"Hieroglyphic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and fractures on the wall Assuming features solemn and terrific, Hinted some tragedy of that old hall Locked up in hieroglyphic! Prophetic hints that filled the soul with dread; But to one gloomy window pointing mostly, The while some secret inspiration said, That chamber is ...
— Capitola the Madcap • Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... reputed the most learned of mankind, and Egypt was considered the cradle of the arts and sciences. In her existing monuments, hieroglyphic inscriptions, and tomb paintings, we have presented to us the materials for forming a more correct opinion of the religion and life of the Egyptians than of any other ancient people; and the investigation of these ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... of wonders, Egypt, abounds in hieroglyphic inscriptions, going back, as is agreed by modern scholars, to the year 2000 before the Christian era. A Papyrus manuscript, too, exists, which is assigned to about 1600 B. C. And the earliest recorded collection of books in the world, ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford
... both are mediums of communication. Hence the fame of sculptors, painters, and musicians, although the intrinsic powers of the great masters of these arts may yield in no degree to that of those who have employed language as the hieroglyphic of their thoughts, has never equalled that of poets in the restricted sense of the term, as two performers of equal skill will produce unequal effects from a guitar and a harp. The fame of legislators and founders of religions, ...
— A Defence of Poetry and Other Essays • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... result and exponent of a great national religion. You can't have bits of it here, bits there—you must have it everywhere, or nowhere. It is not the monopoly of a clerical company—it is not the exponent of a theological dogma—it is not the hieroglyphic writing of an initiated priesthood; it is the manly language of a people inspired by resolute and common purpose, and rendering resolute and common fidelity to the legible ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... of looking at these matters is perfectly right and reasonable, so long as we bear in mind that it is a facon de parler, a sort of hieroglyphic which shall stand for the course of nature, but nothing more. Repair (as is now universally admitted by physiologists) is only a phase of reproduction, or rather reproduction and repair are only phases of the same power; and again, death and the ordinary daily waste of tissue, are phases ...
— Life and Habit • Samuel Butler
... cavalcade. They swung themselves lightly from their saddles, and returned the polite greetings of the generals; the one in fluent German, the other in equally flowing words, but in a language which no one understood, and to which the only answer was a few murmured words, a smile, and hieroglyphic hand-pressures. ...
— Frederick The Great and His Family • L. Muhlbach
... the box was filled with gold and silver, and the Cordeliers congratulated each other on their rich acquisition. When it came to be opened, they found to their horror that it was filled only with slates, scratched with hieroglyphic and cabalistic characters. Indignant at the insult, they determined to refuse him Christian burial, on pretence that he was a sorcerer. He was, however, honourably buried in Paris, the whole ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... seem to be constantly changing, shifting, and, we hope, progressing. After the key to the interpretation of ancient inscriptions has been found, it by no means follows that every word can at once be definitely explained, or every sentence correctly construed. Thus it happens that the same hieroglyphic or cuneiform text is rendered differently by different scholars; nay, that the same scholar proposes a new rendering not many years after his first attempt at a translation has been published. And what applies to the decipherment of inscriptions applies with equal force to ...
— Chips From A German Workshop - Volume I - Essays on the Science of Religion • Friedrich Max Mueller
... and three for me—full of invaluable advice—the sort of information which experience alone can supply, such landmarks as only genius can place. In those papers, smelling of tobacco, and covered with writing so vile as to be almost hieroglyphic, there are suggestions for a fortune, and forecasts of unerring acumen. There are hints as to certain parts of America and Asia which have been fully justified, both before and since Juste and I ...
— Z. Marcas • Honore de Balzac
... for a Corinthian statue of bronze but for the prominence of her cheek-bones and the slightly African fulness of her lips, which compelled one to recognize her as belonging beyond all doubt to the hieroglyphic race which dwelt upon the banks ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Mystic-Humorous Stories • Various
... Hail hieroglyphic State machine, Contrived to punish fancy in: Men that are men in thee can feel no pain, And all thy insignificants disdain; Contempt, that false new word for shame, Is, without crime, an empty name; A shadow to amuse mankind, But ne'er to fright the wise or well-fixed mind. Virtue despises ...
— Bygone Punishments • William Andrews
... Lasting memories of terror, to be sure, for his oppressors; but on the other hand, hopeless failure for the insurrection, and certain death for him. What a watch he must have kept that night! To that excited imagination, which had always seen spirits in the sky and blood-drops on the corn and hieroglyphic marks on the dry leaves, how full the lonely forest must have been of signs and solemn warnings! Alone with the fox's bark, the rabbit's rustle, and the screech-owl's scream, the self-appointed prophet brooded over his despair. Once creeping to ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 46, August, 1861 • Various
... and the crossed flags of the two nations." Only Peter Atherly and his sister understood the sting inflicted either by accident or design in the latter sentence. Both he and his sister had some singular hieroglyphic branded on their arms,—probably a reminiscence of their life on the plains in their infant Indian captivity. But there was no mistaking the general sentiment. The criticisms of a small town may become inevasible. Atherly ...
— Tales of Trail and Town • Bret Harte
... chilled. The sidewalk was frozen. There was no snow, and the day before there had been a thaw. One could see on this walk, hardened into temporary stability, the footprints of hundreds of the sons and daughters of labor. Read rightly, that sidewalk in the little manufacturing city was a hieroglyphic of toil, and perhaps of toil as tending to the advance of the whole world. Ellen did not think of that, for she was occupied with more personal considerations, thinking of the dead woman in the great Lloyd house. She pictured her lying ...
— The Portion of Labor • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... show, like the scenes on a stage: there is nothing real about them. Ships festooned and hung with pennants, firing of cannon, illuminations, beating of drums and blowing of trumpets, shouting and applauding—these are all the outward sign, the pretence and suggestion,—as it were the hieroglyphic,—of joy: but just there, joy is, as a rule, not to be found; it is the only guest who has declined to be present at the festival. Where this guest may really be found, he comes generally without ...
— Counsels and Maxims - From The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... "to speak disrespectfully of the battue places you at once outside the pale. You are an Avian Rat. You do consume an inordinate quantity of corn. Since history began you have been an impudent parasite on man. As a hieroglyphic character you signified the enemy. Choleric old gentlemen have been roused to frenzy over your misdeeds. You have been shot at, trapped, poisoned, netted. Like the chafers, you have been excommunicated. You have been made into a yearly tribute, by the ...
— "Wee Tim'rous Beasties" - Studies of Animal life and Character • Douglas English
... an astral lamp was penetrating mistily through the white curtain of Zenobia's drawing-room. The shadow of a passing figure was now and then cast upon this medium, but with too vague an outline for even my adventurous conjectures to read the hieroglyphic ...
— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... inspector, waited, trembling, for the readjustment. But Michael Petrovitch Gregoriev, who, it might have been thought, had good cause for apprehension, came down from his bedroom at the usual hour, shut himself into his sanctum, sat down to stare thoughtfully at a certain portion of his hieroglyphic map, and then, with a deep, relieving sigh, fared vigorously forth ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... of most uninviting looking type, and headed with the Papal arms—the cross-keys and tiara. If, being like myself afflicted with an inquisitive turn of mind, he takes the trouble of deciphering these hieroglyphic documents, his labour would not be altogether thrown away. Those straggling strips, stuck up in out-of-the- way places, glanced at by a few idle passers-by, and torn down by the prowling vagabonds of the streets after a day ...
— Rome in 1860 • Edward Dicey
... rich brown on the inside. But these colours are modified and altered in all varieties, corresponding to the mood of the day and hour, as well as the season of the year; and sometimes I found the various colours so intermingled, that I could not determine even the season, though doubtless the hieroglyphic could be deciphered by more experienced eyes. One splendour, in particular, I remember—wings of deep carmine, with an inner down of warm gray, around ...
— Phantastes - A Faerie Romance for Men and Women • George MacDonald
... above comprehension! All poetry praised by critics now-a-days is as hard to understand as a hieroglyphic. I own a weakness for Pope and common sense. I could keep up with our age as far as Byron; after him I was thrown out. However, Arthur was declared by the critics to be a great improvement on Byron—more 'poetical in form'—more 'aesthetically ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... and took up his fountain pen. He signed with a rapid, illegible scrawl that toward the end of the pile became a mere hieroglyphic. Jonas put his black face in at the door just as ...
— The Enchanted Canyon • Honore Willsie Morrow
... detain or unite the soul with it; for the thought is unavoidable that it is precisely the absence of the soul which constitutes death. Again: such an explanation of the motive for embalming cannot be correct, because in the hieroglyphic representations of the passage to the judgment the separate soul is often depicted as hovering over the body, 6 or as kneeling before the judges, or as pursuing its adventures through the various realms of the creation. "When the body is represented," Champollion says, "it is as an aid to the ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... interpretations as there are spectators. It is very curious to read criticisms upon pictures, and upon the same face in a picture, and by men of taste and feeling, and to find what different conclusions they arrive at. Each man interprets the hieroglyphic in his own way; and the painter, perhaps, had a meaning which none of them have reached; or possibly he put forth a riddle, without himself knowing the solution. There is such a necessity, at all events, of helping the painter out with the spectator's own resources ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... some of the determinations given in this paper may require further confirmation, it is evident that the combined studies of Dr. Tozzer and Dr. Allen cannot fail to be useful to students of the Maya hieroglyphic writing. ...
— Animal Figures in the Maya Codices • Alfred M. Tozzer and Glover M. Allen
... inventors. Whence arose the policy, which still continues in Indostan, of obliging the son to practice the profession of his father. After the discovery of letters, the facts of Astronomy and Chemistry became recorded in written language, though the antient hieroglyphic characters for the planets and metals continue in use at this day. The antiquity of the invention of music, of astronomical observations, and the manufacture of Gold and Iron, are recorded ...
— The Botanic Garden. Part II. - Containing The Loves of the Plants. A Poem. - With Philosophical Notes. • Erasmus Darwin
... materially have aided one unfamiliar with the city; but he could not read them at all since, though there is but one spoken language upon Barsoom, there are as many different written languages as there are nations. One thing, however, soon became apparent to him—the hieroglyphic of a corridor remained the same until ...
— The Chessmen of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... physician and naturalist, Thomas Young, who also occupied himself with the three various texts, made better progress. Taking advantage and making use of the parts that had been revealed to him by demotic and hieroglyphic text, he succeeded, in a mechanical way, and by intelligent comparisons in deciphering the names Ptolemaios and Berenike, and in recognizing even the hieroglyphic signs for numbers. Still the true nature of the Egyptian writing was not revealed ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 4 of 8 • Various
... great sealed envelope over and over in his hand, wondering what could be the contents. It was postmarked "New York," but the hand was large and round and flourished, not in the least like his uncle's sexagenarian crabbedness of hieroglyphic. In the corner was the name of a firm he did not know, and the top of the letter was covered with a long row of stamps, for it was very thick and heavy. So he went into his room, and sat down on the window-sill to see what Messrs. Screw and Scratch of Pine Street, New York, ...
— Doctor Claudius, A True Story • F. Marion Crawford
... euthanasia? Should dramatic critics write plays? Who built the Pyramids? Are the English the Lost Ten Tribes? Should we send missions to the heathen? How long will our coal hold out? Who executed Charles I.? Are the tablets of Tel-el-Amarna trustworthy? are hieroglyphic readers? Will war ever die? or people live to a hundred? The best moustache-forcer, bicycle, typewriter, and system of shorthand or of teaching the blind? Was Sam Weller possible? Who was the original of Becky Sharp? ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... on the look out for it, thus seeing it where another will not see it, and giving it the preference as among things to be preserved and rendered amid the wholesale slaughter of innocents which is inevitable in any painting. Painting is only possible as a quasi-hieroglyphic epitomising of nature; this means that the half goes for the whole, whereon the question arises which half is to be taken and which made to go? The colourist will insist by preference on the coloured half, the man who has no liking for colour, however much else ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... shining, then sweated, and returned to its original colour, and plainly discovered, the red spots of blood, which were before obscure. The letters on this stone could not be understood till the year 1561, when a learned bramin said they consisted of 36 hieroglyphic characters, each containing a sentence, and explained them to this effect: "In the time of the son of Sagad the gentile, who reigned 30 years, the one only GOD came upon earth, and was incarnate in the womb of a virgin. ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VI - Early English Voyages Of Discovery To America • Robert Kerr
... hieroglyphic system of writing not as their own invention, but as "the language of the gods." (Lenormant and Cheval, "Anc. Hist. of the East," vol. ii., p. 208.) "The gods" were, doubtless, their highly civilized ancestors—the people of Atlantis—who, as we ...
— The Antediluvian World • Ignatius Donnelly
... the mighty aspirations which thus became incarnate in enduring stone. And the poem of Dante—which has been well likened to a great cathedral—we reverently accept, with all its quaint carvings and hieroglyphic symbols, as the authentic utterance of feelings which still exist, though they no longer choose ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... Licia, Burton's heavily and distinctively written initials RB are written a bit below the middle of the title page, on either side of the printer's device.[32] Also in its typical location at the bottom of the title page is found "a curious mark, a sort of hieroglyphic or cypher," which Burton almost always affixed to his books. The significance of this device remains obscure; it "has usually been supposed to represent the three 'R's' in ...
— Seven Minor Epics of the English Renaissance (1596-1624) • Dunstan Gale
... thereof—and shortly afterwards, while laboring in the field, I discovered drops of blood on the corn as though it were dew from heaven—and I communicated it to many, both white and black, in the neighborhood—and I then found on the leaves in the woods hieroglyphic characters, and numbers, with the forms of men in different attitudes, portrayed in blood, and representing the figures I had seen before in the heavens. And now the Holy Ghost had revealed itself to me, and made plain the miracles it had shown me—For as the blood of Christ had been shed on this ...
— The Confessions Of Nat Turner • Nat Turner
... could see the whole of London shaping itself vaguely and largely in the grey and growing light, until the white sun stood over it and it lay at their feet, the splendid monstrosity that it is. Its bewildering squares and parallelograms were compact and perfect as a Chinese puzzle; an enormous hieroglyphic which man must decipher or die. There fell upon both of them, but upon Turnbull more than the other, because he know more what the scene signified, that quite indescribable sense as of a sublime and passionate and heart-moving futility, which is never evoked by ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton
... given to the great collection of funerary texts in the first quarter of the nineteenth century by the pioneer Egyptologists, who possessed no exact knowledge of their contents. They were familiar with the rolls of papyrus inscribed in the hieroglyphic and the hieratic character, for copies of several had been published, [1] but the texts in them were short and fragmentary. The publication of the Facsimile [2] of the Papyrus of Peta-Amen-neb-nest-taui [3] by M. Cadet ...
— The Book of the Dead • E. A. Wallis Budge
... performing it. He had a deep-rooted objection against permitting the palm of his hand to be seen; a reluctance which common fame attributed to the fact of his having received on that part the impress of a hot iron, in the shape of the letter T, not forgetting to add, that T was the hieroglyphic for Thief. The villain himself affirmed it was simply the mark of a cross, burned into it by a blessed friar, as a charm against St. Vitus's dance, to which he had once been subject. The people, however, were rather sceptical, not of the friar's ...
— The Hedge School; The Midnight Mass; The Donagh • William Carleton
... vii. 101. A short specimen of her composition may be interesting, at any rate to hieroglyphic students: "Mesiceuras ancor mien re mies quan geu ceures o pres deu vous, e deu vous temoes tous la goies e latandres deu mon querque vous cones ces que getou gour e rus pour vous, e qui neu finiraes quotobocs ces mon quere qui vous paleu ces ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... before, Search his deep sense, unveil his hidden mirth, And make that fiery which before seem'd earth (Conquering those things of highest consequence, What's difficult of language or of sense), He will appear some noble table writ In the old Egyptian hieroglyphic wit; Where, though you monsters and grotescoes see, You meet all mysteries of philosophy. For he was wise and sovereignly bred To know what mankind is, how 't may be led: He stoop'd unto them, like that wise man, who Rid on a stick, when 's children would ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... part whereof was whey, The nether orange mixt with grey. This hairy meteor did denounce The fall of sceptres and of crowns; With grisly type did represent Declining age of government, And tell, with hieroglyphic spade, Its own grave and the state's ...
— Flowers from a Persian Garden and Other Papers • W. A. Clouston
... on the left branch of the delta of the Nile, 44 m. NE. of Alexandria, famous for the discovery near it by M. Boussard, in 1799, of the Rosetta stone with inscriptions in hieroglyphic, demotic and Greek, and by the help of which archaeologists have been able to interpret the hieroglyphics ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... assume this dangerous leadership; the party moves rapidly forward; in a few minutes it is swallowed up from your eyes in clouds of smoke; for one half hour, from behind these clouds, you receive hieroglyphic reports of bloody strife—fierce repeating signals, flashes from the guns, rolling musketry, and exulting hurrahs advancing or receding, slackening or redoubling. At length all is over; the redoubt has been recovered; that which ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... my claim to remarkable discoveries. I believe I am only trying to stammer out the first terms of a forgotten knowledge. But I have no desire to revive dead kings, or dead sages. It is not for me to arrange fossils, and decipher hieroglyphic phrases. I couldn't do it if I wanted to. But then I can do something else. The soul must take the hint from the relics our scientists have so marvelously gathered out of the forgotten past, and from the hint develop a new living utterance. The spark is from dead wisdom, ...
— Fantasia of the Unconscious • D. H. Lawrence
... archives of the Royal Public Library, under A, Vol. II, No. 10, and bears the title: 'Books consigned to me for the Royal Library in January, 1740.' Under No. 300 we read: 'An invaluable Mexican book with hieroglyphic figures.' This is the same codex which ...
— Aids to the Study of the Maya Codices • Cyrus Thomas
... entertained by the Sioux concerning thunder. On the cradle of the Indian child we frequently see the figure of thunder represented. It is generally carved on the wood by the father of the child, with representations of the Elk, accompanied with hieroglyphic looking figures, but thunder is regarded as the type of all ...
— Dahcotah - Life and Legends of the Sioux Around Fort Snelling • Mary Eastman
... Trailles departed than Franchessini opened a pack of cards and took out the knave of spades. This he cut up in a curious manner, leaving the figure untouched. Placing this species of hieroglyphic between two sheets of paper, he consigned it to an envelope. On this envelope and disguising his hand ...
— The Deputy of Arcis • Honore de Balzac
... design the palace of his art. Nor is this all; for since these blocks or words are the acknowledged currency of our daily affairs, there are here possible none of those suppressions by which other arts obtain relief, continuity, and vigour: no hieroglyphic touch, no smoothed impasto, no inscrutable shadow, as in painting; no blank wall, as in architecture; but every word, phrase, sentence, and paragraph must move in a logical progression, and ...
— Style • Walter Raleigh
... consisted of twelve precious stones in a framework of gold, with golden hooks at two of the corners. The stones were all varying in sort and colour, but they were of the same size. Their shapes, arrangement, and gradation of tint made me think of a box of water-colour paints. Each stone had some hieroglyphic scratched upon ...
— Tales of Terror and Mystery • Arthur Conan Doyle
... map of Jerusalem, and a hieroglyphic of "the old and new man," completed the decorations on that side of the room. Clean as was the white-washed wall, it was not cleaner than the rest of the place and its furniture. Seldom had the sun enlightened ...
— The Annals of the Poor • Legh Richmond
... language. Amongst the curiosities are the cuneiform types, the wedge-like series of faces in which old Persian, Median, and Assyrian inscriptions are written; and last, but by no means least in interest, the odd-looking hieroglyphic type faces, which are on bodies ranging from half nonpareil to three nonpareils, and some idea of their extent may be derived by noting that this type occupies fourteen cases of one hundred ...
— A Short History of English Printing, 1476-1898 • Henry R. Plomer
... Cathedral in that other family of lofty, aerial churches, rich in painted windows and sculpture; pointed in form, bold in attitude; communal and bourgeois as political symbols; free, capricious, lawless, as a work of art; second transformation of architecture, no longer hieroglyphic, immovable and sacerdotal, but artistic, progressive, and popular, which begins at the return from the crusades, and ends with Louis IX. Notre-Dame de Paris is not of pure Romanesque, like the first; nor of pure Arabian race, ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... "I wish I could; but look, boy, I means this mark for three quarters of a bushel. Mind you recollects it when I axes you, or I'll be blowed if I don't wallop you." But it was only a case of peculiar difficulty which would require a new hieroglyphic, or extract such a long speech from my father. I was well acquainted with his usual scratches and dots, and having a good memory, could put him right when he was puzzled with some misshapen x or z, representing some ...
— Jacob Faithful • Captain Frederick Marryat
... make nothing of it, and the gentleman noted down what I said and went away. But he left me the paper of which he had two with him, and when the Major came in I says to the Major as I put it in his hand "Major here's Old Moore's Almanac with the hieroglyphic complete, for ...
— Mrs. Lirriper's Legacy • Charles Dickens
... Or deny curtains to thy royal bed, As take this sacred cov'ring from thy head. Secrets of State are points we must not know; This vizard is thy privy-council now, Thou royal riddle, and in everything The true white prince, our hieroglyphic king! Ride safely in His shade, Who gives thee light, And can with blindness thy pursuers smite. O! may they wander all from thee as far As they from peace are, and thyself from war! And wheresoe'er thou dost design to be With thy—now spotted—spotless majesty, ...
— Poems of Henry Vaughan, Silurist, Volume II • Henry Vaughan
... to anybody who chanced to walk over little Dick's arabesques. Patient and gentle in his acceptance of the world's rebuffs, this he would not endure. He was afraid of Mr. Shackford, yet one day, when the preoccupied man happened to trample on a newly executed hieroglyphic, the child rose to his feet white with rage, his fingers clenched, and such a blue fire flashing in the eyes that ...
— The Stillwater Tragedy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich |
