"Unsurpassable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... world has shown a sound instinct in fixing upon one expression, "with malice toward none, with charity for all," as the key-note of the final Lincoln. These words form the opening line of that paragraph of unsurpassable prose in which the second ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... Before the rancher could sight his weapon the thief seemed to plunge headlong over the further side of his steed; but instead of doing so he resorted to the common trick of his people, all of whom are unsurpassable horsemen. He flung himself so far over that nothing of his body remained visible. The horse himself became the shield between him and the white man. The redskin was in the saddle, but he would have been just as expert had he ...
— Cowmen and Rustlers • Edward S. Ellis
... thing all his days. I shall call upon you to despise him presently in a sort, but not as if he were a mere smoother of mortar; perhaps a great man, infinite in memory, indefatigable in labor, exhaustless in expedient, unsurpassable in quickness of thought. Take good heed you understand ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin
... Lord undertake my father's matters, as he ordereth! For, even as thou sayest, the things that are impossible with men, are possible with him. But for myself, thanks to thine unsurpassable speech, I renounce the vanity of things present, and am resolved to withdraw from them altogether, and to spend the rest of my life with thee, lest, by means of these transitory and fleeting things, I lose the enjoyment ...
— Barlaam and Ioasaph • St. John of Damascus
... tone was an insult unsurpassable, "perhaps it is to be preferred. This ragout grows cold, ...
— St. Martin's Summer • Rafael Sabatini
... bore his punishment, Mr. Balfour was even worse. It is seldom that the House of Commons has seen a more remarkable or more effective retort than the happy, dexterous, delightful—from the literary point of view, unsurpassable—parody which Mr. Asquith made of Mr. Balfour's flagitious incitements to the men of Belfast. Mr. Asquith put the case of Mr. Morley going down to a crowd in Cork, and using the same kind of language. Mr. Balfour, in his speech, had over and over again used the name of the ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... Islands of the Southern Seas. It is in passages of this temper that Virgil wins us most, when he speaks for himself and for his age, so distant, and so weary, and so modern; when his own thought, unborrowed and unforced, is wedded to the music of his own unsurpassable style. ...
— Letters on Literature • Andrew Lang
... which you have undertaken. To destroy such a monster is something like one of the labours of Hercules, in that not only its size and weight and power of using them in little-known ways are against you, but the occult side is alone an unsurpassable difficulty. The Worm is already master of all the elements except fire—and I do not see how fire can be used for the attack. It has only to sink into the earth in its usual way, and you could not overtake ...
— The Lair of the White Worm • Bram Stoker
... is natural, for the heroine is my small daughter Susy, whom we lost. It was not intentional—it was a good while before I found it out, so I am sending you her picture to use —& to reproduce with photographic exactness the unsurpassable expression & all. May you find an artist who has ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... The two authors of the pieces, Dubourg and Tom Taylor, were great friends of his. "It was a real treat," he writes, "being well acted in every detail. Ellen Terry was wonderful, and I should think unsurpassable in all but the lighter parts." Mr. Dodgson himself had a strong wish to become a dramatic author, but, after one or two unsuccessful attempts to get his plays produced, he wisely gave up the idea, realising that he had not the necessary constructive powers. The ...
— The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll • Stuart Dodgson Collingwood
... 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 from her, of unsurpassable barriers between them, the vanity of aspiration. And now the Landgrave permits her name to be used to keep him from departing! And with his long-dead soul come back to intenser life than ever, that lily more than ever calls forth the worshipping devotion ...
— The Wagnerian Romances • Gertrude Hall
... whether they could really be the work of human hands. If they possess only one of the elements of architectural excellence, they possess that element to so great an extent that in respect of it they are unsurpassed, and probably unsurpassable. ...
— Ancient Egypt • George Rawlinson
... winter quarters, the whole ship's company, save himself, were prostrate below decks, and he with incredible strength and fortitude was literally doing everything, not even omitting to register regular observations of the instruments;—in the midst of that unsurpassable heroism among the polar solitudes, he felt at night a dissatisfaction with the day as having been spent to little ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 7 • Various
... Berlin Museum. It has been broken from a standing or kneeling statue. The form of the closely-shaven skull and the features of the strong face, wrinkled by age, have been reproduced by the sculptor with unsurpassable fidelity. The number of works emanating from the same school as this is very small, but in quality they represent the highest development of Egyptian sculpture. It is fit that we should take our leave of Egyptian art with such ...
— A History Of Greek Art • F. B. Tarbell
... later in life, to the same object. The prevailing tone and imagery of them are such as he would hardly have used but with a woman in his thoughts; they are full-fraught with deep personal feeling, as distinguished from exercises of fancy; and they speak, with unsurpassable tenderness, of frequent absences, such as, before the Sonnets were printed, the Poet had experienced from his wife. I feel morally certain that she was the inspirer of them. I can quote but a part ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... His letters show the true rapture. Of the scenery of the St. Gothard he writes: "Oh God! what a beautiful country it is. How poor and shrunken, beside it, is Italy in its brightest aspect!" He sees "places of terrible grandeur unsurpassable, I should imagine, in the world." Going up the Col de Balme, he finds the wonders "above and beyond one's wildest expectations." He cannot imagine anything in nature "more stupendous or sublime." His impressions are so prodigious ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... of those features of unsurpassable excellence which have gained for the preacher a reputation which has had no equal in our time. They are full of thought and suggestiveness, and are marked by that rare beauty of style which Mr. Robertson's readers have learned to associate with all his Sermons. His devoted ...
— Sermons Preached at Brighton - Third Series • Frederick W. Robertson
... misfortune to be a hunchback, to be embittered by his deformity, and to be constantly engaged in personal quarrels with his rivals; but his attitude in these polemics is always dignified, and his crushing retort to Lope de Vega in Los pechos privilegiados is an unsurpassable example of cold, scornful invective. More than any other Spanish dramatist, Alarcon is preoccupied with ethical aims, and his gift of dramatic presentation is as brilliant as his dialogue is natural and vivacious. It has been alleged that his foreign origin is noticeable ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... oldest and best possible. He made him swallow a few drops; its strength revived him. The hidalgo excused his weakness on the score of fatigue and the heat. He would not or could not assign it to its real sense. There are souls who die out, after burning with unsurpassable moral beauty and grandeur, without ever having found a way, and even without ever having felt the need, of revealing ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... whole of his work. Nothing could be quoted as a more distinctive note of his genius than that blend. It is seen perhaps most clearly in such stories as The Last Supper and The Fisher of Men. In these tales of unsurpassable power and beauty, Fiona Macleod has created the Gaelic Christ. The Christ is the same as He of Galilee and of the Upper Room in Jerusalem, and His work the same. But he talks the sweet Celtic language, ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... guinea." Sunset comes sooner below than above. The reapers are early home, and the peaks are still purple when the marauders pour down upon the fields, and their share of the work is done with a neatness unsurpassable by reiver, ritter or kateran. The monkey-tax thus collected is quite a calculable percentage of the crop, and few taxes are more regularly paid. As it goes to non-producers, its reduction is an object constantly kept in view. The ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, October, 1877, Vol. XX. No. 118 • Various
... literature a more revealing utterance of those effects of alcohol that are not discussed in scientific literature—the joyous exhilaration, the conviction of (comparative) sobriety, the temporary intensification of the feeling of good fellowship. The challenge to the moon is unsurpassable in its unconscious humor. Yet Arnold thought the world of ...
— Robert Burns - How To Know Him • William Allan Neilson
... contumely and ingratitude even while he is living upon him. We hear much of Shelley's unselfishness, but it does not appear that he ever denied himself the indulgence of a whim. The "Ode to the West Wind," the "Ode Written in Dejection near Naples," and "The Skylark" are unsurpassed and unsurpassable; but I can hardly pardon a man for cruelty and turpitude merely because he produces a few masterpieces ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... clouds and air strata of different densities; a new and more brilliant light flushes the western sky, and a display of gorgeous ever-changing tints occurs which are at once the delight of the beholder and the despair of the artist. And all this unsurpassable ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... still more brilliant—may take his full measure. No work in black and white in our time has been more truly artistic, and certainly no success more unqualified. The artist has given us an evocation of a social state to its smallest details, and done it with an unsurpassable lightness of touch. The problem was in itself delightful—the accidents and incidents (granted a situation de comedie) of an old, rambling, wainscoted, out-of-the-way English country-house, in the age of ...
— Picture and Text - 1893 • Henry James
... sir!" cried the exasperated Don Custodio, turning very red. "The buildings are already constructed and only wait to be utilized. Hygienic, unsurpassable, spacious—" ...
— The Reign of Greed - Complete English Version of 'El Filibusterismo' • Jose Rizal
... found him early at his task. A few hours' work completed a portrait which, for fidelity of likeness, harmony of accessories, and felicity of coloring, was almost unsurpassable. Yet the painter refused to have it framed, and concealed it from view behind a ...
— The Three Brides, Love in a Cottage, and Other Tales • Francis A. Durivage
... long as the great rivers of our land flow eastward and westward, north and south, the Union shall stand up, and stand majestical and bright, beheld by ages, as these shall be, an orb and living stream of glory unsurpassable." ...
— Chanticleer - A Thanksgiving Story of the Peabody Family • Cornelius Mathews
... year 1519 belongs the Annunciation in the Cathedral of Treviso, the merit of which, in the opinion of the writer, has been greatly overstated. True, the Virgin, kneeling in the foreground as she awaits the divine message, is of unsurpassable suavity and beauty; but the foolish little archangel tumbling into the picture and the grotesquely ill-placed donor go far to mar it. Putting aside for the moment the beautiful and profoundly moving representations of the subject due to ...
— The Earlier Work of Titian • Claude Phillips
... cried. "You are behind the times! You may be an unsurpassable expert on dress and manners, on perfumery and jewels, but you could know more law. All those ferocious old statutes have been abolished by the enactments of Antoninus and Aurelius. A slave, during good behavior, is almost as safe as ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... days must have been glorious. Men like Purcell do not create music such as theirs by blind instinct, as a cat catches mice. A mighty brain and mightier heart must have worked with passionate energy, the fires must have burnt at an unbroken white heat, to produce so much unsurpassable music in so short a time. The qualities we find in the music were in him before they got into the music; all that we can enjoy he enjoyed first. He had, too, a high destiny to work out, and he knew it. Thomas Tudway said he was ...
— Purcell • John F. Runciman
... sit down. Certainly they must go through it, to see what he would look like at the end. He was unsurpassable. She ...
— Mr. Waddington of Wyck • May Sinclair |
