"Encyclopaedic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Anna, shortly. "And Lena's growing up a perfect young prig. I'll have to change governesses. Heaven knows what I'll draw next time! The last one had charm, but no learning, and mighty little intelligence. This one has no manner at all, and is of encyclopaedic information. A ...
— Life at High Tide - Harper's Novelettes • Various
... the wide-spread ignorance among the monks of that age, the encyclopaedic movement of the Renaissance was attracting all the lofty minds. Rabelais threw himself into it with enthusiasm, and Latin antiquity was not enough for him. Greek, a study discountenanced by the Church, which looked on it as dangerous and tending to freethought and heresy, took possession ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... momentous results of our own practice, so familiar to us, seem still unfamiliar across the water. This gives our nation a great advantage, and renders it impossible to produce, at present, in Europe, a work so encyclopaedic as this. It is not merely the best book, but the only book, on the theme it treats: there is no other account of the structure and results of modern standard ordnance. That it is the work of a civil engineer, and not of a military or naval man, gives ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 93, July, 1865 • Various
... that I permitted the matter to rest. In addition to Grits Jarvis, there was another contraband among my acquaintances, namely, Alec Pound, the scrape-grace son of the Reverend Doctor Pound. Alec had an encyclopaedic mind, especially well stocked with the kind of knowledge I now desired; first and last he taught me much, which I would better have got in another way. To him I appealed and got the story, my worst suspicions being confirmed. Mrs. ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... He was the more entertaining talker of the two, and in other respects very much like Tom Appleton,—better known on the Paris boulevards than in his native country. Instead of being witty like Appleton he was brilliantly encyclopaedic; and they both carried their statements to the verge ...
— Cambridge Sketches • Frank Preston Stearns
... pension at Strasburg speaking all the languages, dabbling in all the sciences: an historian, a poet,—a blue of the ultramarinest sort, in a word. What a difference there was, for instance, between poor, simple Dorothea's love of novel reading and the profound encyclopaedic learning ...
— The Fitz-Boodle Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... thirty thousand volumes, as Walpole declared, in a building that reached halfway from London to Highgate; his collection was in two parts, of which the first was mainly classical, and the other was very rich in English antiquities and history. In 1783 was sold almost the last of the encyclopaedic collections which used to fill the position now occupied by great public libraries. Mr. Crofts possessed a treasury of Greek and Roman learning; he was especially rich in philology, in Italian literature, in travels, ...
— The Great Book-Collectors • Charles Isaac Elton and Mary Augusta Elton
... to professions and to learning, and that Comenius had his justification for introducing a mass of vocables now wholly useless to the student of Latin. But even for his own time, Comenius, under the influence of his encyclopaedic passion, overdid his task. His real merits in language-teaching lie in the introduction of the principle of graduated reading-books, in the simplification of Latin grammar, in his founding instruction in foreign tongues on the vernacular, and in his insisting on method in instruction. ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various
... different periods. Several of them contain biographical accounts of the translators and other notes. The work called Chen-cheng-lun criticizes several false sutras and names. There are also several encyclopaedic works containing extracts from the Tripitaka, arranged according to subjects, such as the Fa-yuan-chu-lin[738] in 100 volumes; concordances of numerical categories and a dictionary of Sanskrit ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, An Historical Sketch, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Charles Eliot
... discipline than on unselfish virtue exercised throughout successive existences. There are a dozen or more collections of Avadanas of which the most important are the Mahavastu and the Divyavadana. The former[152] is an encyclopaedic work which contains inter alia a life of Sakyamuni. It describes itself as belonging to the Lokottaravadins, a section of the Aryamaha-sanghikas. The Lokottaravadins were an ancient sect, precursors of the Mahayana rather than a branch of it, and ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... many people not to know when his own end was nigh; and his notary, finding him on his death-bed, draped as it were, in the mantle of encyclopaedic philosophy, pressed him to make a provision in favor of the young ...
— The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... of geology shown by Trevittick in The Hillyars and the Burtons, and by the encyclopaedic Dr. Mulhaus in his lecture at the picnic in the grass-covered crater of Mirngish, there is nothing to suggest that the author had any personal acquaintance with mining in the colonies. The experience that was so fresh and abundant in his mind is put aside in favour ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne
... the intelligentsia, to his court because his uneducated Manchus could not alone have administered the enormous empire; and he showed great interest in Chinese culture, himself delved deeply into it, and had many works compiled, especially works of an encyclopaedic character. The encyclopaedias enabled information to be rapidly gained on all sorts of subjects, and thus were just what an interested ruler needed, especially when, as a foreigner, he was not in a position to gain really thorough instruction in things Chinese. The Chinese ...
— A history of China., [3d ed. rev. and enl.] • Wolfram Eberhard
... Gilbert the Bad. Francoise was at once dispatched to the grocer's, but returned empty-handed owing to the absence of Theodore, whose dual profession of choirman, with a part in the maintenance of the fabric, and of grocer's assistant gave him not only relations with all sections of society, but an encyclopaedic knowledge of ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... own efforts. It's wonderful, by the way, how much a person can pick up of odds and ends of information when forced, by a hobby of this kind, to delve into recondite departments of knowledge which he would otherwise not have dreamt of exploring. One grows quite encyclopaedic! Minerals, medicine, strategy, heraldry, navigation, palaeography, statistics, politics, botany—what did I know or care about all these things before I stumbled on old Perrelli? Have you ever tried to annotate a classic, Mr. Heard? I assure you it opens up new vistas, new realms of ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... this talented and beautiful princess had a jay,[FN74] whose name was Madan-manjari or Love-garland. She also possessed encyclopaedic knowledge after her degree, and, like the parrot, ...
— Vikram and the Vampire • Sir Richard F. Burton
... important contributions to the social and intellectual history of England which has ever been made by a Cambridge man. The title of the work conveys but a very inadequate notion of its wide scope, of the encyclopaedic learning and originality of treatment which it displays, and, least of all, of the abundance of human interest which characterizes it so markedly. It is because of this wealth of human interest that the book must needs exercise a powerful fascination upon those who have a craving to get some insight ...
— The Coming of the Friars • Augustus Jessopp
... world of men, the State, society. This State, this society produces religion, which is an inverted world-consciousness, because they are an inverted world. Religion is the general theory of this world, its encyclopaedic compendium, its logic in popular form, its spiritualistic Point d'honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement, its general basis of consolation and justification. It is the fantastic realization of the human being, inasmuch as the human ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx
... stole away. Trundled and bundled out, with ostentatious indifference to great orator, the fund of information he had garnered, the counsel with which he was charged. CHAPLIN had brought statesmanship and literature of Europe into review, picking out from encyclopaedic stores testimony to destruction of Mr. G.'s pet scheme. The very names quoted were a liberal education—Mr. LECKY, Count BEUST, CAVOUR, Dr. GEFFCKEN, M. DE MOLINARIS. And then interposes the SAGE OF QUEEN ANNE'S GATE with bland ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, April 22, 1893 • Various
... one telegram and the letter from you in which you write that you want to bring out an encyclopaedic dictionary. I don't know why, but the news of that dictionary rejoiced me greatly. Do, my dear friend! If I am any use for working on it, I will devote November and December to you, and will spend those months in Petersburg. I will ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... probably the most encyclopaedic all-round scholar now living. His new volume on the Origin of the Aryans is a first-rate example of the excellent account to which he can turn his exceptionally wide and varied information.... Masterly ...
— The Industries of Animals • Frederic Houssay
... and romantic interest. Darwin's Origin of Species was published in 1859; and its effect on thought became marked within the next few years. In 1862, Herbert Spencer commenced to issue his great encyclopaedic work, Synthetic Philosophy, still, we trust, to be completed after more than thirty years of devoted toil. Darwin's later books appeared about the same period, as did a large body of scientific works in popular form by Huxley, ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... complete systems of metaphysics and logic and religion and politics and aesthetics out of their own consciousness. We have multiplied professors of late, and professors are bound to write books, and to magnify the value of their own studies. They must make a show of possessing an encyclopaedic theory which will explain everything and take into account all previous theories. Sometimes, perhaps, they will lose themselves in endless subtleties and logomachies and construct cobwebs of the brain, predestined to the rubbish-heap ...
— Social Rights and Duties, Volume I (of 2) - Addresses to Ethical Societies • Sir Leslie Stephen
... however, as a part of its regular text the several market towns in England and Wales, with a general description of the places, their situation, market-days, government, manufacture, number of representatives sent to parliament, and distance from London. The encyclopaedic features of a dictionary are clearly of American addition, growing out of the more general and exclusive use of the Dictionary as a book of reference, and increased by the suggestions of competition. The Dictionary proper was an enlargement ...
— Noah Webster - American Men of Letters • Horace E. Scudder
... thing, that under the new state of things specialism, in the future, must more and more abound. But specialism means subdivision of labor; and with subdivision labor ought to be more completely, more exactly, performed. Let us bow our heads to the inevitable; the day of encyclopaedic learning has gone by. It may perhaps be said that that sun set with Leibnitz. But as little learning is only dangerous when it forgets that it is little, so specialism is only dangerous when it forgets ...
— On Books and the Housing of Them • William Ewart Gladstone
... to suppose that everybody is competent to learn or to teach everything. Would our great artists have succeeded equally well in Greek or calculus? A smattering of everything is worth little. It is a fallacy to suppose that an encyclopaedic knowledge is desirable. The mind is made strong, not through much learning, but by the thorough ...
— Louis Agassiz as a Teacher • Lane Cooper |
