"Oracular" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... this, he went on his way toward Libya and Egypt. Over the latter land ruled Busiris, the son of Neptune and Lysianassa. To him during the period of a nine-year famine a prophet had borne the oracular message that the land would again bear fruit if a stranger were sacrificed once a year to Jupiter. In gratitude Busiris made a beginning with the priest himself. Later he found great pleasure in the custom and killed all strangers who ...
— Myths and Legends of All Nations • Various
... almost more simple than that of the dalesmen their neighbours. "It is my opinion," ran one of his oracular sayings to Sir George Beaumont, "that a man of letters, and indeed all public men of every pursuit, should be severely frugal." Means were found for supporting the modest home out of two or three small windfalls bequeathed ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... ever read Little Dorrit, whatever else in the novel may slip the memory, fails to recall the oracular utterance of Mr. F.'s aunt that "There's milestones on the Dover road". To the opening of A Tale of Two Cities the colour and atmosphere of the time in which it is set, and of the drama which is to be developed, are given at once by the alarm of the passengers of the Dover coach as they walk ...
— Dickens-Land • J. A. Nicklin
... rubicund, moon-round face, full of large blue eyes smiling a gentle and kindly welcome ... if the face of Shelley's father, plump and methodic-oracular, could have been joined to the wild, shining ecstasy of Shelley's countenance itself—you would have had Mackworth's face before its time. I never beheld such spirituality in a fat man. His stoutness ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... dealt with the oracles of heathendom. Mr. Lecky is hardly correct when he says that nothing analogous to the ancient oracles was incorporated with Christianity.[1] There is the notable case of the god Sosthenion, whom Constantine identified with the archangel Michael, and whose oracular functions were continued in a precisely similar manner by the latter.[2] Oracles that were not thus absorbed and supported were recognized as existent, but under diabolic control, and to be tolerated, if not patronized, by the representatives of the dominant ...
— Elizabethan Demonology • Thomas Alfred Spalding
... flight. As accident had thus brought him, as it might be on a visit, to the spot, he at once determined to give his arrival the character of a friendly call, and the better to support the pretension, to blend with it, if possible, a little of the oracular, or "medicine" manner, in order to impose on the imaginations of the superstitious beings into whose power he ...
— Oak Openings • James Fenimore Cooper
... detail, of that sublime-sounding sweep of despotic generality, (so inherent a vice of German literature,) which delights to confound the differences, rather than to discriminate the characters, of things; much that seems only too justly to warrant that oracular sentence of the stern Fichte with which we set out, "The younger brother wants clearness;" much that, when applied to practice, and consistently followed out in that grand style of consistency which belongs to a real German philosopher, becomes what we in English call Puseyism and Popery, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... for two or three to come. By the third elicton though, all the Oirish populeetion will be riddy to vote, and thin we'll have our oun Oirish Prisidint. And afther that," said O'Halloran, in an oracular tone, and pausing to quaff the transparent draught— "afther that, Amirica will be simplee an Oirish republic. Then we'll cast our oys across the say. We'll cast there our arrums. We'll sind there our flates and armies. We'll take vingince ...
— The Lady of the Ice - A Novel • James De Mille
... poetry. His language may not be intelligible, but his manner is not to be mistaken. It is clear that he is either mad or inspired. In company, even in a tete-a-tete, Mr. Wordsworth is often silent, indolent, and reserved. If he is become verbose and oracular of late years, he was not so in his better days. He threw out a bold or an indifferent remark without either effort or pretension, and relapsed into musing again. He shone most (because he seemed most roused and animated) in reciting his own poetry, or in talking ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... the whole, this play is exquisitely respondent to its title, and even in the fault I am about to mention, still a winter's tale; yet it seems a mere indolence of the great bard not to have provided in the oracular response (Act ii. sc. 2.) some ground for Hermione's seeming death and fifteen years voluntary concealment. This might have been easily effected by some obscure sentence of the ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge
... a roaring lion," on the Sunday after every 17th of August, and he was accustomed to surpass himself upon that text both by the appalling nature of the matter and the terror of his bearing in the pulpit. The children were frightened into fits, and the old looked more than usually oracular, and were, all that day, full of those hints that Hamlet deprecated. The manse itself, where it stood by the water of Dule among some thick trees, with the Shaw overhanging it on the one side, and ...
— Stories by English Authors: Scotland • Various
... with its long, tireless gallop, and they were obliged to return to the forge, lost in wonder and conjecture. For the blacksmith had recognized it as a stranger to the locality, and as a man of oracular pretension had a startling theory to account for its presence. This he confided to the editor of the local paper, and the next issue contained an editorial paragraph: "Our presage of a severe winter in the higher Sierras, and consequent spring floods in ...
— Openings in the Old Trail • Bret Harte
... touch her, but looked deeply into her eyes for a long space of time, and took from her again an equally searching regard; then, turning to her father-in-law and the company at large, she said, "This is begun, and will be done. He is like his father before him." To that oracular utterance old King, catching probably but the last sentence, replied, "And he couldn't do better, my child." He meant no more than a testimony to his daughter-in-law. Mrs. King's observations, coupled with that, nevertheless, went far to give credit ...
— Lore of Proserpine • Maurice Hewlett
... hills.... For extreme license in criticism of administrations and of everybody connected with them, broad arguments can no doubt be found in the files of the journal made famous by the pencil of Nast. But a convention may not deem itself a chartered libertine of oracular ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... privation and labour. At the same time that in these labours they had at all times an eye to their darling object, an ascendancy over the minds of their countrymen at large, and the extorting from them a blind and implicit deference to their oracular decrees. They however loved their pursuits for the pursuits themselves. They felt their abstraction and their unlimited nature, and on that account contemplated them with admiration. They valued them (for such is the indestructible character of the human mind) for the pains they had bestowed on ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin
... Mr. Milburgh in his best oracular manner, "describing all the events which preceded the death of the late Thornton Lyne. Nor will I go to any length to deal with his well-known and even notorious character. He was not a good employer; he was suspicious, unjust, and in many ways mean. Mr. Lyne was, I admit, ...
— The Daffodil Mystery • Edgar Wallace
... say?' asked Leonard, laughing; and as Aubrey repeated the conversation, ending with the oracular prediction, he laughed again, but said proudly, 'He'll see himself wrong then. I'll put up with whatever ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... couldn't expect a poor ould crathur o' sixty to travel at this rate, at all at all; except for raisons, your Reverence:"—looking towards me quite confidently and knowingly. This was still more oracular, and I felt very odd under it; my character for devotion was at stake, and I feared that the old lady was drawing me into a kind of vicious circle. "Your Reverence knows, that for the likes o' me, that can hardly move to the market ...
— The Station; The Party Fight And Funeral; The Lough Derg Pilgrim • William Carleton
... forward to the future, so does rationalism here again face backward to a past eternity. True to her inveterate habit, rationalism reverts to 'principles,' and thinks that when an abstraction once is named, we own an oracular solution. ...
— Pragmatism - A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking • William James
... Amusements for the Ingenious, by a Society of Gentlemen. The British Apollo invited and professed to answer questions upon all subjects of wit, morality, science, and even religion; and two out of its four pages are filled with queries and replies much like some of the oracular penny ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... which the above quotation is taken, we are told that Ben Azai (the son of impudence) says, a man is bound to instruct his daughter in the law, although Rabbi Eliezer, who always assumes an oracular air, and boasts that the Halachah is always according to his decision (Bava Metzia, fol. 59, col. 2), insists, on the other hand, that he who instructs his daughter in the law must be considered as training her into habits of frivolity; and the saying above ...
— Hebraic Literature; Translations from the Talmud, Midrashim and - Kabbala • Various
... made a deep impression upon the owner of it, and had given to Quigg's ordinary observations on the weather, the state of his health, and the other familiar topics to which his remarks were principally addressed, an oracular importance in his own opinion. Such were the deceptive effects produced by his large, polished brow, and slow, imposing speech, that he always seemed to be on the point of uttering vital truths. But the listener's ear ached in ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... here reports that num'rous suitors haunt 270 Thy palace for thy mother's sake, and there Much evil perpetrate in thy despight. But say, endur'st thou willing their controul Imperious, or because the people, sway'd By some response oracular, incline Against thee? But who knows? the time may come When to his home restored, either alone, Or aided by the force of all the Greeks, Ulysses may avenge the wrong; at least, Should Pallas azure-eyed thee love, as erst ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer
... his owne genius is his intelligencer. His mint goes weekely, and he coines monie by it. Howsoeuer, the more intelligent merchants doe jeere him, the vulgar doe admire him, holding his novels oracular: and these are usually sent for tokens or intermissiue curtsies betwixt city and countrey. Hee holds most constantly one forme or method of discourse. He retaines some militarie words of art, which ...
— Microcosmography - or, a Piece of the World Discovered; in Essays and Characters • John Earle
... itself before him, which he describes in a few satirical touches, yet without expressing his opinion openly: he tells the people enough to set them all thinking and guessing; but in order to hurt nobody, he wraps his witty oracular judgments in a transparent veil, or rather in a lurid thundercloud, shooting forth bright sparks of wit, that they may fall in the powder-magazine ...
— Andersen's Fairy Tales • Hans Christian Andersen
... When the answer came from within, "Ship letter, sir, double postage," they thought it almost uncanny; and Hector's shilling was requited by something so like a real ship letter, that they had some idea that the real post had somehow transported itself thither. The interior was decidedly oracular, consisting of this one line, "I counsel you to persevere in ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... Again the boy's countenance needed a twinkle of merriment to redeem it from a too serious acceptance of self. "Not to like poetry—if it's real poetry—is simply to be a plain clod." He spoke with an oracular and pedantic assurance which ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... philosopher and materialist often becomes the visionary of riper years, running into illuminism, magnetism, and transcendentalism, with its inspired priests and priestesses, its revelations and oracular responses. ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... wished he had chosen one of my favorite chapters in the Book of Kings. I was awed by his intonation of the word "Selah." "He shall choose our inheritance for us, the excellency of Jacob whom He loved. Selah." I had no idea what the word meant; perhaps he had not. But, as he uttered it, it became oracular, the ...
— My Antonia • Willa Sibert Cather
... is about three-fourths of war," said Obed in an oracular tone. "He who eats and runs away will live to eat another day. Besides, Napoleon said that an army marched better on a full stomach, or ...
— The Texan Scouts - A Story of the Alamo and Goliad • Joseph A. Altsheler
... God most high, Famed for harping song, will I Proclaim, and the deathless oracular word From the snow-topped rock that we gaze on heard, Counsels of thy glorious giving Manifest for all men living, How thou madest the tripod of prophecy thine Which the wrath of the dragon kept guard on, a shrine Voiceless till thy shafts could smite ...
— A Channel Passage and Other Poems - Taken from The Collected Poetical Works of Algernon Charles - Swinburne—Vol VI • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... for some mortal, sending bird messengers to him. A sort of pagan enchantment was put upon him, and he rose up from the ferns to see an evening as fair as Nora and as fragrant. He tried to think of the colour of her eyes, which were fervid and oracular, and of her hands, which were long and curved, with fragile fingers, of her breath, which was sweet, and her white, even teeth. The evening was like her, as subtle and as persuasive, and the sensation of her presence became so clear that he shut his eyes, feeling her about him—as ...
— The Lake • George Moore
... sees nor thinks," was Malcolm Sage's oracular retort, and he went over to the window and seated ...
— Malcolm Sage, Detective • Herbert George Jenkins
... of mind is not among the Mafulu in any way a necessary, or indeed a usual, qualification for a sorcerer or magic man of any sort. The person appealed to will perhaps tell them who has done the deed, or will make some oracular statement which will lead to his identification. The culprit identified by him will in any case be a member of another clan, and most probably of another community. When he has been discovered, there will probably be a fight, in which the members of the victim's clan, or ...
— The Mafulu - Mountain People of British New Guinea • Robert W. Williamson
... condemn the possessive instinct or the instinct to possess property with an unwavering voice. As eternal aspects of the complex vision, both conscience and the aesthetic sense, when their power is exercised in harmony with all the other aspects of the soul, indicate with an oracular clearness that the possessive instinct is not ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... has not been recorded. Enough that half an hour later Mr. Weaver appeared in the courtyard with traces of tears on his foolish face, a broken falsetto voice, and other evidence of mental and moral disturbance. His cordiality and oracular predisposition remained sufficiently to enable him to suggest the magical words "Blue Grass" mysteriously to Concha, with an indication of his hand to the erect figure of her pale mistress in the doorway, who waved to him a silent but half ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte
... impetuous eagerness, so creditable to her heart, he replies with the oracular solemnity by which caution can ...
— Angels & Ministers • Laurence Housman
... it may seem, these words of a withered old creature, whose palm had to be crossed with silver to bring forth her oracular response, have always clung to my memory as if they were destined to fulfilment. The extraordinary nature of the affliction to which I was subject disposed me to believe the incredible with reference to all that relates to it. I have ...
— A Mortal Antipathy • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... with a Minister, obtained more or less full knowledge of what the Queen's Speech would contain. But he was bound in honour to preserve his informant from possibly inconvenient consequences of his garrulity, and so the oracular style was adopted. When other papers, put on the track, obtained information in the same way they adopted the same quaint practice, till now it has become deeply ingrained in journalism. To-day, whilst there is no secret of the sources of information very properly conveyed ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 29, May 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... term "Nymphe" and its derivations was used to designate young women, brides, the marriage chamber, the lotus flower, oracular temples and the labiae ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... the absence of any more words, put this sudden climax to what he had faintly intended should be a long explanation of the whole life and character of his man, the oracular John Willet led the gentleman up his wide dismantled staircase into the ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens
... fellow, with whom I have spent many a jolly hour; but being just dubbed a graduate in physic, he has gained such an entire conquest over the risible muscles, that he hardly vouchsafes at any time to smile. I have heard him harangue, with all the oracular importance of a veteran, on the possibility of Canning's subsisting for a whole month on a few bits of bread; and he is now preparing a treatise, in which he will set forth a new and infallible method to prevent the spreading of the plague from France to England. Batson's has been reckoned ...
— Inns and Taverns of Old London • Henry C. Shelley
... fortunes, undefined rights, and in search of evidence, without a legal adviser of some sort? Mr. Mervyn, of course, had his, and paid for the luxury according to custom. And every now and then off went a despatch from the Tiled House to the oracular London attorney; sometimes it was a budget of evidence, and sometimes only a string of queries. To-night, to the awful diapason of the storm—he was penning one of these—the fruit of a tedious study of many papers and letters, tied up in bundles ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... When shall these eyes behold, these arms be folded about thee?" Loud and sudden and near the note of a whippoorwill sounded Like a flute in the woods; and anon, through the neighboring thickets, Farther and farther away it floated and dropped into silence. "Patience!" whispered the oaks from oracular caverns of darkness; And, from the moonlit ...
— Elson Grammer School Literature, Book Four. • William H. Elson and Christine Keck
... weeks at this time (dates all to be had in Formey's Note-book, if anybody would consult); in the whole course of which the shock to the Perpetual President increased, instead of diminishing. Republican freedom and equality is evidently Konig's method; Konig heeds not a whit the oracular talent or majestic position of Maupertuis; argues with the frankest logic, when he feels dissent;—drives a majestic Perpetual President, especially in the presence of third parties, much out of patience. Thus, one evening, replying to some argument of the Perpetual President's, he begins: ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVI. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Ten Years of Peace.—1746-1756. • Thomas Carlyle
... rhetoricians, beating over again the old straws of philosophies which had once possessed a living meaning and exercised a living force. Athens herself had never properly recovered from the migration of learning to Alexandria. Delphi, the great oracular seat of the Greek world, had also declined in importance, although it could still boast of an imposing array of buildings and memorials. The centre of commerce and of official life, a Roman colony in the midst of Greece, a cosmopolitan and a dissolute place, was ...
— Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul • T. G. Tucker
... of art. And if he now were to see some beautiful pale slave bound in these iron chains, and being exhibited for the amusement of an idle world, what would the fierce blood of the Macleods say to that debasement? He began to dislike this old man, with his cruel theories and his oracular speech. But he forbore to have further or any argument with him; for he remembered what the Highlanders call "the advice of the bell of Scoon"—"The thing that concerns you not meddle ...
— Macleod of Dare • William Black
... the Flying Dutchman, which could scarcely be the case seeing the latitude we are in," said Dick Harper with oracular authority, "she's near akin to the chap, that you may depend on, for no other would have been for to go for to play us such a trick as he has been doing; and for that matter, messmates, look ye here—he ...
— Mark Seaworth • William H.G. Kingston
... North, Mr. Seward delivered a speech at Rochester, N. Y., which stirred the country. In that speech, while paying due deference to the Constitution and the laws, he very solemnly declared that "there is a higher law." Mr. Seward sometimes called attention to his position by an oracular utterance which he left the people to interpret. This phrase, "the higher law," became of first-class importance, both in Congress, in the press, and on the platform. On the one side, it was denounced as treason and anarchy. On the other ...
— My Memories of Eighty Years • Chauncey M. Depew
... weekly, monthly periodicals, in desperate exertion to attract public attention. They have at their head one sublime genius, whom they swear by, and they admire him the more, the more incomprehensible and oracular he appears to the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXIX. - March, 1843, Vol. LIII. • Various
... backers of each bird; but a glance at the expressive features of the host warned the markers that nothing must be chalked down that did not come up to his idea of singing. Had the destinies of empires hung upon his nod he could scarcely have looked more oracular. But Walworth could afford to take matters easily now. For the last five minutes the Bermondsey bird did most of the music; still it was a hopeless case. Success was not on the cards. By-and-by, time was ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... last shouted the confused man, "and t'other's another!" An oracular deliverance which surely must have been entirely unintelligible in the kitchen, where we will not deny that an utterance so ...
— The Rector • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... discussing the subject of mission services with a stranger; she defended them in her dream with great warmth and rhetoric: when she had done, her companion said, "Well, to tell you the truth, I don't believe in people being inspired IN ROWS." This oracular saying has a profound truth in it—that salvation is not to be found in public meetings; and that to assemble a number of persons, and to address them on the subject of simplicity, is the surest way to miss the charm ...
— From a College Window • Arthur Christopher Benson
... laurels, too)—Ver. 5. The "cortina" or oracular shrine was surrounded with laurels; which were said to quiver while the oracles were being pronounced. This is probably the most beautiful portion of these newly-discovered poems. Still, it cannot with ...
— The Fables of Phdrus - Literally translated into English prose with notes • Phaedrus
... the disciple of Thrasyllus, the hearer of Nicomachus, who was of the school of Secundus, the doctor of the new Pythagoreans? Not feel the presence in Sicca of Polemo, the most celebrated, the most intolerable of men? That, however, is not his title, but the 'godlike,' or the 'oracular,' or the 'portentous,' or something else as impressive. Every one goes to him. He is the rage. I should not have a chance of success if I could not say that I had attended his lectures; though I'd be bound our little Firmian here would deliver as good. He's the very cariophyllus of human nature. ...
— Callista • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... delivered himself of an oracular phrase. No doubt he had been meditating it during the supper. ...
— McTeague • Frank Norris
... "DISUNION" should be pronounced over the Republic. The Lincoln-Douglass debate augmented everywhere the excitement, fed the already mighty numbers of the new party. More and more the public consciousness and conviction were squaring with Mr. Lincoln's oracular words in respect that the Union could not "endure permanently ...
— William Lloyd Garrison - The Abolitionist • Archibald H. Grimke
... vale of Eurotas, and amongst the ruins of Sparta; had traversed Thessaly, and surveyed the famous Pass where Leonidas and his warriors stood at bay against the hosts of Persia; had mused in the oracular shades of Delphi and gazed at the haunted peak of Parnassus, and looked upon all that remains of hundred-gated Thebes. It is impossible for us to follow in all this extended circuit, and over ground so rich in tradition and association. Wherever she ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams
... audacious, seemed to flash out. He opened his thin lips to speak. When old men speak, they have the air of rousing themselves from an eternal contemplation in order to do so, and what they say becomes accordingly oracular. ...
— Sacred And Profane Love • E. Arnold Bennett
... the time," he writes in "The Editor's Table" of Appleton's Journal for October, 1880, "when the theatre had a pit, where critics and wiseacres were wont to assemble and utter oracular things about the plays and the performers. The actors were in those days afraid of the Pit, especially at the Park, of the fourth bench from the orchestra, where the magnates of the pen sat watchful, and ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: Love in '76 - An Incident of the Revolution • Oliver Bell Bunce
... testimony of witnesses was frequently insisted on. X. appeared to be a chosen spiritual agent, and told us many surprising things. He affirmed that, when he took a pen in his hand, an influence ran from his shoulder downwards, and impelled him to write oracular sentences. I listened for a time, offering no observation. 'And now,' continued X, 'this power has so risen as to reveal to me the thoughts of others. Only this morning I told a friend what he was thinking of, and what he intended to do during the ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... bad fortune here," said Aglootook, endeavouring to look oracular, as he came up at that moment with Anteek. "We must go far away in that direction," he added, pointing to the right, and looking at his leader with the aspect as well as the wisdom ...
— The Walrus Hunters - A Romance of the Realms of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... clouded the skies; and on the summit, surrounded by iron guards and spectral-looking priests, stood the magic standard of the north, the image of the Raven, which flapped its wings on the coming of battle, and gave the oracular cry of victory. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various
... after perusing the Cogitata et Visa, one of the most precious of those scattered leaves out of which the great oracular volume was afterward made up, acknowledged that "in all proposals and plots in that book, Bacon showed himself a master workman"; and that "it could not be gainsaid but all the treatise over did abound with choice conceits of the present ...
— Is Shakespeare Dead? - from my Autobiography • Mark Twain
... the pure fragrance of melilot. He honored certain plants with special regard, and, over all, the pond lily, then the gentian, and the Mikania scandens, and "life-everlasting," and a bass-tree which he visited every year when it bloomed, in the middle of July. He thought the scent a more oracular inquisition than the sight—more oracular and trustworthy. The scent, of course, reveals what it concealed from the other senses. By it he detected earthiness. He delighted in echoes, and said they were almost the only kind of kindred voices that he heard. ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IX (of X) - America - I • Various
... her life her slumber was fitful and restless, long intervals of wakefulness alternating with snatches of fantastic dreams. . . . And then her mind reverted to Tom Pratt, to old Simon Burney, and to her mother's emphatic and oracular declaration that widowers are in league with Satan, and that the girls upon whom they cast the eye of supernatural fascination have no choice in the matter. "I wish I knowed ef that thar sayin' war true," she murmured, her face still turned to the western ...
— Southern Literature From 1579-1895 • Louise Manly
... simple old husband shuffling away his papers, and puzzling over cyphers and perpetually leaving the key of them lying about, and betraying again and again when he least intended it, by his mysterious becks and nods and glances and oracular sayings, that some scheme was afoot. She could have helped him considerably if he had allowed her; but he had an idea that the capacities of ladies in general went no further than their harps, their embroidery and ...
— By What Authority? • Robert Hugh Benson
... all such scorn to set a second, lesser, lower idol, where formerly they bowed in worship. Even false gods hold sway long after their images are defiled, their temples overthrown, and as the Dodonian Groves still whisper of the old oracular days, to modern travellers, so a woman's idolatry leaves her no shrine, no libation, no reverence for new divinities; mutilated though she acknowledges her Hermae, no fresh image can profane their pedestal. Memory is the high priestess who survives the wreck ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... These oracular verses, pronounced by Bampfylde with all the enthusiasm of one who was inspired, had the desired effect upon our wise man; and he left the presence of the king of the gipsies with a prodigiously high opinion of his majesty's judgment ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. 2 • Maria Edgeworth
... the tricks of acoustics may have been practised by the priests who officiated at oracular shrines, which would have awed the ignorant multitude; as in sacred groves a tree might have been made to speak by the simple contrivance of a man concealed within the hollow stem, which to outward appearance would have been considered solid. The devices ...
— Cyprus, as I Saw it in 1879 • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... the divine wife of the god, or high priestess, was the head of the harem of concubines of the god; and similarly in Babylonia the chamber of the god with the golden couch could only be visited by the priestess who slept there for oracular responses. The Egyptian gods could not be cognisant of what passed on earth {3} without being informed, nor could they reveal their will at a distant place except by sending a messenger; they were as limited as the Greek gods who required ...
— The Religion of Ancient Egypt • W. M. Flinders Petrie
... went out to seek, yet some stray godsend or rare literary windfall which may serve to excuse his indulgence in the seemingly profitless pastime of a truant disposition. It is a pure impertinence to affirm with oracular assurance what might perhaps be admissible as a suggestion offered with the due diffidence of modest and genuine scholarship; to assert on the strength of a private pedant's personal intuition that such must be the history or such the composition of a great work whose ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... in the Present what is small and what is great. Slow of faith how weak an arm may turn the iron helm of fate, But the soul is still oracular; amid the market's din. List the ominous stern whisper from the Delphic cave within,— 'They enslave their children's children who ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... are dumb! Through their oracular depths and secret nooks, To the mute supplication of her looks No mystic ...
— The Coming of the Princess and Other Poems • Kate Seymour Maclean
... he said, in the sonorous, oracular tone which he usually employed when a subject held his serious thought. "Peaceful Hart, him all same sleepum. All same sleepum 'longside snake. No seeum snake, no thinkum mebbyso catchum bite." He glanced down at his own snake-bitten foot. "Snake bite, make ...
— Good Indian • B. M. Bower
... that it was never meant to be anything else. It is wiser to admit that perhaps the author was not very clear himself, or possibly enjoyed that ambiguous attitude which might be interpreted according to the taste of his readers and the development of events. A man who deals in oracular utterances acquires instinctively a mode of speech which may shift its colour with every change of light. The texture of Disraeli's writings is so ingeniously shot with irony and serious sentiment that each tint may predominate by turns. It is impossible to suppose ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... point I climb from the oracular platform and go down through my own chosen underbrush for haphazard adventure. I renounce the platform. Whatever it may be that I find, pawpaw or may-apple or spray of willow, if you do not want it, throw it over the edge of the hill, without ado, to the ...
— The Art Of The Moving Picture • Vachel Lindsay
... them that dreams are sent among men, and also the tokens of disease and health; these last, too, being sent not only to men, but to sheep also, and other cattle. Also that it is they who are concerned with purifications and expiations and all kinds of divination and oracular predictions, ...
— A History of Science, Volume 1(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... distinct city interests. At the time when the Homeric Hymn to the Delphinian Apollo was composed (probably in the seventh century B.C.), the Pythian festival had as yet acquired little eminence. The rich and holy temple of Apollo was then purely oracular, established for the purpose of communicating to pious inquirers "the counsels of the Immortals." Multitudes of visitors came to consult it, as well as to sacrifice victims and to deposit costly offerings; but while the god delighted in ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1 • Various
... resumed Vladimir, "never contradicts his own character? In Russia the duties of my position oblige me to be reserved, secret, enveloped in mystery from head to foot, a great pontiff of science, speaking but in brief sentences and in an oracular tone; but here I am not obliged to play my role, and by a natural reaction, finding myself alone in the woods with a man of sense and heart, my tongue unloosens like a magpie's. Let us see; if I tell you my history do you promise ...
— Stories of Modern French Novels • Julian Hawthorne
... (our oracular friend who talked in the style of an oration) was with us this evening at the tea-table, and we were mentioning the fact that about thirty colleges last summer in the United States contested for the championship ...
— Around The Tea-Table • T. De Witt Talmage
... the goddess cried: 'Observe, and in the truths I speak confide; The oracular seer frequents the Pharian coast, From whose high bed my birth divine I boast; Proteus, a name tremendous o'er the main, The delegate of Neptune's watery reign. Watch with insidious care his known abode; There fast in chains constrain ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer, translated by Alexander Pope
... Now to "Prussian's" oracular pronouncements concerning the German workers. "The German poor," he puns, "are not wiser than the poor Germans, that is, they can nowhere see beyond their hearth, their factory, their district: the whole question has so far been neglected by the all-comprehending ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx
... the Oxonian was at the bottom of all this oracular mystery, and was disposed to amuse himself with the general, whose tender approaches to the widow have attracted the notice of the wag. I was a little curious, however, to know the meaning of the dark hints which had so suddenly ...
— Bracebridge Hall • Washington Irving
... the 13th century. In these stories also the beautiful Roxana, who becomes the bride of Alexander, is Darius's daughter, bequeathed to his arms by the dying monarch. Conspicuous among them again is the Legend of the Oracular Trees of the Sun and Moon, which with audible voice foretell the place and manner of Alexander's death. With this Alexandrian legend some of the later forms of the story had mixed up one of Christian origin about the Dry Tree, L'Arbre Sec. And they had ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... to the old-fashioned minds was immense. Long and far-sounding debate followed, though Emerson, with provoking self-possession, declined to argue. He simply 'announced.' This oracular attitude certainly affected some of the younger men greatly, but fortunately for the success of the new gospel one of these younger men translated the oracular into a more popular and reasoned form. Three years after Emerson's Address, Theodore Parker (1810-60) completed ...
— Unitarianism • W.G. Tarrant
... almost as dreadful an alarmist as our Cumberland cow, who is believed to have lately uttered this prophecy, delivering it with oracular propriety in verse: ...
— Colloquies on Society • Robert Southey
... his own genius is his intelligencer. His mint goes weekly, and he coins money by it. Howsoever, the more intelligent merchants do jeer him, the vulgar do admire him, holding his novels oracular; and these are usually sent for tokens or intermissive courtesies betwixt city and country. He holds most constantly one form or method of discourse. He retains some military words of art, which he shoots at random; no matter where they hit they cannot wound ...
— Character Writings of the 17th Century • Various
... "I opine with Sir Isaac Newton, Knight, and umwhile [*Late] master of his Majesty's mint, that the (pretended) science of astrology is altogether vain, frivolous, and unsatisfactory." And here he reposed his oracular jaws. ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... for autographs first began to pour in upon me, I gladly took a sheet of Delarue's creamiest note-paper and wrote thereon an oracular sentence from one of my most popular papers. After a while my replies degenerated to "Sincerely, Your Friend, Dionysius Green," and finally, (daily blessings come at last to be disregarded,) no application was favored, which did not enclose a postage-stamp. When ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 107, September, 1866 • Various
... not the ugly clamoring Nor the dumb stillness of the other homes About and opposite. For in our home Rare birds sing forth uncommon melodies; And in our home-yard a young offshoot grows, Sprung from Dodona's tree oracular! And in the garden of our home, full thick, The ironworts and snakeroots blossom on; And in our home the magic mirror shines Reflecting always in its gleaming glass The visage of the ...
— Life Immovable - First Part • Kostes Palamas
... Everybody was discontented and quarrelsome, as fearful of Eyes-in-the-hands as he was of his tribal god; many were impressed by the propaganda of Sakamata and Yabolo and the impunity with which Yabolo and Sakamata and company had quietly gone over to the enemy. Meanwhile Bakahenzie squatted in oracular silence, murmuring incantations that were prayers to the Unmentionable One interlarded with promises of the things he would accomplish for the said Deity, with solemnity and sincerity, for he felt that the result of Marufa's intrigue with the magician Moonspirit would mature ...
— Witch-Doctors • Charles Beadle
... But of this oracular statement Ted could make nothing and wisely did not try. He was quite content to splash along in Rob's wake, thinking complacently how hot and buttery the popped corn would be an ...
— The Twenty-Fourth of June • Grace S. Richmond
... said before, is rather oracular enunciation than doctrine; i.e. it is not doctrine elaborately drawn out and explained and guarded, but simply laid down as by the authority of ...
— The Lost Gospel and Its Contents - Or, The Author of "Supernatural Religion" Refuted by Himself • Michael F. Sadler
... for some time, gazing with gloomy eyes into the fire. Finally he said, speaking in an oracular manner, yet brokenly as he always did, for the English tongue was hard to him: "Jonas Harding not friend to Injin; Injin not friend to him. You friend to Crow Wing. You fight Crow Wing; fight 'um fair; when foot well we fight once ...
— With Ethan Allen at Ticonderoga • W. Bert Foster
... the oracular cow or some other one, it did not seem reasonable that she should travel a great way farther. So, whenever they reached a particularly pleasant spot on a breezy hillside, or in a sheltered vale, or flowery meadow, on the shore of a calm lake, or along the bank of a ...
— Myths That Every Child Should Know - A Selection Of The Classic Myths Of All Times For Young People • Various
... With which oracular and superhumanly wise utterance Lois closed her eyes softly again. Madge, provoked, was about to carry on the discussion, when, noticing how pale the cheek was which lay against the crimson chair cushion, ...
— Nobody • Susan Warner
... was in its death-agony, this claim to legislative power was formally confirmed by the Emperor Valentinian III (445). But for some time after the Council of Sardica the new prerogative was used with the greatest caution. The Popes of that period use every precaution to make their oracular answers inoffensive. They assure their correspondents that Rome enjoins no novelties; that she does not presume to decide any point on which tradition is silent; that she is merely executing a mandate which general councils have laid upon her. Those who evince respect ...
— Medieval Europe • H. W. C. Davis
... the stern, it would be absolutely impossible to make the vessel steer." It may not be obvious to every one how our naval philosopher derived his conclusion from his premises; but his hearers doubtless readily acquiesced in the oracular proposition, and were much amused at the idea of undertaking to steer a vessel when the power was applied ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... of his character has probably suffered by his detecting the impression he makes on those around him. There is a circle, I suppose, who look up to him as an oracle, and so he inevitably assumes the oracular manner, and speaks as if truth and wisdom were attiring themselves by his voice. Mr. Emerson has risked the doing him much mischief by putting him in print,—a trial few persons can sustain without losing their unconsciousness. But, after all, a man gifted ...
— Two Thousand Miles On An Automobile • Arthur Jerome Eddy
... Low-speakers, who seem to fancy all their acquaintance deaf, and come up so close to you that they may be said to measure noses with you, and frequently overcome you with the full exhalations of a foul breath. I would have these oracular gentry obliged to speak at a distance through a speaking-trumpet, or apply their lips to the walls of a whispering-gallery. The Wits who will not condescend to utter anything but a bon-mot, and the Whistlers or Tune-hummers, who never articulate at all, may be joined very agreeably together ...
— Talks on Talking • Grenville Kleiser
... at the oracular message, written in capitals on a sheet of paper which contained nothing else. He again examined the envelope, but the post-mark in no way helped him. He glanced at his mother, and, finding her eye upon him, folded the sheet carelessly. He glanced at his father, who had ...
— Our Friend the Charlatan • George Gissing
... I can't afford to feed you on diamonds from my sacred ring! Did you get your greedy nature from some sable Dodonean ancestress? If we had lived three thousand years ago, I might be superstitious, and construe your freak into an oracular protest against my engagement. Feathered augurs survive their shrines. Clear out! ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... in underground dwellings, communicating with each other by subterranean passages, through which they led those who wished to consult the oracle hidden in the bowels of the earth." "Not far from the lake of Avernus," says Maximus of Tyre, "was an oracular cave, which took its name from the calling up of the dead. Those who came to consult the oracle, after repeating the sacred formula and offering libations and slaying victims, called upon the spirit of the friend or relation they wished to consult. Then it appeared, ...
— Greek and Roman Ghost Stories • Lacy Collison-Morley
... himself to imitate his man. He placed himself on a chair, his head fixed, his hat coming over his eyebrows, his eyes half-shut, his arms hanging down, moving his jaw up and down like an automaton:] Gloomy, obscure, oracular as destiny ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... of authority. Criticism had been fatal to the apprehension which both had inherited concerning the authority of Scripture. From that point onward they took divergent courses. The arguments which touched the infallible and oracular authority of Scripture, for Newman established that of the Church; for Martineau they had destroyed that of the Church four hundred years ago. Martineau's sense, even of the authority of Jesus, reverent as it is, is yet no pietistic and mystical ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... that the bullets of the enemy may pass him by or slide off from his skin like drops of water. Almost every man of the three hundred East Cherokees who served in the rebellion had this or a similar ceremony performed before setting out—many of them also consulting the oracular ul[^u][n]s[^u][']t[)i] stone at the same time—and it is but fair to state that not more than two or three of the entire number were wounded ...
— The Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees • James Mooney
... nothing. He was always a good listener. He preferred to hear what other men said, to weigh their words, rather than pour out his own ideas. Lawanne sometimes liked to talk at great length, to assume the oracular vein, to analyze actions and situations, to put his finger on a particular motive and trace its origin, its most remote causation. Mills seldom talked. It was strange to hear him speak as ...
— The Hidden Places • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... produce 4,400 pounds of plantains or bananas. The cultivation of the various varieties in India, China, and the Malay Archipelago dates, says De Candolle, 'from an epoch impossible to realise.' Its diffusion, as that great but very oracular authority remarks, may go back to a period 'contemporary with or even anterior to that of the human races.' What this remarkably illogical sentence may mean I am at a loss to comprehend; perhaps M. de Candolle supposes that the banana was originally cultivated ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... immediately before the war, that he would assist them whether invoked or uninvoked; and the disorder now raging was ascribed to the intervention of their irresistible ally; while the elderly men further called to mind an oracular verse sung in the time of their youth: "The Dorian war will come, and pestilence along with it." Under the distress which suggested, and was reciprocally aggravated by these gloomy ideas, prophets were consulted, and supplications with solemn procession ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 2 • Various
... nostrums they are oracular enough, but I either comprehend 'em not, or there is miching malice and mischief in 'em. But for the most part ringing with their own emptiness. Hazlitt said well of 'em—Many are wiser and better for reading Shakspeare, but nobody was ever wiser or ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... and shakes of his ponderous head, he had prevented my being employed. Indeed, in the case of the public bodies, with all of which he had authority either as an official or as an honorary adviser, he had directly vetoed my appointment by the oracular announcement that, after ample inquiry among medical friends in London, he had satisfied himself that I was not a suitable person ...
— Doctor Therne • H. Rider Haggard
... also in Nov. ii. of the Cent nouvelles Nouvelles. Captain Lockett (p. 32) quotes Strepsiades in The Clouds {Greek} "because he cannot express the bathos of the original (in the Tale of Ja'afar and the old Badawi) without descending to the oracular language of Giacoma Rodogina, the engastrymythian prophetess." But Sterne was by no means so squeamish. The literature of this subject is extensive, beginning with "Peteriana, ou l'art de peter," which distinguishes 62 different ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... the great ignorant folk who came to visit his temple of science, and to inspect its curiosities, felt themselves insulted—not always without reason. He kept a tame maniac in the house, named Lep, and he used to regard the sayings of this personage as oracular, presaging future events, and far better worth listening to than ordinary conversation. Consequently he used to have him at his banquets and feed him himself; and whenever Lep opened his mouth to speak, every one else was peremptorily ordered to hold his tongue, so that Lep's words might be written ...
— Pioneers of Science • Oliver Lodge
... the expression, "rule with rigor," and an inference drawn from it, have an air so oracular, as quite to overcharge risibles of ordinary calibre, if such an effect were not forestalled by its impiety. It is interpreted to mean, "you shall not make him an article of property, you shall not force him ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... taste, of feeling, he listened not as a lover to his mistress, but rather as a baby to its mother; and thus, half unconsciously to himself, he taught her where her true kingdom lay,- -that the heart, and not the brain, enshrines the priceless pearl of womanhood, the oracular jewel, the 'Urim and Thummim,' before which gross man ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... continued in private life—but not uselessly, for he has been consulted from all parts of the Union on almost all subjects; and by his intimate acquaintances, his opinions have been regarded as oracular inspirations. He has also attended with care to his private duties, and these, with his correspondence, have ...
— Discourse of the Life and Character of the Hon. Littleton Waller Tazewell • Hugh Blair Grigsby
... the table Maleotti spied his master, Messer Simone. He had now disarmed, and sat, very big with meat and drink and very red of face, talking loudly to a company of obsequious gentlemen who thought, or seemed to think, his utterances oracular. A good way off, at the head of his own table, sat Messer Folco, grave and gray and smiling, his one thought seeming to be that those that came under his roof should be happy in their own way, so long as that way accorded with the decorum expected of ...
— The God of Love • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... may be rather more plausible than Aubrey's tale of Ralegh's reply to the King's boast that he could have won the succession by force: 'Would God,' cried Ralegh, 'that had been put to the trial!' 'Why?' asked James. 'Because,' was the oracular answer—'never,' says Aubrey, 'forgotten or forgiven'—'your Majesty would then have known your friends from your foes.' It is much easier to agree with the apparent meaning of Aubrey's interrupted general ...
— Sir Walter Ralegh - A Biography • William Stebbing
... can suggest no better explanation of this oracular epigram than that the tailor's bill is an ...
— The Hesperides & Noble Numbers: Vol. 1 and 2 • Robert Herrick
... and daily praises her babes with the most doating loquacity. And she does this with so grave a face that it is impossible to forbear laughing, when you hear her. She is so serious, so solemn, so convinced that every thing she utters is oracular, and so irascible if she does but so much as smell a doubt concerning the beauty and perfection of her brats, that there is no scene in the world which tickles my imagination so irresistibly as to watch her maternal visage during ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft |
