"Biped" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... figure of the biped species, to whom, however, at the moment, I paid little attention, but of whom I shall have plenty ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... shell, then cries: 'Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.' This cry he might be spared would he learn a lesson from the squirrel, who weighs his nuts and throws away the light, hollow shell.... And there are scarescrows, the harmlessness of which the human biped learns not in a a lifetime. How long is it since that horned, cloven-footed monster whom the monks made of Pan theos and called him Devil, was an object of fear? How 'the real, genuine, no mistake' (savin' his presence) ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. V, May, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... can get going," I said, and I began to cut out a white feather. "Yes, your ladyship, this is from the genuine bird on our own ostrich farm in the Fulham Road. Plucked while the ingenuous biped had its head in the sand. I shall put that round the brim," and I pinned ...
— Once a Week • Alan Alexander Milne
... lord strolled into Russia; there he drove a pair of horses, one of whom put his head down and did the work; the other pranced and capricoled alongside, all unconscious of the trace. He seemed happier than his working brother; but the biped whose career corresponded with this playful animal's ...
— Christie Johnstone • Charles Reade
... itself in distressing symptoms such as one sees daily in society, or sits and shudders at in one's own friends, when the victim, swelling with importance, makes confident mis-statements, draws erroneous conclusions, sums up and gives advice so fatuous that you blush to be a biped of the ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... comprehend us as dogs and horses. They see through us at a glance. And after all, what is a horse but a species of four-footed dumb man, in a leathern overall, who happens to live upon oats, and toils for his masters, half-requited or abused, like the biped hewers of wood and drawers of water? But there is a touch of divinity even in brutes, and a special halo about a horse, that should forever exempt him from indignities. As for those majestic, magisterial truck-horses of the docks, I would as soon think of striking a judge on the ...
— Redburn. His First Voyage • Herman Melville
... Court just now, what sort of a reverence should we get, think you? Eh, you rogue, as much as we deserve! I will tell you, good Borso, my own poor opinion of these things. A Duke who cannot be dukely in his shirt, a Pope who is but an afflicted biped between the blankets, is no Duke at all, is a Pope by toleration. There should be some such test at every crowning of our sort. Souse a Bishop in his bath before you let him warm his chair; cry 'Fire!' on the stairs of the Vatican and ...
— Little Novels of Italy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... evil for which he pays so heavy a penalty. Insects increase whenever the birds which feed upon them disappear. Hence, in the wanton destruction of the robin and other insectivorous birds, the bipes implumis, the featherless biped, man, is not only exchanging the vocal orchestra which greets the rising sun for the drowny beetle's evening drone, and depriving his groves and his fields of their fairest ornament, but he is waging a treacherous warfare on his natural allies. [Footnote: In the artificial woods of ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... for counting and comparison. From these an aggregate distance was struck. But it was not until we were well on the march that I noticed the man with the pace stick, who staggered and reeled like an inebriated crab in his efforts to extricate his biped from the unevennesses of the ground before he was trampled down by the column. I watched him with a curious fascination, and as I grew sleepier and sleepier that part of my consciousness which was not counting steps, recognized him as a cripple ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume V (of 8) • Francis J. (Francis Joseph) Reynolds, Allen L. (Allen Leon)
... feet between a biped, a quadruped, and a centipede, and say whether the foot of Mr. Joseph Hume, being just as broad as it is long, may not be considered as a ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... they do stop, they never seem to think. Napoleon on St. Helena never faced realities, aggressively pompous to the end. Then there is Don Carlos, whom I miss in my afternoon stroll. He who might have dazzled us with divinity is visibly a feather-less biped. The poor, mock king had to leave Venice because his brother-sovereigns would not have called upon him. For Don Carlos still keeps up the form and style of a crowned head, and remains the last of the Bourbons, a picturesque ruin, reproach to a blasphemous generation, ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... for the moment, but as it was repeated here and there, he knew it was the pheasants which haunted that part of the forest, flying up to their roosts for the night, to be safe from prowling animals—four-legged, or biped who walked the woods ...
— The Weathercock - Being the Adventures of a Boy with a Bias • George Manville Fenn
... biped animal already alluded to, actuated by an overweening desire of notoriety, and in order to catch the applause of some one, grovelling in the morasses of insignificance and vice, like himself, leaves his native obscurity, ...
— The Hedge School; The Midnight Mass; The Donagh • William Carleton
... look of silent pity on the boy, and left him in his pleasing illusion. He wondered that Dr. Amboyne should have tacked this biped on ...
— Put Yourself in His Place • Charles Reade
... utterly self-sacrificing. I hope to God, Doloria, that you won't be among those who squeeze their hearts dry! You've lived away from the world and may not know how plentiful these are; but no day passes without its toll of some woman being silently crucified in her losing fight to save a besotted biped—the lord of her earthly temple. It's only by a streak of luck when their stage is ...
— Wings of the Wind • Credo Harris
... social gulf which yawned between the youngest son of the late Lord Bortledyne and the only daughter of Albert Edward Smith, mechanic. To the Professor she was Miss H. Sapiens—an agreeable, featherless plantigrade biped of the genus Homo. She was also thoroughly domesticated and cooked like an angel, a nice woman who apparently never knew that her husband had a Christian name, for she called him "Mr. Whitland" to ...
— Bones in London • Edgar Wallace
... mean habitations. I don't wonder the tenants were glad to make our arrival the excuse for running off. Here are men claiming to have been worth forty thousand dollars, half in biped property, half in all other kinds, and they lived in dens such as a drayman would have disdained and a hod-carrier only ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 46, August, 1861 • Various
... just the reverse effect of rarefied mountain air, and they seldom had to expand their lungs fully in order to breathe. The ground continued to be marked with very large footprints. Often the impressions were those of a biped like some huge bird, except that occasionally the creature had put down one or both forefeet, and a thick tail had evidently dragged nearly all the time it walked erect. Presently, coming to something they ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds • J. J. Astor
... with his teeth and bit it to the bone. Hawes yelled with pain and strove furiously to get his hand away, but Carter held it like a tiger. Hawes capered with agony and yelled again. The first to come to his relief was Mr. Eden. He was at the biped's side in a moment, and pinched his nose. Now, as his lungs were puffing like a blacksmith's bellows, his mouth flew open the moment the other breathing-hole was stopped, and Hawes got ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade
... marching-trim. Iglesias bore an umbrella, our armor against what heaven could do with assault of sun or shower. I was weaponed with a staff, should brute or biped uncourteous dispute our way. We had no impediments of "great trunk, little trunk, bandbox, and bundle." A thoughtful man hardly feels honest in his life except as a pedestrian traveller. "La propriete ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... several of the Kappan natives. The latter, naturally, caught Mayne's eye first. The most imposing individual among them stood about five feet tall. The planet being of about the same mass as Terra, the Kappan probably weighed over two hundred and fifty pounds. He was a rugged biped with something saurian in his ancestry; for his skin was scaled, and bony plates grew into a low crown upon his long skull. His arms and legs were heavy and bowed, with joints obscured by thick muscles and loose skin. Mayne was struck by the fancy that the Kappan's ...
— A Transmutation of Muddles • Horace Brown Fyfe
... a wonder: at the whirling of a wand the swine of Circe converted back to biped man; whereupon without fail whatsoever he does it shall astonishingly prosper: that succession of wits, seers, savants, Heines, Einsteins, inspired mouths, pens of iridium, brushes from the archangel's plumage, discoveries, new Americas, elations, sensations—in therapeutics—in ...
— The Lord of the Sea • M. P. Shiel
... Mary Ann he did not remember having seen her before. This time she was a biped, and wore a white cap. Besides, he hardly glanced at her. He was in a bad temper, and Beethoven was barking terribly at the intruder who stood quaking in the doorway, so that the crockery clattered on the ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... if only from the one consideration, that, if man is stupid, then who is wise?) But if he is not stupid, he is monstrously ungrateful! Phenomenally ungrateful. In fact, I believe that the best definition of man is the ungrateful biped. But that is not all, that is not his worst defect; his worst defect is his perpetual moral obliquity, perpetual—from the days of the Flood to the Schleswig-Holstein period. Moral obliquity and consequently lack of good sense; for it has ...
— Notes from the Underground • Feodor Dostoevsky
... a thrush, an ortolan, a beccafico, a robin-redbreast, or any other feathered and diminutive biped. He is not so ambitious as to expect a quail. Partridges he has heard of; of one, at least, a sort of phoenix, reproduced from its own ashes, and seen from time to time before an earthquake, or other great catastrophe. As to the hare, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 55, No. 340, February, 1844 • Various
... paragraph seems to have been a keen sportsman; he regrets the not meeting with a single rebel, as he would the not meeting with a single hare or partridge; and he justly considers the human biped as fair game, to be hunted down by all who are properly qualified and licensed by government. To the English, perhaps, it may seem a strange subject of lamentation, that a general could not meet with a single rebel ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. IV • Maria Edgeworth
... This was perhaps his only weakness, and it was necessary to make him a well-wadded dressing-gown. But what a servant he was, clever, zealous, indefatigable, not indiscreet, not talkative, and he might have been with reason proposed as a model for all his biped brothers in the Old ...
— The Secret of the Island • W.H.G. Kingston (translation from Jules Verne)
... acquaintance with a fellow who peddled brooms and dustpans along the countryside. He was hung both front and back with cheap commodities—a necklace of scrubbing brushes—tins jangling against his knees. A very kitchen had become biped. A pantry had gone on pilgrimage. Except for dogs, which seemed maddened by his strange appearance, it was, he informed me, an engaging livelihood for a man who chafed indoors. Or for one of dreamy disposition the employment of a sandwich man, with billboards fore and aft, ...
— Chimney-Pot Papers • Charles S. Brooks
... human one, though it came only from a bird. No lark this time, however, but a great black and white creature that flew into the cloak, and began walking round and round on the edge of it with a dignified stride, one foot before the other, like any unfeathered biped you could name. ...
— The Little Lame Prince - And: The Invisible Prince; Prince Cherry; The Prince With The Nose - The Frog-Prince; Clever Alice • Miss Mulock—Pseudonym of Maria Dinah Craik
... sweetbrier. I had often played Daniel in the lion's den there, assisted by a caste of small colored children. They were the lions, I, with the choice of parts, electing invariably to play the persecuted and finally triumphant biped. The fury of forty wild beasts was in my heart, as I pushed aside the prickly branches and crept into my lair. The den was paved with bricks, loosely laid. With a pointed stick I pried one up, and scooped out with my hands a grave deep enough ...
— When Grandmamma Was New - The Story of a Virginia Childhood • Marion Harland
... coward, dost thou forever pip and whimper, and go cowering and trembling? Despicable biped!... Hast thou not a heart; canst thou not suffer whatsoever it be; and, as a Child of Freedom, though outcast, trample Tophet itself under thy feet, while it consumes thee? Let it come, then, I will ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... conversation with this hybrid: and being equally disposed for hot discourse or for sleep, the deprivation of the one and the other forced him to seek amusement in his famous reading of character; which was profound among the biped equine, jockeys, turfmen, sharpers, pugilists, demireps. He fronted Woodseer with square shoulders and wide knees, an elbow on one, a fist on the other, engaged in what he termed the 'prodding of his eel,' ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... illogical biped. Before Kirby had seen the glove on the table and associated it with the crime, his feeling had been that the gallows was the proper end of so cruel a murderer. Now he not only intended to protect Rose, but his ...
— Tangled Trails - A Western Detective Story • William MacLeod Raine
... by a brace at least of dogs in his morning visits; and it is not easy to determine on these occasions which is the most troublesome animal of the two, the biped ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... sleep. His wife, weary with anxiety and watching, was trying to get a nap in the easy chair, when, suddenly, close by them, as if in the very room, came an indescribable screech, an unearthly, long, shrill cock-a-doodle-do yell, such as only a fancy feathered biped can perform. ...
— Who Spoke Next • Eliza Lee Follen
... was the keeper, who did the showman, vainly endeavouring to go through his usual jogtrot description. His monotone was drowned every minute by the chorus of voices, each shouting out some new fact in natural history touching the biped or quadruped whom the keeper was attempting to describe. At that day a great deal of this sort of chaff was current, so that the most dunder-headed boy had plenty on the tip of his tongue. A small and indignant knot of townspeople, ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... she met with the old man, who had seen her alight from the carriage, and had asked the mischievous Victor, "Who was the small biped ...
— Darkness and Daylight • Mary J. Holmes
... arms and of the lever, man has conquered all nature; he has subjected it to his pleasure, wants and caprices. He has overturned its surfaces, and a feeble biped has become king ...
— The Physiology of Taste • Brillat Savarin
... companion and constant friend of grave philosophers and thoughtful students. By the ancient Egyptians cats were held in the highest esteem; and we learn from Diodorus Siculus, their 'lives and safeties' were tendered more dearly than those of any other animal, whether biped or quadruped. 'He who has voluntarily killed a consecrated animal,' says this writer, 'is punished with death; but if any one has even involuntarily killed a cat or an ibis, it is impossible for him to escape death: the mob drags him to it, treating him with every ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 419, New Series, January 10, 1852 • Various
... people, as distinct from those biped beasts we've found so far? I doubt it," Loudons replied, finishing his caffchoc and wiping his mustache on the back of his hand. "I think the whole eastern half of the country is nothing but forest like this, and the highest type of life is just about three cuts below Homo Neanderthalensis, almost ...
— The Return • H. Beam Piper and John J. McGuire
... night's quarters. Agnello himself was cook, and proved a very tolerable one. This is essential; for Spanish custom prevails in the inns, whose host considers his duty accomplished when he has provided ample stabling for the mules and dubious bedding for his biped guests. ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... extremity of the rational soul is opinion, which in his Sophista he defines to be that power which knows the conclusion of dianoia. This power also knows the universal in sensible particulars, as that every man is a biped, but it knows only the oti, or that a thing is, but is ignorant of the dioti, or why it is: knowledge of the latter kind being the ...
— Introduction to the Philosophy and Writings of Plato • Thomas Taylor
... (1) pedal, pedestrian, pedestal, expedite, expediency, expedition, quadruped, impediment, biped, tripod, chiropodist, octopus, pew; (2) centiped, pedicle, pedometer, velocipede, sesquipedalian, antipodes, podium, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... fed, well groomed, goes through a field-day without injury, although carrying more than twenty stone weight; he and his rider presenting together, a kind of alderman centaur. But if in the field, half starved, they have, at the end of a forced march, to charge an enemy! The biped full of fire and courage, transformed by war-work to a wiry muscular dragoon, is able and willing, but the ...
— A New Illustrated Edition of J. S. Rarey's Art of Taming Horses • J. S. Rarey
... classification of naturalists would be useless, for a biped and a reptile not unfrequently bear the same interpretation as emblems. The simplest plan will be to divide the Church menagerie into two large classes, real beasts and monsters; there is no creature that we may not include in ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... should do this reluctantly. I, besides, am so attached to the very name of Mary, that as Johnson once said, 'If you called a dog Harvey, I should love him;' so, if you were to call a female of the same species 'Mary,' I should love it better than others (biped or quadruped) of the same sex with a different appellation. She was an extraordinary woman: she could translate Epictetus, and yet write a song worthy ...
— Life of Lord Byron, With His Letters And Journals, Vol. 5 (of 6) • (Lord Byron) George Gordon Byron
... fourteen years (he omitted to say that he had branded him and so knew his bird), teach his year-old boy to sing (the italics are mine). This hermit-inclined sparrow wanted to "desert the fields for a life in the woods," but his "wife would not consent." Many a featherless biped has had the same experience with his society-spoiled wife. The puzzle is, how did this masterly observer know that this state of affairs existed between this couple? Did the wife tell him, or the husband? "Hermit" often takes his visitors to a wood thrushes' singing-school, ...
— Ways of Nature • John Burroughs
... particular one he had thus encountered, he would not have been so badly frightened. In truth, the bear was as much disinclined to an encounter as he, at a loss, no doubt, to make out the character of its adversary. It was probable that Karl himself was the first human biped the animal had ever set eyes on; and, not knowing the strength of such a strange creature, it was willing enough to give him a wide berth, provided he would reciprocate ...
— The Plant Hunters - Adventures Among the Himalaya Mountains • Mayne Reid
... eft; asp, aspick[obs3]. [amphibians] frog, toad. [fishes] trout, bass, tuna, muskelunge, sailfish, sardine, mackerel. [insects] ant, mosquito, bee, honeybee. [arthropods] tardigrade, spider. [classificatiopn by number of feet] biped, quadruped. flocks and herds, live stock; domestic animals, wild animals; game, ferae naturae[Lat]; beasts of the field, fowls of the air, denizens of the sea; black game, black grouse; blackcock[obs3], duck, grouse, plover, rail, snipe. [domesticated mammals] horse ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... gaze to where the biped native sat hunched. The creature was bent into an ungainly position, its body crooked at incongruous angles, in such a way as to allow most of its weight to rest on a packing-box at the base of a middle angle. Its stubby feet, on the ends of thin, pipelike legs, rested against ...
— Vital Ingredient • Charles V. De Vet
... before, for never before had he heard himself so freely criticised. In addition to the not very flattering remarks "the bounders of the Fifth" had to pass on his features, Plunger had to listen to terse descriptions of himself as "that ass, Plunger," "a mixed pickle," "a queer egg," "conceited young biped," ...
— The Hero of Garside School • J. Harwood Panting
... A typical confession is that of a girl of nineteen: "I seldom have time to build castles in Spain, but when I do, I am not different from most Southern girls; i.e., my dreams are usually about a pretty fair specimen of a six-foot three-inch biped." ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... many readers, it is because it has nothing to do with the humanitarian pity retailed by rhetoricians. It is philosophical and haughty, detached from any "anthropocentric" characteristics. It is universal suffering that it covers. And to tell the truth, it is man, the hypocritical and cunning biped who has the least share in it. Maupassant is helpful to all those of his fellows who are tortured by physical suffering, social cruelty and the criminal dangers of life, but he pities them without caring for them, and his ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... anything else at the ridiculous simplicity of my emancipation. Yesterday at this hour I was a highly respectable if slightly pampered person with a shrewd sense of my own importance in the economic and social scheme; to-day I'm a mere biped—an instinct on legs, with nothing to recommend me but an amiable disposition ...
— Madcap • George Gibbs
... was obviously angered by the congenial demeanour of Monsieur le Gestionnaire, and rasped with his boot upon the threshold. The maps to my right and left, maps of France, maps of the Mediterranean, of Europe, even, were abashed. A little anaemic and humble biped whom I had not previously noted, as he stood in one corner with a painfully deferential expression, looked all at once relieved. I guessed, and correctly guessed, that this little thing was the translator of La Ferte. His weak face wore glasses of the same type as the ...
— The Enormous Room • Edward Estlin Cummings
... interdependence if one of the two is denoted, not by that name which expresses the correlative notion, but by one of irrelevant significance. The term 'slave,' if defined as related, not to a master, but to a man, or a biped, or anything of that sort, is not reciprocally connected with that in relation to which it is defined, for the statement is not exact. Further, if one thing is said to be correlative with another, and the terminology used is correct, then, though all irrelevant ...
— The Categories • Aristotle
... just as the sun was setting, amid a gabbling of ducks, a barking of terriers, mixed with the deep bay of two or three large heavy fox-hounds which had been lounging about in the shade, and a peal of joyous welcome from all beings, quadruped or biped, within hearing. ...
— Warwick Woodlands - Things as they Were There Twenty Years Ago • Henry William Herbert (AKA Frank Forester)
... impossible all that subtle tracery of thought and feeling should be painted out clear red and ochre with a house-painter's brush, and lose nothing of its effect.[22] A play that runs nowadays has generally four legs to run with—something of the beast to keep it going. The human biped with the 'os divinior' is slower than a racehorse even. What I hope is, that the poetical appreciation of 'Colombe' will give an impulse to the sale of the poems, which will be more acceptable to us than the other ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... until an animal somewhat of the nature of the missing link is discovered. It is found in the Endymion (a circular walled plain) in company with a small kind of reindeer, the elk, the moose, and the horned bear, and is described as the biped beaver. It 'resembles the beaver of the earth in every other respect than in its destitution of a tail, and its invariable habit of walking upon only two feet. It carries its young in its arms like a human being, and moves with an easy gliding ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... there had come into possession of this particular pair of creatures of the sort they had occasionally eaten, a trifling thing of wood and sinew string and flint point, which was destined henceforth to make a decided change in the relative condition of the biped and quadruped hunters of the time. How could they know that something small and sharp would fly down and sting them more deeply than they had ever been stung before, that it would sting so deeply that their arteries might be cut, or their ...
— The Story of Ab - A Tale of the Time of the Cave Man • Stanley Waterloo
... donkey. There is a general understanding that the wooden-legged men in country parishes should be employed as postmen, owing to the great steadiness of demeanour which a wooden leg is generally found to produce. It may be that such men are slower in their operations than would be biped postmen; but as all private employers of labour demand labourers with two legs, it is well that the lame and halt should find a refuge in the less exacting service of the government. The one-legged man who rode his donkey into Nuncombe Putney would reach his post-office ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope
... adds his mellow whistle to the orchestra of the mocking-bird. This so-called lark is classed by most naturalists among the starlings, as are two of the blackbirds, which two he resembles in some of his habits, but not in migrating, being about as much of a continental as any other biped American. Nor is he like his cousins in changes of dress. Out of a dozen of the latter that may be brought down at a shot, you will scarcely find three exactly alike. They moult at the South, and ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885 • Various
... called at the post-office for a letter as you came! Verdure and a mild heaven are above; clunking frogs and plants that keep company with man are beneath. But in the North Nature herself is wild. Of man she has never so much as heard. She has seen, perchance, a biped atomy creeping through her snows; but he is not Man, lording it in power of thought and performance; he is a muffled imbecility, that can do nothing but hug and hide its existence, lest some careless breath of hers should blow it out; ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 86, December, 1864 • Various |
