"Pinnacle" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Prince of Wales became his friend and patron and when he became Lord High Admiral he took Pepys with him in his advancement. Thus in 1684, Pepys became Secretary of the Navy. When later the Prince of Wales became King James II, Pepys, although his office remained the same, came to quite a pinnacle of administrative power. He was shrewd and capable in the conduct of his position and brought method to the Navy Office. He was a prime factor in the first development of the British Navy. Later victories that were to sweep the seas may be traced in part to him. Nelson rides upon his shoulders. ...
— There's Pippins And Cheese To Come • Charles S. Brooks
... the flight, designed to be rid of her, coinceived a dire revenge. He and some others broke into Abelard's chamber by night, and perpetrated on him the most brutal mutilation. Thus cast down from his pinnacle of greatness into an abyss of shame and misery, there was left to the brilliant master only the life of a monk. The priesthood and ecclesiastical office were canonically closed to him. Heloise, not yet twenty, consummated her work of self-sacrifice at the call of his jealous ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... breakfast we watched the sentinel peaks put on the glory of the sun, and followed the conquering light as it swept down among the shadows, and set the captive crags and forests free. We watched the tinted pictures grow and brighten upon the water till every little detail of forest, precipice, and pinnacle was wrought in and finished, and the miracle of the ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
... sum was supplemented by a sufficient amount to complete the structure, from the treasury of St. Croix county. It was perched on the top of one of the high bluffs in that town, and much private and judicial blasphemy has been expended by exhausted litigants and judges in climbing to its lofty pinnacle. I held a term in it ...
— The History of Minnesota and Tales of the Frontier • Charles E. Flandrau
... the head of an expedition into those territories, he could observe those who voluntarily encountered risks; these he made rulers of the territory which he subjected, and afterwards honoured them with other gifts. So that, if the good and brave were set on a pinnacle of fortune, cowards were recognised as their natural slaves; and so it befell that Cyrus never had lack of volunteers in any service of danger, whenever it was expected that his ...
— Anabasis • Xenophon
... hills covered with vines and woods rose abruptly, and on the right, tottering on a pinnacle that frowns over the flood, stood the Castle ...
— Before and after Waterloo - Letters from Edward Stanley, sometime Bishop of Norwich (1802;1814;1814) • Edward Stanley
... the portrait of a lady on a sliding panel. In truth, the castle is uncommonly well supplied with apparitions. Earl Herbert rides around it every night on a white horse; Lady Bertha haunts the west pinnacle of the chapel tower; and Lord Hildebrand may be seen any midnight in the great hall, playing football with his own head. So says Motley the jester, who affords the comedy element of the play, with the help of a fat friar who guzzles sack and stuffs venison pasties, and a soubrette ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... self-forgetfulness comes to him again and as a diviner thing. By and by, as the man walks up the mountain, he seems to pass out of the cloud which hangs about the lower slopes of the mountain, until at last he stands upon the pinnacle at the top, and there is in the perfect light. Is it not exactly like the mountain at whose foot there seems to be the open sunshine where men see everything, and on whose summit there is the sunshine, but on whose sides, and half way up, ...
— Addresses • Phillips Brooks
... whom it was given to afflict the earth. They believed the devil could carry persons hundreds of miles, in a few seconds, through the air. They believed this, because they knew that Christ had been carried by the devil in the same manner and placed on a pinnacle of the temple. "The prophet Habakkuk had been transported by a spirit from Judea to Babylon; and Philip, the evangelist, had been the object of a similar miracle; and in the same way Saint Paul had been carried in the body into ...
— The Ghosts - And Other Lectures • Robert G. Ingersoll
... time when Percival was nineteen years of age that he stood upon a pinnacle of rock and looked down into a certain valley. And it was very early in the spring-time, so that the valley appeared, as it were, to be carpeted all with clear, thin green. There was a shining stream of water that ran down through the midst of the valley, ...
— The Story of the Champions of the Round Table • Howard Pyle
... good manners, morals, methods, and [5] means. It points to the scientific spiritual molecule, pearl, and pinnacle, that everybody needs. May the Christlikeness it reflects rest on the dear readers, and throw the light of penetration on the page; even as the dawn, kindling its glories in the ...
— Miscellaneous Writings, 1883-1896 • Mary Baker Eddy
... which there was no waking. He considered the stability of his days—a lifetime followed upon high principles and founded on religious convictions that had comforted his sorrows and countenanced his joys. It seemed a trial undeserved, that in his old age he should be thrust upon a pinnacle of publicity, forced into the public eye, robbed of dignity, denied the privacy he esteemed as the most precious privilege that wealth could command. Stability was destroyed; to count upon the morrow seemed impossible. ...
— The Grey Room • Eden Phillpotts
... dead parents had any claim upon this foreigner who received him coldly and yet would hear nothing of his departure. Pride had little share in this, for the issues were momentous. It was sufficient to know that a hand had suddenly drawn him from the abyss, had put him on this pinnacle—beyond all, had placed him in Anna Gessner's home as the first-born, there to embark upon a career whose goal lay beyond the City ...
— Aladdin of London - or Lodestar • Sir Max Pemberton
... greater; and no better proof of this fact is necessary than can be obtained from even the sidelong glance into the abyss of the whirl which may be had from the highest crag of Helseggen. Looking down from this pinnacle upon the howling Phlegethon below, I could not help smiling at the simplicity with which the honest Jonas Ramus records, as a matter difficult of belief, the anecdotes of the whales and the bears; for it appeared to me, in fact, ...
— Selections From Poe • J. Montgomery Gambrill
... has paid for her great celebrity!—weariness, vacuity, and utter deadness of spirit. The cup has been so highly flavored that life is absolutely without savor or sweetness to her now, nothing but tasteless insipidity. She has stood on a pinnacle till all things have come to look flat and dreary; mere shapeless, colorless, level monotony to her. Poor woman! what a fate to be condemned to, and yet how she has been envied, ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... and all goddesses; yet could ye not drag from heaven to earth Zeus, counsellor supreme, not though ye toiled sore. But once I likewise were minded to draw with all my heart, then should I draw ye up with very earth and sea withal. Thereafter would I bind the rope about a pinnacle of Olympus, and so should all those things be hung in air. By so much am I beyond gods and beyond men." [Footnote: Iliad viii. 5.—Translated by Lang, ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... flagstaffs, 60 or 80 feet high, surmounted by emblematical figures or representations of the Brahminy duck, float their long streamers in the wind, while the sound of tinkling bells descends from the "tis" with which every pinnacle is crowned. Surrounding all is a broad platform fringed with shops and other buildings, for the Burmese love their pagoda, and many spend their days here, and the necessities ...
— Burma - Peeps at Many Lands • R.Talbot Kelly
... to wealth or title, was kept in a constant state of feverish anxiety with respect to his fame and the means of a precarious livelihood: that "from being chilled with poverty, steeped in contempt, he had passed into the sunshine of fortune, and was lifted to the very pinnacle of public favour"; yet even there could not count on the continuance of success, but was, "like the giddy sailor on the mast, ready with every blast to topple down into the fatal bowels of the deep!" ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt
... as with the silence of the thought Upon its bleak and visionary sides, The history of many a winter storm Or obscure record of the path of fire. There the sun himself At the calm close of Summer's longest day Rests his substantial orb; between those heights, And on the top of either pinnacle, More keenly than elsewhere in night's blue vault Sparkle the stars, as of their station proud: Thoughts are not busier in the mind of man Than the mute agents stirring there,—alone Here do I ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William - IV, Volume 1 (of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... between Luzon and Samar, and passed for a day through a region of isles. The sea was glassy save when a school of porpoises tore it apart in their pursuit of the flying fish. On its deep sapphire the islands seemed to float, sometimes a mere pinnacle of rock, sometimes a cone-shaped peak timbered down to the beach where the surf fell over. Toward evening, when the breeze freshened slightly, we seemed almost to brush the sides of some of these islets, and ...
— A Woman's Impression of the Philippines • Mary Helen Fee
... century, inheriting the richly diversified musical experiences of the present time. But in one direction there is little doubt that these three great masters did carry the art of instrumental music to a pinnacle beyond which no one as yet has been able to soar. They represent the climax of classical art. In the nature of the case, the term classical itself is subject to an element of uncertainty. According to the philosopher Hegel, the classical is that ...
— A Popular History of the Art of Music - From the Earliest Times Until the Present • W. S. B. Mathews
... on which we looked down were blistered with conical hills, crowned by ancient castles which would have rejoiced the hearts of mediaeval painters, as they did mine. Severac-le-Chateau, perched on its naked pinnacle of rock, was best of all, as we saw it from our bird's-eye view, and then again, almost startlingly impressive when we had somehow whirled down below it, to pass under its old huddled town, before we flew up once more to higher and ...
— The Motor Maid • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... have done a little better, because he would have been no colder at heart, and more exact in time, and would have sung clean; whereas this gentleman set his windpipe trembling, all through the business, as if palsy were passion. By what system of leverage such a man came to be hoisted on to such a pinnacle of song as "Faust" puzzled our English friends in front as much as it did the Anglo-Danish artist at the wing; for English girls know ...
— The Woman-Hater • Charles Reade
... the envy of the child and the admiration of the man. Is there no appeal in this wonderful and enchanting fact to man's highest reason? Does it contain no suggestion that man, representing the highest pinnacle of created life upon the globe, must undergo a final metamorphosis, as supremely more marvelous and more spiritual, as man is greater in physical conformation, and far removed in mental construction from the humble worm that at the call of nature straightway leaves the ...
— Hidden Treasures - Why Some Succeed While Others Fail • Harry A. Lewis
... a pinnacle, Presley, from where he now stood, dominated the entire country. The sun had begun to set, everything in the range of his vision was overlaid with ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... the genius and the wonder of the thing!" he cried. "The man pervades London, and no one has heard of him. That's what puts him on a pinnacle in the records of crime. I tell you, Watson, in all seriousness, that if I could beat that man, if I could free society of him, I should feel that my own career had reached its summit, and I should be prepared to turn to some more placid line ...
— Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... thirteenth century we are confronted by the anomaly of a church grossly corrupt but widely obeyed. She is nearing the pinnacle of her power and the zenith of her glory, although the parochial clergy have sunk into vice and incapacity, and the monks, as a class, are lazy, ignorant and notoriously corrupt. Two things, especially, ...
— A Short History of Monks and Monasteries • Alfred Wesley Wishart
... the old guardsman, as he stood perched upon the high pinnacle of rock, was again too much for the muleteers; and one and all of them gave utterance to fresh peals of laughter. His young masters were too much concerned about their faithful Pouchskin to give way to mirth; but on ascertaining ...
— Bruin - The Grand Bear Hunt • Mayne Reid
... being raised to the pinnacle of honor, his former comrade Bazaine was imprisoned in another part of the palace at Versailles, awaiting trial on the charge of treason for the surrender of Metz. In the trial, in which the whole world took a deep interest, the efforts of the prosecution were ...
— A History of The Nations and Empires Involved and a Study - of the Events Culminating in The Great Conflict • Logan Marshall
... the enemy in check. Bonaparte silently formed a third army, the corps of which he cleverly dispersed, distracting the attention of Europe by the camp of the army of reserve at Dijon. Already he was preparing the grand campaign which should raise his glory to its pinnacle, and establish his power upon victory. In his idea everything was to be sacrificed to the personal glory of his successes. He conceived a project of attack by crossing the Rhine. Moreau, modest and disinterested, accepted the general plan of the war, and subordinated ...
— Worlds Best Histories - France Vol 7 • M. Guizot and Madame Guizot De Witt
... the pinnacle and flying buttress a striking example of the adoption of a mechanical feature, and its transformation into an element of beauty. Nothing could at first sight be more hopeless than the external half-arch propping the side of a pier, or the chimney-like ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana
... Queen of the glaciers. She, the murderess, the destroyer, is half a child of air and half the powerful ruler of the streams; therefore, she had received the power, to elevate herself with the speed of the chamois to the highest pinnacle of the snow-topped mountain; where the most daring mountaineer had to hew his way, in order to take firm foot-hold. She sails up the rushing river on a slender fir-branch—springs from one cliff to another, with her long snow-white hair, fluttering around her, and with her bluish-green mantle, ...
— The Ice-Maiden: and Other Tales. • Hans Christian Andersen
... to our story. The triumph was complete. The timid and obscure girl found herself on the highest pinnacle of fame. Great men, on whom she had gazed at a distance with humble reverence, addressed her with admiration, tempered by the tenderness due to her sex and age. Burke, Windham, Gibbon, Reynolds, Sheridan, were among her most ardent eulogists. Cumberland(15) acknowledged her ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 1 • Madame D'Arblay
... towers of Westminster Abbey; but I cannot help thinking, that as two and two are said not always to make four, the projecting counterpart, instead of doubling the effect, would have lessened the feeling of stupendous height with which the present single pinnacle inspires the beholders. As there cannot be two suns in the same sphere, neither could the spire of Antwerp have borne a rival near its solitary, aerial throne. It soars aloft with such grandeur, that in gazing upon it my brain actually grew dizzy with the sight: never was ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 396, Saturday, October 31, 1829. • Various
... textile fabrics." So that it comes to this: if spiders are useless because they eat each other, the bees do much the same thing (only wholesale), but it makes them commercially useful. The bee therefore we place upon a pinnacle of respectability, but the spider we despise. Faugh! the hypocrisy of it makes me sick. My children will be taught to venerate the spider and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, August 11, 1920 • Various
... of the many topsy-turvy things in topsy-turvy China that this prosaic people is so addicted to picturesque and significant terms. I found the names of some of the monasteries quite as interesting as anything else about them. From the "Pinnacle of Contemplation" you ascend to the "Monastery of the White Clouds," stopping to rest in the "Hall of the Tranquil Heart," and passing the "Gate to Heaven" you enter ...
— A Wayfarer in China - Impressions of a trip across West China and Mongolia • Elizabeth Kendall
... the foliage, and everywhere the view was clear. Below me stretched the incredible bridge, with the frog people hurrying back and forth upon it. A pinnacle at my side hid the abyss. My eyes followed the cavern ledge. Above it the rock rose bare, but at the ends of the semicircular strand a luxuriant vegetation began, stretching from the crimson shores back into far distances. Of browns and reds and yellows, like an autumn forest, was the foliage, ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt
... not large nor is the chapel, but, nevertheless, my soul expanded as in a basilica, soared up as under some vast dome, and touched the pinnacle of high Heaven where blazes the Sign of Signs in the azure of Paradise, in the ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... daylight left to me, and should darkness find me still clinging like a fly to the face of the cliff my fate was certain. I was almost exhausted, and my heart sank as I searched in vain for a way up. The distance was not great now, a bare fifty feet separating me from the topmost pinnacle, but though I walked along the bottom of this barrier for some distance it still presented the ...
— A Rip Van Winkle Of The Kalahari - Seven Tales of South-West Africa • Frederick Cornell
... superstructure was to be finally edified. But the architect who placed each block in its proper niche, who planned and designed the whole elevation, who planted the building firmly on the rock and poised the coping-stone on the topmost pinnacle, was the author of the 'System of Synthetic Philosophy,' and none other. It is a strange proof of how little people know about their own ideas, that among the thousands who talk glibly every day of evolution, not ten per cent. are probably ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... and had failed. He, however, was confident of his divine call: should he not, therefore, press forward with his work, heedless of all danger and regardless of the dictates of prudence,—as heedless as if, trusting God's promised care, he should cast himself down from a pinnacle of the temple to the rocks in Kidron below? A fanatic would have yielded to such a temptation. Many another than Jesus did so,—Theudas (Acts v. 36), the Egyptian (Acts xxi. 38); and Bar Cochba (Dio Cassius, lxix. 12-14; Euseb. Ch. Hist. iv. 6). Jesus, however, ...
— The Life of Jesus of Nazareth • Rush Rhees
... Courtenay was shouting for some explanation, a great black wall rose out of the deep on the port bow. It was a pinnacle rock, high as the ship's masts, but only a few feet wide at sea level, and the Kansas sped past this ugly monitor as though it were a buoy in a ...
— The Captain of the Kansas • Louis Tracy
... down from the pinnacle you stood on. So it's not cowardice that has set you down here. It's wrong conception. And I've thought of two things. The first, and best, is for you to go back. No one has taken your place, because no one could ...
— K • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... from a race that started from that skull-less vertebrae, and came up and up and up, and finally produced Shakespeare, who found the human intellect wallowing in a hut, and touched it with a wand of his genius, and it became a palace—dome and pinnacle. I would rather belong to a race that commenced then, and produced Shakespeare, with the eternal hope of an infinite future for the children of progress leading from the far horizon, beckoning men forward—forward and onward forever. I had rather belong to this race, and commence there, ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll
... needed, filling his mind with the learning of the world, winning when others would have failed, profiting by experience allotted to him through fate's kindly offices and association with the healthy, true men. What has been the result? He has risen to the very pinnacle of human endeavor ... no honors await him. He has lived consistently and cleanly and he can look any man in the eye and say honestly: "I have lived as ...
— Laugh and Live • Douglas Fairbanks
... great feud, except only my hereditary enemy; I was high in the favor of the Emperor; I was in a fair way to marry the youngest, the most lovely and the richest widow in Rome. In the twinkling of an eye I was cast down from the pinnacle of good fortune into an abyss of adversity. And upon what did my catastrophe hinge? Upon the whims of a friend and upon one oversight of my secretary. I should have had no story to tell, I should have been a man continuously happy, affluent and at ease, early married and passing ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... not, as many another mediaeval architect has done, decked his roofs as Nature has decked hers, with the spruce and fir-tree spires, which cling to the hill-side of the crag, old above young, pinnacle above pinnacle, whorl above whorl; and clothed with them the sides and summit of the stone mountain which he had raised, till, like a group of firs upon an isolated rock, every point of the building should seem in act to grow toward heaven, and the grey leads of the Minster ...
— Lectures Delivered in America in 1874 • Charles Kingsley
... some one of these will have done the deed. Therefore they must all die. You must see to it, following them if necessary to the ends of the earth. You will know how; and what means to employ. When all these are gone, then go you to the highest rock on the southerly pinnacle of Cochise's Stronghold. Ten paces northwest is a gray, flat slab. If you lift this slab there will be found a copper box. In the box is the name of a man. You will go to this man and give him the copper box and in return ...
— The Killer • Stewart Edward White
... New York capitalist, belonged to that older school of American financiers who, having built up large fortunes by taking advantage of the speculative opportunities of their day, look somewhat doubtfully from the pinnacle of a successful old age upon the same adventurous spirit when shown by the active younger generation. George Cartwright was ready to take a chance, certainly. He had taken chances all his life. But George Cartwright distrusted mightily what he called the "slap-dash, smash- bang" system ...
— The Winning of Barbara Worth • Harold B Wright
... erecting my edifice; she only adorned it with her smiling grace. I shall do what fate and my people have a right to expect of me, but I do not say that it must be done immediately. I have time enough to wait; for as yet I do not stand on the pinnacle to which I am aspiring. My plans are not yet accomplished. I hope that I shall not die at so early an age as my father. I need ten years more to carry out my purposes. A sovereign ought not to set too narrow limits to his wishes; but mine—they are boundless. Like the conqueror of Darius, ...
— Napoleon and the Queen of Prussia • L. Muhlbach
... night: Each rock reflects a softer light, When the whole mount from foot to crest In robes of lambent flame is dressed; When from a million herbs a blaze Of their own luminous glory plays, And clothed in fire each deep ravine, Each pinnacle and crag is seen. Some parts the look of mansions wear, And others are as gardens fair, While others seem a massive block Of solid undivided rock. Behold those pleasant beds o'erlaid With lotus leaves, for lovers ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... crimes and vices in the subsequent "highway school"—the gradual development of every unnatural tendency in the youthful Jack Sheppard (another immor-t-al work by the author of the afore-lauded comedy)—the celebration, by a classic chaunt, of his reaching the pinnacle of depravity; this was the ne plus ultra of dramatic invention. Robbers and murderers began to be treated, after the Catholic fashion, with extreme unction; audiences were intoxicated with the new drop; sympathy became epidemic; everybody ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... was shockingly burned. Her beauty was destroyed forever, and her career upon the stage was ended. Thus was the public deprived of a most delightful source of entertainment, and thus was a popular actress thrown out of the profession just as she had reached the pinnacle of fame, and just as she was in a fair way to acquire ...
— My Life: or the Adventures of Geo. Thompson - Being the Auto-Biography of an Author. Written by Himself. • George Thompson
... blood-bathed hill, and from the highest pinnacle there flaunted the yellow and white banner with the lions and the towers of the royal house of Castile. Up the long slope rushed ranks and ranks of men exultant, shouting, with waving pennons and brandished arms. Over the whole summit were dense throngs of knights, with no enemy that could be seen ...
— The White Company • Arthur Conan Doyle
... can find a thousand dramas in the books on geography if she knows how to interpret the pages of the books, and with these inspiring dramas she can lift her pupils to the very pinnacle of appreciation. Such tales are as fascinating as fairy stories and have the added charm of being true to the teachings of science. A raindrop seems a common thing, but cast in dramatic form it becomes of rare charm. It slides from the roof of ...
— The Reconstructed School • Francis B. Pearson
... the City, and going along the riuers side called Nigondin, which runneth vnder the walles of the City, vntill they come vnto a place where they vse to make this burning of women, being widdowes, there is prepared in this place a great square caue, with a little pinnacle hard by it, foure or fiue steppes vp: the foresayd caue is full of dried wood. [Sidenote: Feasting and dancing when they should mourne.] The woman being come thither, accompanied with a great number of people which come to see the thing, then they make ready a great banquet, and she that shall ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, - and Discoveries of The English Nation, Volume 9 - Asia, Part 2 • Richard Hakluyt
... Also, the perplexing questions reaching down into the under-soul of things were silent. Also, again—mark of a change so radical that none but a Thomas Jefferson may read and understand—an awe-inspiring Major Dabney had ceased to be the first citizen of the world, that pinnacle being now occupied by a tall, sallow, smooth-faced gentleman, persuasive of speech and superhuman in accomplishment, who was the life and soul of the activities, and whom his father and mother always ...
— The Quickening • Francis Lynde
... into some tall, blank orifice. Then suddenly one is in the Close, with trees and flowers and green grass, with quaint Prebendal houses of every style and date, breathing peace and prosperity. A genial parson or two pace gravely about; and above you soars the huge church, with pinnacle and parapet, the jackdaws cheerily hallooing from the lofty ledges. You are a little weary of air and sun; you push open the great door, and you are in the cool, dark nave with its holy smell; you sit for a little and let the spirit of the place creep ...
— The Upton Letters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... luxuriance around and afar. There you may see sleeping on the verge of the landscape the mighty city,—crowned with the thousand spires from which, proud above the rest, rises the eyry of Napoleon's eagle, the pinnacle of ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Book VIII • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... of the voice of Charlemagne. For God thou hast known fear, when from His side Men wandered, seeking alien shrines and new, But still the sky was bountiful and blue And thou wast crowned with France's love and pride. Sacred thou art, from pinnacle to base; And in thy panes of gold and scarlet glass The setting sun sees thousandfold his face; Sorrow and joy, in stately silence pass Across thy walls, the shadow and the light; Around thy lofty pillars, tapers ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... to the pinnacle of unreason. He attacked the courts boldly, openly and publicly accused the judges of corruption, said they were in conspiracy with the Bar and the medical societies to do him up, added to this list of his enemies the Irish and the Catholic ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... has dawned the day when science strengthens the argument for immortality. The dream of the prophet and seer is confirmed in the light of modern knowledge. "Each new discovery," says John Fiske, "but places man upon a higher pinnacle than ever, and lights the future with the radiant color of hope." Leaving his body behind, man journeys on toward an immortal destiny. Science has emptied a thousand new meanings into the words of Socrates: "The destruction ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... mountains, to an almost inaccessible volcanic ground not far from the stars. Robert on horseback, Wilson and the nurse with baby, on other donkeys; guides, of course. We set off at eight in the morning and returned at six P. M., after dining on the mountain pinnacle.... The scenery, sublime and wonderful,... innumerable mountains bound faintly with the gray sea, ...
— The Brownings - Their Life and Art • Lilian Whiting
... expected to make the fortune which I have acquired here; indeed, I myself have no use for it, for a man who has fallen from the pinnacle of his hopes needs very little. It costs but little to live, the idler's life alone is a costly one, and I am not sure that the unproductive consumer is not robbing the community at large. There was some discussion about Napoleon's pension ...
— The Country Doctor • Honore de Balzac
... Malmaison for her rural retreat, Napoleon for her father, Josephine for her mother, Eugene for her brother; with the richest endowments of person, mind, and heart, with glowing health, and surrounded by admirers, Hortense seemed now to be placed upon the very highest pinnacle of ...
— Hortense, Makers of History Series • John S. C. Abbott
... for you to understand the anxiety with which Mr. Smith and his associates awaited the news from the Commissioners, without first realizing the astounding progress of Mr. Smith in the three past years, and the pinnacle of public eminence ...
— Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town • Stephen Leacock
... chapter there is an account of one built under the superintendence of Buddha himself, "as a model for all topes in future." They were usually in the form of bell-shaped domes, and were solid, surmounted by a long tapering pinnacle formed with a series of rings, varying in number. But their form, I suppose, was often varied; just as we have in China pagodas of different shapes. There are several topes now in the Indian Institute at ...
— Record of Buddhistic Kingdoms • Fa-Hien
... and ran on deck. Every one else was already there. I joined the row at the rail, indifferent, for the moment, to the fact that to display so much interest in their ridiculous island involved a descent from my pinnacle. Indeed, the chill altitude of pinnacles never agrees with me for long at a time, so that I am obliged to descend at intervals to breathe the ...
— Spanish Doubloons • Camilla Kenyon
... the noble patriot, soon "put out his wings," and soared, ultimately, to a pinnacle of honor and renown attained by few among men. In the winter of 1793 and 1794, the public mind had become highly excited from the inflammatory appeals in behalf of France, by Citizen Genet, the French Minister to the United States. A large portion of the anti-Federal party ...
— Life and Public Services of John Quincy Adams - Sixth President of the Unied States • William H. Seward
... raised Bathurst on a lofty pinnacle. The Doctor had spoken very highly of him. She had admired the energy with which, instead of caring, as others did, for pleasure, he devoted himself to his work. Older men than himself listened to his opinions. His quiet and somewhat ...
— Rujub, the Juggler • G. A. Henty
... please Borrow, because in the City of Perdition Rome stands at the gate of Pride, and the Pope has palaces in the streets of Pleasure and of Lucre; because the Church of England is the fairest part of the Catholic Church, surmounted by "Queen Anne on the pinnacle of the building, with a sword in each hand"; and because the Papist is turned away from the Catholic Church by a porter with "an exceedingly large Bible." "One fair ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... Hirondelle had left Yarmouth, on the Norfolk coast, where she had been lying for two or three days, the day before she was lost, and was then intending to cruise round the coast of Great Britain. The baron was immediately raised from the depths of despair to the highest pinnacle of hope on hearing this, for he felt sure Leon had gone ashore at Yarmouth to place the baby with some Englishwoman, and had remained there some days on purpose. Confiding his new hope to Pere Yvon, he at once decided ...
— The Girl's Own Paper, Vol. VIII, No. 357, October 30, 1886 • Various
... greedy churchman, who affects to be a second Wolsey in the senate." This high-toned memorial struck with astonishment the English ministers, who did not hesitate to hint, that, in a reign less merciful, it would not have passed with impunity. In Ireland it raised the hardy earl to the pinnacle of popular favour. A medal was struck in his honour, representing him guarding a heap of treasure with a drawn sword, and the motto—"Touch not, says Kildare." At the opening of the next Parliament, he was a full hour making his way among the enthusiastic crowd, from his house in Kildare ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee
... the main dome for a mile into mid-air. On the right, the snow descended in a steep, unbroken sheet into the tremendous {p.124} basin which lies between the southern and the northern peaks, and which is enclosed by them as by two mighty arms.[6] Sheltered behind a pinnacle of ice, we fastened our flags upon the Alpine staffs, and then, standing erect in the furious blast, waved them ...
— The Mountain that was 'God' • John H. Williams
... of the kind, but, Hyacinthe, ladies do not go out into the world seeking their fortunes. I believe I have heard"—Miss King speaks austerely and as from some pinnacle of pride—"that there are women who write and lecture and paint, and, in short, do anything that is disgraceful; but you, my dear, are not ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, August, 1878 • Various
... on the Mount is perfectly expressed by the craggy pinnacle in front of Christ, and the high dark horizon. There is curious evidence throughout all these frescos of Simon Memmi's having read the Gospels with a quite clear ...
— Mornings in Florence • John Ruskin
... that day. Sir Harry had at that time learned a good deal of his cousin George's mode of life in London, and had already decided that this young man was not one whom it would be well to set upon the pinnacle. ...
— Sir Harry Hotspur of Humblethwaite • Anthony Trollope
... important damage occurred in the city of Hereford, which, in 1901, contained 4,565 inhabited houses. Here, no fewer than 218 chimneys had to be repaired or rebuilt. The Cathedral was slightly injured. The finial of a pinnacle of the Lady Chapel was thrown down, a fragment of a stone fell from one of the arches in the south transept, and the three pinnacles of the western front were fractured. Several churches suffered to ...
— A Study of Recent Earthquakes • Charles Davison
... have their day. Meanwhile it is the duty of the historian to note that self-sacrifice and heroism have a hard struggle for life in an age which for a time exalted Herbert Spencer to the highest pinnacle of greatness, which still riots in the calculating selfishness of Nietzsche ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... 1533, and the peaks of the mighty mountains that appeared to pierce the bright blue sky, appearing to bear out the fabulous belief of the eastern lands, for their icy summits glowed, and flushed, and sparkled in the rays of the sun, which gilded every pinnacle and turned each glacier into a river of gold, seeming to flow slowly downwards towards the vales and plains of the Andes, as yet flooded with the darkness of ...
— The Golden Magnet • George Manville Fenn
... that this is not merely a suggestive analogy, but really true as a tendency, not only with regard to man's gains by the conquest of electricity, but also with respect to every other signal victory which has brought him to his present pinnacle of discernment and rule. If this permutative principle in former advances lay undetected, it stands forth clearly in that latest accession to skill and interpretation which has been ushered in by Franklin and ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - Invention and Discovery • Various
... triumphant moment when he thinks the nestlings his own, and strips his arm, launching it down into the cavity, and grasping what he conceives to be the callow young, starts with horror at the sight of a hideous snake, and almost drops from his giddy pinnacle, retreating down the tree with terror and precipitation. Several adventures of this kind have come to my knowledge; and one of them was attended with serious consequences, where both snake and boy fell to the ground, and a broken thigh, and long confinement, ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... description of Eveline's feelings at this hour would be a vain task. In a moment, she was brought down from the pinnacle of hope to the depths of despair; for she saw in all this that had passed the hand of Duffel, her avowed enemy; and, indeed, as the reader has doubtless already concluded, she was in the hands of none others than Bill and Dick, who were bearing ...
— Eveline Mandeville - The Horse Thief Rival • Alvin Addison
... "it is my right. It is Jean's right. You would love to put him on top of the pinnacle of ...
— The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol • William J. Locke
... niche, nigh to its pinnacle, Twelve Saints had once stood sanctified in stone; But these had fallen, not when the friars fell, But in the war which struck Charles from his throne, When each house was a fortalice—as tell The annals of full many a line ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... suggested by the falseness of the common code of morality, which is apt to be overlooked by many readers in the strong interest of the tale. It is one of the few books of that period which may still be said to live. It is quite the best of his novels. "It raised Godwin's reputation to a pinnacle," according to contemporary criticism, though some of his other novels, notably "Fleetwood," have been preferred for their descriptive writing. He was an exceedingly industrious writer; essays, biography, political philosophy, and history all coming from his pen; ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IV. • Editors: Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... of the leading Prussian social stars Opines that War, although it makes for leanness, Not only banishes discordant jars And purifies Berlin of all uncleanness, But places her, beatified by Mars, Upon a pinnacle of mental keenness, Changing the cult of trencher and of bowl To feasts of ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 152, January 24, 1917 • Various
... old-fashioned paper that had followed tradition rather than the lead of an alert, progressive public. From a pinnacle of confident superiority it had spoken to the people, telling them what they should think, rather than giving ear to their groping and clamoring desire for a hearing. The Echo never discussed questions with its readers. Its editor had never deigned ...
— Paul and the Printing Press • Sara Ware Bassett
... vicinity. Cod are sometimes abundant here all winter; haddock are found here from December 1 to February and are more abundant than the cod. Hake are plentiful on this ground and in 60 fathoms on the mud off the edge SE. of this ground during the summer season. Marks: The high pinnacle on the eastern end of Wooden Ball, showing just out by Matinicus Rock, SW. by S. from ...
— Fishing Grounds of the Gulf of Maine • Walter H. Rich
... in the face of the cliff Here the jackdaws appeared quite at their ease, their loud, merry note being heard above every other sound, as they flew in and out of the fissures in the white rock or sate perched on a pinnacle near the summit, and leisurely surveyed ...
— Seaward Sussex - The South Downs from End to End • Edric Holmes
... animals that suckle their young. And finally,—last born of creation,—man appears upon the scene, in his several races and varieties; the sublime arch of animal being at length receives its keystone; and the finished work stands up complete, from foundation to pinnacle, at once an admirably adjusted occupant of space, and a wonderful monument of Divine arrangement and classification, as it exists in time. Save at two special points, to which I shall afterwards advert, the particular arrangement unfolded ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... inanimate to living objects; from plants to animals; from animals to man; from man to angels; from these to archangels, upward and still upward, to the Being who, bathed in the full blaze of divine effulgence, tops the pyramid, and stands on the highest pinnacle of Creation. That Being is God manifest in the flesh, our Lord Jesus Christ—the redemption which He wrought for us, through blood and suffering and death, being the work which reveals God most fully to our eyes, and forming a looking-glass, so ...
— The Angels' Song • Thomas Guthrie
... our hands. If poor naked Joy, that is so meanly clad, she is ashamed to walk about the earth, were once to enter our doors, then the stab of the bright dagger would only be the last glittering pinnacle of our joyous transport. For after that brief pulsation is over, how bald is the earth, how black is life! It is because I know not whither I am going, or whether I am going, or whether there be a whither, that the act is so alluring. Only men will not confess this, but give the ...
— The Old Man of the Mountain, The Lovecharm and Pietro of Abano - Tales from the German of Tieck • Ludwig Tieck
... history present to us than the rise of Spanish power to the pinnacle of greatness and glory in the sixteenth century? The Mohammedans, after centuries of fierce and stubborn war, driven back; the whole peninsula brought under a single rule with a single creed; enormous acquisitions from the Netherlands of Naples, Sicily, the ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... the profane and idle who may chance to stumble across his entertainment. His living auditors, unsolicited for the tribute of worship or an alms, find themselves conceived of in the likeness of what he would have them to be, raised to a companion pinnacle of friendship, and constituted peers and judges, if they will, of his ...
— Style • Walter Raleigh
... may be doubted which of the two Napoleon hated most—Wellington, who finally overthrew him at Waterloo, or Sidney Smith, who, to use Napoleon's own words, made him "miss his destiny," and exchange the empire of the East for a lonely pinnacle of rock in ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... have seen is this. Love as a positive pleasure, if it be ever reduced to such, will be a very different thing from what our positivist moralists at present see it to be. It will perform none of those functions for which they now look to it. It will no longer supply them, as now, with any special pinnacle on which human life may raise itself. The one type of it that is at present on an eminence will sink to the same level as the others. All these will be offered to us indiscriminately, and our choice between ...
— Is Life Worth Living? • William Hurrell Mallock
... mortal and fallible, be wary how we condemn one whose head was rendered giddy by his very pinnacle of power! ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... at least one point in common, and the pupil made rapid headway. But his originality and fertility in ideas, which showed itself at times in a disregard for established forms when his genius was hampered thereby—qualities which even in Albrechtsberger's lifetime were to place his pupil on a pinnacle above all other composers of the period, were neither understood nor approved by the teacher. Under the circumstances, it is not surprising that the lessons continued but little over a year. His studies in theory and composition ...
— Beethoven • George Alexander Fischer
... his opportunity and seized it by the hair. He is one of three leaders of the Irish Nationalists. Understood that his Party consists of a single member, so shadowy that there are varied reports as to his identity. Member for N.W. Meath leaped on to pinnacle of enduring fame when the present Parliament met to elect a Speaker. Before Mr. LOWTHER was qualified to take the Chair, and whilst as yet no recognised authority existed, GINNELL, master of the situation, delivered a long harangue. Proposed ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, July 29, 1914 • Various
... deference. The son, inheriting his mother's belief, and having the deportment always before him, had lived and grown in the same faith, and now, at thirty years of age, worked for his father twelve hours a day and looked up to him with veneration on the old imaginary pinnacle. ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... high around the hut—a hopeless, uncharted, trackless sea of white lying below the rocky shores to which the castaways still clung. Through the marvelously clear air the smoke of the pastoral village of Poker Flat rose miles away. Mother Shipton saw it, and from a remote pinnacle of her rocky fastness hurled in that direction a final malediction. It was her last vituperative attempt, and perhaps for that reason was invested with a certain degree of sublimity. It did her good, she privately informed the Duchess. "Just you go out there and cuss, ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... so bare that the hungry goats can hardly crop one spear of grass along its jagged slopes. It is so steep it scarce needs defence against an army. It is so commanding that he who stands on the westmost pinnacle can look across the windy hill of the Pnyx, across the brown plain-land and down to the sparkling blue sea with the busy havens of Peiraeus and Phalerum, the scattered gray isles of the AEgean, and far away to the domelike crest of Acro-Corinthus. Let him turn to the right: ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis
... human being. A feeling of curiosity had afterwards induced her to return and see if the bold hunter had cleared the gulf, or perished in his mad attempt; but when she looked outward from the highest pinnacle of her rocky prison, she could discover no traces of him whatever. It then occurred to her, that, if successful in his leap, his progress must have been finally arrested by the impassable rock that ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson
... excitement aroused that people are actually afraid lest they should by some manner of means be deprived of the privilege of being tempted. Let all such allay their fears. Jesus was tempted even on the pinnacle of the temple, and we will never be above our Lord, and may well expect temptation until we pass from this world-stage to the other land. No responsible Christian student teaches any such chimera as a life without temptation ...
— The Heart-Cry of Jesus • Byron J. Rees
... which Bonaparte must have felt at the pinnacle of grandeur where fortune had placed him was not, however, entirely unmixed with uneasiness and vexation. Except at Berlin, in all the other great Courts the Emperor of the French was still Monsieur Bonaparte; and your country, ...
— Memoirs of the Court of St. Cloud, Complete - Being Secret Letters from a Gentleman at Paris to a Nobleman in London • Lewis Goldsmith
... part—thou to enter on thy career of fame, I to set in motion every spring within my reach to advance thee to the pinnacle of glory and power. Henceforth thy name is Ibrahim! Go, then, my Ibrahim, and throw thyself at the feet of the reis-effendi, and that great minister will forthwith present thee to Piri Pasha, the grand vizier. Toil diligently—labor arduously—and ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds
... of my dear Prince too, can leave no room to suspect me of flattery) that as I have been his companion in the lowest degree of adversity that ever prince was reduced to, so I have beheld him too, as it were, on the highest pinnacle of glory, amidst the continual applauses, and I had almost said, adorations, of the most brilliant Court in Europe; yet he was always the same, ever affable and courteous, giving constant proofs of his great humanity, and of his love for ...
— Pickle the Spy • Andrew Lang
... the very pinnacle; or bouton of the spire; but the ascent was impracticable—owing to the stair-case being under repair. On the summit of this spire, there once stood a statue of the Virgin, above a cross. That statue was taken down at the end ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Two • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... every moment lest the support break beneath them and hurl them down along the sloping side of the pinnacle to death. ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... developed against the blue background of the sky. The arms, the limbs, the oval outlines of the steed, even the very trappings, could be seen distinctly; and for the short period in which they were poised and motionless, the spectator might have fancied an equestrian statue of bronze, its pedestal the pinnacle of ...
— The White Chief - A Legend of Northern Mexico • Mayne Reid
... stood in the choir with the obsequient verger at his elbow he recollected how he had got through the minutes of a long sermon,—a sermon that had seemed to be very long,—in planning the way in which, if left to himself, he would climb to the pinnacle which culminated over the bishop's seat, and thence make his way along the capitals and vantages of stonework, till he would ascend into the triforium and thus become lord and master of the old building. How much smaller his ambitions ...
— Is He Popenjoy? • Anthony Trollope
... would choose the manner of my death. On the pinnacle of rocks overlooking this valley, where each day that he hunted in the woods my dear Mus-kin-gum would stand and wave to me, tomorrow night 'neath the light of the moon, with my son's hand in mine—together he and I will leap from that rock into the valley ...
— How Ethel Hollister Became a Campfire Girl • Irene Elliott Benson
... regard it in sections. Far to the north east lies Virginia, from which the long waving line of the Blue Ridge comes, and passes directly under the Black, making a point of junction, near which it towers into the steep Pinnacle and stately Graybeard—so called from the white beard which it wears when a frozen cloud has iced its rhododendrons. From our greater eminence we overlook the Blue Ridge entirely, and see the country below spreading into azure distance, with white spots which resolve themselves ...
— Southern Literature From 1579-1895 • Louise Manly
... Split. De Poutrincourt landed on this headland, and ascended a steep and lofty summit which is not less than four hundred feet in height. Moss several feet in thickness, the growth of centuries, had gathered upon it, and, when he stood upon the pinnacle, it yielded and trembled like gelatine under his feet. He found himself in a critical situation. From this giddy and unstable height he had neither the skill or courage to return. After much anxiety, he was at length ...
— Voyages of Samuel de Champlain, Vol. 1 • Samuel de Champlain
... body, by the carriage of Christ, after his resurrection; but even by many a saint before their death. The Spirit used to catch Elijah away, no man could tell whither. It carried Ezekiel hither and thither: It carried Christ from the top of the pinnacle of the temple into Galilee; through it he walked on the sea; the Spirit caught away Philip from the eunuch, and carried him as far as Azotus (1 Kings 18:11,12; 2 Kings 2:11; Eze 3:14; Luke 4:14; Matt ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... doubted its authenticity; whereupon everybody said that it was not genuine except three people who really counted, and these included the gentleman who had recommended the purchase of the Van Tromps by the nation. So enormous was the row upon the matter that the picture reached the very pinnacle of fame, and an Australian then travelling in England was determined to get that Van Tromp ...
— On Something • H. Belloc |
