"Mote" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... But, remember, it is but for an hour. The wise man will be he who quickest lights his candle; the wisest he who never lets it out. Tomorrow, the next moment, he, a poor, darkened, blurred soul, may need it again to focus the Image better, to take a mote off the lens, to clear the mirror from a breath with which the world ...
— Addresses • Henry Drummond
... flapped his sail-like wings, though heavily he flew, A mote upon the sun's broad face he seemed unto my view: But once I thought I saw him stoop, as if he would alight; 'Twas only a delusive thought, for ...
— The Universal Reciter - 81 Choice Pieces of Rare Poetical Gems • Various
... Suddenly she remembered that she had her secret, and she felt humbled before this other girl whom she was judging. She became conscious to such an extent of the beam in her own eye that she was too blinded to see the mote in that of poor Lily, who, indeed, was not to blame, being simply helpless before her own temperament and ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... horseback against the southern sky-line could possibly make to the shimmer of purple above the plains, or the fragrance of prairie-roses lining the trail. It seems to me the lonely call of the meadow-lark high overhead—a mote in a sea of blue—or the drumming and chirruping of feathered creatures through the green, could not have sounded less musical, if I had not been a lover. But that, too, is only an opinion; for one glimpse ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut
... going to the place of execution, he still looked graver and mote concerned; though he did not fall into those agonies of sighing and tears as some do, but seemed to bear his miserable state with great composedness and resignation, saying he had repented as well as he could in the short time allowed him, ...
— Lives Of The Most Remarkable Criminals Who have been Condemned and Executed for Murder, the Highway, Housebreaking, Street Robberies, Coining or other offences • Arthur L. Hayward
... wilt mind thee for many a season How we met in the high voice of Hilda. Right fain I go forth to the spear-mote Being fitted for every encounter. There Cormac's gay shield from his clutches I clave with the bane of the bucklers, For he scorned in the battle to seek me If we set not ...
— The Life and Death of Cormac the Skald • Unknown
... come, we won't laugh any mote. Come back, and you needn't climb. You can stay underneath and pick up ...
— Gypsy's Cousin Joy • Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
... then, and sneer? From out your own eye pull the mote; A pretty thing for you to jeer! Haven't you, too, got a ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 487 - Vol. 17, No. 487. Saturday, April 30, 1831 • Various
... role of a labourer behind a hedge on the Brighton road): "'Oo are you a-gettin' at? Do you see any mote in my eye? If you want to know the time, I've ...
— Mr. Punch Awheel - The Humours of Motoring and Cycling • J. A. Hammerton
... of "mixed motives," "the arm of flesh," "idolatry," and so forth. No doubt he is so far right, that perverse humanity will ever abuse God's gifts, and often make them occasions of sin; but this outcry of the beam against the mote, which is so grievously prevalent in the religious world, is very unseemly. Oh, how infinitely more tender is the Lord to us than we ...
— Personal Recollections • Charlotte Elizabeth
... we had the place to ourselves. But then Feth sees few visitors at any season. Sixteen miles from a station is its salvation. True, there is Mote Abbey hard by—a fine old place with an ancient deer-park and deep, rolling woods. Ruins, too, we had heard. A roofless quire, a few grass-grown yards of cloister and the like. Only the Abbot's kitchen was at all preserved. There's irony for you. We were going to see them before we left. We ...
— The Brother of Daphne • Dornford Yates
... is imperceptible but at last they are within range of each other's magnetism; there is a start, a swift rush, and they are together. Thus it was that Clara was gently, very gently, and unconsciously to herself, approaching Coronado. A mote on the wave of life, she was subject to attraction, as all of us motes are, and this man was the only tractor at hand. Aunt Maria did not count, for woman cannot absorb woman. As to Thurstane, he not only was not there, but he was not anywhere, as ...
— Overland • John William De Forest
... cheerfulness which has found the centre of gravity. I am myself again, as people say. After months of agitation in what seemed to be chaos the lost atom has dropped back to its place in the scheme of things, and even aspires (poor mite!) to do its infinitesimal business intelligently. So might a mote in a sunbeam feel itself at ...
— Old Fires and Profitable Ghosts • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... not as a sufficient argument for disputing papal power, but in order to show the perverted opinions of those who strain the gnats, but let elephants go through [Matt. 23:24], who behold the mote in the brother's eye and permit the beams in their own to remain [Matt. 7:3], only to the end that others may be stifled by superfluous and unnecessary things, or at least branded as heretics or by any ...
— Works of Martin Luther - With Introductions and Notes (Volume I) • Martin Luther
... Lo the nations! as a drop from a bucket, And as dust on a balance are they reckoned. Lo the isles! as a mote he uplifteth, And Lebanon is not enough for fuel, And its wild beasts for a burnt-offering. All the nations are as nothing before him, They are reckoned by him as void ...
— The Makers and Teachers of Judaism • Charles Foster Kent
... gentle heart. Let him come back, that his compassion may Give life to yours. Hub. Come, boy, prepare yourself. Arth. Is there no remedy? Hub. None, but to lose your eyes. Arth. O, Heaven! that there were but a mote in yours, A grain, a dust, a gnat, a meandering hair, Any annoyance in that precious sense! Then, feeling what small things are boisterous there, Your vile intent must needs seem horrible. Hub. Is this your promise? Go to, hold your tongue. Arth. Hubert, the utterance of a brace of tongues ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... and shoved Rip, sweeping him through space like a dust mote. He clutched his propulsion tube with both hands and fought to ...
— Rip Foster Rides the Gray Planet • Blake Savage
... done in the kindest and gentlest manner, and in nine cases out of ten had best be left undone. When one is inclined to be censorious or critical, it is well to remember the scriptural injunction, "First cast the beam out of thine own eye, and then shalt thou see clearly to cast the mote out ...
— Our Deportment - Or the Manners, Conduct and Dress of the Most Refined Society • John H. Young
... passion and be ready to break the offender's head. The individual that suffers a single adverse word immediately proceeds to abuse and slander in the extreme his opponent. In short, an angry heart knows no moderation and cannot equally repay, but must make of a splinter, even a mote, a great beam, or must fan a tiny spark into a volcano of flame, by retaliating with reviling and cursing. Yet it will not admit that it does wrong. It would, if possible, actually murder the offender, thus committing a greater wrong than it ...
— Epistle Sermons, Vol. III - Trinity Sunday to Advent • Martin Luther
... even to lament the prospect of his funeral expences, though a short time before he had been censuring one of his own relations for his parsimonious temper—"Now is it not strange," continued he, "that this man would not remove the beam from his own eye, before he attempted to take the mote out of other peoples?" "Why, so I dare say he would," cried Foote, "if he were sure of ...
— The Book of Three Hundred Anecdotes - Historical, Literary, and Humorous—A New Selection • Various
... nor ever lie, Till, beyond thinking, out of view, One mote of all the dust that's I Shall meet one ...
— Georgian Poetry 1911-12 • Various
... first the hot fermentation and unwholesome secrecy of the population crowded into large cities, each mote in the misery lighter, as an individual soul, than a dead leaf, but becoming oppressive and infectious each to his neighbour, in the smoking mass of decay. The resulting modes of mental ruin and ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... nothing but the extremity of old-maid desperation will ever induce me to accept the vocation of a deaconess. Thus do a man's children play hide and seek with the beam in his eye while he practises upon the mote in theirs! But if, some day when the heavens are doubtful between sun and rain, you espy a little ruffled rainbow, propelled by a goose-quill pen, coquetting northward with the retiring clouds, know that 'tis the spirit of Jessica Doane arched for another outing ...
— The Jessica Letters: An Editor's Romance • Paul Elmer More
... wont (they say), To make his wonne low underneath the ground, In a deep delve far from the view of day, That of no living wight he mote be found, Whenso he counselled with ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... of the land of Noua Zembla, toward the East out of the circle Arcticke in the mote temperate Zone, you are to haue regard: for if you finde the soyle planted with people, it is like that in time an ample vent of our warme woollen clothes may be found. [Sidenote: A good consideration.] And if there be no people at all there to be found, then you shall specially note what plentie ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of The English Nation v. 4 • Richard Hakluyt
... conclusions, with the same deference to self-esteem, and the same submission to hope, as had been apparent among their competitors. It would seem to be a law of nature that men should thus flatter themselves, and perceive the mote in the eye of their neighbour, while the ...
— The Sea Lions - The Lost Sealers • James Fenimore Cooper
... whether we go on with or without the other newspapers. We will do justice and say what is true, regardless of popularity. We detest hypocrisy; and we have no disposition to make a mountain out of a molehill, or to see a mote in the eye of Lola Montez, and not discover a beam in the eye of Fanny Elssler, or of any of the ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... that kiss other shores thousands of miles away, I am oppressed by a sense of my own littleness. I ask the question whether the God who has such large things in His care, can think of me—a speck on an infinite aggregate of surface—a mote uneasily shifting in the boundless space. I get no hope in this direction; but I look down, and find that the shoulders of all inferior creation are under me, lifting me into the very presence of God. I find that God has been at work below me, in a mass ...
— Lessons in Life - A Series of Familiar Essays • Timothy Titcomb
... Else how, when in the holy grove I wandered of the idol, Love,— Who daily scents his snowy wings With incense of burnt-offerings From the most unpolluted things, Whose pleasant bowers are yet so riven Above with trellised rays from Heaven No mote may shun—no tiniest fly— The light'ning of his eagle eye— How was it that Ambition crept, Unseen, amid the revels there, Till growing bold, he laughed and leapt In the ...
— Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Poetical Works • Edgar Allan Poe
... I should like and Lady Lyttelton, but Garrick does not tempt me at all. I have no taste for his perpetual buffoonery, and am sick of his endless expectation of flattery; but you who charge me with making a long visit to Lord and Lady Ossory,—you do not see the mote in your own eye; at least I am sure Lady Ailesbury does not see that in hers. I could not obtain a single day from her all last year, and with difficulty got her to give me a few hours this. There is always an indispensable ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... the eternal throne Of stars begemming the bewildering blue Unless one has the eyes to see him. Think How we two stand upon the brink Of nothing! Here's a globe, whereto we trust, No larger than the smallest speck of dust Or mote in the sunbeam is to that sun's self, And we are like dead leaves in autumn's whil Of wind ...
— Household Gods • Aleister Crowley
... earl or, in his absence, the gerefa, (sheriff,) and sometimes both the earl and the gerefa, presided at the schyre-mote (county court); the gerefa (sheriff) usually alone presided at the mote (meeting or court) of the hundred. In the cities and towns which were not within any peculiar jurisdiction, there was held, at regular stated intervals, a burgh mote, (borough court,) ...
— An Essay on the Trial By Jury • Lysander Spooner
... the body of a perfect man," said he. "In the days when our State was powerful and great, when men and not dogs ruled at Mandakan, no man might be Dakoon save him who was clear of mote or beam; of true bone and body, like a high-bred yearling got from a perfect stud. But two such are there that I have seen in Mandakan to-day, and they are ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... will he go Through the pale, scattered asphodels, Down mote-hung dusk of olive dells, To where the ancient basins throw Fleet threads of blue and trembling zones Of gold upon the ...
— Gloucester Moors and Other Poems • William Vaughn Moody
... while others seem to be not larger than pebbles, or even than grains of sand. Yet, insignificant as these bodies may seem, the sun does not disdain to undertake their control. Each particle, whether it be as small as the mote in a sunbeam or as mighty as the planet Jupiter, must perforce trace out its path around the sun in conformity with the laws ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball
... expressions, such as (II Tim. ii. 4): "No man holding knighthood to God, wlappith himself with worldli nedes;" and many of the best-known phrases in our present Bible originated with him; e.g., "the beame and the mote," "the depe thingis of God," "strait is the gate and narewe is the waye," "no but a man schall be born againe," "the cuppe of blessing which ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... halcyon days,—'twould be most cruel to deny him the grave's dearest privilege, peace and quiet. Amen! Amen! with all my heart to thy benediction and prayer, O priest! as, aspersing his lifeless remains with holy-water, thou sayest, Requiescat! So mote it be! ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 74, December, 1863 • Various
... I was telling you, it was after sunset, and there was no time to lose, so I whittled a bit of wood to a point, and essayed the task in which I claim a certain eminence, namely, the extraction of a mote from ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... That ye ne arrette it nought my villanie, Though that I plainly speak in this matere To tellen yon her words, and eke her chere: Ne though I speak her wordes properly, For this ye knowen al so well as I, Who-so shall tell a tale after a man, He mote rehearse as nye as ever he can Everich a word, if it be in his charge, All speke he never so rudely and large. Or elles he mot telle his tale untrue. Or feine things, or finde wordes new: He may not spare, although he were his brother, He mot as well say o word ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... England. Feudalization of Europe, and partial metamorphosis of the mark or township into the manor. Parallel transformation of the township, in some of its features, into the parish. The court leet and the vestry-meeting. The New England town-meeting a revival of the ancient mark-mote. ...
— American Political Ideas Viewed From The Standpoint Of Universal History • John Fiske
... to the sky, from the sky to the hills, and the sea; to every blade of grass, to every leaf, to the smallest insect, to the million waves of ocean. Yet this earth itself appears but a mote in that sunbeam by which we are conscious of one narrow streak in the abyss. A beam crosses my silent chamber from the window, and atoms are visible in it; a beam slants between the fir-trees, and particles rise and fall within, and cross it while the air each side seems void. Through ...
— The Story of My Heart • Richard Jefferies
... that this is the case, from the mote that floats in the sunbeam to multiple stars revolving round each other, are we willing to carry our principles to their consequences, and recognize a like operation of law among living as among lifeless things, in the organic as well as the inorganic ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 5, November, 1863 • Various
... friend finishes his brief explanation of the conditions with the application of the whole. "Hold on"; that is the ABC, the Alpha and Omega of it. So mote it be. Still, saying it is one thing, doing it another. My steel-centred Hardy I know pretty well, and have no fear, though it is small by comparison with the full-sized greenhearts to which my attendant is accustomed, ...
— Lines in Pleasant Places - Being the Aftermath of an Old Angler • William Senior
... town! whose choking elms each year With eddying dust before their time turn gray, Pining for rain,—to me thy dust is dear; It glorifies the eve of summer day, And when the westering sun half sunken burns, 250 The mote-thick air to deepest orange turns, The westward horseman rides through clouds of ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... invincible and just severity; but his raised elbow trembled slightly, and the perspiration poured from under his hat as if a second sun had suddenly blazed up at the zenith by the side of the ardent still globe already there, in whose blinding white heat the earth whirled and shone like a mote ...
— End of the Tether • Joseph Conrad
... declared to these two princes on February 12, and again afterwards, that it must not be allowed to embarrass or prevent a treaty of peace. If it violated a trifling article of the Golden Bull, that was no sin against the Holy Ghost, and God could show the Protestants, for a mote like this in the eyes of their enemies, whole beams in their own. It must needs be an intolerable burden to the Elector's conscience if war were to arise in consequence,—a war which might 'well end in rending the Empire asunder ...
— Life of Luther • Julius Koestlin
... will not persevere."[178] For milder language than this, many of the Reformers had been branded as "traitors," "disaffected," and "republicans," by the very person who now gave utterance to it. The beam in one's own eye is so much harder to perceive than the mote in the eye ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... pasture lay, And not a shadowe mote be seene, Save where full fyve good miles away The steeple towered from out the greene; And lo! the great bell farre and wide Was heard in all the country side ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For, Book Two • Various
... the two, the Indian was much the finest relic of human powers, though he was less uneasy and more stationary than the black. But the propensity to see the mote in the eye of his friend, while he forgot the beam in his own, was a long-established and well-known weakness of Jaaf, and its present exhibition caused everybody to smile. I was delighted with the beaming, laughing eyes of Mary Warren in ...
— The Redskins; or, Indian and Injin, Volume 1. - Being the Conclusion of the Littlepage Manuscripts • James Fenimore Cooper
... noun-certeyn ben alle your observaunces, But it a sely fewe poyntes be; Ne no-thing asketh so grete attendaunces As doth youre lay, and that knowe alle ye; 340 But that is not the worste, as mote I thee; But, tolde I yow the worste poynt, I leve, Al seyde I sooth, ye wolden ...
— Troilus and Criseyde • Geoffrey Chaucer
... but the least of real as opposed to 'ideal', the least speck of positive existence, even though it were but the mote in a sun beam, into the sciential 'contemplamen' or theorem, and it ceases to be science. 'Ratio desinit esse pura ratio et fit discursus, stat subter et fit [Greek: hypothetikon]:—non superstat'. The 'Nous' is bound to a rock, the immovable firmness of which ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge
... Nibelungs and Volsungs, of Sigurd and of Siegfried,—whether we follow the older versions or the mote recent renderings,—there is, as it were, an ever-present but indefinable shadow of coming fate, "a low, inarticulate voice of Doom," foretelling the inevitable. This is but in consonance with the general ideas of our Northern ancestors regarding the ...
— The Story of Siegfried • James Baldwin
... ring of spectral light, Whose distance thrills the soul with solemn awe, Can ne'er escape in its majestic might The firm control of omnipresent law; This mote descending to its bounden place, Those suns whose radiance we can scarcely trace, Alike ...
— Poems • John L. Stoddard
... no explanation. "Oh yes, quite parvarted; not a word of truth in it; there never is when England is consarned. There is no beam in an Englishman's eye; no not a smell of one; he has pulled it out long ago; that's the reason he can see the mote in other folks's so plain. Oh, of course it ain't true; it's a Yankee invention; it's a hickory ham and a ...
— The Attache - or, Sam Slick in England, Complete • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... said—it must be said—that, if they be human beings (as they are), they are meant for something more than mere enjoyment of life. Well and good: but are they not meant for enjoyment likewise? Let us take the beam out of our own eye, before we take the mote out of theirs; let us, before we complain of them for being too healthy and comfortable, remember that we have at home here tens of thousands of paupers, rogues, whatnot, who are not a whit more civilised, intellectual, virtuous, ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... such crowds of little faint dots in it all night, was the real thing—the big, final, and important thing—and that they and their churches and popes and pyramids and nations should just dance about it for millions of years like a mote in a sunbeam, hurt their feelings at first. But it did them good. It started them looking Up, and looking ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... inherited Ewelme through his wife Alice Chaucer, a kinswoman of the poet, and "for love of her and the commoditie of her landes fell much to dwell in Oxfordshire," and in 1430-40 was busy building a manor-place of "brick and Tymbre and set within a fayre mote," a church, an almshouse, and a school. The manor-place, or "Palace," as it was called, has disappeared, but the almshouse and school remain, witnesses of the munificence of the founders. The poor ...
— Vanishing England • P. H. Ditchfield
... for him in politics; the conventions of civilization, as he knew them in New York City, palled upon him; a sure instinct whispered to him that he must break away and seek health of body and heart and soul among the re mote, unspoiled haunts of primeval Nature. For nearly two years, with occasional intervals spent in the East, the Elkhorn Ranch at Medora was his home, and he has described the life of the ranchman and ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... is evident that there is power not ourselves. We did not make this world. We did not put into it even the lowest force, gravitation. It is more than our minds can compass to measure its power. We have no arithmetic to tell its power on every mote in the sunbeam, or flower, or grain-head bowing toward the earth, tree brought down with a crash, or avalanche with thunder. Much less can we measure the power that holds the earth to the sun spite of its measureless centrifugal ...
— Among the Forces • Henry White Warren
... the towers a study called Paradise, where was a closet in the middle of eight squares latticed; about and at the top of every square was a desk lodged to set books on, &c. The garde robe in the castle was exceeding fair, and so were the gardens within the mote and the orchards without; and in the orchards were mounts opere topiario writhen about with degrees like turnings of a cockle-shell, to come ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... standard of absolute truth and right, grievously would they all fall short,—and we, too, with them. Judged by the human standard of progressive development and gradual growth,—the only standard to which the man of the beam can venture, unrebuked, to bring the man with the mote,—we shall find much in them all to sadden us, and much, also, in which ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... my purse, and to none other wight, Complain I, for ye be my lady dere; I am sorry now that ye be light, For, certes, ye now make me heavy chere; Me were as lefe be laid upon a bere, For which unto your mercy thus I crie, Be heavy againe, or els mote I die. ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... three, The grizeliest beast that ere mote bee Her hede was greate and graye; Scho was bred in Rokebye woode, Ther war few that thither yoode, {14} But cam ...
— Ancient Poems, Ballads and Songs of England • Robert Bell
... when the pupil is ready to receive the truth, then will this little book come to him, or her. Such is The Law. The Hermetic Principle of Cause and Effect, in its aspect of The Law of Attraction, will bring lips and ear together—pupil and book in company. So mote it be! ...
— The Kybalion - A Study of The Hermetic Philosophy of Ancient Egypt and Greece • Three Initiates
... in the free gilds into which the city was divided, under the presidency of an alderman. These divisions were afterwards called wards, and were analogous to the corresponding division of the shire into hundreds. In each ward was held a court-leet, or ward-mote, dating from the time of Alfred, though the actual institution of wards by that name is no later than the reign of Edward I. Civil causes, in London at least, were tried before a peculiar tribunal, the president ...
— The Corporation of London: Its Rights and Privileges • William Ferneley Allen
... soon reached that town and had a twelve-o'clock lunch at one of the inns, where we heard something of the principal annual event of the town, the "Common Riding," the occasion on which the officials rode round the boundaries. There was an artificial mound in the town called the "Mote-Hill," formerly used by the Druids. It was to the top of this hill the cornet and his followers ascended at sunrise on the day of the festival, after which they adjourned to a platform specially erected in the town, to sing the ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... in the regions of eternal twilight, revolutions, of which history has been silent, in the mysterious depths of Asia, outpourings of human rivets along the sides of the Altai mountains, convulsions up-heaving r mote realms and unknown dynasties, shock after shock throb bing throughout the barbarian world and dying upon the edge of civilization, vast throes which shake the earth as precursory pangs to the birth of a new empire—as ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... proverbs, "summum jus, summa injustitia," "The most strenuous right is the most strenuous wrong"; and again, Solomon's words (Ec 7, 17), "Noli nimium esse justus," "Be not righteous overmuch." Here is where we leave unperceived the beam in our own eye and proceed to remove the mote from our neighbor's eye. Laws without love make the conscience timid and fill it with unreasonable terror and despair, to the great injury of body and soul. Thus, much trouble and labor are incurred all to ...
— Epistle Sermons, Vol. II - Epiphany, Easter and Pentecost • Martin Luther
... that they considered the procession of the nuptial couch extremely improper. But as the old saying goes—"A man can see the mote in his neighbour's eye when he cannot perceive the beam in his own;" and it struck me that the manner in which marriages are managed among the Europeans who are settled here, is much more unbecoming. It is a rule with the English, that ...
— A Woman's Journey Round the World • Ida Pfeiffer
... There's a mote in my eye or a blot on the page, And I cannot tell of the joyful greeting; You may take it for granted and I will engage, There were kisses and tears at the strange, glad meeting; For aye since the birth of the swift-winged years, In the desert ...
— Legends of the Northwest • Hanford Lennox Gordon
... to gather one of the taller branches, a mote, a bit of bark—some hateful thing—falls into Molly's right eye. Instant agony is the result. Tears stream from the offended pupil; the other eye joins in the general tribulation; and Molly, standing in the centre of the grass-plot, with her ...
— Molly Bawn • Margaret Wolfe Hamilton
... and amplify itself into mountains of darkness, which exists oftentimes in germs that are imperceptible. An error in human choice, an infirmity in the human will, though it were at first less than a mote, though it should swerve from the right line by an interval ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... "a new adaptation from the New Testament." He and a charming "she" sit waiting their turn at the Hofrath's door. He is looking into her eyes and she into his. "Really I don't see the slightest mote in your eyes," says she. "No, but I can see the beams in yours," ...
— In Bohemia with Du Maurier - The First Of A Series Of Reminiscences • Felix Moscheles
... they never go out of their road. We are dapper little busybodies, and run this way and that way superserviceably; but they swerve never from their fore-ordained paths,—neither the sun, nor the moon, nor a bubble of air, nor a mote ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 • Various
... only earth phenomena, yet the benefaction of the sun is as if it shone for us alone. It is as great as if this were the case, and yet the fraction of his light and heat that actually falls upon this mote of a world adrift in sidereal space is so infinitely small that it could hardly be computed by numbers. In our religion we appropriate God to ourselves in the same way, but he knows us not in this private and particular way, though we are all sharers ...
— Under the Maples • John Burroughs
... daye I mote thy worke renew, If to correct and eke to rubbe and scrape, And all is thorow thy ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... how sorry she was for him; and how strange that she of all people should be the only one in whom he confided. What secret sorrow could it be that depressed him? Perhaps he, too, had lost his mother. Or could it be something still mote terrible? How glad she would be if only she could ...
— Tales of Two Countries • Alexander Kielland
... de la Baudraye, "London is the capital of trade and speculation and the centre of government. The aristocracy hold a 'mote' there for sixty days only; it gives and takes the passwords of the day, looks in on the legislative cookery, reviews the girls to marry, the carriages to be sold, exchanges greetings, and is away again; and is so far from amusing, that it cannot bear itself for more than the few days known ...
— Parisians in the Country - The Illustrious Gaudissart, and The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... shell struck squarely in the center of the earthwork, burst with a terrible crash, and sent steel splinters and fragments flying in every direction. A rain of dirt followed the rain of steel, and, when the colonel wiped the last mote from his eye, he said ...
— The Guns of Bull Run - A Story of the Civil War's Eve • Joseph A. Altsheler
... rule of the borough lay as in the townships about it in the hands of its own freemen, gathered in "borough-moot" or "portmanni-mote." But the social change brought about by the Danish wars, the legal requirement that each man should have a lord, affected the towns as it affected the rest of the country. Some passed into the hands of great thegns near to them; the bulk became ...
— History of the English People, Volume I (of 8) - Early England, 449-1071; Foreign Kings, 1071-1204; The Charter, 1204-1216 • John Richard Green
... spring wherein advance seems as passive as is the progress of a log down the race of a spring freshet. Then there are other days wherein it seems that every mote must feel to the full its sentient life, and its swelling towards development or fulfilment. On a day like the latter, everything and everybody bestirs. The dust motes spin in whirling columns, the gnats dance for their lives their dance ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... /[4,66] What mote it be?—It is the knowledge of nature, and the power of its various operations; particularly the skill of reckoning, of weights and measures, of constructing buildings and dwellings of all kinds, and the true manner of forming all things for ...
— The Builders - A Story and Study of Masonry • Joseph Fort Newton
... this throwing himself upon my mercy, took me somewhat aback. In threatening to tear the mote from his eye, what about a certain obstruction ...
— The Chauffeur and the Chaperon • C. N. Williamson
... accepting the proofs of the relative insignificance of the earth; they were more quickly convinced of the comparative littleness of the solar system; and now the evidence assails their reason that what they had regarded as the universe is only one mote gleaming in the ...
— Curiosities of the Sky • Garrett Serviss
... domination. For Mark, when he was not "William Foster," was simply a high-spirited and happy youth, full of energy and of apparently normal desires and intentions. He had that sort of genius which can be long asleep in the dark, while its possessor dances, like a mote, in sunshine. ...
— Tongues of Conscience • Robert Smythe Hichens
... reverence and lovely dread turning ourselves with all our mights unto the working that our good Lord stirreth us to, rejoicing and thanking inwardly. And sometimes for plenteousness it breaketh out with voice and saith: Good Lord! great thanks be to Thee: blessed mote Thou be." ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... the more welcome,' sayd Robyn, 'So ever mote I the! Fyll of the best wyne,' sayd Robyn, 'This monke shall ...
— Ballads of Robin Hood and other Outlaws - Popular Ballads of the Olden Times - Fourth Series • Frank Sidgwick
... Let us be rational. Let us think. Death is strange only because we do not think enough. God must breathe. Life is the exhalation, death the inhalation of deity. He breathes out, and the Universe flames forth with all her wings—her suns and clusters of suns—down to her mote-like earth, the butterfly of space, trimmed with its gaudy seasons, and nourishing on its back ...
— Semiramis and Other Plays - Semiramis, Carlotta And The Poet • Olive Tilford Dargan
... my orbit; and your flickering planet A mote that flecks your sun, that faint white star; Yet, in my magic pools, I still can scan it; For I have ways to look ...
— Watchers of the Sky • Alfred Noyes
... [th]e sayl(:) [th]ey sayle[th] faste: Arthour owt of sy[gh]t ys paste. [Th]e ferst lond [th]at he gan Meete, and lands at Forso[th]e hyt was Bareflete; 344 Barfleet. Ther he gan vp furst aryve. Now welle Mote Arthour spede & thryve; God speed him! And [th]at hys saule spede [th]e better, Lat eche man sey ...
— Arthur, Copied And Edited From The Marquis of Bath's MS • Frederick J. Furnivall
... All natural motion is Beauty in action. The winds, the waves, the clouds, the trees, the birds, the animals, all move beautifully; and beautifully do the joyous light-words of the skies dance their eternal cotillion of glory. From the mote that plays its little frolic in the sunbeam, to the world that blazes along the sapphire spaces of the firmament, are visible the ever-varying features of the enrapturing spirit of Beauty. All this great realm of ...
— Aims and Aids for Girls and Young Women • George Sumner Weaver
... fayne wolde I Affter the sentence off myne auctowre, Butte I pray yowe of thys grette labowre I mote at ...
— Early Theories of Translation • Flora Ross Amos
... beautiful, and in some subtle quality, in this small difference and that, new to me and strange. They were in no fashion I could name, and the simple costume the man wore suggested neither period nor country. It might, I thought, be the Happy Future, or Utopia, or the Land of Simple Dreams; an errant mote of memory, Henry James's phrase and story of "The Great Good Place," twinkled across my mind, and passed ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... phrase is always applied when people, with pretence of friendship, do you an ill turn, as one licking a mote out of your eye makes it ...
— The Proverbs of Scotland • Alexander Hislop
... do dislike the behavior of those persons who, when people are unfortunate, say: "I told you so—getting punished—served him right." If those I-told-you-so's got their desert they would long ago have been pitched over the battlements. The mote in their neighbor's eyes—so small that it takes a microscope to find it—gives them more trouble than the beam which obscures their own optics. With air sometimes supercilious and sometimes Pharisaical, and always blasphemous, they take the razor of the divine judgment ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage
... no doubt," began the other. But Coey came to her sister's assistance with a Biblical allusion to the mote and the beam, and Bluebell saw that if personalities were to be avoided, they had better go downstairs at once. So the party of ladies passed a quiet sleepy evening,—Mrs. Rolleston mentally resolving ...
— Bluebell - A Novel • Mrs. George Croft Huddleston
... it's all right," she added with a sigh of relief. "Now to see if it will operate. But first I think we'd better see if we can push ourselves off with the oars and boat hook," for Betty, knowing that the best of motors may not "mote" at times, carried a pair of long sweeps by which the Gem could laboriously be propelled in case of a break-down. There was also a long hooked ...
— The Outdoor Girls in Florida - Or, Wintering in the Sunny South • Laura Lee Hope
... must be a final judgment, and the true man will welcome it, even if he is to appear a convicted fool. A man's business is to see first that he is not acting the part of a fool, and next, to help any honest people who care about the matter to take heed likewise that they be not offering to pull the mote out of their brother's eye. But there are even societies established and supported by good people for the express purpose of pulling out motes.—'The Mote-Pulling Society!'—That ought to take with a ...
— The Seaboard Parish Vol. 3 • George MacDonald
... knows not what to do: the outrage sore Avenged he has not, nor his pain allaid: What was a mote is now a beam; so sore It prest him; on his heart so heavy weighed. So plain is what was little known before, He fears that it will shortly be displaid. At first, he haply might have hid his woe; Which Rumour now throughout ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto
... there are considerable remains of the old port, a mote, by the ruins of which you can easily trace ...
— Charles Philip Yorke, Fourth Earl of Hardwicke, Vice-Admiral R.N. - A Memoir • Lady Biddulph of Ledbury
... million miles in diameter. That means it would take twenty-seven million of our suns to equal it in bulk. So that this big world of ours, which takes so many weeks to crawl about on the fastest ships and the fastest trains, is really a mote of dust, something smaller than the smallest pin-prick, compared to that far-away sun up there on the ...
— The Prairie Child • Arthur Stringer
... foes Clorinda sallied out, And many a baron bold was by her side, Within the postern stood Argantes stout To rescue her, if ill mote her betide: With speeches brave she cheered her warlike rout, And with bold words them heartened as they ride, "Let us by some brave act," quoth she, "this day Of Asia's hopes ...
— Jerusalem Delivered • Torquato Tasso
... 5 En la cuja gruesa lanza, Con recamado pendon, Y una cifra a ver se alcanza, Que es de desesperacion, O a lo menos de venganza. 10 En el arzon de la silla Ancho escudo reverbera Con blasones de Castilla, Y el mote dice a la orilla: Nunca mi espada venciera. 15 Era el caballo galan, El bruto mas generoso, De mas gallardo ademan: Cabos negros, y brioso, Muy tostado, y alazan, 20 Larga cola recogida En las piernas descarnadas, Cabeza pequena, ...
— Modern Spanish Lyrics • Various
... smelled somewhat of his secret tricks, that whereas he was a most licentious liuer, and an vnchast person of bodie and mind, vet he was so blinded, that he could not perceiue the beame in his own eies, whilest he espied a mote in another mans. Herevpon they grudged, that he should in such wise call other men to accompts for their honest demeanor of life, which could not render any good reckoning of his owne: insomuch that they watched him so narrowlie, that in the euening (after he had blown his horne so lowd ...
— Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland (2 of 6): England (3 of 12) - Henrie I. • Raphael Holinshed
... he?[23] A soulless clod. How can he cause such different powers to flow Upon the aforesaid mortals here below? And how, indeed, to this far distant ball Can he impart his energy at all?— How pierce the ether deeps profound, The sun and globes that whirl around? A mote might turn his potent ray For ever from its earthward way. Will find, it, then, in starry cope, The makers of the horoscope? The war[24] with which all Europe's now afflicted— Deserves it not by them to've been predicted? Yet heard we not a whisper ...
— The Fables of La Fontaine - A New Edition, With Notes • Jean de La Fontaine
... us doubt whether it is not our manifest duty to endeavor at least to show our disapproval of the deed and our sympathy with those who have suffered by it. The cases must be extreme in which such a course is justifiable. There must be no effort made to remove the mote from our brother's eye if we refuse to remove the beam from our own. But in extreme cases action may be justifiable and proper. What form the action shall take must depend upon the circumstances of the case; that is, upon the degree of the atrocity and upon our power to remedy it. The cases ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... been perfect. Literally and truly there was not a cloud, not a mote in her sunshine. She had everything—the love of her husband, great wealth, extraordinary beauty, perfect health, an untroubled mind, friends, position—everything. God had been good to her, beyond ...
— The Pit • Frank Norris
... not ouer studyous to spy ane mote in myn E, That in gour awin ane ferrye bot can not se." —Tooke's ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... time Ruth had been less than a mote in the eye of Uncle Jabez. She was merely an annoyance to the miller at that time. Since then, however, she had many and many a time proved a blessing to him. Nor did Jabez Potter refuse ...
— Ruth Fielding on the St. Lawrence - The Queer Old Man of the Thousand Islands • Alice B. Emerson
... furious, violent. rec og nized: known. re flec tion: image. ref uge: shelter. re fused: declined to do. reign ing (rain): ruling. re mote: distant. rest less: eager for change, discontented; unquiet. re store: to return, to give back. roe buck: male deer. runt: an animal unusually small ...
— The Child's World - Third Reader • Hetty Browne, Sarah Withers, W.K. Tate
... a slender dole our love mote satisfy, * Yet nor my gratitude therefor nor laud of me shalt gain: I'm none of those console their hearts by couplets or by verse * For breach of inner faith by one who liefly breaks the chain: When so it fortunes she I love a partner gives to me * I wone in single bliss and let my lover love ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... distracted, Captain SHANDY," said Mrs. WADMAN, holding up her cambric handkerchief to her left eye, as she approached the door of my Uncle TOBY'S Sentry-Box—"a mote, or sand, or small fly, or something, I know not what, has got into this eye of mine. The Gardener declares it is one of those Green Flies which are the pest of this Distressful Country. I refuse to believe that. There never was, never will, never ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, April 22, 1893 • Various
... anthology as it stands open to a telling tu quoque by means of a selection of gems from British books and pamphlets of the type of those from which I have made my gleanings? Is it a case of the mote and the beam? I think we may be pretty confident that it is not. I doubt whether the literature of the world can show a parallel to the amazing outburst of tribal arrogance, unrestrained and unashamed, of which these pages contain but a few scattered specimens. In the extracts ...
— Gems (?) of German Thought • Various
... shalt have, boy, therefore,[204] so mote I go; Is that the guise of a trusty page, To play, when he is sent ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. II • Robert Dodsley
... said the Idiot. "I sort of like Bill and I'll bet the University Intelligence Office will get him a job in forty-eight hours. A man who is willing to mote or Edit has an adaptability that ought to locate ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume IX (of X) • Various
... happened in the old village community. Legislation and judicial procedure were developed and quarrels settled by arbitration, ordeal, and wager, and punishment by bumping often followed the decision of the boy folk-mote. Scales of prices for commodities in "butters" or in pie-currency were evolved, so that we here have an almost entirely spontaneous but amazingly rapid recapitulation of the social development of the race by ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... Darwin calls hallucinations, and which sometimes terminate in mania. The haughtiness, the melancholy, and the aspiring genius of Leland, were tending to a disordered intellect. Incipient insanity is a mote floating in the understanding, escaping all observation, when the mind is capable of observing itself, but seems a constituent part of the mind itself when that is completely covered with ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... than they are? All's in its place, from mote to star. The thistledown that flits and flies Could drift no hair-breadth otherwise. What is, must be; with rhythmic laws All Nature chimes, Effect and Cause. The sand-grain and the sun obey — What ho! the World's all right, ...
— Rhymes of a Rolling Stone • Robert W. Service
... he stopped you might have heard a mouse Squeak, such a death-like hush sealed up the old Mote House. But when the mass of man sank meek upon his knees, While Tab, alongside, wheezed a hoarse "Do hang us, please!" Why, then the waters rose, no eye but ran with tears, Hearts heaved, heads thumped, until, paying all past arrears Of pity and sorrow, at last a regular scream outbroke ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... Jesu, said Sir Percivale, what may this mean, that we be thus healed, and right now we were at the point of dying? I wot full well, said Sir Ector, what it is; it is an holy vessel that is borne by a maiden, and therein is part of the holy blood of our Lord Jesu Christ, blessed mote he be. But it may not be seen, said Sir Ector, but if it be by a perfect man. So God me help, said Sir Percivale, I saw a damosel, as me thought, all in white, with a vessel in both her hands, ...
— Le Morte D'Arthur, Volume II (of II) - King Arthur and of his Noble Knights of the Round Table • Thomas Malory
... soldiers, nor the father of his son, for they purpose not their death, when they purpose their services. Every subject's duty is the king's; but every subject's soul is his own. Therefore should every soldier in the wars do as every sick man in his bed, wash every mote out of his conscience: and dying so, death is to him advantage; or not dying, the time was blessedly lost wherein such ...
— King Henry the Fifth - Arranged for Representation at the Princess's Theatre • William Shakespeare
... mail of beetles and the softened glory of purple emperors! What a thing it was to examine; how you could look in and discover afresh, and dwell for five minutes at a time on that hollow petal of a flower steeped in honey, on that mote of a ladybird crawling to ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler
... thought himself a saint by such omission, when what God and the realm wanted and needed was a man to rule and suffer for the common weal. Arthur was not a thing "enskied and sainted;" rather a wholesome man, whose duty lay in working for men. Sir Percivale became a monk; other knights returned no mote, thus spilling the best blood of the table round. Meantime the king's enemies multiplied, and these visionaries decimated the ranks of opposition to the wrong; but come what would, King Arthur served. An appeal to him for help found answer, though treasons plotted at his back. As to his last ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... aldermen in right of their estates within the City. What powers the Knighten Guild possessed is not easy to define. Besides this, the aristocracy of the City, there were already trade guilds for religious purposes and for feasting—but, as yet, with no powers. The people had their folk mote, or general gathering: their ward mote: and their weekly hustings. We must not seek to define the powers of all these bodies and corporations. They overlapped each other: the aristocratic party was continually innovating while the popular party as continually ...
— The History of London • Walter Besant
... slanted low and golden and mote-laden. Bobby suddenly felt a little tired, and more than a little hungry. He descended from the buggy with alacrity. The wetting was forgotten in the home-coming. Only when washing for dinner did he remember with certain ...
— The Adventures of Bobby Orde • Stewart Edward White
... more than fifty yards when the third bomb fell from that plane so far aloft that it was not even a mote in the sky. Up there the sky was not even blue, but a dull leaden gray because of the thinness of the atmosphere yet above it. The men in that high-flight bomber could see the ground only as a mass of vaguely blending colors. They were aiming ...
— Morale - A Story of the War of 1941-43 • Murray Leinster
... in a hurry, Oswald," replied Edward; "at present let him give his own version of the affair, for he may prove mote dangerous when discharged than when under your control. Now sit down and take your supper. Billy must have an hour to get his, and therefore there is no hurry ...
— The Children of the New Forest • Captain Marryat
... question. The orb we know as the sun is centre of a system of worlds of which our earth is almost the most insignificant; yet great as is the sun when compared to the little bit of matter on which we dwell and have our being, it is itself but a mote, as it were, in the beam of the Universe. Formerly this sun was thought to be fixed and immovable, but the progress of science demonstrated that while the earth moves around this luminary, the latter is moving with mighty velocity in an orbit of its own. Tis the same with all the other bodies which ...
— Marvels of Modern Science • Paul Severing
... measured to you again. And he spake a parable unto them, Can the blind lead the blind? shall they not both fall into the ditch? The disciple is not above his master; but every one that is perfect shall be as his master. And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but perceivest not the beam that is in thine own eye? Either how canst thou say to thy brother, Brother, let me pull out the mote that is in thine eye, when thou thyself beholdest not the beam ...
— The Book of Common Prayer - and The Scottish Liturgy • Church of England |
