"Phrase" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... an hour later he made his appearance at Hemerlingue's, making a despairing gesture in the banker's direction as he entered, and approached the baroness, stammering the ready-made phrase that he had heard repeated so often on the evening of his own ball: "His wife was very ill—in despair that she could not—" She did not give him time to finish, but rose slowly, like a long, slender snake in the crosswise folds of her clinging skirt, and said, in her schoolgirl ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... milkmen do not come out after five in the morning. This irritated Constable Plimmer. You talk of a man 'going home with the milk' when you mean that he sneaks in in the small hours of the morning. If all milkmen were like Alf Brooks the phrase ...
— The Man with Two Left Feet - and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... and hundreds of other medical terms, "change of life" is a convenient phrase to cover the doctor's ignorance. No matter what ailments befall a woman during the years from forty to fifty, may the causes be ever so obscure, the diagnosis is easy. "You are in the climacteric, you are suffering from the change ...
— Nature Cure • Henry Lindlahr
... afternoon you were saying you had become reconciled to my vice—that you had canonized it along with me—wasn't that your phrase?" This indifferently, without turning toward me, and as if she were thinking ...
— The Deluge • David Graham Phillips
... occasionally were made use of on the lower deck. He made no observation, but occasionally looked over the side, to see whether the brig went through the water. This she did slowly for about ten minutes, when it fell a perfect calm—so that, to use a common sea phrase, he gained little by his motion. About half-past one, a slight breeze from the opposite quarter sprung up—we turned round to it—it increased—the fog blew away, and, in a quarter of an hour, the chase was again visible, now upon our lee beam. The ...
— Peter Simple and The Three Cutters, Vol. 1-2 • Frederick Marryat
... one. What would my dear father have done if I had? but simply to show you how the very people we think the least of frequently become our best friends; the "weak things of the earth confounding those that are mighty," in scripture phrase.' ...
— Gladys, the Reaper • Anne Beale
... were moved by one muscle, all the faces were turned toward him with wide, derisive grins. He seemed to hear some one make a humorous remark in a low tone. At it the others all crowed and cackled. He was a slang phrase. ...
— The Red Badge of Courage - An Episode of the American Civil War • Stephen Crane
... little speech, His Majesty the German Emperor had made a big one, from which we learned yet once again that William I had been entrusted with a mission, and had handed it down to William II; and then we heard once more the phrase with which Bismarck had deafened our ears, on one of his blustering days, and which the King of Prussia has re-issued in a new form and on his own account: "We Germans fear God and nothing else in ...
— The Schemes of the Kaiser • Juliette Adam
... Chancellor use a single phrase to indicate that he was prepared to accept such a peace? Was there a hint of restitution? Was there a suggestion of reparation? Was there an implication of any security for the future that this outrage on civilization ...
— America's War for Humanity • Thomas Herbert Russell
... how looked the bird? If I could tell, if I could show With one quick phrase, one lightning word, I'd learn you more than poets know; For poets, could they only catch Of that forgotten tune one snatch, Would build it up in song or sonnet, And found their whole life's ...
— Georgian Poetry 1918-19 • Various
... influential man denied that head-hunting is a religious ceremony among them. It is merely to show their bravery and manliness, that it may be said that so-and-so has obtained heads. When they quarrel it is a constant phrase, "How many heads did your father or grandfather get?" If less than his own number, "Well, then, you have no occasion to be proud!" Thus the possession of heads gives them great considerations as warriors and men of wealth, the skulls being prized ...
— The Bontoc Igorot • Albert Ernest Jenks
... [94:1] The phrase is used in a large sense, as comprehending the whole subject of the nature and organization of the visible church (L. ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... "listen." And with slow, painstaking phrase this man of strong feeling and feeble will (the trait of his caste) told—as Frowenfeld felt he would do the moment he said "listen"—such part of the story of Bras-Coupe as showed how he came by his deadly ...
— The Grandissimes • George Washington Cable
... voices filled the store, all talking at once, rapidly and loudly. Here and there we could distinguish a snatch of conversation, a word, a phrase, now and then even a whole sentence above the rest. There was the clink of glasses. I could hear the rattle of dice on a bare table, and an oath. A cork popped. ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Detective Stories • Various
... patronage and selfishness, calling themselves kindness, protection, benevolence, and other fine names, which I have described as inherent in my nature. I often heard it said, too, that she had 'an unhappy temper.' Well understanding what was meant by the convenient phrase, and wanting a companion with a knowledge of what I knew, I thought I would try to release the girl from her bondage and sense of injustice. I have no occasion to ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... G.G. Found her beginning my letter of answer to the thanks of Alessio del Pinto of Rome for assisting his brother the late Commandant in his last moments, as I had begged her to pen my reply for the purer Italian, I being an ultra-montane, little skilled in the set phrase of Tuscany. Cut short the letter—finish it another day. Talked of Italy, patriotism, Alfieri, Madame Albany, and other branches of learning. Also Sallust's Conspiracy of Catiline, and the War of Jugurtha. ...
— Life of Lord Byron, With His Letters And Journals, Vol. 5 (of 6) • (Lord Byron) George Gordon Byron
... in my boyhood," he would say when he was forced against his will to consider either of these disturbing problems. Not progress, but a return to the "ideals of our ancestors," was his sole hope for the future; and in Virginia's childhood she had grown to regard this phrase as second in reverence only to that other familiar invocation: "If it ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... these latter days, whether from any change of the methods used by printers or publishers I do not know. But it strikes me that many youngsters, even of the scribbling tribe, may not know that the phrase "a token" had no connection whatever with signs and wonders of any sort, but simply meant two hundred and ...
— What I Remember, Volume 2 • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... his imitative worship, delighting in the unconscious fashion in which the sonorous phrases of convention rolled off from her son's baby lips. And then, one day, Scott's memory failed him in his invocation. There came a familiar phrase or two, and then a babble of meaningless syllables, ending in a long-drawn and relieved Amen. An instant later, Scott lifted ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... fact that he enjoyed a reputation for quite alarming astuteness of a brilliant kind presented elements of probable embarrassment. If he thought that they had allowed themselves to be led upon a wild-goose chase, he would express his opinions with trying readiness of phrase. ...
— T. Tembarom • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... to give him his correct name—Frederick Palmer, was, as he declared with such emphasis, a man who had indeed "seen better days," as the phrase is. Now that he was invested in fair-looking clothes, and was graced with a clean collar and a smooth-shaven face, he actually might have passed for a person in fairly well-to-do circumstances. For the part Mortlake wished him to play, he could not have ...
— The Girl Aviators' Sky Cruise • Margaret Burnham
... commandment might be abused, and persons might find in it an encouragement for their extravagant habits, for their love of pleasure, for their habit of spending everything they have, or can obtain, upon themselves. It does not mean, then, as is the common phrase, that we should "live up to our income;" for he adds, "But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven." There is such a thing as laying up as truly in heaven as there is laying up on earth; if it were not so, our Lord would not have said so. Just as ...
— The Life of Trust: Being a Narrative of the Lord's Dealings With George Mueller • George Mueller
... which indeed was forbidden by the canons of good breeding as well as by the mandates of the taboo. But it was not always so easy to perceive wherein you had contravened [Footnote: Contravened: come into conflict with.] the spirit of this institution. I was many times called to order, if I may use the phrase, when I could not for the life of me conjecture what particular offense I ...
— Short Stories and Selections for Use in the Secondary Schools • Emilie Kip Baker
... of such feelings; so that it might seem he was not afraid of Ippolito's displeasure in that direction. But the weakness which selfish people excuse in themselves becomes a "very different thing" (as they phrase it) in another. The appeal to the cardinal's experience might only have exasperated him, in its assumption of the identity of the case. However, the poet was, at all events, left this time to the indulgence of his love and his poetry; and in the course of the ensuing year, a copy ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Vol. 2 • Leigh Hunt
... ring for the afternoon session. At the close of school she returned to the cottage more deliberately, to finish her house work before taking her daily walk. Occasionally she found this work already performed; Anna Svenson's robust form would greet her as she entered the cottage, with the apologetic phrase, "My fingers were restless." Mrs. Svenson had an unquenchable appetite for work. The two women would have a silent cup of tea; then Mrs. Svenson would smile in her broad, apathetic manner, saying, "One lives, you see, after all," and disappear through ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... I took to that sort of thing in circumstances in which I did not expect, in colloquial phrase, "to come out of it." Neither could I expect the record to outlast me. This shows that it was purely a personal need for intimate relief and ...
— The Shadow-Line - A Confession • Joseph Conrad
... vir doctissime et in republica literarum potentissime! So said or sung the Chancellor of the University of Oxford, in violation of all the traditions of the place; for Oxford never used before the phrase 'respublica literarum' which words and the thing signified she has ever repudiated and abhorred; and to be potentissimus in republica are jarring and incoherent things. But let this hypercriticism pass, and when I see Mrs. Reeve ...
— Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Henry Reeve, C.B., D.C.L. - In Two Volumes. VOL. II. • John Knox Laughton
... in Italy and his proclamations ought to give, and in fact do give, weight to this account of his opinion. But there is no doubt that this idea was more connected with lofty views of ambition than a sincere desire for the benefit of the human race; for, at a later period, he adopted this phrase: "I should like to be the head of the most ancient of the dynasties cf Europe." What a difference between Bonaparte, the author of the 'Souper de Beaucaire', the subduer of royalism at Toulon; the author of the ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... Under one of the dark arches in Bloomsbury Church—with Mrs. Ianson's large feathers tossing on one side, and Jane's sickly unhappy face at the other—Agatha said her prayers in due sabbatical form. "Said her prayers" is the right phrase, for trouble had not yet opened her young heart to pray. Yet she was a good girl, not wilfully undevout; and if during the long missionary-sermon she secretly got her prayer-book and read—what was the most likely ...
— Agatha's Husband - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik (AKA: Dinah Maria Mulock)
... equal horizontal bands of red (top), white, and black with three green five-pointed stars in a horizontal line centered in the white band; the phrase ALLAHU AKBAR (God is Great) in green Arabic script - Allahu to the right of the middle star and Akbar to the left of the middle star - was added in January 1991 during the Persian Gulf crisis; similar ...
— The 2005 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... see it beat under its film of tissue—the only thing between him and death. I thought of it a day or two later when I was reading a book about the Austrian army officer's life, written by an English lady, and came across the phrase: '"Sharpen sabres!' ...
— Antwerp to Gallipoli - A Year of the War on Many Fronts—and Behind Them • Arthur Ruhl
... future student of our manners comes to look over the pictures and the writing of these queer volumes, what will he think of our society, customs, and language in the consulship of Plancus? "Corinthian," it appears, was the phrase applied to men of fashion and ton in Plancus's time: they were the brilliant predecessors of the "swell" of the present period—brilliant, but somewhat barbarous, it must be confessed. The Corinthians were in the ...
— John Leech's Pictures of Life and Character • William Makepeace Thackeray
... me solicitous to avoid laying myself under any such: yet, sometimes, formerly, have I been put to it, and cursed the tardy resolution of the quarterly periods. And yet I ever made shift to avoid anticipation: I never would eat the calf in the cow's belly, as Lord M.'s phrase is: for what is that, but to hold our lands upon tenant-courtesy, the vilest of all tenures? To be denied a fox-chace, for breaking down a fence upon my own grounds? To be clamoured at for repairs studied for, rather than really wanted? To be prated ...
— Clarissa, Volume 3 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... feel the imperative necessity of rest and freedom. I go to find these, even if I lose myself in the endeavour. So farewell! And as old-fashioned folks used to say—'God be with you!' If there be any meaning in the phrase, it is conveyed to you in all sincerity by your ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... dissimilarity), is a net drawing in of all kinds. It must not be supposed that we have a stricter definition incorporated in the Bill. Indeed, the first definition of "feeble-minded" in the Bill was much looser and vaguer than the phrase "feeble-minded" itself. It is a piece of yawning idiocy about "persons who though capable of earning their living under favourable circumstances" (as if anyone could earn his living if circumstances were directly unfavourable to his doing so), are nevertheless "incapable of managing ...
— Eugenics and Other Evils • G. K. Chesterton
... at her curiously. Some phrase of Peter's, half forgotten, came back to him. "Revolt," ...
— Judith of the Godless Valley • Honore Willsie
... could understand the dreary, bleak, isolated lives of these American boys, with all the desolation of foreigners hungering always for human companionship, outside of the everlasting camp. And we came to know the misery of homesickness that hides in the phrase, "a stranger in a ...
— The Martial Adventures of Henry and Me • William Allen White
... mysterious phrase is significant. But the king lays too much stress upon that little duchy of Courland; if I wanted it, I could make it mine without troubling his majesty in the least. As to the bride, I doubt whether it would be agreeable to the czarina for ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... "I catch on—correct phrase, isn't it?" rejoined the Englishman. "Of course, you're liberal minded and free from effete prejudice, but I hardly fancied the wives of your best citizens would care to meet ...
— Thurston of Orchard Valley • Harold Bindloss
... any. So he began to court her company again, to propose riding with her, to sing to her, to join her whenever she was strolling about the grounds, to make himself agreeable, according to the ordinary understanding of that phrase, in every way which seemed to promise a chance for succeeding in ...
— Elsie Venner • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... will accompany thee and show thee what there is worthy of thine inspection." Hereat the Witch again louted low and kissed the carpet under Peri-Banu's feet, and took leave of her hostess in goodly phrase and with great show of gratitude for her favours. The handmaids then led her round the palace and displayed to her all the rooms, which dazed and dazzled her sight so that she could not find words to praise ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... left unburied or uncared for on the field. Whatever his reasons, he stabbed and meant to stab, and for just one moment she seemed almost to droop and reel in saddle; then, with splendid rally, straightened up again, her eyes flashing, her lip curling in scorn, and with one brief, emphatic phrase ended the interview and, whirling Harney about, smote him sharply with her whip, and ...
— A Daughter of the Sioux - A Tale of the Indian frontier • Charles King
... two youths had chatted, as only youths can, sometimes in mere childish folly, sometimes gravely on the highest subjects. Fink had changed in many respects. He had become more quiet, or, as Anton expressed it in counting-house phrase, more solid; but he was more inclined than ever to make use of men for his own varying interests, and to look down upon them as mere instruments. His physical strength was unabated. After having stood all morning superintending his workmen—after having ...
— Debit and Credit - Translated from the German of Gustav Freytag • Gustav Freytag
... being built?" And again, Are they all wrong? If none of these is right, we must reject them all, and say, "While they were building the bridge;"—"While the bridge was in process of erection;"—or resort to some other equivalent phrase. Dr. Johnson, after noticing the compound form of active-intransitives, as, "I am going"—"She is dying,"—"The tempest is raging,"—"I have been walking," and so forth, adds: "There is another manner of using the active participle, which gives it a passive ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... Fatigued by pain, by nervous agitation, and by the immense moral and physical effort needed to carry her to the Town Hall and back, she had caught a chill, and had got her feet damp. In such a subject as herself it was enough. The doctor used only the phrase 'acute rheumatism.' Constance did not know that acute rheumatism was precisely the same thing as that dread disease, rheumatic fever, and she was not informed. She did not surmise for a considerable period that her case was desperately serious. The doctor explained the summoning of two nurses, and ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... drama from beginning to end, is the love-motive. Its fundamental form is that in which it appears in the second bar of the Prelude in the oboe (No. 1).[35] Variants of it occur without the characteristic semitone suspension (1a) or with a falling seventh (1b). The cello motive of the opening phrase of the Prelude may also be considered as derived from the same by ...
— Wagner's Tristan und Isolde • George Ainslie Hight
... the Cresent is only a half circle; there is no going round it, you must turn back when you come to the end. Boz must have been thinking of the Circus. Hardly—for he knew both well—and Circus and Crescent are things not to be confused. The phrase was a little loose, but, as the Circus was curved "round," is not inappropriate, and he meant that Winkle turned when he got to the ...
— Pickwickian Studies • Percy Fitzgerald
... One phrase of his, in speaking of Ireland at a banquet, achieved the dignity of being printed in all the great London daily papers and was followed by a splenetic attack in the "Irish Nation." Both incidents pleased the old gentleman beyond measure. It ...
— Peg O' My Heart • J. Hartley Manners
... hastened on, "I know that you have a great deal of influence with him; that article of yours is about the only thing he's ever read in 'Every Other Week,' and he's proud of your acquaintance. Well, you know" —and here Fulkerson brought in the figure that struck him so much in Beaton's phrase and had been on his tongue ever since—" you're the man on horseback to him; and he'd be more apt to do what you say than if anybody else ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... Talked to at both ears by different persons at the same time, confounded, confused. IRISH PHRASE. ...
— 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue • Captain Grose et al.
... leadership only when they're to elect him to a fat job. He wants to use the party, but when the party wants service in return, up goes Mr. Cass' snout and tail, and off he lopes. He's what I call a cast iron—" I shall omit the vigorous phrase wherein he summarized Cass. His vocabulary was not large; he therefore frequently resorted to the garbage barrel and ...
— The Plum Tree • David Graham Phillips
... 'his word is more than the miraculous harp'? 5. Gonzalo's Commonwealth—its origin from Montaigne. It is commonly supposed that Shakespeare must have borrowed this reference from the translation. He may have taken it directly from the French. 6. Show the bearing of Sebastian's phrase, 'I am standing water,' with its context. (That is, at the turn of the tide between ebb and full.) 7. 'The man i' the moon,' and the folk-lore about it. 8. Natural history on the island. (Poet-Lore, ...
— Shakespeare Study Programs; The Comedies • Charlotte Porter and Helen A. Clarke
... frothy simmering ferment of the general mind and no-mind; struggling to 'make itself up,' as the phrase is, or ascertain what it does really want: no easy matter, in most cases. St. Edmundsbury, in that Candlemas season of the year 1182, is a busily fermenting place. The very clothmakers sit meditative at their looms; ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... of words. For like the folk-song, it has within it the genius and values of the popular tongue. Moussorgsky's style is blood-brother to the spoken language, is indeed as much the Russian language as music can be. In the phrase of Jacques Riviere, "it speaks in words ending in ia and schka, in humble phrases, in swift, poor, suppliant terms." Indeed, so unconventional, so crude, shaggy, utterly inelegant, are Moussorgsky's scores, that they ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... and, a feeling of if, a feeling of but, and a feeling of by, quite as readily as we say a feeling of blue or a feeling of cold. All things in experience naturally 'compenetrate,' to use a phrase of Bergson's; they are distinct and they are united ...
— Pragmatism • D.L. Murray
... phrase: "Honest as the day is long." He did not go to the hotel that night. He went back to his room and read the Constellation. He liked the Constellation. Newspapers were very kind, he thought. Now and then, he would pick up his pile of legislative bills and try to spell through the ponderous ...
— In the Arena - Stories of Political Life • Booth Tarkington
... place, however, as a musical critic and historian than as a composer, and his Life of Palestrina (Memorie storico-critiche della vita e delle opere di Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, 1828) ranks as one of the best works of its class. The phrase Il Principe della Musica, which has become finally associated with the name of Palestrina, originates with this biography. Giuseppe Baini died on the 21st of ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... mythology, had rights of their own. To them belonged all the universe that had not been seized and reclaimed by the younger race of Odin and AEsir; and though this upstart dynasty, as the Frost-Giants in AEschylean phrase would have called it, well knew that Hel, one of this giant progeny, was fated to do them all mischief, and to outlive them, they took her and made her queen of Niflheim, and mistress over nine worlds. There, in ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various
... desfavorable, unfavourable donde, where emision, issue, of loans, etc. emplearse, to be employed, to be used espalda, shoulder (back) explicar to explain explanar to explain falta de aceptacion, non-acceptance falta de pago, non-payment la frase, the phrase, sentence ganancias y perdidas, profits and losses el gerente, the manager *gobernar, to govern *haber, there to be[75] hay, there is[75] hay, there are el hecho, the fact la ley, the law llamar, to call mas adelante, later ...
— Pitman's Commercial Spanish Grammar (2nd ed.) • C. A. Toledano
... in the nature of things (if one may venture here to employ a phrase too often used out of mere idleness or ignorance) that the undertaking which year by year had been carried forward with so much energy and success, should after a while come to a standstill; and the commonest observation of life will suffice to remind us that when progress ...
— The Famous Missions of California • William Henry Hudson
... praise, that for want of flatterers he commends himself, to the floutage of his own family. He deals upon returns, and strange performances, resolving, in despite of public derision, to stick to his own fashion, phrase, ...
— Every Man Out Of His Humour • Ben Jonson
... very definite positive ideals. The first of these is "Comfort for All" (to use a chapter-heading from Prince Kropotkin's too little known book, "La Conquete du Pain"). The second is Leisure for All, or, in Paul Lafargue's witty phrase, "The Right to be Lazy." The third is the fullest possible physical and intellectual development of every individual, considered not as an isolated, self-centred entity, but as a member of an interdependent society; or, in the words of Karl ...
— Socialism: Positive and Negative • Robert Rives La Monte
... Nature designed a black fringe for this coast? Has not the importation of the negro been designed by Providence to reclaim this coast, and to give his progeny permanent and appropriate homes? And, to use a favorite phrase of the South, does not Manifest Destiny point to this consummation? and why should the negro be exiled from these shores? Does he not cling like the white man to his native land? and are not his tastes, wishes, and attachments ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 60, October 1862 • Various
... merely because I had a shrinking horror of all brutal and sordid things, a detestation for anything smacking of vulgarity or bad taste. To me, the subtle beauty of line or colour, the singing music of a phrase, were of more account than the reek of stables or the whooping clamour and excitement of the hunting-field, my joys being rather raptures of the soul than the more material pleasures of ...
— Peregrine's Progress • Jeffery Farnol
... overwhelming, horribly acute, but there was mingled with it a faint consolatory thrill of pride, for it was clear that the man who had loved her had done a splendid thing. He had given all that had been given him—and she knew she would never forget that phrase of his—willingly, and it seemed to her that the gifts he had been entrusted with were rare and precious ones—steadfast, unflinching courage, compassion, and the fine sense of honour which had sent him out on that forlorn hope. He had gone down, unyielding and undismayed—she felt ...
— Hawtrey's Deputy • Harold Bindloss
... spread from place to place, from tribe to tribe, and soon an army stood in the field which struck with the old vigour, and soon shook off the yoke of the oppressor. Jehovah thus proved himself to be Jehovah Sebaoth, i.e., in the most probable rendering of the phrase, the God of the armies of his people. A religion which proved itself in this way could never cease to be a power in the heart of the nation; even if the tribes, dispersing again after a victory, soon seemed to lose touch of each other, and to be sinking deeper than ever in the surrounding tide ...
— History of Religion - A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems • Allan Menzies
... This sonorous balance of phrase and epithet cannot always escape what Milton himself calls "the heathenish battology of multiplying words." It serves the uses of rhetoric rather than of logic, and by the fervour of its repetitions and enlargements unfits his prose for the plainer ...
— Milton • Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh
... to exclude the Jews, for even the most ardent fire-eater would hardly venture to advocate the disfranchisement of the thrifty race whose mortgages cover so large a portion of Southern soil. What the eloquent gentleman really meant by this high-sounding phrase was simply the white race; and the substance of the argument of that school of Southern writers to which he belongs, is simply that for the good of the country the Negro should have no voice in directing the government or public ...
— The Wife of his Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line, and - Selected Essays • Charles Waddell Chesnutt
... closer to our theme—that the round or the whirling have such attraction for us? What is the secret of the fascination of the circle? Why is it that the turning of anything, be it but a barrel-organ or a phrase, holds one as with an hypnotic power? I confess that I can never genuinely pity a knife-grinder, however needy. Think of the pleasure of driving that wheel all day, the merry chirp of the knife on the stone, and the crisp, bright ...
— Prose Fancies (Second Series) • Richard Le Gallienne
... coolly, "you have the option. I am not going to use physical force to persuade you to hand the package over to me, but you are a greater fool than I take you for if you choose that alternative. To use an expressive modern phrase, Mr. Billington Rand, you will be caught with the goods on, and unless you have a far better explanation of how those securities happen in your possession at this moment than I think you have, there is no power on earth can keep you from landing ...
— R. Holmes & Co. • John Kendrick Bangs
... was some sadness in seeing such a bright, proud woman living in such a small, dull way. Cecilia had, moreover, a turn for sarcasm, and her smile, which was her pretty feature, was never so pretty as when her sprightly phrase had a lurking scratch in it. Rowland remembered that, for him, she was all smiles, and suspected, awkwardly, that he ministered not a little to her sense of the irony of things. And in truth, with his means, his leisure, and his opportunities, what had he done? He had an unaffected ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... sisters the larks.' He used to talk to any thieves and robbers he met about their misfortune in being unable to give rein to their desire for holiness. It was an innocent habit, and doubtless the robbers often 'got round him,' as the phrase goes. Quite as often, however, they discovered that he had 'got round' them, and discovered the other side, the side ...
— Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton
... Fleetwood had passed cured him of the wound Carinthia dealt, with her blunt, defensive phrase and her Welshman. Seated on his coach-box, he turned for a look the back way leading to Esslemont, and saw rosed crag and mountain forest rather than the soft undulations of parkland pushing green meadows or brown copse up the slopes under his eye. She had ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... "E'en as his beam illumes me, so I look Into the eternal light, and clearly mark Thy thoughts, from whence they rise. Thou art in doubt, And wouldst, that I should bolt my words afresh In such plain open phrase, as may be smooth To thy perception, where I told thee late That 'well they thrive;' and that 'no second such Hath risen,' which no small distinction needs. "The providence, that governeth the world, In depth of counsel ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... had not been in a brown study as he went into the Chequers to "sup his four-hours"—in modern phrase, to have his tea—and to give his horse a rest and feed before returning home, he would certainly have recognised two people who were seated in a dark corner of the inn kitchen, and had come there for the same purpose. The man kept his hat drawn over his face, and slunk close into ...
— All's Well - Alice's Victory • Emily Sarah Holt
... let her go, now that he had finally come up with her, polecats or no polecats, smells or not. But he was not a fool. He knew the game, the bitter, cruel game of death, as it is played throughout the wild. With man the inexorable law is, "Get on or get out." In the wild they phrase it another way: "Kill or be killed." Man puts it more politely, perhaps, but it's all the same old natural law, ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars
... destitute of every useful art. When our ambassadors were required to perform a prostration, which in Europe would have been considered as degrading, we were rather amused than irritated. It would have been unworthy of us to have recourse to arms on account of an uncivil phrase, or of a dispute about a ceremony. But this is not a question of phrases and ceremonies. The liberties and lives of Englishmen are at stake: and it is fit that all nations, civilised and uncivilised, should know that, wherever the Englishman ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... The phrase seemed hopeless, but light was thrown upon it when, later, I learned that this man of many buried books gave addresses upon the responsibilities of citizenship, upon the higher politics, and upon themes of like character. ...
— The Bibliotaph - and Other People • Leon H. Vincent
... of this phrase in our everyday life. The Spirit is that which gives life and movement to anything, in fact it is that which causes it to exist at all. The thought of the author, the impression of the painter, the feeling of the musician, is that without which their works could never have come into being, and ...
— The Dore Lectures on Mental Science • Thomas Troward
... felt a fine scorn for the woman who, under the circumstances, would insist upon a bond and all a man's worldly goods in return for that which it was her privilege to give freely; while the notion of servility, of economic dependence—though she did not so phrase it—repelled her far more than ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... convent. She had schooling enough for me, God knows, in her tender and faithful heart; but she is as obstinate as any creature ever was when she thinks a thing is right. So I have to wait, very much against my will, while the nuns make a lady of Nora. It is her own phrase. I have assured her that she is a better lady than most ladies I have known, and that I am not a gentleman. But she would banish me and ...
— The Story of Bawn • Katharine Tynan
... least, of the best manhood of France and her Colonies. One million and a half! That figure had become a familiar bit of statistics to me; but it was not till I stood the other day in that vast military cemetery of Chalons, to which General Gouraud had sent me, that, to use a phrase of Keats, it was "proved" upon "one's own pulses." Seven thousand men lie buried there, their wreathed crosses standing shoulder to shoulder, all fronting one way, like a division on parade, while ...
— Fields of Victory • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... submission, To prove to them that liberty was crime,— This was, in fact, the Padre's present mission; To get new souls perchance at the same time, And bring them to a "sense of their condition,"— That easy phrase, which, in the past and present, Means making that condition ...
— Complete Poetical Works of Bret Harte • Bret Harte
... began, however dimly and darkly, with the triumph of Naseby. Old things passed silently away. When Astley gave up his sword the "work" of the generations which had struggled for Protestantism against Catholicism, for public liberty against absolute rule, in his own emphatic phrase, was "done." So far as these contests were concerned, however the later Stuarts might strive to revive them, England could safely "go to play." English religion was never to be more in danger. English liberty ...
— History of the English People, Volume VI (of 8) - Puritan England, 1642-1660; The Revolution, 1660-1683 • John Richard Green
... meanings which have been ingeniously extorted from the imperfect RECORD of what he taught. British museum libraries of polemics have been written in defence of what Christ himself would have been indifferent to, and written with an animosity towards opponents which has been crystallized in a phrase now applied in a general way ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... volumes in this set, each even-numbered page had a header consisting of the page number, the volume title, and the chapter number. The odd-numbered page header consisted of the year with which the page deals, a subject phrase, and the page number. In this set of e-books, the odd-page year and subject phrase have been converted to sidenotes, usually positioned between the first two paragraphs of the even-odd page pair. If such positioning ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume IV (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... not finish his phrase. The engineer, towards whom all eyes were turned, shook his ...
— The Secret of the Island • W.H.G. Kingston (translation from Jules Verne)
... in short, of the mixed World of Books, of that vast City of the Press, with its palaces and hovels, its aqueducts and sewers—which opens all alike to the naked eye and the curious mind of him to whom you say, in the Tinker's careless phrase, ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... you?" Then he bowed his head a little, and tore up the paper. Once when we were at the Tuileries he sent me at two o'clock in the morning a small note in his own writing, in which was, "To Bourrienne. Write to Maret to make him erase from the note which Fleurieu has read to the Tribunate the phrase (spelt frase) concerning Costaz, and to soften as much as possible what concerns the ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... night in a dimly lighted hall, when the lack of clear light adds to the horror of the scene. Note the Rembrandtesque effects in such phrases: 'aux tremblantes clartes,' 'l'ombre indistincte,' 'a travers l'ombre, on voit toutes les soifs infames,' and it ends in 'le triomphe de l'ombre,' a phrase in which the literal and the figurative are subtly blended together. On the other hand, how everything sparkles and gleams in Le Mariage de Roland! Olivier's sword-point glitters like the eye of a demon, while Durandal shines as he falls on his foeman's head; the sunshine is all round ...
— La Legende des Siecles • Victor Hugo
... trouble the modern engineer; but to poise and place them on the top of the columns, seventy feet from the ground, with our mechanical means, were indeed a great feat. The columns were not of single pieces, but composed of several, and they now lie, to use an unpoetical phrase, like rows of enormous cheeses. The great temple was three hundred and thirty-four feet long, one hundred and fifty-four wide; its porticoes at each end were four columns in depth, eight in width; a double row on the sides of the cella or interior edifice, which in all Grecian temples was ...
— Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, March 1844 - Volume 23, Number 3 • Various
... Parliament which should really represent the nation, reform the laws, and pass a general act of pardon. In his despatch to the House of Commons after the victory of Worcester, he called the battle a "crowning mercy." Some of the republicans in that body took alarm at this phrase, and thought that Cromwell used it to foreshadow a design to place the crown on his own head. For this reason, perhaps, ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery
... goods: the second offence subjected them to the penalty of a praemunire.[*] This law was plainly levelled against the queen of Scots and her partisans; and implied an avowal, that Elizabeth never intended to declare her successor. It may be noted, that the usual phrase of "lawful issue," which the parliament thought indecent towards the queen, as if she could be supposed to have any other, was changed into that of "natural issue." But this alteration was the source of pleasantry during the time; and some suspected a deeper ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part D. - From Elizabeth to James I. • David Hume
... station building, with their battalion commander holding officers call at command of the bugle. An excited little French officer popped out of his dugout and pointed at the shell holes in the ground and in the station and spoke a terse phrase in French to the British field staff officer who was gnawing his mustache. The latter overcame his embarrassment enough to tell Major Young that the French officer feared the Bolo any minute would reopen artillery fire. Then we realized we were in the fighting zone. The major ...
— The History of the American Expedition Fighting the Bolsheviki - Campaigning in North Russia 1918-1919 • Joel R. Moore
... for an instant, and, had he spoken his inmost thoughts, probably they might have been appropriately expressed in the slang phrase, "Ah, what are you givin' me?" "Well, it might have been his grandfather's ghost, I daresay," he facetiously remarked at length, "but, anyhow, there seemed to be a strong resemblance between ...
— The House by the Lock • C. N. Williamson
... old soul in a phrase that might have seemed comic if it hadn't been so infinitely profound and touching. "Ah, Madame, even if there isn't anything left, it will be our village just ...
— With Those Who Wait • Frances Wilson Huard
... not easy to quiet down the half wild steeds. They had been going through a long period of inaction since the fierce charge made on the night of the encounter before crossing the snowy pass, and once their driver had, to use the horsey phrase, given them their heads, and urged them on to their top speed, their hot, wild blood had been bubbling through their veins, making them snort and tear along heedless of rock, rut, and the roughest ...
— Marcus: the Young Centurion • George Manville Fenn
... his long brown hands showed no trace of labor; his iron-gray hair was reduced to smoothest order; his coat speckless, if threadbare; and he ate like a gentleman, an accomplishment not always to be found in the "best society," as the phrase goes,—whether the best in fact ever lacks it is another thing. Miss Lucinda appreciated these traits,—they set her at ease; and a pleasanter home-life could scarce be painted than now enlivened the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 46, August, 1861 • Various
... this proposition cannot prevail, every slave State will secede; or, as some prefer to phrase it, will resort to revolution. I forbear to discuss eventualities. I must say, however, and say plainly, that considerations such as these will not move me from my recognized duty to my country and its Constitution. And let ...
— A Report of the Debates and Proceedings in the Secret Sessions of the Conference Convention • Lucius Eugene Chittenden
... A better phrase, or idea, could not be found with which to reply to the Manifiesto of Don Pedro A. Paterno, published in El Comercio of the 2nd instant, than the epigraph which ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... its terms were not divulged. The French minister of foreign affairs used the word "alliance" in the Chamber of Deputies in 1895, and two years later, when President Faure visited the Czar at St. Petersburg, the Czar used the phrase "two great nations, friends and allies." The consequence of these two alliances, and of the peaceful policy pursued by England, was the localizing of difficulties and the maintenance of a "concert" on all questions likely to embroil Europe. This was evident from ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... of a great author too conscious of his own views to be angry with his critic! The singular phrase of the lodgings chalked up is a sarcasm explained by this passage in "The Advancement of Learning." "As Alexander Borgia was wont to say of the expedition of the French for Naples, that they came with chalk in their hands to mark up their lodgings, and not ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... before aught else you learn, You must with zeal to metaphysics turn! There see that you profoundly comprehend What doth the limit of man's brain transcend; For that which is or is not in the head A sounding phrase will serve you in good stead. But before all strive this half year From one fix'd order ne'er to swerve! Five lectures daily you must hear; The hour still punctually observe! Yourself with studious zeal prepare, And closely in your manual look, Hereby may you be quite aware That all he utters ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... spent waiting at a railway junction" ... Here, with his instinct for the perfect phrase, Stevenson has pointed a finger at the one experience which is commonly accepted as the acme of imaginable dulness. This man, who could be happy at a railway junction, could not have found a prouder way of boasting to posterity that he had never "faltered more or ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various
... of a citizen before a throne—never did the legal authority of a prime minister before a people display themselves in such a voice to assembled citizens. He was a public man in all the greatness of the phrase—the soul of a nation personified in an individual—the inspiration of the nation in the heart of a patrician. His oratory had something as grand as action—it was the heroic in language. The echo of Lord Chatham's discourses were heard—felt on the Continent. The stormy scenes of the Westminster ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... They are all specimens of the upper part of the middle class. They have all been liberally educated. They all lie under the restraints of the same sacred profession. They are all young. They are all in love. Not one of them has any hobbyhorse, to use the phrase of Sterne. Not one has a ruling passion, such as we read of in Pope. Who would not have expected them to be insipid likenesses of each other? No such thing. Harpagon is not more unlike to Jourdain, Joseph Surface ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... atop one of the stately stone lions outside the library met his eye with such a steady gaze of understanding, though not of sympathy, that he found himself needing to repeat the by-now almost magic phrase to himself: "Not in my lifetime anyway." Would some intelligent life form develop to supplant man? Or would the planet revert to a primeval state of mindless innocence? He would never know and he didn't really care ... no point in speculating over ...
— The Most Sentimental Man • Evelyn E. Smith
... may be gathered out of many places of the Book it self. Joshua had set up twelve stones in the middest of Jordan, for a monument of their passage; (Josh 4. 9) of which the Writer saith thus, "They are there unto this day;" (Josh 5. 9) for "unto this day", is a phrase that signifieth a time past, beyond the memory of man. In like manner, upon the saying of the Lord, that he had rolled off from the people the Reproach of Egypt, the Writer saith, "The place is called Gilgal unto this day;" which to have said in the time of Joshua had been ...
— Leviathan • Thomas Hobbes
... in length from year to year, in order that, during the performance of them, one may have the requisite time to dream. The composition has become infinitely more complicated. Formerly four measures sufficed for a simple melodic phrase, then six, then eight, now twelve and sixteen are hardly enough. Worthy old Schicht called young Beethoven a musical pig when he first learned to know the broad architectonic composition in the latter's works. He listened to the man of the future with ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... question in that phrase: "I cannot understand how you came to be there at that time." She thought, perhaps, that to carry his point and stop the marriage he had had a hand in that miserable business! Well, let her think it. It was not his place to explain, and really of course it could make ...
— Lo, Michael! • Grace Livingston Hill
... has been secured to use nearly all of it in a biographical volume that will be issued within the next two or three years. The letters in this volume have been chosen as an "exihibit," as early specimens of his writing and for their particularly characteristic turns of thought and phrase. The collection is not "complete" ...
— Rolling Stones • O. Henry
... ability that he must believe only that which he clearly knows and understands, and that he must concern himself with those matters only which he can thoroughly comprehend. He must live, in other words, by the rule of common sense; meaning by that oft-used phrase, clear sight and practical dealing with actual things and conditions. It would greatly simplify life if this course could be followed, but it would simplify it by rejecting those things which the finest spirits among men and women have loved most and believed ...
— Famous Stories Every Child Should Know • Various
... Plain be the phrase, yet apt the verse, More ponderous than nimble; For since grimed War here laid aside His Orient pomp, 'twould ill befit Overmuch to ...
— John Marr and Other Poems • Herman Melville
... not waited an instant. One phrase of the momentous scrawl had caught his ear. "I shall be at the creek which is in a direct line opposite the 'Chat Gris' near Calais": that phrase might yet mean victory for him. "Which of you knows this coast well?" he shouted to his men who now one by one all returned from their fruitless ...
— The Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... one of the few complaints of Christ. "Have I been so long time with you and yet hast thou not known me, Philip?" All one has ever felt is said for one in a phrase, all that one finds most isolating in the world is put into one sentence. There is a wan feeling of wonder in it; "so long," and yet you think that of me! "so long," and yet such absolute inability to read my character! "so long," and yet still quite unaware ...
— My War Experiences in Two Continents • Sarah Macnaughtan
... the phrase as though it struck a familiar chord. "Life is lonesome, isn't it Doug! Seems as though I never dare to be myself any more, since Oscar's death. That was the first time I ever realized how lonely ...
— Judith of the Godless Valley • Honore Willsie
... ever hear that little slang phrase so much in vogue in America," queried Napoleon, coldly fixing his eye on Barras—"a phrase which in French runs, 'Petit, mais O Moi'—or, as they have it, 'Little, but O My'? Well, that is me. {1} Besides, if I am small, there is less chance ...
— Mr. Bonaparte of Corsica • John Kendrick Bangs
... of Paganism, which turned it into Christianity, can be expressed with some accuracy in one phrase. The pagan set out, with admirable sense, to enjoy himself. By the end of his civilization he had discovered that a man cannot enjoy himself and continue to enjoy anything else. Mr. Lowes Dickinson has pointed ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... press harder and harder upon the energies and virtue of a people; and the last steps only are alarmingly hurried and irregular. A republic without industry, economy, and integrity, is Samson shorn of his locks. A luxurious and idle republic! Look at the phrase!—The words were never made to be married together; every body sees it would be death to ...
— The American Frugal Housewife • Lydia M. Child
... the sign of the cross in confirmation of a written paper. Several charters still remain in which kings and persons of great eminence affix "signum crucis pro ignoratione literarum," the sign of the cross, because of their ignorance of letters. From this is derived the phrase of signing instead of subscribing ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume XII, No. 347, Saturday, December 20, 1828. • Various
... less than admirable, if not wonderful, when we consider how close the translator has on the whole (in spite of occasional slips into inaccuracy) kept himself to the most rigid limit of literal representation, phrase by phrase and often line by line. The really startling force and felicity of occasional verses are worthier of remark than the inevitable stiffness and heaviness of others, when the technical difficulty of such a task is duly taken ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... complete change, a horrible loss of oneself by substitution—far worse than death, and not even annihilation. We happen to have camped in a spot where their region touches ours, where the veil between has worn thin"—horrors! he was using my very own phrase, my actual words—"so that they are aware of our being ...
— The Willows • Algernon Blackwood
... of the matter was that Jimmy Torrance was slowly approaching that mental condition that is aptly described by the phrase, "losing your grip," one of the symptoms of which was the fact that he was almost contented with his ...
— The Efficiency Expert • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... been captured at Pylos; yet, when the Lacedaemonians discovered that it was chiefly by Nikias's means that they obtained peace, and recovered their prisoners, they were lavish of their attentions to him. The common phrase among the Greeks of that time was that Perikles had begun the war, and Nikias had finished it; and the peace was usually called the peace of Nikias. Alkibiades, irritated beyond measure at his rival's ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume I (of 4) • Plutarch
... impossible in a printed discussion of the length of this booklet to weed out every word capable of misconstruction; and equally so to furnish a definition or limitation to every doubtful word or phrase. Nevertheless I call attention ...
— Communism and Christianism - Analyzed and Contrasted from the Marxian and Darwinian Points of View • William Montgomery Brown
... but, staff in hand, Ulysses rose; Minerva by his side, In likeness of a herald, bade the crowd Keep silence, that the Greeks, from first to last, Might hear his words, and ponder his advice. He thus with prudent phrase his speech began: "Great son of Atreus, on thy name, O King, Throughout the world will foul reproach be cast, If Greeks forget their promise, nor make good The vow they took to thee, when hitherward We sailed from Argos' grassy plains, to raze, Ere ...
— The Iliad • Homer
... in which women predominated, and we are told that in the interest of procreation both childlessness and celibacy were severely punished. Thus the situation of women was that best described by the phrase "between the devil ...
— Sex=The Unknown Quantity - The Spiritual Function of Sex • Ali Nomad
... no real difference of principle between the two great historic Parties on this question. The late Government have repeatedly declared that it was their intention at the earliest possible moment—laying great stress upon that phrase—to extend representative and responsible institutions to the new Colonies; and before his Majesty's present advisers took office the only question in dispute was, When? On the debate on the Address, the right hon. Member for West Birmingham—whose absence to-day ...
— Liberalism and the Social Problem • Winston Spencer Churchill
... Let me say that I can exchange my personality. The Jews used to say that men of certain mentality were possessed of a devil. I only say that I was a student in India. One phrase is good as another. The Swami Hamadata was ...
— The Way of a Man • Emerson Hough
... its outward life. Such indeed is the respect paid to science, that the most absurd opinions may become current, provided they are expressed in language, the sound of which recals some well-known scientific phrase. If society is thus prepared to receive all kinds of scientific doctrines, it is our part to provide for the diffusion and cultivation, not only of true scientific principles, but of a spirit of sound criticism, founded on an examination of the evidences ...
— Five of Maxwell's Papers • James Clerk Maxwell
... a difficult word to translate. It sometimes means merely intellectuality, sometimes in addition (as here) all that is implied in the phrase, "Ye know not what manner of spirit ([Greek: oiou pneumatos]) ...
— The New Society • Walther Rathenau
... piece is called the Na, because a character so named is an important part of the first line. So generally the pieces in the Shih receive their names from a character or phrase occurring in them. This point will not be ...
— The Shih King • James Legge
... enacted by law, and enforced by legal authority. Yet we virtually recognize a broader meaning of the word, whenever we place law and justice in opposition to each other, as when we speak of an unjust law. In this phrase we imply that there is a supreme and universal justice, of whose requirements human law is but a partial and imperfect transcript. This justice must embrace all rights and dues of all beings, human and Divine; and it is in this sense that we may regard whatever any one being in the universe can ...
— A Manual of Moral Philosophy • Andrew Preston Peabody
... where the Algonquin magi, May have reclined "sub tegmine fagi;" For when across the Sapper's Bridge, The prospect was a fine beech ridge, And "Gibson's corner," in old time, For squirrel hunting was most prime, "Prime" is a somewhat slangy phrase For these high philologic days, And in connexion, be it stated, With a spot to science dedicated. J.H.P. Gibson's astral lecture Will place this fact beyond conjecture. Bound that old spot now thronged by all, Has many a chipmonk met his fall By dart from ...
— Recollections of Bytown and Its Old Inhabitants • William Pittman Lett
... have pointed this put to them.' But they were not interested in themes; but in morality, and how they might crush a play which, if it were uncrushed by them, would succeed in undermining the foundations of society—their favourite phrase at the time, it entered into every article written about the Doll's House—and, looking upon themselves as the saviours of society, these master-builders kept on staying and propping the damaged construction till ...
— Muslin • George Moore
... unhealthy localities,—stations for distributing the germs of disease throughout their neighborhood and at a distance from them,—unless they are reserved, and left unoccupied. The most extravagant way of disposing of such localities is for the city to permit them to be built over, "improved" is the phrase, I believe, and then suffer the consequences, in the way of increase of disease and taxes, which follow such sort ...
— Parks for the People - Proceedings of a Public Meeting held at Faneuil Hall, June 7, 1876 • Various
... implies that he considered this opinion of you, which he attributes to me, as a despicable one; but he affirms that I have expressed some other more despicable, without, however, mentioning to whom, when, or where. 'Tis evident that the phrase "still more despicable" admits of infinite shades, from very light to very dark. How am I to judge of the degree intended? Or how shall I annex any precise ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis
... assert, but you declaim. There is too little of nature and truth in your tone; you remind me a little of the stilted French tragedies, in which design and premeditation obscure all true passion; in which love is only a phrase, that no one believes in, dressed up with the tawdry gilding of sentiment ...
— Berlin and Sans-Souci • Louise Muhlbach
... Though this phrase, short and snappish enough, was not worded as an invitation for me to sit down, I accepted it as such, and took the chair which a lean boy of some nine or ten years old had hurriedly vacated. In such cases, I had learned by experience, it is not best ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 45, July, 1861 • Various
... inhabitants, and as he himself was not so tall as his father, and, moreover, suffered from bad digestion, and had a tendency to 'run to head,' he determined to select as his wife a 'daughter of the soil,' to use his own phrase, above the average height, with a vigorous constitution and plenty of common sense. She need not be bookish, 'he could supply all that himself.' Accordingly, he married Sarah Caffyn. His mother and Mrs Caffyn had been early friends. ...
— Clara Hopgood • Mark Rutherford
... Ark, as have stooped to become a buffooning pander to the idle follies of the million. It remained for England—great and classic England—no, by heavens! I will not do her that wrong—but for London, and London artists!—I believe that is the proper phrase—after having exhausted every other subject of parody, sacred and profane, to invade the sanctuary of childhood, and vulgarize the very earliest impressions which are conveyed to the infant. Are not ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various
... not published until 1845, but is well worthy of being preserved, not only for its antiquarian interest, as being the earliest account of Devonshire, its agriculture and its industries, but also for the pleasure of its quaint turns of phrase, the ponderous classic authorities which he marshals to support a simple fact—and there are indeed some strange wild-fowl among his authorities—and above all for a gentle and unobtrusive humour which seasons all the narrative. Westcote gives a list of the fish afforded by the Devon seas (a very ...
— Lynton and Lynmouth - A Pageant of Cliff & Moorland • John Presland
... seemed comfort in the very wording of it, in every little characteristic phrase that had been Patrick's, in the familiar appellation, "Little old pal," which he had kept ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... that the distinctive Jewish name for the Almighty, "Jehovah," or "the Lord," does not appear at all, the familiar phrase of the received version, "the Lord thy God," being replaced throughout ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 401, September 8, 1883 • Various
... had shown excellent judgment when he compared her to a family portrait. She was, in fact, exactly the person a painter would select to represent some old burgher's wife—a chaste and loving spouse, a devoted mother, an incomparable housewife—in one phrase, the faithful guardian of her husband's domestic happiness. She had just passed her fiftieth birthday, and looked fully her age. She had suffered. A close observer would have detected traces of weeping about her wrinkled eyelids; ...
— The Count's Millions - Volume 1 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau
... orders to take a woman spy whose password was the key to a Latin phrase. But until you stood straight in your rags and smiled at me, I did not know it was you—I did not know I was to take the Special Messenger! ...
— Special Messenger • Robert W. Chambers
... these creatures do not range so far north as the latitude of Missouri—not a wild boar, neither, if you restrict the meaning of the phrase to the true indigenous animal of that kind. For all that, it was a wild boar, or rather a boar ran wild. Wild enough and savage too it appeared, although we had only a glimpse of its shaggy form as it dashed into the thicket with a ...
— The Hunters' Feast - Conversations Around the Camp Fire • Mayne Reid
... very beginning he had shown her that he disapproved of her fundamentally. She was the "type of woman he hated!" Night and day that curt little phrase had bitten into her thoughts, stinging her with ...
— The Lamp of Fate • Margaret Pedler
... provisional government that should avert anarchy and impose some barrier to the Mahdi's progress. All this was trying to those who only wished to be rid of the whole matter, but Gordon did not spare their feelings, and phrase by phrase he revealed what his own policy would be and what his inner wishes, however repressed his charge might keep them, ...
— The Life of Gordon, Volume II • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... any civil rights, nor can he hold any property, or, indeed, remain more than a few weeks on shore, unless he belong to some vessel. Consequently, the Americans and English who intend to remain here become Catholics, to a man; the current phrase among them being,—"A man must leave his conscience at ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... why did you deny rudimentary reason to animals? and why did you state flatly that "instinct suffices for the animals"? And, second, with great reluctance and with overwhelming humility, because of my youth, I suggest that you do not know exactly what you do mean by that phrase "the simple law of association." Your trouble, I repeat, is with definitions. You have grasped that man performs what is called abstract reasoning, you have made a definition of abstract reason, and, betrayed by that great maker ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... Lillian, graceful, sceptical, and shallow, to the young girl beside him, so frankly modern in her appreciation of life. This, then, was love as seen by the eyes of the world—the world that accepts, judges, and condemns in a slang phrase or two! Very slowly the blood ...
— The Masquerader • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... Polidori, addressing the cure, but emphasizing, as it were, each phrase by an ironical glance at Jacques Ferrand—"imagine that my friend found in his new servant, who, as I have already told you, was called Cecily, the best qualities, great modesty, angelic sweetness, and above all, much piety. This is not all; Jacques, you know, owes to his long practice in business ...
— Mysteries of Paris, V3 • Eugene Sue
... had he pretended to repeat any such conversation, I should have felt strongly inclined to doubt the truth of his entire narrative. Happily he disclaims any such abnormal powers of memory. He can remember nothing but a chance phrase or two which some secondary circumstance fixed indelibly on his mind. But he can remember a great number of little facts bearing on the relations between his master and the Russian. These facts, considered singly, may seem ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 6, June, 1891 • Various
... instances when the Moon was "totally" eclipsed in the technical sense of that word, it was still perfectly visible, whilst during other eclipses it absolutely and entirely disappeared from view. Such eclipses are sometimes spoken of as "black" eclipses of the Moon, but the phrase is not a happy one. Many instances of both kinds will be found mentioned in the chapter ...
— The Story of Eclipses • George Chambers
... surelie a strange happenninge, that I, who am ofte accompted a man of y^e Worlde, (as y^e Phrase goes,) sholde be soe Overtaken & caste downe lyke a Schoole-boy or a countrie Bumpkin, by a meere Mayde, & sholde set to Groaninge and Sighinge, &, for that She will not have me Sighe to Her, to Groaninge and Sighinge on paper, w^ch is y^e greter Foolishnesse in ...
— Stories by American Authors (Volume 4) • Constance Fenimore Woolson
... of insignificant trifles in what they believed to be a most ludicrous manner. Afterward they enjoyed prolonged spasms of mirth, their cachinnations carrying far out over the flat lands disturbing inoffensive truck gardeners in their sleep. They cried "S-o-m-e time!" so often that the phrase struck even their fuddled ...
— The Lookout Man • B. M. Bower
... among the clouds and, in the poet's phrase, "waiting to see some wonder momently ...
— Correggio - A Collection Of Fifteen Pictures And A Portrait Of The - Painter With Introduction And Interpretation • Estelle M. Hurll
... quoth he. "But of course I understand your point of view about education, which is that of times past, when 'the struggle for life,' as men used to phrase it (i.e., the struggle for a slave's rations on one side, and for a bouncing share of the slave- holders' privilege on the other), pinched 'education' for most people into a niggardly dole of not very accurate information; something ...
— News from Nowhere - or An Epoch of Rest, being some chapters from A Utopian Romance • William Morris
... blend together to form a compound emotion, but if in the nature of the case such a blending is impossible, the weaker is for the time being forgotten in the intensity of the stronger. "The expulsive power of a new affection" is not merely a happy phrase; it is a fact in every day life. The problem, then, resolves itself into ways of making the desirable emotion the stronger, of learning how to form the habit of giving it the head start and the right of way. In our chapter on "Choosing the Emotions," we shall find that much depends on building ...
— Outwitting Our Nerves - A Primer of Psychotherapy • Josephine A. Jackson and Helen M. Salisbury
... strength prevailed. Soon, he could breathe fully once again, and the jaws of the sea gave over their gnawing. After the mortal peril through which he had won, Zeke found his case not so evil. The life was still in him, and he voiced a crude phrase of gratefulness to Him who is Lord of the deep waters, even as of the ...
— Heart of the Blue Ridge • Waldron Baily
... stick of timber comes ashore on a man's land, he thereby acquires a "right of possession" as against an actual finder who enters for the purpose of removing it. /2/ A right of possession is said to be enough for trespass; but the court seems to have meant possession by the phrase, inasmuch as Chief Justice Shaw states the question to be which of the parties had "the preferable claim, by mere naked possession, without other title," and as there does not seem to have been any right of possession in the case unless there ...
— The Common Law • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
... pre-eminence which the blood and treasure of her sons have attained for her among the nations, by a piece of striped bunting flying at the mastheads of a few fir-built frigates, manned by a handful of bastards and outlaws,"—a phrase which had great success in America,—but such defiances expressed a temper studiously held in restraint previous to the moment when the war ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... such performances begins and ends with the first author. He that should again adapt Milton's phrase to the gross incidents of common life, and even adapt it with more art, which would not be difficult, must yet expect but a small part of the praise which Philips has obtained; he can only hope to be considered as ...
— Lives of the Poets, Vol. 1 • Samuel Johnson
... where Satan or the Devil is mentioned, the truth taught is the same, and the moral result the same, whether we interpret the phrase as meaning a personal being, or the principle of evil. In many of these passages a personal being cannot be meant: for example, John vi. 70; Matt. xvi. 23; Mark viii. 33; 1 Cor. v. 5; 2 Cor. xii. 7; 1 Thess. ii. 18; 1 Tim. i. 20; ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... 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 Cruise of the Snark • Jack London |
