"Marco Polo" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... other, may, by the force of circumstances, be reduced to a partnership. The question that troubles me most is to determine precisely what is the highest condition of civilization. It can not be to enjoy fine palaces and have a great many soldiers, for Marco Polo tells us that the great Kubla Khan had palaces of gold and precious stones of incredible extent and most sumptuous magnificence, such as the world has never seen from that day to this, and could number his troops by millions; yet nobody will undertake to say that the Tartars ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... as an example. He sailed from Aden to Calicut in thirty days, and in eighty-three days from Calicut to Zaumotra (Sumatra), a distance of about fourteen hundred leagues. "With this number agree Marco Paulo (Marco Polo) and Juan de Mandevilla (John Mandeville) in the self-same voyages and travels made by them, as is stated very diffusely in their books." The three-year voyage of King Solomon's ships, as recorded in "the third book of the Kings" [187] to "Ofir and Zetin whence they brought the gold to ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1803 • Emma Helen Blair
... be the home of its descendants. The Tartars have been called the troubadours of Asia—and of Asia in the widest sense of the word—penetrating into the heart of the Caucasus on the west and reaching through the country eastward to the shores of the Yellow Sea. Marco Polo, the celebrated Venetian traveller, and M. Huc, a French missionary to China and Thibet, as well as Spencer, Atkinson, and many others, speak of the wandering bards of Asia. Marco Polo's account of how Jenghiz Kahn, the great ...
— Critical & Historical Essays - Lectures delivered at Columbia University • Edward MacDowell
... grant—not by those who only know a little; but by those who are well informed, you probably would be. The fact is, from a too ready credulity, we have now turned to almost a total skepticism, unless we have ocular demonstration. In the times of Marco Polo, Sir John Mandeville, and others,—say in the fifteenth century, when there were but few travelers and but little education, a traveler might assert almost any thing, and gain credence; latterly a traveler hardly dare assert any thing. ...
— The Mission • Frederick Marryat
... than shorn. And murdered they were by their ruthless uncle Clotaire with his own hand." [321] In this case it appears that if their hair was shorn the children could not come to the throne but would be destined to become monks. Similarly, in speaking of the Georgians, Marco Polo remarks that they cut their hair short like churchmen. [322] When a member of the religious order of the Manbhaos is initiated his head is shaved clean by the village barber, and the scalp-lock and moustache must be cut off by his guru ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume IV of IV - Kumhar-Yemkala • R.V. Russell
... that called forth the admiration of Marco Polo may be seen to-day, not only along the internal waterways of the Empire but far afield, at Singapore, in Siamese waters and amongst the East India Islands, and it may be interesting for yachtsmen to know that the problems of water-tight compartments, centre-boards, balanced ...
— Life and sport in China - Second Edition • Oliver G. Ready
... Africa, black or white. He had no resources save his tongue, his thews, an empty revolver, and his mother wit, and yet he had won a slow way down to the western seaboard through a hundred hostile tribes, where an army would have been eaten up, and a Marco Polo might ...
— A Master of Fortune • Cutcliffe Hyne
... toiled through a life of difficulty and danger, could not endure the laugh and scorn of public opinion; for BRUCE there was a simoon more dreadful than the Arabian, and from which genius cannot hide its head. Yet BRUCE only met with the fate which MARCO POLO had before encountered; whose faithful narrative had been contemned by his contemporaries, and who was long thrown aside among ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... narwhal has two tusks, but generally only one—on the left side. The females have none at all. You know the unicorn is always represented with a narwhal's tusk? One of the early travelers, Sir John de Mandeville or Marco Polo, I forget which, brought back a narwhal's tusk which, he had been told, had been taken from a kind of horse. I really suppose that the native who sold it believed it was from some species of antelope. But to this day the arms of Great Britain show a horse having a fish's tooth ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Fisheries • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... figures in the adventures of Sindbad occurs in the popular German story of "Herzog Ernst von Baiern," which is extant in a Latin poem that cannot be later than the 13th century and is probably a hundred years earlier.[FN387] The Valley of Diamonds in the History of Sindbad is described by Marco Polo who travelled in the East in the 13th century; moreover, it had been known in Europe from the 4th century, when the story connected with it was related by Epiphanius, bishop of Salamis, who lays the scene in Scythia, while Marco Polo and the author of Sindbad's Voyages both place it in ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... fast-sailing ships to waft away from present troubles to the Fortunate Islands.'[101] Grouped under each quarter of the globe, we should have selections of the works of those travellers, who, from Herodotus to Mr. Stanley, and from Marco Polo or Captain Cook down to Miss Bird, have made us who stay at home familiar with the remotest corners of the earth. Much of the romance of travel has of necessity perished in these matter-of-fact days; but as the writing of history has developed from a mere ...
— The Quarterly Review, Volume 162, No. 324, April, 1886 • Various
... Buddha, Central and southern empires and all their belongings, possessors, The wars of Tamerlane,the reign of Aurungzebe, The traders, rulers, explorers, Moslems, Venetians, Byzantium, the Arabs, Portuguese, The first travelers famous yet, Marco Polo, Batouta the Moor, Doubts to be solv'd, the map incognita, blanks to be fill'd, The foot of man unstay'd, the hands never at rest, Thyself O soul that will not ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... has lost its meaning, for we now travel by rail, and life is expressed in terms of the railway time-table. As has been said, we leave and arrive at places, but we no longer travel. Consequently we cannot understand the hubbub that Marco Polo must have caused among his townsmen when he swaggered in. He and his crew were bronzed by the sun, were dressed as Tartars, and could speak their native Italian with difficulty. To convince the Venetians of their identity, ...
— Journeys to Bagdad • Charles S. Brooks
... biographies of Suetonius; in Tacitus at his best; in Pliny's Natural History; in Hanno's Periplus; in all the early chronicles; in the Lives of the Saints; in Froissart and Sir Thomas Malory; in the travels of Marco Polo; in Olaus Magnus, and Aldrovandus, and Conrad Lycosthenes, with his magnificent Prodigiorum et Ostentorum Chronicon; in the autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini; in the memoirs of Casanova; in Defoe's History of the Plague; in Boswell's Life of Johnson; in Napoleon's despatches, and in the works ...
— Intentions • Oscar Wilde
... It was not Marco Polo alone, but every man of extraordinary aspirations, who took that long journey, through semimythical deserts, into the realm of the Great Khan, and there for many years lived a life unrelated to the lives of his ...
— Sacrifice • Stephen French Whitman
... which contains 120,000 volumes, and some 10,000 valuable manuscripts, among which are many rare and beautifully illuminated literary treasures: Cicero's "Epist. ad Familiaries," the first book printed in Venice, 1465; a Florence "Homer," on vellum, 1483; Marco Polo's Will, 1323; a Herbary, painted by A. Amadi, 1415; Cardinal Guinani's Breviary, with Hemling's beautiful miniatures; and the manuscript of the "Divina Commedia,"—are only a sample of the treasures here contained, over which we could have lingered with great enjoyment for a far longer time ...
— Fair Italy, the Riviera and Monte Carlo • W. Cope Devereux
... men were beginning to travel to distant countries for the sole purpose of seeing new scenes and acquiring fresh knowledge. The famous Venetian, Marco Polo, was the first European who (in 1300) visited Central Asia, crossed China and Thibet, and brought news to Europe of the fairyland of Japan. Sight-seeing as an end in itself was discovered. Long sea-voyages for commercial purposes were no novelty, but no human foot had ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... such as Cicero's Letters, Suetonius, Vasari's Lives of the Painters, the Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini, Sir John Mandeville, Marco Polo, St. Simon's Memoirs, Mommsen, and (till we get a better one) Grote's ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... Marco Polo, the famous traveler of the thirteenth century, makes reference to the burning jets of the Caucasus, and those fires are known to the Russians as continuing in existence since the army of Peter the Great wrested the regions about the Caspian from the modern Persians. The record of those flaming ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 497, July 11, 1885 • Various
... peoples have died out, of Babylon and Nineveh only ruins are left; but the waters of the rivers murmur just the same, and the caravan bells ring now as in the days when Alexander led the Macedonian army over the Euphrates and Tigris, when the Venetian merchant Marco Polo travelled 620 years ago between Tabriz and Trebizond by the road we are now driving along, when Timur the Lame defeated the Turks and by this road carried the Sultan Bayazid in an iron cage to exhibit him like a wild beast in the ...
— From Pole to Pole - A Book for Young People • Sven Anders Hedin |
