"Unattainable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... interest is equally so. I repeat that the principle here expressed, is incontrovertible; but there may be something even beyond it. There may be an object in full keeping with the principle suggested—an object unattainable by the means ordinarily in possession of mankind, yet which, if attained, would lend a charm to the landscape-garden immeasurably surpassing that which a merely human interest could bestow. The true poet possessed of very unusual pecuniary resources, might possibly, while ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... becomes convinced of its truth the clear thinker must not only accept it, but must accept all legitimate deductions from it. If it seems true to us we must believe it. Absolute demonstrable truth, except in the simplest of matters is almost unattainable. The best we can ordinarily get is a close approach to certainty, and with this we must be content. In many matters, indeed in most matters, we must trust the judgment of others who are better trained in a particular line ...
— The Meaning of Evolution • Samuel Christian Schmucker
... help Lily with the household tasks, which she adored, but she had practically taken the place of nurse to the children, leaving Mary hours of freedom for her work which would otherwise have been unattainable. ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale
... is proved by the episode of Sofronia and Olindo in the Gerusalemme, which points in carefully constructed innuendoes to his affection. It can even be conceded that Tasso, who was wont to indulge fantastic visions of unattainable greatness, may have raised his hopes so high as sometimes to entertain the possibility of winning her hand. But if he did dally with such dreams, the realities of his position must in sober moments have convinced him of ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... inexpressible longing, combined with a conviction of the impossibility of attainment. This poignant contradiction returned to his mind again and again, notwithstanding every effort. He saw near to him, even within his reach, in close and tangible reality, the soul; and in the unattainable—in the depths of the ideal—the flesh. None of these thoughts attained to certain shape. They were as a vapour within him, changing every instant its form, and floating away. But the darkness which ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... not the expression of a resigned spirit which renounces the unattainable; it is precept, not doctrine, the starting point of philosophy, not its conclusion, a methodological instrument in the hand of a strong and confident longing for truth, which makes use of doubt to find the indubitable. It is not aimed at the possibility of attaining knowledge, ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... empty and garnished, in which neither Love nor Hope dwells. A self, with no God to protect from it, a self unrulable, insatiable, makes of existence to some the hell called madness. Godless man is a horror of the unfinished—a hopeless necessity for the unattainable! The most discontented are those who have all the ...
— Donal Grant • George MacDonald
... have declared it to be a great misfortune for us, and announced that between myself and them there could never be anything in common. Yet neither waste of the golden hours which I consumed in constantly endeavouring to observe the many arduous, unattainable conditions of "comme il faut"-ness (to the exclusion of any more serious pursuit), nor dislike of and contempt for nine-tenths of the human race, nor disregard of all the beauty that lay outside the narrow circle of "comme il faut"-ness comprised the whole ...
— Youth • Leo Tolstoy
... fortifying the speculative reason, but also with respect to religion. In default of this, either the moral law is degraded from its holiness, being represented as indulging our convenience, or else men strain after an unattainable aim, hoping to gain absolute holiness of will, thus losing themselves in fanatical ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... musician is not one of mere talent, or of a certain sensual refinement and dexterity. It involves deep systematic study, closely akin to that of the severer sciences. It has a sequence and logic of its own, and excellence in it is unattainable without good sense and strong intellect. It involves great moral and pathetic sensibility, and a ready sympathy with all the joys and sorrows of mankind. And finally, the lightest branch of it is beyond the reach of any but those who are lifted up by strong feelings ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... satiety. But when all joy was tasted, what then? If there was any "crowning" state, it could only be, thought Browning, one in which the soul looked up to the unattainable ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... between a large and a small farm on the Three-Notched Road. As a boy, he would have been puzzled to choose between "Will you go to Heaven?" and "Will you go to Fontenoy?" The one seemed as remote, as unattainable, and as happy as the other. The advantage was possibly with Fontenoy, for he could picture that to himself. He could not have described the mansions in the skies, but, thanks to Jacqueline, he knew every room at Fontenoy. Before he was laid in it, he had known the blue room, ...
— Lewis Rand • Mary Johnston
... was the face of a woman whose heart and mind were crowding with a yearning for something—something unattainable. Such was her look of strength and virility that he almost regretted them, fearing that her character might belie her ...
— The Law-Breakers • Ridgwell Cullum
... new formula. She will be of use; will do the daily task, forgetting the unattainable ideals. She cannot keep her husband's love, any more than she can draw the perfect hand; then she will not waste her life in sighing for either gift. She will be useful; she will gain cheer that way, since all the ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... if not my strongest ambition was to do something worth doing, and not utterly unworthy of a young countryman of Marlowe the teacher and Webster the pupil of Shakespeare, in the line of work which those three poets had left as a possibly unattainable example for ambitious Englishmen. And my first book, written while yet under academic or tutoral authority, bore evidence of that ambition in every line.' And indeed we need not turn four pages to come upon a mimicry of the style of Shakespeare so ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... when he did speak, it was more to the point and more charged with old experience. He drank a bottle of wine gladly; above all, at sunset on the hill-top or quite late at night under the stars in the arbour. The sight of something attractive and unattainable seasoned his enjoyment, he would say; and he professed he had lived long enough to admire a candle all the more when he could compare ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 6 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... what unanswerable cry in my heart, Reverie alone was at my side. I seemed to see the long fringes of the lake, the sedge withered, the grey waters restless in the bonds of the wind, tuneless and chill; all these happy gardens swept bare and flowerless; and the far hills silent in the unattainable dawn. ...
— Henry Brocken - His Travels and Adventures in the Rich, Strange, Scarce-Imaginable Regions of Romance • Walter J. de la Mare
... future of humanity can surely exist only in those who have a knowledge of history sufficient to enable them to embrace the unity of the past, and an imagination sufficiently cultivated to glow with anticipation of the future. For the bulk of mankind the humanity worshippers point of view seems unattainable at least within any ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... thus spoke, she unconsciously created a new impression on his mind,—a veil seemed to be suddenly lifted, and he saw her as he had never before seen her—a creature removed, isolated and unattainable through the force of some inceptive intellectual quality which he had not previously suspected. He answered ...
— Innocent - Her Fancy and His Fact • Marie Corelli
... deliberately and determinedly, though she knew she was shaking the Ormsby millions into the abyss of the unattainable. ...
— The Grafters • Francis Lynde
... this disposition is unattainable, I answer, so is all perfection: ought therefore a moralist to recommend imperfections? One excellency, however, of our Saviour's rules is, that they are either never mistaken, or never so mistaken as to do harm. I could feign a hundred ...
— Evidences of Christianity • William Paley
... impression, which was neither hope, nor desire, nor regret, but rather a sense of emotion, of passionate impulse, mingled with admiration and anxiety. I am conscious at once of joy and of want; beyond what I possess I see the impossible and the unattainable; I gauge my own wealth and poverty: in a word, I am and I am not—my inner state is one of contradiction, because it is one ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... that is why I always seem about to lose you. My heart is unsatisfied, my mind knows no peace. Come closer to me, unattainable one! Surrender yourself to the bonds of name and home and parentage. Let my heart feel you on all sides and live with you in the peaceful security ...
— Chitra - A Play in One Act • Rabindranath Tagore
... walks of life, of virtues worth cultivating, and to erect models out of those who, while they may be derelict in their ethical duties, are still worthy of being imitated in other respects. Our standards and patterns of morality are so high as to be unattainable, not in the details of the practice of virtue, but in the personnel of the model. Royal and noble blood permeated with the odor of sanctity; virtuous statesmanship, or proud political position attained through the rigid observance of the ethical rules of personal purity, are nothing to ...
— Life, Letters, and Epicurean Philosophy of Ninon de L'Enclos, - the Celebrated Beauty of the Seventeenth Century • Robinson [and] Overton, ed. and translation.
... the stile (A, Fig. 207) perfectly true, and usually the job is turned out something like the illustration shows. The side of the rail (B) must be straight with the side of the stile. If the work is done by machinery it results in accuracy unattainable in hand work. ...
— Carpentry for Boys • J. S. Zerbe
... several men could be estimated with mathematical exactitude, although it has frequently engaged the attention of scientific minds, appears to be an expenditure of ingenuity and research upon an unattainable object. So ever varying, so much dependent on the mutations of position which every move occasions, and on the augmented power which it acquires when combined with other forces, is the proportionate worth of this with that particular man, that it ...
— The Blue Book of Chess - Teaching the Rudiments of the Game, and Giving an Analysis - of All the Recognized Openings • Howard Staunton and "Modern Authorities"
... orator on the floor of the Senate, "is endurable only because unattainable. The only things on earth that make this world interesting are its sporting chances, its ...
— The Gay Rebellion • Robert W. Chambers
... Intellect and Love; and Intellect and Love as well are equal objects of his unbounded devotion. Hence his sensuousness is touched with a real spiritual quality. In his poetic emotion, as in his social ambitions, Shelley is constantly yearning for the unattainable. One of our best critics [Footnote: Mr. R. H. Hutton.] has observed: 'He never shows his full power in dealing separately with intellectual or moral or physical beauty. His appropriate sphere is swift sensibility, the intersecting line between the sensuous ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... living body, and it is, and must remain, unintelligible, so long as we are ignorant of the nature of these normal activities. In other words, there could be no real science of pathology until the science of physiology had reached a degree of perfection unattained, and indeed unattainable, until quite ...
— Science & Education • Thomas H. Huxley
... to the books of M. Renan; for no one has practiced these qualities with greater constancy than he, who on the first page of his 'Vie de Jesus' invokes the pure spirit of the venerated Dead, and who prayed to him in a melancholy petition to the unattainable—"O good Genius, reveal to me whom you love, the truths which govern death, keep one from fearing and make one almost ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... consciousness of self interposed between her and her filial service; then, as the weeks passed, little blighted hopes began to stir and ache in her breast; defeated ambitions raised their heads as if to sting her; unattainable delights teased her by their very nearness; by the narrow line of separation that lay between her and their realization. It is easy, for the moment, to tread the narrow way, looking neither to the right ...
— Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... Prometheus sums up the perpetual agony of the human race in its perpetual striving to rise beyond its limitations. The tragic irony of the Greeks is but the expression of the tragedy of passion in its pitiful reaction from hope, the intensity of feeling with which men see desire defeated and ideal unattainable. So, too, in the most intense moments the characters of ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... went wandering away, and vision after vision, now of war and now of love, now of earthly victory and now of what seemed unattainable felicity, arose and passed before him, filling its place. At length it came back: he would glance again into his cousin Thomas's book. He had but to stretch out his hand to take it, for his bed was close by the window. ...
— St. George and St. Michael • George MacDonald
... several, the deeds of the women themselves may carry them different ways. I think a reasonable husband ought to be satisfied with passing his allotted time with any particular wife in this world, and not to go about moping for things unattainable. I'm infinitely obliged to you, Major Duncan, for this and all your other acts of friendship; and if you could but add another, I should think you had not altogether forgotten the play-fellow of ...
— The Pathfinder - The Inland Sea • James Fenimore Cooper
... applied to an end, absolutely indispensable to any even tolerable system of discipline, and yet absolutely unattainable upon any commensurate scale in any other university of Europe. They are applied to the personal settlement and domestication of the students within the gates and walls of that college to whose discipline they are amenable. Everywhere ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... seemed in body that sleep for many hours would not return again. And he spent almost all the remainder of the lagging darkness pacing softly to and fro; one face only before his eyes, the one sure thing, the one thing unattainable in ...
— The Return • Walter de la Mare
... young priestess. She sought no longer to hold sway over the elemental tribes, and her empire over them departed: the song of the poet rang for ever in her ears; its proud assertion of kingship and joy in the radiance of a deeper life haunted her like truth; but such a life seemed unattainable by her and a deep sadness rested in her heart. The wood-people often saw her sitting in the evening where the sunlight fell along the pool, waving slowly its azure and amethyst, sparkling and flashing in crystal and gold, melting as if a phantom Bird of Paradise were fading ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... what he wishes, the wishes of the weak remain unfulfilled, and for this reason the weak, or whoever in comparison with the magnitude of his desires, thinks himself weak, avails himself of the phantastic wish fulfillment. He desires to attain the unattainable at least in imagination. This is the psychological reason why so many fairy stories are composed from the standpoint of the weak, so that the experiencing Ego of the fairy tale, the hero, is a simpleton, the smallest or the weakest or the ...
— Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts • Herbert Silberer
... is stamped on all Tolstoy's utterances, the simplest and the most metaphysical. But though he did not pass scathless through the purging fires, nor escape with eyes undimmed from the mystic light which flooded his soul, his ideal is not thereby invalidated. It was, he admitted, unattainable, but none the less a state of perfection to which we must continually ...
— The Forged Coupon and Other Stories • Leo Tolstoy
... Blanchard remarks very justly, that as they possess no sting and are consequently less readily able than the mothers of our own bees to kill each other, several queens will probably live together in the same hive. But certainty on this point has hitherto been unattainable owing to the great resemblance that exists between queens and workers, as also to the impossibility of rearing the Meliponitae in ...
— The Life of the Bee • Maurice Maeterlinck
... of view was haughty and superb, but unfortunately I felt it to be unattainable. Two aspects of the truth seized Girardin, the logical side and the practical side. Here, in my opinion, the practical ...
— The History of a Crime - The Testimony of an Eye-Witness • Victor Hugo
... decided to ask twenty pounds. It seemed more to him now than it would have done a year ago, by reason of the small sums he had handled lately; but it was a good deal less than his golden dreams had painted the bulb to be worth in the time when it seemed unattainable, and he was paying debts and providing for Julia out of the proceeds of the imaginary sale. Still, he finally decided to ask it and wrote to that effect, and after some waiting for the opportunity got the ...
— The Good Comrade • Una L. Silberrad
... loved before, more times than one. He would skim the cream of passion, brush the dew from the flower, crush the first sweetness from the myrtle-blooms,—and leave the rest. You child, what do you know of men? It is only the unattainable that is worth striving for. There is much of the brute beast in their passions. Did you mark, the other day, how the dead hound turned a scornful nozzle to the first sweet morsel that I pressed on his acceptance? But afterward, ...
— Margaret Tudor - A Romance of Old St. Augustine • Annie T. Colcock
... infallibly distinguish between the two, avoiding thus all unworthy fretfulness and all idle kicking against the pricks. Therefore he has made you for happiness; for the joy of men is an achievement; and their misery in the coveting of the unattainable end. If you would fulfil his benevolent design, seek only what has been placed in your power, frankly resigning all that lies beyond; but be ever difficult in renunciation; test and sound well ...
— Apologia Diffidentis • W. Compton Leith
... I any near prospect of seeing them. I do not venture to wish it, for fear of growing discontented. The girls are happy, and so am I; and we do not repine because we cannot reach an unattainable pleasure." ...
— Principle and Practice - The Orphan Family • Harriet Martineau
... a pleasant thing to me now. I forgot all my wild unattainable ambitions in the little pleasures of everyday life. Such a thing as writing never entered my head. I occasionally dreamt out a little yarn which, had it appeared on paper, would have brimmed over with pleasure and ...
— My Brilliant Career • Miles Franklin
... a somewhat larger time. As a consequence of its motion the clock goes more slowly than when at rest. Here also the velocity c plays the part of an unattainable limiting velocity. ...
— Relativity: The Special and General Theory • Albert Einstein
... which the more respectable part among us Philistines mistake for the true goal of man's desire after all that is lovely. And for the Populace this false idea is a stone which kills the desire before it can even arise; so impossible and unattainable for [220] them do the conditions of that which is lovely appear according to this ideal to be made, so necessary to the reaching of them by the few seems the falling short of them by the many. So that, perhaps, of the actual vulgarity of our Philistines and brutality of ...
— Culture and Anarchy • Matthew Arnold
... miles and miles of the States and Canada, where the wildness for the most part rather repels than delights you. I do not say everywhere; in places the wilderness will blossom like a rose; boggy margins of lakes, fallen trunks in the forest overgrown with wild flowers, make scenes unattainable in our civilised England. Even our roughest scenery is comparatively man-made: our heaths are game preserves; our woodlands are thinned of superfluous underbrush; our moors are relieved by deliberate plantations. But England in her own way is unique and unrivalled. Such parks, such greensward, such ...
— Post-Prandial Philosophy • Grant Allen
... better days; at another, he was in want, in the lowest depression, no hope in the world. He only asks for work; he is entirely unconcerned for whom he writes or what party he eulogizes; he wants money and a name, and when these seem unattainable, he takes refuge from "the whips and scorns of time," the burning fever of pride, the gnawings of hunger, in suicide. He goes to his little garret room,—refusing, as he goes, a dinner from his landlady, although ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... writings from the pen of this remarkable man leaves us with the conviction that he is one of the most powerful spiritual forces in our generation. It is the more to be regretted that in certain points he seems to be hampered by false presuppositions and misled by unattainable ideals. His loyalty to 'Catholic truth,' as understood by the party in the Church to which he consents to belong, prevents him from understanding where the shoe really pinches among those of the younger generation who are both thoughtful and ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... me. Regenerate Brahmanas that have thoroughly studied the Vedas, that have tranquillity in their souls, they that have subdued their wrath, obtain a high reward by means of their numerous sacrifices. That reward, however, is unattainable by men that are wicked in their deeds, overwhelmed by covetousness, mean and disreputable with souls unblessed and impure. Therefore, must thou know, O Brahmana that this reward which is obtained by persons having their souls under control and which is unobtainable by the ignorant and the foolish,—this ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa Bk. 3 Pt. 2 • Translated by Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... of the Bible—the Land of Promise to the Israelites, the land of Miracle and Sacrifice to the Apostles and their followers—still slept in the unattainable distance, under a sky of bluer and more tranquil loveliness than that to whose cloudless vault I looked up. It lay as far and beautiful as it once seemed to the eye of childhood, and the swords of Seraphim kept profane feet from its sacred hills. But these rough rocks around me, these ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor
... not unattainable, some members in this academy give a sufficient proof. And, be assured, that if this power is not acquired whilst you are young, there will be no time for it afterwards: at least, the attempt will ...
— Seven Discourses on Art • Joshua Reynolds
... to do; it was in his reach; and he did it, therefore, manfully, religiously. He did not waste his mind on too many things; for whatever too much expands the mind weakens it; nor on vague or multitudinous thoughts and speculations; nor on dreams or things distant or unattainable. However interesting, they did not absorb him, body and soul, like the safety and welfare of ...
— Charles Lamb • Barry Cornwall
... see it, Ellida. Step by step you are slipping from me. The craving for the boundless, the infinite, the unattainable will drive your soul into the darkness ...
— The Lady From The Sea • Henrik Ibsen
... the possibility of such a feat. It was, as we all know, very generally believed, in distant antiquarian times, that occasionally dead men could be induced to rise, and impart all sorts of otherwise unattainable information to the living. This creed, however, has not been limited to those ancient times, for, in our own days, many sane persons still profess to believe in the possibility of summoning the spirits of the departed from the other ...
— Archaeological Essays, Vol. 1 • James Y. Simpson
... abdominal walls drawn in (retracted), which gives the singer, in all parts above and below, a bellows with tense walls in all parts, with the great advantage that such breathing permits of a firmness otherwise unattainable, and he is enabled to exert his breath force with great certainty and power, and, as some maintain, with all the control necessary for ...
— Voice Production in Singing and Speaking - Based on Scientific Principles (Fourth Edition, Revised and Enlarged) • Wesley Mills
... mother-tongue of all the senses, into which they must be translated to be of service to the organism. Hence its importance. The parrot is the most intelligent of birds, and its tactual power is also greatest. From this sense it gets knowledge, unattainable by birds which cannot employ their feet as hands. The elephant is the most sagacious of quadrupeds—its tactual range and skill, and the consequent multiplication of experiences, which it owes to its wonderfully adaptable trunk, being the basis of its sagacity. Feline animals, for a similar cause, ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... that time the queen began to regard him with an eye of tenderness that might one day prove dangerous to herself, to the king, her august comfort, to Zadig, and to the kingdom in general. Zadig now began to think that happiness was not so unattainable ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne
... points of undisputed resemblance, why not he? A nervous, excitable, impetuous boy like that and anxious, too, that the lady of his heart should be freed from the one thing, the one man, whose existence made her everlastingly unattainable, in the hands of a clever woman like Anita Rosario such a chap could be made to identify anything and to believe it as religiously as he believes. Now, go to bed and rest easy, Major. I'm going to call up Dollops and do a little night prowling. If it turns out as ...
— Cleek, the Master Detective • Thomas W. Hanshew
... been snatched by untimely death and shut away from him forever in an early grave—a life where there had been not only sorrow, but bitterness—where there had been pain and want and homelessness and desolate wanderings and longings for the unattainable—where there had been misunderstanding and distrust and temptation and defeat—into such a life this wee bit of maidenhood—this true heartsease—had crept and blossomed, filling heart and life with beauty and ...
— The Dreamer - A Romantic Rendering of the Life-Story of Edgar Allan Poe • Mary Newton Stanard
... engines made and making show a great increase. 2. Speeds hitherto unattainable are now seen to be possible in vessels of all the various classes. 3. The consumption of fuel is reduced by 13.38 per cent. on the average; and numbers of vessels are now working on much less coal than that average, while the quality ...
— Scientific American Suppl. No. 299 • Various
... word was thought-provoking. A glimmer of understanding began to dawn in Lane. Already an immense pity had flooded his soul, and a profound sense of the mystery and tragedy of Mel Iden. She had always been unusual, aloof, proud, unattainable, a girl with a heart of golden fire. And now she had a nameless child and was an outcast from her father's house. The fact, the fatality ...
— The Day of the Beast • Zane Grey
... impulse."[179] Be that as it may, it is, in any case, if we grant the facts, a means through which male sexual behaviour with all its biological and psychological implications, is raised to a level otherwise perhaps unattainable by natural means, while in the female it affords opportunities for the development in the individual and evolution in the race of what we may follow Darwin in calling appreciation, if we empty this word of the aesthetic implications which have gathered round ...
— Evolution in Modern Thought • Ernst Haeckel
... easier, then, to effect the ruin of poor, fallen man, by stirring up this fierce desire of equality with discontented thoughts and vain hopes of unattainable good! It is this dark desire, and not liberty, which, in its rage, becomes the "poisonous snake;" and, though decked in fine, allegoric, glowing garb, it is still the loathsome thing, the "false worm," that turned God's Paradise itself into ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... he sadly, "I am penned up here where I cannot fight back. Treason is laid against me. But, beyond all this, I have permitted my loyalty to mislead my ambition. I have aspired to something I can cherish but never possess. Better that I never should have tasted of the unattainable than to have the cup withdrawn just as its sweetness ...
— Beverly of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... province the perplexities are numberless and distracting. Never surely was there a career more beset with insoluble riddles and unmanageable dilemmas. At each step, in the relation of the most ordinary incidents, exactness of dates, or precision of events, appears unattainable. Fiction is ever elbowing fact, so that it might be supposed contemporaries had with one accord been conspiring to disguise the truth from posterity. The uncertainty is deepened tenfold when motives ...
— Sir Walter Ralegh - A Biography • William Stebbing
... substructure had crumbled at the test. She loved another; had suddenly become as unattainable as the stars—and was lost ...
— The Promise - A Tale of the Great Northwest • James B. Hendryx
... D'Israeli, Borthwick, Ferrand, Lord John Manners, etc. Lord Ashley, too, is in sympathy with them. The hope of Young England is a restoration of the old "Merry England" with its brilliant features and its romantic feudalism. This object is of course unattainable and ridiculous, a satire upon all historic development; but the good intention, the courage to resist the existing state of things and prevalent prejudices, and to recognise the vileness of our present condition, is worth something anyhow. ...
— The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 - with a Preface written in 1892 • Frederick Engels
... it, he had really acted on the prompting of this cherished dream. Would not Chartres be a sort of monastic haven, of open cloister, where he could enjoy his liberty and not have to give up his comforts? Would it not, at any rate, for lack of an unattainable hermitage, be a sop thrown to his desires; and supposing he could succeed in reducing his too exorbitant demands, give him the final repose and peace for which he had yearned ever since his ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... loudly, with terror in his voice, and close to that delicate ear which had always been so sensitive to every discord. But the sound evidently reached her not. It is indescribable what a sense of remote, dim, unattainable distance betwixt himself and Alice was impressed on the father by this impossibility of reaching her with ...
— The House of the Seven Gables • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... once assist and abridge the labours of the future; like tools which, themselves the result of the finest mechanical skill, do at the same time render other and further triumphs of art possible, oftentimes such as would prove quite unattainable without them. [Footnote: See Mill, System of Logic, iv. ...
— On the Study of Words • Richard C Trench
... face of his Wee Wifie seemed to lure him on with the sad Undine eyes that he remembered so well; when, with the contrariety of man ever eager for the unattainable, he began to long more and more to see her; when his anger revived, and impatience with it. And, though he hardly owned it to himself, both anger and impatience were born ...
— Wee Wifie • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... and I was not altogether playacting now, "that tale about Polyxo was a pure invention. Helen—and the gods be praised for it!—can never die. For it is hers to perpetuate that sense of unattainable beauty which never dies, which sways us just as potently as it did Homer, and Dr. Faustus, and the Merovingians too, I suppose, with memories of that unknown woman who, when we were boys, was very certainly some day, to be our mate. And so, ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... public abuses or private morals, in the same sweeping clause of ban and anathema, do all they can to combine all parties in a common cause against them, and to prevent every one else from advancing one step farther in the career of practical improvement than they do in that of imaginary and unattainable perfection. ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... hospital with her own hands. It is possible for beauty to condescend without wounding. A woman who is not outwardly attractive must do a different kind of work. The first brings a poetic element into a dreary life, and may even in this way arouse the aspiration for an unattainable ideal. But a plain and awkward woman may be the inspiration of a still higher ideal by the radiance ...
— Girls and Women • Harriet E. Paine (AKA E. Chester}
... circumstances of savage life, is one of the most important pieces of information to be derived from a collection such as that we have undertaken and where direct means of communicating that intelligence are unattainable, it is surely better to employ such as on be ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 5 • Robert Kerr
... bowed myself out, mounted again, and rode to the hotel, where I left my horse with instructions for its return to its owner. Then, at my best speed, I hastened down the hill again, reached the grounds of the convent, and approached the door. Perfect rest and freedom from excitement were unattainable until I had learned whether Marie Delhasse was still safe within the old white walls which I saw before me; for, though I could not trace how the change in me had come, nor track its growth, I knew now that if she were there the walls held what was of the ...
— The Indiscretion of the Duchess • Anthony Hope
... and insanity, they advocated an intermediate institution, in which merciful treatment and social security were alike considered. They also emphasised the importance of certain measures which hitherto had been universally regarded as a pure abstraction or an unattainable desideratum—measures for the prevention of crime by tracing it to its source, divorce laws to diminish adultery, legislation of an anti-alcoholistic tendency to prevent crimes of violence, associations for destitute children, and co-operative associations to check the tendency to theft. Above ...
— Criminal Man - According to the Classification of Cesare Lombroso • Gina Lombroso-Ferrero
... was to have consisted of the same number:—1. Of the extent and limits of human reason. 2. Of those arts and sciences, and of the parts of them, which are useful, and therefore attainable, together with those which are unuseful, and therefore unattainable. 3. Of the nature, ends, use, and application of the different capacities of men. 4. Of the use of learning, of the science of the world, and of wit; concluding with a satire against the misapplication of them, illustrated ...
— Poetical Works of Pope, Vol. II • Alexander Pope
... farther advance to the northward, as well as a nearer approach to either continent, obstructed by a sea blocked up with ice, Captain Clerke at length determined to lose no more time in the pursuit of what seemed utterly unattainable, and to sail for Awatska Bay, to repair their damages, and before the winter should set in, to explore the coast of Japan on their way towards Europe. To the great joy, therefore, of every individual on board both ships, they turned their faces towards home; and the delight and ...
— Narrative of the Voyages Round The World, • A. Kippis
... around it; and there he sat, motionless and entranced, straining his eyes upon vacancy, powerless to divert their gaze from the imaginary treasure—like a child gazing with watering mouth at a dish of unattainable sweetmeats. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... think that I do nothing, that I have deceived their expectations and their hopes. I, too, am disappointed. All that would restore my self-respect and give me a right to be proud of myself, seems to me unattainable and impossible, and I fall back upon trivialities, gay talk, distractions. I am always equally lacking in hope, in faith, in resolution. The only difference is that my weakness takes sometimes the form of despairing melancholy and sometimes that of a cheerful quietism. And ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Mediterranean, and her marine chantiers not only repaired the engines in a few hours, but supplied a set of spare parts, a wise precaution in view of the yacht's probable sojourn in a locality where castings would be unattainable. ...
— The Wheel O' Fortune • Louis Tracy
... unattainable to a woman all the other creatures take on the hue of being valuable from the reflection. ...
— The Tinder-Box • Maria Thompson Daviess
... those matters I aimed at impartiality, which is an unattainable ideal, but I trust that sincerity and detachment have brought me reasonably close to it. Having no pet theories of my own to champion, my principal standard of judgment is derived from the law of causality and the rules of ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... been due to everyone else besides myself—to the backing and firm direction I had received from Government, to the sound advice and help of my Staff, to the bravery and endurance of the troops, without all or any one of which aids success would have been unattainable—yet I could not help also feeling that I had often on my own responsibility to make decisions and run risks, and to give advice to Government; and that if I had erred in my decisions or in the advice I gave or in taking ...
— The Heart of Nature - or, The Quest for Natural Beauty • Francis Younghusband
... a picture is at length painted which leaves in the mind of him who contemplates it with a kindred art, a sense of the fullest satisfaction. The idea of the tale has been presented unblemished, because undisturbed; and this is an end unattainable by the novel. Undue brevity is just as exceptionable here as in the poem; but undue length is yet more to ...
— A Manual of the Art of Fiction • Clayton Hamilton
... and his footsteps in the vast silence were loud to his own ears, as if echoed by the watchful stars: his eyes, roaming about the line of the horizon, seemed to gaze hungrily into the unattainable, and did not see the shadow of the coming event. The only shadow on the sea was the shadow of the black smoke pouring heavily from the funnel its immense streamer, whose end was constantly dissolving in the air. Two Malays, silent and almost motionless, ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... had to leave, dreadful gaps in our yearning, dreadful lapses in our knowledge, dreadful failures in our energy; there were always things off and beyond, goals of delight and dreams of desire, that dropped as a matter of course into the unattainable, and over to which our wonder- working agent now flings the firm straight bridge. Curiosity has lost, under this amazing extension, its salutary renouncements perhaps; contemplation has become one with action and satisfaction one with ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... that she might be more to him than an unattainable divinity, he was not fool enough to imagine that such a hope could be realised. She was a princess royal, he the slave who stood afar off and worshipped beyond the barrier of her disdain. In his leather pocketbook lay the ever-present reminder that ...
— The Man From Brodney's • George Barr McCutcheon
... correspondingly needed foresight and statesmanship involve? Such a volume would thus differ widely from the traditional and contemporary "literature of Utopias" in being regional instead of non-regional, indeed ir-regional and so realisable, instead of being unrealisable and unattainable altogether. The theme of such a volume would thus be to indicate the practicable alternatives, and to select and to define from these the lines of development of the legitimate Eu-topia possible in the given city, and characteristic of it; obviously, therefore, a very ...
— Civics: as Applied Sociology • Patrick Geddes
... solemnity, these gentlemen, Grumkow the spokesman, in soft phrase, but with strict clearness, made it apparent to her, That marry she must,—the Hereditary Prince of Baireuth,—and without the consent of both her parents, which was unattainable at present, but peremptorily under the command of one of them, whose vote was the supreme. Do this (or even say that you will do it, whisper some of the well-affected), his Majesty's paternal favor will return upon you like pent waters;—and the Queen will surely reconcile herself (or perhaps turn ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. VIII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... ultimate integration, temporized, guaranteeing as a first step an intricate system of separate but equal treatment and opportunity for Negroes. The Marine Corps began with the idea that separate but equal service was not discriminatory, but when equal service proved unattainable, black marines were left with separatism alone. The Navy announced the most progressive policy of all, providing for integration of its general service. Yet it failed to break the heavy concentration of Negroes in the Steward's Branch, (p. 175) where no whites ...
— Integration of the Armed Forces, 1940-1965 • Morris J. MacGregor Jr.
... may find in them some echo from the ever-shifting tonality of the Odes, something of their verbal felicity, something of their thrilling wistfulness; may strive not quite unsuccessfully, in the words of Tennyson's "Timbuctoo," to attain by shadowing forth the unattainable. ...
— Horace • William Tuckwell
... project, brought to birth by that slight accident of dropping the knife at Feuchtwang; [Ranke, i. 304.] and hanging heavy on his mind during this Augsburg drive. At Augsburg, furthermore, "he bought, in all privacy, red cloth, of quantity to make a top-coat;" red, the gray being unattainable in Katte's hands: in all privacy; though the watchful Rochow had full knowledge of ...
— History of Friedrich II of Prussia V 7 • Thomas Carlyle
... Whether such a state of opinion grows up or not depends mainly upon the stubbornness or conciliatoriness of the possessing classes, and, conversely, upon the moderation or violence of those who desire fundamental economic change. The majority which Bolsheviks regard as unattainable is chiefly prevented by the ruthlessness of ...
— The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism • Bertrand Russell
... eye, with grand patience, fascinated by her very splendours, not without hope. When at 8 P.M. a banquet was served to 250 guests in the Radcliffe Library, the upper gallery being open to a crawling public to see the lions feed, Harris, watching thence the unattainable under the blue of the canopy—blue always in honour of the Sea—thought within himself: "Ah, Mr. 76, you've got it all, ain't you?—for the time being. But 'ow'd you feel if I had a pistol now? Gawd! I can just ...
— The Lord of the Sea • M. P. Shiel
... be concluded that the happiest state of society is that in which supreme power resides in the whole body of a well-informed people. This is an imaginary, perhaps an unattainable, state of things. Yet, in some measure, we may approximate to it; and he alone deserves the name of a great statesman, whose principle it is to extend the power of the people in proportion to the extent of their knowledge, ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Contibutions to Knight's Quarterly Magazine] • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... nature—make them blossom and bear fruit. [With more and more warmth, rising.] And I will do more than that! I will help him to bring his desires into harmony with what lies attainable before him. That is just what at present they are not. All his longings are for things that must for ever remain unattainable to him. But I will create a conscious happiness in his mind. [He goes once or twice up and down the room. ASTA and RITA follow him with ...
— Little Eyolf • Henrik Ibsen
... disgusts because they dream of something better, to whom the bloom is off everything, and who always are impressed with the uselessness, the commonness of their own achievements—these come to regard literary art as a thing unattainable and mysterious, scarcely to be detected save in a few pages by ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant
... magnificent? I've been up to the nursery looking at the infant wonder—just wild to hug him; but he's asleep, and his nurse glared at me. So I thought I'd come and look at something else as unattainable—the stars, Louis," she ...
— The Common Law • Robert W. Chambers
... not of these. His mind was occupied by one little, slender, fair-haired woman, and that one unattainable. Had he analyzed his new mental condition, he might have marvelled that the little winged god could have aimed so straight and let fly so unexpectedly. True love, however, does not come of reasoning, but rather in spite of it. And, to do ...
— Mlle. Fouchette - A Novel of French Life • Charles Theodore Murray
... to smoke as though he derived an actual visual enjoyment from the blue sprays that travelled and dispersed across the room. He had already placed before his visitor a box containing cigars of a brand which that gentleman keenly appreciated but generally regarded as unattainable, and the matter-of-fact ease and certainty with which the blind man had brought the box and put it before him had sent a ...
— Four Max Carrados Detective Stories • Ernest Bramah
... language must be vague; nor is it desirable too strictly to correct the language whilst the thought is incorrigible. Much of the effect of poetry and eloquence depends upon the elasticity and indirect suggestiveness of common terms. Even in reasoning upon some subjects, it is a mistake to aim at an unattainable precision. It is better to be vaguely right than exactly wrong. In the criticism of manners, of fine art, or of literature, in politics, religion and moral philosophy, what we are anxious to say is often far from clear to ourselves; and it ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... down the lake with the sun on her uncovered head, on the soft whiteness of the doeskin garment, and to young Dupre she had never seemed so near the divine, so far and unattainable. ...
— The Maid of the Whispering Hills • Vingie E. Roe
... ground is a little more rugged in the service than elsewhere. But they are all founded in hard military experience; they did not find expression because some Admiral got it in his head one day to set an unattainable goal for his men, or because some General wished to turn a pious face toward the public, professing that his men were aspiring to greater virtue ...
— The Armed Forces Officer - Department of the Army Pamphlet 600-2 • U. S. Department of Defense
... seldom go together, scientific and parochial knowledge. But a body of evidence already waits to be used, and though its discussion may lead—as it has led me—into topographical minutiae, where completeness and certainty are too often unattainable and errors are fatally easy, my results may nevertheless contain some new suggestions and may ...
— Ancient Town-Planning • F. Haverfield
... can be no harm in introducing a few remarks on this aspect and branch of our subject, particularly seeing that the effect of throwing on the market thousands of rare books, which were once thought to be hopelessly unattainable, has contributed to improve the prospects and opportunities ...
— The Book-Collector • William Carew Hazlitt
... and even near, by films of cloud passing over the darkness of ravines or forests, blues are produced of the most subtle tenderness; these azures and purples[107] passing into rose-color of otherwise wholly unattainable delicacy among the upper summits, the blue of the sky being at the same time purer and deeper than in the plains. Nay, in some sense, a person who has never seen the rose-color of the rays of dawn crossing a blue mountain twelve or fifteen ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... her mandates, and yet not be blind to the exquisite perfection of her appearance and belongings. Charlotte had privately borrowed one of Aunt Virginia's skirts, and practised before the cheval glass, but the flowing lines that so much pleased her she found unattainable. ...
— The Pleasant Street Partnership - A Neighborhood Story • Mary F. Leonard
... clearly as possible, we shall call attention particularly to a contradiction in which the moderns are often involved. They call the ancients their teachers, they acknowledge in their works an unattainable excellence, yet they depart both in theory and practice far from the maxims which the ancients continually observed. In starting from this important point and in returning to it often, we shall find others about which something falls ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... dross. She leaned back in the carriage, with a restless, burning cheek, and wondered why she was born to be so miserable. The thought of Mary's saintly face and tender eyes rose before her as the moon rises on the eyes of some hot and fevered invalid, inspiring vague yearnings after an unknown, unattainable peace. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... worlds unseen, and to bring back the evidence of what they have met and studied; that it so teaches men their own nature that it enables them to separate soul and body, and travel without the physical body in worlds long thought unattainable, save through the gateway of death. I say "Long thought unattainable"; but the scriptures of every religion bear witness that they are not unattainable. The Hindu tells us that man should separate himself from his body as you strip the sheath from the stem of the grass. The ...
— London Lectures of 1907 • Annie Besant
... while one's pen engraves one's indignation at their success; the old baron in his castle, preceded and surrounded by loyal dependants, who desired only to live under his protection and die in his defence, inspires a notion of dignity unattainable by those who, seeking the beautiful, are by so far removed from the sublime of life, and affords to the mind momentary images of surly magnificence, ill exchanged perhaps by fancy, though truth has happily substituted ...
— Observations and Reflections Made in the Course of a Journey through France, Italy, and Germany, Vol. I • Hester Lynch Piozzi
... all this should make him feel outside [Transcriber's Note: Original reads 'outide'] the warm glow and life of things; but it did. It did worse in that it inspired a longing for what he knew positively to be unattainable. It stirred a new impulse to fight for what he had definitely given up. It raised again questions he thought he had answered and revived hopes he had never had to quench, since from the ...
— The Street Called Straight • Basil King
... among his own countrymen by his efforts to uphold prelacy in the north. He was doubtless in error: but his error is to be attributed to a cause which does him no discredit. His favourite object, an object unattainable indeed, yet such as might well fascinate a large intellect and a benevolent heart, had long been an honourable treaty between the Anglican Church and the Nonconformists. He thought it most unfortunate that one opportunity of concluding such a treaty ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... think the Gordian knot of the origin of evil can be disentangled by that or any similar assertions.... That there is a true solution of the riddle, and that in our present state that solution is unattainable by us, are propositions which may be regarded as equally certain: meanwhile, as it is the province of the poet to attach himself to those ideas which exalt and ennoble humanity, let him be permitted ...
— Adonais • Shelley
... right and wrong, or a rational distribution of rewards or punishment, nor consequently inculcate the feeling of duty and responsibility, without which goodness as a matter of principle is impossible and a reliable state of society unattainable. ...
— Chaldea - From the Earliest Times to the Rise of Assyria • Znade A. Ragozin
... have been abolished, and the new road is going to be made—where the old neighbourhood has been tumbled down, and the new one is not half built up. We know all about that party on the platform who, with the best intentions, can do nothing for our luggage except pitch it into all sorts of unattainable places. We know all about that short omnibus, in which one is to be doubled up, to the imminent danger of the crown of one's hat; and about that fly, whose leading peculiarity is never to be there when it is wanted. We know, ...
— Speeches: Literary and Social • Charles Dickens
... given his hand to marry me, and she resents it. Not such a great catch, I'm sure, that Dick Hare, even if he had gone on right," continued Afy, somewhat after the example of the fox, looking at the unattainable grapes. "He had no brains to speak of; and what he had were the color of ...
— East Lynne • Mrs. Henry Wood
... and absolute liberty being unattainable, the limits prescribed by right and duty are supposed to be set. But as each person seeks to have as much right and to be burdened with as little duty as possible, the results are endless disputes and legal contentions. The principles of liberty and ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... cutting the blue sky fascinated her. Florence Kingsley's expression "beckoning mountains" returned to Madeline. She could not see or feel so much as that. Her impression was rather that these mountains were aloof, unattainable, that if approached they would recede or vanish like the ...
— The Light of Western Stars • Zane Grey
... sinking toward the water line, the forest along the uneven coast was merging into one vast green shadow, the waters were growing blacker and blacker, and yet the row of canoes continued its wearisome glide toward a seemingly unattainable end. Lady Tennys became so tired and sleepy that her long lashes could not be restrained from caressing her cheeks, nor could her dreamy eyes bear the strain of wakefulness. Hugh, observing her fatigue, persuaded her to turn about in the boat and lie back against his shoulder. Soon she was sleeping ...
— Nedra • George Barr McCutcheon
... the note through as modestly as possible, holding it very close to his nose, as his glasses were unattainable, with an arm of which not more than the wrist appeared. He swallowed in his throat once or twice, and seemed to taste something with his ...
— None Other Gods • Robert Hugh Benson
... sparks which fall into our hearts from the higher regions of Love are first made visible to us in the hours of hopeless pain? And so it is with the doubts that storm the artist's mind. He sees the Ideal and feels how impotent are his efforts to reach it; it will flee before him, he thinks, always unattainable. But then again he is once more animated by a divine courage; he strives and struggles, and his despair is dissolved into a sweet yearning, which both strengthens him and spurs him on to strain after his beloved ...
— Weird Tales. Vol. I • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... married—was, perhaps, rather an exceptional than an average character. I hope, at least, the experience of few has been such as mine was, or that few have felt their sufferings as I felt mine. They nearly shook my mind; relief was so hopeless, redress so unattainable. But, my dear, I do not wish to dishearten; I only wish to warn you, and to prove that the single should not be too anxious to change their state, as they may change ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... well armed, often daunts the courage of the soldiers. The smugglers, who seek only safety, never engage, when they can possibly avoid it; the military, also, who know, that in these encounters, danger is certain, and glory almost unattainable, are equally reluctant to fight; an engagement, therefore, very seldom happens, but, when it does, it never concludes till after the most desperate and bloody conflict. You are inattentive, Blanche,' added ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe
... dare to yell for negro freedom and then deny me the freedom of speech? I claim to be a man of practical judgment. I do not seek the unattainable. I am not ...
— Children of the Market Place • Edgar Lee Masters
... contrived to effect many important changes. Upon an examination morning, some hundred luckless "jibs" might be seen perambulating the courts, in the vain effort to discover their tutors' chambers, the names having undergone an alteration that left all trace of their original proprietors unattainable: Doctor Francis Mooney having become Doctor Full Moon; Doctor Hare being, by the change of two letters, Doctor Ape; Romney Robinson, Romulus and Remus, etc. While, upon occasions like these, there could be but little doubt of Master Frank's intentions, upon many others, so subtle ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... bronze-trimmed yacht. It pursues them everywhere, swifter than the deer, swifter than the wind that drives before it the storm-cloud. Not even those who are most happy are entirely so. No lot is wholly blest. Perfect happiness is unattainable. Tithonus, with the gift of ever-lasting life, wasted away in undying old age. Achilles, with every charm of youthful strength and gallantry, was doomed to early death. Not even the richest are content. Something is always lacking in the midst of abundance, and ...
— Horace and His Influence • Grant Showerman
... philosophic work "The World, as Will and Idea"—"Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung." Schopenhauer, in this book, laid down the doctrine that the universe, and therefore human life as such, is governed by the conflicting principles of the ungoverned will and of the unattainable ideal. The true solution of life, he held, was to be found in subjecting brute will to the intellectual force of ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson
... long perilous journeys and the faces of strange countries; of the silver way across moonlit seas; of the beckoning voices from the under edges of the desert. It had taken a deeper, a more mysterious tone. It had told of great joys, quite unattainable, and of great griefs too, eternal, and with a sort of nobility by reason of their greatness; and of many unformulated longings beyond the reach of words; but with never a single note of mere complaint. So it had seemed to Durrance that night as he had sat listening ...
— The Four Feathers • A. E. W. Mason
... this foolish world of scandal and jealousy. She had the answer to it all in herself. Whatever Clara Day had done, Ariel was free and unattainable. She could achieve utter forgetfulness of self, she could be born again in this miraculous experience for which she had striven. As Ariel she could ...
— Mummery - A Tale of Three Idealists • Gilbert Cannan
... yet. Each is striving for the sole possession and control of things which belong to neither alone. Each looks upon the other not as a co-labourer but as a rival, instead of making intelligent and united effort for an object unattainable by either alone. If capital would smoke this in his cigar and labour the same in his pipe, the soothing effects might tend to more amicable and effective use of what is ...
— Blue Goose • Frank Lewis Nason
... either side the gleaming pinnacles of the Twin Bears, and he remembered many a time when he had looked up toward them from the crests of lesser mountains—looked up toward them as a man looks to a great and unattainable ideal. ...
— Riders of the Silences • John Frederick
... to Lowell, he invented the forest primeval. Chateaubriand gave the first full utterance to that romantic note which sounds so loudly in Byron's verse; the restless dissatisfaction with life as it is, the longing for something undefined and unattainable, the love for solitude and the desert, the "passion incapable of being converted into action"—in short, the maladie du siecle—since become familiar in "Childe Harold" and in Senancour's "Obermann." In one ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... invited—at least it did not discourage—further inquiry. Mr. Gardner was bored. Amateurs who "occasionally write" were the bane of him who, having a signature of his own in the leading local paper, represented to the aspiring mind the gilded and lofty peaks of the unattainable. However he must play this youth ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... eyes there rose a sudden vision of Alice: Alice no longer unattainable; Alice walking on his arm down the aisle; Alice mending his socks; Alice with her heavenly ...
— The Man with Two Left Feet - and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... humbled and occupied again, and the Phoenician ports and the city of Damascus, impregnable theretofore, were taken and held to tribute—she began to dream of world empire, the first society in history to conceive this unattainable ideal. Certain influences and events, however, would defer awhile any attempt to realize the dream. Changes of dynasty took place, thanks partly to reactionary forces at home and more to the praetorian basis on which the kingdom ...
— The Ancient East • D. G. Hogarth
... which he should travel, but had simultaneously revealed all its obstacles, insurmountable for him solitary and unequipped. In those days his mind was constantly fumbling at some insoluble problem with the sense of frustration that one has who gropes vainly in the dark, well knowing how a single unattainable match-flare would put what he is seeking into his hands. And no brighter prospect seemed to lie before him ...
— Strangers at Lisconnel • Barlow Jane
... the Unattainable; For a glimpse of a brighter day, When hatred and strife, With their legions rife, Shall forever have passed away; When pain shall cease, And the dawn of peace Come down from heaven above, And man can meet his fellow-man In the spirit of ...
— Hesperus - and Other Poems and Lyrics • Charles Sangster
... of this poor girl was mean according to the present standard: was ineffably grand, according to a purer philosophic standard: and only not good for our age because for us it would be unattainable. She read nothing, for she could not read; but she had heard others read parts of the Roman martyrology. She wept in sympathy with the sad Misereres [Footnote: The penitential psalm which, set to music, is one ...
— Journeys Through Bookland - Volume Four • Charles H. Sylvester
... not perceiving that the bankers were tossing him from one to the other like a shuttle-cock; but Constance had already guessed that credit was unattainable. If three bankers refused it, it was very certain that they had inquired of each other about so prominent a man as a deputy-mayor; and there was, consequently, no hope from the Bank ...
— Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau • Honore de Balzac
... are indifferent to environment. As usual, also, there is a real underlying harmony of those two demands. There is, however, here more than this. In this most modern of their embodiments, Socialism and Individualism are not merely harmonious, each is the key to the other, which remains unattainable without it. However carefully we improve our breed, however anxiously we guard the entrance to life, our labour will be in vain if we neglect to adapt the environment to the fine race we are breeding. ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... saw at the window our fortunate extruders, who no doubt congratulated themselves on so many points of the law being in their favour. Here were we stuck on the Queen's high road—tired horses, cooped-up children—and the Three Cocks as unattainable as the Philosopher's stone. The sympathizing landlord consoled us in our disappointment as well as he could. The postilion jumped into his saddle again, and we pursued our way to the nearest place where there was any likelihood of a reception—namely, the Hay, a village ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various
... be unconquerable, even unattainable, and Caligula, before this mad frenzy had fully seized hold of him, had—in his own brutish way—indulged her in this, allowing her to lead her own life and secretly laughing at the machinations that went on around him to obtain the most coveted ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... has certainly nothing to do with their spawning. Is it presumptuous to suppose that God in His providence has implanted this instinct in Salmon for our good, that we might have a supply of excellent food, which without this would be in a great measure unattainable? Whether this is the true cause, and the only one, I am unable to determine; but this is the effect produced, and in the absence of other reasons it is, in my opinion, one that ought to be admitted. Another reason why fish ascend rivers is their impatience ...
— Essays in Natural History and Agriculture • Thomas Garnett
... it? Not to reward two or three persons yearly for reaching some dizzy peak of art unattainable by ordinary taste and skill, nor to reward one part of the town or one element of its people for gardening better than another, nor to promote the production of individual plants or flowers of extraordinary splendor, nor even ...
— The Amateur Garden • George W. Cable
... and everywhere the shadow of the priest, the mystical, magical dispenser of the favours of heaven! We look to the days when religion shall be purified of such conceptions, when no one shall venture to stand between a man and his conscience, or claim to possess powers unattainable by other men, or pretend that the favour of heaven can be purchased by any other means than those indicated by the prophet of old and no less by the conscience of mankind—a life in accordance with ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... she found in abundance. She ate and rested, for she had no objective as yet. Her freedom was too new to be spoiled by plannings for the future. The haunts of civilized man seemed to her now as vague and unattainable as the half-forgotten substance of a dream. If she could but live on here in peace, waiting, waiting for—him. It was the old hope revived. She knew that he would come some day, if he lived. She had always known that, though recently she had believed that he would come too late. If he ...
— Tarzan the Terrible • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... men trust in him so much as the story of those last days. If that story were taken from the pages of the Bible, what would Christ be to us? Only a great teacher whose morality was high and wonderful, though to us unattainable; but with this record added, he becomes a Savior and makes his righteousness attainable by us all. Had he not suffered, he could not have brought us to God. How much poorer we should be today without the story of Gethsemane and Calvary, without knowing that "it ...
— Heart Talks • Charles Wesley Naylor
... place during the summer of 1873, and he condemned the folly of the anarchists, who had refused to cooeperate with the other revolutionary forces in Spain. In his opinion, the workers were simply wasting their energy and lives in pursuit of a distant and unattainable end. "Spain is a country so backward industrially," he wrote, "that it cannot be a question there of the immediate complete emancipation of the workers. Before arriving at that stage, Spain will ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter
... the book that he had at the moment in mind and to repeat these paragraphs between the various chores or between the wood-chopping until every page was committed by heart. Paper was scarce and dear and for the boy unattainable. He used for his copying bits of board shaved smooth with his jack-knife. This material had the advantage that when the task of one day had been mastered, a little labour with the jack-knife prepared ...
— Abraham Lincoln • George Haven Putnam
... from the garden puts an end to this transient riot of the heart. With her departs the amorous illusion that had shed a temporary charm over the scene of his captivity, and he relapses into loneliness, now rendered tenfold more intolerable by this passing beam of unattainable beauty. Through the long and weary day he repines at his unhappy lot, and when evening approaches, and Phoebus, as he beautifully expresses it, had "bade farewell to every leaf and flower," he still lingers at the window, and, laying his head upon the cold stone, gives vent to a mingled flow of ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving
... soothes and interests the man she loves? Will she not cast aside a sentiment when it no longer responds to some vision of infinitude which she grasps and contemplates in her soul? Who can scale the heights to which her eyes have risen? Yes, a man fears to find in such a woman something unattainable, unpossessable, unconquerable. The woman of strong mind should remain a symbol; as a reality she must be feared. Camille Maupin is in some ways the living image of Schiller's Isis, seated in the darkness of the temple, at whose feet ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... in her opinion that honour compelled her to meet him. Probably the very longing to avoid him lent additional weight to the conviction; for she was markedly one of those who sigh for the unattainable—to whom, superlatively, a hope is pleasing because not a possession. And she knew it so well that her intellect was inclined to exaggerate this defect ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy |
