"Aztec" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... from London for the Race-Week. Poses Plastiques in the Grand Assembly Room up the Stable-Yard at seven and nine each evening, for the Race-Week. Grand Alliance Circus in the field beyond the bridge, for the Race-Week. Grand Exhibition of Aztec Lilliputians, important to all who want to be horrified cheap, for the Race-Week. Lodgings, grand and not grand, but all at grand prices, ranging from ten pounds to twenty, for the ...
— The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices • Charles Dickens
... acquiring as the spear of Alvarado, Tonatrish the sun-god, as he was called by the Mexicans, by reason of his long, bright, golden hair. This may have been, probably was, the spear that Alvarado bore when he charged up the steps of the great Teocalli or God's house, rained upon by Aztec darts, driving before him the hordes of heathendom. With this very spear, when the summit was gained, he may have fought in that strange fight, high in air, beheld by all the people of the city and all the allies of Spain. Here stood the Christian cross; there was planted the war-god, ...
— Lost Leaders • Andrew Lang
... of the tree Persea gratissima, which grows in the West Indies and elsewhere; the flesh is of a soft and buttery consistency and highly esteemed. The name avocado, the Spanish for "advocate," is a sound-substitute for the Aztec ahuacatl; it is also corrupted into "alligator-pear." Avocato, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... Aztec [Footnote: The Aztec Indians of Mexico, like various other tribes in Central America and in Peru, had reached in many respects a high degree of civilization before the arrival of Europeans.] confederacy of Mexico, was overthrown in 1519 by the reckless ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... youth, passed aboard tramp freighters between Lisbon and Rio, Leith and Natal, Tokyo, Melbourne and the Golden Gate—wherever the sea ran green; of ginseng-growing in China, shellac gathering in India, cattle-grazing in Wyoming. He spoke of Alaskan totem-poles, of Indian sign language, of Aztec monoliths buried in the forest. He sang "Lather an' Shavin's," "La Golondrina," "The Cowboy's Lament," and, clicking his fingers castanet-wise, hummed little Spanish airs whose words he would by ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... began. Certainly it was the first region where civilization reached any height. When Columbus was discovering America great cities flourished in the Fire Country—cities of untold wealth and beauty, now fallen into ruins like the great cities of our own Aztec and ...
— The Fire People • Ray Cummings
... oligarchs and Athenian democrats, Roman patricians and Roman plebeians, Venetian senators and Florentine ciompi, Norman nobles and Saxon serfs, Russian boyars and Turkish spahis, Spanish hidalgos and Aztec soldiers, Carolina slaveholders and New England farmers,—these and a hundred other races or orders have all been parties to the great, the universal struggle which has for its object the acquisition of property, the providing of a shield against the ever-threatening fiend which ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various
... then it was that I fell in with that arch-devil, that master rogue whose deeds had long been a terror throughout the Main, a fellow more bloody than any Spaniard, more treacherous than any Portugal, and more cruel than any Indian—Inca, Mosquito, Maya or Aztec, and this man an Englishman, and one of birth and breeding, who hid his identity under the name of Bartlemy. I met him first in Tortuga where we o' the Brotherhood lay, six stout ships and nigh four hundred men convened for ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol
... of the same ideas. He hated Mestrovic, was not satisfied with the Futurists, he liked the West African wooden figures, the Aztec art, Mexican and Central American. He saw the grotesque, and a curious sort of mechanical motion intoxicated him, a confusion in nature. They had a curious game with each other, Gudrun and Loerke, of infinite ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... of Mexico without having our minds drawn to the time of the Aztec monarchy,—when sumptuous palaces, enormous temples, fortresses, and other public edifices covered the face of the country. In the midst of the territory, on the western shore of the large lake of Tezcuco, stood the city ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... now to what little we know from the different sources, of the early history of our continent. When the Spaniards came to Mexico in the early years of the 16th century, Montezuma, an Aztec prince was on the throne. The Aztecs gave themselves out as intruders in Mexico. They were a bloody and warlike race, and though they gave the Spaniards an easy victory it was rather a reception, for they were overawed by superstition as to the invaders. They stated that a few centuries before, ...
— The Mound Builders • George Bryce
... horizon. But the new continent was vast in extent. It blocked the westward path from pole to pole. With each voyage, too, the resources and the native beauty of the new land became more apparent. The luxuriant islands of the West Indies, and the Aztec empire of Mexico, were already bringing wealth and grandeur to the monarchy of Spain. South of Mexico it had been already found that the great barrier of the continent extended to the cold tempestuous ...
— The Dawn of Canadian History: A Chronicle of Aboriginal Canada • Stephen Leacock
... the total destruction of my marvellous talent, which died of cerebro-musical excitement when confronted with the gamut. Except as the language in which Strauss appeals to my waltzing genius, I have no more use for it than for ancient Aztec. Thank Heaven! this is a progressive age, and girls are no longer tormented as formerly by piano fiends, who once persisted in pounding and squeezing music into their poor struggling nauseated souls, as relentlessly as girls' feet are still squeezed in China. ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... and something, and the deluge of blood began. If you have read up on the subject at all, you doubtless know how merciless the Spaniards were in their attitude toward the Aztecs. They killed them by thousands, in open battle and by treacherous means, and they tortured Aztec priests to force them to reveal the places where the vessels of gold used in worship ...
— Boy Scouts in Mexico; or On Guard with Uncle Sam • G. Harvey Ralphson
... who study graves; their pathetic ending has long been pictured in our country's story as occurring amid the shadows of that dreadful midnight upon the banks of the Ocatahoola, when vengeful Frenchmen put them to the sword. Whence they came, whether from fabled Atlantis, or the extinct Aztec empire of the South, no living tongue can tell; whither fled their remnant,—if remnant there was left to flee,—and what proved its ultimate fate, no previous pen has written. Out from the darkness of the unknown, scarcely more than spectral figures, they came, wrote ...
— Prisoners of Chance - The Story of What Befell Geoffrey Benteen, Borderman, - through His Love for a Lady of France • Randall Parrish
... of Mauresques from Aragon. To compute the loss of wealth and population inflicted upon Spain by these mad edicts, would be impossible. We may wonder whether the followers of Cortez, when they trod the teocallis of Mexico and gazed with loathing on the gory elf-locks of the Aztec priests, were not reminded of the Torquemada they had left at home. His cruelty became so intolerable that even Alexander VI. was moved to horror. In 1494 the Borgia appointed four assessors, with equal powers, to restrain ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... expedition that put the finishing touch to Philip Steele. He came back a big hearted, clear minded young fellow, as bronzed as an Aztec—a hater of cities and the hothouse varieties of pleasure to which he had been born, and as far removed from anticipation of his father's millions as though they had never been. He possessed a fortune in his own right, but as yet he had found no use ...
— Philip Steele of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police • James Oliver Curwood
... plains were covered with high grass and the country was not cut up with ravines and gullies as it is now. This has been brought about through over-stocking the ranges. On the Little Colorado we could cut hay for miles and miles in every direction. The Aztec Cattle Company brought tens of thousands of cattle into the country, claimed every other section, overstocked the range and fed out all the grass. Then the water, not being held back, followed the cattle trails and cut the country up. Later, tens ...
— Mormon Settlement in Arizona • James H. McClintock
... possible level of thought and instinctive sentiment to which man could attain without supernatural light and help. If this last perhaps is preferable to the others, where was this scaffolding the highest? Over Confucius, or Socrates, or the Scandinavian seer, or Druid or Aztec priest? Was it highest at Athens, because there the great apostle to the Gentiles planted his feet upon it, and said, in the ears of the Grecian sophists, "Him whom ye ignorantly worship declare I unto you?" At that brilliant ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt
... his force, strengthened by Indian allies and by ships which he built on the lakes, Cortes, in May, 1521, began the siege of Mexico, as historians call the Aztec capital. Guatemotzin, the last of the Aztec emperors, made a desperate defence, and before its capture the city was almost destroyed. On August 12th the Spaniards made a strong assault, which so weakened the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 9 • Various
... Four Peaks still stand, wrapped in their black shadows by night, and their purple colors by day, waiting for the passing of the Apache and the coming of the white man, who shall dig his canals in those arid plains, and build his cities upon the ruins of the ancient Aztec dwellings. ...
— Vanished Arizona - Recollections of the Army Life by a New England Woman • Martha Summerhayes
... account of his great age he declined the honor, and died (June 3, 1548) a few days after those documents arrived, being eighty years old. A cloud upon his memory is the ruthless and vandalic destruction, under his direction, of the Aztec images, manuscripts, and other records, both public and private, for which his agents made close search, not only in the City of Mexico but in all the larger cities and towns—a cruel and irreparable loss to scholars ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume XXV, 1635-36 • Various
... Amerindian tribes reverence the rattlesnake as grandfather and king of snakes who is able to give fair winds or cause tempest. Among the Hopi (Moqui) of Arizona the serpent figures largely in one of the dances. The rattlesnake was worshipped in the Natchez temple of the sun; and the Aztec deity Quetzalcoatl was a serpent-god. The tribes of Peru are said to have adored great snakes in the pre-Inca days; and in Chile the Araucanians made a serpent ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 2, Part 1, Slice 1 • Various
... I know not what—but 'tis enough for me To know my Captain knows." And then he told How sometimes o'er the gorgeous forest gloom Some marble city, rich, mysterious, white, An ancient treasure-house of Aztec kings, Or palace of forgotten Incas gleamed; And in their dim rich lofty cellars gold, Beyond all wildest dreams, great bars of gold, Like pillars, tossed in mighty chaos, gold And precious stones, agate and emerald, Diamond, sapphire, ruby, and sardonyx. So ...
— Collected Poems - Volume One (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... the days of Montezuma, the Aztec priests had engrafted upon these simple ceremonies not only a burdensome ceremonial, and a polytheism similar to that of Eastern nations, but, as we have seen, human sacrifices and even cannibalism had become ...
— The God-Idea of the Ancients - or Sex in Religion • Eliza Burt Gamble
... Major, rubbing his nose, 'I can't hardly say. I imagine it's infidel or Aztec or Nonconformist or something like that. There's a church here—a Methodist or some other kind—with a parson named Skidder. He claims to have converted the people to Christianity. He and me don't assimilate ...
— Options • O. Henry
... of the Pentateuch, the land of Tulan or Tlapallan in Aztec myth, the islands of the Hesperides, the rose garden of Feridun, and a score of other legends attest with what strong yearning man seeks in the past the picture of that perfect felicity which ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton
... towns, and cities have contributed largely to this collection of native antiquities. This is especially true of the Southwest, of Central America, and the Andean region, where the Aztec, the Maya, the Quichuas, the Aymaras, and other highly-organized nations held sway over wide regions. The greatest remains of these people lie in their architecture, the ruins of which astonish the traveller in Mexico, Yucatan, and Peru. Beyond fragments ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, November 1885 • Various
... said, the estafa, or sacred fire, is kept burning, and has never been permitted to go out since the time of Montezuma, from whom and his people they believe themselves descended. They are undoubtedly of Aztec race, and sun-worshippers, as were the subjects of ...
— The Lone Ranche • Captain Mayne Reid
... Notwithstanding Prescott's very brilliant work, we cannot but feel some regret that Irving did not write a Conquest of Mexico. His method, as he outlined it, would have been the natural one. Instead of partially satisfying the reader's curiosity in a preliminary essay, in which the Aztec civilization was exposed, Irving would have begun with the entry of the conquerors, and carried his reader step by step onward, letting him share all the excitement and surprise of discovery which the invaders experienced, and learn of the wonders of the country in the manner most likely to impress ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... the sixteenth century. The ancient Aztecs used the game of ball as a training in warfare for the young men of the nation; and that it was considered of great importance is evident from the fact that the tribute exacted by a certain Aztec monarch from some of the cities conquered by him consisted of balls, and amounted to sixteen ...
— Froebel's Gifts • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... would have his share of his father's three square leagues, whatever incongruity there was between his lively Latin extravagance and Miss Mannersley's Puritan precision and intellectual superiority. They had gone to Mexico; Mrs. Saltillo, as was known, having an interest in Aztec antiquities, and he being utterly submissive to her wishes. For myself from my knowledge of Enriquez's nature, I had grave doubts of his entire subjugation, although I knew the prevailing opinion was that Mrs. Saltillo's superiority would ...
— Stories in Light and Shadow • Bret Harte
... nouvelle-riche with a low-bred physiognomy that no millions on earth could gild or refine, and manners to match; some foolish, fashionable, would-be worldling, who combined the arch little coquetries and impertinent affectations of a spoilt beauty with the ugliness of an Aztec or an Esquimau; some silly, titled old frump who frankly ignored his tea-making wife and daughters and talked to him only—and only about her grotesque and ugly self—and told him of all the famous painters who had wanted to paint her for the last hundred years—it was only then ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... of the Mexicans; but to me they seem more like delightful German Romanesque workmanship, leaning more towards that of certain spirited Lombard grotesques, or even that of Arles and certain parts of France, than to the Aztec to which Didron has reference. The little climbing figures, while they certainly have very large hands and feet, yet are endowed with a certain sprightly action; they all give the impression of really making an effort,—they are trying to climb, instead of simply occupying places in the foliage. ...
— Arts and Crafts in the Middle Ages • Julia De Wolf Addison
... "Peregrina's" stamp-mill, and I was soon winding through the gorge-hung village. According to the manager, I had chosen well the time of my coming, for there was "something doing." We strolled about town until he had picked up the jefe politico, a handsome Mexican, built as massive as an Aztec stone idol, under a veritable haystack of hat, who ostensibly at least was a sworn friend of the mining company. With him we returned to the deafening stamp-mill and brought up in the "zinc room," where the metal is cast into bricks. Here ...
— Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras - Being the Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond • Harry A. Franck
... the storage place for all kinds of ammunition, Roman spears, shields, breast plates, guns, powder, ammunition of every kind and character, used by Roman Catholics for war, and was probably built by the Aztec Indians who were; under the control of the Spaniards. It was said to be 300 years old when I saw it 53 years ago. It was a two-story structure, built of adobe, or sun-dried brick. The floors of the building were built of some kind of concrete and were hard and glossy. The upper floor ...
— The Second William Penn - A true account of incidents that happened along the - old Santa Fe Trail • William H. Ryus
... mutations, it is worth noting that Montesinos[J] expressly asserts that the Peruvians threw their years into cycles of ten; a curious fact which has escaped the notice of Neumann, who conjectures that 'it may have been a subdivision of the Aztec period, or have even been used as an independent period, as was indeed the case by the Chinese, who term their notations 'stems.' It is worthy of remark,' he adds, 'that among the Mongols and Mantchous these 'stems' are named after colors which perhaps ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. V, May, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... the people they passed, who might have tripped them up or aided in the pursuit, merely fled indoors. The people in Wapping are not always on the side of the pursuer. But the police held on. At last Ben and Toller slipped through the door of an empty house in Aztec Street barely ten yards ahead of their nearest pursuer. Blows rained on the door, but they slipped the bolts, and then fell panting to the floor. When Ben could speak, ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Various
... transcription or of printing. As specimens I mention two, because they have unfortunately perverted ordinary usage. The two words Coco and Cocoa—the former a Portuguese word[12], naming the coco-nut, the fruit of a palm-tree; the latter a latinized form of Cacao, the Aztec name of a Central American shrub, whence we have cocoa and chocolate—were always distinguished down to Johnson's time, and were in fact distinguished by Johnson himself in his own writings. His account of these in the Dictionary is quoted from Miller's ...
— The evolution of English lexicography • James Augustus Henry Murray
... might be—and the guests were of many nationalities—he could talk with that guest in his own language or in any other language the guest might fancy. I myself was sorely tempted to try him on Coptic and early Aztec; but I held off. My Coptic is not what it once was; and, partly through disuse and partly through carelessness, I have allowed my command of early Aztec to fall off pretty badly ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... of origin in some indefinitely remote past. We find these on the Maya side narrated in the sacred book of the Kiches, the Popol Vuh, in the Cakchiquel Records of Tecpan Atitlan, and in various pure Maya sources which I bring forward in this volume. The Aztec traditions refer to the Huastecs, and a brief analysis of them will not ...
— The Maya Chronicles - Brinton's Library Of Aboriginal American Literature, Number 1 • Various
... we prepare. If may be we shall have such a start that we shall prevent him growing. You know, because he was better skilled in chemistry, knew how to manufacture gunpowder, that the Spaniard destroyed the Aztec. May not we, who are possessing ourselves of the world and its resources, and gathering to ourselves all its knowledge, may not we nip the Slav ere he grows a thatch to ...
— A Daughter of the Snows • Jack London
... pulp, and whilst the pulp is very pleasant to taste, the beans themselves are uninviting, so that doubtless the beans were always thrown away until ... someone tried roasting them. One pictures this "someone," a pre-historic Aztec with swart skin, sniffing the aromatic fume coming from the roasting beans, and thinking that beans which smelled so appetising must be good to consume. The name of the man who discovered the use of cacao must be written in some early chapter of the history of man, but it is blurred and ...
— Cocoa and Chocolate - Their History from Plantation to Consumer • Arthur W. Knapp
... for argumentation. The Fijian does not feel disgust at the flavor of a well-roasted white sailor; and as long as he does not insist upon our relishing his fare, what right have we to ask him to feel disgusted? When the panther-tailed Aztec priest fattened his prisoner, or carried along the children decked with wreaths, soon to be smothered in their own juice, he cannot have felt disgust, any more than the Malay, of whom Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles tells us, that, with epicurean refinement, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 17, March, 1859 • Various
... the Mexican coast, and had held a friendly conference with one cacique, or chief, who seemed desirous of collecting all the information he could about the Spaniards, and their motives in visiting Mexico, that he might transmit it to his master, the Aztec emperor. Presents were exchanged at this interview, and in return for a few glass beads, pins, and such paltry trifles, the Spaniards had received such a rich treasure of jewels and gold ornaments that the general at once sent back ...
— The True Story Book • Andrew Lang
... "An Aztec Cacique that I saved from an evil death. He is one of the few I can trust. And here another!" said he, as the door opened and a great blackamoor Centered, bearing a roast with wine, etc., at sight whereof my mouth watered and I grew ...
— Martin Conisby's Vengeance • Jeffery Farnol
... the sun are familiar, and are the centres of myths among most races. I give examples in C. and M. (pp. 104, 133, New Zealand and North America) and in M. R. R. (i. 124-135, America, Africa, Australia, Aztec, Hervey Islands, Samoa, and so on). Such Nature-myths—of sun, sky, earth—are perhaps universal; but they do not arise from disease of language. These myths deal with natural phenomena plainly and explicitly. The same is the case among the Mordvinians. 'The few names preserved ...
— Modern Mythology • Andrew Lang
... regarding the origin of pueblo culture is the usual and perhaps proper accompaniment of nearly all treatises bearing on that subject. Early writers on the Aztec culture, aided by a vague tradition of that tribe that they came from the north, pushed the point of emigration farther and farther and still farther north, until finally the pueblo country was reached. Pueblo ruins are even now known locally as "Aztec ruins." Logically the inhabited villages ...
— The Cliff Ruins of Canyon de Chelly, Arizona • Cosmos Mindeleff
... mere symbols by no means told the whole story of the cylinder. The workmanship was archaic, older than any Aztec art Kirby knew, older than Toltec, older far, he ventured to guess, than ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, December 1930 • Various
... for my mother and sisters. But I was in a pickle as to what to give Esther, and on consulting Miss Jean, I found that motherly elder sister had everything thought out in advance. There was an old Mexican woman, a pure Aztec Indian, at a ranchita belonging to Las Palomas, who was an expert in Mexican drawn work. The mistress of the home ranch had been a good patron of this old woman, and the next morning we drove over to the ranchita, where ...
— A Texas Matchmaker • Andy Adams
... the Petrified Man had been entrusted to an artist devoted to the making of clothing dummies. Instead of an Aztec or Cave Dweller cast of countenance, he had given the Petrified Man the simpering features of the wax figures seen in cheap clothing stores. The result was that, instead of gazing at the Petrified Man with awe as a wonder of nature, ...
— Philo Gubb Correspondence-School Detective • Ellis Parker Butler
... detect an intention on the part of the architect. There are certain lights that have a way of dressing up the tower as a whole, giving it unity and hiding its ugliness. And at all times it has a kind of barbaric splendor. It might have come out of an Aztec mind, rather childish in expression, and seeking for beauty in an elemental way. I can imagine Aztecs living up there in a barbaric fashion, their houses piled, one above another, ...
— The City of Domes • John D. Barry
... the improvement of the human animal which we do to that of the equine or the porcine, the experiment would not have been left untried so long. In-and-in breeding is a mistake, and can only commend itself, and that for selfish reasons, to the Aztec in physique and the imbecile in mind. The families which take most pride in their purity are the most degenerate; the stock which is the most robust and handsome is that which has in it a liberal infusion of foreign bloods. In my opinion, the coming man, the highest form of well-balanced ...
— Romantic Spain - A Record of Personal Experiences (Vol. II) • John Augustus O'Shea |
