"Sapient" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Our wool was inferior, our looms were inferior, our men knew so little, and demanded such high wages. Then we never could do any thing under the present wretched tariff and the skinning system of taxation. It took all a man could make. Another sapient statesman declared nothing could be done without more money. The contraction had been so great that not a man could do business. Then came a long list of figures to prove what a very little money ...
— Hope Mills - or Between Friend and Sweetheart • Amanda M. Douglas
... needlework. This was undertaken at the sapient instigation of Antoinette, who in her turn, I am sure, neglected the ladle for the scissors, and cast many of her duties upon the silent but sympathetic Stenson. Carlotta herself delighted in these preparations. She ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... Jackey being then in a somewhat precarious state of health, and tolerably advanced in life, without any very self-evident heir, was obnoxious to the attentions of three distinct litters of cousins, some one or other of whom was constantly 'baying him.' Lotion, though a sapient man, and somewhat grinding in his practice, did not profess to grind old people young again, and feeling he could do very little for the body corporate, directed his attention to amusing Jackey's mind, and anything ...
— Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour • R. S. Surtees
... but a fool, or a very young child, knows at once that a gun with caps on is loaded. You leave yours on the table without caps, and in comes some meddling chap or other, puts on one to try the locks, or to frighten his sweetheart, or for some other no less sapient purpose, and off it goes! and if it kill no one, it's God's mercy! Never ...
— Warwick Woodlands - Things as they Were There Twenty Years Ago • Henry William Herbert (AKA Frank Forester)
... night precisely as the sapient woman had conjectured. Shortly before nine she took up position against the railings in a dark patch that marked the middle point between two lamps, some doors above 506. No tremor agitated her form; in action ...
— Once Aboard The Lugger • Arthur Stuart-Menteth Hutchinson
... an ocean, 'way out yonder (As all sapient people know), Is the land of Wonder-Wander, Whither children love to go; It's their playing, romping, swinging, That give great joy to me While the Dinkey-Bird goes singing In ...
— A Nonsense Anthology • Collected by Carolyn Wells
... attempt on summer eve to count What dogs and beggars haunt the Pincian Mount. All Tuzzi's frauds, all Coco's falsehoods tell, And all the Beckers[1] all the rogues shall sell; How many sick some sapient quack at Rome Helps—not to England, but their longer home;[2] How many Couriers forge the scoundrel tale; How many Maids their mistress' fame assail; How many English girls, by foreign arts Seduced, have smiled on needy ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 367, May 1846 • Various
... lugged the commander in chief of the cutpurses by the throat, that sapient soothsayer that was playing off his pranks with his match the ...
— The Old Man of the Mountain, The Lovecharm and Pietro of Abano - Tales from the German of Tieck • Ludwig Tieck
... ungrateful to the good physician, the man of skill can avenge himself very easily by throwing the vervain into water; for as the root absorbs the moisture once more, the tumour will return. The same sapient writer recommends you, if you are troubled with pimples, to watch for a falling star, and then instantly, while the star is still shooting from the sky, to wipe the pimples with a cloth or anything that comes to hand. ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... women, the Committee reply that all just governments exist by the consent of the governed. An old truism. We reply, women have given no such consent, and therefore are not bound to allegiance. But our sapient Legislators say, since there are two hundred thousand women in Massachusetts twenty-one years of age, and only two thousand who sign this petition, therefore it is fair to suppose that the larger part of the women of the State have consented to the present form of government. ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... other compounds. The harp, flageolet, and first violin, had prudently abstained from drinking—at their own expense, and had reserved their thirstiness for the benefit of the bibicals of the "founder of the feast," and, consequently, had only attained that peculiar state of sapient freshness which invariably characterises quadrille bands after supper, and had, therefore, overlooked the rapid obfuscation of their more imprudent companion in ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... herring he holds the scales, my sapient brother," cried the fat man. "But I pray you, good youth, to tell us whether you are a learned clerk, and, if so, whether you have studied at Oxenford or ...
— The White Company • Arthur Conan Doyle
... middle of the seventeenth century it occurred to the sapient mind of one Puseygur, a native of Bayonne, in France, that it would be a grand thing to have a sharp point on which to receive an advancing adversary after one had missed him, or the fizzling matchlock had failed to go off. The weapon devised was a sharp-bladed knife, ...
— Broad-Sword and Single-Stick • R. G. Allanson-Winn
... used to be, In pride of plume, where plumy Death had trod, Trailing their gorgeous velvets wantonly, Most unmeet pall, over the holy sod; There, gentle stranger, thou may'st only see Two sombre Peacocks. Age, with sapient nod Marking the spot, still tarries to declare How they once lived, ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... So about eight in the morning Juan left home with about three pesos' worth of pork, full of many a hopeful expectation. After having wandered through many streets, he noticed that a big horse-fly was following him with an imploring murmur. Imagining that the fly wanted to buy meat, this sapient vender said to it, "Do you want to buy meat?" The fly answered with a "buzzzzz." For Juan this was a sufficient answer: so he left one-third of the pork with the fly, saying that he was coming back again for his pay. Next he met a hungry and greatly-abused pig, and he asked it if it wanted to ...
— Filipino Popular Tales • Dean S. Fansler
... dog and the horse in your argument? They've got no prehensile organ that ever I heard of, and yet they're universally allowed to be the cleverest and most intelligent of all earthly quadrupeds.' True, O most sapient and courteous objector. I grant it you at once. But observe the difference. The cleverness of the horse and the dog is acquired, not original. It has probably arisen in the course of their long hereditary intercourse and companionship with man, the cleverest and most ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... voluble and bold, now hid, now seen, Among thick-woven arborets, and flowers Imbordered on each bank, the hand of Eve: Spot more delicious than those gardens feigned Or of revived Adonis, or renowned Alcinous, host of old Laertes' son; Or that, not mystick, where the sapient king Held dalliance with his fair Egyptian spouse. Much he the place admired, the person more. As one who long in populous city pent, Where houses thick and sewers annoy the air, Forth issuing on a ...
— Paradise Lost • John Milton
... that one can not believe "in the tameness of a wolf, a horse's health, a boy's love, or a whore's oath." Then Lear imagines he is judging his daughters. "Sit thou here, most learned justicer," says he, addressing the naked Edgar; "Thou, sapient sir, sit here. Now, you she foxes." To this Edgar says: "Look where he stands and glares! Wantest thou eyes at trial, madam?" "Come o'er the bourn, Bessy, to ...
— Tolstoy on Shakespeare - A Critical Essay on Shakespeare • Leo Tolstoy
... attributing Lady Juliana's agitation entirely to surprise. The word operated like a charm; all were ready to admit that it was a surprising thing when heard for the first time. Miss Jacky remarked that we are all liable to be surprised; and the still more sapient Grizzy said that, indeed, it was most surprising the effect that surprise had upon some people. For her own part, she could not deny but that she was very often frightened when ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier
... it was neither from you nor Mary Taylor, my only correspondents. Having opened and read it, it proved to be a declaration of attachment and proposal of matrimony, expressed in the ardent language of the sapient young Irishman! Well! thought I, I have heard of love at first sight, but this beats all. I leave you to guess what my answer would be, convinced that you will not do me the injustice of guessing ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... live, alas! of heaven-directed mien, Of cultured soul, and sapient eye serene, Who hail thee, Man! the pilgrim of a day, Spouse of the worm, and brother of ...
— The World's Best Poetry — Volume 10 • Various
... introduces a rope to pull the boat across. You say that a rope is forbidden; and he then falls back on the use of a current in the stream. I once thought I had carefully excluded all such tricks in a particular puzzle of this class. But a sapient reader made all the people swim across without using the boat at all! Of course, some few puzzles are intended to be solved by some trick of this kind; and if there happens to be no solution without the trick it is perfectly legitimate. We have to use our ...
— The Canterbury Puzzles - And Other Curious Problems • Henry Ernest Dudeney
... out in the sapient and good-natured stage of intoxication, and, the door being opened, I was confronted by a rough bar and a smoking, blazing kerosene lamp without a chimney. This is the worst place I have put up at as to ...
— A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains • Isabella L. Bird
... subjected in almost every instance. 'Nothing by which we can be known.' 'Then I am afraid to undertake the publication.' We presumed timidly to suggest that every writer must have a beginning, and that to refuse to publish for him until he had acquired a name, was to imitate the sapient mother who cautioned her son against going into the water until he could swim. 'An old joke—a regular Joe!' exclaimed our companion, tossing off another bumper. 'Still older than Joe Miller,' was our reply; 'for, if we mistake not, it is the very first anecdote in the facetiae of Hierocles.' ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... as yet," replied the Cardinal-Bishop with a sapient smile. "Nor is there any restriction upon the inspiration, political as well as spiritual, which the American Government draws from Rome—an inspiration much more potent, I think, than our Protestant brethren ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... Bloom knew what they were. He knew they were the "wilde-honden," very absurdly named by sapient naturalists "Hyena venatica," or "hunting hyena," and by others, with equal absurdity, the "hunting dog." I pronounce these names "absurd," first because the animal in question bears no more resemblance to a hyena than it does to a hedgehog; and, ...
— The Bush Boys - History and Adventures of a Cape Farmer and his Family • Captain Mayne Reid
... apple-woman in a grimy English town left her basket, with all her stock-in-trade, outside in the street while she went into a church to commune with her heavenly friends; the conversation between a sapient publican, a friendly constable and a group of dubious bona fide travellers—such things were materials for his insight or his fancy or his delightful humour. Often when he returned in the evening full of his day's observations one wished there had ...
— Irish Fairy Tales • Edmund Leamy
... the very time, when the presumption against the revivication of poetry shall have attained the appearance of absolute certainty, to witness a Tenth Avatar of Genius—and to witness its effect, too, upon the sapient personages who had been predicting that it ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... prodigal expenses, and the economy which has been introduced by the virtuous and sapient Assembly, make amends for the losses sustained in the receipt of revenue. In this at least they have fulfilled the duty of a financier.—Have those who say so looked at the expenses of the National Assembly itself? of the municipalities? of the city of Paris? of the increased pay of the ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... "Who, O thou sapient, saintly bird! Thy shouted warnings ever heard Unbleached by fear? The blue-faced blubbering imp, who steals Yon turnips, thinks thee at ...
— Citation and Examination of William Shakspeare • Walter Savage Landor
... not a Joe Miller joke, but one of actual and recent occurrence; although there is a similar story fathered on a sapient civic authority. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 334 Saturday, October 4, 1828 • Various
... there's nothing TO her," said the sapient Miss Thornton. "No. You'll be doing that work in a few months, and getting forty. So come along to the big ...
— Saturday's Child • Kathleen Norris
... cobwebs Death and Eternity sate glaring." "How will this look in the Universe," he asks, "and before the Creator of Man?" When someone in his old age challenged him with the question, "Who will be judge?"—(it is curious how every sapient inanity strikes, as on an original idea, on the notion that opinions differ, and therefore—apparently, if their thought has any consequence—are as good one as another)—Who will be judge? "Hell fire will be judge," said Carlyle, "God Almighty will be the judge ...
— The Jesus of History • T. R. Glover
... gave a clearer if more circumscribed view of the surface—green countryside, veined by rivers and wrinkled with mountains; little towns that were mere dots; a scatter of white clouds. Nothing that looked like roads. There had been no native sapient race on this planet, and in the thirteen centuries since it had been colonized the Terro-human population had never completely lost the use of contragravity vehicles. In that screen, farther down, the four destroyers, Irma, ...
— A Slave is a Slave • Henry Beam Piper
... sapient precept dropped oracularly from his lips, a word at a time, his figure faded and turned pale. With the last word he had passed out ...
— The Man-Wolf and Other Tales • Emile Erckmann and Alexandre Chatrian
... "the determined campaigners" if he had only knit the issue with them in a fair and square fight. This, however, was the thing of all others he wished to avoid. Perhaps if he could have foreseen how barren in any alternative policy his sapient critics were to be he might have acted otherwise, but the credit is due to him of making dissension impossible by leaving no second party ...
— Ireland Since Parnell • Daniel Desmond Sheehan
... immediate neighbourhood of prehistoric remains. In the Chinese Encyclopaedia we are told that the 'lightning stones' have sometimes the shape of a hatchet, sometimes that of a knife, and sometimes that of a mallet. And then, by a curious misapprehension, the sapient author of that work goes on to observe that these lightning stones are used by the wandering Mongols instead of copper and steel. It never seems to have struck his celestial intelligence that the Mongols ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... sapient patrician much has been said, and more has been written, respecting our antipodean empire; though I believe the mass of the English people are still as unacquainted with the characteristics of the colony, and the manners of colonial life, as if the vast continent of Australia remained ...
— Fern Vale (Volume 1) - or the Queensland Squatter • Colin Munro
... more I rais'd my brow, I spied the master of the sapient throng, Seated amid the philosophic train. Him all admire, all pay him rev'rence due. There Socrates and Plato both I mark'd, Nearest to him in rank; Democritus, Who sets the world at chance, Diogenes, With Heraclitus, and Empedocles, And Anaxagoras, and Thales sage, Zeno, and Dioscorides ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri
... a Drouet, interested to praise. There she heard a different voice, with which she argued, pleaded, excused. It was no just and sapient counsellor, in its last analysis. It was only an average little conscience, a thing which represented the world, her past environment, habit, convention, in a confused way. With it, the voice of the people was truly the voice ...
— Sister Carrie • Theodore Dreiser
... Sally," cried the sapient waiter. "Don't you see that his dress is military? Look at his black cap, with its long bag and great feather, and the monstrous sword at his side; look at them, and then if you can, say I am mistaken in deciding that he is some great ...
— Thaddeus of Warsaw • Jane Porter
... Greece! and so it goes on transfusing itself from clime to clime, in ever new and higher forms, until man is developed. Well, was there ever such stuff concocted before? I almost hear the bray of that donkey, who originated in a flower. And pray, most sapient self! what is nature? It seems now, to me, a form, a mere dead incubus of matter. And could this inert tangible matter, sublimate in its hard, dead bosom, an essence so subtle, as to be freer of the bonds of time and space? At such a preposterous suggestion even a donkey might bow his ears with ...
— Words of Cheer for the Tempted, the Toiling, and the Sorrowing • T. S. Arthur
... with propriety, and as my fair countrywomen are generally willing to listen to good counsel, no matter how remote the period from which it is derived, I cannot resist giving them the benefit of some of the recommendations of the sapient poet to the Parisian belles, some of which are certainly highly commendable. The verses were written by a monk, ...
— How to Enjoy Paris in 1842 • F. Herve
... river, finding gold all the way, but not in quantities sufficiently large to warrant working. At the place, however, which they subsequently named Chihuahua (pronounced in the vernacular Chee-waw-waw) the perspicacious Jones had given it as his opinion, formed after mature deliberation and a sapient examination of some two or three shovelsful of dirt, that there was a satisfactory "color in that ar bank." Some hard work of about a week demonstrated that there were excellent diggings there, and then ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 86, February, 1875 • Various
... fuller-flavoured? It is we stay-at-home British birds that really keep the insects down. I know that insect eggs do not appear in our poor dissected gizzards. How should they? How would you recognize their remains, O sapient sparrow-shooters? But they are there, for all that. Those blessed with eyes can see us hunting for them in the fallen leaves, among the garbage, in the ...
— "Wee Tim'rous Beasties" - Studies of Animal life and Character • Douglas English
... village church "sung like a tuning-fork." The noises have occurred simultaneously with earthquakes in other parts of the country, and afterward rocks have been found moved from their bases and cracks have been discovered in the earth. One sapient editor said that the pearls in the mussels in Salmon and ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... which occasionally appeared in the political horizon, and had thereby obtained a powerful ascendency in the council, pressed his fat chin into furrows, and his narrow brow into wrinkles, and, with reflection in his little eyes, assured his sapient brethren that "This distinguished stranger was nothing else than a secret envoy of his imperial majesty, who was come into Germany to observe attentively the situation, the comparative strength, the disagreements, and the alliances, of the various states and princes; so that ...
— Faustus - his Life, Death, and Doom • Friedrich Maximilian von Klinger
... on, packed them up in a brazen vessel, and cast them into the sea. But James, "our English Solomon," "imported by his book all that were flying about Europe, to plague the country, which was sufficiently plagued already in such a sovereign." This sapient ruler, who, it is said, "taught divinity like a king, and made laws like a priest," in the first year of his reign made it felony to suckle imps, &c. This statute, which was repealed March 24th, 1736, describes offences declared ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... Swing, sapient young person, walked casually to the window and watched Luke Tweezy cross the street to Calloway's store. Then he returned to Racey's table. Racey turned his tousled head sidewise and whispered from a corner of his mouth, "Help me out to Tom Kane's stable. ...
— The Heart of the Range • William Patterson White
... the plant itself it has developed into a great and increasing industry and its culture become a source of wealth unprecedented in agricultural history. Could the sapient James I. and his successors the Stuarts, now look upon this cherished production of the world, they would discover a commercial prosperity connected with those nations which have fostered and encouraged ...
— Tobacco; Its History, Varieties, Culture, Manufacture and Commerce • E. R. Billings
... of liberal ones The head, with long red blades; Through feats of testy men, And a chief with his foes. Woe be to them, the fools, When revenge comes on them. I Taliesin, chief of bards, With a sapient Druid's words, Will set kind Elphin free From haughty tyrant's bonds. To their fell and chilling cry, By the act of a surprising steed, From the far distant North, There soon shall be an end. Let neither grace nor health Be to Maelgwn Gwynedd, ...
— The Mabinogion • Lady Charlotte Guest
... truth," said the damsel; "but I think from this on I shall have no need of any prompting, and I shall bring my true story safe into port, and here it is. The king my father, who was called Tinacrio the Sapient, was very learned in what they call magic arts, and became aware by his craft that my mother, who was called Queen Jaramilla, was to die before he did, and that soon after he too was to depart this life, and I was to be left an orphan without father or mother. But all this, he declared, ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... The sapient Thomas Heywood gravely goes on to inform us, that all these things actually came to pass. Upon Richard III he is ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... beauty of virtue; but if Nature has bestowed on them any point of courage, subtlety, or activity, they make use of it for the satisfaction of their fleshly pleasure and the accomplishment of their lusts. And the sapient Metrodorus believes that this should be so, for he says: "All the fine, subtle, and ingenious inventions of the soul have been found out for the pleasure and delight of the flesh, or for the hopes of attaining to it and enjoying it, and every act which tends ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... and bargain with me," said Gotzkowsky with a hoarse laugh. "You take me for a chapman, who measures out his life and services by the yard; and you wish to pay me for mine by the same measure. Go, most sapient gentlemen; I carry on a wholesale trade, and do not cut off yards. That I leave to ...
— The Merchant of Berlin - An Historical Novel • L. Muhlbach
... black and white; some stipulating that their clothes or other treasures should be burnt with them, others that their graves should be watched by particular servants, or their monuments crowned with flowers;—sapient end to a life of sapience! 'Of their doings in this world,' said he, 'you may form some idea from their injunctions with reference to the next. These are they who will pay a long price for an entree; whose floors are sprinkled ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... hermit Peter, to whose sapient heart High Heaven his secrets opens, tells and shews, Your messengers direct can to that part, Where of the prince they shall hear certain news, And learn the way, the manner, and the art To bring him back ...
— Jerusalem Delivered • Torquato Tasso
... appeared to suit him. The first did not dazzle him; but as to the second, he did not conceal from himself the imperfections of a provincial education which he should have to unmake, but this was no serious objection to his sapient conjugal pedagogy. ...
— The Deputy of Arcis • Honore de Balzac
... took the matter up: he re-established all that had been done by his illustrious predecessor, and endowed a number of professorial chairs—especially in chemistry, wherein he was himself an ardent student and sapient expert—and kindred sciences, and founded scholarships or apprenticeships ...
— The Tragedies of the Medici • Edgcumbe Staley
... I may not condone, and, though abhorring the Kaiser and my mother's compatriots for their share in that horror going on abroad, I can also pity the hot-headed, imperfect mere man going to war under a carefully incited and fostered misapprehension, and need no longer glorify the cool-headed, sapient policy which so ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... not accustomed to see. Evidently, it was neither from you nor Mary, my only correspondents. Having opened and read it, it proved to be a declaration of attachment and proposal of matrimony, expressed in the ardent language of the sapient young Irishman! I hope you are laughing heartily. This is not like one of my adventures, is it? It more nearly resembles Martha's. I am certainly doomed to be an old maid. Never mind. I made up my mind to that fate ever since I ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte - Volume 1 • Elizabeth Gaskell
... behold your light, your star, Ye would be dupes and victims and ye are. Is it enough? or, must I, while a thrill Lives in your sapient ...
— The Deerslayer • James Fenimore Cooper
... fall in love with Rose? Why did not he, O most sapient senate of womanhood? why did not your brother fall in love with that nice girl you know of, who grew up with you all at his very elbow, and was, as everybody else could see, just the ...
— Pink and White Tyranny - A Society Novel • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... butt made an ass of himself. He maundered and wandered, and stopped, and went on, and lost one thread and took up another, and got into a perfect maze. And while he was thus entangled, a servant came in and brought him a note, and put it in his hand. The unhappy narrator received it with a sapient nod, but was too polite, or else too stupid, to open it, so closed his fingers on it, and went maundering on till his story trickled into the sand of the desert, and somehow ceased; for it could not be said to end, being a thing without head ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various
... harder reading than the Gospels. My difficulties are quite different from those which enabled the learned curiosity of the German mind to achieve one of its most unforgettable triumphs. It is a long while since I, like all other young scholars, enjoyed with all the sapient laboriousness of a fastidious philologist the work of the incomparable Strauss.[5] At that time I was twenty years old: now I am too serious for that sort of thing. What do I care for the contradictions of "tradition"? How can any one call pious legends "traditions"? The histories ...
— The Antichrist • F. W. Nietzsche
... and after morning service a group of men gathered about the church porch to discuss the events of the night before. In the evening the parlor of the Flying Horse was full of dalespeople, and many a sapient theory was then and there put forth to account for the extraordinary coincidence of the presence of Paul Ritson at the fire and his alleged departure ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine
... streets of Charleston, rows of greedy vultures, with sapient look, sit on the parapets of the houses, watching for offal. These birds are great blessings in warm climates, and in Carolina a fine of ten dollars is inflicted for wantonly destroying them. They appeared to be quite conscious of their privileges, and sailed ...
— An Englishman's Travels in America - His Observations Of Life And Manners In The Free And Slave States • John Benwell
... he thus far sacrificed his time to the Muses, he would, if the truth must be spoken, have been much better pleased had the pious or sapient apothegms, as well as the historical narratives, which these various works contained, been presented to him in the form of simple prose. And he sometimes could not refrain from expressing contempt of the 'vain and unprofitable art of poem-making', in which, he said,'the only one who had excelled ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... the lovers of the marvellous had not appeared in the country side within the memory of that sapient individual—the ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest
... the gentler sex, bad feminine manners. Just now he sees the man's side of the shield, a few years later he will see the woman's side also. He ungallantly concludes "to lead the 'single life,' and not," as he puts it, "trouble myself about the ladies." A most sapient conclusion, considering that this veteran misogynist was but sixteen years old. During the year following the publication of this article, he plied his pen with no little industry—producing in all fifteen articles on a variety of topics, such as "South American Affairs," "State Politics," ...
— William Lloyd Garrison - The Abolitionist • Archibald H. Grimke
... excellent Robert, that, by some hocus-pocus which I do not exactly comprehend, myself, I have introduced a wheel within a wheel, a letter within a letter, a play within a play, after the manner of the old dramatists; and I beg you to make a note that the foregoing admonitions and most sapient counsels are not addressed to you. You are something of a philosopher; but you are not, like Mr. Stephen Duck, "something of a philosopher and something of a poet"; for I do not believe, O fortunate youth, that you ever invoked the ten ladies minus one in your life; and I ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... be easier for him than to go, as Insie had said to him at least a score of times, and mind his own business, and shake off the dust—or the mud—of his feet at such strangers? But, alas! he had tried it, and could shake nothing, except his sad and sapient head. How deplorably was he altered from the Pet that used to be! Where were now his lofty joys, the pleasure he found in wholesome mischief and wholesale destruction, the high delight of frightening all the world ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... understand, in consequence, that all the hotels are furnished in the same way, and that bonbons, extraits, &c. are not to be procured, is like the proceeding of the Hon. Frederick de Roos, R. N. who affirms, in his sapient work on the United States, that all the inhabitants in Philadelphia take tea on the steps before their doors in summer evenings, because, forsooth, he saw a family sitting on those of the house in which they lived, in order to enjoy a ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... other seeds Which in their turn are doing just the same. But if we see what raving nonsense this, And that a man may laugh, though not, forsooth, Compounded out of laughing elements, And think and utter reason with learn'd speech, Though not himself compounded, for a fact, Of sapient seeds and eloquent, why, then, Cannot those things which we perceive to have Their own sensation be composed as well Of intermixed ...
— Of The Nature of Things • [Titus Lucretius Carus] Lucretius
... more difficult to analyse than specialisation of work—a specialisation of sentiment, habits and morals, which makes people supremely sapient within a narrow sphere which they have appropriated, and so limited as to be blind in the broad field of ethics which lies outside their special ken. And yet it is through these groups, keen-eyed in one direction, blind in others, that the intellect, the reforming ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... human or tangible enemy. They constituted an important part of the popular belief! for the history of ghosts and fairies, and omens, was, in general, the only kind of lore in which the people were educated; thanks to the sapient traditions ...
— The Dead Boxer - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... Cambridge, was in truth comparing Columbia with my dream of Oxford and Cambridge, to her disadvantage. I was capable of saying to myself: "All this is terribly new. All this lacks tradition." Criticism fatuous and mischievous, if human! It would be as sapient to imprison the entire youth of a country until it had ceased to commit the offense of being young. Tradition was assuredly not apparent in the atmosphere of Columbia. Moreover, some of her architecture was ugly. On the other hand, some of it was beautiful ...
— Your United States - Impressions of a first visit • Arnold Bennett
... than to find and create new ones, whereas in the sixty years that lie between Bach's death and Wagner's birth the whole form and content, the very stuff, of music was changed. In 1750 he would have been a daring and extraordinarily sapient being who prophesied that within forty years Mozart's G minor Symphony would be written. Between Bach and Wagner is a great gulf set, a gulf bridged by Emanuel Bach, Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven; between ourselves and Mendelssohn there is no such chasm and certainly no such list ...
— Wagner • John F. Runciman
... primitive-looking sling; and a huge Goliath decorated with a militia belt and sword, and a spear like a weaver's beam indeed, enchained everybody's attention. Even the peccant schoolmaster and his pretended letters were forgotten, while the sapient Goliath, every time that he raised the spear, in the energy of his declamation, to thump upon the stage, picked away fragments of the low ceiling, which fell conspicuously on his great shock of black hair. At last, with the crowning threat, up went the ...
— The Best American Humorous Short Stories • Various
... had it back. I watched her listening very suspiciously to Professor Crooklyn. My dear, it is her passion to foretell disasters—her passion! And when they are confirmed, she triumphs, of course. We shall have her domineering over us with sapient nods at every trifle occurring. The county will be unendurable. Unsay it, my Middleton! And don't answer like an oracle because I do all the talking. Pour out to me. You'll soon come to a stop and find the want ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... from such conditions needs not to be enlarged upon; it is at once obvious, and probably gave rise to the following sapient remark by a globe-trotting author, which I took from a ...
— China and the Chinese • Herbert Allen Giles
... own, the sapient jurymen exchanged glances several times during the evidence of the last two witnesses, and shook their heads, while one man began to make notes on the sheet of paper before him with a very scratchy pen, whereupon ...
— The Bag of Diamonds • George Manville Fenn
... town by the citation of a peculiarity of which King Jamie put to shame the boastings of the Southrons as to the superior magnitude of English towns. "I have a town," quoth the sapient James, "in my ancient kingdom of Scotland, whilk is sae lang that at ane end of it a different language is spoken from that whilk prevails at the other." To this day the monarch's words are true; one end of Nairn is Gaelic, the other Sassenach. Here we obtain a considerable accession of ...
— Camps, Quarters, and Casual Places • Archibald Forbes
... ensued, until the citizens of Caracas quietly deposed the chief Colonial authorities, and appointed a Junta Suprema to administer affairs in the name of Ferdinand VII. Intelligence of this step, however, was received with great alarm by the sapient Junta of Cadiz, and a proclamation was launched, on the 31st of August, 1810, declaring the Province of Caracas in a state of rigorous blockade. A war of manifestoes ensued, until the Provinces became enlightened as to their own importance and strength, and published, on the 5th of July, 1811, ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 3, No. 16, February, 1859 • Various
... "True, most sapient counsellor, and I will be on my guard. To show how I profit by your sageness, let us drop all thought of this royal maiden who is probably out of my reach, and attend to the other business. It is good to have ...
— Bay State Monthly, Vol. II. No. 5, February, 1885 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... American war; a sapient French statesman, writing from Louisiana to his royal master in Paris, advised the French government to cultivate a close and intimate alliance with the Cherokee Indians, who, occupying as they did the defiles of the Alleghanies, would form a permanent bulwark between ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 1, August 1850 - of Literature, Science and Art. • Various
... its sapient head, shrugged its authoritative shoulders, and sundry criticisms crept into the journals; but the prophet was judged in "his own country"; and home work, according to universal canons, rarely finds favor among home awarding committees, whose ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... <Wise, learned, erudite, sagacious, sapient, sage, judicious, prudent, provident, discreet>. (Compare the distinction between knowledge and wisdom under Words Often ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... however, getting a little time to collect testimony, brought in twelve men who swore that they did not see him take the chickens. "Balance of evidence overwhelmingly in favor of the prisoner," said the sapient justice (in Dutch I suppose,) and finding him innocent in a ratio of six to one, he discharged him ...
— The Humbugs of the World • P. T. Barnum
... at all, it will be about the expiration of the fifth week, although there will be no absolute security in less than the double number of months," After making these remarks, our author reasons himself into the sapient conclusion, that the poison in all rabid animals resides in the saliva, and does not affect any other secretion. "The knowledge that the virus is confined to the saliva," he opines, "will settle a matter that has been the cause of considerable ...
— Delineations of the Ox Tribe • George Vasey
... lay upon Rose the burden of my disappointment last night; and my affection suggests a thousand good reasons for absolving her. Is this wrong? And are we to consider, with the sapient ones of the earth, that our vision is never clear until the day when we no longer have the strength to love, believe and admire? I do not think so. Setting aside the careful judgment which we exercise in the case of our companion for life, it ...
— The Choice of Life • Georgette Leblanc
... Harmony That lead'st th' oblivious soul astray— Though thou sphere-descended be— Hence away!— Thou mightier Goddess, thou demand'st my lay, 5 Born when earth was seiz'd with cholic; Or as more sapient sages say, What time the Legion diabolic Compell'd their beings to enshrine In bodies vile of herded swine, 10 Precipitate adown the steep With hideous rout were plunging in the deep, And hog and devil mingling grunt ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... mention may be made,[Sec.c][Sec.6] Who for the Junta modelled sapient laws, Taught them to govern ere they were obeyed: Certes fit teacher to command, because His soul Socratic no Xantippe awes; Blest with a Dame in Virtue's bosom nurst,— With her let silent Admiration pause!— True ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... were not for the wine and the good cheer which we have had in yonder old man's house, my lord," said this sapient follower, "and that I ken him by report to be a just living man in many respects, and a real Edinburgh gutterblood, I should have been well pleased to have seen how his feet were shaped, and whether he had not a cloven cloot under the ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... but I persisted in not reading my letter in the presence of my friend. A notice on my punctiliousness may be put down to-night in her 'private diary.' I kept the letter in my hand and only read it with those sapient ends of the fingers which the mesmerists make so much ado about, and which really did seem to touch a little of what was inside. Not all, however, happily for me! Or my friend would have seen in my eyes ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... pretty until Jack Holloway turned up with a family of Fuzzies and the claim that they were not just nice little animals, but human. If he was right and the Fuzzies were declared the 9th extrasolar sapient race, there went the Company, charter ...
— Talents, Incorporated • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... seemed now! How the words of diamond thief number two yet burned in his ears: "If you ever get a girl, she'll have a picnic." What did that mean but that women instinctively knew him for one they could hoodwink? Still again, there reverberated the policeman's sapient contribution to his agony: "A man these days and nights wants to know what his women folks are up to." Oh, yes, he had been a fool; he had looked at ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry
... allowed the wisdom of his lady to flow by him like the wind, did not choose to answer this sapient appeal, but observed curtly, that he had some writing to do, and should like, as soon as convenient, to be left to himself. Upon this the lady folded her white gloves spitefully and left the room, tossing her head till the marabouts on each ...
— The Old Homestead • Ann S. Stephens
... this Animal, supercedes the necessity of puffing advertisements or exaggerated bills—that the Sapient Dog is a great curiosity, the Proprietor feels no hesitation in affirming, that his feats of activity are more various and pleasing than any preceding exhibition of a similar nature, all of which will be made manifest to every spectator, by his dexterity and precision in exhibiting ...
— The Olden Time Series, Vol. 4: Quaint and Curious Advertisements • Henry M. Brooks
... straw, stubble—but suffer them to be pitch-forked en masse, and unconsidered: it is their privilege, in common with that of certain others—lightnesses that froth upon the surface of society. Moreover, let me remind your worship's classicality that no one of mortals is sapient at all times. Item, that if friend Flaccus be not a calumniator, even the rigid virtue of the antiquer Cato delighted in so stimulant a vanity as wine hot. So give the colt his head, and let it go: remembering always that this same colt, as straying without a responsible rider, ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... the philanthropist moved away less lightsome than he had come, leaving the discomfited misanthrope to the solitude he held so sapient. ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... Monarchy," published in 1651, he had inserted an hieroglyphical plate, representing on one side persons in winding sheets digging graves; and on the other a large city in flames. After the great fire some sapient member of the legislature bethought him of Lilly's book, and having mentioned it in the house, it was agreed that the astrologer should be summoned. Lilly attended accordingly, when Sir Robert Brooke told him the reason of his summons, and called upon him to declare what ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... of blackberry wine as the short cut from poverty to prosperity in Ireland, the scheme being parallel to Mr. Gladstone's famous remedy of jam, this sapient "B.O.N." says:— ...
— About Ireland • E. Lynn Linton |
