"Unwritten" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and to an extent which it is difficult to limit, by any considerable omission of knowledge, of whatever kind, and that revealed knowledge is very far indeed from an inconsiderable department of knowledge, this I consider undeniable. As the written and unwritten word of God make up Revelation as a whole, and the written, taken by itself, is but a part of that whole, so in turn Revelation itself may be viewed as one of the constituent parts of human knowledge, considered as a whole, and its omission is the omission of one of those ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... bluebells, violets; purple spring and golden autumn; sunshine, shower, and dewy mornings; the night immortal; all the rhythm of time unrolling. A chronicle unwritten and past all power of writing; who shall preserve a record of the petals that fell from the roses a century ago? The swallows to the house-tops three hundred—times think of that! Thence she sprang, and the world yearns toward her beauty as to flowers that are past. The loveliness ...
— Jennie Gerhardt - A Novel • Theodore Dreiser
... almost irresistible impulse which tempted me to fly from the painful scenes and fearful discouragements which met me at Gainesville, Alabama, these "Memories" would have remained unwritten. ...
— Memories - A Record of Personal Experience and Adventure During Four Years of War • Fannie A. (Mrs.) Beers
... "Platts." Stowe records of one of our actors that "he had a quick, delicate, refined, extemporal wit." And of another, that "he had a wondrous, plentiful, pleasant, extemporal wit." These actors, then, who were in the habit of exercising their impromptus, resembled those who performed in the unwritten comedies of the Italians. Gabriel Harvey, the Aristarchus of the day, compliments Tarleton for having brought forward a new species of dramatic exhibition. If this compliment paid to Tarleton merely alludes to his dexterity at extemporaneous wit in the character of ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... hundred yards from the Maryland Private Hospital for Ladies and Gentlemen he saw Doctor Keene, the family physician, descending the front steps, rubbing his hands together with a washing movement—as all doctors are required to do by the unwritten ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... holds that it would be difficult to overstate the contrast. The House was no longer an arena for set combat between a few distinguished parliamentarians, whose displays were watched by followers on either side, either diffident of their ability to compete, or held silent by the unwritten rule which imposed strict reserve upon a new member. For the greater number promotion had come through slow and steady ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke V1 • Stephen Gwynn
... protection for life and property, the grinding oppression, the nameless horrors of all kinds, were terrible. Blood was continually flowing, for every anniversary demanded fresh holocausts, and the "Golgotha" presented a sight of indescribable horror. The unwritten code of laws were of such a sanguinary nature, that the public executioners formed a numerous section of the community and were constantly employed collecting their victims, leading them for exhibition through the capital ...
— The Great White Queen - A Tale of Treasure and Treason • William Le Queux
... lot of flub-dub," says the colonel, "about higher laws and unwritten laws. But we've got high enough law written if we live up to ...
— Danny's Own Story • Don Marquis
... straighten it out. In case the latter are unable to agree on the remedy, the case is referred by them to the assistant superintendent, whose duties, for a certain time at least, may consist largely in arbitrating such difficulties and thus establishing the unwritten code of laws by which the shop is governed. This serves as one example of what is called the "exception principle" in management, which ...
— Shop Management • Frederick Winslow Taylor
... before the fact and the first settlers of the west after the fact had their part, witting or unwitting, willing or unwilling, written or unwritten, along with George Rogers Clark and his men, who seized the British forts in that territory during the Revolution (and thus gave standing to the claim for its transfer), and along with the men of the Atlantic colonies who sacrificed their fortunes and their lives—these ...
— The French in the Heart of America • John Finley
... school-master's discourse; now its contents betrayed a childish apprehension, as if Pepita were a monster lying in wait to devour him; now it had other faults not less serious. In fine, after wasting many sheets of paper in the attempt, the letter remained unwritten. ...
— Pepita Ximenez • Juan Valera
... the executive and the legislative branches of government. Like their neighbours the Canadian people have based their system on English principles, but they have at the same time been able to keep pace with the progress of the unwritten constitution of England, to adapt it to their own political conditions, and to bring the executive and legislative authorities to assist and harmonize ...
— Lord Elgin • John George Bourinot
... why Nat Burns was not at the fire, as usual attempting to make himself leader of the battle without doing much of the work, and now the reason was apparent. He preferred to pursue his courting under the eyes of the village rather than to obey the unwritten law of service. And ...
— The Harbor of Doubt • Frank Williams
... a break, except twice, where there were gates to close. Dick, speeding a furlong before, had obligingly left them open; and a stockman is hard pressed indeed—or very drunk—when he fails to close his gates behind him. It is an unwritten ...
— Her Prairie Knight • B.M. Sinclair, AKA B. M. Bower
... lover Goethe drew, but the great genius who first taught mankind to stamp its wisdom in imperishable characters, and to bequeath it unto races yet to rise. The Faust of history shall long outlive the Faust of wild romance. The victim in the transient poem shall be a conqueror in the unwritten chronicles of time. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... Rockies fell. Even then the great trains of the covered wagons, driven by men who never heard of Destiny, achieved their places on the unwritten scroll of Time. ...
— The Covered Wagon • Emerson Hough
... the Just is of two kinds, the unwritten and the legal, so Friendship because of advantage is of two kinds, what may be called the Moral, and the Legal: and the most fruitful source of complaints is that parties contract obligations and discharge them not in the same line of Friendship. ...
— Ethics • Aristotle
... white flannel trousers, heavy white socks, and rubber-soled shoes form the accepted dress for tennis. Do not appear on the courts in dark clothes, as they are apt to be heavy and hinder your speed of movement, and also they are a violation of the unwritten ethics of the game. ...
— The Art of Lawn Tennis • William T. Tilden, 2D
... "grown old along with me," but for the forethought of Messrs. Smith, Elder and Co., in limiting its serial flow to twelve numbers of The Cornhill Magazine As it is, I have added a few chapters; but a hundred and fifty episodes remain unwritten, with the courtships of Mr. Priske, and the funeral oration spoken by the Rev. Mr. Grylls over the cenotaph Of Sir John Constantine in Constantine Parish Church. These omissions, however, may be remedied if you will ask the publishers for ...
— Sir John Constantine • Prosper Paleologus Constantine
... splendour of the coming day. A description of them has often been attempted by writers of northern scenes, and I have to confess, that I have been rash enough to try it elsewhere; but their full glories are still unwritten and perhaps ever will be. They appear to belong to the spiritual rather than to the earthly; and there are times when they so dazzle and overwhelm, that it does seem as though only the language of spirits is adequate to the task of describing them. Then they are so changeable. Never have I seen ...
— On the Indian Trail - Stories of Missionary Work among Cree and Salteaux Indians • Egerton Ryerson Young
... constant danger from infection, there arose a code of unwritten custom as rigid as that enforced by a careful physician in infectious cases at the present day; and thus, too, in course of time there was developed the idea of the possibility of disinfection, an idea as salutary as the discovery in medical science of effective ...
— The Religious Experience of the Roman People - From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus • W. Warde Fowler
... Death, freezes the tuneful tongue, unnerves the critical hand, from which the terrible pen drops into dust. Shakspeare has written his last play—Dryden his last tale. You may dream—if you like—of what projected and unwritten—what unprojected but possible comedies, histories, tragedies, went into the tomb in the church of Stratford upon Avon! In the meanwhile, you will find that what is written is not so soon read. Read for the first time it soon is—not for the last. For what is "to read?" "Legere" is "to gather." ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various
... dappled deer was hidden under a fallen tree-top and one day, while the doe was gone, he fell upon the helpless fawn, which, according to the unwritten law of the forest, was ...
— Black Bruin - The Biography of a Bear • Clarence Hawkes
... the wealth which supported the castle and the palace, and to march to the field to fight battles, in which they had no earthly interest. The written history of Europe is only the history of kings and nobles—their ambitions, intrigues and war. The unwritten history of the dumb, toiling millions, defrauded of their rights, doomed to poverty and ignorance, is only recorded in the book of God's remembrance. When that page shall be read, every ear that hears it ...
— The Empire of Austria; Its Rise and Present Power • John S. C. Abbott
... had satisfied itself beforehand that, acting on some unwritten code of Parliamentary procedure, the Speaker would rule out such an amendment as unconstitutional. At any rate, this is what he did ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... have no other distinctions which they make any use of against this argument, but the very same which Papists use in defence of their unwritten dogmatical traditions, namely, that additio corrumpens is forbidden, but not additio perficiens: that there is not alike reason of the Christian church and of the Jewish; that the church may not add to the essential parts of God's worship, but ...
— The Works of Mr. George Gillespie (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Gillespie
... that to kill one of them might have entailed upon us a long delay, and a formal trial in a council of elders of different tribes, collected for the purpose; followed by the penalty awarded by the unwritten laws which obtain in the desert, namely, a payment of as much fine wheat as would entirely cover the dog when held up by his tail, and the nose touching the ground, and this is no small quantity; such delay would have probably thwarted ...
— Byeways in Palestine • James Finn
... water, the gastronomic may depend, will not make up for the deficiency of solid convertible aliment. No culinary digesting, or stewing, or boiling, can convert four ounces into twelve, unless, indeed, the laws of animal physiology can be unwritten, and some magical power be made to reside in the cap and apron of the cook for substituting fluids in the place of solids, and aqua pura in place of solids in the ...
— The History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847 (3rd ed.) (1902) - With Notices Of Earlier Irish Famines • John O'Rourke
... evidently began with the idea that the folk-tale belonged to the domain of fiction. Thus the opening words of his book are: "Folk-tales are the earliest form of romantic and imaginative literature—the unwritten fiction of early man and of primitive people in all parts of the world;" whereas as he nears the end of his study he observes: "Thus, in their origin, folk-tales may have had some other purpose than mere amusement; they ...
— Folklore as an Historical Science • George Laurence Gomme
... made up of unwritten and written acts, customs, judicial decisions, and traditions; the written part of the constitution consists of the Constitution Act of 29 March 1867, which created a federation of four provinces, and the Constitution Act of 17 April 1982, which transferred formal control over the constitution ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... is that the real drama of daily life of the settlers—the life they knew 24 hours a day—is locked in the unwritten history beneath humus and tangled vegetation of the island. Here a brass thimble from the ruins of a cottage still retains a pellet of paper to keep it on a tiny finger that wore it 300 years ago. A bent halberd in an ...
— New Discoveries at Jamestown - Site of the First Successful English Settlement in America • John L. Cotter
... Ansdell, Ansdell and Phillip, Hefner, Weiser, Creswick, Sant, John Wilson, Junr., Solomon, and Henry O'Neil—the latter artist's "Return of the Wanderer" being in a conspicuous position. As Sir Robert points them out, he seems to see an unwritten story on every canvas. He singles out the Mueller as his greatest treasure, for it was the last and possibly the best work the artist ever chronicled with his brush, and he died eight days after ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 29, May 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... the special privilege or for the special needs of each. Hence was formed a habit of self-government, the practice of legislative, judicial and administrative functions, which resulted gradually in a code of written or unwritten laws embodied in the fueros or fors of each province, and the cartas-pueblos of the towns. In form these fueros or charters are often grants from the lord or sovereign; in reality they are only a confirmation or codification ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... define the functions of THE UNITED AMATEUR beyond making imperative the publication of certain official documents. The rest is left to an unwritten combination of tradition and editorial judgment. Any editor, once elected, is absolutely in control of the magazine aside from the essential official matter; his only external obligation being a tacit recognition of the prevailing objects ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... career, the same contraction of studies in the law school, in that order of truths of which Montesquieu, a Frenchman, fifty years before, had first seized the entire body, marked the connections and delineated the chart. At issue are the laws and the "spirit of laws," unwritten or written, by which diverse human societies live, of whatever form, extent and kind,—the State, commune, Church, school, army, agricultural or industrial workshop, tribe or family. These, existing ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 6 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 2 (of 2) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... become known all over the world. The latest instance of such a type is, perhaps, Lord Dundreary. The word mimus appears in Greece in the fifth century B.C. The mimus was a picture of life or, more exactly, an unwritten parody of life. It was divided into grades and the actors into castes. Women had previously appeared as jugglers and mountebanks. They now appeared amongst the actors of the popular drama. This made the exhibitions questionable according to Greek standards. The exhibitions were given by wandering ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... feelings." John Stuart Mill, with that candour which is the rarest of his great qualities, gave a generous and authoritative testimony to the merit of these attacks upon his father, and his father's creed, which Macaulay himself lived to wish that he had left unwritten. ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... of present day Hopi culture and an examination into the myths and traditions constituting the unwritten literature of this people, this bulletin proposes to show that an intimate connection exists between their ritual acts, their moral standards, their social organization, even their practical activities of today, and their myths and ...
— The Unwritten Literature of the Hopi • Hattie Greene Lockett
... had just lost a prisoner, which was against the unwritten law of the Force, but he had gained another in his place. It would not be long till he ...
— Man Size • William MacLeod Raine
... craze had swept the country, gathering in all public land as claims. J. G. Whitmore had contented himself with acquiring title to the whole of the Flying U coulee, secure in his belief that the old order of things would not change, in his life-time, at least, and that the unwritten law of the range land, which leaves the vicinity of a ranch to the use of the ranch owner, would never be repealed by new customs imposed by ...
— Flying U Ranch • B. M. Bower
... at the brink of the hill, overtaken. The stake was too large for the young artist to risk its loss by adhering to the unwritten rules of combat. He released Rachel, whirled about, and as the foremost descended on him, ducked, seized the man about the middle, and pitched him head-first down into the valley. The second, the tall Nubian that wore the striped tunic, ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... 1982 (Constitution Act); originally, the machinery of the government was set up in the British North America Act of 1867; charter of rights and unwritten customs ...
— The 2003 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... learned was she in all the devices of the pantry and kitchen, that many a young woman in the parish would have given half her setting-out, and her whole store of printed cookery-books, to know by heart Tira Blake's unwritten lore of rules and recipes. So, wherever she went, she was welcome, albeit not a few stood in fear of her; for though, when well treated, she was as good-humored as a kitten, when provoked, especially by a slight or affront, her wrath was dangerous. Her tongue ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... hesitation that Christians accepted the inferences from the idea of the Church in the remaining directions, and these conclusions always continued to be hampered with some degree of uncertainty. The idea of the [Greek: paradosis agraphos]; (unwritten tradition); i.e., that every custom, however recent, within the sphere of outward regulations, of public worship, discipline, etc., is as holy and apostolic as the Bible and the "faith", never succeeded in gaining complete ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 2 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... the Hurons always passed this way as a matter of favor, and gave yearly presents to the Algonquins of the island, in acknowledgment of the privilege—Le Jeune, Relation, 1636, 70.—By the unwritten laws of the Hurons and Algonquins, every tribe had the right, even in full peace, of prohibiting the passage of every other tribe across its territory. In ordinary cases, such prohibitions were quietly ...
— The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century • Francis Parkman
... Scandinavia to the Balkan peninsula, from the Rhine to the Ural Mountains, other myriads will come in the long years that will follow the war. New history is sure to be written for Europe and America. What shall be our contribution to its unwritten pages? ...
— The Lutherans of New York - Their Story and Their Problems • George Wenner
... of the unwritten books is, however, of little importance in comparison with the execution of the existing portion of the poem. The Argonaut Saga has its weaknesses as a theme for epic. It is too episodic, it lacks unity and proportion. Save for the struggle ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... unwritten; the great deeds are undone; in no biographical dictionary will you find the name of our cousin the curate. Is his life therefore lost? ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. X (of X) - America - II, Index • Various
... of men whose lives had been mostly spent in the army, as a rule in guerilla warfare, and the talk turned with surprising frequency to the subject of cutting throats. Not to waste powder on prisoners was an unwritten law of the Argentine army at that period, and the veteran gaucho clever with the knife took delight in obeying it. It always came as a relief, I heard them say, to have as victim a young man with a good neck after an experience of tough, scraggy old throats: ...
— Far Away and Long Ago • W. H. Hudson
... individual, needs is the formation of a distinct character. Now, the character of a nation depends, in my opinion, on the high or low estimate it has formed as to the meaning and purpose of life, and also the extent to which it adheres to the unwritten moral law, which is, after all, something superior to, because higher than, mere legal enactments. I confess that as I wander about this marvellous country of Japan, as I mingle with its common people and see them in various phases of their lives I say to myself, as St. Francis Xavier ...
— The Empire of the East • H. B. Montgomery
... who are now seeking to plant themselves against the tremendous force of kingly and patrician prestige. They have hitherto derived from our example all the inspiration with which they have struggled upward. They have been able to accomplish, step by step, important alterations in the unwritten constitution, by the apt comparisons their leaders have been able to make between American and British civilization. So that, in considering the forces at work to influence those at the head of affairs, it is necessary to consider ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... more valuable to Wagner, and what excited his gratitude to even more superlative utterance, was the confidence which Liszt showed in his genius, and without which, it is no exaggeration to say, Wagner's greatest works would probably have remained unwritten. ...
— Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, Volume 1 • Francis Hueffer (translator)
... "The Unwritten Law," by Arthur Henry, A. S. Barnes & Co., is extremely interesting, and written in a curiously circumstantial style, so explicitly worked out as to details of scenery, location and so forth, that it constantly produces the effect ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 6, July 1905 • Various
... modern peoples in an unbreakable web of prejudice, after the conditions favoring their acquirement have in great part ceased to operate. These preconceptions of national solidarity and international enmity have come down from the past as an integral part of the unwritten constitution underlying all these modern nations, even those which have departed most widely from the manner of life to which the peoples owe these ancient preconceptions. Hitherto, or rather until recent times, the workday experience ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen
... principle of growth, which characterizes all constitutions of government which are really adapted to the progressive needs of a people, if the people have in them any impulse which stimulates them to advance. The unwritten constitution of Great Britain has this advantage, that a decree of Parliament can alter the whole representative system, annihilating by a vote of the two houses all laws which the Parliament had enacted in former years. In Great Britain, therefore, ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... the prerogative which could not be affirmed to be illegal, but which no one would deny to be altogether inconsistent with the principles and practice of the constitution, since a great part of the constitution rested on unwritten law, on long-continued usage, Lex et consuetudo Parliamenti. And they affirmed that this measure was so opposed to that usage, that "no instance had occurred within a period of four hundred years in which a commoner had been raised to a seat in the House of Lords ...
— The Constitutional History of England From 1760 to 1860 • Charles Duke Yonge
... exist a mysterious, unwritten law governing the social organism which causes a natural and wholesome reaction to take place whenever tendencies, perhaps inherent in certain classes, threaten to become general, and thereby dangerous to the community. A few years ago, for instance, with the ...
— Reflections and Comments 1865-1895 • Edwin Lawrence Godkin
... midst of this spectacle, this din and uproar, the women are chaffering and bargaining quite calmly, watching the scales to see that they get their full pennyworth or sixpennyworth of this or that. To the student of faces, of manners, of voices, of gestures; to the person who sees unwritten and unwritable stories in all these groups of men, women, and children, the scene reveals many things: some comedies, many tragedies, a few plain narratives (thank God!) and now and then—only now and then—a romance. As to ...
— Penelope's English Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... of England, Heirs of Glory, Heroes of unwritten story, Nurslings of one mighty mother, Hopes of her, and ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... necessary that the father should play with and be the companion of his boy as it is for him to see that he has good food, warm clothing, and a comfortable bed to sleep in. The father generally is the boy's hero up to a certain age. This seems to be an unwritten, natural law of the boy's life, and the father often forfeits this worship and respect of his boy by failing to afford him the natural companionship necessary to keep it alive. In addition to a place and a voice in the councils of the family, ...
— The Boy and the Sunday School - A Manual of Principle and Method for the Work of the Sunday - School with Teen Age Boys • John L. Alexander
... certain portions of the literary classes, although these have all been made the subjects of wide discussion of late, both in America and Great Britain, and have, I think, a bearing under the circumstances on his character and genius. It is an unwritten tragedy that will doubtless always remain unwritten. I will but mention an eloquent appeal of the Scotch poet, Robert Buchanan, published in London in March, 1876, eulogizing and defending the American bard, in his old age, illness, and poverty, from the swarms of maligners who still continue ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... telegraph instrument no sign of it remained now. Had it not been for the chance that caused Cogdon Nestor to throw down his sleeping rug directly over the hidden instrument, it might still be clicking there unheard—and this story still unwritten. ...
— Pellucidar • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... the earlier bishops are taken from Bishop Stubbs' "Registrum Sacrum Anglicanum." Of the bishops between 1609 and 1845 there was only one (Peter Gunning) who was not translated to Ely from some other see. It is now an unwritten law that the Bishop of Ely should be a Cambridge man. For at least two centuries and a half this rule has been followed, if we except Francis Turner; and he, though of New College, Oxford, had been Master of S. John's, Cambridge. ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Ely • W. D. Sweeting
... more moral nor less than its kind. An unwritten law kept respectable women away, but the management showed no inclination to interfere where there was no noise or disorder. Employees were supposed to see that no feminine visitors remained ...
— A Poor Wise Man • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... after dinner with her in the moonlight. When the ladies retired he came into the smoking room, drank a whisky and soda, said that Miss Queenborough was really a very charming companion, and apologized for leaving us early, on the ground that his sermon was still unwritten. My good cousin, the squire, suggested rather grimly that a discourse on the vanity of ...
— Frivolous Cupid • Anthony Hope
... not yet civilized community it was natural that the early days of self-government should witness some corruption among the voters, the more so because, at election times "there were no less than four days, the nomination, two days' polling, and declaration day, on all of which, by a sort of unwritten law, the candidates in many constituencies were compelled to keep open house for their supporters," while direct money bribes were often resorted to, especially on the second day's polling in a ...
— British Supremacy & Canadian Self-Government - 1839-1854 • J. L. Morison
... LORD ARCHBISHOP,—There are some important proposals which I wish to make to the Electors, and as it is an unwritten rule that I should not communicate with them separately, I beg of you to convene a meeting to-morrow, in the Wahlzimmer, at the hour of midday. Perhaps it is permissible to add, for your own information, that while my major proposition has to do with the ...
— The Sword Maker • Robert Barr
... abruptly. He had broken the unwritten law of Rocky Springs, where it was understood that no man spoke of another man's past, or questioned his present doings, or even admitted knowledge of them. But like all the rest of the male portion of Rocky ...
— The Law-Breakers • Ridgwell Cullum
... were not ordained of Zeus, And she who sits enthroned with gods below, Justice, enacted not these human laws. Nor did I deem that thou, a mortal man, Could'st by a breath annul and override The immutable unwritten laws of Heaven. They were not born today nor yesterday; They die not; and none knoweth whence they sprang. I was not like, who feared no mortal's frown, To disobey these laws and so provoke The wrath of Heaven. I knew that I must die, E'en hadst thou not proclaimed it; and if death ...
— The Oedipus Trilogy • Sophocles
... the water out," she said, rising wearily. "Will we be obliged to hire a watchman to camp by our water tank? This is serious, boys. The unwritten law of the desert would condemn whoever did this to a lariat and a yucca palm. Still, we don't know who did it. It's too dark to find tracks or to learn anything about it. It's seventeen miles to the Washburn-Stokes outfit—the nearest water ahead. ...
— The She Boss - A Western Story • Arthur Preston Hankins
... of kings That are many and strange and unwritten, Diverse, and our watchword is one; Therefore, though seven be the strings, One string, if the harp be smitten, Sole sounds, till the tune ...
— Songs before Sunrise • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... own laws,—the common and unwritten law of the forecastle, of which Admiralty Courts take infrequent cognizance, and the law of the quarter-deck, which is to be read in acts of Parliament and statutes of Congress. The sea has its own customs, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... Pollyanna sent Jimmy a letter. It was confused and incoherent—a series of half-completed, illogical, but shyly joyous sentences, out of which Jimmy gathered much: a little from what was written; more from what was left unwritten. After all, did he really ...
— Pollyanna Grows Up • Eleanor H. Porter
... been closed. They shall be outwardly in Eyolf's place, and perhaps in time they may fill the place in her heart that should have been Eyolf's. Thus she will try to "make her peace with the great open eyes." For now, at last, she has divined the secret of the unwritten book on "human responsibility" and has realised ...
— Little Eyolf • Henrik Ibsen
... brought them, and that was enough. And, although there were many expressions of welcome spoken and called out to Curly John when he passed into the room and took his seat at the table, nobody in all that throng offered to approach him, for it was an unwritten law of the underworld that a man who reappears for the first time among his associates after imprisonment is left alone to make his own advances when he ...
— A Woman at Bay - A Fiend in Skirts • Nicholas Carter
... whole thing," browbeat and ride rough-shod over all their fellows. It is in the want of that wholesome corrective, public opinion, that this pestilence is possible. Of public opinion the Continent knows next to nothing in any shape; and yet it is by the unwritten judgments of such a tribunal that society is guided in England, and the same law that discourages the bully supports and encourages the timid, without either the one or the other having the slightest power to corrupt the court, or coerce its decrees. Club-life is, in a way, the normal ...
— Cornelius O'Dowd Upon Men And Women And Other Things In General - Originally Published In Blackwood's Magazine - 1864 • Charles Lever
... uncompromising degree. With him there is no need of further speech, and to this end I have inscribed certain words upon his namepaper. To everyone this person will now return the paper which has been entrusted to him, folded so that the nature of its contents shall be an unwritten leaf to all others. Nor shall the papers be unfolded by any until he is within his own chamber, with barred doors, where all, save the one who shall find the message, shall remain, not venturing forth until ...
— The Wallet of Kai Lung • Ernest Bramah
... A code is almost the only blessing, perhaps is the only blessing, which absolute governments are better fitted to confer on a nation than popular governments. The work of digesting a vast and artificial system of unwritten jurisprudence is far more easily performed, and far better performed, by few minds than by many, by a Napoleon than by a Chamber of Deputies and a Chamber of Peers, by a government like that of Prussia or Denmark than by a government like that of England. A quiet knot of two or three veteran jurists ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... was justified. A ship at sea in distress for provisions, meets another having abundance, yet refusing a supply; the law of self-preservation authorizes the distressed to take a supply by force. In all these cases, the unwritten laws of necessity, of self-preservation, and of the public safety, control the written laws of meum and tuum. Further to exemplify the principle, I will state an hypothetical case. Suppose it had been made known to the executive of the Union in the autumn of 1805, that ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... those who have so much to give they want no time to take, and their name is legion. She is as full of beautiful possibilities as a perfect harp, and she realizes that all the harmonies of the universe are in herself, while her own soul plays upon magic strings the unwritten anthems of love. She is the apostle of the true, the beautiful, the good, commissioned to complete all that the twelve have left undone. Hers is the mission of missions—the highest of all—to make the body not the prison, ...
— Pulpit and Press • Mary Baker Eddy
... or brown, or yellow; of how those brown and yellow complexions came to be so common; of yourself, the son of the Governor, yet obliged to read the Bible by stealth, under the penalty of a bleeding back washed with brine. These and many other things revolve in your active mind, and your unwritten inferences are worth ...
— The Duty of Disobedience to the Fugitive Slave Act - Anti-Slavery Tracts No. 9, An Appeal To The Legislators Of Massachusetts • Lydia Maria Child
... laws, nor Justice that dwelleth with the Gods below. I judged not that thy decrees had such authority that a man should transgress for them the unwritten sure commandments of the Gods. For these, indeed, are not of to-day or yesterday, but they live for ever, and their beginning no man knoweth. Should I, for fear of thee, be found guilty against them? That I should die I knew. Why not? All ...
— Stories from the Greek Tragedians • Alfred Church
... silver: silence is golden. No utterance more Orphic than this. While, therefore, as highest author, we reverence him whose works continue heroically unwritten, we have also our hopeful word for those who with pen (from wing of goose loud-cackling, or seraph God-commissioned) record the thing that is revealed.... Under mask of quaintest irony, we detect here the deep, storm-tost (nigh shipwracked) soul, ...
— The Biglow Papers • James Russell Lowell
... eyes. As for the girls, they munched away in silence, no one daring to make a remark, and it was significant of the solemnity of the occasion that not a single girl helped herself to marmalade or jam. By the unwritten laws of the school it would have been considered unfeeling to indulge in such luxuries while the reputation of a companion was at stake. It was a ghastly occasion, and Pixie seemed literally to shrink ...
— Pixie O'Shaughnessy • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... that he cannot." Alfred's value to literature is this: he placed by the side of Anglo-Saxon poetry,—consisting of two great poems, Caedmon's great song of the 'Creation' and Cynewulf's 'Nativity and Life of Christ,' and the unwritten ballads passed from lip to lip,—four immense translations from Latin into Anglo-Saxon prose, which raised English from a mere spoken dialect to a true language. From his reign date also the famous Anglo-Saxon Chronicle ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... little simple child, tractable and flexible as Christ would have all his disciples. A man thus emptied and vacuated of self-conceit, these lines of natural pride being blotted out, the soul is as a tabula rasa, "an unwritten table," to receive any impression of the law of God that he pleases to put on it; and then his words are all "plain to him that understandeth, and right to them that find knowledge," Prov. viii. 9. Then I say it is not difficult to understand and ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... had come home from the Odd Fellows and passed into Slumber she crept out and took a Low Advantage of him. She slid his Left Hand into a bowl of Warm Water without arousing him, and he Gave Up. He told all the Passwords, the Secret Mottoes, the Oaths, the Meaning of the Symbols and the Unwritten Work. When he had finished she had a Notion to Ring for a Night Cab and go Home to her own Family, but her Better Judgment prevailed. She concluded that she would have to continue to Live with him, no matter what she ...
— More Fables • George Ade
... thinking about? Very wonderful things, no doubt! Unwritten history! Unfathomed mystery! Yet he laughs and cries, and eats and drinks, And chuckles and crows, and nods and winks, As if his head were as full of kinks And curious riddles as any sphinx! Warped by colic, and wet by tears, Punctured by pins, ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 1 (of 4) • Various
... distance, Arnold of Brescia sadly contemplated Rome's disgrace and the evil state of the Roman people. The yet unwritten words of Saint Bernard were already more than true. They are worth repeating here, in Gibbon's strong translation, for they perfect the ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... in wave after wave of icy, sullen surf. Had he had the right to cut loose from the life of Clifford Matheson? Had one alone of a married couple the right to decide on such a separation? Had he violated some unwritten law of Fate, and was this the hand of Fate punishing him through the woman he cared for more deeply than he had yet confessed ...
— Swirling Waters • Max Rittenberg
... him; it was a distinct contravention of an unwritten law among "Commercials" that no person must be interrogated concerning the nature of his business. The big and the little man, once inside the hostel, which is their club as well, are on an equality. I did not remind my questioner ...
— A Traveller in Little Things • W. H. Hudson
... various fields of action, and other honors are recognized than those marked on the catalogue or contained in the degrees. The graduate who excels in mathematics, the languages, the arts and sciences, is decked with the highest honor on commencement day, but there are unwritten honors given by general consent of classmates to those who have developed a superiority in any mental or physical excellence. When in after life the members of a class meet on some public college anniversary or gather together at a reunion and the memories and traditions of college life are talked ...
— Memorial Addresses on the Life and Character of William H. F. Lee (A Representative from Virginia) • Various
... forgotten the unseen for the seen, and was happy that they two were alone together—that was the joy of it all, so much alone together; for Swift Wing did not live with them, and, like Breaking Rock, she watched her daughter's life, standing afar off, since it was the unwritten law of the tribe that the wife's mother must not cross the path or enter the home of her daughter's husband. But at last Dingan had broken through this custom, and insisted that Swift Wing should be with her daughter when he was away from home, as now on this wonderful autumn morning, when Mitiahwe ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... Lothian, Orkney*, Shetland*, Strathclyde, Tayside, Western Isles* Wales: 8 counties; Clwyd, Dyfed, Gwent, Gwynedd, Mid Glamorgan, Powys, South Glamorgan, West Glamorgan Independence: 1 January 1801, United Kingdom established Constitution: unwritten; partly statutes, partly common law and practice Dependent areas: Anguilla, Bermuda, British Indian Ocean Territory, British Virgin Islands, Cayman Islands, Falkland Islands, Gibraltar, Guernsey, Hong Kong, Jersey, Isle of Man, Montserrat, Pitcairn ...
— The 1992 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... in the vast unwritten history of commercial advance was that made by the five men from the camp of the main expedition across the lower slopes of a mountain range—unmarked on any map, unnamed by any geographer—to the mysterious Simiacine Plateau. It almost seemed as if the wild, bloodshot eyes of their guide could ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman
... consecutive detail, of the Loyal governments of the Southern States, by any and all means which might be by them considered most desirable, judicious, expedient, and effectual; the solidifying of these Southern States into a new Confederation, or league, in fact—with an unwritten but well understood Constitution of its own—to be known under the apparently harmless title of the "Solid South," whose mission it would be to build up, and strengthen, and populate, and enrich itself within the Union, ...
— The Great Conspiracy, Complete • John Alexander Logan
... particularly contemptuous of the management for allowing the words to be read out of a book. They ought to be improvised. At Palermo the only play that is ever read is Samson, which was written by a Sicilian, and even in that the comic episode of the masks with the riddle of Rosina is a home-made, unwritten interpolation. ...
— Diversions in Sicily • H. Festing Jones
... suddenly, and he stopped, looked to see where the snake was coiled, saw it withdraw its mottled gray body from under a rabbit weed and drag sinuously away, its ugly head lifted a little, eyes watching him venomously. An unwritten law of the West he broke by letting the snake go. Again he moved forward, from bush to bush, from boulder to boulder. When all of the basin and the grove were revealed to him, he stopped, removed his gray range hat and hung it on a near-by bush. He took his small field glasses from his pocket, ...
— Rim o' the World • B. M. Bower
... man has fewer means of resisting a woman than she has of escaping him. Our code of manners forbids the brutality of repressing a woman, whereas repression with your sex is not only allurement to ours, but is imposed upon you by conventions. With us, on the contrary, some unwritten law of masculine self-conceit ridicules a man's modesty; we leave you the monopoly of that virtue, that you may have the privilege of granting us favors; but reverse the case, and man succumbs ...
— The Lily of the Valley • Honore de Balzac
... observance of Washington's example in retiring at the close of a second presidential term will be in the future, as it has been in the past, regarded as a fundamental rule in the unwritten law of the Republic." ...
— The Life, Public Services and Select Speeches of Rutherford B. Hayes • James Quay Howard
... to live well. Besides employment there was an intense interest for them in the country customs. There was scope for modest ambition too. Best of all, those customs provided a rough guidance as to conduct—an unwritten code to which, though we forget it, England owes much. It seems singular to think of now; but the very labourer might reasonably hope for some satisfaction in life, nor trouble about "raising" himself into ...
— Change in the Village • (AKA George Bourne) George Sturt
... regulated in the absence of any express stipulation with regard to the matter dealt with by such rules. This is done either by statutory enactment, as by that part (Part VIII.) of the Merchant Shipping Act 1804 which deals with the liability of shipowners; or by established rules of the unwritten law, the "common law'' as it is called, as, for instance, the rule that the common carrier is absolutely responsible for the safe delivery of the goods carried, unless it is prevented by the act of God or the ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... I wished to present them in a more concise form, and partly because the principal actor could be spoken of more freely by a third person, than he could speak of himself. Moreover, he had a more dramatic way of telling a story than he had of writing it; and I have tried to embody his unwritten style as nearly as I could remember it. Where-ever incidents or expressions have been added to the published narratives, I ...
— Isaac T. Hopper • L. Maria Child
... example of the platoon officer. He met his wound in the course of a trivial duty which, had I guessed that he would do it under heavy shelling, I should have forbidden him to undertake. His type of bravery, though it wears no decorations, is distinguished, more than all other, by the unwritten admiration of ...
— The Story of the 2/4th Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry • G. K. Rose
... more about Mr. Nassau-Senior I shall fill a book. I admit that it would be a very curious and attractive work, for he was in the truest sense a man of note, but I cannot put a book inside a book. Therefore this must be, not merely one of my unwritten chapters, but one ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... wholly personal, the new ethics (still unwritten) is social first—personal later. In the old list we find, on a par with adultery, theft and murder, "Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain." Does this mean common swearing? Is it as wrong to say 'damn' as to ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... exuberance, we can discover two distinct traditions. The one is the actual Guy Fawkes celebration of the capture of the rebel and outlaw Shane O'Neill; the other is much older, going back into the remote past of unwritten history, and connected with those strange religious ceremonies which a study of comparative religions has shown us to be a natural development of the mind of primitive peoples, struggling out of the darkness of mere barbarism. Over and over again ...
— Lynton and Lynmouth - A Pageant of Cliff & Moorland • John Presland
... was an excellent school for the future politician. The dust might accumulate upon his law books: he was learning unwritten law in the hearts of these countrymen. And yet, even at this time, he exhibited a certain maturity. There seems never to have been a time when the arts of the politician were not instinctive in him. He had no boyish illusions to outlive regarding the nature and conditions of public ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson
... bulk is alive with the bacteria of animalism, under increasing control as it rises, still with the ferocity, rapacity and selfish passions of the gloomy mass at the bottom and forever in revolt. Is this not proved by history, written and unwritten? Is it not proved by the ghastly secrets of individual introspection that men never reveal or admit to others; secrets guarded by a system of conventions so impenetrable and vast that to attempt to personalize it in the sneaking figure of Hypocrisy would be as ...
— On the Vice of Novel Reading. - Being a brief in appeal, pointing out errors of the lower tribunal. • Young E. Allison
... remain unallayed. One night there appeared to her in a dream a phantom, Corambe by name. The dream-created being took hold of her waking imagination, and became the divinity of her religion and the title and central figure of her childish, unwritten romance. Corambe, who was of no sex, or rather of either sex just as occasion might require—for it underwent numberless metamorphoses—had "all the attributes of physical and moral beauty, the gift of eloquence, and the all-powerful charm of the arts, especially the magic of musical improvisation," ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... story I can speak of only from hearsay. How it became public property, I do not know. But there was a confiding strain in Wilton, and I imagine he confided in someone, who confided in someone else. At any rate, it is recorded in Marois Bay's unwritten archives, from which ...
— The Man with Two Left Feet - and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... grew to be proud of their rosy citadel; it was an unwritten law among them that every new house should adapt itself to this tone. For the rest, there was not much building done after his death, with the exception of a few isolated villas that sprang up, despite his old commands, in the neighbourhood. ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... misfortune that he lived before his country was ready for him. Coming a quarter of a century later, he might have made a part of a national emancipation of intellect. Coming when he did, he stood merely for one of the spasmodic reactions against the dominant spirit. Unwritten history is full of such reactions, since it is by the accumulated energy of their revolts that the world moves ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... the tip fixed by custom. You may almost say it's the unwritten law. If you gave the conductor more, he would hand you change. Well, how I reason it out is this way: If five pfennigs is enough for a car conductor, who may carry you three miles, why shouldn't it be enough for the elevator boy, who may carry ...
— A Book of Burlesques • H. L. Mencken
... asses march along with dignity and run their noses against anybody who comes in their way. 'That has often been my experience.' At last the citizens become so sensitive that they cannot endure the yoke of laws, written or unwritten; they would have no man call himself their master. Such is the glorious beginning of things out of which tyranny springs. 'Glorious, indeed; but what is to follow?' The ruin of oligarchy is the ruin of democracy; ...
— The Republic • Plato
... unwritten verse, 'Soleil si pale,' etc., it relates to the 11th, 12th, and 13th of October, and, generally, to the time of the battle in the woods, which lasted for our regiment from September 22nd to October 13th. What struck ...
— Letters of a Soldier - 1914-1915 • Anonymous
... and bright. There was the stuffiness of yesterday's day indoors to be shaken off. I meant to go out early. It was our unwritten rule to leave the colonel to himself at breakfast, and I drove pencil and ruler rapidly, collating the intelligence reports from the batteries. I looked into the mess again for my cap and cane before setting forth. The colonel was drinking tea and reading ...
— Pushed and the Return Push • George Herbert Fosdike Nichols, (AKA Quex)
... the fire of Tomlin's spirit, and reduces the sulky Sopkin to obedience, besides overawing the presumptuous Rumkin, and from that day forth there is among the passengers a better understanding of the authority of a sea captain, and the nature of the unwritten laws that exist, more or ...
— The Coxswain's Bride - also, Jack Frost and Sons; and, A Double Rescue • R.M. Ballantyne
... melodramatic, and what was stranger, perhaps, she was not ashamed. According to her lights, she was a good woman, who went to church regularly, and did a little conventional good with her superfluous wealth. She obeyed the unwritten laws of society, and busied herself little in her neighbours' affairs. She was kind to her servants, and did not hate her neighbours more than is necessary in a crowded world. She led a blameless, unoccupied, ...
— Roden's Corner • Henry Seton Merriman
... partly written, partly unwritten, as among the Greeks. The written law consists of statutes, plebiscites, senatusconsults, enactments of the Emperors, edicts of the magistrates, and answers of those learned in ...
— The Institutes of Justinian • Caesar Flavius Justinian
... the Flying Scud was now quite ended; we had dashed into these deep waters and we had escaped again to starve; we had been ruined and were saved, had quarrelled and made up; there remained nothing but to sing Te Deum, draw a line, and begin on a fresh page of my unwritten diary. I do not pretend that I recovered all I had lost with Mamie, it would have been more than I had merited; and I had certainly been more uncommunicative than became either the partner or the friend. But she accepted the position handsomely; and during the week ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... time when de Florac had set the fashion, and that not only in waistcoats and walking-sticks. He was a fine swordsman, and was even now in some request as second at fashionable duels. None knew more certainly than he every punctilio of those unwritten laws which govern affairs of honour, and, had he been born to even a quarter of the fortune of Tom Pargeter, his record would probably have remained unstained. Unfortunately for him this had not been the case; he had soon run through the moderate fortune left him by his father, ...
— The Uttermost Farthing • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... and Mr. Dennis Doane ain't careful; that's the trouble. He's looking for Marchand, and blabbing what he means to do when he finds him. That ain't good for Dennis. If he kills Marchand, it's murder, and even if the lawyers plead unwritten law, and he ain't hung, and his wife ain't a widow, you can't have much married life in gaol. It don't do you any good to be punished for punishing someone else. ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... practice, of their ancestors. The honors of sacrifice were reserved for the supreme deity; they acknowledged, in rude hymns, their obligations to the air, the fire, the water, and the earth; and their priests derived some profit from the art of divination. Their unwritten laws were rigorous and impartial: theft was punished with a tenfold restitution; adultery, treason, and murder, with death; and no chastisement could be inflicted too severe for the rare and inexpiable guilt of cowardice. ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon
... eyes on the end of the central passage, he called out abruptly, "I see a man!" Every one looked to that point,—"I see a man of Tarsus; and he says, Make mention of me!" It must not be supposed that the discourses of "Uncle Ebenezer," with these abrupt appeals and sudden starts, were unwritten or extempore; they were carefully composed and written out,—only these flashes of thought and passion came on him suddenly when writing, and were therefore quite natural when delivered—they ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... salary, thus pleasantly imagined, was never paid. Campbell died of typhoid fever, that summer, leaving Adams and his employer the only possessors of the formula, an unwritten one; and Adams, pleased to think himself more important to the great man than ever, told his wife that there could be little doubt of his being put in sole charge of the prospective glue-works. Unfortunately, the enterprise ...
— Alice Adams • Booth Tarkington
... put his hand into a pocket and drew forth a five-franc piece. He placed it on a number. The angel in the pitch robes is always lying in wait for man to make his first bad step; so she urged fortune to let this man win. It is an unwritten law, high up on Olympus, that the gods must give to the gods; only the prayers of the ...
— The Man on the Box • Harold MacGrath
... breach of the Constitution. Were the case one referring to our British Constitution, a plain man, knowing little of parliamentary usage and nothing of law lore, would probably feel some hesitation in expressing any decided opinion on such a subject, seeing that our constitution is unwritten. But the intention has been that every citizen of the United States should know and understand the rules under which he is to live, and that he that runs ...
— Volume 2 • Anthony Trollope
... brow of him who has given his best work to help this world onward, even though it be but a hair's-breadth; but the mother who has given herself to her children through long years of an unwritten self-abnegation, who has thrilled every fiber of their beings with faith in God and hope in man, a faith and a hope which no canker-worm of worldly experience can ever eat away, she shall be crowned with ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... tradition were looked on to a large extent as the institution of the Deity. Thus, for example, the ways and rules of agriculture. Jehovah had instructed the husbandman and taught him the right way. He it was whose authority gave to the unwritten laws of custom their binding power. "It is never so done in Israel," "that is folly in Israel," and similar expressions of insulted public conscience are of frequent occurrence, and show the power of custom: the fear of God acts as a motive ...
— Prolegomena to the History of Israel • Julius Wellhausen
... Roger lazily, "that the two great heroes in their mad rush for the Solar Medal have forgotten an unwritten law of space. There's no gravity out here—no natural force to pull or push the tube. The only way it could be moved is by the power of thrust, either ...
— Stand by for Mars! • Carey Rockwell
... who drafted such a code were idiots, and that those whose duty it became to enforce it were simply spies and tyrants, resistance to whom was innate virtue. He was forever ignoring or violating some written or unwritten law of the Academy; was frequently being caught in the act, and was invariably ready to attribute the resultant report to ill luck which pursued no one else, or to a deliberate persecution which followed him forever. Every six months he had been on ...
— Starlight Ranch - and Other Stories of Army Life on the Frontier • Charles King
... with the Romans of that age, when they were moving into battle array, and were on the point of taking up their bucklers, and girding their coats about them, to make at the same time an unwritten will, or verbal testament, and to name who should be their heirs, in the hearing of three or four witnesses. In this precise posture Marcius found them at his arrival, the enemy ...
— The Boys' and Girls' Plutarch - Being Parts of The "Lives" of Plutarch • Plutarch
... and a half ago women indulged in little introspective analysis. They thought on broad lines, and honestly understood the strength of their emotions. Moreover, although Mary Wollstonecraft was unborn and "Emile" unwritten, Individualism was germinating; and what soil so quickening as the Tropics? Nevertheless, to admit was not to lay the question, and Rachael passed through many hours of torment before hers was settled. She was not unhappy, for the intoxication lingered, ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... an effective method of dealing with bores, which might be adopted by Western peoples. This simple tribe considers long speeches injurious to the orator and his hearers; so to protect both there is an unwritten law that every public orator must stand on only one leg when he is addressing an audience. As soon as he has to place the other leg on the ground his oration is brought to a close, ...
— Toaster's Handbook - Jokes, Stories, and Quotations • Peggy Edmund & Harold W. Williams, compilers
... a sacred concert—on Sunday nights: and it had been one o'clock in the morning before the concert scenery could be moved out of the theatre and the first act set of "The Rose of America" moved in. And, as by some unwritten law of the drama no dress-rehearsal can begin without a delay of at least an hour and a half, the curtain had not gone up on Mr Miller's opening chorus till half past two. There had been dress-parades, conferences, interminable arguments between the stage-director and a mysterious ...
— The Little Warrior - (U.K. Title: Jill the Reckless) • P. G. Wodehouse
... young man, smiling quietly, had wanted to know why; but after she had explained that it was because he had enlisted himself in the search for a horse, adding that in doing so he had conformed with one of the unwritten laws of the country, he still confessed himself in the dark. This had been but a moment before, and she now settled ...
— Bred of the Desert - A Horse and a Romance • Marcus Horton |
