"Phrase" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... favour; her ladyship admired her spirit, but little suspected that the contemptuous manner in which she had once been overheard to speak of this banker's son was the real and immediate cause of his rejection. The phrase—"only Stock the banker's son"—decided his fate: so much may be done by the mere emphasis on a single word from fashionable lips! Our heroine managed with considerable address in bringing her quarrel with one friend to a crisis at the moment when another was ready to receive her. An ostensible ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. V - Tales of a Fashionable Life • Maria Edgeworth
... considered his wife's likes and inclinations somewhat silly; she considered his sordid and material. The husband's business was that of a gunmaker in a thriving city northwards, and his soul was in that business always; the lady was best characterized by that superannuated phrase of elegance 'a votary of the muse.' An impressionable, palpitating creature was Ella, shrinking humanely from detailed knowledge of her husband's trade whenever she reflected that everything he manufactured had for its purpose ...
— Wessex Tales • Thomas Hardy
... wrapped it from head to foot, allowing not a glimpse of face. The young man trembled, and followed. He saw the ladies step into the carriage, and was himself about to mount his horse, when a military officer, attended by three soldiers, stepped towards him, and, without phrase of courtesy, demanded his name. Pallid, shaken with all manner of emotions, Basil replied to this and several other inquiries, the result being that the two vehicles were ordered to be driven to the citadel, and he ...
— Veranilda • George Gissing
... assez grande ville, mais totalement detruite, et ou je passai la Marisce une seconde fois. [Footnote: Ici le copiste ecrit la Maresce, plus haut il avoit mis Maresche, et plus haut encore Marisce. Ces variations d'orthographe sont infiniment communes dans nos manuscrits, et souvent d'une phrase a l'autre. J'en ai fait la remarque dans mon discours preliminaire.] Elle est a deux journees d'Andrinople. Le pays, dans tout cet espace, est marecageux et difficile ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, - and Discoveries of The English Nation, Volume 10 - Asia, Part III • Richard Hakluyt
... STREET, NAPLES, ITALY.—This famous city is beautifully situated on the Bay of Naples, with Mount Vesuvius in the distance. Its charming position has given rise to the phrase "See Naples and die." It was founded by the Greeks, and here Virgil spent his time in study, his tomb being one of the points of interest for travelers. The city is still surrounded by a wall. It has often suffered from earthquakes and eruptions. ...
— Shepp's Photographs of the World • James W. Shepp
... that night, thinking over the words his father had carelessly enough dropped. "Dog in the manger"—what did that mean exactly? He had heard the phrase more than once, but had never stopped to consider it in any way. Yet it was a plain sort of illustration, carrying its own meaning along with it. Harry had once been staying in the country with some cousins at a farm-house called Clover Hollow, and he remembered ...
— The Good Ship Rover • Robina F. Hardy
... the new class of land speculators for large grazing or tillage farms, to form which the consolidation of existing holdings was demanded, were the factors which resulted in the clearances of 1849 and the subsequent years. "Notices to quit," in a historic phrase, "fell like snowflakes," at a time when it was truly said that an eviction was equal to a sentence of death. In a few months whole counties, such as those of Meath and Tipperary, were converted into prairies; cabins were thrown down, fences removed, and peasants swept off, and in ten years nearly ...
— Ireland and the Home Rule Movement • Michael F. J. McDonnell
... "It's your phrase altogether, not mine. Your own, not simply the sequel of our conversation. 'Our' conversation it was not at all. It was a teacher uttering weighty words, and a pupil who was raised from the dead. I was that pupil and you were ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... Poems that shuffle with superfluous legs A blindfold minuet over addled eggs, Where all the syllables that end in ed, Like old dragoons, have cuts across the head; Essays so dark Champollion might despair To guess what mummy of a thought was there, Where our poor English, striped with foreign phrase, Looks like a zebra in a parson's chaise; Lectures that cut our dinners down to roots, Or prove (by monkeys) men should stick to fruits,— Delusive error, as at trifling charge Professor Gripes will certify at large; Mesmeric pamphlets, which to facts appeal, Each fact as slippery ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... Nouns and pronouns, I pronounce you as traitors to boys' buttocks; syntaxis and prosodia, you are tormentors of wit, and good for nothing, but to get a schoolmaster twopence a-week. Hang, copies! Fly out, phrase-books! let pens be turn'd to pick-tooths! Bowls, cards, and dice, you are the true liberal sciences! I'll ne'er be a goosequill, ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VIII (4th edition) • Various
... of many works, but his literary reputation now rests mainly on his letters. Mr. Austin Dobson, in his delightful Memoir of Walpole, says of them that 'for diversity of interest and perpetual entertainment, for the constant surprises of an unique species of wit, for happy and unexpected turns of phrase, for graphic characterisation and clever anecdote, for playfulness, pungency, irony, persiflage, there is nothing like his letters in English.' A collected edition of his works, edited by Mary Berry, under the name of her father, Robert Berry, was published ...
— English Book Collectors • William Younger Fletcher
... unpopular man in England," is like the cry of a child under chastisement; but he had little affinity, moral or artistic, with the spirit of our so-called Augustans, and his determination to admire them was itself rebellious. Again we are reminded of his phrase, "I am of the opposition." His vanity and pride were perpetually struggling for the mastery, and though he thirsted for popularity he was bent on compelling it; so he warred with the literary impulse of which he ...
— Byron • John Nichol
... sunny, calm, inspiriting, and presently Tom began to hum. After a time Henry perceived that Tom was humming the same phrase again and again: 'Some streets are longer than others. Some streets are ...
— A Great Man - A Frolic • Arnold Bennett
... young brood doth much afflict me." Probably the minister's wife had the worst of this; but she seems to have been generally, like the modern minister's wife, a saint, and could bear it. Cotton Mather, indeed, quotes triumphantly the Jewish phrase for a model female,—"one who deserved to marry a priest"; and one of the most singular passages in the history of the human heart is the old gentleman's own narrative, in his manuscript diary, of a passionate love-adventure, in his later years, with a fascinating young girl, an "ingenious ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... harm done by disparaging nomenclature is incalculable. Take the word "thief," for example. Its meaning can be expressed with infinitely greater precision and delicacy in the phrase, "one who is unable to discriminate between meum and tuum." Here you have in place of one mean little word a well-cadenced phrase of ten. Euphony as well ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156., March 5, 1919 • Various
... George Manville Fenn, full of mystery, suspense and terror—to coin a phrase. Ned, a boy of sixteen, who has just left school, and who has been brought up by an uncle who is a naturalist and who is often away, begs that he may be allowed to come on the uncle's next expedition. By the way, how could he have been brought up by an uncle who was often ...
— The Rajah of Dah • George Manville Fenn
... refuse, for the moment he finished speaking she heard a too familiar motive, the ponderous phrase in the brass choir which Van Kuyp intended as the thematic ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... instrument had a remarkable compass; melody followed melody—"The Harp that Once through Tara's Hall," "She is Far from the Land," "In Death I shall Calm Recline," and other popular pieces. When Straws missed a note he went back to find it; when he erred in a phrase, he patiently repeated it. The cadence in the last mournful selection, "Bid her not shed a tear of sorrow," was, on his first attempt, fraught with exceeding discord, and he was preparing once more to assault the citadel of grief, entrenched ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... what periwigged phrase Won the heart of this sentimental Quaker, At what golden-laced speech of those modish days She ...
— East and West - Poems • Bret Harte
... me with your secret, ma'am, the phrase would have had more significance. But, obeying my Master, I do not require to think of my own honor. Those who do not acknowledge their Master, can not afford to forget it. But if they do not learn to obey Him, they will find ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald
... Mr. David answered. "But what fault was there in it," said the king.——"It cutteth off our general assemblies," answered Mr. Calderwood. The king, having the protestation[75] in his hand, challenged him for some words of the last clause thereof.——He answered, "Whatsoever was the phrase of speech, they meant no other thing but to protest, that they would give passive obedience to his majesty, but could not give active obedience unto any unlawful thing which should flow from that article." "Active and passive obedience!" said ...
— Biographia Scoticana (Scots Worthies) • John Howie
... sentiment in the respect; there was something at once gentle and virile in his character which she admired and leaned upon; in his presence the small housekeeping troubles always slipped from her; but her heart, to use a pretty French phrase, had not consciously spoken,—possibly it had murmured a little, incoherently, to itself, but it had not spoken out aloud, as perhaps it would have done long ago if an impediment had been placed in the way of their intimacy. With all her subtler intuitions, Margaret ...
— The Stillwater Tragedy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... can deceive the world?) whereas it is in commendation of those who live and die so obscurely, that the world takes no notice of them. This Horace calls deceiving the world, and in another place uses the same phrase. ...
— Cowley's Essays • Abraham Cowley
... which have been given so far in this chapter relate to tradesmen and merchants, country gentlemen and the clergy. Other professional men smoked—we read in Fielding's "Amelia" of a doctor who in the evening "smoked his pillow-pipe, as the phrase is"—and among the rest of the people of equal or lower social standing smoking was as generally practised as in the preceding century. Handel, I may note, enjoyed his pipe. Dr. Burney, when a schoolboy at Chester, was "extremely curious to see so extraordinary a man," so when Handel went ...
— The Social History of Smoking • G. L. Apperson
... note-book in hand, and was shown with great alacrity every variety of mortadella, from delicacies the size of a finger to mottled conceptions as thick as a small barrel. He found a difficulty in explaining, however, even with an Italian phrase book, that it was the manufacture only about which he was curious, and that, admirable as the result might be, he did not wish to buy any of it. When the latter fact finally made itself plain, the proprietor became truculent and ...
— A Voyage of Consolation - (being in the nature of a sequel to the experiences of 'An - American girl in London') • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... and in power; they press harder and harder upon the energies and virtue of a people; and the last steps only are alarmingly hurried and irregular. A republic without industry, economy, and integrity, is Samson shorn of his locks. A luxurious and idle republic! Look at the phrase!—The words were never made to be married together; every body sees it would be ...
— The American Frugal Housewife • Lydia M. Child
... remained fidgeting about the room in the most distracting manner, hindering the preparations of Maurice, stumbling over articles scattered on the floor, now and then stammering out a broken, unintelligible phrase, and altogether seeming wretchedly uncomfortable, yet unwilling to leave until he saw the obstinate traveller in the fiacre which drove him ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... I have the time—say during our voyage to Cairo, whence we start inland up the Nile for Ethiopia—I shall make love whenever you like. And, confound it, Selina, I admire you no end—to use a slang phrase. You are a fine woman and a sensible woman, and I am afraid that you are throwing yourself away on a snuffy old ...
— The Green Mummy • Fergus Hume
... for it is said that no phrase becomes a proverb until after a century's experience of its truth. In England it is proverbial to judge of men by the company they keep. Judge of the Cardinal de Rohan from his most intimate friend, ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XV. and XVI., Volume 5 • Madame du Hausset, and of an Unknown English Girl and the Princess Lamballe
... Revolution is summed up in its entirety in the one phrase—Liberty, equality, and Fraternity. The principle of equality, as we have seen, has exerted a powerful influence, but the two others did ...
— The Psychology of Revolution • Gustave le Bon
... And Barnriff was a raging cauldron of fury and disappointment. So was the entire district, for the news was abroad, travelling with that rapidity which is ever the case with the news of disaster. Every rancher was, to use a local phrase, "up in the air, and tearing his sky-piece" (his hair), which surely meant that before long there would be trouble for some one, the nature of which would be quite easy ...
— The One-Way Trail - A story of the cattle country • Ridgwell Cullum
... in republica literarum potentissime! So said or sung the Chancellor of the University of Oxford, in violation of all the traditions of the place; for Oxford never used before the phrase 'respublica literarum' which words and the thing signified she has ever repudiated and abhorred; and to be potentissimus in republica are jarring and incoherent things. But let this hypercriticism pass, and when I see Mrs. ...
— Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Henry Reeve, C.B., D.C.L. - In Two Volumes. VOL. II. • John Knox Laughton
... 13: A phrase which may serve to keep in mind the medieval meaning of 'libertas' is to be found in the statement that a certain monastery kept up a pair of stocks 'pro libertate servanda'—that is to say, to keep up its franchise of ...
— A Student's History of England, v. 1 (of 3) - From the earliest times to the Death of King Edward VII • Samuel Rawson Gardiner
... often is buried for careless ears, is that of the active love of God poured out upon inferiors who deserve something very different. Then there follows a second meaning, which covers a great part of the ground of the use of the phrase in the New Testament, and that is the communication of that love to men, the specific and individualised gifts which come out of that great reservoir of patient, pardoning, condescending, and bestowing love. Then there may be taken into view a meaning which is less ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... Daily Telegraph, told us last Friday, that the Princess's Theatre is now "heated by a new process," which must mean the exceptionally warm reception given every evening to Mrs. LANGTRY as Cleopatra. In this favourable sense of the phrase, "She gets it hot all round," and the public assists in "making it warm" for her, in return for her making it warm for them. The more than CLEMENT SCOTT writes of "extra rows of stalls," and of "money ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., Dec. 20, 1890 • Various
... that Mary Byrd is," conceded Stephen, so pleasantly that she realized he was repeating parrot-like the phrase she had uttered. His thoughts were somewhere else, she observed bitterly; it was perfectly evident that he was not paying the slightest attention to anything that ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... leaves crisp beneath his footfall. "Wait," said Stafford. "One moment—" He drew himself up against the beech. "I wish to tell you why I—as you phrase it—lied to you. I allowed you to rest under that impression which I am not sure that I myself gave you, because I thought her yet trembling between us, and that your withdrawal would be advantageous to my cause. Not for all of Heaven would I have had her turn to you! Now that, apparently, I ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... Solhoug, and of Olaf Liljekrans must be taken in spite of anything their author chose to say nearly thirty years afterwards. Great poets, without the least wish to mystify, often, in the cant phrase, "cover their tracks." Tennyson, in advanced years, denied that he had ever been influenced by Shelley or Keats. So Ibsen disclaimed any effect upon his style of the lyrical dramas of Hertz. But we must appeal from the arrogance of old age to the ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... were not for the carbuncle. She does not care for me to see her disfigured. She does not understand—" Sir Richmond was at a loss for a phrase—"that it is not ...
— The Secret Places of the Heart • H. G. Wells
... discussion between me and Mr. Loose was the divine authority of the Bible. He went through the whole debate, which lasted several days, without uttering one uncharitable, scornful, or angry word, with the exception of a single phrase in his last speech; and even that he meekly and generously recalled, after I had satisfied him of its impropriety. I never forgot the conduct of that dear good man, and his Christian meekness and forbearance had a ...
— Modern Skepticism: A Journey Through the Land of Doubt and Back Again - A Life Story • Joseph Barker
... Madagascar this mode of cheating the fates is reduced to a regular system. Here every man's fortune is determined by the day or hour of his birth, and if that happens to be an unlucky one his fate is sealed, unless the mischief can be extracted, as the phrase goes, by means of a substitute. The ways of extracting the mischief are various. For example, if a man is born on the first day of the second month (February), his house will be burnt down when he comes of age. To take time by the forelock and avoid this catastrophe, the friends ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... it satisfied Martha. She considered that Katharine Maitland had the "perfectly sweetest manner of any girl in the world," and was daily trying to improve her own by the pattern set. "Make my regards." She had never heard that phrase before, but it impressed her as very stately and "Miss Eunicey," so put it away in her memory for future use. She was further delighted by Katharine's begging her and Mary to walk home with her, as far as they went her way, for she had something to ...
— The Brass Bound Box • Evelyn Raymond
... he had discoursed about all there was to be seen in Kyoto. Only, visitors must know their way about, or must have the service of an experienced guide who was au fait and who knew the "open sesames." He pronounced this phrase "open sessums," and it was not until late that night that its ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... them with his head in the clouds, thinking of what she had said when last he saw her; inquiring into every word she had uttered; finding, with a sudden flash of delight, a new meaning which might perchance lurk in a phrase of hers, and which could be construed into the intoxicating belief that she had thought of him in his absence. This was far more interesting than any of the vague processional effects that glided half seen before his eyes, the streams of people ...
— A Country Gentleman and his Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... rhyme, the meter, and the sense of the phrase require a word here that is missing from the published text. Possibly "flight" or "sight" was ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil - Translated into English Verse by E. Fairfax Taylor • Virgil
... had to drag my dear lad down and hold him fast, else he had flung himself into the torrent in some mad endeavor to spend his life for her. So I know not in what false phrase the baronet refused her, but when I looked again she was no longer pleading as his suppliant; she was standing before him in the martyr steadfastness of a true, ...
— The Master of Appleby • Francis Lynde
... in absence of mind—perhaps in a more literal absence of mind than is usually understood by the phrase—had smelt so hard at a sprig in his hand as to be on the verge of the offence in question. He smiled, said, 'I ask your pardon, my dear,' and threw it ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... surprise. "Oh, that would never do," she answered, catching a colloquial phrase she had often heard long before in Queensland. "Me missy's Shadow. That great Taboo. If me go away out of missy's sight, very big sin—very big danger. Man-a-Boupari catch me and kill me like Jani, for no me stop and wait all the ...
— The Great Taboo • Grant Allen
... the same time to preserve the living union of diction and thought. Professor Bergson has himself carefully revised the whole work. We both of us wish to acknowledge the great assistance of Miss Millicent Murby. She has kindly studied the translation phrase by phrase, weighing each word, and her revision has resulted ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson
... make me know that I wanted more time to value it, and to enjoy it rightly; and, in truth, if I could then have imagined your farther stay in these parts, which I understood afterwards by Mr. H., I would have been bold, in our vulgar phrase, to mend my draught (for you left me with an extreme thirst), and to have begged your conversation again, jointly with your said learned friend, at a poor meal or two, that we might have banded together ...
— Milton's Comus • John Milton
... occupied with the cares of this life, there are nevertheless a few who aspire,' etc. Be is here purely indicative. This usage is frequent in Elizabethan English, and still survives in parts of England. Comp. Lines on Univ. Carrier, ii. 25, where it occurs in a similar phrase, "there be that say 't": also lines 519, 668. It is employed to refer to a number of persons or things, regarded as a class. by due steps, i.e. by the steps that are due or appointed: comp. 'due feet,' Il Pens. 155. Due, duty, ...
— Milton's Comus • John Milton
... judged. I have sought to learn the objects Germany has in this war from the mouths of her own spokesmen, and to deal as frankly with them as I wished them to deal with me. I have laid bare our own ideals, our own purposes, without reserve or doubtful phrase, and have asked them to say as plainly what it is that ...
— President Wilson's Addresses • Woodrow Wilson
... sensation that he was not as rich a man as his brother-in-arms, the Seraph, future Duke of Lyonnesse. How could he then bring himself to understand, as nothing less than truth, the grim and cruel insult his father had flung at him in that brutally bitter phrase—"A Pauper and a Guardsman"? If he had ever been near a comprehension of it, which he never was, he must have ceased to realize it when—pressed to dine with Lord Guenevere, near whose house the last fox had been killed, while a groom dashed over to Royallieu for his change of clothes—he caught ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... that I will, sir: the doubtfulness of your phrase, believe it, sir, would breed you a quarrel once an hour, with the terrible boys, if you should but keep ...
— Epicoene - Or, The Silent Woman • Ben Jonson
... one of those half-witted persons who fancy they have received a call to preach nonsense—some cobbler escaped from his stall, or tailor from his shopboard. Kitty Quintal's cant phrase—'we want food for our souls,' and praying at meals for 'spiritual nourishment,' smack not a little of the jargon of the inferior caste of evangelicals. Whoever this pastoral drone may be, it is ...
— The Eventful History Of The Mutiny And Piratical Seizure - Of H.M.S. Bounty: Its Cause And Consequences • Sir John Barrow
... sort of tremor. I was too young to be in love in the ordinary sense of the phrase, but I was aghast at the thought of the bloom of her cheeks and lips being plucked like roses in a hedgerow. She was precious to my imagination, yet, for all her every-day reality, scarcely nearer to my aspirations than Lady Edith Plantagenet or ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. July, 1878. • Various
... enlightenment in the literal phrase, 'how the myths ought to be put together.' The higher Greek poetry did not make up fictitious plots; its business was to express the heroic saga, the myths. Again, the literal translation of poetes, poet, as 'maker', helps to explain a term that otherwise ...
— The Poetics • Aristotle
... case of the Latin mea domina, i.e. my mistress, which became in French ma dame, and in English madam; and the last of these has been further shortened to mam, and even to 'm, as in the phrase "Yes, 'm." This shows how nine letters may be reduced to one. Similarly, our monosyllable alms is all that is left of the Greek ele{-e}mosyn{-e}. Ten letters have here been ...
— English Dialects From the Eighth Century to the Present Day • Walter W. Skeat
... "Prisoners of Poverty" is a striking example of the trite phrase that "truth is stranger than fiction." It is a series of pictures of the lives of women wage-workers in New York, based on the minutest personal inquiry and observation. No work of fiction has ever presented ...
— Prisoners of Poverty Abroad • Helen Campbell
... wheel had rest, It was because the other was at work. 85 The Pair had but one inmate in their house, An only Child, who had been born to them When Michael, telling o'er his years, began To deem that he was old,—in shepherd's phrase, With one foot in the grave. This only Son, 90 With two brave sheep-dogs tried in many a storm, The one of an inestimable worth, Made all their household. I may truly say, That they were as a proverb in the vale For endless industry. ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. II. • William Wordsworth
... in order to show that, in relation to the most important department of human conduct, Arnold's influence, to use his own phrase, "made for righteousness," and made for righteousness unequivocally and persistently. So keen was his sense of the supreme value of this characteristically Christian virtue that he framed what old-fashioned theologians ...
— Matthew Arnold • G. W. E. Russell
... the residence which the king had provided for him at the court end of the town, Peter contrived to have a house set apart for him "below bridge," as the phrase was—that is, among the shipping. There was but one bridge across the Thames in those days, and the position of that one, of course, determined the limit of that part of the river and town that could be devoted to the purposes of commerce and navigation, for ships, of course, could not go above ...
— Peter the Great • Jacob Abbott
... for the superintendent to work out these figures, he sauntered through the works. A phrase from Edwin Markham's "The Hoe-Man in the Making" kept ringing through his head. It ran as follows—"It is in the glass-factory perhaps, that the child is pushed most hopelessly under the blind hammer of greed," and the boy wondered whether this especial works was one of those which the poet-author ...
— The Boy With the U.S. Census • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... in the way of good looks. Dr. Krumm was a short, bandy-legged, sturdy young man, with long, fair hair, a tanned complexion, light-blue eyes not quite looking the same way, spectacles, and a general air of industrious common sense about him, if one may use such a phrase. There was certainly little of the lover in his manner toward Ziska, and as little in hers toward him. They were very good friends, though, and he called her Ziska, while she gave him his nickname of Fidelio, his real ...
— Stories By English Authors: Germany • Various
... Erik thus: "O thou, wantoning in insolent phrase, in boastful and bedizened speech, whence dost thou say that thou hast ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... listened together in the old Norman cathedral; to-morrow, he would show her a singular deposit on the beach, of rare silvery shells underflushed with rose, kept there over a tide for her eyes; to-day, he treated her to politics condensed into a single phrase whose essence told all his philosophy:—"The great error in government," he said, "is also inversely the great want in marriage: in government, individuality should be supreme; in marriage, lost. In government, this error is a triple-headed ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various
... no less importance than Horace who called Cleopatra "non humilis mulier"—a woman capable of no baseness. But the phrase gains its greatest importance from the fact that it adorns the hymn which the poet dedicated to Octavianus and his victory over Antony and Cleopatra. It was a bold act, in such an ode, to praise the victor's foe. Yet he did it, and his words, which ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... be sure!" exclaimed the gardener's wife again. It was her favourite phrase; she seemed never to tire of it, and to have little else to say; but I understood what she meant, and took a ...
— Cat and Dog - Memoirs of Puss and the Captain • Julia Charlotte Maitland
... which height, what is beautifully translated, where figures are fit, which gentle, which strong, to show the composition manly; and how he hath avoided faint, obscure, obscene, sordid, humble, improper, or effeminate phrase; which is not only praised of the most, but commended (which is worse), especially for ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume III (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland I • Francis W. Halsey
... than an Englishman in a similar condition in Paris: to wit, the waggish joke told of the Parisian inquiring for Old Bailey, or Mr. Bailey, Sen. It is, therefore, quite as requisite that a Frenchman should be provided with a good French and English phrase-book, as that an Englishman should have an English and French Manual. Of the former description is Mr. Leigh's "Recueil de Phrases utiles aux etrangers voyageant en Angleterre," a new and improved edition of which is before us. It ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 405, December 19, 1829 • Various
... perfection, and his main concern is to exhort the athlete to fling aside the garments of prejudice, tradition, and constraint, until one asks at the end how much of flesh and blood has been torn away with the garments. If one were to attempt in a phrase to sum up his work, the best title which one could invent for it would be Prolegomena to all Future Progress. What in a word are the ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford
... phrase, "pot liquor's" true And constant partner, good "'corn pone"; Oh, we "down South" do beg of you Leave ...
— American Cookery - November, 1921 • Various
... yet did the whole with an extraordinary attention. After the communion, when he turned for the wine and water, his face, as so often with rude folk in a great emotion, browned as it was with wind and sun, seemed lighted from within; he seemed etherealized, yet with his virility all alive in him. A phrase, wholly inapplicable in its first sense, came irresistibly to the younger priest's mind as he waited on him. "When the strong man, armed, keepeth his house, his goods are ...
— Come Rack! Come Rope! • Robert Hugh Benson
... Anglian heathendom seems to be preserved in a phrase which forms the local slogan of the town of Hawick, and which, as the name of a peculiar local air, and the refrain, or 'owerword' of associated ballads, has been connected with the history of the town back to 'fable-shaded eras.' Different words have been sung to the tune ...
— Folklore as an Historical Science • George Laurence Gomme
... to the phrase "Fuerstenknechte." Does not the King of England speak of his "subjects"? That word irritates a German, because he is conscious that he is not a subject, but a citizen of the empire. Yet he will not infer from the English ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... Bob Logic must be recorded—a wondrous history indeed theirs was! When the future student of our manners comes to look over the pictures and the writing of these queer volumes, what will he think of our society, customs, and language in the consulship of Plancus? "Corinthian," it appears, was the phrase applied to men of fashion and ton in Plancus's time: they were the brilliant predecessors of the "swell" of the present period—brilliant, but somewhat barbarous, it must be confessed. The Corinthians were in the habit of drinking a ...
— John Leech's Pictures of Life and Character • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Alive with incident, bounding with physical energy, dramatic in coloring, and modern in every phrase. He has a message delivered with vigor, inspired ...
— Red Fleece • Will Levington Comfort
... slightest suggestion that the author intended to describe "this law" delivered on the plains of Moab as a second code in contradistinction to the first code given on Sinai thirty-eight years earlier. Moreover the phrase "this law" is so ambiguous as to raise a much greater difficulty than that caused by the Greek mistranslation of the Hebrew word for "copy." How much does "this law" include? It was long supposed to mean the whole of our present Deuteronomy; indeed, it is on ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 3 - "Destructors" to "Diameter" • Various
... Polidora Rossetti who supplied Emerson that fine phrase, "Plain living and high thinking." Of course, it might have been original also with Emerson, but probably it reached him via the Ruskin and ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... of talking that way, and Joy didn't pay much attention to it. In a phrase of his own, it was like kissing over the telephone—it didn't get you anywhere, but it had a cunning sound. It has a warming feeling to think that any one is in love with you, even if you know they ...
— The Wishing-Ring Man • Margaret Widdemer
... yield to the persecution of those who thus maltreated him; and to show that the effect of that imprisonment was of no avail to suppress or extinguish his ardor, within two years after that he had the courage, the audacity—I dare say many of his countrymen used even a stronger phrase than that—he had the courage to commence the publication, in the city of Boston, of a newspaper devoted mainly to the question of the abolition of slavery. The first number of that paper, issued on the 1st January, 1831, contained ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still
... boxes; bedsteads, mattresses, sheets, and blankets; all of which a Japanese can do without, and is really better off without."[G] Surely one finds much of truth in this, and there is no denying the charm of the simpler civilization, but the closing phrase of the quotation is the assumption without discussion of the disputed point. Are the Japanese really better off without these implements of Western civilization? Evidently they themselves do not think so. For, in glancing through the list as given by the writer quoted, one ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... he has departed honorably. This phrase is used in the English universities to signify that the student leaves his college to enter another by the express consent and approbation of the ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... to say is that 'there is the rude sweetness of a Scotch tune in it, which is natural and pleasing, though not perfect.' Addison, wishing to praise Chaucer's numbers, compares them with Dryden's own. And all through the eighteenth century, and down even into our own times, the stereotyped phrase of approbation for good verse found in our early poetry has been, that it even approached the verse of Dryden, Addison, Pope, and Johnson. Are Dryden and Pope poetical classics? Is the historic estimate, which represents them as such, and ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... existing statutes are abundantly adequate to completely prevent military interference with the elections in the sense in which the phrase is used in the title of this bill and is employed by the people of this country, I shall find no difficulty in concurring in any additional legislation limited to that object which does not interfere with the ...
— Messages and Papers of Rutherford B. Hayes - A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents • James D. Richardson
... prominent than it is now. He was the official head of numerous enterprises, both spiritual and civic, and the social equal of the best people in the community. With many people the custom of calling him "Father" was then by no means an empty phrase. Parishioners sought their pastor and accepted his counsel in numerous affairs that are now considered to be outside of his domain. In view of Kingo's humble antecedents, a position of such prominence might well have proved difficult ...
— Hymns and Hymnwriters of Denmark • Jens Christian Aaberg
... have got a heartache," say I, more for the sake of preserving the harmony of my sketch, and for making a pendant to Barbara, than because the phrase accurately describes ...
— Nancy - A Novel • Rhoda Broughton
... again he stopped short and demanded an explanation of some obscure phrase, the answers to which were now correct, now hazy, now brilliantly original. On the whole it was not satisfactory; and when for a change the Doctor gave up reciting, and made the boys read, the effect was still worse. One ...
— The Fifth Form at Saint Dominic's - A School Story • Talbot Baines Reed
... wall from the office. The useless scrap she took indoors, and began to copy the calligraphy, which she much admired. The letter began "Dear Sir," and presently writing on a loose slip "Elizabeth-Jane," she laid the latter over "Sir," making the phrase "Dear Elizabeth-Jane." When she saw the effect a quick red ran up her face and warmed her through, though nobody was there to see what she had done. She quickly tore up the slip, and threw it away. After this she grew cool and laughed ...
— The Mayor of Casterbridge • Thomas Hardy
... been from youth. Lord Mahon has pointed out this error, p. 401. I should add that in the last 4to. edition, corrected by Gibbon, it stands "want of youth and experience;"—but Gibbon can scarcely have intended such a phrase.—M.] ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon
... and worked as chauffeur—that is to say in the stoke-hole. He had landed in, I think, Havre; had missed his ship; had inquired something of a gendarme in French (which he spoke not at all, with the exception of a phrase or two like "quelle heure qu'il est?"); had been kindly treated and told that he would be taken to a ship de suite—had boarded a train in the company of two or three kind gendarmes, ridden a prodigious distance, got off the train finally with high hopes, walked a little ...
— The Enormous Room • Edward Estlin Cummings
... independence. He was emphatically a John Bull, sublimated. He rushed into the poetic arena more like a pugilist than a poet, laying about him on all sides, giving and taking strong blows, and approving himself, in the phrase of "the fancy," game to the backbone. His faults, besides those incident to most satirists,—such as undue severity, intrusion into private life, anger darkening into malignity, and spleen fermenting into venom,—were carelessness of style, inequality, ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill
... already so accepted me; in return, the Rough Riders, although for the most part Southwesterners, who have a strong color prejudice, grew to accept them with hearty good-will as comrades, and were entirely willing, in their own phrase, "to drink out of the same canteen." Where all the regular officers did so well, it is hard to draw any distinction; but in the cavalry division a peculiar meed of praise should be given to the officers ...
— Rough Riders • Theodore Roosevelt
... interrupted Huckaback, smiling incredulously, and chinking some money in his trousers pocket. Titmouse heard it, and (as the phrase is) his teeth watered; and he immediately swore such a tremendous oath as I dare not set down in writing, that if Huckaback would that evening lend him ten shillings, Titmouse would give him one hundred pounds out of the very first moneys he got ...
— Ten Thousand a-Year. Volume 1. • Samuel Warren
... adopt a circuitous form of speech? It is polite and it is obliging; but why do it? Why not openly say that they are much too kind and too good for US? We understand the allusion. Why disguise the phrase?' ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... figures she really portrays her own. Certainly, in these Memoirs she is generally content to keep herself in the background, while giving us a faithful picture of the brilliant Court at which she was for long the most lustrous ornament. It is only by stray touches, a casual remark, a chance phrase, that we, as it were, gauge her temperament in all its wiliness, its egoism, its love of supremacy, and its shallow worldly wisdom. Yet it could have been no ordinary woman that held the handsome Louis so long her captive. The fair Marquise was more than a mere leader of wit and ...
— The Memoirs of Madame de Montespan, Complete • Madame La Marquise De Montespan
... painter and musician does the like with his pictures or compositions. There is much mere scaffolding and many lay-figures in drama and novel. But the work of the masters is different. There each line or stroke or musical phrase, each character or incident, is unique or meaningful. The greatest example of this is perhaps the Divine Comedy, where each of the hundred cantos and each line of each canto is perfect in workmanship and packed ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... "On board the 'Hoppergrass'!" He got us to shout the same phrase. The sailor-like way of putting it did not please ...
— The Voyage of the Hoppergrass • Edmund Lester Pearson
... wise plan. For where shall we find a friend so intimate, so discreet, so conciliating as self? Who can speak to us so well?—without obscurity, without words, without passion. Yes, indeed: "I will talk to myself" is a very significant phrase. ...
— The Maid of Maiden Lane • Amelia E. Barr
... conclusion is warranted by the grants of 1417 and 1419; excepting that in these the Commons make the argument intended to support the charge against Henry's veracity still less tenable, by inserting a phrase which might seem to exclude the very object for which application for the subsidy was made. The application was made especially for the supplies necessary to carry on the war abroad; the Commons vote the subsidy ...
— Henry of Monmouth, Volume 2 - Memoirs of Henry the Fifth • J. Endell Tyler
... the head-quarters of her own army, hoping that she might also enkindle similar ardor. Accompanied by a magnificent retinue of her brilliantly-accoutred generals, she swept, like a gorgeous vision, before her troops. She lavished presents upon her officers, and in high-sounding phrase harangued the soldiers; but there was not a private in the ranks who did not know that she was a wicked and a polluted woman. She had talent, but no soul. All her efforts were unavailing to evoke one single electric spark of emotion. She had sense enough to ...
— Henry IV, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott
... equal horizontal bands of red (top), white, and black with three green five-pointed stars in a horizontal line centered in the white band; the phrase ALLAHU AKBAR (God is Great) in green Arabic script—Allahu to the right of the middle star and Akbar to the left of the middle star—was added in January 1991 during the Persian Gulf crisis; similar to the flag of Syria that has two stars but no script ...
— The 1999 CIA Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... familiar irresponsible and high-spirited way in "A Bread-and-Butter Miss" and "The Seven Cream Jugs;" although there may be no masterpiece of fun or raillery to put beside, say, "Esme;" there is in every story a phrase or fancy marked by his own inimitable felicity, audacity or humour. It is good news that a complete uniform edition of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Feb. 26, 1919 • Various
... as if asking what business she had there. She had lain asleep on the sloping bank above the lake on drowsy afternoons, tired by wandering far a-field with her young esquires. She knew the Abbey by heart—better than even Urania knew it; though she had used that phrase to express utter satiety. Ida Palliser had a deeper love of natural beauty, a stronger appreciation of all that made the old place interesting. She had a curious feeling, too, about the absent master of that grave, gray old house—a fond, romantic dream, which she would not for the wealth of ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... prints a law of the same content and date, cited as Law 3, Title XXIV, Book 1 of the Recopilacion, where we have seen it, with the extremely significant addition, "it shall not be published, or printed, or used." If this phrase was not included in the original cedula sent to Manila, but added when printed as applying to all the Indies, it is important evidence that the King felt an admonition against printing unnecessary where no facilities for ...
— Doctrina Christiana • Anonymous
... That inelegant phrase, by the mere vibrating, warm nobility of the sound, found its way into Heyst's heart. His mind, cool, alert, watched it sink there with a sort of vague concern at the absurdity of the occupation, till it rested at the bottom, deep down, ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... The phrase tickled my fancy, and, thenceforward, I would have no other title for the sight-draughts made by the boys upon my bank of memory. When these "vouchers" grew into a volume, no name would serve my turn except the mot de famille set in ...
— When Grandmamma Was New - The Story of a Virginia Childhood • Marion Harland
... who can sit in the House, but not vote. The states are each divided, by its own laws, into congressional districts, as many as Ihe number of representatives to which it is entitled; and the electors in each one of these vote for their representative. The phrase "all other persons" meant "slaves": but this has been amended by the XIVth Amendment. The speaker is always a member of the House; the clerk, sergeant-at-arms, chaplain, etc., are not members. To impeach an officer is to ...
— A Brief History of the United States • Barnes & Co.
... mistake has sometimes arisen from the phrase "as by law established". Where is this law? It does not exist. No law ever established the Church of England. The expression refers to the protection given by law to the Catholic Church in England, enabling it to do its duty in, and to, the country. It tells of the legal recognition ...
— The Church: Her Books and Her Sacraments • E. E. Holmes
... concerned me, to which we added a hundred foolish comments, after which I began to turn the leaves in a mechanical way. A phrase written in capital letters caught my eye on one of the pages I was turning; I distinctly saw some words that were insignificant enough, and I was about to read the rest when Brigitte stopped me ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... in defiance of Mr. Dodge's opinion of the phrase, pulling off his pee-jacket, and laying aside his sow-wester; "a cap-full of wind, with just enough drizzle to take the comfort out of a man, and lacker him ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... it, and are very fond of it, but white men don't 'hanker after it,' as your American phrase is. However, those who have been bold enough to taste it assert that, when well ...
— The Land of the Kangaroo - Adventures of Two Youths in a Journey through the Great Island Continent • Thomas Wallace Knox
... imitative worship, delighting in the unconscious fashion in which the sonorous phrases of convention rolled off from her son's baby lips. And then, one day, Scott's memory failed him in his invocation. There came a familiar phrase or two, and then a babble of meaningless syllables, ending in a long-drawn and relieved Amen. An instant later, Scott ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... supreme strategic importance, were impeded only, not broken off. It becomes, therefore, of interest to inquire whether this failure can be attributed to any oversight or mistake in the arrangements made for forcing the passage—in the tactical dispositions, to use the technical phrase. In this, as in every case, those dispositions should be conformed to the object to be attained and to the ...
— Admiral Farragut • A. T. Mahan |
