"Mote" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... themselues touched with his words, who hauing smelled somewhat of his secret tricks, that whereas he was a most licentious liuer, and an vnchast person of bodie and mind, vet he was so blinded, that he could not perceiue the beame in his own eies, whilest he espied a mote in another mans. Herevpon they grudged, that he should in such wise call other men to accompts for their honest demeanor of life, which could not render any good reckoning of his owne: insomuch that they watched him so narrowlie, ...
— Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland (2 of 6): England (3 of 12) - Henrie I. • Raphael Holinshed
... of Michael's pannikin, this inconsiderable adventurer from out of the dark into the sun of life, a mere spark and mote between the darks, by a ruffing of his salmon-pink crest, a swift and enormous dilation of his bead-black pupils, and a raucous imperative cry, as of all the gods, in his throat, could make Michael give back ...
— Michael, Brother of Jerry • Jack London
... heaven!—that there were a mote in yours, A grain, a dust, a gnat, a wandering hair, Any annoyance in that precious sense! Then, feeling what small things are boist'rous there, Your vile intent ...
— The Canadian Elocutionist • Anna Kelsey Howard
... everybody knew Alderman Cute was a Justice! Oh dear, so active a Justice always! Who such a mote of brightness in the public ...
— The Chimes • Charles Dickens
... travelling by a story or two. There are certain principles to be assumed,—such as these:—He who is carried by horses must deal with rogues.—To-day's dinner subtends a larger visual angle than yesterday's revolution. A mote in my eye is bigger to me than the biggest of Dr. Gould's private planets.—Every traveller is a self-taught entomologist.—Old jokes are dynamometers of mental tension; an old joke tells better among friends travelling than at home,—which shows that ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... dislike the behavior of those persons who, when people are unfortunate, say: "I told you so—getting punished—served him right." If those I-told-you-so's got their desert they would long ago have been pitched over the battlements. The mote in their neighbor's eyes—so small that it takes a microscope to find it—gives them more trouble than the beam which obscures their own optics. With air sometimes supercilious and sometimes Pharisaical, and always blasphemous, ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage
... enveloping idolatry that had made Christie so unlike parents and sister. She was neither retiring nor serious, but social and pleasure-loving, ready to dance through life as irresponsibly enjoying as a mote in a sunbeam. And now Lorry had wakened to the perplexed realization that it was her affair to provide the sunbeam and she did not know how to do it. They were rich, they had a fine house, but nothing ever happened there and it was evident that Chrystie wanted things to happen. It ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner
... whilom wont (they say,) To make his wonne low underneath the ground, In a deep delve far from the view of day, That of no living wight he mote be found, Whenso he counselled with ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... active.—"All things proceed out of the same spirit, and all things conspire with it." While a man seeks good ends, nature helps him; when he seeks other ends, his being shrinks, "he becomes less and less, a mote, a point, until absolute badness is absolute death."—"When he says 'I ought;' when love warms him; when he chooses, warned from on high, the good and great deed; then deep melodies wander through his soul from ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... dear fellow, how often must I explain to you your confusions? Orthodox sentiment and stereotyped emotion master you. And then your temperament! You are really incapable of rational judgments. Cerberus? Pshaw! A flash expiring, a mote of fading sparkle, a dim-pulsing and dying organism—pouf! a snap of the fingers, a puff of breath, what would you? A pawn in the game of life. Not even a problem. There is no problem in a stillborn babe, nor in a dead child. They never arrived. Nor ...
— Moon-Face and Other Stories • Jack London
... particular endings of his soldiers, nor the father of his son, for they purpose not their death, when they purpose their services. Every subject's duty is the king's; but every subject's soul is his own. Therefore should every soldier in the wars do as every sick man in his bed, wash every mote out of his conscience: and dying so, death is to him advantage; or not dying, the time was blessedly lost wherein such preparation ...
— King Henry the Fifth - Arranged for Representation at the Princess's Theatre • William Shakespeare
... been censuring one of his own relations for his parsimonious temper—"Now is it not strange," continued he, "that this man would not remove the beam from his own eye, before he attempted to take the mote out of other peoples?" "Why, so I dare say he would," cried Foote, "if he were sure of ...
— The Book of Three Hundred Anecdotes - Historical, Literary, and Humorous—A New Selection • Various
... first to stand up for the right; our business is not to protect ourselves from our neighbour's wrong, but our neighbour from our wrong. This is to slay evil; the other is to make it multiply. A man who would pull out even a mote from his brother's eye, must first pull out the beam from his own eye, must be righteous against his own selfishness. That is the only way to wound the root of evil. He who teaches his neighbour to insist ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... found. You probably have some millions of germs up your sleeve now, or, more likely, on your back, and I wouldn't let you go into my hog pen for a $2000 note. I'm so well quarantined that I don't much fear contagion; but there's always danger from infected dust. The wind blows it about, and any mote may be an automobile for a whole colony of bacteria, which may decide to picnic in my piggery. This dry weather is bad for us, and if we get heavy winds from off the ridge, I'm going ...
— The Fat of the Land - The Story of an American Farm • John Williams Streeter
... round like a flying mote this troublesome idea circled in his brain, ... he must do better in future, he resolved, supposing that any future remained to Him in which to work, . . HE MUST REDEEM THE PAST! ... Here he roused his mental faculties with a start and forced himself to realize that it was ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... than they are? All's in its place, from mote to star. The thistledown that flits and flies Could drift no hair-breadth otherwise. What is, must be; with rhythmic laws All Nature chimes, Effect and Cause. The sand-grain and the sun obey — What ho! the ...
— Rhymes of a Rolling Stone • Robert W. Service
... considered that he had only acted in the character of a just judge. He could imagine that Arnold was undergoing "the torments of a mental hell," for the part he had acted in this transaction, but he felt no compunction for his own unjust and uncalled-for severity—he could see the mote in Arnold's eye, but could not discover the beam which was in his own. As regards Arnold he was probably correct. After the death of Andre that renegade issued addresses to the Americans, but he was scorned and unheeded; and ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... aid of these numbers we may begin to gain a just appreciation of the doctrine of the human destiny of the universe—the doctrine that all things were made for man. Seen from the sun, the earth dwindles away to a mere speck, a mere dust-mote glistening in his beams. If the reader wishes a more precise valuation, let him hold a page of this book a couple of feet from his eye; then let him consider one of its dots or full stops; that dot is several hundred times ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper
... or greater in the economy of Nature (Nature is God Manifest), the most infinitesimal mote in the universe is as perfect within itself as is the most gigantic sun. Size is but relative. The anatomy of the midget is as perfect and complex as is that of the mammoth, and so there exist in the universe inhabited worlds that are ...
— The Planet Mars and its Inhabitants - A Psychic Revelation • Eros Urides and J. L. Kennon
... that there is power not ourselves. We did not make this world. We did not put into it even the lowest force, gravitation. It is more than our minds can compass to measure its power. We have no arithmetic to tell its power on every mote in the sunbeam, or flower, or grain-head bowing toward the earth, tree brought down with a crash, or avalanche with thunder. Much less can we measure the power that holds the earth to the sun spite ...
— Among the Forces • Henry White Warren
... Concert-Meister Altgelt played, And the four strings of his violin Were spinning like bees on a day in Spring. The notes rose into the wide sun-mote Which slanted through the window, They lay like coloured beads a-row, They knocked together and parted, And started to dance, Skipping, tripping, each one slipping Under and over the others so That the polychrome fire streamed like a lance Or a comet's tail, Behind them. Then a ...
— Men, Women and Ghosts • Amy Lowell
... by the autographs of the plants themselves. "It was when I came upon the mute witness of these self-made records," said Sir J. C. Bose, when he stood before the Royal Institution "and perceived in them one phase of a pervading unity that bears within it all things: the mote that quivers in ripples of light, the teeming life upon our earth, and the radiant suns that shine above us—it was then that I understood for the first time a little of that message proclaimed by my ancestors on the banks of ...
— Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose - His Life and Speeches • Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose
... re-quotation a few lines lower down they are equally well indicated by being the only words not put in italics. The fact is, that Dr. Lightfoot has mistaken and misstated the whole case. He has been so eagerly looking for the mote in my eye that he has failed to perceive the beam which is in his own eye. It is by this wonderful illustration that he "exemplifies the elaborate looseness which pervades the critical portion of this ...
— A Reply to Dr. Lightfoot's Essays • Walter R. Cassels
... in stone mansions who throw stones. If there is a mote in the neighbor's eye, perhaps there is a very large piece of timber in your own. Great zeal in belaboring the neighbor for his faults will not lessen your own, nor make you appear an angel of light before God when you are something very different. If you employed this same zeal towards yourself, ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton
... through his wife Alice Chaucer, a kinswoman of the poet, and "for love of her and the commoditie of her landes fell much to dwell in Oxfordshire," and in 1430-40 was busy building a manor-place of "brick and Tymbre and set within a fayre mote," a church, an almshouse, and a school. The manor-place, or "Palace," as it was called, has disappeared, but the almshouse and school remain, witnesses of the munificence of the founders. The poor Duke, favourite minister of Henry ...
— Vanishing England • P. H. Ditchfield
... calfe, And made a dish at supper for my guests Of her kinde charge; I am beholding to her. Puffe, is there not a feather in this ayre A man may challenge for her? what? a feather? So easie to be seene, so apt to trace, In the weake flight of her unconstant wings? A mote, man, at the most, that with the Sunne, Is onely seene, yet with his radiant eye, We cannot single so from other motes, To say this mote is she. Passion of death, She wrongs me past a death; come, come, my friend Is mine, she not her owne, ...
— A Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. III • Various
... to see the beam that is in our own eye, and blind us to the mote that is in our brother's. Let us feel our offences with our hands, make them great and bright before us like the sun, make us eat them and drink them for our diet. Blind us to the offences of our beloved, cleanse them from our memories, take them out of our mouths for ...
— A Lowden Sabbath Morn • Robert Louis Stevenson
... cuja gruesa lanza, Con recamado pendon, Y una cifra a ver se alcanza, Que es de desesperacion, O a lo menos de venganza. 10 En el arzon de la silla Ancho escudo reverbera Con blasones de Castilla, Y el mote dice a la orilla: Nunca mi espada venciera. 15 Era el caballo galan, El bruto mas generoso, De mas gallardo ademan: Cabos negros, y brioso, Muy tostado, y alazan, 20 Larga cola recogida En las piernas descarnadas, Cabeza pequena, erguida, Las narices dilatadas, ...
— Modern Spanish Lyrics • Various
... absolutely vertical line. It dwindled to the size of a basketball and then an apple. Then to the size of a pea. And then that pea diminished until the spaceship from Krim, Walden, Cetis, Rigel and the Nearer Rim had become the size of a dust mote and then could not be seen at all. But one knew that it was going on to Lohala and Tralee and Famagusta ...
— The Pirates of Ersatz • Murray Leinster
... to have my head clear. Stimulated nerves are not to be depended upon, and the brain that has wine in it is never a sure guide. A surgeon must see at the point of his instrument; and if there be a mote or any obscurity in his mental vision, his hand, instead of working ...
— Danger - or Wounded in the House of a Friend • T. S. Arthur
... heard a most melodious sound, Of all that mote delight a daintie eare, Such as attonce might not on living ground, Save in this paradise, be heard elsewhere: Right hard it was for wight which did it heare, To read what manner musicke that mote bee; For all that pleasing is to living eare ...
— Flowers and Flower-Gardens • David Lester Richardson
... all the swifter will he go Through the pale, scattered asphodels, Down mote-hung dusk of olive dells, To where the ancient basins throw Fleet threads of blue and trembling zones Of gold upon the ...
— Gloucester Moors and Other Poems • William Vaughn Moody
... his rod on th' ocean stream, And this o'erhanging wood-top nods Like golden helms of drowsy gods. Methinks that now I'll stretch for rest, With eyelids sloping toward the west; That, through their half transparencies, The rosy radiance passed and strained, Of mote and vapor duly drained, I may believe, in hollow bliss, My rest in the empyrean is. Watch thou; and when up comes the moon, Atowards her turn me; and then, boon, Thyself compose, 'neath wavering leaves That hang these ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various
... a boy, in going among the savages at this hour, and letting himself fall into their hands like a deer that tumbles into a pit," growled the old man, perceiving as usual the mote in his neighbor's eyes, while he overlooked the beam in his own; "if he is left to pay for his stupidity with his own flesh, he can blame ...
— The Deerslayer • James Fenimore Cooper
... "He knows not what to do: the outrage sore Avenged he has not, nor his pain allaid: What was a mote is now a beam; so sore It prest him; on his heart so heavy weighed. So plain is what was little known before, He fears that it will shortly be displaid. At first, he haply might have hid his woe; Which Rumour now ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto
... is a stone so clear and spotless, that even her greatest adversaries, in the midst of all their rage, are not able justly to charge her with the least mote or spot imaginable; wherefore when he saith, that this city in her descending is even like the jasper for light, and like the crystal for clearness; he would have us further learn, that at the day of the descending ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... not judged. For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again. And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye? Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me pull out the mote out of thine eye; and, behold, a beam is in thine own eye? Thou hypocrite, first cast ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes
... as before—just as much irritated by his small patronizing ways; for my pride, my diseased sensibility, were there as they had always been, and winced as inevitably under every offence as my eye winced from an intruding mote. The future, even when brought within the compass of feeling by a vision that made me shudder, had still no more than the force of an idea, compared with the force of present emotion—of my love for Bertha, of my dislike and jealousy towards ...
— The Lifted Veil • George Eliot
... Alas! dere God, xuld I now rave? An old man may nevyr thryff With a yonge wyff, so God me save! Nay, nay, sere, lett bene, Xuld I now in age begynne to dote, If I here chyde she wolde clowte my cote, Blere myn ey, and pyke out a mote, And thus oftyn tymes ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... when suddenly there rose A magick form before my dazzled eyes: 'Or do I wake,' I asked myself 'or doze'? Or hath an angel come in mortal guise'? So wondered I; but nothing mote surmise; Only I gazed upon that lovely face, In reverence yblent with mute surprise: Sure never yet was seen such wondrous grace, Since Adam first began ...
— Sagittulae, Random Verses • E. W. Bowling
... movements in the regions of eternal twilight, revolutions, of which history has been silent, in the mysterious depths of Asia, outpourings of human rivets along the sides of the Altai mountains, convulsions up-heaving r mote realms and unknown dynasties, shock after shock throb bing throughout the barbarian world and dying upon the edge of civilization, vast throes which shake the earth as precursory pangs to the birth of a new empire—as dying symptoms of the proud ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... more after the weemen than the money, an' nobody as I know o' carin' to cut 'em out there. It's true him I refer to hez come into the thing at the 'leventh hour, as ye may say—after 'twar all planned. But he mote a gied us trouble by stannin' apart. Tharfore, I say, let's take him in on shares ...
— The Flag of Distress - A Story of the South Sea • Mayne Reid
... Love is a plaintive song, Sung by a suff'ring maid, Telling a tale of wrong, Telling of hope betrayed; Tuned to each changing note, Sorry when he is sad, Blind to his ev'ry mote, Merry when he is glad! Merry when he is glad! Love that no wrong can cure, Love that is always new, That is the love that's pure, That is the love that's true! Love that no wrong can cure, Love that is always new, That is the love that's pure, That is the ...
— The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan - The 14 Gilbert And Sullivan Plays • William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan
... There's a mote in my eye or a blot on the page, And I cannot tell of the joyful greeting; You may take it for granted and I will engage, There were kisses and tears at the strange, glad meeting; For aye since the birth of the swift-winged years, In the desert drear, in the field of clover, In the cot, and the ...
— Legends of the Northwest • Hanford Lennox Gordon
... rapture. Human sounds had fainted from my ear. I was in the abyss of heaven, and alone with my God. I could tell my direction by the sun on my left; and, as his rays played on the aerostat, it seemed only a bright bubble, wavering in the sky, and I, a suspended mote, hung by chance to its train. Looking below me, the distant Sound and Long Island appeared to the east; the bay lay to the south, sprinkled with shipping; under me, the city, girded with bright rivers and ...
— Sanders' Union Fourth Reader • Charles W. Sanders
... story of the Nibelungs and Volsungs, of Sigurd and of Siegfried,—whether we follow the older versions or the mote recent renderings,—there is, as it were, an ever-present but indefinable shadow of coming fate, "a low, inarticulate voice of Doom," foretelling the inevitable. This is but in consonance with the general ideas of our Northern ancestors regarding the ...
— The Story of Siegfried • James Baldwin
... strange. They were in no fashion I could name, and the simple costume the man wore suggested neither period nor country. It might, I thought, be the Happy Future, or Utopia, or the Land of Simple Dreams; an errant mote of memory, Henry James's phrase and story of "The Great Good Place," twinkled across my mind, and passed and left ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... beauty, when in love; but I do not see what difference two figures on horseback against the southern sky-line could possibly make to the shimmer of purple above the plains, or the fragrance of prairie-roses lining the trail. It seems to me the lonely call of the meadow-lark high overhead—a mote in a sea of blue—or the drumming and chirruping of feathered creatures through the green, could not have sounded less musical, if I had not been a lover. But that, too, is only an opinion; for one glimpse of the forms before me brought ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut
... Julia. Yah! yah! what a li'l spec to make such a rumpus! Looks like de Bible 'mote,' but, golly! it done feel mo' like de 'beam.' Yah! yah! yah!" laughed the negress, revealing two rows of dazzling teeth to an appreciative audience as she laboriously struggled ...
— Katherine's Sheaves • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... "When you 've set in one spot's long's I hev, p'raps you'll hev the use o' your faculties! Men folks has more 'n one way o' gettin' married, 'specially when they 're ashamed of it. ... Well, I vow, there's the little Hobson girls comin' out o' the door this minute, 'n' they 're all dressed up, and Mote don't seem to be ...
— The Village Watch-Tower • (AKA Kate Douglas Riggs) Kate Douglas Wiggin
... agonizing over the pitiful condition of the Armenians under Moslem rule, but has nothing to say anent her own awful record in India. It were well for John Bull to get the beam out of his own eye before making frantic swipes at the mote in the optic of the Moslem. The oppression of the children of Israel by the Egyptian Pharaohs, the Babylonian king and Roman emperors were as nothing compared to that suffered by the patient Bengalese at the hands of Great Britain. The history of every barbarous prince of the Orient, in those ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... ye abhomynable savours causid by ye kepig of ye kenell in ye mote and ye diches there, and i especiall by sethig of ye houndes mete wt roten bones, and vnclenly keping of ye houdes, wherof moche people is anoyed, soo yt when the wynde is in any poyte of the northe, all the fowle ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 37. Saturday, July 13, 1850 • Various
... finishes his brief explanation of the conditions with the application of the whole. "Hold on"; that is the ABC, the Alpha and Omega of it. So mote it be. Still, saying it is one thing, doing it another. My steel-centred Hardy I know pretty well, and have no fear, though it is small by comparison with the full-sized greenhearts to which my attendant is accustomed, and I can see that he distrusts it. Of ...
— Lines in Pleasant Places - Being the Aftermath of an Old Angler • William Senior
... into twenty-six judicial circuits, and each circuit has one superior court judge (or mote than one if the Legislature so provides). This judge is elected by the people for a term of four years. To be eligible he must be thirty years of age; he must have been a citizen of the State for three years, and must have practiced law ...
— Elements of Civil Government • Alexander L. Peterman
... their lord, when they sued in his court, they claimed the privilege of all the German freemen, the right of judging one another: the lord's steward was only the register. This domestic court, which continued in full vigor for many ages, the Saxons called Hall mote, from the place in which it was held; the Normans, who adopted it, named it a Court-Baron. This court had another department, in which the power of the lord was more absolute. From the most ancient times the German nobility considered themselves as the natural judges of those ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... freely, and shall cheerfully grant reviewers, critics, and readers, the same privilege. I send forth this book with a pure desire that it may do good. Amen, so mote it be. ...
— The Lost Ten Tribes, and 1882 • Joseph Wild
... fuyle a betel be he smetyn, That al the werld hyt mote wyten, That gyfht his sone al his thing, And goht hym self ...
— Game and Playe of the Chesse - A Verbatim Reprint Of The First Edition, 1474 • Caxton
... do not, my brethren, keep these sacred thoughts of Christ's companionship in sorrow, for the larger trials of life. If the mote in the eye be large enough to annoy you, it is large enough to bring out His sympathy; and if the grief be too small for Him to compassionate and share, it is too small for you to be troubled by it. If you are ashamed to apply that divine thought, 'Christ bears this ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... for removing objects from the eye: Take a horse-hair and double it, leaving a loop. If the object can be seen, lay the loop over it, close the eye, and the mote will come out as the hair is withdrawn. If the irritating object cannot be seen, raise the lid of the eye as high as possible and place the loop as far as you can, close the eye and roll the ball around a few times, draw out the hair, and the substance which ...
— The Whitehouse Cookbook (1887) - The Whole Comprising A Comprehensive Cyclopedia Of Information For - The Home • Mrs. F.L. Gillette
... wylle goon by an other way, he mote goon by the playnes of Romayne, costynge the Romayne see. Uppon that cost, ys a woundur fayre castelle, that men clepen Florathe. And whanne that a man ys oute of that ylke hylles, men passen thenne thorewe ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries - of the English Nation. v. 8 - Asia, Part I. • Richard Hakluyt
... can all be angry with our neighbour; what we want is to be shown, not his defects, of which we are too conscious, but his merits, to which we are too blind. And "The Egoist" is a satire; so much must be allowed; but it is a satire of a singular quality, which tells you nothing of that obvious mote, which is engaged from first to last with that invisible beam. It is yourself that is hunted down; these are your own faults that are dragged into the day and numbered, with lingering relish, with cruel cunning and precision. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... mote it be?—It is the knowledge of nature, and the power of its various operations; particularly the skill of reckoning, of weights and measures, of constructing buildings and dwellings of all kinds, and the true manner of forming all things for the ...
— The Builders - A Story and Study of Masonry • Joseph Fort Newton
... things, yet the sun knows them not. They are local and only earth phenomena, yet the benefaction of the sun is as if it shone for us alone. It is as great as if this were the case, and yet the fraction of his light and heat that actually falls upon this mote of a world adrift in sidereal space is so infinitely small that it could hardly be computed by numbers. In our religion we appropriate God to ourselves in the same way, but he knows us not in this private and particular way, though we are all ...
— Under the Maples • John Burroughs
... care a straw whether we go on with or without the other newspapers. We will do justice and say what is true, regardless of popularity. We detest hypocrisy; and we have no disposition to make a mountain out of a molehill, or to see a mote in the eye of Lola Montez, and not discover a beam in the eye of Fanny Elssler, or of any of the other ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... some great affliction or disappointment will open his eyes and cause him to see his selfish propensities as they are. In the meantime, let us not forget the beam in our own eyes while we are talking of the mote in our brother's eye. To go back to our subject; you have acknowledged your belief in God and also, I hope, in His Son ...
— The Old Stone House • Anne March
... we had the place to ourselves. But then Feth sees few visitors at any season. Sixteen miles from a station is its salvation. True, there is Mote Abbey hard by—a fine old place with an ancient deer-park and deep, rolling woods. Ruins, too, we had heard. A roofless quire, a few grass-grown yards of cloister and the like. Only the Abbot's kitchen was at all preserved. There's irony for you. We were going ...
— The Brother of Daphne • Dornford Yates
... Lo the nations! as a drop from a bucket, And as dust on a balance are they reckoned. Lo the isles! as a mote he uplifteth, And Lebanon is not enough for fuel, And its wild beasts for a burnt-offering. All the nations are as nothing before him, They are reckoned by ...
— The Makers and Teachers of Judaism • Charles Foster Kent
... days in spring wherein advance seems as passive as is the progress of a log down the race of a spring freshet. Then there are other days wherein it seems that every mote must feel to the full its sentient life, and its swelling towards development or fulfilment. On a day like the latter, everything and everybody bestirs. The dust motes spin in whirling columns, the gnats dance for ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... city in the clouds before my soul's vision, that love like a broad river flowing through the lands, an atmosphere bathing the worlds, the subtile essence and ether of space in which the farthest star pursues its course,—why, then, should it escape me, the mote? Oh, when the world turned from me, I sought to flee thither! I sighed for the rest there! Wretched, alone, I have wept in the dark and in the light that I might go and fling myself at the heavenly feet. But, do you see? sin has broken down the bridge between God ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... town! whose choking elms each year With eddying dust before their time turn gray, Pining for rain,—to me thy dust is dear; It glorifies the eve of summer day, And when the westering sun half sunken burns, 250 The mote-thick air to deepest orange turns, The westward horseman rides through clouds ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell
... he ordered the innocent slain. Beware of false prophets, Mr. Parris. They are more to be dreaded than the protean devil of which you speak. Be sure that you remove the beam from your own eye, before you try to see the mote in the eye of ...
— The Witch of Salem - or Credulity Run Mad • John R. Musick
... within the City. What powers the Knighten Guild possessed is not easy to define. Besides this, the aristocracy of the City, there were already trade guilds for religious purposes and for feasting—but, as yet, with no powers. The people had their folk mote, or general gathering: their ward mote: and their weekly hustings. We must not seek to define the powers of all these bodies and corporations. They overlapped each other: the aristocratic party was continually ...
— The History of London • Walter Besant
... their comparisons, and formed their conclusions, with the same deference to self-esteem, and the same submission to hope, as had been apparent among their competitors. It would seem to be a law of nature that men should thus flatter themselves, and perceive the mote in the eye of their neighbour, while the ...
— The Sea Lions - The Lost Sealers • James Fenimore Cooper
... ought to have joined the church because it was your duty," said Bertie, who could very clearly see the mote in her sister's eye, in spite of the beam in her own. "You will be a Christian soon, won't you? ...
— Katie Robertson - A Girls Story of Factory Life • Margaret E. Winslow
... ask Canadians To treat us not as fools; We cannot learn to play the game Until we learn the rules. We ask them not to try to take The mote from our eye, Nor say, till their own beam's removed, "No ...
— War Rhymes • Abner Cosens
... set His disapproval. "Judge not, that ye be not judged," He admonished, for, according to one's own standard of judging others, shall he himself be judged. The man who is always ready to correct his brother's faults, to remove the mote from his neighbor's eye so that that neighbor may see things as the interested and interfering friend would have him see, was denounced as a hypocrite. What was the speck in his neighbor's vision to the ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... the talk of a man with experience dight: Three maidens who borrowed the bloom of the dawn * Making hearts of their lovers in sorriest plight. They were hidden from eyes of the prier and spy * Who slept and their modesty mote not affright; So they opened whatever lay hid in their hearts * And in frolicsome fun began verse to indite. Quoth one fair coquette with her amorous grace * Whose teeth for the sweet of her speech ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 7 • Richard F. Burton
... to be sure, this mote of life and light; but before it is a vast evolution, Dane, on the pinnacle of which are to be found men and women, ...
— The Kempton-Wace Letters • Jack London
... Garrick does not tempt me at all. I have no taste for his perpetual buffoonery, and am sick of his endless expectation of flattery; but you who charge me with making a long visit to Lord and Lady Ossory,—you do not see the mote in your own eye; at least I am sure Lady Ailesbury does not see that in hers. I could not obtain a single day from her all last year, and with difficulty got her to give me a few hours this. There is always an indispensable pheasantry that ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... eavesdropper; your evil secrets have only a sobering and a saddening and a silencing effect upon him. Your house might be full of skeletons for anything he would ever discover or remember. The beam in his own eye is so big that he cannot see past it to speak about your small mote. 'The inward Christian,' says A Kempis, 'preferreth the care of himself before all other cares. He that diligently attendeth to himself can easily keep silence concerning other men. If thou attendest unto God and unto thyself, thou wilt be but little moved with what thou seest ...
— Bunyan Characters - Third Series - The Holy War • Alexander Whyte
... that they considered the procession of the nuptial couch extremely improper. But as the old saying goes—"A man can see the mote in his neighbour's eye when he cannot perceive the beam in his own;" and it struck me that the manner in which marriages are managed among the Europeans who are settled here, is much more unbecoming. ...
— A Woman's Journey Round the World • Ida Pfeiffer
... therefore began his pupil's initiation with great alacrity, first teaching him cautiously to open the cabinet door, lest any particles of dust should be dislodged and fix upon his canvas, and advising him never to take up his pencil without sitting motionless a few minutes, till every mote casually floating in the air should be settled. Such instructions were not thrown away upon Watersouchy: he treasured them up, and refined, if ...
— A Wanderer in Holland • E. V. Lucas
... Sun, my selfishness destroy, Thy atmosphere of Love be all my joy; Thy Presence be my sunshine ever bright, My soul the little mote that ...
— Daily Strength for Daily Needs • Mary W. Tileston
... distance—the boundless deep spread afar, till, at the misty edge of vision it bends, in mingling threefold circles, to embrace the globe, the impenetrable below and the infinite above him, how slight and insignificant a creature he seems! like a fly that clings to the ceiling, or a mote that swims in the sunbeam, one of the mere mites of nature, easily lost by the way or a frail figure ready to be crushed by any stroke of the ponderous machinery mid which he moves. When he reflects on his condition—his brief date, his speedy ...
— Gifts of Genius - A Miscellany of Prose and Poetry by American Authors • Various
... a state of beatitude always. What is a mote of dust in another's eye, in yours is a cataract. You are mad at your blindness, and fight the air ...
— The Morgesons • Elizabeth Stoddard
... is centre of a system of worlds of which our earth is almost the most insignificant; yet great as is the sun when compared to the little bit of matter on which we dwell and have our being, it is itself but a mote, as it were, in the beam of the Universe. Formerly this sun was thought to be fixed and immovable, but the progress of science demonstrated that while the earth moves around this luminary, the latter is moving with mighty velocity in an orbit of its own. Tis the same with all the other bodies which ...
— Marvels of Modern Science • Paul Severing
... accepting the proofs of the relative insignificance of the earth; they were more quickly convinced of the comparative littleness of the solar system; and now the evidence assails their reason that what they had regarded as the universe is only one mote gleaming in ...
— Curiosities of the Sky • Garrett Serviss
... The idea that that big blue field up there, empty by day and with such crowds of little faint dots in it all night, was the real thing—the big, final, and important thing—and that they and their churches and popes and pyramids and nations should just dance about it for millions of years like a mote in a sunbeam, hurt their feelings at first. But it did them good. It started them looking Up, and looking the ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... mother's domination. For Mark, when he was not "William Foster," was simply a high-spirited and happy youth, full of energy and of apparently normal desires and intentions. He had that sort of genius which can be long asleep in the dark, while its possessor dances, like a mote, in sunshine. ...
— Tongues of Conscience • Robert Smythe Hichens
... I know no place comparable to it in its own way. I know no place so pathetic, and yet so impressive, in its decay. It is not a ruin—all ruins are frauds—it is only decayed. It is a kind of Stokesay or Ightham Mote, better preserved than the first, and less furnished than the second, but on a grander scale than either, and set in incomparably finer surroundings. The path towards it passes the church, which has been spoiled. ...
— Alps and Sanctuaries of Piedmont and the Canton Ticino • Samuel Butler
... said nothing and his sour, pasty visage turned sourer. It was the one possibility that disturbed him—the only fly in the amber—the only mote that troubled his clairvoyance. Also, he was the only man among the three who didn't think a thing was certain to happen merely because he wanted ...
— The Dark Star • Robert W. Chambers
... the world mote stonde, And hath done sithen it began, And shall while there is any man, And that ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... faults can spy, And blame the mote that dims their eye, Each little speck and blemish find, To our own stronger errors blind. A turkey, tired of common food, Forsook the barn, and sought the wood; Behind her ran her infant train, Collecting ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... kind is that of magnifying and aggravating the faults of others; raising any small miscarriage into a heinous crime, any slender defect into an odious vice, and any common infirmity into a strange enormity; turning a small "mote in the eye" of our neighbour into a huge "beam," a little dimple in his face into a monstrous wen. This is plainly slander, at least in degree, and according to the surplusage whereby the censure doth exceed the fault. As he that, upon the score of a small debt, ...
— Sermons on Evil-Speaking • Isaac Barrow
... the influence of liquor when he made the remark in regard to Barton, and the one to whom he was talking was far from sober. They could both see the mote in Barton's eye, but failed to remove the beams ...
— From Wealth to Poverty • Austin Potter
... successive barons had already flourished on this spot when a younger son of the house accompanied his neighbor the Duke of Normandy in his descent on England, and was rewarded by a grant of English land, on which he dug a mote and built a chateau, and called it Beaurepaire (the worthy Saxons turned this into Borreper without delay). Since that day more than twenty gentlemen of the same lineage had held in turn the original chateau and lands, and handed them ...
— White Lies • Charles Reade
... were fair for Cobden to buy up land from owners whom he thought unconscious of its proper, value, it was fair enough for my Russian Jew to give credit to his farmers. Kelmar, if he was unconscious of the beam in his own eye, was at least silent in the matter of his brother's mote. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... plucked out the eyes of this Seer; but that would have been too direct; the devil works in a more cunning way. He let him see and seek the true and the good; but while the young man was contemplating them, the evil spirit blew one mote after another into each of his eyes; and such a proceeding would be hurtful even to the best sight. Then the fiend blew upon the motes, so that they became beams; and the eyes were destroyed, and the Seer stood like a blind man ...
— What the Moon Saw: and Other Tales • Hans Christian Andersen
... morning, and it pleasantly flooded this big living-room whose walls were entirely lined with the mellow backs of books. Here, as host, among his treasures, Swinburne was more than ever attractive. He was as happy as was any mote in the sunshine about him; and the fluttering of his little hands, and feet too, was but as a token of so much felicity. He looked older, it is true, in the strong light. But these added years made only more notable his youngness of heart. ...
— And Even Now - Essays • Max Beerbohm
... with great reverence and lovely dread turning ourselves with all our mights unto the working that our good Lord stirreth us to, rejoicing and thanking inwardly. And sometimes for plenteousness it breaketh out with voice and saith: Good Lord! great thanks be to Thee: blessed mote ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... Issy Sonata was his first cousin. He can tell you offhand which one of the Shuberts—Lee or Jake—wrote that Serenade. He speaks of Mozart and Beethoven in such a way a stranger would probably get the idea that Mote and Bate used to work for his folks. He can go to a musical show, and while the performance is going on he can tell everybody in his section just which composer each song number was stolen from, humming the original air aloud to show the points ...
— Cobb's Bill-of-Fare • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... as I was, You mote have let me bee, I never had come to the kings faire courte, To crave ...
— Book of Old Ballads • Selected by Beverly Nichols
... as children, we and our fathers before us, for generations, of the kingdom of God. Ay, my friends, these words, that kingdom, that King, witness this day against this land of England. Not merely against popery, the mote which we are trying to take out of the foreigner's eye, but against Mammon, the beam which we are overlooking in our own. Owe no man anything save love. "Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself." ...
— Sermons on National Subjects • Charles Kingsley
... will he haue you if he may, so mote I thriue, And he biddeth you sende him worde by me, That ye humbly beseech him, ye may his wife be, And that there shall be no let in you nor mistrust, But to be wedded on sunday next if he lust, And biddeth you to looke ...
— Roister Doister - Written, probably also represented, before 1553. Carefully - edited from the unique copy, now at Eton College • Nicholas Udall
... night at Covent Garden, as the Garden is turned into a Race-course for The Prodigal Daughter's steeplechase, and Drury Lane is wanted for the Pantomime. Sir DRURIOLANUS has his hands full—likewise his pockets. "So mote it be!" ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 103, December 17, 1892 • Various
... to pass a hundred (31) years after Othniel's reign. Conditions in Palestine were of such a nature that if a judge said to a man, "Remove the mote from thine eye," his reply was, "Do thou remove the beam from thine own." (32) To chastise the Israelites God sent down them one of the ten seasons of famine which He had ordained, as disciplinary measures for mankind, from the ...
— THE LEGENDS OF THE JEWS VOLUME IV BIBLE TIMES AND CHARACTERS - FROM THE EXODUS TO THE DEATH OF MOSES • BY LOUIS GINZBERG
... within, he thought: "Tradition, handed down for hours and hours, Tells that our globe, this quivering crystal world, Is slowly dying. What if, seconds hence, When I am very old, yon shimmering dome Come drawing down and down, till all things end?" Then with a weazen smirk he proudly felt No other mote of God had ever gained Such giant ...
— Practice Book • Leland Powers
... mocking-bird turned his head from side to side, then lifting his full throat he poured forth again his incomparable, superb, infinitely versatile melody, fixing his glittering eye on the moon, and heeding the futilely ambitious worldling no mote. ...
— The Moonshiners At Hoho-Hebee Falls - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... meeting,"—Samuel Adams. The limitations of this great man, as well as his powers, were those which belonged to him as chief among the men of English race who have swayed society through the medium of the ancient folk mote. At this time he was believed by many to be hostile to the new Constitution, and his influence in Massachusetts was still greater than that of any other man. Besides this, it was thought that the governor, ...
— The Critical Period of American History • John Fiske
... mote of Greater-Serbianism in Serbia's eye, but he was peculiarly anxious not to perceive the beam of Pan-Germanism which has blinded Germany's vision for a generation, and is the one and only cause for the rapid ...
— What Germany Thinks - The War as Germans see it • Thomas F. A. Smith
... Prince of thunder and lightning of his time. German, Japan shall be! he publicly swears before them all. M. Falarique damascenes his sharpest smile; M. Bobinikine double-dimples his puddingest; M. Mytharete rolls a forefinger over his beak; Dr. Bouthoin enlarges his eye on a sunny mote. And such is the masterful effect of a frank diplomacy, that when one party shows his hand, the others find the reverse of concealment in hiding ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... in the center of the earthwork, burst with a terrible crash, and sent steel splinters and fragments flying in every direction. A rain of dirt followed the rain of steel, and, when the colonel wiped the last mote from his eye, ...
— The Guns of Bull Run - A Story of the Civil War's Eve • Joseph A. Altsheler
... which then thou shalt possess, No mortal tongue can them declare: All earthly joys, compared with this, are less Than smallest mote to the world so fair. Then is not that man blest That must enjoy this rest? Full happy is that guest Invited to this feast, that ever, that ever ...
— The Sources and Analogues of 'A Midsummer-night's Dream' • Compiled by Frank Sidgwick
... issue was pressed temporarily into the background by the sudden demand of the railroad brotherhoods for shorter hours and mote pay, threatening a nation-wide strike if their plea was unheeded. Neither party wished to risk the labor vote by opposing the unions, and the public did not desire a strike, much as it deprecated the attitude of the labor leaders in threatening trouble at this juncture. The President took the ...
— The United States Since The Civil War • Charles Ramsdell Lingley
... right to go into the family purposely to watch over and find fault with any one member of it. If she had seen anything wrong in Jemima, Ruth loved her so much that she would have told her of it in private; and with many doubts, how far she was the one to pull out the mote from any one's eye, even in the most tender manner;—she would have had to conquer reluctance before she could have done even this; but there was something undefinably repugnant to her in the manner of acting which Mr Bradshaw ...
— Ruth • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... crest, That all the summer, with a tuneful wing, Makes merry chirpings in its grassy nest, Inspirited with dew to leap and sing:— So let us also live, eternal King! Partakers of the green and pleasant earth:— Pity it is to slay the meanest thing, That, like a mote, shines in the smile of mirth:— Enough there is of joy's decrease ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... cloud, so does mirthfulness frequently proceed from a heart susceptible of the deepest melancholy. Many and true are the simple tales of Irish life which could prove this. Many a fair laughing girl who has danced in happiness, light as a mote in the sunbeam, has been suddenly left in darkness, bowed down in youth and beauty to the grave, and though the little circle of which she was the centre may have been disturbed by her untimely life, yet in brief space, except to a few yearning and stricken hearts ...
— Lha Dhu; Or, The Dark Day - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... that the world lost in a moment its joyousness, the sunshine its warmth. The greenness and beauty round me, which an instant before had filled me with pleasure, seemed on a sudden no more than a grim and cruel jest at my expense, and I an atom perishing unmarked and unnoticed. Yes, an atom, a mote; the bitterness of that feeling I well remember. Then, in no long time—being a soldier—I recovered my coolness, and, retaining the power to think, decided what it ...
— A Gentleman of France • Stanley Weyman
... ascertains he has merely been temporarily blinded by the excess of light which emanates from St. John, who proceeds to examine him in regard to Charity. His answers are greeted by the heavenly chorus with the chant "Holy, holy, holy," in which Beatrice joins, ere she clears the last mote away from Dante's eyes and thus enables him to see more plainly than ever. Our poet now perceives a fourth spirit, in whom he recognizes Adam, father of mankind, who retells the story of Eden, adding that, ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... small, shiny nut-coal. The draughts were put on, and in five minutes the coals were red. In these five minutes the stove and the mantel were dusted, the hearth brushed up, and there was neither chip nor mote to tell the tale. It was not like an Irish fire, that reaches out into the middle of the room with its volcanic margin ...
— We Girls: A Home Story • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... and tell him, once for all, that he was not to be trusted. He held aloof from Jim and he was scantily civil to Dick Thomas, whose friendship rang false. He pushed the work ahead while the air was still alive with swirls of mote-like snowflakes, and himself bore the brunt of it just to dull that gnawing self-disgust which made his waking hours ...
— The Uphill Climb • B. M. Bower
... covered no more than fifty yards when the third bomb fell from that plane so far aloft that it was not even a mote in the sky. Up there the sky was not even blue, but a dull leaden gray because of the thinness of the atmosphere yet above it. The men in that high-flight bomber could see the ground only as a mass of vaguely blending colors. They were aiming their bombs by filtered light, through telescopes ...
— Morale - A Story of the War of 1941-43 • Murray Leinster
... originate, start, found. Belief, faith, persuasion, conviction, tenet, creed. Belittle, decry, depreciate, disparage. Bind, secure, fetter, shackle, gyve. Bit, jot, mite, particle, grain, atom, speck, mote, whit, iota, tittle, scintilla. Bluff, blunt, outspoken, downright, brusk, curt, crusty. Boast, brag, vaunt, vapor, gasconade. Body, corpse, remains, relics, carcass, cadaver, corpus. Bombastic, sophomoric, turgid, tumid, grandiose, grandiloquent, magniloquent. Boorish, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... sunshine,—so agitated by storm,—so bereaved of halcyon days,—'twould be most cruel to deny him the grave's dearest privilege, peace and quiet. Amen! Amen! with all my heart to thy benediction and prayer, O priest! as, aspersing his lifeless remains with holy-water, thou sayest, Requiescat! So mote it be! Requiescat! ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 74, December, 1863 • Various
... road. We are dapper little busybodies, and run this way and that way superserviceably; but they swerve never from their fore-ordained paths,—neither the sun, nor the moon, nor a bubble of air, nor a mote of dust. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 • Various
... down to be saying the same thing as French Atheists? It would break my heart to think that of you. And O, Erchie, here are'na YOU setting up to JUDGE? And have ye no forgot God's plain command - the First with Promise, dear? Mind you upon the beam and the mote!" ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... phrase is always applied when people, with pretence of friendship, do you an ill turn, as one licking a mote out of your eye makes ...
— The Proverbs of Scotland • Alexander Hislop |
