freedom was borne onward to a more tremendous catastrophe than that which strewed the waters of Salamis with Persian wrecks and the field of Plataea with Persian dead; but to him, at least, it was given to proclaim aloud the clear and ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... venerable man before me, and noted his homely and rugged yet profound and melancholy expression, I knew that their look was upon him also, and that a greater than Ossian had been nursed amid those lonely hills. Few men in literature have felt the burden of the world, the weight of the inexorable conscience, as has Carlyle, or drawn such fresh inspiration from that source. However we may differ from him (and almost in self-defense one must differ from a man of such intense and overweening personality), it must yet be admitted that he habitually speaks out of that primitive silence ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... in, and when she twitched herself loose from his embrace he came near regretting his extreme virtue. He spent ten minutes trying to explain, without telling all of the truth, and he felt his good opinion of himself slipping from him before her inexorable disfavor. ...
— Lonesome Land • B. M. Bower
... pressing invitation from an ever benevolently- disposed father to a prosaic but dutifully-inclined son. The recording of certain matters of no particular moment. Concerning that ultimate end which is symbolic of the inexorable wheels of ...
— The Mirror of Kong Ho • Ernest Bramah
... was leading 8th Air Force against Germany found "a strikingly soft-spoken, sober, compact man who has the mild manner of a conservative minister and the judicial outlook of a member of the Supreme Court. But he is always about two steps ahead of everybody on the score, and there is a quiet, inexorable logic about everything he does." Of his own choice, Eaker would have separated from military service after World War I. He wanted to be a lawyer and he also toyed with the idea of running a country newspaper. In his off hours, he wrote books on aviation ...
— The Armed Forces Officer - Department of the Army Pamphlet 600-2 • U. S. Department of Defense
... with his subjects; then he would straightway break his plighted word and his oath, like the vilest of slaves, who perjure themselves and are only driven to confess through fear of torture. He was a faithless friend, an inexorable foe, and mad for murder and plunder; quarrelsome and revolutionary, easily led to do evil, never persuaded to act rightly, he was quick to contrive and carry out what was evil, but loathed even to hear ...
— The Secret History of the Court of Justinian • Procopius
... right hand moved, lifted. He supported his weight on his left arm. The right moved toward Bonbright, opening as it moved. There was something inexorable about its movement, something that seemed to say it did not move by Dulac's will, but that it had been ordained so to move since the beginning of time.... It approached and opened, ...
— Youth Challenges • Clarence B Kelland
... is a man with whom you may prevail when you have need there should be law, or when you have need there should be no law; he has favors in the right, and he frowns not in the wrong place; he knows his friends from his enemies. But laws are deaf, inexorable things, such as make no difference between a gentleman and an ordinary fellow; a man can never be merry for them, for to trust altogether to his own innocence is a sad life." Unhappy wantons! Scipio, on the other side, when he was but a boy (about two or ...
— The Commonwealth of Oceana • James Harrington |
