"Figure of speech" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Grotius and the rest, with the New England theologians down to Park, to feel that forgiveness could not be quite free. If we acknowledge that this symbolism of God as judge or sovereign is all symbolism, mere figure of speech, not fact at all, then that objection—and much else—falls away. If we assert that another figure of speech, that of God as Father, more perfectly suggests the relation of God and man, then forgiveness may be free. Then justification and forgiveness are only two ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... F.C.D.C.'s. I will do all in my power to do this for you; but my dear lady, please understand, that in all matters concerning these little dances I must consult the powers that be. I am their humble servant; I must take orders from them.' All of which was a figure of speech on my part." The arbiter would then diplomatically suggest the possibility of a friend of social influence, and make some allusion to family. That always started the fair visitor. The family always went back ...
— Fifth Avenue • Arthur Bartlett Maurice
... of these two small maids was an instant success. It has subsequently been established, by hesper light so to speak, that the bond which first united the two was their chastened and wide-eyed mutual marveling at six long black cockscrew curls which marked—for only by a figure of speech could they have been said to adorn—the lateral aspects of Miss Dorcas's chignon. Forth they jutted, these remarkable structures, from cul-de-lampes above the lady's ears, and thence they descended, three toward the right shoulder, ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble
... sank suddenly at the opening of her new life. Nobody could account for it. The doctors themselves were divided in opinion. Scientifically speaking, there was no reason why she should die. It was a mere figure of speech—in no degree satisfactory to any reasonable mind—to say, as Lady Lundie said, that she had got her death-blow on the day when her husband deserted her. The one thing certain was the fact—account for it as you might. In spite of science ...
— Man and Wife • Wilkie Collins
... Ardea's figure of speech was no figure. The palazzo-sharing invitation did die hard; and when Miss Farley's letters failed, Mr. Vincent Farley made a journey to Paris for the express purpose of persuading the Dabneys to reconsider. Miss Euphrasia was neutral. The Major was homesick for a sight of his native Southland, ...
— The Quickening • Francis Lynde
... the corner posts, and sometimes the worshipper presenting a living creature would tether it with a cord to the altar's horn, so that the gift could be used either for sacrifice or service. In both cases the figure of speech seems to imply the possibility of the consecration being reversed by the withdrawal of the offering, or broken by its loss, the sacrifice slipping off or away from the altar, or being loosened by the person who had presented ...
— Standards of Life and Service • T. H. Howard
... came with the ropes and the tackle necessary and slowly righted the car he found that its engine ran again and he had speed and strength once more as his servants. He tried to encourage Charity with a figure of speech. ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... time comes when reasonable men find it hard to understand how any one in his senses can suppose that by eating bread or drinking wine he consumes the body or blood of a deity. "When we call corn Ceres and wine Bacchus," says Cicero, "we use a common figure of speech; but do you imagine that anybody is so insane as to believe that the thing he feeds upon ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... taunting the fallen foe, and he missed no opportunity to rub into the shamed inhabitants of Matautu the bitterness of their humiliation. He broke their spirit. And one morning, putting their pride in their pockets, a figure of speech, since pockets they had not, they all set out with the strangers and started working on the road. It was urgent to get it done quickly if they wanted to save any food at all, and the whole village joined in. But they worked silently, ...
— The Trembling of a Leaf - Little Stories of the South Sea Islands • William Somerset Maugham
... an interrogative point, but the height of our affirmation is taken with it. It is a figure of speech and intensifies the affirmative with ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... given in a Court of Justice. So anxious the story-teller seems, that the truth should be clearly comprehended, that when he has told us a matter of fact, or a motive, in a line or two farther down he repeats it with his favorite figure of speech, 'I say' so and so,—though he had made it abundantly plain before. This is in imitation of the common people's way of speaking, or rather of the way in which they are addressed by a master or mistress, who wishes to impress something ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... know. I make it a point never to deal with any one except the head of a concern, if you'll pardon my way of putting it. It isn't right to speak of Growstock as a concern, but you'll understand, of course. Figure of speech." ...
— The Prince of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... up to his balcony for the purpose of decorating it with an Italian flag. The old gentleman protested, and was thereupon taken to the barracks, where he remained for one day. The Yugoslavs told us that the state of things was worse than in Africa—but that was a figure of speech; the facts were that the different societies and clubs had been closed, that all persons going down to the harbour had been forbidden to speak their own language to their friends on board ship, that three ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein
... altogether like that figure of speech. It makes one seem too trivial, to be controlled by a mere finger. No, it is not quite complimentary to call ...
— Jurgen - A Comedy of Justice • James Branch Cabell
... followed, Emily's isolated position in the world was revealed in few words. But one more discovery—the most important of all—remained to be made. Had she used a figure of speech in saying that she was as poor as Mirabel himself? or had she told him the shocking truth? He put the question with perfect delicacy—-but with ...
— I Say No • Wilkie Collins
... India trade. On this point the negotiators had taken refuge in that most useful figure of speech for hard-pressed diplomatists and law-makers—the ellipsis. They had left out the word India, and his Catholic Majesty might persuade himself that by such omission a hemisphere had actually been taken away from the Dutch ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... it might be said that as the Father was unbegotten, so the man was unbegotten, inasmuch as "man" stood for the Person of the Father. But if one were to go on to say, "The man is unbegotten; the Son is man; therefore the Son is unbegotten," it would be the fallacy of figure of speech or of accident; even as we now say God is unbegotten, because the Father is unbegotten, yet we cannot conclude that the Son is unbegotten, although He ...
— Summa Theologica, Part III (Tertia Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... seldom enjoy. Such an autumn glows upon us like a splendid evening; it is the very sunset of the year; and I have been tempted forth into a wider range of enjoyment than usual. This WALK (if I may use the Irish figure of speech called a bull) will be a RIDE. A very dear friend has beguiled me into accompanying her in her pretty equipage to her beautiful home, four miles off; and having sent forward in the style of a running footman the servant who had driven her, she assumes ...
— Our Village • Mary Russell Mitford
... waving his heavy white hand, "is a figure of speech, Mr. Wayne. Only by the process of elimination can one arrive at the exquisite simplicity of poverty—care-free poverty. Even a single penny is a burden—the flaw in the marble, the fly in the amber of perfection. Cast it away and enter Eden!" And joining thumb and forefinger, he ...
— Iole • Robert W. Chambers
... lead us to speak of the "laws" of nature, and of the "powers and forces" of brute matter; and few persons, in adopting these phrases, are aware that they are using a figure of speech. Yet nothing is more certain than that all the researches of science have not been able to point out with certainty a single active cause apart from the operation of mind. We discern nothing but regularity and similarity of sequences; ...
— A Theory of Creation: A Review of 'Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation' • Francis Bowen
... that fine print there in the dark. W'y don't you go over to the light?... I'll 'ave to 'ave them shutters tyken off the winders." This was Stryker's amiable figure of speech, frequently employed to indicate ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance
... on the Roddam or were brought away by the Suchet, talked of a "hurricane of flame" that had come upon them. That phrase was no figure of speech, but a ...
— Complete Story of the San Francisco Horror • Richard Linthicum
... "A figure of speech, sir—as one might say, holiday-keeping there. I paid Mr. Byfield five pounds in advance. I have his receipt. And the stipulation was that I should be concealed in the car and make the ascension with ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... in soul. Christ taught this when He said:—'Let your light so shine before men that they may see your good works and glorify your Father which is in heaven.' Your 'light'—remember!—that word 'light' is not used here as a figure of speech but as a statement of fact. A positive 'light' surrounds you—it is exhaled and produced by your physical and moral being,— and those among us who have cultivated their inner organs of vision see IT before they ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... interpreter of this text will admit. Christ could easily have said: Upon thee will I build My Church, if it had been His intention to say just that. And we imagine on such a momentous occasion Christ would have used the plainest terms, containing no figure of speech, no ambiguities whatever; for was he not now introducing to the Church the distinguished person who was to preside over its affairs? Catholics claim that when Christ spoke these words, "upon this rock," He had ...
— Luther Examined and Reexamined - A Review of Catholic Criticism and a Plea for Revaluation • W. H. T. Dau
... Queen herself would in such a matter act so simply in accordance with the advice of some one else, that the pardon, if given, would not in the least depend on her Majesty's sentiments. To call it the Queen's pardon was a simple figure of speech. This was manifest to him, and he was driven to endeavour to make it manifest to her. She spoke of a petition to be sent direct to the Queen, and insinuated that Robert Bolton, if he were anything like a real brother, would force himself into her Majesty's presence. 'It ...
— John Caldigate • Anthony Trollope
... may have a glorious youth and prime, but their old age is dismal. To the outsider, like myself, signs are not wanting—to continue the figure of speech—that you have put on your last ...
— Better Dead • J. M. Barrie
... candle-sticks to prevent our being led astray with the supposition that they were actually intelligent agents. (I speak humanly.) Accepting this statement, the actions of these witnesses here described can be explained only by the figure of speech known as Personification, by which it is proper, under certain conditions, to attribute life, action, and intelligence to inanimate objects. Thus, the blood of Abel is said to have cried from the ground. Gen. 4:9, 10. "The ...
— The Revelation Explained • F. Smith
... country and see if they can discover the enemy. If some one of the scouts reports that he has seen a camp, and that the enemy have been found, the leader directs his men to paint themselves and put on their war bonnets. This last is a figure of speech, since the war bonnets, having of late years been usually ornamented with brass bells, could not be worn in a secret attack, on account of the noise they would make. Before painting themselves, therefore, they untie their war bonnets, and spread them ...
— Blackfoot Lodge Tales • George Bird Grinnell
... appearance of the name "Ardelie," which our own Lady Winchelsea took and anglicised as her coterie title. It may occur elsewhere, but I do not recollect it. The other is yet a fresh anticipation of that bold figure of speech which has been cited before from Dickens—one of the characters appearing "in a very clean shepherd's dress and a profound melancholy." Mme. de Villedieu (it is about the only place she has held ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... apparent enough. The literary "Boom," for example, affected the entire reading public of the early nineteenth century. It was no figure of speech that "everyone" was reading Byron or puzzling about the Waverley mystery, that first and most successful use of the unknown author dodge. The booming of Dickens, too, forced him even into the reluctant hands of Omar's Fitzgerald. But the factory-syren voice of the modern "boomster" ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... anticipative notes obscurely struck in The Blessed Damozel, and, in his later work, makes him speak sometimes almost like a believer in mesmerism. Dream-land, as we said, with its "phantoms of the body," deftly coming and going on love's service, is to him, in no mere fancy or figure of speech, a real country, a veritable expansion of, or addition to, our waking life; and he did well perhaps to wait carefully upon sleep, for the lack [215] of it became mortal disease with him. One may even recognise ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... current" is now understood to be mere figure of speech; it is thought that a wire does little else than give direction to electric energy. Pulsations of high tension have been proved to be mainly superficial in their journeys, so that they are best conveyed (or convoyed) by conductors of tubular form. And what is it that ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - Invention and Discovery • Various
... with the sin against the Holy Ghost (Luke), allowing for the difference between Greek and Christian modes of speaking. To this is opposed the lie in words, which is only such a deception as may occur in a play or poem, or allegory or figure of speech, or in any sort of accommodation,—which though useless to the gods may be useful to men in certain cases. Socrates is here answering the question which he had himself raised about the propriety of deceiving a madman; and he is also contrasting ...
— The Republic • Plato
... group are numerous allegories and symbolical stories. To understand Hawthorne's method of allegory [Footnote: An allegory is a figure of speech (in rhetoric) or a story (in literature) in which an external object is described in such a way that we apply the description to our own inner experience. Many proverbs, such as "People who live in glass houses should not throw stones," are condensed allegories. So also are fables and parables, ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... paw opened and shut to illustrate his point as he moved toward the door and the Three Bar girl knew that when Waddles spoke of clamping down it was no mere figure of speech. ...
— The Settling of the Sage • Hal G. Evarts
... Loelia elegans, I said that those Brazilian islanders who have lost it might find solace could they see its happiness in exile. The gentle reader thought this an extravagant figure of speech, no doubt, but it is not wholly fanciful. Indians of Tropical America cherish a fine orchid to the degree that in many cases no sum, and no offer of valuables, will tempt them to part with it. Ownership is distinctly recognized when the specimen grows near a village. The root of ...
— About Orchids - A Chat • Frederick Boyle
... and state of mind. But, at the end of the days, the truth dawned on him. He began to see what it all meant. He saw what he was, and why he was so; and he lifted up his eyes to heaven; and from that moment his madness past. He lifted up his eyes to heaven. That is no mere figure of speech: it is an actual truth. Most madmen, if you watch them, have that down look, or rather that inward look, as if their eyes were fixed only on their own fancies. They are thinking only of themselves, poor creatures—of their own selfish and private suspicions and wrongs—of their ...
— Sermons on National Subjects • Charles Kingsley
... mind it," said Mary, stanching the flow. "You were not so badly mistaken. I wasn't satisfied, but I was about to surrender." She smiled at herself and her warlike figure of speech. ...
— Dr. Sevier • George W. Cable
... French book about two lovers I came across the expression: "They were the universe to each other." It struck me as at once pathetic and comical, how that thoughtless phrase, put there merely as a hyperbolical figure of speech, in our case was so literally true. Still it is also literally true for a French passion of that kind. They are the universe to each other, because they lose sense for everything else. Not so with us. Everything we once loved we still ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... that we are not here entitled to suppose Shakspere a reader of the Senecan tragedies; and even were it otherwise, the passage in question is a figure of speech rather than a reflection on life or a stimulus to such reflection. And the same holds good of the other interesting but inconclusive parallels drawn by ...
— Montaigne and Shakspere • John M. Robertson
... is the illusion of looking into our own minds as if our thoughts or feelings were written down in a book. This is another figure of speech, which might be appropriately termed 'the fallacy of the looking-glass.' We cannot look at the mind unless we have the eye which sees, and we can only look, not into, but out of the mind at the thoughts, words, actions ...
— Theaetetus • Plato
... This figure of speech employed by the sailor exactly expressed the changes going on at the mouth of the volcano. Already for three months had the crater emitted vapours more or less dense, but which were as yet produced only by an internal ebullition of mineral substances. But now the vapours were replaced by a ...
— The Secret of the Island • W.H.G. Kingston (translation from Jules Verne)
... used that as a figure of speech. But I'm sure if you try to be quiet and well-behaved children you can ...
— Marjorie's Maytime • Carolyn Wells
... in understanding how ideas can be causes, which to us seems to be as much a figure of speech as the old notion of a creator artist, 'who makes the world by the help of the demigods' (Plato, Tim.), or with 'a golden pair of compasses' measures out the circumference of the universe (Milton, P.L.). We can understand how the idea in the mind of an ...
— Sophist • Plato
... literal observance. To give to all who ask; to lend to all who would borrow; to yield the cloak when the coat is taken forcibly; to turn the left cheek when the right is smitten—all this is to him so evidently but a figure of speech, that he does not find it very hard to satisfy conscience. Setting these passages aside, as not to be taken in the sense of the letter, he does not find it very difficult to dispose of others that come nearer to the obvious duties ...
— All's for the Best • T. S. Arthur
... memory now. If Jonah's gourd had not been a little too much used already, it would serve an excellent turn just here in the way of an apt figure of speech illustrating the growth, the wilting, and the withering of Metropolisville. The last time I saw the place the grass grew green where once stood the City Hall, the corn-stalks waved their banners on the very ...
— The Mystery of Metropolisville • Edward Eggleston
... would try to secure your happiness. I know what you want, need, and deserve, and here is this perfect child—the one woman for you, snatched from under your nose by Clive Cameron who will—" Emily Tweksbury sought for a figure of speech—"who will, without doubt, end ...
— The Shield of Silence • Harriet T. Comstock
... softer than she intended, especially as she could have told anybody that the Baron's compliment was the merest figure of speech. ...
— The Lunatic at Large • J. Storer Clouston
... rabbits; the cabbage to swell and overshadow the earth, like the Tree of Knowledge; and the puppy to go off at a scamper along the road to the end of the world. Any one who has read Browning's longer poems knows how constantly a simile or figure of speech is selected, not among the large, well-recognised figures common in poetry, but from some dusty corner of experience, and how often it is characterised by smallness and a certain quaint exactitude which could not have been found in any more usual example. Thus, for instance, Prince Hohenstiel—Schwangau ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton
... is not a series of events charged with elements of contrast, contradiction, or surprise. It is a deep, coherent, and unfaltering process. And one feels that it was something more than the chance of the moment that led the singer of old to weave the tears and the rejoicings of men's lives into a figure of speech that stands for unity of process, even ...
— The Threshold Grace • Percy C. Ainsworth
... central circle, in which a small open-air theatre was in active operation. A small quarter of the great slope of masonry facing the stage was roped off into an auditorium, in which the narrow level space between the foot-lights and the lowest step figured as the pit. Foot-lights are a figure of speech, for the performance was going on in the broad glow of the afternoon, with a delightful and apparently by no means misplaced confidence in the good-will of the spectators. What the piece was that was deemed so superbly able to shift ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... thing for another.] Substitution — N. substitution, commutation; supplanting &c v.; metaphor, metonymy &c (figure of speech) 521. [Thing substituted] substitute, ersatz, makeshift, temporary expedient, replacement, succedaneum; shift, pis aller [Fr.], stopgap, jury rigging, jury mast, locum tenens, warming pan, dummy, scapegoat; double; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... way was said to be a quality or [383] incident of a neighboring piece of land, men's minds were not alert to see that these phrases were only so many personifying metaphors, which explained nothing unless the figure of speech ...
— The Common Law • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
... (which it isn't, and only suggested by my trials with those dressmakers), I should say I was on pins and needles till it's all over. Bless me! and so I am, for here are three on the floor and one in my shoe." Prue paused to extract the appropriate figure of speech which she ...
— Moods • Louisa May Alcott
... much in this respect that they scarcely credit each other's testimony. Some who had practically zero imagery held that the "picture before the mind's eye" spoken of by the poets was a myth or mere figure of speech; while those who were accustomed to vivid images could not understand what the others could possibly mean by "remembering facts about the breakfast table without having any image of it", and were strongly tempted to accuse them of poor introspection, if not worse. ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth
... figure of speech I feel quite ashamed when I think of you, Bertie. I send you one or two enormously long letters, burdened, as far as I can remember them, with all sorts of useless detail. Then, in spite of your kindly answers ...
— The Stark Munro Letters • J. Stark Munro
... for Owen to say that figurative language of this kind explains nothing; but it was little less than puerile in him to see no more in the theory of natural selection than such a mere figure of speech. To say that the liver selects the elements of bile, or that nature selects specific types, may both be equally unmeaning re-statements of facts; but when it is explained that the term natural selection, unlike that of "hepatic sensation," ...
— Darwin, and After Darwin (Vol. 1 and 3, of 3) • George John Romanes
... my father calls a figure of speech. He's a minister—a clergyman, you know. We've come down here to board, and he's going to have the services in the Chapel of the Heavenly Rest. Mother's sick about always, so I have to roam around—Say, I know a game; let's ...
— What Two Children Did • Charlotte E. Chittenden
... existed a secret religions fraternity of man-eaters sometimes the heart of a brave enemy was devoured in the idea that it made the eater brave. This last practice was common. The ferocious threat, used in speaking of an enemy, "I will eat his heart," is by no means a mere figure of speech. The roving hunter-tribes, in their winter wanderings, were not infrequently impelled to cannibalism ...
— Pioneers Of France In The New World • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... the chimney-corner, leaving Mistress Clere to deal with the offender. Elizabeth well knew that the strap was no figure of speech, and that Mistress Clere when angry had no light hand. Girls were beaten cruelly in those days, and grown women too, when their mothers or mistresses chose to punish them for real or supposed offences. But Elizabeth Foulkes thought very little of the pain ...
— The King's Daughters • Emily Sarah Holt
... see how I could have answered it better. My speech certainly was better cheered than any other; especially one passage, where I made a colossus of Mr. Browne, at which the audience grew so tumultuous in their applause that they drowned my figure of speech before it was half ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... persons in the community, should not also be represented." In replying to the anti-suffrage arguments of Prof. Goldwin Smith, she says: "Do sex relations depend upon acts of Parliament or constitutional amendments? Can women marry a ballot, or embrace the franchise, otherwise than by a questionable figure of speech? Must adultery and infanticide necessarily be favored by the decisions of female jurors? Is divorce legislation, as arranged by the exclusive wisdom of men, now so satisfactory that women—who must perforce be involved in every case—should always ...
— Woman and the Republic • Helen Kendrick Johnson
... resemblance expressed by some phrase or word which seems to mean more than it does. In other words, when you are testing an analogy, whether your own or an opponent's, make sure that the similarity is real for the present case. A picturesque figure of speech may add life to an argument, but it may also cover a gap in ...
— The Making of Arguments • J. H. Gardiner
... figure of speech 'in the fulness of time' embodies a truth too often forgotten. History knows nothing of spontaneous generation; the chain of cause and effect is unbroken, and however modest be the scale on which an historical ...
— The Liberation of Italy • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... make the performance so much the more interesting. And now, as the conjurer says when he begins, observe that there is no deception. That is the figure of speech called lying, because there is to be nothing but deception from beginning to end. Did you ever consider the nature of a lie, Unorna? It ...
— The Witch of Prague • F. Marion Crawford
... that displeases him; but I was told when he smiled, the smile was of the sweetest and most amiable. I cannot say I saw him in smiling mood, but I saw him frown, and never did anyone so truly translate to me the figure of speech of "looking black." He advanced with self-possession, returned my salute without coldness or empressement, as if it were a mere matter of form, and sat down beside me. We had a long chat. Santa Cruz did not take much active part in it, but listened as his host spoke, punctuating ...
— Romantic Spain - A Record of Personal Experiences (Vol. II) • John Augustus O'Shea
... use a little different figure of speech," returned Blind Charlie smoothly. "When I've got a coon up a hollow tree I build a fire in the hollow to bring him down. Bruce is ...
— Counsel for the Defense • Leroy Scott
... the elements at such times is no figure of speech. What has so disturbed the peace in the electric equilibrium, as to make possible this sudden outburst, this steep incline in the stream of energy, this ethereal Niagara pouring from heaven to earth? Is a thunderstorm a display of ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs
... reproduce not only these body-cells, but the mental traits—indeed, we may in a sense say the very soul—that inhabited them, has been passed on. The individual continues to live, in his offspring, just as the past lives in him. To the eugenist, life everlasting is something more than a figure of speech or a theological concept—it is as much a reality as the beat of the heart, the growth of muscles or the ...
— Applied Eugenics • Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill Johnson
... I'm conservative, doctor, but I'm glad you're consistent. She did send another valentine. I am afraid she strained this figure of speech about the boat. But when everything in the world depends on one metaphor, it will not do to be fastidious. Jennie drew again the little boat with misspelt name. And this time she added five words: ...
— Duffels • Edward Eggleston
... reappears to evaporate the facts of His life. At the present hour there are eminent Christian teachers in Europe who are treating the resurrection of the Lord in very much the same way as these early Docetae treated His death—as a kind of figure of speech, not to be understood too literally. Against such the Church must lift up the crude facts of the resurrection as St. John did those of the death of the Saviour.[3] In our generation teachers of every kind are appealing to Christ and putting Him in the centre of ...
— The Trial and Death of Jesus Christ - A Devotional History of our Lord's Passion • James Stalker
... the word Providence is from (Providentia, Pro-videre), and originally meant foresight. The corresponding Greek word (Pronoia) means forethought. By a well-known figure of speech, called metonymy, we use a word denoting the means by which we accomplish anything to denote the end accomplished; we exercise care over anything by means of foresight, and indicate that care by the word ...
— Conversion of a High Priest into a Christian Worker • Meletios Golden
... constant mingling of Gipsies with prizefighters, it is almost evident that the word BONGO may have been the origin of it. A bongo yakko or yak, means a distorted, crooked, or, in fact, a bunged eye. It also means lame, crooked, or sinister, and by a very singular figure of speech, Bongo Tem or the Crooked Land is the name ...
— The English Gipsies and Their Language • Charles G. Leland
... phrases of the street are not only forcible but subtle: for a figure of speech can often get into a crack too small for a definition. Phrases like "put out" or "off colour" might have been coined by Mr. Henry James in an agony of verbal precision. And there is no more subtle truth than that ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... not satisfied. I used the wrong figure of speech awhile ago. He was not a cat with paw upon the prey. He was only an angler, and had but hooked his fish. He had not landed it yet. He felt how slender was the thread of committal by which he held Julia. August had her ...
— The End Of The World - A Love Story • Edward Eggleston
... in general use in small provincial printing establishments. Even at Angouleme, so closely connected through its paper-mills with the art of typography in Paris, the only machinery in use was the primitive wooden invention to which the language owes a figure of speech—"the press groans" was no mere rhetorical expression in those days. Leather ink-balls were still used in old-fashioned printing houses; the pressman dabbed the ink by hand on the characters, and the movable table on which the form of type was ...
— Two Poets - Lost Illusions Part I • Honore de Balzac
... recent origin. But if we use it (as we do use it) as implying vigour, or vivacity, or crudity, or inexperience, or hope, or a long life before them or any of the romantic attributes of youth, then it is surely as clear as daylight that we are duped by a stale figure of speech. We can easily see the matter clearly by applying it to any other institution parallel to the institution of an independent nationality. If a club called "The Milk and Soda League" (let us say) was set up yesterday, ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... mine?" repeated Strachan, looking somewhat embarrassed. "It was a mere figure of speech: you always take one up so uncommonly short.—Nothing remained for her but flight, or submission to the Cruel mandate. Like a heroic girl, in whose veins the blood of the old crusaders was bounding, she preferred the former alternative. The only relation ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 • Various
... Greek mythology, the bull is an Egyptian god, a serpent is found in the Zendavesta; and was there not a scaly fellow in the garden of Eden? So common are these beast-demons in the higher mythologies that they are used in every literature as rhetorical figures. So we find, as a figure of speech, the great red dragon with seven heads and ten horns, with tail that with one brush sweeps away a third of the stars of heaven. And where-ever we find nature-worship we find it accompanied with beast-worship. In the study of higher philosophies, having learned that lower philosophies often ...
— Sketch of the Mythology of the North American Indians • John Wesley Powell
... by way of a figure of speech," remarked Theron, not with entire directness. "Women are great hands to separate one's observations from their context, and so give them meanings quite unintended. They are also great hands," he added genially, "or at least one of them is, at making the most delicious dumplings ...
— The Damnation of Theron Ware • Harold Frederic
... it would. I mused on the changing fortunes of this unsteady world, and the ingratitude of man. I thought it would be easier going to the Promised Land if Jordan did not roll between. Rolling had long ceased to be a pleasant figure of speech with me. How frail are all things here below, how false, and yet how fair! My mind is naturally picturesque. In the midst of my sadness the force of nature compelled me to grope after an illustration. I could only think that my own foothold was frail, ...
— The Wit of Women - Fourth Edition • Kate Sanborn
... were dead!" I say tersely, and it is not a figure of speech. For the moment I do honestly ...
— Nancy - A Novel • Rhoda Broughton
... to reply that finding fault with a figure of speech was beside the point; but a ringing of the front door bell forestalled the retort. "Now, who do you suppose that is?" she wondered aloud, then her face brightened. "Ah—did Mr. ...
— Alice Adams • Booth Tarkington
... would infer) took place in—it sounds like the "Arabian Nights" now!—took place in the great room, caravansary, stable, behind a negro-trader's auction-mart, where human beings underwent literally the daily buying and selling of which the world now complains in a figure of speech—a great, square, dusty chamber where, sitting cross-legged, leaning against the wall, or lying on foul blanket pallets on the floor, the bargains of to-day made their brief sojourn, awaiting transformation into the ...
— Balcony Stories • Grace E. King
... rejected, as an ordinary device to elevate the style, and raise it above prose. My purpose was to imitate, and, as far as is possible, to adopt the very language of men; and assuredly such personifications do not make any natural or regular part of that language. They are, indeed, a figure of speech occasionally prompted by passion, and I have made use of them as such; but have endeavoured utterly to reject them as a mechanical device of style, or as a family language which Writers in metre seem to lay claim to by prescription. I have wished to keep the Reader in the company ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... shaking out her black bombazeen skirts, and plucking up all the ogress within her. 'If she don't like it, Mr Dombey, she must be taught to lump it.' The good lady apologised immediately afterwards for using so common a figure of speech, but said (and truly) that that was the way ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... that except he has repented of his evil self, and abjured all wrong, he is not safe from any, even the worst offence. There was a time when I could not understand that he who loved not his brother was a murderer: now I see it to be no figure of speech, but, in the realities of man's moral and spiritual nature, an absolute simple fact. The murderer and the unloving sit on the same bench before the judge of eternal truth. The man who loves not his brother, I do not say is at ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald
... England must be made to do justice. England must be taught her place in the world. England must give up her claims. In hot moments he had gone further, and had declared that England must be—whipped. He had been specially loud against that aristocracy of England which, according to a figure of speech often used by him, was always feeding on the vitals of the people. But now all this was very much changed. He did not go the length of expressing an opinion that the House of Lords was a valuable ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope
... those who "walk in the way of luxuries and pleasures," and "set themselves up as an example of sin and vanity." But Catherine's use of the first person in this connection, strained though it may appear, is more than a figure of speech, to soften the severity of her rebuke. We learn from the legend that till the end of her life she never ceased to repent, bitterly and with tears, for having at the age of twelve allowed an older sister to dress her prettily, and blanch her hair after the fashion of the day. The reason for ...
— Letters of Catherine Benincasa • Catherine Benincasa
... things. You often think, I doubt not, in quiet hours, what would become of your children, if you were gone. You have done, I trust, what you can to care for them, even from your grave: you think sometimes of a poetical figure of speech amid the dry technical phrases of English law: you know what is meant by the law of Mortmain; and you like to think that even your dead hand may be felt to be kindly intermeddling yet in the affairs of those who were your dearest: ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... another and perhaps closer figure of speech, almost all Dickens's works such as these may best be regarded as private letters addressed to the public. His private correspondence was quite as brilliant as his public works; and many of his public works are almost as formless and casual as his private correspondence. If ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... heated in France and Great Britain over the delay, as well as over the question itself. France in particular called for immediate and energetic action, urging that it was necessary to show the iron hand under the velvet glove. The iron hand was not a mere figure of speech, for the British and French fleets could not only bombard the coast cities of Greece, but institute a blockade which would ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume IV (of 8) • Francis J. (Francis Joseph) Reynolds, Allen L. (Allen Leon)
... The figure of speech pleased her, and as she walked on to the store a vision of blue sea rose before her. On it she seemed to see a fleet of little boats with white sails swelling in the wind. On each sail was a letter and all together ...
— Mary Ware's Promised Land • Annie Fellows Johnston
... me to the station, reiterating their wish to see me again. Nothing, indeed, would have been pleasanter than to idle away weeks amid this adorable scenery and these charming people. But life is short and France is immense. The genially uttered au revoir becomes too often a mere figure of speech. ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... coagulation of the two dogs in one. The capacity of the two dogs to see both by day (the sun) and by night (the moon) may have given the myth a slight start into the direction of the two-headed Greek Cerberus. But there is the alternate possibility that four-eyed is but a figure of speech for "sharp-sighted," especially as I have shown elsewhere that the parallel expression "to run with four feet" is a Vedic figure of speech for "swift of foot."[17] Certainly the god Agni, "Fire," is once in the Rig-Veda (i. 31. 13) ...
— Cerberus, The Dog of Hades - The History of an Idea • Maurice Bloomfield
... inward self, naturally," he said. "We call it 'soul' as a figure of speech; it is ...
— Ziska - The Problem of a Wicked Soul • Marie Corelli
... went to the front room, opened the casement, and looked out. To say that her heart leaped into her mouth would be a most imperfect figure of speech to describe the state of feeling that rushed over her. In the rainy obscurity of the night she could discern something white drawn up to the door, and the figures of two men standing by it. The only wonder was that she did not leap out; she might ...
— Verner's Pride • Mrs. Henry Wood
... of character and situation which presents vividly a situation or event to the mind's eye of the reader or hearer so that he seems to participate in the action and vicariously live through it, was incorporated into rhetoric as ἐνέγεια, a figure of speech. There petrified in an alien substance, this characteristic quality of poetic was transmitted to another age which knew of it through no other source.[85] Thus a successful orator narrated with descriptive ...
— Rhetoric and Poetry in the Renaissance - A Study of Rhetorical Terms in English Renaissance Literary Criticism • Donald Lemen Clark
... thou thy servant depart ... in peace;" the figure of speech is full of beauty; it is the word of a faithful watchman who welcomes with joy the hour of his dismissal, for he has caught the vision of the coming One; now he is about to be sent away in the peace of an accomplished task, in the peace of fulfilled ...
— The Gospel of Luke, An Exposition • Charles R. Erdman
... figure of speech, but has its origin in the very texture of the human mind. The heavens, the upper regions, are in every religion the supposed abode of the divine. What is higher is always the stronger and the nobler; a superior is one who is better than ...
— The Myths of the New World - A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America • Daniel G. Brinton
... which have no meaning apart from this belief in the conscious animation of every object in the world. They may move us for the moment by their utterances; but we never take their raptures literally. To the savage, however, it is no figure of speech to call upon the sun to behold some great deed, or to declare that the moon hides her face; to assert that the ocean smiles, or that the river swells with rage, and overwhelms a wayfarer who is crossing it, or an unsuspecting village on its ...
— The Science of Fairy Tales - An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology • Edwin Sidney Hartland
... America, shows clearly that at the bottom of the ancient desire to use very young persons in industry was a conviction that work, constant and hard work, is the only safeguard against evil. "Satan finds some mischief still for idle hands to do" was not a figure of speech to our ancestors, it was statement of a sober fact. This feeling led naturally to the conditions that gave Samuel Slater, the pioneer in textile manufacture in New England, a collection of child workers in his first mill as his only laborers and at ages ...
— The Family and it's Members • Anna Garlin Spencer
... IRONY is a subtle figure of speech in which, while one thing is said, some indication serves to show that quite the opposite is meant; thus apparent praise becomes severe condemnation or ridicule; practical irony is evinced in ostensibly furthering ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... thirty-four years. The family type is strong. One of the Pope's nieces might have sat for a portrait of his mother. The extraordinarily clear, pale complexion is also a family characteristic. Leo the Thirteenth's face seems cut of live alabaster, and it is not a figure of speech to say that it appears to emit a light of ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... your Honour," I heard the man reply; and, I believe, sailors do hand down to each other a tradition of that kind; for there is a figure of speech, and it is nothing more, with which the English men-of-war's men used to hail the lobster ...
— A Yacht Voyage to Norway, Denmark, and Sweden - 2nd edition • W. A. Ross
... figure of speech referring to the youths who go to war. The same or similar metaphors are ...
— Ancient Nahuatl Poetry - Brinton's Library of Aboriginal American Literature Number VII. • Daniel G. Brinton
... lady, you did not," said Gilman. "That was merely a figure of speech. I meant named the month. She has definitely promised in October, and I may begin to hunt a location and plan a home for us. I want the congratulations of my dear friend ...
— Her Father's Daughter • Gene Stratton-Porter
... adaptability of the race to environments constitutes one of the means of his endurance. In servitude as in freedom, no conditions have yet been so vigorous that the negro has not been able to adjust himself with ease. Indeed, it is not a figure of speech to assert that wherever he has suffered the most, there he has given the best proof of his vitality. His acquisition of wealth, his possession of material means in general, has been most rapid in parts where he has most obstacles to confront and encounter. He not only laughs ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... and would cry with envy like a spoiled child who cannot have the moon to play with. Happily, therefore, for the harmony of the world, each nation cordially detests the other and the much exploited "brotherhood of man" is only a figure of speech. The Englishman, confident that he is the last word of creation, despises the Frenchman, who, in turn, laughs at the German, who shows open contempt for the Italian, while the American, conscious of his superiority to the whole family ...
— The Lion and The Mouse - A Story Of American Life • Charles Klein
... pephyke? ouk enchorei gnoston kai doxaston tauton einai?) and thirdly, to illustrate that opposition, the figurative use, so impressed on thought and speech by Plato that it has come to seem hardly a figure of speech at all but appropriate philosophic language, of the ...
— Plato and Platonism • Walter Horatio Pater
... cook and cabin-boy on board a "horse-jockey;" one of those vessels which carry horses, mules, and other cattle to the West Indies; a title bestowed upon them by sailors, who are very much in the habit of indulging in that figure of speech called by rhetoricians metonymy; in this instance applying the genuine name of all Connecticut men, and some Rhode Islanders, to a fore-topsail schooner, or hermaphrodite brig, as the case might be. He was next, by a sort of metamorphosis, or rather metastasis, not uncommon ...
— An Old Sailor's Yarns • Nathaniel Ames
... and directed the light downwards, as he spoke. Amelius looked in. The policeman's figure of speech, likening the lodgers to "herrings in a barrel," accurately described the scene. On the floor of a kitchen, men, women, and children lay all huddled together in closely packed rows. Ghastly faces rose terrified out of the seething obscurity, when the light of the lantern fell on them. The ...
— The Fallen Leaves • Wilkie Collins
... us," shouted Job Truefitt, from forward, making use of a very common nautical figure of speech. "There's port the helm—square away the yards—she'll be down to ...
— Ronald Morton, or the Fire Ships - A Story of the Last Naval War • W.H.G. Kingston
... I, "I see. Yes, Macedonia. Slight misunderstanding. It's written from Ireland all right. There's the Irish Command stamp on it. 'Come over to Macedonia and help us.' Biblical phrase. St. PAUL, you know. Just a figure of speech. My friend meant ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 156, April 9, 1919 • Various
... The figure of speech or of thought by which we transfer the language and ideas of a familiar science to one with which we are less acquainted may be ...
— Five of Maxwell's Papers • James Clerk Maxwell
... of chest resonance, it would be impossible now to determine. Were it not for the fact of this doctrine having received the support of eminent scientists (Holmes, Mackenzie, Curtis, and many others), it might be looked upon as a mere figure of speech. That the tones of the voice are reinforced by the resonance of the air in the chest cavity, is an utter absurdity. In the acoustic sense, the thorax is not a cavity at all. The thorax is filled with the spongy tissue of the lungs, not ...
— The Psychology of Singing - A Rational Method of Voice Culture Based on a Scientific Analysis of All Systems, Ancient and Modern • David C. Taylor
... figure of speech, I might briefly say that the whole Collectivist error consists in saying that because two men can share an umbrella, therefore two men can share a walking-stick. Umbrellas might possibly be replaced by some kind of common awnings covering certain ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... word, spoken at first as a figure of speech by the Knight von Rochow, had grown into a charge against him, heavy enough to wreck the honor and freedom of a man who had no friends, and even to bring him to the stake; and I know full well that ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... shortening of life, this accumulating amount of ill health, causes an annual loss, in each of our great cities, of productive capacity to the value of millions of dollars, as well as an unnatural expense of millions more. This is no figure of speech. The community is poorer by millions of dollars each year through the waste which it allows of health and life. Leaving out of view all humane considerations, all thought of the misery, social and moral, which accompanies this physical degradation, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... a mighty lucky thing for her that the Red Cross was ready to take it off her shoulders, and she has turned to us (How does that sound? Can you imagine me doing anything useful?) with tears of appeal and gratitude. That isn't a figure of speech. I have actually seen the Prefect of this Province, who would rank with the governor of one of our states, and who is a brave, capable man, cry like a woman over the seeming hopelessness of the ghastly problem. ...
— 'Smiles' - A Rose of the Cumberlands • Eliot H. Robinson
... first said she knew Mr. Trollop, "and was aware that he had a Blank-Blank;"—[**Her private figure of speech for Brother—or Son-in-law]—but Mr. Buckstone said that he was not able to conceive what so curious a phrase as Blank-Blank might mean, and had no wish to pry into the matter, since it was probably private, he "would nevertheless venture the blind assertion ...
— The Gilded Age, Complete • Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner
... the Senator's toasts increased in volume. His final flight, I recall, involved terms like "our blood-cousins of the British Isles," and introduced a figure of speech about "hands across the sea," which I thought striking, indeed. The applause aroused by this was noisy in the extreme, a number of the cattle and horse persons, including the redskin Tuttle, emitting a shrill, concerted "yipping" which, though it would never have done with us, seemed ...
— Ruggles of Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... to polish the teeth of her grandmother's cat! I must rank pretty low in the consideration of Dejah Thoris, I thought; but I could not help laughing at the strange figure of speech, so homely and in this respect so earthly. It made me homesick, for it sounded very much like "not fit to polish her shoes." And then commenced a train of thought quite new to me. I began to wonder what my people at home ...
— A Princess of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... doubtless have come to the same conclusion. "Hanging" gardens do not necessarily depend from anything, "floating" islands need not necessarily float. They really have the appearance of buoyancy to-day, and hence the figure of speech which has been universally applied to them. "I have not seen any floating gardens," says R. A. Wilson, author of "Mexico and its Religion," "nor, on diligent inquiry, have I been able to find a man, woman, or child ...
— Aztec Land • Maturin M. Ballou
... only a figure of speech, my dear," replied Mrs. Rathbawne, with engaging placidity. "Mercy! but I'm glad to get home. We've had a positively exhausting day with Natalie's shopping, and the worst of it is to think what a lot more there is to do. A wedding certainly ...
— The Lieutenant-Governor • Guy Wetmore Carryl |
