"Fakir" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... suckerdom, Charley imagined the fakir who had done him had preserved as keen a recollection of the transaction as himself. He learned afterwards that there is a sucker born every minute and the crop of fakirs is ...
— Watch Yourself Go By • Al. G. Field
... his grim coal-mine, looking at the "three ells" of Heaven high overhead there. In sorrow he would not dwell; all sorrow he swiftly subdued, and shook away from him. How could you have made an Indian Fakir of the Greek Apollo, "whose bright eye lends brightness, and never yet saw a shadow"?—I should say, not religious reverence, rather artistic admiration was the essential character of him: a fact connected with all other facts in the physiognomy of his life and self, and giving ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... make the following observations. In the first place, it is an untenable idea that religiosity or devoutness of spirit is valuable in itself, without reference to the goodness or badness of the dogmatic forms and the practices in which it clothes itself. A fakir would hardly be an estimable figure in our society, merely because his way of living happens to be a manifestation of the religious spirit. If the religious spirit leads to a worthy and beautiful life, if it shows itself in cheerfulness, in pity, in charity and ...
— On Compromise • John Morley
... a fakir. He thought he could carry off the honours from the regular force, and when he found he couldn't he quietly disappeared. We shall hear of ...
— Agatha Webb • Anna Katharine Green
... News-Record staff was that their journal was too "respectable," too intelligent, to be widely read; that the "yellow journals" grovelled, "appealed to the mob," drew their vast crowds by the methods of the fakir and the freak. They professed pride in the News-Record's smaller circulation as proof of its freedom from vulgarity and debasement. They looked down upon the journalists of the popular newspapers and posed as ...
— The Great God Success • John Graham (David Graham Phillips)
... Christmas comes—only once a year; and how soon it is over—a night and a day! If that is the whole of it, it seems not much more durable than the little toys that one buys of a fakir on the street-corner. They run for an hour, and then the spring breaks, and the legs come off, and nothing remains but a contribution to ...
— The Spirit of Christmas • Henry Van Dyke
... the dreary little voice, "in India once, when Father and I were going into the mountains for the summer, there was a—there was a sort of fakir at one of the railway stations doing tricks with a crippled tiger-cub—a tiger-cub with a shot-off paw. And when Father wasn't looking I got off the train and went back—and I followed that fakir two days till he just naturally had to sell me the tiger-cub; he couldn't exactly ...
— Little Eve Edgarton • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... hour an intermittent stream of figures in quaint neglige passed and repassed to their toilets. Inside the bathroom itself song and the splashing of water drowned all other sounds. The owner of the enlarged biceps was seated, fakir-wise, cross-legged in one of the shallow, circular baths in a corner, bailing water over himself from an ...
— The Long Trick • Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie
... degree of a full point and never approaching the dramatic significance of an exclamation mark. Already he floated above the common world, looking down upon its tortured contours and half-defaced frontiers—for the true poet is a fakir who quits his physical body at the beck of inspiration, to return laden with ...
— The Orchard of Tears • Sax Rohmer
... piece of his mind. He would have told them what he thought of their silly, prattling humbug about the fatherland and about the great honor it was to return home to Marcsa looking like a monkey. If he had the doctor in his clutches now! The fakir had photographed him, not once, but a dozen times, from all sides, after each butchery, as though he had accomplished a miracle, had turned out a wonderful masterpiece. And here Julia, even Julia, his playmate, his ...
— Men in War • Andreas Latzko
... I made a great tear in Bonsal's record today by refusing to pay a snake charmer all he wanted and then when he protested I took one of the snakes out of his hands and swung it around my head to the delight of the people. I wanted to show him he was a fakir to want me to pay for what I would do myself. It was a large snake about four feet long. Then my horse and another horse got fighting in the principal street in the city standing up on their hind legs and boxing like men and biting and squealing. ...
— Adventures and Letters • Richard Harding Davis
... was swinging a light bamboo cane and smoking a cigarette. He wore a jet black moustache and a jet black speck of a goatee. Moustache and goatee were unmistakably of the variety Andy had seen a circus fakir selling for twenty-five cents, back ...
— Andy the Acrobat • Peter T. Harkness
... appalling prologue still exists unchanged. That sigh will penetrate the gloomy cell of the Abbe Faria, the frightful dungeons of the Inquisition, the gilded halls of Vanity Fair, the deep forests of Brahmin and fakir, the jousting list, the audience halls and the petits cabinets of kings of France, sound over the trackless and storm-beaten ocean—will echo, in short, wherever warm blood has jumped in the veins ...
— The Delicious Vice • Young E. Allison
... invulnerable as claimed. At the present writing we who shoot the bow have slain more than a dozen bears with our shafts, but the mighty Kadiac brown grizzly has laughed at us from his frozen lair—as the literary nature fakir might say—we have been told that all that is necessary if you wish to meet a brownie, is to give him your address in Alaska and he will look you up. Also we have been told that once insulted he will tear a house down to "get even with you,"—so I shook Art's hand good-bye, ...
— Hunting with the Bow and Arrow • Saxton Pope
... Salvation Army, a young woman, a young man, a crippled boy, two young girls, and an old man, were singing "Nearer, My God, to Thee." Opposite the Board of Trade building on the edge of the river a street medicine-fakir had drawn a crowd to his wagon. To the beat of the Salvation Army's tambourine rose the thrum of ...
— The River's End • James Oliver Curwood
... since given over trying to explain what he did not understand, but in a vague way he regarded Mrs. Taylor as an unconscious fakir, whose spiritual communications bore the earmarks of something she had learned in a quite ...
— The Fighting Shepherdess • Caroline Lockhart
... place pointed out with considerable misgivings, for we had not forgotten the plot of the Hindu fakir. We could see very little of its interior, which was only partly lighted by the torch which the Tamil still carried affixed to his spear. He left us there for a few minutes, during which we rested on the limestone floor, and, being unable to distinguish any part of ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 26, February 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... their own diminutive measurement, the newspaper and magazine hacks who live on abuse of everybody who has a high ideal, all joined in the whoop and chase after Douglas of the fourth district, branded him as a fakir, an idiot, a senseless dreamer, an egotist, a demagogue, a party traitor, a knocker, and every other objectionable kind of disturber of the peace, meaning by "peace," the peace of those who are let alone by reformers to rob the state, degrade ...
— The High Calling • Charles M. Sheldon
... have him bring his trained cockatoos. And while he was making them go through their tricks, Mr. Hume would call him a mountebank, a side show fakir and other things, and tell him that he ought to stick to that as a business, for he could make a living at it, where he would starve as a violinist. I've often seen Antonio go out trembling and white at the ...
— Ashton-Kirk, Investigator • John T. McIntyre
... all I want to know!" burst from Frank, as he flung the hat and beard to the floor. "So you were monkeying around my horse to-day, you fakir! Well, what you need is a pair of good black eyes, and I propose to ...
— Frank Merriwell's Races • Burt L. Standish
... of the soul, are yet celebrated for their "phenomena," and that mesmerism was known and daily practised in China from time immemorial under the name of "gina." In India they fear and hate the very name of the spirits whom the Spiritualists venerate so deeply, yet many an ignorant fakir can perform "miracles" calculated to turn upside-down all the notions of a scientist and to be the despair of the most celebrated of European prestidigitateurs. Many members of the Society have visited India—many were born there and have themselves ...
— From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan • Helena Pretrovna Blavatsky
... small, but well shapen. A low grey cap of coarse woollen completed the costume of this singular visitor. There was, at times, in the expression of his eye, an indescribable mixture of imbecility and enthusiasm, as though the spirit of some Eastern fakir had reanimated a living body. A gleam of almost supernatural intelligence was mingled with an expression of fatuity, that in less enlightened ages would have invested him with the dangerous reputation of priest or prophet in the eyes of ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... the rites and ceremonies of the various Hindoo castes, and could act the part of a fakir or ...
— At Suvla Bay • John Hargrave
... generations of my descendants; and I feared lest an I gain say him I should repent for ever and ever having let so great a treasure slip out of hand. Accordingly, giving full consent to all be said, I got together every one of my beasts and set me a-wayfaring along with the Fakir.[FN253] After travelling over some short distance we came upon a gorge between two craggy mountain-walls towering high in crescent form and the pass was exceeding narrow so that the animals were forced to pace in single file, ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... is as old as the human race, and you find the man who undertakes to reveal to you the secrets of the future among all peoples. The Orientals are always ready to listen to the "neby" or the necromancer or the fakir or the wandering minstrel, who improvises for you and sings for you the good things which are in store for you. We see this tendency among our own people who would have their destiny pointed out by means of a pack of cards, by the reading ...
— By the Golden Gate • Joseph Carey
... married and his wife had died and left him a widower without any kids. And the doctor—it was always hard fur me to get to calling him anything but Doctor Kirby—how he had happened to start out with a good chancet in life and turn into jest a travelling fakir. ...
— Danny's Own Story • Don Marquis
... a priori, for assigning to the domain of legerdemain the astonishing facts that are told us by a large number of witnesses, worthy of credence, regarding a young fakir who, forty years ago, was accustomed to allow himself to be buried, and resuscitated ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 497, July 11, 1885 • Various
... beard, after which he put hand in pouch and pulling out an Ashrafi of gold set it upon the looking-glass which he gave back to the boy.[FN152] Hereupon the barber turned towards the beggar and wondered in himself and said, "Praise be to Allah, albeit this man be a Fakir yet he placeth a golden piece upon the mirror, and surely this is a marvellous matter." Hereupon the Darwaysh went his ways, and on the following day he suddenly made his appearance and entering the booth called for a ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... not mention to me this afternoon that he was dining with Mr. Edestone tonight," he drew himself up stiffly. And it was in his mind that, on the contrary, His Royal Highness had inveighed against the American inventor as a fraud and a fakir, and had loudly urged that no attention be paid to him or ...
— L. P. M. - The End of the Great War • J. Stewart Barney
... either of pleasure or pain. His dress consisted of a cloth wrapped round his waist, a scarf over his shoulder, and a turban on his head—the upper part of his body and his legs being completely exposed. The man was a fakir, one of a class of religious fanatics, who, ignorant of a God of love and mercy, believe that holiness can be obtained by practising the most rigid self-denial and the infliction of every variety of ...
— The Young Rajah • W.H.G. Kingston
... made a plausible excuse about the horses, and they halted for four days at a roadside dak-bungalow about a mile from where a foul-mouthed fakir sat and took tribute at a crossroads. It was a strangely chosen ...
— Rung Ho! • Talbot Mundy
... help me. My little girl is in terrible trouble and there is not anyone to 'elp 'er but me. She is a good girl—you know all things, you know she is a good girl. Show me the way. I 'ave been a fakir all my life. I 'ave tricked them and fooled them, but I 'ave never meant to 'arm a soul, I 'ave never done 'arm to any person. And there is a power. It 'as come to me before, a power that I could not ...
— The Thirteenth Chair • Bayard Veiller
... forth noisily against "society," was denouncing it as a debaucher of manhood and womanhood, a waster of precious time, and on and on in that trite and tedious strain. Margaret's lip curled as she listened. What did this fakir know about manhood and womanhood? And could there be any more pitiful, more paltry wasting of time than in studying out and performing such insincerities as his life was made up of? True, Mrs. Houghton, of those funny, fashionable New Yorkers ...
— The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig • David Graham Phillips
... nonsense in your head? you are so comfortable here with us, and you have your own way, and I never tease you now about going to balls. It is so silly of you trying to make yourself miserable, and living in poky lodgings. You might as well be a fakir, or a dervish, or a Protestant nun, or anything else ...
— Uncle Max • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... reigned there very quietly for some months, until, to appease the jealousy of the Turks, Lord Elgin despatched a frigate to dethrone the new sovereign. Afterwards he traversed India in the dress of a fakir. He is ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... is in many respects the most remarkable man in county Clare, after, if not before, The O'Gorman Mahon himself. He is also the dirtiest. But the grime on Mr. Considine has a romantic origin. It is the fakir's robe of filth. When he was only a budding patriot the great Liberator once kissed him. Mr. Considine determined that the cheek sanctified by the embrace of O'Connell should never again be profaned by water, ...
— Disturbed Ireland - Being the Letters Written During the Winter of 1880-81. • Bernard H. Becker
... monstrous yarn. He maintained that in a Hindu family of his acquaintance there had been transmitted the secret of a drug, capable of altering a man's whole temperament until the antidote was administered. It would turn a coward into a bravo, a miser into a spendthrift, a rake into a fakir. Then, having delivered his manifesto he got up abruptly and went ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan
... his knowledge of Bombay might be of great service to me. In this I did not mistake. I told him I wished to ascertain the whereabouts of a Rama Ragobah, who had been something between a rishi and a fakir, and he directed me at once to a fakir named Parinama who, he said, would be able to locate my man, if he were still alive and ...
— The Darrow Enigma • Melvin L. Severy
... unto him in his immortal state, before he had taken into his body those things that made of it a thing of earth. He was warned against that very practise. He was not told to treat his body as something to be tortured. He was not told to look upon it as the fakir of India has come to look upon his body, or professes to look upon it, as a thing to be utterly contemned; but he was told that he must not take into that body certain things which were there at hand. He was warned that, ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... what Mrs. Cole at the Mountain House told me. She's Mrs. Paula Markham—" his mind went on, "the great fakir of the spook doctors," but his lips stifled the phrase and said after ...
— The House of Mystery • William Henry Irwin
... Sunday. A little woman with gray, powdered hair was always there in the same place, her pink face like a pastel somewhat worn by years, who, in the discrete light of a recess, smiled sweetly, with her hands lying idly on her knees, motionless as a fakir. Jenkins, amiable, with his open face, his black eyes, and his apostolical manner, moved on from one group to another, liked and known by all. He did not miss, either, one of Felicia's days; and, indeed, he showed his patience in this, all the snubs of his hostess both as artist and pretty woman ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... his palace in disguise, and entering a boat which had been engaged for the purpose, reached Rajmahal, ninety miles distant, on the evening of the fourth day. There the rowers were obliged to halt for a rest, and taking refuge in a deserted garden, the Nawab was seen by a fakir whose ears he had caused to be cut off thirteen months before and was handed over to Mir Jafar's brother, who resided at Rajmahal. He was at once captured, sent back to Murshidabad, and handed over to Mir Jafar on July 2d. He pleaded earnestly for his life, offering to give up everything ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... to accomplish this now was obviously through finding his uncle, the Sheikh Burrachee, and to do this he must follow the course he had pointed out: find a dervish or fakir, and show the ring and parchment. Of course the efficacy of these might all be the delusion of a crazy brain, but he must take his chance of that. It was certain, however, that he would never get the chance of a hearing ...
— For Fortune and Glory - A Story of the Soudan War • Lewis Hough
... began Pa and I went and sat on the lowest seat near the ring, and the performers guyed Pa for a Hoosier, and the lemonade butchers tried to sell Pa lemonade and peanuts, which was the last hair, until a fakir tried to get Pa to bet on a shell game, and ...
— Peck's Bad Boy With the Cowboys • Hon. Geo. W. Peck
... Even the cab-horses, on whom he used to look with disdain, eyed him scornfully. Skipper stood it as long as possible and then one day, while the apple fakir was standing on the back step of the cart shouting things at a woman who was leaning half way out of a fourth-story window, he bolted. He distributed that load of apples over four blocks, much to the profit of the street children, and he wrecked the wagon on a hydrant. For this the fakir beat ...
— Horses Nine - Stories of Harness and Saddle • Sewell Ford
... was livid. "It's a pack of lies!" he shouted, advancing toward Kennedy, "a pack of lies! You are a fakir and a blackmailer. I'll have you in jail for this, ...
— Master Tales of Mystery, Volume 3 • Collected and Arranged by Francis J. Reynolds
... attempt at altogether unusual trickery in the course of this racing-day. The team of four splendid piebald stallions, about five years old, was one of the few entered for two races. I could not conjecture how a horse which had spent his youth as trick-horse in possession of an itinerant fakir, had acquired, since I knew him, reputation enough to be yoke-mate in a team highly enough thought of to be entered for two races the same day in the Circus Maximus. This was a puzzle almost as absorbing as the likeness and contrast between ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... courts. Long lines of yellow-robed priests will chant their last processional hymn to Buddha, and the smoking incense to waning gods shall be quenched forever. Where Tao rites were celebrated, silence shall fall; where fakir and dervish tortured and immolated their lives, happy children shall play. Instead of the lotos of the Ganges and the Nile, there shall bloom the Rose of Sharon and ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... but an old 'law,' as the Scots still call a mound, which men of old had broken into seeking for treasure, and a little pond; and how he built himself a hermit's cell thereon, and saw visions and wrought miracles; and how men came to him, as to a fakir or shaman of the East; notably one Beccel, who acted as his servant; and how as Beccel was shaving the saint one day, there fell on him a great temptation: Why should he not cut St. Guthlac's throat, and install himself in his cell, that he ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... 'tis supposed war will break out again and the fleet is intended to attack us here. So that we may have the Subah making common cause with the French to crush us. He'll turn against the French then, but that won't save us. On top of that comes a fakir from Murshidabad demanding in the Subah's name that we should stop work on our fortifications; the insolence of the wretch passes all bounds. Mr. Drake properly refused the demand; he said we were repairing our defenses in ...
— In Clive's Command - A Story of the Fight for India • Herbert Strang
... body of St. Oran under his monastery to make the building secure. Any country will supply stories of a similar kind. Finally, we have the amusing story of the manner in which Sir Richard Burton narrowly escaped deification. Exploring in Afghanistan in the disguise of a Mohammedan fakir, he received a friendly hint that he would do well to get off without delay. He expressed surprise, as the people seemed very fond of him. That, it was explained, was the cause of the trouble. They thought so much of him they intended ...
— Theism or Atheism - The Great Alternative • Chapman Cohen
... you?" exclaimed Ludwig, with sudden sharpness. "Don't I love you as the fakir loves his Brahma—as the Carthusian loves his Virgin Mary? Don't I ...
— The Nameless Castle • Maurus Jokai
... perform his mystic hocus pocus over the sick or dying, and charm away the spirits from a neighborhood. I have known an Indian, when in great pain through having eaten too much, send for the old fakir, who, after examination of the patient and great show of learning, declared that the suffering one had two tigers in his stomach. A very common remedy is the somewhat scientific operation of bleeding a patient, but the manner is certainly uncommon—the witch doctor sucks ...
— Through Five Republics on Horseback • G. Whitfield Ray
... urged him to surrender to Clive, but he thought this advice treacherous, and determined to flee towards Rajmehal. When nearly there he was recognized by a Fakir,[103] whose ears he had, some time before, ordered to be cut off. The Fakir informed the Faujdar, who seized him and sent him to Murshidabad, where Miran, Mir Jafar's son, put him to death on the ...
— Three Frenchmen in Bengal - The Commercial Ruin of the French Settlements in 1757 • S.C. Hill
... the son of a shipwright, formerly well known there. From his early youth he was fond of meditation and studying the Koran, rather than of working like his brothers; and his tastes were encouraged. He became the disciple of a fakir, or dervish, near Khartoum. In 1870 he took up his residence on an island, where he gained reputation as a learned and devout man. For a time he used this reputation only for selfish and sensual ends. He took wives from among the Arabs, and thus made many ...
— General Gordon - A Christian Hero • Seton Churchill
... unbelievers upon the Latin Christians in the Holy Land, in colours scarce inferior to those employed at the Council of Clermont by the Hermit Peter, when he preached the first Crusade. To find, in a person so reverend and so much revered, the frantic gestures of a mad fakir, induced the Christian knight to pause ere he could resolve to communicate to him certain important matters, which he had in charge from some of the leaders of ...
— The Talisman • Sir Walter Scott
... Eastern affairs than any living man. Yes, I mean it. He knows any amount of Eastern dialects; speaks Arabic and Turkish like a native, and has a regular passion for mixing himself up in Eastern matters. He can pass himself off as a Fakir, a Dervish—anything you like. He knows the byways of Eastern cities and Eastern life better than any man I know of, and obtained a great reputation in certain official quarters for discovering plots inimical to British interests. That's Maurice St. Mabyn. A jolly ...
— "The Pomp of Yesterday" • Joseph Hocking
... arrogance, and passion. I cannot fancy all this thy warmth and obstinacy to be created from earth, but from fire. I went to a holy man in the land of Bailcan, and said: "Cleanse me of ignorance by thy instruction?" He replied: "O fakir, or theologician! go and bear things patiently like the earth; or whatever thou hast read let it all ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 2, Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous
... that is brutal, cruel, heathenish, that makes life hopeless for the most of mankind and perhaps for entire races,—anything that assumes the necessity of the extermination of instincts which were given to be regulated, —no matter by what name you call it,—no matter whether a fakir, or a monk, or a deacon believes it,—if received, ought to produce insanity in every well-regulated mind. That condition becomes a normal one, under the circumstances. I am very much ashamed of some people for retaining their reason, when they know ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... asking about him, and he's a regular fakir," said Roger. "He isn't a doctor at all, although he calls himself one. He puts up a number of medicines and calls them 'Montgomery's Wonderful Cures.' I was told that he used to do quite a business among the ignorant country folks, but lately ...
— Dave Porter and His Rivals - or, The Chums and Foes of Oak Hall • Edward Stratemeyer
... astonishing speed—for a rheumatic person—in proffering him the entire room to himself. But there was a time—and that as late as Shakespeare's day—when so-called doctors in rural England used just such words not only for rheumatism, but for many another disease. And to this hour the fakir on the street corner uses that opening expression, "Hocus pocus." Those words simply prove how slowly the Christian religion was absorbed by ancient Anglo-Saxon paganism; for "Hocus pocus" is but the hastily mumbled syllables of the Catholic priest to his early English congregation—"Hoc est corpus," ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... came nearer again, trembling with fright. Brown snatched the lamp away from him, and pushed it forward toward the fakir, moving it up and down to get a view of the whole of him. There was nothing that he saw that would reassure or comfort or please a devil even. It was ultradevilish; both by design and accident—conceived ...
— Told in the East • Talbot Mundy
... attendants: tiny oxen with gorgeous trappings, tiny chariots richly gilded and carved and painted, tiny occupants richly dressed and jewelled. Troupes of Nautchnees add their picturesque appearance to the brilliant throngs, and here and there is encountered a holy fakir, unkempt and unwashed, having, perchance, registered a vow years ago never more to apply water to his skin, his only clothing a dirty waist-cloth and the yellow clay plastered on his body. Long strings of less pretentious bullock-gharries ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens |
