"Punning" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... a prevailing uniform of green, and the banner which was borne after them was emblazoned with a green bay-wreath on a silver ground, which the King, in the course of his researches into a bottle of champagne, had discovered to be the quaint old punning cognisance of the ...
— The Napoleon of Notting Hill • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... them male, To BORRIA doubled the knee, They were once on a far larger scale, But he'd eaten the balance, you see ("Scale" and "balance" is punning, you see). ...
— The Bab Ballads • W. S. Gilbert
... punning on his own name, he used to say that he was an ox, fit only to bear burdens. This sort of humility may pass for what it is worth; but it must be remembered, that there is a kind of acting in which the actor firmly believes in the part he is playing. As for the obedience, it was as ...
— The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century • Francis Parkman
... the wrong subject, or as many a man who has the best will to advance the social millennium might be ill-inspired in imagining its lighter pleasures; unable to go beyond Offenbach's music, or the brilliant punning in the last burlesque. Lydgate's spots of commonness lay in the complexion of his prejudices, which, in spite of noble intention and sympathy, were half of them such as are found in ordinary men of the world: ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... he was not joking everyone would be quite certain that he was. This greatly amused G.K. and he began the book (it actually appeared as The Well and the Shallows) with "An Apology for Buffoons." After defending the human instinct of punning he remarked that "many moderns suffer from the disease of the suppressed pun." They are actuated even in their thinking by ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... classic. Such ambiguities are sometimes serious enough; sometimes are little better than jokes. For jokes, as Whately observes, are often fallacies; and considered as a propaedeutic to the art of sophistry, punning deserves the ignominy that has ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... hold the cabin any longer," continued Old Jock, who seemed to be in a punning vein this afternoon, "we'll go below to the hold, and hold that as long ...
— Afloat at Last - A Sailor Boy's Log of his Life at Sea • John Conroy Hutcheson
... Browning could make. But though that searching criticism were earliest in declaring this, I think that few of us can have read the poem without being vaguely and discomfortably aware of it. From the moment of the direct introduction of Bluphocks[68:1] (whose very name, with its dull and pointless punning, is an offence), that sense of over-ingenuity, of "tiresomeness," which is the prime stumbling-block to whole-hearted Browning worship, becomes perceptible, and acts increasingly upon our nerves until the ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... next appears thus stalking by his side? Why that is one who'd sooner die than—ride! No inch of ground can maps unheard of show Untrac'd by him, unknown to every toe: As if intent this punning age to suit, The globe's circumf'rence meas'ring ...
— The Sylphs of the Season with Other Poems • Washington Allston
... like the punning riddles which are asked at feasts or the children's puzzle about the eunuch aiming at the bat, with what he hit him, as they say in the puzzle, and upon what the bat was sitting. The individual objects of which I am speaking are also a riddle, and have ...
— The Republic • Plato
... indefinitely prolonged by a higher power, and after a protracted illness he had noiselessly disappeared from the stage of life. There had been few more learned doctors of both laws than he. There had been few more adroit politicians, considered from his point of view. His punning device was "Vita mortalium vigilia," and he acted accordingly, but with a narrow interpretation. His life had indeed been a vigil, but it must be confessed that the ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... "Come, Mr. Gregory, punning is a very bad symptom. You must go to sleep at once." And soon her mellow voice was finding its way into a labyrinth of hard scientific terms, as a mountain brook might murmur among the stones. After a little time she ...
— Opening a Chestnut Burr • Edward Payson Roe
... nation as a whole was uneasy and alarmed at the sudden break-up of political tranquillity, and by the sense of a coming struggle between opponents of whom as yet neither had fully its sympathies. There were mobs, riots, bonfires in the streets, and disturbances which culminated—in a rough spirit of punning upon the name of the minister—in the solemn burning of a jack-boot. The journals, which were now becoming numerous, made themselves organs for this outburst of popular hatred; and it was in the North-Briton that Wilkes took a lead in the movement ...
— History of the English People, Volume VII (of 8) - The Revolution, 1683-1760; Modern England, 1760-1767 • John Richard Green
... Cloyne, born 1594? Of what family was Mary Paget, wife of the Rev. Richard Synge, preacher at the Savoy in 1715? The name appears to have been indifferently spelt, Sing, Singe, and Synge. And I believe an older branch than the baronet's still exists at Bridgenorth, writing themselves Sing. The punning motto of this family is ...
— Notes and Queries, No. 209, October 29 1853 • Various
... lines to a page. It is a medley of knowledge and fancy, history, philosophy, and poetry, written in seven languages. A large portion of his poetry is devoted to the pleasures of gardening, the description of flowers, and the care of bees. The following specimen of his punning Latin ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... [c]akbatzulu. The punning explanation of this name refers to its similarity to [c]ak, to place in front of another; also to shoot with arrows, or to stone. Its real derivation seems to be [c]akba, from [c]akaba, to reveal, disclose, ...
— The Annals of the Cakchiquels • Daniel G. Brinton |
