"Unfathomable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... at her, and a pair of violet eyes met his glance through her mask, deep, almost unfathomable eyes, difficult to read and filled with the light that lures men on to strange and wonderful things. Her auburn hair had brown and darker shadows in it, the color one may see in a distant wood in late autumn when the sun touches it; her transparent skin was delicately tinted, such a tint as may be ...
— The Light That Lures • Percy Brebner
... him in still greater astonishment, opening her eyes slowly until they seemed like two pellucid lakelets of unfathomable depth into which March felt inclined to fling himself, clothes and all, and be drowned comfortably. She then looked at the fire, then at March again. It was evident that she had not been accustomed to hold intercourse with jocular minds. Perceiving this, March ...
— The Wild Man of the West - A Tale of the Rocky Mountains • R.M. Ballantyne
... less," said Mrs. Mallowe with an unfathomable smile. "But be sure he understands that ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... I loved Gladys Todd, and I did not have to stamp the floor to prove it. I was sure that I had lost her, and it was the sense of my loss that made my love well up from unfathomable depths to overwhelm me. I was angry. My pride was hurt. I counted over the years of my untiring devotion to her, and they seemed to sum up the best years of my life. That the telegram foreran a more explicit statement ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd
... big, bluff Captain himself, with his unfathomable sea-craft and his autocratic power, a regular old Viking such as you might read of in your history books, but would hardly expect to meet with in the flesh? And was there not a real Italian Count, elderly but impressive, who had dealings with no one but his valet, the ...
— A Bookful of Girls • Anna Fuller
... catherine wheels, but there are certain requests which one has not the option of refusing. Tommy crept nearer, and put his lips to the round face out of which the eyes shone. Oh! it was so downy and warm, so soft, so indescribably soft. Tommy's lips sank into it, and couldn't get to the bottom. It was unfathomable feathers and fluffiness. ...
— The Brownies and Other Tales • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... candles or saying why he had entered. The most solemn mystery in the world continued its course. Evening passed, night came, and the feeling of suspense and softening of heart in the presence of the unfathomable did not lessen ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... Distinction, not separation, is the mark of personality; but it is separation, not distinction, that forbids union. The error, according to the mystic's psychology, is in regarding consciousness of self as the measure of personality. The depths of personality are unfathomable, as Heraclitus already knew;[48] the light of consciousness only plays on the surface of the waters. Jean Paul Richter is a true exponent of this characteristic doctrine when he says, "We attribute far too small dimensions to the rich empire ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... Eliot's daughter Mary, who while skating over one of the so-called "sink-holes," then existing about the city, broke the ice, fell in, and the body was never recovered. These sink holes were generally supposed to be unfathomable. ...
— Memories and Anecdotes • Kate Sanborn
... thought, showed a trace of cruelty—or was it only firmness? The teeth were good. If he stood up her own eyes would have to angle upward a trifle to look into his and if hers were brown the Ramblin' Kid's were positively black—yes, she would say, a brutal, unfathomable black, penetrating and hard. His cheeks were smooth and almost sallow they were so dark, and she could tell there was not an ounce of flesh save tough sinewy muscle on his body. He was fully dressed except for the white weather-beaten Stetson lying beside the saddle and the chaps ...
— The Ramblin' Kid • Earl Wayland Bowman
... joined you. I pity the poor women. No one can properly repair such a deficiency; but rather than such a chasm should be left utterly unfathomable, I, even I, the most awkward of attendants and deplorable of danglers, would have been of your forlorn hope, on this expedition. Nothing but business, and the notion of my being utterly superfluous in so numerous a party, would have induced me ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron
... the Crustaceans—the crabs, lobsters, prawns, &c.—is different, it is not because one feels them to be less intelligent than fishes, but because their intelligence is altogether a mysterious, unfathomable, unmeasurable quantity. There's no saying what they don't know. There is no telling how much they can see. And the great puzzle is what they can be thinking of. For that the spiny lobsters are thinking, and "thinking very seriously about something," ...
— Brothers of Pity and Other Tales of Beasts and Men • Juliana Horatia Gatty Ewing
... look into those wise unfathomable eyes. Standing close to her, she seemed somewhat older than he had guessed her to be, although her face was unlined. Probably it was her remarkable poise, her air of power and security—and those eyes! What had not ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... departure; but I had not. It was impossible for me to accept a truth with that amount of evidence which satisfied her mind, and I doubted, at times, a future existence. But I do not doubt it now. I have had proof,—abundant proof; and, O, the joy that fills my soul is unfathomable. ...
— Town and Country, or, Life at Home and Abroad • John S. Adams
... it was all imagination—and he did not see that thing lurking in the depths of his sister-in-law's cold, unfathomable eyes that he thought he did. And yet her testimony against Rebecca Nurse, reads to us, even at this late day, with all the charity that we are disposed to exercise towards things so long past, ...
— Dulcibel - A Tale of Old Salem • Henry Peterson
... who look upon psychology as "blue-sky" theorizing or "new thought." There are others who have a hazy idea that it is a sort of unfathomable mystery intended to amuse long-haired scientists. The truth is that every one of these same business men, if he is getting ahead, is unconsciously using psychological principles to the profit of his own business every ...
— Initiative Psychic Energy • Warren Hilton
... smile lighted up the thin wan face, full of unfathomable thoughts; and he replied, again half ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... were once paddled, and the lonely seclusion of the lake is said to have made it the theme of many an Indian story. Only one legend now survives. The lake has always been, and is now, well stocked with fish, and it is in places so deep that the Indians thought it unfathomable. With a curious kind of veneration they believed that the Great Spirit brought the fish that swarm in its waters, and kept them under his special care. Even when the whites came upon the scene the red men clung to their superstition, and would not ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, November, 1878 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... learned much; they have thrown much light on the dark mysteries of revelation; yet what they know is only as a drop in the boundless ocean of God's unfathomable being. With all the vast knowledge of God which they have acquired, they are still constrained to cry out with St. Paul: "Oh, the depth of the riches of the wisdom and of the knowledge of God! How incomprehensible are His judgments, ...
— The Happiness of Heaven - By a Father of the Society of Jesus • F. J. Boudreaux
... history of such periods is written in bank books and cheque counterfoils and burnt to save individual reputations; it sneaks along under a thousand pretences, it finds its molelike food and safety in the dirt; its outer forms remain for posterity, a huge debris of unfathomable riddles." ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... miscall our life is Memory: We walk upon a narrow path between Two gulfs—what is to be, and what has been, Led by a guide whose name is Destiny; Beyond is sightless gloom and mystery, From whose unfathomable depths we glean Chaotic hopes and terrors, dimly-seen Reflections of a ...
— The Writer, Volume VI, April 1892. - A Monthly Magazine to Interest and Help All Literary Workers • Various
... of graceful adjustment. The head, however much it may contain of the actual look of Sophocles, must be idealized. To appreciate it properly one must remember that this poet, though he dealt with tragic themes, was not wont to brood over the sin and sorrow and unfathomable mystery of the world, but was serene in his temper and ...
— A History Of Greek Art • F. B. Tarbell
... of observing the subtle grace with which she moved, and the half-light left unrevealed the lustrous purity of her complexion, the radiant red and white which only the warm damp of the western seaboard can give or preserve. Her eyes he had seen even in the church, but now first he realized what unfathomable gentleness and what a wonder of frank innocence were in them. The Canon looked round the table at his children, and there was a humorous twinkle in his eye when he turned to Hyacinth ...
— Hyacinth - 1906 • George A. Birmingham
... incalculable elements in his character could be controlled, place and fame were probably before him. Compared with him, the priest realised profoundly his own meaner, obscurer destiny. The humble servant of a heavenly patria, of an unfathomable truth, is no match for these intellectual soldiers of fortune. He does not judge them; he often feels towards them a strange forbearance. But he would ...
— Eleanor • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... glance of unfathomable scorn. And when I thought of all the sufferings I had gone through that term owing to her repulsive son and, indirectly, for her sake, I felt that the time ...
— The Little Nugget • P.G. Wodehouse
... 175, wherein the scribe Ani is made to converse with Thoth and Temu in the Tuat, or Other World. Ani, who is supposed to have recently arrived there, says: "What manner of country is this to which I have come? There is no water in it. There is no air. It is depth unfathomable, it is black as the blackest night, and men wander helplessly therein. In it a man may not live in quietness of heart; nor may the affections be gratified therein." After a short address to Osiris, the deceased ...
— The Literature of the Ancient Egyptians • E. A. Wallis Budge
... like wood. The grain stood out in knee-high ridges in all directions to the limit of visibility. It was like a nightmare picture of a frozen bad-lands, split here and there by six-feet-broad, unfathomable chasms—which were ...
— The Raid on the Termites • Paul Ernst
... God; since we learn Soul only as we learn God, by spiritualization. As the five senses take no cognizance of Soul, so they take no cognizance of God. Whatever cannot be taken in by mortal mind—by human reflection, reason, or belief—must be the unfathomable Mind, which "eye hath not seen, nor ear heard." Soul stands in this relation to every hypothesis as to its ...
— Unity of Good • Mary Baker Eddy
... on the cross, the work accomplished there, is so fully known to them, that they do not need any more instruction on it. They tell us that they search for deeper things. There can be nothing deeper than the death of God's Son on the cross. Depths are here which are unfathomable. We must ever turn back to the cross. Always we shall learn something new. With unspeakable Glory upon us and greater glory before us in eternal ages to come, the cross of Christ and the Lamb of God ...
— The Work Of Christ - Past, Present and Future • A. C. Gaebelein
... of a strong nature, would have liked to be the protectress of a weak man; but, as a result of living in the capital, the capital had altered her superficially. Parisian polish became rust on this coarsely tempered soul. Gifted with a cunning which had become unfathomable, as it always does in those whose celibacy is genuine, with the originality and sharpness with which she clothed her ideas, in any other position she would have been formidable. Full of spite, she was capable of bringing discord into the ...
— Cousin Betty • Honore de Balzac
... moment we looked at one another, mute, as though deep down in the unfathomable darkness below the surface and present reality of things dumb meanings strove to be. She made to speak ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... animals when they hear a cry. Halliday hung motionless, an almost imbecile smile flickering palely on his face. The girl only stared at him with a black look in which flared an unfathomable hell of knowledge, and a certain impotence. She was limited ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... corner, a barber would be bending over a half-shaven skull. Everywhere children of every shade from yellow to deep umber would be playing solemnly about the ways, turning upon the passing stranger their grave, unfathomable eyes. ...
— Apologia Diffidentis • W. Compton Leith
... gentle current of air or tide, which was imperceptible to us, drifted the yacht into the bay again; but, beyond the inconvenience of being land-locked, no danger threatened us; for the coast in the neighbourhood of Kongsbacka is bold, and the water unfathomable within a few feet of the rocks. The bay itself, not enlivened by a house, or sign of human habitation anywhere, was grand, surrounded on three sides by rocky mountains, and studded here and there with islands, perfectly white from the multitude of gulls ...
— A Yacht Voyage to Norway, Denmark, and Sweden - 2nd edition • W. A. Ross
... our research in the unfathomable waters." "Impenetrable veil covering our knowledge of the cetacea." "A field strewn with thorns." "All these incomplete indications but serve to ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... places experienced considerable difficulty, and ran no little risk, in passing along the faces of cliffs, where the precipices ascended hundreds of feet upwards like walls, on the one hand, and descended sheer down into an unfathomable abyss, on the other. But the exceeding grandeur of the scenery amply repaid their toils, and the deep roar of that mighty cataract ever sounded in their ears. At length they reached the head of the valley, and stood under the spray of the fall, which, ...
— The Golden Dream - Adventures in the Far West • R.M. Ballantyne
... supper; and after that, for the first time in her life, Joan was present when a man had the presumption to speak to his Maker direct from his own heart, without the mediation of a book. This she found odder than all the rest; she had never even heard of such a thing! So peculiar, so unfathomable were his utterances, that it never occurred to her the man might be meaning something; farther from her still was the thought, that perhaps God liked to hear him, was listening to him and understanding ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... Hebrew, fiercely, "the contamination would be mine. Things of yesterday, as thy Prophet and thy creed are, thou canst not sound the unfathomable loathing which each heart faithful to the Ancient of Days feels for ...
— Leila or, The Siege of Granada, Book V. • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... with the hunted look in her eyes had developed into an amazingly attractive young woman. Her fair skin had taken on a dazzling whiteness; her hair was richer and more luxuriant than of yore; but it was her eyes in which the chief alteration had occurred. These now held an unfathomable depth of tenderness, together with a roguish fear that the former alluring quality might be discovered. If her figure were not as unduly stout as the skinny virgins of Melkbridge declared it to be, there was no denying the rude health apparent in ...
— Sparrows - The Story of an Unprotected Girl • Horace W. C. Newte
... in the human heart that must ever remain unfathomable, and it is not for us to judge one another when we are confronted by them, and can find no clue to ...
— Penshurst Castle - In the Days of Sir Philip Sidney • Emma Marshall
... a hint of tenderness?—renewed her failing strength. She commanded herself and raised her head. She scarcely recognised in the steady, square-chinned man before her the impulsive, round-faced boy she had left. There was something unfathomable about him, a hint of greatness ...
— The Way of an Eagle • Ethel M. Dell
... under this series of somewhat peremptory questions. He replied very placidly, "I am afraid I have but a superficial outside acquaintance with the secrets, the unfathomable mysteries, of music. I can no more conceive of the working conditions of the ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... sweetheart, and afterward myself. Presently come dawn and death; and my heart, according to the ancient custom of Poictesme, is crying, 'Oy Dieus! Oy Dieus, de l'alba tantost ve!' But for all that, my mouth will resolutely discourse of the last Parisian flounces, or of your unfathomable eyes, or of Monsieur de Voltaire's new tragedy of Oreste,—or, in fine, of any topic you ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell
... the west of this proud summit, below it in a very extraordinary hollow, is a circular lake of two acres, reported to be unfathomable. The descriptions which I have read of the craters of exhausted volcanoes leave very little doubt of this being one; and the conical regularity of the summit of Galtymore speaks the same language. East of this respectable hill, to use Sir William Hamilton's language, ...
— A Tour in Ireland - 1776-1779 • Arthur Young
... quickened sufficiently to suggest a ruse. Peter Boyelen, a new patrolman and one unknown to the fisher-folk, happened to arrive in Benicia, and we took him into our plan. We were as secret as possible about it, but in some unfathomable way the friends ashore got word to the beleaguered Italians to keep their ...
— Tales of the Fish Patrol • Jack London
... been a proud family. From time immemorial we have held ourselves aloof from whatever could be thought to stain our honor or impeach our good name. I cannot drag the unfathomable disgrace of all these crimes into a record so pure as that of the Roche-Guyon race. Though I had wished to bestow upon my wife a name and position of which she could be proud, I must content myself with merely giving ...
— The Forsaken Inn - A Novel • Anna Katharine Green
... her hand and his eyes were as unfathomable as a midnight sky. She turned to her horse and he helped her to the saddle with a ...
— The Untamed • Max Brand
... a ledge beneath which the sheer cliff dropped away into unfathomable snowy depths. After short excursions to right and left I discovered that a section of the cliff had split off and dropped into the canyon, leaving only sheer rock walls that offered nothing in the way of footholds. Irresolutely, I faced back the way I had come. Overhead the wind roared ...
— A Mountain Boyhood • Joe Mills
... of the origin of this calamity. They were a distracted group indeed! There were a thousand things to do, and frantically they were giving orders, struggling to cope with conditions so suddenly unprecedented. A great city, millions of people, plunged into conditions unfathomable. And every moment growing worse. One calamity bringing another, in the city, with its myriad diverse activities so interwoven. Around Alten the clattering, terrifying reports were surging. He sat there nearly all that ...
— Astounding Stories, April, 1931 • Various
... handed down for millions of years, perhaps, with little change. It was the sole remaining thread of the ancient woof of a dawning culture which had been woven when Caprona was a fiery mount upon a great land-mass teeming with life. It linked the unfathomable then to the eternal now. And yet it may have been pure coincidence; my better judgment tells me that it is coincidence that in Caspak the term for speechless man is Alus, and in the outer world of our own day ...
— The Land That Time Forgot • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... go her eyes thanked him with an unfathomable glance. He was again conscious of that esoteric disturbance in his temples. Puzzled, hazily analyzing the sensation, he followed ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance
... look out at the great mass of the British Museum frowning beyond the little dingy strip of garden, with a sick longing in her heart for the Murewell cornfield, the wood-path, the village, the free air-bathed spaces of heath and common. Oh! this huge London, with its unfathomable poverty and its heartless wealth—how it oppressed and bewildered her! Its mere grime and squalor, its murky poisoned atmosphere, were a perpetual trial to the countrywoman brought up amid the dash of mountain streams and the scents of mountain ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... And she did not know quite what to do with them all. She had never, in the quiet, dreamy days of her youth, pictured a life with any of these men in it, and the future was suddenly tremendous, unfathomable. There were vast possibilities in it of misery, of danger, of difficulty; and behind these a vague, new feeling of a possible happiness far exceeding the happiness ...
— The Grey Lady • Henry Seton Merriman
... wanted to see him. He requested that the man be shown into his study. In due course the visitor arrived. He was a man somewhere in the neighbourhood of sixty, but, save for a slight greying of the hair about his temples, he showed little outward signs of his age. His eyes, which were of a deep, unfathomable black, were very alert and followed Mr. Bryce's every movement with a glittering serenity, if one can use the expression, ...
— The Lost Valley • J. M. Walsh
... differed as to his good looks. Some women proclaimed him as adorable, rather Sphynx-like, you know, but quite fascinating with his well-marked eye-brows, his dark and curly lashes, the rich warm tints of his complexion, the unfathomable grey eyes and short upper lip with the down of adolescence upon it. Other women without assigning any reason admitted he did not produce any effect on their sensibility—they disliked law students, they said, even if they were of a literary turn; they also disliked curates and ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... things unseeing,—from Stars, that did not shine, to Earth, that did not perceive,—the change, I say, of that blind vibration into the glory of the Sun and Moon for human eyes: so making possible the communication out of the unfathomable truth of that portion of truth which is good for us, and animating to us, and is set to rule over the day and over the night of our joy ...
— The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century - Two Lectures delivered at the London Institution February - 4th and 11th, 1884 • John Ruskin
... are recognized by the evident absence of life self-supported and independent of the producer; as, on the contrary, where this acts, Art imparts to its work, together with the utmost clearness to the understanding, that unfathomable reality wherein it resembles ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... of song goes deep. Who is there that, in logical words, can express the effect music has on us? A kind of inarticulate, unfathomable speech, which leads to the edge of the infinite, and lets us for ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... women are so religiously inclined by nature that they will have some object of worship, and while their husbands, fathers and sons are talking and praying about the celestial hierarchies, and the unfathomable mysteries, the wives, mothers and daughters will throng the "zeyarehs," or holy visiting shrines, on the hill tops, and among the groves of green trees, to propitiate the favor of the reputed saints of ancient days. These shrines are ...
— The Women of the Arabs • Henry Harris Jessup
... reader this may seem mere theory; he may feel that it cannot explain all the seemingly unfathomable mystery of suffering in the lives of many of the redeemed, the real children of God. Let the reader consider two things: first, that as a juror, he would not form a judgment till all the evidence had ...
— God's Plan with Men • T. T. (Thomas Theodore) Martin
... overhead; the little circle of light within which I stood, seemed like a magician's ring, sacred and safe from evil spirits that filled the air around. It was as the speck of Time amid the ocean of Eternity — as Hope, bright and solitary in the midst of unfathomable darkness. There I felt safe and secure — but without — who might tell what spirits roamed abroad, melancholy and malignant? Peering into that dark boundary of forest, the eye vainly endeavoured to pierce the gloom. Fancy peopled its confines with flitting ...
— The Bushman - Life in a New Country • Edward Wilson Landor
... know as little of this silent, gloomy human force as geographers know of the archipelagoes of the Antarctic. The philosopher begins with pure reason and expands it; the student delves into the records of other students; in unfathomable depths below both are the myriads who eat, drink, sleep and seek their prey as their primitive parents once did when they disputed carcasses with ...
— On the Vice of Novel Reading. - Being a brief in appeal, pointing out errors of the lower tribunal. • Young E. Allison
... could see nothing at all. There was but an unfathomable gulf beyond the glass. He stood up on the couch, and drawing the curtains behind his head to shut out the light, he once more stared out. Then he ...
— Dawn of All • Robert Hugh Benson
... by unknown multitudes of properties, and not solely by a few determinate ones—which are parted off from one another by an unfathomable chasm, instead of a mere ordinary ditch with a visible bottom—are the only classes which, by the Aristotelian logicians, were considered as genera or species. Differences which extended only to a certain property or properties, and there terminated, they considered as differences only in the ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... are swept by the greater viewpoint. Awed by the mysteries of nature, we realize how very small and unimportant we are in the vast scheme of things. We envisage the infinite reaches of astronomical space overhead. Realms of largeness unfathomable. And at our feet, everywhere, are myriad entrances into the infinitely small. With ourselves in between—with our fatuous human consciousness that we are of ...
— Astounding Stories, March, 1931 • Various
... those days, where I was always made welcome. The servants were all very kind to me: as I recall it now, they seemed to have pity for me, because I was the only child perhaps. I was very happy, that is certain, and I enjoyed my childish amusements as heartily as if there were no unfathomable mysteries or perplexities or ...
— An Arrow in a Sunbeam - and Other Tales • Various
... sorts of impedimenta. The tugboat moored itself to us fore and aft, and proceeded to think about discharging. Perhaps twenty men in accurate replica of those in the small boats had charge of the job. They had their own methods. After a long interval devoted strictly to nothing, some unfathomable impulse would incite one or two or three of the natives to tackle a trunk. At it they tugged and heaved and pushed in the manner of ants making off with a particularly large fly or other treasure trove, ...
— African Camp Fires • Stewart Edward White
... beyond all!—that flings itself at your feet, and cries, Love me, Arthur! Your heart beats no quicker at the kneeling appeal of my love!—your proud eye is dimmed by no tear of sympathy!—you accept my soul's treasure as though 'twere dross! not the pearls from the unfathomable deeps of affection! not the diamonds from the caverns of the heart. You treat me like a slave, and bid me bow to my master! Is this the guerdon of a free maiden—is this the price of a life's passion? Ah me! when was it otherwise? when did love meet with ...
— The History of Pendennis, Vol. 2 - His Fortunes and Misfortunes, His Friends and His Greatest Enemy • William Makepeace Thackeray
... to Central Park, or impart to him a test for the destinations of trolley lines—yet Thorpe's new friends were profoundly impressed with his knowledge of occult things. The forest was to them, as to most, more or less of a mystery, unfathomable except to the favored of genius. A man who could interpret it, even a little, into the speech of everyday comfort and expediency possessed a strong claim to their imaginations. When he had finished ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White
... to that end, which he asked himself, remained unanswered, and for this reason he was desirous of seeing whether the essence might not perhaps enable others to grasp the real nature of that which until then had been unfathomable by man. ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... truths, or truth-powers,—not of notions and conceptions, the manufacture of the understanding,—is therefore 'simplex et nuda', that is, immediate; like the clear blue heaven of Italy, deep and transparent, an ocean unfathomable in its depth, and yet ground all the way. Still as meditation soars upwards, it meets the arched firmament with all its suspended lamps of light. O, let not the 'simplex et nuda' of Gregory be perverted to the Socinian, 'plain and easy for the meanest understandings!' The truth in Christ, ...
— The Literary Remains Of Samuel Taylor Coleridge • Edited By Henry Nelson Coleridge
... the borders of sleep, The unfathomable deep Forest where all must lose Their way, however straight, Or winding, soon or late; They ...
— Poems • Edward Thomas
... unfathomable infinity of space, Owen wondered what manner of Being or Power it was that had originated and sustained all this? Considered as an explanation of the existence of the universe, the orthodox Christian religion was too absurd to merit a second thought. But then, every other conceivable hypothesis ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell
... on in the morning to Manusbul, a small lake connected with the river by a canal. This lake is about three miles long and one mile wide, it is very deep in the middle, and said by the natives to be unfathomable. In one of the Hindoo Legends we are told a story of a holy man who spent all his life endeavouring to make a rope long enough to reach to the bottom, and failing, at length threw himself in and was never seen again. My boatman to give me an idea of its depth, dropped in white ...
— Three Months of My Life • J. F. Foster
... Nowell who this man was. That powerful face, with its unfathomable eyes and thoughtful mouth, was not the countenance she had conjured up from the depths of her imagination when Gilbert Fenton had described his friend; yet she felt that this stranger lounging in the window was John Saltram, and no other. He rose, and set down his gun very quietly, and stood ...
— Fenton's Quest • M. E. Braddon
... young gentleman in a very vermilion uniform, flourishing a sabre; and one of a literary character with a high forehead, a pen and ink, six books, and a curtain. There was, moreover, a touching representation of a young lady reading a manuscript in an unfathomable forest, and a charming whole length of a large-headed little boy, sitting on a stool with his legs fore-shortened to the size of salt-spoons. Besides these works of art, there were a great many ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens
... greater tempests in other parts of the Ocean, and Germany was unsurpassed for its convulsions of the elements, yet this disaster was worse than those for the novelty and magnitude of its dangers —the surrounding shores being inhabited by enemies, and the sea so boundless and unfathomable that it was taken to be without a shore, and the last in the world": whence we way infer that the ships had got well out into the Atlantic, which must have presented to the eyes of the Romans pretty much the same appearance that it presented to Bracciolini's contemporaries, ...
— Tacitus and Bracciolini - The Annals Forged in the XVth Century • John Wilson Ross
... ambiguity runs through him in everything. Burke has found an admirable word for it in the Persian tongue, for which we have no translation, but it means an intricacy involved so deep as to be nearly unfathomable—an artificial entanglement." ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madam D'Arblay Volume 2 • Madame D'Arblay
... the Fore-hand, Right About" "Right Pass, Shoulder Out" "Serpentine" "Order Lance" "Trail Lance" "Right Front Thrust" (for the front rank of the Queen's Greys carry lances); dreams of riding wild mad horses to unfathomable precipices and at ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... most bounteous, the richest and finest wheat in all the world. Strange and unfathomable that so much of the bread of man, the staff of life, the hope of civilization in this tragic year 1917, should come from a vast, treeless, waterless, ...
— The Desert of Wheat • Zane Grey
... eight weeks after the sale. Six or eight weeks more then pass in demanding explanations, and six or eight more obtaining them, and after that just as many more as Chinese slimness can arrange for before a settlement is finally made. "Cash," the drover repeated insinuatingly at the Maluka's unfathomable "Yes ?" Then, certain that he ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn
... pensive mood this evening. She sat in the verandah, looking dreamily at the lake, and at Fairfield yonder, a broad green slope, silvered with moonlight, and seeming to stretch far away into unfathomable distance. ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... reject at once all attempt to penetrate an unfathomable obscurity for an idle object. I do not pause to inquire whether, after the destruction of Babel, Javan was the first settler in Attica, nor is it reserved for my labours to decide the solemn controversy whether Ogyges was the contemporary ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... She pushed her gray hair back from her temples, and struggled with the sickness of heart, the dreadful faintness of terror, which would have overpowered a younger or a less resolute woman. Her eyes, dim with watching, weary with grief, searched the lawyer's unfathomable face. "His unhappy daughters?" she repeated to herself, vacantly. "He talks as if there was some worse calamity than the calamity which has made them orphans." She paused once more; and rallied her sinking ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... palely at intervals. There was no wind. Far on the southern horizon the muttering thunder became heavier and more distinct. From where he sat he could now watch the passage of the great mortar shells through the sky, looking like swiftly moving comets cleaving unfathomable space; then, falling, faster and faster, dropping out of the heights of night, they seemed to leave behind them tracks of fire that lingered on the dazzled retina long after they had disappeared. The explosion of the incendiary shells ...
— Ailsa Paige • Robert W. Chambers
... new beauty, new spiritual power. Do you think I only half understand you, or only half love you? I want to sit close in your heart, warmed by its glow. It is the irresistible power of truth that has drawn me to you. My whole life will not be long enough for me to sound the unfathomable depths of your soul. ...
— Three Comedies • Bjornstjerne M. Bjornson
... a use for that hand presently, and, having sighed, lifted it to press it upon his brow, but did not complete the gesture. As his hand came within the scope of his gaze, levelled on the unfathomable distance, he observed that the fingers held a sheet of printed paper; and he remembered Florence. Instead of pressing his brow he unfolded the journal she had thrust upon him. As he began to read, his eye was lustreless, his ...
— Gentle Julia • Booth Tarkington
... from the depths of the Incredible such a colossal manifestation of human folly as that man did. But it may be that I am under-estimating the alacrity of human folly in rising to the bait. No doubt I am. The greed of that absurd monster is incalculable, unfathomable, inconceivable. The career of de Barral demonstrates that it will rise to a naked hook. He didn't lure it with a fairy-tale. He hadn't enough ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... the bottom creep, Nor longer dares the crooked dolphin leap; Gasping for breath, the unshapen phocae die, 310 And on the boiling wave extended lie. Nereus, and Doris with her virgin train, Seek out the last recesses of the main; Beneath unfathomable depths they faint, And secret in their gloomy regions pant, Stern Neptune thrice above the waves upheld His face, and thrice was by the flames repelled. The Earth at length, on every side embraced With scalding seas, that floated round her waist, ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... town and river were steeped in its thick, gray damp; but overhead, the sun-touched smoke-clouds opened like a cleft ocean,—shifting, rolling seas of crimson mist, waves of billowy silver veined with blood-scarlet, inner depths unfathomable of glancing light. Wolfe's artist-eye grew drunk with color. The gates of that other world! Fading, flashing before him now! What, in that world of Beauty, Content, and Right, were the petty laws, the mine and thine, of ...
— Life in the Iron-Mills • Rebecca Harding Davis
... right, O wise Minerva! It is the truth that there are days when my life rings terribly hollow. I am conscious of holes in it, unfathomable depths. Everything disappears that I throw in to fill them up. My noblest artistic enthusiasms are swallowed up in them and die every time in a sigh. At such times I think of marriage. A husband, children, a lot ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... kind is inscrutable for any observer, even for a man who prides himself, as I do, on a certain expertness. It is everywhere unfathomable; the dark depths in it are darker than in any other mystery; the colors confused ...
— A Prince of Bohemia • Honore de Balzac
... his skull, being the thickest and hardest bone in his body, had withstood the terrible shock to which it had been subjected without damage, though the brain within was, for a time, incapacitated from doing duty. When John rose again to the surface, after a descent into unfathomable water, he floated there in a state of insensibility. Fortunately the wind and tide combined to wash him to the shore, where a higher swell than usual launched him among the coral rocks, and left him there, with only his feet ...
— Gascoyne, The Sandal Wood Trader - A Tale of the Pacific • R. M. Ballantyne
... with tense muscles, held in the wildly racing Blackie to a moderately fast pace; Freneli was alone in the wide world. As far off in the distant sky the stars floated in the limitless space of the unfathomable blue ocean, each by itself in its solitary course, so she felt herself again to be the poor, solitary, forsaken girl in the great turmoil of the universe. When she had left aunt and uncle, when they were dead, she would have no one left on earth; no house for a refuge ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... Mystery unfathomable of Death! Mystery unapproachable of God! Destined it was, from the foundations of the world, that each mystery should make war upon the other: once that the lesser mystery should swallow up for a moment a limbus of the greater; and that woe is ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... apply himself to the task given to him with his usual conscientiousness of duty, and presently acquired a certain manual dexterity in the operation. It was "good fun" to throw the cast-off husks into the mighty unfathomable void before him, and watch them linger with suspended gravity in mid air for a moment—apparently motionless—until they either lost themselves, a mere vanishing black spot in the thin ether, or slid suddenly at a sharp angle into unknown shadow. How deuced odd for him ...
— A Phyllis of the Sierras • Bret Harte
... of the whole ship's company depends on him, and there is the fine tradition, which British captains always live up to, that in case of any accident happening to the ship the captain must be the last man to quit her. Innumerable captains indeed have preferred to go down into the unfathomable depths with their ships sooner than leave them ...
— Round the Wonderful World • G. E. Mitton
... cocks had been crowing and now the first light of the dawn of a new day fell upon the figure of the man who in honor and understanding towered above his fellows. Now, for a moment, on the character of this man the unfathomable plan of God for future ages would seem to have ...
— In the Days of Poor Richard • Irving Bacheller
... far-away world; a cry from another sphere. To those of us who once experienced the still and pitiless cold, a cry terribly suggestive of the horror-charged gloom, of the icy silence as unbroken as that of unfathomable deeps, of the stern and uncompromising individuality of a disturbed ...
— Out of the North • Howard V. Sutherland
... virgin's heart,—this new, unfathomable, and divine emotion! Was it only the ordinary affection of the pulse and the fancy, of the eye to the Beautiful, of the ear to the Eloquent, or did it not justify the notion she herself conceived of it,—that it was born not of the senses, that it was less of earthly and ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... The meridian of some has been the most splendid. Others, and they the greatest number, have fluctuated, and experienced at different periods of their existence a great variety of fortune. At the very moment when some of them seemed plunged in unfathomable abysses of disgrace and disaster, they have suddenly emerged. They have begun a new course and opened a new reckoning; and, even in the depths of their calamity, and on the very ruins of their country, have laid the foundations of a towering and durable ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... one long nightmare of remorse, heightened by fear, until he had met Amalia, and after that it had been one unremitting strife between love and duty—delight in her mind, in her touch, in her every movement, and in his own soul despair unfathomable. Now at last it was to end in public exposure, imprisonment, disgrace. A peculiar apathy of peace seemed to envelop him. There was no longer hope to entice, no further struggle to be waged against the terror of fear, or the joy of ...
— The Eye of Dread • Payne Erskine
... then depends upon a dilemma of his moral character. If he is a mean artist success will make him a society man. If he is a magnanimous artist, success will make him an ordinary man. But only as long as he is unsuccessful will he be an unfathomable and serious artist, like Mr. Crummles. Dickens was always particularly good at expressing thus the treasures that belong to those who do not succeed in this world. There are vast prospects and splendid songs in the point of view of the typically ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton |
