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More "Sapient" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... an ocean, 'way out yonder (As all sapient people know), Is the land of Wonder-Wander, Whither children love to go; It's their playing, romping, swinging, That give great joy to me While the Dinkey-Bird goes singing In ...
— A Nonsense Anthology • Collected by Carolyn Wells
... attempt on summer eve to count What dogs and beggars haunt the Pincian Mount. All Tuzzi's frauds, all Coco's falsehoods tell, And all the Beckers[1] all the rogues shall sell; How many sick some sapient quack at Rome Helps—not to England, but their longer home;[2] How many Couriers forge the scoundrel tale; How many Maids their mistress' fame assail; How many English girls, by foreign arts Seduced, have smiled on needy ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 367, May 1846 • Various
... lugged the commander in chief of the cutpurses by the throat, that sapient soothsayer that was playing off his pranks with his match the ...
— The Old Man of the Mountain, The Lovecharm and Pietro of Abano - Tales from the German of Tieck • Ludwig Tieck
... ungrateful to the good physician, the man of skill can avenge himself very easily by throwing the vervain into water; for as the root absorbs the moisture once more, the tumour will return. The same sapient writer recommends you, if you are troubled with pimples, to watch for a falling star, and then instantly, while the star is still shooting from the sky, to wipe the pimples with a cloth or anything that comes to hand. ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... women, the Committee reply that all just governments exist by the consent of the governed. An old truism. We reply, women have given no such consent, and therefore are not bound to allegiance. But our sapient Legislators say, since there are two hundred thousand women in Massachusetts twenty-one years of age, and only two thousand who sign this petition, therefore it is fair to suppose that the larger part of the women of the State have consented to the present form of government. ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... other compounds. The harp, flageolet, and first violin, had prudently abstained from drinking—at their own expense, and had reserved their thirstiness for the benefit of the bibicals of the "founder of the feast," and, consequently, had only attained that peculiar state of sapient freshness which invariably characterises quadrille bands after supper, and had, therefore, overlooked the rapid obfuscation of their more imprudent companion in ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... herring he holds the scales, my sapient brother," cried the fat man. "But I pray you, good youth, to tell us whether you are a learned clerk, and, if so, whether you have studied at Oxenford or ...
— The White Company • Arthur Conan Doyle
... middle of the seventeenth century it occurred to the sapient mind of one Puseygur, a native of Bayonne, in France, that it would be a grand thing to have a sharp point on which to receive an advancing adversary after one had missed him, or the fizzling matchlock had failed to go off. The weapon devised was a sharp-bladed knife, ...
— Broad-Sword and Single-Stick • R. G. Allanson-Winn
... used to be, In pride of plume, where plumy Death had trod, Trailing their gorgeous velvets wantonly, Most unmeet pall, over the holy sod; There, gentle stranger, thou may'st only see Two sombre Peacocks. Age, with sapient nod Marking the spot, still tarries to declare How they once lived, ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... So about eight in the morning Juan left home with about three pesos' worth of pork, full of many a hopeful expectation. After having wandered through many streets, he noticed that a big horse-fly was following him with an imploring murmur. Imagining that the fly wanted to buy meat, this sapient vender said to it, "Do you want to buy meat?" The fly answered with a "buzzzzz." For Juan this was a sufficient answer: so he left one-third of the pork with the fly, saying that he was coming back again for his pay. Next he met a hungry and greatly-abused pig, and he asked it if it wanted to ...
— Filipino Popular Tales • Dean S. Fansler
... dog and the horse in your argument? They've got no prehensile organ that ever I heard of, and yet they're universally allowed to be the cleverest and most intelligent of all earthly quadrupeds.' True, O most sapient and courteous objector. I grant it you at once. But observe the difference. The cleverness of the horse and the dog is acquired, not original. It has probably arisen in the course of their long hereditary intercourse and companionship with man, the cleverest and most ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... voluble and bold, now hid, now seen, Among thick-woven arborets, and flowers Imbordered on each bank, the hand of Eve: Spot more delicious than those gardens feigned Or of revived Adonis, or renowned Alcinous, host of old Laertes' son; Or that, not mystick, where the sapient king Held dalliance with his fair Egyptian spouse. Much he the place admired, the person more. As one who long in populous city pent, Where houses thick and sewers annoy the air, Forth issuing on a ...
— Paradise Lost • John Milton
... that one can not believe "in the tameness of a wolf, a horse's health, a boy's love, or a whore's oath." Then Lear imagines he is judging his daughters. "Sit thou here, most learned justicer," says he, addressing the naked Edgar; "Thou, sapient sir, sit here. Now, you she foxes." To this Edgar says: "Look where he stands and glares! Wantest thou eyes at trial, madam?" "Come o'er the bourn, Bessy, to ...
— Tolstoy on Shakespeare - A Critical Essay on Shakespeare • Leo Tolstoy
... attributing Lady Juliana's agitation entirely to surprise. The word operated like a charm; all were ready to admit that it was a surprising thing when heard for the first time. Miss Jacky remarked that we are all liable to be surprised; and the still more sapient Grizzy said that, indeed, it was most surprising the effect that surprise had upon some people. For her own part, she could not deny but that she was very often frightened when ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier
... it was neither from you nor Mary Taylor, my only correspondents. Having opened and read it, it proved to be a declaration of attachment and proposal of matrimony, expressed in the ardent language of the sapient young Irishman! Well! thought I, I have heard of love at first sight, but this beats all. I leave you to guess what my answer would be, convinced that you will not do me the injustice of guessing ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... live, alas! of heaven-directed mien, Of cultured soul, and sapient eye serene, Who hail thee, Man! the pilgrim of a day, Spouse of the worm, and brother of ...
— The World's Best Poetry — Volume 10 • Various
... introduces a rope to pull the boat across. You say that a rope is forbidden; and he then falls back on the use of a current in the stream. I once thought I had carefully excluded all such tricks in a particular puzzle of this class. But a sapient reader made all the people swim across without using the boat at all! Of course, some few puzzles are intended to be solved by some trick of this kind; and if there happens to be no solution without the trick it is perfectly legitimate. We have to use our ...
— The Canterbury Puzzles - And Other Curious Problems • Henry Ernest Dudeney
... out in the sapient and good-natured stage of intoxication, and, the door being opened, I was confronted by a rough bar and a smoking, blazing kerosene lamp without a chimney. This is the worst place I have put up at as to ...
— A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains • Isabella L. Bird
... subjected in almost every instance. 'Nothing by which we can be known.' 'Then I am afraid to undertake the publication.' We presumed timidly to suggest that every writer must have a beginning, and that to refuse to publish for him until he had acquired a name, was to imitate the sapient mother who cautioned her son against going into the water until he could swim. 'An old joke—a regular Joe!' exclaimed our companion, tossing off another bumper. 'Still older than Joe Miller,' was our reply; 'for, if we mistake not, it is the very first anecdote in the facetiae of Hierocles.' ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... as yet," replied the Cardinal-Bishop with a sapient smile. "Nor is there any restriction upon the inspiration, political as well as spiritual, which the American Government draws from Rome—an inspiration much more potent, I think, than our Protestant brethren ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... Bloom knew what they were. He knew they were the "wilde-honden," very absurdly named by sapient naturalists "Hyena venatica," or "hunting hyena," and by others, with equal absurdity, the "hunting dog." I pronounce these names "absurd," first because the animal in question bears no more resemblance to a hyena than it does to a hedgehog; and, ...
— The Bush Boys - History and Adventures of a Cape Farmer and his Family • Captain Mayne Reid
... apple-woman in a grimy English town left her basket, with all her stock-in-trade, outside in the street while she went into a church to commune with her heavenly friends; the conversation between a sapient publican, a friendly constable and a group of dubious bona fide travellers—such things were materials for his insight or his fancy or his delightful humour. Often when he returned in the evening full of his day's observations one wished there had ...
— Irish Fairy Tales • Edmund Leamy
... the very time, when the presumption against the revivication of poetry shall have attained the appearance of absolute certainty, to witness a Tenth Avatar of Genius—and to witness its effect, too, upon the sapient personages who had been predicting that it ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... prodigal expenses, and the economy which has been introduced by the virtuous and sapient Assembly, make amends for the losses sustained in the receipt of revenue. In this at least they have fulfilled the duty of a financier.—Have those who say so looked at the expenses of the National Assembly itself? of the municipalities? of the city of Paris? of the increased pay of the ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... "Who, O thou sapient, saintly bird! Thy shouted warnings ever heard Unbleached by fear? The blue-faced blubbering imp, who steals Yon turnips, thinks thee at ...
— Citation and Examination of William Shakspeare • Walter Savage Landor
... not a Joe Miller joke, but one of actual and recent occurrence; although there is a similar story fathered on a sapient civic authority. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 334 Saturday, October 4, 1828 • Various
... there's nothing TO her," said the sapient Miss Thornton. "No. You'll be doing that work in a few months, and getting forty. So come along to the big ...
— Saturday's Child • Kathleen Norris
... cobwebs Death and Eternity sate glaring." "How will this look in the Universe," he asks, "and before the Creator of Man?" When someone in his old age challenged him with the question, "Who will be judge?"—(it is curious how every sapient inanity strikes, as on an original idea, on the notion that opinions differ, and therefore—apparently, if their thought has any consequence—are as good one as another)—Who will be judge? "Hell fire will be judge," said Carlyle, "God Almighty will be the judge ...
— The Jesus of History • T. R. Glover
... gave a clearer if more circumscribed view of the surface—green countryside, veined by rivers and wrinkled with mountains; little towns that were mere dots; a scatter of white clouds. Nothing that looked like roads. There had been no native sapient race on this planet, and in the thirteen centuries since it had been colonized the Terro-human population had never completely lost the use of contragravity vehicles. In that screen, farther down, the four destroyers, Irma, ...
— A Slave is a Slave • Henry Beam Piper
... sapient precept dropped oracularly from his lips, a word at a time, his figure faded and turned pale. With the last word he had passed out ...
— The Man-Wolf and Other Tales • Emile Erckmann and Alexandre Chatrian
... "the determined campaigners" if he had only knit the issue with them in a fair and square fight. This, however, was the thing of all others he wished to avoid. Perhaps if he could have foreseen how barren in any alternative policy his sapient critics were to be he might have acted otherwise, but the credit is due to him of making dissension impossible by leaving no second party ...
— Ireland Since Parnell • Daniel Desmond Sheehan
... immediate neighbourhood of prehistoric remains. In the Chinese Encyclopaedia we are told that the 'lightning stones' have sometimes the shape of a hatchet, sometimes that of a knife, and sometimes that of a mallet. And then, by a curious misapprehension, the sapient author of that work goes on to observe that these lightning stones are used by the wandering Mongols instead of copper and steel. It never seems to have struck his celestial intelligence that the Mongols ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... more I rais'd my brow, I spied the master of the sapient throng, Seated amid the philosophic train. Him all admire, all pay him rev'rence due. There Socrates and Plato both I mark'd, Nearest to him in rank; Democritus, Who sets the world at chance, Diogenes, With Heraclitus, and Empedocles, And Anaxagoras, and Thales sage, Zeno, and Dioscorides ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri
... a Drouet, interested to praise. There she heard a different voice, with which she argued, pleaded, excused. It was no just and sapient counsellor, in its last analysis. It was only an average little conscience, a thing which represented the world, her past environment, habit, convention, in a confused way. With it, the voice of the people was truly the voice ...
— Sister Carrie • Theodore Dreiser
... Sally," cried the sapient waiter. "Don't you see that his dress is military? Look at his black cap, with its long bag and great feather, and the monstrous sword at his side; look at them, and then if you can, say I am mistaken in deciding that he is some great ...
— Thaddeus of Warsaw • Jane Porter
... Greece! and so it goes on transfusing itself from clime to clime, in ever new and higher forms, until man is developed. Well, was there ever such stuff concocted before? I almost hear the bray of that donkey, who originated in a flower. And pray, most sapient self! what is nature? It seems now, to me, a form, a mere dead incubus of matter. And could this inert tangible matter, sublimate in its hard, dead bosom, an essence so subtle, as to be freer of the bonds of time and space? At such a preposterous suggestion even a donkey might bow his ears with ...
— Words of Cheer for the Tempted, the Toiling, and the Sorrowing • T. S. Arthur
... with propriety, and as my fair countrywomen are generally willing to listen to good counsel, no matter how remote the period from which it is derived, I cannot resist giving them the benefit of some of the recommendations of the sapient poet to the Parisian belles, some of which are certainly highly commendable. The verses were written by a monk, ...
— How to Enjoy Paris in 1842 • F. Herve
... river, finding gold all the way, but not in quantities sufficiently large to warrant working. At the place, however, which they subsequently named Chihuahua (pronounced in the vernacular Chee-waw-waw) the perspicacious Jones had given it as his opinion, formed after mature deliberation and a sapient examination of some two or three shovelsful of dirt, that there was a satisfactory "color in that ar bank." Some hard work of about a week demonstrated that there were excellent diggings there, and then ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 86, February, 1875 • Various
... fuller-flavoured? It is we stay-at-home British birds that really keep the insects down. I know that insect eggs do not appear in our poor dissected gizzards. How should they? How would you recognize their remains, O sapient sparrow-shooters? But they are there, for all that. Those blessed with eyes can see us hunting for them in the fallen leaves, among the garbage, in the ...
— "Wee Tim'rous Beasties" - Studies of Animal life and Character • Douglas English
... village church "sung like a tuning-fork." The noises have occurred simultaneously with earthquakes in other parts of the country, and afterward rocks have been found moved from their bases and cracks have been discovered in the earth. One sapient editor said that the pearls in the mussels in Salmon and ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... which occasionally appeared in the political horizon, and had thereby obtained a powerful ascendency in the council, pressed his fat chin into furrows, and his narrow brow into wrinkles, and, with reflection in his little eyes, assured his sapient brethren that "This distinguished stranger was nothing else than a secret envoy of his imperial majesty, who was come into Germany to observe attentively the situation, the comparative strength, the disagreements, and the alliances, of the various states and princes; so that ...
— Faustus - his Life, Death, and Doom • Friedrich Maximilian von Klinger
... on, packed them up in a brazen vessel, and cast them into the sea. But James, "our English Solomon," "imported by his book all that were flying about Europe, to plague the country, which was sufficiently plagued already in such a sovereign." This sapient ruler, who, it is said, "taught divinity like a king, and made laws like a priest," in the first year of his reign made it felony to suckle imps, &c. This statute, which was repealed March 24th, 1736, describes offences declared ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... Swing, sapient young person, walked casually to the window and watched Luke Tweezy cross the street to Calloway's store. Then he returned to Racey's table. Racey turned his tousled head sidewise and whispered from a corner of his mouth, "Help me out to Tom Kane's stable. ...
— The Heart of the Range • William Patterson White
... the plant itself it has developed into a great and increasing industry and its culture become a source of wealth unprecedented in agricultural history. Could the sapient James I. and his successors the Stuarts, now look upon this cherished production of the world, they would discover a commercial prosperity connected with those nations which have fostered and encouraged ...
— Tobacco; Its History, Varieties, Culture, Manufacture and Commerce • E. R. Billings
... of liberal ones The head, with long red blades; Through feats of testy men, And a chief with his foes. Woe be to them, the fools, When revenge comes on them. I Taliesin, chief of bards, With a sapient Druid's words, Will set kind Elphin free From haughty tyrant's bonds. To their fell and chilling cry, By the act of a surprising steed, From the far distant North, There soon shall be an end. Let neither grace nor health Be to Maelgwn Gwynedd, ...
— The Mabinogion • Lady Charlotte Guest
... truth," said the damsel; "but I think from this on I shall have no need of any prompting, and I shall bring my true story safe into port, and here it is. The king my father, who was called Tinacrio the Sapient, was very learned in what they call magic arts, and became aware by his craft that my mother, who was called Queen Jaramilla, was to die before he did, and that soon after he too was to depart this life, and I was to be left an orphan without father or mother. But all this, he declared, ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... The sapient Thomas Heywood gravely goes on to inform us, that all these things actually came to pass. Upon Richard III he is ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... beauty of virtue; but if Nature has bestowed on them any point of courage, subtlety, or activity, they make use of it for the satisfaction of their fleshly pleasure and the accomplishment of their lusts. And the sapient Metrodorus believes that this should be so, for he says: "All the fine, subtle, and ingenious inventions of the soul have been found out for the pleasure and delight of the flesh, or for the hopes of attaining to it and enjoying it, and every act which tends ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... and bargain with me," said Gotzkowsky with a hoarse laugh. "You take me for a chapman, who measures out his life and services by the yard; and you wish to pay me for mine by the same measure. Go, most sapient gentlemen; I carry on a wholesale trade, and do not cut off yards. That I leave to ...
— The Merchant of Berlin - An Historical Novel • L. Muhlbach
... black and white; some stipulating that their clothes or other treasures should be burnt with them, others that their graves should be watched by particular servants, or their monuments crowned with flowers;—sapient end to a life of sapience! 'Of their doings in this world,' said he, 'you may form some idea from their injunctions with reference to the next. These are they who will pay a long price for an entree; whose floors are sprinkled ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... hermit Peter, to whose sapient heart High Heaven his secrets opens, tells and shews, Your messengers direct can to that part, Where of the prince they shall hear certain news, And learn the way, the manner, and the art To bring him back ...
— Jerusalem Delivered • Torquato Tasso
... appeared to suit him. The first did not dazzle him; but as to the second, he did not conceal from himself the imperfections of a provincial education which he should have to unmake, but this was no serious objection to his sapient conjugal pedagogy. ...
— The Deputy of Arcis • Honore de Balzac
... took the matter up: he re-established all that had been done by his illustrious predecessor, and endowed a number of professorial chairs—especially in chemistry, wherein he was himself an ardent student and sapient expert—and kindred sciences, and founded scholarships or apprenticeships ...
— The Tragedies of the Medici • Edgcumbe Staley
... I may not condone, and, though abhorring the Kaiser and my mother's compatriots for their share in that horror going on abroad, I can also pity the hot-headed, imperfect mere man going to war under a carefully incited and fostered misapprehension, and need no longer glorify the cool-headed, sapient policy which so ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... not accustomed to see. Evidently, it was neither from you nor Mary, my only correspondents. Having opened and read it, it proved to be a declaration of attachment and proposal of matrimony, expressed in the ardent language of the sapient young Irishman! I hope you are laughing heartily. This is not like one of my adventures, is it? It more nearly resembles Martha's. I am certainly doomed to be an old maid. Never mind. I made up my mind to that fate ever since I ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte - Volume 1 • Elizabeth Gaskell
... behold your light, your star, Ye would be dupes and victims and ye are. Is it enough? or, must I, while a thrill Lives in your sapient ...
— The Deerslayer • James Fenimore Cooper
... fall in love with Rose? Why did not he, O most sapient senate of womanhood? why did not your brother fall in love with that nice girl you know of, who grew up with you all at his very elbow, and was, as everybody else could see, just the ...
— Pink and White Tyranny - A Society Novel • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... butt made an ass of himself. He maundered and wandered, and stopped, and went on, and lost one thread and took up another, and got into a perfect maze. And while he was thus entangled, a servant came in and brought him a note, and put it in his hand. The unhappy narrator received it with a sapient nod, but was too polite, or else too stupid, to open it, so closed his fingers on it, and went maundering on till his story trickled into the sand of the desert, and somehow ceased; for it could not be said to end, being a thing without head ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various
... harder reading than the Gospels. My difficulties are quite different from those which enabled the learned curiosity of the German mind to achieve one of its most unforgettable triumphs. It is a long while since I, like all other young scholars, enjoyed with all the sapient laboriousness of a fastidious philologist the work of the incomparable Strauss.[5] At that time I was twenty years old: now I am too serious for that sort of thing. What do I care for the contradictions of "tradition"? How can any one call pious legends "traditions"? The histories ...
— The Antichrist • F. W. Nietzsche
... and after morning service a group of men gathered about the church porch to discuss the events of the night before. In the evening the parlor of the Flying Horse was full of dalespeople, and many a sapient theory was then and there put forth to account for the extraordinary coincidence of the presence of Paul Ritson at the fire and his alleged departure ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine
... streets of Charleston, rows of greedy vultures, with sapient look, sit on the parapets of the houses, watching for offal. These birds are great blessings in warm climates, and in Carolina a fine of ten dollars is inflicted for wantonly destroying them. They appeared to be quite conscious of their privileges, and sailed ...
— An Englishman's Travels in America - His Observations Of Life And Manners In The Free And Slave States • John Benwell
... he thus far sacrificed his time to the Muses, he would, if the truth must be spoken, have been much better pleased had the pious or sapient apothegms, as well as the historical narratives, which these various works contained, been presented to him in the form of simple prose. And he sometimes could not refrain from expressing contempt of the 'vain and unprofitable art of poem-making', in which, he said,'the only one who had excelled ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... the lovers of the marvellous had not appeared in the country side within the memory of that sapient individual—the ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest
... the gentler sex, bad feminine manners. Just now he sees the man's side of the shield, a few years later he will see the woman's side also. He ungallantly concludes "to lead the 'single life,' and not," as he puts it, "trouble myself about the ladies." A most sapient conclusion, considering that this veteran misogynist was but sixteen years old. During the year following the publication of this article, he plied his pen with no little industry—producing in all fifteen articles on a variety of topics, such as "South American Affairs," "State Politics," ...
— William Lloyd Garrison - The Abolitionist • Archibald H. Grimke
... excellent Robert, that, by some hocus-pocus which I do not exactly comprehend, myself, I have introduced a wheel within a wheel, a letter within a letter, a play within a play, after the manner of the old dramatists; and I beg you to make a note that the foregoing admonitions and most sapient counsels are not addressed to you. You are something of a philosopher; but you are not, like Mr. Stephen Duck, "something of a philosopher and something of a poet"; for I do not believe, O fortunate youth, that you ever invoked the ten ladies minus one in your life; and I ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... be easier for him than to go, as Insie had said to him at least a score of times, and mind his own business, and shake off the dust—or the mud—of his feet at such strangers? But, alas! he had tried it, and could shake nothing, except his sad and sapient head. How deplorably was he altered from the Pet that used to be! Where were now his lofty joys, the pleasure he found in wholesome mischief and wholesale destruction, the high delight of frightening all the world ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... understand, in consequence, that all the hotels are furnished in the same way, and that bonbons, extraits, &c. are not to be procured, is like the proceeding of the Hon. Frederick de Roos, R. N. who affirms, in his sapient work on the United States, that all the inhabitants in Philadelphia take tea on the steps before their doors in summer evenings, because, forsooth, he saw a family sitting on those of the house in which they lived, in order to enjoy a ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... other seeds Which in their turn are doing just the same. But if we see what raving nonsense this, And that a man may laugh, though not, forsooth, Compounded out of laughing elements, And think and utter reason with learn'd speech, Though not himself compounded, for a fact, Of sapient seeds and eloquent, why, then, Cannot those things which we perceive to have Their own sensation be composed as well Of intermixed ...
— Of The Nature of Things • [Titus Lucretius Carus] Lucretius
... more difficult to analyse than specialisation of work—a specialisation of sentiment, habits and morals, which makes people supremely sapient within a narrow sphere which they have appropriated, and so limited as to be blind in the broad field of ethics which lies outside their special ken. And yet it is through these groups, keen-eyed in one direction, blind in others, that the intellect, the reforming ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... human or tangible enemy. They constituted an important part of the popular belief! for the history of ghosts and fairies, and omens, was, in general, the only kind of lore in which the people were educated; thanks to the sapient traditions ...
— The Dead Boxer - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... Cambridge, was in truth comparing Columbia with my dream of Oxford and Cambridge, to her disadvantage. I was capable of saying to myself: "All this is terribly new. All this lacks tradition." Criticism fatuous and mischievous, if human! It would be as sapient to imprison the entire youth of a country until it had ceased to commit the offense of being young. Tradition was assuredly not apparent in the atmosphere of Columbia. Moreover, some of her architecture was ugly. On the other hand, some of it was beautiful ...
— Your United States - Impressions of a first visit • Arnold Bennett
... than to find and create new ones, whereas in the sixty years that lie between Bach's death and Wagner's birth the whole form and content, the very stuff, of music was changed. In 1750 he would have been a daring and extraordinarily sapient being who prophesied that within forty years Mozart's G minor Symphony would be written. Between Bach and Wagner is a great gulf set, a gulf bridged by Emanuel Bach, Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven; between ourselves and Mendelssohn there is no such chasm and certainly no such list ...
— Wagner • John F. Runciman
... primitive-looking sling; and a huge Goliath decorated with a militia belt and sword, and a spear like a weaver's beam indeed, enchained everybody's attention. Even the peccant schoolmaster and his pretended letters were forgotten, while the sapient Goliath, every time that he raised the spear, in the energy of his declamation, to thump upon the stage, picked away fragments of the low ceiling, which fell conspicuously on his great shock of black hair. At last, with the crowning threat, up went the ...
— The Best American Humorous Short Stories • Various
... had it back. I watched her listening very suspiciously to Professor Crooklyn. My dear, it is her passion to foretell disasters—her passion! And when they are confirmed, she triumphs, of course. We shall have her domineering over us with sapient nods at every trifle occurring. The county will be unendurable. Unsay it, my Middleton! And don't answer like an oracle because I do all the talking. Pour out to me. You'll soon come to a stop and find the want ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... from such conditions needs not to be enlarged upon; it is at once obvious, and probably gave rise to the following sapient remark by a globe-trotting author, which I took from a ...
— China and the Chinese • Herbert Allen Giles
... own, the sapient jurymen exchanged glances several times during the evidence of the last two witnesses, and shook their heads, while one man began to make notes on the sheet of paper before him with a very scratchy pen, whereupon ...
— The Bag of Diamonds • George Manville Fenn
... town by the citation of a peculiarity of which King Jamie put to shame the boastings of the Southrons as to the superior magnitude of English towns. "I have a town," quoth the sapient James, "in my ancient kingdom of Scotland, whilk is sae lang that at ane end of it a different language is spoken from that whilk prevails at the other." To this day the monarch's words are true; one end of Nairn is Gaelic, the other Sassenach. Here we obtain a considerable accession of ...
— Camps, Quarters, and Casual Places • Archibald Forbes
... ensued, until the citizens of Caracas quietly deposed the chief Colonial authorities, and appointed a Junta Suprema to administer affairs in the name of Ferdinand VII. Intelligence of this step, however, was received with great alarm by the sapient Junta of Cadiz, and a proclamation was launched, on the 31st of August, 1810, declaring the Province of Caracas in a state of rigorous blockade. A war of manifestoes ensued, until the Provinces became enlightened as to their own importance and strength, and published, on the 5th of July, 1811, ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 3, No. 16, February, 1859 • Various
... "True, most sapient counsellor, and I will be on my guard. To show how I profit by your sageness, let us drop all thought of this royal maiden who is probably out of my reach, and attend to the other business. It is good to have ...
— Bay State Monthly, Vol. II. No. 5, February, 1885 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... American war; a sapient French statesman, writing from Louisiana to his royal master in Paris, advised the French government to cultivate a close and intimate alliance with the Cherokee Indians, who, occupying as they did the defiles of the Alleghanies, would form a permanent bulwark between ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 1, August 1850 - of Literature, Science and Art. • Various
... its sapient head, shrugged its authoritative shoulders, and sundry criticisms crept into the journals; but the prophet was judged in "his own country"; and home work, according to universal canons, rarely finds favor among home awarding committees, whose ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... <Wise, learned, erudite, sagacious, sapient, sage, judicious, prudent, provident, discreet>. (Compare the distinction between knowledge and wisdom under Words Often ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... however, getting a little time to collect testimony, brought in twelve men who swore that they did not see him take the chickens. "Balance of evidence overwhelmingly in favor of the prisoner," said the sapient justice (in Dutch I suppose,) and finding him innocent in a ratio of six to one, he discharged him ...
— The Humbugs of the World • P. T. Barnum
... at all, it will be about the expiration of the fifth week, although there will be no absolute security in less than the double number of months," After making these remarks, our author reasons himself into the sapient conclusion, that the poison in all rabid animals resides in the saliva, and does not affect any other secretion. "The knowledge that the virus is confined to the saliva," he opines, "will settle a matter that has been the cause of considerable ...
— Delineations of the Ox Tribe • George Vasey
... lay upon Rose the burden of my disappointment last night; and my affection suggests a thousand good reasons for absolving her. Is this wrong? And are we to consider, with the sapient ones of the earth, that our vision is never clear until the day when we no longer have the strength to love, believe and admire? I do not think so. Setting aside the careful judgment which we exercise in the case of our companion for life, it ...
— The Choice of Life • Georgette Leblanc
... Harmony That lead'st th' oblivious soul astray— Though thou sphere-descended be— Hence away!— Thou mightier Goddess, thou demand'st my lay, 5 Born when earth was seiz'd with cholic; Or as more sapient sages say, What time the Legion diabolic Compell'd their beings to enshrine In bodies vile of herded swine, 10 Precipitate adown the steep With hideous rout were plunging in the deep, And hog and devil mingling grunt ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... mention may be made,[Sec.c][Sec.6] Who for the Junta modelled sapient laws, Taught them to govern ere they were obeyed: Certes fit teacher to command, because His soul Socratic no Xantippe awes; Blest with a Dame in Virtue's bosom nurst,— With her let silent Admiration pause!— True ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... were not for the wine and the good cheer which we have had in yonder old man's house, my lord," said this sapient follower, "and that I ken him by report to be a just living man in many respects, and a real Edinburgh gutterblood, I should have been well pleased to have seen how his feet were shaped, and whether he had not a cloven cloot under the ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... but I persisted in not reading my letter in the presence of my friend. A notice on my punctiliousness may be put down to-night in her 'private diary.' I kept the letter in my hand and only read it with those sapient ends of the fingers which the mesmerists make so much ado about, and which really did seem to touch a little of what was inside. Not all, however, happily for me! Or my friend would have seen in my eyes ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... pretty until Jack Holloway turned up with a family of Fuzzies and the claim that they were not just nice little animals, but human. If he was right and the Fuzzies were declared the 9th extrasolar sapient race, there went the Company, charter ...
— Talents, Incorporated • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... seemed now! How the words of diamond thief number two yet burned in his ears: "If you ever get a girl, she'll have a picnic." What did that mean but that women instinctively knew him for one they could hoodwink? Still again, there reverberated the policeman's sapient contribution to his agony: "A man these days and nights wants to know what his women folks are up to." Oh, yes, he had been a fool; he had looked at ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry
... allowed the wisdom of his lady to flow by him like the wind, did not choose to answer this sapient appeal, but observed curtly, that he had some writing to do, and should like, as soon as convenient, to be left to himself. Upon this the lady folded her white gloves spitefully and left the room, tossing her head till the marabouts on each ...
— The Old Homestead • Ann S. Stephens
... this Animal, supercedes the necessity of puffing advertisements or exaggerated bills—that the Sapient Dog is a great curiosity, the Proprietor feels no hesitation in affirming, that his feats of activity are more various and pleasing than any preceding exhibition of a similar nature, all of which will be made manifest to every spectator, by his dexterity and precision in exhibiting ...
— The Olden Time Series, Vol. 4: Quaint and Curious Advertisements • Henry M. Brooks
... straw, stubble—but suffer them to be pitch-forked en masse, and unconsidered: it is their privilege, in common with that of certain others—lightnesses that froth upon the surface of society. Moreover, let me remind your worship's classicality that no one of mortals is sapient at all times. Item, that if friend Flaccus be not a calumniator, even the rigid virtue of the antiquer Cato delighted in so stimulant a vanity as wine hot. So give the colt his head, and let it go: remembering always that this same colt, as straying without a responsible rider, ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... the philanthropist moved away less lightsome than he had come, leaving the discomfited misanthrope to the solitude he held so sapient. ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... Monarchy," published in 1651, he had inserted an hieroglyphical plate, representing on one side persons in winding sheets digging graves; and on the other a large city in flames. After the great fire some sapient member of the legislature bethought him of Lilly's book, and having mentioned it in the house, it was agreed that the astrologer should be summoned. Lilly attended accordingly, when Sir Robert Brooke told him the reason of his summons, and called upon him to declare what ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... of blackberry wine as the short cut from poverty to prosperity in Ireland, the scheme being parallel to Mr. Gladstone's famous remedy of jam, this sapient "B.O.N." says:— ...
— About Ireland • E. Lynn Linton
... mentioned Carlotta's needlework. This was undertaken at the sapient instigation of Antoinette, who in her turn, I am sure, neglected the ladle for the scissors, and cast many of her duties upon the silent but sympathetic Stenson. Carlotta herself delighted in these preparations. ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... with patriarch pride elate, Burst forth triumphant at a scene so great; Here springs indeed the day, since time began, The brightest, broadest, happiest morn of man. In these prime settlements thy raptures trace The germ, the genius of a sapient race, Predestined here to methodise and mould New codes of empire to ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow
... student is of course aware that in most languages a question is frequently equivalent to a negative, as in this sentence. A sapient critic, to whom I have more than once alluded, was pleased to honour me with the following profound remark on the reading given in the original, viz.—"There is a slip here in Forbes's edition, as well as the ...
— Bagh O Bahar, Or Tales of the Four Darweshes • Mir Amman of Dihli
... hen's throat with the most heartfelt satisfaction, as he grinned and exclaimed, by way of answer to its screams, "Poor feller! I guess I wouldn't hurt you for de world;" I could not help thinking with Leibnitz, that most sapient of philosophers, that this is the ...
— A Ramble of Six Thousand Miles through the United States of America • S. A. Ferrall
... seen Among thick-wov'n Arborets and Flours Imborderd on each Bank, the hand of Eve: Spot more delicious then those Gardens feign'd Or of reviv'd Adonis, or renownd 440 Alcinous, host of old Laertes Son, Or that, not Mystic, where the Sapient King Held dalliance with his faire Egyptian Spouse. Much hee the Place admir'd, the Person more. As one who long in populous City pent, Where Houses thick and Sewers annoy the Aire, Forth issuing on a Summers Morn, to breathe Among the pleasant Villages and Farmes ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... woefully lacking in practice and the knowledge of Western humankind was one of the great menaces to effective personnel. Fortunately this particular report came into the hands of the Chief, who happened to be touring in the West. A fuller investigation exposed to the sapient experience of that able man the gullibility of the inspector. From the district a brief statement was issued upholding the ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White
... the river, finding gold all the way, but not in quantities sufficiently large to warrant working. At the place, however, which they subsequently named Chihuahua (pronounced in the vernacular Chee-waw-waw) the perspicacious Jones had given it as his opinion, formed after mature deliberation and a sapient examination of some two or three shovelsful of dirt, that there was a satisfactory "color in that ar bank." Some hard work of about a week demonstrated that there were excellent diggings there, and then work was commenced upon it in good earnest. The cabin was built, Gentleman Dick's ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 86, February, 1875 • Various
... beheld, Who Tarquin chas'd, Lucretia, Cato's wife Marcia, with Julia and Cornelia there; And sole apart retir'd, the Soldan fierce. Then when a little more I rais'd my brow, I spied the master of the sapient throng, Seated amid the philosophic train. Him all admire, all pay him rev'rence due. There Socrates and Plato both I mark'd, Nearest to him in rank; Democritus, Who sets the world at chance, Diogenes, With Heraclitus, and Empedocles, And Anaxagoras, and ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... You say that a rope is forbidden; and he then falls back on the use of a current in the stream. I once thought I had carefully excluded all such tricks in a particular puzzle of this class. But a sapient reader made all the people swim across without using the boat at all! Of course, some few puzzles are intended to be solved by some trick of this kind; and if there happens to be no solution without the trick it is perfectly legitimate. We have to use our best judgment as ...
— The Canterbury Puzzles - And Other Curious Problems • Henry Ernest Dudeney
... Oxonia herself. We do not cut our wise teeth in a day; some people, indeed, are so unfortunate as never to cut them at all; at the best, two months is but a brief space in which to get through this sapient teething operation, a short time in which to graft our cutting on the tree of Wisdom, more especially when the tender plant happens to be a Verdant Green. The golden age is past when the full-formed goddess of Wisdom sprang from the brain of Jove complete in all her parts. If our Vulcans ...
— The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green • Cuthbert Bede
... in contact; and while they attract more admirers than they know what to do with, are seldom very fortunate in their selection, or happy in their eventual lot. Miss Bruce was one of these witches, far more mischievous than the old conventional hags we used to burn under the sapient government of our first Stuart, and she knew a deal better than any old woman who ever mounted a broom-stick the credulity of her victims, the dangerous power of her spells. These she had lately been using freely. It was time to turn their ...
— M. or N. "Similia similibus curantur." • G.J. Whyte-Melville
... not a Drouet, interested to praise. There she heard a different voice, with which she argued, pleaded, excused. It was no just and sapient counsellor, in its last analysis. It was only an average little conscience, a thing which represented the world, her past environment, habit, convention, in a confused way. With it, the voice of the people was truly ...
— Sister Carrie • Theodore Dreiser
... not restricted, as yet," replied the Cardinal-Bishop with a sapient smile. "Nor is there any restriction upon the inspiration, political as well as spiritual, which the American Government draws from Rome—an inspiration much more potent, I think, than our Protestant ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... It was this sapient pair that received Cowperwood in the old General's absence, first in Mr. Du Bois's room and then in that of Mr. MacDonald. The latter had already heard much of Cowperwood's doings. Men who had been connected ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... and sapient Frenchman, the remedy lies in the direction you have pointed out; but we have doubts if you have fully discovered its nature, or are prepared to apply it in its necessary extent. The husband must make the wife the companion of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various
... fifteen she said of him, in her adoring way: "Oh! he has a great mind." And, naturally enough, she only acknowledged Blaise to be a necessary lieutenant, a humble assistant, one whose hand would execute the sapient young master's orders. The latter, to her thinking, was now so strong and so handsome, and he was so quickly reviving the business compromised by the father's slow collapse, that surely he must be on the high-road to prodigious wealth, ...
— Fruitfulness - Fecondite • Emile Zola
... of the seventeenth century it occurred to the sapient mind of one Puseygur, a native of Bayonne, in France, that it would be a grand thing to have a sharp point on which to receive an advancing adversary after one had missed him, or the fizzling matchlock had failed to go off. The weapon devised ...
— Broad-Sword and Single-Stick • R. G. Allanson-Winn
... books which offer me harder reading than the Gospels. My difficulties are quite different from those which enabled the learned curiosity of the German mind to achieve one of its most unforgettable triumphs. It is a long while since I, like all other young scholars, enjoyed with all the sapient laboriousness of a fastidious philologist the work of the incomparable Strauss.[5] At that time I was twenty years old: now I am too serious for that sort of thing. What do I care for the contradictions of "tradition"? How can any one call pious legends "traditions"? The histories ...
— The Antichrist • F. W. Nietzsche
... of heaven-directed mien, Of cultured soul, and sapient eye serene, Who hail thee Man!—the pilgrim of a day, Spouse of the worm, and brother of the clay, Frail as the leaf in autumn's yellow bower, Dust in the wind, or dew upon the flower, A friendless slave, a child without a sire. * * * * * Are these the pompous tidings ye proclaim, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various
... say; how about the dog and the horse in your argument? They've got no prehensile organ that ever I heard of, and yet they're universally allowed to be the cleverest and most intelligent of all earthly quadrupeds.' True, O most sapient and courteous objector. I grant it you at once. But observe the difference. The cleverness of the horse and the dog is acquired, not original. It has probably arisen in the course of their long hereditary intercourse and ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... done his best to unravel a very difficult case. That he had not succeeded was the fault of the case and not of Mr Inspector, and for his part, he thought that the thanks of the Beorminster citizens were due to the efforts of so zealous and intelligent an officer as Tinkler. This sapient speech reduced the recalcitrant Jobson to silence, but he still held to his opinion that the over-confident Tinkler had bungled the matter, and in this view he was silently but heartily supported by ...
— The Bishop's Secret • Fergus Hume
... householder had to rekindle the fire on his hearth by means of a light taken from the bonfire. Strange to say, this salutary measure had no effect whatever in staying the cattle-plague, and seven years later the sapient Joh. Koehler himself was burnt as a witch. The farmers, whose pigs and cows had derived no benefit from the need-fire, perhaps assisted as spectators at the burning, and, while they shook their heads, ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer
... as the sapient woman had conjectured. Shortly before nine she took up position against the railings in a dark patch that marked the middle point between two lamps, some doors above 506. No tremor agitated her form; in action this woman ...
— Once Aboard The Lugger • Arthur Stuart-Menteth Hutchinson
... to whose sapient heart High Heaven his secrets opens, tells and shews, Your messengers direct can to that part, Where of the prince they shall hear certain news, And learn the way, the manner, and the art To bring him back to these thy warlike crews, ...
— Jerusalem Delivered • Torquato Tasso
... when he makes one of his people express praise of another. Look at those speeches in Coriolanus. Such niggardly persons, in their detraction of Henry Irving, are prompt to declare that he is a capital stage manager but not a great actor. This has an impartial air and a sapient sound, but it is gross folly and injustice. Henry Irving is one of the greatest actors that have ever lived, and he has shown it over and over again. His acting is all the more effective because associated with unmatched ability ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... came out in the sapient and good-natured stage of intoxication, and, the door being opened, I was confronted by a rough bar and a smoking, blazing kerosene lamp without a chimney. This is the worst place I have put up at as to food, lodging, and general character; ...
— A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains • Isabella L. Bird
... watched her listening very suspiciously to Professor Crooklyn. My dear, it is her passion to foretell disasters—her passion! And when they are confirmed, she triumphs, of course. We shall have her domineering over us with sapient nods at every trifle occurring. The county will be unendurable. Unsay it, my Middleton! And don't answer like an oracle because I do all the talking. Pour out to me. You'll soon come to a stop and find the want of reason in the want of words. I assure you that's true. Let me have a good gaze ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... John fall in love with Rose? Why did not he, O most sapient senate of womanhood? why did not your brother fall in love with that nice girl you know of, who grew up with you all at his very elbow, and was, as everybody else could see, just the proper ...
— Pink and White Tyranny - A Society Novel • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... evangelists. "This," says he plaintively, "it will be admitted, is going a little too far, as nothing else but four holes could be the result of a ring and cross combined." At Phillack, in the west of Cornwall, there is part of a coped stone having a rude cable mounting along the top of the ridge. Two sapient young archaeologists counted the remaining notches of this cable, and, finding they came to thirty-two, decided at once that they represented our Lord's age! They were quite certain, having counted them twice. In fact, ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... Petit Picpon, with a sapient nod that spoke volumes. "He always does something when he thinks promotion is coming—something to get himself out of its way, do you see? And the reason is this: 'tis a good zig, and loves you, and will not be put over your head. 'Me rise afore him?' said the zig to me once. ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... Nancy again," and the big black sun-bonnet nodded with sapient significance. "Send ...
— A Maid of the Silver Sea • John Oxenham
... the foul fiend bites his back. At this the fool remarks that one can not believe "in the tameness of a wolf, a horse's health, a boy's love, or a whore's oath." Then Lear imagines he is judging his daughters. "Sit thou here, most learned justicer," says he, addressing the naked Edgar; "Thou, sapient sir, sit here. Now, you she foxes." To this Edgar says: "Look where he stands and glares! Wantest thou eyes at trial, madam?" "Come o'er the bourn, Bessy, to ...
— Tolstoy on Shakespeare - A Critical Essay on Shakespeare • Leo Tolstoy
... in your favour, you are bound by our bargain; and if it be given against you, you are bound by the decision of the jurors.' The pupil, however, was equal to the occasion, and rebutted the dilemma as follows. 'Most sapient master, whatever be the issue of this suit, I shall not pay you what you claim: for, if the verdict be given in my favour, I am absolved by the decision of the jurors; and, if it be given against me, I am absolved by our bargain.' The jurors are said to have been so puzzled ...
— Deductive Logic • St. George Stock
... compatriots for their share in that horror going on abroad, I can also pity the hot-headed, imperfect mere man going to war under a carefully incited and fostered misapprehension, and need no longer glorify the cool-headed, sapient policy which so ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... appear at all, it will be about the expiration of the fifth week, although there will be no absolute security in less than the double number of months," After making these remarks, our author reasons himself into the sapient conclusion, that the poison in all rabid animals resides in the saliva, and does not affect any other secretion. "The knowledge that the virus is confined to the saliva," he opines, "will settle a matter that has been the cause of ...
— Delineations of the Ox Tribe • George Vasey
... lead him back very soon to his "governing method, ignorance"—an ignorance "strong and generous, and that yields nothing in honour and courage to knowledge; an ignorance, which to conceive requires no less knowledge than to conceive [104] knowledge itself"—a sapient, instructed, shrewdly ascertained ignorance, suspended judgment, doubt everywhere.—Balances, very delicate balances; he was partial to that image of equilibrium, or preponderance, in things. But was there, after all, so much as preponderance anywhere? To Gaston there was a kind of fascination, ...
— Gaston de Latour: an unfinished romance • Walter Horatio Pater
... delightful. The one is the best type of Manx seaman, a true son of the sea, full of wise saws and proverbs, full of long yarns and wondrous adventures, up to anything, down to anything, pragmatical, a mighty moralist in his way, but none the less equal to a round ringing oath; a sapient adviser putting on the airs of a philosopher, but as simple as the baby of a girl—in a word, dear old Tom Baynes of "Fo'c's'le Yarns," old salt, old friend, old rip. The other type is that of the Manx parish patriarch. This good soul it would be ...
— The Little Manx Nation - 1891 • Hall Caine
... Rouen, (sapient clime) Two villagers, whose wives were in their prime, And rather pleasing in their shape and mien, For those in whom refinement 's scarcely seen. Each looker-on conceives, LOVE needs not greet Such humble wights, as ...
— The Tales and Novels, Complete • Jean de La Fontaine
... mistakes his love of novelty for wisdom. He would break his head against a wall, this obstinate King of Rome, while I crept safely through a mouse-hole. Walls are not so easily battered down as he supposes; but mouse-holes abound everywhere, as this sapient king will find out some of these days. It was much easier for us to creep into Bavaria with the help of the lovely Josepha, than to flourish our sword in her brother's face. He has not long to live, and we shall come peacefully in possession ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... such extensive service; none of the other corps having volunteered to go farther than their military district, Wilts, Hants, and Dorset. One of these wiseacres exclaimed, in very boisterous language, against accepting the offer, and for this sapient reason—"because," as he said, "two hundred men out of one parish had volunteered to march to any part of the kingdom to hazard their lives in the defence of their country, provided they were commanded ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 2 • Henry Hunt
... Juliana's agitation entirely to surprise. The word operated like a charm; all were ready to admit that it was a surprising thing when heard for the first time. Miss Jacky remarked that we are all liable to be surprised; and the still more sapient Grizzy said that, indeed, it was most surprising the effect that surprise had upon some people. For her own part, she could not deny but that she was very often frightened ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier
... read my compositions to them,' said Percy. 'Pallas acts sapient judge to admiration, and Puss never commits herself, applauding only her own music—like other critics. We ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... comparing Columbia with my dream of Oxford and Cambridge, to her disadvantage. I was capable of saying to myself: "All this is terribly new. All this lacks tradition." Criticism fatuous and mischievous, if human! It would be as sapient to imprison the entire youth of a country until it had ceased to commit the offense of being young. Tradition was assuredly not apparent in the atmosphere of Columbia. Moreover, some of her architecture was ugly. On the other hand, some of it was beautiful to the point of nobility. ...
— Your United States - Impressions of a first visit • Arnold Bennett
... kingdom all the demons that he could lay his hands on, packed them up in a brazen vessel, and cast them into the sea. But James, "our English Solomon," "imported by his book all that were flying about Europe, to plague the country, which was sufficiently plagued already in such a sovereign." This sapient ruler, who, it is said, "taught divinity like a king, and made laws like a priest," in the first year of his reign made it felony to suckle imps, &c. This statute, which was repealed March 24th, 1736, ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... treat him so. What could be easier for him than to go, as Insie had said to him at least a score of times, and mind his own business, and shake off the dust—or the mud—of his feet at such strangers? But, alas! he had tried it, and could shake nothing, except his sad and sapient head. How deplorably was he altered from the Pet that used to be! Where were now his lofty joys, the pleasure he found in wholesome mischief and wholesale destruction, the high delight of frightening all the ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... she would miss her, empty as the house would be without her. Nannie Slade Hunter, though she disapproved, was too deeply engulfed in the real business of life to be much concerned over the vagaries of a just-about-to-be-engaged girl, and Martin Wetherby, coached, Jane knew, by the sapient father of the Teddy-bear, was presently able to translate her exodus into something very soothing to his own piece of mind. Jane could watch his mental processes as easily as she could watch the ...
— Jane Journeys On • Ruth Comfort Mitchell
... born in Greece! and so it goes on transfusing itself from clime to clime, in ever new and higher forms, until man is developed. Well, was there ever such stuff concocted before? I almost hear the bray of that donkey, who originated in a flower. And pray, most sapient self! what is nature? It seems now, to me, a form, a mere dead incubus of matter. And could this inert tangible matter, sublimate in its hard, dead bosom, an essence so subtle, as to be freer ...
— Words of Cheer for the Tempted, the Toiling, and the Sorrowing • T. S. Arthur
... something different. The Terran Federation is a government of and for—if occasionally not by—all sapient peoples of all races. The Federation Constitution guarantees equal rights to all. Making slaves of people, human or otherwise, is a direct blow at everything the Federation stands for. No wonder they kept hunting fifteen years ...
— Four-Day Planet • Henry Beam Piper
... Is not the project an excellent one? Is it not worthy of the sapient Doctor Clifton? Shall I lose reputation, think you, ...
— Anna St. Ives • Thomas Holcroft
... advice as to the conduct ladies ought to observe who wished to act with propriety, and as my fair countrywomen are generally willing to listen to good counsel, no matter how remote the period from which it is derived, I cannot resist giving them the benefit of some of the recommendations of the sapient poet to the Parisian belles, some of which are certainly highly commendable. The verses were written by a monk, whose name I ...
— How to Enjoy Paris in 1842 • F. Herve
... unsanctioned, proved too weak To bind the roving appetite, and lead Blind nature to a God not yet revealed. 'Tis Revelation satisfies all doubts, Explains all mysteries, except her own, And so illuminates the path of life, That fools discover it, and stray no more. Now tell me, dignified and sapient sir, My man of morals, nurtured in the shades Of Academus, is this false or true? Is Christ the abler teacher, or the schools? If Christ, then why resort at every turn To Athens or to Rome for wisdom short Of man's occasions, when in Him reside Grace, knowledge, ...
— The Task and Other Poems • William Cowper
... of his satanic majesty under the influence of a cold, and receiving, as he enters, the usual deprecation on such occasions. I rather suspect that the adventures of Punch, and his fickle lady, who are always attended by a dancing demon, have afforded the materials for this sapient observation. ...
— The Stranger in France • John Carr
... with the angel's command, she at once returned to her lord, as the holy spirit-messenger of God 2295 bade her, in sapient speech. Thus was Ismael born to Abraham, even when he had [lived] 86 winters in the world. The son grew and flourished, as the angel, the 2300 true minister of peace, had promised to the ...
— Genesis A - Translated from the Old English • Anonymous
... can score pretty heavily nowadays by being a "psychologist." All the most disagreeable people I know are psychologists, notably ——, who breaks his promises and throws all his friends to the wolves, but who can still explain everything in his sapient way by saying he ...
— My War Experiences in Two Continents • Sarah Macnaughtan
... a much inferior man being coupled by some sapient review as "biographers,"—"Those two joined!" he exclaimed. "You can't plough with an ox and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... what they were. He knew they were the "wilde-honden," very absurdly named by sapient naturalists "Hyena venatica," or "hunting hyena," and by others, with equal absurdity, the "hunting dog." I pronounce these names "absurd," first because the animal in question bears no more resemblance to a hyena than it does to a ...
— The Bush Boys - History and Adventures of a Cape Farmer and his Family • Captain Mayne Reid
... back into his cast-off skin. I have breathed this free, exhilarating, vitalizing atmosphere, and the convention-laden air of Paris would stifle me. I have written to my father and announced that I propose remaining in Charleston. That is not all: he forbade my studying law in Paris, because his sapient Breton neighbors would have been scandalized by a viscount's taking so sensible a step; but possibly I may prepare myself for the bar at this distance, without subjecting my father to the annoyance of their ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... joined in offering the telegraph to the Government for the paltry sum of $100,000. But the Administration of that day seems to have been stricken with unaccountable blindness, for the Postmaster-General, that same wise and sapient Cave Johnson who had sought to kill the telegraph bill by ridicule in the House, and in despite of his acknowledgment to Morse, reported: "That the operation of the Telegraph between Washington and Baltimore had not satisfied him that, under any ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume II • Samuel F. B. Morse
... possession of Nanking still invested the Taepings. Without that city they would have been nothing but a band of brigands, who could easily have been dispersed. With it they could claim the status of a separate dynasty. Yet the capture of Nanking was put off until the last act of all. These sapient leaders, whose military knowledge was antiquated, acted with an indifference to the most obvious considerations, that would have been ludicrous if it had not been a further injury to a suffering people. In 1858 their apathy was such that it ...
— The Life of Gordon, Volume I • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... maundered and wandered, and stopped, and went on, and lost one thread and took up another, and got into a perfect maze. And while he was thus entangled, a servant came in and brought him a note, and put it in his hand. The unhappy narrator received it with a sapient nod, but was too polite, or else too stupid, to open it, so closed his fingers on it, and went maundering on till his story trickled into the sand of the desert, and somehow ceased; for it could not be said to end, being a thing ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various
... I have never seen surpassed anywhere," he complacently recorded in later years. Some one spoke to the elder McAllister of the admirable manner in which his son kept house. "Yes," was the sapient retort. "He keeps everything ...
— Fifth Avenue • Arthur Bartlett Maurice
... usually allowed the wisdom of his lady to flow by him like the wind, did not choose to answer this sapient appeal, but observed curtly, that he had some writing to do, and should like, as soon as convenient, to be left to himself. Upon this the lady folded her white gloves spitefully and left the room, tossing her head till the marabouts on each side of her coiffure trembled like drifting ...
— The Old Homestead • Ann S. Stephens
... Oh, it was just this letter, mamma, from Mr. Sapient, telling me that the Council won't let me go to University College to share the education that can only be had there at a reasonable cost, because the young men would be demoralized ...
— Laura Secord, the heroine of 1812. - A Drama. And Other Poems. • Sarah Anne Curzon
... this glowing mass of colour some three or four feathers of a pheasant's tail are stuck, apparently with no ulterior purpose than that of ornament; but beside the bunch of ribbands there is also fixed a piece of wolf's skin, to give strength to the jaded animal, for, remarks the sapient Pliny, "a wolf's skin attached to a horse's neck will render him proof against all weariness." Personally, we should think a little more consideration and some elementary knowledge of farriery would have been of more ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... of Youth is perverse and foolish," said the goldsmith, as he poured out the tea. "When the voice of Experience and the voice of Wisdom say, 'Eschew cards, abjure dice, avoid men with lumps on their necks and revolvers in their pockets,' sapient Youth says, 'The old man's goin' dotty.' But we shall see. Youth's innings will come, and I bet a fiver—no, no, what am I thinking of?—I stake my honour that Youth's middle stump gets ...
— The Tale of Timber Town • Alfred Grace
... captain of a vessel may be judged By those subordinate to his command, So do I quick conception of thee form. By the broad mental gifts of Seldonskip Who were the hose, through which thy mind doth squirt Most sapient thought, for mankind's betterment. Seldonskip: You bet his wisdom squirts until I feel As if my think tank were about to bust. Francos: Good captain, greatly hast thou honored me And from such worthy source, I doubly feel The compliment were born from honor's ...
— 'A Comedy of Errors' in Seven Acts • Spokeshave (AKA Old Fogy)
... Joe Miller joke, but one of actual and recent occurrence; although there is a similar story fathered on a sapient civic authority. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 334 Saturday, October 4, 1828 • Various
... memory, and certainly it has not been attempted again since. We constantly speak of the "Messiah" as the most popular oratorio ever written; but even in the provinces only selections from it are sung, and in the metropolis the selections are cut very short indeed, frequently by the sapient device of taking out all the best numbers and leaving only those that appeal to the religious instincts of Clapham. I cannot resist the suspicion that but for the words of "He was despised," "Behold, and see," and "I know that my Redeemer liveth," Clapham would have tired of the oratorio ...
— Old Scores and New Readings • John F. Runciman
... Irish apple-woman in a grimy English town left her basket, with all her stock-in-trade, outside in the street while she went into a church to commune with her heavenly friends; the conversation between a sapient publican, a friendly constable and a group of dubious bona fide travellers—such things were materials for his insight or his fancy or his delightful humour. Often when he returned in the evening full of his day's observations one wished there had been a shorthand-writer ...
— Irish Fairy Tales • Edmund Leamy
... midnight, one goes toward Orion and the other toward Hercules; or an Eskimo goes toward Polaris and a Patagonian toward the coal-black hole in the sky near the south pole. Where is your heaven anyhow?" O sapient, sapient questioner! Heaven is above us, you especially; but going in different directions from such a little world as this is no more than a bee's leaving different sides of a bruised pear exuding honey. Up or down he is in the same fragrant garden, warm, light, ...
— Among the Forces • Henry White Warren
... abstained from drinking—at their own expense, and had reserved their thirstiness for the benefit of the bibicals of the "founder of the feast," and, consequently, had only attained that peculiar state of sapient freshness which invariably characterises quadrille bands after supper, and had, therefore, overlooked the rapid obfuscation of their more imprudent companion in their ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... shrewdly at her. "I've learned to look for a particular application when you wear that particularly sapient ...
— Ridgway of Montana - (Story of To-Day, in Which the Hero Is Also the Villain) • William MacLeod Raine
... when he might easily have overborne "the determined campaigners" if he had only knit the issue with them in a fair and square fight. This, however, was the thing of all others he wished to avoid. Perhaps if he could have foreseen how barren in any alternative policy his sapient critics were to be he might have acted otherwise, but the credit is due to him of making dissension impossible by leaving no second party ...
— Ireland Since Parnell • Daniel Desmond Sheehan
... seems they called a caucus wise Of rats of every age and size, And then their dean, With sapient mien, A very Solon of a rat, Said it was best to ...
— The Jingle Book • Carolyn Wells
... follows instantly the doing of evil. Never is conscience louder in her complaints than when she rises from a temporary overthrow. I had discovered every thing to Miss Fairman. I had fatally committed myself. There was no doubt of this; and nothing was left for present consolation but sapient resolutions for the future. Virtuous and fixed they looked in my silent chamber and in the silent hour of night. Morning had yet to dawn, and they had yet to contend with the thousand incitements which our desires are ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - April 1843 • Various
... "Since my sapient sister is so curious, I will confess that once—and only once in my life—I was in dire danger of falling most desperately in love. The frigate was coaling at Palermo, and I went ashore. One afternoon, ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... "Sure!" she said, sapient. "Sure! How could you? But there are other men besides these here—" She waved her hand to ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... Northern papers announce the capture of Wilmington. No doubt the city has fallen, although the sapient dignitaries of this government deem it a matter of policy to withhold such intelligence from the people and the army. And wherefore, since the enemy's papers have a circulation here—at least their items of news are sure ...
— A Rebel War Clerk's Diary at the Confederate States Capital • John Beauchamp Jones
... property of the Church to be touched, and that He who had raised up the Princess Judith for the Hebrews, and Queen Lucretia for the Romans, would keep his most illustrious abbey of Turpenay, and indulged in other equally sapient remarks. But his monks, who—to our shame I confess it—were unbelievers, reproached him with his happy-go-lucky way of looking at things, and declared that, to bring the chariot of Providence to the rescue in time, all the oxen in the province ...
— Droll Stories, Complete - Collected From The Abbeys Of Touraine • Honore de Balzac
... sorrowed over him, till the harsh voice of Rooke summoned him to some menial duty. This discharged, he came running back; and sat on the bench beside his crushed benefactor without saying a word. At last he delivered this sapient speech: "I see. You want to get out ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... of this sapient patrician much has been said, and more has been written, respecting our antipodean empire; though I believe the mass of the English people are still as unacquainted with the characteristics of the colony, and the manners of colonial life, as ...
— Fern Vale (Volume 1) - or the Queensland Squatter • Colin Munro
... lead'st th' oblivious soul astray— Though thou sphere-descended be— Hence away!— Thou mightier Goddess, thou demand'st my lay, 5 Born when earth was seiz'd with cholic; Or as more sapient sages say, What time the Legion diabolic Compell'd their beings to enshrine In bodies vile of herded swine, 10 Precipitate adown the steep With hideous rout were plunging in the deep, And hog and devil mingling grunt and ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... After this sapient speech Poppy bade the Mainwarings good-bye. They looked after her retreating form down the street with many regrets, for they were very fond of her, and Jasmine at least ...
— The Palace Beautiful - A Story for Girls • L. T. Meade
... of Charleston, rows of greedy vultures, with sapient look, sit on the parapets of the houses, watching for offal. These birds are great blessings in warm climates, and in Carolina a fine of ten dollars is inflicted for wantonly destroying them. They appeared to be quite conscious ...
— An Englishman's Travels in America - His Observations Of Life And Manners In The Free And Slave States • John Benwell
... his wisdom-freighted head; when he relates his talk to Peets, the Doc shakes his head sim'lar in sapient yoonison. ...
— Faro Nell and Her Friends - Wolfville Stories • Alfred Henry Lewis
... irresistibly tempted to talk with Susan about her charge, but he felt the impropriety of such a proceeding, and refrained. Not so Gillie White. That sapient blue spider, sitting in his wonted chair, resplendent with brass buttons and brazen impudence, availed himself of every opportunity to perform an operation which he styled "pumping;" but Susan, although ready enough to converse freely on things in general, was judicious in regard ...
— Rivers of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... seen, Among thick-woven arborets, and flowers Imbordered on each bank, the hand of Eve: Spot more delicious than those gardens feigned Or of revived Adonis, or renowned Alcinous, host of old Laertes' son; Or that, not mystick, where the sapient king Held dalliance with his fair Egyptian spouse. Much he the place admired, the person more. As one who long in populous city pent, Where houses thick and sewers annoy the air, Forth issuing on a summer's morn, to breathe Among the pleasant villages ...
— Paradise Lost • John Milton
... and statesman may not have selected the supposed best authorities for his dates, but the sapient critic indulges in a strange admixture of misconception. However, Egyptian chronology is not fully agreed upon, even Manetho and Herodotus differ some 120 years as to the time of Sesostris, and Bishop Warburton, we read, was highly indignant with a scholar, one Nicholas Man, who argued for the identity ...
— Chess History and Reminiscences • H. E. Bird
... steed, unmeet for such a course, Appeared the honoured veteran; but weak seemed man and horse. Then shook their ears the sapient peers,—'That joust will soon be done: My Lord of Brougham, I'll back Fitzball, and give ...
— The Bon Gaultier Ballads • William Edmonstoune Aytoun
... Vulpes mention may be made,[Sec.c][Sec.6] Who for the Junta modelled sapient laws, Taught them to govern ere they were obeyed: Certes fit teacher to command, because His soul Socratic no Xantippe awes; Blest with a Dame in Virtue's bosom nurst,— With her let silent Admiration pause!— True to her second husband and her first: On such unshaken ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... reason of their own, the sapient jurymen exchanged glances several times during the evidence of the last two witnesses, and shook their heads, while one man began to make notes on the sheet of paper before him with a very scratchy pen, whereupon two more immediately caught the complaint, and the foreman regretted to himself ...
— The Bag of Diamonds • George Manville Fenn
... better," said the tutor sarcastically. "Now, will you kindly explain—no, no, don't look at your figures—Will you kindly explain how you arrived at this sapient conclusion?" ...
— Quicksilver - The Boy With No Skid To His Wheel • George Manville Fenn
... King continued to harangue the crowd. Little of what he said could be heard, but he was at a white heat of excitement, and those nearest him were greatly aroused. An officer made a movement to arrest him, but a hasty message from the sapient North restrained that. ...
— The Gray Dawn • Stewart Edward White
... solar heat of the Soudan at that season did not admit of much originality in thought, expression, or act. One of my companions was a veritable modern Sancho Panza, and in one's limp, mental, noontide condition his sapient "instances" were catching. When he left Cairo, as he confided to me, though it was warm enough there, he decided not to buy too thin clothing lest he might catch cold. He therefore purchased articles that even in England would be called woolly and comfortable. Later ...
— Khartoum Campaign, 1898 - or the Re-Conquest of the Soudan • Bennet Burleigh
... "Ah, that is because you haven't seen the past, you haven't studied the effect of European immigration, of the coming of new books, and of the movement of our youth to Europe. Examine and compare these facts. It is true that the Royal and Pontifical University of Santo Tomas, with its most sapient faculty, still exists and that some intelligences are yet exercised in formulating distinctions and in penetrating the subtleties of scholasticism; but where will you now find the metaphysical youth of our days, with their ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... me through these thin cobwebs Death and Eternity sate glaring." "How will this look in the Universe," he asks, "and before the Creator of Man?" When someone in his old age challenged him with the question, "Who will be judge?"—(it is curious how every sapient inanity strikes, as on an original idea, on the notion that opinions differ, and therefore—apparently, if their thought has any consequence—are as good one as another)—Who will be judge? "Hell fire will be judge," said Carlyle, "God Almighty will be the judge now ...
— The Jesus of History • T. R. Glover
... with foreign manufacturers. Our wool was inferior, our looms were inferior, our men knew so little, and demanded such high wages. Then we never could do any thing under the present wretched tariff and the skinning system of taxation. It took all a man could make. Another sapient statesman declared nothing could be done without more money. The contraction had been so great that not a man could do business. Then came a long list of figures to prove what a very little money was left in the country. Newspaper ...
— Hope Mills - or Between Friend and Sweetheart • Amanda M. Douglas
... known." "Then I am afraid to undertake the publication." We presumed timidly to suggest that every writer must have a beginning, and that to refuse to publish for him until he had acquired a name, was to imitate the sapient mother who cautioned her son against going into the water until he could swim. "An old joke—a regular Joe!" exclaimed our companion, tossing off another bumper. "Still older than Joe Miller," was our reply; "for, if we mistake not, ...
— Rejected Addresses: or, The New Theatrum Poetarum • James and Horace Smith
... When these sapient guardians of the peace perceive that as many have been admitted as can possibly be squeezed into the building, they shut the doors; and the process of distribution goes on until the mass is equalized throughout the edifice; a task of no small difficulty, as the portions ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... As erst in Badon's fight, - With Arthur of liberal ones The head, with long red blades; Through feats of testy men, And a chief with his foes. Woe be to them, the fools, When revenge comes on them. I Taliesin, chief of bards, With a sapient Druid's words, Will set kind Elphin free From haughty tyrant's bonds. To their fell and chilling cry, By the act of a surprising steed, From the far distant North, There soon shall be an end. Let ...
— The Mabinogion • Lady Charlotte Guest
... particularly expert in deciphering the meaning of the signs which occasionally appeared in the political horizon, and had thereby obtained a powerful ascendency in the council, pressed his fat chin into furrows, and his narrow brow into wrinkles, and, with reflection in his little eyes, assured his sapient brethren that "This distinguished stranger was nothing else than a secret envoy of his imperial majesty, who was come into Germany to observe attentively the situation, the comparative strength, the disagreements, and the alliances, of the ...
— Faustus - his Life, Death, and Doom • Friedrich Maximilian von Klinger
... extract from an equally sapient proposition, published in the Chinese state-papers on the 14th January, 1840; it is headed, Memorial of Toang Wangyen to the emperor, recommending plans for the extermination of barbarians: "Your minister's opinion is this: that we, being upon shore and ...
— The Expedition to Borneo of H.M.S. Dido - For the Suppression of Piracy • Henry Keppel
... yet burned in his ears: "If you ever get a girl, she'll have a picnic." What did that mean but that women instinctively knew him for one they could hoodwink? Still again, there reverberated the policeman's sapient contribution to his agony: "A man these days and nights wants to know what his women folks are up to." Oh, yes, he had been a fool; he had looked at things from the ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry
... in reply to Chiron, he celebrateth 'the obscure memory of Chaos, and the natures which it contained within itself in a state of perpetual vicissitude; how the heaven had its boundary determined, the generation of the earth, the depth of the ocean, and also the sapient Love, the most ancient, the self-sufficient, with all the beings which he produced when he separated one thing from another.' Which noble passage is more directly to Aristotle's purpose in the first book of his metaphysics ...
— Poetical Works of Akenside - [Edited by George Gilfillan] • Mark Akenside
... exclaimed that he had discovered in the cabin an iron chest, full of money, which surely proved that the "Sampson" had something to do with the French, for "no blasted Yankee ever had iron chests or dollars on board his vessel!" Such conclusive proof as this could not be overlooked by the sapient privateers; and, after a little consultation, they informed Capt. Barney that they would let the ship go, if the money were given to them. As it amounted to eighteen thousand dollars, Capt. Barney looked upon this demand as nothing ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 1 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... hour When the Act's gearing finds its ordered grooves And circles into full utility? The motion of the honourable gentleman Reminds me aptly of a publican Who should, when malting, mixing, mashing's past, Fermenting, barrelling, and spigoting, Quick taste the brew, and shake his sapient head, And cry in acid voice: The ale is new! Brew old, you varlets; ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... me with the sapient reflection that it's a terrible thing to be in love, even if only with ...
— The Fortune Hunter • Louis Joseph Vance
... to arise from such conditions needs not to be enlarged upon; it is at once obvious, and probably gave rise to the following sapient remark by a globe-trotting author, which I took from a newspaper ...
— China and the Chinese • Herbert Allen Giles
... away, and the bell on the village church "sung like a tuning-fork." The noises have occurred simultaneously with earthquakes in other parts of the country, and afterward rocks have been found moved from their bases and cracks have been discovered in the earth. One sapient editor said that the pearls in the mussels in Salmon and Connecticut ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... said Fritz, laughing at this sapient declaration. "However, I assure you, brother mine and most considerate of cooks, I'll not be sorry to have a change of diet from the cold salt pork and biscuit on which we have fared all the ...
— Fritz and Eric - The Brother Crusoes • John Conroy Hutcheson
... be dragged slowly against a moderate wind, but flying machines which conquered the wind and used it as a bird does—had been submitted to the War Office during the last six or seven years, and had been pooh-poohed or pigeon-holed by some sapient permanent official—and now the penalty of stupidity and neglect ...
— The World Peril of 1910 • George Griffith
... breasted the hill together from the North Shore landing-place, Mr. Smith delivered himself of these sapient words, designed, I am sure, to be of real help ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... understand not the justice of the gods, nor revere the beauty of virtue; but if Nature has bestowed on them any point of courage, subtlety, or activity, they make use of it for the satisfaction of their fleshly pleasure and the accomplishment of their lusts. And the sapient Metrodorus believes that this should be so, for he says: "All the fine, subtle, and ingenious inventions of the soul have been found out for the pleasure and delight of the flesh, or for the hopes of attaining ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... inanity behind them in black and white; some stipulating that their clothes or other treasures should be burnt with them, others that their graves should be watched by particular servants, or their monuments crowned with flowers;—sapient end to a life of sapience! 'Of their doings in this world,' said he, 'you may form some idea from their injunctions with reference to the next. These are they who will pay a long price for an entree; whose ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... rather to develop old resources and forms than to find and create new ones, whereas in the sixty years that lie between Bach's death and Wagner's birth the whole form and content, the very stuff, of music was changed. In 1750 he would have been a daring and extraordinarily sapient being who prophesied that within forty years Mozart's G minor Symphony would be written. Between Bach and Wagner is a great gulf set, a gulf bridged by Emanuel Bach, Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven; between ourselves and Mendelssohn there is no such chasm and certainly ...
— Wagner • John F. Runciman
... place, and the secret opposition of the minister to this wish of a man who was one of his firmest supporters and most zealous workers. This, of course, brought down an avalanche of suppositions, flooded with the sapient arguments of the two officials, who sent back and forth to each other a wearisome flood of nonsense. Elisabeth quietly ...
— Bureaucracy • Honore de Balzac
... ago"—and although men part reluctantly with favorite—and lucrative—fallacies, and "Faith, fantastic Faith, once wedded fast to some dear falsehood, hugs it to the last," nevertheless this false belief, like so many other sapient pronouncements of human wisdom, must be subjected ...
— Valere Aude - Dare to Be Healthy, Or, The Light of Physical Regeneration • Louis Dechmann
... entertain the world with a few of her eccentricities some day or other; the ghost of poor Ralph Wewitzer cries loudly for revenge. The sapient police knight, when he secured the box of letters for his patroness, little suspected that they had all been previously copied by lieutenant Terence O'Farellan of the king's own. A mighty inquisitive sort of a personage, who will try his art to do her justice, spite of "leather ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... wine-bearer; minstrels far roaming; Lean are the kine; the bees never humming; Milking-folds void; to the kiln no meat coming; Gaunt every steed; no pert sparrows strumming; Long the night till the dawn; but a glimpse is the gloaming. Sapient Cynfelyn, this was thy summing; "Prudence is Man's surest guide, by ...
— A Celtic Psaltery • Alfred Perceval Graves
... cried Conrad, "have lugged the commander in chief of the cutpurses by the throat, that sapient soothsayer that was playing off his pranks with his match the other ...
— The Old Man of the Mountain, The Lovecharm and Pietro of Abano - Tales from the German of Tieck • Ludwig Tieck
... shook its sapient head, shrugged its authoritative shoulders, and sundry criticisms crept into the journals; but the prophet was judged in "his own country"; and home work, according to universal canons, rarely finds favor among home awarding committees, whose ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... far sacrificed his time to the Muses, he would, if the truth must be spoken, have been much better pleased had the pious or sapient apothegms, as well as the historical narratives, which these various works contained, been presented to him in the form of simple prose. And he sometimes could not refrain from expressing contempt of the 'vain and unprofitable art of poem-making', in which, he said,'the ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... the poems of A.H. Clough, whose chief merit was to die and to offer thereby an occasion for a grave and twilit elegy by Matthew Arnold. Clough's life-work was a continual asking of the question, "Life being unbearable, why should I not die?"—while echo, that commonplace and sapient commentator, mildly answered, "Why?": and this was precisely the impression that I gathered from my initial vista of the Athenaeum ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various
... have just heard that sapient Fred Salisbury declare, in the most civil terms chooseable, that your fraternal preceptor, Edwardus magnus, non est inventus," said Frank, pompously, with a most condescending flourish of his person in the ...
— Louis' School Days - A Story for Boys • E. J. May
... state of health, and tolerably advanced in life, without any very self-evident heir, was obnoxious to the attentions of three distinct litters of cousins, some one or other of whom was constantly 'baying him.' Lotion, though a sapient man, and somewhat grinding in his practice, did not profess to grind old people young again, and feeling he could do very little for the body corporate, directed his attention to amusing Jackey's mind, and anything in the shape ...
— Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour • R. S. Surtees
... stems of hay, straw, stubble—but suffer them to be pitch-forked en masse, and unconsidered: it is their privilege, in common with that of certain others—lightnesses that froth upon the surface of society. Moreover, let me remind your worship's classicality that no one of mortals is sapient at all times. Item, that if friend Flaccus be not a calumniator, even the rigid virtue of the antiquer Cato delighted in so stimulant a vanity as wine hot. So give the colt his head, and let it go: remembering always that ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... Sir Jonas upon Berlin—for he exercises everywhere a sapient observation on men and things—are of dim tumidly insignificant character, reminding us of an extinct Minerva's Owl; and reduce themselves mainly to this bit of ocular testimony, That his Prussian Majesty rides much about, often ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVI. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Ten Years of Peace.—1746-1756. • Thomas Carlyle
... a clearer if more circumscribed view of the surface—green countryside, veined by rivers and wrinkled with mountains; little towns that were mere dots; a scatter of white clouds. Nothing that looked like roads. There had been no native sapient race on this planet, and in the thirteen centuries since it had been colonized the Terro-human population had never completely lost the use of contragravity vehicles. In that screen, farther down, the four destroyers, ...
— A Slave is a Slave • Henry Beam Piper
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