"Unwritten" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... she had been taught, her father was in heaven already. It was not possible that any human being should obey every written and unwritten ordinance of his religion more strictly than he had done ever since she could remember him. He had been severe, almost to cruelty, but he had been quite as unyieldingly austere in dealing with himself. He had fasted ...
— The White Sister • F. Marion Crawford
... places) much among the islands; and after a Cape Horn passage with its snow-squalls and its frozen sheets, he announced his intention of "taking a turn among them Kanakas." I thought I should have lost him soon; but, according to the unwritten usage of mariners, he had first to dissipate his wages. "Guess I'll have to paint this town red," was his hyperbolical expression; for sure no man ever embarked upon a milder course of dissipation, most of his days being passed in ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... redress, perhaps even no cause of complaint. I know how subordinates in business are turned away to suit the convenience, or at the whim, of their superiors; but in most colleges there is a sort of unwritten law that promotion shall follow efficient service. As a rule, the one year appointment is merely a safeguard to protect the institution from a man ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... is the collision between the individual will, impulse, or action, and society in some form of its organisation, or those unwritten laws of life which we call the laws of God. The tragic character is always a lawbreaker, but not always a criminal; he is, indeed, often the servant of a new idea which sets him, as in the case of Giordano Bruno, in opposition to an established order of knowledge; he is ...
— Books and Culture • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... rang out a high, clear voice. It was the voice of the new member. Inadvertently he was recognized and had the floor. There was a little more "senatorial courtesy" then than now in deliberative bodies, and one of the unwritten laws of the Virginia Legislature was that no member during his first session should make an extended speech or take an active part in ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... an Ohio volunteer regiment; the colonel belonged to the regular army, but all the other officers were volunteers. I grew to know them all, and among them I found many noble hearts, and, had I the time, I could relate many incidents of generosity and true courage, part of that unwritten history of the war which will never come into print. Among these officers there was one young captain whom I especially liked. He was quiet and reserved, and although he never talked with me as his companions sometimes did, although he told me nothing of his life and history, ...
— The Old Stone House • Anne March
... The unwritten and the enduring laws of God, Which are not of to-day nor yesterday, But live from everlasting, and none breathes ...
— Is Life Worth Living? • William Hurrell Mallock
... metre, unwritten mouth-to-mouth wisdom, stable as a proverb, enduring through generations of unrecorded wanderers, that repeated it for a few years, and ...
— Red Men and White • Owen Wister
... so conveyed would be exercised, upon the whole, with a due regard to the integrity of her faith, and of her office, which was and has ever been a part of that faith? I do not ask whether these securities were all on parchment or not—whether they were written or unwritten—whether they were in statute, or in common law, or in fixed usage, or in the spirit of the Constitution and in the habits of the people—I ask the one vital question, whether, whatever they were in form, they were in ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church
... digging, occupation. Being tired and worn with the two-fold labor, Paul was tempted many times to abandon the claim and take a rest, and was prevented only by the fear that jumpers would take advantage of the work already done. The unwritten law at that time was that if a miner ceased working his claim for a certain length of time it could be "jumped" by others. About this time Paul also began to suspect the honesty of the sorter and kept a close eye on ...
— The Story of Paul Boyton - Voyages on All the Great Rivers of the World • Paul Boyton
... popular method of tipping was to present your gold in a long, knitted purse, which you threw at the tippee's feet or slapped into the palm of his hand; but this system seems to have lapsed; and no fresh regulation has been established in the unwritten laws of the douceur, which goes back even before the days when extravagant and unwilling tips were often enforced with pincers, racks, and other imperative inventions. Monte Cristo gave wonderful tips, and Monte Carlo is lavish to this day. The genius that wrecked Panama has an open hand. ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III., July 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... though one may reply that he has made use of English writers and collectors of frontier folklore, and indeed he acknowledges his debt to Mr. Thorburn's excellent book on Bannu or our Afghan Frontier. However that may be, we have here, in these unwritten lays, the stuff out of which is developed, first, the established tradition, and, secondly, not only poetry but also the beginnings of history, for these lays are the oral records of contemporary events—'c'est ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... of one who knows that he is doomed alone to unwritten responsibilities. He lagged, with tragic ...
— The Red Badge of Courage - An Episode of the American Civil War • Stephen Crane
... organically "United"; for it lacked the principle of growth, which characterizes all constitutions of government which are really adapted to the progressive needs of a people, if the people have in them any impulse which stimulates them to advance. The unwritten constitution of Great Britain has this advantage, that a decree of Parliament can alter the whole representative system, annihilating by a vote of the two houses all laws which the Parliament had enacted in former years. In Great Britain, therefore, a measure which any Imperial ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... Subordination to the Wisest and the Best: and of that Equilibrium between the Active Energy of the Will of the Present, expressed by the Vote of the People, and the Passive Stability and Permanence of the Will of the Past, expressed in constitutions of government, written or unwritten, and in the laws and customs, gray with age and sanctified by time, as precedents and authority; which is represented by the arch resting on the two columns, Jachin and Boaz, that stand at the portals of the Temple builded by Wisdom, on one of which Masonry sets the celestial Globe, symbol of ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... them, and those he had had borne away the memory of most outrageous insult gratuitously offered and rubbed home. But this particular Jew was a money-lender on occasion, and his rates had proved as reasonable as his acceptance of Alwa's unwritten promise had been prompt. A man who holds his given word as sacred as did Alwa respects, in the teeth of custom or religion, the man who accepts that word; so, when the chance had offered, Alwa had done the Jew occasional favors and had won ...
— Rung Ho! • Talbot Mundy
... distinct and independent revelations—the unwritten revelation which God has made to all men in the constitution of the human mind, and the external written revelation which he has made in the person and teaching of his Son. And these two are perfectly harmonious. We have here two great volumes—the volume ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... averts his countenance from the contributor who writes at him; but if he feels that the contributor conceives the situation, and will conform to the conditions which his periodical has invented for itself, arid will transgress none of its unwritten laws; if he perceives that he has put artistic conscience in every general and detail, and though he has not done the best, has done the best that he can do, he will begin to liberate him from every trammel except those he must ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... of the Fifth lingered behind in perturbed consultation. They considered they had a just and most pressing grievance. In all the annals of the school such a case had never occurred before. It had been hitherto an inviolable though unwritten law that no one under the age of fifteen should be admitted to the Fifth Form, a law which they had believed as strict as that of the Medes and Persians, and here was the headmistress actually breaking it, and in favour of a girl only fourteen and a quarter. If ...
— The Youngest Girl in the Fifth - A School Story • Angela Brazil
... to the school, which will be his home for at least eight weeks—unless before that time he is shown to be obviously unfit for the service. There he will work from nine in the morning till half-past seven at night, learning the thousand and one laws, written and unwritten, that a policeman has to obey. In cold black and white the curriculum, of which even a summary would occupy many thousand words, looks formidable. But so minutely, so lucidly is everything taught that a man of average intelligence finds ...
— Scotland Yard - The methods and organisation of the Metropolitan Police • George Dilnot
... its perihelion passage on the 12th of March following, thus proving beyond dispute that some at least of these erratic bodies are domesticated within our system, and strictly conform, if not to its unwritten customs (so to speak), at any rate to its fundamental laws. Their movements, in short, were demonstrated by the most unanswerable of all arguments—that of verified calculation—to be calculable, and their investigation was erected into a legitimate department ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... Nat Burns was not at the fire, as usual attempting to make himself leader of the battle without doing much of the work, and now the reason was apparent. He preferred to pursue his courting under the eyes of the village rather than to obey the unwritten law of service. And ...
— The Harbor of Doubt • Frank Williams
... learned in the history of Alexandria under the Romans may wonder that I should have made no mention of the Therapeutai on Lake Mareotis. I had originally meant to devote a chapter to them, but Luca's recent investigations led me to decide on leaving it unwritten. I have given years of study to the early youth of Christianity, particularly in Egypt, and it affords me particular satisfaction to help others to realize how, in Hadrian's time, the pure teaching of the Saviour, as yet little sullied by the contributions of human minds, ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... Herder. He declared in the most uncompromising terms that all real poetry must have a popular origin; "can be and must be of the people, for that is the seal of its perfection." And he comments on the delight with which he has listened, in village street and home, to unwritten songs; the poetry which finds its way in quiet rivulets to the remotest peasant home. In like manner, Helene Vacaresco overheard the songs of the Roumanian people; hiding in the maize to catch the reaping songs; listening at spinning parties, at festivals, at ...
— The Book of Old English Ballads • George Wharton Edwards
... the latter at Elizabeth's interference—a letter which, as Mr. Froude notices, was not written by Cecil and merely signed by the queen, but was her own peculiar and characteristic composition. "Far sooner," she wrote, "would I pass over those murders on land; far rather would I leave unwritten those noyades in the rivers—those men and women hacked in pieces; but the shrieks of the strangled wives, great with child—the cries of the infants at their mothers' breasts—pierce me through. What drug of rhubarb can purge the ...
— History of the Rise of the Huguenots - Volume 2 • Henry Baird
... consideration, pleasant and prolonged, of that other book, known to no other man, not yet written, and perhaps destined to perish, a secret dream. But what are now these books? What now is even that book which is perfect and unwritten? It, too, has lost its light. I am left staring into the fire. The newspapers tell us of a common joy at the coming of Peace. Peace? If she is coming, then we are much obliged to her. I remember during an earlier and wasted joy at a word in France of the coming of Peace ...
— Waiting for Daylight • Henry Major Tomlinson
... The unwritten laws of politeness obliged Regina to say something. "I have not heard Mr. Goldenheart mention your name," she remarked. "Are you an old ...
— The Fallen Leaves • Wilkie Collins
... Then she had forgotten the unseen for the seen, and was happy that they two were alone together—that was the joy of it all, so much alone together; for Swift Wing did not live with them, and, like Breaking Rock, she watched her daughter's life, standing afar off, since it was the unwritten law of the tribe that the wife's mother must not cross the path or enter the home of her daughter's husband. But at last Dingan had broken through this custom, and insisted that Swift Wing should be with her daughter when he was away from home, as now ...
— Northern Lights • Gilbert Parker
... Sentiment of Christian self-complacency Spain was governed by an established terrorism That unholy trinity—Force; Dogma, and Ignorance The great ocean was but a Spanish lake The most thriving branch of national industry (Smuggler) The record of our race is essentially unwritten Thirty thousand masses should be said for his soul Those who argue against a foregone conclusion Three or four hundred petty sovereigns (of Germany) Utter want of adaptation of his means to his ends While one's friends urge moderation Whole revenue was pledged to pay the ...
— Quotations From John Lothrop Motley • David Widger
... characteristic modesty diffidently approached it. Taking his seat last Wednesday, he to-day delivered his maiden speech. It was risky in face of the sound axiom, adapted from nursery discipline, that new Members should (for a reasonable period) be seen, not heard. As a breaker of unwritten law Sir GEORGE has extenuation of success. This due to intrinsic merits of speech. Foremost of these was brevity. Furthermore, it was in the best sense a contribution to debate, arising directly out of question sprung upon ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, January 26, 1916 • Various
... of meditating much, of brooding over thought, whether it be our own or that of others, will tend to disclose new and deeper meanings, and consequently deeper shades and depths of feeling. The speaker will diligently search for unwritten meanings in words; he will study, whenever possible, masterpieces of painting and sculpture; he will closely observe the natural feeling of well-bred children, as shown in their conversation; and in many other ways that will suggest themselves, he will daily develop ...
— Talks on Talking • Grenville Kleiser
... country should he not be given THE SAME CHANCE AS THE WHITE MAN? "You will say that he should go to West Point. Well and good; but who is to send him? Next, who will defend him while there against the "Unwritten Law" of the white students not to allow him to matriculate? "The first officers of such regiments could be easily picked, made from Spanish War veterans and non-commissioned officers of the regular army, and second ...
— History of the American Negro in the Great World War • W. Allison Sweeney
... men were falling in as calmly as if mustered for divisions. Some were blowing up their pneumatic swimming-collars, others helping to adjust a comrade's life-belt. A few were joking and talking, none of the officers gainsaying them. By virtue of an unwritten law the men were allowed to smoke, and the odour of strong tobacco ...
— The Submarine Hunters - A Story of the Naval Patrol Work in the Great War • Percy F. Westerman
... profession, the standard of conduct in every department of life connected with the publishing trade was determined by aristocratic ideas. The unwritten laws which regulated the practice of bookselling in the eighteenth century were derived from the Stationers' Company. Founded as it had been on the joint principles of commercial monopoly and State control, this famous organization had long ...
— A Publisher and His Friends • Samuel Smiles
... had satisfied itself beforehand that, acting on some unwritten code of Parliamentary procedure, the Speaker would rule out such an amendment as unconstitutional. At any rate, this is what he did ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... does much more than circumstances drive him to do. Even I would not write this article were not the publication-day hard on my heels. I should read Hawthorne and Emerson and Holmes, and dream in my armchair, and project in the clouds those lovely unwritten stories that curl and veer and change like mist-wreaths in the sun. So also, however dignified, however invigorating, however really desirable, are habits of life involving daily physical toil, there is a constant evil demon at every one's elbow, seducing him to evade it, or to bear ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... made a feint at the man by the hole. He, having lived for many a year in the hope of one day pegging out his own patch of alluvial on a new rush, would have defied dynamite to move him now that he had his pick in the ground, now that he had performed all that the unwritten but eternal laws of the mining fraternity needed to give him sole and absolute rights over the few square yards of earth and all the precious mineral he could win from it. He took the feint seriously, and, being at a disadvantage ...
— Colonial Born - A tale of the Queensland bush • G. Firth Scott
... symmetrical clearness through the proper process of phenomena, classification, and generalized statement. My own experience suffices to myself for both assurance and prophecy. Although the loftiest, sweetest music of the soul is yet unwritten, its faint articulations interblend with the jangling discords of life, as the chimes of distant bells float through the roar of winds and waves, and chant to imperilled hearts the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... it is appointive by a non-partisan board. But, in general, the candidate of the prevailing party, or the one who is the best "mixer," secures the office regardless of qualifications. Sharing the fortunes of other political offices, the county superintendency frequently has applied to it the unwritten party rule of "two terms and out," thus crippling the efficiency of the office by frequent changes of administration and ...
— New Ideals in Rural Schools • George Herbert Betts
... productive period. One by one certain pinnacles of his fair snow-mountain of Titanic aim melted away. He began to realise the first disenchantment of the artist: the sense of dreams never to be accomplished. That land of the great unwritten poems, the great unpainted pictures: what a heritance there for the enfranchised ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... rather than a solid mass of bone and muscle—in place of jerking and straining and wrenching, in place of plying the quirt or clinging with the tearing spurs, he was riding "straight up" and obeying every rule of that unwritten code which prescribes the manner in which a gentleman cowpuncher shall combat with his horse for superiority. Again that thrill of terror of the unknown passed through the stallion; could this apparently weaponless enemy cling to him in spite of his best efforts? ...
— Alcatraz • Max Brand
... that made nothing in its sweep of every emotion that had not its birth and growth in art, and forbade the mere consideration of anything that might be an obstacle, as if it were a sin. She entered her new world with proud recognition of its unwritten laws, its unsanctified morale, its riotous overflowing ideals; and she was instant in gathering that to see, to comprehend these was to be thrice blessed, as not to see, not to comprehend them was to dwell in outer ...
— A Daughter of To-Day • Sara Jeannette Duncan (aka Mrs. Everard Cotes)
... grand scale, whether it be in a Greek colonnade or a Gothic arcade, we cannot tolerate irregularity of spacing except where some constructive necessity affords an obvious and higher reason for it. Then, again, we find the unwritten law running throughout all architecture that a progress of line in one direction requires to be stopped in a marked and distinct manner when it has run its course, and we find a similarly felt necessity in regard to musical form. The repetition so common ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 633, February 18, 1888 • Various
... rebel against the unwritten rule that seats are not to be made use of, but a moment's reflection convinced her of the ...
— Sparrows - The Story of an Unprotected Girl • Horace W. C. Newte
... broke off from it long enough to write a paragraph in his note-book. This would be the last paragraph in "Overdue"; but so thoroughly was the whole book already composed in his brain that he could write, weeks before he had arrived at the end, the end itself. He compared the tale, as yet unwritten, with the tales of the sea-writers, and he felt it to be immeasurably superior. "There's only one man who could touch it," he murmured aloud, "and that's Conrad. And it ought to make even him sit up and shake hands with me, and say, 'Well ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... Quaker poet there is an unwritten chapter of personal history full to the brim of romance. It will be remembered that Whittier in his will left ten thousand dollars for an Amesbury Home for Aged Women. One room in this home Mrs. Elizabeth W. Pickard (the niece to whom the poet bequeathed his Amesbury ...
— The Romance of Old New England Rooftrees • Mary Caroline Crawford
... he had made a prevaricating reply simply impossible. Nothing of the sort! Mr. Sarrazin slipped through his fingers once more. The unwritten laws of gallantry afforded him a ...
— The Evil Genius • Wilkie Collins
... doubt whether she ever had a heart; if so, it was frittered away long ago in her numberless flirtations. But with all her folly she has ever had the sense to keep within the conventionalities of her own fashionable 'coterie,' which is the only world she knows anything about, and whose unwritten laws are her only creed and religion. Her disappointed suitors can justly charge her with cruelty, silliness, ignorance, and immeasurable vanity, but never with indiscretion. She has to perfection the American girl's ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... inhabitants of Northern Europe. Scarcely was this effected when the sources of history began to be poisoned. At the end of the eleventh century Saemund Sigfusson, a Christian priest, gathered the popular and hitherto unwritten histories of the North into what is called the "Elder Edda"; and he was satisfied with adding to his compilation the corrective of a Christian hymn. A hundred years later there was made another collection of the native ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... word whenever the flow of affectionate badgering lagged. Fanny, who had served them since they were children, bustled in and out, redfaced, wholesome, fruitlessly trying to press upon Terry an excess of the over-ample dinner. It was a sort of unwritten law in Crampville that the Sunday dinner should be sufficiently heavy to drive the menfolk to a ...
— Terry - A Tale of the Hill People • Charles Goff Thomson
... eastern end where the altar might have been, was a dark purple curtain against which blazed in brilliant luminance a Cross and Seven-pointed Star. The rays of light shed by this uplifted Symbol of an unwritten Creed were so vivid as to be almost blinding, and nearly eclipsed the summer glory of the sun itself. Awed by the strange and silent solemnity of my surroundings, I was glad to be hidden under the ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... as her own, she did not wish to violate any of the unwritten canons of society, but she longed for the hour to come when she could acknowledge her love openly to the world. At one moment she thought of writing a letter, but dismissed the thought as the height of folly. As the time passed ...
— Caught In The Net • Emile Gaboriau
... them. It is too difficult to explain just the nature of such situations as arose in Europe, so I may be permitted for once to ask this question: Does Prof. Eliot believe that the majority of the American people think that the unwritten Monroe Doctrine could be made the subject of arbitration, whether it had a right to exist or to be enforced? I must emphatically say, No, it could not. It can be as little arbitrated upon as a matter of religion or of ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various
... one of the unwritten laws of nature that a man shall not go naked into the market-place or wear woman's clothes. The Mosaic law forbade men to wear women's clothes, which was thought to be a mode of discountenancing the Assyrian rites of Venus. The early Christians, ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 3, May 1906 - Monthly Magazine Devoted to Social Science and Literature • Various
... hear from them about these great truths which I had come so far to tell them of. I wanted to know what were their wishes and determinations about becoming Christians. When I had finished, every eye turned towards the principal chief, as these Indians, like the other tribes, have their unwritten laws of precedence. He rose up from his place among his people, and, coming near me on my right hand, he made one of the most thrilling addresses I ever heard. Years have passed away since that hour, and yet the memory of that tall, straight, impassioned Indian ...
— By Canoe and Dog-Train • Egerton Ryerson Young
... dying sea foreign port unwritten maritime law stipulates mate succeeds. Yankee can sail anything afloat. This my chance. Grant it or insure successor's life. Will throw ...
— Cappy Ricks • Peter B. Kyne
... value, a penny, or a farthing has been quietly put into Mr. Smith's hands, in furtherance of his work, by some poor Gipsy woman. The story which made us laugh was of a Gipsy marriage. It is one of the unwritten laws of Gipsy life that the wife works while the husband idles about the tent. The wife hawks with the basket or the cart and sells, while the husband loiters about the encampment or cooks the evening meal. But one young Gipsy fell in love with an Irish girl named Kathleen, and from the day ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... it were to be old— A little past "forty-five;" 'Twere better indeed than a purse of gold At a premium yet unwritten, untold, For what poor devil that's now "enrolled" ...
— The Feast of the Virgins and Other Poems • H. L. Gordon
... that candour which is the rarest of his great qualities, gave a generous and authoritative testimony to the merit of these attacks upon his father, and his father's creed, which Macaulay himself lived to wish that he had left unwritten. ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... facts with reference to an isolated transaction. There are many, very many others of a similar character that I might mention, but I will not. The unwritten and secret history of our border would amaze the civilized world, and would stagger the faith of the most credulous. In the case just mentioned, we find an old man who had passed his threescore and ten, and a youth who had not yet reached his score, ...
— A Rebel War Clerk's Diary at the Confederate States Capital • John Beauchamp Jones
... future may hold your names in a high and honored place. Do well your part today. The work of today is the history of tomorrow, and we are its makers. So let us strive to show just as grand names on the pages yet unwritten as are inscribed on those that we have for our ...
— How Girls Can Help Their Country • Juliette Low
... performance—incorrectly termed a sacred concert—on Sunday nights: and it had been one o'clock in the morning before the concert scenery could be moved out of the theatre and the first act set of "The Rose of America" moved in. And, as by some unwritten law of the drama no dress-rehearsal can begin without a delay of at least an hour and a half, the curtain had not gone up on Mr Miller's opening chorus till half past two. There had been dress-parades, conferences, interminable arguments between the stage-director and a mysterious man in shirtsleeves ...
— The Little Warrior - (U.K. Title: Jill the Reckless) • P. G. Wodehouse
... more valuable to Wagner, and what excited his gratitude to even more superlative utterance, was the confidence which Liszt showed in his genius, and without which, it is no exaggeration to say, Wagner's greatest works would probably have remained unwritten. ...
— Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, Volume 1 • Francis Hueffer (translator)
... turned the water out," she said, rising wearily. "Will we be obliged to hire a watchman to camp by our water tank? This is serious, boys. The unwritten law of the desert would condemn whoever did this to a lariat and a yucca palm. Still, we don't know who did it. It's too dark to find tracks or to learn anything about it. It's seventeen miles to the Washburn-Stokes outfit—the nearest water ahead. Or it's eight miles back ...
— The She Boss - A Western Story • Arthur Preston Hankins
... poesy which has glorified these works and those of their kind, the spring of the unwritten law yielding preeminence to the emotional arts. Impulse is the life of it: it dies when ...
— Pictorial Composition and the Critical Judgment of Pictures • Henry Rankin Poore
... Secondly, the parlements not only frankly criticised the proposed measures of the king and his ministers, but they familiarized the nation with the idea that the king was not really at liberty to alter what they called "the fundamental laws" of the state. By this they meant that there was an unwritten constitution, of which they were the guardians and which limited the king's power. In this way they promoted the growing discontent with a government which was carried on in secret, and which left the nation at the mercy of the men in whom the king ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson
... Forbes, daughters of the geologist, are modest affairs with forty-foot fronts. Others, like Dean Norris's, cover two acres. Those built before 1800 have their birth-years painted carefully over their doorways, and it is an unwritten law that younger houses may not claim this privilege. Many are sheltered by box hedges, and none but has its garden—in which flowers other than hollyhocks, mignonette, larkspur, stock, and bachelor's buttons are considered ...
— Tutors' Lane • Wilmarth Lewis
... the traditions, usages and customs of the fraternity as they have existed from the remotest antiquity, and as they are universally admitted by the general consent of the members of the Order. In fact, we may apply to these unwritten laws of Masonry the definition given by Blackstone of the "leges non scriptae" of the English constitution—that "their original institution and authority are not set down in writing, as acts of parliament are, but they ...
— The Principles of Masonic Law - A Treatise on the Constitutional Laws, Usages And Landmarks of - Freemasonry • Albert G. Mackey
... to be so common; of yourself, the son of the Governor, yet obliged to read the Bible by stealth, under the penalty of a bleeding back washed with brine. These and many other things revolve in your active mind, and your unwritten inferences are worth whole folios of ...
— The Duty of Disobedience to the Fugitive Slave Act - Anti-Slavery Tracts No. 9, An Appeal To The Legislators Of Massachusetts • Lydia Maria Child
... saying that election for life might result from repeated reelection. In following Washington's course and defending it on principle, he set an example to all his successors, making the "third term doctrine" a part of American unwritten law. ...
— History of the United States • Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard
... unwritten laws of the world you now live in is to tell the least of all you know. The fact remains. You were tractable—submissive. You never made a scene for poor ...
— The Gorgeous Isle - A Romance; Scene: Nevis, B.W.I. 1842 • Gertrude Atherton
... first. When she arose and began to speak, I felt instantly that she had something to say; something that she felt was important we should hear, and how beautifully, how simply it was said! Not a thought of self, not one instant's hesitation for a thought or a word, yet it was evidently unwritten and not committed to memory. Every eye was drawn to her earnest face; every heart was touched. As she sat down, I rose and left the room rather rapidly; and when my name was called and my fizzling fireworks expected, I was walking up Fifth Avenue, thinking about her and her ...
— Memories and Anecdotes • Kate Sanborn
... there was another loss. He bitterly blamed himself for having written that letter to Sir Thomas Underwood, before he was actually in a position to do as he had proposed. It must all be unwritten now. Every resolution hitherto taken as to his future life must be abandoned. He must begin again, and plan a new life for himself. It had all come upon him so suddenly that he was utterly at a loss ...
— Ralph the Heir • Anthony Trollope
... cold, pedantic, like a poor sermon or a school-master's discourse; now its contents betrayed a childish apprehension, as if Pepita were a monster lying in wait to devour him; now it had other faults not less serious. In fine, after wasting many sheets of paper in the attempt, the letter remained unwritten. ...
— Pepita Ximenez • Juan Valera
... who will say that cats are not in misery when they give vent to those soul-stirring passages from unwritten opera, under the currant bushes, but we cannot but think that they are in the most crushing misery which it would be a charity to put them out of, or they would not chew their words so, and expectorate imaginary tobacco juice, ...
— Peck's Sunshine - Being a Collection of Articles Written for Peck's Sun, - Milwaukee, Wis. - 1882 • George W. Peck
... of mankind is the reverse of the truth. He is a slave, not indeed to a visible master, but to the past, to the spirits of his dead forefathers, who haunt his steps from birth to death, and rule him with a rod of iron. What they did is the pattern of right, the unwritten law to which he yields a blind unquestioning obedience. The least possible scope is thus afforded to superior talent to change old customs for the better. The ablest man is dragged down by the weakest and dullest, who necessarily sets the standard, since he cannot rise, while ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... informed by the numerous agents whom they employed in France. It was under these sad circumstances that the year 1813 closed. We will see in future what were the consequences of it, and in fact the history, until now unwritten, of the Emperor's inner life at Fontainebleau; that is to say, of the most painful period of ...
— The Private Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Constant
... as well upon a black fox?" asked Oo-koo-hoo in surprise, as it is an unwritten law of the country that missionaries are not to carry on ...
— The Drama of the Forests - Romance and Adventure • Arthur Heming
... is that the real drama of daily life of the settlers—the life they knew 24 hours a day—is locked in the unwritten history beneath humus and tangled vegetation of the island. Here a brass thimble from the ruins of a cottage still retains a pellet of paper to keep it on a tiny finger that wore it 300 years ago. A bent halberd ...
— New Discoveries at Jamestown - Site of the First Successful English Settlement in America • John L. Cotter
... remained. The inhabitants grew to be proud of their rosy citadel; it was an unwritten law among them that every new house should adapt itself to this tone. For the rest, there was not much building done after his death, with the exception of a few isolated villas that sprang up, despite his old commands, in the neighbourhood. And the decline in population once more set ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... all. The unwritten law, my friend. I find you insulting my cousin and the hot blood in me boils. I avenge her. Regrettable, of course. Too hasty, perhaps. But—oh well, ...
— The Pirate of Panama - A Tale of the Fight for Buried Treasure • William MacLeod Raine
... unwritten school-book of the wilderness have been gathered together for the children of to-day; both as a slight contribution to the treasures of aboriginal folk-lore, and with the special purpose of adapting them to the demands of the American ...
— Wigwam Evenings - Sioux Folk Tales Retold • Charles Alexander Eastman and Elaine Goodale Eastman
... regulated in the absence of any express stipulation with regard to the matter dealt with by such rules. This is done either by statutory enactment, as by that part (Part VIII.) of the Merchant Shipping Act 1804 which deals with the liability of shipowners; or by established rules of the unwritten law, the "common law'' as it is called, as, for instance, the rule that the common carrier is absolutely responsible for the safe delivery of the goods carried, unless it is prevented by the act of God or the king's ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... sense and intelligence of the people begin to reach from nation to nation. Mr. Beecher's visit is the most notable expression of this movement of national life. It marks the nisus formativus which begins the organization of that unwritten and only half spoken public opinion recognized by Mr. Cobden as a great underlying force even in England. It needs a little republican pollen-dust to cause the evolution of its else barren germs. The ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various
... in all public land as claims. J. G. Whitmore had contented himself with acquiring title to the whole of the Flying U coulee, secure in his belief that the old order of things would not change, in his life-time, at least, and that the unwritten law of the range land, which leaves the vicinity of a ranch to the use of the ranch owner, would never be repealed by new customs imposed by a new class ...
— Flying U Ranch • B. M. Bower
... least one ray of hope to those who complain that, do what they will, they cannot escape having to pay this dangerous tribute. The tendency must sooner or later bear fruit in a generally recognised code of courtship (whether written or unwritten does not much matter), prescribing the precise number and character of the "attentions"—in their adaptation to dancing, croquet-playing, cracker-pulling, and other conventional pretexts for flirtation—which virtually amount to an offer of marriage. This scheme, ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous
... be subject to the shame and abasement of social, legal, and political proscription. The land of his birth proved herself equal to this imperative call of civilized Duty, regardless of customs and the laws, written as well as unwritten, which had doomed to life-long degradation every member of the progeny of Ham. Recognizing in the erewhile bondman a born leader of men, America, with the unflinching directness that has marked her course, whether in good or in evil, responded with spontaneous loyalty to the inspiration of her highest ...
— West Indian Fables by James Anthony Froude Explained by J. J. Thomas • J. J. (John Jacob) Thomas
... article (8) I show that, contrary to an oft expressed opinion, the rate of change in these unwritten tongues is remarkably slow, not ...
— A Record of Study in Aboriginal American Languages • Daniel G. Brinton
... fitting creed without the least shade of diversity. But faith and practice are not to be confused, each is separate from the other; the two may unite or the one may be divorced from the other without the integrity of either being affected: this is the unwritten Hindu code which she and hers had ever held; and now, after years of belief in it, to face round suddenly to its opposite—this was more than she could do. She held, as it were, the Truth in her hand, and turned it round and round and round, but she always ...
— Things as They Are - Mission Work in Southern India • Amy Wilson-Carmichael
... women who hadn't sense enough to pound sand in a rat-hole or breeding enough to display a reasonable amount of skill in the manipulation of a knife and fork. Public opinion! Bah! Deference to a fetish, a shibboleth, to the ancient, unwritten law that one must not do that which hypocrites condemn and cowards fear to do, unless, indeed, one ...
— Kindred of the Dust • Peter B. Kyne
... various races have recognized the debt they owe to her who is the "fashioner" of the child, its "nourisher" and its "nurse." An examination of the etymologies of the words for "mother" in all known languages is obviously impossible, for the last speakers and interpreters of many of the unwritten tongues of the earth are long since dead and gone. How primitive man—the first man of the race—called his mother, we can but surmise. Still, a number of interesting facts are known, and some ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... his stride stiff and springless, but still carrying his weapons and stoically setting the pace as befitted the son of a subchief. He had had no sleep; he had lain in the gates of death; his arm ached cruelly; yet a warm glow shone in his hollow eyes as he reflected on the fact that in all the unwritten history of his people he was the first man to survive the inexorable power of the wurali. As long as he lived this fact would lift him above the level of all his fellows. Even the chief could not boast of ...
— The Pathless Trail • Arthur O. (Arthur Olney) Friel
... undefiled. A still more wonderful gift developed in him when he got home to his native country. Though the tones of Scotch humour were much less refined, and its utterances at that early period could be scarcely more than the jests and unwritten ballads of the populace, yet his early acquaintance with them must have lingered in the young Prince's mind, acquiring additional zest from the prepossessions of exile and the longing for home. And when the polished singer of the King's "Quhair" ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... free? we would willingly answer, but our correspondent cannot expect us to solve problems which are as old as BARNUM said JOYCE HETH was. He should be able to see such things as others see them. They are the unwritten law, and PUNCHINELLO does ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 15, July 9, 1870 • Various
... the prelude to another drama? Was his life to be a series of unwritten plays, of which he was both the hero and the bewildered spectator? Or would it bring him calm, the terrible calm of stagnation, of an inner life finished, ...
— The Avalanche • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... and find out where the children came from, but when she saw Lovey Mary's evident distress and embarrassment, she accepted the statement that they were orphans and that the girl was seeking work in order to take care of herself and the boy. It had come to be an unwritten law in the Cabbage Patch that as few questions as possible should be asked of strangers. People had come there before who could not ...
— Lovey Mary • Alice Hegan Rice
... promptly sent about his business. Her negative would, no doubt, be eager enough even upon this exquisite and charitable morning. Wishing devoutly that, being a gentleman, he had not to conform to an unwritten code of manners, Hindford walked away. And, as he walked, he saw continually the back of the beggar with that black coat of the two hills and the valley between ...
— Tongues of Conscience • Robert Smythe Hichens
... hidden under a fallen tree-top and one day, while the doe was gone, he fell upon the helpless fawn, which, according to the unwritten law of the forest, ...
— Black Bruin - The Biography of a Bear • Clarence Hawkes
... once condemned, was ever permitted to come back. The condemnation was for all time. Furthermore, it was part of the Chief's unwritten code, that no one who transgressed the law could ever make atonement, ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: Adventures on Strange Islands • Roger Thompson Finlay
... remained unspoken, because the unwritten code—the bond 'twixt man and man—tried to still this natural cry of his heart and reason argued that he must hold his peace. His heart rebelled, contending that to remain silent was cowardly—that his first duty was to the woman whom he loved better ...
— The Bronze Eagle - A Story of the Hundred Days • Emmuska Orczy, Baroness Orczy
... (no doubt, said Sadie) because of some lingering suspicion that she might, after all, be an anti-sweat spy, the springs or hinges were mysteriously repaired throughout the department. By law any girl could sit down. By unwritten law she mustn't, yet there were the chairs as good as gold and fresh as paint. They were even pointed out to Win, but in the whirl of things the moment after she forgot their very existence and never had time to remember ...
— Winnie Childs - The Shop Girl • C. N. Williamson
... the preliminaries had been carried on with a due regard for the unwritten but rigid code of underworld etiquette. From neither side had there issued a single unethical word. The detectives had been punctilious to avoid ruffling the sensibilities of any and all. All the same, the prisoner chose of a sudden to ...
— From Place to Place • Irvin S. Cobb
... that he had rarely known outside the walls of prison, even Humpy would be bitter. The thought that he was again among the hunted would depress Mary and Humpy, and he knew that their harshness would be intensified because of his violation of the unwritten law of the underworld in resorting to purse-lifting, an infringement upon a branch of felony despicable and greatly inferior ...
— A Reversible Santa Claus • Meredith Nicholson
... by a whole separate incident which is not in Mark.[2] There is a general tendency in Matt. and Luke to narrate the same facts as Mark in the order of Mark. And therefore it is difficult to think that the original basis of the Synoptic Gospels, whether written or unwritten, did not coincide closely with Mark ...
— The Books of the New Testament • Leighton Pullan
... (Constitution Act); originally, the machinery of the government was set up in the British North America Act of 1867; charter of rights and unwritten customs ...
— The 2001 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... snare the thoughtless rabbit; Break the next-door neighbour's pane; Cultivate the smoker's habit On the not-innocuous cane; Leave the exercise unwritten; Systematically cut Morning school, to plunge the kitten In his bath, ...
— Green Bays. Verses and Parodies • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... up a matchlock, levelled it at the head of the mulatto Pedro, but at that very moment," etc., etc., etc., though I much fear that the remainder of Bob, the Boy Buccaneer of the Bahamas will remain unwritten. ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton
... by custom. You may almost say it's the unwritten law. If you gave the conductor more, he would hand you change. Well, how I reason it out is this way: If five pfennigs is enough for a car conductor, who may carry you three miles, why shouldn't it be enough for the elevator boy, who may carry ...
— A Book of Burlesques • H. L. Mencken
... brain. Here visibly before him he beheld the final link that tied these lost Folk to the other time, the last and breaking thread. What history could this book have told? What vast catastrophes, famines, pestilences, wars, horrors had it passed through? In what unwritten cataclysms, in what anguish and despair and long degeneration had the human mind still clung to ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... always consider Milton's Macbeth the most fascinating poem—certainly, if play it were, the most fascinating play—ever unwritten. But of this any man may be sure; that (since they were both great poets) one made, as the other would have made, a story of far more value to us than Shakespeare or Milton or any man before or after could have made by a strict biography of Macbeth, the man as ...
— Poetry • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... effect; she could not be dispassionate or impartial; his relation to any enterprise was always more important than anything else about it. On some of his missions he took her with him, and then they made it a pleasure excursion; and if they came home late with the material still unwritten, she helped him with his notes, wrote from his dictation, and enabled him to give a fuller report than his rivals. She caught up with amusing aptness the technical terms of the profession, and was voluble about getting in ahead of ...
— A Modern Instance • William Dean Howells
... in the great English public schools—enforced services exacted from the younger lads—which at the time Myles came to Devlen had, in the five or six years it had been in practice, grown to be an absolute though unwritten law of the body—a law supported by all the prestige of long-continued usage. At that time the bachelors numbered but thirteen, yet they exercised over the rest of the sixty-four squires and pages a rule of iron, and were taskmasters, hard, exacting, ...
— Men of Iron • Ernie Howard Pyle
... tried to do to prevent us from getting here. But we got out of the trap you set for us, and we are on the ground first. I recognize your right to make explorations as well as ourselves, and I presume you have not fallen so low that you will not recognize the unwritten law in a case of this kind—the law which says the right of discovery belongs to the one ...
— Tom Swift in the Land of Wonders - or, The Underground Search for the Idol of Gold • Victor Appleton
... his sardonic, evil smile. "The unwritten law works in Arizona as well as in other places." He brutally ordered Lucia to get out of ...
— The Bad Man • Charles Hanson Towne
... held some special kind of passport to admit us, and that we had, somewhat audaciously, come without asking leave into a separate little kingdom of wonder and magic—a kingdom that was reserved for the use of others who had a right to it, with everywhere unwritten warnings to trespassers for those who had the imagination ...
— The Willows • Algernon Blackwood
... and a handful of sailors escaping in the longboat. Then there were the Spanish pieces, which told of the loss of one of the early explorers. All this, of the vessels named, is a matter of history, and is to be found in the SOUTH PACIFIC SAILING DIRECTORY. But that there was other history, unwritten, I was yet to learn. In the meantime I puzzled why six thousand primitive savages let one degenerate ...
— South Sea Tales • Jack London
... universities are the refuge of a myth called "college democracy." But there is no university near a considerable city into which the inheritors of the wealth of that city do not carry all the local social distinctions. Their family rank, their place in the unwritten peerage, determines to which fraternity they shall be elected, and the fraternity determines with whom—men and girls—they shall be intimate. The sons and daughters of Seattle and Tacoma, the scions of old families ...
— Free Air • Sinclair Lewis
... waistband of his trousers. (It is as safe as a bank to hand your money to an Arab chief who has entertained you in his tent. If you have "eaten his salt" he will not betray or rob you. Absolute loyalty to your guest is the unwritten law that no true Arab ...
— The Book of Missionary Heroes • Basil Mathews
... thine eyes— Save but the soul in thine uplifted eyes. I saw but them—they were the world to me. I saw but them—saw only them for hours— Saw only them until the moon went down. What wild heart-histories seemed to lie unwritten Upon those crystalline, celestial spheres! How dark a woe! yet how sublime a hope! How silently serene a sea of pride! How daring an ambition! yet how deep— How fathomless a capacity ...
— Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Poetical Works • Edgar Allan Poe
... life in city and town, to appreciate the enjoyments of the gatherings and merry-makings of the great masses of the people who live in the rural districts of our country. The historian records the deeds of the great; he consigns to fame the favored few; but leaves unwritten the short and simple annals of the poor—the lives ...
— Gov. Bob. Taylor's Tales • Robert L. Taylor
... as they did each other's, but there was no public evidence of partiality. However, if any boy was too rough or took advantage of a girl smaller than himself, he was promptly thrashed by his fellows. There was an unwritten law and public sentiment in that little Academy world that enabled us to study and play together with ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... three hours’ duration. These long stories are mostly founded upon Oriental topics, and in one of them I recognised with some alteration an old friend of the “Arabian Nights.” I inquired as to the source from which the story had been derived, and the crew all agreed that it had been handed down unwritten from Greek to Greek. Their account of the matter does not, perhaps, go very far towards showing the real origin of the tale; but when I afterwards took up the “Arabian Nights,” I became strongly impressed with a notion ...
— Eothen • A. W. Kinglake
... morning ride creates unexecuted cabinet pictures and unwritten sonnets, how delightful 'the find,' 'the run' along brook-intersected vales, up steep hills, through woodlands, parks, and villages, showing you in byways little gothic churches, ivy-covered cottages, and nooks of beauty you never dreamed of, ...
— A New Illustrated Edition of J. S. Rarey's Art of Taming Horses • J. S. Rarey
... after due pressing on the part of host and hostess, the other members of the company advanced upon the piano, either singly or in couples, to bear a hand in the burden of entertainment. Their seeming reluctance had no basis in fact; for it was an unwritten law that every one who could must add his mite; and only those who literally had "not a note of music in them" were exempt. Tilly took a mischievous pleasure in announcing bluntly: "So sorry, my dear, not to be able to do you a tool-de-rool! But ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... not be believed that a marriage can be made, or is made, with any one without due regard being had to the relations and spirit of the family of the bride or groom. The intimate, unwritten history of Sicily and the Sicilians is full of facts that show how between natives of this town and that, of this ward and that, and between the partisans of different factions, marriages cannot, and ought not, and will not, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. July, 1878. • Various
... too much that which would be normal for young men, and the sentiment of these groups of women is silently opposed to admitting that the feminine life has necessities which do not cumber that of man. Thus the unwritten code remains in a measure hostile to the accepted laws ...
— Wear and Tear - or, Hints for the Overworked • Silas Weir Mitchell
... nomadic life there were a few unwritten laws by which our people were governed. There was a council, a police force, and an executive officer, who was not always the chief, but a member of the tribe appointed to this position for a given number of days. There ...
— Indian Boyhood • [AKA Ohiyesa], Charles A. Eastman
... rule. They ran the two miles without a break, except twice, where there were gates to close. Dick, speeding a furlong before, had obligingly left them open; and a stockman is hard pressed indeed—or very drunk—when he fails to close his gates behind him. It is an unwritten ...
— Her Prairie Knight • B.M. Sinclair, AKA B. M. Bower
... belongings once more—half a penknife, a bunch of keys, but not a farthing. Suddenly I dive into my pocket and take the papers out again. It was a mechanical movement, an unconscious nervous twitch. I selected a white unwritten page, and—God knows where I got the notion from—but I made a cornet, closed it carefully, so that it looked as if it were filled with something, and threw it far out on to the pavement. The breeze blew it onward a little, and ...
— Hunger • Knut Hamsun
... actions, is the supreme crime. They represent the moral experience of the race: whosoever denies that experience denies them also, and falls to the level of the beast, or below it. They represent the unwritten law, the traditions of the commune, the duties of all to all: whosoever offends against these, sins against the dead. And, finally, they represent the mystery of the invisible: to Shinto belief, at least, they ...
— Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation • Lafcadio Hearn
... for it that the Homeric poems were handed down unwritten for several centuries. Well; I can imagine the Aoidoi and Citharaoidoi and the rest learning poems from the verbal instruction of other Aoidoi and Citharaoidoi, and so preserving them from generation to generation to generation. But I cannot imagine, ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... lore holds the people in awe, a few may be found who, although rejecting that part of the tradition which is evidently but the fruit of a fertile imagination, or of religious fanaticism, recognize in these legends the preservation of a still unwritten history, to whose identification with facts the ruins of many a Moslem building of rare architectural ...
— Tales from the Lands of Nuts and Grapes - Spanish and Portuguese Folklore • Charles Sellers and Others
... learner to read the common type in one-fourth of the time necessary according to the usual mode of instruction. That its acquisition leads the pupil to the correct pronunciation of every word. That it will present to the missionary a superior alphabet for the representation of hitherto unwritten languages," &c. A similar committee, to whom the question was referred by the House of Representatives in 1852, state that during the past year the system had been tried in twelve public schools, and that, according to the testimony of the teachers, children evinced greater ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... come before a wife, of course—that's an unwritten law. [She sits by table, takes up tobacco ...
— Plays: Comrades; Facing Death; Pariah; Easter • August Strindberg
... their old camp on the river to look after some smuggling there. One afternoon, while they were riding through a dense mesquite flat, they came upon a patch of open hog-wallow prairie. There they rode upon the scene of an unwritten tragedy. ...
— Sixes and Sevens • O. Henry
... unwritten. Perhaps she had not yet "absorbed" the "local color"; perhaps inspiration was tardy. At all events she had not written a word. But she was beginning to realize the possibilities; deep in her soul something was moving that would presently flow from ...
— The Two-Gun Man • Charles Alden Seltzer |
