"Belles-lettres" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... with silver buckles completed is costume. The old man's head was bare, and ornamented with a fringe of grizzled locks, quite poetically scanty. "Old Doguereau," as Porchon styled him, was dressed half like a professor of belles-lettres as to his trousers and shoes, half like a tradesman with respect to the variegated waistcoat, the stockings, and the watch; and the same odd mixture appeared in the man himself. He united the magisterial, dogmatic ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... qu'il a fait de micux; mais songez qu'a quatre cent lieues de Paris il est bien difficile de savoir si un homme qu'on lui recommende a du merite ou non; de plus c'est toujours des vers, et bien ou mal appliques ils prouvent que le vainqueur de l'Autriche aime les belles-lettres que j'aime de tout mon coeur. D'ailleurs D'Arnaud est un bon diable, qui par-oi par-la ne laisoe pas de rencontrer de bons tirades. Il a du gout, il se forme, et s'il aime qu'il se deforme, il n'y a pas grand mal. En un mot, la petite meprise du Roi de Prusse n'empeche ...
— Berlin and Sans-Souci • Louise Muhlbach
... directions—a grand collegiate literary race. Let the mental contest be on the same week with the muscular. Let Yale and Harvard and Williams and Princeton and Dartmouth see who has the champion among scholars. Let there be a Waterloo in belles-lettres and rhetoric and mathematics and philosophy. Let us see whether the students of Doctors McCosh, or Porter, or Campbell, or Smith are most worthy to wear the belt. About twelve o'clock at noon let the literary flotilla start prow and prow, oar-lock and oar-lock. Let Helicon empty its waters ...
— Around The Tea-Table • T. De Witt Talmage
... himself for a want of social ceremony, Ibn Abi 's-Sakr, "an amateur of the belles-lettres," who died in 1105, composed these verses: An indisposition called eighty years hinders me from rising to receive my friends; but when they reach an advanced age, they will ...
— A Boswell of Baghdad - With Diversions • E. V. Lucas
... especially for the belles-lettres, he entertained a profound contempt. With this he had been inspired by Casimir Perier, whose pert little query "A quoi un poete est il bon?" he was in the habit of quoting, with a very droll pronunciation, as the ne plus ultra of logical wit. Thus my own inkling for the ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... annoying appellation? for annoying it most assuredly was. It was because of something in me that could not be hidden; stealing out in an occasional polysyllable; an otherwise incomprehensible deliberation in dining; remote, unguarded allusions to Belles-Lettres affairs; and other trifles superfluous ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville
... famously. We have had a paper presented and read lately which has greatly amused some of us and provoked a few of the weaker sort. The writer is that crabbed old Professor of Belles-Lettres at that men's college over there. He is dreadfully hard on the poor "poets," as they call themselves. It seems that a great many young persons, and more especially a great many young girls, of whom the Institute has furnished a considerable proportion, have taken to ...
— A Mortal Antipathy • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... Stephen Longfellow, an eminent lawyer, was born in Portland, Maine. He graduated at Bowdoin College in 1825. After spending four years in Europe, he was Professor of Modern Languages and Literature at Bowdoin till 1835, when he was appointed to the chair of Modern Languages and Belles-lettres in Harvard University. He resigned his professorship in 1854, after which time he resided in Cambridge, Mass. Longfellow wrote many original works both in verse and prose, and made several translations, the most famous of which is that of the works of Dante. His poetry is always chaste and ...
— McGuffey's Fifth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... at all hours, tearing his hair in my laboratory, while I tried to coach him. I do think, for a boy brought up on belles-lettres, he's made a decent showing as assistant mineralogist. I like Dolph. He's an all-round ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... acquirement was accompanied by an equal delight in imparting his treasures. When the essential ingredients of his course were completed, he relieved his memory of its redundant stores, by giving lectures on rhetoric and belles-lettres, on the microscope, and on the anatomy of the human frame; and there is one feature of his method which we would especially commemorate, as we fear that it still remains an original without a copy. Sometimes he conducted the students into ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... artist and the man of letters to assist and celebrate this establishment. There was to be much editing of Shakespear and Charles Lamb, much delightful humour and costume romance, and an Academy of refined Fine Writers would presently establish belles-lettres on the reputable official basis, write finis to creative force and undertake the task of stereotyping the language. Literature was to have its once terrible ferments reduced to the quality of a helpful pepsin. Ideas were dead—or domesticated. The last wild idea, in an impoverished ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... wrote Parr, 'were all the Johnsonians: Malone, Steevens, Sir W. Scott, Windham, and even Fox, all in arms. The epithet was cold. They do not understand it, and I am a Scholar, not a Belles-Lettres man.' ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 4 (of 6) • Boswell
... now sent to reside with Augustine Washington, at Bridges Creek, and enjoy the benefit of a superior school in that neighborhood, kept by a Mr. Williams. His education, however, was plain and practical. He never attempted the learned languages, nor manifested any inclination for rhetoric or belles-lettres. His object, or the object of his friends, seems to have been confined to fitting him for ordinary business. His manuscript school books still exist, and are models of neatness and accuracy. One of them, it is true, a ciphering book, preserved in the library at Mount Vernon, has some school-boy ...
— The Life of George Washington, Volume I • Washington Irving
... "reflects the pleasure-loving and effeminate, but cultured and refined, character of the class of Japanese who produced it. It has no serious masculine qualities and may be described in one word as belles-lettres—poetry, fiction, diaries, and essays of a desultory kind. The lower classes of the people had no share in the literary activity of the time. Culture had not as yet penetrated beyond a very narrow circle. Both writers and readers belonged ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... were by no means confined to the libraries of the economist and politician. When the national troops pillaged the houses and deserted buildings of Charleston, the streets were strewn with the pamphlets, sermons and essays of politicians, clergymen, and belles-lettres scholars, all promulgating, according to the ability and tastes of their several authors, the rights of the sovereign State. No public occasion passed by which did not witness an assertion of these rights, and the gauntlet of defiance ...
— Report on the Condition of the South • Carl Schurz
... prison de Jeanne d'Arc a Rouen. Memoire lu a l'Academie des Sciences, Belles-lettres et Arts de Rouen, ...
— Joan of Arc • Ronald Sutherland Gower
... side in a hundred years time. For the day is not we may be sure, very far distant when man will cease to attach much interest to his past. I am very much afraid that our minute contributions to the Academie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, which are intended to assist to an accurate comprehension of history, will crumble to dust before they have been read. It is by chemistry at one end and by astronomy at the other, and especially by general physiology, that we really grasp the secret of existence of the world or of ...
— Recollections of My Youth • Ernest Renan
... has 'literature,' contrasted with the magnitude of its present import. It is just 'litteral'—letters in their most primitive sense; and [Greek: grammata] is nought other. Nor can even all the pomposity of the 'belles-lettres' carry us any farther than the very fine 'letters' or litteral; while even Solomon So-so may take courage when he reflects (provided Solomon be ever guilty of reflecting) that the 'literati' have 'literally' nothing more profound about them than the knowledge of their 'letters.' ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... women do not have an important place on the list. They have in all thirty-two representatives in the thousand. Of these eleven are hereditary sovereigns, and eight are eminent through misfortunes, beauty, or other circumstances. Belles-lettres and fiction—the only department in which woman has accomplished much—give ten names as compared with seventy-two men. Sappho and Joan d'Arc are the only other women on the list. It is noticeable that with the exception of Sappho—a name associated with certain fine fragments—women ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... founder. Somewhat later, in 1430, was established the University of Barcelona, placed under the direction of the municipality, and endowed by the city with ample funds for instruction in the various departments of law, theology, medicine, and the belles-lettres. This institution survived until the commencement ...
— History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella V1 • William H. Prescott
... science, it is anathema; and the press being subject to the restrictions of the Holy Office, and the University closed to modern thought, but few scholars are to be found in the duchy, save those who occupy themselves with belles-lettres, or, like the abate Crescenti, are engaged in historical research. Pianura, even in the late Duke's day, had its circle of lettered noblemen who patronised the arts and founded the local Arcadia; but ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... letter about Bourget.... You are speaking of the "right to live" of this or that branch of knowledge; I am speaking of peace, not of rights. I want people not to see war where there is none. Different branches of knowledge have always lived together in peace. Anatomy and belles-lettres are of equally noble descent; they have the same purpose and the same enemy—the devil—and there is absolutely nothing for them to fight about. There is no struggle for existence between them. If a man knows about the circulation of the blood, he is ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... literature should be created. The other men of his epoch, and among whom he lived, believed that literature was a very desirable article, a thing you could create if you were only smart enough. But Emerson had no literary ambition. He cared nothing for belles-lettres. The consequence is that he stands above his age like a colossus. While he lived his figure could be seen from Europe towering like Atlas over the ...
— Emerson and Other Essays • John Jay Chapman
... Frischlin, a German poet and philosopher, born in the duchy of Wrtemberg in 1547. At an early age he showed great talents; honours clustered thickly on his brow. At the age of twenty years he was made Professor of Belles-Lettres at Tubingen; he received from the Emperor Rudolph the poetic crown with the title of chevalier, and was made Count Palatin as a reward for his three panegyrics composed in honour of the emperors of the House of Austria. Certainly Fortune smiled upon her favourite, but Envy raised up ...
— Books Fatal to Their Authors • P. H. Ditchfield
... winter, took more than one dose a week, varying from thirty to sixty drops. Toward the close of the session I one day deferred the dose till Sunday evening. On the Monday following, in the afternoon, I was in one of the class-rooms listening to the lecturer on Belles-lettres and Rhetoric. One hundred and more young men sat, on that Monday afternoon, listening to his silvery voice as he read extracts from Falconer's "Shipwreck," while the splendid conceptions of the poem, and the opium to boot, taken on the Sunday ...
— The Opium Habit • Horace B. Day
... human heart, and delighted to study it in its earlier impulses. My two elder sisters, having returned home from a city boarding-school, were likewise placed under his care, to direct their reading in history and belles-lettres. ...
— The Crayon Papers • Washington Irving
... the reality of foulness and decay, are so suggested as to become centers on which receptive minds will organize and congenial ones will combine in sympathy. It is the effect of a great and active literature of belles-lettres, which is practically current throughout the civilized world, to multiply these sects of sentimental philosophy, with the fads and poses which correspond, and to provide them with appropriate cant. The cant of the voluptuary, the cynical egoist, the friend of humanity, and all the rest ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... was the pleasantest and most conversable member of the diplomatic corps while I was there; a man of good fancy, acuteness, irony, cunning, and egoism. No heart, not much of any science, yet enough of every one to speak its language: his forte was Belles-lettres, painting, and sculpture. In these he was the oracle of the society, and as such, was the Empress Catharine's private correspondent and factor, in all things not diplomatic. It was through him I got her permission for poor Ledyard to go to Kamschatka, and cross over thence to the ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... from the classic and belles-lettres grooves that were still almost a cult with the college graduate, by another recreation now become habitual with him. In his long tramps about the city, to vary the monotony, he would sometimes stop and chat with ...
— The Honorable Peter Stirling and What People Thought of Him • Paul Leicester Ford
... with your German literature, and your stars of the first magnitude! We must acknowledge our poverty with humility; belles-lettres have never achieved success upon our soil. Moreover, this star of the first magnitude—this Herr Goethe—I remember him well; I wish to know nothing of him. He has quite turned the heads of all the love-sick fools with his 'Sorrows of Young Werther.' ...
— Old Fritz and the New Era • Louise Muhlbach
... castle of your own to go to; and that's a dismal sort of business, compared with what I have in petto for you—'the feast of reason, and the flow of soul,' in the first style, I assure you. You must know, I always—even in the midst of the wildest of my wild oats—had a taste for the belles-lettres, and philosophy, and the muses, and the literati, and so forth—always a touch of the Mecaenas about me.—And now my boy's growing up, it's more particularly proper to bring these sort of people about him; ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. V - Tales of a Fashionable Life • Maria Edgeworth
... intellect. Several litterateurs of some distinction have already been mentioned. Sainte-Beuve and Balzac were two of the earliest of her literary friends, among whom she numbered also Heine. With Lamartine and other cultivators of the belles-lettres she was likewise acquainted. Three of her friends, men of an altogether different type and calibre, have, however, a greater claim on the attention of the student of George Sand's personality than any of those just named, because their speculations and ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... with the inspiration of spring-tide, having the perfume of the first lilacs, and Forest Birds (the title of that collection of poems which Louis Miraz published a little while after he read them to me) will retain a place among the volumes in the first rank of belles-lettres, by the side of those poets of a single book—of the Daudet ...
— Ten Tales • Francois Coppee
... TREASURY: A new and popular Encyclopædia of Science and the Belles-Lettres: Including every Subject connected with Literature ...
— Rambles in the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia - with Notices of their History, Antiquities, and Present Condition. • Thomas Forester
... saw it decided by a rising vote that England would come first—Sergeant Smith, indeed, who chanced to be a professor of belles-lettres at a great school, having declared, with the gesture of Saint John on Patmos, that he saw approaching our shores a white winged ship bearing her declaration of amity. "No. 3," intoned the first musician. ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... As for instructors, I think we know enough to be instructors ourselves," replied the Idiot. "For instance: Pedagog's University. John Pedagog, President; Alonzo B. Whitechoker, Chaplain; Mrs. Smithers-Pedagog, Matron. For Professor of Belles-lettres, the Bibliomaniac, assisted by the Poet; Medical Lectures by Dr. Capsule; Chemistry taught by our genial friend who occasionally imbibes; Chair in General Information, your humble servant. Why, we would be overrun with pupils and money ...
— Coffee and Repartee • John Kendrick Bangs
... consider the art of letters we find a similar condition. Germany has had philosophers and historians of high rank; but in pure literature, in what used to be called "belles-lettres," from the death of Goethe in 1832 to the advent of the younger generation of dramatists, Sudermann and Hauptmann and the rest, in the final decade of the nineteenth century—that is to say, for a period of ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various
... some commercial occupation that will furnish me with a livelihood. The book and stationery business, though an humble one, seems to me not inapt nor altogether uncongenial. I am a graduate of the University of Virginia; and Mrs. Blaylock's really wonderful acquaintance with belles-lettres and poetic literature should go far toward insuring success. Of course, Mrs. Blaylock would not personally serve behind the counter. With the nearly three hundred dollars I have remaining I can manage the building of a ...
— Waifs and Strays - Part 1 • O. Henry
... ago in Coalchester, a hundred years ago, there had been a little circle of elegant literati, connoisseurs of literature and art,—men, so far as men of that age might be, genuinely, if timidly and old-maidishly, affectionate towards belles-lettres; men who had got so far as to appreciate the freshness of an Elizabethan song; minor Bishops Percy; and such lavender is the true love of anything that their memories still hung about the walls of the old Lyceum along with their portraits; while so necessary are great names for little ...
— The Romance of Zion Chapel [3d ed.] • Richard Le Gallienne
... sincerity. Scarcely a department of Southern life escapes this fundamental attitude of special pleader and disingenuousness. It explains the Southern fondness for legal subtleties. All attempts at Southern poetry, belles-lettres, painting, novels, bear the stamp of the special plea, of authors ...
— Birthright - A Novel • T.S. Stribling
... had been Jesuit professors, with almost no exception, and nearly all had taught humanities, belles-lettres, and rhetoric. Father Southwell in 1676 numbers 2240 authors, and Father de Backer ...
— The Autobiography of St. Ignatius • Saint Ignatius Loyola
... his early death. At the time he was numbered one of the "five greatest poets of the country." On his return from a journey to Mexico, taken for his health, he was elected, in 1826, professor of Belles-lettres in the University of Maryland, formerly called the ...
— Southern Literature From 1579-1895 • Louise Manly
... bitter evening of December, I arrived by mail in a large town, which was then the residence of an intimate friend, one of those gifted youths who cultivate poetry and the belles-lettres, and call themselves students at law. My first business, after supper, was to visit him at the office of his distinguished instructor. As I have said, it was a bitter night, clear starlight, but cold as Nova Zembla,—the shop-windows along the street being frosted, so as almost to hide the ...
— The Snow Image • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... was made Professor of Belles-Lettres in Harvard University, and after spending somewhat more than a year in Europe, in special preparation, he entered in the autumn of 1856 upon the duties of the chair, which he continued to occupy till 1877, when he was appointed Minister of ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... house of Han a beginning was made in the institution of civil service examinations—a system which has continued to dominate the Chinese intellect down to our time; but it was not fully developed until the dynasty of T'ang. Belles-lettres made a marked advance. The poetry of the period is more finished [Page 110] than that of the Chous. Prose composition, too, is vigorous and lucid. The muse of history claims the place of honour. Sze-ma Ts'ien, the Herodotus of China, was born in ...
— The Awakening of China • W.A.P. Martin
... became known as the Lycee. These institutions corresponded to the Colleges under the old regime, of which the College of Guyenne (R. 136) was a type. The instruction was to include the ancient languages, rhetoric, logic, ethics, belles-lettres, mathematics, and physical science, with some provision for additional instruction in modern languages and drawing. Each was to have at least eight "professors," an administrative head, a supervisor of studies, and a steward to manage the business affairs ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... he never knew; he had a belles-lettres professorship in a new college up in D——. He would not take a cent of the farm money; he had had his share long ago; the four thousand dollars were invested for Luke. He did the best he could, and all he ...
— Real Folks • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... young men go to the Paris schools from time to time. The only sculptor of original merit that Canada has yet produced is Hebert, a French Canadian, whose monuments of eminent Canadians stand in several public places. Science has not made so much progress as belles-lettres and history, though Laval University—the principal educational institution of the highest class—has among its professors men who show some creditable work in mathematics, geology, and physics. In romance, however, very little has ...
— Canada • J. G. Bourinot
... Jules Doinel, who was chiefly concerned in the restoration of the Gnosis and the establishment of a "Gnostic church" in Paris about the year 1890, and is moreover not unknown as a Masonic orator, and in the world of belles-lettres. M. Papus, with the generosity of a mystic, can only speak well of the pious enthusiast who has betrayed his cause and scandalised the school he represents; he explains that Jules Doinel is a marvellous poet deficient in the scientific culture which might have enabled him to explain in ...
— Devil-Worship in France - or The Question of Lucifer • Arthur Edward Waite
... as I went back to my seat; "this must be the man of whom my tutor spoke, the other day! Monsieur Flamaran belongs to the Academy of Moral and Political Science, the other to the Institute of Inscriptions and the Belles-Lettres. Charnot? Yes, I have those two syllables in my ear. The very last time I saw Monsieur Flamaran he let fall 'my very good friend Charnot, of the 'Inscriptions.' They are friends. And I am in a pretty situation; threatened with I don't know ...
— The Ink-Stain, Complete • Rene Bazin
... is figured a brilliant, honorable and successful Man, of standing and perhaps of marked taste in art, belles-lettres and the like; and gifted in them. Influenced by its like suit, a Man with much original in him, shrewd in money or gift. By a Heart, a Male Character of kindly and humane traits; or one sensitive and easily moved in his mood. By a Club, ...
— The Square of Sevens - An Authoritative Method of Cartomancy with a Prefatory Note • E. Irenaeus Stevenson
... in the common development of civilisation? One of the latest of the champions of the Moderns, the Abbe Terrasson, maintained that "to separate the general view of the progress of the human mind in regard to natural science, and in regard to belles-lettres, would be a fitting expedient to a man who had two souls, but it is useless to him who has only one." [Footnote: Abbe Terrasson, 1670-1750. His Philosophie applicable a tons les objets de l'esprit et de la raison was issued posthumously in 1754. His Dissertation critique sur l'Iliade ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... reminiscence of student life-for the "Tia Fingida," if it be his, is not one—nothing, not even "a college joke," to show that he remembered days that most men remember best. All that we know positively about his education is that Juan Lopez de Hoyos, a professor of humanities and belles-lettres of some eminence, calls him his "dear and beloved pupil." This was in a little collection of verses by different hands on the death of Isabel de Valois, second queen of Philip II, published by the professor in 1569, to which Cervantes ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... Poetry and belles-lettres being more dependent on the state of the language than purely scientific works, we can proceed no further, without first making our readers acquainted with the recent innovations ...
— Historical View of the Languages and Literature of the Slavic - Nations • Therese Albertine Louise von Jacob Robinson |
