"Arabian Nights" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Ravelston family, that Mrs. Scott, who had, she says, "a turn for literature quite uncommon among the ladies of the time," encouraged her son in his passion for Shakespeare; that his plays, and the Arabian Nights, were often read aloud in the family circle by Walter, "and served to spend many a happy evening hour;" nay, that, however good Mitchell may have frowned at such a suggestion, even Mr. Scott made little objection to his children, ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume I (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... him to a seat by the fire, and comforted him with tea and hot muffins. The frank charm of his girl-hostess captivated Aristide and drove from his mind the riddle of his adventure. Besides, think of the Arabian Nights' enchantment of the change from his lonely and shabby bed-sitting-room in the Rusholme Road to this fragrant palace with princess and all to keep him company! He watched the firelight dancing through her hair, the dainty ...
— The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol • William J. Locke
... it that we all have some acquaintance at least with the Arabian Nights? What have these purely Eastern tales to do with us? Both questions may be answered at once. It is because they contain the very essence of oriental thought, manners, customs, habits, speech, and deeds: because we can learn from ...
— The Book-Hunter at Home • P. B. M. Allan
... grand-daughter. They went home to talk about her. They went to bed to dream of her. They read Mary Lamb's stories from Shakespeare, and Hope Wayne was Ophelia, and Desdemona, and Imogen—above all others, she was Juliet. They read the "Arabian Nights," and she was all the Arabian Princesses with unpronounceable names. They read Miss Edgeworth—"Helen," "Belinda."—"Oh, thunder!" they cried, and dropped the book to think ...
— Trumps • George William Curtis
... queer ideas about America, and seemed never to have seen anything but Stornham and the village. G. Selden liked him, and was vaguely sorry for a little chap to whom a description of the festivities attendant upon the Fourth of July and a Presidential election seemed like stories from the Arabian Nights. ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... and in many ways the most interesting and romantic, is a horde of huddled refugees living among ruins. It may rebuild; it probably will; but those who have known that peculiar city by the Golden Gate and have caught its flavor of the Arabian Nights feel that it can never be the same. When it rises out of its ashes it will probably doubtless resemble other modern cities and have ...
— The San Francisco Calamity • Various
... An Arabian Nights touch was imparted to the dissolving panorama by strange visitants from Tartary and Kurdistan, Korea and Aderbeijan, Armenia, Persia, and the Hedjaz—men with patriarchal beards and scimitar-shaped noses, ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... Steinheimer, to which all the Austrian and foreign notables were invited. It was just before the ball began that the diamonds were first missed—in fact, the Princess was about to put them on, she representing some gorgeously decorated character from the Arabian Nights, when the discovery was made that the diamonds were gone. She was naturally very much upset over her loss, and sent at once for the Prince, her husband, insisting that the police should be notified immediately and detectives ...
— Jennie Baxter, Journalist • Robert Barr
... magnificent list of names in the next day's papers. If the stock of the Consolidated Illuminating and Power Company was considered a good investment by these generals and captains and lieutenants of finance, who, of course, attended this Arabian Nights banquet as investors, it must certainly be a good investment for the ...
— The Making of Bobby Burnit - Being a Record of the Adventures of a Live American Young Man • George Randolph Chester
... long, is by universal confession the richest treasure-house the ransackers of the whole earth have yet brought to light. "The wealth of Ormuz or of Ind," immortalised by Milton's most majestic epic, the wealth of the Rand completely eclipses, and nothing imagined in the glowing pages of the "Arabian Nights" rivals in solid worth the sober realities now being unearthed along this uninviting ridge. It fortunately was not in the power of the Boer Government to carry off this as yet ungarnered treasure, or it ...
— With the Guards' Brigade from Bloemfontein to Koomati Poort and Back • Edward P. Lowry
... 'm afraid. It is still in circulation in Germany, I believe, on its merits as a serious book. I haven't a copy of the edition in English. THAT was all exhausted by collectors who bought it for its supposed obscenity, like Burton's 'Arabian Nights.' Come this way, and I will show you ...
— The Damnation of Theron Ware • Harold Frederic
... oldest romances in the world have to do with the magical operation of the mirror. In the Gesta Romanorum there is a story of a knight who went to Palestine, and who while there was shown by an Eastern magician in a mirror what was going on at home. In the Arabian Nights the story of Prince Ahmed has a variant, an ivory tube through which could be discovered the far-distant—a sort of anticipation of Sam Weller's 'double million magnifying gas microscope ...
— Storyology - Essays in Folk-Lore, Sea-Lore, and Plant-Lore • Benjamin Taylor
... witchery scenes are in general but poorly executed, and possess little novelty to those who have read the Arabian Nights Entertainments, there is, occasionally, some fine description, and striking combination. We do not remember any poem, indeed, that presents, throughout, a greater number of lively images, or could afford so many subjects for ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... that David and Hope had not thrown away the Quaker drab, the shovel hat and the poke bonnet, and had gone forth fashionable, worldly and an hungered, among the fleshpots of Egypt. There was talk of gilded palaces, Saracenic splendours and dark suggestions from the Arabian Nights. ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... datto's wine-forbidden code of ethics, whiskey and soda were passed to the men, as well as fine cigars and cigarettes; and when we finally left it was to be followed to the launch in real Arabian Nights style by two picturesque slaves carrying gifts for us all from the future Sultan and Sultana of Mindanao—jabuls magnificently embroidered, hand-woven turbans, and knives with silver handles—truly right royal gifts and charming mementos ...
— A Woman's Journey through the Philippines - On a Cable Ship that Linked Together the Strange Lands Seen En Route • Florence Kimball Russel
... an Arabian Nights tale," said Bessie. "I don't believe that it is more than half true, ...
— Paste Jewels • John Kendrick Bangs
... burned too fast, or papa was full, or both, but the shell went off (in the usual way) before he threw it, and where was papa’s hand? Well, there’s nothing to hurt in that; the islands up north are all full of one-handed men, like the parties in the “Arabian Nights”; but either Randall was too old, or he drank too much, and the short and the long of it was that he died. Pretty soon after, the nigger was turned out of the island for stealing from white men, and went off to the west, where he found men of his own ...
— Island Nights' Entertainments • Robert Louis Stevenson
... his hand out of it, with a gold ring on one of the fingers, which he permitted a noble of the Dolfin family to remove; and a quaint and delightful story was further invented of this ring, which I shall not repeat here, as it is now as well known as any tale of the Arabian Nights. But the fast and the discovery of the coffin, by whatever means effected, are facts; and they are recorded in one of the best-preserved mosaics of the north transept, executed very certainly not long after the event had taken place, closely resembling in its treatment that of the Bayeux tapestry, ...
— Stones of Venice [introductions] • John Ruskin
... became alarmed, and, after making me stand with my tongue out before himself and Mrs. Waddy, like a dragon in a piece of tapestry, would resume his old playfulness, and try to be the same that he had been in Mrs. Waddy's lodgings. Then we read the Arabian Nights together, or, rather, he read them to me, often acting out the incidents as we rode or drove abroad. An omission to perform a duty was the fatal forgetfulness to sprinkle pepper on the cream-tarts; if my father subjected me to an interrogation concerning my lessons, he was the dread African ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... promenading the quarter-deck. A dozen steady old salts are rolling along the gangways; and the men are clustered in knots between the guns, talking, laughing, or listening to the yarns of their comrades—an amusement to which sailors are as much addicted as the Sultan in the Arabian Nights. But music is the order of the evening. Though a band is not allowed to a ship of our class, there are always good musicians to be found among the reckless and jolly fellows composing a man-of-war's crew. ...
— Journal of an African Cruiser • Horatio Bridge
... fact," said Mrs. Copley. "And in the hen, or under it—in the hen, I believe—there is a crown of gold and diamonds and pearls, with a motto. Oh, it's wonderful. It's better than the Arabian Nights, ...
— The End of a Coil • Susan Warner
... he was suffering for food, and to-morrow he will be again bereft of all by the fickle turns that Fortune makes in the wheel of destiny. The wildest of our romances never come up to many incidents that have occurred in their own mine; and when they attempt fiction, it is on the pattern of the Arabian Nights' Entertainments. I do verily believe that all that class of Arabian tales are but the reproduction of the romances from the ...
— Mexico and its Religion • Robert A. Wilson
... an evidently familiar nail in the passage, and then re-entering,— "But from Bagdad in the first instance. I visited that city, sacred to fairy-lore, and from thence journeyed to Damascus like one of our favorite merchants in the Arabian Nights,—then I went to Beyrout, and Alexandria, from which latter place I took ship homeward, stopping at delicious Venice while on ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... for colouring. MS. Ed. 34. v. Northumb. Book, p. 415. Sandall wood. The translators of that very modern book the Arabian Nights Entertainments, frequently have Sanders and Sandal wood, as a commodity of ...
— The Forme of Cury • Samuel Pegge
... is open to any one to say that the pious records from which I have quoted are a desolation of the spirit; that they possess all the improbability of the "Arabian Nights," and none of their charm; that all the distempered dreamings to which our poor humanity is subject have given themselves a rendezvous in their pages. I am not for disputing the point, and I can understand how one man may be saddened by their perusal, while another ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... silent town; many were yet abed and asleep; some sat drowsily in their open houses; there was no sound of intercourse or business. In that hour before the shadows, the quarter of the palace and canal seemed like a landing-place in the "Arabian Nights" or from the classic poets; here were the fit destination of some "faery frigot," here some adventurous prince might step ashore among new characters and incidents; and the island prison, where it floated on the luminous face of the lagoon, might have passed for the repository of the Grail. In ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... story from the Arabian Nights," he said. "Only an Oriental could have planned it. It does not belong ...
— A Little Princess • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... I scarce knew if I dreamed and was waking, or if the reality ended with my imprisonment in the clammy cellar and this silent escape, blindfolded, upon the river with a girl for our guide who might have stepped out of the pages of "The Arabian Nights" ...
— The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... visit the Midway Plaisance. It seemed like the "Arabian Nights," it was crammed so full of novelty and interest. Here was the India of my books in the curious bazaar with its Shivas and elephant-gods; there was the land of the Pyramids concentrated in a model Cairo with its mosques ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller
... even a bookshelf with books on it: "Hans Andersen," "The Arabian Nights," "Lavengro," "Inquire Within," "Mrs. Beeton," "Bradshaw" (rather cowardly, Robert thought), and "The Blue Poetry Book." There was also "The Whole Art of Caravaning," with certain passages marked ...
— The Slowcoach • E. V. Lucas
... from her indifference to the project, resolved to put it into execution. This story of the two girls weeping, and filling Madame's bedroom with the noisiest lamentations, was Malicorne's chef-d'oeuvre. As nothing is so probable as improbability, so natural as romance, this kind of Arabian Nights story succeeded perfectly with Madame. The first thing she did, was to send Montalais away, and then three days, or rather three nights, afterward, she had La Valliere removed. She gave to the latter one of the small rooms on the top story, situated immediately ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas
... Arabian Nights Swift's Gulliver's Travels Defoe's Robinson Crusoe Goldsmith's Vicar of Wakefield Cervantes' Don Quixote Boswell's Life of Johnson Moliere Schiller's William Tell Sheridan's The Critic, School for Scandal, and The Rivals ...
— The Pleasures of Life • Sir John Lubbock
... that the realists paint the manners of their own place and time, while the romantics deal with more remote materials. But this distinction, likewise, often fails to hold. No stories were ever more essentially romantic than Stevenson's "New Arabian Nights," which depict details of London and Parisian life at the time when the author wrote them; and no novel is more essentially realistic than "Romola," which carries us back through many centuries to a medieval city far away. Thackeray, the realist, in "Henry Esmond," ...
— A Manual of the Art of Fiction • Clayton Hamilton
... the Beast, which stands in the Court of Flowers, was designed to be set here, while Mrs. Harry Payne Whitney's Fountain of the Arabian Nights was to have found a place in the Court of Flowers. These two courts were planned as the homes of the fairy tales, one of Oriental, the other of Occidental lore. Many beautiful things were designed for them. The attic ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber
... knew all about that, because his son was stationed in the Citadel. And he proceeded to meander on historically, over a period between the first Arab conqueror Amru, to Haroun-al-Raschid, assuring us that old Cairo was the city of the Arabian Nights. He would, to my joy, have gone on indefinitely from Saladin to Napoleon if Sir John Biddell, as the only baronet on board, had not cut the only general short. He is a square man whose portrait could be properly done only by a Cubist. "Too much history, my friend!" ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson
... thought that Cartier would find his way to the sea of Verrazano, beyond which were probably the lands visited by Marco Polo, that enterprising merchant of Venice, whose stories of adventure in India and China read like stories of the Arabian Nights. ...
— Canada • J. G. Bourinot
... ago, we sent a page or two to one of the magazines,—the "Knickerbocker," if we remember aright,—in which the story was told from the "Arabian Nights," of the three kings' sons, who each wished to obtain the hand of a lovely princess, and received for answer, that he who brought home the most wonderful object should obtain the lady's hand as his ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 20, June, 1859 • Various
... is a suite inspired by the Arabian Nights. The Sultan, persuaded of the falseness and faithlessness of woman, had sworn to put every one of his wives to death in turn after the first night. But Scheherazade saved her life by interesting him in the ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... In this social Arabian Nights' dream, however, you will find no sailors or soldiers, no great actors or writers, no real poets or artists, no genuine statesmen. The nearest you will get to any of these is the millionaire senator, or the amateur decorators and portrait painters who, by making ...
— The "Goldfish" • Arthur Train
... trouble and loss of comfort. We stayed three weeks at the Cape de Verds; it was no ordinary pleasure rambling over the plains of lava under a tropical sun, but when I first entered on and beheld the luxuriant vegetation in Brazil, it was realizing the visions in the 'Arabian Nights.' The brilliancy of the scenery throws one into a delirium of delight, and a beetle hunter is not likely soon to awaken from it, when whichever way he turns fresh treasures meet his eye. At Rio de Janeiro three months passed away like so many weeks. I made a most delightful ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... isn't it refreshing! Then, my precious child, the fun of it is that nobody knows who these Veneerings are, and that they know nobody, and that they have a house out of the Tales of the Genii, and give dinners out of the Arabian Nights. Curious to see 'em, my dear? Say you'll know 'em. Come and dine with 'em. They shan't bore you. Say who shall meet you. We'll make up a party of our own, and I'll engage that they shall not interfere with you for one single moment. You really ought to see their gold and silver ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... their political creed, has been justified by results. Their gigantic creation launches into the second decade of its second century, belted with power, aggrandized with El Dorados, the amazement of the world, the "Arabian Nights" ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 22, September, 1891 • Various
... awed by hearing of the little Egyptian that his native tongue was Arabic, and that he spoke nothing more occidental than Turkish. But, indeed, was it wholly absurd to offer a tacit homage to this favored boy, who must know the "Arabian Nights" in the original? ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... form was not invisible to my mind's eye,—an Arab girl, her arms, hard and smooth as marble, visible through her loose sleeves, a thin veil falling on her face from the fringe of her cap, and a curved dagger at her waist! Methought that one of the thousand and one Arabian Nights had been wafted to me from the world of romance, and that at the dead of night I was wending my way through the dark narrow alleys of slumbering Bagdad to a ...
— The Hungry Stones And Other Stories • Rabindranath Tagore
... in my opinion the poem had too much; and that the only, or chief fault, if I might say so, was the obtrusion of the moral sentiment so openly on the reader as a principle or cause of action in a work of such pure imagination. It ought to have had no more moral than the Arabian Nights' tale of the merchant's sitting down to eat dates by the side of a well, and throwing the shells aside, and lo! a genie starts up, and says he must kill the aforesaid merchant, because one of the date shells had, it seems, put out the ...
— Coleridge's Ancient Mariner and Select Poems • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... the fens and flats of Cambridge and Lincolnshire. In 1829 he obtained the Chancellor's medal for a poem on "Timbuctoo." In 1830 he published his first volume, with the title of Poems chiefly Lyrical— a volume which contained, among other beautiful verses, the "Recollections of the Arabian Nights" and "The Dying Swan." In 1833 he issued another volume, called simply Poems; and this contained the exquisite poems entitled "The Miller's Daughter" and "The Lotos-Eaters." The Princess, a poem as remarkable for its striking thoughts ...
— A Brief History of the English Language and Literature, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John Miller Dow Meiklejohn
... the hearing of one story reminds us of another. I always admired the 'Arabian Nights,' because the stories contained in that work hang together so like a string of onions, or a braid of seed corn. The first is a sort of introduction to the second, and the second an usher to the third, ...
— Wild Northern Scenes - Sporting Adventures with the Rifle and the Rod • S. H. Hammond
... the state, either for public establishments during peace, or as aids during the war. The colossal fortunes of the great Russian nobility are employed in making collections of all kinds, and in enterprises of which the Arabian Nights have given the models; these fortunes are also frequently lost by the unbridled passions of their possessors. When I arrived at Moscow, nothing was talked of but the sacrifices that were made on account of the war. A young Count de Momonoff raised a regiment for the state, ...
— Ten Years' Exile • Anne Louise Germaine Necker, Baronne (Baroness) de Stael-Holstein
... aspects of it for which it is almost as difficult to find aesthetic as moral justification. The truth is, no doubt, that the whole spectacle was plunged for him in the glamour of romance. Paris did not belong to the working-day world, but was like Baghdad or Samarcand, a city of the Arabian Nights. How his imagination transfigured it we may see in such ...
— Poems • Alan Seeger
... study of Oriental languages and manners, and adopted the dress and habits of the Egyptian man of learning. He pub. Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians (1836), which remains a standard authority, and a translation of The Thousand and One Nights (1838-40) (Arabian Nights). What was intended to be the great work of his life, his Arabic Lexicon, was left unfinished at his death, but was completed by his nephew, Prof. S.L. Poole. L. was regarded as the chief European ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... ingenious writer on the "Arabian Nights," observed to me that Moliere, it must be presumed, never read Fletcher's plays, yet his "Bourgeois Gentilhomme," and the other's "Noble Gentleman," bear in some instances a great resemblance. Both may have been drawn from the same ...
— A History of Pantomime • R. J. Broadbent
... this year was a sketch entitled THE LAST VOYAGE OF SINBAD THE SAILOR, and was a burlesque on Camp life. The idea had come to Migwan in a flash of inspiration one night when Dr. Grayson was reading the Arabian Nights aloud before the fire in the bungalow. She communicated her idea to the rest of the Alley and they received it with whoops ...
— The Campfire Girls at Camp Keewaydin • Hildegard G. Frey
... The Arabian Nights' story of the mountain which consisted of a single loadstone finds its literal fulfilment in Mexico. Not far from Huetamo, on the road towards the Pacific, there is a conical hill composed entirely ...
— Anahuac • Edward Burnett Tylor
... bring you something,' says he, 'next time we call. What shall it be? Now's the time to ask. I'm like the fellow in the "Arabian Nights", the slave of the ring—your ring.' Here he took the girl's hand, and pretending to look at a ring she wore took it up and kissed it. It wasn't a very ugly one neither. 'What will you ...
— Robbery Under Arms • Thomas Alexander Browne, AKA Rolf Boldrewood
... the Bosporus—the colossal magnificence of Baalbec—the Pyramids of Egypt—the prodigious form, the benignant countenance of the Sphynx—Oriental Smyrna—sacred Jerusalem —Damascus, the "Pearl of the East," the pride of Syria, the fabled Garden of Eden, the home of princes and genii of the Arabian Nights, the oldest metropolis on earth, the one city in all the world that has kept its name and held its place and looked serenely on while the Kingdoms and Empires of four thousand years have risen to life, ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... you merry elves! Oh my foot! Oh my hand! I would rather tell you all the stories in the Arabian Nights, than go through one such dance as this. Sit down now and be quiet, for if I have really got it to do, I want to begin as soon as possible. Well, what shall I tell you ...
— No and Other Stories Compiled by Uncle Humphrey • Various
... upon the grave of the eminent saint, Miniato. This personage was, it seems, the son of the king of Armenia,—very much as all the heroes in the Arabian Nights are sons of the emperor of China. Having been converted to Christianity, he was offered by the emperor Decius great honors and rewards suitable to his royal rank, if he would renounce his faith. (A.D. 250.) He refused, and the emperor ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... show you? Perhaps you do not care for sermons. We have a good many; ministers like to see their sermons in print. I think perhaps you will like this better," said Mr. Knox, taking down a copy of the Arabian Nights' Entertainments. "You will find it very interesting; just sit down ...
— Daughters of the Revolution and Their Times - 1769 - 1776 A Historical Romance • Charles Carleton Coffin
... Cunningham, of Knoxville, Tenn. Mr. Cunningham intended to stay at Aden for six months. Like "linked sweetness long drawn out," that period has extended to three years, and is now "losing its sweetness on the desert air." He stated that he was not infatuated with those "scarlet days" and "Arabian nights," and is seeking relief or placement amid more congenial surroundings, where distance (does not) "lend enchantment to the view." But I assured him the Department was as astute as selfish. It knows when it has a good thing, and endeavors to keep it. Mr. ...
— Shadow and Light - An Autobiography with Reminiscences of the Last and Present Century • Mifflin Wistar Gibbs
... remains of the luncheon of which Lady Clavering and Blanche had just partaken. When nobody was near, our little Sylphide, who scarcely ate at dinner more than the six grains of rice of Amina, the friend of the Ghouls in the Arabian Nights, was most active with her knife and fork, and consumed a very substantial portion of mutton cutlets: in which piece of hypocrisy it is believed she resembled other young ladies of fashion. Pen and his uncle declined the refection, but they admired the dining-room with ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... another floor of similar extent. Through one of the doors, which was ajar, Kenyon beheld an almost interminable vista of apartments, opening one beyond the other, and reminding him of the hundred rooms in Blue Beard's castle, or the countless halls in some palace of the Arabian Nights. ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume II. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... too quickly to catch my seat again, for it apparently had the effect of the turned peg on the enchanted horse in the Arabian Nights,[152-1] and Chu Chu instantly rose into the air. But she came down this time before the open window of the kitchen, and I alighted easily on the dresser. The indefatigable ...
— Short Stories of Various Types • Various
... late, Mr. Vane had sent it off rather too soon—there was a neat little packet for Biddy from grandmamma, containing a story-book called The Christmas Stocking, and a lovely scarf worked in all kinds of marvellous Eastern colours, 'making one think of the Arabian nights,' as Alie said, from the Indian cousins. So that it was with a sigh of deep content that Biddy sat down to breakfast, knowing that something still more delightful and wonderful was ...
— The Rectory Children • Mrs Molesworth
... principal actors in it are clearly divine beings who have been brought down to the level of human nature, and who perform feats and tricks so strange and incredible that in reading them we imagine ourselves in the midst of the Arabian Nights. In the struggles of the two favourite heroes against the cruel princes of Xibalba, there may be reminiscences of historical events; but it would be perfectly hopeless to attempt to extricate these ...
— Chips From A German Workshop - Volume I - Essays on the Science of Religion • Friedrich Max Mueller
... and One Nights; or, The Arabian Nights' Entertainments. Translated and Arranged for Family Reading, with Explanatory Notes, by E. W. LANE. 600 Illustrations by Harvey. 2 ...
— Harper's Young People, May 18, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... forth from the blue eyes that met his, and the radiance seemed to light up all his future with mild sunshine. Ideal happiness (of the kind known in the Arabian Nights, in which you are invited to step from the labor and discord of the street into a paradise where everything is given to you and nothing claimed) seemed to be an affair of a few weeks' waiting, ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... motionless awaiting orders by wireless. Of the country before us we knew next to nothing. We did not grasp that the great river at whose mouth we lay was called the Shatt-el-Arab and not the Tigris; and I do not think that a single one of us possessed a copy of the "Arabian Nights." Few of us knew anything about the gun-running troubles in the Persian Gulf of recent years, and of the exploits of the ...
— In Mesopotamia • Martin Swayne
... very interesting," he observed, as if he had never seen Sarakoff before. "A germ that is going to keep us all young. It reminds me of the Arabian Nights. I should like ...
— The Blue Germ • Martin Swayne
... for what was a young sub-lieutenant, without fortune or prospects, to her? What she dreamed of was some princely alliance, that would make her one of the most powerful ladies in Russia, and unless he could realise some dream of the Arabian Nights, Foedor could not ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - VANINKA • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... stories straight from Broadway. At the post-office and in Lamson's store he was soon established as a mighty favourite. Even the women who came to make purchases in the evening,—a hitherto unknown custom,—lingered outside the circle on the porch, revelling in the second edition of the "Arabian Nights." ...
— The Daughter of Anderson Crow • George Barr McCutcheon
... doubt whether or not they would have lost anything in this respect if they, too, had happened to come a little late to the feast furnished by Defoe, Dean Swift, Miss Edgeworth, Oliver Goldsmith, the man who wrote the "Arabian Nights," and ...
— St. Nicholas, Vol. 5, No. 2, December, 1877 • Various
... not yet set, we reserved our chief admiration until the churches should be illuminated. One, however, we entered at sunset, which is worthy of remark—Santo Domingo. It looked like a little Paradise, or a story in the Arabian Nights. All the steps up the altar were covered with pots of beautiful flowers; orange-trees, loaded with fruit and blossom, and rose-bushes in full bloom, glasses of coloured water, and all kinds of fruit. ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon De La Barca
... great chamber, was, that she was following a drove of elephants; but as she skirted the regular ranks of the great dun monsters and came to the front, she concluded that she had stumbled upon the factory of Ali Baba's oil-jars. At any rate, the old picture in the "Arabian Nights" represented Morgiana in the act of pouring the boiling oil into vessels marvellously like these, and in each of these was room for at least four robbers ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... on his part, had a deeply interested auditor in his mother, as he spun the yarn that equaled anything he had ever read in the Arabian Nights. ...
— The Chums of Scranton High at Ice Hockey • Donald Ferguson
... man is in ecstasies; he beholds the realization of the Arabian Nights, and when the harmony commences again, he is fairly entranced. At first, he is fearful of adding the efforts of his laryngeal "little muscles with the long names" to swell the chorus; but, after the second glass of stout and a "go of whiskey," he becomes emboldened, and when the gentleman with ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... with them, went through the military drill with the precision of a trooper, and waltzed about the arena with his mistress on his back!—well, he was not a horse; he was a wizard steed, like the one described in the "Arabian Nights Tales." Alice almost thought she detected the little peg behind ...
— Nine Little Goslings • Susan Coolidge
... herself in winter on a shelf of rock above the Gin Spa Well, a lone streamlet that gurgled from out the rocky sides of the gorge. The story laid hold of his young mind, and under the glow of his imagination assumed the proportions of an Arabian Nights' wonder. He dreamed of it by night, and during the day received thrashings not a few from his zealous schoolmaster, because his thoughts were away from his lessons with Jenny Greenteeth in her Green Fold Clough retreat. On this, the afternoon of ...
— Lancashire Idylls (1898) • Marshall Mather
... I consider one who writes them as a sort of doctor of the mind. And frankly, Meiklejohn, it is not Shakespeare we take to, when we are in a hot corner; nor, certainly, George Eliot—no, nor even Balzac. It is Charles Reade, or old Dumas, or the Arabian Nights, or the best of Walter Scott; it is stories we want, not the high poetic function which represents the world; we are then like the Asiatic with his improvisatore or the middle-agee with his trouvere. We want incident, interest, action: to the devil with ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... I know already," answered Rebecca, with a bright glance. "I'm sure you must be Mr. Aladdin in the Arabian Nights. Oh, please, can I run down and tell Emma Jane? She must be so tired waiting, and she ...
— Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... disagreeable; to the hyperaesthetic every breeze has a sting, and life is full of pin pricks. "The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune" are multiplied in number, and furthermore the reaction to them is intensified. In the "Arabian Nights" the princess boasts that a rose petal bruises her skin, while her competitor in delicacy is made ill by a fiber of cotton in her silken garments. So with the hyperaesthetic; an unintentional overlooking is reacted to as a deadly insult; the thwarting of any desire robs life of its savor; sounds ...
— The Nervous Housewife • Abraham Myerson
... exclaims, "how like the Gorgon of the Arabian Nights thou art! For does not every one whom thou favorest undergo a pitiful transformation even from the first bedding with thee? Does not everything suffer from thy look, thy touch, thy breath? The rose loses its perfume, the grape-vine its clusters, the ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... of the one arose from an exuberance of enjoyment—of the other, from an excess of indifference, real or assumed. Voltaire had no enthusiasm for one thing or another: he made light of every thing. In his hands all things turn to chaff and dross, as the pieces of silver money in the Arabian Nights were changed by the hands of the enchanter into little dry crumbling leaves! He is a Parisian. He never exaggerates, is never violent: he treats things with the most provoking sang froid; and expresses his contempt by the most indirect ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt
... she crossed the compound, and he once caught a glimpse to the ankle of brown open-work stockings. Somehow, she had been made many times the woman by these mere extraneous trappings; and in his mind these wild Arabian Nights adventures of hers seemed ...
— Adventure • Jack London
... creating new species of plant life, Max Standfuss doing the like with insects, make the Arabian Nights commonplace and dull. Think of the Roentgen rays! Think of the achievement of the wonderful young Italian! Marconi's invention seems uncanny, so impossible does it appear even when you watch his ...
— The Young Man and the World • Albert J. Beveridge
... investigated, by twos, or threes, or dozens, till her soul despaired of finding an end. At last her patient search was rewarded, for at the very bottom of a barrel of musty sermons she discovered an ancient volume of "The Arabian Nights." With this her fortune was made, for in these most fascinating of fairy tales the imaginative child discovered a well-spring of joy that was all her own. When things went astray with her, when her brothers started off on long excursions, refusing to take her with them, or in any other childish sorrow, ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe
... three incidents in Dickens' career which should not pass unnoticed. At the first of these dates he was in Paris, where he remained till the middle of May, 1856, greatly feted by the French world of letters and art; dining hither and thither; now enjoying an Arabian Nights sort of banquet given by Emile de Girardin, the popular journalist; now meeting George Sand, the great novelist, whom he describes as "just the sort of woman in appearance whom you might suppose to be the ...
— Life of Charles Dickens • Frank Marzials
... guides our craft with his hands through an opening in the sheer wall, so low that the gunwales grate against the rocky surface of the natural arch. At once we find ourselves in a scene of mystical beauty, in an extravagant voluptuous dream of loveliness, such as the Arabian Nights alone could dare to suggest. Above us, around us, behind us, before us lies a luminous azure atmosphere, which produces the effect of a gigantic molten sapphire, whose secret blue fires we have actually tracked ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... inventory of the characteristics of the Lake of Como!—When Melnotte, for instance, talks of birds "that syllable the name of Pauline" (by the way, a literal translation from an Italian poet), he is not thinking of ornithology, but probably of the Arabian Nights. He is venting the extravagant, but natural, enthusiasm of the ...
— The Lady of Lyons - or Love and Pride • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... purpose of getting her out for a little fresh air, he proposed that she should go for an hour's walk every day, and during her absence invent a story to be told on her return. It was to be a sort of Arabian Nights' Entertainment, with him as the Sultan and her as Scheherazade. The Dynamiter was suggested by certain attempted outrages in London which had all turned out to be fiascos. She began with the Mormon tale and followed with the others, one for each afternoon. Afterwards, when a lean time ...
— The Life of Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson • Nellie Van de Grift Sanchez
... her. "I refer to that Arabian Nights entertainment in New York. Where did we leave off that ...
— The Lure of the Mask • Harold MacGrath
... of disposing of objectionable suitors is unfortunately not available in Europe. A great swallowing capacity is a feature of the species Rakshasa. The "coming as soon as thought of" (dhyatagata) is the Indian equivalent of "rubbing the lamp" in the Arabian Nights. ...
— An Essence Of The Dusk, 5th Edition • F. W. Bain
... and bring them from a distance. This, too, is not one of those miracles which can be explained by the convenient hypothesis of a "substratum of truth." It is either a direct exhibition of the creative power of God, or a fiction as unworthy of a moment's serious consideration as a story in the "Arabian Nights." ...
— The Lost Gospel and Its Contents - Or, The Author of "Supernatural Religion" Refuted by Himself • Michael F. Sadler
... the city, (whether from our tents on the terrace above an ancient and dilapidated pleasure-garden, or from our red-tiled rooms in the good Hotel d'Orient, to which we had been driven by a plague of sand-flies in the camp), we step at once into a chapter of the "Arabian Nights' Entertainments." ...
— Out-of-Doors in the Holy Land - Impressions of Travel in Body and Spirit • Henry Van Dyke
... says that one of the most unfortunate phases of modern civilization is the drift away from the farm, the drift of country youth to the city which has an indescribable fascination for him. His vivid imagination clothes it with Arabian Nights possibilities and joys. The country seems tame and commonplace after his first dream of the city. To him it is synonymous with opportunity, with power, with pleasure. He can not rid himself of its fascination until he tastes its emptiness. He ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... political calculations, and in opposition to the experience of past times; everything upon that grand scale, so common in Epic Poetry, so rare in real life; and thus calculated to strike the imagination of the vulgar, and to remind the sober-thinking few of the Arabian Nights. Every event, too, has that roundness and completeness which is so characteristic of fiction; nothing is done by halves; we have complete victories,—total overthrows, entire subversion of ...
— Historic Doubts Relative To Napoleon Buonaparte • Richard Whately
... stern-featured man, with a dark and deeply marked countenance: his speech was strongly inflected with his native Northumbrian accent, but the fascination of that story told by himself, while his tame dragon flew panting along his iron pathway with us, passed the first reading of the Arabian Nights, the incidents of which it almost seemed to recall. He was wonderfully condescending and kind, in answering all the questions of my eager ignorance, and I listened to him with eyes brimful of warm tears of sympathy and enthusiasm, as he told me of all his alternations ...
— Railway Adventures and Anecdotes - extending over more than fifty years • Various
... what you want, and do what you like, and kill people that you don't like," said she. "Don't you remember the Arabian Nights?" ...
— The King's Mirror • Anthony Hope
... my good Sir, when I tell you all these strange tales? Do you think me distracted, or that your country is so? Does not this letter seem an olio composed of ingredients picked out of the history of Charles I., of Clodius and Sesostris, and the "Arabian Nights"? Yet I could have coloured it higher without trespassing on truth; but when I, inured to the climate of my own country, can scarcely believe what I hear and see, how should you, who converse only with the ordinary race of men and women, give credit to what I have ventured ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume II • Horace Walpole
... armpits in water sometimes; and a man would stand up afterwards shining with phosphorus, like a golden statue. Romantic! No poet could relate it. They used to cross and recross in the starlight—all the gleaming figures. Like a ballet done for a Sultan in the Arabian Nights. I was at that for a couple of years, and then the gunboats got too sharp for us and the ...
— Love and Lucy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... silent town; many were yet abed and asleep; some sat drowsily in their open houses; there was no sound of intercourse or business. In that hour before the shadows, the quarter of the palace and canal seemed like a landing-place in the Arabian Nights or from the classic poets; here were the fit destination of some 'faery frigot,' here some adventurous prince might step ashore among new characters and incidents; and the island prison, where it floated on the luminous face of the lagoon, might have passed for the repository of the Grail. In ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... places than—some young people I know. But, for all that, we do not feel any older than we did when we were sixteen. We enjoy building with blocks as well, and we can do it a great deal better; we like the "Arabian Nights" just as well as we ever did; and we can laugh at a good charade quite as loud as any of you can. So you need not take it on yourselves to suppose that because you are among "old people,"—by which you mean married people,—all is lost, and that the hours are to be stupid and forlorn. ...
— How To Do It • Edward Everett Hale
... building up those last years in Bulawayo. I had got my pile—not one of the big ones, but good enough for me; and I had figured out all kinds of ways of enjoying myself. My father had brought me out from Scotland at the age of six, and I had never been home since; so England was a sort of Arabian Nights to me, and I counted on stopping there for the rest ...
— The Thirty-nine Steps • John Buchan
... mine to the canine family in general, and their affection towards myself, have induced me, like the Vizier in the "Arabian Nights," of happy memory, to devote some time to the study of their language. Its idiom is not so difficult as many would suppose. There is a simplicity about it that often shames the dialects of man; which ...
— The Adventures of a Dog, and a Good Dog Too • Alfred Elwes
... Labouret. Here, in gardens full of shady trees and gorgeous blossoms, I spent those happy days when hope extends hardly further than to-morrow, and memory hardly further than yesterday; storing my mind with classical mythology and Bible stories, the "Arabian Nights," the natural history of Buffon, and ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... learning the art of ship-carpentry. Such was the first introduction to Europe of the Tsar of Russia! They had long heard of this autocrat before whom millions trembled, ruling like a savage despot in the midst of splendors rivaling the Arabian Nights. Now they saw him! And the amazement can scarcely be described. He dined with the Great Electress Sophia, afterwards first Queen of Prussia, and she wrote of him: "Nature has given him an infinity of wit. With advantages he might have been ...
— A Short History of Russia • Mary Platt Parmele
... and then, not understanding, and having a greater fondness for the versifying part than the prose. But she did pore over "Rasselas," and an odd collection of adventures in Eastern lands, very like the "Arabian Nights." ...
— A Little Girl in Old Philadelphia • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... "Scene from the Arabian Nights," by Mr Jacobi, which, though it is an attempt, and by no means an unsuccessful one, at an accidental effect of nature, which is generally to be avoided, is extremely pleasing. It is a portrait of great loveliness, grace, and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various
... the wheels, the preparation of forces, are far less visible. It is an honest man, an austere but pious figure, of middling talents, that shoots up one morning, borne upward by I know not what cataclysm. There is nothing like it in the Arabian Nights. And in a moment he goes higher than the throne. He is set ...
— The Psychology of Revolution • Gustave le Bon
... recompense in the joy with which Herbert would come home of a night and tell me of these changes, little imagining that he told me no news, and would sketch airy pictures of himself conducting Clara Barley to the land of the Arabian Nights, and of me going out to join them (with a caravan of camels, I believe), and of our all going up the Nile and seeing wonders. Without being sanguine as to my own part in those bright plans, I felt that Herbert's way was clearing ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... now I am sure. Do you remember that house we looked at one day? I have forgotten even the street, but we can find it again. It had a long sloping lawn, you remember, and stone steps and a beautiful panelled hall running straight through to a walled garden which might well have fallen there by some Arabian Nights enchantment. That is the house I mean to have for Esther. I can see her there quite plainly, in her blue dress, filling the rose bowl which stands upon the round table in a dusky corner of the hall. Over her shoulder, through the open door, ...
— Up the Hill and Over • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... furniture appeared to be of very ancient Arabian design; each chair was a perfect masterpiece of wood-carving, picked out and inlaid with gold. The sight of a semi-grand piano, which stood open, brought me back to the realization that I was living in modern times, and not in a dream of the Arabian Nights; while the Paris Figaro and the London Times—both of that day's issue—lying on a side-table, demonstrated the nineteenth century to me with every possible clearness. There were flowers everywhere in this apartment—in graceful vases and in gilded osier baskets—and a queer lop-sided Oriental ...
— A Romance of Two Worlds • Marie Corelli
... of the native Australian flowers emit any perfume except the golden and silver wattle (the Mimosae tribe): these charm the senses, and fully realize the description we read of in the 'Arabian Nights' Entertainments' of those exotics, the balmy perfume of which is exhaled ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... cash-box had seemed to him inexhaustible, and he had drawn on it like a Prince in the Arabian Nights on the treasure ...
— Serge Panine, Complete • Georges Ohnet
... the true Stevenson would our critical grandchild acquire if he chanced to pick down any one of half a dozen of these volumes! As we watched his hand stray down the rank, how we would pray that it might alight upon the ones we love, on the "New Arabian Nights" "The Ebb-tide," "The Wrecker," "Kidnapped," or "Treasure Island." These can surely never lose ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... It was glamour. Father, I have lived Arabian nights. I have sat out a dance with the evening star. But it was all in a past existence, in the days of Babylon, and I am myself again. But he has been chivalrous always. If the slothful, indolent creature I used to be has improved in any way, ...
— The Admirable Crichton • J. M. Barrie
... a story-telling age, I have been tempted occasionally to give the reader one of the many tales that are served up with supper at the Hall. I might, indeed, have furnished a series almost equal in number to the Arabian Nights; but some were rather hackneyed and tedious; others I did not feel warranted in betraying into print; and many more were of the old general's relating, and turned principally upon tiger-hunting, elephant-riding, and Seringapatam; enlivened by the wonderful deeds of Tippoo Saib, and ...
— Bracebridge Hall, or The Humorists • Washington Irving
... rumbustious pony with little spurs on my heels (knowing that in my agitation I would use them unconsciously), and being enormously amused at my terrors. Yet when that same lady discovered that I had found a copy of The Arabian Nights and was devouring it with avidity, she was horrified, and hid it away from me lest it should break my soul as the pony might have broken my neck. This way of producing hardy bodies and timid souls is so common in country houses that you may ...
— A Treatise on Parents and Children • George Bernard Shaw
... dear," said Wilbur as they left the house, "that was a sort of Arabian Nights entertainment for us, wasn't it? A little barbaric, but handsome and well intentioned. I hope it didn't ...
— Unleavened Bread • Robert Grant
... himself, the influence of his grown-up friends, and that of his contemporaries. All that his grown-up friends tell him in the way of experience goes for very little, except in palpable matters. They talk of abstractions which he cannot comprehend: and the "Arabian Nights" is a truer world to him than that they talk of. Still, though they cannot furnish experience, they can give motives. Indeed, in their daily intercourse with the child, they are always doing so. For instance, truth, courage, and ...
— Friends in Council (First Series) • Sir Arthur Helps
... some town," said Bill, on reaching the gay and dazzling city. The wide streets, oriental buildings, the weird bazaars, gaily-lit cafes, and veiled women, amazed these simple Bushmen. It was like "The Arabian Nights," wonderful, alluring, seductive and strange. All were gripped by the subtle atmosphere of things. Their blood tingled with the sensuous aroma of the East. Cheap wine in the cafes of the Greeks let the devil loose, and so they fell an easy prey to the lures ...
— The Kangaroo Marines • R. W. Campbell
... Apicius, has come down to us what may be accepted as the most ancient European "Book of Cookery." I think that the idea widely entertained as to this work having proceeded from the pen of a man, after whom it was christened, has no more substantial basis than a theory would have that the "Arabian Nights" were composed by Haroun al Raschid. Warner, in the introduction to his "Antiquitates Culinariae," 1791, adduces as a specimen of the rest two receipts from this collection, shewing how the Roman cook of the Apician epoch was wont ...
— Old Cookery Books and Ancient Cuisine • William Carew Hazlitt
... of the play were still warm and vital, in his imagination, infusing his thoughts with a roseate glamour of unreality, wherein all things were strangely possible. The iridescent imagery of the Arabian Nights of his boyhood (who has forgotten the fascination of those three fat old volumes of crabbed type, illuminated with their hundreds of cramped old wood-cuts?) had in a scant three hours been recreated for him by Knoblauch's ...
— The Day of Days - An Extravaganza • Louis Joseph Vance
... growth of passion. She, alone, young, beautiful and attractive, had been the magnet to youth, beauty and attraction. She had been the centre of an island world of her own, which she had tried to keep as inaccessible to others as the granite coast in the Arabian Nights. ...
— Helen and Arthur - or, Miss Thusa's Spinning Wheel • Caroline Lee Hentz
... life which you certainly will not envy;" then, evidently desirous to change the subject, he said in a livelier tone, "But what a marvellous city this Paris of ours is! Remember I had never seen it before: it burst on me like a city in the Arabian Nights two weeks ago. And that which strikes me most—I say it with regret and a pang of conscience—is certainly not the Paris of former times, but that Paris which M. Buonaparte—I beg pardon, which the Emperor—has called up around ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... of the "ladies' saloon." In short, you will note all around you a style and luxuriance to which you, as a European traveller, have not been accustomed. You have only read of such a scene in some Oriental tale—in Mary Montagu, or the "Arabian Nights." ...
— The Quadroon - Adventures in the Far West • Mayne Reid
... the Lake" at Glasgow. Grove catalogues his other compositions as follows: a cathedral service, anthems, chants, psalm-tunes, and introits for the Holy Days and Seasons of the English Church (1866); "Songs in a Cornfield" (1868); "Shakspeare Songs for Four Voices" (1860-64); songs from Lane's "Arabian Nights," and Kingsley's and Tennyson's poems; overtures to "The Merchant of Venice," "Romeo and Juliet," "Hamlet," and "Don Carlos;" symphonies, string quartets, and a quintet; a concerto for violin and orchestra; and sonatas for pianoforte alone, and in combination ...
— The Standard Oratorios - Their Stories, Their Music, And Their Composers • George P. Upton
... the "Arabian Nights," served in an eighty-foot hall full of ancestors and pots of flowering roses, and, what was more impressive, heated by steam. When it was ended and the little mother had gone away—("You boys want to talk, so I shall say good-night now")—we gathered about an apple-wood fire, in ...
— Stalky & Co. • Rudyard Kipling
... only remained to await the coming of Injun. He was Whitey's guest at the ranch house that night, the night of the last day of Whitey's freedom from school. As it was early, no doubt the boys would soon appear at the bunk house, to listen to the sort of Arabian Nights' entertainment that was afforded by the ...
— Injun and Whitey to the Rescue • William S. Hart
... my visions, as I read the Arabian Nights, looked and walked like Mlle. d'Esgrignon; and afterwards, when my drawing-master gave me heads from the antique to copy, I noticed that their hair was braided like Mlle. d'Esgrignon's. Still later, when the foolish fancies had vanished one by one, ...
— The Collection of Antiquities • Honore de Balzac
... that quick, affectionate sympathy of hers that was so winning, leaning forward and watching them with the lighted look in her blue eyes. It all seemed to her tired, alert mind like some story she might have read to her children, an Arabian Nights narrative which might begin, "And the Master of the House, ascribing praise unto Allah, repeated ...
— The Rose Garden Husband • Margaret Widdemer
... Letters"? It is the style, the irony, the elegance. It is the exquisite delineation of character, the moral wisdom, the purity and force of language, the artistic arrangement, and the lively and interesting narratives, appealing to all minds, like the "Arabian Nights," or Froissart's "Chronicles," which give immortality to the classic authors of antiquity. We will not let them perish, because they amuse us, and inspire us. Livy doubtless was too ambitious in aspiring ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... guide. It is said that David Hume became a deist by being appointed in a debating society to take the side of infidelity. Voltaire could not erase from his mind the impression of a poem on infidelity committed at the age of five. The "Arabian Nights" aroused the genius of Coleridge. A Massachusetts soldier in the Civil War observed a bird hulling rice, and shot it; taking its bill for a model, he invented a hulling machine which has revolutionized the rice business. ...
— Architects of Fate - or, Steps to Success and Power • Orison Swett Marden
... Thomas Cooper, sitting in Stafford gaol, after a youth spent in cobbling shoes, vents his treasures of classic and historic learning in a "Purgatory of Suicides"; or a Prince becomes the poet of the poor, no less for having fed his boyish fancy with "The Arabian Nights" and "The Pilgrim's Progress." But, with the most of us, sedentary and monotonous occupations, as has long been known, create of themselves a morbidly-meditative and fantastic turn of mind. And what else, in Heaven's name, ye fine gentlemen—what else can a working man do with ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... his books and college, and woke up half a dozen times in the night to assure himself that the great man sleeping so soundly beside him was not simply the magician of the "Arabian Nights." ...
— Choice Readings for the Home Circle • Anonymous
... between the nightingale that sings in the tree tops and the artificial bird that goes with a spring. Cities like New York, Boston, Pittsburgh and Chicago listened and heard, if sometimes indistinctly, the notes of universal appeal, and children saw the Arabian Nights come true. ...
— The Art of the Story-Teller • Marie L. Shedlock
... other Dutch town. Our English publishers have not been innocent of this charge either. Many a volume printed in Holland and Germany bears the London imprint. The original edition of Burton's translation of the 'Arabian Nights,' issued by him in London, claims to have ...
— The Book-Hunter at Home • P. B. M. Allan
... pattern of your stories appears to have been taken from the Arabian Nights and from Grimm's Fairy Tales—but with not a millionth part of ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science January 1931 • Various
... power surpassed anything told in the Arabian Nights' Tales, and yet he remained the same simple, unaffected man, more thoughtful for another's interests than for his own. The supreme test came in his contact with his brothers, who had insulted and cruelly wronged him. They were completely at his mercy and he had abundant ...
— The Making of a Nation - The Beginnings of Israel's History • Charles Foster Kent and Jeremiah Whipple Jenks
... bicycle up and down the sidewalks, holding her skirts down against the wind, but also she had ransacked the boarding-house shelves and High School library, reading her uncensored way through Lady Audrey's Secret, Canterbury Tales, Five Little Peppers and How They Grew, Plain Facts About Life, Arabian Nights, Golden Treasury, Childe Harold, To Have and to Hold, Tales from Shakespeare, Pilgrim's Progress, Old Curiosity Shop, Diary of Marie Baschkertcheff, Pride and Prejudice, Vanity Fair, Les Miserables, Stories of the Operas, and a red volume ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... fires are mentioned in many Indian legends. In the "Arabian Nights" we read of a demon changing himself into a ...
— Three Frenchmen in Bengal - The Commercial Ruin of the French Settlements in 1757 • S.C. Hill
... aspirations—the large waistcoat beginning to 'point,' (as it soon does in merchants), heavy watchchain, and cheerful conviction of the coming scarcity of necessaries for everybody else, would have failed to please. The sort of merchant I wanted to be was never found in 'Post Office Directory,' but in the 'Arabian Nights,' trading to Bussorah, chiefly in pearls and diamonds. When the Paterfamiliases of my acquaintance instance certain stenches and messes which their Toms and Harrys make with chemicals all over their house, as a proof of 'their natural turn for engineering,' I say, ...
— Some Private Views • James Payn
... the Daphnis and Chloe Suite, the material drawn from an opera of the same name. In modern literature easily the most celebrated and brilliant example of this type is the Scheherazade Suite (based on the Arabian Nights) for full orchestra by Rimsky-Korsakoff. This work in the genuine poetic quality of its themes, in its marvellous descriptive power and in the boldness of its ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... for the Celestial Empire during the rule of the Tang dynasty (seventh and ninth centuries). Colonel J. W. Watson of Bombay suggests New Guinea or the adjacent islands where the Bird of Paradise is said to cry "Wak Wak!" Mr. W. F. Kirby in the Preface (p. ix.) to his neat little book "The New Arabian Nights," says: "The Islands of Wak-Wak, seven years' journey from Bagdad, in the story of Hasan, have receded to a distance of a hundred and fifty years' journey in that of Majin (of Khorasan). There is no ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 8 • Richard F. Burton
... encouraged to read the stories of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, the two great Epics of India and Tales from the Sanskrit Dramatists when they are recommended to read "The Boy's Odyssey," "Legends of Greece and Rome," "Arabian Nights' Tales" and Lamb's "Tales from Shakespeare." It was perhaps from this view of the matter that the University of Calcutta recommended "The Boy's Ramayana" and "Tales from the Hindu Dramatists" for the Matriculation ...
— Tales from the Hindu Dramatists • R. N. Dutta
... the stories of the Arabian Nights, the way we've gone on and all the time kept together, Peter," Nat said one day. "Think of it! We have been given more money and better jobs all the time. I do not just see why, either. Lots of the men who started long ago in the beamhouse of Factory 1 are still there and haven't had a cent ...
— The Story of Leather • Sara Ware Bassett
... books together when I was a boy, 'Robinson Crusoe' being the first (and the second), and the 'Arabian Nights' should have been the next, for we got it out of the library (a penny for three days), but on discovering that they were nights when we had paid for knights we sent that volume packing, and I have curled my lips at it ever since. ...
— Margaret Ogilvy • James M. Barrie
... lesson in ways that neither she nor anybody else dreamed of. The reader who has shrugged his (or her) shoulders over the last illustration will perhaps hear this one which follows more cheerfully. The physician in the Arabian Nights made his patient play at ball with a bat, the hollow handle of which contained drugs of marvellous efficacy. Whether it was the drugs that made the sick man get well, or the exercise, is not of so much consequence as the fact that he did at ...
— The Guardian Angel • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... that the scenes in the Turkish bazars on a fete day are like a picture from the "Arabian Nights," the places being illuminated by many candles or chandeliers, and covered by awnings formed of rich shawls, scarfs, and embroideries brought from the interior. This gives each bazar the appearance of ...
— Travels in the Far East • Ellen Mary Hayes Peck
... The Arabian Nights rehearsed in bed! The Fairy Tales in school-time read, By stealth, 'twixt verb and noun! The angel form that always walk'd In all my dreams, and look'd and talk'd Exactly like ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... seen a cave before, though she had read and played about caves all her life, so you can imagine her ecstasy and astonishment at finding herself in a real one at last. It was as good as the "Arabian Nights," she thought, and a great deal better than the cave in the "Swiss Family Robinson." Indeed, it was a beautiful place. Cool green light filled it, like sunshine filtered through sea-water. The rocky shelves were red, or rather a deep rosy pink, and the ...
— Eyebright - A Story • Susan Coolidge
... to me and Pete!" said Billy Fairfax; "didn't we think, way back there that first day, that our lamps were on the blink because we saw black spots? Great Scott, what dreams I've had," he went on, "a mixture of 'Arabian Nights,' 'Gulliver's Travels,' 'Peter Wilkins,' 'Peter Pan,' 'Goosie,' Jules, Verne, H. G. Wells, and every dime novel I've ever read. Do you suppose ...
— Angel Island • Inez Haynes Gillmore
... myself; Edward C. kindly help'd me at my handwriting and composition, and, (the signal event of my life up to that time,) subscribed for me to a big circulating library. For a time I now revel'd in romance-reading of all kinds; first, the "Arabian Nights," all the volumes, an amazing treat. Then, with sorties in very many other directions, took in Walter Scott's novels, one after another, and his poetry, (and continue to enjoy novels and ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... and marble floor that she looked as if she might have had it spread for the trying on of a ready-made pair of shoes; or as if she had come into possession of the enchanted piece of carpet, bought for forty purses by one of the three princes in the Arabian Nights, and had that moment been transported on it, at a wish, into a palatial saloon with which ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... national phrases are kept, and all others successively picked out, and thrown away. Something like the same process had gone on, long before, with the originals of these books. The world takes liberties with world-books. Vedas,[586] AEsop's Fables,[587] Pilpay,[588] Arabian Nights,[589] Cid,[590] Iliad,[591] Robin Hood,[592] Scottish Minstrelsy,[593] are not the work of single men. In the composition of such works, the time thinks, the market thinks, the mason, the carpenter, the merchant, the farmer, the fop, all think for us. ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... crimson and purple garments and soundless shoes embroidered with flowers, this prince of tournaments and tensos, who hearing the sorrows of the beautiful Flamenca, loves her unseen, sits sighing in sight of her prison bower, and faints like a hero of the Arabian Nights at her name, and has visions of her as St. Francis has of Christ; this younger and brighter Sir Launcelot, is an ideal little figure, whom you might mistake for Love himself as described in the "Romaunt of the Rose;" Love's avatar or incarnation, on whose appearance the year blooms into spring, ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. II • Vernon Lee
... told me I would see him, because he'd begged Mrs. Ray to be allowed to call. He had asked Saidee lots of questions, and she'd told him even about me—so he sent me his love. She seemed to think I ought to be pleased, but I wasn't. I'd read the 'Arabian Nights', with pictures, and I knew Arabs were dark people. I didn't look down on them particularly, but I couldn't bear to have Say interested in an Arab. It didn't seem right ...
— The Golden Silence • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... and so inspiring," was he not in earnest after all? When he wrote to a lady about the Court, "I love the Queen—perhaps the only person in this world left to me that I do love," was he not creating for himself an enchanted palace out of the Arabian Nights, full of melancholy and spangles, in which he actually believed? Victoria's state of mind was far more simple; untroubled by imaginative yearnings, she never lost herself in that nebulous region of the spirit where feeling and fancy grow confused. Her emotions, with all their intensity and all their ...
— Queen Victoria • Lytton Strachey
... the Arabian Nights!" he told himself. "It's Delhi— Twentieth Century A.D.! Gad! Wouldn't the whole confounded army ...
— Winds of the World • Talbot Mundy
... colloquialisms, and read with avidity everything from the Confessions of Saint Augustine to the newspapers. He wrote a "Book of the Sword," that is the standard book on that implement for the carving of the world. His translations of the "Arabian Nights" is a Titanic work, invaluable for its light upon Oriental folk lore, and literal to a degree that will keep it forever a sealed book to the Young Person. His translations of Camoens is said to be a wonderful rendition of the spirit of the Portuguese Homer. His Catullus ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... for the entertainment to commence by thump of sticks and stamp of boot-heels. Nor was it a great while longer before, in response to their call, there appeared a bearded personage in Oriental robes, looking like one of the enchanters of the Arabian Nights. He came upon the platform from a side door, saluted the spectators, not with a salaam, but a bow, took his station at the desk, and first blowing his nose with a white handkerchief, prepared to speak. The environment of the homely village hall, and the absence of many ingenious contrivances of stage ...
— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... sound like the fables in the Arabian Nights, are but a specimen of the wonderful fruits of the victories of this Mahmood. His richest prize was the great temple of Sunnat, or Somnaut, on the promontory of Guzerat, between the Indus and Bombay. It was a place ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman
... Creator, is a scorn and contempt for the fleshy investiture which he has bestowed on us, at least among Christians; for the Pagans were far more pious in this respect; and Mohammed agreed with them in doing justice to the beauty and dignity of the human frame. It is quite edifying, in the Arabian Nights, to read the thanks that are so often and so rapturously given to the Supreme Being for his bestowal of such charms on his creatures. Nor was a greater than Mahomet of a nature to undervalue the earthly ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... unpleasant discipline that he derived the contempt for self-indulgence, and the indifference to pain, which distinguished him in after life. On the other hand, he was allowed to read what he liked, and devoured Grimm's Tales, The Seven Champions of Christendom, and The Arabian Nights. He was an imaginative and reflective child, full of the ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... I should care to spend my nights that way now; a quarter of a century has added unexpected charm to a dinner-table and fireside of my own; but no Arabian Nights could then have been fuller of entertainment than the Roman Nights that drove us from home in search of warmth and food. In Philadelphia there never had been a suspicion of chance, a shadow of adventure ...
— Nights - Rome, Venice, in the Aesthetic Eighties; London, Paris, in the Fighting Nineties • Elizabeth Robins Pennell |
