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More "Figurative" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... trace it back to a few hundred monosyllabic roots, each expressing with analytic precision some definite material object, from which roots the whole subsequent must be derived by etymologic spinning-out, by agglutination, and by figurative heightening of meaning. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 79, May, 1864 • Various
... clear! more natural! more agreeable to the true spirit of simplicity! Here are no tropes,—no figurative expressions,—not even so much as an invocation to the Muse. He does not detain his readers by any needless circumlocution; by unnecessarily informing them, what he is going to sing; or still more unnecessarily enumerating ...
— Parodies of Ballad Criticism (1711-1787) • William Wagstaffe
... what's in the damned thing, you know, Mr. Vandemark; and the truth being a seamless web, if a lawyer knows all about the law in one book, he's prone to make a hell of a straight guess at what's in the rest of 'em. Hence beware of the man of one book. I may safely lay claim to being that man—in a figurative way; though there are half a dozen volumes or so back there—the small pedestal on which I stand reaching up toward a place on the Supreme Bench ...
— Vandemark's Folly • Herbert Quick
... 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 life and duties. The oriental languages, like the people who speak them, are exceedingly figurative and poetic in their modes of expression; and hence, for our present purpose, it is only by getting back as closely as we can to the original that we are able adequately to appreciate the beauty and poetry of that simple but charming life about ...
— The Shepherd Of My Soul • Rev. Charles J. Callan
... freight of imperishable literature, revealing a learning positively prodigious, a style that flows with a sonorous majesty and crashes with a vitriolic and destroying power, a lavish richness in figurative language, a beauty of Aeolian harps, of sapphire seas, of the flushed and ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... we have creative power, not in a figurative sense, but in reality. Everything in the material universe about us had its origin first in spirit, in thought, and from this it took its form. The very world in which we live, with all its manifold ...
— What All The World's A-Seeking • Ralph Waldo Trine
... from every stage and process of the social training of men. Things long hidden appeared discovered with an amazing clearness and nakedness. These men who had awakened, laughed dissolvent laughs, and the old muddle of schools and colleges, books and traditions, the old fumbling, half-figurative, half-formal teaching of the Churches, the complex of weakening and confusing suggestions and hints, amidst which the pride and honor of adolescence doubted and stumbled and fell, became nothing but ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... messenger, and in general to be subject to his directions. It gave to the aid the office of chief and rendered probable his election as the successor of his principal after the decease of the latter. In their figurative language these aids of the sachems were styled "Braces in the Long House," which symbolized ...
— Houses and House-Life of the American Aborigines • Lewis H. Morgan
... jolly fellow, a lover of fun and good dinners, and of an amiability and personal popularity that have aided not a little the popularity of his writings in verse and prose—for he writes prose too, prettier, quainter, more figurative, and more poetic if anything, than his poetry. He is also a professor at ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. I, No. 6 - Of Literature, Art, And Science, New York, August 5, 1850 • Various
... unusual metaphor, for example—may often be used in the beginning of an article to arouse curiosity. As the comparison in a metaphor is implied rather than expressed, the points of likeness may not immediately be evident to the reader and thus the figurative statement piques his curiosity. A comparison in the form of a simile, or in that of a parable or allegory, may ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer
... not believe in any literal heaven and hell, but considers these as figurative expressions of the state of the soul, whether in this life or the life to come. The Aryas therefore do not perform the shradhh ceremony nor offer oblations to the dead, and in abolishing these they reduce enormously the power and ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India—Volume I (of IV) • R.V. Russell
... Indians of different tribes were going to attack the British garrison at Michili-Makinak, and endeavour to destroy all the English in Upper Canada. Henry did not pay over much attention to this warning, because "the Indian manner of speech is so extravagantly figurative". ...
— Pioneers in Canada • Sir Harry Johnston
... figurative. Polly, why have you gone back to braids and bows? You look very infantile for a ...
— The Wide Awake Girls in Winsted • Katharine Ellis Barrett
... with, bring absolutely to an end, especially as something hostile, hindering, or harmful, was formerly used of persons and material objects, a usage now obsolete except in poetry or highly figurative speech. Abolish is now used of institutions, customs, and conditions, especially those wide-spread and long existing; as, to abolish slavery, ignorance, intemperance, poverty. A building that is burned to the ground is said to be destroyed by fire. Annihilate, as a philosophical term, signifies ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... by a friend as to the circumstances which would be sufficient to legalize a "nuncupative [Footnote: "Nuncupative" is a legal term for an oral as distinguished from a written will.] death-bed will." Kinglake wrote a figurative account of an imaginary case in much detail, and by the next post received a solemn affidavit from the man setting out Kinglake's own exact series of incidents as ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke V1 • Stephen Gwynn
... from the probability that, as contemporaries resident in the same provincial town, Ely, they were well acquainted with each other, leave little doubt that the two were personal friends. Bulleyn's figurative description of the poet, quoted at p. xxvii., is scarcely complete without the following verses, which are appended to it by way of summary of his teachings (similar verses are appended to the descriptions of Chaucer, Gower, &c.):—[Barclay ...
— The Ship of Fools, Volume 1 • Sebastian Brandt
... hearth, lighting up with a ruddy glow the heavy panelings and the time-worn tapestries. Dinner was just over, the dessert was on the table, and two gentlemen were sitting over their wine—though this is to be taken rather in a figurative sense, for their conversation was so engrossing as to make them oblivious of even the charms of the old ancestral port of rare vintage which Lord Chetwynde had produced to do honor to his guest. Nor is this to be wondered at. Friends ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... among the New-Brunswick Indians frequently wear a round hat, a shawl, and short clothes, resembling the short gown and petticoat worn by the French and Dutch women. The Indian language is bold and figurative, abounding in hyperbolical expressions, and is said to be susceptible of much elegance. To give the reader some notion of the manner in which these people conduct their conferences with each other, and with Europeans, ...
— First History of New Brunswick • Peter Fisher
... centre-piece is in illustration of the text in the Apocalypse (v. 12): "Worthy is the Lamb that was slain to receive power, and 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, ...
— Beautiful Europe - Belgium • Joseph E. Morris
... this unprecedented occurrence, I made a discovery,—that of Sergeant Marigold's sense of humour. To that sense of humour my upbraidings, often, I must confess, couched in picturesque and figurative terms so as not too greatly to hurt his feelings, had made constant appeal for the past fifteen years. Hitherto he had hidden all signs of humorous titillation behind his impassive mask. To-night, a spark of ...
— The Red Planet • William J. Locke
... often taken to mean unreal, fanciful, figurative. For man is earthly in his views as well as in his feelings, and therefore regards visible and material things as the emphatic realities. Hence he employs material objects as the ultimate standard, by which he measures the reality of all other things. The natural man has more consciousness ...
— Sermons to the Natural Man • William G.T. Shedd
... never did. Various greedy sinners of the congregation drank in the comfortable doctrine with relief. It was worth the while having come to church that Sunday morning! All was plain. The Bible, as usual, meant nothing in particular; it was merely an obscure and figurative school-copybook; and if a man were only respectable, he was a man after God's ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... it 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 in connection ...
— Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts • Herbert Silberer
... and figurative expression beyond her, paused in her knitting and looked anxiously at Phoebe, to see how she would take it. After a moment of thought, the young woman admitted ...
— The Panchronicon • Harold Steele Mackaye
... not these clumsy drawings, too, reveal that which, considering their environment, is talent—original and unacademic. Here is the sheer beginning, the spontaneous germ of art, the labouring of a savage soul controlled by wilful aesthetic emotions. For these pictures are not figurative, not mere signs and symbols capable of elucidation, but the earliest and only efforts of an illiterate race, a race in intellectual infancy, towards the ideal—a forlorn but none the less sincere attempt to reach the "light that quickens dreams ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... however, are limited to relatively few of a population. The raison d'etre of the greater number of minor mental inefficiencies the psychanalyst puts down to handicaps in the unconscious. Again he mistakes figurative imagery for explanations. The conception of endocrine diversity in the make-up supplies us with the rationale of the vast majority of organic and functional defects and inferiorities, in short, subnormalities of any group, ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... commentaries, eh? and shapes of helmets. Well. What shape does it take? Why, my dear, you know of course that those expressions are figurative. I think it takes the shape of a certain composure and peace of mind which the Christian soul feels, and justly feels, in regarding the provision made for its welfare in the gospel. It is spoken of as the helmet of salvation; and there is the ...
— The Old Helmet, Volume I • Susan Warner
... hear everything," he interposed quickly; for an idea came to him—if Mrs. Dickson had to hear the tale she should hear it from him, with certain little embellishments and figurative allusions, which would effectually destroy any chance Ailleen might have of making capital out ...
— Colonial Born - A tale of the Queensland bush • G. Firth Scott
... with Wordsworth's Ode on the Intimations of Immortality. Francis Quarles' Divine Emblems long remained a favorite book with religious readers, both in Old and New England. Emblem books, in which engravings of a figurative design were accompanied with explanatory letterpress in verse, were a popular class of literature in the 17th century. The most famous of them all ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... though seldom—sages never: But speakers, bards, diplomatists, and dancers, Little that's great, but much of what is clever; Most orators, but very few financiers, Though all Exchequer Chancellors endeavour, Of late years, to dispense with Cocker's rigours,[804] And grow quite figurative with their figures. ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... philosophy, be it Plato's or Hegel's, recognises in what actually is, the rational, the realisation of eternal, rational ideas. This realisation, or the process of what we call creation, can never be conceived by us otherwise than figuratively. But we can make this figurative presentation clearer and clearer. That the world was made by a wood cutter, as was originally implied in the Hebrew word bara, and in the German schoepfer, schaffer, in the English shaper, or ...
— The Silesian Horseherd - Questions of the Hour • Friedrich Max Mueller
... formed according to the figurative sense of a word, or the mental conception of the thing spoken of, and not according to the literal or common use of the term; it is therefore in general connected with some figure of rhetoric: as "The Word was made flesh, and dwelt amongst us, and we beheld ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... in the same language, forgetting himself, in the excitement of the moment, and unconsciously using the same figurative diction, "or the fountain of the red stream may be dried up before the medicine-man comes. Hasten! It is noble to do good, and the Great Spirit shall ...
— The Lost Hunter - A Tale of Early Times • John Turvill Adams
... with his kindly half-caste wife, we visit the gilded and dragon-carved mansion of a leading Chinese merchant, friendly, hospitable, and delighted to exhibit his household gods, both in literal and figurative form. A visit to the Joss Temple follows, liberally supported by this smiling Celestial, whose zeal and charity may perchance plead for him in that purer sanctuary not made with hands, and as yet unrevealed to his spiritual sight. The ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... the figurative politeness of a negro chief, he assured me that his town, his forests, his slaves, his wives, were mine (he was quite sincere with regard to ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... chemical philosopher should adopt the simplest style and manner; he will avoid all ornaments as something injurious to his subject, and should bear in mind the saying of the first king of Great Britain respecting a sermon which was excellent in doctrine but overcharged with poetical allusions and figurative language, "that the tropes and metaphors of the speaker were like the brilliant wild flowers in a field of corn—very pretty, but which did very much hurt the corn." In announcing even the greatest and most important discoveries, the true philosopher will communicate ...
— Consolations in Travel - or, the Last Days of a Philosopher • Humphrey Davy
... have anything like justice in him, how is he to reprove, in his children, vices in which he himself so long indulged? These vices of youth are varnished over by the saying, that there must be time for 'sowing the wild oats,' and that 'wildest colts make the best horses.' These figurative oats are, however, generally like the literal ones; they are never to be eradicated from the soil; and as to the colts, wildness in them is an indication of high animal spirit, having nothing at all to do with the mind, which is invariably debilitated and debased ...
— Advice to Young Men • William Cobbett
... and even with God himself, the center and source of all being; through his active will he is increasingly creator of his environment. Man is thus in a true sense creating the conditions which make him to be what he is. Thus in no figurative sense, but literally and actually, man is in the process of creating himself. He is realizing the latent and hitherto unsuspected potentialities of his nature. He is creating a world in which to express himself; ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... incident of the leper, Tertullian argues that the prohibition of contact with a leper was figurative, applying really to the contact with sin. But the Godhead is incapable of pollution, and therefore Jesus touched the leper. It would be in vain for Marcion to suggest that this was done in contempt of the law. For, upon his own (Docetic) theory, the body of Jesus was phantasmal, and ...
— The Gospels in the Second Century - An Examination of the Critical Part of a Work - Entitled 'Supernatural Religion' • William Sanday
... to observe, children, that we have no real authority for the reveries to which it is owing. We are told nothing distinctly of the heavenly world; except that it will be free from sorrow, and pure from sin. What is said of pearl gates, golden floors, and the like, is accepted as merely figurative by religious enthusiasts themselves; and whatever they pass their time in conceiving, whether of the happiness of risen souls, of their intercourse, or of the appearance and employment of the heavenly powers, is entirely the product of their own imagination; ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... oldest documents there are certain ideograms that, when we are warned, remind us of the natural objects from which their forms have been taken, but the connection is slight and difficult of apprehension. Even in the case of those characters whose forms most clearly suggest their true figurative origin, it would have been impossible to assign its prototype to each without the help of later texts, where, with more or less modification, they formed parts of sentences whose general significance was known. Finally, the Assyrian ...
— A History of Art in Chaldaea & Assyria, v. 1 • Georges Perrot
... said, very seriously. "It is kind of you.... But, do you know, I was speaking rather of figurative sugar." ...
— A Fool There Was • Porter Emerson Browne
... acquaintance I had made on our former visit, and who was now located on the island Mahonta (lat. 17d 58' S., long. 24d 6' E.). The villagers looked as we may suppose people do who see a ghost, and in their figurative way of speaking said, "He has dropped among us from the clouds, yet came riding on the back of a hippopotamus! We Makololo thought no one could cross the Chobe without our knowledge, but here he drops among us like ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... equally accepted; and a grateful world insisted upon styling the new science, as it was deemed, "Galvanism." Thus a word was added to all the languages, which has been found useful in its literal sense, and forcible in its figurative. Whatever we may think of Galvani's philosophy, we cannot deny that he immortalized his name. He died a few years after, fully satisfied with his theory, but having no suspicion of the many, the peculiar, the marvellous results that were to flow from the chance ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... its middle or quattrocento age of evolution. It remained for Buonarroti to cover the vault and the whole western end with masterpieces displaying what Vasari called the "modern" style in its most sublime and imposing manifestation. At the same time he closed the cycle of the figurative arts, and rendered any further progress on the same lines impossible. The growth which began with Niccolo of Pisa and with Cimabue, which advanced through Giotto and his school, Perugino and Pinturicchio, Piero della Francesca and Signorelli, Fra Angelico and Benozzo Gozzoli, ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... to my saying on the general question of miracles: Why these dubious miracles?—such as curing blindness that may have been cured by a process?—since the unity given to the act of healing is probably (more probably than otherwise) but the figurative unity of the tendency to mythus; or else it is that unity misapprehended and mistranslated by the reporters. Such, again, as the miracles of the loaves—so liable to be utterly gossip, so incapable of being watched or examined amongst a crowd of 7,000 people. Besides, were these people mad? ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... prisoner remained in the dock. The days of the years of his pilgrimage were not few, and quite probably, except in a figurative sense, not evil. He was of sturdy build, quiet manners, and his countenance was indicative of great sincerity. In a voice extremely deferential he stated that he had once ministered to a dying Confederate, and it was impossible for him to take ...
— Something of Men I Have Known - With Some Papers of a General Nature, Political, Historical, and Retrospective • Adlai E. Stevenson
... Saviour's arms, and taken even into himself. Assuredly, if we put on the Lord Jesus Christ, we shall not make provision for the flesh to fulfil the lusts thereof; such a warning would then be wholly unnecessary. Or, if we do not like language thus figurative, let us put it, if we will, into the plainest words that shall express the same meaning; let us call it praying to Christ, thinking of him, hoping in him, earnestly loving him; these, at least, are words without a figure, which all can surely understand. Let us ...
— The Christian Life - Its Course, Its Hindrances, And Its Helps • Thomas Arnold
... 15th verse of the fourth chapter of the Epistle to the Galatians, instead of being taken in a figurative sense, as it generally has been, be understood literally, it will be found to furnish the means of determining, with a tolerably near approach to certainty, the particular nature of the disease under which St. Paul is supposed ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... has a strong temper within him, and he can redden up beautifully all over when his equanimity is disturbed. If you tread upon his ecclesiastical bunions he will give you either a dark mooner or an eye opener—we use these classical terms in a figurative sense. He will keep quiet so long as you do; but if you make an antagonistic move be will punish you if possible. He can wield a clever pen; his style is cogent, scholarly, and, unless overburdened with temper, dignified. He can fling the shafts of satire or distil the balm of pathos; can ...
— Our Churches and Chapels • Atticus
... second meaning attached in Scripture to the expression God dwells in man. According to the first meaning, we understand it in the most plain and literal sense the words are capable of conveying. According to the second, we understand His dwelling in a figurative sense, implying this—that He gives an acquaintance with Himself to man. So, for instance, when Judas asked, "Lord, how is it, that Thou wilt manifest Thyself to us and not to the world?" Our Redeemer's reply was this—"If a ...
— Sermons Preached at Brighton - Third Series • Frederick W. Robertson
... to burn incense, as at that time his lot was, "The whole multitude of the people were praying without." (Luke 1:9,10) They left him where he was, near to God, between God and them, mediating of them; for the offering of incense by the chief priest was a figurative making of intercession for the people, and ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... Oecolampadius, in their anti-literal and figurative interpretation of the words of institution, endeavour to support it by Scriptural analogies, more or less appropriate, but in the practical objections they raised, which Luther treated as over-curious subtleties of human reason, they were actuated ...
— Life of Luther • Julius Koestlin
... more distinct than the object it reflects; and if Mr. Clerk's version can be trusted (it appears to be more literal though less rhetorical than MacPherson's) the Gaelic is often concrete and sharp where MacPherson is general; often plain where he is figurative or ornate; and sometimes of a meaning quite different from his rendering. Take, e.g., the closing passage of the second ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... metamorphosed into a cascade in a pantomime is full as sublime an effort of genius. I do not know whether the Arabian Nights are of Oriental origin or not:(641) I should think not, because I never saw any other Oriental composition that was not bombast without genius, and figurative without nature; like an Indian screen, where you see little men on the foreground, and larger men hunting tigers above in the air, which they take for perspective. I do not think the Sultaness's narratives very natural or very probable, but there is a wildness in them that ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... here speaks of 'light,' not 'the light,'—that is, he is speaking now not of Christian character, which he had likened to light, but of physical light to which he had likened it, and is backing up his figurative statement as to the reproving and manifesting effects of the former, by the plain fact as to the latter, that, when daylight shines on anything, it is revealed, and, as it were, becomes light. He clenches his exhortation by quoting probably an early Christian hymn, which regards Christ as the great ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... Natche may be considered, from the above account of it, as merely figurative. For the small quantity of yams, which we saw the first day, could not be intended as a general contribution; and, indeed, we were given to understand, that they were a portion consecrated to the Otooa, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 15 (of 18) • Robert Kerr
... to drop all figurative expression, what hopes can we ever have of engaging mankind to a practice which we confess full of austerity and rigour? Or what theory of morals can ever serve any useful purpose, unless it can show, ...
— An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals • David Hume
... horrid ritual, in order to secure an unearthly guardian to their treasures. They killed a negro or Spaniard, and buried him with the treasure, believing that his spirit would haunt the spot, and terrify away all intruders." There is a figurative peculiarity in the language in which Joshua denounced the man who should dare rebuild Jericho, that seems to point at some ancient pagan rite of this kind. Nor does it seem improbable that a practice which existed in times so little remote as those of the buccaneers, may have first begun ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... more clear! more natural! more agreeable to the true spirit of simplicity? Here are no tropes, no figurative expressions, not even so much as an invocation to the Muse. He does not detain his readers by any needless circumlocution, by unnecessarily informing them what he is going to sing, or still more unnecessarily enumerating what he ...
— English Satires • Various
... me to place you here an excuse I am conscious of owing you, for having, perhaps, too much affected the figurative style; though surely, it can pass nowhere more allowable than in a subject which is so properly the province of poetry, nay, is poetry itself, pregnant with every flower of imagination and loving metaphors, even ...
— Memoirs Of Fanny Hill - A New and Genuine Edition from the Original Text (London, 1749) • John Cleland
... transmutation-processes—in the sensations, feelings, perceptions, images, ideas—in short, in all that is going on at the point where (I necessarily express myself in terms of spatial relations, though in this connection these are figurative) my sentience and ...
— Essays Towards a Theory of Knowledge • Alexander Philip
... preposition "de" conveys the general idea of separation from a source or starting point, in space (literal or figurative), or in time (89, 131). This meaning develops into that of the source from which connection or ownership arises (49), and also into that of the agency from which an act is done or a condition caused (169). ...
— A Complete Grammar of Esperanto • Ivy Kellerman
... do not dull thy palm with entertainment/Of each new-hatch'd, unfledg'd comrade] The literal sense is, Do not make thy palm callous by shaking every man by the hand. The figurative meaning may be, Do not by promiscuous conversation make thy mind insensible ...
— Notes to Shakespeare, Volume III: The Tragedies • Samuel Johnson
... act practically—according to the literality of the legal, implied, figurative, allegorical significations of the Great National ...
— The Monikins • J. Fenimore Cooper
... have none, unless you learn to cook him." These words recurred to me, just as I was on the point of taking a life partner, in a figurative sense. ...
— How to Cook Husbands • Elizabeth Strong Worthington
... case, indeed, can try so severely, or put upon record so conspicuously, this indestructible propensity for seeking light out of darkness—this thirst for looking into the future by the aid of dice, real or figurative, as the fact of men eminent for piety having yielded to the temptation. We give one instance—the instance of a person who, in practical theology, has been, perhaps, more popular than any other in any church. Dr. Doddridge, in his ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... professes to contain all the words used in South France, with their meaning in French, their proper and figurative acceptations, augmentatives, diminutives, with examples and quotations. Along with each word we have all its various forms as they appear in the different dialects, its forms in the older dialects, the closely related forms in the other Romance languages, and its etymology. A special feature ...
— Frederic Mistral - Poet and Leader in Provence • Charles Alfred Downer
... Chapters ix.-xiv. of the book of Zechariah illustrate this custom,—chapters which apparently come from the last Old Testament period, the Greek or Maccabean. The habit of presenting prophetic truth in the highly figurative, symbolic form, of the apocalypse also became prominent in later Judaism. This has already been noted in the study of the growth of the New Testament, and is illustrated by the book of Revelation. ...
— The Origin & Permanent Value of the Old Testament • Charles Foster Kent
... a beautiful diction, it will always be found that it consists in this happy relation between external freedom and internal necessity. The principal features that contribute to this freedom of the imagination are the individualizing of objects and the figurative or inexact expression of a thing; the former employed to give force to its sensuousness, the latter to produce it where it does not exist. When we express a species or kind by an individual, and portray a conception in a single case, we remove from fancy the chains which the understanding ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... little Fyne less solemn. He hissed through his teeth in unexpectedly figurative style that it would take a lot to persuade him to "push under the head of a poor devil of a girl quite sufficiently plucky"—and snorted. He was still gazing at the distant quarry, and I think he was affected by that ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad
... those professors of religion who still preach a heaven of golden streets and pearly gates, of idleness and everlasting psalm-singing, of restful and innocuous bliss. Mark Twain wanted to point out the absurdity of taking the allegories and the figurative language of the Bible literally. Of course everybody called for a harp and a halo as soon as they reached heaven. They were given the harps and halos—indeed nothing harmless and reasonable was refused them. But they found these things the merest accessories. ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... been entrusted a high destiny, and who know not at what hour they may be called to give an account of their stewardship,[34] bids men look forward with certainty and hope to a glorious consummation of the kingdom. Though many of our Lord's sayings with regard to His second coming are couched in figurative language, we cannot believe that He intended to teach that the kingdom itself was to be brought about in a spectacular or material way. He bids His disciples take heed lest they be deceived by a visible Christ, or led away by merely outward signs.[35] His coming ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... of sensuous intuition, which is possible and necessary a priori, may be called figurative (synthesis speciosa), in contradistinction to that which is cogitated in the mere category in regard to the manifold of an intuition in general, and is called connection or conjunction of the understanding (synthesis intellectualis). Both are transcendental, not merely because ...
— The Critique of Pure Reason • Immanuel Kant
... novice who neglected to sweep out the Council room, hence was reborn as a broom,(!) therefore the wisest of all the world's sages stands accused of idiotic superstition. Why not try and understand the true meaning of the figurative statement before criticising? Is or is not that which is called magnetic effluvia a something, a stuff or a substance, invisible and imponderable though it be?... The mesmeric or magnetic fluid which emanates from man to man, or even from ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal
... Legislation,' it must be understood that 'legislation' is here to be understood in a figurative sense only. When we speak of legislation in everyday language, we mean that process of parliamentary activity by which Municipal Statutes are called into existence. Municipal Legislation presupposes a sovereign power, which prescribes rules of conduct to its subjects. ...
— The League of Nations and its Problems - Three Lectures • Lassa Oppenheim
... carking cares and tribulations of the present life, were kept in view the far more important realities of the life that is to come, and the souls of the people were enbraved and strengthened for the conflicts, both literal and figurative, to which ...
— Neville Trueman the Pioneer Preacher • William Henry Withrow
... insisted on by our theologians and the framers of our Confessions, is that a passage of Scripture is always to be taken in its natural, plain and literal sense, unless there is something in the text itself, or in the context, that clearly indicates that it is intended to convey a figurative sense. ...
— The Way of Salvation in the Lutheran Church • G. H. Gerberding
... But in the house, if "faither was in," they were quiet as mice. In short, Hob moved through life in a great peace - the reward of any one who shall have killed his man, with any formidable and figurative circumstance, in the midst of a country ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... by their form of teeth, the character of their stomachs, and the shortness of their bowels, and fed, for the time they remained in it, exclusively on vegetable substances, which, in ordinary circumstances, their lacteals could not have converted into chyle. Certain figurative expressions in Scripture taken literally, which refer to a class of wild animals whose real destiny is rather, it would seem, to be extirpated than to be changed, coupled with the belief, now no longer ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... white man, and of noble Castilian race, had been enabled to give us something which, on the other side of the sea,* was sought for as very precious. (* 'Por alla,' or, 'del otro lado del charco,' (properly 'beyond,' or 'on the other side of the great lake'), a figurative expression, by which the people in the Spanish colonies denote Europe.) I here acquit myself of the promise I made to this worthy man, who disinterestedly refused to accept of the slightest retribution. The Pearl Coast presents ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... theories of their own to support. The image of a vinculum juris colours and pervades every part of the Roman law of Contract and Delict. The law bound the parties together, and the chain could only be undone by the process called solutio, an expression still figurative, to which our word "payment" is only occasionally and incidentally equivalent. The consistency with which the figurative image was allowed to present itself, explains an otherwise puzzling peculiarity of Roman legal phraseology, the fact that "Obligation" ...
— Ancient Law - Its Connection to the History of Early Society • Sir Henry James Sumner Maine
... against us, amid the ripeness of its gardens, the dark red residence, with its formal facings and its vacant windows, seemed to make the past definite and massive; the little village, nestling between park and palace, around a patch of turfy common, with its taverns of figurative names, its ivy-towered church, its mossy roofs, looked like the property of a feudal lord. It was in this dark composite light that I had read the British classics; it was this mild moist air that had blown from the pages of the poets; while I seemed ...
— A Passionate Pilgrim • Henry James
... come down to look into the matter. As his people were then holding a grand council fire at the forks of the Delaware, they did not wish to put it out and build another council fire on this side of the Delaware. The reason which he gave for this was figurative and Indian-like. ...
— Stories of New Jersey • Frank Richard Stockton
... the home-life that needs the fullest sympathy, Granville had no true companionship. He went out alone to parties and the theatres. Nothing in his house appealed to him. A huge Crucifix that hung between his bed and Angelique's seemed figurative of his destiny. Does it not represent a murdered Divinity, a Man-God, done to death in all the prime of life and beauty? The ivory of that cross was less cold than Angelique crucifying her husband ...
— A Second Home • Honore de Balzac
... Annotations, on its first pages, a "Preface declaring the reason and use of the Book;" and at the last pages a "Table directing to some principal things observed in the Annotations of the Psalms," a list of "Hebrew phrases observed which are somewhat hard and figurative," and also some ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle
... the word 'founded' in a literal as well as figurative sense. While the merchants, in their year of victories, threw down the walls of the war-towers, they as eagerly and diligently set their best craftsmen to lift higher the walls of their churches. For the most part, the Early Norman or Basilican ...
— Val d'Arno • John Ruskin
... highly respectable in the beginning of its career. I have here used the term in the figurative sense; it is in truth an epigram into which all political abomination ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... monstris liberat Perseus frees the land from monsters (literal separation—actual motion is expressed) (b) Perseus terram tristitia liberat Perseus frees the land from sorrow (figurative ...
— Latin for Beginners • Benjamin Leonard D'Ooge
... know it—nor do I think it; nor what is more, do you think it; for you are sharp enough to know that where there are so many figurative terms in use to signify murder, it is not probable that had they, on this occasion, wished to signify murder, they would have used a phrase which every one knows expresses an intention to drive a man out of the country. Yes, sir, ...
— The Macdermots of Ballycloran • Anthony Trollope
... of biological equality of the two sexes must use the word in a figurative sense, not ignoring the differentiation of the two sexes, as extreme feminists are inclined to do. To this differentiation we ...
— Applied Eugenics • Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill Johnson
... how much might be done in the way of enticing the youthful and unwary, and shoving the old and helpless, into the wrong buss, and carrying them off, until, reduced to despair, they ransomed themselves by the payment of sixpence a-head, or, to adopt his own figurative expression in all its native beauty, 'till they was rig'larly done over, ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... INFLUENCE.—It is true to nature, although it be expressed in a figurative form, that a mother is both the morning and the evening star of life. The light of her eye is always the first to rise, and often the last to set upon man's day of trial. She wields a power more decisive far than syllogisms ...
— Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics • B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols
... with a stick until the sparks rose like quail out of the grass, Dr. Slavens vowed solemnly that he would win that fee or take in his shingle—which, of course, was a figurative shingle only at that time—and Agnes pledged herself to stand by and help him do it as faithfully as if they were already in the future and bound to sustain each other's hands in the bitter and the ...
— Claim Number One • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... Professor Tyndall, endeavoring to write poetically of the sun, tells you that "The Lilies of the field are his workmanship," you may observe, first, that since the sun is not a man, nothing that he does is workmanship; while even the figurative statement that he rejoices as a strong man to run his course, is one which Professor Tyndall has no intention whatever of admitting. And you may then observe, in the second place, that, if even in that figurative sense, the lilies of ...
— The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century - Two Lectures delivered at the London Institution February - 4th and 11th, 1884 • John Ruskin
... the Bible whether national or personal, are nothing else than statements of the universal law of Cause and Effect applied to the inmost principles of our being, and that therefore it is not mere rhapsody, but the figurative expression of a great truth when the Psalmist says '"The Lord is my Shepherd," and "Thou art my God and ...
— The Dore Lectures on Mental Science • Thomas Troward
... laid out. The notching took a tedious time, and the bows of the blunt scissors left purple furrows upon thumb and fingers. Uncle Ike had given me an empty raisin box. I lined it with Musidora's own mattress and quilt, spread the "pinked" cambric on them, laid the remains (no figurative phrase in this connection) upon this bed, folding the one arm left to the unfortunate across her breast, and wrapped the edges of the winding-sheet over her face. With difficulty I coaxed the points of four projecting nails left ...
— When Grandmamma Was New - The Story of a Virginia Childhood • Marion Harland
... apart from their usefulness, is an appetising occupation, and to exchange bald, uniform shillings for a fine big, figurative knick-knack, such as a windmill, a gross of green spectacles, or a cocked hat, gives us a direct and emphatic sense of gain. We have had many shillings before, as good as these; but this is the first time we have possessed a windmill. Upon these principles ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... had seen beside all the usual events in the life of that savage region, the author violates no probability in putting into his mouth the most strange and characteristic stories. The whole are told with a fictitious reproduction of the teser and somewhat monotonous, yet figurative style, proper to all savages. La Grande Kabylie recounts the personal experiences of the author in that yet unconquered country of the Arabs, whither he went with Marshal Bugeaud in his last expedition. Kabylia ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... as she is faithful to tradition, i.e., orthodox, must as a matter of course agree with that of Rome. (2) Irenaeus asserts that every Church, i.e., believers in all parts of the world, must agree with this Church ("convenire" is to be understood in a figurative sense; the literal acceptation "every Church must come to that of Rome" is not admissible). However, this "must" is not meant as an imperative, but [Greek: anagke] "it cannot be otherwise." In reference to principalitas [Greek: authentia] (see I. 31. 1: ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 2 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... boy from Apple Orchard to his lodge in the wilderness, and shown how he passed many of his hours in the hills, it is proper now that we should mount—in a figurative and metaphorical sense—behind Mr. Rushton, and see whither that gentleman also bends his steps. We shall thus arrive at the real theatre of our brief history—we mean at ...
— The Last of the Foresters • John Esten Cooke
... be measured by thermometers was not the kind that was causing two groups of men in two hotels, only a few blocks apart on the East Side of New York's Midtown, to break out in sweat, both figurative and literal. ...
— Hail to the Chief • Gordon Randall Garrett
... lived with their mother. She turned out to be in a rather remote manner "one of us," and had about her, very faint and dim, like an antique lavender bag, the odour of Ashbridge. She lived like the lilies of the field, without toiling or spinning, either literally or with the more figurative work of the mind; indeed, she can scarcely be said to have had any mind at all, for, as with drugs, she had sapped it away by a practically unremitting perusal of all the fiction that makes the average reader wonder why it was written. In fact, she supplied the answer to that perplexing ...
— Michael • E. F. Benson
... will be easy to put an end to this dispute. No man will disagree from another's judgment concerning the dignity of style in heroic poetry; but all reasonable men will conclude it necessary, that sublime subjects ought to be adorned with the sublimest, and consequently often, with the most figurative expressions. In the mean time I will not run into their fault of imposing my opinions on other men, any more than I would my writings on their taste: I have only laid down, and that superficially enough, my present thoughts; and shall ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Volume 5 (of 18) - Amboyna; The state of Innocence; Aureng-Zebe; All for Love • John Dryden
... Father, who was in the beginning? Has not Jesus himself stated (iii. 13) that no man hath ascended up to heaven except him who came down from heaven, that is from God, and that no one has seen the Father, save he which is of God, that is the Son (vi. 46)? These are, of course, figurative expressions, but their meaning cannot be doubtful. When Nathanael called Jesus, Rabbi, King of Israel, and Son of God, his ideas may still have been very immature, but in time the true meaning of the Son of God breaks ...
— The Silesian Horseherd - Questions of the Hour • Friedrich Max Mueller
... we are, in the first place, to acquaint our-selves with the figurative language of the Prophets. This language is taken from the analogy between the world natural, and an empire or kingdom considered ...
— Observations upon the Prophecies of Daniel, and the Apocalypse of St. John • Isaac Newton
... of the French was pounded to powder in a bowl. This is literal, not figurative. To attempt to describe Sedan after Victor Hugo has described it for all mankind were a work futile and foolish. To Hugo we concede the palm among all writers, ancient and modern, as a delineator of battle. His description of the battle of Waterloo will outlast the tumulus and the lion which ...
— Notable Events of the Nineteenth Century - Great Deeds of Men and Nations and the Progress of the World • Various
... a figurative way this explains how we have come to take our present attitude toward the problem of drill or training in the process of education. Drill means the repetition of a process until it has become mechanical or automatic. It means the kind of discipline ...
— Craftsmanship in Teaching • William Chandler Bagley
... responded to in Adrian's figurative speech, instructed Austin that the baronet was waiting for his son, in a posture of statuesque offended paternity, before he would receive his daughter-in-law and grandson. That was what Adrian meant by the efforts of the System ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... Puritanism in Dr. Sill's Christianity which to some minds imported an unnecessary strictness of view, but none could quarrel with it, for he practised his austerities upon himself, not toward others. Certain precepts of the Sermon on the Mount usually interpreted in a figurative sense he took literally as rules of action. "Give to him that asketh thee, and from him that would borrow of thee turn not thou away" was one of these. His literal fidelity to this precept afforded him the deep satisfaction of giving aid to honest neighbors in distress; it enabled him to come to ...
— The Story of Cooperstown • Ralph Birdsall
... over to his views; and the frequent success that attended such efforts is their highest praise. He seldom attempted an ambitious flight, and when he did his best friends felt it was not his true line. He dealt but little in figurative language, except when argument failed him; still he has left some specimens of much beauty in this style. In his great speech introducing Catholic Emancipation in 1829, he told Parliament it had but two courses to follow—to advance ...
— The History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847 (3rd ed.) (1902) - With Notices Of Earlier Irish Famines • John O'Rourke
... word to signify those compartments which he feigns in his Hell." (Per similitudine di quelle valigie, che s'aprono per lo lungo, a guisa di cassa, significa quegli spartimenti, che Dante finge nell' Inferno.) The reader will think of the homely figurative names in Bunyan, and the contempt which great and awful states of mind have for conventional notions of rank in phraseology. It is a part, if well considered, of ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 • Leigh Hunt
... up the argument against him, and maintained that no man ever thinks of the NOSE OF THE MIND, not adverting that though that figurative sense seems strange to us, as very unusual, it is truly not more forced than Hamlet's 'In my MIND'S EYE, Horatio.' He persisted much too long, and appeared to Johnson as putting himself forward as his antagonist ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... or might not have been figurative, but he had allowed himself the pleasure of wishing the tester ...
— Eight Keys to Eden • Mark Irvin Clifton
... side a street, you cross over to the attic of your opposite neighbour. The white stone, where clean, has a beautiful effect, and, even where worn, a grand one. But I must not write a literal Bath guide, and a figurative one Anstey (348) has all to himself. I will only tell you in brief, yet in truth, it looks a city of palaces, a town of hills, and a hill of ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madam D'Arblay Volume 2 • Madame D'Arblay
... Well, who said they did? The language was intended to be figurative, wholly figurative. Anybody that knows anything will know that I meant that the boy should shake ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... to attend his instructions with the silence necessary; and however old age and a long state of beggary seem to have reduced his writing faculties to a state of imbecility, in those days his language occasionally rose to the bold and figurative: for, when he was in despair to stop their chattering, his ordinary phrase was, "Ladies, if you will not hold your peace, not all the powers in heaven can make you!" Once he was missing for a day or two: he had run ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... interpretation, we must not attribute to the above-mentioned symbolic and less intelligible passages any meaning inconsistent with that announcement. The arguments I have adduced respecting the interpretation of the figurative statements contained in the latter half of chap. xx. are directed to showing that these figures do, in fact, admit of meanings consistent with the gospel revelations given in chap. xxi. 1-4. It is of so much importance, as regards the Scriptural doctrine of immortality, ...
— An Essay on the Scriptural Doctrine of Immortality • James Challis
... Isaac is an only son, is offered in sacrifice, has secured for him a bride in a most unusual manner. This again in many ways illustrates the attitude and work of the Savior. But Joseph is perhaps more highly figurative of the Redeemer. His being hated and cast out by his brethren is like the rejection of Jesus; the way his wicked brethren came to him in their extremity and received forgiveness and sustenance suggest how a sinner finds mercy and life ...
— The Bible Period by Period - A Manual for the Study of the Bible by Periods • Josiah Blake Tidwell
... legends. The attempt is made to prove that, in the common speech of the undivided Aryan race, many words for splendid or glowing natural phenomena existed, and that natural processes were described in a figurative style. As the various Aryan families separated, the sense of the old words and names became dim, the nomina developed into numina, the names into gods, the descriptions of elemental processes into myths. As this system ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... be supposed not to be encumbered with existing prejudices, which in the nature of things might more or less interfere with expressing an honest opinion about the Association football player of the past or his colleagues and successors, I will introduce them to you, and in figurative language allow them to tell their own unvarnished tale. My last advice, however, to you, my old friends, before leaving you to the tender mercies of a scribbler, is not to answer all the questions he thinks proper to put. Please don't tell him what ...
— Scottish Football Reminiscences and Sketches • David Drummond Bone
... misty air, A ghost, by glimpses, may present Of imitable lineament, And give the phantom an array That less should scorn the abandoned clay; Then let him hew with patient stroke An Ossian out of mural rock, And leave the figurative Man— Upon thy margin, roaring Bran!— Fixed like the Templar of the steep, An everlasting watch to keep; With local sanctities in trust, More precious than a hermit's dust; And virtues through the mass infused, Which ...
— Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland A.D. 1803 • Dorothy Wordsworth
... part, and the appearance of the Grecian Helen in the second; but whereas the popular tradition makes Fust's great discovery the fruit of his alliance with the powers of Evil, Mr. Browning represents it as an act of atonement for the figurative devil-worship which was involved in a disorderly and ostentatious life. Fust has by his own admission sinned to this extent.[139] He has obeyed the father of lies. He has also accepted with thankfulness the chance of redeeming his soul by a signal service rendered to the cause of Truth. ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... something great in the half-success that has attended the effort of turning into an emotional religion, Bald Conduct, without any appeal, or almost none, to the figurative, mysterious, and constitutive facts of life. Not that conduct is not constitutive, but dear! it's dreary! On the whole, conduct is better dealt with on the cast-iron 'gentleman' and duty formula, with as little fervour and poetry ...
— Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 2 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... be supplied. His ear was well tuned, and his diction was elegant and copious. But his devotional poetry is, like that of others, unsatisfactory. The paucity of its topics enforces perpetual repetition, and the sanctity of the matter rejects the ornaments of figurative diction. It is sufficient for Watts to have done better than others what no man has done well. His poems on other subjects seldom rise higher than might be expected from the amusements of a man of letters, and have different degrees of value as they are more or less laboured, or as the occasion ...
— Lives of the Poets: Gay, Thomson, Young, and Others • Samuel Johnson
... appeared discovered with an amazing clearness and nakedness. These men who had awakened, laughed dissolvent laughs, and the old muddle of schools and colleges, books and traditions, the old fumbling, half-figurative, half-formal teaching of the Churches, the complex of weakening and confusing suggestions and hints, amidst which the pride and honor of adolescence doubted and stumbled and fell, became nothing but a curious and pleasantly faded memory. "There must be a common ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... that spells owl, a bird that pertends to great wisdom but don't know anything. Send your things C. O. W. by all means!" sez I wore out. "Send 'em along and spell your all, o-w-l. I think it is a highly figurative and ...
— Samantha at Coney Island - and a Thousand Other Islands • Marietta Holley
... said the rector, "the problems of clergymen would be much easier. And it is precisely because people will not tell us what they feel that we are left in the dark and cannot help them. Of course, the language of St. John about the future is figurative." ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... July 1808.] he was prepared to go a considerable step farther, and claim that there was no essential difference between ancient mythology and the theology of the Christians, that both were interpretations, in more or less figurative language, of the great mysteries of being, and indeed that the earlier interpretation, precisely because it was more frankly figurative and poetical than the later one, was better fitted to stimulate and to allay the sense of wonder ...
— Proserpine and Midas • Mary Shelley
... since you make such fuss about it, though I 'spect they try to give me Bean for this job" (here he spoke not in figurative English slang, but of the Calabar bean, which is a favourite native poison). "Well, dinner gone and girls gone, and we tired, so best go to bed. Think we all private here now, though in Gold House ...
— The Yellow God - An Idol of Africa • H. Rider Haggard
... abolished. They are the remains of tyranny on one part and slavery on the other; and the name of the Creator ought not to be introduced to witness the degradation of his creation; or if taken, as is already mentioned, as figurative of the nation, it is in this place redundant. But whatever apology may be made for oaths at the first establishment of a government, they ought not to be permitted afterwards. If a government requires ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... more natural! more agreeable to the true spirit of simplicity? Here are no tropes, no figurative expressions, not even so much as an invocation to the Muse. He does not detain his readers by any needless circumlocution, by unnecessarily informing them what he is going to sing, or still more unnecessarily ...
— English Satires • Various
... the learned man's astonishment, when that unaccountable person flung the money on the pavement, and requested in figurative terms to be allowed the pleasure of fighting him ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... feet joined together, and afterwards proved, in an eloquent discourse, that the Sovereign of heaven and earth, who accepted not the persons of men, makes no distinction between the right and left foot. The envious man and his wife alleged that his discourse was not figurative enough, and that he did not make the rocks and mountains to ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne
... "voice of the Lord" ("kallam el Allah"), having spoken unto the person; or, that God appeared to him in a dream and "said," etc. Thus much allowance would be necessary on the part of a European reader for the figurative ideas and expressions of the people. As the Arabs are unchanged, the theological opinions which they now hold are the same as those which prevailed in remote ages, with the simple addition of their belief in Mahomet ...
— In the Heart of Africa • Samuel White Baker
... that the language of common people, when giving utterance to passionate emotions, is highly figurative; and hence he concludes not so well fit for a lyrical ballad. Their volubility is great, nor few their flowers of speech. But who ever heard them, but by the merest accident, spout verses? Rhyme do they never—the utmost they reach is occasional blanks. But their prose! Ye ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... is true to nature, although it be expressed in a figurative form, that a mother is both the morning and the evening star of life. The light of her eye is always the first to rise, and often the last to set upon man's day of trial. She wields a power more decisive far than syllogisms in argument or courts ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis
... references to the Cross in "Science and Health," but the word is used generally in a figurative and sentimental way. Mrs. Eddy's cross is simply the pain of being misunderstood and criticised in the preaching and practice of Christian Science, though indeed the Cross of Jesus was also the outcome of hostilities and ...
— Modern Religious Cults and Movements • Gaius Glenn Atkins
... sister lived with their mother. She turned out to be in a rather remote manner "one of us," and had about her, very faint and dim, like an antique lavender bag, the odour of Ashbridge. She lived like the lilies of the field, without toiling or spinning, either literally or with the more figurative work of the mind; indeed, she can scarcely be said to have had any mind at all, for, as with drugs, she had sapped it away by a practically unremitting perusal of all the fiction that makes the average reader wonder why it was written. In fact, she supplied the answer to that ...
— Michael • E. F. Benson
... of this conventional art is, that it puts no bounds to the fancy of the designer. It is a figurative language in which he may get away from commonplace statement. What has always seemed to me a very logical employment of convention appears in the Punch cartoons of Sir John Tenniel and Mr. Lindley Sambourne. Even in those cartoons which are devoid of physical ...
— Pen Drawing - An Illustrated Treatise • Charles Maginnis
... out of the blood, and rejects them as "bile." Attributes were given to the liver which can only be predicated of the whole animal; the "appetency" of the liver, it was said, was for the elements of bile, and "biliosity," or the "hepatic sensation," guided the gland to their secretion. Such figurative language, I need not say, explains absolutely nothing ...
— Darwin, and After Darwin (Vol. 1 and 3, of 3) • George John Romanes
... self-control, and right thinking formed through the years of childhood will indeed help now. But there awakens for the first time a new force: the child is, in a literal as well as figurative sense, being born anew. At this new birth, which is sometimes very difficult, he enters into a hitherto unknown world of interests and feelings. While the change from child to adult may proceed as a gradual and placid unfolding in some individuals, in the great majority it advances with irregular ...
— The Renewal of Life; How and When to Tell the Story to the Young • Margaret Warner Morley
... that they should pretend not to understand the simile of which she had made use, accustomed as she was to speak in figurative language. ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... might make business history. Hopper, at one end of the room, studied his shoe heel intently. He was unbelievably boyish looking to command the fabulous salary reported to be his. Advertising men, mentioning his name, pulled a figurative forelock as they did so. Near Mrs. McChesney sat Sam Hupp, he of the lightning brain and the sure-fire copy. Emma McChesney, strangely silent, kept her eyes intent on the faces of the others. T.A. Buck, interested, enthusiastic, ...
— Personality Plus - Some Experiences of Emma McChesney and Her Son, Jock • Edna Ferber
... 'But, Sir, Taylor means it literally, for he founds a conceit upon it. When praying for the conversion of sinners, and of himself in particular, he says, "LORD, thou wilt not leave thy chief work undone." JOHNSON. 'I do not approve of figurative expressions in addressing the Supreme Being; and I never use them[906]. Taylor gives a very good advice: "Never lie in your prayers; never confess more than you really believe; never promise more than you mean ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 4 (of 6) • Boswell
... must also remember, that St. Luke the Evangelist was early regarded as the great authority with respect to the few Scripture particulars relating to the character and life of Mary; so that, in the figurative sense, he may be said to have painted that portrait of her which has been since received as the perfect type of womanhood:—1. Her noble, trustful humility, when she receives the salutation of the angel (Luke i. 38); the ...
— Legends of the Madonna • Mrs. Jameson
... which to some minds imported an unnecessary strictness of view, but none could quarrel with it, for he practised his austerities upon himself, not toward others. Certain precepts of the Sermon on the Mount usually interpreted in a figurative sense he took literally as rules of action. "Give to him that asketh thee, and from him that would borrow of thee turn not thou away" was one of these. His literal fidelity to this precept afforded him the deep satisfaction of giving ...
— The Story of Cooperstown • Ralph Birdsall
... we should call a willow-wand,[FN307] while Age, crabbed and crooked, bends groundwards vainly seeking in the dust his lost juvenility. As Baron de Slane says of these stock comparisons (Ibn Khall. i. xxxvi.), "The figurative language of Moslem poets is often difficult to be understood. The narcissus is the eye; the feeble stem of that plant bends languidly under its dower, and thus recalls to mind the languor of the eyes. Pearls signify both tears and teeth; the latter ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... opportunities for him and me of holding discourse together in public? But already had he bethought himself of acting in more subtle ways; and now he would speak to this one, now to that one, words whereby I, being most eager for such enlightenment, discovered that whatever he said to these was fraught with figurative and hidden meanings, intended to show forth his ardent affection for myself. When he was sensible that I had a clear perception of the occult significance of his questions and answers, he went still further, and by gestures, and mobile changes in the expression of his features, he would make known ...
— La Fiammetta • Giovanni Boccaccio
... understand what is written, but if he that speaks looks towards them, and modifies his organs by distinct and full utterance, they know so well what is spoken, that it is an expression scarcely figurative to say, they hear with the eye. That any have attained to the power mentioned by Burnet, of feeling sounds, by laying a hand on the speaker's mouth, I know not; but I have seen so much, that I can believe more; a single word, or a short sentence, I think, ...
— A Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland • Samuel Johnson
... of the manifold of sensuous intuition, which is possible and necessary a priori, may be called figurative (synthesis speciosa), in contradistinction to that which is cogitated in the mere category in regard to the manifold of an intuition in general, and is called connection or conjunction of the understanding (synthesis intellectualis). Both are transcendental, not merely because they themselves ...
— The Critique of Pure Reason • Immanuel Kant
... were given, were in very different circumstances from those in which we are placed. The injunctions were drawn rather tighter than is quite necessary, in order to allow for a little relaxation in practice. The expressions of the sacred Writers are figurative; the Eastern style ...
— A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, in the Middle and Higher Classes in this Country, Contrasted with Real Christianity. • William Wilberforce
... adumbration; application. exaggeration, hyperbole &c 549. association, association of ideas (analogy) 514.1 V. employ a metaphor &c n.; personify, allegorize, adumbrate, shadow forth, apply, allude to. Adj. metaphorical, figurative, catachrestical^, typical, tralatitious^, parabolic, allegorical, allusive, anagogical^; ironical; colloquial; tropical. Adv. so to speak, so to say, so to express oneself; as it were. Phr. mutato nomine de te fabula narratur ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... agrees in its figurative language with the character of the monument. It practically states that William Austin had the tomb constructed, while he was yet alive, as a burial-place for his wife, his mother (Lady Clarke), and himself, ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: Southwark Cathedral • George Worley
... himself, to himself, logically, before he proceeds to express himself imaginatively. All that is essential is that the kernel of his personality, that which determines philosophies as it determines every other achievement, should be directly, immediately, expressed in the figurative language of his art. This is the central, the all-important thing, that final, essential, and therefore indefinable entity which has thrust itself upon us when we say of a man that he has an "interesting personality." The more powerful and energetic a man is, the more distinctive become ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... lecturing to his pupils upon the diseases of the heart, narrated an anecdote to prove that the expression "broken heart" was not merely figurative. On one occasion, in the early period of his life, he accompanied, as surgeon, a packet that sailed from Liverpool to one of the American ports. The captain frequently conversed with him respecting a lady who had promised to become his bride on his return from that voyage. Upon this subject ...
— Life and Literature - Over two thousand extracts from ancient and modern writers, - and classified in alphabetical order • J. Purver Richardson
... say, after having spent some time in explaining his text, "But that I may devil-hope the subject a little more fully, I would observe, that the words are mephitical." He, of course, meant to say, metaphorical, figurative, not mephitical which means of a bad smell. My plan ...
— Modern Skepticism: A Journey Through the Land of Doubt and Back Again - A Life Story • Joseph Barker
... my own State consisted of two dissolute bears holding up the head of a dead and gone cask between them and making the pertinent remark, "UNITED, WE STAND—(hic!)—DIVIDED, WE FALL." It was always too figurative for the author of this book. But the Mormon crest was easy. And it was simple, unostentatious, and fitted like a glove. It was a representation of a GOLDEN BEEHIVE, with ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... the object it reflects; and if Mr. Clerk's version can be trusted (it appears to be more literal though less rhetorical than MacPherson's) the Gaelic is often concrete and sharp where MacPherson is general; often plain where he is figurative or ornate; and sometimes of a meaning quite different from his rendering. Take, e.g., the closing passage of the second "Duan," or book, ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... Century, except for their slant eyes and round heads. The characteristic of the high cheek bones appeared to have been bred out of them, as were those of the relatively short legs and the muddy yellow skin. To call them yellow was more figurative than literal. Their skins were whiter than those of our own weather-tanned forest men. Nevertheless, their pigmentation was peculiar, and what there was of it looked more like a pale orange tint than the ruddiness of the Caucasian. They were well formed, but rather undersized ...
— The Airlords of Han • Philip Francis Nowlan
... short of leading them in the Study, and Practice of the exalted Virtues of the Christian system, which will happily tend to subdue the turbulent passions of Men, and introduce that Golden Age beautifully described in figurative language; when the Wolf shall dwell with the Lamb, and the Leopard lie down with the Kid—the Cow, and the bear shall feed; their young ones shall lie down together, and the Lyon shall eat straw like the Ox—none shall then hurt, or destroy; for the Earth shall be full of the Knowledge ...
— The Original Writings of Samuel Adams, Volume 4 • Samuel Adams
... other, and agoreuein, to speak), a figurative representation conveying a meaning other than and in addition to the literal. It is generally treated as a figure of rhetoric, but the medium of representation is not necessarily language. An allegory may be addressed to the eye, and is often embodied ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... no means a figurative expression, for if this were true there would be no comfort in it to God's children. Yet, as a matter of fact, this prayer of Paul's has been an inspiration to God's people everywhere. It is rather a special Pentecostal privilege for God's children concerning which ...
— And Judas Iscariot - Together with other evangelistic addresses • J. Wilbur Chapman
... 'founded' in a literal as well as figurative sense. While the merchants, in their year of victories, threw down the walls of the war-towers, they as eagerly and diligently set their best craftsmen to lift higher the walls of their churches. For the ...
— Val d'Arno • John Ruskin
... the vice-governatore, and completely puzzled Vito Viti. The grave mariners at the other table, too, thought it odd, for in no other tongue is the language of the sea as poetical, or figurative, as in the English; and the term of boot-top, as applied to a vessel, was Greek to them, as well as to the other listeners. They conversed among themselves on the subject, while their two superiors were holding a secret conference on the other side of the room, giving the American ...
— The Wing-and-Wing - Le Feu-Follet • J. Fenimore Cooper
... said, "I come with the words of Indabeni, who has chosen me because he knows I am your younger brother" (figurative). ...
— Kafir Stories - Seven Short Stories • William Charles Scully
... himself. Assuredly, if we put on the Lord Jesus Christ, we shall not make provision for the flesh to fulfil the lusts thereof; such a warning would then be wholly unnecessary. Or, if we do not like language thus figurative, let us put it, if we will, into the plainest words that shall express the same meaning; let us call it praying to Christ, thinking of him, hoping in him, earnestly loving him; these, at least, are words without a figure, which all can surely understand. Let us ...
— The Christian Life - Its Course, Its Hindrances, And Its Helps • Thomas Arnold
... startling to a terrific degree. Here was a new, strange, perplexing combination—"deny himself," and "cross," coupled with His "Follow Me." What could He mean? This was surely some of His intensely figurative language again, they think. Yes, it surely was; and it stood for a yet intenser experience. "Follow Me" means sacrifice. It means a going down as well as a going up. And it proves to mean that one can go up in power and service, only as far as he has gone ...
— Quiet Talks on Following the Christ • S. D. Gordon
... the dock. The days of the years of his pilgrimage were not few, and quite probably, except in a figurative sense, not evil. He was of sturdy build, quiet manners, and his countenance was indicative of great sincerity. In a voice extremely deferential he stated that he had once ministered to a dying Confederate, and it was impossible for him to take the required oath that ...
— Something of Men I Have Known - With Some Papers of a General Nature, Political, Historical, and Retrospective • Adlai E. Stevenson
... have only moderately sipped of the Helicon Fountain; yet from my knowledge of Orthometry I can prove the correctness of it; by special and general metric analysis. In conclusion, I have not indulged in Rhetorical figures and Tropes, but have rigidly adhered to the use of figurative and literal language; finally I have used a concatination of appropriate mellifluous epithets, logically and philosophically accurate, copious, sublime, eloquent, ...
— The Hedge School; The Midnight Mass; The Donagh • William Carleton
... occasions of ceremony, to act as his messenger, and in general to be subject to his directions. It gave to the aid the office of chief and rendered probable his election as the successor of his principal after the decease of the latter. In their figurative language these aids of the sachems were styled "Braces in the Long House," ...
— Houses and House-Life of the American Aborigines • Lewis H. Morgan
... paper. Lord Shaftesbury, on the contrary, who aimed at the same easy, degage mode of communicating his thoughts to the world, has quite spoiled his matter, which is sometimes valuable, by his manner, in which he carries a certain flaunting, flowery, figurative, flirting style of amicable condescension to the reader, to an excess more tantalising than the most starched and ridiculous formality of the age of James I. There is nothing so tormenting as the affectation of ease and freedom ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... fear on Earth is different. It's the fear that everyone else is out to get you, the fear that someone will stick a figurative knife in your back and reduce you to the basic subsistence level. And that fear is solidly based, believe me. The only way to climb up from basic subsistence is to climb over everyone else, to knock aside those in your way, to get rid of whoever is ...
— Anchorite • Randall Garrett
... At the present day, however, the work of Puttenham is most of all to be valued for the remarks on language and on manners, and the contemporary anecdotes with which it abounds, and of which some examples may be quoted. After observing that "as it hath been always reputed a great fault to use figurative speeches foolishly and indiscreetly, so it is esteemed no less an imperfection in man's utterance, to have none use of figure at all, specially in our writing and speeches public, making them but as our ordinary talk, than which nothing can be more unsavory and far from all civility:—'I ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... not backward in doing its duty in the war. His prowess has been mentioned; and it was chiefly by his courage and example, that the Tetons sustained themselves in the heroic manner they did, when the death of Mahtoree was known. This warrior, who, in the figurative language of his people, was called "the Swooping Eagle," had been the last to abandon the hopes of victory. When he found that the support of the dreaded rifle had robbed his band of the hard-earned advantages, he sullenly retired amid a shower of missiles, to the secret spot where he had hid ...
— The Prairie • J. Fenimore Cooper
... we reason but from what we know?" and therefore a great part of such language will be necessarily figurative; but it by no means follows from this, that the writers who are obliged to use this figurative language when speaking of the Deity, intend to be understood in the same sense when they apply the same expressions to describe men and their actions. On the contrary, ...
— Five Pebbles from the Brook • George Bethune English
... sceptre of these realms in moderation and justice, and be a pious and benevolent man, and a merciful sovereign.' Fortunately, the time has long since passed when swaying the sceptre of these realms had any but a figurative meaning, or when Englishmen who obeyed their country's laws depended on the mercy of any man, or when even bad citizens were judged by princes. But we still prefer that princes should be well-mannered gentlemen, and therefore it is sincerely ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... commanding, and there was an air of hauteur in his countenance, arising from an elevated pride of soul, which did not forsake it when life was extinct. He was habitually taciturn, but, when excited, his eloquence was nervous, concise, and figurative. His dress was plain, and he was never known to indulge in the gaudy decoration of his person, which is the common practice of the Indians. On the day of his death, he wore a dressed deer skin coat ...
— The Life and Correspondence of Sir Isaac Brock • Ferdinand Brock Tupper
... the tragical lore of the infant mortality, the malnutrition, and the five-in-a-room morality of the city's poor is written in statistics, and the statistical path to the heart is more figurative ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... clerical, close corporation invested with direct authority over souls so that without their priestly mediation the kingdom of heaven is forever shut against men. The words "keys of the kingdom of heaven" (Matt. 16:19) are evidently nothing more than a figurative expression indicating the moral influence in the kingdom which Peter in particular should wield with peculiar energy and efficiency. According to Matt. 18:18 all the apostles and others were to exercise the same functions. In time, this expression denoting moral ...
— The Last Reformation • F. G. [Frederick George] Smith
... have creative power, not in a figurative sense, but in reality. Everything in the material universe about us had its origin first in spirit, in thought, and from this it took its form. The very world in which we live, with all its manifold wonders and sublime manifestations, is the result of the energies ...
— What All The World's A-Seeking • Ralph Waldo Trine
... Still I may offer a few olives, a branch or two of succulent celery to those who have not as yet been invited to sit down. One of his ladies walks the Avenue in a gown the "color of fried smelts." Such figurative phrases as "Her eyes were of that green-grey which is caught in an icicle held over grass," "The sand is as fine as face powder, nuance Rachel, packed hard," "Death, it may be, is not merely a law but a place, perhaps a garage which the traveller ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten
... of a Divinity into male and female halves. In many accounts the Deity brings into being personages who continue the work of world-making and such entities as mind, time and desire are produced before the material world. But everything in these creation stories is figurative. The faithful are not perplexed by the discrepancies in the inspired narratives, and one can hardly imagine an Indian sect agitated by the question whether God made the world ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... must get other meat than fresh pork, and we will all eat it together." "Meat," in Indian parlance, meant prisoners; and as these were valuable by reason of the ransoms paid for them, and as the Indians had suspected that the French meant to keep them all, they were well pleased with this figurative assurance of Rigaud that they should have their share. [Footnote: "Mes enfans, leur dis-je, le temps approche ou il faut faire d'autre viande que le pore frais; au reste, nous la mangerons tous eusemble; ...
— A Half-Century of Conflict, Volume II • Francis Parkman
... infinite scorn. He remembered that, in the days of the civil war, slackers and rebel sympathizers who wished to evade the draft made their way across the national border into Canada. They had received the contempt of their own generation and had drawn a figurative bar-sinister across the shield of their descendants. Could it be possible that this grandchild of his was about to add disgrace to disloyalty? That, in addition to heaping insults on the flag of his country as a boy, he was now, as a man, taking ...
— The Flag • Homer Greene
... It was the dying boast of Dutugaimunu that he had lived "a slave to the priesthood." The expression was figurative in his case; but so abject did the subserviency of the kings become, and so rapid was its growth, that Bhatiya Tissa, who reigned A.D. 8, rendered it literal, and "dedicated himself, his queen, and two sons, as well ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... them in the basis of representation. Half our Congressmen hold their seats to-day as representatives of women. We help to swell the figures by which you are here, and too many of you, alas, are only figurative representatives, paying little heed ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... gas, even the idea of it, has gone out of fashion, through its figurative use to designate empty, vapouring talk; therefore, when deipnosophist and gastronomer are spoken, the former is employed to denote learned talkers at supper, such as we were half an hour ago, and the latter, to signify one who enjoys the ...
— Two Knapsacks - A Novel of Canadian Summer Life • John Campbell
... made a great noise, both in a literal and figurative sense, during the greater part of the preceding eight years. It had made the rounds of the principal opera houses on the European continent, but most of the noise came from Paris, and among those who sat in Mr. Hammerstein's ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... time, almost a dead letter. These Midrashim have little or nothing to do with the Halachoth or legal decisions of the Talmud, except in aim, which is that of illustration and explanation. They are not literal interpretations, but figurative and allegorical, and as such enigmatic. They are, however, to be received as utterances of the sages, and some even regard them of as binding obligation as the law of Moses itself. The following ...
— Hebraic Literature; Translations from the Talmud, Midrashim and - Kabbala • Various
... the beryl, meaning sound doctrine, learning, and long-suffering, to Benjamin and to St. Thomas, and so forth. There is, indeed, a table of the harmony of gems and their application to patriarchs, apostles, and virtues, drawn up by Madame Felicie d'Ayzac, who has written an elaborate paper on the figurative meaning of gems." ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... the great mysteries of life and death. Thus it happens that the remains of the Greek lyric poets, especially the later, such as Simonides and Bacchylides, are principally of a deeply moral cast. The Greeks do not seem to have had the extravagant rage which now prevails for merely figurative language. They sought for truth itself, and the man became a poet who clothed living truths in the most appropriate ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... think of a chestnut burr," said Kittie resorting to figurative comparisons. "There's lots of good in her, but she won't let any one get at it. If we try, she shuts up and gets prickly. I never thought much about it, until here lately, and then she was so splendid, and knew how to do everything; and, I begin to think that there ...
— Six Girls - A Home Story • Fannie Belle Irving
... particular state of disordered mind, which is supposed to differ from idiotcy and lunacy, has been the source of considerable perplexity to medical practitioners; and, in my own opinion, opens an avenue for ignorance and injustice. The application of figurative terms, especially when imposed under a loose analogy, and where they might be supplied by words of direct meaning, always tends ...
— A Letter to the Right Honorable the Lord Chancellor, on the Nature and Interpretation of Unsoundness of Mind, and Imbecility of Intellect • John Haslam
... principally drawn this account from the Zendavesta of M. d'Anquetil, and the Sadder, subjoined to Dr. Hyde's treatise. It must, however, be confessed, that the studied obscurity of a prophet, the figurative style of the East, and the deceitful medium of a French or Latin version may have betrayed us into error and heresy, in this abridgment of Persian theology. * Note: It is to be regretted that Gibbon followed the ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... the virtuoso was an amateur. In the literal sense the amateur loves the activities in which he engages, and in the figurative sense he remains independent of any Establishment. Not trained in any rigorous, prescribed discipline, he was not committed to any set doctrine. Furthermore, he was not restricted by the regulations which all Establishments employed to preserve their status, block opposition, and ...
— Medical Investigation in Seventeenth Century England - Papers Read at a Clark Library Seminar, October 14, 1967 • Charles W. Bodemer
... prosopopoeia[obs3], allegory, apologue[obs3], parable, fable; allusion, adumbration; application. exaggeration , hyperbole &c. 549. association, association of ideas (analogy) 514a V. employ -metaphor &c. n.; personify, allegorize, adumbrate, shadow forth, apply, allude to. Adj. metaphorical, figurative, catachrestical[obs3], typical, tralatitious[obs3], parabolic, allegorical, allusive, anagogical[obs3]; ironical; colloquial; tropical. Adv. so to speak, so to say, so to express oneself; as it were. Phr. mutato nomine de te ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... return. Fortune had, with her usual caprice, condescended to smile upon him at last. Incredible as it appeared, he had "got into something," and this "something" was actually remunerative,—reasonably remunerative, if not extravagantly so. Four hundred a year would pay the rent of the figurative house in Putney or elsewhere, and buy the green sofa and appurtenances, at least. Dolly could scarcely believe it, and, indeed, he scarcely ...
— Vagabondia - 1884 • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... a council of war, I did so largely in a figurative sense. Literally, we set about reviving Hicks, with a view to learning from him what had become of Lyn Rowan. He and Bevans undoubtedly knew, and as Bevans persisted in his defiant sullenness, refusing to ...
— Raw Gold - A Novel • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... safeguard of knowing what kind of man Miss March had once been willing to accept. He felt that if he went down to the neighborhood of Midbranch one of the battles of his life would begin, and that when he held up before him his figurative shield, he would see in its inner mirror that, on account of his own disposition toward the lady, he was in a condition of great peril. But, for all that, he wanted very much to go, and no one will be surprised to learn that he ...
— The Late Mrs. Null • Frank Richard Stockton
... in the use of it. We use one word in various ways, and a pet one for many ideas. Language is always more concrete in its earlier forms. In this period of the concrete English language, then, the translation was made from the Hebrew, which was also a concrete, figurative language itself. The structure of the Hebrew sentence is very simple. There are no extended paragraphs in it. It is somewhat different in the New Testament, where these paragraphs are found, certainly in the Pauline Greek; but even there the extended sentences are broken into clauses which ...
— The Greatest English Classic A Study of the King James Version of • Cleland Boyd McAfee
... understand his Wallenstein, I thought to myself—how much greater might the great poet have become had he ever known a public and real actors! It is remarkable, by the way, that Schiller, who is not at bottom very objective, lends himself so perfectly to an objective representation. He became figurative, while believing himself to be only eloquent—one more proof of his incomparable genius. In Goethe we find the exact opposite. While he is ordinarily called objective and is so to a great extent, his characters lose in the actual representation. ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... war-song—the death-song—the song of victory—the cradle-chant—the lament for the slain—these are the overflowings of the essential poetry of their untaught souls. Their eloquence is proverbially soaring and figurative; and in spite of all that renders gross and mechanical their ordinary mode of marrying and giving in marriage, instances are not rare among them of love as true, as fiery, and as fatal, as that of the most exalted hero of romance. ...
— Dahcotah - Life and Legends of the Sioux Around Fort Snelling • Mary Eastman
... which convinced me of the truth of the supposition of Mr. Thomas Campbell, the intended lecturer of poetry to the London University, that mankind in an aboriginal state is essentially poetical, and express their ideas either in rhythmical or figurative language— ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, No. - 287, December 15, 1827 • Various
... now, Jack, having explained these matters, I will leave you, to study them at your leisure, while I prepare for my journey to Cornwall, where, by the way, I have my eye upon a sweet little girl, whose uncle, I believe, has lots of tin, both in the real and figurative sense of the word. Something may ...
— Deep Down, a Tale of the Cornish Mines • R.M. Ballantyne
... were added various rites, such as, signing the forehead of the candidate with the cross, the consecration and giving of salt, which was entitled the sacrament of catechumens, repeated exorcisms, or prayers and adjurations to cast out the power of Satan, anointing with oil, and other mystical and figurative rites. In the course of many ages, when the Christian church had overspread the face of the world, and infidelity had become in most places extinct, the form of admission to the class of catechumens was from a veneration for old customs in many places ...
— The Ceremonies of the Holy-Week at Rome • Charles Michael Baggs
... are many other instances besides those just given in which there is a figurative use of the word light. It is a natural and beautiful figure. A person in doubt intellectually or spiritually looks upon himself as in darkness, and light to him is an intellectual or spiritual awakening. The light that ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... effect, would also bring a third anecdote under the same nexus. We are told that Calpurnia, the last wife of Caesar, dreamed on the same night, and to the same ominous result. The circumstances of her dream are less striking, because less figurative; but on that account its import was less open to doubt: she dreamed, in fact, that after the roof of their mansion had fallen in, her husband was stabbed in her bosom. Laying all these omens together, Caesar would have been ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... always are, to experienced clerks, who have no regard for the novelty of the thing; they mean from one to three weeks' work, day and night without let-up. But the blinding work is not the worst of it; the suspense is what unnerves and worries. A fellow never knows what moment he is going to get a figurative knock-out from the head office official. The inspector, if he happens to have indigestion or domestic trouble, can ...
— A Canadian Bankclerk • J. P. Buschlen
... way his imagination works and clothes itself in language. The quality of his mind is poetic, and his style is highly figurative. There have been very few professors, lecturing on abstruse subjects, such as economics, jurisprudence, and politics, who have dared to give so free a rein to an instinct frankly artistic. In the early days of his career, Mr. Wilson was invited ...
— President Wilson's Addresses • Woodrow Wilson
... degradation of language by those who use it carelessly, he will not treat coloured glass as if it were clear; and while half the world is using figure unconsciously, will be fully aware not only of all that latent figurative texture in speech, but of the vague, lazy, half-formed personification—a rhetoric, depressing, and worse than nothing, [21] because it has no really rhetorical motive—which plays so large a part there, and, as in the case of more ostentatious ornament, scrupulously ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... words having different meanings may perhaps lead some to suppose that they may have originated in error on my part. Some have a figurative connexion as upu a series of waterholes, also a blister; kusali the constellation of the Pleiades, also a plant with bunches of seeds which become white and glittering by exposure to the sun: others have no obvious community of ...
— Voyage Of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John MacGillivray
... asked you to spend Christmas with us in Boston I had no idea that, like the Prophet Habbacuc, I, with my dinner pail, was to be lifted by the hair of my head, and transported to Babylon—in other words, New York. But so it is! If you know your Apocrypha, this figurative language will seem apt, but in case you should like my end of it explained I will leave the mystifications of Bel and the Dragon and ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905 • Various
... "that it was necessary to quit the regular fold in order to recover these lost sheep"—that "the stouter and better worth catching the fish were, the more anxious should they be to secure them in the net of the Prince of Apostles." When separated from the figurative bombast by which a Frenchman frequently obscures a sensible reason, this plea seems fair enough: provided that the motives of the missionaries were unmixed with spiritual vanity, and the pride of creating a strong sensation. It was no doubt most ...
— Itinerary of Provence and the Rhone - Made During the Year 1819 • John Hughes
... that there was the greatest difficulty in the earlier stages of classification in determining the affinity of these two great groups. When scientists began to speak of the affinity of the various animal groups in more than a figurative—in a genealogical—sense, this question came at once to the front, and seemed to constitute one of the chief obstacles to the carrying-out of the evolutionary theory. Even earlier, when they had studied ...
— The Evolution of Man, V.2 • Ernst Haeckel
... critics were hampered by a vicious inherited method. The schoolmen, with purely dogmatic interest, had developed a hopeless and fantastic exegesis, by which every text of Scripture was given a fourfold sense, the historical, allegorical, tropological (or figurative) and anagogical ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... coming puts him out; he stiffens himself into an uncomfortable posture, out of respect to the cloth, and dare not take the comfort of kicking, and swearing, and scolding his wife, while I am there. I hear him, with my figurative ears, my lady, heave a sigh of relief when my back is turned, and the sermon that he thinks I ought to have kept for the pulpit, and have delivered to his neighbours (whose case, as he fancies, it would ...
— My Lady Ludlow • Elizabeth Gaskell
... fear the figurative crow I eat, accursed be thou and all thy kin! Thee will I show up—yea, up will I show Thy too thick buckwheats, and thy tea too thin. Ay! here I dare thee, ready for the fray: Thou dost not "keep a first-class house," I say! It does not with the advertisements agree. Thou lodgest a ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... sugar candy, and the piety of the Dean of Faculty and Mr. Penney, joined to that of some four or five hundred respectable ladies of both sexes besides, all sticking out around him in cubes, hexagons, and prisms, like cleft almonds in a bishop-cake. Hardly inferior in the figurative is the passage which follows: 'The Doctor (Dr. Chalmers) rides on at a rickety trot,—Messrs. Cunningham, Begg, and Candlish by turns whipping up the wornout Rosenante, and making the rider believe that windmills ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... to by a friend as to the circumstances which would be sufficient to legalize a "nuncupative [Footnote: "Nuncupative" is a legal term for an oral as distinguished from a written will.] death-bed will." Kinglake wrote a figurative account of an imaginary case in much detail, and by the next post received a solemn affidavit from the man setting out Kinglake's own exact series of incidents as ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke V1 • Stephen Gwynn
... and wine into His Body in the Eucharist. The Cathari considered transubstantiation as the worst of abominations, since matter, in every form, was the work of the Evil Spirit. They interpreted the Gospel texts in a figurative sense: at "This is My Body," they said, simply means: "This represents My Body," thus anticipating the teaching of Carlstadt and Zwingli. They all agreed in denouncing Catholics for daring to claim that they really ...
— The Inquisition - A Critical and Historical Study of the Coercive Power of the Church • E. Vacandard
... do not think of the concrete, the material connection implied in every relationship. We should notice it more if we were told that "Tous les arts sont cousins," for the word "cousin" is not so often employed in a figurative sense; that is why the word here already assumes a slight tinge of the comic. But let us go further still, and suppose that our attention is attracted to the material side of the metaphor by the choice of a relationship which is incompatible with the gender of the two words composing ...
— Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic • Henri Bergson
... metaphor is called an allegory; both are figurative representations, the words used signifying something beyond their literal meaning. Thus, in the eightieth Psalm, the Jews are represented under the symbol ...
— The Verbalist • Thomas Embly Osmun, (AKA Alfred Ayres)
... Navy departments, of Congress, of the editors of newspapers, of witty paragraphers, and of the man on the street. Possibly the churches themselves might hesitate before giving their support to such a plan of war: "We must take the biblical stories in a figurative sense!" But stout Joshua had seen the angel of the Lord, with his sword drawn, the night before; and he knew nothing of figures of speech. He got the seven trumpets of rams' horns, and put them in the hands ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... mass of knowledge, viz.: the 'quantitative', relative determinations according to number and magnitude, and 'qualitative', material characters. Means of submitting phenomena to calculation. Atoms, mechanical methods of construction. Figurative representations; mythical conception of imponderable matters, and the peculiar vital forces in every organism. That which is attained by observation and experiment (calling forth phenomena) leads, by analogy and induction, to a knowledge of 'empirical ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt
... "Your language is figurative," returned De Valette, "and implies the sufferance of mental, rather than bodily pain. If such is your unhappy state, I know full well that human ...
— The Rivals of Acadia - An Old Story of the New World • Harriet Vaughan Cheney
... designed purely for instruction, ought to be plain and natural, and yet majestic: for here the poet is presumed to be a kind of lawgiver, and those three qualities which I have named, are proper to the legislative style. The florid, elevated, and figurative way is for the passions; for love and hatred, fear and anger, are begotten in the soul, by showing their objects out of their true proportion, either greater than the life or less: but instruction is to be given by showing them what they naturally are. A man is to be cheated into passion, but to ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol I - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... signify those compartments which he feigns in his Hell." (Per similitudine di quelle valigie, che s'aprono per lo lungo, a guisa di cassa, significa quegli spartimenti, che Dante finge nell' Inferno.) The reader will think of the homely figurative names in Bunyan, and the contempt which great and awful states of mind have for conventional notions of rank in phraseology. It is a part, if well considered, ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 • Leigh Hunt
... assume with some probability that in the mind of the natives such resemblances are not purely figurative or symbolic, but that they are also magical in intention, being supposed not merely to represent the object of the supplicant's prayer, but actually, on the principle of homoeopathic or imitative magic, to contribute to its accomplishment. If that is so, we must conclude that the religion of these ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... and, rebuking this last speech, added in a tone of gentle remonstrance, that the first remark, though far from being respectful, was more endurable because it was a proverb and implied that a Superior had been given to them who was less capable than his predecessor, and that this was expressed in figurative terms, as David speaks of himself in relation to Almighty God in one of the Psalms when he says: I am become as a beast before Thee.[1] "The second sarcasm, however," he added, "has nothing figurative ...
— The Spirit of St. Francis de Sales • Jean Pierre Camus
... Arabia, Persia, Turkey, Italy, and Spain. The cold countries, even the temperate ones, France, England and Germany, make no pretensions. He is acquainted with every language and speaks the most of them. His style, elevated, grand and figurative, leads me to believe that he is of Oriental origin, and that he has absorbed what he found good among the Europeans. He is passionately fond of music, wild over poetry, inquisitive about paintings, a connoisseur ...
— Life, Letters, and Epicurean Philosophy of Ninon de L'Enclos, - the Celebrated Beauty of the Seventeenth Century • Robinson [and] Overton, ed. and translation.
... How much would it have helped poor Belisarius, in his sore estate, if he had kept a record of his household expenses, as my friend Minimus does? By the same token, he sometimes makes odd misentries, pious figurative fictions, in order to save the feelings of Mrs. Minimus, who is auditor-general and comptroller of the household. And speaking of Belisarius, just fancy the hard fate of that gallant and decayed soldier! ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... a provincial paper should consistently contain such a freight of imperishable literature, revealing a learning positively prodigious, a style that flows with a sonorous majesty and crashes with a vitriolic and destroying power, a lavish richness in figurative language, a beauty of Aeolian harps, of sapphire seas, of the flushed and ardent splendor of ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... lance is to enter the lists, to try one's strength. The concussion of two powerful knights would suffice to shiver the lances. Hence comes the figurative use. Cp. I Henry ...
— Marmion • Sir Walter Scott
... saying that Alexander took less time to annex Asia than Isocrates spent in writing an oration, to bid the Greeks attack Persia, we know what he would have thought of Macaulay's antithesis. He blames Xenophon for a poor pun, and Plato, less justly, for mere figurative badinage. It would be an easy task to ransack contemporaries, even great contemporaries, for similar failings, for pomposity, for the florid, for sentences like processions of intoxicated torch-bearers, ...
— On the Sublime • Longinus
... be observed however that it often proves a very difficult matter to trace the connexion between the figurative and the literal sense of the stanza. The essentials in the composition of the pantun, for such these little pieces are called, the longer being called dendang, are the rhythmus and the figure, particularly the latter, which they consider as the ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... with a fresh pang the one woman who had a right to share her grief, nay, to call him—in no figurative sense—"enfant"; the wrinkled old Jewess, palsied and deaf and peevish, who lived on in a world despoiled of his splendid fighting strength, of his ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... meaning of it being taken differently. In course of time, as knowledge makes its way among the people, and religious enlightenment with it, much of what had been received literally will relapse into its original figurative or symbolical meaning. Reason will resume her supremacy, and stereotyped dogmas will fall like ...
— The God-Idea of the Ancients - or Sex in Religion • Eliza Burt Gamble
... earliest work, the poetry, may have succeeded in this wish most of all. Although he felt that his poetry was aiming toward truths which his "later and better concocted Prose"[8] reached, the effort cost him the suggestiveness of figurative speech. In urging himself on toward an ever more consistent statement of belief, he lost much of his beginning exuberance (best expressed in the brief "Philosopher's Devotion") and the joy of intellectual discovery. ...
— Democritus Platonissans • Henry More
... is smitten)—Ver. 78. "Habet," literally "He has it." This was the expression used by the spectators at the moment when a Gladiator was wounded by his antagonist. In the previous line, in the words "captus est," a figurative allusion is made to the "retiarius," a Gladiator who was provided with a net, with which he endeavored to entangle ...
— The Comedies of Terence - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Notes • Publius Terentius Afer, (AKA) Terence
... and what a personable! and how near he draws to the moment that must break him utterly! we none of us like him here; we hate him, rather; and yet I have a sense—I don't think at my time of life it can be pity—but a reluctance rather, to break anything so big and figurative, as though he were a big porcelain pot or a big picture of high price. Ay, there is what I was waiting for!' he cried, as the lights of a second chaise swam in sight. 'It is he beyond a doubt. The ...
— St Ives • Robert Louis Stevenson
... that he will perhaps be able to buy up the architect and the tailor and the decorator and so forth is merely preliminary to the graver issue. It is just possible that the shareholder may, to a very large extent—in a certain figurative sense, at least—buy up much of the womankind that would otherwise be available to constitute those severe, capable, and probably by no means unhappy little establishments to which our typical engineers will tend, and so prevent many women from becoming mothers of a regenerating ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... take no notice of your advertisement," he replied and stood in the middle of the street, his hat in his hand, to the intense annoyance of a taxi-cab driver who literally all but ran him down and in a figurative sense did so until T. X. was ...
— The Clue of the Twisted Candle • Edgar Wallace
... the other islands; and, during this voyage, I took every opportunity of improving my acquaintance with it, by conversing with Omai, before we arrived, and by my daily intercourse with the natives, while we now remained there.[1] It abounds with beautiful and figurative expressions, which, were it perfectly known, would, I have no doubt, put it upon a level with many of the languages that are most in esteem for their warm and bold images. For instance, the Otaheiteans express their notions of death very emphatically, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 16 • Robert Kerr
... which suggests the attitude and work of Jesus. Isaac is an only son, is offered in sacrifice, has secured for him a bride in a most unusual manner. This again in many ways illustrates the attitude and work of the Savior. But Joseph is perhaps more highly figurative of the Redeemer. His being hated and cast out by his brethren is like the rejection of Jesus; the way his wicked brethren came to him in their extremity and received forgiveness and sustenance suggest how a sinner finds mercy and life in Jesus; his prosperity and honor gained among ...
— The Bible Period by Period - A Manual for the Study of the Bible by Periods • Josiah Blake Tidwell
... his passions tending to disturb the equilibrium of his mind. Such passions as anger, hatred, jealousy, sorrow, worry, grudge, and fear always untune one's mood and break the harmony of one's mind. They poison one's body, not in a figurative, but in a literal sense of the word. Obnoxious passions once aroused never fail to bring about the physiological change in the nerves, in the organs, and eventually in the whole constitution, and leave those injurious ...
— The Religion of the Samurai • Kaiten Nukariya
... doctrine concerning Christ's Presence in the Holy Eucharist. The term "Real Presence" is intended to signify that the Presence of our Lord in this Sacrament is a reality; that while His Presence is spiritual, it is none the less real, and not simply figurative. The sacrament is not a mere sign or token of an absent {225} Christ. It is a great deal more. As it is Christ who invites, bids and calls us to this Feast and provides the spiritual food for it, it would be strange indeed if we were uncertain whether He ...
— The American Church Dictionary and Cyclopedia • William James Miller
... projection crowning a building, especially the uppermost member of the entablature of an order, surmounting the frieze. The word is also used in mountaineering to describe an overhanging mass of hardened snow at the edge of a precipice. In the Maritime Alps it has a striking figurative meaning. There are four corniches—the main roads along the two sections of the Riviera, Menton to Nice and Theoule to Saint-Raphael, where the mountains come right down to the sea and nature affords no natural routes. The Grande Corniche ...
— Riviera Towns • Herbert Adams Gibbons
... religious meaning is firm and steadfast as the mountains round about Jerusalem; but even as those mountains rose before us glorified, uplifted, and bejewelled by the vague splendours of the sunset, so the form of the history was enlarged and its colours irradiated by the figurative spirit of the East. ...
— Out-of-Doors in the Holy Land - Impressions of Travel in Body and Spirit • Henry Van Dyke
... mahogany—such persons will not be surprised to hear that the Longfellow is a very jolly fellow, a lover of fun and good dinners, and of an amiability and personal popularity that have aided not a little the popularity of his writings in verse and prose—for he writes prose too, prettier, quainter, more figurative, and more poetic if anything, than his poetry. He is also a professor at Harvard ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. I, No. 6 - Of Literature, Art, And Science, New York, August 5, 1850 • Various
... that she dismissed, as typically chimerical "notions," the speculations of her doctor—also a lifelong friend of her husband's—as to what Judge Emery might have become if—the doctor spoke in his usual highly figurative and fantastic jargon—"he had not had to hurry so with that wheel in his cage." "When I first knew Nat Emery," he once said, "he was sitting up till all hours reading Les Miserables, and would knock you down if you didn't bow your head at the mention ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... of the first part, and the appearance of the Grecian Helen in the second; but whereas the popular tradition makes Fust's great discovery the fruit of his alliance with the powers of Evil, Mr. Browning represents it as an act of atonement for the figurative devil-worship which was involved in a disorderly and ostentatious life. Fust has by his own admission sinned to this extent.[139] He has obeyed the father of lies. He has also accepted with thankfulness the chance ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... though figurative, sufficiently indicated the bent of Mrs. Poyser's mind with regard to Adam; and though she and her husband might have viewed the subject differently if Hetty had been a daughter of their own, it was clear that they would have welcomed the ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot
... affording keen delight to the few enlightened travellers who sojourn within its borders. It is a field which has been neglected by anthologists and essayists; one of its few serious recognitions being in a certain "Treatise of Figurative Language," which says: "Nonsense; shall we dignify that with a place on our list? Assuredly will vote for doing so every one who hath at all duly noticed what admirable and wise uses it can be, and often is, put to, though never before in rhetoric has it been so highly honored. How deeply ...
— A Nonsense Anthology • Collected by Carolyn Wells
... us get, as quickly as may be, at the exact meaning with which the advocates of "High Art" use that somewhat obscure and figurative term. ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... visit to his mother from the State of New Hampshire. He was a heavy and loutish youth, standing upon the borders of boyhood, and looking forward to the future with a vacant and listless eye. I mean this was his figurative attitude; his actual manner, as he lolled upon a chair beside the kitchen window, was so eccentric that we felt a little uncertain how to regard him, and Mrs. Johnson openly described him as peculiar. He was ...
— Masterpieces Of American Wit And Humor • Thomas L. Masson (Editor)
... refreshed by the breezes of the north wind.[89] Even at Rome the adherents of the Alexandrian gods frequently inscribed the following wish on their tombs: "May Osiris give you fresh water."[90] Soon this water became, in a figurative sense, the fountain of life pouring out immortality to thirsting souls. The metaphor obtained such popularity that in Latin refrigerium became synonymous with comfort and happiness. The term retained ...
— The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism • Franz Cumont
... present feelings it seems incredible that I should ever believe that I believed in transubstantiation. But my conqueror oppressed me with the sacramental words, "Hoc est corpus meum," and dashed against each other the figurative half-meanings of the protestant sects: every objection was resolved into omnipotence; and after repeating at St. Mary's the Athanasian creed, I humbly acquiesced in the ...
— Memoirs of My Life and Writings • Edward Gibbon
... contains but one figurative expression, the mask of night; and every one reading this speech with the context, must have felt the peculiar propriety of its simplicity, though perhaps without examining the cause of an omission which certainly is not fortuitous. ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... that John 3:5—"Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit," and Titus 3:5—"The washing of regeneration," teach that regeneration may occur in connection with baptism. These passages, however, are to be understood in a figurative sense, as meaning the cleansing power of the Word of God. See also Eph. 5:26—"With the washing of water by (or in) the word"; John 15:3—"Clean through the word." That the Word of God is an agent in regeneration is clear from James 1:18, and ...
— The Great Doctrines of the Bible • Rev. William Evans
... who holds the lowest card, stands a better chance of winning than he who has none, though in his hand may be all the aces of the others, diamonds included. But, lest I go too far beyond the analogy—as I might ignorantly do, being unskilled in the many games of cards—I will drop the figurative.... Keep your heart for faith, love, friendship, for God, your country, and truth. And where the heart is given, it should be unreservedly. Its allegiance is too often withheld where it is due, yet this is ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various
... In the yard, were half a dozen hives for bees, made from the stocks of the maguey. The old man was rich, and owned other houses, but he lives alone, his wife being dead and his daughters married. He is a master of the Aztec, and uses it in its most poetical and figurative style. He does not speak like common men, but his conversation abounds in metaphor and flowers of speech. When once one spoke to him of his lonely and solitary life, he said, "Alone and solitary! No, we are three! There are ...
— In Indian Mexico (1908) • Frederick Starr
... of the leper, Tertullian argues that the prohibition of contact with a leper was figurative, applying really to the contact with sin. But the Godhead is incapable of pollution, and therefore Jesus touched the leper. It would be in vain for Marcion to suggest that this was done in contempt of the ...
— The Gospels in the Second Century - An Examination of the Critical Part of a Work - Entitled 'Supernatural Religion' • William Sanday
... don't know it—nor do I think it; nor what is more, do you think it; for you are sharp enough to know that where there are so many figurative terms in use to signify murder, it is not probable that had they, on this occasion, wished to signify murder, they would have used a phrase which every one knows expresses an intention to drive a man out of the country. Yes, sir, you know that not one of the party ...
— The Macdermots of Ballycloran • Anthony Trollope
... eighteen years old, I ventured to regard this language as figurative on the part of Mr Doubleday, and trusted the sevens were not quite as bad as he ...
— My Friend Smith - A Story of School and City Life • Talbot Baines Reed
... "the armies have kept a respectful distance; they were like nothing I can think of," said the figurative Frenchman, "except two hideous serpents wallowing in mire, and vomiting at each other whole rivers of ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 2 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... to them a broom, that it had formerly been a novice who neglected to sweep out the Council room, hence was reborn as a broom,(!) therefore the wisest of all the world's sages stands accused of idiotic superstition. Why not try and understand the true meaning of the figurative statement before criticising? Is or is not that which is called magnetic effluvia a something, a stuff or a substance, invisible and imponderable though it be?... The mesmeric or magnetic fluid which emanates from man to man, or even from man to what is termed an inanimate object, is ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal
... of Portland Place, London, England, a pleasure tourist in Canada, with a (figurative) mortgage on every town he visited, and a claim on the hand of one ...
— The Doctor's Daughter • "Vera"
... sung, its appropriateness consisting mostly in its dismal words and tune. Then the terrible moment arrived, the lowering of the coffin and the sound of the first earth upon it; for, formerly the company awaited this last act. This was not the formal dust to dust, a verbal and figurative act, but some shovelfuls of real earth that for a few moments rattled and pounded the top of the coffin with a heart-rending sound. The minister shook hands with the chief mourners, every one took his way home, the ...
— Confessions of Boyhood • John Albee
... others, until he comes to that one which seems to indicate something beyond a merely figurative use of the word "nymphs;" though, after all, it is possible that the word was originally written with an l, instead of n, which would make all the difference between ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
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