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Insuperable   Listen
adjective
Insuperable  adj.  Incapable of being passed over or surmounted; insurmountable; as, insuperable difficulties. "And middle natures, how they long to join, Yet never pass the insuperable line?" "The difficulty is enhanced, or is... insuperable."
Synonyms: Impassable; insurmountable; unconquerable.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Insuperable" Quotes from Famous Books



... improved the time consumed in the foregoing colloquy, and was already near the river bank. On he sped, bent on making good his escape with the money he had dishonestly acquired. One doubt was in his mind. Should he find a boat? If not, the river would prove an insuperable obstacle, and he would be compelled to turn and change the direction of his flight. Looking over his shoulder he saw Robert and the farmer on his track, and he clutched his gun ...
— Brave and Bold • Horatio Alger, Jr.

... case of what, at one time, was, with quite as much sympathetic affection as contempt, popularly called "the poor old Cambrian." There were times when the difficulties which faced its constructors appeared to be absolutely insuperable. What with the enormous weight of its cradle, measured in gold, and the continual quarrels of its nurses, the undertaking was well nigh strangled at birth. Even when the line was actually opened for traffic a burden of financial difficulty rested ...
— The Story of the Cambrian - A Biography of a Railway • C. P. Gasquoine

... there would not have been the same insuperable difficulty, a sovereign lady holding high military office as a matter of course; but we have thrown aside some noble traditions, and America never has a ...
— A Military Genius - Life of Anna Ella Carroll of Maryland • Sarah Ellen Blackwell

... Hospitalers, the Templars, and the Teutonic Knights, into one great order, purposing at the same time to engage the Emperor and the kings of Christendom to lay aside all their quarrels, and combine their forces for the recovery once for all of the Holy Land. Difficulties without number, which proved insuperable, prevented the realization of this scheme. Among these was the objection raised by the Teutonic Knights, that while the Hospitalers and Templars had but one object in view—the recovery of Palestine, their order had to ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume VI. • Various

... beneficent purpose lies in wait for us. We cannot bandy words with nature, or deal with her as we deal with persons. If we measure our individual forces against hers, we may easily feel as if we were the sport of an insuperable destiny. But if, instead of identifying ourselves with the work, we feel that the soul of the workman streams through us, we shall find the peace of the morning dwelling first in our hearts, and the fathomless powers of gravity and chemistry, and, over them, of life preexisting within us in ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson

... disappointed passion. You too shall know, what it is to love without hope! I daily expect orders for restoring Agnes to her Parents. Immediately upon her arrival in Spain, She will take the veil, and place an insuperable barrier to your union. You may spare your supplications.' She continued, perceiving me on the point of speaking; 'My resolution is fixed and immoveable. Your Mistress shall remain a close Prisoner in her chamber till She exchanges this Castle for the Cloister. ...
— The Monk; a romance • M. G. Lewis

... curiosity was presently diverted into a new channel by Olla, who suddenly demanded to know my name. I accordingly repeated it, and she endeavoured several times to pronounce it after me, but without success. The 'th' seemed to constitute an insuperable difficulty, which, however, she finally evaded, by softening 'Arthur' into 'Artua,' and this, singularly enough, was what Rokoa had always been in the habit of calling me. He and Barton were now called upon for their names, and in return, we were favoured ...
— The Island Home • Richard Archer

... the children were so also at their birth, but they had been manumitted by their father. One of them was being educated in Germany; and it was intended that both should spend their lives in that country, the taint in their blood being an insuperable bar to their ever acquiring ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various

... lines of route actually do exist, it becomes a matter of much interest and importance to determine the most favourable point from which to explore them. My own experience has pointed out the dreadful nature of the southern coast, and the very great and almost insuperable difficulties that beset the traveller at the very commencement—in his efforts even to establish a single depot from which to enter upon his researches. The northern coast may, probably, afford greater facilities, but in a tropical climate, ...
— Journals Of Expeditions Of Discovery Into Central • Edward John Eyre

... civilisation and thought has impressed this amazing idea on the general mind. It is no matter-of-course conception. The difficulties attending it were long insuperable to the deepest thought as well as to popular belief; and the triumph of the modern and Christian idea of God is the result not merely of the eager forwardness of faith, but of the patient and inquiring waiting ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church

... unfortunately is often the case, the difficulty of maintaining one's serenity seems insuperable, the battle can often be won by "living one day at a time." Almost any one in ordinary conditions of adversity has it within his or her power, for merely one day or at any rate one hour, or one minute, ...
— How to Live - Rules for Healthful Living Based on Modern Science • Irving Fisher and Eugene Fisk

... Trinity as this there are insuperable objections, from grounds of reason as well as of Scripture. For God is the Supreme Being, the Most High; and how can there be three Supreme Beings, three Most High Gods? Again: God is the First ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke

... insuperable even to the iron will of Anicza. It was a test even she could not submit to. She stamped her foot with rage and uttered again and again the word Dracu, which in Roumanian means nothing less than his highness ...
— The Poor Plutocrats • Maurus Jokai

... mentioned by name in the dynastic histories of China, was inclined to regard worship of ancestors more as a civil than a religious rite. He probably foresaw, as indeed time has shown, that ancestral worship would prove to be an insuperable obstacle to many inquirers, if they were called upon to discard it once and for all; at the same time, he must have known that an invocation to spirits, coupled with the hope of obtaining some benefit therefrom, is worship pure and simple, and cannot be ...
— China and the Manchus • Herbert A. Giles

... hearing I was opposed to slave-dealing, it could not be done, as he and all the merchants were obliged to deal in slaves. Indeed, the obstacle of English merchants joining the Tripoline is at present insuperable, on account of the slave traffic; if they could unite in one firm, it would be equally ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson

... gradually causes it to turn yellow. By using redistilled bisulphide this defect may be avoided. (2) Another defect is the evil odour of the solvent. This, however, is less with redistilled bisulphide than with the ordinary quality, and with suitable apparatus is not insuperable. (3) Another defect is the volatility and inflammability of carbon bisulphide. On the other hand, bisulphide possesses the very great advantage of being at once heavier than, and insoluble in, water, and it can be, therefore, stored under water very much ...
— The Dyeing of Woollen Fabrics • Franklin Beech

... temperament he acquiesced in the inevitable as if it were positively advantageous. He saw his way to render as excellent service to the State under King James as he was rendering now. He was conscious of the obstacles in his path; he was unconscious that they were insuperable. He knew he had been always ranked as of the anti-Scottish party. He knew the specific meaning James would put upon his resistance to the formal declaration of a successor. His antagonism to Essex, he was aware, had created a strong repulsion against him in the King's mind. ...
— Sir Walter Ralegh - A Biography • William Stebbing

... said sufficient? If this letter gives you half the pain on reading it that I have felt in writing it, you will be satisfied at last that the obstacles to our union are permanent and insuperable. The time is come when I am forced to tell you the secrets which I have never before revealed to any human soul. You know them now. They are in your ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine

... overcome. He knew them again; they were difficult to get started, but once started could hardly be stopped again. If his idea got proper hold of these men with their huge organizations and firm discipline, it would be insuperable. He entered with heart and soul into the agitation, and gave a lecture every week in ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo

... tumble-down buildings, overtopped by factory chimneys, whilst in the foreground, amidst the snow, he set a girl and a ragged street rough devouring stolen apples. His obstinacy in painting from nature greatly complicated his work, and gave rise to almost insuperable difficulties. However, he finished this picture out of doors; he merely cleaned and touched it up a bit in his studio. When the canvas was placed beneath the wan daylight of the glazed roof, he himself was startled by its brutality. It showed like ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola

... thought as an example, that the restraints upon the sex were insuperable only to those who think them so, or who noisily strive to break them. She had taken a course of her own, and no man stood in her way. Many of her acts had been unusual, but excited no uproar. Few helped, ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli

... Unionist is not really passionately attached to the Union. He has no insuperable antipathy to Home Rule. Indeed, I think most Unionists would welcome any change in our existing system of government if it were not that they have the most profound and deeply rooted objection to the men whom McNeice describes as "those fellows," ...
— The Red Hand of Ulster • George A. Birmingham

... polyarchic commercialism, the other with his demagogic violence—had possibly a useful part to play at the present stage of things. He, however, could have no place in that camp. Too indiscreetly he had hoisted his standard of idealism, and by stubborn resistance of insuperable forces he had merely brought forward the least satisfactory elements of his own character. 'Hold on!' cried Malkin. 'Fight the grovellers to the end!' But Earwaker had begun to see himself in a light of ridicule. There was just time to ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing

... prosperous country like Canada, to steady and industrious men like the young Morrisons, the impediments were not insuperable, nor, indeed, did ...
— Janet McLaren - The Faithful Nurse • W.H.G. Kingston

... to the conclusion that difficulties well-nigh insuperable lay between me and the safe possession of the beautiful little vessel. She lay in a most un-get-at-able position at the further end of the hold, stowed in so confined and narrow a space that it was impossible to think of fitting the parts together there. At the same ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V3 • Charles H. Sylvester

... same manner from a mirror. Accordingly, Newton perceived that if he could construct a telescope the action of which depended upon reflection, instead of upon refraction, the difficulty which had hitherto proved an insuperable obstacle to the improvement of the instrument ...
— Great Astronomers • R. S. Ball

... his sentences are so brief, and leave so much for the student to read between the lines, that in order to be understood and appreciated the author must be read over and over again, lest the reader miss the point of some of his most excellent thoughts. Such an author presents grave, if not insuperable, difficulties to the translator, but notwithstanding this fact, the following pages cannot but impress the reader ...
— The Germany and the Agricola of Tacitus • Tacitus

... whole matter is simple enough, and the necessary measures to be taken to remedy it are no less simple—barring sentimental objections which will probably prove insuperable. A monarchy, even a sufficiently inane monarchy, carries the burden of a gentlemanly governmental establishment—a government by and for the kept classes; such a government will unavoidably direct the affairs of state with a view to ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen

... what success attended the efforts of Dr. Wheelock to communicate the gospel to the Indian nations, it may be replied that he accomplished something for their benefit, and that great and insuperable obstacles in the providence of God prevented him from accomplishing more. It was soon after he sent out missionaries into the wilderness, that the controversy with Great Britain blighted his fair and encouraging prospects. During the last four years of his life there was actual war, ...
— The History of Dartmouth College • Baxter Perry Smith

... tested. The tasks often became well-nigh insuperable. There were moments when dogs and Indians lay beaten in the midst of their labours, without will, without energy to stir another yard. It was at such times that despair knocked at the strong heart of the man who had never learned to yield, and who ...
— The Heart of Unaga • Ridgwell Cullum

... limited friendship with the sea-gentry. How much remains to be done may be gathered from the fact that we can as yet keep no deep-sea Merrows in aquaria, only shore-dwellers will live with us, and not all of these. And so insuperable, as yet, are the difficulties of transport, that "distinguished ...
— Brothers of Pity and Other Tales of Beasts and Men • Juliana Horatia Gatty Ewing

... of the same regions, prove that some portions of it were, for longer or shorter periods, invaded by the sea; but any break of continuity was probably not prolonged; for Mr. Wallace's investigations in the Eastern Archipelago have shown how narrow a sea may offer an insuperable barrier to the migration of land animals. In Palaeozoic times this land must have been connected with Australia, and in Tertiary times with Malayana, since the Malayan forms with African alliances are in several cases distinct from those of India. We know as yet too little of the geology ...
— The Story of Atlantis and the Lost Lemuria • W. Scott-Elliot

... those high works In yielding up attachment, and all fruit Produced by works. This is My judgment, Prince! This My insuperable ...
— The Bhagavad-Gita • Sir Edwin Arnold

... the heart of his heart. Of the style a foreigner may not speak. But those who are proper judges maintain that in simplicity and lucidity, vigour, and power, softness, elevation, and eloquence, the style of Machiavelli is 'divine,' and remains, as that of Dante among the poets, unchallenged and insuperable among ...
— Machiavelli, Volume I - The Art of War; and The Prince • Niccolo Machiavelli

... the hidden wireless in the mountains at the Elk City storage reservoir, where there were no other wireless plants to distract them and no houses to conceal the apparatus. The obstacles now before them appeared almost insuperable. ...
— The Secret Wireless - or, The Spy Hunt of the Camp Brady Patrol • Lewis E. Theiss

... carefully, we shall see that he has rendered it virtually impossible that his wishes can be carried out. He desires to be buried in a certain place and makes Godfrey responsible for his being so buried. But he gives Godfrey no power or authority to carry out the provision, and places insuperable obstacles in his way. For until Godfrey is an executor, he has no power or authority to carry out the provisions: and until the provisions are carried out, he ...
— The Vanishing Man • R. Austin Freeman

... reduce the phenomena of the universe to a grand central unity, including the labors of Anaxagoras, Aristotle, Giordano Bruno, Descartes, and Sir Isaac Newton. The problem, as he conclusively shows, still remains to be solved. The present imperfect state of physical science offers insuperable obstacles to a speedy solution. New substances and new forces are constantly brought to light, nor can we escape from the conviction that no observation or analysis has yet exhausted the number of impelling, producing, and formative ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various

... my wife it is my will and desire, that all the slaves which I hold in my own right shall receive their freedom—To emancipate them during her life, would tho earnestly wished by me, be attended with such insuperable difficulties, on account of their intermixture by marriages with the Dower negroes as to excite the most painful sensations—if not disagreeable consequences from the latter while both descriptions are in the occupancy of the same proprietor, it not being in my power under tenure by which the ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various

... progress was now checked for long by a constitutional and insuperable aversion to angling with worm. If the gardener, or a pretty girl-cousin of the mature age of fourteen, would put the worm on, I did not "much mind" fishing with it. Dost thou remember, fair lady of the ringlets? Still, I never liked bait-fishing, ...
— Angling Sketches • Andrew Lang

... consists in the excessive accumulation of liquid in the ventricles of the brain so that the cranial cavity is enlarged and constitutes a great, projecting, rounded mass occupying the space from the eyes upward. (See Plate XIII, fig. 3.) With an anterior presentation (fore feet and nose) this presents an insuperable obstacle to progress, as the diseased cranium is too large to enter the pelvis at the same time with the fore arms. With a posterior presentation (hind feet) all goes well until the body and shoulders have passed out, when progress is suddenly arrested by the great bulk of the head. In the first ...
— Special Report on Diseases of the Horse • United States Department of Agriculture

... that the strikingly different temperaments and abilities of the two men were most clearly revealed. Seaton strode up and down the room, puffing great volumes of smoke from his hot and reeking briar, suggesting methods and ideas, his keen mind finding the way over, around, or through the apparently insuperable obstacles which beset their path. Crane, seated calmly at the drafting-table, occasionally inhaling a mouthful of smoke from one of his specially-made cigarettes, mercilessly tore Seaton's suggestions to shreds—pointing out their weaknesses, proving his points ...
— The Skylark of Space • Edward Elmer Smith and Lee Hawkins Garby

... as his love and faith in his father. And perhaps nothing will tend to lift the whole subject of paternity in the popular mind to the plane where it belongs, as will this love and knowledge, when it is bred in the child from his early years. Many difficulties in handling this subject that become insuperable might never even exist if the knowledge of fatherhood, if love and respect for it and for the father as the giver of life, were bred into the boy at an early age. Moreover a certain shyness, which often makes it more difficult for fathers to talk to their sons on these matters ...
— The Renewal of Life; How and When to Tell the Story to the Young • Margaret Warner Morley

... cajole him, but without reference, and devoid of all business relations or acquaintance in Paris, it was at best a questionable expedient, and I probably would have had a take-down. But the accident at Marquise came and smoothed the apparently insuperable difficulties in my way. But I have found that something unusual does come to help a man on his way to the devil when he is anxious to get there, which he is pretty sure to do, if he is only diligent and careful to ...
— Bidwell's Travels, from Wall Street to London Prison - Fifteen Years in Solitude • Austin Biron Bidwell

... after some weeks, during which he remained unapproached, and at the end of which he came to a belated perception of the insuperable barrier between the elect and the undesirable, and of his own identity with the latter class, he decided he must fall back upon his friends for what they might be worth. He had undergone many snubs in his efforts to thrust himself upon fine gentlemen in taverns, coffee-houses, and gaming-places. ...
— Philip Winwood • Robert Neilson Stephens

... still have no doubt that the lady herself is a well-conducted and amiable young person, who would not disgrace our family, but were she ten times more desirable as a daughter-in-law than I can allow myself to hope, your joint poverty is an insuperable objection to your marriage. I have four other children besides yourself, and my expenses do not permit me to save money. This year they have been especially heavy, indeed I have had to purchase two not inconsiderable pieces of land which happened to come into the market ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler

... France to dictate terms which England could not accept without degradation, or refuse without aggravating the existing grounds of hostility. Circumstances might arise—such as a change in the Government—to obviate the former difficulty; but the latter was insuperable. It would have been inconsistent with the principles upon which the war was undertaken to have proposed or submitted to any conditions which France, exulting over her recent successes, could have been expected to approve; ...
— Memoirs of the Court and Cabinets of George the Third, Volume 2 (of 2) - From the Original Family Documents • The Duke of Buckingham

... and others which I shall have occasion to mention in another place, are by no means such as to raise that insuperable obstacle which many suppose. They may all be overcome by resolution and perseverance. As regards merely the use of unpremeditated language, it is far from being a difficult attainment. A writer, whose opportunities of observation give weight to his opinion, ...
— Hints on Extemporaneous Preaching • Henry Ware

... is. I do not say that there might not be insuperable obstacles; but I believe we ought to know whether you are still indifferent ...
— Dynevor Terrace (Vol. I) - or, The Clue of Life • Charlotte M. Yonge

... the world. As soon as amended roads admitted of more rapid movement from place to place, the vocation of the highway robber was at first rendered difficult, and in the end impossible to exercise on the greater thoroughfares. Fast horse-coaches were the first obstacle. Railways have became an insuperable impediment to "life on ...
— Old Roads and New Roads • William Bodham Donne

... you, I will; and if not, I will account to you as I best may for my inability.' But in order to put this question into any terms, one had first of all to face the difficulty just spoken of—to me for the present insuperable,—the difficulty of knowing whether to address one's audience as believing, or not believing, in any other world than this. For if you address any average modern English company as believing in an Eternal life, and endeavour to draw any conclusions, from this assumed belief, ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin

... we learnt in Chapter II., is a short cylinder rounded at the bottom. It is formed of compact white satin, an insuperable barrier. It opens into a round orifice wherein is bedded a lid of the same material, through which the feeble beasties would be incapable of passing. It is not a porous felt, but a fabric as tough as that of the sack. Then by what ...
— The Life of the Spider • J. Henri Fabre

... very little way, despite his ambition, because in every branch of letters imperfect education is an insuperable obstacle. Still he could become news-editor, descriptive reporter, paragraph writer, and even, in the case of country papers, editor. Sometimes he passed from the office of the journal to that of one of the many societies, where he became secretary and ...
— As We Are and As We May Be • Sir Walter Besant

... further proof of the utter impossibility of peace except under a common government, and at once an illustration of the import of what has just been stated, and the suggestion of a new and insuperable difficulty, let it be remembered that this great mountain region, throughout its general course, is more loyal to the Union than any other portion of the slave States. It is the mountain counties of Maryland that have held ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I., No. IV., April, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... of the doors. The house-door might possibly be negotiated, though at the probable cost of arousing the notice of Beaumaroy—and of the old blighter himself. But the door from the parlor into the Tower offered insuperable difficulties. It was always locked; the lock was intricate; he had never so much as seen the key at close quarters and, even had opportunity offered, was quite unpractised in the art of taking impressions of locks—a thing not done with accuracy ...
— The Secret of the Tower • Hope, Anthony

... theory that the ministry of Jesus extended over but little more than one year is beset, however, by difficulties that seem insuperable. The first is presented by the three Passovers distinctly mentioned in the Gospel of John (ii. 13; vi. 4; xii. 1). The last of these is plainly identical with the one named in the other gospels. The second gives the time of year for the feeding of the five thousand, ...
— The Life of Jesus of Nazareth • Rush Rhees

... the difficulties suggested in the memorial, respecting the different Particular Synods to which the brethren belong, and the delays of carrying out a system of appellate jurisdiction covering America and China, it is enough to say:—(1) That the Presbyterian Church (O.S.) finds no insuperable difficulties in carrying into operation her system which comprehends Presbyteries and Synods in India as well as here; and (2) That whatever hindrances may at any time arise, this body will, in humble reliance upon the divine aid and ...
— History and Ecclesiastical Relations of the Churches of the Presbyterial Order at Amoy, China • J. V. N. Talmage

... strategy has not neglected the important task of rendering all possible aid to China. Despite almost insuperable difficulties, we increased this aid during 1944. At present our aid to China must be accomplished by air transport—there is no other way. By the end of 1944, the Air Transport Command was carrying into China ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various

... the answer, unless it were merely a significant exclamation of belief. "You wouldn't stand upon the chances of change though," resumed Bulchester, "I know you well enough. But, according to you, there's the insuperable obstacle." ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2 • Various

... settled to strike down into the plain, where we could gallop for a considerable distance, and then, keeping by the borders of a long lake, return towards our own home. Gerald, who knew the way well, said there were no insuperable difficulties to overcome, though we might have to swim a stream or two. "But that," as he observed, "is nothing when one is accustomed to it; and you, Barry, will have many a river to cross and many a marsh to wade through, as well as mountains to climb, and hundreds of miles to gallop over ...
— The Young Llanero - A Story of War and Wild Life in Venezuela • W.H.G. Kingston

... of every proud spirit, and turns even the sweets of life to ashes in the mouth, had him in bitter bondage. He lashed himself with it, reminding himself constantly of his origin and his environment, and magnifying these into insuperable barriers which would for ever stand blankly in his way. Although common-sense told him that there was no other course open to Gladys than to accept the kindness offered her by the lawyer and his wife, and though in his inmost better heart he did not doubt her, it pleased his harder mood ...
— The Guinea Stamp - A Tale of Modern Glasgow • Annie S. Swan

... train the tale of the Englishman who came face to face with such a crisis. Having removed most of his garments, he came to that point where the ingenuity of human nature seemed to fail. He pondered it. The matter seemed insuperable. And he began to wonder if.... He put his head through his curtains and shouted along the crowded—and mixed—green corridor ...
— Westward with the Prince of Wales • W. Douglas Newton

... enforce the reasons of the theologian; and as he opposed the orthodox faith of Nice, it is readily confessed that his incapacity and ignorance were equal to his presumption. [93] The eunuchs, the women, and the bishops, who governed the vain and feeble mind of the emperor, had inspired him with an insuperable dislike to the Homoousion; but his timid conscience was alarmed by the impiety of Aetius. The guilt of that atheist was aggravated by the suspicious favor of the unfortunate Gallus; and even the death of the Imperial ministers, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon

... that you would have thus returned any service I may have rendered you. I have been wrong, I confess, to permit the intimacy which has existed between you and all the members of my family; but I tell you at once that I have an insuperable objection to any one of my daughters marrying a man whose family is unknown to me. For yourself I shall always entertain the truest regard, and I must beg you to receive this answer as final. Though Mrs Leslie and I shall regret the loss ...
— The Loss of the Royal George • W.H.G. Kingston

... attempting the direct passage of the Frozen Strait; though, I confess, not without some apprehension of the risk I was incurring, and of the serious loss of time which, in case of failure either from the non-existence of the strait or from the insuperable obstacles which its name implies, would thus be inevitably occasioned ...
— Three Voyages for the Discovery of a Northwest Passage from the • Sir William Edward Parry

... officers composing the council, one and all declared to be impracticable, owing to the want of provisions, the surrender of the surrounding forts, and the insuperable difficulties of the road at the present season." The new treaty was therefore, forthwith accepted. The demand of the chiefs, that married officers with their families should be left as hostages, was successfully resisted. Captains Drummond, Walsh, Warburton, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXVIII. February, 1843. Vol. LIII. • Various

... ground that the three thick volumes of her reminiscences made a further portrait needless, and I reflected, though I did not say, that the difficulties of presenting the evanescent charm and petulant wit of Lady Dorothy were insuperable. I partly think so still, but your command has lingered in my memory all these months, and I have determined to attempt to obey you, although what I send you can be no "portrait," but a few leaves torn out ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse

... supposed that these were the summits of submarine volcanoes on which the coral had grown. But as the reef-making coral does not live at greater depths than about twenty-five fathoms, the immense number of these reefs formed an almost insuperable objection to this theory. The Laccadives and Maldives for instance—meaning literally the "lac of or 100,000 islands," and the "thousand islands"—are a series of such atolls, and it was impossible to imagine so great ...
— The Beauties of Nature - and the Wonders of the World We Live In • Sir John Lubbock

... and the aims and ends of development, were self-caused, is surely a much more difficult task. It is the existence of such a variety, it is the existence of a uniform tendency to produce certain though multitudinous results, that makes the insuperable difficulty of supposing matter always developing (towards certain ends) to ...
— Creation and Its Records • B.H. Baden-Powell

... as he should have pleased them, built as he was, and wealthy. Shyness was the reason; shyness, not his beard. Women exercised an invincible attraction for him, and at the same time inspired him with an insuperable fear. He feared them as much as he loved them. This was the origin and initial cause of all his misfortunes. Seeing a lady for the first time, he would have died rather than speak to her, and however much ...
— The Seven Wives Of Bluebeard - 1920 • Anatole France

... and creditable description. Although a residence in Canada is infinitely preferable to slavery in America, yet the climate of that country is uncongenial to the constitutions of the fugitive slaves, and their lack of education is an almost insuperable barrier to their social progress. The latter evil Mr. Brown attempted to remedy by the establishment of a Manual Labour School ...
— Three Years in Europe - Places I Have Seen and People I Have Met • William Wells Brown

... cook always puts an onion in the tin with a joint," I said tentatively, for I was not very hopeful. I know that there is always some insuperable objection to anything not consecrated ...
— Home Life in Germany • Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick

... of both. They were of an old aristocracy, with but two ambitions, the military and the political, and while they prayed for complete success in the end, they wanted another great triumph on the field of battle. Gettysburg, that insuperable bar, was behind them, casting its gloomy memory over the year between; but this might take its place, atoning for it, wiping it out. But there was doubt and fear in the heart of each; this was a new general that the North had, ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler

... grievance under which the Romans groan. The few articles that are landed on their coast have to encounter tedious and almost insuperable delays before they can find their way to the capital. This is owing to the wretched state of the communication, which is kept purposely wretched in order to isolate Rome and the Romans from the rest of the world. That Church likes to sit apart ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie

... capable of. But to Dorothy it would have given a yet keener pain, had she not begun to learn that neither must the excesses of individuals be attributed to their party, nor those of his party taken as embodying the mind of every one who belongs to it. At the same time the old insuperable difficulty returned; how could Richard belong to such ...
— St. George and St. Michael • George MacDonald

... Erie Canal and the Public Works of Pennsylvania. But discouragements in plenty frustrated the plan. The cost was believed to be excessive and the engineering difficulties were said to be almost insuperable. George Bernard, a French engineer, was of the opinion that the high elevations and scarcity of water along the route would prevent such a canal from having much practical value. For these reasons Baltimore believed that its position as a center for the rapidly developing Western trade was ...
— The Railroad Builders - A Chronicle of the Welding of the States, Volume 38 in The - Chronicles of America Series • John Moody

... kneeled to Dawes, and it gave him a subtle pleasure. But the distance between them was still very great—too great. It frightened the man. It almost pleased the woman. She liked to feel she was serving him across an insuperable distance. ...
— Sons and Lovers • David Herbert Lawrence

... before this deception. The crystal that separated the water from the atmosphere had the density of millions of leagues,—an insuperable obstacle interposed between two worlds that do ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez

... this reason, you will find yourselves obliged to deny also the existence of many fundamental properties of natural objects (such as fundamental forces), which you can just as little comprehend; and even the possibility of so simple a conception as that of change must present to you insuperable difficulties. For if experience did not teach you that it was real, you never could conceive a priori the possibility of this ceaseless sequence of ...
— The Critique of Pure Reason • Immanuel Kant

... '47, it was clear that free emigration was essential to his plan when he proposed to resume it in '48. The funds he assigned for this purpose were sums,—the cost of their exile—to be exacted from ticket-holders as the price of freedom. But these funds were wholly prospective. Insuperable difficulties opposed their collection. Nor was the principle just. The sickly and unskilful would have stood at a greater distance from liberation than the clever and robust. The successful thief could purchase his freedom, and leave behind his ...
— The History of Tasmania, Volume I (of 2) • John West

... ponderous, but not necessarily insuperable. The majority of Palestinian obstacles, such as the difficulties which the confusion of national tongues, culture, and habits will impose on unification, the precarious chance of ultimately securing ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various

... hundred feet high and twenty feet thick, across the entire space of seventy-five miles which joined the Tigris with one of the canals of the Euphrates: while the canals themselves, as we may see by the march of the ten thousand Greeks after the battle of Cunaxa, presented means of defence altogether insuperable by a rude army such as that of the Persians. On the east, the territory of Babylonia was defended by the Tigris, which cannot be forded lower than the ancient Nineveh or the modern Mosul. In addition to these ramparts, natural as well as artificial, to protect ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1 • Various

... feeling of being accountable for the discovery which had changed his prospects. They would have done anything for him that they could, but all Lord Kirkaldy's interest was at the foreign office, or with his fellow-diplomates, and here he soon found an insuperable bar. Mark's education had stood still from the time of Miss Headworth's flight till his father's second marriage, his energies having been solely devoted to struggles with the grim varieties of governess purveyed by his grandmother, and he had thus missed all chance of foundation of foreign ...
— Nuttie's Father • Charlotte M. Yonge

... that its mirth might be insuperable, not to be saddened by the most grievous song; nevertheless he did not turn back then, but softly climbed the stairs and, placing the agate bowl upon a step, struck up the chaunt called Dolorous. It told of desolate, regretted things befallen ...
— The Book of Wonder • Edward J. M. D. Plunkett, Lord Dunsany

... very well, and full glad was I that no insuperable obstacle had deferred my return one single day longer. Just at the foot of Bridgehouse hill, I met John, staff in hand; he fortunately saw me in the cab, stopped, and informed me he was setting off ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell

... makers of the Constitution had in the highest temper of statesmanship found a way round seemingly insuperable difficulties. The whole attitude of "the fathers" towards slavery is a question of some consequence to a biographer of Lincoln, and we shall return to it in ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood

... de Villabuena gazed on the temporary prison, of which he commanded a view from his balcony, and meditated how he should overcome the almost insuperable difficulties that opposed themselves to Herrera's rescue, there emerged from the door of the guard-room a man, whose gait and figure the Count thought he knew, although he was too far distant to discern his features. This man was in a sort of half-uniform; a blue jacket ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 363, January, 1846 • Various

... commerce gradually extended its scope in spite of the almost insuperable difficulties. The roads were still so miserable that wares had to be carried on pack-horses instead of in wagons. Frequently the merchant had to risk spoiling his bales of silk in fording a stream, for bridges were few and usually ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes

... result. Early in 1607 however the efforts were renewed, and negotiations were actively set on foot for the purpose of concluding a peace or a truce for a term of twelve, fifteen or twenty years. There were, however, almost insuperable difficulties in the way. In the first place the stadholders, the military and naval leaders, the Calvinist clergy, and the great majority of the traders honestly believed that a peace would be detrimental to all the best interests of the States, and were thoroughly ...
— History of Holland • George Edmundson

... warlike propensities of the native tribes are indeed formidable but not insuperable difficulties in the way of their elevation. The wildest of them may compare not unfavorably with those Northern barbarian hordes that swooped down upon Christian Europe, and who were so soon the docile pupils and proselytes of the peoples they had conquered. ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier

... take up my abode at Traverse des Sioux. The proposition seemed too absurd to me to be seriously entertained, and I said: "I am destitute of funds, and how can a lawyer subsist where there are no people? How can I get a living?" This dilemma, which seemed to me to be insuperable, was easily answered by my new found friend. "Why," he said, "That is the easiest part of it. We can hunt a living, and I have a shack and a bed." The proposition was catching, having a spice of adventure in it, and I promised to ...
— The History of Minnesota and Tales of the Frontier • Charles E. Flandrau

... you must change the order of your divisions, and put the first last, and the last first; you have got the cart before the horse." "Ne'er moind," said Abe, "I'll back her up th' hill. Good-morning, sir." "Cart before the horse" was no insuperable difficulty with Abe; he knew how to manage his own pony, and must drive in his own way; he was not very particular which came first so long as he could "mak' her goa." He took what suited his mind best, and paid very little attention to the rules of sermonizing; he was in this respect a ...
— Little Abe - Or, The Bishop of Berry Brow • F. Jewell

... the store in despair. He found himself engaged in what appeared to be an endless chase after a phantom Considine, and the difficulties in his way semed insuperable. Yet how could he go back and tell them all at home that he had failed? What would they think of him? The thought made him miserable; and he determined, if he failed, never to go back to the old ...
— An Outback Marriage • Andrew Barton Paterson

... arguments that have been used. These have been exhausted. They have been ineffective. We must use the personal and"—he added it significantly—"the political appeal. If you find difficulty, let me know. I shall not be idle in your behalf. If you meet any insuperable obstacle, I'll see if I can't help you ...
— Under the Prophet in Utah - The National Menace of a Political Priestcraft • Frank J. Cannon and Harvey J. O'Higgins

... Chungking—a distance of 412 miles—the river Yangtse, in a great part of its course, is a series of rapids which no steamer has yet attempted to ascend, though it is contended that the difficulties of navigation would not be insuperable to a specially constructed steamer of elevated horse-power. Some idea of the speed of the current at this part of the river may be given by the fact that a junk, taking thirty to thirty-five days to do the upward journey, hauled most of the way by gangs of trackers, has been known to do ...
— An Australian in China - Being the Narrative of a Quiet Journey Across China to Burma • George Ernest Morrison

... shut women out in the old days from these easy avenues to citizenship and to-day her path by the state by state method is beset by almost insuperable difficulties. ...
— Woman Suffrage By Federal Constitutional Amendment • Various

... is of the central entrance front, facing east, towards the Canal and the Horse Guards, taken from the Wall in St. James's Park. The first objection is the site, in itself insuperable, as will appear from the following remarks on the subject by Mr. Loudon, editor ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, - Issue 278, Supplementary Number (1828) • Various

... such a task as that now partially executed, would, perhaps, have presented insuperable difficulties, but for the assistance rendered me by Mr. Earp, who, with great perseverance, has unravelled—what, in the lapse of time, had become the almost inextricable confusion of my papers. That, however, has, with his assistance, been accomplished in such a way as to base upon original ...
— Narrative of Services in the Liberation of Chili, Peru and Brazil, - from Spanish and Portuguese Domination, Volume 1 • Thomas Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald

... moulded in imitation of forms belonging to the physical plane; in this third group we have a glimpse of the forms natural to the astral or mental planes. Yet this very fact, which makes them so interesting, places an insuperable barrier in the way ...
— Thought-Forms • Annie Besant

... that form the perennial source of obscene talk, and often of obscene action, among boys; and it is in explaining these, without violating those instincts of reserve and modesty with which nature herself surrounds the whole subject, that what often seems an insuperable difficulty arises. Yet these functions are, and must be, the very shrine of a body which is a temple of the Lord and Giver of life; and on the face of things, therefore, there must be some method of conveying pure knowledge to the opening mind with ...
— The Power of Womanhood, or Mothers and Sons - A Book For Parents, And Those In Loco Parentis • Ellice Hopkins

... creeps on; and that brings fears of its own, and fears that are all the more intolerable because they are not definite fears at all, merely a loss of nervous vigour, which attaches itself to the most trivial detail and magnifies it into an insuperable difficulty. A friend of mine who was growing old once confided to me that foreign travel, which used to be such a delight to him, was now getting burdensome. "It is all right when I have once started," he said, "but for days before I am the prey of all kinds of apprehensions." ...
— Where No Fear Was - A Book About Fear • Arthur Christopher Benson

... afraid she might meddle in the distribution of places that he was willing to keep in his own hands; and he represented to the King that the Roman Catholic religion that she professed was an insuperable objection to her appearance at the Court of England, at least so early; but he gave her private hopes that things might be so arranged as to make her admittance easy when the King was settled in his new dominions. And with this hope she consented without much concern to let him go without her; not ...
— Lady Mary Wortley Montague - Her Life and Letters (1689-1762) • Lewis Melville

... hands with amusement, while the sweat of anguish stood on the old slave's face, and to prolong the delightful joke, he took good care not to help the miserable old man when his unaccustomed tongue came to some insuperable difficulty. When, at length, the negro had finished the pompous announcement, Hadrian ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... chief evangelical princes and towns, which henceforth was to give the name to all anti-Catholics together (19 April 1529). And not only between Catholics and Protestants in the Empire did the rupture become complete. Even before the end of that year the question of the Lord's supper proved an insuperable stumbling-block in the way of a real union of Zwinglians and Lutherans. Luther parted from Zwingli at the colloquy of Marburg with the words, 'Your spirit ...
— Erasmus and the Age of Reformation • Johan Huizinga

... schools, and many other things new to the country; and they were the sort of people who had a right to have them. The problem of defence was always a vexed one with the inadequate military forces at hand and the insuperable difficulties concerning the militia. The British still held the Western forts pending the settlement of the frontier and the execution of the treaty of peace in full. This naturally annoyed the ...
— The Father of British Canada: A Chronicle of Carleton • William Wood

... By his advice and example, the principal officers of the State and army were obliged to swear that, without listening, in any circumstances, to any conditions of peace, they would still persevere in perpetual and implacable war against the enemy of the republic. This rash engagement opposed an insuperable bar to all future negotiation. The ministers of Honorius were heard to declare that if they had only invoked the name of the Deity they would consult the public safety, and trust their souls to the mercy of heaven; but they had sworn by the sacred head of the Emperor himself; they had touched, in ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 4 • Various

... near Lexington, Virginia, an Indian couple sprang off because there were insuperable bars to ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner

... even to turn the balance, on questions relating to English education, English licensing laws, English taxation, English dispositions of property? The difficulty of distinguishing between Imperial and local questions would be insuperable. The division of the House into two categories of members with distinct spheres of voting power would prove unworkable, and the colonial representatives would during most of their time in Parliament ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky

... our English fauna was far from a rich one, especially as regards the larger quadrupeds. In bats, birds, and insects we have always done better, because to such creatures a belt of sea is not by any means an insuperable barrier; whereas in reptiles and amphibians, on the contrary, we have always been weak, seeing that most reptiles are bad swimmers, and very few can rival the late lamented Captain Webb in his feat of crossing the Channel, as Leander and ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen

... to see to it; but it was especially important to secure a safe return, and a secret landing on the French coast, lined as it was by patrols, watched day and night by custom-house officers, and guarded by sentinels at every point where a boat could approach the shore, offered almost insuperable difficulties. D'Ache selected a little creek at the foot of the rocks of Saint Honorine, scarcely two leagues from Trevieres and David, who knew all the coast guards in the district, bribed one of them to ...
— The House of the Combrays • G. le Notre

... of all navigators one is led to believe that the theory so much advocated was put into practice upon most occasions. Humanity had made great strides. Difference of colour no longer presented an insuperable barrier to a man's being treated as a brother, and the convention which at the close of the century ordered the freedom of the black, set a seal to the convictions ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part 2. The Great Navigators of the Eighteenth Century • Jules Verne

... dwell on the defects of the bow. The great and insuperable one was its want of power. The strength of a man was the limit of its capacity, and something more was necessary to pierce the ironclad breast of the knight. But, until the invention of gunpowder, it stood at ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various

... unsating freshness. Now, when men say repiningly, and in a temper which impeaches alike society and providence, that a lowly lot, with its necessary privations and its consequent ignorance, is a barrier, perpetual and insuperable, against usefulness and happiness and honor, we turn to the name and memory of Bunyan as an embodied denial of the impeachment, and as carolling forth their cheerful rebuke of such unmanly and ungodly plaints. With God's grace in the heart, and with the gleaming gates of his heaven brightening ...
— The Riches of Bunyan • Jeremiah Rev. Chaplin

... is a long battle against all but insuperable obstacles. Born at Wesselburen in the present province of Schleswig-Holstein on March 18, 1813, he was the son of a poor stone mason—so poor that, as Hebbel said, poverty had taken the place of his soul. Though Klaus Hebbel was a well-meaning man, he was a slave to the inexorable non possumus ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IX - Friedrich Hebbel and Otto Ludwig • Various

... subject of great practical importance, and one which, until quite recently, has been attended with apparently insuperable difficulties. ...
— Langstroth on the Hive and the Honey-Bee - A Bee Keeper's Manual • L. L. Langstroth

... through the streets, which were so interesting and novel to them. Richmond was never gayer and brighter. They were sure that the hated Yankees could never come. For more than two years the Army of Northern Virginia had been an insuperable bar to their advance, and ...
— The Shades of the Wilderness • Joseph A. Altsheler

... Cambridge, and the "Devil's Ditch" by Newmarket. The outer fosse of each is from twenty to thirty feet deep; and the rampart, when topped by a stockade, must have constituted an obstacle to troops unprovided with artillery which the Iceni might justifiably think insuperable. The "one narrow entrance" along the whole length of the dykes (five miles and ten miles respectively) is where the Icknield ...
— Early Britain—Roman Britain • Edward Conybeare

... apparently ask'd for by that powerful body. Bishop Simpson, of Philadephia, came on and spoke for the selection. The President was much perplex'd. The reasons for appointing Col. Dubois were very strong, almost insuperable—yet the argument for Mr. Harlan, under the adroit position he had plac'd himself, was heavy. Those who press'd him adduc'd the magnitude of the Methodists as a body, their loyalty, more general ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman

... in the drawing-room. Not a hint, however, did she drop about sending me to school: still I felt an instinctive certainty that she would not long endure me under the same roof with her; for her glance, now more than ever, when turned on me, expressed an insuperable ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte

... even this alternative, is not without difficulties, which, to a spirit so little enterprising as mine, seem in a manner insuperable. These are ...
— Clarissa, Volume 2 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson

... Command of Colo Procter was lately taken into Continental Service and the Commissions were dated at the time they were raisd. It was upon this Occasion that Colo Crafts Regiment was mentiond; and I suppose that Regiment wd be admitted on the same terms. But I think I foresee an insuperable Obstacle in that Case. If any thing can be done consistently with the general Service, to show Honor, but especially to do Justice to the Regiment of Artillery in Boston, I shall not fail to push it as far as I may have Influence. My fellow Citizens well know that I have never been indifferent TO ...
— The Writings of Samuel Adams, vol. III. • Samuel Adams

... States of Holland. His want of money is supplied by his cousin George. England and Prussia abet his usurpations, and France the patriotic party. Were England and France in a condition to go to war, there is no question but they would have been at it before now. But their insuperable poverty renders it probable they will compel a suspension of hostilities, and either arrange and force a settlement on the Dutch, or if they cannot agree themselves on this, they will try to protract things by negotiation. Can I be useful to you here in anything in the purchase ...
— The Writings of Thomas Jefferson - Library Edition - Vol. 6 (of 20) • Thomas Jefferson

... his heart to her. The social gulf that set their lives apart was all too wide to be spanned but by a miracle of love requited; and he had too much humility and naivete of soul to presume that such a thing could ever come to pass. And even if it should, there remained the insuperable barrier of her fortune, in the face of which the pretensions of a penniless adventurer could ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance

... for several weeks, but they were weeks of increasing uneasiness and pain for Norma, and she knew that Chris found them even less endurable than she. The happy hours of confidence and happiness grew fewer and fewer, and as their passion strengthened, and the insuperable obstacles to its natural development impressed them more and more forcibly, miserable and anxious times took their place. Their love was no sooner acknowledged than both came to realize how mad and hopeless it was, and that no reiteration of its intensity and no argument ...
— The Beloved Woman • Kathleen Norris

... these parts, which they were at first inclined to consider "one of the most pleasant, most healthful, and most fruitful parts of the world," longer acquaintance and better information abundantly satisfied them of the insuperable obstacles to ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various

... Adelaide in 29 days. We Australians must hope that ere long Melbourne and Sydney, together with all about them, will weigh, with ourselves at least, as heavily as New York. The coal question is, of course, an awful difficulty for three weeks instead of five to six days, but not, we hope, insuperable. Our "Coptic" burns but fifty tons a day, but the New York liners require ...
— Personal Recollections of Early Melbourne & Victoria • William Westgarth

... make the administration of Ireland by constitutional means simply impossible. The policy of the Liberal Unionists is thus much too large or much too small. It is too small to conciliate, and therefore too large to be given with safety. All these proposed concessions are liable to one insuperable objection; they would each and all enable the Irish to extort Home Rule, but under circumstances which would rob it of its grace and repel gratitude. Mill has some admirable observations bearing on this subject, and I venture to quote the following passage: "The greatest imperfection ...
— Handbook of Home Rule (1887) • W. E. Gladstone et al.

... leave Ghent. But the British Ministry abated its extreme demands and continued the negotiations. At the same time new instructions from Washington advised the American representatives that they might drop the subject of impressments if they found it an insuperable obstacle in the way ...
— Union and Democracy • Allen Johnson

... none so gracious and graceful as giving dinners to other people who have time and money to waste. The prime condition of such dinners is that neither host nor guest shall need them. The presence of a person who actually wanted meat and drink would imply certain insuperable disqualifications. The guest must have the habit of dining, with the accumulated indifference to dinners and the inveterate inability to deal peptically with them which result from the habit of them. Your true diner must be well on in middle life, for though the ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells

... to the man I owe money to. O the supreme curse of making three guineas do the business of five! Not all the labours of Hercules; not all the Hebrews' three centuries of Egyptian bondage, were such an insuperable business, such an infernal task!! Poverty! thou half-sister of death, thou cousin-german of hell: where shall I find force of execration equal to the amplitude of thy demerits? Oppressed by thee, the venerable ancient, grown hoary ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham

... their admiration of the richness and flexibility of Elizabethan English, have tried to write with the same copiousness of vocabulary and the same freedom of structure as the Elizabethans. Between these and their object lies an insuperable barrier, the formed and finished prose of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; between Fronto and his lay the whole mass of what, in the sustained and secure judgment of mankind, is the classical prose of the Latin language, from Cicero to Tacitus. In the simplicity ...
— Latin Literature • J. W. Mackail

... possibilities of passing the limits of the pen alive, to tunneling. This was also surrounded by almost insuperable difficulties. First, it required not less than fifty feet of subterranean excavation to get out, which was an enormous work with our limited means. Then the logs forming the Stockade were set in the ground to a depth ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy

... these difficulties, it must be said that it is under our present system of school administration practically insuperable. Adequately equipped schools for industrial education will cost a great deal of money,—money which the whites of the South will probably not be willing to give for many years to come, and which we think they should not be asked to give. As we have ...
— Sociology and Modern Social Problems • Charles A. Ellwood

... piano-tuner, and everything veterinary held up its head. And all this again qualified, as everywhere, by the presence or absence of the social faculty, that magnetic capacity for coming, as Mrs Murchison would say, "to the fore," which makes little of disadvantages that might seem insuperable and, in default, renders null and void the most unquestionable claims. Anyone would think of the Delarues. Mr Delarue had in the dim past married his milliner, yet the Delarues were now very much indeed to the fore. And, on the ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan

... still more so. The Emperor had indeed consented to unite the Ministers, who had hitherto worked independently, in a Council of State; but here reform stopped. Cobenzl, who was now First Minister, understood nothing but diplomacy. Men continued in office whose presence was an insuperable bar to any intelligent action: even in that mechanical routine which, in the eyes of the Emperor Francis, constituted the life of the State, everything was antiquated and self-contradictory. In all that affected the mental life of the people the years that followed the ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe

... of fickleness arising from her idealism, which fills her with insuperable discontent, is voiced most clearly by the nineteenth century Sappho through the lips of Sara Teasdale, in lines wherein she dismisses ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins

... propounded in certain despatches are more powerful, and more regarded and reverenced, than any others, human or divine. A kind of moral gun-cotton, they drive through the most stupendous difficulties, and rend rocks that appeared to be insuperable barriers in the eyes of common sense or common justice. Judges are compelled to yield to their authority, and do violence to their own consciences whilst they help to lay the healing unction ...
— The Bushman - Life in a New Country • Edward Wilson Landor

... future poet were entirely directed to a military life; but his continued lameness interposed an insuperable difficulty, and was a source of deep mortification. He was at length induced to adopt a profession suitable to his physical capabilities, entering into indentures with his father in his fourteenth year. To his confinement at the desk, sufficiently irksome to a youth of his ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel , Volume I. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various

... object of intense hatred to that free and independent body, and has some thoughts of removing to another part of the country, where he may be more tranquil. He gave us a terrible account of these night attacks, of the ineffectual protection afforded him by the government, and of the nearly insuperable difficulties thrown in the way of any attempt to bring these men to justice. He lately told the president that he had some thoughts of joining the robbers himself, as they were the only persons in the republic protected by the government. The president, however, is not to blame in this matter. He ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon De La Barca

... every other person in town would have seemed an insuperable obstacle to this undertaking, was no obstacle to me. I KNEW HOW TO GET IN. One day in my restless wanderings about a place which had something of the nature of a shrine to me, I had noticed that one of the windows (a swinging one) ...
— Dark Hollow • Anna Katharine Green

... an insuperable obstacle, as far as the majority of minds are concerned, to the discovery that the established principles of education are absolutely false. These principles will never be questioned. It is good enough for the average man that his fellow-creatures have been contented with them since ...
— The Curse of Education • Harold E. Gorst

... the Duke of Oldenburg. No similar escape was now possible for the younger one: but, after leaving Napoleon's request unanswered until February 4th, the reply was then despatched that the tender age of the princess, she being only twenty years old, formed an insuperable obstacle. ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose

... North. Even in Ireland petitions were being circulated for signature among the working men, appealing to Irishmen in America to stand by the administration of Lincoln and to enlist in the Northern armies on the ground of emancipation[1247]. Here, indeed, was the insuperable barrier, in the fall of 1864, to public support of the South. Deny as he might the presence of the "foul blot" in Southern society, Hotze, of The Index, could not counteract that phrase. When the Confederate Congress at Richmond began, in the autumn of 1864, seriously to discuss a plan ...
— Great Britain and the American Civil War • Ephraim Douglass Adams

... before, he spoke English well, and thought it not impossible to undertake the part in the original language. My uncle, however, strongly dissuaded him from it, thinking the decided French accent an insuperable obstacle to his success, and being very unwilling that he should risk by a failure in the attempt his deservedly high reputation. A friend of mine, at a dinner party, being asked if she had seen Mr. Fechter in Hamlet, replied in the negative, adding ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble

... that groaned with light literature. Once I met her at the Academy soiree, where you meet people you thought were dead, and she vouchsafed the information, as if she owed it to me in candour, that Leolin had been obliged to recognise insuperable difficulties in the question of FORM, he was so fastidious; so that she had now arrived at a definite understanding with him (it was such a comfort) that SHE would do the form if he would bring home the substance. That was now his position—he foraged for her in ...
— Greville Fane • Henry James

... unexpected conditions, one can comprehend the object of this nocturnal walk and the long pause that Henri made beneath the windows of Zibeline's apartment. A small garden, protected by a light fence, was the only obstacle that separated them. But how much more insuperable was the barrier which his own principles had raised between ...
— Zibeline, Complete • Phillipe de Massa

... it, that they might perhaps bolster up the Irish Church a little longer than the other party could, that they, however, could not do more than this now, and it was only doubtful if they could do this. He talked the language of reason, and with a just sense of the insuperable difficulties which present themselves on all sides with respect to this question, but at the same time of their eventual (though as to time uncertain) solution. I told him that I had long been of opinion that the only practicable ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. III • Charles C. F. Greville

... obedience, and piety, in which it was founded. We find so little change in our souls by our devotions, because we neglect the practice of self-denial and mortification, live wedded to the world, and slaves to our senses and to self-love, which is an insuperable obstacle to this principal effect of holy prayer. Cuthman, after the death of his father, employed his whole fortune and all that he gained by the labor of his hands, in supporting his decrepit mother: and afterwards was not ashamed to beg for her ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler

... It is contended by some advanced socialists that among {226} the poor and the toiling home life is practically non-existent; indeed, under present industrial conditions, impossible. Marriage and separate family life are insuperable barriers, it is said, to corporate unity and social progress. It is but fair to add that this extreme view is now largely repudiated by the most enlightened advocates of a new social order, who are contending, they tell us, ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander

... me to dance, and I, for some reason or another (though I had driven there with no other thought in my head than to dance well), had replied that I never indulged in that pastime, that I began to blush, and, left solitary among a crowd of strangers, became plunged in my usual insuperable and ever-growing shyness. In fact, I remained silent on that spot almost ...
— Youth • Leo Tolstoy

... of fear. This habit gets itself fixed on men because they lack vision. They start out to do something that reaches from A to Z. At A they fail, at B they stumble, and at C they meet with what seems to be an insuperable difficulty. They then cry "Beaten" and throw the whole task down. They have not even given themselves a chance really to fail; they have not given their vision a chance to be proved or disproved. They have simply let themselves ...
— My Life and Work • Henry Ford

... itself in 1861 side by side with the southern secession from the Old School, and in full agreement with it in morals and politics. The two bodies were not long in finding that the doctrinal differences which a quarter-century before had seemed so insuperable were, after all, no serious hindrance to their ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon

... and the entire loss of so much time and plant! If," he concluded musingly, "we had been merely able to recover the lost bags, I believe, with but a touch or two, I could have remedied the peccant engine. But what with the loss of plant and the almost insuperable scientific difficulties of the task, our friends in France are almost ready to desert the chosen medium. They propose, instead, to break up the drainage system of cities and sweep off whole populations ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 5 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... was not yet betrothed to Sophia Peabody; he already loved her and she him; but her health seemed an insuperable barrier between them. This and certain other matters were weighing heavily upon his soul, and his future seemed dark and uncertain. He thought of taking a voyage round the world; he thought of getting into politics; he even thought—as ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne



Words linked to "Insuperable" :   unsurmountable, unconquerable



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