"Illiterate" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... kindly patron, Leonard Dowson had been able to carry out his desire and qualify as a dentist, he was under no delusion as to his social position. He came of humble, illiterate folk, and he knew well enough that in a fashionable, high-class practice he would be ...
— The Making of a Soul • Kathlyn Rhodes
... Swinburne, or such eulogists as Hazlitt and Knight, we are in a world of abstract aesthetics or of abstract ethics; we are not within sight of the man Shakspere, who became an actor for a livelihood in an age when the best actors played in inn-yards for rude audiences, mostly illiterate and not a little brutal; then added to his craft of acting the craft of play-patching and refashioning; who had his partnership share of the pence and sixpences paid by the mob of noisy London prentices and journeymen and idlers that filled the booth theatre ...
— Montaigne and Shakspere • John M. Robertson
... continued to spread Raboff's "message." Borykin, the master-carpenter, took employment under a certain Grigorieff, and succeeded in converting all his fellow-workers. Finally Grigorieff's house was turned into a church for the new sect, and an illiterate woman named Vassilisa became their prophetess. Under the influence of the general excitement, she would fall into trances and give extravagant and incomprehensible discourses, while her listeners laughed, danced and wept ecstatically. ...
— Modern Saints and Seers • Jean Finot
... to scientific facts which the medium can not possibly comprehend. It is a matter of common knowledge that mediums are usually people without technical scientific knowledge. Some of them have some degree of education and some of them are illiterate. Some of the most celebrated belong to ...
— Elementary Theosophy • L. W. Rogers
... with strict accuracy all the essential features which mark the character of this extraordinary epidemic, it is proper I should state that the opponents of Jansenism concur in bringing against the convulsionists the charge that many of them were not only ignorant and illiterate girls, but persons of bad character, occasionally of notoriously immoral habits; nay, that some of them justified the vicious courses in which they indulged by declaring these to be a representation of a religious tendency, emblematic of that degradation through which ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... no harm. Those who are struggling with the difficulty (and who know by experience how great it already is) of expressing one's self clearly with precision, find their resources continually narrowed by illiterate writers, who seize and twist from its purpose some form of speech which once served to convey briefly and compactly an unambiguous meaning. It would hardly be believed how often a writer is compelled to a circumlocution by the single vulgarism, ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... Naples then so desirous of our alliance that it has already offered its heir to another one of my daughters? I am sorry that we should be obliged to accept, for I have heard of late that the king is an illiterate and trifling fellow, scarcely better than the lazzaroni who are his chosen associates. Josepha will not be happy with such ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... original character not simple, but sordid in his appearance and economy, savage in his deportment, ferocious, illiterate, stubborn, implacable, and reserved. The English general assailed him on the side of his vanity, the only part by which he was accessible. "Sire," said he, "I present to your majesty a letter, not from the chancery, but from the heart of the ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... Prince, Capt. Boy-Ed, von Bernstorff and von Tirpitz. Most of this denunciation, of course, was frankly idiotic—the naive pishposh of suburban Methodists, notoriety-seeking college professors, almost illiterate editorial writers, and other such numskulls. In much of it, including not a few official hymns of hate, Nietzsche was gravely discovered to be the teacher of such spokesmen of the extremest sort of German nationalism ...
— The Antichrist • F. W. Nietzsche
... use of such intransitive verbs would be like using the English intransitive verb "learn" for the transitive verb "teach," as in the "I'll learn you" (for "I'll teach you") of illiterate speech.] ...
— A Complete Grammar of Esperanto • Ivy Kellerman
... on in the usual matrimonial routine, until he was chosen into the managing committee of Drury Lane; an office in which, had he possessed the slightest degree of talent for business, he might have done much good. It was justly expected that the illiterate presumption which had so long deterred poetical genius from approaching the stage, would have shrunk abashed from before him; but he either felt not the importance of the duty he had been called to perform, or, what is more probable, yielding to the allurements of the moment, ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... was born at Genoa on the night of February 18, 1784, of parents in humbly prosperous circumstances, his father being a ship-broker, and, though illiterate in a general way, a passionate lover of music and an amateur of some skill. The father soon perceived the child's talent, and caused him to study so severely that it not only affected his constitution, but actually ...
— Great Violinists And Pianists • George T. Ferris
... perhaps, what I just said about the loves and friendships of illiterate persons,—that is, of the human race, with a few exceptions here and there. I like books,—I was born and bred among them, and have the easy feeling, when I get into their presence, that a stable-boy has among horses. I don't think I undervalue them either as companions or as instructors. ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... "covered" Jerry motioned him to step up to the bank. They looked so threatening that he obeyed. Daggett produced a legal looking paper. He read this aloud, blunderingly, for he was an illiterate man. ...
— Ruth Fielding on Cliff Island - The Old Hunter's Treasure Box • Alice Emerson
... forget their powers; the judgment becomes feeble and lethargic, the imagination languid or irregular. Fully to apprehend this important truth, let us attempt, in an improved society, to calculate the immense distance between the man of learning and the illiterate peasant. The former, by reading and reflection, multiplies his own experience, and lives in distant ages and remote countries; whilst the latter, rooted to a single spot, and confined to a few years of existence, surpasses but very little his fellow-laborer, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... with the Governor, the Nonsuch, frigate. As Phips was his parishioner, owed to him his office, and was necessarily thrown into close intimacy, during the long voyage, he fell naturally under his influence, which, all things considered, could not have failed to be controlling. The Governor was an illiterate person, but of generous, confiding, and susceptible impulses; and the elder Mather was precisely fitted to acquire an ascendency over such a character. He had been twice abroad, in his early manhood and in his later years, had knowledge of the ...
— Salem Witchcraft and Cotton Mather - A Reply • Charles W. Upham
... cinema already: a famous Empire run-up by Jordan, the sly builder and decorator who had got on so surprisingly. In James's younger days, Jordan was an obscure and illiterate nobody. And now he had a motor car, and looked at the tottering James with sardonic contempt, from under his heavy, heavy-lidded dark eyes. He was rather stout, frail in health, but silent and insuperable, was A. ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... comparatively illiterate man like the captain of the schooner, to whom we were under travelling obligations, and a joke from my equal, a scholar and a gentleman, are two distinct things. I wish the expression, 'that girl of yours,' absolutely and ...
— Two Knapsacks - A Novel of Canadian Summer Life • John Campbell
... same paper appeared a letter from the same culprit. He ingenuously confessed that the line did not belong to Shakespeare, but to a poet whom he called Grey. Which was another cropper—or whopper. This strange and illiterate outbreak was printed by the editor with the justly scornful title, "Mr. Chesterton 'Explains'?" Any man reading the paper at breakfast saw at once the meaning of the sarcastic quotation marks. They meant, of course, "Here is a man who doesn't know Gray from Shakespeare; ...
— A Miscellany of Men • G. K. Chesterton
... veins. Only little Paul, of all the household, lent me the aid of his nimble hand to seize the fugitives. I have already stated that the entomologist has need of simplicity of mind. In this important business of the Necrophori, my assistants were a child and an illiterate. ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... we see that Nature hath no end In her great works responsive to their worths; That she, that makes so many eyes and soules To see and fore-see, is stark blind her selfe; And as illiterate men say Latine prayers 5 By rote of heart and dayly iteration, Not knowing what they say, so Nature layes A deale of stuffe together, and by use, Or by the meere necessity of matter, Ends such a work, fills it, or leaves ...
— Bussy D'Ambois and The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois • George Chapman
... is a novel, and throughout it runs a love story which is characterized by sympathetic treatment and a constantly increasing interest; but the title role is taken by the old country banker, David Harum: dry, quaint, somewhat illiterate, no doubt, but possessing an amazing amount of knowledge not found in printed books, and holding fast to the cheerful belief that there is nothing wholly bad or useless in this world. Or, in his own words: "A reasonable amount ...
— David Harum - A Story of American Life • Edward Noyes Westcott
... only a man as his skin contained the qualities necessary; and the illiterate who could ride and shoot and live to himself was far more esteemed than the educated who could not do those things. The more a man depends upon himself and the closer is his contact to a quick judgment the more laconic and even-poised he becomes. And the knowledge that he is himself a judge tends ...
— Hopalong Cassidy's Rustler Round-Up - Bar-20 • Clarence Edward Mulford
... bravest, sincerest girl in the world. She's braver than Molly Breckenridge, and I like her immensely. All the boys at Brentnor think she's fine, and we all hope some grand romance will come out of the facts of her parentage. She doesn't come of any illiterate, common stock, Mamma. You may be sure of that. So I hope you'll be nice and not—not too Stark-ish toward ...
— Dorothy's Travels • Evelyn Raymond
... we have no equivalent. The assize records show that offences against public morality are almost wholly confined to the towns in Artois, and it is a notable fact that these particular offences are much more frequently committed by persons who can read and write than by the illiterate.' ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... taken the country over, rather better educated than men. There are more girls than boys in the high schools of the United States; more girls than boys in the higher grammar grades. Fewer women than men are numbered among illiterate. As for the great middle class of women, it is obvious that they are better read than their men. Their specific knowledge of affairs may be less, but their general intelligence is not less ...
— What eight million women want • Rheta Childe Dorr
... beautiful incident and action in their ornament, unless they see beautiful incident and action in the world about them. Inform their minds, refine their habits, and you form and refine their designs; but keep them illiterate, uncomfortable, and in the midst of unbeautiful things, and whatever they do will still be spurious, vulgar, ...
— The Two Paths • John Ruskin
... Arts were placed at Amsterdam and Antwerp, which were to bear good fruit. His attention was also given to the much-needed improvement of primary education, which in the south was almost non-existent in large parts of the country. Here the presence of a number of illiterate dialects was a great obstacle and was the cause of the unfortunate effort to make literary Dutch into a national ...
— History of Holland • George Edmundson
... age of fourteen it seemed that Gibbon, as he says, was destined to remain through life an illiterate cripple. But as he approached his sixteenth year, a great change took place in his constitution, and his diseases, instead of growing with his growth and strengthening with his strength, wonderfully vanished. This unexpected recovery was ...
— Gibbon • James Cotter Morison
... nevertheless possessed the not too common knack of chatting with the poor. He had the simplicity which made them kin, and his sympathy, unlike that of so many persons who consider themselves sympathetic, was not exclusively reserved for the death-bed and the ruined home. He wrote letters for the illiterate, found places for the unemployed, knew one baby from another as soon as their own mothers, and with his own hand sent to the local papers full reports of the village matches in which he rarely scored a run. Until this August afternoon he was not aware that he had made an actual ...
— The Shadow of the Rope • E. W. Hornung
... I am? A blooming traffic policeman?" growled the cook to two soldiers who had found themselves in a blind alley in the maze of streets back of the firing-trench. "My word! Is His Majesty's army becoming illiterate? Strafe that sign at the corner! What do you think we put it up for? To show what a beautiful ...
— My Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... must be at least five hundred poets in the city and suburbs of London: half as many coffeehouse orators, exclusive of the clergy, forty thousand politicians, and four thousand five hundred profound scholars; not to mention the wits, the railers, the smart fellows, and critics; all as illiterate and impudent as a suburb whore. What are we to think of the fine-dressed sparks, proud of their own personal deformities, which appear the more hideous by the contrast of wearing scarlet and gold, with ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift
... to you, Pinchas, I am actuated by nothing but an unselfish desire for their good. May this morsel of sandwich choke me if I have ever been swayed by anything but sympathy with their wrongs. And yet you saw that malicious pamphlet that was circulated against me in Yiddish—silly, illiterate scribble." ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... whose religion was "unsavoury," at the same time hurling at the giver a number of texts conveying epithets of an offensive character. Bramah replied to the farrago of nonsense, which he characterised as "unmannerly, absurd, and illiterate that it must have been composed when the writer was intoxicated, mad, or under the influence of Lucifer," and he threatened that unless Huntington apologised for his gratuitous insults, he (Bramah) would assuredly expose him. The mechanician nevertheless proceeded ...
— Industrial Biography - Iron Workers and Tool Makers • Samuel Smiles
... fascinating scenery. Accordingly, I hastened to Regla with my letter of introduction, which was interpreted by Bachicha to the Italian grocer, the friend of Rafael, to whom I was confided. Il signore Carlo Cibo was an illiterate man of kind heart, who had adventurously emigrated from Italy to furnish the Havanese with good things; while, in return, the Havanese had been so pleased with his provender, that Carlo may be said to have been a man "very ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer
... names. I am myself, although, as a student of philology, I ought to know better. The greatest of Englishmen was so careless in the matter as to sign himself Shakspe, a fact usually emphasized by Baconian when speaking of the illiterate clown of Stratford-on-Avon. Equally illiterate must have been the learned Dr. Crown, who, in the various books he published in the latter half of the seventeenth century, spelt his name, indifferently Cron, Croon, Croun, Crone, Croone, Croune. The modern spelling of any particular ...
— The Romance of Names • Ernest Weekley
... so various constructions to be put upon it? It is clear, the professor maintains, that the reference is to pagan rhetors from Gaul whose arrogant presumption, founded on their learning, made them regard with disdain the comparatively illiterate apostle of the Scots. Everyone is familiar with the classic passage of Tacitus wherein he alludes to the harbours of Ireland as being more familiar to continental mariners than those of Britain. We have references ...
— Lives of SS. Declan and Mochuda • Anonymous
... that of the Chet Ramis, or sect of Chet Ram, whose strange history may be found in East and West for July 1905. Chet Ram was an illiterate Hindu, a water-carrier and then a steward in the Indian army that took part in the war with China in 1859-1860. Returning to his native district not far from Lahore, Chet Ram, the Hindu, came under the spell of a Mahomedan ascetic ...
— New Ideas in India During the Nineteenth Century - A Study of Social, Political, and Religious Developments • John Morrison
... no human nature in this nonsense. An ambitious lawyer passes his nights in retouching stock pieces, from which he can reap neither fame nor profit. He gives his work to a second-rate illiterate actor, who adopts it as his own. Bacon is so enamoured of this method that he publishes 'Venus and Adonis' and 'Lucrece' under the name of his actor friend. Finally, he commits to the actor's care all his sonnets ...
— The Valet's Tragedy and Other Stories • Andrew Lang
... on alone, brought up his family himself, added to his bit of land in course of years, and acquired other property. His children were now all settled in life, and he had given them everything he had except the cottage in which he lived. I was struck by the strong virtue of this illiterate peasant, who had evidently no notion of his own value, and who would not have told the simple story of his life passed amidst the moors of the Correze had I not drawn ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... French. But it is our misfortune, that some, who set up for professed critics among us, are so stupid, that they do not know how to put ten words together with elegance or common propriety; and withal so illiterate, that they have no taste of the learned languages, and therefore criticise upon old authors only at second hand. They judge of them by what others have written, and not by any notions they have of the authors themselves. ...
— The Palmy Days of Nance Oldfield • Edward Robins
... before I was well out of the pulpit." As an evidence of the estimation in which Bunyan was held by the highly-educated, it is recorded that Charles the Second expressed his surprise to Dr. Owen that "a learned man such as he could sit and listen to an illiterate tinker." "May it please your Majesty," Owen replied. "I would gladly give up all my learning if I could ...
— The Life of John Bunyan • Edmund Venables
... man of forty, upon whom the years had laid no bonds. A large fortune, founded by his able but illiterate father in the timber stretches of the Great Lakes region, and spread out into various profitable enterprises of mining, oil, cattle, and milling, provided him with a constantly increasing income which, though no amateur at spending, he could never quite overtake. Like many other hustlers ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... in the English language are so much bandied about in efforts to describe or classify society at the present day as are the words "culture," "cultured," "cultivated" and their antitheses. These are the terms that intimidate the vain, selfish, illiterate rich; for to be described as "rich but uncultivated" is regarded as a greater slur upon the social standing of families than to be reported as having gained wealth by dishonesty or trickery. And then the matter is made all the harder for ...
— Letters to a Daughter and A Little Sermon to School Girls • Helen Ekin Starrett
... his wooden jack in his chimney, which goes with the smoke, which indeed is very pretty. I found him to be as ingenious and good-natured a man as ever I met with in my life, and cannot admire him enough, he being so plain and illiterate a man as he is. From thence by coach home and to bed, which was welcome to me after ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... could sign their names, and a contemporary well acquainted with them declares that he knew but a single Acadian who could read and write. [Footnote: Moise des Derniers, in Le Canada Francais, I. 118.] This was probably the notary, Le Blanc, whose compositions are crude and illiterate. Ignorant of books and isolated in a wild and remote corner of the world, the Acadians knew nothing of affairs, and were totally incompetent to meet the crisis that was soon to come upon them. In activity and enterprise they were far behind ...
— A Half-Century of Conflict, Volume II • Francis Parkman
... transpired that might not have transpired in a parlor, if there had not been so many people in the house, and yet these illiterate and ungodly saw mill hands went off and told a story that would make angels blush. It is possible that the elder did wrong in not offering to go with them and look for the mooley cow, but we should not chide him for that. He probably had not time to take up a collection of his thoughts, and no ...
— Peck's Sunshine - Being a Collection of Articles Written for Peck's Sun, - Milwaukee, Wis. - 1882 • George W. Peck
... reveals to the assembled multitude the face of some Garibaldi or Hampden or Lincoln, the beloved one is seen to be clothed with genius and beauty and truth indeed, but also to be crowned with self-sacrifice. Society makes haste to forget him who remembers only himself. As there can be no illiterate sage, no ignorant Shakespeare, so history knows no selfish hero. For the mercenary forehead memory has no wreath. A sentinel with a flaming sword guards the threshold of the temple of fame against those ...
— The Investment of Influence - A Study of Social Sympathy and Service • Newell Dwight Hillis
... first year at college I lived on a barrel of potatoes, and we had just a sofa-bed between two of us; when the one lay down the other had to get up. Do you think it was hardship? It was sublime. But this year I can't afford it. I'll have to stay on here, collecting the tickets of the illiterate, such as you, when I might be with Romulus and ...
— What Every Woman Knows • James M. Barrie
... Durham, there is the record of the hanging and quartering in 1590 of "Duke, Hyll, Hogge and Holyday, iiij Semynaryes, Papysts, Tretors and Rebels for their horrible offences." "Burials, 1687 April 17th Georges Vilaus Lord dooke of bookingham," is the illiterate description of the Duke who was assassinated by Felton and buried at Helmsley. It is impossible to mention all the gleanings from parish registers; each parish tells its tale, its trades, its belief ...
— Vanishing England • P. H. Ditchfield
... health and the attainment of long life are objects of desire to every man, no matter in what age or country his lot is cast, nor by what arbitrary tenure he holds his life. They are the wish of the master and the slave, of the illiterate and the learned, of the timid Hindoo and the warlike Arab, of the natives of New Zealand not less than of the inhabitants of New England,—an indispensable condition for the greatest and longest enjoyment of the senses and propensities; for the widest range and exercise of intellect and ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... down from his chair, and he ran eagerly to his blackboard, upon which he wrote, "This is illiterate, this is unscholarly." ...
— How Doth the Simple Spelling Bee • Owen Wister
... from a REVIEW, are the works of Genius perpetually criticized in our public Prints: "Passion has not sufficient coolness to pause for metaphor, nor has metaphor ardor enough to keep pace with passion."—Nothing can be less true. Metaphoric strength of expression will burst even from vulgar and illiterate minds when they are agitated. It is a natural effort of roused sensibility in every gradation, from unlettered simplicity to the highest refinement. Passion has no occasion to pause for metaphors, they rush upon the mind which it has heated. Similies, it is true, ...
— Original sonnets on various subjects; and odes paraphrased from Horace • Anna Seward
... inflicted on the friends of the apostolic see. It is hard to dissociate the pope's feeling in this matter from his rejection of the nomination of the king's chancellor, Ralph Neville, Bishop of Chichester, to the see of Canterbury, as an illiterate politician. ...
— The History of England - From the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) • T.F. Tout
... comprehend. 'The celebrated Mr. Cameron,' says the minister of the Scottish Church, London, 'was left on Drumclog a mangled corpse.' Fine thing to be minutely acquainted with ecclesiastical history! We illiterate non-intrusionists hold, and we are afraid Mr. Cunningham among the rest, that the celebrated Cameron was killed, not at the skirmish of Drumclog, but at the skirmish of Airdmoss, which did not take place until about a twelvemonth after; but this must result surely from our ignorance. ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... connection is cited the old history of a discourse between Vasudeva and the celestial sage Narada. On a certain occasion Vasudeva said, 'Neither an illiterate and foolish friend, nor a learned friend of fickle soul, deserves, O Narada, to know one's secret counsels. Relying on thy friendship for me, I shall say something to thee, O sage! O thou that canst go to heaven at thy pleasure, one should speak to another if ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... book-reviewer, dramatic critic, or manuscript-reader, since they have the naive belief that these occupations require neither toil nor training, and enable one to "write on the side." Meanwhile they make their livings as sub-editors on trade journals, as charity-workers, or as assistants to illiterate literary agents. ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... the profession as a "diploma mill." She selected it because the course was easy and the tuition light, though its equipment was a farce and its laboratory too meagre to deserve the name; one of the commercial medical colleges turning out each year by the hundreds, for a few dollars, illiterate graduates, totally unfitted by temperament and education for a profession that calls for the highest and best, sending them out in hordes like licensed murderers to prescribe and operate among the ...
— The Lady Doc • Caroline Lockhart
... to deal with the subject, having been secretary in the foreign office, and attached to the service of Voevoda (field marshal), Prince Dolgoruky, in 1666-1667. Among other things, he points out that the "women of the kingdom of Moscow are illiterate," and deduces the conclusion that the chief cause of all contemporary troubles in the kingdom is excessive ignorance. He declares, "We must learn from foreigners, and send our children abroad for instruction"—precisely Peter the Great's policy, ...
— A Survey of Russian Literature, with Selections • Isabel Florence Hapgood
... Melchester with Mrs. Harnham, the latter, who took a kindly interest in the girl, had taught her to speak correctly, in which accomplishment Anna showed considerable readiness, as is not unusual with the illiterate; and soon became quite fluent in the use of her mistress's phraseology. Mrs. Harnham also insisted upon her getting a spelling and copy book, and beginning to practise in these. Anna was slower in this branch of her education, and ...
— Life's Little Ironies - A set of tales with some colloquial sketches entitled A Few Crusted Characters • Thomas Hardy
... give no idea of the strong impression it made on my mind, though conveyed to it through the medium of an illiterate interpreter, Even in this mangled form, I saw the disjecta membra of a regular and splendid oration." [Footnote: Col. Stone's Life and ...
— An account of Sa-Go-Ye-Wat-Ha - Red Jacket and his people, 1750-1830 • John Niles Hubbard
... Callias's board, Charmides, Antisthenes, Hermogenes, and the like,—we will permit them to philosohize, and to mix Bacchus with the Muses as well as with the Nymphs; for the latter make him wholesome and gentle to the body, and the other pleasant and agreeable to the soul. And if there are some few illiterate persons present, they, as consonants with vowels, in the midst of the other learned, will participate not altogether inarticulately and insignificantly. But if the greater part consists of such who ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... the sterile theorists of the new illiterate literature, who are as incapable of appreciating his refined and subtle perversities as they are of admiring the beautiful form in which his full-blooded and exuberant imagination clothes his conceptions. He is an aesthete, but his aestheticism has never expressed itself ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... answer, and the ignorance of the cathedral clergy will be harped upon; you will make some small mistake, which will be a falsehood, or some admission, which will be self-condemnation; you will find yourself to have been vulgar, ill-tempered, irreverend, and illiterate, and the chances are ten to one, but that being a clergyman, you will have been guilty of blasphemy! A man may have the best of causes, the best of talents, and the best of tempers; he may write as well as Addison, or as strongly ...
— The Warden • Anthony Trollope
... enabled to produce a bowstring for his benefactor; and the sultan's "firman" appointed him to the vacant pachalik. His qualifications for office were all superlative: he was very short, very corpulent, very illiterate, ...
— The Pacha of Many Tales • Captain Frederick Marryat
... combine a plan for asserting their freedom, and rest their safety on success alone. The difference is, that then they sought freedom merely as a good; now they also claim it as a right. * * * Ignorant and illiterate as they yet are, they have maintained a correspondence, which, whether we consider its extent ...
— An Account of Some of the Principal Slave Insurrections, • Joshua Coffin
... started at the beginning of the last century, with so many human instrumentalities back of it, let us compare the Apostolic church which was started in the first third of the first century by a handful of poor, illiterate and despised Galileans. Although the wealth and culture and political power of the world were all against them, at the end of the century we are told that they numbered ...
— To Infidelity and Back • Henry F. Lutz
... was the illiterate son of a literary father who had reaped both money and fame. The son spent the former, on the strength of the latter married an earl's daughter, and thereupon began to embody in his own behavior his ideas of how a nobleman ought to carry himself; whence, ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... fly-leaf paradox, which puzzled me for many years, until I found a probable solution. I frequently saw, in the blank leaves of old books, learned books, Bibles of a time when a Bible was very costly, etc., the name of an owner who, by the handwriting and spelling, must have been an illiterate person or a child, followed by the date of the book itself. Accordingly, this uneducated person or young child seemed to be the first owner, which in many cases was not credible. Looking one day at a Barker's[418] Bible of 1599, I saw an {265} inscription in a child's ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... a small back settlement which in that day was shabby and unclean, and densely illiterate. Of the nineteen important men charged with the government of the town, thirteen had to "make their mark" in attesting important documents, because they could ...
— Is Shakespeare Dead? - from my Autobiography • Mark Twain
... of every white man's religion? Can it be a matter of astonishment, that slaves often feel that there is no just God for the poor African? Nay, verily; and were it not for the comforting and sustaining influence that these poor, illiterate and suffering creatures feel as coming from an unearthly source, they would in their ignorance all become infidels. To me, that beautiful Sabbath morning was clouded in midnight darkness, and I retired to ponder ...
— Twenty-Two Years a Slave, and Forty Years a Freeman • Austin Steward
... A group of us go every morning at five o'clock to serve the near-by villagers and teach them simple hygiene. We make it a point to clean their latrines and their mud-thatched huts. The villagers are illiterate; they cannot be educated except by example!" She ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... to ask Booth the name of the gentleman who, in the vulgar language, had struck, or taken him in for a guinea with so much ease and dexterity. Booth answered, he did not know his name; all that he knew of him was, that he was the most impudent and illiterate fellow he had ever seen, and that, by his own account, he was the author of most of the wonderful productions of the age. "Perhaps," said he, "it may look uncharitable in me to blame you for your generosity; but I am convinced the fellow hath not the least merit or capacity, and you have ...
— Amelia (Complete) • Henry Fielding
... their heavy burdens along some country road, who are not jabbering away, one and all, as if in the very heat of some exciting discussion, and afraid that their journey will come to an end before their most telling arguments are exhausted. One wonders what ignorant, illiterate fellows like these can possibly have to talk about to each other in a country where beer-shop politics are unknown, where religious disputations leave no sting behind, and want of communication limits the area of news to half-a-dozen neighbouring streets in a single agricultural village. Comparing ...
— Chinese Sketches • Herbert A. Giles
... therefrom and within quite recent times, and such I am now disposed to think is the case of the Roman version of Aladdin given by Miss Busk under the title of "How Cajusse was Married," notwithstandtng the circumstance that the old woman from whom it was obtained was almost wholly illiterate. A child who could read might have told the story out of Galland to his or her nurse, through whom it would afterwards assume local colour, with some modifications of the details. But stories having all the essential features of the tale of Aladdin were known throughout ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... and young and middle-aged persons, men and women, married and single, persons with many relatives and others with few, native and foreign born, strong and weak, well and ill, good and bad, educated and illiterate. Yet there are certain ...
— Society - Its Origin and Development • Henry Kalloch Rowe
... and which was then so frequently and so ably refuted. Cicero exclaims with the utmost indignation and contempt against such a notion:[22] he considers it not only as unworthy of a philosopher, but of an illiterate peasant; that of all things this was the most truly absurd, to fancy that the rule of justice was to be taken from the constitutions of commonwealths, or that laws derived their authority from the statutes of the people, ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VI. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... were the squire, a half-pay captain in the army, a retired custom-house surveyor who was supposed to be the illegitimate son of a member of parliament, and the surrounding farmers and labourers. All were grossly illiterate, but I soon observed that a common ignorance does not prevent, but rather tends to establish artificial distinctions. Inferiority by a single degree in the social scale becomes not only a barrier to intercourse, but a sufficient reason for contempt. The squire and his lady spent their ...
— More Pages from a Journal • Mark Rutherford
... Lord, I know very well, will pass for nothing with those who wish that the Popish clergy should be illiterate, and in a situation to produce contempt and detestation. Their minds are wholly taken up with party squabbles, and I have neither leisure nor inclination to apply any part of what I have to say to those who never think of religion or of the commonwealth in any other light than as they tend ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IV. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... experience, but it is doubtful whether the Seik soldiery ever seriously thought, although they often hauntingly boasted of fighting with the greatest power in Hindostan, until within two or three months of the first battle, and even then the rude and illiterate yeoman considered that they were about to enter upon a war purely defensive, although one in every way congenial to their feelings of pride and national jealousy. To the general impression of the Seiks, in common ...
— Vellenaux - A Novel • Edmund William Forrest
... mean to tell me," rejoined the other, "that you broke my window, and challenged me to mortal combat, and tied a tradesman up with ropes, and chased an Oxford Fellow across five meadows—all under the impression that I am such an illiterate idiot as ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton
... Peace, neighbor Smug. You see this is a Boor, a Boor of the country, an illiterate Boor, and yet the Citizen of good fellows: come, let's provide; a hem, Grass and hay! we are not yet all mortall; we'll live till we die, and be merry, and ...
— The Merry Devil • William Shakespeare
... century ago, rich and flourishing, an object of reverence, and a source of consolation to the people. It was now despoiled of its revenues; the sacred edifices were in ruins; the clergy were either ignorant of the language of their flocks, or illiterate and uncivilized intruders; and the only ritual permitted by the laws was one of which the people neither comprehended the language nor believed the doctrines. And this ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack
... you illiterate old man. What do you know of literature? Aint all them gentlemen as I plays with chice sperits and writers? Isn't it a honour to jine 'em in the old English drammy, and to eat of the wittles and drink of the old ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 365, March, 1846 • Various
... industrious man. Her mother was esteemed as a very pious woman. As was common with the laboring classes of people in England at that period, their children, instead of being sent to school, were brought up to work from early childhood. By this means, Ann, though quite illiterate, acquired a habit of industry, and was early distinguished for her activity, faithfulness, neatness, and good economy in ...
— The Book of Religions • John Hayward
... bookshelves—an odd volume of sermons, a collection of scientific essays, a technical work out of date. And the men, anxious to improve their minds, stared at the titles with the curious reverence of the illiterate for a printed book. At their elbows boys gloated over the pages of a penny dreadful, and the women fingered penny novelettes with rapid movements, trying to judge the contents from ...
— Jonah • Louis Stone
... shaking her head, thinking over the vanished splendor. Illiterate enough, unimaginative enough on all other subjects, her distorted wits called up this picture with marvellous distinctness. It was plain she saw the plate clearly. Her description ...
— McTeague • Frank Norris
... has any effective choice in the matter: their children must either go to the schools that are, or to no school at all. And as the duke thinks with reason that his son will be a lout or a milksop or a prig if he does not go to school, and the coster knows that his son will become an illiterate hooligan if he is left to the streets, there is no real alternative for either of them. Child life must be socially organized: no parent, rich or poor, can choose institutions that do not exist; and the private enterprise of individual school masters appealing to a group of well-to-do parents, ...
— A Treatise on Parents and Children • George Bernard Shaw
... of Savoy, to pay his troops, arrived at Asti on the 9th of September. Here he was received with great honour by Lodovico and his father-in-law, Duke Ercole, who rode out to meet him on his entry into the town. The magistrates and citizens welcomed him as their liege lord, and the illiterate French barons were amazed to hear a child of eleven, Margareta Solari, declaim a Latin oration with perfect ease and fluency. Two days afterwards Beatrice herself arrived at the castle of Annona, in the neighbourhood ...
— Beatrice d'Este, Duchess of Milan, 1475-1497 • Julia Mary Cartwright
... month. In fact, the number of murders, maimings and whippings during these months aggregated over one thousand.[4] The result was that the intelligent Negroes were either intimidated or killed so that the illiterate masses of Negro voters might be ordered to refrain from voting the Republican ticket to strengthen the Democrats or be subjected to starvation through the operation of the mischievous land tenure and credit system. What was not done in 1868 to overthrow ...
— A Century of Negro Migration • Carter G. Woodson
... face. Her death had left him desolate. She was the only human being who had ever understood him. He could never, he thought, have got through his tortured school days without her. After she died he would not go to school. He was not in any sense educated. His father and grandfather had been illiterate men and he had inherited their underdeveloped brain cells. But he loved poetry and read all he could get of it. It overlaid his primitive nature with a curious iridescence of fancy and furnished him with ideals and hungers his environment could ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1909 to 1922 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... you recommended. He was a great deal too full of the market to think of any thing else—which is just as it should be, for a thriving man. What has he to do with books? And I have no doubt that he will thrive, and be a very rich man in time—and his being illiterate and coarse need ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... 17-year-old midshipman of the Salamis, is suddenly given the job of going aboard and taking command of the Mercury, an emigrant ship that they find drifting in mid-ocean, all her officers having died in various accidents, and the illiterate bosun and the ship's carpenter knowing full well that they had no idea how to navigate. He takes charge and all appears to be going well, when— But I will not spoil a good story ...
— Overdue - The Story of a Missing Ship • Harry Collingwood
... novel is purposely pitched in a style that will be easily understood; but even so, there is a great deal of word- and phrase-skipping to be done by many illiterate readers, who are quite satisfied if they can extract the general sense as they go along. The book-language, as cultivated by the best writers, is to be freely understood only by those who have stocked their minds well with the extensive phraseology which has been gradually created by eminent ...
— The Civilization Of China • Herbert A. Giles
... that there fell upon Clonderriff a snowstorm of documents—leases and mortgages and conveyances and post-obits—all the documentary debris of a crumbled estate, from the Elizabethan charter on which the first Hewish had founded Roscarna to the illiterate IOU's of Jocelyn's spider-racing days. Considine, up to his neck in it, called on Gabrielle to help in the ordering of her affairs. At Clonderriff they had not room enough for this accumulation of papers, so they set aside the library at Roscarna for the ...
— The Tragic Bride • Francis Brett Young
... sick and nearly dead from starvation. When they reached Nashville, or Knoxville after it came into our possession, they were in need of all things; shelter, food, clothing, medicine and care. A few of them were well educated; the majority were illiterate so far as book knowledge was concerned, but intelligent and thoughtful on the subject of loyalty and the war; not a few were almost reduced to a state of fatuity by their sufferings, and seemed to have lost all distinct consciousness of what ...
— Woman's Work in the Civil War - A Record of Heroism, Patriotism, and Patience • Linus Pierpont Brockett
... wrong Way. Thus we founde it before, poor motherlesse Girls, to our Cost; and I reallie believe it was more in Kindnesse for us than himself, that Father listened to the Doctor's Overtures in behalfe of Miss Minshull; for what Companion can soe illiterate a Woman be to him? But he believed her gentle, hearde that she was a good Housewife, and apprehended she would be kind to us. . . . Alas the Daye! What Tears we three shed in our Chamber that Night! and wished, ...
— Mary Powell & Deborah's Diary • Anne Manning
... AN illiterate person, who always volunteered to "go round with the hat," but was suspected of sparing his own pocket, overhearing once a hint to that effect, replied, "Other gentlemen puts down what they thinks proper, and so do I. ...
— The Jest Book - The Choicest Anecdotes and Sayings • Mark Lemon
... 'Jai Kabir Ki,' or 'Victory to Kabir.' They conceive of the deity as consisting of light, and therefore it seems probable that, like the other Vaishnava sects, they really take him to be the Sun. Kabir prohibited the worship of all idols and visible symbols, but as might be expected the illiterate Kabirpanthis cannot adhere strictly to this. Some of them worship the Bijak, the principal sacred book of their sect. At Rudri near Dhamtari on the Mahanadi one of the Gurus is buried, and a religious fair is held there. ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India—Volume I (of IV) • R.V. Russell
... hope that it may be a heeded warning to the intellectual of earth, not less than the illiterate. The educated man is more liable to suffer from strong stimulants than the man who is not educated. Never was there a greater or more dangerous fallacy than that so often urged, that the thinking ...
— Fifteen Years in Hell • Luther Benson
... boy is a possible President, some undesirable results are inevitable. The successful men become egotistic, and it is a common, well-nigh universal, practise for all sorts and conditions of men to speak harshly of the authorities. In the loafers on the street corners, in the illiterate that use the country store as their club, in the very halls of congress, are heard the most unsparing criticisms and denunciations of the administration. These unwarranted comments fell thick and fast on Lincoln, because he ...
— The Life of Abraham Lincoln • Henry Ketcham
... magnificence of taste which would have made the houses and manners of modern stock-jobbers intolerable to them. Renaissance millionaires could be vulgar and brutal, but they were great gentlemen. They were neither illiterate cads nor meddlesome puritans, nor even saviours of society. Yet, if we are to understand the amazing popularity of Titian's and of Veronese's women, we must take note of their niceness to kiss and obvious willingness to be kissed. That ...
— Art • Clive Bell
... give utterance to its meaning, was there. He had hardly surrendered his commission as chaplain in the army. He had fought to win the freedom of a race. To make that race true free men was a task much more vast than to emancipate them. The parting of the ways had come. An illiterate people must be taught. No longer should it be a crime to instruct them. The rather was he the criminal who should deny them an education. It was an hour for the voice of a prophet. With the ken of a seer, Chaplain Cravath, representing the American Missionary Association, Jan. 9th, 1866, made ...
— The American Missionary — Volume 54, No. 01, January, 1900 • Various
... the boy, as a long letter written next day to his father and mother clearly shows. He went to the house of the printer, where he did not receive the warm welcome he had expected. Deborah Franklin was a fat, hard-working, illiterate, economical housewife. She had a great pride in her husband, but had fallen hopelessly behind him. She regarded with awe and slight understanding the accomplishments of his virile, restless, on-pushing ...
— In the Days of Poor Richard • Irving Bacheller
... She is illiterate, but clever. Her understanding is quick, and her perceptions keen. I think, with education she might have been a remarkable person. She is not particularly masculine in her appearance, and her manners are gentle and cheerful. She has not contracted ...
— Journal of a Voyage to Brazil - And Residence There During Part of the Years 1821, 1822, 1823 • Maria Graham
... hallucination or untruth on the part of those who depose to them. These things could not have occurred as they are narrated, and Dr Bataille is exploiting the ignorance of that class of readers to whom his mode of publication appealed. As products of imagination his marvels are crude and illiterate; in other words, they belong to precisely that type which is characteristic of romances published in penny numbers, and when he pledges his rectitude regarding them he does not enlist our confidence but indicates the slight value which he sets on ...
— Devil-Worship in France - or The Question of Lucifer • Arthur Edward Waite
... that is studied, do not stagger Prof. Muller at all. Grantha he takes to mean simply a composition, and this may be handed down to posterity by oral communication. Hence, we must believe that Panini was illiterate; but yet composed the most elaborate and scientific system of grammar ever known; recorded its 3,996 rules only upon the molecular quicksands of his "cerebral cineritious matter," and handed them over to his disciples by atmospheric vibration, ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... born, or originally a resident, in the Hartz Mountains; he was the serf of an Hungarian nobleman, of great possessions, in Transylvania; but, although a serf, he was not by any means a poor or illiterate man. In fact, he was rich, and his intelligence and respectability were such, that he had been raised by his lord to the stewardship; but, whoever may happen to be born a serf, a serf must he remain, ...
— The Phantom Ship • Captain Frederick Marryat
... communicant, who, after conference with his minister, should declare that he could not conscientiously receive the bread and wine kneeling, might receive them sitting. Mew, Bishop of Winchester, an honest man, but illiterate, weak even in his best days, and now fast sinking into dotage, protested against this concession, and withdrew from the assembly. The other members continued to apply themselves vigorously to their task: and no more secessions took place, though there ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... among men. In the human tide that ebbed and flowed through this world gateway, he saw men of wealth and men of poverty—people of culture and position who had come or were going in Pullman or private cars and illiterate, stupid, animal looking, emigrants who were crowded, much like cattle, in the lowest class. There were business men of large affairs; countrymen with wondering faces; shallow, pleasure seekers; artists and scholars; idle fools; vicious sharks watching for victims; mothers with flocks ...
— Their Yesterdays • Harold Bell Wright
... their friends, which was shown me at the time by Mr. McCreary, Commissioner of Immigration at that point. The cable read, "Arrived Canada safe are free." The change was a little too much for them, and they did not realize that they were not free to become nuisances to others. They were ignorant, illiterate, but had the merit of being conscientious and being willing to suffer for conscience' sake. This latter characteristic always prevented me from condemning them wholly. Once their ignorance was removed they would become industrious and ...
— Policing the Plains - Being the Real-Life Record of the Famous North-West Mounted Police • R.G. MacBeth
... those by Grazing, then to make him consider the Circumstances of the People in Ulster, and those in the other Provinces. In the first, all are laborious, all are well Cloath'd, well Fed, well Housed and Taught; in the last, all Lazy, Naked, Starv'd, Lodg'd in dirty Hutts, and almost Illiterate. The superior Advantages which the North so eminently enjoys, proceed not so much from the different Genius's, of the two opposite Religions, which prevail there, and in the South, (tho' that is something) but from Tillage and Labour, ...
— A Dialogue Between Dean Swift and Tho. Prior, Esq. • Anonymous
... her—that she didn't care for it herself. She was furiously jealous, she said; and that weakness was but a new proof of her disinterested affection. She pronounced Mrs. Wix's effusions moreover illiterate and unprofitable; she made no scruple of declaring it monstrous that a woman in her senses should have placed the formation of her daughter's mind in such ridiculous hands. Maisie was well aware ...
— What Maisie Knew • Henry James
... their beer-mugs to the adventures of Culotte-Verte, were not thinking of sun-gods or dawn-maidens, or night-demons; and no theory of mythology can be sound which implies such an extravagance. Most of these stories have lived on the lips of the common people; and illiterate persons are not in the habit of allegorizing in the style of mediaeval monks or rabbinical commentators. But what has been amply demonstrated is, that the sun and the clouds, the light and the darkness, were once supposed to be actuated by wills analogous to the human will; that they were personified ...
— Myths and Myth-Makers - Old Tales and Superstitions Interpreted by Comparative Mythology • John Fiske
... to the parish, was at great pains to teach an illiterate old man, crippled with rheumatism, his letters so that he could read the Bible. On the clergyman's return after a short absence from the parish, he ...
— Jokes For All Occasions - Selected and Edited by One of America's Foremost Public Speakers • Anonymous
... the most commonplace and trivial string of talk. The newest form of English diction is of course never written; the sense of that leisure-class propriety which requires archaism in speech is present even in the most illiterate or sensational writers in sufficient force to prevent such a lapse. On the other hand, the highest and most conventionalized style of archaic diction is—quite characteristically—properly employed only in communications between an anthropomorphic divinity ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... and fifty persons were put in prison. It was sometime before the conviction began to spread, that even men of sense, education, and fervent piety could entertain the madness and infatuation of the weak, illiterate, and unprincipled. A disbeliever in witchcraft was an 'obdurate sadducee.' That conviction did at last possess men. The disease which affected the supposed bewitched children somewhat resembled St. Vitus' ...
— The Rise of Canada, from Barbarism to Wealth and Civilisation - Volume 1 • Charles Roger
... handwriting caused him to stop. Then still staring at it, he began to move slowly and automatically backwards to the porch. When he reached it he sat down, unfolded the letter, and without attempting to read it, turned its pages over and over with the unfamiliarity of an illiterate man in search of the signature. This when found apparently plunged him again into motionless abstraction. Only once he changed his position to pull up the legs of his trousers, open his knees, and extend the distance between his feet, and ...
— Cressy • Bret Harte |
