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More "Figurative" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... regard for the novelty of the thing; they mean from one to three weeks' work, day and night without let-up. But the blinding work is not the worst of it; the suspense is what unnerves and worries. A fellow never knows what moment he is going to get a figurative knock-out from the head office official. The inspector, if he happens to have indigestion or domestic trouble, can be ...
— A Canadian Bankclerk • J. P. Buschlen
... "l'ennuit les avoit gagnes," by the context of which it was plain he meant, that the common influence of the night, in bringing on heaviness and yawning, had come upon them. The proper sense is totally antiquated, but the figurative remains in full currency ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 191, June 25, 1853 • Various
... however figurative your way of putting it may be, I'm afraid that the Archdeacon ...
— Lalage's Lovers - 1911 • George A. Birmingham
... to myself—how much greater might the great poet have become had he ever known a public and real actors! It is remarkable, by the way, that Schiller, who is not at bottom very objective, lends himself so perfectly to an objective representation. He became figurative, while believing himself to be only eloquent—one more proof of his incomparable genius. In Goethe we find the exact opposite. While he is ordinarily called objective and is so to a great extent, his characters lose in the actual representation. His figurativeness is only for the imagination; ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... the word 'founded' in a literal as well as figurative sense. While the merchants, in their year of victories, threw down the walls of the war-towers, they as eagerly and diligently set their best craftsmen to lift higher the walls of their churches. For the most part, the Early Norman or Basilican forms were too ...
— Val d'Arno • John Ruskin
... is not difficult to learn. The vowels occur much more frequently than the consonants, our c, g, k, s, and p, being entirely wanting. Cook and his companions made considerable progress in it; and one of them says—"It is rich in figurative modes of expression; and I am convinced that a nearer acquaintance with it would place it on a level with the most distinguished for boldness ...
— A New Voyage Round the World in the Years 1823, 24, 25, and 26. Vol. 1 • Otto von Kotzebue
... "mother," so does "hire" or "wages" imply a [181] "hirer" or "wage-giver." Therefore, when a man in "the original state of things" gathered fruit or killed game for his own sustenance, the fruit or the game could be called his "wages" only in a figurative sense; as one sees if the term "hire," which has a more limited connotation, is substituted for "wage." If not, it must be assumed that the savage hired himself to get his own dinner; whereby we are led to the tolerably absurd conclusion that, as in the "state ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... with large and brilliant stars, brilliant yet mellow, unlike the crisp scintillating presentment in northern latitudes, might have served as an illustration of an air-tight bowl, flung down relentlessly upon this part of the world. Inside this figurative bowl it was chill, yet the air was stirless. It was without refreshment; it became a labor and not an exhilaration to breath it. A pall of suffocating dust rolled above and about the Irrawaddy flotilla boat which, buffeted ...
— Parrot & Co. • Harold MacGrath
... dream work. The first dream thoughts which are unravelled by analysis frequently strike one by their unusual wording. They do not appear to be expressed in the sober form which our thinking prefers; rather are they expressed symbolically by allegories and metaphors like the figurative language of the poets. It is not difficult to find the motives for this degree of constraint in the expression of dream ideas. The dream content consists chiefly of visual scenes; hence the dream ideas must, in the first place, be prepared ...
— Dream Psychology - Psychoanalysis for Beginners • Sigmund Freud
... the equilibrium of his mind. Such passions as anger, hatred, jealousy, sorrow, worry, grudge, and fear always untune one's mood and break the harmony of one's mind. They poison one's body, not in a figurative, but in a literal sense of the word. Obnoxious passions once aroused never fail to bring about the physiological change in the nerves, in the organs, and eventually in the whole constitution, and leave those injurious impressions ...
— The Religion of the Samurai • Kaiten Nukariya
... nothing is said of the word [Hebrew: PETACH]. I do not know of any place in Holy Scripture where this word is used figuratively, and unless this can be shown, there is no supporting so strong a metaphor as the advocates of the figurative meaning of the passage contend for. Davison takes no notice of the remainder of the verse.... Now the words are remarkable; they are the same as those in which the Lord declares the subjection of Eve to her husband, Gen. iii. 16. I have always thought this passage (Gen. iv. 7.) to allude to Abel; ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 234, April 22, 1854 • Various
... that of Milton's prose works, is more remarkable than that of many of our writers of verse. He speaks in figures, images, symbols; and the musical cadence of his sentences reflects the influence of his wide reading of poetry. Not only in figurative expression, but much more in spirit, he belongs with the poets of the revival. At times his language is pseudo-classic, reflecting the influence of Johnson and his school; but his thought is always romantic; he is governed by ideal rather than by practical interests, and a ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... He caught hold of things then and dragged himself along as far as the after skylight where he would sit for hours. Our, then young, friend offered once to assist him and this service was the first beginning of a sort of friendship. He clung hard to one—Powell says, with no figurative intention. Powell was always on the lookout to assist, and to assist mainly Mrs Anthony, because he clung so jolly hard to her that Powell was afraid of her being dragged down notwithstanding that she very soon became very sure-footed ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... often thought of writing a hymn on the Beauty of Viceroys; and have repeatedly attuned my mind to the subject; but my inability to express myself in figurative language, and my total ignorance of everything pertaining to metre, rhythm, and rhyme, make me rather hesitate to employ verse. Certainly, the subject is inviting, and I am surprised that no singer has arisen. How can any one ...
— Twenty-One Days in India; and, the Teapot Series • George Robert Aberigh-Mackay
... man peoples air, earth, and the waters with countless creatures of his fancy; his expressions are figurative and metaphorical; he is quick to seize analogies; and when he cannot explain he is ever ready to invent. This is shown in his inappeasable love of story telling. As a raconteur he is untiring. ...
— Aboriginal American Authors • Daniel G. Brinton
... from my purpose, which was to assure you, that I know you as well as the mother who did not bear you, for MacDuff's peculiarity sticks to your whole race. You are not born of woman, unless, indeed, in that figurative sense, in which the celebrated Maria Edgeworth may, in her state of single blessedness, be termed mother of the finest family in England. You belong, sir, to the Editors of the land of Utopia, a sort of persons for whom I have the highest esteem. How is it possible ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... gas, even the idea of it, has gone out of fashion, through its figurative use to designate empty, vapouring talk; therefore, when deipnosophist and gastronomer are spoken, the former is employed to denote learned talkers at supper, such as we were half an hour ago, and the latter, to signify one who ...
— Two Knapsacks - A Novel of Canadian Summer Life • John Campbell
... opposition was, moreover, made in the house of lords; and, had Bute been wise, he would have bowed deferentially to the public feeling, and have adopted some other mode of raising the money less repugnant to the temper and disposition of the people. Bute, however, to use a figurative expression, proudly bared his head to the tempest which was playing around him. He was determined that the bill should pass, and he carried his point despite the fierce opposition of the whole country. The bill passed into a law, and although there ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... still kindled though they burn not as brightly as of yore. Nor do the young braves listen to the wisdom, or ever now in their Councils witness the allegorical or figurative language so beautifully illustrating the discourses of Red Jacket, Corn Planter, Farmers Brother and other Chiefs, thus eulogized by PRES. DWIGHT: "In strength and sublimity of their eloquence they may be fairly compared ...
— Birch Bark Legends of Niagara • Owahyah
... Sodom and saved lot, all of which suggests the attitude and work of Jesus. Isaac is an only son, is offered in sacrifice, has secured for him a bride in a most unusual manner. This again in many ways illustrates the attitude and work of the Savior. But Joseph is perhaps more highly figurative of the Redeemer. His being hated and cast out by his brethren is like the rejection of Jesus; the way his wicked brethren came to him in their extremity and received forgiveness and sustenance suggest how a sinner finds mercy and life in ...
— The Bible Period by Period - A Manual for the Study of the Bible by Periods • Josiah Blake Tidwell
... candidate with the cross, the consecration and giving of salt, which was entitled the sacrament of catechumens, repeated exorcisms, or prayers and adjurations to cast out the power of Satan, anointing with oil, and other mystical and figurative rites. In the course of many ages, when the Christian church had overspread the face of the world, and infidelity had become in most places extinct, the form of admission to the class of catechumens was from a veneration for old customs in many ...
— The Ceremonies of the Holy-Week at Rome • Charles Michael Baggs
... something great in the half-success that has attended the effort of turning into an emotional religion, Bald Conduct, without any appeal, or almost none, to the figurative, mysterious, and constitutive facts of life. Not that conduct is not constitutive, but dear! it's dreary! On the whole, conduct is better dealt with on the cast-iron 'gentleman' and duty formula, with as little fervour and poetry as possible; ...
— Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 2 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the word "gig" in a figurative sense. It was a power launch that put smartly away from the "Reed" and was speedily alongside. Dan waved his hand to his chum, who was leaning ...
— Dave Darrin After The Mine Layers • H. Irving Hancock
... moon-god the eldest son of En-lil or Bel; and, similarly, a goddess like Bau would be called the daughter of Anu. It is a mistake, however, to interpret the use of 'daughter' and 'son' literally. Such terms are employed in all Semitic languages in a figurative sense, to indicate a dependent position of some sort. Again, we have seen that the union of a number of cities or states under one head would be followed by a union of the deities proper to these ...
— The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria • Morris Jastrow
... waxen head on the rocks when she was alone, and sometimes dragged it with a string round its neck to and from school. At other times, setting it up on her desk, she made a pincushion of its patient and inoffensive body. Whether this was done in revenge of what she considered a second figurative obtrusion of Clytie's excellencies upon her; or whether she had an intuitive appreciation of the rites of certain other heathens, and indulging in that "fetich" ceremony imagined that the original of her wax model would pine away ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... settled country, neglected by the average tourist, but affording keen delight to the few enlightened travellers who sojourn within its borders. It is a field which has been neglected by anthologists and essayists; one of its few serious recognitions being in a certain "Treatise of Figurative Language," which says: "Nonsense; shall we dignify that with a place on our list? Assuredly will vote for doing so every one who hath at all duly noticed what admirable and wise uses it can be, and often is, put to, though ...
— A Nonsense Anthology • Collected by Carolyn Wells
... expected to judge the quality of literature, distinguishing with ease between what is literal and what is imaginative, or figurative, or humorous. When they read that the rope with which the powerful Fenris-Wolf was bound was "made out of such things as the sound of a cat's footsteps, the roots of the mountains, the breath of a fish and ...
— How To Study and Teaching How To Study • F. M. McMurry
... duty to stand behind his superior on all occasions of ceremony, to act as his messenger, and in general to be subject to his directions. It gave to the aid the office of chief and rendered probable his election as the successor of his principal after the decease of the latter. In their figurative language these aids of the sachems were styled "Braces in the Long House," ...
— Houses and House-Life of the American Aborigines • Lewis H. Morgan
... the meanest artifices in order to apologise for the numerous glaring falsehoods and horrid violations of all decency and decorum, which abound in almost every page. Any thing, it seems, will do with these men but the word of God. They ridicule the figurative language of Scripture, but will run allegory-mad in support of the most worthless productions that ever were published. I should think it time lost to translate any of them; and only a sense of duty excites me to read them. ...
— The Life of William Carey • George Smith
... You recognize women as people, for you count them in the basis of representation. Half our Congressmen hold their seats to-day as representatives of women. We help to swell the figures by which you are here, and too many of you, alas, are only figurative representatives, paying little heed to our ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... motion from. Fly may be used, in a figurative sense, of persons, to indicate great speed as of wings. "I flew to his rescue." "He flew to my rescue." "Resist the devil and he will ...
— Slips of Speech • John H. Bechtel
... leads inevitably to death. He is excluding himself from that sphere of good, that career of service and devotion, wherein alone true life is to be found. He is banishing himself to that outer darkness which is our figurative expression for the absence of all those rewards of virtue and the presence of all those penalties of vice which our previous studies have brought to our attention. "Sin, when it is full-grown, bringeth forth death." "The wages of ...
— Practical Ethics • William DeWitt Hyde
... Meuse should not give way to riot or disorder on that occasion. He hoped and believed it would not—here M. le Maire laid his hand on his heart—but a spark, as I knew, fired tinder, and the St. Meuse populace were at present figurative tinder. ...
— Camps, Quarters, and Casual Places • Archibald Forbes
... artist almost of a certainty produced both of these figurative tombstones. The handicraft is similar, the idea in each is equally daring and grotesque, and the phraseology of the inscriptions is nearly identical. I thought both conceptions original and native to the place, but I do not think so now. In point of taste, the first, ...
— In Search Of Gravestones Old And Curious • W.T. (William Thomas) Vincent
... road built along the rocky shore of a seaside, being a figurative application of the architectural ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Vol VIII - Italy and Greece, Part Two • Various
... attempt to perpetrate innovations. From time to time they resume forgotten expressions in their vocabulary, which they restore to use; or they borrow from some particular class of the community a term peculiar to it, which they introduce with a figurative meaning into the language of daily life. Many expressions which originally belonged to the technical language of a profession or a party, are thus drawn into ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 2 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... that St. Luke the Evangelist was early regarded as the great authority with respect to the few Scripture particulars relating to the character and life of Mary; so that, in the figurative sense, he may be said to have painted that portrait of her which has been since received as the perfect type of womanhood:—1. Her noble, trustful humility, when she receives the salutation of the angel (Luke i. 38); the complete and feminine surrender of her whole being to the ...
— Legends of the Madonna • Mrs. Jameson
... right, Whizzer! Kick him if you can—I'll stand by you!" This assertion, you understand, was purely figurative; the Little Doctor would have hesitated long before attempting ...
— Chip, of the Flying U • B. M. Bower
... questions as: What are the limits of each art? What can be represented with colours, and what with sounds? What with simple monochromatic lines, and what with touches of various colours? What with notes, and what with metres and rhymes? What are the limits between the figurative and the auditional arts, between painting and ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... she dismissed, as typically chimerical "notions," the speculations of her doctor—also a lifelong friend of her husband's—as to what Judge Emery might have become if—the doctor spoke in his usual highly figurative and fantastic jargon—"he had not had to hurry so with that wheel in his cage." "When I first knew Nat Emery," he once said, "he was sitting up till all hours reading Les Miserables, and would knock you down if you didn't bow your head at the mention of Thackeray. He might ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... when he returned from what he and his friends, by an agreeable fiction, called an "office," where he generally spent as many hours as served to give him a flavor of business and a figurative title as a businessman—where were to be found the best cigars and choicest wines, and generally a pleasant circle of good fellows congregated—he found Percy with the most charming little dinner awaiting ...
— Not Pretty, But Precious • John Hay, et al.
... hae run about the braes And pu'd the gowans' fine —in a figurative point of view—on several occasions. I am not exactly aware,' said Mr. Micawber, with the old roll in his voice, and the old indescribable air of saying something genteel, 'what gowans may be, but I have no doubt that Copperfield and myself would frequently have taken a pull at ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... compromise with any modern theorists. To all such he says, "The narration of Moses is historical and is to be received in its natural sense, and no right-thinking man will deny this." To those who favoured the figurative interpretation he says, "With such reasonings any passage of Scripture can ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... taken up my affair, and kept me for a week or two careering through the public prints, in my decapitated state, like Irving's Headless Horseman, ghastly and grim, and longing to be buried, as a political dead man ought. So much for my figurative self. The real human being all this time, with his head safely on his shoulders, had brought himself to the comfortable conclusion that everything was for the best; and making an investment in ink, paper, and steel pens, ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... foot, graceful in movement, and give them a form like the Apollo's; he may put as much expression as he pleases into their black eyes; he may tessellate their speech as freely as he will with poetical and figurative expressions, drawn from the aspects of the external world: for all this there is authority, and chapter and verse may be cited in support of it. But we have a right to ask that he shall not transcend the bounds of reason and possibility, and represent his red men as moved by motives and guided ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... point, particularly, is vital. To return to the direct view of things beyond all figurative symbols, to descend into the inmost depths of being, to watch the throbbing life in its pure state, and listen to the secret rhythm of its inmost breath, to measure it, at least so far as measurement is possible, has always ...
— A New Philosophy: Henri Bergson • Edouard le Roy
... mountain solitude, Might some aspiring artist dare To seize whate'er, through misty air, A ghost, by glimpses, may present Of imitable lineament, And give the phantom an array That less should scorn the abandoned clay; Then let him hew with patient stroke An Ossian out of mural rock, And leave the figurative Man— Upon thy margin, roaring Bran!— Fixed like the Templar of the steep, An everlasting watch to keep; With local sanctities in trust, More precious than a hermit's dust; And virtues through the mass infused, ...
— Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland A.D. 1803 • Dorothy Wordsworth
... order to see the conclusion that is implicated in the premises. Without this, he falls into confusion and fallacy, or fails, with the premises both before him, to get the conclusion. The "clear and steady mental eye", in less figurative language, means the ability to check hasty responses to either premise alone, or to extraneous features of the situation, so as to insure that "unitary response" to the combination of premises which constitutes the ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth
... the moment that must break him utterly! we none of us like him here; we hate him, rather; and yet I have a sense—I don't think at my time of life it can be pity—but a reluctance rather, to break anything so big and figurative, as though he were a big porcelain pot or a big picture of high price. Ay, there is what I was waiting for!' he cried, as the lights of a second chaise swam in sight. 'It is he beyond a doubt. The first was the signature and the next the flourish. Two chaises, the second following ...
— St Ives • Robert Louis Stevenson
... rate the glorious hills and valleys bordering the Bay, which have inspired more than one Welsh literary itinerant to rhapsody, and furnished Mr. Lloyd George with many a homely and figurative peroration, have proved no mean asset to the proprietors of a railway, whose traffic consists so largely of tourists. To the shareholders of the Cambrian has come the satisfaction of knowing that a concern, which was born under, and for many years continued ...
— The Story of the Cambrian - A Biography of a Railway • C. P. Gasquoine
... the figurative finds on entering the New York Stock-Exchange a strong suggestion of having penetrated a die with which Giants have been casting lots. The first impression is one of cubical dimensions—and unless the curb be drawn, a fancy so spurred will plunge to yet other ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... the social training of men. Things long hidden appeared discovered with an amazing clearness and nakedness. These men who had awakened, laughed dissolvent laughs, and the old muddle of schools and colleges, books and traditions, the old fumbling, half-figurative, half-formal teaching of the Churches, the complex of weakening and confusing suggestions and hints, amidst which the pride and honor of adolescence doubted and stumbled and fell, became nothing ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... himself was not likely to fall into that error. He speaks against it most emphatically. "Either," he says, "the first eleven chapters of Genesis—all due allowance being made for a figurative Eastern style—are true, or the whole fabric of our national religion is false; a conclusion which none of us, I trust, would wish to be drawn. But it is not the truth of our national religion as such that I have ...
— Chips From A German Workshop, Vol. V. • F. Max Mueller
... we wonder at such language? Is it merely figurative, expressive of more than the reality?—He gave Himself for us; after that pledge of His affection we must cease to marvel at any expression of the interest He feels in us. Anything He can say or do is infinitely less than what He ...
— The Words of Jesus • John R. Macduff
... Thine eyes, wherein I confess unto Thee, that I believe, O Lord, that Thou spokest not so in vain; nor will I suppress, what this lesson suggests to me. For it is true, nor do I see what should hinder me from thus understanding the figurative sayings of Thy Bible. For I know a thing to be manifoldly signified by corporeal expressions, which is understood one way by the mind; and that understood many ways in the mind, which is signified one way by corporeal expression. Behold, the single love of God and our neighbour, by what manifold ...
— The Confessions of Saint Augustine • Saint Augustine
... sir," said Denham quietly. "I was not speaking in a figurative way, but in plain, downright English. That really is part of an ancient gold-mine, in which the water has collected ...
— Charge! - A Story of Briton and Boer • George Manville Fenn
... tighter, more closely packed with figurative meaning than perhaps any of Swinburne's later verse. It is less fluid, less 'exuberant and effusive' (to accept two epithets of his own in reference to the verse of Atalanta in Calydon). He is ready to be harsh when harshness is required, ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... with perspiration, drenched with rain, with his clothes hanging in ribbons, his hands flayed, his elbows bleeding, his knees torn, Thenardier had reached what children, in their figurative language, call the edge of the wall of the ruin, there he had stretched himself out at full length, and there his strength had failed him. A steep escarpment three stories high separated him from the ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... quite right; you mean your father wou'd bring his corn to a fine market: You mean it as a figurative expression, I presume. ...
— The Politician Out-Witted • Samuel Low
... morals, adapted to the interval between the ascension of Christ and his return with the kingdom which he has received from God; the Apocalypse, or Revelation of Jesus Christ to John, in Patmos, as a figurative and prospective view of all the fortunes of Christianity, from its date to ...
— The Book of Religions • John Hayward
... with some probability that in the mind of the natives such resemblances are not purely figurative or symbolic, but that they are also magical in intention, being supposed not merely to represent the object of the supplicant's prayer, but actually, on the principle of homoeopathic or imitative magic, to contribute to its accomplishment. If that ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... of all nations generally wrote from passion excited by real events; they wrote naturally, and as men: feeling powerfully as they did, their language was daring, and figurative. In succeeding times, Poets, and Men ambitious of the fame of Poets, perceiving the influence of such language, and desirous of producing the same effect without being animated by the same passion, set themselves to a mechanical ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... hunter will rest till morning, the eagle will show him the way to the nest of his white dove," was the reply of the Indian, in that figurative style so general among his people; and then taking him by the hand he led him through the rapidly increasing darkness, until they reached a small encampment lying near the river, and under the cover of some trees which grew upon its banks. ...
— Choice Readings for the Home Circle • Anonymous
... privileged forms, the other as the hidden possibility that pervades all things. One or the other must abate something: either the image must become less sacred, or the meaning narrower; for the language of painting is not figurative, like the language of poetry, but figure, and unless the form bear on its face that it is not all that is meant, its inherent limitations are transferred to the thought itself. When Dante tells us that Brunetto Latini and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... the learned man's astonishment, when that unaccountable person flung the money on the pavement, and requested in figurative terms to be allowed the pleasure of fighting him ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... the blanket, leggins, and moccasins, worn by all the tribes; the women among the New-Brunswick Indians frequently wear a round hat, a shawl, and short clothes, resembling the short gown and petticoat worn by the French and Dutch women. The Indian language is bold and figurative, abounding in hyperbolical expressions, and is said to be susceptible of much elegance. To give the reader some notion of the manner in which these people conduct their conferences with each other, and with Europeans, ...
— First History of New Brunswick • Peter Fisher
... gives in his verdict, unavoidable accident and no one to blame but the sufferer. 'He was slinking about in his boat,' says Tom, 'which slinking were, not to speak ill of the dead, the manner of the man, when he come right athwart the steamer's bows and she cut him in two.' Mr Tootle is so far figurative, touching the dismemberment, as that he means the boat, and not the man. For, the man lies whole ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... mind by that book, that there is any other kind of invention or discovery intended in the practical applications of this method? The very free, but of course not pedantic, use of the new terminology of a new school in philosophy, in which this author indulges—a terminology of a somewhat figurative and poetic kind, one cannot but observe, for a philosopher of so strictly a logical turn of mind, one whose thoughts were running on abstractions so entirely, to construct; his continued preference for ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... Indeed the latter is a class that requires as much sustainment and comfort as the other—being as they are, more numerous, and suffering all the privations of widowhood, poor things, except its reality. The expression, my Lord, is figurative, and taken from the agricultural occupation of ploughing; for whenever one animal is unyoked for any other purpose, such as travelling a journey or the like, the other is forthwith turned into some park or grassy paddock, and indeed generally enjoys more comfortable times than if still with the ...
— Valentine M'Clutchy, The Irish Agent - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... endeavoring to write poetically of the sun, tells you that "The Lilies of the field are his workmanship," you may observe, first, that since the sun is not a man, nothing that he does is workmanship; while even the figurative statement that he rejoices as a strong man to run his course, is one which Professor Tyndall has no intention whatever of admitting. And you may then observe, in the second place, that, if even in that figurative sense, ...
— The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century - Two Lectures delivered at the London Institution February - 4th and 11th, 1884 • John Ruskin
... chance of winning than he who has none, though in his hand may be all the aces of the others, diamonds included. But, lest I go too far beyond the analogy—as I might ignorantly do, being unskilled in the many games of cards—I will drop the figurative.... Keep your heart for faith, love, friendship, for God, your country, and truth. And where the heart is given, it should be unreservedly. Its allegiance is too often withheld where it is due, yet this is better than a half-way loyalty; there should be no if, ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various
... The opportunities for figurative flying were not wanting. There were no vessels in the port which might be engaged for an indeterminate voyage in pursuit of a British man-of-war, but there was a goodly sloop about to sail in ballast for Belize. Before sunset three passages were ...
— Kate Bonnet - The Romance of a Pirate's Daughter • Frank R. Stockton
... bearing the burdens of the weak; the rich cast down and the poor exalted; brother sharing with brother, according to their needs. We are accustomed to make ourselves complaisant with the reflection that these were figurative expressions, and not meant as literal commands. But if we consider candidly, we must confess that if it is the spirit of its Master's commands which the Church means to follow, it is very far, as a body, from reaching up to their full ...
— Monopolies and the People • Charles Whiting Baker
... used in this way, that when we hear it we do not think of the concrete, the material connection implied in every relationship. We should notice it more if we were told that "Tous les arts sont cousins," for the word "cousin" is not so often employed in a figurative sense; that is why the word here already assumes a slight tinge of the comic. But let us go further still, and suppose that our attention is attracted to the material side of the metaphor by the choice of a relationship ...
— Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic • Henri Bergson
... personage, long-nosed and shrewd-looking. The detective explained that Mr. Holden was an ex-police sergeant, retained for many years at headquarters on account of his fluency in the language of Tasso. Winter did not mention Tasso. This is figurative. ...
— The Stowmarket Mystery - Or, A Legacy of Hate • Louis Tracy
... one stone—that is to say, he killed the sugar speculation by holding for high rates till he had to sell at the bottom figure, and that calamity killed the mule that laid the golden egg—which is but a figurative expression and will be so understood. Sellers had returned home cheerful but empty-handed, and the mule business lapsed into other hands. The sale of the Hawkins property by the Sheriff had followed, and the Hawkins ...
— The Gilded Age, Complete • Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner
... Book of Esther, ii. 18: "And he made a release to the provinces and gave gifts . . ." Line 80 is figurative: the king's releases and gifts did not actually "invite" the masses of his subjects (see N. to l. 56) to the royal nuptials, but "made them partake of the joy" of these nuptials.—Leurs princes Ahasuerus and his new queen. ...
— Esther • Jean Racine
... far as in them lay. What arrant rogues are we in all climes and under whatever rule, quoth I, internally, as I listened to these wordy disputants; for, to do messieurs the pilots justice, the matter was conducted in a manner more worthy the courts, better argued, and in language less offensively figurative, than similar disputes at which it has been my chance to assist between angry members of our ...
— Impressions of America - During the years 1833, 1834 and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Tyrone Power
... from beginning to end is figurative, a piece of far-fetched, enigmatical symbolism in the ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson
... might say, degraded, is still poetical. There is so much poetry in the thought that the flattening of the phraseology cannot smother it, the lines still remaining poetically alive, their poetry shining through the plainer and less figurative words. And the thought is poetical because it is the result of a flight of intellect made by aid of imagination's wings, these being moved by the soaring demands of the beautiful, and beating an atmosphere exhaled from sensibility. ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... desire to shine betrayed him at times into very ridiculous blunders. I once heard him say, after having spent some time in explaining his text, "But that I may devil-hope the subject a little more fully, I would observe, that the words are mephitical." He, of course, meant to say, metaphorical, figurative, not mephitical which means of a bad smell. My plan secured me against ...
— Modern Skepticism: A Journey Through the Land of Doubt and Back Again - A Life Story • Joseph Barker
... should adopt the simplest style and manner; he will avoid all ornaments as something injurious to his subject, and should bear in mind the saying of the first king of Great Britain respecting a sermon which was excellent in doctrine but overcharged with poetical allusions and figurative language, "that the tropes and metaphors of the speaker were like the brilliant wild flowers in a field of corn—very pretty, but which did very much hurt the corn." In announcing even the greatest and most important discoveries, the true ...
— Consolations in Travel - or, the Last Days of a Philosopher • Humphrey Davy
... no very choice language; for, among their other accomplishments, the Crows are famed for possessing a Billingsgate vocabulary of unrivalled opulence, and for being by no means sparing of it whenever an occasion offers. Indeed, though Indians are generally very lofty, rhetorical, and figurative in their language at all great talks, and high ceremonials, yet, if trappers and traders may be believed, they are the most unsavory vagabonds in their ordinary colloquies; they make no hesitation to call a spade a spade; and ...
— The Adventures of Captain Bonneville - Digested From His Journal • Washington Irving
... primitive stage of language, all nouns had a gender, either male or female; and verbs, even auxiliary verbs, it is alleged, expressed activity of some sort. On the basis of these facts it has been inferred, that, at a later day, figurative expressions, descriptive of natural changes, were taken as literal; as if one should interpret the saying, "the sun follows the dawn," as meaning that one person pursues another. By this kind of misunderstanding, it has been ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... remained in the dock. The days of the years of his pilgrimage were not few, and quite probably, except in a figurative sense, not evil. He was of sturdy build, quiet manners, and his countenance was indicative of great sincerity. In a voice extremely deferential he stated that he had once ministered to a dying Confederate, and it was impossible ...
— Something of Men I Have Known - With Some Papers of a General Nature, Political, Historical, and Retrospective • Adlai E. Stevenson
... life hurts so much," he said impressively, "as to get a three-pound bass to the top of the water and have your line break. I've had a big fellow get away like that and chase me a mile with its thumb on its nose." This last, of course, was purely figurative. ...
— Tish, The Chronicle of Her Escapades and Excursions • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... to hear that he had shaved his beard—had laid aside his sad-colored clothes, and was adorned like a bridegroom of ancient days. What could be the meaning of all this? Was Toad-in-the-hole mad? or how? Soon after the secret was explained—in more than a figurative sense "the murder was out." For in came the London morning papers, by which it appeared that but three days before a murder, the most superb of the century by many degrees had occurred in the heart of London. I need hardly say, that ...
— Miscellaneous Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... Bible there are many other instances besides those just given in which there is a figurative use of the word light. It is a natural and beautiful figure. A person in doubt intellectually or spiritually looks upon himself as in darkness, and light to him is an intellectual or spiritual awakening. The light that came to ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... to resume the old reliance on the Scriptures. No case, indeed, can try so severely, or put upon record so conspicuously, this indestructible propensity for seeking light out of darkness—this thirst for looking into the future by the aid of dice, real or figurative, as the fact of men eminent for piety having yielded to the temptation. We give one instance—the instance of a person who, in practical theology, has been, perhaps, more popular than any other in ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... letter. These Midrashim have little or nothing to do with the Halachoth or legal decisions of the Talmud, except in aim, which is that of illustration and explanation. They are not literal interpretations, but figurative and allegorical, and as such enigmatic. They are, however, to be received as utterances of the sages, and some even regard them of as binding obligation as the law of Moses itself. The following are fairly ...
— Hebraic Literature; Translations from the Talmud, Midrashim and - Kabbala • Various
... not think himself so bad as Judas Iscariot.' BOSWELL. 'But, Sir, Taylor means it literally, for he founds a conceit upon it. When praying for the conversion of sinners, and of himself in particular, he says, "LORD, thou wilt not leave thy chief work undone." JOHNSON. 'I do not approve of figurative expressions in addressing the Supreme Being; and I never use them[906]. Taylor gives a very good advice: "Never lie in your prayers; never confess more than you really believe; never promise more than you mean to perform[907]." I recollected this precept in his Golden Grove; but his example ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 4 (of 6) • Boswell
... Government of Societys great, or small—in short of leading them in the Study, and Practice of the exalted Virtues of the Christian system, which will happily tend to subdue the turbulent passions of Men, and introduce that Golden Age beautifully described in figurative language; when the Wolf shall dwell with the Lamb, and the Leopard lie down with the Kid—the Cow, and the bear shall feed; their young ones shall lie down together, and the Lyon shall eat straw like the Ox—none shall then hurt, ...
— The Original Writings of Samuel Adams, Volume 4 • Samuel Adams
... were large by which his fancy was to be supplied. His ear was well tuned, and his diction was elegant and copious. But his devotional poetry is, like that of others, unsatisfactory. The paucity of its topics enforces perpetual repetition, and the sanctity of the matter rejects the ornaments of figurative diction. It is sufficient for Watts to have done better than others what no man has done well. His poems on other subjects seldom rise higher than might be expected from the amusements of a man of letters, and have different degrees of ...
— Lives of the Poets: Gay, Thomson, Young, and Others • Samuel Johnson
... skillful a dialectician as Douglas found this compact structure of history and argument a serious matter. Its simple solidity was not so susceptible to treatment by the perverting process as had been the figurative and prophetic utterance about the "house divided against itself." Neither could he find a chink between the facts and the inferences. One aspect of the speech, however, could not be passed over. Lincoln said that he had not charged "Stephen and Franklin and Roger and James" with collusion and conspiracy; ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. I. • John T. Morse
... upright as an Alif, or slender and bending as a branch of the Ban-tree which we should call a willow-wand,[FN307] while Age, crabbed and crooked, bends groundwards vainly seeking in the dust his lost juvenility. As Baron de Slane says of these stock comparisons (Ibn Khall. i. xxxvi.), "The figurative language of Moslem poets is often difficult to be understood. The narcissus is the eye; the feeble stem of that plant bends languidly under its dower, and thus recalls to mind the languor of the eyes. Pearls signify both tears and teeth; the latter are sometimes called hailstones, from their ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... potent reason is to be found in the power of that loving sympathy which the Army extends even to the vilest, to those from whom the least puritanical of us would shrink. It shows such men that they are not utterly lost, as these believe; that it, at any rate, does not mark them with a figurative broad arrow and consign them to a separate division of society; that it is able to give them back the self-respect without which mankind is lower than the beast, and to place them, regenerated, upon a path that, if it be steep and thorny, still leads ...
— Regeneration • H. Rider Haggard
... most of all to be valued for the remarks on language and on manners, and the contemporary anecdotes with which it abounds, and of which some examples may be quoted. After observing that "as it hath been always reputed a great fault to use figurative speeches foolishly and indiscreetly, so it is esteemed no less an imperfection in man's utterance, to have none use of figure at all, specially in our writing and speeches public, making them but as our ordinary talk, than which nothing can be more unsavory and far from all civility:—'I ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... and, not disconcerted by her curt refusal, he drew a wicker box from beneath a seat and opened it. His reference to a "bite and a drop" was obviously figurative, especially the "drop," which grew to the dimensions of a pint, which he swallowed quickly. Perhaps the flavor of the wine made him less attentive to his prisoner, for as he lifted the receptacle to his lips, she thrust her arms through the window and a ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... besides the Psalms and Annotations, on its first pages, a "Preface declaring the reason and use of the Book;" and at the last pages a "Table directing to some principal things observed in the Annotations of the Psalms," a list of "Hebrew phrases observed which are somewhat hard and figurative," and also some ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle
... said that in an advanced stage of yoga, one is enabled to behold one's Soul, or, a sort of double existence is realised in consequence of which the Soul becomes an object of internal survey to the Soul itself. Very probably, writers on yoga employ this language in a figurative sense. ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... stretch'd, the Image is most Sublime; if we consider no foreign Assistances. As Homer say's, The Horses of the Gods, sprung as far at every Stride, as a Man can see who sit's upon the Sea-shore. But foreign Assistances, as a figurative Turn, &c. may raise a passage to an equal degree of Sublimity, which yet does not so largely dilate the Mind; as this of Shakespear's is more ...
— A Full Enquiry into the Nature of the Pastoral (1717) • Thomas Purney
... Divine protest against Hurry. It was a Divine object lesson of perfect law, perfect plan, perfect order, perfect method. Six days of work carefully planned, scheduled and completed were followed by,—rest. Whether we accept the story as literal or as figurative, as the account of successive days or of ages comprising millions of years, matters little if we ...
— The Majesty of Calmness • William George Jordan
... Commission except for one most practical and urgent purpose. It will be answered to me that the first Kind of Man of whom I spoke could not really be on boards and committees, as modern England is managed. His dirt, though necessary and honourable, would be offensive: his speech, though rich and figurative, would be almost incomprehensible. Let us grant, for the moment, that this is so. This Kind of Man, with his sooty hair or sanguinary adjectives, cannot be represented at our committees of arbitration. Therefore, the other Kind of Man, fairly ...
— A Miscellany of Men • G. K. Chesterton
... figurative expression, the mask of night; and every one reading this speech with the context, must have felt the peculiar propriety of its simplicity, though perhaps without examining the cause of an omission which certainly is not fortuitous. The reason lies in the situation and in ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... where its remotest descendants still flourish. But that these trees should have waded the Pacific, or sent their acorns on a voyage of discovery after new habitats on the Asiatic coast, is hardly more probable than Jason's voyage after the golden fleece, in any other than a highly figurative sense. The spontaneous appearance of a forest of oaks on the eastern shores of Asia was just as probable, under favoring conditions—though occurring subsequently to the time of their appearance on this continent—as that of the ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright
... and full of romantic charm * * * it possesses ingenuity of incident, a figurative designation of the unhallowed scenes in which unlicensed love accomplishes and wrecks ...
— Princess Zara • Ross Beeckman
... unmanageable precept. Much of its contents, it is true, are of such a nature that they may be glossed over,—explained away,—ignored,—set aside. The reading is doubtful: or there are two opinions, (perhaps twenty,) concerning it: or the language may be figurative: or the words are not to be pressed too closely: or a perverse logic may pretend to find in it agreeable confirmation, instead of stern reproof. Not a few places there are, however, which defy any such handling; stubborn rocks which refuse to yield a single trace of the wished-for vegetation, ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon
... and had seen beside all the usual events in the life of that savage region, the author violates no probability in putting into his mouth the most strange and characteristic stories. The whole are told with a fictitious reproduction of the teser and somewhat monotonous, yet figurative style, proper to all savages. La Grande Kabylie recounts the personal experiences of the author in that yet unconquered country of the Arabs, whither he went with Marshal Bugeaud in his last expedition. ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... a jaw like a bulldog, an' a mouth on him ye couldn't span with your two hands." Further description proceeded in the same strain, and even allowing for the exuberancies of my friend's southern imagination, and his wide command of figurative language, this account of the kind of people who constitute ninety-nine hundredths of Mr. Gladstone's allies ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... listener. But there was no attempt nor impulse of the kind on the part of the orators, nor apparent expectation of such a phenomenon on that of the audience. In fact, I imagine that the latter were best pleased when the speaker embodied his ideas in the figurative language of arithmetic, or struck upon any hard matter of business or statistics, as a heavy-laden bark bumps upon a rock in mid-ocean. The sad severity, the too earnest utilitarianism, of modern life, have wrought a radical and lamentable change, I am afraid, in this ancient ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... of this wood." What figurative language! The flatterer adopts the grand style to add dignity to his speech, to make it more attractive. Will the child understand this cunning? Does he know, how could he possibly know, what is meant by ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... leads us back to Gen. xlix. 10; and, in general, the announcements of Balaam have, throughout, the promises and hopes of the Patriarchs for their foundation. As in the fundamental passage, so here also, the sceptre, the symbol of dominion, stands for dominion itself. The substance of the two figurative expressions is briefly stated in ver. 19, in the words, "They shall rule out of Jacob," which are tantamount to, "A Ruler shall ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions, v. 1 • Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg
... Makololo, whose acquaintance I had made on our former visit, and who was now located on the island Mahonta (lat. 17d 58' S., long. 24d 6' E.). The villagers looked as we may suppose people do who see a ghost, and in their figurative way of speaking said, "He has dropped among us from the clouds, yet came riding on the back of a hippopotamus! We Makololo thought no one could cross the Chobe without our knowledge, but here he drops among ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... take strange gods for deified men or for demons, would consider all these figurative representations as idols. The seductions of the naturalistic worships, which intoxicated the more sensitive nations, never affected him. He was doubtless ignorant of what the ancient sanctuary of Melkarth, at Tyre, might still contain of a primitive worship more or less analogous to ...
— The Life of Jesus • Ernest Renan
... take care of themselves. The bacilli are not the only ones who can be numbered in their billions. If there are billions of them there are billions of us. We are not mere units—scarcely even individuals—except in a broad and figurative sense. We are confederacies of billions upon billions of little, living animalcules which we call cells. These cells of ours are no Sunday-school class. They are old and tough and cunning to a degree. They are war-worn veterans, carrying the scars of a score of victories ...
— Preventable Diseases • Woods Hutchinson
... logically, before he proceeds to express himself imaginatively. All that is essential is that the kernel of his personality, that which determines philosophies as it determines every other achievement, should be directly, immediately, expressed in the figurative language of his art. This is the central, the all-important thing, that final, essential, and therefore indefinable entity which has thrust itself upon us when we say of a man that he has an "interesting personality." The more powerful and energetic ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... children, that we have no real authority for the reveries to which it is owing. We are told nothing distinctly of the heavenly world; except that it will be free from sorrow, and pure from sin. What is said of pearl gates, golden floors, and the like, is accepted as merely figurative by religious enthusiasts themselves; and whatever they pass their time in conceiving, whether of the happiness of risen souls, of their intercourse, or of the appearance and employment of the heavenly powers, is entirely the product of their own ...
— The Ethics of the Dust • John Ruskin
... driving up the lane at this moment and Marilla made off, feeling that she had escaped from the snare of the fowler, and wishing devoutly that Mr. Bell were not quite so highly figurative in his public petitions, especially in the hearing of small boys who were ...
— Anne Of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... borrowed my idea from the words of the wise king of Israel:—"Hear the instruction of thy father, and forsake not the law of thy mother; for they shall be an ornament of grace unto thy head," &c., and other Scripture passages of similar figurative meaning; for, though often given in a sportive way, it is my design that no moral shall be conveyed in the volume, but such as a good and judicious parent would wish ...
— The Youth's Coronal • Hannah Flagg Gould
... concentration in war, and was one reason of their decided superiority over all the other nations of America. In council, where all common and tribal affairs were decided, the Iroquois showed great capacity for calm deliberation, and became quite eloquent at times. Their language was extremely figurative, though incapable of the expression of abstract thought, as is the case with Indian tongues generally. The Indian—essentially a materialist—could only find his similes, metaphors, and illustrations in the objects of nature, but these he used with great skill. ...
— Canada • J. G. Bourinot
... present took up the argument against him, and maintained that no man ever thinks of the NOSE OF THE MIND, not adverting that though that figurative sense seems strange to us, as very unusual, it is truly not more forced than Hamlet's 'In my MIND'S EYE, Horatio.' He persisted much too long, and appeared to Johnson as putting himself forward as his antagonist with too much presumption; upon ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... of the moment of spontaneity in productive art, and he praised Schelling for having drawn attention to the figurative arts, as being less liable than poetry to be diverted to false and illusory moralistic ends. Before he begins the study of the place due to the artistic activity in Ethic, he carefully excludes from the study of Aesthetic all practical ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... money out of his own possession. It had been hidden in the cellar, hidden in the parlor, hidden in the kitchen, and hidden in his chamber; but no place seemed to be safe, and the miser trembled when awake, and trembled when asleep, in his dreams, lest the figurative description of riches should be realized, and his gold should take to itself wings and ...
— Freaks of Fortune - or, Half Round the World • Oliver Optic
... and mischievous design. Thus, when two men did witness that our Lord affirmed, he "could demolish the Temple, and rear it again in three days"—although he did, indeed, speak words to that purpose, meaning them in a figurative sense, discernible enough to those who would candidly have minded his drift and way of speaking:—yet they who crudely alleged them against him are called false witnesses. "At last," saith the Gospel, "came two false witnesses, and said, ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... thing be more clear! more natural! more agreeable to the true spirit of simplicity! Here are no tropes,—no figurative expressions,—not even so much as an invocation to the Muse. He does not detain his readers by any needless circumlocution; by unnecessarily informing them, what he is going to sing; or still more unnecessarily enumerating what ...
— Parodies of Ballad Criticism (1711-1787) • William Wagstaffe
... magic influence of a beautiful diction, it will always be found that it consists in this happy relation between external freedom and internal necessity. The principal features that contribute to this freedom of the imagination are the individualizing of objects and the figurative or inexact expression of a thing; the former employed to give force to its sensuousness, the latter to produce it where it does not exist. When we express a species or kind by an individual, and portray a conception in a single case, we remove from fancy the chains which the understanding ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... it; 'for everything that is made manifest is light.' Observe that Paul here speaks of 'light,' not 'the light,'—that is, he is speaking now not of Christian character, which he had likened to light, but of physical light to which he had likened it, and is backing up his figurative statement as to the reproving and manifesting effects of the former, by the plain fact as to the latter, that, when daylight shines on anything, it is revealed, and, as it were, becomes light. He clenches his exhortation by quoting probably ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... an interesting form, the fall of a man whose great bad actions have cast a disastrous lustre on his name. In the execution of the work, as intricacy of plot could not have been attempted without a gross violation of recent facts, it has been my sole aim to imitate the impassioned and highly figurative language of the French Orators, and to develop the characters of the chief actors on a vast ...
— Biographia Epistolaris, Volume 1. • Coleridge, ed. Turnbull
... application. exaggeration, hyperbole &c 549. association, association of ideas (analogy) 514.1 V. employ a metaphor &c n.; personify, allegorize, adumbrate, shadow forth, apply, allude to. Adj. metaphorical, figurative, catachrestical^, typical, tralatitious^, parabolic, allegorical, allusive, anagogical^; ironical; colloquial; tropical. Adv. so to speak, so to say, so to express oneself; as it were. Phr. mutato nomine de ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... perfection, so that the first stage-coach over the new road could arrive upon the completed town. "We don't want to show up in a 'b'iled shirt' and a plug hat, and our trousers stuck in our boots," said a figurative speaker. Nevertheless, practical necessity compelled them to build the hotel first for their own occupation, pending the erection of their private dwellings on allotted sites. The hotel, a really elaborate structure for the locality and ...
— Openings in the Old Trail • Bret Harte
... the Mistress is filled with conceits, is very copiously displayed by Addison. Love is by Cowley, as by other poets, expressed metaphorically by flame and fire; and that which is true of real fire is said of love, or figurative fire, the same word in the same sentence retaining both significations. Thus, "observing the cold regard of his mistress's eyes, and, at the same time, their power of producing love in him, he considers them as burning-glasses made of ice. Finding ...
— Lives of the Poets, Vol. 1 • Samuel Johnson
... earth, and the waters with countless creatures of his fancy; his expressions are figurative and metaphorical; he is quick to seize analogies; and when he cannot explain he is ever ready to invent. This is shown in his inappeasable love of story telling. As a raconteur he is untiring. He has, in the highest degree, Goethe's Lust zu fabuliren. ...
— Aboriginal American Authors • Daniel G. Brinton
... then, the Prvapakshin resumes, that the 'seeing' of the text denotes not 'seeing' in its primary, direct sense—such as belongs to intelligent beings only; but 'seeing' in a secondary, figurative sense which there is ascribed to the Pradhna in the same way as in passages immediately following it is ascribed to fire and water—'the fire saw'; 'the water saw' (Ch. Up. VI, 2, 3). The transference, to non- existent things, of attributes properly ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Ramanuja - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 48 • Trans. George Thibaut
... diction was elegant and copious. But his devotional poetry is, like that of others, unsatisfactory. The paucity of its topicks enforces perpetual repetition, and the sanctity of the matter rejects the ornaments of figurative diction. It is sufficient for Watts to have done better than others what ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... in an extraordinary degree. His carriage was erect and commanding, and there was an air of hauteur in his countenance, arising from an elevated pride of soul, which did not forsake it when life was extinct. He was habitually taciturn, but, when excited, his eloquence was nervous, concise, and figurative. His dress was plain, and he was never known to indulge in the gaudy decoration of his person, which is the common practice of the Indians. On the day of his death, he wore a dressed deer skin coat and pantaloons. He was present ...
— The Life and Correspondence of Sir Isaac Brock • Ferdinand Brock Tupper
... about on the boundless sea. And as for you, Johanna," says I, "you've committed a grievous sin, and you're a fallen creature. But Jacob Engstrand," says I, "he's got two good legs to stand upon, he has—" You see, your Reverence, I was speaking figurative-like. ...
— Ghosts • Henrik Ibsen
... most practical and urgent purpose. It will be answered to me that the first Kind of Man of whom I spoke could not really be on boards and committees, as modern England is managed. His dirt, though necessary and honourable, would be offensive: his speech, though rich and figurative, would be almost incomprehensible. Let us grant, for the moment, that this is so. This Kind of Man, with his sooty hair or sanguinary adjectives, cannot be represented at our committees of arbitration. Therefore, the ...
— A Miscellany of Men • G. K. Chesterton
... teeth, the character of their stomachs, and the shortness of their bowels, and fed, for the time they remained in it, exclusively on vegetable substances, which, in ordinary circumstances, their lacteals could not have converted into chyle. Certain figurative expressions in Scripture taken literally, which refer to a class of wild animals whose real destiny is rather, it would seem, to be extirpated than to be changed, coupled with the belief, now no longer tenable, that there was a time, ere man had sinned, ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... he hadn't any ship, Any flocks at his command, Nor to feed them any land; Said he never in his life Owned a mine to keep a wife. But the guilty stammer so That his meaning wouldn't flow; So he thought his aim to reach By some figurative speech: Said his Fate had been unkind Had pursued him from behind (How the mischief could ...
— Shapes of Clay • Ambrose Bierce
... answered in the following couplet, which convinced me of the truth of the supposition of Mr. Thomas Campbell, the intended lecturer of poetry to the London University, that mankind in an aboriginal state is essentially poetical, and express their ideas either in rhythmical or figurative language— ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, No. - 287, December 15, 1827 • Various
... impressively, "as to get a three-pound bass to the top of the water and have your line break. I've had a big fellow get away like that and chase me a mile with its thumb on its nose." This last, of course, was purely figurative. ...
— Tish, The Chronicle of Her Escapades and Excursions • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... broom, that it had formerly been a novice who neglected to sweep out the Council room, hence was reborn as a broom,(!) therefore the wisest of all the world's sages stands accused of idiotic superstition. Why not try and understand the true meaning of the figurative statement before criticising? Is or is not that which is called magnetic effluvia a something, a stuff or a substance, invisible and imponderable though it be?... The mesmeric or magnetic fluid which emanates from man to man, or even from man to what is termed an inanimate ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal
... Shaftesbury, on the contrary, who aimed at the same easy, degage mode of communicating his thoughts to the world, has quite spoiled his matter, which is sometimes valuable, by his manner, in which he carries a certain flaunting, flowery, figurative, flirting style of amicable condescension to the reader, to an excess more tantalising than the most starched and ridiculous formality of the age of James I. There is nothing so tormenting as the affectation of ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... "hire" or "wages" imply a [181] "hirer" or "wage-giver." Therefore, when a man in "the original state of things" gathered fruit or killed game for his own sustenance, the fruit or the game could be called his "wages" only in a figurative sense; as one sees if the term "hire," which has a more limited connotation, is substituted for "wage." If not, it must be assumed that the savage hired himself to get his own dinner; whereby we are led to the tolerably absurd conclusion ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... the opposite political party at one time during a campaign, Lincoln said: "My opponent uses a figurative expression to the effect that 'the Democrats are vulnerable in the heel, but they are sound in the heart and head.' The first branch of the figure—that is the Democrats are vulnerable in the heel—I admit is not merely figuratively ...
— Lincoln's Yarns and Stories • Alexander K. McClure
... however, the work of Puttenham is most of all to be valued for the remarks on language and on manners, and the contemporary anecdotes with which it abounds, and of which some examples may be quoted. After observing that "as it hath been always reputed a great fault to use figurative speeches foolishly and indiscreetly, so it is esteemed no less an imperfection in man's utterance, to have none use of figure at all, specially in our writing and speeches public, making them but as our ordinary talk, than which nothing can be more unsavory ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... the river, obtained some information from Moors and from negroes, on its course by Timbuctoo. The Jinnie of Park is synonymous with Jenne, Gine, Dhjenne, of other writers, as Jenne has again been confounded with Kano or Kanno. It may be a figurative term—for the Jinnie of Park was on an island, as was the Jenne of the Moorish reports, while the Jenne of some travellers is at a short distance from the river. This cannot be the case with regard to Timbuctoo, which is visited ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, - Issue 495, June 25, 1831 • Various
... complete standard of Christian faith and morals, adapted to the interval between the ascension of Christ and his return with the kingdom which he has received from God; the Apocalypse, or Revelation of Jesus Christ to John, in Patmos, as a figurative and prospective view of all the fortunes of Christianity, from its date to the return of ...
— The Book of Religions • John Hayward
... Clyde, of Portland Place, London, England, a pleasure tourist in Canada, with a (figurative) mortgage on every town he visited, and a claim on the hand of one ...
— The Doctor's Daughter • "Vera"
... unnecessary space. The only difference between the two traditions is that the otter, which is emblematical of one of the four Medicine Spirits who are believed to preside over the Midawe rites, is used in one in the same figurative manner as the seashell is used in the other, first appearing to the ancient An-ish-in-aub-ag from the depths of the great salt water, again on the river St. Lawrence, then on Lake Huron at Sault Ste. Marie, again at La Pointe, but lastly ...
— The Mide'wiwin or "Grand Medicine Society" of the Ojibwa • Walter James Hoffman
... symbolical language in both being the same, but the meaning of it being taken differently. In course of time, as knowledge makes its way among the people, and religious enlightenment with it, much of what had been received literally will relapse into its original figurative or symbolical meaning. Reason will resume her supremacy, and stereotyped dogmas will fall like ...
— The God-Idea of the Ancients - or Sex in Religion • Eliza Burt Gamble
... lesson on the harpsichord, and found the teacher a most charming man: for each finger of the right and left hand he had a nickname, by which he indicated in the merriest way when it was to be used. The black and white keys were likewise symbolically designated, and even the tones appeared under figurative names. Such a motley company worked most pleasantly together. Fingering and time seemed to become perfectly easy and obvious; and, while the scholar was put into the best humor, ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... the literature and history of the Scandinavians, and the people listened, not as to the inspiration of an individual mind, but to the pulsation of its own past life. Their praises were desired, their satire feared, by the greatest heroes and kings. Their style was figurative, ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... it; e.g., doctrines about Adam, universal sinfulness, the fall, predestination, Theodicy, etc., besides all kinds of ideas about redemption. Besides these spiritual doctrines there were not a few spiritualised myths which were variously made use of in the Apocalypses. A rich, spiritual, figurative style, only too rich and therefore confused, waited for the theological artist to purify, reduce and vigorously fashion. There really remained very little of the Cosmico-Mythological in the doctrine of ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 1 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... moral or metaphysical theories of their own to support. The image of a vinculum juris colours and pervades every part of the Roman law of Contract and Delict. The law bound the parties together, and the chain could only be undone by the process called solutio, an expression still figurative, to which our word "payment" is only occasionally and incidentally equivalent. The consistency with which the figurative image was allowed to present itself, explains an otherwise puzzling peculiarity of Roman legal phraseology, the fact that "Obligation" signified rights as well as duties, the ...
— Ancient Law - Its Connection to the History of Early Society • Sir Henry James Sumner Maine
... me of holding discourse together in public? But already had he bethought himself of acting in more subtle ways; and now he would speak to this one, now to that one, words whereby I, being most eager for such enlightenment, discovered that whatever he said to these was fraught with figurative and hidden meanings, intended to show forth his ardent affection for myself. When he was sensible that I had a clear perception of the occult significance of his questions and answers, he went still further, and by gestures, and ...
— La Fiammetta • Giovanni Boccaccio
... this technical and figurative expression beyond her, paused in her knitting and looked anxiously at Phoebe, to see how she would take it. After a moment of thought, the young ...
— The Panchronicon • Harold Steele Mackaye
... of writing a hymn on the Beauty of Viceroys; and have repeatedly attuned my mind to the subject; but my inability to express myself in figurative language, and my total ignorance of everything pertaining to metre, rhythm, and rhyme, make me rather hesitate to employ verse. Certainly, the subject is inviting, and I am surprised that no singer has arisen. How can any one view the Viceroyal halo of scarlet ...
— Twenty-One Days in India; and, the Teapot Series • George Robert Aberigh-Mackay
... let us get, as quickly as may be, at the exact meaning with which the advocates of "High Art" use that somewhat obscure and figurative term. ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... They are the remains of tyranny on one part and slavery on the other; and the name of the Creator ought not to be introduced to witness the degradation of his creation; or if taken, as is already mentioned, as figurative of the nation, it is in this place redundant. But whatever apology may be made for oaths at the first establishment of a government, they ought not to be permitted afterwards. If a government requires the support of oaths, it is a sign that it is not worth ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... Introduction to the Pentateuch, Gospels, and Acts. 4. Interpretation of the Gospels in Harmony and of the Acts. 5. Interpretation of the Historical Writings of Moses. 6. Particular Introduction to the several Books of the Old and New Testaments. 7. Hebrew Poetry, including Figurative and Symbolical Language of Scripture. 8. Interpretation of Psalms, Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes. 9. Epistles to Romans, Corinthians, Timothy, and I Peter. 10. Nature and Fulfilment of Prophecy, particularly in reference to the Messiah. 11. Interpretation of Isaiah, Zechariah, ...
— American Scenes, and Christian Slavery - A Recent Tour of Four Thousand Miles in the United States • Ebenezer Davies
... Opposite Influences.*—(b) Since we are now dropping the figurative manner of expression hitherto employed, by which we spoke of sources of sexual excitement, we may now assume that all the connecting ways leading from other functions to sexuality must also be passable in the reverse direction. For example, if the lip ...
— Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex • Sigmund Freud
... cap, the blanket, leggins, and moccasins, worn by all the tribes; the women among the New-Brunswick Indians frequently wear a round hat, a shawl, and short clothes, resembling the short gown and petticoat worn by the French and Dutch women. The Indian language is bold and figurative, abounding in hyperbolical expressions, and is said to be susceptible of much elegance. To give the reader some notion of the manner in which these people conduct their conferences with each other, ...
— First History of New Brunswick • Peter Fisher
... cup to drink, he adds, "This do ye, as oft as ye drink it, in remembrance of me." The words, "this is my body—this cup is the New Testament in my blood," appeared to me only what they really are, figurative expressions, signifying that the bread represented his body, and the wine his blood. These words do in no degree change or modify the principal idea, that of commemoration, which runs throughout ...
— The Village in the Mountains; Conversion of Peter Bayssiere; and History of a Bible • Anonymous
... order by which the Almighty regulates the common course of things. Nature is not a person; it is not active; it neither creates nor performs actions more or less energetically, nor learns, nor forgets, nor reexerts itself, nor recruits its vigour. Perhaps it will be said that all this is merely figurative language. Figurative language is very much misplaced in strict philosophical investigations; and these particular figures, which might be quite consistent with the atheistical philosophy of Lucretius, sound ill in the mouth of a pious Christian, which Mr. Coleridge undoubtedly was. He ...
— Hints towards the formation of a more comprehensive theory of life. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... think that the failing of the sight is here to be understood. But I am surprized, how they happened not to take notice, that every thing in this discourse, even to the most minute circumstances, is expressed in words bearing a figurative sense. For whereas, in describing the infirmities of Old-age, the injuries of the operations of the mind, as the most grievous of all, were not to be pretermitted; so these could not be more clearly expressed, than by the obscuration of the coelestial luminous ...
— Medica Sacra - or a Commentary on on the Most Remarkable Diseases Mentioned - in the Holy Scriptures • Richard Mead
... ridiculous toy to match the cottage piano, he was taking in the details around him with a keen and thoroughly kind sensibility. He remembered a home no longer than this on the outskirts of Bohemia; and in the figurative Bohemia too he had had large acquaintance with the variety and romance which belong to small incomes. He addressed Mrs. Meyrick ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... devout mind, full of the figurative sacred writings then current, must have overflowed with visions, ecstasies and miracles! And what tremors of awe must he have felt, in putting these visions into colour! His Madonnas, their features suffused with candour and humility, bend with maternal grace hitherto ...
— Fra Angelico • J. B. Supino
... threat. High is thus used in a number of figurative senses, e.g. a high wind, a high hand, high passions (Par. Lost, ix. 123), high descent, high ...
— Milton's Comus • John Milton
... Spaniard, and the levity of the Frenchman, are as evident in all their productions as in their persons themselves; and the style of my countrymen is as naturally strong and nervous, as that of an Arabian or Persian is rich and figurative. ...
— The Poetical Works of William Collins - With a Memoir • William Collins
... prohibits image-worship. On this point Aristotle and the Bible are in accord. The inference is that in the Holy Scriptures there are many metaphors and words with a double or allegoric sense. Such is the case with the word "image." It has two meanings, the one usual and obvious, the other figurative. Here the word must be taken in its figurative sense. God is conceived as the highest Reason, and as reason is the specific attribute which characterizes the human mind, it follows that man, by virtue of his possession of reason, resembles God, and the more fully he realizes ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... the carking cares and tribulations of the present life, were kept in view the far more important realities of the life that is to come, and the souls of the people were enbraved and strengthened for the conflicts, both literal and figurative, to which they ...
— Neville Trueman the Pioneer Preacher • William Henry Withrow
... those texts of Scripture which represent the earth as the immovable center of the universe, we shall be referred to the figurative language of the Psalms, the book of Job, and other poetical parts of Scripture, which speak of the "foundations of the earth," "the earth being established," "abiding for ever," and the like, when the slightest ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... Hernandez to suppose that the Mayas had Trinitarian doctrines. When they said that the god of the merchants and planters supplied the wants of men and furnished the world with desirable things, it was but a slightly figurative way of stating ...
— American Hero-Myths - A Study in the Native Religions of the Western Continent • Daniel G. Brinton
... of the same incident occurs in No. IV of M. Emile Legrand's Receuil de Contes Populaires Grecs (Paris, 1881), where a prince sets out in quest of some maiden acquainted with "figurative language," whom he would marry. He comes upon an old man and his daughter, and overhears the latter address her father in metaphorical terms, which she has to explain to the old man, at which the prince is highly pleased, and following them ...
— Flowers from a Persian Garden and Other Papers • W. A. Clouston
... truth. To my present feelings it seems incredible that I should ever believe that I believed in transubstantiation. But my conqueror oppressed me with the sacramental words, 'Hoc est corpus meum,' and dashed against each other the figurative half meanings of the Protestant sects; every objection was resolved into omnipotence, and, after repeating at St. Mary's the Athanasian Creed, I humbly acquiesced in the mystery of ...
— Gibbon • James Cotter Morison
... writing thus constituted by the metrical or rhythmical structure of its sentences; and is not necessarily any more figurative or obscure than prose writing. It is, also, a term sometimes applied to the language of excited imagination ...
— A Brief Commentary on the Apocalypse • Sylvester Bliss
... birds with one stone—that is to say, he killed the sugar speculation by holding for high rates till he had to sell at the bottom figure, and that calamity killed the mule that laid the golden egg—which is but a figurative expression and will be so understood. Sellers had returned home cheerful but empty-handed, and the mule business lapsed into other hands. The sale of the Hawkins property by the Sheriff had followed, and the Hawkins ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 1. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... while, and gall the wounded sufferer. Their smartness is pleasant, and delights the company; and those that are pleased with the saving seem to believe the detracting speaker. For according to Theophrastus, a jeer is a figurative reproach for some fault or misdemeanor; and therefore he that hears it supplies the concealed part, as if he knew and gave credit to the thing. For he that laughs and is tickled at what Theocritus said to one whom he suspected of a design upon his clothes, ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... medicine man: he has no bones, always lies out in the open air, and is rolled over from one side to the other twice a year, during spring and fall. He adds that an intelligent Indian once suggested that this was a figurative representation of the ...
— Contribution to Passamaquoddy Folk-Lore • J. Walter Fewkes
... herself that they should pretend not to understand the simile of which she had made use, accustomed as she was to speak in figurative language. ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... the Prophecies, we are, in the first place, to acquaint our-selves with the figurative language of the Prophets. This language is taken from the analogy between the world natural, and an empire or kingdom considered ...
— Observations upon the Prophecies of Daniel, and the Apocalypse of St. John • Isaac Newton
... fire with a stick until the sparks rose like quail out of the grass, Dr. Slavens vowed solemnly that he would win that fee or take in his shingle—which, of course, was a figurative shingle only at that time—and Agnes pledged herself to stand by and help him do it as faithfully as if they were already in the future and bound to sustain each other's hands in the bitter and the ...
— Claim Number One • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... who has persuaded an enlightened body of electors to receive L10,000 decimated amongst them, and has in return the honour of sleeping in "St. Stephen's," and smoking in "Bellamy's," or, to be less figurative, who has been returned as their representative in Parliament, receives the foretaste of his importance in a "public dinner," which commemorates his election; or should he desire to express "the deep ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, August 28, 1841 • Various
... the quartermaster; "the armies have kept a respectful distance; they were like nothing I can think of," said the figurative Frenchman, "except two hideous serpents wallowing in mire, and vomiting at each other whole rivers of fire ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 2 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... Societys great, or small—in short of leading them in the Study, and Practice of the exalted Virtues of the Christian system, which will happily tend to subdue the turbulent passions of Men, and introduce that Golden Age beautifully described in figurative language; when the Wolf shall dwell with the Lamb, and the Leopard lie down with the Kid—the Cow, and the bear shall feed; their young ones shall lie down together, and the Lyon shall eat straw like the Ox—none shall then hurt, or destroy; for the ...
— The Original Writings of Samuel Adams, Volume 4 • Samuel Adams
... windows of heaven" and taught that they were opened when it rained, and closed when it ceased to rain. Hence it is evident that the ancient Astronomers did not refer to these pillars and windows in a figurative sense, but as real appurtenances to a solid firmament, as will be seen by reference to Gen. vii. 11, and viii. 2, Job xxvi. ...
— Astral Worship • J. H. Hill
... [155] A figurative and highly poetic expression as old as Homer. In this instance it is said to signify that the sun had been two gharis above ...
— Bagh O Bahar, Or Tales of the Four Darweshes • Mir Amman of Dihli
... moral resurrection "coming" on a more extensive scale, even embracing all men. Jesus changes one word only, using graves,—more properly tombs,—instead of death. But coming out of death into life, and coming out of the tombs into life, are essentially the same thing. Both are figurative expressions. I insist that where Jesus says, "The hour is coming and now is," he conveys the impression that the then present process was in its nature the same as the coming one, only that the latter would be more ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 20, July, 1891 • Various
... object in itself. The grapes of Zeuxis at which birds pecked, the painted dog at which a cat's hair bristles—if such grapes or such a dog were ever put on canvas—are but evidences of the artist's skill, not of his faculty as artist. These two plastic, or, as I prefer to call them, figurative arts, use their imitation of the external world for the expression, the presentation of internal, spiritual things. The human form is for them the outward symbol of the inner human spirit, ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... rebuking this last speech, added in a tone of gentle remonstrance, that the first remark, though far from being respectful, was more endurable because it was a proverb and implied that a Superior had been given to them who was less capable than his predecessor, and that this was expressed in figurative terms, as David speaks of himself in relation to Almighty God in one of the Psalms when he says: I am become as a beast before Thee.[1] "The second sarcasm, however," he added, "has nothing figurative in it, and is absolutely and grossly insulting. We must never speak ...
— The Spirit of St. Francis de Sales • Jean Pierre Camus
... Barclay (see above, pp. xxvii., liv.), apart from the probability that, as contemporaries resident in the same provincial town, Ely, they were well acquainted with each other, leave little doubt that the two were personal friends. Bulleyn's figurative description of the poet, quoted at p. xxvii., is scarcely complete without the following verses, which are appended to it by way of summary of his teachings (similar verses are appended to the descriptions of ...
— The Ship of Fools, Volume 1 • Sebastian Brandt
... of imagery and nowise elevated above every-day life. But energetical passions electrify all the mental powers, and will consequently, in highly-favoured natures, give utterance to themselves in ingenious and figurative expressions. It has been often remarked that indignation makes a man witty; and as despair occasionally breaks out into laughter, it may sometimes also give vent to ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... his finest poetry are a tender love of nature, a profusion of figurative language, and a ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... than they. Among their own brethren they could think of many a one who had hung upon the cross for his brethren or died at the stake for his God. They took up the cross and followed Christ, bearing the reproach. That cross and that reproach were not figurative. Witness these gloomy labyrinths, fit home for the dead only, which nevertheless for years opened to shelter the living. Witness these names of martyrs, those words of despair. The walls carry down to later ages the words of grief, of ...
— The Martyr of the Catacombs - A Tale of Ancient Rome • Anonymous
... madam," said the elder Devlin, "you are mistaken in the meaning of that text, which has a figurative sense, and has no reference to corn, pumpkins, rye, or any other crop that your ...
— The Cross and the Shamrock • Hugh Quigley
... accounts the Deity brings into being personages who continue the work of world-making and such entities as mind, time and desire are produced before the material world. But everything in these creation stories is figurative. The faithful are not perplexed by the discrepancies in the inspired narratives, and one can hardly imagine an Indian sect agitated by the question whether God made the world in ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... full of romantic charm * * * it possesses ingenuity of incident, a figurative designation of the unhallowed scenes in which unlicensed love accomplishes and wrecks faith ...
— The Coast of Chance • Esther Chamberlain
... Jesus. Isaac is an only son, is offered in sacrifice, has secured for him a bride in a most unusual manner. This again in many ways illustrates the attitude and work of the Savior. But Joseph is perhaps more highly figurative of the Redeemer. His being hated and cast out by his brethren is like the rejection of Jesus; the way his wicked brethren came to him in their extremity and received forgiveness and sustenance suggest how a sinner finds mercy and life in Jesus; his prosperity and honor ...
— The Bible Period by Period - A Manual for the Study of the Bible by Periods • Josiah Blake Tidwell
... Thames. Setting the butt of his rifle on the ground and resting his hand upon the muzzle, the young Kentuckian now addressed the chieftain, not only speaking to him in his own language, but adopting the poetical and figurative style of expression peculiar ...
— Burl • Morrison Heady
... freely imparted to others, and his books he gladly lent. This is apparent in the Philobiblon; and his generous spirit warms his diction—not always chaste—into a fluent eloquence. His composition overflows with figurative expressions, yet the rude, ungainly form on which they are moulded deprive them of all claim to elegance or chastity; but while the homeliness of his diction fails to impress us with an idea of his versatility as a writer, his chatty anecdotal style rivets ...
— Bibliomania in the Middle Ages • Frederick Somner Merryweather
... evil, and less attributable to the visionary humour and weak judgment of the individual expositors, is the literal rendering of Scripture in passages, which the number and variety of images employed in different places to express one and the same verity, plainly mark out for figurative. And lastly, add to all these the strange—in all other writings unexampled—practice of bringing together into logical dependency detached sentences from books composed at the distance of centuries, nay, sometimes a millennium from each other, under different dispensations, and for different ...
— Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit etc. • by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... little narrow lagunes, over which the high trees spread in vaulted cupolas almost impervious to the light of day, there dwells the powerful giant snake (Eunectes murinus, Wagl.), called by the Indians, in their figurative language, yacumaman, "mother of the waters." Stretched in listless repose, or winding round the stem of an old tree, bathing her tail in the cool lagune, she watches wistfully for the animals of the forest who come to the waters to quench their thirst. Whilst she gazes at her distant ...
— Travels in Peru, on the Coast, in the Sierra, Across the Cordilleras and the Andes, into the Primeval Forests • J. J. von Tschudi
... must be understood in the figurative sense of the mantram. Generally speaking, the rivers of India, beginning with the thrice sacred Ganges, are dreadfully dirty, especially near villages ...
— From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan • Helena Pretrovna Blavatsky
... or scarified on the chest, sufficient to draw blood and cause pain, the natural accompaniments of his figurative death. He took his position opposite the singers, facing the pole, and dragging the skull by leather thongs which were merely fastened about his shoulders. During a later period, incisions were made in the breast or back, sometimes both, through ...
— The Soul of the Indian - An Interpretation • [AKA Ohiyesa], Charles A. Eastman
... English for years and thought she knew it, and yet she found it difficult fully, to comprehend all the figurative phrases of this pleasing ...
— The Slim Princess • George Ade
... particularly 1), "one of the most important rules of true rhetoric," "that there is nothing beautiful except that which is true; which would take away from discourse a multitude of vain ornaments and false thoughts;" and 2) the doctrine that "the figurative style commonly expresses, with the things, the emotions which we experience in conceiving or speaking of them," and hence in the light of the adjustment of feeling to the situation "we may judge the use which ought ...
— An Essay on True and Apparent Beauty in which from Settled Principles is Rendered the Grounds for Choosing and Rejecting Epigrams • Pierre Nicole
... is reduced to nothing—that all is illusion, appearance, dream; that the moral metempsychosis is only the figurative sense of the physical metempsychosis, or the successive movement of the elements of bodies which perish not, but which, having composed one body, pass when that is dissolved, into other mediums and form other combinations. The soul is but the vital principle which results from ...
— The Ruins • C. F. [Constantin Francois de] Volney
... arms, bared almost to the shoulder, seemed designed as a sculptor's model rather than to wield the brush with which she scoured the paint and woodwork; but she thought not of sculpture except in the remote and figurative way of querying, with mind far absent from her work, how best she could carve their humble fortunes out of the unpromising material of the present and ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... to the Cross in "Science and Health," but the word is used generally in a figurative and sentimental way. Mrs. Eddy's cross is simply the pain of being misunderstood and criticised in the preaching and practice of Christian Science, though indeed the Cross of Jesus was also the outcome of hostilities and misunderstandings and a final ...
— Modern Religious Cults and Movements • Gaius Glenn Atkins
... of taking the stick from a minister was less figurative in Queen Anne's days than now. The white wand of office was carried before every Cabinet Minister, not only in his public ...
— The Maidens' Lodge - None of Self and All of Thee, (In the Reign of Queen Anne) • Emily Sarah Holt
... own State consisted of two dissolute bears holding up the head of a dead and gone cask between them and making the pertinent remark, "UNITED, WE STAND—(hic!)—DIVIDED, WE FALL." It was always too figurative for the author of this book. But the Mormon crest was easy. And it was simple, unostentatious, and fitted like a glove. It was a representation of a GOLDEN BEEHIVE, with ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... "That's only figurative. Polly, why have you gone back to braids and bows? You look very infantile for a real ...
— The Wide Awake Girls in Winsted • Katharine Ellis Barrett
... incomprehensible, but also distinct and permanent in spite of its metamorphoses, declares, on the strength of the sensations and ideas which this essence suggests to it, that the NOT-ME is extended and impenetrable. Impenetrability is a figurative term, an image by which thought, a division of the absolute, pictures to itself material reality, another division of the absolute; but this impenetrability, without which matter disappears, is, in the last analysis, only a spontaneous judgment of inward sensation, ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... conduct which has been pursued. It is said and believed through Paris literally, that the Count de Montmorin, "pleuroit comme un enfant," when obliged to sign the counter-declaration. Considering the phrase as figurative, I believe it expresses the distress of his heart. Indeed, he has made no secret of his individual opinion. In the meantime, the Principal goes on with a firm and patriotic spirit, in reforming the cruel abuses of the government, ...
— The Writings of Thomas Jefferson - Library Edition - Vol. 6 (of 20) • Thomas Jefferson
... on the surface of a mirror. Such concrete character, however, Greek poet or sculptor, from time to time, impressed on the vague world of popular belief and usage around him; and in the Bacchanals of Euripides we have an example of the figurative or imaginative power of poetry, selecting and combining, at will, from that mixed and floating mass, weaving the many-coloured threads together, blending the various phases of legend—all the light and shade of the [54] subject—into a shape, substantial and firmly set, through ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... of the Aryan peoples in their ancient home was full of imagination. They never ceased to wonder at what they heard and saw in the sky and upon the earth. Their language was highly figurative, and so the things which struck them with wonder, and which they could not explain, were described under forms and names which were familiar to them. Thus the thunder was to them the bellowing of a mighty beast ...
— Fairy Tales; Their Origin and Meaning • John Thackray Bunce
... conventional art is, that it puts no bounds to the fancy of the designer. It is a figurative language in which he may get away from commonplace statement. What has always seemed to me a very logical employment of convention appears in the Punch cartoons of Sir John Tenniel and Mr. Lindley Sambourne. Even ...
— Pen Drawing - An Illustrated Treatise • Charles Maginnis
... images and figures have also been received in the language of the vulgar, so natural it is for men to be sensible of the wonderful art that fills all nature. Poetry did only ascribe to inanimate creatures the art and design of the Creator, who does everything in them. From the figurative language of the poets those notions passed into the theology of the heathens, whose divines were the poets. They supposed an art, a power, or a wisdom, which they called numen, in creatures the most destitute of understanding. With them great rivers were gods; ...
— The Existence of God • Francois de Salignac de La Mothe- Fenelon
... for regarding the whole Man as compounded of BODY, SOUL, and SPIRIT. The Farewell Address, in a lower and figurative sense, is likewise so compounded. If these were divisible and distributable, we might, though not with full and exact propriety, allot the SOUL to Washington, and the SPIRIT to Hamilton. The elementary body is Washington's, also; but Hamilton has ...
— Washington and the American Republic, Vol. 3. • Benson J. Lossing
... which she had for so many years beheld him, that she dismissed, as typically chimerical "notions," the speculations of her doctor—also a lifelong friend of her husband's—as to what Judge Emery might have become if—the doctor spoke in his usual highly figurative and fantastic jargon—"he had not had to hurry so with that wheel in his cage." "When I first knew Nat Emery," he once said, "he was sitting up till all hours reading Les Miserables, and would knock you down if you didn't bow your head at the mention of Thackeray. He might have liked music, ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... felicity to the righteous, in the future world, though the precise nature of that felicity may not be defined, are illustrated by every image that can swell the imagination: while the misery of the 'lost', in its unutterable intensity, though the language that describes it is all necessarily figurative, is there exhibited as resulting chiefly, if not wholly, from the withdrawment of the 'light of God's countenance', and a banishment from his 'presence!'—best comprehended in this world, by reflecting on the desolations which would instantly follow the loss ...
— The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - 1838 • James Gillman
... upon the impressive procession with pride unutterable; very soon I also should walk two and two in the sunshine, my dome crowned with figurative laurels, cracking scientific witticisms with my fellow inmates, or, perhaps, squeezing the pretty fingers of ...
— Police!!! • Robert W. Chambers
... difficulty is rather within than without us, it arises from a lack of will power. But hard or easy, these occasions must nevertheless be removed. Let the suffering entailed be what it may, the eye must be plucked out, the arm must be lopped off, to use the Saviour's figurative language, if in no other way the soul can be saved from sin. Better to leave your father's house, better to give up your very life, than to damn your soul for all eternity. But extremes are rarely called for; small sacrifices often cost more than great ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton
... that class of myths which have been dramatized in ritual, or, to put it otherwise, which have been performed as magical ceremonies for the sake of producing those natural effects which they describe in figurative language. A myth is never so graphic and precise in its details as when it is, so to speak, the book of the words which are spoken and acted by the performers of the sacred rite. That the Norse story of Balder was a ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer
... Philo, notably Professor Drummond,[219] have examined his words more carefully and studied them in relation to their context; and they have shown how, judged in this critical fashion, the personality of the Logos is only figurative. It is, indeed, probable that certain extreme passages, where the Logos is presented most explicitly as a separate Deity, are due to Christological interpolation. The Church Fathers found in the popular belief in the Divine Word a remarkable support of the Trinity, ...
— Philo-Judaeus of Alexandria • Norman Bentwich
... word to thwart her sisters: she even went so far as to explain to Mr. Trinder that they would not have to carry parcels, as Phillis meant to hire a boy. She had no idea that this magnanimous speech was in a figurative manner the last straw that broke the camel's back. Mr. Trinder pushed back his chair hastily, made some excuse that his train must be due, and beat a retreat an hour before the time, unable to pursue such a painful subject ...
— Not Like Other Girls • Rosa N. Carey
... nineteen-twentieths would take care of themselves. The bacilli are not the only ones who can be numbered in their billions. If there are billions of them there are billions of us. We are not mere units—scarcely even individuals—except in a broad and figurative sense. We are confederacies of billions upon billions of little, living animalcules which we call cells. These cells of ours are no Sunday-school class. They are old and tough and cunning to a degree. They are war-worn veterans, carrying the scars of a score of victories written ...
— Preventable Diseases • Woods Hutchinson
... notwithstanding, was a good Catholic, or at least pretended to be one, and certainly desired to become such, but it appeared to her that the Scriptures were too literally and harshly explained, supposing that all we read of everlasting torments were figurative threatenings, and the death of Jesus Christ an example of charity, truly divine, which should teach mankind to love God and each other; in a word, faithful to the religion she had embraced, she acquiesced in all its professions of faith, ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... not more than nine-tenths stand straight on their legs; the remainder are in quite angular attitudes; a few even sprawl out helplessly on all sides, quite broken-backed and dismembered." There is no modern writer who possesses so large a profusion of figurative language. His works are also full of the pithiest and most memorable sayings, ...
— A Brief History of the English Language and Literature, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John Miller Dow Meiklejohn
... in society, such as heart disease. Such handicaps, however, are limited to relatively few of a population. The raison d'etre of the greater number of minor mental inefficiencies the psychanalyst puts down to handicaps in the unconscious. Again he mistakes figurative imagery for explanations. The conception of endocrine diversity in the make-up supplies us with the rationale of the vast majority of organic and functional defects and inferiorities, in short, subnormalities of any ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... heaven, was believed to have united himself in marriage with Gaea, the earth; and a moment's reflection will show what a truly poetical, and also what a logical idea this was; for, taken in a figurative sense, {12} this union actually does exist. The smiles of heaven produce the flowers of earth, whereas his long-continued frowns exercise so depressing an influence upon his loving partner, that she no longer decks herself in bright and festive robes, but responds with ...
— Myths and Legends of Ancient Greece and Rome • E.M. Berens
... of biological equality of the two sexes must use the word in a figurative sense, not ignoring the differentiation of the two sexes, as extreme feminists are inclined to do. To this differentiation ...
— Applied Eugenics • Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill Johnson
... hear everything," he interposed quickly; for an idea came to him—if Mrs. Dickson had to hear the tale she should hear it from him, with certain little embellishments and figurative allusions, which would effectually destroy any chance Ailleen might have of making capital out ...
— Colonial Born - A tale of the Queensland bush • G. Firth Scott
... the moral side of life the Greek is, of course, supreme. It is hardly too much to say that intellectual progress has only pursued a steady and consistent course when men's minds have been in touch with the Greek. The sense of beauty in all the arts, intellectual and figurative, was the prerogative of the Hellenic communities, or, rather, of Athens, for only in Athens was perfection in the arts achieved. The Greek was the best, as he was the first, director and teacher. It is true that the artists of Florence, Umbria, Lombardy, and Venice equalled the ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... speculations will deal. For this argument that he will perhaps be able to buy up the architect and the tailor and the decorator and so forth is merely preliminary to the graver issue. It is just possible that the shareholder may, to a very large extent—in a certain figurative sense, at least—buy up much of the womankind that would otherwise be available to constitute those severe, capable, and probably by no means unhappy little establishments to which our typical engineers will tend, ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... it; and now, to make things quite pleasant, there descended upon us a thicker fog than I should have thought the atmosphere capable of sustaining; it seemed to hang in solid festoons from the masts and spars. To say that you could not see your hand, ceased almost to be any longer figurative; even the ice was hid—except those fragments immediately adjacent, whose ghastly brilliancy the mist itself could not quite extinguish, as they glimmered round the vessel like a circle of luminous phantoms. The perfect stillness of the sea and sky added very much to the solemnity ...
— Letters From High Latitudes • The Marquess of Dufferin (Lord Dufferin)
... "Sundus," a kind of brocade (low Lat. brocare to figure cloth), silk worked in high relief with gold and silver. The idea is figurative meaning it was hung outside and inside with fine stuff, like the Ka'abah, the "Bride of Meccah." The "lords" means ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... is harder, tighter, more closely packed with figurative meaning than perhaps any of Swinburne's later verse. It is less fluid, less 'exuberant and effusive' (to accept two epithets of his own in reference to the verse of Atalanta in Calydon). He is ready to be harsh when harshness is required, abrupt for some sharp effect; ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... act as his messenger, and in general to be subject to his directions. It gave to the aid the office of chief and rendered probable his election as the successor of his principal after the decease of the latter. In their figurative language these aids of the sachems were styled "Braces in the Long House," which ...
— Houses and House-Life of the American Aborigines • Lewis H. Morgan
... "The Lyon Campaign," by Eugene F. Ware, pp. 324-339.) I have read somewhere this saying of Bonaparte's: "An army of deer commanded by a lion is better than an army of lions commanded by a deer." While that statement is only figurative in its nature, it is, however, a strong epigrammatic expression of the fact that the commander of soldiers in battle should be, above all other things, a forcible, ...
— The Story of a Common Soldier of Army Life in the Civil War, 1861-1865 • Leander Stillwell
... been dispelled from every stage and process of the social training of men. Things long hidden appeared discovered with an amazing clearness and nakedness. These men who had awakened, laughed dissolvent laughs, and the old muddle of schools and colleges, books and traditions, the old fumbling, half-figurative, half-formal teaching of the Churches, the complex of weakening and confusing suggestions and hints, amidst which the pride and honor of adolescence doubted and stumbled and fell, became nothing but a curious and pleasantly faded memory. "There must ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... than he who has none, though in his hand may be all the aces of the others, diamonds included. But, lest I go too far beyond the analogy—as I might ignorantly do, being unskilled in the many games of cards—I will drop the figurative.... Keep your heart for faith, love, friendship, for God, your country, and truth. And where the heart is given, it should be unreservedly. Its allegiance is too often withheld where it is due, yet this is better than a half-way loyalty; there should be ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various
... occurrences in his life corresponding to such traits as tortured limbs and burning thirst, pierced hands and parted garments, has driven some critics to the hypothesis that we have here a psalm of the exile describing either actual sufferings inflicted on some unknown confessor in Babylon, or in figurative language the calamities of Israel there. But the Davidic origin is confirmed by many obvious points of resemblance with the psalms which are indisputably his, and especially with those of the Sauline period, while the difficulty of finding historical facts answering ...
— The Life of David - As Reflected in His Psalms • Alexander Maclaren
... conclude, they must all act according to their distinct and peculiar characters. If the persons represented were to speak upon the stage, it would follow, of necessity, that the expressions should be lofty, figurative, and majestical: but the nature of an opera denies the frequent use of these poetical ornaments; for vocal music, though it often admits a loftiness of sound, yet always exacts an harmonious sweetness; or, to distinguish yet more justly, the recitative part of the opera requires a more masculine ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Vol. 7 (of 18) - The Duke of Guise; Albion and Albanius; Don Sebastian • John Dryden
... his countenance, and his whole person. Having somewhat recovered himself, instead of following his discourse, inspired with a divine impulse, he declared to his audience the encounter, and shock of the two navies, but in a mysterious and figurative manner. ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Volume XVI. (of 18) - The Life of St. Francis Xavier • John Dryden
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