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Brahmin   /brˈɑmɪn/   Listen
Brahmin

noun
(pl. brahmans, brahmins)
1.
A member of a social and cultural elite (especially a descendant of an old New England family).  Synonym: brahman.
2.
A member of the highest of the four Hindu varnas.  Synonym: brahman.
3.
The highest of the four varnas: the priestly or sacerdotal category.  Synonym: brahman.
4.
Any of several breeds of Indian cattle; especially a large American heat and tick resistant greyish humped breed evolved in the Gulf States by interbreeding Indian cattle and now used chiefly for crossbreeding.  Synonyms: Bos indicus, Brahma, Brahman.



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"Brahmin" Quotes from Famous Books



... art sacred here, where the Brahmin tells Of the godhead's seal impressed By Vishnoo's hand—that thou bearest still His gorget on ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 441 - Volume 17, New Series, June 12, 1852 • Various

... inspired. Another who is a Buddhist asks, "Was not Buddha inspired?" Yes, but he was not the only one inspired. A Christian asks, "But is not our Christian Bible inspired?" Yes, but there are other inspired scriptures. A Brahmin or a Buddhist asks, "Are not the Vedas inspired?" Yes, but there are other inspired sacred books. Your error is not in believing that your particular scriptures are inspired, but your error is—and you show your absurdly ...
— In Tune with the Infinite - or, Fullness of Peace, Power, and Plenty • Ralph Waldo Trine

... all Thy works, No hint I see of damning; And think there's faith among the Turks, And hope for e'en the Brahmin. Harmless my mind is, and my mirth, And kindly is my laughter; I cannot see the smiling earth, And think ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 4 (of 4) • Various

... sooa, loom kis-wasti omara bukri not bring?" says Hastings Clive, whose English is apt to figure among his Hindostanee like Brahmins in a regiment of Sepoys,—that is, one Brahmin to ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 5, March, 1858 • Various

... a regular and a welcome visitor at the Greene home. I shook my wild habits from me like a worn-out cloak. I trained for the conflict with the care of a prize-fighter and the self-denial of a Brahmin. ...
— Options • O. Henry

... shadow of his hand hovered over the burning-ghats of Benares, where a Brahmin of the new persuasion watched the straight spires of funereal smoke ascend into the glow of the late afternoon, while he talked to an English painter, his friend, of the blind intolerance of race and caste and ...
— Soul of a Bishop • H. G. Wells

... receive by this action a new birth of the soul. According to the same idea the rulers of Travancore, who are Nairs by caste, are made into Brahmins when they ascend the throne by passing through a hole in a large golden image of a cow or lotus flower, which then becomes the property of the Brahmin priests. It is possible that there may be an allusion to this primitive custom in the rule of the Jewish Temple, mentioned by Ezekiel,—"He that entereth in by the way of the north gate to worship ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan

... beauty under every school; equally an ideal moralist would see the enduring ethic under every code. But practically some of the best Englishmen that ever lived could see nothing but filth and idolatry in the starry piety of the Brahmin. And it is equally true that practically the greatest group of artists that the world has ever seen, the giants of the Renaissance, could see nothing but barbarism in the ethereal ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton

... silver. They were arrayed in robes of white, with red turbans in which a spray of pearls was fastened, while jewels and diamonds of great value were around and suspended from their necks. Harcarrahs, or Brahmin messengers of trust, headed the procession, and seven standard-bearers, each carrying a small green banner displayed on a rocket-pole. After these marched 100 pikemen, whose weapons were inlaid with silver. Their escort was a ...
— The Junior Classics • Various

... law, the Romans by the Roman. To amalgamate the two races would have been as impossible as to amalgamate English and Hindoos. The parallel is really tolerably exact. The Goth was very English; and the over-civilized, learned, false, profligate Roman was the very counterpart of the modern Brahmin. But there was to be equal justice between man and man. If the Goths were the masters of much of the Roman soil, still spoliation and oppression were forbidden; and the remarkable edict or code of Theodoric, shews how deeply into his great mind had sunk the idea of the divineness of Law. It is ...
— The Roman and the Teuton - A Series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge • Charles Kingsley

... themselves, where barbaric conquerors had similarly imposed themselves upon the first known historical civilisations. Take India under the Moguls, once more; the aristocracy of the time consisted of the rude Mahommedan Tartar, who lorded it over the ancient enchorial culture of Rajpoot and Brahmin. Take China: the same thing over again—a Tartar horde imposing its savage rule over the most ancient civilised people of Asia. Take England: its aristocracy at different times has consisted of the various barbaric invaders, first the ...
— Post-Prandial Philosophy • Grant Allen

... the teaching of Buddhism, it must be remembered that to the Buddhist, as to the Brahmin, ...
— The Soul of a People • H. Fielding

... Sakka, the King of the Gods, heard this thing, he determined to put the Royal Hare to the test. So he came in disguise of a Brahmin to the Otter and said: "Wise Sir, if I could get something to eat, I would perform all ...
— The Art of the Story-Teller • Marie L. Shedlock

... solemn brethren of the Order of Druids, in white gowns, bald heads, and grey beards. A company of sweeps comes next, attended by an active Jack-in-the-Green. Now an Indian doctor appears, smoking a long pipe in his chariot, drawn by a Brahmin bull. Another band, and then the rear is brought up by more cavalry. There were seven bands—good ones, too—in the procession, which took full twenty minutes to pass the hotel, on the balcony of which I stood. I have seen the London Lord Mayor's Show, but must confess the Talbot ...
— A Boy's Voyage Round the World • The Son of Samuel Smiles

... even to his wife, whom he loved: it was a sacred thing. And the old man, who was considered prosaic and dry of heart, and nearing the end of his life, used to say to himself the bitter and tender words of a Brahmin of ancient India: ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland

... velocity, that the eye was dazzled as they flew round and round, their hair radiating and diverging like the thrumbings of a mop, when trundled by some strong-limbed housemaid. Their motions were regulated by the tom-toms, while an old Brahmin, with a ragged white beard, sat perched over the door of the pagoda, and, with a small piece of bamboo, struck upon the palm of his left hand, as he presided over the whole ceremony. After a few minutes of violent exertion, he ...
— The King's Own • Captain Frederick Marryat

... traveling in the East met a Brahmin priest, who refused to shake hands with him for fear of pollution. The reason he assigned was that Americans eat hogs. Said the priest, "Why, I have heard that in America they put hogs' flesh in barrels and eat it after it has been dead six ...
— Science in the Kitchen. • Mrs. E. E. Kellogg

... time is not, and the computations of chronology are an insult to the spirit of your surroundings. History, in India, was kept an esoteric science, and esoteric all the ancient records remain now; and I dare say any twice-born Brahmin not Oxfordized knows far more about it than the best Max Mullers of the west, and laughs at them quietly. Until someone will voluntarily lift that veil of esotericism, the speculations of western scholars will go for little. Why it should be kept esoteric, ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris

... my boy, into the crowd like a wedge! Out with the hangers, messmates, but do not strike with the edge!" Cries Charnock, "Scatter the faggots! Double that Brahmin in two! The tall pale widow is mine, Joe, the little ...
— Roving East and Roving West • E.V. Lucas

... Daniel's philosophy, and of the wisdom the latter had acquired from the Chaldeans, had nevertheless firmly maintained his independence of thought. He was not an Israelite, nor would he ever wish to become one; but he was not an idolater nor a Magian, nor a follower of Gomata, the half-Indian Brahmin, who had endeavoured to pass himself off as Smerdis ...
— Marzio's Crucifix and Zoroaster • F. Marion Crawford

... father. 'I can't keep her avay from me. If I was locked up in a fireproof chest vith a patent Brahmin, she'd find means to get ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens

... was fifteen the great struggle of her life began. Dr. Govindurajulu Naidu, now her husband, is, though of an old and honourable family, not a Brahmin. The difference of caste roused an equal opposition, not only on the side of her family, but of his; and in 1895 she was sent to England, against her will, with a special scholarship from the Nizam. She remained in England, with an interval ...
— The Golden Threshold • Sarojini Naidu

... in battle. Such a magic song, or chant, was called a brahma, and he who sang it a brahmin. Thus the very foundation of Brahminism, from which rose Buddhism in the sixth century B.C., can be traced back to the music of the sacred songs of the Rig-Veda of India. The priestly or Brahmin caste grew therefore from the singers of the Vedic hymns. The Brahmins were not merely the keepers of the sacred books, or Vedas, the philosophy, science, and laws of the ancient Hindus (for that is how the power of the caste developed), but they were also the creators ...
— Critical & Historical Essays - Lectures delivered at Columbia University • Edward MacDowell

... adhere to his mother's religion? Did he look on Gentiles as his legitimate prey? Had he turned Roman Catholic, Lutheran, Mahometan, Brahmin, or what not? I never knew anything whatsoever about his religious opinions, and so far as I could see, he was indifferent ...
— Gobseck • Honore de Balzac

... conclusion of his last lecture, Hazlitt told the story of a Brahmin who, on being transformed into a monkey, "had no other delight than that of eating cocoanuts and studying metaphysics." "I too," he added, "should be very well contented to pass my life like this monkey, did I but know how to provide myself with a substitute for cocoanuts." But it must have become ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin

... the ideal type is the "just man," who conformed to ritual standards at all points. A Moslem is a man who is "faithful" to Islam, which is self-surrender to the Omnipotent One.[420] The type of the perfect man-as-he-should-be in the Mahabharata is one who will give his all to a Brahmin. The god Siva, disguised as a Brahmin, came to a hero. He ordered the hero to kill his own son and serve his corpse for the Brahmin to eat. The hero obeyed at once. The Brahmin set the hero's buildings on fire, but the latter served the dish without heeding ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner

... Brahmin, Mohini Mohun Chatterjee, has arrived in the United States at New York, who has been teaching in England and on the continent. He has the approval of the brotherhood in Thibet, and has a high intellectual ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, March 1887 - Volume 1, Number 2 • Various

... shook his head despondently, and that same abject, almost cringing humility of mien and manner which had pained at times Lionel and Vance crept over the whole man, so that he seemed to cower and shrink as a Pariah before a Brahmin. "No, sir; thank you most humbly. No, sir; that must not be. I must work for my daily bread; if what a poor vagabond like me may do can be called work. I have made it a rule for years not to force myself to the hearth and home of any kind man, who, not knowing my past, has ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... East—long-coated Persians; small, brown, slant-eyed Japanese; big, yellow, slant-eyed Chinamen; a naked Coringhi, his dark body shining in the lamp-light, and the rings in his nose jingling together; Hindus of all ranks, from the stately Brahmin to the coolie bearing loads or pulling a rickshaw; Burmese; and, to Jack's pleasant surprise, three straight-stepping English soldiers, swinging along with their little canes, their lively talk sounding pleasantly familiar amid the babel of ...
— Jack Haydon's Quest • John Finnemore

... its rites and ceremonies, sometimes in its object, in each of those castes. A man who is born in the highest caste, which at once unites what would be tantamount in this country to the dignity of the peerage and the ennobled sanctity of the episcopal character,—the Brahmin, who sustains these characters, if he loses his caste, does not fall into an inferior order, the Chittery, the Bice, or the Soodur, but he is thrown at once out of all ranks of society. He is precipitated from the proudest elevation of respect and honor to a bottomless abyss of contempt,—from ...
— The Works Of The Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IX. (of 12) • Edmund Burke

... nominally civilized, to produce a false awe in minds incapable of apprehending the true nature of the Deity, are assembled in St. Mark's to a degree, as far as I know, unexampled in any other European church. The arts of the Magus and the Brahmin are exhausted in the animation of a paralyzed Christianity; and the popular sentiment which these arts excite is to be regarded by us with no more respect than we should have considered ourselves justified in rendering to the devotion of the worshippers ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume II (of 3) • John Ruskin

... purify the "State." The people support the State, the State supports the Public Schools, and they support the State. If this is not what logicians call a "vicious circle," it looks very much like it. It puts me in mind of the Brahmin's theory of the support of the earth. The Hindoo says, "The world rests on the back of an elephant—the elephant rests on the back of a turtle." But what does the turtle rest on? So it is with our "Public School Brahmins." They will tell you, with all the coolness ...
— Public School Education • Michael Mueller

... or Romanesque architecture, one feels the priest, nothing but the priest, whether he calls himself Brahmin, Magian, or Pope. It is not the same in the architectures of the people. They are richer and less sacred. In the Phoenician, one feels the merchant; in the Greek, the republican; in the ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo

... indignity to his high caste might be offered: as having his food prepared by pariah hands in the hotel kitchens, foul hands to make his bed. He was thoroughly religious; the gods of his fathers were his in all their ramifications; he wore the Brahmin thread ...
— The Voice in the Fog • Harold MacGrath

... said he; 'I have forsworn it upwards of twenty years. In one respect, sir, I am a Brahmin. I abhor taking away life—the brutes have as much right to live ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow

... a case by the size of the chew which Tazewell put into his mouth when he took it up for the first time. His usual remedy for indisposition was strict abstinence from food, which he could endure as heroically as a Brahmin, ...
— Discourse of the Life and Character of the Hon. Littleton Waller Tazewell • Hugh Blair Grigsby

... No Brahmin could abominate your meal more than I do. Hirtius and Apicius would have blushed for it. Mark Antony, who roasted eight whole boars for supper, never massacred more at a meal than you have done.—Cumberland, The Fashionable Lover, ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.

... WATER-FETCHING goes the noble Brahmin's wife, so pure and lovely; He is honour'd, void of blemish. And of justice rigid, stern. Daily from the sacred river Brings she back refreshments precious;— But where is the pail and pitcher? She of neither ...
— The Poems of Goethe • Goethe

... smiling, once more said unto Janaka,—Know that I am Dharma, who have come here today for examining thee. Thou art verily the one person for setting this wheel in motion, this wheel that has the quality of Goodness for its circumference, Brahmin for its nave, and the understanding for its spokes, and which ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli

... have opened the door! For the feast of souls We have kindled the coals We may kindle no more! Snake, fever, and famine, The curse of the Brahmin, The sun and the dew, They burn us, they bite us, They waste us and smite us; Our days are but few In strange lands far yonder To wonder and wander We hasten to you. List then to our sighing, While yet we are here Nor seeing nor hearing, We wait without fearing, To ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier

... discomposure, that, living in the mission, he would only eat what he saw was eaten by the Padres. Reproaches addressed to the natives on the abominable practice which we here discuss, produce no effect; it is as if a Brahmin, travelling in Europe, were to reproach us with the habit of feeding on the flesh of animals. In the eyes of the Indian of the Guaisia, the Cheruvichahena was a being entirely different from himself; and one whom he thought it was no more ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V2 • Alexander von Humboldt

... they make long expeditions together to the Platonic North-pole and back to the torrid regions of Swinburne; and that together they perform their zikr and drink at the same fountain of ecstasy and devotion. Withal, the Dervish, who now wears his hair long and grows his finger nails like a Brahmin, is ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani

... difficulty of caste. I do not know how many castes there are in England; but I should think there were about thirty-seven. Any member of either of these finds it as hard to associate with a member of any other as a Sudra does to associate with a Brahmin, or a Brahmin with a Sudra. It is not that people are unwilling to condescend to the castes below them. At least, it is not that chiefly. It is, quite as much or more, that, with a good, solid, English pride, they do not care to be snobbish, and do not choose ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 45, July, 1861 • Various

... be said that a man will certainly marry a woman with whom he is deeply in love, who returns his affection, whom he can marry if he likes, and whom he has the means of maintaining in a suitable manner? Nine times out of ten he probably will; but in the tenth instance a Brahmin's passion may be checked by fear of contamination with a Pariah, or a King Cophetua's pride may prevent his wedding a beggar-maid, or the titled owner of an entailed estate may decline to illegitimatise his offspring by espousing ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton

... large towns, and thousands of populous villages. Many of them are centres of a trade growing greater every year, and many are also headquarters of Mohammedanism and of Hindoo idolatry. The endowments and vested interests of idolatry are of enormous value; the Brahmin families may be counted by millions; the Hindoo religious books were commenced 1200 years B.C., and the system itself goes back a thousand years farther still. Such a system is a formidable antagonist and the barriers it raises against change are very strong. Yet even Hindooism, so powerful, ...
— Fruits of Toil in the London Missionary Society • Various

... the compound and spoke to a dignified man, who proved to be a high caste Brahmin, having in his charge the care of the white elephant. He disappeared and returned soon with the Khan. The pleasant face, though proudly molded, together with the simplicity of his appearance, conveyed to Kathlyn the fact that here was a man to be trusted, at least for the present. ...
— The Adventures of Kathlyn • Harold MacGrath

... Miss Lamb painted an admirable portrait of Mohini Mohun Chatterji, a Brahmin, who spent ...
— Women in the fine arts, from the Seventh Century B.C. to the Twentieth Century A.D. • Clara Erskine Clement

... sale of many interesting, beautiful, rare, quaint, comical, and necessary articles. Here you will find objects of taste, such as Babies' Shoes, Children's Petticoats, and Shetland Wool Cravats; objects of general usefulness, such as Tea-cosies, Bangles, Brahmin Beads, and Madras Baskets; and objects of imperious necessity, such as Pen-wipers, Indian Figures carefully repaired with glue, and Sealed Envelopes, containing a surprise. And all this is not to be sold by your common Shopkeepers, intent ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... in usage today. That"—pointing to the image he had replaced, with signs of respect and veneration, on the table—"is very old; very great thing,—only very wise men and saints are allowed to touch it." After much ado and coaxing, he at last told me, in a voice as full of reverence as a Brahmin would in uttering the sacred word O-A-UM, that the meaning of the inscription ...
— The Mayas, the Sources of Their History / Dr. Le Plongeon in Yucatan, His Account of Discoveries • Stephen Salisbury, Jr.

... most curious specimens of the practice of swearing men by that to which they attached most importance, is to be found in an Hindoo law. It says, let a judge swear a Brahmin by his veracity; a soldier by his horses, his elephants, or his arms; an agriculturist by his cows, his grain, or his money; and a Soudra by all ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 187, May 28, 1853 • Various

... in the illusions of my fellow-countryman Rousseau, when he affirms that even if he had lived in a desert isle, and had never known a fellow-man, he would nevertheless have been able to write the Profession de foi du Vicaire Savoyard. I know very well that if I were a Brahmin, born at the foot of the Himalayas, or a Chinese mandarin, I should not be able to say all that I am saying respecting the goodness of God. The light which we have received—I know whence it radiates; but, by the help of that light, I seek its kindred rays everywhere, and everywhere ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville

... 'And do you know,' said my friend, 'that the fellow actually believed it himself.' And we both laughed most heartily. His master continued his examination, until the kulashee confessed that a certain Brahmin, officiating at a large tank close to the fortress of Bombay, had threatened him with his revenge, and was now actually eating up his liver, by which process he would shortly be destroyed. 'I will tell you what I did: I no sooner got ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 457 - Volume 18, New Series, October 2, 1852 • Various

... to-day. Doctor and Mrs. Ripley received us very kindly and gave us a most cordial welcome to Brook Farm. Mrs. Ripley, born Sophia Dana, was a slender, graceful lady, belonging to what Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes calls the Brahmin class of Boston; charming in manner, animated and blithe, but profoundly serious in her religious devotion to what she regarded as the true Christian life. She had, informally, the general charge of the girls in ...
— My Friends at Brook Farm • John Van Der Zee Sears

... manners. Wise poets, by words, make the beautiful-winged manifold, though he is One" ("Rig-Veda," B.C. 1500, from "Anthology," p.76). "The Divine Mind alone is the whole assemblage of the gods.... He (the Brahmin) may contemplate castle, air, fire, water, the subtile ether, in his own body and organs; in his heart, the Star; in his motion, Vishnu; in his vigour, Hara; in his speech, Agni; in digestion, Mitra; in production, Brahma; but he must consider the supreme Omnipresent ...
— The Freethinker's Text Book, Part II. - Christianity: Its Evidences, Its Origin, Its Morality, Its History • Annie Besant

... collecting trepang on the coral reefs outside the river, and also in seeking for bird's nests on the mainland. Those two articles he professed himself ready to buy if there were any to be obtained in that way. He said he was from Bali, and a Brahmin, which last statement he made good by refusing all food during his often repeated visits to Lakamba's and Almayer's houses. To Lakamba he went generally at night and had long audiences. Babalatchi, who was always a third party at those meetings of potentate and trader, knew how to ...
— Almayer's Folly - A Story of an Eastern River • Joseph Conrad

... are very serious and deliberate. One of the best of them, Harold Glynde, is a Cantata for Total Abstainers, and has already been set to music. A Hindoo Tragedy is the story of an enthusiastic Brahmin reformer who tries to break down the prohibition against widows marrying, and there are other interesting tales. Mr. Foskett has apparently forgotten to insert the rhymes in his sonnet to Wordsworth; but, as he tells us elsewhere ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde

... The Hindoo (Brahmin) ascetic, or naked philosopher, as the Greeks called him, exhausted his imagination in devising schemes of self-torture. He buried himself with his nose just above the ground, or wore an iron collar, or suspended weights from his ...
— A Short History of Monks and Monasteries • Alfred Wesley Wishart

... of Montgomery was Sunday at dinner time. He was at once asked to sit down and partake of the chickens and bacon which had just been placed on the table, but here was a dilemma; Sir Richard, although neither a Brahmin nor a Jew, avowed himself a staunch Pythagorean—he could eat no flesh! Luckily there was a plentiful supply of carrots and turnips, and—jelly. But was the latter made from calves' feet? Montgomery ...
— Heads and Tales • Various

... the joys and griefs of the men and women whom we meet daily. Unhappily, the opinion prevails that a poet must be also a philosopher, and hence it is that much of our poetry is as indefinable in its mysticism as an Indian Brahmin's commentary on his sacred books, or German metaphysics subjected to homeopathic dilution. It assumes to be prophetical, and its utterances are oracular. It tells of strange, vague emotions and yearnings, painfully suggestive of spiritual ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier

... us have the facts, we can then best see what use we can make of them. This I think is the correct position in regard to any abnormal claim that is made upon our attention. Everybody has heard of the prophecies of the Brahmin seer, most people have some acquaintance with the phenomena attending the clairvoyance of the seeress of Prevorst, while the experiences of Emanuel Swedenborg have been set forth in many biographies, but in none more lucidly and dispassionately than that by William White. ...
— Second Sight - A study of Natural and Induced Clairvoyance • Sepharial

... to unpack he grinned in spite of himself, for into his mind came a poem of Guiterman's he'd read lately, about an agnostic Brahmin who didn't believe in prayer, and came inadvertently on a tiger praying for a meal in ...
— The Wishing-Ring Man • Margaret Widdemer

... the Brahmin, mild and gray, his father's face he saw; He thought upon his mother's tears the day he gaed awa'; And her he loved—his Hieland girl—there 's magic in the name— They a' combine to wile him back to his ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume IV. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various

... it would not only be the end of all promises, but the end of all projects. In not being able to see that, the Berlin philosopher is really on a lower mental level than the Arab who respects the salt, or the Brahmin who preserves the caste. And in this quarrel we have a right to come with scimitars as well as sabres, with bows as well as rifles, with assegai and tomahawk and boomerang, because there is in all these at least a seed of civilisation ...
— The Barbarism of Berlin • G. K. Chesterton

... with real glee how he had been known successfully to introduce two men, not knowing the name of either. On one occasion it fell to him to introduce to each other a low-caste West African native and a particularly high-caste Brahmin rejoicing in a lofty sounding polysyllabic title: of course he transposed the names—with results, so he declared, almost fatal ...
— Letters to His Friends • Forbes Robinson

... of Sufism,—the general character of which mode of Islam, long prevalent in the adjacent kingdom of Persia, has been described by our own orientalists. Disputed questions as to its origin, whether in Brahmin philosophy or in the reveries of Moslem mystics, cannot be discussed here; it must suffice to indicate those points which appear to connect it with the hieratic policy that has given a new aspect to the ...
— The International Weekly Miscellany, Volume I. No. 9. - Of Literature, Art, and Science, August 26, 1850 • Various

... aspiration serves to show how nearly multitudes may approach the boundary line of insanity in their protracted periods of causeless mental agony and in their fierce hostility to heresy and to science. Alike in Brahmin, Buddhist, Mohammedan, and Christian nations have we seen the vast expenditure of spiritual energy in the ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, August 1887 - Volume 1, Number 7 • Various

... universally prevalent belief that education, civilisation and increased material prosperity will reconcile the people of India eventually to our rule." Hence he was prepared to accept—perhaps rather more entirely than it deserved to be accepted—the statement of that very astute Brahmin, Sir Dinkur Rao, himself the minister of an important native State, that "the natives prefer a bad native Government to our best patent institutions." These, and similar oracular statements, have now become the commonplaces of all who deal with questions affecting India. That ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring

... Lowell was ten years younger than Holmes, and though he died three years before the Doctor, he seems, for other reasons than those of chronology, to belong more nearly to the present. Although by birth as much of a New England Brahmin as Holmes, and in his later years as much of a Boston and Cambridge idol, he nevertheless touched our universal American life on many sides, represented us worthily in foreign diplomacy, argued the case of Democracy with convincing ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry

... and succor them in their embarrassments." An elaborate report was adopted at another large convocation, in which it was suggested that the convert should be admitted into the church while still a slaveholder, an oppressive ruler and a proud Brahmin, in the hope that under proper teaching, "the master may be prepared to break the bonds of the slave, the oppressive ruler to dispense justice to the subject, and the proud Brahmin fraternally to embrace ...
— American Missionary, Volume 43, No. 10, October, 1889 • Various

... who had vowed a sacrifice, went to the market to buy a goat. Three thieves saw him, and wanted to get hold of the goat. They stationed themselves at intervals on the high road. When the Brahmin, who carried the goat on his back, approached the first thief, the thief said, "Brahmin, why do you carry a dog on your back?" The Brahmin replied: "It is not a dog, it is a goat." A little while after, he was accosted ...
— Popular Tales from the Norse • Sir George Webbe Dasent

... you, whom I have so often called daughter, look at me and listen to my words. You are the daughter of the Rajah Duttjah and his wife Naya. The marriage of your parents was celebrated at Epping Forest, in England, by a Brahmin, who was also a prisoner there; in the portfolio there you will find the paper relating to the marriage. Do not look at me so fearfully, my poor darling, I am speaking the truth, and these gentlemen will tell ...
— The Son of Monte-Cristo, Volume I (of 2) • Alexandre Dumas pere

... good churchwoman who would be sweet as a sister to the abject poor, but offensively condescending to a shopkeeper or a dissenter, exactly as if he was a Pariah, and she a Brahmin. I have known good people who were noble and generous towards their so-called inferiors and full of the rights of the race—until it touched their own family, and just no longer. Yea I, who had talked like this for years, at once, when Tom Weir wanted to marry my sister, ...
— Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood • George MacDonald

... Bimbisara, one of the then most powerful rulers in the valley of the Ganges. He was favourably received by the raja; but though asked to do so, he would not as yet assume the responsibilities of a teacher. He attached himself first to a brahmin sophist named Alara, and afterwards to another named Udraka, from whom he learnt all that Indian philosophy had then to teach. Still unsatisfied, he next retired to the jungle of Uruvela, on the most northerly spur of the Vindhya range of mountains, and there for six years, attended ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various

... "Accompanied by the officiating Brahmin, the widow walked seven times round the pyre, repeating the usual mantras, or prayers, strewing rice and cowries on the ground, and sprinkling water from her hand over the bystanders, who believe this to be efficacious in preventing disease and in expiating committed sins. She then removed her ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams

... accessories and the skill with which they are grouped bring the California of 1849 before us with unmatched vividness. We have been getting knowledge and learning a deep moral without suspecting it, as if by our own observation and experience. In the same way "Asirvadam the Brahmin" is a prose poem that lets us into the secret of the Indian revolt. It is seldom that we meet with volumes of more real power than these, or whose force is so artistically masked under ease and playfulness. We prefer the "Old" part of the book to the "New." It seems to us to show ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various

... ever touches his hair, and his locks are matted and dishevelled, when other children's are neatly combed and anointed. When he approaches manhood, he takes the vow of celibacy, he receives from the hand of the Brahmin the muntra or mystical creed, the dried skin of an antelope, and a piece of coarse, unbleached cotton, stained yellow with ochre, which he can use as a plaid, it being seven feet long; upon the skin he is supposed to sit ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 419, New Series, January 10, 1852 • Various

... mosques in Bombay, but none of them is of particular interest. The Hindu or Brahmin temples are also commonplace, with two exceptions. One of them, known as the Monkey Temple, is covered with carved images of monkeys and other animals. There are said to be 300 of them, measuring from six inches to two feet in height. The other is the "Walkeshwar," ...
— Modern India • William Eleroy Curtis

... with his lota[1] full of water, meeting a low-caste man belonging to the arsenal where the Enfield cartridges were being manufactured. This man, it was said, asked the sepoy to allow him to drink from his lota. The sepoy, a Brahmin, refused, saying: 'I have scoured my lota; you will defile it by your touch.' The low-caste man replied: 'You think much of your caste, but wait a little: the Sahib-logue[2] will make you bite cartridges soaked in cow's ...
— Forty-one years in India - From Subaltern To Commander-In-Chief • Frederick Sleigh Roberts

... the soul of man is an emanation from the world-soul: "Although God differs from the individual soul, the individual soul does not differ from God." At this point it is no longer an easy matter to distinguish the feeling of the Christian mystic from the feeling of the Brahmin; though their valuations of man, life and the world differ, nay, are even opposed to each other, they finally meet in God. We read in the Vedanta: "The force which created and maintains the universe, the eternal principle of all being, dwells entirely and undividedly ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka

... Italian music-teacher, chiefly noticeable for his length of limb, an exiled nobleman, of course. I hinted to Jenny a doubt as to his nobility. She said, if he didn't belong to 'the Brahmin caste,' he did to the Bramah cast, and that was the next thing to it. He has become violently attached to the assistant music-teacher, who is very thin. Now, he has been teaching us to screech 'For Bonnie Annie Laurie.' ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No. 2, August, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... thought be free or necessary, happiness lies in identifying one's self with it. Both the stoic and the Christian surrender themselves to the Being of beings, which the one calls sovereign wisdom and the other sovereign goodness. St. John says, "God is Light," "God is Love." The Brahmin says, "God is the inexhaustible fount of poetry." Let us say, "God is perfection." And man? Man, for all his inexpressible insignificance and frailty, may still apprehend the idea of perfection, may help forward the supreme will, and die with ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... this terrible goddess (who holds the same place in the Brahmin religion as the Evil One in our own) the swarthy faces turned perfectly livid, and more than one stalwart fellow was seen to shiver from ...
— Harper's Young People, March 23, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various

... the Zoological Society in their collection of Zebus is the introduction of an improved breed of oxen. The larger specimens are kept at the farm at Kingston Hill, and only a pair of small ones are reserved for the Gardens, in addition to the Brahmin Bull, who occupies the central division of ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 19, - Issue 552, June 16, 1832 • Various

... proud fane of Diana at Ephesus, the shrines of the Delian Apollo; but the Brahminical symbols and interpretations prevail. Strange that it should be so, with a sect that suffered by the slayings and the outcastings of a ruthless persecution, at the hands of their Brahmin fathers, for the cause of restoring the culture of that simple and pure philosophy which nourished ...
— The English Governess At The Siamese Court • Anna Harriette Leonowens

... science, and Herbert Spencer, and not Evangelists and the Gospels? Are you to send the code of English law and not Christ's law of love? Are you to send godless Englishmen, 'through whom the name of God is blasphemed amongst the Gentiles,' and are you not to send missionaries of the Cross? A Brahmin once said to a missionary, 'Look here! Your Book is a good Book. If you were as good as your Book you would make India ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... Henceforward, your wishes will be accurately fulfilled, but at the expense of your life. The compass of your days, visible in that skin, will contract according to the strength and number of your desires, from the least to the most extravagant. The Brahmin from whom I had this skin once explained to me that it would bring about a mysterious connection between the fortunes and wishes of its possessor. Your first wish is a vulgar one, which I could fulfil, ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac

... forgotten that he was in mask and domino—called it "gave away." Not that he believed it had been done; for, look you, how could it be? The pretended treaty contained, for instance, no provision relative to the great family of Brahmin Mandarin Fusilier de ...
— The Grandissimes • George Washington Cable

... mean a building set apart for Christian worship. The Jew had his Tabernacle in the Wilderness, his Temple at Jerusalem, and his Synagogue in the Provinces; the Mohammedan has his Mosque, and the Brahmin his Pagoda; but the Christian has his Church, in whose very name his Lord is honoured. Sometimes the word denotes the Christians of a specified city or locality—the Church at Ephesus, the Church at Corinth. Sometimes it is ...
— Exposition of the Apostles Creed • James Dodds

... Council condescended to repair. His house was an office for the purpose of receiving charges against the Governor-General. It was said that, partly by threats, and partly by wheedling, the villainous Brahmin had induced many of the wealthiest men of the province to send in complaints. But he was playing a perilous game. It was not safe to drive to despair a man of such resources and of such determination as ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... white turban with much vehemence, and waving his small delicate hands in the air as he told of "The General's" work in India, and how he had been drawn by the gospel (which he pronounced go-spell) to give up his rank in the Brahmin caste, to wander over ...
— Flint - His Faults, His Friendships and His Fortunes • Maud Wilder Goodwin

... was of the Aztec rather than the Brahmin variety, nonetheless managed to radiate all the mystery of the East. "My well-being, dear Mrs. Jesser, is due to the fact that I have been communing for the past three months with my very good friend, the ...
— Psichopath • Gordon Randall Garrett

... libation. The son sees the gold, and thinking the serpent's hole full of treasure determines to slay the snake. He strikes at its head with a cudgel, and the enraged serpent stings him to death. The Brahmin mourns his son's death, but next morning as usual brings the libation of milk (in the hope of getting the gold as before). The serpent appears after a long delay at the mouth of its lair, and declares their friendship at an end, as it could not forget the blow of the Brahmin's son, ...
— Indian Fairy Tales • Collected by Joseph Jacobs

... abandon the faithful and devoted is an endless crime, like the murder of a Brahmin; Never, therefore, come weal or woe, will I abandon yon faithful dog. Yon poor creature, in fear and distress, hath trusted in my power to save it: Not, therefore, for e'en life itself will I ...
— Voices for the Speechless • Abraham Firth

... Cardinals, nor the Bishops, nor the least of the Prelates, could set foot on this accursed ground without contracting a moral stain—the custom of Rome forbids it: and I thought of those Indian Pariahs whom a Brahmin cannot touch without losing caste. I learnt that the lowest places in the lowest of the public offices were inaccessible to Jews, neither more nor less than they would be to animals. A child of Israel might as well apply for the place of a copying-clerk ...
— The Roman Question • Edmond About

... of the middle, ages, yet so ignorantly as to reverse the very circumstances of his authors. Andromeda is not the lady who was rescued by Perseus, but the monster by which she was to have been devoured. Two islands in India, one called Brahmin, and the other Gymnosophist. And a thousand other fictions and absurdities, too ridiculous even for the credulity of children. Of this worse than useless performance, the foregoing analysis is perhaps more than ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 1 • Robert Kerr

... that Sovereign rules over a third of the earth's surface and a quarter of its population, it is more than usually so. King Edward VII., when he came to the Throne, found himself the first of Mohammedan rulers, with more Moslem subjects than the Sultan of Turkey; the first of Brahmin and Parsee Sovereigns; the head of various Confucian colonies and the possessor of the most sacred of Buddhist shrines; the ruler of Christian sects and idolatries of every conceivable kind and variety. Almost every race in the world was included in his Empire—English, Scotch and Irish everywhere, ...
— The Life of King Edward VII - with a sketch of the career of King George V • J. Castell Hopkins

... earthly desires that all were seeking, for it is only through such deliverance that the final blessedness of total extinction can be reached. Then, as they cry, they cease to wander in the jungles of the senses, rebirth comes no more, and the peace of Nirvana is won. A poor Brahmin's daughter who had been married to a cripple, thus ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson

... a coot, and a fox, became hermits, and lived in a wilderness together, after having sworn not to kill any living thing. The god Sakkria having seen this through his divine power, thought to try their faith, and accordingly took upon him the form of a brahmin, and appearing before the monkey begged of him alms, who immediately brought to him a bunch of mangoes, and presented it to him. The pretended brahmin, having left the monkey, went to the coot and made the ...
— Moon Lore • Timothy Harley

... "a singular man, an exotic result of the unnatural conditions we English have brought about in India. The word renegade describes him aptly, I think: he was born and bred a Brahmin, a Rajput, of the hottest and bluest blood in Rajputana; he died to all intents and purposes a European—with an English heart. He is—was—by rights Maharana of Khandawar. As the young Maharaj he was sent to England to be educated. I'm told his record at Oxford was a brilliant one. ...
— The Bronze Bell • Louis Joseph Vance

... is the non-Brahmin question. I wish I had studied it more closely than I have been able to. A quotation from my speech delivered at a private meeting in Madras has been torn from its context and misused to further the antagonism ...
— Freedom's Battle - Being a Comprehensive Collection of Writings and Speeches on the Present Situation • Mahatma Gandhi

... strive thus to distinguish himself has its justification in the mystery of his birth, and this is assuredly always the principle of the caste-state in which it exists. The castes lead to genealogical records, which are of the greatest importance in determining the destiny of the individual. The Brahmin may strike down one of a lower caste who has defiled him by contact, without becoming thereby liable to punishment; rather would he be to blame if he did not commit the murder. Thus formerly was it with the officer who did not immediately kill the citizen or ...
— Pedagogics as a System • Karl Rosenkranz

... of the Deity. The ancient Aryans deified language, and represented it by a goddess "which rushes onward like the wind, which bursts through heaven and earth, and, awe-inspiring to each one that it loves, makes him a Brahmin, a poet, and a sage." Men used language many centuries before they seriously began to inquire into its origin and structure. The ancient Hindu philosophers, the Greeks, and all early nations that had begun a speculative philosophy, wonderingly tried ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar

... Brahmin philosopher and theist; born in Bengal about 1774, died at Stapleton Grove, ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott

... realizing only the temporary danger that threatened, marveled that he talked with this woman. God pity them! But how human they were. So to-day, in India, the missionaries of the cross, true to their Lord's great example, talk with pariah and Brahmin, and welcome them both to equal privileges in the kingdom of his grace—and men marvel. And so in Alabama and South Carolina, the missionaries of the cross, true to the same divine example, talk with black and with white, and welcome them both to the same privileges in this ...
— American Missionary, Volume XLII. No. 11. November 1888 • Various

... the centuries during which they have been told. Many of them have been narrated, almost in their present shape, for thousands of years since, to little copper-coloured Sanscrit children, listening to their mother under the palm-trees by the banks of the yellow Jumna—their (p. 42) Brahmin mother, who softly narrated them through the ring in her nose. The very same tale has been heard by the Northmen Vikings as they lay on their shields on deck; and by Arabs couched under the stars on the Syrian plains when the ...
— A Mother's List of Books for Children • Gertrude Weld Arnold

... in our little knowledge of results, pronounce sentence, but final judgment is reserved for a higher court, that sees the cross-purposes in which we are blindly caught. So with everything. Below me prayed Christian and Jew, Mohammedan and Brahmin, idolater and agnostic. Why was one man different in this way from his fellows? Because he was born so, because his parents were so, because he was bred so, because it seemed natural and convenient to remain so,—custom and environment had made his religion. Because Jesus ...
— Other Things Being Equal • Emma Wolf

... If children of the Brahmin caste of millionairdom were seized by the Pariah ills of measles, or chicken-pox, or mumps, it was deemed quite as imperatively the duty of doting parents to provide an "Anchorage" nurse, as to secure an eminent physician, and the most costly ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson

... "Garden of Knowledge," translated by himself, story viii. lesson 4; chapter xii. vol. iii. pp. 64-68. Cadell & Co., Strand, London, 1799. Five women come from a town to draw water at a well; and, finding there a young Brahmin, become his teachers and undertake to instruct him in the "Tirrea" or fifth "Veda"—there being only four of these Hindu Scriptures. Each lesson consists of an adventure showing how to cornute a husband, and the fourth runs as follows. I leave them ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton

... account of the Deluge, it is well known, resembles most wonderfully the history of Moses. When Alexander can proceed no further, poetical fiction introduces the person of a Brahmin, who relates the history of the Deluge: viz., that one sacred man was, in this part of the world, miraculously preserved by an ark; the further march of the conqueror towards the holy spot is deprecated: his ...
— The Poetical Works of William Lisle Bowles, Vol. 1 • William Lisle Bowles

... back to his friend the Brahmin, who died longing for that absorption into deity which had been the dream of his life: might not the Brahmin find the grand idea shaped to yet finer issues than his aspiration had dared contemplate?—might he not inherit in ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald



Words linked to "Brahmin" :   varna, Brahma, Hindu, brahminic, brahman, genus Bos, bovine, Bos, Hindustani, brahminical, Bos indicus, Hindoo, smarta, patrician, aristocrat, blue blood, zebu



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