"Obsolete" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... found and helps to destroy the insects and to avoid the dangers of contact. This is the formula after which those reformers want to work who hold the old-fashioned policy of silence in sexual matters to be obsolete. Of course they aim toward a mild beginning. It may start with beautiful descriptions of blossoms and of fruits, of eggs and of hens, before it comes to the account of sexual intercourse and human embryos, but if the talking is to have any effect superior to not talking, the ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... Ro. The custom was getting to be a little obsolete even before I left home; but it is almost an American custom, by sticking to us longer than to ...
— The Redskins; or, Indian and Injin, Volume 1. - Being the Conclusion of the Littlepage Manuscripts • James Fenimore Cooper
... certain degree of truth underlying this view. In the settled nationalities of the West these distinctions of race and religion have a tendency to become unimportant and obsolete for political purposes, although a glance across the water to Ireland will remind us that they have by no means disappeared. What I wish to lay stress upon is the very serious importance of race and religion, politically, in other parts of the world, ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... large. No matter how many laws they passed increasing the severity of the punishments inflicted on those who ate meat in secret, the people found means of setting them aside as fast as they were made. At times, indeed, they would become almost obsolete, but when they were on the point of being repealed, some national disaster or the preaching of some fanatic would reawaken the conscience of the nation, and people were imprisoned by the thousand for illicitly selling ...
— Erewhon • Samuel Butler
... the strength of the belief he attacks and in the course of time even they who have defended begin to shift from it and it becomes refuted. Beliefs, as Lecky[1] so well pointed out, are not so of ten destroyed as become obsolete. ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... after this affair, the king himself procured for his old "torconnier" a young orphan in whom he took an interest. Louis XI. called Maitre Cornelius familiarly by that obsolete term, which, under the reign of Saint-Louis, meant a usurer, a collector of imposts, a man who pressed others by violent means. The epithet, "tortionnaire," which remains to this day in our legal phraseology, explains the old word torconnier, which we often find ...
— Maitre Cornelius • Honore de Balzac
... unknown. Some attribute it to direct inspiration (whatever that may mean), others to marks traced upon the sand originally by boys stealing palm-wine. My belief is that the suggestion came from the Moslems. Of late years it has been waxing obsolete, and few care to write their letters ...
— To The Gold Coast for Gold, Vol. II - A Personal Narrative • Richard Francis Burton and Verney Lovett Cameron
... matter of fact this original wolfish attitude of nations is already obsolete, if it ever existed. The expansion and growth of political and moral relations is a gradual process, and the fact that for the sake of brevity and clearness we fix and describe certain arbitrary points in that process must not ...
— The World in Chains - Some Aspects of War and Trade • John Mavrogordato
... our feet much impressed; and now absolutely convinced that there did exist, somewhere, descendants of prehistoric men in whom the third eye—placed in the back of the head for purposes of defensive observation—had not become obsolete and reduced to the traces which we know only as the pituitary body ...
— Police!!! • Robert W. Chambers
... Agriculture dominates the economy, with cotton being the most important crop. Mineral resources, varied but limited in amount, include silver, gold, uranium, and tungsten. Industry is limited to a large aluminum plant, hydropower facilities, and small obsolete factories mostly in light industry and food processing. The Tajik economy has been gravely weakened by four years of civil conflict and by the loss of subsidies and markets for its products, which has left Tajikistan dependent on Russia and Uzbekistan and on international ...
— The 1996 CIA Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... I lay there on that contracted place, and the half-smothery sensation began to make life miserable, I remembered some of the lessons we were taught at school about requiring so many cubic feet of fresh air, and began to wonder if such laws were obsolete out here." ...
— Winter Adventures of Three Boys • Egerton R. Young
... where instruments of punishment were piled up. There were rattans and bamboos for flogging purposes by the side of yokes, collars, and fetters, carefully designed for subduing the refractory. There was a double set of stocks like those now obsolete in America, and their appearance indicated frequent use. To be cornered in these would be as unpleasant as in Harlem ...
— Overland through Asia; Pictures of Siberian, Chinese, and Tartar - Life • Thomas Wallace Knox
... was Eph. Perhaps he had another name, too, but if so it had become obsolete. Far and wide he was ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume III. (of X.) • Various
... hear again, a name she was trying to forget. But as she was unable to trace anything which had led to it, there remained only the conclusion that her nerves were not what they should be. The vapors having become obsolete for young ladies as an explanation for all unpleasant sensations, they were instructed to have "nerves." This was Miss Betty's first consciousness of her own, and, desiring no greater acquaintance with them, she told herself it was unwholesome to fall ...
— The Two Vanrevels • Booth Tarkington
... judicious selection from the treatises of such foreign writers as the severe and critical Anderson, the brilliant but capricious Drummond, Robert Martin, perhaps the first of living players, Hay, Sinclair, and Wylie, besides many valuable games from Sturges and Payne, who will never be rendered obsolete by modern improvements,—together with the labors of such acknowledged masters in America as Bethell, Mercer, Ash, Drysdale, and Young, and the contributions of such rising players as Howard, Brooks, Fisk, Boughton, Janvier, Hull, and Thwing. But his labors have not been merely those ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... claim for damages, for so insignificant a wrong as cutting down and carrying off a few pine or oak trees, was regarded as a mean-spirited act in a proprietor. The habits formed at this period are not altogether obsolete, and even now the notion of a common right of property in the woods still lingers, if not as an opinion at least as a sentiment. Under such circumstances it has been difficult to protect the forest, whether it belong to the State or to individuals. Property ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... now stand in the vestibule of a vast new technological age-one that, despite its capacity for human destruction, has an equal capacity to make poverty and human misery obsolete. If our efforts are wisely directed—and if our unremitting efforts for dependable peace begin to attain some success—we can surely become participants in creating an age characterized by justice and ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Dwight D. Eisenhower • Dwight D. Eisenhower
... modern science is made evident in those great lectures, "Substance and Show," "Laws of Disorder," and in those memorable sermons dealing with natural phenomena. All the progress of more than half a century has not rendered them obsolete. They can still be ...
— Starr King in California • William Day Simonds
... system of spiritual physic," replied the spectre, "is obsolete, and the holy-water cure, in particular, has almost ceased to number any advocates, except the Rev. Dr F. G. Lee, whose books," said this candid apparition, "appear to me to indicate superstitious credulity. No, I don't know that any new discoveries have been made ...
— In the Wrong Paradise • Andrew Lang
... slight movement which seemed to draw the three of them into alliance together. Katharine's tone and glance made Mr. Hilbery once more feel completely at a loss, and in addition, painfully and angrily obsolete; but in spite of an awful inner ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... accident] one would say, Why have anything to do with such a testy person? [Wrong word; no testy person can manage cool and consecutive ridicule. Quaere, what is this word? Is it anything but a corruption of the obsolete word tetchy of the same meaning? Some think touchy is our modern form of tetchy, which I greatly doubt]. My answer is, the poor man is lamentably ignorant; he is not only so, but 'out of the way' [quite true; my readers know me by this time for an out-of-the-way person. What ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... sense of the word 'ballad,' or rather of its French and Provencal predecessors, balada, balade (derived from the late Latin ballare, to dance), was 'a song intended as the accompaniment to a dance,' a sense long obsolete.[1] Next came the meaning, a simple song of sentiment or romance, of two verses or more, each of which is sung to the same air, the accompaniment being subordinate to the melody. This sense we still use in our 'ballad-concerts.' ...
— Ballads of Romance and Chivalry - Popular Ballads of the Olden Times - First Series • Frank Sidgwick
... of this event. The High Priest offered the evening sacrifice unaware that it was rendered obsolete by the coming of the true Sacrifice, and Caesar slept that night without a dream that a Rival had been born who would uproot his empire and erect a worldwide kingdom. Earth was unconscious of this birth, but heaven knew it. There was holy ecstacy in all the shining ...
— A Wonderful Night; An Interpretation Of Christmas • James H. Snowden
... over my 'omnium gatherum;' the same being a drawer containing scraps of poetry, unfinished letters, half-written editorials, incidents of travel, obsolete briefs, with many other odds and ends that have fallen from my brain during the last three years, but which from want of quality in them or lack of energy in me, have failed to reach the dignity of types and ink; I came across a diary kept while hunting ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, February 1844 - Volume 23, Number 2 • Various
... The cause which induced the scribes to expressly prescribe certain passages to be read in the marginal version, I will now touch on, for not all the marginal notes are various readings, but some mark expressions which have passed out of common use, obsolete words and terms which current decency did not allow to be read in a public assembly. (88) The ancient writers, without any evil intention, employed no courtly paraphrase, but called things by their plain names. (891) Afterwards, through the spread ...
— A Theologico-Political Treatise [Part II] • Benedict de Spinoza
... was the mother of Florence, and, in spite of formal objections to the contrary, I venture to defend that now somewhat obsolete and heretical opinion. For why does Fiesole stand just where it does? What made them build a city up there, anyway? Well, a town always exists just where it does exist for some good and amply sufficient reason. Even if, like Fiesole, it is mainly a survival (though at Fiesole there are, ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... the B's in the Index came 'Miss Barrett' and, woe's me, 'R.B.'! I don't know when I have had so ghastly a visitation. There was the utterly forgotten letter, in the as thoroughly disused hand-writing, in the ... I fear ... still as completely obsolete feeling—no, not so bad as that—but at first there was all the novelty, and social admiration at the friend—it is truly not right to pluck all the rich soil from the roots and hold them up clean and dry as if they came so from all you ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... circle of their own— "old-fashioned" people certainly, but happily free from the sort of suppressed rowdyism which distinguishes the "nouveaux riches" of the present day,—people who adhered rigidly to almost obsolete notions of honour and dignity, who lived simply and well within their means, who spoke reverently of things religious and believed in the old adage—"Manners makyth the man." So by degrees, Innocent found herself ...
— Innocent - Her Fancy and His Fact • Marie Corelli
... consequences, the letter had a prima facie interest, of no ordinary kind, as the first for years from a once constant correspondent. And so I sat studying the envelope with a curiosity too piquant not to be enjoyed. What in the world could so obsolete a friend find to say to one now? Six months earlier there had been a certain opportunity for an advance, which at that time could not possibly have been misconstrued; when they landed me, a few later, there was another and perhaps a better one. But this was the last summer of the late century, and ...
— No Hero • E.W. Hornung
... advance or retard, but you cannot prevent it. It will work out like the development of organic nature. In the present state of civilization and with the scientific means of happiness at our command, the notion of home should be obsolete. Home is a barbarous idea; the method of a rude age; home is isolation; therefore anti-social. What we ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... of his verse, and in the harmony, simplicity, and variety, of his composition. Antique expressions I have avoided; admitting, however, some old words, where they seemed to suit the subject; but I hope none will be found that are now obsolete, or in any degree unintelligible to a reader ...
— The Minstrel; or the Progress of Genius - with some other poems • James Beattie
... whose cells are charged with sand saturated with dilute acid. It prevents spilling of acid. It is now practically obsolete. ...
— The Standard Electrical Dictionary - A Popular Dictionary of Words and Terms Used in the Practice - of Electrical Engineering • T. O'Conor Slone
... Power is, in fact, becoming as obsolete as the Monopoly of Power enjoyed by the Roman Empire. It is a bankrupt policy which went into liquidation in 1914, and the high court of public opinion demands a reconstruction. The principle of that reconstruction was stated by President Wilson, ...
— Essays in Liberalism - Being the Lectures and Papers Which Were Delivered at the - Liberal Summer School at Oxford, 1922 • Various
... wreck of a steady central lava-flood, which truly was volcanic and explosive to a strange degree, but did rest as few others on the grand fire-depths of the world. Thus, if he stormed along, ten thousand strong, in the time of the Reform Bill, indignantly denouncing Toryism and its obsolete insane pretensions; and then if, after some experience of Whig management, he discerned that Wellington and Peel, by whatever name entitled, were the men to be depended on by England,—there lay in all this, visible enough, a deeper consistency ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... battalion, including myself, were sent to L—, where we went through a course in bombing. Here we were instructed in the uses, methods of throwing, and manufacture of various kinds of hand grenades, from the old "jam tin," now obsolete, to the present Mills bomb, the ...
— Over The Top • Arthur Guy Empey
... Milton was one of the tabooed poets—to say what he thought as forcibly as he could say it; and he has suffered the natural punishment of plain speaking. It must, of course, be admitted that a book embodying such principles is doomed to become more or less obsolete, like his political pamphlets. And yet, as significant of the writer's own character, as containing many passages of sound judgment, expressed in forcible language, it is still, if not a great book, really impressive within ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... British rule passed through a trial by fire and it emerged from the ordeal unscathed and fortified. For it was purged of all the ambiguities of a dual position and of divided responsibilities. The last of the Moghuls forfeited the shadowy remnants of an obsolete sovereignty. Just a hundred years earlier Clive had advised after Plassey that the Crown should assume direct sovereignty over the whole of the British possessions in India, as the responsibility was growing too heavy for the mere trading corporation that ...
— India, Old and New • Sir Valentine Chirol
... should mention the progress of the West Indian war; but the Parliamentary campaign opening so warmly, has quite put the Ohio upon an obsolete foot. All I know is, that the Virginians have disbanded all their troops and say they will trust to England for their defence. The dissensions in Ireland increase. At least, here are various and ample fields for speeches, if we are to have new oppositions. You will ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... answered, that the old poets took the same method of describing the passions and fancies of men whom they met at large, which forms the point of communion between us: for the title of the old play, "A Mad World, my Masters," is hardly yet obsolete; and we are pretty much the same Bedlam still, perhaps a little better managed, like the real one, and with more care and ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... result of accidental collision, on the other. But, as every one anticipated, the charge of the judge and the finding of the jury demanded strenuously the extreme penalty of the law. Besides this the judge deemed it advisable to introduce into the sentence one of those already obsolete penalties of posthumous degradation, devised in coarser ages for the purpose of making an ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... inasmuch as it enabled the person using it to take a more steady aim than with the other, which, revolving and firing by the action of the trigger, the moment of explosion could not be depended upon. To Col. Colt belongs the honour of so combining obsolete and modern inventions, and superadding such improvements of his own, as to produce the first practical ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... dint of extraordinary excellence! Our mistuned and unplayable organs and pianofortes replaced by harmonious instruments, as manageable as barrel organs! Works of fiction superseded by interesting company and conversation, and made obsolete by the human mind outgrowing the childishness that delights in the tales told by grownup children such as novelists and their like! An end to the silly confusion, under the one name of Art, of the tomfoolery and make-believe of our play-hours with the higher methods of teaching men to know themselves! ...
— An Unsocial Socialist • George Bernard Shaw
... thus ignore the educational progress of the age, starve our children spiritually, and hamper them in their religious development by this obsolete system of education which has been long since outgrown in the public schools? Why should we not ignore tradition, prejudice, and personal preference, where these are in the way, and let the needs of the child decide? Why should thousands of ...
— How to Teach Religion - Principles and Methods • George Herbert Betts
... Thou, some seer the power to sing them in their might, The men who feared the master's whip, but did not fear the fight; That he may tell of their virtues as minstrels did of old, Till the pride of face and the hate of race grow obsolete ...
— The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... have preserved the memory of the coaching days for us do not appear to have taken coachmen seriously, or to have regarded them as responsible and civilized men. Abuse of the railway from a pastoral point of view is obsolete. There are millions of grown persons in England to whom the far sound of the train is as pleasantly suggestive as the piping of a blackbird. Again—is not that Lord Worthington getting out of the train? Yes, that one, at the third ...
— Cashel Byron's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... they may keep the government within the bounds they have set for it; otherwise it will disregard them as is proved by the example of all our American governments, in which the constitutions have all become obsolete, at the moment of their adoption, for nearly or quite all purposes except the appointment of officers, who at once become practically absolute, except so far as they are restrained by ...
— An Essay on the Trial By Jury • Lysander Spooner
... what I believe there is, in every nation, a stile which never becomes obsolete, a certain mode of phraseology so consonant and congenial to the analogy and principles of its respective language as to remain settled and unaltered; this stile is probably to be sought in the common intercourse of life, among those who speak only to be understood, without ...
— Preface to Shakespeare • Samuel Johnson
... to replicate this text as faithfully as possible, including obsolete and variant spellings and other inconsistencies. Corrections in the text are noted below, with corrections inside ...
— Still Jim • Honore Willsie Morrow
... have inherited "white elephants," which may be of absolutely no use to us, encumbrances of which we cannot easily rid ourselves, influential ideas which are no longer adequate to our present situation, obsolete emotions, methods, or institutions. We may allow our cultural inheritance, through bad education, to fall ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... "impression-stone." Modern machinery has swept all this old-world mechanism into oblivion; the wooden press which, with all its imperfections, turned out such beautiful work for the Elzevirs, Plantin, Aldus, and Didot is so completely forgotten, that something must be said as to the obsolete gear on which Jerome-Nicolas Sechard set an almost superstitious affection, for it plays a part in this ...
— Two Poets - Lost Illusions Part I • Honore de Balzac
... Campo (obsolete grade) about equivalent to the modern General of Brigade. This officer was practically the ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... of Parliament, the last trace of the judicial negative disappeared. From that time on the right of Parliament to be the constitutional judge of its own powers has not been seriously questioned. Even the veto power of the King soon became obsolete, though in theory ...
— The Spirit of American Government - A Study Of The Constitution: Its Origin, Influence And - Relation To Democracy • J. Allen Smith
... the nineteenth century. If it has now been dethroned or reduced to the measure of truth it contains—for undoubtedly a natural object enters as a component into the essence of some Greek deities—this is in the first place due to the intensive study of the religions of primitive peoples, living or obsolete; and the results of this study were only applied to Greek religion during the last decade of the century. But the starting-point of modern history of religion lies much farther back: its beginnings date from the great revival of historical research which was inaugurated ...
— Atheism in Pagan Antiquity • A. B. Drachmann
... forego his favourite old songs, written by "honest Harry Carey," (as Ritson insists on his being called); the mother is laughed to scorn if she mentions "Auld Robin Gray," "Mary's Dream," "Oh, Nanny, wilt thou gang wi' me?"—or such obsolete stuff;—and even the brothers, who might stickle a little for ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 393, October 10, 1829 • Various
... his own employer too long. The only credential he could produce was the testimony of his whole life. What better recommendation could anyone require? But vaguely he felt that the unique document would be looked upon as an archaic curiosity of the Eastern waters, a screed traced in obsolete words—in a ...
— End of the Tether • Joseph Conrad
... against any and every change from the strict letter of the printed music—ignorant of the possibility, that only in this way can its spirit be respected—the changes in a multitude of cases are essential because due (1) to reverential deciphering of an obsolete musical notation, (2) to improvements in musical instruments, or (3) to the sanction and authority of ...
— Style in Singing • W. E. Haslam
... at some of Harrington's other notions:—"The way propounded [Milton's] is plain, easy, and open before us: without intricacies, without the introducement of new or obsolete forms or terms, or exotic models,—ideas that would effect nothing, but with a number of new injunctions to manacle the native liberty of mankind; turning all virtue into prescription, servitude, and necessity, to the great impairing and ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... Walter, in one of his numerous addresses to the public, "lay before me in a confused arrangement. It consisted of about ninety thousand words. This multitudinous mass I reduced to about five thousand, by separating the parcels, and removing the obsolete words, technical terms, ...
— Captains of Industry - or, Men of Business Who Did Something Besides Making Money • James Parton
... myself. The same wonderful knowledge of the human mind, the same sweetness of voice, the same miraculous management which has brought us both under the same roof: yet do I find her the most abandoned of all beings; a creature guilty of that which, even in this guilty age, I thought was obsolete. And is it possible that I am like her? that I can resemble her? that even the indefinite shadow of my most unhallowed thought can for a moment be as vile as her righteousness? O God! the system of my existence seems to ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... be indifferent to elevating the taste of the masses in matters of domestic detail, or be otherwise wanting in a whole-hearted devotion to the service of humanity, or to scoff at the theory of evolution, as it would be for him to accept the errors and superstitions of an obsolete theology, or the antiquated dogmas of ...
— Fashionable Philosophy - and Other Sketches • Laurence Oliphant
... imaginative beauty to conversational commonplace, from deep feeling to didactic aphorism or theological dogma, and it has been my endeavor faithfully to interpret these variations of matter and of style, sometimes substituting modern colloquialisms for such as are obsolete, or in other ways paraphrasing a stubborn passage, but striving never to polish the dullest lines nor to strengthen ...
— The Pearl • Sophie Jewett
... of the system of government provided by the soon obsolete Articles of Confederation lay in the fact that it operated not upon the individual citizens of the United States but upon the States in their corporate capacities. As a consequence the prescribed duties ...
— John Marshall and the Constitution - A Chronicle of the Supreme Court, Volume 16 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Edward S. Corwin
... meetings a misdemeanour, while admitting the constitutional right of the people to petition. These proceedings evoked a satirical reply from Gourlay, who was arrested for seditious libel, but the prosecutions failed. It was then decided to resort to the provisions of a practically obsolete statute passed in 1804, authorising the arrest of any person who had resided in the province for six months without taking the oath of allegiance, and was suspected to be a seditious character. Such a person could be ordered by the authorities to leave the province, or give ...
— Canada under British Rule 1760-1900 • John G. Bourinot
... for all boys is the Scots kilt," says a correspondent of The Daily Mail. "My own boys wear nothing else." We are glad to see that the obsolete Highland Practice of muffling the ears in a ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, January 14, 1920 • Various
... the representatives of the people, the Executive should be made responsible to the Assembly; and, in order to bring the scattered provinces closer together, an inter-colonial railway should be built. In other words, the obsolete, bad system of colonial government must undergo radical reform, both within and without, because 'while the present state of things is allowed to last, the actual inhabitants of these provinces have no security for person ...
— The Winning of Popular Government - A Chronicle of the Union of 1841 • Archibald Macmechan
... theology and religion that is now recognized by many theologians, and in the liberalizing of the church that has marked the last two decades, are not most of your contentions already granted? Is not the "lake of fire and brimstone" an obsolete issue? ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll
... super-Dreadnought and the devastating cordite gun were still in the womb of the future; but the keels of a newer fleet were nevertheless already on the slips, and with the old order the press-gang, now for ever obsolete, went the way of all ...
— The Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore • John R. Hutchinson
... were forced in self-defence to assume the leading role. At Courtrai (in 1302) they turned the tables on the Crown, and took an ample vengeance for Bouvines, by a terrible slaughter of French knights and men-at-arms, demonstrating to a startled Europe that feudal tactics were obsolete, and that pikemen on foot were a match for the best mailed cavalry. Cheated by a treacherous Count of the due fruits of their victory, the Flemish communes nursed their resentment and waited for new opportunities, while consoling ...
— Medieval Europe • H. W. C. Davis
... Lubin, I have had a university education too; and all this about wages and distribution being fixed by immutable laws of political economy is obsolete rot. ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... amongst them, and for overawing the growth of insurrectionary movements amongst their neighbors. Acting on this system, the Roman colonies in some measure resembled the English Pale, as existing at one era in Ireland. This mode of service, it is true, became obsolete in process of time, concurrently with the dangers which it was shaped to meet; for the whole of Italy proper, together with that part of Italy called Cisalpine Gaul, was at length reduced to unity and obedience by the almighty republic. But in forwarding that great ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... the Saviour of the world, had been scattered all over the earth. The present-day Israelites were represented as people who, urged by a stiff-necked wilfulness and obstinacy and almost incomprehensible callousness, clung to the obsolete religious ideal of the stern God in opposition to the God ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... had served under him, and only regained his liberty on payment of a large sum of money.(1013) In 1507 Sir William Capel, Alderman of Walbrook Ward, who had already fallen a victim to Empson and been heavily fined under an obsolete statute, was again attacked and fined L2,000 for supposed negligence during his mayoralty. Rather than submit to such extortion he went to prison, and remained there until the king's death, when he obtained ...
— London and the Kingdom - Volume I • Reginald R. Sharpe
... but that in itself constitutes one of the bases of its richness. Scarcely a word but evokes an image, a strange, bizarre image, often a complication of images. He is never afraid of the colloquial, never afraid of slang even, and he often weaves lovely patterns with obsolete or technical words. These lines, in which Saltus paid tribute to Gautier, he might, with equal justice, have applied to himself: "No one could torment a fancy more delicately than he; he had the gift of adjective; he scented a new one afar like a truffle; and from ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten
... pass by the meat market empty-handed, because his advertising account there was traded out. He told me once that he has taken disk-plows, flaxseed, magazines, encyclopedias and a new back porch in trade for advertising and subscriptions, but that he has been wearing an obsolete pair of spectacles, to his great discomfort, for ten years, because our local jeweler will not advertise. The doctors in town carry cards in the paper and owe him large amounts because his family is too ...
— Homeburg Memories • George Helgesen Fitch
... brevity, the poetical allusion that enlivened the discourse, and the dazzling imagery, are sure to be transmitted to their respective colonies and provinces. The ornaments of poetic diction are now required, not, indeed, copied from the rude obsolete style of Accius [e] and Pacuvius, but embellished with the graces of Horace, Virgil, and [f] Lucan. The public judgement has raised a demand for harmonious periods, and, in compliance with the taste of the age, our orators grow every day more polished and adorned. Let it not be said ...
— A Dialogue Concerning Oratory, Or The Causes Of Corrupt Eloquence • Cornelius Tacitus
... another direction. The Government had kindly issued to the officers Colt Automatic Pistols and high power field glasses. My glasses were of a very high power, and I could pick out the figures of the women and men working about the farm houses five miles away. The British warships in the basin were obsolete small cruisers of slow speed, the "Diana," the "Eclipse," the "Talbot" and the "Charybdis." The latter was the flagship of the Admiral. We looked upon these ships with a good deal of apprehension. The "Dresden" or "Karlsruhe," the German ships in the Atlantic, would only have ...
— The Red Watch - With the First Canadian Division in Flanders • J. A. Currie
... velocity, the process being hastened to a comparatively small degree by the screw-down brakes on the engine and guard's van. The goods train of to-day in many cases still observes this practice, long obsolete ...
— How it Works • Archibald Williams
... young), he spared not to produce compounds which, if the names were anywise to be trusted, would supersede all other remedies, and speedily render any medicine a needless thing, making the trade of apothecary an untenable one, and the title of Doctor obsolete. Whether there was real efficacy in these nostrums, and whether their author himself had faith in them, is more than can safely be said; but, at all events, the public believed in them, and thronged to ...
— The Dolliver Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... a surplice, worn by bishops, under their satin robes. The word, it is true, is not obsolete, nor the thing disused, but it is little known."—Nares. ("Lent unto thomas Dowton, the 11 of Aprel 1598, to bye tafitie to macke a Rochet for the beshoppe in earlle good wine, xxiiii s." Henslowe's Diary, ed. Collier, ...
— Old English Plays, Vol. I - A Collection of Old English Plays • Various
... for anything—for its benign and simple expression. There was a far-off, indescribable something about this person, as though he had existed long ago and once had a meaning, but was now become an obsolete word in the human dictionary. His wide placid brows and the double chin which asserted itself above his high neckcloth gave him a curious resemblance ...
— The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... into a weird new world, so had the frog-man equipment made him still freer in the sea. And now the gill-pack which separated the needed oxygen from the water made even that lighter burden of tanks obsolete. But there remained depths into which man could not descend, whose secrets were closed to him. There the dolphins operated, in a partnership of minds, equal minds—though that last fact had been difficult for ...
— Key Out of Time • Andre Alice Norton
... her father dressing in his ancient suit of rusty black and pulling on his obsolete boots. She stole into the dining-room and looked at the ...
— A Young Man in a Hurry - and Other Short Stories • Robert W. Chambers
... any lynx; Sometimes, if 'tis not blind, at least it blinks. If it extols the ancient sous of song As though they were unrivalled, it goes wrong: If it allows there's much that's obsolete, Much hasty work, much rough and incomplete, 'Tis just my view; 'tis judging as one ought; And Jove was present when that thought was thought. Not that I'd act the zealot, and desire To fling the works of ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace
... says that we have the vestiges of one hundred and eighty organs which have stuck to us from our animal ancestors,—now useless, or often worse than useless, like the vermiform appendix. Eleven of these superannuated and obsolete organs we bring from the fishes, four from amphibians and reptiles. The external ear is a vestige—of no use any more. Our dread of snakes we no doubt inherited ...
— Time and Change • John Burroughs
... Telephone system: domestic: obsolete wire system; no longer provides a telephone for every village; in 1992, following the fall of the communist government, peasants cut the wire to about 1,000 villages and used it to build fences international: inadequate; international traffic carried ...
— The 2000 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... cruiser, the Vindictive, in charge of Commander Alfred F. B. Carpenter, with two ferryboats, the Daffodil and the Iris, were to escort six obsolete British cruisers filled with concrete and sand to the harbor mouths at Ostend and Zeebrugge and to sink them there in the channels. The ferryboats carried sailors and marines who were to attack and destroy the mole. It was thought that this attack would divert the attention of the defenders ...
— Winning a Cause - World War Stories • John Gilbert Thompson and Inez Bigwood
... twenty-three years too soon. I am old-fashioned, very likely, but I do believe in the almost obsolete doctrine of early marriage. I love her with all my heart." His kindling eyes and softened voice betrayed it. "Thank Heaven she has accepted me. Without her my life would not be worth ...
— A Terrible Secret • May Agnes Fleming
... causing Dagon to bow down before them—over all the civilized world. New Holland seems to be the only uncivilized part of this watery ball, but New Holland holds out no temptations to the missionary; the inhabitants are a little too cannibally given, and martyrdom is altogether obsolete; besides, it is doubted by our soundest theologians whether Christianity was ever intended for a people so ...
— An Old Sailor's Yarns • Nathaniel Ames
... state—otherwise a brand-new sulky he had recently purchased; and such is human nature that we were all sufficiently malicious to be secretly pleased that poor old Uncle Jake could not vote at all, because he had only an obsolete red elector's right, and he should have procured ...
— Some Everyday Folk and Dawn • Miles Franklin
... that discovery himself, gossip [an intimate friend or companion (obsolete)]," said the elder personage; "it may, perchance, save a rope and break a proverb [refers to the old saw, 'Who is born to be ...
— Quentin Durward • Sir Walter Scott
... might say obsolete! But you Americans with your reputation for divorce and originality are very old-fashioned in some things, ...
— Guns of the Gods • Talbot Mundy
... been recovered from a severe fit of sickness by a christian, became a great favourer of the christians in general; but the prejudice and fury of the ignorant multitude prevailing, obsolete laws were put in execution against the christians. The progress of christianity alarmed the pagans, and they revived the stale calumny of placing accidental misfortunes to the account of its ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... that motor expressions of shock or motor methods of adaptation or reaction are much older and far more prominent than psychic. But although a changed environment made the old types of defense obsolete, they still persist, "in a sthenic if somewhat now inco-ordinated way, and when they are called into action now they evoke a faint phosphorescence of the ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... among them. But in Chaucer we find the true philosophy of English society, the principle of the guilds, or fraternities, to which his pilgrims belong—the character and avocation of the knight, squire, yeoman, franklin, bailiff, sompnour, reeve, etc., names, many of them, now obsolete. Who can find these in our compendiums? they must be dug—and dry work it is—out of profounder histories, or found, with greater pleasure, in poems ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... since the writer of this page used to dine with a conveyancer—a lawyer of an old and almost obsolete school—who had a numerous household, and kept a hospitable table in Lincoln's Inn Fields; but the conveyancer was almost the last of his species. The householding legal resident of the Fields, like the domestic resident of the Temple, has become a feature of the past. Among ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... would be highly injurious to the feelings of many to publish at the present time; the rest are not interesting, except a few which show the spirit of the times; and are mostly long and able constructions of militia laws, now obsolete. About this time he issued a proclamation suspending the acts of assembly, and making paper money* a tender in law, which, although strong, was ...
— A Sketch of the Life of Brig. Gen. Francis Marion • William Dobein James
... changed greatly within two generations. Today the Bible is so little read that the language of the Authorized Version is rapidly becoming obsolete; so that even in the United States, where the old tradition of the verbal infallibility of "the book of books" lingers more strongly than anywhere else except perhaps in Ulster, retranslations into modern English ...
— Preface to Androcles and the Lion - On the Prospects of Christianity • George Bernard Shaw
... all means the rucksack. Never the knapsack. I am almost ashamed to say this, because as far as my knowledge goes the knapsack is now obsolete. It may be, however, that it lingers here and there. If you see one, buy it for a museum if you like but not for use. The bundle should be allowed to fit itself to the back, as it does in a canvas bag. Suppose now that you fix the V point of a pair of braces ...
— The Healthy Life, Vol. V, Nos. 24-28 - The Independent Health Magazine • Various
... light I have always regarded those biographers who have recorded the actions of great and worthy persons of both sexes. Not to mention those antient writers which of late days are little read, being written in obsolete, and as they are generally thought, unintelligible languages, such as Plutarch, Nepos, and others which I heard of in my youth; our own language affords many of excellent use and instruction, finely calculated to sow the ...
— Joseph Andrews Vol. 1 • Henry Fielding
... 'An obsolete restriction of free contract,' said the General. He stamped his foot, and in a second a file of soldiers ...
— 'That Very Mab' • May Kendall and Andrew Lang
... mentioned by Desfontaines as neologisms perpetrated by Marivaux, none can be considered as coined words, and but very few, such as disciplinable, fictivement, sceleratesse, as obsolete ...
— A Selection from the Comedies of Marivaux • Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux
... the mother meaning but the secondary, or mystical meaning, created by the peculiar circumstances for one separate and peculiar ear, the daughter meaning, or echo meaning. This mode of augury, through secondary interpretations of chance words, is not, as some readers may fancy, an old, obsolete, or merely Jewish form of seeking the divine pleasure. About a century ago, a man so famous, and by repute so unsuperstitious, as Dr. Doddridge, was guided in a primary act of choice, influencing his whole ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... expression of 'axiomatic postulates.' But then it should not have been said that the case does not 'admit of formal proof,' since the proof is as 'formal' and rigorous by this new method of Kant as by the old obsolete methods of Sam. Clarke and the schoolmen.[Footnote: The method of Des Cartes was altogether separate and peculiar to himself; it is a mere conjuror's juggle; and yet, what is strange, like some other audacious sophisms, it is capable of ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey
... actually live. A thing must be gone by before you can see it, just as it must be printed before it is read. This little bit of weather-stained board may serve, perhaps, to throw up the present into a picture so that it may be visible. For this inhuman law still holds good, and is not obsolete or a mere relic of barbarism. The whipping, indeed, is abrogated for very shame's sake; so is the reward to the informer; but the magistrate and the imprisonment and the offence remain. You must not sleep in the open, either in a barn or a cart-house ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... should arise as to the cause of this anomalous state of things; and there were people to doubt its being so much due to obstinacy on the part of the shells as to inexperience on the part of the Boers. One wiseacre held that the missiles were antique and obsolete relics of the 'eighty-one struggle. Others questioned whether "the Boer" then knew that shells were invented. A lot more contended that "the Boer" was unacquainted with the mysteries of a fuse, and knew as little about "timing" a shell as he did about discipline. One or ...
— The Siege of Kimberley • T. Phelan
... were then broken up into two or three, and certain others were rearranged into a word order more like that of today. Nothing was omitted, however, and nothing was added except relative pronouns, parts of "to be," and other such neutral connectives. Finally, obsolete words were changed to more familiar equivalents except when they were entirely clear and too good to lose. Thus "wot" became "know" but "gigglot" and "galp up the ghost" were retained. Words that have come to have a quite different ...
— Dialogue of Comfort Against Tribulation - With Modifications To Obsolete Language By Monica Stevens • Thomas More
... application of a sacred building would be to modern feelings, it probably shocked no one in an age when the practice of performing dramatic entertainments in churches, introduced with the mysteries and moralities of the middle ages, was scarcely obsolete, and certainly not forgotten. Neither was the representation of plays on Sundays at this time regarded as ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... the language, which includes all words not appropriated to particular sciences, admits of many distinctions and subdivisions; as, into words of general use; words employed chiefly in poetry; words obsolete; words which are admitted only by particular writers, yet not in themselves improper; words used only in burlesque writing; and words ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume V: Miscellaneous Pieces • Samuel Johnson
... Perthshire castles that more plainly declare their feudal origin and exhibit traces of obsolete power than does the great gaunt pile of ruins known as Glencardine. Its situation is both picturesque and imposing, and the stern aspect of the two square baronial towers which face the south, perched on a sheer precipice that descends to the Ruthven Water deep below, shows that the castle ...
— The House of Whispers • William Le Queux
... out at Frankfort a new collection of GERMAN POPULAR SONGS, not obsolete or artistic poems, but such as still live among the people, and are familiar to every class. "Among Volkslieder," he says in his preface, "I include only such as have proceeded directly from the people, and still bear the tokens of ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... of pronunciation is now rapidly becoming obsolete, and for very good reasons. But it is the basis of the pronunciation of the many classical derivatives in English; and therefore it is highly important that we should understand precisely what it ...
— Society for Pure English Tract 4 - The Pronunciation of English Words Derived from the Latin • John Sargeaunt
... obsolete term,) means a most pure and universal menstruum or dissolvent, with which some chemists have pretended to resolve all bodies into their first elements, and perform other extraordinary and ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian |
