"Literal" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... now proceed to the solution of our proper problem. There are no general reasons, either against the figurative, or against the literal interpretation; neither of them has any unfavourable prejudice which can be urged against it. A devastation by real locusts is threatened, in the Pentateuch, against the transgressors of the law, Deut. xxviii. 38, 39; against the Egyptians, the Lord actually made use ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions, v. 1 • Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg
... Nuremberg, {1} and intensified the vivid description of a mastersingers' meeting which the curious may read in August Hagen's novel "Norica." His studies have been marvellously exact and careful, and he has put Wagenseil's book under literal and liberal contribution, as will appear after a while. Now it seems best to tell the story of the ...
— A Book of Operas - Their Histories, Their Plots, and Their Music • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... nature—gives, after all, a kind of crude synthesis of the natural and the spiritual, by which it is possible to live; it is, for many persons, an indispensable bridge between the world of phenomena and the world of spirit. But when the heavy-handed dogmatist requires a categorical assent to the literal truth of the miraculous, in exactly the same sense in which physical facts are true, a tension between faith and reason cannot be avoided. And it is in this literal sense that Bishop Gore requires all his clergy to assent to the miracles in ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... David, Elijah, who were obedient to the commandments of God. He did not speak of patriotism, although an intense lover of his country. He exhorted his sons to be simply obedient to the Law,—not, probably, in the restricted and literal sense of the word, but in the idea of being faithful to God, even as Abraham was obedient before the Law was given. The glory which he assured them they would thus win was not the eclat of victory, ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume II • John Lord
... Mussulman had his equally sensual Heaven. And many Christians have as foolish notions as any one else. Some think that they win Heaven by believing something with their minds about our Lord's atonement. Some think they go to Heaven by soaring up through the air. Some of them, taking in its literal meaning the glorious imagery of the Apocalypse, picture to themselves streets of beaten gold and walls of flashing emerald and jasper, and the wearing of crowns and the singing of Psalms over and over again through ...
— The Gospel of the Hereafter • J. Paterson-Smyth
... that some crabs like to be boiled alive. In the same way he thought and spoke as if the people liked being kept in superstition; only he meant this in a literal sense, whereas the cookery book did ...
— Resurrection • Count Leo Tolstoy
... parabolarum J. C. indole poetica com. Men have good cause to suspect the accuracy of their artificial rules, when the application of them works such havoc. Better that we should have no critical rules, than adopt such as separate on superficial literal grounds, things that the judgment of the Church and the common sense of men have in all ages joined together as ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... much excited by the fact that he had received a despatch from Berlin in which the German Government—which, of course, means the Emperor—had strongly and finally declared against everything like an arbitration tribunal. He was clearly disconcerted by this too literal acceptance of his own earlier views, and said that he had sent to M. de Staal insisting that the meeting of the subcommittee on arbitration, which had been appointed for this day (Friday), should be ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... the operation begins: you are cheated, at best, of all the money in your pocket, and if you stay late, very probably robbed of your watch and snuff-box, possibly murdered for greater security. This I can assure you, is not an exaggerated, but a literal description of what happens every day to some raw and inexperienced stranger at Paris. Remember to receive all these civil gentlemen, who take such a fancy to you at first sight, very coldly, and take care always to be previously ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... to Beard, The Hibbert Lectures, 1883, p. 119, "It was a mediaeval maxim, which no one thought of questioning, that the language of the Bible had four senses—the literal, the allegorical, the tropological, and the anagogical, of which the last three were mystical or spiritual, in contradistinction to the first." The learned Erasmus, who lived and died a devout Roman Catholic, ...
— The Digger Movement in the Days of the Commonwealth • Lewis H. Berens
... was in an exceptionally good temper this morning. Everything had turned out as he had hoped for and anticipated, and the literal kicking-out of Henson the previous evening was still fresh and sweet in his memory. It would be something to boast of in his ...
— The Crimson Blind • Fred M. White
... A literal prose translation of Homer, by Mr. T. A. Buckley, has just appeared in London. No prose version will cause any just notion of the spirit of Homer. Of the half dozen metrical translations published recently, we think that of our countryman Munford the ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... is one of those autobiographical novels that were popular throughout the third and fourth decades of the twentieth century. It was published in 1970, and one must understand Wander Jahre rather in a spiritual and intellectual than in a literal sense. It is indeed an allusive title, carrying the world back to the Wilhelm Meister of Goethe, a century and a ...
— The World Set Free • Herbert George Wells
... well be questioned whether any arbitrary and literal translation, even though practicable, of a highly complex, intensely mobile art, unfolding in time, as does music, into a correspondent light and color expression, is the best approach to a new art of mobile color. ...
— Architecture and Democracy • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... from that view. So far as Poetry attempts to improve on truth in that way, so far it abandons truth, and is false to itself. Even literal facts, exactly as they were, a great poet will prefer whenever he can get them. Shakespeare in the historical plays is studious, wherever possible, to give the very words which he finds to have been used; and it shows how wisely he was guided in this, that those magnificent ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... This literal quotation from the frank Mr. Calvin caused a sensation. Captain Dan struggled to find words. His daughter laid a hand ...
— Cap'n Dan's Daughter • Joseph C. Lincoln
... at the question,—it was a literal translation of his own thought at that moment. He checked the enthusiasm that rose to his lip, and calmly ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... siege and the imminent danger of famine and attack for many weeks. It sent its echoes down into the south-west part of the territories where the warlike Blackfeet confederacy had its centre. At each of these points, as at Prince Albert, the few Mounted Police that were on duty became a literal tower of strength. At Battleford, Inspector Morris, with his few men, organizing also a home guard, guarded nearly 400 women and children who sought refuge inside the stockade. And Constable Storer, riding out alone from that stockade, when all the wires were cut, ...
— Policing the Plains - Being the Real-Life Record of the Famous North-West Mounted Police • R.G. MacBeth
... literal gentleman, that Captain Drinkwater, but he knows how to take care of his ship. Look for the number of 'follow the rear-admiral's motions.' ...
— The Two Admirals • J. Fenimore Cooper
... vision foreshadows the conquest of the air, its significance is symbolic rather than literal, and, like Pindar checking the steeds of his song, Hugo ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... sunrise every person should stand at the door of his dwelling, and after observing for a period, compare among themselves the details of their thoughts. By this means he hoped to achieve his imperial purpose, but although the literal part of the enactment is scrupulously maintained, especially by the slothful and defamatory, who may be seen standing at their doors and conversing together even to this day, from some unforeseen imperfection the intellectual capacity of the ...
— The Mirror of Kong Ho • Ernest Bramah
... copious facility than Crassus; as sufficiently appeared upon many other occasions, but particularly in the cause of M. Curius, which was tried before the Centum Viri. For he urged a great variety of arguments in the defence of right and equity, against the literal jubeat of the law; and supported them by such a numerous series of precedents, that he overpowered Q. Scaevola (a man of uncommon penetration, and the ablest Civilian of his time) though the case before them was only a matter of legal right. But the cause was so ably managed ...
— Cicero's Brutus or History of Famous Orators; also His Orator, or Accomplished Speaker. • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... corrected the literal-minded Gershom. "They do not last forever. They come and go out, just as we do. Only they take longer. Consider the Dipper up there, for instance. A hundred thousand years from now that Dipper will be perceptibly altered, for we know the lateral movement ...
— The Prairie Child • Arthur Stringer
... the extraordinary advantage which the Austrians enjoy in this respect, it has been found necessary to screen certain of the roads not only on both sides but above, so that in places the traffic passes for miles through literal tunnels of matting. This road masking is a simple form of the art of concealment to which the French have given the name "camouflage," which has been developed to an extraordinary degree on the Western Front. That the Italians ...
— Italy at War and the Allies in the West • E. Alexander Powell
... simply a pledge to believers of their redemption." But Luther saw, in every attempt to exhibit the symbolical import of the supper, only the danger of weakening the authority of Scripture, which was his stronghold, and became exceedingly tenacious on that point; carried his views to the extreme of literal interpretation, and never could emancipate himself from the doctrines of Rome respecting the eucharist. Carlstadt, finding himself persecuted at Wittemberg left the city, and, as soon as he was released from the presence of Luther, began to revive ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... are a sect of religious mendicants in Bengal, unlettered and unconventional, whose songs are loved and sung by the people. The literal meaning of the word ...
— The Fugitive • Rabindranath Tagore
... useful to studious men, though superfluous as far as I myself was concerned. For I have translated the most illustrious orations of the two most eloquent of the Attic orators, spoken in opposition to one another: Aeschines and Demosthenes. And I have not translated them as a literal interpreter, but as an orator giving the same ideas in the same form and mould as it were, in words conformable to our manners; in doing which I did not consider it necessary to give word for word, but I have preserved the character ...
— The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero, Volume 4 • Cicero
... no need to be so literal," returned Mrs. Challoner, reprovingly; for she was a gentlewoman of the old school, and nothing grieved her more than slipshod English or any idiom or idiotcy of modern parlance in the mouths of her bright young daughters: to speak ...
— Not Like Other Girls • Rosa N. Carey
... but the inside works were all right." And so thought its jolly patrons. Seated at tables, well supplied with piles of gold and silver, where numerous disciples of that ancient trickster Pharaoh, being dubious perhaps of the propriety of adopting the literal orthography of his name, ...
— Shadow and Light - An Autobiography with Reminiscences of the Last and Present Century • Mifflin Wistar Gibbs
... Hebrew poetry; that peculiarity consisting of the repetition of clauses, containing either the same proposition in a slightly different form, or its antithesis; a rhyme of thoughts, if we may so say, instead of a rhyme of sounds, and consequently capable of being preserved by a literal translation. ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 183, April 30, 1853 • Various
... the most debraille of my crew, a hashshash, {48} but a singer and a good fellow. The translation is not free, though the sentiments are. I merely rhymed Omar's literal word-for-word interpretation. The songs are all in a similar strain, except one funny one abusing the 'Sheykh el-Beled, may the fleas bite him.' Horrid imprecation! as I know to my cost, for after visiting the Coptic ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon
... a different rendering is required from that suggested in the note on 3, 25. What is it? Notice that it is necessary to know the literal significance of the Latin words, but that the translation must often be something quite different if it is to be acceptable English. The rule for translation is: Discover the exact meaning of the original; then express ...
— Ritchie's Fabulae Faciles - A First Latin Reader • John Kirtland, ed.
... vested beneficial interest" in them, whereas the trustees had no such interest at stake. But, said he, the case is within the words of the rule, and "must be within its operation likewise, unless there be something in the literal construction" obviously at war with the spirit of the Constitution, which was far from the fact. For, he continued, "it requires no very critical examination of the human mind to enable us to determine that one great inducement to these gifts is the conviction felt by the giver that ...
— John Marshall and the Constitution - A Chronicle of the Supreme Court, Volume 16 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Edward S. Corwin
... are unincorporated voluntary societies. In our modern nomenclature the name "inn" may seem a strange one for an institution of learning; but the term is a literal rendering of the ancient title hospitia applied to them in the Latin records, as ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, Old Series, Vol. 36—New Series, Vol. 10, July 1885 • Various
... men very much wished to overtake our game, for the big peccary is a murderous foe of dogs (and is sometimes dangerous to men). One of their number frankly refused to come or to let his dogs come, explaining that the fierce wild swine were "very badly brought up" (a literal translation of his words) and that respectable dogs and men ought not to go near them. The other fazendeiros merely feared for their dogs; a groundless fear, I believe, as I do not think that the dogs could by any ...
— Through the Brazilian Wilderness • Theodore Roosevelt
... her thoughts. View the case in any of the lights which shone into her mind, she could not discover an aspect that gave her real comfort. It is true she was free from all legal obligations to her former husband, and that was something gained. But what of that husband's position under the literal reading of the divine law? No doubt he contemplated marriage. But could he marry, conscience clear? Had not her false vows cursed both their lives?—imposed on each almost ...
— The Hand But Not the Heart - or, The Life-Trials of Jessie Loring • T. S. Arthur
... he say so? Very stupid of him. One can't be too literal in dealing with the War Office, that notorious fount ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 156, April 9, 1919 • Various
... of science and the wide world; Dante, despite his cramped outlook; Milton, in spite of his perverse theologizing—these and their like are, and will always be, literature. No matter if Carlyle's French Revolution be in reality as far from the literal truth as the work of Froude, yet Carlyle and Froude are literature, along with Herodotus and Livy and Froissart, while the most scrupulously exact of chronicles may ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... answered the rich young man and said for him to give to the poor all he possessed or he could not gain everlasting life, He did not mean it in the literal sense. My interpretation of His words is that we should part with what comes ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... in my hearing, said Luther, that he was earnest against the sectaries, as contemners of God's Word, and also against those who attributed too much to the literal Word; for, said he, such do sin against God and his almighty power, as the Jews did in naming the ark "God." But, said he, whoso holdeth a mean between both, the same is taught what is the right use of the ...
— Selections from the Table Talk of Martin Luther • Martin Luther
... often heard Gladstone say that, in the nature of things, a speech cannot be adequately reported. You may get the words with literal precision, but the loss of gesture, voice, and intonation, will inevitably obscure the meaning and impede the effect. Of no one's speaking is this more true than of his own. Here and there, in the enormous mass of his reported eloquence, you will come upon a fine peroration, a ...
— Fifteen Chapters of Autobiography • George William Erskine Russell
... his wife about the singular trial and about the impression which Jesus had made upon his mind. When he left her, she had fallen asleep and dreamed about it; for, though our version makes her say, "This night I have dreamed about Him," the literal translation is "this day"; and of course there might be many causes why a lady should fall asleep in the daytime. Her dream had been such as to fill her with a vague sense of alarm, and her message to her husband ...
— The Trial and Death of Jesus Christ - A Devotional History of our Lord's Passion • James Stalker
... swirling snow which sifted past the glare of his headlights, he could discern a sign which told him he had reached the summit, that he now stood at the literal ...
— The White Desert • Courtney Ryley Cooper
... valves which, when open, flood the ballast tanks with water and secure the submergence of the boat. Most of the underwater boats to-day sink rapidly on an even keel. The old method of depressing the nose of the boat so as to make a literal dive has been abandoned, partly because of the inconvenience it caused to the men within who suddenly found the floor on which they were standing tilted at a sharp angle, and partly because the diving position proved to be a ...
— Aircraft and Submarines - The Story of the Invention, Development, and Present-Day - Uses of War's Newest Weapons • Willis J. Abbot
... and sufferings ensue which would have been prevented by keeping up even the ambiguous thoughts of recovery. Sick people have reflections and feelings which exert an influence upon them beyond our discernment, and which frequently need not our literal interpretations of symptoms, and our exhortations, to make them more effectual. But where there is evidently no preparedness for death, and the patient, we fear, is deceiving himself, no one who has suitable views of Christian duty will fail to impress him with the necessity of ...
— Catharine • Nehemiah Adams
... nothing of other improbabilities and incongruities. Every thing of this kind was now awakened; while, in order to master the Hebrew, I occupied myself exclusively with the Old Testament, and studied it, though no longer in Luther's translation, but in the literal version of Sebastian Schmid, printed under the text, which my father had procured for me. Here, I am sorry to say, our lessons began to be defective in regard to practice in the language. Reading, interpreting, grammar, transcribing, and the repetition of words, seldom lasted a full half-hour; ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... its literal meaning, means an infusion of intelligence that lifts up the minds of man, and it is generally so accepted by the world at large, but education, as far as Catholicism goes, means only a rehearsal of abominations, which have been practiced upon the followers of this creed for centuries ...
— Thirty Years In Hell - Or, From Darkness to Light • Bernard Fresenborg
... answered, "I if we are to be literal. You walked on to me; if I had not stopped you, I suppose you ...
— The Second Thoughts of An Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome
... take the form of a literal battle between two individuals, or of the individual with inclemency of climate or other destructive agents. More usually it is a competition, no more noticeable and no less real than that between merchants or manufacturers in the ...
— The Whence and the Whither of Man • John Mason Tyler
... of northern realization can be matched in the south, when the southerns choose. There are two pieces of animal drawing in the Sistine Chapel unrivaled for literal veracity. The sheep at the well in front of Zipporah; and afterwards, when she is going away, leading her children, her eldest boy, like every one else, has taken his chief treasure with him, and this treasure is his pet dog. It is a little sharp-nosed white fox-terrier, ...
— Ariadne Florentina - Six Lectures on Wood and Metal Engraving • John Ruskin
... The translation is literal, and affords one of many instances in which the Greek ...
— The Iliad of Homer - Translated into English Blank Verse • Homer
... taken as a more or less poetical account under the metaphor of motion. These "leanings" are literal in the sense that one note does imply another as its natural complement and satisfaction and we seek to reach or make it. The striving is an intrinsic element, not a by-product for ...
— The Psychology of Beauty • Ethel D. Puffer
... our duty, when we have the desires of the people before us, to pursue them, not in the spirit of literal obedience, which may militate with their very principle,—much less to treat them with a peevish and contentious litigation, as if we were adverse parties in a suit. It would, Sir, be most dishonorable for a faithful representative of the Commons to ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. II. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... to this hereafter, and to show that we at least are not guilty of exaggeration, we subjoin the passage in the original Italian, from which it will be seen that our translation is as literal as possible. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... gather and eat the buds of the basswood, and then bring an apronfull home to her family. In one neighbourhood a beef bone passed from house to house, and was boiled again and again in order to extract some nutriment from it. This is no fiction, but a literal fact. Many other equally uninviting bills of fare might be given, but these no doubt will suffice. Sufficient has been said to show that our fathers and mothers did not repose upon rose-beds, nor did they fold their hands in despair, but ...
— Life in Canada Fifty Years Ago • Canniff Haight
... could not ride, or lead in war. She resisted the voice with all her energy. She asserted that she knew the Dauphin, on their first meeting, by aid of her voices.** She declared that the Dauphin himself 'multas habuit revelationes et apparitiones pulchras.' In its literal sense, there is no evidence for this, but rather the reverse. She may mean 'revelations' through herself, or may refer to some circumstance unknown. 'Those of my party saw and knew that voice,' she said, but later would only accept ...
— The Valet's Tragedy and Other Stories • Andrew Lang
... translation is fairly literal, and Malleson (a clergyman) has taken pains with the scientific portions of the work and added the chapter headings, he has made some unfortunate emendations mainly concerning biblical references, and ...
— A Journey to the Interior of the Earth • Jules Verne
... interminably, one hardly knows whether to or from battle with the English and the Austrians, from victory or defeat:—Well! he has become like one of our family. "He will go far!" my father declares. He would go far, in the literal sense, if he might—to Paris, to Rome. It must be admitted that our Valenciennes is a quiet, nay! a sleepy place; sleepier than ever since it became French, and ceased to be so near the frontier. The grass is growing deep on ...
— Imaginary Portraits • Walter Pater
... Jesus comfort his friends who are left? As we read over the story of the sorrow of the Bethany home we find the answer to our question. You say, "He brought back their dead, thus comforting them with the literal undoing of the work of death and grief. If only he would do this now, in every case where love cries to him, that would be comfort indeed." But we must remember that the return of Lazarus to his home was only a temporary restoration. He came ...
— Personal Friendships of Jesus • J. R. Miller
... speedy justice in a very literal sense, and allowing only fifteen days for the examination of this important affair, she sent a citation to Lenox, requiring him to appear in court, and prove his charge against Bothwell.[*] This nobleman, meanwhile, and all ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part D. - From Elizabeth to James I. • David Hume
... illustrates the difficulty which the alchemists themselves had in understanding what they meant by the term Mercury; yet there is perhaps no word more often used by them than that. Some of them evidently took it to mean the substance then, and now, called mercury; the results of this literal interpretation were disastrous; others thought of mercury as a substance which could be obtained, or, at any rate, might be obtained, by repeatedly distilling ordinary mercury, both alone and when mixed with other substances; others used the word to mean a hypothetical something which was liquid ...
— The Story of Alchemy and the Beginnings of Chemistry • M. M. Pattison Muir
... sacrificing qualities that a brother should have for a sister, he was nevertheless her blood kin, and without doubt he had loaded his pistol with a bullet for the man whom he believed would have it in his power to crush that beautiful sister to the earth, even to the point of literal seduction. For judged from the nihilists' standpoint again, they understood Zara to be one who would not hesitate at any sacrifice, in defense ...
— Princess Zara • Ross Beeckman
... extinct in their old haunts and homes. I have heard one of the members for Cape Breton speak in high terms of that portion of his constituency; and I believe I am correct in saying that Mr. Le Visconte, the late Finance Minister of Nova Scotia, was, in the literal sense of the term, an Acadian. Mr. Cozzans, of New York, who wrote a very readable little book the other day about Nova Scotia, describes the French residents near the basin of Minas, and he says, especially of the women, 'they might have stepped out of Normandy ...
— Canada and the States • Edward William Watkin
... when our bread-dust was of real service to them, and they were always particularly desirous of obtaining it for their younger children. They distinguished this kind of food by the name of kanibroot, and biscuit or soft bread by that of shegalak, the literal meaning of which terms we never could discover, but supposed them to have some reference to their ...
— Three Voyages for the Discovery of a Northwest Passage from the • Sir William Edward Parry
... believed, have taught himself to acquiesce, had he seen any chance of happiness before her; but the picture he drew of her prospects justified his misery, at being only able to goad her on, instead of drawing her back. He was absolutely amazed at himself. He had spoken only the literal truth, when he said that he had been unconscious of the true nature of the feelings that always drew him towards her, though only to assert his independence, and make experiments by teasing in his ironically ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... four men and dog-teams at the former place by December 20th, ready to carry us on to Penzhina and Anadyrsk. We engaged an old and experienced Cossack named Gregorie Zinovief as guide and Chukchi interpreter, hired a young Russian called Yagor as cook and aid-de-camp (in the literal sense), packed our stores on our sledges and secured them with lashings of sealskin thongs, and by December 13th were ready to take the field. That evening the Major delivered to us our instructions. They were simply to ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan
... to judge the quality of literature, distinguishing with ease between what is literal and what is imaginative, or figurative, or humorous. When they read that the rope with which the powerful Fenris-Wolf was bound was "made out of such things as the sound of a cat's footsteps, the roots of the mountains, the breath of a fish and the sinews of a bear, and nothing could break ...
— How To Study and Teaching How To Study • F. M. McMurry
... Saxe punningly puts it; but more of a leveler was this old coach, for there was of necessity the forceful putting of people of the most heterogeneous character together in the most homogeneous manner as the omnibus (most literal word here), made up its hashy load at the hand and command of the driver, whose word was unappealable law as complete as that of another captain on the high seas. Prodigal, profligate, and pure, maiden or Magdalene, millionaire or Lazarus, all were crowded together as the needs ...
— Trail Tales • James David Gillilan
... not Life only, but all the garniture and form of Life, and work and speak, and even think and feel, as our fathers and primeval grandfathers from the beginning have given it to us;' how 'mankind is a living, indivisible whole.'[14] Even this, however, with the 'literal communion of saints,' which follows in connection with it, is only a detached suggestion, not incorporated with the body of the writer's doctrine. It does not neutralise the general lack of faith in the cultivable virtue of masses ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 2: Carlyle • John Morley
... the gods in the literal sense; the gods were supposed to dwell in them, their spirits having entered into the graven images or blocks of stone. It is probable that like the Ancient Egyptians they believed a god had as many spirits as he had attributes. The gods, as we have said, ...
— Myths of Babylonia and Assyria • Donald A. Mackenzie
... soul-life - the division which was to give him, on the one hand, an abstract experience of his own self, divorced from the outer world, and on the other a mere onlooker's experience of that outer world. As a result of these endeavours, concepts were formed which in their literal meaning seemed to apply merely to outwardly perceptible substances, while in truth they stood for the spiritual functions represented by those substances, both within and outside the ...
— Man or Matter • Ernst Lehrs
... upon its having for object either to state a true thing, or adorn a serviceable one. The two functions of art in Italy, in this entirely liberal and virescent phase of it,—virgin art, we may call it, retaining the most literal sense of the words virga and virgo,—are to manifest the doctrines of a religion which now, for the first time, men had soul enough to understand; and to adorn edifices or dress, with which the completed politeness of daily life might be invested, its convenience ...
— Val d'Arno • John Ruskin
... "Familiar Phrases," most of which appear to be old friends with new faces, Senhor Carolino's literal cribs from the French become more and more apparent, in spite of his boast in the Preface of being "clean of gallicisms and despoiled phrases." "Apply you at the study during that you are young" is doubtless an excellent precept, and as he remarks further on "How do you can it to deny"; but ...
— English as she is spoke - or, A jest in sober earnest • Jose da Fonseca
... has followed the Genevan or Puritan version. It was a favourite version with our pilgrim forefathers, and is in many texts more faithful than our authorized translation; but, in this passage, our present version is more literal. The same Hebrew word, to 'break' or 'bruise,' is used as to Satan's head ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... fair to say, that, just as music must have all these, so conversation must have its partial truths, its embellished truths, its exaggerated truths. It is in its higher forms an artistic product, and admits the ideal element as much as pictures or statues. One man who is a little too literal can spoil the talk of a whole tableful of men of esprit.— "Yes," you say, "but who wants to hear fanciful people's nonsense? Put the facts to it, and then see where it is!"—Certainly, if a man is too fond of paradox,—if he is flighty and empty,—if, instead of striking those fifths ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... was plunged in all the most appropriate emotions—shedding floods of tears over my lost childhood and my misspent youth. Don't you like to have a good cry now and then? Oh, I don't mean literal tears, of course; only spiritual ones. For the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life. ...
— Grey Roses • Henry Harland
... church had given her fine ideals and moral precepts; but religion itself was not a reality to her. It was not a deep urge, an inner and profound passion as it was with him. She prayed in church, she had always prayed—half automatically—at bedtime; but actual, entreating prayer to a literal God had been outside her born of thought. In her sheltered life she had never felt the need of a literal God. The spirit of All Being was not close to her, as ...
— The Snowshoe Trail • Edison Marshall
... that point very quick. People take the figurative language of the Bible and the allegories for literal, and the first thing they ask for when they get here is a halo and a harp, and so on. Nothing that's harmless and reasonable is refused a body here, if he asks it in the right spirit. So they are outfitted with these things without a word. They go and sing and play just about one ...
— Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven • Mark Twain
... of Herakles, Theseus, Perseus, and so forth, in the reader succeeding the primer, and the stories of Odysseus, or Ulysses, as we commonly call him, following as a third book, answering to our second or third reader. This book I brought home with me and had a careful, literal translation made. I submitted this translation to that notable scholar, Zenaide A. Ragozin, with whom I faithfully traversed the ground, word by word and sentence by sentence. This version I have carefully compared with ...
— Odysseus, the Hero of Ithaca - Adapted from the Third Book of the Primary Schools of Athens, Greece • Homer
... is the earth, and the sisters are the tribes that dwell thereon. The little book was conceived in a happy hour; its pictures are so real and so graphic, so warm and so human, that the most literal and the most imaginative of children must find in them, not only something to charm, but also to mould pleasant associations for maturer years. THOMAS ...
— A Mother's List of Books for Children • Gertrude Weld Arnold
... last of the great school of American poets that made the last quarter of a century brilliant, asked me in the White Mountains, one morning after prayers, in which I had given out Cowper's famous hymn about "The Fountain Filled with Blood," "Do you really believe there is a literal application of the blood of Christ to the soul?" My negative reply then is my negative reply now. The Bible statement agrees with all physicians, and all physiologists, and all scientists, in saying that the blood is the life, and in the ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage
... how far the gospels are original, and how far they consist of Greek and Chinese interpolations. The record that Jesus said certain things is not invalidated by a demonstration that Confucius said them before him. Those who claim a literal divine paternity for him cannot be silenced by the discovery that the same claim was made for Alexander and Augustus. And I am not just now concerned with the credibility of the gospels as records ...
— Preface to Androcles and the Lion - On the Prospects of Christianity • George Bernard Shaw
... Grant even went so far as to give them a grudging professional tribute. They held a canker of doubt, too, which it was difficult to dissect. Their veiled threats were perplexing. While their effect, as apart from literal significance, was fresh in his mind, he made a few ...
— The Postmaster's Daughter • Louis Tracy
... Quakers amongst us, whose system of religion, first founded upon enthusiasm, hath been many years growing into a craft, held it an unlawful action to take an oath to a magistrate. This doctrine was taught them by the author of their sect, from a literal application of the text, "Swear not at all;" but being a body of people, wholly turned to trade and commerce of all kinds, they found themselves on many occasions deprived of the benefit of the law, as well as of voting at elections, ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. X. • Jonathan Swift
... crime. He found there something akin to his own imaginative mood, something which he alone could fully comprehend and interpret. From the superficial narratives of writers like Bandello he extracted a spiritual essence which was, if not the literal, at least the ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... a city, whose inhabitants dwell on the tops of trees like rooks." Thus spake Erasmus; and this literal fact makes Amsterdam a most curious as well as a ...
— The Strand Magazine: Volume VII, Issue 37. January, 1894. - An Illustrated Monthly • Edited by George Newnes
... a literal obedience, too. There were great joints of corned beef, red and savory; pots of cabbage, and huge mounds of boiled potatoes. Pots of mustard were scattered along the table, and each man had a pitcher ...
— The Camp Fire Girls on the March - Bessie King's Test of Friendship • Jane L. Stewart
... been poor, at least within modern memory—a literal, actual poverty when often there has not been enough to eat in the family pot to go around. She has had a difficult time in the economic race for bread and butter for her children. There is neither sufficient land easily cultivable nor manufacturing resources to ...
— The World Decision • Robert Herrick
... preferred seeing him exhibit his uniform in the drawing-rooms of London, had purchased the step into his present corps from a cavalry regiment at home. Not that we mean, however, to assert he was not a feather-bed soldier in its more literal sense: no man that ever glittered in gold and scarlet was fonder of a feather-bed than the young baronet; and, in fact, his own observations, recorded in the early part of this volume, sufficiently prove his predilection ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson
... criticisms. Of course she had been reminded of something—of the strictures which a certain Provincial Editor had passed on the household arrangements of a certain Minor Canon; a libel action had ensued, and the jury had been beguiled into finding for the defendant on a bare literal construction of words which to anybody acquainted with local circumstances bore another and much blacker meaning. This Mrs. Baxter called a pettifogging trick, and she pursued her parallel till the same terms were obviously indicated ...
— Quisante • Anthony Hope
... hereafter be confined to those bodies to which its literal meaning refers—fat, unctuous, inodorous (when pure), greasy substances—and can no longer be applied to those odoriferous materials which possess qualities diametrically opposite to oil. We have grappled with "spirit," and fixed its meaning in a chemical sense; we have no longer "spirit" ...
— The Art of Perfumery - And Methods of Obtaining the Odors of Plants • G. W. Septimus Piesse
... and general readers, the writer submits it to the public, chiefly as the result of antiquarian research, and actual observation during a period of nearly forty years. The writer does not attempt to define what superstition is, either in its broadest or most literal sense; but, as he desires the expression to be understood, it may be considered to imply a fear of the Evil One and his emissaries, a trust in benign spirits and saints, a faith in occult science, and a belief that a conjunction of certain planets or other inanimate bodies is capable of producing ...
— The Mysteries of All Nations • James Grant
... had a high-school course in Latin can experiment with Virgil, turning it either into couplets like Pope's Iliad or into the more appropriate meter used by Longfellow in his Evangeline. With a dictionary and a literal translation it is easy enough to puzzle out Horace, who is more modern in his thought and who is, in a way, the ancestor of our present vers-de-societe writers. There is also this advantage in the translation of Horace: One finds a chance to compare ...
— Rhymes and Meters - A Practical Manual for Versifiers • Horatio Winslow
... literal meaning of Tjipanas, and a hot spring in the vicinity of the villa supplies the bath-rooms, as well as the swimming ...
— Across the Equator - A Holiday Trip in Java • Thomas H. Reid
... quite twenty shillings in the pound. What say you to the assets? The statue will not be forth coming—but will you have the model, after which the undug block was to have been chiseled? Shall I send you the literal truth which I had intended to drape with imagination—tell the facts of real life which I had designed to weave into a story. I shall thus, at least, clear yourself of the non-fulfillment of the promise of your pre-advertised contents, and (engaging to send you a story properly completed for the ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 1 January 1848 • Various
... knock on the eye against his gun, which he was carrying before him; and after a minute's rueful look he joined heartily in the shouts of laughter of his father and brother at his expense, "Ah, Charley, brag is a good dog, but holdfast is a better. I never saw a more literal proof of the saying. There, jump up again, and I need not say ...
— On the Pampas • G. A. Henty
... saying that "a negro has no rights which a white man is bound to respect." This was certainly a distortion of his exact words and meaning; yet the exaggeration was more than half excusable, in view of the literal and unbending rigor with which he proclaimed the constitutional disability of the entire African race in the United States, and denied their birthright in the Declaration of Independence. His unmerciful logic made the black before the law less than a slave; it reduced him ...
— Abraham Lincoln, A History, Volume 2 • John George Nicolay and John Hay
... early part of the eighteenth century that music began to be cultivated as an art in America.[391:1] Up to that time "the service of song in the house of the Lord" had consisted, in most worshiping assemblies on this continent, in the singing of rude literal versifications of the Psalms and other Scriptures to some eight or ten old tunes handed down by tradition, and variously sung in various congregations, as modified by local practice. The coming in of "singing by rule" was nearly ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... told with the simplicity and sprightliness of which the French language is so peculiarly capable, but which a literal translation would render not only ...
— Think Before You Speak - The Three Wishes • Catherine Dorset
... followed by their English equivalents. Literal translations have been followed, excepting a few instances where preference is shown for a clearer or more comprehensive ...
— The Human Comedy - Introductions and Appendix • Honore de Balzac
... and anomaly in the mind and heart of man. Again, what would become of the Posthaec meminisse juvabit of the poet, if a principle of fluctuation and reaction is not inherent in the very constitution of our nature, or if all moral truth is a mere literal truism? We are not, then, so much to inquire what certain things are abstractedly or in themselves, as how they affect the mind, and to approve or condemn them accordingly. The same object seen near strikes us more powerfully ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... place; and he was so loved and trusted by the firemen of his district, that no mayor, however beset by applicants for office, had ever dreamed of removing him. In all of Uncle Ith's limited relations with the world, he was esteemed an honest man; and his word would have possessed the literal novelty of being as good as his note, had necessity ever required him to borrow money. But Uncle Ith was frugal, and made his small salary suffice for himself and a ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... opinion of Mr. Watling, of modern lawyers in general. More than once a wave of self-congratulation surged through me that I had possessed the foresight and initiative to get out of the wholesale grocery business while there was yet time. I looked at Willie, still freckled, still literal, still a plodder, at Walter Kinley, and I thought of the drabness of their lives; at Cousin Robert himself as he sat smoking his cigar in the bay-window on that dark February day, and suddenly I pitied him. The suspicion struck me that he had not prospered of ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill |
