"Penultimate" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... am in training to dine with Sheridan and Rogers this evening. I have a little spite against R., and will shed his 'Clary wines pottle-deep.' This is nearly my ultimate or penultimate letter; for I am quite equipped, and only wait a passage. Perhaps I may wait a few weeks for Sligo, but not if ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. II - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... admitted on all hands. It refers to the nature, or origin, or constitution of the fact. Is the perception of matter simple and indivisible, or is it composite and divisible? Is it the ultimate, or is it only the penultimate, datum of cognition? Is it a relation constituted by the concurrence of a mental or subjective, and a material or objective element,—or do we impose upon ourselves in regarding it as such? Is it a state, or modification of the human mind? Is it an effect that ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 • Various
... Now as you know, 'e shuts 'isself up and never opens the door to a soul; only you don't know why and we does. The only one as can ever get at 'im is 'is mother. Well, it's a confounded funny coincidence,' he said, accenting the penultimate, 'it's a very unusual piece of good luck, but ...
— The Club of Queer Trades • G. K. Chesterton
... worse, it seems, than the penultimate, as the present is worst than the last. We, however, of the present, bad as we may be, shall be kept in countenance by the coming generation, which will prove much worse than ourselves. On the same precedent, all the sermons through the last three centuries, if traced back through decennial periods, ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... an "interchangeable part," with a fixed number, in a rule-bound organism. The real thing to aim at is liberation of the inner interests. Give man possession of a soul, and he will work out his own happiness under any set of conditions. Accordingly, when, in the penultimate year of his life, he proposed his night-school to a meeting of young East-Side workingmen in New York, he told them that he had no sympathy whatever with the griefs of "labor," that outward circumstances meant nothing in his eyes; that through their individual ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... and departed to his own country, from which he had lately received some unsatisfactory intelligence. The Emperor endeavoured to engage his influence to bring about a marriage which he desired to contract with a daughter of the penultimate Emperor, Muhammad Shah: but the Abdali, on his attention being drawn to the young lady, resolved upon espousing her himself. He at the same time married his son Timur Shah to the daughter of the heir apparent, and, having left that son in charge of the ...
— The Fall of the Moghul Empire of Hindustan • H. G. Keene
... was now entering upon the penultimate period of his enormous career. He who had once been the rising hope of the stern and unbending Tories, had at length emerged, after a lifetime of transmutations, as the champion of militant democracy. He was at the apex of his power. His great rival was dead; he stood pre-eminent ...
— Eminent Victorians • Lytton Strachey
... its fourth and penultimate stage—its Australian stage. It is hard to see why these correspondences spring up; one only knows that they do spring up, suddenly, like street crowds. There comes, it would seem, a moment when the whole English-speaking race is unconsciously ...
— A. V. Laider • Max Beerbohm
... hasten then to reassure our readers that the blow, though it must inevitably descend one day, is mercifully deferred for a considerable period. To begin with, Mr. Bamborough is under contract to give five farewell tours in the United States at intervals of four years before entering upon the penultimate stage of his severance from the British concert platform. This, which will begin in the autumn of 1934, is likely to continue until the year 1948, when he is booked for an extended tour in Polynesia, Japan, New Guinea and Java. On his ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, May 20, 1914 • Various
... maddened, And a barber came to draw it. As he sat with jaws expanded, "Which tooth is it, sir, that pains you?" Asked of him the honest barber, And the patient in affected Language grandly thus made answer, "The penultimate"; the dentist Not being used to such pedantic Talk as this, with ready forceps Soon the last of all extracted. The poor patient to be certain, With his tongue the spot examined, And exclaimed, his mouth all bleeding, "Why, that 's not the right tooth, master". "Is it not the ultimate molar?" ...
— The Two Lovers of Heaven: Chrysanthus and Daria - A Drama of Early Christian Rome • Pedro Calderon de la Barca
... the Duke and Duchess of Urbino in the Uffizi belong, as has already been noted, to 1537. Francesco Maria, here represented in the penultimate year of his stormy life, assumes deliberately the truculent warrior, and has beyond reasonable doubt made his own pose in a portrait destined to show the leader of armies, and not the amorous spouse or the patron of art and artists. Praise ...
— The Later works of Titian • Claude Phillips
... Browning in Robert Browning's penultimate book, that "Parleyings with certain people of importance in their day" which fell somewhat coldly upon all save Browning fanatics, and which, when it seemed to show that the poet's hand had palsied, served only as the discordant ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 1 • Grace Wharton and Philip Wharton
... to say more of Mr. Morris's "Odysseus." Close to the letter of the Greek he usually keeps, but where are the surge and thunder of Homer? Apparently we must accent the penultimate in "Amphinomus" if the line is to scan. I select a passage of peaceful beauty from ...
— Adventures among Books • Andrew Lang
... seems to be borrowed from a different source, namely from the masks which in comedies and tragedies used to signify the different subjects of representation. Now persona "mask" is derived from personare, with a circumflex on the penultimate. But if the accent is put on the antepenultimate[61] the word will clearly be seen to come from sonus "sound," and for this reason, that the hollow mask necessarily produces a larger sound. The Greeks, ...
— The Theological Tractates and The Consolation of Philosophy • Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius
... his confidence, of his spirits and, what was more to the point, of his system. The whole occasion on which the first symptom flared out is before me as I write. I had met them both at dinner: they were diners who had reached the penultimate stage—the stage which in theory is a rigid selection and in practice a wan submission. It was late in the season and stronger spirits than theirs were broken; the night was close and the air of the banquet such as to restrict conversation to the refusal of dishes and consumption ...
— Embarrassments • Henry James
... Cuvier— Rhin. megarhinus, Christol; fossil from fresh-water beds of Grays, Essex; penultimate molar, lower jaw, left side; two-thirds of natural size. Post-pliocene and ...
— The Student's Elements of Geology • Sir Charles Lyell
... in logic) and two grammatical improprieties. To lean is a neuter verb, and 'seizing on' is not properly to be called a pleonasm, merely because it is—nothing at all. The concluding line is difficult of pronunciation through excess of consonants. I should have preferred, indeed, the ante-penultimate tristich as the ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. I, No. 6 - Of Literature, Art, And Science, New York, August 5, 1850 • Various |
