"Illimitable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... fanatical passion of the nuns for their confessors, priests, and monks, exceeds belief. That which especially renders their incarceration endurable is the illimitable opportunity they enjoy of seeing and corresponding with those persons with whom they are in love. This freedom localizes and identifies them with the convent so closely that they are unhappy when, on ...
— The Priest, The Woman And The Confessional • Father Chiniquy
... pardonest our madness, guidest our blindness, guardest our weakness. Thou, by the basest and most loathed instruments, dost work out thy great ends. All thanks, then, be to thee, by whatsoever name thou wouldest be addressed; to thee, whose dwelling is illimitable space, whose essence is in every thing that we behold, that moves, that is—to thee whom I hail, GOD! For thou hast given it to me to save my country. And whether I die now, by this assassin's knife, or ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 1 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... his sky girt rings, Jupiter lights his waning moons, and Venus dips her queenly robes anew. Thy fountains are shoreless as the ocean of heavenly love; thy centre is everywhere, and thy boundary no power has marked. Thy beams gild the illimitable fields of space, and gladden the farthest verge of the universe. The glories of the Seventh Heaven are open to thy gaze, and thy glare is felt in the woes of the lowest Erebus. The sealed books of heaven by thee are read, and thine eyes like ...
— The World As I Have Found It - Sequel to Incidents in the Life of a Blind Girl • Mary L. Day Arms
... strange mounts like two children on a holiday. Their spirits lifted with the beauty of the morning, and with that strange primitive exhilaration of the desert, that wild joy in vast, lonely reaches, in far horizons and illimitable space. The air intoxicated them; the leaping light and the free winds fired them, and with laughing shouts and challenges they urged their camels forward in a wild race that sent the desert hares scattering to right and left. Like runaways ...
— The Palace of Darkened Windows • Mary Hastings Bradley
... conception of vast complexity. But it must be remembered that, once the mind of man began to play with the idea of a vital essence capable of existing apart from the body and to identify it with the breath of life, an illimitable field was opened up for speculation. The vital principle could manifest itself in all the varied expressions of human personality, as well as in all the physiological indications of life. Experience of dreams led men to believe that the "soul" could also leave the ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... witnessed, shining out of the New England reserve with which Holgrave habitually masked whatever lay near his heart. It was the look wherewith a man, brooding alone over some fearful object, in a dreary forest or illimitable desert, would recognize the familiar aspect of his dearest friend, bringing up all the peaceful ideas that belong to home, and the gentle current of every-day affairs. And yet, as he felt the necessity of responding to her look of inquiry, the ...
— The House of the Seven Gables • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... but take up his wandering abode with the husks and swine; when he shall no longer let the world pass by him with heed only as there is need, but weary himself to better the unchangeable; when space shall not be some quiet nook of the world large enough for the cradle of his life, but the illimitable void filled with floating spheres, out upon the myriads of which, with his poor, puzzled, human eyes, he will pitifully gaze; when time shall not be his instant of action, but two eternities, past and future, along the baffling walls of which he will lead his groping faith; and when the ...
— Aftermath • James Lane Allen
... force as persisting, what I intend to be understood is, that there is a something—call it force, or energy, or x—which, so far as experience or imagination can extend, is, in its relation to us, ubiquitous and illimitable; or, in other words, that it universally presents the property of permanence. (See, for a more detailed explanation, supplementary essay, "On the Final Mystery ...
— A Candid Examination of Theism • George John Romanes
... bare necessities of life, and there are no inducements to movement, to travel, and to enterprise. There are no conditions prompting man to attempt the conquest of nature. Society is therefore stationary as in China and India. Enfolded and imprisoned within the overpowering vastness and illimitable sweep of nature, man is almost unconscious of his freedom and his personality. He surrenders himself to the disposal of a mysterious "fate" and yields readily to the despotic sway of superhuman powers. The State is consequently the reign of a single despotic will. The laws of the Medes and Persians ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... doubt did their best, and we honour and praise them for it. We think their work among the loveliest gratifications of the eye that can be imagined. But the eye is very catholic—it has immense capacities for enjoyment. The window of the soul opens on illimitable prospects, and if the soul be satisfied for the time, it is not necessarily repleted for ever. Golden ages are cyclical, and it may be that the glory of the books of the future shall surpass all the ...
— Illuminated Manuscripts • John W. Bradley
... daily experience, and has, more than any other, rendered it impossible for them to accept the beliefs of their fathers. Astronomy,—which tells them that this so vast and seemingly solid earth is but an atom among atoms, whirling, no man knows whither, through illimitable space; which demonstrates that what we call the peaceful heaven above us, is but that space, filled by an infinitely subtle matter whose particles are seething and surging, like the waves of an angry sea; which opens up to us infinite regions where nothing ...
— Autobiography and Selected Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... sting of her imagination forced her to start up impatiently. What was this? A weight of iron on her legs—a weight stated afterwards, by the gaoler of Salem prison, to have been 'not more than eight pounds.' It was well for Lois it was a tangible ill, bringing her back from the wild illimitable desert in which her imagination was wandering. She took hold of the iron, and saw her torn stocking,—her bruised ankle, and began to cry pitifully, out of strange compassion with herself. They ...
— Curious, if True - Strange Tales • Elizabeth Gaskell
... when rolling to the shore Swells o'er the seas an undulating roar; Slow, dark, portentous, as the meteors sweep. And curtain black the illimitable deep, High stalks, from surge to surge, a demon Form, That howls thro heaven and breathes a billowing storm. His head is hung with clouds; his giant hand Flings a blue flame far flickering to the land; His blood-stain'd ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow
... car window it was all mountains—at least, everywhere on the horizon. But the train seemed to thread an illimitable desert—a poor exchange for the boundless plains, Kate thought. But she grew to love the very ...
— Laramie Holds the Range • Frank H. Spearman
... the marvellous stores of learning and experience which he had amassed during his long and eventful career, turning his modest study into a chamber of philosophy, and the well-spring of oracles more practical, more prudent, more profound, and penetrating further into the abyss of the dark and illimitable future than were ever uttered at the Pythian fane; and last, though not least, how, in the lingering twilight of his years as in their earliest dawn, he loved Virginia, not with that cold feeling ...
— Discourse of the Life and Character of the Hon. Littleton Waller Tazewell • Hugh Blair Grigsby
... crumbling downward to meet the Golden Gate—the narrow inlet of green tide-water with its flanking Presidio. But, further than this, the eye was stayed. Further than this there was nothing, nothing but a vast, illimitable plain of green—the open Pacific. But at this hour the color of the scene was its greatest charm. It glowed with all the sombre radiance of a cathedral. Everything was seen through a haze of purple—from the low green hills in the ...
— Blix • Frank Norris
... Aeneas yet had nam'd the shore, Nor fondness for my son, nor reverence Of my old father, nor return of love, That should have crown'd Penelope with joy, Could overcome in me the zeal I had T' explore the world, and search the ways of life, Man's evil and his virtue. Forth I sail'd Into the deep illimitable main, With but one bark, and the small faithful band That yet cleav'd to me. As Iberia far, Far as Morocco either shore I saw, And the Sardinian and each isle beside Which round that ocean bathes. Tardy with age Were I and ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... Water is the first principle of all things; this was the central doctrine of his system (Thales). Now, if we may believe Aristotle, this thought was suggested to him not so much by contemplating the illimitable ocean, out of which, as old cosmogonists taught, all things had at first proceeded, as by noticing the obvious fact, that moisture is found in all living things, and that if it were absent they would cease to be. Thales, no doubt, believed this humour or moisture to be, ...
— The Heroic Enthusiast, Part II (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno
... "spiritual faculty" have somehow left humanity involved in the most deplorable perplexities and the most humiliating errors, they yet assure us that there is "a good time coming,"—an auspicious "progress" in virtue and religion, very gradual indeed, but sure and illimitable for the race collectively! Yes, "progress," that is 'the word; and a "progress" for the world at large, of which they speak as certainly as if they had received, at least on that point, that external revelation, the possibility of which ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... of these things had lost their novelty, most of them were in the earlier stages of development. But it is when we turn to electricity that the rich virgin condition of an illimitable new kingdom of discovery is seen. Perhaps the word "utilization" or "application" is better than discovery, for then, as now, an endless wealth of phenomena noted by experimenters from Gilbert to Franklin ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... girl was alighting. As he went wonderingly to meet her, he saw that she was city-bred. She seemed to be dazed by the illimitable spaces and was blinking from the sunshine. His observant eye noted the smart suitcase and the wardrobe trunk the man was depositing on the porch. There was city shrewdness in having had the amount of the fare ...
— Penny of Top Hill Trail • Belle Kanaris Maniates
... the great North-West, that is just opening up, which they say has as fine land as the world possesses, and to an extent that is practically illimitable. This is settling rapidly, and will be in some future day the home of ...
— From Wealth to Poverty • Austin Potter
... energies for many hours." It is only fair to add, however, that the JOURNAL went on to remark that in this way some 50 grains of caffeine would be taken each week, and that very little more might develop injurious symptoms, so that the power of doing an illimitable amount of work would be ...
— The Art of Living in Australia • Philip E. Muskett (?-1909)
... dancing. Accordingly, an order was given to the Dublin fishmonger to send them fish daily for the next three weeks, and to the pastrycook for a French cook. The store of flattery kept on the premises being illimitable, she did not trouble about that, but devoted herself to the solution of the problem of how she should obtain a constant and unfailing supply of music. Once she thought of sending up to Dublin for a ...
— Muslin • George Moore
... would have been enchanted with the situation. They were quite alone, if not unobserved; and there was magic in the night, mystery and romance in the moonlight, the inky shadows, the sense of swift movement through space illimitable. Alison stood with back to the rail so near him that his elbow almost touched the artificial orchid that adorned her corsage. He was acutely sensitive of her presence, of the faint persistent odour of her individual ...
— The Bandbox • Louis Joseph Vance
... indefinite and almost illimitable variability is the usual result of domestication and cultivation, with the same part or organ varying in different individuals in different or even in directly opposite ways; and as the same variation, if strongly pronounced, usually recurs only after long intervals of time, ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... of sleep; yet it is not sleep. The body and brain are actively employed by another intelligence, loaned as an instrument might be, while the individual consciousness, the ego of the human being, is set free to visit these illimitable realms or states of ...
— The Arena - Volume 18, No. 92, July, 1897 • Various
... willingly to the march of improvement? You had better talk with Mr. Cream Cheese upon the 'genius of the country.' You are really unpatriotic, you show nothing of the enterprising spirit of your time." "Yes," I answer. "That's pretty from you; you are patriotic aren't you, with your liveries and illimitable expenses, and your low bows to money, and your immense intimacy with all lords and ladies that honor the city by visiting it. You are prodigiously patriotic with your inane imitations of a splendor impossible to you in the nature of things. You are the ideal American woman, ...
— The Potiphar Papers • George William Curtis
... steeply below me, and the beeches fell, one below the other, like a vast cascade, towards the limestone cliffs that dipped down still further, beyond my sight. I looked through this framing hollow and praised God. For there below me, thousands of feet below me, was what seemed an illimitable plain; at the end of that world was an horizon, and the dim bluish ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... accounts in large measure for three cardinal facts in the history of man: First, his leaps forward; second, the constant accelerations in these leaps; and third, the gap in the record of the tribes which, in the illimitable past, have succumbed as forces of a new edge and sweep have ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - Invention and Discovery • Various
... helpless at the stake of his unquenchable heart, then he might have been inconsolable, then might he have cast the gorge at life, then have cowered in the darkening chamber of his being, tapestried with mouldering hopes, and hearkened to the winds that swept across the illimitable wastes of death. But no such hapless lot was Shelley's as that of his own contemporaries—Keats, half chewed in the jaws of London and spit dying on to Italy; de Quincey, who, if he escaped, escaped rent and maimed from those cruel jaws; Coleridge, ...
— Shelley - An Essay • Francis Thompson
... To every Jewish child of a religious disposition Jerusalem was the center of all things; the footsteps of prophets and kings echoed in the streets; memories sacred and sublime clung to its walls and buildings; and it shone in the glamor of illimitable hopes. ...
— The Life of St. Paul • James Stalker
... which had turned on the light and bade her was stronger than she. She beheld, as it were, the elements of his being, the very sources of the ceaseless, restless energy that was driving him on. And scan as she would, no traces of the vaunted illimitable power that is called love could she discern. Love he possessed; that she had not doubted, and did not doubt, even now. But it had been given her to see that these springs had existed before love had come, and would flow, perchance, after it had departed. Now she understood ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... that he must be walking in his sleep, or that he had been troubled with phantoms, and not a family of flesh and blood, beset the Captain at first, when he went back to the little parlour, and found himself alone. Illimitable faith in, and immeasurable admiration of, the Commander of the Cautious Clara, succeeded, and threw the ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... miles to as many yards (for the name is only applied to the narrow portion which is capable of cultivation), it extends in a thin, green, palm-fringed strip upon either side of the broad coffee-coloured river. Beyond it there stretches on the Libyan bank a savage and illimitable desert, extending to the whole breadth of Africa. On the other side an equally desolate wilderness is bounded only by the distant Red Sea. Between these two huge and barren expanses Nubia writhes like a green sandworm along the course of ...
— The Tragedy of The Korosko • Arthur Conan Doyle
... beautiful spectacle, and one which I can never forget. The black of night would suddenly open like a huge silver flower, deep within deep, till you almost fancied you could see within the gates of heaven. The hills stood out dark against the illimitable splendour, and on every koppie you saw the huge lions, like kittens at play, roaring till you could scarcely hear the thunder. The rain was rushing like a river, all glittering like diamonds, and then, in the twinkling of an eye, all was black as a wolf's mouth ...
— Old Friends - Essays in Epistolary Parody • Andrew Lang
... terrestial kingdom, and cast it back on religious dreams, which it cherished with a kind of sombre passion. The establishment of the Roman empire exalted men's imaginations, and the great era of peace on which the world was entering gave birth to illimitable hopes. This confused medley of dreams found at length an interpretation in the peerless man to whom the universal conscience has decreed the title of the Son of God, and that with justice, since he gave religion an impetus ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various
... his generalship, supposed that the moment was come when he would fall back upon the sacred bulwarks of our nationality. No such thing. He replied thus: 'My good friend Tipkisson, gentlemen, wishes to know what I mean when he asks me what we are driving at, and when I candidly tell him, at the illimitable perspective, he wishes (if I understand him) to know what I mean?' - 'I do!' says Tipkisson, amid cries of 'Shame' and 'Down with him.' 'Gentlemen,' says our honourable friend, 'I will indulge my good friend Tipkisson, by telling him, both what I mean and ...
— Reprinted Pieces • Charles Dickens
... to pipe—all in some way called her girlhood back to her, though there was little in her girlhood to give her pleasure. Her large gray eyes (her only interesting feature) grew round, deep, and wistful as she saw the illimitable craggy clouds grow crimson, roll slowly up, and fire at the top. A childish scream ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 20, July, 1891 • Various
... in the end to mould and control the thinking of the civilized world. But apart from its truth or falsity, in whole or in part, regarded simply as an intellection, it strikes us as one of the grandest of modern times. Spreading itself over almost illimitable space, grasping back through almost illimitable time, claiming for itself the boundless multiplicity of type, and form, and life, and law of the organic world, and unfolding to the wondering gaze the vast prophetic possibilities ...
— Continental Monthly, Volume 5, Issue 4 • Various
... of the sky, the shifting clouds of dull shade, split asunder to show a glimpse of a radiant star, piercingly white, cold, pure, a steadfast eye of the universe, beyond all understanding and illimitable with its meaning of the past and the present and the future. Ellen watched it until the drifting clouds once more hid it from her ...
— To the Last Man • Zane Grey
... he had dreamed would not look toward him over the illimitable ocean. Seek as he would, it was never there, with warm gravity. His eyes might strive, but all they would see was the oily swell of the Dogger Bank, and the great plowed field of Biscay Bay, and the smash of foam against the Hebrides. Never would a space in the watery horizon open ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... within his own immediate radius and luxuries were unknown; but now, with rapid ocean transportation, the ends of the earth are ransacked and laid under tribute to furnish delicacies to tempt the palate. The ease with which food may now be procured and the almost illimitable variety offered to man for his selection has tempted him into indulgences that have been productive of much evil. Although over indulgence in eating is a very ancient offense, yet, as before stated, the multiplicity of ...
— The Royal Road to Health • Chas. A. Tyrrell
... not, at some period of their lives, amused themselves in retracing the steps by which particular conclusions of their own minds have been attained. The occupation is often full of interest and he who attempts it for the first time is astonished by the apparently illimitable distance and incoherence between the starting-point and the goal. What, then, must have been my amazement when I heard the Frenchman speak what he had just spoken, and when I could not help acknowledging that he had spoken the truth. ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... We launch ourselves in conceit into illimitable space, and take up our rest beyond the fixed stars. We proceed without impediment from country to country, and from century to century, through all the ages of the past, and through the vast creation of the imaginable future. We spurn at the bounds of time and space; ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... title rang through his soul. The people, for whom he had fought, for whom he had suffered, worked and dreamed, had put him on trial for his life. What a strange fate! The faces grew dim, and a sense of illimitable and awful ruin ...
— The One Woman • Thomas Dixon
... death comes to all mortals. It is the culmination of the human mind's sense of limitation. It does not usher them into immortal, illimitable bliss. It but leaves them upon another seeming plane of mortal thought, there to drag out another sense of existence, unless they have so learned the lesson which Jesus taught as to enable them to overcome death. It will not be ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... great green area at the summit of the cliff, which was the angle where the river and the sea met, and so overlooking both the busy crowded little town, the port, the shipping, and the bar on the one hand, and the wide illimitable tranquil sea on the other—types of life and eternity. It was a good situation for that church. Homeward-bound sailors caught sight of the tower of St Nicholas, the first land object of all. They who went forth upon the great deep might carry ...
— Sylvia's Lovers — Complete • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... picture it was upon which we looked. There was the illimitable expanse of ocean all round us, blue as sapphire, heaving in long, regular ridges of swell, and whipped into foam here and there by the scourging of the strong trade wind, with a rich blue sky above, dappled with wisps of ...
— A Pirate of the Caribbees • Harry Collingwood
... led the way, and the throng opened out to let them pass. Henry glanced back at the two swaying lines of women, now engaged in one of their minute-long chants, and he wondered at the illimitable patience of the red race, ...
— The Riflemen of the Ohio - A Story of the Early Days along "The Beautiful River" • Joseph A. Altsheler
... little difference. These anecdotes if only founded on facts, show at least the estimation in which he was regarded, and the impression which his character produced in these days of childhood. Before he was ten years old he would take his rifle and plunge boldly into the depths of the illimitable forest. He seemed, by instinct, possessed of the skill of the most experienced hunter, so that he never became bewildered, or in danger of being lost. There were panthers, bears and wolves in those ...
— Daniel Boone - The Pioneer of Kentucky • John S. C. Abbott
... have stated the case about as it is," said he, "if, indeed, this rate of speed does not carry us entirely beyond the earth's attraction, out into illimitable space." ...
— Daybreak: A Romance of an Old World • James Cowan
... shade, all unaware At a new turn of the golden glade, I shall see her, and as though afraid Shall halt a moment and almost fall For passing faintness, like a man Who feels the sudden spirit of Pan Brimming his narrow soul with all The illimitable world. And she, Turning her head, will let me see The first sharp dawn of her surprise Turning to welcome in her eyes. And I shall come and take my lover And looking on her re-discover All her beauty:—her dark hair And the little ears beneath it, where Roses of lucid ...
— The Defeat of Youth and Other Poems • Aldous Huxley
... advertisement beginning with "M.A., Oxford, accustomed to the best society and familiar with European languages," but though the newspapers charged highly for it, he only received one answer, except those from agents, and that, he said with illimitable disgust, was from ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... which parted under her departing keel flowed together. There was no sign on earth or sea or in the sky of that last link between the little group of colonists and their home land. They were as much alone as Enoch Arden on his desert isle. Can we imagine the emptiness, the illimitable loneliness of that bay? One small shallop down by the pier—that was the only visible connection between themselves ...
— The Old Coast Road - From Boston to Plymouth • Agnes Rothery
... mountains called Djebel Orousse, north-east of Oran in Algeria. All over an extensive rocky plateau in this place numerous shallow depressions plainly indicate the existence of very ancient quarries. A large company has been formed to work and export the marble, which may now be had in illimitable quantity. The largest specimens of giallo antico existing in Rome are the eight fluted Corinthian pillars, thirty feet high and eleven feet in circumference, with capitals and bases of white marble, which stand in pairs within the niches of the Pantheon. In consequence of the fires ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... Indians of one of the coastal tribes. Daily now Mackenzie saw signs of white traders. The Indians possessed beads and trinkets. One Indian had a Spanish or Russian lance. Fishing weirs were passed. There was a whiff of salt water in the air; then far out between the hills lay a gap of illimitable blue. At eight o'clock in the morning of Saturday, July 20, 1793, Mackenzie reached the mouth of the river and found himself on the sea. The next day he went down North Bentinck Arm, and, passing the entrance to the south arm, landed at the cape on the opposite ...
— Pioneers of the Pacific Coast - A Chronicle of Sea Rovers and Fur Hunters • Agnes C. Laut
... the peace—at the ship—at the sea that stretching away on all sides merged into the illimitable silence of all creation. He felt himself pulled up sharp by unrecognised grievances. He had been physically cowed, but his injured dignity remained indomitable, and nothing could heal his lacerated ...
— The Nigger Of The "Narcissus" - A Tale Of The Forecastle • Joseph Conrad
... sort, the whole community, I do not strain the truth. It was suggested by Mr. Babbage, in his ninth "Bridgewater Treatise," that a mere spoken word—a single articulated syllable thrown into the air—may go on reverberating through illimitable space for ever and for ever, seeing that there is no rim against which it can strike—no boundary at which it can possibly arrive. Similarly it may be said—not as an ingenious speculation, but as ...
— Speeches: Literary and Social • Charles Dickens
... being a baseless superstition the Reconciling of the world to God through the One Offering once-for-all offered for the sin of the whole world, lays the immovable foundation upon which we may build securely for all the illimitable future. ...
— The Creative Process in the Individual • Thomas Troward
... nobleness? What was the significance of the aspirations that made the heart beat high on fresh sunlit mornings, the dim and beautiful hopes that came beckoning as we looked from our windows in a sunset hour, with the sky flushing red behind the old towers, the sense of illimitable power, of stainless honour, that came so bravely, when the organ bore the voices aloft in the lighted chapel at evensong? Was all that not a real inspiration at all, but a mere accident of boyish vigour? No, it was not a delusion—that was life as it was meant to be lived, and the best victory ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... we thundered along at a brisk rate of speed. Sometimes we dodged in and out among the mesquite bushes, alternately separating and coming together again; sometimes we swept over grassy plains apparently of illimitable extent, sometimes we skipped and hopped and buck-jumped through and over little gullies, barrancas, and other sorts of malpais—but always without drawing rein. The men rode easily, with no thought to the way nor care for the footing. The air came back sharp ...
— Arizona Nights • Stewart Edward White
... up. She dressed slowly and came down and out on to the terrace. The crumbling stones of the balustrade were moss-grown, as was the slender body of the bronze Mercury, poised for flight and dark against the pale illimitable blue of the December sky. Hilaire Avenel never tried to make Nature neat; the scarlet leaves of the Virginia creeper came fluttering down and were scattered on the worn black and white mosaic of the pavement; they showed like fire flickering in the sombre ...
— Olive in Italy • Moray Dalton
... random over the cheerless soil. Above swam the marvellous clarified atmosphere of the sky, like iridescent gauze, showering a thousand harmonies of metallic colors. Like a dome of vitrified glass, it shut down on the illimitable, ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... vocation in which a man's prospects may be said to be illimitable. Hee-hee!—they may buy me up before they die! And now what stands in the way? It would take fifty alliances with fifty families so little disreputable as yours, darling, to drag ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy
... "The illimitable hatred, rising from so many sources, found vent in the tradition that a special curse had been uttered against the Samaritans, by Ezra, Zerubbabel, and Joshua. It was said that these great ones assembled ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... Kelson's voice giving his orders with a promptness and decision which was sweet music to my ears. A moment more and the whole sky was one blaze of dazzling light; in a second of time I saw with almost supernatural distinctness every rope and spar, every brace and shroud of the ship; I saw the illimitable black expanse of water on the port side, and the Ellen, a mile distant on the starboard bow, her outlines as sharply defined as in a silhouette; I saw the figures of men ascending her shrouds, and with utter amazement I saw that ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... of the dog was lost in the illimitable field of ether, whither he was just then projected by the kick of a passing horse. The moral of this fable cannot be given until he shall get down, and close the conversation with the ...
— Cobwebs From an Empty Skull • Ambrose Bierce (AKA: Dod Grile)
... worked themselves out, three new forces entered. In the sudden extension of our boundaries to the Pacific Coast, which took place in the forties, the nation won so vast a domain that its resources seemed illimitable and its society seemed able to throw off all its maladies by the very presence of these vast new spaces. At the same period the great activity of railroad building to the Mississippi Valley occurred, making these lands available and diverting attention to the task of economic ...
— The Frontier in American History • Frederick Jackson Turner
... have had them, not cloaked with falseness, but exposed in the searching noonday glare of our western science. We have had them, we have them still, with all their mortal frailty and littleness and ignorance confessed, with all their 'weaved-up follies ravelled out,' with all the illimitable capacity of affection and passion and will in man, with all his illimitable capacity for folly and wrong-doing, assumed and acknowledged in their own persons, symbolically, vicariously, assumed and confessed. 'I am very proud, ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... day—nipped their noses and ears viciously, and the feet became so painful that every step was anguish; but when they caught sight of the open stretch of country it appeared to them so appallingly lugubrious under its illimitable white covering that they turned back with one accord, their hearts constricted, their spirits below zero. The four ladies walked in front, the three men following ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... a figure of the large and boundless baptism of the Holy Ghost. It speaks of something more even than the ordinary experiences of the consecrated Christian. It tells of the abundant and redundant supply which God has for us out of His illimitable fulness. ...
— Days of Heaven Upon Earth • Rev. A. B. Simpson
... a serene faith, and you shall acquire wonderful power and insight; its results are sure and illimitable, moulding and moving to its purposes equally spirit, mind, and matter. It is the power-endowing essential of ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. I, No. 6 - Of Literature, Art, And Science, New York, August 5, 1850 • Various
... of shacks and cabins at the mouth of the Coho River, and it overlooked some of the most glorious scenery in the world. In front stretched the Sound, a silver sea just dimpled by the soft spring breeze. To right and left, and behind, lay the forest—that silent land of the North, illimitable as space, everlastingly green when the snows ...
— Bunch Grass - A Chronicle of Life on a Cattle Ranch • Horace Annesley Vachell
... unity of God. Perhaps this is due to the fact, as a recent author has suggested, that a diversified landscape of mountains and valleys, islands, and rivers, and gulfs, predisposes man to a belief in a multitude of divinities. A vast sandy desert, the illimitable ocean, impresses him with an idea of the oneness ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper
... her) left a large smudge upon accepted ideas of orthodoxy; charred human flesh was a principal constituent of it. The mark remains, the differences are far greater, but, to Chesterton, both Anglican and Roman Catholic are "orthodox." Of such is the illimitable orthodoxy of an ethical society, or of a body of Theosophists who "recognize the essential unity of all creeds and religions"—the liars! Chesterton tells us that Messrs. Shaw, Kipling, Wells, Ibsen and others are heretics, because of their doctrines. But he gives us no idea whether the Pope ...
— G. K. Chesterton, A Critical Study • Julius West
... futile wings. Vainly I seek the sloping pearl-white sand And the mirage's phantom citadels Miraculous, a moment seen, then gone. Among the mountains I am ill at ease, Missing the stretched horizon's level line And the illimitable restless blue. The crag-torn sky is not the sky I love, But one unbroken sapphire spanning all; And nobler than the branches of a pine Aslant upon a precipice's edge Are the strained spars of some great battle-ship Plowing across the sunset. No bird's lilt ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... that streamed down us. Yet we stopped once at a station, and humans lived there and a man got off the train. A lone lean babu and his leaner, more miserable native crew came out and eyed the train like vultures waiting for a beast to die. But we did not die, and the train passed on into illimitable dusty redness, leaving them to watch the hot rails ribbon ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy
... inscribed: "The —th Battery of Artillery"; long strips of freshly-tilled earth which gleamed green, yellow, and black on the face of the countryside. With it mingled long-drawn singing, glimpses of elm-tops amid mist, the far-off notes of bells, endless clouds of rocks, and the illimitable line of the horizon. ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... The red sun shot down. Darkness fell upon the forest, and swept up to the circling rim of the camp fire. Chill came into the air. The Spaniards shivered and crept a little nearer to the coals. Talk ceased, and, out of the illimitable forest, came the low, moaning sound of the wind among the leaves. The great stars sprang out, and shone with a thin, pale ...
— The Free Rangers - A Story of the Early Days Along the Mississippi • Joseph A. Altsheler
... strange resonant laugh it seemed in this upper stillness, and said they were "a lot of chestnut horses capering about in the field." A flock of sheep in another field huddled together, looked like a heap of limestone chippings. As for the fields, stretched out in illimitable extent, far as the eye could reach, they seemed to form a gigantic carpet, with patterns chiefly diamond-shaped, and in colour shaded from bright emerald to ...
— Tales from Many Sources - Vol. V • Various
... upon a long trail that led into an illimitable wilderness. With a moan the old man ran to the ledge of rock. Greevy and ...
— Northern Lights • Gilbert Parker
... loathed; something of a purist in speech, which was affectation unpardonable; something of a dissenter as to drink, appreciative of "Cucumungo" and claret, but distrustful of whisky—another thing to call down scorn illimitable from the elect of the mining camps and packing "outfits." But all these disqualifications might have been overlooked had the lieutenant displayed even a faint preference for poker. "The Lord loveth a cheerful giver—or loser" ...
— An Apache Princess - A Tale of the Indian Frontier • Charles King
... El-Hadj-ben-Guemama, brother of Sheik Otham and Sultan of Ahaggar. By the time the soup arrived, a bouillon of wild game, seasoned with Tokay, he was already much smitten. When they served the compote of fruits Martinique a la liqueur de Mme. Amphoux, he showed every indication of illimitable passion. The Cyprian wine de la Commanderie made him quite sure of his sentiments. Hortense kicked my foot under the table. Gramont, intending to do the same to Anna, made a mistake and aroused the indignant protests of one of the Tuareg. I can safely say that when ...
— Atlantida • Pierre Benoit
... of them; and when he told his story to the Sovereigns they could not help being impressed, not only with his sincerity but with his ability and single-heartedness also. It was almost the same old story, of illimitable wealth that was just about to be acquired, and perhaps no one but Columbus could have made it go down once more with success; but talking about his exploits was never any trouble to him, and his astonishing conviction, the lofty and dignified manner in which he described both good and bad fortune, ...
— Christopher Columbus, Complete • Filson Young
... a man was declared to be maa-kheru, "true of voice," or "true of word," his power became illimitable. It gave him rule and authority, and every command uttered by him was immediately followed by the ...
— Legends Of The Gods - The Egyptian Texts, edited with Translations • E. A. Wallis Budge
... fires, Roaring like lions, asked their meat from God. I lay there, a black blot upon a shield Of quivering, watery whiteness. The hush held Until I staggered up and cried aloud, And then it seemed that something far too great For knowledge, and illimitable as God, Rent the dark sky like lightning, and I fell, And, falling, heard a wild and rushing wind Of music, and saw lights that blinded me With white, impenetrable swords, and felt A pressure of soft hands upon my lips, Upon my eyelids — and since then ...
— Young Adventure - A Book of Poems • Stephen Vincent Benet
... of the passage of time, he was visited by pleasant dreams, in which were mingled happy voices, laughter, and singing. He rested on a couch of roses, and cool breezes fanned his fevered brow. He was free as air itself and surrounded by illimitable space. ...
— The Copper Princess - A Story of Lake Superior Mines • Kirk Munroe
... remarked, "I am in my usual lamentable state of impecuniosity. Nevertheless, for the moment I am representing wealth illimitable. That is to say, I am ...
— The Traitors • E. Phillips (Edward Phillips) Oppenheim
... examine her. My eyes rejoiced as they glided over the sweet speaker; they kissed her feet, they clasped her waist, they played with the ringlets of her hair. And yet I was a prey to terror, as all who, once in their lives, have experienced the illimitable joys of a true passion will understand. I feared she would detect me if I let my eyes rest upon the shoulder I had kissed, and the fear sharpened the temptation. I yielded, I looked, my eyes tore away the covering; I saw the mole which lay where the pretty ...
— The Lily of the Valley • Honore de Balzac
... Stark and brilliant in the sunshine, Blank as the desert, Blank as the Sphinx, Winking golden eyes in the twinkles of light, Silent, immutable, vacuous infinity, Illimitable capacity for absorption, ...
— Precipitations • Evelyn Scott
... with you," I said diplomatically, "that Randall would be more or less wasted as a private soldier. The heroic stuff of which Thomas Atkins is made is, thank God, illimitable. But intellect is rare—especially in the ranks of God's own chosen, the British officer. And Randall is of the kind we want as officers. As for a commission, he could get one any day. I could get one for him myself. I still have a few friends. ...
— The Red Planet • William J. Locke
... about the world with reticules of discoloured papers clamorously asserting their rights and wrongs unheeded and unbelieved, until they encountered sharp-witted lawyers who took up their claims, and carried them triumphantly into the ownership of illimitable wealth. ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... thought and emotion a knowledge of the spirit of our literature is impossible. Take, for instance, the mere physical situation of the first colonists, encamped on the very beach of the wide ocean with an illimitable forest in their rear. Their provisions were scanty. They grew watchful of the strange soil, of the new skies, of the unknown climate. Even upon the voyage over, John Winthrop thought that "the declination of the pole star was much, even to the view, beneath that it is in England," and that "the ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... the printing-press, and the annihilation of these means of intercommunication,—nothing but some such arbitrary intervention could accomplish it. The facts already in human possession, and the constitution of the mind, together insure what we have as imperishable, and what we are to obtain as illimitable. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various
... Max's map; but Max steered into the right fork. After pulling about three miles he admitted his mistake and turned back; but I shall never forget Old River. It was the vision of a drowned world, an illimitable waste of dead waters, stretching into a ...
— Famous Adventures And Prison Escapes of the Civil War • Various
... plain-country, rich in all charms of field and town. Waving blooming country of the brightest green; dotted all over with handsome villas, handsome groves; crossed by roads and human traffic, here inaudible or heard only as a musical hum: and behind all swam, under olive-tinted haze, the illimitable limitary ocean of London, with its domes and steeples definite in the sun, big Paul's and the many memories attached to it hanging high over all. Nowhere, of its kind, could you see a grander prospect on a bright summer day, with the set of the air going southward,—southward, ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... strange a doom to share. Would I may never bear Inevitable darkness after me (Darkness endowed with drawings strong, And shadowy hands that cling unendingly), Nor feel that phantom-wings behind me sweep, As she feels night pursuing through the long Illimitable reaches of ...
— Poems by Jean Ingelow, In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Jean Ingelow
... of work is of more than sentimental importance. It may be said of it, as Hamlet says of death: "The readiness is all." All of us are conscious of the fact that, given a love of work, and the capacity for it seems almost illimitable—as witness Napoleon, with his thousand-man power, or Shakespeare, who in twenty years could write more ...
— The Constitution of the United States - A Brief Study of the Genesis, Formulation and Political Philosophy of the Constitution • James M. Beck
... artist is a person of some consequence. He has a knowledge of London that makes most Londoners sick, and his acquaintance with queer and casual characters is illimitable. He was swollen with good food and drink, and as he extended a strong right arm to greet us, he positively shed a lustre of success and power. The state of business in all trades and professions may be heartbreakingly bad, but there is one profession in which there are no bad seasons—one ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... antedated in his exploit, Santos-Dumont did in fact accomplish more for the advancement and development of dirigible balloons. To begin with he was able to use a new and efficient form of motor destined to become popular, and capable, as the automobile manufacturers later showed, of almost illimitable development in the direction of power and lightness. Except for the gasoline engine, developed by the makers of motor cars, aviation to-day would be where it was a quarter ...
— Aircraft and Submarines - The Story of the Invention, Development, and Present-Day - Uses of War's Newest Weapons • Willis J. Abbot
... now be in possession of the boy who has thus far outstripped his classmate. In his mastery of German he has a key to a vast literature—a key which the other has not. He is now like a rich man with an illimitable library of his own, while the other by comparison is like a poor man who can get at no books at all. Thus if opportunity, in its most fundamental form, were equalised for all boys, no matter how completely, ...
— A Critical Examination of Socialism • William Hurrell Mallock
... and gentlest of hosts, moving among his guests and charming all hearers with his stammered, inimitable pleasantry; the clerk at his desk at the India House, and finally released from it into a life of illimitable leisure; the quaint little scholar of Christ's Hospital; the quaint old humorist taking his long walks about his beloved London; the author, known and endeared by his books; the careworn and devoted man, hurrying through the streets with his maniac sister on his ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 110, December, 1866 - A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and Politics • Various
... the crime-stained castle of Heidelberg. Cold, and bitter, and clear was the starry night, when the weary Gotleib issued out of the Herr professor's warm house to answer the late call of a sick woman. Gotleib looked up into those illimitable depths where earths and suns hang suspended, to appeal to the material perceptions of man that this is not the alone world—the alone existence. The silent bright stars comforted the earth-wearied heart in which the day's toil had dimmed the spirit's ...
— Words of Cheer for the Tempted, the Toiling, and the Sorrowing • T. S. Arthur
... mist that would presently mount into the upper air and melt away. On a dead pine a quarter of a mile away, a turkey-buzzard sat with wings outspread to catch the warmth of the sun; while far above him, poised in the illimitable blue, serene, almost motionless, as though swung in the centre of space, his mate overlooked the world. The wild honeysuckles clambered from bush to bush, and from tree to tree, mingling their faint, sweet perfume with the delicious odors ...
— Free Joe and Other Georgian Sketches • Joel Chandler Harris
... cylinder was a luminous speck like a fire seen from a long way off. Waves and jags of angry light burst from it ceaselessly, this way and that. The restless mass was alive, active, burning. Infinitesimal though its dimensions were it gave a sense of illimitable force and power, ...
— Men of Affairs • Roland Pertwee
... illimitable freedom of the valley rises before me, as we again bear down into sunlit space. Can this be "Chu Chu," staid and respectable filly of American pedigree—Chu Chu, forgetful of plank roads and cobblestones, wild with excitement, twinkling her small white feet beneath me? George laughs ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... than the horns of elf-land, came now and then a few bars of music played by the casino band. The Hudson was broadened by the night into an illimitable sea—those lights, dimly seen on its opposite shore, were not beacons for prosaic trolley-lines, but low-set stars millions of miles away. The waters in front of the inn were gay with fireflies—or were they motor-boats, ...
— Options • O. Henry
... supreme centre of all things; intelligence and power increase from centre to centre in a ratio rising with inconceivable rapidity, according to the law we are now investigating, until they culminate in illimitable intelligence and power ...
— The Hidden Power - And Other Papers upon Mental Science • Thomas Troward
... To this illimitable claim the English opposed a right derived, at second hand, from a traditionary Indian conquest. A treaty, they said, had been made at Lancaster, in 1744, between commissioners from Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia, and the Iroquois, or Six Nations, ...
— The Life of George Washington, Volume I • Washington Irving
... we three were as completely isolated in our place of concealment as if the house we lived in had been a desert island, and the great network of streets and the thousands of our fellow-creatures all round us the waters of an illimitable sea. I could now reckon on some leisure time for considering what my future plan of action should be, and how I might arm myself most securely at the outset for the coming struggle with ...
— The Woman in White • Wilkie Collins
... So here are the three great elemental characters, all together—the primal sea and sky and land—to act the azoic prologue. And here, too, for all mankind to glory in, is the whole pageant of animal life: from the weakest invertebrate forms, which link us with the illimitable past, to the mightiest developments of birds and mammals at the present day, the leviathan whales around us, the soaring eagles overhead, and man himself—the culmination of them all—and especially migrating man, whose incoming myriads are linking ...
— Animal Sanctuaries in Labrador • William Wood
... sight, my perception, gradually became adjusted. The gray mist remained, and slowly it took form. It made a tremendous panorama of gray, a void of illimitable, unfathomable distance; gray above, below—everywhere; and in it ...
— Astounding Stories, May, 1931 • Various
... that was a good entrance to Arthurian country, wasn't it? Our road cut huge, rolling downs in two, and they surged up on either side, so it was rather like the passage through the Red Sea. And under a sky that hung over us like an illimitable bluebell, we saw our first Cornish mountains, Rough Tor and Brown Willy. Names of that sort make you feel at home with mountains at once, as if you'd known them all your life, and might lead them about with a string. ...
— Set in Silver • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... be said that the movement of Nature turns upon two immovable pivots—one, the illimitable fecundity which she has given to all species; the other, the innumerable difficulties which reduce the results of that fecundity, and leave throughout time nearly the same quantity of individuals in every species; ... destruction and ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard
... being drafted in the war of 1812; others that he had been crossed in love; but my boy did not quite know then what either meant. He only knew that Solomon Whistler lived at the poor-house beyond the eastern border of the town, and that he ranged between this sojourn and the illimitable wilderness north of the town on the western shore of the river. The crazy man was often in the boy's dreams, the memories of which blend so with the memories of real occurrences: he could not tell later whether ...
— A Boy's Town • W. D. Howells
... where bald, rolling mountains, showing little or no rock, are frequented by the sheep, which graze over the uplands, descending at midday to the valleys to drink, and then slowly working their way up the hills again to their illimitable pastures. ...
— American Big Game in Its Haunts • Various
... of the reach of science, and yet the compass of science is practically illimitable. Hence it is that from time to time we are startled and perplexed by theories which have no parallel in the contracted moral world; for the generalizations of science sweep on in ever-widening circles, and more aspiring flights, through a limitless ...
— The Darwinian Hypothesis • Thomas H. Huxley
... of womanhood. Perhaps it is akin to the maternal instinct; for to the mother, after she has felt the throb of a new life within her, there is no sacrifice so great and no anguish so keen that she will not welcome it as the outward sign and evidence of her illimitable love. ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... distinguished painter of Biblical catastrophes, of boundless halls, and illimitable space, John Martin—made three drawings for Punch. "The Bonnet-maker's Dream" was an effort to enlist sympathy for one class of women-workers; but his only fair illustrated joke was that in which a page-boy, pointing to the ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... Just as there are vast stretches in the world where the foot of man has never trod, so there are unmeasured regions whereon prayer has never been. The more we pray, the more illimitable appears this spiritual realm. And all about us in the universe are also great hidden forces: nothing will lay hold of them ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... Adonais and himself. After this, he says in this stanza no more about Adonais, but only about the mourner. He calls upon the mourner to consider (1) the magnitude of the planet earth; then, using the earth as his centre, to consider (2) the whole universe of worlds, and the illimitable void of space beyond all worlds; next he is to consider (3) what he himself is—he is confined within the day and night of our planet, and, even within those restricted limits, he is but an infinitesimal point. After he shall have realised this to himself, and ...
— Adonais • Shelley
... girl bitterly reproached her tiredness, which had dulled apprehension so far that she had not realized at once the danger of the situation, nor retreated while there was yet time. She had always dreaded this; and now that it was accomplished, an illimitable vista of the disagreeable consequences broadened out before her. The ice being once broken, however she might answer him now, a repetition, perhaps even several, could scarcely be avoided; she foresaw that his persistence would be immense, so that with whatsoever finality she might refuse him, ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... human knowledge[32] and power which for the time it transcends; a word whose history, in its record of ranges already transcended, prompts expectation that ranges still beyond may be transcended in the illimitable progress of mankind. Professor Le Conte says that miracle is "an occurrence or a phenomenon according to a law higher than any yet known." Thus it is a case of human ...
— Miracles and Supernatural Religion • James Morris Whiton
... heart is in a tumult, it is something mightier than he and his will that is dealing with him! As I have looked from one of the northern windows of the street which commands our noble estuary,—the view through which is a picture on an illimitable canvas and a poem in innumerable cantos,—I have sometimes seen a pleasure-boat drifting along, her sail flapping, and she seeming as if she had neither will nor aim. At her stern a man was laboring to bring her head round with an oar, ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... vision scarcely conditioned by the limits of his normal purview. The evidence of all this deals with matters often trivial, like the electric sparks rubbed from the deer's hide, which yet are cognate with an illimitable, essential potency of the universe. Not being able to explain away these facts, or, in this place, to offer what would necessarily be a premature theory of them, I regard them, though they seem shadowy, as grounds of hope, or, at least, as tokens that men need not yet ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang
... his mirth, looked round. "'Indomitable will," said be seriously. "Unconquerable ambition, illimitable faith. They all seem to be saying their creed. 'I believe in myself almighty, and in Venice under my control, and in God who made us both, and in the inferiority of the remnant of the habitable globe.' Or else: 'In the beginning God created Venice. Then He created the rest ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... except when they were left, for odd numbers of minutes, at branch-places, up illimitable flights of steps, or down wells - which was the only variety of those branches - and, early in the morning, were turned out on a swamp, a mile or two from the town they sought. From this dismal spot they were rescued ...
— Hard Times • Charles Dickens*
... do, even once, the right thing excellently well? The eager passion for display, the desire to speak and act in the eyes of the world, is boyish. Will is concentration, and a great purpose works in secrecy. Oh, the goodness and the seriousness of life, the illimitable reach of achievement, which it opens to the young who have a great heart and noble aims! With them is God's almighty power and love, and his very presence is hidden from them by a film only. From this little islet they look out upon infinite worlds; heaven bends ...
— Education and the Higher Life • J. L. Spalding
... as observed by us, these schools present is sufficiently obvious; nevertheless, it is alleged that the revelation of the Paradise in the West was first made by Buddha himself to one of his principal disciples. In the distant West is said to dwell one named Amida, or Amitabha, that is to say "Illimitable Light." Immortal himself, immortal also and freed from all the trammels of transmigration are the vast multitudes of men(18) who inhabit the boundless regions which he rules. In that "Pure Land,"(19) that "Undefiled Ground," ...
— Religion in Japan • George A. Cobbold, B.A.
... present-day thought it must stand for the un-caused Cause of all existence, the unitary principle implied in all multiplicity. Everyone of necessity believes in this. It is impossible to define the term completely, for to define is necessarily to limit, and we are thinking of the illimitable. But we ought to understand clearly that to disbelieve in God is an impossibility; everyone believes in God if he believes in his own existence. The blankest materialist that ever lived, whoever he may have been, must have affirmed God even in the act of denying Him. ...
— The New Theology • R. J. Campbell
... and the train, after so long beating and panting, stretched itself upon the downward track—when I beheld that vast extent of prosperous country rolling seaward from the woods and the blue mountains, that illimitable spread of rippling corn, the trees growing and blowing in the merry weather, the country boys thronging aboard the train with figs and peaches, and the conductors, and the very darky stewards, visibly exulting in the change—up went my soul like a balloon; Care fell from his perch ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... this spirit of life that has come rolling in through the eons, rolling in from some vast illimitable sea of life that we call God. For ages and ages on this planet life could only give to new life the power to feed and propagate, could only pass on to new life the heritage of instinct; then another impulse of ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... called, for want of a more specific definition, foliated clouds of the highest rarity; that is, they undulated and broke into vegetable formations, and were tinged with splendors compared with which the gilding of our autumn woodlands is as dross compared with gold. Far away into the illimitable distance stretched long avenues of these gaseous forests, dimly transparent, and painted with prismatic hues of unimaginable brilliancy. The pendent branches waved along the fluid glades until every vista seemed to break through half-lucent ranks of many-colored drooping silken ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... Shakespeare, heavy-headed Romney's Shakespeare, wooden-headed West's Shakespeare (though he did the best in "Lear"), deaf-headed Reynolds's Shakespeare, instead of my, and everybody's Shakespeare. To be tied down to an authentic face of Juliet! To have Imogen's portrait! To confine the illimitable! I like you and Stothard (you best), but "out upon this half-faced fellowship." Sir, when I have read the book I may trouble you, through Moxon, with some faint criticisms. It is not the flatteringest compliment, in a letter to an author, to say you have not read his book yet. ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... for me was illimitable dreariness; and like Archie in Weir of Hermiston, I seemed abroad in a world from which every hope of intimacy was banished. And as with every month the hopelessness of resistance was made plainer and plainer, there came upon me the recklessness of the condemned man who ...
— Apologia Diffidentis • W. Compton Leith
... thought it so "queer" that we should live together! Altogether she behaved like a spoiled, ill-tempered child, but she looked so young and worried and pretty through it all, that on the whole I felt more sorry for her than myself. As for Charmion, she smiled, with an air of listening from an illimitable distance, which I can quite understand has an exasperating effect on people who do not understand and care. It exasperated Delphine now. I saw the blue eyes flash, and the pink lips set, with a ...
— The Lady of the Basement Flat • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... Were the Eternal Being to slacken the course of a planet, or increase even the distance of the fixed stars, the decree would be soon known on earth. Our ignorance is great, because so is our knowledge; for it is from the mightiness and vastness of what we do know that we imagine the illimitable unknown creation. And to whom has God made these revelations? To a worm that next moment is to be in darkness? To a piece of earth momentarily raised into breathing existence? To a soul perishable as the telescope through which it looks ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... evolution, even though it draws upon illimitable ages, can evolve what was not already present in the form of a spiritual potency. The empiric treatment of conscience as the result of social environment and culture leads inevitably back to the assumption of some rudimentary moral consciousness ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... spirit, while it enlarges the heart, and everything which, under the influence of it, people do and undertake, has a tendency toward the illimitable. The friends could not remain any more shut up at home; their walks extended themselves further and further. Edward would hurry on before with Ottilie, to choose the path or pioneer the way; and ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... figures we have been dealing with, appears a mere trifle. With a telescope, even of small power, many more are revealed, and every increase in the size of the telescope shows more still; so that it might be supposed the universe is indeed illimitable, and that we are only prevented from seeing beyond a certain point by our limited resources. But in reality we know that this cannot be so. If the whole sky were one mass of stars, as it must be if the number of them were infinite, then, even though ...
— The Children's Book of Stars • G.E. Mitton
... that one puts on a par with his—there, in another man's work the illimitable panorama of varied and life-like men and women "merely players," may draw laughter and tears (Crabbe, and much of Dickens and other men, and Don Quixote). His coarse wit and satire and shrewdness, when he is least pure, may I suppose find rivals in some of the eighteenth or seventeenth century English ...
— Juliana Horatia Ewing And Her Books • Horatia K. F. Eden
... consciousness may be our appointed task on this earth—a task in which fate has perhaps engaged nothing of us except our conscience, gifted with a voice in order to bear true testimony to the visible wonder, the haunting terror, the infinite passion, and the illimitable serenity; to the supreme law and the abiding mystery of ...
— A Personal Record • Joseph Conrad
... the seas, And call the echoes of the breeze To one triumphal lay Whose harmony, whose heavenly harmony Sounding for aye In loud and solemn benedicite, Voices the glory of the Central Day, And through th' illimitable realms of air Is borne afar In wafted echoes that the strain prolong Through boundless space, and countless worlds among, Meas'ring the pulsing of each lonely star, And sounding ceaselessly from sphere to sphere That note of immortality That whispers in the sorrow of the sea, ...
— Atma - A Romance • Caroline Augusta Frazer
... what men supposed to be an illimitable ocean, full of mystery, peril, and death. A vague conception that islands hitherto unknown might be met afar off on that strange wilderness of waters was entertained by some minds, but no one thought of venturing in search of them. ...
— Due South or Cuba Past and Present • Maturin M. Ballou
... Phaeacia. That great mysterious body of water, with its uncertainties of wind and wave, with its hidden rocks and magic islands, is now to drop out of the horizen of the Odyssey. It is the great sea-poem of the Greeks, yes of the world; the sea is the setting of its adventurous, marvelous, illimitable portion. It comes out the sea, with its realm of wonders; henceforth it is a land poem in the clear finite world. Ulysses the Hero must turn his face away from the briny element; not without significance is ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider
... lengthened to the litheness of a boy. Her father noticed that the Gallic strain in her seemed to be crowding out the other. In Rochester, under city roofs, she had been at least half his. On the trail, with the arch of the sky above and the illimitable earth around her, she was throwing ...
— The Emigrant Trail • Geraldine Bonner
... new world!" was the reply. "No one for a moment can deny the greatness of the finding of America, and Columbus and the other early navigators are sure of immortal fame, but even so, what was the New World they found to the illimitable areas of unknown life, in the bottom of the sea, that have been made known to man. Think of the wonder that has been revealed by the Challenger and other ships that have explored ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Fisheries • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... it. De la Rey's force was scattered over a long tract of country, capable of rapidly concentrating for a blow, but otherwise as intangible and elusive as a phantom army. Were Lord Kitchener simply to launch ten thousand horsemen at him, the result would be a weary ride over illimitable plains without sight of a Boer, unless it were a distant scout upon the extreme horizon. De la Rey and his men would have slipped away to his northern hiding-places beyond the Marico River. There was no solid obstacle here, as in the ...
— The Great Boer War • Arthur Conan Doyle
... moralizing on the death of Alexander, tells us that, notwithstanding his illimitable ambition, the narrow tomb that be found in Babylon was sufficiently ample for the small body that had contained his ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... our noble fathers that had slept in God from Creci to Trafalgar. And now had we reached the last sarcophagus, now were we abreast of the last bas-relief, already had we recovered the arrow-like flight of the illimitable central aisle, when coming up this aisle to meet us we beheld a female infant that rode in a carriage as frail as flowers. The mists, which went before her, hid the fawns that drew her, but could ...
— Miscellaneous Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... with its seemingly boundless prairies, grand, solemn mountains, and frankly spoken men peculiarly attired and everywhere bearing the inevitable "gun," was to her a newly discovered world. She could scarcely comprehend its reality. As the apparently illimitable plains, barren, desolate, awe-inspiring, rolled away behind, mile after mile, like a vast sea, and left a measureless expanse of grim desert between her and the old life, her unfettered imagination seemed to expand with the fathomless blue of the Western sky. As her eager eyes traced the ...
— Bob Hampton of Placer • Randall Parrish
... nature in the spring inspires every human being with any freshness of sensation left. Perchance from his windows in the Lion Mansion he had looked in the evening over the broad expanse of frontierless waters, and risen to the exaltation of the chainless unrest, the tireless and eternal youth, the illimitable breadth of the sea. At all events, he stood before the House visibly younger, brighter, serener than for many ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... des Lilas, a little garden, a courtyard surrounded by apple-trees, a path winding beside wheat-fields,—these were enough for him. His Muse, we feel, has never journeyed, never soared, never beheld its first horizon in the Alps, the ocean, or the illimitable prairie. Lamartine, born in the country, amid all the wealth of the old rural and patriarchal life, had a right to oppose him, to put his own first instincts as poet in contrast with his, and to say to him, "I was born among shepherds; but you, you were born among citizens, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 4, February, 1858 • Various
... say, resistance. Without an object which resists it, it would be a blank, and what, then, is the meaning of omnipotence? It is not that it is merely inconceivable; it is nonsense, and so are all these abstract, illimitable, self-annihilative attributes of which ...
— The Autobiography of Mark Rutherford • Mark Rutherford
... are traversing; and the murky atmosphere which, settling upon the remoter end of every long avenue, wraps its termination in gloom and uncertainty,—all these are circumstances aiding that sense of vastness and illimitable proportions which forever brood over the aspect of London in its interior. Much of the feeling which belongs to the outside of London, in its approaches for the last few miles, I had lost, in consequence of the stealthy route of by-roads, lying near Uxbridge and ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... Through almost illimitable difficulties (for when at work Henry can no more stand piano practice than I can) The Kid has got to the Variations of 'The Blue Bells of Scotland.' Nevertheless she is yearning for the day when she will arrive at the ...
— Our Elizabeth - A Humour Novel • Florence A. Kilpatrick
... no doubt well satisfied with the night's enterprise. But notwithstanding the many scouts they sent out, they were quite oblivious of the fact that their movements had been closely watched. Sail was set, and the sneaking craft crept out into the illimitable darkness, having apparently completed its work unseen by unfriendly eyes. There was not a little talk round the countryside about the landing that had taken place without any one in authority to check its progress. Wise, knowing people said it was ...
— Looking Seaward Again • Walter Runciman
... the edge of a cliff on the hill-top, whence they could see an almost illimitable stretch of tropical wilderness bathed in a glorious flood of ...
— Blown to Bits - or, The Lonely Man of Rakata • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... middle of an order he found himself breaking off and turning again to the north, looking for the return of the party, hoping to see the men waving their hats that all was well, straining his ears for their reassuring shouts. And the desert, vast, illimitable, threatening, mysterious, full of dim promise, full of vague threats, ...
— Under Handicap - A Novel • Jackson Gregory
... busy life and nature's calm repose. A few miles further, and he may site upon the quiet shore to listen to the murmuring wave until the troubled spirit sinks to rest, and in the little sail that vanishes on the illimitable sea, we may find the type of the voyage which he is so soon to take, when, his ephemeral existence closed, he embarks for that better state which ...
— Speeches of the Honorable Jefferson Davis 1858 • Hon. Jefferson Davis
... even of the fashionable literary world. At heart he was a Bohemian of the old type. He loved to spend his days at work, and his evenings at a certain well-known club, where evening dress was abhorred, and a man might sit, if he would, in his shirt sleeves. Illimitable though her tact, even Emily de Reuss, the Queen of London hostesses, never succeeded in making him feel altogether at home in her magnificent rooms. To-night he felt more at sea even than usual. Generally she had ...
— The Survivor • E.Phillips Oppenheim
... cubits, or twelve hundred cubits high; or that his dimensions equalled those of Teneriffe or Atlas;—because these, and if they were a million times as high it would be the same, are bounded: The expression is, 'His stature reached the sky!' the illimitable firmament!—When the Imagination frames a comparison, if it does not strike on the first presentation, a sense of the truth of the likeness, from the moment that it is perceived, grows—and continues to grow—upon ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... Provinces entered into the brain of any man, Lord Selkirk, coming to the wilds of North America, found a tract of country fertile in soil, and fair to look upon. He arrived in this unknown wilderness when it was summer, and all the prairie extending over illimitable stretches till it was lost in the tranquil horizon, was burning with the blooms of a hundred varieties of flowers. Here the "tiger rose," like some savage queen of beauty, rose to his knees and breathed her sultry balm in his face. Aloof stood the shy wild rose, shedding its scent with delicate ...
— The Story of Louis Riel: The Rebel Chief • Joseph Edmund Collins
... and the persecutors fools about equally matched. He was easy-tempered and humane—in the hunting-field he could not bear the cry of a dying hare with composure—martyr-burning had consequently no attraction for such a man. His scepticism came into play, his melancholy humour, his sense of the illimitable which surrounds man's life, and which mocks, defeats, flings back his thought upon himself. Man is here, he said, with bounded powers, with limited knowledge, with an unknown behind, an unknown in front, assured of nothing but that he was born, and that he must die; ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... It grows apace, chasing away the night and casting a ruddy glow on, as it seems, a vast and waveless sea, as still as the painted ocean of the poem, as silent as death, a sea without ships and without life, mournful and illimitable, and as awe-inspiring and impressive as the ...
— Mr. Fortescue • William Westall |
