"Unattainable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... aloud. This was the innocent, fantastic truth of it. They had chosen to do this thing—to spend their honey-moon in this particular way, and there was no reason why they should not. The little dream which had been of such unattainable proportions in the days of Mrs. Bowse's boarding-house could be realized to its fullest. No one in the St. Francesca apartments knew that the young honey- mooners in the five-roomed apartment were other than Mr. and Mrs. T. Barholm, as recorded on the tablet of names in the entrance. Hutchinson ...
— T. Tembarom • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... In another part of the same epistle, he says: 'My first if not my strongest ambition was to do something worth doing, and not utterly unworthy of a young countryman of Marlowe the teacher and Webster the pupil of Shakespeare, in the line of work which those three poets had left as a possibly unattainable example for ambitious Englishmen. And my first book, written while yet under academic or tutoral authority, bore evidence of that ambition in every line.' And indeed we need not turn four pages to come upon a mimicry of the style of Shakespeare so ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... rest. But each new generation finds them as fresh and attractive as if they had never been touched, never probed and tortured by fruitless examination; to each generation they appear in all the unabated charms of mystery; to each generation must their solution at least be shown to be unattainable. In vain you write over the portal Lasciate ogni speranza! there is always a band of youth newly arrived before the gates, who will ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... thinker must not only accept it, but must accept all legitimate deductions from it. If it seems true to us we must believe it. Absolute demonstrable truth, except in the simplest of matters is almost unattainable. The best we can ordinarily get is a close approach to certainty, and with this we must be content. In many matters, indeed in most matters, we must trust the judgment of others who are better trained in a particular ...
— The Meaning of Evolution • Samuel Christian Schmucker
... the lake with the sun on her uncovered head, on the soft whiteness of the doeskin garment, and to young Dupre she had never seemed so near the divine, so far and unattainable. ...
— The Maid of the Whispering Hills • Vingie E. Roe
... consequences that has attended the entire destruction of factitious personal distinctions in the country, which has certainly aided in bringing out in bolder relief than common, the prevalent disposition in man to covet that which is the possession of another, and to decry merits that are unattainable. ...
— Home as Found • James Fenimore Cooper
... our birth, in order that we may acquire the power of influencing for good those amongst whom we are placed, by our precepts and example; a study without an end—for our labors cease only when we have become perfect—an unattainable goal, but one that we must not the less set before us from the very first. It is true that we shall not be able to reach it, but in our struggle toward it we shall strengthen our characters and give stability to our ideas, so that, whilst ever advancing calmly ...
— Little Journeys To The Homes Of Great Teachers • Elbert Hubbard
... expression of hardness, of greed, of unsatisfied desire. And Mr. Obloski's face was beginning to bloat with drink. It was only natural that Daisy, upon whom all the work was put, should have been too busy to look hard or greedy. She had no time to brood upon life or to think upon unattainable things. She had only time to cook, time to wash the dishes, to mend the clothes, to make the beds, and to play the mother to her little brothers and to her doll. And so, and naturally, as the skin upon her little hands ...
— IT and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris
... I am not forgetting that an effective check on diplomacy is not easy to devise, and that high personal character and class disinterestedness (the latter at present unattainable) on the part of our diplomatists will be as vital as ever. I well know that diplomacy is carried on at present not only by official correspondence meant for possible publication and subject to an inspection which is in ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... sympathy and grief were so keen she thought of nothing but her mother's pain. No consciousness of self interposed between her and her filial service; then, as the weeks passed, little blighted hopes began to stir and ache in her breast; defeated ambitions raised their heads as if to sting her; unattainable delights teased her by their very nearness; by the narrow line of separation that lay between her and their realization. It is easy, for the moment, to tread the narrow way, looking neither to the right nor left, ...
— Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... Sir Redvers Buller. The mishap to a portion of the artillery will be better understood when the full story of the battle is accessible. Meanwhile Sir Redvers Buller's withdrawal of the troops when he saw that success was unattainable has preserved his force, and he is now awaiting reinforcement before again attempting an advance. The critical element in the position of affairs in Natal lies in the fact that time runs against the British. Sir Redvers Buller ...
— Lessons of the War • Spenser Wilkinson
... drew on him for the loan without waiting to hear that it had been negotiated; after a small advance, the Spanish Government declined the loan unless the sole right of navigating the Mississippi were granted. Having thus failed to accomplish the great object, which indeed was unattainable except at a sacrifice which subsequent events have proved would have essentially interfered with the prosperous development of the Southwest—Jay, sensitively vigilant of his country's credit, despite his habitual prudence, accepted the bill at his own credit; boldly ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 3, September 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... courts and assizes; to the great damage of the national character and reputation. The abundant supply of cheap labour which they furnished had no doubt the effect of enabling our manufacturing industry to increase at a rate and, to a height which, without them, would have been unattainable; and so far they have been of service."—North British ...
— The trade, domestic and foreign • Henry Charles Carey
... not to the masterly inactivity of their fathers and mothers, that the Madeira beetles owe their winglessness? If we begin stickling for proof in this way, our opponents would not be long in letting us know that absolute proof is unattainable on any subject, that reasonable presumption is our highest certainty, and that crying out for too much evidence is as bad as accepting too little. Truth is like a photographic sensitized plate, which is equally ruined by over ...
— The Humour of Homer and Other Essays • Samuel Butler
... the two, avoiding thus all unworthy fretfulness and all idle kicking against the pricks. Therefore he has made you for happiness; for the joy of men is an achievement; and their misery in the coveting of the unattainable end. If you would fulfil his benevolent design, seek only what has been placed in your power, frankly resigning all that lies beyond; but be ever difficult in renunciation; test and sound well every issue, lest you ...
— Apologia Diffidentis • W. Compton Leith
... with vain longings after unattainable advantages, no medicine can be prescribed, but an impartial inquiry into the real worth of that which is so ardently desired. It is well known, how much the mind, as well as the eye, is deceived by distance; and, ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... citizen one vote and to specify three principal conditions under which this basal voting power may be augmented. As the head of a family, the citizen's suffrage may be doubled. By reason of his possession of property or of capital, it likewise may be doubled. On the basis of a not unattainable educational qualification, it may be tripled. Under no circumstances may an individual be entitled to more than three votes. The plural vote of Belgium differs, therefore, from that of Great Britain, not only in that it is based upon a variety of qualifications ...
— The Governments of Europe • Frederic Austin Ogg
... may, the mingled cries, roars, and shrieks, of sapajous, alouates, jaguars, cougars, pacaris, sloths, curassows, parraquas, etcetera, broke forth from time to time with such fury, that sleep was almost unattainable; then a thunderstorm came on which wet them to the skin; after that a large vampire-bat bit Bunco on the nose, causing that worthy to add his noise to the general concert; and, finally, a soft hairy animal dropt from a branch into Larry O'Hale's hammock. The Irishman received it with open ...
— Lost in the Forest - Wandering Will's Adventures in South America • R.M. Ballantyne
... tonality of the Odes, something of their verbal felicity, something of their thrilling wistfulness; may strive not quite unsuccessfully, in the words of Tennyson's "Timbuctoo," to attain by shadowing forth the unattainable. ...
— Horace • William Tuckwell
... thing beneath me, this chasm that hid mountains in the shades of its cliffs, and the granite tombs, some gleaming pale, passionless, others red and warm, painted by a master hand; and the wind-caves, dark-portaled under their mist curtains, and all that was deep and far off, unapproachable, unattainable, of beauty exceeding, dressed in ever-changing hues, was mine by right of presence, by right of the eye to see ...
— Tales of lonely trails • Zane Grey
... utterances, the simplest and the most metaphysical. But though he did not pass scathless through the purging fires, nor escape with eyes undimmed from the mystic light which flooded his soul, his ideal is not thereby invalidated. It was, he admitted, unattainable, but none the less a state of perfection to which we must continually aspire, undaunted by ...
— The Forged Coupon and Other Stories • Leo Tolstoy
... not unattainable, some members in this academy give a sufficient proof. And, be assured, that if this power is not acquired whilst you are young, there will be no time for it afterwards: at least, the attempt will be attended ...
— Seven Discourses on Art • Joshua Reynolds
... days; at another, he was in want, in the lowest depression, no hope in the world. He only asks for work; he is entirely unconcerned for whom he writes or what party he eulogizes; he wants money and a name, and when these seem unattainable, he takes refuge from "the whips and scorns of time," the burning fever of pride, the gnawings of hunger, in suicide. He goes to his little garret room,—refusing, as he goes, a dinner from his landlady, although he is gaunt with ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... mean something more in the antique—something or other, you see"—here he began twirling his forefinger in the air and sketching an amorphous phantom of some sort, of an altogether unattainable character, "in ...
— Chanticleer - A Thanksgiving Story of the Peabody Family • Cornelius Mathews
... housekeeping was her forte, and that she possessed powers of comprehension, in regard to financial matters connected with the payment of debts and dividends, such as she had all her previous life believed to be unattainable anywhere, save in the Bank of England or on ...
— Under the Waves - Diving in Deep Waters • R M Ballantyne
... get interested in her, son. That family is like a secret sanctuary; and she is the holy thing behind the altar. She's unattainable." ...
— Son of Power • Will Levington Comfort and Zamin Ki Dost
... life was a drama of morbid seeking after the unattainable, and finally he became so poor and helpless that in his old age he would have starved had Lorenzo de' Medici not taken care of him. Lorenzo and other friends who in spite of his gloominess admired his real piety, gathered about him and kept him ...
— Pictures Every Child Should Know • Dolores Bacon
... Alastor, Adonais, and his wonderful lyrics, Shelley is like a wanderer following a vague, beautiful vision, forever sad and forever unsatisfied. In the latter mood he appeals profoundly to all men who have known what it is to follow after an unattainable ideal. ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... sense of superiority—gnawing discontent where that superiority is not recognized—morbid susceptibility, which comes with all new feelings—the underrating of simple pleasures apart from the intellectual—the chase of the imagination, often unduly stimulated, for things unattainable below—all these are surely amongst the first temptations that ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... Miltonically, or Pope-ishly, or Shakespearian-ally, and seldom with that racy literalness which characterizes Carlyle's occasional bits of German poetic version. Sometimes, as in the present instance, the old form is almost unattainable, for Hebrew poetry and the modes of speech used at Herod's court are too little known in their first fresh life to be vividly reproduced. Consequently the more modern forms are indispensable. But, from the stand-point of English poetry, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 2, No 6, December 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... make a disproportionate sacrifice; whether he did not empty his first act in order to overfill his second. I do not say he did: I merely propound the question for the student's consideration. One thing we must recognize in dramatic art as in all other human affairs; namely, that perfection, if not unattainable, is extremely rare. We have often to make a deliberate sacrifice at one point in order to gain some greater advantage at another; to incur imperfection here that we may achieve perfection there. It is no disparagement ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... to be, and because you would still march on to some nearer approach to equality; though the thing itself is so great, so glorious, so godlike,—nay, so absolutely divine,—that you have been disgusted by the very promise of it, because its perfection is unattainable. Men have asserted a mock equality till the very idea of ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... knocking her down. I have heard it said that this apparently brutal action has anything but the maddening effect tenderly nurtured persons might suppose, and that the patient is soothed and satisfied with a rapidity and completeness unattainable by other and more polite methods. Do you suppose," he went on, flicking a twig off a tree with his whip as we passed, "that the intellectual husband, wrestling intellectually with the chaotic yearnings of his intellectual wife, ever ...
— Elizabeth and her German Garden • "Elizabeth", AKA Marie Annette Beauchamp
... as to keep the plants erect. In addition to this, all laterals that have no flowers, and, after the fifth topping, all laterals whatsoever, are nipped off. In this way, the ripe sap is directed into the fruit, which acquires a beauty, size, and excellence unattainable by other ...
— The Field and Garden Vegetables of America • Fearing Burr
... patch against the mountain? Brushwood of some kind, without a doubt. The place seemed to be unattainable, and yet, after an inordinate outlay of energy, we had climbed across those torrid meadows. It proved to be a hazel copse mysteriously dark within, voiceless, and cool as a ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... starched, prim, and even uninteresting, had an effect upon their character not altogether unwholesome, and prevented any public crying for the moon, or any public charge of injustice against its Maker because it is unattainable. ...
— Catharine Furze • Mark Rutherford
... is, so to say, the mother-tongue of all the senses, into which they must be translated to be of service to the organism. Hence its importance. The parrot is the most intelligent of birds, and its tactual power is also greatest. From this sense it gets knowledge, unattainable by birds which cannot employ their feet as hands. The elephant is the most sagacious of quadrupeds—its tactual range and skill, and the consequent multiplication of experiences, which it owes to its wonderfully ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... hot and dusty, and the unclouded August sun was blazing down upon it; but Ishmael did not mind that, as he stood devouring with his eyes the unattainable books. ...
— Ishmael - In the Depths • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... at its topmost toss irks and pains. Beyond is ever the unattainable, the lure of the infinite with its ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... nations, and a lucid and well-arranged narrative of monetary history. A novel and excellent mode of illustration has been adopted, representing the coins in exact fac-simile in gold, silver, and copper, produced by casts from the originals, many of which would be quite unattainable, and all costly."—Art Journal. ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 62, January 4, 1851 • Various
... blood enough in them all to decompose, and they gave out no odor even while burning. I burned them all, cleaned off all the blood-spots, ventilated the room, opened the windows, and will turn it to a workshop. No more sighing for the unattainable, no more grasping at the intangible, no more clutching at the impalpable. I am no poet, and we don't want poetry. Our civilization isn't old enough. Poets, like other maggots, will be produced when fermentation comes. I am ...
— Bart Ridgeley - A Story of Northern Ohio • A. G. Riddle
... his turn. She easily convinced each that he was the favored one, and that the others were friends and were simply tolerated. She tried no such coquetry with Dic, but gladly fed upon such crumbs as he might throw her. If he unduly withheld the crumbs, she, unable to resist her yearning for the unattainable, at times lost all maidenly reserve, and by eloquent little signs and pleadings sought them at the hand of her Dives. The heart of a coquette is to be won only by running away from it, and Dic's victory over Sukey ...
— A Forest Hearth: A Romance of Indiana in the Thirties • Charles Major
... discarded—that she felt the need of a pincushion, as it were, into which to stick the little points of her malevolence. I think I was inclined to be hard on her. I have felt the same antagonism many times towards beauty that was unattainable by me. For she was ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... followed Diana's gesture. "I know," he said, softly. "It's impossible to express it. I've thought of you and your work so often, down here. Somehow, though, you do suggest the unattainable in your pictures. It's what ...
— The Enchanted Canyon • Honore Willsie Morrow
... and bear disagreeables contentedly has worn out their patience. They want her to marry, and, without wasting any empty wishing upon a result so certain to come, she wants to marry herself. She is not likely to have unattainable ideals: what she demands is a continuation of her petted existence—a lifelong adorer to minister to her vanity and desires, to find her always beautiful, always precious, and to smooth away the rough places ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 26, July 1880. • Various
... is concerned, developments and demonstrations of cultivated taste. There may, indeed, be a fictitious or chimerical taste without Poetry or Religion; but a genuine good taste, in our judgment, without these handmaids, is unattainable. ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... and enthusiasm to be recorded by the historian and to be celebrated by the poet; but such perfection is not an object of reasonable pursuit, because it is not one of possible attainment; and never yet did a passionate struggle after an absolutely unattainable object fail to be productive of misery to an individual, of madness and confusion to a people. As the inhabitants of those burning climates which lie beneath a tropical sun sigh for the coolness ...
— Ten Englishmen of the Nineteenth Century • James Richard Joy
... districts are poorly policed and the ears of the farmer working in the field are always alert for the sound of the bell or the horn calling for help, perhaps from his own home. Occasionally, in spite of all precautions some human animal, inflamed by brooding upon the unattainable, leaves a victim outraged and dead, or worse than dead. Granted that such a crime occurs in a district only once in ten, or even in twenty years; that is enough. Rural folks have long memories, and ...
— The New South - A Chronicle Of Social And Industrial Evolution • Holland Thompson
... generals had a right to punish with death; and it was an inflexible maxim of Roman discipline, that a good soldier should dread his officers far more than the enemy. From such laudable arts did the valor of the Imperial troops receive a degree of firmness and docility unattainable by the impetuous and ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... a grisly embodiment of their secret griefs, a tantalising vision of the unattainable. To glide reputably into a grey wig had been for years their dearest desire. As each saw herself getting older and older, saw her complexion fade and the crow's-feet gather, and her eyes grow hollow, and her teeth ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... del Sorriso grew slowly into life; it was not that most perfect life of which the artist had dreamed, for hitherto beauty had sufficed to him and he had never sought to burden his creations with questions of the soul; but now the sadness of the unattainable that was growing within him looked out of the wonderful eyes of the maiden on his canvas, yet he tossed his brushes aside in discontent. "Her smile eludeth me, though it hath the candor of a ...
— A Golden Book of Venice • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... attributed to "an ambition he cannot extinguish"? This article has been written in vain, if the reader has not already perceived, that they had haunted him in early life; sickening his spirit after the possession of a poetical celebrity, unattainable by his genius; some expectations too he might have cherished from the talent he possessed for political studies, in which Graves confidently says, that "he would have made no inconsiderable figure, if he had had a sufficient motive for applying his mind to them." Shenstone has left several ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... I was not altogether playacting now, "that tale about Polyxo was a pure invention. Helen—and the gods be praised for it!—can never die. For it is hers to perpetuate that sense of unattainable beauty which never dies, which sways us just as potently as it did Homer, and Dr. Faustus, and the Merovingians too, I suppose, with memories of that unknown woman who, when we were boys, was very certainly some day, to be our mate. ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... thinking the unthinkable, attracted and repulsed, a victim to his imagination and the fever of his flesh, until it seemed to him sometimes that in the loaded chamber of his rifle lay the only sure avenue of escape from these vain longings, from unattainable desire. ...
— The Hidden Places • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... there rose a sudden vision of Alice: Alice no longer unattainable; Alice walking on his arm down the aisle; Alice mending his socks; Alice with her heavenly hands fingering ...
— The Man with Two Left Feet - and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... house-hunting. Thirty pounds a-year was all they could afford to give, but in Hampshire they could have met with a roomy house and pleasant garden for the money. Here, even the necessary accommodation of two sitting-rooms and four bed-rooms seemed unattainable. They went through their list, rejecting each as they visited it. Then they looked at each other ...
— North and South • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... according to circumstances. In England, the king, or his ministers, have no fund from which they can do this. An application to parliament is expensive and troublesome; and, in many cases, where the object would be fair, it would be unattainable. But this is not all, for when, by act of parliament, any thing of the sort is [end of page 259] once done, it is left without proper controul, and the expense is generally double what it ...
— An Inquiry into the Permanent Causes of the Decline and Fall of Powerful and Wealthy Nations. • William Playfair
... The time will come when you will wish even the modest handmaiden Economy had blessed it. And if a thing is really beautiful, what difference whether it was introduced by Mrs. Shoddy last spring, or by Mrs. Noah, before her husband launched his fairy boat? Nor is fine art unattainable, even in the door-casings. It does not imply fine work. The size, shape, and position of the doors and windows, and the relative proportions of the work about them, is the first thing to be studied. Then have a care that such mouldings as may be needed are graceful, and ...
— Homes And How To Make Them • Eugene Gardner
... a few days. Far or near was all one to me, as if one could never get any further but also never any nearer to her secret: the state like that of some strange wild faiths that get hold of mankind with the cruel mystic grip of unattainable perfection, robbing them of both liberty and felicity on earth. A faith presents one with some hope, though. But I had no hope, and not even desire as a thing outside myself, that would come and go, exhaust or excite. It was in me just ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... which she can neither give nor take away. Such are reputations, which appear at one time so brilliant, and a short time after are heard of no more. Here, also, are countless vows and prayers for unattainable objects, lovers' sighs and tears, time spent in gaming, dressing, and doing nothing, the leisure of the dull and the intentions of the lazy, baseless projects, intrigues, and plots; these and such like ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... a bit ahead of Carlotta, thinking my own thoughts, and sighing as a man often does sigh, for the vague unattainable which is happiness. Suddenly I missed her by my side, and turning round saw a sight that made my heart beat with its sheer beauty. It was only Carlotta on her barbarically betrapped and besaddled mule. But it was Carlotta ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... to make a good use of his opportunities. Or the Marchesa was hanging round his neck all the time. Or perhaps he took her as a next-best, when Marcolina, the philosopher, the woman of learning, proved unattainable!" ...
— Casanova's Homecoming • Arthur Schnitzler
... their own, and which are completely within their jurisdiction, they engage in the offensive and hopeless undertaking of reforming the domestic institutions of other States, wholly beyond their control and authority. In the vain pursuit of ends by them entirely unattainable, and which they may not legally attempt to compass, they peril the very existence of the Constitution and all the countless benefits which it has conferred. While the people of the Southern States confine their attention to their own affairs, not presuming officiously to ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... too, how this intention of continuous growth is marked by the gifts that are bestowed upon us in Jesus Christ. He gives us—and it is by no means the least of the gifts that He bestows—an absolutely unattainable aim as the object of our efforts. For He bids us not only be 'perfect, as our Father in Heaven is perfect,' but He bids us be entirely conformed to His own Self. The misery of men is that they pursue aims so narrow and so shabby that they can be attained, and are therefore ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... it symbolizes the moral fact of the Unattainable, the flying Perfect, around which the hands of man can never meet, at once the inspirer and the condemner of every success, may conveniently serve us to connect many illustrations of human power in ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... oath that the secret you have confided to me shall be held sacred, and you have thereby secured her from every outbreak of my passion. She stands so high above me that I can only adore her as my saint, can love her only as one loves the unattainable stars!" ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach
... is longing for the unattainable. Sometimes a person sets her mind on a certain thing. If that goal is an honorable one, she should make every effort to attain it but if circumstances over which she has no control make that goal impossible ...
— Herself - Talks with Women Concerning Themselves • E. B. Lowry
... Bible—the Land of Promise to the Israelites, the land of Miracle and Sacrifice to the Apostles and their followers—still slept in the unattainable distance, under a sky of bluer and more tranquil loveliness than that to whose cloudless vault I looked up. It lay as far and beautiful as it once seemed to the eye of childhood, and the swords of Seraphim kept profane feet from its sacred hills. But these rough rocks ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor
... only for fortifying the speculative reason, but also with respect to religion. In default of this, either the moral law is degraded from its holiness, being represented as indulging our convenience, or else men strain after an unattainable aim, hoping to gain absolute holiness of will, thus losing themselves in fanatical theosophic dreams ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... first, he had been in love with the princess, not the woman. It had been rather like him to fix on the unattainable and worship it from afar. Because, for all the friendliness of their growing intimacy, Hedwig was still a star, whose light touched him, but whose warmth was not for him. He would have died fighting for her with a smile on his lips. There had been times when he almost wished he might. He ...
— Long Live the King • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... Travels have been published at different periods, many of which are inaccessible from their scarcity, or from being in foreign languages: And such great numbers of Voyages and Travels to particular regions and countries have been printed, as to be Altogether unattainable by the generality of readers. Every thing, however, which could contribute to the perfection of this work has been collected, or will be carefully procured during its progress; and no pains or expense shall be withheld ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 1 • Robert Kerr
... this line of conduct. If thou dost not act so, the Kurus will surely meet with destruction, for neither Bhimasena nor Arjuna, if angry, will leave any of their foes unslain. What is there in the world which is unattainable to those who cannot among their warriors Savyasachin skilled in arms; who have the Gandiva, the most powerful of all weapons in the world, for their bow; and who have amongst them the mighty Bhima also as a warrior? Formerly, as soon as thy son was born, I told thee,—Forsake ...
— Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa Bk. 3 Pt. 1 • Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa
... Suddenly the whole situation came back to him, tenfold clearer than before. He saw at once beyond all possibility of contradiction that he could not shoot Marian, no matter who ordered him to do it; that for him the ideal of a perfect soldier was altogether unattainable, and that he was obliged to admit to himself that his entire life was a failure. The public might praise and acclaim him, but he was essentially a fraud and could never secure his ...
— Captain Jinks, Hero • Ernest Crosby
... But, in our daydreams, it is not unpleasant sometimes to imagine the possibility of such a feat. It was, as we all know, very generally believed, in distant antiquarian times, that occasionally dead men could be induced to rise, and impart all sorts of otherwise unattainable information to the living. This creed, however, has not been limited to those ancient times, for, in our own days, many sane persons still profess to believe in the possibility of summoning the spirits of ...
— Archaeological Essays, Vol. 1 • James Y. Simpson
... with virtues that exist only in his imagination. The beloved is consciously or unconsciously aware of this, and endeavors to fulfil the high ideal; and in the contemplation of the transcendent qualities that his mind has created, the lover is raised to heights otherwise unattainable. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... But as to myself, I can solemnly protest, as the most sacred of truths, that I never, one instant, lost sight of your reputation and favorable standing with your country, and never omitted to justify your failure to attain our wish, as one which was probably unattainable. Reviewing, therefore, this whole subject, I cannot doubt you will become sensible, that your impressions have been without just ground. I cannot, indeed, judge what falsehoods may have been written ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... of our steamer only a quarter of a mile away, to know that almost within reach were a cool bath, a good supper, a clean bed, and all the comforts, if not the luxuries, of life, and yet to feel that, so far as we were concerned, they were as unattainable as if the ship were in ...
— Campaigning in Cuba • George Kennan
... spring, the enemy made another irruption into the inhabited country, and did great mischief. The number of troops on the regular establishment was totally insufficient for the protection of the frontier, and effective service from the militia was found to be unattainable. The Indians, who were divided into small parties, concealed themselves with so much dexterity, as seldom to be perceived until the blow was struck. Their murders were frequently committed in the very neighbourhood of the forts; and the detachments from the garrisons, employed in scouring ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 2 (of 5) • John Marshall
... read, and read on and on through the exquisite rise and fall of the stanzas, through the beautiful clear high thoughts which seem to come as a breath and a breeze from an unattainable heaven, from the Nirvana we all hope for in our inmost hearts, whatever our confession of faith. And the poor girl was soothed, and touched and lulled by the music of thought and the sigh of verse that is in the poem; and the morning passed. I suppose ...
— Mr. Isaacs • F. Marion Crawford
... and distorted in their growth, by similar influences. But, however great the difficulty of getting rid of these distorting influences and facing such questions in a perfectly dry light, nobody suggests that objective truth on such matters is non-existent or for ever unattainable. A claim for objective validity for the moral judgement does not mean a claim for infallibility on behalf of any individual Conscience. We may make mistakes in Morals just as we may make mistakes in ...
— Philosophy and Religion - Six Lectures Delivered at Cambridge • Hastings Rashdall
... intense heat. He looked at the brown and sparkling solitude of the flowing water, of the water flowing ceaseless and free in a soft, cool murmur of ripples at his feet. The world seemed to end there. The forests of the other bank appeared unattainable, enigmatical, for ever beyond reach like the stars of heaven—and as indifferent. Above and below, the forests on his side of the river came down to the water in a serried multitude of tall, immense trees towering in a great spread ...
— An Outcast of the Islands • Joseph Conrad
... and convictions in every human soul which call for love and truth and justice. There is a revelation from God which confirms them all. One noble life was all made up of these high qualities, a present incarnation of these seemingly almost unattainable ideals, and freely gave itself for man. Some say it was very God; all acknowledge that such virtue is the divinest thing known, that such love stands for the Most High, and that to reverence and obey it, is to obey the very saving principle of human nature; that such obedience, ...
— Brook Farm • John Thomas Codman
... that the happiest state of society is that in which supreme power resides in the whole body of a well-informed people. This is an imaginary, perhaps an unattainable, state of things. Yet, in some measure, we may approximate to it; and he alone deserves the name of a great statesman, whose principle it is to extend the power of the people in proportion to the extent of their knowledge, and to give them every facility for ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Contibutions to Knight's Quarterly Magazine] • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... circumstances, that success must have been due to everyone else besides myself—to the backing and firm direction I had received from Government, to the sound advice and help of my Staff, to the bravery and endurance of the troops, without all or any one of which aids success would have been unattainable—yet I could not help also feeling that I had often on my own responsibility to make decisions and run risks, and to give advice to Government; and that if I had erred in my decisions or in the advice I gave or in taking the risks, success ...
— The Heart of Nature - or, The Quest for Natural Beauty • Francis Younghusband
... right and wrong, or a rational distribution of rewards or punishment, nor consequently inculcate the feeling of duty and responsibility, without which goodness as a matter of principle is impossible and a reliable state of society unattainable. ...
— Chaldea - From the Earliest Times to the Rise of Assyria • Znade A. Ragozin
... her young beauty; it seemed to him as if she were now less beautiful than he had imagined her; the enchantment she had exercised upon him was thrown off by simple considerations of good sense. And yet he gave a long sigh of regret when he thought she was unattainable except by marriage. He, however, thanked heaven that he had not gone far enough to have compromised himself with her. The most his conscience could reproach him with was an occasional imprudence in moments of forgetfulness; no court of honor could hold him bound to ...
— Jacqueline, Complete • (Mme. Blanc) Th. Bentzon
... often reproved for her romantic ideas, she had dreams where the sincerity of a great passion appeared like the ideal fulfilment and the only truth of life. Entering the world she discovered that ideal to be unattainable because the world is too prudent to be sincere. Then she hoped that she could find the truth of life an ambition which she understood as a lifelong devotion to some unselfish ideal. Mr. Travers' name was on men's lips; he seemed capable of enthusiasm ...
— The Rescue • Joseph Conrad
... hearths, their nearest and dearest, and led a wretched and miserable existence, all because they were anxious to be ma'amike be-hakmah ("delvers in knowledge"), as he himself might have said, and avail themselves of the opportunities for acquiring the truth and wisdom unattainable ...
— The Haskalah Movement in Russia • Jacob S. Raisin
... you ask me after my articles of domestic wants; I believe they are as usual: the bull-dogs, magnesia, soda-powders, tooth-powders, brushes, and every thing of the kind which are here unattainable. You still ask me to return to England: alas! to what purpose? You do not know what you are requiring. Return I must, probably, some day or other (if I live), sooner or later; but it will not be for pleasure, nor can it ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. IV - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... was the Vicar) said, "Hush!" and she began to play. In her passion for the unattainable she had selected Chopin's Grande Valse in A Flat, beginning with the ...
— The Three Sisters • May Sinclair
... for. According to Browning's theory, perfection gained and rested in means stagnation. Aspiration toward the unattainable is the condition of growth. The artist who can satisfy himself with such themes as can be completely expressed by his art, is on a low level of ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... long perilous journeys and the faces of strange countries; of the silver way across moonlit seas; of the beckoning voices from the under edges of the desert. It had taken a deeper, a more mysterious tone. It had told of great joys, quite unattainable, and of great griefs too, eternal, and with a sort of nobility by reason of their greatness; and of many unformulated longings beyond the reach of words; but with never a single note of mere complaint. So it had seemed to Durrance that night as he had sat listening ...
— The Four Feathers • A. E. W. Mason
... to be his, however, he found a deep satisfaction in considering himself hopelessly in love with her. He was profoundly sorry for himself. He saw himself a tragic figure, hopeless and wretched. He longed for the unattainable; he held up empty hands to the stars, and by so mimicking the gesture of youth, he ...
— Dangerous Days • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... of a diseased mind, owing to a want of the proper exercise of its powers, are, apathy, discontent, a restless longing for excitement, a craving for unattainable good, a diseased and morbid action of the imagination, dissatisfaction with the world, and factitious interest in trifles which the mind feels to be unworthy of its powers. Such minds sometimes seek alleviation in exciting amusements; others resort to the grosser enjoyments ...
— A Treatise on Domestic Economy - For the Use of Young Ladies at Home and at School • Catherine Esther Beecher
... balls and concerts there are yet the queen's and prince of Wales's breakfasts or garden-parties, which come off about 3 P.M. These are the most exclusive and unattainable of all the court entertainments. There are two or three of these in a season, and out of all London society only a couple of hundred are invited. There are certain persons who are always invited, and others ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 30. September, 1873 • Various
... protest and die. I was going to kill Nettie—Nettie who had smiled and promised and given herself to another, and who stood now for all the conceivable delightfulnesses, the lost imaginations of the youthful heart, the unattainable joys in life; and Verrall who stood for all who profited by the incurable injustice of our social order. I would kill them both. And that being done I would blow my brains out and see what vengeance followed my ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... some gentlemen in the House who seem to consider it already certain that the ultimate success to which I am looking is unattainable: they suppose us contending only for the restoration of the French monarchy, which they believe to be impracticable, and deny to be desirable for this country. We have been asked in the course of this debate, ...
— Selected Speeches on British Foreign Policy 1738-1914 • Edgar Jones
... returned Bill. "Do shed the light of your countenance on me for a few blissful moments. You're the most unattainable hostess I ...
— Patty's Butterfly Days • Carolyn Wells
... the soul equivalent of his light and brilliance, his endurance and unwearied race. I turned to the blue heaven over, gazing into its depth, inhaling its exquisite colour and sweetness. The rich blue of the unattainable flower of the sky drew my soul towards it, and there it rested, I for pure colour is rest of heart. By all these I prayed; I felt an emotion of the soul beyond all definition; prayer is a puny thing to it, and the word is a rude sign to the feeling, but I know no other.By the blue heaven, ...
— The Story of My Heart • Richard Jefferies
... the most advanced part of the world as regards her opportunities, has hardly reached the height of Arete. Unquestionably a glorious ideal is set up before the Sisterhood of all time for emulation; or is it unattainable? At any rate the woman in Homer stands far in advance of her later historical ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider
... no particular school, laid hold on the elements of skepticism contained in both the pre-Socratic schools of philosophy, and they declared that "the sophia" was not only unattainable, but that no relative degree of it was possible for the human faculties.[468] Protagoras of Abdera accepted the doctrine of Heraclitus, that thought is identical with sensation, and limited by it; he therefore ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... book that he had at the moment in mind and to repeat these paragraphs between the various chores or between the wood-chopping until every page was committed by heart. Paper was scarce and dear and for the boy unattainable. He used for his copying bits of board shaved smooth with his jack-knife. This material had the advantage that when the task of one day had been mastered, a little labour with the jack-knife prepared the surface of the board for the work of the next day. As I read this incident in ...
— Abraham Lincoln • George Haven Putnam
... turn of mind, and this solitude I sweeten by an imaginative sympathy which re-creates the past for me,—the past of the world, as well as the past which belongs to me as an individual,—and which makes me independent of the passing moment. I see every one struggling after the unattainable, but I struggle not, and so spare myself the pangs of disappointment and disgust. I have no ventures at sea, and, consequently, do not fear the arrival of evil tidings. I have no desire to act any prominent part in the world, but I am devoured by an unappeasable curiosity as to the men ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... pleasure it would now have given him to protract, during a promenade to my hotel, our delightful conversation! But infirmities teach us to curtail our pleasures, and many things that seem natural to man's bodily configuration are found to be unattainable. He seldom left his rooms; the stairs—the diabolical stairs! Would I at least accept his card and rest assured how gladly he would receive me and do all in his power ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... once lovely as theirs, it may be, that gazed meagre and pinched and hungry on the young maidens in rose-colour and blue, tripping lightly through the avenue of their eager eyes—not yet too envious of unattainable felicity to gaze with admiring sympathy on those who seemed to them the angels, the goddesses of their kind. 'O God!' I thought, but dared not speak, 'and thou couldst make all these girls so lovely! Thou couldst give them all ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... years before, but still there was a great deal that was open to criticism. Mr. Phillips and Mr. Brandon thought the colony had made rapid strides towards civilization and comfort since the great influx of wealth consequent on the gold discoveries had attracted to Victoria much that was unattainable before. Even during their absence in England there had been a great deal of building going on in Melbourne, and many other improvements had been introduced. The houses were better, and better furnished; the shops seemed to contain everything that enterprise could import or ...
— Mr. Hogarth's Will • Catherine Helen Spence
... man. Not once again did either of us look back. Yard upon yard we raced forward together. My heart seemed to be bursting. My leg muscles throbbed with pain. At last, with the empty cottage in sight, it came to that pass with me when another three yards looks as unattainable as three ...
— The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... sensible to intelligible objects; the third step is to judge of sensible objects according to intelligible things; the fourth is the absolute consideration of the intelligible objects to which one has attained by means of sensibles; the fifth is the contemplation of those intelligible objects that are unattainable by means of sensibles, but which the reason is able to grasp; the sixth step is the consideration of such intelligible things as the reason can neither discover nor grasp, which pertain to the sublime ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... eternal Substance revealed by Attributes and their Modes is God, absolute in His perfections if He could be fully conceived and known in all His activities. And even to our ignorance He is entrancing in His gradual self-revelation, as with our inadequate ideas we pursue the unattainable from glory to glory. ...
— Pantheism, Its Story and Significance - Religions Ancient And Modern • J. Allanson Picton
... difference between them is of course in completeness of execution. Sir Joshua's and Gainsborough's work, at its best, is only magnificent sketching; giving indeed, in places, a perfection of result unattainable by other methods, and possessing always a charm of grace and power exclusively its own; yet, in its slightness addressing itself, purposefully, to the casual glance, and common thought—eager to arrest the passer-by, but careless to detain ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... they had to leave, dreadful gaps in our yearning, dreadful lapses in our knowledge, dreadful failures in our energy; there were always things off and beyond, goals of delight and dreams of desire, that dropped as a matter of course into the unattainable, and over to which our wonder- working agent now flings the firm straight bridge. Curiosity has lost, under this amazing extension, its salutary renouncements perhaps; contemplation has become one with action ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... occasions that this sentiment got possession of him strongly. He was generally able to keep it down. Hard work, assisted by his natural faculty for singleness of purpose and concentration of attention, kept him from lifting the eyes of his heart toward the unattainable. Moreover, he had developed an enthusiasm, genuine in its way, for the land of his adoption. The elemental hugeness of its characteristics—its rivers fifty to a hundred miles in width, its farms a hundred thousand acres in extent, its sheep herds ...
— The Wild Olive • Basil King
... A glimmer of understanding began to dawn in Lane. Already an immense pity had flooded his soul, and a profound sense of the mystery and tragedy of Mel Iden. She had always been unusual, aloof, proud, unattainable, a girl with a heart of golden fire. And now she had a nameless child and was an outcast from her father's house. The fact, the ...
— The Day of the Beast • Zane Grey
... here or hereafter until its innate capabilities for wisdom, love, and power for good are developed and exercised. His precepts and example would be foolishness and a stumbling-block, his character an unattainable ideal, were it other than the first fruit ripened on the tree of life, the promise ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various
... thinning hair and his struggle against poverty, Peter was something of a dreamer. And like all the rest of us who build our dreams out of wishes and hopes and maybes, Peter had not a single fact to use in his foundation. Arizona, New Mexico or Colorado—to Peter they were but symbols of all those dear unattainable things he longed for. And that he longed for them, not for himself but for another who was very dear to him, only made the longing ...
— Starr, of the Desert • B. M Bower
... she touches on a difficult point, and says that when Goethe and Byron attempt to paint the aspirations of a superior being, we admire their breadth of view, and wish we could aid them with our minds to reach the unattainable; but that an author who announces that he has swept to the utmost range of thought shocks us by his vanity, and she begs Balzac to eliminate certain phrases in his book which sound as though he had ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... the servants were pouring into the room, adding to the general confusion by howling at random and asking irrelevant questions, while they gazed at the figure of a man a little on in years arrayed in a long night-shirt, pawing fiercely at the unattainable spot in the middle of his back, while he danced an unnatural, weird, wicked-looking jig by the dim, religious light of the night-lamp. And while he danced and howled, and while they gazed and shouted, a navy-blue wasp, that Master Middlerib ...
— Masterpieces Of American Wit And Humor • Thomas L. Masson (Editor)
... husband, our Q.C., cannot come till his circuit is over, but of course you know more about his movements than I do. I wonder you have never said anything about those girls of his, but I suppose you class them as unattainable. I have said nothing to my mother or Emily of our plans, as I wish to be perfectly unbiased, and as I have seen none of the nieces for five years, and am prepared to delight in them all, I may be reckoned as a blank sheet as to their merits.—Your ...
— More Bywords • Charlotte M. Yonge
... was unattainable. This morning, after having seen the Park, the fashionable boulevard, the pictures, the cafes—having sipped, I say, the sweets of every flower that grows in this paradise of Brussels, quite weary of the place, we mounted ...
— Little Travels and Roadside Sketches • William Makepeace Thackeray
... sophisticated woman. Nothing seemed to surprise her. Whatever happened was all part and parcel of the great adventure. Yesterday she was an overwatched girl, looking yearningly at a city that appeared to be unattainable. To-day she was a married woman who, a moment ago, had been standing before a minister, binding herself for good or ill to a man who was delightfully a boy and of whom she knew next to nothing. What did it matter—what did anything matter—so long as she achieved her long-dreamed-of ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton
... of preventing the too early and too frequent yielding to the sexual impulse."[179] Be that as it may, it is, in any case, if we grant the facts, a means through which male sexual behaviour with all its biological and psychological implications, is raised to a level otherwise perhaps unattainable by natural means, while in the female it affords opportunities for the development in the individual and evolution in the race of what we may follow Darwin in calling appreciation, if we empty this word of the aesthetic implications which have gathered ...
— Evolution in Modern Thought • Ernst Haeckel
... a fund of amusing anecdote, as well as of instructive detail, presents itself. We may travel in a carriage and four—from morn 'till night—and sweep county after county, in pursuit of all that is exquisite, and rare, and precious, and unattainable in other quarters: but I doubt if our horses' heads can be turned in a direction better calculated to answer all the ends in view than in ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... us, that ministers disregard peace; that they are prodigal of blood; insensible to the miseries, and enemies to the liberties of mankind; that the extinction of Jacobinism is their pretext, but that personal ambition is their motive; and that we have squandered two hundred millions on an object, unattainable were it desirable, and were it not unattainable, yet still to be deprecated. Sir, will men be governed by mere words without application? This country, Sir, will not. It knows that to this war it owes its prosperity, its constitution, ...
— The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - 1838 • James Gillman
... man manifest; not puny resolve, not crude determinations, not errant purpose—but that strong and indefatigable Will which treads down difficulties and danger, as a boy treads down the heaving frost-lands of winter; which kindles his eye and brain with a proud pulse-beat toward the unattainable. Will ...
— A Series of Lessons in Raja Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... meanwhile to Erasmus Walker the ten thousand pounds of blackmail—for it was little else—agreed upon between them. The great engineer accepted the money with as little compunction as men who earn large incomes always display in taking payment for doing nothing. It is an enviable state of mind, unattainable by most of us who work hard for our living. He pocketed his check with a smile, as if it were quite in the nature of things that ten thousand pounds should drop upon him from the clouds without rhyme or reason. To Tyrrel, on the other hand, ...
— Michael's Crag • Grant Allen
... where the wildness for the most part rather repels than delights you. I do not say everywhere; in places the wilderness will blossom like a rose; boggy margins of lakes, fallen trunks in the forest overgrown with wild flowers, make scenes unattainable in our civilised England. Even our roughest scenery is comparatively man-made: our heaths are game preserves; our woodlands are thinned of superfluous underbrush; our moors are relieved by deliberate plantations. But England in her own way is unique ...
— Post-Prandial Philosophy • Grant Allen
... 1: The truth of faith is contained in Holy Writ, diffusely, under various modes of expression, and sometimes obscurely, so that, in order to gather the truth of faith from Holy Writ, one needs long study and practice, which are unattainable by all those who require to know the truth of faith, many of whom have no time for study, being busy with other affairs. And so it was necessary to gather together a clear summary from the sayings of Holy Writ, to be proposed ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... perpetual agony of the human race in its perpetual striving to rise beyond its limitations. The tragic irony of the Greeks is but the expression of the tragedy of passion in its pitiful reaction from hope, the intensity of feeling with which men see desire defeated and ideal unattainable. So, too, in the most intense moments the characters of Shakespeare ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... desired object was discovered on a shelf in the shed. Its high position enhanced its value, giving it the cruel fascination of the unattainable. ...
— Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch • Alice Caldwell Hegan
... irresistible: the lovely something We follow in our dreams, but may not reach. The unattainable Divine Enchantment, Hinted in music, ...
— India's Love Lyrics • Adela Florence Cory Nicolson (AKA Laurence Hope), et al.
... said Mother, fiercely, and they trailed forlornly past. They were not so much envious as in awe of Miss Mitchin's; it seemed to belong to the same unattainable world as Newport and ...
— The Innocents - A Story for Lovers • Sinclair Lewis
... M. Renan; for no one has practiced these qualities with greater constancy than he, who on the first page of his 'Vie de Jesus' invokes the pure spirit of the venerated Dead, and who prayed to him in a melancholy petition to the unattainable—"O good Genius, reveal to me whom you love, the truths which govern death, keep one from fearing and make one almost ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... class, which the dark brown fog seemed to have inspired with unaccountable liveliness. His short holiday had not served to rest and invigorate him as much as might have been expected; it had left him consumed with a hopeless longing for something unattainable. His thirst for distinction had returned in an aggravated form, and he had cut himself off now from the only means of slaking it. As that day wore on, and with each day that succeeded it, he felt a wearier disgust ...
— The Giant's Robe • F. Anstey
... proceeded to indicate economic legislation which, though sorely needed by Ireland, was hopelessly unattainable unless it could be removed from the region of controversy. The modus co-operandi suggested was as follows:—a committee sitting in the Parliamentary recess, whence it came to be known as the Recess Committee, was to be formed, consisting in the first instance, ...
— Ireland In The New Century • Horace Plunkett
... of the soul, all the reflected results of its energizing after the unattainable in this life, all that has truly BEEN, belong to the absolute, and are permanent amid all earth's changes. It is, indeed, through these changes, through the dance of plastic circumstance, that the permanent is secured. They are the machinery, the ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... had told him, sitting under the apple tree beside the stream that flowed between a large and a small farm on the Three-Notched Road. As a boy, he would have been puzzled to choose between "Will you go to Heaven?" and "Will you go to Fontenoy?" The one seemed as remote, as unattainable, and as happy as the other. The advantage was possibly with Fontenoy, for he could picture that to himself. He could not have described the mansions in the skies, but, thanks to Jacqueline, he knew every room at Fontenoy. Before he was laid in it, he had known the ...
— Lewis Rand • Mary Johnston
... as the two young lovers looked out upon the world of promise! It was well thus, for much too soon in life, humanity experiences the same old story of unsatisfied ambitions and weary struggles after the unattainable. ...
— The Harris-Ingram Experiment • Charles E. Bolton
... to effect the ruin of poor, fallen man, by stirring up this fierce desire of equality with discontented thoughts and vain hopes of unattainable good! It is this dark desire, and not liberty, which, in its rage, becomes the "poisonous snake;" and, though decked in fine, allegoric, glowing garb, it is still the loathsome thing, the "false worm," that turned God's Paradise itself into a ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... things in her days that poverty kept from her to the end, and the cloak was merely a luxury. She would soon have let it slip by as something unattainable had not Hendry encouraged it to rankle in her mind. I cannot say when he first determined that Jess should have a cloak, come the money as it liked, for he was too ashamed of his weakness to admit ...
— A Window in Thrums • J. M. Barrie
... feet, seeming not to see the hand the old Judge had extended across the desktop toward him. On his face, of a sudden, was a queer, eager look. It was as though he foresaw the coming true of long-cherished and heretofore unattainable visions. ...
— From Place to Place • Irvin S. Cobb |
