"Purist" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Shelley's Adonais, I have taken no count of those instances of lax sound-rhyme which are correct letter-rhyme—such as the coupling of move with love, or of star with war; for these, however much some more than commonly purist ears may demur to them, appear to be part and parcel of the rhyming system of the English language. I need hardly say that, if these cases had been included, my list would in every instance have swelled considerably; nor yet ...
— Adonais • Shelley
... no outlaw in the proper sense of the term. The phrase has survived, but the fact is obsolete," said Seymour, who was both a prig and a purist, a man of leisure, and bookish, but a good shot, and vain of his sylvan accomplishments. "Our law places no man beyond the pale of its protection. He has a constitutional right to plead ...
— Wolf's Head - 1911 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... out of our pockets and in litle piles ready and cood breeth inside we all got ready. the old pedler had a bottle in his hand and sed now ladies and gentlemen i have here a bottel of my selibrated panyseer compounded by the most destinkwished chemists in Europe and of the purist and most xpensive drugs and warranted to cure headake, earake, backake, bellyake, hartake, rumatism, growing panes, varicose vanes, bunions, corns, ingrowing tonales, scroffuler, siattikeer, lung fevers, scarlet feever, meezles, hooping coff mumps and ...
— Brite and Fair • Henry A. Shute
... miles from London, where persons of an extreme sensibility meet together without embarrassment. It was all in a fine dull bottle-green and black; a grave harmonious piece of colouring, with nothing, so far as coarser folk can judge, to hurt the better feelings of the most exquisite purist. A cherry-red half window-blind kept up an imaginary warmth in the cold room, and threw quite a glow on the floor. Twelve cockle-shells and a half- penny china figure were ranged solemnly along the mantel-shelf. ...
— Essays of Travel • Robert Louis Stevenson
... we may be sure that the admiration and reverence which they may awaken in the mind of the mere classical purist is cold beside that which they kindle in the mind which can give them their true place in the history of art. The temples of Paestum are great and noble from any point of view. But they become greater and nobler as we run over ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Vol VIII - Italy and Greece, Part Two • Various
... than Tennyson never existed. As scrupulous a purist in language as Cicero, Chesterfield and Macaulay in prose, as Virgil, Milton, and Leopardi in verse, his care extended to the nicest minutiae of word-forms. Thus "ancle" is always spelt with a "c" when it stands alone, ...
— The Early Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson • Tennyson
... not pronounce as "lish" but as "English," for instance; and "nothing" (anglice nuthing), as noth-ing; or, perhaps, it were better to say "nawthin'." While Jason showed himself so much of a purist with these and many other words, he was guilty of some of the grossest possible mistakes, that were directly in opposition to his own theory. Thus, while he affectedly pronounced "none," (nun,) as "known," he did not scruple to call "stone," "stun," ...
— Satanstoe • James Fenimore Cooper
... generation after generation of students who graduated carried into after-life the effects of his teaching and personality. We all loved Professor Olmstead, though we were not vitally interested in his department of physics and biology. He was a purist in his department, and so confident of his principles that he thought it unnecessary to submit them to practical tests. One of the students, whose room was immediately over that of the professor, took up a plank from the ...
— My Memories of Eighty Years • Chauncey M. Depew
... leaves predominating, notably those of the wild briar and of the common acacia, the robinia. It would appear, therefore, that the insect distinguishes between two kinds of materials, without being an absolute purist and sternly excluding any sort of blending. The very much indented leaves, whose projections can be completely removed with a dexterous snip of the scissors, generally furnish the various layers of the barricade; the little robinia-leaves, with their fine texture and their unbroken edges, ...
— Bramble-bees and Others • J. Henri Fabre
... who did not know him, hardly suggested this. He was very tall and thin, with a dark, solemn face. He was a purist in the matter of clothes, and even in times of storm and stress presented an immaculate appearance to the world. In his left eye, attached to a cord, he ...
— The Prince and Betty - (American edition) • P. G. Wodehouse
... feeling, no weakness, no inflation, no appealing for petty sympathy, no writing for the sake of seeming fine, does she ever indulge in. She coins words at will, for she writes from her heart and is no purist; but we feel them to be appropriate, and requisite to express the shade of thought in question: we may laugh at them at first, but so natural and naive are they that we soon find them stealing into ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 5, November, 1863 • Various
... Cavalcasella, inspector of fine arts in Italy, removed for the odd reason that it was a work of the fourteenth century, while the church was of the thirteenth, and to be in perfect keeping should have a stone choir. I have not learned whether this hyper-purist will require of the congregation a thirteenth-century costume when the church is ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, September 1880 • Various
... ignorant of theology and indifferent to niceties of discipline, Pius IV. was at all points the exact opposite of the fiery Neapolitan noble, the Inquisitor and fanatic, the haughty trampler upon kings, the armed antagonist of Alva, the brusque, impulsive autocrat, the purist of orthodoxy, who preceded him upon the Papal throne.[31] His trusted counselor was Cardinal Morone, whom Paul had thrown into the dungeons of the Inquisition on a charge of favoring Lutheran opinions, and who was liberated by ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... a wave of relief sweep over her. She thanked the speaker with her eyes. To her hostess she said lightly, "Mr. Flint is as much of a purist as ever—no; don't leave us together. He and I have been quarrelling over the tea-cups this afternoon. I will let you take up the defence, while I go over to speak to your sister, Miss Wabash, in the corner—and isn't that Captain ...
— Flint - His Faults, His Friendships and His Fortunes • Maud Wilder Goodwin
... salmon should be tempted, he was on a lofty plane, and, if not unassailable, had better be left there in his vain glory. They loved him none the more, of course, and spun, prawned, and wormed as before, honestly envying just a little the purist whose fly undoubtedly often justified his claims. His beat was a mile higher up the river than the Rowan Pool, and he is here introduced because on this morning Grey and Brown gave him a lift in their wagonette, and dropped him at the larch plantation so that he might, by the short ...
— Lines in Pleasant Places - Being the Aftermath of an Old Angler • William Senior
... point the purist in morality, the collets montes will accuse us perhaps of presenting here conclusions which are excessively despairing; they will be desirous of putting up a defence, either for the virtuous women or the celibates; but we have in reserve for them ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part I. • Honore de Balzac
... excitements, revivals, and startings of new orders, which hoped to realize the perfection which the old orders could not. You must bear this in mind, as you read mediaeval history. You will be puzzled to know why continual new rules and new orders sprung up. They were so many revivals, so many purist attempts at new sects. You will see this very clearly in the three great revivals which exercised such enormous influence on the history of the 13th, the 16th and the 17th centuries,—I mean the rise first of the Franciscans and Dominicans, next of the Jesuits, and lastly ...
— The Roman and the Teuton - A Series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge • Charles Kingsley
... the frescoes. And there was Florence, with Giotto's campanile and Santa Maria Novella, where the young Protestant frequented monasteries, made hay with monks, sketched with his new-found friends Rudolf Durheim of Berne and Dieudonne the French purist; and spent long days copying Angelico and annotating Ghirlandajo, fevered with the sun of Italy at its strongest, and with the rapture of discovery, "which turns the unaccustomed head like ...
— The Life of John Ruskin • W. G. Collingwood
... doomful as you please; but in our ordinary modern life ninety per cent. of the tragedies are determined by sheer million to one fortuities. The history of our great criminal trials, for instance, is a romance of coincidence. It is your melodramatist and not your Aristotelian purist that knows what he's talking about when he writes a play. He only has to look about him and draw what happens in real life. That there may be an Eternal Puckish Malice arranging and deranging human destinies is another question. I am neither a theologian nor a metaphysician, and I do not ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... poetry. His modernisms were out of tune with the strain of my aspirations at that moment, and I did not find the unexpected word and the eccentricities of expression which were, and are still, so dear to me. I am not a purist; an error of diction is very pardonable if it does not err on the side of the commonplace; the commonplace, the natural, is constitutionally abhorrent to me; and I have never been able to read with any very thorough sense of pleasure even the opening lines of "Rolla," that splendid lyrical ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... the task of composition had become a fixed habit, which he could not discontinue without uneasiness. His fame even in his lifetime was unbounded. He seems to have made no enemies. The acrid criticism of Asinius Pollio, a purist by profession, on certain provincialities of his style, was an insignificant exception to the general chorus of praise. In treading the delicate ground of the Civil wars his attitude towards the Republican party led Augustus to tax him half jestingly as a Pompeian; yet Livy lost ...
— Latin Literature • J. W. Mackail
... always," Richard continued reminiscently, "a sort of cross between a dreamer, an idealist, and a sportsman. There was never anything of the practical man of affairs about him. He was scrupulously honourable, and almost a purist in his outlook upon life. I have met a great many Germans," Richard went on, "and I've killed a few, thank God!—but he is about as unlike the ordinary type as any one I ever met. The only pity is that he ever served his time ...
— The Zeppelin's Passenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim |
