"Unerring" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... which the influence of this story mainly depends, and which we despair of being able to instil by a philosophical disquisition on the features of the age. A few pages of illustration will serve our purpose better, perhaps, than volumes of historical description. There is no more unerring index to the character of a people than the streets ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... the schoolmaster, behind his back in Drumtochty, because we loved him, was true to the tradition of his kind, and had an unerring scent for "pairts" in his laddies. He could detect a scholar in the egg, and prophesied Latinity from a boy that seemed fit only to be a cowherd. It was believed that he had never made a mistake in judgment, and it was not his blame if the embryo scholar did not come to birth. "Five ...
— Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush • Ian Maclaren
... the monarch his father standing in the ford with Ceat, son of Magach, at one side, and Connall Cearnach at the other, to guard him, he grasped his battle-stone quickly and dexterously, and threw it with all his strength, and with unerring aim, at the king his father; and the massive stone passed with a swift rotatory motion towards the king, and despite the efforts of his two brave guardians, it struck him on the breast, and laid him prostrate in the ford. The king, however, recovered from the shock, arose, and ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack
... of death the crews repair: Rodmond unerring o'er his head suspends The barbed steel, and ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... quelled the Trojans' lust, And laid the labour of the gods in dust, Before the towering Muse began her flight, And drew the hero raging in the fight, 40 Engaged in tented fields and rolling floods, Or slaughtering mortals, or a match for gods. And here, perhaps, by fate's unerring doom, Some mighty bard lies hid in years to come, That shall in William's godlike acts engage, And with his battles warm a future age. Hibernian fields shall here thy conquests show, And Boyne be sung when it has ceased to flow; Here Gallic ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... instantaneous. Silently, but with unerring certainty, something small, round, and deadly, fell plumb from the library ceiling to where the settle had formerly stood against the hearthstone. Finding nothing there but vacancy to expend itself upon, it swung about for a moment ...
— The Filigree Ball • Anna Katharine Green
... lords, I am willing to confess that they cannot judge of events to come with such unerring and demonstrative knowledge as their opponents can obtain of them after they have happened; and they are inclined to pay all necessary deference to the great sagacity of those wonderful prognosticators, who can so exactly foresee the past. They only ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 10. - Parlimentary Debates I. • Samuel Johnson
... about to walk in the deep mud of the street, or the snow and water of spring, if she would escape defilement to either her dress or her slippers. As the power of direction of these human missiles is by no means unerring, notwithstanding so much practice, one's own person, and all parts of his person, are exposed to the random shots of this universal foe of American civilised life; and often he finds, on different parts of his dress, proofs abundant ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 425 - Volume 17, New Series, February 21, 1852 • Various
... week,[2102] 136 new deputies enter their names on the club's register. In the Assembly the party numbers about 250 members. On passing all the posts of the fortress in review, we may estimate the besiegers as occupying one-third of them, and perhaps more. Their siege for two years has been carried on with unerring instinct, the extraordinary spectacle presenting itself of an entire nation legally overcome by a troop ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 3 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 2 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... Devil's Tavern, Temple Bar.] Jocund and boon; where at the entrance stands A stripling, who with scrapes and humil cringe Greets us in winning speech, and accent bland: With lightest bound, and safe unerring step, He skips before, and nimbly climbs the stairs. Melampus thus, panting with lolling tongue, And wagging tail, gambols and frisks before His sequent lord, from pensive walk return'd, Whether in shady wood or pasture green, And waits ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... curious dream; I thought the three Great planets that are drawing near the sun With such unerring certainty begun To talk together in a mighty glee. They spoke of vast convulsions which would be Throughout the solar system—the rare fun Of watching haughty stars drop, one by one, And vanish in a ...
— Poems of Cheer • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... fell softly, silently, until it became a ghostly mist that hid the town—hid the very houses on opposite sides of the street, and through this flurry Bill shuffled with unerring instinct, dragging Mr. Shrimplin from lamp-post to lamp-post, until presently down the street a long row of lights blazed red in ...
— The Just and the Unjust • Vaughan Kester
... the same, that thereby the memory and love for the poet and the man may be cherished and perpetuated." Mr. Ordway was made president of the board, and in his hands the office has been no sinecure. His unflagging zeal and his unerring good taste have resulted not only in putting the ancient house into the perfect order of the olden time, but in fertilizing the wornout fields, and preserving for future ages one of the finest specimens in the country of the colonial farmhouse of New England. Mr. Whittier's niece, to whom he left ...
— Whittier-land - A Handbook of North Essex • Samuel T. Pickard
... Mines of oriental learning were laid bare for the students of the Jewish and Arabic traditions. What we may call the Aryan and the Semitic revelations were for the first time subjected to something like a critical comparison. With unerring instinct the men of the Renaissance named the voluminous subject-matter of scholarship Litterae Humaniores ("the more human literature"), the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... force superior to the force of instinct had traced a long, greenish canal, calm, peaceful, deliberate; that flowed steadily across the country, across the crumbling stones, across the obedient forest, on its clear and unerring, unhurrying way from its distant source on the horizon to the same tranquil, shining lake. And I had at my feet before me the image of the two great ...
— Wisdom and Destiny • Maurice Maeterlinck
... dark that there was no sign of the boat; but Wolf Larsen held back through the frightful turmoil as if guided by unerring instinct. This time, though we were continually half-buried, there was no trough in which to be swept, and we drifted squarely down upon the upturned boat, badly smashing it as ...
— The Sea-Wolf • Jack London
... parts of Miss Edgeworth's earlier stories, and of Miss Mitford's sketches and descriptions, and not a little of Mrs. Opie's, that exhibit the same fine and penetrating spirit of observations, the same softness and delicacy of hand, and unerring truth of delineation, to which we have alluded as characterizing the purer specimens of female art. The same distinguishing traits of woman's spirit are visible through the grief and piety of Lady Russel, and the ...
— The Young Lady's Mentor - A Guide to the Formation of Character. In a Series of Letters to Her Unknown Friends • A Lady
... somehow, reminded him of the miraculous sequence of facts as he knew them; the unerring accuracy with which he, quite unthinkingly and almost without volition, had solved problem after problem, although the chances were totally against him. He became more and more convinced that he himself had practically no ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint
... your Honour and this Honourable Board please to give me leave, I would speak a Word or two upon this solemn Occasion. Altho the unerring Providence of God has brought you to the Chair of Government in a cloudy and tempestuous season, yet you have this for your Encouragement, that the people you Have to do with are a part of the Israel of God, and you may expect to have of the Prudence and Patience of Moses communicated ...
— A Half Century of Conflict - Volume I - France and England in North America • Francis Parkman
... Gobble. The knight was moved at this scene, which he could not help comparing, in his own mind, to what would appear upon a much more awful occasion, when the cries of the widow and the orphan, the injured and oppressed, would be uttered at the tribunal of an unerring Judge, against the villanous and insolent authors of ...
— The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves • Tobias Smollett
... source of the beautiful road-side fountain, which traverses a natural subterranean passage-way between these two distant points. These little isolated clumps of waving trees, rearing their green heads conspicuously above the surrounding barrenness, are an unerring indication of both water and human habitations. Often one sees them suddenly when least expected, nestling in a little depression high up some mountain-slope far away, the little dark-green area looking almost black in contrast with the whitish color of the hills. These are literally "oases ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... signal but the promptings of the impulse that snatched, unerring, at opportunity—the men, Delaney and Christian from one side, the sheriff and the deputy from the other, rushed in. They did not fire. It was Dyke alive they wanted. One of them had a riata snatched from a saddle-pommel, and with this they tried to ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... man, throwing the ear of corn with unerring aim at the head of the nearest porker and beckoning to Rodney with both hands. "Come out of the road. Come up behind the bresh and be ...
— Rodney The Partisan • Harry Castlemon
... Already, with her unerring instinct for power, Imogen knew that Sir Basil was interested in her. There was only, to be sure, a languid pleasure in the sense of power over a person already, as it were, so bespoken, so in bondage to other altars; but, though without a trace of coquetry, the smile quietly claimed ...
— A Fountain Sealed • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... her cheeks were flushed, she passed out of the room. In a moment Mrs. Falchion entered. There was something new in her carriage, in her person. She came towards me, held out her hand, and said, with the same old half-quizzical tone: "Have you, with your unerring instinct, guessed that I was leaving, and ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... ray of Him who formed the whole; A Glory circling round the soul! 1140 I grant my love imperfect, all That mortals by the name miscall; Then deem it evil, what thou wilt; But say, oh say, hers was not Guilt! She was my Life's unerring Light: That quenched—what beam shall break my night?[ei] Oh! would it shone to lead me still, Although to death or deadliest ill! Why marvel ye, if they who lose This present joy, this future hope, 1150 No more with Sorrow meekly cope; In phrensy then their ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Vol. 3 (of 7) • Lord Byron
... we understood all sweet things; and we could detect the sweets of a fairy story by an unerring science of our own. We never cared for such useless things as knowledge. We only cared for truth. And our unsophisticated little hearts knew well where the Crystal Palace of Truth lay and how to reach it. But to-day ...
— The Hungry Stones And Other Stories • Rabindranath Tagore
... Pomponio's first thought now was for his own safety, and he took the shortest course to the forests south of the mission. As much at home among the great trees as at the mission, he made his way into their depths with unerring aim, in spite of the Egyptian darkness, until he reached a slight thinning of the trees, where he halted. The spot, mentioned at the beginning of this tale, was a favorite of Pomponio, and one he visited from time to time, when he wished to be free ...
— Old Mission Stories of California • Charles Franklin Carter
... close at hand, almost at her ear. Something hurtled through the air, a stone flung with an unerring aim which struck the bull in the forehead. The gate opened with her and she felt herself drawn through the opening while the switch fell with a ...
— Love of Brothers • Katharine Tynan
... of prayer died from her lips, when there came into her chamber the three unerring Fates who spin the destinies of men. White-robed and garlanded, they stood beside the babe, and with unwearied fingers drew out the lines of his untried life. Clotho held the golden distaff in her hand, and twirled and twisted the delicate ...
— Hero Tales • James Baldwin
... way up difficult places calls for the sixth sense, instinct, which cannot always be acquired by experience. Wild animals possess this "instinct" to a great degree; but human beings are not so unerring. One man may be blest with it, but another, with equal experience, will be unreliable. There is no accounting for the wide difference in their accuracy, it exists—that ...
— A Mountain Boyhood • Joe Mills
... pollen of another variety or merely of another individual of the same variety is often strongly prepotent over its own pollen, when both are placed at the same time on the same stigma. In those great families of plants containing many thousand allied species, the stigma of each distinguishes with unerring certainty its own pollen from that of ...
— The Effects of Cross & Self-Fertilisation in the Vegetable Kingdom • Charles Darwin
... it will rest with the wisdom of Congress to decide on the course best adapted to such a state of things; and bringing with them, as they do, from every part of the Union the sentiments of our constituents, my confidence is strengthened that in forming this decision they will, with an unerring regard to the essential rights and interests of the nation, weigh and compare the painful alternatives out of which a choice is to be made. Nor should I do justice to the virtues which on other occasions have marked the character of our fellow-citizens if I did not cherish an ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 3 (of 4) of Volume 1: Thomas Jefferson • Edited by James D. Richardson
... was about. And so on and so on; and with each new marvel the astonishment at his accuracy rose higher and higher. They thought he must surely strike an uncertain place some time; but no, he never had to hesitate, he always knew, and always with unerring precision. I saw that if this thing went on I should lose my supremacy, this fellow would capture my following, I should be left out in the cold. I must put a cog in his wheel, and do it right ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... Sue's heels, stern, alert, unyielding. Richard Lambert was probing the secret of the mysterious prince, with the unerring ...
— The Nest of the Sparrowhawk • Baroness Orczy
... right, it reconducts us to the left. If we cultivate this or that faculty which we think that we possess or which we would like to possess, it hides it under some other which we did not expect and did not wish for. It saves us from a danger by imparting to our limbs unforeseen and unerring movements and actions which they had never made before and which are contrary to those which they had been taught to make: it knows that the hour has not yet come when it will be useless to defend ourselves. ...
— The Unknown Guest • Maurice Maeterlinck
... suppose that Dr Jones would have brought the water unless he had been directed. She would tell this to Theobald, and get him to see it in the . . . and yet perhaps it would be better not. The insight of women upon matters of this sort was deeper and more unerring than that of men. It was a woman and not a man who had been filled most completely with the whole fulness of the Deity. But why had they not treasured up the water after it was used? It ought never, never to have ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... appeared to be moving to and fro. The silence and loneliness no longer seemed to be absolute. A few metres from where I was men were living and breathing, plotting and planning, unconscious of the net which the unerring hand of a skilful fowler had drawn round them ...
— Castles in the Air • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... things—and which, be it said in passing, was due to Mr. Palgrave's giving way at that point to his personal enthusiasm—the "Golden Treasury" in form, in scope, and in arrangement, as well as in almost unerring taste, is the best model of what an anthology should be which is to be found in ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume I (of X) - Greece • Various
... genial and lovable is Balder, the Northern Sun-god, than his Grecian counterpart, the lord of the unerring bow, the Southern genius of light, and poesy, and music! Balder dwelt in his palace of Breidablick, or Broadview; and in the magical spring-time of the North, when the fair maiden Iduna breathed into the blue air her genial breath, he set ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... doing its work in perfect silence and with a motionless grace, that seems to hide a capricious and not always governable power, taking nothing away from the material stores of the earth. Not for it the unerring precision of steel moved by white steam and living by red fire and fed with black coal. The other seems to draw its strength from the very soul of the world, its formidable ally, held to obedience by the frailest bonds, like a fierce ghost captured in a snare of something even finer than spun ...
— The Mirror of the Sea • Joseph Conrad
... person who has this strongly developed, if he once goes to a place, whether a room, or a street in a city, or a road in any part of the country, knows the way again, and can find it by instinct ever after. In the same way any one gifted with this almost unerring sense of locality, can find any book on any shelf in any part of a library where he has once been. He knows, in like manner, on which side of the page he saw any given passage in a book, which impressed him at the time, although he may never have had the volume in his hand more than once. ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford
... and also ennobled my instincts; for, though his marvellous integrity and his modest disposition prevented him from throwing himself into philosophical discussions, he had an innate love of justice, and he judged all questions of sentiment and morality with unerring wisdom. He acquired an ascendency over me which the abbe had never been able to acquire, owing to the attitude of mutual distrust in which we had been placed from the beginning. He revealed to me the wonders of a large ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... of the Argentine every Gaucho is a trailer or rastreador. On those vast feeding-grounds of a million cattle, whose tracks intersect each other in every direction, the herdsman can distinguish with unerring accuracy the footprints of his own peculiar charge. When an animal is missing from the herd, he throws himself upon his horse, gallops to the spot where he remembers having seen it last, gazes for a moment ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Number 9, July, 1858 • Various
... younger officers at the official favouritism which left them in obscurity, and by the apathy of soldiers who had lost heart. Neither his skill nor the natural strength of their positions in Friuli and Carinthia could avail against veterans flushed with victory and marshalled with unerring sagacity. The rest of the war only served to emphasize the truth of Napoleon's later statement, that the moral element constitutes three-fourths of an army's strength. The barriers offered by the River Tagliamento and the many commanding heights of the Carnic ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... that pierced with unerring skill the one joint in his armour he knew to be vulnerable, the judge took a minute in which to control his rage and then addressing the half- averted ...
— Dark Hollow • Anna Katharine Green
... age is a totally different one to the spirit of their own childhood's age. It is shorn of reverence and unquestioning obedience to elders, and is an independent creature who will only obey through conviction of good or personal benefit. Children are unerring and pitiless judges of those placed over them, and how can a mother, just because she is a mother, expect respect and reverence in her children if she earns their contempt ...
— Three Things • Elinor Glyn
... criteria of life as we commonly think of it. If oxygen could go wrong and mistake some other gas for hydrogen and thus learn not to mistake it any more, we should say oxygen was alive. The older life is, the more unerring it becomes in respect of things about which it is conversant—the more like, in fact, it becomes to such a thing as the force of gravity, both as regards ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... meam! An Ahab is he, and a Jerobeam, Who the people from faith's unerring way, To the worship of idols would ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... an Irish landlord—or, indeed any landlord—should lay down, as his fixed and unerring guide, is ever to remember that his tenantry are his best friends—his only patrons—and that instead of looking down upon them with contempt, neglect, or even indifference, he should feel that they are his chief benefactors, ...
— Valentine M'Clutchy, The Irish Agent - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... Tell took his thoughtless nephew with him, on a hunting excursion, since it was necessary he should find some better occupation than throwing stones. After several days they returned, loaded with the skins of the chamois that had been slain by the unerring arrow ...
— Heroes Every Child Should Know • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... man is said to pay his oaths to God because he performs what he swears to do, or because, from the very fact that he calls upon God to witness, he recognizes Him as possessing universal knowledge and unerring truth. ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... was about to pass under one of the dripping extensions of the elevated, a great splotch of grease detached itself from the ironwork and struck, with unerring precision, directly in the ...
— The Flaw in the Sapphire • Charles M. Snyder
... dozen questions; he restrained himself and asked none. Richard was not so fond of fiction as to invite it. He sent the report and interview to the Daily Tory, and dispatched a private message to Mr. Bayard, giving him the news and congratulating him on his unerring gifts ...
— The President - A novel • Alfred Henry Lewis
... shouldn't have thought of using that word. But, he is bringing its gray hairs in sorrow to the grave—or will, if he remains in office, instead of turning it over to a well-balanced man of good judgment and unerring taste—say, like one ...
— Raspberry Jam • Carolyn Wells
... is, supposing the fire to be within one square of the place where the steamer is located. The object in locating a machine at any point is to protect that immediate vicinity; and it is therefore absolutely necessary to have it available in the shortest space of time, and that with unerring certainty. We think that reliability is of the greatest importance to the protection of a city from fire, as everything is dependent on the working of such apparatus in time; and for this reason no expense should be spared ...
— A Catechism of the Steam Engine • John Bourne
... of his party. Ernest had retired behind his friends for the same purpose. His eye, however, never left the ball. He saw a stick uplifted which he thought would strike it. So it did, and the ball came flying towards him. His quick eye saw it coming, and with unerring aim he struck it over the heads of both parties, who, not knowing what had become of it, broke asunder, and enabled him to pass between them. He reached the neighbourhood of the ball at the same moment that Blackall, having seen it coming, got close up to it. ...
— Ernest Bracebridge - School Days • William H. G. Kingston
... possibly fancy yourself on the premises of a clockmaker who works by steam. Your attention is speedily concentrated on a small brass box, not larger than an eight-day pendule, the works of which are impelled by steam. This is a self-acting weighing machine, which, with unerring precision, tells which sovereigns are of standard weight, and which are light, and of its own accord separates the one from the other. Imagine a long trough or spout—half a tube that has been split into two sections—of such a semi-circumference ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... watery deeps and fiery ways We march at thy command, Led to possess the promis'd place By thine unerring hand. ...
— The Psalms of David - Imitated in the Language of The New Testament - And Applied to The Christian State and Worship • Isaac Watts
... her lucid bosom swells, Courts her young navies, and the storm repels; High on a rock, amid the troubled air, HOPE stood sublime, and wav'd her golden hair. "Hear me," she cried, "ye rising realms record Time's opening scenes, and Truth's unerring word: There shall broad streets their stately walls extend, The circus widen, and the crescent bend; There, ray'd from cities o'er the cultur'd land, Shall bright canals and solid roads expand. Embellish'd villas crown the landscape scene, Farms wave with gold, and orchards blush between; ...
— The History of Tasmania, Volume I (of 2) • John West
... forth, though evidently with much less heart than before. A few were very violent. The Dublin University Magazine, after the traditional Hibernian fashion, charged Mr. Darwin with seeking "to displace God by the unerring action of vagary," and with being "resolved to hunt God out of the world." But most notable from the side of the older Church was the elaborate answer to Darwin's book by the eminent French Catholic physician, Dr. Constantin James. In his work, On Darwinism, ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... common minds to comprehend such a novel idea? If a century later, with all the blaze of reviving art and science and learning, the most learned people ridiculed the idea that the earth revolved around the sun, even when it was proved by all the certitudes of mathematical demonstration and unerring observations, how could the prejudiced and narrow-minded priests of the time of Columbus, who controlled the most important affairs of state, be made to comprehend that an unknown ocean, full of terrors, could be crossed by frail ships, and that even a successful voyage would open marts ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VI • John Lord
... ravines and the elevation of rocks and precipices would have been changed into the unerring evidences of fertility and luxuriance of vegetation afforded by the dense forests and gigantic pine-trees of the coast district. We can scarce estimate the transition of feeling and change which would have been produced in their estimate of the country, if they ...
— Handbook to the new Gold-fields • R. M. Ballantyne
... He could wield a light battle-axe, and with his sword could turn aside or sever an arrow however sharply shot at him, provided that he had time to mark its flight. With a quarter-staff he was a match for any youth on the estate, and he could hurl a dart with unerring aim. ...
— Wulf the Saxon - A Story of the Norman Conquest • G. A. Henty
... follow? and what would come of the great purpose to which he had dedicated his life and energies? Was this a time for fear or shrinking back? No, surely. So he knelt down and asked for guidance of him who is unerring Wisdom to every one of his children. And then he retired to rest, and slept soundly ...
— Amos Huntingdon • T.P. Wilson
... acme of finesse. He angles soft to the side-lines, stop volleys the hardest drives successfully. He picks openings with an unerring eye. His overhead lacks "punch," but is steady ...
— The Art of Lawn Tennis • William T. Tilden, 2D
... impossible to conceive that a man, who, in other respects, made such booty of the world around him, whose observation of manners was so minute, and whose insight into character and motives, as if he had been one of God's spies, was so unerring that we accept it without question, as we do Nature herself, and find it more consoling to explain his confessedly immense superiority by attributing it to a happy instinct rather than to the conscientious ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... Stillman was not unfamiliar to any San Franciscan who scanned the social news with even a casual glance, and Claire had a vague remembrance that Mrs. Condor also figured socially, but in a rather more inclusive way than her companion. At all events, it was plain that her mother, with unerring feminine insight, had placed the pair to her satisfaction. Already the elder woman was contriving to let Stillman know something of her antecedents. She was Emily Carrol, also of Rincon Hill, and of course he knew her two sisters—Mrs. Thomas Wynne and Mrs. Edward Finch-Brown! ...
— The Blood Red Dawn • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... "the grave of the Mahommedan girl." The fate of the inquisitor was quite unsuspected; and he might have been still believed to have disappeared supernaturally, or perished by some less awful visitation, had not unerring records thrown ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XVII. No. 473., Saturday, January 29, 1831 • Various
... Sunrise turned again to Victor Burleigh as its highest hope. Although this was his first game for the season, he had never failed to bring victory to the Sunrise banners, and in all his base-ball practice he was as unerring as he was speedy. And then success was his habit anyhow. So "Burleigh at the bat" was the slogan now from the summit of the college ridge to the farthest corners of Lagonda Ledge; and idol worship were insignificant compared to the adulation poured out on him. ...
— A Master's Degree • Margaret Hill McCarter
... persons, but under fashions and persons, an outward presentment of life and of themselves, which had a kind of immaculate grace and discretion about them, as if Raphael himself had already brought his unerring gift of selection to bear upon it all for motives of art. With life in those streets of Perugia, as with nature, with the work of his masters, with the mere exercises of his fellow-students, his hand rearranges, refines, renews, ...
— Miscellaneous Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... forth long before our author is ready to present him to our (theoretically) astonished eyes. The whole village may be deceived by the venerable stranger, with his white hair and benevolent spectacles, but our unerring eye instantly discerns in him Black Donald, the robber-captain; and if we do not tremble for our heroine, it is only because we are morally certain that her deadly peril is only an excuse for her inevitable ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... event of the war, implores Venus, who, as the offspring of his element, naturally venerates him, to procure from Vulcan a deadly sword and a pair of unerring pistols for the Duke. They are accordingly made, and superbly decorated. The sheath of the sword, like the shield of Achilles, is carved, in exquisitely fine miniature, with scenes from the common life of the period; a dance at Almack's a boxing match ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Contibutions to Knight's Quarterly Magazine] • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... reached, as regards any habit, the creature will cease trying to improve; on which the repetition of the habit will become stable, and hence capable of more unerring transmission—but at the same time improvement will cease; the habit will become fixed, and be perhaps transmitted at an earlier and earlier age, till it has reached that date of manifestation which shall be found most agreeable to the other habits of the creature. It will also be manifested, as ...
— Selections from Previous Works - and Remarks on Romanes' Mental Evolution in Animals • Samuel Butler
... now in joy's excesses, Nor in the happy life of love secure, But in the unerring strength the heart possesses, Of conflicts ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... The unerring aim of our gunners paralysed, for a time, the initiative of the Turkish Staff. This tremendous reply was unexpected. And the British shells burst in their magazines, their supply depots, their headquarters dug-outs in a startling way. Never was gunnery so deadly. Never was slaughter so sure. ...
— The Kangaroo Marines • R. W. Campbell
... declared, and at a time when he thought himself dying, that he did not give any offence to the man who wounded him; that he had even quitted his arms, to induce him to look upon him as a friend, when the savage threw his spear at about the distance of ten yards with a skill that was fatally unerring. When the spear was extracted, which was not until suppuration took place, it was found to have entered his body under the left arm, to the depth of seven inches and a half. It was armed for five or six inches from the point with ragged pieces ...
— An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, Vol. 1 • David Collins
... receives my gift, A simple piece of bread; But to her mouth she doth not lift The love in bread conveyed, Till on my lips, unerring, swift, The morsel ...
— A Hidden Life and Other Poems • George MacDonald
... trouble-the poison of a war upon society-the excitement of seeking revenge of the world. She cannot at all times trust her memory, for it has given out in the watchfulness necessary to the respectability of her house, which she regards as the Gibraltar from which she turns upon society her unerring guns. "Lord, gentlemen," she says in quick accents, "the reputation of this house-I watch it as our senator to Congress does his-is my bank stock; and on the respectability and behavior of my customers, who are of the first families, depends my dividends. Madame Flamingo wouldn't-gentlemen, ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams
... wrong; because he would not oppose that which he could not overcome, and because his whole life was occupied in doing right. It is against the prophetic character of Washington's mission, ever crowned with success; against his wisdom, which was most profound; and against his judgment, which was unerring,—to presume his hostility to slavery as wrong, or his opposition to it in a moral point of view, when he knew, as we know, the emancipation of the slaves to be wrong in itself, and impossible, even if right or desirable. It is plain, then, ...
— The Right of American Slavery • True Worthy Hoit
... an unerring instinct. Set a greedy man before a dish of fruit and he will make no mistake, but take the choicest even without seeing it. In the same way, if you allow a girl who is well brought up to choose a husband ...
— Cousin Betty • Honore de Balzac
... as we may well believe, those Irish lords had really been the victims of deception, and had not, as a body, been corrupted by the sacrilegious gift of suppressed monasteries, the people, their clansmen, prompted by the vivid impressions and unerring instincts of religious faith and patriotic nationality, which were ever living in their breasts, resented the weakness of their chieftains as a national defection and a real apostasy, and took immediate steps to bring the lords to their senses, and to prevent ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... time on the wing, struck to and fro with unerring aim, and to all appearances would never have touched the ground, if Lord Curryfin had not seen, or fancied he saw, symptoms of fatigue on the part of his fair antagonist. He therefore, instead of returning ...
— Gryll Grange • Thomas Love Peacock
... old, Village wights true and bold, Unerring in hand and in eye, Learned skill in their craft With yew-bow and shaft, Wand to ...
— A History of Horncastle - from the earliest period to the present time • James Conway Walter
... long time I had to try and keep cool under the most violent treatment by a clique of students, among whom my predecessor had raised up enemies for me; and by the unerring certainty of my conducting I had to overcome the initial opposition of the orchestra, which had been set ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... essentials of that conflict with the present attempt to elevate King Cotton to the throne of this Republic. It is close enough to show that the same great rules have hitherto governed human action with unerring fidelity. The Government displayed at the outset the same vacillation; the people were apparently as thoroughly indifferent to the Hanoverian cause as the Northern merchants, before the fall of Sumter, to the prosperity of Lincoln's administration. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 48, October, 1861 • Various
... sent it through the left hand of his adversary, who instantly dropped his bow. At the same moment it seemed as though the whole band of vikings had become suddenly convinced that they stood exposed to the shafts of a man who could use them with unerring certainty, for they turned with one consent and fled into the woods—each man seeking shelter ...
— Erling the Bold • R.M. Ballantyne
... shut out from his rightful heritage, and the victim, if not of a conspiracy, of a cabal. His school playmates and close friends, Taine, Edmond About and Th. Gautier, might be on his side; perhaps, with reservations, Rossini and a few other eminent associates also. But the prescient, unerring verdict of the collective ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... main compartment, he briefly informed the girls as to what had happened. All three donned the suits and stationed themselves at the upper opening. Rapidly, but with unerring precision, the two ships were brought into place and held together by the attractor. As the doors were opened, there was a screaming hiss as the air of the vessels escaped through the narrow crack between them. The passengers saw the moisture in the air turn into snow, and saw ...
— The Skylark of Space • Edward Elmer Smith and Lee Hawkins Garby
... of Dave, whatever it was, with the old woman at the Towers, whom Lady Gwen had nigh lost her wits about—so folks said. "But tha knowas what o'or Gwen be!" said Mrs. Keziah. Gwen's reputation with all the countryside was that of waywardness and wilfulness carried to excess, but always with an unerring ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... there is plenty of scope for the intelligent and wary flatterer, and some room for the honest man of superior gifts, who is sufficiently free from Oriental prejudice to do energetically the thing which comes in his way, distancing all competitors for the favours of fortune by sheer industry and unerring foresight. ...
— Mr. Isaacs • F. Marion Crawford
... the first to speak, for he was a man of quick and unerring determinations that led to actions as sudden as they were bold and brilliant, and what Dolores had told him of her quarrel with her father was enough to rouse his whole energy at once. At all costs she ...
— In The Palace Of The King - A Love Story Of Old Madrid • F. Marion Crawford
... for some cover where they might have found safety. Two or three times Brun was on the point of being caught, but each time the dragoon or Swiss who had got up to him fell, struck by Francezet's unerring bullet. The chase lasted four hours, during which time five officers, thirty dragoons, and fifty Swiss were baffled by two men, one of whom Francezet was almost a boy, being only twenty years old! Then the two ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... the simple-minded—how sweet the people of the Countryside—how inevitable and unerring is the voice of the people!" As a matter of truth, unless directed by some strong man's vision, the voice of the people has never yet given utterance to constructive truth; and the same may be said of those who cater to the public taste in politics or the so-called arts. The ...
— Child and Country - A Book of the Younger Generation • Will Levington Comfort
... she played with apparent absorption, her ears were strained to catch the sound of their voices in the garden behind her, the girl's light chatter, her companion's brief, cynical laugh. For she knew by the sure intuition which is a woman's inner and unerring vision, that jest or trifle as he might his keen brain was actively employed in some subtle investigation too obscure for her to fathom, and that behind his badinage and behind his cynicism there sat a ...
— The Keeper of the Door • Ethel M. Dell
... dear fellow, in that case, why didn't you get him a pauper's funeral? There would have been something poetic in that. You have an unerring ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... due subordination to the laws. Herman Husbands, the head of the Regulators, has been denounced by a late writer, as a "turbulent and seditious character." If such he was, then John Ashe and Hugh Waddell, for opposing the stamp law, were equally turbulent and seditious. Time, that unerring test of principles and truth, has proved that the spirit of liberty which animated the Regulators, was the true spirit which subsequently led to ...
— Sketches of Western North Carolina, Historical and Biographical • C. L. Hunter
... matter is that when Mary Garden first came to New York only a few of us were ready to receive her at anywhere near her true worth. In a field where mediocrity and brainlessness, lack of theatrical instinct and vocal insipidity are fairly the rule her dominant personality, her unerring search for novelty of expression, the very completeness of her dramatic and vocal pictures, annoyed the philistines, the professors, and the academicians. They had been accustomed to taking their opera quietly with their ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten
... the rifle from under her knee. It leaped to her shoulder, and, standing up in her stirrups while her pony stood quivering and snorting, for he had smelled the puma, the girl of Rose Ranch took quick but unerring aim at the crouching, slate-colored ...
— Nan Sherwood at Rose Ranch • Annie Roe Carr
... Spirit-revelator, is man healed and saved. No opinions of mortals nor human hypotheses enter this [15] line of thought or action. Drugs, inert matter, never are needed to aid spiritual power. Hygiene, manipulation, and mesmerism are not Mind's medicine. The Principle of all cure is God, unerring and immortal Mind. We have learned that the erring or mortal thought holds [20] in itself all sin, sickness, and death, and imparts these states to the body; while the supreme and perfect Mind, as seen in the truth of being, antidotes and destroys these material ...
— Miscellaneous Writings, 1883-1896 • Mary Baker Eddy
... said by us to be true opinion; and true opinion is surely unerring, and the results which follow from it are all noble ...
— Theaetetus • Plato
... backwoodsman is met with at long intervals, would have marvelled at the zeal and promptitude with which these adventurous people, abandoning their homes, and disregarding their personal interests, flocked to the several rallying points. Armed and accoutred at their own expence, with the unerring rifle that provided them with game, and the faithful hatchet that had brought down the dark forest into ready subjection, their claim upon the public was for the mere sustenance they required on service. It is true that this partial independence ...
— The Canadian Brothers - or The Prophecy Fulfilled • John Richardson
... simplicity of problems the intricacies of political knowledge, to teach us the fallacy of the system which had governed by restriction, and imagined that the happiness of nations depended upon the perpetual interference of its rulers, and to prove to us that the only unerring policy of art is to leave a free and unobstructed progress to the hidden energies and province of Nature. But it was not only the theoretical investigation of the state which employed me. I mixed, though in secret, with the agents of its springs. While I seemed only intent upon pleasure, I locked ...
— Falkland, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... alarm; and the whole woman seemed turned to stone. Yet the dinner went on without further hitch; it might have been the very smallest and homeliest affair, to which only these guests had been invited. Indeed, the menu had been reduced, like the table, by the unerring tact of Rachel's husband, so that there was no undue memorial to the missing one-and-twenty, and ...
— The Shadow of the Rope • E. W. Hornung
... of Hyperion—the most beautiful arms in the world. Homesick for heaven, those weary arms try to free themselves of the clinging foam. Another minute and surely the triumphant god will leap from his watery couch and guide with unerring hands the coursers of the Dawn! But that reluctant minute is eternal, and the divinity still remains incapable, clogged and wrapped in the embrace of marble waves. Yet the real sun every morning succeeds in equipping himself for his journey, and arrives, glad, at his welcome ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Vol. XV., No. 85. January, 1875. • Various
... an exact, unconscious memory. This last is not imagination nor imaginative memory, but an automatic power, if I may so say, of the retina—as unconscious as is the pianist's memory of his notes, and as unerring. It is not the power to fix in the mind by conscious effort the objects before one, and to recall them deliberately, inch by inch, at any time, but the power, when the brush pauses trembling for the signal, to put down unerringly facts learned God knows where, or imagined ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December 1878 • Various
... then still be onward! Justice, humanity, patriotism; every high and every holy motive urge us forward, and we dare not refuse to obey. The way of duty lies open before us, and though no pillar of fire be visible to the outward sense, yet an unerring light shall illumine our pathway, guiding us through the sea of persecution and the wilderness of prejudice and error, to the promised land of freedom, where "every man shall sit under his own vine and fig-tree, and none ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... by no means an uninterrupted dream of sunshine and roses; the tramontana sweeps down from the encircling Apennines, with its peculiarly piercing cold that penetrates the entire system with the unerring precision of the Roentgen ray; torrents of icy rains fall; and the purple hills, on whose crest St. Domenico met St. Benedict, are shrouded in clouds and mist. All the loveliness of Florence seems to be utterly effaced, till one questions if it existed except as ...
— The Brownings - Their Life and Art • Lilian Whiting
... to Cheiron on the Monday and Tuesday when John Derringham had announced he might bring over his hostess to see the Professor. She did not wish to cause complications with her aunts by making Mrs. Cricklander's acquaintance, and underneath she had some strange reluctance herself. Her unerring instincts warned her that this woman might in some way trouble her life, but she thought Saturday would be perfectly safe and was preparing to start, when some vague longing came over her to see her goddess. She had felt less serene since the day before, and John Derringham and his words and looks ...
— Halcyone • Elinor Glyn
... deferred. The United States Government, though possessing only a very small standing army, had established at Springfield a small arms factory, where, by the use of machine tools specially designed to execute with the most unerring precision all the details of muskets and rifles, they were enabled to dispense with mere manual dexterity, and to produce arms to any amount. It was finally determined to improve the musketry and rifle systems of the English army. The Government resolved to introduce the American system, by ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... unerring vision that the conflict was inevitable and irrepressible—that one or the other, the right or the wrong, freedom or slavery, must ultimately prevail and wholly prevail, throughout the country; and this was the principle that carried the war, once ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... again stood close in; and even then we could by no means make sure of the spot until we were within a cable's length of it. Then, however, by means of a carefully taken set of compass bearings, I obtained the means which would enable me to run in from a distance and hit off the place with unerring precision. ...
— A Middy of the King - A Romance of the Old British Navy • Harry Collingwood
... again, he had passed over the storm-whipped bar into still waters. There Lucy met him, and together they sailed, guided by the unerring Light of God into the Harbor ...
— Story of Chester Lawrence • Nephi Anderson
... silver-paper and pink ribands. There was a pyramid of bandboxes. There was a virgin forest of boot-trees. And rustling quickly hither and thither, in and out of this profusion, with armfuls of finery, was an obviously French maid. Alert, unerring, like a swallow she dipped and darted. Nothing escaped her, and she never rested. She had the air of the born unpacker—swift and firm, yet withal tender. Scarce had her arms been laden but their loads were lying lightly between shelves or tightly in drawers. To calculate, catch, distribute, ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm
... do too much," I admonished him. But he dismissed my caution with a laugh and an elated gesture. Pooh! Nothing, nothing could happen to the brig, he cried, as if the flame of his heart could light up the dark nights of uncharted seas, and the image of Freya serve for an unerring beacon amongst hidden shoals; as if the winds had to wait on his future, the stars fight for it in their courses; as if the magic of his passion had the power to float a ship on a drop of dew or sail her through ...
— 'Twixt Land & Sea • Joseph Conrad
... negro with the right of suffrage, and was an indirect but most effective answer to those who subsequently attempted to use Mr. Lincoln's name in support of policies which his intimate friends instinctively knew would be abhorrent to his unerring sense of justice. ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... depends solely upon the two operas, La Vie pour le Tsar and Russlan et Ludmille. That he should have chosen to express himself especially in opera is a significant fact. The unerring instinct of his genius evidently told him that in this form, rather than in purely instrumental music, he would most truly represent that people whose musical aspirations he wished above all else to portray faithfully, and ...
— Russia - As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Various
... beggar can bear anything but banter. He is a keen physiognomist, and selects his victims with unerring acumen. If you storm or scowl at him, he knows he is making you uncomfortable, and hangs on like a burr. But if you laugh at him, with good humor, he is disarmed. A friend of mine reduced to confusion one of the most unabashed mendicants in Castile by replying to his whining petition, politely ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... less delight th' attentive sage, T' observe that instinct which unerring guides The brutal race, which mimics reason's lore, And ...
— Anecdotes of Dogs • Edward Jesse
... passes on,—but the tired Madonna, leaning on the well's margin, asks wistfully of the women if they have seen such and such a child astray. Now will you just look for a while into the lines by which the expression of the weary and anxious face is rendered; see how unerring they are,—how calm and clear; and think how many questions have to be determined in drawing the most minute portion of any one,—its curve,—its thickness,—its distance from the next,—its own preparation ...
— Ariadne Florentina - Six Lectures on Wood and Metal Engraving • John Ruskin
... son. She should always be keeping her promises." He rose, and getting a small stone bottle and his stick from the corner between the projecting inglecheek and the window, left the house, to walk with unerring steps through the labyrinth of the village, threading his way from passage to passage, and avoiding pools and projecting stones, not to say houses, and human beings. His eyes, or indeed perhaps rather his whole face, appeared to possess an ethereal sense as of touch, for, without the slightest ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald |
