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Unknowing   /ənnˈoʊɪŋ/   Listen
Unknowing

adjective
1.
Unaware because of a lack of relevant information or knowledge.  Synonyms: ignorant, unknowledgeable, unwitting.  "An unknowledgeable assistant" , "His rudeness was unwitting"






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Unknowing" Quotes from Famous Books



... than he by nearly two years the nature of her education made her more childish at least in the knowledge and expression of feeling; she received his warm protestations with innocence, and returned them unknowing of what they meant. She had read no novels and associated only with her younger sisters, what could she know of the difference between love and friendship? And when the development of her understanding disclosed the true nature of this intercourse to ...
— Mathilda • Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

... the ability of life to thank you: He never gave commandment for their death. But since, so jump upon this bloody question, You from the Polack wars, and you from England, Are here arriv'd, give order that these bodies High on a stage be placed to the view; And let me speak to the yet unknowing world How these things came about: so shall you hear Of carnal, bloody and unnatural acts; Of accidental judgments, casual slaughters; Of deaths put on by cunning and forc'd cause; And, in this upshot, ...
— Hamlet, Prince of Denmark • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]

... leans forward. His eyes are eloquent; his tongue alone refrains from finishing the declaration that he had begun. To the girl beside him, however, ignorant of subterfuge, unknowing of the wiles that run in and out of society like a thread, his words sound sweet—the sweeter for the very hesitation ...
— April's Lady - A Novel • Margaret Wolfe Hungerford

... regardless that he is on the wide—wide sea—whose billows may so soon be lashed up to madness;—where may I find a resemblance more close, than my Acme's simplicity, which guides her through a troubled world, unknowing its treacheries, and happily ignorant of its ...
— A Love Story • A Bushman

... And that ought to be our desire, our prayer and our intent, night and day, that the fire of His love kindle our hearts, and the sweetness of His grace be our comfort and our solace in weal and woe. Thou hast now heard a part how the fiend deceives, with his subtle craft, unknowing men and women. And if thou wilt do by good counsel and follow holy teaching, as I hope that thou wilt, thou shall destroy his traps, and burn in love's fire all the bands that he would bind thee with; and all his malice shall turn thee ...
— The Form of Perfect Living and Other Prose Treatises • Richard Rolle of Hampole

... with Wauchope on Sunday evening to that Service for Men. He used to say that if you traced it back far enough, poor old Wauchope was at the bottom of it. It was poor old Wauchope who had "rushed" him for the Service (in calling him poor old Wauchope, he recognized him as the unknowing and unwilling thing of Destiny). Thus it had its root and rise in the extraordinary state ...
— The Combined Maze • May Sinclair

... every incident, looking out over the sea, she descries an indistinct object floating in the water. At first she was in doubt what it was, but by degrees the waves bore it nearer, and it was plainly the body of a man. Though unknowing of whom, yet, as it was of some shipwrecked one, she was deeply moved, and gave it her tears, saying, "Alas! unhappy one, and unhappy, if such there be, thy wife!" Borne by the waves, it came nearer. As she more and more nearly views it, she trembles more and more. ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch

... the doctor came to the final conclusion that it was a case of typhoid, and pronounced Mr Clinton very ill. He was indeed; he lay for days, between life and death, on his back, looking at people with dull, unknowing eyes, clutching feebly at the bed-clothes. And for hours he would mutter strange things to himself so quietly that one could not hear. But at last Dame Nature and the Scotch doctor conquered the microbes, ...
— Orientations • William Somerset Maugham

... every Belgian man a hero and the unknowing convinced that a citizen soldiery at Liege—defended by the Belgian standing army—had rushed from their homes with rifles and beaten German infantry, it is right to repeat that the schipperke spirit was not universal, ...
— My Year of the War • Frederick Palmer

... and said to her, "Leave me;" but she was instant with him to come and eat. Accordingly, he came forward and ate a little; then, rising, he threw himself on his bed and lay musing till break of morn; and on this wise he abode all next day. His mother was perplexed at his case, unknowing what had befallen him, and bethought herself that belike he was sick; so she came up to him and questioned him, saying, "O my son, an thou feel aught of pain or otherwhat, tell me, that I may go fetch thee a physician, more by token there is presently in the city a physician from the ...
— Alaeddin and the Enchanted Lamp • John Payne

... atmosphere using, At random glancing, each as I notice absorbing, Swiftly on, but a little while alighting, Curious enveloped messages delivering, Sparkles hot, seed ethereal, down in the dirt dropping, Myself unknowing, my commission obeying, to question it never daring, To ages, and ages yet, the growth of the seed leaving, To troops out of me rising—they the tasks I have set promulging, To women certain whispers of myself bequeathing—their affection me more clearly explaining, To young men my problems offering—no ...
— Poems By Walt Whitman • Walt Whitman

... be sure, the wonder-stricken youth, Holden in doubt if this were lies or truth, Was tongue-tied with amaze, and sore perplext, Unknowing what strange thing might chance him next, And ere he found fit words to make reply, The porter bade a youth who stood hard by Conduct the princely stranger, as was meet, Through the great golden gate into the street, And thence o'er all ...
— The Poems of William Watson • William Watson

... Scott Peck, when he stepped up to the log-house that served for the guides, unknowing what awaited him, for the messenger had not found him at home, but left word he was to come to Bartlett's for something, and the first thing he saw ...
— The Wit of Women - Fourth Edition • Kate Sanborn

... chose This lonely wild, this desert plain, This silent witness of the woes Which he, though guiltless, must sustain. Unknowing why these pains he bears, He groans, he raves, and he despairs. With lingering fires Love racks my soul: In vain I grieve, in vain lament; Like tortured fiends I weep, I howl, And burn, yet never can repent. Distant, though present in idea, I mourn ...
— Wit and Wisdom of Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

... and too unknowing to speculate on the loss of her beauty, which would have brought her competency once—if sold in the right market. As she lay in her little attic bed, she was still sullenly thinking, wearily thinking of her life. She thought of a poor old horse which Sim had bought ...
— Other Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland

... spoke, the anchorite's son soared up the glowing heaven afar, In air his heavenly body shone, while stood he in his gorgeous car. But they, of that lost boy so dear the last ablution meetly made, Thus spoke to me that holy seer, with folded hands above his head. 'Albeit by thy unknowing dart my blameless boy untimely fell, A curse I lay upon thy heart, whose fearful pain I know too well. As sorrowing for my son I bow, and yield up my unwilling breath, So, sorrowing for thy son shalt thou at life's last ...
— National Epics • Kate Milner Rabb

... "Recollections." The second opens with a description of his wretched dwelling, and the scanty support gained by labour and begging, shared by nine persons: his grandfather's wallet, from which he had so often received a piece of bread, unknowing how it had been obtained, now hung a sad memorial of his hard life, and told the story of his trials, when he went round to his former friends, from farm to farm, in the hope of filling it for a starving family. At last, one day, the ambitious mother entered ...
— Barn and the Pyrenees - A Legendary Tour to the Country of Henri Quatre • Louisa Stuart Costello

... hold in thought that nightly here His phantom may draw down to the water's brim, And hers come up to meet it, as a dim Lone shine upon the heaving hydrosphere, And mariners wonder as they traverse near, Unknowing ...
— Satires of Circumstance, Lyrics and Reveries, with - Miscellaneous Pieces • Thomas Hardy

... universe. "God! God! God!" he said. "What have we done, what has this poor thing done, that we are so sore beset? Is there fate amongst us still, send down from the pagan world of old, that such things must be, and in such way? This poor mother, all unknowing, and all for the best as she think, does such thing as lose her daughter body and soul, and we must not tell her, we must not even warn her, or she die, then both die. Oh, how we are beset! How are all the powers of the devils ...
— Dracula • Bram Stoker

... had loved him madly, all unknowing her own passion, not presuming even to look up in his beautiful face, thinking of him only as the slave of her sister, and in dead secrecy knowing strange things—strange things! And when she had seen the letter she had known the handwriting, and the beating ...
— A Lady of Quality • Frances Hodgson Burnett

... paving pebble in the street, And towns and towers their fatal periods meet: So rivers, rapid once, now naked lie, Forsaken of their springs and leave their channels dry: So man, at first a drop, dilates with heat; Then form'd the little heart begins to beat; Secret he feeds, unknowing in the cell; At length, for hatching ripe, he breaks the shell, And struggles into breath, and cries for aid; Then helpless in his mother's lap is laid. He creeps, he walks, and, issuing into man, Grudges their life, from whence his own began; Retchless of laws, affects to ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various

... instant. The water was up to his waist. He plunged deeper recklessly. With a cry of rage he struck at the serpent with the bird, and struck and struck again, blindly, still giving utterance to that odd sound, and with the fury of a young demon. The woman had reached the bank and stood, unknowing what to do, shrieking in maternal terror, while across the clearing a man was running. And then a fierce chance blow, delivered with all the strength of the maddened boy, alighted fairly, just below the head of ...
— A Man and a Woman • Stanley Waterloo

... and nerves, nor need he elaborately calculate the distance of the object by measuring the angle made by the optic axes; he wills to take hold of the thing he wants, and the apparatus of his body obeys his will though he does not even know of its existence. So is it with the man who prays, unknowing of the creative force of his thought, of the living creature he has sent out to do his bidding. He acts as unconsciously as the child, and like the child grasps what he wants. In both cases God is equally the primal Agent, all power being from Him; in both cases the actual work is done by the ...
— Esoteric Christianity, or The Lesser Mysteries • Annie Besant

... outgrown but unsublimated, and check the movement towards life's spiritualization, then—whatever they may be—they belong to the body of death, not to the body of life, and are "sin." "Call sin a lump—none other thing than thyself," says "The Cloud of Unknowing."[67] Capitulation to it is often brought about by mere slackness, or, as religion would say, by the mortal sin of sloth; which Julian of Norwich declares to be one of the two most deadly sicknesses of the soul. ...
— The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day • Evelyn Underhill

... through copses planted by his fathers, through towns built for his use. Posterity is no more; fame, and ambition, and love, are words void of meaning; even as the cattle that grazes in the field, do thou, O deserted one, lie down at evening-tide, unknowing of the past, careless of the future, for from such fond ignorance alone ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley

... down the daughter's beauteous cheeks Ran drops like the plenteous summer rain. "I hear, my father, Yet, hard thy words weigh on my heart; Thou gav'st me to him, while we lay, Unknowing the pledge, in our willow cage(3), When first we opened our eyes on the world, And saw the bright and twinkling stars, And the dazzling sun, and the moon alive(4), And the fields bespread with blooming flowers, And we breath'd the balmy winds of spring; ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 1 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones

... Ah, but sing for whom The walls shut in; and even as eyes that fade, The windows take no heed of light nor shade,— The leaves are lost in mutterings of the loom. Sing near! So in that golden overflowing They may forget their wasted human bloom; Pay the devouring days their all, unknowing.— Reck not of life's ...
— The Singing Man • Josephine Preston Peabody

... sympathy. Being aloof from others, such a mind is unlike others; and it feels, and sometimes it feels bitterly, its own unlikeness. Generally, however, it is too wrapped up in its own exalted thoughts to be sensible of the pain of moral isolation; it stands apart from others, unknowing and unknown. It is deprived of moral experience in two ways,—it is not tempted itself, and it does not comprehend the temptations of others. And this defect of moral experience is almost certain to produce two effects, ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various

... of the City, E.C.—a straggling street of flat-faced warehouses and printing-works; high, impassive walls; gaunt, sombre, and dumb; not one sound or spark of life to be heard or seen anywhere. Yet that is what the unknowing think of when they think ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke

... practical and scientific treatise of great beauty on the spiritual life.[66] An interesting group of writings are the five little treatises, almost certainly by one author (c. 1350-1400), to be found in Harleian 674, and other MSS. Their names are The Cloud of Unknowing, The Epistle of Prayer, The Epistle of Discretion, The Treatise of Discerning Spirits, and The Epistle of Privy Counsel. We find here for the first time in English the influence and spirit of Dionysius, ...
— Mysticism in English Literature • Caroline F. E. Spurgeon

... wholesome mind? What? Did I fall in some god's snare? —Nurse, veil my head again, and blind Mine eyes.—There is a tear behind That lash.—Oh, I am sick with shame! Aye, but it hath a sting, To come to reason; yet the name Of madness is an awful thing.— Could I but die in one swift flame Unthinking, unknowing! ...
— Hippolytus/The Bacchae • Euripides

... books. Also, a gentleman might carry flowers, or a basket of fruit, or, in fact, any package that looks tempting. He might even stagger under bags and suitcases, or a small trunk—but carry a "bundle"? Not twice! And yet, many an unknowing woman, sometimes a very young and pretty one, too, has asked a relative, a neighbor, or an admirer, to carry something suggestive of a pillow, done up in crinkled paper and odd lengths of joined string. Then she wonders afterwards in unenlightened ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post

... with his parable, so tender, so ingenious, so powerful. And the quick flash of generous indignation, which showed how noble the man was after all, with which he responded to the picture, unknowing that it was a picture of his own dastardly conduct, led on to the solemn words in which Nathan tore away the veil; and with a threefold lever, if I may so say, overthrew the toppling structure of ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... as the poor hunted fox, when his last chance—and sole one—is, by winding and doubling, to run under the earth; to know that it would be an ungrateful imposture to take chair at the board—at the hearth, of the man who, unknowing your secret, says, 'Friend, be social'; accepting not a crust that one does not pay for, lest one feel a swindler to the kind fellow-creature whose equal we must not be!—all this—all this, Sophy, did at times chafe ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... rose in him. Poor child—poor, young, unknowing creature, that, after all, was only twenty-two! She felt it, then, the strange mist that seemed to muffle his words and actions, to hold him back. And she ...
— The Courting Of Lady Jane • Josephine Daskam

... ourselves entitled to draw from the words of Paul, when fairly interpreted in the light of the past religious history of the world, is, that the Athenians were a religious people; that is, they were, however unknowing, believers in and worshippers of the One ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker

... help it: here I stand, there he; To one of them I cannot say— Go, and on yonder water play. Nor one poor ragged daisy can I fashion— I do not make the words of this my limping passion. If I should say: Now I will think a thought, Lo! I must wait, unknowing, What thought in me is growing, Until the thing to birth is brought; Nor know I then what next will come From out the gulf of silence dumb. I am the door the thing did find To pass into the general mind; I cannot say ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald

... came, to let go of other reading matter, they explained to their husbands or fathers that The Ladies' Home Journal was a necessity—they did not feel that they could do without it. The very quality for which the magazine had been held up to ridicule by the unknowing and unthinking had become, with hundreds of thousands of women, its source of power and the ...
— A Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward Bok

... in every look he has bestowed upon you, every word he has uttered in your hearing during all these four horrible weeks, has been weaving a cord for your neck—thinks you the assassin of your uncle, unknowing that a man stood at your side ready to sweep half the world from your path if that same white hand rose in ...
— The Leavenworth Case • Anna Katharine Green

... Tristram's side did passingly well, and held them truly together. Then Sir Arthur and Sir Launcelot took their horses and dressed them, and gat into the thickest of the press. And there Sir Tristram unknowing smote down King Arthur, and then Sir Launcelot would have rescued him, but there were so many upon Sir Launcelot that they pulled him down from his horse. And then the King of Ireland and the King of Scots with their knights did their pain to ...
— Le Morte D'Arthur, Volume II (of II) - King Arthur and of his Noble Knights of the Round Table • Thomas Malory

... swirl of mist, too soon they fly For my poor wits to capture them again. O sonnet unattained! For other men So easy to attain, but it is I Who struggle, and for me all goes awry,— My efforts fond go unrequited then. "Why, surely it is but a trifle, this," They cry amazed, in sweet unknowing bliss. A trifle, yes, for Shelley or for Blake, They had not many extra marks at stake; I toil in vain toward a retarding goal,— I fear the poet's part is not ...
— The 1926 Tatler • Various

... honourably, even beyond our expectations, the whole city believing we had perished on the ocean, as indeed all the rest of our companions did, through the presumptuous folly of our commander. I now remain in Lisbon, unknowing what may be the intentions of his majesty respecting me, though I am now desirous of resting myself after my ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. III. • Robert Kerr

... would not have come to the Grove alone, or, coming alone, he would have availed himself of his position in the consul's family, and made provision against wandering idly about, unknowing and unknown; he would have had all the points of interest in mind, and gone to them under guidance, as in the despatch of business; or, wishing to squander days of leisure in the beautiful place, he would have had in hand a letter to the master of it all, whoever he might ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace

... midst of slaughter. It is sweet and glorious to die for one's country; death even pursues the man that flies from him; nor does he spare the trembling knees of effeminate youth, nor the coward back. Virtue, unknowing of base repulse, shines with immaculate honors; nor does she assume nor lay aside the ensigns of her dignity, at the veering of the popular air. Virtue, throwing open heaven to those who deserve not to die, directs her progress through paths of ...
— The Works of Horace • Horace

... had a job." Miss Araminta sat up at once and wiped her eyes and left, unknowing, a streak of white down a pink cheek that turned purple at the word "job." "He has been unfortunate in not being able to retain certain positions he has once held, but ...
— Kitty Canary • Kate Langley Bosher

... never looks up those stairs, but passes by them, dimly lit as they are, as though they had never been built; and Desmond, unknowing of this, goes sadly into the dancing-room, ostensibly in search of Kelly, but with his mind so full of his cross little love that he does not see him, although he is within a yard ...
— Rossmoyne • Unknown

... is that the greatest art in the Woman's Business is using youth. It is no easy matter. Youth is a terrible force, confident, selfish, unknowing. Rarely has it real courage, real interest in aught but itself. It has all to learn, but it is youth, the most beautiful and hopeful thing in life. And it is the thing upon which the full development of life for a woman depends. She must have it always at her side, if she is to know her own full ...
— The Business of Being a Woman • Ida M. Tarbell

... Sometimes on one, sometimes on another, the flickering light would glare more fiercely. Sometimes it was the good Shereef that seemed the foremost, as he sat with venerable beard the image of manly piety—unknowing of all geography, unknowing where he was or whither he might go, but trusting in the goodness of God and the clinching power of fate and the good star of the Englishman. Sometimes, like marble, the classic ...
— Eothen • A. W. Kinglake

... Let him always suppose himself master, while you really are master. No subjection is so perfect as that which retains the appearance of liberty; for thus the will itself is made captive. Is not the helpless, unknowing child at your mercy? Do you not, so far as he is concerned, control everything around him? Have you not power to influence him as you please? Are not his work, his play, his pleasure, his pain, in your hands, whether he knows it ...
— Emile - or, Concerning Education; Extracts • Jean Jacques Rousseau

... dance with, Esther, and when his final testimony was given and he returned to his station, and not until then, Esther Dade discovered that life had little interest or joy without him; but Field rode back unknowing, and met at Frayne, before Esther Dade's return, a girl who had come almost unheralded, making the journey over the Medicine Bow from Rock Springs on the Union Pacific in the comfortable carriage of old Bill Hay, the post trader, escorted by that redoubtable woman, Mrs. Bill ...
— A Daughter of the Sioux - A Tale of the Indian frontier • Charles King

... a darkness, passionate, electric, for ever haunting the back of the common day, never in the light. In the light, he seemed to sleep, unknowing. Only she knew him when the darkness set him free, and he could see with his gold-glowing eyes his intention and his desires in the dark. Then she was in a spell, then she answered his harsh, penetrating call with a soft leap of her soul, the darkness woke up, electric, ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence

... fellows in, just to see if old D—' had anything." Verinder is a book-collector. "By the way, do you know Sammy Dawkins? You may call him the Boy when you make his better acquaintance and can forgive him for having chosen to go to Cambridge. Thebes did his green, unknowing youth engage, and—as the Oxford Magazine gloomily prophesied—he bowls out Athens in his later age." The Boy laughed cheerfully and blushed. I felt a natural awe in holding out an exceedingly dusty ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... came o'er his face, that was stranger than any look I had e'er seen on th' face of man or of woman, and his eyes were no more bright and eager, but deep and soft. Then she turned and went direct towards him unknowing. ...
— A Brother To Dragons and Other Old-time Tales • Amelie Rives

... Holmes's books, I am very sensible of this disenchanting effect of time and experience. "The Professor at the Breakfast Table" and the novels came into my hands when I was very young, in "green, unknowing youth." They seemed extraordinary, new, fantasies of wisdom and wit; the reflections were such as surprised me by their depth, the illustrations dazzled by their novelty and brilliance. Probably they will still be as fortunate with young readers, and I am to be pitied, I hope, rather ...
— Adventures among Books • Andrew Lang

... have brought the end about. But to Gwen it seemed speculative and uncertain, and to point to no more than a possible return to London of the mother, accompanied by her unknown and unknowing daughter. A curious vision flashed across her mind of Ruth Thrale, entertained at Sapps by old Mrs. Picture; and there, by the window, the table with the new leg; and, in the drawer of it ... what? A letter written five-and-forty years ago, ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan

... wonderment, that it was strange he should feel no more compassion for the object stretched out here, dumb, dead, bruised, and bloody, which so short a space since he had seen full of life and interest, animated by a genial courtesy and graced with learning and subtle insight; now so unknowing, so unlettered, so blind! Whither went this ethereal investiture of life?—for it was not mere being; one might exist hardily enough without it. Did the darkness close over it, too, or was it not the germ of the soul, the budding of that wider knowledge and finer aspiration to flower hereafter in ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock

... my loves and me, (Aurelius!) craving modesty. That (if in mind didst ever long To win aught chaste unknowing wrong) Then guard my boy in purest way. 5 From folk I say not: naught affray The crowds wont here and there to run Through street-squares, busied every one; But thee I dread nor less thy penis Fair or foul, ...
— The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus • Caius Valerius Catullus

... success. At last our ignorance shall be done away; and we shall "apprehend" the real and the eternal, as we apprehend the sunshine when the sky is free from cloud. Therefore "Smite upon that thick cloud of unknowing with a sharp dart of longing love"— and suddenly it shall part, ...
— Practical Mysticism - A Little Book for Normal People • Evelyn Underhill

... a world, and has its own inhabitants; each is distinct from, and almost unconscious of the existence of any other. There are some few people well to do, who remember to have heard it said, that numbers of men and women - thousands, they think it was - get up in London every day, unknowing where to lay their heads at night; and that there are quarters of the town where misery and famine always are. They don't believe it quite, - there may be some truth in it, but it is exaggerated, of course. So, each of these thousand worlds goes ...
— Master Humphrey's Clock • Charles Dickens

... an act that does not bear the close scrutiny of the unknowing mob. And I do not wonder at the fierce hate that sprang up in the breast of Rossetti when a hounding penny-a-liner in London sought to picture the stealthy, ghoul-like digging in a grave at midnight, ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard

... hers, Which colored all his objects;—he had ceased To live with himself: she was his life, The ocean to the river of his thoughts, Which terminated all; upon a tone, A touch of hers, his blood would ebb and flow, And his cheek change tempestuously;—his heart Unknowing of its cause of agony. But she in these fond feelings had no share: Her sighs were not for him; to her he was Even as a brother,—but no more; 'twas much, For brotherless she was, save in the name Her infant friendship had bestowed on him; Herself the solitary ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various

... came to him, saying, "My brother, by what law or title occupy you this tree?" "Dear brother," quoth he, "I occupy it by this title: my father gave me all that is under the earth, and above of the said tree, by reason thereof the tree is mine." "Unknowing to thee," quoth the second brother, "he gave unto me all that is great and small of the said tree, and therefore I have as great right in the tree as you." This hearing, the third son he came to them and ...
— Mediaeval Tales • Various

... Unknowing of the tidings in reserve for him, the Bishop was on his voyage, following the usual course; hearing at Anaiteum that a frightful mortality had prevailed in many of these southern islands. Measles had been imported by a trader, and had, in many cases, brought on dysentery, ...
— Life of John Coleridge Patteson • Charlotte M. Yonge

... to step up to the door when hurrying feet came towards us. I pulled mademoiselle back into the deepest shadow, and as I did so two dark figures appeared, and halted before the door. Like us, all unknowing we were so near, they stopped too, listening to the hymn, and after a little one of ...
— Orrain - A Romance • S. Levett-Yeats

... I passed her in the open street, Following the vocal line of chanting priests, Clad in rough serge, and with her soft bare feet Wooing the ruthless flints; the gaping crowd Unknowing whom they held, did thrust and jostle Her tender limbs; she saw me as she passed— And blushed and veiled her face, ...
— The Saint's Tragedy • Charles Kingsley

... breakfast, nothing was uttered, by prudent people, but awkward sentences about the weather—the wind—and the likelihood of there being a mail from the continent. Still through all this, regardless and unknowing of it all, the Rosamunda talked on, happily abstracted, egotistically secured from the pains of sympathy or of curiosity by the all-sufficient power of vanity. Even her patron, Lord Glistonbury, was at last provoked and ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. V - Tales of a Fashionable Life • Maria Edgeworth

... going, at all times. A few miles had taken him into country over which he had already driven, and his memory for any place he had once seen was phenomenal. So he had been able, by constant turning and doubling, to fool the driver of the enemy's car completely, and lead him, all unknowing the fate in store for him, into the very midst ...
— The Boy Scout Automobilists - or, Jack Danby in the Woods • Robert Maitland

... tell me," he said, in more humane tones, "how you came to do it. I would like to understand, and I can't, for the life of me. You must have had some reason. DID I do anything, unknowing—" ...
— Sisters • Ada Cambridge

... out of the dreams of childhood, that careless come and go, The boy gains strength, unknowing, that the ...
— Dreams and Dust • Don Marquis

... Matelgar the Thane and these friends of his might well have laughed away all these foolishnesses, rather than hoard them up to bring before this solemn council. This, too, I hold for injustice, that one should be kept in ward till his trial, unknowing of all that is against him, unhelped by the counsel of any freeman, and unable to send word to those who should stand by him at his trial. Indeed, this thing must be righted, I tell you, before ...
— A Thane of Wessex • Charles W. Whistler

... them from the kitchen door, as brightly, as furtively, as excitedly as two birds in a secret thicket. The host paid without remarks what seemed to the Applebys an enormous bill, a dollar and sixty cents, and rambled out to the car, still unknowing that two happy people wanted to follow him with their blessings. This history is unable to give any further data regarding him; when his car went round the bend he disappeared from the fortunes of the Applebys, ...
— The Innocents - A Story for Lovers • Sinclair Lewis

... feeling, perhaps, as acutely the grief, have given up in despair the search. But he kept on; and at the end of the fifth year, so far from desisting, he chartered a schooner and passed eighteen months in a fruitless search, calling at little-known islands, and once, unknowing, at an island only three hundred miles away from the tiny ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole

... is as the imperishable monument of those tragic centuries that we rightly look upon Ravenna: before the empire was founded she was already famous. It was from her silence that Caesar emerged to cross the Rubicon and all unknowing to found what, when all is said, was the most beneficent, as it was the most universal, government that Europe has ever known. In the first years of that government Ravenna became, and through the four hundred ...
— Ravenna, A Study • Edward Hutton

... and Rupert living, although unconsciously, in the shadow all their lives of just this crime, breathing the air of it, and breathing it too with the other air of love and affection—that they had thus, all unknowing, been ...
— The Prelude to Adventure • Hugh Walpole

... have been as signs to our jaded spirits that we were nearly at the end of our penance, but discipline had seared over our souls, and we rode on unknowing. ...
— The Mountains • Stewart Edward White

... that, my darling," she prayed in piteous entreaty, "don't do that. For I will share all your trouble, do share it even now, beforehand, foreseeing it, while you still lie smiling unknowing of your own distress. I shall live through it many times, by day and night, while you live through it only once. And so you must be forbearing towards me, my dear one, when ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet

... world sits at the feet of Christ, Unknowing, blind, and unconsoled; It yet shall touch His garment's fold, And feel the heavenly Alchemist Transform its ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier

... bonny, and no more inclined to break his heart about his mother's departure than any other healthy, happy child under like circumstances. Indeed, it may be doubted whether a healthy, happy child, unknowing whence its beatitudes spring, does not in its deepest, most vital moment regard all grown-up people as necessary nuisances. No one came so delightfully near being another child as Mildred; but Tims was a capital playfellow ...
— The Invader - A Novel • Margaret L. Woods

... aside at Tim; his rifle was flung forward. Then I looked quickly back at the man, who had already dropped from his horse, and seemed scarcely able to stand. Was this true, had he ridden here unknowing whom he would meet, with no other thought but to save his life? Heaven knows he looked the part—his swarthy face dirtied, with a stain of blood on one cheek, his shirt ripped into rags, bare-headed, and with a ...
— The Devil's Own - A Romance of the Black Hawk War • Randall Parrish

... to weep Like Thracian wives of yore, Save when in rapture still and deep Her thankful heart runs o'er. They mourned to trust their treasure on the main, Sure of the storm, unknowing of their guide: Welcome to her the peril and the pain, For well she knows the bonus where they may ...
— The Christian Year • Rev. John Keble

... icily in a perpetual cinematograph show of excited, uneasy travellers; to watch huge steamers, sliding in and out all day and all night like railway trucks, unknowing and unsought by a single soul aboard; to talk five or six tongues indifferently, but to have no country—no interest in any earth except one reservation in ...
— Letters of Travel (1892-1913) • Rudyard Kipling

... loveliness, Who flittest in the mirth of the wild folk, Profferest greeting in the faces of flowers, Blowest in the firmamental glory, Renewest in the heart of the sad human All faiths, guard thou the innocent spirit Into whose unknowing hands this noontide Thou pourest treasure, yet scarce recognised, That unashamed before man's glib wisdom, Unabashed beneath the wrath of chance, She accept in simplicity of homage The hidden holiness, the created emblem To be in her, until death shall take her, ...
— Georgian Poetry 1918-19 • Various

... In either case, as long as she was in New York she was personally safe; and as her disclosures had been restricted to very few persons, she might have withdrawn from the public institution, and in privacy have passed away her life, "alike unknowing and unknown." Lunacy itself could only have instigated a woman situated as she was, to visit Montreal, and there defy the power, and malice, and fury of the Roman Priests, and their myrmidons; by accumulating upon ...
— Awful Disclosures - Containing, Also, Many Incidents Never before Published • Maria Monk

... my rosebud. Partly, it is that he is disappointed that she is not like her mother; he had made up his mind to another Lucy, and her Williams face took him by surprise, and, partly, he is not a man to adapt himself to a child. She must be trained to help unobtrusively in his occupations; the unknowing little plaything her mother was, she never can be. I am afraid he will never adapt himself to English life again—his soul seems to be in his mines, and if as you say he is happy and valued there—though it is folly to look ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge

... for right as they have for wrong, "rich" (I wish you could have heard the full way in which he said that word) "rich" on "thirty dollars a year for clothes," spending self without stint, joyfully, unknowing of self-pity, for the making of right into might, for the making of a patch of human weeds into a garden of goodness. Only, I would put on record the fact that each man's reward was not the hero's crown of laurel leaves, but the crown that their great ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut

... Whilst I in darkness in the self-same place, Get not one glance to recompense my merit? So doth the plowman gaze the wand'ring star, And only rest contented with the light, That never learned what constellations are, Beyond the bent of his unknowing sight. O why should beauty, custom to obey, To their gross sense apply herself so ill! Would God I were as ignorant as they, When I am made unhappy by my skill, Only compelled on this poor good to boast! Heavens are not kind to them ...
— Elizabethan Sonnet Cycles - Idea, by Michael Drayton; Fidessa, by Bartholomew Griffin; Chloris, by William Smith • Michael Drayton, Bartholomew Griffin, and William Smith

... less learned Thebans than these—Thebes, by the way, was Dryden's irreverent name for Cambridge, the nursing mother of "his green unknowing youth," when that "renegade" was recreant enough to compliment Oxford at her expense as the chosen Athens of "his riper age"—the likelihood is only too evident that the sole text we possess of Macbeth has not been interpolated but mutilated. ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne

... tumultuous murmur of wings Grew through the hall; And I knew the white undying Fire, And, through open portals, Gyre on gyre, Archangels and angels, adoring, bowing, And a Face unshaded . . . Till the light faded; And they were but fools again, fools unknowing, Still ...
— The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke • Rupert Brooke

... scale, no gift remains to gain, Yet I act here! and, if I acted not— Earnest and watchful—those that look to me For guidance, sinking back to sloth again Because I slumbered, would decline from good, And I should break earth's order and commit Her offspring unto ruin, Bharata! Even as the unknowing toil, wedded to sense, So let the enlightened toil, sense-freed, but set To bring the world deliverance, and its bliss; Not sowing in those simple, busy hearts Seed of despair. Yea! let each play his part In all he finds to do, with unyoked soul. All things are everywhere ...
— The Bhagavad-Gita • Sir Edwin Arnold

... If manly breast is ever stirred By wrong done to a helpless bird, To them for quick redress I cry." Moved by the tale, and drawing nigh, On alder branch thou didst espy How, sitting lonely and forlorn, His breast was pressed upon a thorn, Unknowing that he leant thereon; Then bidding him take heart again, Thou rannest down into the lane To seek the doer of this wrong, Nor under hedgerow hunted long, When, sturdy, rude, and sun-embrowned, A child thy earnest seeking found. ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 1 July 1848 • Various

... said he, "of murder-spinners Who toil their brains out for their dinners, Though base, too long unsung has lain By kindred brethren of Duck Lane, Unknowing that its little plan Holds all the ...
— Aesop, in Rhyme - Old Friends in a New Dress • Marmaduke Park

... it!" said Orloff, laughing. "It will be a pleasant task to enlighten this little unknowing one as to her own feelings. And I flatter myself I understand ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach

... they contribute to the general lethargy. In order to save the feelings of the family, a death from consumption is reported as bronchitis or pneumonia. The man is buried quietly. The premises are not disinfected, as they should be, and perhaps some unknowing victim moves into that germ-reeking atmosphere, as into a pitfall. Let me give an instance. A clergyman in a New York city told me of a death from consumption in his parish. The family had moved away, and the following week a young married ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. XXXI, No. 3, July 1908. • Various

... sooner did we come upon Saxon ground at the frontier town of Kothen, than we spun along over the sandy waste with a rapidity which reminded one of a trip on an English railway. It was already dark when the train reached Leipsic, and in the drizzling rain I wandered round the city ditch and rampart, unknowing where to find a lodging. At length, directed by a stranger to a trade herberge in the Kleine Kirche Hof, after some demur on account of my not belonging to the proper craft, I was admitted to a sort of out-house, paved with red bricks, and allowed a bed for the night. On the morrow I presented ...
— A Tramp's Wallet - stored by an English goldsmith during his wanderings in Germany and France • William Duthie

... you will be undone for the sake of virtue, blindly, and like a fool, unknowing the consequences, I, Mary of Aragon and England, will make alliance with thee, knowing that the alliance is dangerous. And, since it is more valiant to go to a doom knowingly than blindfold, so I do show myself more valiant than thou. For well I know—since ...
— The Fifth Queen Crowned • Ford Madox Ford

... that hand raised to stem the traffic at a congested corner on the Monday night! Into what a vortex of crime and passion had it not pointed, all unknowing! ...
— Number Seventeen • Louis Tracy

... not this weak, unknowing hand Presume thy bolts to throw, Or deal damnation round the land On ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen

... sae mony changefu' years, On earth I am a stranger grown: I wander in the ways of men, Alike unknowing, and unknown: Unheard, unpitied, unreliev'd, I bear alane my lade o' care, For silent, low, on beds of dust, Lie a' hat would my ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns

... had gone my way, Tara of Helium. I shudder to think how close was the chance at that. But for the momentary shining of the sun upon the emblazoned device on the prow of your craft, I had passed on unknowing." ...
— The Chessmen of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... Unknowing that the hesitation held a half-escaped confidence, Betty did not wait for her to go on, but held up the check, saying, "You know this is a partnership story, and you are to get another trip to New York out of it. Putting your shilling in the Christmas offering ...
— The Little Colonel's Chum: Mary Ware • Annie Fellows Johnston

... referring to Byron as "the most celebrated Englishman of the nineteenth century." Nor have we now; but in the interval between 1840-1870, it was the fashion to talk of him as a sentimentalist, a romancer, a shallow wit, a nine days' wonder, a poet for "green unknowing youth." It was a reaction, such as leads us to disestablish the heroes of our crude imaginations till we learn that to admire nothing is as sure a sign of immaturity ...
— Byron • John Nichol

... who lived across the square—a man of no wit indeed, but, at any rate, one of means and of generosity, too, as they had lately found out—means and generosity, they understood, that were made possible by the unknowing assistance of his master. In a word it was believed among Mr. Topcliffe's men that all the refreshment which they had lately enjoyed, beyond that provided by their master, was at old Mr. Biddell's expense, though he did not know it, and that George Beaton, fool though ...
— Come Rack! Come Rope! • Robert Hugh Benson

... gleam of dawn, the modest castle where her careless childhood had glided on; there were the verdant lawns, the rippling brook, the little chamber, the scenes of her happy play. She saw herself gathering flowers and planting them, unknowing why they wilted and would not grow, despite her constancy in watering them. Next, she saw confusedly the vast town and the vast house blackened by age, to which her mother took her when she was seven years old. Her lively memory showed her the old gray heads of the masters who taught ...
— The Hated Son • Honore de Balzac

... Unknowing as Mr Harding was in the ways of London, he felt that he had somehow selected an ineligible dining-house, and that he had better leave it. It was hardly five o'clock;—how was he to pass the time till ten? Five miserable hours! He was already tired, ...
— The Warden • Anthony Trollope

... the sealing-wax was unbroken. The secret had outlived the king, and he had gone to his death unknowing. All at once—I cannot tell why—I put my hand over my eyes; I found my eyelashes ...
— Rupert of Hentzau - From The Memoirs of Fritz Von Tarlenheim: The Sequel to - The Prisoner of Zenda • Anthony Hope

... single catspaw was all that the Eternal Painter had to offer over that basin shut in between the long, jagged teeth of the ranges biting into the steel-blue of the sky. The savage, merciless hours of the desert day approached; the hours of reckoning for unknowing and unprepared travellers. ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer

... Those who go to work so pedantically will assuredly come to grief along with the music. It were best if a good composer, who understands the stage, and is himself able to suggest something, and a clever poet could be united in one, like a phoenix. Again, one must not fear the applause of the unknowing." ...
— Mozart: The Man and the Artist, as Revealed in his own Words • Friedrich Kerst and Henry Edward Krehbiel

... yells and shouts from the far side, and we knew that the work had begun, and ran up the hillside. Then fled a man in chain mail out of the place, leaping over the earthworks straight at us, unknowing. ...
— King Olaf's Kinsman - A Story of the Last Saxon Struggle against the Danes in - the Days of Ironside and Cnut • Charles Whistler

... thus laboring to produce his offering should be eager to excel his neighbor, and to win the greatest appreciation from the all-unknowing little pilgrim for his own particular toy or trinket, was a natural outcome of the Christmas spirit actuating the manoeuvres. And all the things they could give would have to be made, since there was not a shop in a radius of a hundred miles where baubles for youngsters could be purchased, ...
— Bruvver Jim's Baby • Philip Verrill Mighels

... arrived, In the sea of sense I dived; But what is land, or what is wave, To me who only jewel crave? Love's the air-fed fire intense, My heart is the frankincense; As the rich aloes flames, I glow, Yet the censer cannot know. I'm all-knowing, yet unknowing; Stand not, pause not, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 6, April, 1858 • Various

... have come into dreamland; into the lotus-eater's paradise; into the land where it is always afternoon. I am released from care; I am unknown, unknowing; I live in a house whose arrangements seem to me strange, old, and dreamy. In the heart of a great city I am as still as if in a convent; in the burning heats of summer our rooms are shadowy and cool as a cave. My time ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe

... needle in the haystack was no more hopeless a quest than that he had set out on, and the spectacle of their innocence in the woodland soothed him like a psalm in a cathedral as he stood to watch. Unknowing of his presence there, they ran and played upon the grass, their lips stained with the berry-juice, their pillow-slips of nuts gathered beneath a bush of whin. They laughed, and chanted merry rhymes: a gaiety their humble clothing lent them touched ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro

... in his rich voice—"We are midges in a sunbeam,—emmets on a sand- hill...no more! Is there a next world, thinkest thou, for the bees who die of surfeit in the nilica-cups?—for the whirling drift of brilliant butterflies that sleepily float with the wind unknowing whither, till met by the icy blast of the north, they fall like broken and colorless leaves in the dust of the high-road? Is there a next world for this?"—and he took from a tall vase near at hand a delicate flower, lily-shaped and deliciously odorous, . . "The ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli

... Approves his counsel, and ascends the car: The steeds he left, their trusty servants hold; Eurymedon, and Sthenelus the bold: The reverend charioteer directs the course, And strains his aged arm to lash the horse. Hector they face; unknowing how to fear, Fierce he drove on; Tydides whirl'd his spear. The spear with erring haste mistook its way, But plunged in Eniopeus' bosom lay. His opening hand in death forsakes the rein; The steeds fly back: he falls, and spurns the plain. Great Hector sorrows for his servant kill'd, ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer

... manner as this hope disappears, the power of song is taken away, and taken away utterly. "When the Christian falls back out of the bright hope of the Resurrection, even the Orpheus song is forbidden him. Not to have known the hope is blameless: one may sing, unknowing, as the swan, or Philomela. But to have known and fall away from it, and to declare that the human wishes, which are summed in that one—"Thy kingdom come"—are vain! The Fates ordain there shall be no singing ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin

... Cause was put out into the world, and, old or young, sick or sound, knowing or unknowing, who can rein in the effect of that Cause? Does the Wheel hang still if a child spin it—or a drunkard? Chela, this is a great ...
— Kim • Rudyard Kipling

... was; in beauty an embodied lord of love: And ofttimes Nala praised they all other chiefs above In Damayanti's hearing; and oftentimes to him, With worship and with wonder, her beauty they would limn; So that, unmet, unknowing, unseen, in each for each A tender thought of longing grew up from seed of speech; And love (thou son of Kunti!) those gentle hearts did reach. Thus Nala—hardly bearing in his heart Such longing—wandered in his ...
— Hindu Literature • Epiphanius Wilson

... escaped both pursuit and insult by the velocity of her own motion. She called aloud upon Delvile as she flew to the end of the street. No Delvile was there!—she turned the corner; yet saw nothing of him; she still went on, though unknowing whither, the distraction of her mind every instant growing greater, from the inflammation of fatigue, heat, and disappointment. She was spoken to repeatedly; she was even caught once or twice by her riding habit; but she forced herself along by her own vehement rapidity, not hearing ...
— Cecilia vol. 3 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)

... study giving abrupt and sudden turnings to our dreaming. Christmas was near, and I was easily persuaded to see more of a people, shut in as they were from the noise and commotion of the lower world, and still not so far as to be unknowing of all that was taking place, whether in deliberative bodies, state policies, or the lighter ...
— Scenes in Switzerland • American Tract Society

... Till each succeeding morning saw me rise With cheerful song, and heart for ever light; No heavy gems—no jewel, sparkling bright, Cumbered the tresses nature's self had twined; Nor festive torches glared before my sight; Unknowing and unknown, with peaceful mind, Blest in the lot I knew, none ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 13 Issue 364 - 4 Apr 1829 • Various



Words linked to "Unknowing" :   uninformed, ignorance



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