"Unattainable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... after day John searched the papers in vain, until it seemed as if a suburban residence was the one thing in life unattainable. But the long lane of disappointment had its turning at length, and he hurried home ...
— A Beautiful Possibility • Edith Ferguson Black
... march of the Ulster men upon Lough Mask House would not commence till nearly nightfall, I drove over early this morning to Mr. Boycott's in a private carriage, hired cars being, for the reasons stated yesterday, quite unattainable. "Did your honour wish to set the country on me?" is the only reply vouchsafed by car-drivers since one of their body was cruelly beaten, presumably for the unpardonable sin of driving a policeman to the ...
— Disturbed Ireland - Being the Letters Written During the Winter of 1880-81. • Bernard H. Becker
... of blank dejection. Kirk's first disappointment, when the girl had failed to keep her tryst, was as nothing compared to this, for now he felt that she was unattainable. He did not quite give up hope; so many strange experiences had befallen him since his involuntary departure from New York that it all seemed like a dream in which anything is possible. But he was deep in the doldrums when, with magic suddenness, the scene ...
— The Ne'er-Do-Well • Rex Beach
... the best thing, we do well to strive for it; but success being difficult to attain, if not unattainable, it remains for us to wring from our failures all the sap and sustenance and succor that are in them, if so be we may grow thereby to a finer and fuller richness, and hear one day the rapturous voice bid us come ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... like an angel in heaven, and I am left out." During all his after life a contralto voice was to John one of his most bitter and heart-wringing pleasures. It suggested the immaculate scornful, the melancholy unattainable. ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... have I any near prospect of seeing them. I do not venture to wish it, for fear of growing discontented. The girls are happy, and so am I; and we do not repine because we cannot reach an unattainable pleasure." ...
— Principle and Practice - The Orphan Family • Harriet Martineau
... power of the engines made and making show a great increase. 2. Speeds hitherto unattainable are now seen to be possible in vessels of all the various classes. 3. The consumption of fuel is reduced by 13.38 per cent. on the average; and numbers of vessels are now working on much less coal ...
— Scientific American Suppl. No. 299 • Various
... I was dear to you then; I am so still, it seems. In your love let me find the love of that Heaven I have defied.—Stay, friend, yet another word. If man's love can be so great, what can God's love be? That which I said I said, in desperation; in very truth, that peace hangs like an unattainable city in the clouds before my soul's vision, that love like a broad river flowing through the lands, an atmosphere bathing the worlds, the subtile essence and ether of space in which the farthest ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... since they are contradictory to the fundamental laws of reflexion and refraction. Consequently the Gaussian theory only supplies a convenient method of approximating to reality; and no constructor would attempt to realize this unattainable ideal. All that at present can be attempted is, to reproduce a single plane in another plane; but even this has not been altogether satisfactorily accomplished, aberrations always occur, and it is improbable that these will ever be ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... much proving to prove that to my—dissatisfaction I should say; and more failure besides, I can tell you, than there will be time for in this world. If it were proved, however—don't you see it would disprove both suppositions equally? If such a philosophical spirit be unattainable, it discredits both sides of the alternative on either of which it would ...
— Wilfrid Cumbermede • George MacDonald
... by easy joys, untasted, is ever growing in my life. And the day may come when I shall feel that, could I but have the past back, I would strive no more after the unattainable, but drain to the full these little, unsought, ...
— Glimpses of Bengal • Sir Rabindranath Tagore
... to Compostella, of which the confessor had spoken? For the very reason that it had been described to her as unattainable, it would perhaps be rated at a high value in heaven, and restore to her while on earth ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... mentioned by Ptolemy among the Fortunate or Canary islands, by the names of Aprositus, [354] or the Inaccessible; and which, according to friar Diego Philipo, in his book on the Incarnation of Christ, shows that it possessed the same quality in ancient times of deluding the eye and being unattainable to the feet of mortals. [355] But whatever belief the ancients may have had on this subject, it is certain that it took a strong hold on the faith of the moderns during the prevalent rage for discovery; nor did it lack abundant testimonials. Don Joseph de Viera y Clavijo says, there never was ...
— The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (Vol. II) • Washington Irving
... a logical argument, or an appeal from argument to feeling? Is it not, as Fitzjames thinks, a roundabout way of saying, 'I believe in this system because it suits my tastes and feelings, and because I consider truth unattainable'? If so, persuasion is substituted for reasoning: and the force of persuasion depends upon the constitution of the person to be persuaded. Now the arguments, if they be called arguments, which Newman could address to Fitzjames upon ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... narrow-minded bigots, who paint the Deity from their own gloomy conceptions, the young are too often frighted from the paths of virtue; despairing of ideal perfections, they give up all virtue as unattainable, and start aside from the road which they ...
— The History of Emily Montague • Frances Brooke
... who belonged to no particular school, laid hold on the elements of skepticism contained in both the pre-Socratic schools of philosophy, and they declared that "the sophia" was not only unattainable, but that no relative degree of it was possible for the human faculties.[468] Protagoras of Abdera accepted the doctrine of Heraclitus, that thought is identical with sensation, and limited by it; he therefore declared that there is no criterion of truth, and Man is the measure of all things.[469] ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... fascinated by her very splendours, not without hope. When at 8 P.M. a banquet was served to 250 guests in the Radcliffe Library, the upper gallery being open to a crawling public to see the lions feed, Harris, watching thence the unattainable under the blue of the canopy—blue always in honour of the Sea—thought within himself: "Ah, Mr. 76, you've got it all, ain't you?—for the time being. But 'ow'd you feel if I had a pistol now? Gawd! I can just see him nicely curl and kick. ...
— The Lord of the Sea • M. P. Shiel
... liked the man who drew these strange people, even without knowing him; when you knew him you loved him very much—so much that no room was left in you for envy of his unattainable mastery in his art. For of this there can be no doubt—no greater or more finished master in black and white has devoted his life to the illustration of the manners and humours of his time; and if Leech is even greater than he—and I for one am inclined to think he ...
— Social Pictorial Satire • George du Maurier
... it led (the anti-Court party excepted), should brood over the means of inveigling the Queen into a consent for his reappearance before her and the gay world, which was his only element, and if her favour should prove unattainable to revenge himself ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... in their distances; and even near, by films of cloud passing over the darkness of ravines or forests, blues are produced of the most subtle tenderness; these azures and purples[107] passing into rose-color of otherwise wholly unattainable delicacy among the upper summits, the blue of the sky being at the same time purer and deeper than in the plains. Nay, in some sense, a person who has never seen the rose-color of the rays of dawn crossing a blue mountain twelve or fifteen miles away, ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... the brass be not immaculate, certainly all will be to match—the reflectors scratched, the spare lamp unready, the storm-panes in the storehouse. If a light is not rather more than middling good, it will be radically bad. Mediocrity (except in literature) appears to be unattainable by man. But of course the unfortunate of St. Andrews was only an amateur, he was not in the Service, he had no uniform coat, he was, I believe, a plumber by his trade, and stood (in the mediaeval phrase) quite out of the danger of my father; but he had a painful interview ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... mastery of the mighty orator. The G.O.M. had made an allusion to that pleasant and promising speech of young Austen Chamberlain, of which I have spoken already. Just by the way, with that delightful and unapproachable lightness of touch which is the unattainable charm of Mr. Gladstone's oratory, he alluded to the speech and to Mr. Chamberlain himself. "I will not enter into any elaborate eulogy of that speech," said Mr. Gladstone. "I will endeavour to sum up my opinion of it by simply saying that ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... Boer reply would die away altogether, only to break out with augmented violence, and with an accuracy which increased our respect for their training. Huge shells—the largest that ever burst upon a battlefield—hurled from distances which were unattainable by our fifteen-pounders, enveloped our batteries in smoke and flame. One enormous Creusot gun on Pepworth Hill threw a 96-pound shell a distance of four miles, and several 40-pound howitzers outweighted ...
— The Great Boer War • Arthur Conan Doyle
... emperors, kings, viceroys, and presidents, and their greatness had long ago ceased to interest or even to amuse him. He was conscious only of an agitation which had already passed through the process of analysis. He loved, he loved the impossible and the unattainable, and it was the exhilaration of this thought that agitated him. He never would be the same again—he would be better. Neither did he ...
— The Puppet Crown • Harold MacGrath
... affinity with St. Martin's Summer, but are unlike anything else in Browning. It is the utterance of a hopeless-hoping and pathetically resigned love: the love of a merely human man for an angelically pure and unhumanly cold woman, who requires in him an unattainable union of immaculate purity and ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons
... our hearts to, and that, no doubt, is true. It is no reason why we should drink sewage and kneel to grossness and base stupidity. To endure the worst because we cannot have the best is surely the last word of folly. Our business as New Republicans is not to waste our lives in the pursuit of an unattainable chemical purity, but to clear the air as much as possible. Practical ethics is, after all, a quantitative science. In the reality of life there are few absolute cases, and it is foolish to forego a great end for a small concession. But to ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... outcome of literary study if it makes the man wiser in himself, if it makes him truer in his judgment, richer and broader in his feelings, makes him put forth antennae of tact and sympathy, if also it supplies him with such inward resources that he can dispense with unattainable luxuries or with vulgar methods of passing his time. Such results are surely a profoundly useful application of the ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... Bibliomania, a fund of amusing anecdote, as well as of instructive detail, presents itself. We may travel in a carriage and four—from morn 'till night—and sweep county after county, in pursuit of all that is exquisite, and rare, and precious, and unattainable in other quarters: but I doubt if our horses' heads can be turned in a direction better calculated to answer all the ends in view than in ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... sarcasm; who would not amidst literary and artistic reminiscences have overlooked the pitiful condition of the constitutions of the Hellenic states; and who, while treating Hellas according to its deserts, would have spared the Romans the trouble of striving after unattainable ideals. ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... Janet was aware of the change in Ditmar, and knew the cause of it. Her feelings were complicated. He, the most important man in Hampton, the self-sufficient, the powerful, the hitherto distant and unattainable head of the vast organization known as the Chippering Mill, of which she was an insignificant unit, at times became for her just a man—a man for whom she had achieved a delicious contempt. And the knowledge that she, if she chose, could sway and dominate ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... her. A faint tremor woke in his speech. "And so," said he, softly, "I cry for the moon—the unattainable, exquisite moon. It is very ...
— The Eagle's Shadow • James Branch Cabell
... taught is bad. Curiously enough the outward result of the two states is the same. Only later comes the period of judicious sifting, and by then characteristics, tastes, habits, have unwittingly formed such bias that true poise is almost unattainable. Ishmael's root-ideas were unchanged, but he conformed to all the fads of the school, even, as he became more of a personage, adding to them, for his inborn dread of ridicule prevented him from being an iconoclast and his bent ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... a sigh. It was an unattainable sum, as far as she was concerned. The salesgirl remarked ...
— Apples, Ripe and Rosy, Sir • Mary Catherine Crowley
... no mightier Spirit than I to sway The heart of man: and teach him to attain By shadowing forth the Unattainable; And step by step to scale that mighty stair Whose landing-place is wrapt about with clouds Of glory of Heaven. [1] With earliest Light of Spring, And in the glow of sallow Summertide, And in red Autumn when the winds are wild With gambols, and when full-voiced Winter ...
— The Early Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson • Tennyson
... his finished work is but an imperfect expression. The original is the first specimen, good or bad; the original of a master is superior to all copies. The standard may be below the ideal. The ideal is imaginary, and ordinarily unattainable; the standard is concrete, and ordinarily attainable, being a measure to which all else of its kind must conform; as, the standard of weights and measures, of corn, or of cotton. The idea of virtue is the mental concept ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... to start with motion approximately patent, and motion approximately latent (absolute patency and absolute latency being unattainable), and lay down that motion latent as motion becomes patent as substance, or matter of chair-and-table order; and that when patent as motion it is latent as ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... with all those matters I aimed at impartiality, which is an unattainable ideal, but I trust that sincerity and detachment have brought me reasonably close to it. Having no pet theories of my own to champion, my principal standard of judgment is derived from the law of causality and the ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... fortifying the speculative reason, but also with respect to religion. In default of this, either the moral law is degraded from its holiness, being represented as indulging our convenience, or else men strain after an unattainable aim, hoping to gain absolute holiness of will, thus losing themselves in fanatical theosophic ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... cruelly with the child—she would have nothing else to depend upon in her battle with the world. Poor Emily A feeble, overgrown child, needing fresh air, which she could not get, needing food of a better kind, just as unattainable. Large-eyed, thin-checked Emily; she, too, already in the clutch of the great brute world, the helpless victim of a civilisation which makes its food of those the heart most pities. How well if her last sigh had been drawn in infancy, if she had ...
— A Life's Morning • George Gissing
... very noble origin, is a sentiment beneficial both to the community and the individual, and is therefore worthy of encouragement. Happily, those cold heights of philosophy on which every man is loved as a brother and every nationality held in equal honour and esteem are unattainable by human nature; for without the stimulus of Patriotism National Life would be impracticable.[8] It's chief defect is that like most of the emotions it is sometimes hasty ...
— A Handbook of the Boer War • Gale and Polden, Limited
... ever loved him, as the idiom has it, she would have married him, and so made him ineligible for his present happiness. But the average bachelor is a man who has been loved, so to speak, by many women, and is the lost first choice of at least some of them. Here presents the unattainable, and hence the admirable; the husband ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... complete and perfect bliss of one glorious emotion. But alas! when we have attained our object, when the distant there becomes the present here, all is changed: we are as poor and circumscribed as ever, and our souls still languish for unattainable happiness. ...
— The Sorrows of Young Werther • J.W. von Goethe
... far as they go beyond the establishment of facts to the proof of connections under law and to inferences concerning the future. Habit is for him a safe guide for life, although it does not go beyond probabilities; absolute knowledge is unattainable for us, but not indispensable. Toward metaphysics, as an alleged science of the suprasensible, he takes up an entirely negative attitude. If an argument from experience is to be assured of merely that degree of probability which is sufficient for belief, ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... fortress through gates that open to him of their own accord. If he fails in his siege, I do really believe he will die early; not of a broken heart, exactly, but of a heart starved, with the food it was craving close to it, but unattainable. I have, therefore, a deep interest in knowing how Number Five and the Tutor are getting along together. Is there any danger of one or the other growing tired of the intimacy, and becoming willing to get rid of it, like a garment which has shrunk and grown too tight? Is it likely that some ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... though we see a thing to be highly valuable, yet that it does not belong to our condition of being is sufficient to suspend our desires after it, to make us rest satisfied without such advantage. Now there is just the same reason for quiet resignation in the want of everything equally unattainable and out of our reach in particular, though others of our species be possessed of it. All this may be applied to the whole of life; to positive inconveniences as well as wants, not indeed to the sensations of pain and sorrow, but to all the uneasinesses ...
— Human Nature - and Other Sermons • Joseph Butler
... nature more under the control of high, ideal motives than was his own; he would not himself wash the feet of the poor; he would rather commit thirty mortal sins than be a leper; but a kingly saint may touch heights of piety which are unattainable by himself. And, at the same time, he makes us feel that Louis is not the less a man because he is a saint. Certain human infirmities of temper are his; yet his magnanimity, his sense of justice, his ardent devotion, his charity, his pure self-surrender are made so sensible to us ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... him in all affairs of state. From that time the queen began to regard him with an eye of tenderness that might one day prove dangerous to herself, to the king, her august comfort, to Zadig, and to the kingdom in general. Zadig now began to think that happiness was not so unattainable ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne
... woman were yearning, they came finally to believe, after the unattainable, but each was strong enough of character to ...
— The Booming of Acre Hill - And Other Reminiscences of Urban and Suburban Life • John Kendrick Bangs
... Whether such a state of opinion grows up or not depends mainly upon the stubbornness or conciliatoriness of the possessing classes, and, conversely, upon the moderation or violence of those who desire fundamental economic change. The majority which Bolsheviks regard as unattainable is chiefly prevented by the ...
— The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism • Bertrand Russell
... the parts of an idea be organic and not merely mechanical, they must be regarded as containing false mingled with true.[3] Still some analogies are less imperfect, less mingled with fallacy than others, and there is room for indefinite approximation towards an unattainable exactitude. For example, assuming theism, as we do in the argument under consideration, it is evident that man conceives the superhuman object of his fear and worship more truly as personal than as impersonal; ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... remain unfulfilled, and for this reason the weak, or whoever in comparison with the magnitude of his desires, thinks himself weak, avails himself of the phantastic wish fulfillment. He desires to attain the unattainable at least in imagination. This is the psychological reason why so many fairy stories are composed from the standpoint of the weak, so that the experiencing Ego of the fairy tale, the hero, is a simpleton, the smallest or the weakest or the ...
— Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts • Herbert Silberer
... monsters roaring for our lives. The sea, in short, has honeycombed it, and renews her vows to be its ruin with every gale. Yet the 'Welcome' lasts our time, and will last that of many generations, who will continue, however, doubtless to believe that the sublimities of Nature are unattainable short of Switzerland. ...
— Some Private Views • James Payn
... contrary, perfect simplicity and freedom from self-consciousness are possible only to those who have acquired at least some degree of cultivation. For flagrant examples of pretentiousness (which is the infallible sign of lack of breeding), see page 61. For simplicity of expression, such as is unattainable to the rest of us, but which we can at least strive to emulate, read first the Bible; then at random one might suggest such authors as Robert Louis Stevenson, E.S. Martin, Agnes Repplier, John Galsworthy and Max Beerbohm. E.V. ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... worship of the far-fetched, the intangible, the obscure. Thus she thought to inflame his curiosity by hinting that Frida Tancred was incomprehensible, while she touched the very soul of desire by representing her as unattainable. All this was no doubt very clever of Mrs. Fazakerly; but it was not quite what he had ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... great the difficulty of getting rid of these distorting influences and facing such questions in a perfectly dry light, nobody suggests that objective truth on such matters is non-existent or for ever unattainable. A claim for objective validity for the moral judgement does not mean a claim for infallibility on behalf of any individual Conscience. We may make mistakes in Morals just as we may make mistakes in Science, or even in pure Mathematics. If a class ...
— Philosophy and Religion - Six Lectures Delivered at Cambridge • Hastings Rashdall
... before, but still there was a great deal that was open to criticism. Mr. Phillips and Mr. Brandon thought the colony had made rapid strides towards civilization and comfort since the great influx of wealth consequent on the gold discoveries had attracted to Victoria much that was unattainable before. Even during their absence in England there had been a great deal of building going on in Melbourne, and many other improvements had been introduced. The houses were better, and better furnished; the shops seemed to contain everything that enterprise could import or money procure; ...
— Mr. Hogarth's Will • Catherine Helen Spence
... stretched his long, lazy limbs. "And now let me tell you, friend, that my league of The Scarlet Pimpernel never attempted the impossible, and to try and drag the Queen out of the clutches of these murderous rascals now, is attempting the unattainable." ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... stage and decided to try to get an education, then teach. You know the rest of my story. Now comes the hardest part. After giving up all idea of the stage, the door that I thought was barred has been opened to me. The unbelievable has come to pass, and I have in a measure achieved what once seemed unattainable. Do you think that I ought to bury my one talent when my college days are over and become a teacher, or do you believe that I should put it to good use by becoming an exponent of the ...
— Grace Harlowe's First Year at Overton College • Jessie Graham Flower
... Perfection is unattainable, but nearer and nearer approaches may be made; and, finding my Dictionary about to be reprinted, I have endeavoured, by a revisal, to make it less reprehensible. I will not deny that I found many parts requiring ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume V: Miscellaneous Pieces • Samuel Johnson
... distinguishable from the flying clouds, having the appearance of black walls, seemingly within reach of the hand; while the more varied and softer cotes of Vaud lay an indefinable and sombre mass, less menacing, it is true, but equally confused and unattainable. ...
— The Headsman - The Abbaye des Vignerons • James Fenimore Cooper
... she had seen so many failures and so much consequent mortification and dissatisfaction as to determine her to give those minute directions which were so often wanting in cook-books, and without which success in preparing dishes was for many a person unattainable. It seemed then unwise to leave much to the cook's judgment; and experience in lecturing and in teaching in her school since that time has satisfied the author that what was given in her first literary work was what was needed. In ...
— Miss Parloa's New Cook Book • Maria Parloa
... possession. But he was unwilling to hear his own voice—to hear any sound whatever—owing to a vague belief, shaping itself slowly within him, that solitude and silence are the greatest felicities of mankind. The next moment it dawned upon him that they are perfectly unattainable—that faces must be seen, words spoken, thoughts heard. All the ...
— Tales of Unrest • Joseph Conrad
... harmony as if it were one of substantial identity or chemical fusion; and, taking the sensuous language of religious feeling literally, it bids the individual aim at nothing less than an interpenetration of essence. And as this goal is unattainable while reason and the consciousness of self remain, the mystic begins to consider these as impediments to be thrown aside.... Hence Mysticism demands a faculty above reason, by which the subject shall be placed in immediate and complete union with the object of his desire, a union ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... to the office this time, but sought the stores immediately. He found conditions now even worse than before. Every one seemed to have an Uncle Harold for whom was frenziedly being sought the unattainable. If at nine o'clock Jasper had been nervous, at ten he was terrified, and at eleven he was nearly frantic. All power of decision seemed to have left him, and he stumbled vaguely on and on, scarcely ...
— The Tangled Threads • Eleanor H. Porter
... attain self-satisfaction through negation, through a serene surrender of the unattainable. As the Epicureans counseled, they increase their happiness by lessening their desires. The content which middle-aged people exhibit is not so frequently to be traced to the dazzling character of their achievement as to their resignation ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... associated were totally unaware of it, that they glowed only with the colour of quite other and not at all guessable thoughts, this directly added to their splendour, gave the girl the sharpest impression she had yet received of the uplifted, the unattainable plains of heaven, and yet at the same time caused her to thrill with a sense of the high company she did somehow keep. She was with the absent through her ladyship and with her ladyship through the absent. The only pang—but it didn't matter—was the proof in the admirable face, in ...
— In the Cage • Henry James
... may be called, comparatively speaking, the immediate vicinity of the earth itself; and, at the same time, it is taken for granted that animal life is and must be essentially incapable of modification at any given unattainable distance from the surface. Now, all such reasoning and from such data must, of course, be simply analogical. The greatest height ever reached by man was that of 25,000 feet, attained in the aeronautic expedition of Messieurs Gay-Lussac and ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... more, and there it loomed, more brilliant than ever, now so huge that it filled the screen, and it had not become drab, neither gray-green or brown. No, it was cake frosting, and icicles, and raindrops against the sun, and all of the bright, unattainable Christmas tree ornaments ...
— The Marooner • Charles A. Stearns
... bay is usually but a coloured thought in the mind, a phantom and an unattainable refuge by day, and a star by night, the real coast which stretches seaward to it, marching on either hand into the blue, confident and tall, is hardly more material, except by the stones of my outlook. The near rocks ...
— Old Junk • H. M. Tomlinson
... miles deep, with which the Raja has surrounded his capital on every side as hunting grounds. The lands comprised in this forest are, for the most part, exceedingly poor, and water for irrigation is unattainable within them, so that little is lost by this taste of the chief for the sports of the field, in which, however, he cannot himself ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... code included both the ceremonial and the moral law. Though St. Paul declares justification unattainable by obedience to either or to both, he did not set aside the moral law, as no longer obligatory, as he did the ceremonial. This latter had answered the ends of its appointment, and was abolished by fulfillment. It was only a shadow of good things to come, and fled away before that ...
— Sermons on Various Important Subjects • Andrew Lee
... I had to go to my office, as the Director was absent in London, and there I applied myself to the notes and spaces below the stave, but relinquished the exercise, convinced that these mysteries were unattainable by man, while the knowledge that above the stave there were others and not less complex, stayed mournfully ...
— The Insurrection in Dublin • James Stephens
... mechanical science had made so marvellous a progress, and in which intellectual civilisation had exhibited itself in realising those objects for the happiness of the people, which the political philosophers above ground had, after ages of struggle, pretty generally agreed to consider unattainable visions, should, nevertheless, be so wholly without a contemporaneous literature, despite the excellence to which culture had brought a language at once so rich and simple, vigourous ...
— The Coming Race • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... and most abiding demand of all sentient creatures, strong and weak alike, is for safety, or, that being unattainable, for a sense of safety, an illusion ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... unattainable, some members in this academy give a sufficient proof. And, be assured, that if this power is not acquired whilst you are young, there will be no time for it afterwards: at least, the attempt will be attended with as much difficulty as those ...
— Seven Discourses on Art • Joshua Reynolds
... but after we had climbed by insensible grades to the shorter growth we began to see many hartebeeste, zebra, and gazelles, and a few of the wildebeeste, or brindled gnus. Travel over these great plains and through these leisurely low hills is a good deal like coastwise sailing—the same apparently unattainable landmarks which, nevertheless, are at last passed and left astern by the same sure but insensible progress. Thus we drew up on apparently continuous hills, found wide gaps between them, crossed them, and turned to ...
— African Camp Fires • Stewart Edward White
... lonely only child, had lived so intensely secret, imaginative a life, peopling the prim alleys of Hyde Park with fairies, imps, tricksy hobgoblins in whom he more than half believed, and longing even then, as ever after, for the unattainable, never carelessly happy as his father and ...
— Studies in love and in terror • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... The truth of faith is contained in Holy Writ, diffusely, under various modes of expression, and sometimes obscurely, so that, in order to gather the truth of faith from Holy Writ, one needs long study and practice, which are unattainable by all those who require to know the truth of faith, many of whom have no time for study, being busy with other affairs. And so it was necessary to gather together a clear summary from the sayings of Holy Writ, to be proposed to the belief of all. This indeed was no ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... her. As the evening wore on, she leaned against the iron bars, looking at the hills that rose far off, through the thick sodden clouds, like a bright, unattainable calm. As she looked, a shadow of their solemn repose fell on her face: its fierce discontent faded into a pitiful, humble quiet. Slow, solemn tears gathered in her eyes: the poor weak eyes turned so hopelessly to the place where Hugh was to rest, the grave heights looking higher and brighter ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 42, April, 1861 • Various
... York; and another told of a beautiful mastiff living somewhere in the State of New Jersey that had the honor of bringing him into the world. It would be very interesting to know something of the parentage of our hero, but since the facts surrounding his birth are unattainable, we must content ourselves with telling a portion of a simple story of a good and noble life. It may be safe to assert that he was not a native American; if he had been, he would have provided himself with the regulation ...
— The Junior Classics Volume 8 - Animal and Nature Stories • Selected and arranged by William Patten
... need a deep earnestness and a lofty unselfishness to round out our lives. It is the inner life that develops the outer, and if we are in earnest the precious things lie all around our feet, and we need not waste our strength in striving after the dim and unattainable. Women, in your golden youth; mother, binding around your heart all the precious ties of life,—let no magnificence of culture, or amplitude of fortune, or refinement of sensibilities, repel you from helping the weaker and less favored. If you have ampler gifts, ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... to assume that any course other than that which he adopted was open to Sir Redvers Buller. The mishap to a portion of the artillery will be better understood when the full story of the battle is accessible. Meanwhile Sir Redvers Buller's withdrawal of the troops when he saw that success was unattainable has preserved his force, and he is now awaiting reinforcement before again attempting an advance. The critical element in the position of affairs in Natal lies in the fact that time runs against the British. Sir Redvers Buller and the Government no doubt know pretty accurately the date up ...
— Lessons of the War • Spenser Wilkinson
... strictly observed among the Meliponitae. Blanchard remarks very justly, that as they possess no sting and are consequently less readily able than the mothers of our own bees to kill each other, several queens will probably live together in the same hive. But certainty on this point has hitherto been unattainable owing to the great resemblance that exists between queens and workers, as also to the impossibility of rearing ...
— The Life of the Bee • Maurice Maeterlinck
... aspirations by knocking her down. I have heard it said that this apparently brutal action has anything but the maddening effect tenderly nurtured persons might suppose, and that the patient is soothed and satisfied with a rapidity and completeness unattainable by other and more polite methods. Do you suppose," he went on, flicking a twig off a tree with his whip as we passed, "that the intellectual husband, wrestling intellectually with the chaotic yearnings of his intellectual wife, ever achieves the result aimed at? He may ...
— Elizabeth and her German Garden • "Elizabeth", AKA Marie Annette Beauchamp
... Russo-Turkish war. The reactionary Government at the helm of Russian affairs could not tolerate the sight of a Jewish physician exercising the rights of an army officer which were otherwise utterly utterly unattainable for a Jewish soldier. Accordingly, the Minister of War, Vannovski, issued a rescript dated April 10, 1882, ...
— History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II • S.M. Dubnow
... virtue let the human heart be set; To virtue nothing serves as check or let The moon, attaining unattainable, is led By virtue to her seat on ...
— The Little Clay Cart - Mrcchakatika • (Attributed To) King Shudraka
... dies and imparts only his life force to the character of the cocky youngster who comes fully alive without the slightest trace of the personality of Jason Rowe. In this debut performance young Rowe achieves the hitherto unattainable goal of completely displacing the feeliegoer's identity with that of the character he portrays. We expect great things from him for a talent such as his illumines the theater but once in a millennium. Thanks to Mr. Jason Rowe, the U-Live-It ...
— The Premiere • Richard Sabia
... was to be his, however, he found a deep satisfaction in considering himself hopelessly in love with her. He was profoundly sorry for himself. He saw himself a tragic figure, hopeless and wretched. He longed for the unattainable; he held up empty hands to the stars, and by so mimicking the gesture of youth, ...
— Dangerous Days • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... range of the domestic circle. To make a good mistress of that circle, one must possess, if our ideal is to be fully realized, many important qualifications. Were we to be constantly indulging in the severity of criticism, always objecting to this or that, a perfect character would be almost unattainable. Men should therefore bear with patience any trifling dissatisfaction which they may feel, and strive constantly to keep alive, to augment, and to cherish, the warmth of their early love. Only such a man as this can be called faithful, and ...
— Japanese Literature - Including Selections from Genji Monogatari and Classical - Poetry and Drama of Japan • Various
... supporters. They talked seriously of building another church, and made arrangements to apply to the bishop; but it was found that both parties were so scattered over the two parishes, which were of very considerable extent, that their object was unattainable. While General Caulfield remained among them, he prevented the flame of discord from bursting forth. He allowed no angry word to escape his lips, but contented himself with simply preaching the Gospel, either in the Congregational ...
— Clara Maynard - The True and the False - A Tale of the Times • W.H.G. Kingston
... one that thirsteth, and harmony as the remote, unattainable well—I am as one swimming in a wide sea, and she is the land which recedes as I deem myself near ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... souls, and though they walk among the crowd, live most of their lives in solitude. Through Mother Sorrow, or Mother Fancy, or Mother Church, they are ever seeking the ideal, which to them is otherwise unattainable. And whether a howler of Turabu or a member of the French Academy, man, in this penumbra of faith and doubt, of superstition and imagination, is much the same. 'The higher powers in us,' says Novalis, 'which one day, as ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... universe. For nowadays the pride of man denies in vain his kinship with the original dust. He stands no longer like a thing apart. Close at his heels we see the dog, prince of another genius: and in him too, we see dumbly testified the same cultus[11] of an unattainable ideal, the same constancy in failure. Does it stop with the dog? We look at our feet where the ground is blackened with the swarming ant: a creature so small, so far from us in the hierarchy of brutes, that we can scarce trace and scarce comprehend his doings; and here also, in his ordered ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... that it is that portion of human need and experience which lies between the knowable and the unknowable with which it is the preacher's chief province to deal. Doctrinal preaching endeavors to give form and relations to its intuitions and high desires, its unattainable longings and insights. There is a native alliance between the doctrine of Immanence and expository preaching. For the office of both is to give us the God of this world in the affairs of the moment. There is a native alliance between expository preaching ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... patch against the mountain? Brushwood of some kind, without a doubt. The place seemed to be unattainable, and yet, after an inordinate outlay of energy, we had climbed across those torrid meadows. It proved to be a hazel copse mysteriously dark within, voiceless, and cool as ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... great difference between them is of course in completeness of execution. Sir Joshua's and Gainsborough's work, at its best, is only magnificent sketching; giving indeed, in places, a perfection of result unattainable by other methods, and possessing always a charm of grace and power exclusively its own; yet, in its slightness addressing itself, purposefully, to the casual glance, and common thought—eager to arrest the passer-by, ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... princes and the potentates! I was losing hope, my Queen, losing hope. You were so far away, so unattainable. I would brave a thousand deaths rather than lose this single minute of my life. It makes me the richest man in all the world. How brave you are! This night you have given up everything for my sake. ...
— Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... been Clementina's thoughts since learning that Florimel had not run away with her groom? It were hard to say with completeness. Accuracy, however, may not be equally unattainable. Her first feeling was an utterly inarticulate, undefined pleasure that Malcolm was free to be thought about. She was clear next that it would be matter for honest rejoicing if the truest man she had ever met except his master was not going to marry ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 20, August 1877 • Various
... leaves out one-half of the world's resources; but the same thing must occur with a bimetallic standard unless the metals can be placed and kept in a state of exact equilibrium, or so that nothing can be gained by the exchange of one for the other. Hitherto this has been an unattainable perfection. A law fixing the ratio of 16 of silver to 1 of gold, as proposed by different members of the Commission, would now be a gross over-valuation of silver and wholly exclude gold from circulation. It will ...
— American Eloquence, Volume IV. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1897) • Various
... grasp at everything—do so by the very constitution of our natures; and seize—less than nothing. We can not rest without perfection in everything, yet the labor of a life devoted to one thing, only shows us how unattainable it is. I am oppressed with gloom—oh, for light, light, light! Feb. 20th.—Alas! my feelings of discouragement and despondency, instead of diminishing, strengthen every day. I have been ill for the last fortnight; and possibly physical causes ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... are hopelessly misleading: let us have correct figures or none. That attitude is easily understood, but under the circumstances it is vain. "Correct figures," that is, meticulously exact figures, are unattainable. An estimate is in nearly all matters of daily life and business the basis, and rightly the basis, of our action. It will be noticed that in that letter which we quoted above concerning the statistics of the candy trade in ...
— Missionary Survey As An Aid To Intelligent Co-Operation In Foreign Missions • Roland Allen
... saw at the window our fortunate extruders, who no doubt congratulated themselves on so many points of the law being in their favour. Here were we stuck on the Queen's high road—tired horses, cooped-up children—and the Three Cocks as unattainable as the Philosopher's stone. The sympathizing landlord consoled us in our disappointment as well as he could. The postilion jumped into his saddle again, and we pursued our way to the nearest place where ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various
... toward the water line, the forest along the uneven coast was merging into one vast green shadow, the waters were growing blacker and blacker, and yet the row of canoes continued its wearisome glide toward a seemingly unattainable end. Lady Tennys became so tired and sleepy that her long lashes could not be restrained from caressing her cheeks, nor could her dreamy eyes bear the strain of wakefulness. Hugh, observing her fatigue, persuaded her to turn about in the boat ...
— Nedra • George Barr McCutcheon
... the ease, too, with which Babylonia was humbled and occupied again, and the Phoenician ports and the city of Damascus, impregnable theretofore, were taken and held to tribute—she began to dream of world empire, the first society in history to conceive this unattainable ideal. Certain influences and events, however, would defer awhile any attempt to realize the dream. Changes of dynasty took place, thanks partly to reactionary forces at home and more to the praetorian basis on which the kingdom now reposed, ...
— The Ancient East • D. G. Hogarth
... changes. Upon an examination morning, some hundred luckless "jibs" might be seen perambulating the courts, in the vain effort to discover their tutors' chambers, the names having undergone an alteration that left all trace of their original proprietors unattainable: Doctor Francis Mooney having become Doctor Full Moon; Doctor Hare being, by the change of two letters, Doctor Ape; Romney Robinson, Romulus and Remus, etc. While, upon occasions like these, there could be but little doubt of Master Frank's intentions, upon many others, so subtle were ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... the kindest of hosts and could not do enough for us during our stay. Cettinje had not changed much. The hotel-keeper showed an intense and violent anxiety to leave Montenegro. Never had his native Switzerland seemed so alluring and never was it so unattainable. The chemist, who owned a little one-windowed shop, was engaged to the king's niece, quite a lift in the world for her, as she was marrying a man ...
— The Luck of Thirteen - Wanderings and Flight through Montenegro and Serbia • Jan Gordon |
