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Sesame   Listen
noun
Sesame  n.  (Bot.) Either of two annual herbaceous plants of the genus Sesamum (Sesamum Indicum, and Sesamum orientale), from the seeds of which an oil is expressed; also, the small obovate, flattish seeds of these plants, sometimes used as food. See Benne.
Open Sesame, the magical command which opened the door of the robber's den in the Arabian Nights' tale of "The Forty Thieves;" hence, a magical password.
Sesame grass. (Bot.) Same as Gama grass.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Sesame" Quotes from Famous Books



... but to shut her eyes; and the apostolic succession became narrowed down into a mere dynasty of priests and pontiffs. A hierarchy of magicians, saving souls by machinery, opening and shutting the kingdom of heaven by a "sesame" of incantations which it would have been the labour of a lifetime to make so much as intelligible to ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham

... cleanliness and recreation; and even the women after childbirth do not refrain from the bath, and children just born are bathed in the rivers and springs of cold water. When leaving the bath, they anoint the head with ajonjoli [i.e., oil of sesame] mixed with civet—of which, as we shall later show, there is great abundance in those regions. Even when not bathing, they are accustomed to anoint their heads for comfort and adornment, especially the women and children. Through modesty, they bathe with their bodies drawn up and almost in ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898: Volume XII, 1601-1604 • Edited by Blair and Robertson

... be a day of queer experiences. He had never before realized with how many miracles mere everyday life is besieged. Here in this small punctilious packet lay a Sesame—a power of transformation beside which the transformation of that rather flaccid face of the noonday into this tense, sinister face of midnight was but as a moving from house to house—a change just as ...
— The Return • Walter de la Mare

... employed in adulterating olive oil, and to which regard must be had in testing it, are the following: Cotton seed oil, sesame, peanut, sun flower, rape, and castor oils. The tests for the two last named have hitherto never presented any difficulty, as rape seed is easily detected, owing to the sulphur in it, by saponifying it in a silver dish, and castor oil by its solubility in alcohol. But in ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 392, July 7, 1883 • Various

... we find, as the result, a considerable progress, for which the Philippines are indebted to the Spaniards. The influence of social relations has been already exhibited in the text. The Spaniards have imported the horse, the bullock, and the sheep; maize, coffee, sugar-cane, cacao, sesame, tobacco, indigo, many fruits, and probably the batata, which they met with in Mexico under the name of camotli. [113] From this circumstance the term camote, universal in the Philippines, appears to have ...
— The Former Philippines thru Foreign Eyes • Fedor Jagor; Tomas de Comyn; Chas. Wilkes; Rudolf Virchow.

... effect is destroyed. The spell loses its power; and he who should then hope to conjure with it would find himself as much mistaken as Cassim in the Arabian tale, when he stood crying, 'Open Wheat,' 'Open Barley,' to the door which obeyed no sound but 'Open Sesame.' The miserable failure of Dryden in his attempt to translate into his own diction some parts of the 'Paradise Lost' is ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald

... a world which could be bright, and which, rolling along in its foolish fashion, even now gives promise of exceeding joy in the future. Work and save and give work! This is the light of the world, the open sesame of the millennium? Let us come again to ...
— The Golden Censer - The duties of to-day, the hopes of the future • John McGovern

... hero-worshipper. His admiration for Washington exceeded that entertained by him for any man of any time. Franklin, too, he greatly esteemed. "Ah, if you had but another Washington and Franklin!" he exclaimed one day. To have suffered for freedom was the open-sesame to Landor's heart; nor did age in any way chill this noble enthusiasm, as the letter here inserted amply proves. It was sufficient to name Kossuth to bring fire to the old man's eye and eulogistic ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various

... a page the flowers which Cicero scatters over a treatise; but still on that very account more fitted for the purpose of inflicting upon the inquiring student what Latinity was. Any how, such was its effect upon me; it was like the 'Open Sesame' of the tale; and I quickly found that I had a new sense, as regards composition, that I understood beyond mistake what a Latin sentence should be, and saw how an English sentence must be fused and remoulded in order to make it Latin. ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman

... bring your basket and your cup; 'tis the priest of Bacchus who invites you. But hasten, the guests have been waiting for you a long while. All is ready—couches, tables, cushions, chaplets, perfumes, dainties and courtesans to boot; biscuits, cakes, sesame-bread, tarts, lovely dancing women, the sweetest charm of the festivity. ...
— The Acharnians • Aristophanes

... wife, and so he lived plenteously, while his poor brother, Ali Baba, worked in the wood. It came to pass that Ali Baba one day saw in the wood a company of forty robbers, the captain of whom cried, "Open, Sesame!" to a great rock, and lo! it opened, and the men disappeared. When they were gone out again, Ali Baba came from his hiding, and, addressing the rock in the same way, found that it obeyed him. Then went he in and took much of the treasure, which he drove home on his mule. Now, when his wife ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol. I • Various

... "Come, rain!" according to his particular desires of the particular moment. I think he really caught it from an illustration in The Arabian Nights, from the picture of Cassim grandiloquently proclaiming "Open Sesame!" He is an imaginative little beggar. "Mummy," he said to me the other night, "see all the moonlight that's been spilled on the grass!" But children are made that way. Even my sage little Poppsy, when a marigold-leaf fell in the bowl of our solitary gold-fish, ...
— The Prairie Child • Arthur Stringer

... "Hello!" sent tingling over the wire a few million times daily was taken from Menlo Park by men installing telephones in different parts of the world, men who had just learned it at the laboratory, and thus made it a universal sesame for telephonic conversation. ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin

... observed her to take something bright from her girdle, which apprehension converted into a stiletto or dirk, and such is the force of self-preservation, that I was on the point of tripping her up and throwing her on her back. But thrusting the supposed dirk against the wall—presto—open sesame—the wall gave way, and she drew me through a doorway. This was done so quickly it absolutely seemed magic. For an instant I thought of dropping her arm—indeed I should have done so, and retreated back through the door, but she held ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol. XXXII No. 2. February 1848 • Various

... moving to those who know. But the tragedy I have in mind is this—for tragedy consists not in sacrifice itself but in needless and futile sacrifice—that some of these young men suppose there is a magic virtue in education for its own sake, that it is the open-sesame to all the wealth and beauty of life. With insufficient ability to start with, they are preparing to be unfit professional men, when they might be excellent artisans. The knowledge of books is in no sense the whole story nor the only means of education. In devotion to some craft or in the ...
— The Gate of Appreciation - Studies in the Relation of Art to Life • Carleton Noyes

... brought behind them. Then each of them took off his saddle-bag, which seemed to Ali Baba to be full of gold and silver from its weight. One, whom he took to be their captain, came under the tree in which Ali Baba was concealed; and making his way through some shrubs, pronounced these words: "Open, Sesame!" [Footnote: "Sesame" is a small grain.] As soon as the captain of the robbers had thus spoken, a door opened in the rock; and after he had made all his troop enter before him, he followed them, when the ...
— Fairy Tales Every Child Should Know • Various

... a native of Texas, Senator Nixon's life is essentially a Nevada Romance. He started on his career as a simple telegraph operator, and then migrated with all the Nevada immigrants in the boomy days of the goldfields. It wasn't exactly "open Sesame" and then a fortune. It was perseverance that "did the trick." But it made a mighty good job of it, for at the time of his decease in 1912, the Senator was worth several millions, and his beautiful residence ...
— Reno - A Book of Short Stories and Information • Lilyan Stratton

... drying them,'that cannot be. You cannot be to them Vich Ian Vohr; and these three magic words,' said he, half smiling, 'are the only Open Sesame to their feelings and sympathies, and poor Evan must attend his foster-brother in death, as he has done ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott

... left to the imagination of the reader. Doris saw it as a safe and artistic home for earnest young girlhood; Nancy saw it as an open sesame to fun, rather wilder than school bats, but with the same delicious tang. Doctor Martin viewed the place as most dangerous, and those young people gathered there as perilous offsprings of a much-deplored departure from ...
— The Shield of Silence • Harriet T. Comstock

... the green land of waving corn, where three crops were annually harvested and the average yield was two hundredfold of the seed sown. The wheat and barley, so Herodotus tells us, were a palm-breadth long in the blade, and millet and sesame grew like trees. And in these details the revered Father of Lies seems to have spoken less than the truth, for the statistics we get elsewhere more than bear out his accounts of its amazing fertility. From its wealth before his day had arisen ...
— Crescent and Iron Cross • E. F. Benson

... for this unexpected demand upon it. It was safe enough, he knew, in his daughter's room; and as for its having been opened, that was an impossibility; the padlock hung in front of it as usual, and it would have taken a man half a lifetime to have hit upon its open sesame by trial. He was justly proud of that letter lock, which was his own contrivance, invented when he was quite a young man, and had been perforce compelled to turn his attention to mechanics, and he considered it a marvel of skill. It was characteristic in him that he had never revealed its secret ...
— Bred in the Bone • James Payn

... was full of people with money to invest. Profiteering, easy-come money, a lot of it. Easy-go money, too, when the profiteers, still dazzled by their riches, totally unconscious of real values, would meet Keith, thinking their money an open sesame to equality ...
— Rimrock Trail • J. Allan Dunn

... have been to the far-famed British Museum. I carried an 'open sesame' in the form of a letter given to me by Professor Henry, asking for me special attention from all societies with which the 'Smithsonian' at Washington ...
— Maria Mitchell: Life, Letters, and Journals • Maria Mitchell

... the town rose up clear and hard, lingering and falling like notes of music. Somewhere they were playing football, and the shouting was distant and regular like the tramp of armed men. "Three" struck the Cathedral clock, as though it were calling "Open Sesame." Other lesser clocks repeated the challenge cry through the town. "Woppley—Woppley—Why!" sung the man who was selling skins down Orange Street. The sky, turning slowly from blue to gold, shone mysteriously through the glass of the street lamps, and the sun began to wrap itself in tints of ...
— Jeremy • Hugh Walpole

... men, the high, the low, the rich, the poor, the learned, the unlearned, the good, the bad, the wise and the foolish—it is necessary to be one with them all, else you can never comprehend them. Sympathy!—it is the touchstone to every secret, the key to all knowledge, the open sesame of all hearts. Put yourself in the other man's place and then you will know why he thinks certain things and does certain deeds. Put yourself in his place and your blame will dissolve itself into pity, and your tears will wipe out the record of his misdeeds. The saviors of ...
— Love, Life & Work • Elbert Hubbard

... products: rice, millet, sorghum, peanuts, corn, sesame, cassava (tapioca), palm kernels; ...
— The 2003 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency

... arrayed in their finest. The uniforms were new and there is no doubt that they were a gorgeous looking party as they marched up Pennsylvania avenue wearing shining brasses, bright red sashes, buff gauntlets, and sabres glittering in their scabbards. Mr. Kellogg pronounced the "Open Sesame" which caused the doors of the White House to open and secured admission to the presence ...
— Personal Recollections of a Cavalryman - With Custer's Michigan Cavalry Brigade in the Civil War • J. H. (James Harvey) Kidd

... but in grain it is so fruitful as to yield commonly two hundredfold, and when the production is greatest, even three hundredfold. The blade of the wheat plant and barley is often four fingers in breadth. As for millet and the sesame, I shall not say to what height they grow, though within my own knowledge; for I am not ignorant that what I have already written concerning the fruitfulness of Babylonia, must seem incredible to those who have never visited the country.... ...
— A History of Art in Chaldaea & Assyria, v. 1 • Georges Perrot

... high-toned and virtuous women. Moreover, they are to be seen in boxes at the theatre and the opera, and in almost every accessible place where wealthy and fashionable people congregate. In point of fact, through the potent influence of their more or less wealthy protector, they possess the open sesame to all places where admittance is not secured by vouchers, and in many instances those apparently insuperable barriers fall before their indorser's tact ...
— Danger! A True History of a Great City's Wiles and Temptations • William Howe

... "You can take your choice presently. You have the open sesame to every real American ...
— The Call of the Canyon • Zane Grey

... Mr. Henfrey had been sadly deceived by Charles Benton, and had taken him into his family as a friend. Other men had done the same. His geniality, his handsome, open face, and his plausible manner, proved the open sesame to many doors of the wealthy, and the latter were robbed in various ways, yet never dreaming that Benton was the instigator of it all. He never committed a theft himself. He gave the information—and ...
— Mademoiselle of Monte Carlo • William Le Queux

... cannular^, fistulous; pervious, permeable; foraminous^; vesicular, vasicular^; porous, follicular, cribriform^, honeycombed, infundibular^, riddled; tubulous^, tubulated^; piped, tubate^. opening &c v.; aperient^. Int. open sesame!, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget

... departing from among us. The intelligence which so long gazed wistfully upon the barred door of nature, or picked unsuccessfully at the bolts, with skeleton theories, and vague speculations, had learned to try the 'open sesame' of science. The master key is turning, the shafts yield, and already a ...
— The Continental Monthly , Vol. 2 No. 5, November 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... to its open streets, but penetrating to all its galleries, salles, and cabinets: of every door which shut in an object worth seeing, of every museum, of every hall, sacred to art or science, he seemed to possess the "Open! Sesame." I never had a head for science, but an ignorant, blind, fond instinct inclined me to art. I liked to visit the picture-galleries, and I dearly liked to be left there alone. In company, a wretched idiosyncracy forbade me to see much or to feel ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte

... all he had without success, and then the boys were called on. They were not able to produce the Sesame to the japanned box, and Will's plan of using an axe was finding more favor when Allen produced a ...
— The Outdoor Girls at Ocean View - Or, The Box That Was Found in the Sand • Laura Lee Hope

... it is so fruitful as to yield commonly two hundred-fold, and when the production is at the greatest, even three hundred-fold. The blade of the wheat-plant and of the barley-plant is often four fingers in breadth. As for the millet and the sesame, I shall not say to what height they grow, though within my own knowledge; for I am not ignorant that what I have already written concerning the fruitfulness of Babylonia must seem incredible to those who ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 1. (of 7): Chaldaea • George Rawlinson

... suggestion. The meaning "innkeeper", while not as yet found in Babylonian-Assyrian literature is most plausible, since we have sabu as a general name for 'drink', though originally designating perhaps more specifically sesame wine (Muss-Arnolt, Assyrian Dictionary, p. 745b) or distilled brandy, according to Prof. Haupt. Similarly, in the Aramaic dialects, sebha is used for "to drink" and in the Pael to "furnish drink". Muss-Arnolt in his Assyrian Dictionary, 746b, has also recognized that sabitum was originally ...
— An Old Babylonian Version of the Gilgamesh Epic • Anonymous

... trade of a part of these was turning primary elections, packing nominating conventions, repeating, and breaking up meetings." Wood also systematized naturalization. A card bearing the following legend was the open sesame to American citizenship: ...
— The Boss and the Machine • Samuel P. Orth

... its slave of freedom, covers him with other gifts which he learns to value more; which, binding him in fetters, makes him believe that they are sceptres and symbols before which all things become what he desires them. His speech is changed, his very nature perverted, but he acquires an "open sesame" by their loss, and the loss seems to his imagination an exceeding gain. We will not say that William Hinkley was altogether satisfied with HIS bargain, but in the moment when he stood confronting his enemy on the bald rock, with a deadly ...
— Charlemont • W. Gilmore Simms

... Post? If thou dost, cleave unto her, and give up unto her thy body and mind; Think with her ideas, and distribute thy smiles at her bidding: So shalt thou become like unto her; and thy manners shall be "formed," And thy name shall be a Sesame, at which the doors of the great shall fly open: Thou shalt know every Peer, his arms, and the date of his creation, His pedigree and their intermarriages, and cousins to the sixth remove: Thou shalt kiss the hand of Royalty, and lo! in next morning's papers, Side by side with rumours ...
— Verses and Translations • C. S. C.

... is finding that exuberance, this Open Sesame to the things that count, may not be won without the friendly collaboration of the pores; and that two birds of paradise may be killed with one stone (which is precious above rubies) by giving the mind fun while one gives the pores occupation. Sport is this precious stone. There is, of course, something ...
— The Joyful Heart • Robert Haven Schauffler

... is not a poetic word—mere mention of it would distress Mr. Yeats; but it is potent as "Sesame" to unlock the treasures of memory. And before the laggard Spring comes round again many of us will sigh for a whiff of yellow, acrid smoke, curling from a smoldering fire in the heart of the ...
— The So-called Human Race • Bert Leston Taylor

... thirst, and evil hunger, and wants healthier feeding. You have got its corn laws repealed for it; try if you cannot get corn laws established for it, dealing in a better bread;—bread made of that old enchanted Arabian grain, the Sesame, which opens doors;- -doors not of robbers', ...
— Sesame and Lilies • John Ruskin

... destroyed. The spell loses its power: and he who should then hope to conjure with it would find himself as much mistaken as Cassim in the Arabian tale, when he stood crying, "Open Wheat," "Open Barley," to the door which obeyed no sound but "Open Sesame." The miserable failure of Dryden in his attempt to translate into his own diction some parts of the Paradise Lost, is a ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... his feet—a white envelope. Hers! It was in his hand now, those slim, tapering, wonderfully sensitive fingers of Jimmie Dale, that were an "open sesame" to locks and safes, subconsciously telegraphing to his mind the fact that the texture of the paper—was hers. Hers! And she must be one of those around him—one of those crowding either the row ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard

... with you, Mr. Dunkerley," said Parkson. "I don't know if you have read Sesame and Lilies, but there you have, set forth far more fairly than any words of mine could do, an ideal ...
— Love and Mr. Lewisham • H. G. Wells

... was issued she might have heard the whispered words in her every hut, "Open, Sesame;" but, so far as her humble domicile and her degraded person were concerned, there was no invisible but gracious Genii who, on the instant, could transmute the rudeness of her hut into instant elegance, and change the crude surroundings ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various

... stamped on all His laws. Love is the vital essence that pervades and permeates, from the center to the circumference, the graduating circles of all thought and action. Love is the talisman of human weal and woe—the open sesame to every human soul. Where two beings are drawn together, by the natural laws of likeness and affinity, union and happiness are the result. Such marriages might be Divine. But how is it now? You all know our marriage is, in many cases, a mere outward tie, impelled by ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage

... Bismarck, and they set out by way of Sevres, Forsyth and I accompanying them as far as the Palace of St. Cloud, which we, proposed to see, though there were strict orders against its being visited generally. After much trouble we managed, through the "open sesame" of the King's pass, to gain access to the palace; but to our great disappointment we found that all the pictures had been cut from the frames and carried off to Paris, except one portrait, that of Queen Victoria, against whom the French were much incensed. All other works of art had ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan

... fire by friction, a water-jar, and in a cellar-like hole, whose opening was covered with stones and so concealed from any but a practised eye, there were some cakes of hard bread, and several pots. In one of these were some good dates, in another gleamed some white meal, a third was half full of sesame-oil, and a fourth ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... is henceforth no longer a field of labour for the individual. Co-operation is the open sesame to the economic life of the future. And co-operation means organization. Organization, then, is the Alpha and Omega of the new era. That is the mysterious radium which has enabled a single race to assail and hold its own against a group of powers whose territory ...
— England and Germany • Emile Joseph Dillon

... stood still. Michael was forgotten. And, while her brush sped hither and thither, she crooned low and clear, the song that had proved the open sesame ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver

... has he not had the same idea? Are they not his? Is not their appearance in a public print proof of the shrewdness and soundness of his judgment? Ruskin knows this foible in human nature and condemns it. You may read in "Sesame and Lilies:" ...
— How to Listen to Music, 7th ed. - Hints and Suggestions to Untaught Lovers of the Art • Henry Edward Krehbiel

... triple Shibboleth, (it ended in rag, and signified "Wales, Welshmen, and Welshwomen,") than the whole party rose, and cheered at me till I felt positively modest. My pronunciation, I believe, was perfect, (a woman's lips and an angel's voice had taught it to me:) and it was indeed the Open Sesame to their hearts and feelings. I became at once the intimate friend of all who could get near enough to offer me their houses, their horses, their dogs—I have no doubt, had I given a hint at the moment, I might have had any one of their daughters. "Would I come and pay a visit at ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various

... had opened like magic before the "sesame" of Thermidor and the prospects of settled order under the Directory. There were visiting, dining, and dancing; dressing, flirtation, and intrigue; walking, driving, and riding—all the avocations of a people soured with the cruel and bloody past, and reasserting its native ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane

... other, "according to Eternal Providence, that we must arise and wash our faces and do our gregarious work and act and re- act on one another, leaving only the idiot and the palsied to sit blinking in the corner. Come!" apostrophising the gate. "Open Sesame! Show his eyes and grieve his heart! I don't care who comes, for I know what ...
— Tom Tiddler's Ground • Charles Dickens

... and unique opportunities. For the most part the soul dwells in a castle locked and barred against outsiders. No man can keep open-house for every passer-by. But friendship is an open sesame, drawing every bar and bolt. How the heart leaps when the friend crosses the threshold! His shadow always falls behind him. His coming is summer in the soul; his presence is peace. Friendship glorifies everything it touches. ...
— The Investment of Influence - A Study of Social Sympathy and Service • Newell Dwight Hillis

... order of beings with all the elements of sovereignty, wisdom, goodness and power full-fledged, but because the exercise of the suffrage is the primary school in which the citizen learns how to use the ballot as a weapon of defense; it is the open sesame to the land of freedom and equality. The ballot is the scepter of power in the hand of every citizen. Woman can never have an equal chance with man in the struggle of life until she too wields this power. So long as women have no voice in the Government under which they ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various

... was looking around for business prospects. This proved his open-sesame. Five years had not changed the Continental frequenters much, and Skaggs's intention immediately brought Beachfield Davis down upon him with the remark, "If a man wants to go into business, business for a gentleman, suh, Gad, there ...
— The Sport of the Gods • Paul Laurence Dunbar

... had been introduced by Ceres, and other symbols of civilized life. They then spent the night at Eleusis, in celebrating the mysteries of the Goddess. The second day was one of mourning, during which the women sat on the ground around the statues of Ceres, taking no food but cakes made of sesame and honey. On it no meetings of the people were held. Probably it was in the afternoon of this day that there was a procession at Athens, in which the women walked bare-footed behind a waggon, upon which ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Copious Notes - and Explanations • Publius Ovidius Naso

... April afternoon the tea was neglected in the cups, and there was nothing of the usual mild gossip. The discussion involved Daren Lane, and when two of those social arbiters settled back in their chairs the open sesame of Middleville's select affairs ...
— The Day of the Beast • Zane Grey

... has fallen dropsical of late, and has an evil thirst, and evil hunger, and wants healthier feeding. You have got its Corn Laws repealed for it; try if you cannot get Corn Laws established for it dealing in a better bread—bread made of that old enchanted Arabian grain, the Sesame, which opens doors, doors, not of ...
— The Private Library - What We Do Know, What We Don't Know, What We Ought to Know - About Our Books • Arthur L. Humphreys

... of a large and competent staff. His proofs of capacity for a series of occupations that would have staggered a CRICHTON, was always attested by his old College testimonials, for SAUNDERS was of opinion that the courteous obiter dictum of a Professor was an Open Sesame to all the golden gates of the world. Meanwhile, he supported existence by teaching the elements of the classic languages, with which he had the most distant acquaintance, to little boys, at a Day School. But one of these pupils came home, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 103, December 3, 1892 • Various

... in time, compass the entire realm of ornithology. If he knows a flower, from this known he may be so directed that he may become a master in the unknown field of botany. If he knows coal, this experience may be made the open sesame to the realms of geology. In short, all his experiences may be capitalized under the direction of a skillful teacher, and made to produce large dividends as ...
— The Vitalized School • Francis B. Pearson

... them. Really, they needed no dower with their good looks, for they were all pretty. The Madison Avenue mansion gave them the open sesame into good society—choice society, in fact—and there some wealthy trio of unattached young men must see and fall in ...
— The Girl from Sunset Ranch - Alone in a Great City • Amy Bell Marlowe

... to cultivate an acquaintance with members of child-world, but into that kingdom there is no open sesame. The sure keen intuition of a child recognizes on sight a kindred spirit and Silvia's forced advances met with but indifferent response. She wistfully proposed to me one day that we adopt a child. My doubts as to ...
— Our Next-Door Neighbors • Belle Kanaris Maniates

... motion, Kennedy turned off the acetylene and oxygen. The last bolt had been severed, the lock was useless. A gentle push of the hand, and he swung the once impregnable door on its delicately poised hinges as easily as if he had merely said, "Open sesame." ...
— The Gold of the Gods • Arthur B. Reeve

... here are black enough, but the blacker they be the more they are thought of; wherefore from the day of their birth their parents do rub them every week with oil of sesame, so that they become as black as devils. Moreover, they make their gods black and their devils white, and the images of their saints they do paint black ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa

... tho' the spinster be reverend and thin, What are all the Three Graces to her Three per Cents? While her aeres!—oh Dick, it don't matter one pin How she touches the affections, so you touch the rents; And Love never looks half so pleased as when, bless him, he Sings to an old lady's purse "Open, Sesame." ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al

... been wrong in his secret apprehension. His identification with his unimpressionable neighbour's mood had shown him what to expect. These letters—these innocent and precious outpourings of a rare and womanly soul—the only conceivable open sesame to the hard-locked nature he found himself pitted against, would soon be resolved into a vanishing ...
— Initials Only • Anna Katharine Green

... our habitation had not prepared us for the comforts we found inside; and as for the first time we followed Giorgio and his brother-in-law up the rude and narrow stone staircase, which appeared to be scarped out of the very thickness of the wall—an open sesame from the former causing a strong iron studded door to fly back on its hinges, disclosed a handsome patis or court paved with black and white marble, along the sides of which were luxuriantly growing, and imparting a cooling freshness to the scene, the perfumed orange-tree, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various

... spell was broken, Nina was the sesame which unlocked his powers of speech; and wiping the large drops from his forehead, ...
— Darkness and Daylight • Mary J. Holmes

... bar doors and shut hearts, kindness and propriety of behaviour, in which good manners consist, act as an "open sesame" everywhere. Doors unbar before them, and they are a passport to the hearts of everybody, young ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles

... there is just one little thing you must do for me, dear son-in-law that is to be. Go outside the town, and near the most westerly tower you will find a team of oxen and a plough awaiting you. Close to them is a pile of three hundred bushels of sesame seed. This you must sow this very day, or instead of a bridegroom you will be ...
— Hindu Tales from the Sanskrit • S. M. Mitra and Nancy Bell

... A landmark to far seas. The enchanted cell Was clouded over in the gentle night Of a luxuriant foliage, and its door, Half-filled with rainbow hues of coloured glass, Opened into the bosom of the hill. Never to sesame of mine that door Gave up its sanctuary; but through the glass, Gazing with reverent curiosity, I saw a little chamber, round and high, Which but to see was to escape the heat, And bathe in coolness of the eye and ...
— The Poetical Works of George MacDonald in Two Volumes, Volume I • George MacDonald

... made in North China is for sale—furs, silks, jade, jewels, sweetmeats, everything. But it is to the sweet-stalls that we always go, where wonderful Chinese candies and sugared fruits are for sale. We first change a dollar into pennies, and then all four of us eat our way from stall to stall—sesame candy, sugared walnuts, sugary plums on straws. It's wonderful. Germs? Maybe, but we don't care. I am sick of germs, of the emphasis that every one at home places on them. It's restful to get into a country where there ...
— Peking Dust • Ellen N. La Motte

... winds were off the shore— So that, beclouded, ever in the night Of a luxuriant ivy, its low door, Half-filled with rainbow hues of deep-stained glass, Appeared to open right into the hill. Never to sesame of mine that door Yielded that room; but through one undyed pane, Gazing with reverent curiosity, I saw a little chamber, round and high, Which but to see, was to escape the heat, And bathe in coolness of the eye and brain; For it was dark and green. Upon one side ...
— A Hidden Life and Other Poems • George MacDonald

... timidly to the window and looked out. She looked right over his head at first, and then she looked down and saw him, and her eyebrows went far up on her forehead, and her mouth opened; and so he knew that she was delighted to see him. He nodded to give her courage, and shouted three times, "Open Sesame, Open Sesame, Open Sesame," and then she opened the window and he ...
— Here are Ladies • James Stephens

... just then the name Grace Noir was a sort of talisman opening to the young man's vision the interior of wonderful treasure- caves; it was like crying "Sesame!" to the very rocks, for though he was not in love with Gregory's secretary, he fancied the day of fate ...
— Fran • John Breckenridge Ellis

... social and economic questions. These subjects appear also in many novels. The girl who wants to see conditions improved for the sick, the poor, and the unfortunate may again ask advice from the librarian. The biography of a woman like Miss Nightingale, or such a book as Ruskin's "Sesame and Lilies," will ...
— The Canadian Girl at Work - A Book of Vocational Guidance • Marjory MacMurchy

... literary odor with which Mr. Lindsley sprayed himself as he sprayed his handkerchief with a domestic scent called "Sesame and Lilies," his neoclassic determination to write the American Iliad must have died painlessly when his iambically disposed feet ventured too deeply into the quagmire of pedagogy, from which he was not to emerge. But for the first time in her life Lilly was hearing her name pronounced ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst

... taught in the schools, English is the most practical, because it is most used in life. We buy with it, sell with it, converse with it, write with it, adore with it, and protest with it. English is the open sesame of life in English-speaking countries. In some classes the English period would be fascinating even ...
— The New Education - A Review of Progressive Educational Movements of the Day (1915) • Scott Nearing

... neighbourhood of Damascus as:—"Wheat, barley, maize (white and yellow), beans, peas, lentils, kerane, gelbane, bakie, belbe, fessa, borake (the last seven being green crops for cattle food), aniseed, sesame, tobacco, shuma, olive, and liquorice root. The fruits are grapes, hazel, walnut, almond, pistachio, currant, mulberry, fig, apricot, peach, apple, pear, quince, plum, lemon, citron, melon, berries of various kinds, and a few oranges. The vegetables are cabbage, potatoes, artichokes, ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various

... whether a poet's philosophy be ordinary metaphysics, divisible into chapter and section. It is rather something which is more energetic in a word than in a whole treatise, and our hearts unclose themselves instinctively at its simple Open sesame! while they would stand firm against the reading of the whole body of philosophy. In point of fact, the one element of greatness which The Excursion possesses indisputably is heaviness. It is only the episodes that are universally read, and the effect of ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various

... require no praise from the hands of the reviewer; his name is a true 'open sesame' to all hearts. Not to know him argues one's self unknown. Some of his finest passages are to be found in the Campaner Thal. It was written from his heart, and embodies his conviction of immortality. How tender its imagery, how rich its consoling suggestions, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 5, May, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... as to be locked up in the same cell with him at Headquarters, and that the latter was in desperate need of morphine. That Parker was an habitual user of the drug could be easily seen from the most casual inspection, but that it would prove an open sesame to the girl's confidence was, as the detective afterward ...
— True Stories of Crime From the District Attorney's Office • Arthur Train

... in a chair near by, with a copy of "Sesame and Lilies" in her lap, listened to her mother's side of this conversation with an expression of impersonal interest; and if she could have realized how completely her parents had forgotten (naturally ...
— Gentle Julia • Booth Tarkington

... "drying" oils, although the hardening process is not really drying, since they contain no water, but is oxidation. The "semi-drying oils," those that will harden somewhat on exposure to the air, include the oils of cottonseed, corn, sesame, soy bean and castor bean. Olive oil and peanut oil are "non-drying" and contain oleic compounds (olein). The hard fats, such as stearin, palmitin and margarin, are mostly of animal origin, tallow and lard, though coconut and ...
— Creative Chemistry - Descriptive of Recent Achievements in the Chemical Industries • Edwin E. Slosson

... marvellous astuteness in reading each other's motives, that I should imagine Estelle's ingenuity would furnish an open sesame to the locked chamber of this girl's heart, and supply some satisfactory explanation ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans

... it will be an easy matter for you to find admittance to the Pacific Union Club, the Cosmos Club, or the Bohemian Club, if you have the indorsement of a member. A letter of introduction or commendation from a clergyman or some well-known public man will secure for you the Open Sesame at any time; and here you can pass an hour pleasantly and meet the foremost men of the city, physicians, clergymen, lawyers, ...
— By the Golden Gate • Joseph Carey

... too, the logical continuation of that triumph in the Baiae of our modern republic and empire, Newport. Open, Sesame! seems, as ever, to be the countersign of her life. Even the palace gates swung wide to her: most of them with the more readiness because she had already passed through other gates—Mrs. Grainger's, for instance. Baiae, apparently, ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... visit these places, and without such a permit he cannot enter. At Cairo the managers of the tour had obtained from the government for each member of the Nile party a little cloth bound "Service des Antiquites L'Egypte" made out in the name of the holder. This open-sesame for the iron gates was given to each person with the warning that it ...
— A Trip to the Orient - The Story of a Mediterranean Cruise • Robert Urie Jacob

... scribbling edicts in which sons are ordered to behead their own fathers; responses from oracles, delivered in time of pestilence, ordering the immolation of three or more virgins; every word a honied drop, every period sprinkled with poppy-seed and sesame. ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter

... an opportunity to thaw the surface ice. The lady could have done it in an instant, by talking to the gentleman about himself. That is the "Open Sesame!" of human intercourse. She preferred to say that in their village—her clan's, that is—in Dorsetshire, there was a sept named Chobey that always went into an underground cellar and stopped its ears, whenever there was ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan

... hand. Distressed authors, male and female, who have not her rank, and, therefore, most clearly not her genius, beg her to take their literary bantlings under her wing; and with a heart, as full of generous sympathies as her pen is of magic, she writes but her name on the title as an "Open Sesame!" and lo! the dead become alive; her genius permeates the whole volume, which that moment puts forth wings of popularity, and flies into every bookseller's shop and every circulating ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various

... ninety and nine that go not astray, never feel the caressing touch which the yearning Shepherd lays on the obstinate wanderer, who would not pasture in peace; and from the immemorial dawn of inchoate civilization, prodigals have possessed the open sesame to parental hearts that seemed barred against the more dutiful. By what perverted organon of ethics has it come to pass in sociology, that the badge of favoritism is rarely the guerdon ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson

... hospitable place: its name is associated with so many pleasing recollections, that it never fails to extort another glass from the bottle which, having been gagged, was going to pass the night in the cellaret. But only say Halifax! and it is like "Open sesame!"—out flies the cork, and down goes a bumper to the "health of ...
— Frank Mildmay • Captain Frederick Marryat

... he needed to be endowed by them with magical powers. The primitive gods Lakhmu and Lakhamu, and the Igigi, who may be regarded as star-gods, were also summoned. A banquet was prepared, and the gods attended, and having met and kissed each other they sat down, and ate bread and drank hot and sweet sesame wine. The fumes of the wine confused their senses, but they continued to drink, and at length "their spirits were exalted." They appointed Marduk to be their champion officially, and then they proceeded to invest ...
— The Babylonian Legends of the Creation • British Museum

... individuals; and, in order to belong to that band, one must have taken a very solemn pledge of eternal secrecy and a primal oath to devote his life to certain purposes, good or evil, according to his conscience. By means of the friendly Sesame that has opened the way for us to the gentler secrets, we are permitted to enter this forbidding apartment and listen in safety to the ugly business ...
— Truxton King - A Story of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon

... to show their two hands held up in front of the face, the fingers apart. M. de Maufil, at a sign from Juve, immediately bade the attendant hand the person in question a card bearing his name and description. Armed with this "Sesame" he could come and go unimpeded all ...
— The Exploits of Juve - Being the Second of the Series of the "Fantmas" Detective Tales • mile Souvestre and Marcel Allain

... under the snow and were unwilling to rise, until Xenophon himself set the example of rising and employing himself without his arms in cutting wood and kindling a fire. Others followed his example, and great comfort was found in rubbing themselves with pork-fat, oil of almonds or of sesame,[65] or turpentine. Having sent out a clever scout named Demokrates, who captured a native prisoner, they learned that Tiribazus was laying plans to intercept them in a lofty mountain pass lying farther on in their route; upon which they immediately set forth, and by two days of forced march, ...
— The Two Great Retreats of History • George Grote

... every disputed question only begins to appear when the rival ideals admit each other's right to exist.—A. SIDGWICK, Distinction and the Criticism of Beliefs, 1892, 211. That cruel reticence in the breasts of wise men which makes them always hide their deeper thought.—RUSKIN, Sesame and Lilies, i. 16. Je offener wir die einzelnen Wahrheiten des Sozialismus anerkennen, desto erfolgreicher konnen wir seine fundamentalen Unwahrheiten widerlegen.—ROSCHER, Deutsche Vierteljahrschrift, 1849, ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton

... set out in several provinces. The Emperor Nimmyo (834-850) had buckwheat sown in the home provinces (Kinai), and the same sovereign encouraged the cultivation of sorghum, panic-grass, barley, wheat, large white beans, small red beans, and sesame. It was at this time that the ina-hata (paddy-loom) was devised for drying sheaves of rice before winnowing. Although it was a very simple implement, it nevertheless proved of such great value that an Imperial command was issued urging its ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi

... valley of the White Nile. They are essentially a pastoral people, passionately devoted to the care of their numerous herds of oxen, though they also keep sheep and goats, and the women cultivate small quantities of millet and sesame. For their crops and above all for their pastures they depend on the regularity of the rains: in seasons of prolonged drought they are said to be reduced to great extremities. Hence the rain-maker is a very important personage among them to this day; indeed the men ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer

... Almighty he had clean forgotten the cabalistic words and cried out, "Open, O Barley!" whereat the door refused to move. Astonished and confused beyond measure he named the names of all manner of grains save sesame, which had slipped from his memory as though he had never heard the word; whereat in his dire distress he heeded not the Ashrafis that lay heaped at the entrance and paced to and fro, backwards and forwards, within the ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton

... taste was of the delicacy of point lace. She knew her Austin Dobson by heart. She read poems, essays, the ideas of the seminary at Marysville persisting in her mind. "Marius the Epicurean," "The Essays of Elia," "Sesame and Lilies," "The Stones of Venice," and the little toy magazines, full of the flaccid banalities of the "Minor Poets," were ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris

... out to the damsels and bade them bind my feet with cords and sit on me. They did her bidding, whilst I lay insensible, and she fetched a pan of copper and setting it on a brazier, poured into it oil of sesame, in which she fried cheese.[FN139] Then she came up to me and unfastening my trousers, tied a cord round my cullions and giving it to two of her women, bade them pull at it. They did so, and I swooned away and was for excess of pain in a world other than this. Then she came with a steel scalpel ...
— The Book Of The Thousand Nights And One Night, Volume II • Anonymous

... Sesame oil (Sesamum indicum) 46.7 Black til, coloured variety of ditto (Verbesena sativa) 46.4 Gingelie oil (S. orientale) 46.7 Ground nuts, produced by Arachis hypogoea 45.5 Wounded seeds obtained from the Poonnay-tree (Calophyttum Inophyllum), ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds

... to thank Larry for an open sesame to the doors of Sunnyside, however; for he has some distant acquaintance with the grand-nephew of Washington Irving who has inherited the quaint, delightful house with its red gables and extraordinarily intelligent-looking ...
— The Lightning Conductor Discovers America • C. N. (Charles Norris) Williamson and A. M. (Alice Muriel)

... spiritual being; under the ministrations of the angel of compensation, out of the very depths of the gulf of bereavement and sadness through which I was passing, there was coming to me the precious gift of a priceless mediumship, the marvelous key! the all-potent 'open sesame' with which to unlock the gates between the two worlds and reunite the separated loved ...
— Solaris Farm - A Story of the Twentieth Century • Milan C. Edson

... country was superior to anything that I had seen farther north; large quantities of sesame were grown and carefully harvested, the crop being gathered and arranged in oblong frames about twenty feet long by twelve high. These were inclined at an angle of about sixty—the pods of the sesame plants on one face, so that the frames resembled enormous brushes. In this manner ...
— The Albert N'Yanza, Great Basin of the Nile • Sir Samuel White Baker

... phonograph. When the tympanum vibrates under the influence of the voice, the stylus acts as a pawl and turns a ratchet-wheel. An ingenious smith might apply it to the construction of a lock which would operate at the command of 'Open, Sesame!' Another trifle perhaps worthy of note is his ink, which rises on the paper and solidifies, so that a blind person can read the writing by passing his ...
— Heroes of the Telegraph • J. Munro

... heaped around me, I paid them scant attention, so much was I struck by a great black horse which stood in one corner, the handsomest and best-shaped animal I had ever seen. His saddle and bridle were of massive gold, curiously wrought; one side of his trough was filled with clean barley and sesame, and the other with rose water. I led the animal into the open air, and then jumped on his back, shaking the reins as I did so, but as he never stirred, I touched him lightly with a switch I had picked up in his stable. No sooner did he feel the stroke, than he spread his wings (which ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments • Andrew Lang.

... with that movie actress is sure to make trouble for us, Ford. You might be a little more considerate. Just as we are getting in with the Perritons. And their guest, Mrs. Conroth, was really very nice to mother this morning on the beach. She has the open sesame to all the society there is on this side of the Atlantic. It's really a wonderful ...
— Cap'n Abe, Storekeeper • James A. Cooper

... ten gantas of wine, for one toston; fowls have advanced to two reals apiece, although the usual price is one real; while a hog costs four or five pesos, or six or eight for one of considerable size. Oil of agenxoli [sesame], cocoanuts, and butter, which formerly could be bought very cheaply, cannot now be obtained—although in this there is variation, as little or much ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1803, Volume V., 1582-1583 • Various

... kWh produced, 40 kWh per capita (1991) Industries: cotton lint, beverages, agricultural processing, soap, cigarettes, textiles, gold mining and extraction Agriculture: accounts for about 30% of GDP; cash crops - peanuts, shea nuts, sesame, cotton; food crops - sorghum, millet, corn, rice; livestock; not self-sufficient in food grains Economic aid: US commitments, including Ex-Im (FY70-89), $294 million; Western (non-US) countries, ODA and OOF bilateral ...
— The 1993 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.

... heart of the Sovereign has been melted by the words that have been poured into his ears. 'My heart yearns towards my people of El Muddee,' he says; 'I have thought how to relieve their miseries. Near them lies the fruitful land of El Guanee. It is rich in maize and cotton, in sesame and barley; it is worth a thousand purses; but I will let it to my children for seven hundred, and I will give over the rest of the profit to them, as an alleviation for ...
— Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo • William Makepeace Thackeray

... is right. I see you know all about it; but would you understand what I meant, dear, if I said that God had given you an 'Open Sesame' into other ...
— Sisters Three • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey



Words linked to "Sesame" :   sesame family, Sesamum, benni, sesame oil, benniseed, herbaceous plant, open sesame, benne, benny, herb



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