"Illiterate" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... voice gives life and character to a humdrum narrative, and the gestour would know how to make the best of incidents which he knew from experience to be specially interesting to an audience. Such yarns would be most attractive to "lewd" or illiterate men— ...
— Old English Libraries, The Making, Collection, and Use of Books • Ernest A. Savage
... the shepherds to join the party. "I am provoked," said Lady Mabel, "to find how little progress I have made in speaking Portuguese. But it is not surprising what a complete mastery the rudest and most illiterate people here have ...
— The Actress in High Life - An Episode in Winter Quarters • Sue Petigru Bowen
... parchments to the author, the which he has, not without great labour, translated into French, and which were fragments of a most ancient ecclesiastical process. He has believed that nothing would be more amusing than the actual resurrection of this antique affair, wherein shines forth the illiterate simplicity of the good old times. Now, then, give ear. This is the order in which were the manuscripts, of which the author has made use in his own fashion, because the ...
— Droll Stories, Complete - Collected From The Abbeys Of Touraine • Honore de Balzac
... man. Her mother was esteemed as a very pious woman. As was common with the laboring classes of people in England at that period, their children, instead of being sent to school, were brought up to work from early childhood. By this means, Ann, though quite illiterate, acquired a habit of industry, and was early distinguished for her activity, faithfulness, neatness, and good ...
— The Book of Religions • John Hayward
... Anglo-Saxon character; and especially with regard to polygamy, their effect has been to acquaint the people of Utah with the grossest features of its practice in foreign lands, and encourage them to imitation. Every Mormon, prominent in the Church, however illiterate in other respects, is thoroughly acquainted with the extent and characteristics of polygamy in Asiatic countries, and prepared to defend his own domestic habits, in argument, by historical and geographical references. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 19, May, 1859 • Various
... enabled to produce a bowstring for his benefactor; and the sultan's "firmaun" appointed him to the vacant pachalik. His qualifications for office were all superlative: he was very short, very corpulent, very illiterate, very irascible, and ...
— The Pacha of Many Tales • Frederick Marryat
... politicians, to be learned, honest, discreet, well qualified to be fit for any manner of employment in country and commonwealth, war and peace, than to be degeneres Neoptolemi as so many brave nobles are, only wise because rich, otherwise idiots, illiterate, unfit for any manner of service? Udalricus, Earl of Cilia, upbraided John Huniades with the baseness of his birth; but he replied, In te Ciliensis comitatus turpiter exstinguitur, in me gloriose Bistricensis exoritur; thine earldom is consumed with riot; mine begins ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... in fields and forests and mines, but in the free schools, churches, and printing presses. Ignorance breeds misery, vice, and crime. Mephistopheles was a cultured devil, but he is the exception. History knows no illiterate seer or sage or saint. No Dante or Shakespeare ever had ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... conversation. Numberless examples of this polite pastime are provided in the heroic romances; in "Almahide, or the Captive Queen,"[331] among others, we read discussions as to whether it is better for a man to court a lady in verse or in prose, whether an illiterate lover is better than a learned ...
— The English Novel in the Time of Shakespeare • J. J. Jusserand
... to-day. Never mind consistency, find fault with Christianity on all its sides, and with all its preachers, though you have to contradict yourself in doing so. Object to this man that he is too learned and doctrinal; to that one that he is too illiterate, and gives no food for thought; to this one that he is always thundering condemnation; to that one that he is always running over with love; to this one that he is perpetually harping upon duties; to that other one that he is up in the clouds, and forgets the ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... C represents the boundary of the disturbed area, so far as known, for about one-third of the area lies in regions from which no information was procurable, while another third is inhabited by ignorant and illiterate tribes. But, notwithstanding this, the shock is known to have been felt over an area of at least 1,200,000 square miles. If we include the detached region to the west, near Ahmedabad, the portion of the Bay of Bengal ...
— A Study of Recent Earthquakes • Charles Davison
... no literature in China, not even in the sacred books, which is so generally known as their nursery rhymes. These are understood and repeated by the educated and the illiterate alike; by the children of princes and the children of beggars; children in the city and children in the country and villages, and they produce like results in the minds and hearts of all. The little folks laugh over the Cow, look ...
— The Chinese Boy and Girl • Isaac Taylor Headland
... the woods, rough and illiterate, but with all their physical faculties at a maximum acuteness, senses on the alert and keen as no townsman could comprehend them—were Emerson's avid study. This he had never seen,—the man at his simplest ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... Catherine Peg, or Kep, whose son was afterward made Earl of Plymouth. It must be confessed that in his attachments to English women Charles showed little care for rank or station. Lucy Walters and Catherine Peg were very illiterate creatures. ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... the stars were shining in the cloudless sky, dimmed a little in brightness by the faint silvery veil of moisture in the air. The man's soul grew very tender as he stood waiting for his bride. He was rough, illiterate, yet there was something fine about him after all, a kind of simplicity ...
— Other Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... generally made by ignorant and illiterate persons. The true parts of the record were so mixed up with imaginary additions, that cautious men refused to credit the statements that such objects really fell from the sky. Even at the present day it is often extremely difficult ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball
... true! He was so gross, so tubby, so manifestly over-fed, whereas her mother had ever been elegant and bien soignee. But he had shown kindness to her in his domineering way. He was not quite so illiterate as his accent and his general air of uncouthness seemed to imply. In his speech, the broad vowels of the Lancashire dialect were grafted on to the clipped staccato of a Cockney. He would scoff at anyone who told him that knives and forks had precise uses, or that table-napkins ...
— The Stowaway Girl • Louis Tracy
... medium, but to scientific facts which the medium can not possibly comprehend. It is a matter of common knowledge that mediums are usually people without technical scientific knowledge. Some of them have some degree of education and some of them are illiterate. Some of the most celebrated belong to ...
— Elementary Theosophy • L. W. Rogers
... he had not felt since that day when he had first come to the city to work out his dreams among men. In the human tide that ebbed and flowed through this world gateway, he saw men of wealth and men of poverty—people of culture and position who had come or were going in Pullman or private cars and illiterate, stupid, animal looking, emigrants who were crowded, much like cattle, in the lowest class. There were business men of large affairs; countrymen with wondering faces; shallow, pleasure seekers; artists and scholars; idle fools; vicious ...
— Their Yesterdays • Harold Bell Wright
... men. In both, the moral and end are substantially the same. The girl's affections are bestowed naturally in her own class, and the disconsolate urban discovers that a wide divergence of feelings and sympathies, a gulf not to be voluntarily bridged over, lies between the man of the world and the illiterate peasant; that the results of habit are not lightly to be got rid of; and that a happiness which lies below us in the social scale may be as unattainable as higher prizes. The relations of the romantic and dreamy Olenin to his barbaric neighbors are finely portrayed. Nothing could be more ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, November, 1878 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... there is any one of your readers so illiterate as not to have read the Antiquary, {450} there are few memories which are not the better for being from time to time refreshed. My own is not of the best, which is sometimes disadvantageous to me, but not in a ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 57, November 30, 1850 • Various
... band was a man far from illiterate: he was able to travel by the stars, or the compass, and had marked, in his erratick expeditions, such places as are most worthy the notice of a passenger. He observed to me, that buildings are always best preserved in places little frequented, and difficult of access: ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... to apply the art of disputation, has been accurately shown by our philosophers (the Stoics); but with respect to the proper use of the things, we are entirely without practice. Only give to any of us, whom you please, an illiterate man to discuss with, and he cannot discover how to deal with the man. But when he has moved the man a little, if he answers beside the purpose, he does not know how to treat him, but he then either abuses ...
— A Selection from the Discourses of Epictetus With the Encheiridion • Epictetus
... same. This was a great disappointment to the dominating element in the Democratic party, who had hoped and expected, through their policy of "Masterly Inactivity" and intimidation of white men, that the convention would be composed almost exclusively of illiterate and inexperienced colored men. Although a minor at that time, I took an active part in the local politics of my county, and, being a member of a Republican club that had been organized at Natchez, I was frequently called upon to address the ...
— The Facts of Reconstruction • John R. Lynch
... not sober, or not informed, or not conscientious? The crying need of to-day is, that men and women shall be urged into positions of conviction and activity against this most colossal evil of our time. In our country the responsibility for drunkenness rests not with the illiterate, blasphemous, ex-prison convicts who operate the 250,000 saloons of our Nation, nor yet with the 250,000 finished products of the saloon who go down into drunkards' graves every year, but with the sober, respectable, hard-working, voting citizens of our country. Nor does this ...
— Questionable Amusements and Worthy Substitutes • J. M. Judy
... church, which was the chief ornament, as well as the great treasure of the village, and there the Indians all joined in a hymn which the Jesuit Fathers had composed for them in their own language. The strain was simple, the temple humble, the congregation illiterate and poorly clad, yet who shall say that colonnaded aisle or fretted dome of proud cathedral ever resounded with music sweeter in the ear of heaven, than was that unpretending hymn of the despised Indians! Who would not envy the emotions of the Venerable Mother and her fervent Sisters, as they ...
— The Life of the Venerable Mother Mary of the Incarnation • "A Religious of the Ursuline Community"
... paused to dwell on the most fascinating scenery. Accordingly, I hastened to Regla with my letter of introduction, which was interpreted by Bachicha to the Italian grocer, the friend of Rafael, to whom I was confided. Il signore Carlo Cibo was an illiterate man of kind heart, who had adventurously emigrated from Italy to furnish the Havanese with good things; while, in return, the Havanese had been so pleased with his provender, that Carlo may be said to have ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer
... cases that the parents feel it needful to hire any kind of tutor for THEM. What the average girl knows is simply what her mother can teach her. Perhaps a certain number of Athenian women (of good family, too) are downright illiterate; but this is not very often the case. A normal girl will learn to read and write, with her mother for school mistress.[*] Very probably she will be taught to dance, and sometimes to play on some instrument, ...
— A Day In Old Athens • William Stearns Davis
... all, let us just point out the chief claims of the above pleasing piece of composition. In the first place, it is perfectly stilted and unnatural; the dialogue and the sentiments being artfully arranged, so as to be as strong and majestic as possible. Our dear Cat is but a poor illiterate country wench, who has come from cutting her husband's throat; and yet, see! she talks and looks like a tragedy princess, who is suffering in the most virtuous blank verse. This is the proper end of fiction, and one of the greatest triumphs that a novelist can ...
— Catherine: A Story • William Makepeace Thackeray
... saying, 'I have traveled much, been among people of royalty, title and nobility, have lived among the rich, and great society leaders, also among great politicians, learned men, spiritual giants, business people, also among the poor, also the illiterate, the abandoned, the offscouring, and the outcasts of society; and I have yet to see the person that is not as good as I.' So you see he thinks that you are just as good as he. Now, dear, don't be discouraged in the least. I know just how my daughter feels; she wants Penloe ...
— A California Girl • Edward Eldridge
... over can read and write total population: 82% male: 87% female: 77% note: over two-thirds of the world's 785 million illiterate adults are found in only eight countries (India, China, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Indonesia, and Egypt); of all the illiterate adults in the world, two-thirds are women; extremely low literacy rates are concentrated ...
— The 2005 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... great wonder and praise in the neighbourhood. On the other hand, those rabid little tracts, which dealt so summarily with the destinies of the human race, even when his growing reason and the perusal of works more classical or more logical had led him to perceive that they were illiterate, and to suspect that they jumped from premises to conclusions with a celerity very different from the careful ratiocination of mechanical science, had still, in the citations and references wherewith they abounded, lured him on to philosophers more specious ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... letter of the 29th, relates the following anecdote:—"Now I am talking of bishops, I must tell you that, not long ago, Bishop Warburton, in a sermon at court, asserted that all preferments were bestowed on the most illiterate and worthless objects; and, in speaking, turned himself about and stared at the Bishop of London: he added, that if any one arose distinguished for merit and learning, there was a combination of dunces to keep him down. I need not tell you that he expected ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... who vary in qualities and resemblances. There are old and young and middle-aged persons, men and women, married and single, persons with many relatives and others with few, native and foreign born, strong and weak, well and ill, good and bad, educated and illiterate. Yet there are certain characteristics that ...
— Society - Its Origin and Development • Henry Kalloch Rowe
... a rugged, headstrong, untamable, illiterate youth. At twelve years of age he could scarcely write his own name. But he knew the ways of the water; when still a youth he commenced ferrying passengers and freight between Staten Island and New York City. For books he cared nothing; the refinements of life he scorned. ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers
... that of the Chet Ramis, or sect of Chet Ram, whose strange history may be found in East and West for July 1905. Chet Ram was an illiterate Hindu, a water-carrier and then a steward in the Indian army that took part in the war with China in 1859-1860. Returning to his native district not far from Lahore, Chet Ram, the Hindu, came under the spell of a Mahomedan ...
— New Ideas in India During the Nineteenth Century - A Study of Social, Political, and Religious Developments • John Morrison
... you must get into the habit of looking intensely at words, and assuring yourself of their meaning, syllable by syllable, nay, letter by letter. You might read all the books in the British Museum, if you could live long enough, and remain an utterly illiterate, uneducated person; but if you read ten pages of a good book, letter by letter,—that is to say, with real accuracy,—you are forevermore, in some measure, an ...
— Reading Made Easy for Foreigners - Third Reader • John L. Huelshof
... ended, said that this was their constant way, and that all his life long he had made it a rule, after supper was over, to call out his family to dance and rejoice, believing, he said, that a cheerful and contented mind was the best sort of thanks to heaven that an illiterate peasant could pay— ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... census only one in 10,000 could not read or write, and these dunces were all Slavs. But how even a Slav born under the eye of the Eagle can remain illiterate is a mystery. In 1905 there were 59,348 elementary schools in the empire, and their organisation is as elaborate and well planned as the organisation of the army. In Berlin alone there are 280. All the ...
— Home Life in Germany • Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick
... matter was a serious one; the headmaster had never heard of Villon, and the culprit gave up the name of his literary admirer without remorse. Hence, sorrow for Lucian, and complete immunity for the miserable illiterate Barnes, who resolved to confine his researches to the Old Testament, a book which the headmaster knew well. As for Lucian, he plodded on, learning his work decently, and sometimes doing very creditable Latin and Greek prose. His school-fellows ...
— The Hill of Dreams • Arthur Machen
... apparition, though the logical inference would have been, that the body which required planks to transport it, could scarcely be classed with anything of the world of spirits. The links in arguments, however, are seldom respected by the illiterate and vulgar, who jump to their conclusions, in cases of the marvellous, much as politicians find an expression of the common mind in the prepared opinions of the few who speak for them, totally disregarding ...
— Jack Tier or The Florida Reef • James Fenimore Cooper
... "unsavoury," at the same time hurling at the giver a number of texts conveying epithets of an offensive character. Bramah replied to the farrago of nonsense, which he characterised as "unmannerly, absurd, and illiterate that it must have been composed when the writer was intoxicated, mad, or under the influence of Lucifer," and he threatened that unless Huntington apologised for his gratuitous insults, he (Bramah) would assuredly expose him. The mechanician ...
— Industrial Biography - Iron Workers and Tool Makers • Samuel Smiles
... academical for the stirring age which had now opened, and on which he had unhappily fallen, they nevertheless suited the audience to which they were particularly addressed. His Corinthian style, in which the Maenad of Mr. Burke was habited in the last mode of Almack's, his sarcasms against the illiterate and his invectives against the low, his descriptions of the country life of the aristocracy contrasted with the horrors of the guillotine, his Horatian allusions and his Virgilian passages, combined to produce a whole which ...
— Endymion • Benjamin Disraeli
... Peking, 'that there is here more than I can do, and writing must go to the wall.' And as late in his life as 1890 he added, 'I could have made, and could now make, I believe, money by writing, but I do not write. I settle down to teach illiterate Chinamen and Mongols, heal their sores, and ...
— James Gilmour of Mongolia - His diaries, letters, and reports • James Gilmour
... it is probable the fugitive made part of some slaver's crew, and fled from his vessel, as he had previously abandoned the military service in the delicious clime of Brazil. His parents were poor, indolent, and careless, so that Cha-cha grew up an illiterate, headstrong youth. Yet, when he touched the soil of Africa, a new life seemed infused into his veins. For a while, his days are said to have been full of misery and trouble, but the Brazilian slave-trade happened ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer
... rank in London who had a favourable opinion of the humble Irish adventurer. What a riddle these women are, I have often thought! I have seen the most elegant creatures at St. James's grow wild for love of the coarsest and most vulgar of men; the cleverest women passionately admire the most illiterate of our sex, and so on. There is no end to the contrariety in the foolish creatures; and though I don't mean to hint that I am vulgar or illiterate, as the persons mentioned above (I would cut the throat of any man who dared to whisper a word against my birth or my breeding), ...
— Barry Lyndon • William Makepeace Thackeray
... large changes we are not yet fit; but as education spreads and we approach the western standard, some power and voice ought to be given to all intelligent enough to use it; that is to say, to the educated classes. I would not—no one in his senses would—give the power of voting to illiterate and ignorant men, who would simply be tools in the hands of the designing and ambitious; but the peoples of the great towns, St. Petersburg, Moskow, Kieff, Odessa, and others should be permitted to send representatives—men of their own choice—to the provincial councils, which ...
— Condemned as a Nihilist - A Story of Escape from Siberia • George Alfred Henty
... ladies, daughters of Colonel Montford, of Halifax county, North Carolina. When Cornwallis and his army were at Halifax, on their way to Virginia, Tarleton was at the house of an American citizen. In the presence of Mrs. Willie Jones, Tarleton spoke of Colonel Washington as an illiterate fellow, hardly able to write his name. "Ah! Colonel," said Mrs. Jones, "you ought to know better, for you bear on your person proof that he knows very well how to make his mark!" At another time, Tarleton was sarcastically speaking ...
— Sketches of Western North Carolina, Historical and Biographical • C. L. Hunter
... appeals not to the illiterate and unlearned (whose obstinacy is too great to receive insturction, and whose prejudices are too strong to be obliterated by any reasons) but to the candid and impartial inquiry of reasoning and unprejudiced men into these principles, and hopes ...
— A Dissertation on Horses • William Osmer
... do, you illiterate old man. What do you know of literature? Aint all them gentlemen as I plays with chice sperits and writers? Isn't it a honour to jine 'em in the old English drammy, and to eat of the wittles and drink of ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 365, March, 1846 • Various
... thirty days among them, not so much like a prisoner as a prince surrounded by his guards, and he joined in their sports and exercises with perfect unconcern. He also wrote poems and some speeches which he read to them, and those who did not approve of his compositions he would call to their faces illiterate fellows and barbarians, and he would often tell them with a laugh that he would hang them all. The pirates were pleased with his manners, and attributed this freedom of speech to simplicity and a mirthful disposition. As soon as the ransom came from Miletus and Caesar had ...
— Plutarch's Lives Volume III. • Plutarch
... people and their rights bore me. I am sick of both. In these modern days to be vulgar, illiterate, common and vicious, seems to give a man a marvellous infinity of rights that his honest fathers never dreamed of. Believe me, Prince, in good democracy every man should be an aristocrat; but these people in Russia who seek to thrust us out are no better than the ...
— Vera - or, The Nihilists • Oscar Wilde
... the spinning-jenny, born at Standhill, near Blackburn; was a poor and illiterate weaver when in 1760 he, in conjunction with Robert Peel, brought out a carding-machine; in 1766 he invented the spinning-jenny, a machine which has since revolutionised the cotton-weaving industry, but which at the time evoked the angry resentment of the hand-weaver; he was driven ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... moments of unreasonable happiness are the most enviable no doubt, for there is neither gall nor satiety in the reaction. All this is as enchanting as—well, as a woman's promise. What lies beyond? Illiterate and mercenary Spaniards, vicious natives, and boundless ennui, one may safely wager. But if all California is as beautiful as this, no man that has spent a winter in Sitka should ...
— Rezanov • Gertrude Atherton
... hesitation and many misgivings, we finally established our quarters at the sign of the "General Armstrong," which was kept by John Hubbard, a tight little Irishman, a regular "broth of a boy," illiterate, not being able to write his name, with a tongue well steeped in blarney, with a conscience as elastic as a piece of India rubber, and a consummate adept in the art of wheedling a ...
— Jack in the Forecastle • John Sherburne Sleeper
... with such anxiety, were the joint-proprietors of a small farm in Palestine which they cultivated with their own hands; and the jealous monarch at once saw that, when his fears had been excited by reports of the treasonable designs of such simple and illiterate husbandmen, he had been miserably befooled. After a single interview, these poor peasants met with no farther molestation ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... Ivan Kouzmitch read to us, before his wife, Pugatchef's proclamation, drawn up by some illiterate Cossack. The robber proclaimed his intention of marching directly upon our fort, inviting the Cossacks and the soldiers to join him, and counselling the chiefs not to withstand him, threatening them, should they do so, with ...
— The Daughter of the Commandant • Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin
... bounty from his own little savings, not one in a dozen of the children would ever enter a school-room or see a book. As it is, only one sixth part of the children are, or ever were, under instruction. And the instruction they receive is too often from persons themselves illiterate and full of superstition, but who are the best teachers who can be obtained with limited means. Consider, then, the real condition of affairs,—three hundred and fifty thousand blacks, a large share of them children or grandchildren of those who were brought from Africa, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... repeated appeals for the recognition to which she had so long been entitled in the sisterhood of states; of the prompt refusals with which her pleas were persistently met, though other territories with smaller and more illiterate populations, more restricted resources, and in every way weaker claims, were allowed to assume the habiliments of maturity, while Utah, lusty, large and strong, was kept in swaddling clothes. But the cries of the vigorous ...
— The Story of "Mormonism" • James E. Talmage
... what I just said about the loves and friendships of illiterate persons,—that is, of the human race, with a few exceptions here and there. I like books,—I was born and bred among them, and have the easy feeling, when I get into their presence, that a stable-boy has among horses. I don't think I undervalue them either as companions or as instructors. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 6, April, 1858 • Various
... no idea of the strong impression it made on my mind, though conveyed to it through the medium of an illiterate interpreter, Even in this mangled form, I saw the disjecta membra of a regular and splendid oration." [Footnote: Col. Stone's Life and Times ...
— An account of Sa-Go-Ye-Wat-Ha - Red Jacket and his people, 1750-1830 • John Niles Hubbard
... Prohibitionists, or Republicans, as the case may be. But a theatre audience is composed of all sorts and conditions of men. The same theatre in New York contains the rich and the poor, the literate and the illiterate, the old and the young, the native and the naturalised. The same play, therefore, must appeal to all of these. It follows that the dramatist must be broader in his appeal than any other artist. He cannot confine ...
— The Theory of the Theatre • Clayton Hamilton
... them; yet we are so familiar with it that it produces on us no impression of being antiquated or quaint, seldom of being grotesque, and what is still more to the purpose, produces that impression as little on illiterate persons to whom many of the words are incomprehensible. So, too, it seems to us, no part of Burns is alien to a man whose mother-tongue is English, in the same sense that some parts of Beranger are; because Burns, though a North Briton, was still a Briton, as Homer, though an Ionian, was still ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... statement, which is merely one of his exaggerations for the sake of point. She had not a fine understanding: though she was neither silly nor stupid, her sense was altogether inferior to her sensibility. Although living in a most bookish circle she was, as Macaulay himself admits, almost illiterate: and (which he does not say) her comparative critical estimates of books, when she does give them, are merely contemptible. This harsh statement could be freely substantiated: but it is enough to say that, when a girl, she preferred some forgotten rubbish ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... Aston-juxta-Birmingham, refers to the tradition that one of the family "murdered his cook, and was afterwards compelled to adopt the red hand in his arms." Este is perfectly correct in his concise but comprehensive particulars. That which, by the illiterate, is termed "the bloody hand," and by them reputed as an abatement of honour, is nothing more than the "Ulster badge" of dignity. The tradition adds, that Sir Thomas Holt murdered the cook in a cellar, at the old family mansion, by "running ...
— Notes and Queries, Issue No. 61, December 28, 1850 • Various
... the horse-fair the next day to look for a good horse, and, may be, to buy one. He went on to state that he had now nearly twenty-five roubles—only one rouble short—and that half of it was a coupon. He took the coupon out of his purse to show to his new friend. The yard-porter was an illiterate man, but he said he had had such coupons given him by lodgers to change; that they were good; but that one might also chance on forged ones; so he advised the peasant, for the sake of security, to change it at once at ...
— The Forged Coupon and Other Stories • Leo Tolstoy
... Pendennis was willing to bow before her and welcome her, and yield her up the first place. But an actress—a mature woman, who had long ceased blushing except with rouge, as she stood under the eager glances of thousands of eyes—an illiterate and ill-bred person, very likely, who must have lived with light associates, and have heard doubtful conversation—Oh! it was hard that such a one should be chosen, and that the matron should be deposed to give place to such ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... be afraid of us, and so had I to be afraid of him. He was a huge, illiterate brute, an ex-Chesapeake-Bay-oyster-pirate, an "ex-con" who had done five years in Sing Sing, and a general all-around stupidly carnivorous beast. He used to trap sparrows that flew into our hall through the open bars. When he made a capture, he hurried away ...
— The Road • Jack London
... always been more of a problem in rural districts than urban. Evidence of this is found in the 1910 Census, which shows that for every illiterate person living in an urban community there are approximately two living in rural communities. The higher per cent of illiteracy in the rural districts is even more marked in the states where immigrants are settling than ...
— A Stake in the Land • Peter Alexander Speek
... him, or perhaps because of it, the following night Senator Ingalls made his famous speech against suffrage, and it fell to my lot to answer him. In the course of his remarks he asked this question: "Would you like to add three million illiterate voters to the large body of illiterate voters we have in America to-day?" The audience applauded light-heartedly, but I was disturbed by the sophistry of the question. One of Senator Ingalls's most discussed personal peculiarities ...
— The Story of a Pioneer - With The Collaboration Of Elizabeth Jordan • Anna Howard Shaw
... terms and words, and never any effects which are above the natural power of man? To be convinced of this truth, it suffices to observe that the pretended magicians are, and ever have been, anything but learned; on the contrary, they are very ignorant and illiterate men. Is it credible that so many celebrated persons, so many famous men, versed in all kinds of literature, should never have been able or willing to sound and penetrate the mysterious secrets of this art; and that of so many philosophers spoken of by Diogenes Laertius, neither Plato, ...
— The Phantom World - or, The philosophy of spirits, apparitions, &c, &c. • Augustin Calmet
... and we followed her into the house. It was a wretched place; and the smell inside was sickly. I should think a broker would not give half-a-crown for all the furniture we saw. The woman seemed simple-minded and very illiterate; and as she stood in the middle of the floor, looking vaguely round she said, "Aw can hardly ax yo to sit deawn, for we'n sowd o' th' things eawt o'th heawse for a bit o' meight; but there is a cheer theer, sich as it is; see yo; tak' that." When she found that I ...
— Home-Life of the Lancashire Factory Folk during the Cotton Famine • Edwin Waugh
... taken the country over, rather better educated than men. There are more girls than boys in the high schools of the United States; more girls than boys in the higher grammar grades. Fewer women than men are numbered among illiterate. As for the great middle class of women, it is obvious that they are better read than their men. Their specific knowledge of affairs may be less, but their general intelligence is not less ...
— What eight million women want • Rheta Childe Dorr
... which was shown me at the time by Mr. McCreary, Commissioner of Immigration at that point. The cable read, "Arrived Canada safe are free." The change was a little too much for them, and they did not realize that they were not free to become nuisances to others. They were ignorant, illiterate, but had the merit of being conscientious and being willing to suffer for conscience' sake. This latter characteristic always prevented me from condemning them wholly. Once their ignorance was removed they would become industrious ...
— Policing the Plains - Being the Real-Life Record of the Famous North-West Mounted Police • R.G. MacBeth
... detailed and noised abroad.... And it was with a half feeling of shame that she prepared herself that afternoon for one more, perhaps one last attempt, to scale the heavens, as she recollected how many an illiterate monk and nun, from Constantinople to the Thebaid, was probably employed at that moment exactly as she was. Still, the attempt must be made. In that terrible abyss of doubt, she must have something palpable, real; something beyond her own thoughts, and hopes, ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... time. O Yudhishthira, Manu and other royal Rishis of meritorious deeds had undertaken journeys to tirthas. Indeed, a trip to them is capable of dispelling all fear, O king! They that are crooked-minded, they that have not their souls under control, they that are illiterate and perverse, do not, O Kauravya, bathe in tirthas. But thou art ever of a virtuous disposition and conversant with morality and firm in thy promises. Thou wilt surely be able to free thyself from the world. For, O son of Pandu, thou art even as king Bhagiratha, or Gaya, or ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... is he who tells of the robber who, being accustomed to commend himself in his adventures to our Lady, was supported on the gibbet for three days by her white hands, and received his pardon; and of the illiterate monk who suffered shame because he knew no more than his Ave Maria, but who, when dead, was proved a holy man by the five roses that came from his mouth in honour of the five letters of Maria's name; and of the nun who quitted her convent to lead a life of disorder, yet ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... that reading books has its utilitarian side, and that we have to consider printed matter (let me never call it literature!) as the raw material whence we extract some of the information necessary to life. But long familiarity with an illiterate peasantry like the Italian one, inclines me to think that we grossly exaggerate the need of such book-grown knowledge. Except as regards scientific facts and the various practices—as medicine, engineering, and ...
— Hortus Vitae - Essays on the Gardening of Life • Violet Paget, AKA Vernon Lee
... were in danger of coming to look on our mother-tongue as a dead language, to be sought in the grammar and dictionary rather than in the heart, and that our only chance of escape was by seeking it at its living sources among those who were, as Scottowe says of Major-General Gibbons, 'divinely illiterate.' President Lincoln, the only really great public man whom these latter days have seen, was great also in this, that he was master—witness his speech at Gettysburg—of a truly masculine English, classic, because it was of no special period, and level at once to the highest and lowest ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... discovery," he says himself, "of their being affected was to see the white gutters made by their tears, which plentifully fell down their cheeks, black as they came out of the coal-pits." It was not only miners and other illiterate men whom Whitefield impressed by the fervor and passion of his eloquence. Hume, Benjamin Franklin, Horace Walpole, and other men as well qualified to judge, and as little likely to fall under the spell of religions or sentimental enthusiasm, have borne ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume II (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... theory as strict as her husband, and for a time made more moan over the aberrations of her favourite son. Like most Scotch mothers of her rank, she had set her heart on seeing him in a pulpit, from which any other eminence seemed a fall; but she became, though comparatively illiterate, having only late in life learnt to write a letter, a student of his books. Over these they talked, smoking together in old country fashion by the hearth; and she was to the last proud of the genius which ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... remaining difference being as to whether any party designations should be printed. Most practical politicians desire that the name "Republican" or "Democrat," or even that some party symbol like a star or flag, should be affixed, which can be understood by the most illiterate voter; also, that the voter should be allowed to make one cross opposite the word "Republican" or "Democrat" when he means to vote the whole of the ticket, "in order to give each candidate the benefit of the full party strength." On ...
— Popular Law-making • Frederic Jesup Stimson
... them, a quick remembrance shot before her. She saw Nicholas Burr as she had seen him in his youth—ardent, assured, holding out his arms to the future, which was to be love, love, love. Now the future had become the present, and the one affection that remained to him was that of the old, illiterate woman, with the rasping voice. He had lost the thing he had lived for—and ...
— The Voice of the People • Ellen Glasgow
... Bouquet, who seems to have detested Croghan, wrote to General Gage, at a time when new powers had been conferred upon Indian-agents, "It is to be regretted that powers of such importance should be trusted to a man illiterate, impudent, and ill-bred." Nevertheless, within a few months, Bouquet wrote to Gage recommending Croghan as the person most competent to negotiate with the Western Indians for British control of the French posts in the Illinois country—a mission upon which Croghan was wounded, captured, ...
— The Story of Cooperstown • Ralph Birdsall
... colours of nature unspoiled; impossible for them to supply beautiful incident and action in their ornament, unless they see beautiful incident and action in the world about them. Inform their minds, refine their habits, and you form and refine their designs; but keep them illiterate, uncomfortable, and in the midst of unbeautiful things, and whatever they do will still ...
— The Two Paths • John Ruskin
... any one wonder that I, and other slaves, often doubted the sincerity of every white man's religion? Can it be a matter of astonishment, that slaves often feel that there is no just God for the poor African? Nay, verily; and were it not for the comforting and sustaining influence that these poor, illiterate and suffering creatures feel as coming from an unearthly source, they would in their ignorance all become infidels. To me, that beautiful Sabbath morning was clouded in midnight darkness, and I retired to ponder on what ...
— Twenty-Two Years a Slave, and Forty Years a Freeman • Austin Steward
... but though compelled to acknowledge the ignorance of the Spaniards in general, I have great pleasure in being able to state that during the latter years it has been becoming less and less, and that the rising generation is by no means so illiterate as the last, which was itself superior in acquirements to the preceding one. It is to be hoped that the progress in improvement will still continue, and that within a few years the blessings of education will be as generally diffused ...
— Letters of George Borrow - to the British and Foreign Bible Society • George Borrow
... start as doctors or fortune-tellers. Besides painting pictures and fans, and illustrating books, these men write fancy scrolls in the various ornamental styles so much prized by the Chinese; they keep accounts for people, and write or read business and private letters for the illiterate masses. ...
— Myths and Legends of China • E. T. C. Werner
... hills of Londesborough. He had only been two or three times in the church at Threlkeld, which was simple and bare, and the full display of a monastic church was an absolute amazement, making him kneel almost breathless with awe, recollecting what the royal hermit had told him. He was too illiterate to follow the service, but the music and the majestic flow of the chants overwhelmed him, and he listened with hands clasped over his face, not daring to raise his eyes to the dazzling gold of the altar, lighted by ...
— The Herd Boy and His Hermit • Charlotte M. Yonge
... boast that they are not literally illiterate. They are always saying the ancient barons could not sign their own names—for they know less of history perhaps than of anything else. The modern barons, however, can sign their own names—or someone else's for a change. They can sign their own names; and that is about all they can do. They ...
— Utopia of Usurers and other Essays • G. K. Chesterton
... which had promoted and confirmed Sophie's prosecution, consisted of illiterate, worn-out officers, who had no scruple in committing the procureur-general's victim for trial to the ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... indigent patriarch, and a remnant of ten bishops; forty monasteries have survived the inroads of the Arabs; and the progress of servitude and apostasy has reduced the Coptic nation to the despicable number of twenty-five or thirty thousand families; [148] a race of illiterate beggars, whose only consolation is derived from the superior wretchedness of the Greek patriarch ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon
... Baron du Guenic was illiterate as a peasant. He could read, write, and do some little ciphering; he knew the military art and heraldry, but, excepting always his prayer-book, he had not read three volumes in the course of his life. His clothing, which is not an insignificant point, was invariably the ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... are convinced that the narrative which follows was not reduced to writing till the twenty- ninth century. Not only was it unlawful to write or print such matter during that period, but the working-class was so illiterate that only in rare instances were its members able to read and write. This was the dark reign of the overman, in whose speech the great mass of the people were characterized as the "herd animals." All literacy was frowned upon and stamped out. From the statute-books of ...
— When God Laughs and Other Stories • Jack London
... This Lady, who was for many years known in Somersetshire as an itinerant dealer in earthenware, rags, &c., and occasionally a fortune-teller, died a few years since at Huntspill, where she had resided for the greater part of a century. She was extremely illiterate, so much so, as not to be able to write, and, I think, could scarcely read. She lived for some years in a house belonging to my father, and while a boy, I was very often her gratuitous amanuensis, in writing letters for her to her children. She possessed, however, considerable ...
— The Dialect of the West of England Particularly Somersetshire • James Jennings
... since taught me that I was in imminent danger of being reduced to beggary. I had no profession, nor any means of subsistence till a profession could be secured; at least no adequate means, unless by retiring to some humble garret, and confining myself to the society of the illiterate, the boorish, and the brutal, between whose habits and mine there was no congeniality. The very day before, Olivia, ecstatic vision, had risen in full view of my delighted hopes, and, forgetting the tormenting distance which malignant fate had placed between ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... strives to hold the people to its own archaic and innocuous religious tenets; why your Church strives so zealously to hold its adherents fast to the rules laid down by pagan emperors and ignorant, often illiterate churchmen, in their councils and synods; and why the Protestant church is so quick to denounce as unevangelical everything that does not measure to its devitalized concept of Christianity. They do not ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... are no signs of this prophecy coming true; but the prophets may cling, if they please, to the hope of its fulfilment. For the rest, it was perfectly clear that the monarchy had done nothing for the material or spiritual advancement of the country, which remained as poverty-stricken and as illiterate as it well could be. Dom Carlos had not even the common prudence to affect, if he did not feel, a sympathy with the nation's pride in its "heroes." The Monarchy could boast neither of good deeds nor of good intentions. Its cynicism was ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor
... arrived at Asti on the 9th of September. Here he was received with great honour by Lodovico and his father-in-law, Duke Ercole, who rode out to meet him on his entry into the town. The magistrates and citizens welcomed him as their liege lord, and the illiterate French barons were amazed to hear a child of eleven, Margareta Solari, declaim a Latin oration with perfect ease and fluency. Two days afterwards Beatrice herself arrived at the castle of Annona, ...
— Beatrice d'Este, Duchess of Milan, 1475-1497 • Julia Mary Cartwright
... plain as sunshine, for that must correct itself. You know I am homo unius linguae: in English, illiterate, ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... had he to do with the world; even its good opinion was scarcely of any importance to him. What to him was the fastidiousness of virtue—to him whom poverty excluded from the refined portion of society, and knowledge and education from the vulgar and illiterate? What could he profit by it? Nothing, absolutely nothing. And yet there was no power on earth could have made this man false to his honour. Partly, perhaps, from his very estrangement from the business of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 360, October 1845 • Various
... mechanic skill. "That Gospel, Paul with zeal and love maintain'd, To others lost, to you is now explain'd; No worldly learning can these points discuss, Books teach them not as they are taught to us. Illiterate call us!—let their wisest man Draw forth his thousands as your Teacher can: They give their moral precepts: so, they say, Did Epictetus once, and Seneca; One was a slave, and slaves we all must be, Until the Spirit comes and sets us free. Yet hear you nothing from ...
— The Borough • George Crabbe
... fact that one of the few truly original and novel ideas the past century can boast, and the one which has had the deepest influence on geology, had its origin in the brain of an illiterate Swiss chamois hunter named Perraudin. Throughout the Alps, on lofty crags, great bowlders were often found, which had no relation to the geology of the region and which were called erratics, because they had evidently ...
— American Men of Mind • Burton E. Stevenson
... piece, represented for the first time on the metropolitan boards. Here the story rushed on, per fas aut nefas, and the audience went with it. Certes, some man who understood the stage must have put the incidents together, and then left it to each illiterate histrio to find the words,—words, my dear confreres, signify so little in an acting play. The movement is the thing. Grand secret! Analyze, practise it, and restore to grateful stars that lost ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton |
