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Literal   /lˈɪtərəl/   Listen
Literal

adjective
1.
Being or reflecting the essential or genuine character of something.  Synonyms: actual, genuine, real.  "A literal solitude like a desert" , "A genuine dilemma"
2.
Without interpretation or embellishment.
3.
Limited to the explicit meaning of a word or text.
4.
Avoiding embellishment or exaggeration (used for emphasis).



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"Literal" Quotes from Famous Books



... caught? Yes,' replied Sir John, 'he will certainly be caught—probably when he commits his next crime. A whole army of bloodhounds, metaphorical and literal, will be on his track the moment he draws blood again. With the whole community against him, he cannot escape, especially when it be remembered that he chooses the quietest hour in the twenty-four to ...
— The Lodger • Marie Belloc Lowndes

... still came to inquire with the solicitude of seeming friendship, but outside that house he was busy breathing life into a scheme of broad and parlous scope, and in all but a literal sense that scheme was a ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck

... translation into verse, and especially into rhymed verse, cannot be as literal as a translation into prose; this disadvantage I have used my best pains to minimize. I hope it may be said that nothing of real moment has been omitted from the verses; and where lack of metrical skill has compelled expansion, I have striven to ...
— The Little Clay Cart - Mrcchakatika • (Attributed To) King Shudraka

... and that "all countries came into Egypt to Joseph to buy corn." And of course the universally admitted existence of such a class of passages, in which words are not to be accepted in their rigidly literal meanings, but with certain great modifications, renders the task of determining and distinguishing such passages from others in which the meaning is definite and strict, not only legitimate, but also laudable; and justifies us in inquiring whether those passages descriptive of the ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller

... it is often impossible for foreign authors to know the English language title under which a work is being exploited, especially as it is often not a literal translation. She, therefore, asked that a NIE not be invalidated if it gives the literal translation of the foreign title, and later it is determined that the English language title under which the work is exploited is different ...
— Supplementary Copyright Statutes • Library of Congress. Copyright Office.

... caressing, by appealing to the weak or the base in you, will often persuade you what fine and splendid books they are. (Of course, I use the word "true" in a wide and essential significance. I do not necessarily mean true to literal fact; I mean true to the plane of experience in which the book moves. The truthfulness of *Ivanhoe*, for example, cannot be estimated by the same standards as the truthfulness of Stubbs's *Constitutional ...
— LITERARY TASTE • ARNOLD BENNETT

... this did George Muller ever resort to the lot: once at a literal parting of the ways when he was led by it to take the wrong fork of the road, and afterward in a far more important matter, but with a like result: in both cases he found he had been misled, and henceforth abandoned all such chance methods of determining the mind of God. ...
— George Muller of Bristol - His Witness to a Prayer-Hearing God • Arthur T. Pierson

... had been declaiming upon the dangers from Catholic supremacy and the subserviency of the Irish vote to the Church of Rome, and upon the absolute necessity of the supremacy of the Democratic party; upon the Apocalypse and the seven seals. He had been maintaining the literal infallibility of the Scriptures, and the necessity of treating some portions as legendary. It would be hard to say what inconsistent views he had not set forth within the space of the past hour; and all this with the utmost intensity, and yet with the utmost good-humor, ...
— By The Sea - 1887 • Heman White Chaplin

... me always the honor of your good graces; and believe, my charming Sister, that never brother in the world loved with such tenderness a sister so charming as mine; in short, believe, dear Sister, that without compliments, and in literal truth, I am yours ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. IX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle

... is a [ef]two edged sword, sharp in a literal, and sharp in an allegoricall exposition. Hitherto you haue heard the history, now there remaineth a mistery, nihil enim hic ludicrum aut lubricum saith [eg]Augustine, and therefore [eh]diuines vnderstand ...
— An Exposition of the Last Psalme • John Boys

... patterns of the basketry were reproduced in incised lines. When these peoples came to paint their wares it was natural that the colored patterns native to the basketry should also be reproduced, and many more or less literal transfers by copying are to be found. A fine example of these painted textile designs is shown in Fig. 354. It is executed in a masterly style upon a handsome vase of the white ware of ancient Tusayan. Not only are the details reproduced with all their geometric exactness, but the ...
— A Study Of The Textile Art In Its Relation To The Development Of Form And Ornament • William H. Holmes

... it in an airplane. As a result of the extraordinary advantage which the Austrians enjoy in this respect, it has been found necessary to screen certain of the roads not only on both sides but above, so that in places the traffic passes for miles through literal tunnels of matting. This road masking is a simple form of the art of concealment to which the French have given the name "camouflage," which has been developed to an extraordinary degree on the Western Front. That the Italians have not made a greater ...
— Italy at War and the Allies in the West • E. Alexander Powell

... and the mother of the gods (Cybele) was taurobolio criobolio que in aeternum renatus." (2) "In the procedure of the Taurobolia and Criobolia," says Mr. J. M. Robertson, (3) "which grew very popular in the Roman world, we have the literal and original meaning of the phrase 'washed in the blood of the lamb' (4); the doctrine being that resurrection and eternal life were secured by drenching or sprinkling with the actual blood of a sacrificial bull or ram." (5) For the POPULARITY ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter

... at the end of the same letter he added: "Speak not of South America to anyone out of your family, for there is treason in the very name." What did he mean by that? He spoke of "digging gold in South America," and clearly did not mean it in the strict literal sense. ...
— The Life of Captain Matthew Flinders • Ernest Scott

... way more untruthful. The Latter-day Saints have but one "Bible" and that the Holy Bible of Christendom. They place it foremost amongst the standard works of the Church; they accept its admonitions and its doctrines, and accord thereto a literal significance; it is to them, and ever has been, the word of God, a compilation made by human agency of works by various inspired writers; they accept its teachings in fulness, modifying the meaning in no wise, except in the rare cases of undoubted ...
— The Story of "Mormonism" • James E. Talmage

... in my hearing (said Luther) that he was earnest against the Anabaptists, as contemners of God's word, and also against those which attributed too much to the literal word, for (said he) such do sin against God and his almighty power; as the Jews did in naming the ark, God. But, (said he) whoso holdeth a mean between both, the same is taught what is the right use of the ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge

... difficulty to the Japanese cannot be even faintly imagined by anyone unfamiliar with the construction of the native tongue—a language so different from his own that the very simplest Japanese phrase cannot be intelligibly rendered into English by a literal translation of the words or even the form of the thought. And he must learn all this upon a diet no English boy could live on; and always thinly clad in his poor cotton dress without even a fire in his schoolroom during the ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan • Lafcadio Hearn

... crimes between the races, Miss Willard said in her annual address that this statement "put an unjust imputation upon half the white race." But as this expression has been misunderstood she desires to declare that she did not intend a literal interpretation to be given to the language used, but employed it to express a tendency that might ensue in public thought as a result of utterances so sweeping as some that have been made by ...
— The Red Record - Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynching in the United States • Ida B. Wells-Barnett

... accumulated since 1901, when the system was first put in force, a collection of more than two hundred thousand prints. It is all a matter of system, of scientific and literal exactness, and there is no margin of error. A mistake in identification ...
— Scotland Yard - The methods and organisation of the Metropolitan Police • George Dilnot

... his own way. He was too robustly original to "transcribe" well, and his bold emphatic speech, curbed to the task of reproducing the choice and pregnant sobriety of Attic style, is apt to eliminate everything but the sobriety. The "transcribed" Greek is often yet flatter than "literal" versions of Greek verse are wont to be, and when Browning speaks in his own person the style recovers itself with a sudden and vehement bound, like a noble wild creature abruptly released from restraint. Among the finest of these "recoveries" are the bursts of description which Balaustion's enthusiasm ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford

... of culture. The vocabulary used is limited. An intelligent observer says: "The vocabulary of the native community is the meagerest I have ever known, except that of the immigrant." There are, however, very few illiterates; none, indeed, in the literal meaning of ...
— Quaker Hill - A Sociological Study • Warren H. Wilson

... Meinhold's "Amber Witch" has more of the true romantic spirit than Tieck, who was its professional representative. On the contrary, it has less of the romantic spirit, but more of the mediaeval fact. It is a literal, realistic handling of the witch superstition, as Balzac's "Succube," in the "Contes Drolatiques" is a satirical version of similar material. But Tieck's "Maerchen" are the shadows thrown by mediaeval ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers

... work, and which have a factitious value set upon them by the public, as they are taken to be the signs and passwords of initiation into the new school. But, lying deeper than these, there is a danger to Pre-Raphaelitism from the tendency to insist on too literal an application of its own principles. The best principles will not include all cases. The workings and ways of Nature are infinite, and the principles of Art are finite deductions from these infinite examples. As yet these deductions ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various

... view were from that time abandoned, and he was not only permitted, but assisted to rise and quit what had been, in a literal sense, his couch of confinement. But he was not allowed to leave the hut; for the young Highlander had now rejoined his senior, and one or other was constantly on the watch. Whenever Waverley approached the cottage door, the sentinel upon duty civilly, but resolutely, ...
— Waverley • Sir Walter Scott

... OF THE NETHERLANDS was translated by Lieut. E. B. Eastwick, and originally published abroad for students' use. But this translation was too strictly literal for general readers. It has been carefully revised, and some portions have been entirely rewritten by the Rev. A. J. W. Morrison, who also has so ably translated the HISTORY ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller

... from the writings of both poets, which would seem to indicate that Heine had borrowed many of his ideas and even some forms of expression from Byron. Except in the case of the most literal correspondence, this is generally a very unsafe deduction. Such passages as a rule prove nothing more than a similarity, possibly quite independent, in the trend of their pessimistic thought. Compare ...
— Types of Weltschmerz in German Poetry • Wilhelm Alfred Braun

... go to the country for a few days this afternoon, so that it will be unnecessary to send me any more sheets till I return. The Dissertation upon the Origin of Languages is to be printed at the end of the Theory. There are some literal errors in the printed copy of it which I should have been glad to have corrected, but have not the opportunity, as I have no copy by me. They are of no great consequence. In the titles, both of the Theory and Dissertation, call me simply Adam Smith without ...
— Life of Adam Smith • John Rae

... observed however that it often proves a very difficult matter to trace the connexion between the figurative and the literal sense of the stanza. The essentials in the composition of the pantun, for such these little pieces are called, the longer being called dendang, are the rhythmus and the figure, particularly the latter, which they consider as the life and spirit of the poetry. I had a proof of this in an attempt ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden

... not the literal beloved, but the purified stainless image of her,—surely this would be to ascend into the region of spiritual love, a love unhampered and untainted by ...
— The Worshipper of the Image • Richard Le Gallienne

... and though they often have ties of family and other stabilizing responsibilities, their lives are subject to periods of unemployment, and these fluctuations serve to feed their innate restlessness. They are, in quite the literal sense of the word, American proletarians. They are more volatile than any European proletarian, for they have learned the lesson of migration, and they retain the socialistic and anarchistic philosophy of ...
— The Armies of Labor - Volume 40 in The Chronicles Of America Series • Samuel P. Orth

... him by strategem. He was brought to London, tried, and condemned to death with sixteen accomplices, dragged from Westminster to the Tower, and there hanged. "When he had there breathed out his wretched soul," he was drawn and quartered—a literal account of which, as given in Matthew Paris, I forbear to set down—and the quarters of his body sent to the four principal cities of England. His father, Geoffrey, fled to France, and the island came under the government of Henry de Tracy for ...
— Lynton and Lynmouth - A Pageant of Cliff & Moorland • John Presland

... Shakespeare, in his "Julius Caesar," makes a like use of Sir Thomas North's translation of Plutarch; the speech of Mark Antony over the body of Caesar, to cite the most striking instance among many, is almost a literal transcription of North's version, but subjected ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer

... mercantile colony Marseilles flourished, and sent forth other colonies, that formed settlements along the Ligurian coast, as a Literal crown from Ampurias and Rhode in Catalonia to the confines of Etruria. Free, rich, protected by the Roman legions, these Greek settlements cultivated the arts and sciences with ardour, as well as carrying on the trade of ...
— In Troubadour-Land - A Ramble in Provence and Languedoc • S. Baring-Gould

... the world of imaginative readers, and has become the type of a school of poetry of its own-and, in evident earnest, attributes its success to the few words of commendation with which we had prefaced it in this paper.—It will throw light on his sane character to give a literal copy of the note: ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe

... other writers used the word in this its original sense; and Johnson explains it "to cultivate by manual labour," according to its literal derivation. In one passage Shakespeare uses the word somewhat ...
— The plant-lore & garden-craft of Shakespeare • Henry Nicholson Ellacombe

... June we left central China for Tientsin and further north, sailing by coastwise steamer from Shanghai, again plowing through the turbid waters which give literal exactness to the name Yellow Sea. Our steamer touched at Tsingtao, taking on board a body of German troops, and again at Chefoo, and it was only between these two points that the sea was not strongly turbid. Nor was this all. From early morning of the 10th until we anchored at Tientsin, ...
— Farmers of Forty Centuries - or, Permanent Agriculture in China, Korea and Japan • F. H. King

... old-wives' fables; but observe, he always trembles when he tells his own. But they are all true; there is not one old-wife's fable on the list. Necromancers have had private interviews with visitors who had no right to be seen this side the Styx. The Witch of Endor and the raising of Samuel were literal facts. Above all others, the Nemesis and Eumenides were facts not to be withstood. And, philosophize as we may, ghosts have been seen at dead of night, and not always under the conduct of Mercury;[6] ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various

... its nature must be. I concluded that no ultimate particle of it—as with matter no atom—is ever added to or removed from the universe. Now, if we could succeed in removing from this inexpansible, universal ocean of ether even the most ultimate portion, there would be a literal vacuum with nothing to fill it, and the equilibrium of the universe would be destroyed. Now, gentlemen, is or is not this ...
— A Strange Discovery • Charles Romyn Dake

... rain. The old cadet cap was older yet, the ancient boots as grotesquely large, the curious lift of his hand to Heaven no less curious than it had always been. He was as awkward, as hypochondriac, as literal, as strict as ever. Moreover, there should have hung about him the cloud of disfavour and hostility raised by that icy march to Romney less than three months ago. And yet—and yet! What had happened since ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston

... that statutes bristling with difficulties remain unrepealed in the volumes of the law of Russia as well as of other nations. Even we ourselves have our obsolete "blue laws," and their literal enforcement, if such a thing were possible, might to-day subject a Russian of freethinking proclivities, in Maryland or Delaware, to the penalty of having his tongue bored through with a red-hot iron for blasphemy. Happily the spirit of progress is of higher ...
— Notes on the Diplomatic History of the Jewish Question • Lucien Wolf

... literal and unconventional sense utterly ignorant of the value of sixpence, I thought this a great sum, amply sufficient for all my needs, or at least until I secured employment—for I had from the first some vague idea of earning my ...
— The Woman Thou Gavest Me - Being the Story of Mary O'Neill • Hall Caine

... amusing part of this little fracas is the denial of his Lordship, as to pilfering the thoughts and fancies of others; for it so happens, that the first passage of The Bride of Abydos, the poem in question, is almost a literal and unacknowledged translation from Goethe, which was pointed out in some of the periodicals soon after the work ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt

... autobiographical record[17] marked the commencement of Gissing's reclamation from that worst form of literary slavery—the chain-gang. For he had been virtually chained to the desk, perpetually working, imprisoned in a London lodging, owing to the literal lack of the means of locomotion.[18] His most strenuous work, wrung from him in dismal darkness and wrestling of spirit, was now achieved. Yet it seems to me both ungrateful and unfair to say, as has frequently been done, ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing

... the aesthetic side of man's nature; in engaging him with the beautiful, the pure, the wonderful, the truly natural; with painting, poetry, music, horticulture, physical science—in all this lies recreation, in the true and literal sense of that word, namely, the recreating and mending of the exhausted mind and feelings, such as no rational man will now neglect, either for himself, his children, or ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley

... and it became known that he meant to go back in February, and would send nothing to the Salon that year, the studio tore its hair and hugged its content. All but the master, who attempted to dissuade his pupil with literal tears, of which he did not seem in the least ashamed and which annoyed Kendal very much. In fact, it was a dramatic splash of Lucien's which happened to fall upon his coat-sleeve that decided Kendal finally about the impossibility of living ...
— A Daughter of To-Day • Sara Jeannette Duncan (aka Mrs. Everard Cotes)

... inconsistent with facts. Some widows are virgins, but there is not always a father or mother to give them away by the formula of "virgin gift." The women all have a notion, taken from the words of a heroine in the Mahabharata, that a woman can be given but once.[1299] They cling to the literal formula. By the form of first marriage also a woman passes into the kin of her husband for seven births (generations), the limit of degrees of consanguinity. It is irreligious and impossible to change the kin again, because consequences have been entailed which ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner

... deal with here is why both balloons lift their aeronauts at least three miles into the clouds, while other men who have no balloon to lift them can get no higher than the top of the church steeple. Or to come back to literal fact, our problem must be expressed thus: Let us take the present population of Great Britain or America, and, having noted the wealth at present annually produced by it, ask ourselves what would happen if some duly qualified angel were to pick out and kill, or otherwise make away with, ...
— A Critical Examination of Socialism • William Hurrell Mallock

... these words, and taking them in the literal acceptation, got up in some hurry, and seizing a knife from the side-board, cried, 'Not here, an please your ladyship — It will daub the room — Give him to me, and I'll carry him to the ditch by the roadside' To this ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett

... ridiculed it, is based on a great, a gigantic truth. Paradise, the summer land of fruits, the serpent, the fire from heaven, the expulsion, the waving sword, the "fall of man," the "darkness on the face of the deep," the age of toil and sweat—all, all, are literal facts. ...
— Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel • Ignatius Donnelly

... therefore a moralist to recommend imperfections? One excellency, however, of our Saviour's rules is, that they are either never mistaken, or never so mistaken as to do harm. I could feign a hundred cases in which the literal application of the rule, "of doing to others as we would that others should do unto us," might mislead us; but I never yet met with the man who was actually misled by it. Notwithstanding that our Lord bade his followers, "not to resist evil," and to "forgive the enemy who should trespass against ...
— Evidences of Christianity • William Paley

... wantonness of summer. These had all been objective experiences, but Joan's untamed and undistracted heart had taken them in deeply and deeply pondered upon them. There was no morality in their teachings, unless it was the morality of complete suspension of any judgment whatsoever, the marvelous literal, "Judge not." She knew that the sun shone on the evil and on the good, but she knew also that frost fell upon the good as well as upon the evil nor was the evil to be readily distinguished. Her father ...
— The Branding Iron • Katharine Newlin Burt

... living thing—a severe but kindly guide—but as the menacing ghost of the religion he has murdered, and which comes to embitter degradation, not to raise it. The moral life, it is true, will still exist for him, but it will probably, in literal truth, ...
— Is Life Worth Living? • William Hurrell Mallock

... is speaking of the lower fauna in the time of Noah. A literal application of her theory toman today is enough to bring it to a reductio ad absurdum. Which sex of Homo sapiens actually does the primping and parading that she describes? Which runs to "beautiful coloring," sartorial, hirsute, facial? Which encases itself in vestments ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken

... her conceit of self-importance, she stood there, above the battling millions of men, proof against mystery and dread, untouched by the voices of the past, and in the present seeing only common things, though from an odd point of view. Here her senses seemed to make literal the assumption by which her mind had always been directed: that she—Nancy Lord—was the mid point of the universe. No humility awoke in her; she felt the stirring of envies, avidities, unavowable passions, and let ...
— In the Year of Jubilee • George Gissing

... out a successful career for himself. Our mother determined to accord him an interview in her own apartment. She longed to converse with him at her ease—to hear his tale from his own lips—to sympathize with and console him. Oh! who could blame her if in so doing she departed from the strict and literal meaning of that vow which had bound her to consider her relations as dead to her? But the fault—if fault it were—was so venial, that to justify it is to invest it with an importance which it would not have possessed save for the frightful results to which it led. You have already heard ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds

... secession, would take with it all our prosperity and all our power. It would take the Border States and the control of the Mississippi, and worse than this, it would establish a war which would rage without intermission until we should be crushed, perhaps into literal tribute and vassalage. Every dispute arising from our entangled neighborhood—and these would be innumerable—would be determined with an insolence and a cruelty far surpassing any thing which we have heretofore experienced; and at every manifestation of ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2 No 4, October, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... and his did not agree, so both counted again, getting in each other's way and, as Mr. Winslow expressed it, having a good time generally. And this remark, intended to be facetious, was after all pretty close to the literal truth. Certainly Babbie was enjoying herself, and Jed, where an impatient man would have been frantic, was enjoying her enjoyment. Petunia, perched in lopsided fashion on a heap of ...
— Shavings • Joseph C. Lincoln

... disturbing geological evidence that the earth could scarcely have been begun and finished in a little under a week, was happily nullified by the suicide of its author; that pistol-shot had been a striking proof of the literal ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett

... is probably true; it is another thing to see it as a fact. If you loved mankind as Christ loved them, you would see his conclusion as a fact. It would be obvious. You would sell your goods, and they would be no loss to you. These truths, while literal to Christ, and to any mind that has Christ's love for mankind, become parables to lesser natures. There are in every generation people who, beginning innocently, with no predetermined intention of becoming saints, find themselves drawn into ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James

... lucidity, an almost hieratic calm, that he reviewed that recent interview, in which he had so deliberately unburdened himself. It seemed as if, in his great weakness, the ache of his old desire, his fever of longing, bad suddenly left him, giving place (as though the literal wasting away of his body had really given freer access to that pure spirit, its prisoner), to a love now altogether purged of passion, and ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore

... carefully prepared with far more than the average erudition, because it had been changed throughout by the substitution of bad readings for good, in defiance of MS. authority, with a view of preserving a literal agreement with the Vulgate.[124] Sigonius, another of the Vatican students, was instructed to prepare certain text-books by Cardinal Paleotti. These were an Ecclesiastical History, a treatise on the Hebrew Commonwealth, and an edition of Sulpicius Severus. ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds

... people asked him if this meant what it said. He told them that it did. One of them said he would like to have the table, pointing to it; another asked for a chair, another for the bed, and so on. The missionary was rather startled at such literal taking of his teaching. He told them to come again on the morrow, and he ...
— Quiet Talks on Following the Christ • S. D. Gordon

... not have been announced at a more opportune time. For some years the scientific world had been agog over the question whether such a form of lightning as that reported—appearing in a clear sky, and hurling literal thunderbolts—had real existence. Such cases had been reported often enough, it is true. The "thunderbolts" themselves were exhibited as sacred relics before many an altar, and those who doubted their ...
— A History of Science, Volume 3(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams

... say, because I have seen the transition. But it 's very likely. You are, in the literal sense of the word, more civilized. I dare say," added Rowland, "that Miss Garland ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James

... of wood engraving, written mainly by 19th-century practitioners and bibliophiles, have tended to emphasize literal rendition rather than artistic vision. The writers favored wood engraving executed with the burin on the end grain of hard dense wood, such as box or maple, because it could produce finer details than the old woodcut, which made use of knife ...
— John Baptist Jackson - 18th-Century Master of the Color Woodcut • Jacob Kainen

... I cannot say a shopkeeper should be tied down to the literal meaning of his words in the price he asks, or that he is guilty of lying in not adhering stiffly to the letter of his first demand; though, at the same time, I would have every tradesman take as little liberty that way as may be: and if the ...
— The Complete English Tradesman (1839 ed.) • Daniel Defoe

... compliment. It is enough to say that a fund was raised for Flanagan's defence, and a threatening notice written to be pasted on the Bodagh Buie's door—of which elegant production the following is a literal copy:— ...
— Fardorougha, The Miser - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton

... one impatient minute, wished that the children would pay more attention to their elderly and experienced guardian. It was too much to ask her—a professional theory-maker—to adapt her theories to the young and literal. That was the worst of Jay, she was so literal, so unimaginative, so lacking in the simple unpractical quality of poetry. However, not a word to the others. Jay's reputation and Anonyma's dignity might ...
— This Is the End • Stella Benson

... a while. His was a literal mind, and he knew nothing of Sally's finances beyond the fact that when he had first met her she had come into a legacy of some kind. Moreover, he had been hugely impressed by Fillmore's ...
— The Adventures of Sally • P. G. Wodehouse

... running parallel to this habit of preaching was a fond love for the water, and it may be said in a literal sense that I was as fond of it as a duck. I am told that when an infant under the care of any person other than my mother, nothing in the world would quiet me except a bowl of water and a sponge to play with. Naturally this liking developed, as you will see. Separated by a thick wall from ...
— From Lower Deck to Pulpit • Henry Cowling

... the uselessness of attempting to copy an object exactly, the desire to give the object full expression, are the impulses which drive the artist away from "literal" colouring to purely artistic aims. And that brings us to the question of composition. [Footnote: Here Kandinsky means arrangement of ...
— Concerning the Spiritual in Art • Wassily Kandinsky

... us! what an extraordinary case!' gasped Mrs. Bloss, as if she understood the communication in its literal sense, and was astonished at a gentleman without a stomach finding it ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens

... is a literal copy of a specimen of this paper money, which varied in value from two shillings ...
— Count Frontenac and New France under Louis XIV • Francis Parkman

... generally condemning the rash proceeding, though many deeply sympathized with the purpose of Brown's movement, and his heroic conduct and life caused many to admire him. He was a devout believer in the literal reading of the Holy Bible, and of the special judgments of God, as he interpreted them in the Old Testament. His attack on slavery he regarded as more rational than and as likely to triumph as Joshua's attack ...
— Slavery and Four Years of War, Vol. 1-2 • Joseph Warren Keifer

... moments of leisure, and these moments were evidently subject to abrupt and prolonged interruptions. Many repetitions and trivial incidents have been omitted in this translation; but, in order to express the personality of the Author, the rendering has been as literal as possible, and it shows the strange mixture of sentimentality and ferocity peculiar to ...
— The Journal of Submarine Commander von Forstner • Georg-Guenther von Forstner

... expositions are mystical. The literal explanation is that which is given Deut. 5:11: "Thou shalt not take the name of . . . thy God in vain," namely, "by swearing on that which is not [*Vulg.: 'for he shall not be unpunished that taketh His name upon ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas

... fact, but an emanation from self-love, through the association of ideas, it has been fancied that these writers dispute the existence of disinterested benevolence or sympathy. Now, the selfish system, in its literal import, is flatly inconsistent with obvious facts, but this is not the system contended for by the writers in question. Still, this distortion has been laid hold of by the opponents of utility, and ...
— Moral Science; A Compendium of Ethics • Alexander Bain

... should be taken within the curtain, and shewn how the wires are pulled by the master, which produce all the turmoil and strife that before riveted our attention. It is good for him who would arrive at all the improvement of which our nature is capable, at one time to take his place among the literal beholders of the drama, and at another to go behind the scenes, and remark the deceptions in their original elements, and the actors in ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin

... soul, in the sense of complex emotion. Nor those combinations of thought and emotion which synthesize attitudes, sentiments and character. The internal secretions and the vegetative system mediate the primary soul stuff. Mind is thus emulsified with body as a matter of cold literal fact. The soul was once a subtlety of metaphysics. Now when mind appears soaked in matter saturated with chemicals like the hormones, therefore woven out of material threads, the independent entity created out of intangible spirit flies ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.

... horse-shoe curve around the Snodgrass hill, and did his full share of the desperate fighting which held that part of the field. But he had thus become the subject of a controversy, and the friends of Rosecrans charged him with a too literal obedience, and a failure to use a sound discretion in his action. The result was that whilst Rosecrans was removed from active field service, Wood still found himself under a cloud, and opposed by influences which ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V2 • Jacob Dolson Cox

... that her stepson was wonderful, but with quite a literal meaning. She found him a real cause for wonder—this poised, handsome, crippled boy of nineteen, with his tailor, and his tutor, and his groom, and the heavy social responsibilities that bored him so heartily. With the honesty of a naturally brilliant mind cultivated by hard experience, ...
— Poor, Dear Margaret Kirby and Other Stories • Kathleen Norris

... circular was sent around asking for subscriptions to a volume of Pekinese Folklore, published by Baron Vitali, Interpreter at the Italian legation, which, on examination, proved to be exactly what I wanted. He had collected about two hundred and fifty rhymes, had made a literal—not metrical—translation and had issued them ...
— The Chinese Boy and Girl • Isaac Taylor Headland

... the English language have been fraught with such stupendous consequences as El Dorado. When the padres attempted to tell the story of the Christ, the natives exclaimed 'El Dorado'—the golden. The ignorant sailors and adventurers seized upon the literal meaning, instead of the spiritual one. The time, being that of Don Quixote and of the Inquisition, accounts for the childish credulity on one side and the unparalleled ferocity on the other. The search for El Dorado, whether it was believed to be a fabulous country of gold, or an inaccessible mountain, ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber

... effected his purpose, and that once Jeanne was disposed of, the legality or illegality of the proceedings would be of small importance. I have thought it right to give to the best of my power a literal translation of these examinations, notwithstanding their great length; as, except in one book, now out of print and very difficult to procure, no such detailed translation,(8) so far as I am aware, exists; and it seems to me that, even at the risk of fatiguing the reader (always capable of skipping ...
— Jeanne d'Arc - Her Life And Death • Mrs.(Margaret) Oliphant

... extracts given above, can it, however, be seriously contended that Barruel or Robison exaggerated the guilt of the Order? Do my literal translations differ materially in sense from the translations and occasional paraphrases given ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster

... him. Yet at that very time he was on the point of publishing the first volume of "Capital," the result of gigantic researches into industrial history and economic theory. This great work was intended to be, in its literal sense, the Bible of the working class, as indeed it has since become. Certainly, Jaures' tribute to Marx is well deserved and fairly sums up the work accomplished by him in the period 1847-1869. "To Marx belongs the merit," he says, " ... ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter

... the country is heavily timbered, and the high lands towards the westward were found barren and cold. Mr. Curr was anxious to bring his line as far possible towards the sun; but the governor held him to the literal agreement, under an impression that the grant was already improvident and excessive. The whole scheme was distasteful to Arthur: a powerful company having interests of its own, whose head-quarters were in London, might have been a counterpoise to his influence, had it not been ...
— The History of Tasmania, Volume I (of 2) • John West

... himself was so eminently unsatisfactory that it produced a characteristic protest. "I am really distressed by the illustration of Mrs. Pipchin and Paul. It is so frightfully and wildly wide of the mark. Good heaven! in the commonest and most literal construction of the text, it is all wrong! She is described as an old lady, and Paul's 'miniature arm-chair' is mentioned more than once. He ought to be sitting in a little arm-chair down in a corner of the fireplace, staring up at her. I can't say ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt

... the premises at the time, so I can't say; but, be that 'ow it may, there's no denying it's a singler thing the way my words have been fulfilled almost literal.' ...
— The Talking Horse - And Other Tales • F. Anstey

... literal copy of a notice served by a worthy inhabitant of Gravesend upon his neighbor, whose fowl had ...
— The Jest Book - The Choicest Anecdotes and Sayings • Mark Lemon

... back to the house for dinner, Charles suggested that they might like to come up to his dressing-room and wash their hands before dinner—to which one of them replied, "Grazie, non mi sporco facilmente" (literal translation, "Thanks, I don't dirty myself easily"), and declined the ...
— Chateau and Country Life in France • Mary King Waddington

... fixed by nature herself." On the theory enunciated by Watts-Dunton, everything except the perfect average is absolutely funny, and the perfect average, of course, is generally an incommensurable quantity. Chesterton carefully made it his business to present the eccentricity—I use the word in its literal sense—of most things, and the humour followed in accordance with the above definition. The method was simple. Chesterton invented some grotesque situation, some hypothesis which was glaringly absurd. He then placed it in ...
— G. K. Chesterton, A Critical Study • Julius West

... guilty of interpolating two or three passages. The manuscript was long in possession of the Everards, a distinguished family of that persuasion. (It is hardly necessary to say, unless to some readers of very literal capacity, that Dr. Rochecliffe and his manuscripts ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott

... At that literal question, put with an air of the most impulsive good faith, John's face slightly changed. The rapt look faded from his eyes, and a reflective smile took its place, as the young man gazed long and earnestly into the bright face ...
— In the Days of Chivalry • Evelyn Everett-Green

... of exchange of gallantry between the Baron of Bradwardine and Col. Talbot is a literal fact. [For the real circumstances of the anecdote, we must refer our readers to the "Introduction" itself. It was communicated to Sir Walter ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, - Vol. 10, No. 283, 17 Nov 1827 • Various

... he was the idealist historian of the poet, and that the adventures which he related of him were not to be taken in the literal and ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet

... reproaches! I have informed you that you may write, or still better, telegraph, since the wire is so handy—on business. Well, of course, it is for you to judge whether you will add postscripts of another sort. There, you make me say more than a woman ought, because you are so obtuse and literal. Good afternoon—good-bye! This will ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy

... but the prospective purchaser should remember that the possession of one of these giant pachyderms entails considerable overhead, or rather, internal expense. De Wolf Hopper was telling only the literal truth when he sang in Wang of the tribulations of the peasant who had an elephant on ...
— Where the Strange Trails Go Down • E. Alexander Powell

... the sake of argument, that there was a servitude in the patriarchal families which was approved by God. But what does this avail in your defence of slavery, unless you show, that that servitude and slavery are essentially alike? The literal terms of the relation of master and servant, under that servitude, are not made known to us; but we can, nevertheless, confidently infer their spirit from facts, which illustrate their practical character; and, if this character be found to be opposite to ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society

... knowledge; and his experience in Congress, during a part of the "reconstruction period," and throughout the Tilden-Hayes controversy, had taught him how effectively the national power could assert itself. The others, blind to such dangers, seemed to feel that under Utah's sovereignty the literal "kingdom of God" (as they regard their Church) was to exercise an undisputed authority. Unable, myself, to take their viewpoint, I was conscious of a sense of transgression against the orthodoxy of their religion. I was aware, for the first time, that in gaining the fraternity ...
— Under the Prophet in Utah - The National Menace of a Political Priestcraft • Frank J. Cannon and Harvey J. O'Higgins

... having got leave of absence from Mr. Taylor, who commanded the Bell Rock tender, and had in his possession one of the Protection Medals. Unfortunately, however, for Dall, the Regulating Officer thought proper to disregard these documents, as, according to the strict and literal interpretation of the Admiralty regulations, a seaman does not stand protected unless he is actually on board of his ship, or in a boat belonging to her, or has the Admiralty protection in his possession. This order of the Board, however, cannot be rigidly followed in practice; and ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... on the bare, literal fact any more than they can live on bread alone; there is something in every man to feed besides his body. He has been told many times by men of great disinterestedness and ability that he must believe only that ...
— Famous Stories Every Child Should Know • Various

... above referred to, says, that "in the number of Latin Bibles is also usually ranked the version of the same Pagninus, corrected, or rather rendered literal by {25} Arias Montanus." But in the title-page of my ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 63, January 11, 1851 • Various

... window facing Penrod was filled with a gigantic Eye. Of oyster-white and raw blues and reds, inflamed by the pouring sun, it had held an awful place in the infantile life of Penrod Schofield, for in his tenderer years he accepted it without question as the literal Eye of Deity. He had been informed that the church was the divine dwelling—and there was ...
— Penrod and Sam • Booth Tarkington

... and morals. A mighty fondness, it is true, and attachment, he expresses to his consort, and often professes that he never would embrace any measures which she disapproved: but such declarations of civility and confidence are not always to be taken in a full, literal sense. And so legitimate an affection, avowed by the laws of God and man, may perhaps be excusable towards a woman of beauty and spirit, even though she was ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part E. - From Charles I. to Cromwell • David Hume

... Poitevin or the Provencal. The most remarkable development of the "religious" life that the later middle age was to witness had just been worked out in Italy. St. Francis of Assisi had taught the cult of absolute poverty, and his example held up to his followers the ideal of the thorough and literal imitation of Christ's life. Thus arose the early beginnings of the Minorite or Franciscan rule. St. Dominic yielded to the fascination of the Umbrian enthusiast, and inculcated on his Order of Preachers a complete renunciation of worldly goods which made a society, originally little ...
— The History of England - From the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) • T.F. Tout

... modifications of the wedge; such as the knife, the shears (formed of two knives working on a joint), the chisel, and the axe. These, with the primitive hammer, formed the principal stock-in-trade of the early mechanics, who were handicraftsmen in the literal sense of the word. But the work which the early craftsmen in wood, stone, brass, and iron, contrived to execute, sufficed to show how much expertness in the handling of tools will serve to compensate for their mechanical ...
— Industrial Biography - Iron Workers and Tool Makers • Samuel Smiles

... proofs taken out of the Old Testament, and urged in the New, being sometimes not to be found in the Old, nor urged in the New, according to the literal and obvious sense, which they appear to bear in their supposed places in the Old, and, therefore, not proofs according to the rules of interpretation established by reason, and acted upon in interpreting every other ancient book— almost all Christian commentators on the Bible, and advocates ...
— The Grounds of Christianity Examined by Comparing The New Testament with the Old • George Bethune English

... this vision foreshadows the conquest of the air, its significance is symbolic rather than literal, and, like Pindar checking the steeds of his song, ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury

... so," said he thoughtfully, "I hope he'll hab more'n one room for us, rather be mos' anywhar dan in sight ob dat man," and he trudged off with his literal Heaven and ...
— The Harvest of Years • Martha Lewis Beckwith Ewell

... disposal of the author of a "History of Java." As I have embodied in the text some extracts from Raffles' translations, it may be well to say a word as to the value of these versions. What Vreede says of a particular passage is true of these renderings in general: "They are not literal translations, but the spirit of the work is ...
— A Visit to Java - With an Account of the Founding of Singapore • W. Basil Worsfold

... and squalls. In lat. 28 N., long. 177 W., his water going rotten, and misled by Hoyt's North Pacific Directory, which informed him there was a coaling station on the island, Captain Trent put in to Midway Island. He found it a literal sandbank, surrounded by a coral reef mostly submerged. Birds were very plenty, there was good fish in the lagoon, but no firewood; and the water, which could be obtained by digging, brackish. He found good holding-ground off the north end of the larger bank in ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne

... is to be made voluntarily. The verb ([Hebrew: nador]) translated to vow, in its literal acceptation means to beat out grain from the sheaf on the thrashing-floor: hence, as the corn is thus scattered, it came to signify to scatter, or to be liberal; and thence, finally, to offer willingly and freely. The ...
— The Ordinance of Covenanting • John Cunningham

... which everybody else knows and does not repeat. He, though he tried to repeat them, did not know them, and could not get on without my prompting. Sotheby was full of his translation of Homer's Iliad, some specimens of which he has already published. It is a complete failure; more literal than that of Pope, but still tainted with the deep radical vice of Pope's version, a thoroughly modern and artificial manner. It bears the same kind of relation to the Iliad that Robertson's narrative bears to the story of Joseph in the ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan

... expression of man's primary needs, the legislator's duty was to reform the errors of legislation; to complete that which was defective; to harmonize, by superior definitions, those things which seemed to conflict. Instead of that, they halted at the literal meaning of the laws, content to play the subordinate part of commentators and scholiasts. Taking the inspirations of the human mind, at that time necessarily weak and faulty, for axioms of eternal and unquestionable truth,—influenced by public opinion, ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon

... the Animals and Man. Ancient and medieval representations of the creation of man Literal acceptance of the book of Genesis by the Christian fathers By the Reformers By modern theologians, Catholic and Protestant Theological reasoning as to the divisions of the animal kingdom The Physiologus, the Bestiaries, ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White

... comes the question, What does God do? What does he aim at? And how does he effect his purposes? The answer seems to be that, in a literal, tangible sense, he does nothing. He operates solely in and through the mind of man; and even through the mind of man he does not influence external events. This, it may be said, is impossible, since all those external events which we call human conduct flow from the mind of man. Perhaps it would ...
— God and Mr. Wells - A Critical Examination of 'God the Invisible King' • William Archer

... grounds from those cases, where actual crimes have been perpetrated and deeds committed, which leave numerous traces behind, and which may be proved by the permanent results of which they have been the cause. Technical difficulties without number also exist: the most literal accuracy, which is indispensable—the artful inuendoes, the artistical averments, which are necessary, correctly to shape the charge ere it is submitted to the grand jury, may be well conceived to involve many niceties and refinements, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXIX. January, 1844. Vol. LV. • Various

... ordinary common or garden daffodil, charming as it is, but named varieties of every description— white trumpeted Horsefieldi, stately yellow Emperors, Bari Conspicui with its dainty outline of orange; these, and a dozen others were growing in patches, not in dozens or scores, but in literal hundreds, beneath the budding trees. There were violets, too; and white and purple and golden saxifrages peeping out between the stones which bordered the trickling stream—a scene of enchantment, indeed, for City eyes accustomed to gaze only on bricks and mortar. ...
— The Fortunes of the Farrells • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey

... intellectualism, and humanism represent ways in which frightened and disturbed people seek to make themselves secure. Unfortunately, however, their security then is purchased at the price of their freedom. Their lives become locked up in the small closet of their limited concepts. Their literal and rigid understanding of the Christian church and its faith makes them so loveless that their lives have an alienating effect on others, and they themselves fail to ...
— Herein is Love • Reuel L. Howe

... judge's edification the scraps of family history and biography that he could recollect. Adelle, who had come into the room, listened to his story. Tom Clark might be limited in knowledge of his family as he was in education, but he was certainly literal and picturesque. He spared neither himself nor his brothers and sisters, nor his remoter cousins. The one whose career seemed to interest him most was that Stan Clark, the politician, who now represented Fresno County in the State Legislature. There was a curious mixture of pride and contempt in ...
— Clark's Field • Robert Herrick

... literal, and Malleson (a clergyman) has taken pains with the scientific portions of the work and added the chapter headings, he has made some unfortunate emendations mainly concerning biblical references, and has added a few 'improvements' of his own, which ...
— A Journey to the Interior of the Earth • Jules Verne

... are, at the same time, true, in that the material of which they are moulded consists of facts,—facts as precise as painstaking observation and anxious regard for truth can make them. Certain of the stories, of course, are true literally. Literal truth may be attained by stories which treat of a single incident, or of action so restricted as to lie within the scope of a single observation. When, on the other hand, a story follows the career of a wild creature of the ...
— The Watchers of the Trails - A Book of Animal Life • Charles G. D. Roberts

... in countless other places, Mark Twain throws over his ethical suggestion—a suggestion, by contrast, of the very converse of his literal words—the veil of paradox and exaggeration, of incongruity, fantasy, light irony. Yet beneath this outer covering of art there is a serious meaning that, like murder, will out. If demonstration were needed that Mark Twain is sealed of the tribe of moralists, that is amply supplied ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson

... up the first sheet, and as he compared the constructed renderings with the literal translation, the ghost of a smile stole ...
— John Thorndyke's Cases • R. Austin Freeman

... the body is literally burned up by the oxygen; and it is this burning which means the warmth of a living body, its absence giving the stony cold of the dead. "Who shall deliver me from the body of this death?" may well be the literal question for each day of our lives; and "pure air" alone can secure genuine life. Breathing bad air reduces all the processes of the body, lessens vitality; and thus, one in poor health will suffer more from bad air than those who have become thoroughly accustomed ...
— The Easiest Way in Housekeeping and Cooking - Adapted to Domestic Use or Study in Classes • Helen Campbell

... which his chief work was to be done. This work was an exposition of the parable of "the Rich Man and Lazarus," bearing the horror-striking title, "A Few Sighs from Hell, or the Groans of a Damned Soul." In this work, as its title would suggest, Bunyan, accepting the literal accuracy of the parable as a description of the realities of the world beyond the grave, gives full scope to his vivid imagination in portraying the condition of the lost. It contains some touches of racy humour, especially in the similes, and is written ...
— The Life of John Bunyan • Edmund Venables

... where the translator had misconceived it. For the latter purpose the original was consulted; and it affords great pleasure to bear witness to the general fidelity with which Mr. REEVE has transferred the author's ideas from French into English. He has not been a literal translator, and this has been the cause of the very few errors which have been discovered: but he has been more and better: he has caught the spirit of M. DE TOCQUEVILLE, has understood the sentiment he meant to express, and has clothed it in the language which M. DE TOCQUEVILLE ...
— American Institutions and Their Influence • Alexis de Tocqueville et al

... was; nay, I should have thought with less danger of my life. But he is a peculiar man; and I repeat it, we have hot heard the last of him. You will find that by serving the King he understands in a very literal sense; and there is a young gentleman(52) who it is believed intends those words shall not have ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole

... height, and by a person who had himself been a witness of them, and whose "good hap" it had been to "do some little service" in promoting them. The object of the writer is declared to be, that he might be "more capable to assist in lifting up a standard against the infernal enemy." The literal meaning of this expression is, that he might be enabled to get up another witchcraft delusion under his own special management and control. Can any thing be imagined more artful and dishonest than ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham

... to grow every tree that was pleasant to the sight and good for food; also, the tree of life and the tree of knowledge of good and evil were in this garden, and a river to water it. It is said that God "walked in the garden in the cool of the day." That was in the day of literal things. We are now in the day of spiritual things, when our bodies have become the temple of God through the Spirit, and our hearts his lovely garden. It is in this garden he dwells; it is there he walks. See 2 Cor. 6:16. ...
— Food for the Lambs; or, Helps for Young Christians • Charles Ebert Orr

... in that department, equally distinguished for the success with which he has led forward the musical education of New England, trained a corps of buglers to converse with each other by long and short bugle-notes, and thus to carry information with literal accuracy from point to point at any distance within which the tones of a bugle could be heard. It will readily be seen that there are many occasions in military affairs when such means of conversation might prove of inestimable value. Mr. Tuttle, the astronomer, on duty ...
— The Man Without a Country and Other Tales • Edward E. Hale

... the demon and his lake of fire, Sluiskin's portent of hardship proved to be a literal, even a modest, prophecy. At five o'clock in the evening, after eleven hours of struggle with precipices and glaciers, exhausted, chilled, and without food, they faced a night of zero gales upon the summit. The discovery of comforting steam-jets in a neighboring ...
— The Book of the National Parks • Robert Sterling Yard

... upon him. If, instead of fearing, you will trust in the Lord to put his Spirit upon you when there is need of it, you may overcome Satan as easily as Samson did the lion. Daniel was thrown into the lions' den, but they did not eat him. God put a muzzle on them, not a literal muzzle, but something still more effectual, and they ...
— Heart Talks • Charles Wesley Naylor

... judicious and wide-minded friend to correct and supplement the mainly admirable principles which had been instilled into him by my mother, he would have been saved years of spiritual wandering; but, as it was, he fell in with one after another, each in his own way as literal and unspiritual as the other—each impressed with one aspect of religious truth, and with one only. In the end he became perhaps the widest-minded and most original thinker whom I have ever met; but no one from his early manhood could have augured this result; on the contrary, he shewed every sign ...
— The Fair Haven • Samuel Butler

... he thought, evaded the spirit of Mr. Skinner's ultimatum while conforming to its literal terms, Cappy Ricks hurried home leaving his general manager a stunned and horrified man. In this instance, however, Cappy had erred in his strategy. Skinner was calm, cold-blooded, suave, politic and deferential, but in his kind of fight he never bluffed. He never played ...
— Cappy Ricks • Peter B. Kyne

... a magnanimous man, in the literal as well as the accepted meaning of the word, he was also, as we have seen, a truly fortunate one. Honorable assistance came to him at critical moments, such as the delicate gift from Humboldt at Paris, which perhaps ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 4 of 8 • Various

... of doom to those who should lay hands upon him had been falsified, but to the literal sense of David Gillespie he had not yet been sufficiently proved an impostor: till he should bring his daughter a strand of the hair which Dylks had proclaimed it death to touch, she would believe in him, and ...
— The Leatherwood God • William Dean Howells

... especially out of place. The "AEneid" is rendered with a roughness which might better befit a translation of Ennius. Thus the reader of Mr. Morris's poetical translations has in his hands versions of almost literal closeness, and (what is extremely rare) versions of poetry by a poet. But his acquaintance with Early English and Icelandic has added to the poet a strain of the philologist, and his English in the "Odyssey," ...
— Adventures among Books • Andrew Lang

... the first line of 13, as a closely literal version would scarcely be intelligent to the general reader. The sense is that the evil consequences, that have now overtaken thee, arose even then when the beneficial counsels ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli

... to have been and still to be the custom of some nations to make sepulchres the repositories of their greatest riches is (I am sure) universally true in a moral sense however it may be thought in the literal there being never a grave but what conceals a treasure though all have not the art to discover it I do not here invite the covetous miser to disturb the dead who can frame no idea of treasure distinct from gold and silver but him who knows that wisdom and virtue are the ...
— An introduction to the mortuary customs of the North American Indians • H. C. Yarrow

... I gratefully acknowledge the assistance of my friend Mrs. A.H. Beddoe) is neither "free" nor literal. It sometimes amplifies a thought, much as a musician might amplify the harmonies upon a master's figured bass. But even this is rarely done, and then only with a view to the youthful reader's pleasure and profit. With that view, further, the social and political ...
— The Original Fables of La Fontaine - Rendered into English Prose by Fredk. Colin Tilney • Jean de la Fontaine

... of GOD by the spirit of holiness. What is flesh, is born of flesh; and what is spirit, is born of Spirit." (p. 82.) Rom. i. 1-3 is quoted in support of this, which I cannot but regard as blasphemy: for if it does not mean that our SAVIOUR was not, in a true and literal sense, the SON of GOD at all, it is hard to see what it can mean.—As for the following account of the mystery of the Blessed Trinity, it shall only be said that it sounds like a denial of the Catholic doctrine altogether. "Being, becoming, and animating; or substance, ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon

... Poland, and provided for the education of music teachers for schools, organists for churches, and singers for the stage. Although I try to do my best with the unsatisfactory and often contradictory newspaper reports and dictionary articles from which I have to draw my data, I cannot vouch for the literal correctness of my notes. In making use of Sowinski's work I am constantly reminded of Voltaire's definition of dictionaries: "Immenses archives de mensonges et d'un peu de verite." Happy he who need ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks

... honesty. There is a great deal to be said for this point of view in the hands of a painter with a large appreciation of form and design. But without these more inspiring qualities it is apt to have the dulness that attends most literal transcriptions. There are many instances of this point of view among early portrait painters, one of the best of which is the work of Holbein. But then, to a very distinguished appreciation of ...
— The Practice and Science Of Drawing • Harold Speed

... astronomical terminology reveals the same relationship to western thought, for Var[a]ha-Mihira (6th century A.D.), a contemporary of [A]ryabha[t.]a, entitled a work of his the B[r.]hat-Sa[m.]hit[a], a literal translation of [Greek: megale suntaxis] of Ptolemy;[306] and in various ways is this interchange of ideas apparent.[307] It could not have been at all unusual for the ancient Greeks to go to India, for Strabo lays down the route, saying that all who make ...
— The Hindu-Arabic Numerals • David Eugene Smith

... greatness here—and here—and here." With such a man, she felt, the direct and obvious appeal of Rose Stribling would be victorious. He could discern pink and white and blue and gold; but the indeterminate shades, the subtleties and mysteries of charm were enigmatical to him. His emotions would be as literal as his convictions or his oratory. Yet there must be some faculty in him which did not appear on the surface, some primitive grasp of realities in his understanding of men. Why should the influence of this ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow

... very quietly allayed Mr. Spriggins' fears by convincing him that it was the motto—the principle which governed the working of the institution, and also, gave the literal meaning ...
— Marguerite Verne • Agatha Armour

... literal sense of honor, his narrow conscience which led him into inexpediency, seemed to me a part of a feminine rather than of a masculine nature, and ...
— The Blue Wall - A Story of Strangeness and Struggle • Richard Washburn Child

... consequences to the occupants of the garden, stood, had a real existence and geographical site. Now I need hardly remark that the Mosaic narrative unquestionably professes a geographical exactness and a literal existence of the garden, as no fabled locality—no Utopia or garden of the Hesperides. I need only refer to the data afforded to us ...
— Creation and Its Records • B.H. Baden-Powell

... a wage dispute, which was submitted by both sides to Federal Judge K.M. Landis for arbitration, the award authorized not only a wage reduction but a revision of the "working rules" as well. Most of the unionists refused to abide by the award and the situation developed into literal warfare. In Chicago the employers' side was aggressively upheld by a "citizens' committee" formed to enforce the Landis award. The committee claimed to have imported over 10,000 out-of-town building mechanics to take the places ...
— A History of Trade Unionism in the United States • Selig Perlman

... most incorrectly printed throughout, the editor requested the favour of the late learned professor of oriental languages in the University of Edinburgh, Dr Alexander Murray, to revise and correct this first sentence, which he most readily did, adding the following literal translation: "Presence, [or face.] of the world—protector, salutation to thee: A poor dervish and world-wanderer I am; that I have come from a kingdom far, to-wit, from the kingdom of Ingliz-stan, which historians ancient, relation have made, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume IX. • Robert Kerr

... Anthropo-Geographie. The German work is difficult reading even for Germans. To most English and American students of geographic environment it is a closed book, a treasure-house bolted and barred. Ratzel himself realized "that any English form could not be a literal translation, but must be adapted to the Anglo-Celtic and especially to the Anglo-American mind." The writer undertook, with Ratzel's approval, to make such an adapted restatement of the principles, with a view to making ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple

... absence of mind—perhaps in a more literal absence of mind than is usually understood by the phrase—had smelt so hard at a sprig in his hand as to be on the verge of the offence in question. He smiled, said, 'I ask your pardon, my dear,' and threw it out ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens



Words linked to "Literal" :   error, true, denotative, plain, explicit, unrhetorical, mistake, figurative, exact



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