"Tower of Babel" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... excluded. The juniors took possession of the play-room, and relieved their spirits by games which made the maximum of noise. Several of the intermediates peeped in, but, finding the place a mixture of a bear-garden and the Tower of Babel, they retired to the sanctuary of their own form-room, where they sat making half-hearted efforts to read or paint, and grousing ...
— A harum-scarum schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... the same way, if he had decided that God and immortality did not exist, he would at once have become an atheist and a socialist. For socialism is not merely the labor question, it is before all things the atheistic question, the question of the form taken by atheism to-day, the question of the tower of Babel built without God, not to mount to heaven from earth but to set up heaven on earth. Alyosha would have found it strange and impossible to go on living as before. It is written: "Give all that thou hast to the poor and follow Me, if thou ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... been predicted beforehand of raw troops, or which, indeed, General Scott himself had not foreboded? That was not an especially American disgrace. Every nationality under heaven was represented there, and an alarm among the workmen on the Plains of Shinar that the foundations of the Tower of Babel were settling could not have set in motion a more polyglot stampede. The way to blot out Bull Run is as our brave Massachusetts and Pennsylvania men did at Ball's Bluff, with their own blood, poured only too ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 50, December, 1861 • Various
... dispersed, more than four thousand years ago, Nimrod and a large party traveled three or four hundred miles, and settled where the great city of Babylon afterwards stood. Nimrod built that city. He also began to build the famous Tower of Babel, but circumstances over which he had no control put it out of his power to finish it. He ran it up eight stories high, however, and two of them still stand, at this day—a colossal mass of brickwork, rent down the centre ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... geyser, and when his linguistic power got under full headway he fairly tore up all the tongues by their roots and trampled them under foot in the rush of his stinging invective. Although of Italian origin, "Gassy" was born near the site of the Tower of Babel, and its propinquity and influence gave him that varied volubility in expressing fine shades of meaning in many languages that made him the pride of the profession of which he was a distinguished light. His ebullitions were frequently hurled at the "boots" for neglecting ...
— A Fantasy of Mediterranean Travel • S. G. Bayne
... BABEL—Nimrod, the son of Cush, an Ethiopian, attempted to build the Tower of Babel (Gen. x. 8-10 xi. 4-9). One hundred and two years after the flood, in the land of Shinar—an extensive and fertile plain, lying between Mesopotamia on the west and Persia on the east, and watered by the Euphrates,—mankind being all of one language, one color, and one religion,—they agree ...
— History of the Negro Race in America From 1619 to 1880. Vol 1 - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George W. Williams
... fellow-travelers, who can never decide what nation we belong to. Johan talks Danish to me; we talk French to the governess, German to the valet, Italian to my maid, and English alternately. I think we would have puzzled the builders of the tower of Babel at that confusing moment when they all burst forth ...
— The Sunny Side of Diplomatic Life, 1875-1912 • Lillie DeHegermann-Lindencrone
... ready to act when those on the stage cease that occupation, gave a splendid imitation of the historic last scene at the Tower of Babel. Having accomplished this to its evident satisfaction, the audience proceeded, like the closing phrase of the "Goetterdaemmerung" Dead March, to become ...
— The Fifth String, The Conspirators • John Philip Sousa
... household effects which had no business in a bedroom. It was, indeed, used as a storehouse for such wares as the proprietor of the shop only offered to a chosen few. The atmosphere of the room must have been a very Tower of Babel, where strange foreign bacilli from all parts of the world rose up and ...
— Roden's Corner • Henry Seton Merriman
... beyond that." "As it will be quite an undertaking to change the orbit, said Deepwaters, "we shall have time meanwhile to absorb or run out all inferior races, so that we shall not make the mistake of extending the Tower of Babel." "He is putting on his war-paint," said Stillman, "and will soon want a planet to himself." "I see no necessity for even changing the orbit," said Bearwarden, "except for the benefit of those that remain. If this attempt succeeds, it can doubtless be repeated. An increase in eccentricity ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds • J. J. Astor
... about your Tower of Babel! It wasn't in the same class as that row. Twenty men trying to talk all at once!" growled Jerry, ...
— The Outdoor Chums After Big Game - Or, Perilous Adventures in the Wilderness • Captain Quincy Allen
... will be the ideal setting for my treasures. There be it that the public shall throng to steep itself in the splendour of possibilities, beholding, under glass, and perhaps in excellent preservation, Penelope's web and the original designs for the Tower of Babel, the draft made by Mr. Asquith for a reformed House of Lords and the notes jotted down by the sometime German Emperor for a proclamation from Versailles to the citizens of Paris. There too shall be the MS. of that fragmentary ...
— And Even Now - Essays • Max Beerbohm
... farther on, pale, frightened creatures, motionless, bowed down, and grief-stricken. Here were women, with glowing cheeks and sparkling eyes, shouting over their hero king. There, the people wept and moaned; their king had disappeared, was a prisoner, or dead. As at the Tower of Babel, the people spoke in a thousand tongues, and no one listened to another; every one was lost—blinded by his own passionate ...
— Frederick The Great and His Family • L. Muhlbach
... "Excursion" (I think the quarto holds five hundred pages), Has given a sample from the vasty version Of his new system to perplex the sages; 'Tis poetry—at least by his assertion, And may appear so when the dog-star rages— And he who understands it would be able To add a story to the Tower of Babel. ...
— English Satires • Various
... a corps-student," said the one—"he is still innocent. But what does that matter nowadays! It is the age of the masses: they lie on their belly before everything that is massive. And so also in politicis. A statesman who rears up for them a new Tower of Babel, some monstrosity of empire and power, they call 'great'—what does it matter that we more prudent and conservative ones do not meanwhile give up the old belief that it is only the great thought that gives greatness to an action ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... Tower of Babel, of which an old Author says, there were the Foundations to be seen in his time, which looked like a spacious Mountain; what could be more noble than the Walls of Babylon, its hanging Gardens, and its Temple to Jupiter ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... numberless bodyless heads rolling about around me, and of people being burned alive, until I finally woke up next morning with a fearful shock, and the thought that I was being precipitated from the top of the Tower of Babel. ...
— Corea or Cho-sen • A (Arnold) Henry Savage-Landor
... of various scholars have reproduced, in a more or less perfect form, from the legendary tablets, the Chaldaean account of the Creation of the World, of an ancestral Paradise and the Tree of Life with its angel guardians, of the Deluge, and of the Tower of Babel. [Footnote: Consult especially George Smith's The Chaldaean Account of Genesis; see also Records of the Past, Vol. VII. ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... wars. Young men, young boys, beware of schoolmasters; They will infect you, mar you, blear your eyes: They seek to lay the curse of God on you, Namely, confusion of languages, Wherewith those that the Tower of Babel built Accursed were in the world's infancy. Latin, it was the speech of infidels; Logic hath nought to say in a true cause; Philosophy is curiosity; And Socrates was therefore put to death, Only ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VIII (4th edition) • Various
... hands in despair. The wheel-barrows were easily disposed of—nor was there much greater difficulty with the gigs and shandrydans. But the hackney-coaches stood confoundedly in the way—and a wagon, drawn by four horses, and heaped up to the very sky with beer-barrels, like the Tower of Babel or Babylon, did indeed give us pause—but ere we had leisure to ruminate on the shortness of human life, we broke through between the leaders and the wheels with a crash of leathern breeching, dismounted collars, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, - Issue 286, December 8, 1827 • Various
... number of gold plates, eight inches long and seven wide, nearly as thick as tin, fastened together by three rings, and bearing inscriptions, in "Reformed Egyptian," relative to the history of America "from its first settlement by a colony that came from the Tower of Babel at the confusion of tongues, to the beginning of the 5th century of the Christian era." These inscriptions were originally got up by a prophet named Mormon were, as before stated, found by Joseph Smith, were read off by him to a man rejoicing ...
— Our Churches and Chapels • Atticus |
