"Illimitable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... knew, since such knowledge must transcend all scope of the human mind. The formula, if you must have a formula, is one thing; but the turning it into a statute of limitations and applying it to the Illimitable ...
— The Conquest of Fear • Basil King
... insistent, ravished his imagination with visions of illimitable power and peace and rest. "Gold! Lost gold!" it would whisper as he sat by the meager flame. Then he would tremble and draw nearer the warmth. "Where?" he would ask, tempting the darkness as a child, fearfully ...
— Overland Red - A Romance of the Moonstone Canon Trail • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... could wander about in the open, while if there was "nothing doing," the men back in reserve could lie out in the long grass and bask in the sunshine. This was all very comforting and relieved the strain of war very considerably, but the advantages in the matter of organisation were illimitable. Rations came up in the middle of the day, and the limbers and water carts, in singles of course on account of balloon observation, trundled up the road in the afternoon to a point within four hundred yards of the front line! As the men put it "We were laughing"—especially ...
— The Seventh Manchesters - July 1916 to March 1919 • S. J. Wilson
... climate cannot compare. Here the rising of the sun from his bed of waves, presents a spectacle that fills the heart with reverence and awe at the same time that it swells with rapture of the purest kind. The thick clouds that rested like a veil of darkness upon the illimitable surface of the sea, at the coming of the god of day, disperse in their vapors. The twinkling stars grow paler as he approaches, the dark gray color of the water changes to a cheerful blue, and streaks of clear purple are seen in the east, increasing each ...
— Hair Breadth Escapes - Perilous incidents in the lives of sailors and travelers - in Japan, Cuba, East Indies, etc., etc. • T. S. Arthur
... these seas. There was barely room to move about on the deck of the Morning Star; merely a few steps were possible abaft the wheel amid the play of main-sheet boom and traveler. Here, while my three fellow-passengers went below, I stood gazing at the rain-whipped illimitable ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... long way off. Waves and jags of angry light burst from it ceaselessly, this way and that. The restless mass was alive, active, burning. Infinitesimal though its dimensions were it gave a sense of illimitable force and power, a ...
— Men of Affairs • Roland Pertwee
... mood only, but a portrait in which his whole character is seen. The sweetest and gentlest of hosts, moving among his guests and charming all hearers with his stammered, inimitable pleasantry; the clerk at his desk at the India House, and finally released from it into a life of illimitable leisure; the quaint little scholar of Christ's Hospital; the quaint old humorist taking his long walks about his beloved London; the author, known and endeared by his books; the careworn and devoted man, hurrying through the streets with ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 110, December, 1866 - A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and Politics • Various
... reply to this, for her mind was not by nature philosophically disposed, though she was intelligent enough to admire the sagacity of a remark that seemed to her fraught with illimitable significance. ...
— The Walrus Hunters - A Romance of the Realms of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... Napoleon wants to keep his crown—if England wishes Europe to remain quiet—if they both dread our good friend Russia, who in event of a war would 'annex,' for aught we can see, all Austria and an illimitable share of the East—if they wish to avoid such an upstirring, riot, and infernal carnival of revolution as the world never ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No 3, September, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... side of which stood a well-sweep, windlass and such like articles; the ground further down being divided into parcels, and apportioned into fields, which, with the fine vegetables and cabbages in flower, presented, at the first glance, the aspect of being illimitable. ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... Djebel Orousse, north-east of Oran in Algeria. All over an extensive rocky plateau in this place numerous shallow depressions plainly indicate the existence of very ancient quarries. A large company has been formed to work and export the marble, which may now be had in illimitable quantity. The largest specimens of giallo antico existing in Rome are the eight fluted Corinthian pillars, thirty feet high and eleven feet in circumference, with capitals and bases of white marble, ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... they loathed; something of a purist in speech, which was affectation unpardonable; something of a dissenter as to drink, appreciative of "Cucumungo" and claret, but distrustful of whisky—another thing to call down scorn illimitable from the elect of the mining camps and packing "outfits." But all these disqualifications might have been overlooked had the lieutenant displayed even a faint preference for poker. "The Lord loveth a cheerful giver—or loser" was the creed ...
— An Apache Princess - A Tale of the Indian Frontier • Charles King
... What a wonderful world it must seem to the young bird when he first steps out! He is very timid, and as he gets near the opening he hears the beating of the waves on the shore perhaps, and then the great wide ocean opens before him and the illimitable sky. What a big world! He must turn almost ...
— The Children's Book of London • Geraldine Edith Mitton
... the great destruction, may we not suppose that the state of man was something of this sort:—In the beginning of things there was a fearful illimitable desert and a vast expanse of land; a herd or two of oxen would be the only survivors of the animal world; and there might be a few goats, these too hardly enough to maintain ...
— Laws • Plato
... almost illimitable variability is the usual result of domestication and cultivation, with the same part or organ varying in different individuals in different or even in directly opposite ways; and as the same variation, if strongly ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... of grass and short blue thistles in which already buzzed a world of bees; they climbed it and from the summit watched a ball of fire rise into the cloudless blue. The morning wind, blowing over that illimitable forest, fanned their brows, and a tide of woodland sound and incense swept up to them from the world below. Around them were the Blue Mountains—gigantic masses, cloudy peaks, vast ramparts rising from a sea of mist—mysterious fastnesses, scarcely believed in and never ...
— Prisoners of Hope - A Tale of Colonial Virginia • Mary Johnston
... led the way, and the throng opened out to let them pass. Henry glanced back at the two swaying lines of women, now engaged in one of their minute-long chants, and he wondered at the illimitable patience of the red race, to whom ...
— The Riflemen of the Ohio - A Story of the Early Days along "The Beautiful River" • Joseph A. Altsheler
... accustomed to do with the right. You will convince yourself of it, Sire, if you will condescend to try our system on something which is familiar to you,—like shuffling cards, for instance. We can then flatter ourselves that we have opened an illimitable career to labor. ...
— Sophisms of the Protectionists • Frederic Bastiat
... which Wordsworth first disclosed. It is habitually lovers who have these visions,—all that was mystical in Browning's mind attaching itself, in fact, in some way to his ideas of love. To the Two in the Campagna its primeval silence grows instinct with passion, and its peace with joy,—the joy of illimitable space and freedom, alluring yet mocking the finite heart that yearns. To the lovers of the Alpine gorge the old woods, heaped and dim, that hung over their troth-plighting, mysteriously drew them together; the moment that broke down the bar between soul and soul also ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... existence—transitory, real and potential; and if the capacity of the mind is co-extensive with the capacity of infinite space, since it feels itself undoubtedly capable of grasping any limited idea contained in any portion of the illimitable whole, it follows that the mind is of itself as infinite as the space in which all created things have their transitory form of being, and in which all uncreated truths exist eternally. The mind is aware of infinity ...
— Marzio's Crucifix and Zoroaster • F. Marion Crawford
... supremest kind necessarily implies an object—that is to say, resistance. Without an object which resists it, it would be a blank, and what, then, is the meaning of omnipotence? It is not that it is merely inconceivable; it is nonsense, and so are all these abstract, illimitable, self-annihilative attributes of which God ...
— The Autobiography of Mark Rutherford • Mark Rutherford
... searches for a reason and all reasons point to a God, all-wise, all-powerful, and all-loving. On no other theory can we account for what we see about us. It is impossible to conceive of the universe, illimitable in extent and seemingly measureless in time, as being the result of chance. The reign of law, universal and eternal, compels belief in ...
— In His Image • William Jennings Bryan
... supercilious person,—I believe they call him Chilly Billy at the Metropolitan Club,—and our efforts to converse were pathetically unfruitful. He asked me the value of land in my county, and as my ignorance on this subject was vast and illimitable, I could see that he was forming a low opinion of my character and intelligence. The two ladies stood by, making no concealment of their impatience. Their eyes were upon the girls from St. Agatha’s on the other platform, whom they could see beyond me. I had jumped the ...
— The House of a Thousand Candles • Meredith Nicholson
... and Americans had done their part with steady, driving pressure. The illimitable reserves of Americans, and their fighting quality, which triumphed over a faulty organization of transport and supplies, left the German High Command without hope ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... sky, revealing its peak in bolder lines as the searchers pushed up the Ste. Marie, exploring mile after mile of pine and white birch and fantastic rock. The shaggy bank stooped to them, the illimitable glory of the wilderness witnessing a little procession of boats like ...
— The Chase Of Saint-Castin And Other Stories Of The French In The New World • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... a sheet of water nine miles long and from one to three wide; fifty rods below was Little Lake Jacques Cartier, an irregular body about two miles across. Stretching away on every hand, bristling on the mountains and darkling in the valleys, was the illimitable spruce woods. The moss in them covered the ground nearly knee-deep, and lay like newly fallen snow, hiding rocks and logs, filling depressions, and muffling the foot. When it was dry, one could find a most delightful ...
— Locusts and Wild Honey • John Burroughs
... horse was again beginning to show signs of disturbance and active terror. His quivering nostrils were turned towards the wind, and he almost leaped the centre pole in his frantic effort to avoid it. The eyes of the two men were turned instinctively in that direction. Nothing was to be seen,—the illimitable plain and the sinking sun were all that met the eye. But the horse continued to struggle, and the wagon stopped. Then it was discovered that the horse of an adjacent trooper was also laboring under the same mysterious excitement, and at the ...
— Tales of Trail and Town • Bret Harte
... Agawam," already mentioned. What the cobbler saw was chiefly the theological difficulties of the time. Discord and confusion seemed to have settled upon the earth, and "looking out over English Christendom, he saw nothing but a chaos of jangling opinions, upstart novelties, lawless manners, illimitable changes in codes, institutions and creeds." He declaims ferociously against freedom of opinion, and "the fathers of the inquisition might have reveled over the first twenty-five pages of this Protestant ...
— Anne Bradstreet and Her Time • Helen Campbell
... it had been from the start, and they could not travel fast. During the first few hours all coolness was driven out of the glassy morning, and another day of illimitable sun invested the world with its blaze. The pale Bow Leg Range was coming nearer, but its hard hot slants and rifts suggested no sort of freshness, and even the pines that spread for wide miles along near the summit counted for nothing in the distance and the glare, but seemed mere ...
— The Virginian - A Horseman Of The Plains • Owen Wister
... to its forests, mines, fisheries and resources, which though not bread, are those from which the implements, conveniences, and much of the wealth of civilization is derived. Of forests, furnishing almost illimitable quantities of timber and lumber—this is the very centre. Of this, we have evidence in the wharves of Chicago, Milwaukee, Detroit, and far down the lakes. The testimony of actual observers on this point, is so strong as to seem almost incredible. We shall cite but two or three unquestionable authorities. ...
— Old Mackinaw - The Fortress of the Lakes and its Surroundings • W. P. Strickland
... persecutors fools about equally matched. He was easy-tempered and humane—in the hunting-field he could not bear the cry of a dying hare with composure—martyr-burning had consequently no attraction for such a man. His scepticism came into play, his melancholy humour, his sense of the illimitable which surrounds man's life, and which mocks, defeats, flings back his thought upon himself. Man is here, he said, with bounded powers, with limited knowledge, with an unknown behind, an unknown in front, assured of nothing but that he ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... Power whose care Teaches thy way along the pathless coast, The desert and illimitable air, Lone, wandering but ...
— Raemaekers' Cartoons - With Accompanying Notes by Well-known English Writers • Louis Raemaekers
... a dirge Swells sobbing through the melancholy air: Where Love has entered, Death is also there. The wail outrings the chafed, tumultuous surge; Ocean and earth, the illimitable skies, Prolong one note, a mourning for the dead, The cry of souls not to be comforted. What piercing music! Funeral visions rise, And send the hot tears raining down our cheek. We see the silent grave ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus
... with it in hand, running our fingers over the big staring letters, as over the black and white keys of a piano, drumming out of them a mild melody of perfect repose. With what delight do we disport us in the illimitable void of its nothingness, as who should swim in air! Here is nothing to startle-nothing to wound. The very atmosphere is saturated with "the spirit of the rural press;" and even our dog stands by, with pendant tail, slowly dropping the lids over his great eyes; and then, jerking them suddenly ...
— The Fiend's Delight • Dod Grile
... and it is lovingly dedicated to the Twentieth Century Woman by one who has seen and shared in the struggles of the Woman of the Nineteenth Century." But nothing that is good is lost, and the book testifies to the illimitable ideas, the trust in eternal goodness, and the strength of purpose of one who had a glorified estimate of latent feminine forces that ...
— Memories of Jane Cunningham Croly, "Jenny June" • Various
... Hawbury had to an extraordinary degree of perfection. He knew how to beat out the faintest shred of an idea into an illimitable surface of small-talk. He never took refuge in the weather. He left that to bunglers and beginners. His resources were of a different character, and were so skillfully managed that he never failed to leave a very agreeable impression. ...
— The American Baron • James De Mille
... whose application narrows with the enlarging range of human knowledge[32] and power which for the time it transcends; a word whose history, in its record of ranges already transcended, prompts expectation that ranges still beyond may be transcended in the illimitable progress of mankind. Professor Le Conte says that miracle is "an occurrence or a phenomenon according to a law higher than any yet known." Thus it is a case of human ignorance, not of ...
— Miracles and Supernatural Religion • James Morris Whiton
... from the state of nature to the civil state, man substitutes justice for instinct in his conduct, and gives to his actions a morality of which they were formerly devoid. What man loses by the contract is his natural liberty, and an illimitable right to all that tempts him and that he can obtain; what he gains is civil liberty, and a right of secure property ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... foot upon the ground. For the first time in his life he was savagely angry. But as the hours went by, the consciousness of time and place gradually slipped further and further away. The blackness seemed an illimitable thing, with no beginning and no end, and life had, as it were, stopped for him. On the evening of the third day, when the door was opened and the head warder appeared on the threshold with a soldier, he looked up, dazed and bewildered, shading ...
— The Gadfly • E. L. Voynich
... the slide I saw a lion headed for the rim wall and climbing fast. I added my exultant cry to the medley, and I stretched my arms wide to that illimitable void and gloried in a moment full to the brim of the tingling joy of existence. I did not consider how painful it must have been to the toiling lion. It was only the spell of wild environment, of perilous yellow ...
— The Last of the Plainsmen • Zane Grey
... alighting. As he went wonderingly to meet her, he saw that she was city-bred. She seemed to be dazed by the illimitable spaces and was blinking from the sunshine. His observant eye noted the smart suitcase and the wardrobe trunk the man was depositing on the porch. There was city shrewdness in having had the amount of the fare fixed before ...
— Penny of Top Hill Trail • Belle Kanaris Maniates
... structure is not, perhaps, so small as my imagination presents it to me; but I cannot see it save with the desert as a background—the desert austere and illimitable. You reach the prim little front door by climbing a street which runs parallel with the Rio Grande, and the church is almost the last structure you will pass before you set forth into a No-Man's land of sage and cactus and yucca and mesquite ...
— Children of the Desert • Louis Dodge
... being the great people of their district were, of course, looked upon by the peasant farmers and villagers as aristocrats of illimitable wealth. Therefore when the full force of the war struck these poor people—they were in the path of the Germans during the advance on Paris, and ruthlessly treated—they looked to Madame Waddington and her daughter, Madame Francis Waddington, ...
— The Living Present • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... western sky was toning down to grays, while beyond, and seen through an oval-shaped rift in their sombre colours, lay a distant streak of amber that, moment by moment, slowly disappeared under the closing lids of evening cloud—the eye of weary day wooed to slumber by the hush of illimitable sweeps of moor. Even so would Amanda fain have closed her eyes and sunk to rest amid the purple clouds of heather that, like a great sky, lay for miles around ...
— Lancashire Idylls (1898) • Marshall Mather
... Grayson was speaking was a tiny place of twelve or fifteen houses, all square, unadorned, and ugly, standing in the centre of an illimitable prairie that rolled away on either side exactly like the waves of the sea, and with the same monotony. It was a weather-beaten gathering. The prairie winds are not good for the complexion, and the cheeks of these people were brown, not red. On the outskirts of the ...
— The Candidate - A Political Romance • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... all with dry and savage eyes. The illimitable regret, the boundless, hopeless remorse for the irrevocable that has been shaped by our own heedless hands, the unspeakable yearning for that, once more, which has been freely ours and we have flung away, rose like a swelling tide within me, and rolled through me in thundering, deadening waves ...
— To-morrow? • Victoria Cross
... to the bare necessities of life, and there are no inducements to movement, to travel, and to enterprise. There are no conditions prompting man to attempt the conquest of nature. Society is therefore stationary as in China and India. Enfolded and imprisoned within the overpowering vastness and illimitable sweep of nature, man is almost unconscious of his freedom and his personality. He surrenders himself to the disposal of a mysterious "fate" and yields readily to the despotic sway of superhuman powers. The State is consequently the reign of a single despotic will. The laws of the Medes and Persians ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... our noble fathers that had slept in God from Creci to Trafalgar. And now had we reached the last sarcophagus, now were we abreast of the last bas-relief, already had we recovered the arrow-like flight of the illimitable central aisle, when coming up this aisle to meet us we beheld a female infant that rode in a carriage as frail as flowers. The mists, which went before her, hid the fawns that drew her, but could not hide the shells and tropic flowers with which she played—but ...
— Miscellaneous Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... wilderness—eight hundred miles between him and the little town on the Saskatchewan where McDowell commanded Division of the Royal Mounted. The thought of distance did not appall him. Four years at the top of the earth had accustomed him to the illimitable and had inured him to the lack of things. That winter Conniston had followed him with the tenacity of a ferret for a thousand miles along the rim of the Arctic, and it had been a miracle that he had not killed the Englishman. A score of times he might have ended the exciting chase without ...
— The River's End • James Oliver Curwood
... Already I note a change in the aspect of thy shores. The coniferae have disappeared, and thou art draped with a deciduous foliage of livelier hue. Oaks, elms, and maples, mingle their frondage, and stretch their broad arms over thee. Though I still look upon woods that seem illimitable, I feel that the wilderness is past. My eyes are greeted by the signs of civilisation—its sounds fall upon my ear. The hewn cabin—picturesque in its rudeness—stands among prostrate trunks; and the ring of the lumberer's axe is heard in the far depths of the forest. ...
— The Quadroon - Adventures in the Far West • Mayne Reid
... from babyhood Allan had seen crowded with bustling traffic, was a ghastly emptiness. Not even a tiny, wheeling speck betrayed the presence of a bird. And below—the gas that was fatal to animal life seemed to have stimulated vegetable growth—an illimitable sea of green rolled untenanted to where the first ramparts of New York rose against the sky. Roads, monorail lines, all the countless tracks of civilization had disappeared beneath the green tide. Nature had ...
— When the Sleepers Woke • Arthur Leo Zagat
... bone and muscle and fibre, every feather and scale, is instinct with an energy which you cannot satisfy, and which is like an eternal hunger. Chain it by the feet, or place it in a cage fifty feet wide—in either case it is just as miserable. The illimitable fields of thin cold air, where it outrides the winds and soars exulting beyond the clouds, alone can give free space for the display of its powers and scope to its boundless energies. Nor to the power of flight alone, but also to a vision formed for sweeping wide horizons, and perceiving ...
— Birds in Town and Village • W. H. Hudson
... still all questioning, The leaves will whisper peace, and calm will be The wild, vast, blue, illimitable sea. And we shall hush our murmurings, and bring To Nature, green below and blue above, A whole life's worshipping, a whole ...
— A Woman's Love Letters • Sophie M. Almon-Hensley
... every study and pursuit, the one sole, safe, certain, remunerative quality; and summed up briefly his political belief.—"My faith in the people governing is, on the whole, infinitesimal; my faith in the People governed is, on the whole, illimitable." This he afterwards (January 1870) explained to mean that he had very little confidence in the people who govern us ("with a small p"), and very great confidence in the People whom they govern ("with a large ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... comparison of her little circle was a prey to vagueness. The sense, indeed, that the good people about her had, as regards her remarkable self, no standard of comparison at all gave her a feeling of almost illimitable power. It was true, as she said to herself, that if for this reason they would be able to discover nothing against her, so they would perhaps neglect to perceive some of her superior points; but she always ...
— The Europeans • Henry James
... things, but to present-day thought it must stand for the un-caused Cause of all existence, the unitary principle implied in all multiplicity. Everyone of necessity believes in this. It is impossible to define the term completely, for to define is necessarily to limit, and we are thinking of the illimitable. But we ought to understand clearly that to disbelieve in God is an impossibility; everyone believes in God if he believes in his own existence. The blankest materialist that ever lived, whoever he may have been, must have affirmed God even in the act of denying Him. Professor Haeckel ...
— The New Theology • R. J. Campbell
... illimitable. In the foreground, the plain, its ruddy soil pierced on all sides by rocks, like a Titan graveyard with its bones protruding through the earth. Then, sharply outlined in the setting sun, was Avignon with its girdle of walls and its vast palace, ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas, pere
... great power and effect by their acceptance of the spiritual as real. There is a light, a subtle aroma, a width of vision, a sense of reality, in their work from this source, which is wanting in George Eliot's. The illimitable mystery beyond the region of the real is the greatest fact man has presented to him, and that region is a reality in all the effects it works on humanity. No poet can ignore it or try to limit it to humanity without a loss to his work. It is this subtle, ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... direction, and we three were as completely isolated in our place of concealment as if the house we lived in had been a desert island, and the great network of streets and the thousands of our fellow-creatures all round us the waters of an illimitable sea. I could now reckon on some leisure time for considering what my future plan of action should be, and how I might arm myself most securely at the outset for the coming struggle with Sir ...
— The Woman in White • Wilkie Collins
... here, as in other parts of the world, the resources of human folly are illimitable. A large party in Norway urges secession from Sweden, and both remain divided from Denmark, though the three are, to all intents and purposes, of the same race, religion, language, and early historical ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... who love or wish to know the State of Arizona, with its painted deserts, its glorious skies, its wonderful mountains, its magical horizons, its illimitable distances, its romantic past and its magnificent possibilities, this ...
— Arizona's Yesterday - Being the Narrative of John H. Cady, Pioneer • John H. Cady
... and other groceries; it was astonishing to herself that she did not feel more delight. But it was startling to find the gypsies in a lane, after all, and not on a common; indeed, it was rather disappointing; for a mysterious illimitable common, where there were sand pits to hide in, and one was out of everybody's reach, had always made part of Maggie's picture of gypsy life. She went on, however, and thought with some comfort that gypsies most likely knew nothing about idiots, ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 7 • Charles H. Sylvester
... would be the result if the illimitable source of wealth upon which by chance and a whisper Barraclough had stumbled should be revealed to the world? A panic—a mad headlong exodus of men and women too. Unequipped and unqualified they ...
— Men of Affairs • Roland Pertwee
... the saints, with which the childish minds of the common people practised idolatry, so much the better. The Infinite and Eternal was no subject for the artist. The humanization of God only belittled his infinite and illimitable nature. Earthly life offered art material enough. Man himself would be the worthiest model for imitation, and perhaps no earlier epoch had created handsomer likenesses of men and women than would now be produced by ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... became more nobly rounded, her lustrous skin took a finer grain; the outlines of her form gained plenitude. Lastly and best of all, her open countenance, serene and slightly rosy, the purity of her blue eyes, that a look too eager might have wounded, expressed illimitable sympathy, the tenderness ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... a delightful hostess, she loved situations, and her social tact was illimitable. In a few minutes Trent was seated in a comfortable and solid chair with a little round table by his side, drinking tea and eating buttered scones, and if not altogether at his ease very nearly so. Opposite him was Davenant, dying to escape yet constrained to be agreeable, and animated ...
— A Millionaire of Yesterday • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... its unquestioned domination over the conscience of Europe was the very period in which licence among the Teutonic races was most unchecked. A church which, though founded on the Gospel, and wielding the illimitable power of the Roman hierarchy, could yet allow the feudal principle to extend to the jus primae noctis or droit de marquette, and whose ministers in their character of temporal seigneurs could even occasionally claim the disgusting right, ...
— Religion & Sex - Studies in the Pathology of Religious Development • Chapman Cohen
... few of us who keep the faith, who do not bow the knee to Baal, who hold fast to what is high and good in the doctrine of political equality; in whose hearts the altar-fires of rational liberty are kept aglow, beaconing the darkness of that illimitable inane where their countrymen, inaccessible to the light, wander witless in the bogs of political unreason, alternately adoring and damning the man-made gods of their own stature. Of that bright band fueling the bale-fires of political consistency I can not profess ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce
... in lands of adventure, under the green light of a virgin forest, or on some illimitable prairie; he should have sailed with the vikings or fought with Cromwell's Ironsides; or, better still, he should have run, half-naked, splendidly pagan, bearing ...
— The Combined Maze • May Sinclair
... and the struggle for existence consequent thereon. Messrs. Darwin and Wallace have each thrown invaluable light upon these last two points, but Buffon, as early as 1756, had made them the keystone of his system. "The movement of nature," he then wrote, "turns on two immovable pivots: one, the illimitable fecundity which she has given to all species: the other, the innumerable difficulties which reduce the results of that fecundity." Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck followed in the same sense. They thus admit the survival of the fittest as fully as Mr. Darwin himself, though they do not ...
— Essays on Life, Art and Science • Samuel Butler
... doglike habit of shaking himself at the close of a fray. He did so now when he stood up. Iris showed clearer signs of the ordeal. Her face was drawn and haggard, the pupils of her eyes dilated. She was gazing into depths, illimitable, unexplored. Compassion awoke ...
— The Wings of the Morning • Louis Tracy
... to thank Dr. Charles Tuckey for the gift of a copy of his Psycho-Therapeutics. "An old pupil of Dr. Elliotson," [607] he says, "I am always interested in these researches, and welcome the appearance of any addition to our scanty knowledge of an illimitable field. Suggestion (what a miserable name!) perfectly explains the stigmata of St. Francis and others without preter-natural assistance, and the curative effect of a dose of Koran (a verset written upon ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... conception of vast complexity. But it must be remembered that, once the mind of man began to play with the idea of a vital essence capable of existing apart from the body and to identify it with the breath of life, an illimitable field was opened up for speculation. The vital principle could manifest itself in all the varied expressions of human personality, as well as in all the physiological indications of life. Experience of dreams led men to ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... he gazed toward the North, where the stars already twinkled serenely in the sky. It seemed to him that their army was about to enter some vast, illimitable space, swarming with unknown enemies. He felt for a little while a deep depression. But it was partly physical. His exertions of the day had been tremendous, and the intense excitement, too, had almost overcome him. The watchful Dalton noticed his ...
— The Star of Gettysburg - A Story of Southern High Tide • Joseph A. Altsheler
... and fro and looked down into the weird and mystic shadows, like the darkness of his passion, and farther on down the moon track and the glittering stretches that vanished in the cold, blue horizon. The moon soared radiant and calm, the white stars shone serene. The vault of heaven seemed illimitable and divine. The desert surrounded him, silver-streaked and black-mantled, a chaos of rock and sand, silent, austere, ancient, always waiting. It spoke to Cameron. It was a naked corpse, but it had a soul. In that wild solitude the white stars looked down upon him pitilessly and pityingly. ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey
... Traced quaint and varying character. Perchance you may a marvel deem, That Marmion's paramour (For such vile thing she was) should scheme 665 Her lover's nuptial hour; But o'er him thus she hoped to gain, As privy to his honour's stain, Illimitable power: For this she secretly retain'd 670 Each proof that might the plot reveal, Instructions with his hand and seal; And thus Saint Hilda deign'd, Through sinners' perfidy impure, Her house's glory to secure, 675 And ...
— Marmion • Sir Walter Scott
... bullets, whose harmless discharge that cry was intended to provoke; for now the voices seemed to rise progressively from the earth, until they reached the level of each individual height, and were already almost hotly breathing in the ears of those they were destined to fill with illimitable dismay. ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson
... hill, beyond which appears the void of the firmament. This conceit singularly helps the idea of vastness, though in effect it is certainly inferior to the pastoral prettiness and rural thoughts of modern landscape gardening. Probably too much is attempted here; for if the mind cannot conceive of illimitable space, still less can it be represented by means ...
— Recollections of Europe • J. Fenimore Cooper
... the living and the dead, and History seems to move between two hemispheres that everywhere touch yet unite nowhere, the Past, shadowy, vast, illimitable, that at each moment ends, the Future not less shadowy, vast, illimitable, that at each moment begins. The question, "What is History?" is but the question, "What is Life?" transferred from the domain of the Present to the domain of the Past. To understand the whorl of a shell would require an ...
— The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain - Nineteenth Century Europe • J. A. Cramb
... could be seen their shadows, meandering like streaks of grey slime stirred up from the lower depths by some huge, never-ceasing finger. The innumerable roar of that human sea climbed out above the roofs and trees, and somewhere in illimitable space blended, and slowly reached the meeting-point of sound and silence—that Heart where Life, leaving its little forms and barriers, clasps Death, and from that clasp springs ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... of the reach of science, and yet the compass of science is practically illimitable. Hence it is that from time to time we are startled and perplexed by theories which have no parallel in the contracted moral world; for the generalizations of science sweep on in ever-widening circles, ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... How infinitely grander—how illimitable in its vistas—the subject becomes when thus treated by a great poet we all must feel. And even if we cannot with a whole heart accept as a true Gospel what (in spite of Goethe's admission that God's mercy was a necessary factor) seems to be a gospel ...
— The Faust-Legend and Goethe's 'Faust' • H. B. Cotterill
... is true that these objects of vision were but the occasion of the more profound discoveries within the region of his own soul. There he discovered vastness and illimitable vistas; found himself to be an eddy in the universal flux, driven whence and whither he knew not, conscious of perpetual instability, the meeting place of mighty impacts of which only the farthest ripple agitates the steady moonbeam ...
— Aspects of Literature • J. Middleton Murry
... Necessity, which knows no law, either in the drama or out of it, accepted a lad of eighteen as the representative of "Sir Anthony Absolute"; the stage-manager undertaking to supply the necessary wrinkles from the illimitable resources of theatrical art. A lady whose age was unknown, and whose personal appearance was stout—but whose heart was in the right place—volunteered to act the part of the sentimental "Julia," and ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... "appeal." They understand that everything rests with themselves. Every immigrant of those days had come from what Freeman calls "overgoverned" countries. They escaped from highly organized social constraints to have their fling on a continent as illimitable in extent as it was in the prizes which its natural resources offered. That such a large proportion of the strong lived this free border-life through the entire century has resulted in making a standard of individualistic action almost dominant in ...
— The Conflict between Private Monopoly and Good Citizenship • John Graham Brooks
... honesty that were still left in his corrupted soul revolted at the thought of the shameful compact into which he was about to enter, but the dazzling prospect held out before his eyes silenced his scruples, and he felt a certain pride in being the associate of men who possessed such seemingly illimitable power. Mascarin saw that there was no longer any necessity for the extreme firmness with which he had before spoken, and it was with the most studied courtesy that he replied: "I have no orders to give you, Marquis, our ...
— Caught In The Net • Emile Gaboriau
... what men supposed to be an illimitable ocean, full of mystery, peril, and death. A vague conception that islands hitherto unknown might be met afar off on that strange wilderness of waters was entertained by some minds, but no one thought of venturing in search of them. Columbus alone, regarded merely as a brave and intelligent ...
— Christopher Columbus and His Monument Columbia • Various
... together, after luncheon, "Mrs. Mill and Mr. Hayward"—he restored to calmness—could look thousands of feet down to the floor of the valley. Exactly how many thousands of feet there were Angela refused to be told, for the distance seemed illimitable, and cold facts might dwarf imagination. They saw the Yosemite Falls, a quivering white vein on a dark wall a million miles away. Mirror Lake was a splinter of glass on a pavement of green tiles. Nevada and Vernal Falls were pale yet bright as ...
— The Port of Adventure • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... Pity, not condemnation—profound illimitable pity—flowed from this conclusion of Justine's. To a compassionate heart there could be no sadder instance of the wastefulness of life than this struggle of the small half-formed soul with a destiny too heavy for its strength. If Bessy ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... her way back to life, Thorney was wrapped in silence and illimitable gloom. The light of the burning houses had died; the shouts of men and shrieks of women and the fierce song of the Saxons had ceased. Yet there were other sounds which grew out of the darkness as she listened; a thin far wailing, like the ghost of grief, and close ...
— Nicanor - Teller of Tales - A Story of Roman Britain • C. Bryson Taylor
... definition, foliated clouds of the highest rarity; that is, they undulated and broke into vegetable formations, and were tinged with splendors compared with which the gilding of our autumn woodlands is as dross compared with gold. Far away into the illimitable distance stretched long avenues of these gaseous forests, dimly transparent, and painted with prismatic hues of unimaginable brilliancy. The pendent branches waved along the fluid glades until every vista seemed to break through ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... those points wherein men differ from each other, to the exclusion of those in which all men are alike, or the same; and in making him ashamed of the vanity that renders him insensible of the appropriate excellence which civil arrangements, less unjust than might appear, and Nature illimitable in her bounty, have conferred on men who may stand below him in the scale of society? Finally, does it lie in establishing that dominion over the spirits of readers by which they are to be humbled and humanised, in order that they ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... concept of sex to include personality. That as I understand it, is what Dr. White has also said. It seems to me the value of the sex conception lies in the fact that while it can be expanded, and is illimitable, at the same time it focuses, it does come to a point. Personalities as talked of ordinarily have no point, they are too vague. On the other hand, a man who has a mind no bigger than a pinhole is too circumscribed to be capable of understanding any very broad generalization. ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... dog was lost in the illimitable field of ether, whither he was just then projected by the kick of a passing horse. The moral of this fable cannot be given until he shall get down, and close the conversation with the ...
— Cobwebs From an Empty Skull • Ambrose Bierce (AKA: Dod Grile)
... within us, from whose summit we venture to pass judgment on the totality of life, to absolve or condemn it, is doubtless the merest pin-prick, visible to our eye alone, on the illimitable sphere of life. It is wise to think and to act as though all that happened to man were all that man most required. It is not long ago—to cite only one of the problems that the instinct of our planet is invited to solve—that a scheme was ...
— Wisdom and Destiny • Maurice Maeterlinck
... before me. As has been the case with so many other observers, the real magnitude of the spectacle did not at first affect me; the character of the decoration and detail prevented the impression of greatness; it was only after many times traversing that illimitable pavement, and after frequent comparisons with ordinary human measurements of the aerial heights of those arches and that dome, that one conies to understand, by a sort of logical compulsion, how immense it all is. It is a miniature cabinet magically made titanic; but the magic ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... them. It is therefore within the compass of all intelligent beings, except those who are no longer conscious of the passage of time, having exchanged its limitations for the wider sweep of eternity. The illimitable range of this alphabet, however, is not half disclosed when this has been said. Most articulate language addresses itself to one sense, or at most to two, sight and sound. I see, as I write, that the particular illustrations I have ...
— If, Yes and Perhaps - Four Possibilities and Six Exaggerations with Some Bits of Fact • Edward Everett Hale
... depths of the stars above us; at that endless procession of shining worlds; at that illimitable expanse of silence. And I thought of those vast gaps and lapses of manless time, when all these starry hosts unrolled and marshaled themselves before the attentive eyes of God, and it had not yet entered into his heart to create that swarming, writhing, crawling, contentious mass ...
— Caesar's Column • Ignatius Donnelly
... me to quote the concluding words of Clarence Hawkes' wonderful book, "Hitting the Dark Trail": "If night has overtaken me at noonday, yet have I found beauty in night. The sun at noontide showed me the world and all its wonder but the night has shown me the universe, the countless stars and illimitable spaces, the vastness and the wonder of all life. The perfect day only showed me man's world, but the night ...
— Five Lectures on Blindness • Kate M. Foley
... and the somber mystery of it, pressed upon him like an illimitable and deserted ocean. The sun was a tiny white disk on his right, hanging between rosy coronal wings; his native Earth, a bright greenish point suspended in the dark gulf below it; Mars, nearer, smaller, a little ocher speck ...
— Salvage in Space • John Stewart Williamson
... outlook which we need in the solution of the vast enigmas that surround us. It not only clearly indicates the true place of a man in Nature, but it dissipates the prevalent illusion of man's supreme importance and arrogance with which he sets himself apart from the illimitable universe, and exalts himself to the position of its most valuable element. This boundless presumption of conceited man has misled him into making himself "the image of God," claiming an "eternal life" for his ephemeral personality, and imagining that he possesses unlimited "freedom of will." ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... brow of the hill overlooking Garra-na-hina[H] and the panorama of the western lochs and mountains. Down there on the side of the hill was the small inn, with its little patch of garden; then a few moist meadows leading over to the estuary of the Black River; and beyond that an illimitable prospect of heathy undulations rising into the mighty peaks of Cracabhal, Mealasabhal and Suainabhal. Then on the right, leading away out to the as yet invisible Atlantic, lay the blue plain of Loch Roag, with a margin of yellow seaweed along its shores, where the rocks revealed ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 11, No. 24, March, 1873 • Various
... has its horizon and none are illimitable. The factory bell rang clearly the next morning, and the powerful call of duty made John answer it. God had given, and God had taken his only child, but the children of hundreds of families looked to the factory for their daily bread. Yea, and he did not ...
— The Measure of a Man • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... burning on the altar, the doll lying on the pavement, the gaping niche and the fallen panel to bear witness to some of the incredible phases through which the human race passes on its way from incomprehensible nothingness to the illimitable unknown. ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... She was driven there by the farmer with whom she was staying, and she asked to be left there while he went forward. He was to fetch her when he returned. It was a clear but grey day, and she sat outside the outer circle on the turf looking northwards over the almost illimitable expanse. She had been told as much as is known about that mysterious monument,—that it had been built ages before any record, and that not only were the names of the builders forgotten, but their purpose ...
— Miriam's Schooling and Other Papers - Gideon; Samuel; Saul; Miriam's Schooling; and Michael Trevanion • Mark Rutherford
... our way to some mystic monument of eternal law, or pluck garlands from some new-budded bough of moral truth. The romance is like a portal of ebony inlaid with ivory,—another gate of dreams,—swinging softly open into regions of illimitable wisdom. But some pause on the threshold, unused to such large liberty; and these cry out, in the words of a well-known critic, "It begins in mystery, and ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... born upon the ocean after his mother, Ilmatar, daughter of the illimitable Ether, had floated upon its surface for more than seven hundred years. During this time Ilmatar had created the islands, the rocks, and the continents. After eight years of swimming through the ocean, studying his surroundings, Wainamoinen left the waters and swam to a barren promontory, ...
— National Epics • Kate Milner Rabb
... soldiers. Wonderful deeds are being done all round me with scissors and needle and thread. A sewing-machine has been requisitioned. Button-holes are being manufactured with immense expedition. A good deal of "basting" is being got through. In my illimitable ignorance I had hitherto imagined that basting was something that you did to a joint of meat with a big ladle and some gravy. If you did it sufficiently the joint came out succulent, if not it became dry and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, August 19th, 1914 • Various
... eyes, as near as his judgment could direct, towards Melissa's favourite rock, till nothing but sea was discoverable. With a heart-parting sigh he then descended. They had now launched into the illimitable world of billows, and the sable wings of night ...
— Alonzo and Melissa - The Unfeeling Father • Daniel Jackson, Jr.
... confederation of the British Provinces entered into the brain of any man, Lord Selkirk, coming to the wilds of North America, found a tract of country fertile in soil, and fair to look upon. He arrived in this unknown wilderness when it was summer, and all the prairie extending over illimitable stretches till it was lost in the tranquil horizon, was burning with the blooms of a hundred varieties of flowers. Here the "tiger rose," like some savage queen of beauty, rose to his knees and breathed her ...
— The Story of Louis Riel: The Rebel Chief • Joseph Edmund Collins
... softer, many miles away. Only a few days together the camp remained in one place, no longer than it took the sheep to crop the herbage within easy reach. Then came the camp-mover and hauled the wagon to fresh pastures in that illimitable, gray-green land. ...
— The Flockmaster of Poison Creek • George W. Ogden |
