"Elephant" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... they are commonly called, beasts. Of cetacea, or whale-like mammals, sixty-five; ruminantia, or cud-chewers, one hundred and seventy-seven; pachydermata, or thick-skinned mammals, such as the horse, hog, and elephant, forty-one; edentata, like the sloth and ant-eater, thirty-five; rodentia, or gnawers, such as the rat, squirrel, and beaver, six hundred and seventeen; carnivora, or flesh-eaters, four hundred and forty-six; ...
— The Deluge in the Light of Modern Science - A Discourse • William Denton
... mythical cosmogonies must know—no more absurd than twenty similar guesses on record. Try to imagine the gradual genesis of such myths as the Egyptian scarabaeus and egg, or the Hindoo theory that the world stood on an elephant, the elephant on a tortoise, the tortoise on that infinite note of interrogation which, as some one expresses it, underlies all physical speculations, and judge: must they not have arisen in some such fashion as that which I ...
— Scientific Essays and Lectures • Charles Kingsley
... your places all over. Pete, you're a lion; Sammy, you're a big wolf; Helen, you're a wild cat; Gory, you're a elephant; and Tommy, you'll have to be,—let's see, what other animal is there? Oh! yes; you must be a kangaroo! and I'm a great big hunter-man, with a ...
— Donald and Dorothy • Mary Mapes Dodge
... a pipe line into Literates' Hall big enough to chase an elephant through," Cardon went on, ignoring the interruption. "This fellow Mongery, for instance." Elliot Mongery was one of Literate Frank Cardon's best friends; he comforted his conscience with the knowledge that Mongery would slander him just as ...
— Null-ABC • Henry Beam Piper and John Joseph McGuire
... the Eastern theory—Burmese, is it? or Siamese?—according to which the world rests on the heads of four elephants; when one of the elephants shakes his head, there is an earthquake. But must not the elephant therefore move ...
— A Red Wallflower • Susan Warner
... their equilibrium in themselves? Power has to be made secure not only against power, but also against weakness; for there lies the peril of its losing balance. The weak are as great a danger for the strong as quicksands for an elephant. They do not assist progress because they do not resist; they only drag down. The people who grow accustomed to wield absolute power over others are apt to forget that by so doing they generate an unseen force which some day rends ...
— Creative Unity • Rabindranath Tagore
... grasshopper or two, would hop suddenly on the cake, and hop more suddenly off, before they could catch him; but what of that? Some people shriek so if a grasshopper hops near them, you would think it was an elephant come to pack them up in his trunk, for the rest of their lives; but these children had more sense, and did not mind a little insect a thousand times smaller ...
— The Fairy Nightcaps • Frances Elizabeth Barrow
... geography, an inexhaustible folio, describing Indian customs, the Asiatic splendour of costume, the gorgeous thrones of the descendants of the Prophet, the history of the Prophet himself, the superior instinct and stupendous body of the elephant; all that Edward Forster had collected of nature or of art, through these extensive regions, were successively displayed, until they returned to China, from whence they had commenced their travels. Thus did the little vase, ...
— Newton Forster - The Merchant Service • Captain Frederick Marryat
... for Petherick, they caught sight of a sturdy English figure approaching them. Uttering a hearty cheer and waving their hats, they rushed forward and, greatly to their delight, found themselves shaking hands with Mr, now Sir Samuel, Baker, the elephant hunter of Ceylon, who had bravely come out in search ...
— Great African Travellers - From Mungo Park to Livingstone and Stanley • W.H.G. Kingston
... plant herself near the glass door; like a very epicure, to enjoy both the present and the future at once. Even then the present often made her forget the future; she would be lost in her book, perhaps hunting the elephant in India or fighting Nelson's battles over again, and the first news she would have of what she had set herself there to watch for would be the click of the door-lock or a tap on the glass, for the horse was almost ...
— The Wide, Wide World • Susan Warner
... him rested on no tangible evidence whatever. He was also credited with superhuman ingenuity and diabolical cunning of which he had shown no previous symptom. Hypothesis was piled on hypothesis, as in the old Oriental legend, where the world rested on the elephant and the elephant on the tortoise. It might be worth while, however, to point out that it was at least quite likely that the death of Mr. Constant had not taken place before seven, and as the prisoner left Euston ...
— The Big Bow Mystery • I. Zangwill
... in the Mandingo countries, the most common are the hyaena, the panther, and the elephant. Considering the use that is made of the latter in the East Indies, it may be thought extraordinary that the natives of Africa have not, in any part of this immense continent, acquired the skill of taming ...
— Travels in the Interior of Africa - Volume 1 • Mungo Park
... twittered among the topmost twigs of the fir-trees. How long this state of things endured we know not, but at length it came to an end. The upheaved glacial mud hardened into the soil of modern Norfolk. Forests grew once more, the wolf and the beaver replaced the reindeer and the elephant; and at length what we call the ...
— Discourses - Biological and Geological Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... share worthy the name of reason! But you may see a greater difference in this respect between the lowest and the highest at a common school, than you will between them and us. A pony that has taught itself without hands to pump water for its thirst, an elephant that puts forth its mighty lip to lift the moving wheel of the heavy wagon over the body of its fallen driver, has rather more to plead on the score of intellect than many a schoolboy. Not a few of them shed tears. A bishop, one of the foremost ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald
... explain to us the passion, the peevishness, the anger, the memory, and affections of the small canary-wren? the consciousness of identity and the dreams of the dog? the reasoning powers of the elephant? the wondrous instincts, passions, government, and civil policy, and modes of communication of ideas of the ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... a most wonderful time," said the Elephant from the Noah's Ark to a Double Humped Camel who lived in ...
— The Story of Calico Clown • Laura Lee Hope
... If I were nature-faking a book on Africa I could run a picture of it as an elephant's playground, but that's all." He stopped and gazed at the house long enough to memorize the windows that commanded a view of the garden. "No use going back there, now," he decided. "Chuck full of a man named Norvallis. Suppose ...
— The Monk of Hambleton • Armstrong Livingston
... Bogharib. Enraged Imbozhwa. An attack. Narrow escape. Renewed attack. A parley. Help arrives. Bin Juma. March from the Imbozhwa country. Slaves escape. Burial of Syde bin Habib's brother. Singular custom. An elephant killed. Native game-laws. Rumour of Baker's ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume I (of 2), 1866-1868 • David Livingstone
... McKenny launched into a blistering tirade. His choice of words were to be long remembered by the group and repeated to succeeding classes. Storming against the huge Venusian like a pygmy attacking an elephant, McKenny roared, ...
— Stand by for Mars! • Carey Rockwell
... married to a tolerably handsome Kubu girl who was carried off by a party that discovered their huts. They have a language quite peculiar to themselves, and they eat promiscuously whatever the woods afford, as deer, elephant, rhinoceros, wild hog, snakes, or monkeys. The Gugu are much scarcer than these, differing in little but the use of speech from the Orang Utan of Borneo; their bodies being covered with long hair. There have not ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... second grievance I must break, 277 'That loss of strength makes understanding weak.' I grieve no more my youthful strength to want, Than, young, that of a bull, or elephant; Then with that force content, which Nature gave, Nor am I now displeased with what I have. When the young wrestlers at their sport grew warm, Old Milo wept, to see his naked arm; And cried, 'twas dead. Trifler! thine heart ...
— Poetical Works of Edmund Waller and Sir John Denham • Edmund Waller; John Denham
... As they were lived, but stark like a slain man Who would alive have been ourself with twice The skill, the knowledge, the vitality Actually ours. Yea, as a tree may view With fingerless boughs and lorn pole impotent, An elephant gorged upon its leaves depart, Men often have reviewed an unwieldy past, That like a feasted Mammoth, leisured and slow, Turned its back on their warped bones. Even thus, Momentous with reproach, her grave regard Made me feel mean, cashiered of rank and right, My ...
— Miscellany of Poetry - 1919 • Various
... know why an old engraving in my father's study crossed my mind. It represents the entry of Alexander the Great into Babylon; he is on an elephant which is glittering with precious stones. You must know it. Only, Alexander was a heathen who had many things to reproach himself with, while I ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... take a box. Armadale was present, and flourished his well-filled purse in his usual insufferable way. 'I'm rich enough, old boy, and it comes to the same thing.' With those words he took up his hat, and trampled out on his great elephant's feet to get the box. I looked after him from the window as he went down the street. 'Your widow, with her twelve hundred a year,' I thought to myself, 'might take a box at the San Carlo whenever she pleased, without being beholden to anybody.' The empty-headed ...
— Armadale • Wilkie Collins
... ill-fortune, which about this time befel me. Turning over the picture of the ark with too much haste, I unhappily made a breach in its ingenious fabric—driving my inconsiderate fingers right through the two larger quadrupeds—the elephant, and the camel—that stare (as well they might) out of the two last windows next the steerage in that unique piece of naval architecture. Stackhouse was henceforth locked up, and became an interdicted treasure. ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... an interest in the animal kingdom (and I am very sorry for those who do not) should force the Lion to take off the crown, put down the sceptre, and surrender the throne to the real King of Beasts—the Elephant. ...
— Round-about Rambles in Lands of Fact and Fancy • Frank Richard Stockton
... are some interesting exceptions. The large caterpillars of some of the Elephant Hawkmoths are very conspicuous, and rendered all the more so by the presence of a pair of large eyelike spots. Every one who sees one of these caterpillars is struck by its likeness to a snake, and the so-called ...
— The Beauties of Nature - and the Wonders of the World We Live In • Sir John Lubbock
... Elephant-child with the "'satiable curiosity" finally asked a question which seemed simple enough but which sent him on a long journey into unknown parts. In the same way man's modest and simple question, "What makes people nervous?" has sent him far-adventuring to find the answer. ...
— Outwitting Our Nerves - A Primer of Psychotherapy • Josephine A. Jackson and Helen M. Salisbury
... therein, with weapons, ornaments, etc., and covered over with saplings of the mountain aspen; on top of these the removed bowlders were piled, forming a huge cairn, which appeared large enough to have marked the last resting place of an elephant. In the immediate vicinity of the graves were scattered the osseous remains of a number of horses which had been sacrificed no doubt during the funeral ceremonies. In one of the graves, said to contain the body of a chief, ...
— An introduction to the mortuary customs of the North American Indians • H. C. Yarrow
... could have hindered the perception of so fair a vision, or her mere quantitative bulk have killed automatically in the mind the possible idea of her being in some sense living. A microbe, endowed with our powers of consciousness, might similarly deny life to the body of the elephant on which it rode; or some wee arguing atom, endowed with mind and senses, persuade itself that the monster upon whose flesh it dwelt were similarly a "heavenly body" of dead, inert matter; the bulk of the "world" that carried them obstructing ...
— The Centaur • Algernon Blackwood
... we lunched on wine soup. The elephant at the Jardin des Plantes has been slaughtered. He ...
— The Memoirs of Victor Hugo • Victor Hugo
... will find him over the door of places of business; and contracts open with an invocation to Ganesa, sometimes given by a picture of the god. He was the son of Siva and Parvati. His picture is that of a short, fat man, with four arms and an elephant's head. ...
— Across India - Or, Live Boys in the Far East • Oliver Optic
... Pachydermatous animal, probably the same with the Macrauchenia, a huge beast with a long neck like a camel, which I shall also refer to again. Lastly, the Toxodon, perhaps one of the strangest animals ever discovered: in size it equalled an elephant or megatherium, but the structure of its teeth, as Mr. Owen states, proves indisputably that it was intimately related to the Gnawers, the order which, at the present day, includes most of the smallest quadrupeds: ...
— A Naturalist's Voyage Round the World - The Voyage Of The Beagle • Charles Darwin
... conceivable without such delicacy. Elephantine strength may drive its way through a forest, and feel no touch of the boughs, but the white skin of Homer's Atrides would have felt a bent rose leaf, yet subdue its feelings in glow of battle, and behave itself like iron. I do not mean to call an elephant a vulgar animal; but if you think about him carefully, you will find that his non- vulgarity consists in such gentleness as is possible to elephantine nature; not in his insensitive hide, nor in his clumsy foot, but in the way he ...
— Frost's Laws and By-Laws of American Society • Sarah Annie Frost
... satisfied with finding a buffalo? And if mere Being only were the object of all our cognitions, why should we not remember, in the case of each particular cognition, all the words which are connected with all our cognitions? And further, if the cognition of a horse and that of an elephant had one object only, the later cognition would cause us to apprehend only what was apprehended before, and there being thus no difference (of object of cognition) there would be nothing to distinguish the later state of cognition from ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Ramanuja - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 48 • Trans. George Thibaut
... Zeb entirely overdid the matter. The trained elephant that steps over the prostrate and pompous form of Van Amburgh, was not more careful and tardy in the performance of his feat than was the negro in passing the unconscious form of a Shawnee. Although Leland deemed this circumspection unnecessary, he did not protest, as he ...
— The Ranger - or The Fugitives of the Border • Edward S. Ellis
... as great and more greater than is a destrier, and men clepe them Loerancs; and some men clepe them odenthos; and they have a black head and three long horns trenchant in the front, sharp as a sword, and the body is slender; and he is a full felonious beast, and he chaseth and slayeth the elephant. There be also many other beasts, full wicked and cruel, that be not mickle more than a bear, and they have the head like a boar, and they have six feet, and on every foot two large claws, trenchant; and the body is like a bear, and the tail as a lion. And ...
— The Travels of Sir John Mandeville • Author Unknown
... trolley-loads of rations to the front line. Of these posts the best remembered would be Winchester, where existed a board bearing the names of Wykhamists, whom chance had led that way. Battalion Headquarters were there for a long time and were comfortable enough with many 'elephant' dug-outs and half a farmhouse for a mess—the latter ludicrously decorated by some predecessors with cuttings from La Vie Parisienne ...
— The Story of the 2/4th Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry • G. K. Rose
... to England and arrived here just in time to miss, to his disappointment, his brother Edward, who had again left for Ceylon. Edward's after career was sad enough to draw tears from adamant. During an elephant hunt a number of natives set upon him and beat him brutally about the head. Brain trouble ensued, and he returned home, but henceforth, though he attained a green old age, he lived a life of utter silence. Except on one solitary occasion he never after—and ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... 'pology for real men, them elephant-busters," disgustedly observed Bill Ball. "Come ...
— The Red-Blooded Heroes of the Frontier • Edgar Beecher Bronson
... have done, I think, for one night; let's have the eatables removed, and we will have a pipe, and hear what Jem has got to say; and you have told us nothing about birds, either, you old elephant; what do you mean by it? That's right, Tim, now bring in my cigars, and Mr. Forester's cheroots, and cold iced water, and boiling-hot water, and sugar, out of my box, and lemons. The shrub is here, and the Scotch whiskey; will you have another bottle of champagne, Tom? No! ...
— Warwick Woodlands - Things as they Were There Twenty Years Ago • Henry William Herbert (AKA Frank Forester)
... arrangements of camp life. He seems to have just arrived from out of the firmament of green fields and mango groves that encircles the little station where he lives; or he seems just about to pass away into it again. The shooting-howdahs are lying in the verandah, the elephant of a neighbouring landowner is swinging his hind foot to and fro under a tree, or switching up straw and leaves on to his back, a dozen camels are lying down in a circle making bubbling noises, and tents are pitched ...
— Twenty-One Days in India; and, the Teapot Series • George Robert Aberigh-Mackay
... issues: overgrazing; soil erosion; deforestation; desertification; wildlife populations (such as elephant, hippopotamus, and lion) threatened because of poaching ...
— The 1997 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... articles to be desired of science is a false hand, or a spectral arm, that shall reach miraculously about,—not a fruit-picker or a carpet-sweeper, but something working with the fineness of an elephant's trunk,—thus to end the discomfort of those orange-seeds spilled on the far side of the room, while, lying inactive, one reaches, reaches, with a patient power which, if transformed into the practical, would ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 109, November, 1866 • Various
... AS TO FORMS.—Nature does not furnish a wheel in any of its mechanical expressions. If man followed nature's form in the building of the locomotive, it would move along on four legs like an elephant. Curiously enough, one of the first road wagons had "push legs,"—an instance where the mechanic tried to copy ...
— Aeroplanes • J. S. Zerbe***
... very much for the pretty picture book you gave me. Sam asked me to show him the pictures and I showed him all the pictures in it; and I read to him how the tame Elephant took care of the Master's little boy, and put him on his back and would not let anybody touch his master's little son. I can read three or four pages sometimes without missing a word.... I have a little piece of poetry ...
— Forgotten Books of the American Nursery - A History of the Development of the American Story-Book • Rosalie V. Halsey
... particular liuing creature cannot liue in euery particular place or region, especially with the same ioy and felicitie, as it did where it was first bred, for the certeine agreement of nature that is betweene the place and the thing bred in that place; as appeareth by the Elephant, which being translated and brought out of the second or third climat, though they may liue, yet will they neuer ingender or bring forth yong.[63] Also we see the like in many kinds of plants and herbs; for ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of The English Nation, Vol. XII., America, Part I. • Richard Hakluyt
... lodging-houses, with the gentleman whose anatomy we have just inspected. Here are bones of hippopotamus, and rhinoceros, which he hunted with the weapons you saw. And the object on which your arm is reposing, Madame, is the tooth of an elephant. Our ancestor must have been pretty costaud to kill an elephant ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... face of the woman opposite me, that I interposed the thought of Kilimanjaro, that highest mountain of Africa, between us; the grassy slopes and green realms of negro kings from which its dark cone rises, the immense, dim, elephant-haunted forests which clothe its flanks; and above, the white crown of snow, freezing in eternal isolation over the palm trees and deserts of the ...
— More Trivia • Logan Pearsall Smith
... about that," returned Barnum. "It would be unpleasant to have an elephant drop on one after the fashion of which you speak, but I am glad the elephant was saved just the same. I haven't advocated the Proterosaurus as a Sunday-afternoon surprise, but as an attraction for a show. I still ...
— A House-Boat on the Styx • John Kendrick Bangs
... attached to the front of an engine, sometimes, like a pilot; but a great two-storied monster of strong timbers, that runs upon wheels of its own, and that boys run after and stare at as they would after and at an elephant. You are snow-bound at Buffalo. The Lake Shore Line is piled with drifts like a surf. Two passenger trains have been half-buried for twelve hours somewhere in snowy Chautauqua. The storm howls like a congregation of Arctic bears. But the superintendent at Buffalo is determined to ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... DOOMED Joy to the German mind in mass was an unknown quantity. The literature on which they fed was heavier and more somber than their music. When the average German tried to be gay and playful he reminded one of an elephant trying to caper. Their humor in the main, manifested itself in coarse and ...
— History of the American Negro in the Great World War • W. Allison Sweeney
... and applied to the church of Christ, I answer The word of God, the "river that makes glad the city of God," though it have many easy and known fords where any of Christ's lambs may pass through, yet in this vision, and other places of this kind, it is "a great deep" where the greatest elephant, as he said, may swim. I shall not say with the Jews, that one should not read the last nine chapters of Ezekiel before he be thirty years old. Surely a man may be twice thirty years old, and a good divine too, and yet not able to understand ...
— The Works of Mr. George Gillespie (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Gillespie
... What did he care for Conkey Sam or the Worcestershire Nobber? What for the French prints ogling him from all sides of the room; those regular stunning slap-up out-and-outers? And Calverley spelling bad, and calling him Hokey-fokey, confound her impudence! The idea of being engaged to a dinner at the Elephant and Castle at Richmond, with that old woman (who was seven and thirty years old, if she was a day), filled his mind with dreary disgust now, instead of that pleasure which he had only yesterday expected to ...
— The History of Pendennis, Vol. 2 - His Fortunes and Misfortunes, His Friends and His Greatest Enemy • William Makepeace Thackeray
... halls I have built. But death would have taken them from me if misfortune had spared them. My poor people whom I loved so well! There is just another die to turn up against me in this run of ill-luck; i.e. if I should break my magic wand in the fall from this elephant, and lose my popularity with my fortune. Then Woodstock and Bony may both go to the paper-maker, and I may take to smoking cigars and drinking grog, or turn devotee, and intoxicate the brain another way. In prospect of absolute ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... which oft times do rush strange beasts both wilde and fierse, Whereof oft times we see, at going downe of Sunne, Diuers descend in companie, and to the sea they come. Where as vpon the sand they lie, and chew the cud: Sometime in water eke they stand and wallow in the floud. The Elephant we see, a great vnweldie beast, With water fils his troonke right hie and blowes it on the rest. The Hart I saw likewise delighted in the soile, The wilde Boare eke after his guise with snout in earth doth moile. A great strange beast ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, - and Discoveries of The English Nation, v5 - Central and Southern Europe • Richard Hakluyt
... mortar, into the great free world from which my body was debarred. Now I was the corsair in the pride of freedom on the dark blue sea. Now I wandered in fairy caverns among the bones of primaeval monsters. I fought at the side of Leonidas, and the Maccabee who stabbed the Sultan's elephant, and saw him crushed beneath its falling bulk. Now I was a hunter in tropic forests—I heard the parrots scream, and saw the humming birds flit on from gorgeous flower to flower. Gradually I took a voluntary pleasure in calling up these images, and working out their details ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... the elephant, the extremities of the tails of certain species of monkeys, and the tentacula of some kinds of fish, receive a more abundant supply of sensitive nerves than other parts ...
— A Treatise on Anatomy, Physiology, and Hygiene (Revised Edition) • Calvin Cutter
... the elephant directly behind them thrust his trunk into the car and picked up Medmangi's camera, to the immense delight of the crowd on the sidewalk. After much prodding from his rider he released it again, dropping it safely into Medmangi's lap. All the rest of the ride ...
— The Campfire Girls Go Motoring • Hildegard G. Frey
... quick, wild glances out of their startled, never-resting eyes. Those warriors would squat in long rows, four or more deep, before the verandah, while their chiefs bargained for hours with Makola over an elephant tusk. Kayerts sat on his chair and looked down on the proceedings, understanding nothing. He stared at them with his round blue eyes, called out to Carlier, "Here, look! look at that fellow there—and that other one, to the ...
— Tales of Unrest • Joseph Conrad
... lift-man and I between us carried it into my flat. It seemed a featherweight to me now. I felt a Samson in the exaltation of that hour. And I will not say what my first act was when I found myself alone with my white elephant in the middle of the room; enough that the siphon was still doing its work when the glass slipped through ...
— A Thief in the Night • E. W. Hornung
... theme announced by the ponderous double basses), because it is such a convincing illustration of the humorous possibilities inherent in fugal style. The way in which the voices chase each other about—compared by Berlioz[160] with the gambols of a delighted elephant—and their spasmodic attempts at assertion, produce an effect irresistibly droll. The humour is as broad as that of Aristophanes or Rabelais. Words are powerless to describe the thrill of the last fifty measures which launch us into the ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... creatures as they meekly and lovingly came to him? The mighty lion, shaking the curls of his mane, and fixing his eyes (not then fierce and fiery, but bright and joyous) on the man, who, by God's gift, was mightier than he; the great elephant, putting out his trunk to caress his new master, and passing on to rest under the shadow of some stately tree; the horse, with his arching neck and prancing movements; the fond dog; the gentle sheep; the peacock, with its plumes of blue, and green, ...
— Kindness to Animals - Or, The Sin of Cruelty Exposed and Rebuked • Charlotte Elizabeth
... Elephant's rope was Karna's ensign made of rich and burnished gold, And a bull bedecked the standard ...
— Maha-bharata - The Epic of Ancient India Condensed into English Verse • Anonymous
... swept by the foot of a promontory, which strutted forth boldly into the waves, and seemed to frown upon them as they brawled against its base. This is the bluff well known to modern mariners by the name of Gracie's Point, from the fair castle which, like an elephant, it carries upon its back. And here broke upon their view a wild and varied prospect, where land and water were beauteously intermingled, as though they had combined to heighten and set off each other's charms. To their right lay the sedgy point of Blackwell's Island, dressed ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... most, and which with the least, luggage? The elephant the most because he is never without his trunk. The fox and cock the least because they have only one ...
— Entertainments for Home, Church and School • Frederica Seeger
... I said. 'I decline to hear anything about a horse. There is no horse down in my stock list, nor an elephant.' ...
— Ridan The Devil And Other Stories - 1899 • Louis Becke
... being contradicts its own self, and so on. Why not take heed to the meaning of what is said? When we make the predication concerning pure being, our meaning is merely the denial of all other determinations than the particular one we make. The showman who advertised his elephant as 'larger than any elephant in the world except himself' must have been in an hegelian country where he was afraid that if he were less explicit the audience would dialectically proceed to say: {283} "This elephant, ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... an immortal soul, or we have not. If we have not, we are beasts; the first and wisest of beasts, it may be; but still true beasts. [1] We shall only differ in degree, and not in kind; just as the elephant differs from the slug. But by the concession of all the materialists of all the schools, or almost all, we are not of the same kind as beasts—and this also we say from our own consciousness. Therefore, methinks, it ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge
... to visit the Midway Plaisance. It seemed like the "Arabian Nights," it was crammed so full of novelty and interest. Here was the India of my books in the curious bazaar with its Shivas and elephant-gods; there was the land of the Pyramids concentrated in a model Cairo with its mosques and its long processions of camels; yonder were the lagoons of Venice, where we sailed every evening when the city and the fountains were illuminated. ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller
... veterans Colonel Grimshaw evinced his mirth upon a scale more proper to an elephant; and relapsed, with a reassuring air of having done his duty ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... if such it can be called, used in pike-fishing. This fly resembles a natural insect as much as a tea-pot resembles an elephant, but it does attract pike—in the same way, we suppose, that a piece of red flannel will attract a mackerel. If our readers wish to try it, they can buy it at almost any tackle shop. Pike are to be found in almost all lochs, though in the more frequented of our Scotch ...
— Scotch Loch-Fishing • AKA Black Palmer, William Senior
... the ancient heretics brought forward as their palmary proof that there was an evil creator, and of whom an Arabian writer shows his national horror, when he says that they have the head of a horse, the eyes of an elephant, the neck of a bull, the horns of a stag, the breast of a lion, the belly of a scorpion, the wings of an eagle, the legs of a camel, the feet of an ostrich, and the ...
— Callista • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... minstrelsy; and the sea beat upon the one side of the walls, where were many ships and mariners' noise with "hale and how." And also there was fast by a sycamore tree, and there hung an horn, the greatest that ever they saw, of an elephant's bone; and this Knight of the Red Launds had hanged it up there, that if there came any errant-knight, he must blow that horn, and then will he make him ready and come to him to do battle. But, sir, I pray you, said the damosel Linet, blow ye not the horn till it be high noon, for now it ...
— Le Morte D'Arthur, Volume I (of II) - King Arthur and of his Noble Knights of the Round Table • Thomas Malory
... digestion than the infant's natural food. We all know how complex is the digestive apparatus of the herbivorous animal, of which the four stomachs of the ruminants are an instance, and how large is the bulk of food in proportion to his size which the elephant requires, compared with that which suffices for the lion ...
— The Mother's Manual of Children's Diseases • Charles West, M.D.
... friendship of these animals to that of men; for men have received many lessons from beasts, and learned many important things, as, for example, the clyster from the stork, vomit and gratitude from the dog, watchfulness from the crane, foresight from the ant, modesty from the elephant, and loyalty ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... lads encounter a leopard seal, or a sea elephant," said Captain Hazzard, when the boys ...
— The Boy Aviators' Polar Dash - Or - Facing Death in the Antarctic • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... present to Pope Leo X an elephant, a panther, with other animals and products of their new territories in ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 8 - The Later Renaissance: From Gutenberg To The Reformation • Editor-in-Chief: Rossiter Johnson
... argument he takes occasion to dwell on the wonderful instincts, and almost rational sagacity of the inferior animals. We must, however, lament that, although he does full justice to the 'half-reasoning elephant,' to the aptitude and fidelity of the dog, to the marvellous economical arrangements of the bees, and even to the imitative capacity of the magpie, he pays no higher tribute to the merits of the cat than that she is as capable of being amused as himself, and like himself, ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 419, New Series, January 10, 1852 • Various
... Clementina had, for she always carried sugar for her horse. Malcolm held the demoness very watchfully, but she took the sugar from Florimel's palm as neatly as an elephant, and let her stroke her nose over her wide red nostrils without showing the least of her usual inclination to punish a liberty with death. Then Malcolm rode her home, and she was at peace till the evening —when he took her ...
— The Marquis of Lossie • George MacDonald
... superintended the securing of Pepper, Mr. Crewe led the way through the house to the study, pausing once or twice to point out to Austen a carved ivory elephant procured at great expense in China, and a piece of tapestry equally difficult of purchase. The study itself was no mere lounging place of a man of pleasure, but sober and formidable books were scattered through ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... no evidence, or hardly any, would justify one in believing in the view of a new species of Elephant, e.g. out of the earth, I mean that such an occurrence would be so diametrically contrary to all experience, so opposed to those beliefs which are the most constantly verified by experience, that one would ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley
... went to see it. When we got there it was covered with a tarpaulin, but the officer in charge took the sheet off and let us have a good look: at it—and such a queer-looking monster as it was! It looked like a cross between an elephant (without his baggage) and a mud turtle. We bombarded the officer with questions, but he wouldn't answer many of them; only he said that nothing but a direct hit with a six-inch shell would penetrate its hide; and it could go through any hole or walk right over a house. It ...
— Into the Jaws of Death • Jack O'Brien
... already remarked by writers,—though that will not prevent me from repeating it,—that, of all the four-footed friends of man, none, not even that corpulent chap, Elephant, has contributed more voluminously to the literature of anecdote than that first-rate fellow, Dog. Let me also take the liberty of recalling, in corroboration of others who have previously drawn attention to the same fact, that from ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... fine circus! Jack and Bob went, but [Jimmy Crow] was left at home. The [two boys] bought [a bag of peanuts] and fed the [elephant] and [monkeys]. Jack put his [hand] full of nuts between the bars, and a little brown [monkey] pulled his [fingers] open and picked out ...
— Jimmy Crow • Edith Francis Foster
... trifle of chills and fever or maybe a picnic. I don't know how I feel. I feel like knocking the face off a policeman, or else maybe like playing Coney Island straight across the board from pop-corn to the elephant houdahs." ...
— The Voice of the City • O. Henry
... that you have settled this here question of them 'Early to Bed' plays, Mawruss," Abe said, "would you kindly tell me what the idea of them Germans was in sinking all them white-elephant war-ships which everybody with any sense wished was at the bottom of the ocean, ...
— Potash and Perlmutter Settle Things • Montague Glass
... to none in the world, was an achievement of which the conquering race was pardonably proud, and for which it had good reason to be duly thankful. Over the gateways was blazoned the badge of the club, an elephant, whale, and eagle, typifying the three armed forces of the State, by land and sea and air; the eagle bore in its beak a scroll with the proud legend: "The last am I, but ...
— When William Came • Saki
... corkscrew with the folds pressed close together, and when expanded, like a long straight thin bit of flesh-coloured silk, with a little corkscrew of the same material at the end. The larger tentacula are shaped like the trunk of an elephant, and their extremity is furnished with a very delicate organ with which they can catch anything, and, if touched, they instantly turn some of these tentacula, which they have the power of moving in any direction, to ...
— Journals Of Two Expeditions Of Discovery In North-West And Western Australia, Vol. 1 (of 2) • George Grey
... Opportunities for observing the latter, and for collecting facts in connection with them, are abundant in Ceylon; and from the moment of my arrival, I profited by every occasion afforded to me for observing the elephant in a state of nature, and obtaining from hunters and natives correct information as to its oeconomy and disposition. Anecdotes in connection with this subject, I received from some of the most experienced residents in the island; amongst others, from Major SKINNER, Captain PHILIP PAYNE ...
— Sketches of the Natural History of Ceylon • J. Emerson Tennent
... 'Pan-America' long before Unger ever dreamed of producing it. I sicked him onto 'The Official Chaperon' when every manager in town had turned it down. I went down and seen 'em doing 'The White Elephant' in a Yiddish theater and wired Unger out in Chicago to come back and grab it for Broadway. Where's it got me? Nowhere. Because I whiled away the best fifteen years of my life in an up-State burg, and then, ...
— Gaslight Sonatas • Fannie Hurst
... confusion was so great, due to that barrage, that I could have led an elephant up to the line with no one taking the time to challenge me. You forget that my German is quite good. On a dark night, well covered by a German officer's coat, which I borrowed from a chap who won't ever need it again, it was not a difficult feat. Believe me, my biggest worry was that I would get ...
— Aces Up • Covington Clarke
... that the creek could easily be flumed to the barn, and as that was the only objection of the others to this location, they wrote the owner of the property for a price. They were astonished when they received the figures. It had come by inheritance to a man to whom it was a white elephant of the most exasperating sort, and he was glad to get rid of it for almost a song. They were a jubilant three at the news. It saved the cost of building a mill, and including that, the price was as low per acre as any land they could have obtained. ...
— Red Saunders • Henry Wallace Phillips
... the brawny, dominant, forceful commander that he was—big among the biggest passengers. Here, pacing the small cabin, his head almost touching the ceiling, his great frame filled the small narrow room as an elephant would fill a boudoir. Everything seemed too small for him—the table, even the chair which he had now regained, the tiny egg-shell cup which he ...
— The Veiled Lady - and Other Men and Women • F. Hopkinson Smith
... cries almost drowned the hissing and crackling sound of the flames. At length they reached the mizzenmast, and the falling yards loosened a plank or two of one of the cages—a noble lion with flowing mane and glaring eyes burst forth and sprung overboard. At the same instant an elephant had freed himself from the rope which fettered his hind legs. Flourishing his long proboscis he rushed into the midst of the fire, but soon driven back by the heat he retreated to a portion of the foredeck which had not yet ignited, ...
— Hair Breadth Escapes - Perilous incidents in the lives of sailors and travelers - in Japan, Cuba, East Indies, etc., etc. • T. S. Arthur
... Journal may remember, was enough to scare the colonists from their propriety, and suggest the gravest fears of portended disaster. The student of the seventeenth century opened his Licetus and saw figures of a lion with the head of a woman, and a man with the head of an elephant. He had offered to his gaze, as born of a human mother, the effigy of a winged cherub, a pterocephalous specimen, which our Professor of Pathological Anatomy would hardly know whether to treat with the reverence due to its celestial ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... the way men speak of beasts as if they were something base," he said. "'Beast' should not be a term of opprobrium. The average dog or elephant, for example, is fairly wholesome and quite naturally proper in his fulfilment of instincts. It is more than one can say for men. Yes, I am a beast, if by that you you mean a physical being; and if humanity ever does get anywhere in quest for a soul I suspect it will ...
— Claire - The Blind Love of a Blind Hero, By a Blind Author • Leslie Burton Blades
... An elephant battery came up from the Punjab, looking in very good condition. There were several convalescents with it going up to rejoin their regiments. Knew none of them except Mostyn of the Hussars and young Blakesley, who was my fag ...
— The Mystery of Cloomber • Arthur Conan Doyle
... attention to Alaric's indignation, 'he did not do so very badly. Why, M'Buffer has been at it now for thirteen years. He began with nothing; he had neither blood nor money; and God knows he had no social merits to recommend him. He is as vulgar as a hog, as awkward as an elephant, and as ugly as an ape. I believe he never had a friend, and was known at his club to be the greatest bore that ever came out of Scotland; and yet for thirteen years he has lived on the fat of the land; for five years he has been in Parliament, his wife has ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope
... latitudes—the antelope from the Zaara—and the leigh, or gigantic stag, from Britain. Thither came the buffalo and the bison, the white bull of Northumberland and Galloway, the unicorn from the regions of Nepaul or Thibet, the rhinoceros and the river-horse from Senegal, with the elephant of Ceylon or Siam. The ostrich and the cameleopard, the wild ass and the zebra, the chamois and the ibex of Angora,—all brought their tributes of beauty or deformity to these vast aceldamas of Rome: their savage voices ascended in tumultuous uproar to the ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... deserved the gallows; but the offended elephant tramples on men not on worms. Were thy life worth but two words ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... a charmed life—that must have been the way of it. Nothing could hurt him. He even gave the elephant in the menagerie a plug of tobacco, and the elephant didn't knock the top of his head off with his trunk. He browsed around the cupboard after essence-of peppermint, and didn't make a mistake and drink aqua fortis. He stole his father's gun and went hunting on the Sabbath, and didn't shoot ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... smile than the surprise. Perhaps the most essential of the fairy traits is the combination of the familiar and the unfamiliar. The desire for the unknown, that curiosity which brings upon itself surprise, is the charm of childhood as well as the divine fire of the scientist. The naughty little Elephant who asked "a new, fine question he had never asked before," and who went to answer his own question of "what the crocodile has for dinner," met with many surprises which were spankings; and as a result, he returned home with a trunk and ...
— A Study of Fairy Tales • Laura F. Kready
... for human chess, the pieces being slave-girls; here is a noble mosque; here is the vast court where the great father of his people administered justice, or what approximated to it, and received homage. Here are the spreading stables and riding school; here is even the tomb of a favourite elephant. ...
— Roving East and Roving West • E.V. Lucas
... causing the brig to assume various unseemly attitudes, and perform gymnastic exercises wonderful to behold. As the wind increased and the sea became more turbulent, the Dolphin tumbled about like an elephant dancing a hornpipe, insomuch that it was difficult for a person to keep his perpendicular. Indeed, as I was passing along from the camboose to the cabin, with a plate of toast in one hand and a teapot in the other, the brig took a lee lurch ...
— Jack in the Forecastle • John Sherburne Sleeper
... seen the path of duty; of the touching hunger for love and understanding that were so characteristic in her. "Lord A'mighty!" he ejaculated under his breath, "Lord A'mighty! to hector and abuse a child like that one! 'T ain't ABUSE exactly, I know, or 't wouldn't be to some o' your elephant-hided young ones; but to that little tender will-o'-the-wisp a hard word 's like a lash. Mirandy Sawyer would be a heap better woman if she had a little gravestun to remember, same's ...
— Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... impartiality between them —his father doing the breaking and he the suffering! Sam claimed to be a very backward, cautious, unadventurous boy. But this modest estimate is subject to modification when we learn that once he jumped off a two-story stable; another time he gave an elephant a plug of tobacco, and retired without waiting for an answer; and still another time he pretended to be talking in his sleep, and got off a portion of every original conundrum in hearing of his father. He begs the curious not to pry ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... and valorous young gallant, Three years together in his town hath been; Yet my Lord Chancellor's[468] tomb he hath not seen, Nor the new water-work,[469] nor the elephant. I cannot tell the cause without a smile,— He hath been in the Counter ...
— The Works of Christopher Marlowe, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Christopher Marlowe
... melodiously) under our windows. But they all go soon, and leave us to ourselves again. We once had a travelling Circus and Wombwell's Menagerie at the same time. They both know better than ever to try it again; and the Menagerie had nearly razed us from the face of the earth in getting the elephant away - his caravan was so large, and the watering-place so small. We have a fine sea, wholesome for all people; profitable for the body, profitable for the mind. The poet's words are sometimes ...
— Reprinted Pieces • Charles Dickens
... of conversation were in arguing and anecdotalizing the virtues and ratiocinations of animals and birds. The monkey, he said, was next to man the most clever, but was inferior to the elephant in that he had no sense of right or wrong. Furthermore, monkeys were immodest. Next came certain breeds of dogs. Very low in the scale he ...
— The Spread Eagle and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris
... a minute the old bear stood her ground, dodging the clumsy but terrific onslaughts of the cow, and dealing her two or three buffets which would have smashed in the skeleton of any creature less tough than a walrus or an elephant. But she had no notion of risking her health and the future of her baby by cultivating any more intimate acquaintance with those two roaring mountains of blubber which were bearing down upon her. When they were within just one more crashing plunge, she briskly drew aside, whirled about, ...
— Children of the Wild • Charles G. D. Roberts
... really seems strange to see a happy man," observes one of the passengers; "one as soon expects to see a white elephant." ...
— The Horse-Stealers and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... they were brave and loyal and even after their first fear of the white man had worn off, fulfilled their promises without a murmur. Once, indeed, when he chanced to have gone for a walk unarmed and to be charged by a bull elephant, these Ogula ran at the brute with their spears and drove it away, a rescue in which one of them lost his life, for the "rogue" caught ...
— The Yellow God - An Idol of Africa • H. Rider Haggard
... deforestation; desertification; wildlife populations (such as elephant, hippopotamus, giraffe, and lion) threatened because of poaching ...
— The 1998 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... to go?" Gregory surmised. "Yes, he might look well in that big music-room at Les Solitudes, or in some vast hall where he would be more of an episode and less of a white elephant. I hardly thing he'll fit anywhere ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... to themselves, and used to play all sorts of strange games with each other. The great trees, chained one to the other by thick flowering plants with bright scarlet or yellow blossoms, were famous hiding-places for the monkeys, who could wait unseen, till a puma or an elephant passed by, and then jump on their backs and go for a ride, swinging themselves up by the creepers when they had had enough. Near the rivers huge tortoises were to be found, and though to our eyes a tortoise seems a dull, slow thing, it is wonderful to think how clever they were, and how ...
— The Brown Fairy Book • Andrew Lang
... had been on top of the earth," my mountaineer guide declared, "destructuous man would have laid it waste long ago. Look about," he urged. "There's every sort of varmint by the Master's Hand, from a 'possum to an elephant, and even the ...
— Blue Ridge Country • Jean Thomas
... wedding of East and West; an empire firm on the ground and in the blood of the people, instead of an empire of aliens, that would bear comparison to a finely fretted cotton-hung palanquin balanced on an elephant's back, all depending on the docility of the elephant (his description of Great Britain's Indian Empire). 'And mind me,' he said, 'the masses of India are in character elephant all over, tail to proboscis! ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... as far as Newington, a district unfamiliar to her, and repulsive. By the Elephant and Castle she stood watching the tumultuous traffic which whirls and roars at this confluence of six highways; she had neither a mind to go on, nor yet to return. The conductor of an omnibus close at hand kept ...
— In the Year of Jubilee • George Gissing
... more gravely, "this order sent to Hafferman, for the diamonds which he delivered at Venner's store, is merely a forgery. Neither Venner nor Garside wrote it, that's as plain as the nose on an elephant's face." ...
— With Links of Steel • Nicholas Carter |
