"Pygmy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... inhabitants of the earth such a fright in 1832, it really did not come within fifty millions of miles of us. Even the great comet through whose filmy tail the earth passed in 1861 was itself fourteen millions of miles away. The ordinary mind, schooled to measure space by the tiny stretches of a pygmy planet, cannot grasp the import of such distances; yet these are mere units of measure compared with the vast stretches of sidereal space. Were the comet which hurtles past us at a speed of, say, a hundred miles a second to continue its mad flight ...
— A History of Science, Volume 3(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... Arno, the Seine, the Rhine, and the Thames hold on the map of the world's passion. We are all acquainted with the typical American who added to his name in the hotel book on the shores of Lake Como, "What pygmy puddles these are to the inland seas of tremendous and eternal America!" But these are coarser, more palpable signs of that uneasy consciousness which frets at a ...
— Noah Webster - American Men of Letters • Horace E. Scudder
... will never relinquish the hope that what I am writing may one day reach your hands—has not forsaken me, even in my confinement, and the extensive though unimportant details into which I have been hurried, renders it necessary that I commence another sheet. Fortunately, my pygmy characters comprehend a great many words within a small space ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott
... heaven's armory to plan the world; whereas Moses represented the Deity as producing the whole universe by his fiat! Can I think you have any esteem for a writer who has spoiled Tasso's hell and the devil; who transforms Lucifer, sometimes into a toad, and at others into a pygmy; who makes him say the same thing over again a hundred times; who metamorphoses him into a school-divine; and who, by an absurdly serious imitation of Ariosto's comic invention of fire-arms, represents the devils and angels cannonading each other in heaven! Neither I, nor any other ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... fierce July sun is pouring down a flood of humid, moisture-laden heat upon a densely-packed, sweltering mass of turbulent men, many of them flushed with drink, all of them flushed with triumph, for the ill-armed, ill-disciplined militia of the seventies—a pygmy force as compared with the expert "Guardsmen" of to-day—has been scattered to the winds: the sturdy police have been swept from the streets and driven to the shelter of the stations. Mob law rules supreme. Dense clouds of smoke are rising ...
— Foes in Ambush • Charles King
... goes we can probably do as well in the pygmy land as anywhere else," answered the veteran, "and perhaps it will be well to head for that place. If we run across any elephant herds in the meanwhile, we can stop, ...
— Tom Swift and his Electric Rifle • Victor Appleton
... and spirit of the ministry easily broke through all the machinations of these pygmy rebels, and our armament was quickly such as was likely ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 6 - Reviews, Political Tracts, and Lives of Eminent Persons • Samuel Johnson
... occupying the sides and two the ends. Those at the ends are curious, but have little artistic merit. They consist, in each case, of a caryatid figure four times repeated, representations, respectively, of Astarte and of a pygmy god, who, according to some, is Bes, and, according to others, Melkarth or Esmun.[732] The figures of Astarte are rude, as are generally her statues.[733] They have the hair arranged in three rows of crisp curls, the arms bent, and the hands supporting the breasts. ...
— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson
... perplexed in contemplating the possibility of their having descended from a common progenitor. Yet the disparity is no greater than that between the Shire horse and the Shetland pony, the Shorthorn and the Kerry cattle, or the Patagonian and the Pygmy; and all dog breeders know how easy it is to produce a variety in type ...
— Dogs and All About Them • Robert Leighton
... dwarfs compared with the ancients, or even the Elizabethan men. But what is that to the purpose? A living dog is better than a dead lion. Shall a man go and hang himself because he belongs to the race of pygmies, and not be the biggest pygmy that he can? Let every one mind his own business, and endeavor to be what he ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... as the water. The boat was behaving splendidly, leaping and lurching through the welter like a race-horse. I could hardly contain myself with the joy of it. The huge sail, the howling wind, the driving seas, the plunging boat—I, a pygmy, a mere speck in the midst of it, was mastering the elemental strife, flying through it and over it, ...
— Tales of the Fish Patrol • Jack London
... appreciably curved that the owner was evidently in a condition of transition from the semi-quadrupedal crouch of the ape to the erect attitude of man. The Ape-Man, in other words, was a heavy, squat, powerful, bestial-looking animal; of small stature, but above the pygmy standard; erect in posture, but with clear traces of the proneness of his ancestor; far removed from the highest ape in brainpower, but almost equally far removed from the lowest savage that is known ...
— The Story of Evolution • Joseph McCabe
... the indescribable blessing to the congested communities of Europe and America, to find an unlimited outlet here! Mars is already past its prime, and Venus scarcely habitable, but in Jupiter we have a new promised land, compared with which our earth is a pygmy, or but little more ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds - A Romance of the Future • John Jacob Astor |
