"Unsolved" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... reason the Rebels decided to vaccinate us all. Why they did this has been one of the unsolved problems of my life. It is true that there was small pox in the City, and among the prisoners at Danville; but that any consideration for our safety should have led them to order general inoculation ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... Mercy had dropped to sleep and none of the other girls seemed to have heard the harp at midnight. So there was no talk this time about the Ghost of the Campus. To the other girls at Briarwood, the mystery remained unsolved, and the legend of the marble harp was told again and again to the Infants who came to the school, with the added point that, on the night Ruth Fielding and Helen Cameron had come to the hall, the marble harp was again heard to ...
— Ruth Fielding at Briarwood Hall - or Solving the Campus Mystery • Alice B. Emerson
... up from the table by her bed, and as she did so she fixed her eyes on her husband and looked steadily at him all the time that central was making the connection; she was trying to answer that unsolved problem as to whether or not a mist hung between them. Then ...
— The Happiest Time of Their Lives • Alice Duer Miller
... stories give proof of that wide range of experience which does not so much depend on an extended or varied acquaintance with the world, as upon an intelligent and comprehensive sympathy, which makes each new person with whom one is connected a new illustration of the unsolved problems of life and a new link in the unending ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 7, May, 1858 • Various
... Congresses and Conferences, Treaty Stipulations, Diplomatic Correspondence and other public Acts—in the hope that it may prove useful as a permanent record, and serviceable to those of our communal organisations whose duty it will be to bring the still unsolved aspects of the Jewish Question before ...
— Notes on the Diplomatic History of the Jewish Question • Lucien Wolf
... be observed that these studies of contemporary workers are supplemented with a chapter in which a hurried review is taken of the field of cosmical, of physical, and of biological science, with reference to a few of the problems that are still unsolved. As we have noted the clearing up of mystery after mystery in the past, it may be worth our while in conclusion thus to consider the hordes of mysteries which the investigators of our own age are passing on to their successors. For the unsolved problems of to-day beckon to the ...
— A History of Science, Volume 5(of 5) - Aspects Of Recent Science • Henry Smith Williams
... among these people, he would be fixed there irrevocably and permanently. However, in a very few minutes he decided that to run away was impossible; that it would be cowardly; that great problems lay before him, and that he had no right to leave them unsolved, or at least to refuse to give all his energy and strength to the attempt to solve them. Having come to this determination, he turned and went home, his walk having lasted less than a quarter of an hour. At that moment ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... disclosure. Perhaps in all instances the phraseology we employ, like our manners, is derived from the society we frequent: that which is imbibed from persons of good education bears the stamp of superior discrimination and correctness, contrasted with the rude dialect of the vulgar: but it still remains unsolved, by what means these phantasms, or Ideas, accommodate themselves with the appropriate words to express the ...
— On the Nature of Thought - or, The act of thinking and its connexion with a perspicuous sentence • John Haslam
... and state is hardly to be desired, and the call to political service is quite as urgent, quite as moral, and far more exacting than the perfectly just calls to foreign mission support and to the support of the great philanthropies of the day. Because of the influx of foreign peoples, the unsolved race problem, tardy economic reforms, uncertain justice, political corruption, and official mediocrity, America stands more in need of good citizenship than of generosity, more in need of statesmen than ...
— The Minister and the Boy • Allan Hoben
... strikers would have stood their ground or not is still an unsolved problem, but at that opportune moment the big school bell began to clang, and Miss Willough, the drill mistress, in her blue tunic, entered the gymnasium ready to take her next class. At sight of her, ...
— A Popular Schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... passed, with the problem yet unsolved. They were still much together, for she could not turn him away, and he would not stay away. There was more pleading on his part, and more anger sometimes. It seemed to him absurd that lives should be blighted because of ...
— A Man and a Woman • Stanley Waterloo
... partnership in the matter of their sons' education. And here we are back against the root of all evil, for the reason why this has not been done is that the schools have not yet seriously faced the fact that a liberal education for the average boy is an unsolved problem, for the solution of which they need all the help they can possibly get. Of course this taking of the parent into partnership would be no easy matter. Readers of that wise and humorous tale, "The Lanchester Tradition," will remember the comical failure of the head ...
— The School and the World • Victor Gollancz and David Somervell
... and cheap jewelry, and would spend their last farthing for either, though the question of whence the next meal was to come from might be an unsolved problem. They roam idly about the grounds of the Alhambra, but are not permitted to enter its walls, and no exterior picture of the structure would be true which did not introduce one or more of them in the foreground. Strangers generally ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou
... had a chance to sail along the Cuban coast and discover whether it really was an island, as the natives said, or whether it was the mainland, as he had forced his sailors to swear while on the Cuban voyage when his brain was full of fever. Again he let the problem go unsolved; the object of this fourth voyage was to find the straits leading into the Indian Ocean. Having failed to begin his search from Trinidad by following South America westward, as originally planned, he expected he would come to the straits ...
— Christopher Columbus • Mildred Stapley
... "All dreams of course! ... vague phantoms,— creations of my own imaginative brain,—yet fair enough to fill my heart with speechless longings for ethereal raptures unseen, unknown! Thou hast, methinks, a certain faith in the unsolved mysteries,—but I have none,—for sweet as the promise of a future life may seem, there is no proof that it shall ever be. If one died and rose again from the dead, then might we all believe and hope.. ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... a satisfactory account of certain phenomena which had perplexed all preceding investigators. That mysterious movement by which the pole of the earth sways about among the stars had been long an unsolved enigma, but Newton showed that the moon grasped with its attraction the protuberant mass at the equatorial regions of the earth, and thus tilted the earth's axis in a way that accounted for the phenomenon which had been known but had never been explained for ...
— Great Astronomers • R. S. Ball
... Prussians. The masses suspected that the ministry would welcome a peace with Germany which would mean little more than a cessation of hostilities and which would leave the great problems of the war unsolved. That this opinion was unjust, that, on the contrary, the British Foreign Office was steadily resisting all attempts to end the war on an unsatisfactory basis, Page's correspondence, already quoted, abundantly proves, but this unreasoning ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume I • Burton J. Hendrick
... century, if not the fifth, they, and their disciples of Iona and Scotland, derived their peculiar tonsure, their use of bells, their Eastern mode of keeping the Paschal feast, and other peculiarities, seemingly without the intervention of Rome, is a mystery still unsolved. ...
— The Hermits • Charles Kingsley
... that Wise and Breckinridge thought so too, as regards their opinions; that Mr. Crittenden thought that his views would gain something although he was opposed to both these other men. It is probable that each and all of them thought they were using Douglas, and it is yet an unsolved problem whether he was ...
— Abraham Lincoln, A History, Volume 2 • John George Nicolay and John Hay
... authority as a sort of insanity, or rather they have in most practical affairs, come to be divided into two groups: a small number of men, who know the truth, say, upon a political matter or some financial arrangement, or some unsolved problem; and a vast majority, which accepts without question an always incomplete, a usually quite false, statement of the thing because it has been repeated in the daily press and vulgarized in a ...
— Europe and the Faith - "Sine auctoritate nulla vita" • Hilaire Belloc
... Machiavelli to elucidate. The laugh which had risen from the shrubbery the night before, and the look which Dwight Pollard had given when he heard it, proved that a mystery did exist, and gave me strength to let the boy vanish from my sight with his secret unsolved ...
— The Mill Mystery • Anna Katharine Green
... feet, when a heavy gale prevails. The height of the waves is measured from the trough to the crest, and is of course conjecture, but in a continuous storm which we realized on board the Belgic was certainly some thirty feet. One aspect was to us an unsolved problem: the storm being on our starboard quarter was so nearly aft as to give us some idea of the velocity of the waves, which was clearly much greater than that of the ship's progress, and yet they increased the speed of the Belgic scarcely at all. ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou
... at war with both logic and the facts. So with the question of sex specifically. I have read, literally, hundreds of volumes upon it, and uncountable numbers of pamphlets, handbills and inflammatory wall-cards, and yet it leaves the primary problem unsolved, which is to say, the problem as to what is to be done about the conflict between the celibacy enforced upon millions by civilization and the appetites implanted in all by God. In the main, it counsels yielding ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... the next passed with the mystery still unsolved. Valencia continued to stay at the hotel instead of opening the family town house, probably because she had brought no servants with her from the valley and did not know how long she would remain in the city. She and Manuel called upon the Underwoods to ...
— A Daughter of the Dons - A Story of New Mexico Today • William MacLeod Raine
... forty or fifty children motionless for hours in the prescribed hygienic attitude, and of finding desks exactly adapted to these growing bodies, makes this remedy impracticable, so hunchbacks continue among us. The problem remains unsolved. ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... police-officer would look to find a sixty-minim bottle of prussic acid concealed among the coils of a young girl's hair? And when Leam said in that quiet if desperate manner that it was she who had killed madame, her words made the whole mystery clear and solved the as yet unsolved problem. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XVII, No. 102. June, 1876. • Various
... a dozen long-stemmed flowers from this lovely bush, and then—whether it was because of the sentiment conveyed by the blooms she had gathered, or the effect of the landscape, is a mystery unsolved—her eyes wandered from the garden to the far-off hills. With the richly-laden basket on her arm, she gazed at the blue haze which hung over mountain and forest. Regardless of her pleasant occupation, forgetful that the fragrant flowers in the basket would wither ...
— The Tale of Timber Town • Alfred Grace
... we live and move Outlasts aversion, outlasts love..... Nay, and since death, which wipes out man, Finds him with many an unsolved plan,.... Still gazing on the ever full Eternal mundane spectacle, This world in which we draw our breath In ...
— The Germ - Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art • Various
... of desultory search by the writer, the problem is yet unsolved, though a good Yankee guess may not come very far ...
— Cape Cod and All the Pilgrim Land, June 1922, Volume 6, Number 4 • Various
... going after," he writes to his brother; while to Locker he propounds the problem which always has perplexed the British mind, and still does,—how to make the French fight, if they are unwilling. So long as that question remains unsolved, the British government has to bear the uncertainties, exposure, and expense of a difficult and protracted defensive. "We have done nothing," he says, "and the same prospect appears before us: the French cannot come out, and we ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... makes each of us "indescribably himself." And as for the origin of His unique Person, we have no better explanations to substitute for those of the First Century; the mystery of our Lord's singular personality remains unsolved. ...
— Some Christian Convictions - A Practical Restatement in Terms of Present-Day Thinking • Henry Sloane Coffin
... was not apparent. No course of action seemed to her indubitably right. All she achieved by her thinking was the conviction that, in such a cause, no risk was too great; and that, far from making any rules for herself or others, she would let difficulties accumulate unsolved, situations widen their jaws unsatiated, while she maintained a position of absolute and fearless independence. So she could best ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... we start with S, a situation unsolved, i.e., without any P. P, when found, will be the solution. We explore the situation, and find in it M; i.e., we observe that S is M. Now M recalls our previously acquired knowledge that M is P. Having then before us the two premises, ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth
... course said, in 1914, that she would take up war work. She subscribed most handsomely to the Soldiers' and Sailors' Families' Association, to the Red Cross, to the Prince of Wales's Fund (one of the unsolved war-time mysteries ... what's become of it?), to the Cigarette Fund, the 1914 Christmas Plum Pudding Fund, the Blue Cross, the Purple Cross, the Green Cross funds; to the outstandingly good work at St. Dunstan's and at Petersham—(I am glad she gave a Hundred pounds each to them); and to ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... the former generations—viz. the coming of the great Sacrifice and the offering of the great Propitiation. All the past of Israel pointed onwards to the Cross, and in that Cross its highest word was transcended, its faintest emblems were explained and expressed, its unsolved problems which it had raised in order that they might be felt to be unsolved, were all answered, and that which had been set forth but in shadow and symbol was given to the world in reality for evermore. In Moses Law and ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... important subsequent historical events, describing the work of the first Philippine Commission, and showing in what manner the government established by the second Philippine Commission has discharged its stewardship, subsequently discussing certain as yet unsolved problems which confront the present government, such as that presented by the existence of slavery and peonage, and that of the non-Christian tribes. For the benefit of those who, like Judge Blount, consider the Philippines "a vast straggly archipelago of jungle-covered ...
— The Philippines: Past and Present (vol. 1 of 2) • Dean C. Worcester
... all." Pierre Leroux, an enthusiastic living defender of the idea of repeated births, attempts to reply to the objection drawn from the absence of memory; but his reply is an appeal rather to authority and fancy than to reason, and leaves the doubts unsolved.12 His supposition is that in each spirit life we remember all the bygone lives, both spiritual and earthly, but in each earth life we forget all that has gone before; just as, here, every night we lose in sleep all memory ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... attitude of Christianity might be urged with additional force against Buddhism. It is full of the strong, sweet, pathetic compassion which looks upon life with eyes full of tears, but only to turn them away from it again, as from an unsolved and insoluble riddle." And he substantiates his position by quoting Reville and Oldenberg. Reville reaches this similar conclusion: "Buddhism, born on the domain of polytheism, has fought against it, not by rising above nature in subordinating it to a single ...
— Oriental Religions and Christianity • Frank F. Ellinwood
... such opinions must necessarily be without rational basis, since many of them are concerned with problems admitted by the expert to be still unsolved, while as to the rest it is clear that the training and experience of no average man can qualify him to have any ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... numerous sight-seers who season after season drive from Cairo to the Pyramids, and take pleasure in staring at the Sphinx with all the impertinence common to pigmies when contemplating greatness. But more riddles than that of the Sphinx are lost in the depths of the sandy desert; and more unsolved problems lie in the recesses of the past than even the restless and inquiring spirit of modern times will ever discover;—and if it should ever chance that in days to come, the secret of the movable floor of the Great Pyramid should be found, and ...
— Ziska - The Problem of a Wicked Soul • Marie Corelli
... the side; and in the course of the day several curious persons endeavored to open the main gate, at that time the only entrance. But the gate was barred within, and as the high stockade was slippery with ice, for some days the mystery remained unsolved. The islanders, always slow, grow torpid in the winter like bears; they watched the smoke in the daytime and the little twinkling light by night; they talked of spirits both French and Indian as they went their rounds, but they were too indolent ...
— Castle Nowhere • Constance Fenimore Woolson
... has no right to our secrets, and the Reverend Raymond Rashleigh will go to his grave with his little mystery unsolved. But we will be married again, openly and before the world, and you, Mrs. Ingelow, will be under double obligation, because you will have promised to love, honor ...
— The Unseen Bridgegroom - or, Wedded For a Week • May Agnes Fleming
... occupied the space now laid out as gardens, wondered how River Hall, desolate, tenantless, uninhabited, looked under that sullen sky, with the murky river flowing onward, day and night, day and night, leaving, unheeding, an unsolved mystery on its banks. ...
— The Uninhabited House • Mrs. J. H. Riddell
... hollows disfiguring cheeks otherwise as delicate as the petals of a rose! An interesting, if not absolutely beautiful face, it told me something I could hardly put into words; so that it was like leaving a fascinating but unsolved mystery when I finally turned from it to study the hands, each of which presented a separate problem. That offered by the right wrist you already know—the long white ribbon connecting it with the discharged pistol. But the secret concealed ...
— The Filigree Ball • Anna Katharine Green
... is a singular fact that the scream of the cougar, like the roar of the lion, seems to come from any or every side. It is difficult to tell in what direction the animal is who utters it. Whether this illusion be produced by the terror of the listener is a question yet unsolved. ...
— The Boy Hunters • Captain Mayne Reid
... every prearranged and conscious action of a personal creator." Compare this last statement with the following: "I will, however," says Haeckel,[28] "not deny that Kant's grand cosmogony has some weak points." * * * "A great unsolved difficulty lies in the fact that the cosmological gas theory furnishes no starting-point at all in explanation of the first impulse which caused the rotary motion ...
— Was Man Created? • Henry A. Mott
... any better if we get the others?" Allen asked, just a little exasperated, for he liked mysteries and hated to leave them unsolved. "We can get to them in five minutes ...
— The Outdoor Girls on Pine Island - Or, A Cave and What It Contained • Laura Lee Hope
... generation has arisen untrammelled by tradition, which, having the experience of older countries before it, and benefiting from the advantages of the freer life and the greater opportunities afforded by a new country, gives promise of ultimately finding the solution of the hitherto unsolved problem of making country life as attractive to the masses as that of the towns and cities. As time goes on the effect of education must tell, and the generations that are to come will be more enlightened and more altruistic, and the tendency of the world will be more and more, even as it is now, ...
— An Autobiography • Catherine Helen Spence
... progenitors, which seems to fit it peculiarly for the prosperous occupation of the tropics. Supposing this colored race to have the power of continuing itself through successive generations, a problem which is as yet unsolved, it would seem as if the future of these islands were mainly in its hands. Of pure whites, there are not more than fifteen thousand in Jamaica; of the mixed race, there are said to be seventy thousand. Before the abolition of slavery, their position was one of degradation; ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... family mansion. He makes singular discoveries, all of which bring the book to an end unexpected by everybody, and not satisfactory to the natural yearnings of novel readers. In the traditions that he brought over, there was a key to some family secrets that were still unsolved, and that controlled the descent of estates and titles. His influence upon these matters involves [him] in divers strange and perilous adventures; and at last it turns out that he himself is the rightful heir to the titles and estate, that had passed into another name within the last half-century. ...
— The Ancestral Footstep (fragment) - Outlines of an English Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... would have knocked de Freece off his length or not was a question that was destined to remain unsolved, for in the middle of the other bowler's over Bob hit a single; the batsmen crossed; and Burgess had his leg-stump uprooted while trying a ...
— Mike • P. G. Wodehouse
... minute and apparently insignificant particle of living matter becomes animated by a new and mysterious activity. The germinal vesicle and spot cease to be discernible (their precise fate being one of the yet unsolved problems of embryology), but the yelk becomes circumferentially indented, as if an invisible knife had been drawn round it, and thus appears divided into two hemispheres ...
— On the Relations of Man to the Lower Animals • Thomas H. Huxley
... was interrupted by the sound of the bell ringing for second lesson. The problem was left unsolved. It was evident that the burglar had been interrupted, but how or why nobody knew. The suggestion that he had heard Master R. Robinson training for his quarter-mile, and had thought it was an earthquake, found much ...
— The Pothunters • P. G. Wodehouse
... its value. Why it is a measure only. The trip to the north in charge of the Chief's son. Gruesome tales of the ferocity of the convicts. John still anxious to find some particular cave. His chart. The unsolved mystery of the boat. The clothing of the natives. Bracelets. Glitter to attract natives. Weaving, the only industry. The aptness of native women to adopt fancy articles of dress and ornament. John's scheme, anticipating the wedding of Sutoto and Cinda. A "State affair." The mission ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: Adventures on Strange Islands • Roger Thompson Finlay
... the Nile, recurring as regularly as the revolutions of the heavenly bodies, necessarily remained an unsolved mystery to the ancients, for until the discovery of the tropical regions, with their mountainous lakes and deluging rains, it was impossible to learn the occasion of this increase. It is now known that the Blue Nile, flowing out of the mountainous ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 12 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... of this remarkable emblem has a more important signification than the mere insidious and creeping characteristics of Jesuitism. The lines beneath the curious print in Brandt's Stultifera Nuvis throw no light on the meaning of the Lobster. We think the difficulty yet remains unsolved. ...
— Notes & Queries 1850.01.12 • Various
... in the shape of a godly person, to do hurt: others affirm the contrary, and say that he can and often have so done, of which they give many instances for proof of what they say; which if granted, the case remains yet unsolved, and yet the very hinge upon which that weighty case depends. To which I humbly say: First, That I do lament that such a point should be so needful to be determined, which seems not probable, if possible, to be determined to infallible satisfaction for want of clear Scripture to decide it ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... was the unsolved land question. "We cannot desert the English garrison—the Irish landlords," was the cry. "We cannot trust the Irish people to treat them justly." But the Irish land question is now settled. The Irish landlords are either gone or going. The Irish tenants are ...
— Home Rule - Second Edition • Harold Spender
... deserted house—the dead man on the floor below, the inexplicable clanking of a chain by some unseen THING from the depth of the cellar upward toward them; and, to heighten the effect of these, there were the grim stories of unsolved tragedy and crime. All in all Bridge could not have denied that he was glad of the room at the end of the hall with its suggestion of safety in the door which might be closed against the horrors of the hall and the Stygian ...
— The Oakdale Affair • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... many compliments in all my life! I didn't know that you were a student of sociology—could estimate capabilities and get everyone in their right groove. I should have been conferring with you, for I have an unsolved problem, bigger than any you've mentioned." Adine had ceased her scorning tones; now she was asking for an answer. She motioned Davy ...
— David Lannarck, Midget - An Adventure Story • George S. Harney
... a pupil who was engaged to assist the teacher was unable to solve a problem in algebra. The class was approaching the problem, and he was mortified because, after many trials, he was obliged to take it to the teacher for solution. The teacher returned it unsolved. What could he do? He would not confess to the class that he could not solve it, so, after many futile attempts, he went to a distant town to seek the assistance of a friend who, he believed, could do the work. But, alas! ...
— Architects of Fate - or, Steps to Success and Power • Orison Swett Marden
... under the circumstances it seemed grotesquely unwarranted. However, it was a brief visitation and was gone before he had finished dressing. It left a little trail, the pleased recollection of it and the puzzle of it, which remained unsolved. And, in fact, waking happily in the morning is not usually the result of a drive home from a funeral. No wonder ...
— The Turmoil - A Novel • Booth Tarkington
... sent an address to the governments of all the German states in which it was admitted that numerous eczematous diseases, even those of an epidemic nature, were directly attributable to vaccination and that the origin and cure of smallpox were still unsolved problems. ...
— Nature Cure • Henry Lindlahr
... snort the citizen passed on his way, doubtless adding the outrage, in his mind, to the long list of unsolved London crimes. But retribution awaited the youthful miscreant. The phlegmatic policeman who was regulating the traffic on the single-line system happened to notice the deed. He walked majestically across from the far side of the ...
— The Right Stuff - Some Episodes in the Career of a North Briton • Ian Hay
... nearly half the money that is left, and so I can reckon that tea and groceries, boots and clothes, firing and light, have somehow to be obtained at a cost of no more than seven or eight shillings weekly. But these calculations fail to satisfy me. They leave unsolved the problem of those last seven or eight shillings, on the expenditure of which turns the really vital question which an inquiry like this ought to settle. How do the people make both ends meet? Are the seven shillings ...
— Change in the Village • (AKA George Bourne) George Sturt
... leaving some physiological questions unsolved in my dark Protestant mind, I took occasion to speak to Father Xavier himself about it when I next met him. From him I learned that on the morning in question a party of English left the city on a hunting-excursion on the Campagna. A fox was unearthed after considerable delay, and a sharp run started, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 26, August, 1880 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... didn't have time to attend to it. He had hauled down a chapel monitorship that paid his tuition. He got his board and room from us for being steward, and how he ever got the fancy eats he gave us out of four dollars per week per appetite is an unsolved wonder. He made twenty-five dollars in one week by introducing a new brand of canned beans among the hash clubs. He took orders for bookbinding on Saturdays, and sold advertising programs for the college functions after school hours. More than once I borrowed ten dollars ...
— At Good Old Siwash • George Fitch
... well as hooked; for how large trout are to be killed in a weedy chalk-stream without a stiff rod which will take them down, is a question yet unsolved. Even the merest Cockney will know, if he thinks, that weeds float with their points down-stream; and that therefore if a fish is to be brought through them without entangling, he must be 'combed' through ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... propeller is still to a great extent an unsolved problem. We have no definite rule by which we can fix the most important factor of the whole, namely, the diameter. Mr. Froude has pointed out that by reducing the diameter, and thus the peripheral friction, we can increase the efficiency; and this is ...
— Scientific American Suppl. No. 299 • Various
... threshold, half lost in darkness, half white in starlight. And there I, too, beheld the haunting Luminous Shadow, the spectral effigies of the mysterious being, whose very existence in the flesh was a riddle unsolved by my reason. Distinctly I saw the Shadow, but its light was far paler, its outline far more vague, than when I had beheld it before. I took courage, as I felt Lilian's heart beating against my own. I advanced, I crossed the threshold,—the ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... language and their complex social institutions, and the inability of the Turkish authorities to afford a safe conduct in the remoter districts, combine to render Albania almost unknown to the foreign traveller, and many of its geographical problems still remain unsolved. A portion of the Mirdite region, the Mat district, the neighbourhood of Dibra, Jakova and Ipek and other localities have never been thoroughly explored. The northern boundary of Albania underwent some alteration ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... mistress and young Werner Were each other fondly kissing. Grumbling said he to himself then: "Often have I meditated On great problems hard to settle, Which my cat-heart fully fathomed; But there's one which yet remaineth Quite unsolved, uncomprehended: Why do people kiss each other? Not from hatred, not from hunger, Else they'd bite and eat each other; Neither can it be an aimless Nonsense, for they are in general Wise, and know well what they're doing. Why then is it, I ask vainly, Why do people kiss each other? ...
— The Trumpeter of Saekkingen - A Song from the Upper Rhine. • Joseph Victor von Scheffel
... favoured such a supposition, but she made no difference in her behaviour, and, indeed, several times praised Patty's work during the Latin lesson. The ownership of the book seemed likely to remain an unsolved mystery, one of those unpleasant occurrences which happen sometimes in a school, to the grief of the mistresses and the consternation of all concerned. The only thing which it was possible for Patty to do was to live the affair down, and trust that time and patient waiting ...
— The Nicest Girl in the School - A Story of School Life • Angela Brazil
... years the progress of interpretation was completely arrested. The flowers remained without a champion until 1787, when Sprengel began his investigations, based upon the unsolved mysteries of color and markings of petals, fragrance, nectar, and visiting insects. The prevalent idea of the insect being a mere idle accessory to the flower found no favor with him. He chose to believe that some ...
— My Studio Neighbors • William Hamilton Gibson
... Athens was built, before the Pyramids were conceived, were thinking out this matter in strange parts of Egypt, in forgotten parts of Syria and Asia. For generations their dream has been looked upon as a thing elusive as the philosopher's stone, the transmutation of metals—any of these unsolved problems. For five hundred years—since the days of a Russian scientist who lived on the Black Sea, but whose name, for the moment, I have forgotten—the whole subject has lain dead. It is indeed true that the fairy tales of one generation become the science of the next. ...
— The Double Life Of Mr. Alfred Burton • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... and friends canvassed the subject morning, noon and night, and the longer the mystery remained unsolved the more ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces in Society • Edith Van Dyne
... however, it became clearer and clearer that the displacement-control presented an unsolved, and quite possibly an insoluble, problem. It was mathematically certain that, when the Gunther field went on, the ship would be displaced instantaneously to some location in space having precisely the ...
— The Galaxy Primes • Edward Elmer Smith
... starve on a treasure hoard rather than bestir himself to unbury it. Lack of energy, lack of initiative, lack of opportunity, lack also of guides have made your subjects suffering idlers whose very existence is a curse to themselves and an unsolved problem for others. Charity can not help them—that enervating poison has already done enough mischief. You could fling away your whole fortune on your state, and leave it with no improvement. The cure, if cure there ...
— The Native Born - or, The Rajah's People • I. A. R. Wylie
... I did, I felt that the question of his flight was not so simple as it seemed to others, and the problem lay long unsolved before me until it was suddenly made clear by the will ...
— Reminiscences of Tolstoy - By His Son • Ilya Tolstoy
... are still gaps in the most modern maps of Africa, where one-eleventh of the whole area remains unexplored. Further, in Asia the problem of the Brahmaputra Falls is yet unsolved; there are ...
— A Book of Discovery - The History of the World's Exploration, From the Earliest - Times to the Finding of the South Pole • Margaret Bertha (M. B.) Synge
... Picasso. The severe economy of line suggests simplicity. Yet, on further inspection, you see that each line contributes to a rather bewildering variety of perspectives. I strongly suspect that the city and the people of Miracastle will remain one of the great, unsolved mysteries of the universe." ...
— General Max Shorter • Kris Ottman Neville
... laid over her back by a strong arm, the manifestations would cease at once. Fortunately for Esther, no one had the right or power to beat her as if she were a slave, and so the mystery still remained unsolved. ...
— The Haunted House - A True Ghost Story • Walter Hubbell
... any. My promise was to marry the Lady Nur al-Nihar to him who should produce the rarest of rarities, but although strange 'tis not less true that all are alike in the one essential condition. The difficulty still remaineth and the question is yet unsolved, whilst I fain would have the matter settled ere the close of day, and without prejudice to any. So needs must I fix upon some plan whereby I may be able to adjudge one of you to be the winner, and ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... hospital accommodation. At a pinch, a dozen hammocks could be slung in the den which the marine's lantern revealed; but how a dozen sick men could recover there, and how the surgeon could move between the hammocks to perform his ministrations, were mysteries happily left unsolved. As it was, the two invalids and their visitors crowded ...
— The Mayor of Troy • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... the mystery remained unsolved. "One heel's plumb gone," said Curly, sighing. "And they've begun on the toe of the ...
— Heart's Desire • Emerson Hough
... most urgent, task. But it was complicated, adjourned, and finally botched by interweaving it with a mutilated scheme for the complete readjustment of the politico-social forces of the planet. The result was a tangled skein of problems, most of them still unsolved, and some insoluble by governments alone. Out of the confusion of clashing forces towered aloft the two dominant Powers who command the economic resources of the world, and whose democratic institutions and internal ordering are unquestionably more conducive ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... greatest mysteries in the unsolved problem of life. I have been a dreamer from my cradle, and if any person could explain the phenomena, the practical experience of a long life ought to have ...
— The Monctons: A Novel, Volume I • Susanna Moodie
... divine providence as a whole, but even of those divine providences that fill up our own lives. And he warns us that, till we have heard the "Prologue in Heaven," many a riddle in our lives must of necessity remain unsolved. Christiana could not have told her inquiring children what a prologue was, nor an epilogue either, but many were the wise and winning discourses she held with her boys about their father now in heaven, ...
— Bunyan Characters (Second Series) • Alexander Whyte
... the great problem, What is right and how may I reach it? Somewhere he knows there is a solution to all the riddles of his friends and the questions of his own heart. An orderly universe is not crowned by a being whose life must ever remain an unsolved riddle. Men are not adrift in a fog with no hope of taking bearings. If men have marked the natural world with lines of latitude and longitude for the guidance of its travellers, the moral world is not ...
— Levels of Living - Essays on Everyday Ideals • Henry Frederick Cope
... more his father, his mother, his sister, and to find himself, enthusiastic hunter as he was, in the midst of these superb forests of the Upper Amazon, some of whose secrets remained after so many centuries still unsolved by man. ...
— Eight Hundred Leagues on the Amazon • Jules Verne
... David Carroll is going to find himself with one unsolved case on his hands. Yes, sir—if this is a blind lead, we're up ...
— Midnight • Octavus Roy Cohen
... remains noble and keeps his title? For the rest, the square is excellently arranged for spectators, and my ancestor, Montrevel, whose name it bears, doubtless, foreseeing its ultimate destiny, solved the great problem, still unsolved by the theatres, of being able to see well from every nook and corner. If ever they cut off my head, which, considering the times in which we are living, would in no wise be surprising, I shall have but one regret: that of being less well-placed and seeing less than the others. Now let us go up ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas
... imperious voice of spring, singing in concord with it, had overridden the decision of his stubborn will, demanding surrender, clamorous for recognition, and now having allowed the claim he was again forced back on the unsolved question of his own history. It was as if some imp of mischief had coupled his love to the Past, and had left him without knowledge to loose the secret knot. The silence became intolerable for fear of the next words that might break it from his companion. It would be better to take control ...
— Christopher Hibbault, Roadmaker • Marguerite Bryant
... bed that night she turned Marian's words over and over in her mind, but could arrive at no logical conclusion, and finally dropped to sleep with the riddle still unsolved. ...
— Grace Harlowe's Senior Year at High School - or The Parting of the Ways • Jessie Graham Flower
... tropical bird, through the gaudy glare of the stage. Winston, waiting patiently for twenty minutes amid the denser gloom just inside the stage door, watched the young girl's unconsciously interested face, wondering alike at both himself and her. This entire adventure remained an unsolved problem to his mystified mind—how it was she yet continued to retain his interest; why it was he could never wholly succeed in divorcing her from his life. He endeavored now to imagine her a mere ordinary woman of the stage, whom he might ...
— Beth Norvell - A Romance of the West • Randall Parrish
... sky of his happiness a cloud had gloomed, spoiling for a time the perfection of it. He could not think of marriage while the mystery of Dacre Wynne's death remained unsolved. It ...
— The Riddle of the Frozen Flame • Mary E. Hanshew
... And yet, oddly enough, this explanation was not the true one. The Honorable Heman solemnly assured the captain that he had not communicated with Emily's father. He intended to do so, as a part of the compact agreed upon at the hotel, but the man had fled. And the mystery is still unsolved. The supposition is that there really was a wife somewhere in the West. Who or where she was no Bayporter knows. Henry Thomas has never come back ...
— Cy Whittaker's Place • Joseph C. Lincoln
... unrestrained will, was to be trusted to contribute to the happiness of all without that security from wrong which, often rude in its operation, had been the fundamental basis of social order for ages! The ideal was no doubt pure and noble, but unfortunately it only raised once more the old unsolved problem of the forum whether that which is theoretically right can ever be practically wrong. The French Revolution did not, as a matter of fact, rest with a mere revulsion of moral forces, but as the infection descended from moral heights into the grosser elements of ...
— Fragments of Two Centuries - Glimpses of Country Life when George III. was King • Alfred Kingston
... all the discoveries made before and in Albrecht Duerer's day, in the book, the chart, the lever, the crystal, the crucible, the plane, the hammer. The intention of this picture has been disputed, but the best explanation of it is that which regards the woman as pondering on the humanly unsolved and insoluble mystery of the sin ...
— The Old Masters and Their Pictures - For the Use of Schools and Learners in Art • Sarah Tytler
... were not begun at the stated hours of military vigil and did not finish with them. Why these meetings of Christians were held at night, and in what their religious exercises consisted in, both in matter and form, is an unsolved problem. But it is certain that they resembled the services of the Jewish synagogue in the readings from Scripture, psalm-singing and prayers, and differed from those services by having readings from the Gospels, the Epistles, and from non-canonical ...
— The Divine Office • Rev. E. J. Quigley
... Candidly, we believe our morals are not so bad on the whole. We are now putting most stress on economic development. How to maintain their families is the question that troubles people most. With that question unsolved it is preaching to a horse to preach morality. We can always find high ideals and good leaders when economic conditions improve. The development of morality is our final aim, but it is encouraged for six years at the primary school. The child learns that if it does bad things it ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott
... necessary as war. Without strife of some sort the world would become like a stagnant pool breeding nothing but weeds and the slimy creatures pertaining to foulness. Even in love, the most divine of passions, there should be a wave of uncertainty and a sense of unsolved mystery to ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... reward of a thousand dollars," said Chi Foxy. "It was one of them unsolved mystery cases—one of them cases that never get solved because no detective is smart enough to solve it. Nobody knew who killed old John J. Smith but me, and I wasn't going ...
— Philo Gubb Correspondence-School Detective • Ellis Parker Butler
... almost absolute safety. The rich had been assured of his wealth and comfort, the toiler assured of his life and work. No doubt in that perfect world there had been no unemployed problem, no social question left unsolved. And a great ...
— The Time Machine • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... and contradictions which the Christian revelation leaves unsolved are made tolerable by Hope." To adopt Bunyan's figurative language in the closing paragraph of his allegory, the day is certainly coming when the famous town of Mansoul shall be taken down and transported "every stick and stone" to Emmanuel's land, and there set up for the Father's ...
— The Life of John Bunyan • Edmund Venables
... tranquillizing assurance that he will reach the end of the year without experiencing all the horrors of enforced idleness to which the ordinary day or wage laborers are condemned in both city and country. But, in substance, the whole problem in its entirety remains unsolved (even under this system), and there is always one man who lives in comfort, without working, because ten others ...
— Socialism and Modern Science (Darwin, Spencer, Marx) • Enrico Ferri
... Lord Hastings, "is a mystery that is as yet unsolved. It is assumed, however, that she has obtained sufficient food and fuel to meet her needs from captured ships. In at least one instance this is known to have been done. The captain of the British steamer Exford, ...
— The Boy Allies Under Two Flags • Ensign Robert L. Drake
... the important question yet unsolved, as to what Matter is. Lord Kelvin and Dr. Larmor have recently given to the world certain conceptions as to the origin of Matter, and I shall endeavour to show that such conceptions receive confirmation and support by the proposed new ...
— Aether and Gravitation • William George Hooper
... head above the boards. Then I quenched the light, and flung myself once more upon my bed, in the hope that darkness would prove a stimulant to thought and bring me to the solution I was seeking. It brought me sleep instead. Unconsciously I sank to it, my riddle all unsolved. ...
— The Shame of Motley • Raphael Sabatini
... the north of the {71} continent of America, and at any rate the vast distance to be traversed to reach the Pacific from the Atlantic, could now be surmised with some accuracy. But the internal geography of the continent still contained an unsolved mystery. It was known that vast bodies of fresh water far beyond the basin of the Saskatchewan and the Columbia emptied towards the north. Hearne had revealed the existence of the Great Slave Lake, and the advance of daring fur-traders into the north had brought some knowledge of the great ...
— Adventurers of the Far North - A Chronicle of the Frozen Seas • Stephen Leacock
... world, writhings and struggles against the received order of things? In this sentiment of discontent there is a certain truthfulness, because it is an element of human nature, and how best to deal with it is a problem yet unsolved; but in the opinions and doctrines to which, among the masses, the sentiment gives birth, the wisdom of the wisest detects only the certainty of a common ruin, offering for reconstruction the same building-materials as ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... melody and adoration is yet an unsolved religio-psychological problem. But we all know that everywhere in the habitable globe the two intermingle, and stimulate each other, whether the adoration be offered to heavenly or earthly objects. And so it came to ...
— Romance of California Life • John Habberton
... Greek and its increasing use as a medium of instruction in the schools on the one hand, and the appearance of Vergil and the rise of the Aeneas saga on the other, the demand for a translation of the Iliad naturally became less. The Silver Age arrived with the problem unsolved. It was a period when writers abounded who would have been better employed on translation than on any attempt at original work. Further, in spite of the general knowledge of Greek, a translation of Homer would have its value in the schools both as ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... thing, that we could not rely upon altruistic conduct always being for individual benefit, that there was no 'natural identity' between egoism and altruism. He held that morality, to save it from an unsolved dualism, required a principle capable of reconciling the discrepancy between the conduct in accordance with the axiom of Benevolence and the conduct in accordance with the equally ...
— Recent Tendencies in Ethics • William Ritchie Sorley
... group, comprising less than one-half of the boys in the school. Unquestionably it would tend to vitalize the teaching of mathematics, drawing, and science for the boys who enroll in the industrial course, but it leaves unsolved the question of method and content of instruction in these subjects for the boys in the non-industrial or so-called academic course. Very possibly future experience may demonstrate that the plan recommended for the general industrial course affords ...
— Wage Earning and Education • R. R. Lutz
... upward. He had ever been a creature of unreason, morbidly conscious of self—and naturally, for in him struggled the blood of three races. His father was Scotch, and his mother—Spanish on the spindle side and Irish by way of a most mercurial father—remained an unsolved problem all her days, even to her husband. Her laughter was as illogical as her tears. Her household could never tell what the next hour would bring forth, so ready were her sympathies, so instant her despairs. She lived all her life ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... prosperous little seaport. As we know that he was a careful observer, endowed by nature with an active temperament and an unusual degree of practical sense we are sure that no event escaped his attention, and that no mystery was permitted to go unsolved. The military and commercial enterprise of the place brought him into daily contact with men of the highest character in their departments. The salt-factors of Brouage were persons of experience and activity, who knew ...
— Voyages of Samuel de Champlain, Vol. 1 • Samuel de Champlain
... bonds, and also to act without interference of any court of law or any Public Administrator whatever." He might better have trusted the courts, as we shall see, for his friends failed him. After thirty years the executors all died; and to this day the will of Robert Palmer is an unsolved mystery. ...
— Forty-one Thieves - A Tale of California • Angelo Hall
... next? A perverse destiny seems to perplex them with one after another of the riddles which mankind put forth to the wandering universe, and left unsolved in their own destruction. They enter an edifice of stern gray stone standing insulated in the midst of others, and gloomy even in the sunshine, which it barely suffers to penetrate through its iron grated windows. It is a prison. The jailer has left his post at the summons of ...
— The New Adam and Eve (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... from a verdict, or have attempted the via media; have leaned to the idea that the Ruthvens died in an accidental brawl, caused by a nervous and motiveless fit of terror on the part of the King. Thus the question is unsettled, the problem is unsolved. Why did the jolly hunt at Falkland, in the bright August morning, end in the sanguinary scuffle in the town house at Perth; the deaths of the Ruthvens; the tumult in the town; the King's homeward ride through the dark and dripping twilight; the laying of the ...
— James VI and the Gowrie Mystery • Andrew Lang
... the North American continent; and Britain emerged in 1763 the supreme colonial power of the world. The problem of power had been settled in her favour; but the problem of organisation remained unsolved. It emerged in an acute and menacing form as soon as the war ...
— The Expansion of Europe - The Culmination of Modern History • Ramsay Muir
... governed by them, 733-l. Nature's great book interpreted in the doctrines of Masonry, 625-m. Nature's immutable Law, the Eternal Will of the Justice which is God, 847-l. Nature's magnificences are an algebra of graces and splendors, 845-u. Nature's problems unanswered; the problems unsolved, 647-l. Nature's regularity suggested by common appearances very early, 699-m. Nature's single and absolute law, the equipoise of contrary forces, 848-u. Nature's Soul released at the end for a brighter existence, 614-u. Naya philosophers declare the individual Soul and God are distinct, 852-u. ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... game birds should be stopped everywhere. But the legislatures of many states paid small heed to the little minority of their constituents who voiced such sentiments, and the problem of how to bring about the desired results remained unsolved. ...
— The Bird Study Book • Thomas Gilbert Pearson
... "Low Land Beauty" was has been the source of much speculation, but the question is still unsolved, every suggested damsel—Lucy Grymes, Mary Bland, Betsy Fauntleroy, et al.—being either impossible or the evidence wholly inadequate. But in the same journal which contains the draughts of these letters is a ...
— The True George Washington [10th Ed.] • Paul Leicester Ford
... giving to the newly enfranchised a sound, practical education was considered at the dawn of freedom, an easy solution of what as an unsolved problem threatened the perpetuity of republican institutions. Within a year from the firing on Sumter, benevolent and farsighted Northern friends had established schools from Washington to the Gulf of Mexico, which ...
— Memories of Childhood's Slavery Days • Annie L. Burton
... reasoned it out?" asked his chum; knowing full well that Paul would never allow such a problem to remain unsolved long. ...
— The Banner Boy Scouts on a Tour - The Mystery of Rattlesnake Mountain • George A. Warren
... dare to pray? You miserable digger of dung, soiled by the smut of ruined altars, are you perchance the architect who shall build the new temple? Upon what do you base your hopes, you who disavow the old gods and have no new gods to take their place? The eternal night of doubts unsolved, the dead desert, deprived of the living spirit—this is your world, you pitiful worm, who gnawed at the living belief which was a refuge for simple hearts, who converted the world into a dead chaos. Now, then, where are ...
— Best Russian Short Stories • Various
... expedient to give them, and also to say a few words in explanation of the general design. A young girl, Mary Cecilia Rogers, was murdered in the vicinity of New York; and, although her death occasioned an intense and long-enduring excitement, the mystery attending it had remained unsolved at the period when the present paper was written and published (November, 1842). Herein, under pretence of relating the fate of a Parisian grisette, the author has followed in minute detail, the essential, ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... with it biological and psychological, as well as social and practical, issues of the widest significance, and further, it is bound up intimately with the profoundest riddles of existence. The problems remain to a great extent unsolved. But the conviction forces itself that the emancipation of woman will ultimately involve a revolution in many of our social institutions. It is this that brings fear to many. Yet we must remember that woman's emancipation is no new movement, but has always been with us, although with ...
— The Truth About Woman • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... the rest of mankind is not encouraged by easy publicity. In the vivacious Pepin I have often seen the image of my early youth, when it seemed to me astonishing that the philosophers had left so many difficulties unsolved, and that so many great themes had raised no great poet to treat them. I had an elated sense that I should find my brain full of theoretic clues when I looked for them, and that wherever a poet had not done what I expected, it was for want of my insight. Not knowing what had been ...
— Impressions of Theophrastus Such • George Eliot |
