"Flawless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... admission at that time that the divorce was an affair they might properly speculate about. Mrs. Vereker knew well that her son would be hard on himself for the slightest unfairness, and forthwith climbed up to a pinnacle of flawless rectitude, for his confusion. ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... sanctity had scarcely evaporated before we discovered, with horror, that the man had never been ordained at all! He was an impostor, masquerading under an assumed name, but while he was with us he did good and lived a flawless life. These matters puzzle me. Perhaps you, my dear PLAU, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, April 16, 1892 • Various
... and Earth and Air, Listen to the Pilot's prayer— Send him wind that's steady and strong, Grant that his engine sings the song Of flawless tone, by which he knows 5 It shall not fail him where he goes; Landing, gliding, in curve, half-roll— Grant him, O Lord, a full control, That he may learn in heights of Heaven The rapture altitude has given, 10 That he shall know the joy they feel Who ...
— Story Hour Readings: Seventh Year • E.C. Hartwell
... called it "Mice Will Play." He had kept it quiet and hidden away ever since he wrote it, waiting to find a partner who fitted his conception of "Helen Grimes." And here was "Helen" herself, with all the innocent abandon, the youth, the sprightliness, and the flawless stage art that ...
— Strictly Business • O. Henry
... respond to the idea that here was a new world, flawless and unblemished, into which no human being had ever pried. Here were open secrets to be read for the first time. It was not with the cold eye of science alone that we gazed at these rocks—a tiny spur of the great unseen continent; but it was with ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... I said. Then, with colorless ceremony, I made them known to one another, and with greater ceremony they exchanged salutes and compliments—a pair matched in flawless breeding and ...
— The Reckoning • Robert W. Chambers
... Latin sentences and made no endeavour to treat them so as to make sense in the singing, but made the words wait upon the musical phrases, in Dr. Campion we see the first clear wish to weld music and poem into one flawless whole. To an extent he succeeded, but full success did not come till several generations had first tried, tried and failed. Campion properly belongs to the sixteenth century, and Harry Lawes, born twenty-five years before Campion died, as properly belongs to the seventeenth century. In his ...
— Old Scores and New Readings • John F. Runciman
... expressionless eyes, down an aisle formed by the other cats who sat in solemn contemplation on their tails. There was no doubt of Lola's success. The tricks were as marvellous in themselves as their execution was flawless. During the applause I noticed her eagerly scanning the sea of faces. Her eyes seemed to be turned in my direction. I waved my handkerchief, and instinct told me that at last she recognised the point of pink and the ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke
... to have gained mastery of himself, and to have put his social nature to the severest test and found it flawless, were valid results of his life on the Elkhorn Ranch. It imparted to him also a knowledge which was to prove most precious to him in the unforeseen future. For it taught him the immense diversity of the people, and consequently of the interests, of ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... by. I see now all our summers there bathed in mellow sunlight, all the autumns aglow with red and gold, all the winters clean with sparkling snow, all the springs green with breaking buds and white with bloom. If those seasons were not flawless at the time, they have become so, now when they are ...
— Dwellers in Arcady - The Story of an Abandoned Farm • Albert Bigelow Paine
... the feet, flawless, that haunt the hills— (ah, sweet, dare I think, beneath fetter of golden clasp, of the rhythm, the fall and rise of yours, carven, slight beneath straps of gold that keep their slender beauty caught, like wings and ...
— Hymen • Hilda Doolittle
... who chose to listen. Her amazing outburst forced from me an avowal that should have been made to you alone. Helen, I want you to be my wife. I love you better than all the world. I have my faults,—what man is flawless?—but I have the abiding virtue of loving you. I shall make your life happy, Helen. For God's sake do not tell me that you are already ...
— The Silent Barrier • Louis Tracy
... flawless cup: how delicate and fine The flowing curve of every jewelled line! Look, turn it up or down, 'tis perfect still,— But holds no ...
— The Poems of Henry Van Dyke • Henry Van Dyke
... lustre of this is the true "adamantine," or diamond, brilliancy, and the other and impure divisions of this particular lustre are: splendent, when objects are reflected perfectly, but of a lower scale of perfection than the true "adamantine" standard, which is absolutely flawless. When still lower, and the reflection, though maybe fairly good, is somewhat "fuzzy," or is confused or out of focus, it is then merely shining; when still less distinct, and no trace of actual reflection is possible (by which is meant that no object can be reproduced in any ...
— The Chemistry, Properties and Tests of Precious Stones • John Mastin
... the dog-wood, the red-bud, the spice-wood, the sweet-strife, the angelica. On the west the velvet turf began to unroll gently downward toward the river. The quiet stream ran with molten silver on that flawless October day, and deep shadows of royal purple hung curtains of wondrous beauty above the water. Back under the trees the shadows were darkly blue, bluer even than the cloudless sky arching so high above the ...
— Round Anvil Rock - A Romance • Nancy Huston Banks
... everything. If he is a man he will think, 'Only her purity has prompted her to tell me,' and he will love her more than ever. Some momentary spasm he may feel. Every man wishes to believe that the flower he plucks is flawless. But his higher nature will conquer his vanity and he will say, 'She loves me, I love her, she is innocent, and if any blow is to be struck at her ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine
... The strange repressed surrounding accentuated every detail of her Manchu pomp and color. The frank splendor of her satins and carved jades and embroidery, her immobile striking face loaded with carmine and glinting headdress, the flawless loveliness of hands with the pointed nail protectors, were, in his room, ...
— Java Head • Joseph Hergesheimer
... The dinner is flawless, the guests importantly jeweled or stomached, depending on their sex, the other Mrs. Severance an admirable hostess—and yet in spite of it all, Mr. Severance does not seem to be enjoying himself ...
— Young People's Pride • Stephen Vincent Benet
... tone, was affable, and even considerate, in the morning. Mabel, studying him with new eyes, had to admire his flawless surface, though her conviction of the shallow depth of him was firmlier rooted than before. "He is—he really is—a tremendous donkey, poor James," she thought to herself as he gave out playful sarcasms at her expense, ...
— Love and Lucy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... thrust of wind up the ravine would produce a tremulous motion in the image at the focus of the mirror; but this was seldom. For the most part the wonderful lenses presented a steady curvature, not flawless, but ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... willing to let it go for five hundred. She opened her bag slowly, in spite of the terrified and ever-louder protestations of the doctor, and took from it a slender gold necklace set simply with seven pearls in front; but the pearls were of wonderful brilliancy—flawless, and perfect in shape. The ornament was simple, chaste, and of exquisite delicacy. And instantly he saw in fancy the necklace on Clotilde's beautiful neck, as its natural adornment. Any other jewel would have been a useless ornament, these pearls would be the fitting symbol of her youth. And ...
— Doctor Pascal • Emile Zola
... recall among others a visit made me in 1866 by a distinguished friend of the President, Mr. Thomas A. Hendricks. The purpose of his coming was to convey to me assurances of the very high esteem in which I was held by the President, and to explain personally Mr. Johnson's plan of reconstruction, its flawless constitutionality, and so on. But being on the ground, I had before me the exhibition of its practical working, saw the oppression and excesses growing out of it, and in the face of these experiences ...
— The Memoirs of General Philip H. Sheridan, Vol. II., Part 5 • P. H. Sheridan
... Roman Catholic hierarchy, and the German Social Democracy. There are some 4,200 Socialist associations, subject to the orders of forty-two district associations, these in turn being ruled by the Central Committee. The working of the Social Democratic machine is almost flawless. The discipline, it ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... wallet, yet, if one of the infantrymen knew it was there, not one of them let any sign escape him. Discipline was absolutely perfect. These marching men of rifle and bayonet swept on, heads up, eyes straight forward, every file in flawless, ...
— Uncle Sam's Boys as Sergeants - or, Handling Their First Real Commands • H. Irving Hancock
... columns round me, two and two, The odd one at my feet where Anselm stands: Peach-blossom marble all, the rare, the ripe As fresh-poured red wine of a mighty pulse, 30 —Old Gandolf with his paltry onion-stone, deg. deg.31 Put me where I may look at him! True peach, Rosy and flawless: how I earned the prize! Draw close: that conflagration of my church —What then? So much was saved if aught were missed! My sons, ye would not be my death? Go dig The white-grape vineyard where the oil-press stood, Drop water gently till the surface sink, And if ye find... Ah God, I ...
— Browning's Shorter Poems • Robert Browning
... warms my cheeks. And all of this is pure joy. No hawk of dread and horror keeps swooping down and bearing off the little birds of happiness. No accusing conscience starts forth and beckons me away from pleasure. Everywhere is supreme and flawless beauty. Whether one looks at this tiny snail shell, marvellously chased and marked, a very elf's horn whose open mouth is coloured rose; or gazes down at the flat land between here and the sea, wandering under the smile of the afternoon sunlight, seeming ...
— Tatterdemalion • John Galsworthy
... proportion; and the worst of all these discussions on points of art is that each person has to find his own standard—one can't accept other people's standards. To me Bouvard et Pecuchet is a piece of almost flawless art—it is there—it lives and breathes. I don't like it all, of course, but I don't doubt that it happened so. There must be an absolute rightness behind all supreme writing. Art must have laws as real ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... hope of selling it once again to provincials, clerics, widows, orphans, and in general the uninstructed and the credulous—among whom had been industriously spread the report that the rock in question consisted of one solid and flawless diamond. ...
— First and Last • H. Belloc
... The result was most soul-satisfying. My spirits rose unaccountably. Even the sight of Von Gerhard, looking troubled and distrait, did not quiet them. We darted away, out along the lake front, past the toll gate, to the bay road stretching its flawless length along the water's side. It was alive with swift-moving motor cars swarming like twentieth-century pilgrims toward the mecca of cool breezes and comfort. There were proud limousines; comfortable family cars; trim little roadsters; noisy ...
— Dawn O'Hara, The Girl Who Laughed • Edna Ferber
... me a moment longer. I think you may have realized last year what Jerry was. You saw him then, a creature with the body and intelligence of a man and the heart of a child. He was what I had made him. From my point of view he was flawless, as nearly perfect as you will find ...
— Paradise Garden - The Satirical Narrative of a Great Experiment • George Gibbs
... the reductio ad absurdum—the lawyers' argument, technically flawless, though proceeding upon a transparent fallacy. That fallacy I shall consider hereafter; the question of the moment is the reporters'—"Have you any statement ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... that she had always viewed her good-natured husband as the most willing and most natural butt for her caustic wit; she still was fond of aiming a shaft or two at him, and he was still equally ready to let the shaft glance harmlessly against the flawless shield of his own imperturbable good humour, but now, contrary to all precedent, to all usages and customs of London society, Marguerite seldom was seen at routs or at the opera without her husband; she accompanied him to all the races, and even one night—oh ...
— The Elusive Pimpernel • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... the great day was a marvel of organisation. The jobs fitted into one another, and into the general tactical scheme of the advance, as exactly as the parts of a flawless motor. At no time could enemy craft steal toward the lines to spy out the land. Every sector was covered by defensive patrols which travelled northward and southward, southward and northward, eager to pounce on any black-crossed stranger. ...
— Cavalry of the Clouds • Alan Bott
... later the back room was in its usual flawless order and the two sisters had seated themselves near the lamp. Ann Eliza had taken up her sewing, and Evelina was preparing to make artificial flowers. The sisters usually relegated this more delicate business to the long leisure of the summer months; but to-night Evelina had ...
— Bunner Sisters • Edith Wharton
... A.D.) Quintus describes Helen, as she is led with the captive women of Ilios, to the ships of the Achaeans:—"Now Helen lamented not, but shame dwelt in her dark eyes, and reddened her lovely cheeks, . . . while around her the people marvelled as they beheld the flawless grace and winsome beauty of the woman, and none dared upbraid her with secret taunt or open rebuke. Nay, as she had been a Goddess they beheld her gladly, for dear and desired was she in their sight. And as when their ...
— Helen of Troy • Andrew Lang
... moon, slowly deepening from lustreless white, through gleaming silver, into burnished gold, and attended by one solitary, pearl-white star. The vast concave of sky above was of violet, infinite and flawless. Far out dusky amethystine islets clustered like gems on the shining breast of the bay. The little pools of water along the low shores glowed like mirrors of polished jacinth. The small, pine-fringed headlands ran out into the water, cutting its ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1896 to 1901 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... Burgers attempted to levy tribute on him in the form of hut tax. It was his great ambition to obtain a cannon for the defense of his mountain stronghold. Accordingly, towards the end of the seventies, he offered a heavy price, no less than a pint of clear, flawless diamonds, to any one who would supply such a weapon. Herbert Rhodes heard of the offer, opened communications with the chief, and agreed to provide a cannon on the ...
— Reminiscences of a South African Pioneer • W. C. Scully
... And tangled dells, and wilding pleasances, Hung moist with odors strange from scented trees. Sweet sounds o'erbrimmed the place; and rare perfumes, Faint as far sunshine, fell 'mong verdant glooms. In that fair land, all hues, all leafage green Wrapt flawless days in endless summer-sheen. Bright eyes, the violet waking, lifted up Where bent the lily her deep, fragrant cup; And folded buds, 'gainst many a leafy spray— The wild-woods' voiceless nuns—knelt ...
— Lilith - The Legend of the First Woman • Ada Langworthy Collier
... said. "Binoculars, microscopes—it would take us a long time to learn how to make glass as clear and flawless as those crystals. But we have no way of cutting and ...
— Space Prison • Tom Godwin
... sharply outlined crests of remote mountain range, in lifeless desolation the landscape lay outspread to the view. Southward, streaked with white fringe of alkali, the flat monotone of sand and ashes blended with the flatter, flawless surface of a wide-spreading, ash-colored inland lake, its shores dotted at intervals with the bleaching bones of cattle and ridged with ancient wagon-tracks unwashed by not so much as a single drop from the cloudless heavens ...
— Ray's Daughter - A Story of Manila • Charles King
... leaning back against the dark green upholstery and showing her flawless teeth; her long, narrow eyes with their seductive gleam flashed into his. A ...
— The Lighted Way • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... couple through the iron grating of his cell. He noted the tremor which passed down Beard's form and the furtive caress which he bestowed on the visitor's hand. At the same time the girl lifted her veil, disclosing a finely molded face of flawless features, with a skin of exquisite paleness, and flashing brown eyes shaded by long, dark lashes. As she stood with fingers encircling the bars that interposed between her and Beard, her beautiful face took on a purposeful aspect, as of one suddenly ...
— The Substitute Prisoner • Max Marcin
... no one of his generation writing in English is his superior. We cannot resist the pleasure of quoting here from his "Innisfree", which won the praise of Robert Louis Stevenson, and which, if not the high mark of Yeats's achievement, is still a flawless ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... felt and accentuated; the psychological possibility of a single Homer is ever more forcibly demanded. If we descend backwards from this zenith, step by step, we find a guide to the understanding of the Homeric problem in the person of Aristotle. Homer was for him the flawless and untiring artist who knew his end and the means to attain it; but there is still a trace of infantile criticism to be found in Aristotle—i.e., in the naive concession he made to the public opinion that considered Homer as the author of the original of all comic epics, the Margites. ...
— Homer and Classical Philology • Friedrich Nietzsche
... survey, to assure himself that he had forgotten none of those niceties of the toilet that Winona would insist upon, he took his new straw hat and went again to the Penniman house. For the moment he was in flawless order, as neat, as compactly and accurately accoutred as the Merle twin, to whom this effect came without effort. But it would be so only for a few fleeting moments. He mournfully knew this, and so did ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson
... the latest fashion of Saville Row, yet Gallic to his finger-tips and in every gesture. It was almost impossible at times to credit the fact that a Parisian was speaking, for the English of Gaston Max was flawless except that he spoke with a faint American accent. Then, suddenly, a gesture, an expletive, would ...
— The Golden Scorpion • Sax Rohmer
... reached her she smiled faintly and a little brown mole at the corner of her mouth played charmingly up and down. After the first minute, Gay found himself fascinated by this single imperfection in her otherwise flawless features. More than her beauty he felt that it stirred his blood and aroused in him the physical tenderness which he associated always with some vague ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... oval, marked in every cameo-like line and feature with that expression of absolute, flawless purity, found in the angels and Madonnas of old paintings, a purity that held in it no faintest strain of earthliness. Her head was bare, and her thick, jet-black hair was parted above her forehead and hung in two heavy lustrous ...
— Kilmeny of the Orchard • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... the questions about which Lady Ashbridge had her convictions. She had a mild but unalterable opinion that when anybody died, all that they had previously done became absolutely flawless and laudable. ...
— Michael • E. F. Benson
... notary, and the recorder, "Madame du Barry was the Suzanne of Louis XV.,—a circumstance well known to scamps like ourselves, but unsuitable for the knowledge of young ladies. Your ignorance proves you to be a flawless diamond; historical corruptions do not enter ...
— An Old Maid • Honore de Balzac
... a cry of recognition. Yes, there was no mistake about that flawless complexion, those handsome features or those wondrous eyes, the mysterious depths of which had enthralled me, as they had ...
— The Great White Queen - A Tale of Treasure and Treason • William Le Queux
... be beautiful children, happy with their luxurious toys on the bear rug, and they would NEVER be seen in any part of the house except the nursery. Their deportment would be flawless, and— ...
— Seventeen - A Tale Of Youth And Summer Time And The Baxter Family Especially William • Booth Tarkington
... locomotive, not protective, skeleton, composed of cartilage—a tough, elastic, organic material, hardened, as a rule, by the deposition of mineral salts, mainly phosphate of lime, in exceedingly fine particles, so as to form a homogeneous, flawless, elastic, tough, light, and unyielding skeleton, held together by ...
— The Whence and the Whither of Man • John Mason Tyler
... uncouth, vulgar, exaggerated, fantastic, obscene even, are entirely due to Life calling for an echo of her own voice, and rejecting the intervention of beautiful style, through which alone should life be suffered to find expression. Shakespeare is not by any means a flawless artist. He is too fond of going directly to life, and borrowing life's natural utterance. He forgets that when Art surrenders her imaginative medium she ...
— Selected Prose of Oscar Wilde - with a Preface by Robert Ross • Oscar Wilde
... first thing we've got to do is find out where we are." His flash sought the window switch and found it. He went over and pressed it. A section of the beryllium-steel casing slid smoothly open, disclosing a thick flawless quartzite port. He stared out at the dark pattern of space. Long he gazed, then a stifled exclamation reached ...
— Pirates of the Gorm • Nat Schachner
... of knowing that, in spite of Dick's shrewdness respecting shades of difference in muscatels, she and Lady Newhaven were nevertheless ranged on the same pedestal in Dick's mind as flawless twins of equal moral beauty. But after this particular day she observed that Lady Newhaven had somehow slipped off the pedestal, and that she, Rachel, had the honor of occupying ...
— Red Pottage • Mary Cholmondeley
... were closed. Her complexion, pale though she was, seemed more the creamy pallor of some southern race than the whiteness of ill-health. The bodice of her dress was open a few inches at the neck, showing the faint white smoothness of her flawless skin. Not even her shabby shoes could conceal the perfect shape of her feet and ankles. Once more he remembered his first simile, his first thought of her. She seemed, indeed, like some dainty statuette, uncouthly clad, who had strayed from a world of her own upon rough days and ...
— Havoc • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... himself peering at him over her shoulder; and in its expression the countenance of the Roman was not that of a mendicant or a friend; the sneer was as patrician as ever, and the fine edge of the hauteur as flawless and irritating. ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... am shaken by sobs and cannot tell you all that is in my heart. My darling, I am sending you a jade ring that I used to play with when I was a child. I want you to wear it at your girdle, that you may become firm and flawless as this jade, and, in your affections, unbroken as ...
— More Translations from the Chinese • Various
... age or generation, has matched them again and again. As a creative and inventive singer, he surpasses all his rivals in quantity of good work; in quality of spontaneous instinct and melodious inspiration he reminds us, by frequent and flawless evidence, who above all others must beyond all doubt have been his first master and his first model in lyric poetry—the author of "The Passionate Shepherd ...
— The Hesperides & Noble Numbers: Vol. 1 and 2 • Robert Herrick
... matter, some of the word-pictures are flawless in their beauty; this, for instance, suggested by the view of the ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... was practically a teetotaller. He had taken a whim that way as a boy, and a few experiments in drunkenness which he had made at college had only confirmed what had been originally perhaps a piece of notoriety-hunting. He had, as a rule, flawless health; and the unaccustomed headaches and nausea which followed these occasional excesses had disgusted and deterred him. He shook himself easily free of a habit which had never gained a hold upon him, and had ever since found his abstinence a source ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Captain Palliser felt himself more irritatingly infolded in the swathing realization that some one was in a ridiculous position, and it is certain that Mr. Palford felt it necessary to preserve an outwardly flawless dignity as the duke surprisingly left his ...
— T. Tembarom • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... depending from it. But the smallest stones at the back, where the clasp came, were as large as my little finger nail, and the largest were almost the size of a filbert. All were of perfect colour and fire, extraordinarily deep and faultlessly shaped, as well as flawless. Besides, the necklace had a history which would have made it interesting even if it hadn't been intrinsically ...
— The Powers and Maxine • Charles Norris Williamson
... this attitude of Mr. Tarkington's is of course not even a compliment to Indiana, any more than it is a compliment to women to take always the high chivalrous tone toward them, as if they were flawless creatures; any more than it is a compliment to the poor to assume that they are all virtuous or to the rich to assume that they are all malefactors of a tyrannical disposition. If Indiana plays microcosm to Mr. Tarkington's art, he owes it to his state to find more there ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... position, if it were necessary, she would see me drown in this lake without lifting a finger, she would stand there and see it—she would push me in—and never feel a pang. That's my young lady!" Her lucidity chilled me to the soul—it seemed to shine so flawless. "To climb up to the top and be splendid and envied there," she went on—"to do that at any cost or by any meanness and cruelty is the only thing she has a heart for. She'd lie for it, she'd steal ...
— Louisa Pallant • Henry James
... Mrs. Landless. Mrs. F. tells me he writes poetry himself. Some one once said of Gray that no other poet entered the portals of fame with so slender a volume under his arm. He wrote very little, Mrs. Landless, but he polished every letter of every word until the lines were flawless as the ...
— Old Valentines - A Love Story • Munson Aldrich Havens
... by Mrs. Whitney's manner, flawless though it was, apparently, had watched with sinking hearts the disappearance of her glittering chariot and her glistening steeds. Then they had gone into the garden before Torrey and the clerks arrived. And they sat there thinking each his own kind ...
— The Second Generation • David Graham Phillips
... but an artist by the grace of God. He was indeed an exquisite artist, and if his place in Russian literature is not large, it seems permanent. He does not rank among the greatest. He lacks the tremendous force of Tolstoi, the flawless perfection of Turgenev, and the mighty world-embracing sympathy of Great-heart Dostoevski. But he is a faithful interpreter of Russian life, and although his art was objective, one cannot help feeling the essential goodness of the ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... them on the altar of love. Lying there, bound and bleeding and burning if need be, they are grand indeed—for they are in their noble place, and rejoicing in their fate. But this man was miserable, because, the possessor of a priceless jewel, he had found it was not such as would pass for flawless in the judgment of men—judges themselves unjust, whose very hearts were full of bribes. He sat there an injured husband, a wronged, woman-cheated, mocked man—he in whose eyes even a smutch on her face would ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald
... conditions. Long ago De Quincey noted it as a strongly determinant fact in Wordsworth's literary career, pointing, at the same time, to his remarkable good luck also, on the material side of life. The poet's own flawless temperament, his fine mountain atmosphere of mind (so to express it), had no doubt a good deal to do with that. What a store of good fortune, what a goodly contribution to happiness, in the very best sense of that ...
— Essays from 'The Guardian' • Walter Horatio Pater
... March 2.—In speech of flawless lucidity displaying perfect command of columnar figures upon which strength of British Navy is based, the WINSOME WINSTON moved Supplementary Estimates amounting to two and a-half millions. These raise total expenditure of year on the Navy to forty-eight millions. "A serious event," he ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, March 11, 1914 • Various
... building belonging to the Academy in what was called Bramble Street, and not far from the Common. Here, during the day, she industriously copied manuscripts' or, from her notebook, letters dictated by various members of the faculty. And she was pleased when they exclaimed delightedly at the flawless copies and failed to suspect her of frequent pilgrimages to the dictionary in the library in order to familiarize herself with the meaning and manner of spelling various academic words. At first it ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... noble Hildegard: And rather would I give my soul to burn Than wrong in thought her flawless maidenhood. And now she hath told me what I dare not think Truth. And I dare not think her lips ...
— Rosamund, Queen of the Lombards • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... engaged a boat, and then went down to the lake. Nature wore a thoughtful, contemplative smile, and the lake was a dimple. A flawless day; an Indian summer day, gauzed with a glowing haze. And the smaller trees, in recognition of this grape-juice time of year, had adorned themselves in red. October, the sweetest and mellowest stanza in ...
— The Colossus - A Novel • Opie Read
... admiration was quite impersonal, it was none the less sincere; and his approval of her grey eyes, set widely apart beneath her crown of sunny hair, of the delicately rounded face, the frank mouth, which disclosed teeth as white as milk, was enhanced by the fact that every line, every tint spoke of flawless health and a mind attuned to the simple, gracious things of life rather than those which are complex and hard ...
— Afterwards • Kathlyn Rhodes
... irresistibly to overwhelm the sanities of a whole region; but somewhere, in the very forefront of turmoil, was like to slumber one of these little meadows, as unconscious of anything but its own flawless green simplicity as a child asleep in mid-ocean. Or, away up in the snows, warmed by the fortuity of reflected heat, its emerald eye looked bravely out to the heavens. Or, as here, it rested confidingly in the very heart of ...
— The Mountains • Stewart Edward White
... surprise of her maid, who usually found her easy to please. She finally decided upon a small toque which was made to set well back from her face into the heavy waves of her hair. She was too wise to wear a veil, for her complexion was flawless, her forehead low and full, and her hair arranged loosely about it; ...
— Senator North • Gertrude Atherton
... And here laid firm foundations of the Free. The sunlight makes the dim dunes hills of snow, And every vessel's sail a twinkling wing Glancing the violet ocean far away: The world is full of color and of glow; A mighty canvas whereon God doth fling The flawless picture ...
— An Ode • Madison J. Cawein
... that it did. Their happiness was flawless; flawless as far as her husband's wife was concerned. It was in regard to Tante's ward that Gregory was more and more conscious of keeping something from Karen, while more and more it grew difficult to keep anything from her. Already, ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... purchase them." She replied: "The merchant offers them for six thousand crowns; and were it not for some of those trifling defects you speak of, the rope would be worth over twelve thousand." To this I replied, that "even were the necklace of quite flawless quality, I could not advise any one to bid up to five thousand crowns for it; for pearls are not gems; pearls are but fishes' bones, which in the course of time must lose their freshness. Diamonds, rubies, emeralds, and sapphires, on the contrary, never grow old; these ...
— The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini • Benvenuto Cellini
... to the manly earnestness of the Eros of Praxiteles. Set in relief amid the coarser matter of the book, this episode of Cupid and Psyche served to combine many lines of meditation, already familiar to Marius, into the ideal of a perfect imaginative love, centered upon a type of beauty entirely flawless and clean—an ideal which never wholly faded from his thoughts, though he valued it at various times in different degrees. The human body in its beauty, as the highest potency of all the beauty of material objects, seemed to him just then to be matter no longer, but, ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume One • Walter Horatio Pater
... loosely around the forehead smooth as a sleeping baby's, the broad arch of the delicately-pencilled black brows, the Madonna droop of the lids whose heavy sable fringes deepened the bluish shadows beneath the eyes, the straight, flawless nose, the perfect chin with its deeply-incised dimple, the remarkably beautiful mouth, which despairing grief had kissed and ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... darkened way With its bright, golden glory, let me seek A crown that well befits it for my quest. Fair waist that curves beneath the heart I love, I shall engirdle you with priceless gems Won by my prowess for your perfect grace. O wondrous neck! great lustrous, flawless pearls, That shall be royal in their worth, to match The white enchantment of your beauty fair, Shall be my quest ...
— Under King Constantine • Katrina Trask
... each other in the twilight of the closely shuttered room, was struck by the fact that Eugenia did not seem wholly like herself. Her outward aspect was the same, the usual exquisite exactitude of detail, every blond hair shining and in its place, the flawless perfection of her flesh as miraculous as ever, her tiny white shoe untouched by dust through which she must have walked to reach the house. But there was something . . . in her eyes, perhaps . . . which now looked back at Marise with an ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... instead of which the only metal present was a heavily-insulated tube containing a full pound of metallic radium. The least valuable items in the bag were scores of diamonds, rubies, and emeralds of enormous size and of flawless perfection. Merely ornamental glass upon Osnome, Dunark knew that they were priceless upon Earth, and had acted accordingly. To this great wealth of known gems, he had added a rich and varied assortment of the rare ...
— The Skylark of Space • Edward Elmer Smith and Lee Hawkins Garby
... the burgomaster's household. Maria's frank nature exerted a beneficial influence; it seemed as if her respect for her own sex increased in her society. The day before she had heard her sing. The young wife's voice was like her character. Every note flawless and clear as a bell, and Henrica grieved that she should be forbidden to mingle her own voice with her hostess's. She was very sorry to leave the children too. Yet she was obliged to go, on Anna's account, for her father could ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... heaven, and in many deeper and more devious theological doctrines as well. Indeed, his heterodoxy was of so mild a type that, viewed by the incandescent light of to-day, which is not half a century later, it shines with the clear blue radiance of flawless Calvinism. ...
— The Wizard's Daughter and Other Stories • Margaret Collier Graham
... great character. It is one more instance of the fall of a 'son of the morning.' We need not elaborate the contrast with Christ's character. In Him is no falling from a high ideal, no fading of morning glory into a cloudy noon or a lurid evening. There is no black streak in that flawless white marble. Jesus draws the perfect circle, like Giotto's O, while all other lives show some faltering of hand, and consequent irregularity of outline. Greater than Solomon, with his over-clouded glories and his character ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... is an almost flawless narrative poem, romantic in its conception and artistic in its execution. Porphyro, a young lover, gains entrance to a hostile castle on the eve of St. Agnes to see if he cannot win his heroine, Madeline, on ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... three days is the general rule in Japan. All their friends came to see them, and presents were showered on the happy pair. The great Sho-gun, remembering his former page, sent Taro a present of a flawless ball of pure rock-crystal five inches in diameter. Prince Echizen, his feudal lord, presented him with a splendid saddle with gilt flaps and a pair of steel stirrups inlaid with gold and silver ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 86, February, 1875 • Various
... the gorge the great geier twisted; after him sped the airplane, banking steeply in full chase. Both disappeared where the flawless elbow of Thusis turns. Then, all alone, up out of ...
— In Secret • Robert W. Chambers
... and out of the tree, a little home of song and love-making, of intimate and familiar life. I heard a cuckoo calling from the thick woods of the valley below, like the note of a bell, very far away. I noticed the unopened buds of the ash shining like silver against the flawless blue sky; it seemed to me I had lain there a hundred years looking at them, and hearing the thin song of the linnets, in a world entranced from movement or the passing of time. ...
— Lynton and Lynmouth - A Pageant of Cliff & Moorland • John Presland
... ascent to the "bench," or plateau above the wooded point on which were grouped the glistening white buildings of the pretty summer resort, and, having reached the crest, turned silently to gaze at the beauty of the scene,—at the broad, flawless bosom of a summer lake all sheen and silver from the unclouded moon. Far to the southeast it wound among the bold and rock-ribbed bluffs rising from the forest growth at their base to shorn and rounded summits. Miles away to the southward twinkled the lights of one busy ...
— From the Ranks • Charles King
... me is not that I showed so little self-command and so much insincerity, but the doubt whether Brett's flawless technique was the vehicle for an act of true good feeling or was used simply for the pleasure of using it. Similar doubts abide in all my special memories of him. There was an evening when he seemed to lose control over himself—but did he really ...
— And Even Now - Essays • Max Beerbohm
... Advaita Vedanta, the philosophy which would do intellectually what morally the Buddha had done, which intellectually would guard spirituality and allow a materialistic age to break its teeth on the hard nut of a flawless philosophy. Thus in India metaphysical religion triumphed, while the teaching of the Blessed One passed from the Indian soil, to do its noble work in lands other than the land of A'ryavarta, which must keep unshaken its belief in the Gods, and where highest and lowest alike must bow before their ...
— Avataras • Annie Besant
... serious-looking man without livery returned almost immediately. He led Mademoiselle into a room like a sort of study or apartment given up to business matters. Mademoiselle Valle had never seen Lord Coombe's ceremonial evening effect more flawless. Tall, thin and finely straight, he waited in the centre of the room. He was evidently on the point of going out, and the light-textured satin-lined overcoat he had already thrown on revealed, through a suggestion of being winged, that he wore in his lapel ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... black man has by nature a highly organized rhythmic sense. A totally uneducated Negro, dancing or playing the bones, is often a consummate artist in rhythm, performing with utter abandon and yet with flawless accuracy. My African informant, Kamba Simango, thought nothing of singing one rhythm, beating another with his hands and dancing ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 3, 1918 • Various
... bad shown himself twenty years before at the Bartholomew festival. And he had wit enough to foresee that the "instruction" which the gay free-thinker held so cautiously in his fingers might perhaps turn out the trump card. A bold, valorous Frenchman with a flawless title, and washed whiter than snow by the freshet of holy water, might prove a more formidable claimant to the allegiance of Frenchmen than a foreign potentate, even though backed by all the doctors of ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... of removing flaws from diamonds. The King showed him a stone valued at 6,000 francs—without a flaw it would have been worth 10,000. Saint-Germain said that he could remove the flaw in a month, and in a month he brought back the diamond—flawless. The King sent it, without any comment, to his jeweler, who gave 9,600 francs for the stone, but the King returned the money, and kept the gem as a curiosity. Probably it was not the original stone, but another cut in the same fashion, ...
— The Lock and Key Library/Real Life #2 • Julian Hawthorne
... which enriched all the national galleries of Europe (save, of course, that in Trafalgar Square), dreamt of him, worshipped him, and quarrelled fiercely about him, as the very symbol of glory, luxury and flawless accomplishment, never conceiving him as a man like themselves, with boots to lace up, a palette to clean, a beating heart, and ...
— Buried Alive: A Tale of These Days • Arnold Bennett
... by the poor light, he could see the mark left on the inside of the wrist, by the buttons of the glove. It was a generously formed arm, but so long that it looked slender, and its firm white roundness was flawless from wrist to shoulder. He shut his eyes, but he could see it through his eyelids. Sitting beside her like this, in the semidarkness, morbidly aware of the perfume of her hair and dress, he suddenly forgot that he had been rude, and she ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... like very old bronze, with certain metallic gleams in it—like time-veiled copper and brass. His flawless frame was covered with tight-banded muscle. There was no appearance of fat. His skin was smooth—without wrinkles. He was young; about forty years, or less. But there was the nick of a tusk-stroke in one ear; and a small red devil in ...
— Son of Power • Will Levington Comfort and Zamin Ki Dost
... obscure free-lance when he wrote this book. The effort, he says, somewhere, "was born of pain—despair, almost." It was a better piece of work, however, for that very reason, as Crane knew. It is far from flawless. It has been remarked that it bristles with as many grammatical errors as with bayonets; but it is a big canvas, and I am certain that many of Crane's deviations from the rules of polite rhetoric were deliberate experiments, looking to effect—effect which, frequently, ...
— Men, Women, and Boats • Stephen Crane
... shelving of a scheme that was supported by men of local experiences by the head of the Provincial Government, and by the Government of India, because people living 6,000 miles away did not consider it to be absolutely flawless. ...
— Indian Unrest • Valentine Chirol
... Yale took the lead from the start, and at the end of fifteen minutes was ahead by 16 points to 7.... This splendid victory is due in part to the general superiority of the New Haven eight, but too much credit cannot be given to little Howells, who steered a flawless contest. The Blue made use of the short, snappy English style of text-book, while Harvard pinned its faith to the more deliberate German seminar system. After the contest captains for the following year were elected. Yale chose Bridgman, who did splendid ...
— The Patient Observer - And His Friends • Simeon Strunsky
... scarcely any of the comment has been adverse. Some people have objected to a frivolity of tone; but as the tone is not, in my opinion, at all frivolous, this objection did not impress me; and had no weightier reproach been put forward I might almost have been persuaded that the volume was flawless! A more serious stricture has, however, been offered—not in the press, but by sundry obviously sincere correspondents—and I must deal with it. A reference to page 43 will show that I anticipated and feared this disapprobation. The sentence against which protests have been made is as follows:—"In ...
— How to Live on 24 Hours a Day • Arnold Bennett
... sandalwood screen! She had the pallidly dusky skin of a Eurasian, but, by virtue of nature or artifice, her cheeks wore a peachlike bloom. Her features were flawless in their chiseling, save for the slightly distended nostrils, and ...
— The Yellow Claw • Sax Rohmer
... For more than twenty years, They had thought and planned and worked. Ten years had gone, One-fourth, or more, of man's brief working life, Before they made those solid tons of glass, Their hundred-inch reflector, the clear pool, The polished flawless pool that it must be To hold the perfect image of a star. And, even now, some secret flaw—none knew Until to-morrow's test—might waste it all. Where was the gambler that would stake so much,— Time, patience, treasure, on a single ...
— Watchers of the Sky • Alfred Noyes
... vanished youth, Of faith in what so flawless seemed, Before the painful quest of truth Had proved how much I then esteemed Was other ...
— Poems • John L. Stoddard |
