FREE TRANSLATOR.ORG • More 'Sharp-sighted' Quotes from Famous Books

... Montespan, on the contrary, liked Boileau better than my father, but they always paid their court jointly, without any jealousy between them. When Madame de Montespan would let fall some rather tart expressions, my father and Boileau, though by no means sharp-sighted, observed that the king, without answering her, looked with a smile at Madame de Maintenon, who was seated opposite to him on a stool, and who finally disappeared all at once from these meetings. They met her in the gallery, ...

— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume VI. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot

... friend" to whom Titmouse alluded as having engaged himself to dinner with him, was, in fact, Mr. Snap; who had early evinced a great partiality for him, and lost no opportunity of contributing to his enjoyment. Snap was a sharp-sighted person, and quickly detected many qualities in Titmouse, kindred to his own. He sincerely commiserated Titmouse's situation, than which, could anything be more lonely and desolate? Was he to sit night after night in the lengthening nights of autumn and winter, with not a soul to speak ...

— Ten Thousand a-Year. Volume 1. • Samuel Warren

... authority, and give many positive and many qualified rights. In other words, they must be subject to rule and regulation. This is the very essence of free political institutions. The spirit of liberty is, indeed, a bold and fearless spirit; but it is also a sharp-sighted spirit, it is a cautious, sagacious, discriminating, far-seeing intelligence; it is jealous of encroachment, jealous of power, jealous of man. It demands checks; it seeks for guards; it insists on securities; it ...

— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster

... supposition that prosperity is always proportioned to good conduct, nor yet merely because it contributes nothing to the establishment of morality- since it is quite a different thing to make a prosperous man and a good man, or to make one prudent and sharp-sighted for his own interests and to make him virtuous- but because the springs it provides for morality are such as rather undermine it and destroy its sublimity, since they put the motives to virtue and to vice in the same class and only teach us to make a better calculation, the specific ...

— Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals • Immanuel Kant

... of logs and branches, with blankets, buffalo robes, and the leathern covers of lodges, extended round the top as a screen. The movements of the leaders, as they groped their way, had been descried by the sharp-sighted enemy. As Sinclair, who was in the advance, was putting some branches aside, he was shot through the body. He fell on the spot. "Take me to my brother," said he to Campbell. The latter gave him in charge to some of the men, who conveyed him out of ...

— The Adventures of Captain Bonneville - Digested From His Journal • Washington Irving

... older, however, she was always complaining of her own sinfulness, while every one else thought her the meekest, the gentlest, and most self-sacrificing being that ever lived. She had, indeed, become remarkably sharp-sighted to her own faults, and, in proportion, forgiving to ...

— Effie Maurice - Or What do I Love Best • Fanny Forester

... a bower fitted for beauty and love, it is said that here Arlette, the skinner's daughter, was confined of William the Conqueror. It is said, too, that from this height, the sharp-sighted Duke his father, gazing from his towers, first beheld the lovely peasant girl bathing in the fountain which still bears her name. In this retreat, concealed from prying eyes, and where inquisitive ears found it ...

— Barn and the Pyrenees - A Legendary Tour to the Country of Henri Quatre • Louisa Stuart Costello

... their share of the land, had parted with them long since, either to their own officers or to the trafficers in such bonds, who had sprang up by hundreds, and who obtained them from the needy soldiers often for a mere trifle. Sharp-sighted speculators like Dr. Petty, by whom the well-known Survey of Ireland was made, acquired immense tracts of land at little or no outlay. Of those soldiers, too, who did receive grants of land many left after a while. ...

— The Story Of Ireland • Emily Lawless

... length at the baths, where there were many strangers, and among them a beautiful princess, whose real disease consisted in being too sharp-sighted, which made every one very uneasy. She saw at once that the new comer was very different to every one else. "They say he is here to make his beard grow," she thought; "but I know the real cause, he is unable to cast a shadow." Then she ...

— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen

... might be pardoned—but he thought me such an egregious ass as not to know that the war was with the Turks, and not with the Persians at all." We bowed in amazement to find our English friend more ignorant than Juvenal. We shall now transcribe the observations of Colonel Leake, the most sharp-sighted and learned of the modern travellers who have visited the isthmus of Mount Athos:—"The modern name of this neck of land is provlaka, evidently the Romanic form of the word [Greek: proaulax], having reference to the canal in front of the peninsula of Athos, ...

— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various

... that angling is an art: is it not an art to deceive a trout with an artificial fly? a trout! that is more sharp-sighted than any hawk you have named, and more watchful and timorous than your high-mettled merlin is bold; and yet I doubt not to catch a brace or two to-morrow for a ...

— The Golf Course Mystery • Chester K. Steele

... their own convenience, a whole school exhibits a similar handwriting; the pupils are forced in their automatic motions, as if acted on by the pressure of a steam-engine; a bevy of beauties will now write such fac-similes of each other, that in a heap of letters presented to the most sharp-sighted lover to select that of his mistress—though, like Bassanio among the caskets, his happiness should be risked on the choice—he would despair of fixing on the right one, all appearing to have come from the same rolling-press. Even brothers ...

— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli

... always our boats ready to go in chase of a fish at a moment's notice. One day two of them were away, and had killed, dead to windward of us, a large whale, towards which I was endeavouring to beat up, when the look-out man from the crow's nest, a sharp-sighted fellow, Jerry Wilkins by name, hailed the deck to say that there was land in sight on our lee bow. I knew very well that there wasn't, and couldn't be, but when I went aloft and looked out myself, I was dumbfoundered, for there I saw a dark ...

— Marmaduke Merry - A Tale of Naval Adventures in Bygone Days • William H. G. Kingston

... Milton, Swift, and Fielding, those four Atlantes of English verse and prose, all affected him with lukewarm admiration, or with positive dislike, for which it is vain to attempt to assign any uniform secondary cause, political or other. It may be permitted to hint another reason. All Johnson's most sharp-sighted critics have noticed, though most have discreetly refrained from insisting on, his "thorn-in-the-flesh," the combination in him of very strong physical passions with the deepest sense of the moral and religious duty of abstinence. It ...

— Joseph Andrews Vol. 1 • Henry Fielding

... enough," exclaimed the skipper and Mr Sennitt, as both caught sight of the stranger at the same moment. "A frigate! French, too, as I'm a living sinner," continued the first luff, taking a squint through his glass at the craft. "Ah! he is as sharp-sighted as we are," he went on, with the telescope still at his eye. "Up goes his helm, and there go the lads aloft to make sail, he's coming down to say 'how d'ye do' to us, sir. And there goes the ...

— Under the Meteor Flag - Log of a Midshipman during the French Revolutionary War • Harry Collingwood

... if these repeated delays were persisted in, they would leave the court, protesting against the injustice which had been manifested to them and to their cause.[1142] Yet their anxiety was great. That dark cloud of portentous aspect could be descried by all sharp-sighted observers. It was the approaching storm of civil war, every moment rising higher above the horizon.[1143] Even now its advent was heralded by the anarchy pervading entire provinces—a righteous retribution for the sanguinary legislation and the yet more ...

— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird

... was musk-ox country, and we scanned it carefully, but saw none of the animals. Some miles down the bay we came upon the tracks of a couple of deer. A little farther on we were electrified by a tense whisper from the ever sharp-sighted Egingwah: ...

— The North Pole - Its Discovery in 1909 under the auspices of the Peary Arctic Club • Robert E. Peary

... of sensitive being, let us consider the beast of the forest, in whose case, without microscopic aid, we have the subject more accessible. Is he a beast of prey? Has the God of nature given him an instinctive thirst for blood? Behold, then, his sharp-sighted organs of vision for descrying his victim afar, his agile limbs for pursuit, his curved and pointed claws for seizing and tearing his prey, his sharp-edged teeth for cutting through its flesh, his firm jaws for gripping, crushing, and devouring it, and his intestines for digesting raw ...

— The Christian Foundation, April, 1880

... Marzo (March-Cock) from its returning in that month, and our old writers "lapwing" (Deut. xiv. 18). This foul-feeding bird derives her honours from chapt. xxvii. of the Koran (q.v.), the Hudhud was sharp-sighted and sagacious enough to discover water underground which the devils used to draw after she had marked the place ...

— Supplemental Nights, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton

... gun, and so quick were its movements that it could dive ere the bullets or other missiles reached it. Acting on this knowledge, he rigged up in the canoe a kind of a barrier behind which Sam was seated, concealed from the sharp-sighted bird. For a time they were not able to get a successful shot, although a great ...

— Three Boys in the Wild North Land • Egerton Ryerson Young

... received bonds or debentures for their share of the land, had parted with them long since, either to their own officers or to the trafficers in such bonds, who had sprang up by hundreds, and who obtained them from the needy soldiers often for a mere trifle. Sharp-sighted speculators like Dr. Petty, by whom the well-known Survey of Ireland was made, acquired immense tracts of land at little or no outlay. Of those soldiers, too, who did receive grants of land many left after a while. Others, despite all regulations ...

— The Story Of Ireland • Emily Lawless

... observation, educated powers for observation, knowledge of what to observe, and finally opportunities for observation, or being able to go where the things are which are to be seen. A blind man standing in front of the Parthenon would be no authority to us as to its architecture; neither would the most sharp-sighted person who should happen in be in America, instead of Greece. So an Indian, with the finest perceptive faculty, and standing directly in front of this majestic temple, would give a very poor account of it, from want of previous knowledge. He, only, would be an authority to us in regard to such ...

— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke

... alive. But when they came to reason, that hope was quite extinguished. Had he been alive, and within any reasonable distance, he would have been discovered. But no trace of him could be found even by the sharp-sighted Indians; and then the screams of those panthers, on the first dismal night, increased the probability of his awful fate. Still a search was continued by three or four, and on the fifth day, they discovered a hat about a mile from the path he was ...

— Summerfield - or, Life on a Farm • Day Kellogg Lee

... who think they are very sharp-sighted in this matter, is so blind as not to see that the 14th of the moon and the full moon are not the same things in the Church of God?... Although the Church, in finding the new moon, and from it the 14th day, uses neither the true nor the mean motion of the moon, ...

— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan

... Has not M. Palisa, for instance, discovered about eighty of such objects, and are there not hundreds of them known nowadays?" This is, to a certain extent, quite true. I have not the least desire to detract from the credit of those industrious and sharp-sighted astronomers who have in modern days brought so many of these little objects within our cognisance. I think, however, it must be admitted that such discoveries have a totally different importance in the history of science from that which belongs to the peerless ...

— Great Astronomers • R. S. Ball

... It startled her, however, greatly, to find her own view of things held by her much less sharp-sighted mother. She pondered on what was best to do. Should she sit still and quietly see her father lost irretrievably in the bad habits which were creeping upon him? But what step could she take? She asked herself this question ...

— The End of a Coil • Susan Warner

... edition, charged with MS. notes of the celebrated Mercier St. Leger, was sold for 30 livres.——RIVE. Catalogue de la Bibliotheque de l'Abbe Rive, par Archard, Marseille, 1793, 8vo. A catalogue of the books of so sharp-sighted a bibliographer as was the Abbe Rive cannot fail to be interesting to the collector.——DU ROI [Louis XV.] Catalogus Codicum Manuscriptorum Bibliothecae Regiae (studio et labore Anicetti Mellot). Paris, e Typog. Reg., 1739, folio, four vols.——DU ROI. Des Livres imprimes de la meme Bibliotheque ...

— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin

... not take the sharp-sighted leaders of the Abolition movement very long to discover that one of the uses its managers expected to make of the Colonization Society was as a shield for slavery. It kept a number of excellent people ...

— The Abolitionists - Together With Personal Memories Of The Struggle For Human Rights • John F. Hume

... similarities running through wide families of languages which, in the words of Professor Buschmann, are "calculated to fill us with bewildering amazement,"[38-1] some of which will hereafter be pointed out; and lastly, passing to the psychological constitution of the race, we may quote the words of a sharp-sighted naturalist, whose monograph on one of its tribes is unsurpassed for profound reflections: "Not only do all the primitive inhabitants of America stand on one scale of related culture, but that mental condition of all in which humanity chiefly mirrors itself, ...

— The Myths of the New World - A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America • Daniel G. Brinton

... other or others of the people who were present at the same meeting, not exceeding a certain limited sum; without any regard to equity or reason. And yet, such blindness doth the spirit of persecution bring on men, otherwise sharp-sighted enough, that this unlawful, unjust, unequal, unreasonable, and unrighteous law took place in almost all places, and was rigorously prosecuted against the meetings of Dissenters in general, though the brunt of the storm fell most sharply on the people called Quakers; not that it seemed to be ...

— The History of Thomas Ellwood Written by Himself • Thomas Ellwood

... exclaimed the skipper and Mr Sennitt, as both caught sight of the stranger at the same moment. "A frigate! French, too, as I'm a living sinner," continued the first luff, taking a squint through his glass at the craft. "Ah! he is as sharp-sighted as we are," he went on, with the telescope still at his eye. "Up goes his helm, and there go the lads aloft to make sail, he's coming down to say 'how d'ye do' to us, sir. And there goes the tricolour up ...

— Under the Meteor Flag - Log of a Midshipman during the French Revolutionary War • Harry Collingwood