"Unsurpassable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... absolute teacher; no one has surpassed him in the difficult art of giving tone to pure tints in combination. There is a picture of Bellini's in S. Zaccaria at Venice—Madonna enthroned with Saints—where the skill of the colourist may be said to culminate in unsurpassable perfection. The whole painting is bathed in a soft but luminous haze of gold; yet each figure has its individuality of treatment, the glowing fire of S. Peter contrasting with the pearly coolness of the drapery and flesh-tints of the Magdalen. ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... mind not one of them could touch Jevons. He rose, he soared, he poised himself, he turned and swept above them; you could feel the tense vibration that kept him there, in his atmosphere of deadly peril. He volplaned, he looped the loop. His behaviour was unsurpassable. For his case, if you like, was desperate. I tell you he had seen the effect of his Tudor hall and drawing-room. He had been watching; and nothing, not a murmur, or a furtive snigger, not the quiver of ...
— The Belfry • May Sinclair
... to have been done by a brilliant and unsurpassable stroke of combined strategy, tactics, manoeuvres, marches, and swimmings; also on land and ...
— Diary from March 4, 1861, to November 12, 1862 • Adam Gurowski
... weariness. All around lay orchards of orange trees, the finest I had ever seen, and over their solid masses of dark foliage, thick hung with ripening fruit, poured the splendour of the western sky. It was a picture unsurpassable in richness of tone; the dense leafage of deepest, warmest green glowed and flashed, its magnificence heightened by the blaze of the countless golden spheres adorning it. Beyond, the magic sea, purple and crimson as the sun descended upon the vanishing ...
— By the Ionian Sea - Notes of a Ramble in Southern Italy • George Gissing
... year 1519 belongs the Annunciation in the Cathedral of Treviso, the merit of which, in the opinion of the writer, has been greatly overstated. True, the Virgin, kneeling in the foreground as she awaits the divine message, is of unsurpassable suavity and beauty; but the foolish little archangel tumbling into the picture and the grotesquely ill-placed donor go far to mar it. Putting aside for the moment the beautiful and profoundly moving representations ...
— The Earlier Work of Titian • Claude Phillips
... himself, little better in their lives than the creatures upon which they preyed. But they were for the most part men, vigorous, dauntless men who not only made history, but prepared the way for those who were to come after, leaving them a heritage of unsurpassable magnificence. ...
— The Golden Woman - A Story of the Montana Hills • Ridgwell Cullum
... power that makes the reading of him one of the most stimulating things to be had from literature. His figures especially are apt and telling in the very minimum of words; they say it all, like the unsurpassable Shakespearean example of "the dyer's hand"; and the more you think of them, the more you see that not a word could be ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... quarters, the whole ship's company, save himself, were prostrate below decks, and he with incredible strength and fortitude was literally doing everything, not even omitting to register regular observations of the instruments;—in the midst of that unsurpassable heroism among the polar solitudes, he felt at night a dissatisfaction with the day as having been spent to little purpose worthy ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 7 • Various
... more certain of his "tithe-pig and mortuary guinea." Sunset comes sooner below than above. The reapers are early home, and the peaks are still purple when the marauders pour down upon the fields, and their share of the work is done with a neatness unsurpassable by reiver, ritter or kateran. The monkey-tax thus collected is quite a calculable percentage of the crop, and few taxes are more regularly paid. As it goes to non-producers, its reduction is an object constantly kept in view. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, October, 1877, Vol. XX. No. 118 • Various
... interest is natural, for the heroine is my small daughter Susy, whom we lost. It was not intentional—it was a good while before I found it out, so I am sending you her picture to use —& to reproduce with photographic exactness the unsurpassable expression & all. May you find an artist ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... weight of realism, this lurid little play beats A Warning for Fair Women fairly out of the field. It is and must always be (I had nearly said, thank heaven) unsurpassable for pure potency of horror; and the breathless heat of the action, its raging rate of speed, leaves actually no breathing-time for disgust; it consumes our very sense of repulsion as with fire. But such power as this, though a rare and a great gift, is not the right quality for ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... world, I am satisfied with this which it surpasses. Besides its beauty, what strikes one most is its perfect adaptation to the original purpose of palace and fortress for which the Normans planned their strongholds in Wales. The architect built not only with a constant instinct of beauty, but with unsurpassable science and skill. The skill and the science have gone the way of the need of them, but the beauty remains indelible and as eternal as the hunger for it in the human soul. Conway castle is not all a ruin, even as a fortress, however. Great part of it still challenges decay, and is so entire ...
— Seven English Cities • W. D. Howells
... Morals and nature offer such an abundance of facts with which we may connect the teaching of language, that it is better to dispense with legends. AEsop's fables combine the moral and the natural in a manner unsurpassable. My child tells me one of these ...
— The Mind of the Child, Part II • W. Preyer
... visit to the town, and now supporting an outhouse door-post, while a young man with whom he talked leant against the tailboard of a cart advertising that he was the first-class butcher of Kangaroo, and had several other unsurpassable virtues ...
— Some Everyday Folk and Dawn • Miles Franklin
... lines, one cannot help from remembering the classical description Alexander Von Humboldt gives of the Negro boatmen of the river Dagua, in the actual republic of Colombia. The inimitable skill and unsurpassable bravery Humboldt saw them display in the midst of the ferocious currents and loud-pouring rapids of that river caused him to exclaim: "Every movement of the paddle is a wonder, and every Negro a god!" A nice monument to the fame of indomitable bravery the Negroes ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Vol. I. Jan. 1916 • Various
... the hospital, I used to open my window and gaze at the road. That road was the link which connected his world with mine. Now when I had lost that link through my blindness, all my body would go out to seek him. The bridge that united us had given way, and there was now this unsurpassable chasm. When he left my side the gulf seemed to yawn wide open. I could only wait for the time when he should cross back again from his ...
— The Hungry Stones And Other Stories • Rabindranath Tagore
... word-daubing, to set down a confused group of gorgeous colors, like a bunch of tangled skeins of bright silk; but there is nothing of the reality in the glare which would thus be produced. And yet the splendor both of individual clusters and of whole scenes is unsurpassable. The oaks are now far advanced in their change of hue; and, in certain positions relatively to the sun, they light up and gleam with a most magnificent deep gold, varying according as portions of the foliage are in shadow or sunlight. On the sides which receive ...
— Passages From The American Notebooks, Volume 2. • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... you, as I hope, or rather as I clearly perceive, in enjoyment of your civil rights. Meanwhile, to you in your absence, as also to your son who is here—the express image of your soul and person, and a man of unsurpassable firmness and excellence—I have long ere this both promised and tendered practically my zeal, duty, exertions, and labours: all the more so now that Caesar daily receives me with more open arms, while his intimate friends distinguish ...
— Letters of Cicero • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... in the way of handling a crew and training it to work together in such a manner that its efforts might be employed to the best advantage. Therefore, once fairly at sea, he began to sedulously exercise his crew, first in the work of reducing and making sail, until he had brought them to a pitch of unsurpassable perfection in that particular direction. Then he as sedulously drilled them in tacking, veering, and other manoeuvres. Finally, he exercised them at the guns, putting them through all the actions of loading, aiming, firing, and sponging out their weapons—but ...
— The Cruise of the Nonsuch Buccaneer • Harry Collingwood
... then there's a couple whose conjugal life Is happy as happy can be; Now and then there's a man who believes that his wife Is the One Unsurpassable She; There are doubtless in England a great many folks Whose humour is airy and sage; But there never is one in American jokes Or on ...
— Tobogganing On Parnassus • Franklin P. Adams
... astronomer and the meteorologist, it has yielded means of registering terrestrial, solar, planetary, and stellar phenomena, independent of the sources of error attendant on ordinary observation; in the hands of the physicist, not only does it record spectroscopic phenomena with unsurpassable ease and precision, but it has revealed the existence of rays having powerful chemical energy, or beyond the visible limits of either end of the spectrum; while, to the naturalist, it furnishes the means by which the forms of many highly complicated objects may be represented, without ...
— The Advance of Science in the Last Half-Century • T.H. (Thomas Henry) Huxley
... bear, for the behoof of my countrymen, such testimony to the gigantic changes in this country as I have hinted at to-night. Also, to record that wherever I have been, in the smallest places equally with the largest, I have been received with unsurpassable politeness, delicacy, sweet temper, hospitality, consideration, and with unsurpassable respect for the privacy daily enforced upon me by the nature of my avocation here and the state of my health. This testimony, so long as I live, and so long as ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens |
