"At the best" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... to bring out her friend to advantage. There was nothing said, however, from which a person unacquainted with the writings of Joanna Baillie would have inferred her true character,—no flashing lights, no surprises, no thunder-bursts. The conversation was, at the best, but sociable and free, as if we were all of the same neighborhood or household; but knowing her by her great work on the Passions, I was profoundly impressed, nevertheless, and left her well satisfied with ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 106, August, 1866 • Various
... that means of livelihood. And I think that she stated as much in her letter to Nancy and upbraided the girl with living in luxury whilst her mother starved. And it must have been horrible in tone, for Mrs Rufford was a cruel sort of woman at the best of times. It must have seemed to that poor girl, opening her letter, for distraction from another grief, up in her bedroom, like the laughter of ...
— The Good Soldier • Ford Madox Ford
... most elaborately phrased creeds, can at the best be no better than the shadow of something unseen thrown ...
— Soul of a Bishop • H. G. Wells
... friendship left among us; and elective affinity is but a dainty carving on the chancel stalls. The loveliness which makes that special person the veritable Rose of the World to us exists but in our imagination. It is no rose that we adore—only at the best a bedeguar, of which the origin is a disagreeable little insect. We believe in the exquisite harmony of those atoms which have arranged themselves to form the thing we love. And we marry our human ideal, expecting the unbroken continuance of that harmony. But the discord comes; ...
— The Idler, Volume III., Issue XIII., February 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly. Edited By Jerome K. Jerome & Robert Barr • Various
... At the best of times there was in the nature of Mr. Edward Eggleston Murch not overmuch genuine urbanity. Urbanity of the surface he had, of course; he called on it at need in very much the same way that he called on his stenographer. ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble
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