"Literal" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... I may say, in the most literal sense, for in picking his way from the links to the shingle beach his foot caught, partly in a gorse-root and partly in a biggish stone, and over he went. When he got up and surveyed his surroundings, he found himself in a patch of somewhat broken ground covered ...
— Ghost Stories of an Antiquary • Montague Rhodes James
... do not injure those that go no further than the apparent meaning. Thus, for instance, they assert that there are punishments and rivers under the earth: and if we adhere to the literal meaning of these we shall not be injured. But they are deficient in this, that as their apparent signification does not injure, we often content ourselves with this, and do not explore the latent truth. ...
— Introduction to the Philosophy and Writings of Plato • Thomas Taylor
... picture of myself! Hooray for you! A picture, then, not of my physiognomy, but of my personality. Very well, sir. Here is the portrait—true to the life—in this great, clumsy, conglomerate package of articles that represent—perhaps—not even so much the prosy, literal things that I am, as the much more illuminating and significant things that I would like to be. It's what we would 'like to be' that really tells most about us, isn't it, Carl Stanton? The brown that I have to wear talks loudly ...
— Molly Make-Believe • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... sagacious critic who censures the description, because it is not an exact and prosaic inventory of the characteristics of the Lake of Como!—When Melnotte, for instance, talks of birds "that syllable the name of Pauline" (by the way, a literal translation from an Italian poet), he is not thinking of ornithology, but probably of the Arabian Nights. He is venting the extravagant, but natural, enthusiasm of the ...
— The Lady of Lyons - or Love and Pride • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... in a sense not entirely literal, for reasons which are not necessary to be explained, this man of wondrous wisdom saw that he had been made a dupe. Cunning as a fox were his would-be friends; but having got him to the bush, there they let him gambol as he would, ensnaring him to ...
— Punchinello, Vol. II., No. 33, November 12, 1870 • Various
... admirers must admit that he is not a satisfactory representative of Cervantes. His translation of the First Part was very hastily made and was never revised by him. It has all the freshness and vigour, but also a full measure of the faults, of a hasty production. It is often very literal—barbarously literal frequently—but just as often very loose. He had evidently a good colloquial knowledge of Spanish, but apparently not much more. It never seems to occur to him that the same translation of a word will not suit ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... Reuchlin, Santez, Pagnino, Pelikan, and Cardinal Bellarmine. The contention of the early Reformers that the Bible was the sole source of divine revelation, though never accepted by Catholic scholars, necessitated a close study of the words and literal meaning of the sacred text. In opposition to the private interpretation of the Reformers Catholics contended that the teaching authority of the Church and the interpretation of the Fathers were the only sure guides. The distinction between deutero-canonical and proto-canonical ...
— History of the Catholic Church from the Renaissance to the French • Rev. James MacCaffrey
... is—what it pretends to be a joint production, in the conception of the story, the exposition of the characters, and in its literal composition. There is scarcely a chapter that does not bear the marks of the two writers of the book. S. ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 1. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... humblest aspect of life. They brought out with marvellous accuracy all its traits, except, indeed, the underlying strain of poetry, which, while it redeems plainness, sordidness, and even coarseness, is as true to life as is its veriest prose. With those who ask a literal copy of life, whether high or low, and ask no more, the Teniers and their school must always be in the highest favour; and to those who are wearied and sceptical of blunders and failures in seeking that underlying strain ...
— The Old Masters and Their Pictures - For the Use of Schools and Learners in Art • Sarah Tytler
... deciding whether to employ say, five typists, or six, you will not vaguely lump the services of the whole six typists together, and consider whether as a whole they are worth to you the wages you must give them. You will, in the most direct and literal manner, weigh up the additional benefit you would derive from a sixth typist, and if that does not seem to you equivalent to her wage, you will not engage her, however essential it may be to you to have one or two typists in your office. If on the other hand, the utility of having ...
— Supply and Demand • Hubert D. Henderson
... vision foreshadows the conquest of the air, its significance is symbolic rather than literal, and, like Pindar checking the steeds of his ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... excellent qualities, by Mr. W. S. Dugdale. Another version of great merit, of both the Purgatorio and Paradiso, is that of Mr. A. J. Butler. It is accompanied by a scholarly and valuable comment, and I owe much to Mr. Butler's work. But through what seems to me occasional excess of literal fidelity his English is now and then somewhat crabbed. "He overacts the office of an interpreter," I cite again from Howell, "who doth enslave himself too strictly to words or phrases. One may be so over-punctual in words that ...
— The Divine Comedy, Volume 1, Hell [The Inferno] • Dante Alighieri
... there was no need to be so literal," returned Mrs. Challoner, reprovingly; for she was a gentlewoman of the old school, and nothing grieved her more than slipshod English or any idiom or idiotcy of modern parlance in the mouths of her bright young daughters: to speak ...
— Not Like Other Girls • Rosa N. Carey
... love and life, the translations of which from Bengali are published in this book, were written much earlier than the series of religious poems contained in the book named Gitanjali. The translations are not always literal—the originals being ...
— The Gardener • Rabindranath Tagore
... thus that the heroic heart, the seeing eye of the first times, still feels and sees in us of the latest; that the Wise Man stands ever encompassed, and spiritually embraced, by a cloud of witnesses and brothers; and there is a living, literal Communion of Saints, wide as the World itself, and as the History of ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... the Inferno, a literal prose translation with the text of the original collated from the best editions, with explanatory notes by J. A. Carlyle, Ed. 6, 1891 (contains valuable chapters on manuscripts, ...
— National Epics • Kate Milner Rabb
... of the term burial throughout this paper is to be understood in its literal significance, the word being derived from the Teutonic Anglo-Saxon "birgan," ...
— A Further Contribution to the Study of the Mortuary Customs of the North American Indians • H.C. Yarrow
... and the same people returned with Mansong's answer, a literal translation of which I give as follows. "Mansong says he will protect you; that a road is open for you every where, as far as his hand (power) extends. If you wish to go to the East, no man shall harm you from Sego till you pass Tombuctoo. If you wish to go ...
— The Journal Of A Mission To The Interior Of Africa, In The Year 1805 • Mungo Park
... not allowed to waste away, however much the constituent parts of it may shift. The waste and renewal which business entails leave the equivalent of the million dollars always on hand, though never in the literal shape of money. A stock of shifting goods always worth a million dollars is, by a figure of speech, described as a million dollars ...
— Essentials of Economic Theory - As Applied to Modern Problems of Industry and Public Policy • John Bates Clark
... twenty-six marginal changes, a very large proportion, quite one-half, and we should think more, are mere insignificant literal changes or additions, such as an editor in supervising manuscript, or an author in reading proof, passes over, and leaves to the proof-readers of the printing-office, by whom they are called "literals," we ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... the vegetation, shall be seized, utilised, converted into some profitable substance, till the black country shall be black no longer, the streams once more crystal clear, the trees once more luxuriant, and the desert, which man has created in his haste and greed, shall in literal fact once more blossom as the rose. And just so can I conceive a time when by a higher civilisation, formed on a political economy more truly scientific, because more truly according to the will of God, our human refuse ...
— Daily Thoughts - selected from the writings of Charles Kingsley by his wife • Charles Kingsley
... Absurd as this speech seems, it is a literal transcript of words spoken in the author's presence by a woman who, like Miss ...
— The Hoosier Schoolmaster - A Story of Backwoods Life in Indiana • Edward Eggleston
... distinguished for the success with which he has led forward the musical education of New England, trained a corps of buglers to converse with each other by long and short bugle-notes, and thus to carry information with literal accuracy from point to point at any distance within which the tones of a bugle could be heard. It will readily be seen that there are many occasions in military affairs when such means of conversation might ...
— The Man Without a Country and Other Tales • Edward E. Hale
... William Cowper (Very literal and inattentive to melody, but has more of simple majesty and ...
— National Epics • Kate Milner Rabb
... evidently subject to abrupt and prolonged interruptions. Many repetitions and trivial incidents have been omitted in this translation; but, in order to express the personality of the Author, the rendering has been as literal as possible, and it shows the strange mixture of sentimentality and ferocity peculiar to the psychology of ...
— The Journal of Submarine Commander von Forstner • Georg-Guenther von Forstner
... of another matter, was the woman built—viz., with one of Adam's small bones, for as Adam lay asleep, God took away one of his ribs, and out of that made Eve. So much for the forming of the first man and woman by the literal text. Moses has likewise given us a large account of their first habitation. He says that God made them in a certain famous garden in the East, and gave it to them as a farm to cultivate and to inhabit, ...
— Ancient and Modern Celebrated Freethinkers - Reprinted From an English Work, Entitled "Half-Hours With - The Freethinkers." • Charles Bradlaugh, A. Collins, and J. Watts
... second thought, that idea of the dinner and procession really had a good deal in it. I had been in New York, and knew the length of Broadway; and at the recollection, felt flattered by the thought of being conveyed in an open chariot drawn by four or even eight horses, with nodding plumes, (literal ones for the horses,—only metaphorical ones for me,) past those stately buildings fluttering with handkerchiefs, and through streets black with people thronging to see the man who had solved the riddle of Africa. And then it would be pleasant, too, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... He had another volume in press—a collection of his sketches—among them the "Jumping Frog," and others of his California days. The "Jumping Frog" had been translated into French, and in this book Mark Twain published the French version and then a literal retranslation of his own, which is one of the most amusing features in the volume. As an example, the stranger's remark, "I don't see no p'ints about that frog that's any better than any other frog," in the literal retranslation becomes, "I no saw not that that frog had nothing of better than each ...
— The Boys' Life of Mark Twain • Albert Bigelow Paine
... in the early Hebrew they seem to have been very scanty. The day, week, month, year, and generation (this last usually implying the time from the birth of a man to that of his son, but possibly in Gen. xv. 16, a century) are all that we find. These in their literal sense were evidently inadequate. Nor could the deficiency be supplied by numerals, even if the general style of the narrative would have admitted their use, for we find in Genesis no numeral beyond the thousand. ...
— The Story of Creation as told by Theology and by Science • T. S. Ackland
... log shows plenty of fine weather, with light airs, calms, and squalls. In lat. 28 N., long. 177 W., his water going rotten, and misled by Hoyt's "North Pacific Directory," which informed him there was a coaling station on the island, Captain Trent put in to Midway Island. He found it a literal sandbank, surrounded by a coral reef, mostly submerged. Birds were very plenty, there was good fish in the lagoon, but no firewood; and the water, which could be obtained by digging, brackish. He ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... that the British farmer may obtain the benefit of this gentleman's experience, and that he may receive all manner of justice, I beg leave to send you a literal copy of the recipe which he was kind enough to ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 237, May 13, 1854 • Various
... had gone over to where Ben Sansome was still standing by the door. Sansome did not like Mrs. Sherwood. He considered that she had no social tact at all. This was mainly—though he did not analyze it—because she was quite apt to speak the direct and literal truth to him; because she had a disquieting self-confidence and competence in place of appropriate, graceful, feminine dependence; but especially because she had never and would never ...
— The Gray Dawn • Stewart Edward White
... swarthy personage in the full dress uniform of a general, received us in a haughty manner, and cross-questioned us in the most minute and tedious manner. Dennis somewhat puzzled him by the style of his answers, which were anything but literal translations of what Captain Hassall said. The result, however, was favourable, and we were allowed to go wherever we chose about the city, and to get the necessary repairs of our ships executed, and to obtain all the stores ...
— James Braithwaite, the Supercargo - The Story of his Adventures Ashore and Afloat • W.H.G. Kingston
... cursing and swearing and rude orders, the mess-dish and camp-bread, physical hardships all day and every other day, are for the former, but not for the latter, novelties and, consequently, sufferings. From which it follows that, if literal equality is applied, positive inequality is established, and that by virtue even of the new creed, it is necessary, in the name of true equality as in the name of true liberty, to allow the former, who would suffer most, to treat fairly and squarely with the latter, who will suffer less. ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 5 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 1 (of 2)(Napoleon I.) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... consistence, but solely by the light and shade of their salient and retreating outlines.] The most sanguine believer in indefinite human progress hardly expects that man's cunning will accomplish the universal fulfilment of the prophecy, "the desert shall blossom as the rose," in its literal sense; but sober geographers have thought the future conversion of the sand plains of Northern Africa into fruitful gardens, by means of artesian wells, not an improbable expectation. They have gone farther, and argued that, if the soil were ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... be held. In eagerness to do something which will pass as a settlement, either China's—and Siberia's—interests will be sacrificed in some unfair compromise, or irritation and friction will be increased—and in the end so will armaments. In any literal sense, it is ridiculous to suppose that the problems of the Pacific can be settled in a few weeks, or months—or years. Yet the discussion of the problems, in separation from the question of armament, may be of ...
— China, Japan and the U.S.A. - Present-Day Conditions in the Far East and Their Bearing - on the Washington Conference • John Dewey
... these alterations depends on a diversity of reading, the other on a difference of translation. The one introduces a significant difference of meaning; the other is rather a change of expression. The word rendered here 'pressed,' and by the Revised Version 'constrained,' is employed in its literal use in 'Master, the multitude throng Thee and press Thee,' and in its metaphorical application in 'The love of Christ constraineth us.' There is not much difference between 'constrained' and 'pressed,' but there is a large difference between 'in the spirit' and 'by the word.' ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... I trouble some kind reader to give me the origin, derivation, full and literal meaning, and the several senses, in their regular succession, of the above word Quadrille? There seems to be much uncertainty attached ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 210, November 5, 1853 • Various
... assured by the late Bertholdy Seemann that the "language of Hoffmann and Heine" contained a literal and complete translation of The Nights; but personal enquiries at Leipzig and elsewhere convinced me that the work still remains to be done. The first attempt to improve upon Galland and to show the world what the work really is was made by Dr. Max Habicht and was printed at Breslau (1824-25), ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... original debtors at par, allowing secondary holders barely the highest market value previous to the opening of the question in Congress. He was overruled, however, and this part of the debt, too, was ordered paid according to its literal terms. ...
— History of the United States, Volume 2 (of 6) • E. Benjamin Andrews
... parasites, and it must not be forgotten that just as there are drifts in the world of man, so are there drifts in the world of micro-organisms— hunger-quests for food. Little is known of the micro-organic world, but that little is appalling; and no census of it will ever be taken, for there is the true, literal "abysmal fecundity." Multitudinous as man is, all his totality of individuals is as nothing in comparison with the inconceivable vastness of numbers of the micro-organisms. In your body, or in mine, right now, are swarming more individual entities than there ...
— The Human Drift • Jack London
... truth can also be drawn in full from the literal sense of the Word; for the Word in this sense is like a man clothed, whose face and hands are bare. All that concerns man's life, and so his salvation, is ...
— The Gist of Swedenborg • Emanuel Swedenborg
... wrote little lessons for him in English and had Tarzan repeat them in French, but as a literal translation was usually very poor French Tarzan was ...
— Tarzan of the Apes • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... queer little experience an intellectual symbol. The book was verse. Might not the warm rays from the fire exhibit the page as it appears to an imaginative and kindred mind, whilst that cold, dull light from the window showed it as it is beheld by eyes to which poetry has but a poor, literal meaning, or ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... big, inarticulate Russian on the steamer; that Stahl's part in the account was unvarnished; that the boy had fallen on the deck from heart disease; and that, after an interval, chance had brought O'Malley and the father together again in this valley of the Central Caucasus. All that was as literal as the superstitious terror of the Georgian peasant. Further, that the Russian possessed precisely those qualities of powerful sympathy with the other's hidden longings which the subtle-minded Celt had been so quick to appropriate—this, too, was literal enough. ...
— The Centaur • Algernon Blackwood
... that time the intellectual and artistic center of Christendom. For a few years, beginning in 1402, he also taught Greek at the University of Pavia. He had earlier written a Catechism of Greek Grammar, and at Pavia he began a literal rendering of Plato's Republic into Latin. From his visit dates the enthusiasm for the study ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... did last Sunday, if they had told people plainly that, if the cholera was God's judgment at all, it was His judgment of the sin of dirt, and that the repentance which He required was to wash and be clean in literal earnest, the cholera would be impossible in ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... a line of forts behind our colonies, if in no other part of their attempt, they had acted against the general intention, if not against the literal terms of treaties, can scarcely be denied; for it never can be supposed, that we intended to be inclosed between the sea and the French garrisons, or preclude ourselves from extending our plantations backwards, to any length that our convenience ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 6 - Reviews, Political Tracts, and Lives of Eminent Persons • Samuel Johnson
... rights of man in general. His favourite political picture was a joking, profligate, careless king, nominally absolute—the heads of great houses paying court to, but in reality governing, that king, whilst revelling with him on the plunder of a nation, and a set of crouching, grovelling vassals (the literal meaning of vassal is a wretch), who, after allowing themselves to be horsewhipped, would take a bone if flung to them, and be grateful; so that in love with mummery, though he knew what Christianity was, no wonder he admired such a church as that of Rome, and ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... non-ability to count up the time I have spent on earth obliges them to accept me at my own valuation! There's really nothing to explain in the matter. Everyone can keep young if he understands himself and Nature. If I were to tell you the literal truth of the process, you would not believe me,—and even if you did you would not have the patience to carry it out! But what does it matter after all? If we only live for the express purpose of dying, the sooner we get the business ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... ways. First, painting is an art which merely addresses the eye; it does not in any particular exercise the moral sense. And second, painting, in common with all the other arts, implies the dangerous quality of imagination. A man of imagination is never moral; he outsoars literal demarcations and reviews life under too many shifting lights to rest content with the ...
— The Merry Men - and Other Tales and Fables • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Such efforts at conversation won her the appellation of "that good Mademoiselle Cormon," which, from the lips of the beaux esprits of society, means that she was as ignorant as a carp, and rather a poor fool; but many persons of her own calibre took the remark in its literal ...
— An Old Maid • Honore de Balzac
... appeal to the eye, a "reflection of the more serious mental attitude of the nation." Louis XVI had an aristocratic sobriety and was masculine in a light, alert, mental way, if one can so express it, which stimulates the imagination, in direct contrast to the material and literal type of Louis XIV which, as we have said, was masculine in its ponderous magnificence, ...
— The Art of Interior Decoration • Grace Wood
... rather than setting down his actual experience. An Essene he never became, but he remained throughout his life very partial to certain forms of the Essene belief, more especially those which coincided with the Greco-Roman superstitions of the time, such as the literal prediction of future events, the meaning of dreams, the significance of omens.[2] These ideas, handed down from primitive Israel, had lived on among the masses of the people, though discarded by the learned teachers, and Josephus, finding ...
— Josephus • Norman Bentwich
... to judge the quality of literature, distinguishing with ease between what is literal and what is imaginative, or figurative, or humorous. When they read that the rope with which the powerful Fenris-Wolf was bound was "made out of such things as the sound of a cat's footsteps, the roots of the mountains, the breath ...
— How To Study and Teaching How To Study • F. M. McMurry
... & Historiees Faces de la Mort avtant elegamtment pourtraictes, que artificiellement imaginees." This may be Englished as follows: The Images and Storied Aspects of Death, as elegantly delineated as [they are] ingeniously imagined. Such is the literal title of the earliest edition of the famous book now familiarly known as "Holbein's Dance of Death." It is a small quarto, bearing on its title-page, below the French words above quoted, a nondescript emblem with the legend Vsus me Genuit, and on ...
— The Dance of Death • Hans Holbein
... instructed her in oaths and legend, and her father taught her to ride, to swim, to shoot and to fish, her moral and literal education were entrusted to Mr. Considine. Physically Mr. Considine was of a type that does not change much with the passage of time. When first he came to Roscarna, a couple of years before Gabrielle was born, he was a young man of twenty. How he came ...
— The Tragic Bride • Francis Brett Young
... refused to print the admirable poem of Petofi entitled Talpra Magyar ("Up, Magyar"), and doing the printing there themselves. The first stanza of this poem, later the war-song of the national movement, runs, in a literal translation, thus: ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 17 • Charles Francis Horne
... all the requisites of the highest political leadership. He believed in the principles of Democracy as he did in a demonstration of Euclid,—all that might be said on the other side was necessarily absurd. He applied to his own political creed the literal teachings of the Bible. If Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob had held slaves without condemnation or rebuke from the Lord of hosts, he believed that Virginia, Carolina, and Georgia might do the same. He found ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... to that habit which some preachers have of plunging into the mystical meaning of a passage, whether allegorical or figurative, before they have explained its literal sense. "To do this," he said, "is to build the roof of a house before laying the foundation. Holy Scripture must be treated with more reverence and more consistency—it is not material to be cut according ...
— The Spirit of St. Francis de Sales • Jean Pierre Camus
... hulu-nui. Steep declivities, pali, on the side of Waipio valley, Hawaii. Instead of inserting these names, which would be meaningless without an explanation, the author has given a literal translation of the names themselves, thus getting a closer insight into ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson
... a Christian. He did not forget that his uncle and aunt lived in that old and dilapidated house, and he did his best to keep the peace with them. In the most literal manner he returned good for evil. It is true he could not respect his uncle, or get up a very warm regard for him,—he was too mean, selfish, and unprincipled to win the respect and regard of any decent person,—but he could ...
— Freaks of Fortune - or, Half Round the World • Oliver Optic
... we never saw, whose voice we never heard. Boswell boasted that he had "Johnsonized the land," and that he had shown Johnson in his book as no man had ever been shown in a book before; and the boast is after a hundred years seen to be a literal statement of fact. But after all Boswell did not make Johnson's reputation. On the contrary, it was Johnson's name that sold Boswell's book. No man owes so much to his biographer as Johnson to Boswell, but that must not make us forget that Johnson was the most famous man ...
— Dr. Johnson and His Circle • John Bailey
... Chatterissa. This excellent and prudent matron is No. 4,626,243, russet, or, Mistress Vigilance Lynx, to translate her appellation also into the English tongue; and that I am No. 22,817, brown-study color, or, Dr. Reasono, to give you a literal signification of my name—a poor disciple of the philosophers of our race, an LL.D., and a F.U.D.G.E., the travelling tutor of this heir of one of the most illustrious and the most ancient houses of the island of Leaphigh, in ...
— The Monikins • J. Fenimore Cooper
... of the whole thing nobody realizes. We've all got used to it here; and nobody clearly remembers just what the world was like in peace times; those times were so far away. All this I write not to fill you with horrors but to prove that I speak the literal truth when I say that it seems a hundred years since I had before ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume II • Burton J. Hendrick
... until actually witnessed, and their beauty is much heightened by the free play to which the arms of these people are accustomed, and the small and well-shaped hands for which they are remarkable. Among them can seldom be noticed in literal fact— ...
— Sign Language Among North American Indians Compared With That Among Other Peoples And Deaf-Mutes • Garrick Mallery
... to convey meaning to the interpreters of the chiefs of Africa, in whatever tongue it may be spoken; being that which they use in translation; and when they are addressed in this phraseology, they convey their ideas with more perspicuity and literal interpretation. But ...
— Observations Upon The Windward Coast Of Africa • Joseph Corry
... impatient, who want results to come as they walk. Probably this is a reason that it is occasionally said that Emerson has no vital message for the rank and file. He has no definite message perhaps for the literal, but messages are all vital, as much, by reason of his indefiniteness, as ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... me Intelligible) sets down, among divers Speculations not pertinent to our Subject, the following Narrative, which I shall repeat to you the sence of in English, with as little variation from the Literal sence of the French words, as my memory will enable me. Having (sayes he) discern'd such great Wonders by the Natural Operation of Water, I would know what may be done with it by Art Imitating Nature. Wherefore I took Water which I well knew not to be compounded, nor to be mix'd ...
— The Sceptical Chymist • Robert Boyle
... A literal prose translation of Homer, by Mr. T. A. Buckley, has just appeared in London. No prose version will cause any just notion of the spirit of Homer. Of the half dozen metrical translations published recently, we think that of our ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... expressing his most undisguised feelings, as excited by an event which dissolves trifling attachments, while it gives permanence to those of a genuine nature. It was probably intended for no eye but his own. I annex as literal a translation as possible, and from the beauty and ease of their latinity, have been tempted to precede it ...
— Itinerary of Provence and the Rhone - Made During the Year 1819 • John Hughes
... the French that which they had borrowed of them. Formerly, people did not go to walk on the boulevard, but on the boule-verd, from which the english have made bowling-green, a literal translation. From this word, the french derive ...
— Rouen, It's History and Monuments - A Guide to Strangers • Theodore Licquet
... Roger's canvases and set them along the wall. Tears filled her eyes as she looked at them, seeing the tragedy of labor the old man had expended upon them; but she felt the recompense: hard, tight, literal as they were, he had had his moment of joy in each of them before he saw them coldly and knew the truth. And he had been given his years of Paris at last: and had seen "how the other fellows ...
— The Conquest of Canaan • Booth Tarkington
... ship realising fully, perhaps for the first time, the fact that we had lost for ever a genial, brave, devoted, and sympathetic friend. "In the midst of life we are in death." Never did I so thoroughly realise the absolute literal truth of this as whilst sitting in the gig, silently struggling with my feelings, on our return from poor Austin's funeral. We had just laid him in his lonely grave on a foreign shore, far away ...
— The Congo Rovers - A Story of the Slave Squadron • Harry Collingwood
... altogether the fault of men. Such people will ask you with a clever air why the servile wars were always the most fierce; desperate and atrocious of all wars. And you may make such answer as you can—even the eminently feminine one, if you choose, so typical of the women's literal mind. "I don't see what this has to do with it!" How many arguments have been knocked over (I won't say knocked down) by these few words! For if we men try to put the spaciousness of all experiences ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... construction. He kept the shell and threw away the kernel. Faust becomes insignificant in this play to which he gives his name. In Goethe he was a thinker, even more than a poet. Here he speaks bad verse full of emptiness. Even where Goethe's words are followed, in a literal translation, the meaning seems to have gone out of them; they are displaced, they no longer count for anything. The Walpurgis Night is stripped of all its poetry, and Faust's study is emptied of all its wisdom. The Witches' Kitchen brews messes without magic, ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... meant by 'walking?' Think ye he meant a physical walking, and a moving, and a going backward and forward thus? (represented by Mr. N.'s proceeding, or rather marching, a la militaire, several times from end to end of the staging). No, sirs!—it was not a literal walking and locomotion, a moving and agitating of the natural legs and limbs. No, sirs!—no!—but it was a moral, a spiritual, a religious, ay! yes! a philosophical and metaphorically figurative walking, our ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VII. (of X.) • Various
... when man first emerged amongst the beasts, our Lord the Sun has always been his chiefest God, and legend says that He raised this circle of stones Himself to be a place where votaries should offer Him worship. It is the fashion amongst us moderns not to take these old tales in a too literal sense, but for myself, this one satisfies me. By our wits we can lift blocks weighing six hundred men, and set them as the capstones of our pyramids. But to uprear the stones of that great circle would be beyond ...
— The Lost Continent • C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne
... reserve, the simple and unconscious dignity of Beatrice, distinguish her no less than her beauty, her grace, and her ineffable courtesy. The story, based upon actual experience, is ordered not in literal conformity with fact, but according to the ideal of the imagination; and its reality does not consist in the exactness of its record of events, but in the truth of its poetic conception. Under the narrative lies an allegory of the power of love to transfigure earthly things into the ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... must be said, however, that, granting the facts as they seem certainly to have occurred, no misunderstanding, no technical verbal allegation, can justify a military stupidity so great as that of which he complained. There are occasions in which not only is literal disobedience permissible, but literal obedience, flying in the face of the evident conditions, becomes ...
— The Major Operations of the Navies in the War of American Independence • A. T. Mahan
... Prophties qui servent de fondement la religion Chrtienne, Londres (Amsterdam), 1768. Translation of Anthony Collins, A Discourse on the Grounds and Reasons of the Christian Religion, London, 1724. Contains also The Scheme of literal Prophecy considered, 1727, also by Collins in answer to the works of Clarke, Sherlock, Chandler, Sykes, and especially to Whiston's Essay towards restoring the text of the Old Testament, one of the thirty-five works directed against Collins' original "Discourse". Copies ...
— Baron d'Holbach - A Study of Eighteenth Century Radicalism in France • Max Pearson Cushing
... what an extraordinary case!' gasped Mrs. Bloss, as if she understood the communication in its literal sense, and was astonished at a gentleman without a stomach finding it ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... clauses drop heavily like slow tears, each adding a new touch of woe. The savage manners of the times used the literal forcing out of the eyes from their sockets as the easiest way of reducing dangerous enemies to harmlessness. Pitiable as the loss was, Samson was better blind than seeing. The lust of the eye had led him astray, and the loss of his sight showed him his sin. Fetters ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... is allowed to emerge into the light of consciousness. And if the fugitive elements want to venture forth they must be correspondingly disguised, in order to pass the censor. Freud calls this disguising or paraphrasing process the dream disfigurement. The literal is thereby displaced by the figurative, an allusion intimated through a nebulous atmosphere. Thus, in the following example, an unconscious death wish is exhibited. In the examination of a lady's dream it struck me that the motive of a dead child occurred repeatedly, generally ...
— Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts • Herbert Silberer
... how minutely he had studied, and how deeply he had pondered, the word of God. But it is possible to be very TEXTUAL, and yet by no means very scriptural. A man may heave an exact acquaintance with the literal Bible, and yet entirely miss the great Bible message. He may possess a dexterous command of detached passages and insulated sentences, and yet be entirely ignorant of that peculiar scheme which forms the great gospel revelation. But this was Bunyan's peculiar ...
— Life of Bunyan • Rev. James Hamilton
... accustomed. So it was taken off me and flung aside, like any other worn-out or unseasonable garment; and, after shivering a little while in my skeleton, I began to be clothed anew, and much more satisfactorily than in my previous suit. In literal and physical truth, I was quite another man. I had a lively sense of the exultation with which the spirit will enter on the next stage of its eternal progress after leaving the heavy burden of its mortality in an early grave, with as little concern for what may become of it as ...
— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... from which Mr. Halliwell has taken his text is not the original copy, nor even a literal transcript of it. It exhibits certain orthographical and grammatical peculiarities unknown to the Northumbrian dialect which have been introduced by a Midland transcriber, who has here and there taken the liberty to adapt the original text to the dialect of his ...
— Early English Alliterative Poems - in the West-Midland Dialect of the Fourteenth Century • Various
... for the Davidsons and holds him until the deadly lance is plunged into his 'life,' and the Davidssons let Orca carry the carcass to the bottom, and take his tithe of luscious blubber. This is the literal truth; and grizzled old Davidson, or any one of the stalwart sons who man his two boats, will tell you that but for the killers, who do half of the work, whaling would not pay with oil only worth from L18 to ...
— Ridan The Devil And Other Stories - 1899 • Louis Becke
... "Is it a figure of speech that the rich man fared sumptuously, that he died, that he was buried? Is not that literal? Why, then, is it a figure of speech that he lifted up his eyes in torment, and said, 'I am tormented in this flame'(Luke 16:24). My dear friend, be sure that there is an awful reality in that story—a most solemn reality in the fact of the impassable gulf. If here we do not believe in this ...
— From Death into Life - or, twenty years of my ministry • William Haslam
... say with Philo that the translator rendered each word of the Hebrew with literal faithfulness, so as to give its proper force. Rather may we accept the words of the Greek translator of Ben Sira: "Things originally spoken in Hebrew have not the same force in them when they are translated ...
— Philo-Judaeus of Alexandria • Norman Bentwich
... much belov'd by the Natives on that Account; tho' to give him his due, he behaved himself extremely well in all other Respects. It was in his Time, that a Design was laid of surprising Guardamere, a small Sea-port Town, in Murcia: But the military Bishop (for he was in a literal Sense excellent tam Marte, quam Mercurio, among his many others Exploits), by ...
— Military Memoirs of Capt. George Carleton • Daniel Defoe
... Liquidator likvidanto. Liquor likvoro. Liquorice glicirizo. Lisp lispi. List registro. List of names nomaro. List (index) tabelo. Listen auxskulti. Listless senvigla. Litany litanio. Literal lauxlitera. Literally lauxlitere. Literary literatura. Literateur literaturisto. Literature literaturo. Lithe aktiva. Lithograph litografi. Lithographer litografisto. Lithography litografarto. Litigation ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... is there told with the simplicity and sprightliness of which the French language is so peculiarly capable, but which a literal translation would render not only ...
— Think Before You Speak - The Three Wishes • Catherine Dorset
... in your hearts." Everything that disturbs the peace of God in our hearts is sin, no matter how small it is, and no matter how little like sin it may at first appear to be. This peace is to "rule" our hearts, or (a more literal translation) "be the referee" in our hearts. When the referee blows his whistle at a football match, the game has to stop, a foul has been committed. When we lose our peace, God's referee in our hearts has blown his whistle! Let us stop immediately, ...
— The Calvary Road • Roy Hession
... city, whose inhabitants dwell on the tops of trees like rooks." Thus spake Erasmus; and this literal fact makes Amsterdam a most curious as well as a most ...
— The Strand Magazine: Volume VII, Issue 37. January, 1894. - An Illustrated Monthly • Edited by George Newnes
... fairly literal, and Malleson (a clergyman) has taken pains with the scientific portions of the work and added the chapter headings, he has made some unfortunate emendations mainly concerning biblical references, and has added a few 'improvements' of his own, ...
— A Journey to the Interior of the Earth • Jules Verne
... is not here to be understood in its literal sense. Surveying a place, according to my idea, is taking a geometrical plan of it, in which every place is to have its true situation, which cannot be done in a ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 14 • Robert Kerr
... that problematical animal, the toad-in-a-hole (literal, not culinary) has been one of the most familiar and interesting personages of contemporary folk-lore and popular natural history. From time to time he turns up afresh, with his own wonted perennial vigour, on paper at least, in company with the ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... wilderness of arid and futile subtlety. Lefevre tried to see simply what the text said, and as it became more human it became, for him, more divine. His preface is a real cry of joy at his great discovery. He did, indeed, interpret everything in a double sense, literal and spiritual, and placed the emphasis rather on the latter, but this did not prevent a genuine effort to read the words as they were written. Three years later he published in like manner the Epistles of St. Paul, with commentary. Though he spoke ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... him if this meant what it said. He told them that it did. One of them said he would like to have the table, pointing to it; another asked for a chair, another for the bed, and so on. The missionary was rather startled at such literal taking of his teaching. He told them to come again on the morrow, and ...
— Quiet Talks on Following the Christ • S. D. Gordon
... a proclamation, a copy of which is in the possession of the British army, was posted all over the town. A literal translation of ...
— America's War for Humanity • Thomas Herbert Russell
... Camborne, of which St. Meriasek was patron, and to the Well of St. Meriasek there. It is probable that it was written for performance at that town. The language of the play is later than that of the Ordinalia, the admixture of English being greater, while a few of the literal changes, such as the more frequent substitution of g (soft) for s, and in one instance (bednath for bennath) the change of nn to dn, begin to appear. The grammar has not changed much, but ...
— A Handbook of the Cornish Language - chiefly in its latest stages with some account of its history and literature • Henry Jenner
... spot upon the crown of J. G.'s head, and the back of his neck. Sary longed for sight of the woman horse doctor, and when she essayed to crowd in and usurp Ellen's point of vantage, there ensued a war of extermination which ended in the literal downfall of Sary. ...
— Chip, of the Flying U • B. M. Bower
... of the afternoon was an apple-guessing contest, the names of different varieties of apples to be guessed from literal definitions, thus: The Royal Apple—. King. After that there was an apple-peeling contest in Hallowe'en fashion and each girl threw the peeling over her left shoulder to discover the initial of ...
— Entertaining Made Easy • Emily Rose Burt
... Kalmuck host, now in the last extremities of their exhaustion, and very fast approaching to that final stage of privation and killing misery beyond which few or none could have lived, but also, happily for themselves, fast approaching (in a literal sense) that final 5 stage of their long pilgrimage at which they would meet hospitality on a scale of royal magnificence and full protection from their enemies. These enemies, however, as yet, still were hanging ...
— De Quincey's Revolt of the Tartars • Thomas De Quincey
... chapter of over sixty quarto pages to this very subject; it is to be found in his fourteenth volume, and is headed "De la Degeneration des Animaux," of which words "On descent with modification" will be hardly more than a literal translation. I shall give a fuller but still too brief outline of the chapter later on, and will confine myself here to saying that the three principal causes of modification which Buffon brings forward are changes of climate, of food, and the effects of domestication. He may be said to have attributed ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler
... movement born of the spirit of our epoch; a movement essentially progressive, as I shall prove to you when we come to consider the principles involved in the logical co-ordination of the social fabric. I will now explain my meaning by literal examples, leaving aside all purely abstract reasoning, which I call the mathematics of thought. Instead of being, as you are, a proprietor living upon your income, let us suppose that you are painter, a musician, an artist, ...
— The Illustrious Gaudissart • Honore de Balzac
... riches, and wisdom, and strength, and honour, and glory, and blessing." One may question, indeed, if figurative language of the kind in question can ever be successfully transferred to canvas; whether this literal lamb, on its red-damasked table, in the midst of these carefully marshalled squadrons of Apostles, Popes, and Princes, can ever quite escape a hint of something ludicrous. One may question all this, yet still admire to the full both the spirit of devotion that inspired this marvellous ...
— Beautiful Europe - Belgium • Joseph E. Morris
... bothering in their relation to heavenly things, I mean. On the Friday, the penitent thief, as you call him, was to be with Jesus in Paradise; and now it was Sunday, and Jesus said he had not yet been up to see his Father. Some would say, I am too literal, too curious; what can Friday and Sunday have to do with Paradise? But words MEAN in both worlds, for they are not two but one—surely at least when Jesus thinks and speaks of them; and there can be no wrong in feeling ever so ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald
... Now, the term here translated "bondman" is the generic EVEDH, evedh, elsewhere translated "servant," and therefore should have been thus translated here, unless a different rendering is required by the context. The more literal reading of the Hebrew is, "And thy men-servants and thy maid-servants which shall be to thee from the nations around you, of them shall ye procure the man-servant and maid-servant." What, then, was the difference between ...
— Is Slavery Sanctioned by the Bible? • Isaac Allen
... acquainted with him I was of opinion that his interpretation of Hamlet was based only upon the translated text, but in the course of a very long conversation on the subject I discovered that he was well acquainted (through literal translations) not only with the text, but also with the notes and comments of our leading critics. In speaking of the part in which he is altogether unrivaled he said, "I am of opinion that Shakespeare intended Othello to be a Moor of Barbary or some other part of Northern Africa, of whom ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Vol. XV., No. 85. January, 1875. • Various
... then, is nothing but a preacher of Christ; and the first articulate utterance in his message is therefore that of boundless faith in the practicability of living according to Christ; that of insistence upon the literal following of the words of Christ as a practical ...
— Lectures on Russian Literature - Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenef, Tolstoy • Ivan Panin
... the tribes we find a literal repetition of the rule of hospitality as practiced by the Iroquois. Mr. Dall, speaking of the Aleuts, says, "hospitality was one of their prominent traits," [Footnote: On the Remains of Later Prehistoric Man, Alaska Ter. Smithsonian Cont., No. 318, p. 3. Travels, ...
— Houses and House-Life of the American Aborigines • Lewis H. Morgan
... text some extracts from Raffles' translations, it may be well to say a word as to the value of these versions. What Vreede says of a particular passage is true of these renderings in general: "They are not literal translations, but the spirit of the ...
— A Visit to Java - With an Account of the Founding of Singapore • W. Basil Worsfold
... he was the idealist historian of the poet, and that the adventures which he related of him were not to be taken in the literal ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... was not left for our age to discover that the wages of sin is death: but Charles, his players and his courtiers, refused to see what the very heathen had seen, and so had to be taught the truth over again by another and a more literal lesson; and what neither stage-plays nor sermons could teach them, sharp shot ...
— Plays and Puritans - from "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley
... for all the prominent features of the Yosemite Valley, and these have been variously translated (sometimes with considerable poetic license), and variously spelled. The translations given below are as literal as possible, without embellishment, and are believed to be fairly accurate. The spelling adopted is such ...
— Indians of the Yosemite Valley and Vicinity - Their History, Customs and Traditions • Galen Clark
... genuine Gypsy composition, the translation of the Apostles' Creed by the Gypsies of Cordova, made under the circumstances detailed in the second part of the first volume. To all have been affixed translations, more or less literal, to assist those who may wish to form some acquaintance ...
— The Zincali - An Account of the Gypsies of Spain • George Borrow
... obstacles—to win the confidence and friendship of officials of a district where all British subjects were regarded with undisguised suspicion and distrust. No better proof of this could be furnished than by reproducing here a literal translation of a quaint document, dated May, 1898, given him, unsolicited, by Mir Masum Sar-tip, Deputy Governor of Sistan, whose ...
— Across Coveted Lands - or a Journey from Flushing (Holland) to Calcutta Overland • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... of compromises, or of conjectural interpretations of the Sacred Scriptures, neither is it a paraphrase, but a strict [strictly] literal rendering. It neither adds nor takes away; but aims to express the original with the utmost clearness and force, and with ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 17, March, 1859 • Various
... come with the STORY OF SIEGFRIED, still another version of the time-honored legend. The story as I shall tell it you is not in all respects a literal rendering of the ancient myth; but I have taken the liberty to change and recast such portions of it as I have deemed advisable. Sometimes I have drawn materials from one version of the story, sometimes from another, and sometimes largely from my own imagination ...
— The Story of Siegfried • James Baldwin
... was composed and written in the Hebrew tongue, the language of ancient Palestine, we have employed here a literal translation from the original language, simply because it expresses much more beautifully and more exactly than does any rendering from the Latin or Greek the various marks and characteristics of the shepherd's ...
— The Shepherd Of My Soul • Rev. Charles J. Callan
... in the very simplest and most literal sense," Bertram went on quite seriously. "I'd been among you some time before it began to dawn on me that you English didn't regard your own taboos as essentially identical with other people's. To me, from the very first, they seemed absolutely ...
— The British Barbarians • Grant Allen
... motionless eternity of perfection, but an overflowing vitality, an inexhaustible fecundity, the everlasting well-spring of all existence." He is the eternal Creator of all things; not indeed in any sense which commits us to a literal acceptance of the mythology of Genesis, but in the sense that the created universe has its origin in His holy and righteous will, and that upon Him all things depend. "In affirming that the world was made ...
— Religious Reality • A.E.J. Rawlinson
... an intelligent First Cause. He reads an essay to prove that we can form a notion of inspiration which does not involve dictation. He thinks it 'more agreeable to right reason' to explain the Biblical account of the creation by literal interpretation than 'on scientific principles,' but adds the rider, 'so far as it can be reconciled with geological facts.' He denies that the Pentateuch shows 'traces of Egyptian origin.' He thinks that Paley's views of the 'essential doctrines of Christianity' ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... cookery book declares that some crabs like to be boiled alive. In the same way he thought and spoke as if the people liked being kept in superstition; only he meant this in a literal sense, whereas the cookery book did not mean its ...
— Resurrection • Count Leo Tolstoy
... etiquette he obtained from books, and was often quite as literal in his observance of prescribing modes and forms, as was the Frenchman in showing off his skill in our idioms, when he informed a company of ladies, as an excuse for leaving them, that he had "some fish to fry." ...
— Off-Hand Sketches - a Little Dashed with Humor • T. S. Arthur
... This literal quotation from the frank Mr. Calvin caused a sensation. Captain Dan struggled to find words. His daughter laid a ...
— Cap'n Dan's Daughter • Joseph C. Lincoln
... appears against him is Bellarmine, one of the greatest of theologians and one of the poorest of scientists. He was earnest, sincere, learned, but made the fearful mistake for the world of applying direct literal interpretation of Scripture to science. The consequences were sad, indeed. Could he with his vast powers have taken a different course, humanity would have been spared the long and fearful war which ensued, and religion would have saved to herself thousands on thousands ...
— Scientific American, Vol.22, No. 1, January 1, 1870 • Various
... of the Latin and English will allow;" and to be "printed for the use of schools, as well as of private gentlemen." A few moments' perusal of this work will satisfy the reader that it has not the slightest pretension to be considered a literal translation, while, by its departure from the strict letter of the author, it has gained nothing in elegance of diction. It is accompanied by "critical, historical, geographical, and classical notes in English, from the best Commentators, both ancient and modern, beside a great number ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Copious Notes - and Explanations • Publius Ovidius Naso
... school of English gentlewomen. She had reared her only child with jealous care and assiduous attention, so that her mind had been richly stored in classic lore, and her hands duly instructed in domestic duties. There was no mock-modesty about the mother, she was straightforward and literal in all she said or did; evidently of excellent family, she was sufficiently assured of her position not to be sensitive about its recognition by others, and preferred to instil into her daughter's mind sound wholesome principles to useless and giddy ...
— The Sea-Witch - or, The African Quadroon A Story of the Slave Coast • Maturin Murray |
