"Unattainable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... triumphs; and what sustained his young hero through something of the same sort of trial was also his own support. He too had his Dora, at apparently the same hopeless elevation; striven for as the one only thing to be attained, and even more unattainable, for neither did he succeed nor happily did she die; but the one idol, like the other, supplying a motive to exertion for the time, and otherwise opening out to the idolater, both in fact and fiction, a highly unsubstantial, happy, foolish time. I used to laugh and tell him I had ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... the secret you have confided to me shall be held sacred, and you have thereby secured her from every outbreak of my passion. She stands so high above me that I can only adore her as my saint, can love her only as one loves the unattainable stars!" ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach
... ladder could be constructed by which to leave the things and the virtues themselves behind; but the sagacity and exigencies of the school would not fail to arrange the steps in this progress—the end of which was unattainable except, perhaps, in a momentary ecstasy—so that the obvious duties of men would continue, for the nonce, to be imposed upon them. The chief difference made in morals would be only this: that the positive occasions and sanctions of good ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... wished.[43] He was covetous of other men's property, and prodigal of his own. He had abundance of eloquence,[44] though but little wisdom. His insatiable ambition was always pursuing objects extravagant, romantic, and unattainable. ...
— Conspiracy of Catiline and The Jurgurthine War • Sallust
... from the old home whence he has come. Such a story might have been very cynically treated; but it is not so done, the whole tone is kindly and consolatory, and the disenchanted man submissively takes the lesson, and understands that things far away are to be loved for their own sake, and that the unattainable is not truly unattainable, when we can make the beauty of it our own. Indeed, throughout all these two volumes, though there is much practical scepticism, and much irony on abstract questions, this kindly and consolatory ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... revelation.[4] There are three possible relations of reason to this doctrine. First, it may be affirmed that the content of religion and theology is matter communicated to man in extraordinary fashion, truth otherwise unattainable, on which it is beyond the competence of reason to sit in judgment. We have then the two spheres arbitrarily separated. As regards their relation, theology is at first supreme. Reason is the handmaiden of faith. It ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... duties to her—no thoughtful persons now doubt this—is to secure for her such physical training and exercise as may confirm her health, and perfect her beauty, the highest refinement of that beauty being unattainable without splendor of activity and of delicate strength. To perfect her beauty, I say, and increase its power; it cannot be too powerful, nor shed its sacred light too far: only remember that all physical freedom is vain to ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... Marie; then that crisis, the transcendent uplift in the mountains, when for the first time in his life he actually reached for something beyond and above himself through the mediumship of Dolly Drake, that wonderful embodiment of the, for him, unattainable. He had lost out there. He had slipped at the foot of the heights up which she was ...
— The Desired Woman • Will N. Harben
... into this delicate register of perceptions and sensations—as far above the ordinary human faculty of appreciation as some scientific registering instrument is beyond the rough human senses—only to find that the beauty which alone could satisfy him was unattainable—that he was never to know the last deep identification which only possession can give. He had trained himself in short, to feel, in the rare great thing—such an utterance of beauty as the Daunt Diana, say—a ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... wrong, or a rational distribution of rewards or punishment, nor consequently inculcate the feeling of duty and responsibility, without which goodness as a matter of principle is impossible and a reliable state of society unattainable. ...
— Chaldea - From the Earliest Times to the Rise of Assyria • Znade A. Ragozin
... if there should be no rain: and it seemed as if there never would be any; for this was now the third year, and the earth had not received a shower. And now, ceasing to be supplied from their usual sources, the springs and rivers withered and shrank. Water became in many places not dear, but unattainable. The greatest people of the land left it, and used their wealth in chasing the retreating element from place to place on the earth. In some cases, among these luxurious spirits there were scenes of extravagant revelry still; they had no employment except to live, and they endeavoured ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 348 • Various
... girl, often reproved for her romantic ideas, she had dreams where the sincerity of a great passion appeared like the ideal fulfilment and the only truth of life. Entering the world she discovered that ideal to be unattainable because the world is too prudent to be sincere. Then she hoped that she could find the truth of life an ambition which she understood as a lifelong devotion to some unselfish ideal. Mr. Travers' name was on men's lips; he seemed capable of enthusiasm and of devotion; he impressed her imagination ...
— The Rescue • Joseph Conrad
... new formula. She will be of use; will do the daily task, forgetting the unattainable ideals. She cannot keep her husband's love, any more than she can draw the perfect hand; then she will not waste her life in sighing for either gift. She will be useful; she will gain cheer that way, since all the others ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... the most renowned princess in Christendom. It was done most gracefully. She was but a trifle to his strong arms, and he lifted her to the sod as gently as if she were a child. The nobles envied Brandon his evident favor with this unattainable Mary and hated him accordingly, but they kept their thoughts to themselves for two reasons: First, they knew not to what degree the king's favor, already marked, with the help of the princess might carry him; and second, they did not care to have ...
— When Knighthood Was in Flower • Charles Major
... and battles on the stage. The Greeks have uniformly renounced them: as in the whole of their theatrical system they proceeded on ideas of grandeur and dignity, a feeble and petty imitation of the unattainable would have appeared insupportable in their eyes. With them, consequently, all fighting was merely recounted. The principle of the romantic dramatists was altogether different: their wonderful pictures were infinitely larger than their theatrical means of visible execution; they were every where ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... and exalted nature, and who is driven to infidelity perhaps even less by pressure of circumstances, than by the sheer force of her love, which will go on loving — loving what it can have, when that which it would rather have is for the time unattainable. His Pandarus is a gentleman, though a gentleman with a flaw in him; a man who, in his courtier-like good-nature, places the claims of comradeship above those of honour, and plots away the virtue ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer
... that Heaven I have defied.—Stay, friend, yet another word. If man's love can be so great, what can God's love be? That which I said I said, in desperation; in very truth, that peace hangs like an unattainable city in the clouds before my soul's vision, that love like a broad river flowing through the lands, an atmosphere bathing the worlds, the subtile essence and ether of space in which the farthest star pursues its course,—why, then, should it escape me, the mote? Oh, when the world turned from ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... age, instead of aiming at an abstract, unattainable ideal, studied nature in its choicest forms, and attained the beautiful by selecting and concentrating in one those charms which are found diffused over all. They avoided the representation of all violent motions and perturbations of the passions, which would have completely marred that ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... as many books of travel as he could lay his hands on. Often he had wondered if it ever would be his fortune to see some of the distant countries of which he read with so much interest. Though he had cherished vague hopes, he had never really expected it. Now, however, the unattainable seemed within his grasp. He would not have to wait until he was a rich man, but when still a boy he could travel to the opposite side of the world, paying his expenses as he ...
— Facing the World • Horatio Alger
... both man and wife must bring kindness and goodwill. The true love story commences at the altar, when there lies before the married pair a most beautiful contest of wisdom and generosity, and a life-long struggle towards an unattainable ideal. Unattainable? Ay, surely unattainable, from the very fact that they are two instead ...
— The Pocket R.L.S. - Being Favourite Passages from the Works of Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... was the face of a woman whose heart and mind were crowding with a yearning for something—something unattainable. Such was her look of strength and virility that he almost regretted them, fearing that her character might belie her ...
— The Law-Breakers • Ridgwell Cullum
... be blind to the exquisite perfection of her appearance and belongings. Charlotte had privately borrowed one of Aunt Virginia's skirts, and practised before the cheval glass, but the flowing lines that so much pleased her she found unattainable. ...
— The Pleasant Street Partnership - A Neighborhood Story • Mary F. Leonard
... began, "this is the farewell of a dying man. You were the wisest, but take it not ill if I say, 'Be not too wise'; seek not the unattainable, and confuse not men's minds with subtleties; do not make the simple complicated. You wish to see things with both eyes, but he who shoots with the bow, must close one eye; otherwise he sees his mark doubled. You are not a Sophist, but may easily appear so; ...
— Historical Miniatures • August Strindberg
... therefore to sin, can attain to living to God, and therefore can be righteous. We must receive, if we are ever to possess, the righteousness which is of God, and which becomes ours through Jesus Christ. The righteousness which shines as a fair but unattainable vision before sinful men, has a real existence, and may be theirs. It is not to be self-elaborated, but to ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... war has made; nor ascertain the immensity of blood we have lost. Some have asked, whether it was a crime to resist; to repel some parts of this evil. Others have asserted, that a resistance so general makes pardon unattainable, and repentance useless: and dividing the crime among so many, renders it imperceptible. What one party calls meritorious, the other denominates flagitious. These opinions vary, contract, or expand, like the events of the war on which they are founded. What ...
— Letters from an American Farmer • Hector St. John de Crevecoeur
... disappointed in me; they think that I do nothing, that I have deceived their expectations and their hopes. I, too, am disappointed. All that would restore my self-respect and give me a right to be proud of myself, seems to me unattainable and impossible, and I fall back upon trivialities, gay talk, distractions. I am always equally lacking in hope, in faith, in resolution. The only difference is that my weakness takes sometimes the form of despairing melancholy and sometimes that ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... splendid list of unattainable posts, Peter Plymley chooses, to illustrate his theme, the offices of Sheriff and Deputy-Sheriff in Ireland. No one he says, who is unacquainted with that country, can conceive the obstacles to justice ...
— Sydney Smith • George W. E. Russell
... beauty revive!—through love for him if possible; if not, then through anger and hate! He must make her feel, must make her acknowledge, that he had power. It seemed to him another instance of the resistless fascination which the unattainable, however unworthy, has ever had ...
— The Grain Of Dust - A Novel • David Graham Phillips
... keeps a poet In his high singing mood, Like unappeasable hunger For unattainable ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... exclusively secular objects, is apparent.... Up to the present time I have employed my best efforts, by every kind of argument, persuasion and entreaty, to get the proceeds applied simply and solely to educational purposes.... This is unattainable, and is rendered so by an original provision of our Constitution (of 1791), ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson
... a great treat to hear a working-man who has the power of utterance deliver a speech in a straightforward and unrhetorical way. There is always a pith and vigour about such deliverances quite unattainable in a formal harangue. The magnates of the little Fife villages are specially notorious for their gift of the gab: when Bailie M'Scales or Provost Cleaver gets up to speak, no one has ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... charming a frame for her young beauty; it seemed to him as if she were now less beautiful than he had imagined her; the enchantment she had exercised upon him was thrown off by simple considerations of good sense. And yet he gave a long sigh of regret when he thought she was unattainable except by marriage. He, however, thanked heaven that he had not gone far enough to have compromised himself with her. The most his conscience could reproach him with was an occasional imprudence in ...
— Jacqueline, Complete • (Mme. Blanc) Th. Bentzon
... is concerned, developments and demonstrations of cultivated taste. There may, indeed, be a fictitious or chimerical taste without Poetry or Religion; but a genuine good taste, in our judgment, without these handmaids, is unattainable. ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... how it was to be reached, or whether shelter could there be found in any decent tenement; his impression was that there had been a public house on top of the mountain, but that it had recently been destroyed by fire. Certainties were evidently still unattainable. ...
— The Continental Monthly, Volume V. Issue I • Various
... abdominal walls drawn in (retracted), which gives the singer, in all parts above and below, a bellows with tense walls in all parts, with the great advantage that such breathing permits of a firmness otherwise unattainable, and he is enabled to exert his breath force with great certainty and power, and, as some maintain, with all the control ...
— Voice Production in Singing and Speaking - Based on Scientific Principles (Fourth Edition, Revised and Enlarged) • Wesley Mills
... pleasures, or intelligence of church or state. Women might elope, men embezzle, dynasties fall, ministries change, or public faith be broken, and they viewed the result, if indeed they noted it, with absolute composure. But let eggs be unattainable, jellies become murky, the fruit in cake or pudding sink hopelessly to the bottom, and Rachel weeping for her children could not have ...
— Princess • Mary Greenway McClelland
... larger time. As a consequence of its motion the clock goes more slowly than when at rest. Here also the velocity c plays the part of an unattainable limiting velocity. ...
— Relativity: The Special and General Theory • Albert Einstein
... beyond our reach anything but a very moderate share of success in travelling to the northward. Still, however, we had been anxious to reach the highest latitude which our means would allow, and with this view, although our whole object had long become unattainable, had pushed on to the northward for thirty-five days, or until half our resources were expended, and the middle of our season arrived. For the last few days the eighty-third parallel was the limit to which we had ventured to extend our hopes; but even this expectation had become considerably ...
— Three Voyages for the Discovery of a Northwest Passage from the • Sir William Edward Parry
... a diseased mind, owing to the want of the proper exercise of its powers, are apathy, discontent, a restless longing for excitement, a craving for unattainable good, a diseased and morbid action of the imagination, dissatisfaction with the world, and factitious interest in trifles which the mind feels to be unworthy of its powers. Such minds sometimes seek alleviation in ...
— The American Woman's Home • Catherine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe
... and nature of terrestrial life, as a whole, are open questions. Geology at present provides us with most valuable topographical records, but she has not the means of working them up into a universal history. Is such a universal history, then, to be regarded as unattainable? Are all the grandest and most interesting problems which offer themselves to the geological student essentially insoluble? Is he in the position of a scientific Tantalus—doomed always to thirst for a knowledge which he cannot obtain? The reverse is to be hoped; nay, it may not ...
— Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews • Thomas Henry Huxley
... week. Half his destiny would then be determined, but the other half might not be so very smoothly wooed. His duties would be established, but the wife who was to share, and animate, and reward those duties, might yet be unattainable. He knew his own mind, but he was not always perfectly assured of knowing Miss Crawford's. There were points on which they did not quite agree; there were moments in which she did not seem propitious; and though trusting altogether to her affection, ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... miserable existence, all because they were anxious to be ma'amike be-hakmah ("delvers in knowledge"), as he himself might have said, and avail themselves of the opportunities for acquiring the truth and wisdom unattainable ...
— The Haskalah Movement in Russia • Jacob S. Raisin
... minister of the place, and I have preserved it, that the praise of a good man, being made more credible, may be more solid. Narrations of romantic and impracticable virtue will be read with wonder, but that which is unattainable is recommended in vain; that good may be endeavoured it must be shown to be possible. This is the only piece in which the author has given a hint of his religion, by ridiculing the ceremony of burning the Pope, and by mentioning ...
— Lives of the English Poets: Prior, Congreve, Blackmore, Pope • Samuel Johnson
... beyond words with any move which was to bring Boris on the scene. The moment Boris seemed at all unattainable, he became wonderfully precious in Kitty's eyes. She would, of course, snub him in five minutes after he did arrive, but that really did not matter. The fascination of Annie's secret mission also delighted her much, and she skipped along now by the side of this beautiful lady ...
— Red Rose and Tiger Lily - or, In a Wider World • L. T. Meade
... over-whelming athlete of literature, Blasco Ibanez. But Unamuno is head and shoulders above them all in the highness of his purpose and in the earnestness and loyalty with which, Quixote-like, he has served all through his life his unattainable Dulcinea. Then there is another and most important reason which explains his position as first, princeps, of Spanish letters, and it is that Unamuno, by the cross which he has chosen to bear, incarnates ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... time to think I could not seem to realise the situation. Indian House Lake! Five days to Ungava! Oh! how I wanted it to be true. Ungava, in spite of hopes and resolves, had seemed always far away, mysterious, and unattainable, but now it had been suddenly thrust forward almost within my reach. If true, this would mean the well-nigh certain achievement of my heart's desire—the completion of my husband's work. Yet there were the rapids, where the skill and judgment of the men were our ...
— A Woman's Way Through Unknown Labrador • Mina Benson Hubbard (Mrs. Leonidas Hubbard, Junior)
... though he derived an actual visual enjoyment from the blue sprays that travelled and dispersed across the room. He had already placed before his visitor a box containing cigars of a brand which that gentleman keenly appreciated but generally regarded as unattainable, and the matter-of-fact ease and certainty with which the blind man had brought the box and put it before him had sent a questioning flicker ...
— Four Max Carrados Detective Stories • Ernest Bramah
... change and glow like supernatural fire, trouble me with the cause and motive of its beauty? Why should yonder rock, standing like a spar of some ship wrecked in a cataclysm of the awful past, draw me to it as though it were the image of a grand, yet unattainable and blighted, longing of ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... could know nothing. It had spoken of long perilous journeys and the faces of strange countries; of the silver way across moonlit seas; of the beckoning voices from the under edges of the desert. It had taken a deeper, a more mysterious tone. It had told of great joys, quite unattainable, and of great griefs too, eternal, and with a sort of nobility by reason of their greatness; and of many unformulated longings beyond the reach of words; but with never a single note of mere complaint. So it had seemed to Durrance that night as he had ...
— The Four Feathers • A. E. W. Mason
... an education, but what it was worth he could not guess. Indeed, when he raised his eyes to the loftiest and most triumphant results of politics — to Mr. Boutwell, Mr. Conkling or even Mr. Sumner — he could not honestly say that such an education, even when it carried one up to these unattainable heights, was worth anything. There were men, as yet standing on lower levels — clever and amusing men like Garfield and Blaine — who took no little pleasure in making fun of the senatorial demi-gods, and who used language about Grant himself which the North American Review would not have admitted. ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... the sons of one, Zeus; derived from one source of tradition, Homer; formed by one artist, Phidias; on him measured and decided by Parrhasius. In the simplicity of this principle, adhered to by the succeeding periods, lies the uninterrupted progress and the unattainable superiority ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... and a vague energetic disposition to improve material things. In another part of England ingenious people were beginning to use coal in smelting iron, and were producing metal in abundance and metal castings in sizes that had hitherto been unattainable. Without warning or preparation, increment involving countless possibilities of further increment was coming to the strength of horses and men. "Power," all unsuspected, was flowing like a drug into the veins of the ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... of a lunar crater is shown in Plate VIII. This is, no doubt, a somewhat imaginary sketch. The point of view from which the artist is supposed to have taken the picture is one quite unattainable by terrestrial astronomers, yet there can be little doubt that it is a fair representation of objects on the moon. We should, however, recollect the scale on which it is drawn. The vast crater must be many miles across, and the mountain at its centre must ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball
... shrugged his shoulders, got up and walked out of the carpenter's shop. He had accomplished one part of his infamous design, at least. With every symptom of the most exquisite torture of mind I recalled throughout that day and night the lovely, fleeting, unattainable image of Aurelia Gualandi. She was fatally present, every bend and turn of her head, every motion of her bosom, the weaving of her hands, every flutter of her breath, every sigh, every flash of her eyes danced before ...
— The Fool Errant • Maurice Hewlett
... ranch and it was far lonelier than his first home, because his father was away so much of the time. At first the nearest neighbor was Panhandle's uncle, who lived two long prairie miles away. His house was a black dot on the horizon, not unattainable, it seemed to Panhandle, but very far away. He would have risked the distance, save for his mother, who was very timid in this country so new to her. Panhandle would never forget how she was frightened at a crazy wanderer who happened to come along, and another ...
— Valley of Wild Horses • Zane Grey
... be happy. The benediction of Christ on every home to which he is welcomed as an abiding guest is, "Peace be to this house." While perfection of happiness is unattainable in this world, rich, deep, heart-filling happiness certainly may be, and ought ...
— Making the Most of Life • J. R. Miller
... voice rose, but his big hand stroked his white beard twice with an effect of venerable calmness. "Si, Senores! Women are ready to rise to the heights of devotion unattainable by us men, or to sink into the depths of abasement which amazes our masculine prejudices. I am speaking now of exceptional women, you ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad
... patch against the mountain? Brushwood of some kind, without a doubt. The place seemed to be unattainable, and yet, after an inordinate outlay of energy, we had climbed across those torrid meadows. It proved to be a hazel copse mysteriously dark within, voiceless, and cool ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... finally failed. About that time Fox died, and the French government attributed publicly the failure of these negociations to his death. But the truth was, Fox had long ago expressed his convictions that peace would be unattainable; and after he had commenced the negociations, he had said in the house of commons:—"My wish, the first wish of my heart, is peace; but such a peace as shall preserve our connexions and influence on the continent, as shall not abate one jot ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... philosopher, and what philosophy I have is of no particular school, and neither stoical nor mystic. I feel no sort of call to vindicate the Ways of Providence; and on the whole there seems something rather ill-bred in crabbing the unattainable, and pretending that what we can't have can't be good for us. Happiness is good for us, excellent for us, necessary for us, indispensable to us. But ... how put such transcendental facts into common or garden (for it ...
— Hortus Vitae - Essays on the Gardening of Life • Violet Paget, AKA Vernon Lee
... penniless artist with no prospect of fame, there was a very long way. Felix had lately become conscious of a luxurious preference for the society—if possible unshared with others—of Gertrude Wentworth; but he had relegated this young lady, for the moment, to the coldly brilliant category of unattainable possessions. She was not the first woman for whom he had entertained an unpractical admiration. He had been in love with duchesses and countesses, and he had made, once or twice, a perilously near ...
— The Europeans • Henry James
... Harris. There is no poetry about Harris - no wild yearning for the unattainable. Harris never "weeps, he knows not why." If Harris's eyes fill with tears, you can bet it is because Harris has been eating raw onions, or has put too much Worcester over ...
— Three Men in a Boa • Jerome K. Jerome
... all as it ought to be, and because you would still march on to some nearer approach to equality; though the thing itself is so great, so glorious, so godlike,—nay, so absolutely divine,—that you have been disgusted by the very promise of it, because its perfection is unattainable. Men have asserted a mock equality till the very idea of equality stinks ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... Jefferies writes: "I turned to the blue heaven over, gazing into its depth, inhaling its exquisite colour and sweetness. The rich blue of the unattainable flower of the sky drew my soul towards it, and there it rested, for pure ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... Pauline—two despairing people who long for the unattainable. Why should they not be mated? It is perhaps possible, and would be a master stroke of genius on my part. Jove! I'll see what I can do! Great pity to have all the plotting on ...
— Miss Caprice • St. George Rathborne
... end with Justin, Emperor of the East. He was thrown into prison at Pavia, where he wrote the Consolation of Philosophy, and he was brutally put to death in 524. His brief and busy life was marked by great literary achievement. His learning was vast, his industry untiring, his object unattainable— nothing less than the transmission to his countrymen of all the works of Plato and Aristotle, and the reconciliation of their apparently divergent views. To form the idea was a silent judgment on the learning of his day; to realize it was more than one man could accomplish; but Boethius ...
— The Theological Tractates and The Consolation of Philosophy • Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius
... not cast aside a sentiment when it no longer responds to some vision of infinitude which she grasps and contemplates in her soul? Who can scale the heights to which her eyes have risen? Yes, a man fears to find in such a woman something unattainable, unpossessable, unconquerable. The woman of strong mind should remain a symbol; as a reality she must be feared. Camille Maupin is in some ways the living image of Schiller's Isis, seated in the darkness of the temple, at whose ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... inevitable occasions in life when inaction is a kind of action, and must count as action, and when not to be for is to be practically against; and in all such cases strict and consistent neutrality is an unattainable thing. ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... cannot find whereat this dainty emotion, this wandering gleam, points. It is destroyed for the imagination by any attempt to refer it to organization. Nor does it point to any relations of friendship or love known and described in society, but, as it seems to me, to a quite other and unattainable sphere, to relations of transcendent delicacy and sweetness, to what roses and violets hint and foreshow. We cannot approach beauty. Its nature is like opaline doves'-neck lustres, hovering and evanescent. Herein it resembles the most excellent things, ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... constant rain cast a shadow over the sunny Hoogeveld and made our lives sombre and almost unbearable. Then our tattered garments could not dry on our bodies, and everything about us was wet and dirty. Even in dry weather fuel was almost unattainable, for the treeless Hoogeveld had been almost exhausted by the many large commandos which had visited the 'uitspan' places. In wet weather it was almost an ...
— On Commando • Dietlof Van Warmelo
... appearance of black walls, seemingly within reach of the hand; while the more varied and softer cotes of Vaud lay an indefinable and sombre mass, less menacing, it is true, but equally confused and unattainable. ...
— The Headsman - The Abbaye des Vignerons • James Fenimore Cooper
... dies and imparts only his life force to the character of the cocky youngster who comes fully alive without the slightest trace of the personality of Jason Rowe. In this debut performance young Rowe achieves the hitherto unattainable goal of completely displacing the feeliegoer's identity with that of the character he portrays. We expect great things from him for a talent such as his illumines the theater but once in a millennium. Thanks to Mr. Jason Rowe, ...
— The Premiere • Richard Sabia
... pathos in unsuccessful authorship. The book that perishes unread is the deaf mute of literature. The great asylum of Oblivion is full of such, making inaudible signs to each other in leaky garrets and unattainable dusty upper shelves." ...
— The Guardian Angel • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... let me tell you, friend, that my league of The Scarlet Pimpernel never attempted the impossible, and to try and drag the Queen out of the clutches of these murderous rascals now, is attempting the unattainable." ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... Ponsonby had received, although it may have made them starched, prim, and even uninteresting, had an effect upon their character not altogether unwholesome, and prevented any public crying for the moon, or any public charge of injustice against its Maker because it is unattainable. ...
— Catharine Furze • Mark Rutherford
... to answer admirably? Miss Pritty discovered that housekeeping was her forte, and that she possessed powers of comprehension, in regard to financial matters connected with the payment of debts and dividends, such as she had all her previous life believed to be unattainable anywhere, save in the Bank of England or ...
— Under the Waves - Diving in Deep Waters • R M Ballantyne
... clear thinker must not only accept it, but must accept all legitimate deductions from it. If it seems true to us we must believe it. Absolute demonstrable truth, except in the simplest of matters is almost unattainable. The best we can ordinarily get is a close approach to certainty, and with this we must be content. In many matters, indeed in most matters, we must trust the judgment of others who are better trained in a particular ...
— The Meaning of Evolution • Samuel Christian Schmucker
... understood. But as to myself, I can solemnly protest, as the most sacred of truths, that I never, one instant, lost sight of your reputation and favorable standing with your country, and never omitted to justify your failure to attain our wish, as one which was probably unattainable. Reviewing, therefore, this whole subject, I cannot doubt you will become sensible, that your impressions have been without just ground. I cannot, indeed, judge what falsehoods may have been written or told you; and that, under such forms as to ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... from the slum and the gutter Are off "to the country" in troops, To feed on new eggs and fresh butter, To frolic with balls and with hoops; These three, with their eyes on the poster That hints unattainable joys, Must envy the son of the Coster, The waifs ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, July 12, 1890 • Various
... terror in his voice, and close to that delicate ear which had always been so sensitive to every discord. But the sound evidently reached her not. It is indescribable what a sense of remote, dim, unattainable distance betwixt himself and Alice was impressed on the father by this impossibility of reaching ...
— The House of the Seven Gables • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... had long since won which answered her every movement. Flushed, rapturous, eyes sparkling, cheeks aglow, the small head weaving through the throng like a golden shuttle—ah, did she know how adorable she was! Was Tom right: is it the attainable unattainable to one man and given to some other that leaves a deeper mark upon him than success? At all events the unattainable was now like a hot sting in the heart, but yet a sting more precious than a balm. The voice of Brainard ...
— The Gentleman From Indiana • Booth Tarkington
... should come. Mrs. Berry, in her loving considerateness for the little bride, positively commanded her to lie down, and be quiet, and submit to be nursed and cherished. For Mrs. Berry well knew that ten minutes alone with the hero could only be had while the little bride was in that unattainable position. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... become his wife. She belonged, still belonged, to a world he had thought of as outside the possibilities of his life. Was she not young, strong, straight of body? Did she not array herself in what seemed unbelievably beautiful clothes? The clothes she wore were a symbol of herself. For him she was unattainable. ...
— Poor White • Sherwood Anderson
... dwelt for him on the most remote borderland of unattainable dreams. Now her heart was throbbing against his own and he knew exultantly that whatever her mind might say in protest, her heart was at home there. In his brain pealed a crescendo of passion that drowned out whispers of remonstrance ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... thy sons and counsellors, meet with destruction, afflicted by the might of the Brahmanas. Thou thinkest that thou art an immortal and that, therefore, art at liberty to proceed in this way. Do not, however, disregard the Brahmanas. Know that there is nothing unattainable by penance.' ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... on Monday morning and went to Usk Castle, a ruin of which not much is left besides a picturesque round tower; neither the Castle nor the country is very remarkable, but we brought home a crimped salmon, for which Usk is famous (and where the crimping is said to be a secret unattainable even to the vendors of Wye and Severn salmon), which was, without exception, the most dainty fish I ever ate. From Usk we returned to Raglan Castle, a most noble and beautiful ruin; there has often been a notion of restoring it, and an estimate was made of the probable expense, which was calculated ...
— The Greville Memoirs (Second Part) - A Journal of the Reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1852 - (Volume 1 of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... instructions for its return to its owner. Then, at my best speed, I hastened down the hill again, reached the grounds of the convent, and approached the door. Perfect rest and freedom from excitement were unattainable until I had learned whether Marie Delhasse was still safe within the old white walls which I saw before me; for, though I could not trace how the change in me had come, nor track its growth, I knew now that if she were there the walls held what was of the greatest ...
— The Indiscretion of the Duchess • Anthony Hope
... thought not of these. His mind was occupied by one little, slender, fair-haired woman, and that one unattainable. Had he analyzed his new mental condition, he might have marvelled that the little winged god could have aimed so straight and let fly so unexpectedly. True love, however, does not come of reasoning, but rather in spite of it. And, to do Jean's Latin race justice, he never thought ...
— Mlle. Fouchette - A Novel of French Life • Charles Theodore Murray
... taught that salvation or reprobation depended on personal deserts, and that the Divine election was merely through prescience of merits. Augustine said that saving grace was supernatural, irresistible, unattainable by human effort. Pelagius said it might be won or resisted by conformity to certain conditions in each person's power. Augustine believed that bodily death was inflicted as a punishment for sin;7 Pelagius, that it was the result of a natural law. The extensive, various ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... have, who come from the wildernesses of life, from the lowly walks and waste places—the madness of those who feed on locusts and wild honey; who, like St. Francis and Savonarola, go forth on hopeless quests for the unattainable ideal, or like John Brown, who burn in the scorching flame all the wisdom of the schools and the courts, and for one glorious day shine forth with their burning lives a beacon by which the world is lighted to its own ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... of God alone. Then, with the utmost tact and delicacy, she touches on a difficult point, and says that when Goethe and Byron attempt to paint the aspirations of a superior being, we admire their breadth of view, and wish we could aid them with our minds to reach the unattainable; but that an author who announces that he has swept to the utmost range of thought shocks us by his vanity, and she begs Balzac to eliminate certain phrases in his book which sound as though he had ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... kings, viceroys, and presidents, and their greatness had long ago ceased to interest or even to amuse him. He was conscious only of an agitation which had already passed through the process of analysis. He loved, he loved the impossible and the unattainable, and it was the exhilaration of this thought that agitated him. He never would be the same again—he would be better. Neither ...
— The Puppet Crown • Harold MacGrath
... as to the true intrinsic nature of physical objects, and if there were good reason to regard them as mental, we could not legitimately reject this opinion merely because it strikes us as strange. The truth about physical objects must be strange. It may be unattainable, but if any philosopher believes that he has attained it, the fact that what he offers as the truth is strange ought not to be made a ground ...
— The Problems of Philosophy • Bertrand Russell
... It is true that she kept her head above the stream, and that the failure of the material event did not frustrate or hinder her ultimate achievement. But Charlotte's was not by any means "a chainless soul". It struggled and hankered after the unattainable. What she attained and realized she realized and attained in her imagination only. She knew nothing of the soul's more secret and intimate possession. And even her imagination waited to some extent upon experience. When Charlotte wrote of passion, of its tragic suffering, or of its ...
— The Three Brontes • May Sinclair
... was not a single person who was capable of giving him sympathy or artistic appreciation. Not least in the pathos of his situation was the simplicity and humility with which he accepted himself, with his whole nature yearning towards an ideal which he knew to be as unattainable as the stars, without impatience or bitterness towards men or fate. If he was not content with what was given him, no one could see it, and he was so filled with the happiness that nature and his ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... heart warmed to him directly, because like most high-bred Arabs, he is so like Don Quixote—only Don Quixote quite in his senses. The sort of innocent sententiousness, and perfectly natural love of fine language and fine sentiments is unattainable to any European, except, I suppose, a Spaniard. It is quite unlike Italian fustian or French sentiment. I suppose to most Europeans it is ridiculous, but I used to cry when the carriers beat the most noble of all knights, ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon
... surroundings. She wandered aimlessly through the forest searching for food which she found in abundance. She ate and rested, for she had no objective as yet. Her freedom was too new to be spoiled by plannings for the future. The haunts of civilized man seemed to her now as vague and unattainable as the half-forgotten substance of a dream. If she could but live on here in peace, waiting, waiting for—him. It was the old hope revived. She knew that he would come some day, if he lived. She had always known that, though recently she had believed that he would come too late. ...
— Tarzan the Terrible • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... slow renunciation of the notions which he imbibed in his youth. What we sacrifice to God, we take away from mankind, and absorb a great part of his best intellectual powers in the pursuit of an unattainable goal. At any rate, the least that we can expect in this respect from the state and society of the future is a complete separation between ecclesiastical and worldly affairs, or an absolute emancipation of the state and the ...
— Men, Women, and Gods - And Other Lectures • Helen H. Gardener
... very informal meal was ended by some excellent coffee in the place of the conventional dessert, after which came a hurried dispersion as they were all going to some political meeting at the East End. Cabs were unattainable and, having secured a couple of link-boys, they set off, apparently ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... you ask me after my articles of domestic wants; I believe they are as usual: the bull-dogs, magnesia, soda-powders, tooth-powders, brushes, and every thing of the kind which are here unattainable. You still ask me to return to England: alas! to what purpose? You do not know what you are requiring. Return I must, probably, some day or other (if I live), sooner or later; but it will not be for pleasure, nor can it end in good. You enquire after my health and SPIRITS in large letters: ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. IV - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... with all those matters I aimed at impartiality, which is an unattainable ideal, but I trust that sincerity and detachment have brought me reasonably close to it. Having no pet theories of my own to champion, my principal standard of judgment is derived from the law of causality and the rules of ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... no longer the same, that a certain portion of the clergy had obtained the control, and that their object, though laudable, was special and quite distinct from mine, I resigned at the end of one year rather than to struggle, probably in vain for what was nearly unattainable." The history of the university through its precarious existence of half a century amply justifies Mr. Gallatin's previsions and retirement. Instead of an American Sorbonne, of which he dreamed, it has never been more than a local ...
— Albert Gallatin - American Statesmen Series, Vol. XIII • John Austin Stevens
... in her days that poverty kept from her to the end, and the cloak was merely a luxury. She would soon have let it slip by as something unattainable had not Hendry encouraged it to rankle in her mind. I cannot say when he first determined that Jess should have a cloak, come the money as it liked, for he was too ashamed of his weakness to admit his project to me. I remember, however, ...
— A Window in Thrums • J. M. Barrie
... go to the office this time, but sought the stores immediately. He found conditions now even worse than before. Every one seemed to have an Uncle Harold for whom was frenziedly being sought the unattainable. If at nine o'clock Jasper had been nervous, at ten he was terrified, and at eleven he was nearly frantic. All power of decision seemed to have left him, and he stumbled vaguely on and on, scarcely knowing what he was doing. It was then that his eye ...
— The Tangled Threads • Eleanor H. Porter
... to say, the mother-tongue of all the senses, into which they must be translated to be of service to the organism. Hence its importance. The parrot is the most intelligent of birds, and its tactual power is also greatest. From this sense it gets knowledge, unattainable by birds which cannot employ their feet as hands. The elephant is the most sagacious of quadrupeds—its tactual range and skill, and the consequent multiplication of experiences, which it owes to its wonderfully ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... nobleman upon his travels,—it is not surprising, we say, that she should be among the favoured individuals who had secured a position there. Undoubtedly, she would have preferred a seat amongst the court dames in the galleries of the tilt-yard, but as this was unattainable, she was obliged to be content; and, indeed, she had no reason to complain, for she saw quite as much as those inside, and was ...
— The Star-Chamber, Volume 2 - An Historical Romance • W. Harrison Ainsworth
... faith is the flight of the soul towards Christ. Therein is one of the special blessednesses of the Christian life, that it has for its object and aim absolutely infinite and unattainable completeness and glory, so that unwearied freshness, inexhaustible buoyancy, endless progress, are the dower of every spirit that truly trusts in Christ. All other aims and objects are limited, transient, and will be left ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... a certain happiness otherwise unattainable. They had come to know each other and to help form each other's characters and to share each other's difficulties in the years when only there is real joy in the struggle of life. They had not postponed their love till, with ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... unreality. More homes where there is no shamefacedness over the want of the luxuries of their neighbors, but a simple content with what it is possible to have honorably; where plain living is a religion, and where there is no insatiable longing for the unattainable. The worship of wealth, the feeling that there is no other good than money, is one of the most degrading features of our modern life. It is a falsehood, too. There is everything good in the world, ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... capacities? We grasp at everything—do so by the very constitution of our natures; and seize—less than nothing. We can not rest without perfection in everything, yet the labor of a life devoted to one thing, only shows us how unattainable it is. I am oppressed with gloom—oh, for light, light, light! Feb. 20th.—Alas! my feelings of discouragement and despondency, instead of diminishing, strengthen every day. I have been ill for the last fortnight; and possibly physical ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... still steadfast in her opinion that honour compelled her to meet him. Probably the very longing to avoid him lent additional weight to the conviction; for she was markedly one of those who sigh for the unattainable—to whom, superlatively, a hope is pleasing because not a possession. And she knew it so well that her intellect was inclined to exaggerate ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... far deeper than sentiment. Indeed, though, every second of the time, I was living so vividly, so cruelly, in the past, I made one heartbroken acknowledgment of the present by beginning with the anachronism of a dry Martini cocktail, which, twelve years previous, was unknown and unattainable in that haunted gallery. That cocktail was a sort of desperate epitaph. It meant that I was alone—alone with my ghosts. Yet it had a certain resurrecting influence, and as I sat there proceeding dreamily with my meal, one face and another would flash before me, and memory after ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... good to himself and evil to his foes. In time the fallacy of this belief becomes apparent to him: he discovers that there are things he cannot do, pleasures which he is unable of himself to procure, pains which even the most potent magician is powerless to avoid. The unattainable good, the inevitable ill, are now ascribed by him to the action of invisible powers, whose favour is joy and life, whose anger is misery and death. Thus magic tends to be displaced by religion, and the sorcerer by the priest. At this ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... that life at its topmost toss irks and pains. Beyond is ever the unattainable, the lure of the infinite ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... would be reached if she gave her hand to Karpathy. A single step would raise her at once into this seemingly unattainable world. ...
— A Hungarian Nabob • Maurus Jokai
... with her. To him, poor fellow, Reardon seemed supremely blessed. That a struggling man of letters should have been able to marry, and such a wife, was miraculous in Biffen's eyes. A woman's love was to him the unattainable ideal; already thirty-five years old, he had no prospect of ever being rich enough to assure himself a daily dinner; marriage was wildly out of the question. Sitting here, he found it very difficult ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing
... then?" continued Rosine, speaking quite freely the very words I should so much have wished to say, but had no address or courage to bring it out: how short some people make the road to a point which, for others, seems unattainable! ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... prisoners in the various fortresses and dungeons of the Papal States. Thirty thousand was the estimate of Mr Freeborn. Thirty thousand was the estimate of Mr Stewart, who, mingling with the Romans, knew well the prevailing opinion. Of course, precise accuracy is unattainable in such a case. No one ever counted these prisoners. No list of them is kept,—none that is open to the public eye at least; but it is well known, that there is scarce a family in Rome which does not mourn some of its members lost to it, and scarce ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie
... the apple tree beside the stream that flowed between a large and a small farm on the Three-Notched Road. As a boy, he would have been puzzled to choose between "Will you go to Heaven?" and "Will you go to Fontenoy?" The one seemed as remote, as unattainable, and as happy as the other. The advantage was possibly with Fontenoy, for he could picture that to himself. He could not have described the mansions in the skies, but, thanks to Jacqueline, he knew every room at Fontenoy. Before he was laid in it, he had known the blue ...
— Lewis Rand • Mary Johnston
... love, too eager to attain, Forgive the fervour that would forge beyond The limits set to mortal joy and pain. Knowing the soul's unmeasured loneliness, My passion must be mingled with distress, As I, despairing, struggle to draw near What is as unattainable as dear. ...
— Last Poems • Laurence Hope
... coolly sent in requisitions for chloroform, which, having been (contrary to the dictates of humanity and to the customs of civilized nations) long since declared by their government "contraband of war," was almost unattainable, and used by our Confederate surgeons only in extreme cases. In all minor, and in some severe, operations the surgeons relied upon the manly fortitude of the patients, and, God bless our brave boys, they bore this cruel test with a courage fully as ...
— Memories - A Record of Personal Experience and Adventure During Four Years of War • Fannie A. (Mrs.) Beers
... came to his mind the ancestral letter which his father had inclosed to him—the message from old Ralph Brandon in the treasure-ship. It was a wild, mad hope; but was it unattainable? This he felt was now the one object that lay before him; this must first be sought after, and nothing else could be attempted or even thought of till it had been tried. If he failed, then other things might ...
— Cord and Creese • James de Mille
... had climbed for a long time and stopped, panting and suffering, the stars appeared to be as far away as ever. He felt as if he ought to have been out of the ravine long before, but the opening looked to be as unattainable ...
— Two Boys in Wyoming - A Tale of Adventure (Northwest Series, No. 3) • Edward S. Ellis
... variety of instruction. But in the culture of the imagination, books, although not the only, are the readiest means of supplying the food convenient for it, and a hundred books may he had where even one work of art of the right sort is unattainable, seeing such must he of some size as well as of thorough excellence. And in variety alone is safety from the danger of the convenient food becoming the ...
— A Dish Of Orts • George MacDonald
... great the difficulty of getting rid of these distorting influences and facing such questions in a perfectly dry light, nobody suggests that objective truth on such matters is non-existent or for ever unattainable. A claim for objective validity for the moral judgement does not mean a claim for infallibility on behalf of any individual Conscience. We may make mistakes in Morals just as we may make mistakes in Science, or even in pure Mathematics. ...
— Philosophy and Religion - Six Lectures Delivered at Cambridge • Hastings Rashdall
... is no such ladder to place and fame as their fellow-men. Over their crushed and trampled backs, or with a hand in their pocket, ambition or greed can climb to heights which would be hopelessly unattainable but for the unwilling foothold of another's disadvantage. La Mothe? Who the deuce was La Mothe? Beaufoy neither knew nor cared. He had his first commission in his pocket, a good horse between his knees, the warm sunshine of the May morning lapping him round with all ...
— The Justice of the King • Hamilton Drummond
... dropping off, when he remembered that he had still not decided how to pay for the funeral. He was wide awake again at once. That problem had to be solved without more ado—and suddenly he saw a gleam of hope—is wasn't so unattainable after all—he might meet the cost of the funeral and maintain himself into the bargain, at any rate for a start. His drowsiness fell from him, he slipped out of the cave and ...
— Seven Icelandic Short Stories • Various
... tell me that you love me because you cannot bear to be resisted, and want to master me. You liked me at first because I treated you and all men with indifference. You resolved to have me because I seemed unattainable. This ...
— The Story of an African Farm • (AKA Ralph Iron) Olive Schreiner
... do. They prefer being treated like dogs. Is it nothing that we have met heart to heart for one sweet moment, that you have rested a moment in my arms? To me it is a glimpse of the unattainable heaven of love. (Going up to her.) Kiss ...
— The Black Cat - A Play in Three Acts • John Todhunter
... anecdote, as well as of instructive detail, presents itself. We may travel in a carriage and four—from morn 'till night—and sweep county after county, in pursuit of all that is exquisite, and rare, and precious, and unattainable in other quarters: but I doubt if our horses' heads can be turned in a direction better calculated to answer all the ends in view than ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... the life and walk in God's strength has little attraction. But some there are with whom it is not thus. They do wonder if these words really mean what they say, and if the wonderful life each one of them speaks of is simply an unattainable ideal, or meant to be realised in flesh and blood. The more they study them, the more they feel that they are spoken as for daily life. And yet they appear too high. Oh that they would believe that God sent his Almighty Son, and His Holy Spirit, indeed to bring us and fit us for a life and walk from ...
— The Ministry of Intercession - A Plea for More Prayer • Andrew Murray
... of musing and speculation had passed over the young man's head, when one day, as he was feeling unusually disconsolate, and wishing for unattainable things—Cornelia among others—he became aware, through some subtle channel of sensation, that somebody was standing in the door-way. He was lying in such a position that he could not see the door, so, after waiting a few moments, he exclaimed, ...
— Bressant • Julian Hawthorne
... sentiment of distance so acute that often it ends by wearing itself out in a few days. Far or near was all one to me, as if one could never get any further but also never any nearer to her secret: the state like that of some strange wild faiths that get hold of mankind with the cruel mystic grip of unattainable perfection, robbing them of both liberty and felicity on earth. A faith presents one with some hope, though. But I had no hope, and not even desire as a thing outside myself, that would come and go, exhaust or excite. It was in me just like life ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... was denied it. All the favour I could obtain was a promise to be waited on in the morning; and then was left by myself under a hundred locks and bolts, with a bit of candle, after finding that the words of my jailors were few, their orders peremptory, and their favours unattainable. ...
— Love Romances of the Aristocracy • Thornton Hall
... the Beekman family, and Chris had heard that Dr. Hoffman was considered a great catch. She was almost twenty and had never kept company yet. Young men called at the house, to be sure, and attended her home from parties, but the most desirable ones seemed unattainable. ...
— A Little Girl in Old New York • Amanda Millie Douglas
... to be the purpose of life, for when was anything ordained with an unattainable purpose?... But life, which, but for duty, seems always sad enough to me, appears sadder than usual when I try to look at it from the point of view of ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... or fool, it was not for him! Madame Chalice was his friendly inquisitor, not his enemy; she endured him for some talent he had shown, for the apparent sincerity of his love for the cause; but that was all. Yet she was ever in this dream of his, and he felt that she would always be; the unattainable, the undeserved, more splendid than his cause itself—the cause for which he would give—what would ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... himself into a personality which will be the more respected the more pronounced, decided, and unchangeable it manifests itself. But would he assume a mask, enact a part far removed from his own form ideals and unattainable to the plasticity of his true nature, he fails miserably, is called a scoundrel and a knave and is indeed ...
— The Bride of Dreams • Frederik van Eeden
... fixed, more compelling. Since he had seen that look on her face and that blush he was sure of his ground; he knew that, given time and peace, the wheel of fate, which had already taken an upward turn for him, would soon carry him to the summit of his desires—the woman whom he loved was no longer unattainable and she had remained ...
— A Bride of the Plains • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... self-abuse is longing for the unattainable. Sometimes a person sets her mind on a certain thing. If that goal is an honorable one, she should make every effort to attain it but if circumstances over which she has no control make that goal impossible of attainment she should turn her thoughts in another direction. ...
— Herself - Talks with Women Concerning Themselves • E. B. Lowry
... and as clearly as possible, we shall call attention particularly to a contradiction in which the moderns are often involved. They call the ancients their teachers, they acknowledge in their works an unattainable excellence, yet they depart both in theory and practice far from the maxims which the ancients continually observed. In starting from this important point and in returning to it often, we shall find others about which something falls to ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... at length alone with her. At last, after two years of torture, of resignation, of dissimulation, God had granted him this hour, for which he had so long yearned, which he had so long considered unattainable. Now it was ...
— Henry VIII And His Court • Louise Muhlbach |
