"Pygmean" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of primitive men has attracted more attention from the civilized world than the pygmy blacks. From the time of Homer and Aristotle the pygmies, although their existence was not absolutely known at that early period, have had their place in fable and legend, and as civilized man has become more and more acquainted with the unknown parts of the ...
— Negritos of Zambales • William Allan Reed
... a hidden wash rose little balloon-like puffs of smoke, followed by a faint, far popping, as if somebody had touched off a bunch of firecrackers. Men on horseback, dwarfed by distance to pygmy size, clambered to the bank—now one and then another firing into the mesquite that ran like a broad tongue from the roll of hills into ...
— Mavericks • William MacLeod Raine
... what happened. Pouf! The unfortunate tutor shut up like a crush-hat, and shrunk together until he was as short as a pygmy and as plump as a mushroom. Really one might just as well have no tutor at all as to have one so tiny. How Prince Vance did laugh! Of all the wizards he had ever known—and for one so young his Highness had known a great many wizards; ...
— Prince Vance - The Story of a Prince with a Court in His Box • Eleanor Putnam
... was an impressive one. The great trunks ran up far aloft, tremendous columns, before their brighter portions were lost in the vaulted roof of somber greenery. They dwarfed the rig and team; she felt herself a pygmy ...
— Vane of the Timberlands • Harold Bindloss
... circumspectly among the crocodiles hauled out of water for slumber, and crept under the jungle-roof and spied upon the snow-white saucy cockatoos, the fierce ospreys, the heavy- flighted buzzards, the lories and kingfishers, and the absurdly garrulous little pygmy parrots. ...
— Jerry of the Islands • Jack London
... exaggerate nothing. How feeble is language to depict the stupendous barbarism! How small by its side the bloody games which degraded ancient Rome! How pygmy the one, how colossal the other! Would you know how the combat is conducted? Here is the briefest picture of the arena by a ...
— The Duel Between France and Germany • Charles Sumner
... account of "The Pygmy Tribes of Africa," treated from the purely scientific and ethnological point of view see Dr. Henry Schlichter's articles in The Scottish Geographical Magazine of ...
— Fians, Fairies and Picts • David MacRitchie
... imperious thirst for glory instead of devotion to the good; always the ambitious artist, never the citizen, the believer, the man. Chateaubriand posed all his life as the wearied Colossus, smiling pitifully upon a pygmy world, and contemptuously affecting to desire nothing from it, though at the same time wishing it to be believed that he could if he pleased possess himself of everything by mere force of genius. He is the type of an untoward race, and the father ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... recalls that of the Nilotic negro). Arabs from Zanzibar have settled in the country, but not, as far as is known, earlier than the beginning of the 19th century. As the present writer takes the general term "Negro" to include equally the Bantu, Hottentot, Bushman and Congo Pygmy, this designation will cover all the natives of British Central Africa. The Bantu races, however, exhibit in some parts signs of Hottentot or Bushman intermixture, and there are legends in some mountain districts, especially ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... he had done, Wainamoinen wondered how to get rid of the oak, and implored his mother to send some one to help him. Immediately there rose from the sea a pygmy, armed in copper, whom Wainamoinen deemed incapable of coping with so large a tree, until the dwarf suddenly transformed himself into a giant of such proportions that four blows from his copper axe felled the oak, scattering its trunk to the east, its top to the ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... or pygmy, is an animal of serene mind and steady habits. Their appetites work with clock- like regularity, and require no winding. I can not recall that any one of our five hippos was ever sick for a day, or missed a meal. When the idiosyncrasies ...
— The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals • William T. Hornaday
... who cries 'Westward Ho!' But he has not got into the woods yet in this play. He is only on the edge of them as yet. It is under the blue roof of that same dome which is 'too high,' the princess here says, to belong to the pygmy that this Philosopher likes so well to bring out and to measure under that canopy—it is 'out of doors' that this new speech on behalf of a new learning is spoken. But there is a close rim of conventionalities about us still. It is a ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... elephant hunting goes we can probably do as well in the pygmy land as anywhere else," answered the veteran, "and perhaps it will be well to head for that place. If we run across any elephant herds in the meanwhile, we can stop, get the ...
— Tom Swift and his Electric Rifle • Victor Appleton
... break down the present One Old Man system of government in this country. The bane of Great Britain is that we are such hero-worshippers by nature that we can only believe in one man at a time. We get hold of a Palmerston or a Gladstone, and set him on a pedestal, and think that everybody else is a pygmy. It may be that our idol is a tolerably good one—that is, not mischievously active. In that case he cannot do much harm. But when, as in the case of Gladstone, you have a national idol who is actively mischievous, it is impossible ...
— Name and Fame - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... the Triassic, some being formidable creatures as large as alligators. They were still of the primitive Paleozoic types. Their pygmy descendants of more modern types are not found until later, salamanders appearing first in the Cretaceous, and frogs at the beginning of ...
— The Elements of Geology • William Harmon Norton
... foreigners as to one's fellow-countrymen it is obvious that all national feeling must vanish. The British Freemason does not, of course, interpret the theory in this manner; he cannot seriously regard himself as the brother of the Bambute pygmy or the Polynesian cannibal, thus he uses the term merely in ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster
... fierce July sun is pouring down a flood of humid, moisture-laden heat upon a densely-packed, sweltering mass of turbulent men, many of them flushed with drink, all of them flushed with triumph, for the ill-armed, ill-disciplined militia of the seventies—a pygmy force as compared with the expert "Guardsmen" of to-day—has been scattered to the winds: the sturdy police have been swept from the streets and driven to the shelter of the stations. Mob law rules supreme. Dense clouds of smoke are rising from sacked and ruined warehouses and from ...
— Foes in Ambush • Charles King
... them to adopt the methods of the Berlin Decree contrary to their will, and contrary to the wishes, the interests, and the bare well-being of their populations. "You will see," wrote an observant American representative abroad, "that Napoleon stalks at a gigantic stride among the pygmy monarchs of Europe, and bends them to his policy. It is even an equal chance if Russia, after all her blustering, does not accede to his demands without striking a blow."[185] To meet the danger Great Britain opposed a maritime dominion, equally exclusive, ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 1 • Alfred Thayer Mahan
... The words sounded as remote as if the speaker bestrode some peak of the Chiricahuas to address a pygmy in a canyon below. "I know of no law which states that I may not employ whom I choose on my own land. If a man does his job and makes no trouble, his past does not matter. I am as ready to fire a former Union soldier as I am ...
— Rebel Spurs • Andre Norton
... ardor. It was a touching spectacle to see this little handful of men taxing their pygmy muscles to resist the forces of nature—trying with anchors, chains, and planks to fill up the fissures made in the ice and to cover them with snow, so that there might be a uniformity of motion among the mass. After four or five hours of almost superhuman exertions, and when their strength ...
— The Waif of the "Cynthia" • Andre Laurie and Jules Verne
... the huge winter stars seemed to watch him with at once a glittering intentness and a disdain of his pygmy being. Once he looked up to them with a gesture of his head. "Are we so far apart and so ...
— Foes • Mary Johnston
... forests had not gone beyond his own kind, and such creatures as owls and rabbits and small feathered things. The otters had not frightened him, because he still measured things by size, and Nekik was not half as big as Kazan. But the bear was a monster beside which Kazan would have stood a mere pygmy. He was big. If nature was taking this way of introducing Baree to the fact that there were more important creatures in the forests than dogs and wolves and owls and crayfish, she was driving the point home with a little more than necessary emphasis. For Wakayoo, the bear, weighed six hundred pounds ...
— Baree, Son of Kazan • James Oliver Curwood
... of eloquence, is of use to each one in proportion to the measure of his knowledge. For it is of most use to him who knows the most and of least use to him who knows little. For as the sword of Hercules in the hand of a pygmy or dwarf is ineffective, while the same sword in the hand of Achilles or Hector strikes down everything like a thunderbolt, so dialectic, if it is deprived of the vigor of the other disciplines is to a certain degree crippled and almost useless. If ...
— Readings in the History of Education - Mediaeval Universities • Arthur O. Norton
... intervened; subsequently inviting him to leave the carriage and receive a lesson at the station they were nearing. Upon his promising faithfully, that it should be a true and telling lesson, the navvy requested this pygmy spark to flick his cheek, merely to show he meant war in due sincerity; and he as faithfully, all honour, promising not to let it bring about a breakage of the laws of the Company, Skepsey promptly did the deed. So ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... guess that the Panther had fled north, and he sent the tug spitting along a course that would lie between the cruiser and her enemy. The Panther was forced to repass the Vulcan in the new maneuver. The giant and pygmy were flying along at top speed, fairly abreast, scarcely ...
— The Cruise of the Dry Dock • T. S. Stribling
... use her in that kind For which thou whipp'st her. The usurer hangs the cozener. Through tatter'd clothes small vices do appear; Robes and furr'd gowns hide all. Plate sin with gold, And the strong lance of justice hurtless breaks; Arm it in rags, a pygmy's straw does pierce it. None does offend, none.—I say none; I'll able 'em: Take that of me, my friend, who have the power To seal the accuser's lips. Get thee glass eyes; And, like a scurvy politician, seem To see the things thou dost not.—Now, ...
— The Tragedy of King Lear • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... whose main occupation in life was to buy knick-knacks that he might give them away afterwards, bought the little chap a pony not much bigger than a large rat, the donor said, and on this little black Shetland pygmy young Rawdon's great father was pleased to mount the boy, and to walk by his side in the park. It pleased him to see his old quarters, and his old fellow-guardsmen at Knightsbridge: he had begun to think ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... favors from the workers. Wages went up and up, and continued to go up, until the workers demanded the full product of their toil. Now it is clear that, when labor receives its full product capital must perish. And so the pygmy capitalists of that post-Plague day found their existence threatened by this untoward condition of affairs. To save themselves, they set a maximum wage, restrained the workers from moving about from place to place, smashed incipient organization, refused to tolerate idlers, and by most barbarous ...
— War of the Classes • Jack London
... mould, and ulcers, tottering, worm-eaten, abandoned, condemned, a sort of mendicant colossus, asking alms in vain with a benevolent look in the midst of the cross-roads, had taken pity on that other mendicant, the poor pygmy, who roamed without shoes to his feet, without a roof over his head, blowing on his fingers, clad in rags, fed on rejected scraps. That was what the elephant of the Bastille was good for. This idea of Napoleon, disdained by men, had been taken back by God. That which ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... man of conceiving, even approximately, the great law-giving Force that rules the universe? Shall we ever do more than attribute to Him those qualities which our own pygmy minds admire? Shall we forever conceive Him ...
— Editorials from the Hearst Newspapers • Arthur Brisbane
... mentions an "Isle of Apes" in the Sea of China and Al-Idrisi places it two days' sail from Sukutra (Dwipa Sukhatra, Socotra). It is a popular error to explain the Homeric and Herodotean legend of the Pygmies by anthropoid apes. The Pygmy fable (Pygmaei Spithamai1 cubit3 spans) was, as usual, based upon fact, as the explorations of late years have proved: the dwarfs are homunculi of various tribes, the Akka, Doko, Tiki- Tiki, Wambilikimo ("two-cubit men"), the stunted race that share the central regions ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... whereas Moses represented the Deity as producing the whole universe by his fiat! Can I think you have any esteem for a writer who has spoiled Tasso's hell and the devil; who transforms Lucifer, sometimes into a toad, and at others into a pygmy; who makes him say the same thing over again a hundred times; who metamorphoses him into a school-divine; and who, by an absurdly serious imitation of Ariosto's comic invention of fire-arms, represents the devils and ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... himself with the utmost gravity to the affairs of a pygmy state with a total population under 250,000. His imagination did its work. While you seem, he said most truly, to be dealing only with a few specks scarcely visible on the map of Europe, you are engaged in solving a problem as delicate and difficult as if it arose on a far more conspicuous ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... and sharply rapped out these words close to Joe's ear. He felt certain that he would not now bring upon him the woodsman's good-natured scorn for making a disturbance about nothing. A heavy, stealthy tread, as of some big animal, was crushing the pygmy bushes near the tent. Immediately afterwards he saw an uncouth black shape in the lane of light between himself and the fire. It disappeared while his heart was giving one jump, and he heard a dull, mumbling noise, such as a pig might make when rooting amid rubbish, varied with ...
— Camp and Trail - A Story of the Maine Woods • Isabel Hornibrook
... help to wake a sleepin' an' selfish nation. If the cryin' o' the children has ever rung in your ears, it'll never stop till you're doin' somethin' to help. Do you think I could dream every day, as I do, o' that 'spectral army of pygmy people sucked in from the hills to dance beside the crazing ...
— The Boy With the U.S. Census • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... line of little pyramids—tiny ones, not more than six inches high, stretching across Xanthus as far as I could see! Little buildings made of pygmy bricks, they were, hollow inside and truncated, or at least broken at the top and empty. I pointed at them and said 'What?' to Tweel, but he gave some negative twitters to indicate, I suppose, that he didn't know. So off we went, following the row of pyramids because ...
— A Martian Odyssey • Stanley Grauman Weinbaum
... reasonable, but opposing, has not been found out—except that we modify that by saying that, though nothing's finally reasonable, some phenomena have higher approximations to Reasonableness than have others. Against the notion of toys, the higher approximation is that where "pygmy flints" are found, all flints are pygmies—at least so in India, where, when larger implements have been found in the same place, there are separations ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... stern upon the wrath; the attributes that do not please the worshipper he insensibly forgets. Wherefore, O my pupils, you will not smile when you read in Barnes that the pygmies declared Jove himself was a pygmy. The pious vanity of man makes him adore his own qualities under the pretence of ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Americans, and moderns generally, are intellectual dwarfs compared with the ancients, or even the Elizabethan men. But what is that to the purpose? A living dog is better than a dead lion. Shall a man go and hang himself because he belongs to the race of pygmies, and not be the biggest pygmy that he can? Let every one mind his own business, and endeavor to be what ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... quivers, torches, We turned to seek for sweeter—fresher things! Instead of sipping in a pygmy glass Dull fashionable waters,—did we try How the soul slakes its thirst in fearless draught By drinking from the ...
— Cyrano de Bergerac • Edmond Rostand |
