"Cubit" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... altar of incense, which was in the holy place of the tabernacle. It was of similar construction to the altar of burnt-offering, but smaller, being 2 cubits high and 1 cubit square (Ex. xxx. 1-5). It was overlaid with gold. Solomon's altar of incense (1 K. vi. 20) is referred to in a problematical passage from which it would appear to have been of cedar. But the authenticity of the passages describing the altar of incense in ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... hard to shake out the entrenched. He had his public hypnotized. He could sell ten copies of a book where a reviewer could sell one. His word on a play was final—or almost. Personal mention of any of the Sophisticates added a cubit to reputation. Three mentions made them household words. Neglect caused agonies and visions of extinction. Disparagement was preferable. By publicity shall ye know them. Even public men with rhinocerene hides had been seen to shiver. Cause women courted him. Prize fighters on ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... was one hundred and forty and four cubits high, or two hundred and sixteen feet, a proper height for a wall; while it is said only that 'the length is as large as the breadth.'" This writer reckoned but eighteen inches for a cubit, whereas some figure twenty-two. A city one thousand and five hundred miles high with a wall only two hundred and sixteen or two hundred and sixty four feet high, would be altogether out ...
— The Revelation Explained • F. Smith
... of the women, and their mournings and festivals. A woman was not allowed to travel with more than three dresses, nor with more than an obolus' worth of food or drink, nor a basket more than a cubit in length; nor was she to travel at night, except in a waggon with a light carried in front of it. He abolished the habits of tearing themselves at funerals, and of reciting set forms of dirges, and of hiring mourners. ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume I (of 4) • Plutarch
... understand the description of the universe, the course of the sun, moon, stars, and planets, be acquainted with the division of Egypt into thirty-six nomes, with the course of the Nile, with instruments, measures, sacred ornaments, and sacred places. Next comes the stole bearer, who carries the cubit of justice, or measure of the Nile, and a cup for the libations; he bears also in the procession ten volumes on the subject of sacrifices, hymns, prayers, offerings, ceremonies, festivals. Lastly arrives the prophet, bearing in his bosom a pitcher, so as to be exposed ...
— The Ruins • C. F. [Constantin Francois de] Volney
... ravens: for they neither sow nor reap; which neither have storehouse nor barn; and God feedeth them: how much more are ye better than the fowls? 25. And which of you with taking thought can add to his stature one cubit? 26. If ye then be not able to do that thing which is least, why take ye thought for the rest? 27. Consider the lilies how they grow: they toil not, they spin not; and yet I say unto you, that Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. 28. If then ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... unrivalled in the walk of his genius, degraded history by the meanness of his conceptions. Such instances abound, and demonstrate an important truth in the history of genius that we cannot, however we may incline, enlarge the natural extent of our genius, any more than we can "add a cubit to our stature." We may force it into variations, but in multiplying mediocrity, or in doing what others can do, we ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... Pinches throw light on the building and cost of the ships. One of them is as follows: "A ship of six by the cubit beam, twenty by the cubit the seat of its waters, which Nebo-baladan, the son of Labasi, the son of Nur-Papsukal, has sold to Sirikki, the son of Iddin, the son of Egibi, for four manehs, ten shekels of silver, in one-shekel ...
— Babylonians and Assyrians, Life and Customs • Rev. A. H. Sayce
... and his daughter. It was a thing for which he had longed,—as a plain girl might long to possess the charms of an acknowledged beauty;—as a poor little fellow, five feet in height, might long to have a cubit added to ...
— The Duke's Children • Anthony Trollope
... round them.]. I had a great mind to see this wonderful place, and in my way thither saw fishes of an hundred and two hundred cubits long, that occasion more fear than hurt; for they are so fearful, that they will fly upon the rattling of two sticks or boards. I saw likewise other fishes about a cubit in length, that had heads ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Volume 1 • Anonymous
... Inundations.—The just height of the inundation, according to Pliny, is sixteen cubits.(290) When it rises but to twelve or thirteen, a famine is threatened; and when it exceeds sixteen, there is danger. It must be remembered, that a cubit is a foot and a half. The emperor Julian takes notice, in a letter to Ecdicius, prefect of Egypt,(291) that the height of the Nile's overflowing was fifteen cubits, the 20th of September, in 362. The ancients do not agree entirely with one another, nor with the moderns, with regard to ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... feeble hand, was keeping them from ill? I gave them life, and life is more than meat; Those little limbs, so comely and so sweet. You can make raiment for them, and are glad, But can you add One cubit to their stature? Yet they grow! Oh, child, hands off! Hands off! And leave them so. I guarded hitherto, I guard ...
— The Verse-Book Of A Homely Woman • Elizabeth Rebecca Ward, AKA Fay Inchfawn
... and sorrowful, And down upon him bare the bandit three. And at the midmost charging, Prince Geraint Drave the long spear a cubit through his breast And out beyond; and then against his brace Of comrades, each of whom had broken on him A lance that splintered like an icicle, Swung from his brand a windy buffet out Once, twice, to right, to left, and stunned the twain Or slew them, and dismounting like a man ...
— Idylls of the King • Alfred, Lord Tennyson
... fowls of the air: for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your Heavenly Father feedeth them. Are ye not much better than they? Which of you by taking thought can add one cubit unto his stature? And why take ye thought for raiment? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they toil not, neither do they spin: And yet I say unto you, That even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. Wherefore, if ...
— In His Image • William Jennings Bryan
... Nothing can, but being a poet. Nor can these gifts make a great romancer or poet in prose. Nothing can, but being born to romance, being a prose poet. As the Gospel has it—"Which of you by taking thought can add one cubit unto his stature?" George Eliot had not sufficiently meditated on this scripture. She too often supposed that by taking thought—by enormous pains, profound thought, by putting this thought in exquisite and noble words—she might produce an immortal romance, ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... thou desirest my life or my death, thou shalt see that I dread not these robbers." Then, as the foremost of the four rode upon him, Geraint drove upon him with his spear with such force that the weapon stood out a cubit behind him; and so he did with the second, and the third, and the fourth. Then, dismounting from his horse, he stripped the dead felons of their armour, bound it upon their horses, and tying the bridle reins together, bade Enid ...
— Stories from Le Morte D'Arthur and the Mabinogion • Beatrice Clay
... doing!" cried Decius suddenly, and the three turned at his voice. A nodding forest of crests, red and black, rising a cubit above the uncovered helmets of the legionaries, seemed to fill the eastern plain and extend almost to where the Adriatic beat upon the shingle. "Look at his front! Look at how closely the maniples are crushed together! Gods! they are almost 'within ...
— The Lion's Brood • Duffield Osborne
... saving money, keeping our papers in order, and persisting at work amid distractions. But the bad habits and the good are already fixed in our nervous system, and in physiology also possession is nine tenths of the law. We may intend to change, but by taking thought alone we cannot add a cubit to our stature. Reflection can do no more than point the way we should go. For unless the wrong actions are systematically and repeatedly refrained from, and the proper ones made habitual, thinking remains merely an impotent summary of what can be done. Conduct is governed, it must be ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... might at the smallness of the social conditions which allowed him to play the role of a Croesus in the fancy of love-sick maids, he could not deny that he found it a pleasant thing to be the object of such tender rivalry. It seemed to add a cubit to his height and two to his self-esteem. He revelled in the sense of his desirability and watched with amusement the innocent manoeuvres by which his fair entertainers checkmated each other, and in their zeal occasionally forgot that he, too, was a rational being, endowed with the faculty ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 10 • Various
... was built in Mesopotamia, less than five thousand years ago, to save Noah from the flooded Euphrates. The shipwrights seem to have built it like a barge or house-boat. If so, it must have been about fifteen thousand tons, taking the length of the cubit in the Bible story at eighteen inches. It was certainly not a ship, only some sort of construction that simply floated about with the wind and current till it ran aground. But Mesopotamia and the shores of the Persian ...
— Flag and Fleet - How the British Navy Won the Freedom of the Seas • William Wood
... spans long—Furttenbach measures a ship by palmi, which varied from nine to ten inches in different places in Italy,—say 150 feet, the length of an old seventy-four frigate, but with hardly a fifth of its cubit contents—and its greatest beam is 25 spans broad. The one engraved on p. 37 is evidently an admiral's galley of the Knights of Malta. She carries two masts—the albero maestro or mainmast, and the trinchetto, or foremast, each with a great lateen sail. The Genoese and Venetians set the models ...
— The Story of the Barbary Corsairs • Stanley Lane-Poole
... of the Round Table that were a hundred and fifty, and they sat down to dine. When they were seated there entered the hall two men well and richly dressed, and upon their shoulders leaned the handsomest young man that ever was seen of any of them, higher than the other two by a cubit. He was wide in the chest and large handed, but his great height seemed to be a burden and a shame to him, therefore it was he leaned on the shoulders of his friends. As soon as Arthur beheld him he made a sign, and ...
— The Book of Romance • Various
... keep breath within their stunted bodies. "All the traffic can bear!"—a brazen rule. Of such sage policy the result can be seen in the wizened and undersized submerged of London; of nearer than London. Man, by not taking thought, has taken a cubit ...
— Copper Streak Trail • Eugene Manlove Rhodes
... where it belonged, my figure sometimes had a way of clinging to it in a kind of smudgy weakness, as if it were afraid to come out like a man and stand the inspection of my eye. How often have I squandered paint upon the ungrateful object without adding a cubit to its stature! It refused to look like flesh and blood, but resembled rather some half-made creature flung on the passive canvas in a liquid state, with its edges running over into the background. There are a good many of these people in literature, too,—heroes who, like home-made ...
— Penelope's Irish Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... club, resembles the Kafir "Tonga." It is a knobstick about a cubit long, made of some hard wood: the head is rounded on the inside, and the outside is cut to an edge. In quarrels, it is considered a harmless weapon, and is often thrown at the opponent and wielded viciously enough where the spear point would ...
— First footsteps in East Africa • Richard F. Burton
... linear measures, the cubit of the Hebrews was the length of the forearm from the elbow to the end of the middle finger; and the smaller scriptural dimensions are expressed in hand-breadths and spans. The Egyptian cubit, which was similarly ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... food, and the body than the raiment. 24 Consider the ravens, that they sow not, neither reap; which have no store-chamber nor barn; and God feedeth them: of how much more value are ye than the birds! 25 And which of you by being anxious can add a cubit unto the measure of his life? 26 If then ye are not able to do even that which is least, why are ye anxious concerning the rest? 27 Consider the lilies, how they grow: they toil not, neither do they spin; yet I say unto you, Even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. ...
— The Gospel of Luke, An Exposition • Charles R. Erdman
... of this floating menagerie, supposing them got in, supplied with fresh air? According to the Bible narrative the ark was furnished with but one window of a cubit square, and one door which was shut by God himself, and it may be presumed, quite securely fastened. Talk about the Black-hole of Calcutta, why it was nothing to this! What a scramble there must have been for that solitary window and a mouthful ...
— Bible Romances - First Series • George W. Foote
... were, and in how long space it could come from this place to that, without measuring the time in which it is moved? This same time then, how do I measure? do we by a shorter time measure a longer, as by the space of a cubit, the space of a rood? for so indeed we seem by the space of a short syllable, to measure the space of a long syllable, and to say that this is double the other. Thus measure we the spaces of stanzas, by the spaces of the verses, and the spaces of the verses, by the spaces ...
— The Confessions of Saint Augustine • Saint Augustine
... advocate of the coffer being a marvellous standard of capacity measure for all nations, ancient and modern, declares its measure to be neither of the above quantities, but 71,328 cubic inches, or a cube of the ancient cubit of Karnak.[246] A vessel cannot be a measure of capacity whose own standard theoretical size is thus declared to vary somewhat every few years by those very men who maintain that it is a standard. But ...
— Archaeological Essays, Vol. 1 • James Y. Simpson
... upon her, she chanced to look up and caught sight of me whereupon her face changed and she said to her women, 'Sing ye till I come back to you.' Then, taking up a knife half a cubit long, she made towards me, crying, 'There is no Majesty and there is no Might save in Allah, the Glorious the Great!' Now when I saw this, I well-nigh lost my wits but, whenas she drew near me and face met face, the knife dropped from her hand, and ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 9 • Richard F. Burton
... quantity of them, 'alive and kicking,' and let them go into my tank. The most strange thing that ever struck me in connexion with this event, was, that the fish did not fall helter skelter, everywhere, or 'here and there;' but they fell in a straight line, not more than a cubit in breadth." Another shower is said to have taken place at a village near Allahabad, in the month of May. About noon, the wind being in the west, and a few distant clouds visible, a blast of high wind came on, accompanied with so much dust as to change the tint of the ...
— The Rain Cloud - or, An Account of the Nature, Properties, Dangers and Uses of Rain • Anonymous
... in the mean time, lifted up his hands above his ears half a cubit, and taking breath again, said, audibly, although he willed it to be ...
— Citation and Examination of William Shakspeare • Walter Savage Landor |
