"Literal" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... murderer be caught? Yes,' replied Sir John, 'he will certainly be caught—probably when he commits his next crime. A whole army of bloodhounds, metaphorical and literal, will be on his track the moment he draws blood again. With the whole community against him, he cannot escape, especially when it be remembered that he chooses the quietest hour in the twenty-four ...
— The Lodger • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... myself was concerned. For I have translated the most illustrious orations of the two most eloquent of the Attic orators, spoken in opposition to one another: Aeschines and Demosthenes. And I have not translated them as a literal interpreter, but as an orator giving the same ideas in the same form and mould as it were, in words conformable to our manners; in doing which I did not consider it necessary to give word for word, but I have preserved the character and energy of the ...
— The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero, Volume 4 • Cicero
... lunch—" she answered clearly. She hadn't the remotest idea of being impertinent. She was merely literal. The only thing that saved her from Mrs. Alden's mounting wrath was the old man's voice chuckling from ...
— Little Miss By-The-Day • Lucille Van Slyke
... This literal quotation from the frank Mr. Calvin caused a sensation. Captain Dan struggled to find words. His daughter laid a hand on ...
— Cap'n Dan's Daughter • Joseph C. Lincoln
... how the disease takes advantage of it, and sufferings ensue which would have been prevented by keeping up even the ambiguous thoughts of recovery. Sick people have reflections and feelings which exert an influence upon them beyond our discernment, and which frequently need not our literal interpretations of symptoms, and our exhortations, to make them more effectual. But where there is evidently no preparedness for death, and the patient, we fear, is deceiving himself, no one who has suitable views of Christian duty will fail to impress him with the necessity ...
— Catharine • Nehemiah Adams
... told you the literal truth,' said Captain Carrington coldly. 'You can take us or leave us as ...
— On Land And Sea At The Dardanelles • Thomas Charles Bridges
... construction. He kept the shell and threw away the kernel. Faust becomes insignificant in this play to which he gives his name. In Goethe he was a thinker, even more than a poet. Here he speaks bad verse full of emptiness. Even where Goethe's words are followed, in a literal translation, the meaning seems to have gone out of them; they are displaced, they no longer count for anything. The Walpurgis Night is stripped of all its poetry, and Faust's study is emptied of all its wisdom. The Witches' ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... finite man, does arrival in one place necessitate withdrawal from another. Jesus uttered a saying concerning himself so mysterious and seemingly contradictory that many attempts have been made to explain away its literal and obvious meaning: "And no man hath ascended up to heaven but he that came down from heaven, even the Son of man who is in heaven"—Christ on earth, and yet in glory; here and there, at the same time, just as a thought which we embody in speech and send ...
— The Ministry of the Spirit • A. J. Gordon
... the poet's claim to borrow from all science, and from every phase of nature, the associations and images which he wants; and he showed that those images and associations did not lose their poetry by being expressed with the most literal reality. ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... signifying "Jerusalem, which is from above," or the church of God. It is the home of the saints, where they are cared for by the Lord. As the ancient literal city of Babylon typifies the great spiritual Babylon, so the literal city of Jerusalem typifies the spiritual Jerusalem or Zion or church of God. God does not want his people joined unto a sect and under the laws and creeds ...
— The Gospel Day • Charles Ebert Orr
... I think, preserve the literal text entire: "Gratias agimus tibi propter magnam gloriam tuam."— Consequently ...
— Letters of Franz Liszt, Volume 2: "From Rome to the End" • Franz Liszt; letters collected by La Mara and translated
... was proclaimed to be the solitary incarnation, the Deity hidden behind a veil of flesh, naturally paved the way for the Eucharist as a sacrament wherein the Deity is hid behind the veil of bread. The one incarnation is, as it were, the complement of the other. Hence, a rigidly literal meaning was given to Christ's utterances about eating his flesh and drinking his blood, and Christians were taught to believe that by the manducation of his bodily frame his holy spirit could be incorporated, as though, for example, ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... obvious appeal of Rose Stribling would be victorious. He could discern pink and white and blue and gold; but the indeterminate shades, the subtleties and mysteries of charm were enigmatical to him. His emotions would be as literal as his convictions or his oratory. Yet there must be some faculty in him which did not appear on the surface, some primitive grasp of realities in his understanding of men. Why should the influence of this sanguine, ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... protracted seasons of foreign service, one of the banishments to which his military duty condemned Arthur Mair was a remote and lonely outpost on the furthest border of our then hardly peopled Canadian territory—a literal wilderness, without human inhabitants. Here, alone, with the small body of men under his command, he led a life of absolute mental and intellectual solitude, the effect of which upon his nervous system was such that, on his return to civilized ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... legitimate heir, the king had thought of him as his possible successor. Mary and Elizabeth were illegitimate also, according to law and form; but the illegitimacy of neither the one nor the other could be pressed to its literal consequences. They were the children, each of them, of connexions which were held legal at the period of their birth. They had each received the rank of a princess; and the instincts of justice demanded that they should ...
— History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth. Vol. II. • James Anthony Froude
... appendages. Nor can I do more at present than make a passing reference to the excellent labours of Dr. Huggins in connexion with the fixed stars, nebulae, and comets. They, more than any others, illustrate the literal truth of the statement, that the establishment of spectrum analysis, and the explanation of Fraunhofer's lines, carried with them an immeasurable extension of the chemist's range. The truly powerful experiments of Professor Dewar are daily adding to our ...
— Six Lectures on Light - Delivered In The United States In 1872-1873 • John Tyndall
... plenty of fine weather, with light airs, calms, and squalls. In lat. 28 N., long. 177 W., his water going rotten, and misled by Hoyt's "North Pacific Directory," which informed him there was a coaling station on the island, Captain Trent put in to Midway Island. He found it a literal sandbank, surrounded by a coral reef, mostly submerged. Birds were very plenty, there was good fish in the lagoon, but no firewood; and the water, which could be obtained by digging, brackish. He found good holding-ground ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... he cried to Amelia, "in the most literal sense, under our own vine and fig-tree. Delicious retirement! For my part, I'm sick and tired of the hubbub ...
— An African Millionaire - Episodes in the Life of the Illustrious Colonel Clay • Grant Allen
... needful, are liable to mislead by veiling the actual agencies." "The words 'natural selection,' do not express a cause in the physical sense." "Kindred objections," he continues, "may be urged against the expression into which I was led when seeking to present the phenomena in literal terms rather than metaphorical terms—'the survival of the fittest.' In the working together of those many actions, internal and external, which determine the lives and deaths of organisms, we see nothing to which the words ...
— Evolution - An Investigation and a Critique • Theodore Graebner
... is no myth; but a literal resume of a five days' outing at Poplar Spring, on Marsh Creek, in Pennsylvania. Alas, for the beautiful valley, that once afforded the finest camping grounds I have ...
— Woodcraft • George W. Sears
... is the spirit of the sun. We hear a good deal about him in the Rig-veda, but the whole of it is merely description of the power of the sun in the order of nature, partly allegorical, and partly literal. He is only a nature-power, not a personal god. The case is not quite so clear with Savita, whose name seems to mean literally "stimulator," "one who stirs up." On the whole it seems most likely that he represents ...
— Hindu Gods And Heroes - Studies in the History of the Religion of India • Lionel D. Barnett
... Mademoiselle Cormon," which, from the lips of the beaux esprits of society, means that she was as ignorant as a carp, and rather a poor fool; but many persons of her own calibre took the remark in its literal ...
— An Old Maid • Honore de Balzac
... here, sir, especially in that gross literal way! The new lights here have taught us that Scripture's saying one thing, is a certain proof that it means another. Except, by the bye, in ...
— The Saint's Tragedy • Charles Kingsley
... Locke made of Clary's bower! as unique as Sam Winnington's portrait of Clary herself. It was not the literal bower; and it would not have suited Master Mayor or the Justice, though it might have had a charm for the Vicar. We will go with the Vicar; although he also had his bombast, and, when elevated by company and cheer, denominated Cambridge a goddess, and raised in the poor woman's breast expectations ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler
... me!" answered Mrs Penhaligon, not with literal intention but idiomatically. "No, I'm but goin' up to see 'em off decent. But I wonder at you liggin' behind, when 'tis the only Bank Holiday randivoo this side ...
— Nicky-Nan, Reservist • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (Q)
... upon the hearer by definite repetitions on various degrees of the scale.[18] For an elaborate example of Transposition nothing can surpass the opening movement of Cesar Franck's D Minor Symphony, the entire first part of which consists of a literal repetition in F minor of what has been ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... But the literal abandonment of life to the ideal of poverty is clearly not what our Lord contemplated for the universal practice of His followers. He nowhere indicates that all gainful labour is to be abandoned, or that ...
— Our Lady Saint Mary • J. G. H. Barry
... I have here paraphrased, as any literal translation would have been hopelessly obscure to most modern readers. Campion could but hint darkly his comparison of the Elizabethan persecution to the Decian. The Latin runs: Etenim, ut nostrorum illa fuit Epistasis turbulenta, sic nostrorum haec evasit divina Catastrophe. Epistasis ...
— Ten Reasons Proposed to His Adversaries for Disputation in the Name • Edmund Campion
... that witnessed the absorption would hear the knell of public right and public law in Europe? But we have an interest in the independence of Belgium, which is wider than that—which is wider than that which we may have in the literal operation of the guarantee. It is found in the answer to the question whether, under the circumstances of the case, this country, endowed as it is with influence and power, would quietly stand ...
— Selected Speeches on British Foreign Policy 1738-1914 • Edgar Jones
... dear, there was no need to be so literal," returned Mrs. Challoner, reprovingly; for she was a gentlewoman of the old school, and nothing grieved her more than slipshod English or any idiom or idiotcy of modern parlance in the mouths of her bright young daughters: to speak of any young man except Dick without the ceremonious prefix ...
— Not Like Other Girls • Rosa N. Carey
... of imagination; so that, on the one hand, daily events and common circumstances became a part of his spiritual experience in a far more intimate sense than is the case with other men, while, on the other, his fancies and his visions assumed the absoluteness and the literal existence of positive external facts. The remotest flights of his imagination never carry him where his sight becomes dim. His journey through the spiritual world was no less real to him than his journeys between Florence and Rome, or his wanderings between Verona ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... found on the field of Waterloo, so much stained with clay and with blood as sufficiently to indicate what had been the fate of its late owner. The song is popular in France, and is rather a good specimen of the style of composition to which it belongs. The translation is strictly literal.] ...
— Some Poems by Sir Walter Scott • Sir Walter Scott
... language used is symbolical, and has naught to do with sex, in any sense. Woe unto him or her who takes these allegories of the Soul as literal histories, for nothing but sorrow will follow such materialization of divine mysteries. If Simon or his followers fell into this error, they worked their own downfall, under the Great Law, as surely do all who forge such bonds of matter ...
— Simon Magus • George Robert Stow Mead
... discovered in Central Asia. Hitherto these have been merely fragments, but the number of manuscripts found and not yet published permits the hope that longer texts may be forthcoming. Those already made known are partly Mahayanist and partly similar to the Pali Canon though not a literal translation of it. It is not clear to what extent the Buddhists of Central Asia regarded the Hina and Mahayanist scriptures as separate and distinct. Probably each school selected for itself a small collection ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... that individuals, and even families, of extraordinary stature and strength existed in the earliest ages cannot be denied, except by those who regard the narrative of Scripture as equally fabulous with the fictions of the poets; although the statements are literal and exact, occur in a variety of incidental notices, and are confirmed by discoveries related by authors ...
— Rambles in the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia - with Notices of their History, Antiquities, and Present Condition. • Thomas Forester
... and laid it over the girl's. "It is very sweet of you to say so, but I mayn't accept it. Seeing I have a husband like Billy, I should be a very real fool in the most literal sense if I stayed away. No, the women-heroes in this land are those who face it with a careless, selfish husband, or perhaps in a home having no love, and who win through their little day and make no ...
— The Rhodesian • Gertrude Page
... given the best morsel, to be remembered, to be praised, to be obeyed blindly and punctiliously, these have been thought points of honor with the gods, for which they would dispense favors and punishments on the most exhorbitant scale.... The idea that religion contains a literal, not a symbolic, representation of truth and life is simply an impossible idea. Whoever entertains it has not come within the region of profitable philosophizing on ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... of the Christian life be charity, gentleness, forgiveness, non-resistance to evil, then all war is a violation of the faith. The question is not unimportant. It is not a subject which you can toy with, or put aside as having no immediate bearing on life and duty. If the literal application of the teaching of Christ to social and political life be impossible, then the rationalists are right when they urge us to drop a religion which we profess on Sunday and repudiate on Monday. If the fault lies not in the teaching itself but in the feebleness ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... Each day he returned to his mother with his day's earnings. The humor lies in what he brought, in how he brought it, and in what happened to it; in the admonition of his mother, "You should have done so and so," and Jack's one reply, "I'll do so another time"; in Jack's literal use of his mother's admonition, and the catastrophe it brought him on the following day, and on each successive day, as he brought home a piece of money, a jar of milk, a cream cheese, a tom-cat, a shoulder of mutton, ...
— A Study of Fairy Tales • Laura F. Kready
... ma'am,' said the literal maid; 'I never cared for their heads, or them. I've been ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... water, produces heat. The waste of the body is literally burned up by the oxygen; and it is this burning which means the warmth of a living body, its absence giving the stony cold of the dead. "Who shall deliver me from the body of this death?" may well be the literal question for each day of our lives; and "pure air" alone can secure genuine life. Breathing bad air reduces all the processes of the body, lessens vitality; and thus, one in poor health will suffer more ...
— The Easiest Way in Housekeeping and Cooking - Adapted to Domestic Use or Study in Classes • Helen Campbell
... which had opened up that question to the minds of men had set them working upon the problem of the Old Testament as well. We have seen how the Christians made for themselves a canon of the New Testament. By the force of that conception of the canon, and through the belief that, almost in a literal sense, God was the author of the whole book, the obvious differences among the writings had been obscured. Men forgot the evolution through which the writings had passed. The same thing had happened for the Old Testament in the Jewish synagogues and for the rabbis before the Christian ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... contained more treasures than were ever dreamed of in ancient Golconda. There was everything the soldier's heart might desire, from gun grease and cigarette paper down to wine and provisions; the whole stored away in a literal honey-comb of shelves and drawers with ...
— With Those Who Wait • Frances Wilson Huard
... Those literal translations were always at hand, and from them he could easily obtain his author's sense with sufficient certainty; and among the readers of Homer the number is very small of those who find ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... epicurean doctrine: 'Eat, drink, and be merry, for to-morrow we die.' I have gone through so many yesterdays when I strove with Death that I have realised to its full the wisdom of that sentence; and it is to me not merely a figure of speech, but a literal fact. Any to-morrow I might die. It is scarcely two months since I came back from the grave: is it worth while to be anything but radiantly glad? Of all things that life or perhaps my temperament has given me I prize the gift of laughter ...
— The Golden Threshold • Sarojini Naidu
... intended as a reply to a sagacious critic who censures the description, because it is not an exact and prosaic inventory of the characteristics of the Lake of Como!—When Melnotte, for instance, talks of birds "that syllable the name of Pauline" (by the way, a literal translation from an Italian poet), he is not thinking of ornithology, but probably of the Arabian Nights. He is venting the extravagant, but natural, enthusiasm of the poet ...
— The Lady of Lyons - or Love and Pride • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... astronomical terminology reveals the same relationship to western thought, for Var[a]ha-Mihira (6th century A.D.), a contemporary of [A]ryabha[t.]a, entitled a work of his the B[r.]hat-Sa[m.]hit[a], a literal translation of [Greek: megale suntaxis] of Ptolemy;[306] and in various ways is this interchange of ideas apparent.[307] It could not have been at all unusual for the ancient Greeks to go to India, for Strabo lays down the route, saying that all who make the journey start from Ephesus and traverse ...
— The Hindu-Arabic Numerals • David Eugene Smith
... colouring of Titian and the drawing of Michelangelo, it appears that Tintoretto's acquaintance with the works of the latter only developed his tendency to a naturalistic style. That which with Michelangelo was the symbol of a higher power in nature was adopted by Tintoretto in its literal form. Most of his defects, it is probable, arose from his indefatigable vigour, which earned for him the nickname of Il Furioso. Sebastian del Piombo said that Tintoretto could paint as much in ...
— Six Centuries of Painting • Randall Davies
... ought not to exact from us the literal performance of the stipulation when you know that we cannot perform it without conscious culpability. A true solution of the difficulty seems to be attainable by regarding it as a simple case where a contract, from changed circumstances, cannot be fulfilled exactly ...
— A Report of the Debates and Proceedings in the Secret Sessions of the Conference Convention • Lucius Eugene Chittenden
... What I told you means nothing open—or disgusting. Your sister will notice nothing unless you tell her. But I was candid with you—I always am. I told you last night that I had no scruples. You thought it was a woman's exaggeration; it was the literal truth! If a man drinks, or is vicious, so long as he doesn't hurl the furniture at my head, or behave himself offensively to me, what does it matter to me! If he drinks so that he can't paint, and he wants ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... taken the bull by the horns in a literal as well as figurative sense, the lad began gradually to develop into that terrible embodiment of unrest—a boy. He exhibited no very marked peculiarities up to this time to distinguish him from other youths; but just grew ...
— Sword and Pen - Ventures and Adventures of Willard Glazier • John Algernon Owens
... the elder of the two on the raft, rolling his glowing eyes over the different objects that were visible in and about the Castle, with a keenness that showed how little escaped him. "My brother is very proud, but Rivenoak (we use the literal translation of the term, writing as we do in English) is a name to make a Delaware ...
— The Deerslayer • James Fenimore Cooper
... to know what it is you're afraid of," he said in a carefully literal but carefully inaudible tone. He did that sort of ...
— Love and Lucy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... is not without embarrassment. When once his mind is settled, it is no trifle that will amuse this Mr. Ludlow. I do not know a more literal construer of his orders in the fleet;—a man, Sir, who thinks words have but a single set of meanings, and who knows as little as can be imagined on the difference between a ...
— The Water-Witch or, The Skimmer of the Seas • James Fenimore Cooper
... emphatically that he has authority for every single bit of Folk-lore recorded. Very often his work was merely that of a translator, for most of his information, derived from the people, was spoken in Welsh, but he has given in every instance a literal rendering of the narrative, just as he heard it, without embellishments or additions ...
— Welsh Folk-Lore - a Collection of the Folk-Tales and Legends of North Wales • Elias Owen
... all, I say that such silence is inhuman. You would all recognise that in the case of an actual, literal, instead of a metaphorical, famine. What would you say about a man who contented himself with sitting in his own back room, where nobody could see his abundance, and feasting to the full, whilst ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... continent, had tilted up the lateral rocks in the manner they are now seen to lie. The greater energy and more extended range of igneous action in those very remote periods when Africa was formed, embracing all the flanks, imparted to it its present very simple literal outline. This was the length ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... take charge of the little church in Blue Creek. He was neither a great man, nor an educated one. On the contrary, he was ignorant of any life outside of his own narrow sphere, and intolerant of all spirit of advance or change, singularly devoid of tact, but literal, honest, and well-meaning. Moreover, he was absolutely self-satisfied, but utterly lacking in the sense of fun which makes conceited people so much less disagreeable, since it gives them a glimmering appreciation of their ...
— In Blue Creek Canon • Anna Chapin Ray
... This was the literal fact; but there was something behind which Elizabeth had not the slightest intention of communicating. In fact, she set herself, physically and mentally, in an attitude of dogged resistance to any pumping of Mr. Ascott: for though, as she had truly said, nothing ...
— Mistress and Maid • Dinah Craik (aka: Miss Mulock)
... of our time, if merely in respect of longevity, must be reckoned Lady Louisa Stuart, sister and heir of the last Earl of Traquair. She was a friend and correspondent of Sir Walter Scott, who in describing "Tully Veolan" drew Traquair House with literal exactness, even down to the rampant bears which still guard the locked entrance-gates against all comers until the Royal Stuarts shall return to claim their own. Lady Louisa Stuart lived to be ninety-nine, and ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... It is vain, then, to object to "senseless jokes." The very definition of a joke is that it need have no sense; except that one wild and supernatural sense which we call the sense of humour. Humour is meant, in a literal sense, to make game of man; that is, to dethrone him from his official dignity and hunt him like game. It is meant to remind us human beings that we have things about us as ungainly and ludicrous as the nose of the elephant or the neck of the giraffe. If laughter does not touch a sort of ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... as a prayer with God," quoted Deleah, unquestioning in her child's heart the literal truth of ...
— Mrs. Day's Daughters • Mary E. Mann
... of it," he wrote, "is that should the Bill, through a literal interpretation of its complicated provisions, fail to secure the object at which it avowedly aims, no one will be able to protest against ...
— Lord Milner's Work in South Africa - From its Commencement in 1897 to the Peace of Vereeniging in 1902 • W. Basil Worsfold
... internal relations of clans and village groups, Sir H. Maine states: "The men who composed the primitive communities believed themselves to be kinsmen in the most literal sense of the word; and, surprising as it may seem, there are a multitude of indications that in one stage of thought they must have regarded themselves as equals. When these primitive bodies first make their appearance as landowners, as claiming an exclusive enjoyment in a definite area of land, ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India—Volume I (of IV) • R.V. Russell
... said Benson; "don't be too literal, Jack. In the heat of argument we all say things we don't mean. Pete here doesn't like to have his lovely English all messed up by a practical dub like me. I doubt if he wants to sever his connection ...
— The Happiest Time of Their Lives • Alice Duer Miller
... IX. C. translates his conjecture mh for h. The Greek means "straight, or rectified," with a play on the literal and metaphorical meaning ...
— Meditations • Marcus Aurelius
... all his favorite themes. He had been declaiming upon the dangers from Catholic supremacy and the subserviency of the Irish vote to the Church of Rome, and upon the absolute necessity of the supremacy of the Democratic party; upon the Apocalypse and the seven seals. He had been maintaining the literal infallibility of the Scriptures, and the necessity of treating some portions as legendary. It would be hard to say what inconsistent views he had not set forth within the space of the past hour; and ...
— By The Sea - 1887 • Heman White Chaplin
... the drawing-room, that was practically the first. It was all so different from what it's supposed to be. On the stage, or in books, a proposal is—how shall I put it? —a full-blown affair, a kind of bouquet; it loses its literal meaning. But in life a proposal ...
— Howards End • E. M. Forster
... onlooker could scarcely distinguish between Boer and Briton, friend or foe. Now when the Boers behaved thus towards their prisoners-of-war they only did what they ought to have done. When a man is captured or wounded he is no more an enemy in the literal sense of the word, and should not be treated as such. Military precautions must necessarily be taken to prevent the escape of prisoners, but, apart from that, men forced to surrender should neither be regarded nor treated ...
— In the Shadow of Death • P. H. Kritzinger and R. D. McDonald
... where literal descriptions are followed entirely or where illustrations are not drawn to correct proportions or followed closely are as follows. The wings are usually too large, and much too long for the size of the hook, ...
— How to Tie Flies • E. C. Gregg
... taught her wasn't so; if all that she had accepted so blindly wasn't the literal truth, inexorable for every individual (life was a too bitterly personal thing for her to concern herself with a doctrine which, accurate in the main, could be shrugged aside when it failed in isolated ...
— Winner Take All • Larry Evans
... know and love them all, especially the Major Duquesnois, an almost literal translation into French of Colonel Newcome. He took to me at once, in spite of my Englishness, and drilled me, and taught me the exercise as it was performed in the Vieille Garden and told me a new fairy-tale, I verily believe, every afternoon for seven years. ...
— Peter Ibbetson • George du Marier et al
... comparatively cultivated Romans accepted a monstrous fable about Julius Caesar. "The enthusiasm of the multitude," says Mr. Froude, "refused to believe that he was dead. He was supposed to have ascended into heaven, not in adulatory metaphor, but in literal and ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (First Series) • George W. Foote
... all, these words are the revelation of a firm resolve, of a great molding purpose; Jesus perceived that it was his duty to be in the house of his Father—not merely in the literal Temple, but in the sphere of life and activity of which the Temple was the great expression and symbol and sign. He had determined, that is, to devote all his thoughts and energies and powers to the definite service of God. At the age of twelve are not most children sufficiently ...
— The Gospel of Luke, An Exposition • Charles R. Erdman
... fascination which the giant computer at Moscow University held for her; and two, the students around her. People, she had noted, had behavior patterns very similar to the complex computer; not as individual units, though as individual units they could also be as surprisingly obtuse as the literal-minded reaction of the computer; but in statistical numbers they had an even greater tendency to act ...
— Where I Wasn't Going • Walt Richmond
... Deity—which cannot be tested? What sort of "inspiration" is that which leads to the promulgation of a fable as divine truth, which forces those who believe in that inspiration to hold on, like grim death, to the literal truth of the fable, which demoralises them in seeking for all sorts of sophistical shifts to bolster up the fable, and which finally is discredited and repudiated when the fable is finally proved to be a fable? If Satan had wished ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2 • Leonard Huxley
... his lake of fire, Sluiskin's portent of hardship proved to be a literal, even a modest, prophecy. At five o'clock in the evening, after eleven hours of struggle with precipices and glaciers, exhausted, chilled, and without food, they faced a night of zero gales upon the summit. The discovery of comforting steam-jets in a neighboring crater, the ...
— The Book of the National Parks • Robert Sterling Yard
... the emperor, I demand, on both sides, the literal fulfilment of your conditions. The electoral ambassadors must withdraw their red cloaks from the backs of their chairs, and throw them over the arms, and the other envoys must draw back their chairs until the hind-legs thereof are on ...
— Prince Eugene and His Times • L. Muhlbach
... large in the common thought, {684} but it was the religion of the popular preacher, translating the life of Christ into contemporary German life, wholesome and a little vulgar. The people love marvels and they are very literal; what could be more marvellous and more literal than Duerer's illustrations of the Apocalypse in which the Dragon with ten horns and seven heads, and the Lamb with seven horns and seven eyes are represented ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... have good cause to suspect the accuracy of their artificial rules, when the application of them works such havoc. Better that we should have no critical rules, than adopt such as separate on superficial literal grounds, things that the judgment of the Church and the common sense of men have in all ages joined together as substantially of the ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... other. The real question which we have to deal with here is why both balloons lift their aeronauts at least three miles into the clouds, while other men who have no balloon to lift them can get no higher than the top of the church steeple. Or to come back to literal fact, our problem must be expressed thus: Let us take the present population of Great Britain or America, and, having noted the wealth at present annually produced by it, ask ourselves what would happen ...
— A Critical Examination of Socialism • William Hurrell Mallock
... the rich Virgilian measure they are especially out of place. The "AEneid" is rendered with a roughness which might better befit a translation of Ennius. Thus the reader of Mr. Morris's poetical translations has in his hands versions of almost literal closeness, and (what is extremely rare) versions of poetry by a poet. But his acquaintance with Early English and Icelandic has added to the poet a strain of the philologist, and his English in the "Odyssey," still more in the "AEneid," is occasionally more archaic than the Greek of 900 B.C. ...
— Adventures among Books • Andrew Lang
... near kin to Vice, she does not acknowledge the relationship, and, to do Harry Trevethick justice, she would never have made a midnight assignation with Richard in the Fairies' Bower. She was more alarmed and shocked at the too literal fulfillment of her wish than pleased to see him there. She shed tears for very shame. Whatever reserve she had hitherto maintained, with respect to her affection for him, had now, she perceived, been swept away by her own act. ...
— Bred in the Bone • James Payn
... temptation, the place where the trees that were the vehicles of such consequences to the occupants of the garden, stood, had a real existence and geographical site. Now I need hardly remark that the Mosaic narrative unquestionably professes a geographical exactness and a literal existence of the garden, as no fabled locality—no Utopia or garden of the Hesperides. I need only refer to the data afforded to us by Gen. ...
— Creation and Its Records • B.H. Baden-Powell
... thoroughly enjoying a task which might have daunted one of less boyish confidence. He was, in fact, recasting the 'Fasti' of Ovid into English verse, using for that purpose a spirited, if literal, prose translation (published by Mr Bohn) in default of the original, from which his ignorance of the Latin language ...
— Hocken and Hunken • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... translation of Plutarch, of which Shakspeare has made such admirable use in his Coriolanus and Julius Caesar; and Ben Jonson's tragedies of Catiline and Sejanus may themselves be considered as almost literal translations into verse, of Tacitus, Sallust, and Cicero's Orations in his consulship. Boccacio, the divine Boccacio, Petrarch, Dante, the satirist Aretine, Machiavel, Castiglione, and others, were ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... thorns is to be tilled, and to bloom like Eden, a restored paradise. How far the fulfilment has halted behind the promise, the melancholy condition of Palestine to-day may remind us. Whether the literal fulfilment is to be anticipated or no seems less important than to note that the experience of forgiveness (and of the consequent blessings described above) is the precursor of this fair picture. Therefore, the Church's condition of growth and prosperity is its realisation ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... literal meaning is one plane. As monoplane machines are all provided with a fore and aft body, and each has a wing or plane projecting out from each side of this body, it is obvious that it has two planes instead of one. The term, however, has reference to the fact that it ...
— Aeroplanes • J. S. Zerbe***
... on his own account, will toil and save to lay up hoards for those who are to come after him. The deacon had only a niece to inherit his effects, unless he might choose to step beyond that degree of consanguinity, and bestow a portion of his means on cousins. The church—or, to be more literal, the 'meeting'—had an eye on his resources, however; and it was whispered it had actually succeeded, by means known to itself, in squeezing out of his tight grasp no less a sum than one hundred dollars, as a donation to a certain theological college. ...
— The Sea Lions - The Lost Sealers • James Fenimore Cooper
... history of the Grandchildren of the Ghetto, which is mainly a history of the middle-classes, is mainly a history of isolation. "The Upper Ten" is a literal phrase in Judah, whose aristocracy just about suffices for a synagogue quorum. Great majestic luminaries, each with its satellites, they swim serenely in the golden heavens. And the middle-classes look ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... restricted to the thin spot upon the crown of J. G.'s head, and the back of his neck. Sary longed for sight of the woman horse doctor, and when she essayed to crowd in and usurp Ellen's point of vantage, there ensued a war of extermination which ended in the literal ...
— Chip, of the Flying U • B. M. Bower
... explicable by the fact that the strongest emotions are excited by ideas. Hence, on the hypothesis, the impression radiating downwards to the emotional centres from the cerebral hemispheres, would counteract a sensory impression radiating upwards from them, by a literal interference analogous to that observed in opposing waves of sound. But as the direction of the impression generating emotion coincides with that of the motor impulses, the latter would not be counteracted, ...
— The Education of American Girls • Anna Callender Brackett
... of our approach to Plato's Dialogues is not a matter of indifference. They will mean more or less to us, according to our spiritual condition. Much more passed from Plato to his disciples than the literal meaning of his words. The place where he taught his listeners thrilled in the atmosphere of the Mysteries. His words awoke overtones in higher regions, which vibrated with them, but these overtones needed the atmosphere of the Mysteries, or they died away ...
— Christianity As A Mystical Fact - And The Mysteries of Antiquity • Rudolf Steiner
... the virtuoso was an amateur. In the literal sense the amateur loves the activities in which he engages, and in the figurative sense he remains independent of any Establishment. Not trained in any rigorous, prescribed discipline, he was not committed to any set doctrine. Furthermore, he was not restricted by the regulations ...
— Medical Investigation in Seventeenth Century England - Papers Read at a Clark Library Seminar, October 14, 1967 • Charles W. Bodemer
... his class-room tone. He was all brown like a leaf with Valley dust and sun and rain. The old cadet cap was older yet, the ancient boots as grotesquely large, the curious lift of his hand to Heaven no less curious than it had always been. He was as awkward, as hypochondriac, as literal, as strict as ever. Moreover, there should have hung about him the cloud of disfavour and hostility raised by that icy march to Romney less than three months ago. And yet—and yet! What had happened since then? Not much, indeed. The return of the Stonewall Brigade ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... servent de fondement la religion Chrtienne, Londres (Amsterdam), 1768. Translation of Anthony Collins, A Discourse on the Grounds and Reasons of the Christian Religion, London, 1724. Contains also The Scheme of literal Prophecy considered, 1727, also by Collins in answer to the works of Clarke, Sherlock, Chandler, Sykes, and especially to Whiston's Essay towards restoring the text of the Old Testament, one of the thirty-five works directed against ...
— Baron d'Holbach - A Study of Eighteenth Century Radicalism in France • Max Pearson Cushing
... too readily verified in the passions of men; in the follies of love, its entanglements, its mischiefs, its foulness. In one shape or another it meets us at every turn; it is never absent; it is the motive and stimulant of the whole activity of the poem. The picture of life held up before us is the literal rendering ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church
... laughed, though not without apparent secret anguish, in telling me this. I felt extremely shocked, but, willing to confine my words at least to the literal story, I only exclaimed against the unfeeling absurdity of ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 1 • Madame D'Arblay
... make me keep silence. I am not the man calmly to let pass black insinuations against the character of a friend. No, I stood up for him. I am glad to think how I stood up for him, not only metaphorically, but in the most literal sense of the term; for I found myself continually getting up, and Marston as often pulling me down ...
— The Danvers Jewels, and Sir Charles Danvers • Mary Cholmondeley
... only in Papua but throughout Malaysia you find this story. And, so the tradition runs, these people—the Chamats—will one day break through the hills and rule the world; 'make over the world' is the literal translation of the constant phrase in the tale. It was Herbert Spencer who pointed out that there is a basis of fact in every myth and legend of man. It is possible that these survivors I am discussing form Spencer's fact ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt
... "She's a desperately literal woman, primitive, the kind you never meet—well, out here. She has a thirst for happiness, ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... longer, but those things belong to rich people who live in towns, and after all they are luxuries. Besides, you have often said yourself that everybody ought to get his bread by the work of his own hands, yet you get money and not bread. Why shouldn't you keep to the literal sense of your words? You ought to be getting bread, that is, you ought to be ploughing, sowing, reaping, threshing, or doing something which has a direct connection with agriculture, for instance, looking after cows, digging, building huts of logs. ...
— The Chorus Girl and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... armour. 'Steely' in Elizabethan times was used both literally and figuratively. Shakespeare, 3 Henry VI. ii. 3. 16, has 'The steely point of Clifford's lance,' and Fisher in his 'Seuen Psalmes' has 'tough and stely hertes.' For a modern literal example, ...
— Marmion • Sir Walter Scott
... All this is quite literal; and the tomb of the poet himself, near the southeast window, completes the impression of the scene. It is a plain brick altar tomb, covered with a blue slate slab, and, besides his own ashes, contains ...
— Select Poems of Thomas Gray • Thomas Gray
... 533. This literal version of the verse yields no sense. The meaning, however, is this: Atichccheda or Atichcchanda implies a hyperbolic statement, Ativaua means a paradox. It is said that by gift of even a palmful of water one may ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... Lovelace to Belford.— Receives a letter from Clarissa, written by way of allegory to induce him to forbear hunting after her. Copy of it. He takes it in a literal sense. Exults upon it. Will now hasten down to Lord M. and receive the gratulations of all his family on her returning favour. Gives an interpretation of his frightful dream to ...
— Clarissa, Or The History Of A Young Lady, Volume 8 • Samuel Richardson
... no pedantic or scholastic traits. His pleasure in the poetry itself will not be distracted by a marginal numbering of the lines; by index-figures and footnotes; or by antiquated peculiarities of spelling, capitalization, and elision. Except where literal conventions are essential to the poet's purpose,—as in The Castle of Indolence, The Schoolmistress, or Chatterton's poems,—I have followed modern usage. Dialect words are explained in the glossary; and the student who may wish to consult the context of any passage ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... things which strike the traveller in Persia, especially on nearing a big city, is the literal myriads of curious conical heaps, with a pit in the centre, that one notices running across the plains in long, interminable rows, generally towards the mountains. These are the kanats, the astounding aqueducts with which dried-up Persia is bored in all directions ...
— Across Coveted Lands - or a Journey from Flushing (Holland) to Calcutta Overland • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... personage in the full dress uniform of a general, received us in a haughty manner, and cross-questioned us in the most minute and tedious manner. Dennis somewhat puzzled him by the style of his answers, which were anything but literal translations of what Captain Hassall said. The result, however, was favourable, and we were allowed to go wherever we chose about the city, and to get the necessary repairs of our ships executed, and to obtain all the ...
— James Braithwaite, the Supercargo - The Story of his Adventures Ashore and Afloat • W.H.G. Kingston
... education, which is not to make too easy the tasks which have for their aim the mastering of a difficulty. Their main object was to make their pupils into honourable men. Their lessons of goodness and morality, which impressed me as being the literal embodiments of virtue and high feeling, were part and parcel of the dogma which they taught. The historical education they had given me consisted solely in reading Rollin. Of criticism, the natural sciences, and philosophy I as ...
— Recollections of My Youth • Ernest Renan
... is quite twenty shillings in the pound. What say you to the assets? The statue will not be forth coming—but will you have the model, after which the undug block was to have been chiseled? Shall I send you the literal truth which I had intended to drape with imagination—tell the facts of real life which I had designed to weave into a story. I shall thus, at least, clear yourself of the non-fulfillment of the promise of your pre-advertised contents, and (engaging to send you a story properly completed ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 1 January 1848 • Various
... with the anxious attention of one who believed that her every word had a real and literal meaning; and his face was overclouded with a calm but deep sadness, which testified to the nature of the impression made on his mind by language that hardly conveyed to my own more than a dim and general prediction of victory, won through scenes of trial and trouble. But when she had closed, ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg
... and feeling, are too remote from modern interest to allow it. We require every possible help and attraction of sound in our language to smooth the way for the admission of things so remote from our present concerns. My own notion of translation is, that it cannot be too literal, provided these faults be avoided: baldness, in which I include all that takes from dignity; and strangeness, or uncouthness, including harshness; and lastly, attempts to convey meanings which, as they cannot be given but by languid circumlocutions, cannot in ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers
... takin' the Scripter literal, and if I can't git my stuff there entirely unbeknown to my right hand ...
— Samantha at Saratoga • Marietta Holley
... he swore that I would send it to heaven or to hell. In the light of what I have read, and in the recollection of what I have often heard father say in his arguments with preachers, perhaps I should have been strong enough to scout the idea of a literal torment, but I could not. You remember old Aunt Betsy Taylor, Jim's black mammy. When I was very young she was still living on the place, and was to me a curiosity, the last of her race, I was told. I did not ...
— An Arkansas Planter • Opie Percival Read
... novel of the day—not in the vulgar sense, of which there are too many, but as a literal photograph of the manners and habits of the nineteenth century, thrown on to paper by the light of a powerful mind; and one also of the most artistic effect. Mr. Thackeray has a peculiar adroitness in leading on the fancy, or rather memory of ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... variety of their tastes and occupations? In cultivating the aesthetic side of man's nature; in engaging him with the beautiful, the pure, the wonderful, the truly natural; with painting, poetry, music, horticulture, physical science—in all this lies recreation, in the true and literal sense of that word, namely, the recreating and mending of the exhausted mind and feelings, such as no rational man will now neglect, either for himself, his ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... humblest thanks and praises." The legislature plainly had in view the Act of Recognition of the first of Queen Elizabeth, chap. 3rd, and of that of James the First, chap. 1st, both acts strongly declaratory of the inheritable nature of the crown; and in many parts they follow, with a nearly literal precision, the words, and even the form of thanksgiving which is found in these old ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... from all sorts of passengers, who were never so fluent as when sitting beside him "up in front!" There was a tallow dip or two, and no other light save that of the fire. Who that ever told a story could wish a more inspiring auditor than Jacob Bean, a literal, honest old fellow who took the most vital interest in every detail of the stories told, looking upon their heroes and their villains as personal friends or foes. He always sat in one corner of the fireplace, poker in hand, and the crowd tacitly allowed him the ...
— The Village Watch-Tower • (AKA Kate Douglas Riggs) Kate Douglas Wiggin
... metaphorical sense in which fine gentlemen, with all the delicacy of Agag about them, trip to the hustings about election time, and protest that they too are working men. I really mean my words to be taken in their direct, literal, and straightforward sense. In fact, if the most nimble-fingered watchmaker among you will come to my workshop, he may set me to put a watch together, and I will set him to dissect, say, a blackbeetle's nerves. I do not wish to vaunt, ...
— Science & Education • Thomas H. Huxley
... a generally accepted division of language into literal and figurative. Language that is literal uses words in their accepted and accurate meaning. Figurative language employs words with meanings not strictly literal, but varying from ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster
... our duty, when we have the desires of the people before us, to pursue them, not in the spirit of literal obedience, which may militate with their very principle,—much less to treat them with a peevish and contentious litigation, as if we were adverse parties in a suit. It would, Sir, be most dishonorable ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. II. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... as having taken the initiative in nameless crimes between the races, Miss Willard said in her annual address that this statement "put an unjust imputation upon half the white race." But as this expression has been misunderstood she desires to declare that she did not intend a literal interpretation to be given to the language used, but employed it to express a tendency that might ensue in public thought as a result of utterances so sweeping as some that have been made ...
— The Red Record - Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynching in the United States • Ida B. Wells-Barnett
... in which your excellency, referring to the twenty-second article of the treaty of friendship, navigation, and limits agreed upon between the King, my master, and the United States of America, has been pleased to inquire, after transcribing the literal text of said article (which you find so explicit as not to require any comment nor to admit of dubious construction), if His Majesty has been pleased to designate any other position on the banks of the Mississippi, and where that is, if his royal pleasure does not continue the permission ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 3 (of 4) of Volume 1: Thomas Jefferson • Edited by James D. Richardson
... from that view. So far as Poetry attempts to improve on truth in that way, so far it abandons truth, and is false to itself. Even literal facts, exactly as they were, a great poet will prefer whenever he can get them. Shakespeare in the historical plays is studious, wherever possible, to give the very words which he finds to have been used; and it shows how wisely ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... account and selection of stories gathered from various native sources, as literal a rendition as possible has been observed by the translators for the better insight it gives ...
— Hawaiian Folk Tales - A Collection of Native Legends • Various
... problem. Those of my readers who have studied to some extent the ancient "Mantra" and the "Tantra Sastras" * of India, would have seen that very often Sanskrit words are made to convey a certain hidden meaning by means of well-known pre-arranged methods and a tacit convention, while their literal significance is something quite ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... statue!" was the literal answer. "There's no other like it in the world. Doctor Athelstone found it near Thebes, and took a good deal of pride in arranging this shrine. The device is clever; the parting of the veil you see, makes the light shine down on the statue, and it dies out when I close it—so"; and, as she pulled ...
— The False Gods • George Horace Lorimer
... fable of AEsop, of the boy and the wolf, had then a literal application. Every child in the days of our fathers knew the story of Putnam, and the she-wolf which he dragged from its den. This and similar tales go far to make up the popular reputation of the hero, and ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 2 of 8 • Various
... to give in each case an accurate bibliographical description of the volume, anotion of the value of the text used in making it, &c. But the emphasis given to these topics has necessarily varied from time to time. In discussing literal translations, for example, much attention has been paid to the value of the text, while little or nothing is said of the value of the rendering as literature. On the other hand, in the case of a book which is literary in aim, the attention ...
— The Translations of Beowulf - A Critical Biography • Chauncey Brewster Tinker
... assuming that the figures were destroyed by Ludlow's troopers when he garrisoned the belfry. But such an assumption requires many facts to support it which are not forthcoming. We have no proof that Hollar's sketch was intended to be a literal transcript of what he saw; it is quite possible that for the sake of effect he preferred to complete the design according to the supposed intention of its builders. We are not certain that the niches were all filled originally; it is quite possible that some were purposely left vacant for ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Salisbury - A Description of its Fabric and a Brief History of the See of Sarum • Gleeson White
... 'Significance,' in the sense of standing as the sign of other mental states, is taken to be the sole function of what mental states we have; and from the perception that our little primitive sensation has as yet no significance in this literal sense, it is an easy step to call it first meaningless, next senseless, then vacuous, and finally to brand it as absurd and inadmissible. But in this universal liquidation, this everlasting slip, slip, slip, of direct acquaintance into knowledge-ABOUT, until ...
— The Meaning of Truth • William James
... me out a literal dish of tea, black and boiling; and I drained the tin with a feeling of relief such as one seldom knows. The place was lined round with bunks like the forecastle of a ship. After a time I rose to depart and asked the man who acted as cook how much ...
— The Great Lone Land - A Narrative of Travel and Adventure in the North-West of America • W. F. Butler
... subsequent Hebrew poetry; that peculiarity consisting of the repetition of clauses, containing either the same proposition in a slightly different form, or its antithesis; a rhyme of thoughts, if we may so say, instead of a rhyme of sounds, and consequently capable of being preserved by a literal translation. ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 183, April 30, 1853 • Various
... none. The end at first in such cases may be very noble and the fib or quibble very petty, but worse lies for meaner objects may follow. Youth often describes such situations with exhilaration as if there were a feeling of easement from the monotonous and tedious obligation of rigorous literal veracity, and here mentors are liable to become nervous and err. The youth who really gets interested in the conflict of duties may reverently be referred to the inner lie of his own conscience, the need of keeping which as a private ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... historical periods and discovering their great significance, says: "Pietism went back from the cold faith of the seventeenth century to the living faith of the Reformation. But just because this return was vital and produced by the agency of the Holy Spirit, it could not be termed a literal return. We must not forget that the orthodoxy of the seventeenth century was only the extreme elaboration of an error, the beginning of which we find as far back as Luther's time, and which became more and more a power in the Church ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... young warriors for want of ardour in resisting Gudabirsi encroachments, were quoted as models of the "withering." Stimulated by the present of a Tobe, he composed a song in honor of the pilgrim: I will offer a literal translation of the exordium, though sentient of the fact that modesty ...
— First footsteps in East Africa • Richard F. Burton
... bards! compare this word with its literal translation, "tail-horn-hoofed Satan," and be shy of compound epithets, the components of which are indebted for their union exclusively to the printer's hyphen. Henry More, indeed, would have naturalized the word without hesitation, and 'cercoceronychous' would have shared the astonishment ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... the Count. "I acquit him of all such dissimulation. You may as well expect courtesy from a literal wild boar, you may as well try to lay leaf gold on old rusty gibbet irons. No—idiot as she is, she is not quite goose enough to fall in love with the fox who has snapped her, and that in his very den. But you women are all alike—fair words carry it—and, I dare say, here is my ...
— Quentin Durward • Sir Walter Scott
... "The literal subject of the whole work is the state of the soul after death, simply considered. But if the work be taken allegorically the subject is man, as by merit or demerit, through freedom of the will, he renders himself liable to the ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... department, equally distinguished for the success with which he has led forward the musical education of New England, trained a corps of buglers to converse with each other by long and short bugle-notes, and thus to carry information with literal accuracy from point to point at any distance within which the tones of a bugle could be heard. It will readily be seen that there are many occasions in military affairs when such means of conversation might prove of inestimable value. Mr. Tuttle, the astronomer, on duty in the same campaign, ...
— If, Yes and Perhaps - Four Possibilities and Six Exaggerations with Some Bits of Fact • Edward Everett Hale
... is kept intact in his possession. It is not allowed to waste away, however much the constituent parts of it may shift. The waste and renewal which business entails leave the equivalent of the million dollars always on hand, though never in the literal shape of money. A stock of shifting goods always worth a million dollars is, by a figure of speech, described as a million dollars "invested ...
— Essentials of Economic Theory - As Applied to Modern Problems of Industry and Public Policy • John Bates Clark
... I repeated. "Is it a figure of speech that the rich man fared sumptuously, that he died, that he was buried? Is not that literal? Why, then, is it a figure of speech that he lifted up his eyes in torment, and said, 'I am tormented in this flame'(Luke 16:24). My dear friend, be sure that there is an awful reality in that story—a most solemn reality in the fact of the impassable gulf. If here we do not believe in this gulf, ...
— From Death into Life - or, twenty years of my ministry • William Haslam
... observe, he always trembles when he tells his own. But they are all true; there is not one old-wife's fable on the list. Necromancers have had private interviews with visitors who had no right to be seen this side the Styx. The Witch of Endor and the raising of Samuel were literal facts. Above all others, the Nemesis and Eumenides were facts not to be withstood. And, philosophize as we may, ghosts have been seen at dead of night, and not always under the conduct of Mercury;[6] even the Salem witchcraft was very far from being a humbug. They are all true,—the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various
... the idea is suggested to them. I have known horses content to go even quite slowly. But your German horse, seemingly, is built for one particular speed, and is unable to depart from it. I am stating nothing but the literal, unadorned truth, when I say I have seen a German coachman, with the reins lying loose over the splash-board, working his brake with both hands, in terror lest he would not be in time to avoid ...
— Three Men on the Bummel • Jerome K. Jerome
... But if we were merry, we were wise. Shortly after dinner, M. Gail rose, as if in a moment of inspiration, from his seat—and recited the Latin verses which are here enclosed.[162] They will at least make you admire the good humour of the poet. He afterwards chanted a song: his own literal version of the XIXth ode of Anacreon, beginning [Greek: He ge melaina pinei]. The guests declared that they had never sat so long at table, or were more happy. I proposed a stroll or a seat upon the lawn. Chairs and benches were at hand; and we requested that the coffee ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Two • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... becomes unsatisfying to the impatient, who want results to come as they walk. Probably this is a reason that it is occasionally said that Emerson has no vital message for the rank and file. He has no definite message perhaps for the literal, but messages are all vital, as much, by reason of his indefiniteness, as in ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... may, indeed, be so managed as to look emergent from the stone, rather than fastened to it; and wherever there is throughout the architecture any expression of sternness or severity (severity in its literal sense, as in Romans, XI. 22), such divisions of the living form may be permitted; still, you cannot cut an animal to pieces as you can gather a flower or a leaf. These were intended for our gathering, and for our constant delight: wherever men exist in a ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin
... he is about to kill; he seemed to find me worthy to be served on the table of the head-chief, but as he was hungry and did not wish to wait [blot], he drew from its sheath the knife that he carried at his belt and before I had had time to guess what he intended to do [Enough to say, in place of literal translation, that the savage, from the outside of her right thigh, flayed off a large piece of her flesh.] It must be supposed that I again lost consciousness. When I came to myself, I was lying some paces away from the stake of torture ...
— Strange True Stories of Louisiana • George Washington Cable |
