"Munchausen" Quotes from Famous Books
... ability to exterminate armies with a lightning flash, added to the power of sailing at will through the air or of passing at will and in safety beneath the ocean waves, and he would depopulate the earth." The writer gives much more of this Munchausen stuff which is not worthy of notice except as an illustration of the feeble scientific intelligence with which many newspapers are edited. The editor of a really scientific journal referred to this article in the Open Court "as a proof of the danger ... — Buchanan's Journal of Man, July 1887 - Volume 1, Number 6 • Various
... pause in the advance. It had all happened, and the gun with a few dead and wounded of both sides were in our hands, in less time than it has taken to describe it. Those who may have a fancy for learning how Munchausen would tell this story, may find it in the narrative of Major Heros von Borke of J. E. B. Stuart's staff. [Footnote: Von Borke's account is so good an example of the way in which romance may be built up out of a little fact that I give it in full. The burning of the ... — Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V1 • Jacob Dolson Cox
... filled with the most absurd and ludicrous stories of all sorts of things to be seen in distant lands. Sir John Mandeville tells tales almost as imaginative and quite as amusing as those attributed to Baron Munchausen. ... — The Meaning of Evolution • Samuel Christian Schmucker
... the members of our company were first received. The articles written by me on my return from the trip described in this diary, and published in Scribner's (now Century) Magazine for May and June, 1871, were regarded more as the amiable exaggerations of an enthusiastic Munchausen, who is disposed to tell the whole truth, and as much more as is necessary to make an undoubted sensation, than as the story of a sober, matter-of-fact observer who tells what he has seen with his own eyes, and exaggerates nothing. Dr. Holland, one of the editors of that magazine, sent to ... — The Discovery of Yellowstone Park • Nathaniel Pitt Langford
... and circumstantiality of narration, to give it that air of truth which constitutes the principal attraction of Sir Edward Seaward's narrative, and Robinson Cursoe; but it has none of the pleasing interest of these tales; it is as full of wonders as Munchausen, has as many atrocities as the Book of Pirates, and as liberal an array of paining and revolting horrors as ever was invented by Anne Radcliffe or George Walker. Thus far a tendency to extravagance had ... — International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... and keeper of the Landgrave of Hesse's antique gems and medals, in the purloining of some of which he was detected, and fled to England. Here he won for himself a certain place in English literature by the publication in 1785 of Baron Munchausen's Narrative. Only a small portion of the work in its present form is by R., the rest having been added later by another hand. He appears to have maintained more or less during life his character of a rogue, and is the prototype of ... — A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... are disposed to accuse me of being a little extravagant, I fear I shall have to let the case go by default; but I shall plead, in extenuation, that I have tried to be reasonable, even where a few grains of the romantic element were introduced; for Baron Munchausen and Sindbad the Sailor were standard works on my shelf in boyhood, and I may possibly have imbibed some of their peculiar spirit. But I feel a lively satisfaction in the reflection that, whatever exaggerations the critic may decide I have perpetrated in ... — Poor and Proud - or The Fortunes of Katy Redburn • Oliver Optic
... with some degree of trepidation that I follow a desire which impels me to describe a bunch of grapes I saw in this vineyard. I must beg my readers to free me from any taint of the spirit of the renowned Baron Munchausen, whose intensely magnifying vision threw its impress upon all objects, but, without the faintest degree of exaggeration, I can say, that while I am no Lilliputian in size, I stood, holding with great difficulty, the weight of a single bunch of ... — The World As I Have Found It - Sequel to Incidents in the Life of a Blind Girl • Mary L. Day Arms |