"Unfitting" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of unfitting a cultivated mind for scientific or literary pursuits, are often the best training for them. Voltaire insisted with truth that the real spirit of business and literature are the same; the perfection of each being the union of energy and thoughtfulness, of cultivated intelligence ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles
... of the firm texture it once could boast; and your friend knows well how to press on the spring of every passion that can agitate and alarm her. Threats of exposure may extort her consent to this most unfitting match, if they do not indeed drive her to suicide, which I think the most likely termination. I will, therefore, be strong where she is weak.—Your friend, sir, must at least strip his proposals of their fine gilding. I will satisfy Mr. Mowbray of ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... in the night, wondering whether the "Kindly Light" was indeed leading on Jack Pringle, no longer boy on the schooner "Flying Fish," but—what? The soul of a fisher lad, who had kissed his girl, and drunk his glass, and told many a brave and unfitting tale, and sworn many a lusty oath, following some torch along the radiant ways of Heaven! Was that it? Uniacke had, possibly, preached now and then that so indeed it was. Or, perhaps, was the light-hearted and careless living lad caught fast, like sunk wreckage, ...
— Tongues of Conscience • Robert Smythe Hichens
... a pause in Snoilsky's productive activity; he was depressed. It was generally said, although it sounded improbable, that he had had to promise his wife's relations to give up publishing verse, they regarding it as unfitting the dignity of a noble. In any case, he was at that time suffering under a marriage that meant to him the deprivation of the freedom without which it was impossible to write. Still, he never mentioned ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... think, however, why our cousin should make so strange a proffer to me—one so unfitting for a ...
— Andrew Golding - A Tale of the Great Plague • Anne E. Keeling
... Birds, bubbles, leaves and mountains, echo, all Ring in mine ears, that I am Richard's son. Fond man, ah, whither art thou carried? How are thy thoughts yrapt in Honour's heaven? Forgetful what thou art, and whence thou cam'st? Thy father's land cannot maintain these thoughts; These thoughts are far unfitting Falconbridge; And well they may; for why this mounting mind Doth soar too high to stoop to Falconbridge Why, how now? Knowest thou where thou art? And know'st thou who expects thine answer here? Wilt thou, upon ...
— Shakespeare's Lost Years in London, 1586-1592 • Arthur Acheson
... the company looked surprised at the familiarity of the 'thou,' it being the general custom in those days for superiors to address their inferiors in the third person singular. Directly to address a serving-man or maid was deemed incorrect, for it would have betokened an unfitting equality. However, Madame de Ruth's peasant lad responded with alacrity to his lady's homely speech, and in an astonishingly short time he reappeared with an enormous bowl of the steaming hot spirits—the punch, which Marlborough's army had ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay
... to belong to the body politic in any active sense. Not that he is no longer a member of society nor unamenable to its general laws, but that he has become a respectable declasse, as it were. He has entered, so to speak, the social nirvana, a not unfitting first step, as he regards it, toward entering the eventual nirvana beyond. Such abdication now takes place without particular cause. After a certain time of life, and long before a man grows old, it is the fashion thus to ...
— The Soul of the Far East • Percival Lowell
... to be about five hundred feet from the surface. The rock is white limestone, in which are chambers and passage-ways, stalactites and stalagmites innumerable. These have their somewhat fantastic but not unfitting names, such as the Gothic Temple, the Altar, the Guardian Spirit, the Fountain of Snow, and Columbus' Mantle. The place has been called "a dream of fairyland," a fairly appropriate description. The colors are snow-white, pink, ...
— Cuba, Old and New • Albert Gardner Robinson
... grateful or the less loving towards her new friend. She thought how nice it would be to have Nora at that splendid abode in England of which she had heard so much,—but she thought also that in that splendid abode she herself ought never to have part or share. If it were the case that this were an unfitting match, it was clearly her duty to decide that there should be no marriage. Nora had been quite right in bidding her speak to Mr. Glascock himself, and to Mr. Glascock she would go. But it was very difficult for her to determine on the manner in which she would discuss the subject with him. She ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope
... it may not be unfitting to make further mention of that same little spot of darkness, germ of canker, echo of the cry of fear, that had come to mar the fair records of Brockhurst For very certain it was that among the varying scenes, moving merry or majestic, upon which Sir Denzil ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... But were it even granted that her corpse were lying stiff and cold at the bottom of the Danube, or swept away by the current to the ocean, still Bertalda had had some share in her death; and it was unfitting for her to step into the place of the poor injured wife. The fisherman, however, had felt a strong regard also for the knight: this and the entreaties of his daughter, who had become much more gentle and respectful, as well as her tears for Undine, all exerted their influence, ...
— Undine - I • Friedrich de la Motte Fouque |
