"Illiterate" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... precocious, Abraham Lincoln soon learned his letters and drank in all the learning that his few books could supply. Hence at an early age he became the oracle on the rude frontier, where even a smattering made him handy and valuable to the illiterate backwoodsmen. Besides, as working at any place and at any work, he rarely abided long in any one spot, and had not what might be called a ...
— The Lincoln Story Book • Henry L. Williams
... directed ridicule—was a man of honour. Little had he to do with the world; even its good opinion was scarcely of any importance to him. What to him was the fastidiousness of virtue—to him whom poverty excluded from the refined portion of society, and knowledge and education from the vulgar and illiterate? What could he profit by it? Nothing, absolutely nothing. And yet there was no power on earth could have made this man false to his honour. Partly, perhaps, from his very estrangement from the business of the world, his sense of virtue had retained its fresh and youthful susceptibility. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 360, October 1845 • Various
... Academies of the Arts were placed at Amsterdam and Antwerp, which were to bear good fruit. His attention was also given to the much-needed improvement of primary education, which in the south was almost non-existent in large parts of the country. Here the presence of a number of illiterate dialects was a great obstacle and was the cause of the unfortunate effort to make literary Dutch into a national language ...
— History of Holland • George Edmundson
... periods of the influx, of an Irish association. It was in like manner inevitable, from the fact that the immigrant class are preponderantly poor and of low social rank, that it should for two or three generations be looked upon as a church for the illiterate and unskilled laboring class. An incident of the excessive torrent rush of the immigration was that the Catholic Church became to a disproportionate extent an urban institution, making no adequate provision for the ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... the consolation of hope where crime is the result of ignorance or misdirected patriotism.... If I sinned in pardoning a sinner then sin must be an unpardonable crime!... Nathan treated David as I treated Rasputin, although both were guilty of the same offense.... He was grossly illiterate,—the only schooling he ever got was in the Monastery Abalaksky and what he acquired from the lips of monks while making his rounds as a barefoot pilgrim from place to place.... His claims of having visions ...
— Rescuing the Czar - Two authentic Diaries arranged and translated • James P. Smythe
... highest degree the most cultivated, and to the widest extent the less cultivated. Lear and the Divine Comedy exhaust the thinking of the profoundest student, yet subdue to hushed and breathless attention the illiterate minds that know not what study means. The "Last Judgment," the "Transfiguration," the "Niobe," and the "Dying Gladiator" excite alike the intelligent rapture of artists, and the unintelligent admiration of those to whom art and its principles are a sealed book. Handel's Israel in Egypt—the wonder ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... Mr. Careless, if a person that is wholly illiterate might be supposed to be capable of being qualified to make a suitable return to those obligations, which you are pleased to confer upon one that is wholly incapable of being qualified in all those circumstances, I'm sure I should rather ...
— The Comedies of William Congreve - Volume 1 [of 2] • William Congreve
... with those whom you think dishonest, the outward manners and fashions of life need create no barriers. I should not turn up my nose at the House of Commons because some constituency might send them an illiterate shoemaker; but I might probably find the illiterate shoemaker an unprofitable ...
— The Duke's Children • Anthony Trollope
... among the smugglers I should be sent to prison. I felt that the magistrate would be too angry to listen to my story, and that they would perhaps send to me prison at once if they ever got hold of me. Magistrates in those days had a great deal of power. They were often illiterate, and they bullied and hectored the people whom they tried. I had seen one or two bad magistrates at home, and I knew how little chance I should stand if I told my unlikely story to a bench in a court-house before such men as they were. So I turned up ...
— Jim Davis • John Masefield
... seemed wider open and lying deeper in her sockets. She looked shrunken and contracted, very much like my mother on the eve of the Ninth of Av, when she read aloud the Lamentations for the benefit of her illiterate women-friends. ...
— In Those Days - The Story of an Old Man • Jehudah Steinberg
... disgust is often excited, and not seldom tardiness of belief. And hence it is that the life of the most glorious priest Patrick, the patron and apostle of Ireland, so illustrious in signs and miracles, being frequently written by illiterate persons, through the confusion and obscurity of the style, is by most people neither liked nor understood, but is held in weariness and contempt. Charity therefore urging us, we will endeavor, by reducing them to order, to collect what ...
— The Most Ancient Lives of Saint Patrick - Including the Life by Jocelin, Hitherto Unpublished in America, and His Extant Writings • Various
... partake of the Eucharist, it was with difficulty that he could refrain from imprecating destruction on his brethren while the cup was passing from hand to hand. After he had been some time a member of the congregation, he began to preach; and his sermons produced a powerful effect. He was indeed illiterate; but he spoke to illiterate men. The severe training through which he had passed had given him such an experimental knowledge of all the modes of religious melancholy as he could never have gathered from books; and his vigorous genius, animated by a fervent spirit of devotion, enabled him, not ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 3. (of 4) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... in speech of which the pronunciation does not correspond with the letters with which the word is written, we instinctively image the written or printed word in the mind, and others apprehend the sense intended. I am aware of a certain answer that may be made to this—namely, that illiterate persons are able to understand a word only from its sound as it falls on their ears; but I am speaking now of a civilized language as used by a civilized people, and illiterates and their language do not come under ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 26, July 1880. • Various
... I found poorly qualified for their business. Bradford had not been bred to it, and was very illiterate; and Keimer, though something of a scholar, was a mere compositor, knowing nothing of presswork. He had been one of the French prophets, and could act their enthusiastic agitations. At this time he did not profess any particular religion, but something of all on ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... men of letters have developed wonderful feats of memory; and among illiterate persons, by means of points of association, the power of memory has been little short of marvelous. At a large hotel in Saratoga there was at one time a negro whose duty was to take charge of the hats and coats of the guests as they entered the dining-room and return ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... his own profit, were it at the expence of his employer's ruin. He is continually insinuating new plans to my father, whom he Sir Arthurs, and Honours, and Nobles, at every word, and then persuades him the hints and thoughts are all his own. The illiterate fellow has a language peculiar to himself; energetic but half unintelligible; compounded of a few fine phrases, and an inundation of proverbial wisdom and uncouth cant terms. Of the scanty number of polite words, which he has endeavoured to catch, he is very bountiful to Sir ...
— Anna St. Ives • Thomas Holcroft
... showed itself to have been systematically collected; it stretched pretty equably through two centuries,—namely, from about 1600 to 1800,—and might, perhaps, amount to seventeen thousand volumes. Lord Massey was far from illiterate; and his interest in books was unaffected, if limited, and too often interrupted, by defective knowledge. The library was dispersed through six or seven small rooms, lying between the drawing-room in one wing, and the dining-room ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... anyone reads it!"—she answered—"But what are we to read? If low-minded and illiterate scavengers are employed to write for the newspapers instead of well-educated men, we must put up with the mud the scavengers collect. We know well enough that every journal is more or less a calendar of lies,—all the same we cannot blind ourselves to the great change that has come ...
— The Secret Power • Marie Corelli
... 18. An illiterate patchwork of lifeless and uninteresting scribbling appeared under my byline day after day in the Intelligencer. Not a word, not a thought of my own was left. I was not restrained from protest ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... did these come? Whence had this man his wisdom? Was our Saviour, in fact, a well instructed philosopher, whilst he is represented to us as an illiterate peasant? Or shall we say that some early Christians of taste and education composed these pieces and ascribed them to Christ? Beside all other incredibilities in this account, I answer, with Dr. Jortin, that they could ...
— Evidences of Christianity • William Paley
... Peter he was succeeded by his wife Catherine, an amiable but illiterate woman, who was wholly under the influence of Menshikov, one of Peter's chief favourites. After a short reign of two years, she was succeeded by Peter II., son of the unfortunate Alexis, in whose time Menshikov and his family were banished to ...
— Russia - As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Various
... raised in Sulaco for the defence of the Five-Year Mandate of regeneration. The petition, like everything else, had found its way into Don Jose's hands. He had showed to Mrs. Gould these pages of dirty-greyish rough paper (perhaps looted in some village store), covered with the crabbed, illiterate handwriting of the old padre, carried off from his hut by the side of a mud-walled church to be the secretary of the dreaded Salteador. They had both bent in the lamplight of the Gould drawing-room over the document containing the fierce and yet humble appeal of the ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... Thomas Walker, who with other gentlemen had made a hunting and exploring-tour through it as early as 1748. They were mostly from the farming population, somewhat uncouth in manner, and not much acquainted with books, but not illiterate, for in a document subscribed soon afterward by upward of a hundred of them only two names are signed with a cross. They had but little wealth; but they had what in a new community is far better,—frugal and industrious habits, enterprise, firm self-reliance, and ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, Old Series, Vol. 36—New Series, Vol. 10, July 1885 • Various
... from the ecclesiastical profession, and to become a definite vocation in its various branches. Crowds of students flocked to the seats of learning, and, as travelling scholars, earned a precarious living by begging or "professing" medicine, assisting the illiterate for a small fee, or working wonders, such as casting horoscopes, or performing thaumaturgic tricks. The professors of law were now the most influential members of the Imperial Council and of the various Imperial Courts. In Central Europe, as elsewhere, ...
— German Culture Past and Present • Ernest Belfort Bax
... opened your letter too," said Kitty, handing him an illiterate letter. "It's from that woman, I think, your brother's..." she said. "I did not read it through. This is from my people and from Dolly. Fancy! Dolly took Tanya and Grisha to a children's ball at the Sarmatskys': ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... rich man, it is true, but he was entirely illiterate, and all his money had been made in trade. As a lad his education had been neglected, for his early life had been spent in the mere struggle for existence. He had been more than successful, but the honours of the student never could be his, and never could he act as one of the officials of the ...
— Chinese Folk-Lore Tales • J. Macgowan
... his life long he had made it a rule, after supper was over, to call out his family to dance and rejoice; believing, he said, that a cheerful and contented mind was the best sort of thanks to heaven that an illiterate ...
— A Sentimental Journey • Laurence Sterne
... Ali Pasha, who was an illiterate coffee-house keeper in Salonica, first came to Egypt at the head of a body of Albanians and co-operated with the English against the French. By his extraordinary vigour and intelligence he became the ruler of Lower Egypt, and succeeded in attaching ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon
... The chief justice of Louisiana was convicted of fraud. A supreme court judge of South Carolina offered his decisions for sale, and Whipper and Moses, both notorious thieves, were elected judges by the South Carolina Legislature. In Alabama there were many illiterate magistrates, among them the city judge of Selma, who in April 1865, was still living as a slave. Governor Chamberlain, a radical, asserted that there were two hundred trial judges in South Carolina who could ...
— The Sequel of Appomattox - A Chronicle of the Reunion of the States, Volume 32 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Walter Lynwood Fleming
... royal Rishis of meritorious deeds had undertaken journeys to tirthas. Indeed, a trip to them is capable of dispelling all fear, O king! They that are crooked-minded, they that have not their souls under control, they that are illiterate and perverse, do not, O Kauravya, bathe in tirthas. But thou art ever of a virtuous disposition and conversant with morality and firm in thy promises. Thou wilt surely be able to free thyself from the world. For, O son of Pandu, thou art even as king Bhagiratha, or Gaya, or Yayati, or any ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... Bibles ordered to be kept in churches for general use chiefly survive in crumbling fragments, or at best woefully dilapidated copies, we cease to be surprised at the easy prey which more fugitive compositions have formed to a succession of careless and indifferent owners. The illiterate inscriptions on many books, which have thus become valuable, point to the hands through which they have passed, and tell a story of prolonged neglect, too often culminating in appropriation to ...
— The Book-Collector • William Carew Hazlitt
... revived, as we know, the almost lost idea of beauty, and the serious and successful pursuit of it. Cardinal Antonelli,[461] speaking to me about the education of the common people in Rome, said that they were illiterate, indeed, but whoever mingled with them at any public show, and heard them pass judgment on the beauty or ugliness of what came before them,—"e brutto," "e bello,"—would find that their judgment agreed admirably, ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... not immediately plant churches and school-houses, as the settlers of New England did. Still they were not altogether illiterate. A public document still in existence has the signature of 112 out of 114 of their number who signed the paper, two ...
— The American Missionary, Volume XLII. No. 10. October 1888 • Various
... the whole crew including the skipper were apprentices and under twenty-one years of age. Even after that they were fitted for no other calling but to follow the sea, and had to accept the master's terms. There were no fishermen's unions, and the men being very largely illiterate were often left victims of a peonage system in spite of the Truck Acts. The master of a vessel has to keep discipline, especially in a fleet, and the best of boys have faults and need punishing while on land. These skippers themselves ...
— A Labrador Doctor - The Autobiography of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... written and uttered since then. There were pigmies in the old days, too. I had a friend who, as a stenographer some years ago, made a fortune by knocking bad grammar out of the speeches of Congressmen and Senators, who were illiterate. They said to him haughtily, "Stenographer, here are a couple of hundred dollars; fix up that speech I made this morning, and see that it gets into the Congressional Record all right. If you can't fix ...
— T. De Witt Talmage - As I Knew Him • T. De Witt Talmage
... plead, but while they enlighten and sustain the reader his common sense will not refuse them. Their authors are a natural and irresistible aristocracy in every society, and, more than kings or emperors, exert an influence on mankind. When the illiterate and perhaps scornful trader has earned by enterprise and industry his coveted leisure and independence, and is admitted to the circles of wealth and fashion, he turns inevitably at last to those still higher but yet inaccessible circles of intellect and genius, and is sensible ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... where the slaves are chattels, and classed with "horses and other cattle," and where the tortures of the whipping-post are in vigorous operation. Here was a message, which every slave, however ignorant and illiterate could read. His instinct would tell him, wherever he saw the pictured horror, that a friend, not an enemy, had drawn it, but for what purpose? What was the secret meaning, which he was to extract from ...
— William Lloyd Garrison - The Abolitionist • Archibald H. Grimke
... this special rule, Harvard College was founded in the early days of the Colony. It was the pet and pride and hope of the colonists. They gave to it of their abundance and their poverty. To what end? "Dreading to leave an illiterate ministry to the churches," says the author of "New England First-Fruits." The first Constitution of the College declares one of its objects to be "to make and establish all such orders, statutes, and constitutions as they shall see necessary for the instituting, guiding, and ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... investigate the matter; but some, in the present day, support the monstrous delusion that enlightened and well-trained intellects, the most glorious of all the earthly gifts of God, should bow to canting and illiterate fanaticism. . . ...
— Successful Exploration Through the Interior of Australia • William John Wills
... the sacred fire in his veins. Only little Paul, of all the household, lent me the aid of his nimble hand to seize the fugitives. I have already stated that the entomologist has need of simplicity of mind. In this important business of the Necrophori, my assistants were a child and an illiterate. ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... occurred as they are narrated, and Dr Bataille is exploiting the ignorance of that class of readers to whom his mode of publication appealed. As products of imagination his marvels are crude and illiterate; in other words, they belong to precisely that type which is characteristic of romances published in penny numbers, and when he pledges his rectitude regarding them he does not enlist our confidence but indicates the slight value which he sets on ...
— Devil-Worship in France - or The Question of Lucifer • Arthur Edward Waite
... comes news of Captain Winstanley, who has married a Jewish lady at Frankfort, only daughter and heiress of a well-known money-lender. The bride is reported ugly and illiterate; but there is no doubt as to her fortune. The Captain has bought a villa at Monaco—a villa in the midst of orange-groves, the abandoned plaything of an Austrian princess; and he has hired an apartment in one of the new avenues, just outside the Arc de Triomphe, where, as his ...
— Vixen, Volume III. • M. E. Braddon
... regarded as injurious, and cannot be trusted to the daughters until mamma has read them. Mamma never has time to read them, and so they are condemned by default. Fernan Caballero, in one of her sleepy little romances, refers to this illiterate character of the Spanish ladies, and says it is their chief charm,—that a Christian woman, in good society, ought not to know anything beyond her cookery-book and her missal. There is-an old proverb which coarsely conveys this idea: A mule that whinnies and a woman ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... a poor, uneducated, defrauded Japanese, torn from his field and taught that Buddhism consists not in compassion to all that lives, but in sacrifices to idols, and how a similar poor illiterate fellow from the neighborhood of Toula or Nijni Novgorod, who has been taught that Christianity consists in worshipping Christ, the Madonna, Saints, and their ikons—one could understand how these unfortunate men, brought by the violence and deceit of centuries to recognize ...
— "Bethink Yourselves" • Leo Tolstoy
... we may go so far as to assert, that a painter stands in need of more knowledge than is to be picked off his pallet, or collected by looking on his model, whether it be in life or in picture. He can never be a great artist who is grossly illiterate. ...
— Seven Discourses on Art • Joshua Reynolds
... and their assistants answer this description exactly. They must be able to sign their names, but they are not obliged to know how to read, and eighty per cent. of them are totally illiterate. Their work is done for them very usually by the local schoolmaster. The Senate, therefore, was quite sure of finding among them men absolutely incompetent for the post of juge de paix, and it has found what it ...
— The Cult of Incompetence • Emile Faguet
... and the vast majority of the populati(m, both Christian and Moslem, are totally illiterate. Instruction in the Albanian language is prohibited by the Turkish government for political reasons; a singleexception has been made in the caseof an American school for girls at Kortcha. There are Turkish primary and ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... Denys in his cell at Mount Athos? Or Cennini, who spread the pious teaching of the Giotteschi? Or one of the old painters of Sienna, who in their profession of faith called themselves "by the grace of God, those who manifest marvellous things to common and illiterate men, by the virtue of the holy faith, and to ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland
... the story of their ancient Epics. The Hindu scarcely lives, man or woman, high or low, educated or ignorant, whose earliest recollections do not cling round the story and the characters of the great Epics. The almost illiterate oil-manufacturer or confectioner of Bengal spells out some modern translation of the Maha-bharata to while away his leisure hour. The tall and stalwart peasantry of the North-West know of the five Pandav brothers, and of their friend the righteous Krishna. The people of ...
— Maha-bharata - The Epic of Ancient India Condensed into English Verse • Anonymous
... look at the woman, and think of the man, I can scarcely believe her to be his wife. Why, she is illiterate and ill bred to the ...
— Her Mother's Secret • Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... the greatest zeal military glory and eloquence in debate. [23] His notice of the Ligurians is far from complimentary. "They are all deceitful, having lost every record of their real origin, and being illiterate, they invent false stories and have no recollection of the truth." [24] He hazards a few etymologies, which, as usual among Roman writers, are quite unscientific. Graviscae is so called from its unhealthy climate (gravis aer), Praeneste from its conspicuous position on the mountains (quia montibus ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... Bartholomew Sharp (notes 1 and 3, ibid.), and very brief accounts in William Dampier's New Voyage around the World (London, 1697) and in Lionel Wafer's A New Voyage and Description of the Isthmus of America (London, 1699). The present narration is by still another participant, illiterate but not incapable of telling an interesting story, ...
— Privateering and Piracy in the Colonial Period - Illustrative Documents • Various
... Genoa on the night of February 18, 1784, of parents in humbly prosperous circumstances, his father being a ship-broker, and, though illiterate in a general way, a passionate lover of music and an amateur of some skill. The father soon perceived the child's talent, and caused him to study so severely that it not only affected his constitution, but actually made him a tolerable ...
— Great Violinists And Pianists • George T. Ferris
... you do, you illiterate old man. What do you know of literature? Aint all them gentlemen as I plays with chice sperits and writers? Isn't it a honour to jine 'em in the old English drammy, and to eat of the wittles and drink of the ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 365, March, 1846 • Various
... narrative, and the gestour would know how to make the best of incidents which he knew from experience to be specially interesting to an audience. Such yarns would be most attractive to "lewd" or illiterate men— ...
— Old English Libraries, The Making, Collection, and Use of Books • Ernest A. Savage
... age 15 and over can read and write total population: 82% male: 87% female: 77% note: over two-thirds of the world's 785 million illiterate adults are found in only eight countries (India, China, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Indonesia, and Egypt); of all the illiterate adults in the world, two-thirds are women; extremely low literacy rates are concentrated in three regions, ...
— The 2005 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... an absurdity it was that the spirit of truth should have anything to communicate to illiterate and vulgar persons except through the mouths of those to whom had been committed the dispensation of the means of grace! Whatever wind might blow, except from their bellows, was, to Mr Cairns at least, not even of doubtful origin. Indeed the priests of every religion, taken ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... philosophy! Do you remember it? But that is now far away. Will that happy time ever return? Shall we one day meet again? Here my life is restless, uncertain, precarious, and, what is worse, indolent, illiterate, and vagrant. I do no work, I live in idleness, I ramble about; I do not read, I no longer study; my books are forsaken; now and then I glance over a few metaphysical works, and after a days walk through dirty, filthy, crowded streets. I lie down with empty head and ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... have associated to any extent with the people in the rural districts, especially those of American or Dutch-American descent, they, no doubt, have observed that a great many of the older and more illiterate ones among them are very superstitious, being implicit believers in signs, charms, apparitions, etc.; and most of them, also, entertain the opinion that the moon exerts an occult influence over many things of vital importance to the residents of this mundane ...
— From Wealth to Poverty • Austin Potter
... attributes of chivalry, we incline towards the erroneous view that it was confined entirely to the upper classes. That the manuscript volumes of the romantic tales which were so eagerly purchased and treasured by the educated classes could never possibly come into the hands of the rude illiterate peasants is a fallacious argument. Scanty indeed would be our folk-lore had it all been transmitted graphically. Chaucer bears evidence of the widespread popularity of these heroic tales in ...
— The Book-Hunter at Home • P. B. M. Allan
... dread of the vengeance of the Yorkists caused his widow to conceal his son and heir under the lowly disguise of a shepherd-boy, in which condition he grew up among the fells of Westmorland totally illiterate, and ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... AN illiterate person, who always volunteered to "go round with the hat," but was suspected of sparing his own pocket, overhearing once a hint to that effect, replied, "Other gentlemen puts down what they thinks proper, and so do I. Charity's a private ...
— The Jest Book - The Choicest Anecdotes and Sayings • Mark Lemon
... ignorance, and the nearer relation into which the two countries are now brought by means of the excellent system of railroads is rapidly dispelling the misconception on both sides of the Rio Grande. The masses, especially the peons, are far more illiterate than in this country, and are easily led by the higher intelligence of the few; nor have the Mexicans yet shown much real progress in the purpose of promoting general education, though incipient steps ...
— Aztec Land • Maturin M. Ballou
... ignore almost any crime which is just a matter of common knowledge. In fact, they are mildly grateful. It gives them something to talk about. But when detraction is printed in the morning paper you can't overlook it without incurring the suspicion of being illiterate and virtueless. That's Lichfield." ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... corruption of taste and language, still preserves the majesty of the Roman laws. In some respects, the office of the Imperial quaestor may be compared with that of a modern chancellor; but the use of a great seal, which seems to have been adopted by the illiterate barbarians, was never introduced to attest the public acts of the emperors. 4. The extraordinary title of count of the sacred largesses was bestowed on the treasurer-general of the revenue, with the intention perhaps of inculcating, that every payment flowed from the voluntary ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... served to make irresistible. But Puerto Rico did not aspire to emancipation. It never had been a colony, there was no creole class, and the only indigenous population—the "jibaros," the mixed descendants of Indians, negroes, and Spaniards—were too poor, too illiterate, too ignorant of everything concerning the outside world to look with anything but suspicion upon the invitations of the insurgents of Colombia and Venezuela to join them or imitate their example. They, nor the great majority of the masses whom Bolivar, San Martin, Hidalgo, and others liberated ...
— The History of Puerto Rico - From the Spanish Discovery to the American Occupation • R.A. Van Middeldyk
... see you: he is a sparkling draught in person; probably illiterate, if I may judge from one interruption of my discourse when he sat opposite me, but lettered enough to respect Learning and write out his prescription: I do not ask more of men or of physicians." Dr. Middleton said this rising, glancing at the clock and at the back of his ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... trifle light as air is magnified, as the poet says, 'into confirmation strong as holy writ.' Now, consider, somebody calls at the Foundling to ask after you—which I acknowledge to be a satisfactory point—his name is taken down by an illiterate brute, as Derbennon; but how you can decide upon the real name, and assume it is De Benyon, is really more than I can imagine, allowing every scope to fancy. It is in the first instance, therefore, you are at fault, as there are many other names which may have been given by the party who ...
— Japhet, In Search Of A Father • Frederick Marryat
... October. When the cattle bunched at night I simply rolled up in a blanket where they were and watched the stars until I forgot them; the next thing I knew it was morning. I had hours to read in though, hours and hours; and that was another thing I was after. For I could read, I wasn't quite illiterate, and I was dead in earnest at last. When the Fall round-up came I quit and went to Denver, and portered in a big hotel ...
— The Dominant Dollar • Will Lillibridge
... Conscious that they might be crowded out by the greater energy and enterprise of white settlers—that they could no longer depend on their means of livelihood in the past, when the buffalo and other game were plentiful, these restless, impulsive, illiterate people were easily led to believe that their only chance of redressing their real or fancied wrongs was such a rising as had taken place on the Red River in {394} 1869. It is believed that English settlers in the Prince Albert district secretly fomented the ...
— Canada • J. G. Bourinot
... fellow-citizens? I think you will find, in investigating this subject, that every solid argument is against the extraordinary court, and that every one in its favor is specious only. It is a transfer from a judicature of learning and integrity, to one, the greatness of which is both illiterate and unprincipled. Yet such is the force of prejudice with some, and of the want of reflection in others, that many of our constitutions have copied this absurdity, without suspecting it to be one. I am glad to hear that our new Constitution is pretty sure of being accepted by States enough to secure ...
— The Writings of Thomas Jefferson - Library Edition - Vol. 6 (of 20) • Thomas Jefferson
... sufferer:—nineteen persons, "members of the Church", were executed, and one hundred and fifty persons were put in prison. It was sometime before the conviction began to spread, that even men of sense, education, and fervent piety could entertain the madness and infatuation of the weak, illiterate, and unprincipled. A disbeliever in witchcraft was an 'obdurate sadducee.' That conviction did at last possess men. The disease which affected the supposed bewitched children somewhat resembled St. Vitus' Dance. It was an involuntary motion of the ...
— The Rise of Canada, from Barbarism to Wealth and Civilisation - Volume 1 • Charles Roger
... surrendered his commission as chaplain in the army. He had fought to win the freedom of a race. To make that race true free men was a task much more vast than to emancipate them. The parting of the ways had come. An illiterate people must be taught. No longer should it be a crime to instruct them. The rather was he the criminal who should deny them an education. It was an hour for the voice of a prophet. With the ken of a seer, Chaplain Cravath, representing the American Missionary Association, ...
— The American Missionary — Volume 54, No. 01, January, 1900 • Various
... literary merit. Usher, notwithstanding his being a bishop, received a pension from him. Marvel and Milton were in his service. Waller, who was his relation, was caressed by him. That poet always said, that the protector himself was not so wholly illiterate as was commonly imagined. He gave a hundred pounds a year to the divinity professor at Oxford; and an historian mentions this bounty as an instance of his love of literature.[*] He intended to have erected a college at Durham for the benefit ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part E. - From Charles I. to Cromwell • David Hume
... said Lucia. "I hope she understood his English too, and his music. He had not an 'h' when he spoke English, and I have not the slightest doubt in my own mind that his Italian was equally illiterate. It does not matter; I do not see that Mr Cortese's linguistic accomplishments concern us. But his music does, if poor Miss Bracely, with her lovely notes, is going to study it, and appear as Lucretia. I am sorry if that is so. ...
— Queen Lucia • E. F. Benson
... besides, the mysterious Rasputin to contend with! This extraordinary man seems to exercise a malign influence over everyone, and people are powerless to resist him. Nothing seems too strange or too mad to recount of this man and his dupes. He is by birth a moujik, or peasant, and is illiterate, a drunkard, and an immoral wretch. Yet there is hardly a great lady at Court who has not come under his influence, and he is supposed by this set of persons to be a reincarnation of Christ. Rasputin's figure is one of those mysterious ...
— My War Experiences in Two Continents • Sarah Macnaughtan
... colloquialism, were overwhelming in their effect on such an audience. "The first discovery," he says himself, "of their being affected was to see the white gutters made by their tears, which plentifully fell down their cheeks, black as they came out of the coal-pits." It was not only miners and other illiterate men whom Whitefield impressed by the fervor and passion of his eloquence. Hume, Benjamin Franklin, Horace Walpole, and other men as well qualified to judge, and as little likely to fall under the spell of religions or sentimental enthusiasm, have borne willing testimony to the irresistible power ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume II (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... letter written next day to his father and mother clearly shows. He went to the house of the printer, where he did not receive the warm welcome he had expected. Deborah Franklin was a fat, hard-working, illiterate, economical housewife. She had a great pride in her husband, but had fallen hopelessly behind him. She regarded with awe and slight understanding the accomplishments of his virile, restless, on-pushing intellect. She did not know how to enjoy the prosperity that had come to them. ...
— In the Days of Poor Richard • Irving Bacheller
... distinguished sire had won. There are few authentic facts, however, recorded concerning him; for it seems that as soon as he had emerged from the hiding-place where he had been brought up in ignorance of his rank, finding himself more illiterate than was usual, even in an illiterate age, he retired to a tower, which he built in a beautiful and sequestered forest, where, under the direction of the monks of Bolton Abbey, he gave himself up to the forbidden studies of alchemy and astrology. His descendant Anne Clifford, Countess ...
— Strange Pages from Family Papers • T. F. Thiselton Dyer
... that his father's grandfather was a humble private soldier at the storming of Stony Point. This great-grandfather's name was Miller. Dutch or German neighbors had called him Millerd by some confusion with other names having a similar termination, and as he was tolerably illiterate, and rarely wrote his name, the change came to be accepted. A new schoolmaster who spelled it Millerd in the copy-book of Charley's grandfather fixed the orthography and pronunciation in the new form. About the time that Millard Fillmore became President by succession, ...
— The Faith Doctor - A Story of New York • Edward Eggleston
... of making this provision for the officers I am ready to declare that I do most religiously believe the salvation of the cause depends upon it, and without it your officers will moulder to nothing, or be composed of low and illiterate men, void of capacity for this or ...
— Life And Times Of Washington, Volume 2 • John Frederick Schroeder and Benson John Lossing
... a great deal too full of the market to think of any thing else—which is just as it should be, for a thriving man. What has he to do with books? And I have no doubt that he will thrive, and be a very rich man in time—and his being illiterate and coarse need not ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... renowned now living. Though only an illiterate peasant woman, she has been able for more than twenty years to baffle every scientist who has studied her. Her organism remains the most potent mystery on ...
— The Shadow World • Hamlin Garland
... condescends to an intimacy with a simple son of sea and shore who is not only practically illiterate but is entirely ignorant of his patron's prowess, the opinions of the illiterate concerning the personal characteristics of the genius obtain a very remarkable value as being honest criticism by man of man, uninfluenced by the ...
— Edward FitzGerald and "Posh" - "Herring Merchants" • James Blyth
... don't know where the reform is to begin. I've seen a perfectly capable, honest man, time and again, run against an illiterate trickster, and get beaten. I suppose if the people wanted decent members of congress they would elect them. Perhaps," continued Philip with a smile, "the women will have ...
— The Gilded Age, Complete • Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner
... C represents the boundary of the disturbed area, so far as known, for about one-third of the area lies in regions from which no information was procurable, while another third is inhabited by ignorant and illiterate tribes. But, notwithstanding this, the shock is known to have been felt over an area of at least 1,200,000 square miles. If we include the detached region to the west, near Ahmedabad, the portion of the Bay of Bengal in which the shock ...
— A Study of Recent Earthquakes • Charles Davison
... triumphs over matter and have not some of you with only a few months' preparation stood fearless at your post in Mesopotamia and won recognition by your calm collectedness and true heroism? They may say that you are but a small handful, what of the vast illiterate millions? Illiterate in what sense? Have not the ballads of these illiterates rendered into English by our Poet touched profoundly the hearts of the very elect of the West? Have not the stories of their common life appealed to the ...
— Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose - His Life and Speeches • Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose
... of oak or laurel; but then Rome never produced a Rev. Seasholes, nor Greece a Senator Bowser. The Imperial City did manage to breed a Brutus and a Cato, but never proved equal to a Culberson. Think of a Texas legislature, composed chiefly of illiterate jabber- whacks who string out the sessions interminably for the sake of the $2 a day—imagine these fellows, each with a large pendulous ear to the earth, listening for the approach of some Pegasus to carry him to Congress—teaching the aesthetics of civilization to the divine philosophers ...
— Volume 12 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... delicacy and magnificence of taste which would have made the houses and manners of modern stock-jobbers intolerable to them. Renaissance millionaires could be vulgar and brutal, but they were great gentlemen. They were neither illiterate cads nor meddlesome puritans, nor even saviours of society. Yet, if we are to understand the amazing popularity of Titian's and of Veronese's women, we must take note of their niceness to kiss and obvious willingness ...
— Art • Clive Bell
... symbol that provides excellent material for clues to tricks and mannerisms. It varies in form from a mere v-shaped tick of almost indeterminate character to an ornate thing of loops and flourishes. It is very sparingly employed by illiterate persons, and some educated writers avoid its use under the impression that, like the abbreviation of words, it is vulgar. In a few high-class ladies' schools its use is sternly repressed, and there are many fluent and habitual writers who never employ this sign. This in itself ...
— The Detection of Forgery • Douglas Blackburn
... and caused great tumult and alarm. From the foundation of New England it had been the custom of the inhabitants, in matters of doubt and difficulty, to look to their ministers for counsel. So they did now; 10 but unfortunately the ministers and wise men were more deluded than the illiterate people. Cotton Mather, a very learned and eminent clergyman, believed that the whole country was full of witches and wizards who had given up their hopes of heaven and signed a covenant with ...
— Story Hour Readings: Seventh Year • E.C. Hartwell
... deeds were drawn in accordance with them. When the day for signing arrived, the bridegroom-elect demurred at first to the stringency of the provisions of the marriage-contract; but as upon this point Mr Dutton was found to be inflexible, the handsome, illiterate clown—he was little better—gave up his scruples, the more readily as a life of assured idleness lay before him, from the virtual control he was sure to have over his wife's income. These were the thoughts which passed across his mind, I was quite sure, as taking the pen awkwardly in his ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 440 - Volume 17, New Series, June 5, 1852 • Various
... before the public. The necessity of the library, its great value to the community, should be urged by the local press, from the platform, and in personal talk. Include in your canvass all citizens, irrespective of creed, business, or politics; whether educated or illiterate. Enlist the support of teachers, and through them interest children and parents. Literary, art, social, and scientific societies, Chautauqua circles, local clubs of all kinds should be ...
— A Library Primer • John Cotton Dana
... wholesale or retail for the punctual delivery of unadulterated moonshine. Such a dealer, such a contractor, is the Anti-Corn-Law Association; and for such it has always been known amongst intelligent men. But its character has now diffused itself among the illiterate: and we believe it to be the simple truth at this moment, that every working man, whose attention has at any time been drawn to the question, is now ready to take his stand upon the following answer:—"We, that is our order, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various
... added a full hour to the business of the toilette. It was generally three before Miss Burney was at liberty. Then she had two hours at her own disposal. To these hours we owe great part of her Diary. At five she had to attend her colleague, Madame Schwellenberg, a hateful old toadeater, as illiterate as a chambermaid, as proud as a whole German Chapter, rude, peevish, unable to bear solitude, unable to conduct herself with common decency in society. With this delightful associate, Frances Burney had to dine, and pass the evening. The pair ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... of her own savings,—savings which had been the secret result of secret labors with the pen and type-writer. As soon as the accident happened she quitted the High School, put aside her books, and divided her time between nursing her mother and keeping the books of a successful but illiterate milliner, who offered her a place; and she gave so many other evidences of good sense and determination that Mrs. Tarbell felt it would be hopeless to try to resist her. Her decision did not seem to have altered ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, November 1885 • Various
... accepted by them, with the gravest face; no story is too silly, no falsehood too glaring, for them to believe and to retail, in fullest confidence of its truth. Gross ignorance is one of their characteristics; they are superstitious, credulous, illiterate, to an almost incredible extent. Clement considers that "the Lord continually proves to us that there shall be a future resurrection" by the following "fact," among others: "Let us consider that wonderful sign which takes place in Eastern lands—that is, in Arabia and ...
— The Freethinker's Text Book, Part II. - Christianity: Its Evidences, Its Origin, Its Morality, Its History • Annie Besant
... the Gold Conspiracy to respectability and editorial law, but when he sent the manuscript on to the Quarterly, the editor of the Quarterly also refused it. The literary standard of the two Quarterlies was not so high as to suggest that the article was illiterate beyond the power of an active and willing editor to redeem it. Adams had no choice but to realize that he had to deal in 1870 with the same old English character of 1860, and the same inability in himself to understand it. As usual, when ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... also express agent, and the new volunteer who Clinch had suggested would be found among the stable-men. The nearest justice of the peace was ten miles away, and Hale had to abandon even his hope of being sworn in as a deputy constable. This introduction of a common and illiterate ostler into the party on equal terms with himself did not add to his satisfaction, and a remark from Rawlins seemed to ...
— Snow-Bound at Eagle's • Bret Harte
... members of Parliament who spoke of public virtue and patriotism he would reply "you will soon come off that and grow wiser," the autocrat enamoured of power who could brook no colleague within measurable distance, the man of coarse habits and illiterate tastes, above all the man who induced his countrymen to place money before honour, and whose administration even an admirer describes as one of unparalleled stagnation—such a man must have roused intense antagonism in Fielding's generous ...
— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden
... now call 'culture' certainly did not enter into the 'curriculum,' nor 'English,' nor modern languages, nor 'literature.'" {17a} Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps says that "removed prematurely from school, residing with illiterate relatives in a bookless neighbourhood, thrown into the midst of occupations adverse to scholastic progress—it is difficult to believe that when he first left Stratford he was not all but destitute of polished accomplishments." {17b} Mr. Greenwood adds the apprenticeship ...
— Shakespeare, Bacon and the Great Unknown • Andrew Lang
... perhaps, what I just said about the loves and friendships of illiterate persons,—that is, of the human race, with a few exceptions here and there. I like books,—I was born and bred among them, and have the easy feeling, when I get into their presence, that a stable-boy has ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... was born July 17, 1674, at Southampton, where his father, of the same name, kept a boarding-school for young gentlemen, though common report makes him a shoemaker. He appears, from the narrative of Dr. Gibbons, to have been neither indigent nor illiterate. ...
— Lives of the Poets: Gay, Thomson, Young, and Others • Samuel Johnson
... designations should be printed. Most practical politicians desire that the name "Republican" or "Democrat," or even that some party symbol like a star or flag, should be affixed, which can be understood by the most illiterate voter; also, that the voter should be allowed to make one cross opposite the word "Republican" or "Democrat" when he means to vote the whole of the ticket, "in order to give each candidate the benefit of the full party strength." On the other side it is argued that all ...
— Popular Law-making • Frederic Jesup Stimson
... because of this many a time in later days his enemies taunted him with being ignorant and unlearned. He felt these taunts bitterly, and again and again answered them in his writings. "I have been in my time pretty well master of five languages," he says in one place. "I have also, illiterate though I am, made a little progress in science. I have read Euclid's Elements. . . . I have read logic. . . . I went some length in physics. . . . I thought myself master of geography and to possess sufficient skill in astronomy." Yet he says ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... own sort, in this single particular, were the two girls with whom she shared a cheap room. Their common decency in attitude toward the other sex was the unique bond of union. In their association, she found no real companionship. Nevertheless, they were wholesome enough. Otherwise they were illiterate, altogether uncongenial. ...
— Within the Law - From the Play of Bayard Veiller • Marvin Dana
... arrived at the beach, the darkness of the night was illumined by the light of an immense fire. Ordering his boat's crew (with the intrepid though illiterate William at their head) to keep close and be upon their guard, Boldheart bravely went on, arm in arm with ...
— Holiday Romance • Charles Dickens
... amazing to me that this person should have assurance, in the face of the sun, to go about persuading your Highness that our age is almost wholly illiterate and has hardly produced one writer upon any subject. I know very well that when your Highness shall come to riper years, and have gone through the learning of antiquity, you will be too curious to neglect inquiring ...
— A Tale of a Tub • Jonathan Swift
... the death-bed of an illiterate woman, old and plain, dying away by inches? Is it only that she died with a hold of my hand, and that therefore I am interested in the story? I trust not. I was interested in HER. Why? Would my readers be more interested if I told ...
— Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood • George MacDonald
... this is how she treated a work which she considered a world-masterpiece. First she skimmed it over, then she expurgated it, and finally she either typed it herself, [663] or, what is more likely, put it into the hands of a typist who must have been extremely illiterate or abominably careless. Then, without even troubling to correct the copy, she sent the manuscript of the Catullus up the chimney after that of The Scented Garden. The typewritten copy was forwarded to the unhappy and puzzled Mr. Leonard ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... such a student out of my office." That eminent lawyer's remark did me more service than any month's study in the Seminary. It taught me that cultivated audiences relished plain, simple scriptural truths as much as did the illiterate, and that down-right earnestness to save souls hides a multitude of sins in ...
— Recollections of a Long Life - An Autobiography • Theodore Ledyard Cuyler
... what we must call religious erotics, in no way different, save for names of Christ and the Virgin, from their most impassioned secular ones. The Song of Solomon, therefore, is one of the few pieces of written literature of which we find constant traces in the works of these very literally illiterate poets. Yet the quality of their love, if one may say so, is very different from anything Hebrew, or, for the matter of that, Greek or Roman; their ardour is not a transient phenomenon which disturbs them, like that of the Shulamite, ...
— Renaissance Fancies and Studies - Being a Sequel to Euphorion • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... was illiterate, and had no sympathy with his son's efforts to educate himself. Fortunately for him, however, his stepmother helped and encouraged him in every way possible. Shortly before her death she said to a biographer of Lincoln: "I induced my husband ...
— Eclectic School Readings: Stories from Life • Orison Swett Marden
... the college. The religious motive predominated in the founding of Harvard, for though the colonists longed "to advance learning and perpetuate it to posterity," they were actuated chiefly by dread "to leave an illiterate ministry to the churches, when our present Ministers ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... whatever about his work, as he had been in the Excise Duties Department, and had received the post of school inspector through influence. The School Council met very rarely, and there was no knowing where it met; the school guardian was an almost illiterate peasant, the head of a tanning business, unintelligent, rude, and a great friend of the watchman's—and goodness knows to whom she could ...
— The Schoolmistress and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... Danger (the spurre of all great mindes) is ever The curbe to your tame spirits; you respect not (With all your holinesse of life and learning) 80 More then the present, like illiterate vulgars; Your minde (you say) kept in your fleshes bounds Showes that mans will must rul'd be by his power: When by true doctrine you are taught to live Rather without the body then within, 85 And rather to your God still then your selfe. To live to Him is to ...
— Bussy D'Ambois and The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois • George Chapman
... ignorance, but the depravity of the doctors. Nothing could be more unjust or mischievous. Doctors, if no better than other men, are certainly no worse. I was reproached during the performances of The Doctor's Dilemma at the Court Theatre in 1907 because I made the artist a rascal, the journalist an illiterate incapable, and all the doctors "angels." But I did not go beyond the warrant of my own experience. It has been my luck to have doctors among my friends for nearly forty years past (all perfectly aware of my freedom from the usual credulity as to the miraculous ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma: Preface on Doctors • George Bernard Shaw
... him, for most of his friends were unreasoning and uncritical enough to assert that the 'Poems on Rural Life and Scenery,' were less remarkable as poetic works, than as productions of a very poor and illiterate man. This statement was echoed far and wide, with the necessary result of getting 'the Northamptonshire Peasant' looked upon as but a nine-days' wonder. Quite as fatal to Clare's fame as a poet were the loud appeals made on his behalf for ...
— The Life of John Clare • Frederick Martin
... hundred per cent, just as it would in school. Men are only boys. As soon as the fellows got it into their heads we were trying to work out a republic in a jail, they were possessed by it. I wish you could see the letters that were sent in to the paper. You couldn't publish 'em, some of 'em. Too illiterate. But they showed you what was inside the fellows. Sometimes they were as smug ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown
... the people that amuse me, and the other is the reading of French books. I didn't see how I was going to keep my circle here together, and my own mind in decent repair, unless I could find somebody to be eyes for me, and to read to me. And as I'm a bundle of nerves, and I never was agreeable to illiterate people, nor they to me, I was rather put to it. Well, one day these girls and their mother came over to tea, and, as you guess, of course, they brought Mademoiselle Le Breton with them. I had asked them to come, but when they arrived I was ...
— Lady Rose's Daughter • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... reference, and had laid it down that if the human race became extinct the birds would stand the best chance of "evolving a primate"! Since that time other "scientists" have been encountered, with no better equipment, with no history, no poetry, no philosophy in any broad sense, men with no letters—illiterate, strictly speaking—yet with all the dogmatism in the world. Can any one be more dogmatic than your modern scientist? The reproach has passed altogether to him from ...
— The Ascent of Denali (Mount McKinley) - A Narrative of the First Complete Ascent of the Highest - Peak in North America • Hudson Stuck
... the beginning's of these various degenerate and illiterate attempts at book-work we have only to watch the last expiring gleams of classic art beneath the ruthless footsteps of the barbarian invaders of ...
— Illuminated Manuscripts • John W. Bradley
... strong mechanic skill. "That Gospel, Paul with zeal and love maintain'd, To others lost, to you is now explain'd; No worldly learning can these points discuss, Books teach them not as they are taught to us. Illiterate call us!—let their wisest man Draw forth his thousands as your Teacher can: They give their moral precepts: so, they say, Did Epictetus once, and Seneca; One was a slave, and slaves we all must be, Until the ...
— The Borough • George Crabbe
... office. Mr Chalk, a quiet-looking little man, with easy familiar manners, which won the confidence of his illiterate constituents, knowing Bob Fox well, received us graciously. His eyes glittered as he heard the money chink ...
— Peter Trawl - The Adventures of a Whaler • W. H. G. Kingston
... service of the will, is not of itself sufficient: there must be a real superfluity of power, set free from the service of the will and devoted to that of the intellect; for, as Seneca says, otium sine litteris mors est et vivi hominis sepultura—illiterate leisure is a form of death, a living tomb. Varying with the amount of the superfluity, there will be countless developments in this second life, the life of the mind; it may be the mere collection and labelling of insects, birds, minerals, coins, or the highest achievements of ...
— The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer: The Wisdom of Life • Arthur Schopenhauer
... enabled to produce a bowstring for his benefactor; and the sultan's "firmaun" appointed him to the vacant pachalik. His qualifications for office were all superlative: he was very short, very corpulent, very illiterate, very irascible, ...
— The Pacha of Many Tales • Frederick Marryat
... of her. She was sentimental. I never gave her any money. When I had some, she refused to take it, but allowed me to spend a little in buying her a present. On the night before I left London she wept. She wrote me illiterate, but affectionate letters. One day she wrote to me that she was to be kept by a man, but that she had made it a condition with him that she should be allowed to have me. I had never been in love with her, because of her vulgarity. ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 4 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... at his desk. He began to write, working on a report which the governor of Samoa had been clamouring for and which Walker, with his usual dilatoriness, had neglected to prepare. Mackintosh as he made his notes reflected vindictively that Walker was late with his report because he was so illiterate that he had an invincible distaste for anything to do with pens and paper; and now when it was at last ready, concise and neatly official, he would accept his subordinate's work without a word of appreciation, ...
— The Trembling of a Leaf - Little Stories of the South Sea Islands • William Somerset Maugham
... different nations, Turcomans, Greeks, and Armenians. The Turcomans, who are Mahometans, are a rude, illiterate, and savage people, inhabiting the mountains and inaccessible places, where they can procure pasture, as they subsist only on the produce of their flocks and herds. In their country there are excellent horses, called Turkish ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 1 • Robert Kerr
... authority we learn that as a child Miss Mehetabel was so precocious that at the age of eight she could read the Greek Testament in the original; that she was from her earliest youth emotional and sentimental; that despite her intellectual tastes and attainments she gave her hand to an illiterate journeyman plumber and glazier; and that when the fruit of this union lay dying by her side she insisted on dictating to her husband a poem afterward published under the moving caption of "A Mother's Address to Her Dying Infant." Another of her ...
— Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters • H. Addington Bruce
... illiterate son of a literary father who had reaped both money and fame. The son spent the former, on the strength of the latter married an earl's daughter, and thereupon began to embody in his own behavior his ideas of how a nobleman ought to carry himself; whence, from being ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... Negroes, and illiterate persons of all complexions, set up as doctors. Old Joe Pye and Sabbatus were famous Indian healers. Indian squaws, such as Molly Orcutt, sold many a decoction of leaves and barks to the planters, and, ...
— Customs and Fashions in Old New England • Alice Morse Earle
... works of Genius perpetually criticized in our public Prints: "Passion has not sufficient coolness to pause for metaphor, nor has metaphor ardor enough to keep pace with passion."—Nothing can be less true. Metaphoric strength of expression will burst even from vulgar and illiterate minds when they are agitated. It is a natural effort of roused sensibility in every gradation, from unlettered simplicity to the highest refinement. Passion has no occasion to pause for metaphors, they rush upon the mind ...
— Original sonnets on various subjects; and odes paraphrased from Horace • Anna Seward
... at least born in Flanders, notwithstanding that the Spanish Translation representeth him to be a Native of the Kingdom of France. His printing this History originally in Dutch, which doubtless must be his native Tongue, who otherwise was but an illiterate man, together with the very sound of his name, convincing me thereunto. True it is, he set sail from France, and was some years at Tortuga; but neither of these two Arguments, drawn from the History, are prevalent. For were he to be a French-man born, how came he to learn ...
— The Pirates of Panama • A. O. (Alexandre Olivier) Exquemelin
... every white man's religion? Can it be a matter of astonishment, that slaves often feel that there is no just God for the poor African? Nay, verily; and were it not for the comforting and sustaining influence that these poor, illiterate and suffering creatures feel as coming from an unearthly source, they would in their ignorance all become infidels. To me, that beautiful Sabbath morning was clouded in midnight darkness, and I retired to ponder on what ...
— Twenty-Two Years a Slave, and Forty Years a Freeman • Austin Steward
... being quite illiterate, had not reckoned on such damning evidence, but he recovered himself and replied with dignity: "Very well, Senor; if it is yours, take it; but don't call ...
— Argentina From A British Point Of View • Various
... wranglings of the common sort, plebs, the rabble, duelloes with fists, proper to this island, at which the stiletto'd and secrete Italian laughs.) Withdrawing myselfe from these buzzing and illiterate vanities, with a bezo las manos to the city, I begin to inhale, draw in, snuff up, as horses dilatis naribus snort the fresh aires, with exceeding great delight, when suddenly there crosses me a procession, sad, heavy, dolourous, tristfull, melancholick, able to change mirth into ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... commenced in the reign of Charles I. The Puritans had the pulpit on their side, and found it a powerful instrument. The Cavaliers had the song writers on theirs, and found them equally effective. And the song and ballad writers of that day were not always illiterate versifiers. Some of them were the choicest wits and most accomplished gentlemen of the nation. As they could not reach the ears of their countrymen by the printed book, the pamphlet, or the newspaper, nor mount the pulpit and ...
— Cavalier Songs and Ballads of England from 1642 to 1684 • Charles Mackay
... accomplished an upright little letter to Mrs. Churchley—her eldest sister neither fostered nor discouraged the performance—to which Mrs. Churchley replied, after a fortnight, in a meagre and, as Adela thought, illiterate fashion, making no allusion to the approach of any closer tie. Evidently the situation had changed; the question of the marriage was dropped, at any rate for the time. This idea gave our young ...
— The Marriages • Henry James
... and address on the envelope as precisely and as legibly as you can. The post-office has enough to do in deciphering the letters of the illiterate, without being asked to do ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... against his father; and immediately afterwards the young lord emerged from the hiding place, where he had been brought up in ignorance of his rank, and with the manners and education of a mere shepherd. Finding himself more illiterate than was usual even in an illiterate age, he retired to a tower, which he built in the beautiful forest of Barden, and there, under the direction of the monks of Bolton Abbey, gave himself up to the forbidden studies of alchemy and astrology. His son, who was the first Earl of Cumberland, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 13, No. 354, Saturday, January 31, 1829. • Various
... by George Bentinck,[13] who took the trouble. Besides, his fortune consists in great measure of wool, he lives in the country, is well versed in rural affairs and the business of the quarter sessions, has a certain calibre of understanding, is prejudiced, narrow-minded, illiterate, and ignorant, good-looking, good-humoured, and unaffected, tedious, prolix, unassuming, and a duke. There would not have been so much to say about him if they had not excited an idea in the minds of some people of making him Prime Minister and successor ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William - IV, Volume 1 (of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... "Which One of These Couples Will be the Happier in Five Years?" the implication being that the young people who buy Dr. Eliot's books will, by constant reading aloud to each other from the works of the world's best writers, cement a companionship which will put to shame the illiterate union of ...
— Love Conquers All • Robert C. Benchley
... Cosineus—or Gog and Magog, as the grotesque giants are designated by the unlearned, who know not the history of the two famous effigies, which originally figured in an Elizabethan pageant, stirring the wonder of the illiterate, and reminding scholars of two mythical heroes about whom the curious reader of this paragraph may learn further particulars by referring ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... contented that men of learning praise our actions, and thereby inspire us with additional courage in war. I wish I could employ more time in reading, and could expend some of that money on learned men which I must throw away on so many illiterate knights." ...
— The Empire of Austria; Its Rise and Present Power • John S. C. Abbott
... Driven from pillar to post by the relentless hatred of the Established Church, they sought refuge in America, where Janson planned a theocratic socialistic community. Its communism was based entirely upon religious convictions, for neither Janson nor any of his illiterate followers had heard of the politico-economic systems of French reformers. Over one thousand young and vigorous peasants followed him to America. The first contingent of four hundred arrived in 1846 and spent their first ...
— Our Foreigners - A Chronicle of Americans in the Making • Samuel P. Orth
... that day our petulant demand for originality was not so much pressed. There was no literature for the million. The universal reading, the cheap press, were unknown. A great poet, who appears in illiterate times, absorbs into his sphere all the light which is anywhere radiating. Every intellectual jewel, every flower of sentiment, it is his fine office to bring to his people; and he comes to value his memory equally with his invention. He is therefore little solicitous whence his thoughts have ...
— Representative Men • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... audiobook, if you can cope with the numerous words of unusual spelling, to represent the speech of illiterate seamen, and the Spanish words. The latter are also to be found in Reid's Wild-West novels. For some reason Reid often uses a few French phrases, but that was not unusual at the ...
— The Flag of Distress - A Story of the South Sea • Mayne Reid
... or mob, in all ages, have been a set of blind, deaf, obstinate, senseless, illiterate savages. That no man of genius, in his senses, would be ambitious of pleasing such a capricious, ungrateful rabble. That the only legitimate end of writing for them is to pick their pockets, and, that failing, we are at full liberty to vilify and abuse ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... what Messrs. Hobhouse and Leigh Hunt wish to make him appear. A man of his birth, a man of his taste, a man of his talents, a man of his habits, can have nothing in common with such miserable creatures as we now call Radicals, of whom I know not that I can better express the illiterate and blind ignorance and vulgarity than by saying that the best informed of them have probably never heard of Lord Byron. No, no, Lord Byron may be indulgent to these jackal followers of his; he may connive at their use of his name—nay, it is not to be denied ...
— A Publisher and His Friends • Samuel Smiles
... from past experience, but it is doubtful whether the Seik soldiery ever seriously thought, although they often hauntingly boasted of fighting with the greatest power in Hindostan, until within two or three months of the first battle, and even then the rude and illiterate yeoman considered that they were about to enter upon a war purely defensive, although one in every way congenial to their feelings of pride and national jealousy. To the general impression of the Seiks, ...
— Vellenaux - A Novel • Edmund William Forrest
... it was soon required of them that they should sign "Articles of War" before they could be enrolled. These Articles formed so simple and clear an expression of The Army's teachings and system, that the most illiterate in every land could at once take in ...
— The Authoritative Life of General William Booth • George Scott Railton
... not object to the tell-tale day! The light will show, character'd in my brow, The story of sweet chastity's decay, The impious breach of holy wedlock vow: Yea, the illiterate, that know not how To cipher what is writ in learned books, Will quote my loathsome ...
— The Rape of Lucrece • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... things they wanted to communicate about were learned subjects, mostly of a philosophical or literary nature, which Latin was adapted to express. The educated public was extremely small, and foreign travel altogether beyond the reach of all but the very few. The overwhelming mass of the people were illiterate, and fast tied to their native spot by lack of pence, lack of communications, and the ...
— International Language - Past, Present and Future: With Specimens of Esperanto and Grammar • Walter J. Clark
... England at this period,—and in the small provincial town where his final rupture with the illiterate theatrical manager had taken place, there was a curious, silent contest going on between the inhabitants and their vicar. The vicar was an extremely unpopular person,—and the people were striving against him, and fighting him at every ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... worst enemies of society, the anarchists, are recruited among the prize-winners of schools; while in a recent work a distinguished magistrate, M. Adolphe Guillot, made the observation that at present 3,000 educated criminals are met with for every 1,000 illiterate delinquents, and that in fifty years the criminal percentage of the population has passed from 227 to 552 for every 100,000 inhabitants, an increase of 133 per cent. He has also noted in common with his colleagues that criminality is particularly on the increase among young persons, for whom, as ...
— The Crowd • Gustave le Bon
... Yet on their dark voices all depends. Would you promote or prevent some great measure that may affect the destinies of unborn millions, and the future character of the people,—take, for example, a system of national education,—the minister must apportion the plunder to the illiterate clan; the scum that floats on the surface of a party; or hold out the prospect of honours, which are only honourable when in their transmission they impart and receive lustre; when they are the meed of public virtue and public ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... inevitable. The successful men become egotistic, and it is a common, well-nigh universal, practise for all sorts and conditions of men to speak harshly of the authorities. In the loafers on the street corners, in the illiterate that use the country store as their club, in the very halls of congress, are heard the most unsparing criticisms and denunciations of the administration. These unwarranted comments fell thick and fast on Lincoln, because he was at the post of responsibility in a critical period, a time of general ...
— The Life of Abraham Lincoln • Henry Ketcham
... with strict accuracy all the essential features which mark the character of this extraordinary epidemic, it is proper I should state that the opponents of Jansenism concur in bringing against the convulsionists the charge that many of them were not only ignorant and illiterate girls, but persons of bad character, occasionally of notoriously immoral habits; nay, that some of them justified the vicious courses in which they indulged by declaring these to be a representation of a religious tendency, emblematic of that degradation through which the Church ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... letter of the 29th, relates the following anecdote:—"Now I am talking of bishops, I must tell you that, not long ago, Bishop Warburton, in a sermon at court, asserted that all preferments were bestowed on the most illiterate and worthless objects; and, in speaking, turned himself about and stared at the Bishop of London: he added, that if any one arose distinguished for merit and learning, there was a combination of dunces to keep him down. I need not tell you that he expected the bishopric of London when ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... the Congress for the benefit of the most illiterate and humble of our people, and with the intention of encouraging in them industry and thrift. Most of its branches were presided over by officers holding the commissions and clothed in the uniform of the United States. These and other circumstances ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 3 (of 3) of Volume 8: Grover Cleveland, First Term. • Grover Cleveland
... empirical routine which has sometimes been vaunted as the proper education for the industrial classes'—an absurd and shallow system which has been urged by quacks and dabblers in world-bettering, and which has been exhausted without avail in England—the system dear to single-sided Gradgrinds and illiterate men who grasp a twig here and there without knowing of the existence of the trunk and roots. It lays down a perfectly scientific and universal basis, believing that the most insignificant industry, to be perfectly understood and pursued, must proceed from a knowledge of the great principles ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various
... seem, the isolated Red River Colony was far from being an illiterate community. The presence of the officers of the Hudson's Bay Company, the coming of the clergy of the different churches, who established schools, and the leisure for reading books supplied by the Red River Library produced ...
— The Romantic Settlement of Lord Selkirk's Colonists - The Pioneers of Manitoba • George Bryce |
