|
|
|
More "Prate" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... handsome young fellows about my niece. I see too many of them: they have little fortune, and less shame; they give me a deal of trouble; no good can come of their smirking and smiling, their foppery and their forward prate. My niece I believe has much more prudence than is usual with the young minxes of the present day. But no matter for that: I am sure there is no prudence in setting gunpowder too near the fire. I have heard her talk of your taking her ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... work except in darkness; Thought will not work except in Silence; neither will Virtue work except in Secrecy. Let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth! Neither shalt thou prate even to thy own heart of "those secrets known to all." Is not Shame (Schaam) the soil of all Virtue, of all good manners and good morals? Like other plants, Virtue will not grow unless its root be hidden, buried from the eye ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... can't chuse but laugh to hear the Fools prate about Preheminence: They would all fain be Masters, and yet they know they are but all my Servants; they make their Boast, of this and that, and talk of their great gains: and forget that I rule the Roast, and that both their gains and their very being here, depends upon my Pleasure: ...
— The London-Bawd: With Her Character and Life - Discovering the Various and Subtle Intrigues of Lewd Women • Anonymous
... don't fully appreciate it myself. John Tullis playing nurse and story-teller to a seven-year-old boy, to the exclusion of everything else, is more than I can grasp. Somehow, I've come to feel that he's mine. That must be the reason. But you've heard me prate on this subject a hundred times. Don't let me start it again. There's something else you want to talk to me about, so please don't encourage me to tell all the wonderful things he has said and ...
— Truxton King - A Story of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... They prate and prattle pleasantly While riding on the way, To those their wicked uncle hired, ...
— My First Picture Book - With Thirty-six Pages of Pictures Printed in Colours by Kronheim • Joseph Martin Kronheim
... god or demon? 290 With new kings rise new altars. But, proceed; You are sent to prate your master's will, and ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... combination and balance are so rare that they are hardly to be found in perfection among the sons of men. The very fact of his greatness made his failings all the more dangerous and unfortunate. To be blinded by the splendor of his fame and the lustre of his achievements and prate about the sin of belittling a great man is the falsest philosophy and the meanest cant. The only thing worth having, in history as in life, is truth; and we do wrong to our past, to ourselves, and to our posterity if we do not strive to render simple justice always. We can forgive ...
— Daniel Webster • Henry Cabot Lodge
... of Europe. The camp-fire is extinguished; the tent is furled. We are no longer happy nomads, masquerading in Moslem garb. We shall soon become prosaic Christians, and meekly hold out our wrists for the handcuffs of Civilization. Ah, prate as we will of the progress of the race, we are but forging additional fetters, unless we preserve that healthy physical development, those pure pleasures of mere animal existence, which are now only to be found among ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor
... Restrain thy tongue, nor singly thus presume The Kings to slander; thou, the meanest far Of all that with the Atridae came to Troy. Ill it beseems, that such an one as thou Should lift thy voice against the Kings, and rail With scurril ribaldry, and prate of home. How these affairs may end, we know not yet; Nor how, or well or ill, we may return. Cease then against Atrides, King of men, To pour thy spite, for that the valiant Greeks To him, despite ...
— The Iliad • Homer
... not of those niggard souls, who deem That poesy is but to jingle words, To string sweet sorrows for apologies To hide the barrenness of unfurnished hearts, To prate about the surfaces of things, And make more thread-bare what was quite worn out: Our common thoughts are deepest, and to give Such beauteous tones to these, as needs must take Men's hearts their captives ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, February 1844 - Volume 23, Number 2 • Various
... are you that talk to me of dishonour?—you that come straying here out of the night with your cicisbeo at your heels? You, with the dew on you and your dress bedraggled, arrive straight from companioning in the woods and prate to me of shame—of the blood of the Colonne!" He smote a hand on the table and spat forth a string of vile names upon her, mixed with curses; abominable words before which she drew back cowering, yet less (I think) from the ...
— Sir John Constantine • Prosper Paleologus Constantine
... Shepherd's Dog, who saw the deed, Detesting the vexatious breed, Bespoke him thus: "When coxcombs prate, They kindle wrath, contempt, or hate; Thy teasing tongue, had judgment tied, Thou hadst ...
— Favourite Fables in Prose and Verse • Various
... have felt, and this I have guessed, and this I have heard men say, And this they wrote that another man wrote of a carl in Norroway." —"Ye have read, ye have felt, ye have guessed, good lack! Ye have hampered Heaven's Gate; There's little room between the stars in idleness to prate! O none may reach by hired speech of neighbour, priest, and kin Through borrowed deed to God's good meed that lies so fair within; Get hence, get hence to the Lord of Wrong, for doom has yet to run, And. . .the faith that ye share ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... canons of scientific logic, but that it is the only adequate method. Critics exclusively trained in classics or in mathematics, who have never determined a scientific fact in their lives by induction from experiment or observation, prate learnedly about Mr. Darwin's method, which is not inductive enough, not Baconian enough, forsooth, for them. But even if practical acquaintance with the process of scientific investigation is denied them, they may learn, by the perusal of Mr. Mill's admirable chapter "On the Deductive ...
— Darwiniana • Thomas Henry Huxley
... primacy by the evangelic voice of our Lord and Saviour, saying, "Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my Church," etc.(202) To it was given the fellowship of the most blessed Apostle Paul, that chosen vessel who not at a different time, as heretics prate, but at one time and on one and the same day by a glorious death, was crowned together with Peter in agony in the city of Rome under the Emperor Nero. And they equally consecrated the said holy Roman Church to Christ and ...
— A Source Book for Ancient Church History • Joseph Cullen Ayer, Jr., Ph.D.
... "Prate not to me, my lord, of truth or honor amongst these savages," he replied. "Did not their chief himself but even now lie to me? Well knew the rascally heathen where the Spaniard hides! The truth indeed! They know not the meaning ...
— Their Mariposa Legend • Charlotte Herr
... ourselves, not move the crowd. Our gravity prefers the muttering tone, A proper mixture of the squeak and groan; No borrow'd grace of action, must be seen, The slightest motion would displease the dean. Whilst every staring graduate would prate, Against what, ...
— Fugitive Pieces • George Gordon Noel Byron
... the government of these quiet old places, there is much to be said that is depressing. While men prate about the decay of trade and the advance of poverty, how few people reflect on the snug fortunes which are amassed in out-of-the-way corners! We hear of jobbery in the metropolis, and jobbery in Government departments, but I take it that the corporations ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... "I know every step of the Caucasus. I have been where your serpents climb not, your tigers cannot mount, your eagles cannot fly. Make way, comrade: thy threshold is not on God's high-road, and I have no time to prate with thee." ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXIX. - March, 1843, Vol. LIII. • Various
... spider swings And snares the people for the kings: "Luther is dead; old quarrels pass; The stake's black scars are healed with grass"; So dreamers prate;—did man e'er live Saw priest or woman yet forgive? But Luther's broom is left, and eyes Peep o'er their creeds to where it lies. Spin, spin, Clotho, spin! Lachesis, twist! and Atropos, sever! In the shadow, year out, year in, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various
... beforenamed prophetess, who while they all sat at the table, began to groan and quake gradually until at length the whole bench shook. Then rising up she began to pray, shrieking so that she could be heard as far as the river. This done, she was quickly in the dish, and her mouth began immediately to prate worldly and common talk in which she was not the least ready. When the meal was finished, Ephraim obtained a horse for himself and his wife, and we followed him on foot, carrying our travelling bags. Our host took us to the path, and Ephraim's servant was to act as our guide. ...
— Journal of Jasper Danckaerts, 1679-1680 • Jasper Danckaerts
... well to such a guest, Immortal, unimpair'd, she rears her head, And damns alike the living and the dead. Oft have I known thee, Hogarth, weak and vain, Thyself the idol of thy awkward strain, Through the dull measure of a summer's day, In phrase most vile, prate long, long hours away, 460 Whilst friends with friends, all gaping sit, and gaze, To hear a Hogarth babble Hogarth's praise. But if athwart thee Interruption came, And mention'd with respect some ancient's ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill
... against love?" Helen demanded, almost fiercely. "A sister may prate about them, Philippa. A wife couldn't. I'd sacrifice every principle I ever had, every scrap of self-respect, myself and all that belongs to me, to ...
— The Zeppelin's Passenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... sick man. "Silence your senseless prate! They will neither eat nor drink here. Tell the coachman that there are excellent accommodations at the Hurdlestone Arms for himself and his horses. But first see to your mistress—she is in a swoon. Carry her into the ...
— Mark Hurdlestone - Or, The Two Brothers • Susanna Moodie
... freedom from stain. Charity, as even those of whose religion it makes a formal part have been compelled to acknowledge, creates a multitude of evils. The mere existence of conscience, that faculty of which people prate so much nowadays, and are so ignorantly proud, is a sign of our imperfect development. It must be merged in instinct before we become fine. Self-denial is simply a method by which man arrests his progress, and self-sacrifice a survival of the mutilation of the savage, part ...
— Intentions • Oscar Wilde
... idler, smiling sneeringly, And why? because, forsooth, so many moons, Here dwelling voiceless by the voiceful sea, Thou hast not set thy thoughts to paltry tunes In song or sonnet. Them these golden noons Oppress not with their beauty; they could prate, Even while a prophet read the solemn runes On which is hanging some imperial fate. How know they, these good gossips, what to thee The ocean and its wanderers may have brought? How know they, in their busy vacancy, With what far aim thy spirit may be fraught? ...
— Poems of Henry Timrod • Henry Timrod
... cackle, gabble, murmur, prattle, blurt, chat, gossip, palaver, tattle, blurt out, chatter, jabber, prate, twaddle. ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... you going, by your theoretical treatises on philosophy, to make me learn the practical part of it, and prate upon learning while I ...
— Devereux, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... seems talk of "time's compensation"! Who now may prate, "Evil is good misunderstood"? Surely such cogent blending requires some powerfully focalized far ...
— Oswald Langdon - or, Pierre and Paul Lanier. A Romance of 1894-1898 • Carson Jay Lee
... giving up when she said no. If you had followed your heart, you would have choked the name and amount out of her and paid that devilish debt. You walk away in a case like that, and then have the nerve to come here and prate to me about following your heart. I'll wager my last dollar your heart is sore because you were not allowed to help her; but on the proposition that you followed its promptings I wouldn't stake a penny. ...
— The Harvester • Gene Stratton Porter
... be laid out, with all his marvelous masculine virtues, for a week at least. Now do not waste your arguments on these prigs from Union College. Take each, in turn, the ten-miles' circuit on 'Old Boney' and they'll have no breath left to prate of woman's inferiority. You might argue with them all day, and you could not make them feel so small as I made that popinjay feel in one hour. I knew 'Old Boney' would keep up with me, if he died for it, and that my escort could neither stop ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... an the wealthy may prate, An booast o' ther riches and land, Some o'th' laadest 'ul sink second-rate To that lad with his ...
— Yorkshire Lyrics • John Hartley
... the Dominion; for the government seem to grasp the purse-strings with one hand while they hold a drawn sword in the other. There is no security to be found in any corner of the State; and no projects, formed for the future of its people. To be sure, certain parties prate and jabber about the Volunteer Service and national defenses; but what have they to defend? If their frontier were bristling to-morrow with forts and bayonets, all they could hope to accomplish would be the shutting out of American liberty and national prosperity from the people. This must ...
— Ridgeway - An Historical Romance of the Fenian Invasion of Canada • Scian Dubh
... our young men go abroad, it is no longer for clothes, nor to seek new laws in wretched printing shops, nor to study eloquence in the cafes of Paris. For now Napoleon, a clever man and a swift, gives us no time to prate or to search for new fashions. Now there is the thunder of arms, and the hearts of us old men exult that the renown of the Poles is spreading so widely throughout the world; glory is ours already, and so we shall soon again have our Republic. From ...
— Pan Tadeusz • Adam Mickiewicz
... not late in the day, Hogan, for you and me to prate of honour?" asked Crispin bitterly, yet with averted gaze. "God knows my honour is as like honour as a beggar's rags are like unto a cloak of ermine. What signifies another splash, another rent in that which is tattered beyond all semblance of ...
— The Tavern Knight • Rafael Sabatini
... woman with the evil eye, do you suppose that I wish you here to bring all the ills you prate of upon my head? I say that I am afraid of you. Why, for your sake, once, years ago, I made a vow to the Blessed Virgin that, whatever I worked on men, I would never again lift a hand against a woman. To that oath I look ...
— Lysbeth - A Tale Of The Dutch • H. Rider Haggard
... "All this parrot-prate, I suppose, is only intended to vex me," cried the warrior king, who always considered himself, and very naturally, a person of such consequence as ever to be uppermost in the thoughts and minds of others. "If thou must tell a tale, then tell one, Vampire! or else be silent, as I ...
— Vikram and the Vampire • Sir Richard F. Burton
... true!—it is most horrible. Now who among you will stand forth and prate still of patience and delay? My daughter's fate is linked with that of Genoa. I sacrifice the affections of a father to the duties of a citizen. Who among us is so much a coward as to hesitate in the salvation of his country, when this poor guiltless being must pay for his timidity with endless ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... her to accept such a proposition as mine, especially after all that has happened, and still prate of ...
— What Can She Do? • Edward Payson Roe
... Pat's being up with the pike and shillelagh on any or no occasion. God forbid Scotland should retrograde towards such a state—much better that the Deil, as in Burns's song, danced away with the whole excisemen in the country. We do not want to hear her prate of her number of millions of men, and her old military exploits. We had better remain in union with England, even at the risk of becoming a subordinate species of Northumberland, as far as national consequence is concerned, than remedy ...
— Political Pamphlets • George Saintsbury
... Whigs about the sugar prate! They do not care one dump About the blacks and their sad state— Just ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, July 24, 1841 • Various
... prate about Bibliolatry, and labor to lower men's estimate of the Bible. They may spare their breath. The people who idolize the Bible too much are creatures of their own imagination only, and not living men and women. People may love the Bible unwisely, but not too well. ...
— Modern Skepticism: A Journey Through the Land of Doubt and Back Again - A Life Story • Joseph Barker
... great danger to the fruit of their womb and to themselves, rather than not to fast when the others fast. They make a matter of conscience where there is none, and where there is matter of conscience they make none. This is all the fault of the preachers, because they continually prate of fasting, and never point out its true use, limit, fruit, cause and purpose. So also the sick should be allowed to eat and to drink every day whatever they wish. In brief, where the wantonness of the flesh ceases, there every reason for fasting, watching, ...
— Works of Martin Luther - With Introductions and Notes (Volume I) • Martin Luther
... Prate not about Fame! I've addressed half the world, In Court and in cottage, in Castle and slum! I've been warbled, and chorussed, and tootled, and skirled, Yet, for kudos, I might just as well have been dumb. Though familiar to all men, I'm wholly unknown; You're inclined to pooh-pooh, and ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100, April 11, 1891 • Various
... love stale instead of fresh, withered better than blooming, excellence in the abstract rather than the palpable. With their idle prate of feminine intellect, and a grotto nymph, and a mother of Gracchi! Why, he must think me dazed with admiration of him to talk to me! One listens, you know. And he is one of the men who cast a kind ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... somber-drest. "Lo, who art thou," they ask, "that thou shouldst fret To find, forsooth, one single heart undone? The page thou turnest there is purple-wet With blood that gushed from Caesar overthrown! Lo, who art thou to prate of sorrow?" Yet, This little woe, it is my own, ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. 31, No. 1, May 1908 • Various
... soared sky-high, and saw divinity itself, because he can no longer fly after his wings are broken! Give us but our independence, allow us to take care of ourselves, grant us but a little strip of land like that of the Servians and Rumanians, give us a chance to lead a national existence, and then prate about our lacking manly virtues. What we lack is not genius (Genialitaet) but self-consciousness (Selbstgefuehl) and appreciation of our value as men (Bewusstsein der Menschenwuerde), of which ...
— The Haskalah Movement in Russia • Jacob S. Raisin
... loquacity, loquaciousness; talkativeness &c. adj.; garrulity; multiloquence[obs3], much speaking. jaw; gabble; jabber, chatter; prate, prattle, cackle, clack; twaddle, twattle, rattle; caquet[obs3], caquetterie[Fr]; blabber, bavardage[obs3], bibble-babble[obs3], gibble-gabble[obs3]; small talk &c. (converse) 588. fluency, flippancy, volubility, flowing, tongue; flow of words;.flux de bouche[Fr], flux de mots[Fr]; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... aske your patience, and be trew. This play was never liked, unlesse by few That brought their judgements with um, for of late First the infection, then the common prate Of common people, have such customes got Either to silence plaies, or like them not. Under the last of which this interlude, Had falne for ever prest downe by the rude That like a torrent which the moist south feedes, ...
— The Faithful Shepherdess - The Works of Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher (Vol. 2 of 10). • Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher
... great anger, Rodolph said: "I will go to the mountain-tops; there I shall find no birds, nor trees, nor brooks, nor flowers to prate of a monarch no one has ever seen. There shall there be no sea to vex me with its murmurings, nor any human voice to displease ...
— A Little Book of Profitable Tales • Eugene Field
... here, and desires to be my bedfellow to-night. So I shall not have an opportunity to sit down with that seriousness and attention which the subjects of yours require. For she is all prate, you know, and loves to set me a prating; yet comes upon a very grave occasion—to procure my mother to go with her to her grandmother Larking, who has long been bed-ridden; and at last has taken it into her head that ...
— Clarissa, Volume 2 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... and descried, more or less plainly, the secret of it, while yet she never even alluded to the existence of such a trouble. She had a regard for woman's dignity as profound as silent. She was not of those that prate or rave about their rights, forget their duties, and care only for what they count ...
— The Flight of the Shadow • George MacDonald
... these superfluities signify, but that the venter of them doth little skill the use of speech, or the rule of conversation, but meaneth to sputter and prate anything without judgment or wit; that his invention is very barren, his fancy beggarly, craving the aid of any stuff to relieve it? One would think a man of sense should grudge to lend his ear, or ...
— Sermons on Evil-Speaking • Isaac Barrow
... it and thee! I never heard a man yet begin to prate of his conscience, but I knew that he was about to do something more than ordinarily cruel ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... bonds to keep the peace, as Lawyer Donigan cautioned Biddy Gavan when the doctor said she was driving the parish mad with her prate." ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... most confident I am Thy life is one of very little ease; Albeit men mock thee with their similes And prate of being "happy as a clam!" What though thy shell protects thy fragile head From the sharp bailiffs of the briny sea? Thy valves are, sure, no safety-valves to thee, While rakes are free to desecrate thy bed, And bear thee off—as ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... from her tresses like golden stars; but never have I read an untruth in her pages. There is good intelligence between her and some on board; and, trust me, she knows the paths of the ocean too well, ever to steer a wrong course. But we prate like gossiping river-men.—Wilt see the Skimmer of ...
— The Water-Witch or, The Skimmer of the Seas • James Fenimore Cooper
... all fare?" Finn cried. "Strong drink, if it be too freely supplied, Or the prate of a fool," the ...
— Ulf Van Yern - and Other Ballads • Thomas J. Wise
... unconcern, as if delivered from all danger, and the devil far fled. By the very reason of their security they are overcome of the devil and their own flesh, and fall unawares from the Gospel. They have just enough connection with it to be able to prate of it, boasting themselves Christians but giving no indication of the fact in ...
— Epistle Sermons, Vol. III - Trinity Sunday to Advent • Martin Luther
... who preach the gospel of man's pre-eminence;—you who prate of God and know nothing whatsoever about Him! The horse, dog, cat,—even the wild animals, whose vices, perchance, pale beside your own, may go to Heaven before you. The Supreme Architect is neither a Nero, nor a Stuart, nor a clown. ...
— Animal Ghosts - Or, Animal Hauntings and the Hereafter • Elliott O'Donnell
... Both bodily and ghostly health; Nor too much wealth, nor wit, come to thee, So much of either may undo thee. I wish thee learning, not for show, Enough for to instruct and know; Not such as gentlemen require To prate at table, or at fire. I wish thee all thy mother's graces, Thy father's fortunes, and his places. I wish thee friends, and one at court, Not to build on, but support To keep thee, not in doing many Oppressions, but from suffering ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... Religion!—'tis not blindly prating what the gurus prate, But to love, as God hath loved them, all things, be they small or great; And true bliss is when a sane mind doth a healthy body fill; And true knowledge is the knowing what is good ...
— Indian Poetry • Edwin Arnold
... most confident I am Thy life is one of very little ease; Albeit men mock thee with their similes, And prate of being "happy as a clam!" What though thy shell protects thy fragile head From the sharp bailiffs of the briny sea? Thy valves are, sure, no safety-valves to thee, While rakes are free to desecrate ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... But why prate history, why evoke phantoms of the past, when we can gaze on this exquisitely concrete thing—this glad and simple creature of Hokusai? Let us emulate his calm, enjoy his enjoyment as he sprawls before us—pinguis, iners, placidus—in the pale twilight. Let us not seek ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... no pranks and ceremonies and entertainments; I have not time. I must wed her at once. Canst thou not see, under the circumstances, scandal-mongers will make eyes and prate of wrong for me thus to have a young maid here alone?" Now indeed this thought had not occurred to Constance in just this way; but now it struck her with a mighty force, and she shot at him a piercing glance through ...
— Mistress Penwick • Dutton Payne
... "What heart can bear Such slanders false, devised by hate and spite? Or with stayed patience, reproaches hear, And not revenge by battle or by fight? The Norway Prince hath bought his folly dear, But who with words could stay the angry knight? A fool is he that comes to preach or prate When men with swords their ...
— Jerusalem Delivered • Torquato Tasso
... communist holds before us a world where all alike are poor. For the activity, the push, the vigor of our modern life, his substitute is a life aimless and unbroken. And so we have to say to communists what George Eliot might have said: Be not blinded by the passions of the moment, but when you prate about your own wrongs and the sufferings of your offspring, take heed lest in the long run you make a worse time of it for your own generation, and leave a bad inheritance for ...
— The Altruist in Politics • Benjamin Cardozo
... BECKET. Prate not of bonds, for never, oh, never again Shall the waste voice of the bond-breaking sea Divide me from the mother church of England, My Canterbury. Loud disturbances! Oh, ay—the bells rang out even to deafening, Organ and pipe, and dulcimer, chants and hymns In all the churches, ...
— Becket and other plays • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... dearest, don't sob so. It is a case of two affirmatives making a negative; two great nationalities decried, derided, rendered null and void in their offspring through the dictates of those who, in religion, prate that we are all brothers. I have just got to stick it, my mother, and life is not very long. But I shall never marry." And as he spoke, Fate flicked a page of an illustrated paper, which was but the volume of the Book of Life, and perhaps only a mother's eyes would have noticed the ...
— The Hawk of Egypt • Joan Conquest
... firm-set earth, Hear not my steps, which way they walk, for fear Thy very stones prate of my whereabout, And take the present horror from the time ...
— A Dish Of Orts • George MacDonald
... the sergeant bitterly, "that all them beasts were stuffed down your throttle the way you'd have to hold your prate." ...
— The Crock of Gold • James Stephens
... will use the names of actors with whom perhaps they have never exchanged a word, in the silly belief they are raising themselves in the estimation of their auditors. It is an odd conceit, yet it prevails with the would-be fast young men of the present day. To hear some of these mollycoddles prate one who was not acquainted with their weaknesses would imagine these chaps were on intimate terms with players—who, as a rule, are slow to cultivate new acquaintances, attend strictly to their own business, and do not particularly relish that particular class ...
— A Pirate of Parts • Richard Neville
... to secure His passage at a narrow door, And scarce could reach the rack of hay, His horns so much were in his way. A Calf officious, fain would show How he might twist himself and go. "Hold thou thy prate; all this," says he, "Ere thou wert calved was known to me." He, that a wiser man by half Would teach, may ...
— The Fables of Phdrus - Literally translated into English prose with notes • Phaedrus
... John Adams, speaking of a conversation with Arbuthnot, a Boston physician, says: "He began to prate upon the presumption of philosophy in erecting iron rods to draw the lightning from the clouds. He railed and foamed against the points and the presumption that erected them. He talked of presuming upon God, as Peter attempted to walk ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... He had tried to obtain it for Poland and had failed; he had not tried to obtain it for Italy, because he was afraid of offending Austria. At least he had the courage to tell the truth, and did not prate about the felicity of being subjects of the Austrian Emperor, as many English partisans of Austria prated in ...
— The Liberation of Italy • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... shallow as to dream that I feel nothing? What is your love for Tom Faggus? What is your love for your baby (pretty darling as he is) to compare with such a love as for ever dwells with me? Because I do not prate of it; because it is beyond me, not only to express, but even form to my own heart in thoughts; because I do not shape my face, and would scorn to play to it, as a thing of acting, and lay it out before you, are you fools enough to think—" but here I stopped, having ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... power, grandeur, eye, and to prate of thrones! Is a prison the fit place? You wish to make me believe in splendor, and we are lying lost in night; you boast of glory, and we are smothering our words in the curtains of this miserable bed; you give me glimpses of power absolute whilst I hear the footsteps of the every-watchful jailer ...
— The Man in the Iron Mask • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... up to recover his title and his fortune. There, at least; is one who deserves what he will get. For once I shall not be sorry to see a lad get on, who has been brought up in the school of adversity. But, pshaw! he will be like all the rest. Prosperity will turn his brain. Already he begins to prate of his ancestors. . . . Poor humanity he almost made me laugh. . . . But it is mother Gerdy who surprises me most. A woman to whom I would have given absolution without waiting to hear her confess. When I think that ...
— The Widow Lerouge - The Lerouge Case • Emile Gaboriau
... then?" he was thinking. "What clergyman could raise his voice against my rule? Ah! Their 'high principles' they prate of so eloquently, their crack-brained economics, their rebellions and their strikes—the dogs!—would soon bow down before that power! Men have starved for stiff-necked opposition's sake, and still may do so—but with my hand at the throat of the world, with the world's very life-breath ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England
... I fear these happy days when we Can loll in cooling shades while others toil For us, on stipends which like widow's mite Are small: will in the future disappear. These men who prate of slavery in these isles Do know full well that witness false they bear. We buy not souls and on the record place Their names among the chattels which we own, But their life's labor for a certain sum We purchase, when in times of sorry stress They fain prefer ...
— 'A Comedy of Errors' in Seven Acts • Spokeshave (AKA Old Fogy)
... elate, His grinning Rival 'gan to prate. Oh, fie! my friends; upon my word, You're too severe: he should be heard; For Mind can ne'er to glory reach, Without the usual aid of speech. If thus howe'er, you seal his doom, What hope have I unknown to Rome? But since the truth be your dominion, I beg to hear your just opinion. This ...
— The Sylphs of the Season with Other Poems • Washington Allston
... fifteen or sixteen years' study, compare one of our college Latinists, who has thrown away so much time in nothing but learning to speak. The world is nothing but babble; and I hardly ever yet saw that man who did not rather prate too much, than speak too little. And yet half of our age is embezzled this way: we are kept four or five years to learn words only, and to tack them together into clauses; as many more to form them into a long discourse, ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... friend and patroness. Thus it is that very many of our unmarried women of distinction, are to all intents and purposes married, except the consideration of different sexes. They are directly under the conduct of their whisperer; and think they are in a state of freedom, while they can prate with one of these attendants of all men in general, and still avoid the man they most like. You do not see one heiress in a hundred whose fate does not turn upon this circumstance of chusing a confident. ...
— The Coverley Papers • Various
... gall in it To let truth shape like that!—I also said That when my arms were round him I forgot That I was not his mother. So spoke I, But oh me,—I remembered it too well!— He was a lovely child; in his fond prate His father's voice was eloquent. One might say I am well punished ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... sails by— As that poor bird flies home, nor knows his loss, So Rustum knew not his own loss, but stood Over his dying son, and knew him not. But, with a cold incredulous voice, he said:— "What prate is this of fathers and revenge? The mighty Rustum never had a son." And, with a failing voice, Sohrab replied:— "Ah yes, he had! and that lost son am I. Surely the news will one day reach his ear, Reach Rustum, where ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 6 • Charles H. Sylvester
... him in the council of state, and that the appointment of this or any Spaniard was a violation of the charters of the provinces and of the promises of his Majesty. As if it were for the nobles of the obedient provinces to prate of charters and of oaths! Their brethren under the banner of the republic had been teaching Philip for a whole generation how they could deal with the privileges of freemen and with the perjury of tyrants. It was late in the day for the obedient Netherlanders to remember their rights. Havre ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... Why prate of peace? when, warriors all, We clank in harness into hall, And ever bare upon the board Lies the necessary sword. 1319 ROBERT ...
— Handy Dictionary of Poetical Quotations • Various
... thou to seduce me then with words that have no meaning? Parrots so can learn to prate, our speech by pieces gleaning: Nurses teach their children so about ...
— Lyrics from the Song-Books of the Elizabethan Age • Various
... Theology are false, and her record of Time a fable; that the Deluge, for instance, is an old wives' story, and the economy of times and seasons a human fabrication:—when Astronomical and Mechanical Science strut up to the Throne whereon sits the Ancient of Days,—prate to Him, (the first Author of Law,) about the "supremacy of Law,"—and tell Him to His face that His miracles are things impossible:—when Physiology insinuates that Mankind cannot be descended from one primval ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon
... courteous," replied Aymer, "and therefore scarce angels in disguise, even though you prate of the clouds. So if you wish to measure blades I shall not balk you. Nathless," as he slowly freed his own weapon, "it is a quarrel not of ...
— Beatrix of Clare • John Reed Scott
... might have been at liberty; but now—you go with me. And, one word more. Walk gently if you value life, or what may be dearer than life. I am not one to have my will disputed. You will learn as much; but now, I say, walk gently. I wish not to disturb this giddy household: they prate, like others of their sort, of people's doings, and 'tis not ...
— The Buccaneer - A Tale • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... think not then to say 'Tis others' fault, nor foolishly upbraid The lot thyself for thine own self hast made. Say not the world's askew! with idle prate Of never-ending grief the hour grows late. Strike off my head! with many a tear he cries, And might, in sooth, draw ...
— Japanese Literature - Including Selections from Genji Monogatari and Classical - Poetry and Drama of Japan • Various
... Newspapers might prate about wealth till commonplace print was exhausted, but as matter of habit, few Americans envied the very rich for anything the most of them got out of money. New York might occasionally fear them, ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... with the magic of words. When menaced by some exceptionally monstrous form of the tyranny of numbers we have closed our eyes and murmured, "Liberty." When armed Anarchists threaten to quench the fires of civilization in a sea of blood we prate of the protective power of "free ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce
... Closets, Beds, &c. We are all for Humour, Gallantry, Conversation, and Courtship, and shou'dn't endure the chief Lady in the Play a Mute, or to say very little, as 'twas agreeable to them: Our amorous Sparks love to hear the pretty Rogues prate, snap up their Gallants, and Repartee upon 'em on all sides. We shou'dn't like to have a Lady marry'd without knowing whether she gives her consent or no, (a Custom among the Romans) but wou'd be for hearing ...
— Prefaces to Terence's Comedies and Plautus's Comedies (1694) • Lawrence Echard
... let's hope those canoes and blankets and grub will follow suit; for it'd sure tickle me to be able to restore the same to the right owners. I keep on hopin' that Ned here won't think of leavin' this neck of the woods without makin' a real des'prate effort to ...
— Boy Scouts on Hudson Bay - The Disappearing Fleet • G. Harvey Ralphson
... which floated out from the plantation, the clatter of the small stones which his own feet dislodged as he feverishly climbed the rocks. Above him, on the other side of the road, towered the hill where he had sat and dreamed as a boy, where Rochester had come and encouraged him to prate of his ambitions. ...
— The Moving Finger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... you pity me, 'tis dangerous, exceeding dangerous, to prate of pity; which are the poorer? you are now puppies; I without you, or you without my knowledge? be Rogues, and so be gone, be Rogues and reply not, for if ...
— Wit Without Money - The Works of Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher • Francis Beaumont
... smiled 'And even in this lone wood, Sweet lord, ye do right well to whisper this. Fools prate, and perish traitors. Woods have tongues, As walls have ears: but thou shalt go with me, And we will speak at first exceeding low. Meet is it the good King be not deceived. See now, I set thee high on vantage ground, From ...
— Idylls of the King • Alfred, Lord Tennyson
... religious faith than barbarous tradition and the vote of ecumenical councils. Bigotry has quailed beneath the ringing blows of your iconoclastic hammer, dogmatism become more humble and the priesthood well-nigh forgotten to prate of a hell of fire in which the souls of unbaptized babes forever burn. Without intending it, perhaps, you have done more to promote the cause of true religion, more to intellectualize and humanize ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... children.' But the restless women who do these things have generally no homes or children to mind; what is the use of preaching the sacredness of motherhood when you will not allow them to be mothers? To what end prate of the duties of wifehood when you do not ask ...
— Modern marriage and how to bear it • Maud Churton Braby
... person in half a million to whom Art is anything more than a name. Dismissing the countless hordes who have absolutely never heard the word, and confining attention to the few thousands scattered about Europe and America who prate of it, how many of even these do you think it really influences, entering into their lives, refining, broadening them? Watch the faces of the thin but conscientious crowd streaming wearily through our miles of picture galleries and art museums; gaping, with guide-book in hand, ...
— Tea-table Talk • Jerome K. Jerome
... my company; For if the king of gods can be Full oft in need of recreation,— Who rules the world,—right well may I, Who serve him in that high relation: Amuse me, then, before you fly." Our cackler, pleased, at quickest rate Of this and that began to prate. No fool, or babbler for that matter, Could more incontinently chatter. At last she offer'd to make known— A better spy had never flown— All things, whatever she might see, In travelling from tree to tree. But, ...
— A Hundred Fables of La Fontaine • Jean de La Fontaine
... point to it as the witness of their departed successions. Who on seeing New College does not recall William of Wykeham? and then, what a roll of proud names own this renowned university for their Alma Mater. The very stones "prate of the whereabout" of things connected with the development of great minds, and while we look without fatigue at the gorgeous mass of buildings in this university, we feel we are contemplating what carries an intimate connexion, in object at least, with that all of man which marches ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... faced by this Congress is more menacing than merely a return to the past—bad as that would be. Our resplendent economic autocracy does not want to return to that individualism of which they prate, even though the advantages under that system went to the ruthless and the strong. They realize that in thirty-four months we have built up new instruments of public power. In the hands of a people's Government this power is wholesome and proper. But ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... to operate upon, and, when professing to experiment upon pure metal, at least to see that it was not mere dross they were casting into the crucible. Plainly, however, they despise any such nice distinctions. The most earnest prayer and the emptiest ceremonial prate are both alike to them. What sort of a process they imagine prayer to be may be at once perceived from the sort of trials to which ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... of Theology are false, and her record of Time a fable; that the Deluge, for instance, is an old wives' story, and the economy of times and seasons a human fabrication:—when Astronomical and Mechanical Science strut up to the Throne whereon sits the Ancient of Days,—prate to Him, (the first Author of Law,) about the "supremacy of Law,"—and tell Him to His face that His miracles are things impossible:—when Physiology insinuates that Mankind cannot be descended from one primval pair; and that the lives of the Patriarchs ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon
... hypocrite is like unto this frog; As like as is the Puppy to the Dog. He is of nature cold, his mouth is wide To prate, and at true Goodness ...
— Forgotten Books of the American Nursery - A History of the Development of the American Story-Book • Rosalie V. Halsey
... England against the savage on their borders have become a nation that may defy every foe but that most dangerous of all foes, herself, destined to a majestic future if she will shun the excess and perversion of the principles that made her great, prate less about the enemies of the past and strive more against the enemies of the present, resist the mob and the demagogue as she resisted Parliament and King, rally her powers from the race for gold and the delirium of prosperity to make firm the foundations on which that prosperity rests, ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... some true relation with his audience, it may be pardonable to imagine that a friend, a kind and apprehensive, though not the closest friend, is listening to our talk; and then, a native reserve being thawed by this genial consciousness, we may prate of the circumstances that lie around us, and even of ourself, but still keep the inmost Me behind its veil. To this extent, and within these limits, an author, methinks, may be autobiographical, without violating either the ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... the things of the world, save pleasant life, by the boon of Allah Almighty!" He answered, "O my lady Zayn al-Mawasif, ask of me what thou wilt of the goods of the world." Quoth she, "What shall I ask of thee? For sure thou wilt fare forth and prate of me in the highway and I shall become a laughing-stock among the folk and they will make a byword of me in verse, me who am the daughter of the chief of the merchants and whose father is known of the notables of the tribe. I have no need of money or raiment and such love will not be ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 8 • Richard F. Burton
... and nothing else, is, for awhile at least, the king's highway of progress. Here, in England, too many painters and writers dwell dispersed, unshielded, among the intelligent bourgeois. These, when they are not merely indifferent, prate to him about the lofty aims and moral influence of art. And this is the lad's ruin. For art is, first of all and last of all, a trade. The love of words and not a desire to publish new discoveries, the love of form and not a novel reading of historical ...
— Across The Plains • Robert Louis Stevenson
... that now if our young men go abroad, it is no longer for clothes, nor to seek new laws in wretched printing shops, nor to study eloquence in the cafes of Paris. For now Napoleon, a clever man and a swift, gives us no time to prate or to search for new fashions. Now there is the thunder of arms, and the hearts of us old men exult that the renown of the Poles is spreading so widely throughout the world; glory is ours already, and so we shall soon again have our Republic. From ...
— Pan Tadeusz • Adam Mickiewicz
... whose mission seems but destruction to his race, and deadly enmity to his country. The Times, who in these days of victory and triumph of Union arms, would "steal the livery of heaven to serve the devil in," and prate of its devotion to the Union, furnishes us some information it were well for good citizens to know, and which we will presume is (unlike most statements in that ...
— The Great North-Western Conspiracy In All Its Startling Details • I. Windslow Ayer
... weep? Woo't fight? Woo't fast? Woo't tear thyself? Woo't drink up eisel? Eat a crocodile? I'll do't. Dost thou come here to whine? To outface me with leaping in her grave? Be buried quick with her, and so will I: And, if thou prate of mountains, let them throw Millions of acres on us, till our ground, Singeing his pate against the burning zone, Make Ossa like a wart! Nay, an thou'lt mouth, I'll ...
— The Journal of Arthur Stirling - "The Valley of the Shadow" • Upton Sinclair
... to? Upon my live. All trees have very deal bear. A throat's ill. You shall catch cold one's. You make grins. Will some mutton? Will you fat or slight? Will you this? Will you a bon? You not make who to babble. You not make that to prate all day's work. You interompt me. You mistake you self ...
— English as she is spoke - or, A jest in sober earnest • Jose da Fonseca
... a narrow life, prate in the North of our sympathy with the universal man, don't we? And so we extend a stomachic greeting to our Spanish brother that sends us wine, and a bow from our organ of ideality to Italy for beauty incarnate in ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... woman," Nancy groaned, "and I've hammered my finger to a pulp, trying to open this crate, while you perch on a broken step-ladder and prate to me of legacies. The saucers to these cups may be in here, and I can't wait to find out. I'm perfectly crazy about this ware. ...
— Outside Inn • Ethel M. Kelley
... will exclude them from any voice in the settlement. But we understand their position, and at least they are ready to fight for their own freedom. There are, however, individuals who are not ready to fight at all. They call themselves conscientious objectors, prate of the law of Christ, and pose as idealists. If they followed Christ they would sacrifice their lives for others, but they are only concerned for their own skins. Their place is in the shafts The true idealist lies beneath ...
— Raemaekers' Cartoons - With Accompanying Notes by Well-known English Writers • Louis Raemaekers
... "Sure as we're both alive here sittin' on this sooty London grass," he cried. "This Call of the Wild they prate about is just the call a fellow hears to go on 'the bust' when he's had too much town and's got bored—a call to a little bit of license and excess to safety-valve him down. What I feel," his voice turned grave and quiet again, "is quite a different affair. ...
— The Centaur • Algernon Blackwood
... less, no doubt She must have long ago run out. Then, who can think we'll quit the place, When Doll hangs out a newer face? Nail'd to her window full in sight All Christian people to invite. Or stop and light at Chloe's head, With scraps and leavings to be fed? Then, Chloe, still go on to prate Of thirty-six and thirty-eight; Pursue your trade of scandal-picking, Your hints that Stella is no chicken; Your innuendoes, when you tell us, That Stella loves to talk with fellows: But let me warn you to believe A truth, for which your soul should grieve; That should you live to see the ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift
... "Nay, prate not so wildly," answered the Templar. "Surely, when the object of his suspicion is gone, thy woman's art and thy Greek wiles can easily allay the jealous fiend. Do I not know thee, Glycera? Why, thou wouldst ...
— The Pilgrims Of The Rhine • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the scholars were renewed, and further intimations of violence were exhibited. Again the peas rattled upon the hands and faces of the halberdiers, till their ears tingled with pain. "Prate to us of the king's favorites," cried one of the foremost of the scholars, a youth decorated with a paper collar: "they may rule within the precincts of the Louvre, but not within the walls of the university. Maugre-bleu! We hold them cheap enough. We heed not the idle bark of these full-fed ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... humours is gained by Pat's being up with the pike and shillelagh on any or no occasion. God forbid Scotland should retrograde towards such a state—much better that the Deil, as in Burns's song, danced away with the whole excisemen in the country. We do not want to hear her prate of her number of millions of men, and her old military exploits. We had better remain in union with England, even at the risk of becoming a subordinate species of Northumberland, as far as national consequence is concerned, than remedy ourselves by even hinting the possibility ...
— Political Pamphlets • George Saintsbury
... thrust at all factions and sects. For they also have a word and boast much of their doctrine, but theirs is not the Word of truth whereby men are made children of God. They teach naught, and know naught, about how we are to be born God's children through faith. They prate much about the works done by us in the ...
— Epistle Sermons, Vol. II - Epiphany, Easter and Pentecost • Martin Luther
... of life, that he aroused the deadly antagonism of the ruling hierarchy. And as he, witnessing for truth and freedom, steadfastly and defiantly opposed oppression, so those who catch his spirit today will do as he did and will realise as duty—"While wrong is wrong let no man prate of peace!" ...
— The Higher Powers of Mind and Spirit • Ralph Waldo Trine
... You shall have time to prate. My Lord Brachiano— Alas! I make but repetition Of what is ordinary and Rialto talk, And ballated, and would be play'd a' th' stage, But that vice many times finds such loud friends, That preachers are charm'd ...
— The White Devil • John Webster
... the levee and then at the drawing-room; and he reprehended him very sharply at both places. An explanation afterwards took place through Lord Camden, to whom he said that he was angry because de Saumarez would prate at the levee, when he told him that it was not a proper place for discussing ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. III • Charles C. F. Greville
... and this I have heard men say, And this they wrote that another man wrote of a carl in Norroway." —"Ye have read, ye have felt, ye have guessed, good lack! Ye have hampered Heaven's Gate; There's little room between the stars in idleness to prate! O none may reach by hired speech of neighbour, priest, and kin Through borrowed deed to God's good meed that lies so fair within; Get hence, get hence to the Lord of Wrong, for doom has yet to run, And. . .the faith that ye share with Berkeley Square uphold ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... of Westport and my father were old friends and companions-in-arms in the service of the French king, and I came over from Ireland especially to take a dying message and a token from my father to the Earl. That is all you need know about that; but I would have you leave off your prate of your friend the Earl of Westport, for I understand full well you couldn't distinguish between him and a church door, although 'tis scandalously little you know of church doors. So we will stop there on that point. Then I will go on to the next point. The next point is that I am going ...
— The O'Ruddy - A Romance • Stephen Crane
... loved all children and simple-minded people, and the very babies in Concord knew and loved him. "Incorrigible spouting Yankee" he called himself; but he was rather a silent man in reality, and did not care to talk excepting when he had somewhat to say. He did not prate eternally of silence, as Carlyle did, while wreaking himself upon speech in the most frantically vehement manner all his days, but he knew when and how to be silent. The glimpses he gives of Mrs. Emerson, in the long correspondence with Carlyle, are all ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... The preachers prate of fallen man And choirs repeat the chant, While unco' guid with unction urge Repression of the joys that surge, And jail for those who can't. The poor deluded duds forget That something drew the sting When Adam tiptoed to his fall, And ...
— The Eye of Zeitoon • Talbot Mundy
... to read, and to reflect upon what she read, and to apply it to the purpose for which it is valuable, viz. in enlarging her mind and cultivating her taste; but she had never been accustomed to prate, or quote, or sit down for the express purpose of displaying her acquirements; and she began to tremble at hearing authors' names "familiar in their mouths as household words;" but Grizzy, strong ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier
... Cellar deep I sit and steep My soul in GRANVILLE'S logic. Companions mine, sound ale, good wine— That foils Teetotal dodge—hic! With solemn pate our sages prate, The Pump-slaves neatly pinking. He's proved an ass, whose days don't pass ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101. October 3rd, 1891 • Various
... like unto this frog, As like as is the puppy to the dog. He is of nature cold, his mouth is wide To prate, and at true goodness to deride. He mounts his head as if he was above The world, when yet 'tis that which has his love. And though he seeks in churches for to croak, He neither loveth Jesus ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... About the joy and beauty of this world A long black veil is furled. Even the face of Heaven itself seems lost Behind a veil. It takes a fervent soul In these tense times To visualise a God so long defamed By insolent lips, that send out prayers, and prate Of God's collaboration in dark deeds, So foul they put to ...
— Hello, Boys! • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... forgotten that the five-and-thirtieth rule of the order is that in the presence of a woman the face should be ever averted and the eyes cast down? Hast forgot it, I say? If your eyes were upon your sandals, how came ye to see this smile of which ye prate? A week in your cells, false brethren, a week of rye-bread and lentils, with double lauds and double matins, may help ye to remembrance of the ...
— The White Company • Arthur Conan Doyle
... peace, old man! Neither good nor ill wilt thou ever prate of mortal more, for I've drawn thy sting. Once thou wert kind to me; twice, in return, did I steal for thee, and once took a beating from thy shoulders. But thou wert more loyal to thy master than thou wert friend to me—and in a matter such as this, I take no chances. As I have served ...
— Nicanor - Teller of Tales - A Story of Roman Britain • C. Bryson Taylor
... climb a tree, or to suck their paws through the long nights of winter?—The panther would teach them savage cruelty and a speedy step, and the deer would counsel them to fly from the pursuit of a snail, or a land-tortoise, or the cry of a wren, or the prate of a jackdaw; the fox might teach them cunning, and the dog sagacity, and the wild cat nimbleness, and the antelope fleetness, and the wolf courage, and the owl an insight into my ways. But there must be a being to repress the insolence, and controul the rage, of the more savage ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 2 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones
... and cant!" said Julian, starting from his seat, aroused by his hypocritical prate into unwonted intolerance; and he suddenly observed, by the cowering attitude which Hazlet assumed, that the worthy youth was afraid of receiving at his head the water-bottle, on which Julian's hand was resting. Julian thought it best to avoid the temptation, ...
— Julian Home • Dean Frederic W. Farrar
... were sincere? No, certainly not: but the joy of the people was real. They know what is right. Besides, consult the grand thermometer of opinion, the price of the funds: on the 17th Brumaire at 11 francs, on the 20th at 16 and to-day at 21. In such a state of things I may let the Jacobins prate as they like. But let them not talk too ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... tenant in tail without issue." "Spoke like a true disciple of Geber," cries Ferret. "No, sir," replied Mr. Clarke, "Counsellor Caper is in the conveyancing way—I was clerk to Serjeant Croker." "Ay, now you may set up for yourself," resumed the other; "for you can prate as unintelligibly ...
— The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves • Tobias Smollett
... struggling for the earth: but she no more Could give her offspring rigour. Slowly came The chill of death upon him, and 'twas long Before the hero, of his victory sure, Trusted the earth and laid the giant down. Hence hoar antiquity that loves to prate And wonders at herself (19), this region called Antaeus' kingdom. But a greater name It gained from Scipio, when he recalled From Roman citadels the Punic chief. Here was his camp; here can'st thou see the trace ...
— Pharsalia; Dramatic Episodes of the Civil Wars • Lucan
... You prate, he said, instead of answering. But if, my good sir, you admit that I am wise, answer as I ...
— Euthydemus • Plato
... du Mail—"Commission-Exportation"—had a very definite idea. He wished to give up his shop, to retire from business, and for some time he had been thinking of going to see Sidonie, in order to interest her in his new schemes. That was not the time, therefore, to make disagreeable scenes, to prate about paternal authority and conjugal honor. As for Madame Chebe, being somewhat less confident than before of her daughter's virtue, she took refuge in the most profound silence. The poor woman wished that she were deaf and blind—that she never ...
— Fromont and Risler, Complete • Alphonse Daudet
... to weep upon the stage, Tricked for a part of woe and somber-drest. "Lo, who art thou," they ask, "that thou shouldst fret To find, forsooth, one single heart undone? The page thou turnest there is purple-wet With blood that gushed from Caesar overthrown! Lo, who art thou to prate of sorrow?" Yet, This little woe, it is my ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. 31, No. 1, May 1908 • Various
... breast, A mansion suited well to such a guest, Immortal, unimpair'd, she rears her head, And damns alike the living and the dead. Oft have I known thee, Hogarth, weak and vain, Thyself the idol of thy awkward strain, Through the dull measure of a summer's day, In phrase most vile, prate long, long hours away, 460 Whilst friends with friends, all gaping sit, and gaze, To hear a Hogarth babble Hogarth's praise. But if athwart thee Interruption came, And mention'd with respect some ancient's name, Some ancient's name who, ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill
... might prate about wealth till commonplace print was exhausted, but as matter of habit, few Americans envied the very rich for anything the most of them got out of money. New York might occasionally fear them, but more often laughed or sneered at them, and ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... "One should not prate of one's duty, of course," she agreed. "Not that you do—far from it. But, as I was saying, our dear ...
— Cap'n Warren's Wards • Joseph C. Lincoln
... O pardon, Lord above! "My child, with pray'rs invoke his love, "The Almighty never errs?" "O, mother! mother! idle prate, "Can he be anxious for my fate, "Who never heard ...
— Translations of German Poetry in American Magazines 1741-1810 • Edward Ziegler Davis
... Claribel, Measure us back[407-62] to Naples? Keep in Tunis, And let Sebastian wake! Say, this were death That now hath seized them; why, they were no worse Than now they are. There be[407-63] that can rule Naples As well as he that sleeps; lords that can prate As amply and unnecessarily As this Gonzalo: I myself could make A chough[407-64] of as deep chat.[407-65] O, that you bore The mind that I do! what a sleep were this For your ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 8 • Charles H. Sylvester
... measures the Bolsheviks have been compelled to travel a long way from the ideals which originally inspired the revolution. But the situation is so desperate that they could not be blamed if their measures were successful. In a shipwreck all hands must turn to, and it would be ridiculous to prate of individual liberty. The most distressing feature of the situation is that these stern laws seem to have produced so little effect. Perhaps in the course of years Russia might become self-supporting without help from the outside world, but the suffering meantime would be ...
— The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism • Bertrand Russell
... in bonds to keep the peace, as Lawyer Donigan cautioned Biddy Gavan when the doctor said she was driving the parish mad with her prate." ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... sure and firm-set earth, Hear not my steps, which way they walk, for fear Thy very stones prate of my whereabout, And take the present horror from the time ...
— A Dish Of Orts • George MacDonald
... the hostages off to Denmark against his plighted faith. There Gustav was held prisoner a year. All that winter rumors of great armaments against Sweden filled the land. He heard the young bloods from the court prate about bending the stiff necks in the country across the Sound, and watched them throw dice for Swedish castles and Swedish women,—part of the loot when his fatherland should be laid under the yoke. Ready to burst with anger and grief, he sat silent at their boasts. ...
— Hero Tales of the Far North • Jacob A. Riis
... fiddlesticks! Hold thy prate. Do I know my own mind, or do I filter my wits through thee? Did I not say that it is thine? Good, then—'tis thine, although it were thrice somebody else's; and thrice as much thy very own through having other owners. Dost hear? Well, ...
— Master Skylark • John Bennett
... at the sincere beliefs and conscientiously performed rites of those, whether men or women, whether strangers or kinsfolk, from whose religion he disagrees. 'It is not ancient impressions only,' said Pascal, 'which are capable of abusing us. The charm of novelty has the same power.' The prate of new-born scepticism may be as tiresome and as odious as the cant of gray orthodoxy. Religious discussion is not to be foisted upon us at every turn either by defenders or assailants. All we plead for is that when the opportunity meets the freethinker full in front, he is called upon to speak ...
— On Compromise • John Morley
... gave these Sages four, Above the buried Emperor; It was no foolish women's prate That held them ...
— A Celtic Psaltery • Alfred Perceval Graves
... recline in groups, Scanning the motley scene that varies round. There some grave Moslem to devotion stoops, And some that smoke, and some that play, are found. Here the Albanian proudly treads the ground Half-whispering, there the Greek is heard to prate. Hark! from the mosque the nightly solemn sound; The Muezzin's call doth shake the minaret. "There is no god but ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... deserving of aversion are the rabbins. The sublimest passages of the Scriptures they shamefully corrupt. As a case in point, they prate concerning Enoch that, while he was good and righteous, he very much inclined toward carnal desires. God, therefore, out of pity, prevented his sinning and perishing through death. Is not this, I pray you, a shocking corruption of the text before us? Why should they say concerning Enoch ...
— Commentary on Genesis, Vol. II - Luther on Sin and the Flood • Martin Luther
... stale instead of fresh, withered better than blooming, excellence in the abstract rather than the palpable. With their idle prate of feminine intellect, and a grotto nymph, and a mother of Gracchi! Why, he must think me dazed with admiration of him to talk to me! One listens, you know. And he is one of the men who cast a kind of physical ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... of his train there was a henchman page, A peasant boy, who serv'd his master well; And often would his pranksome prate engage Childe Burun's[40] ear, when his proud heart did swell With sullen thoughts that he disdain'd to tell. Then would he smile on him, and Alwin[41] smiled, When aught that from his young lips archly fell, The gloomy film ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. II - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... thee! I never heard a man yet begin to prate of his conscience, but I knew that he was about to do something more than ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... He commands, we are free only to obey. His will is supreme, and when it is asserted, we purely and simply have no choice to do as we list. This privilege is called license, not liberty. We have certain rights as men, but we have duties, too, as creatures, and it ill-becomes us to prate about our rights, or the duties of others towards us, while we ignore the obligations we are under towards others and our first duty which is to God. Our boasted independence consists precisely in ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton
... perhaps, dear my Lord, among other worse crimes, The whole was no more than a lie of The Times. It is monstrous, my Lord! in a civilis'd state That such Newspaper rogues should have license to prate. 90 Indeed printing in general—but for the taxes, Is in theory false and pernicious in praxis! You and I, and your Cousin, and Abb Sieyes, And all the great Statesmen that live in these days, Are agreed that no nation secure is from vi'lence 95 Unless all who must think are maintain'd ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... Blueskin. "Take my life, if you're so disposed. You're welcome to it. And let's see if either of these women, who prate of their love for you, will ...
— Jack Sheppard - A Romance • William Harrison Ainsworth
... welcome business, welcome strife, Welcome the cares, the thorns of life, The visage wan, the purblind sight, The toil by day, the lamp by night, The tedious forms, the solemn prate, The pert dispute, the dull debate, The drowsy bench, the babbling hall,— For ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... every stroke, is a matter for cheers, derisive or otherwise. The Rev. Septimus need not prate of golden days gone by. Boys at heart never change. And the atmosphere is so charged with electricity that a spark sets the ...
— The Hill - A Romance of Friendship • Horace Annesley Vachell
... protectively over their people. Perhaps the Milovka study-house boasted even Cabbalists starving themselves into celestial visions and graduating for the Divine kiss. How infinitely restful after the Milovka market-place! No more, for that day at least, would he prate of Self-Defence and the ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... names of actors with whom perhaps they have never exchanged a word, in the silly belief they are raising themselves in the estimation of their auditors. It is an odd conceit, yet it prevails with the would-be fast young men of the present day. To hear some of these mollycoddles prate one who was not acquainted with their weaknesses would imagine these chaps were on intimate terms with players—who, as a rule, are slow to cultivate new acquaintances, attend strictly to their own business, and do not particularly relish that particular class ...
— A Pirate of Parts • Richard Neville
... is, that I will not go with the multitude to do evil. My singularity is, that when I say that Freedom is of God, and Slavery is of the devil, I mean just what I say. My fanaticism is, that I insist on the American people abolishing Slavery, or ceasing to prate of the rights of man. My hardihood is, in measuring them by their own standard, and convicting them ...
— No Compromise with Slavery - An Address Delivered to the Broadway Tabernacle, New York • William Lloyd Garrison
... not," said Don Quixote; "for not only art thou not sage silence, but thou art pestilent prate and perversity; still I would like to know what three proverbs have just now come into thy memory, for I have been turning over mine own—and it is a good one—and ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... dogs," said Little John; "Fryer, at my bidding be." "Whose man art thou," said the curtail fryer, "Come here to prate ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... hate and spite? Or with stayed patience, reproaches hear, And not revenge by battle or by fight? The Norway Prince hath bought his folly dear, But who with words could stay the angry knight? A fool is he that comes to preach or prate When men with swords ...
— Jerusalem Delivered • Torquato Tasso
... brave land! The Huns are thundering toward the citadel; They prate of Culture but their path is Hell; Their light is darkness, and the bloody sword They wield and worship is their only Lord. O land where reason stands secure on right, O land where freedom is the source of light, Against ...
— The Red Flower - Poems Written in War Time • Henry Van Dyke
... only rigorously in accordance with the canons of scientific logic, but that it is the only adequate method. Critics exclusively trained in classics or in mathematics, who have never determined a scientific fact in their lives by induction from experiment or observation, prate learnedly about Mr. Darwin's method, which is not inductive enough, not Baconian enough, forsooth, for them. But even if practical acquaintance with the process of scientific investigation is denied them, they may learn, by the perusal of Mr. Mill's admirable chapter "On the Deductive Method," that ...
— Darwiniana • Thomas Henry Huxley
... flowers That idly hide life's iron diadem: It should grow alway like that Eastern tree Whose limbs take root and spread forth constantly; That love for one, from which there doth not spring Wide love for all, is but a worthless thing. Not in another world, as poets prate, Dwell we apart above the tide of things, High floating o'er earth's clouds on faery wings; But our pure love doth ever elevate Into a holy bond of brotherhood All earthly things, making them ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... at length in the newspapers and magazines. Our poor hobby-horses are dragged out of the stable, and made to show their shambling paces before the mob of gentlemen who read with ease. There has been much prate lately of as innocent a foible as ever served to make men self-forgetful for a few seconds of time—the collecting of first editions. Somebody hard up for 'copy' denounced this pastime, and made merry over a ...
— In the Name of the Bodleian and Other Essays • Augustine Birrell
... wealthy may prate, An booast o' ther riches and land, Some o'th' laadest 'ul sink second-rate To that lad with ...
— Yorkshire Lyrics • John Hartley
... and now they appear, fa, la, Sure they will tell Stories of what we do here, fa, la, la, Lie still my dear Chloris, enjoy thy Conceit, For the Babes are too young and too little to prate, fa, la, la. ...
— Wit and Mirth: or Pills to Purge Melancholy, Vol. 5 of 6 • Various
... great truth that faithfulness and loyalty are general human traits, nowhere more so than among those from whom they should not be expected; nowhere more so than among those who are debarred from hope. The great captains of industry so-called, themselves blown full of pride of circumstance, prate often of the inefficiencies of human cattle; yet continually the wonder remains that these same cattle continue to do that which their conscience tells them is right for them to do, and to do it for the sake of the doing. The lives of all of us are daily put in charge of beings entitled ...
— The Law of the Land • Emerson Hough
... of jackasses we Americans are!" he continued. "We talk of liberty and demand license; we prate of democracy and we're ...
— Cappy Ricks Retires • Peter B. Kyne
... maxims inculcated into their minds in the churches and Common Schools of the North; precepts which impressed upon them the duty of manliness and honor in all the relations and exigencies of life; not the "chivalric" prate of their enemies, but the calm steadfastness which endureth to the end. The highest tribute that can be paid them is to say they did full credit to their teachings, and they died as every American should when duty ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... abide any tongues That will prattle and prate against reason, About that which doth not concern them; Which thing is no better than treason. Wherefore I'd wish all that do hear me Not to meddle with matters of state, Lest they be in question called for it, And repent them when ...
— Ancient Poems, Ballads and Songs of England • Robert Bell
... prattling will please you, princess," replied Leander, "I will prate from morning ...
— The Little Lame Prince - And: The Invisible Prince; Prince Cherry; The Prince With The Nose - The Frog-Prince; Clever Alice • Miss Mulock—Pseudonym of Maria Dinah Craik
... superfluities signify, but that the venter of them doth little skill the use of speech, or the rule of conversation, but meaneth to sputter and prate anything without judgment or wit; that his invention is very barren, his fancy beggarly, craving the aid of any stuff to relieve it? One would think a man of sense should grudge to lend his ear, or incline ...
— Sermons on Evil-Speaking • Isaac Barrow
... here's a bowl that shall be quaff'd To loyalty's devotion, And here's to fortune that shall waft Your ship across the ocean, And here's a smile for those who prate Of Davy Jones's locker, And here's a pray'r in every fate— God ...
— John Smith, U.S.A. • Eugene Field
... there's a difference, lad," Cross pointed out, setting down the tankard of beer from which he had been drinking. "You talk sometimes that white-livered stuff about not hitting a man back if he wants to hit you, and you drag in your conscience, and prate about all men being brothers, and that sort of twaddle. A full-blooded Englishman don't like it, because we are all of us out to protect what we've got, any way and anyhow. But that doesn't alter the fact ...
— The Devil's Paw • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... "They prate of God! Believe it, fellow-creature, There's no such bugbear: all was made by Nature. We know all came of nothing, and shall pass Into the same condition once it was By Nature's power, and that they ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... skins of beasts and had to be sewn with backbone sinews. Because you despise fine clothes, and because you have seen me only decked out as fan-girl, you think I am useless. Bah, Deucalion! Never let people prate to me about your perfection. You know less about a woman than a ...
— The Lost Continent • C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne
... somewhat aggressively burst into a guffaw of derisive laughter. "Miss Loomis is just one of those admirable women," said he, "that empty-headed idiots prate about. I wish other people had half her sense." A luckless way of essaying the defence of the absent, for it reflected on many ...
— Under Fire • Charles King
... has accomplished good works; yea, it is always engaged in doing good works. Whoever does not do such good works is void of faith; he gropes and mopes about, looking for faith and good works, but knows neither what faith nor what good works are, though he may prate and babble ever so much about faith ...
— Luther Examined and Reexamined - A Review of Catholic Criticism and a Plea for Revaluation • W. H. T. Dau
... those pretty babes, Rejoicing at that tide, Rejoicing with a merry mind They should on cock-horse ride. They prate and prattle pleasantly, As they ride on the way, To those that should their butchers be And work ...
— English Fairy Tales • Flora Annie Steel
... natural right. But since natural right is immutable, the right to contract marriage must always remain. For where nature does not change, that ordinance also with which God has endowed nature does not change, and cannot be removed by human laws. Therefore it is ridiculous for the adversaries to prate that marriage was commanded in the beginning, but is not now. This is the same as if they would say: Formerly, when men were born, they brought with them sex; now they do not. Formerly, when they ...
— The Apology of the Augsburg Confession • Philip Melanchthon
... Suffrage. By clinging with desperate tenacity to the Restrictive law of May 31st, they virtually confess that their hopes of success involve the continued exclusion of Three Millions of adult Frenchmen from the Registry of Voters. When they prate, therefore, of the people's desire for Revision, the Republican retort is ready and conclusive—"Repeal the law of May 31st, and we can then tell what the people really desire. But so long as you maintain that law, you confess that you ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley
... of the Deemster! Wifeless, childless, living solitary, dying alone, unregretled, unmourned. What is the wickedness you are plotting? Your father is dead, you can do him neither good nor harm. This girl is alive. She loves you. Love her. Let the canting hypocrites prate as they will." ...
— The Manxman - A Novel - 1895 • Hall Caine
... a gracious breeze that brings from the gulf shore showers and fills with its rain our streams. And this, of a truth, I know—no fancy it is of mine: who holds mean his kith and kin, the meanest of men is he! And surely a foolish tongue, when rules not its idle prate discretion, but shows men where thou ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... better man, and have something, therefore, for which to live. I have not—my heart can know no change. It is no longer under the guidance of reason. It is quite ungovernable now. There was a time when—but why prate of this?—it is too late to think of, and only maddens me the more. Besides, it makes not anything with you, and would detain you without a purpose. Linger no longer, Dillon—speed to the west, and, at some future day, perhaps ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... what god or demon? 290 With new kings rise new altars. But, proceed; You are sent to prate your master's will, ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... all the kings that promise peace while they swell their armouries and armies; when all the statesmen that chatter of the people's weal as they steal up to the locked casket where coronets are kept; when all the men who talk of "glory," and prate of an "idea" that they may stretch their nation's boundary, and filch their neighbour's province—when all these are no longer in the land, and no more looked on with favour, then I will believe your cry that you hate the ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... we only knew! And who knows how much worse? It has petty bickerings, damning lies of spite and malice, trickery and thievery and corruption on its conscience. Let the little people of the world prate of their little things! We are free, dearest—and we defy it, don't we? Our ideals are never lost. And ideals are the life of love. Is love—a love like ours—a murderer ...
— One Day - A sequel to 'Three Weeks' • Anonymous
... too wrought the same Alcimedon A pair of cups, and round the handles wreathed Pliant acanthus, Orpheus in the midst, The forests following in his wake; nor yet Have I set lip to them, but lay them by. Matched with a heifer, who would prate of cups? ...
— The Bucolics and Eclogues • Virgil
... of the trust I placed in you, sirrah?' he rejoined, in a terrible voice; and stooping still farther forward he probed me with his eyes. 'You who prate of trust and confidence, who received your life on parole, and but for your promise to me would have been carrion this month past, answer me that? What of the trust I placed ...
— Under the Red Robe • Stanley Weyman
... confident I am Thy life is one of very little ease; Albeit men mock thee with their similes And prate of being "happy as a clam!" What though thy shell protects thy fragile head From the sharp bailiffs of the briny sea? Thy valves are, sure, no safety-valves to thee, While rakes are free to desecrate thy bed, And bear thee off—as foemen take their spoil— Far from ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... the other. And of course no party could exist five minutes unless it had some good in it. There are several admirable principles in the Populist creed; there are enough windy theories to upset the Constitution of which they prate; and, by the way, the more wrong-headed a would-be statesman is the more hysterically does he plead for the Constitution. As to the other Senator—I sympathize as deeply with the farmer as any man, and I hoped against hope for ...
— Senator North • Gertrude Atherton
... hearts of cowards who prate, Afraid to dare or spend, The doctrine of a narrower state More easy to defend; Not this the watchword of our sires, Who breathed with ocean's breath, Not this our spirit's ancient fires, Which naught ...
— The Ontario Readers: Fourth Book • Various
... one. Out upon the honour which is harmed by gossip! What slanderous tongues say of me as a disgrace I deem the highest honour; but if you are of a different opinion, and held it when you wooed me, you would be wiser to prate less loudly of the proud word ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... Izdubar will seek The cool enchantment of the cove, and slake His thirst with its sweet waters bubbling pure, Where Love has spread for him her sweetest lure, The maids expectant listening, watch and wait His coming; oft in ecstacies they prate O'er his surprise, and softly sport and splash The limpid waves around, that glowing flash Like heaps of snowy pearls lung to the light By Hea's[1] hands, his Zir-ri[2] to delight. And now upon the rock each maid reclines, ...
— Babylonian and Assyrian Literature • Anonymous
... shall be told, he was sorry that it had ever passed his lips. Still in the boat Sir Geoffrey applauded him, saying that his lady's melancholy had grown beyond all bearing, and that she did little but prate to him about his will and what colour of marble he desired for ...
— Red Eve • H. Rider Haggard
... she smiled 'And even in this lone wood, Sweet lord, ye do right well to whisper this. Fools prate, and perish traitors. Woods have tongues, As walls have ears: but thou shalt go with me, And we will speak at first exceeding low. Meet is it the good King be not deceived. See now, I set thee high on vantage ground, From whence to watch the time, and eagle-like Stoop ...
— Idylls of the King • Alfred, Lord Tennyson
... guests, with Farmer Crouder, "Began to prate of corn; "And we found out they talk'd the louder, ...
— Wild Flowers - Or, Pastoral and Local Poetry • Robert Bloomfield
... arrow, and I can make garments, yes, though they were cut from the skins of beasts and had to be sewn with backbone sinews. Because you despise fine clothes, and because you have seen me only decked out as fan-girl, you think I am useless. Bah, Deucalion! Never let people prate to me about your perfection. You know less about a woman than ...
— The Lost Continent • C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne
... going to say to my romantic young friend. The days of chivalry are not gone. Let me remark that this assertion does not apply to the blatant, nigger-driving article that whilom flourished in Dixie, for that is about 'played out,' though they still rant and prate about the 'flower of chivalry.' At Fort Lafayette, there is an herbarium of choice specimens (rather faded and seedy) of that curious 'yarb;' and at the old Alton Penitentiary, and at Camp Douglas, Chicago, there are collections, not so choice and a great deal more seedy. Though Simon—not ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various
... know," she said to herself, recalling some of the dances and the good-night leave-takings at that time. "It's because he is so put upon by everybody now. What with Juan Can in one bed sending for him to prate to him about the sheep, and Senor Felipe in another sending for him to fiddle him to sleep, and all the care of the sheep, it's a wonder he's not out of his mind altogether. But I'll find a chance, or make one, before this day's sun sets. If I can once get a half-hour with him, I'm ...
— Ramona • Helen Hunt Jackson
... where the shoe pinches," replied Eustace; "thou hast found some traitors who have been instilling rebellion into thy youthful ears. Well, if they are found, they shall ere long lack tongues wherewith to prate, and for the present thou must return home with me. Wilt thou go as a freeman or ...
— The Rival Heirs being the Third and Last Chronicle of Aescendune • A. D. Crake
... fools will prate o' right and wrang, While knaves laugh in their sleeve; But wha blaws best the horn shall win, I'll spier nae ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... pretty babes, Rejoicing at that tide, Rejoicing with a merry mind, They should on cock-horse ride. They prate and prattle pleasantly, As they rode on the way, To those that should their butchers be, And work ...
— The Children's Garland from the Best Poets • Various
... looked on Beauty bare. Let all who prate of Beauty hold their peace, And lay them prone upon the earth and cease To ponder on themselves, the while they stare At nothing, intricately drawn nowhere In shapes of shifting lineage; let geese Gabble and hiss, but heroes seek release From ...
— American Poetry, 1922 - A Miscellany • Edna St. Vincent Millay
... struggling to secure His passage at a narrow door, And scarce could reach the rack of hay, His horns so much were in his way. A Calf officious, fain would show How he might twist himself and go. "Hold thou thy prate; all this," says he, "Ere thou wert calved was known to me." He, that a wiser man by half Would teach, may think ...
— The Fables of Phdrus - Literally translated into English prose with notes • Phaedrus
... craven England, nevermore Prate thou of generous effort, righteous aim! So ran the lines, and left me very sore, For you may guess my heart was hot with shame: Even thus early in your ample song I felt that something must be ...
— The Battle of the Bays • Owen Seaman
... for human happiness, Alas! for human sorrow; Our Yesterday is nothingness, What else will be our Morrow? Still Beauty must be stealing hearts, And Knavery stealing purses; Still Cooks must live by making tarts, And Wits by making verses; While Sages prate and Courts debate, The same Stars set and shine; And the World, as it roll'd through ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 351 - Volume 13, Saturday, January 10, 1829 • Various
... own nose. But, if you called me out of hell merely for this chit-chat, permit me to return for ever. I have long known your inclination to prate about that ...
— Faustus - his Life, Death, and Doom • Friedrich Maximilian von Klinger
... utterance benumbed, unless the speaker stand in some true relation with his audience, it may be pardonable to imagine that a friend, a kind and apprehensive, though not the closest friend, is listening to our talk; and then, a native reserve being thawed by this genial consciousness, we may prate of the circumstances that lie around us, and even of ourself, but still keep the inmost Me behind its veil. To this extent, and within these limits, an author, methinks, may be autobiographical, without violating either the reader's rights ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... is more trouble to you than your disease: if he is on board ship with you, he disgusts you more than sea-sickness; if he praises you, he is more fulsome than blame. It is more pleasure associating with bad men who have tact than with good men who prate. Nestor indeed in Sophocles' Play, trying by his words to soothe exasperated ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... this Congress is more menacing than merely a return to the past—bad as that would be. Our resplendent economic autocracy does not want to return to that individualism of which they prate, even though the advantages under that system went to the ruthless and the strong. They realize that in thirty-four months we have built up new instruments of public power. In the hands of a people's Government ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... trust I placed in you, sirrah?' he rejoined, in a terrible voice; and stooping still farther forward he probed me with his eyes. 'You who prate of trust and confidence, who received your life on parole, and but for your promise to me would have been carrion this month past, answer me that? What of the trust ...
— Under the Red Robe • Stanley Weyman
... fare?" Finn cried. "Strong drink, if it be too freely supplied, Or the prate of a ...
— Ulf Van Yern - and Other Ballads • Thomas J. Wise
... breaks down quickly. What, after all, is the sum of those doings in the shrub-house? What would Pippa gain, were she in truth great haughty Ottima? She would but "give abundant cause for prate." Ottima, bold, confident, and not fully aware, can face that out, but Pippa knows, more closely than the woman rich and ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... motive:—we meet phantoms in our known walks; fantasques only christened. In the poet we have names which announce fiction; and we have absolutely no place at all, for the things and persons of the Fairy Queen prate not of their "whereabout." But in their inner nature, and the law of their speech and actions, we are at home and upon acquainted ground. The one turns life into a dream; the other to the wildest dreams gives the sobrieties of ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... loving, trusting ones were cold faces, that begun to press on him and judge him. Such as these would buy and sell his pictures for garniture and household-stuff. His pictures, so sacred to his soul, would be the subject of their prate, "This I love, or this I hate, this likes me more, and this affects me less!" To avoid such sacrilege, he has chosen his portion. And if his heart sometimes sinks, while at his monotonous work ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... that I did not dismiss him, before he came to disclose to me the intrigues of Metternich: at present, the opportunity is gone by; and he would every where proclaim me for a suspicious tyrant, who had sacrificed him without any cause. Go to him: say nothing to him of Montron or Bresson; let him prate at his ease, and bring me a full account ...
— Memoirs of the Private Life, Return, and Reign of Napoleon in 1815, Vol. II • Pierre Antoine Edouard Fleury de Chaboulon
... "Now cease thy prate," quoth Little John, "Thou japest but in vain; An he have not a groat within his pouch, We ...
— The Bon Gaultier Ballads • William Edmonstoune Aytoun
... this people from us, they will become the prey of our recent enemies, and if that happens we can prate about the Treaty of Paris as much as we like. The Teuton will have more than ...
— With the "Die-Hards" in Siberia • John Ward
... your ancestral Protestantisms are fast breaking down. Your churches are turning into concert and lecture rooms. Catholicism is growing among you,—science gaining on the quack-medicines! But there—there—I'll not prate. Forgive me. This has been a fascinating half-hour. Only, take care! I have seen you a Catholic ...
— Eleanor • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... to say 'Tis others' fault, nor foolishly upbraid The lot thyself for thine own self hast made. Say not the world's askew! with idle prate Of never-ending grief the hour grows late. Strike off my head! with many a tear he cries, And might, in sooth, draw ...
— Japanese Literature - Including Selections from Genji Monogatari and Classical - Poetry and Drama of Japan • Various
... bear in order to procure the slightest gratification, should it not impress the thinking mind with amazement, how much of fortitude and patience the honest poor display in the exercise of self-denial! Oh! ye prosperous! prate of the uses of adversity as poetically as you please, we who are obliged to learn of them by bitter experience would greatly prefer a ...
— From the Darkness Cometh the Light, or Struggles for Freedom • Lucy A. Delaney
... sergeant bitterly, "that all them beasts were stuffed down your throttle the way you'd have to hold your prate." ...
— The Crock of Gold • James Stephens
... old ones prate of!—Bah, what is't they want? 'Some one to work for me, when I am old; Some one to follow me unto my grave; Some one—for me!' Yes, yes. There is not one Old huddler-by-the-fire would shift his seat To a cold corner, if it might bring back All ...
— The Piper • Josephine Preston Peabody
... not, could you know all I have endured. To me, earth has been a hell—not the place of flames and torments of which your divines prate, but the true hell—that of the conscience and the soul. I, too, a man whose whole nature was athirst for truth. I sought it first among its professors; there I found that they who, too idle or too weak to demonstrate their creed, took it upon trust, did what their fathers did, believed ...
— Olive - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik, (AKA Dinah Maria Mulock)
... pheasant, but it costs too much And does not tend to decimate the Dutch; Your duty plainly then before you stands, Conscription is the law for seagirt lands; Prate not of freedom! Since I learned to shoot I itch to use ...
— Poems: New and Old • Henry Newbolt
... what justification you make to yourselves when you are alone in the watches of the night, and your conscience saith, 'What went ye out for to see?' You will then complain of the bitterness of life, and prate of the refining influences of music; of the help to spiritual-mindedness given by the exhibition on the public stage of mockeries of God's world, wherein some pitiful temporal triumph of simulated virtue in the last act is the apology for the vicious trifling that has gone ...
— The Irrational Knot - Being the Second Novel of His Nonage • George Bernard Shaw
... know your anger And why you prate thus: I have found your melancholy: Ye all want mony, and you are liberal Captains, And in this want will talk a little desperately: Here's gold, come share; I love a brave Commander: And be not peevish, ...
— The False One • Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher
... and finally, on being struck by the master, determined to enter his presence no more. I loved to leap, to run, to swim, to climb trees and to clamber up rocks, to shroud myself in thickets and stroll among woods, to obey the impulse of the moment, and to prate or be silent, just as my humour prompted me. All this I loved more than to go to and fro in the same path, and at stated hours to look off and on a book, to read just as much and of such a kind, to stand up and be seated, ...
— Arthur Mervyn - Or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 • Charles Brockden Brown
... fools together prate, O'er punch or tea, of this or that, What silly poor unmeaning chat Does all their talk engross! A nobler theme employs my lays, And thus my honest voice I raise In well-deserved strains to praise The worthy ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel , Volume I. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... will flock together. The robin sings to his ruddy mate, And the chattering jays, in the winter weather, To prate and gossip will congregate; And the cawing crows on the autumn heather, Like evil omens, will flock together, In extra-session, for high debate; And the lass will slip from a doting mother To hang ...
— Legends of the Northwest • Hanford Lennox Gordon
... a cold incredulous voice, he said:— "What prate is this of fathers and revenge? The mighty Rustum ...
— Matthew Arnold's Sohrab and Rustum and Other Poems • Matthew Arnold
... cant!" said Julian, starting from his seat, aroused by his hypocritical prate into unwonted intolerance; and he suddenly observed, by the cowering attitude which Hazlet assumed, that the worthy youth was afraid of receiving at his head the water-bottle, on which Julian's hand was resting. Julian thought ...
— Julian Home • Dean Frederic W. Farrar
... up, Sanford! You drive me frantic! You prate the same foolishness. over and over! I don't want to hear any more about it. You said you had spoken the last word on the subject, now stop it! I, too, have said my final say. I shall do as ...
— Raspberry Jam • Carolyn Wells
... but that the venter of them doth little skill the use of speech, or the rule of conversation, but meaneth to sputter and prate anything without judgment or wit; that his invention is very barren, his fancy beggarly, craving the aid of any stuff to relieve it? One would think a man of sense should grudge to lend his ear, or incline his attention to such motley ragged discourse; that without nauseating ...
— Sermons on Evil-Speaking • Isaac Barrow
... murders annually in the latter city, while only twenty in London. Nor is Chicago the leading city in crime, since it is only seventh on the list, which is headed by four Southern cities, and San Francisco and Los Angeles. In view of such a terrible condition of affairs, it seems ridiculous to prate of the protection society derives ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman
... my life, if you're so disposed. You're welcome to it. And let's see if either of these women, who prate of their love for you, ...
— Jack Sheppard - A Romance • William Harrison Ainsworth
... discovery fell of his own hand. And the nightmare at the cross-roads was the regular punishment, according to the laws of England, for an act which the Romans honoured as a virtue! Whenever an Englishman begins to prate of civilisation (as, indeed, it's a defect they are rather prone to), I hear the measured blows of a mallet, see the bystanders crowd with torches about the grave, smile a little to myself in conscious ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... a different thing indeed! Justice wears a sword, because she is of gentle birth. Work-people with axes must not prate of rights, or a prison will be their next one. Your right is to be disdained, young man, because you were not born a gentleman; and your duty is to receive scorn with your hat off. You like it, probably, because your father did. But ...
— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore
... at his vagary, to have the act lauded as an instance of Roman virtue. I look upon the famed Brutus, when he thought it a matter of conscience to witness, as well as order, his sons' execution, to have been a vain unfeeling fool or a madman. Let us have no prate about conscience proceeding from a hard heart; these are frightful notions when they become infectious. A handful of such madmen are enough, if allowed to have their way, to enact the horrors of a French Revolution. All this you know, Eusebius, better than I do, and will knit your brows at ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 348 • Various
... is gone, and I have none of yours to answer, my conscience is so clear, and my shoulder so light, and I go on with such courage to prate upon nothing to deerichar MD, oo would wonder. I dined with Sir Matthew Dudley, who is newly turned out of Commission of the Customs. He affects a good heart, and talks in the extremity of Whiggery, which was always ...
— The Journal to Stella • Jonathan Swift
... many" have elbowed "the few," and the gentle circle of Art swarms with the intoxicated mob of mediocrity, whose leaders prate and counsel, and call aloud, where the Gods once spoke ...
— The Gentle Art of Making Enemies • James McNeill Whistler
... Darwin has adopted is not only rigorously in accordance with the canons of scientific logic, but that it is the only adequate method. Critics exclusively trained in classics or in mathematics, who have never determined a scientific fact in their lives by induction from experiment or observation, prate learnedly about Mr. Darwin's method, which is not inductive enough, not Baconian enough, forsooth, for them. But even if practical acquaintance with the process of scientific investigation is denied them, they may learn, by the ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... talk of "time's compensation"! Who now may prate, "Evil is good misunderstood"? Surely such cogent blending requires some powerfully focalized far ...
— Oswald Langdon - or, Pierre and Paul Lanier. A Romance of 1894-1898 • Carson Jay Lee
... phrase, delicately amended that, till the latent passion had gripped him, and he was soon in full swing, revelling in all the jests and topicalities of the play, where the strikers and pacifists, the profiteers, the soldiers and munition workers of two thousand odd years ago, fight and toil, prate and wrangle and scheme, as eager and as alive as their descendants of to-day. Soon his high, tempestuous laugh rang out; Elizabeth's gentler mirth answering. Sometimes there was a dispute about a word or a rendering; she would put up her ...
— Elizabeth's Campaign • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... of the Madrilenian Carlists capable of bearing arms departed long ago to join the ranks of the factious in the Basque provinces. Those who remain are for the most part grey-beards and priests, good for nothing but to assemble in private coffee-houses, and to prate treason together. Let them prate, Don Jorge; let them prate; the destinies of Spain do not depend on the wishes of ojalateros and pasteleros, but on the hands of stout gallant nationals like myself and friends, ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... than among those from whom they should not be expected; nowhere more so than among those who are debarred from hope. The great captains of industry so-called, themselves blown full of pride of circumstance, prate often of the inefficiencies of human cattle; yet continually the wonder remains that these same cattle continue to do that which their conscience tells them is right for them to do, and to do it for the sake of the doing. The lives of all of us are daily ...
— The Law of the Land • Emerson Hough
... a talker!"[637] Let us prate. The next of perils, though I place it sternest, Is when, without regard to Church or State, A wife makes or takes love in upright earnest. Abroad, such things decide few women's fate— (Such, ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... for their religious faith than barbarous tradition and the vote of ecumenical councils. Bigotry has quailed beneath the ringing blows of your iconoclastic hammer, dogmatism become more humble and the priesthood well-nigh forgotten to prate of a hell of fire in which the souls of unbaptized babes forever burn. Without intending it, perhaps, you have done more to promote the cause of true religion, more to intellectualize and humanize ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... undoubtedly have been, by the law of Scotland, punished with imprisonment till he should retract his errors and do penance before the congregation of his parish; and every man of sense and humanity would have thought this a sufficient punishment for the prate of a forward boy. But Stewart, as cruel as he was base, called for blood. There was among the Scottish statutes one which made it a capital crime to revile or curse the Supreme Being or any person of the Trinity. Nothing ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... That sups the moment's joy, and nothing heeds Time past or time to come, but fills all needs With present kindness. She would laugh and talk, Take arms, suffer embraces, even walk The terrace 'neath the eyes of all her fate, And seem to heed what they might show or prate, As if her whole heart's heart were in this house And not at fearful odds and perilous. And should one speak of Paris, as to say, "Would that our lord might see thee go so gay About his house!" ...
— Helen Redeemed and Other Poems • Maurice Hewlett
... grave" Or read "Monadnoc," and mark the insight and the power with which the significance and worth of the great facts of nature are interpreted and stated. "Complement of human kind, having us at vantage still, our sumptuous indigence, oh, barren mound, thy plenties fill! We fool and prate; thou art silent and sedate. To myriad kinds and times one sense the constant mountain doth dispense; shedding on all its snows and leaves, one joy it joys, one grief it grieves. Thou seest, oh, watchman tall, our towns and races grow and fall, and imagest the stable good for ...
— Confessions and Criticisms • Julian Hawthorne
... loved Ophelia; forty thousand brothers, Could not, with all their quantity of love Make up my sum: And, if thou prate of mountains, let them throw Millions of acres on us, till our ground Singeing his pate against the burning zone Make ...
— Shakspere, Personal Recollections • John A. Joyce
... and selected a blue cup with dragons on it. "At any rate," she continued, "it is very disagreeable of you to come here and prate like a death's-head on ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... Beds, &c. We are all for Humour, Gallantry, Conversation, and Courtship, and shou'dn't endure the chief Lady in the Play a Mute, or to say very little, as 'twas agreeable to them: Our amorous Sparks love to hear the pretty Rogues prate, snap up their Gallants, and Repartee upon 'em on all sides. We shou'dn't like to have a Lady marry'd without knowing whether she gives her consent or no, (a Custom among the Romans) but wou'd be for hearing all the Courtship, all ...
— Prefaces to Terence's Comedies and Plautus's Comedies (1694) • Lawrence Echard
... desperate tenacity to the Restrictive law of May 31st, they virtually confess that their hopes of success involve the continued exclusion of Three Millions of adult Frenchmen from the Registry of Voters. When they prate, therefore, of the people's desire for Revision, the Republican retort is ready and conclusive—"Repeal the law of May 31st, and we can then tell what the people really desire. But so long as you maintain that law, you confess that you dare ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley
... rising and confronting him with an anger before which he recoiled, appalled. "Do you dare to stand there and prate of honour—you? Do you forget why he stood his trial? Do you forget why he is dying, and can you not see the vile thing that you are doing in arguing flight, that you talk of honour thus, and deny his claim to it? Mon Dieu! Your effrontery stifles me! La Boulaye was right when he ...
— The Trampling of the Lilies • Rafael Sabatini
... and then we to christen the child. I was Godfather, and Mrs. Holder (her husband, a good man, I know well), and a pretty lady, that waits, it seems, on my Lady Bath, at White Hall, her name, Mrs. Noble, were Godmothers. After the christening comes in the wine and the sweetmeats, and then to prate and tattle, and then very good company they were, and I among them. Here was old Mrs. Michell and Howlett, and several married women of the Hall, whom I knew mayds. Here was also Mrs. Burroughs and Mrs. Bales, the young widow, whom I led home, and having staid till ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... traveller; "I know every step of the Caucasus. I have been where your serpents climb not, your tigers cannot mount, your eagles cannot fly. Make way, comrade: thy threshold is not on God's high-road, and I have no time to prate with thee." ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXIX. - March, 1843, Vol. LIII. • Various
... gained by Pat's being up with the pike and shillelagh on any or no occasion. God forbid Scotland should retrograde towards such a state—much better that the Deil, as in Burns's song, danced away with the whole excisemen in the country. We do not want to hear her prate of her number of millions of men, and her old military exploits. We had better remain in union with England, even at the risk of becoming a subordinate species of Northumberland, as far as national consequence is concerned, than remedy ourselves by even hinting the possibility ...
— Political Pamphlets • George Saintsbury
... give up his shop, to retire from business, and for some time he had been thinking of going to see Sidonie, in order to interest her in his new schemes. That was not the time, therefore, to make disagreeable scenes, to prate about paternal authority and conjugal honor. As for Madame Chebe, being somewhat less confident than before of her daughter's virtue, she took refuge in the most profound silence. The poor woman wished that she were deaf and blind—that ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... be attached to it!" cried Ellis. "The species is a mere screen invented to conceal the massacre of individuals. I'm sick of these biologico-sociologico-anthropologico-historico treatises, with their talk of races, of nations, of classes, never of men! their prate about laws as if they were the real entities, and the people who are supposed to be subject to them mere indifferent particles of stuff! their analysis of the perfection with which the machine works, its combinations, differentiations, ...
— The Meaning of Good—A Dialogue • G. Lowes Dickinson
... Nay, sir, do not scowl at me,' he continued sharply. 'I am the mouthpiece of the King of Navarre, to whom this matter is of the highest importance. I cannot believe that the man whom he would choose would act so. This house you prate of in Blois, for instance, and the room with the two doors? What were you doing ...
— A Gentleman of France • Stanley Weyman
... blindly prating what the gurus prate, But to love, as God hath loved them, all things, be they small or great; And true bliss is when a sane mind doth a healthy body fill; And true knowledge is the knowing what is good and ...
— Indian Poetry • Edwin Arnold
... should not recollect it till this moment," replied Parravicin. "But be your inamorata whom she may—even the rich widow of Watling-street, of whom you prate so much—you ...
— Old Saint Paul's - A Tale of the Plague and the Fire • William Harrison Ainsworth
... forty. A little foppishness in a young man is good; it is human. I like to see a young cock ruffle his feathers, stretch his neck, and crow as if the whole world belonged to him. I don't like a modest, retiring man. Nobody does—not really, however much they may prate about modest worth and other things they ...
— Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome
... Some other pleasures: these to me are none. Why do I prate Of women, that are things against my fate! I never mean to wed That torture to my bed: My Muse is she My love shall be. Let clowns get wealth and heirs: when I am gone And that great bugbear, grisly Death, ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... opportunely and somewhat aggressively burst into a guffaw of derisive laughter. "Miss Loomis is just one of those admirable women," said he, "that empty-headed idiots prate about. I wish other people had half her sense." A luckless way of essaying the defence of the absent, for it reflected ...
— Under Fire • Charles King
... Folly and falsehood prate apace; Truth under bushel is fain to creep; Flattery is treble, pride sings the bass, The mean, the best part, scant ...
— England's Antiphon • George MacDonald
... earned, to become pets and "grandees" in English society, to secure good appointments and assume leading parts, and to be elected members of the venerable Westminster Assembly! They had not even had the courage to go to New England, though some of them had talked of doing so! And then their prate of this emigration to New England, which they had themselves declined, as the greatest undertaking for the sake of pure Religion, next to Abraham's migration out of his own country, that the world had ever seen! Why, the emigration to New England was no such great affair after all! There had ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... would not surprise us, if we found the greatest tyrant in the world in some small cottage, with none to oppress but a few unoffending children, and a helpless woman. O! when shall we, be just!—when shall we cease to prate about wrongs inflicted by others, and magnified by being beheld through the haze of distance, and seek to redress those which lie at our own doors, and to redress which we shall only have to prevail upon ourselves to be just ...
— Friends and Neighbors - or Two Ways of Living in the World • Anonymous
... you are!" shouted Judge Harlin. "A nice lot to prate about law and order, and ready to do murder yourselves! That is what you are preparing to do! Murder! As cold-blooded a murder as ...
— With Hoops of Steel • Florence Finch Kelly
... groaned, "and I've hammered my finger to a pulp, trying to open this crate, while you perch on a broken step-ladder and prate to me of legacies. The saucers to these cups may be in here, and I can't wait to find out. I'm perfectly crazy about this ware. ...
— Outside Inn • Ethel M. Kelley
... a while at least, the king's highway of progress. Here, in England, too many painters and writers dwell dispersed, unshielded, among the intelligent bourgeois. These, when they are not merely indifferent, prate to him about the lofty aims and moral influence of art. And this is the lad's ruin. For art is, first of all and last of all, a trade. The love of words and not a desire to publish new discoveries, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... wide thrust at all factions and sects. For they also have a word and boast much of their doctrine, but theirs is not the Word of truth whereby men are made children of God. They teach naught, and know naught, about how we are to be born God's children through faith. They prate much about the works done by us in the state ...
— Epistle Sermons, Vol. II - Epiphany, Easter and Pentecost • Martin Luther
... Volscians make new head! Who, "like an eagle in a dovecote," then Will flutter them and discipline AUFIDIUS? An eagle! Shall I spurn my shadow, then Trample my own projection? So they babble Who'd silence me, make this my mouthpiece[1] mute; Who prate of prosecution—banishment, Perchance, anon, for me, as for the Roman, Because "I cannot brook to be commanded Under COMINIUS." What said VOLUMNIA To her imperious son? "The man was noble, But with his last attempt he wiped it out; Destroy'd ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, VOL. 100. Feb. 28, 1891 • Various
... wavering of belief concerning his own impressions and motives which most human beings who have not a stupid inflexibility of self-confidence must be liable to under a marked change of external conditions. In a life where the experience was so tumultuously mixed as it must have been in the Prate's, what a possibility was opened for a change of self-judgment, when, instead of eyes that venerated and knees that knelt, instead of a great work on its way to accomplishment, and in its prosperity stamping ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... accurately. Yet I may say that others talk of Rome as holy ground, but you alone make me feel that the soil inside the Pomoerium is holy ground: others talk of the grandeur of Rome; you make me realize its grandeur: others prate of their love for Rome: you, saying little, make me tingle with a subtly communicated sense of how you love Rome: others babble of how life away from Rome is not life, but merely existence; of how any dwelling out ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... was more or less rheumatic and asthmatic, but a cheerful old man withal, and quite ready to prate of old times, when Barbican and Aldersgate-street were pleasanter places than they are to-day, or had seemed so to ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... me ridiculously inconsistent for gentlemen upon this floor to prate so much about a republican form of government, and rise here and offer resolution after resolution about the Monroe doctrine and the downtrodden Mexicans, while they force upon the people of this District a government not of their own choice, because ...
— History of the Thirty-Ninth Congress of the United States • Wiliam H. Barnes
... kingdom, they live in unconcern, as if delivered from all danger, and the devil far fled. By the very reason of their security they are overcome of the devil and their own flesh, and fall unawares from the Gospel. They have just enough connection with it to be able to prate of it, boasting themselves Christians but giving no indication of the fact in ...
— Epistle Sermons, Vol. III - Trinity Sunday to Advent • Martin Luther
... he used it,—grew Out of such unlucky habits, or relapsed, and back again Brought the late-ejected devil with a score more in his train,— That's for you to judge. Reprieval I procured, at any rate. Ugh—the memory of that minute's fear makes gooseflesh rise! Why prate Longer? You've my story, there's your instance: fear I did, ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... multepova. Powerless senpotenca. Practical praktika. Practice (custom) kutimo. Practice praktiko, kutimo, uzado. Practise praktiki. Prairie herbejo. Praise lauxdi. Prank petoleco—ajxo. Prate babili. Prattle babili. Pray (religious) pregxi. Pray (to request) peti. Prayer pregxo. Prayer-book pregxlibro. Preach prediki. Preacher predikisto. Preaching predikado. Preamble antauxparolo. Prebendary kanoniko. Precarious duba, necerta. Precaution antauxzorgo, singardo. ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... smiling sneeringly, And why? because, forsooth, so many moons, Here dwelling voiceless by the voiceful sea, Thou hast not set thy thoughts to paltry tunes In song or sonnet. Them these golden noons Oppress not with their beauty; they could prate, Even while a prophet read the solemn runes On which is hanging some imperial fate. How know they, these good gossips, what to thee The ocean and its wanderers may have brought? How know they, in their busy vacancy, With what far ...
— Poems of Henry Timrod • Henry Timrod
... "you know nothing about this business, my hurler. You're a day before the fair. They're not married yet—but it's as good—so hould your prate about it till the knot's tied—then trumpet it through the town ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... the Grenadier Guards ceased to be objects of admiration, and the War Office would have howled with exquisite torture at sight of their hair and clothes. Speak of wrapping clothes around head or body to keep out the dust? It is sheer nonsense to prate so. Why it is hard enough to gape and gasp and catch a mouthful of sanded breath, without that added worry. There is nothing for it, but to grin and bear it and get through with the swallowing of that proverbial peck ...
— Khartoum Campaign, 1898 - or the Re-Conquest of the Soudan • Bennet Burleigh
... find the sober Mervale, he leaned his face on his hands, and endeavoured to recall the words of Zanoni in their last meeting. Yes, he felt Nicot's talk even on art was crime; it debased the imagination itself to mechanism. Could he, who saw nothing in the soul but a combination of matter, prate of schools that should excel a Raphael? Yes, art was magic; and as he owned the truth of the aphorism, he could comprehend that in magic there may be religion, for religion is an essential to art. His old ambition, freeing itself from the frigid prudence with which ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... that talk to me of dishonour?—you that come straying here out of the night with your cicisbeo at your heels? You, with the dew on you and your dress bedraggled, arrive straight from companioning in the woods and prate to me of shame—of the blood of the Colonne!" He smote a hand on the table and spat forth a string of vile names upon her, mixed with curses; abominable words before which she drew back cowering, yet less (I think) from the lash of them than from shock and horror of his incredible baseness. Passion ...
— Sir John Constantine • Prosper Paleologus Constantine
... we die?" asked Ghek. "Your people prate of the just laws of Manator, and yet you would slay three strangers without telling them of what ...
— The Chessmen of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... before:— "O this I have felt, and this I have guessed, and this I have heard men say, And this they wrote that another man wrote of a carl in Norroway." —"Ye have read, ye have felt, ye have guessed, good lack! Ye have hampered Heaven's Gate; There's little room between the stars in idleness to prate! O none may reach by hired speech of neighbour, priest, and kin Through borrowed deed to God's good meed that lies so fair within; Get hence, get hence to the Lord of Wrong, for doom has yet to run, And. . .the ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... Jenny Fynnett is here, and desires to be my bedfellow to-night. So I shall not have an opportunity to sit down with that seriousness and attention which the subjects of yours require. For she is all prate, you know, and loves to set me a prating; yet comes upon a very grave occasion—to procure my mother to go with her to her grandmother Larking, who has long been bed-ridden; and at last has taken it into her head that she is mortal, and therefore will make her will; ...
— Clarissa, Volume 2 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... sinking at his heart. They prate who say it is success that tries a man. He flung himself ...
— Better Dead • J. M. Barrie
... giant form, Still struggling for the earth: but she no more Could give her offspring rigour. Slowly came The chill of death upon him, and 'twas long Before the hero, of his victory sure, Trusted the earth and laid the giant down. Hence hoar antiquity that loves to prate And wonders at herself (19), this region called Antaeus' kingdom. But a greater name It gained from Scipio, when he recalled From Roman citadels the Punic chief. Here was his camp; here can'st thou see the trace Of that most famous rampart (20) whence at length Issued ...
— Pharsalia; Dramatic Episodes of the Civil Wars • Lucan
... bore it, and still live; and it is so much harder for me, because I have to bear it all alone. You have your religion to help you, Margie. Surely that will bear you up! I have heard all you pious people prate enough of its service in time of trouble to ...
— The Fatal Glove • Clara Augusta Jones Trask
... his true moments. Then, they were both great Poets. Some silly and sickly affectations connected with the accidents of birth and breeding may be observed in both, when they are not under the influence of 'the happier star.' Witness Burns's prate about independence, when he was an exciseman, and Byron's ridiculous pretence of Republicanism, when he never wrote sincerely about the Multitude without expressing or insinuating ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron
... Let Napoleon III., they said in effect, imitate the policy of his uncle, who, as long as he dazzled France by triumphs, could afford to laugh at the efforts of constitution-mongers. The big towns might prate of liberty; but what France wanted was glory and strong government. Such were their pleas: there was much in the past history of France to support them. The responsible advisers of the Emperor determined to take a stronger tone in foreign affairs, while ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... which to watch the pearl-gray dawn. Dearest, dearest, don't sob so. It is a case of two affirmatives making a negative; two great nationalities decried, derided, rendered null and void in their offspring through the dictates of those who, in religion, prate that we are all brothers. I have just got to stick it, my mother, and life is not very long. But I shall never marry." And as he spoke, Fate flicked a page of an illustrated paper, which was but the volume of the Book of Life, and perhaps only a mother's eyes ...
— The Hawk of Egypt • Joan Conquest
... "Silence your senseless prate! They will neither eat nor drink here. Tell the coachman that there are excellent accommodations at the Hurdlestone Arms for himself and his horses. But first see to your mistress—she is in a swoon. Carry her into the next room. And, mark me, Ruth—lock the door, ...
— Mark Hurdlestone - Or, The Two Brothers • Susanna Moodie
... how you pity me, 'tis dangerous, exceeding dangerous, to prate of pity; which are the poorer? you are now puppies; I without you, or you without my knowledge? be Rogues, and so be gone, be Rogues and reply ...
— Wit Without Money - The Works of Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher • Francis Beaumont
... may prate of the fervour of Phoebus Of days that are calm and serene, When a tint as of teak is imposed on the cheek That is commonly pallid (when clean); But we have a taste that's aesthetic; Mere sunshine seems vulgar and crude, As we gather to gaze ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, August 19th, 1914 • Various
... weal, except * To while away the time in chat and prate: Then shun their intimacy, save it be * To win thee lore, or ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 4 • Richard F. Burton
... man should make the hour, not this the man; And Thomas White will prove this Thomas Wyatt, And he will prove an Iden to this Cade, And he will play the Walworth to this Wat; Come, sirs, we prate; hence all—gather your men— Myself must bustle. Wyatt comes to Southwark; I'll have the drawbridge hewn into the Thames, And see the citizens arm'd. Good day; ...
— Queen Mary and Harold • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... Selingman replied; "your Press, written for and inspired with the whole spirit of the bourgeoisie. You prate about your Empire, but you've never learnt yet to think imperially. But there, it is not for this I crossed the Channel. It is to be ...
— A People's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... and moods of that amiable passion? But, my good friend, you have all this time spoke nothing but the paltry gossip which simpletons repeat from play-books and romances, till they give mere cant a real and powerful influence over their minds. Boys and girls prate themselves into love; and when their love is like to fall asleep, they prate and tease themselves into jealousy. But you and I, Frank, are rational beings, and neither silly nor idle enough to talk ourselves into any other relation than that of plain honest ...
— Rob Roy, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... an instinct of understanding, she saw into my uncle's trouble, and descried, more or less plainly, the secret of it, while yet she never even alluded to the existence of such a trouble. She had a regard for woman's dignity as profound as silent. She was not of those that prate or rave about their rights, forget their duties, and care only for ...
— The Flight of the Shadow • George MacDonald
... feeling had too, too much gall in it To let truth shape like that!—I also said That when my arms were round him I forgot That I was not his mother. So spoke I, But oh me,—I remembered it too well!— He was a lovely child; in his fond prate His father's voice was eloquent. One might say I am well punished for ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... this,—you who preach the gospel of man's pre-eminence;—you who prate of God and know nothing whatsoever about Him! The horse, dog, cat,—even the wild animals, whose vices, perchance, pale beside your own, may go to Heaven before you. The Supreme Architect is neither a Nero, nor a Stuart, nor a clown. He ...
— Animal Ghosts - Or, Animal Hauntings and the Hereafter • Elliott O'Donnell
... aftertimes will say of you "He loved her"—while of me what will they say? Not that I loved you more than just in play, For fashion's sake as idle women do. Even let them prate; who know not what we knew Of love and parting in exceeding pain, Of parting hopeless here to meet again, Hopeless on earth, and heaven is out of view. But by my heart of love laid bare to you, My love that you can make not void nor vain, Love that foregoes ...
— Poems • Christina G. Rossetti
... brawl, An hour with silence we prefer, Where statelier rise the woods than all Yon towers of talk at Westminster. Let this man prate and that man plot, On fame or place or title bent: The votes of veering crowds are not The things ...
— The Poems of William Watson • William Watson
... edgtooles I graunte it; but does his grave majestie looke like a lorde of that mettall? Come, come, be not seveare; let us prate whylst ...
— A Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. III • Various
... vulgar scoundrel to the dust, but at what a price! The convict's dress now worn by his brother would soon be worn by him. And what solace would it be then that the same suit would be worn by the impostor also? Yet why prate of solace in a matter like this? What alternative was left to him? In what quarter of the sky was the light dawning for him? He was traveling toward the deepening night, and the day of his life ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine
... of state, and that the appointment of this or any Spaniard was a violation of the charters of the provinces and of the promises of his Majesty. As if it were for the nobles of the obedient provinces to prate of charters and of oaths! Their brethren under the banner of the republic had been teaching Philip for a whole generation how they could deal with the privileges of freemen and with the perjury of tyrants. It was late in the day for the obedient ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... be thanked that made us friends; Men prate of wealth in empty words, I Sit here content as '90 ends. And sip my grog, ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100., January 3, 1891. • Various
... children shall be taught to love and revere their holy Church. We wish to teach them that that Church has been, for over eighteen hundred years, the faithful guardian of that very Bible of which Protestants prate so loudly, and which they dishonor so much. We wish our children to learn that the Catholic Church has been, in all ages, the friend and supporter of true liberty; i.e., liberty united to order and ...
— Public School Education • Michael Mueller
... jackasses we Americans are!" he continued. "We talk of liberty and demand license; we prate of democracy and we're a nation ...
— Cappy Ricks Retires • Peter B. Kyne
... And I will send you guerdonless to the foul fiend, if you prate of Lady Inger but one unseemly ...
— Henrik Ibsen's Prose Dramas Vol III. • Henrik Ibsen
... who are perfectly capable of intelligent understanding if they didn't let their brains remain asleep or locked tight, go night after night to dinner parties, day after day to other social gatherings, and absent-mindedly prate about this or that without ever taking the trouble to think what they are saying and to whom they are saying it! Would a young mother describe twenty or thirty cunning tricks and sayings of the baby to a bachelor who has been helplessly ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... liest, thou fiend! Not unawares The sinner swallows Satan's bait, Nor pits conceal'd nor hidden snares Seeks blindly; wherefore dost thou prate Of destiny ...
— Poems • Adam Lindsay Gordon
... to follow the path that promises success," interrupted von Kerber savagely. "Had I told you these things you would have been the first to inform the Italian government. Why do you prate of deceit? Had we found the treasure, you must have seen everything. I only meant to hold you to your bond and demand my third share. Lieber Gott! if you were not a stiff-necked Englishman you would now, even at the twelfth hour, force ...
— The Wheel O' Fortune • Louis Tracy
... influence of his or her own controlling Soul, to higher and ever higher perception and attainment. The great majority of the world's inhabitants live with less consciousness of this Spirit than flies or worms—they build up religions in which they prate of God and immortality as children prattle, without the smallest effort to understand either,—and at the Change which they call death, they pass out of this life without having taken the trouble to discover, acknowledge ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... these windows were not of the new-fangled sort, made to open, that honest men might get rheums, and foolish maids prate therefrom. So there was no hope in that direction. He really seemed to be less ungracious than utterly clownish, dull, and untaught, and extremely shy and ...
— Unknown to History - A Story of the Captivity of Mary of Scotland • Charlotte M. Yonge
... me, as I intended it should: it was as a tub to a whale; and after I had let them play with it a while, I claimed their attention, and, knowing that they always loved to hear me prate, went on. ...
— Clarissa, Volume 7 • Samuel Richardson
... you will, I deserve it. A man may prate of his own secrets if he like, but he should be careful of those of other people. I trusted yours to ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest
... sad blunder— What can be come over me lately, I wonder? The Prince was as cheerful as if all his life He had never been troubled with Friends or a Wife— "Fine weather," says he—to which I, who must prate, Answered, "Yes, Sir, but changeable rather, of late." He took it, I fear, for he lookt somewhat gruff, And handled his new pair of whiskers so rough, That before all the courtiers I feared they'd come off, And then, Lord, how ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... whose husband was so meek, That only from her lips the truth he'd seek, When seated with him 'neath a pear tree's shade, Contriv'd at ease and her arrangement made. The story I shall presently relate; The butler, strong, well dress'd, and full of prate: Who often made the other servants trot, Stood near when madam hit upon her plot, To whom she said, I wish the fruit to taste; On which the man prepar'd with ev'ry haste, To climb the tree, and off the produce shook; But while above, the fellow gave a look Upon the ...
— The Tales and Novels, Complete • Jean de La Fontaine
... cried Laura indignantly. "What you've got you're welcome to, but for Heaven's sake don't prate around here about loyalty and ...
— The Easiest Way - A Story of Metropolitan Life • Eugene Walter and Arthur Hornblow
... Parthenon and the statue of the grey-eyed goddess standing up in faultless symmetry against the clear blue sky of Attica; Plato's Apology of Socrates breathing serene and lucid thought in language lucid and serene—these are the types of art as understood by the Hellenic spirit. We nowadays prate much of real and ideal. The Greek combined them without prating. The anatomy of a Grecian statue is anatomically true in proportion and in pose, while the whole figure is none the less of an ideal beauty which could rarely have ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... advantage. The immediate danger in China seems, so far as I can judge, to be that the anti-foreign feeling, which is undoubtedly intense especially in the south of the Empire, may come to a head any day and prematurely explode. The nincompoops and quidnuncs and newspaper men ravenous for copy who prate about a "yellow peril" may, in this latter fact, find some slight excuse for their blatant lucubrations. There is no real "yellow peril." Poor old China, which has been so long slumbering, is just rousing herself and making arrangements ...
— The Empire of the East • H. B. Montgomery
... Do you know what you are talking about? Do you prate of patience, and waiting, and hope in the future to a man who has no future—to a man whose days are numbered, and who feels the creeping chills of death stealing over him every day as he sits beside his wretched hearth, or labours through his daily drudgery? I can live as I have always lived! ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... hate to prate— - I'm no fanatic croaker, But learn contentment from the fate Of this East India broker. He'd everything a man of taste Could ever want, except a waist; And discontent His size anent, And bootless perseverance blind, Completely wrecked the ...
— The Bab Ballads • W. S. Gilbert
... irrefutable truths would show how utterly unworthy and false are the vulgar taunts which attribute "treason" to those who, in the late secession of the Southern States, were loyal to the only sovereign entitled to their allegiance, and which still more absurdly prate of the violation of oaths to support "the Government," an oath which nobody ever could have been legally required to take, and which must have been ignorantly confounded with the prescribed oath ...
— The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government • Jefferson Davis
... the French king, and I came over from Ireland especially to take a dying message and a token from my father to the Earl. That is all you need know about that; but I would have you leave off your prate of your friend the Earl of Westport, for I understand full well you couldn't distinguish between him and a church door, although 'tis scandalously little you know of church doors. So we will stop there on that point. Then I will go on to the next point. The next point is that I am going ...
— The O'Ruddy - A Romance • Stephen Crane
... be Full oft in need of recreation,— Who rules the world,—right well may I, Who serve him in that high relation: Amuse me, then, before you fly.' Our cackler, pleased, at quickest rate Of this and that began to prate. Not he of whom old Flaccus writes, The most impertinent of wights, Or any babbler, for that matter, Could more incontinently chatter. At last she offer'd to make known— A better spy had never flown— All things, whatever she might ...
— The Fables of La Fontaine - A New Edition, With Notes • Jean de La Fontaine
... over this,—you who preach the gospel of man's pre-eminence;—you who prate of God and know nothing whatsoever about Him! The horse, dog, cat,—even the wild animals, whose vices, perchance, pale beside your own, may go to Heaven before you. The Supreme Architect is neither a Nero, nor a Stuart, nor a clown. ...
— Animal Ghosts - Or, Animal Hauntings and the Hereafter • Elliott O'Donnell
... Heaven be thanked that made us friends; Men prate of wealth in empty words, I Sit here content as '90 ends. And sip my grog, and smoke ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100., January 3, 1891. • Various
... motives which most human beings who have not a stupid inflexibility of self-confidence must be liable to under a marked change of external conditions. In a life where the experience was so tumultuously mixed as it must have been in the Prate's, what a possibility was opened for a change of self-judgment, when, instead of eyes that venerated and knees that knelt, instead of a great work on its way to accomplishment, and in its prosperity stamping the agent as ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... they have driven their wives and families from their tables, is so degrading, and consists of such obscenities, that it would even be scouted at the table of the bribed, queen-slandering Italian witnesses in Cotton Garden. Yet some of these canting hypocrites, I understand, now begin to prate about morality! But I ought, and I do apologize to the reader for this digression, which I was led into by the circumstance of a gentleman, who dined with me yesterday, having given me a description of one of these ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 1 • Henry Hunt
... sensible and wary man, we call him a disguised and subtle fellow. And is any one more open, [and less reserved] than usual in such a degree as I often have presented myself to you, Maecenas, so as perhaps impertinently to interrupt a person reading, or musing, with any kind of prate? We cry, "[this fellow] actually wants common sense." Alas! how indiscreetly do we ordain a severe law against ourselves! For no one Is born without vices: he is the best man who is encumbered with the least. ...
— The Works of Horace • Horace
... this wur a damper an' th' biggest i'th' lot, An th' folks thay declared it wur Keighla plot, But one Jack o' Ludges sed he'd stop 'em thair prate, He'a learn 'em i' Keighla to insinuate, Thay'st hev no excurshuns for nowt but thair lip, And Shipla an' Bradford ...
— Th' History o' Haworth Railway - fra' th' beginnin' to th' end, wi' an ackaant o' th' oppnin' serrimony • Bill o'th' Hoylus End
... as he, witnessing for truth and freedom, steadfastly and defiantly opposed oppression, so those who catch his spirit today will do as he did and will realise as duty—"While wrong is wrong let no man prate of peace!" ...
— The Higher Powers of Mind and Spirit • Ralph Waldo Trine
... trade, to forget sentiment, to think of his material and nothing else, is, for awhile at least, the king's highway of progress. Here, in England, too many painters and writers dwell dispersed, unshielded, among the intelligent bourgeois. These, when they are not merely indifferent, prate to him about the lofty aims and moral influence of art. And this is the lad's ruin. For art is, first of all and last of all, a trade. The love of words and not a desire to publish new discoveries, the love of form and not a novel reading of historical ...
— Across The Plains • Robert Louis Stevenson
... "But when they prate of you and me, As the two gifts they want, Say Classic lore and Cookery Are things for which they pant; Believe me, my dear Heptarchy, They ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, September 17, 1892 • Various
... "And prate of spelling and reading as if they were the cardinal virtues?" returned his sullen companion. "By my halidame, I have two fair daughters at home who will lack husbands, I trow, for they can only spin and be chaste,—two maidenly gifts ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... might go to Milton, and steal, bit by bit, A description to suit my Spirit of Cant, A second-hand suit, but a "shplendid fit," As a Jew would assure me—but then I sha'nt. His work is to preach the humbug which passes For gospel among the "down-trodden masses;" And to prate of the "wrongs and indignities," which Are heaped on their ...
— Nothing to Say - A Slight Slap at Mobocratic Snobbery, Which Has 'Nothing - to Do' with 'Nothing to Wear' • QK Philander Doesticks
... scattering, in the epigram— Provided that by art, and in due time, They turned upon the thought, and not the rime. Thus in all parts disorders did abate; Yet quibblers in the court had leave to prate, Insipid jesters and unpleasant fools, A corporation of dull, punning drolls. 'Tis not but that sometimes a dextrous muse May with advantage a turned sense abuse, And on a word may trifle with address; But above all, avoid the fond excess, And think not, when ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... dandy, poetical, rose-water thieves; but real downright scoundrels, leading scoundrelly lives, drunken, profligate, dissolute, low; as scoundrels will be. They don't quote Plato, like Eugene Aram; or live like gentlemen, and sing the pleasantest ballads in the world, like jolly Dick Turpin; or prate eternally about "to kalon,"[*] like that precious canting Maltravers, whom we all of us have read about and pitied; or die whitewashed saints, like poor "Biss Dadsy" in "Oliver Twist." No, my dear ...
— Catherine: A Story • William Makepeace Thackeray
... to prate, to harangue, to debate, is now the ambition of all in the state. Each exercise-ground is in consequence found deserted and empty: to evil repute Your lessons have brought our youngsters, and taught our sailors to challenge, discuss, and refute The orders ...
— The Frogs • Aristophanes
... against the savage on their borders have become a nation that may defy every foe but that most dangerous of all foes, herself, destined to a majestic future if she will shun the excess and perversion of the principles that made her great, prate less about the enemies of the past and strive more against the enemies of the present, resist the mob and the demagogue as she resisted Parliament and King, rally her powers from the race for gold and the delirium of prosperity to make firm the foundations ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... when Izdubar will seek The cool enchantment of the cove, and slake His thirst with its sweet waters bubbling pure, Where Love has spread for him her sweetest lure, The maids expectant listening, watch and wait His coming; oft in ecstacies they prate O'er his surprise, and softly sport and splash The limpid waves around, that glowing flash Like heaps of snowy pearls lung to the light By Hea's[1] hands, his Zir-ri[2] to delight. And now upon the rock each maid reclines, While Ishtar's form beneath them brightly ...
— Babylonian and Assyrian Literature • Anonymous
... their Chloes and Phyllises poets may prate, I sing my plain country Joan, These twelve years my wife, still the joy of my life, Blest day that ...
— Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin • Benjamin Franklin
... too—out-o'-place here, out-o'-date? The modern sort, the sort that gets on in this country, is a prime hand at cuttin' his coat to suit his cloth; for all that the stop-at-homes, like the writer o' that line and other ancients, prate about the Ethiopian's hide or the leopard and his spots. They didn't buy their experience dear, like we did; didn't guess that if a man DON'T learn to fit himself in, when he gets set down in such a land as this, he's a goner; any more'n they ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... portion of the Dominion; for the government seem to grasp the purse-strings with one hand while they hold a drawn sword in the other. There is no security to be found in any corner of the State; and no projects, formed for the future of its people. To be sure, certain parties prate and jabber about the Volunteer Service and national defenses; but what have they to defend? If their frontier were bristling to-morrow with forts and bayonets, all they could hope to accomplish would be the shutting out of American liberty ...
— Ridgeway - An Historical Romance of the Fenian Invasion of Canada • Scian Dubh
... general human traits, nowhere more so than among those from whom they should not be expected; nowhere more so than among those who are debarred from hope. The great captains of industry so-called, themselves blown full of pride of circumstance, prate often of the inefficiencies of human cattle; yet continually the wonder remains that these same cattle continue to do that which their conscience tells them is right for them to do, and to do it for the sake of the doing. The lives of all ...
— The Law of the Land • Emerson Hough
... Farmer Crouder, "Began to prate of corn; "And we found out they talk'd the louder, "The oftner ...
— Wild Flowers - Or, Pastoral and Local Poetry • Robert Bloomfield
... anti-foreign feeling, which is undoubtedly intense especially in the south of the Empire, may come to a head any day and prematurely explode. The nincompoops and quidnuncs and newspaper men ravenous for copy who prate about a "yellow peril" may, in this latter fact, find some slight excuse for their blatant lucubrations. There is no real "yellow peril." Poor old China, which has been so long slumbering, is just rousing herself and making arrangements for defence against ...
— The Empire of the East • H. B. Montgomery
... are we so differently fashioned that thou, Eric, canst prate to me of happiness when my heart is racked with grief? Oh, Eric, I blame thee not, for thou hast not wrought this evil on me willingly; but I say this: that my heart is dead, as I would that I were dead. ...
— Eric Brighteyes • H. Rider Haggard
... Sanford! You drive me frantic! You prate the same foolishness. over and over! I don't want to hear any more about it. You said you had spoken the last word on the subject, now stop it! I, too, have said my final say. I shall do as I please, and I shall not consider myself accountable ...
— Raspberry Jam • Carolyn Wells
... it claimed to have for its foundation. Be it said to the credit of each society, sect and organization, they all responded heartily and co-operated with Penloe and Stella in helping forward the grand reform; for they saw it was useless to prate about love, purity, justice and freedom, with woman debarred by law from her legal and political rights and tolerating a social custom which excited the worst passions and bred prurient curiosity. It was a grand and glorious sight, such as the world had not ...
— A California Girl • Edward Eldridge
... geology be correct, was not always thus a watering-place; but seems, for a long period, to have been a place under water. The very stones prate of Neptune's whereabouts in days of langsyne. No one who has seen what heaps of rounded pebbles are gleaned from the corn-fields, or become familiar with the copious remains of fresh water shells and insects, which are kneaded into the calcareous deposits a little below ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 365, March, 1846 • Various
... Dog, who saw the deed, Detesting the vexatious breed, Bespoke him thus: "When coxcombs prate, They kindle wrath, contempt, or hate; Thy teasing tongue, had judgment tied, Thou hadst ...
— Favourite Fables in Prose and Verse • Various
... Lord above! "My child, with pray'rs invoke his love, "The Almighty never errs?" "O, mother! mother! idle prate, "Can he be anxious for my fate, ...
— Translations of German Poetry in American Magazines 1741-1810 • Edward Ziegler Davis
... accustomed to read, and to reflect upon what she read, and to apply it to the purpose for which it is valuable, viz. in enlarging her mind and cultivating her taste; but she had never been accustomed to prate, or quote, or sit down for the express purpose of displaying her acquirements; and she began to tremble at hearing authors' names "familiar in their mouths as household words;" but Grizzy, strong in ignorance, was no wise daunted. True, she heard what she could not comprehend, but she thought ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier
... as a matter of course! You may talk of iron, and prate of force; But, after all, and do what you can, The best—and cheapest—machine is Man! Wealth knows it well, and the hucksters feel 'Tis safer to trust them to sinew than steel. With a bit of brain, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, October 4, 1890 • Various
... can no longer fly after his wings are broken! Give us but our independence, allow us to take care of ourselves, grant us but a little strip of land like that of the Servians and Rumanians, give us a chance to lead a national existence, and then prate about our lacking manly virtues. What we lack is not genius (Genialitaet) but self-consciousness (Selbstgefuehl) and appreciation of our value as men (Bewusstsein der Menschenwuerde), of which ...
— The Haskalah Movement in Russia • Jacob S. Raisin
... Fools! Flouting the sages Through history's pages And driving the dreary old seers into rages— The humbugging Magis Who prate that the wages Of Folly are Death—toast the Fools of all ages! They have ridden like froth down the whirlpools of time, They have jingled their caps in the councils of state, They have snared half the wisdom of life in a rhyme, And tripped into nothingness ...
— Dreams and Dust • Don Marquis
... not work except in darkness; Thought will not work except in Silence; neither will Virtue work except in Secrecy. Let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth! Neither shalt thou prate even to thy own heart of "those secrets known to all." Is not Shame (Schaam) the soil of all Virtue, of all good manners and good morals? Like other plants, Virtue will not grow unless its root be hidden, buried from the eye of the sun. Let the sun shine on it, nay do but look at it ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... do you prate to me?' said Redgauntlet, bending his brows. 'I, sir, transact my own business; you, I am told, act ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott
... this, of a steady and systematic mind! Prate to us of the love of liberty, of self-dignity! Where are such things to be found in their reality, on their trial, if not in the scenes and the nation we ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... dear H.,—The date of my postscript "will prate to you of my whereabouts." We anchored between the Seven Towers and the Seraglio on the 13th, and yesterday settled ashore. [3] The ambassador [4] is laid up; but the secretary [5] does the honours of the palace, and we have a general invitation to his ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Letters and Journals, Vol. 1 • Lord Byron, Edited by Rowland E. Prothero
... cannot continue to sit there; who or what, then, is to follow? "Free Parliament," right of election, constitutional formulas of one sort or the other—the thing is a hungry fact coming on us, which we must answer or be devoured by it! And who are you that prate of constitutional formulas, rights of Parliament? You have had to kill your king, to make pride's purges, to expel and banish by the law of the stronger whosoever would not let your cause prosper: there are but fifty or threescore of ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various
... mend myself by reclaiming my old right to send you letters. I doubt not I shall have much to tell you, could I overcome the hesitation to attempt a reasonable letter when one is driven to write so many sheets of mere routine as sixty-six (nearly sixty-seven) years enforce. I shall have to prate of my daughters;—Edith Forbes, with her two children at Milton; Ellen Emerson at home, herself a godsend to this house day by day; and my son Edward studying medicine in Boston,—whom I have ever meant and still mean to send that he may see your face when that professional curriculum ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1834-1872, Vol II. • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... my Dew, in idle mood, What prate I, minding not my debt? What do I talk of bad or good? The best is ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... course, jealous, in all the tenses and moods of that amiable passion? But, my good friend, you have all this time spoke nothing but the paltry gossip which simpletons repeat from play-books and romances, till they give mere cant a real and powerful influence over their minds. Boys and girls prate themselves into love; and when their love is like to fall asleep, they prate and tease themselves into jealousy. But you and I, Frank, are rational beings, and neither silly nor idle enough to talk ourselves into any other relation than that of plain honest disinterested ...
— Rob Roy, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... juvenis! Why should I exert myself to explain my opinions to coarse and common folk, who don't know what universalia entia rationis formae substantiales are? It certainly is absurdissimum to try to prate of colors to the blind. Vulgus indoctum est monstrum horrendum informe, cui lumen ademptum. Not long ago a man ten times as learned as you wished to dispute with me, but when I found that he did not know what quidditas was, I ...
— Comedies • Ludvig Holberg
... appeared to me by far the most luminous. In human life it is invariably the lower nature that needs to be reconciled and conciliated; whilst the higher nature, in proportion to its development, is forgiving and tolerant and wide-minded, and does not prate about its own high sense of justice requiring to be appeased. The best type of man punishes a wrong-doer in order that he may learn to do better and leave off tormenting and wronging his fellow-creatures; not to appease any instinct in ...
— Seen and Unseen • E. Katharine Bates
... for her to accept such a proposition as mine, especially after all that has happened, and still prate of 'sacred honor.'" ...
— What Can She Do? • Edward Payson Roe
... houses[61] and oratories of noble and burgess were rich with ivories exquisitely carved, with sculptures and paintings, tapestry and enamels: the very utensils of common domestic use were beautiful. Men did not prate of art: they wrought in love and simplicity. The very word art, as denoting a product of human activity different from the ordinary daily tasks of men, was unknown. If painting was an art, even so was carpentry. A mason was an ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... the stern answer. "To come here and prate to me of my dead father's dissoluteness and of an ancient quarrel between him and yours, to bleat of my trumped-up course of piracy and my own ways of life as a just cause why I may not wed your sister whilst the real consideration in ...
— The Sea-Hawk • Raphael Sabatini
... even in this lone wood, Sweet lord, ye do right well to whisper this. Fools prate, and perish traitors. Woods have tongues, As walls have ears: but thou shalt go with me, And we will speak at first exceeding low. Meet is it the good King be not deceived. See now, I set thee high on vantage ground, From whence to watch the time, and eagle-like Stoop at thy will ...
— Idylls of the King • Alfred, Lord Tennyson
... busy woman," Nancy groaned, "and I've hammered my finger to a pulp, trying to open this crate, while you perch on a broken step-ladder and prate to me of legacies. The saucers to these cups may be in here, and I can't wait to find out. I'm perfectly crazy about this ...
— Outside Inn • Ethel M. Kelley
... soul!" he cried, "what doth this fellow prate of? ... Past love? ... Thou profane boaster! ... how darest thou speak of love to the Priestess of ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... Americans to stand on inviolate shores and prate of the wickedness of wrath. Moreover, this evil is not to be exorcised by a pious wish for it not to be. It is. And there is every excuse under the arch ...
— In the Claws of the German Eagle • Albert Rhys Williams
... he is more trouble to you than your disease: if he is on board ship with you, he disgusts you more than sea-sickness; if he praises you, he is more fulsome than blame. It is more pleasure associating with bad men who have tact than with good men who prate. Nestor indeed in Sophocles' Play, trying by his words to soothe exasperated Ajax, ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... replied Blueskin. "Take my life, if you're so disposed. You're welcome to it. And let's see if either of these women, who prate of their love for you, will do ...
— Jack Sheppard - A Romance • William Harrison Ainsworth
... or demon? 290 With new kings rise new altars. But, proceed; You are sent to prate your master's will, and not ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... fathoms deep in brine, and the glittering water falling from her tresses like golden stars; but never have I read an untruth in her pages. There is good intelligence between her and some on board; and, trust me, she knows the paths of the ocean too well, ever to steer a wrong course. But we prate like gossiping river-men.—Wilt see the Skimmer ...
— The Water-Witch or, The Skimmer of the Seas • James Fenimore Cooper
... influence "the many" have elbowed "the few," and the gentle circle of Art swarms with the intoxicated mob of mediocrity, whose leaders prate and counsel, and call aloud, where the Gods once spoke ...
— The Gentle Art of Making Enemies • James McNeill Whistler
... twenty in London. Nor is Chicago the leading city in crime, since it is only seventh on the list, which is headed by four Southern cities, and San Francisco and Los Angeles. In view of such a terrible condition of affairs, it seems ridiculous to prate of the protection society derives ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman
... cried, with quivering lips, "prate not to me of thy vain legends and gossip's tales! think not to snatch from me my possession in another, when thine own life is in my hands. Unhand the maiden! throw down thy sword! return home without further parley, ...
— Rienzi • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... turns this people from us, they will become the prey of our recent enemies, and if that happens we can prate about the Treaty of Paris as much as we like. The Teuton will have more than balanced ...
— With the "Die-Hards" in Siberia • John Ward
... metal, at least to see that it was not mere dross they were casting into the crucible. Plainly, however, they despise any such nice distinctions. The most earnest prayer and the emptiest ceremonial prate are both alike to them. What sort of a process they imagine prayer to be may be at once perceived from the sort of trials to which they desire to ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... you know all I have endured. To me, earth has been a hell—not the place of flames and torments of which your divines prate, but the true hell—that of the conscience and the soul. I, too, a man whose whole nature was athirst for truth. I sought it first among its professors; there I found that they who, too idle or too weak to demonstrate their creed, took it upon trust, did what their fathers ...
— Olive - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik, (AKA Dinah Maria Mulock)
... "O this I have felt, and this I have guessed, and this I have heard men say, And this they wrote that another man wrote of a carl in Norroway." —"Ye have read, ye have felt, ye have guessed, good lack! Ye have hampered Heaven's Gate; There's little room between the stars in idleness to prate! O none may reach by hired speech of neighbour, priest, and kin Through borrowed deed to God's good meed that lies so fair within; Get hence, get hence to the Lord of Wrong, for doom has yet to run, And. . .the faith that ye share with Berkeley ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... All trees have very deal bear. A throat's ill. You shall catch cold one's. You make grins. Will some mutton? Will you fat or slight? Will you this? Will you a bon? You not make who to babble. You not make that to prate all day's work. You interompt me. You mistake you self heavily. ...
— English as she is spoke - or, A jest in sober earnest • Jose da Fonseca
... Bunions that afflict us prate Of Plasters unsurpassable, and hate To Cut a corn—ah cut, and let the Plaster go, Nor murmur if the Solace come ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... Hood, "Thou dost prate like an ass, For were I to bend my bow, I could send a dart quite thro' thy proud heart, Before thou ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V3 • Charles H. Sylvester
... swings And snares the people for the kings: "Luther is dead; old quarrels pass; The stake's black scars are healed with grass"; So dreamers prate;—did man e'er live Saw priest or woman yet forgive? But Luther's broom is left, and eyes Peep o'er their creeds to where it lies. Spin, spin, Clotho, spin! Lachesis, twist! and Atropos, sever! In the shadow, year out, year in, The silent ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various
... laugh to hear the Fools prate about Preheminence: They would all fain be Masters, and yet they know they are but all my Servants; they make their Boast, of this and that, and talk of their great gains: and forget that I rule the Roast, and that both ...
— The London-Bawd: With Her Character and Life - Discovering the Various and Subtle Intrigues of Lewd Women • Anonymous
... speech—of my intactness, Ye damage and deface me in your strife. Your aims, expressed with full and fair exactness. Mean fratricidal strife, war to the knife. Encounter hot, and fierce retaliation Must vainly prate about conciliation. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, April 29, 1893 • Various
... mind the great truth that without an increase of African slaves from abroad, you may not expect or look for many more slave States."[27] Jefferson Davis strongly denied "any coincidence of opinion with those who prate of the inhumanity and sinfulness of the trade. The interest of Mississippi," said he, "not of the African, dictates my conclusion." He opposed the immediate reopening of the trade in Mississippi for fear of a paralyzing ...
— The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of America - 1638-1870 • W. E. B. Du Bois
... has looked on Beauty bare. Let all who prate of Beauty hold their peace, And lay them prone upon the earth and cease To ponder on themselves, the while they stare At nothing, intricately drawn nowhere In shapes of shifting lineage; let geese Gabble and hiss, but heroes seek release From dusty ...
— American Poetry, 1922 - A Miscellany • Edna St. Vincent Millay
... will degenerate into a weakling, crushed beneath the inevitable diminutive—Flossie; or he will build up painfully, inch by inch, a barrier against the name's corroding action. He will boast of his biceps, flexing them the while. He will brag about cold baths. He will prate of chest measurements; regard golf with contempt; and speak of the ...
— Gigolo • Edna Ferber
... my Lord, among other worse crimes, The whole was no more than a lie of The Times. It is monstrous, my Lord! in a civilis'd state That such Newspaper rogues should have license to prate. 90 Indeed printing in general—but for the taxes, Is in theory false and pernicious in praxis! You and I, and your Cousin, and Abb Sieyes, And all the great Statesmen that live in these days, Are agreed that no nation secure is from vi'lence 95 Unless all who must ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... that: and when the stranger should aske, What will you giue me for it? the beggar might answere: I haue ten or foureteene children, I will giue you some one or more of them, &c. For this rabble of beggars vseth thus fondly to prate with strangers. Now if there be any well-disposed man, who pitying the need and folly of these beggers, releaseth them of one sonne, and doth for Gods sake by some meanes prouide for him in another countrey: doth the begger therefore (who together ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries - of the English Nation, v. 1, Northern Europe • Richard Hakluyt
... a difference, lad," Cross pointed out, setting down the tankard of beer from which he had been drinking. "You talk sometimes that white-livered stuff about not hitting a man back if he wants to hit you, and you drag in your conscience, and prate about all men being brothers, and that sort of twaddle. A full-blooded Englishman don't like it, because we are all of us out to protect what we've got, any way and anyhow. But that doesn't alter ...
— The Devil's Paw • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... the greater villain, you or I? You, who prate of your birth, rank and position in life, and propose a murder, or I, making no pretensions whatever, I that have committed a murder at the instigation of one of your class, in the hope of reward? Look you, Captain; neither ...
— Venus in Boston; - A Romance of City Life • George Thompson
... I set you on? Even for my love then, I beseech you, sir, To seek him out, and lest he prate of me To put your knife into him ere he come forth: Meseems this were not such wild ...
— Chastelard, a Tragedy • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... of his life and business, he has been occasionally obliged to imitate the ways of such small animals, he has done so, let us say it at once, clumsily, and like as a lion should. Many artists, we hear, hold his works rather cheap; they prate about bad drawing, want of scientific knowledge:—they would have something vastly more neat, ...
— George Cruikshank • William Makepeace Thackeray
... of all fare?" Finn cried. "Strong drink, if it be too freely supplied, Or the prate of a fool," ...
— Ulf Van Yern - and Other Ballads • Thomas J. Wise
... now if our young men go abroad, it is no longer for clothes, nor to seek new laws in wretched printing shops, nor to study eloquence in the cafes of Paris. For now Napoleon, a clever man and a swift, gives us no time to prate or to search for new fashions. Now there is the thunder of arms, and the hearts of us old men exult that the renown of the Poles is spreading so widely throughout the world; glory is ours already, and so we shall soon again have our Republic. From laurels always springs the ...
— Pan Tadeusz • Adam Mickiewicz
... or time to come, but fills all needs With present kindness. She would laugh and talk, Take arms, suffer embraces, even walk The terrace 'neath the eyes of all her fate, And seem to heed what they might show or prate, As if her whole heart's heart were in this house And not at fearful odds and perilous. And should one speak of Paris, as to say, "Would that our lord might see thee go so gay About his house!" Gently she'd bend her head Down to her breast and pluck a vagrant thread Forth from her ...
— Helen Redeemed and Other Poems • Maurice Hewlett
... art a pretty fellow to prate about sallying forth at midnight to do good to thy fellow creatures!—Here we find thee, within an hour after thy departure from thy home, on an 'errand of mercy,' embraced in the soft arms of a pretty wanton, and revelling ...
— City Crimes - or Life in New York and Boston • Greenhorn
... of the living child, as of the dead one. Out upon the honour which is harmed by gossip! What slanderous tongues say of me as a disgrace I deem the highest honour; but if you are of a different opinion, and held it when you wooed me, you would be wiser to prate less loudly of the proud word 'honour,' and ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... "Howld your prate!" said the trumpeter, elegantly, and silenced all reply by playing a tune. As soon as it was ended, he turned to Andy and asked ...
— Handy Andy, Volume One - A Tale of Irish Life, in Two Volumes • Samuel Lover
... three; so about was SHE - The maiden I wronged in Peninsular days . . . You may prate of your prowess in lusty times, But as years gnaw inward you blink your bays, And see too ...
— Wessex Poems and Other Verses • Thomas Hardy
... know what is right. Besides, consult the grand thermometer of opinion, the price of the funds: on the 17th Brumaire at 11 francs, on the 20th at 16 and to-day at 21. In such a state of things I may let the Jacobins prate as they like. But let them not talk ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... cold incredulous voice, he said:— "What prate is this of fathers and revenge? The mighty Rustum ...
— Matthew Arnold's Sohrab and Rustum and Other Poems • Matthew Arnold
... made another sad blunder— What can be come over me lately, I wonder? The Prince was as cheerful as if all his life He had never been troubled with Friends or a Wife— "Fine weather," says he—to which I, who must prate, Answered, "Yes, Sir, but changeable rather, of late." He took it, I fear, for he lookt somewhat gruff, And handled his new pair of whiskers so rough, That before all the courtiers I feared they'd come off, And then, Lord, how ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... your honour," said the traitor, for traitors love to prate of honour, "and will now admit you to the castle; but until we are in the courtyard ...
— The Strong Arm • Robert Barr
... head in anger. "If I, his father, can let him go, why should you prate like women? The lad is my son, and he shall win his spurs—and more, and more, maybe," ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... he only notices external objects his ideas are confined to sensations; let him only see the physical world around him. If not, you may be sure that either he will pay no heed to you at all, or he will form fantastic ideas of the moral world of which you prate, ideas which you will never efface as long ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... another's—and if, as I may add in your case, they have no creeping, old, musty uncle Antonys to strengthen their prepossessions, as he does my mother's. Poor, creeping, positive soul, what has such an old bachelor as he to do, to prate about the duties of children to parents; unless he had a notion that parents owe some to their children? But your mother, by her indolent meekness, let me call it, has spoiled ...
— Clarissa, Volume 1 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... busy now with state affairs, I prate of Pitt and Fox; I ask the price of rail-road shares, I watch the turns of stocks: And this is life! no verdure blooms Upon the withered bough. I save a fortune in perfumes,— I'm not a ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, No. - 288, Supplementary Number • Various
... a secret, says a beau, And sneers at some ill-natured wit below; But faith, if we should tell but half we know, There's many a spruce young fellow in this place, Wou'd never presume to show his face; Women are not so weak, what e'er men prate; How many tip-top beaux have had the fate, T'enjoy from mama's secrets their estate! Who, if her early folly had made known, Had rid behind the ...
— The Palmy Days of Nance Oldfield • Edward Robins
... with the canons of scientific logic, but that it is the only adequate method. Critics exclusively trained in classics or in mathematics, who have never determined a scientific fact in their lives by induction from experiment or observation, prate learnedly about Mr. Darwin's method, which is not inductive enough, not Baconian enough, forsooth, for them. But even if practical acquaintance with the process of scientific investigation is denied them, they may learn, ...
— Darwiniana • Thomas Henry Huxley
... and protoplasm you matter-mongers prompt to prate; Of jelly-speck development and apes that ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton
... would be a different thing indeed! Justice wears a sword, because she is of gentle birth. Work-people with axes must not prate of rights, or a prison will be their next one. Your right is to be disdained, young man, because you were not born a gentleman; and your duty is to receive scorn with your hat off. You like it, probably, because your father did. But come ...
— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore
... unto this frog, As like as is the puppy to the dog. He is of nature cold, his mouth is wide To prate, and at true goodness to deride. He mounts his head as if he was above The world, when yet 'tis that which has his love. And though he seeks in churches for to croak, He neither loveth ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... can you be so shallow as to dream that I feel nothing? What is your love for Tom Faggus? What is your love for your baby (pretty darling as he is) to compare with such a love as for ever dwells with me? Because I do not prate of it; because it is beyond me, not only to express, but even form to my own heart in thoughts; because I do not shape my face, and would scorn to play to it, as a thing of acting, and lay it out before you, are you fools enough to think—" but here ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... A care-free, laughter-loving, brave company, with every man a rider to make his womenfolk prate of his skill to all who would listen; with every man a lover of love and of life and the primitive joys of life. They worked, that company, and they made of their work a game that every man of them loved to play. And Dade, loving the things they loved and living the life they lived, ...
— The Gringos • B. M. Bower
... the sick man. "Silence your senseless prate! They will neither eat nor drink here. Tell the coachman that there are excellent accommodations at the Hurdlestone Arms for himself and his horses. But first see to your mistress—she is in a swoon. Carry her into the next room. And, mark me, Ruth—lock the door, ...
— Mark Hurdlestone - Or, The Two Brothers • Susanna Moodie
... bowl that shall be quaff'd To loyalty's devotion, And here's to fortune that shall waft Your ship across the ocean, And here's a smile for those who prate Of Davy Jones's locker, And here's a pray'r in every fate— ...
— John Smith, U.S.A. • Eugene Field
... went those pretty babes, Rejoicing at that tide, Rejoicing with a merry mind, They should on cock-horse ride. They prate and prattle pleasantly, As they rode on the way, To those that should their butchers be, And ...
— The Children's Garland from the Best Poets • Various
... want to prate such nonsense as that to these folks for? They won't need any kind of fertilizers in this country for twenty years. You'd better be resting instead of shooting such useless stuff as that ...
— The Wind Before the Dawn • Dell H. Munger
... it? You can tell the world all about it afterwards, if you choose. Nobody would believe you. If they did believe you, they would like me all the better for it. I know the age better than you do, though you will prate about it so tediously. Come, I tell you. You have chattered enough about corruption. Now you shall look on ...
— The Picture of Dorian Gray • Oscar Wilde
... fight? Woo't teare thy selfe? Woo't drinke vp Esile, eate a Crocodile?[6] Ile doo't. Dost thou come heere to whine; [Sidenote: doost come] To outface me with leaping in her Graue? Be[8] buried quicke with her, and so will I. And if thou prate of Mountaines; let them throw Millions of Akers on vs; till our ground Sindging his pate against the burning Zone, [Sidenote: 262] Make Ossa like a wart. Nay, and thoul't mouth, Ile rant as well ...
— The Tragedie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark - A Study with the Text of the Folio of 1623 • George MacDonald
... babies in Concord knew and loved him. "Incorrigible spouting Yankee" he called himself; but he was rather a silent man in reality, and did not care to talk excepting when he had somewhat to say. He did not prate eternally of silence, as Carlyle did, while wreaking himself upon speech in the most frantically vehement manner all his days, but he knew when and how to be silent. The glimpses he gives of Mrs. Emerson, in the long correspondence with Carlyle, are all of the most pleasing ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... a true disciple of Geber," cries Ferret. "No, sir," replied Mr. Clarke, "Counsellor Caper is in the conveyancing way—I was clerk to Serjeant Croker." "Ay, now you may set up for yourself," resumed the other; "for you can prate as unintelligibly as ...
— The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves • Tobias Smollett
... of Minstrels—may they be the last!— On half-strung harps whine mournful to the blast. While mountain spirits prate to river sprites, That dames may listen to the sound at nights; . . . . . . Next view in state, proud prancing on his roan, The golden-crested haughty Marmion, Now forging scrolls, now foremost in the fight, Not quite a felon, yet but ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... the speaker stand in some true relation with his audience, it may be pardonable to imagine that a friend, a kind and apprehensive, though not the closest friend, is listening to our talk; and then, a native reserve being thawed by this genial consciousness, we may prate of the circumstances that lie around us, and even of ourself, but still keep the inmost Me behind its veil. To this extent, and within these limits, an author, methinks, may be autobiographical, without violating either the reader's ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... craze creed tribe drone bean shape steep brine stone bead state sleek spire probe beam crape fleet bride shore lean fume smite blame clear mope spume spite flame drear mold fluke quite slate blear tore flume whine spade spear robe dure spine prate smear poke ...
— McGuffey's Eclectic Spelling Book • W. H. McGuffey
... Pitt: hence this sale of sugar. To the Mother Society, again, it is clear that the scarcity is factitious; is the work of Girondins, and such like; a set of men sold partly to Pitt; sold wholly to their own ambitions, and hard-hearted pedantries; who will not fix the grain-prices, but prate pedantically of free-trade; wishing to starve Paris into violence, and embroil it with the Departments: hence this ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... clatter of the small stones which his own feet dislodged as he feverishly climbed the rocks. Above him, on the other side of the road, towered the hill where he had sat and dreamed as a boy, where Rochester had come and encouraged him to prate of his ambitions. ...
— The Moving Finger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... untravelled heart of Asia Minor, and are now almost in sight of Europe. The camp-fire is extinguished; the tent is furled. We are no longer happy nomads, masquerading in Moslem garb. We shall soon become prosaic Christians, and meekly hold out our wrists for the handcuffs of Civilization. Ah, prate as we will of the progress of the race, we are but forging additional fetters, unless we preserve that healthy physical development, those pure pleasures of mere animal existence, which are now only to be found among ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor
... so lightly of it. If you had had as many as I, perhaps you would change your tune. Anyway, I'm a thief—make the most of that—but I'm not a devil from hell, God strike me dead. I would have you to know I've an honor of my own, as good as yours, though I don't prate about it all day long, as if it were a God's miracle to have any. It seems quite natural to me; I keep it in its box till it's wanted. Why now, look you here, how long have I been in this room with you? ...
— The Great English Short-Story Writers, Vol. 1 • Various
... glad to hear that thou beginnest to prate; and find, by thy Yesterday's Vision, thou art so used to it, that thou canst not forbear talking in thy Sleep. Let me only advise thee to speak like other Men, for I am afraid thou wilt be very Queer, if ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... of him in the council of state, and that the appointment of this or any Spaniard was a violation of the charters of the provinces and of the promises of his Majesty. As if it were for the nobles of the obedient provinces to prate of charters and of oaths! Their brethren under the banner of the republic had been teaching Philip for a whole generation how they could deal with the privileges of freemen and with the perjury of tyrants. It was late in the day for the obedient Netherlanders ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... thousand brothers, Could not, with all their quantity of love Make up my sum: And, if thou prate of mountains, let them throw Millions of acres on us, till our ground Singeing his pate against the burning zone Make ...
— Shakspere, Personal Recollections • John A. Joyce
... me!" cried Laura indignantly. "What you've got you're welcome to, but for Heaven's sake don't prate around here about loyalty and ...
— The Easiest Way - A Story of Metropolitan Life • Eugene Walter and Arthur Hornblow
... he burst out to Doctor Keltridge over a cigar, one day; "we are bound by all our articles of indenture, we preachers, to prate about the hand of the Lord and special Providences, when all the time we know the trouble came out of somebody's running up against simple, scientific law. It's theology, not science, we poor beggars are set up to preach, even in funeral ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... species is a mere screen invented to conceal the massacre of individuals. I'm sick of these biologico-sociologico-anthropologico-historico treatises, with their talk of races, of nations, of classes, never of men! their prate about laws as if they were the real entities, and the people who are supposed to be subject to them mere indifferent particles of stuff! their analysis of the perfection with which the machine works, its combinations, ...
— The Meaning of Good—A Dialogue • G. Lowes Dickinson
... or women, whether strangers or kinsfolk, from whose religion he disagrees. 'It is not ancient impressions only,' said Pascal, 'which are capable of abusing us. The charm of novelty has the same power.' The prate of new-born scepticism may be as tiresome and as odious as the cant of gray orthodoxy. Religious discussion is not to be foisted upon us at every turn either by defenders or assailants. All we plead for is that when the opportunity meets the freethinker full in front, ...
— On Compromise • John Morley
... his hands, looked upwards, and said, "O God, I thank thee—he will live. Hush, hush, my sweet one, thou must not prate;" and he retired on tiptoe, and I heard him mutter triumphantly, as he walked away, "He ...
— Jacob Faithful • Captain Frederick Marryat
... Fate, no Providence, no Chance, The will is all. So be it thou art pure, And strong of purpose, thy success is sure; But fools and sluggards prate of circumstance. ...
— Yesterdays • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... merely suggesting it and giving up when she said no. If you had followed your heart, you would have choked the name and amount out of her and paid that devilish debt. You walk away in a case like that, and then have the nerve to come here and prate to me about following your heart. I'll wager my last dollar your heart is sore because you were not allowed to help her; but on the proposition that you followed its promptings I wouldn't stake a penny. ...
— The Harvester • Gene Stratton Porter
... tragic over it! If your father wins—and as the law stands he can scarcely fail to win—I shall be driven out of Upcote. But there will always be a corner somewhere for me and my books, and a pulpit of some sort to prate from." ...
— The Case of Richard Meynell • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Diomed, with his cloak up to his mouth, 'the night grows cold; I cannot stay here while you prate to that blind girl: come, let her follow you home, if you wish to ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... good appointments and assume leading parts, and to be elected members of the venerable Westminster Assembly! They had not even had the courage to go to New England, though some of them had talked of doing so! And then their prate of this emigration to New England, which they had themselves declined, as the greatest undertaking for the sake of pure Religion, next to Abraham's migration out of his own country, that the world had ever seen! ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... of these quiet old places, there is much to be said that is depressing. While men prate about the decay of trade and the advance of poverty, how few people reflect on the snug fortunes which are amassed in out-of-the-way corners! We hear of jobbery in the metropolis, and jobbery in Government departments, but I take it that the corporations of some ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... of common rumours, cut off the ears and tail of his beautiful dog, and turned him out into the public place, to the end that, giving the people this occasion to prate, they might let his other actions alone. I have also seen, for this same end of diverting the opinions and conjectures of the people and to stop their mouths, some women conceal their real affections by those that were only counterfeit; but I have also ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... set you on? Even for my love then, I beseech you, sir, To seek him out, and lest he prate of me To put your knife into him ere he come forth: Meseems this were not ...
— Chastelard, a Tragedy • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... the rank soil of human frailty, what justification you make to yourselves when you are alone in the watches of the night, and your conscience saith, 'What went ye out for to see?' You will then complain of the bitterness of life, and prate of the refining influences of music; of the help to spiritual-mindedness given by the exhibition on the public stage of mockeries of God's world, wherein some pitiful temporal triumph of simulated virtue in the last act is the apology for the vicious trifling that has gone before. ...
— The Irrational Knot - Being the Second Novel of His Nonage • George Bernard Shaw
... funeral, and still more angry because he would begin explaining and apologizing, first at the levee and then at the drawing-room; and he reprehended him very sharply at both places. An explanation afterwards took place through Lord Camden, to whom he said that he was angry because de Saumarez would prate at the levee, when he told him that it was not a proper ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. III • Charles C. F. Greville
... with Farmer Crouder, "Began to prate of corn; "And we found out they talk'd the louder, "The oftner ...
— Wild Flowers - Or, Pastoral and Local Poetry • Robert Bloomfield
... to you, you said, frequently and copiously: you did not mean, I suppose, that I should always be scribbling, but I cannot help it. I can do nothing but converse with you. When present, my prate is incessant; when absent, I can prate to you with as little intermission; for the pen, used so carelessly and thoughtlessly as I use it, does ...
— Jane Talbot • Charles Brockden Brown
... diminutive—Flossie; or he will build up painfully, inch by inch, a barrier against the name's corroding action. He will boast of his biceps, flexing them the while. He will brag about cold baths. He will prate of chest measurements; regard golf with contempt; and speak of the ...
— Gigolo • Edna Ferber
... the epilogue, by rule, Should come and turn it all to ridicule; Should tell the ladies that the tragic bards, Who prate of Virtue and her vast rewards, Are all in jest, and only fools should heed 'em; For all wise women flock to mother Needham. This is the method epilogues pursue, But we to-night in everything are new. Our author then, in jest throughout the play, Now begs a serious ...
— Miscellanies, Volume 2 (from Works, Volume 12) • Henry Fielding
... doctrines—Ah! that odious, heavy, pompous prose of Wagner. In this erotic comedy there is no action, nothing happens except at long intervals; while the orchestra never stops its garrulous symphonizing. And if you prate to me of the wonderful Wagner orchestration and its eloquence, I shall quarrel with you. Why wonderful? It never stops, but does it ever say anything? Every theme is butchered to death. There is endless repetition in different keys, with different instrumental ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker
... nowhere more so than among those from whom they should not be expected; nowhere more so than among those who are debarred from hope. The great captains of industry so-called, themselves blown full of pride of circumstance, prate often of the inefficiencies of human cattle; yet continually the wonder remains that these same cattle continue to do that which their conscience tells them is right for them to do, and to do it for the sake of the doing. The lives of all of us are daily put in charge of beings entitled fully ...
— The Law of the Land • Emerson Hough
... be correct, was not always thus a watering-place; but seems, for a long period, to have been a place under water. The very stones prate of Neptune's whereabouts in days of langsyne. No one who has seen what heaps of rounded pebbles are gleaned from the corn-fields, or become familiar with the copious remains of fresh water shells and insects, which are kneaded into the calcareous deposits a little ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 365, March, 1846 • Various
... to ache, I shall be sending for your master to talk to you.—You know, gentlemen, what megrims I get, and what a numskull mine is. After drinking, we will chirp a little as is our wont; 'tis not amiss to prate in one's cups' ...
— Works, V2 • Lucian of Samosata
... parrot-prate, I suppose, is only intended to vex me," cried the warrior king, who always considered himself, and very naturally, a person of such consequence as ever to be uppermost in the thoughts and minds of others. "If thou must tell ...
— Vikram and the Vampire • Sir Richard F. Burton
... surrender himself to the devilish necromancies of vicious women and viler men, if he remembered his father's character, and his father's death? No; memory must be a blank, and we, who suffered with our royal master, are fools to prate of ingratitude or neglect, since the son who can forget such a father may well forget his father's servants and friends. But we will not talk of public matters in the first hour of our greeting. Nor need I prate of the King, since ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... latent passion had gripped him, and he was soon in full swing, revelling in all the jests and topicalities of the play, where the strikers and pacifists, the profiteers, the soldiers and munition workers of two thousand odd years ago, fight and toil, prate and wrangle and scheme, as eager and as alive as their descendants of to-day. Soon his high, tempestuous laugh rang out; Elizabeth's gentler mirth answering. Sometimes there was a dispute about a word or a rendering; she would put up her ...
— Elizabeth's Campaign • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... with the British Government, and with those of its advisers who, like Hamilton, advocated the employment of the savages. They thereby became participants in the crimes committed; and it was idle folly for them to prate about having bidden the savages be merciful. The sin consisted in having let them loose on the borders; once they were let loose it was absolutely impossible to control them. Moreover, the British sinned ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Two - From the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, 1777-1783 • Theodore Roosevelt
... be her banner Usurped by you! In prison and in darkness Was born your eagle, that did but descend Upon the helpless prey of Roman dead, But never dared to try the ways of heaven, With its weak vision wounded by the sun. Ye prate of Germany. The whole world conspired, And even more in vain, to work us harm, Before that day when, the world being conquered, Rome slew herself. ... Of man's great brotherhood Unworthy still, ye change not ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... in darkness; Thought will not work except in Silence; neither will Virtue work except in Secrecy. Let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth! Neither shalt thou prate even to thy own heart of "those secrets known to all." Is not Shame (Schaam) the soil of all Virtue, of all good manners and good morals? Like other plants, Virtue will not grow unless its root ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... never have I read an untruth in her pages. There is good intelligence between her and some on board; and, trust me, she knows the paths of the ocean too well, ever to steer a wrong course. But we prate like gossiping river-men.—Wilt see the ...
— The Water-Witch or, The Skimmer of the Seas • James Fenimore Cooper
... rich, a man of great affairs, Steeped to the lips in monetary cares Down at Clazomenae: and some dispute 'Twixt him and King had festered to a suit. Tough, pushing, loud was he, with power of hate To beat e'en King's; so pestilent his prate, That Barrus and Sisenna you would find Left in the running leagues and leagues behind. Well, to return to King: they quickly see They can't agree except to disagree: For 'tis a rule, that wrath is short or long Just as the combatants are weak ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace
... "You prate like a play-actor," he snarled. Halfman's whole being flashed into activity again. He was no more a sentimentalist but ...
— The Lady of Loyalty House - A Novel • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... picture published for her that time; but later she had her very own published by the thousand until the little commoner, born in the most neglected corner of oblivion, grew impudent enough to weary of her fame and prate of the comforts ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... bitter thing, although you speak so lightly of it. If you had had as many as I, perhaps you would change your tune. Anyway, I'm a thief—make the most of that—but I'm not a devil from hell, God strike me dead. I would have you to know I've an honor of my own, as good as yours, though I don't prate about it all day long, as if it were a God's miracle to have any. It seems quite natural to me; I keep it in its box till it's wanted. Why now, look you here, how long have I been in this room with you? Did you not tell me you were alone ...
— The Great English Short-Story Writers, Vol. 1 • Various
... perhaps they have never exchanged a word, in the silly belief they are raising themselves in the estimation of their auditors. It is an odd conceit, yet it prevails with the would-be fast young men of the present day. To hear some of these mollycoddles prate one who was not acquainted with their weaknesses would imagine these chaps were on intimate terms with players—who, as a rule, are slow to cultivate new acquaintances, attend strictly to their own business, and do not particularly relish that particular class of hanger-on. ...
— A Pirate of Parts • Richard Neville
... come when Izdubar will seek The cool enchantment of the cove, and slake His thirst with its sweet waters bubbling pure, Where Love has spread for him her sweetest lure, The maids expectant listening, watch and wait His coming; oft in ecstacies they prate O'er his surprise, and softly sport and splash The limpid waves around, that glowing flash Like heaps of snowy pearls lung to the light By Hea's[1] hands, his Zir-ri[2] to delight. And now upon the rock each maid reclines, ...
— Babylonian and Assyrian Literature • Anonymous
... just come off the "trail," he said, at one of the North River ferries. I fancied I could see the snow dust of Chilcoot yet powdering his shoulders. And then he strewed the table with the nuggets, stuffed ptarmigans, bead work and seal pelts of the returned Klondiker, and began to prate to ...
— The Four Million • O. Henry
... take it and thee! I never heard a man yet begin to prate of his conscience, but I knew that he was about to do something more ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... pardon, Sirs, I prate and prate, And never have I said what brought me here. Sirs, if you want a boat to-morrow morn, I'm bold to say there's ne'er ...
— Poems by Jean Ingelow, In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Jean Ingelow
... reconciling his soul to a God whom he justly regards as the embodiment of crime and ferocity." Those words were not mine; they were from an article by one of my contributors; but I ask any reasonable man whether it is not ludicrous to prate about religious freedom in a country where writers run the risk of imprisonment for a sentence like that? As Mr. Maloney ended the quotation his voice sank to a supernatural whisper, he dropped the paper on the desk before him, and regarded his lordship with a look of pathetic horror, ...
— Prisoner for Blasphemy • G. W. [George William] Foote
... Prate as we may of the triumphant march of Anglo-Saxon liberty, rarely has it received impetus from the masses. Was it not rather the work of the squires and gentlemen? Very truly does M. Taine say, "These three syllables, as used across the channel, summarize the history of English ...
— Bushido, the Soul of Japan • Inazo Nitobe
... O Bharata, never prate about the harsh words that may or may not be uttered by inferior men. Persons that have earned respect for themselves, even if they are able to retaliate, remember not the acts of hostility done by their enemies, but, on the other hand, treasure up ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... but an inscription or writting made as it were vpon a table, or in a windowe, or vpon the wall or mantel of a chimney in some place of common resort, where it was allowed euery man might come, or be sitting to chat and prate, as now in our tauernes and common tabling houses, where many merry heades meete, and scrible with ynke with chalke, or with a cole such matters as they would euery man should know, & descant vpon. Afterward the same came to be put in paper and in bookes, and vsed as ...
— The Arte of English Poesie • George Puttenham
... way from the ideals which originally inspired the revolution. But the situation is so desperate that they could not be blamed if their measures were successful. In a shipwreck all hands must turn to, and it would be ridiculous to prate of individual liberty. The most distressing feature of the situation is that these stern laws seem to have produced so little effect. Perhaps in the course of years Russia might become self-supporting without help from ...
— The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism • Bertrand Russell
... and this I have guessed, and this I have heard men say, And this they wrote that another man wrote of a carl in Norroway." —"Ye have read, ye have felt, ye have guessed, good lack! Ye have hampered Heaven's Gate; There's little room between the stars in idleness to prate! O none may reach by hired speech of neighbour, priest, and kin Through borrowed deed to God's good meed that lies so fair within; Get hence, get hence to the Lord of Wrong, for doom has yet to run, And. . .the ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... immutable, the right to contract marriage must always remain. For where nature does not change, that ordinance also with which God has endowed nature does not change, and cannot be removed by human laws. Therefore it is ridiculous for the adversaries to prate that marriage was commanded in the beginning, but is not now. This is the same as if they would say: Formerly, when men were born, they brought with them sex; now they do not. Formerly, when they were born, they brought with them natural ...
— The Apology of the Augsburg Confession • Philip Melanchthon
... little house, and a little new family; just two of them, and just six months since they were made into a family, and set up housekeeping. As a matter of course everything in the house was new also. One may prate of antiquities, and the associations clinging about them that render them beautiful, but after all, every couple will always look back with delight to the time all their surroundings were fresh and pretty, yes, even though they were not pretty; there is a charm in a new ...
— Divers Women • Pansy and Mrs. C.M. Livingston
... know all! Prate not of most or least, Painful or easy! Even to the crumbs I'd fain eat up the feast, Ay, nor feel queasy." Oh, such a life as he resolved to live, When he had learned it, When he had gathered all books had to give! Sooner, he spurned it. Image the whole, then execute the parts— ...
— Browning's Shorter Poems • Robert Browning
... king of gods can be Full oft in need of recreation,— Who rules the world,—right well may I, Who serve him in that high relation: Amuse me, then, before you fly.' Our cackler, pleased, at quickest rate Of this and that began to prate. Not he of whom old Flaccus writes, The most impertinent of wights, Or any babbler, for that matter, Could more incontinently chatter. At last she offer'd to make known— A better spy had never flown— All things, ...
— The Fables of La Fontaine - A New Edition, With Notes • Jean de La Fontaine
... distinction, are to all intents and purposes married, except the consideration of different sexes. They are directly under the conduct of their whisperer; and think they are in a state of freedom, while they can prate with one of these attendants of all men in general, and still avoid the man they most like. You do not see one heiress in a hundred whose fate does not turn upon this circumstance of chusing a confident. Thus it is that the lady is addressed to, presented and flattered, only by proxy, in her ...
— The Coverley Papers • Various
... fool me!" cried Laura indignantly. "What you've got you're welcome to, but for Heaven's sake don't prate around here about loyalty and honesty. I'm sick ...
— The Easiest Way - A Story of Metropolitan Life • Eugene Walter and Arthur Hornblow
... cannot cog, I cannot prate, 40 Mistress Ford. Now shall I sin in my wish: I would thy husband were dead: I'll speak it before the best lord; I would ...
— The Merry Wives of Windsor - The Works of William Shakespeare [Cambridge Edition] [9 vols.] • William Shakespeare
... again the blust'ring North In angry heaps provokes them forth. If then this world, which holds all nations, Suffers itself such alterations, That not this mighty massy frame, Nor any part of it can claim One certain course, why should man prate, Or censure the designs of Fate? Why from frail honours, and goods lent Should he expect things permanent? Since 'tis enacted by Divine decree That nothing mortal ...
— Poems of Henry Vaughan, Silurist, Volume II • Henry Vaughan
... Why prate of ruined lands out there, Of churches shattered stone by stone? We need not care how others fare, We care but ...
— Mr. Punch's History of the Great War • Punch
... The city papers prate of the competition of Bombay with Manchester and the like. The real competition is the competition of Regent Street with the Rue de Rivoli, of Brighton and the south coast with the Riviera, for the spending money of the American Trusts. What is all this growing love of pageantry, this effusive ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... we, the latest seed of Time— ... not only we that prate Of rights and wrongs, have ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... verse and praise; Nor like a puppy, daggled through the town, To fetch and carry sing-song up and down; Nor at rehearsals sweat, and mouthed, and cried, With handkerchief and orange at my side; But sick of fops, and poetry, and prate, To Bufo left the whole Castillan state. Proud as Apollo on his forked hill, Sat full-blown Bufo, puffed by every quill;[202] Fed with soft dedication all day long, Horace and he went hand in hand ...
— English Satires • Various
... But Christian stayed away from the meeting and carried the hostages off to Denmark against his plighted faith. There Gustav was held prisoner a year. All that winter rumors of great armaments against Sweden filled the land. He heard the young bloods from the court prate about bending the stiff necks in the country across the Sound, and watched them throw dice for Swedish castles and Swedish women,—part of the loot when his fatherland should be laid under the yoke. Ready to burst with anger and grief, he sat silent at their boasts. In the spring he escaped, disguised ...
— Hero Tales of the Far North • Jacob A. Riis
... with the evil eye, do you suppose that I wish you here to bring all the ills you prate of upon my head? I say that I am afraid of you. Why, for your sake, once, years ago, I made a vow to the Blessed Virgin that, whatever I worked on men, I would never again lift a hand against a woman. To that oath I look to help me at the last, for I have kept it sacredly, and am keeping it ...
— Lysbeth - A Tale Of The Dutch • H. Rider Haggard
... case he got stove and went to Davy Jones. Peleg! Peleg! said Bildad, lifting his eyes and hands, thou thyself, as I myself, hast seen many a perilous time; thou knowest, Peleg, what it is to have the fear of death; how, then, can'st thou prate in this ungodly guise. Thou beliest thine own heart, Peleg. Tell me, when this same Pequod here had her three masts overboard in that typhoon on Japan, that same voyage when thou went mate with Captain ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... now with state affairs, I prate of Pitt and Fox; I ask the price of rail-road shares, I watch the turns of stocks: And this is life! no verdure blooms Upon the withered bough. I save a fortune in perfumes,— I'm not a ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, No. - 288, Supplementary Number • Various
... as you will, I deserve it. A man may prate of his own secrets if he like, but he should be careful of those of other people. I trusted yours to ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest
... the same Alcimedon A pair of cups, and round the handles wreathed Pliant acanthus, Orpheus in the midst, The forests following in his wake; nor yet Have I set lip to them, but lay them by. Matched with a heifer, who would prate of cups? ...
— The Bucolics and Eclogues • Virgil
... it so! Confounded be your strife! And perish ye, with your audacious prate! Presumptuous vassals, are you not ashamed With this immodest clamorous outrage To trouble and disturb the king and us? And you, my lords, methinks you do not well To bear with their perverse objections; Much less to take occasion from their mouths To raise a mutiny betwixt yourselves: ...
— King Henry VI, First Part • William Shakespeare [Aldus edition]
... talk with Alessandro. "He was fond enough of me last year, I know," she said to herself, recalling some of the dances and the good-night leave-takings at that time. "It's because he is so put upon by everybody now. What with Juan Can in one bed sending for him to prate to him about the sheep, and Senor Felipe in another sending for him to fiddle him to sleep, and all the care of the sheep, it's a wonder he's not out of his mind altogether. But I'll find a chance, or make one, before this day's sun sets. If I can once get a half-hour ...
— Ramona • Helen Hunt Jackson
... I placed in you, sirrah?' he rejoined, in a terrible voice; and stooping still farther forward he probed me with his eyes. 'You who prate of trust and confidence, who received your life on parole, and but for your promise to me would have been carrion this month past, answer me that? What of the trust ...
— Under the Red Robe • Stanley Weyman
... Humour, Gallantry, Conversation, and Courtship, and shou'dn't endure the chief Lady in the Play a Mute, or to say very little, as 'twas agreeable to them: Our amorous Sparks love to hear the pretty Rogues prate, snap up their Gallants, and Repartee upon 'em on all sides. We shou'dn't like to have a Lady marry'd without knowing whether she gives her consent or no, (a Custom among the Romans) but wou'd be for hearing all the Courtship, all the rare and fine things that Lovers can say to each other. The ...
— Prefaces to Terence's Comedies and Plautus's Comedies (1694) • Lawrence Echard
... or her own controlling Soul, to higher and ever higher perception and attainment. The great majority of the world's inhabitants live with less consciousness of this Spirit than flies or worms—they build up religions in which they prate of God and immortality as children prattle, without the smallest effort to understand either,—and at the Change which they call death, they pass out of this life without having taken the trouble to discover, acknowledge ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... deep I sit and steep My soul in GRANVILLE'S logic. Companions mine, sound ale, good wine— That foils Teetotal dodge—hic! With solemn pate our sages prate, The Pump-slaves neatly pinking. He's proved an ass, whose days don't pass ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101. October 3rd, 1891 • Various
... mused, showed white men, the men of the Anglo-Saxon blood, tireless, restless, working. Only when men of other races, dark-skinned, dark-haired, and dark-eyed, passed his mental vision, was there the stillness of lazy rest; and Marmot was pleased, for he loved to prate of the Anglo-Saxon and the work they had done, and would do, for the world ...
— Colonial Born - A tale of the Queensland bush • G. Firth Scott
... throne a spider swings And snares the people for the kings: "Luther is dead; old quarrels pass; The stake's black scars are healed with grass"; So dreamers prate;—did man e'er live Saw priest or woman yet forgive? But Luther's broom is left, and eyes Peep o'er their creeds to where it lies. Spin, spin, Clotho, spin! Lachesis, twist! and Atropos, sever! In the shadow, year out, year in, The ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various
... bear Such slanders false, devised by hate and spite? Or with stayed patience, reproaches hear, And not revenge by battle or by fight? The Norway Prince hath bought his folly dear, But who with words could stay the angry knight? A fool is he that comes to preach or prate When men with swords their right ...
— Jerusalem Delivered • Torquato Tasso
... gratitude, none of the nobler attributes of man, and whose mission seems but destruction to his race, and deadly enmity to his country. The Times, who in these days of victory and triumph of Union arms, would "steal the livery of heaven to serve the devil in," and prate of its devotion to the Union, furnishes us some information it were well for good citizens to know, and which we will presume is (unlike most statements ...
— The Great North-Western Conspiracy In All Its Startling Details • I. Windslow Ayer
... cried, "what doth this fellow prate of? ... Past love? ... Thou profane boaster! ... how darest thou speak of love to ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... from the congregation which offers the best salary, and probing men of science do not hesitate to reap the harvest from a wonderful invention. Yet it is the fashion with most of the people in this country who possess little to prate about the wickedness of money-getters and to think evil of the rich. That proceeds chiefly from envy, and it is sheer cant. The people of the United States are engaged in an eager struggle to advance themselves—to gain individual distinction, comfort, success, and in New York ...
— Unleavened Bread • Robert Grant
... a blue cup with dragons on it. "At any rate," she continued, "it is very disagreeable of you to come here and prate like a death's-head on ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... past or time to come, but fills all needs With present kindness. She would laugh and talk, Take arms, suffer embraces, even walk The terrace 'neath the eyes of all her fate, And seem to heed what they might show or prate, As if her whole heart's heart were in this house And not at fearful odds and perilous. And should one speak of Paris, as to say, "Would that our lord might see thee go so gay About his house!" Gently she'd bend her head Down to her breast and pluck a vagrant thread ...
— Helen Redeemed and Other Poems • Maurice Hewlett
... must win what it deserves. Let the fool prate of luck. The fortunate Is he whose earnest purpose never swerves, Whose slightest action or inaction serves The one great aim. Why, even Death stands still, And waits an hour ...
— Maurine and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... analyze it or describe it accurately. Yet I may say that others talk of Rome as holy ground, but you alone make me feel that the soil inside the Pomoerium is holy ground: others talk of the grandeur of Rome; you make me realize its grandeur: others prate of their love for Rome: you, saying little, make me tingle with a subtly communicated sense of how you love Rome: others babble of how life away from Rome is not life, but merely existence; of how any dwelling out of Rome is exile, ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... the sugar prate! They do not care one dump About the blacks and their sad state— Just please ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, July 24, 1841 • Various
... great notice of the little boys. He dilated their hearts, and set them a prating; and was pleased with their prate. The doctor, who had never seen him before in the company of children, applauded him for his vivacity, and condescending talk to them. The tenderest father in the world, he said, could not have behaved ...
— The History of Sir Charles Grandison, Volume 4 (of 7) • Samuel Richardson
... to talk in that kind of way, Smooth; 'twill never do! When you Yankees make grave charges, you forget to clothe them with style and dignity: they are things of much importance in government matters, and then it never comes to much for small men to prate against powerful bodies ...
— The Adventures of My Cousin Smooth • Timothy Templeton
... himself. No, he would prate no more of 'going to'. "I'll not ask you to believe it," he said, "until I bring it to you and place ...
— Seven Keys to Baldpate • Earl Derr Biggers
... with Balzac. The more he be read, the harder to detect his bias: he seems, one is almost tempted to say, more like a natural force than a human mind. Persons read two or three—perhaps half a dozen of his books—and then prate glibly of his dark view, his predilection for the base in mankind; when fifty fictions have been assimilated, it will be realized that but a phase of Balzac ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... not die. I bore it, and still live; and it is so much harder for me, because I have to bear it all alone. You have your religion to help you, Margie. Surely that will bear you up! I have heard all you pious people prate enough of its service in time of trouble to ...
— The Fatal Glove • Clara Augusta Jones Trask
... Zubeideh saw, she wept and said, "They ceased not to bring [ill] news of my slave- girl, till she died; methinketh Aboulhusn's death was grievous to her and that she died after him."[FN39]. Quoth the Khalif, "Thou shalt not forestall me with talk and prate. She certainly died before Aboulhusn, for he came to me with his clothes torn and his beard plucked out, beating his breast with two bricks, and I gave him a hundred dinars and a piece of silk and said to him, 'Go, carry her ...
— Tales from the Arabic Volumes 1-3 • John Payne
... speak, thou cursed traitor thou! I'll shame thee, bearing truth of thee to men.' 'Away!' he answered: 'what thou wilt, relate: But, shouldst thou get from hence with breath again, Mention him too so ready with his prate." ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... he had done well by Maestro Diego. Plainly the quick wit of the lad betokened good blood, let him prate ever so surely on ...
— The Flute of the Gods • Marah Ellis Ryan
... Tarleton; "are you going, by your theoretical treatises on philosophy, to make me learn the practical part of it, and prate upon learning while I am supporting ...
— Devereux, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... alone has looked on Beauty bare. Let all who prate of Beauty hold their peace, And lay them prone upon the earth and cease To ponder on themselves, the while they stare At nothing, intricately drawn nowhere In shapes of shifting lineage; let geese Gabble and hiss, but heroes seek release From dusty ...
— American Poetry, 1922 - A Miscellany • Edna St. Vincent Millay
... shoe pinches," replied Eustace; "thou hast found some traitors who have been instilling rebellion into thy youthful ears. Well, if they are found, they shall ere long lack tongues wherewith to prate, and for the present thou must return home with me. Wilt thou go as a freeman ...
— The Rival Heirs being the Third and Last Chronicle of Aescendune • A. D. Crake
... patience, or some debt for indulgence. There's a subject:—let some one write, Fables in illustration of the irony of Fate: and I'll undertake to tack-on my grandmother's maxims for a moral to teach of 'em. We prate of that irony when we slink away from the lesson—the rod we conjure. And you to talk of Fate! It's the seed we sow, individually or collectively. I'm bound-up in the prosperity of the country, and if the ship is wrecked, it ruins my fortune, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... only notices external objects his ideas are confined to sensations; let him only see the physical world around him. If not, you may be sure that either he will pay no heed to you at all, or he will form fantastic ideas of the moral world of which you prate, ideas which you will never efface as long ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... it is your own handiwork. Why shouldn't you look at it? You can tell the world all about it afterwards, if you choose. Nobody would believe you. If they did believe you, they would like me all the better for it. I know the age better than you do, though you will prate about it so tediously. Come, I tell you. You have chattered enough about corruption. Now you shall look ...
— The Picture of Dorian Gray • Oscar Wilde
... executions and coal pits. "In short, I am sick and sorry; and when I have a little repaired my irreparable affairs, away I shall march, either to campaign in Spain, or back again to the East, where I can at least have cloudless skies and a cessation from impertinence. I am sick of fops, and poesy, and prate, and shall leave the whole Castalian state to Bufo, or anybody else. Howbeit, I have written some 4000 lines, of one kind or another, on my travels." With these, and a collection of marbles, and ...
— Byron • John Nichol
... the countenance of the chancellor as he replied—"Such friendship, my lord, as is consistent with perpetual strife—open and concealed—shall, if it please you, subsist between us. Pardon me, but we prate a silly jargon when we talk of private friendship and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... of fresh, withered better than blooming, excellence in the abstract rather than the palpable. With their idle prate of feminine intellect, and a grotto nymph, and a mother of Gracchi! Why, he must think me dazed with admiration of him to talk to me! One listens, you know. And he is one of the men who cast a kind of physical ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... read, and to reflect upon what she read, and to apply it to the purpose for which it is valuable, viz. in enlarging her mind and cultivating her taste; but she had never been accustomed to prate, or quote, or sit down for the express purpose of displaying her acquirements; and she began to tremble at hearing authors' names "familiar in their mouths as household words;" but Grizzy, strong ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier
... sure and firm-set earth, Hear not my steps, which way they walk, for fear The very stones prate of my whereabout, And take the present horror from the time, Which now suits with it." ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... diplomatic slights. Let Napoleon III., they said in effect, imitate the policy of his uncle, who, as long as he dazzled France by triumphs, could afford to laugh at the efforts of constitution-mongers. The big towns might prate of liberty; but what France wanted was glory and strong government. Such were their pleas: there was much in the past history of France to support them. The responsible advisers of the Emperor determined to take a stronger tone in foreign affairs, while the out-and-out ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... valuable, his rent was raised on him, even beyond the value of the improvements he had effected. Woe to the industrious man, for he was taxed upon his industry! And yet who is not familiar with the foolish and the ignorant tribe of scribblers who, with no knowledge of the facts, prate about "the lazy Irish"? And if they were lazy—which I entirely deny—who made them so? Had they no justification for their "laziness"? Why should they wear their lives out so that a rapacious landlord whom they never saw should ...
— Ireland Since Parnell • Daniel Desmond Sheehan
... determined to enter his presence no more. I loved to leap, to run, to swim, to climb trees and to clamber up rocks, to shroud myself in thickets and stroll among woods, to obey the impulse of the moment, and to prate or be silent, just as my humour prompted me. All this I loved more than to go to and fro in the same path, and at stated hours to look off and on a book, to read just as much and of such a kind, to stand up and be seated, ...
— Arthur Mervyn - Or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 • Charles Brockden Brown
... exhibited a confidence in the scheme which was startling. He believed that "the North would not refuse so just a demand if the South should unitedly ask it." Jefferson Davis did not join in the movement, but expressed a hearty contempt for those "who prate of the inhumanity and sinfulness of ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... force me to write a book about Italy myself, to give them 'the loud lie.' They prate about assassination; what is it but the origin of duelling—and 'a wild justice,' as Lord Bacon calls it? It is the fount of the modern point of honour in what the laws can't or won't reach. Every man is liable to it more or less, ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. IV - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... How his arm would put to flight All the forms of Stygian night That round us rise in grim array, Darkening the meridian day: Bigotry, whose chief employ Is embittering earthly joy; Chaos, throned in pedant state, Teaching echo how to prate; And 'Ignorance, with looks profound,' Not 'with eye that loves the ground,' But stalking wide, with lofty crest, In science's ...
— Gryll Grange • Thomas Love Peacock
... utterly deny that it can ever, in any circumstances, be right to destroy or put in jeopardy beautiful things. But for any of those governments which took a hand in the deliberate ruin of the summer palace at Pekin to prate of vandalism and pose as defenders of art is not only disingenuous but silly. The spectacle of European soldiers and statesmen who, to admonish such evil Chinamen as might persist in defending their liberty and their religion, destroyed without demur the masterpieces of Oriental art, the spectacle, ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... this rule along with us, it would not surprise us, if we found the greatest tyrant in the world in some small cottage, with none to oppress but a few unoffending children, and a helpless woman. O! when shall we, be just!—when shall we cease to prate about wrongs inflicted by others, and magnified by being beheld through the haze of distance, and seek to redress those which lie at our own doors, and to redress which we shall only have to prevail upon ourselves to be just and gentle! ...
— Friends and Neighbors - or Two Ways of Living in the World • Anonymous
... liberty; but now—you go with me. And, one word more. Walk gently if you value life, or what may be dearer than life. I am not one to have my will disputed. You will learn as much; but now, I say, walk gently. I wish not to disturb this giddy household: they prate, like others of their sort, of people's doings, and 'tis not ...
— The Buccaneer - A Tale • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... desertion turns this people from us, they will become the prey of our recent enemies, and if that happens we can prate about the Treaty of Paris as much as we like. The Teuton will have more ...
— With the "Die-Hards" in Siberia • John Ward
... many people, who really know better, people who are perfectly capable of intelligent understanding if they didn't let their brains remain asleep or locked tight, go night after night to dinner parties, day after day to other social gatherings, and absent-mindedly prate about this or that without ever taking the trouble to think what they are saying and to whom they are saying it! Would a young mother describe twenty or thirty cunning tricks and sayings of the baby to a bachelor ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... asserted, we purely and simply have no choice to do as we list. This privilege is called license, not liberty. We have certain rights as men, but we have duties, too, as creatures, and it ill-becomes us to prate about our rights, or the duties of others towards us, while we ignore the obligations we are under towards others and our first duty which is to God. Our boasted independence consists precisely in this: that we owe to Him ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton
... I looked from face to face surrounding me, and in most of them I found reflected undoubtedly my own sensations. If it be a good thing to excite this blood thirst in the modern man, then the Mensur is a useful institution. But is it a good thing? We prate about our civilisation and humanity, but those of us who do not carry hypocrisy to the length of self-deception know that underneath our starched shirts there lurks the savage, with all his savage instincts untouched. Occasionally he may be wanted, but we never need fear his dying out. ...
— Three Men on the Bummel • Jerome K. Jerome
... later, John Adams, speaking of a conversation with Arbuthnot, a Boston physician, says: "He began to prate upon the presumption of philosophy in erecting iron rods to draw the lightning from the clouds. He railed and foamed against the points and the presumption that erected them. He talked of presuming upon God, as Peter ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... I am a methodical man. Method is the thing, after all. But there are no people I more heartily despise than your eccentric fools who prate about method without understanding it; attending strictly to its letter, and violating its spirit. These fellows are always doing the most out-of-the-way things in what they call an orderly manner. Now here, I conceive, ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... for instance, is an old wives' story, and the economy of times and seasons a human fabrication:—when Astronomical and Mechanical Science strut up to the Throne whereon sits the Ancient of Days,—prate to Him, (the first Author of Law,) about the "supremacy of Law,"—and tell Him to His face that His miracles are things impossible:—when Physiology insinuates that Mankind cannot be descended from one primval pair; and that the lives of the Patriarchs cannot be such as they ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon
... beneficence, and close the ear to the wail of distress and the cry of suffering; to eulogize the intelligence of the people, and plot to deceive and betray them by means of their ignorance and simplicity; to prate of purity, and peculate; of honor, and basely abandon a sinking cause; of disinterestedness, and sell one's vote for place and power, are hypocrisies as common as they are infamous and disgraceful. To steal the livery of the Court of God to serve the Devil withal; ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... our treasures are wasted out of our houses, and much goods have been sold away to Phrygia and fair Meonia, for the hand of Jove has been laid heavily upon us. Now, therefore, that the son of scheming Saturn has vouchsafed me to win glory here and to hem the Achaeans in at their ships, prate no more in this fool's wise among the people. You will have no man with you; it shall not be; do all of you as I now say;—take your suppers in your companies throughout the host, and keep your watches and be wakeful every man of you. If any Trojan ...
— The Iliad • Homer
... curse upon him, or spit in his face as he walks the streets, but then they have done with him; and a man may live an age in their country without hearing a dozen words from them. But of all the people I ever saw, heaven defend me from the French! With their damned prate and civilities, and doing the honour of their nation to strangers (as they are pleased to call it), but indeed setting forth their own vanity; they are so troublesome, that I had infinitely rather pass my life with the Hottentots than set my foot in Paris again. ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding
... shall that Claribel Measure us back to Naples? Keep in Tunis, 250 And let Sebastian wake." Say, this were death That now hath seized them; why, they were no worse Than now they are. There be that can rule Naples As well as he that sleeps; lords that can prate As amply and unnecessarily 255 As this Gonzalo; I myself could make A chough of as deep chat. O, that you bore The mind that I do! what a sleep were this For your advancement! Do you ...
— The Tempest - The Works of William Shakespeare [Cambridge Edition] [9 vols.] • William Shakespeare
... the offender, add the brand of infamy, Add mutilation: and if this suffice not, Unleash the sword and fire, that in their thirst They may lick up that scum of schismatics. I laugh at those weak rebels who, desiring 235 What we possess, still prate of Christian peace, As if those dreadful arbitrating messengers Which play the part of God 'twixt right and wrong, Should be let loose against the innocent sleep Of templed cities and the smiling fields, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... receive a tributary lay From one who cringeth not to titled state Conventional, and lacketh will to prate Of comeliness—though thine, to which did pay The haughty Childe his tuneful homage, may No minstrel deem a harp-theme derogate. I reckon thee among the truly great And fair, because with genius thou dost sway The thought of thousands, while thy noble heart With pity glows for ...
— The Baron's Yule Feast: A Christmas Rhyme • Thomas Cooper
... loquaciousness; talkativeness &c adj.; garrulity; multiloquence^, much speaking. jaw; gabble; jabber, chatter; prate, prattle, cackle, clack; twaddle, twattle, rattle; caquet^, caquetterie [Fr.]; blabber, bavardage^, bibble-babble^, gibble-gabble^; small talk &c (converse) 588. fluency, flippancy, volubility, flowing, tongue; flow of words; flux de bouche [Fr.], ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... we are—if we only knew! And who knows how much worse? It has petty bickerings, damning lies of spite and malice, trickery and thievery and corruption on its conscience. Let the little people of the world prate of their little things! We are free, dearest—and we defy it, don't we? Our ideals are never lost. And ideals are the life of love. Is love—a love like ...
— One Day - A sequel to 'Three Weeks' • Anonymous
... I can guess well enough how learnedly he would prate, and how little he could do. But I will not object to his visit, if it satisfies you that, since I should die under the hands of the doctors, I may be permitted to indulge my own whim in placing my hopes in a Dervish. Yet stay. You have, doubtless, spoken of me to this ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... fashions from all Europe brought. 'T was in those days an honest grace would hold Till an hot pudding grew at heart a-cold, And men had better stomachs for religion, Than now for capon, turkey-cock, or pigeon; When honest sisters met to pray, not prate, About their own and not their neighbors' state, During Plain Dealing's reign, that worthy stud Of the ancient planter-race before ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
Copyright © 2025 Free-Translator.com
|
|
|
