"Phrase" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... disguise himself in many ways, but he can't change his height very much, nor the colour of his eyes, nor his "regular features"'—Dave's features were not strictly regular, and it was a weakness of his always to resent this descriptive phrase—'nor his slim fingers, nor the scar on his temple close to the ...
— Against Odds - A Detective Story • Lawrence L. Lynch
... Heigho! what a phrase! These clear and precise expressions, that throw so much light on the gloom of the situation, are these yours, Felix Pyat? Did the Commune say "Pyat Lux!" Or were they yours, Pierre Denis? Or yours, Vermorel? I particularly admire the double ...
— Paris under the Commune • John Leighton
... he made use of the ultra-significant phrase. And then, in a few rapid sentences, he ran over the synopsis of that affair, beginning with some philosophy and other details that Watson could only half understand, making frequent allusions to the Jarados and other writers of prophecy; then he made some mention of his ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint
... sister-in-law, that I actually dread uttering a word to any of the girls outside the few servant-girls and matrons in my own immediate service; for they invariably spin out, what could be condensed in a single phrase, into a long interminable yarn, and they munch and chew their words; and sticking to a peculiar drawl, they groan and moan; so much so, that they exasperate me till I fly into a regular rage. Yet how are they to know that our P'ing Erh too was once like them. But when I asked her: ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... Mr. KING'S latest performance. Some hold his complaint, that the Government had introduced detectives into the precincts of the House, to have been perfectly genuine, and point to his phrase, "I speak from conviction," as a proof that he was trying to revenge himself for personal inconvenience suffered at the hands of the minions of the law. Others contend that he knew all the time the real reason for their presence—the possibility that Sinn Fein emissaries ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, August 1, 1917. • Various
... and seemed absent-minded. The young man looked at her from time to time with curiosity, for he was not used to being treated with such perfect indifference as she showed to him. He was not spoilt, as the phrase goes, but he had always been accustomed to a certain amount of attention, when he met new people, and, without being in the least annoyed, he thought it strange that this particular young lady should seem not even to listen to ...
— Adam Johnstone's Son • F. Marion Crawford
... in there will be slack time on the farm, and the farmers will seriously think of doing the hundred things that they have let slide during the summer. They will undertake this and that, 'when they get around to it.' The phrase translated is the exact equivalent to the manana of the Spaniard, the kul hojaiga of Upper India, the yuroshii of the Japanese, and the long drawled taihod of the Maori. The only person who 'gets around' in this weather is the ...
— Letters of Travel (1892-1913) • Rudyard Kipling
... of doubt. We of the National Army in Georgia regarded the removal of Johnston as equivalent to a victory for us. Three months of sharp work had convinced us that a change from Johnston's methods to those which Hood was likely to employ, was, in homely phrase, to have our enemy grasp the hot end of the poker. We knew that we should be kept on the alert and must be watchful; but we were confident that a system of aggression and a succession of attacks would soon ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V2 • Jacob Dolson Cox
... presentiment of land, which is sometimes seen off their coasts. His character as an hero of romance, somewhat of the type of Sinbad the Sailor, if not of that of Gulliver, has even injured him as a subject of serious study. There has been a sort of custom, to which may be applied a celebrated phrase of Newman, 'aged but not venerable,' of confounding the hero of the romance with the real man. It would be just as proper to identify the hero of the Pickwick Papers with a certain Mr. Pickwick, whom it was, oddly enough, the duty of one of Dickens' sons to ...
— Brendan's Fabulous Voyage • John Patrick Crichton Stuart Bute
... Office, Whitehall, has few pretensions to architectual beauty. It is, however, to use a common phrase, a commanding pile, and its association with Britain's best bulwarks—her NAVY—renders it an ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 343, November 29, 1828 • Various
... Everything is related. The thing desired is indicated by its relationship with other things. A primitive vocabulary means primitive expression, thus, the continuance of rain is expressed as rain he stop. SUN HE COME UP cannot possibly be misunderstood, while the phrase-structure itself can be used without mental exertion in ten thousand different ways, as, for instance, a native who desires to tell you that there are fish in the water and who says FISH HE STOP. It was while trading on Ysabel island that I learned the excellence ...
— The Cruise of the Snark • Jack London
... wide-spread opinion that Gnosticism was fundamentally a perversion of Christianity finds its most striking expression in the phrase of Harnack that it was "the acute secularizing or Hellenizing of Christianity" (History of Dogma, English translation, I, 226). The foundation for this representation is the later Gnosticism, which took over many Christian and Greek elements, and the opinion of Tertullian that Gnosticism ...
— A Source Book for Ancient Church History • Joseph Cullen Ayer, Jr., Ph.D.
... him Who reverences not with an excess Of faith the beauteous sex; all barren he Shall live a living death of mockery. Ah! had but words the power, what could we say Of Woman! We, rude men of violent phrase, Harsh action, even in repose inwardly harsh; Whose lives walk blustering on high stilts, removed From all the purely gracious influence Of mother earth. To single from the host Of angel forms one ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... correspondence, the phrase of—"If you will land and enter the town, I will be upon your head," is more than once addressed by Sultan Hamed to Captain Haines and seems to have been understood as a menace; but we have been informed that it rather implies, "I ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - April 1843 • Various
... Even the diaries, curiously frank and without reserve, never mentioned the name, so far as she could find, though here and there were strange allusive references, hints of a trouble that weighed her down, phrases of exasperation and defiance. One phrase, or the idea in it, was, however, much repeated in the diaries during the course of years, and towards the last almost feverishly emphasised—"Why should I bear it for one who would bear nothing for me, for his sake, who would ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... at His Excellency, who again felt the insistent hammering of that "something" he should have remembered. The phrase, "all the details," bore an ...
— Charred Wood • Myles Muredach
... night Made it a Foole, and Begger. The two Kings Equall in lustre, were now best, now worst As presence did present them: Him in eye, Still him in praise, and being present both, 'Twas said they saw but one, and no Discerner Durst wagge his Tongue in censure, when these Sunnes (For so they phrase 'em) by their Heralds challeng'd The Noble Spirits to Armes, they did performe Beyond thoughts Compasse, that former fabulous Storie Being now seene, possible enough, got ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... of scorns For men unlearned and simple phrase,) A child would bring it all its praise ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 3 (of 4) • Various
... seem as though his sterling nature rang in his genially dominant voice, and, again, as though his voice transmitted instantaneous waves of an electric current through every nerve of what, for want of a better phrase, I must perforce call his intensely alive hand. I remember once how a lady, afflicted with nerves, in the dubious enjoyment of her first experience of a "literary afternoon," rose hurriedly and, in ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... the Speculum, f^o 41a, this story ends with the phrase: Qui vidit haec scripsit et testimonium perhibet de hiis. The brother is here called Frater Jacobus ...
— Life of St. Francis of Assisi • Paul Sabatier
... benefited by such deficiency? The scheme of free trade is often denounced by its opponents as British free trade; but we respectfully suggest that if its operations lead to so serious a destruction of British interests as is now alleged, the phrase is at least a misnomer. No! as the characteristics of the crisis are common to the United States, England, and France, so the causes of that crisis are to be sought in something which is also common to the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 4, February, 1858 • Various
... previous chapter, we used the phrase "man's response to his highest inspirations" as a description of religious experience; and in responding to the appeal of Jesus, His followers pass into the characteristically Christian experience of the Divine—an experience ...
— Some Christian Convictions - A Practical Restatement in Terms of Present-Day Thinking • Henry Sloane Coffin
... anthem book, with those of Beethoven, Handel, and Mozart. We have heard excellent music sung and played at St. George's; but matters would be improved if the efforts of the choir were seconded. At present the singers have some time been what we must term, for want of a better phrase, musical performers. They are tremendously ahead of the congregation. Much of what they sing cannot be joined in by the people. Many a time the congregation have to look on and listen—ecstacised with what is being sung, wondering what is coming next, and delightfully ...
— Our Churches and Chapels • Atticus
... sooner or later, and I wasn't sure but that it was better for him to learn at an age when such things would offer no real temptations. With Ruth back of him I didn't worry much about that. Besides, the boy had let drop a phrase or two that made me suspect that even among his present associates that same ...
— One Way Out - A Middle-class New-Englander Emigrates to America • William Carleton
... system based both in its agrarian and mercantile aspects on masses of capital and on speculation, there arose a most fearful disproportion in the distribution of wealth. The often-used and often-abused phrase of a commonwealth composed of millionaires and beggars applies perhaps nowhere so completely as to the Rome of the last age of the republic; and nowhere perhaps has the essential maxim of the slave-state— that the rich man who lives by ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... gratitude of thy king shall awaken, thou wilt be sleeping the sleep of the dead. Call her, King of France, but she will not hear thee. Cite her by the apparitors to come and receive a robe of honour, but she will be found en contumace. [Footnote: In contempt is the phrase we now apply to a person who fails to appear when summoned to appear in court.] When the thunders of universal France, as even yet may happen, shall proclaim the grandeur of the poor shepherd girl that gave up all for her country, thy ear, young shepherd girl, will have been ...
— Journeys Through Bookland - Volume Four • Charles H. Sylvester
... was assembled at the house to grace the approaching nuptials. There were to be tableaux, charades, boating-trips, riding-excursions, amusements of all sorts—the whole to conclude (in the play-bill phrase) with the grand climax of the wedding. Mr. Streatfield arrived late; dinner was ready: he had barely time to dress, and then bustle into the drawing-room, just as the guests were leaving it, to offer his arm to Miss Jane—all greetings with friends and introductions to ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... Sam with ruthless candor what the world called his conduct: dishonest, idiotic, ungrateful. He had a terrifying string of adjectives, and through them all the boy looked out of the window. Once, at a particularly impassioned period, he glanced at his father with interest; that phrase would be fine in a play, he reflected. Then he looked out ...
— The Awakening of Helena Richie • Margaret Deland
... day of glory is departed. The newspapers, it is true, still keep up the phrase. They talk of a battalion "covering itself with glory." But the men themselves do not talk so. They know too well what it all means. They see no glory in covering themselves with the blood of their brothers of the opposing trenches; with whom a few moments before ...
— NEVER AGAIN • Edward Carpenter
... looked at him, that practically I was looking at his master, for I have known many cases where even the personal appearance of the two was almost identical, which may have given rise to the English phrase, 'Like master, like man.' The servant was a little more haughty, a little less kind, a little more exclusive, a little less confidential, a little more condescending, a little less human, a little more Tory, and altogether ...
— The Triumphs of Eugene Valmont • Robert Barr
... his saying, "Thy body is all vice and thy mind all virtue." As the actions of the body proceed from the mind, it is difficult to conceive how the one can be impure without the other. At least Beauclerk did not appear to relish the distinction, and he was angry at the phrase. However, Johnson's attempt to appease him was a curious specimen of his magniloquence. "Nay, sir, Alexander the Great, marching in triumph into Babylon, could not have desired to have had ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 55, No. 340, February, 1844 • Various
... had been outwitted by the priest. Hawes had sneaked after Fry to beg him for Heaven's sake—that was the phrase he used—not to produce his journal. Fry thought this very hard, and it took Hawes ten minutes to coax him over. Mr. Eden had calculated on this, and worked with the attested copy, while Hawes was wasting his time suppressing the ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade
... say 'mother' instead of 'father,' but he remembered in time that Hermas had early lost the happiness of caressing a mother, and he had hastily amended the phrase. He was one of those to whom it is so painful to hurt another, that they never touch a wounded soul unless to heal it, divining the seat of even ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... This last phrase has often caused the writer to smile, when he has heard a countryman say, with a satisfied air, as is so often the case in this good republic, that "such or such a thing here is good enough for me;" meaning that he questions if there be anything of the sort that ...
— The Crater • James Fenimore Cooper
... rich—'left comfortably,' as the phrase goes, but with a clause which prevented her marrying again without losing her fortune; and I could gather from various hints that Dr. Fortescue-Langley, whoever he might be, was bleeding her to some tune, using her soul and her inner self as his financial lancet. I also noticed ...
— Miss Cayley's Adventures • Grant Allen
... show off. One of these, a brawny young six-foot Irishman named Jim, used to punch old Thumper pretty roughly, when he had a large audience. Jim was neither a bad-hearted nor cruel fellow; he simply had a body too large for his disposition. In the phrase of the West, he was "staggering with strength," and in Thumper he found a chance to work off his superfluous nervous energy—also to occupy the centre of our local stage for the brief time of train-stop. If it is love that makes the world go round, certainly vanity first put ...
— Red Saunders' Pets and Other Critters • Henry Wallace Phillips
... you kindly," said Grandma Padgett in old-fashioned phrase. "It's growing risky for me to sleep too much in the open night air. At my age folks must favor themselves, and I'd like a bed to-night, if it is a tavern bed, and a set, table, if the vittles are tavern vittles. And we can ...
— Old Caravan Days • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... village schoolmaster, who grew up in a shoemaker's shop, and whose boyish games were played in the street of a Welsh hamlet remote from all the refinements of civilization and all the clangours of industrialism, announced to a breathless Europe without any pomposity of phrase and with but a brief and contemptuous gesture of dismissal the passing away from the world's stage of the Hapsburgs and Hohenzollerns—those ancient, long glorious, and most puissant houses whose history for an aeon was the history ...
— The Mirrors of Downing Street - Some Political Reflections by a Gentleman with a Duster • Harold Begbie
... to Miss Richland. Never so happy as when he imagines himself a martyr. He loves a funeral better than a festival, and delights to think that the world is going to rack and ruin. His favorite phrase ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... appear, you learn more about Rome from foreigners than from natives. Unfortunately, such information as you may acquire in this way is almost always of a suspicious character. Almost every one in Rome judges of what he sees or hears according, in German phrase, to some stand-point of his own, either political or artistic or theological, as the case may be. As to the foreign converts, it is only natural that, as in most cases they have sacrificed everything for the Papal faith, they should therefore look at everything from ...
— Rome in 1860 • Edward Dicey
... His Majesty had gone as far as his conscience would permit, and he chose rather to suffer banishment or death, than yield to abolish the church he had sworn to defend, as Parliament now required him to do, in the phrase of "casting out an idle, unsound, unprofitable, and scandalous ministry, and providing a sound, godly, profitable, and preaching ministry, in every congregation through the land." Yet he so far conceded as to make an offer of reconciliation, secretly convinced that the ...
— The Loyalists, Vol. 1-3 - An Historical Novel • Jane West
... occasion, the scenery is not ready, but a flight of steep steps, essential to the action, is placed far back in a position to left of the stage. As "Becket" has never been played before, there are no traditions whatever to guide actors or scenic artists, and each movement, phrase, gesture, and intonation, must be "created." Mr. Irving picks up a huge battle-axe and hatchet, and carefully plans the details of his own murder. Having decided how to die, he thoughtfully surveys the steps up which the frightened monks are supposed ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III, March 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... hope for a man who, when sober, will not concede or acknowledge that he was ever drunk. But when a man will say (in the apt words of the phrase-distiller), "I had a beautiful skate on last night," you will have to put stuff in his coffee as well as ...
— The Trimmed Lamp and Others • O Henry
... LOVE the old melodious lays Which softly melt the ages through, The songs of Spenser's golden days, Arcadian Sidney's silvery phrase, Sprinkling our noon of time ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... Cor. 9:11), "If we have sown unto you spiritual things, is it a great matter if we reap your carnal things?" [thus implying that on the contrary "it is no great matter if we reap your carnal things"] [*The phrase in the brackets is omitted in the Leonine edition]. For this debt is the principle on which is based the commandment of the Church about the payment of tithes. Now whatever man possesses comes under the designation of carnal things. Therefore ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... to ask why the big Planeteer was dubious, but he was too tired to phrase the question. He contented himself ...
— Rip Foster in Ride the Gray Planet • Harold Leland Goodwin
... of amateurs on the modest success which attended their efforts. Most of the performers are well-known to the Billsbury public. Alderman TOLLAND, as the heavy father, provoked screams of laughter by the studied pomposity of his manner. His unctuous rendering of the catch-phrase, "Constitutional Progress," has lost none of its old force. Mr. CHORKLE was, perhaps, not so successful as we have sometimes seen him in his representation of a real Colonel, but the scene in which he attacked and routed LINDLEY ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100, April 18, 1891 • Various
... making them appear far greater sharers in it than they really were. What was in truth a monologue seemed to be a brilliantly sustained conversation, in which Maddison himself was at once the promoter and the background. On his part there was not a single faulty phrase or unmusical expression. Every idea he sprang upon them was clothed in picturesque garb, and artistically conceived. It was the outpouring of a richly stored, cultured mind—the ...
— The New Tenant • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... he repeated, this time speaking in Chinese and using a phrase which had a more delicate ...
— The Daffodil Mystery • Edgar Wallace
... hackneyed, borrowed expression, but demanded exact portraiture; and nothing vexed him more than to hear one of them spoil and make worthless what he or she had seen, by reporting it in some stale phrase which had been used by everybody. This refusal to take the trouble to watch the presentment to the mind of anything which had been placed before it, and to reproduce it in its own lines and colours was, as he said, nothing but falsehood, ...
— Mark Rutherford's Deliverance • Mark Rutherford
... which prove that the ox and cow have a musical ear, as the phrase is. Professor Bell says that he has often, when a boy, tried the effect of the music of the flute on cows, and always observed that it produced great apparent enjoyment. Instances have been known of the fiercest bulls having been subdued and calmed ...
— Stories about Animals: with Pictures to Match • Francis C. Woodworth
... statuette, but less curved. He found himself watching for her every time as she came round, and finally a thought darted across his mind—a nymph on fire. Why!—he chuckled softly to himself, pleased by the apt phrase and feeling clever—that was what it was, by gad! But where on earth had she got a gown exactly like the one which ...
— The Privet Hedge • J. E. Buckrose
... by them, that yet, taken literally, are not scientifically true. The words, "Sun rises," and "Sun sets," and "Moon rises," and "Moon sets," occur in every page; there are two pages—those devoted to the months of March and September—in which the phrase occurs, "Sun crosses the equinoctial line;" and further, in the other pages, such phrases as "Sun enters Aries," "Sun enters Taurus," "Sun enters Gemini," &c., &c., are not unfrequent. The phrase, "new moon," is also of common ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... last anagram required the substitution of a z for an s),—were a never-ending marvel to Colleville. Raising the anagram to the height of a science, he declared that the destiny of every man was written in the words or phrase given by the transposition of the letters of his names and titles; and his patriotism struggled hard to suppress the fact—signal evidence for his theory—that in Horatio Nelson, "honor est a Nilo." Ever since the accession of Charles X., he had bestowed much thought on the king's anagram. ...
— Bureaucracy • Honore de Balzac
... in merited contempt. For my own part, I always had a dread of the man. That odious smile, forever hanging on those large red lips, singularly annoyed me; that imperturbable gayety, exhibited on all occasions of life, troubled me like the constant presence of a hideous phantom; that phrase, which he appended like a moral to every thing he did, that detested phrase, 'A capital joke,' sounded in my ears as doleful and sombre as the Trappists' motto, 'Brother, ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, January 1844 - Volume 23, Number 1 • Various
... in his first epistle to Timothy acknowledges he had been a blasphemer and a persecutor, But (saith he) I obtained mercy, because I did it ignorantly in unbelief. Now what is the meaning of the phrase [I did it ignorantly] but only this? My fault was occasioned from a misinformed Folly, not from a deliberate malice. What signifies [I obtained mercy] but only that I should not otherwise have obtained it had not folly and ...
— In Praise of Folly - Illustrated with Many Curious Cuts • Desiderius Erasmus
... iron, which they held firmly in their two hands, with the points projecting far before them. The men were arranged in lines, one behind the other, and all facing the enemy—sixteen lines, and a thousand in each line, or, as it is expressed in military phrase, a thousand in rank and sixteen in file, so that the ...
— Alexander the Great - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... to a large extent caused by emigration. A number of devoted and noble-hearted men, realizing that it was hopeless to expect that the potato disease would disappear, and that consequently the holdings had become "uneconomic" (to use the phrase now so popular) as no other crop was known which could produce anything like the same amount of food, saw that the only course to prevent a continuation of the famine would be to remove a large section of the people to a happier country. In this good work the Quakers, who ...
— Is Ulster Right? • Anonymous
... and some shy confidences intrusted to Mrs. de la Vere, she had resolved to tell him that if he left the Maloja at once—an elastic phrase in lovers' language—and came to her in London next month, she would have an answer ready. She persuaded herself that there was no other honorable way out of an embarrassing position. She had come to Switzerland for work, not for love making. Spencer would probably wish ...
— The Silent Barrier • Louis Tracy
... a young, and a pretty large—or, in other phrase, small—family of my own, I hesitated at first how to proceed; but a moment's reflection taught me the necessity of acting rather than of thinking; and I gathered up the little innocent in my arms, and hastened back, with all possible speed, to the manse. The little hands ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume III • Various
... spiritual. It is true that they do sometimes speak of the sun as the 'garment of the Spirit', but it is a vague term, and what they really adore is the fiery orb himself. They also call him the 'hope of eternity', but here again the meaning is vague, and I doubt if the phrase conveys any very clear impression to their minds. Some of them do indeed believe in a future life for the good — I know Nyleptha does firmly — but it is a private faith arising from the promptings of the spirit, not an essential of their creed. ...
— Allan Quatermain • by H. Rider Haggard
... been born; Mr. Walter looked a little confused; he had graduated several years before, and his classics were rusty. I felt that my pedagogical position made it incumbent upon me to take immediate action, but for the life of me I could not think of an appropriate phrase. ...
— A Bicycle of Cathay • Frank R. Stockton
... women, and by means of the individual problems lead these women into the larger view of life and into an understanding of the androcentric culture. 3. Article on Socialism most concise, clearest and most convincing she has ever read. In this I heartily agree." * * * "4. The trite phrase about 'not one dull word from cover to cover' applies literally and without the slightest exaggeration to this number of ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... phrase "to eat humble pie," used to signify a forced humiliation, owe its origin to the "umble ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 4, Saturday, November 24, 1849 • Various
... left the real Stair idly tossing stones into the water, in order to go into the cool kitchen of Tower Rathan, to sit on one of the ancient oaken chests, a row of which ran round the walls, and hear tales of the dare-devil Stair, and especially to listen for the respectful repetition of her favourite phrase, "Your husband, madame!" ...
— Patsy • S. R. Crockett
... rare, these halcyon days, When earth's a paradise rose-petalled, For you to chill us with a phrase: "The further outlook ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, September 29th, 1920 • Various
... ages of fable, the fox has been the principal hero. The most ancient fables on record, those of Lokman, the Arabian, from whom AEsop took most of his, gives him a very conspicuous place among the crafty courtiers of the lion. The chief phrase of which the wily flatterer makes use, as he bows with affected humility to his sovereign, is, "Oh, Father of Beauty," by which indirect compliment he generally gains his wishes. The early German writers have also chosen him as the principal hero of various histories, and the ...
— Anecdotes of the Habits and Instinct of Animals • R. Lee
... definite idea of where we were going, or what we expected to find, or why we went in one direction more than another. In fact, we proceeded on that eminently simple principle which is couched in the well-known and time-honoured phrase, ...
— Freaks on the Fells - Three Months' Rustication • R.M. Ballantyne
... one word in the language, that word was swell. Accordingly, he glared haughtily across the table at Mrs. Lloyd Avalons, noting, as he did so, the scornful cadence of her voice over the final phrase. ...
— The Dominant Strain • Anna Chapin Ray
... slighter sigh. Her face assumed a gentle melancholy, as if she were pained at the exhibition of a weakness of her sex; yet it was unnecessary to be an acute observer to read there the hope that Lucien's significant phrase had not by any chance escaped ...
— A Daughter of To-Day • Sara Jeannette Duncan (aka Mrs. Everard Cotes)
... feeling of the morning after. There are few men in this world of abundant sin who will not know what the phrase means. The fumes of the night had evaporated; he was quite sober now, quite free from excitement. He saw what he had done, and it seemed to ...
— Damaged Goods - A novelization of the play "Les Avaries" • Upton Sinclair
... wonderful "but" to put in here. But, while waiting He puts all His limitless power at our disposal. If that simple sentence could be put into letters of living flame, its tremendous meaning might burn into our hearts. When Paul piled up phrase on phrase in his eager attempt to have his Asiatic friends in and around Ephesus take in the limitless power of the ascended Christ, he added the significant words, "to the Church."[27] All that power is for the use, and at the disposal, ...
— Quiet Talks on the Crowned Christ of Revelation • S. D. Gordon
... regarding the possibility of becoming more general. Peculiar methods of producing spiritual ecstacy, as described by Lord Tennyson and others. The Power and Presence of God, as a reality. The dissolution of race barriers. The effacement of the sense of sin among the Illuminati. What is meant by the phrase "naked and unashamed." Will such a state ever exist on the earth? Efforts of those who have experienced Cosmic Consciousness to express the experience; the strange similarity found in all attempts. Is there any evidence that Cosmic ...
— Cosmic Consciousness • Ali Nomad
... on a quizzical expression. "How do you mean? I was about to agree with you until you tacked that last phrase on. What does point of view have to ...
— Anything You Can Do ... • Gordon Randall Garrett
... calm, satirical, determined self again. But Timmy felt, perhaps for the first time in his life, deeply conscious of sin. His mother's phrase made him feel very uneasy. Had he really pierced her heart—could a mother's heart be permanently injured by ...
— What Timmy Did • Marie Adelaide Belloc Lowndes
... who had lost his children, and had never found any consolation. And so I would read, or rather sing his sentences in my brain, with rather more dolce, rather more lento than he himself had, perhaps, intended, and his simplest phrase would strike my ears with something peculiarly gentle and loving in its intonation. More than anything else in the world I cherished his philosophy, and had pledged myself to it in lifelong devotion. It made me impatient to reach the age when I should ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... severity, has been brought forward in proof of his falsehood. You shall tell a story about a very little man, and say that he is only thirty-six inches. You know very well that he is more than four feet high. That will be a "mendaciunculum," according to Cicero. The phrase has been passed on from one enemy to another, till the little fibs of Cicero's recommending have been supposed to be direct lies suggested by him to all advocates, and therefore continually used ...
— Life of Cicero - Volume One • Anthony Trollope
... nice," she told him, making her phrase less commonplace by a glance of her wide, appealing eyes. "Now, I suppose, you will go on across ...
— Wild Oranges • Joseph Hergesheimer
... the captain equal clearness but more fire. Both see that the only safety is in attack. They answer our questions quite differently, the lieutenant with a crisp completeness that leaves nothing to inquire but much to ponder on, the captain with an illuminating phrase that humanizes everything and brings instant understanding. Their men will go wherever they send them in a fight, for the lieutenant because they know he must be right, for the captain because ...
— At Plattsburg • Allen French
... whether this tradition be well founded, or whether it has not, as Mr. Maundrell and other writers suspect, originated in the misinterpretation of a very common Greek phrase. Our Saviour is said to have taken with him Peter, James, and John, and brought them into a high mountain "apart;" from which it has been rather hastily inferred that the description must apply ...
— Palestine or the Holy Land - From the Earliest Period to the Present Time • Michael Russell
... the conceit!" By that one futile phrase Mary V owned herself defeated in the first ...
— Skyrider • B. M. Bower
... person's death they say, nen matti, matti; nen idup, bekraja: kallo sampi janji'nia, apa buli buat?—Those who are dead, are dead; those who survive must work: if his allotted time was expired, what resource is there? The latter phrase they always make use of to express their sense of inevitability, and has more force than any translation of it ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... This scene is strictly historical. The army knew in what manner the emperor had rewarded Marshal Lefebvre, and it became a cant-phrase for soldiers who wished to borrow money of their comrades: "Have you any ...
— Napoleon and the Queen of Prussia • L. Muhlbach
... of experiments on the thickness of skin of that wonderful little wind-bag —. The way that second rate amateur poses as a man of science, having authority as a sort of papistical Scotch dominie, bred a minister, but stickit, really "rouses my corruption." What a good phrase that is. I am cursed with a lot of it, and any fool ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 3 • Leonard Huxley
... the Silver Foxes was haunted by that letter. The darkness, the breeze, the soothing music of crickets and locusts outside his little tent dissipated his anger, as the voices of nature are pretty sure to do, and made him see straight, to use Tom's phrase. ...
— Tom Slade at Temple Camp • Percy K. Fitzhugh
... readers have often heard the phrase, 'The old man of the sea,' which is only another term for a weight that we have taken upon ourselves and cannot shake off. Thus, if a man is in debt, and cannot get clear, the debt is said to be a veritable 'old man of the sea' to him ...
— Chatterbox, 1905. • Various
... girl was moving hastily away, when she was suddenly, in nautical phrase, 'brought to' by a subdued shriek ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... him strangely, as if for the first time they saw that his mustache was gray, that his brow was not smooth like theirs, that there were crow's-feet at the corners of his kindly eyes. They could not phrase the vague feeling that haunted their hearts, or they would have said that Tonelli, in offering to marry, had voluntarily turned his back upon his youth; that love, which would only have brought a richer bloom to their age, had ...
— A Fearful Responsibility and Other Stories • William D. Howells
... eiltheias" i.e., the truth which is the rule for everything claiming to be Christian. Apparently, this "rule of truth" was the sum of doctrines which every Christian received and confessed at his baptism. The very phrase "rule of truth" implies that it was a concise and definite formulation of the chief Christian truths. For "canon, rule," was the term employed by the ancient Church to designate such brief sentences as were adopted by synods for the practise ...
— Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church • Friedrich Bente
... this be a general signification of the word, its more precise and appropriate use in the Gospel is expressed by the phrase, "believing that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God." Here the general and the particular use are necessarily blended. Faith is belief—but belief in "the truth as it is in Jesus." To believe, in the ordinary sense, is to admit a fact, to assent to the statement of an accredited or respectable witness; ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. II • Francis Augustus Cox
... planning. For years she prepared herself to inflict a crushing blow with all the weight of her powerful army and navy and establish herself as the mistress of the world. On this she was willing to stake her very existence. To use a phrase made famous by one of her leading military writers, Germany had decided upon "world ...
— A School History of the Great War • Albert E. McKinley, Charles A. Coulomb, and Armand J. Gerson
... these are the words you chose! And yet a simple choice; you did not know You would not write again. If you had known— But then, it does not matter,—and indeed If you had known there was so little time You would have dropped your pen and come to me And this page would be empty, and some phrase Other than this would hold my wonder now. Yet, since you could not know, and it befell That these are the last words your fingers wrote, There is a dignity some might not see In this, "I picked the first sweet-pea to-day." To-day! Was there an opening bud ...
— Renascence and Other Poems • Edna St. Vincent Millay
... Lamb's word for it; but the late W.J. Craig found for the last line a nearer parallel than Bowles'. In William Vallans' "Tale of the Two Swannes" (1590), which is quoted in Leland's Itinerary, Hearne's edition, is the phrase: "The fruitful fields of pleasant Hertfordshire." Lamb quotes his own line in ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb IV - Poems and Plays • Charles and Mary Lamb
... pictured phrase to tell Our sorrowing hearts' desire; The shattered harp, the broken shell, ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... at the tiny leaves, already in darkness, but standing out sharply against the rosy sky; in the drawing-room Sofya sat at the piano continually playing over and over again some favourite, passionately pathetic phrase from Beethoven; the ill-natured old lady snored peacefully, sitting on the sofa; in the dining-room, which was flooded by a glow of lurid light, Vera was bustling about getting tea; the samovar hissed merrily as though it were pleased at something; the ...
— A Sportsman's Sketches - Volume II • Ivan Turgenev
... possibly he had reason to suppose that Fellowes loved her and might prove no mean rival, but it seemed evident that he was not the man expected to-night. Sydney Fellowes bowed over her hand presently, murmured some conventional phrase, and passed on; but from a corner, and unobserved, he watched her. When she passed into another room he followed her at a distance, and took note of every man and woman with whom she talked. He saw that she was restless, for who was there who could understand ...
— The Brown Mask • Percy J. Brebner
... food, the best reason for taking it, is to make up for the wastes from the general activities; and this is a process in the order of Nature that actually tires the entire brain system, or, in the common phrase, the whole body, unless the stomach has powers not derived ...
— The No Breakfast Plan and the Fasting-Cure • Edward Hooker Dewey
... Scorner, deserves mention chiefly as being perhaps the earliest specimen of a Moral-Play in-which some attempt is made at individual character. The piece is somewhat remarkable, also, in having been such a popular favourite, that the phrase "Hick Scorner's jests" grew into use as a proverb, to signify the profane scurrility with which certain persons treated the Scriptures in the ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... lived with found her trying. "A very trying person" was the phrase that went the round about her, "always criticizing small arrangements about the meals and the housekeeping," for Henrietta could not at first reconcile herself to having no authority to exert, and this jangling was not ...
— The Third Miss Symons • Flora Macdonald Mayor
... London School Board, I said, in the course of a speech, that our business was to provide a ladder, reaching from the gutter to the university, along which every child in the three kingdoms should have the chance of climbing as far as he was fit to go. This phrase was so much bandied about at the time, that, to say truth, I am rather tired of it; but I know of no other which so fully expresses my belief, not only about education in general, but about technical ...
— Science & Education • Thomas H. Huxley
... sentence is introduced by a phrase consisting in part of a noun in the plural, or several nouns in the singular or plural, and, especially, where the subject follows the verb; care must be taken to keep the nominative well in mind, so that the verb may be in strict accord ...
— Slips of Speech • John H. Bechtel
... phrase—the mettle of the pasture—belongs rather to our century than to his, more to Darwin than to the theatre of that time. What most men are thinking of now, if they think at all, is of our earth, a small grass-grown planet hung in space. ...
— The Mettle of the Pasture • James Lane Allen
... adventures. On his own years of the wild oat St. Augustine dilates in a style which still has charm: but Knox, if he sowed wild oats, is silent as the tomb. If he has anything to repent, it is not to the world that he confesses. About the days when he was "one of Baal's shaven sort," in his own phrase; when he was himself an "idolater," and a priest of the altar: about the details of his conversion, Knox is mute. It is probable that, as a priest, he examined Lutheran books which were brought in with other merchandise from Holland; read the Bible for himself; and failed to find Purgatory, the Mass, ...
— John Knox and the Reformation • Andrew Lang
... doubtless he whom More (Works, p. 355.) calls his "brother" (i.e. his sister's husband), joining him with Rochester (i.e. Bp. Fisher), as in this passage, on account of his great zeal in checking the progress of the earlier Reformation; but what is the allusion in the phrase "with his bloudye bishoppe christen catte," &c., I am unable to divine. Neither in the Supplicacion of Soules, nor in the reply to the "nameles heretike," have I discovered the slightest clue ...
— Notes and Queries 1850.03.23 • Various
... what may be called an aesthetic point of view as to the best mode of accomplishing it. For some of the usual modes he expressed abhorrence, as being so ugly; and on the whole considered—I well remember the phrase, for he used it more than once—that a dagger—and on one of those occasions he took up the Indian weapon already described and said—'such as this now,'—was 'the most gentleman-like usher into ...
— Wilfrid Cumbermede • George MacDonald
... picture of Ichabod Crane in "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow"; but in our model the people are rather typical than individual, and Hawthorne devotes but little space to their external characteristics. A word or a phrase suffices to tell us all that is necessary to enable our minds to body them forth. Even the hero is outwardly distinguished only by a melancholy expression—a slight of which no school-girl "authoress" would have been guilty. It is more often necessary ...
— Short Story Writing - A Practical Treatise on the Art of The Short Story • Charles Raymond Barrett |
