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Neophyte   /nˈiəfˌaɪt/   Listen
Neophyte

noun
1.
A plant that is found in an area where it had not been recorded previously.
2.
Any new participant in some activity.  Synonyms: entrant, fledgeling, fledgling, freshman, newbie, newcomer, starter.
3.
A new convert being taught the principles of Christianity by a catechist.  Synonym: catechumen.






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"Neophyte" Quotes from Famous Books



... to see you trust it too far—that is, not if I cared for you!" said the lady, as if she had been the chemist and he the neophyte. ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford

... placed it half shyly in a glass on his table a wonderful thought occurred to him. Was not the episode of last night a special providence? Was not that young girl, wayward and childlike, a mere neophyte in her idolatrous religion, as yet unsteeped in sloth and ignorance, presented to him as a brand to be snatched from the burning? Was not this the opportunity of conversion he had longed for—this the chance of exercising his gifts of exhortation that he had been hiding in the napkin ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte

... the loneliness and silence. As he grew older these periods of solitary fasting were increased in length, and now, at eighteen, several boys in the Wyandot village had reached the last blackening and fasting. The black paint was spread over the neophyte's face, and he was led by his father far from the village to a solitary cabin or tent, where he was left without weapons or food. It was known from his previous fasting about how long he could stand it, and now the utmost ...
— The Riflemen of the Ohio - A Story of the Early Days along "The Beautiful River" • Joseph A. Altsheler

... Naturally by far the most important part of this was gesture. Here again, while some of our evidence is somewhat unreliable, practically every shred of extant testimony indicates an extreme liveliness and vivacity. In the rhetoricians frequent warning is issued to the forensic neophyte to avoid the unrestraint of theatrical gesticulation. Cicero says (De Or. I. 59. 251): "Nemo suaserit studiosis dicendi adulescentibus in gestu discendo histrionum more elaborare." Quintilian echoes (I. 11. 3): "Ne gestus quidem omnis ...
— The Dramatic Values in Plautus • Wilton Wallace Blancke

... Without delay he went with his godson to Notre Dame de Paris, where he prayed the first priest he met to administer baptism to his friend, and this was speedily done; and the new convert changed his Jewish name of Abraham into the Christian name of Jean; and as the neophyte, thanks to his journey to Rome, had gained a profound belief, his natural good qualities increased so greatly in the practice of our holy religion, that after leading an exemplary life he died in ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere

... they believe them worthy they do not inquire about their means; and a fund is annually set apart by the trustees to pay the passage of poor families whom they have determined to take in. Usually a neophyte enters on probation for two years, signing an obligation to labor faithfully, to conduct himself according to the society's regulations, ...
— The Communistic Societies of the United States • Charles Nordhoff

... bottles, together with folded circulars and advertising cards, into pasteboard boxes. At the far end of this room a pungent, high-spiced scent, as of a pickle-kitchen with a fortified odor underlying it, greeted the unaccustomed nose of the neophyte. ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams

... affairs that the college boys use nowadays. It doesn't seem to be the fashion to grease the landscape with freshmen any more. Initiations are getting to be as safe and sane as an ice-cream festival in a village church. When a frat wants to submit a neophyte to a trying ordeal it sends him out on the campus to climb a tree, or makes him go to a dance in evening clothes with a red necktie on. A boy who can roll a peanut half a mile with a toothpick, or can fish all morning in a pail of water in front of the college chapel without ...
— At Good Old Siwash • George Fitch

... business to visit the dining-room on Saturday evening, where the young man was supposed to be meditating against the ordeal of the morrow, to get the Psalms for the precentor, to answer strictly professional questions, and generally to advise the neophyte about the sermon that would suit Drumtochty, and the kind of voice to be used. One thing John knew perfectly well he ought not to do, and that was to invite a probationer to spend the evening in the Doctor's study, for on this point Rebecca ...
— Kate Carnegie and Those Ministers • Ian Maclaren

... do realise the poster. On only one poster that I can recollect have I seen the rider represented as doing any work. But then this man was being pursued by a bull. In ordinary cases the object of the artist is to convince the hesitating neophyte that the sport of bicycling consists in sitting on a luxurious saddle, and being moved rapidly in the direction you wish to go ...
— Three Men on the Bummel • Jerome K. Jerome

... and for drowned Leander's sake To Anteros its fireless lip shall plight. Aye, waft the unspoken vow: yet dawn's first light On ebbing storm and life twice ebb'd must break; While 'neath no sunrise, by the Avernian Lake, Lo where Love walks, Death's pallid neophyte. ...
— The House of Life • Dante Gabriel Rossetti

... bath-keeper, horse jockey, peddler of satirical news and Holland gazettes; he had more than once pretended to be a Protestant, feigning conversion to the Catholic faith in order to secure the fifty crowns that M. Pelisson paid each neophyte as the price of conversion. This cheat discovered, the chevalier was condemned to the lash and to prison. He suffered the lash, escaped from prison, disguised himself by means of an immense shade over his eye, girded himself with a formidable ...
— A Romance of the West Indies • Eugene Sue

... The Irish Statute Book, afterwards polluted by intolerance as barbarous as that of the dark ages, then contained scarce a single enactment, and not a single stringent enactment, imposing any penalty on Papists as such. On our side of Saint George's Channel every priest who received a neophyte into the bosom of the Church of Rome was liable to be hanged, drawn, and quartered. On the other side he incurred no such danger. A Jesuit who landed at Dover took his life in his hand; but he walked the streets ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... towards the theatre, Lord Dalgarno endeavoured to discover his friend's opinion of the company to which he had introduced him, and to combat the exceptions which he might suppose him to have taken. "And wherefore lookest thou sad," he said, "my pensive neophyte? Sage son of the Alma Mater of Low-Dutch learning, what aileth thee? Is the leaf of the living world which we have turned over in company, less fairly written than thou hadst been taught to expect? Be comforted, and pass over one little blot or two; thou wilt be doomed to read through ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott

... extreme solicitude, deepening by degrees into disappointment and disenchantment. He abated no jot or tittle of his demands upon human frailty. He kept the spiritual cord drawn tight; the Biblical bearing-rein was incessantly busy, jerking into position the head of the dejected neophyte. That young soul, removed from the Father's personal inspection, began to blossom forth crudely and irregularly enough, into new provinces of thought, through fresh layers of experience. To the painful mentor at home in the West, the centre of anxiety was still the meek and docile ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse

... too highly commend this volume to our readers. The author, Mr. DUNCAN BRADFORD, has kept constantly in view one object, viz: to make his subject plain and interesting to the people. Instead of mingling mathematics with his great theme, to such an extent as to alarm the neophyte at the very threshold of the temple of astronomy, he has with a wise judgment selected from the best works, including the latest, those parts that were least encumbered with the abstruse and the unintelligible; ...
— Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, March 1844 - Volume 23, Number 3 • Various

... in tow. What he had in tow, lunged itself at him sometimes in an awful manner when the boat was checked, and sometimes seemed to try to wrench itself away, though for the most part it followed submissively. A neophyte might have fancied that the ripples passing over it were dreadfully like faint changes of expression on a sightless face; but Gaffer was no neophyte and ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens

... were genuine, hall-marked people, whatever the origin from which the individual sprang. He knew the fatigue of productive labor as something far sweeter than the fatigue that comes from mere exercise, and the neophyte's enthusiasm was his. ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer

... delight in store for you! But the reason of our existence as an institution, Soames, is not far to seek. Once the joys of Chandu become perceptible to the neophyte, a great need is felt—a crying need. One may drink opium or inject morphine; these, and other crude measures, may satisfy temporarily, but if one would enjoy the delights of that fairyland, of that enchanted ...
— The Yellow Claw • Sax Rohmer

... while they worked they chanted weird hymns in the ancient tongue of that lost continent that lies at the bottom of the Atlantic. They knew not the meanings of the words they mouthed; they but repeated the ritual that had been handed down from preceptor to neophyte since that long-gone day when the ancestors of the Piltdown man still swung by their tails in the humid jungles ...
— Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... of his statements might provoke a doubt upon this point. We cite a single example. Speaking of M. Sainte-Beuve's temporary connection with the Saint-Simonians, he says: "For a brief season he appears to have felt some of the zeal of a neophyte, speaking the speech and talking the vague nonsense of his new friends. But soon his native good-sense seems to have perceived that the whole thing was only a fevered dream of a diseased age." Now the reviewer, if he knows anything of the doctrines in question, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various

... than people generally imagine, will mere confidence carry the occult neophyte. How many European readers who would be quite incredulous if told of some results which occult chelas in the most incipient stages of their training have to accomplish by sheer force of confidence, hear constantly in church, nevertheless, the familiar Biblical assurances ...
— Fashionable Philosophy - and Other Sketches • Laurence Oliphant

... in answer to his neophyte's half fearful question. Fitly underlined and sufficiently spaced, it was a statement calculated to awe, if only by its mendacity. I wonder if that chapter of Bulwer's would impress one now as it used to do then. It were better, ...
— The Book-Bills of Narcissus - An Account Rendered by Richard Le Gallienne • Le Gallienne, Richard

... pocket, who was in the way of expressing a grave conviction that it was possible to make a capital living at Roulette, so long as you stuck to the colours, and avoided the Scylla of the numbers and the Charybdis of the Zero. By degrees, then, the shyness of the neophyte wears off. Perhaps in the course of his descent of Avernus, a revulsion of feeling takes place, and, horror-struck and ashamed, he rushes out of the Kursaal, determined to enter its portals no more. Then he temporizes; remembers that there is a capital ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume I (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz

... not more tortured by Elizabeth's emissaries, than was Althea by these clever ministers. But the ill-fated Queen, nursed from childhood in the faith, was not more unwaveringly firm than was this six-days' neophyte. ...
— Hubert's Wife - A Story for You • Minnie Mary Lee

... storage-space from which supplies had been removed, Calhoun produced vacuum suits. The four first students went out, each escorting a less-accustomed neophyte and all fastened firmly together with space-ropes. They warmed the interiors of four ships and went on to others. Presently there were eight ships making ready for an interstellar journey, each with a scared but resolute new pilot familiarizing himself with its ...
— Pariah Planet • Murray Leinster

... but a neophyte where Madame is an expert. I know the superficial nature of cats. Now and then without vainglory I can say I know their hearts; but Madame penetrates to and holds commune with their souls. And a cat's soul, monsieur, is a wonderful thing. Once it was divine—in ancient ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke

... admixture of mystical slackness in faith or conduct. Each order is distinguished by a peculiar garb. Candidates for admission have to pass through a noviciate, more or less lengthy. First comes the 'ahd, or initial covenant, in which the neophyte or mur[i]d, "seeker," repents of his past sins and takes the sheikh of the order he enters as his guide (murshid) for the future. He then enters upon a course of instruction and discipline, called a "path" (tar[i]qa), on which he advances through diverse "stations" ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various

... first employed his neophyte in arranging and compiling materials for a great critical work in which Norreys himself was engaged. In this stage of scholastic preparation, Leonard was necessarily led to the acquisition of languages, for which he had great aptitude; the foundations of a large and comprehensive ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... richest and most astute Hebrews of the island were wise enough to become converted in time, voluntarily, mixing with the native families, and sinking their origin into oblivion. These new Catholics were the very ones who, later on, with the fervor of the neophyte, had instigated the persecution against their former brethren. The Chuetas of the present time, the only Majorcans of recognized Jewish origin, were the descendants of the last to be converted, the offspring of the ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez

... however, snared the cadet in a neo-judo hold that no neophyte, however skilled or strong could break. He dragged the struggling Hanlon up to the rostrum and, with his elbow, ...
— Man of Many Minds • E. Everett Evans

... well-known fact, one with which Bulwer Lytton dealt with great power, that an intolerable sadness is the very first experience of the neophyte in Occultism. A sense of blankness falls upon him which makes the world a waste, and life a vain exertion. This follows his first serious contemplation of the abstract. In gazing, or even in attempting to gaze, on the ineffable ...
— Light On The Path and Through the Gates of Gold • Mabel Collins

... The neophyte in crime, being initiated into the mysteries of the profession by some able Fagin, gets his instruction by degrees. Great care is taken that he shall not realize too soon the depravity he is to practise, lest, appalled by ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson

... scents. This did not indicate a sainted man; yet my two friends did not feel scandalized, although their astonishment was very evident, for they had not expected that show of gallantry from a young neophyte. I was nearly bursting into a loud laugh, when I heard M. Dandolo remark that, unless we hurried, we would not have time to hear mass, whereupon Bavois enquired whether it was a festival. M. Dandolo, without passing any remark, ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt

... nature had long needed thus to be filled. He sent for books about the great composers; descriptions of the classics; how the themes were developed through different instruments. Then he wanted the history of all music; and for weeks his receptivity never faltered. No neophyte ever brought a purer devotion to the masters. His first loves—the Andante in F, the three movements of the Kreutzer Sonata, a prayer from Otello, the Twelfth Rhapsody, the Swan Song and the Evening Star, and finally Isolde's Triumph ...
— Fate Knocks at the Door - A Novel • Will Levington Comfort

... then said, "Swordbearer and Deputy Past Pantile, pass in the neophyte who seeks to be a Cemented Brick"; and Mr. Verdant Green was thereupon guided into ...
— The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green • Cuthbert Bede

... of our plans, and in the nearness of the hour of triumph, that if you will pledge yourself to silence, in writing, you will not be molested in any way. You occupy at the moment the apartment reserved for neophytes of a certain order. But we do not ask you to become a neophyte. Disciples must seek us, we do not seek disciples. We only ask for your word ...
— Fire-Tongue • Sax Rohmer

... donna assoluta recalled the famous brava-a-a-a of Lablache on her first evening at her Majesty's Opera-house in London, which satisfied England that she was a great singer, and confirmed her career. To the audience her friendly interest seemed the impulse of her kindly heart for a young neophyte in this profession. To ...
— From the Easy Chair, vol. 1 • George William Curtis

... and could not overtake their old mistress, so she herself alighted from her chair to volunteer her services. She was about to hastily press forward and support her, when, by a strange accident, a young Taoist neophyte, of twelve or thirteen years of age, who held a case containing scissors, with which he had been snuffing the candles burning in the various places, just seized the opportunity to run out and hide himself, when ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin

... and pretend to be persons of very high morals. Their secret practices were obtained from one of his officials who had entered the sect in the lowest grade. On the day of initiation there is a great meeting of members at the cost of the neophyte. A text is taught to him, and the initiation is completed by all the members partaking together of a feast without distinction of caste. The food eaten at this is considered to be Mahaprasad, or as if offered to Vishnu in his form of Jagannath at Puri, and to be therefore ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India—Volume I (of IV) • R.V. Russell

... evolutions. It is bitter to return to infancy, to be supported, and directed, and perpetually set upon your feet, by the hand of some one else. The air besides, as it is supplied to you by the busy millers on the platform, closes the eustachian tubes and keeps the neophyte perpetually swallowing, till his throat is grown so dry that he can swallow no longer. And for all these reasons—although I had a fine, dizzy, muddle-headed joy in my surroundings, and longed, and tried, and always failed, to lay hands on the fish that ...
— A Book of English Prose - Part II, Arranged for Secondary and High Schools • Percy Lubbock

... The neophyte in speculators' creeds and customs may amuse himself, however, with reminiscences like the preceding only in a sense of that proud historic retrospect which concerns past radiant records of "the street." He may, if so minded, con other pages of its noble ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various

... village, covering her face with a cloth and weeping bitterly. Towards sunset one of the older women—who, as directress of the ceremonies, is called nachimbusa— follows her, places a cooking-pot by the cross-roads, and boils therein a concoction of various herbs, with which she anoints the neophyte. At nightfall the girl is carried on the old woman's back to her mother's hut. When the customary period of a few days has elapsed, she is allowed to cook again, after first whitewashing the floor of the hut. But, by the following month, the preparations for ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer

... Had half the treasures an eager father and mother prayed Heaven to grant been bestowed upon the child, he would unquestionably have become an abnormality of health, wealth, and wisdom. But Destiny was too farseeing a goddess to allow her neophyte to be spoiled by prosperity. Both his parents died while Martin was still a pupil at the district school, and the lad, instead of going to the city and pursuing a profession, as had been his ambition, found himself hurried, all unequipped, uneducated and unprepared, into the responsibilities ...
— The Wall Between • Sara Ware Bassett

... the voices of the spirits who communicated with us, instead of the imperfect laws constructed by our benighted fellow-men. How clear and logical, how lofty, these doctrines seemed! If, at times, something in their nature repelled me, I simply attributed it to the fact that I was still but a neophyte in the Spiritual Philosophy, and incapable of perceiving the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, No. 38, December, 1860 • Various

... delight. And let it not be concealed that no one who did not possess the very abundant leisure necessary for investigation and meditation, and had not passed through mental states represented by Romanism, Protestantism, Unitarianism, and Transcendentalism, could be accepted by the veriest neophyte as a competent reviewer. We attempt nothing more than a very humble notice which may bring the existence of this latest salvation before some of the scattered fellowship who are ready for it. We despair of making any statement concerning it which believers ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various

... of the multitude, of the governor, and of the soldiers fell chiefly upon Sanctus, a deacon of Vienne; upon Maturus, a neophyte still, but already a valiant champion of Christ; upon Attalus also, born at Pergamus, but who hath ever been one of the pillars of our Church; upon Blandina, lastly, in whom Christ hath made it appear that persons who seem vile and ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various

... was, before my grate, amid my permutations and combinations! By the evening, I had nearly mastered my subject. When the bell rang, at seven, to summon us to the common meal at the principal's table, I went downstairs puffed up with the joys of the newly initiated neophyte. I was escorted on my way by a, b and c, intertwined ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre

... was only half a Catholic. He accepted with all the fervour of a neophyte the principle of submission to Holy Church. But in place of the official intellectualist apologetic, which an Englishman may study to great advantage in the remarkably able series of manuals issued by the Jesuits of Stonyhurst, he substituted a philosophy of experience which is certainly ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge

... mere, comme je vous en veux," said Eve, without attending to the nice distinctions of Mr. Bragg, which savoured a little too much of the neophyte in cookery, to find favour in the present company, "comme je vous en veux for having neglected so many beautiful sites, to place this building in the ...
— Home as Found • James Fenimore Cooper

... to turn Christian on the supposition of being his companion; and then gives him the slip. The neophyte's expressions on the occasion are ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury

... tells thee true, my noble neophyte; my little gram maticaster, he does: it shall never put thee to thy mathematics, metaphysics, philosophy, and I know not what supposed Suficiencies; if thou canst but have the patience to plod enough, talk, and make a noise enough, be impudent ...
— The Poetaster - Or, His Arraignment • Ben Jonson

... your nerve? Be a man! You'll never make a Rho at this rate. Brace up, for Heaven's sake! Rise, Neophyte." ...
— Stanford Stories - Tales of a Young University • Charles K. Field

... shop," went on Mr. Hazen, "there was, as I told you, a young neophyte by the name of Thomas Watson. Tom had not found his niche in life. He had tried being a clerk, a bookkeeper, and a carpenter and none of these several occupations had seemed to fit him. Then one fortunate day he happened in at Williams's shop and immediately he knew this ...
— Ted and the Telephone • Sara Ware Bassett

... the steep declivity of the mountain, Costal and his neophyte halted by one of these boulders. Now apparently absorbed in profound meditation, now muttering in a low tone, and in the language of his fathers, certain prayers, the Zapoteque awaited that hour when the moon should reach its meridian, ...
— The Tiger Hunter • Mayne Reid

... his union with the maiden. The trials of silence, secrecy, and hardihood in passing through the dread elements of fire and water were ancient literary materials; they may be found in the account of the initiation of a neophyte into the mysteries of Isis in Apuleius's "Metamorphoses; or, The Golden Ass," a romance written in the second century. By placing the scene of the opera in Egypt, the belief of Freemasons that their order originated ...
— A Book of Operas - Their Histories, Their Plots, and Their Music • Henry Edward Krehbiel

... at the confines of the earthly paradise [locus voluptatis terrestris]...." In our parable it is a paradise of joy [pratum felicitatis] where the wanderer meets the company into which he desires admission. He must undergo examinations like every neophyte. The collegium sapientiae of the parable refers to the rosicrucian Collegium Sancti Spiritus, which is actually named in another passage of the book that ...
— Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts • Herbert Silberer

... a moment of taking orders, but his dread of appearing in public conspired with the good sense which lay beneath his excessive sensibility to put a veto on the design. He, however, exercised the zeal of a neophyte in proselytism to a greater extent than his own judgment and good taste approved when ...
— Cowper • Goldwin Smith

... ascertained that there are no aunts in the air, and then plunged into his first public-house. How shall he ask for his liquor? "I will take a glass of ale, if you please, Miss," seems tame for a Blade. It may be useful to know a more suitable formula. Just at present, we may assure the Blade neophyte, it is all the rage to ask for "Two of swipes, ducky." Go in boldly, bang down your money as loudly as possible, and shout that out at the top of your voice. If it is a barman, though, you had better not say "ducky." ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells

... wealth for that something above wealth which the bewildered rich man only discovers the existence of when he has struggled to the highest pinnacle of advancement in his own way, began to seize this wealthy neophyte. To be sure, in this first essay, the company which he assembled in his fine rooms in Portland Place, to see all his fine things and celebrate his glory, was not a fine company, but they afforded more gratification to Mr. Copperhead than if they had been ever so fine. ...
— Phoebe, Junior • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant

... termed his most beautiful flower was to become to him the principal cause of bitter sorrow. Poor, grand Cardinal! It was the final trial of his life, the supremely bitter drop in his chalice, to assist at the disenchantment which followed so closely upon the blissful intoxication of his gentle neophyte's first initiation. To whom, if not to him, should she have gone to ask counsel, in all the tormenting doubts which she at once began to have in her feelings ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet

... loves you, ha? Know, my pretty neophyte, that happiness, married happiness especially, does not come from being loved, but from loving. What says ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various

... Neophyte.—A term applied in the primitive Church to the newly baptized—"newly grafted" (which the word means) into Christianity. It was customary for them to wear white garments at their Baptism and for eight days after. The word is still ...
— The American Church Dictionary and Cyclopedia • William James Miller

... little demons, as bold as birds of prey. Though we ourselves had all gone through this cruel novitiate, we showed no mercy on a newcomer, never sparing him the mockery, the catechism, the impertinence, which were inexhaustible on such occasions, to the discomfiture of the neophyte, whose manners, strength, and temper were thus tested. Lambert, whether he was stoical or dumfounded, made no reply to any questions. One of us thereupon remarked that he was no doubt of the school of Pythagoras, and there was a shout of laughter. The new boy was thenceforth Pythagoras ...
— Louis Lambert • Honore de Balzac

... Poor neophyte in life's mysteries, having served as a slave at false altars of which she did not even know the ritual, it was no wonder that, after all she had suffered, she could not now bring herself into tune with the commonplace intercourse of life. Not that her friends utterly failed to lure ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... of Mr. Leigh Hunt and his simple neophyte.—If any one should be bold enough to purchase this 'Poetic Romance,' and so much more patient, than ourselves, as to get beyond the first book, and so much more fortunate as to find a meaning, we entreat him to make us acquainted with his success; we shall then return to the task which we ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney

... strength, in severe fasts of several days' duration, and in mimic combats, which, although the weapons were blunted, were always attended with wounds, and sometimes with death. During this trial, which lasted thirty days, the royal neophyte fared no better than his comrades, sleeping on the bare ground, going unshod, and wearing a mean attire,—a mode of life, it was supposed, which might tend to inspire him with more sympathy with the destitute. ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott

... think so?" asked St. Guenole. "And what then do you believe that baptism really is? Baptism is the process of regeneration by which man is born of water and of the spirit, for having entered the water covered with crimes, he goes out of it a neophyte, a new creature, abounding in the fruits of righteousness; baptism is the seed of immortality; baptism is the pledge of the resurrection; baptism is the burying with Christ in His death and participation in ...
— Penguin Island • Anatole France

... the neophyte here gave seemed to give great dissatisfaction to all of the trappers present. One ...
— The Life and Adventures of Kit Carson, the Nestor of the Rocky Mountains, from Facts Narrated by Himself • De Witt C. Peters

... mixed up with objectionable thought forms of the stronger kind, such as those brought about by practicing black magic, there this particular form of the dweller will be much stronger and more dangerous, and often desperate is the struggle between the neophyte and these dwellers from his past backed up by the masters of the ...
— An Introduction to Yoga • Annie Besant

... cool their heels in the reception-room, thrown upon the suave hospitality of the grand old man at the desk, it was Ardessa who went out and made soothing and plausible explanations as to why the editor could not see them. She was the brake that checked the too-eager neophyte, the emollient that eased the severing of relationships, the gentle extinguisher of the lights that failed. When there were no longer messages of hope and cheer to be sent to ardent young writers and reformers, Ardessa delivered, as sweetly as ...
— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather

... a sobbing and miserable neophyte who stumbled into the kitchen a few seconds later. The twins were bending earnestly over their Latin grammars by the side of the kitchen fire, and did not raise their eyes as the Seeker burst into the room. Constance sat down, and gasped and quivered for a while. Then she looked down ...
— Prudence of the Parsonage • Ethel Hueston

... she left for two days unanswered letters which were to her as Sibylline leaves to some unquiet neophyte yearning for solutions to enigmas suggested whether by the world without or by the soul within. For six days Madame de Grantmesnil's letter remained unanswered, unread, neglected, thrust out of sight; just as when some imperious necessity compels us to grapple with a world that ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... injustice of vicarious atonement, the student is well aware that the whole of this sanguinary metaphor is drawn really from the Pagan rites of Mithra, where the neophyte was actually placed under a bull at the ceremony of the TAUROBOLIUM, and was drenched, through a grating, with the blood of the slaughtered animal. Such reminiscences of the more brutal side of Paganism are not helpful to the thoughtful and sensitive modern mind. ...
— The Vital Message • Arthur Conan Doyle

... mathematical studies, the learner is required to admit that a point, of which he sees the prototype, a dot before him, has neither length, breadth, nor thickness. This, surely, is a degree of faith not absolutely necessary for the neophyte in science. It is an absurdity which has, with much success, been attacked in "Observations on the Nature of Demonstrative Evidence," by ...
— Practical Education, Volume II • Maria Edgeworth

... on Bajra (that is vajra or dorje), ghanta, mudra, mandala, mystic syllables, and Devis marks it as an offshoot of Tantrism and it offers many parallels to Nepalese literature. On the other hand it is curious that it uses the form Nibana not Nirvana.[428] Its object is to teach a neophyte, who has to receive initiation, how to become a Buddha.[429] In the second part the pupil is addressed as Jinaputra, that is son of the Buddha or one of the household of faith. He is to be moderate but not ascetic in food and clothing: he is not to cleave to the Puranas and ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, An Historical Sketch, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Charles Eliot

... the aerial beings and to discover the secrets of nature. This supernatural knowledge is in possession of a brotherhood of whom two only, Mejnour and his pupil Zanoni, are in existence. The initiation involves the surrender of all violent passions and emotions, and the neophyte must be brought into contact with the powerful and malignant being called the Dweller ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead

... Learner.— N. learner, scholar, student, pupil; apprentice, prentice[obs3], journeyman; articled clerk; beginner, tyro, amateur, rank amateur; abecedarian, alphabetarian[obs3]; alumnus, eleve[Fr]. recruit, raw recruit, novice, neophyte, inceptor[obs3], catechumen, probationer; seminarian, chela, fellow-commoner; debutant. [apprentice medical doctors] intern; resident. schoolboy; fresh, freshman, frosh; junior soph[obs3], junior; senior soph[obs3], senior; sophister[obs3], sophomore; questionist[obs3]. [college and university students] ...
— Roget's Thesaurus

... equations. And the entrance examination, mind you, was no farce. If a candidate was not well grounded they would not have him; and it was necessary to be particular, because the first or lowest form assumed a certain amount of knowledge in the commencement of that course which proposed to land the neophyte in the Indian Civil Service, the army, or a good scholarship ...
— Dr. Jolliffe's Boys • Lewis Hough

... contest with Mr. Dunn, of Indiana, who had steadily refused to vote for Mr. Banks for speaker, to which I deemed proper to refer. He said he was not to be deterred from performing his duty, as he understood it, by the criticisms of the "neophyte" from Ohio. I replied at considerable length and with some feeling. In my reply I repeated my position in respect to the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, declaring: "If the repeal was wrong all northern and southern men alike ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman

... own situation. Might he not be of use in urging this uncle to induce the French King to throw before Savonarola the shield of his protection? At all events, he entered Florence this evening with the burning zeal of a young neophyte who hopes to effect something himself for a glorious and sacred cause embodied in a leader ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 52, February, 1862 • Various

... rises. He despises one of the State judgeships easily at his hand. As his star mounts, his young neophyte, Maxime Valois, shares his toils and enjoys his training. Under his guidance he launches out on the sea of that professional legal activity, which is one ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage

... his sword; the old mission-house, with its church and garrison beside it; the fierce savage lured from a roving life, and changed into a toiling peon, afterwards to revolt against a system of slavery that even religion failed to make endurable; the neophyte turning his hand against his priestly instructor, equally his oppressor; revolt followed by a deluge of blood, with ruinous devastation, until the walls of both mission and military cuartel are left tenantless, and the redskin ...
— The Lone Ranche • Captain Mayne Reid

... reductions had been the economising the third curate, while making the second be always a neophyte, who received his title for Orders, and remained his two years ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge

... phenomenon to investigate would be, the process by which the untonsured neophyte is converted into the bonneted doctor; the progress and stages of his mind in the different phases of the practice; how he begins by deceiving himself, to end in deceiving others; the first uninquiring ignorance; the gradual admission of ideas, what ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 69, February 22, 1851 • Various

... career which he had so laboriously built up from the small beginnings of his Sussex curacy was shattered—and shattered by the inevitable operation of his own essential needs. He was over forty, and he had been put back once more to the very bottom rung of the ladder—a middle-aged neophyte with, so far as could be seen, no special claim to the attention of his new superiors. The example of Newman, a far more illustrious convert, was hardly reassuring: he had been relegated to a complete obscurity, ...
— Eminent Victorians • Lytton Strachey

... considerations, render it advisable that the elementary facts of morphology and physiology should be presented to the beginner side by side— a principle too frequently neglected in books which, like this one, are specially written for the biological neophyte. Although the student is the wiser for the actual observation of the fact of nature, he becomes the better only when able to apply them, as for example, by the judicious construction of elementary generalizations, such as are introduced ...
— Text Book of Biology, Part 1: Vertebrata • H. G. Wells

... between actual and indwelling sin, between guilt and corruption, you have already in that the whole key to Mr. Fearing. He was blamed and counselled and corrected and pitied and patronised by every morning-cloud and early-dew neophyte, while all the time he lived far down from the strife of tongues where the root of the matter strikes its deep roots still deeper every day. "It took him a whole month," tells Greatheart, "to face the Slough. But he would not go back neither. Till, one sunshiny morning, ...
— Bunyan Characters (Second Series) • Alexander Whyte

... gift of the individual who, finding in danger the zest of a glorious, curiosity, the intoxication of action, clear eye, steady hand answering lightning quickness of thought, becomes the D'Artagnan of the air. There is no telling what boyish neophyte will show a steady hand in daring the supreme hazards with light heart, or what man whom his friends thought was born for aviation may lack the ...
— My Second Year of the War • Frederick Palmer

... of my new home, where the excellent principles of high thinking and plain living were highly recommended for all who could not reverse the precept, struck me, a neophyte, as for all the world like that of a cathedral town in England, except that these visiting patrons of religion and learning were treated with a reverence and respect found only in America. Surely it must have amused them, had they ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer

... the neophyte, the well-deserving, who lived eight years, fifteen days. He rests in the peace of the Lord. Flavius and Gratianus and Petronius Probus ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy

... subtract fourteen from two hundred and sixty-two and then to ascertain that one hundred and twenty-four would be precisely half of the remainder. It was all being done, as I have remarked, with the gentlest considering kindness, with no hint of that bitterness which the neophyte had shown himself to be fearing in the lady. Was she not kindness itself? Was she not, in truth, just a shade too kind? Surely there was a purr to her voice, odd, unwonted; and surely her pupil already cringed under a lash ...
— Ma Pettengill • Harry Leon Wilson

... over all of Palestine, and their ascetic brothers were to be found in every wilderness. The requirements of the Order were very strict, and its rites and ceremonies were of the highest mystical and occult degree. The Neophyte was required to serve a preliminary apprenticeship of one year before being admitted to even partial recognition as a member and brother. A further apprenticeship of two more years was required before he was admitted to full membership, and extended the right hand of fellowship. Additional ...
— Mystic Christianity • Yogi Ramacharaka

... offered him as a pattern for "doing up," to that of the unfortunate employer who, while showing John how to handle valuable china carefully, had the misfortune to drop a plate himself—an accident which was followed by the prompt breaking of another by the neophyte, with the addition of "Oh, hellee!" in humble imitation of ...
— Under the Redwoods • Bret Harte

... not to be passed over if we are to make any estimate of his art. He, it is related, always becomes enraged at the word "inspiration," enraged at the common notion that fire descends from heaven upon the head of the favoured neophyte of art. Rodin believes in but one inspiration—nature. He swears he does not invent, but copies nature. He despises improvisation, has contemptuous words for "fatal facility," and, being a slow-moving, slow-thinking man, he admits to his councils those who have conquered art, ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker

... the dissimulation of awkward encumbrances; but Miss Trent's reticence was to Glennard like the closed door to the sanctuary, and his certainty of divining the hidden treasure made him content to remain outside in the happy expectancy of the neophyte. ...
— The Touchstone • Edith Wharton

... off slaves, though in very small numbers, between the Erevato and the Padamo. They would have resisted the attacks of the natives, if, instead of leaving them isolated and solely to the control of the soldiery, they had been formed into communities, and governed like the villages of neophyte Indians. ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V2 • Alexander von Humboldt

... how they're making them in the East?" doubtfully asked the neophyte, reflecting that the pinched-in snugness of the coat, and the flare effect of the skirts, while unquestionably more impressive than his own box-like garb, still lacked something of the quiet distinction which he recalled in the clothes of Herbert ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams

... dollar-mark insignia of a business executive on his purple tunic. He had been standing nearby, and at the mention of asteroid Z-40 had looked up alertly. He glided to the two with a frown on his forehead, and spoke a few curt words to the neophyte, who ...
— The Planetoid of Peril • Paul Ernst

... that he trembled upon the threshold of such a search. He was like the neophyte of some veiled religion, who, after long years of arduous labour and painful preparation, is at length conducted to the doors of its holy of holies, and left to enter there alone. What will he find beyond them? The secret he longed to learn, the seal and ...
— Stella Fregelius • H. Rider Haggard

... was a swift, confirming swoon. Up through the gates they bore her Christalan, Dressed in the garments of the neophyte, That erst were spotless white, but then were soiled, Bedraggled and dust-stained. His golden hair A matted mass, of sunny curls unkempt,— And yet how beautiful he was withal! Into the hall they brought and laid him down, ...
— Under King Constantine • Katrina Trask

... character than in years, was too boyish as yet to be safely consigned to those trials of tact and temper which await the neophyte who enters on life through the doors of a mess-room. His pride was too morbid, too much on the alert for offence; his frankness too crude, his spirit too untamed by the insensible discipline ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... eradicated from his mind. We must add, however, that when the day of trial came, Samdadchiemba boldly confessed his faith as a Christian, and even stood a very fair chance of becoming a martyr, in spite of his backslidings, on the subject of metempsychosis. Well might the missionaries value their neophyte, for (with one doubtful exception) no new convert was added to their church during their long and perilous journey. Although hospitably, and even courteously received every where—under the humblest Mogul tent and in the wealthiest Lama-houses—though listened to with deference ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various

... very evening, a gleam of covert enjoyment on his sombre countenance, as the hot-stuff, the cards, and the pipes were produced, an hour or two before supper,—a meal we always had hot and comfortable. This covert satisfaction, however, was not exhibited without certain misgiving looks, as if the neophyte in these innocent enjoyments distrusted his right to possess his share. I remember in particular, when my mother laid two or three new, clean packs of cards on the table, that Jason cast a stealthy glance over his shoulder, as if to make certain that the act ...
— Satanstoe • James Fenimore Cooper

... was effected, congratulated his congregation and himself, on leaving the village, that he had left in it a person so full of grace, and one who, with the blessing of God, was so likely to bring about the birth of grace in others. The good old man bestowed long and repeated counsels upon his neophyte. The course of study which he prescribed was very simple. The Bible was the Alpha and the Omega—it was the essential whole. It would be well to read other books if they could be had—Clarke and Wesley were, of course, spoken of—but they could be done without. The ...
— Charlemont • W. Gilmore Simms

... discoverable form was the invention of the Church. The religious service by which the neophyte was initiated as a knight has been traced back to the time of Otto III, when it appears in the liturgy of the Roman churches. But the ceremony was not in general use, outside Italy, before the age of the Crusades. It was Urban II who inspired the knighthood of northern Europe with ...
— Medieval Europe • H. W. C. Davis

... table with great care). Always like to be near the stove, and out of the draught. (The prettiest Waitress approaches, and greets him with a sacerdotal sweetness, as one of the Faith, while to the Neophyte—whom she detects, at a glance, as still without the pale—she is severely tolerant.) Now, what are you going to have? [Passing him the bill ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 103, December 17, 1892 • Various

... the black marble hall at the same door by which he had left it, and came up to his neophyte, as the ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott

... freedom and the Union, I pledge my life, my fortune, and my sacred honor. So help me God!" "John Brown's Body" was then sung, the president charged the members in a long speech concerning the principles of the order, and the marshal instructed the neophyte in the signs. To pass one's self as a Leaguer, the "Four L's" had to be given: (1) with right hand raised to heaven, thumb and third finger touching ends over palm, pronounce "Liberty"; (2) bring the hand down over the shoulder and say "Lincoln"; ...
— The Sequel of Appomattox - A Chronicle of the Reunion of the States, Volume 32 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Walter Lynwood Fleming

... contents, they are exceedingly unequal. Modest records of marvellous adventures and sacrifices, and vivid pictures of forest-life, alternate with prolix and monotonous details of the conversion of individual savages, and the praiseworthy deportment of some exemplary neophyte. With regard to the condition and character of the primitive inhabitants of North America, it is impossible to exaggerate their value as an authority. I should add, that the closest examination has left me no doubt that these missionaries wrote ...
— The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century • Francis Parkman

... priest once presented to Saint Teresa a young girl who wished to become a Carmelite nun, and who, according to him, had angelic qualities. Saint Teresa, accepting the neophyte, replied: "See, my father, our Lord has given this maiden devotion, but she has no judgment, and never will have any; and she will always be a ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori

... shall nevertheless hope to angle in Styx with the worm that never dieth." To his editorial successor Spey was a trifle more gracious than she had been to Russel; but she did not wholly open her heart to this neophyte of her stream, serving him up in the pool of Dellagyl with the ugliest, blackest, gauntest old cock-salmon of her depths, owning a snout like the prow ...
— Camps, Quarters, and Casual Places • Archibald Forbes

... admitted as a member of a fraternity, sharing the privileges of that fraternity, and, to a certain extent, its duties. He is at first a junior member, it is true. Among his duties, therefore, will be obedience to some of the senior members, and respect to all. But none the less is he a neophyte member of a corporation which extends back hundreds of years perhaps,—he is a co-proprietor of its honors and privileges, is responsible for their preservation, and is, from the first, inoculated with ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 45, July, 1861 • Various

... analogy. But the transfer of Karma is not altogether foreign to Brahmanic thought, for it is held that a wife may share in her husband's Karma nor is it wholly unknown to Sinhalese Buddhism.[11] After thus deliberately rejecting all personal success and selfish aims, the neophyte makes a vow (pranidhana) to acquire enlightenment for the good of all beings and not to swerve from the rules of life and faith requisite for this end. He is then a "son of Buddha," a phrase which is merely a natural metaphor for saying that he is one of the household of faith[12] ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot

... find themselves together. Godeschal, who had served his apprenticeship under Maitre Derville, was not the sort of clerk to allow the precious tradition of the "welcome" to be lost. This "welcome" is a breakfast which every neophyte must give to the "ancients" of the ...
— A Start in Life • Honore de Balzac

... the picture gallery tends to produce a flutter of excitement and expectation. Magnificent staircases, dim perspectives of frescoes and carvings, the glorious hall of Apollo, rooms with mosaic pavements, antique vases, countless spoils of art, dazzle the eye of the neophyte, and prepare the mind for some grand enchantment. Then opens on one the grand hall of paintings arranged by schools, the works of each artist by themselves, a wilderness ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe

... who converted the Tahitians to the Christian faith the Arioi adherent was the chief barrier, the fiercest opponent, and, when won over, the most enthusiastic neophyte. In that is found the secret of the society's strength. It embraced all the imaginative, active, ambitious Tahitians, to whom it gave opportunities to display varied talents, to form close friendships, to rise ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien

... world, and gave us a point to start from. How I explained to George that he must not subscribe the one hundred thousand dollars in a moment. It must come in bits, when "the cause" needed a stimulus, or the public needed encouragement. How we caught neophyte editors, and explained to them enough to make them think the Moon was well-nigh their own invention and their own thunder. How, beginning in Boston, we sent round to all the men of science, all those of philanthropy, and all those of commerce, three thousand circulars, inviting them ...
— The Brick Moon, et. al. • Edward Everett Hale

... writing first novels is becoming increasingly popular with young authors it was inevitable that a "First Novel Library" should find its way on to the market. Whether the classification is to be construed as an appeal for forbearance for the shortcomings of the neophyte, or as a warning which a considerate publisher feels is due to the public, is not for me to say. But the policy of charging six shillings for these maiden efforts—all that is required of us for the mature ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Oct. 17, 1917 • Various



Words linked to "Neophyte" :   plant life, pupil, tiro, flora, educatee, enlistee, initiate, recruit, novice, plant, student, tyro, beginner



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