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Inconceivably

adverb
1.
To an inconceivable degree.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Inconceivably" Quotes from Famous Books



... him, hurt him inconceivably to think that she might have deceived him thus; might have broken the wrong bottle, and then deliberately have kept him in darkness with the very remedy at hand. That would seem the ...
— The Leopard Woman • Stewart Edward White et al

... ground, instead of gaining, that spurt," he remarked, as he hastened to his post. "It must be inconceivably large, to exert such an enormous attractive force at this distance. We'll have to put on full power. Hang onto ...
— The Skylark of Space • Edward Elmer Smith and Lee Hawkins Garby

... Damanhour our headquarters were established at the residence of a sheik. The house had been new whitened, and looked well enough outside, but the interior was inconceivably wretched. Every domestic utensil was broken, and the only seats were a few dirty tattered mats. Bonaparte knew that the sheik was rich, and having somewhat won his confidence, he asked him, through the medium of the interpreter, why, being in easy circumstances, he thus deprived ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton

... Hudson has been so well described, and so justly eulogized, that I need say little on that score. In short, no words can convey an adequate impression of the gorgeousness of the forest tints in North America during the autumn. The foliage is inconceivably beautiful and varied, from the broad and brightly dark purple leaf of the maple, to the delicate and pale sere leaf of the poplar, all blending harmoniously with the deep green of their brethren in whom the vital sap still flows in full vigour. I have heard ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray

... a pressing call for money. Somebody told him a certain person is inconceivably rich; were he made aware of your want, he would somehow manage to accommodate it. He said, "I do not know him." The other answered, "I will introduce you;" and having taken his hand, he brought him to that person's dwelling. The ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 2, Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous

... the surrounding shell was closing in upon them. On the whole, the funds had held out amazingly well. The wages had been rather higher than we meant; but the men had no chances at liquor or dissipation, and had worked faster than we expected; and, with our new brick- machines, we made brick inconceivably fast, while their quality was so good that dear George said there was never so little waste. We celebrated Thanksgiving of that year together,—my family and his family. We had paid off all the laborers; and there were left, of that busy village, only Asaph Langdon ...
— The Brick Moon, et. al. • Edward Everett Hale

... the next morning. By that time, the Americans had assembled in sufficient force to defeat any landing party the enemy could send ashore. The bombardment of the town continued; but the aim of the British was so inconceivably poor, that, during the three days' firing, no damage was done by their shot. A more ludicrous fiasco could hardly be imagined, and the Americans were quick to see the comical side of the affair. Before departing, the British fired over fifteen ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 2 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot

... their father quietly, seeming to have settled it all a long time before. "She was the most absolutely loving person. You girls may be like her in that, too. I'm sure you're inconceivably ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown

... the effort is almost paralyzed. Mathematically, the resistance increases in the ratio of the square of the velocity; and although the air is of course more easily displaced than water, the same rule applies to it, and the flight of a ball is so inconceivably rapid that the resistance becomes enormous. The average initial velocity of a cannon- or rifle-ball is sixteen hundred feet in a second, and a twelve-pound round shot, moving at this rate, encounters an atmospheric resistance of nearly two ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various

... of so meritorious an institution." What is worthy of note herein is this, that the name which the distinguished writer could not make out, is that of one of our most fluent penmen, namely, C.C. Trowbridge, Esq., but who, on scrutiny, I perceive, writes his name worse than anything else, and so inconceivably bad that a stranger might not be able ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft

... especially was pointed out to me by my host as a horse-dealer from Basle, who was willing to play high, and was always ready to pay his losses. This was sufficient. I immediately proposed to ruin that horse-dealer. I stood behind him and studied his play, which was inconceivably bad. ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton

... Biddy listened to music inconceivably tender. She had been awakened from her prayers by the sound of a harp string touched very gently; and the note had floated down like a flower, and all the vibrations were not dead when the same note floated ...
— The Untilled Field • George Moore

... crumpled form of a man, weak and distorted like a victim of the rack—scattered, so to speak—in a posture inconceivably out of drawing, among the fragments of the engine. The man's head was lowest, and rested on an old battered box; his middle was supported by a beam of the engine; one of his legs was elevated on one ...
— The Mark Of Cain • Andrew Lang

... at the ascending lift with the cat's expression of impotent dismay and stupefaction. It was inconceivably grotesque. It brought into my tragedy an element of infernal farce. I became conscious of peals of laughter, and looking round beheld the American doubled up in a saddlebag chair. I fled from the vestibule of the hotel clothed from head to foot ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke

... one. He is dead. His profits have gone into the mass, his honors have become international. The patents have long expired. The public, the entire world, are long since the beneficiaries, and the benefits continue to be inconceivably vast. Nothing in all history exceeds in moral importance the invention of the telegraph except the invention of printing ...
— Steam Steel and Electricity • James W. Steele

... innocent than his predecessors, it shows him not to have been that exaggerated scoundrel, which the calculations and the clamors of the public have supposed. It shows that the public treasures have not been so inconceivably squandered, as the parliaments of Grenoble, Toulouse, &c. had affirmed. In fine, it shows him less wicked, and France less badly governed, than I had feared. In examining my little collection of books, to see what it could furnish ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson

... one of those sudden and startling flaws of wind common to the Strait. The breeze, which had been strong all day, increased with sudden fury just as the vessel was passing through a rather narrow channel, which gave the wind the additional force of compression. In an inconceivably short time, the channel was lashed into a white foam; the roar of wind and water was so great you could not hear yourself speak, though the hoarse shout of command and the answering cry of the sailors rose above the storm. To add to the confusion, a loose sail slatted as if it would tear itself ...
— Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence • Louis Agassiz

... the principle of nationality in those eastern countries which are under western dominion might not inconceivably raise political issues of considerable magnitude, but in the discussions which have from time to time taken place on this subject the inconveniences and even danger caused by the universality of a non-national bond ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring

... which the waves utter continually a rattling undertone. The steamer pushes boldly in. The cool green of the water underneath changes to gray. Suddenly you make out the bottom, as through a thick green glass, and the big suckers and catfish idling over its riffled sands, inconceivably far down through the unbelievably clear liquid. So absorbed are you in this marvellous clarity that a slight, grinding jar alone brings you to yourself. The steamer's nose is actually touching the white strip ...
— The Forest • Stewart Edward White

... {9} and the motions of all on their axes, are IN ONE DIRECTION—namely, from west to east. Had all these matters been left to accident, the chances against the uniformity which we find would have been, though calculable, inconceivably great. Laplace states them at four millions of millions to one. It is thus powerfully impressed on us, that the uniformity of the motions, as well as their general adjustment to one plane, must have ...
— Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation • Robert Chambers

... the hearth. The landlord of this wretched hostelry met my enquires about supper with a stare of astonishment, and offered me a huge loaf of hard black bread as the whole contents of his larder. Ivan, however, presently appeared, having managed to forage out a couple of fowls, which, in an inconceivably short space of time, were plucked, and one of them simmering in an iron pot over the fire, while the other hung suspended by a string in front of the blaze. Supper over, we wrapped ourselves in our furs, and lay down upon the floor, beds in such a ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various

... But an inconceivably large portion of human knowledge and human power is involved in the science and management of 'words'; and an education of words, though it destroys genius, will often create, and always foster, talent. The young Pitt was conspicuous far beyond his fellows, both at ...
— The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - 1838 • James Gillman

... the sun ever perforates this grove, where black eternal darkness would reign was it not excluded by innumerable lamps which are placed in pyramids round the grove; so that the distant reflection they cast on the palace, which is plentifully gilt with gold on the outside, is inconceivably solemn. To this I may add the hollow murmur of winds constantly heard from the grove, and the very remote sound of roaring waters. Indeed, every circumstance seems to conspire to fill the mind with horror ...
— From This World to the Next • Henry Fielding

... of his eye, or the slow monotony of his speech. I had never witnessed any scene so dramatic as this, and yet all was absolutely simple and unintentional. I had been thrilled by the greatest actors, as with matchless skill they gave rein to their genius in tragic situations; but how inconceivably tawdry and cheap such pictures seemed in comparison with this! The claptrap of the music, the lights, the posing, the wry faces, the gasps, lunges, staggerings, rolling eyes,—how flimsy and colorless, how mocking and grotesque, they all appeared beside this simple, uncouth, ...
— The Ape, the Idiot & Other People • W. C. Morrow

... matters, the two young men sauntered through the streets; they were now in that quarter which was filled with the gayest shops, their open interiors all and each radiant with the gaudy yet harmonious colors of frescoes, inconceivably varied in fancy and design. The sparkling fountains, that at every vista threw upwards their grateful spray in the summer air; the crowd of passengers, or rather loiterers, mostly clad in robes of the Tyrian dye; the gay groups collected round each more attractive shop; the slaves ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton

... of the vast majority of earlier observers the phrase "foundations of the universe" would have suggested something enormously massive and solid. From what we have already seen we are prepared, on the contrary, to pass from the inconceivably large to the inconceivably small. Our sun is, as far as our present knowledge goes, one of modest dimensions. Arcturus and Canopus must be thousands of times larger than it. Yet our sun is 320,000 times heavier than the earth, and the earth weighs ...
— The Story of Evolution • Joseph McCabe

... intimately I become acquainted with barbarians, the more disgusting does heathenism become. It is inconceivably vile. They are always boasting of their fierceness, yet dare not visit another tribe for fear of being killed. They never visit anywhere but for the purpose of plunder and oppression. They never go anywhere but with a club or spear in hand. It is lamentable ...
— The Personal Life Of David Livingstone • William Garden Blaikie

... solitary and meditative life. Her intelligence, less facile than the dog's, and far less highly differentiated, owes little to our tutelage; her character has not been moulded by our hands. The changing centuries have left no mark upon her; and, from a past inconceivably remote, she has come down to us, a creature self-absorbed and self-communing, undisturbed by our feverish activity, a dreamer of dreams, a lover ...
— Americans and Others • Agnes Repplier

... the audio system upon the inconceivably high frequency of their carrier wave and spoke in the ...
— Skylark Three • Edward Elmer Smith

... were, tightly pressed in between a number of different groups, their ears were assaulted by a disjointed mass of stentorian conversation that gave a singular illusion as if it all came from one inconceivably voluble source, the individuality of the voices being lost in the screaming enunciation which, as Mrs. Sandworth had pointed out, was a prerequisite of self-expression ...
— Quit Your Worrying! • George Wharton James

... every evening to taste the air and to look at the ladies, while the Austrians and the other foreigners listen to the military music in the Piazza. They are both young, our friends; they have both glossy silk hats; they have both light canes and an innocent swagger. Inconceivably mild are these youth, and in their ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells

... The "will of God" is, indeed, the atmosphere of heavenly magnetism; it is liberation, not captivity; it is achievement, not renunciation. People talk about being "resigned" to the will of God; as well might they phrase being "resigned" to Paradise! That has been an inconceivably false tradition that repeated the prayer, "Thy will be done," as if it were the most sorrowful, instead of ...
— The Life Radiant • Lilian Whiting

... inspires the skylark and nightingale, but more or less allied to and strengthened by Thought or Consciousness. If human Will or Wisdom alone directed all our work, then every man who had mere patience might be a great original genius, and it is indeed true that Man can do inconceivably more in following and imitating genius than has ever been imagined. However, thus far the talent which enables a man to write such a passage as that ...
— The Mystic Will • Charles Godfrey Leland

... his recovery, a copying-clerk in a solicitor's, and afterwards in a sheriff-clerk's office, and began to contribute to Ruddiman's Weekly Magazine. We remember in boyhood reading some odd volumes of this production, the general matter in which was inconceivably poor, relieved only by Fergusson's racy little Scottish poems. His evenings were spent chiefly in the tavern, amidst the gay and dissipated youth of the metropolis, to whom he was the 'wit, songster, and mimic.' That his convivial powers were extraordinary, ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan

... Rallying himself, he returned to the tavern, drank another glass of brandy, and retired to his chamber. He had scarcely lain his head on the pillow when he heard that hoarse, low, but terribly distinct whisper, repeating the same words. He describes his sensations at this time as inconceivably fearful. Reason was struggling with insanity; but amidst the confusion and mad disorder one terrible thought evolved itself. Had he not, in a moment of mad frenzy of which his memory made no record, actually murdered some one? And was not this a warning from Heaven? Leaving his bed and ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier

... and secret of their individual lives: and that here, in this third factor, the disharmonies between the part and the whole are resolved. As they know themselves to dwell in the world of time and yet to be capable of transcending it, so the Ultimate Reality, they think, inhabits yet inconceivably exceeds all that they know to be—as the soul of the musician controls and exceeds not merely each note of the flowing melody, but also the whole of that symphony in which these cadences must play their part. That invulnerable spark of ...
— Practical Mysticism - A Little Book for Normal People • Evelyn Underhill

... sound, light, heat, etc.; they show the seven colours of the spectrum; give out the seven sounds of the natural scale; respond in a variety of ways to physical vibration—flashing, singing, pulsing bodies, they move incessantly, inconceivably beautiful and brilliant.[12] ...
— Occult Chemistry - Clairvoyant Observations on the Chemical Elements • Annie Besant and Charles W. Leadbeater

... contact with the surface of a gland, act on it, and the tentacle bends. The pressure exerted by the particle of hair, weighing only 1/78740 of a grain and supported by a dense fluid, must have been inconceivably slight. We may conjecture that it could hardly have equalled the millionth of a grain; and we shall hereafter see that far less than the millionth of a grain of phosphate of ammonia in solution, when absorbed by a gland, acts on it and induces movement. ...
— Insectivorous Plants • Charles Darwin

... and mechanics of the place were inconceivably delighted with this idea, because they had never heard of anything in iron before that could not be ...
— The Jest Book - The Choicest Anecdotes and Sayings • Mark Lemon

... immeasurable distances side to side. Little by little, attracted by the smell of cooking food, the animals drew closer, and at last stationed themselves in a kind of wide-drawn circle about their camp on both sides of the river, wailing back and forth like souls inconceivably tormented. Natalie shuddered. ...
— Two on the Trail - A Story of the Far Northwest • Hulbert Footner

... that you sing afterwards.' 'I am afraid I do not understand that,' I said. 'It would not pay me to do so. I only consume about ten shillings worth of food and wine, and my terms are more than that.' There," said Mr. Grossmith, "could you have believed that anyone would have been so inconceivably ...
— The Idler, Volume III., Issue XIII., February 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly. Edited By Jerome K. Jerome & Robert Barr • Various

... after the bridge." Bidding him farewell, we crossed the road and going down the field speedily arrived at Pont y Meibion. The bridge is a small bridge of one arch which crosses the brook Ceiriog—it is built of rough moor stone; it is mossy, broken, and looks almost inconceivably old; there is a little parapet to it about two feet high. On the right-hand side it is shaded by an ash. The brook when we viewed it, though at times a roaring torrent, was stealing along gently, on both sides it is overgrown with alders, noble hills rise above ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow

... broom, and nothing on him but a ragged pair of trousers and a pink glazed-calico coat—made on him—so very tight that it is as evident that he could never take it off, as that he never does. This hideous apparition, inconceivably drunk, has a terrible power of making a gong-like imitation of the braying of an ass: which feat requires that he should lay his right jaw in his begrimed right paw, double himself up, and shake his bray out of himself, with much staggering on his next-to-no legs, ...
— The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices • Charles Dickens

... velocity imparted to the atoms in their rushing together. Of course such a unit of time as a second is not here to be thought of, the whole interval required by the atoms to cross the minute spaces which separate them amounting only to an inconceivably small ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall

... see how Septimius could have shielded her from the insult; and yet he felt inconceivably outraged and humiliated at the thought that this offence had occurred while Rose was under his protection, and he responsible for her. Besides, somehow or other, he was angry with her for having undergone the wrong, though certainly most unreasonably; ...
— Septimius Felton - or, The Elixir of Life • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... each living creature may be thus furnished, the number of such gemmules in each must be inconceivably great. Mr. Darwin says:[219] "In a highly organized and complex animal, the gemmules thrown off from each different cell or unit throughout the body must be inconceivably numerous and minute. Each unit of each part, as it changes during ...
— On the Genesis of Species • St. George Mivart

... evening drew on, another wonderful spectacle presented itself, similar to that which I described at Sakkiazung, but displayed here on an inconceivably grander scale, with all the effects exaggerated. I saw a sea of mist floating 3000 feet beneath me, just below the upper level of the black pines; the magnificent spurs of the snowy range which I had crossed rising out of it in rugged grandeur as promontories and peninsulas, between ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker

... vigor remained until the end, that his attachments long and profoundly affected his emotional life and his work, and that with most of the women he has immortalized he never had actual sexual relationships at all, and when we realize, moreover, that, throughout, he accomplished an almost inconceivably vast amount of work, we shall probably conclude that sexual indulgence had a very much smaller part in Goethe's life than in that of many an average man on whom it leaves no obvious emotional or intellectual trace whatever. Sterne, again, declared that he must ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis

... was not convinced. There was something else at the bottom of this sudden impulse and its inconceivably sudden execution. Why had he never told me of this plan? Well, because it had never become one until after the morning's work at Levy's bank, in itself a reason for being out of the way, as I myself admitted. But he would have told me if only I had turned ...
— Mr. Justice Raffles • E. W. Hornung

... the earthquake; and that I saw a man descending from a great black cloud, and alight upon the ground. He was all over as bright as a flash of fire that a little before surrounded him; his countenance inconceivably terrible; the earth as it were trembled when he stept upon the ground, and flashes of fire seemed to fill all the air. No sooner I thought him landed upon the earth, but with a long spear, or other weapon, he made towards me; but first ascending a rising ground, his voice added to ...
— The Life and Most Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of - York, Mariner (1801) • Daniel Defoe

... interior has been decorated (among other subjects of more delicate execution), by Giulio Romano. There is a leering Giant over a certain chimney-piece, and there are dozens of Giants (Titans warring with Jove) on the walls of another room, so inconceivably ugly and grotesque, that it is marvellous how any man can have imagined such creatures. In the chamber in which they abound, these monsters, with swollen faces and cracked cheeks, and every kind of distortion of look and limb, are depicted as staggering under the weight of falling buildings, and ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens

... part of my subject inconceivably painful; I hurry over it, but if I am to perform my self-imposed duty of giving a true picture of what school life sometimes is, I must not pass ...
— Eric • Frederic William Farrar

... large family, and complained to me that, what with child-bearing and hard field labour, her back was almost broken in two. With an almost savage vehemence of gesticulation she suddenly tore up her scanty clothing, and exhibited a spectacle with which I was inconceivably shocked and sickened. The facts, without any of her corroborating statements, bore tolerable witness to the hardships of her existence. I promised to attend to her ailments and give her proper ...
— Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation - 1838-1839 • Frances Anne Kemble

... this an ill-humored letter, when, in fact, it is the strongest proof of affection I can give to dread to lose you. —— has taken such pains to convince me that you must and ought to stay, that it has inconceivably depressed my spirits. You have always known my opinion. I have ever declared that two people who mean to live together ought not to be long separated. If certain things are more necessary to you than me,—search for them. Say but one word, and you shall never ...
— Mary Wollstonecraft • Elizabeth Robins Pennell

... looked and looked again. "Methinks the winds have been ill which have blown upon thee. Thou lookest stricken unto death—and I know not how, but thou hast changed inconceivably—thou art shorter. No! I know not what ...
— Desert Love • Joan Conquest

... boathouse was being transferred to the hold of the sailing ship. The scene was inconceivably unreal. There was no sound but the intermittent puffs of the wind, and the figures were like phantoms in a sort of lighted mist. Directly as I looked two figures came out of the boathouse and along the path to the drawing-room door under my window. I took off my shoes ...
— The Sleuth of St. James's Square • Melville Davisson Post

... said, 'on the theory of Theism,' 'supposing Theism true,' &c. By such phrase my meaning will always be equivalent to—'supposing, for the sake of argument, that the nearest approach which the human mind can make to a true notion of the ens realissimum, is that of an inconceivably magnified image of itself at ...
— Thoughts on Religion • George John Romanes

... poor, inconceivably inadequate notice in the People's Journal. How curiously wrong, too, in the personal guesses! Sad work truly. For my old friend Mrs. Adams—no, I must be silent: the lyrics seem doggerel in its utter purity. And so the people are to be instructed in the new age of gold! I heard two days ago ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett

... a blaze of light when they arrived, and Francoise, the maid, came flying out to report sundry breakages and mishaps. How the salad had precipitated itself downstairs, dish and all. How Monsieur Gaston was so gay, so inconceivably gay, that he could hardly stand, and insisted on kissing her clandestinely. That Mademoiselle Pelagie had wept much because her veil was torn; and Madame F. had made a fresh toilette, ravishing to behold. Would the dear ladies survey the party, still ...
— Shawl-Straps - A Second Series of Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag • Louisa M. Alcott

... the vibrating note being higher than the highest note on the pianoforte. "She appeared to make a sort of preparation previous to its utterance, and never approached it by the regular scale. It began with an inconceivably fine tone, which gradually swelled both in volume and power, till it made the ears vibrate and the heart thrill. It particularly resembled the highest note of the nightingale, that is reiterated each time more intensely, and which with a sort of ventriloquism ...
— Great Singers, First Series - Faustina Bordoni To Henrietta Sontag • George T. Ferris

... which they live. They contain a larger quantity of nitrogen in their constitution than vegetables generally do, and the substance called 'fungine' has a near resemblance to animal matter. Their spores are inconceivably numerous and minute, and are diffused very widely, developing themselves wherever they find organic matter in a fit state. The principal conditions required for their growth are moisture, heat, and the presence ...
— Forty Centuries of Ink • David N. Carvalho

... a sudden terror seized Susie. She felt that the hairs of her head stood up, and a cold sweat broke out on her body. Her limbs had grown on an instant inconceivably heavy so that she could not move. A panic such as she had never known came upon her, and, except that her legs would not carry her, she would have fled blindly. She began to tremble. She tried to speak, but her ...
— The Magician • Somerset Maugham

... a treatise on synonyms, and a dictionary in which the words were arranged not alphabetically but according to their supposed etymology—thus hirundo (swallow) from aer (air). One had to know the meaning of the word before one searched for it! The grammars were written in a barbarous Latin of inconceivably difficult style. Can any man now readily understand the following definition of "pronoun," taken from a book intended {664} for beginners, published in 1499? "Pronomen . . . significat substantiam seu entitatem sub modo conceptus ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith

... excessively fond of paint as the former. At some courts, they appear in rich furs: and all of them are loaded with jewels, if they can obtain them. The female part of the burgher's families, in many of the German towns, dress in a very different manner, and some of them inconceivably fantastic, as may be seen in many prints published in books of travels. But, in this respect, they are gradually reforming, and many of them make quite a different appearance in their dress from what they did thirty or ...
— Sketches of the Fair Sex, in All Parts of the World • Anonymous

... wain was brought to a halt; the crowd forming a vast circle round it, so as not to interfere with the proceedings. The pole was then taken out, reared aloft, and so much activity was displayed, so many eager hands assisted, that in an inconceivably short space of time it was firmly planted in the ground; whence it shot up like the central mast of a man-of-war, far overtopping the roofs of the adjoining houses, and looking very gay indeed, with its floral crown ...
— The Star-Chamber, Volume 1 - An Historical Romance • W. Harrison Ainsworth

... quality, and a novelist of great variety and of almost the first class. He let his weakest qualities go in with his strongest in his novels, and had also the still more unfortunate tendency to "trail coats" of the most inconceivably different colours for others to tread upon. Liberals, Radicals, and Tories; Roman Catholics, High Churchmen, Low Churchmen, and No-Churchmen; sentimentalists and cynics; people who do not like literary and historical allusion, and ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury

... military and executive, of seeing that the armistice terms were fulfilled, was tremendous. Much of it devolved upon him and made inconceivably great requisitions on that genius he has "for the command of enormous material difficulties"—a genius he first displayed in getting the Ninth Army across the Marne in pursuit of the fleeing Germans, in September, ...
— Foch the Man - A Life of the Supreme Commander of the Allied Armies • Clara E. Laughlin

... beautiful and becomes merely an illustrative element, an aid to dramatic expression. What shall be said, then, when music adorns itself with its loveliest attributes and lends them to the apotheosis of that which is indescribably, yes, inconceivably, gross and abominable? Music cannot lie. Not even the genius of Richard Strauss can make it discriminate in its soaring ecstasy between a vile object and a good. There are three supremely beautiful musical moments in "Salome." Two of them are purely instrumental, though they illustrate ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel

... lines of black oil on these wheels look very much as if centrifugal force actually did produce motion, or had at least a very decided tendency to produce motion, in the radial direction. This interesting action calls for explanation. In this action the oil moves outward gradually, or by inconceivably minute steps. Its adhesion being overcome in the least possible degree, it moves in the same degree tangentially. In so doing it comes in contact with a point of the surface which has a motion more rapid than its own. Its ...
— Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XXI., No. 531, March 6, 1886 • Various

... support of it. Opposing all and every sort of Reform totis viribus while he dared, now he makes a death-bed profession of acquiescence in something which should be more moderate than this. All these things disgust people inconceivably, and it is not the less melancholy that he is our only resource, and his capacity for business and power in the House of Commons places him so far above all his competitors that if we are to have a Conservative party we must look to ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. II • Charles C. F. Greville

... Em, not The Birth of Merlin or Thomas Lord Cromwell, could reasonably or fairly be regarded as on the same level of worthlessness with this incomparable production. No mortal man who had survived its perusal could for a moment hesitate to agree that it was the most incredibly, ineffably, inconceivably, unmitigatedly, irredeemably, inexpressibly damnable piece of bad work ever perpetrated by human hand. No mortal critic of the genuine Anglo-German school could therefore hesitate for a moment to agree that in common consistency ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne

... the mystery of handsome houses and of handsome furnishings came to harass him. Such things were everywhere: how were they got, how were they kept? Should he himself ever——? But no; nothing ahead for years, even in the most favorable of circumstances, save an assistant professorship, with its inconceivably modest emoluments.... ...
— Bertram Cope's Year • Henry Blake Fuller

... complicated in its vital structure,—and that other discovery, that its molecules, oscillating with a rapidity almost infinite, convey their impressions to the surrounding ether, which, in turn, transmits them over inconceivable distances, in an inconceivably short space of time,—these discoveries lead us to the even more marvellous discovery, that any kind of molecules are affected in a special manner by molecules of the same kind, though situated in the most distant ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 20, July, 1891 • Various

... the Drift-dbris, than to believe that a race of human beings, far enough advanced in civilization to manufacture bricks, and build pavements and cisterns, dwelt in the Mississippi Valley, in a past so inconceivably remote that the slow increase ...
— Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel • Ignatius Donnelly

... what they may signify below the surface. Since they profess for the most part to be revealers of spirit life, it is either as being absolutely that, or as being absolute frauds, that they are judged. The result is an inconceivably shallow state of public opinion on the subject. One set of persons, emotionally touched at hearing the names of their loved ones given, and consoled by assurances that they are "happy," accept the revelation, ...
— Memories and Studies • William James

... prohibition is that when it can be enforced by law it makes rebels who think there is something inconceivably clever in doing secretly that which the law forbids. They learn to think there is some subtle merit in evading the law. They encourage others to break the law, and so develop cliques and finally new and silly conventions. Or, prohibition has another ...
— Nonsenseorship • G. G. Putnam

... holding a narrow pass against an enemy. His very figure had a peculiarly stern and rock-like expression. His broad shoulders were set, his rather heavy head erect, and when he did look at Estelle, it was an inconceivably sharp look as if he were trying to ...
— The Dark Tower • Phyllis Bottome

... the wretched prisoners taken in these wars were inconceivably horrible and disgusting. Some of our readers may, perhaps, think we might have passed over the sickening details in silence, but we feel strongly that it is better that truth should be known than that the feelings of the ...
— The Cannibal Islands - Captain Cook's Adventure in the South Seas • R.M. Ballantyne

... unconditioned is found. By the principles we have laid down, however, the problem is solved. The absolute infinity of a series is a contradiction in adjecto. As every number, although immeasurably and inconceivably great, is impossible unless unity is given as its basis, so every series, being itself a number, is impossible unless a first term is given as a commencement. Through a first term alone is the unconditioned possible; that is, if it does not exist ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker

... heart, and glorious singing of soul, will it look forward to eternity, and its everlasting abode in the prepared mansions, remembering that there its begun study will be everlastingly continued, its capacity to understand that unsearchable mystery will be inconceivably greater; and the spiritual, heavenly and glorious joy, which it will have in that practical reading its divinity without book of ordinances, will be its life and felicity for ever? And what peace and joy in the Holy ...
— Christ The Way, The Truth, and The Life • John Brown (of Wamphray)

... form produced by another person when trying to hold exactly the same thought. Here also we have an amazing complexity of almost inconceivably delicate blue lines, and here also our imagination must be called upon to insert the golden globe from Fig. 42, so that its glory may shine through at every point. Here also, as in Fig. 44, we have that curious and beautiful pattern, ...
— Thought-Forms • Annie Besant

... light waves which are quite invisible to the eye and can beam right through the tissues of the body. To the mind's eye only are they visible. And a very wonderful picture they make. We see the transmuting atom flashing out this light for an inconceivably short instant as it throws off the ss-ray. And "so far this little candle throws his beams" in the complex system of the cells, so far atoms shaken by the rays send out ss-rays; these in turn are hurled against other atomic ...
— The Birth-Time of the World and Other Scientific Essays • J. (John) Joly

... was substantially administered. The lawyers came mostly from Kentucky, though an occasional New Englander confronted and lived down the general prejudice against his region and obtained preferment. The profits of the profession were inconceivably small. One early State's Attorney describes his first circuit as a tour of shifts and privations not unlike the wanderings of a mendicant friar. In his first county he received a fee of five dollars for prosecuting the parties to a sanguinary affray. In the next he was equally successful, ...
— Abraham Lincoln: A History V1 • John G. Nicolay and John Hay

... perhaps by its vague suggestion of danger as by the hopes of success it never fails to awaken in the heart of a true adventurer. And its immutable aspect of profound and still repose, seen thus under streams of fire and in the midst of a violent uproar, made it appear inconceivably mysterious and amazing. ...
— The Rescue • Joseph Conrad

... not more than five feet away. He let out a link and fairly flew. The white lines of the field fell away behind him. One more tremendous effort by pursuer and pursued, and just as eager hands reached out to grasp him, he flashed over the goal line for a touchdown. Suddenly, brilliantly, inconceivably, the 'Greys' had ...
— Bert Wilson on the Gridiron • J. W. Duffield

... crescent. Rapidly more brilliant and more decided in shape the profile gradually grew, till it soon resembled the first faint sketch of the New Moon that we catch of evenings in the western sky, or rather the first glimpse we get of her limb as it slowly moves out of eclipse. But it was inconceivably brighter than either, and was furthermore strangely relieved by the pitchy blackness both of sky and Moon. In fact, it soon became so brilliant as to dispel in a moment all doubt as to its particular nature. No meteor could present ...
— All Around the Moon • Jules Verne

... tones swelled high and clear, until the pure voice of the Princess thrilled through all the perfumed air. Then it became more and more glorious, until its beatific beauty caused many of the older hearers to die, and go straight to paradise. The close was inconceivably sweet; and when the last notes died away, the people bowed their heads in tearful peace, and all evil left their hearts, and to many ...
— Ting-a-ling • Frank Richard Stockton

... favoured her quest, for it was in reality only a very few minutes after her parting with Sally that she came upon a loving couple seated by the road-side. The man was a fisherman well known to Jinny. How she explained and what she promised she never quite knew, but, in an inconceivably short space of time they were speeding back together, the man preceding her with long, swinging strides. There was no time to lose in looking for a rope—he thought he knew a place where he could get Mr. Dickinson across; if not available, he ...
— North, South and Over the Sea • M.E. Francis (Mrs. Francis Blundell)

... these iambics are more or less terrible than the "political verses"[183] of the Wise Manasses,[184] which usually accompany them in editions, and which were apparently inserted in what must have been the inconceivably dreary romance of "Aristander and Callithea," must be left to individual taste to decide. Manasses also wrote a History of the World in the same rhythm, and it is possible that he may have occasionally ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury

... valued a hundred years ago. Men went mad for fair faces and glib tongues, but solidly and sensibly married fortunes, according to all the old news-prints. But Clarissa was also a beauty, far more of a regular beauty than Dulcie, with one of those inconceivably dazzling complexions that blush on like a June rose to old age, and a stately height and presence for her years. She had dark brown curls of the deep brown of mountain waters, with the ripple of the same, hanging down in a wreath of tendrils on the bend of the neck behind. With all ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler

... But inconceivably quick as was the action, the puma dodged the missile, which entered the earth just behind him, and driven with such tremendous force was buried half its length in ...
— The Land of Mystery • Edward S. Ellis

... yet forgotten the disclosures in the matter of the Chicago packing houses. That the light which was then turned on that industry revealed conditions that were in some details inconceivably shocking, is hardly to be doubted: and I trust that those are mistaken who say that if similar investigation had been made into the methods of certain English establishments, before warning was given, the state of affairs would have been found not much different. What is certain, however, ...
— The Twentieth Century American - Being a Comparative Study of the Peoples of the Two Great - Anglo-Saxon Nations • H. Perry Robinson

... youth in the American whalers; a circumstance to which he owed his name, his English, his down-east twang, and the misfortune of his innocent life. For one captain, sailing out of New Bedford, carried him to Nuka-hiva and marooned him there among the cannibals. The motive for this act was inconceivably small; poor Tari's wages, which were thus economised, would scarce have shook the credit of the New Bedford owners. And the act itself was simply murder. Tari's life must have hung in the beginning by ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... picture filled the entire visiplate, they arrived at the outermost edge of the galaxy. No more stars were visible: they saw empty space stretching for inconceivably vast distances before them. But beyond that indescribable and incomprehensible vacuum they saw faint lenticular bodies of light, which were also named, and which each man knew to be other galaxies, charted ...
— Skylark Three • Edward Elmer Smith

... power to recover their original shape after distortion or change of shape. If the Aether therefore be atomic, as is pointed out in Art. 44, it can at once be readily understood how the Aether as a whole can possess the property of elasticity. The atoms of the Aether must be inconceivably small, as the light-waves travel with the enormous velocity of 186,000 miles ...
— Aether and Gravitation • William George Hooper

... 'h'm, h'm! An Ogress is an inconceivably hideous creature, yet, like all females, she is inordinately vain, and is extremely susceptible to any insinuations against her personal appearance! H'm!' said the minister; 'h'm, h'm! I know what ...
— The Pot of Gold - And Other Stories • Mary E. Wilkins

... feeling itself alive only on sufferance; the din of highway and byway was a voice of blustering conquest, bidding the weaker to stand aside or be crushed. Here no man was a human being, but each merely a portion of an inconceivably complicated mechanism. The shiny-hatted figure who rushed or sauntered, gloomed by himself at corners or made one of a talking group, might elsewhere be found a reasonable and kindly person, with traits, peculiarities; ...
— The Crown of Life • George Gissing

... to Monday without attendance, and with only bread and water within their reach, while the keepers were enjoying themselves. Discipline in the services, in poorhouses, and in schools was of the most brutal type. Our prisons were unreformed. Our penal code was inconceivably sanguinary and savage. In 1770 there were one hundred and sixty capital offences on the Statute-book, and by the beginning of the nineteenth century the number had greatly increased. To steal five shillings' worth of goods from a shop was punishable by death. A girl of ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell

... the highest vogue. Young Virginians did not need to look beyond the sea in order to learn that the orator was the man most in request in the dawn of freedom. Chatham, Burke, Fox, Sheridan, and Pitt were inconceivably imposing names at that day; but was not Patrick Henry the foremost man in Virginia, only because he could speak and entertain an audience? And what made John Adams President but his fiery utterances in favor of the Declaration of Independence? There were other speakers then in Virginia who ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton

... I doubt it somehow. I don't know why; but I feel that he is sane enough. He is inconceivably cruel and domineering. He will not tolerate a living thing about the place that will not or cannot take orders from him. He kills the flies, the bees, the birds, the frogs, because they are not his. I believe ...
— The Killer • Stewart Edward White

... majesty, we cannot possibly conceive. Though it is not infinite, it may be indefinite; and though not immeasurable in itself, it may be so with regard to any created eye or imagination. If he has made these lower regions of matter so inconceivably wide and magnificent for the habitation of mortal and perishable beings, how great may we suppose the courts of his house to be, where he makes his residence in a more especial manner, and displays himself in the fulness of his glory, among an innumerable ...
— The Young Gentleman and Lady's Monitor, and English Teacher's Assistant • John Hamilton Moore

... income, he had to earn his own living. He had gone through the Harvard Medical School, and had then joined the army in the Southwest as a contract doctor. He had every physical, moral, and mental quality which fitted him for a soldier's life and for the exercise of command. In the inconceivably wearing and harassing campaigns against the Apaches he had served nominally as a surgeon, really in command of troops, on more than one expedition. He was as anxious as I was that if there were ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt

... these grandes dames was unquestionably Lady Cowper, now Lady Palmerston. Lady Jersey's bearing, on the contrary, was that of a theatrical tragedy queen; and whilst attempting the sublime, she frequently made herself simply ridiculous, being inconceivably rude, and in her manner often ill-bred. Lady Sefton was kind and amiable, Madame de Lieven haughty and exclusive, Princess Esterhazy was a bon enfant, Lady Castlereagh and Mrs. Burrell de ...
— Reminiscences of Captain Gronow • Rees Howell Gronow

... than these magnates. His father had been a Democrat, and loyalty to his memory, as well as the very pride just spoken of, conspired to lead him to that unpopular side. This set up another barrier between himself and the rich and powerful Whigs, for political feeling was almost inconceivably more bitter then than now. Thus there arose within him an unquiet, ill-defined, comfortless antipathy that must have tortured him with wearisome distress; and certainly shut him out from the sympathy and appreciation which, if all the conditions had been different, might ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop

... and the ocean, has been subdued by science, and will become a common and convenient highway for mankind. The Atlantic has been actually crossed in a Balloon! and this too without difficulty—without any great apparent danger—with thorough control of the machine—and in the inconceivably brief period of seventy-five hours from shore to shore! By the energy of an agent at Charleston, S.C., we are enabled to be the first to furnish the public with a detailed account of this most extraordinary voyage, which was performed between Saturday, the 6th instant, ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe

... month after she had it to herself she had made tremendous efforts to keep it as the nurse had kept it. She saw (for she was not unintelligent) that trouble taken now would save endless trouble in the long run, in dealing with its inconceivably tender person. As for its food, Violet had been firm about the main point, but it was no strain to order once for all from the dairy an expensive kind of milk ...
— The Combined Maze • May Sinclair

... obtained here in perfection. The weather is too hot for apples, pears, and gooseberries in the summer. Grapes and other English hot-house fruits come to delicious maturity in the open air. The melons are inconceivably exquisite, and grow, as they were wont in Paradise before the fall, without care or trouble spent upon them. The seed is put into the earth; a little water is given to it at that time, and the thing is done—"c'est un fait accompli." ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 55, No. 340, February, 1844 • Various

... own were in much better case, badly as they had suffered. I do not doubt that most of his subordinates discouraged the resumption of the attack, for the belief in Lee's great preponderance in numbers had been chronic in the army during the whole year. That belief was based upon the inconceivably mistaken reports of the secret-service organization, accepted at headquarters, given to the War Department at Washington as a reason for incessant demands of reinforcements, and permeating downward through the whole organization till the error was accepted as truth by officers and ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V1 • Jacob Dolson Cox

... of exceptional moods. I do not know how far my experience is common. At times I suffer from the strangest sense of detachment from myself and the world about me; I seem to watch it all from the outside, from somewhere inconceivably remote, out of time, out of space, out of the stress and tragedy of it all. This feeling was very strong upon me that night. Here was another side ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells

... by Herschel at about 497 times the distance of Sirius—in other words, the bounding orb, or farthest sun of the system in that direction, so far as could be seen with the 20-foot reflector, was thus inconceivably remote. But since the distance of Sirius, no less than of every other fixed star, was as yet an unknown quantity, the dimensions inferred for the Galaxy were of course purely relative; a knowledge of its form and structure might (admitting the truth of the fundamental hypothesis) be obtained, ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke

... thought of the two nephews, their decent limbs all distorted and mangled under a heap of foul rubbish, waiting for a brutal disinterment and a nameless grave. This is no legitimate death, this murderous violation of life. How inconceivably hateful is such a leave-taking, and all that follows after! To picture a fair young body, that divine instrument of joy, crushed into an unsightly heap; once loved, now loathed of all men, and thrust at last, with abhorrence, ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas

... fastidiousness. He was fastidious to his finger-tips. It amused Hadria to note the contrast between him and Mr. Gordon, who was a typical father of a family; limited in his interests to that circle; an amiable ruler of a tiny, somewhat absurd little world, pompous and important and inconceivably dull. ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird

... In an inconceivably short time, they were at their own door. Pierre looked into the carriage, felt his master's wrist and heart, spoke softly to Prince, and they drove on again—only past the corner—only to ...
— The Hour and the Man - An Historical Romance • Harriet Martineau

... his worth, and ruefully endured him until the chaplain, in the most suitable language, desired to become his son-in-law, and that at the most inconceivably awkward moment, namely, just when the Bishop had presented him with a living. The marriage had to be. The daughter wished it with an intensity that amazed her father. And gradually the Bishop discovered that he detested his paragon of a son-in-law. ...
— Prisoners - Fast Bound In Misery And Iron • Mary Cholmondeley

... far weakened her army as to lead to the failures of the Revolutionary War. There is some force in this contention. A closer examination, however, will reveal facts that necessarily weaken it. Firstly, England had never kept up a large army in time of peace. Dislike of a standing army was almost inconceivably strong; and it is certain that an attempt by Pitt to maintain an army in excess of the ordinary peace establishment would have aroused a powerful opposition. He therefore concentrated his efforts on the navy; and the maritime triumphs of the war were due in the last resort to ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose

... in 1763:—'I had never seen so many of them together before, and between this and the following year I was able to form a true judgment of them. They are, in general—I mean the lower order—divided into bucks and prigs; of which the first, though inconceivably ignorant, and sometimes indecent in their morals, yet I held them to be most tolerable, because they were unassuming, and had no other affectation but that of behaving themselves like gentlemen. The other division of them, the ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell

... the violet column spread and extended, till the air was interlaced with the play of the two colors. Streaks of white shot through streaks of purple and black neutral clouds twirled, swirling in ghostlike forms. It was a scene inconceivably beautiful, and it was impossible to realize what ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, May, 1930 • Various

... KEEP PRESERVES.—Apply the white of an egg, with a brush, to a single thickness of white tissue paper, with which covers the jars, lapping over an inch or two. It will require no tying, as it will become, when dry, inconceivably tight and strong, and impervious ...
— Burroughs' Encyclopaedia of Astounding Facts and Useful Information, 1889 • Barkham Burroughs

... chalk, which the chemist regards as a nearly pure carbonate of lime, and the microscopist as an aggregation of inconceivably minute shells and corals, forms the sub-soil of the hilly districts of the south-east of England. The chalk-hills known as the South Downs start from the bold promontory of Beachy Head, traverse the county of Sussex from east to west, and pass through Hampshire into Surrey. The North Downs extend ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton

... spiritually-minded persons, for in truth there seemed to be nothing better for those who saw in the affections the main field of religion. But even of these good men, the monotonous language sounded to all but themselves inconceivably hollow and wearisome; and in the hands of the average teachers of the school, the idea of religion was becoming poor and thin ...
— The Oxford Movement - Twelve Years, 1833-1845 • R.W. Church

... of view, must be one of the most common things in nature. All organisms are to be considered as internally formed of a host of units, partly active and partly inactive. Extremely minute and almost inconceivably numerous, these units must have their material representatives within the most intimate ...
— Species and Varieties, Their Origin by Mutation • Hugo DeVries

... ten inches across its wings. The leaf insects are also fascinating, and the fire-flies in a mangrove swamp on a dark, still night, moving in gentle undulations, or flashing into coruscations after brief intervals of quiescence, are inconceivably beautiful. ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)

... is with human love only that he deals; in his later, and inconceivably finer work, it is not with human love only, but with 'the relation of the soul to Christ as his betrothed wife': 'the burning heart of the universe,' as he realises it. This conception of love, which we see developing from so tamely domestic a level to so incalculable ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons

... but at once picked out a tall old woman huddled over the fire smoking a pipe. She did this, by the sceptical Nash's evidence, instantly and without hesitation. The old woman rose. She was 'tall and swarthy,' a gipsy, and according to all witnesses inconceivably hideous, her underlip was 'the size of a small child's arm,' and she was marked with some disease. 'Pray look at this face,' she said; 'I think God never made such another.' She was named Mary Squires. She added that on January 1 she was in Dorset—'at Abbotsbury,' said her ...
— Historical Mysteries • Andrew Lang

... uneasiness on my own account. If I could have had it at all, it would have been on account of Father La Combe, whom they vilely aspersed, though he was absent. They even made use of his absence, to overset all the good he had done in the country, by his missions and pious labors, which were inconceivably great. At first I was too ready to vindicate him, thinking it justice to do it. I did not do it at all for myself; and our Lord showed me that I must cease doing it for him, in order to leave him to be more thoroughly annihilated; because from ...
— The Autobiography of Madame Guyon • Jeanne Marie Bouvier de La Motte Guyon

... words of De Vries, "Fluctuating variation cannot overstep the limits of the species, even after the most prolonged selection—still less can it lead to the production of new, permanent characters." It has been the wont of Darwinians to base their speculations on the assumption that "an inconceivably long time" could effect almost anything in the matter of specific transformations. But the evidence which has been amassed during the past forty years leaves no doubt that there is a limit to individual variability which neither ...
— At the Deathbed of Darwinism - A Series of Papers • Eberhard Dennert

... of a writer. A reader whose social standing is moderate may communicate his views upon a book or a writer to his own circle; but his own circle is a narrow one. Whereas, in aristocratic classes, having more leisure and wealth, the intercourse is inconceivably more rapid; so that the publication of any book which interests them is secured at once; and this publishing influence passes downwards; but rare, indeed, is the inverse process of publication ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey

... loftiest views and boldest action to bring a speedy relief. Once relieved, its form of government is saved to the world, its beloved history and cherished memories are vindicated, and its happy future fully assured and rendered inconceivably grand. To you, more than any others, the privilege is given to assure that happiness and swell that grandeur, and to link your own names ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne

... the extending to the question of Benevolence the same principles which we apply to that of Intelligence. The evil which exists, or that which we suppose to be evil, not only is of a kind and a magnitude requiring inconceivably less power and less skill than the admitted good of the creation—it also bears a very small proportion in amount; quite as small a proportion as the cases of unknown or undiscoverable design bear ...
— The Fallen Star; and, A Dissertation on the Origin of Evil • E. L. Bulwer; and, Lord Brougham

... Inn lost one of its guests at an inconceivably early hour the morning after Patsy O'Connell unexpectedly filled Miss St. Regis's engagement there. The guest departed by way of the second-floor piazza and a fire-escape, and not even the night watchman ...
— Seven Miles to Arden • Ruth Sawyer

... had 320 people to vote with him on the Speakership (of whom perhaps 20 will not come), so his party make sure of it. Nobody talks of anything else, and what has been written on the subject in pamphlets and newspapers would fill volumes. Though it is become inconceivably tiresome, I cannot help writing and talking about it myself, so impossible is it to avoid the contagion. I went yesterday to see the two Houses of Parliament;[1] the old House of Lords (now House of Commons) is very spacious and convenient; but the present House of Lords is a ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. III • Charles C. F. Greville

... stream ran nearly shoulder deep, and the other bank was still a good forty yards away. Jack pushed on as fast as he could, urging the pony forward. His breath came fast, and his heart thumped like a trip-hammer. The situation was inconceivably desperate. Somewhere through the hidden depths of the rushing stream, three monstrous and frightful reptiles, fearfully dangerous and terrible creatures in their own element, were darting swiftly towards them, and behind them the dacoits now lined the shore and prevented ...
— Jack Haydon's Quest • John Finnemore

... is it that your patron, M. de Monte Cristo, did not make his proposal for you?" Andrea blushed imperceptibly. "I have just left the count, sir," said he; "he is, doubtless, a delightful man but inconceivably peculiar in his ideas. He esteems me highly. He even told me he had not the slightest doubt that my father would give me the capital instead of the interest of my property. He has promised to use his influence to obtain it for me; but he also declared that he never had taken on himself the ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere

... blown out of Krakatoa was found, under the microscope, to consist of excessively thin, transparent plates or irregular specks of pumice—which inconceivably minute fragments were caused by enormous steam pressure in the interior and the sudden expansion of the masses blown out into the atmosphere. Of this glassy dust, that which was blown into the regions beyond the clouds must ...
— Blown to Bits - The Lonely Man of Rakata, the Malay Archipelago • R.M. Ballantyne

... Chinese, because I saw and knew that they were a contemptible herd or crowd of ignorant, sordid slaves, subjected to a government qualified only to rule such a people; and, in a word, for I am now launched quite beside my design, I say, in a word, were not its distance inconceivably great from Muscovy, and were not the Muscovite empire almost as rude, impotent, and ill-governed a crowd of slaves as they, the czar of Muscovy might, with much ease, drive them all out of their country, and conquer them in one campaign; and had the czar, who I since hear is a growing ...
— The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1808) • Daniel Defoe

... of these nocturnal forest concerts is inconceivably striking and pleasing to the hunter's ear. The effect, I may remark, is greatly enhanced when the hearer happens to be situated in the depths of the forest, at the dead hour of midnight, unaccompanied by any attendant, and ensconced within twenty yards of the fountain which the ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various

... the woman I called my friend. The affair was known and talked of every where the next day, and the story was told especially at odious Mrs. Luttridge's, with such exaggerations as drove me almost mad. I was enraged, inconceivably enraged with Lawless, from whom I ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. III - Belinda • Maria Edgeworth

... there is a will behind me, I am sure of that. But I do not know whether that will is just or unjust, kind or unkind, benevolent or indifferent. I have had much happiness and great prosperity, but I have had to bear also things which are inconceivably repugnant to me, things which seem almost satanically adapted to hurt and wound me in my tenderest and innermost feelings, trials which seem to be concocted with an almost infernal appropriateness, not things which I could ...
— The Altar Fire • Arthur Christopher Benson

... scorn and mockery, coinciding with the emotions indicated by his gesture. As Clifford stood on the threshold, partly turning back, he pointed his finger within the parlor, and shook it slowly as though he would have summoned, not Hepzibah alone, but the whole world, to gaze at some object inconceivably ridiculous. This action, so ill-timed and extravagant,—accompanied, too, with a look that showed more like joy than any other kind of excitement,—compelled Hepzibah to dread that her stern kinsman's ominous visit had driven her poor brother to absolute insanity. Nor could she otherwise ...
— The House of the Seven Gables • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... all control. A thick, black cloud swirled before my eyes, and my mind told me that in this cloud, unseen as yet, but about to spring out upon my appalled senses, lurked all that was vaguely horrible, all that was monstrous and inconceivably wicked in the universe. Vague shapes swirled and swam amid the dark cloud-bank, each a menace and a warning of something coming, the advent of some unspeakable dweller upon the threshold, whose very shadow would blast my soul. A freezing horror took possession of me. I felt that ...
— The Adventure of the Devil's Foot • Arthur Conan Doyle

... his mind, as a ray of light which falls into a dark cave, incapable of communicating to it either heat or illumination, serves merely to set in motion the poisonous vapours. The delineation of this monster is throughout inconceivably consistent and profound, and, notwithstanding its hatefulness, by no means hurtful to our feelings, as the honour of ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black

... wonderful in the rapidity and perfection with which these natural prisms, the falling drops of rain, produce these effects. In the inconceivably short space of time occupied by a drop falling through those parts of the sky which form the proper angles with the sun's rays and the eye of the observer, the light enters the surface of the drop, undergoes within it one or ...
— The Rain Cloud - or, An Account of the Nature, Properties, Dangers and Uses of Rain • Anonymous

... relegating it and all that it meant to the merest background in their lives. Her real life consisted in Gregory; in Tante. All that she had to do with these people—oh, so nice and kind they were, she saw that well, but oh so stupid, most of them, so inconceivably blind to everything of value in life—all that she had to do was, from time to time, to open their box, their well-padded, well-provendered box, and look at them pleasantly. She felt sure that for Gregory's sake, if not for theirs, she should always be able to look pleasantly; unless—she ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick

... of its brightness. Nor does their loss affect us and our times only. The species now being exterminated, not only in South America but everywhere on the globe, are, so far as we know, untouched by decadence. They are links in a chain, and branches on the tree of life, with their roots in a past inconceivably remote; and but for our action they would continue to flourish, reaching outward to an equally distant future, blossoming into higher and more beautiful forms, and gladdening innumerable generations of our descendants. But we think nothing of all this: we must give full scope to our passion for ...
— The Naturalist in La Plata • W. H. Hudson

... audible through the thin partition from the next room, in a stifling atmosphere saturated with impurities, on a bedstead moved away from the wall, there lay covered with a quilt, a body. One arm of this body was above the quilt, and the wrist, huge as a rake-handle, was attached, inconceivably it seemed, to the thin, long bone of the arm smooth from the beginning to the middle. The head lay sideways on the pillow. Levin could see the scanty locks wet with sweat on the temples and tense, ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy

... whom have flowered all Vedic rites and acts. Thou art unborn. Thou pervadest all things. Thy eyes are on all things. Thou must not be apprehended by the senses. Thou art not subject to deterioration. Thou art possessed of great puissance. Thy body is inconceivably vast. Thou art holy, thou art beyond the ken of logic or argument. Thou art unknowable. Thou art the foremost of Causes. Thou art the Creator of all creatures and thou art their destroyer. Thou art the possessor of vast powers ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown

... pressed the wind till it was like sheeted lead forcing her back in her seat. There was a ceaseless, intense, inconceivably rapid vibration under her; occasionally she felt a long swing, as if she were to be propelled aloft; but no jars disturbed the easy celerity of the car. The buzz, the roar of wheels, of heavy body in flight, increased to a continuous droning hum. The wind ...
— The Light of Western Stars • Zane Grey

... versions of this tale, the king's is certainly the one in which art has the least share, and in which emotion is most communicative: "It happened formerly that there was a harper in the country called Thrace, which was in Greece. The harper was inconceivably good. His name was Orpheus. He had a very excellent wife who was called Eurydice. Then began men to say concerning the harper that he could harp so that the wood moved, and the stones stirred themselves at the sound, and the wild beasts would run thereto, ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand

... winter, without a due degree of warmth in the apartments we inhabit. Most persons are apt to associate with the idea of warmth, something like the comfort derived from a good fire on a winter's evening at home; but in these regions the case is inconceivably different: here it is not simple comfort, but health, and, therefore, ultimately life, that depends upon it. The want of a constant supply of warmth is here immediately followed by a condensation of all the moisture, whether from the breath, ...
— Three Voyages for the Discovery of a Northwest Passage from the • Sir William Edward Parry

... they did not consult Italy about it, knowing well that Italy would not have consented; in fact, would have denounced it to the world. But they hoped that by surprising her with the "fait accompli," she would have to yield and follow. Italy chose the long hard trail instead, incredibly long, inconceivably hard, but morally right, and it has been made clear once more in the history of humanity, that "Latin" and "barbaric" ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy

... and death in organisms and is probably a representation of the primary steps in that great process of evolution by which all terrestrial forms, organic and inorganic, have been evolved from the original ether by an action inconceivably slow, continuous, and admitting of no break in the series from ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park

... The natives who live near the sea descry the strangers long before they reach their waters, and aware of the purpose for which they come, proclaim loudly the news of their approach. By a species of vocal telegraph the intelligence reaches the inmost recesses of the vale in an inconceivably short space of time, drawing nearly its whole population down to the beach laden with every variety of fruit. The interpreter, who is invariably a 'tabooed Kanaka'*, leaps ashore with the goods intended for barter, while the boats, with their oars shipped, and every man on his thwart, lie just ...
— Typee - A Romance of the South Sea • Herman Melville

... substituted for Law in government, became, as it were, the mainspring of society. Murders, poisoning, rapes, and treasons were common incidents of private as of public life. In cities like Naples blood guilt could be atoned for at an inconceivably low rate. A man's life was worth scarcely more than that of a horse. The palaces of the nobles swarmed with professional cutthroats, and the great ecclesiastics claimed for their abodes the right of sanctuary. ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner



Words linked to "Inconceivably" :   inconceivable



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