"Literate" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... officers of state, chancellors and others, countersigned in autograph. The unlettered Merovingian kings made use of monograms composed of the letters of their names; and, curiously, the illiterate monogram was destined to supersede the literate subscriptions. For the monogram was adopted by Charlemagne and his successors as a recognized symbol of their subscription. It was their signum manuale, their sign manual. In courtly imitation of the royal practice, monograms ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... extraordinary collection of heresies, most of them almost too acrid to be bruited about. In other words, this mass of platitudes took Americans by surprise, and somehow shocked them. What was commonplace to even the peasants of the European Continent was so unfamiliar to even the literate minority over here that the book acquired a sort of sinister repute, and the writer himself came to be discussed as a fellow with the habit of arising in decorous society and indelicately ...
— The American Credo - A Contribution Toward the Interpretation of the National Mind • George Jean Nathan
... typical woman by the notion of marriage has been noted as self-evident by every literate student of the phenomena of sex, from the early Christian fathers down to Nietzsche, Ellis and Shaw. That It is denied by the current sentimentality of Christendom is surely no evidence against it. What we have in ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... supported by the State, though it was not for more than a century that this was generally brought about. The general result of this legislation was that the Scandinavian countries, then including Finland, early became literate nations. ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... were large villages belonging to the crown or to owners whose serfs paid quitrent and could work where they pleased. There were very few resident landlords in the neighborhood and also very few domestic or literate serfs, and in the lives of the peasantry of those parts the mysterious undercurrents in the life of the Russian people, the causes and meaning of which are so baffling to contemporaries, were more clearly and strongly noticeable than among others. One instance, which had occurred some ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... went—a huddled mass of humanity, literate and illiterate, of all ages, of all conditions, and none laughed, none grinned, none smiled, none spoke—all that was past. They stopped, they moved again—as the Flopper stopped and moved. Occasionally a child cried out—occasionally ...
— The Miracle Man • Frank L. Packard
... girl really kissed him, he'd creep out of his den and be human. If Will were as literate as Guy, or Guy were as executive as Will, I think I could endure even Gopher Prairie. It's so hard to mother Will. I could be maternal with Guy. Is that what I want, something to mother, a man or a baby or a town? I WILL ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... are great civilising agents) may have been responsible for the wars, harryings, kidnappings and cattle raids which, alternating with rigorous and austere religious ceremonial, formed the bulk of their pleasures. Nowadays we leave these violent entertainments to children and the semi-literate and take our pleasures more composedly. A man who can put his hands in his pockets will seldom remove them for the purpose of slaying some one whose only fault is that he was born in the County Sligo. A man with a pipe in his teeth will be ...
— Here are Ladies • James Stephens
... than five waggon loads; a veritable hoard, overflowing into the hall of his house, and into his bedroom, where he steps over them to get to his couch. He was a man "of small learning," says Murimuth; "passably literate," writes Chambre; at the best, according to Petrarch, "of ardent temperament, not ignorant of literature, with a natural curiosity for out-of-the- way lore": an antiquarian, not of the lovable kind, but unscrupulous, pedantic, and vain, indulging an inordinate ...
— Old English Libraries, The Making, Collection, and Use of Books • Ernest A. Savage
... only of the literary class, but of literature itself, and resorted to extreme measures of coercion. The writers took up the gage of battle thrown down by the emperor, and Hwangti became the object of the wit and abuse of every literate who could use a pencil. His birth was aspersed. It was said that he was not a Tsin at all, that his origin was of the humblest, and that he was a substituted child foisted on the last of the Tsin princes. These personal attacks were accompanied by unfavorable criticism of all his ...
— China • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... he had spent two years as chemist at the Romanones mines in Andalusia; and he had learned by now the art of talking to the Scotch, whom he had discovered to be as extravagantly literate as they were unsensuous. To them panpipes might play in vain, but almost any series of statistics or the more desiccated kind of social fact recited with a terrier-like air of sagacity would entrance them. "The mines are Baird's, you ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... wig and a billowing black gown, with a big congregation beneath him. But we are not anxious to hear what he is saying. We know it is all very elegant. We know it will be printed and be bound in finely-tooled full calf, and no palaeo-Georgian gentleman's library will be complete without it. Literate people in those days were comparatively few; but, bating that, one may say that sermons were as much in request as novels are to-day. I wonder, will mankind continue to be capricious? It is a very solemn thought ...
— And Even Now - Essays • Max Beerbohm
... inclined to regard the South Kensington scholar as the intellectual salt of the earth, to overrate the abundance of "decent things" yielding from one hundred and fifty to three hundred a year, and to disregard the competition of such inferior enterprises as the universities of Oxford, Cambridge, and the literate North. But the scholastic agents to whom he went on the following Saturday did much in a quiet way to disabuse ...
— Love and Mr. Lewisham • H. G. Wells
... my fellows in misfortune. The Corporal of the Keys was a clerk in the house of Ticknor & Field, the great Boston publishers, before he became a soldier; and was disposed to show every consideration and indulgence to one whom he was pleased to consider a brother of the Literate Guild. The under-superintendent—Donnelly by name—treated one with a benevolence quite paternal. The monotony of my solitary confinement was often broken by his rambling chat and reminiscences of a gambler's life in the Far West; for ...
— Border and Bastille • George A. Lawrence |
