"Unwritten" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... necessity arose. He was a warrior, whose single prowess might go far in deciding the issue of a hard-fought battle—an orator, discoursing with weighty eloquence on grave questions of state—a judge, whose decisions helped to build up the as yet unwritten code of law. Descending from these high altitudes, he could take up his bow and spear, and go forth to hunt the boar and the stag, or wield the woodman's axe, or the carpenter's saw and chisel. He could kill, ...
— Stories from the Odyssey • H. L. Havell
... faces almost concealed by their drooping cowls. There was no altar in this chapel,—but at its eastern end where the altar might have been, was a dark purple curtain against which blazed in brilliant luminance a Cross and Seven-pointed Star. The rays of light shed by this uplifted Symbol of an unwritten Creed were so vivid as to be almost blinding, and nearly eclipsed the summer glory of the sun itself. Awed by the strange and silent solemnity of my surroundings, I was glad to be hidden under the folds of my enshrouding ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... Law: The Board does not recognize the so-called unwritten law as a justification for the ...
— Writing the Photoplay • J. Berg Esenwein and Arthur Leeds
... define the functions of THE UNITED AMATEUR beyond making imperative the publication of certain official documents. The rest is left to an unwritten combination of tradition and editorial judgment. Any editor, once elected, is absolutely in control of the magazine aside from the essential official matter; his only external obligation being a tacit recognition ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... stopped, Bud took up the refrain. It was not his horse, of course, but an unwritten law of the range had been broken, and that was any honest rider's affair. Besides, Bill was a pal of Bud's. "Hangin''s too good for 'im, whoever done it," he finished vindictively. "I'd lay low, if I was ...
— Skyrider • B. M. Bower
... a Rangar of the blood. He had not met many of them, and those he had had borne away the memory of most outrageous insult gratuitously offered and rubbed home. But this particular Jew was a money-lender on occasion, and his rates had proved as reasonable as his acceptance of Alwa's unwritten promise had been prompt. A man who holds his given word as sacred as did Alwa respects, in the teeth of custom or religion, the man who accepts that word; so, when the chance had offered, Alwa had done the Jew occasional favors and had won ...
— Rung Ho! • Talbot Mundy
... knock at the door disturbed these pleasant thoughts and he frowned. There was an unwritten law at the Vicarage that save for the most urgent of reasons he should never be interrupted at ...
— The Bars of Iron • Ethel May Dell
... the framework of the law—not only the written, but the unwritten law—of his society. In a slave society, any slave who openly rebels will find that he gets squashed pretty quickly. But many a slave-owner has danced willingly to the tune of a slave who was wiser and cleverer ...
— The Highest Treason • Randall Garrett
... of constant danger from infection, there arose a code of unwritten custom as rigid as that enforced by a careful physician in infectious cases at the present day; and thus, too, in course of time there was developed the idea of the possibility of disinfection, an idea as salutary as the discovery in ...
— The Religious Experience of the Roman People - From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus • W. Warde Fowler
... do in the matter, for it would seem to be the height of foolishness to warn Stackpole off, and refuse him the little favor he asked, of spending the night by their fire, to enjoy their company—people who roam the woods have peculiar ideas of hospitality, and it is a serious infraction of the unwritten rules to deny a wanderer the privilege of the camp ...
— Canoe Mates in Canada - Three Boys Afloat on the Saskatchewan • St. George Rathborne
... us all the elements of society, as has the Anglo-Saxon ever. Did any man offend against the unwritten creed of fair play, did he shirk duty when that meant danger to the common good, then he was brought before a council of our leaders, men of wisdom and fairness, chosen by the vote of all; and so he was judged ...
— 54-40 or Fight • Emerson Hough
... beheld the final link that tied these lost Folk to the other time, the last and breaking thread. What history could this book have told? What vast catastrophes, famines, pestilences, wars, horrors had it passed through? In what unwritten cataclysms, in what anguish and despair and long degeneration had the human mind still clung ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... intention of this article to condone the existing policy of the navy of the United States as regards the Negro, where unwritten law prescribes and precludes him from service above a designated status. It is well known that no Negro has ever graduated from the United States Naval Academy, at Annapolis, Maryland, which is primarily essential to receive a commission as a line officer of the navy. ...
— Kelly Miller's History of the World War for Human Rights • Kelly Miller
... heirs of Glory, Heroes of unwritten story, Nurslings of one mighty Mother, Hopes of her, and ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... but both the monarch and the Constitution in Germany are different from the monarch and the Constitution in England. The British Constitution is a growth of centuries, not, like the German Constitution, the creation of a day. The British Constitution is unwritten, if it is stamped, as Mary said the word "Calais" would be found stamped on her heart after death, on the heart and brain of every Englishman. The German Constitution is a written document in seventy-eight ...
— William of Germany • Stanley Shaw
... school, in that order of truths of which Montesquieu, a Frenchman, fifty years before, had first seized the entire body, marked the connections and delineated the chart. At issue are the laws and the "spirit of laws," unwritten or written, by which diverse human societies live, of whatever form, extent and kind,—the State, commune, Church, school, army, agricultural or industrial workshop, tribe or family. These, existing or fossilized, are realities, open to observation like plants or animals. One may, the same ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 6 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 2 (of 2) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... and sewed up the rest into the waistband of his trousers. (It is as safe as a bank to hand your money to an Arab chief who has entertained you in his tent. If you have "eaten his salt" he will not betray or rob you. Absolute loyalty to your guest is the unwritten law that no true Arab ...
— The Book of Missionary Heroes • Basil Mathews
... asked a single question of any gossiping native. On that spot I wove delightful romances, and abandoned myself to little debauches of melancholy which enchanted me. If I had known the reason—perhaps quite commonplace—of this neglect, I should have lost the unwritten poetry which intoxicated me. To me this refuge represented the most various phases of human life, shadowed by misfortune; sometimes the peace of the graveyard without the dead, who speak in the language of epitaphs; one day I saw in it the home of lepers; another, ...
— La Grande Breteche • Honore de Balzac
... have declared that he would willingly exchange a library full of the poets for a single good novel of the period in which he was interested. One can readily imagine that if a generation or two hence there should be any Australian history left unwritten, any unsatisfied curiosity concerning the simple annals now so familiar to us, Rolf Boldrewood's novels might be found, within their limits, a more satisfying source of information than all the rest of contemporary Australian ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne
... waggish crew—yet Francis minded them not, so long as they observed sufficient etiquette to keep their distance from his royal person and immediate following. This nice decorum, however, be it said, was an unwritten law with these waifs and scatterlings, knowing the merry monarch who tolerated them afar would feel no compunction at hanging them severally, or in squads, from the convenient branches of the trees surrounding ...
— Under the Rose • Frederic Stewart Isham
... apparently supported by sheer will power and the pride of the Princess, which she had inherited from her long line of ancestors, extending back into the unwritten pages of history. ...
— L. P. M. - The End of the Great War • J. Stewart Barney
... pathetic in the death of an old language. Permit me to tell you, not as a philologist, a character to which I have no claim, but as an imaginative writer, how the death of an ancient tongue affects me. It is unlike any other form of death, for an unwritten language is even as a breath of air which when it is spent leaves no trace behind. A nation may die, yet its history remains, and that is the tangible part of its past. A city may fall to decay and lie a thousand years under the sands of the desert, yet its relics ...
— The Little Manx Nation - 1891 • Hall Caine
... hidden under a fallen tree-top and one day, while the doe was gone, he fell upon the helpless fawn, which, according to the unwritten law of the forest, was his ...
— Black Bruin - The Biography of a Bear • Clarence Hawkes
... customary grip, and that his bark was left more or less to the conflicting guidance of other influences. Many a time since his departure from England had the old sailor been stung with remorse at the unwritten tenor of his present commission. He would frequently try to look the whole thing in the face—would endeavour to account for the acceptance of an office against which his whole self revolted. He would recite the interview in the Billiter Street chambers ...
— Stories by English Authors: The Sea • Various
... not tell all the horrors of that march,—the pangs of hunger that we suffered, the greed for food, the sights that I saw, nor what men did in their despair. Some things had better remain unwritten. ...
— Ben Comee - A Tale of Rogers's Rangers, 1758-59 • M. J. (Michael Joseph) Canavan
... the plaintiffs reply that the language of the statute does exclude women, but they say that in the presence of the first section of the XIV. Amendment, which confers the elective franchise upon "all persons," this word "male" is as if unwritten, and that the statute, constitutionally, reads, "That all citizens shall be entitled to vote." For we contend, your honors, that although the Congress "has exclusive legislation in all cases over this District," it can legislate only, as ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... there may be the consideration, pleasant and prolonged, of that other book, known to no other man, not yet written, and perhaps destined to perish, a secret dream. But what are now these books? What now is even that book which is perfect and unwritten? It, too, has lost its light. I am left staring into the fire. The newspapers tell us of a common joy at the coming of Peace. Peace? If she is coming, then we are much obliged to her. I remember during an earlier and wasted joy at a word in France of the coming of Peace agreeing ...
— Waiting for Daylight • Henry Major Tomlinson
... serious," he had said to his partner when, on making out a rough account, he had brought the Major in a debtor to him of more than a thousand pounds. The Major had remarked that as he was half-owner of the horses his partner had good security for the money. Then something of an unwritten arrangement was made. The "Prime Minister" was now one of the favourites for the Leger. If the horse won that race there would be money enough for everything. If that race were lost, then there should be a settlement by the transfer of the stud to the younger partner. ...
— The Duke's Children • Anthony Trollope
... doctrine. But realizing the necessity, of suppressing the belief in the absorption of all souls, immediately after death, they ceased to teach it, and ultimately it was embodied in that secret and unwritten system known as the Esoteric philosophy, in which the Astrologers formulated their own private belief, and which for many centuries was kept from the knowledge of the uninitiated by their successors in the ...
— Astral Worship • J. H. Hill
... and walked on the terrace after dinner with her in the moonlight. When the ladies retired he came into the smoking room, drank a whisky and soda, said that Miss Queenborough was really a very charming companion, and apologized for leaving us early, on the ground that his sermon was still unwritten. My good cousin, the squire, suggested rather grimly that a discourse on the vanity of human wishes might ...
— Frivolous Cupid • Anthony Hope
... He had broken the unwritten law of Rocky Springs, where it was understood that no man spoke of another man's past, or questioned his present doings, or even admitted knowledge of them. But like all the rest of the male portion of Rocky Springs, he possessed ...
— The Law-Breakers • Ridgwell Cullum
... of the coming day. A description of them has often been attempted by writers of northern scenes, and I have to confess, that I have been rash enough to try it elsewhere; but their full glories are still unwritten and perhaps ever will be. They appear to belong to the spiritual rather than to the earthly; and there are times when they so dazzle and overwhelm, that it does seem as though only the language of spirits is adequate to the task of ...
— On the Indian Trail - Stories of Missionary Work among Cree and Salteaux Indians • Egerton Ryerson Young
... to withstand zero weather. With evident enjoyment of the cold, he calls out a shrill, wiry zee, zee, zee, that rings merrily from the pines and spruces when our fingers are too numb to hold the opera glasses in an attempt to follow his restless fittings from branch to branch. Is it one of the unwritten laws of birds that the smaller their ...
— Bird Neighbors • Neltje Blanchan
... sighs. And I will read of dim Creation's morn, From the deep archives of these mossy hills— On wings of wizard thought, my fancy, borne Back by the whispers of these pouring rills, Shall read the unwritten record of the land— For God, unwitnessed here hath walked the dell, These cliffs have quivered at his loud command, These waters blushed, where his deep shadow fell! And at his bidding, 'mid these solitudes, The ebb and ...
— Poems • Sam G. Goodrich
... resisting a woman than she has of escaping him. Our code of manners forbids the brutality of repressing a woman, whereas repression with your sex is not only allurement to ours, but is imposed upon you by conventions. With us, on the contrary, some unwritten law of masculine self-conceit ridicules a man's modesty; we leave you the monopoly of that virtue, that you may have the privilege of granting us favors; but reverse the case, and man succumbs ...
— The Lily of the Valley • Honore de Balzac
... of small value, a penny, or a farthing has been quietly put into Mr. Smith's hands, in furtherance of his work, by some poor Gipsy woman. The story which made us laugh was of a Gipsy marriage. It is one of the unwritten laws of Gipsy life that the wife works while the husband idles about the tent. The wife hawks with the basket or the cart and sells, while the husband loiters about the encampment or cooks the evening ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... intended by the author, we have only nine that received his final corrections, and even with those now recovered, we have only about one half of the whole, presuming that those which are lost or remained unwritten would have averaged about the same length as those we have. To those who have studied the 'Suspiria' as published, how suggestive many of these titles will be! 'Count the Leaves in Vallombrosa'—what phantasies would that ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... not describe a single incident that he had not viewed from start to finish with his own eyes. He did not have much to do with feelings direct, but such as were necessary to his story he insisted on experiencing in his own person; otherwise the story remained unwritten. And as for emotions—such as anger, or religion, or fear—he would attempt none whose savour he had not tasted for himself. Unkind and envious rivals—not realists—insisted that once Severne had deliberately gotten very drunk on Bowery ...
— Blazed Trail Stories - and Stories of the Wild Life • Stewart Edward White
... brown and yellow complexions came to be so common; of yourself, the son of the Governor, yet obliged to read the Bible by stealth, under the penalty of a bleeding back washed with brine. These and many other things revolve in your active mind, and your unwritten inferences are worth whole folios of ...
— The Duty of Disobedience to the Fugitive Slave Act - Anti-Slavery Tracts No. 9, An Appeal To The Legislators Of Massachusetts • Lydia Maria Child
... whaler, trim and trig, lying placidly at anchor in a harbor where the Austrian thought no man had ever been? It built up towns in New England that half a century of lethargy has been unable to kill. And so if its brigs—and its men—now molder, if its records are scanty and its history unwritten, still Americans must ever regard the whale fishery as one of the chief factors in the building of the nation—one of the most admirable ...
— American Merchant Ships and Sailors • Willis J. Abbot
... we may trace the action of three different influences, which have moulded it with varying effects, in three successive phases of its development. There is first its half-conscious, instinctive, or mystical, phase, in which, under the form of an unwritten legend, living from mouth to mouth, and with details changing as it passes from place to place, there lie certain primitive impressions of the phenomena of the natural world. We may trace it next in its conscious, poetical or literary, phase, in which the ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... single problem with strict regard to purity and economy, the theory of the art received greater attention than before and the essays of C. Schwede, Kohtz and Kockelkorn, Lehner and Gelbfuss, helped to codify hitherto unwritten rules of taste. The last quarter of the 19th century, and its last decade especially, saw a marked advance in technique, until it became a common thing to find as much deep and quiet play embodied in a single first-class problem as ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various
... tears upon the strife of absolutism with new-fledged democracy, or to vaticinate a reign of socialistic terror for the immediate future. We have to recognize that man cannot be other than what he makes himself; and he makes himself in obedience to immutable although unwritten laws, whereof he only of late years became dimly conscious. It is well, then, while reflecting on the lessons of some deeply studied epoch in world-history, to regard the developments with which we have been specially occupied, ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... claims. J. G. Whitmore had contented himself with acquiring title to the whole of the Flying U coulee, secure in his belief that the old order of things would not change, in his life-time, at least, and that the unwritten law of the range land, which leaves the vicinity of a ranch to the use of the ranch owner, would never be repealed by new customs imposed by a new class ...
— Flying U Ranch • B. M. Bower
... whenever more than one person is addressed, even though no word may appear in the sentence indicating how many. This is an idiosyncracy which perhaps would never have been developed, certainly would not be perpetuated, in any except an unwritten language. It is of no effect except in a language always colloquial. The multiple form will be given in this grammar as the first person plural, and, whether indicated or not, the other may be understood as being the same with the change of the first ...
— History of the Ottawa and Chippewa Indians of Michigan • Andrew J. Blackbird
... assertion into the unconditional statement that such and such consequences have actually followed, constantly lands the author in propositions which any reader who tests them by an appeal to the experience of mankind, written and unwritten, at once discovers to be false and absurd. Rousseau himself took less trouble to verify his conclusions by such an appeal to experience than any writer that ever lived in a scientific age. The other remark to be made on the ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... or destroy every foreign citizen in China. Its resources were abundant, its equipment was ample, its methods unspeakably atrocious. Month after month the published record of this rebellion was sickening—its unwritten history beyond human imagining. Impenetrable were its walled cities, countless in numbers, unknown the scenes of its vast plains and rivers and barren fields and mountain fastnesses. Fifteen thousand native ...
— Winning the Wilderness • Margaret Hill McCarter
... and that was enough. And, although there were many expressions of welcome spoken and called out to Curly John when he passed into the room and took his seat at the table, nobody in all that throng offered to approach him, for it was an unwritten law of the underworld that a man who reappears for the first time among his associates after imprisonment is left alone to make his own advances when he is pleased to ...
— A Woman at Bay - A Fiend in Skirts • Nicholas Carter
... responsible for the safety of the party, and every member should do his best to help him by carrying out any instructions he may give for their greater safety. This is not always appreciated by people who do not know the Alps and their unwritten laws, and the Guides complain somewhat bitterly that they are often put in very difficult positions. For instance, on one occasion, when a party was crossing an avalanche slope, the Guide asked them to go singly at intervals of 20 metres, so that if anyone was carried away, the others would ...
— Ski-running • Katharine Symonds Furse
... community it was natural that the early days of self-government should witness some corruption among the voters, the more so because, at election times "there were no less than four days, the nomination, two days' polling, and declaration day, on all of which, by a sort of unwritten law, the candidates in many constituencies were compelled to keep open house for their supporters," while direct money bribes were often resorted to, especially on the second day's polling ...
— British Supremacy & Canadian Self-Government - 1839-1854 • J. L. Morison
... of the earlier bishops are taken from Bishop Stubbs' "Registrum Sacrum Anglicanum." Of the bishops between 1609 and 1845 there was only one (Peter Gunning) who was not translated to Ely from some other see. It is now an unwritten law that the Bishop of Ely should be a Cambridge man. For at least two centuries and a half this rule has been followed, if we except Francis Turner; and he, though of New College, Oxford, had been Master of S. John's, Cambridge. Unless otherwise stated, ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Ely • W. D. Sweeting
... the Jewish Sabbath, nor is it binding on us. But as men we ought to rest, and resting, to worship, on one day in the week. The unwritten law of Christianity, moulding all outward forms by its own free spirit, gradually, and without premeditation, slid from the seventh to the first day, as it had clear right to do. It was the day of Christ's resurrection, probably of His ascension, and of Pentecost. ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... had the great evil of one. The evil was that while it was essentially orderly, it was still literally lawless. That is, the emancipation of the commons had already advanced very far, but it had not yet advanced far enough to be embodied in a law. The custom was "unwritten," like the British Constitution, and (like that evolutionary, not to say evasive entity) could always be overridden by the rich, who now drive their great coaches through Acts of Parliament. The new peasant was still legally a slave, and was to learn it by one of those turns of fortune which ...
— A Short History of England • G. K. Chesterton
... then that man mistrusted the Light Within, and disregarded the unwritten laws graven in the soul by the Creator. He clamored for a Code of Laws and received them (through Moses). His next downward step was taken when he admitted it was necessary to have interpreters of the Law: for if the spirit of the Law had been kept ...
— The Planet Mars and its Inhabitants - A Psychic Revelation • Eros Urides and J. L. Kennon
... true, according to which the architect was not Joao but one Ayres do Quintal. Nothing else seems to be known of Ayres—though a head carved under the west window of the chapter-house is said to be his—but in a country so long illiterate as Portugal, where unwritten stories have been handed down from quite distant times, it is possible that oral tradition may be as true as ...
— Portuguese Architecture • Walter Crum Watson
... battle. The wobblers sit like nightmares on my chest. "Tell them the plain truth" cries conscience. What is the plain truth? Where is it? Is it in Dawnay's draft, or is it in my message, or does it lie stillborn in some cable unwritten? God knows—I don't! But one thing at least is true:—to steer a course between an optimism that deprives us of support and a pessimism that may wreck the whole enterprise, there indeed is a Scylla and Charybdis problem, a two-horned dilemma, or whatever words may best convey ...
— Gallipoli Diary, Volume 2 • Ian Hamilton
... is the first of her duties; however much she may suffer, she must present as calm and serene a countenance as a warrior in the hour of danger, and fall, if necessary, upon the spot, with death in her heart and a smile upon her lips. In order to obey this unwritten law, Madame de Bergenheim, after a slight interruption, seated herself at the piano to accompany three or four young girls who were each to sing in turn the songs that they had been ...
— Gerfaut, Complete • Charles de Bernard
... it that we must abide in that Province where our fathers dwelt, living as they have lived, so to obey the unwritten command that once shaped itself in their hearts, that passed to ours, which we in turn must hand on to descendants innumerable:—In this land of Quebec naught shall die and naught shall suffer ...
— Maria Chapdelaine - A Tale of the Lake St. John Country • Louis Hemon
... made up of unwritten and written acts, customs, judicial decisions, and traditions; the written part of the constitution consists of the Constitution Act of 29 March 1867, which created a federation of four provinces, and the ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... refinement of her oriental home. From her the degraded medicine-men and dreamers caught a gleam of the majestic lore of Buddha; to the chiefs-in-council she taught something of the grave, inexorable justice of the East, that seemed like a higher development of their own grim unwritten code. Her influence was very great, for she was naturally eloquent and of noble presence. More than one sachem felt the inspiration of better, purer thoughts than he had ever known before when the "war-chief's woman" spoke in council. Strange gatherings were those: blood-stained ...
— The Bridge of the Gods - A Romance of Indian Oregon. 19th Edition. • Frederic Homer Balch
... on at a lazy mule-trot, hearing the unwritten annals of the range from one who had seen them enacted at first hand. Pretty soon we passed a herd of burros with mealy, dusty noses and spotty hides, feeding on prickly pears and rock lichens; and just before sunset we slid down the last declivity out upon the ...
— Roughing it De Luxe • Irvin S. Cobb
... but the pomp and circumstance with which she was surrounded had had a sobering effect upon him, and added to his sense of the instability and unreality of the present moment. He had an almost guilty feeling of having broken an unwritten law, of abducting a princess, and the old Duncan house had seemed to frown protestingly that such an act should have taken place under its windows. If Victoria had been—to him—an ordinary mortal in expensive furs instead of a princess, he would have snapped his fingers at the pomp and circumstance. ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... Rhine to the Ural Mountains, other myriads will come in the long years that will follow the war. New history is sure to be written for Europe and America. What shall be our contribution to its unwritten pages? ...
— The Lutherans of New York - Their Story and Their Problems • George Wenner
... writes from Cooktown, that the blacks there have taken Kangaroo from English. Inquiries inserted in each of the Cooktown newspapers have produced no result. Mr. De Vis' second argument as to the type-form seems much stronger. A spoken language, unwritten, unprinted, must inevitably change, and change rapidly. A word current in 1770 would change rather than disappear, and the root consonants would remain. The letters ng together, followed by r, occur in the proportion of one in thirteen, of the ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... history has remained so long unwritten as that which tells the story of the Mormons. There are many books on the subject, histories written under the auspices of the Mormon church, which are hopelessly biased as well as incomplete; more trustworthy works ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn
... said slowly, "learn this from the start and learn it well. Do not ask questions. Do not talk. Think! You will soon learn that there are many unwritten laws attached ...
— The Secrets of the German War Office • Dr. Armgaard Karl Graves
... against the unwritten laws of a vessel for pistols to be owned forward of the main cabin. Beale finally answered for ...
— A Man to His Mate • J. Allan Dunn
... every improvement, which science, civilization, a good police, or a watchful and philanthropic government furnishes to the masses and to individuals, is a liberty acquired, a liberty not the less practical, positive, and fruitful for being unwritten, unestablished by any charter. These, I shall be told, are 'little liberties.' I do not call them such. But we have a greater and more essential one,—the right of the representatives of the nation to discuss and vote on the budget; and this supposes others,—it ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... virtue, the good. Their offspring strengthens the bond (XII.). The friendships that give rise to complaints are confined to the Useful. Such friendships involve a legal element of strict and measured reciprocity [mere trade], and a moral or unwritten understanding, which is properly friendship. Each party is apt to give less and expect more than he gets; and the rule must be for each to reciprocate liberally and fully, in such manner and kind as they are able (XIII.). In unequal friendships, between a superior ...
— Moral Science; A Compendium of Ethics • Alexander Bain
... an attentive spectator and auditor of these scenes of turbulence; and it was interesting to see a British statesman looking up to learn from such a source the unwritten history of his own country, as well as of Europe. For such it was, when Mr. Adams gave the history of the movements at the court of the Emperor Alexander, and his connection with them, which resulted in the Russo-British ...
— Memoir of the Life of John Quincy Adams. • Josiah Quincy
... inhabitants grew to be proud of their rosy citadel; it was an unwritten law among them that every new house should adapt itself to this tone. For the rest, there was not much building done after his death, with the exception of a few isolated villas that sprang up, despite his old commands, ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... she threw it into the fire, after tearing a small blank piece of the paper off, and putting this unwritten-on scrap back in the bodice of her dress. As she hurried away, she again promised him not to undertake anything, nor to allow Aylmer to overpower her prudent ...
— Love at Second Sight • Ada Leverson
... the power of administering the Holy Eucharist was the attribute of a sacred order founded by Christ Himself? Did not the Fathers refer to the tradition of the Church as to something independent of the written word, and sufficient to refute heresy, even alone? Was it not, therefore, God's unwritten word? And did it not demand the same reverence from us as the Scriptures, and for exactly the same reason—BECAUSE IT WAS HIS WORD? The Doctors of Divinity were aghast at such questions, which seemed to lead they hardly knew whither; and they found ...
— Eminent Victorians • Lytton Strachey
... 4000l.,—half of which, according to Scott's bad and sanguine habit, was borrowed from his brother, and half raised on the security of a poem at the moment of sale wholly unwritten, and not completed even when he removed to Abbotsford—"Rokeby"—became only too much of an idol for the rest of Scott's life. Mr. Lockhart admits that before the crash came he had invested 29,000l. in the purchase of land alone. But at this time only the kernel of the subsequent estate ...
— Sir Walter Scott - (English Men of Letters Series) • Richard H. Hutton
... Robert Seymour, but that to a certain extent the claim has a foundation of fact to rest upon; for who will deny that had not Seymour communicated his idea to Chapman, and Chapman introduced the artist to Dickens, the "Pickwick Papers" themselves would have remained unwritten. In this sense, but in this sense only, therefore, Robert Seymour was the undoubted originator of "Pickwick." He was an artist of great power, talent, and ability; and it seems to us that those only detract from his fame who, in a kind but mistaken spirit of zeal, would claim for him ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... creates unexecuted cabinet pictures and unwritten sonnets, how delightful 'the find,' 'the run' along brook-intersected vales, up steep hills, through woodlands, parks, and villages, showing you in byways little gothic churches, ivy-covered cottages, and nooks of beauty you never dreamed ...
— A New Illustrated Edition of J. S. Rarey's Art of Taming Horses • J. S. Rarey
... very good reason they had no desire for Bill to discover their presence. There are certain laws, among the northern men, as to trapping rights. Nothing can be learned in the provincial statute books concerning these laws. Mostly they are unwritten; but their influence is felt clear beyond the Arctic Circle. They state quite clearly that when a man lays down a line of traps, for a certain distance on each side of him the district is his, and no one shall poach on his preserves. ...
— The Snowshoe Trail • Edison Marshall
... a code of its own. Without it social life would be impossible, for no man would know what to expect of his neighbors, nor be able promptly to interpret the words and actions of his fellow-men. It is in obedience to an unwritten law of this kind that an American takes off his hat when he goes into a church, and an Asiatic, when he enters a mosque, takes off his shoes; that Englishmen shake hands, and Africans rub noses. Where etiquette is well understood and well adapted to the persons whom it governs, men are at ease, for ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... Luther groped for the notion of some legal limitation on the monarch's power. The word "constitution" so familiar to us, was lacking then, but that the idea was present is certain. The German Empire had a constitution, largely unwritten but partly statutory. The limitations on the imperial power were then recognized by an Italian observer, Quirini. [Sidenote: 1507] When they were brought to Luther's attention he admitted the right of the German states to resist by force {597} ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... with that candour which is the rarest of his great qualities, gave a generous and authoritative testimony to the merit of these attacks upon his father, and his father's creed, which Macaulay himself lived to wish that he had left unwritten. ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... an unwritten one, but it's the one law of the Hall that Madam expects every one to live ...
— The Little Colonel's Christmas Vacation • Annie Fellows Johnston
... work is a history rather than a biography. It is an interlude, a pause between the acts which were to fill out the complete plan of the "Eighty Years' Tragedy," and of which the last act, the Thirty Years' War, remains unwritten. The "Life of Barneveld" was received as a fitting and worthy continuation of the series of intellectual labor in which he was engaged. I will quote but two general expressions of approval from the two best known British critical reviews. In connection with his ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... known what was to happen before he came to you, are you sure he would have come? Undoubtedly there is an unwritten compact in such matters between a mother and her first-born, and I desire to point out to you that he never breaks it. Again, what will the other boys say when they know? You are outside the criticism of the ...
— The Little White Bird - or Adventures In Kensington Gardens • J. M. Barrie
... after the war was left in the hands of a triumvirate, but after one year Kruger became President, an office which he continued to hold for eighteen years. His career as ruler vindicates the wisdom of that wise but unwritten provision of the American Constitution by which there is a limit to the tenure of this office. Continued rule for half a generation must turn a man into an autocrat. The old President has said himself, in his homely but shrewd way, that when one gets a good ox to lead the team it is a pity to change ...
— The Great Boer War • Arthur Conan Doyle
... since his death than during his lifetime. This is, in part no doubt, one among the consequences of those very defects of character which so unfortunately limited his actual achievements. He has been credited by faith, as it were, with those famous "unwritten books" of which he assured Charles Lamb that the titles alone would fill a volume, and such "popular reputation," in the strict sense of the word, as he has left behind him, is measured rather by what he was thought capable of doing than by what he did. By ...
— English Men of Letters: Coleridge • H. D. Traill
... Phillip, Hefner, Weiser, Creswick, Sant, John Wilson, Junr., Solomon, and Henry O'Neil—the latter artist's "Return of the Wanderer" being in a conspicuous position. As Sir Robert points them out, he seems to see an unwritten story on every canvas. He singles out the Mueller as his greatest treasure, for it was the last and possibly the best work the artist ever chronicled with his brush, and he died ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 29, May 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... were well over 500,000 German colonists, besides a large number of new-comers, whose unwritten "privileges" included, as we saw, occasional permission to their young men liable to serve a few weeks annually in the ranks of the German army to discharge that duty under German officers in Russian Poland! In the Ukraine ...
— England and Germany • Emile Joseph Dillon
... sides by such able disputants in Congress and before the people and in the press, as to the extent to which the legislation of any one nation can control this question, even within its own borders, against the unwritten laws of trade or the positive laws of other governments. The wisdom of Congress in shaping any particular law that may be presented for my approval may wholly supersede the necessity of my entering into these considerations, and I willingly avoid either vague or intricate inquiries. It is only ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Rutherford B. Hayes • Rutherford B. Hayes
... simple yet really inexhaustible monition, that if we would improve a man, it were well to let him believe that we already think him that which we would have him to be. The law that noblesse oblige has unwritten bearings in dealing with all men; all masses of men are susceptible of an appeal from that point: for this Mr. Carlyle seems to ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 2: Carlyle • John Morley
... poesy which has glorified these works and those of their kind, the spring of the unwritten law yielding preeminence to the emotional arts. Impulse is the life of it: it dies when short tethered by ...
— Pictorial Composition and the Critical Judgment of Pictures • Henry Rankin Poore
... world knows, between the ages of one and two the best British babies are built up on beef tea and mutton broth; at two or thereabouts they start on small chops. No one can say when the custom arose. Like so many of those unwritten laws on which the greatness of England is really based it has outgrown the memory of its origin. But its force is as universally binding to-day as it was in Plantagenet times. Thus, though numerous households since the War began have temporarily ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol 150, February 9, 1916 • Various
... voted against the resolution had the courage to sign this protest with him. Lincoln was young, poor, and in need of all the good-will at his command. Nobody could have blamed him for leaving it unwritten; yet he felt the wrong of slavery so keenly that he could not keep silent merely because the views he held happened to be unpopular; and this protest, signed by him and Dan Stone, has come down to us, the first notable public ...
— The Boys' Life of Abraham Lincoln • Helen Nicolay
... English writers and collectors of frontier folklore, and indeed he acknowledges his debt to Mr. Thorburn's excellent book on Bannu or our Afghan Frontier. However that may be, we have here, in these unwritten lays, the stuff out of which is developed, first, the established tradition, and, secondly, not only poetry but also the beginnings of history, for these lays are the oral records of contemporary events—'c'est le cri meme de l'histoire.' ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... the woman sees me pick up so fast, she uses me worse, and has abridged me of paper, all but one sheet, which I am to shew her, written or unwritten, on demand: and has reduced me to one pen: yet my hidden stores stand me in stead. But she is more and more snappish and cross; and tauntingly calls me Mrs. Williams, and any thing she ...
— Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded • Samuel Richardson
... contained in the law of the land and a certain conventional moral code. The pursuit of money is to arouse a man to individual activity, and law and custom determine the conditions to which the activity must conform. The man does not become an individual merely by obeying the written and unwritten laws. He becomes an individual because the desire to make money releases his energy and intensifies his personal initiative. The kind of individuals created by such an economic system are not distinguished one from another by any special ...
— The Promise Of American Life • Herbert David Croly
... in what remains unwritten that the singer's true greatness is revealed? What dilettante has not felt the power of a more incisive attack of the note; of that prolongation of the note, held imperceptibly, which, having captured it, holds the attention of ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... about Mr. Nassau-Senior I shall fill a book. I admit that it would be a very curious and attractive work, for he was in the truest sense a man of note, but I cannot put a book inside a book. Therefore this must be, not merely one of my unwritten chapters, but one ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... even." He looks at her, speechless with amazement. Her eyes do not flinch from his. "If," she continues, with that terrible calmness,—"if you wanted to marry Miss Constance Devereux; if I wished to marry—let us say, Lord Harford—there is nothing to prevent it except," slowly, "the unwritten law of a ...
— Tales from Many Sources - Vol. V • Various
... willful violation of those unwritten laws that have come to govern social intercourse, there are many who err because of excessive self-consciousness, which makes it difficult or impossible to put themselves at ease among those with whom they would like to ...
— The Art of Stage Dancing - The Story of a Beautiful and Profitable Profession • Ned Wayburn
... and endurance is too much that which would be normal for young men, and the sentiment of these groups of women is silently opposed to admitting that the feminine life has necessities which do not cumber that of man. Thus the unwritten code remains in a measure hostile to the accepted laws which ...
— Wear and Tear - or, Hints for the Overworked • Silas Weir Mitchell
... versed in the principles of the game, and defer to his or their opinion. And, similarly, in the Folk-moot, much deference was paid in rendering judgment to the old men who for many years had helped to render justice, and who, in consequence, had much knowledge of the customs, unwritten laws, in accordance with which decisions were rendered. In this deference to one or more persons who are recognized as understanding the principles involved in the case, we see the germ of judgeship ...
— Studies in Civics • James T. McCleary
... of passport to admit us, and that we had, somewhat audaciously, come without asking leave into a separate little kingdom of wonder and magic—a kingdom that was reserved for the use of others who had a right to it, with everywhere unwritten warnings to trespassers for those who had the imagination ...
— Famous Modern Ghost Stories • Various
... numerous books which at one time of another I had resolved to write, and which the evening twilight of my life finds still unwritten, was one on Fur-trading. This volume, indeed, came somewhat nearer to a state of actual existence than any of its unborn brethren, since I have yet a great store of notes and memoranda gathered for its construction in earlier years. ...
— In the Valley • Harold Frederic
... ourselves (we are all alike) painfully pshaw-ing over some new and uncut barley sugar in rime, which a man in the street asked us if we had read, or it may be some learned lucubration about the site of Troy by some one we chanced to meet at dinner. It is an unwritten chapter in the history of the human mind, how this literary prurience after new print unmans us for the enjoyment of the old songs chanted forth in the sunrise of human imagination. To ask a man or woman who spends half a lifetime in sucking magazines and new poems to read a book of Homer would ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VI (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland IV • Various |
