"Unsurpassable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... his art than I have now, and the general public looked upon him as the greatest artist in England. No doubt he was very observant, and had a wonderful memory for animals and their ways, as well as some invention; he had also unsurpassable technical skill, of a superficial ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... the prince of essayists, and his reign is unchallenged. "I still think—says Professor Saintsbury (Corrected Impressions, p. 89 f.)—that on any subject which Macaulay has touched, his survey is unsurpassable for giving a first bird's- eye view, and for creating interest in the matter. . . . And he certainly has not his equal anywhere for covering his subject in the pointing-stick fashion. You need not—you had much better not—pin your faith on his details, but his Pisgah ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... of physical courage they were unsurpassed, unsurpassable. A good many of them were Quakers and non-resistants, and a good many of them were women, but they never shrank from danger to life and limb, when employed in their humanitarian work. Some of them ...
— The Abolitionists - Together With Personal Memories Of The Struggle For Human Rights • John F. Hume
... striking characteristic of Hayes as a soldier was his personal intrepidity. Anthony Wayne, Francis Marion, and Ethan Allen were called brave men in the Revolution, and so they were; but we look in vain in their histories for as numerous proofs of unsurpassable daring as the hero of Cloyd Mountain, Cedar Creek, and South Mountain, has given us. Four horses shot under him; four wounds in action; fighting after he fell; a hundred days exposed to death under fire—these ...
— The Life, Public Services and Select Speeches of Rutherford B. Hayes • James Quay Howard
... taken for granted by all devout Jews: when a man has eternal life, that is, when he is one with God, what should he do but live for ever? without oneness with God, the continuance of existence would be to me the all but unsurpassable curse—the unsurpassable itself being, a God other than the God I see in Jesus; but whatever his idea, it must have held in it, though perhaps only in solution, all such notions as he had concerning God and man and a common righteousness. While thus he stands, ...
— Unspoken Sermons - Series I., II., and II. • George MacDonald
... highest possible skill. They never differed, and they always gave us exactly what we wanted in the best form. Comparing their opinions with those of law officers of other days, which I often at the Foreign Office had to read, I should call James and Herschell unsurpassed and unsurpassable for such a purpose. Lord Selborne, who was, I suppose, a much greater lawyer, was nothing like so good for matters of this kind, for he always tried to find a legal basis for his view, which made it unintelligible ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke V1 • Stephen Gwynn
... the models for the Good Shepherd and for the lions, and declared to himself that these last were unsurpassable in truth, power, and majesty. How eagerly must the young artist long to execute them in hard stone, and to see them placed in the honored, though indeed pagan, spot, which was intended for them. And now the bishop forbade him the work, and the poor fellow might well be feeling ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... could really be the work of human hands. If they possess only one of the elements of architectural excellence, they possess that element to so great an extent that in respect of it they are unsurpassed, and probably unsurpassable. ...
— Ancient Egypt • George Rawlinson
... matter of humor," wrote Clemens, referring to Hay's delicious notes, "what an unsurpassable ...
— 1601 - Conversation as it was by the Social Fireside in the Time of the Tudors • Mark Twain
... meditatively downward upon life, and upon his own work, from a secure height. The world has shown a sound instinct in fixing upon one expression, "with malice toward none, with charity for all," as the key-note of the final Lincoln. These words form the opening line of that paragraph of unsurpassable prose in which ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... rapture. Of the scenery of the St. Gothard he writes: "Oh God! what a beautiful country it is. How poor and shrunken, beside it, is Italy in its brightest aspect!" He sees "places of terrible grandeur unsurpassable, I should imagine, in the world." Going up the Col de Balme, he finds the wonders "above and beyond one's wildest expectations." He cannot imagine anything in nature "more stupendous or sublime." His impressions are so prodigious that he would rave were he to write about them. At the ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... there was not, as many suppose, a sudden decline in the quality of artistic production. Many of the works of the later centuries were in their way almost unsurpassable. The philosophy of Aristotle, the poetry of Theocritus, such statues as the Aphrodite of Melos and the Victory of Samothrace, are great lights for all time. But the works of maturity have seldom the charm which marks those which are full of the ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... Before the rancher could sight his weapon the thief seemed to plunge headlong over the further side of his steed; but instead of doing so he resorted to the common trick of his people, all of whom are unsurpassable horsemen. He flung himself so far over that nothing of his body remained visible. The horse himself became the shield between him and the white man. The redskin was in the saddle, but he would have been just as expert had ...
— Cowmen and Rustlers • Edward S. Ellis
... registering terrestrial, solar, planetary, and stellar phenomena, independent of the sources of error attendant on ordinary observation; in the hands of the physicist, not only does it record spectroscopic phenomena with unsurpassable ease and precision, but it has revealed the existence of rays having powerful chemical energy, or beyond the visible limits of either end of the spectrum; while, to the naturalist, it furnishes the means by which the forms of ...
— The Advance of Science in the Last Half-Century • T.H. (Thomas Henry) Huxley
... Bakhshish and largesse if she would do her very best endeavour. Answered she, "O my lord, be at rest: I will presently contrive to satisfy thy requirement even beyond thy desire; for under my hand are damsels unsurpassable in beauty and loveliness, and all be the daughters of honourable men." But the old woman, O Lord of the Age, knew naught anent the mirror. So she went forth to wander about the city and work on her well-known ways.—And Shahrazad was surprised by the dawn of ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... says: "I value the religion of Jesus, as containing more truth, purer truth, higher truth, than has ever yet been given to man. Much of his teaching I unhesitatingly receive as, to the best of my judgment, unimprovable and unsurpassable—fitted, if obeyed, to make earth all that a finite and material scene can be, and man only a little lower than the angels. 'Not every one that saith unto me, Lord! Lord; * * * * * * but he that ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, - Volume I, No. 9. September, 1880 • Various
... who is a Norman by birth and a nomad by choice, or by those of M. Daudet, who is a native of Provence, although now for thirty years a resident of Paris. M. Coppee is a Parisian from his youth up, and even in prose he is a poet; perhaps this is why his pictures of Paris are unsurpassable in their felicity and ...
— Ten Tales • Francois Coppee
... Acres" at the Court Theatre. The two authors of the pieces, Dubourg and Tom Taylor, were great friends of his. "It was a real treat," he writes, "being well acted in every detail. Ellen Terry was wonderful, and I should think unsurpassable in all but the lighter parts." Mr. Dodgson himself had a strong wish to become a dramatic author, but, after one or two unsuccessful attempts to get his plays produced, he wisely gave up the idea, realising ...
— The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll • Stuart Dodgson Collingwood
... judgment concerning actual events. Morals and nature offer such an abundance of facts with which we may connect the teaching of language, that it is better to dispense with legends. AEsop's fables combine the moral and the natural in a manner unsurpassable. My child tells me one of these ...
— The Mind of the Child, Part II • W. Preyer
... that his only chance of getting out of Germany was to show an unsurpassable incompetence. He showed it. He flourished his incompetence in the faces of all the officials, until some superofficial wrote a letter to his father ...
— The Tree of Heaven • May Sinclair
... whole ship's company, save himself, were prostrate below decks, and he with incredible strength and fortitude was literally doing everything, not even omitting to register regular observations of the instruments;—in the midst of that unsurpassable heroism among the polar solitudes, he felt at night a dissatisfaction with the day as having been spent to little purpose ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 7 • Various
... question, to answer him frankly and joyously in the affirmative; not because he is the handsomest or most brilliant or most desirable person in the world, but because for sheer lovableness and husbandliness he is unsurpassed and unsurpassable. ...
— Ladies-In-Waiting • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... here driven by my shame; it is only grief and sorrow at seeing myself forgotten by thee that have led me. It was thy will to make me thine, and thou didst so follow thy will, that now, even though thou repentest, thou canst not help being mine. Bethink thee, my lord, the unsurpassable affection I bear thee may compensate for the beauty and noble birth for which thou wouldst desert me. Thou canst not be the fair Luscinda's because thou art mine, nor can she be thine because she is Cardenio's; and it will be easier, remember, to bend thy will to love one who adores thee, than ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... highest tragedy is that of the hunger of the heart; his most noble prose sounds in that meeting of Harry Esmond with Lady Castlewood, in the immortal speech which has the burden, "bringing your sheaves with you!" All that scene appears to me no less unique, no less unsurpassable, no less perfect, than the "Ode to the Nightingale" of Keats, or the Lycidas of Milton. It were superfluous to linger over the humour of Thackeray. Only Shakespeare and Dickens have graced the language with so many happy memories ...
— Essays in Little • Andrew Lang
... He rose, he soared, he poised himself, he turned and swept above them; you could feel the tense vibration that kept him there, in his atmosphere of deadly peril. He volplaned, he looped the loop. His behaviour was unsurpassable. For his case, if you like, was desperate. I tell you he had seen the effect of his Tudor hall and drawing-room. He had been watching; and nothing, not a murmur, or a furtive snigger, not the quiver of an eyelash, had escaped him. And consider what it meant to ...
— The Belfry • May Sinclair
... Bunions that afflict us prate Of Plasters unsurpassable, and hate To Cut a corn—ah cut, and let the Plaster go, Nor murmur if the Solace ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... sable Juno looking down with that absolute composure upon the struggles of man and other animals, which Lucretius and his master Epicurus assigned to the Divine nature. Without jesting, the grandeur, majesty, and repose of this figure were unsurpassable in nature, and such as have vanished from sculpture two thousand ...
— A Simpleton • Charles Reade
... murmurs of the crew increase every day, and in vain do they try to drive the tedium away by practising all sorts of diversion. But the night brings some relief, not only in her calm beauty, but cooling dews refresh the heated atmosphere, and the moon and stars shine forth in unsurpassable glory ...
— Hair Breadth Escapes - Perilous incidents in the lives of sailors and travelers - in Japan, Cuba, East Indies, etc., etc. • T. S. Arthur
... one cannot help from remembering the classical description Alexander Von Humboldt gives of the Negro boatmen of the river Dagua, in the actual republic of Colombia. The inimitable skill and unsurpassable bravery Humboldt saw them display in the midst of the ferocious currents and loud-pouring rapids of that river caused him to exclaim: "Every movement of the paddle is a wonder, and every Negro a god!" A nice ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Vol. I. Jan. 1916 • Various
... stuff, a sort of distant community of spirit with Jehan de Paris; but it works in an altogether lower and less imaginative sphere and fashion; no sense of art being present, and very little of craft. It is astonishing that a language which had had, if only in verse, such an unsurpassable tale-teller as Chaucer, should have been so backward. But then the whole conditions of the fifteenth century, especially in England, become only the more puzzling the longer one studies them. Even in France, it will be observed, the output of Tale is by no means large.[89] Nor ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... tone at their highest, more imaginative and more fascinating in their expression of terrible or of piteous truth: there are more superb harmonies, more glorious raptures of ardent and eloquent music, in the sometimes unsurpassed and unsurpassable poetic passion of Cyril Tourneur. But even Webster's men seem but splendid sketches, as Tourneur's seem but shadowy or fiery outlines, beside the perfect and living figure of De Flores. The man is so horribly human, so fearfully and wonderfully natural, in his single-hearted ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... pleasant words seem to call back from the past the stormy figure of the man who loved art, literature, and the drama with a consuming passion, who has described books and plays, authors and actors, with a fiery enthusiasm and reality quite unsurpassable, and who yet, neither living nor dead, has received his due meed of praise. Men still continue to hold aloof from Hazlitt; his shaggy head and fierce scowling temper still seem to terrorize; and his very books, telling us though they do about all things most delightful—poems, ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... figure was unsurpassable. Indeed, I think there cannot be a more beautiful and charming woman in America. She ...
— Tales From Bohemia • Robert Neilson Stephens
... drifting, French prose would have lost some of its most wonderful pages; and had the late Mr. Pater been less troubled by the rose-leaf of style and more by the thorns of the time, English prose would have been the poorer by harmonies and felicities unsurpassed and unsurpassable. This is to ignore Pater the Philosopher and Pater the Critic. Of these persons there will be varying estimates. They have even in a sense, through the extravagances of a disciple, been subjected to the verdict of a British jury—a sufficiently ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... of dark green stone (Fig. 14), recently acquired by the Berlin Museum. It has been broken from a standing or kneeling statue. The form of the closely-shaven skull and the features of the strong face, wrinkled by age, have been reproduced by the sculptor with unsurpassable fidelity. The number of works emanating from the same school as this is very small, but in quality they represent the highest development of Egyptian sculpture. It is fit that we should take our leave of Egyptian art with such a work as this before us, a work which gives us the ...
— A History Of Greek Art • F. B. Tarbell
... old capital of Picardy, on the Somme, with a cathedral begun in 1220, described as the "Parthenon of Gothic architecture," and by Ruskin as "Gothic, clear of Roman tradition and of Arabian taint, Gothic pure, authoritative, unsurpassable, and unaccusable"; possesses other buildings of interest; was the birthplace of Peter the Hermit, and is celebrated for a treaty of peace between France ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... silks and crape shawls, the Chinese are unsurpassable; the latter especially, in beauty, tastefulness, and thickness, are far preferable to those made in England ...
— A Woman's Journey Round the World • Ida Pfeiffer
... the Sala di Cambio at Perugia. Do you remember how dark it seems when one enters, and how gradually the wonderful coloring glows out from the gloom and one is comforted and soothed into a sort of dreamland of pure joy, in the intimate satisfaction of it all? It is unsurpassable for ...
— The House in Good Taste • Elsie de Wolfe
... the printed word of his letters and tales whereby to approach him, has not been without some points of likeness—amid great difference—to the hold of the Brontes on their day and ours. The sense of an unsurpassable courage—against great odds—has been the same in both cases; and a great tenderness in the public mind for work so gallant, so defiant of ill fortune, so loyal to its own aims. In Stevenson's case, quite apart from the claims of his work as literature, there was ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... indefinite and unlimited variation have been regarded as a more probable account of the origin of Adaptation? Only, I think, because the obstacle was shifted one plane back, and so looked rather less prominent. The abundance of Adaptation, we all grant, is an immense, almost an unsurpassable difficulty in all non-Lamarckian views of Evolution; but if the steps by which that adaptation arose were fortuitious, to imagine them insensible is assuredly no help. In one most important respect indeed, as has often been observed, it is a multiplication of troubles. ...
— Evolution in Modern Thought • Ernst Haeckel
... together in yonder sky; look down, as long as the great rivers of our land flow eastward and westward, north and south, the Union shall stand up, and stand majestical and bright, beheld by ages, as these shall be, an orb and living stream of glory unsurpassable." ...
— Chanticleer - A Thanksgiving Story of the Peabody Family • Cornelius Mathews
... Chapel was such a modification of the English Liturgy as was compatible with that profession: a circumstance which enabled its frequenters to unite the advantage of Dr. Channing's eloquent preaching with the use of that book of prayer and praise unsurpassed and unsurpassable in its simple sublimity and fervid ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... to learn, and no extreme impressions to correct when I was here first." And he added that, in all future editions of the two books just named, he would cause to be recorded, that, "wherever he had been, in the smallest place equally with the largest, he had been received with unsurpassable politeness, delicacy, sweet temper, hospitality, consideration, and with unsurpassable respect for the privacy daily enforced upon him by the nature of his avocation there" (as a public reader), "and ...
— Life of Charles Dickens • Frank Marzials
... side of them, as they glided onwards, the rich meadow-grass seemed that morning of a freshness and a greenness unsurpassable. Never had they noticed the roses so vivid, the willow-herb so riotous, the meadow-sweet so odorous and pervading. Then the murmur of the approaching weir began to hold the air, and they felt a consciousness that they were nearing the end, whatever it might be, that ...
— The Wind in the Willows • Kenneth Grahame
... relaxed again, and lay loose and soft, panting in a little delirium. And to him, she was so sweet, she was such bliss of release, that he would have suffered a whole eternity of torture rather than forego one second of this pang of unsurpassable bliss. ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... with excellent rifles, and belonged to a tribe that is unsurpassable in horsemanship. Several had blankets on their mustangs, but most were without even that protection, being bareback, while few possessed anything in the nature of a bridle. The well-trained steeds, as we have shown, were perfectly managed by word and touch, ...
— The Great Cattle Trail • Edward S. Ellis
... has been literally worshipped from infancy upward is only a natural consequence of her unsurpassable gifts, and nowhere has this feeling manifested itself to such an extent as in Paris, and by none more so than by the four famous composers, Auber, Meyerbeer, Rossini, and Gounod. Auber, after hearing her sing Norina, in Donizetti's "Don Pasquale," offered her a bouquet of roses ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 (of 8) • Various
... quarrelling with him, to fit him for the position of a husband. A very unwholesome doctrine. Emotion is particularly prejudicial to the animal economy. I thought the cultivated taste which the de Fleurys so evidently possess might have some weight with you. That dinner they gave us was unsurpassable, and"— ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... performance when he left the House of Commons, and was, we may say, disgusted with his own position generally, when he considered all its circumstances. That had been at the commencement of the evening, and Melmotte had not then been tipsy; but he had behaved with unsurpassable arrogance and vulgarity, and had made the young lord drink the cup of his own disgrace to the very dregs. Everybody now knew it as a positive fact that the charges made against the man were to become matter of investigation before the chief magistrate for the City, ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... morrow found him early at his task. A few hours' work completed a portrait which, for fidelity of likeness, harmony of accessories, and felicity of coloring, was almost unsurpassable. Yet the painter refused to have it framed, and concealed it from view behind ...
— The Three Brides, Love in a Cottage, and Other Tales • Francis A. Durivage
... any being less removed in nature from his hot, pleasure-thirsty, sense-ridden, undisciplined self. An element in his discontent with the earth had been perhaps his sense of life-wide separation from her, of unsurpassable barriers between them, the vanity of aspiration. And now the Landgrave permits her name to be used to keep him from departing! And with his long-dead soul come back to intenser life than ever, that lily ...
— The Wagnerian Romances • Gertrude Hall
... exact measure of effort and then stops as if shut down by an iron wall—this is an open question, and must be answered according to one's art theories. The exquisite modeling of a Benvenuto Cellini vase, wrought with patient elaboration into a thing of unsurpassable beauty, does not invoke as high a sense of pleasure as an heroic statue or noble painting by some great master, but of its kind the pleasure is just as complete. Apart from Thalberg's power as a player, ...
— Great Violinists And Pianists • George T. Ferris
... yard by yard and mile by mile, in a way which will live forever in British military history, there had been forced upon Lloyd George as one of the principal members of the Cabinet that there were grave deficiencies at the front in equipment, that the British soldiers, unsurpassable for valor, for their individual skill, and their contempt of death, were being, not only overwhelmed by German numbers, but swept down by gun-fire which was in extent and in power tremendously superior ...
— Lloyd George - The Man and His Story • Frank Dilnot
... pronuclei takes place. For the purpose of explaining what this means, and still more for the purpose of giving a general idea of the karyokinetic processes as a whole, I will quote the following description of them, because, for terseness combined with lucidity, it is unsurpassable. ...
— Darwin, and After Darwin (Vol. 1 and 3, of 3) • George John Romanes
... characteristic in the Roman writer. Caesar's conciseness comes of strength and pride; Xenophon's, of a vivid imagination. Many a single line of the Anabasis presents a picture which deeply stirs the emotions. A good instance occurs in the fourth book, where a delightful passage of unsurpassable narrative tells how the Greeks rewarded and dismissed a guide who had led them through dangerous country. The man himself was in peril of his life; laden with valuable things which the soldiers had given him in their gratitude, he turned to make his ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... Lord undertake my father's matters, as he ordereth! For, even as thou sayest, the things that are impossible with men, are possible with him. But for myself, thanks to thine unsurpassable speech, I renounce the vanity of things present, and am resolved to withdraw from them altogether, and to spend the rest of my life with thee, lest, by means of these transitory and fleeting things, I lose the enjoyment ...
— Barlaam and Ioasaph • St. John of Damascus
... again, such as the opening of the book last quoted (the wide, treeless, communal plain with its various labouring teams), or as some of the Lake touches in Lucrezia Floriani, or as the relieving patches in the otherwise monotonous grumble of Un Hiver a Majorque, are unsurpassable. Nor is this gift limited to mere paysage. The famous account of Chopin's playing already mentioned for praise is only first among many. But whether these things are supported by sufficient strength of character, plot, incident, "thought," and the rest; whether that strange narrative ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... Magna Charta. When keenly roused they recall the fate of Charles I.; and their favourite toast is the cause for which Hampden died on the field and Sidney on the scaffold. They believe in the jury as the 'palladium of our liberties'; and are convinced that the British Constitution represents an unsurpassable though unfortunately an ideal order of things, which must have existed at some indefinite period. Chatham in one of his most famous speeches, appeals, for example, to the 'iron barons' who resisted King John, and contrasts them with the ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... non-Euclidean geometry led to the recognition of the fact, that we can cast doubt on the infiniteness of our space without coming into conflict with the laws of thought or with experience (Riemann, Helmholtz). These questions have already been treated in detail and with unsurpassable lucidity by Helmholtz and Poincar, whereas I can only touch ...
— Relativity: The Special and General Theory • Albert Einstein
... a couple whose conjugal life Is happy as happy can be; Now and then there's a man who believes that his wife Is the One Unsurpassable She; There are doubtless in England a great many folks Whose humour is airy and sage; But there never is one in American jokes Or on ...
— Tobogganing On Parnassus • Franklin P. Adams
... destroy such a monster is something like one of the labours of Hercules, in that not only its size and weight and power of using them in little-known ways are against you, but the occult side is alone an unsurpassable difficulty. The Worm is already master of all the elements except fire—and I do not see how fire can be used for the attack. It has only to sink into the earth in its usual way, and you could not overtake it if you had the resources of the biggest coal-mine ...
— The Lair of the White Worm • Bram Stoker
... when youths are clever and cultured enough to teach themselves how to walk! Unsurpassable public schools, which succeed in implanting independence in the place of the dependence, discipline, subordination, and obedience implanted by former generations that thought it their duty to drive away all the bumptiousness of independence! Do you clearly ...
— On the Future of our Educational Institutions • Friedrich Nietzsche
... and his tone was an insult unsurpassable, "perhaps it is to be preferred. This ragout grows ...
— St. Martin's Summer • Rafael Sabatini
... went under too. He was immersed, submerged. The parochial vanished; he swam in the universal. He felt drowsy, soothed, and very happy; his heart beat differently. Consciousness ran fluttering along the edge of something hard that hitherto had seemed an unsurpassable barrier. The barrier melted and ...
— The Extra Day • Algernon Blackwood |
