"Mortal" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... breath. All that delightful fooling was over; the hard work was over. The nights were gone when they would wander like children across the parade grounds, or past the bayonet school, with its rows of tripods upholding imitation enemies made of sacks stuffed with hay, and showing signs of mortal injury with their greasy entrails protruding. Gone, too, were the hours when Willy sank into the lowest abyss of depression over his failure to be ...
— A Poor Wise Man • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... don't, either, that is, not definitely. But there was something of that kind in his adventures, and if there wasn't, there should have been. Look at them, how frantically they whirl their great arms—just the thing to excite the crazy knight to mortal combat. It bewilders one to look at them. Help me to count all those we can see, Van Mounen. I want a big item for my notebook." And after a careful reckoning, superintended by all the party, Master Ben wrote in pencil, ...
— Hans Brinker - or The Silver Skates • Mary Mapes Dodge
... Guide, speaking of examinations, says: "First, we must observe that all examinations imply the existence of examiners, and examiners, like other mortal beings, lie open to the frauds of designing men, through the uniformity and sameness of their proceedings. This uniformity inventive men have analyzed and reduced to a system, founding thereon a certain science, and ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... Spiller dryly. "She'd be in mortal fear of the whole of her young ladies following your example and running away with the town sparks. Well, we'll see what can be done for you, Polly, though I fear me I'm going to have a sad pickle ...
— Madame Flirt - A Romance of 'The Beggar's Opera' • Charles E. Pearce
... loverlike attentions could have cured Pamela Winstanley's mortal sickness, she might yet have recovered. But the hour had gone by when such medicaments might have prevailed. While the Captain had shot, and hunted, and caught mighty salmon, and invested his odd hundreds, and taken his own pleasure in various ...
— Vixen, Volume III. • M. E. Braddon
... own, it took my friend and myself so much by surprise that we almost thought for the moment that we had trespassed on to the forbidden ground of some fairy people who lived alone here, high amid the sequestered valleys where mortal steps were rare, but on going to the corner of the street we were undeceived indeed, but most pleasurably surprised by the pretty ...
— Samuel Butler's Cambridge Pieces • Samuel Butler
... every probability that thou wilt know where to find me for some time to come," answered Mead; "and I shall be heartily well-pleased further to explain to you the principles we hold to be the true ones for the guidance of men in this mortal life." ...
— A True Hero - A Story of the Days of William Penn • W.H.G. Kingston
... my friend, as God might be my friend, Thou only hast not trampled on my tears. Life scarce can be so hard, 'mid many fears And many shames, when mortal heart can find Somewhere one healing touch, as my sick mind Finds thee.... And should I wait thy word, to endure A little for thine easing, yea, or pour My strength out in thy toiling fellowship? Thou hast ...
— The Electra of Euripides • Euripides
... best of balms for wounded self-esteem, is it not, Blanche? I confess I am piqued; I had dared to imagine that my squire might remember me still after a month of absence. I should have known it too much to ask of mortal man. Not till the rivers run up-hill will you keep our memories green for ...
— Helmet of Navarre • Bertha Runkle
... semi-military greatcoat leap from a buggy. After making an inquiry or two in the hall, he entered the dining-room just at the juncture when Chichikov, almost swooning with terror, had found himself placed in about as awkward a situation as could well befall a mortal man. ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... more than made up in strength and bravery. It was common in those days to exhibit animal fights at the Frankish court, as indeed, to her shame be it spoken, is common in Spain to this day. On one of these occasions a lion and a bull were engaged in a savage and mortal struggle. Pepin and his courtiers were seated round the arena looking on, when suddenly the king started up, and cried: "Who will dare to separate those beasts?" There was a dead silence. The attempt was madness—certain destruction. Unsheathing ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 1 of 8 • Various
... Robinson, and Scott were hanged June 18th, by order of General E. Kirby Smith, at Atlanta.( 3) Their bodies were buried in a rude trench at the foot of the scaffold. A grateful government has caused this trench to be opened and the mortal remains of these unfortunate heroes of cruel war to be removed to the beautiful National Cemetery near Chattanooga and buried amidst the heroes of Chickamauga, there to rest until the Grand Army of Soldier-dead shall be summoned to ...
— Slavery and Four Years of War, Vol. 1-2 • Joseph Warren Keifer
... judgement from. His answer, however, was not so much to seek as I thought it would have been. 'Look you,' says he, 'by the number which are at this time sick and infected, there should have been twenty thousand dead the last week instead of eight thousand, if the inveterate mortal contagion had been as it was two weeks ago; for then it ordinarily killed in two or three days, now not under eight or ten; and then not above one in five recovered, whereas I have observed that now not above two in five miscarry. ...
— A Journal of the Plague Year • Daniel Defoe
... the cares which come on me I cannot be entirely free Thro' all this mortal life; But cares imported from abroad Make much more ponderous the load, And cause ...
— Our Profession and Other Poems • Jared Barhite
... not rather an angel than a mortal, whose mellifluous notes accompanied the instrument?" ...
— The Pacha of Many Tales • Frederick Marryat
... really an exception," Clyde told him. "The average Westerner is such a superior mortal. He looks down on the East, and when he comes ...
— Desert Conquest - or, Precious Waters • A. M. Chisholm
... its joyous life For toil and hunger, wounds and mortal strife; Love, friendship, learning's all prevailing charms, For the cold bivouac and the clash of arms. The cause of freedom won, a race enslaved Called back to manhood, and a nation saved, These sons of Harvard, falling ere their ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... reason; but an answer to the Whence and Why is no answer to the How, which alone is the physiologist's concern. It is a sophisma pigrum, and (as Bacon hath said) the arrogance of pusillanimity, which lifts up the idol of a mortal's fancy and commands us to fall down and worship it, as a work of divine wisdom, an ancile or palladium fallen from heaven. By the very same argument the supporters of the Ptolemaic system might have rebuffed the Newtonian, ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... monsters rushing along in their wake, lusting for the time when their efforts would prevail and the end of the world would come. For the Northern nations believed that as their gods had sprung from an alliance between the divine element (Boerr) and the mortal (Bestla), they were finite, and doomed to perish with the ...
— Myths of the Norsemen - From the Eddas and Sagas • H. A. Guerber
... he whom thou lovest is mortal—that what thou lovest is not thine own; it is given thee for the present, not irrevocably nor for ever, but even as a fig or a bunch of grapes at the appointed season of ...
— The Golden Sayings of Epictetus • Epictetus
... Doctor said it was only a question of days. But why should this so extraordinarily discompose Captain Pond, who had no particular affection for Fugler, and knew, besides, that all men—and especially hard drinkers—are mortal? ...
— Wandering Heath • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... with it north-easterly, presented a very strong family likeness, as if all cast in one mould. The steamer here approached a long pier projecting from the northern wilderness and built of some of its logs,—and whistled, where not a cabin nor a mortal was to be seen. The shore was quite low, with flat rocks on it, overhung with black ash, arbor-vitae, etc., which at first looked as if they did not care a whistle for us. There was not a single cabman to cry ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... neck of even a foreign soldier in adoration. The thirst for joviality often led wayward sailors to crave for drink, and under its baneful influence they were easily wafted into a delirium of foolhardy devices that would never have entered the mind of the ordinary mortal. ...
— The Shellback's Progress - In the Nineteenth Century • Walter Runciman
... internally. It's a mighty curious thing that you can tell a man his morals are bad and he needs to get religion, and hell still remain your friend; but that if you tell him his linen's dirty and he needs to take a bath, you've made a mortal enemy. ...
— Old Gorgon Graham - More Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son • George Horace Lorimer
... hours,— And o'er their heads unblended pleasure pour; Nor let your fleeting round Their mortal transports bound, But fill their cup of bliss, eternal powers, Till time himself shall cease, and suns shall ...
— Some Old Time Beauties - After Portraits by the English Masters, with Embellishment and Comment • Thomson Willing
... steady work impossible now that he could positively count on his fingers the days before his marriage day—before the day which would make him a free man. It was hard to believe that two such blessings could descend upon a mortal at once. It seemed to him that the very hours, as they went by, looked on him with faces of mysterious menace, foretelling a dread successor. Since Monday he had with difficulty accomplished his tasks; each time ...
— Thyrza • George Gissing
... forward and launched another spear that entered the slimy body near the center, but neither wound was mortal and the ...
— The River of Darkness - Under Africa • William Murray Graydon
... biggest packing-case ever I clapped eyes on. And this Pitman he seemed a good deal cut up, and he had the superintendent out, and they got hold of the vanman—him as took the packing-case. Well, sir," continued Bill, with a smile, "I never see a man in such a state. Everybody about that van was mortal, bar the horses. Some gen'leman (as well as I could make out) had given the vanman a sov.; and so that was where the trouble come ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the beautiful. The green turf, springing with flowers, that lies above a grave, does not seem, to us so hopeless a barrier between us and what was warm and loving; the springing grass and daisies there seem, types and assurances that the mortal beneath shall put on immortality; they come up to us as kind messages from the peaceful dust, to say that it is resting in a certain hope of a ...
— Sunny Memories Of Foreign Lands, Volume 1 (of 2) • Harriet Elizabeth (Beecher) Stowe
... He had a high-keyed voice and no front teeth, and always chewed as he talked. He'd pull out the bill and shake it at the man that owed it and say: 'A debt to the church is registered above. Not to pay it is a mortal sin. To perish in sin is to be burned with brimstone and eaten by the worm that dieth not.' Before Deacon Todd got through that sinner was ready ...
— Dwellers in Arcady - The Story of an Abandoned Farm • Albert Bigelow Paine
... more important are those on the north, of about the middle of the fourteenth century, which show a decided advance, both in feeling and execution, beyond Giotto. The first is The Triumph of Death, in which the supernatural is tempered with representations of what is mortal to an extent that already shows that painting was not to be confined to religious uses alone. All the pleasures and sorrows of life are here represented, on the earth; it is only in the sky that we see the demons and angels. On one side is a festive company of ...
— Six Centuries of Painting • Randall Davies
... sure," the grand master said; "but I deem not that you are in any way to blame in the matter. The plot has been matured, not as a consequence of any laxity of discipline in the prison, but from deliberate treachery, against which no mortal being can guard. The traitors are two of the officials who, being members of the Order, none would suspect of connivance in such a deed. With them are several—I know not how many—under officials, warders, and guards; all ...
— A Knight of the White Cross • G.A. Henty
... vestibule below was a letter-box into which no letter would go, and an electric button from which no mortal finger could coax a ring. Also appertaining thereunto was a card bearing the name "Mr. James Dillingham Young." The "Dillingham" had been flung to the breeze during a former period of prosperity when its possessor was being paid $30 per week. ...
— The Four Million • O. Henry
... slave, or dog! Egad!" He laughed out harshly. "I used not to be so humble. If you were queen, I was king, and I made you know it. There! Go! You have done what you came to do, and more also. Go quickly, before I see your face again! I'm only mortal still, and there are some things that mortals can't endure—even ...
— The Tidal Wave and Other Stories • Ethel May Dell
... know more than many of my elders, thanks to good schools, good method, a genuine love of my noble profession, and a tendency to study from my childhood. Will you not risk something on my ability? If not, God help me, for I shall lose you; and what is life, or fame, or wealth, or any mortal thing to me, without you? I cannot accept your father's decision; ...
— A Simpleton • Charles Reade
... preached but before his eyes put into practice, that interested him. The young man with white hair had been running away from temptation. At forty miles an hour he had been running away from the temptation to do a fellow mortal "a good turn." That morning, to the appeal of a drowning Caesar to "Help me, Cassius, or I sink," he had answered: "Sink!" That answer he had no wish to reconsider. That he might not reconsider he had sought to escape. It was his experience that a sixty-horse-power ...
— The Lost Road • Richard Harding Davis
... carried along with the music of his matchless rhythms is to me a delight and a wonder. I have discovered that the Garden of Proserpine should be read only when one is in a reclining position. Then one's voice conveys more perfectly the weariness of all things mortal and the sweet delight of rest. I find I must practice breathing more deeply, if I wish to render the voluptuous, sinuous lines. Don't you think this is a great ambition, to read Swinburne well? I am so glad to find ...
— An Anarchist Woman • Hutchins Hapgood
... property which had been fraudulently taken from them in days gone by. The writer held himself justified, in the last resort, and in that only, in using any means for effecting this restoration, except such as might involve him in mortal sin. ...
— After Dark • Wilkie Collins
... any mortal, Joan had made a kind of idol of the pictured Denasia. She was sorry for her weakness in this matter, but she was not able to resist the temptation of very frequently opening the drawer in which it lay, of looking at it, and of kissing it. Her conversation, her thoughts, ...
— A Singer from the Sea • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... remember that night when you, with Stephano Verrina and Piero, got into the Riverola Palace some months ago? Well, I don't know who discovered the plot, but I was locked in my room, and next morning young Francisco dismissed me in a way that made me his mortal enemy: and I must have vengeance. For this purpose I have urged on the count to cause Flora Francatelli, whom Francisco loves and wishes to marry, to be included in the proceedings taken by the inquisition ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds
... his return. He was received with great demonstrations of joy; but St. Bridget had told him that if he went to Avignon he should die soon afterwards, and it so happened that her prophecy was fulfilled, for the Pope not long after his arrival in Provence was seized with a mortal illness, and died on the 19th of December, 1370. In the course of his pontificate, he had received two singular honours. The Emperor of the West had performed the office of his equerry, and the Emperor of the East abjured ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch
... ein Held. It was a fine end for a mortal man. We will not call it sad or tragic, but heroic and sublime; and if our eyes water as we write it down, it is not with sorrow, but with ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... of the third son, who spoke thus: 'I found my mortal enemy, who had strayed during the night, and was sleeping on the edge of a precipice in such a manner that the least false movement on waking would have thrown him over. His life was in my hands; I ...
— Chatterbox, 1905. • Various
... heaven be his! If you'll allow me, mistress, in return for my copeck I'll do him a last service—just give his mortal ...
— Russian Fairy Tales - A Choice Collection of Muscovite Folk-lore • W. R. S. Ralston
... human creature, be he ever so paltry, has his hour of effulgence, an hour when the mortal veil grows thin and the divine image stands revealed, endowing him, for a brief space at least with a kind of awful beauty ...
— Marm Lisa • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... me, at that laughing I turned, and I saw the ruddy face of Dan McBride blench like linen, his legs become weak like a man that has a mortal blow, and he came to his son. Bryde was on his back at his full stretch on the shore, and his right arm under his head, with a little switch of hazel in his hand; and lying against his breast with her arms round his neck ...
— The McBrides - A Romance of Arran • John Sillars
... sky— Lightly down from the dark descends The Lady of Beauty and lightly bends Over Barnabas stretched in the altar place, And wipes the dew from his shining face; Then touching his hair with a look of light, Passes again from the mortal sight. An odor of lilies hallows the air, And sounds ...
— Giant Hours With Poet Preachers • William L. Stidger
... mortal his gift for conversation, his profound knowledge, his easy gestures, his freedom of manners, that familiarity with which he could treat women! ...
— Debts of Honor • Maurus Jokai
... doctor, "you are right, and God is too just to add the horror of uncertainty to His rightful punishments. At that moment when the soul quits her earthly body the judgment of God is passed upon her: she hears the sentence of pardon or of doom; she knows whether she is in the state of grace or of mortal sin; she sees whether she is to be plunged forever into hell, or if God sends her for a time to purgatory. This sentence, madame, you will learn at the very instant when the executioner's axe strikes you; unless, indeed, the fire of charity has so purified you in this life ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - THE MARQUISE DE BRINVILLIERS • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... latter, we need hardly say, were the silver ones—the pair that he would not let Jack have when he went to Jawleyford Court. So his lordship went capering and careering along, avoiding, of course, all the turnpike-gates, of which he had a mortal aversion. ...
— Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour • R. S. Surtees
... that they knew of. How would the condemned meet their end? Would it be with craven timidity or with the intrepidity of heroes, or again with the insensibility of brutes? Death was at hand—the inexorable, the all-powerful. How could mortal man encounter it face to face? This was the great problem then; it is the ...
— The Shadow of a Crime - A Cumbrian Romance • Hall Caine
... let me! Am I to be on friendly terms with—with your mortal enemy?" She was still smiling, but now her sensitive mouth ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... sympathy for the hungry man; but there is no sympathy for the unsuccessful man who is not hungry. If a fellow mortal be ragged, humanity will subscribe to mend his clothes; but humanity will subscribe nothing to mend his ragged hopes so long as his outside coat shall ...
— The Bertrams • Anthony Trollope
... eminent names were such as have gained historic place—men of powerful eloquence, and worthy to be leaders of the respective parties which they espoused. To this dignified body (composed of individuals some of whom were older in political experience than he in his mortal life) Pierce came as the youngest member of the Senate. With his usual tact and exquisite sense of propriety, he saw that it was not the time for him to step forward prominently on this highest theatre in the ...
— Sketches and Studies • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... thousand years ago: "May destiny aid me to preserve unsullied the purity of my words and of all my actions, according to those sublime laws which, brought forth in the celestial heights, have Heaven alone for their father, to which the race of mortal men did not give birth, and which oblivion shall never entomb. In them is a supreme God, and one who waxes not old."[7] It would be easy to multiply quotations of this order, and to show you in the documents of Grecian and Roman civilization numerous traces of the knowledge of the only and holy ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville
... a little. On galloped the horse, but the wolves were soon crowding round again, with the blood freezing on their muzzles. It was easier to throw the second child than the first, and Hund did it. It was harder to give up the third—the dumb infant that nestled to his breast, but Hund was in mortal terror; and a man beside himself with terror has all the cruelty of a pack of wolves. Hund flung away the infant, and just saved himself. Nobody at home questioned him, for nobody knew about the orphans, and he did not tell. But he was unsettled and looked wild; ...
— Feats on the Fiord - The third book in "The Playfellow" • Harriet Martineau
... 1860, he had passed by a few months his thirty-fifth birthday. A young man in the morning of his power he felt strangely old, for he wrote to a friend just a little later: "I have passed meridian. It is after twelve o'clock in the large day of my mortal life. I am no longer a young man. It is now afternoon with me, and the shadows turn toward ...
— Starr King in California • William Day Simonds
... Aphrodite had commanded was done. Then the goddess was very angry, and fed Psyche on bread and water, and next day she set Psyche another task. This was to collect a quantity of golden wool from the sheep of the goddess, creatures so fierce and wild that no mortal could venture near them and escape with life. Then Psyche thought herself lost; but Pan came to her help and bade her wait until evening, when the golden sheep would be at rest, and then she might from the trees and shrubs collect all ...
— Fairy Tales; Their Origin and Meaning • John Thackray Bunce
... that spectre terrible: Twice my sad eyes have had upon them traced The picture of that boy always prepared To spring on me. At length, quite wearied out, With horrors that pursued me, unto Baal I went to ask protection for my life, And at his altars look for some repose: What cannot terror do in mortal mind? An instinct forced me to the Jewish temple, And I conceived the thought to appease their God: Some offerings, I believed, would calm His rage, And make that God, whate'er He be, more gentle. Pontiff of Baal excuse ...
— Athaliah • J. Donkersley
... optimist, on the other hand, he trusted that by his own exertions he might so dispose matters as that his master and Ortensia should be murdered while in a state of grace, and not in mortal sin; to be plain, he was determined that they should be duly married before Pignaver's agents despatched them. For he had been constrained to aid and abet his master in more than one romantic adventure before now, and nothing had come of any of them that was at all conducive to ...
— Stradella • F(rancis) Marion Crawford
... strongly advised her to travel for a length of time, both as offering a mortal remedy, and as a temporary escape from the practical perplexities of the moment. Her rescue, however, was to be otherwise effected, and a number of new intellectual interests that sprang up for her at this time all tended to retain ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... the paper, except the mechanical end of it; but they wouldn't come out right full with what they meant. They seemed to have some good reason for protecting a third party, and said quite a good deal about their fathers and mothers being but mortal and so on; so Henry and Herbert thought they oughtn't to expose this third party—whoever she may happen to be. Well, I thought they better not stay too long, because I was compromised enough already, without being ...
— Gentle Julia • Booth Tarkington
... require them to keep the men and women asunder, and to separate you from your daughter, for a short time, remember that I shall be with her, as I was in her childhood, when, by the mercy of God, we carried her through so many mortal diseases in safety, and have got her, in the pride of her youth, without a blemish or a defect, the perfect ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... wager heavily on Smasher Mike, and undertakes to put him in the way of obtaining a loan of L5,000 for this purpose. Their conversation is overheard by an agent of Sir Ernest Scrivener, alias Marmaduke Moorsdyke, who is the mortal enemy of Wonderson and is plotting to get Lady Margaret Tamerton ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, September 2nd, 1914 • Various
... I will tamely brook this insult?" roared Sir Giles; "draw your sword at once, and let it be a mortal ...
— The Star-Chamber, Volume 2 - An Historical Romance • W. Harrison Ainsworth
... Sharp flashes of lightning darted from one to the other; a jet of flame from one leaped across the interval and was buried in the bosom of its adversary; and at every discharge the boom of great guns echoed through the mountains. It was something more than a royal salute to the tomb of the mortal at our feet, for the masses of cloud were rent in the fray, at every discharge the rain was precipitated in increasing torrents, and soon the vast hulks were trailing torn fragments and wreaths of mist, ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... remotely connected with such specimens of boyhood as were before him now. Not that they were any better than he. Oh no, Tode never harbored such a thought for a moment; but then they were different, that he saw, and like many another unthinking mortal, he never gave a thought to the difference that home, and culture, and Christianity must necessarily make. But what nonsense am I talking! Tode didn't know there were any such words, but then there are people who do, and who reason no better ...
— Three People • Pansy
... were parted, and a flush caused by excitement came to her cheeks. She looked with admiration upon those girls who could talk in public. In her eyes they were gifted creatures more richly blessed than the ordinary mortal like herself. Hitherto she had been fond of spunky little Mary Wilson. Now she admired and looked up to her as one must look up to a person ...
— Elizabeth Hobart at Exeter Hall • Jean K. Baird
... Magician, said to Alaeddin, "O my son, now collect thy thoughts! under yon stone wherein the ring is set lieth the treasure wherewith I acquainted thee: so set thy hand upon the ring and raise the slab, for that none other amongst the folk, thyself excepted, hath power to open it, nor may any of mortal birth, save thyself, set foot within this Enchanted Treasury which hath been kept for thee. But 'tis needful that thou learn of me all wherewith I would charge thee; nor gainsay e'en a single syllable of my words. All this, ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... newly-made grave, the narrow coffin, the pale, dead sister, and the solemn vow were all forgotten, and a debauch of three weeks was followed by a violent fever, which in a few days cut short his mortal career. He died alone, with none but his father to witness his wild ravings, in which he talked of his distant home, of Jenny and Rose, Mary Howard, and Ella, the last of whom he seemed now to love with a madness amounting almost to frenzy. Tearing out handfuls of his rich brown hair, he ...
— The English Orphans • Mary Jane Holmes
... bows and arrows. On the point of the arrow they fitted a fish spine, with a certain poison that was so effective that it was mortal even if it only slightly touched the flesh. They used short spears and certain shields which they called carazas. They carried certain knives with two sharp edges, which were short, like daggers. They used jackets ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume XXI, 1624 • Various
... do over-estimate the value of the papaw, although I certainly did once myself hang the leg of a goat no mortal man could have got tooth into, on to a papaw tree with a bit of string for the night. In the morning it was clean gone, string and all; but whether it was the pepsine, the papaine, or a purloining ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... vacuous wonder; I clapped my hands together and beat my breast; it was true; my soul within me said it was true; the boy had not lied; the djins had heard; I was just in the flesh I had; my common human hungers still unsatisfied where never mortal man had hungered before; and scarcely knowing whether I feared or not, whether to laugh or cry, but with all the wonder and terror of that great remove sweeping suddenly upon me I staggered back to my seat, and dropping my arms upon the table, leant my head heavily upon them and strove to choke ...
— Gulliver of Mars • Edwin L. Arnold
... and come forward from the secret place where he held himself hidden? Was I destined to behold a struggle in the streets, an unseemly contest of words in sight of the door I had expected to enter so joyously? In terror of such an event, I seized the hand which seemed my one refuge in this hour of mortal trouble, and hastened into the house which, for all its doleful history, had never received within its doors a heart more burdened or rebellious. As this thought rushed over me, I came near crying out, 'The house of doom! The house of doom!' I ...
— The Filigree Ball • Anna Katharine Green
... tree at the corner, away from the lamp-post," Ann Eliza said to herself, with sudden insight into unconjectured things. On Sundays they usually went for the whole afternoon to the Central Park, and Ann Eliza, from her seat in the mortal hush of the back room, followed step by step their long slow ...
— Bunner Sisters • Edith Wharton
... dear friend received his mortal wound about the middle of the fight, and sent an officer to tell me that he should see ...
— The Letter-Bag of Lady Elizabeth Spencer-Stanhope v. I. • A. M. W. Stirling (compiler)
... in body and in mind, to do more than listen. Claude is telling him about the late Photographic Exhibition; and the old man listens with a triumphant smile to wonders which he will never behold with mortal eyes. ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume II. • Charles Kingsley
... youngest daughter, child of his old age, of whom Mrs. Villars said, on her death-bed, "Take always good care of my darling, dear Toby!"—an injunction which the negro regarded as a sort of last will and testament bequeathing the girl to him beyond mortal question. ...
— Cudjo's Cave • J. T. Trowbridge
... bright one, Agni, with Ghrita through three autumns, they assumed worshipful names; the well-born shaped their own bodies. Acquiring for themselves the two great worlds, the worshipful ones brought forward their Rudra-like powers. The mortal, when beings were in discord, perceived and found out Agni standing in the highest place. Being like-minded they reverentially approached him on their knees. Together with their wives they venerated the venerable one. Abandoning their bodies they ...
— Sacred Books of the East • Various
... true that, if we can trust Hippolytus' account, Calixtus had by this time firmly set his face against the older idea, inasmuch as he not only defined the Church as essentially a mixed body (corpus permixtum), but also asserted the unlawfulness of deposing the bishop even in case of mortal sin.[239] But we do not find that definition in Cyprian, and, what is of more importance, he still required a definite degree of active Christianity as a sine qua non in the case of bishops; and assumed it as a self-evident necessity. He who does not give evidence of this forfeits his episcopal ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 2 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... when she goes to Princess Elizabeth's burial. I passed this whole morning most deliciously at my Lady Townshend's. Poor Roger, for whom she is not concerned, has given her a hint that her hero George may be mortal too; she scarce spoke, unless to improve on some bitter thing that Charles said, who was admirable. He made me all the speeches that Mr. Pitt will certainly make next winter, in every one of which Charles ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... agony; water spreads the poison of these weeds; I got it all over my hands, on my chest, in my eyes, and presently, while eating an orange, a la Rarotonga, burned my lip and eye with orange juice. Now all day, our three small pigs had been adrift, to the mortal peril of our corn, lettuce, onions, etc., and as I stood smarting on the back verandah, behold the three piglings issuing from the wood just opposite. Instantly I got together as many boys as I could—three, and got the pigs penned against the rampart of the sty, till the others joined; ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... furiously to attack them with a squadron of horse and did execution upon the hindmost; but being surrounded and thrown from his horse, or, as some say, his horse falling upon him, while he was fighting, he received a mortal thrust with a pike in his side. And if it be desirable, as it is believed, for a man to die in the height of his prosperity, it is certain that he met with a most happy death in dying after he had ...
— Ravenna, A Study • Edward Hutton
... deliberately neglected. Not a fairy stood at my cradle. All things have come to you unsought. Beauty. Birth. Position. Sufficient wealth. Power over men and women. An enchanting personality. All the social graces. You have had ups and downs merely because after all you are a mortal; and as a matter of contrast—to heighten your powers of appreciation. No doubt the worst is over for you. I have had to take life by the throat and wring out of her what little I have. That is what makes life so hopeless, ...
— The Sisters-In-Law • Gertrude Atherton
... strategy, are affairs of study, and within the grasp of human intelligence. Yet there is a side even of these, and that not the least important, which the gods reserve to themselves, the bearing of which is hidden from mortal vision. Thus, let a man sow a field or plant a farm never so well, yet he cannot foretell who will gather in the fruits: another may build him a house of fairest proportion, yet he knows not who will inhabit it. Neither can a general foresee whether it will profit him to conduct a campaign, ...
— The Memorabilia - Recollections of Socrates • Xenophon
... the monarch of heaven, clothed in the form of a mortal, Kneeling, caressed and caressing, drank from her ...
— A Mummer's Wife • George Moore
... and that is the majestic simplicity and grandeur of the figure itself. It is not unsafe to affirm that ninety-nine out of every hundred persons who have seen this would have become immediately and instantly impressed with the idea that they were in the presence of an object not made by mortal hand, and that the figure before them once lived and had its being like those who stood around it. This feeling arises from the awful naturalness of the figure and its position. No piece of sculpture ...
— The American Goliah • Anon.
... I knew not, and the gates I held were gates of peace; While in my hand the key declared—Let garner'd stores increase!" Here closed the god his lips; but I, not bashful, open'd mine, And with the mortal voice again unseal'd the voice divine. "Since many gates are thine in Rome, say why dost thou appear In perfect shape and size nowhere but at the forums here?"[20] Whereto the god, with gentle hand stroking his long beard hoary, Forthwith recounted in my ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... the Greeks the first mortal to practise healing. In one case he prescribed rust, probably the earliest use of iron as a drug, and he also used hellebore root as a purgative. He married a princess and was given part of a kingdom as a reward for his services. After his death he was awarded divine honours, and temples ...
— Outlines of Greek and Roman Medicine • James Sands Elliott
... get a railroad somewhere near our valley if you have luck later. I'm going to be your kind and loving partner in that deal, and I'll soak you the limit in everything I do for you. You watch me. I'm going to stay here, and I'm going to work all I want to. When I don't want to, there isn't any living mortal soul that's going to crack a whip over me and ...
— Heart's Desire • Emerson Hough
... never again to give up this mortal habitation to her you call its rightful owner. I will never again leave this world, which I enjoy, for the unknown darkness out ...
— The Golden Fleece • Julian Hawthorne
... scheme of creation far more vivid and magnificent than I had ever before attained. In a future world, I thought to myself, man will be able to comprehend the wondrous mysteries of the universe, and the mists will be cleared away which prevent him, while in his present mortal state, from beholding all those unspeakable glories which he will fully comprehend surely in a more spiritual state of existence. The soul of man is made to soar. Its wings become helpless and weak, and without God's grace it no longer has the ...
— My First Voyage to Southern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston
... to drop into reveries and dreams, and when they spoke out of these their words were: his grief is more like despair. And in speaking these words they were nearer the truth than they suspected, for though Jesus grieved and truly for Joseph, there was in his heart something more than mortal grief. ...
— The Brook Kerith - A Syrian story • George Moore
... phenomena may be (granting them to be truthful), I see much that philosophy may question, nothing that it is incumbent on philosophy to deny—viz., nothing supernatural. They are but ideas conveyed somehow or other (we have not yet discovered the means) from one mortal brain to another. Whether, in so doing, tables walk by their own accord, or fiend-like shapes appear in a magic circle, or bodyless hands rise and remove material objects, or a Thing of Darkness, such as presented itself to me, freeze our blood—still am I persuaded that these are ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Stories • Various
... seemed to say. "This world is the real hell, ending in the eternal naught. The dreams of a life beyond and of re-union there are but a demon's mocking breathed into the mortal heart, lest by its universal suicide mankind should rob him of his torture-pit. There is no truth in all your father taught you" (he was a clergyman and rather eminent in his profession), "there is no hope for man, there is ...
— The Mahatma and the Hare • H. Rider Haggard
... way or that, from the narrow path of dogma and discipline which had been marked with his own approval. Tillotson was 'an atheist,'[45] freethinkers were 'the first-born sons of Satan,' the Established Church was 'fallen into mortal schism,'[46] Ken, for thinking of reunion, was 'a half-hearted wheedler,'[47] Roman Catholics were 'as gross idolaters as Egyptian worshippers of leeks,'[48] Nonconformists were 'fanatics,' Quakers were 'blasphemers.'[49] From the peaceful researches, on which he built ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... said Longinus, 'in all that you can have expressed concerning the unsatisfactoriness of life, regarded as a finite existence, and concerning the want of harmony there is between man and the other works of God, if he is mortal; and in this also, that without the assurance of immortality, there can, to the thinking mind, be no true felicity. I only wonder that on the last point there should exist in the mind of any one ...
— Zenobia - or, The Fall of Palmyra • William Ware
... to have his smallnesses—yes, my dear, mark the word, his smallnesses—attended to. The husband is making similar discoveries with regard to the lovely angel whom he took to his arms. She, too, is mortal—affectionate, of course, and sweet and womanly, and ten thousand times better than a real angel would be to him, but still with her faults, her tempers, and her fads. The young couple discover these things in each other during the first two or three months of married life. All their ...
— A Young Mutineer • Mrs. L. T. Meade
... limbs had become half paralysed from cold and his crouching position. Trying to raise his gun he could take no aim as his arm was shaking with involuntary fear. Kaloo Singh explained to me afterwards how he succeeded in shaking off his mortal terror. "I quietly said to myself, Kaloo Singh, Kaloo Singh, who sent you here? Did not the villagers put their trust on you! I could then no longer lie in hiding, and I stood up and something strange ...
— Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose - His Life and Speeches • Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose
... Justice, wronged Nemesis, Thou of the awful eyes, Whose silent sentence judgeth mortal life,— Thou with the curb of steel, Which proudest jaws must feel, Stayest the snort ...
— The Squire of Sandal-Side - A Pastoral Romance • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... give an open mind to other matters; and Odo felt that he was nowhere so secure as in his cousin's company. He remembered, however, that the Duke had plenty of eyes to replace his own, and that a secret which was safe in his actual presence might be in mortal danger ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... had only known then that he was only a common mortal, and that his mission had nothing more overpowering about it than the collecting of seeds and uncommon yams and extraordinary cabbages and peculiar bullfrogs for that poor, useless, innocent, mildewed ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... it like that, Gib. I trailed you. Gib, for two mortal years I follered you, after you dropped us at Suva, an' I was just a thirstin' for your blood. If I'd met up with you any time them first two years I'd have shot you like a dog. I got a whisper you was in Aranuka ...
— Captain Scraggs - or, The Green-Pea Pirates • Peter B. Kyne
... standing up and contemplating the gruesome remnants of the skeleton. "Mortal queer it is. Can't make it out. How'd he come ter be fixed up thataway in the middle of the tree, dyin' thar all lonesome, like a poor critter caught in a trap? How'd it ...
— Kiddie the Scout • Robert Leighton
... good business, the door opened and in staggered Busted Blake. His staggering on this occasion was manifestly not due to drink. His face had the hideous concavities of a starved man and the uncertainty of his gait was the token of a mortal feebleness. His emaciation was painful to behold. His eyes glowed ...
— Tales From Bohemia • Robert Neilson Stephens
... Jaegerhaus. So the terrified, fascinated watchers saw, with horror, this mysterious second shadow on the closed blind, and it was said that by incantations the witch summoned this evil being, for her own servants must know had any person from the mortal world been ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay
... more distinctness and freshness. No obscurity disturbs us. But the passions of the poet break forth so often, as to give the whole narration something of the subjective character; while the Servian, even when representing his countrymen in combat with their mortal enemies and oppressors, displays about the same partiality for the former, as Homer for ...
— Historical View of the Languages and Literature of the Slavic - Nations • Therese Albertine Louise von Jacob Robinson
... now wrought themselves. They had been married about two years and a half. In their desperate struggle for a share of a rich man's estate they had made themselves the terror of the community. Armed at all times and ready for mortal combat with whoever opposed their claims, they seemed, up to the 17th of July, to have won their way in the State courts by intimidation. The decision of the United States Circuit Court was rendered before they were married. It proclaimed the pretended marriage ...
— Personal Reminiscences of Early Days in California with Other Sketches; To Which Is Added the Story of His Attempted Assassination by a Former Associate on the Supreme Bench of the State • Stephen Field; George C. Gorham
... not toward the bottom, but toward the top of possibility. We reject annihilation, because then there is nothing left. And there must always be something left—progress—a bigger something, a better something. Should annihilation be the truth of things, and all the race mortal, then some day there would be a Last Man. And after the Last Man, what? He would die, and then all that any of the other stars could view of the vast panorama of our earthly generations would be an unburied corpse, ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... a fall better not try to show off again, ma'am," said Mac, who would have been more than mortal if he had refrained from teasing when so good ...
— Eight Cousins • Louisa M. Alcott
... awakening the mind from the lethargy of its distress. The woe of separation, the terror of the journey, the vague apprehension of the future, meeting, burst upon you in the fullness of their stern reality. The bewildered mortal turns to gaze at the companions of his danger, casts a lingering look on those he has left behind; the groaning paddles, with reluctant plunges, begin their weary labor; the faces of the cheering crowd, one by one, drop ...
— Trifles for the Christmas Holidays • H. S. Armstrong |
