"Unattainable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... for the unknown and unattainable takes hold of men is illustrated by the search for the universal solvent, by the mysteries of the Rosicrucians, by the patronage of fortune-tellers, even. Wholly absorbed in spiritual researches,—having, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, No. 38, December, 1860 • Various
... postures, what freedom of gesture, what swaying grace and vivacious energy this game involves! And then the attendant distractions,—the pinching together of the hand, to form the needed notch, the perfect art of which, like fist-clenching, is unattainable by woman, who substitutes some queerness all her own,—the fierce grasping and propulsion of the cue,—the loving reclension upon the table when the long shots come in,—the dainty foot, uprising, to preserve the owner's balance, but, as ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various
... propositions together; that silence and inaction are unattainable, and dangerous and improper projects almost unavoidable, and what are we to do? Something we must do. However desirous we might be to do nothing, it is impossible, because others will not consent to do nothing; and if we relinquish the task of ...
— The Trial of Reuben Crandall, M.D. Charged with Publishing and Circulating Seditious and Incendiary Papers, &c. in the District of Columbia, with the Intent of Exciting Servile Insurrection. • Unknown
... folk, doomed to the ill's to which tenement life is heir, must have safe food; a luxury unattainable, or it would be if the House did not have a dispensary from which over a thousand bottles of milk, modified by the doctor's prescription for each individual case, are given ...
— Home Missions In Action • Edith H. Allen
... material was not the desire to possess rarities and curiosities. I found that passages actually read from important originals during my lectures gave a reality and vividness to my instruction which were otherwise unattainable. A citation of the ipsissima verba of Erasmus, or Luther, or Melanchthon, or Peter Canisius, or Louis XIV, or Robespierre, or Marat, interested my students far more than any quotation at second hand could do. No rhetoric could impress on a class the real spirit and strength of the ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... culture of the imagination, books, although not the only, are the readiest means of supplying the food convenient for it, and a hundred books may he had where even one work of art of the right sort is unattainable, seeing such must he of some size as well as of thorough excellence. And in variety alone is safety from the danger of the convenient food becoming the ...
— A Dish Of Orts • George MacDonald
... the nobility of your soul. You have been awakened from the slumber in which you were rocked by the slavery of others' opinions; but you would never reach the degree of grandeur to which you are called if you dissipated your strength in the pursuit of an unattainable end. This course was all proper up to the present time; it was the natural consequence of your recently acquired freedom. It was necessary that the ideas which had most engaged you previously should give the first impulse to the activity of your mind.. Among all ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... involuntary cry. Thrill on thrill shot through him. Delight and hope and fear and despair claimed him in swift, successive flashes. And then again the ruling passion of a rider held him—the sheer glory of a grand and unattainable horse. For Slone gave up Wildfire in that splendid moment. How had he ever dared to believe he could capture that wild stallion? Slone looked and looked, filling his mind, regretting nothing, sure that the moment was reward for ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Campfire Stories • Various
... if the dizzy height did not diminish. When he had climbed for a long time and stopped, panting and suffering, the stars appeared to be as far away as ever. He felt as if he ought to have been out of the ravine long before, but the opening looked to be as unattainable as ...
— Two Boys in Wyoming - A Tale of Adventure (Northwest Series, No. 3) • Edward S. Ellis
... know of such a place! The good doctor who attended my husband in his last illness told me of it. A friend of his receives a certain number of poor people into his house, and charges no more than the cost of maintaining them. An unattainable sum to me! There is the temptation that I spoke of. The help of a few pounds I might accept, if I fell ill, because I might afterward pay it back. ...
— The Black Robe • Wilkie Collins
... an ambition. At present beyond her grasp, yet so sure was she of its ultimate attainment, that she shaped her entire cosmic consciousness toward that end. Her ambition was not unique, perhaps not unattainable. It had been achieved by others with seemingly little effort and less skill; and though as yet, merely a radiant hope, Warble was determined that some day she ...
— Ptomaine Street • Carolyn Wells
... is not unattainable, some members in this academy give a sufficient proof. And, be assured, that if this power is not acquired whilst you are young, there will be no time for it afterwards: at least, the attempt will be attended with as much difficulty as those experience who learn to read or write ...
— Seven Discourses on Art • Joshua Reynolds
... do. They prefer being treated like dogs. Is it nothing that we have met heart to heart for one sweet moment, that you have rested a moment in my arms? To me it is a glimpse of the unattainable heaven of love. (Going up to her.) Kiss me once, ...
— The Black Cat - A Play in Three Acts • John Todhunter
... interests the man she loves? Will she not cast aside a sentiment when it no longer responds to some vision of infinitude which she grasps and contemplates in her soul? Who can scale the heights to which her eyes have risen? Yes, a man fears to find in such a woman something unattainable, unpossessable, unconquerable. The woman of strong mind should remain a symbol; as a reality she must be feared. Camille Maupin is in some ways the living image of Schiller's Isis, seated in the darkness of the temple, at ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... apparently for religious uses. Still others, it is supposed, formed parts of human dwellings. That they proceeded from intelligence and reflection is clear. Usually, whether they are squares or circles, their construction betrays nice, mathematical exactness, unattainable save by the use of instruments. Many constitute effigies—of birds, fishes, quadrupeds, men. In Wisconsin is a mound 135 feet long and well proportioned, much resembling an elephant; in Adams County, 0., a gracefully curved serpent, ...
— History of the United States, Vol. I (of VI) • E. Benjamin Andrews
... Erasmus Walker the ten thousand pounds of blackmail—for it was little else—agreed upon between them. The great engineer accepted the money with as little compunction as men who earn large incomes always display in taking payment for doing nothing. It is an enviable state of mind, unattainable by most of us who work hard for our living. He pocketed his check with a smile, as if it were quite in the nature of things that ten thousand pounds should drop upon him from the clouds without rhyme ...
— Michael's Crag • Grant Allen
... hot that morning, they said nothing. Once, as they passed the familiar scene of his tryst with Miss Presby, now ages past, Dick bit his lips, and suppressed a moan like that of a hurt animal. Bitterly he thought that now she was more unattainable, and his dreams more idle than ever they had been. And the first sight of the reservoir ...
— The Plunderer • Roy Norton
... perilous journeys and the faces of strange countries; of the silver way across moonlit seas; of the beckoning voices from the under edges of the desert. It had taken a deeper, a more mysterious tone. It had told of great joys, quite unattainable, and of great griefs too, eternal, and with a sort of nobility by reason of their greatness; and of many unformulated longings beyond the reach of words; but with never a single note of mere complaint. So it had seemed to Durrance ...
— The Four Feathers • A. E. W. Mason
... of the time, was invitingly open to misconception. Again, she was jealous of her sister-in-law, Madame d'Houdetot, if for no other reason than that the latter, being the wife of a Norman noble, had access to the court, and this was unattainable by the wife of a farmer-general. Hence Madame d'Epinay's barely-concealed mortification when she heard of the meetings in the forest, the private suppers, the moonlight rambles in the park. When Saint ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... practical success the ideal which he preached. But to assume that he must accordingly be adjudged a failure is to ignore the significance of the ideals to which he awakened the world. Much there was that was unattainable and intangible, but its value to mankind in the development of international relations ...
— Woodrow Wilson and the World War - A Chronicle of Our Own Times. • Charles Seymour
... Joseph Buonaparte; and this could not be conceded, so the negociations finally failed. About that time Fox died, and the French government attributed publicly the failure of these negociations to his death. But the truth was, Fox had long ago expressed his convictions that peace would be unattainable; and after he had commenced the negociations, he had said in the house of commons:—"My wish, the first wish of my heart, is peace; but such a peace as shall preserve our connexions and influence on the continent, as shall not abate one jot of the national ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... the head of Mona Lisa, and after years of labor he left them unfinished. The problem of human life, the spirit, the world engrossed him, and all his creations seem impregnated with the psychological, the mystical, the unattainable, the hidden. ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Painting • John C. Van Dyke
... athwart, and his footsteps in the vast silence were loud to his own ears, as if echoed by the watchful stars: his eyes, roaming about the line of the horizon, seemed to gaze hungrily into the unattainable, and did not see the shadow of the coming event. The only shadow on the sea was the shadow of the black smoke pouring heavily from the funnel its immense streamer, whose end was constantly dissolving in the air. Two Malays, silent and almost motionless, steered, one on each side ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... whom her own existence seemed a thing peaceful and fine in its absolute security from any form of want. She realized, through him, those other thousands in the world who had lived through lifetimes of conscious insignificance and unattainable desire, nor thought these serious evils. In short she was given a horizon whereon she began to see things properly proportioned. And there, at last, she beheld also her son, and all the possibilities in the future of those ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... left upon me an indefinable impression, which was neither hope, nor desire, nor regret, but rather a sense of emotion, of passionate impulse, mingled with admiration and anxiety. I am conscious at once of joy and of want; beyond what I possess I see the impossible and the unattainable; I gauge my own wealth and poverty: in a word, I am and I am not—my inner state is one of contradiction, because it ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... sickness, for sickness and death are alike manifestations of mortal thought. We awake from each still human, still with our problems before us. We must break the mesmerism of the belief that the practical application of Jesus' teachings must be relegated to the realm of death, or to the unattainable. We must apply the Christ-principle, and learn to hit the mark, for sin is ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... attainment. This poignant contradiction returned to his mind again and again, notwithstanding every effort. He saw near to him, even within his reach, in close and tangible reality, the soul; and in the unattainable—in the depths of the ideal—the flesh. None of these thoughts attained to certain shape. They were as a vapour within him, changing every instant its form, and floating away. But the darkness which the vapour caused ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... dreadful solemnity, these gentlemen, Grumkow the spokesman, in soft phrase, but with strict clearness, made it apparent to her, That marry she must,—the Hereditary Prince of Baireuth,—and without the consent of both her parents, which was unattainable at present, but peremptorily under the command of one of them, whose vote was the supreme. Do this (or even say that you will do it, whisper some of the well-affected), his Majesty's paternal favor will return upon you like pent waters;—and the ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. VIII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... back presently, and lock the drawer, and, it being dark, perhaps would delay to light his lamp that he might torture himself with looking at that pitiless shadow-play, that humble comedy-drama of sweet, common, unattainable things that was every night renewed in those two rooms over the garage at the bottom ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... of Pierre under his hopeless inward eye. Over him loomed from either side the gleaming pinnacles of the Twin Bears, and he remembered many a time when he had looked up toward them from the crests of lesser mountains—looked up toward them as a man looks to a great and unattainable ideal. ...
— Riders of the Silences • John Frederick
... proletariat. Whether such a state of opinion grows up or not depends mainly upon the stubbornness or conciliatoriness of the possessing classes, and, conversely, upon the moderation or violence of those who desire fundamental economic change. The majority which Bolsheviks regard as unattainable is chiefly prevented by the ...
— The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism • Bertrand Russell
... shall accomplish what it is only possible for the entire human race to accomplish, in the course of its progressive development—as soon as we understand that, it is all over with philosophy in the present sense of the word. In this way one discards the absolute truth, unattainable for the individual, and follows instead the relative truths attainable by way of the positive sciences, and the collection of their results by means of the dialectic mode of thought. With Hegel universal philosophy comes to an end, on the one hand, because he ...
— Feuerbach: The roots of the socialist philosophy • Frederick Engels
... general cry of the working classes is for the compulsory fixing of minimum rates of wages which will ensure that their subsistence will not be liable to be impaired by the fluctuations of the markets. What the workers of the present day look to as a desirable, but almost unattainable, ideal, was the universal practice in the ages when economic relations were controlled ...
— An Essay on Mediaeval Economic Teaching • George O'Brien
... really cared for him had been snatched by untimely death and shut away from him forever in an early grave—a life where there had been not only sorrow, but bitterness—where there had been pain and want and homelessness and desolate wanderings and longings for the unattainable—where there had been misunderstanding and distrust and temptation and defeat—into such a life this wee bit of maidenhood—this true heartsease—had crept and blossomed, filling heart and life with beauty and ...
— The Dreamer - A Romantic Rendering of the Life-Story of Edgar Allan Poe • Mary Newton Stanard
... seems. In your love let me find the love of that Heaven I have defied.—Stay, friend, yet another word. If man's love can be so great, what can God's love be? That which I said I said, in desperation; in very truth, that peace hangs like an unattainable city in the clouds before my soul's vision, that love like a broad river flowing through the lands, an atmosphere bathing the worlds, the subtile essence and ether of space in which the farthest star pursues its course,—why, then, should it escape me, the mote? Oh, when the world turned from me, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... impossible tastes being happily for us unattainable, three hours after our arrival in Munich found Jimmie proudly marching three sailor-hat and ...
— Abroad with the Jimmies • Lilian Bell
... present the magistrates of all our conterminous districts require, or expect, that their charges against any offender in Oude, who has committed a crime in their districts, shall be held to be sufficient for their arrest; but some of them, on the other band, require that nothing less than some unattainable judicial proof, on the part of the officers of the Oude Government, shall be held to be sufficient to justify the arrest of any Oude offender who takes refuge in our districts. They hold, that the sole object of the Oude authorities is to get revenue defaulters into their power, and that ...
— A Journey through the Kingdom of Oude, Volumes I & II • William Sleeman
... reduced to a fraction of its former value. The rockets, which might give it an acceleration of a few hundred feet per second anywhere but in a Dabney field, would immediately accelerate the ship and all its contents to an otherwise unattainable velocity. The occupants of the rocket would lose their relative inertia to the same degree as the ship. They should feel no more acceleration than from the same rocket-thrust in normal space. But ...
— Operation: Outer Space • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... Elizabeth! the Landgrave's niece, the fair and faultless, the saint!... No doubt in the old days he had worshipped her, not daring to lift his eyes above her footprints, had loved as a moth may a star. That lily had shone in his dreams, cool and pure and unattainable, by the mysterious attraction of opposites compelling homage and desire more than might any being less removed in nature from his hot, pleasure-thirsty, sense-ridden, undisciplined self. An element in his discontent with the earth had been perhaps his sense of life-wide separation ...
— The Wagnerian Romances • Gertrude Hall
... Marshall's appearance. She wore a light gray dress and a hat with an impressive bunch of black, and he saw, with sorrowing eyes, that she and all that pertained to her had become more distantly patrician, more generally exalted and unattainable, if possible, than heretofore. He knew little of women's dress, but in the style and cut of this particular gown there existed an indefinable something that warned him off. No mortal woman in such attire could fail to realize her own perfection. He ...
— The Pines of Lory • John Ames Mitchell
... as if even the Joyces could not save her day in its solemn significance unless, indeed, they should appear in their proper persons. She thought of her bread and butter and boiled eggs, lying in her little bundle, and the simple meal seemed as unattainable as if it were some banquet dreamed of in delirium. It was of one piece with cars going by the house, and two maid-servants to correct. To Dilly, a car meant a shrieking monster propelled by steam: yet not even that drove ...
— Tiverton Tales • Alice Brown
... correct the language whilst the thought is incorrigible. Much of the effect of poetry and eloquence depends upon the elasticity and indirect suggestiveness of common terms. Even in reasoning upon some subjects, it is a mistake to aim at an unattainable precision. It is better to be vaguely right than exactly wrong. In the criticism of manners, of fine art, or of literature, in politics, religion and moral philosophy, what we are anxious to say is often far from clear to ourselves; and it is better to indicate our meaning approximately, ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... saw at the window our fortunate extruders, who no doubt congratulated themselves on so many points of the law being in their favour. Here were we stuck on the Queen's high road—tired horses, cooped-up children—and the Three Cocks as unattainable as the Philosopher's stone. The sympathizing landlord consoled us in our disappointment as well as he could. The postilion jumped into his saddle again, and we pursued our way to the nearest place where ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various
... view was haughty and superb, but unfortunately I felt it to be unattainable. Two aspects of the truth seized Girardin, the logical side and the practical side. Here, in my opinion, ...
— The History of a Crime - The Testimony of an Eye-Witness • Victor Hugo
... yet. Each is striving for the sole possession and control of things which belong to neither alone. Each looks upon the other not as a co-labourer but as a rival, instead of making intelligent and united effort for an object unattainable by either alone. If capital would smoke this in his cigar and labour the same in his pipe, the soothing effects might tend to more amicable and effective use of what ...
— Blue Goose • Frank Lewis Nason
... portrait from the wall, demanded a knife, and ordered a fire to be built in the chimney, intending to cut it in pieces and burn it. A friend, an artist, caught him in the act as he entered the room—a jolly fellow, always satisfied with himself, inflated by unattainable wishes, doing daily anything that came to hand, and taking still more gaily to his dinner and ...
— Taras Bulba and Other Tales • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... power of the engines made and making show a great increase. 2. Speeds hitherto unattainable are now seen to be possible in vessels of all the various classes. 3. The consumption of fuel is reduced by 13.38 per cent. on the average; and numbers of vessels are now working on much less coal than that average, while the quality ...
— Scientific American Suppl. No. 299 • Various
... her in his arms, could make her drooping beauty revive!—through love for him if possible; if not, then through anger and hate! He must make her feel, must make her acknowledge, that he had power. It seemed to him another instance of the resistless fascination which the unattainable, however unworthy, has ever ...
— The Grain Of Dust - A Novel • David Graham Phillips
... greatness had long ago ceased to interest or even to amuse him. He was conscious only of an agitation which had already passed through the process of analysis. He loved, he loved the impossible and the unattainable, and it was the exhilaration of this thought that agitated him. He never would be the same again—he would be better. Neither did he ...
— The Puppet Crown • Harold MacGrath
... amongst Moslems, as with other faiths, the instinctive longing to pry into the Future has produced a host of pseudo-sciences, Geomancy, Astrology, Prophecy and others which serve only to prove that such knowledge, in the present condition of human nature, is absolutely unattainable. ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... Obloski's face was beginning to bloat with drink. It was only natural that Daisy, upon whom all the work was put, should have been too busy to look hard or greedy. She had no time to brood upon life or to think upon unattainable things. She had only time to cook, time to wash the dishes, to mend the clothes, to make the beds, and to play the mother to her little brothers and to her doll. And so, and naturally, as the skin upon her little hands thickened and grew rough and ...
— IT and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris
... together by cross beams, connecting the tops of the opposite posts. There was one rude window, made by cutting a hole in the side of the wall about four feet from the ground and covering this with greased paper, glass being an unattainable luxury. Notwithstanding the belief that there was not a man in those days but wore a red shirt and a big revolver, there was not a firearm ...
— Bears I Have Met—and Others • Allen Kelly
... false substructure had crumbled at the test. She loved another; had suddenly become as unattainable as the stars—and ...
— The Promise - A Tale of the Great Northwest • James B. Hendryx
... had turned to mist, and the mist seemed fair to turn into a dream. There are those who say it did become a dream, and afterward descended. For wanderers in desert countries tell that at times they have seen some far city of dreams, alluringly beautiful, but evanescent, intangible, unattainable, trembling and floating upon ...
— The Singing Mouse Stories • Emerson Hough
... it!" said Frederick William, piously lifting his large eyes to Heaven. "It seems now, indeed, as if it were an unattainable goal," he continued, after a pause, "and to no one else would I confess it, for I would only become the scorn and ...
— The Youth of the Great Elector • L. Muhlbach
... loving considerateness for the little bride, positively commanded her to lie down, and be quiet, and submit to be nursed and cherished. For Mrs. Berry well knew that ten minutes alone with the hero could only be had while the little bride was in that unattainable position. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... use woollen) cloth rub it well all over the table; then take another piece of linen, and rub it for ten minutes, then rub it till quite dry with another cloth. This must be done every day for several months, when you will find your mahogany acquire a permanent and beautiful lustre, unattainable by any other means, and equal to the finest French polish; and if the table is covered with the tablecloth only, the hottest dishes will make no impression upon it: and when once this polish is produced, it will only ...
— The Cook's Oracle; and Housekeeper's Manual • William Kitchiner
... hand into the same scientific elbow-rest as before, and backing it up with the inert strength of his arm, as skilfully as a Police Expert, and with an apparent repose quite unattainable by novices, Mr. Crisparkle conducts his pupil to the pleasant and orderly old room prepared for him. Arrived there, the young man throws himself into a chair, and, flinging his arms upon his reading-table, rests his head upon them with ...
— The Mystery of Edwin Drood • Charles Dickens
... in fact. Cynthia was Cynthia, and not Venus herself could have been her substitute. In this one thing Mr. Preston was more really true than many worthy men, who, seeking to be married, turn with careless facility from the unattainable to the attainable, and keep their feelings and fancy tolerably loose till they find a woman who consents to be their wife. But no one would ever be to Mr. Preston what Cynthia had been, and was; and yet he could have stabbed her in certain of his moods. So, Molly, who had ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... was to be his, however, he found a deep satisfaction in considering himself hopelessly in love with her. He was profoundly sorry for himself. He saw himself a tragic figure, hopeless and wretched. He longed for the unattainable; he held up empty hands to the stars, and by so mimicking the gesture ...
— Dangerous Days • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... all born to disappointment. It is as well to be prospective. Our happiness is not in what is, but in what is to be. We may be disappointed in our everyday realities, and if not, we may make an ideality of the unattainable, and quarrel with Nature for not giving what she has not to give. It is unreasonable to be so disappointed, but it is disappointment ...
— Gryll Grange • Thomas Love Peacock
... as the appointed guardian of the Byrdsnest. Not only did she relieve Mary of the housekeeping, and help Lily with the household tasks, which she adored, but she had practically taken the place of nurse to the children, leaving Mary hours of freedom for her work which would otherwise have been unattainable. ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale
... was certainly standing by them well. She it was who had driven Priscilla up on to the heath and into the acquaintance of Augustus Shuttleworth, without whom a cottage in Symford would have been for ever unattainable. She it was who had sent the Morrisons, father and son, to drive Priscilla from the churchyard before Fritzing had joined her, without which driving she would never have met Augustus. She it was who had ...
— The Princess Priscilla's Fortnight • Elizabeth von Arnim
... G.O.M. had made an allusion to that pleasant and promising speech of young Austen Chamberlain, of which I have spoken already. Just by the way, with that delightful and unapproachable lightness of touch which is the unattainable charm of Mr. Gladstone's oratory, he alluded to the speech and to Mr. Chamberlain himself. "I will not enter into any elaborate eulogy of that speech," said Mr. Gladstone. "I will endeavour to sum ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... down the lake with the sun on her uncovered head, on the soft whiteness of the doeskin garment, and to young Dupre she had never seemed so near the divine, so far and unattainable. ...
— The Maid of the Whispering Hills • Vingie E. Roe
... estimate rightly his worth we must contemplate his difficulties. We must examine the means placed in his hands, and the use he made of those means. To preserve an army when conquest was impossible, to avoid defeat and ruin when victory was unattainable, to keep his forces embodied and suppress the discontents of his soldiers, exasperated by a long course of the most cruel privations, to seize with unerring discrimination the critical moment when vigorous offensive operations might be advantageously carried on, are actions ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 1 (of 5) • John Marshall
... had seemed so far away came miles nearer. Presently he would be there. The impossible had become possible, the unattainable was about to be attained. He gave another mighty dig with his shoes, the last reach of the slope passed behind him, and he shot out on the frozen surface of the lake, bruised and breathless, but without ...
— The Scouts of the Valley • Joseph A. Altsheler
... entertained? "She has loved him once," Longmore said with a sinking of the heart, "and with her to love once is to commit herself for ever. Her clever husband thinks her too prim. What would a stupid poet call it?" He relapsed with aching impotence into the sense of her being somehow beyond him, unattainable, immeasurable by his own fretful logic. Suddenly he gave three passionate switches in the air with his cane which made Madame de Mauves look round. She could hardly have guessed their signifying that where ...
— Madame de Mauves • Henry James
... the Economist, while still maintaining the justice of the Northern cause, though with lessened vigour, appealed to the common sense of the North to refrain from a civil war whose professed object was unattainable. "Everyone knows and admits that the secession is an accomplished, irrevocable, fact.... Even if the North were sure of an easy and complete victory—short, of course, of actual subjugation of the South (which ...
— Great Britain and the American Civil War • Ephraim Douglass Adams
... disease, with which she had sailed, had been accelerated by hardships, and Providence permitted him only to receive her last sigh. All these misgivings crowded on him the moment he drew so near the object which had looked all brightness so long as it was unattainable. He sat pale and brave in the boat; but his doubts and fears ...
— Foul Play • Charles Reade
... themselves called upon to depart in the slightest degree from a policy that has so long stood them in such good stead, and it must, therefore, be our policy to assure ourselves of the alliance, or at least, where an alliance is unattainable, of the benevolent neutrality of the other continental Powers in view of a war with England. To begin with, as regards our ally, the French Republic, a satisfactory solution of our task in this direction is already assured by the existing treaties. Yet these treaties do not ...
— The Coming Conquest of England • August Niemann
... such weight as a heavy roof. It is used for keels on account of its great strength—it does not resist the sea-worm; it is applied to all purposes in Manila where more than ordinary strength is required when Molave cannot be procured in sufficiently great lengths and Ipil is unattainable. ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... resolve, not crude determination, not errant purpose, but that strong and indefatigable will which treads down difficulties and danger as a boy treads down the heaving frost-lands of winter,—which kindles his eye and brain with a proud pulse-beat toward the unattainable. Will makes men giants. It made Napoleon an emperor of kings, Bacon a fathomer of nature, Byron a tutor of passion, and the ...
— Dream Life - A Fable Of The Seasons • Donald G. Mitchell
... her. As the evening wore on, she leaned against the iron bars, looking at the hills that rose far off, through the thick sodden clouds, like a bright, unattainable calm. As she looked, a shadow of their solemn repose fell on her face: its fierce discontent faded into a pitiful, humble quiet. Slow, solemn tears gathered in her eyes: the poor weak eyes turned so hopelessly to the place where Hugh was to rest, the grave heights looking higher and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 42, April, 1861 • Various
... underlying harmony of those two demands. There is, however, here more than this. In this most modern of their embodiments, Socialism and Individualism are not merely harmonious, each is the key to the other, which remains unattainable without it. However carefully we improve our breed, however anxiously we guard the entrance to life, our labour will be in vain if we neglect to adapt the environment to the fine race we are breeding. The best individuals are not the toughest, any more ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... medium of such politicians in that country as were disposed to follow a policy of friendly relations with the Central Powers. The main object of our policy to get such men into power in Roumania, and enable them to remain in the Government, would be rendered unattainable if too severe measures were adopted. We might gain something thereby for a few years, but it would mean losing everything in the future. And we succeeded also in convincing the German Secretary of State, Kuehlmann, of the inadvisability ...
— In the World War • Count Ottokar Czernin
... for. According to Browning's theory, perfection gained and rested in means stagnation. Aspiration toward the unattainable is the condition of growth. The artist who can satisfy himself with such themes as can be completely expressed by his art, is on a low ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... parliamentary toils and triumphs; and what sustained his young hero through something of the same sort of trial was also his own support. He too had his Dora, at apparently the same hopeless elevation; striven for as the one only thing to be attained, and even more unattainable, for neither did he succeed nor happily did she die; but the one idol, like the other, supplying a motive to exertion for the time, and otherwise opening out to the idolater, both in fact and fiction, a highly unsubstantial, happy, foolish time. I used to laugh ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... circumstances of the fire. He can raise himself on a window sill, or the top of a wall, if he can only reach it with his hands; and by his hands alone he may sustain himself in situations where other means of support are unattainable, till the arrival of assistance. These are great advantages; but, as I said before, the greatest of all is that feeling of safety with which it enables a fireman to proceed with his operations, uncertainty or distraction being the greatest of possible evils. The cord carried at the waist-belt ...
— Fire Prevention and Fire Extinction • James Braidwood
... beyond its limitations. The tragic irony of the Greeks is but the expression of the tragedy of passion in its pitiful reaction from hope, the intensity of feeling with which men see desire defeated and ideal unattainable. So, too, in the most intense moments the characters of ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... something for him who had suffered all for her. In those nights sacred love conquered earthly love in her; out of the pain of sweet, disappointed desire which yearned to possess, arose his image surrounded once more by that halo of unattainable glory in which she had known ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IX - Friedrich Hebbel and Otto Ludwig • Various
... and with comprehensive gesture took in the countryside. "A fair mistress, lad, and a faithful one, though of many moods. A man suns himself in the warmth of her caresses by day, and at night she is cold, chaste, unattainable; at one time she is all smiles and tears, then with boisterous gesture she bids one seek shelter from her buffets. She gives all and yet nothing; she trails the very traces of her hair across a man's face only to elude him. She holds him fast, for ...
— The Gathering of Brother Hilarius • Michael Fairless
... was sinking toward the water line, the forest along the uneven coast was merging into one vast green shadow, the waters were growing blacker and blacker, and yet the row of canoes continued its wearisome glide toward a seemingly unattainable end. Lady Tennys became so tired and sleepy that her long lashes could not be restrained from caressing her cheeks, nor could her dreamy eyes bear the strain of wakefulness. Hugh, observing her fatigue, persuaded her to turn about in the boat and lie ...
— Nedra • George Barr McCutcheon
... that I mean to dogmatise upon a subject concerning which all men are equally ignorant, or that I think the Gordian knot of the origin of evil can be disentangled by that or any similar assertions.... That there is a true solution of the riddle, and that in our present state that solution is unattainable by us, are propositions which may be regarded as equally certain: meanwhile, as it is the province of the poet to attach himself to those ideas which exalt and ennoble humanity, let him be permitted to have conjectured the condition of that futurity towards which we are all impelled ...
— Adonais • Shelley
... highest but unattainable ideal of such progress would consist in this, that all products should be obtained without cost. If this ideal were attainable, every one would be infinitely rich and all wealth would be free, like the ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... as it was, was defeated by the obstinate enthusiasm of some, who trembled for this New Jerusalem of their hopes, and by the scandalous desertion of others, and especially yourself. The ends of opposition being thus rendered unattainable, but at the hazard of convulsions, that might endanger the great American cause, the same virtue that began it, ended it, and it has long ...
— Nuts for Future Historians to Crack • Various
... beloved with virtues that exist only in his imagination. The beloved is consciously or unconsciously aware of this, and endeavors to fulfil the high ideal; and in the contemplation of the transcendent qualities that his mind has created, the lover is raised to heights otherwise unattainable. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... still belonged, to a world he had thought of as outside the possibilities of his life. Was she not young, strong, straight of body? Did she not array herself in what seemed unbelievably beautiful clothes? The clothes she wore were a symbol of herself. For him she was unattainable. ...
— Poor White • Sherwood Anderson
... be no doubt," say they, "that a well-constructed engine, a steam-carriage conveyance between London and Birmingham, at a velocity unattainable by horses, and limited only by safety, may be maintained; and it is our conviction that such a project might be undertaken with great advantage to the public, more particularly if, as might obviously be ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... Suddenly the whole situation came back to him, tenfold clearer than before. He saw at once beyond all possibility of contradiction that he could not shoot Marian, no matter who ordered him to do it; that for him the ideal of a perfect soldier was altogether unattainable, and that he was obliged to admit to himself that his entire life was a failure. The public might praise and acclaim him, but he was essentially a fraud and could never secure his ...
— Captain Jinks, Hero • Ernest Crosby
... that the happiest state of society is that in which supreme power resides in the whole body of a well-informed people. This is an imaginary, perhaps an unattainable, state of things. Yet, in some measure, we may approximate to it; and he alone deserves the name of a great statesman, whose principle it is to extend the power of the people in proportion to the extent of their knowledge, ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Contibutions to Knight's Quarterly Magazine] • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... informal meal was ended by some excellent coffee in the place of the conventional dessert, after which came a hurried dispersion as they were all going to some political meeting at the East End. Cabs were unattainable and, having secured a couple of link-boys, they set off, apparently ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... employed with the aid of two other great scientific aids of modern times. The flame of the blow-pipe is made by a stream of gas, and driven, instead of by a man's breath, by a steam blast, so that the mechanic has a power and a facility of manipulation which would be unattainable under the old system of working with a lamp and puffed out cheeks. There is great matter for reflection in the sight of the hundreds of ingenious industrious workmen and workwomen under one roof, employed mainly through ...
— Rides on Railways • Samuel Sidney
... breach of the law by the most cruel death, travel in large parties, well armed, often daunts the courage of the soldiers. The smugglers, who seek only safety, never engage, when they can possibly avoid it; the military, also, who know, that in these encounters, danger is certain, and glory almost unattainable, are equally reluctant to fight; an engagement, therefore, very seldom happens, but, when it does, it never concludes till after the most desperate and bloody conflict. You are inattentive, Blanche,' added the Count: 'I have wearied ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe
... been said that "the freedom of the seas" was an unattainable ideal, a mere phrase, a red herring drawn across our track; but it was in reality none of these things. America attached to this phrase a definite and concrete meaning; namely, the abolition of the law of capture at sea, and ...
— My Three Years in America • Johann Heinrich Andreas Hermann Albrecht Graf von Bernstorff
... day by day, he had made himself into this delicate register of perceptions and sensations—as far above the ordinary human faculty of appreciation as some scientific registering instrument is beyond the rough human senses—only to find that the beauty which alone could satisfy him was unattainable—that he was never to know the last deep identification which only possession can give. He had trained himself in short, to feel, in the rare great thing—such an utterance of beauty as the Daunt Diana, ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... Dorrit, trembling on his arm, was less in unison than ever with Mrs Chivery's theory, and yet was not irreconcilable with a new fancy which sprung up within him, that there might be some one else in the hopeless—newer fancy still—in the hopeless unattainable distance. ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... bring back the evidence of what they have met and studied; that it so teaches men their own nature that it enables them to separate soul and body, and travel without the physical body in worlds long thought unattainable, save through the gateway of death. I say "Long thought unattainable"; but the scriptures of every religion bear witness that they are not unattainable. The Hindu tells us that man should separate himself from his body as you strip the sheath from the stem of the grass. The Buddhist ...
— London Lectures of 1907 • Annie Besant
... Parliament, D'Israeli, Borthwick, Ferrand, Lord John Manners, etc. Lord Ashley, too, is in sympathy with them. The hope of Young England is a restoration of the old "Merry England" with its brilliant features and its romantic feudalism. This object is of course unattainable and ridiculous, a satire upon all historic development; but the good intention, the courage to resist the existing state of things and prevalent prejudices, and to recognise the vileness of our present condition, is worth something anyhow. Wholly isolated is the half-German Englishman, ...
— The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 - with a Preface written in 1892 • Frederick Engels
... marvellous a progress, and in which intellectual civilisation had exhibited itself in realising those objects for the happiness of the people, which the political philosophers above ground had, after ages of struggle, pretty generally agreed to consider unattainable visions, should, nevertheless, be so wholly without a contemporaneous literature, despite the excellence to which culture had brought a language at once so rich ...
— The Coming Race • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... necessity of dismounting from the high horse upon which, it must be confessed, he had been inclined for more rough-riding of late than the situation warranted. Peace was unattainable, war was impossible, truce was inevitable; Barneveld ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... which conciliation and harmony can be produced is surely not unattainable. The proposition to compromise by letting the North have exclusive control of the territory above a certain line and to give Southern institutions protection below that line ought to receive universal approbation. In itself, indeed, it may ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 4 (of 4) of Volume 5: James Buchanan • James D. Richardson
... them as fresh and attractive as if they had never been touched, never probed and tortured by fruitless examination; to each generation they appear in all the unabated charms of mystery; to each generation must their solution at least be shown to be unattainable. In vain you write over the portal Lasciate ogni speranza! there is always a band of youth newly arrived before the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... French road. North and South are relative in the sense that I am North of Bournemouth and South of Spitzbergen. But if there be any doubt of the position of the North Pole, there is in equal degree a doubt of whether I am South of Spitzbergen at all. The absolute idea of light may be practically unattainable. We may not be able to procure pure light. We may not be able to get to the North Pole. But because the North Pole is unattainable, it does not follow that it is indefinable. And it is only because the North Pole is not indefinable that we can make ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... maintained at 27 or 28 inches, the condenser is not doing as well as it ought to do, or it is not of the proper type, unless perhaps the temperature and the quantity of cooling water available render a higher vacuum unattainable. ...
— Steam Turbines - A Book of Instruction for the Adjustment and Operation of - the Principal Types of this Class of Prime Movers • Hubert E. Collins
... your nature to trust implicitly those you love. But since I have had time to think, even the little conscience I possess will not permit me to go away in silence in regard to him. Do not think my words inspired by jealousy. I have given you up. You are as unattainable by me as heaven. But that man is not worthy of you. Think ...
— Opening a Chestnut Burr • Edward Payson Roe
... Nell, whom I now wished to snatch from the arms of a hated rival (not that she was in them yet, but she might be at any minute unless I secured her) and it was painful that at such a crisis she should throw her once unattainable stepsister ...
— The Chauffeur and the Chaperon • C. N. Williamson
... cutting the blue sky fascinated her. Florence Kingsley's expression "beckoning mountains" returned to Madeline. She could not see or feel so much as that. Her impression was rather that these mountains were aloof, unattainable, that if approached they would recede or vanish ...
— The Light of Western Stars • Zane Grey
... pardoned children; the sorrow of bereaved, empty hearts may become the gladness of hearts filled with God; and every grief that stoops upon our path may be, and will be, if we keep near that dear Lord, changed into its own opposite, and become the source of blessedness else unattainable. Every stroke of the bright, sharp ploughshare that goes through the fallow ground, and every dark winter's day of pulverising frost and lashing tempest and howling wind, are represented in the broad acres, waving with the golden grain. All ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chaps. XV to XXI • Alexander Maclaren
... Curate's impatience grew almost beyond bearing. It was a discipline upon which he had not calculated, and which exceeded the bounds of endurance, especially as Miss Leonora questioned him incessantly about his "work," and still dangled before him, like an unattainable sweet-meat before a child, the comforts and advantages of Skelmersdale, where poor old Mr Shirley had rallied for the fiftieth time. The situation altogether was very tempting to Miss Leonora; she could not ...
— The Perpetual Curate • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... fascinated by her very splendours, not without hope. When at 8 P.M. a banquet was served to 250 guests in the Radcliffe Library, the upper gallery being open to a crawling public to see the lions feed, Harris, watching thence the unattainable under the blue of the canopy—blue always in honour of the Sea—thought within himself: "Ah, Mr. 76, you've got it all, ain't you?—for the time being. But 'ow'd you feel if I had a pistol now? Gawd! I can just see him nicely ...
— The Lord of the Sea • M. P. Shiel
... attained—a fact which wholly discredits all previous inferences as to the limits of our sidereal system. Hence, notwithstanding the wonderful instrumental advances of the nineteenth century, knowledge of the exact form and extent of our universe seems more unattainable than it seemed ...
— A History of Science, Volume 3(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... callousness had been a shield that had saved him troublous misgivings; behind this shield, even in rapacity, he had experienced peace of mind, absence of remorse. If he could have put away from him his love for the girl he would have done so willingly. Why should he battle and strive for an unattainable something as intangible as a dream? It was so paradoxical that Allis's love for Mortimer seemed hopeless because of the latter's defeat, while his, Crane's love, was equally hopeless in ...
— Thoroughbreds • W. A. Fraser
... attendance of the whole family at the grave, gave a sort of decency to his funeral which rarely, in that country, honors the poor relics of British dust: but no clergyman attended, no prayer was said, no bell was tolled; these, indeed, are ceremonies unthought of, and in fact unattainable without much expense, at such a distance from a town; had the poor youth been an American, he would have been laid in the earth in the same unceremonious manner. But had this poor Irish lad fallen sick in equal poverty and ...
— Domestic Manners of the Americans • Fanny Trollope
... swears by her. Those awesome Archives! The reports of the Council of Ten alone stretch away through vasty halls of death. And then people talk of writing history! How fortunate that the exact details of royal, political and military events are as unessential as they are unattainable! Real history consists mainly of the things that haven't happened—the millions of everyday lives, sunrise and sunset, ships and harvests, the winds and the rain, and the bargains in the market-place. The reading of Clio's blood-stained ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... peace for the soul here or hereafter until its innate capabilities for wisdom, love, and power for good are developed and exercised. His precepts and example would be foolishness and a stumbling-block, his character an unattainable ideal, were it other than the first fruit ripened on the tree of life, the promise of a ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various
... treasures, mocking the ignorance that knew not their meaning. Maybe he now had no hope remaining, yet he would not rest, for the search had become his life,— Just as the ocean for ever lifts its arms to the sky for the unattainable— Just as the stars go in circles, yet seeking a goal that can never be reached— Even so on the lonely shore the madman with dusty tawny locks still roamed in search of ...
— The Gardener • Rabindranath Tagore
... lunar crater is shown in Plate VIII. This is, no doubt, a somewhat imaginary sketch. The point of view from which the artist is supposed to have taken the picture is one quite unattainable by terrestrial astronomers, yet there can be little doubt that it is a fair representation of objects on the moon. We should, however, recollect the scale on which it is drawn. The vast crater ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball
... gates that open to him of their own accord. If he fails in his siege, I do really believe he will die early; not of a broken heart, exactly, but of a heart starved, with the food it was craving close to it, but unattainable. I have, therefore, a deep interest in knowing how Number Five and the Tutor are getting along together. Is there any danger of one or the other growing tired of the intimacy, and becoming willing to get rid of it, like a garment which has shrunk and grown too tight? Is it likely that some ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... beyond the realm of possibility; from which reason recoils; visionary; inconceivable &c. (improbable) 473; prodigious &c. (wonderful) 870; unimaginable, inimaginable[obs3]; unthinkable. impracticable unachievable; unfeasible, infeasible; insuperable; unsurmountable[obs3], insurmountable; unattainable, unobtainable; out of reach, out of the question; not to be had, not to be thought of; beyond control; desperate &c. (hopeless) 859; incompatible &c. 24; inaccessible, uncomeatable[obs3], impassable, impervious, innavigable[obs3], inextricable; self-contradictory. out of one's power, beyond ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... erect, looking round. Just ahead were two islets in the stream, covered with osiers. But they were unattainable. The cliff came down like a sloping wall from far above their heads. Behind, not far back, were the fishermen. Across the river the distant cattle fed silently in the desolate afternoon. He cursed again deeply under his breath. He gazed ...
— Sons and Lovers • David Herbert Lawrence
... unattainable! Ye seem Like awful deities, at whose command Man's evanescent life,—a fretful stream, One instant murmurs ...
— Poems • John L. Stoddard
... art of the musician is not one of mere talent, or of a certain sensual refinement and dexterity. It involves deep systematic study, closely akin to that of the severer sciences. It has a sequence and logic of its own, and excellence in it is unattainable without good sense and strong intellect. It involves great moral and pathetic sensibility, and a ready sympathy with all the joys and sorrows of mankind. And finally, the lightest branch of it is beyond the reach of any but those who are lifted up by strong feelings of reverence and devotion. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... in truth behind that unattainable goal that Kleist tried again and again to carry by force? He himself confesses that it was not the highest poetic art or at least not exclusively so. Otherwise Kleist would have been able to content himself with ...
— Sleep Walking and Moon Walking - A Medico-Literary Study • Isidor Isaak Sadger
... disturbance of its superficial appearance; and (b) to preserve a likeness of the deceased as he was in life. At first it was naturally attempted to make this simulacrum of the body itself if it were possible, or alternatively, when this ideal was found to be unattainable, from its wrappings or by means of a portrait statue. It was soon recognized that it was beyond the powers of the early embalmer to succeed in mummifying the body itself so as to retain a recognizable likeness to the man when alive: although from time to time such attempts were repeatedly made,[24] ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... representations of narrow-minded bigots, who paint the Deity from their own gloomy conceptions, the young are too often frighted from the paths of virtue; despairing of ideal perfections, they give up all virtue as unattainable, and start aside from the road which they falsely suppose strewed ...
— The History of Emily Montague • Frances Brooke
... objects, and if there were good reason to regard them as mental, we could not legitimately reject this opinion merely because it strikes us as strange. The truth about physical objects must be strange. It may be unattainable, but if any philosopher believes that he has attained it, the fact that what he offers as the truth is strange ought not to be made a ground of objection ...
— The Problems of Philosophy • Bertrand Russell
... incident in the life of government that the supreme head of it shall be subject to the vicissitudes of its maniacal, fanatical and criminal classes, those who live by their wits or those who dream of a condition of society unattainable, as human nature is constructed, such as Edward Bellamy has pictured in "Looking Backward." I wish it distinctly understood that I refer to this matter simply to draw attention to the fact that Czolgosz, the obscure assassin ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... is imprudent to remain in the cities of Cuba later than the latter period, as the fever season then commences. The invalid will find that very many physical comforts, and some things deemed imperative at home, must be sacrificed here as quite unattainable: such, for instance, as good beds, strict cleanliness, good milk, and sweet butter. The climatic advantages must suffice for such deprivations. During the greater portion of the year it is dry and hot, ...
— Due South or Cuba Past and Present • Maturin M. Ballou
... or since. France has ever been rich, and is as rich as ever, in men who have known how to sacrifice the shadow to the substance; in fanatics who have pursued without pause or divagation dreams of impossible Utopias and unattainable good; in idealists who have joyfully given all to love, to art, to religion, and to logic. It is not inappropriate, therefore, that France should have produced in an age of turmoil and terrible madness the man who exalted the cult of moderation to the ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... places. Merely because it seemed foolish to take the time to learn a new trade when I already had one, I still sought office work. There was little difficulty in finding such employment—at humble wages; the unattainable thing was the keeping of it. Though I could never succeed in running it down and bringing it to bay, a pitiless Nemesis seemed to dog me from town to town. Gossiping marshals there may have been, now and then, to spread my story; but I had twice been given ...
— Branded • Francis Lynde
... fanciful, pleasure-loving pupil, perseveres in such a course?" I feel the power of industry growing every day, and, besides the all-powerful motive of ambition, and a new stimulus lately given through a friend, I have learned to believe that nothing, no! not perfection, is unattainable. I am determined on distinction, which formerly I thought to win at an easy rate; but now I see that long years of labor must be given to secure even the "succes de societe,"—which, however, shall never content me. I see ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... even his greatest enemies never dared to utter at that time when in England it was the custom to revile him. Although the time has not yet come when Lord Byron's life should be written, since the true sources of collecting information respecting him are unattainable so long as the people live to whom his letters were addressed, still it is easy to perceive that the time has at length arrived when in England the desire to do him justice and fairly to examine his merits is felt by the nation generally. Moore, Parry, Medwin, etc., ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... solitude I sweeten by an imaginative sympathy which re-creates the past for me,—the past of the world, as well as the past which belongs to me as an individual,—and which makes me independent of the passing moment. I see every one struggling after the unattainable, but I struggle not, and so spare myself the pangs of disappointment and disgust. I have no ventures at sea, and, consequently, do not fear the arrival of evil tidings. I have no desire to act any prominent part in the world, but I am devoured by an ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... impotence tends to extremes. Henri was at once an old man, a man, and a youth. To afford him the feelings of a real love, he needed like Lovelace, a Clarissa Harlowe. Without the magic lustre of that unattainable pearl he could only have either passions rendered acute by some Parisian vanity, or set determinations with himself to bring such and such a woman to such and such a point of corruption, or else adventures ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... the garden puts an end to this transient riot of the heart. With her departs the amorous illusion that had shed a temporary charm over the scene of his captivity, and he relapses into loneliness, now rendered tenfold more intolerable by this passing beam of unattainable beauty. Through the long and weary day he repines at his unhappy lot, and when evening approaches, and Phoebus, as he beautifully expresses it, had "bade farewell to every leaf and flower," he still lingers at the window, and, laying his head upon the cold stone, gives vent ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving
... balls and concerts there are yet the queen's and prince of Wales's breakfasts or garden-parties, which come off about 3 P.M. These are the most exclusive and unattainable of all the court entertainments. There are two or three of these in a season, and out of all London society only a couple of hundred are invited. There are certain persons who are always invited, and ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 30. September, 1873 • Various
... that have thoroughly studied the Vedas, that have tranquillity in their souls, they that have subdued their wrath, obtain a high reward by means of their numerous sacrifices. That reward, however, is unattainable by men that are wicked in their deeds, overwhelmed by covetousness, mean and disreputable with souls unblessed and impure. Therefore, must thou know, O Brahmana that this reward which is obtained by persons having their souls under control and which is unobtainable by the ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa Bk. 3 Pt. 2 • Translated by Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... greater part of them, we apprehend, will be found to be composed of the following elements: (1) The antisocial principles, and distempered sensibility of Rousseau—his discontent with the present constitution of society—his paradoxical morality, and his perpetual hankerings after some unattainable state of voluptuous virtue and perfection. (2) The simplicity and energy (horresco referens) of Kotzebue and Schiller. (3) The homeliness and harshness of some of Cowper's language and versification, interchanged occasionally with the innocence of Ambrose Philips, or the quaintness ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... youth; the old worn simile of an April moon, distinguished in her case by the qualification, wistful, was the most complete description of her he possessed. Young men—Peyton Morris—were worshippers of the moon, the unattainable; and when they happily attained a reality they hid it in ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... smoke. Lord! there wasn't flesh and blood enough in them all to decompose, and they gave out no odor even while burning. I burned them all, cleaned off all the blood-spots, ventilated the room, opened the windows, and will turn it to a workshop. No more sighing for the unattainable, no more grasping at the intangible, no more clutching at the impalpable. I am no poet, and we don't want poetry. Our civilization isn't old enough. Poets, like other maggots, will be produced when ...
— Bart Ridgeley - A Story of Northern Ohio • A. G. Riddle
... medicines, flocking at large through the community, areassigned to him or her. The people have a little mistaken thecharacter and purpose of poor Septimius, and remember him as aquack doctor, instead of a seeker for a secret, not the lesssublime and elevating because it happened to be unattainable. ...
— Septimius Felton - or, The Elixir of Life • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... unsuccessful authorship. The book that perishes unread is the deaf mute of literature. The great asylum of Oblivion is full of such, making inaudible signs to each other in leaky garrets and unattainable dusty upper shelves." ...
— The Guardian Angel • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... field? Not so: that were easy to achieve. Human beings, two living, healthy men, one white, one black, were the requirements. Impossible! The experiment could never be performed: its requirements were unattainable. O tempora! O mores! Alas, for the degeneracy of the age! In the days of the Roman emperors men were fed, literally fed, to wild beasts in the arena—Gauls, Scythians, Nubians, even Roman freedmen when barbarians were scarce. This to ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 11, - No. 22, January, 1873 • Various
... were the 5th July, on which the fleet sailed from Lisbon, the 3d of August must have been on Thursday. But it does not seem necessary to insist upon such minute critical accuracy; which, besides, is unattainable.—E. ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. II • Robert Kerr
... produce in generous minds an enterprise and enthusiasm to be recorded by the historian and to be celebrated by the poet; but such perfection is not an object of reasonable pursuit, because it is not one of possible attainment; and never yet did a passionate struggle after an absolutely unattainable object fail to be productive of misery to an individual, of madness and confusion to a people. As the inhabitants of those burning climates which lie beneath a tropical sun sigh for the coolness of the mountain and the grove, so (all history instructs us) do nations which have ...
— Ten Englishmen of the Nineteenth Century • James Richard Joy
... oneself and concluding that whatever one has been taught is bad. Curiously enough the outward result of the two states is the same. Only later comes the period of judicious sifting, and by then characteristics, tastes, habits, have unwittingly formed such bias that true poise is almost unattainable. Ishmael's root-ideas were unchanged, but he conformed to all the fads of the school, even, as he became more of a personage, adding to them, for his inborn dread of ridicule prevented him from being an iconoclast and his bent for dominance ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... musing and speculation had passed over the young man's head, when one day, as he was feeling unusually disconsolate, and wishing for unattainable things—Cornelia among others—he became aware, through some subtle channel of sensation, that somebody was standing in the door-way. He was lying in such a position that he could not see the door, so, after waiting a few moments, he exclaimed, with ...
— Bressant • Julian Hawthorne
... right and virtue, nay, this must at all times flutter high. It is all the same in the end what kind of heraldic figures are represented on it, if they only indicate what is meant. Such an allegorical truth is at all times and everywhere, for mankind at large, a beneficial substitute for an eternally unattainable truth, and in general, for a philosophy which it can never grasp; to say nothing of its changing its form daily, and not having as yet attained any kind of general recognition. Therefore practical aims, my good Philalethes, have in every way ...
— Essays of Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... doubled the parts of Cabbalist and Talmudist. That Jewish mysticism comes to look like a revolt against the Talmud is due to the course of mediaeval scholasticism. While Aristotle was supreme, it was impossible for man to conceive as knowable anything unattainable by reason. But reason must always leave God as unknowable. Mysticism did not assert that God was knowable, but it substituted something else for this spiritual scepticism. Mysticism started with the conviction that God was unknowable by reason, but it held that God was nevertheless ...
— Judaism • Israel Abrahams
... gates which the war would open to him—to go where Death ambushed the reckless or the brave, and take the stroke meant for him, on a field of honour all too kind to himself and soothing to those good friends who would mourn his going, those who hoped for him the now unattainable things. ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... And any act, however humble, on which the light from God falls, will gleam with a lustre else unattainable, like some piece of broken glass in the furrows of ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... lower classes the art of Sight Recognition is regarded as an unattainable luxury. A common Tradesman cannot afford to let his son spend a third of his life in abstract studies. The children of the poor are therefore allowed to "feel" from their earliest years, and they gain thereby a precocity and an early vivacity which contrast at first most favourably with ...
— Flatland • Edwin A. Abbott
... the old home whence he has come. Such a story might have been very cynically treated; but it is not so done, the whole tone is kindly and consolatory, and the disenchanted man submissively takes the lesson, and understands that things far away are to be loved for their own sake, and that the unattainable is not truly unattainable, when we can make the beauty of it our own. Indeed, throughout all these two volumes, though there is much practical scepticism, and much irony on abstract questions, this kindly and ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... with no prospect of fame, there was a very long way. Felix had lately become conscious of a luxurious preference for the society—if possible unshared with others—of Gertrude Wentworth; but he had relegated this young lady, for the moment, to the coldly brilliant category of unattainable possessions. She was not the first woman for whom he had entertained an unpractical admiration. He had been in love with duchesses and countesses, and he had made, once or twice, a perilously near approach to cynicism in declaring that the disinterestedness of ...
— The Europeans • Henry James
... as it ought to be, and because you would still march on to some nearer approach to equality; though the thing itself is so great, so glorious, so godlike,—nay, so absolutely divine,—that you have been disgusted by the very promise of it, because its perfection is unattainable. Men have asserted a mock equality till the very idea of equality stinks ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope |
