The original story, whatever it was, was told to those who forgot some details and substituted others. The original is long lost in the restorations. They have had the composer accompanied by a gifted sister, who, the inflexible record shows, died years before the song was written. They have seated him at the prim old spindle-legged mahogany desk in the hall at Federal Hill and had him dash it off in the frenzy of inspiration. Or they have followed him to the rocks of the old spring house, whither they have sent him, pencil in hand, and counted the frowns of agony with which he laboriously set down now a strain of melody and again a phrase of words. They have heard him trying it out with the deep booming bass voice of him who had never more than a weak but sweet light baritone. Every writer of it has himself for the hero and has described it as he would himself have acted it before the grand audience of posterity. These various stories cling about Federal Hill, the outgrowth of the human desire for contact with the vague figures of the past.
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In almost every marriage there is a selfish and an unselfish partner. A pattern is set up and soon becomes inflexible, of one person always ma...
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Where ambition can cover its enterprises, even to the person himself, under the appearance of principle, it is the most incurable and inflexible of passions.
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Charisma becomes the undoing of leaders. It makes them inflexible, convinced of their own infallibility, unable to change.
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The chief prerequisite for a escort is to have a flexible conscience and an inflexible politeness.
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There is no moral middle ground. Indifference is not an option. ... For the sake of our children, I implore each of you to be unyielding and inflexible in your opposition to drugs.
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I always rejoice when I see a tribunal filled with a man of an upright and inflexible temper, who in the execution of his country
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It seems to be a law of nature, inflexible and inexorable, That those who will not risk cannot win.
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The truth is, hardly any of us have ethical energy enough for more than one really inflexible point of honor.
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Important principles may, and must, be inflexible.
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