"Understandable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the last hope of gaining her end. Until his influence over M'tela was quite assured, Winkleman's arrival would probably turn the scale. She had not prevented Kingozi's arriving before the Bavarian; but she might hold the Englishman comparatively powerless. That was understandable. Kingozi felt he might even love her the more for this evidence of a faithful spirit. But the last few days! It must have become evident to her that her cause was lost; that M'tela's friendship had been gained for the English. If she had cared for him the least in ...
— The Leopard Woman • Stewart Edward White et al
... themselves, a language they've invented just to cause despair in decent people who ask for a little dinner! Why, in every country on earth, when you open your mouth, snap your jaws, smack your lips and teeth, isn't that the world's most understandable message? From Quebec to the Tuamotu Islands, from Paris to the Antipodes, doesn't it mean: I'm hungry, give me a bite ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... prescribes free air and warm sunshine in large doses in place of the old-time bitter nostrums. Even where the boy spirit needs medication, the means employed need not be sepulchral gloom, solemn warning, other-world songs, and penitential prayers, with great moral applications of the non-understandable. The germs of spiritual disease give way before the sunshine of the spirit, just as fast, if not faster, than the microbes before the sun. The Sunday school, then, should be a happy, joyous, sunny place, brimful of ideas, suggestion and impulse; for these three ...
— The Boy and the Sunday School - A Manual of Principle and Method for the Work of the Sunday - School with Teen Age Boys • John L. Alexander
... my desire to make the subject easily understandable and at the same time entertaining, and to appeal less to the memory of my readers than to their common sense and intelligence. I hope in that way not to have strayed too far from the ideal I had in mind when writing this book, namely, to apply to chess the only method of teaching which ...
— Chess Strategy • Edward Lasker
... as the English Gladstonians have a far more virulent dislike for the Liberal Unionists than for the rankest Tories. They say to the Protestants, 'We know why you uphold Unionism'—that is, as they believe, landlordism—'for the landlords are English and Protestant; your position is understandable.' But to the Catholic they say, 'You are not only an enemy, but a renegade, a traitor, and a deserter.' And whatever that man's position may be, the people can make ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... all of us is the first great mystery of life; it stands in the way of every perception, every virtue. There is no making ourselves feel enough astonishment at it. That the occupations or pastimes of life should have no motive, is understandable; but—That life itself should have no motive—that we neither care to find out what it may lead to, nor to guard against its being for ever taken away from us—here is a mystery indeed. For just suppose ...
— Sesame and Lilies • John Ruskin
... stood before the woman whom they called Catalina. She broke into speech. It was cacique to cacique. She was from Boriquen—she would return in a canoe if she were free! Better drown than live with the utterly un-understandable—only that they ate and drank and laid hold of women whether these would or would not, and were understandable that far! Gods! At first she thought them gods; now she doubted. They were magicians. If she were free—if ...
— 1492 • Mary Johnston
... Ord talked queerly at times, and Travis suspected he was a bit deranged. This was understandable, for the man was undoubtedly a Britainer aristocrat, a refugee from Napoleon's thousand-year Empire. Travis had heard about the detention camps and the charcoal ovens ... but once, when he had mentioned the Empereur's sack of London in '06, Ord had ...
— Remember the Alamo • R. R. Fehrenbach
... Hamilton's turn came later. The age has passed for such friendships; but at that time, when young men were nurtured on great ideas, when they were sacrificing themselves in a sacred cause, and had seen next to nothing of the frivolities of life, they were understandable enough. ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... Thermometer.—It must be candidly acknowledged by every unprejudiced mind, that the thermometer question has been most shamefully handled by the scientific world. It is made an exclusive matter; they keep it all to themselves; they talk about Fahrenheit with the utmost coolness; of Raumur in un-understandable jargon, and fire whole volleys of words concerning the centigrade scale, till one's head spins round with their inexplicable dissertations. What is the use of these interminable technicalities to the world at large? Do they enlighten the rheumatic as to how many coats they may put on, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, August 14, 1841 • Various
... first unheralded efforts, and when Japanese prints came into vogue, for the initial stirrings of a less biased attitude toward this medium, so long considered little more than a craft. With the woodcut almost beneath notice it is understandable that Jackson's work should have failed to impress art historians unduly until recent times. Although he bore the brunt as an isolated prophet and special pleader between 1725 and 1754, his significance began to be appreciated ...
— John Baptist Jackson - 18th-Century Master of the Color Woodcut • Jacob Kainen
... further limits of our being plunge, it seems to me, into an altogether other dimension of existence from the sensible and merely "understandable" world. Name it the mystical region, or the supernatural region, whichever you choose. So far as our ideal impulses originate in this region (and most of them do originate in it, for we find them possessing us ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... his bottle of beer whilst Bombastus Furiosis still held forth. His quiet attitude evidently misled the orator, whose guttural German became mixed with quite enough English to make his remarks perfectly understandable to the few Britishers ...
— A Rip Van Winkle Of The Kalahari - Seven Tales of South-West Africa • Frederick Cornell
... not please him was precisely an example of his "absolutely un-understandable" ways of looking at things that so ...
— If Winter Comes • A.S.M. Hutchinson
... usually rendered as ALL CAPS in PG e-texts, but since the meaning of German words can depend on their capitalization (e.g. 'arm' and 'Arm' mean different things) I have added commas instead to make the vocabulary more easily understandable. Short vowels are marked with [s], long vowels with [l]. '-"' is my rendering for a change of a vowel to an ...
— A Book Of German Lyrics • Various
... 1. In software, a misfeature that becomes understandable only in historical context, as a remnant of times past retained so as not to break compatibility. Example: the retention of octal as default base for string escapes in {C}, in spite of the better match of hexadecimal to ASCII and ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... reverend gentleman, not being fluent in the Chinese language, first gave a paragraph in English, and this was translated by his wife into Chinese, which made it more interesting and assuredly more understandable to us. The audience paid the closest attention, and to my surprise their faces revealed an animated response. The women were dressed in the long black coats and loose trousers seen everywhere, but their hair ornaments were of gold, set with jewels, and their ...
— Travels in the Far East • Ellen Mary Hayes Peck
... George of their loss, Mrs Borrow expresses fear that he does "not live regular. When you find yourself low," she continues, "take a little wine, but not too much at one time; it will do you the more good; I find that by myself." Her solicitude for George's health is easily understandable. He is now her "only hope," as she pathetically tells him. "Do not grieve, my dear George," she proceeds tenderly, "I trust we shall all meet in heaven. Put a crape on your hat for ...
— The Life of George Borrow • Herbert Jenkins
... same if he had been mine. It's precious dark and quiet enough now. I don't suppose we shall be disturbed before daylight, for the enemy got more than they expected, so I may just as well sit and rest. I can watch over him just the same, and—" Serge's next utterance was not understandable if treated as words, but perfectly plain if considered as a snore, for he had sunk sideways till his head rested on the hard edge of the car, while at regular intervals he gave vent to a series of deep gruff tones which ...
— Marcus: the Young Centurion • George Manville Fenn
... flourished on the less, had its best treatment in the spread of the Christian religion. Surely, a wonderful witness of its divine origin, lies in the fact that it applies to the elevation and happiness of all the world's races—is understandable to all. Farther, native schools made advances upon sheer ignorance, as hospitals did in respect to witchcraft; and it was possible, in some measure, to eradicate native indolence by affording youths a training in a trade, or grown men work on public improvements: Here ...
— The Romance of a Pro-Consul - Being The Personal Life And Memoirs Of The Right Hon. Sir - George Grey, K.C.B. • James Milne
... self-depreciation, saying that if he has erred it has not been from want of zeal but from want of experience in dealing with the kind of material he has been set to govern. All this is very human, natural, and understandable; product of that warm emotional atmosphere, bedewed with tears, in which the Admiral finds himself; and it is not long before the King and Queen, also moved to it by the emotional temperature, are expressing their unbroken and unbounded confidence in him and repudiating ...
— Christopher Columbus, Complete • Filson Young
... on a yacht. She hated yachts for their very cosiness and their quality of keeping people close together who wanted to be far apart. And as she watched the figure of Musa growing fainter she was more than ever impressed by the queerness of men. Women seemed to be so logical, so realistic, so understandable, so calculable, whereas men were enigmas of waywardness and unreason. At just that moment her feet reminded her that they had been wetted by the adventure in the punt, and she said to herself sagely that she must ...
— The Lion's Share • E. Arnold Bennett
... was the talk of old space hands, who had given the high vacuum of empty space a personality, calling it "high vack," or "Old Man Nothing." With understandable fatalism, they believed—or said they believed—that when high vacuum really wanted you, there was nothing you ...
— Rip Foster in Ride the Gray Planet • Harold Leland Goodwin
... one; at any rate, I had to hunt about on a platform crowded with natives and other poor Britishers in pyjamas, in the same plight as myself and looking mighty cross, and finally got two pieces of paper, each with all sorts of horrible instructions and threats thereon, and un-understandable orders to show ourselves somewhere for examination for the next ten days. Each pass was prepared in triplicate, "original to be retained for record, the duplicate to be delivered to the traveller and the triplicate sent ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch |
