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More "Rote" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and young Octavius, come, Revenge yourselves alone on Cassius, For Cassius is a-weary of the world; 95 Hated by one he loves; brav'd by his brother; Check'd like a bondman; all his faults observ'd, Set in a note-book, learn'd, and conn'd by rote, To cast into my teeth. O, I could weep My spirit from mine eyes! There is my dagger, 100 And here my naked breast; within, a heart Dearer than Plutus' mine, richer than gold: If that thou be'st a Roman, take it forth; I, that denied thee gold, will give my heart: Strike, as ...
— The New Hudson Shakespeare: Julius Caesar • William Shakespeare
... be studied, known, and well attended to; or we only follow the art blindly, and without certainty. Thence the common indifference of so many performers, who mind nothing more than a rote of the art, without tracing it ...
— A Treatise on the Art of Dancing • Giovanni-Andrea Gallini
... frame his phrases to this or that woman. His oncoming was rapid. He could measure, cut, and wrap in a parcel twelve yards of brown or white calico quicker than any one in the shop, and he understood by rote the folds of linen tablecloths and bedsheets; and in the town this was said of him: "Shopmen quite ordinary can sell what a customer wants; Pugh Rees Jones can sell ...
— My Neighbors - Stories of the Welsh People • Caradoc Evans
... said she. "It was I, whose bold behavior, unbecoming a modest and well-trained young woman, gave rise to what seemed like presumption on your part." The sense of justice was strong within her, but she made her speech haughtily and primly, as if she had learned it by rote from some maiden school-mistress, and pulled her arm away and turned to go; but ...
— Evelina's Garden • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... partial in the rest: Foes to all living worth except your own, And advocates for folly dead and gone. Authors, like coins, grow dear as they grow old; It is the rust we value, not the gold. Chaucer's worst ribaldry is learned by rote, And beastly Skelton heads of houses quote: One likes no language but the Faery Queen; A Scot will fight for Christ's Kirk o' the Green: And each true Briton is to Ben so civil, He swears the Muses met him at the devil. Though justly Greece her eldest sons admires, Why should not we be ...
— Essay on Man - Moral Essays and Satires • Alexander Pope
... Then we would have them read, or in turn sing a Psalm or a hymn, or learn some passage from a good book. We sang with them, and asked them questions in what they had been studying. They knew Gellert's songs by rote. There was nothing but peace and contentment in our circle. The servants never saw or heard anything unpleasant. Every little disturbance was hushed at once; and all the family felt the power of my wife in our ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... ribbon string You used to wear about your throat; And of this pale, this perished thing, I think I know the threads by rote. God help such love! To touch your hand, To loiter where your feet might fall, You marvellous girl, my soul would stand The worst of hell ...
— An Anthology of Australian Verse • Bertram Stevens
... teaching Filomena her large letters up to N, and making her say them by rote, and with that end in view have divided them into three portions—ABCD—EFG—ILMN. She manages all right, except that she always jumps E and L. Lesson closed: "Were you at church to-day, Filomena?" "No, I have nothing to confess." "Did you go to church last Sunday?" "No, I have not ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... by which the analytic faculty of the pupil is exercised in tracing the transition from the primary meaning to the secondary and figurative meanings,—thus converting what is ordinarily a matter of rote into an agreeable exercise of the thinking faculty. Another point of novelty in the method of treatment is presented in the copious practical exercises on the use of words. The experienced instructor very well knows ...
— New Word-Analysis - Or, School Etymology of English Derivative Words • William Swinton
... Brembre succeeded to his mayoralty, and the so-called "king's party" was again in the ascendant, Philipot again appears as alderman of his old ward, continuing in office until his death (12 Sept., 1384), when he was succeeded by John Rote.—Letter Book ...
— London and the Kingdom - Volume I • Reginald R. Sharpe
... neist, the Guard relieves, [next] An' Orthodoxy raibles, [rattles by rote] Tho' in his heart he weel believes An' thinks it auld wives' fables: But, faith! the birkie wants a Manse, [fellow] So cannilie he hums them; [prudently, humbugs] Altho' his carnal wit an' sense Like hafflins-wise o'ercomes ...
— Robert Burns - How To Know Him • William Allan Neilson
... bullying, brawling, champion of the Church, Vain as a parrot screaming on her perch; And like that parrot screaming out by rote, The same stale, flat, unprofitable note; Still interrupting all debate With one eternal cry of "Church and State!" With all the High Tory's ignorance increased, By all the arrogance that makes the ...
— East Anglia - Personal Recollections and Historical Associations • J. Ewing Ritchie
... that Aprille with his shoures sote The droghte of Marche hath perced to the rote, And bathed every veyne in swich licour Of which vertu engendred is the flour; Whan Zephirus eek with his swete breeth 5 Inspired hath in every holt and heeth The tendre croppes, and the yong sonne Hath in the Ram his halfe cours ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... falling of the curtain. The youngest girl was so defective in her lesson, that not one word of it could be extracted from her, even by the cowskin; nothing but piercing shrieks, enough to make my heart bleed, could the poor victim utter. Irritated at the child's want of capacity to repeat by rote what she could not understand, the old man darted from his seat, and struck her senseless ...
— Frank Mildmay • Captain Frederick Marryat
... there alone, in the sombre and dank chapel, smelling like stagnant water, and without saying rosaries mechanically, or repeating prayers by rote, he fell into a reverie, endeavouring to look somewhat clearly into his life, and take stock of himself. And while he thus pulled himself together, far-off voices came behind the grating, drew nearer and nearer, passed by the black sieve of the veil, ...
— En Route • J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans
... verses, were repeated, but by rote, and unconnectedly. There were also, occasionally, I believe, a Saint George. In all, there was a confused resemblance of the ancient mysteries, in which the characters of Scripture, the Nine Worthies, ...
— Marmion • Sir Walter Scott
... ilke fruyt is ever lenger the wers Till it be rote in mullok or in stree— We olde men, I drede, so fare we, Till we be roten, ...
— The plant-lore & garden-craft of Shakespeare • Henry Nicholson Ellacombe
... put his questions kindly; but for all that, she was no match for the bright intellects of the law. Lawyers are great men to simple folk; they can quote paragraph this and section that; they have learned such things by rote, ready to bring out at any moment. Oh, they are great men indeed. And apart from all this knowledge, they are not always devoid of sense; sometimes even not altogether heartless. Inger had no cause ...
— Growth of the Soil • Knut Hamsun
... lower schools expands into elementary mathematics in the higher; into arithmetic, with a little algebra, a little Euclid. But I doubt if one boy in five hundred has ever heard the explanation of a rule of arithmetic, or knows his Euclid otherwise than by rote. ...
— Science & Education • Thomas H. Huxley
... present things I turn To speak what in my heart will beat and burn, And hang my wreath on his world-honored urn. Nature, they say, doth dote, And cannot make a man Save on some worn-out plan, Repeating as by rote: 160 For him her Old-World moulds aside she threw, And, choosing sweet clay from the breast Of the unexhausted West, With stuff untainted shaped a hero new, Wise, steadfast in the strength of God, and true, How beautiful to see Once more ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... has passionately at heart—propounds them half in superstition and half in that species of despair which delights in self-torture—propounds them not altogether because he believes in the prophetic or demoniac character of the bird (which reason assures him is merely repeating a lesson learned by rote), but because he experiences a frenzied pleasure in so modelling his questions as to receive from the expected "Nevermore" the most delicious because the most intolerable of sorrow. Perceiving the opportunity ...
— Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Poetical Works • Edgar Allan Poe
... taught to us as a branch of 'Deportment'; our vices are the recognised vices of our reign and set. Our religion hangs ready made beside our cradle to be buttoned upon us by loving hands. Our tastes we acquire, with difficulty; our sentiments we learn by rote. At cost of infinite suffering, we study to love whiskey and cigars, high art and classical music. In one age we admire Byron and drink sweet champagne: twenty years later it is more fashionable to prefer Shelley, and ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III, April 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... ago, was compelled to be familiar with the Genevan creed, as expressed in "The Shorter Catechism," but most little Presbyterians regarded that document as a necessary but unintelligible evil—the sorrow that haunted the Sabbath. I knew it by rote, Effectual Calling and all, but did not perceive that it possessed either meaning or actuality. Nobody was so unkind as to interpret the significance of the questions and answers; but somebody did ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... signifie nothing; but are taken up, and learned by rote from the Schooles, as Hypostatical, Transubstantiate, Consubstantiate, Eternal-now, and ...
— Leviathan • Thomas Hobbes
... man must serve his time to every trade Save censure. Critics all are ready made. Take hackney'd jokes from Miller, got by rote, With just enough of learning to misquote; A mind well skilled to find or forge a fault; A turn for punning—call it Attic salt; To Jeffrey go, be silent and discreet,— His pay is just ten sterling pounds per sheet; Fear not to lie, ...
— Interludes - being Two Essays, a Story, and Some Verses • Horace Smith
... of St. Thomas, all but three were admitted upon inquiry to be unable to read; yet the children of this large parish attend school regularly, and make use of books. They hold the catechism-book in their hands as if they were reading, while they only repeat its contents, which they know by rote." The only exception to this state of things made by Lord Durham was in favour of the Catholic clergy, who were represented by him as a respectable and well-conducted class of men, and well-disposed towards the government. The report further stated that there was no combination ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... great neglect and scorn of preaching, ariseth from the practice of men who set up to decry and disparage religion; these, being zealous to promote infidelity and vice, learn a rote of buffoonery that serveth all occasions, and refutes the strongest arguments for piety and good manners. These have a set of ridicule calculated for all sermons, and all preachers, and can be extreme witty as often as they ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IV: - Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Volume II • Jonathan Swift
... out in the Peninsula, as other mediaeval landmarks become effaced. These people are simply the wandering bards and minstrels, who find their place in an Independent Malay State as naturally as did their prototypes in the countries of Europe during the Middle Ages. They learn by rote some old-world tale, which has been transmitted by word of mouth through countless generations, and they wander from village to village, singing it for pay to the unlettered people, to whom these songs ...
— In Court and Kampong - Being Tales and Sketches of Native Life in the Malay Peninsula • Hugh Clifford
... incarnate: it possesses outsight and insight: it either teaches and inspires or it comforts and consoles, save when a strict sense of duty compels it to severity: briefly, it is keen and guiding and creative. Let the young beginner learn by rote what one master says of another:—"He was never provoked into coarseness: his thrusts were made with the rapier according to the received rules of fence, he firmly upheld the honour of his calling, and in the exercise of it was uniformly fearless, independent and incorrupt." ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... in danger of forgetting that I am to stay in this world only a little while and then go home. Will you help me to bear it in mind?... How must the "Pilgrim's Progress" interest a mind that has never learned the whole book by rote in childhood. I have often wished I could read it as a first-told tale, and so I wish about the xiv. of John and some other chapters in ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... in a fatherly tone, "lemme tell you something. While I've been a-roostin' up here in my perch, I've been a-watchin' you boys; a-watchin' an' a-worryin'. What have you been a-doin'? You've been a-raisin' hell, you have. Son, you ain't a rote a word, have yer? An' you, Whinney—boy, you ain't ketched a bug nor a beetle, have yer? And you, ole Swanko-panko, you ain't drawed a line, ...
— The Cruise of the Kawa • Walter E. Traprock
... the qualities which the trade of a false witness requires except wickedness. There was nothing plausible about him. His voice was harsh. Treachery was written in all the lines of his yellow face. He had no invention, no presence of mind, and could do little more than repeat by rote the lies taught ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... had no such end in view, but already she understood that her education, in the serious sense, was only now beginning. As a girl, her fate had been that of girls in general; when she could write without orthographical errors, and could play by rote a few pieces of pianoforte music, her education had been pronounced completed. In the profound moral revolution which her nature had recently undergone her intellect also shared; when the first numbing shock had spent itself, she felt the growth of an intellectual appetite formerly unknown. ...
— Demos • George Gissing
... hear God himself unless he speak the phraseology of I know not what David, or Jeremiah, or Paul. We shall not always set so great a price on a few texts, on a few lives. We are like children who repeat by rote the sentences of grandames and tutors, and, as they grow older, of the men of talents and character they chance to see,—painfully recollecting the exact words they spoke; afterwards, when they come into the point of view which those had who uttered these sayings, they understand them ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... ungovernable rage, is so wild a visitor that no attempt at all is made to understand him; and the beggars beg dismayed but unalarmed, uninterruptedly, without a pause or a conjecture. They beg by rote, thinking of something else, as occasion arises, and all indifferent to the ...
— Essays • Alice Meynell
... periodical, recurring after seven years, but this last is premature by half that time. Cut off in the flower of Colebrook. The Middletonian stream and all its echoes mourn. Even minnows dwindle. A parvis fiunt MINIMI. I fear to invite Mrs. Hood to our new mansion, lest she envy it, & rote [? rout] us. But when we are fairly in, I hope she will come & try it. I heard she & you were made uncomfortable by some unworthy to be cared for attacks, and have tried to set up a feeble counteraction thro' ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... so far forsake the traditions of his tribe as to stay long in any one place. His mind is not as ours. A little of our civilisation we can teach him, and he will learn it, as he may learn to repeat by rote the signs of the zodiac or the multiplication table, or to use a table napkin, or to decorously dispose of the stones in a cherry tart. But the lesson sits lightly on him, and he remains in heart as irreclaimable as ever. Already, indeed, our Gipsies are leaving us. They are not dying out, it is ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... furnish an excellent topical analysis of the text.[3] In a certain sense they ask "what the book says," but the teacher is advised emphatically to discourage any such thing as committing the text to memory. The tendency to rote-learning is very strong. I had to contend with it in teaching history to seniors at Harvard twenty years ago, but much has since been done to check it through the development of the modern German seminary methods. (For ...
— Civil Government in the United States Considered with - Some Reference to Its Origins • John Fiske
... a class room at a Negro university in one of the Southern cities, which is conducted on the idea that a college course will save the soul. Here the class was reciting a lesson from an abstruse text-book on economics, reciting it by rote, with so obvious a failure to assimilate it that the waste ...
— Up From Slavery: An Autobiography • Booker T. Washington
... stretch or clear, deep channel offered his master a chance to leave his post for a few minutes. For strain on the memory, his education is comparable only to the Chinese system of liberal culture, which comprehends learning by rote some tens of thousands of verses from the works of Confucius and other philosophers of the far East. Beginning at New Orleans, he had to commit to memory the name and appearance of every point of land, inlet, river or bayou mouth, "cut-off," light, plantation and ...
— American Merchant Ships and Sailors • Willis J. Abbot
... it. He bethought himself a little—then ran and got Dr Watts's hymns for children. He knew "How doth the little busy bee" so well as to be able to repeat it without a mistake, for his mother had taught it him, and he had understood it. You see, he was not like a child of five, taught to repeat by rote lines which could give him no notions but mistaken ones. Besides, he had a good knowledge of words, and could use them well in talk, although he could not read; and it is a great thing if a child can talk well before he begins to learn ...
— Gutta-Percha Willie • George MacDonald
... begun throwing the cargo into Boston harber & I says to a fello what is in them boxes & he says T. & I says well why are they throwing it away & he says because they do not want to pay the tacks which is about as sensable Ethen if I was to rite a lot of letters & then as fast as I rote I would tare it up because I did not want to pay for a stamp. Well I says somebody ought to catch he—ll for this & he says are you a torie & I seen he was trying to kid me & I says no I am a congregationalis & a loyal subject of king Geo. Rex & he says ...
— A Parody Outline of History • Donald Ogden Stewart
... hope," he said by rote, "you're well, and your parents also in good health. May I have the pleasure of dancing the cotillon as ...
— Confessions of a Book-Lover • Maurice Francis Egan
... soon as he can say the Creed, the Lord's Prayer, and the Ten Commandments, in the vulgar (i.e. his native) tongue, and be further instructed, etc." Here, the words "can say" obviously mean can say intelligently. The mere saying of the words by rote is comparatively unimportant, though it has its use; but if this were all, it would degrade the Candidate's intellectual status to the capacities of a parrot. But, "as soon as" he can intelligently comply with the Church's requirements, as soon as he has reached "a competent age," ...
— The Church: Her Books and Her Sacraments • E. E. Holmes
... away the main-togallants'l, an' she's to work on the foretops'l now. Guess you'd better look in the alminick agin, and fin' out when this moon sets.' So the cappen thought 'twas 'bout time to go on deck. Dreadful slow them Dutch cappens be." And X. walked away, rumbling inwardly, like the rote of ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VIII (of X) • Various
... in the country. He may, or may not, be able to tell us much of his adventures on that occasion, for whatever he can recall is due to a mental operation of a different character from that which enabled him to learn his lesson. There is here no question of learning by rote, of memorizing, but of capacity to recall to mind a past experience. The boy who is clever at memorizing a passage from Shakespeare may not have a good memory at all for recalling past events. To understand why this is so we must examine these two forms ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn
... before his eighteenth or nineteenth year, was the common school of the district. He made good proficiency, but nothing worthy of note occurred in relation to his studies till he was about fifteen years of age. He then began to think, as he says. Before that time, he had repeated by rote whatever he had been taught. The first impulse to reflection was a new discovery. He had been taught from childhood that accent is a stress of voice laid on some syllable or letter of a word. But this definition ...
— The History of Dartmouth College • Baxter Perry Smith
... forestalled the modern dockyards in the making of metal ships. The man who doubted, let us say, our fabulous ancient kings running up to Adam, or found but mythology in some old tale, was as hated as if he had doubted the authority of Scripture. Above all no man was so ignorant, that he had not by rote familiar arguments and statistics to drive away amid familiar applause, all those had they but found strange truth in the world or in their mind, whose knowledge has passed out of memory and become an instinct of hand or eye. ...
— Synge And The Ireland Of His Time • William Butler Yeats
... Singing by rote means that the singer sings something learned by ear without regard to notes. Singing by note means that the singer is guided to the correct pitch by visible notes. Singing by syllable means that the singer sings the tones ...
— Music Notation and Terminology • Karl W. Gehrkens
... wine, and so keeping all the yeare long; any hearbes, fruit, or flowers in pickle; also pickle it selfe. Fr. compote, stewed fruit. The Recipe for Compost in the Forme of Cury, Recipe 100 (C), p.49-50, is "Take rote of p{er}sel. pasternak of rases. scrape hem and waische he{m} clene. take rap{is} & caboch{is} ypared and icorne. take an erthen pa{n}ne w{i}t{h} clene wat{er}, & set it on the fire. cast all ise {er}inne. whan ey buth boiled, cast {er}to peer{is}, & p{ar}boile hem wel. take ise ...
— Early English Meals and Manners • Various
... no clown, Devereux thought; but as fine a gentleman, to speak honestly, and as handsome, as well dressed, and as pleasant to listen to, with that sweet low voice and piquant smile, as any. Besides he could draw, and had more yards of French and English verses by rote than Aunt Becky owned of Venetian lace and satin ribbons, and was more of a scholar than he. He? He!—why—'he?' what the deuce had Devereux to do with it—was he vexed?—A fiddle-stick! He began to flag with Miss Ward, ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... have no notion of. We read in their writings a great number of high and glorious principles and acts, and our first thought thereupon is, "All this must have had an existence somewhere or other in those times. These very men, indeed, may be merely speaking by rote, and not understand what they say; but it matters not to the profit of their writings what they were themselves." It matters not to the profit of their writings, nor again to the authority resulting from them; for the times ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman
... Ironmongeries, though primitive in their equipment, have produced, by dint of skill and patience, work that is very passable. The women weave their own cloth on the native looms, and practice various other industries. The children are well trained in hospitality and public manners, which they learn by rote. ...
— The Great White Tribe in Filipinia • Paul T. Gilbert
... framers of laws, the pronouncers of judgments, and the arbitrators of rewards or punishments. The immunity which they enjoyed from war, allured many young men to enrol themselves in this order. Their education was a poetical one, for it was necessary to learn by rote several thousand verses, in which all the knowledge then ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XX. No. 557., Saturday, July 14, 1832 • Various
... I know, I the viol well can play; I the pipe and syrinx blow; Harp and geige my hand obey; Psaltery, symphony, and rote Help to charm the listening throng; And Armonia lends its note While I warble forth ...
— Music and Some Highly Musical People • James M. Trotter
... lawes, that is to saie, the wicked and beastlie life of man, their iniurius beha- uiour, sekyng to frame themselues from men to beastes mo- [Sidenote: Euil maners was the occa- sion of good Lawes.] ued the wise and Godlie, elders to ordaine certaine meanes, to rote discipline, whereby the wickedlie disposed personne [Fol. xxxiiij.v] should bee compelled to liue in order, to obeie Godlie lawes, to the vpholdyng of societie. Therefore, all suche as dissolue lawes, caste doune good order, ...
— A booke called the Foundacion of Rhetorike • Richard Rainolde
... Didst hear the fellow's words who handed it? I asked from whom it came, he spoke by rote, "The pepper bites, the corn is ripe for harvest, I come from Eisenach." 'T is ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. II. (of II.), Jewish Poems: Translations • Emma Lazarus
... such tune as he chose, and often sliding from one tune to another in the same line or improvising as he went on. Finally, in 1721, the Rev. Thomas Walter of Roxbury, Mass., published a treatise, upon the grounds or rules of music or an introduction to the art of singing by rote, containing twenty-four tunes harmonized into three parts. The attempt to supersede the old Puritan tunes and restrict the liberty of the individual singers met with the greatest opposition and was long successfully resisted in all the churches in New England, so tenacious were they of the rights ...
— The Two Hundredth Anniversary of the Settlement of the Town of New Milford, Conn. June 17th, 1907 • Daniel Davenport
... Court riz. But now the Court is riz, and pears like you aint no ways better from all accounts. And tell you how we knowed. See Hannah and me, we got a letter from Mrs. Whaley as keeps the 'Farmers.' Well she rote to Hannah and me to send her up some chickins and duks and eggs and butter and other fresh frutes and vegetubbles, which she sez as they doo ask sich onlawful prices for em in the city markits as she cant conshuenshusly ...
— Self-Raised • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... knows how a poor mind is always repeating itself, going by rote through the same train of words, ideas, actions; and that such a mind is neither interesting nor practical. It is not practical, because the circumstances of life are rarely exactly repeated, so that ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... Air foul with wine; a shouting, reeling crowd Of friends who dragged him, dazed and blind with drink Out to the street; a crazy rout of cabs; The steady mutter of his neighbor's voice, Mumbling out dull obscenity by rote; And then... well, they had brought him home it seemed, Since he awoke in bed — oh, damn the business! He had not wanted it — the silly jokes, "One last, great night of freedom ere you're married!" "You'll get no fun then!" "H-ssh, don't tell that story! He'll have a wife ...
— Young Adventure - A Book of Poems • Stephen Vincent Benet
... while in the school he sate 65 His Primer conning with an earnest cheer, [E] The whilst the rest their anthem-book repeat The Alma Redemptoris did he hear; And as he durst he drew him near and near, And hearkened to the words and to the note, 70 Till the first verse he learned it all by rote. ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. II. • William Wordsworth
... smerte. Therfore in stede of weping and praieres, Men mote[85] give silver to the poure freres. His tippet was ay farsed[86] ful of knives, And pinnes, for to given fayre wives. And certainly he hadde a mery note. Wel coude he singe and plaien on a rote.[87] Of yeddinges[88] he bar utterly the pris. His nekke was white as the flour de lis. Therto he strong was as a champioun, And knew wel the tavernes in every toun, And every hosteler and tappestere, Better than a lazar or a beggestere, For unto swiche a worthy ...
— English Satires • Various
... This passage is "rote sarcustic." But surely Dr. Munro will not, he cannot, argue that Mr. Bruce was "an unconscious thought-reader" when he "cleared out" the interior of the canoe, and found three disputed objects ...
— The Clyde Mystery - a Study in Forgeries and Folklore • Andrew Lang
... priests, and his prophets. They do not suffer themselves to be shaken out of their ordinary routine by the gravity of such a crisis as this; the living work of Jehovah is to them a sealed book; their piety does not extend beyond the respect they show for certain human precepts learnt by rote. ...
— Prolegomena to the History of Israel • Julius Wellhausen
... she was not a member of any church, although her nature was deeply religious. Hers was the religion the soul inculcates, not that which is learned by rote in the temple. She was a Christian because she thought Christ the greatest figure in world history, and also because her own conduct of life was modelled upon Christian principles and virtues. She ...
— The Lion and The Mouse - A Story Of American Life • Charles Klein
... of the child has indeed improved, but it has become somewhat fastidious. Only that which seems interesting and intelligible to the child impresses itself permanently; on the other hand, useless and unintelligible verses learned by rote, that persons have taught him, though seldom, for fun, are forgotten after ...
— The Mind of the Child, Part II • W. Preyer
... works with a rollicking stave at lip, And loud is the chorus skirled; With the burly rote of his rumbling throat He batters it ...
— Ballads of Lost Haven - A Book of the Sea • Bliss Carman
... characters of men. While you were a child, I endeavored to form your heart habitually to virtue and honor, before your understanding was capable of showing you their beauty and utility. Those principles, which you then got, like your grammar rules, only by rote, are now, I am persuaded, fixed and confirmed by reason. And indeed they are so plain and clear, that they require but a very moderate degree of understanding, either to comprehend or practice them. Lord Shaftesbury says, very prettily, that he would be virtuous ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... he had prepared beforehand. He had occasionally a slightly affected hesitation in his speech, and when he paused an instant after the second word, my impatience and jealousy impelled me to continue the speech for him, as if it were something we had both learned by rote. He coloured and looked astonished, as well as annoyed; and the words had no sooner escaped my lips than I felt a shock of alarm lest such an anticipation of words—very far from being words of course, easy to divine—should have ...
— The Lifted Veil • George Eliot
... laugh at, you young rascal," he said to Bob. "I'm sure I've given you quite as good a definition as you would find in any of those 'catechisms of common things'—catechisms of conundrums, I call them—which boys and girls are made to learn by rote, like parrots, without really acquiring any sensible knowledge of the subjects they are supposed to teach! I might tell you, as these works do, that 'steam was an elastic fluid generated by water when in a boiling state'; ...
— Bob Strong's Holidays - Adrift in the Channel • John Conroy Hutcheson
... danger to any religious organisation is that a body of men should arise in its ranks, and hold its positions of trust, who have learned its great fundamental doctrines by rote out of the catechism, but have no experimental knowledge of their truth inwrought by the mighty anointing of the Holy Ghost, and who are destitute of "an unction from the Holy One," by which, says John, "ye know all things" (1 ...
— When the Holy Ghost is Come • Col. S. L. Brengle
... hot days of summer, and the cold days of winter), when we had to sit for hours on hard wooden benches, before uncomfortable desks, bending over grimy slates and ink-besprinkled "copy books," and poring over studies in which we took no interest—geography, which we learned by rote; arithmetic, which always evaded us, and grammar, which we never could master. We could repeat the "rules," but we could not "parse;" we could cipher, but our sums would not "prove;" we could rattle off the productions of Italy—"corn, wine, silk and oil"—but we could not "bound" ...
— The Aldine, Vol. 5, No. 1., January, 1872 - A Typographic Art Journal • Various
... never forget that such a truth as this cannot be learned by rote as one would learn the facts of physical science. They must be experienced before we can really know them. We must in our hearts live through Abraham's harsh and bitter experiences if we would know ...
— The Pursuit of God • A. W. Tozer
... xxxvi.) the "heart of the Koran" much used for edifying recitation. Some pious Moslems in Egypt repeat it as a Wazifah, or religious task, or as masses for the dead, and all educated men know its 83 versets by rote. ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 4 • Richard F. Burton
... lineS to inform you that i was the fir St agent for you pills in thiS Setlement but th as iS Several agent round her and tha ar interfer With mee eSpeSly William a StavSon he liveS her at enfield he Wanted mee to giv him one of you Sur klerS So he Wod be agent but i Wodent let hi m hav hit an he rote to you i SupoSe an haS got a Suplye of pillS an ar aruning a gant mee he iS Sell ing them at 20 centS a box i Want you to St op him ...
— History of the Comstock Patent Medicine Business and Dr. Morse's Indian Root Pills • Robert B. Shaw
... word is also used in the sense of 'defeat,' and is cognate with route, rote, and rut. All come from Lat. ruptus, broken: a 'rout' is the breaking up of a crowd, or a crowd broken up; a 'route' is a way broken through a forest; 'rote' is a beaten track; and a 'rut' is a track left by a wheel. See Lyc. 61, "by the rout that made ...
— Milton's Comus • John Milton
... can resolve it by rote, Lady, twas that yeare the Cuckoo sung in May: another token Lady; there raigned in Rome a great Tyrant that yeare, and many Maides lost their heads for using ...
— A Collection Of Old English Plays, Vol. IV. • Editor: A.H. Bullen
... drab Sunday School books: "Hetty, a Humble Heroine" and "Josephus, a Lad of Palestine;" he thumbed once more the high-colored text-cards which no boy wanted but no boy liked to throw away, because they were somehow sacred; he was tortured by the stumbling rote of thirty-five years ago, as in the vast ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis
... all its indescribable charm, no longer surrounded us; we began to feel that our walk on the quarter-deck was very like the exercise of an ass in a mill; that our books had lost half their pages, and that the other half were known by rote; that our beef was very salt, and our biscuits very hard; in short, that having studied the good ship, Edward, from stem to stern till we knew the name of every sail, and the use of every pulley, we had had enough of her, and as we laid down, head to ...
— Domestic Manners of the Americans • Fanny Trollope
... several instances of habits, which may be revived by one single word; as when a person, who has by rote any periods of a discourse, or any number of verses, will be put in remembrance of the whole, which he is at a loss to recollect, by that single word or expression, with which ...
— A Treatise of Human Nature • David Hume
... this reason Flyblow (who is received in all the families in town through the degeneracy and iniquity of their manners) is to be treated like a knave, though he is one of the weakest of fools: he has by rote, and at second-hand, all that can be said of any man of figure, wit, and virtue in town. Name a man of worth, and this creature tells you the worst passage of his life. Speak of a beautiful woman, and this puppy will whisper the next man to him, though he has nothing to say of her. ...
— The Tatler, Volume 1, 1899 • George A. Aitken
... Sir William de Pakington, the prince's own herald and scrivener," whispered Sir Nigel, as they pulled up amid the line of knights who waited admission. "Ill fares it with the man who would venture to deceive him. He hath by rote the name of every knight of France or of England; and all the tree of his family, with his kinships, coat-armor, marriages, augmentations, abatements, and I know not what beside. We may leave our horses here with the varlets, and push ...
— The White Company • Arthur Conan Doyle
... from present things I turn To speak what in my heart will beat and burn, And hang my wreath on his world-honored urn. Nature, they say, doth dote, And cannot make a man Save on some worn-out plan, Repeating us by rote For him her Old-World moulds aside she threw, And, choosing sweet clay from the breast Of the unexhausted West, With stuff untainted shaped a hero new, Vise, steadfast in the strength of God, and true. How beautiful ...
— Selections From American Poetry • Various
... This is rote sarcasticul," as Artemus the Delicious says. Woman's weakness! If Solomon had planned and Samson executed, they could not have served her turn better than this most seasonable swooning did; for, lo! at her fall, the doughty combatants uttered a yell of dismay, and there was an indiscriminate ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various
... analogy with 'typo'] A momentary, correctable glitch in mental processing, especially one involving recall of information learned by rote; a bubble in the stream of consciousness. Syn. {braino}; see also {brain fart}. ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... first the old traditional curriculum, the learning by rote of the classics without explanation in early youth, followed by a more intelligent study in later years. This is exactly like the traditional study of the classics in this country, as it existed, for example, in the eighteenth century. Men ...
— The Problem of China • Bertrand Russell
... after having gone through the ceremony of attending church, and of having performed the humble duty which all are taught to practise there, disposes the people to this license, for they carry away no new idea with them from the sacred house. The formal exercise there being gone through by rote, without exciting new feelings, or touching new chords in their hearts, may cause them to break away from strictness, and give a rein to their passions after the exercise of their ...
— Recollections of Manilla and the Philippines - During 1848, 1849 and 1850 • Robert Mac Micking
... appear on the stage, was a singular wild man of no small talents and humour. Attracted first by Miss Fotheringay's beauty, he began to teach her how to act. He shrieked out in his cracked voice the parts, and his pupil learned them from his lips by rote, and repeated them in her full rich tones. He indicated the attitudes, and set and moved those beautiful arms of hers. Those who remember this grand actress on the stage can recall how she used always precisely the same gestures, looks, and tones; how she stood on the same plank ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... cannot be an actress; I cannot resign my real self for that vamped-up hypocrite before the lamps. Out on those stage-robes and painted cheeks! Out on that simulated utterance of sentiments learned by rote and practised before the looking-glass till every gesture has ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... was quickly fascinated by the professor of mental and moral philosophy, a delicate-looking young college graduate. She worked very hard, studying her lessons far into the night, memorizing long lists of names, dates, maxims, learning by rote whatever was contained in those ...
— One Woman's Life • Robert Herrick
... "Al-Hafizah" which has two meanings. Properly it signifies the third order of Traditionists out of a total of five or those who know 300,000 traditions and their ascriptions. Popularly "one who can recite the Koran by rote." There are six great Traditionists whose words are held to be prime authorities; (1) Al-Bokhari, (2) Muslim, and these are entitled Al-Sahihayn, The (two true) authorities. After them (3) Al-Tirmidi; and (4) Abu Daud: these ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... worship is grave and formal; it has to be done with precision and in strict accordance with the rules; silence is commanded; the sacrificer repeats the prayer proper for the occasion after some one who knows it by rote; the worshippers veil their heads. In this the Roman ritual is markedly different from the Greek. Mommsen says the Greek prayed bareheaded, because his prayer was contemplation, looking at and to the gods; and the Roman with head covered, because his prayer was an exercise of thought; and in this ...
— History of Religion - A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems • Allan Menzies
... beginning to feel at home. The children were put to school; at least it was what passed for a school in those days: a place where tender young humanity devoted itself for eight or ten hours a day to learning incomprehensible rubbish by heart out of books and reciting it by rote, like parrots; so that a finished education consisted simply of a permanent headache and the ability to read without stopping to spell the words or take breath. Hawkins bought out the village store for a song and proceeded to reap the profits, which ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 1. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... and adequate religious instruction, the minister should not be burdened with the care of more souls than he can properly instruct and direct in spiritual matters, so that he can give to all those who are infidels suitable instruction in Christian doctrine—not merely so that they know it by rote, but also so that they may understand (so far as they are capable of this) the signification of the words, and the mysteries contained therein. Thus, too, he will be able to make each and every one of them understand all that is necessary for them ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, V7, 1588-1591 • Emma Helen Blair
... polyglot mime, a bird linguist, a feathered Mezzofanti singing all the bird languages; yet over and above all this, with a something of its own that cannot be described." The mocking-bird speaks for himself in Thompson's 'To an English Nightingale': "What do you think of me? Do I sing by rote? Or by note? Have I a parrot's echo-throat? Oh no! I caught my strains From Nature's freshest veins. . . . . . "He A match for me! No more than a wren or a chickadee! Mine is the voice of the young and strong, Mine the soul of the brave and free!" This ...
— Select Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... logic, morals and metaphysics were taught. Here the young persons handled, adjusted, and knocked about more or less adroitly the formula on God, nature, the soul and science they had learned by rote. Less scholastic, abridged, and made easy, this verbal exercise has been maintained in the lycees.[6219] Under the new regime, as well as under the old one, a string of abstract terms, which the professor ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 6 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 2 (of 2) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... ecstasy: "It is Faustus who calls there. No one else has the power; and no one else, if he had such power, would dare to knock so loudly against the iron portals. Up! up! a man like him is worth a thousand of the scoundrels who come down hither every day by rote." Then, turning to the devil Leviathan, his favourite, he added, "I choose thee, the subtlest seducer, the deadliest hater of the human race, to ascend and purchase for me, by thy dangerous services, the soul of ...
— Faustus - his Life, Death, and Doom • Friedrich Maximilian von Klinger
... by rote, Like any Harvard Proctor; He'd sing a fugue out, note by note; Knew Physics like a Doctor; He spoke in German and in French; Knew each Botanic table; But one small word that you'll agree Comes pat enough to you and me, To speak he was not able: For he couldn't ...
— Our Boys - Entertaining Stories by Popular Authors • Various
... maryage, Corou{n}de me quene i{n} blysse to brede, I{n} lengh{e} of daye[gh] at eu{er} schal wage, 416 & sesed i{n} alle hys herytage Hys lef is, I am holy hysse; Hys prese, hys prys & hys parage, Is rote & grou{n}de of ...
— Early English Alliterative Poems - in the West-Midland Dialect of the Fourteenth Century • Various
... use language correctly, who never saw the inside of a grammar book, and who never examined the principles on which it depends. But this, by no means, proves that it is better to sing by rote, than "with the understanding." These rudiments, however, should form the business of the nursery, rather than the grammar school. Every mother should labor to give distinct and forcible impressions of such things ...
— Lectures on Language - As Particularly Connected with English Grammar. • William S. Balch
... put down as lecturers, Unitarian ministers, or poets; that Maryland and Virginia are one commonwealth; that eighteen months before every Presidential election, a cause of quarrel is made with England by both the principal political parties, for the purpose of securing the Irish rote; that measly pork is caused by too hasty insertion in brine after killing, and consequent rapid fermentation; that the people of the United States, unless they have travelled in Europe, are quite unable to appreciate wit. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various
... and the romping plays must be alternated with quiet employments, of course, but still active. They will sing at their plays by rote; and also should be taught other songs by rote. But there can be introduced a regular drill on the scale, which should never last more than ten minutes at a time. This, if well managed, will cultivate their ears and voices, so that in the course of a year they will become very expert ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 61, November, 1862 • Various
... nay; but I would that I had more learning for your sake, and I shall be jealous of them, that I shall, when I find that you can read off out of any book you have got as smoothly as you do the verses you have learned by rote. Oh, you will be laughing ...
— Won from the Waves • W.H.G. Kingston
... hurdy-gurdy resting on the knees of two performers. One turns the handle, the other plays on the keys. Mr. Chappell at one time believed it was the old English Rote, from rota, a wheel, but changed his mind later, and showed that the rote had a hole through it, which enabled it to be played with both hands like a lyre or harp, and derived its name from ...
— In Troubadour-Land - A Ramble in Provence and Languedoc • S. Baring-Gould
... It went by rote, as they had learned in childhood. It was the tiresome repetition of going over and over and over the lines of a poem or the numbers of the multiplication table until the pathway was a deeply trodden furrow in the brain. Forever imprinted, it was retained until death. Knowledge ...
— The Fourth R • George Oliver Smith
... decided views on the training and education of children, and his wife also, as her English Social Life shows, had thought much on the subject. One of the Archbishop's rules was that children should never learn anything by rote. "When Mrs. Whately and I first married," he observed on one occasion, "one of the first things we agreed on was, that should Providence send us children, we would never teach them anything they did not understand. 'Not even ...
— Excellent Women • Various
... with many yawns; history no glorious epic revealing as it unrolls the Meaning of Things, no revelation of that wondrous distillation of the Spirit of man, but an endless marching and counter-marching up and down the map, weary columns of figures to be learned by rote instantly to be forgotten again. "On June the 7th General So-and-so proceeded with his whole army—" where? What does it matter? One little chapter of Carlyle, illuminated by a teacher of understanding, were worth a million such text-books. Alas, for the hatred of Virgil! "Paret" (a ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... Campbell Medical School, for which purpose a skeleton, with the bones fastened together by wires was hung up in our schoolroom. And finally, time was also found for Pandit Heramba Tatwaratna to come and get us to learn by rote rules of Sanscrit grammar. I am not sure which of them, the names of the bones or the sutras of the grammarian, were the more jaw-breaking. I think the latter took ...
— My Reminiscences • Rabindranath Tagore
... as bearing great resemblance to them, may be added logicians and sophisters, fellows that talk as much by rote as a parrot; who shall run down a whole gossiping of old women, nay, silence the very noise of a belfry, with louder clappers than those of the steeple; and if their unappeasable clamorousness were their only fault it would admit of some excuse; but they are at ...
— In Praise of Folly - Illustrated with Many Curious Cuts • Desiderius Erasmus
... a dummer Junge. Mrs. Melville thus describes her small servant-girl from one of these schools: 'She looks almost nine years old; and, as far as reading goes, she knows nothing more than her alphabet; can repeat the Prayer-Book Catechism by rote, and one or two hymns, utterly ignorant all the while of the import of a single word.' Even in Europe education, till lately, exercised the judgment too little, the memory too much; consequently there were more learned men than wise men. The system is now changing, ...
— To The Gold Coast for Gold, Vol. II - A Personal Narrative • Richard Francis Burton and Verney Lovett Cameron
... I cannot consider words picked up at random and learned by rote speech. The Fuzzies have merely learned to associate that sound with a specific human, and use it as a signal, not ...
— Little Fuzzy • Henry Beam Piper
... commence this speech satisfactorily, or give, or seem to feel, the point of contrast between the must and no must, the compulsion and no compulsion. In fact, the whole of it is usually mouthed out, without much reference to Shylock or the play, as if it had been learned by rote from a school speech-book. Hazlitt says, in his Characters of Shakspeare's Plays, 'The speech about mercy is very well, but there are a ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 75, April 5, 1851 • Various
... freely if thou art led to think that there are evil presences near, and in such lonely places as this cave.' I humoured him by doing as he desired; and that the rather because I hoped his thoughts would thus be turned away from the writing; but as soon as I had the spell by rote he turned back to the parchment, saying, 'He was but a poor divine who wrote this, for beside choosing ill-fitting verses, he cannot even give right numbers to them. For see here, "The days of our age are three-score years and ten; and though men be so strong ...
— Moonfleet • J. Meade Falkner
... cultivate such minds for eminent purposes would be folly. Even supposing they could be educated—which is scarcely supposable, for it would seem a contravention of Heaven's fiat—they could no more apply this learning, which would simply be by rote, than they could go to the moon. Such men are not unfrequently met with, and are designated, by common consent, learned fools. Nature points out the education they should receive. In like manner with those of higher and nobler attributes, educate them for their ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... greater than Kien, and verie white of woulle. Horses haue thei none, ne none desire, for that their Chamelles in al niedes serue them as well. Thei haue siluer and golde plentie, and diuerse kindes of spices, whiche other countries haue not. Laton, Brasse, Iron, Purple, Safron, the precious rote costus, and all coruen woorkes, are brought into theim by other. Thei bewrie their kyng in a donghille, for other thei wille skante take so muche laboure. There is no people that better kiepeth their promise and couenaunt, then thei doe, and ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries - Vol. II • Richard Hakluyt
... truth," reported the judges, "and we recommend that he be chastised for contumacy." He was, at any rate, no witness of the scene which followed Olimpia's entry. There was that about her, a subdued haste, a deliberation, a kind of intensity got by rote, which fascinated the youngster and left him staring in ...
— Little Novels of Italy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... knew well Thy love did read by rote, that could not spell. But come, young waverer, come go with me, In one respect I'll thy assistant be; For this alliance may so happy prove, To turn your households' ...
— Romeo and Juliet • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... midst of cities and affairs they are like landsmen at sea, incapable of an intellectual conception of their position: nor have they any complete confidence in their principles of navigation. They know the logarithms by rote merely, and if they reflect are reduced to a stupid wonder and only half believe they are in a known universe or will ever reach an earthly port. It would not require superhuman eloquence in some prophetic passenger to persuade them ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... the Ground as I was, and retired a Space, I know not whither, but methinks he walked hastilie to and fro. Thus I remained, agonized in Tears, unable to recal one Word of the humble Appeal I had pondered on my Journey, or to have spoken it, though I had known everie Syllable by Rote; yet not wishing myself, even in that Suspense, Shame, and Anguish, elsewhere than where I was cast, at ...
— Mary Powell & Deborah's Diary • Anne Manning
... plumed hats, with the left brim pinned up, caught the boys' eyes. The regulars marched by silently. It was part of their day's work; but following them came a detachment of Germans singing "Marchen Rote," and then the battery of six guns and then the Kansans. Small wonder Captain Gordon Granger told Colonel Mitchel that the Kansas soldiers were only an armed mob. They filed out of Springfield, some in rags and some in tags and some in velvet gowns. They carried ...
— A Certain Rich Man • William Allen White
... hear your voice. An Esquimaux would feel himself getting civilized under it for there's sense in the very sound. A man's character speaks in his voice, even more than in his words. These he may utter by rote, but his 'voice is the man for a' that,' and betrays or divulges his peculiar nature. Do you like my voice, ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... children were so drilled in Shakespeare that there was not one of them who could not, when somewhat older, repeat long passages by rote, and they made the rehearsal of scenes from Shakespeare's plays one of their favorite amusements. Anna Ella showed no taste for accomplishments; cared neither for dancing, drawing, music, or needlework. She used to boast to her sisters that she had ...
— A Military Genius - Life of Anna Ella Carroll of Maryland • Sarah Ellen Blackwell
... beaux. True genuine dulness moved his pity, Unless it offered to be witty. Those who their ignorance confessed, He never offended with a jest; But laughed to hear an idiot quote A verse from Horace learned by rote. ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... tone! I could scarcely interpret it. Was he talking by rote, or was he utterly done with life and all its interests? No one besides myself seemed to note this strange passivity. To the masses he was no longer a suffering man, but an individual from whom information was to be got. The next question was ...
— The Filigree Ball • Anna Katharine Green
... clef, C major, 2/2 time. Doctor sperrt das Thor dem Todt: Rote hilft auch aus der Roth. Doctor sperrt das Thor dem Todt: Rote ...
— Beethoven's Letters 1790-1826 Vol. 2 • Lady Wallace
... this song by rote; To each word a warbling note, Hand in hand with fairy grace Will we sing ...
— Shakspere, Personal Recollections • John A. Joyce
... bullies, to defend him. 100 At once the ravens were discarded, And magpies with their posts rewarded. 'Those fowls of omen I detest, That pry into another's nest, State-lies must lose all good intent; For they foresee and croak the event. My friends ne'er think, but talk by rote, Speak what they're taught, and so to vote.' 'When rogues like these,' a sparrow cries, 'To honours and employments rise, 110 I court no favour, ask no place; For such preferment is disgrace. Within my thatched ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... hundreds of piano recitals which take place yearly in the musical centers of Europe, only a comparatively small number are of real musical interest. In many cases it seems as though the players were merely repeating something learned by rote, in an unknown language; just as though I should repeat a poem in Italian. The words I might pronounce after a fashion, but the meaning of most of them would be a blank to me—so how could ...
— Piano Mastery - Talks with Master Pianists and Teachers • Harriette Brower
... as there was no place, neyther of Germanye, Italye, or Fraunce, wherin there was not some impes or braunches spr[o]ge out of that mooste frutefull rote and foundation of Luther. So likewise was not this Ile of Brittaine without his frute and braunches: amongst whom Patricke Hamelton a skottishman borne, being a yong man of an excellent nature and towardnes, but muche more commendable and praise worthye, for that he was of the kynges bloud ...
— The Works of John Knox, Vol. 1 (of 6) • John Knox
... justifies a very foolish conduct; our interposition is little more than as it were a running on by rote, and more commonly a consideration of custom and example, than of reason. Being formerly astonished at the greatness of some affair, I have been made acquainted with their motives and address by those who had performed it, and have ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... the third estate. The king opened the assembly on the 4th of November, 1596, with these words, full of dignity, and powerful in their vivid simplicity: "If I desired to win the title of orator, I would have learned by rote some fine, long speech, and would deliver it to you with proper gravity. But, gentlemen, my desire prompts me towards two more glorious titles, the names of deliverer and restorer of this kingdom. In order to attain whereto ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume V. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... Henry VI. There is only one passage more, the description of his entrance into London with Bolingbroke, which we should like to quote here, if it had not been so used and worn out, so thumbed and got by rote, so praised and painted; but its beauty ...
— Characters of Shakespeare's Plays • William Hazlitt
... French words, without being able to construct a single grammatical sentence or understand a syllable that is said to them; they know enough shorthand to write down simple words at one half the speed of ordinary handwriting; and they have acquired by rote a few dry facts from history and geography, all of which will be totally obliterated from their memories within ...
— The Curse of Education • Harold E. Gorst
... have never revisited it since I was ten years old. I was sent, at five years old, or earlier, to a school kept by a Mr. Bowers, who was called 'Bodsy Bowers,' by reason of his dapperness. It was a school for both sexes. I learned little there except to repeat by rote the first lesson of monosyllables ('God made man'—'Let us love him'), by hearing it often repeated, without acquiring a letter. Whenever proof was made of my progress, at home, I repeated these words with the most rapid fluency; but on turning ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. I. (of VI.) - With his Letters and Journals. • Thomas Moore
... remind him of Johnnie's presence; but the child came forward. 'Grandpapa, he told me to tell you something,' and, with eyes bent on the ground, the little fellow repeated the words like a lesson by rote. ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Antony, and young Octavius, come, Revenge yourselves alone on Cassius, For Cassius is aweary of the world; Hated by one he loves; braved by his brother; Check'd like a bondman; all his faults observ'd, Set in a note-book, learn'd, and conn'd by rote, To cast into my teeth. O, I could weep My spirit from mine eyes! There is my dagger, And here my naked breast; within, a heart Dearer than Plutus' mine, richer than gold; If that thou be'st a Roman, take it forth; I, that denied thee gold, will ...
— The Ontario Readers: Fourth Book • Various
... attendant upon the repetition of some performance by one who has done it very often before, but who requires just a little prompting to set him off, on getting which, the whole familiar routine presents itself before him, and he repeats his task by rote. Surely then we are justified in suspecting that there must have been more bona fide personal recollection and experience, with more effort and failure on the part of the infant itself, than ...
— Selections from Previous Works - and Remarks on Romanes' Mental Evolution in Animals • Samuel Butler
... one slept,—every one, except they watched like me, on that terrible night. No noise in the town, did I say? Ah, but there was! It came creeping round the corners, it poured rushing up the street, it rose from everywhere,—a voice, a voice of woe, the heavy booming rote of the sea. I looked out, but it was pitch-dark, light had forsaken the world, we were beleaguered by blackness. It grew colder, as if one felt a fog fall, and the wind, mounting slowly, now blew a gale. It eddied in clouds of dead and whirling leaves, and sent big torn ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... and corner" thing, an affair of professional preciosities and discriminations, a set of tiresome rules to be learned by rote. ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... natural for an ass to think—as well as a man, upon the occasion. In truth, it is the only creature of all the classes of beings below me, with whom I can do this: for parrots, jackdaws, &c.—I never exchange a word with them—nor with the apes, &c. for pretty near the same reason; they act by rote, as the others speak by it, and equally make me silent: nay my dog and my cat, though I value them both—(and for my dog he would speak if he could)—yet somehow or other, they neither of them possess the talents for conversation—I ...
— The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman • Laurence Sterne
... sexes, and in it the basis of an education for life was to be given. It was to teach its pupils to read and write the mother tongue; enough arithmetic for the ordinary business of life, and the commonly used measures; to sing, and to know certain songs by rote; to know about the real things of life; the Catechism and the Bible; a general knowledge of history, and especially the creation, fall, and redemption of man; the elements of geography and astronomy; and ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... hear the fellow's words who handed it? I asked from whom it came, he spoke by rote, "The pepper bites, the corn is ripe for harvest, I come from Eisenach." ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. II. (of II.), Jewish Poems: Translations • Emma Lazarus
... her husband, who would probably come to Florence to meet her—and she added that she hoped I should resume my studies at the university, and in serious preparation for the future obliterate all traces of the past. At these words, which I am inclined to fancy had been got by rote, she sighed and looked down. I promised her entire obedience in every particular, and growing bolder by her timidity, said that, with the doctor's permission, I should wait upon her at her convenience. Aurelia ...
— The Fool Errant • Maurice Hewlett
... "Simple, says ye!" remarked Mr. Dooley. "Simple like th' air or th' deep sea. Not complicated like a watch that stops whin th' shoot iv clothes ye got it with wears out. Whin Father Butler wr-rote a book he niver finished, he said simplicity was not wearin' all ye had on ye'er shirt-front, like a tin-horn gambler with his di'mon' stud. An' ...
— Mr. Dooley in Peace and in War • Finley Peter Dunne
... two months; then we are to go on by Nice, Genoa, Florence, Rome, and Naples, and so come back by—Italy." He had got up the first names by rote, and run them off glibly enough, but was evidently at fault about the last one. I fancy he had some vague idea of Austrian troops being quartered in these regions, and looked upon Hesperia in the light of an obscure state or moderate-sized ...
— Sword and Gown - A Novel • George A. Lawrence
... blustering bullies, to defend him. 100 At once the ravens were discarded, And magpies with their posts rewarded. 'Those fowls of omen I detest, That pry into another's nest, State-lies must lose all good intent; For they foresee and croak the event. My friends ne'er think, but talk by rote, Speak what they're taught, and so to vote.' 'When rogues like these,' a sparrow cries, 'To honours and employments rise, 110 I court no favour, ask no place; For such preferment is disgrace. Within my thatched retreat I find (What these ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... everything—that the day was one of signal and disgraceful defeat. In any case that sequence of second prizes must have filled him with chagrin, but to be beaten thus repeatedly by such a fellow as Bruno Chilvers was humiliation intolerable. A fopling, a mincer of effeminate English, a rote-repeater of academic catchwords—bah! The by-examinations of the year had whispered presage, but Peak always felt that he was not putting forth his strength; when the serious trial came he would show what was really in him. Too late he recognised his error, though he tried not ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... refers, behind the event, to the will that declares it. And yet, this will be no formal lifeless resignation. He will not be stripped of his manhood, or become unnatural in his religion. His resignation will not be the cold assent of reason, or the mere rote and repetition of the lips. No, it will be born in struggling and in sorrow. Religion is not a process that makes our nature callous to all fierce heats or drenching storms. Neither is he the most religious man who is calmest ...
— The Crown of Thorns - A Token for the Sorrowing • E. H. Chapin
... wind came softly in, soothing her with a touch like a mother's, in its grateful coolness. The air seemed full of half-vibrations, sub-noises, that crowded it as completely as do the insect sounds of midsummer; yet she could only distinguish the ripple beneath her feet, and the rote on the distant beach, and the busy wash of waters against every shore and islet of the bay. The mist was thick around her, but she knew that above it hung the sleepless stars, and the fancy came over her that perhaps the whole vast interval, ...
— Malbone - An Oldport Romance • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... cockscomb yellow; But all the ravens—they must go— Pry in futurities, you know. That will not do; to baffle all With truth, for the apocryphal. No; jays and pies will do far better,— They talk by rote, nor ...
— Fables of John Gay - (Somewhat Altered) • John Gay
... drove fer cant hold a candel to drivin a truck with Fritz bulets bingin all round you and he sez, I received the kit you sent me and It is a great comfort (the kit is not a cat but a assortment of handkerchiefs and tooth brushes and everything a soldier gets and Mother sent him his and so he rote to thank her) an he sez if I go over the top with the best of luck and get enuf leave to come home I will give Myself the pleasure of calling on you, and showin you what a Greenville soldier looks like. My reciprocity shall never end. And he goes on tellin how french cookin agrees ...
— Deer Godchild • Marguerite Bernard and Edith Serrell
... and upward and although he did not know the alphabet excepting by rote, a common ante-bellum plantation accomplishment, and while professing high contempt for what he called "cold shelf-knowledge," his reputation for wisdom, wisdom as gleaned in observation and experience and "ripened by insight," was supreme, ...
— Daddy Do-Funny's Wisdom Jingles • Ruth McEnery Stuart
... classifications in preference to others. If the facts are understood, he will ordinarily have no difficulty in judging the significance of the variety of names proposed to express these facts. If, on the other hand, the student approaches the subject with a ready-made set of names and definitions learned by rote, he is in danger of perceiving his facts from one angle only and through ...
— The Economic Aspect of Geology • C. K. Leith
... say, a million of Frenchmen, and nearly the same of Italians, since then, with a dozen or so of kings and emperors,—but never the faintest likeness to those deluding pictures. We learned at the same time, by painful rote, the population of various capital cities; but we cannot find in any statistic-book gazetteer, neither in McCulloch nor in Worcester, any of the old, familiar numbers. Also in that same Wonder-Book of Malte-Brun, edited by Pietro il Parlatore, we recall a ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... have not skill enough to advise a diet sutable to diseases; a thing most necessary, as well in curing diseases as in preserving of health, and which requires a great insight into the nature of things; nor the true grounds and reasons of compounding, practising their way rather by rote then by rule; with better reason may a Brick-layer or Carpenter pretend to be a Mathematical, or a Common Fidler to be a Musick Reader in the Universities, or Gresham-College, since both these have the practical part of those Sciences, which Apothecaries have not in Physic, ...
— A Short View of the Frauds and Abuses Committed by Apothecaries • Christopher Merrett
... can't kepe it heer coz ime afrade it will git stole. don't speke wun word tu a livin sole bout this coz I don't want nobodi tu kno i hav got enny mony. yu wont now wil yu. i am first rate heer, only that gude fur nuthin snipe of liz madwurth is heer yit—but i hop tu git red ov her now. yu no i rote yu bout her. give my luv to awl inquiren friends. this is from your sister ...
— The First Violin - A Novel • Jessie Fothergill
... from morning till night—two eldest Miss Buckmasters, "Battle of Prag"—six youngest Miss Shums, "In my Cottage," till I knew every note in the "Battle of Prag," and cussed the day when "In my Cottage" was rote. The younger girls, too, were always bouncing and thumping about the house, with torn pinnyfores, and dogs-eard grammars, and large pieces of bread and treacle. I never ...
— Memoirs of Mr. Charles J. Yellowplush - The Yellowplush Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... landmarks become effaced. These people are simply the wandering bards and minstrels, who find their place in an Independent Malay State as naturally as did their prototypes in the countries of Europe during the Middle Ages. They learn by rote some old-world tale, which has been transmitted by word of mouth through countless generations, and they wander from village to village, singing it for pay to the unlettered people, to whom these songs and stories represent the ...
— In Court and Kampong - Being Tales and Sketches of Native Life in the Malay Peninsula • Hugh Clifford
... left behind him works not to be turned over by the connoisseur by rote, nor the artist who dares not be just. That enthusiast, with a temper of mind resembling Rousseau's, but with coarser feelings, was the same creature of untamed imagination consumed by the same passions, with ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... Minstrel is our most modern and fashionable poem; that the Night Thoughts is the masterpiece of our literature; and that Richardson is our only novelist. Oh, no! Madame Carolina would not have disgraced May Fair. She knew Childe Harold by rote, and had even peeped into Don Juan. Her admiration of the Edinburgh and Quarterly Reviews was great and similar. To a Continental liberal, indeed, even the Toryism of the Quarterly is philosophy; and not an Under-Secretary ever yet massacred a radical innovator without ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... riter ov th time, naimd Max Beerbohm, hoo woz stil alive in th twentieth senchri, rote a stauri in wich e pautraid an immajnari karrakter kauld "Enoch Soames"—a thurd-rait poit hoo beleevz imself a grate jeneus an maix a bargin with th Devvl in auder ter no wot posterriti thinx ...
— Seven Men • Max Beerbohm
... from his writhing throat, Those hellish instruments have haply drawn, And pain hath conn'd the aspish lies by rote; But to my heart no poison'd tooth hath gnawn, For in its ...
— Poems • Walter R. Cassels
... prince. As to the succession, she bade them not think that they had needed this desire, if she had seen a time so fit; and it so ripe to be denounced. That the greatness of the cause, and the need of their return, made her say that a short time for so long a continuance ought not to pass by rote. That as cause by conference with the learned should show her matter worth utterance for their behoof, so she would more gladly pursue their good after her days, than with all her prayers while she lived be a means to linger out her ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... side with that august fan-faronnade, The other voice, like the sudden scream of a destrier affrayed, Like an infernal door that grates ajar its rusty throat, Like to a bow of iron that gnarls upon an iron rote, Grinded; and tears, and shriekings, the anathema, the lewd taunt, Refusal of viaticum, refusal of the font, And clamour, and malediction, and dread blasphemy, among That hurtling crowd of rumour from ...
— New Poems • Francis Thompson
... Old Dispensation, the Ecclesiastical School under the New—it has been taken for granted that he can neither discern what is true, nor desire what is good. The truth of things has therefore been formulated for him, and he has been required to learn it by rote and profess his belief in it, clause by clause. His duty has also been formulated for him, and he has been required to perform it, detail by detail, in obedience to the commandments of an all-embracing Code, or to the direction of an ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes
... serve his time to every trade Save censure. Critics all are ready made. Take hackney'd jokes from Miller, got by rote, With just enough of learning to misquote; A mind well skilled to find or forge a fault; A turn for punning—call it Attic salt; To Jeffrey go, be silent and discreet,— His pay is just ten sterling pounds per sheet; Fear not to ...
— Interludes - being Two Essays, a Story, and Some Verses • Horace Smith
... words to which Rachel's oracles declared that people attached crude or arbitrary meanings; and now she hardly knew what they conveyed to her, and longed, as for something far away, for the reality of those simple teachings—once realities, now all by rote! Saved by faith! What was faith? Could all depend on a last sensation? And as to her life. Failure, failure through headstrong blindness and self-will, resulting in the agony of the innocent. Was this ground of hope? She tried to think of progress and purification beyond the grave; ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Filomena her large letters up to N, and making her say them by rote, and with that end in view have divided them into three portions—ABCD—EFG—ILMN. She manages all right, except that she always jumps E and L. Lesson closed: "Were you at church to-day, Filomena?" "No, I have ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... Abigiel hes under Rote me by saying it is veri Disagria bell to Hur to Expose to the World the miseris & Calamatis of a Distractid famely, and I think as much for hur Father & mother to Witt Stephen deming & his wife ...
— Customs and Fashions in Old New England • Alice Morse Earle
... learning—'tis mother-wit. No one else sees the lady-moon sit On the sea, her nest, all night, but the owl, Hatching the boats and the long-legged fowl. When the oysters gape to sing by rote, She crams a pearl down each stupid throat. Howlowlwhitit that's wit, ...
— Cross Purposes and The Shadows • George MacDonald
... it they did with such absorption that when the group broke up, several hours later, Average Jones was committed, by plan and rote, to the new and hopeful adventure ...
— Average Jones • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... th as iS Several agent round her and tha ar interfer With mee eSpeSly William a StavSon he liveS her at enfield he Wanted mee to giv him one of you Sur klerS So he Wod be agent but i Wodent let hi m hav hit an he rote to you i SupoSe an haS got a Suplye of pillS an ar aruning a gant mee he iS Sell ing them at 20 centS a box i Want you to St op ...
— History of the Comstock Patent Medicine Business and Dr. Morse's Indian Root Pills • Robert B. Shaw
... the story—repose!" his words sounded hollow, like a lesson he had learned by rote and propriety had obliged ...
— The Man Who Wins • Robert Herrick
... keeping all the yeare long; any hearbes, fruit, or flowers in pickle; also pickle it selfe. Fr. compote, stewed fruit. The Recipe for Compost in the Forme of Cury, Recipe 100 (C), p.49-50, is "Take rote of p{er}sel. pasternak of rases. scrape hem and waische he{m} clene. take rap{is} & caboch{is} ypared and icorne. take an erthen pa{n}ne w{i}t{h} clene wat{er}, & set it on the fire. cast all ise ...
— Early English Meals and Manners • Various
... of the third estate. The king opened the assembly on the 4th of November, 1596, with these words, full of dignity, and powerful in their vivid simplicity: "If I desired to win the title of orator, I would have learned by rote some fine, long speech, and would deliver it to you with proper gravity. But, gentlemen, my desire prompts me towards two more glorious titles, the names of deliverer and restorer of this kingdom. In order to attain whereto I have gathered you together. ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume V. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... individual tendencies Labyrinth habits, Labyrinth method, Labyrinth path, formula, method of recording, Ladder climbing tests, Landois, H, account of dancer, Lathrop, A, dancers, Learning, process, methods of in dancer, by being put through act, by imitation, by rote, rapidity of, permanency of, learning and relearning, curves of, Left whirlers, Life span of dancer, Light, reflected, transmitted, unit of measurement, control of, Litter, size of, in dancer, ...
— The Dancing Mouse - A Study in Animal Behavior • Robert M. Yerkes
... long before the successor of the inventor discovered the defect of this instruction, which was purely mechanical and acquired by rote. He thought he perceived this defect in the concrete verb, in which the deaf and dumb, seeing only a single word, were unable to distinguish two ideas which are comprehended in it, that of affirmation and that of quality. ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon
... Englishmen hammered away in vain at Brother Jonathan Herring's. The Englishmen represented brute force. The Germans had been trained to appreciate principle. The Englishman "knows his business by rote and rule of thumb"—science, which would "teach him to do in an hour what has hitherto occupied him two hours," "is in a manner forbidden to him." To this cause the "Times" attributes the falling off of English workmen in comparison with those of ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... a man, of course the very smallest marks of favor are construed as more significant than open encouragement would be by a less poetic temperament. I have no doubt the poor fellow wears over his heart every rose-bud you ever gave him, and knows by rote every word of sympathy you ever said to him. And then that portrait,—what volumes it tells of itself! Fancy that ardent soul toiling over the canvas to reproduce from memory your image (you tell me you ...
— A Romantic Young Lady • Robert Grant
... Index, bad books, such as the Bible, are finding their way into the Roman States; and it is better, therefore, not to entrust the people with the key of knowledge; for nothing is so useless as knowledge under an infallible Church. The matters which the Italian youth are taught they are taught by rote. "Ignorance is the mother of devotion,"—a maxim sometimes quoted with a sneer, but one which embodies a profound truth as regards that kind of devotion which is ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie
... des Spaltes, weil sich im Prisma die Strahlen von grsserer Wellenlnge rascher fortpflanzen als die von kleinerer. Ein solches farbiges Spaltbild nennt man Spektrum. Das weisse Licht besteht aus einem Gemisch von unendlich vielen Strahlen verschiedener Farbe. Das rote Licht ist am wenigsten, das ...
— German Science Reader - An Introduction to Scientific German, for Students of - Physics, Chemistry and Engineering • Charles F. Kroeh
... soothed me greatly before going to my bedroom. The doctor's counsels were all forgotten, of course, or remembered only in odd moments, as when going to bed, or shaving in the morning. Then I would promise myself reformation when the book was finished. That done I would live by rote and acquire bucolic ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... O Nestor, to be bought? Asia's not price enough! bid the world for him. And shall this man, this Hermes, this Apollo, Sit lag of Ajax' table, almost minstrel, And with his presence grace a brainless feast? Why they con sense from him, grow wits by rote, And yet, by ill repeating, libel him, Making his wit their nonsense: nay, they scorn him; Call him bought railer, mercenary tongue! Play him for sport at meals, and kick ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 6 (of 18) - Limberham; Oedipus; Troilus and Cressida; The Spanish Friar • John Dryden
... have nothing to pardon," said she. "It was I, whose bold behavior, unbecoming a modest and well-trained young woman, gave rise to what seemed like presumption on your part." The sense of justice was strong within her, but she made her speech haughtily and primly, as if she had learned it by rote from some maiden school-mistress, and pulled her arm away and turned to go; ...
— Evelina's Garden • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... soon be waning. Now, and for a long time to come, what the United States most need, to give purport, definiteness, reason why, to their unprecedented material wealth, industrial products, education by rote merely, great populousness and intellectual activity, is the central, spinal reality, (or even the idea of it,) of such a democratic band of-native-born-and-bred teachers, artists, litterateurs, tolerant and receptive ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... that, after all, savage freedom was to be preferred to dull, systematic civilization? Had he come to the conclusion that much learning is, at best, but vanity? Did he want to go babbling again in chaotic gibberish rather than to talk smoothly by rote? ...
— St. Nicholas, Vol. 5, No. 2, December, 1877 • Various
... a great many of us often have expectations fainter than desires; and that we should be very much surprised if the thing that we ask for, in the prayers that we so often repeat by rote, were granted to us. You will hear men praying for holiness, for clean hearts, for progress in the Christian life, for a hundred other such blessings. They do not expect that anything is going to come in consequence, and they would be mightily at a loss ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... for dates, and for learning by rote; but good in retaining a general or vague recollection of many facts. R.D.—Wonderful memory for dates. In old age he told a person, reading aloud to him a book only read in youth, the passages which were ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin
... me my mind and sperit loved to grope around more and find out things to praise and blame by rote and not by note, and Dorothy and Robert ...
— Around the World with Josiah Allen's Wife • Marietta Holley
... whole of the Evidences with perfect correctness, but not of course in the clear language of Paley. The logic of this book and, as I may add, of his Natural Theology, gave me as much delight as did Euclid. The careful study of these works, without attempting to learn any part by rote, was the only part of the academical course which, as I then felt and as I still believe, was of the least use to me in the education of my mind. I did not at that time trouble myself about Paley's premises, and taking these on trust ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... instances of habits, which may be revived by one single word; as when a person, who has by rote any periods of a discourse, or any number of verses, will be put in remembrance of the whole, which he is at a loss to recollect, by that single word or expression, ...
— A Treatise of Human Nature • David Hume
... With his consent he embarked, and after tossing for many days on the sea, was driven by the winds to the coast of Ireland. He landed, full of joy and gratitude that he had escaped the peril of the sea; took his rote,[Footnote: A musical instrument.] and began to play. It was a summer evening, and the king of Ireland and his daughter, the beautiful Isoude, were at a window which overlooked the sea. The strange harper was sent for, and conveyed to the palace, where, ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... groaning witness Of the poor martyr's faith. I never heard Of any true affection, but 'twas nipt With care, that, like the caterpillar, eats The leaves off the spring's sweetest book, the rose. Love, bred on earth, is often nursed in hell: By rote it reads woe, ere it learn ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... the whites of his eyes turned up to the sky? These charitable visits had the same conventional stage-setting and accent. The machine-like gestures of the little preachers with arms too short for the work, were answered by words learned by rote, so false as to set one's teeth on edge. The comical words of encouragement, the "consolation lavishly poured forth" in prize-book phrases by voices suggestive of young roosters with the influenza, called forth emotional blessings, the whining, sickening mummery of a church porch after vespers. ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... the excitement, the animosity, and the contention which arose in the New England colonies from these discussions over "singing by rule" or "singing by rote." Many prominent clergymen wrote essays and tracts upon the subject; of these essays "The Reasonableness of Regular Singing," also a "Joco-serious Dialogue on Singing," by Reverend Mr. Symmes; "Cases of Conscience," compiled by several ministers; "The Accomplished Singer," by Cotton Mather, ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle
... went down along The leaene a-whisslen ov a zong, The saucy Daw cried out by rote "Girt Soft-poll!" lik' to split his droat. Jim stopp'd an' grabbled up a clot, An' zent en at en lik' a shot; An' down went Daw an' cage avore The clot, up thump ageaen the door. Zoo out run Poll an' Tom, to zee What all the meaenen o't mid be; ...
— Poems of Rural Life in the Dorset Dialect • William Barnes
... in Saxon poetrie, most liberall endowed with wisdome, fortitude, justice, and temperance, departed this life;"[243] and right well did he deserve this eulogy, for as an old chronicle says, he was "a goode clerke and rote many bokes, and a boke he made in Englysshe, of adventures of kynges and bataylles that had bene wne in the lande; and other bokes of gestes he them wryte, that were of greate wisdome, and of good learnynge, thrugh whych ...
— Bibliomania in the Middle Ages • Frederick Somner Merryweather
... the art to talk by rote: At Nando's 'twill but cost you half a groat; The Redford school at three-pence is not dear, Sir; At White's—the stars instruct you for a tester. 21 But he, whom nature never meant to share One spark of taste, will never catch it there:— ...
— Essays on Taste • John Gilbert Cooper, John Armstrong, Ralph Cohen
... misshapen creatures of the human imagination. Knowledge of facts, knowledge of nature, knowledge of the true aspects of the world we live in,—these seem to us of first importance. After that, we prize next reasonable and reasoning goodness; for mere rule-of-thumb goodness, which comes by rote, and might so easily degenerate into formalism or superstition, has no honour among us, but rather the contrary. If any one were to say with us (after he had passed his first infancy) that he always did such and such a thing because he had been told it was right by his parents or teachers—still ...
— The British Barbarians • Grant Allen
... But, as an honest man, I cannot possibly give my rote for it, until I have considered it more fully. I will not deny that our Constitution may have faults, and that those faults, when found, ought to be corrected; but, on the whole, that Constitution has been our own pride, and an object of admiration to all other nations. It is not everything ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VI. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... quarts foaming over with strong beer, that the subject of the evening's conversation at last turned upon the fairies of the neighbouring hill, and each related his oft-told tale which he had learned by rote from the lips of some parish grandame. At last the senior of the mirthful party proposed to a youthful mate of his, who had dared to doubt even the existence of such creatures, that he durst not go to the hill, mounted on his master's ...
— Notes and Queries, Issue No. 61, December 28, 1850 • Various
... It lies rather in a knowledge of life based on the experience of mankind. Hence our study of history. But a study of history in the abstract is valueless. It must be concrete, real and living to have any significance for us. The schoolboy who learns by rote imagines the Greeks as outline figures of one dimension, clad in helmets and tunics, and brandishing little swords. That is like thinking of Jeanne d'Arc as a suit of armor or of Theodore Roosevelt ...
— The "Goldfish" • Arthur Train
... only one male in ten and only one female out of a hundred and forty-four, can read and write; and it is said by British residents in the land that the native knows no such thing as scholarship—he learns everything by rote, even to the extent of perfect recitation, without comprehending the meaning of the wards he is uttering. It is the nature of illiterate Hindus to resort to the extremest extravagance in nearly every statement, and it is not uncommon for report to have it that an Englishman ...
— East of Suez - Ceylon, India, China and Japan • Frederic Courtland Penfield
... writers as if they had been always written by old men. I am trying to present the Wartons to you as I see them, and that is as enthusiastic youths, flushed with a kind of intellectual felicity, and dreaming how poetry shall be produced as musicians make airs, by inspiration, not by rote. Remember that when they took their walks in the forest at Hackwood, the whole world of culture held that true genius had expired with Pope, and this view was oracularly supported by Warburton and such-like pundits. I have already pointed out to you that Pope was divided from them ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... an ambuscade of savages in some Paynim country. They were, as I surmise, of the same breed as those of whom the excellent John Milton wrote: "The sons of Belial, flown with insolence and wine." Alas! my memory is not what it was, for at one time I could say by rote whole books of ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... never seen an elephant, or a rhinoceros, who should tell him most exquisitely all their shape, colour, bigness, and particular marks? or of a gorgeous palace, an architect, who, declaring the full beauties, might well make the hearer able to repeat, as it were, by rote, all he had heard, yet should never satisfy his inward conceit, with being witness to itself of a true living knowledge; but the same man, as soon as he might see those beasts well painted, or that house well in model, should straightway grow, without ...
— A Defence of Poesie and Poems • Philip Sidney
... That bless[^e]d man borne, Which jugeleth with a bote; I beschrewe his herte rote That will trust him, and it ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... and praieres, Men mote[85] give silver to the poure freres. His tippet was ay farsed[86] ful of knives, And pinnes, for to given fayre wives. And certainly he hadde a mery note. Wel coude he singe and plaien on a rote.[87] Of yeddinges[88] he bar utterly the pris. His nekke was white as the flour de lis. Therto he strong was as a champioun, And knew wel the tavernes in every toun, And every hosteler and tappestere, Better than a lazar or a beggestere, For unto swiche a worthy man as he Accordeth not, as by his ...
— English Satires • Various
... slightly on his flank. Perhaps the greatest disadvantage of this method is that it does not give the student the best kind of training. What he needs most in life is the ability to arrange and present ideas rapidly, not to speak a part by rote. ...
— Elements of Debating • Leverett S. Lyon
... mercy, which delighteth not in the death of a sinner, but would rather that he should be converted and live. The beautiful prayers in the Liturgy, were explained to them in a manner suitable to their different capacities; consequently, they were not repeated by rote, as is too frequently the case, where the same attention is not paid. Mr. and Mrs. Bernard took unremitted pains with their children, and felt themselves amply rewarded by their conduct; for though, like other human beings, they ...
— Domestic pleasures - or, the happy fire-side • F. B. Vaux
... but methinks he walked hastilie to and fro. Thus I remained, agonized in Tears, unable to recal one Word of the humble Appeal I had pondered on my Journey, or to have spoken it, though I had known everie Syllable by Rote; yet not wishing myself, even in that Suspense, Shame, and Anguish, elsewhere than where I was cast, ...
— Mary Powell & Deborah's Diary • Anne Manning
... dare not yet hear God himself unless he speak the phraseology of I know not what David, or Jeremiah, or Paul. We shall not always set so great a price on a few texts, on a few lives. We are like children who repeat by rote the sentences of grandames and tutors, and, as they grow older, of the men of talents and character they chance to see,—painfully recollecting the exact words they spoke; afterwards, when they come into the point of view which those had who uttered ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... that note To which fond love hath charm'd me, Long, long to sing by rote, Fancying that that harm'd me: Yet when this thought doth come, "Love is the perfect sum Of all delight," I have no other choice Either for pen or voice ...
— Tudor and Stuart Love Songs • Various
... you will know as much as many who have been two years at the work. I have always said that it is a mistake to teach children young; their minds do not take in what you say to them. You may beat it into them, but they only get it by rote; and painfully, because they don't understand how one thing leads to another, and it is their memory only, and not their ...
— Both Sides the Border - A Tale of Hotspur and Glendower • G. A. Henty
... Mississaga woman, having been converted to Christianity, and admitted as members of the Wesleyan Methodist Church, became anxious to redeem their countrymen from their degraded state of heathenism and spiritual destitution. They collected a considerable number together, and by rote and frequent repetitions, taught the first principles of Christianity to such as were too old to learn to read, and with the Lord's Prayer, the Creed, and Commandments, were thus committed to memory. ...
— Canadian Crusoes - A Tale of The Rice Lake Plains • Catharine Parr Traill
... upon the flute or the fiddle, he is altogether irresistible. But he piques himself upon being polished above the natives of any other country by his conversation with the fair sex. In the course of this communication, with which he is indulged from his tender years, he learns like a parrot, by rote, the whole circle of French compliments, which you know are a set of phrases ridiculous even to a proverb; and these he throws out indiscriminately to all women, without distinction in the exercise of that kind of address, ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... rote, Like any Harvard Proctor; He'd sing a fugue out, note by note; Knew Physics like a Doctor; He spoke in German and in French; Knew each Botanic table; But one small word that you'll agree Comes pat enough to you and me, To speak he was not able: For he couldn't say "No!" He couldn't ...
— Our Boys - Entertaining Stories by Popular Authors • Various
... aryse With wofull mynde / beholdynge than the ayre Alas he sayth / what nedeth to deuyse Ony suche pastyme / here for to repayre Where is my conforte / where is my lady fayre Where is my Ioye / where is now all my boote Where is she nowe / that persed my herte rote ...
— The coforte of louers - The Comfort of Lovers • Stephen Hawes
... the justiciary, turning to the third prisoner. "The charge against you is that, having come to the Hotel Mauritania with the key to Smelkoff's trunk, you stole therefrom money and a ring," he said, like one repeating a lesson learned by rote, and leaning his ear to the associate sitting on his left, who said that he noticed that the phial mentioned in the list of exhibits was missing. "Stole therefrom money and a ring," repeated the justiciary, "and after ...
— The Awakening - The Resurrection • Leo Nikoleyevich Tolstoy
... completed by the lesson in philosophy. In this course logic, morals and metaphysics were taught. Here the young persons handled, adjusted, and knocked about more or less adroitly the formula on God, nature, the soul and science they had learned by rote. Less scholastic, abridged, and made easy, this verbal exercise has been maintained in the lycees.[6219] Under the new regime, as well as under the old one, a string of abstract terms, which the professor ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 6 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 2 (of 2) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... couldn't read all the books and find out about everything right off. But you bet he found out a lot, and he believes that after a fellow gets some rudiments of education he can learn more by studying in his own way and experimenting than by just learning by rote and rule. Maybe he's not altogether right about that, for education is mighty fine and I'd like to go to a technical school; Gus and I both are aiming for that, but we're going to read and study a lot our own way, too, and experiment; aren't we, Gus? Nobody ...
— Radio Boys Cronies • Wayne Whipple and S. F. Aaron
... evil presences near, and in such lonely places as this cave.' I humoured him by doing as he desired; and that the rather because I hoped his thoughts would thus be turned away from the writing; but as soon as I had the spell by rote he turned back to the parchment, saying, 'He was but a poor divine who wrote this, for beside choosing ill-fitting verses, he cannot even give right numbers to them. For see here, "The days of our age are three-score years and ten; and though men be ...
— Moonfleet • J. Meade Falkner
... tavernes et aux filles' which was that of my life for so many years is so no longer, I wonder what the devil the refrain is now? Ha!" he exclaimed clapping his hand on my shoulder in his old violent way, "I have it! also Villon. Guess. Didn't I teach you all the ballades by rote as we wandered ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... his shoures sote The droghte of Marche hath perced to the rote.... Bifel that, in that season on a day In Southwerk at the Tabard as I lay Redy to wenden on my pilgrimage To Caunterbury with ful devout corage, At night was come into that hostelrye Wel nyne and twenty in a companye Of sondry folk, by aventure yfalle In felawshipe, and ...
— England of My Heart—Spring • Edward Hutton
... be folly. Even supposing they could be educated—which is scarcely supposable, for it would seem a contravention of Heaven's fiat—they could no more apply this learning, which would simply be by rote, than they could go to the moon. Such men are not unfrequently met with, and are designated, by common consent, learned fools. Nature points out the education they should receive. In like manner with those of higher and nobler attributes, educate them for their pursuits in life. It requires ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... countries, they are buried in classical frivolities, languages which they never master, and manners and races which they cannot appreciate. Instead of being disciplined to think exactly, to speak and write accurately, they are crammed with rules and taught to repeat forms by rote. ...
— Thomas Davis, Selections from his Prose and Poetry • Thomas Davis
... teachers. Then we would have them read, or in turn sing a Psalm or a hymn, or learn some passage from a good book. We sang with them, and asked them questions in what they had been studying. They knew Gellert's songs by rote. There was nothing but peace and contentment in our circle. The servants never saw or heard anything unpleasant. Every little disturbance was hushed at once; and all the family felt the power of my wife in our household arrangements; and our reciprocal ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... am so ignorant, replied Campuzano, as not to know that brutes cannot talk unless by a miracle. I well know that if starlings, jays, and parrots talk, it is only such words as they have learned by rote, and because they have tongues adapted to pronounce them; but they cannot, for all that, speak and reply with deliberate discourse as those dogs did. Many times, indeed, since I heard them I have been disposed not to believe myself, but to regard as ...
— The Exemplary Novels of Cervantes • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... the minstrel art I know, I the viol well can play; I the pipe and syrinx blow; Harp and geige my hand obey; Psaltery, symphony, and rote Help to charm the listening throng; And Armonia lends its note While I ...
— Music and Some Highly Musical People • James M. Trotter
... had however decided him in the part he should take, making him sure that Colet was not controverting the formularies of the Church, but drawing out those meanings which in repetition by rote were well-nigh forgotten. It was as if his course were ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... angry grief: Forgive me, if from present things I turn To speak what in my heart will beat and burn, And hang my wreath on his world-honored urn. Nature, they say, doth dote, And cannot make a man Save on some worn-out plan, Repeating as by rote: 160 For him her Old-World moulds aside she threw, And, choosing sweet clay from the breast Of the unexhausted West, With stuff untainted shaped a hero new, Wise, steadfast in the strength of God, and true, How beautiful to ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... a moment, realising with a wonder beyond words how different it was. Every word, every glance between him and Betty had, hitherto, been part of a play. She had been a charming figure in a charming comedy. He had known, as it were by rote, that she had feelings—a heart, affections—but they had seemed pale, dream-like, just a delightful background to his own sensations, strong and conscious and delicate. Now for the first time he perceived her as real, a human being in the stress of a real human emotion. And he was conscious ...
— The Incomplete Amorist • E. Nesbit
... outside!" grated out the Captain. "Why didn't you come and tell me what was going on? Why didn't you tell me about this the first thing this morning? That is the trouble with these made-over men," he continued, half angrily as he looked at Ned. "You can teach them to do things by rote, but when an emergency ...
— Boy Scouts in the Philippines - Or, The Key to the Treaty Box • G. Harvey Ralphson
... haberdashery. He marked how this and that were done, and in what sort to fashion his visage and frame his phrases to this or that woman. His oncoming was rapid. He could measure, cut, and wrap in a parcel twelve yards of brown or white calico quicker than any one in the shop, and he understood by rote the folds of linen tablecloths and bedsheets; and in the town this was said of him: "Shopmen quite ordinary can sell what a customer wants; Pugh Rees Jones can ...
— My Neighbors - Stories of the Welsh People • Caradoc Evans
... Rade, rode. Raep, a rope. Ragweed, ragwort. Raibles, recites by rote. Rair, to roar. Rairin, roaring. Rair't, roared. Raise, rase, rose. Raize, to excite, anger. Ramfeezl'd, exhausted. Ramgunshoch, surly. Ram-stam, headlong. Randie, lawless, obstreperous. Randie, randy, a scoundrel, ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... which has two meanings. Properly it signifies the third order of Traditionists out of a total of five or those who know 300,000 traditions and their ascriptions. Popularly "one who can recite the Koran by rote." There are six great Traditionists whose words are held to be prime authorities; (1) Al-Bokhari, (2) Muslim, and these are entitled Al-Sahihayn, The (two true) authorities. After them (3) Al-Tirmidi; and (4) Abu Daud: these four being ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... full gallop and the distinct enunciation of an "El" train, the biblical account of the creation of the world, the legends of Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, and Noah's travels with a menagerie, all learned by rote. The entire school then arose ...
— Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras - Being the Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond • Harry A. Franck
... absorbed the matter at hand in the way he breathed, without the least conscious effort; or his interest remained unstirred, in which case no amount of mechanical application would help. Learning by rote offered no escape in the latter case, for his memory operated in the same way as the rest of his mind, sucking up what fitted it as a blotter sucks the ink, and presenting a surface of polished marble to any matter not germane according to its own ...
— The Soul of a Child • Edwin Bjorkman
... in his tone! I could scarcely interpret it. Was he talking by rote, or was he utterly done with life and all its interests? No one besides myself seemed to note this strange passivity. To the masses he was no longer a suffering man, but an individual from whom information was to be got. The next ...
— The Filigree Ball • Anna Katharine Green
... who seems preternaturally keen, swears that on Thirteenth Street between Fifth Avenue and University Place the woman stopped and spoke to him; and he tells his story as though it were learned by rote. ...
— The Man in Court • Frederic DeWitt Wells
... hate my pen; I hate my stool; What am I but a nerveless tool? But we did not work by rote or rule When I ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. CLVIII, January 7, 1920 • Various
... think they frightened me into it," she said, laughing. "They were written by Carlyle; you will know something of his works some day, I hope. This is what he says: 'Not one in a thousand has the smallest turn for thinking; only for passive dreaming, and hearsaying, and active babbling by rote. Of the eyes that men do glare withal, so few can see.' It sounds rather like a scolding, doesn't it? Well, I don't want you to be like that; I want you both to think and to see, and you will find much happiness to think about and many beauties ...
— Hunter's Marjory - A Story for Girls • Margaret Bruce Clarke
... old traditional curriculum, the learning by rote of the classics without explanation in early youth, followed by a more intelligent study in later years. This is exactly like the traditional study of the classics in this country, as it existed, for example, in the eighteenth century. Men over thirty, ...
— The Problem of China • Bertrand Russell
... little—then ran and got Dr Watts's hymns for children. He knew "How doth the little busy bee" so well as to be able to repeat it without a mistake, for his mother had taught it him, and he had understood it. You see, he was not like a child of five, taught to repeat by rote lines which could give him no notions but mistaken ones. Besides, he had a good knowledge of words, and could use them well in talk, although he could not read; and it is a great thing if a child can talk well before he begins to learn ...
— Gutta-Percha Willie • George MacDonald
... continued through all these years. I had left the dame's school, where the rule of long division proved my pons asinorum, and went to a man's school, where I earned my schooling by making the fires and sweeping the schoolroom, and here I learned some Latin and the higher rules in arithmetic by rote, always with the reputation of a stupid boy, good in the snowball fights of the intermission, when we had two snow forts to capture and defend; in running foot-races, the speediest, and in backhand wrestling, ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... eighteenth or nineteenth year, was the common school of the district. He made good proficiency, but nothing worthy of note occurred in relation to his studies till he was about fifteen years of age. He then began to think, as he says. Before that time, he had repeated by rote whatever he had been taught. The first impulse to reflection was a new discovery. He had been taught from childhood that accent is a stress of voice laid on some syllable or letter of a word. But this definition had not been illustrated by an example, and ...
— The History of Dartmouth College • Baxter Perry Smith
... killed—Englishmen I mean; almost all the men I went to school with." He started to count as if by rote: "Don and Robert, and Fred Sands, and Steve, and Philip and Sandy." His voice was muffled in the sand. "Benjamin Robb and Cyril and Eustis, Rupert and Ted ...
— Four Days - The Story of a War Marriage • Hetty Hemenway
... been periodical, recurring after seven years, but this last is premature by half that time. Cut off in the flower of Colebrook. The Middletonian stream and all its echoes mourn. Even minnows dwindle. A parvis fiunt MINIMI. I fear to invite Mrs. Hood to our new mansion, lest she envy it, & rote [? rout] us. But when we are fairly in, I hope she will come & try it. I heard she & you were made uncomfortable by some unworthy to be cared for attacks, and have tried to set up a feeble counteraction thro' the Table Book of last Saturday. Has it not reach'd ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... corrupte Iugement Wo worthe delyte in worldely rychesse Wo worthe bebate without extynguyshment Wo worthe your wordes so moche impacyent Wo worthe you vnto whome I dyde bote And wo worthe you that tere me at the rote ...
— The Conuercyon of swerers - (The Conversion of Swearers) • Stephen Hawes
... teach to youth, And praise by rote, Is not, but merely stands for, truth. So of my goat: She's merely designed to represent The truth—"immortal" to this extent: Dead she may be, and skinned—frappe— Hid in a dreadful den away; Prey ...
— Cobwebs From an Empty Skull • Ambrose Bierce (AKA: Dod Grile)
... Islands the landing of illegal immigrants from Indonesia's Rote Island has become ...
— The 2005 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... the office, among other things with Cooper the Purveyor, whose dullness in his proceeding in his work I was vexed at, and find that though he understands it may be as much as other men that profess skill in timber, yet I perceive that many things, they do by rote, and very dully. Thence home to dinner, whither Captain Grove came and dined with me, he going into the country to-day; among other discourse he told me of discourse very much to my honour, both as to my care and ability, happening at ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... worst had brought me balm: 'Twas but the tempest's central calm. Vague sinkings of the heart aver That dreadful wrong is come to her, And o'er this dream I brood and dote, And learn its agonies by rote. As if I loved it, early and late I make familiar with my fate, And feed, with fascinated will, On very dregs of finish'd ill. I think, she's near him now, alone, With wardship and protection none; Alone, perhaps, in the hindering stress Of airs that clasp him with her dress, They wander whispering ...
— The Victories of Love - and Other Poems • Coventry Patmore
... other superhuman forms; that there is a queen of heaven; that the reading of the Scriptures is in itself an actual merit, whether its precepts are followed or not; that prayer may be offered by saying a formula by rote, or even by turning the handle of a mill from which invocations written on paper issue forth; that the revealer of Buddhism is to be regarded as the religious head of ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... lazy learned man, who liked to think and talk, better than to read or write; who, however, wrote much and well, but too often by rote. His long compound Latin phrases required less thought, and took up more room than others. What shews the facilities afforded by this style of imposing generalization, is, that it was instantly adopted with success by all those who were writers by profession, or who were not; ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt
... would I change that note To which fond love hath charm'd me, Long, long to sing by rote, Fancying that that harm'd me: Yet when this thought doth come, "Love is the perfect sum Of all delight," I have no other choice Either for pen or voice To sing ...
— Tudor and Stuart Love Songs • Various
... shelfe, in leues all torne With Letters, dymme, almost defaced cleane Thy hyllynge rote, with wormes all to worne Thou lay, that pyte it was to sene Bounde with olde quayres, for ages all hoorse and grene Thy mater endormed, for lacke of thy presence But nowe arte losed, go shewe forth ...
— Printers' Marks - A Chapter in the History of Typography • William Roberts
... Downside wish to teach you, it's not for me to say them nay; but I would that I had more learning for your sake, and I shall be jealous of them, that I shall, when I find that you can read off out of any book you have got as smoothly as you do the verses you have learned by rote. Oh, you will be ...
— Won from the Waves • W.H.G. Kingston
... ouel Pease of Painted Glass In Chakers of yoler & Green & blew 10 yong Hedge frougs Two Pikse of Armse on Each Side W.B. there was in this Rote on y' Glass Lyfford but there is only now ford y' 3 fust Leters ar Broken & Lost oute One Pecs of y' Painted Glass in y' frount Chamber window as foloweth In a Surkel 6 flours of Luse 6 Red Lyans Traveling 4 Rede Roses ...
— Notes & Queries 1850.01.26 • Various
... about human bones by a pupil of the Campbell Medical School, for which purpose a skeleton, with the bones fastened together by wires was hung up in our schoolroom. And finally, time was also found for Pandit Heramba Tatwaratna to come and get us to learn by rote rules of Sanscrit grammar. I am not sure which of them, the names of the bones or the sutras of the grammarian, were the more jaw-breaking. I think the ...
— My Reminiscences • Rabindranath Tagore
... humane, but not very enlightened, because it derived its light from the heart and not from, his understanding. Egmont possessed more of conscience than of fixed principles; his head had not given him a code of its own, but had merely learnt it by rote; the mere name of any action, therefore, was often with him sufficient for its condemnation. In his judgment men were wholly bad or wholly good, and had not something bad or something good; in this system of morals there was no middle term between vice and virtue; ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... Mercutio outlag one another in hunting after the leaping Romeo. They call without the slightest impetus. One can imagine how the true Mercutio called—certainly not by rote. There must have been pauses indeed, brief and short-breath'd pauses of listening for an answer, between every nickname. But the nicknames were quick work. At the Lyceum they were quite an effort of memory: "Romeo! Humours! ...
— The Colour of Life • Alice Meynell
... I havnt rote for some time I had such sore feet lately. When they broke up our regiment and sent me over to the artillery I thought I was goin to quit usin my feet. That was just ...
— Dere Mable - Love Letters Of A Rookie • Edward Streeter
... reply, and Bessy, profiting by an embarrassment which she had perhaps consciously provoked, went on hastily, and as if by rote: "I have left you perfectly free to do as you think best at the mills, but this perpetual discussion of my personal expenses is very unpleasant to me, as I am sure it must be to you, and in future I think it would be much better for us ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... the country of Zacapula and the Quiche tribes, whom they thought qualified to play the part, the friars carefully taught them the verses. The Indian's memory is as tenacious as his faculty for learning by rote is quick, and as the rhymes were graceful and the subject matter both dramatic and mysterious, the four traders quickly learned to chant them in chorus, accompanied by several Indian musical instruments. Some time was necessarily consumed in these preparations ...
— Bartholomew de Las Casas; his life, apostolate, and writings • Francis Augustus MacNutt
... has made no difference to scholarship. His moral earnestness has made no difference to morality. He acquired scholarship by rote, politics by association, and morality by tradition. To none of these things did he bring the fire of original passion. The force in his youth was ambition, and the goal of his energy was success. No man ever laboured harder to judge between the thoughts of conflicting schools; few men so ...
— The Mirrors of Downing Street - Some Political Reflections by a Gentleman with a Duster • Harold Begbie
... in presence of the Kings the preceptor is appointed to his responsible duties, one of the obligations to which he is required to subscribe is, that he will teach the pupil to understand thoroughly, and not merely by rote,—"monkey-like," or as you would probably say, "parrot-like," were the same obligation imposed in ...
— Another World - Fragments from the Star City of Montalluyah • Benjamin Lumley (AKA Hermes)
... and verie white of woulle. Horses haue thei none, ne none desire, for that their Chamelles in al niedes serue them as well. Thei haue siluer and golde plentie, and diuerse kindes of spices, whiche other countries haue not. Laton, Brasse, Iron, Purple, Safron, the precious rote costus, and all coruen woorkes, are brought into theim by other. Thei bewrie their kyng in a donghille, for other thei wille skante take so muche laboure. There is no people that better kiepeth their promise and couenaunt, then thei doe, and thus ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries - Vol. II • Richard Hakluyt
... equipment, have produced, by dint of skill and patience, work that is very passable. The women weave their own cloth on the native looms, and practice various other industries. The children are well trained in hospitality and public manners, which they learn by rote. ...
— The Great White Tribe in Filipinia • Paul T. Gilbert
... book of the hundred ballades, which my master was adorning with pictures, and with scarlet, blue, and gold. It set forth how a young knight, in sorrow of love, was riding between Pont de Ce and Angiers, and how other knights met him and gave him counsel. These lines I read, and getting them by rote, took them for my device, for they bid the lover thrust himself foremost in the press, and ...
— A Monk of Fife • Andrew Lang
... well-a-day! A few cant phrases learnt by rote Each beardless booby spouts away, A Solon, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 487 - Vol. 17, No. 487. Saturday, April 30, 1831 • Various
... masses and truth in the heavens above. When ye came upon me I was in contemplation of the elevated road in conjunction with the chief luminary of night. The rapid transit is poetry and art: the moon but a tedious, dry body, moving by rote. But these are private opinions, for, in the business of literature, the conditions are reversed. 'Tis me hope to be writing a book to explain the strange things I ...
— The Four Million • O. Henry
... hours in making our toilette; but in order that the time may not be entirely lost, we learn French proverbs by rote, or madame reads aloud a new work, which is very moral and quite amusing: 'The Child's Magazine,' by Madame de Beaumont. I cannot express how charming I find these tales, narrated by a governess to her pupils. At noon the Angelus is ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 1, July, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... school was going to the dogs. But even in the present state of things, Leonard had no chance of excelling his competitors. His study, like theirs, had been mere task-work, and though he showed more native power than the rest, yet perhaps this had made the mere learning by rote even more difficult to an active mind full of inquiry. He was a whole year younger than any other who touched the foremost ranks, two years younger than several; and though he now and then showed a feverish spark of genius, reminding Mr. Cheviot ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... a puggaree which, perhaps, he wears on a grey day, adds that of ungovernable rage, is so wild a visitor that no attempt at all is made to understand him; and the beggars beg dismayed but unalarmed, uninterruptedly, without a pause or a conjecture. They beg by rote, thinking of something else, as occasion arises, and all indifferent to the violence of ...
— Essays • Alice Meynell
... gout is due to inheritance as much as eyes and noses? In what respects do the two things differ so that we should refer the inheritance of eyes and noses to memory, while denying any connection between memory and gout? We may have a ghost of a pretence for saying that a man grew a nose by rote, or even that he catches the measles or whooping-cough by rote during his boyhood; but do we mean to say that he develops the gout by rote in his old age if he comes of a gouty family? If, then, rote and red-tape have nothing to do with the one, why ...
— Unconscious Memory • Samuel Butler
... to raptness as of yore, And opening New Year's Day Wove it by rote as theretofore, And went on working evermore In ...
— Time's Laughingstocks and Other Verses • Thomas Hardy
... But it is required that these truths should be instinctively ejaculated or should rise irresistibly from circumstances; in a word that they should be uttered in such connection as shall make it felt that they are not adopted, not spoken by rote, but perceived in their whole compass with the freshness and clearness of an original intuition. The Writer must introduce the truth with such accompaniment as shall imply that he has mounted to the sources of things, penetrated ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... knows no 'Higher Law,' but thinks State Rights the Catechism; Which having learned by rote, he links His practice to ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2 No 4, October, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... eye was kindled: and the blessed sign No more to keep me wond'ring and suspense, Replied: "I see that thou believ'st these things, Because I tell them, but discern'st not how; So that thy knowledge waits not on thy faith: As one who knows the name of thing by rote, But is a stranger to its properties, Till other's tongue reveal them. Fervent love And lively hope with violence assail The kingdom of the heavens, and overcome The will of the Most high; not in such sort As man prevails o'er man; but conquers it, Because 't is willing to ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri
... is serfdom for the Negro, then a vast amount of industrial training by rote, minus the natural sciences and mechanic arts for the generation of capacity, plus such rudiments in arithmetic, reading and writing as will enable him to be an efficient workman under the directions of others is the requisite. If it is the desire to make the Negro a useful agent in ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... Hennin, the two eyes of Count de Vergennes. The former is the most important character, because possessing the most of the confidence of the Count. He is rather cunning than wise, his views of things being neither great nor liberal. He governs himself by principles which he has learned by rote, and is fit only for the details of execution. His heart is susceptible of little passions, but not of good ones. He is brother-in-law to M. Gerard, from whom he received disadvantageous impressions of us, which cannot be effaced. He has much duplicity. Hennin is a philosopher, ...
— The Writings of Thomas Jefferson - Library Edition - Vol. 6 (of 20) • Thomas Jefferson
... Just in one instance be it yet confest Your people, sir, are partial in the rest: Foes to all living worth except your own, And advocates for folly dead and gone. Authors, like coins, grow dear as they grow old; It is the rust we value, not the gold. Chaucer's worst ribaldry is learned by rote, And beastly Skelton heads of houses quote: One likes no language but the Faery Queen; A Scot will fight for Christ's Kirk o' the Green: And each true Briton is to Ben so civil, He swears the Muses met him at the devil. Though justly Greece her eldest sons admires, Why should not we be wiser than ...
— Essay on Man - Moral Essays and Satires • Alexander Pope
... pride in our knowledge. We may, in a certain sense, be proud of being immortal; we may be proud of being God's children; we may be proud of loving, thinking, seeing, and of all that we are by no human teaching: but not of what we have been taught by rote; not of the ballast and freight of the ship of the spirit, but only of its pilotage, without which all the freight will only sink it faster, and strew the sea more richly with its ruin. There is not at this moment a youth of twenty, having received what we moderns ridiculously call ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume III (of 3) • John Ruskin
... to names that signifie nothing; but are taken up, and learned by rote from the Schooles, as Hypostatical, Transubstantiate, Consubstantiate, Eternal-now, and the ...
— Leviathan • Thomas Hobbes
... by side with that august fan-faronnade, The other voice, like the sudden scream of a destrier affrayed, Like an infernal door that grates ajar its rusty throat, Like to a bow of iron that gnarls upon an iron rote, Grinded; and tears, and shriekings, the anathema, the lewd taunt, Refusal of viaticum, refusal of the font, And clamour, and malediction, and dread blasphemy, among That hurtling crowd of rumour from the diverse human tongue, Went by as who beholdeth, when the valleys thick t'ward night, The long ...
— New Poems • Francis Thompson
... Carlyle; you will know something of his works some day, I hope. This is what he says: 'Not one in a thousand has the smallest turn for thinking; only for passive dreaming, and hearsaying, and active babbling by rote. Of the eyes that men do glare withal, so few can see.' It sounds rather like a scolding, doesn't it? Well, I don't want you to be like that; I want you both to think and to see, and you will find much happiness to think about and many ...
— Hunter's Marjory - A Story for Girls • Margaret Bruce Clarke
... the nunnery, she wearied Olga, complaining of her unbearable misery, weeping, and feeling as she did so that she brought with her into the cell something impure, pitiful, shabby. And Olga repeated to her mechanically as though a lesson learnt by rote, that all this was of no consequence, that it would all pass and God ...
— The Darling and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... urged in these chapters cannot be learned by rote. What can be taught by rule of thumb is the administration of precedents. That is at once the easiest and the most fruitless form of public activity. Only a low degree of intelligence is required and of effort merely a persistent repetition. Men fall into a routine when they ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... And by such a man, of course the very smallest marks of favor are construed as more significant than open encouragement would be by a less poetic temperament. I have no doubt the poor fellow wears over his heart every rose-bud you ever gave him, and knows by rote every word of sympathy you ever said to him. And then that portrait,—what volumes it tells of itself! Fancy that ardent soul toiling over the canvas to reproduce from memory your image (you tell me you ...
— A Romantic Young Lady • Robert Grant
... But tormenting visions of Mara and her admirer pursued him, and he discoursed mechanically, his reasoning on the woman question having become a matter of rote to him. ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... order through the streets to the school of the harp-master, naked, and in a body, even if it were to snow as thick as meal. Then again, their master would teach them, not sitting cross-legged, to learn by rote a song, either "pallada persepolin deinan" or "teleporon ti boama" raising to a higher pitch the harmony which our fathers transmitted to us. But if any of them were to play the buffoon, or to turn any quavers, like these difficult turns the present artists make after the manner ...
— The Clouds • Aristophanes
... school. There may have been too much of it when, as the Rev. H. C. Adams informs us in his "Wykehamica" (p. 357), boys used to say by heart 13,000 and 14,000 lines, when one repeated the whole of Virgil, nay, when another was able to say the whole of the English Bible by rote: "Put him on where you would, he would go fluently on, as long ...
— Chips From A German Workshop, Vol. V. • F. Max Mueller
... a very fine speech, Andy," said Niederkircher, shaking hands with him, and gazing tenderly into his flushed face. "It was evident that your words were not learned by rote, but came from your heart, and hence they could not but make a profound impression. But now, commander-in-chief of the Tyrol, dinner is ready. The soup is already on the table, and I myself shall have the honor of waiting ...
— Andreas Hofer • Lousia Muhlbach
... Wept with the passion of an angry grief: Forgive me, if from present things I turn To speak what in my heart will beat and burn, And hang my wreath on his world-honored urn. Nature, they say, doth dote, And cannot make a man Save on some worn-out plan, Repeating as by rote: 160 For him her Old-World moulds aside she threw, And, choosing sweet clay from the breast Of the unexhausted West, With stuff untainted shaped a hero new, Wise, steadfast in the strength of God, and true, How beautiful to see Once more a shepherd ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... thought I might be good once. I used to say my own prayers then. Now I speak them but by rote, and feel ashamed—yes, ashamed to speak them. Is it not horrid to say them, and next morning to be no better than you were last night? Often I revolt at these as at other things, and am dumb. The Vicar comes to ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Schlummer, schaute ich Christus, Den Heiland der Welt. Im wallend weissen Gewande Wandelt' er riesengross Ueber Land und Meer; 10 Es ragte sein Haupt in den Himmel, Die Haende streckte er segnend Ueber Land und Meer; Und als ein Herz in der Brust Trug er die Sonne, 15 Die rote, flammende Sonne; Und das rote, flammende Sonnenherz Goss seine Gnadenstrahlen Und sein holdes, liebseliges Licht, Erleuchtend und waermend 20 Ueber Land ...
— A Book Of German Lyrics • Various
... Rote, Note, Syllable: Singing by rote means that the singer sings something learned by ear without regard to notes. Singing by note means that the singer is guided to the correct pitch by visible notes. Singing by syllable means that the ...
— Music Notation and Terminology • Karl W. Gehrkens
... it yet confess'd, Your people, sir, are partial in the rest: Foes to all living worth except your own, And advocates for folly dead and gone. Authors, like coins, grow dear as they grow old; It is the rust we value, not the gold. Chaucer's worst ribaldry is learn'd by rote, And beastly Skelton[143] heads of houses quote: One likes no language but the 'Faery Queen'; A Scot will fight for 'Christ's Kirk o' the Green';[144] 40 And each true Briton is to Ben so civil, He swears the Muses met him at ...
— The Poetical Works Of Alexander Pope, Vol. 1 • Alexander Pope et al
... such verses, were repeated, but by rote, and unconnectedly. There were also, occasionally, I believe, a Saint George. In all, there was a confused resemblance of the ancient mysteries, in which the characters of Scripture, the Nine Worthies, and other popular personages, were usually exhibited. It were much to be wished ...
— Marmion • Sir Walter Scott
... by dint of skill and patience, work that is very passable. The women weave their own cloth on the native looms, and practice various other industries. The children are well trained in hospitality and public manners, which they learn by rote. ...
— The Great White Tribe in Filipinia • Paul T. Gilbert
... be too remote, A modern magistrate of famous note, Shall give you his own history by rote; I'll make it out, deny it he that can, His worship is a true-born Englishman; By all the latitude that empty word, By modern acceptation's understood: The parish books his great descent record, And now he hopes ere long to be a lord; And truly, as things go, it would be pity, But such ...
— The True-Born Englishman - A Satire • Daniel Defoe
... image by rote, and as I conned the traits in memory it seemed as if I read her very heart. She was dressed with something of her mother's coquetry, and love of positive colour. Her robe, which I know she must have made with her own hands, clung about her with a cunning grace. After the fashion of that country, ...
— The Merry Men - and Other Tales and Fables • Robert Louis Stevenson
... long one; but still there was a quiet, unfaltering decision in her replies, which were given with much humility of manner. I could not help sometimes doubting whether the whole thing was really unprepared and extemporaneous, or whether she might not have learnt her lesson and repeated it by rote, or whether, in short, it might not have been a piece of acting. This impression lasted only for a moment, for there was such an artless and modest manner in the young girl, that I could not fail on the whole to give her the fullest credit for ...
— First Impressions of the New World - On Two Travellers from the Old in the Autumn of 1858 • Isabella Strange Trotter
... this for such a society, and the fruits will be without flavor. Art will not submit to be so lowered," will say some travelled dilettante, who, with book in hand, has looked by rote on the wonders of the Louvre and the Vatican; but the Creator of the universe teaches a different lesson from this observer. Not the rare lightning merely, but the daily sunlight, too; not merely the distant star-studded canopy of the earth, but also our near earth itself, has ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... readn fairy tales, an I never see such woppers. I bet the feller wich rote em will be burnt every tiny little bit up wen he dies, but Billy says they are all true but the facks. Uncle Ned sed cude I tell one, and I ast him wot about, and he sed: "Wel Johnny, as you got to do the tellin I'le leav the choice of subjeck entirely ...
— Prairie Farmer, Vol. 56: No. 3, January 19, 1884. - A Weekly Journal for the Farm, Orchard and Fireside • Various
... He looked four ways, and saw the world hurled from its orbit and reduced by spirit level and tape to an edged and cornered plane. All life moved on tracks, in grooves, according to system, within boundaries, by rote. The root of life was the cube root; the measure of existence was square measure. People streamed by in straight rows; the horrible ...
— The Voice of the City • O. Henry
... of all endeavor, Mar some nocturne by a single note; Is there immortality of discord In your failure to preserve the rote? ...
— Behind the Arras - A Book of the Unseen • Bliss Carman
... 'cute lad becomes a dummer Junge. Mrs. Melville thus describes her small servant-girl from one of these schools: 'She looks almost nine years old; and, as far as reading goes, she knows nothing more than her alphabet; can repeat the Prayer-Book Catechism by rote, and one or two hymns, utterly ignorant all the while of the import of a single word.' Even in Europe education, till lately, exercised the judgment too little, the memory too much; consequently there were more learned men than wise men. The ...
— To The Gold Coast for Gold, Vol. II - A Personal Narrative • Richard Francis Burton and Verney Lovett Cameron
... the administration of the Spirit in directing the worship of God's house. The use of liturgical forms is a relapse into legalism, a consent to be taught to pray as "John taught his disciples." True, there may be extemporaneous forms as well as written forms, praying by rote as well as praying by the book. Against both habits we simply interpose the higher teaching of the Spirit, as belonging especially to this dispensation, in which the Father seeketh worshipers who "worship in ...
— The Ministry of the Spirit • A. J. Gordon
... calamity is groaning witness Of the poor martyr's faith. I never heard Of any true affection, but 'twas nipt With care, that, like the caterpillar, eats The leaves off the spring's sweetest book, the rose. Love, bred on earth, is often nursed in hell: By rote it reads woe, ere it learn ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... then must be studied, known, and well attended to; or we only follow the art blindly, and without certainty. Thence the common indifference of so many performers, who mind nothing more than a rote of the art, without tracing it to ...
— A Treatise on the Art of Dancing • Giovanni-Andrea Gallini
... from one tune to another in the same line or improvising as he went on. Finally, in 1721, the Rev. Thomas Walter of Roxbury, Mass., published a treatise, upon the grounds or rules of music or an introduction to the art of singing by rote, containing twenty-four tunes harmonized into three parts. The attempt to supersede the old Puritan tunes and restrict the liberty of the individual singers met with the greatest opposition and was long successfully resisted in all the churches in New England, so tenacious were they of the rights ...
— The Two Hundredth Anniversary of the Settlement of the Town of New Milford, Conn. June 17th, 1907 • Daniel Davenport
... turned and asked yourself what the devil you were doin' here? And that reminds me.... There was a line we used to have drummed into us at school—it's often come back to me since. COELUM, NON ANIMUM, MUTANT, QUI TRANS MARE CURRUNT. In our green days we gabbled that off by rote; then, it seemed just one more o' the eel-sleek phrases the classics are full of. Now, I take off my hat to the man who wrote it. He knew what he was talkin' about—by the ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... historians of our century survive—Carlyle and Macaulay. They may be read with care. We may do as Cassius said Brutus did to him, observe all their faults, set them in a note-book, learn and con them by rote; nevertheless we shall get good from them. Oscar Browning said—I am quoting H. Morse Stephens again—of Carlyle's description of the flight of the king to Varennes, that in every one of his details ...
— Historical Essays • James Ford Rhodes
... satisfaction;—a sensation entirely my own; this was peculiarly so. It wrought strangely on my mind and spirits. My Aaron, it was replete with tenderness! with the most lively affection. I read and re-read, till afraid I should get it by rote, and mingle it with common ideas; profane the sacred pledge. No; it shall not be. I will economize the boon. I will limit the recreation to those moments of retirement devoted to thee. Of a sudden I found myself ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis
... nine of the clergy, nineteen of the noblesse, fifty-two of the third estate. The king opened the assembly on the 4th of November, 1596, with these words, full of dignity, and powerful in their vivid simplicity: "If I desired to win the title of orator, I would have learned by rote some fine, long speech, and would deliver it to you with proper gravity. But, gentlemen, my desire prompts me towards two more glorious titles, the names of deliverer and restorer of this kingdom. In order to attain whereto I have gathered you together. You know to your cost, as I to mine, ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume V. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... his brain in a scientific way, reasoning from cause to effect; I doubt if it dawned upon one of them that there was such an unheard-of accomplishment to be acquired. They were trying—if they were trying anything at all—to pick up modern science in the folk manner, by rote, as though it were a thing to be handed down by tradition. So at least I infer, not only from watching this particular class then and on other occasions, but also from the ...
— Change in the Village • (AKA George Bourne) George Sturt
... so. So he stood still over her, and she smiled at him. Such a smile! It was cold as death, flattering no one, saying nothing, hideous in its unmeaning, unreal grace. Ah! how I hate the smile of a woman who smiles by rote! It made Mr Palliser feel very uncomfortable,—but he did ...
— The Small House at Allington • Anthony Trollope
... the presence-chamber, and of the canopy to shade the fauteuil which aped a throne, made me smile. All the world is a stage, thought I; and few are there in it who do not play the part they have learnt by rote; and those who do not, seem marks set up to be pelted at by fortune, or rather as sign-posts which point out the road to others, whilst forced to stand still themselves amidst the mud ...
— Letters written during a short residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark • Mary Wollstonecraft
... church porch I found a school of dirty ragged children reading the Psalms from the small English printed edition; not, however, learning to read by means of the alphabet or spelling, but learning to know the forms of words by rote; boys and girls together, all very slightly dressed, and one ...
— Byeways in Palestine • James Finn
... successful fellows. I am dwindling into a whining, submissive, crouching, very humble, yes if you please, no thank you Madam, dangler! I have been to school! Have had my task set me! Must learn my lesson by rote, or there is a rod in pickle for me! Yes! I! That identical Clifton; that bold, gay, spirited fellow, who has so often vaunted of and been admired for his daring! You may meet me with my satchel at my back; not with a shining, but a whindling, lackadaisy, green-sickness face; blubbering ...
— Anna St. Ives • Thomas Holcroft
... difference to scholarship. His moral earnestness has made no difference to morality. He acquired scholarship by rote, politics by association, and morality by tradition. To none of these things did he bring the fire of original passion. The force in his youth was ambition, and the goal of his energy was success. No man ever laboured harder to judge between ...
— The Mirrors of Downing Street - Some Political Reflections by a Gentleman with a Duster • Harold Begbie
... unable to read; yet the children of this large parish attend school regularly, and make use of books. They hold the catechism-book in their hands as if they were reading, while they only repeat its contents, which they know by rote." The only exception to this state of things made by Lord Durham was in favour of the Catholic clergy, who were represented by him as a respectable and well-conducted class of men, and well-disposed towards the government. The report further stated ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... distress[687]. For on the 17th of March, O.S., his wife died. Why Sir John Hawkins should unwarrantably take upon him even to suppose that Johnson's fondness for her was dissembled (meaning simulated or assumed,) and to assert, that if it was not the case, 'it was a lesson he had learned by rote[688],' I cannot conceive; unless it proceeded from a want of similar feelings in his own breast. To argue from her being much older than Johnson, or any other circumstances, that he could not really love her, is absurd; for love is not a subject of reasoning, but of feeling, and therefore ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... not think that they had needed this desire, if she had seen a time so fit; and it so ripe to be denounced. That the greatness of the cause, and the need of their return, made her say that a short time for so long a continuance ought not to pass by rote. That as cause by conference with the learned should show her matter worth utterance for their behoof, so she would more gladly pursue their good after her days, than with all her prayers while she lived be a means to linger out her living thread. That for their ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... consider words picked up at random and learned by rote speech. The Fuzzies have merely learned to associate that sound with a specific human, and use it as a ...
— Little Fuzzy • Henry Beam Piper
... frosty fire, where I am burned, Yet dying bless the flame that is my bane!" With which to clasp her closer was he fain, To touch in love, and feast his eyes to see Her quiver at his touch, and laugh to be The plucker of such chords of such a rote; And laughing stoop and kiss her milky throat, Then see her shut eyes hide what he had done. "Nay, shut them not upon me, nay, nor shun My worship!" So he said; but she, "They fade, But are not yet so old as thou hast made The soul thou pinnest here beneath my breasts Which you ...
— Helen Redeemed and Other Poems • Maurice Hewlett
... override that of the governor himself, yielded so far as to permit the father to see his child, on condition that he spoke to no other English prisoner. He talked with her for an hour, exhorting her never to forget her catechism, which she had learned by rote. Vaudreuil and his wife afterwards did all in their power to procure her ransom; but the Indians, or the missionaries in their name, would not let her go. "She is there still," writes Williams two years later, "and has forgotten to speak English." What grieved him still more, Eunice had ...
— A Half Century of Conflict - Volume I - France and England in North America • Francis Parkman
... breathe are extremely like those attendant upon the repetition of some performance by one who has done it very often before, but who requires just a little prompting to set him off, on getting which, the whole familiar routine presents itself before him, and he repeats his task by rote. Surely then we are justified in suspecting that there must have been more bona fide personal recollection and experience, with more effort and failure on the part of the infant itself than ...
— Life and Habit • Samuel Butler
... repeated by rote, as she had learned from her mother, the ill-omened words, hardly knowing their meaning, beyond that they were something very potent, and very wicked, which had been handed down through generations of poisoners and witches from the times of ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... his lights, he had bled the patient, as he would have bled, by rote, to recall to life one actually cut down from the beam. But, although the young blood did flow, bearing testimony to the fact that the heart still beat in that deathlike frame, the vitality left seemed so faint as to defy the power ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... beneath her in the field, gave him the glance of her eye and her face; so that he strove the more earnestly for her favour. Now to the court had gathered many tumblers, harpers, and makers of music, for Arthur's feast. He who would hear songs sung to the music of the rote, or would solace himself with the newest refrain of the minstrel, might win to his wish. Here stood the viol player, chanting ballads and lays to their appointed tunes. Everywhere might be heard the voice of viols and harp and flutes. In every place rose the sound of lyre and ...
— Arthurian Chronicles: Roman de Brut • Wace
... her large letters up to N, and making her say them by rote, and with that end in view have divided them into three portions—ABCD—EFG—ILMN. She manages all right, except that she always jumps E and L. Lesson closed: "Were you at church to-day, Filomena?" "No, I have nothing to confess." "Did you go to church last Sunday?" "No, I have not been for six ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... all reason. Luckily, having written it, I had his part by rote; and so, snatching his Menelaus' wig and beard, I ran ...
— Sir John Constantine • Prosper Paleologus Constantine
... but this last is premature by half that time. Cut off in the flower of Colebrook. The Middletonian stream and all its echoes mourn. Even minnows dwindle. A parvis fiunt MINIMI. I fear to invite Mrs. Hood to our new mansion, lest she envy it, & rote [? rout] us. But when we are fairly in, I hope she will come & try it. I heard she & you were made uncomfortable by some unworthy to be cared for attacks, and have tried to set up a feeble counteraction thro' the Table Book ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... in the kingdom of Loegria (England). With his consent he embarked, and after tossing for many days on the sea, was driven by the winds to the coast of Ireland. He landed, full of joy and gratitude that he had escaped the peril of the sea; took his rote,[Footnote: A musical instrument.] and began to play. It was a summer evening, and the king of Ireland and his daughter, the beautiful Isoude, were at a window which overlooked the sea. The strange harper was sent for, and conveyed to the palace, where, finding that he was in Ireland, whose champion ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... making of metal ships. The man who doubted, let us say, our fabulous ancient kings running up to Adam, or found but mythology in some old tale, was as hated as if he had doubted the authority of Scripture. Above all no man was so ignorant, that he had not by rote familiar arguments and statistics to drive away amid familiar applause, all those had they but found strange truth in the world or in their mind, whose knowledge has passed out of memory and become an instinct of hand or eye. There was no literature, ...
— Synge And The Ireland Of His Time • William Butler Yeats
... remote, The world that works, the heaven that waits, Con our brief pleasures o'er by rote, The favourite pastime of ...
— Silhouettes • Arthur Symons
... as for his fibre, there was nothing advantageous in it. He was little: his head was large and his legs small; his features were not disagreeable, but he was affected in his carriage and behaviour. All his wit consisted in expressions learnt by rote, which he occasionally employed either in raillery, or in love. This was the whole foundation of the merit of a man so ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... there hevynesse, Were passyd away, and alle there[149] grevaunce, For the sixte Henry, rote of there gladnesse, Ther hertys joye, ther worldis suffissaunce, Be trewe assent[150] crownyd kyng of Fraunce; The even[151] rejoysyng the day of his repaire, Made at his comynge the wedir to ...
— A Chronicle of London from 1089 to 1483 • Anonymous
... not as Brinnaria had been, in growth and behavior, for she was a complete child in all respects, but in being what moderns call an infant prodigy. Infant prodigies in ancient times displayed their unusual powers chiefly by recitations, mostly of poems, which they learned by rote and repeated with very little understanding of what they rehearsed. More than most of her kind Terentia comprehended what she declaimed, but she knew by heart many poems entirely beyond her childish grasp. At barely eight years ...
— The Unwilling Vestal • Edward Lucas White
... she's to work on the foretops'l now. Guess you'd better look in the alminick agin, and fin' out when this moon sets.' So the cappen thought 'twas 'bout time to go on deck. Dreadful slow them Dutch cappens be." And X. walked away, rumbling inwardly, like the rote of the sea ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VIII (of X) • Various
... which, perhaps, he wears on a grey day, adds that of ungovernable rage, is so wild a visitor that no attempt at all is made to understand him; and the beggars beg dismayed but unalarmed, uninterruptedly, without a pause or a conjecture. They beg by rote, thinking of something else, as occasion arises, and all indifferent to ...
— Essays • Alice Meynell
... find in loving. I am in danger of forgetting that I am to stay in this world only a little while and then go home. Will you help me to bear it in mind?... How must the "Pilgrim's Progress" interest a mind that has never learned the whole book by rote in childhood. I have often wished I could read it as a first-told tale, and so I wish about the xiv. of John and some other chapters in ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... so doing, ye shall find that He beareth the heavier end. At the least, He shall bear you, and He must needs bear your burden with you. Yet in very sooth there is some gear we must needs get by rote ere we be witful enough to conceive the use thereof. The littlemaster [a schoolmaster] witteth what he doth in setting the task to his scholar. How much rather the ...
— The White Rose of Langley - A Story of the Olden Time • Emily Sarah Holt
... but as fine a gentleman, to speak honestly, and as handsome, as well dressed, and as pleasant to listen to, with that sweet low voice and piquant smile, as any. Besides he could draw, and had more yards of French and English verses by rote than Aunt Becky owned of Venetian lace and satin ribbons, and was more of a scholar than he. He? He!—why—'he?' what the deuce had Devereux to do with it—was he vexed?—A fiddle-stick! He began to flag with Miss Ward, the dowager's ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... they watched like me, on that terrible night. No noise in the town, did I say? Ah, but there was! It came creeping round the corners, it poured rushing up the street, it rose from everywhere,—a voice, a voice of woe, the heavy booming rote of the sea. I looked out, but it was pitch-dark, light had forsaken the world, we were beleaguered by blackness. It grew colder, as if one felt a fog fall, and the wind, mounting slowly, now blew a gale. It eddied in clouds of dead and whirling leaves, and sent big torn ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... forfeit sense; No actor ever greater heights could reach In all the labour'd artifice of speech. 950 Speech! is that all? And shall an actor found An universal fame on partial ground? Parrots themselves speak properly by rote, And, in six months, my dog shall howl by note. I laugh at those who, when the stage they tread, Neglect the heart, to compliment the head; With strict propriety their cares confined To weigh out words, while passion halts ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill
... has two meanings. Properly it signifies the third order of Traditionists out of a total of five or those who know 300,000 traditions and their ascriptions. Popularly "one who can recite the Koran by rote." There are six great Traditionists whose words are held to be prime authorities; (1) Al-Bokhari, (2) Muslim, and these are entitled Al-Sahihayn, The (two true) authorities. After them (3) Al-Tirmidi; and (4) Abu Daud: these ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... a circle of young ladies who have got by rote a certain set of phrases and opinions—all admiring in the same terms the same things, and detesting in like terms certain others—with anxious solicitude each dressing, thinking, and acting, one as much like another as is possible. A genuine original opinion, even though it were ...
— The May Flower, and Miscellaneous Writings • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... lustre on the family—it will readily be seen that there was nothing to cause education to be concerned with any but one or two of the subjects which are included by Western peoples under that designation. It became at an early age, and remained for many centuries, a rote-learning of the elementary text-books, followed by a similar acquisition by heart of the texts of the works of Confucius and other classical writers. And so it remained until the abolition, in 1905, of the old competitive examination system, and ...
— Myths and Legends of China • E. T. C. Werner
... "stand-and-deliver" attitude for the time being, and then, by way of getting square with the soldier for the sharply military way in which his duty as sentry had been performed, the captain proceeded to catechise him as to his orders. The soldier had been well taught, and knew all his "responses" by rote,—far better than Buxton, for that matter, as the latter was anything but an exemplar of perfection in tactics or sentry duty; but this did not prevent Buxton's snappishly telling him he was wrong ...
— The Deserter • Charles King
... been art instead of nature, something by rote instead of a segment of inner harmony, she could not have succeeded so well. He warded off the few blunders, and at the third change she had another well-bred partner. But she was glad to get back to him. The joy ...
— A Little Girl in Old Salem • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... fourteenth amendment does not secure to all citizens the right to rote, for what purpose was that grand old charter of the fathers lumbered with its unwieldy proportions? The republican party, and Judges Howard and Bingham, who drafted the document, pretended it was to do something for black men; and if that something was not ...
— An Account of the Proceedings on the Trial of Susan B. Anthony • Anonymous
... would rather that he should be converted and live. The beautiful prayers in the Liturgy, were explained to them in a manner suitable to their different capacities; consequently, they were not repeated by rote, as is too frequently the case, where the same attention is not paid. Mr. and Mrs. Bernard took unremitted pains with their children, and felt themselves amply rewarded by their conduct; for though, like other human beings, they were fallible, and, consequently, often did wrong, yet religious principle ...
— Domestic pleasures - or, the happy fire-side • F. B. Vaux
... change that note To which fond love hath charm'd me, Long, long to sing by rote, Fancying that that harm'd me: Yet when this thought doth come, "Love is the perfect sum Of all delight," I have no other choice Either for pen or voice ...
— Tudor and Stuart Love Songs • Various
... now, well-a-day! A few cant phrases learnt by rote Each beardless booby spouts away, A Solon, in a ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 487 - Vol. 17, No. 487. Saturday, April 30, 1831 • Various
... on her head, Wept with the passion of an angry grief: Forgive me, if from present things I turn To speak what in my heart will beat and burn, And hang my wreath on his world-honored urn. Nature, they say, doth dote, And cannot make a man Save on some worn-out plan, Repeating us by rote: For him her Old-World moulds aside she threw, And, choosing sweet clay from the breast Of the unexhausted West, With stuff untainted shaped a hero new, Wise, steadfast in the strength of God, and true. How beautiful to see Once more a shepherd of ...
— Our American Holidays: Lincoln's Birthday • Various
... home," the daytale-men and household servants were enjoying themselves over massive pewter quarts foaming over with strong beer, that the subject of the evening's conversation at last turned upon the fairies of the neighbouring hill, and each related his oft-told tale which he had learned by rote from the lips of some parish grandame. At last the senior of the mirthful party proposed to a youthful mate of his, who had dared to doubt even the existence of such creatures, that he durst not go to the hill, mounted on his master's best palfrey, and call aloud, at the full ...
— Notes and Queries, Issue No. 61, December 28, 1850 • Various
... Negro to work by rule and rote but not by principle and method. It did not and, perhaps, could not teach him to love and respect labor, but left him, on the contrary, with the idea that manual industry was a thing to be despised and gotten rid of, if possible; ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... do the two things differ so that we should refer the inheritance of eyes and noses to memory, while denying any connection between memory and gout? We may have a ghost of a pretence for saying that a man grew a nose by rote, or even that he catches the measles or whooping-cough by rote during his boyhood; but do we mean to say that he develops the gout by rote in his old age if he comes of a gouty family? If, then, rote and red-tape have nothing to do with the one, why should they ...
— Unconscious Memory • Samuel Butler
... I "heard you yesterday before the court," no doubt,' he interrupted, 'and I remember perfectly that you were "awakened only." I could repeat the most of it by rote, indeed. But do you suppose that I believed you ...
— St Ives • Robert Louis Stevenson
... speech satisfactorily, or give, or seem to feel, the point of contrast between the must and no must, the compulsion and no compulsion. In fact, the whole of it is usually mouthed out, without much reference to Shylock or the play, as if it had been learned by rote from a school speech-book. Hazlitt says, in his Characters of Shakspeare's Plays, 'The speech about mercy is very well, but there are a thousand finer ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 75, April 5, 1851 • Various
... the old traditional curriculum, the learning by rote of the classics without explanation in early youth, followed by a more intelligent study in later years. This is exactly like the traditional study of the classics in this country, as it existed, for example, in the eighteenth century. Men over thirty, even if, in ...
— The Problem of China • Bertrand Russell
... Ludendorff. Ah, there we have real work. If Ludendorff will talk now. He is supposed to be in Berlin. I will find him and arrange for you. And so on. You will meet all the great minds, all the big stomachs. I will take you to Radek who is hiding with a price on his head. And Dr. Talheimer on the Rote Fahne, if they do not arrest him too soon. Bernstorff is in the hotel. A man with too much brains. Yes, an intelligent bungler. He will die some day with a sad smile, forgiving his enemies. And if we need women, mention your choice. Mine runs to the married woman of title. A ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht
... realising with a wonder beyond words how different it was. Every word, every glance between him and Betty had, hitherto, been part of a play. She had been a charming figure in a charming comedy. He had known, as it were by rote, that she had feelings—a heart, affections—but they had seemed pale, dream-like, just a delightful background to his own sensations, strong and conscious and delicate. Now for the first time he perceived ...
— The Incomplete Amorist • E. Nesbit
... do it. Either his interest was aroused, and then he absorbed the matter at hand in the way he breathed, without the least conscious effort; or his interest remained unstirred, in which case no amount of mechanical application would help. Learning by rote offered no escape in the latter case, for his memory operated in the same way as the rest of his mind, sucking up what fitted it as a blotter sucks the ink, and presenting a surface of polished marble to any matter not germane according to ...
— The Soul of a Child • Edwin Bjorkman
... by way of making what is learned more available for future use. Our previous studies of learning thus lead us to inquire whether committing to memory may not consist partly in rehearsing what we wish to learn, and partly in observing it. Learning by rote, or by merely repeating a performance over and over again, is, indeed, a fact; and observant study is also ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth
... hath, He understood b' implicit faith: 130 Whatever sceptic could inquire for, For ev'ry why he had a wherefore; Knew more than forty of them do, As far as words and terms cou'd go. All which he understood by rote, 135 And, as occasion serv'd, would quote; No matter whether right or wrong, They might be either said or sung. His notions fitted things so well, That which was which he could not tell; 140 But oftentimes mistook th' one For ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler
... is not all the story—repose!" his words sounded hollow, like a lesson he had learned by rote and propriety had ...
— The Man Who Wins • Robert Herrick
... were the world—because they were Mrs. Lyddell's society—because she was superior? How or why? She disdained them all, without knowing it, and far less knowing why. She complied scrupulously with every rule of formal politeness, and had become a tolerable mistress, by rote, of such common-place small talk as served to fulfil her part, and make her not feel herself absurd, but this was all; she would not let herself be pleased or amused, she would not open her eyes to anything good or agreeable about the people, except a very few favoured ones, chiefly ...
— The Two Guardians • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... are finding their way into the Roman States; and it is better, therefore, not to entrust the people with the key of knowledge; for nothing is so useless as knowledge under an infallible Church. The matters which the Italian youth are taught they are taught by rote. "Ignorance is the mother of devotion,"—a maxim sometimes quoted with a sneer, but one which embodies a profound truth as regards that kind of devotion ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie
... fathom, make out; recognize, discern, perceive, see, get a sight-of, experience. know full well; have some knowledge of, possess some knowledge of; be au courant &c. adj.; have in one's head, have at one' fingers ends; know by heart, know by rote; be master of; connaitre le dessous des cartes[Fr], know what's what &c. 698. see one's way; discover &c. 480a. come to one's knowledge &c. (information) 527. Adj. knowing &c. v.; cognitive; acroamatic[obs3]. aware of, cognizant of, conscious of; acquainted with, made acquainted with; privy to, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... folly Ravidus (poor churl!) Upon my iambs thus would headlong hurl? What good or cunning counsellor would fain Urge thee to struggle in such strife insane? Is't that the vulgar mouth thy name by rote? 5 What will'st thou? Wishest on any wise such note? Then shalt be noted since my love so lief For love thou sued'st to thy ...
— The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus • Caius Valerius Catullus
... through the same figures to new tunes. I wonder if there are any people anywhere in the world who stand on their own feet, and think and act for themselves; who don't set their watches by other people's; who don't live and marry and die by rote, expecting to go straight up to heaven ...
— The Danvers Jewels, and Sir Charles Danvers • Mary Cholmondeley
... April with his shoures sote The droughte of March hath perced to the rote, And bathed every veine in swiche licour, Of which vertue engendred is the flour; Whan Zephirus eke with his sote brethe, Enspired hath in every holt and hethe The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne Hath in the Ram his half cours yronne, And smale foules maken melodie That ...
— The Actress in High Life - An Episode in Winter Quarters • Sue Petigru Bowen
... reck rate reed rill rub rig rim rite ride rise red rag rick rote run reek rib rob rip ruse roar roam rack rid rip rouse Arch farm lark far snare for march harm bark bar spare war larch charm mark hair sure corn starch dark are stair lure born arm spark ...
— McGuffey's Fourth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... of habits, which may be revived by one single word; as when a person, who has by rote any periods of a discourse, or any number of verses, will be put in remembrance of the whole, which he is at a loss to recollect, by that single word or expression, with which ...
— A Treatise of Human Nature • David Hume
... three Englishmen hammered away in vain at Brother Jonathan Herring's. The Englishmen represented brute force. The Germans had been trained to appreciate principle. The Englishman "knows his business by rote and rule of thumb"—science, which would "teach him to do in an hour what has hitherto occupied him two hours," "is in a manner forbidden to him." To this cause the "Times" attributes the falling off of English workmen in comparison ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... did not glance. Take no notice. She took no notice while he read by rote a solfa ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... declared that people attached crude or arbitrary meanings; and now she hardly knew what they conveyed to her, and longed, as for something far away, for the reality of those simple teachings—once realities, now all by rote! Saved by faith! What was faith? Could all depend on a last sensation? And as to her life. Failure, failure through headstrong blindness and self-will, resulting in the agony of the innocent. Was this ground of hope? She tried to think of progress and purification beyond the grave; ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... had rendered scarcely worth defending, could death have come unaccompanied by disgrace. With a manner betraying suppressed, but ill-concealed eagerness, and in language prompt and fluent, as if reciting by rote a carefully kept journal, she went on to detail every fault or neglect or impatient act of her relative, not sparing exposure of the most delicate domestic events, at the same time carefully suppressing ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 48, October, 1861 • Various
... to any religious organisation is that a body of men should arise in its ranks, and hold its positions of trust, who have learned its great fundamental doctrines by rote out of the catechism, but have no experimental knowledge of their truth inwrought by the mighty anointing of the Holy Ghost, and who are destitute of "an unction from the Holy One," by which, says John, "ye know all things" ...
— When the Holy Ghost is Come • Col. S. L. Brengle
... Yet see what strong intellects dare not yet hear God himself unless he speak the phraseology of I know not what David, or Jeremiah, or Paul. We shall not always set so great a price on a few texts, on a few lives. We are like children who repeat by rote the sentences of grandames and tutors, and, as they grow older, of the men of talents and character they chance to see,—painfully recollecting the exact words they spoke; afterwards, when they come into the point of view which those had who uttered these sayings, they understand them ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... correcting their Children, as we do. A general Complaint is, that it seems impossible to convert these People to Christianity, as, at first sight, it does; and as for those in New Spain, they have the Prayer of that Church in Latin by Rote, and know the external Behaviour at Mass and Sermons; yet scarce any of them are steady and abide with constancy in good Works, and the Duties of the Christian Church. We find that the Fuentes and ...
— A New Voyage to Carolina • John Lawson
... bedroom. The doctor's counsels were all forgotten, of course, or remembered only in odd moments, as when going to bed, or shaving in the morning. Then I would promise myself reformation when the book was finished. That done I would live by rote and acquire bucolic health, ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... sequence of second prizes must have filled him with chagrin, but to be beaten thus repeatedly by such a fellow as Bruno Chilvers was humiliation intolerable. A fopling, a mincer of effeminate English, a rote-repeater of academic catchwords—bah! The by-examinations of the year had whispered presage, but Peak always felt that he was not putting forth his strength; when the serious trial came he would show what was really in him. Too late he recognised his error, though he tried ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... of self-culture also calls forth power and cultivates strength. The solution of one problem helps the mastery of another; and thus knowledge is carried into faculty. Our own active effort is the essential thing; and no facilities, no books, no teachers, no amount of lessons learnt by rote will enable us to ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles
... euydence Howe youthe which is nat norysshed in doctryne. In age is gyuen vnto al Inconuenyence. But nought shall make youthe soner forto inclyne. To noble maners: nor Godly dysciplyne: Than shal the doctryne of a mayster wyse and sad: For the rote of vertue and wysdome ...
— The Ship of Fools, Volume 1 • Sebastian Brandt
... to laugh at, you young rascal," he said to Bob. "I'm sure I've given you quite as good a definition as you would find in any of those 'catechisms of common things'—catechisms of conundrums, I call them—which boys and girls are made to learn by rote, like parrots, without really acquiring any sensible knowledge of the subjects they are supposed to teach! I might tell you, as these works do, that 'steam was an elastic fluid generated by water when in a boiling state'; ...
— Bob Strong's Holidays - Adrift in the Channel • John Conroy Hutcheson
... perfect correctness, but not of course in the clear language of Paley. The logic of this book and, as I may add, of his Natural Theology, gave me as much delight as did Euclid. The careful study of these works, without attempting to learn any part by rote, was the only part of the academical course which, as I then felt and as I still believe, was of the least use to me in the education of my mind. I did not at that time trouble myself about Paley's premises, and taking these ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... feastings and mournings; and often it rehearsed for us the tales of many lands, or, best of all, the legends of our own. I see him, a silver-haired minstrel, touching melodious keys, playing and singing in the twilight, within sound of the rote of the sea. There he lingers late; the curfew-bell has tolled and the darkness closes round, till at last that tender voice is silent, and he softly ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... said Haupt. "They can't be forged. We have no precedents to follow. Those chaps over there will know the thing by rote and probably would recognize the signatures ...
— Trusia - A Princess of Krovitch • Davis Brinton
... ever drove fer cant hold a candel to drivin a truck with Fritz bulets bingin all round you and he sez, I received the kit you sent me and It is a great comfort (the kit is not a cat but a assortment of handkerchiefs and tooth brushes and everything a soldier gets and Mother sent him his and so he rote to thank her) an he sez if I go over the top with the best of luck and get enuf leave to come home I will give Myself the pleasure of calling on you, and showin you what a Greenville soldier looks like. My reciprocity shall never end. And he ...
— Deer Godchild • Marguerite Bernard and Edith Serrell
... religion was gentle and humane, but not very enlightened, because it derived its light from the heart and not from, his understanding. Egmont possessed more of conscience than of fixed principles; his head had not given him a code of its own, but had merely learnt it by rote; the mere name of any action, therefore, was often with him sufficient for its condemnation. In his judgment men were wholly bad or wholly good, and had not something bad or something good; in this ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... 100 At once the ravens were discarded, And magpies with their posts rewarded. 'Those fowls of omen I detest, That pry into another's nest, State-lies must lose all good intent; For they foresee and croak the event. My friends ne'er think, but talk by rote, Speak what they're taught, and so to vote.' 'When rogues like these,' a sparrow cries, 'To honours and employments rise, 110 I court no favour, ask no place; For such preferment is disgrace. Within my thatched ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... not feared that her chief might misconstrue any suggestion from her as an act of impertinence, Miss Perkins, having learned all the company's cut-glass quotations by rote, could easily have supplied the remainder of the letter. As it was, she waited impatiently, tapping the corner of the desk with her idle pencil. Jimmy turned at the sound, and glanced at the pencil with unmistakable disapproval. Miss Perkins waited ...
— Baby Mine • Margaret Mayo
... know thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom thou hast sent." In these words is the sufficient defence of Protestantism. It was the cry of the soul to know God, and not merely to assent to what the Church taught concerning him; it was the longing to know Christ, and not to repeat by rote the creeds of the first centuries, and the definitions of mediaeval doctors in regard to him. In a subsequent chapter we shall consider the truth and error in the Protestant principle of justification by faith. Our purpose here is to show that the truth ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... deal, and nearly always alone, one has occasion to gauge the deep dreariness of human beings pure and simple, when, so to speak, the small, learnt-by-rote lessons of civilization, of kindness, graciousness, or intelligence, are not being called into play by common business or acquaintanceship. There, in the train, they sit in the elemental, native dreariness of their more practical, ungracious ...
— Hortus Vitae - Essays on the Gardening of Life • Violet Paget, AKA Vernon Lee
... replied hastily. He seemed to speak by rote. His manner was too eager to suit the impressiveness of his words. "The sheep are without a shepherd," he said. "The young men marry among the Gorgios, or they are lost in the cities and return no more to ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... grandfathers. Thus initiated they are qualified to deliver an opinion in public at a time of life when an English schoolboy could scarcely return an answer to a question beyond the limits of his grammar or syntax, which he has learned by rote. It is not a little unaccountable that this people, who hold the art of speaking in such high esteem, and evidently pique themselves on the attainment of it, should yet take so much pains to destroy the organs of speech in filing down and otherwise disfiguring their teeth; and likewise adopt the ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... his writhing throat, Those hellish instruments have haply drawn, And pain hath conn'd the aspish lies by rote; But to my heart no poison'd tooth hath gnawn, For in ...
— Poems • Walter R. Cassels
... the stage, was a singular wild man of no small talents and humour. Attracted first by Miss Fotheringay's beauty, he began to teach her how to act. He shrieked out in his cracked voice the parts, and his pupil learned them from his lips by rote, and repeated them in her full rich tones. He indicated the attitudes, and set and moved those beautiful arms of hers. Those who remember this grand actress on the stage can recall how she used always precisely the same gestures, looks, and tones; how she stood on the ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... before he died, "Wherever you are, whatever betide, Every year as the time draws near By lot or by rote choose you a goat, And let the high priest confess on the beast The sins of the people, the worst and the least. Lay your sins on the goat! Sure the plan ought to suit yer, Because all your sins are "his troubles" in future. Then lead him ...
— Saltbush Bill, J.P., and Other Verses • A. B. Paterson
... pronouncers of judgments, and the arbitrators of rewards or punishments. The immunity which they enjoyed from war, allured many young men to enrol themselves in this order. Their education was a poetical one, for it was necessary to learn by rote several thousand verses, in which all the knowledge then extant ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XX. No. 557., Saturday, July 14, 1832 • Various
... he willed it, she bethought her that Margot Poins was to go to a nunnery. That afternoon she had decided that Mary Trelyon, who was her second maid, should become her first, and others be moved up in a rote. ...
— The Fifth Queen Crowned • Ford Madox Ford
... made ever so slightly on his flank. Perhaps the greatest disadvantage of this method is that it does not give the student the best kind of training. What he needs most in life is the ability to arrange and present ideas rapidly, not to speak a part by rote. ...
— Elements of Debating • Leverett S. Lyon
... have learned conceits from the catch-books. You quarrel by rote. Were I as eager to answer me, I might say: 'Ah, false flower, you grow out of the foulness underneath. You give your fragrance to all without discretion—a common lover, prodigal of favors, fit only to be torn to shreds by pretty, spiteful fingers, and to die at last with ...
— Red Axe • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... himself upon being polished above the natives of any other country by his conversation with the fair sex. In the course of this communication, with which he is indulged from his tender years, he learns like a parrot, by rote, the whole circle of French compliments, which you know are a set of phrases ridiculous even to a proverb; and these he throws out indiscriminately to all women, without distinction in the exercise ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... wake, O Mother, wake and see - As one who, held in trance, has laboured long By vacant rote and prepossession strong - The coils that thou hast ...
— Poems of the Past and the Present • Thomas Hardy
... and a drunken mob is a drunken mob, and a drunken mob with weapons in its hands is a drunken mob with weapons in its hands, all the world over: elementary propositions, which some of us upon these islands might do worse than get by rote, but which must have been evident enough to Becker. And I am amazed by the man's constancy, that, even while blows were going at the door of that German firm which he was in Samoa to protect, he should have stuck to his demands. Ten days before, Blacklock ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 17 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... passed partly at Cockermouth, and partly with his maternal grandfather at Penrith. His first teacher appears to have been Mrs. Anne Birkett, a kind of Shenstone's Schoolmistress, who practised the memory of her pupils, teaching them chiefly by rote, and not endeavoring to cultivate their reasoning faculties, a process by which children are apt to be converted from natural logicians into impertinent sophists. Among his schoolmates here was Mary Hutchinson, who afterwards became ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... it learning—'tis mother-wit. No one else sees the lady-moon sit On the sea, her nest, all night, but the owl, Hatching the boats and the long-legged fowl. When the oysters gape to sing by rote, She crams a pearl down each stupid throat. Howlowlwhitit that's wit, ...
— Cross Purposes and The Shadows • George MacDonald
... great deal; Juliet and Belvidera scarcely anybody can do ill, but Euphrasia I thought few people could do well, and I feared I was not one of them. Moreover, the language is at once so poor and so bombastic that I took double the time in getting the part by rote I should have taken for any part of Shakespeare's. My dress was beautiful; I think I will tell it you. You know you told me even an account of hat and feathers would interest you. My skirt was made immensely full and with a long train; it was of white merino, almost as ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... main club for we have lots of people in Tex. want to no direct about it and want to go. We take your paper in this citey and your paper was all we had to go by so we are depending on you for farther advise. Dear editor you muss excuse our bad letter for we rote ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 4, 1919 • Various
... the fashion for our school children to learn by rote the facts written down in their geography about all the corners of the earth; they must know rather the children in these foreign lands,—the sights they see, their work and play, their festivals and holidays, their ...
— Rafael in Italy - A Geographical Reader • Etta Blaisdell McDonald
... was so old, it was most bald-hedded, I suckceeded in completely ridden the floor of its surplus stock of litterature, and terbackhey balls, wot them printers spit out, wen they warnted to use there mouths, to consine sum feller, wot rote orful to Hallyfax, or sum ...
— The Bad Boy At Home - And His Experiences In Trying To Become An Editor - 1885 • Walter T. Gray
... eating little pfeller tree.' 'That's the cure,' said William Johnson, 'point me out this plant sublime,' But King Billy, feeling lazy, said he'd go another time. Thus it came to pass that Johnson, having got the tale by rote, Followed every stray goanna, ...
— The Man from Snowy River • Andrew Barton 'Banjo' Paterson
... o'clock in the afternoon, or three o'clock in the afternoon, or only drinks with his meals, or only takes two or three drinks a day, usually is a liar, too—not always, but usually. There are some machine-like, non-imaginative persons who can do this—drink by rote or by rule; but not many. Now I do not say many men do not think they drink this way, but most of these ...
— Cutting It out - How to get on the waterwagon and stay there • Samuel G. Blythe
... school, where the rule of long division proved my pons asinorum, and went to a man's school, where I earned my schooling by making the fires and sweeping the schoolroom, and here I learned some Latin and the higher rules in arithmetic by rote, always with the reputation of a stupid boy, good in the snowball fights of the intermission, when we had two snow forts to capture and defend; in running foot-races, the speediest, and in backhand wrestling, the strongest, but mentally hopeless. ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... historical and legendary, the established and those whose ascription is doubtful; and I have studied the exact sciences, geometry and philosophy and medicine and logic and rhetoric and composition; and I have learnt many things by rote and am passionately fond of poetry. I can play the lute and know its gamut and notes and notation and the crescendo and diminuendo. If I sing and dance, I seduce, and if I dress and scent myself, I slay. In fine, I have reached ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... to say that formalism is no longer a characteristic feature of the typical American school. It is so long since I have heard any rote learning in a schoolroom that I am wondering if it is not almost time for some one to show that a little rote learning would not be at all a bad thing in preadolescent education. We ridicule the memoriter ...
— Craftsmanship in Teaching • William Chandler Bagley
... words of the prophet (Mic. vi. 9), 'The Lord's voice crieth to the city,' and to the country also, with an unusual and amazing loudness. Surely, it warns us to awaken out of all sleep, of security or stupidity, to arise, and take our Bibles, turn to, and learn that lesson, not by rote only, but by heart. 1 Pet. v. 8: 'Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the Devil goes about as a roaring lion, seeking whom amongst you he may distress, delude, and devour.'... Awake, awake then, I beseech you, and remain ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... orphanes, and poore people, most perfect in Saxon poetrie, most liberall endowed with wisdome, fortitude, justice, and temperance, departed this life;"[243] and right well did he deserve this eulogy, for as an old chronicle says, he was "a goode clerke and rote many bokes, and a boke he made in Englysshe, of adventures of kynges and bataylles that had bene wne in the lande; and other bokes of gestes he them wryte, that were of greate wisdome, and of good learnynge, thrugh whych bokes many a man may him amende, that well them rede, and upon them loke. ...
— Bibliomania in the Middle Ages • Frederick Somner Merryweather
... say the Creed, the Lord's Prayer, and the Ten Commandments, in the vulgar (i.e. his native) tongue, and be further instructed, etc." Here, the words "can say" obviously mean can say intelligently. The mere saying of the words by rote is comparatively unimportant, though it has its use; but if this were all, it would degrade the Candidate's intellectual status to the capacities of a parrot. But, "as soon as" he can intelligently comply with ...
— The Church: Her Books and Her Sacraments • E. E. Holmes
... The act of worship is grave and formal; it has to be done with precision and in strict accordance with the rules; silence is commanded; the sacrificer repeats the prayer proper for the occasion after some one who knows it by rote; the worshippers veil their heads. In this the Roman ritual is markedly different from the Greek. Mommsen says the Greek prayed bareheaded, because his prayer was contemplation, looking at and to the gods; and the Roman with head covered, because his prayer was ...
— History of Religion - A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems • Allan Menzies
... said by rote, "you're well, and your parents also in good health. May I have the pleasure of dancing the cotillon ...
— Confessions of a Book-Lover • Maurice Francis Egan
... off," the girl's voice responded. He noted, subconsciously, that she was speaking slowly and carefully, as if with effort.... "Cut off," she repeated as by rote, "and I had trouble ...
— The Bandbox • Louis Joseph Vance
... that mercy, which delighteth not in the death of a sinner, but would rather that he should be converted and live. The beautiful prayers in the Liturgy, were explained to them in a manner suitable to their different capacities; consequently, they were not repeated by rote, as is too frequently the case, where the same attention is not paid. Mr. and Mrs. Bernard took unremitted pains with their children, and felt themselves amply rewarded by their conduct; for though, like other human beings, they were fallible, and, consequently, ...
— Domestic pleasures - or, the happy fire-side • F. B. Vaux
... for his hands, and, apart from his memories, little for his mind. He read and reread his father's dying words until he knew them by rote, and could read them with shut eyes as he lay in his blanket in the wakeful hours of night. He would not admit to himself that he had a real belief in their message, and yet it was always with him in a fainter or a stronger fashion, and it ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray
... has one more word which seems to me quite as good a candidate as any of the others, viz. roteur, a player on the rote, i.e. the fiddle used by the medieval minstrels, Chaucer says of ...
— The Romance of Names • Ernest Weekley
... replies, which were given with much humility of manner. I could not help sometimes doubting whether the whole thing was really unprepared and extemporaneous, or whether she might not have learnt her lesson and repeated it by rote, or whether, in short, it might not have been a piece of acting. This impression lasted only for a moment, for there was such an artless and modest manner in the young girl, that I could not fail on the whole to give her the fullest credit ...
— First Impressions of the New World - On Two Travellers from the Old in the Autumn of 1858 • Isabella Strange Trotter
... an enlightened yet strictly orthodox Parsi, that there is hardly a man or a woman who could give an account of the faith that is in them. 'The whole religious education of a Parsi child consists in preparing by rote a certain number of prayers in Zend, without understanding a word of them; the knowledge of the doctrines of their religion being left to be picked up from casual conversation.' A Parsi, in fact, hardly knows what his faith is. The Zend-Avesta ...
— Chips From A German Workshop - Volume I - Essays on the Science of Religion • Friedrich Max Mueller
... his living—didn't he? He couldn't read all the books and find out about everything right off. But you bet he found out a lot, and he believes that after a fellow gets some rudiments of education he can learn more by studying in his own way and experimenting than by just learning by rote and rule. Maybe he's not altogether right about that, for education is mighty fine and I'd like to go to a technical school; Gus and I both are aiming for that, but we're going to read and study a lot our own way, too, and experiment; aren't we, Gus? Nobody ...
— Radio Boys Cronies • Wayne Whipple and S. F. Aaron
... an excellent topical analysis of the text.[3] In a certain sense they ask "what the book says," but the teacher is advised emphatically to discourage any such thing as committing the text to memory. The tendency to rote-learning is very strong. I had to contend with it in teaching history to seniors at Harvard twenty years ago, but much has since been done to check it through the development of the modern German seminary ...
— Civil Government in the United States Considered with - Some Reference to Its Origins • John Fiske
... and of the canopy to shade the fauteuil which aped a throne, made me smile. All the world is a stage, thought I; and few are there in it who do not play the part they have learnt by rote; and those who do not, seem marks set up to be pelted at by fortune, or rather as sign-posts which point out the road to others, whilst forced to stand still themselves amidst the mud ...
— Letters written during a short residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark • Mary Wollstonecraft
... they know that service all by rote, And there was many and many a lovely note; Some singing loud, as if they had complained; Some with their notes another manner feigned; And some did sing all ...
— Playful Poems • Henry Morley
... number of high and glorious principles and acts, and our first thought thereupon is, "All this must have had an existence somewhere or other in those times. These very men, indeed, may be merely speaking by rote, and not understand what they say; but it matters not to the profit of their writings what they were themselves." It matters not to the profit of their writings, nor again to the authority resulting from them; for the ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman
... Cartier Islands the landing of illegal immigrants from Indonesia's Rote Island has become an ...
— The 2003 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... they say, doth dote, And cannot make a man Save on some worn-out plan, Repeating us by rote. ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett
... "Tell me, Rote, continual derider of cowards, thinkest thou that we have avenged Frode enough, when we have spent seven deaths on the vengeance of one? Lo, those are borne out dead who paid homage not to thy sway in deed, ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... in French and German, as also in drawing, music, and embroidery. We learn music on a fine piano of five octaves and a half. What an improvement on that of Maleszow! Some of the scholars play polonaises very well, but not by rote; they read them from the notes. My master tells me that in six months I will have reached this perfection; but then I already had some ideas of music when ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. IV. October, 1863, No. IV. - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... kiss, Nor visit on thy stately head Aught that thy mouth hath sworn, or thy two eyes have said.... He came, and it was dark. He came, and sighed Because he knew the sorrow,—whispering low, And fast, and thick, as one that speaks by rote: "The vessel lieth in the river reach, A mile above the beach, And she will sail at the turning o' the tide." He said, "I have a boat, And were it good to go, And unbeholden in the vessel's wake Look on the man thou lovedst, and forgive, As he embarks, ...
— Poems by Jean Ingelow, In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Jean Ingelow
... as you are caught in the noose of love it is one of worth and merit that has taken you, and one that has not only the four S's that they say true lovers ought to have, but a complete alphabet; only listen to me and you will see how I can repeat it by rote. He is to my eyes and thinking, Amiable, Brave, Courteous, Distinguished, Elegant, Fond, Gay, Honourable, Illustrious, Loyal, Manly, Noble, Open, Polite, Quickwitted, Rich, and the S's according to the saying, and then Tender, Veracious: X does not suit him, for it is a rough letter; ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... he, "I kep' thinkin' of the clack. Now," sez he, "I'm goin' to build a house by rote and not by note. I will git me away from wimmen, and when I'm on the lot with the timber before me, my mind ...
— Samantha at Coney Island - and a Thousand Other Islands • Marietta Holley
... capacities suited for it. To attempt to cultivate such minds for eminent purposes would be folly. Even supposing they could be educated—which is scarcely supposable, for it would seem a contravention of Heaven's fiat—they could no more apply this learning, which would simply be by rote, than they could go to the moon. Such men are not unfrequently met with, and are designated, by common consent, learned fools. Nature points out the education they should receive. In like manner with those of higher ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... he knew by rote, He could preach like Chrysostome, From the Fathers he could quote, He had even been at Rome. A learned clerk, A man of mark, ...
— Tales of a Wayside Inn • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... that the Greeks borrowed the names of their gods from Egypt, but the gods themselves were entirely different ones. It is also true that some of the gods of the Romans were borrowed from the Greeks, but their life was left behind. They merely repeated by rote the Greek mythology, having no power to invent one for themselves. But the Greek religion they never received. For instead of its fair humanities, the Roman gods were only servants of the state,—a higher kind of consuls, tribunes, and lictors. The real Olympus of ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... considered, and have every reason to be confirmed in my opinion, that the foundation of all education is mathematics. Every thing else may be obtained by rote, and without thinking; but from the elements of arithmetic up to Euclid and algebra, no boy can work his task without thinking. I never yet knew a man who was a good mathematician who was not well-informed upon almost every point; ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... his tone! I could scarcely interpret it. Was he talking by rote, or was he utterly done with life and all its interests? No one besides myself seemed to note this strange passivity. To the masses he was no longer a suffering man, but an individual from whom information was to be got. The next ...
— The Filigree Ball • Anna Katharine Green
... populists, you'll note, Of views enthusiastic, He'd learned by heart, and said by rote A creed iconoclastic; And in his dim, uncertain sight Whatever wasn't must be right, From which it follows he had strong Convictions ...
— Fables for the Frivolous • Guy Whitmore Carryl
... sent." In these words is the sufficient defence of Protestantism. It was the cry of the soul to know God, and not merely to assent to what the Church taught concerning him; it was the longing to know Christ, and not to repeat by rote the creeds of the first centuries, and the definitions of mediaeval doctors in regard to him. In a subsequent chapter we shall consider the truth and error in the Protestant principle of justification by faith. Our purpose here is to show that the truth in Orthodoxy is identical with the ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... years old. I was sent, at five years old, or earlier, to a school kept by a Mr. Bowers, who was called 'Bodsy Bowers,' by reason of his dapperness. It was a school for both sexes. I learned little there except to repeat by rote the first lesson of monosyllables ('God made man'—'Let us love him'), by hearing it often repeated, without acquiring a letter. Whenever proof was made of my progress, at home, I repeated these words with the most rapid fluency; but on turning over a new leaf, I continued to repeat ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. I. (of VI.) - With his Letters and Journals. • Thomas Moore
... had seen a time so fit; and it so ripe to be denounced. That the greatness of the cause, and the need of their return, made her say that a short time for so long a continuance ought not to pass by rote. That as cause by conference with the learned should show her matter worth utterance for their behoof, so she would more gladly pursue their good after her days, than with all her prayers while she lived be a means to linger out her living thread. That for their comfort, ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... stood a modest, blooming Peer, Who bow'd with easy grace, and offer'd there Some fine-spun Verses which he never wrote, Some worthy Speeches which he spoke by rote: For thus I heard surrounding tongues rehearse, "H—— wrote the Speeches, H—— composed the Verse." And soon amid the mingled heap there lay The blasted wishes for Hibernian sway. And here ...
— The First of April - Or, The Triumphs of Folly: A Poem Dedicated to a Celebrated - Duchess. By the author of The Diaboliad. • William Combe
... pause that seemed somewhat long Amathel delivered his answer that was learned by rote, for it replied to "gentle words from the lips of the divine Queen that made his heart to flower like the desert after rain," not one of which had she spoken. Thereon Tua, looking over the top of her fan, saw Rames smile grimly, while unable ...
— Morning Star • H. Rider Haggard
... our fabulous ancient kings running up to Adam, or found but mythology in some old tale, was as hated as if he had doubted the authority of Scripture. Above all no man was so ignorant, that he had not by rote familiar arguments and statistics to drive away amid familiar applause, all those had they but found strange truth in the world or in their mind, whose knowledge has passed out of memory and become an instinct of ...
— Synge And The Ireland Of His Time • William Butler Yeats
... fate at the wheel battles unceasingly with the conscious mind above, for age is prone to live by law and rote. These fates, the oldest daughters of the Earth-Mother, Nature, know nothing of morals or manners, assume that men and women are as naive in their normality as the denizens of forest and field. And ...
— The Sisters-In-Law • Gertrude Atherton
... resolve it by rote, Lady, twas that yeare the Cuckoo sung in May: another token Lady; there raigned in Rome a great Tyrant that yeare, and many Maides lost their heads ...
— A Collection Of Old English Plays, Vol. IV. • Editor: A.H. Bullen
... with a grimace. "You are about to say I repent of folly—or the enticing of a virgin—or that I fell victim to the blandishments of some tricky dame—I know all that cant by rote!—a man always repents until his broken head is mended, but all that is apart from the real thing—which is this:—In what way does my moment with a lady in the dark affect the Viceroy of the Indies? Why should his Excellency ...
— The Flute of the Gods • Marah Ellis Ryan
... accomplishment that did not come to the court. In the great hall there was much merry-making, each one contributing what he could to the entertainment: one jumps, another tumbles, another does magic; there is story-telling, singing, whistling, playing from notes; they play on the harp, the rote, the fiddle, the violin, the flute, and pipe. The maidens sing and dance, and outdo each other in the merry-making. At the wedding that day everything was done which can give joy and incline man's heart to gladness. Drums are beaten, large and small, and there is ...
— Four Arthurian Romances - "Erec et Enide", "Cliges", "Yvain", and "Lancelot" • Chretien de Troyes
... me, friend, You've read my books from end to end. Perhaps not all my myriad rhymes, But all my rhythmics sixty times. Yes, friend, for I have heard you quote My old Proverbials by rote Page after page, and anywhere Have heard you spout them then and there, Though I myself had quite forgot What I had ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... of his herte, He may not wepe although him sore smerte. Therfore in stede of weping and praieres, Men mote[85] give silver to the poure freres. His tippet was ay farsed[86] ful of knives, And pinnes, for to given fayre wives. And certainly he hadde a mery note. Wel coude he singe and plaien on a rote.[87] Of yeddinges[88] he bar utterly the pris. His nekke was white as the flour de lis. Therto he strong was as a champioun, And knew wel the tavernes in every toun, And every hosteler and tappestere, Better than a lazar or a beggestere, For unto ...
— English Satires • Various
... what true culture really consists? As a whole, I think not. A smattering of sentimental literature, a superficial refinement of manners, a few borrowed phrases and appropriated customs of "society," the rendering of a few pieces by rote, and fashionable dress, constitute with, alas! too many the standard of culture. How unworthy of their race are those who entertain the thought! All this may be but the gilding of barbarism; beneath this external ...
— Autobiography of Frank G. Allen, Minister of the Gospel - and Selections from his Writings • Frank G. Allen
... actress; I cannot resign my real self for that vamped-up hypocrite before the lamps. Out on those stage-robes and painted cheeks! Out on that simulated utterance of sentiments learned by rote and practised before the looking-glass till ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... and then a mate comes looming up through the haze of pieces. So he goes away awestricken but unharmed, secretly believing that all chess-players are humbugs, and that intelligent chess, which is neither chancy nor rote-learned, is beyond the wit of man. But clearly this is an unreasonable method of instruction. Before the beginner can understand the beginning of the game he must surely understand the end; how can he commence playing until he knows ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... thy talk by rote; Thy farewells array the West; Fur that clasped thee round the throat Leaps—a squirrel—to its nest! Backward from a sparkling eye Half-forgotten jests return Where the rabbit lollops by Hurry-scurry ...
— Collected Poems - Volume One (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... me opinyon: I don't think Cap. Dhryfuss wr-rote th' borderoo. I think he was th' on'y man in Fr-rance that didn't. But I ain't got as high an opinyon iv th' Cap as I had. I ain't no purity brigade; but, th' older I get, th' more I think wan wife's enough f'r anny man, an' too manny f'r some. They was ...
— Mr. Dooley: In the Hearts of His Countrymen • Finley Peter Dunne
... "you have learned conceits from the catch-books. You quarrel by rote. Were I as eager to answer me, I might say: 'Ah, false flower, you grow out of the foulness underneath. You give your fragrance to all without discretion—a common lover, prodigal of favors, fit only to be ...
— Red Axe • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... abortive child; Born between whores and fops, by lewd compacts, Before the play, or else between the acts; Nor wonder, if from such polluted minds Should spring such short and transitory kinds, Or crazy rules to make us wits by rote, Last just as long as every cuckoo's note: What bungling, rusty tools are used by fate! 'Twas in an evil hour to urge my hate, My hate, whose lash just Heaven has long decreed Shall on a day make sin and folly bleed: When man's ill genius to my presence sent This ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift
... Take rote of parsel. pasternak of rasenns [2]. scrape hem waisthe hem clene. take rapes & caboches ypared and icorne [3]. take an erthen panne with clene water & set it on the fire. cast all ise erinne. whan ey buth boiled cast erto peeres & parboile hem wel. take ise thynges up & lat ...
— The Forme of Cury • Samuel Pegge
... my Wife Abigiel hes under Rote me by saying it is veri Disagria bell to Hur to Expose to the World the miseris & Calamatis of a Distractid famely, and I think as much for hur Father & mother to Witt Stephen deming & his wife acts very much ...
— Customs and Fashions in Old New England • Alice Morse Earle
... our occupations abroad, he sat with the family at home, and amused them by describing the town, with every part of which he was particularly acquainted. He could repeat all the observations that were retailed in the atmosphere of the play-houses, and had all the good things of the high wits by rote long before they made their way into the jest-books. The intervals between conversation were employed in teaching my daughters piquet, or sometimes in setting my two little ones to box to make them sharp, as he ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education
... rat rug reck rate reed rill rub rig rim rite ride rise red rag rick rote run reek rib rob rip ruse roar roam rack rid rip rouse Arch farm lark far snare for march harm bark bar spare war larch charm mark hair sure corn starch dark are stair lure born arm spark star ...
— McGuffey's Fourth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... be unable to read; yet the children of this large parish attend school regularly, and make use of books. They hold the catechism-book in their hands as if they were reading, while they only repeat its contents, which they know by rote." The only exception to this state of things made by Lord Durham was in favour of the Catholic clergy, who were represented by him as a respectable and well-conducted class of men, and well-disposed towards the government. The report ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... Scholar of Westminster School; and "Pyramus and Thisbe" has a special dedication to the Head Master, Lambert Osbalston. As schoolboy, Cowley tells us that he read the Latin authors, but could not be made to learn grammar rules by rote. He was a candidate at his school in 1636 for a scholarship at Cambridge, but was not elected. In that year, however, he went to Cambridge and obtained a scholarship ...
— Cowley's Essays • Abraham Cowley
... 'em before he died, "Wherever you are, whatever betide, Every year as the time draws near By lot or by rote choose you a goat, And let the high priest confess on the beast The sins of the people, the worst and the least. Lay your sins on the goat! Sure the plan ought to suit yer, Because all your sins are "his troubles" in future. ...
— Saltbush Bill, J.P., and Other Verses • A. B. Paterson
... currency to his little pittance of learning To go a mile out of their way to hook in a fine word To keep me from dying is not in your power To kill men, a clear and strong light is required To know by rote, is no knowledge To make little things appear great was his profession To make their private advantage at the public expense To smell, though well, is to stink To study philosophy is nothing but to prepare one's self to die To what friend dare you intrust your ...
— Quotes and Images From The Works of Michel De Montaigne • Michel De Montaigne
... In rote memory, that is, memory for lists of unrelated words, there is not much difference; but the girls are somewhat better. However, in the ability to remember the ideas of a story, girls excel boys at every age. This superiority of girls over boys is not merely a ...
— The Science of Human Nature - A Psychology for Beginners • William Henry Pyle
... knowledge of life based on the experience of mankind. Hence our study of history. But a study of history in the abstract is valueless. It must be concrete, real and living to have any significance for us. The schoolboy who learns by rote imagines the Greeks as outline figures of one dimension, clad in helmets and tunics, and brandishing little swords. That is like thinking of Jeanne d'Arc as a suit of armor or of Theodore Roosevelt as ...
— The "Goldfish" • Arthur Train
... noise in the town, every one slept,—every one, except they watched like me, on that terrible night. No noise in the town, did I say? Ah, but there was! It came creeping round the corners, it poured rushing up the street, it rose from everywhere,—a voice, a voice of woe, the heavy booming rote of the sea. I looked out, but it was pitch-dark, light had forsaken the world, we were beleaguered by blackness. It grew colder, as if one felt a fog fall, and the wind, mounting slowly, now blew a gale. It eddied in clouds of dead and whirling leaves, and sent big torn branches flying aloft; ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... his shoures sote "The droughte of March hath perced to the rote, "And bathed every veine in swiche licour, "Of whiche ...
— Cursory Observations on the Poems Attributed to Thomas Rowley (1782) • Edmond Malone
... the girl. "Don Fernando—Majesty?" Yet a third time she repeated it, as by rote; and, very slowly, understanding grew into the words, and with understanding, terror. The dark innocent eyes went appealingly from one to the other, and the lids began to flutter wildly in a kind of spasm. "Majesty? Majesty?" Then, suddenly, she flung both hands to her face, and a piteous shivering ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... made school-time very pleasant. He seldom had to punish a boy for bad conduct or neglect in getting his lessons. He always encouraged them to ask questions about their studies, and told them never to learn any thing by rote, like a parrot, but to come to him when they did not understand a lesson; and he always made it so clear that it was a pleasure to learn. Sometimes a boy would ask a foolish question, which would make the rest laugh; but then Mr. Harrison ...
— Aunt Fanny's Story-Book for Little Boys and Girls • Frances Elizabeth Barrow
... numbers, yet not forfeit sense; No actor ever greater heights could reach In all the labour'd artifice of speech. 950 Speech! is that all? And shall an actor found An universal fame on partial ground? Parrots themselves speak properly by rote, And, in six months, my dog shall howl by note. I laugh at those who, when the stage they tread, Neglect the heart, to compliment the head; With strict propriety their cares confined To weigh out words, while ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill
... sweet wine, and so keeping all the yeare long; any hearbes, fruit, or flowers in pickle; also pickle it selfe. Fr. compote, stewed fruit. The Recipe for Compost in the Forme of Cury, Recipe 100 (C), p.49-50, is "Take rote of p{er}sel. pasternak of rases. scrape hem and waische he{m} clene. take rap{is} & caboch{is} ypared and icorne. take an erthen pa{n}ne w{i}t{h} clene wat{er}, & set it on the fire. cast all ise {er}inne. whan ey buth boiled, cast {er}to peer{is}, ...
— Early English Meals and Manners • Various
... so ignorant, replied Campuzano, as not to know that brutes cannot talk unless by a miracle. I well know that if starlings, jays, and parrots talk, it is only such words as they have learned by rote, and because they have tongues adapted to pronounce them; but they cannot, for all that, speak and reply with deliberate discourse as those dogs did. Many times, indeed, since I heard them I have been disposed not to believe myself, but to regard ...
— The Exemplary Novels of Cervantes • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... fact that many of the earliest and best Arab poets were, as Mohammed boasted himself, unalphabetic[FN434] or rather could neither read nor write. They addressed the ear and the mind, not the eye. They "spoke verse," learning it by rote and dictating it to the Rawi, and this reciter again transmitted it to the musician whose pipe or zither accompanied the minstrel's song. In fact the general practice of writing began only at the end of the first ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... readily be seen that there was nothing to cause education to be concerned with any but one or two of the subjects which are included by Western peoples under that designation. It became at an early age, and remained for many centuries, a rote-learning of the elementary text-books, followed by a similar acquisition by heart of the texts of the works of Confucius and other classical writers. And so it remained until the abolition, in 1905, of ...
— Myths and Legends of China • E. T. C. Werner
... the Central Pacific atolls. Troops had to learn the hard way how to hit, and how to survive, in moving through jungle or across the mountains and desert. When that happened, the only disciplinary residue which mattered was obedience to orders. The movements they had learned by rote were of less value than the spiritual bond between one man and another. The most valuable lesson was that of mutual support. And unless this lesson was supported by confidence in the judgment of those in authority, ...
— The Armed Forces Officer - Department of the Army Pamphlet 600-2 • U. S. Department of Defense
... fifty years ago, was compelled to be familiar with the Genevan creed, as expressed in "The Shorter Catechism," but most little Presbyterians regarded that document as a necessary but unintelligible evil—the sorrow that haunted the Sabbath. I knew it by rote, Effectual Calling and all, but did not perceive that it possessed either meaning or actuality. Nobody was so unkind as to interpret the significance of the questions and answers; but somebody did interpret ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... interest was aroused, and then he absorbed the matter at hand in the way he breathed, without the least conscious effort; or his interest remained unstirred, in which case no amount of mechanical application would help. Learning by rote offered no escape in the latter case, for his memory operated in the same way as the rest of his mind, sucking up what fitted it as a blotter sucks the ink, and presenting a surface of polished marble to any matter not germane according to ...
— The Soul of a Child • Edwin Bjorkman
... forced to give way to it and sit down at the foot of a tree, where he seemed suffocating with the severity of it, being perfectly black in the face; not less moved than frightened with which, I flew on the instant to his relief, and using the rote of practice I had observed on the like occasion, I loosened his cravat and clapped him on the back; but whether to any purpose, or whether the cough had had its course, I know not, but the fit immediately went off; and now recovered to his ...
— Memoirs Of Fanny Hill - A New and Genuine Edition from the Original Text (London, 1749) • John Cleland
... with a note is not a fighting man at all! He has shaved his beard, and has cut his hair, but I spotted him at a look; He is Tom Devine, who has worked for years for Saltbush Bill as cook. Bill coached him up in the fighting yarn, and taught him the tale by rote, And they shammed to fight, and they got your grass and divided your five-pound note. 'Twas a clean take-in, and you'll find it wise — 'twill save you a lot of pelf — When next you're hiring a fighting man, just fight ...
— Rio Grande's Last Race and Other Verses • Andrew Barton 'Banjo' Paterson
... them, on your return, going through the same figures to new tunes. I wonder if there are any people anywhere in the world who stand on their own feet, and think and act for themselves; who don't set their watches by other people's; who don't live and marry and die by rote, expecting to go straight up to heaven by ...
— The Danvers Jewels, and Sir Charles Danvers • Mary Cholmondeley
... that they become her; and those affectations which in another woman would be odious, serve but to make her more agreeable. Ill tell thee, Fainall, she once used me with that insolence, that in revenge I took her to pieces, sifted her, and separated her failings; I studied em and got em by rote. The Catalogue was so large, that I was not without hopes one day or other to hate her heartily: to which end I so used myself to think of em, that at length, contrary to my design and expectation, they gave me every hour less and less disturbance; till ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... with the minstrel's demand. Tristrem, who had been away hunting, returned immediately after the adventurous earl had departed with his fair prize. He upbraided the King for his extravagant sense of honour, and, snatching up his rote, or harp, hastened to the seashore, where Ysonde had already embarked. There he sat down and played, and the sound so deeply affected Ysonde that she became seriously ill, so that the earl was induced to return with her to land. Ysonde pretended that Tristrem's music was necessary to her recovery, ...
— Legends & Romances of Brittany • Lewis Spence
... done, and in what sort to fashion his visage and frame his phrases to this or that woman. His oncoming was rapid. He could measure, cut, and wrap in a parcel twelve yards of brown or white calico quicker than any one in the shop, and he understood by rote the folds of linen tablecloths and bedsheets; and in the town this was said of him: "Shopmen quite ordinary can sell what a customer wants; Pugh Rees Jones ...
— My Neighbors - Stories of the Welsh People • Caradoc Evans
... heart—propounds them half in superstition and half in that species of despair which delights in self-torture—propounds them not altogether because he believes in the prophetic or demoniac character of the bird (which reason assures him is merely repeating a lesson learned by rote), but because he experiences a frenzied pleasure in so modelling his questions as to receive from the expected "Nevermore" the most delicious because the most intolerable of sorrow. Perceiving the opportunity thus afforded me, or, more strictly, thus forced upon me in ...
— Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Poetical Works • Edgar Allan Poe
... humanities were generally completed by the lesson in philosophy. In this course logic, morals and metaphysics were taught. Here the young persons handled, adjusted, and knocked about more or less adroitly the formula on God, nature, the soul and science they had learned by rote. Less scholastic, abridged, and made easy, this verbal exercise has been maintained in the lycees.[6219] Under the new regime, as well as under the old one, a string of abstract terms, which the professor thought he could explain and which the pupil ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 6 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 2 (of 2) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... glorious epic revealing as it unrolls the Meaning of Things, no revelation of that wondrous distillation of the Spirit of man, but an endless marching and counter-marching up and down the map, weary columns of figures to be learned by rote instantly to be forgotten again. "On June the 7th General So-and-so proceeded with his whole army—" where? What does it matter? One little chapter of Carlyle, illuminated by a teacher of understanding, were ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... knightes of priis, Bifore him kneland and leuedis, Now seth he no thing that him liketh, Bot wild wormes bi him striketh: He that had y-had plente Of mete and drinke, of ich deynte, Now may he al daye digge and wrote, Er he find his fille of rote. In sorner he liveth bi wild fruit, And verien hot gode lite. In winter may he no thing find, Bot ...
— Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, Vol. II (of 3) • Walter Scott
... must be sternly limited, his sight of nature gets limited accordingly. I observed that all our young figure-painters were rendered, to all intents and purposes, blind by their knowledge of anatomy. They saw only certain muscles and bones, of which they had learned the positions by rote, but could not, on account of the very prominence in their minds of these bits of fragmentary knowledge, see the real movement, color, rounding, or any other subtle quality of the human form. And I was quite sure that if I examined the mountain anatomy ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... host that barred his way, their leader raised his long sword until it was poised perpendicularly in the air above his head, and, with a loud voice, in measured tones, as one repeats a lesson he has learned by rote, he cried, "My Lord Archbishop of Treves, the Countess Laurette von Starkenburg invites you to sup ...
— The Strong Arm • Robert Barr
... equivalent of sanctity. Guiltlessness is a negative, sanctity is a positive state, and is acquired as the result of active correspondence with the will of God. In order that there may be this correspondence the will of God must be known, not merely as we know the things that we have learned by rote, but known in the sense of understood and appreciated. The will of God is knowable: that is, it has been revealed to man; but it needs to be effectively made known to the individual man. He must be convinced of the importance of divine ...
— Our Lady Saint Mary • J. G. H. Barry
... very fine speech, Andy," said Niederkircher, shaking hands with him, and gazing tenderly into his flushed face. "It was evident that your words were not learned by rote, but came from your heart, and hence they could not but make a profound impression. But now, commander-in-chief of the Tyrol, dinner is ready. The soup is already on the table, and I myself shall have the honor of ...
— Andreas Hofer • Lousia Muhlbach
... keep a faded ribbon string You used to wear about your throat; And of this pale, this perished thing, I think I know the threads by rote. God help such love! To touch your hand, To loiter where your feet might fall, You marvellous girl, my soul would stand The worst of ...
— The Poems of Henry Kendall • Henry Kendall
... for ever past. She remembered then, with a sort of remorse, laughing at Janey's notion of a "treat." Everything goes by comparison. At this time Bessie had no experience of what it is to live by inelastic rule and rote, to be ailing and unhappy, alone in a crowd and neglected. Janey believed in Mrs. Foster's sun-baked little garden as a veritable pattern of Eden, but Bessie knew the Forest, she knew Fairfield, ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr
... exquisitely all their shape, colour, bigness, and particular marks? or of a gorgeous palace, an architect, who, declaring the full beauties, might well make the hearer able to repeat, as it were, by rote, all he had heard, yet should never satisfy his inward conceit, with being witness to itself of a true living knowledge; but the same man, as soon as he might see those beasts well painted, or that house well in model, should straightway grow, ...
— A Defence of Poesie and Poems • Philip Sidney
... acquaintance that the human mind was not intended to remember with but to think with, and that one of the greatest benefits which had been conferred on mankind by the discovery of printing was that thousands of things could be recorded for reference which former generations had been compelled to learn by rote. ...
— An Adventure With A Genius • Alleyne Ireland
... feel at home. The children were put to school; at least it was what passed for a school in those days: a place where tender young humanity devoted itself for eight or ten hours a day to learning incomprehensible rubbish by heart out of books and reciting it by rote, like parrots; so that a finished education consisted simply of a permanent headache and the ability to read without stopping to spell the words or take breath. Hawkins bought out the village store for a song and proceeded to reap the profits, which amounted to but little ...
— The Gilded Age, Complete • Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner
... eloquence, for the workmen had chosen him for their orator, and he had a right to speak. As he spoke, it could be seen by his sparkling eyes, and by his fiery enthusiasm, that his words had not been learned by rote, but ...
— The Merchant of Berlin - An Historical Novel • L. Muhlbach
... the head of the way up which thou must go, and I wish thee all good speed. Also I advise that thou put this letter in thy bosom; that thou read therein to thyself, and to thy children, until you have got it by rote of heart,[22] for it is one of the songs that thou must sing while thou art in this house of thy pilgrimage (Psa. 119:54); also this thou must deliver in at the further gate.[23] Now I saw in my dream, that this old gentleman, as he told me this story, did himself seem to be ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... will take the upper hand in the confusion will arrange life wisely, after their own fashion. Then things won't go at random, but as if by rote. It's a pity that we shall not ...
— Foma Gordyeff - (The Man Who Was Afraid) • Maxim Gorky
... an infant to breathe are extremely like those attendant upon the repetition of some performance by one who has done it very often before, but who requires just a little prompting to set him off, on getting which, the whole familiar routine presents itself before him, and he repeats his task by rote. Surely then we are justified in suspecting that there must have been more bona fide personal recollection and experience, with more effort and failure on the part of the infant itself, than ...
— Selections from Previous Works - and Remarks on Romanes' Mental Evolution in Animals • Samuel Butler
... he goes with the crowd. In a word, they all think and talk alike—one may predicate their opinion upon any given subject. They follow custom and costume, they obey the Law of Averages. They are, intellectually, all peas in the same conventional pod, unenlightened, prosaic, living by rule and rote. They have their hair cut every month and their minds keep regular office hours. Their habits of thought are all ready-made, proper, sober, befitting the Average Man. They worship dogma. The Bromide conforms to everything sanctioned by the majority, and may be depended ...
— Are You A Bromide? • Gelett Burgess
... pilot-house, to holding the wheel when some straight stretch or clear, deep channel offered his master a chance to leave his post for a few minutes. For strain on the memory, his education is comparable only to the Chinese system of liberal culture, which comprehends learning by rote some tens of thousands of verses from the works of Confucius and other philosophers of the far East. Beginning at New Orleans, he had to commit to memory the name and appearance of every point of land, inlet, river or bayou mouth, "cut-off," ...
— American Merchant Ships and Sailors • Willis J. Abbot
... brilliant scholars in the form. From now on she gave this talent full play, memorising even pages of the history book in her zeal; and before many weeks had passed, in all lessons except those in arithmetic—you could not, alas! get sums by rote—she was separated from Inez and Bertha by ...
— The Getting of Wisdom • Henry Handel Richardson
... school he sate 65 His Primer conning with an earnest cheer, [E] The whilst the rest their anthem-book repeat The Alma Redemptoris did he hear; And as he durst he drew him near and near, And hearkened to the words and to the note, 70 Till the first verse he learned it all by rote. ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. II. • William Wordsworth
... he once clearly master the structure and relations of these five genera, he will have no difficulty in attaching to them, in a satellitic or subordinate manner, such inferior groups as that of the Silver-weed, or the Tormentilla; but all he will have to learn by heart and rote, will be these six names; the Greek Master-name, Charites, and the five generic names, in each case belonging to plants, as he will soon find, of extreme ...
— Proserpina, Volume 1 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin
... who use language correctly, who never saw the inside of a grammar book, and who never examined the principles on which it depends. But this, by no means, proves that it is better to sing by rote, than "with the understanding." These rudiments, however, should form the business of the nursery, rather than the grammar school. Every mother should labor to give distinct and forcible impressions of such things as she learns her children to name. She should carefully prevent them ...
— Lectures on Language - As Particularly Connected with English Grammar. • William S. Balch
... Schorne, that blessed man born, For the ague to him we apply, Which judgeth with a bote; I beshrew his heart's rote That will trust him, ...
— Devon, Its Moorlands, Streams and Coasts • Rosalind Northcote
... they do not practise beating and correcting their Children, as we do. A general Complaint is, that it seems impossible to convert these People to Christianity, as, at first sight, it does; and as for those in New Spain, they have the Prayer of that Church in Latin by Rote, and know the external Behaviour at Mass and Sermons; yet scarce any of them are steady and abide with constancy in good Works, and the Duties of the Christian Church. We find that the Fuentes and several other of the noted Indian Families about Mexico, and ...
— A New Voyage to Carolina • John Lawson
... secret meeting, pondered On all that I should say to her, how best I might enmesh Marina's haughty mind, Calling her queen of Moscow. But the hour Has come—and I remember naught, I cannot Recall the speeches I have learned by rote; Love puts imagination to confusion— But something there gleamed suddenly—a rustling; Hush—no, it was the moon's deceitful light, It was the rustling ...
— Boris Godunov - A Drama in Verse • Alexander Pushkin
... the romping plays must be alternated with quiet employments, of course, but still active. They will sing at their plays by rote; and also should be taught other songs by rote. But there can be introduced a regular drill on the scale, which should never last more than ten minutes at a time. This, if well managed, will cultivate ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 61, November, 1862 • Various
... vices are the recognised vices of our reign and set. Our religion hangs ready made beside our cradle to be buttoned upon us by loving hands. Our tastes we acquire, with difficulty; our sentiments we learn by rote. At cost of infinite suffering, we study to love whiskey and cigars, high art and classical music. In one age we admire Byron and drink sweet champagne: twenty years later it is more fashionable ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III, April 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... enough. Yet see what strong intellects dare not yet hear God himself, unless he speak the phraseology of I know not what David, or Jeremiah, or Paul. We shall not always set so great a price on a few texts, on a few lives.[214] We are like children who repeat by rote the sentences of grandames and tutors, and, as they grow older, of the men and talents and characters they chance to see,—painfully recollecting the exact words they spoke; afterwards, when they come into the point of view which those had who uttered those saying, they understand ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... the day of the ordered life And the law which all obey. We toil by rote and speak by note And never a soul dare stray. Ever among us a lean old man Keepeth his watch and ward, Crying, "The Lord hath set you free: Prepare ye the ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan
... Paynim country. They were, as I surmise, of the same breed as those of whom the excellent John Milton wrote: "The sons of Belial, flown with insolence and wine." Alas! my memory is not what it was, for at one time I could say by rote whole books of ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... with his shoures sote The droghte of Marche hath perced to the rote, And bathed every veyne in swich licour Of which vertu engendred is the flour; Whan Zephirus eek with his swete breeth 5 Inspired hath in every holt and heeth The tendre croppes, and the yong sonne ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... To know by rote is no knowledge; it is only a retention of what is intrusted to the memory. That which a man truly knows may be disposed of without regard to the author, or reference to the book from ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou
... great hall there was much merry-making, each one contributing what he could to the entertainment: one jumps, another tumbles, another does magic; there is story-telling, singing, whistling, playing from notes; they play on the harp, the rote, the fiddle, the violin, the flute, and pipe. The maidens sing and dance, and outdo each other in the merry-making. At the wedding that day everything was done which can give joy and incline man's heart to gladness. Drums are beaten, large and small, and there is playing of pipes, fifes, horns, trumpets, ...
— Four Arthurian Romances - "Erec et Enide", "Cliges", "Yvain", and "Lancelot" • Chretien de Troyes
... it dawned upon one of them that there was such an unheard-of accomplishment to be acquired. They were trying—if they were trying anything at all—to pick up modern science in the folk manner, by rote, as though it were a thing to be handed down by tradition. So at least I infer, not only from watching this particular class then and on other occasions, but ...
— Change in the Village • (AKA George Bourne) George Sturt
... through all these years. I had left the dame's school, where the rule of long division proved my pons asinorum, and went to a man's school, where I earned my schooling by making the fires and sweeping the schoolroom, and here I learned some Latin and the higher rules in arithmetic by rote, always with the reputation of a stupid boy, good in the snowball fights of the intermission, when we had two snow forts to capture and defend; in running foot-races, the speediest, and in backhand wrestling, the strongest, but mentally hopeless. All this period ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... murder. What is done is done. 'What I have written I have written!' Nothing will ever 'wash that little lily hand white again,' as the magnificent murderess in Shakespeare's great creation found out. You can forget your guilt; you can ignore it. You can adopt some of the easily-learned-by-rote and fashionable theories that will enable you to minimise it, and to laugh at us old-fashioned believers in guilt and punishment. You do not take away the rock because you blow out the lamps of the lighthouse, and you do not alter an ugly fact by ignoring it. I beseech you, as reasonable men and ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... yearning, With thoughts that rise and fall To the sound of the sea's hollow call, Breathed now from white-lit waves that reach Cold fingers o'er the damp, dark beach, To scatter a spray on my dreams; Till the slow and measured rote Brings a drowsy ease To my spirit, and seems To set it soothingly afloat On broad and buoyant seas Of endless rest, lulled by the dirge ...
— Dreams and Days: Poems • George Parsons Lathrop
... desperately in love with you. And by such a man, of course the very smallest marks of favor are construed as more significant than open encouragement would be by a less poetic temperament. I have no doubt the poor fellow wears over his heart every rose-bud you ever gave him, and knows by rote every word of sympathy you ever said to him. And then that portrait,—what volumes it tells of itself! Fancy that ardent soul toiling over the canvas to reproduce from memory your image (you tell me you did not sit to him), ...
— A Romantic Young Lady • Robert Grant
... and seek for aid in the kingdom of Loegria (England). With his consent he embarked, and after tossing for many days on the sea, was driven by the winds to the coast of Ireland. He landed, full of joy and gratitude that he had escaped the peril of the sea; took his rote,[Footnote: A musical instrument.] and began to play. It was a summer evening, and the king of Ireland and his daughter, the beautiful Isoude, were at a window which overlooked the sea. The strange harper was sent for, and conveyed to the palace, where, finding that he was in Ireland, whose champion ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... laws, the pronouncers of judgments, and the arbitrators of rewards or punishments. The immunity which they enjoyed from war, allured many young men to enrol themselves in this order. Their education was a poetical one, for it was necessary to learn by rote several thousand verses, in which all the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XX. No. 557., Saturday, July 14, 1832 • Various
... 'Hannah!' I gasped, 'what is it? what has happened? what brings you here in this condition and at this time of night?' 'Miss Leavenworth has sent me,' she replied, in the low, monotonous tone of one repeating a lesson by rote. 'She told me to come here; said you would keep me. I am not to go out of the house, and no one is to know I am here.' 'But why?' I asked, trembling with a thousand undefined fears; 'what has occurred?' 'I dare not say,' she whispered; 'I am forbid; ...
— The Leavenworth Case • Anna Katharine Green
... spite of all endeavor, Mar some nocturne by a single note; Is there immortality of discord In your failure to preserve the rote? ...
— Behind the Arras - A Book of the Unseen • Bliss Carman
... entire series or a large part of it many times, the series is slowly read over once or several times by pairs, only two words at a time, but the method of acquirement is precisely the same as in the former rote process. Let us look at this last proceeding in detail. (1) It is usually applied only where there is a natural suggestiveness between each pair of words. (2) But no previous study is prescribed in ...
— Assimilative Memory - or, How to Attend and Never Forget • Marcus Dwight Larrowe (AKA Prof. A. Loisette)
... section of the general body of mechanics and engineers. Every year, with the advance of invention, new branches of activity, that change in their nature and methods all too rapidly for the establishment of rote and routine workers of the old type, call together fresh levies of amateurish workers and learners who must surely presently develop into, or give place to, bodies of qualified and capable men. And the point I would particularly ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... class learn texts, and are questioned to see if they thoroughly understand the subject. On our asking whether the children answered the questions from what they had learnt by heart, she replied, "No; it would be of no use, you know, for the dear children to repeat merely by rote; we want the great truths of the gospel to sink ...
— Memoir and Diary of John Yeardley, Minister of the Gospel • John Yeardley
... some chance phrase. If my scholar rarely gives me cause for such prophecies, neither will he give me cause for such regrets, for he never says a useless word, and does not exhaust himself by chattering when he knows there is no one to listen to him. His ideas are few but precise, he knows nothing by rote but much by experience. If he reads our books worse than other children, he reads far better in the book of nature; his thoughts are not in his tongue but in his brain; he has less memory and more judgment; he can only speak one language, but he understands what he is saying, and if his speech ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... thus enrobed, is placed in a recumbent posture at the most conspicuous part of the lodge and viewed in rotation by the mourning relatives previously summoned by a courier, all preserving uniformity in the piercing screams which would seem to have been learned by rote. ...
— A Further Contribution to the Study of the Mortuary Customs of the North American Indians • H.C. Yarrow
... a blind, the one to beg, The other to make music; hither, too, From far, with basket, slung upon her arm, Of hawker's wares—books, pictures, combs, and pins— Some aged woman finds her way again, 30 Year after year, a punctual visitant! There also stands a speech-maker by rote, Pulling the strings of his boxed raree-show; And in the lapse of many years may come [7] Prouder itinerant, mountebank, or he 35 Whose wonders in a covered wain lie hid. But one there is, [8] the loveliest of them ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth
... more to keep me wond'ring and suspense, Replied: "I see that thou believ'st these things, Because I tell them, but discern'st not how; So that thy knowledge waits not on thy faith: As one who knows the name of thing by rote, But is a stranger to its properties, Till other's tongue reveal them. Fervent love And lively hope with violence assail The kingdom of the heavens, and overcome The will of the Most high; not in such sort As man prevails o'er man; but conquers it, Because 't is willing to be conquer'd, ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... holy "through the truth." As a child it needs first the "milk of the Word." It is not desirable, neither is it necessary, to try to teach the very young child doctrines and abstract truths. Neither ought the child to be required to learn by rote long passages from the Scriptures. In this way some well-meaning, but mistaken parents make the Word a burden to their children, and it becomes odious in their eyes. There are other and better ways. Begin by showing the child Bible pictures, even ...
— The Way of Salvation in the Lutheran Church • G. H. Gerberding
... King's Scholar of Westminster School; and "Pyramus and Thisbe" has a special dedication to the Head Master, Lambert Osbalston. As schoolboy, Cowley tells us that he read the Latin authors, but could not be made to learn grammar rules by rote. He was a candidate at his school in 1636 for a scholarship at Cambridge, but was not elected. In that year, however, he went to Cambridge and ...
— Cowley's Essays • Abraham Cowley
... French has one more word which seems to me quite as good a candidate as any of the others, viz. roteur, a player on the rote, i.e. the fiddle used by the medieval minstrels, Chaucer ...
— The Romance of Names • Ernest Weekley
... would be a book of artfully turned phrases; a book in which all the characters, especially women, would think and speak and act by rote and rule—as according to Mr. Peter Vibart; it would be a scholarly book, of elaborate finish and care of detail, with no irregularities of style or anything else to break the monotonous harmony of the whole—indeed, sir, it would ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol
... decreasing, but still considerable, class of private schools, which make no attempt to satisfy the conditions attached to these grants. The mullah in the mosque teaches children passages of the Kuran by rote, or the shopkeeper's son is taught in a Mahajani school native arithmetic and the curious script in which accounts are kept. A boys' school of a special kind is the Panjab Chiefs' College at Lahore, intended for the sons of princes and ...
— The Panjab, North-West Frontier Province, and Kashmir • Sir James McCrone Douie
... fine speech, Andy," said Niederkircher, shaking hands with him, and gazing tenderly into his flushed face. "It was evident that your words were not learned by rote, but came from your heart, and hence they could not but make a profound impression. But now, commander-in-chief of the Tyrol, dinner is ready. The soup is already on the table, and I myself shall have the honor ...
— Andreas Hofer • Lousia Muhlbach
... it by rote, and to wave his hand in the same unconscious manner; for he stood observing Bertha with an anxious wondering face, that ...
— The Cricket on the Hearth • Charles Dickens
... their hips, moved stiffly, without interest or spontaneous spirit, as though constrained and indifferent. Though the dances were licentious, they conveyed no meaning and expressed no emotion. The men gestured by rote, appealing mutely to the spectators, so that one might fancy them orators whose voices failed to reach one. There was no laughter, not ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... will wunder Why I ever rote you this; I am sorry I am leevin Daddie needs me in his biz. I don't reely like this quiet Kind of sober farmer life; I like something allus doin, But for this, I'd be your wife. I got two of old Jim's bullets, Didn't ...
— Nancy MacIntyre • Lester Shepard Parker
... making studies interesting to pupils; not the dull, old-fashioned method of learning by rote, whereby, when a hymn was taught, such as, "A Charge to keep I have," the children went home to repeat to their astonished mothers, "Eight yards to keep I have," having learned by ear, with no knowledge of the meaning ...
— Lives of Girls Who Became Famous • Sarah Knowles Bolton
... to depress it. For this reason Flyblow (who is received in all the families in town through the degeneracy and iniquity of their manners) is to be treated like a knave, though he is one of the weakest of fools: he has by rote, and at second-hand, all that can be said of any man of figure, wit, and virtue in town. Name a man of worth, and this creature tells you the worst passage of his life. Speak of a beautiful woman, and this puppy will whisper the next man to him, though he has nothing to say of ...
— The Tatler, Volume 1, 1899 • George A. Aitken
... constant presence of a kind attendant will so reassure the subject that it will become resigned to unnatural confinement, in a day or two. This precaution may, in itself, determine the outcome, and the wise veterinarian will not overlook this feature or fail to deviate from the usual rote in the handling of average cases. Recovery may be brought about in irritable subjects by this concession to the individual ...
— Lameness of the Horse - Veterinary Practitioners' Series, No. 1 • John Victor Lacroix
... is learned by rote, And beastly Skelton heads of houses quote: One likes no language but the 'Faery Queen'; A Scot will fight for 'Christ's Kirk o' ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... in the shade, engaged in disparting Poland? We have seen, say, a million of Frenchmen, and nearly the same of Italians, since then, with a dozen or so of kings and emperors,—but never the faintest likeness to those deluding pictures. We learned at the same time, by painful rote, the population of various capital cities; but we cannot find in any statistic-book gazetteer, neither in McCulloch nor in Worcester, any of the old, familiar numbers. Also in that same Wonder-Book of Malte-Brun, edited ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... the character of Richard II in speaking of Henry VI. There is only one passage more, the description of his entrance into London with Bolingbroke, which we should like to quote here, if it had not been so used and worn out, so thumbed and got by rote, so praised and painted; but its ...
— Characters of Shakespeare's Plays • William Hazlitt
... another, then, in case of any local disturbance, she will probably be capable of seeing how, if the general tone of the system is raised, the particular difficulty will disappear, and she will no longer follow blindly rules she has learned by rote. Yet people learn more by practice than by theory, and it is probable that the fascinating study of Physiology is of more use intellectually than physically to most school-girls. If they are allowed to dwell much on diseases of the body instead of on its normal action, ...
— Girls and Women • Harriet E. Paine (AKA E. Chester}
... Gipsy, even when most prosperous, will never so far forsake the traditions of his tribe as to stay long in any one place. His mind is not as ours. A little of our civilisation we can teach him, and he will learn it, as he may learn to repeat by rote the signs of the zodiac or the multiplication table, or to use a table napkin, or to decorously dispose of the stones in a cherry tart. But the lesson sits lightly on him, and he remains in heart as irreclaimable as ever. Already, indeed, our Gipsies ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... who will take the upper hand in the confusion will arrange life wisely, after their own fashion. Then things won't go at random, but as if by rote. It's a pity that we shall ...
— Foma Gordyeff - (The Man Who Was Afraid) • Maxim Gorky
... tunes. I wonder if there are any people anywhere in the world who stand on their own feet, and think and act for themselves; who don't set their watches by other people's; who don't live and marry and die by rote, expecting to go straight up to ...
— The Danvers Jewels, and Sir Charles Danvers • Mary Cholmondeley
... paroxysms of exhilaration, followed by a gnawing sense of failure and uselessness, were known to her mother only as "wildness" and "low spirits," to be combated by needlework as a sedative, or beef tea as a stimulant. Mrs. Wylie had learnt by rote that the whole duty of a lady is to be graceful, charitable, helpful, modest, and disinterested whilst awaiting passively whatever lot these virtues may induce. But she had learnt by experience that a lady's business in society is to get married, and that ...
— An Unsocial Socialist • George Bernard Shaw
... remember that though he cannot see through a milestone yet, he can see farther into one than his neighbours. Indeed his neighbours cannot see into a milestone at all, but only see the outside of it, and know things only by rote, like parrots, without understanding what they mean and how they ...
— Madam How and Lady Why - or, First Lessons in Earth Lore for Children • Charles Kingsley
... contrary, who is told that, "to do justice is to obey the law," has to inquire, not what is justice! but, what is the law? Now to know the law, (were it practicable!) would be not only to know the statutes at large by rote, but all the precedents, and all the legal discussions and litigations, to which the practitioners of law appeal! Innumerable volumes, filled with innumerable subtleties and incoherencies, and written in a ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... him sore smerte. Therfore in stede of weping and praieres, Men mote[85] give silver to the poure freres. His tippet was ay farsed[86] ful of knives, And pinnes, for to given fayre wives. And certainly he hadde a mery note. Wel coude he singe and plaien on a rote.[87] Of yeddinges[88] he bar utterly the pris. His nekke was white as the flour de lis. Therto he strong was as a champioun, And knew wel the tavernes in every toun, And every hosteler and tappestere, Better than a lazar or a ...
— English Satires • Various
... had brought me balm: 'Twas but the tempest's central calm. Vague sinkings of the heart aver That dreadful wrong is come to her, And o'er this dream I brood and dote, And learn its agonies by rote. As if I loved it, early and late I make familiar with my fate, And feed, with fascinated will, On very dregs of finish'd ill. I think, she's near him now, alone, With wardship and protection none; Alone, perhaps, in the hindering stress Of airs that clasp him with ...
— The Victories of Love - and Other Poems • Coventry Patmore
... slate or paper; and it is wonderful to observe the progress made by these interesting young persons, who have been so harshly treated by Nature. The definitions they give of substances and qualities are so just and happy; and in their situation, definition is everything, for they cannot learn by rote, as other boys often do, who, in the study of philology, acquire only words and not things or meanings. The deaf and dumb persons, on the contrary, acquire at once by this method of instruction the philosophy of grammar; and then it is far from being ...
— After Waterloo: Reminiscences of European Travel 1815-1819 • Major W. E Frye
... began the justiciary, turning to the third prisoner. "The charge against you is that, having come to the Hotel Mauritania with the key to Smelkoff's trunk, you stole therefrom money and a ring," he said, like one repeating a lesson learned by rote, and leaning his ear to the associate sitting on his left, who said that he noticed that the phial mentioned in the list of exhibits was missing. "Stole therefrom money and a ring," repeated the justiciary, "and after dividing the ...
— The Awakening - The Resurrection • Leo Nikoleyevich Tolstoy
... waiting. Well, I have now learn'd to repeat, I think, If only but by rote—This is my palace, And this my throne—which unadvised—And that Out of the window there my Capital; And all the people moving up and down My subjects and my vassals like yourselves, My chamberlain—and lords in ...
— Life Is A Dream • Pedro Calderon de la Barca
... steals and imitates, with wiry note The critics squeak, from Keats, and Tennyson, Shelly, and Hunt, and Wordsworth, every one, And many more whose works we know—by rote! But how, good sirs, if God created him Like unto these, though in their radiance dim? Nothing in Nature's round is infinite; The moulds of every kind are similar: A flower is like a flower; a star a star; And all the suns are lit with self-same light. How can he help, since ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... of each von of dese in the color dey are dere, ant also in black. I vill just gif you a leetle gomplimentary orter on account of Chack. There is no reeson anyvay vy I shouldn't do beesness mit you. You're de first man on de rote dot efer struck me and didn't ask me to buy goots. I don't like the fellow, anyvay, dot I'm buying ties from and his house is not'ing to me. I vill gif you a goot orter next season.' And, sure enough, Morris did give me a good ...
— Tales of the Road • Charles N. Crewdson
... and did not glance. Take no notice. She took no notice while he read by rote a solfa fable for ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... sense of self-importance at medical school, where they proudly endured the high pressure weeding out of any free spirit unwilling to grind away into the night for seven or more years. Anyone incapable of absorbing and regurgitating huge amounts of rote information; anyone with a disrespectful or irreverent attitude toward the senior doctor-gods who arrogantly serve as med school professors, anyone like this was eliminated with especial rapidity. When the thoroughly submissive, homogenized ...
— How and When to Be Your Own Doctor • Dr. Isabelle A. Moser with Steve Solomon
... sufficient defence of Protestantism. It was the cry of the soul to know God, and not merely to assent to what the Church taught concerning him; it was the longing to know Christ, and not to repeat by rote the creeds of the first centuries, and the definitions of mediaeval doctors in regard to him. In a subsequent chapter we shall consider the truth and error in the Protestant principle of justification by faith. Our purpose here is to show that the truth in Orthodoxy is identical ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... of the qualities which the trade of a false witness requires except wickedness. There was nothing plausible about him. His voice was harsh. Treachery was written in all the lines of his yellow face. He had no invention, no presence of mind, and could do little more than repeat by rote the ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... head, Wept with the passion of an angry grief: 150 Forgive me, if from present things I turn To speak what in my heart will beat and burn, And hang my wreath on his world-honored urn. Nature, they say, doth dote, And cannot make a man 155 Save on some worn-out plan, Repeating us by rote: For him her Old-World mould aside she threw, And, choosing sweet clay from the breast Of the unexhausted West, 160 With stuff untainted shaped a hero new, Wise, steadfast in the strength of God, and true. How beautiful to see Once more a shepherd of mankind indeed, Who loved his ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell
... she bade them not think that they had needed this desire, if she had seen a time so fit; and it so ripe to be denounced. That the greatness of the cause, and the need of their return, made her say that a short time for so long a continuance ought not to pass by rote. That as cause by conference with the learned should show her matter worth utterance for their behoof, so she would more gladly pursue their good after her days, than with all her prayers while she lived be a means to linger out her living thread. That for ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... all round you and he sez, I received the kit you sent me and It is a great comfort (the kit is not a cat but a assortment of handkerchiefs and tooth brushes and everything a soldier gets and Mother sent him his and so he rote to thank her) an he sez if I go over the top with the best of luck and get enuf leave to come home I will give Myself the pleasure of calling on you, and showin you what a Greenville soldier looks like. ...
— Deer Godchild • Marguerite Bernard and Edith Serrell
... age of four I learned to read by a simple process. I had heard the elegy of Cock Robin till I knew it by rote, and I picked out the letters and words which compose that classic till I could read it for myself. Earlier than that, "Robinson Crusoe" had been read aloud to me, in an abbreviated form, no doubt. I remember the pictures of ...
— Adventures among Books • Andrew Lang
... I indulged myself, without reluctance, in these gloomy thoughts; but at length, the dejection which they produced became insupportably painful. I endeavoured to dissipate it with music. I had all my grand-father's melody as well as poetry by rote. I now lighted by chance on a ballad, which commemorated the fate of a German Cavalier, who fell at the siege of Nice under Godfrey of Bouillon. My choice was unfortunate, for the scenes of violence and carnage which were here wildly but forcibly pourtrayed, only ...
— Wieland; or The Transformation - An American Tale • Charles Brockden Brown
... Elfride played by rote; Stephen by thought. It was the cruellest thing to checkmate him after so much labour, she considered. What was she dishonest enough to do in her compassion? To let him checkmate her. A second game followed; and being herself absolutely indifferent as to the result (her playing was above ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... of us but what liked him vary mutch and feel vary bad. fift Wee dont none of us ixpect to have no moar sutch good Times at the braker as wee did Befoar. sixt Wee aint scollers enougth to rite it down just what wee feel, but wee feel a hunderd times more an what weave got rote down. ...
— Burnham Breaker • Homer Greene
... and were beginning to feel at home. The children were put to school; at least it was what passed for a school in those days: a place where tender young humanity devoted itself for eight or ten hours a day to learning incomprehensible rubbish by heart out of books and reciting it by rote, like parrots; so that a finished education consisted simply of a permanent headache and the ability to read without stopping to spell the words or take breath. Hawkins bought out the village store for a song and proceeded to reap the profits, which amounted to ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 1. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... rode. Raep, a rope. Ragweed, ragwort. Raibles, recites by rote. Rair, to roar. Rairin, roaring. Rair't, roared. Raise, rase, rose. Raize, to excite, anger. Ramfeezl'd, exhausted. Ramgunshoch, surly. Ram-stam, headlong. Randie, lawless, obstreperous. Randie, randy, a scoundrel, a rascal. Rant, to rollick, to roister. ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... inquiry to be unable to read; yet the children of this large parish attend school regularly, and make use of books. They hold the catechism-book in their hands as if they were reading, while they only repeat its contents, which they know by rote." The only exception to this state of things made by Lord Durham was in favour of the Catholic clergy, who were represented by him as a respectable and well-conducted class of men, and well-disposed towards the government. ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... advise a diet sutable to diseases; a thing most necessary, as well in curing diseases as in preserving of health, and which requires a great insight into the nature of things; nor the true grounds and reasons of compounding, practising their way rather by rote then by rule; with better reason may a Brick-layer or Carpenter pretend to be a Mathematical, or a Common Fidler to be a Musick Reader in the Universities, or Gresham-College, since both these have the practical part of those ...
— A Short View of the Frauds and Abuses Committed by Apothecaries • Christopher Merrett
... Faustus who calls there. No one else has the power; and no one else, if he had such power, would dare to knock so loudly against the iron portals. Up! up! a man like him is worth a thousand of the scoundrels who come down hither every day by rote." Then, turning to the devil Leviathan, his favourite, he added, "I choose thee, the subtlest seducer, the deadliest hater of the human race, to ascend and purchase for me, by thy dangerous services, the soul of this desperado. ...
— Faustus - his Life, Death, and Doom • Friedrich Maximilian von Klinger
... mind and sperit loved to grope around more and find out things to praise and blame by rote and not by note, and Dorothy and Robert Strong ...
— Around the World with Josiah Allen's Wife • Marietta Holley
... bullies to defend him. At once the ravens were discarded, And magpies with their posts rewarded. Those fowls of omen I detest, That pry into another's nest. State lies must lose all good intent, For they foresee and croak th' event. My friends ne'er think, but talk by rote, Speak when they're taught, and so to vote. When rogues like these (a Sparrow cries) To honour and employment rise I court no favour, ask no place, From such, preferment is disgrace: Within my thatch'd ...
— Life And Letters Of John Gay (1685-1732) • Lewis Melville
... that I had more learning for your sake, and I shall be jealous of them, that I shall, when I find that you can read off out of any book you have got as smoothly as you do the verses you have learned by rote. Oh, you will be laughing at ...
— Won from the Waves • W.H.G. Kingston
... occupations abroad, he sat with the family at home, and amused them by describing the town, with every part of which he was particularly acquainted. He could repeat all the observations that were retailed in the atmosphere of the playhouses, and had all the good things of the high wits by rote long before they made way into the jest-books. The intervals between conversation were employed in teaching my daughters piquet, or sometimes in setting my two little ones to box to make them sharp, as he called it: but the hopes of having ...
— The Vicar of Wakefield • Oliver Goldsmith
... often sliding from one tune to another in the same line or improvising as he went on. Finally, in 1721, the Rev. Thomas Walter of Roxbury, Mass., published a treatise, upon the grounds or rules of music or an introduction to the art of singing by rote, containing twenty-four tunes harmonized into three parts. The attempt to supersede the old Puritan tunes and restrict the liberty of the individual singers met with the greatest opposition and was long successfully resisted in all the churches in New England, ...
— The Two Hundredth Anniversary of the Settlement of the Town of New Milford, Conn. June 17th, 1907 • Daniel Davenport
... are strictly so. It is said, to be sure, that the Greeks borrowed the names of their gods from Egypt, but the gods themselves were entirely different ones. It is also true that some of the gods of the Romans were borrowed from the Greeks, but their life was left behind. They merely repeated by rote the Greek mythology, having no power to invent one for themselves. But the Greek religion they never received. For instead of its fair humanities, the Roman gods were only servants of the state,—a higher kind of consuls, tribunes, and lictors. The real Olympus of Rome was the Senate ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... and village potentate or Brummagem magnate. The word occurs in S. Foote's farrago of nonsense, which he wrote to test the memory of old Macklin, who said in a lecture "he had brought his own memory to such perfection that he could learn anything by rote on once hearing it." ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... learn from him what he saith." Said he, "Let not thy heart be troubled," and added, "I will go every day to the session of the leach." So he began resorting daily to the physician and committing to memory his answers and that which he spoke of jargon,[FN435] till he had gotten a great matter by rote, and all this he learned and thoroughly digested it. Then he returned to his wife and said to her, "I have stored up the physician's sayings in memory and have mastered his manner of muttering and diagnoses and prescribing remedies ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... we ever learned as grammar was the Latin, and that not until composition had made us familiar with the use of the rules therein given. Auntie had a great horror of children learning by rote things they did not understand, and then fancying they knew them. "What do you mean by that expression, Annie?" she would ask me. After feeble attempts to explain, I would answer: "Indeed, Auntie, I know in my own head, but I can't explain." "Then, indeed, Annie, you do not know in your own head, ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant
... such bitterness!" Of course he spoke with a conventional sense of duty only, for that sort of wondering had not been unknown to himself in bygone days. And as he looked at the unpracticed mouth and lips, he thought that such a daughter of the soil could only have caught up the sentiment by rote. She went on peeling the lords and ladies till Clare, regarding for a moment the wave-like curl of her lashes as they dropped with her bent gaze on her soft cheek, lingeringly went away. When he was gone she stood awhile, thoughtfully peeling ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... very learned tutor, who taught them Latin, Greek and Hebrew, alternately with an equally precise, stiff old esquire, who trained them in martial exercises, which seemed to be as much matters of rote with them as their tasks, and to be quite as uninteresting. It did not seem as if they ever played, or thought of playing; and if they were ever to be gay, witty Frenchmen, a wonderful change ...
— The Chaplet of Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the Guard relieves, [next] An' Orthodoxy raibles, [rattles by rote] Tho' in his heart he weel believes An' thinks it auld wives' fables: But, faith! the birkie wants a Manse, [fellow] So cannilie he hums them; [prudently, humbugs] Altho' his carnal wit an' sense Like hafflins-wise o'ercomes him [nearly half] At ...
— Robert Burns - How To Know Him • William Allan Neilson
... bless the flame that is my bane!" With which to clasp her closer was he fain, To touch in love, and feast his eyes to see Her quiver at his touch, and laugh to be The plucker of such chords of such a rote; And laughing stoop and kiss her milky throat, Then see her shut eyes hide what he had done. "Nay, shut them not upon me, nay, nor shun My worship!" So he said; but she, "They fade, But are not yet so old as thou hast made The soul thou pinnest here beneath my breasts Which you have ...
— Helen Redeemed and Other Poems • Maurice Hewlett
... Who said she had? It's only one card for me," and with a most satisfied expression 'Lina presented the rote to her mother, whose pale face flushed at the insult thus offered her son—an insult which even 'Lina felt, but would not acknowledge, lest it ...
— Bad Hugh • Mary Jane Holmes
... attitude for the time being, and then, by way of getting square with the soldier for the sharply military way in which his duty as sentry had been performed, the captain proceeded to catechise him as to his orders. The soldier had been well taught, and knew all his "responses" by rote,—far better than Buxton, for that matter, as the latter was anything but an exemplar of perfection in tactics or sentry duty; but this did not prevent Buxton's snappishly telling him he was wrong in several points and contemptuously inquiring where ...
— The Deserter • Charles King
... have said, I did not learn much at the High School. My mind was never opened up by what was taught me there. It was a mere matter of rote and cram. I learnt by heart a number of Latin rules and phrases, but what I learnt soon slipped from my memory. My young mind was tormented by the tasks set before me. At the same time my hungry mind thirsted for ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... a member of any church, although her nature was deeply religious. Hers was the religion the soul inculcates, not that which is learned by rote in the temple. She was a Christian because she thought Christ the greatest figure in world history, and also because her own conduct of life was modelled upon Christian principles and virtues. She was religious for religion's ...
— The Lion and The Mouse - A Story Of American Life • Charles Klein
... th time, naimd Max Beerbohm, hoo woz stil alive in th twentieth senchri, rote a stauri in wich e pautraid an immajnari karrakter kauld "Enoch Soames"—a thurd-rait poit hoo beleevz imself a grate jeneus an maix a bargin with th Devvl in auder ter no wot posterriti thinx ov im! It iz a sumwot labud sattire but not without vallu az showing hou seriusli the yung men ...
— Seven Men • Max Beerbohm
... iS Several agent round her and tha ar interfer With mee eSpeSly William a StavSon he liveS her at enfield he Wanted mee to giv him one of you Sur klerS So he Wod be agent but i Wodent let hi m hav hit an he rote to you i SupoSe an haS got a Suplye of pillS an ar aruning a gant mee he iS Sell ing them at 20 centS a box i Want you to St op ...
— History of the Comstock Patent Medicine Business and Dr. Morse's Indian Root Pills • Robert B. Shaw
... it stood a modest, blooming Peer, Who bow'd with easy grace, and offer'd there Some fine-spun Verses which he never wrote, Some worthy Speeches which he spoke by rote: For thus I heard surrounding tongues rehearse, "H—— wrote the Speeches, H—— composed the Verse." And soon amid the mingled heap there lay The blasted wishes for Hibernian sway. And here he sigh'd, and, as I thought, a tear Rose in his sullen ...
— The First of April - Or, The Triumphs of Folly: A Poem Dedicated to a Celebrated - Duchess. By the author of The Diaboliad. • William Combe
... my pen; I hate my stool; What am I but a nerveless tool? But we did not work by rote or rule When ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. CLVIII, January 7, 1920 • Various
... fabulous ancient kings running up to Adam, or found but mythology in some old tale, was as hated as if he had doubted the authority of Scripture. Above all no man was so ignorant, that he had not by rote familiar arguments and statistics to drive away amid familiar applause, all those had they but found strange truth in the world or in their mind, whose knowledge has passed out of memory and become an instinct of hand or eye. There was no literature, for literature is a child ...
— Synge And The Ireland Of His Time • William Butler Yeats
... a bunch as a memento. Unthinkingly the girl consented. He ran down the cliff to his boat, pushed out, and headed toward the rock, but a fisherman shouted that a gale was rising and the tide was coming in; indeed, the horizon was whitening and the rote was ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... diurnal course. Luncheon was served at two by a trembling parlour-maid; the coffee was set in the hall, the cigar-box, the spirit-flame. Frodsham came for orders, Mr. Menzies reported Glyde absent without leave. These things were done by rote: yet the whole house knew the facts. Sanchia, dining in the middle of the day, plied her knife and fork with composure. It was her way to face facts once for all, tussle with them, gain or lose, and be done with them. She had been ...
— Rest Harrow - A Comedy of Resolution • Maurice Hewlett
... I might be good once. I used to say my own prayers then. Now I speak them but by rote, and feel ashamed—yes, ashamed to speak them. Is it not horrid to say them, and next morning to be no better than you were last night? Often I revolt at these as at other things, and am dumb. The Vicar comes to see us at Newcome, ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Roi's: What with fillets of roses, and fillets of veal, Things garni with lace, and things garni with eel, One's hair, and one's cutlets both en papillote, And a thousand more things I shall ne'er have by rote, I can scarce tell the difference, at least as to phrase, Between beef a la Psyche and curls a la braise.— But, in short, dear, I'm trick'd out quite a la Francaise, With my bonnet—so beautiful!—high up and poking, Like things that are put to ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... girl. "Don Fernando—Majesty?" Yet a third time she repeated it, as by rote; and, very slowly, understanding grew into the words, and with understanding, terror. The dark innocent eyes went appealingly from one to the other, and the lids began to flutter wildly in a kind of spasm. "Majesty? Majesty?" Then, suddenly, she flung both hands to her face, and a piteous ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... from each remote, The world that works, the heaven that waits, Con our brief pleasures o'er by rote, The favourite pastime ...
— Silhouettes • Arthur Symons
... which delighteth not in the death of a sinner, but would rather that he should be converted and live. The beautiful prayers in the Liturgy, were explained to them in a manner suitable to their different capacities; consequently, they were not repeated by rote, as is too frequently the case, where the same attention is not paid. Mr. and Mrs. Bernard took unremitted pains with their children, and felt themselves amply rewarded by their conduct; for though, like other human beings, they were fallible, and, consequently, often did wrong, ...
— Domestic pleasures - or, the happy fire-side • F. B. Vaux
... succeeded to his mayoralty, and the so-called "king's party" was again in the ascendant, Philipot again appears as alderman of his old ward, continuing in office until his death (12 Sept., 1384), when he was succeeded by John Rote.—Letter ...
— London and the Kingdom - Volume I • Reginald R. Sharpe
... that were done, and in what sort to fashion his visage and frame his phrases to this or that woman. His oncoming was rapid. He could measure, cut, and wrap in a parcel twelve yards of brown or white calico quicker than any one in the shop, and he understood by rote the folds of linen tablecloths and bedsheets; and in the town this was said of him: "Shopmen quite ordinary can sell what a customer wants; Pugh Rees Jones can sell ...
— My Neighbors - Stories of the Welsh People • Caradoc Evans
... he was past all reason. Luckily, having written it, I had his part by rote; and so, snatching his Menelaus' wig and beard, I ...
— Sir John Constantine • Prosper Paleologus Constantine
... noon I went to meting & heard Mr. Eals his text was in the 5th Chapter of James 16th verse a good sermon I rote a letter & sent home & in the ...
— The Military Journals of Two Private Soldiers, 1758-1775 - With Numerous Illustrative Notes • Abraham Tomlinson
... it. i asked her where leeclare was and she sed it was a mans name. Cele can hear a band peace once and play it on the piano jest as good as they can. i can whistle it all rite but she can put in the alto and the treble and the base jest like it is rote. ...
— Brite and Fair • Henry A. Shute
... we would be told all about human bones by a pupil of the Campbell Medical School, for which purpose a skeleton, with the bones fastened together by wires was hung up in our schoolroom. And finally, time was also found for Pandit Heramba Tatwaratna to come and get us to learn by rote rules of Sanscrit grammar. I am not sure which of them, the names of the bones or the sutras of the grammarian, were the more jaw-breaking. I think ...
— My Reminiscences • Rabindranath Tagore
... sent for out of the school, and the Seven against Thebes was commenced with great energy. Often during the next hour and a half Mrs Crawley from the kitchen would hear him reading out, or rather saying by rote, with sonorous, rolling voice, great passages from some chorus, and she was very thankful to the bishop who had sent over to them a message and a messenger which had been so salutary in their effect upon her husband. "In truth an angel of the church," ...
— The Last Chronicle of Barset • Anthony Trollope
... Shakspeer rote good plase, but he wouldn't hav succeeded as a Washington correspondent of a New York daily paper. He lackt ...
— Masterpieces Of American Wit And Humor • Thomas L. Masson (Editor)
... Villon 'Tout aux tavernes et aux filles' which was that of my life for so many years is so no longer, I wonder what the devil the refrain is now? Ha!" he exclaimed clapping his hand on my shoulder in his old violent way, "I have it! also Villon. Guess. Didn't I teach you all the ballades by rote as we wandered ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... prophet (Mic. vi. 9), 'The Lord's voice crieth to the city,' and to the country also, with an unusual and amazing loudness. Surely, it warns us to awaken out of all sleep, of security or stupidity, to arise, and take our Bibles, turn to, and learn that lesson, not by rote only, but by heart. 1 Pet. v. 8: 'Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the Devil goes about as a roaring lion, seeking whom amongst you he may distress, delude, and devour.'... Awake, awake ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... go to England." Lucia repeated the words slowly like a lesson learned by rote; and as she did so, an old question rose again ...
— A Canadian Heroine, Volume 1 - A Novel • Mrs. Harry Coghill
... the Captain, quite displeased, said, "What signifies asking them girls? Do you think they know their own minds yet? Ask 'em after any thing that's called diversion, and you're sure they'll say it's vastly fine-they are a set of parrots, and speak by rote, for they all say the same thing: but ask 'em how they like making puddings and pies, and I'll warrant you'll pose 'em. As to them operas, I desire I may hear no more of their liking such nonsense; and for you, Moll" (to his daughter,) "I ...
— Evelina • Fanny Burney
... my brothers, Jacob and Ezra, four hundred dollars each," continued Hiram, in his same voice of repeating by rote, "and to my sister Prudence, five thousand dollars—so fixed that ...
— The Second Generation • David Graham Phillips
... Law,' but thinks State Rights the Catechism; Which having learned by rote, he links ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2 No 4, October, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... noos ov that godfussakn sun ov mine hopn they ma find you as they leave me at present wich i av the lumbeigo vere Bad and no Go the doctor ses bob wot you no was in the ninth lansers he dide comen home so ive only fred left out of the ate. I rote to im fore munths agorne, but no anser, no doubt becos i cum to london soon arter, so no ...
— The Lord of the Sea • M. P. Shiel
... estate. The king opened the assembly on the 4th of November, 1596, with these words, full of dignity, and powerful in their vivid simplicity: "If I desired to win the title of orator, I would have learned by rote some fine, long speech, and would deliver it to you with proper gravity. But, gentlemen, my desire prompts me towards two more glorious titles, the names of deliverer and restorer of this kingdom. In order ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume V. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... and true, and affecting. All their friends did wish it. There were many reasons why it should be done. If talking could have done it, his talking was good enough. Though his words were in truth cold, and affected, and learned by rote, they did not offend her; but his face offended her; and the feeling was strong within her that if she yielded, it would soon be close to her own. She couldn't do it. She didn't love him, and she wouldn't do it. Priscilla would not grudge her her share ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope
... was the first class. I was particularly struck with the very clear manner in which the lad under examination replied to the questions put to him, and I began to suspect it was merely something he had learnt by rote; but the professor dodged him about in such a heartless manner with his "whys" and his "wherefores," his "how do you knows" and "how do you proves," that I quite trembled for the victim. Vain fears on my part; nothing could put him out; he seemed as much at home as the professor, and ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... like a lesson learned by rote, and as though she hoped, thereby, to be rid of him: "I have never done anything of that ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... champion of the Church, Vain as a parrot screaming on her perch; And like that parrot screaming out by rote, The same stale, flat, unprofitable note; Still interrupting all debate With one eternal cry of "Church and State!" With all the High Tory's ignorance increased, By all the arrogance that makes the priest; One who declares upon his solemn word The Voluntary ...
— East Anglia - Personal Recollections and Historical Associations • J. Ewing Ritchie
... sins they learn by rote, And never miss one; no, no miser of them, * * * * * Avid of foulness, so they hound me out Away from blessing that they prate about, But never saw, and never dreamed upon, And know not how to long for ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... which usually served instead of reasons on the like occasions. Not but that these words, and the like, have very proper significations in which they may be used; but there being no natural connexion between any words and any ideas, these, and any other, may be learned by rote, and pronounced or writ by men who have no ideas in their minds to which they have annexed them, and for which they make them stand; which is necessary they should, if men would speak ...
— An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume II. - MDCXC, Based on the 2nd Edition, Books III. and IV. (of 4) • John Locke
... many such verses, were repeated, but by rote, and unconnectedly. There were also, occasionally, I believe, a Saint George. In all, there was a confused resemblance of the ancient mysteries, in which the characters of Scripture, the Nine Worthies, and ...
— Marmion • Sir Walter Scott
... dust, on the floor. By the ade of a broom, wot was so old, it was most bald-hedded, I suckceeded in completely ridden the floor of its surplus stock of litterature, and terbackhey balls, wot them printers spit out, wen they warnted to use there mouths, to consine sum feller, wot rote orful to Hallyfax, ...
— The Bad Boy At Home - And His Experiences In Trying To Become An Editor - 1885 • Walter T. Gray
... "Hear hims!" proud, too, of his vote, And lost virginity of oratory, Proud of his learning (just enough to quote), He revelled in his Ciceronian glory: With memory excellent to get by rote, With wit to hatch a pun or tell a story, Graced with some merit, and with more effrontery,[mq] "His country's pride," he came down to ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... smallest marks of favor are construed as more significant than open encouragement would be by a less poetic temperament. I have no doubt the poor fellow wears over his heart every rose-bud you ever gave him, and knows by rote every word of sympathy you ever said to him. And then that portrait,—what volumes it tells of itself! Fancy that ardent soul toiling over the canvas to reproduce from memory your image (you tell me you did not sit to him), and when the masterpiece ...
— A Romantic Young Lady • Robert Grant
... be an actress; I cannot resign my real self for that vamped-up hypocrite before the lamps. Out on those stage-robes and painted cheeks! Out on that simulated utterance of sentiments learned by rote and practised before the looking-glass till every ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... not always by their friends. But a mob is a mob, and a drunken mob is a drunken mob, and a drunken mob with weapons in its hands is a drunken mob with weapons in its hands, all the world over: elementary propositions, which some of us upon these islands might do worse than get by rote, but which must have been evident enough to Becker. And I am amazed by the man's constancy, that, even while blows were going at the door of that German firm which he was in Samoa to protect, he should have stuck to his demands. Ten days before, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 17 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... she said, laughing. "They were written by Carlyle; you will know something of his works some day, I hope. This is what he says: 'Not one in a thousand has the smallest turn for thinking; only for passive dreaming, and hearsaying, and active babbling by rote. Of the eyes that men do glare withal, so few can see.' It sounds rather like a scolding, doesn't it? Well, I don't want you to be like that; I want you both to think and to see, and you will find much happiness to think about and many beauties ...
— Hunter's Marjory - A Story for Girls • Margaret Bruce Clarke
... to hit, and how to survive, in moving through jungle or across the mountains and desert. When that happened, the only disciplinary residue which mattered was obedience to orders. The movements they had learned by rote were of less value than the spiritual bond between one man and another. The most valuable lesson was that of mutual support. And unless this lesson was supported by confidence in the judgment of those in authority, it is to be doubted that ...
— The Armed Forces Officer - Department of the Army Pamphlet 600-2 • U. S. Department of Defense
... his herte, He may not wepe although him sore smerte. Therfore in stede of weping and praieres, Men mote[85] give silver to the poure freres. His tippet was ay farsed[86] ful of knives, And pinnes, for to given fayre wives. And certainly he hadde a mery note. Wel coude he singe and plaien on a rote.[87] Of yeddinges[88] he bar utterly the pris. His nekke was white as the flour de lis. Therto he strong was as a champioun, And knew wel the tavernes in every toun, And every hosteler and tappestere, Better than a lazar or a beggestere, For unto swiche a worthy ...
— English Satires • Various
... within their mission seemed almost to override that of the Governor himself, yielded so far as to allow the father to see his daughter, on condition that he spoke to no other English prisoner. He spoke to her for an hour, exhorting her never to forget her catechism, which she had learned by rote. The Governor and his wife afterwards did all in their power to procure her ransom, but ...
— Skookum Chuck Fables - Bits of History, Through the Microscope • Skookum Chuck (pseud for R.D. Cumming)
... disgrace a Berkeley. A dextrous plagiarist might get himself an immense reputation by putting them in a popular dress. Oh! how little do they know, who have never done anything but repeat after others by rote, the pangs, the labour, the yearnings and misgivings of mind it costs to get at the germ of an original idea—to dig it out of the hidden recesses of thought and nature, and bring it half-ashamed, struggling, ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... older, this wonderful power became impaired so far that getting by rote the compositions of others was no longer an involuntary process. He has noted in his Lucan the several occasions on which he committed to memory his favourite passages of an author whom he regarded as unrivalled among rhetoricians; and the dates refer to 1836, when he had just turned the middle ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... yesterday before the court,' no doubt," he interrupted, "and I remember perfectly that you were 'awakened only.' I could repeat the most of it by rote, indeed. But do you suppose that I believed you ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... we become tired of the task before we can comprehend the beauty; that we learn by rote before we can get by heart; that the freshness is worn away, and the future pleasure and advantage deadened and destroyed by the didactic anticipation, at an age when we can neither feel nor understand ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... ward (Cornhill); but in the following year, when Brembre succeeded to his mayoralty, and the so-called "king's party" was again in the ascendant, Philipot again appears as alderman of his old ward, continuing in office until his death (12 Sept., 1384), when he was succeeded by John Rote.—Letter Book H, ...
— London and the Kingdom - Volume I • Reginald R. Sharpe
... that note To which fond love hath charm'd me, Long long to sing by rote, Fancying that that harm'd me: Yet when this thought doth come, 'Love is the perfect sum Of all delight,' I have no other choice Either for pen or ...
— Lyrics from the Song-Books of the Elizabethan Age • Various
... eyes of Count de Vergennes. The former is the most important character, because possessing the most of the confidence of the Count. He is rather cunning than wise, his views of things being neither great nor liberal. He governs himself by principles which he has learned by rote, and is fit only for the details of execution. His heart is susceptible of little passions, but not of good ones. He is brother-in-law to M. Gerard, from whom he received disadvantageous impressions of us, which cannot be effaced. He has much duplicity. Hennin is a philosopher, sincere, friendly, ...
— The Writings of Thomas Jefferson - Library Edition - Vol. 6 (of 20) • Thomas Jefferson
... middle of the fifth proposition, when Miss Rowe had changed the letters on the blackboard, and was endeavouring to make Vera Clifford grasp the principle of the reasoning, instead of merely repeating the problem by rote, Enid's head was bent low over her desk, and her fingers appeared to be ...
— The Nicest Girl in the School - A Story of School Life • Angela Brazil
... (BOB'S) cookery language, and Madame LE ROI'S: What with fillets of roses, and fillets of veal, Things garni with lace, and things garni with eel, One's hair and one's cutlets both en papillote, And a thousand more things I shall ne'er have by rote, I can scarce tell the difference, at least as to phrase, Between beef a la Psyche and curls a la braise.— But in short, dear, I'm trickt out quite a la Francaise, With my bonnet—so beautiful!—high up and poking, Like things that are put to ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... never so far forsake the traditions of his tribe as to stay long in any one place. His mind is not as ours. A little of our civilisation we can teach him, and he will learn it, as he may learn to repeat by rote the signs of the zodiac or the multiplication table, or to use a table napkin, or to decorously dispose of the stones in a cherry tart. But the lesson sits lightly on him, and he remains in heart as irreclaimable as ever. Already, indeed, our Gipsies are leaving us. They are not dying out, it is ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... may not wepe although him sor smerte. Therfore in stede of wepyng and preyeres, Men{43} moot yive silver to the pour freres. His typet was ay farsd ful of knyfes And pynns, for to yiv fair wyfes. And certeynly he hadde a mery note; Wel couthe he synge and pleyen on a rote. Of yeddynges he bar utterly the prys. His nekk whit was as the flour-de-lys. Therto he strong was as a champioun. He knew the tavernes wel in every toun, And everych hostiler and tappestere, Bet then a lazer, or a beggestere, For unto ...
— Six Centuries of English Poetry - Tennyson to Chaucer • James Baldwin
... and I hope Ill keep sik a good wile our doctur lets me eat donuts but sez I musnt play out in the rain wen its rainin farther told me Id beter rite to sum of my scholmaids and giv me this hole sheet of paper maibe Id get a leter rote before dinner but I cant tell you mutch wile its rainin Thee git sik and you can come heer to git wel our doctur is bully I havent took no stuf but sitrate of magneeshia and I don't mind that litel Billy ...
— Punchinello, Vol. II. No. 38, Saturday, December 17, 1870. • Various
... not until that day opened her mouth in song. The youth's surprise was increased when she came near enough to let him hear that the words were Spanish; but suddenly remembering that English girls sometimes learned Italian songs by rote, like parrots, his surprise partly abated—why should not an Indian girl learn ...
— The Rover of the Andes - A Tale of Adventure on South America • R.M. Ballantyne
... will warrant that, if Percy delays his return for two months, you will know as much as many who have been two years at the work. I have always said that it is a mistake to teach children young; their minds do not take in what you say to them. You may beat it into them, but they only get it by rote; and painfully, because they don't understand how one thing leads to another, and it is their memory only, and not their minds, ...
— Both Sides the Border - A Tale of Hotspur and Glendower • G. A. Henty
... upon the bed without undressing. He had no inclination to sleep, but his fatigue, bodily and mental, overcame him unawares as he lay listening to the wind which swept through the mountain-gorges, and rose and fell monotonously with a sound like the rote of the sea. It was a vision of the sea that filled his unrestful slumber: Ruth was dead, she had died in his arms, and he was standing woe-begone, like a ghost, on the deck of a homeward bound ship, with the gray, illimitable waste ...
— The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... even as he willed it, she bethought her that Margot Poins was to go to a nunnery. That afternoon she had decided that Mary Trelyon, who was her second maid, should become her first, and others be moved up in a rote. ...
— The Fifth Queen Crowned • Ford Madox Ford
... be familiar to the demon, unless indeed he had forgotten it. This idea met with such general applause that Barre was forced to command the possessed nun to say aqua in Hebrew. The poor woman, who found it difficult enough to repeat correctly the few Latin words she had learned by rote, made an impatient ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... in, soothing her with a touch like a mother's, in its grateful coolness. The air seemed full of half-vibrations, sub-noises, that crowded it as completely as do the insect sounds of midsummer; yet she could only distinguish the ripple beneath her feet, and the rote on the distant beach, and the busy wash of waters against every shore and islet of the bay. The mist was thick around her, but she knew that above it hung the sleepless stars, and the fancy came over her that perhaps the whole vast interval, from ocean up to sky, might be densely filled with the ...
— Malbone - An Oldport Romance • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... I love to hear your voice. An Esquimaux would feel himself getting civilized under it for there's sense in the very sound. A man's character speaks in his voice, even more than in his words. These he may utter by rote, but his 'voice is the man for a' that,' and betrays or divulges his peculiar nature. Do you like my voice, James? I ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... other populists, you'll note, Of views enthusiastic, He'd learned by heart, and said by rote A creed iconoclastic; And in his dim, uncertain sight Whatever wasn't must be right, From which it follows he had strong Convictions that what was, ...
— Fables for the Frivolous • Guy Whitmore Carryl
... how A strain of such rapturous rote Should have gone on thus till now Unchanged in ...
— Late Lyrics and Earlier • Thomas Hardy
... one word of it could be extracted from her, even by the cowskin; nothing but piercing shrieks, enough to make my heart bleed, could the poor victim utter. Irritated at the child's want of capacity to repeat by rote what she could not understand, the old man darted from his seat, and struck her senseless to ...
— Frank Mildmay • Captain Frederick Marryat
... million of Frenchmen, and nearly the same of Italians, since then, with a dozen or so of kings and emperors,—but never the faintest likeness to those deluding pictures. We learned at the same time, by painful rote, the population of various capital cities; but we cannot find in any statistic-book gazetteer, neither in McCulloch nor in Worcester, any of the old, familiar numbers. Also in that same Wonder-Book of Malte-Brun, edited ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... regular gymnastics and the romping plays must be alternated with quiet employments, of course, but still active. They will sing at their plays by rote; and also should be taught other songs by rote. But there can be introduced a regular drill on the scale, which should never last more than ten minutes at a time. This, if well managed, will cultivate their ears and voices, so that in the course of a year they will become ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 61, November, 1862 • Various
... that such a truth as this cannot be learned by rote as one would learn the facts of physical science. They must be experienced before we can really know them. We must in our hearts live through Abraham's harsh and bitter experiences if we would know the blessedness which follows them. The ancient ...
— The Pursuit of God • A. W. Tozer
... the assches there offe, the coles wil duellen and abyden alle quyk, a zere or more. And that tre hathe many leves, as the gynypre hathe. And there ben also many trees, that of nature thei wole never brenne ne rote in no manere. And there ben note trees, that beren notes, als grete as a mannes hed. There also ben many bestes, that ben clept orafles. [Footnote: Giraffes.] In Arabye, thei ben clept gerfauntz; that is a best pomelee or apotted; that is but a litylle ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, - and Discoveries of The English Nation, Volume 9 - Asia, Part 2 • Richard Hakluyt
... looked, twelve and ten years old, and under the dominion of a very learned tutor, who taught them Latin, Greek and Hebrew, alternately with an equally precise, stiff old esquire, who trained them in martial exercises, which seemed to be as much matters of rote with them as their tasks, and to be quite as uninteresting. It did not seem as if they ever played, or thought of playing; and if they were ever to be gay, witty Frenchmen, a wonderful ...
— The Chaplet of Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... flood or earthquake. If the young men boast their knowledge of the ledges and sunken rocks, I speak of pilots, who knew the wind by its scent and the wave by its taste, and could have steered blindfold to any port between Boston and Mount Desert, guided only by the rote of the shore; the peculiar sound of the surf on each island, beach, and line of rocks, along the coast. Thus do I talk, and all my auditors grow wise, ...
— The Village Uncle (From "Twice Told Tales") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Aprille with his shoures sote The droughte of March hath perced to the rote. 104 CHAUCER: Canterbury Tales, ...
— Handy Dictionary of Poetical Quotations • Various
... will never go to England." Lucia repeated the words slowly like a lesson learned by rote; and as she did so, an old question rose ...
— A Canadian Heroine, Volume 1 - A Novel • Mrs. Harry Coghill
... them. Do you hear the falls at my lake? the west wind brings that to us. When I am there and the rote is on the beach, it tells me it is the voice of the south wind giving notice of rain. All nature warns me. The swallow, the pig, the goose, the fire on the hearth, the soot in the flue, the smoke of the chimney, the ...
— Nature and Human Nature • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... names of their gods from Egypt, but the gods themselves were entirely different ones. It is also true that some of the gods of the Romans were borrowed from the Greeks, but their life was left behind. They merely repeated by rote the Greek mythology, having no power to invent one for themselves. But the Greek religion they never received. For instead of its fair humanities, the Roman gods were only servants of the state,—a higher kind of consuls, tribunes, and lictors. The real Olympus of Rome was the Senate Chamber ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... perplexing prohibition, "Thou shalt not commit doldrum." Ladies and gentlemen, I confess, also, that I don't like those schools, even though the instruction given in them be gratuitous, where those sweet little voices which ought to be heard speaking in very different accents, anathematise by rote any human being who does not hold what is taught there. Lastly, I do not like, and I did not like some years ago, cheap distant schools, where neglected children pine from year to year under an amount of neglect, want, and youthful misery ...
— Speeches: Literary and Social • Charles Dickens
... glance for the first time wavered. He looked toward the towering mountain as if for moral sustenance. His lips mutely moved as if he were conning a lesson he was learning by rote, and then, seeing the question still in his father's ...
— Dixie Hart • Will N. Harben
... he stood still over her, and she smiled at him. Such a smile! It was cold as death, flattering no one, saying nothing, hideous in its unmeaning, unreal grace. Ah! how I hate the smile of a woman who smiles by rote! It made Mr Palliser feel very uncomfortable,—but he did not analyse it, ...
— The Small House at Allington • Anthony Trollope
... fashionable poem; that the Night Thoughts is the masterpiece of our literature; and that Richardson is our only novelist. Oh, no! Madame Carolina would not have disgraced May Fair. She knew Childe Harold by rote, and had even peeped into Don Juan. Her admiration of the Edinburgh and Quarterly Reviews was great and similar. To a Continental liberal, indeed, even the Toryism of the Quarterly is philosophy; and not an Under-Secretary ever yet massacred ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... with every part of which he was particularly acquainted. He could repeat all the observations that were retailed in the atmosphere of the play-houses, and had all the good things of the high wits by rote long before they made their way into the jest-books. The intervals between conversation were employed in teaching my daughters piquet, or sometimes in setting my two little ones to box to make them sharp, as he called ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education
... the average student and the average teacher. For the reconstruction of a lecture from notes means an essay in original work, in original thinking; while the recitation lapses all too readily into textbook rote and verbal repetition. ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... flank. Perhaps the greatest disadvantage of this method is that it does not give the student the best kind of training. What he needs most in life is the ability to arrange and present ideas rapidly, not to speak a part by rote. ...
— Elements of Debating • Leverett S. Lyon
... cracked open John Bull Chatwood's strong-box at the Fair the other day, while the three Englishmen hammered away in vain at Brother Jonathan Herring's. The Englishmen represented brute force. The Germans had been trained to appreciate principle. The Englishman "knows his business by rote and rule of thumb"—science, which would "teach him to do in an hour what has hitherto occupied him two hours," "is in a manner forbidden to him." To this cause the "Times" attributes the falling off of English workmen in comparison with those of ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... learn it, but I am afraid I shall never do it by rote. I have the best will in the world about it, but my genius doesn't lie in that direction. As a loafer I shall never be original, as I take ...
— The American • Henry James
... was passed partly at Cockermouth, and partly with his maternal grandfather at Penrith. His first teacher appears to have been Mrs. Anne Birkett, a kind of Shenstone's Schoolmistress, who practised the memory of her pupils, teaching them chiefly by rote, and not endeavoring to cultivate their reasoning faculties, a process by which children are apt to be converted from natural logicians into impertinent sophists. Among his schoolmates here was Mary Hutchinson, ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... She heard it at dinner, and felt it a blessing. By all the others it was mentioned with regret; and his merits honoured with due gradation of feeling—from the sincerity of Edmund's too partial regard, to the unconcern of his mother speaking entirely by rote. Mrs. Norris began to look about her, and wonder that his falling in love with Julia had come to nothing; and could almost fear that she had been remiss herself in forwarding it; but with so many to care for, how was it possible for even her activity ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... has dared to think for himself and voiced his thought—the emancipated man—has been as one in a million. What usually passes for thought is only the repetition of things we have heard or been told. We memorize, repeat by rote and ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... removed from my heart, and Jesus Christ, as the Alpha and Omega, the sum and substance of every thing, shone out upon me just as he is set forth in the everlasting gospel. It was the same as if I had been reading, because I knew it so well by rote, only much more rapid, as thought always is. In this there was nothing uncommon; but in the opening of the understanding, that I might UNDERSTAND the scriptures, was the mighty miracle of grace and truth. There I ...
— Personal Recollections • Charlotte Elizabeth
... bad for dates, and for learning by rote; but good in retaining a general or vague recollection of many facts. R.D.—Wonderful memory for dates. In old age he told a person, reading aloud to him a book only read in youth, the passages which were coming— knew the birthdays ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin
... I thought I might be good once. I used to say my own prayers then. Now I speak them but by rote, and feel ashamed—yes, ashamed to speak them. Is it not horrid to say them, and next morning to be no better than you were last night? Often I revolt at these as at other things, and am dumb. The Vicar comes to see us at Newcome, and eats so much dinner, and pays us such court, and ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... successes, whether solid or specious, with which he has been credited. In the first place, judged by the standards of modern missions, the superficiality of his work was {409} almost inconceivable. He never mastered one of the languages of the countries which he visited. He learned by rote a few sentences, generally the creed and some phrases on the horrors of hell, and repeated them to the crowds attracted to him by the sound of a bell. He addressed himself to masses rather than to individuals and ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... respect to relics; that there are spirits, and goblins, and other superhuman forms; that there is a queen of heaven; that the reading of the Scriptures is in itself an actual merit, whether its precepts are followed or not; that prayer may be offered by saying a formula by rote, or even by turning the handle of a mill from which invocations written on paper issue forth; that the revealer of Buddhism is to be regarded as the religious ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... I don't think Cap. Dhryfuss wr-rote th' borderoo. I think he was th' on'y man in Fr-rance that didn't. But I ain't got as high an opinyon iv th' Cap as I had. I ain't no purity brigade; but, th' older I get, th' more I think wan wife's enough f'r anny man, an' too manny ...
— Mr. Dooley: In the Hearts of His Countrymen • Finley Peter Dunne
... fore noon I went to meting & heard Mr. Eals his text was in the 5th Chapter of James 16th verse a good sermon I rote a letter & sent home & in the after noon ...
— The Military Journals of Two Private Soldiers, 1758-1775 - With Numerous Illustrative Notes • Abraham Tomlinson
... majority of our college graduates today have not learned how to study properly, and find it difficult or impossible to take up a new study and master it. They have only learned how to do certain routine things in a mechanical way. They have learned by rote. ...
— How to Study • George Fillmore Swain
... at five years old, or earlier, to a school kept by a Mr. Bowers, who was called 'Bodsy Bowers,' by reason of his dapperness. It was a school for both sexes. I learned little there except to repeat by rote the first lesson of monosyllables ('God made man'—'Let us love him'), by hearing it often repeated, without acquiring a letter. Whenever proof was made of my progress, at home, I repeated these words with the most rapid fluency; but on turning over a new leaf, ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. I. (of VI.) - With his Letters and Journals. • Thomas Moore
... Horses haue thei none, ne none desire, for that their Chamelles in al niedes serue them as well. Thei haue siluer and golde plentie, and diuerse kindes of spices, whiche other countries haue not. Laton, Brasse, Iron, Purple, Safron, the precious rote costus, and all coruen woorkes, are brought into theim by other. Thei bewrie their kyng in a donghille, for other thei wille skante take so muche laboure. There is no people that better kiepeth their promise and ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries - Vol. II • Richard Hakluyt
... belief and unbelief; of Epicurean levity and fetichistic dread; of pedantic impossible ethics uttered by rote, and crude passions acted out with childish impulsiveness; of inclination toward a self-indulgent paganism, and inevitable subjection to that human conscience which, in the unrest of a new growth, was filling the air with strange prophecies ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... rate reed rill rub rig rim rite ride rise red rag rick rote run reek rib rob rip ruse roar roam rack rid rip rouse Arch farm lark far snare for march harm bark bar spare war larch charm mark hair sure corn starch dark are stair lure born arm spark star care ...
— McGuffey's Fourth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... thought.' Adela as yet had no such end in view, but already she understood that her education, in the serious sense, was only now beginning. As a girl, her fate had been that of girls in general; when she could write without orthographical errors, and could play by rote a few pieces of pianoforte music, her education had been pronounced completed. In the profound moral revolution which her nature had recently undergone her intellect also shared; when the first numbing shock had spent ...
— Demos • George Gissing
... give glimmering light; By the dead and drowsy fire, Every elf and fairy sprite, Hop as light as bird from brier; And this ditty after me, Sing and dance it trippingly. First rehearse this song by rote, To each word a warbling note, Hand in hand, with fairy grace, We will ...
— The Children's Garland from the Best Poets • Various
... your return, going through the same figures to new tunes. I wonder if there are any people anywhere in the world who stand on their own feet, and think and act for themselves; who don't set their watches by other people's; who don't live and marry and die by rote, expecting to go straight up to ...
— The Danvers Jewels, and Sir Charles Danvers • Mary Cholmondeley
... to the harper, and he reluctantly complied with the minstrel's demand. Tristrem, who had been away hunting, returned immediately after the adventurous earl had departed with his fair prize. He upbraided the King for his extravagant sense of honour, and, snatching up his rote, or harp, hastened to the seashore, where Ysonde had already embarked. There he sat down and played, and the sound so deeply affected Ysonde that she became seriously ill, so that the earl was induced to return with her to land. Ysonde pretended ...
— Legends & Romances of Brittany • Lewis Spence
... reasoning from cause to effect; I doubt if it dawned upon one of them that there was such an unheard-of accomplishment to be acquired. They were trying—if they were trying anything at all—to pick up modern science in the folk manner, by rote, as though it were a thing to be handed down by tradition. So at least I infer, not only from watching this particular class then and on other occasions, but also from ...
— Change in the Village • (AKA George Bourne) George Sturt
... Alas, far times ago A woman lyred here In the evenfall; one who fain did so From year to year; And, in loneliness bending wistfully, Would wake each note In sick sad rote, None ...
— Late Lyrics and Earlier • Thomas Hardy
... plain enough. Yet see what strong intellects dare not yet hear God himself, unless he speak the phraseology of I know not what David, or Jeremiah, or Paul. We shall not always set so great a price on a few texts, on a few lives.[214] We are like children who repeat by rote the sentences of grandames and tutors, and, as they grow older, of the men and talents and characters they chance to see,—painfully recollecting the exact words they spoke; afterwards, when they come into the point of view which those had who uttered those saying, they understand ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... no forced and measured tasks, Nor weary rote, nor formal chains; The simple heart, that freely asks In ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... poetrie, most liberall endowed with wisdome, fortitude, justice, and temperance, departed this life;"[243] and right well did he deserve this eulogy, for as an old chronicle says, he was "a goode clerke and rote many bokes, and a boke he made in Englysshe, of adventures of kynges and bataylles that had bene wne in the lande; and other bokes of gestes he them wryte, that were of greate wisdome, and of good learnynge, thrugh ...
— Bibliomania in the Middle Ages • Frederick Somner Merryweather
... not all the story—repose!" his words sounded hollow, like a lesson he had learned by rote and propriety ...
— The Man Who Wins • Robert Herrick
... the kind ladies at Downside wish to teach you, it's not for me to say them nay; but I would that I had more learning for your sake, and I shall be jealous of them, that I shall, when I find that you can read off out of any book you have got as smoothly as you do the verses you have learned by rote. Oh, you will be ...
— Won from the Waves • W.H.G. Kingston
... of you), but an idea that you might, yourself, dislike it. You cannot doubt my sincere admiration, waving personal friendship for the present, which, by the by, is not less sincere and deep rooted. I have you by rote and by heart; of which 'ecce signum!' When I was at * *, on my first visit, I have a habit, in passing my time a good deal alone, of—I won't call it singing, for that I never attempt except to myself—but of uttering, ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. II - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... from certain schoolmasters, which had come into his hands; and the majority of the signatures were those of marks-men. These ignorant teachers could convey no useful instruction to their pupils; the utmost amount which they taught them was to say the Catechism by rote. Even within seven miles of Montreal, there was a schoolmistress thus unqualified. These appointments were, as might have been expected, jobbed by the members among the political partisans; nor were the funds very honestly managed. In many cases ...
— Diary in America, Series Two • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... ladies." And Milly was quickly fascinated by the professor of mental and moral philosophy, a delicate-looking young college graduate. She worked very hard, studying her lessons far into the night, memorizing long lists of names, dates, maxims, learning by rote whatever was contained in ...
— One Woman's Life • Robert Herrick
... he declared, chemistry would solve the social question, and man would forget what it is to worry about food. Why, chemistry was on the verge of discovering how to make bread of stones, a thing that hitherto only plants could do. Frederick continued in a similar strain, speaking by rote, and scarcely looking ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... meaning, and by which the analytic faculty of the pupil is exercised in tracing the transition from the primary meaning to the secondary and figurative meanings,—thus converting what is ordinarily a matter of rote into an agreeable exercise of the thinking faculty. Another point of novelty in the method of treatment is presented in the copious practical exercises on the use of words. The experienced instructor very well knows that pupils may memorize endless lists of terms and ...
— New Word-Analysis - Or, School Etymology of English Derivative Words • William Swinton
... their equipment, have produced, by dint of skill and patience, work that is very passable. The women weave their own cloth on the native looms, and practice various other industries. The children are well trained in hospitality and public manners, which they learn by rote. ...
— The Great White Tribe in Filipinia • Paul T. Gilbert
... cold days of winter), when we had to sit for hours on hard wooden benches, before uncomfortable desks, bending over grimy slates and ink-besprinkled "copy books," and poring over studies in which we took no interest—geography, which we learned by rote; arithmetic, which always evaded us, and grammar, which we never could master. We could repeat the "rules," but we could not "parse;" we could cipher, but our sums would not "prove;" we could rattle ...
— The Aldine, Vol. 5, No. 1., January, 1872 - A Typographic Art Journal • Various
... Either his interest was aroused, and then he absorbed the matter at hand in the way he breathed, without the least conscious effort; or his interest remained unstirred, in which case no amount of mechanical application would help. Learning by rote offered no escape in the latter case, for his memory operated in the same way as the rest of his mind, sucking up what fitted it as a blotter sucks the ink, and presenting a surface of polished marble to any matter not germane according to its own ...
— The Soul of a Child • Edwin Bjorkman
... and sperit loved to grope around more and find out things to praise and blame by rote and not by note, and Dorothy and Robert Strong ...
— Around the World with Josiah Allen's Wife • Marietta Holley
... Note, Syllable: Singing by rote means that the singer sings something learned by ear without regard to notes. Singing by note means that the singer is guided to the correct pitch by visible notes. Singing by syllable means that the singer ...
— Music Notation and Terminology • Karl W. Gehrkens
... hundred ballades, which my master was adorning with pictures, and with scarlet, blue, and gold. It set forth how a young knight, in sorrow of love, was riding between Pont de Ce and Angiers, and how other knights met him and gave him counsel. These lines I read, and getting them by rote, took them for my device, for they bid the lover thrust himself foremost in the press, and in breach, ...
— A Monk of Fife • Andrew Lang
... that we ever learned as grammar was the Latin, and that not until composition had made us familiar with the use of the rules therein given. Auntie had a great horror of children learning by rote things they did not understand, and then fancying they knew them. "What do you mean by that expression, Annie?" she would ask me. After feeble attempts to explain, I would answer: "Indeed, Auntie, I know in my own head, but I can't explain." "Then, indeed, Annie, ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant
... Jesus Christ whom thou hast sent." In these words is the sufficient defence of Protestantism. It was the cry of the soul to know God, and not merely to assent to what the Church taught concerning him; it was the longing to know Christ, and not to repeat by rote the creeds of the first centuries, and the definitions of mediaeval doctors in regard to him. In a subsequent chapter we shall consider the truth and error in the Protestant principle of justification by faith. Our purpose here is ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... afterwards the tissues and the bones. Thus, unversed in the deeper phases of causation, men are hurried unprepared into ranks of a noble profession to struggle as best they may, through lack of deeper knowledge, with the serious symptoms of disease—at first by rote but later, are tempted to tamper ...
— Valere Aude - Dare to Be Healthy, Or, The Light of Physical Regeneration • Louis Dechmann
... these five genera, he will have no difficulty in attaching to them, in a satellitic or subordinate manner, such inferior groups as that of the Silver-weed, or the Tormentilla; but all he will have to learn by heart and rote, will be these six names; the Greek Master-name, Charites, and the five generic names, in each case belonging to plants, as he will soon find, of extreme personal ...
— Proserpina, Volume 1 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin
... As a whole, I think not. A smattering of sentimental literature, a superficial refinement of manners, a few borrowed phrases and appropriated customs of "society," the rendering of a few pieces by rote, and fashionable dress, constitute with, alas! too many the standard of culture. How unworthy of their race are those who entertain the thought! All this may be but the gilding of barbarism; beneath this external glitter ...
— Autobiography of Frank G. Allen, Minister of the Gospel - and Selections from his Writings • Frank G. Allen
... stoic lesson, got by rote, The pomp of words, and pedant dissertation, That can support us in the hour of terror. Books have taught cowards to talk nobly of it: But when the trial comes, they ...
— Clarissa, Volume 7 • Samuel Richardson
... a book of artfully turned phrases; a book in which all the characters, especially women, would think and speak and act by rote and rule—as according to Mr. Peter Vibart; it would be a scholarly book, of elaborate finish and care of detail, with no irregularities of style or anything else to break the monotonous harmony of the whole—indeed, sir, it would be a ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol
... but not very enlightened, because it derived its light from the heart and not from, his understanding. Egmont possessed more of conscience than of fixed principles; his head had not given him a code of its own, but had merely learnt it by rote; the mere name of any action, therefore, was often with him sufficient for its condemnation. In his judgment men were wholly bad or wholly good, and had not something bad or something good; in this system of morals there was no middle term between vice and virtue; and consequently ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... thoroughly understand the subject. On our asking whether the children answered the questions from what they had learnt by heart, she replied, "No; it would be of no use, you know, for the dear children to repeat merely by rote; we want the great truths of the gospel to sink into ...
— Memoir and Diary of John Yeardley, Minister of the Gospel • John Yeardley
... meaningless, and they are naturally as much enchanted as if they were listening to a chimaera bombinans in vacuo. The grammar, to them, is a mere buzz in a chaos of nonsense. They have to learn the buzz by rote; and a pleasant process that is—a seductive initiation into the mysteries. When they struggle so far as to be allowed to try to read a piece of Greek prose, they are only like the Marchioness in her experience of beer: she once had a sip of it. Ten lines of Xenophon, narrating ...
— Essays in Little • Andrew Lang
... but little occupation for his hands, and, apart from his memories, little for his mind. He read and reread his father's dying words until he knew them by rote, and could read them with shut eyes as he lay in his blanket in the wakeful hours of night. He would not admit to himself that he had a real belief in their message, and yet it was always with him in a fainter or a stronger fashion, and it ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray
... nature gets limited accordingly. I observed that all our young figure-painters were rendered, to all intents and purposes, blind by their knowledge of anatomy. They saw only certain muscles and bones, of which they had learned the positions by rote, but could not, on account of the very prominence in their minds of these bits of fragmentary knowledge, see the real movement, color, rounding, or any other subtle quality of the human form. And I was quite sure that if I examined the mountain anatomy ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... the faire gemme vertulees! Wo worth that herbe also that dooth no bote! 345 Wo worth that beautee that is routhelees! Wo worth that wight that tret ech under fote! And ye, that been of beautee crop and rote, If therwith-al in you ther be no routhe, Than is it harm ye liven, by my ...
— Troilus and Criseyde • Geoffrey Chaucer
... "I kep' thinkin' of the clack. Now," sez he, "I'm goin' to build a house by rote and not by note. I will git me away from wimmen, and when I'm on the lot with the timber before me, ...
— Samantha at Coney Island - and a Thousand Other Islands • Marietta Holley
... Bridget, who confessed thrice a-year, and knew the marvellous histories of a dozen saints by rote. ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... you? and what are you secretly guilty of all your life? Will you turn aside all your life? will you grub and chatter all your life? And who are you, blabbing by rote, years, pages, languages, reminiscences, Unwitting to-day that you do not know how to ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... making what is learned more available for future use. Our previous studies of learning thus lead us to inquire whether committing to memory may not consist partly in rehearsing what we wish to learn, and partly in observing it. Learning by rote, or by merely repeating a performance over and over again, is, indeed, a fact; and observant study is ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth
... Billy we ben readn fairy tales, an I never see such woppers. I bet the feller wich rote em will be burnt every tiny little bit up wen he dies, but Billy says they are all true but the facks. Uncle Ned sed cude I tell one, and I ast him wot about, and he sed: "Wel Johnny, as you got to do the tellin I'le leav ...
— Prairie Farmer, Vol. 56: No. 3, January 19, 1884. - A Weekly Journal for the Farm, Orchard and Fireside • Various
... another in hunting after the leaping Romeo. They call without the slightest impetus. One can imagine how the true Mercutio called—certainly not by rote. There must have been pauses indeed, brief and short-breath'd pauses of listening for an answer, between every nickname. But the nicknames were quick work. At the Lyceum they were quite an effort of memory: ...
— The Colour of Life • Alice Meynell
... instruction, the minister should not be burdened with the care of more souls than he can properly instruct and direct in spiritual matters, so that he can give to all those who are infidels suitable instruction in Christian doctrine—not merely so that they know it by rote, but also so that they may understand (so far as they are capable of this) the signification of the words, and the mysteries contained therein. Thus, too, he will be able to make each and every one of them understand all that is necessary for them to believe, ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, V7, 1588-1591 • Emma Helen Blair
... and I will not trouble you with mysteries or personal experiences. You would write as your Southern mockingbird sings his "green-tree ballad"; the thought of that bird mewed in a city cage and taught to perform by rote and not for spontaneous joy, troubled me not a little. I am sending you by express ...
— The Jessica Letters: An Editor's Romance • Paul Elmer More
... the passion of an angry grief: 150 Forgive me, if from present things I turn To speak what in my heart will beat and burn, And hang my wreath on his world-honored urn. Nature, they say, doth dote, And cannot make a man 155 Save on some worn-out plan, Repeating us by rote: For him her Old-World mould aside she threw, And, choosing sweet clay from the breast Of the unexhausted West, 160 With stuff untainted shaped a hero new, Wise, steadfast in the strength of God, and true. How beautiful ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell
... another in the same line or improvising as he went on. Finally, in 1721, the Rev. Thomas Walter of Roxbury, Mass., published a treatise, upon the grounds or rules of music or an introduction to the art of singing by rote, containing twenty-four tunes harmonized into three parts. The attempt to supersede the old Puritan tunes and restrict the liberty of the individual singers met with the greatest opposition and was long successfully resisted in all the churches in New England, ...
— The Two Hundredth Anniversary of the Settlement of the Town of New Milford, Conn. June 17th, 1907 • Daniel Davenport
... perceptions have the brightness and indistinctness of a trance. Our continuity of consciousness is broken, crumbles, and falls to pieces. We go on learning and forgetting every hour. Our feelings are chaotic, confused, strange to each other and ourselves.' But in time we learn by rote the lessons which we had to spell out in our youth. 'A very short period (from 15 to 25 or 30) includes the whole map and table of contents of human life. From that time we may be said to live our ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... flute or the fiddle, he is altogether irresistible. But he piques himself upon being polished above the natives of any other country by his conversation with the fair sex. In the course of this communication, with which he is indulged from his tender years, he learns like a parrot, by rote, the whole circle of French compliments, which you know are a set of phrases ridiculous even to a proverb; and these he throws out indiscriminately to all women, without distinction in the exercise of that kind of address, which is here ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... the truth." As a child it needs first the "milk of the Word." It is not desirable, neither is it necessary, to try to teach the very young child doctrines and abstract truths. Neither ought the child to be required to learn by rote long passages from the Scriptures. In this way some well-meaning, but mistaken parents make the Word a burden to their children, and it becomes odious in their eyes. There are other and better ways. Begin by showing the child Bible pictures, even if it should soil the book a little. Better a thousand ...
— The Way of Salvation in the Lutheran Church • G. H. Gerberding
... spake briefly, as if by rote, of certain other civil and legal addenda that either might or should, at a later time, cap the ceremony. Lorison tendered a fee, which was declined, and before the door closed after the departing couple Father Rogan's book popped open again where ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry
... things differ so that we should refer the inheritance of eyes and noses to memory, while denying any connection between memory and gout? We may have a ghost of a pretence for saying that a man grew a nose by rote, or even that he catches the measles or whooping-cough by rote during his boyhood; but do we mean to say that he develops the gout by rote in his old age if he comes of a gouty family? If, then, rote and red-tape ...
— Unconscious Memory • Samuel Butler
... that he had read his play to her one night shortly after Jenny's birth, and she had leaned forward with her chin on her palm and a look in her face as if she were listening for a cry which never came from the nursery. Her praise had had the sound of being recited by rote, and had aroused in him a sense of exasperation which returned even now whenever she mentioned his work. In the days of his courtship the memory of her simplicities clung like an exquisite bouquet to the ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... What I want is to encounter an adventure to which I can predict no conclusion. It is the breath of existence to me to dare Fate in its blindest manifestations. The world has come to run so much by rote and gravitation that you can enter upon hardly any footpath of chance in which you do not find signboards informing you of what you may expect at its end. I am like the clerk in the Circumlocution Office who always complained bitterly when any one came in to ask information. ...
— Strictly Business • O. Henry
... allowed to lift up their voices; and whether the scanty stock of tunes should be enlarged. Learning a tune by note, without having previously heard it, was almost a mortal offence, and at last something like a compromise was effected in some of the churches, where alternate singing by rote and rule satisfied both parties. The ministers added to the general confusion with a flood of circulars on the subject. Several of them issued a tract entitled "Cases of Conscience about singing Psalms," in which ...
— The Standard Oratorios - Their Stories, Their Music, And Their Composers • George P. Upton
... may perhaps learn it, but I am afraid I shall never do it by rote. I have the best will in the world about it, but my genius doesn't lie in that direction. As a loafer I shall never be original, as I take it ...
— The American • Henry James
... small talents and humour. Attracted first by Miss Fotheringay's beauty, he began to teach her how to act. He shrieked out in his cracked voice the parts, and his pupil learned them from his lips by rote, and repeated them in her full rich tones. He indicated the attitudes, and set and moved those beautiful arms of hers. Those who remember this grand actress on the stage can recall how she used always precisely the same ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... "The cat will mew, the dog will have his day." Let them bark on! who heeds their currish note Knows not the world—they howl, for food, by rote. ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... daughter, laid down his knife and fork, and quite unknown to himself began to hang his head. The great trees were not so far from the house that he had not noticed the sound of the southerly breeze in their branches as he came across the yard. He knew it as well as he knew the rote of the beaches and ledges on that stretch of shore. He was meaning, at any rate, to think it over while he was out fishing, where nobody could bother him. He wasn't going to be hindered by a pack of folks from doing what he liked with his own; but neither ...
— The Life of Nancy • Sarah Orne Jewett
... ovra delle rote magne, Che drizzan ciascun seme ad alcun fine Secondo che le stella ...
— The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism • Franz Cumont
... myself to a greasy monk, who does not—he! he! he!—understand the barbarous Latin he repeats by rote. Such would be a fitting counsellor to one who has studied both in Spain and Arabia! No, Catharine, I will choose a confessor that is pleasant to look upon, and you shall be honoured with the office. Now, look yonder at his valiancie, his eyebrow drops ...
— The Fair Maid of Perth • Sir Walter Scott
... Beattie's Minstrel is our most modern and fashionable poem; that the Night Thoughts is the masterpiece of our literature; and that Richardson is our only novelist. Oh, no! Madame Carolina would not have disgraced May Fair. She knew Childe Harold by rote, and had even peeped into Don Juan. Her admiration of the Edinburgh and Quarterly Reviews was great and similar. To a Continental liberal, indeed, even the Toryism of the Quarterly is philosophy; and ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... other hand, had spoken truth in his denials of these principles, and in his longings to have the righteousness of God set in clear relation to his own afflictions. We must remember, too, that the friends were talking commonplaces learned by rote, while Job's words came scalding hot from his heart. Most excellent truth may be so spoken as to be wrong; and it is so, if spoken heartlessly, regardless of sympathy, and flung at sufferers like a stone, rather than laid on their hearts as a balm. God lets ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... deep underground, Hid in your bed from sight and sound, Without a turn in temperature, With weather life can scarce endure, That light has won a fraction's strength, And day put on some moments' length, Whereof in merest rote will come, Weeks hence, mild airs that do not numb; O crocus root, how do you ...
— Satires of Circumstance, Lyrics and Reveries, with - Miscellaneous Pieces • Thomas Hardy
... primitive in their equipment, have produced, by dint of skill and patience, work that is very passable. The women weave their own cloth on the native looms, and practice various other industries. The children are well trained in hospitality and public manners, which they learn by rote. ...
— The Great White Tribe in Filipinia • Paul T. Gilbert
... Syllable: Singing by rote means that the singer sings something learned by ear without regard to notes. Singing by note means that the singer is guided to the correct pitch by visible notes. Singing by syllable means that the singer sings the tones of a song or part to the sol-fa syllables instead of to words, neutral vowels ...
— Music Notation and Terminology • Karl W. Gehrkens
... is the best in the town, though the worst in his shop. His conscience was a thing that would have laid upon his hands, and he was forced to put it off, and makes great use of honesty to profess upon. He tells you lies by rote, and not minding, as the phrase to sell in, and the language he spent most of his years to learn. He never speaks so truely as when he says he would use you as his brother; for he would abuse his brother, ...
— Microcosmography - or, a Piece of the World Discovered; in Essays and Characters • John Earle
... return, going through the same figures to new tunes. I wonder if there are any people anywhere in the world who stand on their own feet, and think and act for themselves; who don't set their watches by other people's; who don't live and marry and die by rote, expecting to go straight up to ...
— The Danvers Jewels, and Sir Charles Danvers • Mary Cholmondeley
... gloss over: Whate'er the crabbed'st author hath, He understood b' implicit faith: Whatever Skeptic could inquire for; For every WHY he had a WHEREFORE: Knew more than forty of them do, As far as words and terms could go. All which he understood by rote, And, as occasion serv'd, would quote; No matter whether right or wrong, They might be either said or sung. His notions fitted things so well, That which was which he could not tell, But oftentimes mistook the one For th' other, as great clerks have done. He could reduce all things to acts, ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... possesses, at least, analogies in accredited experience, than for a fact (say telepathic crystal-gazing) to which he knows, in experience, nothing analogous. Thus, for the mythical German handmaid, he has the analogy of languages learned in childhood, or passages got up by rote, being forgotten and brought back to ordinary conscious memory, or delirious memory, during an illness, or shortly before death. Strong in these analogies, the psychologist will venture to accept a case of language not learned, but reproduced in delirious memory, on no evidence at all. ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang
... cant hold a candel to drivin a truck with Fritz bulets bingin all round you and he sez, I received the kit you sent me and It is a great comfort (the kit is not a cat but a assortment of handkerchiefs and tooth brushes and everything a soldier gets and Mother sent him his and so he rote to thank her) an he sez if I go over the top with the best of luck and get enuf leave to come home I will give Myself the pleasure of calling on you, and showin you what a Greenville soldier looks like. My reciprocity shall never end. And he goes on tellin how french ...
— Deer Godchild • Marguerite Bernard and Edith Serrell
... purposes would be folly. Even supposing they could be educated—which is scarcely supposable, for it would seem a contravention of Heaven's fiat—they could no more apply this learning, which would simply be by rote, than they could go to the moon. Such men are not unfrequently met with, and are designated, by common consent, learned fools. Nature points out the education they should receive. In like manner with those of higher and nobler attributes, ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... the worst had brought me balm: 'Twas but the tempest's central calm. Vague sinkings of the heart aver That dreadful wrong is come to her, And o'er this dream I brood and dote, And learn its agonies by rote. As if I loved it, early and late I make familiar with my fate, And feed, with fascinated will, On very dregs of finish'd ill. I think, she's near him now, alone, With wardship and protection none; Alone, perhaps, in the hindering stress Of airs that clasp him with her ...
— The Victories of Love - and Other Poems • Coventry Patmore
... song; and there are many examples of each in the Scriptures. As there was no definite notation among the ancient Hebrews, the actual tunes that were sung with these songs will never be known. But it may be possible that the melodies have been preserved by rote, for it is certain that these three schools of singing exist to-day in Arabia and Syria. Whole villages are known to unite in a seven-day festival of rejoicing, not unlike the one at the wedding of Samson, as described in the ...
— Woman's Work in Music • Arthur Elson
... norysshed in doctryne. In age is gyuen vnto al Inconuenyence. But nought shall make youthe soner forto inclyne. To noble maners: nor Godly dysciplyne: Than shal the doctryne of a mayster wyse and sad: For the rote of vertue ...
— The Ship of Fools, Volume 1 • Sebastian Brandt
... night seeking idiosyncrasies in the masses and truth in the heavens above. When ye came upon me I was in contemplation of the elevated road in conjunction with the chief luminary of night. The rapid transit is poetry and art: the moon but a tedious, dry body, moving by rote. But these are private opinions, for, in the business of literature, the conditions are reversed. 'Tis me hope to be writing a book to explain the strange things I ...
— The Four Million • O. Henry
... as if by rote, of certain other civil and legal addenda that either might or should, at a later time, cap the ceremony. Lorison tendered a fee, which was declined, and before the door closed after the departing couple Father Rogan's book popped open again where his finger ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry
... worked forward and upward and although he did not know the alphabet excepting by rote, a common ante-bellum plantation accomplishment, and while professing high contempt for what he called "cold shelf-knowledge," his reputation for wisdom, wisdom as gleaned in observation and experience and "ripened by insight," was supreme, while his way of casually ...
— Daddy Do-Funny's Wisdom Jingles • Ruth McEnery Stuart
... expanse of water, which is quite meaningless to them. And yet you have only to mention the word—the sea—and they will instantly turn up their eyes and start off repeating the lesson they have learned by rote about their rapture and enthusiasm, just like a musical box which grinds out a tune when you press a button at the top. The sea was invented by a few romantically inclined poets. But I deny that there is any truth in then rhapsodies; the sea ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau
... tune to another in the same line or improvising as he went on. Finally, in 1721, the Rev. Thomas Walter of Roxbury, Mass., published a treatise, upon the grounds or rules of music or an introduction to the art of singing by rote, containing twenty-four tunes harmonized into three parts. The attempt to supersede the old Puritan tunes and restrict the liberty of the individual singers met with the greatest opposition and was long ...
— The Two Hundredth Anniversary of the Settlement of the Town of New Milford, Conn. June 17th, 1907 • Daniel Davenport
... in the deeper phases of causation, men are hurried unprepared into ranks of a noble profession to struggle as best they may, through lack of deeper knowledge, with the serious symptoms of disease—at first by rote but later, are tempted to tamper empirically ...
— Valere Aude - Dare to Be Healthy, Or, The Light of Physical Regeneration • Louis Dechmann
... origin this for such a society, and the fruits will be without flavor. Art will not submit to be so lowered," will say some travelled dilettante, who, with book in hand, has looked by rote on the wonders of the Louvre and the Vatican; but the Creator of the universe teaches a different lesson from this observer. Not the rare lightning merely, but the daily sunlight, too; not merely the distant star-studded canopy of the earth, but also our near earth itself, has He made beautiful. ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... wood chopped or piled, or carpets beat up, or errands run, we'll be glad to do it for you—cheap," recited Tobias, in a curious singsong voice, as if he had learned the words by rote. ...
— Heart of Gold • Ruth Alberta Brown
... say it by rote, and to wave his hand in the same unconscious manner; for he stood observing Bertha with an anxious wondering face, that never ...
— The Cricket on the Hearth • Charles Dickens
... im Schlummer, schaute ich Christus, Den Heiland der Welt. Im wallend weien Gewande Wandelt' er riesengro ber Land und Meer; 10 Es ragte sein Haupt in den Himmel, Die Hnde streckte er segnend ber Land und Meer; Und als ein Herz in der Brust Trug er die Sonne, 15 Die rote, flammende Sonne; Und das rote, flammende Sonnenherz Go seine Gnadenstrahlen Und sein holdes, liebseliges Licht, Erleuchtend und wrmend 20 ber Land ...
— A Book Of German Lyrics • Various
... I, "you have learned conceits from the catch-books. You quarrel by rote. Were I as eager to answer me, I might say: 'Ah, false flower, you grow out of the foulness underneath. You give your fragrance to all without discretion—a common lover, prodigal of favors, fit only ...
— Red Axe • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... with his own mouth, before the whole congregation, confess that God's curse is on his doings, with no more sense or care of what the words mean, and of what a sentence he is pronouncing against himself, than if he were a parrot taught to speak by rote words which he does not understand. And so that man, by hardening his own heart, makes the ...
— Sermons on National Subjects • Charles Kingsley
... met with such general applause that Barre was forced to command the possessed nun to say aqua in Hebrew. The poor woman, who found it difficult enough to repeat correctly the few Latin words she had learned by rote, made an impatient movement, ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... given. It was to teach its pupils to read and write the mother tongue; enough arithmetic for the ordinary business of life, and the commonly used measures; to sing, and to know certain songs by rote; to know about the real things of life; the Catechism and the Bible; a general knowledge of history, and especially the creation, fall, and redemption of man; the elements of geography and astronomy; and a knowledge of ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... simply crushed and appalled. A lot of things happen, mostly disagreeable, and then a mate comes looming up through the haze of pieces. So he goes away awestricken but unharmed, secretly believing that all chess-players are humbugs, and that intelligent chess, which is neither chancy nor rote-learned, is beyond the wit of man. But clearly this is an unreasonable method of instruction. Before the beginner can understand the beginning of the game he must surely understand the end; how can he commence playing until he knows what he is playing for? It is like starting athletes on a race, ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... one of them tell it, as I have said, not heralded by any master of ceremonies but as though it arose out of the warmth of the fire before which his knotted hands would chance to be; not a thing learned by rote, but told differently by each teller, and differently according to his mood, yet never has one of them dared to alter its salient points, there is none so base among the Company of Milkmen. The Company of Powderers for the Face know of this story and have envied ...
— Tales of Wonder • Lord Dunsany
... fruyt is ever lenger the wers Till it be rote in mullok or in stree— We olde men, I drede, so fare we, Till we be roten, ...
— The plant-lore & garden-craft of Shakespeare • Henry Nicholson Ellacombe
... in her class learn texts, and are questioned to see if they thoroughly understand the subject. On our asking whether the children answered the questions from what they had learnt by heart, she replied, "No; it would be of no use, you know, for the dear children to repeat merely by rote; we want the great truths of the gospel ...
— Memoir and Diary of John Yeardley, Minister of the Gospel • John Yeardley
... pen; I hate my stool; What am I but a nerveless tool? But we did not work by rote or rule When I counted socks ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. CLVIII, January 7, 1920 • Various
... retired a Space, I know not whither, but methinks he walked hastilie to and fro. Thus I remained, agonized in Tears, unable to recal one Word of the humble Appeal I had pondered on my Journey, or to have spoken it, though I had known everie Syllable by Rote; yet not wishing myself, even in that Suspense, Shame, and Anguish, elsewhere than where I was cast, ...
— Mary Powell & Deborah's Diary • Anne Manning
... as far as the Square, Mr. Starr," she replied, as if she were repeating by rote a ...
— The Romance of a Plain Man • Ellen Glasgow
... vndecent things, and in short poemes vttered pretie merry conceits, and these men were called Epigrammatistes. There were others that for the peoples good instruction, and triall of their owne witts vsed in places of great assembly, to say by rote nombers of short and sententious meetres, very pithie and of good edification, and thereupon were called Poets Mimistes: as who would say, imitable and meet to be followed for their wise and graue lessons. There was another kind of poeme, inuented onely to make ...
— The Arte of English Poesie • George Puttenham
... Rite to me and Cissy rite off. Why aint you done it? It's so long since you rote any. Mister Recketts ses you dont care any more. Wen you rite send your fotograff. Folks here ses I aint got no big bruther any way, as I disremember his looks, and cant say wots like him. Cissy's kryin' all along of it. I've got a hedake. William Walker make it ake by a blo. ...
— Under the Redwoods • Bret Harte
... capacity," repeated Oliver, with unfeigned surprise: "why, you know, I get by rote slower than ...
— Tales And Novels, Volume 1 • Maria Edgeworth
... old feller ane noos ov that godfussakn sun ov mine hopn they ma find you as they leave me at present wich i av the lumbeigo vere Bad and no Go the doctor ses bob wot you no was in the ninth lansers he dide comen home so ive only fred left out of the ate. I rote to im fore munths agorne, but no anser, no doubt becos i cum to london soon arter, so ...
— The Lord of the Sea • M. P. Shiel
... in "Historia Santa," that is, various of the larger boys arose to spout at full gallop and the distinct enunciation of an "El" train, the biblical account of the creation of the world, the legends of Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, and Noah's travels with a menagerie, all learned by rote. The entire school then arose and ...
— Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras - Being the Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond • Harry A. Franck
... youth, who seems preternaturally keen, swears that on Thirteenth Street between Fifth Avenue and University Place the woman stopped and spoke to him; and he tells his story as though it were learned by rote. ...
— The Man in Court • Frederic DeWitt Wells
... satisfactorily, or give, or seem to feel, the point of contrast between the must and no must, the compulsion and no compulsion. In fact, the whole of it is usually mouthed out, without much reference to Shylock or the play, as if it had been learned by rote from a school speech-book. Hazlitt says, in his Characters of Shakspeare's Plays, 'The speech about mercy is very well, but there are a ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 75, April 5, 1851 • Various
... a syllable; and next, that those from the same quarter of the town should march in good order through the streets to the school of the harp-master, naked, and in a body, even if it were to snow as thick as meal. Then again, their master would teach them, not sitting cross-legged, to learn by rote a song, either "pallada persepolin deinan" or "teleporon ti boama" raising to a higher pitch the harmony which our fathers transmitted to us. But if any of them were to play the buffoon, or to turn any quavers, like these difficult turns the present artists make after the manner of Phrynis, he ...
— The Clouds • Aristophanes
... attend—the Legal School under the Old Dispensation, the Ecclesiastical School under the New—it has been taken for granted that he can neither discern what is true, nor desire what is good. The truth of things has therefore been formulated for him, and he has been required to learn it by rote and profess his belief in it, clause by clause. His duty has also been formulated for him, and he has been required to perform it, detail by detail, in obedience to the commandments of an all-embracing Code, or to the ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes
... the sombre and dank chapel, smelling like stagnant water, and without saying rosaries mechanically, or repeating prayers by rote, he fell into a reverie, endeavouring to look somewhat clearly into his life, and take stock of himself. And while he thus pulled himself together, far-off voices came behind the grating, drew nearer and nearer, ...
— En Route • J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans
... The night wind came softly in, soothing her with a touch like a mother's, in its grateful coolness. The air seemed full of half-vibrations, sub-noises, that crowded it as completely as do the insect sounds of midsummer; yet she could only distinguish the ripple beneath her feet, and the rote on the distant beach, and the busy wash of waters against every shore and islet of the bay. The mist was thick around her, but she knew that above it hung the sleepless stars, and the fancy came over her that perhaps the whole vast interval, from ...
— Malbone - An Oldport Romance • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... unfortunates. Here they were housed in the most costly manner, the whole work of the establishment being carried on by a highly paid staff of servants and officials. The children were not allowed to do anything at all, beyond the learning by rote of various theories which there was no likelihood of their ever being able to apply to any reality of life with which they would ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson
... attack is made ever so slightly on his flank. Perhaps the greatest disadvantage of this method is that it does not give the student the best kind of training. What he needs most in life is the ability to arrange and present ideas rapidly, not to speak a part by rote. ...
— Elements of Debating • Leverett S. Lyon
... had once formed a part. Nearly always, in answer to my inquiries about his life, the man began, not only willingly, but eagerly, to relate the story of the misfortunes which he had undergone,—which he had learned by rote like a prayer,—and particularly of his former position, in which he ought still to be ...
— The Moscow Census - From "What to do?" • Lyof N. Tolstoi
... comprehended words had however decided him in the part he should take, making him sure that Colet was not controverting the formularies of the Church, but drawing out those meanings which in repetition by rote were well-nigh forgotten. It was as if his course were ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... high school. Indeed, algebra, Caesar, and Greek history were as nearly senseless to Adelle Clark as they could be. They were entirely remote from her life, and nothing of imagination rose from within to give them meaning. She learned by rote, and she had a poor memory. It was much the same, however, with English literature or social science or French, subjects that might be expected to awaken some response in the mind of a girl. The only subject that she really liked was dancing, which ...
— Clark's Field • Robert Herrick
... live by rote and rule; I was not born a slave To narrow fancies; I must feel, although ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... hastily. He seemed to speak by rote. His manner was too eager to suit the impressiveness of his words. "The sheep are without a shepherd," he said. "The young men marry among the Gorgios, or they are lost in the cities and return no more to the tents and the fields ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... and new revelry. The eye was kindled: and the blessed sign No more to keep me wond'ring and suspense, Replied: "I see that thou believ'st these things, Because I tell them, but discern'st not how; So that thy knowledge waits not on thy faith: As one who knows the name of thing by rote, But is a stranger to its properties, Till other's tongue reveal them. Fervent love And lively hope with violence assail The kingdom of the heavens, and overcome The will of the Most high; not in such sort As man prevails o'er man; but conquers it, Because 't ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri
... to cause education to be concerned with any but one or two of the subjects which are included by Western peoples under that designation. It became at an early age, and remained for many centuries, a rote-learning of the elementary text-books, followed by a similar acquisition by heart of the texts of the works of Confucius and other classical writers. And so it remained until the abolition, in 1905, of the old competitive examination ...
— Myths and Legends of China • E. T. C. Werner
... avoidance. The whole class male subsists by fetching and carrying bays, grasping at notes and scraps, if any great name be to them; run wild after verses in MS.; fond of autographs. The females carry albums; some learn bon mots by rote, and repeat them like parrots; others do not know a good thing when they meet with it, unless they are told the name of the cook. Some relish them really, but eat till they burst; others, after cramming to stupidity, would cram you from their pouch, as the monkey served Gulliver on ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. IX - [Contents: Harrington; Thoughts on Bores; Ormond] • Maria Edgeworth
... im Prisma die Strahlen von grsserer Wellenlnge rascher fortpflanzen als die von kleinerer. Ein solches farbiges Spaltbild nennt man Spektrum. Das weisse Licht besteht aus einem Gemisch von unendlich vielen Strahlen verschiedener Farbe. Das rote Licht ist am wenigsten, das ...
— German Science Reader - An Introduction to Scientific German, for Students of - Physics, Chemistry and Engineering • Charles F. Kroeh
... themselves to be shaken out of their ordinary routine by the gravity of such a crisis as this; the living work of Jehovah is to them a sealed book; their piety does not extend beyond the respect they show for certain human precepts learnt by rote. ...
— Prolegomena to the History of Israel • Julius Wellhausen
... old, and under the dominion of a very learned tutor, who taught them Latin, Greek and Hebrew, alternately with an equally precise, stiff old esquire, who trained them in martial exercises, which seemed to be as much matters of rote with them as their tasks, and to be quite as uninteresting. It did not seem as if they ever played, or thought of playing; and if they were ever to be gay, witty Frenchmen, a wonderful change must come ...
— The Chaplet of Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... by Her suitor's faith declared and gaged, When blest with that release desired, First doubts if truly she is free, Then pauses, restlessly retired, Alarm'd at too much liberty; But soon, remembering all her debt To plighted passion, gets by rote Her duty; says, 'I love him!' yet The thought half chokes her in her throat; And, like that fatal 'I am thine,' Comes with alternate gush and check And joltings of the heart, as wine Pour'd from a flask of narrow neck. Is he indeed her ...
— The Angel in the House • Coventry Patmore
... other fires, and from inflaming brotherly love will proceed to raise that of a gallant. If we inspect into the usual process of modern courtship, we shall find it to consist in a devout turn of the eyes, called ogling; an artificial form of canting and whining, by rote, every interval, for want of other matter, made up with a shrug, or a hum; a sigh or a groan; the style compact of insignificant words, incoherences, and repetitions. These I take to be the most accomplished rules of address to a mistress; and ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... altogether irresistible. But he piques himself upon being polished above the natives of any other country by his conversation with the fair sex. In the course of this communication, with which he is indulged from his tender years, he learns like a parrot, by rote, the whole circle of French compliments, which you know are a set of phrases ridiculous even to a proverb; and these he throws out indiscriminately to all women, without distinction in the exercise of that kind of address, which is here distinguished by the name of ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... sign to remind him of Johnnie's presence; but the child came forward. 'Grandpapa, he told me to tell you something,' and, with eyes bent on the ground, the little fellow repeated the words like a lesson by rote. ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Saxon poetrie, most liberall endowed with wisdome, fortitude, justice, and temperance, departed this life;"[243] and right well did he deserve this eulogy, for as an old chronicle says, he was "a goode clerke and rote many bokes, and a boke he made in Englysshe, of adventures of kynges and bataylles that had bene wne in the lande; and other bokes of gestes he them wryte, that were of greate wisdome, and of good learnynge, thrugh whych bokes many a man may him amende, that well ...
— Bibliomania in the Middle Ages • Frederick Somner Merryweather
... raptness as of yore, And opening New Year's Day Wove it by rote as theretofore, And went on working evermore In his ...
— Time's Laughingstocks and Other Verses • Thomas Hardy
... the Fair the other day, while the three Englishmen hammered away in vain at Brother Jonathan Herring's. The Englishmen represented brute force. The Germans had been trained to appreciate principle. The Englishman "knows his business by rote and rule of thumb"—science, which would "teach him to do in an hour what has hitherto occupied him two hours," "is in a manner forbidden to him." To this cause the "Times" attributes the falling off of English workmen in comparison with those of ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... said; and the drawn face had lightened at the words to which Rachel's oracles declared that people attached crude or arbitrary meanings; and now she hardly knew what they conveyed to her, and longed, as for something far away, for the reality of those simple teachings—once realities, now all by rote! Saved by faith! What was faith? Could all depend on a last sensation? And as to her life. Failure, failure through headstrong blindness and self-will, resulting in the agony of the innocent. Was this ground of hope? She tried to think of ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Gordon has risked another perfectly good yellow-back in the mail. He'll ruin the morals of the mail clerks (I rote that word 'mail' wrong before) if he keeps on. Know how I seen the yellow-back in the letter? I punched a hole with a pin in the crease of the envelope at each end. Squeeze the sides of the envelope together a little and then squint through from one hole to ...
— A Little Miss Nobody - Or, With the Girls of Pinewood Hall • Amy Bell Marlowe
... the great mass of writers followed one another so servilely,—they wrote so much by rote, and so little from experience or real knowledge, that all seemed cold and formal, uninteresting and unprofitable. It was a rare thing to come across a writer that touched the heart, ...
— Modern Skepticism: A Journey Through the Land of Doubt and Back Again - A Life Story • Joseph Barker
... weariness in his tone! I could scarcely interpret it. Was he talking by rote, or was he utterly done with life and all its interests? No one besides myself seemed to note this strange passivity. To the masses he was no longer a suffering man, but an individual from whom information was to be got. The next question was ...
— The Filigree Ball • Anna Katharine Green
... agent for you pills in thiS Setlement but th as iS Several agent round her and tha ar interfer With mee eSpeSly William a StavSon he liveS her at enfield he Wanted mee to giv him one of you Sur klerS So he Wod be agent but i Wodent let hi m hav hit an he rote to you i SupoSe an haS got a Suplye of pillS an ar aruning a gant mee he iS Sell ing them at 20 centS a box i Want you to St op ...
— History of the Comstock Patent Medicine Business and Dr. Morse's Indian Root Pills • Robert B. Shaw
... string as you press a button and—presto—the magic harmonics appear! They are a simple and natural result of the proper application of scientific principles; and the sooner the student learns to form and combine harmonics himself instead of learning them by rote, the better will he play them. Too often a student can give the fingering of certain double harmonics and cannot use it. Of course, harmonics are only a detail of the complete mastery of the violin; but mastery of all details leads ...
— Violin Mastery - Talks with Master Violinists and Teachers • Frederick H. Martens
... ribaldry is learned by rote, And beastly Skelton heads of houses quote: One likes no language but the 'Faery Queen'; A Scot will fight for 'Christ's ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... as sounds, which usually served instead of reasons on the like occasions. Not but that these words, and the like, have very proper significations in which they may be used; but there being no natural connexion between any words and any ideas, these, and any other, may be learned by rote, and pronounced or writ by men who have no ideas in their minds to which they have annexed them, and for which they make them stand; which is necessary they should, if men would speak intelligibly even to ...
— An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume II. - MDCXC, Based on the 2nd Edition, Books III. and IV. (of 4) • John Locke
... it either teaches and inspires or it comforts and consoles, save when a strict sense of duty compels it to severity: briefly, it is keen and guiding and creative. Let the young beginner learn by rote what one master says of another:—"He was never provoked into coarseness: his thrusts were made with the rapier according to the received rules of fence, he firmly upheld the honour of his calling, and in the exercise of it was uniformly ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... gentlemen, I confess, also, that I don't like those schools, even though the instruction given in them be gratuitous, where those sweet little voices which ought to be heard speaking in very different accents, anathematise by rote any human being who does not hold what is taught there. Lastly, I do not like, and I did not like some years ago, cheap distant schools, where neglected children pine from year to year under an amount of neglect, want, and youthful misery far too sad even to be glanced ...
— Speeches: Literary and Social • Charles Dickens
... words of Keats that are a joyful viaticum for the walker: get these by rote in some membrane ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... the Dance begins. Our guilty parents fly before the flaming sword,—poor Eve cowering, and her hair streaming in a wavy flood upon the wind; and before them, but unseen, Death leaps and curvets to the sound of a vielle or rote,—an old musical stringed instrument,—which he has hung about his neck. His glee, as he leads forth his victims into the valley where his shadow lies, is perceptible in every line of his angular anatomy; his very toes curl up like those of a ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 17, March, 1859 • Various
... she was speaking by rote, and was not surprised that Agatha said, "That is just what one has heard so often, and what Miss Merrifield harped upon! I want to breathe in a fresh atmosphere beyond the old traditions, and know ...
— Modern Broods • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... deal; Juliet and Belvidera scarcely anybody can do ill, but Euphrasia I thought few people could do well, and I feared I was not one of them. Moreover, the language is at once so poor and so bombastic that I took double the time in getting the part by rote I should have taken for any part of Shakespeare's. My dress was beautiful; I think I will tell it you. You know you told me even an account of hat and feathers would interest you. My skirt was made immensely full and with a long train; it was of white merino, almost as fine as cashmere, ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... facts, knowledge of nature, knowledge of the true aspects of the world we live in,—these seem to us of first importance. After that, we prize next reasonable and reasoning goodness; for mere rule-of-thumb goodness, which comes by rote, and might so easily degenerate into formalism or superstition, has no honour among us, but rather the contrary. If any one were to say with us (after he had passed his first infancy) that he always did ...
— The British Barbarians • Grant Allen
... back and look up your book, Sandip Babu. You are getting your words all wrong. That's just the trouble with trying to repeat things by rote." ...
— The Home and the World • Rabindranath Tagore
... condited in vinegar, salt, sugar, or sweet wine, and so keeping all the yeare long; any hearbes, fruit, or flowers in pickle; also pickle it selfe. Fr. compote, stewed fruit. The Recipe for Compost in the Forme of Cury, Recipe 100 (C), p.49-50, is "Take rote of p{er}sel. pasternak of rases. scrape hem and waische he{m} clene. take rap{is} & caboch{is} ypared and icorne. take an erthen pa{n}ne w{i}t{h} clene wat{er}, & set it on the fire. cast all ise {er}inne. whan ey buth boiled, cast ...
— Early English Meals and Manners • Various
... indifference to action, striving to enlighten stupidity, and labouring to soften obstinacy; and whose very powers of intellect have been confounded by hearing the same dull lesson repeated a hundred times by rote, and only varied by the various blunders of the reciters. Even the flowers of classic genius, with which his solitary fancy is most gratified, have been rendered degraded, in his imagination, by their connexion with tears, with errors, and with punishment; so that the Eclogues of Virgil and ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... All their friends did wish it. There were many reasons why it should be done. If talking could have done it, his talking was good enough. Though his words were in truth cold, and affected, and learned by rote, they did not offend her; but his face offended her; and the feeling was strong within her that if she yielded, it would soon be close to her own. She couldn't do it. She didn't love him, and she wouldn't do it. Priscilla would not grudge her her share out of ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope
... this obligation of his subordinates, and the urgency of its strict observance. But it had no effect whatever, and the poor-class villagers were only taught to gabble off the christian doctrine by rote, for it suited the friar to stimulate that peculiar mental condition in which belief precedes understanding. The school-teacher, being subordinate to the inspector, had no voice in the matter, and was compelled to follow the views of the priest. Few Spaniards took the trouble to learn ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... sometimes by learning just enough of a language to translate into it some of the main Church formulas; sometimes by getting the help of others to patch together some pious teachings to be learned by rote; sometimes by employing interpreters; and sometimes by a mixture of various dialects, and even by signs. On one occasion he tells us that a very serious difficulty arose, and that his voyage to China was delayed because, among ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... a sinner, but would rather that he should be converted and live. The beautiful prayers in the Liturgy, were explained to them in a manner suitable to their different capacities; consequently, they were not repeated by rote, as is too frequently the case, where the same attention is not paid. Mr. and Mrs. Bernard took unremitted pains with their children, and felt themselves amply rewarded by their conduct; for though, like other human beings, they were fallible, and, consequently, ...
— Domestic pleasures - or, the happy fire-side • F. B. Vaux
... knew ate leaf one due sew tear buy lone hare night clime sight tolled site knights maid cede beech waste bred piece sum plum e'er cent son weight tier rein weigh heart wood paws through fur fare main pare beech meet wrest led bow seen earn plate wear rote peel you berry flew know dough groan links see lye bell great aught foul mean seam moan knot rap bee wrap not loan told cite hair seed night knit made peace in waist bread climb heard sent sun some air tares rain way wait threw fir hart pause would pear fair mane lead meat rest scent ...
— The Art Of Writing & Speaking The English Language - Word-Study and Composition & Rhetoric • Sherwin Cody
... earthquake. If the young men boast their knowledge of the ledges and sunken rocks, I speak of pilots, who knew the wind by its scent and the wave by its taste, and could have steered blindfold to any port between Boston and Mount Desert, guided only by the rote of the shore; the peculiar sound of the surf on each island, beach, and line of rocks, along the coast. Thus do I talk, and all my auditors grow wise, while ...
— The Village Uncle (From "Twice Told Tales") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... astronomy, and it was the first class. I was particularly struck with the very clear manner in which the lad under examination replied to the questions put to him, and I began to suspect it was merely something he had learnt by rote; but the professor dodged him about in such a heartless manner with his "whys" and his "wherefores," his "how do you knows" and "how do you proves," that I quite trembled for the victim. Vain fears on my part; nothing could put him ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... "harvest home," the daytale-men and household servants were enjoying themselves over massive pewter quarts foaming over with strong beer, that the subject of the evening's conversation at last turned upon the fairies of the neighbouring hill, and each related his oft-told tale which he had learned by rote from the lips of some parish grandame. At last the senior of the mirthful party proposed to a youthful mate of his, who had dared to doubt even the existence of such creatures, that he durst not go to the hill, mounted on his master's best palfrey, and call aloud, at ...
— Notes and Queries, Issue No. 61, December 28, 1850 • Various
... would that I had more learning for your sake, and I shall be jealous of them, that I shall, when I find that you can read off out of any book you have got as smoothly as you do the verses you have learned by rote. Oh, you will be ...
— Won from the Waves • W.H.G. Kingston
... will never so far forsake the traditions of his tribe as to stay long in any one place. His mind is not as ours. A little of our civilisation we can teach him, and he will learn it, as he may learn to repeat by rote the signs of the zodiac or the multiplication table, or to use a table napkin, or to decorously dispose of the stones in a cherry tart. But the lesson sits lightly on him, and he remains in heart as irreclaimable as ever. Already, indeed, our Gipsies are leaving us. They are not dying out, ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... Forgive me, if from present things I turn To speak what in my heart will beat and burn, And hang my wreath on his world-honored urn. Nature, they say, doth dote, And cannot make a man 155 Save on some worn-out plan, Repeating us by rote: For him her Old-World mould aside she threw, And, choosing sweet clay from the breast Of the unexhausted West, 160 With stuff untainted shaped a hero new, Wise, steadfast in the strength of God, and true. How beautiful to see Once more a shepherd of mankind indeed, Who loved ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell
... with a gravity of countenance not surpassed by their grandfathers. Thus initiated they are qualified to deliver an opinion in public at a time of life when an English schoolboy could scarcely return an answer to a question beyond the limits of his grammar or syntax, which he has learned by rote. It is not a little unaccountable that this people, who hold the art of speaking in such high esteem, and evidently pique themselves on the attainment of it, should yet take so much pains to destroy the organs of speech in filing down and otherwise disfiguring their ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... melancholy, enquiring mind. This has been ever his favourite Book. He would have bought it had it been double the price. And as he possesses an uncommonly retentive memory, he us'd to repeat great part of it by rote in his walks with his Brothers. He afterwards ...
— An Essay on War, in Blank Verse; Honington Green, a Ballad; The - Culprit, an Elegy; and Other Poems, on Various Subjects • Nathaniel Bloomfield
... "Josephus, a Lad of Palestine;" he thumbed once more the high-colored text-cards which no boy wanted but no boy liked to throw away, because they were somehow sacred; he was tortured by the stumbling rote of thirty-five years ago, as in the vast Zenith church ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis
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