"Magnify" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... upon as a defender of the rights of the people,—he who, not so very long before, dared not walk in the fields after dark, lest he should stumble into pitfalls where he would seem to have been killed by accident! Persecute a man politically and you not only magnify him, but you redeem his past and make it innocent. The liberal party was a great worker of miracles in this respect. Its dangerous journal, which had the wit to make itself as commonplace, as calumniating, as credulous, and as sillily perfidious as every audience ...
— Sons of the Soil • Honore de Balzac
... reprobation; only sometimes extremes meet, and again it may be the trial of faith that the justified seem as loveless and unlovely as the reprobate. Abetissez-vous! A nature, you may think, that would magnify things to the utmost, nurse, expand them beyond their natural bounds by his [88] reflex action upon them. Thus revelation is to be received on evidence, indeed, but an evidence conclusive only on a presupposition or ...
— Miscellaneous Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... by your heroic liberators; sentiments which we, of subsequent generations, have also cultivated; because, in studying the causes which produce the prodigious national prosperity with which your country has astounded the world, we become accustomed to admire, to magnify perhaps, the indomitable will, energy, labor, and civic and patriotic solidarity which constitute the energetic and abundantly ...
— Latin America and the United States - Addresses by Elihu Root • Elihu Root
... distasteful to him; children whose mother would not be a lady, and whose blood would be polluted by an admixture so base;—and, worse still, a life's companion who would be deficient in all those attributes which such a man as Ralph Newton should look for in a wife. Sir Thomas was a man to magnify rather than lesson these evils. And now he allowed his friend,—a man for whose behalf he had bound himself to use all the exercise of friendship,—to go from him with an idea that nothing but suicide ...
— Ralph the Heir • Anthony Trollope
... that magnify Our human nature...... Conversed but little with the world-they knew not The fierce vexation ...
— Night and Morning, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... anything," said Miles, grasping the proffered hand, and shaking it warmly. "Why, man, the air of Egypt seems to magnify you." ...
— Blue Lights - Hot Work in the Soudan • R.M. Ballantyne
... them. "Like 'em!—not a bit." "Then, sir, I fancy, if you please to try These in my hand will better suit your eye?"— "No, but they don't."—"Well come, sir, if you please, Here is another sort; we'll e'en try these; Still somewhat more they magnify the letter, Now, sir?"—"Why, now, I'm not a bit the better."— "No! here, take these which magnify still more,— How do they fit"?—"Like all the rest before!" In short, they tried a whole assortment through, But all ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... community school will not center all of its activities in its own building, but it will take some of its talent to the country schools for local athletic and play contests, dramatic or musical entertainments, etc., and thus magnify the importance of the local school in the neighborhood, for only by acquiring a desire for these advantages will the people in the more isolated parts of the community come to interest themselves in the activities of the whole community at its ...
— The Farmer and His Community • Dwight Sanderson
... ingenuity as are observable in the cognate caverns of Salsette—of endeavors, we repeat, made by peoples as intellectually as geographically distinct, and followers withal of independent and unassociated deities, to magnify and perpetuate some grand ...
— The Antediluvian World • Ignatius Donnelly
... second in authority, responds with the other nuns. The Office of Saint Dominic for Vespers practically consists of one short Psalm, a very diminutive Lesson, one Hymn, and the beautiful Canticle 'My soul doth magnify the Lord'; then follows a little prayer and the short responsory, and all is over. The whole service ...
— The White Sister • F. Marion Crawford
... desired experiments, apparatus designed for the special purpose of discovering truth was necessary. As early as the thirteenth century it was found, for example, that a convex crystal or bit of glass would magnify objects, although several centuries elapsed before the microscope and telescope ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson
... life. They certainly show that she knew the sinfulness of her own heart and the weakness of her resolutions, and that, in common with so many reserved natures, while hiding the true state of her feelings from others, she was much given to introspection and inclined to magnify her faults. Such reserved natures do not "wear their heart on their sleeve," and it should be a comfort to parents and teachers who are anxiously watching children to know that "things are not always what they seem," and that many a child who seems altogether careless ...
— Excellent Women • Various
... "You magnify your own wrongs and mine. If mere revenge prompts us, we are worse than Xerxes, or Sulla. The gods alone can tell us ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis
... perhaps a considerable profit, from the alms which the charity of the faithful bestowed on the prisoners. After the church had triumphed over all her enemies, the interest as well as vanity of the captives prompted them to magnify the merit of their respective sufferings. A convenient distance of time or place gave an ample scope to the progress of fiction; and the frequent instances which might be alleged of holy martyrs, whose wounds had been instantly healed, whose strength had been renewed, and whose lost ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... about it," sighed Miss Ocky repentantly. "Now you'll probably magnify it out of all proportion. You see, I've known old Bates ever since I was a youngster, and we've always been good friends. He got in the habit years ago of bringing his troubles to me and talking ...
— The Monk of Hambleton • Armstrong Livingston
... beginning. We are fighting in the dark, and cannot take the measure of our foe. Every step must be preordained and provided for in the mind. Hence also the fact that to vanquish one mile in the woods seems equal to compassing three in the open country. The furlongs are ambushed, and we magnify them. ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... pretend with horns of mine, Like some in the advertising line, To magnify sounds on such marvellous scales That the sounds of a cod seem ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... good Mr. Holden, do hurry," said Felix, whose anxieties made him magnify the progress ...
— The Lost Hunter - A Tale of Early Times • John Turvill Adams
... Norman walked into Sherry's and sank down at a small table with the calm assurance of one conscious of being both beautiful and perfectly gowned. There were no defects for the critical world to take up and magnify. Her gown fitted flawlessly, was built by the highest court of appeal on Parisian fashions, and ...
— Mrs. Christy's Bridge Party • Sara Ware Bassett
... of his fellow-men. And yet there exist innumerable bores scattered through the length and breadth of our happy country, and carrying on their dismal business with an almost malignant persistency. Longwindedness, pomposity, the exaggeration of petty trivialities, the irresistible desire to magnify one's own wretched little achievements, to pose as the little hero of insignificant adventures, and to relate them to the whole world in every dull detail, regardless of the right of other men to get an occasional word in edgewise—these ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 103, December 3, 1892 • Various
... but the American people have developed an unexpected capacity for destroying things; they can destroy anything. They have even invented a phrase for it—running a thing into the ground. They have perfected the art of making so much of a thing as to kill it; they can magnify a man or a recreation or an institution to death. And they do it with such a hearty good-will and enjoyment. Their motto is that you cannot have too much of a good thing. They have almost made funerals unpopular by over-elaboration and display, especially ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... the Holy One confessed; and therefore "magnify Tetragrammaton with me, and let us exalt His ...
— Hebrew Literature
... for baking the fish on and the other as a dish to put our dinner upon when cooked. That day we had been too busy with fishing to think of anything else, but on the following I recollected the magnifying glass, and brought it to her. She first showed me the power it had to magnify, with which I was much amused for a time, and she explained as well as she could to me the cause of its having that power, but I could not well understand her; I was more pleased with the effect ...
— The Little Savage • Captain Marryat
... ridicule, much less deny the power of ideas. On the contrary, we believe heartily in ideas, and in men of ideas. We accept ideas as forces of civilization, and we would magnify their office as teachers and helpers of man, in his poor strivings after good. Man is ever repeating the despondent cry of the Psalmist, 'Who will show us any good?' It is the mission of ideas, the ministering angels of civilization, to lift him into a realm of glorious communion with good and spiritual ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 5, May, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... their posts, and over snowy wastes where half that number lay dead, dying, or disabled. Well might Ney exclaim: "What a massacre, and without any issue!" Each side claimed the victory, and, as is usual in such cases, began industriously to minimize its own and to magnify the enemy's losses. The truth seems to be that both sides had about 25,000 men hors de combat; but, as Bennigsen lacked tents, supplies, and above all, the dauntless courage of Napoleon, he speedily fell back, and this enabled the Emperor ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... laugh, and said, "You mustn't mind what they say, poor darlings! The fact is, they're fond of me, and they magnify my knowledge; but in reality it doesn't exist. Only, I must tell you, Miss Cardew, I mean to see everything, and to know everything. I mean to have a ...
— The School Queens • L. T. Meade
... choice—"he had to be a democrat, whether or no." Although establishing the Negro in freedom the government failed to establish him in political and social equality with the whites. "But still," says the author, "the race problem and the cry of Negro! Negro! the slogan of political demagogues who magnify and distort a very real difficulty in playing upon the passions of the less educated whites—rise to curtail freedom ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Vol. I. Jan. 1916 • Various
... subjects and things, the one crime never forgiven by respectability? We have given away our resources, what should have been our common wealth; we have squandered our land, wasted our forests. "Such trifles are not my business," interrupts History, rather feverish of manner; "my duty to record and magnify the affairs of the great."—Allow me, madam; we have given away our coal, the wealth of the past; our oil, the wealth of to-day; except we do presently think to some purpose, we shall give away our stored electricity, the wealth of the future—our water power ...
— Copper Streak Trail • Eugene Manlove Rhodes
... ye my speech, And when 'tis done, mock on. Not unto man Is my complaint. For were it so, my heart Would sink in darker depths of hopeless woe. Say ye that earth's 'prosperity' rewards The righteous man? Why do the wicked live, Grow old, and magnify themselves in power? Their offspring flourish round them, their abodes Are safe from fear. Their cattle multiply And widely o'er the hills and pastures green Wander their healthful herds. Forth like a flock They send their little ones, ...
— Man of Uz, and Other Poems • Lydia Howard Sigourney
... unfinished redoubt in front of the breastworks on the river bank. Thirteen pieces of artillery were mounted on the works. [Footnote: Almost all British writers underestimate their own force and enormously magnify that of the Americans. Alison, for example, quadruples Jackson's relative strength, writing: "About 6,000 combatants were on the British side; a slender force to attack double their number, intrenched to the teeth ...
— The Naval War of 1812 • Theodore Roosevelt
... I must commend their prudence who thus wisely cast about how to provide for their own souls, against they come into Purgatory, so I cannot but more highly magnify their charity, who, less solicitous for themselves, employ their whole care to save others out of that dreadful fire. And sure I am, they can lose nothing by the bargain, who dare thus trust God with their own souls, while they do their uttermost to help others; nay, though they should follow that ...
— Purgatory • Mary Anne Madden Sadlier
... correct—and I only hope MRS. S. will, some day, forgive me for publishing it. There are many other eccentricities in female arithmetic, such as increasing twofold the amount of a gentleman's fortune, and diminishing fiftyfold the amount of a lady's—and a general proneness, besides, to magnify figures, leading them, at times, into strange errors of exaggeration, which would debar them from following the profession of a penny-a-liner, or writing works of numerical fidelity, like "M'Culloch's Commercial Dictionary." ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... of immoderate rain and waters." For myself, to be able to lie down all day is something, and as "the mind, when in a healthy state, reposes as quietly before an insurmountable difficulty as before an ascertained truth," so, as I cannot get on, I have ceased to chafe, and am rather inclined to magnify the advantages of the detention, a necessary process, as you would think if you saw ...
— Unbeaten Tracks in Japan • Isabella L. Bird
... (dispersion) 73; flood tide; gain, produce, product, profit. V. increase, augment, add to, enlarge; dilate &c (expand) 194; grow, wax, get ahead. gain strength; advance; run up, shoot up; rise; ascend &c 305; sprout &c 194. aggrandize; raise, exalt; deepen, heighten; strengthen; intensify, enhance, magnify, redouble; aggravate, exaggerate; exasperate, exacerbate; add fuel to the flame, oleum addere camino [Lat.], superadd &c (add) 37; spread &c (disperse) 73. Adj. increased &c v.; on the increase, undiminished; additional &c (added) 37. Adv. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... he held from the pope as lord of that country, and to induce him to forbid his subjects from navigating to the coast of Africa, in which negotiation he was completely successful. He likewise used every exertion to conceal the progress of his own navigators on the western coast of Africa, and to magnify the dangers of the voyage; representing that the coast was quite inhospitable, surrounded by most tremendous rocks, and inhabited by savage cannibals, and that no vessels could possibly live in those tempestuous seas, in which every quarter ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. II • Robert Kerr
... "We needn't magnify the merit, Mrs. William," he rejoined slightingly. "The people down stairs will be paid in good time I dare say, for any little extra service they may have rendered me; and perhaps they anticipate no less. I am much obliged ...
— The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargin • Charles Dickens
... in prose or verse reflects his contempt for earth's mighty and his sympathy for earth's million mites. His art, like that of his favorite author and prototype, Father Prout, was "to magnify what is little and fling a dash of the sublime into a two-penny post communication." Sense of earthly grandeur he had little or none. Sense of the minor sympathies of life—those minor sympathies that are common to all and finally ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... either to the prison of Toledo or Madrid. Yet such a prospect does not discourage me in the least, but rather urges me on to persevere; for I assure you, and in this assertion there lurks not the slightest desire to magnify myself and produce an effect, that I am eager to lay down my life in this cause, and whether a Carlist's bullet or a gaol-fever bring my career to an end, I am ...
— The Life of George Borrow • Herbert Jenkins
... Lord! for he is glorious, Never shall his promise fail; God hath made his saints victorious, Sin and death shall not prevail: Praise the God of our salvation, Hosts on high his power proclaim; Heaven and earth, and all creation, Praise and magnify ...
— Hymns for Christian Devotion - Especially Adapted to the Universalist Denomination • J.G. Adams
... no amount of improvement in moral character can dispense with the crises referred to, we cannot rightly magnify the definite transactions at conversion or cleansing, or any other remarkable point of religious life, to the detraction of spiritual growth. Each aspect of the truth, as I have already said, is the counterpart of the other, and must be viewed in ...
— Standards of Life and Service • T. H. Howard
... salvation which God has so graciously provided in the great sacrifice. It is fearful to see the enemies of the cross increasing and rushing on to their coming doom. What is to be our attitude? It is for us to glory more and more in the cross of Christ. We must exalt and magnify the Person and Work of our blessed Lord as never before. The more He is rejected by the world, His blessed work on the cross disowned in such latter day delusions as the new theology, Christian Science and the numerous other systems, the more we ...
— The Lord of Glory - Meditations on the person, the work and glory of our Lord Jesus Christ • Arno Gaebelein
... reversal of all natural law, is of wholly androcentric origin. It is strongest among old patriarchal races; lingers on in feudal Europe; is to be traced even in America today in a few sporadic efforts to magnify the deeds of ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... law, but it did not seem to mind it. The soldiers had had a few scuffles with rowdies at Blue Island and the stock yards. They had chased the toughs in and out among the long lines of freight cars, and fired a few shots. Even the newspapers couldn't magnify the desultory lawlessness into organized rebellion. It was becoming a matter of the courts now. The general managers had imported workmen from the East. The leaders of the strike—especially Debs and Howard—were giving ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... of weakness can make strong, can, nay, doth oftentimes make use of very unlikely means to bring about the conversion and salvation of his people. Therefore, you that are come to Christ—and that by unlikely means—stay yourselves, and wonder, and, wondering, magnify almighty power, by the work of which the means hath been made effectual to bring you ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... Les Touches at seven in the morning, he saw from afar Beatrix at a window watching for him, and wearing the same straw hat she had worn on the memorable day of their first excursion. For a moment he was dazzled and giddy. These little things of passion magnify the world itself. It may be that only Frenchwomen possess the art of such scenic effects; they owe it to the grace of their minds; they know how to put into sentiment as much of the picturesque as the particular sentiment can bear ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... I answered calmly. "I do not wish to magnify my service, but it was that or the scaffold. Madame your mother had, unfortunately, seen the King before me, and she had prejudiced your father's case by admitting him to be a traitor. There was a moment when in view of that I was almost ...
— Bardelys the Magnificent • Rafael Sabatini
... afraid I did not make it cost him less. I thought he judged her harshly, and that his illness had made him magnify trifles, but though our interference would have been perfectly useless, he was quite right in his warning. Now that, poor thing, she is no longer here to enchant us with her witcheries, I see that my brother greatly suffered from being kept away from ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... like other people engaged in lucrative business. He is apt to magnify his calling, to make much of any symptom which will bring a patient within range of his battery of remedies. I found a case in one of our medical journals, a couple of years ago, which illustrates what I mean. Dr. of Philadelphia, had a female ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... though inexperienced in love, was a good fighter. The best of the sex are. She dropped into the rocking-chair, and began rocking backwards and forwards while still tugging at her gloves, and said, in a gradually warming voice, "I certainly shall not magnify Mr. Van Loo's silliness to that importance. And I have yet to learn what you mean by talking about a rendezvous! And I want to know," she continued, suddenly stopping her rocking and tilting the rockers impertinently behind her, as, with her elbows squared on the chair arms, she tilted her own face ...
— The Three Partners • Bret Harte
... was not visible; but unseen perils are sometimes more dreadful than those we meet face to face, when the imagination does not magnify the horror. ...
— The Golden Magnet • George Manville Fenn
... might dispute it and argue with him, or even denounce him for a heretic. But only at first; the thing was too simply true to be long questioned. In any event, his duty was plain; with righteousness as the girdle of his loins he must go forth on the morrow and magnify his office in the ...
— The Lions of the Lord - A Tale of the Old West • Harry Leon Wilson
... good sense of the average American voter. The public would protect you not only in its own interests, but from an inherent sense of fair play. On the other hand, if you persist in a course of political manipulation which is not only obsolete but wrong, you will magnify the just charges against you, and the just wrath; you will put ammunition into the hands of the agitators you rightly condemn. The stockholders of your corporation, perhaps, are bound to suffer some from the fact that you ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... liberal mind: we must offer some motive of interest, or some hopes of external advantage, to animate the pursuits, or to direct the measures, of ordinary men. They would be brave, ingenious, and eloquent, only from necessity, or for the sake of profit: they magnify the uses of wealth, population, and the other resources of war; but often forget that these are of no consequence without the direction of able capacities, and without the supports of a national vigour. We may expect, therefore, to find among states the bias to a particular ...
— An Essay on the History of Civil Society, Eighth Edition • Adam Ferguson, L.L.D.
... equals, man for man, armed as they assuredly are," just as vigorously affirmed the professor, inclined rather to magnify than diminish the importance of these, his so recently discovered people. "You forget how the Aztecans fought Cortez and his mailed hosts. Yet these are one and identical, so far as valour and ...
— The Lost City • Joseph E. Badger, Jr.
... sacrifice, as he perceived, now that he had time to think how Philip would be certain to treat a challenge), it was not enough to wish no ill to his cousin, to intend no evil measure, he must pardon from the bottom of his heart, regard him candidly, and not magnify ...
— The Heir of Redclyffe • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Everett with one hundred men to capture Maysville. General Morgan instructed these officers to accomplish their respective commissions thoroughly but promptly, to create as much excitement as possible, occasion the concentration of forces already in the State at points widely apart, to magnify his strength and circulate reports which would bewilder and baffle any attempt to calculate his movements and to meet him within three or ...
— History of Morgan's Cavalry • Basil W. Duke
... proper to add that it is not the purpose of this work to magnify or modify or excuse that extreme example of humankind which forms its chief subject; but to set him down as he was inadequately, of course, but with good conscience and ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... of the book, our text was provided by copying, individually, from a manuscript prepared by our teacher, which increased our labor; but, curiously enough, the effect of the whole procedure was so to magnify the subject as materially to increase the impression upon ...
— From Sail to Steam, Recollections of Naval Life • Captain A. T. Mahan
... colored cadets, and of Smith in particular would not have been so convinced? When, therefore, any affront or any thing seemingly of that nature was offered me, I have been disposed, naturally I think, to unduly magnify it, because I expected it. This was hasty and unjust, and so I admit, now that I am better informed. What was apparently done to incommode or discourage me has been shown to have been done either for my own benefit or for some other purpose, not to my ...
— Henry Ossian Flipper, The Colored Cadet at West Point • Henry Ossian Flipper
... found to be false; it was managed by persons in the interest of the insurrection, in order to spread alarm, to magnify the undertaking, and drive many of the Irish people, both in Ireland and Great Britain, to join the confederacy. But while the startling tidings of the telegraph were false, other news, authentic and very alarming, reached London concerning the movements ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... while. He put his whole soul in it. Then we ordered two bottles of ale and had some fat wood put on the fire, and watched it roar and sputter with flame as only fat wood can. After much meditation and a swallow of the fresh-brought ale, my mind began to harp on Evelyn Gray, and to magnify her good looks and attractions. So ...
— We Three • Gouverneur Morris
... though probably in vain, to lay aside for the moment your inherited timidities and conventions. I ask you to lay aside pride, which is the devil itself and the cause of most unhappiness. I ask you to rise to the height of a great conception. To 'magnify' God is a common phrase in our observances. Then let us truly magnify Him—not minify, as the theologians do. If God is anything more than a social fetich, then He must be so much more that He includes and explains everything. It ...
— Where the Blue Begins • Christopher Morley
... faces were two square holes, from the edges of which the inside walls focussed back on two smaller, circular diaphragms. That made the two openings act somewhat like megaphone horns to still further magnify the sound which was emitted directly from this receiver without using any earpieces, and could be listened to anywhere in the room, if we chose. This was attached to the secret arrangement that had been connected with the telephone by replacing the ...
— Guy Garrick • Arthur B. Reeve
... functions, with educational and social outlooks from the feminine point of view. My work might show the bias of sex, but it dealt with the larger questions which were common to humanity; and when I recall the causes which I furthered, and which in some instances I started, I feel inclined to magnify the office of the anonymous contributor to the daily press. And I acknowledge not only the kindness of friends who put some of the best new books in my way, but the large-minded tolerance of the Editors of The Register, ...
— An Autobiography • Catherine Helen Spence
... it a time of trembling, the time of a terrible siege. But he tells us that "The Lord also shall save the tents of Judah first, that the glory of the House of David, and the glory of the inhabitants of Jerusalem, do not magnify themselves against Judah." Thus we learn that the Jews, who have been so long despised and bereft of a king, country, and government, shall see through the great mystery of Providence first. The House of David is found in the royal family of England. The Jews, seeing this, will ...
— The Lost Ten Tribes, and 1882 • Joseph Wild
... Domremy, and gave me many particulars of the petty persecutions to which the Sisters who conduct schools all over France are subjected. The schools are open at all hours to the invasion of Inspectors, who magnify their office too often in the eyes of the children by treating the teachers (lay as well as religious) with the sort of amiable condescension which marks the demeanour of an agent of the octroi overhauling the basket of a peasant-woman at a barrier. If a Sister has a religious ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... men who tried to fly in historic times, the legend of Icarus and Daedalus, in spite of the impossible form in which it is presented, may rank with the story of the Saracen of Constantinople, or with that of Simon the Magician. A simple folk would naturally idealise the man and magnify his exploit, as they magnified the deeds of some strong man to make the legends of Hercules, and there, full-grown from a mere legend, is the first record of a pioneer of flying. Such a theory is not nearly so fantastic as that which makes the Capnobates, ...
— A History of Aeronautics • E. Charles Vivian
... appear that I owed my escape from Father Antoine's meshes to my own craft; and tell, in fine, as pretty a story of plots and counterplots as M. de Brantome has ever woven. Having no desire, however, to magnify myself and, at this time of day, scarcely any reason, I am fain to confess that the reverse was the case; and that while no man ever did less to free himself than I did, my adversary retained his grasp to the ...
— A Gentleman of France • Stanley Weyman
... occasion to allude to the gay and insinuating soldier. I need scarcely say, it was no disadvantage to Mr. Bulstrode to be the heir of a baronetcy, in an English colony. Somehow or other, we are a little apt to magnify such accidental superiority, at a distance from home; and I have heard Englishmen, themselves, acknowledge that a baronet was a greater man, in New York, than a duke was in London. These were things, that passed through my mind, ...
— Satanstoe • James Fenimore Cooper
... of the Clan Mackenzie, though vouched for by certain charters and local histories, is now believed to be fabulous. It seems to have been first advanced in the 17th century, when there was an absurd desire and ambition in Scotland to fabricate or magnify all ancient and lordly pedigrees. Sir George Mackenzie of Tarbat, the Lord Advocate, and Sir George Mackenzie, the first Earl of Cromartie, were ready to swear to the descent of the Scots nation from Gathelus, son of Cecrops, ...
— History Of The Mackenzies • Alexander Mackenzie
... a great man of thee. Whenever I ask thee of any kind of stuff, saying, Hast thou brought with thee aught of such a kind? do thou answer, "Plenty.[FN28]" And if they question me of thee, I will praise thee and magnify thee in their eyes and say to them, Get him a store-house and a shop. I also will give thee out for a man of great wealth and generosity; and if a beggar come to thee, bestow upon him what thou mayst; so will they put faith in what I say ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... than eighteen months, received his license as a St. Louis and New Orleans pilot, and was accepted by his old chief, Bixby, as full partner on an important boat. In Life on the Mississippi Mark Twain makes the period of his study from two to two and a half years, but this is merely an attempt to magnify his dullness. He was, in fact, an apt pupil and a pilot of ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... a true woman, a wife will be as tender of those faults as she can be. She will not talk to her neighbors about them, nor magnify them, nor dwell upon them. She, alas! will never be without her share of blame; for the world, rightly or wrongly, often dowers the wife with the faults of the husband, and, seeing no possibility of interfering and assigning ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... if, at such an hour as this, we are prone to magnify trifles, or that the most insignificant thing becomes an omen full of ghastly meaning and possibilities? The creak of a door in the silence, a rustle in the dark, become to us of infinitely greater moment than the crash of ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol
... young lieutenant was saying in an oratorical manner, "that they magnify the dangers of the wilderness. The ford at which we were to meet Colden is just ahead, and we've come straight to it without the slightest mishap. Colden is no sluggard, and he should be here in the morning at the latest. Do you find anything wrong ...
— The Shadow of the North - A Story of Old New York and a Lost Campaign • Joseph A. Altsheler
... The purpose of the book seems to be: (1) To magnify Jehovah, who delivers his servants, who is God of all nations, and who will punish idolatry, who is pure, righteous, etc. (2) To encourage his countrymen to resist the forces that threaten the foundation of their ...
— The Bible Book by Book - A Manual for the Outline Study of the Bible by Books • Josiah Blake Tidwell
... characters so truthfully delineated in the word of God, and follow the record of human pride, passion and infirmity, we are taught at once to magnify and adore the patience, the forbearance and the mercy of Jehovah. And let us remember that it is because these characters are reflected in the pure mirror of truth that the dark shades so plainly appear. In every age the heart of man is the same; but the temptations which especially evince ...
— Notable Women of Olden Time • Anonymous
... else would I give it: thou delightest not in burnt offering. The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and a contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise." Psa. 51:16, 17. "I will praise the name of God with a song, and will magnify him with thanksgiving. This also shall please the Lord better than an ox or bullock that hath horns and hoofs." Psa. 69:30, 31. "Take thou away from me the noise of thy songs; for I will not hear the melody of thy viols. But let judgment run down as waters, ...
— Companion to the Bible • E. P. Barrows
... circumstances, for Evelyn, we all know, is, excuse me my dear, the devil, when fairly aroused. Now, as to this overhearing of yours—might not your mind, laboring under recent coma, and a sort of mental mirage as it were, have had a tendency to magnify and only partially comprehend the conversation thus suddenly forced upon your attention? For I understand you were unable to make yourself heard at all, or even to give signs of life when the curtains of your bed were lifted ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... Houlihan,'" writes Mr. Yeats, "with its speech of the country people, did not seem to him a preparation. It is not, but that is as it should be. Our movement is a return to the people, like the Russian movement of the early seventies, and the drama of society could but magnify a condition of life which the countryman and the artisan could but copy to their hurt. The play that is to give them a quite natural pleasure should either tell them of their own life or of that life of poetry where every man can see his own image, because there alone does ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... died in the space of twenty-four hours. This being related to him, he, notwithstanding the importunity of his friends to detain him, determined to go there, saying, "They are now in troubles, and need comfort. Perhaps this hand of God will make them now to magnify and reverence the word of God, ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... from an author who delighted to magnify the advantages of generous descent, has contributed to the very general and erroneous impression that until comparatively recent times the members of the English bar were necessarily drawn from the highest ranks of society; and several excellent writers on the antiquities ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... rupture as in failing eyesight. And everybody knows that one man may need very powerful glasses, while another needs glasses which magnify only slightly; one may need a double lens, while another needs only a single lens; one may need convex lenses, while another ...
— Cluthe's Advice to the Ruptured • Chas. Cluthe & Sons
... symbolize nothing more than some political power; but it will be noticed that, combined with his beastly nature, there are also certain characteristics that belong exclusively to the department of human life—a mouth speaking great things; power to magnify himself against the God of heaven; the ability to single out the saints of God and kill them, and to set himself up as an object to be worshiped, etc. This combination of symbols from the two departments—those of animal and of human life—points us with absolute certainty ...
— The Revelation Explained • F. Smith
... more of those interesting questions from which past improvements have sprung, and from the discussion of which future ameliorations are likely to flow, than any other of the newer works which have come under our eye. Where so many excellences exist, we are not ill-natured enough to magnify a few defects. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - April 1843 • Various
... description of this exploit of Hector is wonderfully imposing. It seems to be the poet's wish to magnify his deeds during the short period that he has yet to live, both to do justice to the hero of Troy, and to give the greater glory to ...
— The Iliad of Homer - Translated into English Blank Verse • Homer
... Selva would be a blow directed against the most active and vital energies of Catholicism. The Church tolerates thousands of stupid, ascetic books which unworthily diminish the idea of God in the human mind; let her not condemn those which magnify it!" The hour struck in the distance; half-past nine. Silently His Holiness took Benedetto's hand, held it between his own, and communicated to him through that mute pressure an understanding and approval which his prudent lips ...
— The Saint • Antonio Fogazzaro
... therefore we are equally so; your feelings of interest in us magnify the danger, and I therefore trust that in future you will not allow our position to interfere with your ...
— The Settlers in Canada • Frederick Marryat
... this day. But now the furthest extremity of Brit. is laid open (i.e. our retreat is no longer a safeguard); and every thing unknown is esteemed great (i.e. this safeguard also is removed—the Romans in our midst no longer magnify our strength). Rit. encloses the clause in brackets, as a gloss. He renders sinus famae, bosom of fame, fame being personified as a goddess. R., Dr., Or. make famae dative after defendithas kept back ...
— Germania and Agricola • Caius Cornelius Tacitus
... sneer is out of place. You know very well that one merit of our Church is the spirit of toleration, which does not magnify every variety of opinion into a heresy or a schism. But if Sir Peter sends his son at the age of sixteen to a tutor who eliminates the religion of Christianity from his teaching, he deserves to be thrashed within an inch of his life; and," continued the Parson, eying Sir Peter ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... an unhappy frame of mind exaggerates or prolongs the vomiting of pregnancy. Thus, disappointment, anxiety, grief, fright, and other types of mental uneasiness not only magnify the discomfort but sometimes are its sole cause. The curious cases in which the husband suffers from nausea while his wife is pregnant are explained by mental influences. As a result of the same kind of influence, women who imagine ...
— The Prospective Mother - A Handbook for Women During Pregnancy • J. Morris Slemons
... supernatural, is the meeting-place of earth and heaven. From one point of view our worship is in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus. It is "with angels and archangels and with all the company of heaven," that we laud and magnify GOD'S Holy Name. We join in an eternal act of worship, which is that of the whole Church, the departed with the living, whose adoration ascends continually before the ...
— Religious Reality • A.E.J. Rawlinson
... outlines of her form; if I cast mine eyes upon the fire in the kitchen-grate, the coals will glow and cool until I see her face; nay, but yesterday, the shoulder of mutton upon the spit gyrated until it at last assumed the decapitated head of Mary. 'Think of her faults and magnify them'—nay, that were unjust and unchristian. Let me rather correct mine own. I fear me that when Ovid wrote his picture he intended it for the use of young men, and not for an old fool like me. Behold! I have again broken my pipe—the fourth pipe that ...
— Jacob Faithful • Captain Frederick Marryat
... don't say yes, I suppose you'd magnify me into a sullen old bear, as bad as Ketch, the porter. You may accept it. Stop!" thundered Mr. Galloway, coming to ...
— The Channings • Mrs. Henry Wood
... what he called stump oratory was because he believed it to be a great school of insincerity. Its end was not truth, but plausibility. It was the effort of interested men to throw opinions into such forms as might most captivate uninstructed men; to keep back every unpopular side; to magnify everything in them that was seductive. He once said to me that two great curses seemed to him eating away the heart and worth of the English people. One was drink. The other was stump oratory, which accustomed men to say without shame what they did not in their hearts ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... pure for living beings. All statistics consist of our attempts to represent statistically what is in motion; and in the process things assume a weight in our mind which they have not in reality. For this reason a man, who by his profession is concerned with any particular aspect of life, is apt to magnify its proportions; in laying undue stress upon facts he loses his hold upon truth. A detective may have the opportunity of studying crimes in detail, but he loses his sense of their relative places in the whole social economy. When science collects facts to illustrate the struggle for existence ...
— Sadhana - The Realisation of Life • Rabindranath Tagore
... be not merely fancifully a romance typical of Salem, but in the most essentially true way representative of it. Surely no one could have better right to thus embody the characteristics of the town than Hawthorne, whose early ancestors had helped to magnify it and defend it, and whose nearer progenitors had in their fallen fortunes almost foreshadowed the mercantile decline of the long-lived capital. Surely no one can be less open to criticism for illustrating various phases of his townsmen's character and exposing in this book, as elsewhere, though ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... the shepherds were engaged in the same employment, the cave at that time seemed like a glorious temple, because both the tongues of angels and men united to adore and magnify God, on account of the birth of ...
— The Forbidden Gospels and Epistles, Complete • Archbishop Wake
... attained in his later work. They are frankly lyrical. Unlike his great English contemporary, Isaac Watts, who held that a hymn should not be a lyrical poem and deliberately reduced the poetical quality of his work, Brorson believed that a Christian should use "all his thought and skill to magnify the grace of God". The opinion of an English literary critic "that hymns cannot be considered as poetry" is disproved by Brorson's work. Some of his hymns contain poetry of the highest merit. Their phrasing is in parts extremely lyrical, utilizing to the fullest extent the softness and ...
— Hymns and Hymnwriters of Denmark • Jens Christian Aaberg
... whose royal genius could magnify and enrich every circumstance in honour of his sovereign, has given this story as a medallion on one of the compartments of the great gallery at Versailles. France appears with a stately air, shewing to Rome the design of the pyramid; and Rome, though bearing a shield marked S.P.Q.R. ...
— Boswell's Correspondence with the Honourable Andrew Erskine, and His Journal of a Tour to Corsica • James Boswell
... former cases some harm and danger from keeping it out of sight and pretending not to think of it. I felt doubtful whether some minds, growing weak with fasting and exposure and having such a terrific idea to dwell upon in secret, might not magnify it until it got to have an awful attraction about it. This was not a new thought of mine, for it had grown out of my reading. However, it came over me stronger than it had ever done before—as it had reason for doing—in the boat, and ...
— The Wreck of the Golden Mary • Charles Dickens
... danger of getting things out of focus always remains however and is so subtle that the writer feels an imperative duty to warn his readers to take all statements concerning the unseen world with the proverbial grain of salt, for he has no intention to deceive. He is therefore inclined rather to magnify than to minimize his limitations and would advise the student to accept nothing from the author's pen without reasoning it out for himself. Thus, if he is deceived, he will be self-deceived and the ...
— The Rosicrucian Mysteries • Max Heindel
... Galileo Galilei, a professor at the University of Pisa, developing a telescope that would magnify to eight diameters, discovered Jupiter's satellites and Saturn's rings. The story of his discovery of the satellites of Jupiter is another interesting illustration of the careful scientific reasoning of these early workers (R. 206). Galileo also made ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... cigar upon him and talked of the weather to cover Antoine's retreat. I resolved not to tell him the real cause of the servant's apprehensions, knowing his disposition to magnify trifles and fearing he might send the police to investigate. He lived only five miles from Barton, a fact to which ...
— Lady Larkspur • Meredith Nicholson
... impression which the object under the influence of passion makes on the mind. Let an object, for instance, be presented to the senses in a state of agitation or fear, and the imagination will distort or magnify the object, and convert it into the likeness of whatever is most proper to encourage the fear. "Our eyes are made the fools" of our other faculties. This is the ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... many of the failings as well as many of the virtues which had characterised the Church of the third and fourth centuries. It copied, for instance, far too faithfully, the disposition which primitive ages had early manifested, to magnify unduly the spiritual power and prerogatives of the priesthood. No doubt the outcry against sacerdotalism was often perverted to disingenuous uses. Many a hard blow was dealt against vital Christian doctrine under the guise of righteous war against the ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... reproach which Theologians, in order to magnify the importance of the New Testament, cast upon the Old, is this: They say, that the Old Testament represents God only as the tutelary Deity of the Israelites, and as not so much concerned for the rest of mankind. To show that this is a very mistaken notion, and ...
— The Grounds of Christianity Examined by Comparing The New Testament with the Old • George Bethune English
... with the oriental customs of the time, unless Mary, young as she was, had possessed unusual promptitude and energy of disposition. (Luke i. 39, 40.) 3. The proof of her intellectual power in the beautiful hymn she has left us, "My soul doth magnify the Lord." (Luke i. 46.) The commentators are not agreed as to whether this effusion was poured forth by immediate inspiration, or composed and written down, because the same words, "and Mary said," may be interpreted in either sense; but we can no more doubt her being the authoress, ...
— Legends of the Madonna • Mrs. Jameson
... gold. Then there is a talker who is worth much silver, a man of irresistible geniality, who has a fund of pleasant banter for all present. This is a great art; banter, to be agreeable, must be of a complimentary kind; it must magnify the object it deals with—a perverse person may be bantered on his strength of character; a stingy person may be bantered on his prudence. There is, indeed, a kind of banter, not unknown in academical circles, which takes the heart out of every ...
— The Upton Letters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... "investigate" spiritualism, and part with innumerable guineas to mediums, slatewriters, clairvoyants, and even of turbaned rascals from the East, who would boldly offer at midnight to bring him out into the back yard and there and then raise the devil for him. And just as his tendency was to magnify the success and utility of his patent purchases, so he would lend himself more or less to gross impostures simply because they interested him. This confirmed his reputation for being a bit of a crank; and as he had in addition all the restlessness and eccentricity of the active spirits of his class, ...
— The Irrational Knot - Being the Second Novel of His Nonage • George Bernard Shaw
... manner that the good lady spread the report which she desired through the gossiping little town. Rapidly did the little piece of gossip swell and magnify. It even travelled into the country, and so huge did its dimensions grow there, that it not only killed Matty, but buried her, and placed a beautiful tablet in white marble over her grave, erected by the repentant Captain Bertram and the remorseful ...
— The Honorable Miss - A Story of an Old-Fashioned Town • L. T. Meade
... they with like alacrity follow, dividing [Sidenote: Interjection] between them the sentences wherewith they strive which shall most show his own and stir up others' zeal, to the glory of that God whose name they magnify; [Sidenote: Litany] or when he proposeth unto God their necessities, and they their own requests for relief in every of them; or when he lifteth up his voice like a trumpet to proclaim unto them the laws [Sidenote: ...
— The Prayer Book Explained • Percival Jackson
... whether or not I ought to tell Dicky of the incident. I had so much experience of his intensely jealous temperament that I feared he might magnify and ...
— Revelations of a Wife - The Story of a Honeymoon • Adele Garrison
... on earth its flight was bent, Even since the man within the child began To yearn and kindle with superb intent And trust in time to magnify the man. ...
— Astrophel and Other Poems - Taken from The Collected Poetical Works of Algernon Charles - Swinburne, Vol. VI • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... coming from these sidelong pits and moving about, huge and misshapen lumps, bear-like, that flounder and growl. They are "us." We are muffled like Eskimos. Fleeces and blankets and sacking wrap us up, weigh us down, magnify us strangely. Some stretch themselves, yawning profoundly. Faces appear, ruddy or leaden, dirt-disfigured, pierced by the little lamps of dull and heavy-lidded eyes, matted with uncut beards ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse |
