"Polyglot" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... got over and his comrades realized that he was a polyglot. Then in a joyous spirit of over-confidence, he waved the oriflamme of speech in ...
— The Martial Adventures of Henry and Me • William Allen White
... and disheartened, his ten dollars almost gone, he had decided to shake the dust of New York from his feet, the foreman of a printing office engaged him to do some work that most of the men in the office had refused to touch. The setting up of a Polyglot Testament, with involved marginal references, was something new for the supposed "green" hand from the country. But when the day was done, the young printer was no longer looked upon as "green" by his fellow-workers, for he had done more and ...
— Eclectic School Readings: Stories from Life • Orison Swett Marden
... was born and lived. The Rectory was rebuilt within a year, at a cost of 400 pounds. The day after the fire, as he groped among the ruins in the garden, Mr. Wesley had picked up a torn leaf of his Polyglot Bible, on which these words alone were legible: Vade; vende omnia quot habes; et attolle crucem, et sequere me. He had come to Epworth a poor man: and now, after fifteen years, he stood as poor as then; poorer, ...
— Hetty Wesley • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... judge from the conversation of the inhabitants—was a visit which a governor of Hongkong had made there when he was a guest in the home of Alberto. Many were the tales told of this distinguished Englishman, who was Sir John Bowring, the notable polyglot and translator into English of poetry in practically every one of the dialects of Europe. His achievements along this line had put him second or third among the linguists of the century. He was also interested in history, and mentioned ...
— Lineage, Life, and Labors of Jose Rizal, Philippine Patriot • Austin Craig
... Isabella and the exertions of Cardinal Ximenez (1436-1517). The leading universities, Seville, Alcala, and Salamanca, were not unfriendly, and the whole educational system was remodelled in favour of the classics. Cardinal Ximenez devoted himself to the preparation of the Polyglot edition of the Bible, the New Testament portion of which was printed so early as 1514, and the whole work was published in 1522. The leading Humanist scholars were Lebrixa, or as he is called in Latin Lebrissensis, ...
— History of the Catholic Church from the Renaissance to the French • Rev. James MacCaffrey
... and some of the people who were sitting on the bench outside the door—came and listened, and then looked at me, most of them pityingly. I could hear a lot of words often repeated, queer words, for there were many nationalities in the crowd, so I quietly got my polyglot dictionary from my bag ...
— Dracula • Bram Stoker
... point out the lighthouse on Minecoy Island in the Maldives as "the Light of Asia." Four hundred miles further and your good ship approaches Colombo. The great breakwater, whose first stone was laid by Albert Edward, is penetrated at last, and the polyglot and universal harbor of ...
— East of Suez - Ceylon, India, China and Japan • Frederic Courtland Penfield
... at last where the Hindu clerk sold tea and biscuits. The train disgorged its passengers and there was a scramble in the tiny ticket office like the rush to get through turnstiles at a football game at home, only that the crowd was more polyglot and ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy
... in polyglot expostulations with the stranger on the score of his obstinacy, but all to no purpose; to use a popular expression, he was as dumb as the Doges. He deigned, however, to empty at a single draught a calabash of Malaga that Willis gave him, but ...
— Willis the Pilot • Paul Adrien
... faithless; that, at least, the discourtesy of chance and the inhumanity of an elder brother might have kept him an eternal prisoner at the Hotel de Hollande (where, for all Bernard knew to the contrary, he had been obliged to work out his destiny in the arduous character of a polyglot waiter); so that the poor young girl, casting backward glances along the path of Mrs. Vivian's retreat, and failing to detect the onward rush of a rescuing cavalier, had perforce believed herself forsaken, and had been obliged to summon philosophy to her aid. It was very possible that ...
— Confidence • Henry James
... of Lake Mesantic. These two things the hundreds belonging to a half-dozen nationalities possessed in common—these, and their common humanity together with the laws to which it is subject. But aside from this, their speech, habits, customs, religions, food, and pastimes were polyglot; on this account the lines of racial demarkation were apt, at times, to be drawn all too sharply. Yet this very fact of differentiation provided hundreds of others—farmers, shopkeepers, jobbers, machinists, mechanics, blacksmiths, small restaurant-keepers, pool ...
— Flamsted quarries • Mary E. Waller
... time, and the longer they lasted the more heated became the disputes, culminating in shouts and personalities, and the less was it possible to arrive at any general conclusion from all that had been said. Prince Andrew, listening to this polyglot talk and to these surmises, plans, refutations, and shouts, felt nothing but amazement at what they were saying. A thought that had long since and often occurred to him during his military activities—the idea that there is not and cannot be ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... I have a treat for you. So far we have looked on at the external night life of New York. Wonderful and thrilling it has been, too. But there is the underneath, also. Why not? There is a vast polyglot population here, full of energy said life. A criminal class exists as a matter of course. To-night we make ...
— Peter Ruff and the Double Four • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... delivered this truthful poem off hand, so to speak, in "broken" French, the cosmopolitan, polyglot audience "caught on" and "shipped" the Stratford "poacher" a ...
— Shakspere, Personal Recollections • John A. Joyce
... universal thought. At its base are written some ancient titles of humanity which architecture had not registered. To the left of the entrance has been fixed the ancient bas-relief, in white marble, of Homer; to the right, the polyglot Bible rears its seven heads. The hydra of the Romancero and some other hybrid forms, the Vedas and the Nibelungen ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... of the century (1657) came in England a champion of the sacred theory more important than any of these—Brian Walton, Bishop of Chester. His Polyglot Bible dominated English scriptural criticism throughout the remainder of the century. He prefaces his great work by proving at length the divine origin of Hebrew, and the derivation from it of all other forms of speech. He declares it "probable ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... reader is not less. Here are tales—extensions of the scheme and manner of the Oeuvres de Jeunesse, or attempts at the goguenard story of 1830—a thing for which Balzac's hand was hardly light enough. Here are interesting evidences of striving to be cosmopolitan and polyglot—the most interesting of all of which, I think, is the mention of certain British products as "mufflings." "Muffling" used to be a domestic joke for "muffin;" but whether some wicked Briton deluded Balzac into the idea that it was the proper form or not it is impossible ...
— The Human Comedy - Introductions and Appendix • Honore de Balzac
... of wrinkles on his leathery cheeks. His garb was the rude one of the West, or rather of that remnant of the Old West which has been consigned to the dry farmers and hay ranchers in these modern polyglot days. ...
— The Sagebrusher - A Story of the West • Emerson Hough
... upper heights of the sky-scrapers, clear of the roofs, are still lit on the sunward side with a mellow glow, curiously serene. To the man in the mirk of the street, they seem to exude this light from the great spaces of brick. At this time the cars, always polyglot, are filled with shop-hands and workers, and no English at all is heard. One is surrounded with Yiddish, Italian, and Greek, broken by Polish, or Russian, or German. Some American anthropologists claim that the children of these immigrants show marked changes, in the ...
— Letters from America • Rupert Brooke
... mixed lot of women and men, the latter comprising' numerous nationalities, and all drawn to Paris by the wiles of the Goddess of Art. Topical songs of the day succeeded one another rapidly. A group of long-haired, polyglot students hung around the piano, while others played on violins or guitars, which they had brought to contribute to the evening's enjoyment. At intervals, when there was a lull, the click of billiard balls came from an adjoining apartment. Out on the boulevard, under the glaring lights, ...
— In Friendship's Guise • Wm. Murray Graydon
... much more than a mile away. He draws the distracted officer's attention to the phenomenon and leads him to understand that to start now would lead to an inevitable collision and a watery grave. The polyglot argument waxes furious, the men taking it up in their turn, when their leader falls out exhausted, and the Arab is still keeping up his end triumphantly when the great ship reaches us and slowly steams by, while curious passengers eye us from her decks, their minds doubtless running ...
— The Fifth Battalion Highland Light Infantry in the War 1914-1918 • F.L. Morrison
... heard. By day the cooing of doves, the soft tones of the golden oriole, and the lively chatter of the red cardinal; by night the booming note of the bull-bat, the sonorous call of the trumpeter swan, and that lay far excelling all—the clear song of the polyglot thrush, the famed mocking-bird ...
— The Lone Ranche • Captain Mayne Reid
... polyglot Testament in one hand and a phrase-book in the other, he groped his way among the speakers of eleven European languages. The first of these guides is hardly applicable to the purposes of the philosophic traveller, and even ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... interested her not at all, in a listless hand, long and delicate like her feet, and decorated with too many turquoise rings. Below, in the cabin, she could hear the noise of the men as they argued and shouted at each other in a polyglot of ...
— The Hippodrome • Rachel Hayward
... came to mind now with sinister significance; he wished most heartily he had missed that pheasant. It was quite a relief when dinner was announced, and he made his way to the dining car, where a polyglot gathering showed that although the Orient Express had not quitted Paris fifteen minutes it had already crossed many frontiers. There were few French or English on board, and not one American. A couple of Turks, a Bulgarian, a sprinkling of Russians and Levantines, ...
— A Son of the Immortals • Louis Tracy
... Turk, and cream from cows that cropped the odorous and juicy grasses of mountain meadows, made a breakfast that could not have been more appetizing if composed by a French CHEF, and garnished by a polyglot bill-of-fare. ...
— The Red Acorn • John McElroy
... house, followed by the polyglot curses of Barlasch, who was now endeavouring to find his bayonet ...
— Barlasch of the Guard • H. S. Merriman
... kicked Coutlass until he ran limping out of range, to sit and nurse his bruises with polyglot profanity. The Syrian Rebecca went over to comfort him, and eying the two of them with either malice or else calculation (it was impossible to judge which) Lady Waldon retreated toward the rock that Fred ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy
... daughters seem very well-to-do indeed. He is kindly; considerate—sometimes effusively considerate—of his fellow travellers; patient with the ladies of his family, who in turn are noticeably patient with him. He is genial—very willing to talk with polyglot headwaiters and chauffeurs; in fact the wife and daughters are also practised conversationalists, although their most loyal admirers must admit that their voices are a trifle sharp or flat. These ladies are more widely read than "papa." He has not had much leisure for Ruskin and Symonds and Ferrero. ...
— The American Mind - The E. T. Earl Lectures • Bliss Perry
... every case they agreed with those he had given me. He used to sing a Hebrew drinking-song, which he had learned from some Jews with whom he had once travelled and astonished by joining in their conversation." {23} Borrow's colloquial gift was, to all appearance, closely allied to that of this polyglot Fleming. ...
— Isopel Berners - The History of certain doings in a Staffordshire Dingle, July, 1825 • George Borrow
... in the Brazils, where no doubt they were learning Portuguese; but he himself had found a very good job here. He was saving money to go to England. He seemed to have no roots, as it were. I wondered, as I have often wondered of other polyglot people I have met, how much of any language they really know, which language do they think in? They always seem to me to resemble those lumps of floating grass one sees in the Gulf Stream, forever drifting onward, footless and fruitless ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... "Iconoclasts" or "Egoists" is full of useful information, but it is even more full of agreeable adventure. The style is the book, as it is the man. It is arch, staccato, ironical, witty, galloping, playful, polyglot, allusive—sometimes, alas, so allusive as to reduce the Drama Leaguer and women's clubber to wonderment and ire. In writing of plays or of books, as in writing of cities, tone-poems or philosophies, Huneker always assumes that the ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... and Ireland. It was while officiating at the chapel of the Bavarian Legation in London that he began contributing the Prout papers to Fraser's Magazine. These consisted of fanciful narratives, each serving as a vehicle for the display of his wonderful polyglot learning, and containing translations of well-known English songs into Latin, Greek, French, and Italian verse, which later he seriously represented as the true originals from which the English authors had boldly ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... assassination. A stronger contrast there cannot be than that between these men and the citizen soldiers whom Germany the other day sent forth to defend their country and their hearths. The soldier had a language of his own, polyglot as the elements of the band, and garnished with unearthly oaths: and the void left by religion in his soul was filled with wild superstitions, bullet charming and spells against bullets, the natural reflection in dark hearts of the blind chance which since the introduction of firearms ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... understood, the names of saints, apostles and even the Latin and Greek forms of "God" and "Jesus" were enemies to all germs. Then, too, what comfort a jumbling of many languages brought to the patient, especially if the polyglot cure were expressed in rhythmic lines. Here, for instance, in at least five languages, is a twelfth ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... destiny. His new friend did help him, and it was very much through his urgent recommendation that the foreman of the printing-office gave him a chance. The foreman did not in the least believe that the green-looking young fellow before him could set in type one page of the polyglot Testament for which help ...
— Captains of Industry - or, Men of Business Who Did Something Besides Making Money • James Parton
... with pouring old stuff from flask to flask, instead of collecting fresh and unknown material. Such are recueils of prayers and proverbs, folk-songs and stories, riddles and satires, not forgetting those polyglot vocabularies so common in many parts of the Eastern world, notably in Sind and Afghanistan; and the departmental glossaries such as the many dealing with "Tasawwuf"—the Moslem form of Gnosticism. The excellent lexicon of the late Professor Dozy, Supplement aux Dictionnaires Arabes, ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... you a long list of other Munich restaurants of a kingly order—the great breakfast room of the Bayrischer Hof, with its polyglot waiters and its amazing repertoire of English jams; the tea and liquor atelier of the same hostelry, with its high dome and its sheltering palms; the pretty little open air restaurant of the Kuenstlerhaus in the Lenbachplatz; the huge catacomb of the ...
— Europe After 8:15 • H. L. Mencken, George Jean Nathan and Willard Huntington Wright
... accomplishments, or that he takes it otherwise than as a matter of course. Stevenson, writing from Mentone to his mother, 7 January 1874, said: "We have two little Russian girls, with the youngest of whom, a little polyglot button of a three-year-old, I had the most laughable little scene at lunch to-day. . . . She said something in Italian which made everybody laugh very much . . .; after some examination, she announced emphatically to the whole table, in German, that I was a machen.. . . This hasty conclusion ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... I won't. I'm just going to give him a full opportunity to test his little proposition that the institutions of these jolly old United States are perfectly adapted to settle quarrels among all the polyglot prevaricators of the world and administer justice among people who are still in a barbarous or at least in a patriarchal state. He's young, and he don't understand that a New York merchant is entirely too conscientious to ...
— By Advice of Counsel • Arthur Train
... foretold befell; the men in the body of the carriage broke into a boyish cheer of delight, which drowned for all his passengers but Amaryllis the words of that stream of polyglot invective, exhortation and endearment which the driver poured out over his cattle; a lost jeremiad, for Dick says he does not remember, and Amaryllis that, though she heard it all, there was much that she did not understand and a great deal ...
— Ambrotox and Limping Dick • Oliver Fleming
... o'clock at night the polyglot confusion of tongues would have ceased, the gaudily-uniformed swaggerers, the velveteen-coated, wide-awaked loafers, the filthy tatterdemalions of all nations and their womenkind would have turned in. Then Lady Hannah, attended by the unwilling ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... to be polyglot services here. I saw books of prayer, or Scripture, in Hebrew, Greek, and German: in which latter language Dr. Alexander preaches every Sunday. A gentleman who sat near me at church used all these books indifferently; reading the first lesson from the Hebrew book, and the second from the Greek. ...
— Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo • William Makepeace Thackeray
... a Christian kingdom in A.D. 1000 and for many centuries served as a bulwark against Ottoman Turkish expansion in Europe. The kingdom eventually became part of the polyglot Austro-Hungarian Empire, which collapsed during World War I. The country fell under Communist rule following World War II. In 1956, a revolt and an announced withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact were met with a massive military ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... peregrination, perfunctory, peripatetic, periphery, persiflage, perspicacious, perspicuity, pertinacious, pharmaceutic, phenomenal, phlegmatic, phraseology, pictorial, piquant, pique, plagiarize, platitudinous, platonic, plebeian, plenipotentiary, plethora, pneumatic, poignant, polity, poltroon, polyglot, pontifical, portentous, posterior, posthumous, potent, potential, pragmatic, preamble, precarious, precocious, precursor, predatory, predestination, predicament, preemptory, prelate, preliminary, preposterous, prerequisite, prerogative, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... "It is at least polyglot. But you are taking me too seriously. I wished merely to qualify my midsummer impressions of a prevailing Celtic Boston by my autumnal impressions of a persisting Puritanic Boston. But it is wonderful how that strongly ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... evidently belonged to the educated, or rather to the cultured class. Their speech, which seemed to change with perfect ease from one language to another in the course of their somewhat polyglot converse, was the easy flowing speech of men and women accustomed to the best society, not only in the social but the intellectual sense of ...
— The Angel of the Revolution - A Tale of the Coming Terror • George Griffith
... only admired my pictures,—they did not buy them; they only wondered at my polyglot accomplishment, and were content with ringing silly-kind changes on an Encyclopaedic compliment about the Admirable Crichton, and other well-educated personages, to be found alphabetically embalmed in ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... may be presumed to know any thing of Russian literature, or even to have enquired whether it contains any thing worth knowing? Are there a dozen literary men or women amongst us who could read a Russian romance, or understand a Russian drama? Dr Bowring was regarded as a prodigy of polyglot learning, because he gave us some very imperfect versions of Russian ballads; and we were thankful even for that contribution, from which, we doubt not, many worthy and well-informed people learned for the first time that Russia produced poets as well as potashes. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 55, No. 340, February, 1844 • Various
... the repeal of the prohibitory law in Indian Territory, the resubmission of the prohibitory constitution of Maine, and in preserving the prohibitory law of Vermont. It has secured 20,000,000 signatures and attestations, including 7,000,000 on the Polyglot Petition to the governments of the world. Thousands of girls have been rescued from lives of shame and tens of thousands of men have signed the total abstinence pledge and been redeemed ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... pert young housemaid, in love with Robin. She hates Polyglot, the tutor of "Master Charles," but is very fond of Charles. Molly tries to get "the tuterer Polypot" into a scrape, but finds, to her consternation, that Master Charles is in reality the party to be ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... in my telling you. Isn't it excessively odd? It comes from Beatrice's being so religious and so tremendously moral—so a cheval on fifty thousand riguardi. And then of course we mustn't forget," my companion added, a little unexpectedly, to this polyglot proposition, "that some of Mark's ideas are—well, really—rather impossible, don't ...
— The Author of Beltraffio • Henry James
... looked down on it. It was impossible to think of aught but humanity in the bustle and confusion, in the cram and crush, in the wedge and the jam, in the squeezing and shouting, in the hubbub and medley. Such a jolly, rampant, screaming, fighting, maddening, jostling, polyglot, quarrelling, laughing broth of a Vanity Fair! Mendicants, vendors, buyers, gossips, showmen, all swelled ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... amusing incident. Unable to get at my towels packed in my registered baggage, and ignorant of the Russian language, I inquired of a polyglot fellow-passenger what was the Russian word for towel, so that I could ask the ...
— Across Coveted Lands - or a Journey from Flushing (Holland) to Calcutta Overland • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... unceasingly occupied for such a number of years in this mass," Molendino he calls them, "that that day seemed, as it were, a holiday in which I have not laboured so much as sixteen or eighteen hours in these enlarging lexicons and Polyglot Bibles." ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... side by side with the ante-Hieronymian one, in his Bibliorum Sacrorum Latinae Versiones Antiquae. It is founded upon the preceding one, and is less literal. The Syriac and Arabic versions, printed in the London Polyglot, are literal. The Hexaplar-Syriac version made by Paul, bishop of Tella, in the beginning of the 7th century has been published ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... belong to such and such a singing society) almost drive sensitive ears crazy. But they love it—they adore music, they take such comfort out of it, that one is forced to forgive this lack of ear and this polyglot pitch, or ...
— Abroad with the Jimmies • Lilian Bell |
