"Tradition" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... than a willingness to make sacrifices. If, I said, I prove myself less self-sacrificing than any one of the wretches I am fighting, I shall myself incur well-merited scorn. But if self-sacrifice were the criterion, then Jesus, according to the teachings of tradition, was the Ideal, for who ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... and the owner of the kindest heart in the world. But really to know William, you must know his rooms. William collects things. He has always collected things—and he's saved every one of them. There's a tradition that at the age of one year he crept into the house with four small round white stones. Anyhow, if he did, he's got them now. Rest assured of that—and he's forty this year. Miniatures, carved ivories, bugs, moths, porcelains, jades, stamps, postcards, spoons, ...
— Miss Billy • Eleanor H. Porter
... yesterday, may be more frequent, but are not more certain than those of the central population of Africa. The Caffres themselves state that they formerly came from the northward, and won their territory by conquest; and the Hottentots have the same tradition as regards themselves. ...
— The Mission • Frederick Marryat
... question it is unwise to depart from the old American tradition and to discriminate for or against any man who desires to come here and become a citizen, save on the ground of that man's fitness for citizenship. It is our right and duty to consider his moral and social quality. His standard of living ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... Harden-Hickey by birth and tradition, and Royalist as he always remained, it was the court at the Tuileries that filled his imagination. The Bourbons, whom he served, hoped some day for a court; at the Tuileries there was a court, glittering before his physical eyes. The Bourbons ...
— Real Soldiers of Fortune • Richard Harding Davis
... Herr Professor Luitpold Blumenduft tendered medical evidence to the effect that the instantaneous fracture of the cervical vertebrae and consequent scission of the spinal cord would, according to the best approved tradition of medical science, be calculated to inevitably produce in the human subject a violent ganglionic stimulus of the nerve centres of the genital apparatus, thereby causing the elastic pores of the corpora ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... long been thrown open. The guard, in his fine military uniform and shining top-boots, was strutting the length of the train. "But it was not on account of that that we asked Monsieur Deulin to warn you. It does not matter about my father and Martin. It is required of them—a sort of family tradition. It is their business in ...
— The Vultures • Henry Seton Merriman
... April made it evident that she was attempting to temporize without coming to a conclusion. Under such circumstances Italy was confronted by the danger of losing forever the opportunity of realizing her aspirations based upon tradition, nationality, and her desire for a safe position in the Adriatic, while other contingencies in the European conflict menaced her principal ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 3, June, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... Vestal was even more a matter of concern, of trepidation. She must be scourged that very night, and, as in respect to the rekindling of the fire, every detail of what must be done was prescribed by immemorial tradition, long since committed to writing, among the statutes ...
— The Unwilling Vestal • Edward Lucas White
... place himself on the judgment-seat with a touch of his old confidence, and to sentence poor authors with sufficient airs of infallibility. Sometimes, indeed, the reflection that he is representing not an invariable tradition but the last new aesthetic doctrine, seems even to give additional keenness to his opinions and to suggest no doubts of his infallibility. And yet there is a change in his position. He admits, or at any rate is logically ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen
... the writer in a creative act. The mystery of the transubstantiation of ideas, originates perhaps in the instinctive consciousness that we have of a vocation loftier than our present destiny. Or, is it based on the lost tradition of a former life? What must that life have been, if this slight residuum of memory offers us such volumes ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part II. • Honore de Balzac
... the kiln, as told by Mr. Mallory, is illustrative of Edison's tendency to upset tradition and make a radical departure from generally accepted ideas. "When Mr. Edison first decided to go into the cement business, it was on the basis of his crushing-rolls and air separation, and he had every ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... that St. Gregory reformed the Plainsong of his day, especially that of the Antiphonale Missarum, seems to have been held universally till 1675, when Pierre Gussanville brought out an edition of Gregory's works, in which he threw doubts on the tradition. He was followed in 1729 by George, Baron d' Eckhart, a friend of Leibnitz, who put forward the theory that it was Gregory II., and not Gregory I., who had done this work. In 1772, at Venice, a new edition of Gregory's works ...
— St. Gregory and the Gregorian Music • E. G. P. Wyatt
... finally and deliberately embraced it and shaped his life in conformity to it. The principle of rationalism, instead of growing, seemed for twelve whole years to go under, and to be completely mastered by the antagonistic principles of authority, tradition, ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 5: On Pattison's Memoirs • John Morley
... nature, she has held on her independent way, steadily faithful to the gift she possesses of evoking a character in a portrait or of making us feel how the common task, when representative of genuine human effort and touched with the poetry of national tradition, of religion, and of nature, becomes a subject of noble artistic treatment. She has kept unimpaired that merveilleux frisson de sensibilite which is one of the most precious gifts of the artistic temperament, ...
— Women in the fine arts, from the Seventh Century B.C. to the Twentieth Century A.D. • Clara Erskine Clement
... utterly impossible. All writers on primitive customs and ancient civilization agree that the Sabbath was a day of festivities, free from care and duties, a day of general rejoicing and merry-making. In every European country this tradition continues to bring some relief from the humdrum and stupidity of our Christian era. Everywhere concert halls, theaters, museums, and gardens are filled with men, women, and children, particularly workers with their families, full ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman
... impregnable, except when a hard winter made the Thames, the Cherwell, and the many deep and treacherous streams passable, as happened when Matilda was beleaguered in Oxford. This natural strength of the site is demonstrated by the vast mound within the castle walls, which tradition calls the Jews' Mound, but which is probably earlier than the Norman buildings. Some other race had chosen the castle site for its fortress in times of which we know nothing. Meanwhile, some of the practical citizens of Oxford wish to level the Jews' Mound, and to "utilise" ...
— Oxford • Andrew Lang
... a similar nature can be still composed and made to agree with each other, the causes of the most opposite errors being generally the same. Nor, again, do we allude merely to general systems, but also to many elements and axioms of sciences which have become inveterate by tradition, implicit credence, and neglect."(8) ...
— Manhood of Humanity. • Alfred Korzybski
... house of Montgomery, but Amzi liked the perpetuation of his father's house as a family center. It did not matter that greed and sentimentalism were back of his sisters' stubborn devotion to the Montgomery tradition; with him it was an honest sentiment; and as to their avarice, to which he was not insensible, it should be said that charity was not least among ...
— Otherwise Phyllis • Meredith Nicholson
... Family tradition had it that he was naturally a man of strong passions and violent temper, but since his college days, he had never, as far as living mortal could testify, lifted the impassive mask he wore, at the bidding of anger, surprise, or alarm. ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... folds of their robes, or in the girdle, and the lower orders had a larger knife, but these were always of some immediate practical utility, and were not worn for defence nor as ornaments. They denied having any knowledge of war either by experience or by tradition. ...
— Account of a Voyage of Discovery - to the West Coast of Corea, and the Great Loo-Choo Island • Captain Basil Hall
... home-keeping soldiers. Every one of them has served over-seas, and it was a pity that their names and the record of their services were not printed in the programme, for it is a fine and inspiriting list, and a striking disproof of the old tradition that musicians must needs be long-haired, sallow and unathletic. Alert and young and vigorous they appealed to the eye as well as to the ear, and they played, as they fought, gloriously, these minstrel boys who had all gone to the War. Strings and woodwind, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, February 18th, 1920 • Various
... been much discussion of late years concerning the far-famed Treaty of Penn with the Indians. A circumstance, which has all the interest both of fact and of poetry, was confirmed by such unbroken testimony of tradition that history seemed to have innumerable records of it in the hearts and memories of each generation. But as there appears no document or parchment of such criteria as to satisfy all inquiries, historical scepticism has ventured upon the absurd ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 12 • Editor-In-Chief Rossiter Johnson
... Cross, and it may be used to heighten our own confidence as to our own poor selves. A chamber in the great Temple waits for each of us, and the question is, Shall we occupy it, or shall we not? The old Rabbis had a tradition which, like a great many of their apparently foolish sayings, covers in picturesque guise a very deep truth. They said that, however many the throngs of worshippers who came up to Jerusalem at the passover, the streets of the city and the courts of the sanctuary ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... the same, but they have not had the good fortune to find a sufficient following and to convert the dogma into law. Nevertheless Moses had not inserted in his laws the doctrine of the immortality of souls: it was consistent with his ideas, it was taught by oral tradition; but it was not proclaimed for popular acceptance until Jesus Christ lifted the veil, and, without having force in his hand, taught with all the force of a lawgiver that immortal souls pass into another life, wherein they shall receive ...
— Theodicy - Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil • G. W. Leibniz
... must be so inextricably blended with her nature as to have become in practice a genuine motive in the mind's working. Madeline would speculate on the difference between one of her "culture" in the circumstances and the woman who is a slave of tradition; and a moment after she would say something so profoundly pathetic that it brought tears to her ...
— The Emancipated • George Gissing
... canopy; Along which bluet and anemone Spread dim a carpet; where the Twilight hath Her cool abode; and, sweet as aftermath, Wood-fragrance roams,—has so enchanted me, That yonder blossoming bramble seems to be A Sylvan resting, rosy from her bath: Has so enspelled me with tradition's dreams, That every foam-white stream that, twinkling, flows, And every bird that flutters wings of tan, Or warbles hidden, to my fancy seems A Naiad dancing to a Faun who blows Wild woodland music on the pipes ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 3 (of 4) • Various
... that a single ship of the Fleet should surrender under any circumstances, at any time; therefore I am faced with a dilemma in which tradition ...
— Tulan • Carroll Mather Capps
... to believe as he wished, and Puritan in England refused to conform to a manner of worship which retained much of the mediaeval liturgy and ceremonial. Just as all great revolutionary movements in church or state give rise to men who repudiate tradition and all accretions due to human experience, and base their political and religious ideals upon the law of nature, the rights of man, the inner light, or the Word of God; so, too, in England under Elizabeth and James ...
— The Fathers of New England - A Chronicle of the Puritan Commonwealths • Charles M. Andrews
... from seeing that final agreement among the critics which warrants us in discarding a single book. If any one has been fought about, and fought over, it is the Gospel of John. "It used to be said that this was not a history at all, but an idealizing of tradition in the interest of a speculative idea;[1] now theologians are mostly agreed that if John is the most speculative, he is, at the same time, the most personal of New Testament writers." No other book has been finally overthrown. ...
— The Things Which Remain - An Address To Young Ministers • Daniel A. Goodsell
... London and Raeburn in Edinburgh. The heavy debt which English landscape painting owes to Wilson, who lived neglected, has been acknowledged since his death. In that line Gainsborough was unsurpassed; he was wholly free from classical tradition and, as in his portrait work, interpreted nature as it presented itself to his own artistic sense. By 1800 Girtin had laid the foundation of genuine painting in water-colours, and Turner was entering on his earlier style, working under the influence of old masters. ...
— The Political History of England - Vol. X. • William Hunt
... of life by Ullswater consolidated her womanhood. She bent herself to books with eagerness. The shock of sorrow compelled her to muse on problems which as yet she had either not realised, or had solved in the light of tradition, childwise. Her mind was ripe for those modern processes of thought which hitherto had only ...
— Thyrza • George Gissing
... impartiality, but must expect little intelligence; for the incidents which give excellence to biography are of a volatile and evanescent kind, such as soon escape the memory, and are transmitted[107] by tradition. We know how few can pourtray a living acquaintance, except by his most prominent and observable particularities, and the grosser features of his mind; and it may be easily imagined how much of this little knowledge may be lost in imparting it, and how soon a succession ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... wealthy economy is a mixture of foreign and domestic entrepreneurship, government regulation and welfare measures, and village tradition. It is almost totally supported by exports of crude oil and natural gas, with revenues from the petroleum sector accounting for perhaps half of GDP. Per capita GDP is among the highest in the Third World, and substantial income from overseas investment ...
— The 1997 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... pilot, our argonaut seeks no improvement upon his aerial raft. Like the bow and arrow, it long ago reached perfection, and, though he may cherish some choice and secret recipe for varnish or be the inventor of an improved valve, he generally builds with a birdlike reliance on instinct and tradition. Gas-bag, netting, concentrating-ring, basket, valve, anchor, drag-rope and exploding cord,—what has the century of ballooning added to its essentials? how can coming centuries improve this perfection of simplicity? Aerial navigation is altogether another thing. A swallow does not rise by displacing ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 26, August, 1880 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... have a tradition that this southern crow comes and goes with the shad and herring — a saw which science ...
— Bird Neighbors • Neltje Blanchan
... and a vulgar being. And it may of course be alleged that the music in our hymn-books which is intolerable to the more sensitive minds was not put there for them, but would justify itself in its supposed fitness for the lower classes. 'What use,' the pastor would say to one who, on the ground of tradition advocated the employment of the old plain-song and the Ambrosian melodies, 'What use to seek to attract such people as those in my cure with the ancient outlandish and stiff melodies that pleased folk a thousand years ago, and ...
— A Practical Discourse on Some Principles of Hymn-Singing • Robert Bridges
... And among the exquisite miniatures of the little Maximilian Sforza's Libro del Gesu in the Trivulzian library, we find a picture of Lodovico and Beatrice's child sitting at dinner with his mother and a lady bearing the name of Cecilia, in whom tradition sees the duke's ...
— Beatrice d'Este, Duchess of Milan, 1475-1497 • Julia Mary Cartwright
... in congressional debate, was most uncommon. Some such there were in the great discussions of executive power following the removal of the deposits, which they who heard them will never forget, and some which rest in the tradition of hearers only. But there were other fields of oratory on which, under the influence of more uncommon springs of inspiration, he exemplified, in still other forms, an eloquence in which I do not know that he has had a superior among men. Addressing masses by tens of thousands ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... was the method by which she taught her daughters to gather themselves together, to capture and hold the attitude most favourable to communion with the spiritual world. She tells us— and here she accords with the great tradition of the Christian contemplatives, a tradition which was evolved under the pressure of long experience—that the process is a gradual one. The method to be employed is a slow, patient training of material which the licence of years has made intractable; not the sudden ...
— Practical Mysticism - A Little Book for Normal People • Evelyn Underhill
... tradition extant among the Indians of the Southwest, extending from Arizona to the Isthmus of Panama, to the effect that, Montezuma will one day return on the back of an eagle, wearing a golden crown, and rule the land once more; typifying the return of the Messiah ...
— When Dreams Come True • Ritter Brown
... extensive system of interior water-communications on the globe, affording a commercial highway twenty thousand miles in length through seventeen States not included in the original Union. Patriotic tradition increased Pennsylvania's attachment to the National Government. It was on her soil that the Declaration of Independence was proclaimed. It was in her Legislative halls that the Constitution was formed and the "more perfect Union" of the States ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... rooms; the observed of all observers, from the gentlemen of the road down to waiters, barmaids, and boots. The roadsters of his, as of these days, were no longer, however, of the same high-toned class as that of the "bagmen" in times gone by. Tradition tells now only of the splendid turns-out, the dinner-table luxury, the educated commercial polish, the "feast of reason and the flow of soul" enjoyment, of a race defunct; the degenerate crew of Cobden's association, with wages cut down to short common commissions, dined ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... by the English poet Thomas Edward Brown (1830-1897), deserves to be classed with the most beautiful and artistic verse in our language. Students will notice the allusion to the biblical tradition that God walked in the Garden of Eden in ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... Kantschatka, conferred by the Russians, was adopted from the native appellation of the great river flowing through the country. This river derived its name, according to tradition, from Kontschat, a warrior of former times, who had a stronghold on its banks. It is strange that the Kamtschatkans had no designation either for themselves or their country. They called themselves simply men, as considering themselves either the only inhabitants of the earth, or so far surpassing ...
— A New Voyage Round the World, in the years 1823, 24, 25, and 26, Vol. 2 • Otto von Kotzebue
... expected of one, like tipping waiters. He had neither the vocabulary nor the habit of mind that made an impersonal exposition of an emotional difficulty possible; but even had he possessed these powers he would have retained his tradition against using them. Perhaps, if she had been his sister or his wife, he might have admitted that he had had a hard day or that every one had moments of depression; but that was not the way to talk in a lady's drawing-room. In the silence ...
— The Happiest Time of Their Lives • Alice Duer Miller
... Cinghale all'Agra Dolce and wine of Orvieto. The Falcone was another accident of our tramps, though we afterwards found it starred in Baedeker. It looked the centuries old it was said to be, such a shabby, sombre crypt of a restaurant that I accepted without question the tradition it cherished of itself as a haunt of the Caesars, and was prepared to believe the waiters when they pointed out the mark of the Imperial head on the greasy walls, just as the waiters of the Cheshire Cheese in London ...
— Nights - Rome, Venice, in the Aesthetic Eighties; London, Paris, in the Fighting Nineties • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... originally fixed at Otaheite. This, however, only respects their own immediate creation; for they have notions of an universal one before this; and of lands, of which they have now no other knowledge than what is mentioned in the tradition. Their most remote account reaches to Tatooma and Tapuppa, male and female stones or rocks, who support the congeries of land and water, or our globe underneath. These produced Totorro, who was killed, and divided into land; and after him ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 16 • Robert Kerr
... territories of Hanover and Hessen,—towards Mittenwalde in the Wusterhausen neighborhood. The military gentlemen are vigilant as Argus, and, though pitying the poor Prince, must be rigorous as Rhadamanthus. His attempts at escape, of which tradition mentions more than one, they will not report to Papa, nor even notice to the Prince himself; but will take care to render futile, one and all: his Majesty may be ...
— History of Friedrich II of Prussia V 7 • Thomas Carlyle
... much moved by her recollections, heeded not my inquiry. All her mental energy was concentrated on the nature of that memorable glance. The general tradition of mankind teaches us that glances occupy a considerable place in the self-expression of women. Mrs Fyne was trying honestly to give me some idea, as much perhaps to satisfy her own uneasiness as my curiosity. She was frowning in the ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... The following tradition is still related amongst the surrounding peasantry:—The Baron Rudolf, it is said, was enticed to sign over the bodies and souls of his future offspring to the fiend, Heidelberger, on condition that the latter would enable him to gain the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 338, Saturday, November 1, 1828. • Various
... February 25, 1915, the Queen Elizabeth, Gaulois, Irresistible, and Agamemnon began to fire on the forts Sedd-el-Bahr, Orkanieh, Kum Kale, and Cape Hellas—the outer forts—at long range, and drew replies from the Turkish guns. It was out of all compliance with naval tradition for warships to stand and engage land fortifications, for lessons learned by naval authorities from the Spanish-American and Russo-Japanese wars had established precedents which prohibited it. But here the larger warships were carrying heavier guns ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume V (of 12) - Neuve Chapelle, Battle of Ypres, Przemysl, Mazurian Lakes • Francis J. Reynolds, Allen L. Churchill, and Francis Trevelyan
... insignificant. The test of the relative strength of the English and Roman methods came when England and France contended for the possession of North America. The people which preserved its self-government could send forth self-supporting colonies; the people which had lost the very tradition of self-government could not. Hence the dominion of the sea, with that of all the outlying parts of the earth, fell into the hands of men of English race; and hence the federative method of political union—the method which ...
— The Destiny of Man - Viewed in the Light of His Origin • John Fiske
... grown-up world, if there is one for him to enter; and, in the childhood of man, there is none which he can enter, for the adults themselves, though of larger growth, are children still in mind. Custom and tradition rule the adult community then as absolutely as they rule the child community. In course of time, the adult community may break the bonds of custom and tradition; but the community which consists of children treasures them and hands them on. Within the tribe, thenceforth, ...
— The Idea of God in Early Religions • F. B. Jevons
... place of business open for trade on that day. My people had not been sternly religious people, and, theoretically, I didn't think I was doing anything wicked; yet I felt, as I gave my order to the groceryman, as though I were violating every sacred tradition of birth and breeding. After that I tried to do all necessary marketing the day before, and if I needed anything on Sunday I ...
— The Long Day - The Story of a New York Working Girl As Told by Herself • Dorothy Richardson
... knows, either by tradition or by revelation or by the voice of conscience, that murder is one of the most fearful crimes a man can commit, as the Gospel tells us, and that the sin of murder cannot be limited to certain persons, that is, murder ...
— The Kingdom of God is within you • Leo Tolstoy
... with a hero's love for the brandy he smuggled so freely, and tradition declared of him that on one occasion he set light to some barns and hayricks in order to warn some of his smuggling companions who were "running a cargo" that a trap had been laid for them. The farmers who had suffered by the blaze had sought to carry Cranley before the justices, but he, with ...
— The Shrieking Pit • Arthur J. Rees
... own part, I cannot be mightily pleased with the Laws which have done this, which have provided better to feed than employ the Poor. We have a Tradition from our Forefathers, that after the first of those Laws was made, they were insulted with ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... Christian churches as the fear of eternal perdition. I don't deny that I am afraid of Satan, for if he contrives to smuggle so much sin and sorrow into this world what must his own kingdom be? If there be any truth in the tradition that every human being is afflicted by some besetting sin that crouches at the door of the soul, lying in ambush to destroy it, then my own 'Dweller of the Threshold,' is love of mine ease. Time was when I would have bartered my eternal heritage for a good-sized mess of earthly pottage, provided ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... interpret as anything short of the whole art of life, contemplative as well as active, the will, being, so to say, the main-spring of the soul, naturally plays the most important part. The prominence given, in moral tradition, to the struggle of the will with sexual desire is one of the melancholy evidences as to how seldom the complex vision of the soul has been allowed ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... the natives, who are shy, and endeavour to avoid any intercourse with navigators. Byron landed by force on one of these islands; in the struggle many of the inhabitants were killed, the rest put to flight, and the provision of cocoa-nuts found in their huts plundered. Tradition may perhaps have exaggerated this attack. Cook also permitted some of his crew to land, who indeed met with no resistance, but their presents were received with the greatest indifference, and stones were thrown after them on their departure. Captain Bellingshausen, in ...
— A New Voyage Round the World in the Years 1823, 24, 25, and 26. Vol. 1 • Otto von Kotzebue
... no cases of open rebellion against the authorities. As a matter of fact, even in Old-Constantine, the "mutiny" was of a nature little calculated to be dealt with by a court-martial. According to the local tradition, the Jewish residents, Hasidim almost to a man, were so profoundly stirred by the imperial ukase that they assembled in the synagogues, fasting and praying, and finally resolved to adopt "energetic" measures. A petition reciting their ...
— History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II • S.M. Dubnow
... the best of these choruses, however, is "The Legend of the Bended Bow," a fine war-chant by Mrs. Hemans. Tradition tells that in ancient Britain the people were summoned to war by messengers who carried a bended bow; the poem tells of the various patriots approached. The reaper is bidden to leave his standing corn, the huntsman to turn from the chase; the chieftain, the prince, mothers, sisters, ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... of children is regulated not by their brain formation and possible development, but by the wealth of their parents, the parsimony of municipalities, the baleful influences of tradition and the colossally stupid idea that thorough brain cultivation is in some way antagonistic to ...
— Editorials from the Hearst Newspapers • Arthur Brisbane
... for better security, I did this time under my hat. I am not saying it did the hat any good, but it seemed safer and less deafening, and I accordingly went on in this manner until there were only about three whiteys left between me and Vesuvius, which I kept back, in accordance with tradition, for one big ...
— Love, The Fiddler • Lloyd Osbourne
... I came to lead the orchestra of the Philharmonic Society in London, 1855. Mendelssohn had conducted the concerts during several seasons, and the tradition of his readings was carefully preserved. It appears likely that the habits and peculiarities of the Philharmonic Society suggested to Mendelssohn his favourite style of performance (Vortragsweise)— certainly it was admirably adapted ...
— On Conducting (Ueber das Dirigiren): - A Treatise on Style in the Execution of Classical Music • Richard Wagner (translated by Edward Dannreuther)
... rallied. Every Egyptian soldier received from the chief to whom he was attached, a holding of land for the maintenance of himself and his family. In the fifth century B.C. twelve arurae of arable land was estimated as ample pay for each man,* and tradition attributes to the fabulous Sesostris the law which fixed the pay at this rate. The soldiers were not taxed, and were exempt from forced labour during the time that they were away from home on active service; with this exception they were liable to ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 2 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... pleading music of his voice, drawing the young scholars after him, who are now our chief glory and pride; how his Phi Beta Kappa oration in 1824 and its apostrophe to Lafayette, who was present, is still the fond tradition of those who heard it; and how as he passed on from triumph to triumph in his art of oratory, the elegance, the skill, the floridity, the elaboration, the unfailing fitness and severe propriety of his art, with all its minor gifts, consoled Boston that it was not ...
— From the Easy Chair, vol. 1 • George William Curtis
... you want to do is to dig for Captain Kidd's buried treasure. You have all heard that old Captain Kidd buried a lot of treasure somewhere, but I doubt if you were aware that he buried it in Crosstrees Camp. However, there is a tradition to that effect and so I would like you to do your best to find it. Tradition says that the treasure was buried somewhere near the spot where we are now. It is hidden, I believe, not farther than fifty feet away in any direction from ...
— Two Little Women • Carolyn Wells
... together with the Medes and a few other tribes and peoples of less celebrity, a special branch of the Indo-European family—a branch to which the name of Arian may be assigned, not merely for convenience sake, but on grounds of actual tradition and history. Undistinguished in the earlier annals of their race, the Medes and Persians became towards the eighth or seventh century before our era, its leading and most important tribes. Closely united together, with the superiority now inclining to ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 5. (of 7): Persia • George Rawlinson
... was a tradition that I was a severe, austere musician. The public was led to believe that I played nothing but fugues. So current was this belief that a young woman about to be married begged me to play ...
— Musical Memories • Camille Saint-Saens
... Mabel. Interdicted by her master from speaking to him on the subject of the heaths, glades, and dales of her beloved Northumberland, she poured herself forth to my infant ear in descriptions of the scenes of her youth, and long narratives of the events which tradition declared to have passed amongst them. To these I inclined my ear much more seriously than to graver, but less animated instructors. Even yet, methinks I see old Mabel, her head slightly agitated by the palsy of age, ...
— Rob Roy, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... "Reverently adhering to the churchly tradition and permeating it with the new understanding of the Gospel, such are the characteristics of Luther's Catechisms, especially the Small Catechism." "On every page new and original features appear beside the traditional elements." "The essential doctrinal content of the booklet is ...
— Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church • Friedrich Bente
... to what is called "Hudson's Cave," or "Hudson's Falls," the tradition being that a man by the name of Henry Hudson, many years ago, chasing a deer, the deer fell over the place, which then first became known to white men. It is not properly a cave, but a fissure in a huge ledge of marble, through which a stream has been for ages forcing its way, ...
— Passages From The American Notebooks, Volume 1 • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Cumming, failing in argument, resorts to accusation, and so tender in conscience that, at the mention of his sin, he turns pale and leaves the spot. If there be any human mind in existence capable of holding Dr. Cumming's "Creed of the Infidel," of at the same time believing in tradition and "believing in all unbelief," it must be the mind of the infidel just described, for whose existence we have Dr. Cumming's ex officio word as a theologian; and to theologians we may apply what Sancho Panza says of the bachelors of Salamanca, that they never tell lies—except when ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... advanced by friend or foe against his public life, was an excess of generosity towards his vanquished enemies!' His sense of the comic is amusingly evidenced by the story of his ruse during a dearth in the same siege. Tradition reports, that only one animal, a hog, was left alive in the town, and that more than half starved. In the afternoon, Blake, feeling that in their depression a laugh would do the defenders as much good as a dinner, had the hog carried to all the posts and whipped, ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 439 - Volume 17, New Series, May 29, 1852 • Various
... having his reward in the story which he called godpapa and the acorn. It was his favourite of all Betty's tales, and it was the sort she liked best to tell, with a little bit of fact and a great deal of imagining. Certainly there was not very much fact to begin upon, only an old tradition of one of William the Conqueror's barons, who had long ago owned land at Oakfield and had planted the tree which gave the place its name. What chiefly interested Godfrey was that the baron of the oak had borne the same Christian name as himself, though ...
— Two Maiden Aunts • Mary H. Debenham
... Western Christianity, substituting a number of theological authorities instead of one—several gods, we may say, instead of one God—produced a weakening of ecclesiastical authority in general. The religious tradition was broken. In the second place, in the Protestant States, the supreme ecclesiastical power was vested in the sovran; the sovran had other interests besides ...
— A History of Freedom of Thought • John Bagnell Bury
... considerably; our progress up the stream was distressingly slow, and it was not until the 2nd of February, 1860, that we reached Tette. Mr. Thornton returned on the same day from a geological tour, by which some Portuguese expected that a fabulous silver-mine would be rediscovered. The tradition in the country is, that the Jesuits formerly knew and worked a precious lode at Chicova. Mr. Thornton had gone beyond Zumbo, in company with a trader of colour; he soon after this left the Zambesi and, joining the expedition of the Baron van der Decken, explored ...
— A Popular Account of Dr. Livingstone's Expedition to the Zambesi and Its Tributaries • David Livingstone
... of the social tradition is from the parents to the children. Children are born into society and take over its customs, habits, and standards of life simply, naturally, and without conflict. But it will at once occur to any one that the life of society is not always continued and maintained in this natural way, by the ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 4, 1919 • Various
... Intelligencer, January 19, 1822.] Lowndes was a wealthy South Carolina planter, judicious and dispassionate, with a reputation for fair-mindedness and wisdom that gained him the respect of his foes as well as his friends. According to tradition, Clay once declared that among the many men he had known he found it difficult to decide who was the greatest, but added, "I think the wisest man I ever knew was William Lowndes."[Footnote: Ravenel, William Lowndes, 238.] His death, in less than ...
— Rise of the New West, 1819-1829 - Volume 14 in the series American Nation: A History • Frederick Jackson Turner
... more wonderful," I said, pointing to a beautiful group, —Maya with the infant Buddha issuing from her side, according to tradition. Painlessly the Bodhisattva was born from her right side. It was the eighth ...
— Kokoro - Japanese Inner Life Hints • Lafcadio Hearn
... of "facts," and the deification of synthesis. Lastly, came the reckless way in which Locke "freed philosophy from the incubus of innate ideas." Like Luther and the leaders of the great French Revolution, he broke with the Past; and he threw overboard the whole cargo of human tradition. The result has been an immense movement of the mind which we love to call Progress, when it has often been retrograde; together with a mighty development of egotism resulting from the pampered sentiment ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton
... magnificence of the Assyrians, and the advanced condition of the arts among them which such words imply, were matters familiar to the Greeks and Romans, who, however, had little ocular evidence of the fact, but accepted it upon the strength of a very clear and uniform tradition. More fortunate than the nations of classical antiquity, whose comparative proximity to the time proved no advantage to them, we possess in the exhumed remains of this interesting people a mass of evidence upon the point, which, although in many respects ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 2. (of 7): Assyria • George Rawlinson
... not be very gratifying. He didn't see this at all until Mrs. Upton, folding her letter, came into the slightly awkward silence that followed Imogen's speech, with the decisiveness that had subtly animated her manner since Imogen's entrance. She remarked that the past, in that sense of hereditary tradition handed on by hereditary power, didn't exist at all in America; it was just that fact that made America so different and so interesting; its aristocrats so often had the shallowest of backgrounds. And in her gliding ...
— A Fountain Sealed • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... deprived the laity of the Bible, substitutes in its stead apostolic and ecclesiastical traditions; and obliges her disciples to admit for truth whatever she teaches them: but what do the holy scriptures say? "Why do ye transgress the commandment of God by your tradition?" Matt. xv. 3, 9, &c. They also command us "to call no man master (in spiritual concerns;) to try the spirit, and beware ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... my honoured parents, respected be their remains, and immortalized their virtues! may time, while it moulders their frail relicks to dust, commit to tradition the record of their goodness; and Oh, may their orphan-descendant be influenced through life by the remembrance of their purity, and be solaced in death, that by her it ...
— Cecilia Volume 1 • Frances Burney
... continental eyes seemed a strange laxity of discipline, priests, bishops, members of capitular bodies, were often married. The English diocesan arrangements were unlike continental models. In Gaul, by a tradition of Roman date, the bishop was bishop of the city. His diocese was marked by the extent of the civil jurisdiction of the city. His home, his head church, his bishopstool in the head church, were all in the city. In Teutonic England the bishop was commonly bishop, not of a city but of ...
— William the Conqueror • E. A. Freeman
... divergent, had probably not been as strange as he imagined it to be. He looked back upon it with too intense an interest to be its impartial judge. Certainly its distinctive feature had escaped him altogether. At the age of twenty-nine he was a man absolutely without tradition. ...
— The Summons • A.E.W. Mason
... was made for it, from time to time, but without success; and when that generation had passed away the tradition came to be regarded ...
— Tom, The Bootblack - or, The Road to Success • Horatio Alger
... would have followed their vicious courses. Your servant, however, trusts that he may be instructed to associate with the virtuous, and take to the habits of the prudent; for he is still a child, and the lawless and refractory principles of that gang cannot have yet tainted his mind; and it is in tradition that—Whatever child is born, and he is verily born after the right way of orthodoxy, namely Islamism, afterwards his father and his mother bring him up as a Jew, Christian, or Guebre.—The wife of Lot associated with the wicked, and her posterity failed in the ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 2, Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous
... so steep for taking up goods, and its stones so hard to our bare feet—and the cliffs of San Juan! All this, too, is no more! The entire hide-business is of the past, and to the present inhabitants of California a dim tradition. The gold discoveries drew off all men from the gathering or cure of hides, the inflowing population made an end of the great droves of cattle; and now not a vessel pursues the—I was about to say dear—the dreary once hated business of gathering hides upon the coast, and the beach of San Diego ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... impossible. How is one to argue with a man who is firmly persuaded that medicine is the finest of sciences, that doctors are the best of men, and that the traditions of the medical profession are superior to those of any other? Of the evil past of medicine only one tradition has been preserved—the white tie still worn by doctors; for a learned—in fact, for any educated man the only traditions that can exist are those of the University as a whole, with no distinction between medicine, law, etc. But it would be hard for Pyotr Ignatyevitch to accept ...
— The Wife and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... told us by three of the four Evangelists, and the comparison of their brief narratives is very interesting and instructive. We all know, I suppose, that the common tradition is that Mark was, in some sense, Peter's mouthpiece in this Gospel. The truthfulness of that ancient statement is borne out by little morsels of evidence that crop up here and there throughout the Gospel. There is one of them in this context. The other two Evangelists tell ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... heart; he had gone alone, believing in the honour of his foes, ready to submit to expulsion, to imprisonment, and it was the latter that he expected; but he never dreamed that, going alone amongst his foes, they would use brutal and cowardly violence, and shame every Parliamentary tradition by personal outrage on a duly-elected member, outrage more worthy of a slum pot-house than of the great Commons House, the House of Hampden and of Vane, the House that had guarded its own from Royal violence, and had maintained its privileges in ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant
... book, Pantschatantra (Leipzig, 1859), had suggested another explanation of the similarities of European folk-tales. For many of the incidents and several of the complete tales Benfey showed Indian parallels, and suggested that the stories had originated in India and had been transferred by oral tradition to the different countries of Europe. This entirely undermined the mythological theories of the Grimms and Max Mueller and considerably reduced the importance of folk tales as throwing light upon the primitive psychology of the Aryan peoples. Benfey's researches ...
— Europa's Fairy Book • Joseph Jacobs
... The first question is how much remains of the old ideal of individual liberty. The second question is how far the modern mind is committed to such egalitarian ideas as may be implied in Socialism. The third is whether there is any power of resistance in the tradition of the populace itself. These three questions for the future I shall consider in their order in the final chapters that follow. It is enough to say here that I think the progress of these ideals has broken down at the precise point where they will fail to prevent the ...
— Eugenics and Other Evils • G. K. Chesterton
... perhaps thousands of years. It might have been done by the ancient peoples of Mexico or those who built the great temples of Central America and Yucatan—those places so old that there is no tradition of the time when they were made. One thing is evident, that we have come upon a silver region that was known ...
— The Silver Canyon - A Tale of the Western Plains • George Manville Fenn
... regretted the loss of the crucifix that he promised to pardon Giotto if he would paint him another as good. Giotto exacted the promise in writing, and then, with a wet sponge, removed the wash he had used, and the picture was as good as before. According to tradition all famous crucifixes were drawn from this picture ...
— A History of Art for Beginners and Students: Painting, Sculpture, Architecture - Painting • Clara Erskine Clement
... the date of the building is given in the description of the fabric. Of external evidence in the shape of records or deeds we have very little. Tradition says that there was once a brass tablet in the church bearing the ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Churches of Coventry - A Short History of the City and Its Medieval Remains • Frederic W. Woodhouse
... solid darn,' said Felix. 'We tried one evening, and found that though the pattern of rose-leaves is a tradition, no one younger than Clem could remember having seen either ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Mount Washington, into a lover and deliverer, whose 'allegiance and fast fealty' had bound him to my trail. But, alas! there is no leisure in this material age for fancy-weaving; and all our way was as bare of tradition or fable as if no human footstep had impressed it, till we came to a brawling stream near Davis's, crossing the way, which we were told was called 'Nancy's Brook.' We heard various renderings of the origin of the ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2 No 4, October, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... of learning. It must not be inferred, however, that the Arabian scholars, as a class, were comparable to their predecessors in creative genius. On the contrary, they retained much of the conservative oriental spirit. They were under the spell of tradition, and, in the main, what they accepted from the Greeks they regarded as almost final in its teaching. There were, however, a few notable exceptions among their men of science, and to these must be ascribed ...
— A History of Science, Volume 2(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... on this tradition, Don Jose Carvajal has written a very interesting play entitled Ligaya. It was produced at the National ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... whose rule extended over the whole of Mesopotamia from the mouths of the rivers Tigris and Euphrates to the Mediterranean coast, we must regard it with interest. But when we reflect that the ancient Hebrew tradition ascribed the migration of Abraham from Ur of the Chaldees to this very period, and clearly means to represent their tribe father as triumphing over this very same Hammurabi (Amraphel, Gen. xiv. 1), we can hardly ...
— The Oldest Code of Laws in the World - The code of laws promulgated by Hammurabi, King of Babylon - B.C. 2285-2242 • Hammurabi, King of Babylon
... Sunday the Russians carry branches, or used to do so. These branches were adorned with little painted pictures of cherubs with the ruddy complexions of tradition. Hence ...
— Eugene Oneguine [Onegin] - A Romance of Russian Life in Verse • Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin
... the river, and entered a small arm of it, which presently became still narrower and more straight, assuming the appearance of an artificial cut or canal, which indeed it is, having been dug by General Oglethorpe's men (tradition says, in one night), and afforded him the only means of escape from the Spaniards and Indians, who had surrounded him on all sides, and felt secure against all possibility of his eluding them. The cut is neither ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... on the road again and then took a job as chief-engineer of a big stamp-mill in Arizona, and going there he was lost to myself and the men on the road, and finally the Black Prince robbery passed into history, and nothing remained but the tradition, a sort of a myth of the mountains, like Captain Kidd's treasures, the amount only being increased by time. I believe that the last time I heard the story, it was calmly stated that ...
— Danger Signals • John A. Hill and Jasper Ewing Brady
... Capital, which under various appellations is one of the most profoundly significant forces of the present age. The freedom of the nation was the form into which the older ideal of the freedom of man had dwindled. Saint-Simonianism preserved for a time the old tradition. But the devotees of Saint-Simon's greatest work, Le Nouveau Christianisme, after anticipating in their banquets, graced sometimes by the presence of Malibran, the glories of the coming era, quarrelled amongst themselves, ...
— The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain - Nineteenth Century Europe • J. A. Cramb
... frequent repetition on his part, and the indescribable delight they gave me on mine, that I have hardly ever since heard, during a tolerably enlarged intercourse with Irish society, both educated and uneducated, with the antiquary, the scholar, or the humble senachie—any single tradition, usage, or legend, that, as far as I can at present recollect, was perfectly new to me or unheard before, in some similar or cognate dress. This is certainly saying much; but I believe I may assert ...
— The Ned M'Keown Stories - Traits And Stories Of The Irish Peasantry, The Works of - William Carleton, Volume Three • William Carleton
... old man. The aged sceptic is not a little conceited, as the following exordium to one of his speeches evinces: "It is very strange that I never meet with any one who is equal in sense to myself." The same old man, in one of his communicative moods, related to us the following tradition. The earth had been formed, but continued enveloped in total darkness, when a bear and a squirrel met on the shores of a lake; a dispute arose as to their respective powers, which they agreed to settle by running in opposite directions round the lake, and whichever arrived ...
— Narrative of a Journey to the Shores of the Polar Sea, in the years 1819-20-21-22, Volume 2 • John Franklin
... that they live in profound and enviable ignorance of all the troubles, anxieties, and revolutions of this distracted planet. I am even told that many among them do verily believe that Holland, of which they have heard so much from tradition, is situated somewhere on Long Island; that Spiking-devil and the Narrows are the two ends of the world; that the country is still under the dominion of their High Mightinesses, and that the city of New York still goes by the name of Nieuw Amsterdam. They meet every Saturday afternoon at the ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... choir is in itself the true charm of St. Mammes. It has a fine ambulatory, and a range of eight monolithic columns, removed, says tradition, from an ancient Pagan temple. Their capitals are ornamented with carven foliage, ...
— The Cathedrals of Northern France • Francis Miltoun
... felt grateful toward Smith, whose charitable purpose doubtless was to prevent her being taken in. But she was sorry for the fine tradition and hated to give ...
— Claim Number One • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... of single combat went back into the very mists of time in the Highlands; and merely the form varied. There was Cam-Ruadh, the early red-haired man of tradition, who, fallen prisoner among a batch of hostile "kern," or outlaws, was offered his liberty if he could make so many good arrow-shots. He drew and drew, with much seeming innocence, on the arrows of his captors, and wove a circle of stabs in the ground about ...
— The Black Colonel • James Milne
... in the Poetics which, unless I am mistaken, arises from the fact that Aristotle was writing at a time when the great age of Greek tragedy was long past, and was using language formed in previous generations. The words and phrases remained in the tradition, but the forms of art and activity which they denoted had sometimes changed in the interval. If we date the Poetics about the year 330 B.C., as seems probable, that is more than two hundred years after the ...
— The Poetics • Aristotle
... the plague,' he says. The university of Louvain, established in 1425 to wean the Netherlands in spiritual matters from Paris, was, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, one of the strongholds of theological tradition, which, however, did not prevent the progress of classical studies. How else should Adrian of Utrecht, later pope but at that time Dean of Saint Peter's and professor of theology, have forthwith undertaken to get him a professorship? ...
— Erasmus and the Age of Reformation • Johan Huizinga
... mediaeval Egypt; to the west is Fostat, the original "city of the tent," from which Cairo sprang, while over the rubbish heaps of old Babylon, the Roman aqueduct stretches towards Rhoda, that beautiful garden island on whose banks tradition has it that the infant Moses was found, while still further across the river, sail-dotted and gleaming in the sun, the great Pyramids mark the limit of the Nile Valley and the commencement of that enormous desert which stretches to the Atlantic Ocean. Looking south, ...
— Peeps at Many Lands: Egypt • R. Talbot Kelly
... by Bedwin and Arameans, who were proud of their freedom and independence, like the Bedwin of modern Egypt. In spite, therefore, of the fact that so much of the labor of the country was performed by slaves, agriculture was in high esteem and the free agriculturist was held in honor. Tradition told how Sargon of Akkad, the hero of ancient Babylonia, had been brought up by Akki the irrigator, and had himself been a gardener, while the god Tammuz, the bridegroom of Istar, had tended sheep. Indeed, one of the oldest titles of the Babylonian ...
— Babylonians and Assyrians, Life and Customs • Rev. A. H. Sayce
... Presidential election preserved some trace of the old Party System of America; but its tradition has very nearly faded like that of the Party System of England. It is easy for an Englishman to confess that he never quite understood the American Party System. It would perhaps be more courageous in him, and more informing, to confess that ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... sacrificed the land to the building; to-morrow he would sacrifice the building to the land. Martin Cosgrave knew, the stars seemed to know, that a message, a voice, a command, would come like a wave through the generations of his blood sweeping him back to a common tradition. The cry for service on the land was beginning to stir somewhere. It would come to him in a word, a word sanctified upon the land by the memory of a thousand sacrifices and a thousand struggles, the only word that held magic for his race, the one word—Redemption! He looked up ...
— Waysiders • Seumas O'Kelly
... Sassenach," a man of low blood, of low cunning, caring only for the things of the body, with no veneration for the things of the spirit—with, in fine, no music in his soul. The things that the Irishman loved he could not conceive of. Without tradition or history himself he could not comprehend the passionate attachment of the Irishman to both, and he proceeded to wipe both out, so far as in him lay, from off the map of Ireland and ...
— The Crime Against Europe - A Possible Outcome of the War of 1914 • Roger Casement
... left at any price. Most of the nice ones got married during the war—the servants you loved and regarded as part of the family—and nine-tenths of those that are left have no sense of even giving good work in return for their wages—let alone civility! The tradition of ...
— The Moon out of Reach • Margaret Pedler
... the mines known as the DeBeers group. His great rival was Barney Barnato, who gave African finance the same erratic and picturesque tradition that the Pittsburgh millionaires brought to American finance. His real name was Barnett Isaacs. After kicking about the streets of the East End of London he became a music hall performer under the name by which he is known to business history. The ...
— An African Adventure • Isaac F. Marcosson
... a tradition invented by the old fablers that giants brought the stones of Stonehenge from the most sequestered deserts of Africa, and placed them in Ireland; that every stone was washed with juices of herbs, and contained a medical power; and that Merlin, the magician, at the request of King Arthur, ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... She has grace, too, and a figure, I should say, about perfect. But it is her mental make-up that staggers me. She talks in one way and thinks in another. She clings to her g's, too, in spite of local tradition. She hasn't a passing acquaintance with 'ain't,' or the more criminal 'hain't.' Her English is good, she reads like a starved soul, for the pure pleasure of it; and she thinks like a child of ten. By Jove! she was here in my library, ...
— Janet of the Dunes • Harriet T. Comstock
... Ireland opposed to her invaders have been unequal to the founding of a great state, but have preserved a great tradition. The weakness of Ireland lay in the absence of a central organization, a state machine that could mobilize the national resources to defend the national life. That life had to depend for its existence, under the stress of prolonged invasion, on the spontaneous patriotism and courage ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... at the tops of the trees in an adjacent yard, it struck her how much she had been seeing him. For a moment it made her uncomfortable. What was it leading to? Such suppositions must almost invariably come to a single woman. Ages of tradition have left their imprint upon the sex to the effect that single life is not an end in itself, and that somehow it needs must change. Of course, many a spinster has gone to a satisfied grave in complete contentment over a life of spinsterhood. But there is nothing to prevent the question from arising, ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... to those who fret O'er vanished Faith and feelings fled, That not in English homes is yet Tradition dumb, or Reverence dead. ...
— A Cotswold Village • J. Arthur Gibbs
... of experiences, love, self-forgetfulness, aspiration, and out of these distils the subtle essence of wisdom, so that he who struggles in pain for his fellows, when he wakens again on earth is endowed with the tradition of that which we call self-sacrifice, but which is in reality the proclamation of our own universal nature. There are yet vaster correspondences, for so also we are told, when the seven worlds are withdrawn, the great calm Shepherd of the Ages draws his misty hordes ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... of the measure, however, increased mightily, and there is a tradition that in the winter of 1634-1635 some persons from Watertown went to Connecticut and managed to survive the winter in a few huts erected at Pyquag, afterwards Wethersfield.[46] The next spring the Watertown and Dorchester people imitated the Newtown congregation ...
— England in America, 1580-1652 • Lyon Gardiner Tyler
... shortly after Sommers had left. The come and go of the place, the air of excitement about the hospital, stirred Sommers as nothing in months had done. Then the attention paid him by the internes and the older nurses, who had kept alive in their busy little world the tradition of his brilliant work, aroused all the vanity in his nature. When he was about to tear himself away from the pleasant antiseptic odor and orderly bustle, the house physician pressed him to stay to luncheon. He yielded, longing to hear the talk about cases, and remembering with pleasure the ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... his tragic death. It is the almost unbroken testimony of his contemporaries that by virtue of certain high traits of character, in certain momentous lines of purpose and achievement, he was incomparably the greatest man of his time. The deliberate judgment of those who knew him has hardened into tradition; for although but twenty-five years have passed since he fell by the bullet of the assassin, the tradition is already complete. The voice of hostile faction is silent, or unheeded; even criticism is gentle and timid. If history had said its last word, if no more were to be known of him than ...
— Abraham Lincoln: A History V1 • John G. Nicolay and John Hay
... with a man's straw hat on her head, and a faded cotton gown clinging to her shrunken form, is called Madama Chaleco, from a popular tradition that the old lady formerly donned a man's waistcoat or chaleco. From this cause she has become the butt of every street boy, who irritates the poor mulatto woman into frenzy by shouting her nickname in a derisive tone. The Madama has resided only a few years in Cuba; her birthplace ...
— The Pearl of the Antilles, or An Artist in Cuba • Walter Goodman
... correspondent writes that it may seem inexplicable why the Mahdi's troops attacked Gezireh, which, as its name signifies, is an isle near Berber, but there is an old tradition that the future ruler of the Soudan will be from that isle. Zebehr Rahama knew this, but he fell on leaving his boat at this isle, and so, though the Soudan people looked on him as a likely saviour, this omen shook their confidence in him. He ...
— The Life of Gordon, Volume II • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... soldiers in charge of the wagons cut loose some of the uninjured animals, and galloped after their retreating comrades. The precise loss of the British is not known. It is believed, however, from reliable tradition, that they had at least twenty killed ...
— Sketches of Western North Carolina, Historical and Biographical • C. L. Hunter
... and crazy delusion, let me be always deluded. If forty millions of chubby little angels bow their dimpled knees every evening to a false and foolish tradition, let me do so, too. If I die, then I will be in good company, even if I go no farther than the clouds of ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye
... the diversity of individual views, each man's opinion differing from his fellow's, while truth must be one. There exists no certain, no universally admitted knowledge. The human reason is feeble and blind in all things, knowledge is deceptive, especially the philosophy of the day, which clings to tradition, which fills the memory with learned note-stuff, but leaves the understanding void and, instead of things, interprets interpretations only. Both sensuous and rational knowledge are untrustworthy: the former, ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... one," tells us that she was beautiful, and her amiability and charm of manner are expressly praised by Herodotus. How richly she was endowed with gifts and graces may be gathered too from the manner in which tradition and fairy lore have endeavored to render her name immortal. By many she is said to have built the most beautiful of the Pyramids, the Pyramid of Mycerinus or Menkera. One tale related of her and reported by Strabo and AElian probably gave ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... tells us who they are and what they have done. It shows also the value and the necessity of documentary evidence for establishing the truth of history. How different from the vague, uncertain, shadowy representations derived from oral tradition, or mere reports, though contemporary, circulated from mouth to mouth, and exaggerated according to the interests of one party or the other. Let us for illustration compare Mr. Froude's vivid picture of this battle, ...
— The Land-War In Ireland (1870) - A History For The Times • James Godkin
... about to venture into questionable territory had made Dalgard evasive when he reported his plans to the Elders three days earlier. But since such trips were, by tradition, always thrusts into the unknown, they had not questioned him too much. All in all, Dalgard thought, watching Sssuri flake the firm pink flesh from the fish, he might deem himself lucky and this quest ordained. He went off to ...
— Star Born • Andre Norton
... melted from the field as snow, Tweed's echoes heard the ceaseless splash While many a broken band, Disorder'd, through her currents dash, To gain the Scottish land; To town and tower, to down and dale, To tell red Flodden's dismal tale, And raise the universal wail. Tradition, legend, tune, and song, Shall many an age that wail prolong: Still from the sire the son shall hear Of the stern strife, and carnage drear. Of Flodden's fatal field, Where shiver'd was fair Scotland's spear, And broken ...
— The Prose Marmion - A Tale of the Scottish Border • Sara D. Jenkins
... 1857, and his departure for Italy in 1864. As director of the newly founded "Norwegian Theatre," Ibsen was a prominent member of the little knot of brilliant young writers who led the nationalist revolt against Danish literary tradition, then still dominant in well-to-do, and especially in official Christiania. Well-to-do and official Christiania met the revolt with contempt. Under such conditions, the specific literary battle of the Norwegian with the Dane easily developed into the eternal warfare ...
— Love's Comedy • Henrik Ibsen
... when a child is born, on the warpath, in council, and so on in all cases which can arise. The ways are defined on the negative side, that is, by taboos. The "right" way is the way which the ancestors used and which has been handed down. The tradition is its own warrant. It is not held subject to verification by experience. The notion of right is in the folkways. It is not outside of them, of independent origin, and brought to them to test them. In the folkways, whatever is, is right. This ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... Cristo, "I allow of no excuse. On Saturday, at six o'clock. I shall be expecting you, and if you fail to come, I shall think—for how do I know to the contrary?—that this house, which his remained uninhabited for twenty years, must have some gloomy tradition or ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... be attracted toward the most horrible phases of human life, and the most terrible events of history and tradition. The passions he describes are those of unnatural love, of jealousy between father and son, of fratricidal hatred, or those in which a sense of duty and love for liberty triumphs over the ties of ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... Lancaster Castle. It was in this dismemberment that the hand became separated, and it was secretly carried away by some sorrowing member of his communion, and its supposed curative power was afterwards discovered and made known.[3] Mr Roby cites no authority for this contradiction of the original tradition. The judge who presided at the trial was Sir Henry Yelverton of the Common Pleas, who died on the 24th ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... of this Anti-Suicide Crusade. Thus, it is at work in almost all our big cities, and also in America, in Australia, and in Japan. The Japanese Bureau was opened last year with very good results. This is the more remarkable in a country where ancient tradition and immemorial custom hallow the system of hara-kiri in any ...
— Regeneration • H. Rider Haggard
... Japonia or China, tragical examples of devils, possessions, obsessions, false miracles, counterfeit visions, &c. They do so insult over and restrain them, never hoby so dared a lark, that they will not [6447]offend the least tradition, tread, or scarce look awry: Deus bone ([6448]Lavater exclaims) quot hoc commentum de purgatorio misere afflixit! good God, how many men have been miserably afflicted by ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... considered a sacred food: [462] and their tradition runs that it first sprang from a drop of ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie
... inspiration. Fielding says, "I do not doubt but that the most pathetic and affecting scenes have been writ with tears." He perhaps would have been pleased to have confirmed his observation by the following circumstances. The tremors of Dryden, after having written an Ode, a circumstance tradition has accidentally handed down, were not unusual with him; in the preface to his Tales he tells us, that in translating Homer he found greater pleasure than in Virgil; but it was not a pleasure without pain; the continual agitation of the spirits must ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... the North! still further,—you have another power; you can pray! Do you believe in prayer? or has it become an indistinct apostolic tradition? You pray for the heathen abroad; pray also for the heathen at home. And pray for those distressed Christians whose whole chance of religious improvement is an accident of trade and sale; from whom any adherence to the morals of Christianity is, in many cases, an impossibility, ...
— Uncle Tom's Cabin • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... the same of the Southampton, though it stands on classic ground, and is connected by vocal tradition with the great names of the Elizabethan age. What a falling off is here I Our ancestors of that period seem not only to be older by two hundred years, and proportionably wiser and wittier than we, but hardly a trace of them is left, not even the memory of what has been. How should ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... the village-philosophers to address himself to. It was an establishment conducted by invisible, elusive agencies; they had a kind of stronghold in the dining-room, which was kept locked at all but sacramental hours. There was a tradition that a "boy" exercised some tutelary function as regards the crumpled register; but when he was inquired about, it was usually elicited from the impartial circle in the office either that he was somewhere round or that he had gone a-fishing. Except the haughty waitress who has just ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. II (of II) • Henry James
... soil. This prescriptive right was so generally recognised, that all parties were satisfied. In the other provinces of Ireland it was otherwise. The English and Scottish settlers in Ulster found this usage, which was an old Celtic tradition, and adopted it; their power enabled them to assert it; but the vanquished Celts themselves were not permitted by those to whom the estates were confiscated, to retain a custom so favourable to the occupier. ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... the like, were brought out for her inspection, signed by my grandfather Pasquier, my great-grandfather Boismorinel, and our great-great-grandmother and her husband, Mathurin Budes, the lord of Verny le Moustier; and the tradition of Gatienne, la belle Verriere (also nicknamed la reine de Hongrie, it seems) still lingered in the county; and many old people still remembered, more or less correctly, "Le Chant du Triste Commensal," which a hundred years ago ...
— Peter Ibbetson • George du Marier et al
... distant from the King's house, is seated Woodstook town, new and old. This new Woodstock did arise by some buildings which Henry the Second gave leave to be erected, (as received by tradition,) at the suite of the Lady Rosamond, for the use of out-servants upon the wastes of the manner of Bladon, where is the mother church; this is a hamlet belonging to it, though encreased to a market town by the advantage of the Court residing sometime near, which of late years ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott
... fades away. A few old people can still tell you the tradition of the man who died in a cottage somewhere about this spot,—died of starvation while his wife lived in hard-hearted plenty not two good stone-throws away. This is the form into which popular feeling, and ignorance ...
— Sylvia's Lovers — Complete • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... name as "Santee-Sioux," "Yanktonnai-Sioux," "Sisseton-Sioux," etc. As acquaintance between white men and red increased, the stock name was gradually displaced by tribe names until the colloquial appellation "Sioux" became but a memory or tradition throughout much of the territory formerly dominated by the great Siouan stock. One of the reasons for the abandonment of the name was undoubtedly its inappropriateness as a designation for the confederacy occupying the plains of the ...
— The Siouan Indians • W. J. McGee
... paused. The Spirit, In ecstasy of admiration, felt 245 All knowledge of the past revived; the events Of old and wondrous times, Which dim tradition interruptedly Teaches the credulous vulgar, were unfolded In just perspective to the view; 250 Yet dim from their infinitude. The Spirit seemed to stand High on an isolated pinnacle; The flood of ages combating below, The depth of the unbounded universe 255 Above, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... certain infinitude in his circumstances which humanity must ever want. Few Englishmen feel a profound reverence for Napoleon I.; there was no French alliance in his time; we have most of us some tradition of antipathy to him. Yet hardly any Englishman can read the account of the campaign of 1814 without feeling his interest in the Emperor to be strong, and without perhaps being conscious of a latent ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... inconstancy, than the mother came up from the sea and put him to death, when the daughter pined away and died. Her name was Selina, which gives the tale a modern aspect, and makes us wonder if the old tradition can have been modified by some ...
— Sintram and His Companions • Friedrich de la Motte Fouque
... Legal system: common law tradition with early Roman and modern continental influences; no judicial review of Acts of Parliament; accepts compulsory ...
— The 1997 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... spirit, maybe, but I don't think it's sound on the facts. We've got two mighty great armies of fine fighting-men, but, because we've two commands, we're bound to move ragged like a peal of bells. The Hun's got one army and forty years of stiff tradition, and, what's more, he's going all out this time. He's going to smash our front before America lines up, or perish in the attempt ... Why do you suppose all the peace racket in Germany has died down, and the very men that were talking ...
— Mr. Standfast • John Buchan
... except where it rose in hillocks, and showed its surface of desert sand spotted here and there by mean patches of health. A repellent river in itself, a repellent river in its surroundings, a repellent river even in its name. It was called The Loke. Neither popular tradition nor antiquarian research could explain what the name meant, or could tell when the name had been given. "We call it The Loke; they do say no fish can live in it; and it dirties the clean salt water when it runs into the sea." Such was the character of the river in the estimation of the people who ...
— The Guilty River • Wilkie Collins
... some six thousand years, is that a basis whereon to theorise with regard to the proceedings of Him in whose sight one day is as a thousand years and a thousand years as one day? Might not as well some scientific member of an insect tribe of ephemera, whom ancestral tradition, confirmed by personal experience, had assured that an eight-day clock had already gone on for six days, pronounce it to be a law of the clock's nature that it should go on for ever without being again wound up? Would the insect philosopher's dogmatism be one ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton |
