"Sir Thomas More" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... western suburb of London, on the N. of the Thames; famous for its hospital for old and disabled soldiers, and the place of residence of sundry literary celebrities, among others Sir Thomas More, Swift, Steele, ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... in England. Sir Thomas More[891] provided for some of the troubles of life by slavery. Slaves were to do "all laborsome toil," "drudging," and "base business." They were to be persons guilty of debt and breakers of marriage.[892] Garnier quotes a law of 1547 (I Ed. VI, c. 3), in which a vilein is mentioned as ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... Sir Thomas More seems to have emulated this beautiful example; for, being Lord Chancellor of England at the same time that his father was a Judge of the King's Bench, he would always, on his entering Westminster Hall, go first to the King's Bench, and ask his father's ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various
... amuse himself when travelling, his panegyric on Moria, or folly; which, authorised by the pun, he dedicated to Sir Thomas More. ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... small house with a little chapel attached to it in a road in Chelsea where some Frenchwomen, who were exiled from their own country, have come to dwell. It is built on Sir Thomas More's garden, and it possesses within its boundaries the mulberry tree under which the chancellor was sitting when they came to fetch him to the Tower. It is a poor little house with very poor inmates, and a poor little chapel. But in that chapel night and day, without a moment's break, are to be found ...
— Great Possessions • Mrs. Wilfrid Ward
... that the destruction of the whole family was even then impending. Nor was there anything very improbable in this statement. The English King had already inaugurated his sanguinary career. One of the most eminent English laymen, Sir Thomas More, and one of her best ecclesiastics, Bishop Fisher, had been accused and beheaded, to satisfy the royal caprice. When the King's tutor and his chancellor had been sacrificed, who could ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack
... in ourselves see the necessary reason of every fact,—see how it could and must be. So stand before every public and private work; before an oration of Burke, before a victory of Napoleon, before a martyrdom of Sir Thomas More, of Sidney, of Marmaduke Robinson; before a French Reign of Terror, and a Salem hanging of witches; before a fanatic Revival and the Animal Magnetism in Paris, or in Providence. We assume that we under ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... Macintosh conjectures that the phrase "the tale of a tub" (which was familiarly known in Sir Thomas More's time) had reference to the tub thrown ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 204, September 24, 1853 • Various
... Ranke, have believed in transubstantiation; that is, according to him, in the most ineffable nonsense. There is no certainty that men will not believe to the end of time the doctrines which imposed upon so able a man as Sir Thomas More. Not only, that is, have men been hitherto wandering in a labyrinth without a clue, but there is no chance that any clue will ever be found. The doctrine, so familiar to our generation, of laws of intellectual development, never even occurs to him. The collective thought of generations marks time ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... instituted by Plato is more perfect than that which Sir Thomas More had imagined for his Utopia. The community of women, and that of temporal goods, may be considered as inseparable parts ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... Fryth." To a motto taken from 1 Cor. xi. is subjoined the following date, "Anno M.CCCCC.XXXIII., v. daye of Apryll," together with a printer's device (two hands pointing towards each other). This Tract was promptly answered by Sir Thomas More (A.D. 1533, "after he had geuen ouer the offyce of Lorde Chauncellour of Englande"), and is described by him as "the poysoned booke whych a nameles heretike hath named the Supper of the Lorde" (Works, pp. 1035, seqq., ed. Rastell). From the ...
— Notes and Queries 1850.03.23 • Various
... Mowbray. Their tomb is in the church too—that big carved monument in the side chapel. They had seven children—five sons and two daughters. The eldest son, Sir Godfrey Courtenay, married a relation of Sir Thomas More. Her name is mentioned in one of ...
— The Manor House School • Angela Brazil
... realm as an evidence of their indolence and misconduct.[87] Language of this kind boded ill for the "Christian Brethren"; and the choice of Wolsey's successor for the office of chancellor soon confirmed their apprehensions: Wolsey had chastised them with whips; Sir Thomas More would chastise them with scorpions; and the philosopher of the Utopia, the friend of Erasmus, whose life was of blameless beauty, whose genius was cultivated to the highest attainable perfection, was to prove to the world that the spirit of persecution is no peculiar attribute ...
— History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth. Vol. II. • James Anthony Froude
... have said, a sound, good sense, which is characteristic of the race. We may say that this nation possesses the wisdom of Sir Thomas More, who esteemed it folly to lose eternity for a life of twenty years of ease and honors. Is not this, at bottom, the thought which has sustained the nation in that dread martyrdom of three centuries, whose terrible story we ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... well-proportioned one; the oak panels, which completely cover the walls, still bear the marks of the famous portraits that once adorned them. Charles I. and Henry Prince of Wales, by Cornelius Jansen; Queen Henrietta Maria, by Vandyke; Sir Thomas More and his family, by Holbein; Speaker Lenthall, the former owner of the house; and many other fine pictures hung here in former times. The staircase is a fine ...
— A Cotswold Village • J. Arthur Gibbs
... see me safe up, but for my coming down I can shift for myself," were the last words of Sir Thomas More ...
— The Handy Cyclopedia of Things Worth Knowing - A Manual of Ready Reference • Joseph Triemens
... establishment and perpetuation of our freedom, Lafayette found the most perfect form of government. He wished to add nothing to it. He would gladly have abstracted nothing from it. Instead of the imaginary Republic of Plato, or the Utopia of Sir Thomas More, he took a practical existing model in actual operation here, and never attempted or wished more than to apply it faithfully to his ...
— Successful Methods of Public Speaking • Grenville Kleiser
... were not equal, by many degrees, to the glory of taking it away." I had the honour to have much conversation with Brutus; and was told, "that his ancestor Junius, Socrates, Epaminondas, Cato the younger, Sir Thomas More, and himself were perpetually together:" a sextumvirate, to which all the ages of the world cannot ...
— Gulliver's Travels - into several remote nations of the world • Jonathan Swift
... be found a most ingenious and amusing Essay, entitled "Comments on Sterne," which excited a good deal of interest at the time of its publication. This discovery may be considered, in some measure, as the result of the BIBLIOMANIA. In my edition of Sir Thomas More's Utopia, a suggestion is thrown out that even Burton may have been an imitator of Boisatuau [Transcriber's Note: Boiastuau]: ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... declared this doctrine to be part of the original revelation. It is difficult, impossible, to imagine, I grant;—but how is it difficult to believe? Yet Macaulay thought it so difficult to believe, that he had need of a believer in it of talents as eminent as Sir Thomas More, before he could bring himself to conceive that the Catholics of an enlightened age could resist "the overwhelming force of the argument against it." "Sir Thomas More," he says, "is one of the choice specimens of wisdom and virtue; and the doctrine of transubstantiation ...
— Apologia Pro Vita Sua • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... many valuable antiquities. Also near the eastern border of the Weald is Tenterden, famous for its church-steeple, which Bishop Latimer has invested with a good story. The bishop in a sermon said that Sir Thomas More was once sent into Kent to learn the cause of the Goodwin Sands and the obstructions to Sandwich Haven. He summoned various persons of experience, and among others there "came in before him an olde ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook
... became seated between them in the taxi. The most unobservant of men, he parted from them in the hall without having perceived anything except that they were rather silent; and, going to his study, he took up a Life of Sir Thomas More. There was a passage therein which he itched to show George Laird, who ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... their practice; and a solicitor in one single suit, (the trial of Warren Hastings) is said to have gained no less than thirty-five thousand pounds! How different three centuries ago, when Roper, in his life of Sir Thomas More, informs us, that though he was an advocate of the greatest eminence, and in full business, yet he did not by his profession make above four hundred pounds per annum. There is, however, a common tradition on the other hand, that Sir Edward Coke's gains, at the latter ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... England in the Fifteenth Century; Flower's The Century of Sir Thomas More; The Household of Sir Thomas More, in King's Classics; Green's Town Life in the Fifteenth Century; Field's Introduction to the Study of the Renaissance; Einstein's The Italian Renaissance in England; Seebohm's The Oxford Reformers (Erasmus, ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... seems unreasonable and even incomprehensible; but to me it is very real; and all literature which assumes to treat our lives as if Christianity did not exist lacks that satisfactory quality which one finds in Dante, in Calderon, in Sir Thomas More, and in Shakespeare. It is possible that the prevalence of doubt in modern poetry is the cause of its lack of gaiety. There is a modern belief that gaiety went out of fashion when Pan died or disappeared into hidden haunts. This is not true. The Greeks were gay ...
— Confessions of a Book-Lover • Maurice Francis Egan
... Ascent of Man. There were other books on a quaintly carved shelf, under the picture which had been turned to the wall. He ran over the titles. There were a number of French novels, Ely's Socialism, Sir Thomas More's Utopia, St. Pierre's Paul and Virginia, and a dozen other volumes; there were Balzac and Hugo, and Dante's Divine Comedy. Amid this array, like a black sheep lost among the angels, was a finger-worn and faded little volume bearing the name Camille. Something about this one book, so strangely ...
— Flower of the North • James Oliver Curwood
... acquisitions of his predecessor, notwithstanding the fruitfulness and natural advantages of Ireland. Surprising, indeed, that a policy, such as we have been describing, should not have converted the whole country into a perfect Atlantis of happiness—should not have made it like the imaginary island of Sir Thomas More, where 'tota insula velut una familia est!'—most stubborn, truly, and ungrateful, must that people be, upon whom, up to the very hour in which I write, such a long and unvarying course of penal laws, confiscations, and Insurrection Acts has been tried, without making them in the ...
— Peter Plymley's Letters and Selected Essays • Sydney Smith
... the Life of Sir Thomas More, by William Roper, and his Letters to Margaret Roper and others. Edited, with Introduction and Notes, by ...
— Horace • William Tuckwell
... In Sir Thomas More, for instance, on the scaffold, and Anne Boleyn, in the Tower, when, grasping her neck, she remarked, that it "was too slender to trouble the headsman much." During one part of the French Revolution, it became a fashion to leave some "mot" as a legacy; and the quantity ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Vol. 3 (of 7) • Lord Byron
... and Creseide is quoted in the life of Sir Thomas More, given in Wordsworth's Ecclesiastical Biography. More's daughter said to him, when he was in prison, "Father, I can no further goe; I am come, as Chaucer said of Cressid Dulcarnon, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 16, February 16, 1850 • Various
... made into a bull. We find bevues French, English, Italian, German, Latin, and Greek, of theologians, historians, antiquaries, poets, critics, and translators, without end. The learned Budaeus takes Sir Thomas More's Utopia for a true history; and proposes sending missionaries to work the conversion of so wise a people as the Utopians. An English antiquary[35] mistakes a tomb in a Gothic cathedral for the tomb of Hector. Pope, our great poet, and prince of translators, mistakes Dec. the ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. IV • Maria Edgeworth
... made Holbein's life so miserable that he left Basle for that reason. He visited her sometimes, and always gave her money, but lived away from her. In 1526 Holbein went to England, and his friend Erasmus said that he went because he had so little to do in Basle. He carried a letter to Sir Thomas More, who received him with great kindness, and the artist made many portraits of Sir Thomas and his family. There is a story about one of these portraits of that nobleman. He had refused to be present ...
— A History of Art for Beginners and Students: Painting, Sculpture, Architecture - Painting • Clara Erskine Clement
... decoration forms a contrast to the dreary halls of the Luxembourg. The gallery devoted to the old masters contains some valuable specimens of early Flemish art, and some extremely interesting historical portraits, the gem of the collection being a wonderfully fine portrait by Holbein of Sir Thomas More. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. July, 1878. • Various
... Sir Thomas More affirms that, before the days of Wycliffe, there was an English version of the Scriptures, "by good and godly people with devotion and soberness well and ...
— The Faith of Our Fathers • James Cardinal Gibbons
... Ireland?—of an ejectment, where the wretched families turned out are obliged to sell their little all, and forced in a few days either to steal or go about begging? And yet the description which I have read is a description of England, by Sir Thomas More—a description of the England of his day.[200] And lest it should be considered highly coloured or fanciful, let it be recollected that there are accounts written by magistrates, in which it is stated that in every county there were 200 or 300 persons who lived ...
— The History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847 (3rd ed.) (1902) - With Notices Of Earlier Irish Famines • John O'Rourke
... therefore, he cannot believe that the King is supreme head of the Church." On 29th April, 1535, after a trial lasting two[66] days, the three Carthusians and Father Richard Reynolds were condemned to be drawn, hanged, and quartered. On their way to the scaffold they passed their fellow-prisoner, Sir Thomas More, who saw them from his prison cell. "Lo, dost thou not see, Meg," he said to his daughter Margaret, "that these blessed fathers be now as cheerfully going to their death as bridegrooms to their marriage." ...
— Memorials of Old London - Volume I • Various
... first named, were Eufemia di Messina; Iginia di Asti; Leoniero da Dordona, already named as having been thought out at Spielberg; his Gismonda; l'Erodiade; Ester d'Engaddi; Corradino; and a play upon Sir Thomas More. He wrote also poems, Cantiche, of which the best are Eligi e Valfrido and Egilde; and, in his last years, a religious manual on the Duties ...
— My Ten Years' Imprisonment • Silvio Pellico
... 1509 a handsome youth of eighteen came to the throne, the hopes of England ran high. His intelligence, his frank, genial manners, his sympathy with the "new learning," won all classes. Erasmus in his hopes of purifying the Church, and Sir Thomas More in his "Utopian" dreams for politics and society, felt that a friend had come to the throne ...
— The Evolution of an Empire • Mary Parmele
... were mightily indignant at this presumption; and the King (with the help of SIR THOMAS MORE, a wise man, whom he afterwards repaid by striking off his head) even wrote a book about it, with which the Pope was so well pleased that he gave the King the title of Defender of the Faith. The King and the Cardinal ...
— A Child's History of England • Charles Dickens
... Learning, growing up in the place of war and theology, meant the dawn of material prosperity, of the rule of law, and of a new intelligence diffused through the opinions and industries of men. Of this there is no better exposition than Sir Thomas More's "Utopia." More was a devout Catholic. He wore a hair shirt next his skin; he flogged himself; he gave his life for a theological principle. But he was also a Christian in a wider sense. He appreciated ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... in circumstances with which a different feeling would have harmonized better. Byron represents it as rising in extreme grief: it is, however, I suspect, greatly more common in extreme danger; and all the instances which the poet himself gives in his note—Sir Thomas More on the scaffold, Anne Boleyn in the Tower, and those victims of the French Revolution "with whom it became a fashion to leave some mot as a legacy"—were all jokers rather in circumstances of desperate and hopeless peril than of sorrow. It is, however, ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... he was descended of the family of the famous and learned Sir Thomas More, sometime Lord Chancellor of England: as also, from that worthy and laborious Judge Rastall, who left posterity the vast Statutes of the Law of this nation ...
— Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions - Together with Death's Duel • John Donne
... Disarmament substitutes the constable for the soldier, and reduces the Standing Army to a police. The argument assumes, first, the needlessness of a Standing Army, and, secondly, its evil influence. Both of these points were touched at an early day by the wise Chancellor of England, Sir Thomas More, when, in his practical and personal Introduction to "Utopia," he alludes to what he calls the "bad custom" of keeping many servants, and then says: "In France there is yet a more pestiferous sort of people; for the whole country is full of soldiers, ...
— The Duel Between France and Germany • Charles Sumner
... 'revelations' of Elizabeth Barton, 'the nun of Kent,' he was attainted of misprision of treason, and soon afterwards, on his refusal to acknowledge the King's supremacy and the validity of his marriage with Anne Boleyn, was committed with Sir Thomas More to the Tower. During his imprisonment Pope Paul III. created him a cardinal, an act which greatly increased the irritation of the King against him, and on the 22nd of June 1535 Fisher was beheaded on ...
— English Book Collectors • William Younger Fletcher
... no doubt that many of those older writers who were "Socialists before Socialism," Plato, for instance, and Sir Thomas More, did very roundly abolish private property altogether. They were extreme Communists, and so were many of the earlier Socialists; in More's Utopia, doors might not be fastened, they stood open; one hadn't even a private room. These earlier writers wished to insist upon the need of self-abnegation ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells
... [82] Sir Thomas More's portrait at the age of fifty was painted by Hans Holbein; it is now in the Frick Collection, New York. Two portrait drawings of him by Holbein are in the Royal Library at Windsor Castle. See ...
— Erasmus and the Age of Reformation • Johan Huizinga
... death of Sir Thomas More, Foxe undertook to collect all the traditional gossip afloat concerning the Chancellor's alleged treatment of John Tewkesbury and James Bainham, for heresy. Tewkesbury was a leather-seller of London, and Foxe says that he was sent to Sir Thomas Mores house at Chelsea ...
— Studies from Court and Cloister • J.M. Stone
... Pennsylvania, "dwelt upon Great Tower Hill, on the east side, within a court adjoining to London Wall." But the memories of honored father and more honored son must yield in that air to such tragic fames as those of Sir Thomas More, of Strafford, and above these and the many others in immediate interest for us, of Sir Harry Vane, once governor of Massachusetts, who died here among those whom the perjured second Charles played false when he came ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... Jeremiah, Ruskin is superior to Isaiah; Ingersoll, the Atheist, is a nobler moralist and a better man than Moses; Plato and Marcus Aurelius are wiser than Solomon; Sir Thomas More, Herbert Spencer, Thoreau, Matthew Arnold, and Emerson are worth more to ...
— God and my Neighbour • Robert Blatchford
... higher minds are much more akin than they are different: genius is of all ages, and there is perhaps more uniformity in excellence than in mediocrity. The sublimer intelligences of mankind—Plato, Dante, Sir Thomas More—meet in a higher sphere above the ordinary ways of men; they understand one another from afar, notwithstanding the interval which separates them. They are 'the spectators of all time and of all existence;' their works live for ever; and there is nothing to prevent the force of their individuality ...
— Sophist • Plato
... produce a new scheme of human life for us; he has introduced his description of them and their projects by some account of the previous speculations, of a kindred nature indeed, but conducted in a very different spirit, of Plato, Sir Thomas More, and others; and he has accompanied the whole with observations of his own, which bear the impress of a masculine understanding, a candid judgment, and a sound, healthy condition of the moral sentiments. The French Academy has distinguished the work by according ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 349, November, 1844 • Various
... neighborhood of Chelsea, we determined to look upon the few broken walls that once inclosed the residence of Sir Thomas More, a man who, despite the bitterness inseparable from a persecuting age, was of most wonderful goodness as well as intellectual power. We first read over the memories of him preserved by Erasmus, Hoddesdon, ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... Killingworth, had an unusually long one, measureing 5ft. 2in. in length, the sight of which caused a smile to light up the face of Ivan the Terrible. It is described as a thick, broad, and yellow beard, and we are told that Ivan played with it after dinner as if it were a new toy. When Sir Thomas More laid his head on the block he carefully put his beard aside, saying, "It hath done no treason." John Knox (born 1505 and died 1572), the famous Scottish reformer, whose name figures so largely in the religious annals of his country, was remarkable for the ...
— At the Sign of the Barber's Pole - Studies In Hirsute History • William Andrews
... returned to tillage; but the Act only applied to fourteen counties therein enumerated. The enclosing for sheep-runs still went on, however, often with ruthless selfishness; houses and townships were levelled, says Sir Thomas More, and nothing left standing except the church, which was turned into ...
— A Short History of English Agriculture • W. H. R. Curtler
... satirists, detractors, or else parasitical applauders: and what is poetry itself, but as Austin holds, Vinum erroris ab ebriis doctoribus propinatum? You may give that censure of them in general, which Sir Thomas More once did of Germanus ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... "Sir Thomas More (when a student on his travels) is said to have puzzled a pragmatic professor at Bruges, who gave a universal challenge to dispute with any person in any science: in omni scibili, et de quolibet ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 76, April 12, 1851 • Various
... oath of allegiance to Henry, and to Elizabeth as his successor, and to acknowledge the supremacy of the king in church and state. This resulted in the death of some prominent men in the realm, among them Sir Thomas More. In the preamble of the oath prescribed by law, the legality of the king's marriage with Anne was asserted, thus implying that his former marriage with Catharine was unlawful. More was willing to declare his allegiance to the infant Elizabeth, ...
— A Short History of Monks and Monasteries • Alfred Wesley Wishart
... gave a new impulse in England to the study of Latin and Greek, and Sir Thomas More in his "Utopia" (wherein he imagines an ideal commonwealth with community of property), unconsciously gave birth to a word (utopia), which has ever since been used ...
— The Interdependence of Literature • Georgina Pell Curtis
... Sir Thomas More's Utopia was written in the years 1515-16, when its author's age was about thirty-seven. He was a young man of twenty when Columbus first touched the continent named after the Florentine Amerigo Vespucci, who made his voyages to it ...
— Ideal Commonwealths • Various
... book which exercised a powerful influence on many of the most heroic spirits of the Middle Ages. This book, the well-known, if not now often read, "Consolation of Philosophy", was translated into English by King Alfred and by Geoffrey Chaucer, was imitated by Sir Thomas More (whose history in some respects resembles that of Boethius), and was translated into every tongue and found in every convent library of mediaeval Europe. There is a great charm, the charm of sadness, about many of its pages, and ...
— Theodoric the Goth - Barbarian Champion of Civilisation • Thomas Hodgkin
... themselves on old-fashioned physiology, assume, though they may not always assert, that the sexual products are excretions, to be dealt with summarily like other excretions. That is an ancient view and it was accepted by such wise philosophers of old times as Montaigne and Sir Thomas More. It had, moreover, the hearty support of so eminent a theological authority as Luther, who on this ground preached early marriage to men and women alike. It is still a popular view, sometimes expressed ...
— Little Essays of Love and Virtue • Havelock Ellis
... also bore upon him the purple stain of the earth sorrow. A grave man, knowing what steps of men keep truest time to the chanting of Death. Having grave friends also;—the same singing heard far off, it seems to me, or, perhaps, even low in the room, by that family of Sir Thomas More; or mingling with the hum of bees in the meadows outside the towered wall of Basle; or making the words of the book more tunable, which meditative Erasmus looks upon. Nay, that same soft Death-music is on the lips even of Holbein's Madonna. Who, among many, is ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... an incomprehensible monstrosity. Macbeth is called to denounce life as "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury," and "signifying nothing." Macbeth must be shunned by the reformer as the monk repels the visits of Satan in the desert. He must share the hopefulness of Sir Thomas More. Utopia is possible here, now, and everywhere, though execution is likely to be the penalty of too ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... something of a general interest still belongs to the name of Pico della Mirandola, [36] whose life, written by his nephew Francis, seemed worthy, for some touch of sweetness in it, to be translated out of the original Latin by Sir Thomas More, that great lover of Italian culture, among whose works the life of Pico, Earl of Mirandola, and a great lord of Italy, as he calls him, may still be read, in ...
— The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater
... my mind, a deeper interest in the book than that which arises from its good-humoured flagellation of Persian peccadilloes. Just as no one who is unacquainted with the history and leading figures of the period can properly appreciate Sir Thomas More's "Utopia," or "Gulliver's Travels," so no one who has not sojourned in Persia, and devoted considerable study to contemporary events, can form any idea of the extent to which "Hajji Baba" is a picture of actual personages, and a record of veritable facts. It is no frolic of imaginative satire ...
— The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan • James Morier
... the chancery so empty of causes, that Sir Thomas More could live in Chelsea, and yet very sufficiently discharge that office; and coming one day home by ten of the clock, whereas he was wont to stay until eleven or twelve, his lady came down to see whether he was sick or not; to whom Sir Thomas More said, 'Let your gentlewoman ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 236, May 6, 1854 • Various
... saint is supposed to be a foreign princess of early times, styled also in England St. Wilgeforte. A peck of oats was a favourite offering at her shrine in St. Paul's by those who wished for favours; and according to Sir Thomas More she owed her popular name because wives unhappy in their union so offered in the hope that she would uncumber (i.e., disencumber) them of their husbands. The disgrace of Thomas Cromwell put a temporary ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of St. Paul - An Account of the Old and New Buildings with a Short Historical Sketch • Arthur Dimock
... from any one anything that is exclusively his. These seeming truisms are indeed diametrically opposed to a theory which enters on its list of friends names no less illustrious than those of Plato, Sir Thomas More, Bentham, and Mill. Still, whoever, undeterred by so formidable an array of adverse authorities, is prepared to accept the description of rights of which they form part, will have no difficulty in framing a theory ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... reform there, returned home, not only a humanist, but a religious reformer as well, and began to lecture at Oxford on the Epistles of Saint Paul in the Greek. Linacre, Grocyn, Colet, Erasmus, and Sir Thomas More (author of Utopia), among others, formed a little group of humanists all of whom were also deeply interested in a reform of the practices of the Church. Erasmus, in particular, labored hard by his writings to remove religious abuses. His Colloquies ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... fever, Which doth of physic make a mockery, The gout it cures, and helps ill breaths for ever, Whether the cause in teeth or stomach be; And though ill breaths were by it but confounded, Yet that vild[529] medicine it doth far excel, Which by Sir Thomas More[530] hath been propounded, For this is thought a gentleman-like smell. O, that I were one of these mountebanks Which praise their oils and powders which they sell! 30 My customers would give me coin with thanks; I for this ware, forsooth,[531] a tale would tell: Yet would I use ...
— The Works of Christopher Marlowe, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Christopher Marlowe
... this artist went to England with letters of introduction to Sir Thomas More, Chancellor to King Henry VIII. Sir Thomas treated him very kindly and set him to work making portraits of his own family. During the time he was living at More's home in Chelsea, the King himself, used frequently to visit there, and on one occasion he saw the brilliant portraits of the More family ...
— Pictures Every Child Should Know • Dolores Bacon
... England herself, profiting by almost half a century of peace, was progressing rapidly in culture. She was no longer behind her neighbors. The Renaissance movement can scarce be said to have begun in England before 1500, yet by 1516 her famous chancellor, Sir Thomas More, was writing histories and philosophies. In 1522 the King himself sighed for literary fame and gave opportunity for many future satirists by writing a Latin book against the Lutherans. The Pope conferred upon his royal champion a title, "Defender of ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 9 • Various
... 1500, while visiting Sir Thomas More in Eng-land, he took a few weeks off and wrote a funny little book, called the "Praise of Folly," in which he attacked the monks and their credulous followers with that most dangerous of all weapons, humor. The booklet ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon
... what he conceives to be necessary for the state: political, legislative or judicial reforms, even when loudly demanded, and favored by authority, are hard to be effected, and not seldom generations come and go without effecting them. The republics of Plato, Sir Thomas More, Campanella, Harrington, as the communities of Robert Owen and M. Cabet, remain Utopias, not solely because intrinsically absurd, though so in fact, but chiefly because they are innovations, have no support in experience, and require for their realization the modes of thought, ...
— The American Republic: Its Constitution, Tendencies, and Destiny • A. O. Brownson
... {59a} Cicero is said to be the only wit that the people of Rome had equalled to their empire. Ingenium par imperio. We have had many, and in their several ages (to take in but the former seculum) Sir Thomas More, the elder Wiat, Henry Earl of Surrey, Chaloner, Smith, Eliot, B. Gardiner, were for their times admirable; and the more, because they began eloquence with us. Sir Nicolas Bacon was singular, and almost alone, in the beginning of Queen Elizabeth's ...
— Discoveries and Some Poems • Ben Jonson
... Chelsea at a point in the eastern boundary in the Pimlico Road, we have on the right-hand side Holbein Place, a modern street so named in honour of the great painter, who was a frequent visitor at Sir Thomas More's house in Chelsea. Holbein Place curves to the west, and ...
— Chelsea - The Fascination of London • G. E. (Geraldine Edith) Mitton
... Reformers and the Life of Sir Thomas More, written by William Roper, are my other authorities, though I touched somewhat unwillingly on ground already lighted up by Miss Manning in her Household of Sir ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... on that spot since Sir William Wallace's day and how his benign head (most every bump on it good ones) wuz put up there a mark for the insultin' jeers of the populace, and it made me feel bad and sorry for Helen, his last wife, she that wuz Helen Mar. But Sir Thomas More's head wuz nailed up in the same place, and the Bishop of Rochester's ...
— Around the World with Josiah Allen's Wife • Marietta Holley
... the least terrible of these punishments, and perhaps the most common of all, was that of scourging demons out of the body of a lunatic. This method commended itself even to the judgment of so thoughtful and kindly a personage as Sir Thomas More, and as late as the sixteenth century. But if the disease continued, as it naturally would after such treatment, the authorities frequently felt justified in driving ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... explicit. He says: "A minute study of the facts of Richard's life has tended more and more to convince me of the general fidelity of the portrait with which we have been made familiar by Shakespeare and Sir Thomas More." On Shakespeare's faithful presentation of history see also A.G.S. Canning's "Thoughts on Shakespeare," p. 295; the Dictionary of National (British) Biography under "Holinshed"; Garnett and Gosse's "English Literature," Vol. II, p. 68; and H.N. Hudson's "Shakespeare's Life and Characters," ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery
... he has proved it to the satisfaction of the scientific world. When he applies it to sociology our Bellamys are looking backward to Sir Thomas More, and expect a sudden transformation to a Utopia, not unlike the change which the good old preachers used to tell us we would experience "in the ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... uncertain. A still earlier play, a tragedy in Latin called Richardus Tertius, also told the story. Shakespeare's chief source was, however, Holinshed's Chronicles, which learned the tradition of Richard's wickedness from a life of that king written in Henry VII's time, and ascribed to Sir Thomas More. In the Chronicles was but a bare outline of the character which the ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken
... the pleasure of discharging our vessels, just as nature renders pleasurable the discharges from other parts."[2] Luther, again, always compared the sexual to the excretory impulse, and said that marriage was just as necessary as the emission of urine. Sir Thomas More, also, in the second book of Utopia, referring to the pleasure of evacuation, speaks of that felt "when we do our natural easement, or when we be doing the act of generation." This view would, however, ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 3 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... courage, he made a very just distinction between constitutional courage and courage from reflection. "Sir Thomas More," said he, "would not probably have mounted a breach so well as a sergeant who had never thought of death. But a sergeant would not on a scaffold have shewn the calm resolution of Sir ...
— Boswell's Correspondence with the Honourable Andrew Erskine, and His Journal of a Tour to Corsica • James Boswell
... "hanging matters." Pitt was, perhaps, no more disposed to punish a man for expounding the fundamental principles of philosophic anarchism than was the Russian autocracy in our own day when it tolerated Tolstoy. It was not for writing Utopia that Sir Thomas More lost his head. But the book is quite unflinching in its application of principle, and its attacks on monarchy are as uncompromising as those for which Paine was outlawed. The preface calmly discusses the possibility of prosecution, issues what is in ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford
... source from whence all later historians have taken their materials for the reign of Richard the Third, is Sir Thomas More. Grafton, the next in order, has copied him verbatim: so does Hollingshed—and we are told by the former in a marginal note, that Sir Thomas was under-sheriff of London when he composed his work. It is ...
— Historic Doubts on the Life and Reign of King Richard the Third • Horace Walpole
... beyond measure, by the profound conversations of Grotius and Father Petau: but what a treat must it have been, to have assisted with one, two, or three good listeners, at the conversations between Erasmus and Sir Thomas More! ...
— The Life of Hugo Grotius • Charles Butler
... observe, however, what Sir Thomas More says of it, and nobody will question that Sir Thomas More was a good Catholic and a competent witness. 'These epistles,' he says, 'are the delight of everyone. The wise enjoy the wit; the blockheads of monks take them seriously, and ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... writers have not only added new words and phrases to the language by inventing them; sometimes the name of a book itself has taken on a general meaning. Sir Thomas More in the time of Henry VIII. wrote his famous book, "Utopia," to describe a country in which everything was done as it should be. Utopia (which means "Nowhere," More making the word out of two Greek words, ou, "not," and topos, "place") was the name of the ideal state ...
— Stories That Words Tell Us • Elizabeth O'Neill
... formalities. Great statesmen, and even ecclesiastics, did not consider it beneath their dignity to recruit and solace themselves after important business with the conversation of their fools; the celebrated Sir Thomas More had his fool painted along with himself by Holbein. Shakespeare appears to have lived immediately before the time when the custom began to be abolished; in the English comic authors who succeeded him the clown is no longer to be found. The dismissal of the fool has been extolled ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... however, has shown us that a novel may be an essay rather than a story. No less a writer than Swift used the medium of fiction for his most brilliant criticism of life; his fables, apart from their satire, are often mere essays. Plato, Sir Thomas More, William Morris, and Mr. H. G. Wells have not disdained to transmit their philosophy under the domino of romance or myth. Some of the greatest poets—Ruskin and Pater for example—have chosen prose for their instrument of expression. If that theory is true of literature—and I ask you to accept ...
— Masques & Phases • Robert Ross
... it has become a fixed custom to travel wide and far. Only the clumsiness of communications limit us now, and every facilitation of locomotion widens not only our potential, but our habitual range. Not only this, but we change our habitations with a growing frequency and facility; to Sir Thomas More we should seem a breed of nomads. That old fixity was of necessity and not of choice, it was a mere phase in the development of civilisation, a trick of rooting man learnt for a time from his new-found friends, the corn ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... a long discourse, which Master Silas would at sundry times have interrupted, but that Sir Thomas more than once frowned upon him, even as he had frowned heretofore on young Will, who thus began and continued ...
— Citation and Examination of William Shakspeare • Walter Savage Landor
... say that the "social question," the question how best to organize society, is as old as society itself. Great thinkers all down the ages, from Plato to Sir Thomas More, from More to Jean Jacques Rousseau, from Rousseau to Saint Simon, Fourier, Louis Blanc, Lassalle, and Karl Marx, have devoted their attention to it. The French Revolutionists tried to solve it, and the revolutionary ...
— William of Germany • Stanley Shaw
... religious bigotry and intolerance hung and tortured their victims, and the terrible delusion of witchcraft darkened the sun at noonday over Essex. If he had not quite reached the point where, to use the words of Sir Thomas More, he could "hear heresies talked and yet let the heretics alone," he was in charity and forbearance far in advance of ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... not to be aware of the fact, that Mr. Owen has not originated a single new idea in his whole book, but has simply put forward the notions of Rousseau, Voltaire, Condorcet, Plato, Sir Thomas More, &c., in other language. His merit consists in this, and no small merit it is, that he has collated the ideas of these philosophers—arranged them in a tangible shape, and has devoted time and money ...
— A Ramble of Six Thousand Miles through the United States of America • S. A. Ferrall
... most excellent determination of goodness, what philosopher's counsel can so readily direct a prince as the feigned Cyrus in Xenophon? Or a virtuous man in all fortunes, as AEneas in Virgil? Or a whole commonwealth, as the way of Sir Thomas More's Utopia? I say the way, because where Sir Thomas More erred, it was the fault of the man, and not of the poet; for that way of patterning a commonwealth was most absolute, though he, perchance, hath not so absolutely performed it. For the question is, whether the feigned image of poetry, or the ...
— A Defence of Poesie and Poems • Philip Sidney
... Sir Thomas More, son of Sir John More, a justice of the King's Bench, was born in 1478, in Milk Street, in the city of London. After his earlier education at St. Anthony's School, in Threadneedle Street, he was placed, as a boy, in the household of Cardinal ...
— Utopia • Thomas More
... the transitions and fluctuation, which our language experienced in the intermediate space comprised between Chaucer and Sir Thomas More; and still greater between Robert of Gloucester, 1278, and John Trevisa, or his contemporary Wickliffe, who died 1384, know, to a certainty, that the writers enumerated by Chatterton, without surmounting a physical impossibility, could not ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... henceforward be in London; and to this intent he now leased a block of buildings at Chelsea, known as Lindsey House. The great house, in altered form, is standing still. It is at the corner of Cheyne Walk and Beaufort Street, and is close to the Thames Embankment. It had once belonged to Sir Thomas More, and also to the ducal family of Ancaster. The designs of Zinzendorf were ambitious. He leased the adjoining Beaufort grounds and gardens, spent 12,000 on the property, had the house remodelled in grandiose style, erected, close by, the "Clock" chapel and a minister's house, laid out a cemetery, ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton
... were met at St. George's Bar in Southwark by John Melborne,(1088) the mayor, accompanied by the high officers of the city, clothed in gowns of "pewke," each with a chain of gold about his neck.(1089) A "proposicioun" or address was made by Sir Thomas More, now under-treasurer of England, who was afterwards presented by the City with the sum of L10 towards a velvet gown,(1090) whilst other speeches made in the course of the procession were composed by Master Lilly,(1091) of Euphues fame, the first ...
— London and the Kingdom - Volume I • Reginald R. Sharpe
... dead, and is turned to dust. He always was as dry as dust, even when he was alive, but he was a great man. But the famous Englishman, Sir Thomas More, wrote more engagingly; and does he not tell us, in his "Utopia," that any nation's holding unused a piece of ground needed for the nourishment of other people is a just ...
— A Handbook of Ethical Theory • George Stuart Fullerton
... this event, the opening of the Liverpool and Manchester railway, which showed how machinery would abbreviate space as it had SIR THOMAS MORE, OR COLLOQUIES ON THE PROGRESS OF SOCIETY (1829). There we see the effect of the new force on his imagination. "Steam," he says, "will govern the world next,... and shake it too before its empire is established." The biographer of Nelson devotes a whole conversation ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... We have mentioned the birth of Ben Jonson, near Charing-cross. Spenser died at an inn, where he put up on his arrival from Ireland, in King-street, Westminster—the same which runs at the back of Parliament-street to the Abbey. Sir Thomas More lived at Chelsea. Addison lived and died in Holland House, Kensington, now the residence of the accomplished nobleman who takes his title from it. In Brook-street, Grosvenor-square, lived Handel; and in Bentinck-street, Manchester-square, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 393, October 10, 1829 • Various
... distinction which Sir W. Scott represents Louis XI. (with great appreciation of that monarch's character), as drawing between an oath taken on a false piece and one taken on a piece of the true cross. Sir Thomas More, a very devout believer in relics, says ("Works," p. 119), that Luther wished, in a sermon of his, that he had in his hand all the pieces of the Holy Cross; and said that if he so had, he would throw them there as never sun should ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... the Utopia Russia has given to the world to stand beside Plato's, or Sir Thomas More's or Morris's or Bellamy's. This was the ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... Pugin was by his love of Gothic architecture. His singular book, "The Broad Stone of Honour," was first published in 1822, and repeatedly afterwards in greatly enlarged form. In its final edition it consists of four books entitled respectively "Godefridus," "Tancredus," "Morus" (Sir Thomas More), and "Orlandus," after four representative paladins of Christian chivalry. The title of the whole work was suggested by the fortress of Ehrenbreitstein, the "Gibraltar of the Rhine." Like Fouque, Digby ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... sensible that this scheme of his would be thought wild and called a "new Utopia," but he was not one of those who counted the old Utopia of Sir Thomas More to be either useless or chimerical, and he says that this Utopia of his own is "no more useless or chimerical than the old one." The difficulties it would encounter came, he says, "not from the nature of things, but from the prejudices and opinions ...
— Life of Adam Smith • John Rae
... the past in a golden haze, which obscures our vision. Thus, we think of William Penn's "holy experiment" on the banks of the Delaware as the realization of Sir Thomas More's dream of Utopia; and yet Pennsylvania was somewhat intemperately called in 1698 "the greatest refuge for pirates and rogues in America," and Penn himself wrote, about that time, that he had heard of no place which was "more overrun with wickedness" than ...
— The Constitution of the United States - A Brief Study of the Genesis, Formulation and Political Philosophy of the Constitution • James M. Beck
... VI. borrowed so largely, sinned as deeply. Hall's authorities among French writers were Monstrelet, Bouchet, Mayer, Argentan, Gile Corozet, and the annals of France and Aquitaine—and of English writers, Fabyan, Caxton, John Harding, Sir Thomas More, Basset, Balantyne, and the ...
— Joan of Arc • Ronald Sutherland Gower
... point to the Supremacy Act of 1559 and the Uniformity Act of the same year as very clear evidences of a breach with the ancient order; in the former the governance is shifted from its original owner, the Vicar of Christ, and placed on Elizabeth; it was that that the Carthusian Fathers and Sir Thomas More and many others died sooner than allow: and the latter Act sweeps away all the ancient forms of worship in favour of a modern one. But I am not careful to insist upon those points; if you deny or disprove them,—though I ...
— By What Authority? • Robert Hugh Benson
... (1829), chiefly known to modern readers by one of Macaulay's essays. Southey was as assailable as Mill. His political economy is a mere muddle; his political views are obviously distorted by accidental prejudices; and the whole book is desultory and disjointed. In a dialogue with the ghost of Sir Thomas More, he takes the opportunity of introducing descriptions of scenery, literary digressions, and quaint illustrations from his vast stores of reading to the confusion of all definite arrangement. Southey is in the awkward ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... gave his proclamations the force of laws. In the action of the two Houses the Crown seemed to have discovered a means of carrying its power into regions from which a bare despotism has often had to shrink. Henry might have dared single-handed to break with Rome or to send Sir Thomas More to the block. But without Parliament to back him he could hardly have ventured on such an enormous confiscation of property as was involved in the suppression of the monasteries or on such changes in the national religion as were brought about by the Ten Articles and the Six. It was ...
— History of the English People - Volume 4 (of 8) • John Richard Green
... frutefull pleasaunt, and wittie worke, of the best state of a publique weale, and of the new yle, called Utopia: written in Latine, by the right worthie and famous Sir Thomas More knyght, and translated into Englishe by RAPHE ROBYNSON, sometime fellowe of Corpus Christi College in Oxford, and nowe by him at this seconde edition newlie perused and corrected, and also with diuers notes in the margent ...
— Roister Doister - Written, probably also represented, before 1553. Carefully - edited from the unique copy, now at Eton College • Nicholas Udall
... fifteenth century, had been the most stately mansion in the city, and had had a succession of famous tenants. When Sir John Crosby left it for his splendid tomb in the Church of St Helen's, it was for a time the palace of Richard, Duke of Gloucester, in which, to quote Sir Thomas More, "he lodged himself, and little by little all folks drew unto him, so that the Protector's Court was crowded and King Henry's left desolate"; and it was in one of its magnificent rooms that Richard was offered, and was pleased to accept, the ...
— Love Romances of the Aristocracy • Thornton Hall
... of Alexander were founding their monarchies, and Rome was growing up to crush in its iron grasp all States save its own, Plato withdraws his eyes from the world, to open them in his dreamy "Atlantis." Just in the grimmest period of English history, with the axe hanging over his head, Sir Thomas More gives you his "Utopia." Just when the world is to be the theatre of a new Sesostris, the sages of France tell you that the age is too enlightened for war, that man is henceforth to be governed by pure reason, ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... of the Execution of Thomas Cranmer: MS. Harleian, 422. Another account gives among the causes which Cole mentioned, that "it seemed meet, according to the law of equality, that, as the death of the Duke of Northumberland of late made even with Sir Thomas More, Chancellor, that died for the Church, so there should be one that should make even with Fisher, Bishop of Rochester; and because that Ridley, Hooper, and Ferrars were not able to make even with that man, it seemed ...
— The Reign of Mary Tudor • James Anthony Froude |
