"Untrue" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... spread; the thought that she was not of the charmed circle of the Melroses, not secretly and romantically akin to them, she was merely the casual object of the old lady's fantastic sense of obligation. Aunt Kate, who had never said what was untrue—who, Norma and her children firmly believed, could not say what was untrue—had taken away, once and for all, the veil of mystery and romance that had wrapped Norma for three ...
— The Beloved Woman • Kathleen Norris
... own fortune. He reaches the culminating point of his wealth generally after he has passed the prime of life. The most flourishing period of a nation's existence is wont just to precede its decay, and to introduce it.(157) Hence, here nothing could be more untrue, as Macchiavelli has remarked, than the general opinion that money is the sinew ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... virtuous lie, To do more for me than mine own desert, And hang more praise upon deceased I Than niggard truth would willingly impart: O! lest your true love may seem false in this That you for love speak well of me untrue, My name be buried where my body is, And live no more to shame nor me nor you. For I am shamed by that which I bring forth, And so should you, to love ...
— Shakespeare's Sonnets • William Shakespeare
... "If not wholly untrue, it is at least very inadequate," continued Brown; "for in point of fact, all that the public knows amounts precisely to this: The public knows that Arthur St. Clare was a great and successful English general. It knows that after splendid yet careful ...
— The Innocence of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... delighted with her compliments, and made her drink water from the glass out of which he had drunk, that she might be sure of his good faith in all he had sworn to her yesterday. "They who drink water from the same cup have made an eternal pact together," he said. "I should not dare to be untrue, even if I would. And thou—I think that thou wilt ...
— The Golden Silence • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... amazement she broke into tears. "Oh, Sir Thomas!" she cried. "In my great haste to return the Sangraal to the chamber and to right the grievous wrong committed by the untrue knight Sir Jason, I did bewray my trust again. For when I espied ye and me and Easy Money in the passage I did suffer a great discomfit, and it so happed that when my steed did enter into a cave that the Sangraal came free from ...
— A Knyght Ther Was • Robert F. Young
... a wicked and untrue story has been circulated—that you cannot, for good reasons, involving other persons, prosecute those responsible for it in the usual way. And if she comes across any signs of it, or its effects, she is to trust your wisdom in dealing with it—and not to be troubled—is ...
— The Case of Richard Meynell • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... poor madcap. Friedrich's ELOGE of him, read to the Academy some time after, it was generally thought (and with great justice), might as well have been spared. The Piece has nothing noisy, nothing untrue; but what has it of importance? And surely the subject was questionable, or more. La Mettrie might have done without Eulogy from a King ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVI. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Ten Years of Peace.—1746-1756. • Thomas Carlyle
... do any thing. I will not. I wash my hands of the whole matter. If the story be true, and Miss Bennett can be guilty of conduct so indecorous, it would never do for me to be mixed up in such an improper proceeding and if untrue, and I accused her of it, I should find myself in a very unpleasant position. So, Mrs. Grey, since you have interfered in this matter, you must carry it out on your own responsibility. If you have taken a grudge against Miss ...
— Christian's Mistake • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... his spacious domain Soon made her untrue to her vows: He dazzled her eyes; He bewildered her brain; He caught her affections so light and so vain, And carried her home as ...
— The Monk; a romance • M. G. Lewis
... give themselves pains to describe gardens and pavilions and other things, and think they are beautifying their work, but this is all dreaming and waste of words; I will have no such hyperbole. (Hyperbole means by definition that which is untrue and incredible.) I will only say of this pavilion that there was not its match ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... upon the Anglo-Egyptian arms, not only during the Khartoum Expedition, but also on their conduct in Egypt and the Soudan since 1882. In the Daily Telegraph and elsewhere I have deservedly stigmatised Mr Bennett's allegations as untrue, ...
— Khartoum Campaign, 1898 - or the Re-Conquest of the Soudan • Bennet Burleigh
... It is very true to say that man is made after the likeness of God; and yet it is very untrue to ...
— Erewhon Revisited • Samuel Butler
... to assert, my lord, that you intend to be untrue to your promise, and to throw over your own engagement because my cousin has expressed her wish to retain property which she believes to be her own!" This was said in a tone which made Lord Fawn surer than ever ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope
... not writing that home. Between gasps she was telling the humours of visiting day in the ward, and of how kind every one was to her, which, if not entirely true, was not entirely untrue. They were kind enough when they had time to be, or when they remembered her. Only they did ...
— Love Stories • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... no one will woo— The thing would be absurd. She is so faithless and untrue, You cannot ...
— Cole's Funny Picture Book No. 1 • Edward William Cole
... someway could not help disliking people who, like Nellis Mitchell, always did what they were asked to do, just to oblige. Also, she dreaded this new plan. She had no one to ask, no one to influence. So she said to herself, gloomily, although (knowing that it was untrue) she did not venture to say it aloud. She gave consent, of course, to the proposition to try by personal effort to increase the number at prayer-meeting. It would be absurd to object to it. She did not care to own that she shrunk ...
— The Chautauqua Girls At Home • Pansy, AKA Isabella M. Alden
... as to the natures of the two sexes, for such generalisations bored him and seemed to him generally untrue. But, knowing Hirst, he guessed fairly accurately what had happened, and, though secretly much amused, was determined that Rachel should not store the incident away in her mind to take its place in the view she ...
— The Voyage Out • Virginia Woolf
... which an enlightened conscience can approve. We do not legislate against the man who uses the printed page for the purpose of deception but, viewed from the standpoint of morals, the man who, whether voluntarily or under instructions, writes what he knows to be untrue or purposely misleads his readers as to the character of a proposition upon which they have to act, is as guilty of wrong-doing as the man who assists in any other ...
— In His Image • William Jennings Bryan
... sinned against the Lord, we have been untrue to our promises; but never again will we neglect His Book, ...
— The Bible in its Making - The most Wonderful Book in the World • Mildred Duff
... will do me the justice to believe that I did not wish to hear him, that I tried to silence him, but he would not be silenced. He told me lies! foul lies about you! lies!" Johnny said passionately, "things which I, knowing you, know to be untrue. Yet he told them. I drove him out of the place. Then he came back. He had remembered what his errand was—blackmail. He came to me for money. But—but he did not stay, and then—" Johnny paused. He had reached the window, ...
— The Imaginary Marriage • Henry St. John Cooper
... champagne; but she never became inebriated.[25] Her purpose in life was too set—she meant to break away. In Nicholas Klick's "Life of Anna Podd" he states that she met the Tsar at a ball, whence she was hired professionally. This statement is entirely untrue; and I am more than surprised that such a talented man as Klick should have made such a ...
— Terribly Intimate Portraits • Noel Coward
... as soon as I discovered that he had annexed my revolver. He says he hasn't taken it. That's untrue of course. A Chinaman would not see the sense of confessing under any circumstances. To deny any charge is a principle of right conduct; but he hardly expected to be believed. He was a little enigmatic at the last, Lena. ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... heroic Greece could never die. Breathless was she, to think what nymphs might play In clear green depths, deep-shaded from the day; She thought the dim and inarticulate god Was beautiful, nor knew she man a sod; But hoped what seem'd might not be all untrue, And feared to look beyond the eternal blue. But now the heavens are bared of dreams divine. Still murmurs she, like Autumn, This was mine! How should she face the ghastly, jarring Truth, That questions all, and tramples without ruth? And still she clings to Ida of her dreams, ...
— Primavera - Poems by Four Authors • Stephen Phillips, Laurence Binyon, Manmohan Ghose and Arthur Shearly Cripps
... I wot well that he is not alive;[113] for (p. 140) which point I put me wholly in your grace. And as for the form of a proclamation which should have been cried in the Earl's name as the heir to the crown of England against you, my liege Lord, called by untrue name Harry of Lancaster, usurper of England, to the intent to have made the more people to have drawn to him and from you; of the which cry Scrope knew not of as from me, but Grey did; having with the Earl a banner of the arms of England, having also the crown ...
— Henry of Monmouth, Volume 2 - Memoirs of Henry the Fifth • J. Endell Tyler
... night The moonlit road A diagnosis of death Moxon's master A tough tussle One of twins The haunted valley A jug of sirup Staley Fleming's hallucination A resumed identity Hazen's brigade A baby tramp The night-doings at "Deadman's" A story that is untrue Beyond the wall A psychological shipwreck The middle toe of the right foot John Mortonson's funeral The realm of the unreal John Bartine's watch A story by a physician The damned thing Haita the shepherd An inhabitant ...
— Can Such Things Be? • Ambrose Bierce
... very opposite results to Schiller's reputation. Among the young men of Germany it was received with an enthusiasm absolutely unparalleled, though it is perfectly untrue that it excited some persons of rank and splendid expectations (as a current fable asserted) to imitate Charles Moor in becoming robbers. On the other hand, the play was of too powerful a cast not in any case to have alarmed his serenity ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... fallen men made John happy, because he feared that his aim had been untrue. Both had been severely wounded, and when an hour afterwards both men were able to move, thanks to the knowledge and care of John, they were carried into ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: Treasures of the Island • Roger Thompson Finlay
... heavy burden, or who is overwhelmed by the magnitude of the truths to which it attaches, or who wishes, with a kind of half-doubt, that these things might be seen and felt. They are great, they are incomprehensibly great; but are they therefore untrue? Does not your heart of hearts tell you they are true? Does not that Revelation of Christ steal into your soul and feed it, satisfy it, as nothing else can, with a warm, benignant power, that ...
— The Crown of Thorns - A Token for the Sorrowing • E. H. Chapin
... went on, "Mrs. Stapleton and Dulcie are now tremendous friends, and I believe that Mrs. Stapleton is trying to make Dulcie dislike me; I believe she says things about me to Dulcie that are untrue, and I think that Dulcie believes some of the things ...
— The Four Faces - A Mystery • William le Queux
... she deemed untrue, The light they hailed to her was dim, But that the Christ was kind she knew, She knew that she must be like Him. Like Mary, in her darkened home, She sighed, "O ...
— The Empire of Love • W. J. Dawson
... Company's having ever issued orders, or recommended any particular measures for the preservation of the larger animals, male or female, the statement is positively untrue. The minutes of the Council are considered the statutes of the land, and in them the provision districts are directed to furnish so many bags of pemmican, so many bales of dry meat, and so many cwt. of grease, every year; and no reference whatever is made to restrictions ...
— Notes of a Twenty-Five Years' Service in the Hudson's Bay Territory - Volume II. (of 2) • John M'lean
... unites a soul with Christ, no man can break the bond of union. Sin, and sin only, will sever the tie that binds them together. When God unites husband and wife into one flesh and bone, no civil court can break the bond. When woman has become so untrue to her husband and false to her marriage vow as to have sexual connection with another man, God allows such an unchaste sin, and such a sin only, to dissolve the union. Why is fornication the only just cause for disuniting ...
— The Gospel Day • Charles Ebert Orr
... the utter perfection of the night suggested to me the idea of perfection generally; what a mortal may come to when at his best. Such a view of nature as I was having puts one out of conceit, I believe, with whatever is out of order, unseemly, or untrue, or what for any reason misses the end of its existence. Then rose the question, what is the end of existence?—but I did not mean to give you my moralizings, Queen Esther; I have drifted into it. I can tell you, though, that my moralizing got a ...
— A Red Wallflower • Susan Warner
... that disdainful face, kind and tender and loving! A face she had once delighted to dwell upon! And Isabel had been very good to her once—when others had not been kind, and when Swansdown, her natural protector, had been scandalously untrue to his trust. Isabel had loved her then; and now, how was she about to requite her? Was she to let her know her to be false—not only in thought but in reality! Could she live and see that pale face in imagination filled with ...
— April's Lady - A Novel • Margaret Wolfe Hungerford
... he will never get united counsels, nor will he know how to unite them. Each of the counsellors will think of his own interests, and the prince will not know how to control them or to see through them. And they are not to found otherwise, because men will always prove untrue to you unless they are kept honest by constraint. Therefore it must be inferred that good counsels, whencesoever they come, are born of the wisdom of the prince, and not the wisdom of the ...
— The Prince • Niccolo Machiavelli
... others reliable information concerning several extremely abnormal women of the above-described type who are taking an active interest in the sex-instruction of young people and are actually suggesting to their friends among young women the dangerous and untrue doctrine that prolonged celibacy for women results in repressed sexuality that surely leads to ill health. Such ideas, it is true, are traceable to certain well-known radical writers on the psychopathology of sex; but we must remember that the great majority of physicians ...
— Sex-education - A series of lectures concerning knowledge of sex in its - relation to human life • Maurice Alpheus Bigelow
... story not in itself spirited and absorbing. If from the personal experiences with which this first novel is crowded Kingsley excluded everything that might be unfavourable to the reputation of Australia and its people, he at least told nothing that was untrue. His record of the country is a generous one, but there is no flattery—at least, none ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne
... devised. Did it not suffice thee to take my kingdom and that of my father, but thou must go about to kill me?" And Sasan swore a vain oath that he had not plotted his death and that the report was untrue. So Kanmakan forgave him and said to him, "Follow me." Quoth he, "I cannot walk a single step for weakness." "If the case be thus," replied Kanmakan, "we will get us two horses and ride forth and seek the open country." So they took ...
— The Book Of The Thousand Nights And One Night, Volume II • Anonymous
... our officers would have considered themselves unfaithful to Salvation Army traditions and history, and untrue to those who had gone before, if they had deserted any post, or shirked any duty, because cloaked with the ...
— The War Romance of the Salvation Army • Evangeline Booth and Grace Livingston Hill
... coming of the mendicant before our purses are opened. By these means alone do we judge the extent of suffering in the land, and, not hearing of many cases of penury, or receiving many applications for assistance, we believe that the assertions of great want being among the people are untrue, and we purposely avoid searching for the truth of such assertions. The design of the author, in this little book, has been to open the eyes of the people to the truth. If he has painted the trials of the ...
— The Trials of the Soldier's Wife - A Tale of the Second American Revolution • Alex St. Clair Abrams
... evening, Anne was not entirely aloof. It was perfectly clear to Sara, that with Armitage, strong and clever in a wholesome masculine way, Anne was the light-hearted, mischievous, pure-minded girl—his ideal of American young womanhood. But now she caught the other note of her character—an untrue note, but none the less positive—and the other look in her eyes. Her voice was deeper, more womanly, more surcharged with underlying things, as she spoke to the Russian, and Sara could see she was ...
— Prince or Chauffeur? - A Story of Newport • Lawrence Perry
... transparent than the nature of a judging life. One man goes through the world and finds it suspicious, inclined to wrong-doing, full of capacity for evil, and he judges it with his ready gossip of depreciation. He may be in all this reporting what is true, or he may be stating what is untrue; but one truth he is reporting with entire precision,—the fact that he is himself a suspicious and ungenerous man; and this disclosure of his own heart, which, if another hinted at it, he would resent, ...
— Mornings in the College Chapel - Short Addresses to Young Men on Personal Religion • Francis Greenwood Peabody
... this matter has been represented would reflect dishonesty upon the Secretary, which would be untrue. No one who knows him will, or can accuse him of dishonesty. I love truth, honesty and religion; I do not mean, however, the religion that Barnum believes in: (I believe that the wicked are punished in another world.) I ask the reader to look at my situation ...
— History of the American Clock Business for the Past Sixty Years, - and Life of Chauncey Jerome • Chauncey Jerome
... persons who are enthusiastic and yet not straightforward; nor those who are ignorant and yet not attentive; nor again those folks who are simple-minded and yet untrue. ...
— Chinese Literature • Anonymous
... in this man had been untrue, but recent events and the first shattering reverse that life brought him proved sufficient to sour his very soul and eclipse a sun which aforetime shone with great geniality because unclouded. Fate hits such men particularly hard when ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... he is sacrificing his prospects. Or, again, he is invited to join in some popular movement which he believes to be of a questionable or pernicious tendency, and, because he believes that to take part in it would be untrue to his own convictions and possibly harmful to others, he refrains from doing so, at the risk of losing preferment, or custom, or patronage. Then, we are all familiar with the difficulties in which ...
— Progressive Morality - An Essay in Ethics • Thomas Fowler
... against the proper unity of our European story but also produce a warped attitude in the mind. Such men as are deceived by false accounts of the fate of Britain at the entry into the Dark Ages, take for granted many other things historically untrue. Their presumptions confuse or conceal much else that is historical truth: for instance, the character of the Normans; and even contemporary and momentous truth before our eyes today: for instance, the gulf between Englishmen and Prussians. ...
— Europe and the Faith - "Sine auctoritate nulla vita" • Hilaire Belloc
... knight, Hugh de Lacy, whom their kinsman had so treacherously slain; but they did no more of this than one large stone of granite, and no inscription thereon: thus showing that at all times, and with all men, the O'Caharneys were false knaves and untrue to their word.' ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... is the tri-color, or my eyes are untrue to my own country. Let me see, Etooell; what ship of forty-two, or forty-four, has the ...
— The Wing-and-Wing - Le Feu-Follet • J. Fenimore Cooper
... nice young refugee, does both for me most times. My mother, poor old soul, wrote the other day to know why I only signed my letters, so I had to say my eyes pained me, which was not so untrue as the rest ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... incestuous persons could he find of all those? Our God be thanked, although we be not the men we ought and profess to be, yet, whosoever we be, compare us with these men, and even our own life and innocency will soon prove untrue and condemn their malicious surmises. For we exhort the people to all virtue and well-doing, not only by books and preachings, but also with our examples and behaviour. We also teach that the Gospel is not a boasting or bragging of knowledge, but that it is the ...
— The Apology of the Church of England • John Jewel
... virtuous acts, such as charity, honesty, propriety, chastity, truthfulness, are conduct forced by the teachings of ancient sages against his natural inclination. Therefore vices are congenial and true to his nature, while virtues alien and untrue to ...
— The Religion of the Samurai • Kaiten Nukariya
... York City first, last and all the time. Occasionally it is loyal to a presidential candidate, but more often it is disloyal. Trades are always possible. For instance, it was true to Mr. Cleveland in 1884 and untrue in 1888. It was true again in 1892, and there is no doubt that at the last general election its members were told to knife Mr. Bryan whenever ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... soon as they had promised and vowed. Out of this simple fact I hear the Debats de Paris has quoted Miss H. as 'autrefois tres liee avec le celebre,' &c. &c. I am obliged to him for the celebrity, but beg leave to decline the liaison, which is quite untrue; my liaison was with the father, in the unsentimental shape of long lawyers' bills, through the medium of which I have had to pay him ten or twelve thousand pounds within these few years. She was not pretty, and I suspect that the indefatigable Mr. A—— was (like ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... happiness. Alas! it is not good for the full-grown man to look too closely at these old acquaintances, but rather to reverence them at a distance through the medium of years that have gathered duskily between. There was something laughably untrue in their pompous stride and exaggerated sentiment; they were neither human nor tolerable likenesses of humanity, but fantastic maskers, rendering heroism and nature alike ridiculous by the grave absurdity of their ...
— A Select Party (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... trust that child with such a message. But you know us of old; you know we do not forsake our friends for considerations of self-interest or outward semblance. We act as we deem right; we do not heed untrue constructions. There are many things I desire ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... unconcerned with the offences for which Vivie was on trial; prepared to swear to anything; to swear he arranged the conflagrations; that Miss Warren had really been in London when witness had seen her purchasing explosives at Newmarket (both stories were equally untrue). Bertie Adams only asked to be allowed to perjure himself to the tune of Five Years' penal servitude if that would set Vivie free. Yet at a word or a look from ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... decided that there were mitigating circumstances. All right; penitentiary for life. "Next case!" Suddenly a voice is heard from among the spectators; it is the murderer's sweetheart, who shouts: "His confession is untrue; he has not committed murder! How could he possibly have done it; no one who knows him will believe it! And there are mitigating circumstances; you cannot sentence him, for it wasn't premeditated murder! No, Henry is innocent! Won't any of you ...
— Shallow Soil • Knut Hamsun
... enfeebling him, morally and physically; diverting him from the beautiful arts; weakening his parental love; divorcing him from grand themes and thoughts. He could never marry this woman. Their heart-strings must have been wrung by some final parting; and now that she had been proved untrue, was it not most unmanly that he should permit her to stand even in the threshold of his mind? It was a good riddance, he said, pacing the floor in the firelight; but just then he glanced into the great mirror, and stood fixed to mark the pallor of his face. Say what he might, laugh ...
— Bohemian Days - Three American Tales • Geo. Alfred Townsend
... the Revelation of which we spoke a moment ago. And he knew its notes—well he knew them— knew that they were from republican Geneva, and that kingly pretensions had short shrift with them. James told the conference that these notes were "very partial, untrue, seditious, savoring too much of traitorous and dangerous conceits," supporting his opinion by two instances which seemed disrespectful to royalty. One of these instances was the note on Exodus 1:17, where the ...
— The Greatest English Classic A Study of the King James Version of • Cleland Boyd McAfee
... at him. The statement about the sponges was obviously untrue. There is no sponge fishery in Rosnacree Bay. There never has been. Miss Rutherford, so to ...
— Priscilla's Spies 1912 • George A. Birmingham
... to see if they vibrate truly. This is done by twanging, so that two distinct outlines are shown; if any dimness appear, or the lines wobble, as I may say, try again, for such are false. Not always, though; for I have known this rule (for it is a rule) falsified, and a good string appear untrue ...
— Violin Making - 'The Strad' Library, No. IX. • Walter H. Mayson
... nation at that time. "The king, our sovereign lord, remembereth how, by our unlawful maintainances, giving of liveries, signs, and tokens, retainders by indentures, promises, oaths, writings, and other embraceries of his subjects, untrue demeanings of sheriffs in making panels, and untrue returns by taking money, by juries, etc. the policy of this nation is most subdued." It must indeed be confessed, that such a state of the country ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part C. - From Henry VII. to Mary • David Hume
... treacherous Love! Enemy Of all that mankind may not rue! Most untrue To him who keeps most faith with thee. Woe is me! The falcon has the eyes of the dove. Ah, Love! Perjured, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... this laudable desire has been my chief incitement in the preparation of the following pages, but I should be untrue to my own devotion to Lake Tahoe, which has extended over a period of more than thirty years, were I to ignore the influence the Lake's beauty has had over me, and the urge it has placed within me. Realizing and feeling these ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
... still had in mind the conquest of Babylon. But Jeremiah had preached all his life that Nebuchadrezzar was God's chosen servant for smiting the nations, Egypt among them. He had, many times, dared death rather than dare be untrue to God and to his mission as a prophet. Therefore, in Tehaphenes, before Pharaoh's palace, Jeremiah ...
— Stories of the Prophets - (Before the Exile) • Isaac Landman
... God himself, Kirsty was inexorable. Left alone with that last terrible look from the eyes of the one being he loved, he threw himself in despair on the ground. True love is an awful thing, not to the untrue only, but sometimes to the growing-true, for to everything that can be burned it is a consuming fire. Never more, it seemed, would those eyes look in at his soul's window without that sad, indignant repudiation in them! He rose, ...
— Heather and Snow • George MacDonald
... of common mortar, of broken walking-sticks and cheap tobacco. Years afterwards I discovered that this intolerable prosaic bore had been, in fact, a poet. I learnt that every item of this multitudinous information was totally and unblushingly untrue, that for all I knew he had made it up as he went along; that no tons of rust are scraped off the Menai Bridge, and that the rival tradesmen and Mr. Whiteley were creatures of the poet's brain. Instantly I conceived consuming respect for the man who was so circumstantial, so monotonous, so entirely ...
— The Defendant • G.K. Chesterton
... that the Moslem Albanians drove some sheep on to a Christian grazing-ground; that the Christians drove them off again and so the fight began; that all the Christians there wore Montenegrin caps, and so the tale of the officer was untrue. The Moslems swore to the truth of the officer tale. Judging by the celerity with which the Montenegrin troops were despatched to the frontier I incline to think it was "a put ...
— Twenty Years Of Balkan Tangle • Durham M. Edith
... tale untrue, Keep probability in view. The traveller leaping o'er those bounds, The credit of his book confounds. Who with his tongue hath armies routed, Makes even his real courage doubted: But flattery never seems ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... 'The Memoirs of a Parish Clerk, says he, was a very dull, and unjust abuse of the bishop of Sarum (who wrote in defence of our religion and constitution) who has been dead many years.' 'This also, continues the author of the Notes to the Dunciad, is likewise untrue, it being known to divers, that these Memoirs were written at the seat of the lord Harcourt in Oxfordshire, before the death of bishop Burnet, and many years before the appearance of that history, of ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Vol. IV • Theophilus Cibber
... John. But I found that the Church had been deceiving me. I found that the clergy did not understand their own book. I found that they had been building upon passages that had been interpolated. I found that they had been building upon passages that were entirely untrue. And I will tell you ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll, Volume I • Robert Green Ingersoll
... accidental sort of way, struggling through the unreal part of life, I havnt always been able to live up to my ideal. But in my own real world I have never done anything wrong, never denied my faith, never been untrue to myself. Ive been threatened and blackmailed and insulted and starved. But Ive played the game. Ive fought the good fight. And now it's all over, theres an indescribable peace. [He feebly folds his hands and utters his creed] ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma • George Bernard Shaw
... with his beams hot Scorched the fruits in vale and mountain, Philon the shepherd, late forgot, Sitting beside a crystal fountain, In shadow of a green oak tree Upon his pipe this song play'd he: Adieu Love, adieu Love, untrue Love, Untrue Love, untrue Love, adieu Love; Your mind is light, ...
— Tudor and Stuart Love Songs • Various
... has been well said, deprive books for children of the "shadow-side" of life, because in that case they become artificial and untrue, and the child rejects them. "For the very reason that in the stories of the Old Testament we find envy, vanity, evil desire, ingratitude, craftiness and deceit among the fathers of the Jewish race, and the leaders of God's chosen people, have they so ...
— The Education of American Girls • Anna Callender Brackett
... cruising all social coasts and making port in none where there is not a hotel or cottage life as empty and exclusive as its own. Even in trying to understate the sort, one overstates it. Nothing could be more untrue to its reality than the accentuation of traits which in the arrivals of society elsewhere and elsewhen have marked the ultimation of the bourgeois spirit. Say that the Puritan, the Pilgrim, the Cavalier, and the Merchant Adventurer have come and gone; say that ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... as his name betrays—was an ardent Chartist, and before the Reform Bill was introduced he said in the House that he had been accused of being a personal enemy of King William's. This was quite untrue, for if there were only good laws he did not care if the ...
— The Reminiscences of an Irish Land Agent • S.M. Hussey
... broken promises, but I shall keep those made to you. You are my turning-point. You are to be my wife. I have fancied myself in love often before and been mistaken, but the man does not live who could be untrue to a girl like you. You have made a man of me. I will be true—I will be honest with you. I swear ...
— The Desired Woman • Will N. Harben
... history and mixed up the white handkerchief of the Huguenots of Nantes with the strike-breakers of Pennsylvania. It is needless to repeat (as Mr. Robert A. Pinkerton stated at the time), that the white label story is ridiculously' untrue, and that it was the strikers who attacked the watchmen, and not the watchmen the strikers. One striker and ...
— Courts and Criminals • Arthur Train
... have been translated into many foreign languages. His is a household name in France and England-in fact, the latter nation has often uttered the reproach that Poe's own country has been slow to appreciate him. But that reproach, if it ever was warranted, certainly is untrue. ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... in the city of Richmond, Va., made the bold statement that of the many thousands of patents annually granted by our government to the inventors of our country, "not a single patent had ever been granted to a colored man." Of course this statement was untrue, but what of that? It told its tale, and made its impression—far and wide; and it is incumbent upon our race now to outrun that story, to correct that impression, and to let the ...
— The Colored Inventor - A Record of Fifty Years • Henry E. Baker
... dramatic, but it is not true, for Dickens never saw the wind thus, else his metaphors would have been less mixed. What we see truly with our imagination we see clearly, and the metaphors born of clear sight are ever pure. Hence such description is extravagant because untrue; hence such description is demoralizing because ...
— Lectures on Russian Literature - Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenef, Tolstoy • Ivan Panin
... said has increased my respect and esteem for you fourfold: and, if it has also added to the bitterness of my disappointment, I will not have you reproach yourself; for I would rather reverence you as the wife of another than to claim you as my own, and know you untrue to yourself. And now, dear, the subject ...
— Outpost • J.G. Austin
... thinks that I have been—have been mopish, and lack-a-daisical, and—and—almost untrue. I can hear it in the tone of his voice, and see it in his eye. I can tell it from the way he shakes hands with me in the morning. He is such a true man that I know in a moment what he means at all ...
— The Vicar of Bullhampton • Anthony Trollope
... sacrifice By th' ebon bowes that guard thine eyes, Which now are alter'd white, And by the glorious light Of both those stars, which of their spheres bereft, Only the gellie's left. Then changed thus, no more I'm bound to you, Then swearing to a saint that proves untrue. ...
— Lucasta • Richard Lovelace
... of Napoleon Bonaparte herewith presented, if judged from the viewpoint of the historian or the biographer, are absurdly and grotesquely untrue; but to the anthropologist and the student of human nature they are extremely valuable as self-revelations of national character; and even to the historian and the biographer they have some interest as evidences of the profoundly deep impression ...
— Folk-Tales of Napoleon - The Napoleon of the People; Napoleonder • Honore de Balzac and Alexander Amphiteatrof
... word she spoke, not loudly, for her voice was low and soft, but with an accent which carried it sharply to his ear and to his brain. And then she rose from her seat as she went on. "Your scorn, uncle, is unjust,—unjust and untrue. I have ever acted maidenly, as has become my ...
— The House of Heine Brothers, in Munich • Anthony Trollope
... that time, named Macy, tells the following story of an incident which, for the sake of English manhood, one trusts is untrue. Among others who went to see Joan of Arc in her prison came one day the Earl of Warwick, with Lord Stafford and Ligny—Joan's former jailer. The latter told her in a jeering way that he had come to buy her back from the English, provided she promised never again ...
— Joan of Arc • Ronald Sutherland Gower
... lifeless, they cannot speak; I know, for I have cried aloud to them. The Purana and the Koran are mere words; lifting up the curtain, I have seen. Kabr gives utterance to the words of experience; and he knows very well that all other things are untrue. ...
— Songs of Kabir • Rabindranath Tagore (trans.)
... must be done' and are perfectly unable to say what. They admit Christ's miracles: 'This man doeth many miracles,' but they are not a bit the nearer to recognising His mission, being therein disobedient to their law and untrue to their office. They fear that any disturbance will bring Rome's heavy hand down on them, and lead to the loss of what national life they still possess. But even that fear is not patriotism nor religion. It is pure self-interest. 'They will ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... place, no reason for supposing that the focus is either a point or a sphere, or that the initial impulse is uniform in all directions. If the earthquake were caused by fault-slipping, both assumptions would be untrue, and it is for those who employ the method to prove ...
— A Study of Recent Earthquakes • Charles Davison
... course, be urged that these complete maternal families are exceptions, and thus to dismiss them as unimportant. But this is surely an unscientific way of settling the question. One has to accept these cases, or to prove that they are untrue. Moreover, I have by no means exhausted the evidence; and to these complete maternal families might be added examples from other tribes which would furnish similar proofs, but there is such consistency of ...
— The Position of Woman in Primitive Society - A Study of the Matriarchy • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... returned, and thought How possibly the thing might be untrue: That some one (so he hoped, desired, and sought To think) his lady would with shame pursue; Or with such weight of jealousy had wrought To whelm his reason, as should him undo; And that he, whosoe'er the thing had planned, Had ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... memoirs from the region of actuality; they bristle with the kind of coincidences which are the common convenience of bad novelists to create or escape situations, and are rejected even by legitimate fiction, because they are untrue to life. At the present time the device of coincidence is left to its true monopolists, the Society for Psychical Research and the manufacturers of the penny dreadful. Unreasonable demands are, however, made upon it by Dr Bataille; never in an awkward predicament does the coincidence fail to help ...
— Devil-Worship in France - or The Question of Lucifer • Arthur Edward Waite
... my passion I impart, You deem my words untrue, O place your hand upon my heart— Feel how it ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... the power of abdication, and no fact of history is more certain than that a sovereign Parliament has more than once abdicated or shared its powers. To argue or imply that because sovereignty is not limitable (which is true), it cannot be surrendered (which is palpably untrue) is to confuse together two distinct ideas, and is like arguing that because no man can while he lives give up, do what he will, his freedom of volition, therefore no man can ...
— England's Case Against Home Rule • Albert Venn Dicey
... in their way, as what else should they be, children of men and women as they are? Just as with human friends so with book friends, first impressions are often misleading; good literary coin sometimes seems to ring untrue, but the untruth is in the ear of the reader, not of the writer. For instance, Trollope has many odd and irritating tricks which are apt to scare off those who lack perseverance and who fail to understand that ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope
... sensibly to sight, Till out of myriad pregnant waves there welled Young crocodiles, a gaunt blunt-featured crew, Fresh-hatched perhaps and daubed with birthday dew. The rest if I should tell, I fear my friend, My closest friend, would deem the facts untrue; And therefore it were wisely left untold; Yet if you will, why, hear it ...
— Poems • Christina G. Rossetti
... reason and philosophy, but not Scripture, tell us to be false, must be taken as true if we are io follow the guidance of our author, for according to him, reason has nothing to do with the matter. (39) Further, it is untrue that Scripture never contradicts itself directly, but only by implication. (40) For Moses says, in so many words (Deut. iv:24), "The Lord thy God is a consuming fire," and elsewhere expressly denies that God has any ...
— A Theologico-Political Treatise [Part III] • Benedict de Spinoza
... reasoning processes. And the habit mind hates to be disturbed and compelled to revise its ideas. It fights against it, and rebels, and the result is that many of us are slaves to old outgrown ideas that we realize are false and untrue, but which we find that we "cannot exactly get rid of." In our future lessons we will give methods to get rid ...
— A Series of Lessons in Raja Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... and comfort of even such a refuser as this, I would say: Nothing which you reject can be such as it seems to you. For a thing is either true or untrue: if it be untrue, it looks, so far like itself that you reject it, and with it we have nothing more to do; but, if it be true, the very fact that you reject it shows that to you it has not appeared true,—has not appeared itself. The truth can never be even beheld but by the ...
— A Dish Of Orts • George MacDonald
... Berry. "And how untrue! Naturally ascetic, but for the insistence of my physicians, I should long ago have let my hair grow and subsisted entirely on locusts and motionless lemonade. But a harsh Fate ruled otherwise. Excuse ...
— Jonah and Co. • Dornford Yates
... vilifies his faith by apologetic articles in this or that secular review, in which he attempts to show that the Church which taught the inspiration of Genesis and condemned Galileo was all the time not untrue to the scientific conceptions of Copernicus and Darwin, is a very poor person in the eyes of many of us; and one thing is abundantly certain, that by no possibility could even Mrs. Ward have made him the hero of a novel. For a Helbeck, who has reckoned ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... just and impartial historian will, some day, write a history covering the Reconstruction period, in which an accurate account based upon actual facts of what took place at that time will be given, instead of a compilation and condensation of untrue, unreliable and grossly exaggerated statements taken from ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various
... The billiard sharp whom any one catches, His doom's extremely hard— He's made to dwell In a dungeon cell On a spot that's always barred. And there he plays extravagant matches In fitless finger-stalls, On a cloth untrue With a twisted ...
— Bab Ballads and Savoy Songs • W. S. Gilbert
... their idea and system of law. The fact is important as a reminder that what is one real aspect, or, perhaps, the most complete and consistent representation of a system on paper, may be inadequate and untrue as an exhibition of its real working and ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church
... subsequent term of employment at Whitby, the excellent character he gained when he went to sea, and Professor J.K. Laughton's statement that he left Staithes 'after some disagreement with his master,' there seems every reason to believe that the story is untrue. If it were otherwise, the towering monument on Easby Moor would be a ...
— Yorkshire—Coast & Moorland Scenes • Gordon Home
... Homoeopathy that there is a resemblance between the effects of the vaccine virus on a person in health and the symptoms of small-pox. Therefore, according to the rule, the vaccine virus will cure the small-pox, which, as everybody knows, is entirely untrue. But it prevents small-pox, say the Homoeopathists. Yes, and so does small-pox prevent itself from ever happening again, and we know just as much of the principle involved in the one case as in the other. For this is ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... necessarily injure me with the house? How are two fellows to get on together unless they can put some trust in each other? Even if I did run you into a difficulty, do you really think I'm ruffian enough to tell you that the money was there if it were untrue?" ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... People would come to see us—ladies in fine clothes, and gentlemen with oily hair. I think they wanted to help us. Many of them had kind voices. But always a hard look would come into her face, and she would tell them what even then I knew to be untrue—it was one of the first things I can recollect—that we had everything we wanted, that we needed no help from anyone. They would go away, shrugging their shoulders. I grew up with the feeling that seemed to have been burnt into my brain, that to take from anybody anything you had not earned ...
— Tommy and Co. • Jerome K. Jerome
... has given rise to this fallacy, this exaggeration of the vulgarity and curiosity of the press, is the distinction between the articles and the headlines; or rather the tendency to ignore that distinction. The few really untrue and unscrupulous things I have seen in American 'stories' have always been in the headlines. And the headlines are written by somebody else; some solitary and savage cynic locked up in the office, hating all mankind, and raging and revenging himself at random, while the neat, ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... London Times Mr. Davis denounces as 'a foreigner's slander against the government, the judiciary, and people of Mississippi;' 'very well for the high Tory paper as an attack upon our republican government;' as 'untrue;' 'the hypocritical cant of stockjobbers and pensioned presses' 'reckless of reputation;' 'hired advocates of the innocent stock dealers of London 'Change;' 'a calumnious imputation.' These are pleasant epithets which Mr. Jefferson Davis applied to ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 2, August, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... friends wrote to me on one of my later travels abroad, may serve as an introduction to what I have here to relate. He wrote in his own peculiar style:—"It is your vivid imagination which creates the idea of your being despised in Denmark; it is utterly untrue. You and Denmark agree admirably, and you would agree still better, if there were in Denmark no theatre—Hinc illae lacrymae! This cursed theatre. Is this, then, Denmark? and are you, then, nothing but a writer for ...
— The True Story of My Life • Hans Christian Andersen
... replied, "is the street lamp which guides us. To call it untrue is as hopeless as to expect to see better by plucking out our ...
— The Home and the World • Rabindranath Tagore
... yet so strangely excited—it was here, out of this confusion of voices and explanations, that—very stealthily—the ghost of something horrible slipped in and stood among us. It made all our explanations seem childish and untrue; the false relation was instantly exposed. Eyes exchanged quick, anxious glances, questioning, expressive of dismay. There was a sense of wonder, of poignant distress, and of trepidation. Alarm stood waiting at our elbows. ...
— Three More John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... particularly our section of it, has rather an unpleasant way of putting things. I should not like to have a son of mine accused of such motives even though I knew it to be untrue." ...
— The Music Master - Novelized from the Play • Charles Klein
... impossible to convey to the reader an idea of the awful excitement that always prevailed among his followers, when under the direct leadership of McDonald himself. Even the attempt to do so would be called exaggerated and untrue; but after witnessing through the open window the surprising actions of the congregation, we turned away, feeling that the half could not be told, for words would fail to portray the scene. The reader must be ...
— Miss Dexie - A Romance of the Provinces • Stanford Eveleth
... John. Now all this sounds very fine, and seems very systematic. It has but one objection—it is quite untrue. It is in the first place more than doubtful if the herring frequents the Polar seas at all; and in the second place, the most distinguished naturalists are of opinion that it never leaves the neighbourhood of our own shores, but merely retires ...
— Stories about the Instinct of Animals, Their Characters, and Habits • Thomas Bingley
... The following day she had a paragraph to herself in both papers, and Grey Town was led to believe that she had made the passage merely from a love of adventure. This story was never contradicted, but, like many other tales of adventure, it is untrue. ...
— Grey Town - An Australian Story • Gerald Baldwin
... vain. Mr. DOUGLASS has frankly disclosed the place of his birth, the names of those who claimed ownership in his body and soul, and the names also of those who committed the crimes which he has alleged against them. His statements, therefore, may easily be disproved, if they are untrue. ...
— The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass - An American Slave • Frederick Douglass
... but untrue. In all the ancient Irish literature we find the connection of the gods, both those who survived into the historic times, and those whom they had dethroned, with the raths and cairns perpetually and almost universally insisted upon. ...
— Early Bardic Literature, Ireland • Standish O'Grady
... travel This is absolutely untrue. by day as well as by night, The number of wounded arriving and, in accordance with at the depots in Germany is instructions, are unloaded now so great that the trains only in the daytime. In are obliged to be ...
— The Land of Deepening Shadow - Germany-at-War • D. Thomas Curtin
... and clear— "Stay; would I dare to hold you here So near my heart, if unto you That heart had ever been untrue? ...
— Daisy Dare, and Baby Power - Poems • Rosa Vertner Jeffrey
... palliative of his crime; but in that city was abundant help for worthy poverty. That man lacked an absolute honesty. He and his could have been fed and clothed, and himself maintained his manly dignity and uncorrupted honesty. To blame society with criminality is a current method, but untrue and unwise; for thus we will multiply, not decimate, criminals. The honest man may be in penury; but he will have help, and need not shelter in a jail. Thus, then, these two items of modernity paint background ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... IV. The Description of the People and Productions of the Land not made from the Personal Observations of the Writer of the Letter. What distinctly belonged to the Natives is unnoticed, and what is originally mentioned of them is untrue. Further important Alterations of the ...
— The Voyage of Verrazzano • Henry C. Murphy
... has been produced, and the successive changes through which it has passed. And in all their veins and zones, and flame-like stainings, or broken and disconnected lines, they write various legends, never untrue, of the former political state of the mountain kingdom to which they belonged, of its infirmities and fortitudes, convulsions and consolidations, from the beginning ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume III (of 3) • John Ruskin
... gone for ever. She almost hated him once more. It was dreadful to live with people whom she did not understand, who knew things they kept secret, whose minds and thoughts and motives were incomprehensible to her, who believed horrible untrue things of her. It had been a fixed idea with Fay during her husband's lifetime that he believed horrible untrue things about her. But what they were she would have found ...
— Prisoners - Fast Bound In Misery And Iron • Mary Cholmondeley
... been exposed, and that the vice alleged argues gross ignorance of every thing oriental. Lord Auckland might err, as heavily we believe him to have done, in his estimate of Affghanistan and the Affghan condition: he had untrue notions of what the Affghans needed, and what it was that they could bear: but his critics, Indian and domestic, were not in error by default merely of philosophic views as to the state of society in Affghanistan; they erred by want of familiarity with the most prominent usages of eastern ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various
... xxv. Jan. I. Mary he was lawfully possessed at Bletchingley of and in certein horses with furnyture armure artillarie and munitions for the warres and divers other goodes to the value of L2000 and that upon certein mooste untrue surmises brutes and Rumers raised against him was brought into divers and sundry vexations and troubles during which time one Sir Thomas Saunders Knight and William Saunders of Ewell on pretence ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... the truly wise, born in the sublime East, could find no roothold in Mike Fletcher—that type and epitome of Western grossness and lust of life. Religions being a synthesis of moral aspirations, developed through centuries, are mischievous and untrue except in the circumstances and climates in which they have grown up, and native races are decimated equally by the importation of a religion or a disease. True it is that Christianity was a product ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore
... naturally take extraordinary pains to preserve the body from putrefaction, in the hope of the soul again joining the body it had quitted." The remark is intrinsically untrue, because the doctrine of transmigration coexists in reconciled belief with the observed law of birth, infancy, and growth, not with the miracle of transition into reviving corpses. The notion is likewise historically refuted by the fact that the believers of that doctrine ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... of you," she wrote. "People down here have been saying that you are a coward, and that you ran away from home because you did not dare to meet the people who knew of your action in relation to the war. What you did at Oxford at least shows that is untrue. I am delighted that you defended the poor creature, and thrashed the wretches badly. I see that one of them is still suffering from the blow you struck him. I have written to Oxford for fifty copies of the paper, and shall send them to all our friends. I cannot bear, I simply ...
— All for a Scrap of Paper - A Romance of the Present War • Joseph Hocking
... a pledge of true love she gave it to me, Full seven years ago as I sail'd o'er the sea; But now that the diamonds are changed in their hue, I know that my love has to me proved untrue."' ...
— Penelope's Experiences in Scotland • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... greater than the prevalent ones conveyed by the expressions "out of drawing" or "untrue to nature." There is no such thing as correct drawing or an outside standard of truth ...
— Albert Durer • T. Sturge Moore
... though he were mightier than the author of nature. To this equation of truth and morality happiness is added as a third identical member. The truer the pleasures of a being the happier it is; and a pleasure is untrue whenever more (of pain) is given for it than it is worth. A rational being contradicts itself when it pursues an irrational pleasure.—The course of moral philosophy has passed over the logical ethics of Clarke and Wollaston as an abstract and unfruitful idiosyncrasy, and it is ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... more often kind than cruel, oftener wise than stupid, oftener energetic than apathetic, or the reverse; but it would be false to say of one man that he is kind and wise, of another that he is wicked and foolish. And yet we always classify mankind in this way. And this is untrue. Men are like rivers: the water is the same in each, and alike in all; but every river is narrow here, is more rapid there, here slower, there broader, now clear, now cold, now dull, now warm. It is the same with men. Every man carries in himself the germs of every human quality, ...
— Resurrection • Count Leo Tolstoy
... desire of life, for when the prisoner was asked by the lawyer whether she wished to be defended? she answered, "As you please But all I have confest was in agony of torture; and, before God, all I have spoken is false and untrue." To which she pathetically added, "Ye have been too ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott
... you are talking! you must be dreaming this morning. However, we are alone; I'll light a weed, in defiance of Railway-law, while you spin that yarn; for, true or untrue, it will fill up ...
— The Experiences of a Barrister, and Confessions of an Attorney • Samuel Warren |
