"Fictitious" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... at once Roman and Elizabethan, and men of all time, and men of no time at all. Thackeray, with the conveniences of the novel and the demands of his audience, dichotomizes the presentation while observing a certain unity in the fictitious person, now of Henry Esmond, now of William Makepeace Thackeray himself. If anybody does not like the result, there is nothing to be said. But there are those who regard it as one of the furthest explorations ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... and eclogues—and friendly letters in rhyme or prose. In short, this clever imaginative lad had evolved before he was sixteen such a mass of literary and quasi-historical matter of one kind or another that his fictitious circle of men of taste and learning (living in the dark and unenlightened age of Lydgate and the other tedious post-Chaucerians) may with study become extraordinarily familiar and near to us, and was certainly to Chatterton himself quite as real and vivid as the dull actualities ...
— The Rowley Poems • Thomas Chatterton
... smouldering republican element should not break out in opposition to the constitutional monarchy. But Rome would be ruined. She is no longer the geographical capital of Italy—she is not even the largest city; but in the course of a few years, violent efforts would be made to give her a fictitious modern grandeur, in the place of the moral importance she now enjoys as the headquarters of the Catholic world. Those efforts at a spurious growth would ruin her financially, and the hatred of Romans for Italians of the north would cause endless internal dissension. We should be ...
— Saracinesca • F. Marion Crawford
... of affairs on one side. On the other appeared a still less satisfactory scene. Charles amusing himself, his counsellors, La Tremoille, and the Archbishop of Rheims carrying on fictitious negotiations with Burgundy and playing with the Maid who was in their power, sending her out to make a show and cast a spell, then dragging her back at the end of their shameful chain: while the Court, the King and ...
— Jeanne d'Arc - Her Life And Death • Mrs.(Margaret) Oliphant
... Philosophy is that man passes through three mental periods—the Theological or fictitious; the Metaphysical or ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... two questions of a very different nature: one, whether the unconstitutional influence exercised by the Peers of Scotland in the election of the representatives of the Commons[775], by means of fictitious qualifications, ought not to be resisted;—the other, What, in propriety and humanity, should be done with old horses unable to labour. I gave him some account of my life at Auchinleck: and expressed my satisfaction that the ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 4 (of 6) • Boswell
... fellows" as sat round the table at which our Tony presided, were never furnished by the supernumeraries of Drury or Covent-garden. They were as classical, in their way, as Macready's Roman mob. Then there was no make-believe puffing of empty pipes, and fictitious drinking of small-beer for punch; every nose among the audience could appreciate the genuineness of both liquor and tobacco; and the hearty encore which the song, with its stentorian chorus, was honoured with, gave ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... thoroughly Hindu, Legend composed in Sanskrit, and is the germ which culminated in the Arabian Nights, and which inspired the "Golden Ass" of Apuleius, Boccacio's "Decamerone," the "Pentamerone," and all that class of facetious fictitious literature. ...
— Vikram and the Vampire • Sir Richard F. Burton
... descendants of an extinct race of primates, with a mind still in the early stages of accumulation, should we be in the way of reaching ultimate truth at any point? One may properly urge, however, that as sharp a distinction as possible be made between fictitious mysteries and the unavoidable ones which surround us on every side. How milk turned sour used to be a real mystery, now partially solved since the discovery of bacteria; how the witch flew up the chimney was a gratuitous mystery with which we need no ...
— The Mind in the Making - The Relation of Intelligence to Social Reform • James Harvey Robinson
... that various gross, and I think I may say libellous and fictitious misrepresentations of me have been freely and unwarrantably circulated throughout Great Britain, the Colonies, and America, by certain "lower" sections of the pictorial press, which, with a zeal worthy of a better and kinder cause, ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... an individual, and still more so for a nation, to lose the illusions of youth, if not of innocence, and to awake to the knowledge of an unbeautiful reality, bereft of all fictitious adornment. When, however, the naked truth can be discovered—and that is seldom the case—it must be faced; if the national or individual mind cannot receive it, the fault lies with the immaturity or morbid condition of the former, not with ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... this performance it will be asked, how it was possible in 1784 to have had an idea of what did not take place till the year 1790? The solution is simple. In the original plan the legislator was a fictitious and hypothetical being: in the present, the author has substituted an existing legislator; and the reality has only made ...
— The Ruins • C. F. [Constantin Francois de] Volney
... announced another guest and Lady Ascott went forward to meet him. Guest after guest, and all were greeted with little cries of fictitious intimacy; and each in turn related his or her journey, and the narratives were chequered with the names of other friends who had been staying in the houses they had just come from. Evelyn listened, thinking of her poor people, contrasting their simplicities ...
— Sister Teresa • George Moore
... accuracy, supposed to be characteristic of the first principles of geometry, thus appears to be fictitious. The assertions on which the reasonings of the science are founded, do not, any more than in other sciences, exactly correspond with the fact; but we suppose that they do so, for the sake of tracing the consequences which ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... with lies, false reports, fictitious sales, and the hope and lust of gain that boiled and bubbled, heated by the fires of hell. And ever around that caldron the souls of men were circling, cursing their losses and ...
— Uncle Terry - A Story of the Maine Coast • Charles Clark Munn
... the true stage; and he who cannot find matter of interest or amusement in the piece performed, may rely upon it that the cause is in himself, and not in the drama. Some will say, The world is just what it always was. People are no more fictitious now than at any other time. There was always, and there will be always, a certain amount of false pretension in life which you may, if you like, call acting. And to this I demur in toto, and assert that as ...
— Cornelius O'Dowd Upon Men And Women And Other Things In General - Originally Published In Blackwood's Magazine - 1864 • Charles Lever
... Canada, in connection with the conspirators, and arrest them. He personally arrested the witness, John Maughan, at the Tremont House. He gave me information of the ammunition in Walsh's house, and subsequent facts proved that his information was perfectly correct. I gave him the fictitious name of Johnson. He never acted as a detective, but simply aided in arresting men he had known before. Shanks worked for the Government ever since I knew him. Up to the 12th of November, he received no pay, and after that got $100 a month as his salary. I believe, however, ...
— The Great North-Western Conspiracy In All Its Startling Details • I. Windslow Ayer
... pure and simple, not in making shrewd detective deductions. The lime-light which occasionally bursts upon them distorts their ways and their duties. Really, they have little love for the dramatic. Newspaper notoriety is not sought, and men cannot "work the Press," as in times gone by, to attain a fictitious reputation. ...
— Scotland Yard - The methods and organisation of the Metropolitan Police • George Dilnot
... garlands. The virgin of royal birth even ventured to sit down upon the back of the bull, not knowing upon whom she was pressing. Then the God, by degrees {moving} from the land, and from the dry shore, places the fictitious hoofs of his feet in the waves near the brink. Then he goes still further, and carries his prize over the expanse of the midst of the ocean. She is affrighted, and, borne off, looks back on the shore she has left; and with her right ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Vol. I, Books I-VII • Publius Ovidius Naso
... of the colonel was no doubt fictitious, but this mattered but little. Jack inquired whether their absence in the morning would not be likely to be remarked; but the doctor said that the head of the party had been informed by Demetri that the two strangers would only ...
— Jack Archer • G. A. Henty
... found?—its presence means thrift, thoroughness, precision and prudence. Every circumstance of life from the beginning has taught the people how to extract the utmost value from every resource. Dollars have come slowly and painfully, and have thus, in one sense, a fictitious worth; but penuriousness is almost unknown, and the hardest working man or woman gives freely where a need is really felt. The ideal is still for the many, more powerful than the real. The conscientiousness and painful self-consciousness ...
— Anne Bradstreet and Her Time • Helen Campbell
... of a large Western paper, who enclosed a clipping from his last review for my perusal. It treated, not of "The Gates Ajar" just then, but of a magazine story in "Harper's," the "Century," or wherever. The story was told in the first person fictitious, ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. VI., No. 6, May, 1896 • Various
... hardly be said that these tales are quite fictitious. The king and his successor Khafra are real, but the other sons cannot be identified; and the confusion of supposing three kings of the Vth Dynasty to be triplets born early in the IVth Dynasty, shows what very vague ideas ...
— Egyptian Tales, First Series • ed. by W. M. Flinders Petrie
... fictitious wo, and of splendid distress, may alone be capable of fascinating those who recline on the lap of luxury, and who seek amusement, without soliciting instruction; but, among persons who possess any taste for genuine simplicity, any delight in the sacred employment ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. I • Francis Augustus Cox
... its reverse, 'La Ilaha ill 'Allah.'" This traveller adds in a note, "the value of the Ashrafi changes with each successive ruler. In the reign of Emir Abd el Shukoor, some 200 years ago, it was of gold." At present the Ashrafi, as I have said above, is a fictitious medium used in accounts. ...
— First footsteps in East Africa • Richard F. Burton
... describe the scenery of the Alps to one who had never yet ascended mountains above the region of the clouds, without so bewildering his imagination that his fancy will call forth and accept more fictitious notions than true ones. The best description that I had ever heard of the Alps, was the occasion of my most incorrect conceptions about them. I think the speaker did not misstate or exaggerate anything in a single word, but as he could in an hour's talk tell only one tenth of what ...
— The Youthful Wanderer - An Account of a Tour through England, France, Belgium, Holland, Germany • George H. Heffner
... was the key to the success of Miss Edgeworth's writings. If to us her fictitious children seem like puppets whose strings are too obviously jerked, the monotonous moral cloaked in the variety of incident was liked by ...
— Forgotten Books of the American Nursery - A History of the Development of the American Story-Book • Rosalie V. Halsey
... confidence which belongs only to long acquaintance with the modes of life, and to consciousness of unfailing propriety of behaviour. Deformity itself is regarded with tenderness rather than aversion, when it does not attempt to deceive the sight by dress and decoration, and to seize upon fictitious claims the ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson - Volume IV [The Rambler and The Adventurer] • Samuel Johnson
... natural because "Harper's" published as fast as I could write; which is not saying much, to be sure, for I have always been a slow worker. The first story of mine which appeared in the "Atlantic" was a fictitious narrative of certain psychical phenomena occurring in Connecticut, and known to me, at first hand, to be authentic. I have yet to learn that the story attracted any attention from anybody more disinterested than those few friends of the ...
— McClure's Magazine, March, 1896, Vol. VI., No. 4. • Various
... preserved, of all the trials and proceedings of the moot courts, presided over by Professors Greenleaf and Story, and pages of authorities are cited where "R. B. Hayes" appears as counsel for the fictitious plaintiff or defendant. It might have been safely assumed that a young man of his quick perceptions while in the atmosphere of Boston would make the most of his opportunities and advantages. He attended ...
— The Life, Public Services and Select Speeches of Rutherford B. Hayes • James Quay Howard
... closer the affection of his troops than in that ill-starred campaign into Maryland, which left the moral victory of a superb fight in McClellan's hands? No, the charm lay deeper still, beyond all the fictitious aids of fortune—somewhere in that serene and noble presence he had met one evening as the gray dusk closed, riding alone on an old road between level fields. After this it was always as a high figure ...
— The Battle Ground • Ellen Glasgow
... being unlearned in the curious arts of the theatre, listened wide-eyed, spellbound, until flicked by the swishing skirts of fictitious emotion into genuine, yet covert, excitement. As the reading progressed Henrietta Frayling's presence increasingly sank into unimportance. More and more did the poem assume a personal character, of which, ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... indulgence has made him too poor to purchase, and where artifice fails he will grovel in abject agony of supplication for a few grains. At the same time he resorts to all kinds of miserable and transparent shifts, to conceal his degradation. He never buys for himself, but always for some fictitious person, and often resorts to purchasing ...
— Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics • B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols
... (Catholics among us) thought and said, "Heaven help Europe when the time comes for its destinies to depend largely on the judgment of a man whose be-muddled intellect cannot distinguish between morality of the real world and of an entirely fantastic and fictitious one." ...
— The Drama Of Three Hundred & Sixty-Five Days - Scenes In The Great War - 1915 • Hall Caine
... two or three slight advantages which real merit has, that fictitious merit has not; among the rest, an especial advantage, which, we think, should recommend it to at least the quieter members of society—the advantage of being unobtrusive and modest. It presses itself much less on public notice than its vagabond antagonist, and makes much less noise; it ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... and a fire, and abundance of incidents—some tolerably new in conception, all very pleasant in narration. The good sense, perspicacity and straightforward dealing of the baron, subjugate every one. He unmasks the fictitious viscount, cures his nephew of his electioneering ambition, and the painted dowager of her longing for an invite to the Tuileries; and adopts Froidevaux—whose father had saved his life at Leipsic, and who has himself picked the baron out of a burning house—as his son and heir, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... The confusion and difference of opinion on this subject, have arisen from a want of clear and definite distinctions. Now, as it is impossible to define what are novels and what are not, so as to include one class of fictitious writings and exclude every other, it is impossible to lay down any rule respecting them. The discussion, in fact, turns on the use of those works of imagination, which belong to the class of narratives. That this species of reading, is not only lawful, but necessary and useful, ...
— A Treatise on Domestic Economy - For the Use of Young Ladies at Home and at School • Catherine Esther Beecher
... as the mark of his literary egotism a kind of intellectual tour de force—to found a religious philosophy, to do something with the 'idea' in spite of the essential nature of the 'idea'. And therefore all is fictitious from the beginning. He had determined, that which is humdrum, insipid, which the human spirit has done with, shall yet stimulate and inspire. What he produced symbolizes this purpose—the mass of it ennuyant, depressing: the Aids to Reflection, for instance, with ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... more or less fictitious, of the burning of a fleet with the aid of a glass and the sunbeams, will be matter-of-fact reality long before the coal shall have been ...
— Editorials from the Hearst Newspapers • Arthur Brisbane
... revolt; not to mention that reciprocity of annoyance (17) of which Corinth was the centre. So again the Argives had a strong appetite for peace; they knew that the ban had been called out against them, and, it was plain, that no fictitious alteration of the calendar would any longer stand them in good stead. Hence, when Tiribazus issued a summons calling on all who were willing to listen to the terms of peace sent down by the king (18) to present themselves, the invitation was promptly accepted. At ...
— Hellenica • Xenophon
... by no means an easy one. At each fair charmer, as I bowed, I looked with what directness I dared, to see if I might penetrate the mask and so foil Kitty in her amiable intentions. This occupation caused me promptly to forget most of the names which I heard, and which I doubt not were all fictitious. As we passed out at the foot of the row I recalled that I had not heard the ...
— The Way of a Man • Emerson Hough
... believe, who write in my Way (whatever View they may set out with) can, in the Prosecution of their Works, forbear to dress their fictitious Characters in the real Ornaments themselves have been ...
— Life And Adventures Of Peter Wilkins, Vol. I. (of II.) • Robert Paltock
... official household were the tutors charged with James's education, two of them being members of the Erskine family, abbots of Cambuskenneth and Dryburgh, though those titles were no doubt merely fictitious, meaning only that the "temporalities," the endowments of the extinct monasteries, were in their hands. The other and principal masters of James were Sir Peter Young and Mr. George Buchanan. Young was "gentle, loth to offend the king at any time, carrying ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... single book; yet it falls short of the general estimate that Walter Scott formed of the capacity of our author. "We readily grant to Smollett," he says, "an equal rank with his great rival, Fielding, while we place both far above any of their successors in the same line of fictitious composition." ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 20, June, 1859 • Various
... them against the ocean's perils, and leading them to the ends of the earth. Baleen whales like to frequent the southernmost and northernmost seas. Old legends even claim that these cetaceans led fishermen to within a mere seven leagues of the North Pole. Although this feat is fictitious, it will someday come true, because it's likely that by hunting whales in the Arctic or Antarctic regions, man will finally reach this unknown ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... are preached to you and bestowed upon you through the Gospel as the angels would rejoice and be desirous to behold, rely on them, and fix your confidence thereon with all firmness, so that it shall be a real faith, and not a painted or fictitious ...
— The Epistles of St. Peter and St. Jude Preached and Explained • Martin Luther
... inquiring about them at their lodgings, from the landlady and the landlady's blowsy daughter. It must have been a detective—some shoddy detective. Madame waited. Then she sent Max over to Mansfield, on some fictitious errand. Yes, the lousy-looking dogs of detectives had been there too, making the most minute enquiries as to the behaviour of the Natcha-Kee-Tawaras, what they did, how their sleeping was arranged, how Madame addressed the men, what attitude the men ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... fiction, "founded on fact." The facts on which it is founded are these,—that Aaron Burr sailed down the Mississippi River in 1805, again in 1806, and was tried for treason in 1807. The rest, with one exception to be noticed, is all fictitious. ...
— If, Yes and Perhaps - Four Possibilities and Six Exaggerations with Some Bits of Fact • Edward Everett Hale
... Politeness! this is the coin of the world, and passes current with the fools of it. You have substituted the shadow Honour, instead of the substance Virtue; and have banished the reality of friendship for the fictitious semblance which you have termed Politeness: politeness, which consists in a certain ceremonious jargon, more ridiculous to the ear of reason than the voice of a puppet. You have invented sounds, which ...
— The Man of Feeling • Henry Mackenzie
... more wonderful, went on with a complete unaffected indifference, as if all this was natural. I tried to disengage my arm in horror and dismay, but he held me fast with a pressure that hurt me. 'That's the question,' he said. 'What have we to do with it? Your fictitious consciousness makes it painful to you. To me, on the contrary, who take the view of nature, it is a pleasurable feeling. It enhances the amount of ease, whatever that may be, which I enjoy. I am in no pain. That brute who is'—and he flicked with ...
— The Little Pilgrim: Further Experiences. - Stories of the Seen and the Unseen. • Margaret O. (Wilson) Oliphant
... above breach of confidence merely to give another reason for my constant use of fictitious names with regard to people and places, and having done so (I hope to some purpose), I will proceed with ...
— Scottish Ghost Stories • Elliott O'Donnell
... Judas kiss &c (hypocrisy) 544; disguise &c (mask) 530. V. have a false meaning. Adj. untrue, false, phony, trumped up; void of foundation, without- foundation; fictive, far from the truth, false as dicer's oaths; unfounded, ben trovato[It], invented, fabulous, fabricated, forged; fictitious, factitious, supposititious, surreptitious; elusory[obs3], illusory; ironical; soi-disant &c (misnamed) 565[Fr]. Phr. se non e vero e ben trovato[It]; "where none is meant that meets ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... at Strawberry, my wishes bounded. If I am to live at watering-places, and keep what is called good hours, life itself will be very indifferent to me. I do not talk very sensibly, but I have a contempt for that fictitious character styled philosophy; I feel what I feel, and say I feel what I do feel. ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... in 1812, endeavoured to overcome the same fictitious difficulty of the want of adhesion between the wheel and the rail, by patenting a locomotive to work along the road by means of a chain stretched from one end of it to the other. This chain was passed once round a grooved barrel-wheel ...
— Lives of the Engineers - The Locomotive. George and Robert Stephenson • Samuel Smiles
... discovered that the rocks which abounded here (though there were also large patches of clear sand) were nearly all pure coral, in great variety. Red coral was abundant; and even the pink coral, to which fashion was just then giving a fictitious value, was there by the ton. This interested her, and so did some beautiful shells that lay sparkling. The time passed swiftly; and she was still busy in her researches, when suddenly it darkened a little, and, looking back, she saw ...
— Foul Play • Charles Reade
... the Tiberiana, and the Esquilino. Nearly all of them built, erected huge houses, entire streets of them, for purposes of sale; but they also gambled in land, selling plots at large profit to petty speculators, who also dreamt of making large profits amidst the continuous, fictitious rise brought about by the growing fever of agiotage. And the worst was that the petty speculators, the middle-class people, the inexperienced shop-keepers without capital, were crazy enough to build ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... the best materialized of human ideas, the idea by which man reproduces himself by creating outside of himself the fictitious being called Property, that mental demon, drove its steel claws perpetually into his heart. Then, in the midst of this torture, Fear arose, with all its accompanying sentiments. Two men had his secret, the secret ...
— Maitre Cornelius • Honore de Balzac
... stood looking down upon her beloved garden, she could not seem to see anything but brown stalks and dead blossoms. All that lavish colour looked fictitious and transitory; she had ...
— A Bookful of Girls • Anna Fuller
... there has been no dramatic righting of wrongs, and (unless the evolutionary idea loses its hold) there never will be. These countries have no revolution, they have to put up with an inferior and largely fictitious thing which ...
— Creatures That Once Were Men • Maxim Gorky
... obviously disingenuous that Mr. Lansing had the sympathy of the country. He should either have told the truth then and there or forever have held his peace; and had he remained mute out of the mystery would have grown a myth. The fictitious Lansing would have become an historical character. But he must needs write a book. It does not make pleasant reading. It does not ...
— The Mirrors of Washington • Anonymous
... root of the question to be as above. I do not mean to say that all that they urge is fictitious about morality; and I would go further than you, and say I think they would willingly give up their revenue from opium, indeed I am sure of it, if they could get rid of the forced importation by treaty, but their action in ...
— The Life of Gordon, Volume II • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... also of this particular story. Antimony, the word, is very probably derived from certain dialectic forms of the Greek word for the metal, and the name is no more derived from anti and monachus than it is from anti and monos (opposed to single existence), another fictitious derivation that has been suggested, and one whose etymological value is supposed to consist in the fact that antimony is practically never found alone ...
— Old-Time Makers of Medicine • James J. Walsh
... captivated ere I ever set eyes on my enslaver? But, to speak honestly, little Fiddy, I own I have no great leaning to actresses and authoresses. There are perils enough in a woman's natural course, without her challenging the extremes of a fictitious career. More than that, Fiddy, I have not much faith in the passion that is ranted to the public; even if it were always a creditable passion. Those who are sorely hurt don't bawl, child: ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler
... of an admired writer it is to be regretted, that we do not find a more liberal entry. To his friend, in distress, he sent eight shillings more than was wanted. Had an incident of this kind occurred in one of his romances, Richardson would have known how to grace his hero; but in fictitious scenes, generosity ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... that the Wesleys taught sanctification, and George Mueller, divine healing. "If," said she, "the gentleman would read more, he would be better informed. There is some hope yet for 'Tom Paine,'" referring to the fictitious name signed to his article. I did not know of this wordy battle until ...
— Trials and Triumphs of Faith • Mary Cole
... of the reign of Tiberius, or proposes for your imitation any model outside yourself: yours is a pattern reign. This would have been difficult had your goodness of heart not been innate, but merely adopted for a time; for no one can wear a mask for long, and fictitious qualities soon give place to true ones. Those which are founded upon truth, become greater and better as time ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume II (of X) - Rome • Various
... world the god Apollo exists as an object. Now this is certainly untrue; that is, it does not correspond with fact. There is no such thing as the god Apollo, and science makes a clean sweep of Apollo and Dionysos and all such fictitious objectivities; they are eidola, idols, phantasms, not objective realities. Apollo fades earlier than Dionysos because the worshipper of Dionysos keeps hold of the reality that he and his church or group have projected the god. He knows ...
— Ancient Art and Ritual • Jane Ellen Harrison
... mourning robes, and tears, defended himself briefly, simply, and to the point, and proudly refused the homage which the sovereign capitalists desired, he was actually condemned, and his moderate property was confiscated to satisfy fictitious claims for compensation. The condemned resorted to the province which he was alleged to have plundered, and there, welcomed by all the communities with honorary deputations, and praised and beloved during his lifetime, he spent in literary leisure ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... whether recognized by society or not. Kinship, on the other hand, is a sociological fact. It depends on the conventional system of counting descent. Thus it may exclude real relationships; whilst, contrariwise, it may include such as are purely fictitious, as when some one is allowed by law to adopt a child as if it were his own. Now, under civilized conditions, though there is, as we have just seen, such an institution as adoption, whilst, again, there is the case of the illegitimate child, who can claim consanguinity, but ...
— Anthropology • Robert Marett
... as a Top Dressing, this gentle stimulant imparts a new energy to the vine, and also to the Bug, who thus becomes so vigorous, and at the same time restless, that an uncontrollable impulse seizes him to visit the home of his ancestors, (Colorado.) Here, as is supposed by Mr. JOHNSON, the fictitious energy that had been supplied by the Mixture deserts the immigrant, who now settles down contentedly, ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 18, July 30, 1870 • Various
... proffered to prove that Uitlanders' grievances and irritations are purely fictitious, but few, I venture to say, will bear examination. Taxation, for example, is stoutly averred to fall alike upon burgher and Uitlander, but a glance at the long rubric of articles specially taxed will show that the selection is contrived to hit the latter and to spare, or even to protect ...
— Origin of the Anglo-Boer War Revealed (2nd ed.) - The Conspiracy of the 19th Century Unmasked • C. H. Thomas
... curate and the others thanked him and added their entreaties, and he finding himself so pressed said there was no occasion ask, where a command had such weight, and added, "If your worships will give me your attention you will hear a true story which, perhaps, fictitious ones constructed with ingenious and studied art cannot come up to." These words made them settle themselves in their places and preserve a deep silence, and he seeing them waiting on his words in mute expectation, began thus in a ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... newspapers, magazines, and other fugitive publications, I can speak from certain knowledge, only furnished him with sport. At last there came out a scurrilous volume, larger than Johnson's own, filled with malignant abuse, under a name, real or fictitious, of some low man in an obscure corner of Scotland, though supposed to be the work of another Scotchman, who has found means to make himself well known both in Scotland and England. The effect which ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... characters by the perusal of other poets, without much actual commerce with mankind. The dialogue is one constant reciprocation of conceits, or clash of wit, in which nothing flows necessarily from the occasion, or is dictated by nature. The characters, both of men and women, are either fictitious and artificial, as those of Heartwell, and the ladies; or easy and common, as Wittol, a tam idiot; Bluff, a swaggering coward; and Fondlewife, a jealous puritan; and the catastrophe arises from a mistake not very probably produced, by marrying a ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... me such associations and veneration are riveted the stronger by seeing the places, and putting my hand upon the spots. I do not speak of that fictitious marble slab up there; but here, among the sandhills by this river, and at the Mount of Olives over which we passed, I ...
— A Ride Across Palestine • Anthony Trollope
... mouth of Miss Bowyer, though they sound like burlesque, are taken almost verbatim from the writings of those who claim to be expounders of Christian science. While Miss Bowyer was drawn more closely from an original than is usual in fictitious writing, I am well aware that there are professors of Christian science much superior to her. There are, indeed, souls who are the victims of their own generous enthusiasm; and it grieves me that, in treating the subject ...
— The Faith Doctor - A Story of New York • Edward Eggleston
... St. John's.—In one of the volumes published under the foregoing title, in 1833, there is a striking story, evidently fictitious in the main, but assuming, as an element of fact, the remembered existence of a head-stone over a grave in the little burial-ground, under the shadow of the venerable ruins of Tynemouth Priory in Northumberland, containing the single word "Fanny." Does any one of the ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 77, April 19, 1851 • Various
... "I will remain with you, Monsieur, for the present. I was wondering where in the world that copy of Rabelais had gone. I had not seen it since we left the ship Saint Laurent." The lad patted the book with a fictitious show ...
— The Grey Cloak • Harold MacGrath
... Throughout all the busy harvest season, in spite of the autumn rains that filled the swamps and made the roads almost impassable, in the face of the driving snows of winter, through the melting ice of the spring, and again through the following summer and autumn, the great revival held on. No fictitious means were employed to stir the emotions of the people or to kindle excitement among them. There were neither special sermons nor revival hymns. The old doctrines were proclaimed, but proclaimed with a fullness and power unknown at other ...
— The Man From Glengarry - A Tale Of The Ottawa • Ralph Connor
... note. If this permission be accorded him, he manages to get inside the railing, in close proximity to the safe, if its doors are open. A confederate (or sometimes more) now enters and attracts the attention of the broker or the clerk, by making fictitious arrangements for the purchase of gold or some security. The thief who first entered watches his opportunity, and then, with the greatest rapidity, darts to the safe, abstracts whatever he can lay his bands on, ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... recalled its youth; and she fancied that to her other troubles, the misery of one of the old paroxysms was going to be added. At such an hour, with such sounds of terror filling the night, with such a glare dancing on the ceiling the first attack had come on, years before. Then the alarm had been fictitious; to-night the calamity which the poor woman had imagined, was happening with every ...
— The Long Night • Stanley Weyman
... according to whether our knowledge is insufficient or comprehensive. Men are satisfied in their childhood with stories as explanations of the world's mysteries, in their maturity they advance to plausible hypotheses: the stories yield to theology, hypotheses to philosophy. Religion presents a fictitious solution to the riddle in a concrete form, and metaphysics in an abstract form; the one relates and asserts, the other argues and avoids the improbable. It is only a difference ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau
... attacked the first and second lines of supporting foot, and, when reinforced, compelled horse and foot to retreat towards Mantua.[46] Such was the affair of Lodi (May 10th). A legendary glamour hovers around all the details of this conflict and invests it with fictitious importance. Beaulieu's main force was far away, and there was no hope of entrapping anything more than the rear of his army. Moreover, if this were the object, why was not the flank move of the French cavalry above ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... does not, indeed, seem probable that all these pious frauds were chargeable upon the professors of real Christianity, upon those who entertained just and rational sentiments of the religion of Jesus. The greatest part of these fictitious writings undoubtedly flowed from the fertile invention of the Gnostic sects, though it cannot be affirmed that even true Christians were entirely innocent and irreproachable in this matter" (Ibid, p. 55). ...
— The Freethinker's Text Book, Part II. - Christianity: Its Evidences, Its Origin, Its Morality, Its History • Annie Besant
... maintained Abel's ground, and when Enos endured all miseries for the same: For indeed this makes spectators believe that religion is more than a fictitious notion: The hardships, miseries, and blood of the saints, will make men, otherwise heedless, consider and ponder their ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... The sign of most usual occurrence would be lightning—sometimes such an unexpected event as the seizure of a member of the assembly with epilepsy (morbus comitialis)—and we know to what lengths political obstructionists went in later times in the observation of fictitious signs, or even the prevention of business by the mere announcement of their intention to see an unfavourable omen (servare de caelo). The complications and ramifications of the augur's art are infinite, but the main idea should by now be plain, and it must be remembered ...
— The Religion of Ancient Rome • Cyril Bailey
... victorious, and by him all the wit and malice of that party was overthrown." This passage is taken from a memoir of Henry Earl of Peterborough, in a volume entitled "Succinct Genealogies, by Robert Halstead," fol. 1685. The name of Halstead is fictitious. The real authors were the Earl of Peterborough himself and his chaplain. The book is extremely rare. Only twenty-four copies were printed, two of which are now in the British Museum. Of these two one belonged to George the Fourth, and the other ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... am unacquainted, the prince did not fulfil his engagements. In fact, he quitted Beaupreau, but still roamed about the coast some time with a fictitious passport, and under a borrowed name. General—[86] recognised him, but respected his disguise. The Emperor approved this deference, and gave orders, that he should merely be obliged to depart: the father of the Duke of Enghien was become sacred ...
— Memoirs of the Private Life, Return, and Reign of Napoleon in 1815, Vol. I • Pierre Antoine Edouard Fleury de Chaboulon
... conventional garb, on the street or in the hotel, the surveyor would be as bashful and awkward as a country boy. So they joked him about his numerous sweethearts in Rubio City and related many entirely fictitious love adventures and romantic experiences that he was said to have passed through in different parts of the country during the years they had known him. Not one of them but would have been astonished beyond words had he ...
— The Winning of Barbara Worth • Harold B Wright
... is agreeable, and gives evidence of the same hospitality which is witnessed so generally and so gratefully by the traveller, in those remote regions; but has it not in its very name a charm to the reader who peruses an account of it, in its connexion with those incidents, fictitious or true, which have been formed into one of the most simple, beautiful, and touching tales, that have ever flowed from ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... ran across him by accident on a sea voyage where I think the two were the only passengers. A delicious pair, and admirably mated, they took to each other at once and became as thick as thieves. Joe was passing under a fictitious name, and old Wakeman didn't suspect that he was a parson; so he gave his profanity full swing, and he was a master of that great art. You probably know Twichell, and will know that that is a kind of refreshment ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... historic events another answer presents itself, namely, that the course of human events is predetermined from on high—depends on the coincidence of the wills of all who take part in the events, and that a Napoleon's influence on the course of these events is purely external and fictitious. ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... offences were brought for judgment, and it also settled questions on love affairs in a very judicious manner. Some of the advice is prompted by letters asking for it, but it is probable that they were mostly fictitious and written by Defoe himself. Many of the shafts in this Review were directed against magistrates, and other men in authority. Thus we read in April ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... reached the confines of the town, a pretty young girl, with some lovely lilies in her hand, ran forward and presented them to Good—somehow they all seemed to like Good; I think his eye-glass and solitary whisker gave him a fictitious value—and then said that she had ...
— King Solomon's Mines • H. Rider Haggard
... moral discipline and goodness to a secondary and subordinate place,—as a mere sequel to follow, almost mechanically and of course, on an act or feeling which had nothing moral in it,—which substituted a fictitious and imputed righteousness for an inherent and infused and real one, seemed to him to confound the eternal foundations of right and wrong, and to be a blasphemy against all that was true and sacred ...
— The Oxford Movement - Twelve Years, 1833-1845 • R.W. Church
... Catharine Ray in 1755, he said: "The cords of love and friendship ... in times past have drawn me ... back from England to Philadelphia." If the remark referred to an affection for Miss Read, it was probably no more trustworthy than are most such allegations made when lapsing years have given a fictitious coloring to a remote past. If indeed Franklin's profligacy and his readiness to marry any girl financially eligible were symptoms attendant upon his being in love, it somewhat taxes the imagination to fancy how he would have conducted ...
— Benjamin Franklin • John Torrey Morse, Jr.
... may be bought from L5 to L10; working oxen for about the same price; and fine young breeding ewes from L1 to L3, according to the quality of their fleece. Low as these prices may appear they are in a great measure fictitious; since there is confessedly more stock of all sorts in the colony, than is necessary for its population. It accordingly frequently happens, particularly at sales by public auction, that stock are to be bought for one-half, ...
— Statistical, Historical and Political Description of the Colony of New South Wales and its Dependent Settlements in Van Diemen's Land • William Charles Wentworth
... too restless to stay home, yet as she walked the streets on fictitious errands she was afraid of every person she met. She waited for them to speak; waited with foreboding. She repeated, "I mustn't ever see Erik again." But the words did not register. She had no ecstatic indulgence in the sense of guilt which is, ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... from accuracy was justifiable, and even if a nonjuring friend, under the displeasure, as might often be, of Government, assumed a disguise, he was uneasy and annoyed, and declined to call him by his fictitious name.[22] Happily, perhaps, for his peace of mind, his steady purpose 'to follow truth wherever he might find it,'[23] without respect of persons or fear of consequences, though it led to a sacrifice, ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... course of nine months we produced The King's Own. In The Naval Officer we had sowed all our wild oats; we had paid off those who had ill-treated us, and we had no further personality to indulge in. The King's Own, therefore, was wholly fictitious in characters, in plot, and in events, as have been its successors. The King's Own was followed by Newton Forster, Newton Forster by Peter Simple. These are all our productions. Reader, we have told ...
— Frank Mildmay • Captain Frederick Marryat
... insurmountable obstacles and aversions. Under such circumstances, social feeling becomes strongly fortified against many suggestions that tend to break it down. An intense ferocity is directed toward any disloyal member of the group, a fictitious character may be attributed to the enemy, and there is an imaginative interpretation of all his acts in a manner favorable to uniting the sentiment of the group. This does not appear to be merely a defensive reaction or a ...
— The Psychology of Nations - A Contribution to the Philosophy of History • G.E. Partridge
... how allopathy effects its fictitious cures. It suppresses inflammatory processes by paralyzing the cells and organs ...
— Nature Cure • Henry Lindlahr
... let us forth and see how the land lies; many persons obtain all their notoriety from an elopement; it makes a noise in the world, and even though frequently announced in our newspapers under fictitious titles, the parties soon become known and are recollected ever after; and some even acquire fame by the insertion of a paragraph announcing an elopement, in which they insinuate that themselves are parties; so ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... doctor, but it was too late; he had disappeared. In the afternoon, he called on Madame Frogere, to ask her whether she could tell him anything about the matter. She, however, did not know the negro doctor in the least, and was even able to assure him that he was a fictitious personage, for, as she was well acquainted with the upper classes in Haiti, she knew that the Academy of Medicine at Port-au-Prince had no doctor of that name among its members. As Monsieur de Vargnes persisted, and gave descriptions of the doctor, especially mentioning ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume IV (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... himself and pursued his desired mate. She saw the rapturous, dreamy look of love and mating time in Elizabeth's eyes, and she knew that the inevitable had happened, but she was not content. Premonitions which she sought to strangle shook her whenever the pair wandered away on real or fictitious errands. She saw that no word of love had yet been spoken, but every look cried it aloud and the day could not ...
— The Wind Before the Dawn • Dell H. Munger
... as narrated by himself, and found herself doubting every one. The beautiful house in the country—did it really exist? The eccentric old father who refused to part with his gold—was he flesh and blood, or a fictitious figure invented as a convenient excuse? The fortune which was to enrich the future—was there such a fortune? Or, if there were, was Major Carew in truth the eldest son? Claire felt a devastating helplessness her life abroad had left ...
— The Independence of Claire • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... ample time to perfect his arrangements, so that, when the day arrived, the "Haute Noblesse" presented a most brilliant appearance. Vividly colored transparencies, representing the most sanguinary battle scenes in more or less fictitious surroundings were suspended among the trees; Danish officers were seen in all sorts of humble attitudes, surrendering their swords or begging for mercy, while the Prussian and Austrian heroes, maddened with warlike fury, stormed onward in the path of glory and victory. The gas-jet programme, with ...
— Ilka on the Hill-Top and Other Stories • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... shined, and a couple of delivery wagons hitched to posts. Then in a minute downstairs tumbles this Buckingham Skinner, and runs to the corner, and stands and gazes down the other street at the imaginary dust kicked up by the fabulous hoofs of the fictitious team of chimerical quadrupeds. And then B. Skinner goes back up to the third-story room again, and I see that the lettering on the window is "The Farmers' Friend ...
— The Gentle Grafter • O. Henry
... they have discharged no shots from their rifles. It has all been make-believe, with dummy cartridges, and fictitious ranges, and snapping triggers. To be quite frank, they are getting just a little tired of musketry training—forgetting for the moment that a soldier who cannot use his rifle is merely an expense to his country and a free ...
— The First Hundred Thousand • Ian Hay
... very simply, like genuine peasants, without any luxury, any amusement, save that of being together. Their gay, bright kitchen was redolent of that easy primitive life, lived so near the earth, which frees one from fictitious wants, ambition, and the longing for pleasure. And no fortune, no power could have brought such quiet delight as that afternoon of happy intimacy, while the last-born slept so soundly and quietly that one could ...
— Fruitfulness - Fecondite • Emile Zola
... the three which are extant (for the so-called Funeral Oration of Demosthenes is a bad and spurious imitation of Thucydides and Lysias), conformed to a regular type. They began with Gods and ancestors, and the legendary history of Athens, to which succeeded an almost equally fictitious account of later times. The Persian war usually formed the centre of the narrative; in the age of Isocrates and Demosthenes the Athenians were still living on the glories of Marathon and Salamis. The Menexenus veils in panegyric the weak places of ...
— Menexenus • Plato
... morning he was questioned briefly. He gave a fictitious name, and mentioned a town he had heard of, but had never been in. His horses had ...
— Jim Waring of Sonora-Town - Tang of Life • Knibbs, Henry Herbert
... exorcised in Jacobin revels, sent to the Convention, and the gold and silver, (as the author of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire invidiously expresses himself,) the pearls and jewels, were wickedly converted to the service of mankind; as if any thing whose value is merely fictitious, could render more service to mankind than when dedicated to an use which is equally the solace of the rich and the poor—which gratifies the eye without exciting cupidity, soothes the bed of sickness, and heals the wounds of conscience. Yet I am no advocate for the profuse decorations ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... devolved upon me. I have not had leisure to think of love, have toiled solely for maintenance and position; and have sternly held myself aloof from the world that dared to believe my profession rendered me easy of access. Titles have been laid at my feet, but their glitter seemed fictitious, did not allure me; and no other name save yours has ever for an instant tempted me. To-day you are here to plead my acceptance of that name, and frankly, I tell you, sir, it dazzles me. As an American I know ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... in fact, the very commonest of sense—were not to be beguiled by the plain statement that apparently sane individuals wilfully ventured into solitude for the mere privilege of living. Gold must be the real attraction—all else fictitious, said they. "They have" [Rumour is speaking] "the option of an unwitnessed reef, sensationally, romantically rich, or know of a piratically and solemnly secreted hoard." Indeed, we did think to enjoy our option, but over something ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... own minds. Every utterance delivered under such conditions, in case it admits even the smallest amount of falsehood, not only bestows no praise on its subject but defeats its own ends. The knowledge of the hearers, not agreeing with the fictitious declaration, takes refuge in truth, where it quickly finds satisfaction and learns as well what the statement ought to have been; and then, comparing the two, detects the difference. Stating only the truth, therefore, I affirm that this Caesar was at the same time ...
— Dio's Rome • Cassius Dio
... Rogers and Moore will easily forgive us for saying that, much as we are astonished at the effrontery with which Lord Byron has acknowledged his lampoon, we infinitely prefer it to the cowardly prudence of the author or authors of the Twopenny Post-bag lurking behind a fictitious name, and "devising impossible slanders," which he or they have not ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron
... to arouse and detain his interests, should be real events and personages. The mere play of fancy with the pretty aspects of things could not satisfy him; he wanted to feel beneath him a substantial world of reality. He had not the dramatist's imagination which can body forth fictitious characters with such life-like reality that it can, and does itself, believe in their existence. Macaulay has truly said that Milton's genius is lyrical, not dramatic. His lyre will only echo real emotion, and his imagination ...
— Milton • Mark Pattison
... not what reason. What can we believe, but that Dighton was some low mercenary wretch hired to assume the guilt of a crime he had not committed, and that Sir James Tirrel never did, never would confess what he had not done; and was therefore put out of the way on a fictitious imputation? It must be observed too, that no inquiry was made into the murder on the accession of Henry the Seventh, the natural time for it, when the passions of men were heated, and when the duke of Norfolk, lord Lovel, Catesby, Ratcliffe, ...
— Historic Doubts on the Life and Reign of King Richard the Third • Horace Walpole
... the police you would deprive yourself of a large fortune. By sitting tight and saying nothing you will quite soon be able to marry Lady Clifford. In the circumstances, you will hardly persist in attaching a purely fictitious value to two ...
— Juggernaut • Alice Campbell
... the more immediate and passing scenes of life, to temporary and local matters; and in order to discharge the invidious office of Censor Morum more freely, and with less responsibility, assumed some fictitious and humorous disguise, which, however, in a great degree corresponded to their own peculiar habits and character. By thus concealing their own name and person under the title of the Tatler, Spectator, etc. they were enabled to ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... property and franchises have increased in value since the formation of the corporation the increase of the stock is necessary in order to fairly represent the existing capital. It is said that some railway stock has been "watered" in this way to an alarming extent, so that a great deal of it is fictitious, yet though it exists only on paper it ranks as the equal of the genuine stock when the dividends are paid. Whether or not such an action really is justifiable, or even moral, I leave to the Christian clergy and their followers ...
— America Through the Spectacles of an Oriental Diplomat • Wu Tingfang
... recognized by those who were familiar with his early personal history; but for obvious reasons his real name must be veiled under a fictitious one here. ...
— Ishmael - In the Depths • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... later, Rossetti, perceiving himself alone, laid aside his brushes and palette, put on his hat, and walked rapidly toward Oxford Street. He located the shop, straggled past it, first on one side of the street, then on the other, and finally boldly entered on a fictitious errand. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... particularly in the mission field. Doctrinal lines are being lowered and various denominations absorbed gradually into a "Church-union" scheme from coast to coast. A "social service programme" is the only binding element which is giving to them a fictitious unity. Fabulous sums are placed at the disposal of these bodies for home and foreign mission work. The Methodist Conference of Canada (1918—Hamilton) has pledged itself to levy $8,000,000 in the next four years for mission ...
— Catholic Problems in Western Canada • George Thomas Daly
... shook his head, Doctor Emory lighted a big Havana and continued audibly to luxuriate in his fictitious triumph over the other doctor. As he talked, he forgot to smoke, and, leaning quite casually against the chair, with arrant carelessness allowed the live coal at the end of his cigar to rest against the tip of one of Kwaque's ...
— Michael, Brother of Jerry • Jack London |
