"Infinitive" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... enumerated by us are to be summed up thus: Not to kill ... not to cause suffering ... not to steal ... not to slander. Always reflect upon the words you say in which "Not" is followed by a verb in the imperative infinitive. What ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... in nouns. But in verbs there is a change in moods, as when the infinitive is used for the imperative, as ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... Verbs of the infinitive mood— but hold. Remember that there is scarcely any rule without an exception; and this axiom particularly applies to the Syntax. We used to wish it did not; because then we should not have had so much to learn— to ...
— The Comic Latin Grammar - A new and facetious introduction to the Latin tongue • Percival Leigh
... must speak the schoolmaster's language, I will confess that character comes of this infinitive mood, [Greek: charassen], which signifies to engrave, or make a deep impression. And for that cause a letter (as A, B) is called a character: those elements which we learn first, leaving a ...
— Character Writings of the 17th Century • Various
... Angeles newspaper devoted a whole page to the coming event. Adjective was piled on adjective, split infinitive on split infinitive. The dinner was to be given in the ballroom of the hotel.... The bank accounts of the assembled guests would total $400,000,000.... The terrapin had been specially imported from Baltimore.... The decorations were to be magnificent beyond the wildest dream.... The duke was ...
— Cupid's Understudy • Edward Salisbury Field
... companions, much younger than he, sons of slaves liberated before their birth, they were born free; no white had ever had the right of property over them. They did not even speak that "negro" language, which does not use the article, and only knows the infinitive of the verbs—a language which has disappeared little by little, indeed, since the anti-slavery war. These blacks had, then, freely left the United States, and they were returning ...
— Dick Sand - A Captain at Fifteen • Jules Verne
... (Think of the use of the subjunctive and infinitive in all languages: on and me in Greek; indirect speech in Latin; negatives, comparisons, etc., etc., in all languages.) Esperanto—none. Common sense the only guide, and no ambiguity in practice. The perfect ...
— International Language - Past, Present and Future: With Specimens of Esperanto and Grammar • Walter J. Clark
... that he shot, stuffed, and mounted; yet not inappreciative of form, and accustomed to recommend much good literature to his countrymen. He took an eager interest in a large variety of subjects, from Celtic poetry and the fauna and flora of many regions to simplified spelling and the split infinitive. ...
— Four Americans - Roosevelt, Hawthorne, Emerson, Whitman • Henry A. Beers
... Reino Jano, Act III, Scene IV, we find Ie vai de nostis os,—Il y va de nos os. Vejan, voyons, is used as a sort of interjection, as in French. The partitive article is used precisely as in French. We meet the narrative infinitive with de. In short, the French reader feels at home in the Provencal sentence; it is the same syntax and, to a great degree, the same rhetoric. Only in the vocabulary does he feel himself in a ...
— Frederic Mistral - Poet and Leader in Provence • Charles Alfred Downer
... as beau lui dire, 'it is no use your telling him.' Avoir beau infinitive is ironical, and elliptical for avoir beau temps pour, i.e. to have a fine opportunity, but to no purpose; cf. the English 'it is all very fine for ...
— Le Petit Chose (part 1) - Histoire d'un Enfant • Alphonse Daudet
... the indicative present and past tenses have emphatic forms made up of do and did with the infinitive or simple form; as, "He does strike," "He ...
— An English Grammar • W. M. Baskervill and J. W. Sewell
... afford principles, which seem full of absurdity and contradiction. No priestly dogmas, invented on purpose to tame and subdue the rebellious reason of mankind, ever shocked common sense more than the doctrine of the infinitive divisibility of extension, with its consequences; as they are pompously displayed by all geometricians and metaphysicians, with a kind of triumph and exultation. A real quantity, infinitely less than any finite quantity, containing quantities ...
— An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding • David Hume et al
... the old collection of hymns, or the Rig-Veda, no longer sufficed. Three other collections or service-books were therefore added, making the Four Vedas. The word Veda is from the same root as the Latin vid-ere, to see: the early Greek feid-enai, infinitive of oida, I know: and the English wisdom, or I wit. The Brahmans taught that the Veda was divinely inspired, and that it was literally "the wisdom of God." There was, first, the Rig-Veda, or the hymns in their simplest form. Second, the Sama-Veda, made up of hymns of the Rig-Veda to be ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1 • Various
... will not suit; the Variety of Feet and Metres producing equal Variety of Mode and Movements in Composition. The want of this is what makes the French vocal Musick so confined and uniform; for I cannot recollect above two of their Verbs in use in the infinitive Mood, that are Monosyllables, and not one exact Dactile in all their Polysyllables." Roener's Preface to ...
— Letters Concerning Poetical Translations - And Virgil's and Milton's Arts of Verse, &c. • William Benson
... {97} says—from whose work I first contrived to pick up the rudiments of Armenian—"Est verborum transitivorum, quorum infinitivus—" But I forgot, you don't understand Latin. He says there are certain transitive verbs, whose infinitive is in out-saniel; the preterite in outsi; the imperative in oue: ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... girls.... How was English taught? How did you begin? English grammar... in German? Her heart beat in her throat. She had never thought of that... the rules of English grammar? Parsing and analysis.... Anglo-Saxon prefixes and suffixes ... gerundial infinitive.... It was too late to look anything up. Perhaps there would be a class to-morrow.... The German lessons at school had been dreadfully good.... Fraulein's grave face... her perfect knowledge of every rule... her clear explanations in English ... her examples.... All these things ...
— Pointed Roofs - Pilgrimage, Volume 1 • Dorothy Richardson
... Here the infinitive "To take" might be understood, at first look, as the subject of "Would buffet"; but it depends on "putting", etc., and the subject relative "that" is suppressed: "an argument {that} would buffet their stolidity ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... says that Or in this line should be Nor. Yes, if "draw" is an imperative, like "seek;" no, if it is an infinitive, in the same construction as "to disclose." That the latter was the construction the poet had in mind is evident from the form of the stanza in the Wrightson ...
— Select Poems of Thomas Gray • Thomas Gray
... volvio a reir volvio a reirse, laughed again. Volver a, followed by an infinitive, is to be rendered as a formula of repetition, as, ...
— Novelas Cortas • Pedro Antonio de Alarcon
... coffee, unless under compulsion of an enlightened public opinion. Now you, Mr. Forbes, would never dream of putting your money into a investment without full and careful inquiry into the history and scope of the proposed undertaking, while our young friend here would snort furiously at a split infinitive or a false rhyme, yet, when I submit the vital problem of the sort of coffee you imbibe— the very essence and nutriment of your brains and bodies— you hear the kind of answer ...
— Number Seventeen • Louis Tracy
... has a hundred different ones about a hundred different things. Here in this office we're dead against the split infinitive and the Honest Laboring Man. We don't believe he's honest and we've got our grave doubts as to his laboring. Yet one of our editorial writers is an out-and-out Socialist and makes fiery speeches advising the proletariat to rise ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... ideals are ours. He is busied with the same problems of ethics, of aesthetics, of style, even of grammar. I had not been three days in New York when I found myself plunged in a hot discussion of the "split infinitive," in which I was ranged with two Americans against a recreant Briton who defended the collocation. "It is a mistake to regard it is an Americanism," said one of the Americans. "It is as old as the English language, or at ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer |
