"Plethora" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Nevertheless, I shall endeavor to be busy during the coming winter at Rome, but there will be so much to distract my thoughts that I have little hope of seriously accomplishing anything. It is a pity; for I have really a plethora of ideas, and should feel relieved by discharging some of them upon ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... was even brisker than in White Bay. Out went the merchandise and in came the fish. Nor did the Spot Cash once leave harbour without a hearty, even wistful, invitation to return. Within seven days, so fast did the fish come aboard, the hold had an appearance of plethora. Jimmie Grimm and Bagg protested that not another quintal of fish could be stowed away. It was fairly time to think of a deck-load. There was still something in the cabin: something to be disposed of—something to ...
— Billy Topsail & Company - A Story for Boys • Norman Duncan
... plethora of acquirements will soon cure itself. Knowledge that is not wanted dies out like the eyes of the fishes of the Mammoth Cave. When you come to handle life and death as your daily business, your memory will of itself ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... savage races do not display the greatest physical stamina is not so much intellectual barrenness as their vices, native or acquired,—or because they bring no wisdom to the conduct of life, but dwell in smoky huts, eat unhealthy food, go from starvation to plethora and from plethora to starvation again, exchange the indolent lethargy which is the law of savage life for the frantic struggles of war or the chase which diversify and break up its monotony. Allow the objection; and then what have we ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various
... banishment of the past his old fiancee had dragged from its sepulchre. Bury it again and forget it! "What's all the noise about? What's all the chatterboxing?" For the good gentleman always imputes to his offspring a volubility and a plethora of language far in excess of any meaning it conveys. His own attitude, he implies, is one of weighty consideration ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... which, if not sense, will be so like it as to do as well. Perhaps better: for it spares the reader the trouble of thinking; prevents vacancy, while it indulges indolence; and secures the memory from all danger of an intellectual plethora. Hence of all trades, literature at present demands the least talent or information; and, of all modes of literature, the manufacturing of poems. The difference indeed between these and the works of genius is not less than between an ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... concerns handling large amounts of European capital, and said to be intimately associated with the Rothschilds. Financial journals have recently noted the fact that these concerns are becoming embarrassed by the plethora of funds seeking investment, and are turning their attention to the development of railway systems and cities in the United States. Their South American and Australian investments have not proven satisfactory, especially the former, owing to the character of the people ...
— Aladdin & Co. - A Romance of Yankee Magic • Herbert Quick
... sooner or later, that seems to be the universal fate; and it appears that it is our lot to be emasculated, not by the want of law but by a plethora thereof. This country was made, not by Governments, but for the most part in despite of them by the independent efforts of generations of individuals. The tendency nowadays is to merge the individual in the Government, and to limit or even forcibly to destroy ...
— Jess • H. Rider Haggard
... garden of the Tuileries. Twenty thousand go every Sunday to the Salon during the period that it remains open. One hundred thousand go out to the races on ordinary days, and twice that number attend the Grand Prix. Hence comes a famine of conveyances and of seats, and a plethora of companions that are far ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. July, 1878. • Various
... complete wretchedness, and have a bad dinner and an indigestion everyday, ut plebi placeam et declamatio fiam. If you think this reasonable and right, I am sure you have left all sense of reasonableness in Lusitania. Besides, have you not a plethora of judicial wealth and power? Have you not the Lord Justice, who has little else to do; and the Admiralty Judge; and that great Adminiculum, the learned and pious man whom, honoris causa, I call Holy Joe? [Footnote: Probably sir Joseph Napier, nominated to a place on the Judicial Committee ...
— Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Henry Reeve, C.B., D.C.L. - In Two Volumes. VOL. II. • John Knox Laughton
... one human lifetime, in which to ease his imagination of its tremendous burden. He had Golconda at the root of his tongue: let him but pass you the time of day, and it shall go hard but he will pour you out the wealth of Ormus or of Ind. A plethora, some have said: never mind; wealth was nothing to him, because he had it all. Or note how severe Milton, almost every time he alludes to Satan, throws some new light of majestic gloom, inner or outer, with a new epithet or synonym, upon his figure ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... honour, because you save your nest from the claws of that youthful demon named cuckoldom in the language of the Celts. I say health, because this book incites that which was prescribed by the Church of Salerno, for the avoidance of cerebral plethora. Can you derive a like proof in any other typographically blackened portfolios? Ha! ha! where are the books that make children? Think! Nowhere. But you will find a glut of children making books which ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 3 • Honore de Balzac
... her to pretend that there was a chance that she might find some one waiting her arrival on the platform, but at the bottom of her heart she had little hope of such a possibility. As members of a large family whose parents were not rich enough to pay for the modern plethora of nurses and governesses, the Garnetts and Vernons had been brought up to be independent, and to fend for themselves, hence the two mothers would not be so anxious to count the number of their brood, to see that each member was safe and sound, as ...
— A College Girl • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... will, by this post, hear from others that Lord Egremont died two days ago of an apoplexy; which, from his figure, and the constant plethora he lived in, was reasonably to be expected. You will ask me, who is to be Secretary in his room: To which I answer, that I do not know. I should guess Lord Sandwich, to be succeeded in the Admiralty by Charles Townshend; unless the Duke of Bedford, who seems to have taken to himself the department ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... chance of escape for Thomas Clarke Luby or for his associates. The crown had a plethora of evidence against them, acquired during the months and years when they appeared to be all but totally ignorant of the existence of the conspiracy. They had the evidence of the approver, Nagle, who had been an employe ...
— Speeches from the Dock, Part I • Various
... England, Scotland, and Wales is that in the first named country the control of the constabulary is ruled out of the functions of the local bodies, and is still maintained under the central executive. The plethora of police in the country is one of the most striking features that meet the eye of anyone visiting it for the first time. The observant foreigner who, after travelling in England, crosses to Ireland and there sees on every wayside station at least two policemen varying the ennui of ...
— Ireland and the Home Rule Movement • Michael F. J. McDonnell
... (2702), S. emends to 'a aet fyr' when the fire began to grow less intense afterward. This emendation relieves the passage of a plethora ...
— Beowulf - An Anglo-Saxon Epic Poem • The Heyne-Socin
... lymphatic vessels counterbalances those of nutrition, and thus the form and size of every part of the body is preserved. When their action exceeds that of the nutrient vessels, the body emaciates; when it is deficient, plethora is the result. In youth, they are less active than the nutrient vessels, and the limbs are plump; but in later periods of life, we find these actions reversed, and the body diminishes in size. It is not unfrequent that wens, and other tumors of considerable ...
— A Treatise on Anatomy, Physiology, and Hygiene (Revised Edition) • Calvin Cutter
... which, growing on subterranean walls, takes occasionally definite form, some specimens resembling a lily, others being like a rose; the child tried feebly to be grateful, and put it with care into one of the pockets of his little red coat—his pockets in which he had once felt such plethora of pride! ...
— The Ordeal - A Mountain Romance of Tennessee • Charles Egbert Craddock
... of the easier classes, are in a state of surfeit and disgrace after meat. Plethora has filled us with indifference; and we are covered from head to foot with the callosities of habitual opulence. Born into what is called a certain rank, we live, as the saying is, up to our station. We squander without enjoyment, because our fathers squandered. We eat of the best, ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... no fact more manifest that the plethora of paper money is not only undermining the morals of the people by encouraging waste and extravagance, but is striking at the root of our material prosperity by diminishing labor . . . and if not speedily checked, will, at no distant day, culminate in widespread ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman
... Another striking contrast, due to, or connected with, this plethora of yolk, is the differentiation of a yolk sac ( umbilical vesicle) and the development of two new structures, the amnion and allantois, in the fowl. If the student will compare Figure 10 of the frog, he will ...
— Text Book of Biology, Part 1: Vertebrata • H. G. Wells
... at the day school there at which Lord Byron was a pupil his allusion to the localities of affection of the people of, for his memory Absence, consolations in Abstinence, the sole remedy for plethora Abydos, Lord Byron's swimming feat from Sestos to See Bride of Abydos Abyssinia, Lord Byron's project of visiting Academical studies, effect of, on the imaginative faculty Acerbi, Giuseppe Acland, Mr., Lord Byron's school-fellow at Harrow Acting, ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... hence it is that the relief cannot come at the proper time and season. Has not your lady, may I ask, heretofore at the period of the catamenia, suffered, if indeed not from anaemia, then necessarily from plethora? Am I right in ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... alcohol, owing to its stimulant properties, produce an unnatural susceptibility to morbid action in all the organs, and this, with the plethora superinduced, becomes a ...
— Grappling with the Monster • T. S. Arthur
... The first consider every commercial exertion consequent on a new discovery, or the opening of a new channel for investment, doubtful in itself, and highly dangerous if hurriedly and unhesitatingly adopted. The social system, in their view, may suffer quite as much from plethora as from inanition. Too much blood is as unwholesome as too little, notwithstanding of any extraneous means to work it off. "Slow and sure," is their motto—"Carpe diem," essentially that of their antagonists. And yet in one thing, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... actuated by high motives which, nevertheless, did not stand in the way of their meeting, in the households of the persons thus obnoxious to punishment, the same or even a lower class of Ethiopic damsels, under the title of "housekeeper," on whom they lavished a very plethora of caresses. Perhaps it may be wrong so to hint it, but, judging from indications in his own book, our author himself would have been liable in those days to enthralment by the piquant charms that proved irresistible to so many of his brother-Europeans. It is almost ...
— West Indian Fables by James Anthony Froude Explained by J. J. Thomas • J. J. (John Jacob) Thomas
... were altogether impossible!" said Villiers heartily— "But as long as there is a plethora of little authors, and a scarcity of great ones, so long, I suppose, must it continue—for little men love notoriety, and great ones shrink from it, just in the same way that good women like flattery, while bad ones court it. I hope you don't bear me any grudge because I consider my friend Alwyn ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... confidently reckoned upon five minutes' conversation with you, ere you repaired to the evening lecture, to which I concluded a sober man like you was about to adjourn. While hesitating upon the fit mode to address you, a figure descended the stairs, which, at first sight, I mistook for an Alguazil, in a plethora, but upon nearer approach found to be your worshipful self, posting to the opera, clad in a great-coat of the newest cut, all fringe and frippery, the offspring of a German tailor. You and your cloak were so enveloped in frogs and self-conceit, that I could compare you to nothing but king ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol I, No. 2, February 1810 • Samuel James Arnold
... conditions that have been named—the lightness of their air-filled bodies, and the strength of their chest-packed muscles. Where light air is circulated instead of heavy blood, great vascularity serves only to make existence more ethereal. Plethora probably takes the insect nearer to the skies, instead of dragging it towards the dust. The hawk-moth, with its burly body, may often be seen hovering gracefully, on quivering wings, over some favourite flower, ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 437 - Volume 17, New Series, May 15, 1852 • Various
... manner—at once patronising and servile—struck him as peculiarly odious. Image betrayed an evil tendency to emphasise his remarks by slapping his acquaintances upon the back. He was also guilty of supposing a defect of hearing in all persons older than, or in any measure denied the absolute plethora of physical vigour so conspicuous in, himself. He invariably raised his voice in addressing Richard. In return for which graceful attention Dickie most ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... in other respects proceeded slowly, but regularly, from that time until the 9th of October; when the state of plethora again recurring, with its usual attendant symptoms, [Symbol: ounce]iv. of blood were taken from the arm; and this was upon the same occasion, repeated in the following month, with manifest good consequences; though ...
— An Account of the Foxglove and some of its Medical Uses - With Practical Remarks on Dropsy and Other Diseases • William Withering
... curious artistic law—the survival of the unfittest, of which we are only dimly beginning to realise the significance. It is like the immortality of the invalid, now recognised by all men of science. You see it manifested in the plethora of memoirs. All new books not novels are about great dead men by unimportant little living ones. When I am asked, as I have been, to write recollections of certain 'people of importance,' as Dante says, I feel the force of that law ...
— Masques & Phases • Robert Ross
... items as were visible in the shining of the blaze, and the less cheerful radiance of two smoky lamps which burnt but dimly in the shop itself, as though its plethora sat heavy on their lungs; and glancing, then, at one of the two faces by the parlor-fire, Trotty had small difficulty in recognizing in the stout old lady, Mrs. Chickenstalker: always inclined to corpulency, even in the days when he had known her as established in the general ...
— A Budget of Christmas Tales by Charles Dickens and Others • Various
... ourselves what the financial administration of the Boers must be in this plethora of money, provided almost entirely by the hated Outlander. An example may be cited. The Raad were discussing the budget of 1898, and one of the members called attention to the fact that for several years past advances to the amount of L2,400,000 ...
— Native Races and the War • Josephine Elizabeth Butler
... riches to push every thing they can procure to bombast and extravagance, which are the death of taste. In other countries, however, as well as in China, I have seen some of the most boasted feats, either outgrowing their beauty from a plethora of their owner's wealth, or becoming capricious and hypocondriacal by a quackish application of it. A few fine places, even in England, might be pointed out that are labouring under these disorders; not to mention some celebrated houses ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... ought to have been able to dispense long ago with some, at least, of those details that we have of it. The only fault to be found with the biography of this individual as it stands at present is, that there is too much of it, and the public mind is labouring under a plethora ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... well as from other evidence which it is not necessary to detail in this place, it may be seen that the causes assigned by physiologists, and the plans proposed by cultivators for the production of double flowers, are reducible to three heads, which may be classed under Plethora, Starvation, and Sterility. These three seem inconsistent one with the other, but are not so much so as they at first ...
— Vegetable Teratology - An Account of the Principal Deviations from the Usual Construction of Plants • Maxwell T. Masters
... the "Venus" and the "Lucrece," said finely of Shakespeare "Shakespeare could not have written an Epic; he would have died of plethora of thought." This prodigality of nature is exemplified equally in his Sonnets. The copious selection here given (which from the wealth of the material, required greater consideration than any other portion of the Editor's task) contains many that will ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... between Hythe and Dymchurch has quite a plethora of rustic vanes—many crippled and others almost defunct—sketches of a few of which I give my readers. Note the one, carved out of a piece of wood and rudely shaped like a bottle, which is stuck on an untrimmed bough of a tree and spliced to a clothes-prop: ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 28, April 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... Separate bibliographies will be found under the headings of the separate states. Amid the plethora of books, the reader cannot do better than consult the Narrative and Critical History of America, edited by Justin Winsor (1886-1889), in eight large octavo volumes, in which all the chapters are supplied with copious and carefully-compiled bibliographies. ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... types of character, stately verse, and tragic situations; but English readers too often find him mannered, artificial, dull. Corneille, I freely admit, is not Shakespeare: I greatly prefer Shakespeare; but I prefer Corneille to Ibsen. We have plenty of Ibsenites to-day, and rather a plethora than a dearth of ignoble creatures in squalid situations who expose to us their mean lives with considerable truth to nature. In such an age, it is just as well that the lessons of Adam Bede, Romola, Fedalma and Zarca, ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... selfish. But some lives are but the more selfish because they take in all mankind and look on them as designed to contribute to their single enriching. That kind of a life commits suicide; ever grasping and never giving it dies of plethora. It had never learned that strange secret of ...
— Levels of Living - Essays on Everyday Ideals • Henry Frederick Cope
... have endeavoured to act. We have, however, now found the task to be beyond our capacity, though we have struggled loyally to fulfil the duty imposed upon us; and we write to ask your Lordship to grant us some dispensation, lest permanent plethora ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, April 4, 1917 • Various
... extracts and so make an end: and nobody (except perhaps Mr. Davidson himself) would know my dishonesty. For indeed and out of doubt he is in some respects the most richly-endowed of all our younger poets. Of wit and of imagination he has almost a plethora: they crowd this book, and all his books, from end to end. And his frequent felicity of phrase is hardly less remarkable. You may turn page after page, and with each page the truth of this will become more obvious. Let me add his quick eye for natural ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... the direction of souls in confession should be made to strengthen and develop individual life. We do not need blood-letting, he said, as if we suffered from plethora, but rather we need a course of tonics, sea-baths, and the invigorating air of the mountains. We should not hold our penitents in leading-strings, but should teach them to live a self-reliant life under the direction of the Holy Spirit. Souls tempered by that process would render the ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott
... woman pray for—what does any one pray for—whom do they pray to, when the composition of their mental attitude towards the Highest is a plethora of doubts? ...
— Sally Bishop - A Romance • E. Temple Thurston
... of the day being duly observed, CHOKEPEAR resolves to enjoy Christmas in the true old English fashion. Oh! ye gods, that bless the larders of the respectable,—what a dinner! The board is enough to give Plenty a plethora, and the whole house is odoriferous as the airs of Araby. And then, what delightful evidences of old observing friendship on the table! There is a turkey—"only a little lower" than an ostrich—despatched all ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, December 25, 1841 • Various
... folk failed to justify the scheme, to work their new holdings at a profit, and to hand them down to their posterity. It is true that the landless proletariate of the city continued steadily to increase; but the causes which lead to the plethora of an imperial capital are too numerous to permit us to explain this increase by the single hypothesis of a renewed depopulation of the ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... same day, for it had been arranged that Farmer Oak should go there to live, since he had as yet neither money, house, nor furniture worthy of the name, though he was on a sure way towards them, whilst Bathsheba was, comparatively, in a plethora of all three. ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy
... This, no doubt, explains my unfamiliarity with the name of Miss KATHARINE NEWLIN BURT, also certain minor points, notably the fact that the story, though by no means badly told, suffers from what I can only call a plethora of plot. As I followed the developments of its intrigue and tracked the heroine from untutored savage, wife of the wild Westerner whose excusable suspicions caused him to brand her as private property, to the moment of her ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, March 24, 1920. • Various
... cry with the really honest was, "Hands off, there!"—blood being rightly spilt, if necessary, in defence thereof, as it always will be, till the last of dogs and men lie down and die. Of course if one or other left his own unguarded, or, overcome by plethora, fell asleep, or grew fat and careless, then another of his standing came and took that property away. In such an event, he who had lost could do no more than whimper cur-like, while those lying round the yard would look up to see what the shindy was about, and then quietly ...
— 'Murphy' - A Message to Dog Lovers • Major Gambier-Parry
... handsome Englishmen!) Look to it, ye governors of such institutions, and look to it, ye charitable and humane, who empty your purses into the blandly presented plate to buy shoes and stockings for the kangaroos. Consider the case of your afflicted countrymen, and relieve the plethora of your coffers by providing them music, every way equal to that enjoyed by troops going into action; music so entrancing that an arm or leg whipped off shall, under its influence, be no object to them; ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 364, February 1846 • Various
... away and heard no more. He moved away, in fact, because he was conscious that to a man in his case, this dwelling upon millions, this plethora of wealth, was a little revolting. He had walked down Broadway and seen the price of Jacqueminot roses, and he was not soothed or allured at this particular moment by the picture of a girl whose half-dozen cabins were crowded ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... longer than ordinary; from thence proceed our infirmities, and 'tis the fountain of all diseases, which arise out of the repugnancy of gross humours." Thence, saith [1400] Fernelius, come crudities, wind, oppilations, cacochymia, plethora, cachexia, bradiopepsia, [1401]Hinc subitae, mortes, atque intestata senectus, sudden ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... of passives and negatives, living by precept, according to rules of precedent, and supposing themselves to be righteously guided because of their continuing undisturbed. Them he branded, as hypocritical materialists, and the country for pride in her sweetmeat plethora of them:—mixed with an ancient Hebrew fear of offence to an inscrutable Lord, eccentrically appeasable through the dreary iteration of the litany of sinfulness. He was near a truth; and he had the heat of ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... The extent and grandeur of the house was astonishing, as well as the extreme efficiency of the service. A Chinese was within hand-clap momentarily. There seemed scores of them, fleet, silent, immaculate, full of understanding. Their presence did not bore one, as a plethora of white servants might have done. Bedient reflected that the Chinese have not auras of the obtruding sort.... In his room finally, he drew a chair up to the window, and sat down without turning ...
— Fate Knocks at the Door - A Novel • Will Levington Comfort
... permanently acquiesce in restraints not imposed on the Channel Islands? Irishmen, Unionists no less than Home Rulers, are mostly Protectionists, and believe that tariffs may give to Ireland, not indeed a 'plethora of wealth,' for of this no man out of Bedlam except Mr. Gladstone dreams, but reasonable prosperity. Vain to argue that Protection is folly. Englishmen think so, and Englishmen are right. But English doctrine is ...
— A Leap in the Dark - A Criticism of the Principles of Home Rule as Illustrated by the - Bill of 1893 • A.V. Dicey
... both correctly applied, according as one regards production as a state or as a process. The state of trade in a depression is one of over-production—the industrial body is congested with goods which are not drawn out for consumption fast enough. This plethora debilitates the industrial body, its functional activities are weakened. The slackness of trade thus induced is rightly ...
— The Evolution of Modern Capitalism - A Study of Machine Production • John Atkinson Hobson
... literature and paradox, took up the conceit that England was ruined at her heart's core by excess of luxury and sensual self-indulgence. He had persuaded himself that the ancient activities and energies of the country were sapped by long habits of indolence, and by a morbid plethora of enjoyment in every class. Courage, and the old fiery spirit of the people, had gone to wreck with the physical qualities which had sustained them. Even the faults of the public mind had given way under ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... any use for the coast north of Hopedale, few if any corrections having been made in the topographic efforts of the long late Captain Cook, of around-the-world reputation, one of the Brethren, Mr. Christopher Schmidt, joined the Princess May to help me find their northern stations among the plethora of islands which fringe the coast in that vicinity. Never in my life had I expected any journey half so wonderful. We travelled through endless calm fjords, runs, tickles, bays, and straits without ...
— A Labrador Doctor - The Autobiography of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... may occur during the course of congestion of the lungs, bronchitis, pneumonia, influenza, purpura hemorrhagica, or glanders. An accident or exertion may cause a rupture of a vessel. Plethora and hypertrophy of the heart predispose to it. Following the rupture of a vessel the blood may escape into the lung tissue and cause a serious attack of pneumonia, or it may fill up the bronchial tubes and prove fatal by suffocating the animal. ...
— Special Report on Diseases of the Horse • United States Department of Agriculture |
