"Pygmean" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Poet who cries 'Westward Ho!' But he has not got into the woods yet in this play. He is only on the edge of them as yet. It is under the blue roof of that same dome which is 'too high,' the princess here says, to belong to the pygmy that this Philosopher likes so well to bring out and to measure under that canopy—it is 'out of doors' that this new speech on behalf of a new learning is spoken. But there is a close rim of conventionalities about us still. It ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... large man suspecting his presence and lying in wait for him with a revolver. This was not a comforting thought. Of course, if a man is going to fire a revolver at you it makes little difference whether he is a giant or a pygmy, but Mr Pickering was in no frame of mind for nice reasoning. It was the thought of Bill's physique which kept ...
— Uneasy Money • P.G. Wodehouse
... bursting! He threw out his arms in a momentary instinct of fiercely struggling consciousness. The idols on the walls jeered at him. Those strangely clad warriors seemed to him now to be looking down upon his discomfiture with a satanic smile, mocking the pygmy who had dared to raise his hand against one so jealously guarded. Clang once more went the blacksmith's ...
— The Illustrious Prince • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... to fell the oak," replied the pygmy. "I am a god and a hero from the tribes that ...
— National Epics • Kate Milner Rabb
... the aid, and avert all the harm, that might be in our power. This affair settled, a marvellous jollity entered into the whole tribe of us, manifesting itself characteristically in each individual. The old showman, sitting down to his barrel-organ, stirred up the souls of the pygmy people with one of the quickest tunes in the music-book; tailors, blacksmiths, gentlemen, and ladies, all seemed to share in the spirit of the occasion; and the Merry-Andrew played his part more facetiously ...
— The Seven Vagabonds (From "Twice Told Tales") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... with its brilliant glow. But if any shifting motion caused her to turn pale there was the mark again, a crimson stain upon the snow, in what Aylmer sometimes deemed an almost fearful distinctness. Its shape bore not a little similarity to the human hand, though of the smallest pygmy size. Georgiana's lovers were wont to say that some fairy at her birth hour had laid her tiny hand upon the infant's cheek, and left this impress there in token of the magic endowments that were to ...
— The Short-story • William Patterson Atkinson
... very human; the other very handsome, with frank open innocent features, very prepossessing. They are quick and intelligent, capable of deep affection and gratitude, showing remarkable industry and patience. A pygmy boy of eighteen worked with consuming zeal; time with him was too precious to waste in talk. His mind seemed ever concentrated on work. ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth
... use to each one in proportion to the measure of his knowledge. For it is of most use to him who knows the most and of least use to him who knows little. For as the sword of Hercules in the hand of a pygmy or dwarf is ineffective, while the same sword in the hand of Achilles or Hector strikes down everything like a thunderbolt, so dialectic, if it is deprived of the vigor of the other disciplines is to a certain degree crippled and almost useless. If it is vigorous through the might ...
— Readings in the History of Education - Mediaeval Universities • Arthur O. Norton
... Recently a pygmy skeleton was discovered near Los Angeles which is claimed to be about twenty thousand years old, but we do not know whether this man knew how to build a fire or not. We do know, however, that the American camper was here on this continent when our ...
— Shelters, Shacks and Shanties • D.C. Beard
... conceive that the biographer had never contemplated the poet in any other capacity than, with sealing-wax in his hand and string between his lips, shuddering under the eye of Miss Nightingale. The occasional references to Lord Wolseley suggest an unaccountable hurrying figure of pygmy size, which Mr. Strachey can only just discern. This attitude ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... a passion for truth; always an imperious thirst for glory instead of devotion to the good; always the ambitious artist, never the citizen, the believer, the man. Chateaubriand posed all his life as the wearied Colossus, smiling pitifully upon a pygmy world, and contemptuously affecting to desire nothing from it, though at the same time wishing it to be believed that he could if he pleased possess himself of everything by mere force of genius. He is the type of an untoward race, ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... days of disaster and terror stricken San Francisco was absolutely under the control of General Funston, a few facts about his career will be appropriate here. Red-headed, red-blooded; a pygmy in stature, a giant in experience; true son of Romany in peace and of Erin in war—the capture of Aguinaldo in the wilds of North Luzon and his control of affairs in San Francisco fairly top off the adventurous career of Frederick ...
— Complete Story of the San Francisco Horror • Richard Linthicum
... in ages when the Dreadful Bird Stamped his huge footprints, and the Fearful Beast Strode with the flesh about those fossil bones We build to mimic life with pygmy hands,— Not in those earliest days when men ran wild And gashed each other with their knives of stone, When their low foreheads bulged in ridgy brows And their flat hands were callous in the palm With walking in the fashion of their sires, Grope as ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... Lilliput existence. A child can learn from another child, of course, but the model is the adult. Some day the child will be an adult itself. A pretty state of affairs it would be if an eternal child, a born pygmy, were to be its model! But that's what all this rubbish about Switzerland really amounts to. Why on earth should we, of all people, take the smallest and meanest country as our model? Things are small enough here anyhow. Switzerland is the serf of Europe. Have you ever heard ...
— Look Back on Happiness • Knut Hamsun
... of pygmy size, its shrunk limbs distorted and fleshless, and its lank body covered with filthy rags; its head, of enormous size, was entirely devoid of hair; and the unnatural shape as well as the prodigious dimensions of that bald cranium, betokened beastly idiocy. Its features, ghastly and ...
— City Crimes - or Life in New York and Boston • Greenhorn
... rows. The women wear a bunch of leaves in front and behind. The weapons are the same as elsewhere, except that here we find the feathered arrows which are such a rarity in the Pacific. It is surprising to find these here, in these secluded valleys among the pygmy race, and only here, near Talamacco, nowhere else where the same race is found. It is an open question whether these feathered arrows are an original invention in these valleys, an importation or a remnant of ...
— Two Years with the Natives in the Western Pacific • Felix Speiser
... the scientific observation of pygmy people are illustrated in No. 21 and Nos. 22-25 respectively. Though much has been written about the Pygmies, Messrs. Skeat and Blagden's account of the Semang people is by far the most thorough ...
— Folklore as an Historical Science • George Laurence Gomme
... either Nile or pygmy, is an animal of serene mind and steady habits. Their appetites work with clock- like regularity, and require no winding. I can not recall that any one of our five hippos was ever sick for a day, or missed a meal. When the idiosyncrasies of Gunda, our bad elephant, ...
— The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals • William T. Hornaday
... and small feathered things. The otters had not frightened him, because he still measured things by size, and Nekik was not half as big as Kazan. But the bear was a monster beside which Kazan would have stood a mere pygmy. He was big. If nature was taking this way of introducing Baree to the fact that there were more important creatures in the forests than dogs and wolves and owls and crayfish, she was driving the point home ...
— Baree, Son of Kazan • James Oliver Curwood
... replied the orator. "And it is not Paris alone, it is all France, which, with us, entreats you to decide upon delivering her from this tyrant. All is ready; nothing is wanting but a sign from your august head to annihilate this pygmy, who has attempted to assault the ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... swelled to a piercing wail. His lungs were laboring from the violence of his exertions; again and again he barely escaped from the curling whips of metal tentacles. And now the monster was hardly a foot high; the huge condensers and tubes and colossal machinery were like those of a pygmy laboratory. And overhead the roof ...
— Raiders of the Universes • Donald Wandrei
... not an extreme type. One may judge from modern pygmy and Bushmen that his color was reddish or yellow, and his skull was sometimes round like the Mongolian. He entered Africa not less than fifty thousand years ago and settled eventually in the broad region between Lake Chad and the Great ...
— The Negro • W.E.B. Du Bois
... quivers, torches, We turned to seek for sweeter—fresher things! Instead of sipping in a pygmy glass Dull fashionable waters,—did we try How the soul slakes its thirst in fearless draught By drinking from the river's ...
— Cyrano de Bergerac • Edmond Rostand
... of mythology through all its gradations of fullness and fineness can be traced in the religious systems of the world.[1734] Where there is no recognizable worship there is, of course, no mythology. This is the case in Australia, in Pygmy lands, in Tierra del Fuego, in parts of New Guinea, and perhaps elsewhere.[1735] Scarcely above these are parts of Central and Southern Africa, the countries of the Bantu, the Hottentots, and the Bushmen.[1736] A feeble mythological invention appears ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy
... The pygmies were a nation of dwarfs always at war with the cranes of Scythia. They were not above a foot high, and lived somewhere at the "end of the earth"—either in Thrace, Ethiopia, India, or the Upper Nile. The pygmy women were mothers at the age of three, and old women at eight. Their houses were built of egg-shells. They cut down a blade of wheat with an axe and hatchet, as ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... Skepsey civilly intervened; subsequently inviting him to leave the carriage and receive a lesson at the station they were nearing. Upon his promising faithfully, that it should be a true and telling lesson, the navvy requested this pygmy spark to flick his cheek, merely to show he meant war in due sincerity; and he as faithfully, all honour, promising not to let it bring about a breakage of the laws of the Company, Skepsey promptly did the deed. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... infinitesimal puffs in black and white. I knew that shells of enormous calibre were wrecking trenches, blasting out huge craters; and yet not a sound, not the faintest reverberation of a gun. Here was a sight almost to make one laugh at man's idea of the importance of his pygmy wars. ...
— High Adventure - A Narrative of Air Fighting in France • James Norman Hall
... Doraine was not alone; she sailed a sea whose every foot was charted, whose every depth was sounded. She sailed in an age of Titans, while the caravel was a frolicksome pygmy, dancing to the music of a thousand winds, buffeted today, becalmed tomorrow, but always a snail on the face of the waters. Four hundred years ago Vespucci and his men were lost in the wilderness of waves. Out of touch with the world were they for months,—aye, even ...
— West Wind Drift • George Barr McCutcheon
... event, wars will be of a magnitude besides which the present struggle will seem pygmy; and will rage over the surface of the earth, for the gaining and retaining of the mastery of ...
— The Navy as a Fighting Machine • Bradley A. Fiske
... littleness &c. adj.; smallness &c. (of quantity) 32; exiguity, inextension[obs3]; parvitude[obs3], parvity[obs3]; duodecimo[obs3]; Elzevir edition, epitome, microcosm; rudiment; vanishing point; thinness &c. 203. dwarf, pygmy, pigmy[obs3], Liliputian, chit, pigwidgeon[obs3], urchin, elf; atomy[obs3], dandiprat[obs3]; doll, puppet; Tom Thumb, Hop-o'-my- thumb[obs3]; manikin, mannikin; homunculus, dapperling[obs3], cock-sparrow. animalcule, monad, mite, insect, emmet[obs3], fly, midge, gnat, shrimp, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... at the roots, while its tip was flat and wide. The eyes were dark brown and the hair was black and coarse. If we were to judge the population by the women only, we might call the Otomis true pygmies. The average stature of 28 subjects was 1,435 millimeters—while Sir William Flower's limit for pygmy ...
— In Indian Mexico (1908) • Frederick Starr
... across a trestle that spanned a deep, dry gash in the earth. In the green bottom huddled a cluster of pygmy cattle and mounted men; farther down were two white flakes of tents, like huge snowflakes left unmelted ...
— The Lure of the Dim Trails • by (AKA B. M. Sinclair) B. M. Bower
... Decree contrary to their will, and contrary to the wishes, the interests, and the bare well-being of their populations. "You will see," wrote an observant American representative abroad, "that Napoleon stalks at a gigantic stride among the pygmy monarchs of Europe, and bends them to his policy. It is even an equal chance if Russia, after all her blustering, does not accede to his demands without striking a blow."[185] To meet the danger Great Britain opposed a maritime dominion, equally exclusive, equally ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 1 • Alfred Thayer Mahan
... part of me. I fought him in imagination during school-hours; I dreamed of fighting with him at night, when he would suddenly expand into a giant twelve feet high, and then as suddenly shrink into a pygmy so small that I couldn't hit him. In this latter shape he would get into my hair, or pop into my waistcoat-pocket, treating me with as little ceremony as the Liliputians showed Captain Lemuel Gulliver—all of which was not ...
— The Story of a Bad Boy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... group of primitive men has attracted more attention from the civilized world than the pygmy blacks. From the time of Homer and Aristotle the pygmies, although their existence was not absolutely known at that early period, have had their place in fable and legend, and as civilized man has become more and more acquainted with the unknown parts ...
— Negritos of Zambales • William Allan Reed
... had seen the new continent rise above the boundless waters of Hydrot. I knew the ship; she carried about eighteen hundred passengers, and a crew of seventy-five men and officers. Beside her, the Ertak was a pygmy; that the larger ship, so large and powerful, could be ...
— The Terror from the Depths • Sewell Peaslee Wright
... is born a pygmy, so to speak. It required the support and forces of two powers as great as Spain and France in order to attain independence. A day will come when it will be a giant, even a colossus formidable ...
— The United States in the Light of Prophecy • Uriah Smith
... the dead body of my foeman, and as I thought of the battle I had just fought and won a great idea was born in my brain—the outcome of this and the suggestion that Perry had made within the city of Phutra. If skill and science could render a comparative pygmy the master of this mighty brute, what could not the brute's fellows accomplish with the same skill and science. Why all Pellucidar would be at their feet—and I would be their king and ...
— At the Earth's Core • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... on. The Celts, especially, had a lively faith in fairies, and it was from Wales, Scotland, and Ireland that many stories about them became current in Europe after the tenth century. Some students have explained the belief in fairies as due to memories of an ancient pygmy people dwelling in underground homes. But most of these supernatural beings seem to be the descendants of the spirits and demons which in ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... this picture I exaggerate nothing. How feeble is language to depict the stupendous barbarism! How small by its side the bloody games which degraded ancient Rome! How pygmy the one, how colossal the other! Would you know how the combat is conducted? Here is the briefest picture of the arena by a ...
— The Duel Between France and Germany • Charles Sumner
... sounded as remote as if the speaker bestrode some peak of the Chiricahuas to address a pygmy in a canyon below. "I know of no law which states that I may not employ whom I choose on my own land. If a man does his job and makes no trouble, his past does not matter. I am as ready to fire a former Union soldier as I ...
— Rebel Spurs • Andre Norton
... section of the nineteenth century discoveries have been made which fit in admirably with our argument. Rediscoveries, perhaps, we should call them, for they were imperfectly known in ancient times, but only recently have they fairly come within human ken. We refer to the Pygmy tribes of the African forests, not definitely offered hitherto as aids to the elucidation of this problem, yet which seem to adapt themselves closely to it, and certainly help essentially in filling the gap between civilized man ...
— Man And His Ancestor - A Study In Evolution • Charles Morris
... whole episode with the seal of ineffable meanness and double dealing. He recalled the cowardice displayed by the Prince when Stampoff urged him to seize the vacant throne, and his gorge rose at the thought that Joan had been driven from his arms in order that this pygmy might secure the annual pittance that would supply his lusts in Paris. At that moment Alec was Berserk with impotent rage. His mother's complicity in the banishing of Joan denied him a victim on whom ...
— A Son of the Immortals • Louis Tracy
... dominion of his own self. That is the first great release. Look at the sufferings which come upon us from our narrow and limited experience and sympathy. We each stand quite alone, a solitary unit, a pygmy in the world. What good fortune can we expect? The great life of the world rushes by, and we are in danger each instant that it will overwhelm us or even utterly destroy us. There is no defence to be offered to it; no opposition army can be set up, because ...
— Light On The Path and Through the Gates of Gold • Mabel Collins
... famous print of him—in the old wig, in the stout old hideous Windsor uniform—as the King of Brobdingnag, peering at a little Gulliver, whom he holds up in his hand, whilst in the other he has an opera-glass, through which he surveys the pygmy? Our fathers chose to set up George as the type of a great king; and the little Gulliver was the great Napoleon. We prided ourselves on our prejudices; we blustered and bragged with absurd vainglory; we dealt to our enemy a monstrous injustice ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... height, are light brown in colour, and wear no garments when on their native heath. They are the shyest of all the tribes I encountered. These diminutive creatures seldom enter the service of the white man and prefer the wild life of the jungle. I was informed in the Congo that the real pygmy is fast disappearing from the map. Intermarriage with other tribes, and settlement into more or less permanent villages, have increased the height of the present generation and helped to remove one of the last human links with Stanley's ...
— An African Adventure • Isaac F. Marcosson
... in contemplating the possibility of their having descended from a common progenitor. Yet the disparity is no greater than that between the Shire horse and the Shetland pony, the Shorthorn and the Kerry cattle, or the Patagonian and the Pygmy; and all dog breeders know how easy it is to produce a variety in type and size ...
— Dogs and All About Them • Robert Leighton
... marble halls at Washington. Nor is it our vast dominion on which, like England's, the sun never sets. You will find it rather in workshop and store and factory; it is no more nor less than our men. If the capital at Washington is founded on pygmy manhood, it will be blown away like thistledown before some passing wind of revolution. Russia, Turkey, Spain, will tell you that. If our men are giants, the nation will be lasting as adamant. England and Germany ...
— Prize Orations of the Intercollegiate Peace Association • Intercollegiate Peace Association
... which Mayo surveyed was more lonely than ever, for the Ethel and May was standing off across the heaving surface toward the main and the hulk was left alone in the expanse of ocean. He felt very much of a pygmy and very helpless as he scrambled about over the icy decks. He remembered that faith can move mountains, but he was as yet unable to determine just what power would be able to move that steamer, into whose vitals the reef of ...
— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day
... usually disappoints the modern hunter for the picturesque, who after wearying himself with the follies of a capital seeks the most violent tonic that he can find in the lonely terrors of glacier and peak, and sees only tameness in a pygmy island, that offers nothing sublimer than a high grassy terrace, some cool over-branching avenues, some mimic vales, and meadows and vineyards sloping down to the sheet of blue water at their feet. Yet, as one sits here on a summer day, ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... present pygmy state love is indeed a stranger to most people. Misunderstood and shunned, it rarely takes root; or if it does, it soon withers and dies. Its delicate fiber can not endure the stress and strain of the daily grind. Its soul is too complex to adjust itself to the slimy ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman |
