"Thorny" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Revere his consort's faith, his father's fame, And spare the meek usurper's holy head. Above, below, the rose of snow, Twin'd with her blushing foe, we spread: The bristled boar in infant-gore Wallows beneath the thorny shade. Now, brothers, bending o'er the accursed loom, Stamp we our vengeance deep, and ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education
... and about the only thing that could be done on a Sabbath evening. The most irreligious feel better for the occasional indulgence of a little religious sentimentality. When the aesthetic element is supreme, and thorny self-denial absent, devotion is quite attractive to average humanity. Moreover the dwarfed spiritual nature of the most materialistic often craves its natural sustenance; and Sabbath evening at times suggests ...
— From Jest to Earnest • E. P. Roe
... my readers are disturbed by this thorny question, I beg leave to recommend, to them Letter 69 of Montesquieu's Lettres Persanes; and the late Mr. John Palmer of Islington's Answer to Dr. Priestley's mechanical arguments for what he absurdly calls ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 3 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... arranged a thorny transaction. Mr. Cadell has an interest in some of the Novels, amounting to one-half; but the following are entirely ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... deserted streets flow in gleaming light Through my dull head. And hurt me. I clearly feel that I shall soon slip away— Thorny roses of my skin, don't prick like that. The night grows moldy. The poison light of the lampposts Has smeared it with green muck. My heart is like a bag. My blood freezes. The world is ...
— The Verse of Alfred Lichtenstein • Alfred Lichtenstein
... the low hedge, but though it was low it was very thorny, and while he was trying to find a place to get through, he looked over and spied a hare crouched in the rough grass, just under the hedge between it and the wheat. The hare was lying on the ground; she did not move, though she saw Bevis, and when he looked closer ...
— Wood Magic - A Fable • Richard Jefferies
... which lie alligators, electric eels, and stinging rays. Far as the eye can reach are swamps, swamps, and more swamps, a sea of waving pampa-grass. After the swamps thickets of tacuaras (canes), forests of thorny trees, chanares, nandubay, jacarandas, urundey, talas, and quebrachos, each one hard enough to split an axe, some, like the black canela, almost like iron; the inhabitants ferocious and intractable as when the ...
— A Vanished Arcadia, • R. B. Cunninghame Graham
... at the quiet little settlement of Inenge, where cattle were abundant, but grain so scarce that the villagers were living on calabash seeds. Proceeding thence across fields delightfully checkered with fine calabash and fig trees, we marched, carrying water through thorny jungles, until dark, when we bivouacked for the night, only to rest and push on again next morning, arriving at Marenga Mkhali (the saline water) to breakfast. Here a good view of the Usagara hills is obtained. Carrying ...
— The Discovery of the Source of the Nile • John Hanning Speke
... rock-walled well, Where the silver-scaled sea-farers, and the crook-lipped bull-trout dwell. But most when their hearts were merry 'twas the joy of carle and quean To ride in the deeps of the oak-wood, and the thorny thicket green: Forth go their hearts before them to the blast of the strenuous horn, Where the level sun comes dancing down the oaks in the early morn: There they strain and strive for the quarry, when ...
— The Story of Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs • William Morris
... on again in silence till the moon declined before the coming day, the cruel day, which brought the heat and the following crows again. Dawn brought them to a patch of "dead finish," as the settlers call a dense and thorny scrub with pretty green leaves, through which it is well nigh impossible to force a way even under the most favourable circumstances; and which presented an utterly impassable barrier to men in their condition. They ...
— The Moving Finger • Mary Gaunt
... early been aroused, and had continued with a steadily deepened intensity. The wonderful teaching with authority, and the signs wrought on them that were sick, had been as seed sown by the wayside or in thorny or in stony ground, except for the little handful of hearers who had felt the personal power of Jesus and had surrendered to it, ready henceforth to follow where he should lead, whether or not it should be in a path of their choice. These, however, were the proof that those months ...
— The Life of Jesus of Nazareth • Rush Rhees
... past and gone: many who read these lines will, I trow, know what it is to tramp a long distance with a purse, as Carlyle said, "so flabby that it could scarcely be thrown against the wind." My trudge from Hull to Bradford seemed beset with thorny places. ...
— Adventures and Recollections • Bill o'th' Hoylus End
... sung the hymn Trustingly and tenderly, Voice grown weak and eyes grown dim,— "Let me hide myself in Thee." Trembling though the voice and low, Rose the sweet strain peacefully Like a river in its flow; Sung as only they can sing Who life's thorny path have passed; Sung as only they can sing Who behold the promised rest,— "Rock of Ages, cleft for me, Let me ...
— The World's Best Poetry Volume IV. • Bliss Carman
... is ended. If you have followed us thus far, neglect not to receive what we have faintly endeavored to inculcate; and ever remember, while treading life's thorny vale, that "a kind word is of more value ...
— Town and Country, or, Life at Home and Abroad • John S. Adams
... have an outlet. He circled round it, clambering over fallen trees and forcing his way through thorny vines, till he saw, amid roots of alder-bushes, a streamlet flow from the lakeside. This he hopefully followed. Not far had he gone before a dull roar met his ears, breaking the sullen silence of the woods. It was the sound of falling waters. He hastened ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 1 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... not long in drenching our travellers. Below them, the roads, intersected by "nullahs," a sort of instantaneous torrent, were soon rendered impracticable, entangled as they were, besides, with thorny thickets and gigantic lianas, or creeping vines. The sulphuretted hydrogen emanations, which Captain Burton mentions, ...
— Five Weeks in a Balloon • Jules Verne
... her is so sunny, sportive, so bent on harmless mischief. She still plays with life as a kitten with a ball of yarn. Some day Kitty will fall asleep with the Ball poised in the cup of one foot. Then, waking, when her dream is over, she will find that her plaything has become a rocky, thorny, storm-swept, immeasurable world, and that she, a woman, stands holding out towards it her imploring arms, and asking only for some littlest part in ...
— A Kentucky Cardinal • James Lane Allen
... convulsion far down in the depths of the ocean. Masses of coral worn by time lay scattered about, amid which grew shrubs and tangled creepers, with here and there a few taller trees; but as the shrubs were not of a thorny species we pushed through them or leaped over them, Dick and Nat coming down on their noses more than once in our progress. Seeing a knoll, or rather a mass of coral, thrown up higher than the rest ahead I made for it, hoping to get from thence ...
— The Cruise of the Dainty - Rovings in the Pacific • William H. G. Kingston
... that with his scanty stock of English ammunition scattered over the sterile floor of his literary magazine, he could not have the effrontery, impudence, or presumption to enter the list of philosophical and scientific disputation with one who has traversed the thorny paths of literature, explored its mazy windings, and who is thoroughly and radically fortified, as being encompassed with the impenetrable shield of genuine science. This red, hot, fiery, unguarded ...
— The Hedge School; The Midnight Mass; The Donagh • William Carleton
... perfect; and what was the best path for Jesus Christ is surely good enough for us, even though it be a rough and thorny one. Let us lie still beneath God's hand; for though His hand be heavy upon us, it is strong and safe beneath us too; and none can pluck us out of His hand, for in Him we live and move and have our being. He waits for us year after year, with patience which cannot ...
— Out of the Deep - Words for the Sorrowful • Charles Kingsley
... handsome. By the wave of a hand he housed them in a tropic residence, dim, cool, close shut, kept by servants in white linen moving with mute slippered feet over stone floors; and by another gesture he indicated the fierce thorny growths of the forest in which he hunted those vivid insects,—the luxuriant savannas, the gigantic ferns and palms, the hush and shining desolation, the presence of the invisible fever and death. There was a touch, too, of inexpressible sadness in his half-ignorant mention of the ...
— Suburban Sketches • W.D. Howells
... something of its greenness, and the season of blossoming stays by the beautiful stream. There is a wanton tangling and mingling of the waste-loving flowers, such as the yellow toad-flax, the bristling viper's bugloss, the thorny ononis that spreads a hue of pink as it creeps along the ground, sky-blue chicory on wiry stems, large milk-white blooms of datura, and purple heads of centaurea calcitrapa, whose spines are avoided like those of a hedgehog by people who walk with bare feet. Upon the banks, the high hemp-agrimony ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... to what they are really, surely and positively serviceable for? Well, thought I, as there must be a sure and trust-worthy method of treatment, as certainly as God is the wisest and most beneficient of Beings, I shall seek it no longer in the thorny thicket of ontological explanations,... nor in the authoritative declarations of celebrated men. No; let me seek it where it lies nearest at hand, and where it has hitherto been passed over by all, because it did ...
— Allopathy and Homoeopathy Before the Judgement of Common Sense! • Frederick Hiller
... tangled creepers, looked down at the growing young life at their feet with the sombre resignation of giants that had lost faith in their strength. And in the midst of them the merciless creepers clung to the big trunks in cable-like coils, leaped from tree to tree, hung in thorny festoons from the lower boughs, and, sending slender tendrils on high to seek out the smallest branches, carried death to their victims in an exulting riot of ...
— Almayer's Folly - A Story of an Eastern River • Joseph Conrad
... future saint; from the nuns, for sending such a love of a plaything; and, finally, from papa, for sending such substantial board and well-bolted lodgings, 'from which,' said the malicious old fellow, 'my pussy will never find her way out to a thorny and dangerous world.' Won't she? I suspect, son of somebody, that the next time you see 'pussy,' which may happen to be also the last, will not be in a convent of any kind. At present, whilst this general rendering ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... the tribulus (on the ground), But they cleared away its thorny bushes. Why did they this of old? That we might plant our millet and sacrificial millet; That our millet might be abundant, And our sacrificial millet luxuriant. When our barns are full, And our stacks can be counted by tens of myriads, We proceed to make spirits and prepared ...
— The Shih King • James Legge
... and by whom conferred, M. Thiers went to Bordeaux in 1871, is a thorny question, into which I need not here enter. What he might have done for his country is, perhaps, uncertain. What he did we know. He founded a republic of which, in one of his characteristic phrases, he said that: 'it must be Conservative, or it could not be,' and this he did with the aid of men ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... of the hints of Dr. Mather, who is aware of an unsettled dispute between the captain and the governor, relative to the authority of the latter over a king's ship on the provincial station. Into this thorny subject, Sir William plunges headlong. The captain makes answer with less deference than the dignity of the potentate requires: the affair grows hot; and the clergymen endeavor to interfere in the blessed capacity of peacemakers. ...
— Biographical Sketches - (From: "Fanshawe and Other Pieces") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... White Heath (Erica arborea), a native of the South of France, Corsica, and some other localities, for the purpose of making tobacco-pipes was introduced into this country. The word "brier" or "briar" has no connexion whatever with the prickly, thorny briar which bears the lovely wild rose. It is derived from the French bruyere, heath—the root of the White Heath being the material known as "briar" or "brier," and at first as "bruyer." The Oxford Dictionary quotes ...
— The Social History of Smoking • G. L. Apperson
... while all the townspeople were fast asleep, she ran up the turret-steps and looked out over the field, and at the other side of the field there was a green, ferny ditch and a rose-thorny hedge, and then came the wood. And as Sabrinetta stood on her tower she saw a shaking and a twisting of the rose-thorny hedge, and then something very bright and shining wriggled out through it into the ferny ditch and back again. It only came out for a minute, but she saw ...
— The Book of Dragons • Edith Nesbit
... genius unconcentrated, undisciplined. I see, though you are too diffident to say so openly, that you shrink from the fame of singer, because, fevered by your reading, you would fain aspire to the thorny crown of author. I echo the hard saying of the Maestro: I should be your worst enemy did I encourage you to forsake a career in which a dazzling success is so assured, for one in which, if it were your true vocation, you ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... a man as can slide down a thorny locust and never get scratched!" he shouted. This was equivalent to setting his triggers; then he launched himself nimbly and with enthusiasm into the thick of the fight. It was Mr. Bunker's unfortunate privilege to sustain the onslaught of the ...
— The Prodigal Judge • Vaughan Kester
... the mother, prostrating herself before the Virgin, weeps, and prays, and beats her breast. Alas, and my Khalid? he goes out on the terrace to search in the Nursery for his favourite Plant. No, he does not find it; brambles are there and noxious weeds galore. The thorny, bitter reality he must now face, and, by reason of his lack of savoir-faire, be ultimately out-faced by it. For the upshot of the many quarrels he had with his father, the prayers and tears of ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... again, and stayed there a fortnight absorbed in it. He found matter of study to fill a hundred years, and his education spread over chaos. Indeed, it seemed to him as though, this year, education went mad. The silver question, thorny as it was, fell into relations as simple as words of one syllable, compared with the problems of credit and exchange that came to complicate it; and when one sought rest at Chicago, educational game started like rabbits from every building, and ran out of sight ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... wastes away in extreme wretchedness, with a slow consumption, as ice smitten upon by a sun often clouded. She burns at the good fortune of the happy Herse, no otherwise than as when fire is placed beneath thorny reeds, which do not send forth flames, and burn with a gentle heat. Often does she wish to die, that she may not be a witness to any such thing; often, to tell the matters, as criminal, to her severe father. At last, she sat herself down in the ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Vol. I, Books I-VII • Publius Ovidius Naso
... most people, at least partakes of the nature of religion. The other line is concerned with the practical task of reconciling actual difficulties, bringing nations together for various purposes—arbitration, international trade, boards of conciliation and the like. This is the slow and thorny path, and on account of its very difficulty is apt to engross the thoughts and energy of the best brains which devote themselves to the cause. But the first line, of self-cultivation and the promotion of a favourable spirit ...
— The Unity of Civilization • Various
... more white than snow, If through the thorny brake ye go, My loving heart I'll set below To take the hurt ...
— Beltane The Smith • Jeffery Farnol
... neighborhood of the marl-pit was so irregular, and the thorny underbrush so thick, that when pedestrians wished to reach the nearest highway they, were compelled either to make a long detour or to cross the deepest part of the excavation by means of the trunks of two great trees, which had been cut in half, lashed ...
— Monsieur de Camors, Complete • Octave Feuillet
... with David Trevarrow, and was the means of opening his eyes to many great and previously unknown truths. Among others, he convinced him that "God's ways are not as man's ways;" that He often, though not always, leads His people by thorny paths that they know not of, but does it in love and with His own glory in their happiness as the end in view; that the Lord Jesus Christ must be to a man "the chiefest among ten thousand, and altogether lovely," else He is to him nothing at all, and that ...
— Deep Down, a Tale of the Cornish Mines • R.M. Ballantyne
... singular imbecility of manner and appearance, 'but I meant the path was rough. It lies, all the way, by glade and dingle, and the dingles are both deep and thorny.' ...
— Prince Otto • Robert Louis Stevenson
... scales of the Plaice to another. In comparing certain geographical races of Plaice and Flounder the facts seem to suggest that differences of habitat may have something to do with the development of the scales. In the Baltic the Flounders are as large as those on our own coasts, but the thorny tubercles are much more developed, nearly the whole of the upper surface being covered with them. The Plaice, on the other hand, are smaller than those of the North Sea, and the males have the scales spinulate over a considerable ...
— Hormones and Heredity • J. T. Cunningham
... earth bestow'd, To raise the pilgrim sunk with ghastly fears, To cool his burning wounds, to wipe his tears, And strew with amaranths his thorny road. Alas! how long has Superstition hurl'd Thine altars down, thine attributes reviled, The hearts of men with witchcrafts foul beguiled. And spread his empire o'er the vassal world? But truth returns! she spreads ...
— Poems (1828) • Thomas Gent
... the Sloe is the Blackthorn, our hardy, thorny hedgerow shrub (Prunus [518] spinosa), Greek Prounee, common everywhere, and starting into blossom of a pinky white about the middle of March before a leaf appears, each branchlet ending in a long thorn projecting beyond the flowers at right angles to the stem. From the conspicuous ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie
... growing broader as they advanced. It was a lonely spot, and as it grew darker the loneliness seemed to increase. On all sides were the immense trees and dense brushwood, while the stream was dotted with little islands, covered with reeds and rushes and small, thorny bushes. ...
— Young Hunters of the Lake • Ralph Bonehill
... remarked to Aunt Debby not so long ago, "and, thank God, even in the darkest night I have never failed to find a star brightening through the gloom." Now the earthly shadows were done with for ever; the bleeding feet had trod the last steps of the thorny way, and entered by the gate into the holy Jerusalem, where "eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared ...
— Aunt Judith - The Story of a Loving Life • Grace Beaumont
... plains and wooded hills east of Rio Paraguay; Gran Chaco region west of Rio Paraguay mostly low, marshy plain near the river, and dry forest and thorny scrub elsewhere ...
— The 2005 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... sonny," said the president promptly. "We'll hang on to this until we hear where that thorny old chump of yours has fetched up and is actin' her conundrums, and mebbe we can ...
— Openings in the Old Trail • Bret Harte
... prattle of the child, pursued a vein of sentimental and egotistic recollection at once bitter and dangerous. The sudden apparition of Ah Fe linked her again with her past life at Fiddletown. Over the dreary interval between, she was now wandering,—a journey so piteous, wilful, thorny, and useless, that it was no wonder that at last Carry stopped suddenly in the midst of her voluble confidences to throw her small arms around the woman's neck, and bid ...
— Tales of the Argonauts • Bret Harte
... decapitated. Such petty measures of warfare served merely to annoy the vampires and to whet their diabolical ingenuity for the contrivance of new devices. Since the law of 1872 went into effect, however, the scoundrels have been compelled to travel a thorny road. Scores of arrests have been made, and in many cases the criminals have been ...
— The Lock and Key Library/Real Life #2 • Julian Hawthorne
... carried out their favorite plan, and have run away together, like Roland and Maybird. She kept them from this foolish prank by all sorts of unsuspected means, and was their refuge in troublous times. For all her quiet ways, aunty was full of fun as well as sympathy and patience, and she smoothed the thorny road to virtue with the innocent and kindly little arts that make some people as useful and beloved as good fairy godmothers ...
— Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag • Louisa M. Alcott
... a roadhouse obtaining refreshments. For this trick, Pepper and some of the others got after the Pornellites and made them prisoners in a cave, from which they could escape only by going out a back way, through some water and mud, and thorny bushes. ...
— The Mystery at Putnam Hall - The School Chums' Strange Discovery • Arthur M. Winfield
... and without pausing to relight the pine splinters, they rushed pell-mell towards the sound of barking, bumping into trees, stumbling over logs, scratching their faces and tearing their clothes on thorny vines. But no one minded. Bim had treed a 'coon in the shortest time on record, and now if they could only get it, the triumph would be ample reward for ...
— Raftmates - A Story of the Great River • Kirk Munroe
... gave to it the wood and thorny ground adjacent to the spot. The building being for the habitation of one Leper only, one Orme being the first, was necessarily small. Orme was supplied with his provisions daily from the Abbey. After him Geoffrey Mansell, a Leprous ...
— The Leper in England: with some account of English lazar-houses • Robert Charles Hope
... Monseigneur, "there is one thing which much embarrasses the feet, the furze that grows upon the ground, where M. le Marechal de Villeroy is encamped. The furze, it is true, is not mixed with any other plant, either hard or thorny; but it is a high furze, as high, as high, let me see, what shall I say?"—and he looked all around to find some object of comparison—"as high, I assure you, ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... on board ship is a calm, easy, indolent, well-fed, and cheerful interlude of repose, amid the storms and worries of the great battle of life. If existence has been to him hitherto rather hard and thorny than otherwise, he finds the voyage out a pleasant interval of rest and refreshment; and, in any case, it recruits and prepares him to better commence the new life in the colony, with good spirits and high hopes, ...
— Brighter Britain! (Volume 1 of 2) - or Settler and Maori in Northern New Zealand • William Delisle Hay
... heart to plant annuals, much less perennials, under such circumstances. Let the Parsonage Aid Society do it, if it must be done. And the Parsonage Aid Society does do it. You will see in many Methodist preachers' front yards fiercely-thorny, old-lady-faced roses—the kind that thrive without attention—planted always by the president of the Parsonage Aid Society. And it may be there will be a syringa bush in the background, not that the Parsonage Aid Society is partial to this flower, but because it is not easily killed by neglect. ...
— A Circuit Rider's Wife • Corra Harris
... do nicely, Clementina," she said. She added, in careless acknowledgement of her own failure to direct her choice, "I see you didn't need my help after all," and the thorny point which Clementina felt in her praise was rankling, when Lord Lioncourt began ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... don't say that Walter Evesham's in the wrong. We know that Joseph took advantage of his opportunities, though I can't say that I ever felt much unity with some of his transactions. What would thee have, my dear? Thee's discouraged with thy father for choosing the thorny way, which we tread with him; but thee seems no better satisfied with one who considers ...
— Stories by American Authors (Volume 4) • Constance Fenimore Woolson
... suitable stone in the neighbourhood. It was not that there was none to be found, for the whole district abounds in rock, but that it was so intensely hard as to be almost impossible to work, and a bridge built of it would have been very costly. I spent many a weary day trudging through the thorny wilderness vainly searching for suitable material, and was beginning to think that we should be forced to use iron columns for the piers, when one day I stumbled quite by accident on the very thing. Brock ...
— The Man-eaters of Tsavo and Other East African Adventures • J. H. Patterson
... left-hand fence ran a thick belt of underwood, sumac and birch, with a few young oak trees interspersed; but in the middle of the swampy level, covering at most some five or six acres, was a dense circular thicket composed of every sort of thorny bush and shrub, matted with cat-briers and wild vines, and overshadowed by a clump of tall and leafy ashes, which had not as yet lost one atom of their foliage, although the underwood beneath them ...
— Warwick Woodlands - Things as they Were There Twenty Years Ago • Henry William Herbert (AKA Frank Forester)
... forest extended its gloomy arms athwart the horizon; but did not arrest my aerial journey. The thick boughs groaned and crashed beneath me, as I was dragged through their matted foliage; my limbs lacerated and torn, and my hair tangled amid the thorny branches. Vainly I endeavoured to cling to the twigs which impeded my passage, but they eluded my frenzied grasp, or snapped in my hands, while my cries for help were drowned in the thundering sweep of the mighty gale. Onward—onward. ...
— The Monctons: A Novel, Volume I • Susanna Moodie
... Antioch, escorted lovingly for a little way by the Church, and, journeying by land, gladdened the groups of believers in 'Phenicia and Samaria' with the news that the Gentiles were turning to God. We note that they are not said to have spoken of the thorny question in these countries, and that it is not said that there was joy in Judaea. Perhaps the Christians in it were in sympathy with ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... Imperial affairs, the Round Table, will conclude that extraordinary progress has been made towards racial reunion, and that in this respect no serious peril threatens South Africa. The settlement, by friendly compromise at the end of the last session, of the very thorny question of language in the education of children, is a good example of what good-will can accomplish under free institutions. By a laboured construction of fragments of speeches culled from the utterances ...
— The Framework of Home Rule • Erskine Childers
... the river called Shigogo and Shipanga are bordered by a low level expanse of marshy country, with occasional clumps of palm-trees and a few thorny acacias. The river itself spreads out to a width of from three to four miles, with many islands, among which it is difficult to navigate, except when the river is in flood. In front, a range of high hills from the north-east crosses and ...
— A Popular Account of Dr. Livingstone's Expedition to the Zambesi and Its Tributaries • David Livingstone
... matchless sweet; but they are perish'd, And life is thorny now, and dim, and flat; Yet rests their memory—deeply—fondly cherish'd; God! in thy mercy, ...
— A Yacht Voyage to Norway, Denmark, and Sweden - 2nd edition • W. A. Ross
... an instinct for discerning central issues, genuine concern for high principles of governance, and the rare moral courage that disregards popularity as a mainspring of action—could have fitted any set of legislators to tackle the complex and thorny problems that pressed for settlement and to effect the necessary preliminary changes. That the delegates of the principal Powers were devoid of many of these qualities cannot fairly be made a subject ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... stretch of chaparral brush, absolutely impenetrable, which I must go around or stop my progress in this direction. These thickets were a regular paradise for grizzly bears, for within the protection of this matted and thorny growth he is as safe as is the soldier in the rocky fort of Gibraltar. I soon found a way around the brush and rose high enough so that a backward look over the valley was charming, quite as much so as the eastern side. I wandered over the grassy hills covered with great scattering ...
— Death Valley in '49 • William Lewis Manly
... does statecraft permit superstition to be destroyed? This is a very thorny question; it is like asking up to what point one should make an incision in a dropsical person, who may die under the operation. It is a matter for the ...
— Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary • Voltaire
... beginning of the world. 'Power,' whether spiritual or physical, is the meaning of the trumpet: and so, well used, as you say, by Handel in his approaches to the Deity. The fugue in the overture to the Messiah expresses perhaps the thorny wandering ways of the world before the voice of the one in the wilderness, and before 'Comfort ye my people, etc.' Mozart, I agree with you, is the most universal musical genius: Beethoven has been too analytical and erudite: but his inspiration ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald
... which are to be seen in many places. In the grass itself, and round the edge of these groups so artistically assorted by the hand of Nature, lies slyly hidden the "wait-a-bit" bush,[49] according to the literal translation from the Dutch, whose thorny entanglements no one can gauge ...
— South African Memories - Social, Warlike & Sporting From Diaries Written At The Time • Lady Sarah Wilson
... this occasion: "Other roads will answer better than Silesia!" said they. [Pauli, v. 327, 332.] Baron Freytag, their Ambassador at Berlin, had negotiated the affair so far: "Circle of Schwiebus," said Freytag, "and let us have done with these thorny talks!" ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. III. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Hohenzollerns In Brandenburg—1412-1718 • Thomas Carlyle
... thorn; it looks so old, In truth you'd find it hard to say, How it could ever have been young, It looks so old and grey. Not higher than a two-years' child, It stands erect this aged thorn; No leaves it has, no thorny points; It is a mass of knotted joints, A wretched thing forlorn. It stands erect, and like a stone With lichens it ...
— Lyrical Ballads 1798 • Wordsworth and Coleridge
... but day by day, Shine out more clearly bright; Until this narrow, thorny way, Shall end in Death's dark night. Then freed from all the taints of sin, Through Thine abundant Grace; The crown of righteousness I win, And ...
— Yorkshire Lyrics • John Hartley
... when Balzac showed personal dislike almost amounting to hatred, in criticism, was when, in 1840, in the Revue Parisienne, he published an article on "Leo," a novel by La Touche. He became, George Sand says, completely indifferent to his old master, while the latter —a pathetic, yet thorny and uncomfortable figure, as portrayed by his contemporaries—continued to belittle and revile his former pupil, while all the time he loved him, and longed for a reconciliation which never took place. La Touche had a quick instinct for discovering genius: he introduced Andre Chenier's ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... have been very generally read; and, if not placing him in the highest ranks of writers of fiction, at least vindicate the claims of his section to force and originality. He had been followed up the thorny path by many who stopped half-way, turned back, or sunk forgotten ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... this association of ideas very complimentary to myself, I thanked her for her good advice. I nevertheless took away as a souvenir a flower and one of the thorny apples, seeing which the peasant trudged on her way, saying no doubt that it was wasting time and words to give advice to lunatics. Again the cliffs drew very close together, and the valley was nothing more than a deep crack in the earth's ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... word or two about this friend. At Vernet he was usually called M. le Capitaine, though in fact he had never reached that rank. He had been in the army, and having been wounded in the leg while still a sous-lieutenant, had been pensioned, and had thus been interdicted from treading any further the thorny path that leads to glory. For the last fifteen years he had resided under the roof of Madame Bauche, at first as a casual visitor, going and coming, but now for many years as constant there as ...
— La Mere Bauche from Tales of All Countries • Anthony Trollope
... asked the bramble to accept the position, and the bramble gladly agreed. The first order it gave was for all the trees to take shelter under its branches or be burned with fire. That sounds just like a prickly, thorny, ...
— Fifty-Two Story Talks To Boys And Girls • Howard J. Chidley
... Yesterday my roses began to bloom. The very old bush of thorny, half-double brier roses with petals of soft yellow crepe, in which the sunbeams caught and glinted, took the lead as usual. Before night enough Jacqueminot buds showed rich colour to justify my filling the bowl on the greeting table, fringing it with sprays of the ...
— The Garden, You, and I • Mabel Osgood Wright
... masculated, prevails in one, and the esprit gaulois, decorously draped, in the other—seem to me to run together better than any two other novelists of our company. They do not attempt elaborate analysis; they do not grapple with thorny or grimy problems; they are not purveyors of the indecent, or dealers in the supernatural and fantastic, or poignant satirists of society at large or individuals in particular. But they can both, in their different ways, tell a plain ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... you of brambles, that the wind has entangled one with another? They cling together; thorns of like length on either side, each penetrating to an equal depth, each dealing wound for wound. So we will leave Protagoras' reward to shrewd and greedy folk. It involves too many thorny difficulties. Far better is that other reward, which they ...
— The Apologia and Florida of Apuleius of Madaura • Lucius Apuleius
... That bears unmoved the tempest's shock; The thorns that on the earth abound; The tender grass that clothes the ground; The little birds that fly in air; The sheep that need the shepherd's care; The pearls that deep in ocean lie; The gold that charms the miser's eye; The fruitful and the thorny ground; The piece of silver lost and found; The reaper, with his sheaves returning; The gathered tares prepared for burning; The wandering sheep brought back with joy; The father's welcome for his boy; The wedding-feast, ...
— The Life of Jesus Christ for the Young • Richard Newton
... not, as some ungracious pastors do, Show me the steep and thorny way to heaven; Whiles, like a puff'd and reckless libertine, Himself the primrose path of dalliance treads, And ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett
... to make himself the most logical selection for the governorship of the newly organized Michigan Territory, Douglas saw no military service, and Lincoln only a few weeks of service during the Black Hawk War, and both were obliged to seek fame and fortune along the thorny road of politics. Following admission to the bar at Jacksonville, Illinois, in 1834, Douglas was elected public prosecutor of the first judicial circuit in 1835; elected to the state Legislature in 1836; appointed by President ...
— The Old Northwest - A Chronicle of the Ohio Valley and Beyond, Volume 19 In - The Chronicles Of America Series • Frederic Austin Ogg
... 'what he was at', we must at all costs conceal our success from his German friends, and detach him from them before he was compromised. (You will remark that to blithely accept this limitation showed a very sanguine spirit in us.) The next question, how to find out what he was at, was a deal more thorny. If it had not been for the discovery of Dollmann's identity, we should have found it as hard a nut to crack as ever. But this discovery was illuminating. It threw into relief two methods of action which hitherto we had been hazily seeking to combine, seesawing ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... ground. Such is the fruit of the wisdom and the justice with which our fathers bound contending colonies into confederation and blended different habits and rival interests into a harmonious whole, so that shoulder to shoulder they entered on the trial of the revolution, step with step trod its thorny paths until they reached the height of national independence and founded the constitutional representative liberty, which ...
— Speeches of the Honorable Jefferson Davis 1858 • Hon. Jefferson Davis
... of their depth: for they are faced with an impossible task. Established to deal with politics proper, with the common affairs of men as men, they are bound to flounder helplessly when they are cajoled into the thorny intimate and (let it be added) far more fascinating region of national and individual personality—to a region where, the deeper you penetrate, the less common, uniform, standardized or standardizable are the interests involved, ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... springing of the acanthus round the basket of the canephora, strictly the basket for bread, the idea of bread {105} including all sacred things carried at the feasts of Demeter, Bacchus, and the Queen of the Air. And this springing of the thorny weeds round the basket of reed, distinctly taken up by the Byzantine Italians in the basketwork capital of the twelfth century, (which I have already illustrated at length in the 'Stones of Venice,') becomes the germ of all capitals whatsoever, in the great schools of ...
— Proserpina, Volume 1 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin
... be said on the thorny subject of the return of the refugees, is that latterly the rate of return has been steadily increasing. Last month the military authorities allowed us to grant 400 ordinary permits (this number is ...
— Lord Milner's Work in South Africa - From its Commencement in 1897 to the Peace of Vereeniging in 1902 • W. Basil Worsfold
... dream of being entangled in a thorny hedge, you will be hampered in your business by unruly partners or persons working under you. To lovers, this dream is significant of ...
— 10,000 Dreams Interpreted • Gustavus Hindman Miller
... grass he discovered the doorstep, and near by was a little mound where the great walnut-tree stump had been. The cellar was a mere dent in the sloping ground; it had been filled in by the growing grass and slow processes of summer and winter weather. But just at the pilgrim's right were some thorny twigs of an old rosebush. A sudden brightening of memory brought to mind the love that his mother—dead since his fifteenth year—had kept for this sweetbrier. How often she had wished that she had brought it to her new home! So much had changed in the world, so many had gone ...
— A Country Doctor and Selected Stories and Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett
... flowers in close, showy panicles. Two species, C. prostrates and C. procumbens, spread smooth, blue-flowered mats and rugs beneath the pines, and offer fine beds to tired mountaineers. The commonest species, C. cordulatus, is most common in the silver-fir woods. It is white-flowered and thorny, and makes dense thickets of tangled chaparral, difficult to wade through or to walk over. But it is pressed flat every winter by ten or fifteen feet of snow. The western azalea makes glorious beds of bloom along the river bank and meadows. ...
— The Yosemite • John Muir
... the gifts our planet proffers, Such the thorny home she offers Spirits fine: Artists, poets, earthward sent us, Heavenly natures, briefly lent us, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 2, August, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... soon proved a thorny one. Griffiths was a hard business man, of shrewd, worldly good sense, but little refinement or cultivation. He meddled, or rather muddled with literature, too, in a business way, altering and modifying occasionally the writings ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... beautiful as Eve. Airy and etherial as a vision, and yet sharply defined amid the surrounding shadows, stood this daughter of Hindostan: I could read on her delicate brow the thought that had brought her hither. The thorny creeping plants tore her sandals, but for all that she came rapidly forward. The deer that had come down to the river to quench her thirst, sprang by with a startled bound, for in her hand the maiden bore a lighted lamp. I could see the blood in her delicate finger tips, as she spread them ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... reply, Lord James stooped and crept through the narrow passage under the thorny wall. As he straightened up on the inner side, Blake caught and gripped his hand in a big ...
— Out of the Primitive • Robert Ames Bennet
... the path be long, and thorny, the cycle is closing, and many have reached the goal through its ...
— Cosmic Consciousness • Ali Nomad
... sentiment for the North of Ireland and little sharp stobbers for the manicure lady. Speaking as an outsider I would say that there ought to be other varieties of wood that would serve as well and bring about the desired results as readily—a good thorny variety of poison ivy ought to fill the bill, I should think. But it seems that orange wood is absolutely essential. A manicure lady could no more do a manicure properly without using an orange wood stobber at certain ...
— Cobb's Anatomy • Irvin S. Cobb
... moments he had felt that he was once more a prisoner, and now he breathed freely again, and waiting till the last rustle of the canes and undergrowth had died away with the faint gleam of the torch, he crept painfully out from amidst the thorny undergrowth, ...
— Middy and Ensign • G. Manville Fenn
... rivers glide, And line the path with deadly foes: The wood, my love, is full of woes. Scorpions, and grasshoppers, and flies Disturb the wanderer as he lies, And wake him from his troubled doze: The wood, my love, is full of woes. Trees, thorny bushes, intertwined, Their branched ends together bind, And dense with grass the thicket grows: The wood, my dear, is full of woes, With many ills the flesh is tried, When these and countless fears beside Vex those who in the wood remain: The wilds are naught but ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... in the meadow; They gather the elder-bloom white; They find where the dusky grapes purple In the soft-tinted October light. They know where the apples hang ripest, And are sweeter than Italy's wines; They know where the fruit hangs the thickest On the long, thorny blackberry-vines. ...
— Graded Memory Selections • Various
... proffered aid, Rebecca found herself in the midst of a thicket of bushes, many of which were thorny and all of which seemed ...
— The Panchronicon • Harold Steele Mackaye |
