"Untempered" Quotes from Famous Books
... vague and wistful cravings, untempered, unbeautified by such imaginative visions as usually accompany the eccentric feelings of such children as are subject to them. Obstinate and taciturn, he tells us of the curious passion which he experienced for the little choristers, boys of ... — The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... a sandspit had broiled beneath an untempered sun. Shadeless, grassless, it had been an abomination of desolution and a rallying-place for mosquitoes. Then had come the hand of man. First, the Royal Palm Hotel had sprung into stately existence, out of nothingness. ... — Black Caesar's Clan • Albert Payson Terhune
... H. Tascott says: "Ungoverned passions in the parents may unloose the furies of unrestrained madness in the minds of their children. Even untempered religious enthusiasm may beget a fanaticism that can not be restrained within ... — Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics • B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols
... STRANGER: Because courage, when untempered by the gentler nature during many generations, may at first bloom and strengthen, but at last bursts ... — Statesman • Plato
... with Lord Mar, was the cause of this augmented hatred; and, from that moment, the haughty Southron vowed the destruction of Wallace, by open attack, or secret treachery. Ambition, and the base counterfeit of love, those two master passions in untempered minds, were the springs of this antipathy. The instant in which he knew that the young creature whom at a distance he discerned clinging around the Earl of Mar's neck in the streets of Stirling, was the ... — The Scottish Chiefs • Miss Jane Porter
... of thought might, perhaps, have conducted him to the scepticism of his master, Bolingbroke. He unluckily fills up the gaps of his logical edifice with the untempered mortar of obsolete metaphysics, long since become utterly uninteresting to all men. Admitting that he cannot explain, he tries to manufacture sham explanations out of the 'scale of beings,' and other scholastic rubbish. But, in a sense, too, the most reverent ... — Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... saffron, watching the tints soften and mellow as dusk fell. Every minute now brought its swift quota of changing beauty. A violet haze enveloped the purple mountains, and in the crotch of the hills swam a lake of indigo. The raw, untempered glare of the sun was giving place to a limitless ... — Brand Blotters • William MacLeod Raine
... redressing the wrongs of the poor and weak, seek to promote internal discord, so that thou mayest become only terrible to thyself! And remove from thee the false prophets, who have seen vanity and divined lies; who have daubed thy wall with untempered mortar, that it may fall; who see visions of peace where there is no peace; who have strengthened the hands of the wicked, and made the heart of the righteous sad. O, do this, and fear not the result, for either shall thy end be a majestic and an ... — The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... Jehovah stands condemned before the bar of every noble soul. What Moses and David and Samuel taught as the word and will of God, we, who are fortunate enough to live in the same age with Charles Darwin, know to be the expression of a low social condition untempered by the light of science. Their "thus saith the Lord," read in the light of to-day, is "thus saith ignorance and ... — Men, Women, and Gods - And Other Lectures • Helen H. Gardener
... run over by the appearing of our paymaster with his "stamps," as the boys call the greenbacks. "We received two months' pay. The usual scenes of pay-day were reenacted, and the occasion passed away amid the untempered follies of some and the conserving ... — Three Years in the Federal Cavalry • Willard Glazier
... with patience and resignation. Despair there might be in the hearts of thousands, but those thousands were mute and passive in their misery; all was dark, all was hopeless; the wintry wind of penury blew untempered, keen upon them, but still they cried not; hunger preyed upon their very vitals, but they uttered no complaint. Let us not, even now, refuse a passing tribute of honour and respect to the passive heroism ... — Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXIX. January, 1844. Vol. LV. • Various
... and respect just as surely. Sidney trod the way of the transgressor, and found that its thorns pierced to bone and marrow. Everything had come to an end—nothing was left to her! In the untried recklessness of twenty untempered years she wished she could die before John Lincoln came to Plainfield. The eyes of youth could not see how she could ... — Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1905 to 1906 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... feeling is made small account of by some, but here were two natures rendered, the one intolerably acrid, the other despicably savourless for the want of it. Feeling without judgment is a washy draught indeed; but judgment untempered by feeling is too bitter and husky a ... — Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... of birds, the gulls and rooks and little brown wavering things which flit out and along the edge of the chalk-pits, is once more refreshment to me, utterly untempered. A merle is singing in a bramble thicket; the dew has not yet dried off the bramble leaves. A feather of a moon floats across the sky; the distance sends forth homely murmurs; the sun warms my cheeks. And all of this ... — Tatterdemalion • John Galsworthy
... us say, with a reservation. Even these you may woo with a little care into uncurbed fraternal abandon. With the exception of these few, you know the words of the first class so well that without thinking about it at all you may rely upon their giving you, the moment you need them, their untempered, uttermost service. You need be at no further pains about them. They are ... — The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... undiscovered ore in her nature, profited her nothing, underwent the transforming operation of Time and changed to absurdities. For our absurdities spring, in fact, for the most part, from the good in us, from some faculty or quality abnormally developed. Pride, untempered by intercourse with the great world becomes stiff and starched by contact with petty things; in a loftier moral atmosphere it would have grown to noble magnanimity. Enthusiasm, that virtue within a virtue, forming the saint, inspiring the devotion ... — Two Poets - Lost Illusions Part I • Honore de Balzac
... and rich! The hour perchance is not yet wholly ripe When all shall own it, but the type Whereby we shall be known in every land Is that vast gulf which laves our Southern strand, And through the cold, untempered ocean pours Its genial streams, that far-off Arctic shores May sometimes catch upon the softened breeze Strange tropic warmth and hints ... — War Poetry of the South • Various
... way back to the house when she met Clementina, also returning discomfited. Pleased as she was with them, her hostess soon interrupted her ecstasies by breaking out in accusation of Malcolm, not untempered, however, with a touch of dawning respect. At the same time her report of his words was anything but accurate, for as no one can be just without love, so no one can truly report without understanding. But they had not time to discuss him now, as ... — The Marquis of Lossie • George MacDonald
... wish he could have prevailed on himself to swagger a little.... But considering his failure in the field and the Sheriff Office, I am afraid we must apply to Hogg the apology which is made for Waller by his biographer: 'Let us not condemn him with untempered severity because he was not such a prodigy as the world has seldom seen—because his character included not the poet, the orator, ... — The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... indicative of the equality they profess. Any man's son may become the equal of any other man's son, and the consciousness of this is certainly a spur to exertion; on the other hand, it is also a spur to that coarse familiarity, untempered by any shadow of respect, which is assumed by the grossest and the lowest in their intercourse with the highest and most refined. This is a positive evil, and, I think, more than balances ... — Domestic Manners of the Americans • Fanny Trollope
... possibly send upon a people in this world is to give them over to blind, unregenerate, carnal, lukewarm, and unskilful guides. And yet, in all ages, we find that there have been many wolves in sheep's clothing, many that daubed with untempered mortar, that prophesied smoother things than God did allow. As it was formerly, so it is now; there are many that corrupt the word of God and deal deceitfully with it. It was so in a special manner in ... — The world's great sermons, Volume 3 - Massillon to Mason • Grenville Kleiser
... been an aristocrat, but his choice of sides was perhaps more the result of accident than of conviction, and he afterward acquiesced without great difficulty in the imperial government. His acquiescence was not at first untempered with regret; and in the odes modern critics have found touches of veiled sarcasm against the new monarchy and even a certain sympathy with the abortive conspiracy of Murena in 22 B.C. But as the empire grew stronger and the advantages which it brought became more ... — Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... dwindling of great hopes, the realisation of ebb in the tide of national welfare. Now they must fight on against implacable, indomitable Allies. They are under stresses now as harsh at least as the stresses of France. And, compared with the French, the Germans are untempered steel. ... — What is Coming? • H. G. Wells
... national Ministry. Thus far the Diet had been in the van of the Hungarian movement; it now sank almost into insignificance by the side of the revolutionary organisation at Pesth, where all the ardour and all the patriotism of the Magyar race glowed in their native force untempered by the political experience of the statesmen who were collected at Presburg, and unchecked by any of those influences which belong to the neighbourhood of an Imperial Court. At Pesth there broke out an agitation ... — History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... intervals will take care of themselves, and will take their places gracefully in any harmony in which they are called upon to take part; but if there is a single instance in which an octave or a fifth is allowed to remain untrue or untempered, one or more chords will show it up. It may manifest itself in one chord only. A tone may be untrue to our tempered scale, and yet sound beautifully in certain chords, but there will always be at least one in which it will "howl." For instance, ... — Piano Tuning - A Simple and Accurate Method for Amateurs • J. Cree Fischer
... Master Hymn-of-Praise finished speaking when he turned very sharply round and looked with renewed sternness—wholly untempered by a twinkle this time—in the direction whence he thought a suppressed giggle had just come to his ears. But what he saw must surely have completely reassured him; there was no suggestion of unseemly ribaldry ... — The Nest of the Sparrowhawk • Baroness Orczy
... of a temper in the Lower House which drove William and his Ministers to despair. It became as corrupt, as jealous of power, as fickle in its resolves and factious in spirit as bodies always become whose consciousness of the possession of power is untempered by a corresponding consciousness of the practical difficulties or the moral responsibilities of the power which they possess. It grumbled at the ill-success of the war, at the suffering of the merchants, at the discontent of the Churchmen; and it blamed the Crown and its Ministers ... — History of the English People, Volume VII (of 8) - The Revolution, 1683-1760; Modern England, 1760-1767 • John Richard Green
... politics, but the abstract ideas of speculative philosophy, were named Sophists. Themistokles used to converse with this man when he had already begun his political career. In his childhood he was capricious and unsteady, his genius, as yet untempered by reason and experience, showing great capacities both for good and evil, and after breaking out into vice, as he himself used afterwards to admit, saying that the colts which are the hardest to break in usually make the most valuable horses when properly taught. But as for the stories ... — Plutarch's Lives, Volume I (of 4) • Plutarch
... of liars!" said the mason, catching up his untempered chisels and flinging out of ... — A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine
... the mirror with the air of a lady arriving at an evening party. Celeste, before leaving, had drawn down the blinds and turned on the electric light, and the white and gold room, with its blazing wall-brackets, formed a sufficiently brilliant background to carry out the illusion. So untempered a glare would have been destructive to all half-tones and subtleties of modelling; but Undine's beauty was as vivid, and almost as crude, as the brightness suffusing it. Her black brows, her reddish-tawny hair and the pure red and ... — The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... at that doorway and laughed. No doubt of it, it was that awful description in M. S.'s untempered language that had made me dread my surroundings, not the loneliness and silence of the corridors about me. Now, as I stared at the room, the closed door, the shadows on the wall, I could ... — Astounding Stories of Super-Science February 1930 • Various
... right—something had to give way." The same violence of impulse is seen in the story of how, on one occasion, when he was staying in the country, he took an artistic dislike to his hostess's curtains, and tore them down during the night. His judgments were often much the same kind of untempered emotions as he showed in the matter of the curtains—his complaint, for example, that a Greek temple was "like a table on four legs: a damned dull thing!" He was a creature of whims: so much so that, as a boy, he used to have the curse, "Unstable as water, ... — The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... domestic serenity, rouses the fierce claw and tooth of Nature to drag Hilary and Daphne down to her level. As clearly as the poet saw that, 'all's Love, yet all's Law' so clearly is the same truth held in these stories with their divergent ends. The lawlessness of Nature is the lawlessness of man, untempered and ungoverned by that principle of chastity which is the law of love; and again Nature, lawless in herself, becomes beneficent, law-abiding, when controlled by that higher law of instinct in man which is the seal and sign of the ... — James Lane Allen: A Sketch of his Life and Work • Macmillan Company
... of conscience and the liberty of the sons of God, so letting our "moderation be known to all men." Let no enmity, no untempered controversy, spring up between Christian Science students and Christians who wholly or partially differ from them as to the nature of sin and the marvellous unity of man with God shadowed forth in scientific thought. Rather ... — Unity of Good • Mary Baker Eddy
... have just missed the perfect love, Not the hot passion of untempered youth, But that which lays aside its vanity And gives thee, ... — The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... this kind had even a religious object, as when Dr. John Boys, Dean of Canterbury in the reign of James I., in his zeal, untempered with wisdom, attacked the Romanists by delivering a form of ... — History of English Humour, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... in fine and truthfully glowing words, a picture of woman's progress under the institutions and laws of the United States, she said: "For the first time, all political right, privilege and power reposes undisguisedly on the one brutal fact of sex, unsupported, untempered, unalloyed by any attribute of education, any justification of intelligence, any glamour of wealthy any prestige of birth, any insignia of actual power.... To-day, the immigrants pouring in through the open gates of our seaport towns, the Indian ... — Woman and the Republic • Helen Kendrick Johnson
... the world watched this scene with amusement not untempered with choler, while they proceeded elaborately to assist the pretty Basins, who were wrapping themselves ... — Vesty of the Basins • Sarah P. McLean Greene
... second and revised edition. Webster was a far more considerable man than Marston, and infinitely above him in genius. Without the poetic nature of Marlowe, or Chapman's somewhat unwieldy vigor of thought, he had that inflammability of mind which, untempered by a solid understanding, made his plays a strange mixture of vivid expression, incoherent declamation, dramatic intensity, and extravagant conception of character. He was not, in the highest sense of the word, a great dramatist. Shakspeare ... — The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... the untempered candour of eighteen, suggested to Fay that she should cease to make a slave of Magdalen. It is hardly necessary to add that Fay and Bessie did not materially increase the sum of ... — Prisoners - Fast Bound In Misery And Iron • Mary Cholmondeley
... delighted to wear. I only throw it out to you as an example and an illustration. Where the historical traditions, the religious beliefs, the racial conditions, are all different—there to transfer by mere untempered and cast-iron logic all the conclusions that you apply in one case to the other, is the height of political folly, and I trust that neither you nor I will ever lend ourselves to any ... — Indian speeches (1907-1909) • John Morley (AKA Viscount Morley)
... was devoted, was passing from her, and no one pitied her; while the latent consciousness of disobedience debarred her from gaining solace from the only true source. All was blank desolation—a wild agony, untempered by resignation, uncheered by prayer; for though she did pray, it was without trust, without hope, while her wretchedness was rendered more overwhelming by her efforts to conceal it. These were so far ineffectual that no one could help perceiving that ... — The Heir of Redclyffe • Charlotte M. Yonge
... able to breathe and live in the cloud; content to see it opening here and closing there; rejoicing to catch, through the thinnest films of it, glimpses of stable and substantial things; but yet perceiving a nobleness even in the concealment, and rejoicing that the kindly veil is spread where the untempered light might have scorched us, or ... — Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... The greeny, cream-coloured, waxy blossoms were heat-killed before they were born, and only a few bad-smelling petals came down when he stood on his hind legs and shook the tree. Then, inch by inch, the untempered heat crept into the heart of the Jungle, turning it yellow, brown, and at last black. The green growths in the sides of the ravines burned up to broken wires and curled films of dead stuff; the hidden pools sank down and caked over, keeping the last least footmark on their edges as if it had ... — The Second Jungle Book • Rudyard Kipling
... and political order maintained, by a rigid communism. To harmonize individual rights and national interests, was the wisdom reserved for the fishermen of Galilee. The whole method of Plato's "Politeia," breathes the spirit of legalism in all its severity, untempered by the spirit of Love. This was the living force which was wanting to give energy to the ideals of the reason and conscience, to furnish high motive to virtue, to prompt to deeds of heroic sacrifice and suffering ... — Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... former existences," she answered, "that may have been lived here or elsewhere. It is the sum of our past, good and bad. It is based on a belief in reincarnation, and it is the law that whatsoever a man soweth that shall he also reap. It is justice untempered by mercy, and it is at variance with the doctrine of vicarious atonement, though one may believe it and worship Christ as the highest type of love the world has ever known. Naturally, it does not appeal to ... — The Master-Knot of Human Fate • Ellis Meredith |