"Simile" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of an article to arouse curiosity. As the comparison in a metaphor is implied rather than expressed, the points of likeness may not immediately be evident to the reader and thus the figurative statement piques his curiosity. A comparison in the form of a simile, or in that of a parable or allegory, may serve as a ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer
... expressed the hope that Communism would rage through the country like an epidemic, forgetting for the moment that those municipalities which had gone over to Communism had won general praise for their improvements in the sanitary sphere. Largely on account of this infelicitous simile he was replaced in the leadership by another, a less vigorous and less entertaining person. And this party stood in particular ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein
... But many minds are, as it were, their own religious artists; and build up for themselves psychic structures answering to their intuitive apprehensions. So vivid may these structures sometimes be for them that—to revert again to our original simile—the self turns from the window and the realistic world without, and becomes for the time wholly concentrated on the symbolic drama or picture within the room; which abolishes all awareness of the everyday world. When this happens in a small way, we have what ...
— The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day • Evelyn Underhill
... broad look-out in front, for yonder lies the blue harbor and the ocean deeps. Just back of the tents is the cookery of the camp, huge mounds of loose stones, with grooves at the top, very like the architecture of a cranberry-pie; and if the simile be an homely one, it is the best that comes to mind to convey an idea of those regimental stoves, with their seams and channels of fire, over which potatoes bubble, and roast and boiled scud forth a ...
— Acadia - or, A Month with the Blue Noses • Frederic S. Cozzens
... even a highly-gifted people can produce; and thus an inordinate stream of undesirables flows into these institutions, who, however, by their preponderating numbers and their instinct of 'similis simile gaudet' gradually come to determine the nature of these institutions. There may be a few people, hopelessly unfamiliar with pedagogical matters, who believe that our present profusion of public schools and teachers, ...
— On the Future of our Educational Institutions • Friedrich Nietzsche
... machineguns into action, and the right side of the living bar frittered away, and then the whole line fell into the scorched grass. Another line followed. They were tall men, and did not falter as they came forward, but it seemed to me they walked like men conscious of going to death. They died. The simile is outworn, but it was exactly as though some invisible scythe ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... presented by the author to Pedro II. in 1685. It was published in 1836 by the Academia Real das Sciencias of Lisbon, under the title of "Fatalidade Historica da Ilka de Ceilao;" and forms the Vth volume of the a "Collecao de Noticias para a Historia e Geograjia das Nacoes Ultramarinas" A fac-simile from a curious map of the island as it was then known to the Portuguese, has been included in the ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... from that simile," said the Greek scholar, smiling, "that when a bit of English gets into Greek it goes to heaven, and would better stay there. Perhaps you are right in what you say about fiction. Anyway it is very pleasant to talk with one who ...
— The Squirrel Inn • Frank R. Stockton
... husband about thirty-six. He was at that time Secretary at War, and was promised promotion the first opportunity. The fortune of each was in expectation: they were, she says, "truly merchant adventurers," their whole capital being only twenty pounds; and, to preserve the simile, that capital was laid out in the articles of his trade—in pens, ink, and paper. What was wanting in money was amply supplied by prudence and affection; and there is no difficulty in believing her assurance, that they lived better ...
— Memoirs of Lady Fanshawe • Lady Fanshawe
... faults, but is a magnificent failure. "Vast as night," to borrow a simile from Victor Hugo, but, ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... memory swung back, in spite of himself, to his late wife. Milly Fauncey had liked him almost from the first day they had met. It had been like the attraction—but of course that was the very last simile that would have occurred to Varick himself—of a rabbit for a cobra. He had had but to look at the self-absorbed, shy, diffident human being, to fascinate and draw her to himself. The task would have been almost too easy, but for ...
— From Out the Vasty Deep • Mrs. Belloc Lowndes
... parlor and watched people go by, swarming like bees along the walk. She remembered having heard or read somewhere the simile of a human hive. The shuffle of their feet, the hum of their voices droned in her cars, confusing her, irritating her, and she presently found herself hurrying away from it, walking rapidly eastward toward a thin fringe ...
— North of Fifty-Three • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... day in my office like a nigger and by mid-day had got almost as black as my simile! We are coaling and life has grown dark and noisy. In the middle of it, Ashmead-Bartlett came aboard to see me. He has his quarters on the Queen Elizabeth as one of the Admiralty authorised Press Correspondents, or rather, as the only authorised correspondent. In Manchuria he was known and ...
— Gallipoli Diary, Volume I • Ian Hamilton
... verification of the authenticity of this relic. The Tripartite Life of St. Patrick mentions the gift of this relic by the saint to St. MacCarthainn. Dr. Petrie concludes that the copy of the Gospels contained therein, was undoubtedly the one which was used by our apostle. We give a fac-simile of the first page, which cannot fail to ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack
... enthusiasm over the perpetration, combined with intense disgust "at the miscarriage of justice" of my having escaped without hurt or more than very temporary inconvenience. On my departure, one eloquent writer compared me to 'Macduff taking his babes and bandboxes to England,' a choice simile I ...
— The Reminiscences of an Irish Land Agent • S.M. Hussey
... official letters and petitions drawn up by the chiefs in their own tongues, and forwarded to the Spanish authorities. Of these, two interesting specimens, one in the "Abolachi" tongue (a dialect of Muskokee), and the other in Timucuana, were published in fac-simile by the late Mr. Buckingham Smith, but in a very limited number of copies (only fifty in all). Others in Nahuatl and Maya, also in fac-simile, appear in that magnificent volume, the Cartas de Indias, issued by the Spanish Government in 1880. Doubtless ...
— Aboriginal American Authors • Daniel G. Brinton
... repentance, would there not be a sort of glory, an infernal apotheosis in so conspicuous a shame? Was not Richelieu in disgrace more idolised than ever by the dames of Paris? and when was the highwayman most acclaimed but on his way to Tyburn? Or, to take a simile from nearer home, and still more exactly to the point, what could even corporal punishment avail, administered by a cold, abstract, unearthly schoolmaster, against the influence and fame ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... while, I cannot but take notice of the great Use it is to an Audience, that a Person should thus preside over their Heads like the Director of a Consort, in order to awaken their Attention, and beat time to their Applauses; or, to raise my Simile, I have sometimes fancied the Trunk-maker in the upper Gallery to be like Virgil's Ruler of the Wind, seated upon the Top of a Mountain, who, when he struck his Sceptre upon the Side of it, roused an Hurricane, and set the whole Cavern in ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... tears stood in her eyes. There was something almost grand in the composure with which he was waiting for what seemed inevitable—something of the magnificent resignation with which the noblemen of France one by one took their place at the block, and the simile was heightened by the slightly contemptuous, slightly defiant poise of his finely shaped head. She saw him cast one lingering glance around at the still sea, with its far-off motionless sails; at the clear sky, from which the brilliancy of coloring was ...
— The New Tenant • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... springing from this principle of comparison, the forms fable, parable, and allegory; and in language the figures of speech which we know as simile and metaphor. ...
— Our Catholic Heritage in English Literature of Pre-Conquest Days • Emily Hickey
... Brecknockshire; and Malone guesses that it was when there that he fell in with the word "Puck." Near Scethrog, there is Cwn-Pooky, or Pwcca, the Goblin's valley, which belonged to the Vaughans; and Crofton Croker gives, in his Fairy Legends, a fac-simile of a portrait, drawn by a Welsh peasant, of a Pwcca, which (whom?) he himself had seen sitting on a milestone,[45] by the roadside, in the early morning, a very unlikely personage, one ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... that only existed in their own guilty imaginations, filled the minds of the people with false alarms, and taught every man to distrust if not to hate his neighbour. There was no more chance of Reform under the existing regime than of 'a thaw in Zembla,' to borrow a famous simile. Cobbett was right in his assertion that the measures and manners of George IV.'s reign did more to shake the long-settled ideas of the people in favour of monarchical government than anything which had happened since the days of Cromwell. The day of the King's funeral—it ...
— Lord John Russell • Stuart J. Reid
... What tone of voice should be used in reading a Simile in poetry? The simile should be read in a lower tone than the rest ...
— 1001 Questions and Answers on Orthography and Reading • B. A. Hathaway
... future for the Church as well as for himself, and the horizons were dark in both outlooks. He foresaw evils from two quarters, for 'wolves' would come from without, and perverse teachers would arise within, drawing the disciples after them and away from the Lord. The simile of wolves may be an echo of Christ's warning in Matthew vii 15. How sadly Paul's anticipations were fulfilled the Epistle to the Church in Ephesus (Revelation ii.) shows too clearly. Unslumbering alertness, as of a sentry ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... discriminating; his aspirations noble and pure. There was a pleasing fascination in his oratory and writing which never passed away. One can hardly think of his sad story without remembering also the simile of ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... officers of Sergeant York's regiment were trying to obtain all the facts of his wonderful exploit, they asked him what he did with the German officers he had captured when he started to bring in his line of prisoners. His reply was a simile from his ...
— Sergeant York And His People • Sam Cowan
... her—the pretty girl—a hand at the gangway, that has been softened by fastidious applications of solvent slush to the tint of a long envelope "on public service." "Law sheep," when we come to the binding of books, is too sallow for this simile; a little volume of "Familiar Quotations," in limp calf, (Bartlett, Cambridge, 1855,) might answer,—if the cover of the January number of the "Atlantic Monthly" were not exactly ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... which he desires to draw attention. The reader's mind at once gets to work unconsciously on this comparison, rejecting the unlike qualities and recognizing with an enhanced and satisfied consciousness the like ones. The functions of simile and metaphor are the same in ...
— Tract XI: Three Articles on Metaphor • Society for Pure English
... poems, particularly the later ones, everything by way of punctuation was discarded, except numerous dashes; and all important words began with capitals. The effect of a page of her more recent manuscript is exceedingly quaint and strong. The fac-simile given in the present volume is from one of the earlier transition periods. Although there is nowhere a date, the handwriting makes it possible to arrange the poems ...
— Poems: Three Series, Complete • Emily Dickinson
... "Your simile is no good. If Doris really loved you, it was not because she pictured you as a pretty bird. If she could love you without seeing you, if you appealed to her, why should your marred face make her turn ...
— The Hidden Places • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... The exactness of this simile was not altered by the fact that in this case the slave woman was an agnostic, while the patrician girl had been brought up in the creed of Christ. Sylvia had long since begun to question the formulas of a church ...
— Sylvia's Marriage • Upton Sinclair
... elevation. Accordingly, the bias of the former is toward over-intensity, of the latter toward over-diffuseness. Shakespeare's temptation is to push a willing metaphor beyond its strength, to make a passion over-inform its tenement of words; Milton can not resist running a simile on into a fugue. ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. X (of X) - America - II, Index • Various
... to the west; they lose the principal, dispersing it in the crowd of incidents after an hour of tempest, they know not what they seek: one is low, the other high, and a third wide. One catches at a word and a simile; another is no longer sensible of what is said in opposition to him, and thinks only of going on at his own rate, not of answering you: another, finding himself too weak to make good his rest, fears all, refuses all, at the ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... just a shade sadly. "I know. It isn't." He seemed deep in thought, as if he were deciding whether or not to get rid of Anne Boleyn. It was, Malone thought, an unusually apt simile. Boyd, six feet tall and weighing about two hundred and twenty-five pounds, had a large square face and a broad-beamed figure that might have made him a dead ringer for Henry VIII of England even without his Henry-like fringe of beard and his mustache. With them—thanks to the ...
— The Impossibles • Gordon Randall Garrett
... are not tied down like theatrical writers to the unities of time and place, but may conduct their personages to Athens and Thebes at their pleasure, and bring them back at their convenience. Time, to use Rosalind's simile, has hitherto paced with the hero of our tale; for betwixt Morton's first appearance as a competitor for the popinjay and his final departure for Holland hardly two months elapsed. Years, however, glided away ere we find it ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... payers of direct taxes. These petitions being printed upon large paper, were very generally adopted, as this saved the trouble of drawing up others. A circular letter had also been sent round the country, signed by Sir F. Burdett, or rather with the Baronet's fac-simile, which he had authorised the Major to use, for the purpose of inviting the Hampden Clubs, and all other petitioning bodies, to send up delegates or deputies to London, to meet a deputation of the Hampden Club, to ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 3 • Henry Hunt
... seemed a perfect circle; the terminating line several hundred miles in circumference. This I conjectured from the view of London; the extreme points of which, formed an angle of only a few degrees. It was so reduced on the great scale before me, that I can find no simile to convey an idea of it. I could distinguish Saint Paul's and other churches, from the houses. I saw the streets as lines, all animated with beings, whom I knew to be men and women, but which I should otherwise have had a difficulty in describing. ...
— The War in the Air; Vol. 1 - The Part played in the Great War by the Royal Air Force • Walter Raleigh
... me you recognise. In the same lot of rubbish, purporting to come from the Fayyum, were the alleged poems of Sappho. You swallowed the bait which has waited for you so long, and, if it is any consolation to you, I will admit that in the opinion of the profession, to continue my piscatorial simile, I have landed ...
— Masques & Phases • Robert Ross
... Paul, that which thou sowest is not quickened except it die not; for the grain that dies in the ground never does, nor can vegetate. It is only the living grains that produce the next crop. But the metaphor, in any point of view, is no simile. It is succession, and ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... branches. And depression, always lying in ambush of the novelty of his freedom, began like mist to rise above his restless thoughts. It was all so devilish empty—this raft of the world floating under evening's shadow. How many sermons had he listened to, enriched with the simile of the ocean of life. Here they were, come home to roost. He had fallen asleep, ineffectual sailor that he was, and a thief out of the cloudy deep had stolen oar and sail and compass, leaving him adrift amid the ...
— The Return • Walter de la Mare
... of the Scriptural simile came to him with startling emphasis, bringing on a return of the prickling dismay. The stopping of the paddle-wheels and the rattling clangor of the gang-plank winch aroused him to action and he shook off the creeping numbness and ran aft ...
— The Price • Francis Lynde
... that surrounded it like a halo, a girlish face flashed on him: cheeks like roses, brilliant with the frosty air; roguish eyes, now dancing, now melting; a laughing mouth from which came such rippling music that there was no simile for it in all the realm of silvery sound, the enchanting music of ...
— Santa Claus's Partner • Thomas Nelson Page
... half-insolent forcefulness of manner which in a curious fashion was almost becoming. There was, however, nothing beneath the surface. When he had to face a crisis he collapsed like a pricked bladder, which was the first simile she could think of, though she admitted that it was not a particularly elegant one. He was, it seemed, quite willing that a woman should help him out of the trouble he had involved himself in, for she had no doubt ...
— Hawtrey's Deputy • Harold Bindloss
... (I don't mind the simile) not because he was afraid, I think, but because Mr. John Dane's chin was much squarer and firmer than his; and because such sense of justice as he had told him that the ...
— The Motor Maid • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... however, was but to be pictured in fancy; not to be anticipated, nor desired. What I saw in him—as evidently as the indestructible ramparts of Old Ticonderoga, already cited as the most appropriate simile—was the features of stubborn and ponderous endurance, which might well have amounted to obstinacy in his earlier days; of integrity, that, like most of his other endowments, lay in a somewhat heavy mass, and was just as unmalleable or unmanageable as a ton of iron ore; and of ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... yields to you in guile. You touch the gold! You're not the man who misses A chance! You caught the wariest with your smile! "CARON!" The "h" is dropped, or we could fix (And so we can if Greek the name we make) You as the ancient Ferryman of Styx, Punting the Ghosts across the Stygian lake. The simile is nearly perfect, note, For you, with your Conspirators afloat, Were, as you've shown us, all ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, October 29, 1892 • Various
... the Prince, using the most powerful simile in the Italian language. "We will have her in Santo Spirito before night, and she will puzzle ...
— Saracinesca • F. Marion Crawford
... his report, she wondered, looking like a bronze figure? The simile pleased her, and she smiled. Yes, bronze was the right word to use, for his face and hands and arms were tanned almost to the colour of his khaki with exposure, so that he sometimes looked all of a piece, except for the close-clipped dark moustache ...
— The Rhodesian • Gertrude Page
... The simile of a "nest" as applied to the cabin of the brothers was no mere figure of speech as the light of the lantern first flashed upon it. The narrow ledge before the door was strewn with feathers. A suggestion that it might be the home and haunt of predatory birds was promptly checked by the spectacle ...
— The Twins of Table Mountain and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... other are also likest in nature one to another. So it is among men. The several agreements and symbolizings of men's spirits in different qualities and tempers, make several sorts of men, and part them into so many companies: Pares paribus congregantur. Simile simili gaudet.(238) ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... is in their hands; and the blotted page speaks eloquently enough of the artistic processes of mind to which their most passionate passages are subjected before they come to the reader's eye. Think of the fac-simile of Byron's handwriting in "Childe Harold"! It shows a soul rapt almost beyond the power of writing. But the blots and erasures were not made by a "fine frenzy"; they speak no less eloquently for an artistic taste and skill excited and alert, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 20, June, 1859 • Various
... fulmosxirmilo. Lighthouse lumturo. Like ameti. Like simila. Like (adv.) tiel. Likelihood versxajno. Likeness (similarity) simileco. Likeness (portrait) portreto. Likely (adj.) ebla, versxajna. Likely (adv.) eble, versxajne. Likewise simile. Lilac siringo. Lilac (colour) siringkolora. Lily lilio. Limb membro. Lime kalko. Lime tree tilio. Limestone kalksxtono. Limit limigi. Limit limo. Limp lami, lameti. Limpid klarega. Linden tilio. Line ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... contrast greater than the one between this modern berserk and the pampered daughter of his wealth. A Hun or a Vandal gazing down with barbaric scorn on some decadent paramour of captured Rome was the most analogous simile Farnum's brain could summon. What freak of nature, he wondered, had been responsible for so alien an offspring to this ruthless builder? And what under heaven had the two in common except the blood that ran in ...
— The Vision Spendid • William MacLeod Raine
... the rifles and the basso profundo of the guns, it was a scene of ordered, yes, almost peaceful industry which in no way suggested war but reminded me, rather, of the Panama Canal at the busiest period of its construction (I have used the simile before, but I use it again because I know none better), of the digging of the New York subway, of the laying of a transcontinental railway, of the building of the dam at Assuan. Trenches which had recently been captured from the Austrians were being cleared and renovated ...
— Italy at War and the Allies in the West • E. Alexander Powell
... harmonious, and he displays a fair command of metre. Sometimes he takes a fancy to an obsolete or out-of-the-way stanza; one of his longest and best poems, The Skeleton in Armor, is exactly in the measure of Drayton's fine ballad on Agincourt. His chief fault is an over-fondness for simile and metaphor. He seems to think indispensable the introduction into everything he writes of a certain (or sometimes a very uncertain) number of these figures. Accordingly his poems are crowded with comparisons, sometimes ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. I, No. 6 - Of Literature, Art, And Science, New York, August 5, 1850 • Various
... week at least having killed all your mules for you, before I shot down your dogs—but not being exactly Phoibos Apollon, you are to know further that when I did think I might go modestly on, ... [Greek: omoi], let me get out of this slough of a simile, never mind with what dislocation of ancles! Plainly, from waiting and turning my eyes away (not from you, but from you in your special capacity of being written-to, not spoken-to) when I turned ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... laugh," she cried, laughing herself, "but it's quite true. Or perhaps it would be more 'lady-like' to say that I feel like 'a caged bird,' as people do in books. In future I shall console myself with the thought that I may be the lever which supplies the force. Is that simile right, or ridiculously wrong? It's rash of me to use engineering terms before you. I mean that I'll try to be a good influence to some man, and so inspire work, if I can't do it myself. The worst is, I know so ...
— Betty Trevor • Mrs. G. de Horne Vaizey
... view to the chief characteristic. As far as that is seen in the main parts of the poem, such as the fable, manners, and sentiments, no translator can prejudice it but by wilful omissions or contractions. As it also breaks out in every particular image, description, and simile, whoever lessens or too much softens those, takes off from this chief character. It is the first grand duty of an interpreter to give his author entire and unmaimed; and for the rest, the diction and versification ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... "An absurd simile drawn from an ignorance of the formation of the biped. The heart of a chicken has a just proportion to its other organs, and the domestic fowl is, in a state of nature, a gallant bird. Ellen," he added, with a countenance so solemn as ...
— The Prairie • J. Fenimore Cooper
... such force to Common-Sense, Vain triflers shall no more deceive, And atheists tremble and believe.' He said, and ceased; the chamber rung With due applause from every tongue: The mingled sound (now let me see— Something by way of simile) Was it more like Strymonian cranes, Or winds, low murmuring, when it rains. 610 Or drowsy hum of clustering bees, Or the hoarse roar of angry seas? Or (still to heighten and explain, For else our simile is vain) Shall we declare it like all four, A scream, a murmur, ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill
... is among cresses, to use an American simile, the "finest toad in the puddle." This is because of its superlative medicinal worth, and its great popularity at table. Early writers called the herb "Shamrock," and common folk now-a-days term it the "Stertion." Zenophon advised the Persians to feed their children on Water-cresses ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie
... brags of his Majesty's fine spirits;—and is, Jotting and all, as insignificant a Letter as any other portion of the "Rookery Colloquy," though its fate was a little more distinguished. Prussian Dryasdust is expected to give it in FAC-SIMILE, one day,—surely no British Under-Secretary will exercise an unwise discretion, and forbid him ...
— History of Friedrich II of Prussia V 7 • Thomas Carlyle
... Rebecca; her pencil moved as easily as her tongue, and no more striking simile could possibly be used. Her handwriting was not Spencerian; she had neither time, nor patience, it is to be feared, for copybook methods, and her unformed characters were frequently the despair of her teachers; but write she could, write she would, write she must and did, in season ...
— New Chronicles of Rebecca • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... the bees; and while white clouds floated in the majesty of silence across the blue deeps of the heavens. The air was so full of life and reviving, that it seemed like the crude substance that God might take to make babies' souls of—only the very simile smells of materialism, and therefore ...
— The Seaboard Parish Volume 1 • George MacDonald
... let fly an epistle at you long ere this, had I not known I should have some difficulty in hitting so active a traveller, who may in that respect be likened unto a bird of passage. Were you to follow the simile throughout, I might soon expect to see you winging your way to the southern climes, instead of remaining to wait the approach of winter in the colder regions of the north. Seriously, I have been in weekly ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume I (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... Shakespeare is richest in the material of simile. He thought in pictures, which is another way of saying he wooed comparatives. Thought is inert; and he is greatest in expression who can supply his thinking with ruddy blood, flush the pallid cheek, make the dull eye bright, and make laughter run across the ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... of Shakspere suggested the real explanation, or he had taken pains to acquaint himself with the significance of the simile. We can hardly say that the correspondence might be merely fortuitous; because, at the least, Shakspere looked for and found a suitable figure to associate with the words eye of a needle, and so fell upon the real explanation; except, indeed, he had no particular significance in using the ...
— A Dish Of Orts • George MacDonald
... I cannot think much of. Try to be forgiving. It is toasted dry between the two fires of the Scriptures and Homer, and is as stiff as any dry toast out of the simile. To be sincere, ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... those names as glibly as any other modern quibbler. I can prove the rights of all those labels or I can prove the wrongs of them, according to the way my dinner is digesting. What stays right there, what I never can digest (if you'll pardon an inelegant simile that's just occurred to me), a lump I never can either swallow entirely down or get up out of my throat, is the fact that there are men, hundreds of men, thousands of men, working with picks underground all day, ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... through the same desolate country, we see that he makes a note on the forsaken fields and the watch-towers in them. Cucumbers are cultivated in large quantities by the natives of Inner Africa, and the reader will no doubt call to mind the simile adopted by Isaiah some 2500 years ago, as he pictured the coming desolation of Zion, likening her to a "lodge in a ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume II (of 2), 1869-1873 • David Livingstone
... This simile has occurred to poets in all lands, in all ages. In an old Chinese poem (JOLOWICZ, der Poetische Orient, s. 7) we are told that 'in the south there lives a tree, the Ivy Ko clings and winds around it, bringing the most excellent of joys and happiness in excess.' Owing to this natural ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 1 January 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... a philosopher that was excellently skilled in the noble science or study of astronomy, who told me he had some years studied for some simile, or proper allusion, to explain to his scholars the phenomena of the sun's motion round its own axis, and could never happen upon one to his mind, till by accident he saw his maid Betty trundling her mop: ...
— The Complete English Tradesman (1839 ed.) • Daniel Defoe
... [Footnote 10: This simile is nobly conceived, but expressed somewhat obscurely. As Hercules contended in vain against Antaeus, the Son of Earth,—so long as the Earth gave her giant offspring new strength in every fall,—so the soul contends in vain with evil—the natural earth-born ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. III • Kuno Francke (Editor-in-Chief)
... think it was Tom who employed that truly Suffolk simile—"I look upon this here chapel as the biler, yeou togither as the dumplins, and I'm the spoon that stars ...
— Two Suffolk Friends • Francis Hindes Groome
... find these hard, cold things and take hold of and seize them, we know that we have, to use a homely simile, eaten our cake. The supply of pearls is continuous, and under the control of the cruel ingenuity of man they grow to an ordinary size in less ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... doubt whether I ever knew its name. But how came I, then, to this perception of it? I can {222} answer nothing save this, that on entering that church I was in darkness altogether, and on coming out of it I saw the fullness of the light. I can explain the change no better than by the simile of a profound sleep or the analogy of one born blind who should suddenly open his eyes to the day. He sees, but cannot define the light which bathes him and by means of which he sees the objects which excite ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... more at ease on her white donkey, just as she felt more at ease with pleasant English maidservants than with pompous powdered footmen. It was a ridiculous simile, but it is the ridiculous which invades ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer
... generally to induce variation, whereas Mr. Darwin says he does not know), "and appear not in individuals subjected to new conditions" (What organism can pass through life without being subjected to more or less new conditions? What life is ever the exact fac-simile of another? And in a matter of such extreme delicacy as the adjustment of psychical and physical relations, who can say how small a disturbance of established equilibrium may not involve how great a rearrangement?), "but in the offspring of all, ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler
... anyone anxious to test the nature of the climate go to Kew Gardens and sit for a week or two in one of the tropical houses there; he may be assured that he will by no means feel in robust health when he leaves.' The simile is perfect. Europeans living in Africa like Europeans as regards clothing and diet are, I believe, quite right. We tried grass-cloth, instead of broadcloth, in Western India, when general rheumatism was the result. In the matter of meat and drink the Englishman cannot ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton
... Mac called us, and the world must apply the simile as it thinks fit. The wizard of the Never-Never weaves his spells, until hardships, and dangers, and privations, seem all that make life worth living; and then holds us "tethered goats"; and every time the town calls us with promises of gaiety, and comfort, ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn
... a fellow-countryman, my good sir," said Challenger, "but also, if I may be allowed to enlarge your simile, an ally of the first value. This beech tree will ...
— The Lost World • Arthur Conan Doyle
... a poor simile. No treasures in gold and gems, though heaped waist-high all about, could produce in the greediest man, hungry for earthly pleasures, a delight, a rapture, equal to mine. For this joy was of another and ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... impossible. There are moments in a woman's life when even a diamond seems lustreless as your eyes, Mr. Jawkins, if you will pardon the simile." Her sleepless night had made her wrong burn so grievously that she could not refrain from sententiousness, even in the presence of this man ...
— The King's Men - A Tale of To-morrow • Robert Grant, John Boyle O'Reilly, J. S. Dale, and John T.
... jewels than those which can be pasted in a crown, Supreme Head," said the stranger, entering unperceived behind the attending slave. He bore the external signs of an infirm magician, while his face was hidden in a cloth to mark the imposition of a solemn vow. "With what apter simile," he continued, "can this person describe an imperishable set of verses which he heard this morning falling from the lips of a wandering musician like a seven-roped cable of pearls pouring into a silver bucket? The striking ...
— Kai Lung's Golden Hours • Ernest Bramah
... resemble a group of hideous murderers, standing as if about to be driven into the! flames of perdition itself. To compare them to a tribe of red Indians surrounding their war fires, would be but a faint and feeble simile when contrasted with the terror which, notwithstanding the gory hue with which they were covered from top to toe, might be read in their terrified eyes and visages. After a few minutes, however, the alarm became more intense, and put itself forth ...
— The Evil Eye; Or, The Black Spector - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... a poverty of ideas; in fact many of the difficulties spring from excessive condensation. Where Chapman is really assailable is in a singular incontinence of imagery. Every idea that occurs to him brings with it a plethora of illustrations, in the way of simile, metaphor, or other figure of speech; he seems impotent to check the exuberant riot of his fancy till it has exhausted its whole store. The underlying thought in many passages, though not deserving Dryden's contemptuous epithet, is sufficiently obvious. Chapman was not dowered ...
— Bussy D'Ambois and The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois • George Chapman
... myriads of sheep to the pasture. Children alone can dry up their tears with the rapidity of Nature in the tropics; perhaps we may have already made the remark, and must, therefore, beg pardon for repeating the simile a second time. ...
— Willis the Pilot • Paul Adrien
... donkey across Hampstead Heath. Not that I or any of my readers would think of indulging in any such distressingly vulgar exercise as the last named. It may serve, however, to conjure up in the mind a sufficiently forcible simile. ...
— The Bow, Its History, Manufacture and Use - 'The Strad' Library, No. III. • Henry Saint-George
... temple. Dr. Je[vr]abek, in his excellent booklet on Beautiful Old Prague likens this ancient building to a gigantic hand of Aaron held up in blessing over the Ghetto; I think you will agree with me that this is a very happy simile. Built in the severe style of transition from Romanesque to Gothic, of massive stone walls heavily buttressed, with steep red-tiled sloping roof, blackened with age and the grime of the walled-in Ghetto, this temple served not only as a place of worship for the sons of Israel, but ...
— From a Terrace in Prague • Lieut.-Col. B. Granville Baker
... pure pain the absence of pleasure; although most of the pleasures which reach the mind through the body are reliefs of pain, and have not only their reactions when they depart, but their anticipations before they come. They can be best described in a simile. There is in nature an upper, lower, and middle region, and he who passes from the lower to the middle imagines that he is going up and is already in the upper world; and if he were taken back again would think, and truly think, that he ...
— The Republic • Plato
... not allow truth to appear in its naked form, because its sphere of activity is not a narrow auditory, but the world and humanity at large, and therefore it must conform to the requirements and comprehension of so great and mixed a public; or, to use a medical simile, it must not present it pure, but must as a medium make use of a mythical vehicle. Truth may also be compared in this respect to certain chemical stuffs which in themselves are gaseous, but which for official ...
— Essays of Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... hire a boat and depart. Yesterday I saw a camel go through the eye of a needle—i.e., the low arched door of an enclosure; he must kneel and bow his head to creep through—and thus the rich man must humble himself. See how a false translation spoils a good metaphor, and turns a familiar simile into a ferociously communist sentiment. I expect Henry and Janet here in four or five days when her ancle allows her to travel. If I get a house at Thebes, I will only hire a boat up and dismiss it, and trust to Allah for my return. There are rumours ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon
... of intermingled pine-copse and grassy slopes; but admiring scenery is anything but a riskless undertaking along here, as I quickly discover. On the Inn River I find a primitive ferry-boat operated by a, fac-simile of the Ancient Mariner, who takes me and my wheel across for the consideration of five pfennigs-a trifle over one cent -and when I refuse the tiny change out of a ten-pfennig piece the old fellow touches his cap as ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... Ayesha there began the most mysterious and thrilling of her many changes. Yet how to describe it I know not unless it be by simile. ...
— Ayesha - The Further History of She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed • H. Rider Haggard
... seated herself in the chair and fixed her dark eyes upon me. They were large eyes and very dark. Hephzy said, when she first saw them, that they looked like "burnt holes in a blanket." Perhaps they did; that simile did not ...
— Kent Knowles: Quahaug • Joseph C. Lincoln
... Of Verbal Criticism (1733), p. 14. He added the note: "See a Poem published some time ago under that title, said to be the production of several ingenious and prolific heads; One contributing a simile, Another a character, and a certain Gentleman four shrewd lines wholly made ...
— Two Poems Against Pope - One Epistle to Mr. A. Pope and the Blatant Beast • Leonard Welsted
... The captain's simile was not so Scriptural as the old lady could have desired, but she remembered that he was but a young convert, and that holy conversation was a matter of gradual attainment. So, simply and piously making the best of ...
— Romance of California Life • John Habberton
... be a great capital some day," said Talbot as they walked on, "but, if I may use the simile, it's a little ragged and ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... had not been exhibited in New York, and during these years he had increased considerably in rotundity and had changed much in his general appearance. It was a singular fact, however, that Commodore Nutt was almost a fac-simile of General Tom Thumb, as he looked half-a-dozen years before. Consequently, very many of my patrons, not making allowance for the time which had elapsed since they had last seen the General, declared that there was no such person as 'Commodore Nutt;' but that I was exhibiting ...
— A Unique Story of a Marvellous Career. Life of Hon. Phineas T. • Joel Benton
... continued Dupin, "abounds with very strict analogies to the immaterial; and thus some color of truth has been given to the rhetorical dogma, that metaphor, or simile, may be made to strengthen an argument, as well as to embellish a description. The principle of the vis inertiae, for example, seems to be identical in physics and metaphysics. It is not more true in the former, that a large body is with more difficulty set in motion than a smaller ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... the reader a state of mind unfit for the reception of greatness. Or again he will speak of the value of surprise in literature; "the pleasures of the mind imply something sudden and unexpected." Or he will enlarge, as in the Life of Addison, upon the definition of a simile, the use of similes in poetry, and the distinction between them and what he calls "exemplifications"; or, as in that of Pope, upon the subject of representative metres and onomatopoeic words. No one will pretend that all he says in these general excursions ...
— Dr. Johnson and His Circle • John Bailey
... I could guess what he was going to do, he crossed the room and drew my portieres aside! At first I held on to them, with a desperate desire to lose myself in the scanty folds; but they were firmly withdrawn, and there I stood,—a fac-simile of the fat, black-robed, black-veiled person who sat on the three-cornered chair by ...
— We Ten - Or, The Story of the Roses • Lyda Farrington Kraus
... she received these communications the vision was often in the form of a child, especially in those cases when an artist would have made use of that simile to express his ideas. If, for instance, the accomplishment of some Scripture prophecy was being shown to her, she often saw by the side of the illustration a child, who clearly designated the characteristics of such or such a prophet, by ...
— The Dolorous Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ • Anna Catherine Emmerich
... "Your simile is an unfortunate one, Cuitcatl. The sea covers the rock, but when it retires the rock remains. Still, it does seem to me that, however valiantly the Spaniards may fight, they cannot withstand ...
— By Right of Conquest - Or, With Cortez in Mexico • G. A. Henty
... ground, the horse on which the Lady Augusta was mounted had difficulty to keep up with, she followed him with the alarm and speed of the young spaniel, which from fear rather than fondness, endeavours to keep up with the track of its severe master. The simile, it is true, is not a very polite one, nor entirely becoming an age, when women were worshipped with a certain degree of devotion; but such circumstances as the present were also rare, and the Lady Augusta de Berkely could not but persuade herself that the terrible champion, whose ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... Thunder Lizard that had come back to link the Age of Stone with the Age of Air. On second thought I am inclined to believe the Thunder Lizard did not flourish in the Stone Age; but if you like the simile as much as I like it we ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... azure rainbows all about the firmament of man's own inner world; and at last an atom of gold-dust specks all the glasses with its lurid yellow, and haply leaves the old miser to his master-passion. So, ever changing day by day, every man's life is but a kaleidoscope. Stay; this simile is somewhat of the longest, but the whim is upon me, and I must have my way; the fit possesses me to try a sonnet, and I shall look far for a fairer thesis; he that hates verse—and the Muses now-a-days are too old-maidish to look many lovers—may skip ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... reap. He was exceedingly energetic and exceedingly strenuous; he doubled his strength and said "Take your sickles" and so forth, pointed out the portion to be reaped, offered them drink, food, scent, flowers, etc., and took an equal share of the work.' The simile should be thus applied: volition is like the cultivator, the fifty-five moral states which arise as factors of consciousness are like the fifty-five strong men; like the time of doubling strength, doubling effort by the cultivator is the doubled ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta
... waving trees, and beyond it we could see the white tents of the Boer laager. A young Dutchman had recently described Vryburg to me as a town which looked as if it had gone for a walk and got lost, and as we drove up to it I remembered his words, and saw that his simile was rather an apt one. There seemed no reason, beyond its site in a sheltered basin, why Vryburg should have been chosen for the capital of British Bechuanaland. The railway was at least a mile away on the east, and so hidden was the town that, till you ...
— South African Memories - Social, Warlike & Sporting From Diaries Written At The Time • Lady Sarah Wilson
... or "luminous": the "choice"—here are three ways of qualifying the objects which artists seek to present. Matthew Arnold was captivated by the simile of light, and having repeated Amiel's passionate cry for "more light," used "sweetness and light" as a refrain in all his criticism. Walter Pater, to whom the beauty of the human form, and therefore of sculpture, was especially ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... insight was far too profound for him to fail to strike at the root of individual crime, in those conditions which bred the criminal as surely as, to use his own favourite simile, unclean surroundings breed disease. And he had not been six months on the Bench before finding his first opportunity in a Charge delivered, as their Chairman, to the Westminster Grand Jury, on June 29, 1749. [10] This "very loyal, learned, ingenious, excellent and useful" Charge was published ...
— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden
... The simile is very apt, Socrates (11) (replied the youth), for in battle, too, the rule is to draw up the best men in front and rear, with those of inferior quality between, where they may be led on by the former and pushed on ...
— The Memorabilia - Recollections of Socrates • Xenophon
... monarchs. They must fancy everybody lives in a flutter of flags and walks about under triumphal arches, like as if I were to stitch shoes in my Sunday clothes." By a defiance of chronology Crowl had them on to-day, and they seemed to accentuate the simile. ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... the usual pictorial representations in children's books of the Tower of Babel. It is a happy simile, and conveys a better idea of the building than chapters of laboured description. Nothing can exceed the grace and lightness of the structure; nothing can be more remarkable than its general appearance. In the course ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens
... with its lights and its visitors and its big-aproned guardian? Her lids were actually smarting with tears at the recollection of Carthy's big Irish face.... He had been such a good, faithful watch-dog. Were men always like that—either watch-dogs or wolves? The simile brought her back to Hidden Creek. It grew darker and darker, a heavy darkness; the night had a new soft weight. There began to be a sort of whisper in the stillness—not the motion of pines, for there was no wind. Perhaps it was more a sensation than a sound, of innumerable ...
— Hidden Creek • Katharine Newlin Burt
... become more precious when they were fully understood. He thought of her as steadfast and wholesome in mind; one who sought for the best; but beyond this there was an ethereal something that could not be defined. Then a simile struck him: she was like the snow that towered high into the empyrean in British Columbia. In this, however, he was wrong, for there was warm human passion in the girl, though ...
— Vane of the Timberlands • Harold Bindloss
... looks as if half his tail had been taken off in a trap. The domestic dog is the Asiatic, not the European dog, a leggy, ugly, vagrant, uncared-for fellow, furnishing a useful simile and little more. ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)
... sanguine man. His strength was great; and, I imagine, had he not retired with me, I should never have been able to force my way. I was at this time sensible of no pain, and little uneasiness; I can give you no better idea of my situation than by repeating my simile of the bowl of spirit of hartshorn. I found a stupor coming on apace, and laid myself down by that gallant old man, the Rev. Mr. Jervas Bellamy, who laid dead with his son, the lieutenant, hand in hand, near the southernmost wall of the prison. When I ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... do things by chance, Armstrong. To use your own simile, I'm too much of a fish. I don't want to seem to interfere with your personal affairs, however. I beg your ...
— The Dominant Dollar • Will Lillibridge
... was split into two, whose courses diverged more and more painfully. By one way the Roman Catholic portion of the world were seen trooping to bliss; the other ended in a steep bottomless precipice over which the Protestants might be seen falling. [Footnote: A fac-simile of a similar picture appeared in the Church Missionary Gleaner, of March, 1880.] Upon the more sensible and advanced of the Indians, teaching such as this had little effect. I remember the chief of the Shuswap tribe, at Kamloops, ...
— Metlakahtla and the North Pacific Mission • Eugene Stock
... radio-activity has enabled us to see that Ether is not only as dense as iron, but millions of times denser than that metal, every cubic foot, or probably cubic inch, being capable of supplying millions of horse-power if it could only be tapped. A homely simile of this leak from the Infinite may be seen in a glass of aerated water, where an irregularity of surface, a crumb of bread, or a grain of sand becomes the means by which carbonic-dioxide escapes from ...
— Science and the Infinite - or Through a Window in the Blank Wall • Sydney T. Klein
... old simile, but Madam Liberality really was like a cork rising on the top of the very wave of ill-luck that had swallowed up her hopes. Her little white face and undaunted spirit bobbed up after each mischance or malady as ...
— A Great Emergency and Other Tales - A Great Emergency; A Very Ill-Tempered Family; Our Field; Madam Liberality • Juliana Horatia Gatty Ewing
... of His parables Christ employs the analogy of the work-engagement, in which labour and payment seem to correspond. But the legal element has a very subordinate place in the simile. Jesus lifts the whole relationship into a higher region of thought, and transforms the idea of wages into that of a gift of love far transcending the legal claim which can be made by the worker. He who has the bondsman's mind, and ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... Shakespeare, with the English man-of-war, lesser in bulk, but lighter in sailing, could turn with all tides, tack about and take advantage of all winds by the quickness of his wit and invention." We see in this simile that the lesson of the Spanish Armada had not been forgotten, and that its appearance was still vividly present in ...
— William Shakespeare - His Homes and Haunts • Samuel Levy Bensusan
... along the sky; so that I was at first reminded of a towpath, and we seemed to be mounting some engineered and navigable stream. Presently a red star appeared, about the height and brightness of a danger signal, and with that my simile was changed; we seemed rather to skirt the embankment of a railway, and the eye began to look instinctively for the telegraph-posts, and the ear to expect the coming of a train. Here and there, but rarely, faint tree-tops broke the level. And the sound of the surf ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... "An excellent simile, Captain Passford, and I could not have invented a better myself," returned the privateersman. "I think we understand each other perfectly, and therefore it is not necessary to use up any more time in explanations. You are too intelligent a person ...
— Stand By The Union - SERIES: The Blue and the Gray—Afloat • Oliver Optic |
