"Thomas More" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... belong to every nation. He was born at Rotterdam (c. 1466), but lived the greater part of his life in France, Switzerland, England, and Italy. His Encomium Moriae was sketched on a journey from Italy (1509) and written while he was the guest of Sir Thomas More in London. ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... knowledge should be the common property of the poetry of our time, marking it off from what went before and from what will come after. We believe that it will be found to be so; and that the presence of this knowledge, and the quality which this knowledge imparts, makes Edward Thomas more than one among his contemporaries. He is their chief. He challenges other regions in the hinterland of our souls. Yet how shall we describe the narrowness of the line which divides his province from theirs, or the only half-conscious subtlety of the gesture with which ...
— Aspects of Literature • J. Middleton Murry
... mad, a company of bitter 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 ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... enough existed to build a ship. Most readers will remember the 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
... SIR THOMAS MORE. A reprint of the 2nd edition of Ralph Robinson's translation, with a foreword by William Morris. Edited by F. S. Ellis. 8vo. Chaucer type, with the reprinted title in Troy type. In black and red. Borders 4 and 2. 300 on paper at thirty shillings, 8 on vellum at ten guineas. Dated August 4, issued ...
— The Art and Craft of Printing • William Morris
... 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 that Cranmer should be joined with them to fill up their part of equality."—Foxe, ...
— The Reign of Mary Tudor • James Anthony Froude
... the 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 ...
— History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth. Vol. II. • James Anthony Froude
... shrugged his shoulders almost contemptuously. That did not prevent Lady Anne from being one of the fairest and loveliest women of Old England. And, besides, much as she inclined to the new doctrine, she did us essential good service, for she it was who bore the blame of Thomas More's death. Since he had not approved her marriage with the king, she hated him, as the king hated him because he would not take the oath of supremacy. Henry, however, would have spared him, for, at that time, he ...
— Henry VIII And His Court • Louise Muhlbach
... power of miracles. Having denounced the doom of speedy death against Henry VIII. for his marriage with Anne Boleyn, the prophetess was attainted in Parliament, and executed with her accomplices. Her imposture was for a time so successful, that even Sir Thomas More was disposed to be a believer.] or whether she dwelt upon the general duty which was incumbent on all Catholics of the time, and the pressure of which she ...
— The Abbot • Sir Walter Scott
... for many years Rector of Welwyn; his son was visited there by Boswell and Dr. Johnson. Macaulay was at school at Aspenden. John Scott, the Quaker poet, lived at Amwell; Lee, the dramatist, was born at Hatfield. Skelton probably stayed at Ashridge just before the Dissolution of the Monasteries; Sir Thomas More lived awhile at Gobions, North Mimms. Cowper was born at Berkhampstead. The county has been immortalised by Walton and Lamb in writings ...
— Hertfordshire • Herbert W Tompkins
... other-than-human guide. Again Erasmus, in his Praise of Folly, denounces indiscriminately churches, priesthoods, dogmas, ethical values, the whole structure of organized religion, calling it those "foul smelling weeds of theology." It was inevitable that such men as Erasmus and Thomas More should hold aloof from the Reformation, not, as has been sometimes asserted, from any lack of moral courage but because of intellectual conviction. They saw little to choose between Lutheran, Calvinistic ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... too ready a credence to the '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 ...
— English Book Collectors • William Younger Fletcher
... the 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
... all ages been a pastime of noble minds to try to depict a perfect state of society. Forty years before Shakespeare's birth, Sir Thomas More published his "Utopia" to the world. Bacon intended to do the same thing in the "New Atlantis," but never completed the work, while Sir Philip Sidney gives us his dream in his "Arcadia." Montaigne makes a similar essay, and we quote from Florio's translation, published in 1603, ...
— Tolstoy on Shakespeare - A Critical Essay on Shakespeare • Leo Tolstoy
... the dismantling of our nature do the few words which Roper, Sir Thomas More's son-in-law, relates, convey! He had seen Henry VIII. walking round the chancellor's garden at Chelsea, with his arm round his neck; he could not help congratulating him on being the object of so much kindness. "I thank our lord, I find ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 323, July 19, 1828 • Various
... we can be justified by works is an error for which the Jews are especially condemned. . . . Our only hope is in God's grace." Lefevre's works opened up a new world to the theologians of the time. Erasmus's friend Beatus Rhenanus wrote that the richness of the Quintuplex Psalter made him poor. Thomas More said that English students owed him much. Luther used the two works of the Frenchman as the texts for his early lectures. From them he drew very heavily; indeed it was doubtless Lefevre who first suggested to him the formula of his famous ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... life, and as a welcome interruption of established 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. Shakspeare 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. ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... Thomas More is rightly regarded as a man in whom the spirit burned brighter and clearer than in most of his contemporaries; and yet his matrimonial relations savour more of convenience or even of business than of affection. For his first wife, we are told—and there is no reason to doubt ...
— The Age of Erasmus - Lectures Delivered in the Universities of Oxford and London • P. S. Allen
... more moral than 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 us than ...
— God and my Neighbour • Robert Blatchford
... sensation of the ludicrous 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 ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... well-spent Life, and the prospect of a happy Eternity. If the ingenious Author above mentioned was so pleased with Gaiety of Humour in a dying Man, he might have found a much nobler Instance of it in our Countryman Sir Thomas More. ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... 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
... ways were giving place to modern, and a transition was taking place in the realm of ideas, Thomas More, in his Utopia, and Campanella in his City of the Sun, published their conceptions of an ideal state, while Machiavelli took society as it was, and in his Prince suggested how it might be governed better. ...
— Society - Its Origin and Development • Henry Kalloch Rowe
... originally written in English, such as the works of that very great philosopher Roger Bacon, of whom this isle ought to be prouder than it is. To this rule, however, I have been constrained to make a few exceptions. Sir Thomas More's *Utopia* was written in Latin, but one does not easily conceive a library to be complete without it. And could one exclude Sir Isaac Newton's *Principia*, the masterpiece of the greatest physicist that ...
— LITERARY TASTE • ARNOLD BENNETT
... enemy. In this way Sir Thomas Wyatt in 1557 was kept out of London. Before this drawbridge stood a tower on the battlements of which were placed the heads of traitors and criminals. The heads of Sir William Wallace, Jack Cade, Sir Thomas More and many others were stuck up here. On the Southwark side was ...
— The History of London • Walter Besant
... the Cardinal 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 also issued flaming warnings to the people not to read Luther's books, ...
— A Child's History of England • Charles Dickens
... 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 out the ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... Shakespeare, the fashion of writing lives of men of letters had not yet arisen. The art of biography could hardly be said to be even in its infancy, for the most notable early examples, such as the lives of Wolsey by Cavendish and of Sir Thomas More by his son-in-law in the sixteenth century, and Walton's handful in the seventeenth, are far from what the present age regards as scientific biography. The preservation of official records makes it possible for the modern scholar to reconstruct with considerable fullness the careers of public men; ...
— The Facts About Shakespeare • William Allan Nielson
... treason in Hayward's Henry IV, but 'very much felony', because Hayward 'had stolen many of his sentences and conceits out of Cornelius Tacitus' (Apophthegms, 58). Hayward and Bacon had a precursor in the author of The History of King Richard the Thirde, generally attributed to Sir Thomas More, and printed in the collection of his works published in 1557. It was known to the chroniclers, but it did not affect the writing of history. Nor did George Cavendish's Life and Death of Thomas Wolsey, which they likewise used ...
— Characters from 17th Century Histories and Chronicles • Various
... hope I have: I am able now, methinks, Out of a fortitude of soul I feel, To endure more miseries, and greater far, Than my weak-hearted enemies dare offer. What news abroad? Crom. The heaviest, and the worst, Is your displeasure with the king. Wol. God bless him! Crom. The next is, that Sir Thomas More is chosen Lord chancellor in your place. Wol. That's somewhat sudden: But he's a learned man. May he continue Long in his highness' favor, and do justice For truth's sake and his conscience; that his bones, When he has run his course, and sleeps ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... 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 ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken
... should at least have given a note or two to explain the sense in which he uses words so wide as this. The philosophy which begins in pride, and concludes in malice, is indeed a fountain—though not the fountain—of woes, to mankind. But true philosophy such as Fenelon's or Sir Thomas More's, is a well ...
— Love's Meinie - Three Lectures on Greek and English Birds • John Ruskin
... of arriving at a sound conclusion which are within our reach, and which secure people who would not have been worthy to mend his pens from falling into his mistakes. But when we reflect that Sir Thomas More was ready to die for the doctrine of transubstantiation, we cannot but feel some doubt whether the doctrine of transubstantiation may not triumph over all opposition. More was a man of eminent talents. He had all the information on the subject that we have, or that, while the world lasts, any human ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... classical example of Antigone more forcibly illustrate the persevering fortitude of passive heroism and enduring love in woman's gentle bosom, than did the interesting, lovely Constantia. Like the renowned daughter of Sir Thomas More, "she seemed to have forgotten herself, being ravished with the entire love of her dear father," and fearful of danger only as it pointed at him. She turned her eyes upon the court with a boldness unusual to their general expression, ...
— The Loyalists, Vol. 1-3 - An Historical Novel • Jane West
... the disgrace of Wolsey, which happened nearly a year before his death, (1529,) three remarkable men began to figure in English politics and history. These were Sir Thomas More, Thomas Cranmer, and Thomas Cromwell. More was the most accomplished, most learned, and most enlightened of the three. He was a Catholic, but very exemplary in his life, and charitable in his views. In moral elevation of character, and beautiful ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... concern; if he could render international services to learning, if he could help to set up among the humbler scholars of other lands such a fine rivalry of competitive cooperation as already existed among such leaders as Erasmus and Sir Thomas More, he should be well content to live laborious days and to die poor. Both these he did; but he gathered around him such a company of friends and collaborators as few men have enjoyed; he must have ...
— Printing and the Renaissance - A paper read before the Fortnightly Club of Rochester, New York • John Rothwell Slater
... which the translator gives of the method in which he went to work, compel us to seek an independent origin, and to look for some other translator less immediately under Wyclif's influence. The freedom with which the Bible admittedly circulated for many years, and the well-known allusion by Sir Thomas More to an English translation untouched by any taint of heresy, point also in the same direction. That the second version is really only a revision of the first can hardly be adduced as a strong argument on the other side. The ethics of literary acknowledgment ...
— Fifteenth Century Prose and Verse • Various
... Sixteenth Century, and an American author of our own day. Yet so it is, and here is the parallel to be found between the quaint American tales about the old negro, Uncle Remus, by JOEL CHANDLER HARRIS, in this year of Grace, 1892, and the fables writ by Sir THOMAS MORE in 1520, or thereabouts, which he represents as if told him by an old wife and nurse, one Mother MAUD. Here are "The Wolf,"—"Brer Wolf"—and the simple-minded Jackass, both are going to confession to Father Fox—"Brer Fox." AEsop is, of course, the common origin of all such ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, April 23, 1892 • Various
... Greek Anthology, the other Drummond's 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
... there of what had took place 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 and ...
— Around the World with Josiah Allen's Wife • Marietta Holley
... and ally 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 high ...
— London and the Kingdom - Volume I • Reginald R. Sharpe
... objected to a tone of levity in some portions of the Sketches, I can only say that it is a part of my religion to look well after the cheerfulnesses of life, and let the dismals shift for themselves; believing, with good Sir Thomas More, that it is wise ...
— Hospital Sketches • Louisa May Alcott
... made a good debating Budget speech, of which Sir John Lambert wrote "In Tea, Domine, spero," and I replied: "Since the time of Sir Thomas More all these profane 'good things' ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, Vol. 2 • Stephen Gwynn
... 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, habits, manners, ...
— The American Republic: Its Constitution, Tendencies, and Destiny • A. O. Brownson
... "Richard III" Mr. Gairdner is still more 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," ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery
... afore tyme, as in Phrisia, Canterians, in Spayne Queene Elisabeth the wyfe of Fardinandus, out of whose familye there haue come forthe verye manye womenne bothe merueylouselye well learned and verteouse. Emong the englishe men, it greued not the ryght worshypful Thomas More, although beyng much occupyed in the kynges matters, to be a teacher to hys wyfe, daughters, and sonne, fyrste in vertue, and after to knowledge of Greke and Latine. Verely this ought to be done in those that we haue apoynted to learnynge. Neyther is there anye ieopardie ...
— The Education of Children • Desiderius Erasmus
... after this fashion was held by the learned Sir Thomas More. Sir Thomas was sent ambassador to the Emperor by king Henry the Eighth. The morning he was to have his audience, knowing the virtue of wine, he ordered his servant to bring him a good large glass of ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 13, - Issue 352, January 17, 1829 • Various
... me safe up, but for my coming down I can shift for myself," were the last words of Sir Thomas More when ascending ...
— The Handy Cyclopedia of Things Worth Knowing - A Manual of Ready Reference • Joseph Triemens
... hero, after his capture, that he was worth more for hanging than any other purpose, reminds one, by its combination of wit, wisdom, and self-devotion, of Sir Thomas More. ...
— Autobiography • John Stuart Mill
... married John Middleton, son of Sir John Middleton, of Stockeld Park, co. Yorkshire ("Visitation of Essex," 1588). She afterwards became the second wife of Sir Thomas More, and her arms may be seen on the Chelsea tomb—Ermine a fesse chequy (Notes and Queries, 4th Series, iv. 61; ...
— Shakespeare's Family • Mrs. C. C. Stopes
... or other of these Rastell printed the undated edition of Linacre's Grammar, which bears the address, 'ye sowth side of paulys.' But in 1520 he moved to 'the Mermayd at Powlys gate next to chepe syde.' There he printed The Pastyme of People, and Sir Thomas More's Supplicacyon of Souls, besides several interludes and two remarkable jest-books, The Twelve mery gestys of one called Edith and A Hundred Mery Talys. The last named became one of the most popular books of the ...
— A Short History of English Printing, 1476-1898 • Henry R. Plomer
... the word 'touch' is now obsolete. It refers to touching the seal on a deed, called sealing it; a solemn, deliberate pledge to keep close to your covenants. 'I keep touch with my promise.' Sir Thomas More.—Ed. ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... "ingenious, but unsound The cut of a fair lady's bodice never yet altered the shape of her nose; neither was it the fashion of their furred surtouts that made Erasmus and Sir Thomas More as like as twins. What you call the 'mannerism' of Holbein is only his way of looking at his fellow-creatures. He and Sir Antonio More were the most faithful of portrait-painters. They didn't know how to flatter. They painted exactly what they saw—no more, and no less; so that every head they have ...
— In the Days of My Youth • Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards
... highest aim and effort of the 'new learning' in England. He is the flower of our Renaissance in genius, wisdom, and beauty of nature. 'When ever,' says Erasmus in a famous passage, 'did Nature mould a character more gentle, endearing, and happy, than Thomas More's?' ...
— The Visions of England - Lyrics on leading men and events in English History • Francis T. Palgrave
... Milton, who lived for a time in one of the houses on the south side, looking upon Lincoln's Inn Fields; and Dr. Johnson, who lived at the sign of the Golden Anchor, Holborn Bars. There were also the Bishops of Ely, Sir Christopher Hatton, Francis Bacon, Sir Thomas More, Charles Dickens, Fulke Greville, Thomas Chatterton, Lord Russell, Dr. Sacheverell, and ...
— Holborn and Bloomsbury - The Fascination of London • Sir Walter Besant
... mankind'; and the exquisite humor of the title would tally precisely with what Ben Jonson tells us in his 'Discoveries,' under the head Dominus Verulamius, that 'his language (where he could spare or pass by a jest) was nobly censorious.' Sir Thomas More had the same proneness to merriment, a coincidence the more striking as both these great men were Lord Chancellors. A comic stroke of this description would have been highly attractive to a mind so constituted, and might easily escape the notice of a printer, who was more likely to ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 3, No. 16, February, 1859 • Various
... century Erasmus 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 to designate ...
— The Interdependence of Literature • Georgina Pell Curtis
... thought had been glimmering before, turning into Bibliolaters those who had rationally doubted some of the Catholic mysteries and forcing back into Catholic bigotry those more refined spirits who, like Sir Thomas More, had been in advance of their age." "Before the Lutheran revolt," said Henry C. Lea, "much freedom of thought and speech was allowed in Catholic Europe, but not after." Similar opinions might be collected in large number; I {732} mention only the works of Bezold and the brief but admirably ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... [Sir Thomas More] "not come begging for the clergy from purgatory, with his supplication of souls—nor the poor soul and proctor been there with his bloody bishop Christen catte, so far ...
— Notes & Queries 1849.12.15 • Various
... who are chiefly interesting in themselves, and some whom chance and the agreement of men have picked out as symbols and convenient indications of some particular group or temperament of opinions. To the latter it is that Sir Thomas More belongs. An age and a type of mind have found in him and his Utopia a figurehead and a token; and pleasant and honourable as his personality and household present themselves to the modern reader, it is doubtful if they would by this ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... is believed to have been b. at North Mimms, Herts. He was a friend of Sir Thomas More, and through him gained the favour of Henry VIII., and was at the Court of Edward VI. and Mary, for whom, as a young Princess, he had a great regard. Being a supporter of the old religion, he enjoyed her favour, but on the accession of Elizabeth, he left the country, and ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... Margaret Roper and Sir Thomas More. Agnes and William Wirt. Mary and John Evelyn. Theodosia and Aaron Burr. Maria and Richard Edgeworth. Madame de Stael and Necker. Letitia Landon and ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... with all its humour, a very bitter satire against both the Roman Church and the Calvinistic. Rabelais is one of the very great French writers and humourists whose work is closely connected with English literature. But what he borrowed from Sir Thomas More, he generously repaid to Shakespeare, Swift, and Sterne. The famous Abbey of Thelema is inspired by More's "Utopia"; on the other hand, Shakespeare's praise of debt is taken from the speech of Panurge—the most humorous character in French literature, ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VII • Various
... Summa; of French works, Froissart, Mandeville, two French Bibles, a French Livy and Caesar, with the most popular romances; in English, there were the Polychronicon, Cambrensis, Lyttleton's Tenures, Sir Thomas More's book on Pilgrimages, and several romances. Moreover, there were copies of the Psalter of Cashel, a book of Irish chronicles, lives of St. Beraghan, St. Fiech and St. Finian, with various religious tracts, and romantic ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee
... who refused all connection with government, and all the influence which office could bestow, rather than deny their principles, or aid in doing wrong. Yet I never heard them called either idiots or over-scrupulous. Sir Thomas More need never have mounted the scaffold, had he only consented to take the oath of supremacy. He had only to tell a lie with solemnity, as we are asked to do, and he might not only have saved his life, but, ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... into 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 ...
— Citation and Examination of William Shakspeare • Walter Savage Landor
... people neither could nor would do anything of the sort. With their heads as full of the Anticipations of Mr H. G. Wells as the heads of our actual rulers were empty even of the anticipations of Erasmus or Sir Thomas More, they refused the drudgery of politics, and would have made a very poor job of it if they had changed their minds. Not that they would have been allowed to meddle anyhow, as only through the accident of being a hereditary peer can anyone in these days ...
— Heartbreak House • George Bernard Shaw
... arm from a grasp too feeble to retain it. The consent of the nation was avowed, even in the authoritative language of a statute,[109] as essential to the legitimacy of a sovereign's title; and Sir Thomas More, on examination by the Solicitor-General, declared as his opinion that parliament had power to depose kings if it so pleased.[110] So many uncertainties on a point so vital had occasioned fearful episodes in English history; the most fearful of them, which had traced ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude
... design. Nor is it strange that Steele, who was perhaps not very well acquainted with the history of literature, should have misconceived the nature of the publication, when we learn from an epistle of Sir Thomas More to Erasmus, that some of the stupid theologasters themselves, who were held up to ridicule, received it with ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 38, Saturday, July 20, 1850 • Various |
