"Superhuman" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... feel that no great indignity was suffered in admitting the claim to national existence of a people who had such a representative as Washington. What but the most eminent qualities of mind and feeling—discretion superhuman—readiness of invention, and dexterity of means, equal to the most desperate affairs—endurance, self-control, regulated ardor, restrained passion, caution mingled with boldness, and all the contrarieties of moral excellence—could have expanded the life ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... what superhuman Peal was that? Not man, nor woman, Nor twenty madmen, crush'd, could wreak Their soul in such a ponderous shriek. Dumbly, for an instant, stares The field; and ...
— Captain Sword and Captain Pen - A Poem • Leigh Hunt
... me more brandy—more—more." and when the doctor placed a tumbler to her lips, she drank so greedily that he had to take the glass away lest she should do herself harm. But the ardent spirit put new life into her, and with a superhuman effort she suddenly ...
— The Green Mummy • Fergus Hume
... a long Spanish knife, the original of the murderous "bowie-knife,"—attacked each other with a ferocity terrible to behold. Every muscle seemed trembling and convulsed with passion, their eyes flashed with desperation, and their muscles seemed endued with superhuman power, as ...
— Jack in the Forecastle • John Sherburne Sleeper
... could not do more than provide fuel and keep the fires. All became exhausted. Rescuers and refugees might have perished there together had the nine men not followed what seemed their only alternative. Who would not have done what Reed did? With almost superhuman effort, he saved his two children. No one felt keener regret than he over the fact that he had been obliged to abandon at Starved Camp the eleven refugees he had heroically ...
— The Expedition of the Donner Party and its Tragic Fate • Eliza Poor Donner Houghton
... representatives in Congress only one was friendly to the policy of the Administration. Michigan, which had been Republican by twenty thousand in 1860, now gave the Administration but six thousand majority, though Senator Chandler made almost superhuman efforts to bring out the full vote of the party. Wisconsin, which had given Mr. Lincoln a large popular majority, now gave a majority of two thousand for the Democrats, dividing the Congressional delegation ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... Wainamoinen, the ancient singer, Ilmarinen, the eternal forgeman, and Lemminkainen, the reckless wizard, as mentioned above, are conceived as being of divine origin. In fact, the acting characters of the Kalevala are mostly superhuman, magic beings. Even the female actors are powerful sorceresses, and the hostess of Pohyola, especially, braves the might of all the enchanters of Wainola combined. The power of magic is a striking feature of the poem. Here, as in the legends of ...
— The Kalevala (complete) • John Martin Crawford, trans.
... feel quick-frozen again. Being alone at sea in a rickety craft with a possible madman had been bad enough. To have a weird creature with superhuman powers, and an impossible pet monster, added to the crew was a ...
— Stairway to the Stars • Larry Shaw
... opened a window in a German sleeping car—not without blasting; and trying to open a window in the ordinary first or second class carriage provides healthful exercise for an American tourist, while affording a cheap and simple form of amusement for his fellow passengers. If, by superhuman efforts and at the cost of a fingernail or two, he should get one open, somebody else in the compartment as a matter of principle, immediately objects; and the retired brigadier-general, who is always in charge of a German train, comes and seals ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... During that period, as the prospective commander of a company, he was granted the pay and provisional rank of captain, which all will admit was handsome enough treatment. Three months later, when after superhuman struggles he had pounded his youthful legionaries into something like efficiency, his appointment to a commission was duly confirmed, and he found himself gazetted—Second Lieutenant. In addition to this, he was ...
— The First Hundred Thousand • Ian Hay
... up and followed her like a child. With superhuman energy, she ransacked the house and gathered the most valuable articles. Plate, linen, dresses, Parian ware, books, furs, and jewelry were packed, as securely as the time allowed. A carriage and a baggage-wagon ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various
... these years. And now should I separate myself from the good man who never courted me, as a child, with flatteries, to turn my head, but remained respectfully in the distance, and waited till others had trodden me under foot to raise me to himself, and has never ceased, with superhuman, angelic patience, his endeavors to cure my wound and to share my sorrow with me? I should separate from the man who has no one but me to love him, to whom I am a whole world, the only being that ties him to life, or at whose coming his gloomy face is cheered? I should ...
— Timar's Two Worlds • Mr Jkai
... deemed sufficient to draw down celestial lightning upon the head, not of the blasphemer, but of his victim. Men, who trembled neither at sword nor fire, cowered like slaves before such horrid imprecations, uttered by tongues gifted, as it seemed, with superhuman power. Their fellow-men shrank from the wretches thus blasted, and refused communication with them ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... it says, God is in me, IMMANUEL, nobiscum Deus. And, at the moment when philosophy with pride, and universal conscience with fright, shouted with unanimous voice, The gods are departing! excedere deos! a period of eighteen centuries of fervent adoration and superhuman ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... was there, but she could do nothing, although so greatly adored. She was there with only her beauty. It was a superhuman vision that he evoked, heightened by regret, by remorse and greed. He did not want it to end. He wanted it back again. He loved ...
— The Inferno • Henri Barbusse
... believed unalterable. Lenore sensed a terrible, sinister earnestness in him. She could not divine its meaning. But it was such a driving passion that no man possessing it and free to the violence of war could ever escape death. Even if by superhuman strife, and the guidance of Providence, he did escape death, he would have lost something as precious as life. If Dorn went to war at all—if he ever reached those blood-red trenches, in the thick of fire and shriek and ferocity—there ...
— The Desert of Wheat • Zane Grey
... did not fall at her sides, but shifted about on her lap as if they did not belong to her. Her wandering, senseless eyes stopped their movements, and in them suddenly appeared an expression of deep meaning. The old princess made a terrible, superhuman effort to recover her presence of mind and regain command over herself. A single faint groan broke from her breast, and her teeth chattered. She began to look about the room for a light, but the lamp had been extinguished; the dull ...
— The Most Interesting Stories of All Nations • Julian Hawthorne
... rule by divine right, he exercised the sole functions of the government, which, upon his death, descended to his heir, and thenceforward in direct order of succession. The Mikado, by reason of his superhuman dignities, was invested with a sanctity that gradually became irksome, shutting him out, as it did, from all fellowship with men, and compelling him to forego all familiar intercourse with even the highest nobles around his throne. Consequently arose the custom of abdication ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... great mistake in thus adorning the lives of their heroes, and only mentioning their edifying features. They thus give occasion, even to the most devout, to suspect their testimony. Besides, by thus surrounding their saints with light they make them superhuman creatures, having nothing in common with us; they are privileged characters, marked with the divine seal; they are, as the litanies say, vials of election, into which God has poured the sweetest perfumes; their sanctity is revealed ...
— Life of St. Francis of Assisi • Paul Sabatier
... their beauties from unhallow'd arms! Oh! may their suppliant steal a passing kiss? Alas! he pants not for superior bliss; Thrice-bless'd, his virgin modesty shall be To snatch an evanescent ecstacy! The fierce extremes of superhuman love, For his frail sense too exquisite might prove; He turns, all blushing, from th'Aoenian shade To humbler raptures, with a ...
— Poetic Sketches • Thomas Gent
... Montague, as Jonas entered. 'You rise with the lark. Though you go to bed with the nightingale, you rise with the lark. You have superhuman ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... practically rather that of the dwarfs, as gatherers and guardians of treasure useless to themselves, but with which some luck's-child may enrich himself and his neighbors. Other analogies between them and the dwarfs, such as their accomplishing superhuman things and being prematurely subject to the dryness of old ago, ("Der Zwerg ist schon im siebenten Jahr ein Greis," says Grimm,) will at once ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... Vandover started up in bed, raising his clasped hands above him, crying out, "Oh, help me! Why don't you help me? You can if you only will!" Who was it to whom he had cried with such unerring intuition? He gave no name to this mysterious "You," this strange supernatural being, this mighty superhuman power. It was the cry of a soul in torment that does not stop to reason, the wild last hope that feels its own helplessness, that responds to an intuition of a force outside of itself—the force that can save it in ...
— Vandover and the Brute • Frank Norris
... the Holy Office at Rome was characterized by the Augustinian Cardinal Seripando as at first lenient, but later, he continues, "when the superhuman rigor of Caraffa [one of the first Inquisitors General] held sway, the Inquisition acquired such a reputation that from no other judgment-seat on earth were more horrible and fearful sentences to be expected." Besides the attention it paid to Protestants ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... ideas of this world in which they are to live are taken from his pages. The silent influence of Shakespeare's poetry on millions of young hearts in England, in Germany, in all the world, shows the almost superhuman power of human genius. If we look at that small house, in a small street of a small town of a small island, and then think of the world-embracing, world-quickening, world-ennobling spirit that burst forth from that small garret, ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... or "of the Hills," was that which at a comparatively late date was applied to an idol of green stone preserved with religious care in a cavern in the Cerro de Monopostiac, not far from San Francisco del Mar. The spot is still believed by the natives to be enchanted ground and protected by superhuman powers.[46-Sec.] ...
— Nagualism - A Study in Native American Folk-lore and History • Daniel G. Brinton
... the Vali and his mounted escort arrive. His Excellency alights and examines the Columbia with much interest, and then requests me to ride on immediately in advance of the carriage. The grade is slightly against me, and the whistling wind seems to be shrieking a defiance; but by superhuman efforts, almost, I pedal ahead and manage to keep in front of his horses all the way. The distance from Sivas is four and a quarter miles by the cyclometer; this is the first time it has ever been measured. We are ushered into a room quite elegantly furnished, ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... the embalmed bodies of their dead, exaggerating, as time went on, the foolish grandeur of their tombs. Now, above the sand which looks like the front of some great tidal wave arrested in its progress, we see on all sides, and far into the distance, triangles of superhuman proportions which were once the tombs of mummies; pyramids, still upright, all of them, on their sinister pedestal of sand. Some are comparatively near; others almost lost in the background of the solitudes—and perhaps ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti
... mouth, now they greet me only with curses and execrations. They have smashed my basin, they have torn my clothes," and so on, and so on. There was no complaint against the people for doing these things, only a bitter sense of injury against some superhuman power that had sent this withering curse of twins down on her. She knew not why; she sang "I have not done this, I have not done that"—and highly interesting information regarding the moral standpoint a good deal of it was. I have tried to find out the reason of this widely diffused custom which ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... carried into houses of the Rue Cerisaie; the dying leave their last mandate not to yield till the accursed Stronghold fall. And yet, alas, how fall? The walls are so thick! Deputations, three in number, arrive from the Hotel-de-Ville; Abbe Fouchet (who was of one) can say, with what almost superhuman courage of benevolence. (Fauchet's Narrative (Deux Amis, i. 324.).) These wave their Town-flag in the arched Gateway; and stand, rolling their drum; but to no purpose. In such Crack of Doom, de Launay cannot hear them, ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... more. No human being could carry me above the clouds. No human being could obey absolutely and without question the simplest touch of my hand. The Arrow is not human, John, it is superhuman. You have ...
— The Forest of Swords - A Story of Paris and the Marne • Joseph A. Altsheler
... his paddle deep into the water, pulling against the current. During the six weeks' waiting in Chicago she had taught him the essentials of the canoeist's art and, now, as he shot the canoe under the bridge and around a bend of the river out of sight of the town, a superhuman strength seemed in his arms and back. Before him in the prow of the boat sat Sue, her straight muscular little back bending and straightening again. By his side rose towering hills clothed with pine trees, and piles of cut logs lay ...
— Windy McPherson's Son • Sherwood Anderson
... the usual hour, the sky stranger came again. And, though Wunzh had fasted seven days, he felt a new power arise within him. He grasped the stranger with superhuman strength, and threw him down. He took from him his beautiful garments, and, finding him dead, buried him in the softened earth, and did all else as he ...
— Good Stories For Great Holidays - Arranged for Story-Telling and Reading Aloud and for the - Children's Own Reading • Frances Jenkins Olcott
... vague and dogged as his former ideas of self-destruction—summoned all his energies to reach the shore. He struck out wildly, desperately; once or twice he thought he felt his feet touch the bottom, only to find himself powerlessly dragged back towards the sea. With a final superhuman effort he gained at last a foothold on the muddy strand, and, half scrambling, half crawling, sank exhaustedly beside the fisherman's net. But the fisherman was gone! He attempted again to rise to his ...
— The Crusade of the Excelsior • Bret Harte
... much of them in presents to others. And still, I do not say that Timoleon is to be blamed for having received a fine house and estate; for there is no disgrace in receiving it by such means, though not to take it is better, and shows almost superhuman virtue, which cares not to take what is lawfully within its reach. Yet, as the strongest bodies are those which can equally well support the extremes of heat and cold, so the noblest minds are those which prosperity does not render insolent and overbearing, nor ill fortune depress: and ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume I (of 4) • Plutarch
... which influences them more than their belief in Haokah, or the Giant. They say this being is possessed of superhuman powers: indeed he is deemed so powerful, as to be able to take the thunder in his hand and cast it to the ground. He dresses in many colors, and wears a forked hat. One side of his face is red, the other blue, his eyes are ...
— Dahcotah - Life and Legends of the Sioux Around Fort Snelling • Mary Eastman
... only absurd, but a festering lie, for no man or woman who believes in the teachings of the Holy Bible can believe in such a doctrine, and whenever a man or woman does believe in the infallibility of the Pope and believes that the Pope cannot err, he or she believes that the Pope is superhuman, and such we know cannot be the case as long as there is life in the body, as we are all liable to the Adamic sin, as the world at large was cursed with the Adamic sin in the Garden ...
— Thirty Years In Hell - Or, From Darkness to Light • Bernard Fresenborg
... pacific attitude towards the South, or in his championship of the coloured race. His great work, "The American Conflict," on which he spent ten hours a day for many, many months, had made Greeley a master of all the facts bearing upon the reconciliation of the North and South. He showed almost superhuman endurance during that intense campaign. But Grant had captured the imagination of the people. The old soldiers voted as one solid band, the Republican party was looked upon as the saviour of the nation, and ...
— The Battle of Principles - A Study of the Heroism and Eloquence of the Anti-Slavery Conflict • Newell Dwight Hillis
... toward them, like the god Mentou, I fleshed my hand upon them in the space of a moment[?]. I smote them, I slew them, so that one of them cried to another, saying, "It is no man" [superhuman]. Mighty was he who was among them, Soutech, the most glorious. Baal was in my limbs; why was every enemy weak? his hand was in all my limbs. They knew not how to hold the bow and the spear. As soon as they ...
— Egyptian Literature
... blindly to the end, no matter what the path might be. But I cannot believe them. I cannot think that you or I and a few followers, even aided by Arnold and his aerial fleet, could accomplish such a stupendous task as that. It is too great. It is superhuman! And yet it would be glorious even to fail worthily in such a task, even to fall fighting in such ...
— The Angel of the Revolution - A Tale of the Coming Terror • George Griffith
... peered down upon the deck. She heard nothing but the wind and the waves. And then with her hair streaming wild, with lips bloodless, she stood upright and rushed to the deck. The wind tore at her, flying water buffeted her, and the hulk swayed under her feet; but, as though endowed with superhuman power, as though scorning the elements to which she had bowed through the night she ran forward, heedless of everything but that her companion was ...
— Dan Merrithew • Lawrence Perry
... limply like an undersized Eton-jacket six inches short of where it should have reached. Some lads were lost in shirts with sleeves generally associated with Chinese or other Eastern gentlemen, others moodily surveyed themselves in small shrunken garments that with only superhuman effort could be forced to meet the waistband without emiting a warning rip. Duport found ...
— Norman Ten Hundred - A Record of the 1st (Service) Bn. Royal Guernsey Light Infantry • A. Stanley Blicq
... black mist filming his eyes. The magic blade slipped from his grasp and clanged to the floor. He tried to save himself, but he could not. He fell by the side of his sword and lay there silent. His strength, had been superhuman, the last ...
— The Grey Cloak • Harold MacGrath
... the widened hole. Once over the edge the baby would be safe. The windy fiend seemed to be pursuing him with vindictive hate. It shrieked and tore around that bare strip of mountain side, as though the whole purpose of its fury was to destroy the old man and the babe. With a superhuman effort he grasped the cradle in both arms and lifted it in, then fell senseless across ...
— A Loose End and Other Stories • S. Elizabeth Hall
... seemed to Frank Merriwell that he must give out; a hundred times he set his teeth and vowed that he would die before he would weaken. No one could know the almost superhuman courage and fortitude which enabled him to keep up and continue his work in the proper manner. Those who watched the crew closely fancied that he worked with the utmost ease, for all of the ...
— Frank Merriwell's Races • Burt L. Standish
... explain to her the different positions held by the enemy. She was intensely interested in visiting the Sikandarbagh, the Shah Najaf, the mess-house, and, above all, that glorious memorial of almost superhuman courage and endurance, the Residency, ruined, roofless, and riddled by round shot and bullets. Very little had then been done towards opening out the city, and the surroundings of the Residency were much as they had been during the defence—a ...
— Forty-one years in India - From Subaltern To Commander-In-Chief • Frederick Sleigh Roberts
... who pray to Our Father in Heaven. He is, though I think not avowedly so, an adherent of the philosophy of Schopenhauer and von Hartmann. The primal force, from which all things proceed, is the Immanent Will. The Will is unconscious and omnipotent. It is superhuman only in power, lacking intelligence, foresight, and any sense of ethical values. In The Dynasts, Mr. Hardy has written an epic illustration of the doctrines ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... shape, so lacking in reverence and piety. The outrage on reverence would be put down to her, if she allowed herself to be likened to her of Cnidus and her of the Garden. She would have you bear in mind the close of your discourse, where you spoke of the unassuming modesty that attempted no superhuman flights, but kept near the earth. It was inconsistent with that to take the same woman up to heaven and compare ...
— Works, V3 • Lucian of Samosata
... and his religion, flings his crucifix into the neighbouring stream, and steals a valuable piece of linen cloth. Next by an enchanting melody he cajoles two maidens, Arsinoe and Psyche (Caroline Flachsland), into the belief that he is a superhuman being, and Psyche is so overcome that she submits to his embraces. The people of the neighbourhood flock to him, see in him a new god, and on his persuasion take to eating chestnuts, as the natural food of man—the priest of the community, Hermes, joining in their worship. The hermit appears on ...
— The Youth of Goethe • Peter Hume Brown
... door again with superhuman vigour. Behind me I heard Dona Rita laughing softly, statuesque, turned all dark in the fading glow. I called out to her quite openly, "Do keep your self-control." And she called back to me in a clear voice: "Oh, my dear, will you ever consent to speak ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... salient. Was there ever a more ghastly place? Even the Somme was outdone. Mud, water, battered tanks, hundreds of them, battered pillboxes, everything battered and torn, with Ypres like a skeleton. The Menin Road, the Zonnebeke Road, what sights were there—mangled remains of superhuman effort! ...
— An Onlooker in France 1917-1919 • William Orpen
... ever been vigorous beyond the common wont had acquired an elephantine strength. It was ever thus at the oar. Either you died under the strain, or your thews and sinews grew to be equal to their relentless task. Sir Oliver in those six months was become a man of steel and iron, impervious to fatigue, superhuman almost in his endurance. ...
— The Sea-Hawk • Raphael Sabatini
... three days and four nights of superhuman endeavor, it seemed strange to see Hart slumped white and still over the control pedestal. He who had energy far in excess of that of any of the rest of us had worn himself out. Having had no rest or sleep in nearly a hundred hours, the body that housed so ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science July 1930 • Various
... relief of Benares, Allahabad, Cawnpore, or Lucknow. But the possession of the Punjab at this crisis proved to be the salvation of the empire. Sir John Lawrence, Chief Commissioner in the Punjab, was called upon for almost superhuman work; to maintain order in a conquered province; to suppress mutiny and disaffection among the very sepoy regiments from Bengal that were supposed to garrison the country; and to send reenforcements of troops and guns, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 17 • Charles Francis Horne
... By superhuman sacrifice St. Ange had kept itself sober the Saturday night preceding the wedding but it did not sleep much. The male population discussed the day's doings and the women searched their meagre belongings for appropriate trappings ...
— Joyce of the North Woods • Harriet T. Comstock
... musical strollers, as acting-director Wurzelmann called the company, nevertheless made some money, it was due to the superhuman efforts of Daniel. Wurzelmann was always mixed up in some kind of love affair, introduced in time a ruinous system of favouritism, and became lazier and lazier as the weeks ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... Tiresias is not anything so insipid. He is a study of a real type, and a type which all the tragedians knew. The character of the professional seer or "man of God" has in the imagination of most ages fluctuated between two poles. At one extreme are sanctity and superhuman wisdom; at the other fraud and mental disease, self-worship aping humility and personal malignity in the guise of obedience to God. There is a touch of all these qualities, good and bad alike, in Tiresias. He seems to me ...
— Oedipus King of Thebes - Translated into English Rhyming Verse with Explanatory Notes • Sophocles
... struggle for the supremacy of western Europe. General von Kluck, still in charge of the First German Army, was in control of the western section from the Forest of the Eagle to the plateau of Craonne. He had forced his men to almost superhuman efforts, and by midnight of September 11 he had succeeded in getting most of his artillery across the Aisne, at Soissons, and had whipped his infantry into place on the heights north of the stream. That, with his exhausted troops, he succeeded remains still a tribute to his power ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume III (of 12) - The War Begins, Invasion of Belgium, Battle of the Marne • Francis J. Reynolds, Allen L. Churchill, and Francis Trevelyan
... penalty for her crimes, her evil nature, her flint-like callousness, her more than inhuman cruelty, her contempt for the laws of God and man, she was condemned to bury her magnificent personality, her transcendent beauty, her superhuman charms, in gilded obscurity at a King's left hand. ...
— Marcia Schuyler • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz
... slowly dispersed the morning mists above the Thames. The same sun warmed the court-yards of the London jail, which lately had confined John Law, convicted of the murder of Beau Wilson, gentleman. It was discovered that the said John Law had, in some superhuman fashion, climbed the spiked walls of the inner yard. The jailer pointed out the very spot where this act had been done. It was not so plain how he had passed the outer gates of the prison, yet those were not wanting who said that he had overpowered the turnkey at ...
— The Mississippi Bubble • Emerson Hough
... their daily plan of campaign, and when at last the people rose up against Giolitti and his enormities, the Vatican had its mob in readiness to make counter-demonstrations, and was prevented from letting it loose only by the superhuman efforts of decent Catholics and orderly citizens. It is a fair thing to add that the attitude of the Roman Catholic clergy throughout Italy has with some few exceptions been consistently patriotic. Even ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 5, August, 1915 • Various
... particularly the great river found by De Soto, debouched into the Pacific Ocean, he determined to learn the truth, and projected and commenced the ascent of the St. Lawrence and the navigation of the lakes as a means of reaching the Mississippi. It required almost superhuman daring to undertake such an enterprise; but there was enough in La Salle to accomplish anything possible to human capacity. His followers, like himself, were fearless and determined and, with a few small boats, or skiffs, he commenced his ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... at the last, you know. It's simply an unspeakable state of affairs, Alicia, dear! At a moment when we should be setting the whole world afire in a superhuman effort to flog this piece of construction track into shape, your ...
— Empire Builders • Francis Lynde
... excellence into the wild heart of her brother, but not enough to cure the deep taint of his nature. The third person was a wizard; a small, gray, withered man, with fiendish ingenuity in devising evil, and superhuman power to execute it, but senseless as an idiot and feebler than a child to all better purposes. The central scene of the story was an interview between this wretch and Leonard Doane, in the wizard's hut, ...
— Sketches and Studies • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... an anguished wail, almost superhuman in its power to shatter the silence of the night, and more startling than any human cry could be, struck disorganizingly through the drama. It may have hastened the catastrophe. Mr. Gilbert was unnerved for a moment, and in exasperation picked up a clod and threw it at the offending dog trembling ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... regard for the gods, but simply because birth and everything connected with the propagation of the species on the one hand, and disease and death on the other, seem to him to involve the action of superhuman agencies of a dangerous kind. If he attempts to explain, he does so by supposing that on these occasions spirits of deadly power are present; at all events the persons involved seem to him to be sources of mysterious danger, which has all the characters of an infection and may extend to other ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... how endless are the instances of superhuman sagacity in dogs of all kinds! I once drove twenty-five miles from a place near Guildford in Surrey to Windsor. In the cart I took with me a little liver-coloured spaniel. When I had completed about half the journey I put the spaniel ...
— A Cotswold Village • J. Arthur Gibbs
... of his shirt and pulled out the scapular that hung around his neck, and looked at it so long, and with such apparent seriousness, that Rags was confirmed in his fear that this kindly visitor was something more or less of a superhuman agent, and his efforts to make this supposition coincide with the fact that the angel's parents were on Blackwell's Island, proved one of the severest struggles his mind had ever experienced. He had forgotten to feel hungry, and the knowledge that he was acutely so, first came ...
— Gallegher and Other Stories • Richard Harding Davis
... him just then and he was, moreover, paying the penalty of his two years' campaign, in which his almost superhuman exertions and the privations he had voluntarily endured had told severely upon his health. Possessed of a singularly well-regulated mind, and having in an unusual degree the inestimable gift of common sense, he nevertheless ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... they stood upon the hearth immediately opposite the foot of Frantz's bed, and facing the affrighted young minister, he had full leisure to contemplate his strange visiters. That they were of a superhuman nature, he was warranted in concluding from their appearance in so solitary a place as Steingart—from their unceremonious entree at that unusual hour into his dormitory, and from their movements, actions, and awful silence. Frantz endeavoured to recollect the form of adjuration, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 14, - Issue 386, August 22, 1829 • Various
... stability of their power. The sight is tormenting and intolerable, and the pontiff is stung thereby into ceaseless attempts to retrieve his fall. If he cannot mount to his old seat, and sit there once more in superhuman pride and unapproachable power above the bodies and the souls of men, he may at least hope to draw down those he so much envies into the same gulph with himself. Hence the villanies and plots of all kinds of which Rome is full, and ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie
... Its best influence, however, was in giving him confidence in himself, and assurance of the reasonableness of the views which he had already begun to entertain. He had been led before to regard the old masters as superior to rivalry and incapable of weakness, superhuman characters, indeed, whose works should discourage effort. Instead of this, however, he found them to be men like himself, with their share of defect and error, yet made grand by inspiration and idea, and this knowledge ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume I. No. VI. June, 1884 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... carried her with a strength almost superhuman, forcing his physical powers into subjection to his will. Though limping badly, he covered several miles of wild and broken country, deserted for the most part, almost incredibly lonely, till towards sunrise he found a resting-place in a hollow ...
— The Way of an Eagle • Ethel M. Dell
... very fond of his children. When they were little they had been the joy of his life; the thought of them had been the only one that warmed his heart and gave him almost superhuman energy to take the future by the horns like a bull and force a ring through its bleeding nose that it might be ready for them to ...
— Winnie Childs - The Shop Girl • C. N. Williamson
... Spaniards loved the Church and the Crown. A word against either would have cost any man his life in those days. The old alliance still hung together firmly. The Church bullied and dragooned the king in private, but it valued his despotic power too highly ever to slight it in public. There was something superhuman about the faith and veneration with which the people, and the aristocracy as well, regarded the person of the king. There was somewhat of gloomy and ferocious dignity about Philip II. which might easily bring a courtier to his knees; but how can ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... is, that the Traditional Text—not in superhuman perfection, though under some superhuman Guidance—is the embodiment of the original Text of the New Testament. In the earliest times, just as false doctrines were widely spread, so corrupt readings prevailed in many places. Later on, when Christianity was better ...
— The Causes of the Corruption of the Traditional Text of the Holy Gospels • John Burgon
... man's powers of endurance in listening often exceeded mine in performing—yet I am not sure that he was always listening. At times I became so oppressed with fatigue and sleepiness that it took almost superhuman effort to keep my fingers going; in fact, I believe I sometimes did so while dozing. During such moments this man sitting there so mysteriously silent, almost hid in a cloud of heavy-scented smoke, filled me with a sort of unearthly terror. He seemed to ...
— The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man • James Weldon Johnson
... had crept in awed silence with her brother James to look through the window at the white and solemn figures stretched within. Here, too, she had sat on Sunday after Sunday for more than twenty years, and stared at the quaint Latin inscriptions cut on marble slabs, recording the almost superhuman virtues of departed de la Molles of the eighteenth century, her own immediate ancestors. The place was familiar to her whole life; she had scarcely a recollection with which it was not in some way connected. It was not wonderful, therefore, that ...
— Colonel Quaritch, V.C. - A Tale of Country Life • H. Rider Haggard
... he grasped her delicate chin in his foul hand and bent down, bringing his grimy face close to hers. But this was too much. Though Faustina had hitherto fought with all her natural strength against the ruffians, there was a reserved force, almost superhuman, in her slight frame, which was suddenly roused by the threatened outrage. With a piercing shriek she sprang backwards and dashed herself free, sending the two blackguards reeling into the darkness. Then, like a flash ...
— Sant' Ilario • F. Marion Crawford
... pictures and flowers, the swinging canary and the plaster casts, impressed him mightily, while Miss Bailey's evident and sincere interest in his efforts to do what he could for his boys took him entirely by surprise. He admonished Isidore to superhuman efforts towards the reformation which might keep him in this beautiful room and under the care of its lady, and, as he was about to return to his neglected sewing machine, he gave Miss Bailey all he ...
— Little Citizens • Myra Kelly
... vigorously in the early stages of the attack upon Romani. They had been told that once they got on the hills in the neighbourhood of the British positions they would see the Suez Canal stretched out below them, and this probably urged them on to make almost superhuman efforts. In front of Romani, in the region of the Katia oasis, mobile outposts furnished by the Australian Light Horse were driven in after hard fighting, and they fell back to other positions on the high sand hills ...
— The Seventh Manchesters - July 1916 to March 1919 • S. J. Wilson
... the reader would be amazed if it were not so; because he would regard it as a thing more than phenomenal,—as a matter partaking of the miraculous;—he must consider himself as coming in contact with a being altogether superhuman;—if the "Tacitus" of the fifteenth century, who, as a Florentine, may have been a complete master of the choicest Tuscan, had written with the correctness of the Tacitus of the first century, who, as ...
— Tacitus and Bracciolini - The Annals Forged in the XVth Century • John Wilson Ross
... in them, stand closer to us, because the meaning is no longer petrified in the shape, but speaks to us freely and directly, in a look, a gesture, a sweep of the garment. The Greek said,—"With these superhuman lineaments you are to conceive the presence of Jove; these are the appropriate forms of the immortals." Giotto said,—"See what divine meanings in every-day faces and actions; with these eyes you are to look upon the people in the street." The one is a remote and incredible ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... least six years before the date at which it is said to have occurred to Diderot. Thus the whole story as usually told to us would appear to be a complete fabrication—struggling publishers, toiling litterateurs carrying out their superhuman task as "independent men of letters" without the patronage of the great—which Lord Morley points out as "one of the most important facts in the history of the Encyclopaedia"—writers of all kinds bound together by no "common understanding ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster
... heard that you have superhuman strength, which I now greatly need. About a week ago a monster fish floated up to the shore of my town. It is decaying, and has a most offensive odor. My men in vain have tried to drag the fish out into the middle of the sea. I write to inform you that if you can rid us of it, I will let one of you ...
— Filipino Popular Tales • Dean S. Fansler
... high officials, and when they had seen some of his photographs, and had heard an outline of his plans, they readily followed the lead of England in accrediting him as a sort of unofficial peacemaker. Indeed, the Frenchmen looked upon Edestone as someone almost superhuman—a being who had come to establish on earth the dream of their philosophers, "Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite"—and they gloried in the good fortune of their sister Republic in having produced and sent to ...
— L. P. M. - The End of the Great War • J. Stewart Barney
... instant, Claggett Chew reached out to pluck the parakeet from behind the sheltering head and neck of "the fashionable." Chris, with a superhuman effort, changed himself to a mouse, tearing his foot from the frayed cord that held it, and leaped into the air. Simultaneously, Claggett Chew, overcome by the approaching blackness he had been fighting, crashed to the ...
— Mr. Wicker's Window • Carley Dawson
... for its aim to fix the order and character of events throughout past time in all places. The task is frankly superhuman, because no block of real existence, with its infinitesimal detail, can be recorded, nor if somehow recorded could it be dominated by the mind; and to carry on a survey of this social continuum ad infinitum would multiply the ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... talk about America. What was she going to do? Was she going to do anything at all? Would it be possible for her hugeness, her power, her wealth to remain inert in a world crisis? Would she be content tacitly to admit the truth of old accusations of commerciality by securing as her part in the superhuman conflict the simple and unadorned making of money through the dire necessities of the world? There was bitterness, there were sneers, there were vague hopes and scathing injustices born of torment and racking dread. Some few were patiently just, because they ...
— Robin • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... Raoul, and the pain of his wound now rendered him furious. He had not hands to touch it or dress it. Frenzied by anger and pain to a strength almost superhuman, he twisted off his iron manacles, as if they had been straws. This done, the chain that bound us together was soon broken, and our ...
— The Rifle Rangers • Captain Mayne Reid
... those thirteen years of almost superhuman struggle and that one moment of almost superhuman victory, I think we may safely include Cyrus Field among the masters ...
— Public Speaking • Irvah Lester Winter
... that comes to them, not through reason or evidence, or the probabilities of things, but, as some express it, "as if a voice had spoken to them" when no human being was near, or by a secret whispering to the soul by some unseen and seemingly superhuman authority,—when she had such a presentiment it never deceived her. For some time she had foreboded trouble. The foreboding grew upon her till its dark shadow cast a gloom upon all her feelings; it thrilled her at times with fear. She would start at the veriest trifles, as if ...
— The Cabin on the Prairie • C. H. (Charles Henry) Pearson
... was before him, he called on the shark god, his father, to help him; then, seeming to be endowed with superhuman strength in answer to his prayer, he burst the ropes with which he had been bound in preparation for the burning, and breaking through the throng of Umi's warriors, who attempted to detain him, he ...
— Hawaiian Folk Tales - A Collection of Native Legends • Various
... we have the keynote struck of superhuman excellence; and though the reference is, on the surface, only to physical perfection, yet beneath that there lies the deeper reference to a character which spoke through the eloquent frame, and in which all possible beauties and sovereign graces were united in fullest development, in most harmonious ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... herein distinguished, that whilst the former either proceed of mankind, or seek human intercourse, these form a segregated society—one might say, a peculiar kingdom of their own—and are only, by accident or the pressure of circumstances, moved to converse with men. Something superhuman, approximating them to the gods, is mingled up in them: they possess power to help and to hurt man. They are however, at the same time, afraid of him, because they are not his bodily match. They appear either far below the human stature, or misshapen. Almost ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 344, June, 1844 • Various
... feeling, any warm, hearty feeling is always banal and unusable, and only the irritations and the cold ecstasies of our demoralized, of our artistic nervous system are useful in art. It is necessary that one should be something superhuman and inhuman, that one should have a strangely distant and uninterested relation to everything human, in order to be able or even tempted to play life, to play with it, to represent it effectively ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... and I was alone, by superhuman efforts I contrived to wriggle on my stomach to the foot of the ascending stairway, but not having sufficient strength to wriggle off on arrival at the top, my long-dreaded horror of being sucked under the barrier, where moving stairways ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, June 25, 1919 • Various
... lacked in height he made up in breadth; it almost seemed as though, intended by nature to be a man of many inches, he had been compressed to his present dimensions by art. His vast chest and limbs, indicating strength nearly superhuman, his long iron arms and massive head, all gave colour to this idea. Otter had one redeeming feature, however—his eyes, that when visible, which at this moment was not the case, were large, steady, and, like his ...
— The People Of The Mist • H. Rider Haggard
... winter evenings, when the neighbors sat by the fire and did what they could to cheer the sick man and the sad women, that the wonderful merits of the great Doctor Killmany began to be frequently discussed. Marvellous stories were told of his almost superhuman skill. He had brought back from the very gate of death scores of men and women who had been given up to die by their physicians,—so it was said; and special instances of cures were related that ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 106, August, 1866 • Various
... Dionysius says (Ep. ad Caium Monach.): "Christ does in a superhuman way those things that pertain to man: this is shown in ...
— Summa Theologica, Part III (Tertia Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... augescente superstitione, arbitrantur deas;" i.e. they deem (arbitrantur) very many of their women possessed of prophetic powers, and, as their religious feeling increases, they deem (arbitrantur) them goddesses, i.e. possessed of a superhuman nature; they do not, however, make them goddesses and worship them, as the Romans did Poppaea and her infant, which is covertly implied ...
— The Germany and the Agricola of Tacitus • Tacitus
... out of the road. The girth of the saddle was loosened. With a superhuman effort old Jim remained in his seat, but he knew he must tighten the cinch. Dismounting, he permitted the horse to face away from the gale. The pup came gladly to the shelter of the miner's boots and clambered stiffly up ...
— Bruvver Jim's Baby • Philip Verrill Mighels
... spoke to him with indignation: "So thou hast claimed to possess a superhuman divine power? These are serious accusations, and they are legally proved; answer if thou canst." Jesus remaining silent, Caiaphas resumed, "Thou thinkest that by silence thou canst save thyself. Thou darest not to admit before the fathers and judges of the people what thou hast taught ...
— King of the Jews - A story of Christ's last days on Earth • William T. Stead
... board at the first hint of an investigation into Crazy Laura's story. Three weeks of prying into "vice conditions", gambling, profiteering and the usual petty nonsense with which so many grand juries have managed to fritter away time under the misapprehension of applying some weighty sort of superhuman reasoning to ordinary things, and then good news. The body of twelve good men and true had worn themselves out with other matters and adjourned without even taking up the mystery of the Blue Poppy mine. But the ...
— The Cross-Cut • Courtney Ryley Cooper
... student be familiar with Philo, who was an eminent Platonic Jewish philosopher and a celebrated writer, flourishing previous to the composition of the fourth Gospel, in which, indeed, there is scarcely a single superhuman predicate of Christ which may not be paralleled with striking closeness from his extant works. In all these fields are found, in imperfect proportions and fragments, the materials which are developed in John's belief of the Logos become flesh. To present all these ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... it, is demanded as a preliminary—the Neoplatonists did not make matters easy for themselves,—and a new and mighty principle is set up which is to bridle fancy, viz., the authority of a sure tradition. This authority must be superhuman, otherwise it would not come under consideration; it must therefore be divine. On divine disclosures, that is revelations, must rest both the highest super-rational region of knowledge and the possibility of knowledge itself. ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 1 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... Stilton, took down many of these communications as they were spoken, and they were afterwards published in the "Revelations." It was also remarked, that, while Miss Fetters employed violent gestures and seemed to possess a superhuman strength, I, on the contrary, sat motionless, pale, and with little sign of life except in my voice, which, though low, was clear and dramatic in its modulations. Stilton explained this difference without hesitation. "Miss Abby," he said, "possesses soul-matter of a texture to which the souls ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, No. 38, December, 1860 • Various
... the southward and westward migration of successive waves of transplanted European peoples throughout the entire course of the eighteenth century is the history of the growth and evolution of American democracy. Upon the American continent was wrought out, through almost superhuman daring, incredible hardship, and surpassing endurance, the formation of a new society. The European rudely confronted with the pitiless conditions of the wilderness soon discovered that his maintenance, indeed his existence, was conditioned upon his ...
— The Conquest of the Old Southwest • Archibald Henderson
... it I do not know, he could not explain himself; but by some mysterious process or other he succeeded, after ten minutes of superhuman effort, in getting himself completely rolled up in it. He was so firmly wrapped round and tucked in and folded over, that he could not get out. He, of course, made frantic struggles for freedom - the birthright of every Englishman, - and, in doing so (I learned ...
— Three Men in a Boa • Jerome K. Jerome
... planes in the system but less than half of them require our attention, for the evolutionary field of the human soul is the three lower planes, known as the physical, astral and mental. When the human being has outgrown them in evolution he passes on to superhuman evolution. ...
— Elementary Theosophy • L. W. Rogers
... between them. On one hand the Grass, funneled and constricted to a strip of land absurdly inadequate to support its gargantuan might, on the other the combined resources of man, desperately determined to destroy the bridge before the invader. In tropic heat the work was kept up at superhuman pace. Gangs of native laborers fainting under their loads were blown skyhigh by impatient technicians unwilling to waste the time necessary to revive them. In selfdefense the South American states doubled their contributions. At the edge of the weed all the offensive weapons of ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... remorse, the unavailing agony of that noble nature, too late undeceived, the wild, pathetic tenderness wherewith Othello clasped the dead Desdemona to his heart, smoothing back her loosened tresses with an inarticulate cry of almost superhuman love and woe—the horror of the catastrophe was all swallowed up in a sympathy whose pain was wellnigh too great to be aroused by mimic despair. The fall of the curtain was greeted with a tempest of applause. Men sprang to their feet and wildly waved their hats ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, April, 1876. • Various
... ten letters since her departure, but only two had been dispatched, and by a fatal error these two were identical. After a superhuman effort to couch his burning thoughts in sufficiently cool terms, he had achieved a partially successful result; but, discovering after addressing the envelope that he had misspelled two words, he laboriously ...
— Quin • Alice Hegan Rice
... these few words: when a crime seems to go beyond the ordinary scope of things, when it seems unusual and stupid, then there are many chances that its explanation is to be found in superordinary, supernatural, superhuman motives. ...
— The Confessions of Arsene Lupin • Maurice Leblanc
... the anthropophagous customs of the Amahagger to organise the whole thing in revenge of the slight put upon her by Job. She sank down dead, and as she did so, to my terror and dismay, Mahomed, by a superhuman effort, burst from his tormenters, and, springing high into the air, fell dying upon her corpse. The heavy bullet from my pistol had driven through the bodies of both, at once striking down the murderess, and saving her victim from a death a hundred times more horrible. ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard
... were needed, when each one of those sturdy champions had already been keyed up to top-notch speed. Time was slipping away, and despite the almost superhuman efforts of Clifford they could not seem to get the ball over that strenuously defended ...
— The Boys of Columbia High on the Gridiron • Graham B. Forbes
... Virgins are like goddesses, and seem to typify for him the strength of womanhood. Nowhere do we see nobler beauty than in his angels and archangels. In these "divine birds"[38] he seems to have recognised the ideal of all he strove for, and their wings are symbols to him of swift movement and superhuman strength. It was always strength that attracted him, and strength conscious of its own force, finding its expression in exuberant animation. Thus he loves to paint the swaggering soldiers, whose attitudes express their audacious ...
— Luca Signorelli • Maud Cruttwell
... thus fully adopted, and the world looked on as the battle-ground between two independent and equal powers engaged in perpetual strife, it was natural that the imagination should complete the picture by ascribing to those superhuman rivals the circumstantials that accompany a great struggle between human adversaries. The two kings required, in the first place, to have their councils, which were accordingly assigned them, and ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 3. (of 7): Media • George Rawlinson
... know what to say. Of course you and Dr. Anstice are the people chiefly concerned; and if you are both of you sufficiently superhuman to forego your legitimate revenge—well, I suppose it is not for ...
— Afterwards • Kathlyn Rhodes
... have dared go at noonday and without thought or fear of accident. In spite of the sliding and the plunging down the long hill, the storm and the darkness brought no thought of fear for herself; her only fear was for those ahead. In supreme moments a horse, like a man when human efforts become superhuman, puts the lesser dangers out of reckoning, and the faculties, set on a single purpose, though strained to the breaking-point, never break. Low in her saddle, Dicksie tried to reckon how far they had come and ...
— Whispering Smith • Frank H. Spearman |
