"Charlatan" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... subordinates; and after three years of reorganisation he resigned his post, confessing that he left the army no nearer efficiency than it was before. Charles was replaced at the War Office by General Mack. Within six months this bustling charlatan imagined himself to have effected the reorganisation of which the Archduke despaired, [110] while he had in fact only introduced new confusion into an army already hampered beyond any in Europe by its ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... the principles adopted by M. Neufchateau, Gil Blas might be adapted to any court, or age, or country. For instance, if Triaquero, meaning a charlatan, (which, by the way, it does not,) refers of necessity to Voltaire, might not any Englishman, if the work had been published recently, insist that the work must have been written by an Englishman, as the allusion could apply to no one so well as him, who, having ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 344, June, 1844 • Various
... element then in power, which was sapping the life- blood of the south, and bonding every state within its selfish grasp by dishonest legislative acts. The poor black man was simply a tool for the white charlatan, living in a miserable log cabin, and receiving a very small share of the peculations of his white clerk. When all the enfranchised are educated, and not until then, will the great source of evil be removed from our politics which to-day endangers our future liberty ...
— Four Months in a Sneak-Box • Nathaniel H. Bishop
... communicated to him the steps which I intended to take in order to promote the circulation of the Bible, and they have uniformly met with his approbation; therefore you will easily conceive that in what I have done there has been no rashness nor anything which savoured of the arts of the charlatan: I have too much respect for the Gospel and my own character to ...
— Letters of George Borrow - to the British and Foreign Bible Society • George Borrow
... and, most of all, the generous and ennobling hospitality, in his city house and villas, of the millionaire rhetorician, Herodes Atticus. About Peregrinus Paulus could never make up his mind. Was he the helpful teacher Gellius thought him, or the blatant charlatan of Lucian's frequent attacks? At any rate, the stories that were abroad about his wild youth, his connection with the strange sect known as Christians, his excommunication by them for profaning one of their rites, his expulsion from ...
— Roads from Rome • Anne C. E. Allinson
... leisure, if need be, in the intervals; but that would be a sorry account to present to them. Five years of this sort of thing, moreover, would effectually settle the question. I wish he were less of a genius and more of a charlatan! He 's too confoundedly all of one piece; he won't throw overboard a grain of the cargo to save the rest. Fancy him thus with all his brilliant personal charm, his handsome head, his careless step, his look as of a nervous nineteenth-century ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... upward on a fiery chariot, as well as a predicted disappearance and reappearance after three days. Such were the stories being gulped down by the thousands who still clung with an indefinable fascination to the memory of the charlatan. Meantime the soldier Wilkes had died of his injuries, and the coroner's inquiry was to be opened ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... is what happened. In his chamber in the Rue St. Honore, at Paris, sat a man ALONE—a man who has been maligned, a man who has been called a knave and charlatan, a man who has been persecuted even to the death, it is said, in Roman Inquisitions, forsooth, and elsewhere. Ha! ha! A man ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... outgrown their critical training? And that lazy wholesale disapprobation of living writers, so common and convenient, what does it do but injure all reverence for parents and teachers, when the young find out that the poet, who, as they were told, was a bungler and a charlatan, somehow continues to touch the purest and noblest nerves of their souls, and that the author who was said to be dangerous and unchristian, somehow makes them more dutiful, more earnest, more industrious, more ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... people really find Mr. Charteris particularly attractive?" Patricia demanded, so quickly and so innocently that Mrs. Pendomer could not deny herself the glance of a charlatan who ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... vehement "Dios se lo pagara"—whether in Honduranean change or not she did not specify. The majority of the inhabitants of the wilds of Honduras live and die without any other medical attention than those of a rare wandering charlatan or pill-peddler. ...
— Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras - Being the Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond • Harry A. Franck
... patent medicines regularly employs a person of some literary attainment whose duty it is to invent vigorous testimonials of sufferings relieved by Dr. Charlatan's universal panacea. In many instances persons are hired to give testimonials, and answer letters of inquiry in such a way as to encourage business. The shameless dishonesty and ingenious villainy exhibited are ...
— Alcohol: A Dangerous and Unnecessary Medicine, How and Why - What Medical Writers Say • Martha M. Allen
... seen, and it seemed wicked to waste it by going to bed, so he walked on, all unconsciously going in the direction of Heron Hall. The remarks about his father which had fallen from the bagman, stuck to him for a time like a burr: it isn't pleasant to hear your father described as a kind of charlatan and trickster, and Stafford would have liked to have collared the man and knocked an apology out of him; but there are certain disadvantages attached to the position of gentlemen, and one of them is that you have to pretend to be ...
— At Love's Cost • Charles Garvice
... Did this strange, girlish charlatan see in my face some signs of shrinking when she spoke of enemies, and set me down for a coward whose weakness might be profitable? Very likely. At all events she plucked a long brass pin, with a round bead for a head, from some part of her dress, and ...
— Uncle Silas - A Tale of Bartram-Haugh • J.S. Le Fanu
... to the walk around the parapets of the walls, and look down upon the scene. How gay it is! Around the fountain, which is spilling in the centre of the court, a constantly varying group is gathered, washing, drinking, and filling their flasks and vases. Near by, a charlatan, mounted on a table, with a huge canvas behind him painted all over with odd cabalistic figures, is screaming, in loud and voluble tones, the virtues of his medicines and unguents, and his skill in extracting teeth. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... wandering scholars who gained a livelihood by cures for the sick and lessons for the young. Under him Avicenna read the Isagoge of Porphyry and the first propositions of Euclid. But the pupil soon found his teacher to be but a charlatan, and betook himself, aided by commentaries, to master logic, geometry and the Almagest. Before he was sixteen he not merely knew medical theory, but by gratuitous attendance on the sick had, according to his own account, discovered new methods of treatment. For the ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... costume-design which made her work acceptable to such an outstanding genius as Inigo Jones, she lived by guile. But I have now to invite you to see her at the feet of one of the silliest charlatans who ever lived. There is, of course, the possibility that Anne sat at the feet of this silly charlatan for what she might learn for the extension of her own technique. Or, again, it may have been that the wizard of Lambeth, whom she consulted in the Lady Essex affair, could provide a more impressive setting for spoof than she had handy, or that they were simply rogues together. ...
— She Stands Accused • Victor MacClure
... Nevsky contemptuously. "The spirilla fever has affected your brains. Bah! I will not stay with those who are so ready to suspect an old comrade on the mere word of a charlatan. Boris Kazanovitch, do you stand there silent and let this insult ...
— The Poisoned Pen • Arthur B. Reeve
... Mexico City, one an American, the other an English woman, both experienced, intrepid, efficient. The third step taken simultaneously with the other two was to dismiss the man who masqueraded as a physician though he was nothing in reality but a cheap charlatan fattening himself at the expense of weakness and disease. The man had been inclined to make trouble at first about his unceremonious discharge. He had no mind to lose without a protest such a convenient source of unearned increment as those ...
— Wild Wings - A Romance of Youth • Margaret Rebecca Piper
... discoveries, the true philosopher will communicate his details with modesty and reserve; he will rather be a useful servant of the public, bringing forth a light from under his cloak when it is needed in darkness, than a charlatan exhibiting fireworks and having a trumpeter to announce their magnificence. I see you are smiling, and think what I am saying in bad taste; yet, notwithstanding, I will provoke your smiles still further by saying a word or two on his other moral ...
— Consolations in Travel - or, the Last Days of a Philosopher • Humphrey Davy
... words; just as we give attention to the ideas of the message, or to the language in which it is communicated. The language must first be learned, but the words used to communicate the message may be separately understood, and yet the meaning of the message wholly missed. Knowing only the one makes a charlatan; knowing the other makes a savan. The sciences based upon this objective study of Nature are denominated Natural Sciences; and because they lisp the first syllables of Nature's message to man, they should be his primary teachers. It ...
— The Philosophy of Evolution - and The Metaphysical Basis of Science • Stephen H. Carpenter
... reasonably satisfactory arrangement that is now in force. Yet to leave to an international tribunal not merely the decision of a disputed case but the legislation necessary to regulate an international property was in itself a great step in the development of world polity. The charlatan who almost brought on war by maintaining an indefensible case was also the statesman who made perhaps the greatest single advance in the conservation of the world's resources ...
— The Path of Empire - A Chronicle of the United States as a World Power, Volume - 46 in The Chronicles of America Series • Carl Russell Fish
... issues that challenge, she is lost." His brows knitted. "To defy the world of science in that way will make her fair game for every charlatan in the city. The press will unite to destroy her. I will see Clarke and Pratt myself. For the sake of their own cause they must not enter on such a foolish plan. Unless this life has already eaten deep into the essential purity of the girl's nature, she will be corrupted. This public-test ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... German, for the reason that I thought more could be seen with the successful side, and that the indications pointed to the defeat of the French. My choice evidently pleased him greatly, as he had the utmost contempt for Louis Napoleon, and had always denounced him as a usurper and a charlatan. Before we separated, the President gave me the following letter to the representatives of our Government abroad, and with it I not only had no trouble in obtaining permission to go with the Germans, but was specially ...
— The Memoirs of General P. H. Sheridan, Complete • General Philip Henry Sheridan
... little, heartless creature who had snatched them both from her—William and Geoffrey Cliffe—the higher and the lower—the man who might have ennobled her—and the man, half charlatan, half genius, whom she might have served and raised, by her fortune and her abilities. Her life might have been so full, so interesting! And it was Kitty that had made it flat, ...
— The Marriage of William Ashe • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... form any idea of French orators, and I doubt that they have ever had any or can have any now in the strict construction of the term orator, because we must not confuse the name orator with the words babbler and charlatan, for these can exist in any country, in all the regions of the inhabited world, among the cold and curt Englishmen as among the lively ...
— The Reign of Greed - Complete English Version of 'El Filibusterismo' • Jose Rizal
... patients by the power of his hand and the glance of his large, dark eye. He breathed upon their foreheads, and forthwith they saw visions of far-off lands; he passed the tips of his fingers over their faces, and pain and suffering vanished at his touch. No wonder that physicians denounced him as a charlatan, and apothecaries reviled ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... course. I can readily believe that he did. Doctor St. Jean is not a very bad man, but he is a charlatan and a dullard; he received the story of my reported insanity as he received me, as an advantage to his institution, and he never gave himself the unprofitable trouble to investigate the circumstances. I told ...
— Capitola's Peril - A Sequel to 'The Hidden Hand' • Mrs. E.D.E.N. Southworth
... following it through on sound, psychological lines and bringing to bear upon it great insight and scientific discipline, it fell here into the hands of charlatans and adventurers. Phineas Parkhurst Quimby, best known for his connection with Mary Baker Eddy, hardly deserves the name of charlatan, though he was dangerously near being just that. He belonged to the border-land regions in thought and propaganda and he did give to the whole complex movement which we have been considering a direction which has played a relatively ...
— Modern Religious Cults and Movements • Gaius Glenn Atkins
... disgusted by her behavior (for she had been introduced by him to many noblemen and gentlemen, his personal friends, some one at least of whom, on the slightest encouragement, would, he felt sure, have taken the place of the foreign charlatan she had disgraced him by preferring), consoled himself for her bad taste by entering into her possessions, which comprised a quantity of new jewellery, new lace, and feminine apparel, and an income ...
— The Irrational Knot - Being the Second Novel of His Nonage • George Bernard Shaw
... "Your Majesty, that man's an out-and-out charlatan! He was kicked out of the University here ten years ago, and I'm surprised he could even get on the faculty of a school like Brannerton, on a ...
— Ministry of Disturbance • Henry Beam Piper
... Italian costume, carrying a laurel in her hand, appeared at the entrance. All the Shadows looked up with an air of weary expectation, like people waiting for their turn in a doctor's consulting-room. She beckoned to me, however, and I made haste to follow her. The words 'Charlatan!' 'You a poet!' in a variety of languages, greeted me by way of farewell ...
— Adventures among Books • Andrew Lang
... above men's comprehension, or who were remarkable for any singularity of action were immediately deified. Pythagoras recognized this truth when he shrouded himself in mystery and delivered his lectures from behind a curtain, though to be sure he has come to be regarded as something of a charlatan in consequence." ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol
... felt only that the man was working upon his audience like a sleight-of-hand performer; and the longer she observed, and the stronger his spell over the others, the deeper became her contempt for the "charlatan." He seemed to her like one telling a lie—as that one seems, while telling it, to the hearer who is not deceived. "I've been thinking him rough but genuine," said she to herself. "He's merely rough." She had forgiven, had disregarded his rude almost coarse manners, setting ...
— The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig • David Graham Phillips
... communications. Spirits, I suppose, like earthly people, are obliged to use such instruments as will answer their purposes; but rather than receive a message from a dead friend through the organism of a rogue or charlatan, methinks I would choose to wait till we meet. But what most astonishes me is the indifference with which I listen to these marvels. They throw old ghost stories quite into the shade; they bring the whole world of spirits down amongst us, visibly and audibly; they ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... be hoped that public opinion shall be brought to bear upon the world of science; and that by this intercourse light will be thrown upon the characters of men, and the pretender and the charlatan be driven into merited obscurity. Without the action of public opinion, any administration, however anxious to countenance the pursuits of science, and however ready toreward, by wealth or honours, those whom they might think most eminent, would ...
— On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures • Charles Babbage
... Imperial family was denied again and again. It has been said from authoritative sources that the Czar did not know him by sight, and that the Czarina knew him only as a superstitious and neurotic woman might know some fortune teller or other charlatan. Nevertheless the credulous public believed him to be the evil spirit of the Imperial circle, and every false move, every unpopular act, was ascribed to his baneful influence. But such a career could not last long, and the end became ...
— History of the World War - An Authentic Narrative of the World's Greatest War • Francis A. March and Richard J. Beamish
... charlatan was shouting, "the marvellous Egyptian love-philter distilled from the pearl that the great Emperor Antony dropped into Queen Cleopatra's cup. This infallible fluid, handed down for generations in the family ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... pointed to the schooners "rotting at their wharves," to the empty shipyards and warehouses, to the idle sailors wandering in the streets of port towns, and asked passionately how long they must be sacrificed to the theories of this charlatan in the White House. Even Southern Republicans were asking uneasily when the President would realize that the embargo was ruining planters who could not market their cotton and tobacco. And Republicans whose pockets were not touched were soberly questioning ...
— Jefferson and his Colleagues - A Chronicle of the Virginia Dynasty, Volume 15 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Allen Johnson
... you shan't be!" said Anthony, with a fierce change of tone. "You the dependent of that charlatan! I don't know how I'm to put up with it. You know very well what I think of him, and of your becoming ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... a man who combats desperately with some ailment which threatens his life. 'Am I then of those who have no will power? Will is that whereby men raise themselves above the multitude; let me give proofs now that my claims are not those of a charlatan.' He passed six ...
— Thyrza • George Gissing
... that much good may result from the employment of suggestion by a charlatan, in the form of a written medical charm, both parties being alike profoundly ignorant of the healing ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence
... honest with God too. A well-known agnostic lecturer once said that no god could afford to damn an honest man, and I am not sure that he was not right; but if the words of Christ were not the empty mouthings of a charlatan or a dreamer, there cannot be the slightest doubt about the fate of the hypocrite. Remember that on the only occasion on which the gentle nature of our Lord was roused to anger he denounced in the most terrible language that human ears have ...
— The Missionary • George Griffith
... architecture of life. Nature had formed him for sadness. He found it difficult to smile, and he had never been able to weep, so that he was deprived of the consolation of tears as well as of the palliative of joy. An old man is a thinking ruin; and such a ruin was Ursus. He had the loquacity of a charlatan, the leanness of a prophet, the irascibility of a charged mine: such was Ursus. In his youth he had been a philosopher in the house of ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... sixteenth century does not look backward only; the conflicts in it point forward also. Its abbess is not the traditional pious, fat old lady, but a tall, thin, practical and active woman. Its Faust is a figure of aggressive naturalism, a charlatan and quack who practises blood-transfusion on the hero and who lies drunk in a pig-sty—a scene which shows Arnim's power of drastic contrast at its best. The hero, Berthold, does not sit back and wait for the crown to come to him, but with ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... of which Dickens and Thackeray were the greater lights was Bulwer Lytton,—versatile; subjective in genius; sentimental, and yet not sensational; reflective, yet not always sound in morals; learned in general literature, but a charlatan in scientific knowledge; worldly in his spirit, but not a pagan; an inquisitive student, seeking to penetrate the mysteries of Nature as well as to paint characters and events in other times; and leaving a higher moral impression when he was old than when ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VII • John Lord
... these features, however, are purely incidental. The main interest and the real strength of the book lie in a remarkable study of character-development—that of the chief personage, Horace. It is a cleverly painted portrait of a type that reappears, with slight modifications, in all ages; a moral charlatan, who half imposes on himself, and entirely for a while on other people. A would-be hero, genius, and chivalrous lover, he has none of the genuine qualities needed for sustaining the parts. Nonchalant and inert of temperament, he is capable of nothing beyond a short course of successful ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... existed in his time. Most of our modern medicine and surgery was anticipated in the olden time; but it may be said that all of the modes of the quack are as old as humanity. Galen's description of the travelling charlatan who settled down in his front yard, not knowing that it belonged to a physician, shows this very well. There were evidently as many of them and as many different kinds in Mondeville's time as in our own. ...
— Old-Time Makers of Medicine • James J. Walsh
... they thought me sincere! How they must have despised me if they thought me nothing but an advertising quack! Zora Middlemist, for heaven's sake tell me what you have thought of me. What have you taken me for—a madman or a charlatan?" ...
— Septimus • William J. Locke
... she must fulfil the countless demands of a vanity that enters into every fibre of that living organism called society. Love, for her, is above all things, and by its very nature, a vainglorious, brazen-fronted, ostentatious, thriftless charlatan. If at the Court of Louis XIV. there was not a woman but envied Mlle. de la Valliere the reckless devotion of passion that led the grand monarch to tear the priceless ruffles at his wrists in order to assist the entry of a Duc de Vermandois into the world—what can you expect of the rest ...
— Father Goriot • Honore de Balzac
... emoluments which have been left for their furtherance, and thus to satisfy certain coarse and brutal instincts of their own. Thus it is that we come to have so many charlatans in every branch of knowledge. The charlatan takes very different shapes according to circumstances; but at bottom he is a man who cares nothing about knowledge for its own sake, and only strives to gain the semblance of it that he may use it for his own personal ends, which are always selfish ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; Studies in Pessimism • Arthur Schopenhauer
... whose intelligence he stands in awe; and, to say the truth, this faculty, joined to his matchless impudence, imposed upon me for some time when I first knew him. But I have since understood, that when he is among fools and womankind, he exhibits himself as a perfect charlatantalks of the magisteriumof sympathies and antipathiesof the cabalaof the divining-rodand all the trumpery with which the Rosicrucians cheated a darker age, and which, to our eternal disgrace, has in some degree revived in our own. My friend Heavysterne knew this fellow abroad, and unintentionally ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... thanked!" fell from the lips of those thirty or so bamboozled and hysterical women, who, seated on forms as school-children might sit, had assembled to assist at the admission of Countess Yakimovitch to the secret and disgraceful cult of the blasphemous charlatan. ...
— The Minister of Evil - The Secret History of Rasputin's Betrayal of Russia • William Le Queux
... Frederic, whose "Life" took Thomas Carlyle thirteen years in searching musty German histories to produce. Carlyle says, "One of the reasons that led me to write 'Frederic' was that he managed not to be a liar and charlatan as his century was"; and indeed his adoration for Frederic is quite pardonable. He had spent thirteen years of his life in the supreme effort of making him a hero, and his great work, contained in eight volumes, is a matchless piece of literature; but there is nothing in it to justify ...
— The Tragedy of St. Helena • Walter Runciman
... and merchandise; the stonemasons were at work on the new buildings; the lemonade venders, with their gay reservoirs upon their backs, were plying a noisy trade; the bill-stickers were papering boardings and lamp-posts with variegated advertisements; the charlatan, in his gaudy chariot, was selling pencils and penknives to the accompaniment of a hand-organ; soldiers were marching to the clangor of military music; the merchant was in his counting-house, the stock-broker at the Bourse, and ...
— In the Days of My Youth • Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards
... had nearly furnished his drama with a tragic catastrophe, added to its effect; and his discovery of the sequins was managed by three of his countrymen. As an inquirer into the nakedness of the land, he might have been shot as a spy. As half-charlatan and half-madman, he was sure of national sympathy. During the three days of his stay the old podesta had found himself accessible to reason, the podesta's daughter to the tender passion, and the treasures of the state to the locomotive skill of the French detachment, that waited in the mountains ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 340, Supplementary Number (1828) • Various
... universal forward-hurrying throng, what then? If you have done something that can be mentioned, in art or letters or science, the newspapers may toss you a paragraph; or if you have been a notorious criminal or charlatan or windbag, they may even devote a leader to you; but the multitude—what time have they to think? A careless eye glances at the couple of obituary lines that have been paid for by relatives; then onwards again. Perhaps, here and ...
— Prince Fortunatus • William Black
... are in the Louvre, but there are also many of his pictures in England. Among his masterpieces, 'Cattle of all kinds in a meadow surrounded by rocks, and watered by a cascade; a horseman giving alms to a peasant boy;' and his celebrated 'Charlatan,' full of observation and humour, are in the Louvre. A fine picture, 'Figures of Animals under the shade of a Tree,' is in ...
— The Old Masters and Their Pictures - For the Use of Schools and Learners in Art • Sarah Tytler
... involved the absurd charge of ritual murder, Lutostansky approached several prominent wealthy Jews with an offer to retract his new charges against the Jews, provided they would pay him a certain amount of money for his book. The Jews declined to have anything to do with the charlatan who had caused so much harm to the Jews of Russia by his monstrous accusations. His works attracted special attention because of the fact that they were endorsed and supported by Russian Grand Dukes and by the Dowager ...
— The History of a Lie - 'The Protocols of the Wise Men of Zion' • Herman Bernstein
... Chansons has aroused in Madame Colet a pindaric fury. I have received an anonymous letter from her, in verse, in which she represents me as a charlatan who beats the drum on the tomb of his friend, a vulgar wretch who debases himself before criticism, after having "flattered Caesar"! "Sad example of the passions," as Prudhomme ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... forgotten, Ralph Brooke, the York Herald. He had formerly been an admirer of Camden's, his "humble friend," he called himself; but when Camden was promoted over his head to be Clarenceux King-of-Arms, it seemed to Ralph Brooke that it became his duty to denounce the too successful antiquary as a charlatan. He accordingly fired off the unpleasant little gun already mentioned, and, for the moment, ...
— Gossip in a Library • Edmund Gosse
... does it mingle with the coarse laughing and coarser wit of the banqueters. At this feast of flowers may be seen the man high in office, the grave merchant, the man entrusted with the most important affairs of the commonwealth-the sage and the charlatan. Sallow-faced and painted women, more undressed than dressed, sit beside them, hale companions. Respectable society regards the Judge a fine old gentleman; respectable society embraces Mr. Soloman, notwithstanding he carries on a business, as we shall ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams
... voice is the voice of Robert Browning. His first complete poem, Paracelsus, 1835, aimed to give the true inwardness of the career of the famous 16th century doctor, whose name became a synonym with charlatan. His second, Sordello, 1840, traced the struggles of an Italian poet who lived before Dante, and could not reconcile his life with his art. Paracelsus was hard, but Sordello was incomprehensible. Mr. Browning has denied that ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... nothingness before you without the phrases of a charlatan. He searches a lump of gypsum, finds an impression in it, says to you, "Behold!" All at once marble takes an animal shape, the dead come to life, the history of the world is laid open before you. After countless dynasties of giant creatures, races of fish and clans of mollusks, ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... now, and I didn't know who he was then, or anything about him. I don't know much more now—except that he's a dangerous sort of charlatan-devil, I think. But I came across him one night up there by Thebes in the Valley of the Kings—you know, where they buried all their Johnnies with so much magnificence and processions and masses, and all the rest. It's the most astounding, the most haunted place you ever saw, gloomy, silent, ...
— Four Weird Tales • Algernon Blackwood
... characters, as a rule—that I think is much to be condemned. I deny that there are any living mediums of communication between the spirit world and this one, and I should always judge the man or woman who claimed such power to be a charlatan. But that spirits of the departed have appeared and been recognized by ...
— The Grey Room • Eden Phillpotts
... train! See, for this crown the State conferred on me. A gift, a thing I sought not, for this crown The trusty Creon, my familiar friend, Hath lain in wait to oust me and suborned This mountebank, this juggling charlatan, This tricksy beggar-priest, for gain alone Keen-eyed, but in his proper art stone-blind. Say, sirrah, hast thou ever proved thyself A prophet? When the riddling Sphinx was here Why hadst thou no deliverance for this folk? And yet the riddle was ...
— The Oedipus Trilogy • Sophocles
... variations. It is only of real value when, free from all charlatanism, it rests on a sufficiently scientific basis; for the art of an ignoramus falls into error and employs inappropriate methods; on the other hand, the art of a charlatan has for its object the purse of the patient. It is common to meet with physicians who have a good practical experience of art without possessing scientific knowledge, others who have both practical experience and science ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... be seen, too, at many open spaces. Sometimes a fervid preacher would be declaiming to a pale-faced group on the subject of God's righteous judgments upon a wicked and licentious city. Sometimes a wizened old woman or a juggling charlatan would be seen selling all sorts of charms and potions as specifics against the plague. Joseph pressing near in curiosity to one of these vendors, found him doing a brisk trade in dried toads, which he vowed would ...
— The Sign Of The Red Cross • Evelyn Everett-Green
... written all these essays as a member of the public, as one who has to find a right attitude towards art so that the arts may flourish again. The critic is sure to be a charlatan or a prig, unless he is to himself not a pseudo-artist expounding the mysteries of art and telling artists how to practise them, but simply one of the public with a natural and human interest in art. But one ...
— Essays on Art • A. Clutton-Brock
... same origin) which they sought. But it was not long before the starved ascetic, with his wild appearance and great reputation for sanctity, inspired an awe which, in the unscrupulous, was easily turned to advantage. The Yogi became more or less of a charlatan, more or less of a juggler. Nor was this all. Yoga-practices began to take precedence before other religious practices. In the Br[a]hmanas it is the sacrifice that is god-compelling; but in the epic, although ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... critic of ancient times says he was notorious for advertising his ideas (in doctrinis suis praedicandis venditator)[3], and the Emperor Augustus declares that he was the drum of his own fame (i.e. the blower of his own trumpet). He was in fact a mixture of scholar and charlatan, as many of his successors have been, the Houston Chamberlain of ...
— Josephus • Norman Bentwich
... M. Ernest Hamel talk of him as an angel or a prophet, and the Ninth Thermidor is a red day indeed in their martyrology. Michelet and M. D'Hericault treat him as a mixture of Cagliostro and Caligula, both a charlatan and a miscreant. We are reminded of the commencement of an address of the French Senate to the first Bonaparte: 'Sire,' they began, 'the desire for perfection is one of the worst maladies that can afflict the human mind.' This bold aphorism touches one of the roots of the judgments ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3) - Essay 1: Robespierre • John Morley
... rendered no little service to the state, informing all the faculty that he can heal patients whom they have dismissed as incurable, by merely breathing on them or touching them. In an ordinary, unknown, vulgar charlatan this challenge might have passed unnoticed. In the case of the Australian cousin of Mr. Justice Fitzjames Stephen it must be treated more seriously. We invite communications from our scientific readers as to the best way of putting our visitor to ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, April 1887 - Volume 1, Number 3 • Various
... feeblest results. It is not that this percentage is wicked, nor is it strikingly good, neither is it necessarily feeble-minded, but it shows itself so entirely unimaginative and inane that it is no wonder that the charlatan in religion, politics, and education rampages over the world through a perfect maelstrom of bouquets. Nothing impersonal ever seems to stir the sluggishness of their "souls." They feel nothing that does not hit them straight ...
— Over the Fireside with Silent Friends • Richard King
... almost an expert in many kinds of knowledge, we as children had something of that incomparable advantage for which I have always envied royalty. They are able to learn by the simple process of talking to people who know. That is not only the easiest road to knowledge, but if your teacher is no charlatan a more vivid impression is made upon the mind than ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... might be made out for any country, just as for any individual; but so far as my knowledge goes the United States stands out as preeminently the "Land of Contrasts"—the land of stark, staring, and stimulating inconsistency; at once the home of enlightenment and the happy hunting ground of the charlatan and the quack; a land in which nothing happens but the unexpected; the home of Hyperion, but no less the haunt of the satyr; always the land of promise, but not invariably the land of performance; a land which may be bounded by the aurora borealis, but which has also undeniable acquaintance ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... Saint Iago! thou art some juggling knave—some impish charlatan, who seeks to conceal his imposture in the garb of mystery and terror. Little knowest thou the mettle of a Castilian heart. ...
— The Three Brides, Love in a Cottage, and Other Tales • Francis A. Durivage
... guiltless—I do the same, and you hold me criminal—a robber, perhaps-a murderer it may be! I will tell you what I am: I am a son of Fortune, an adventurer; I live by my wits—so do poets and lawyers, and all the charlatans of the world; I am a charlatan—a chameleon. 'Each man in his time plays many parts:' I play any part in which Money, the Arch-Manager, promises me a livelihood. Are ...
— Night and Morning, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... spells and incantations might, after all, not prove effective, and thus convict him for a charlatan, the man of science felt uneasy. Still, an order was an order, especially when it came from a King, and he promised to do his best. On the day that his patient arrived, he wrote to his married daughter, Emma Niendorf. A free translation of this letter, which is given in full by Dr. ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... first real sanction, and has all along been my inducement and encouragement, to study his life and him. How this man, officially a King withal, comported himself in the Eighteenth Century, and managed not to be a Liar and Charlatan as his Century was, deserves to be seen a little by men and kings, and may silently have ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. I. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Birth And Parentage.—1712. • Thomas Carlyle
... moderate amount of erudition to unearth a charlatan like the supposed father of the infinitesimal dosing system. The real inventor of that specious trickery was an Irishman by the name of Butler. The whole story is to be found in the "Ortus Medicinm" of Van Helmont. I ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... transaction, there is an expression of real or pretended surprise that any one should deem that act improper, much more guilty; nay, in spite even of the solemn warnings of the physician, they will resort to the debased and murderous charlatan, who, for a piece of silver, will annihilate the life of the foetus, and endanger even that of ...
— Moral Principles and Medical Practice - The Basis of Medical Jurisprudence • Charles Coppens
... which minister to their pleasure, and of which alone they are aware. The cleverness of a man who can paint fruit that tempts urchins impresses them; but the artist who feels, and tries to express, the soul of fruit and flowers they take for an incompetent dunce or a charlatan. ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... poor, I am not trusted with the most ridiculous office, and all say, 'He's a fool! He doesn't know how to live!' The curate calls me 'philosopher' as a nickname and gives to understand that I am a charlatan who is making a show of what I learned in the higher schools, when that is exactly what benefits me the least. Perhaps I really am the fool and they the ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... dancing had delighted me. He did not stop here, but turning to his mates, of whom he was chief, introduced me to them as his best friend. These worthy people, seeing me dressed like a lord, with a cross on my breast, took me for a cosmopolitan charlatan who was expected at Augsburg, and Bassi, strange to say, did not undeceive them. When the company had taken off its stage rags and put on its everyday rags, Bassi's ugly wife took me by the arm and said ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... have. Yes, I remember now; he was lecturing and vapouring about at Zurich; he is half Greek, I believe, and all charlatan. Well, Janet has been and gone and done for ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... get behind and within the people of whom he writes, sees with their eyes, hears with their ears, though he speaks with his own lips. But one must observe that the judgment of none of his characters is a final judgment; the artist, the lover, the cynic, the charlatan, the sage, the priest—they none of them provide a solution to life; they set out on their quest, they make their guesses, they reveal their aims, but they never penetrate the inner secret. It is all inference and hope; Browning ...
— Joyous Gard • Arthur Christopher Benson
... always to slip into his advertisements some poetic phrase on the fascination of his person and the susceptibility of his soul. A fine organ, imperturbable coolness, more temperament than intelligence, more power of emphasis than of real singing, made up the charm of this admirable charlatan nature, in which there was something of the ...
— Madame Bovary • Gustave Flaubert
... still study philosophy with the imagination, instead of by observation and method; because fancy and will are universally regarded as judges, in the place of arguments and facts,—it has been impossible to this day to distinguish the charlatan from the philosopher, the savant from the impostor. Since the days of Solomon and Pythagoras, imagination has been exhausted in guessing out social and psychological laws; all systems have been proposed. Looked at in this light, it is probably true that EVERY THING HAS BEEN SAID; but it is no ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... calumny, plausible and unplausible, was invented to besmirch his character and his art. Now it is, in Germany at least, no longer safe to revile him on the ground of his technical artistic style. The days are long past when the terms "charlatan," "amateur," "artistic anarchist" could be applied to him with impunity, and it is fully recognized by all who have any title to speak that Wagner, so far from being a revolutionary destroyer, was, ...
— Wagner's Tristan und Isolde • George Ainslie Hight
... development, and popular psychology. It reveals how desperate man has been when faced with the terrors of disease, how he has purchased the packaged promises offered by the sincere but deluded as well as by the charlatan. It shows how science and law have combined to offer man some safeguards against deception in his pursuit ...
— Old English Patent Medicines in America • George B. Griffenhagen
... be in the Customs—it is, I think, in that or the Excise—besides another at Lord Lonsdale's table, where this poetical charlatan and political parasite licks up the crumbs with a hardened alacrity; the converted Jacobin having long subsided into the clownish sycophant [despised retainer,—MS. erased] of the worst ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... was called a mere charlatan. Langley was pronounced crazy. Fulton and Stephenson were pitied. Columbus faced mutiny on his ship on the eve of his discovery of land. Millet starved in his attic. Time has passed, and the backbiters are all in ...
— Evening Round Up - More Good Stuff Like Pep • William Crosbie Hunter
... this biological law exists, so long the charlatan will keep his hold on the ignorant public. So long as it exists, the wisest practitioner will be liable to deceive himself about the effect of what he calls and loves to think are his remedies. Long-continued and sagacious observation will to some extent undeceive him; but were it not ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... favor of his sovereign, lends an interest to the reign of the second Chintsong. Wanganchi did not possess the confidence or the admiration of his brother officials, and subsequent writers have generally termed him an impostor and a charlatan. But he may only have been a misguided enthusiast when he declared that "the State should take the entire management of commerce, industry, and agriculture into its own hands, with the view of succoring the working classes, and preventing ...
— China • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... any sense whatever a pillar of the orthodoxies. As she would have come to preach Truth, you may suppose Truth needed, and therefore lacking; and so, that her teachings would have been at once dubbed vilest heterodoxy, and herself a charlatan. ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... the native chiefs, but their malignity was only partially concealed. His wife languished before his eyes and died September 15, just five weeks after her arrival. He himself was incapacitated for several months, nor at the height of his illness was he made better by the ministrations of a French charlatan. He never really recovered from the great inroads made upon his ...
— A Social History of the American Negro • Benjamin Brawley
... advent unmercifully; but her reason survived the marriage by two years only, and there were those familiar with the late Lord Rokesle's [Footnote: Born 1685, and accidentally killed by Sir Piers Sabiston in 1738; an accurate account of this notorious duellist, profligate, charlatan, and playwright is given in Ireson's Letters.] peculiarities who considered that in this, at least, the crazed lady was fortunate. Among these gossips it was also esteemed a matter deserving comment that in the shipwrecks not infrequent about Usk ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell
... these letters for you. He hasn't answered the last ... but I've his notes of what he means to say. He'd like them back to-night. He was just going out. I've one or two notes of what Evans said. Bit of a charlatan, don't ...
— Waste - A Tragedy, In Four Acts • Granville Barker
... gone many steps further Nick Dormer stopped short with a question. "I say, my dear fellow, do you mind mentioning to me whether you're the greatest humbug and charlatan on earth, or a genuine intelligence, one that has sifted ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... well-founded self-esteem ... You see, Lisaveta, at the bottom of my soul—translated into the intellectual—I have all the suspicion of the artist type with which each one of my honorable forefathers up yonder in that cramped city would have encountered any charlatan or adventurous 'artist' that might have entered his house. Listen to this. I know a banker, a gray-haired business man, who possesses the ability to write stories. He makes use of this talent in ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... and quack-doctor, harangued the people of Chaudiere from his gaily-painted wagon. He had the perfect gift of the charlatan, and he had discovered his metier. Inclined to the picturesque by nature, melodramatic and empirical, his earlier career had been the due fruit of habit and education. As a dabbler in mines he had been out of his element. He lacked the necessary reticence, and arsenic had not availed ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... horrible crimes have been committed in thy name! Every fool, from king to policeman, from the flatheaded parson to the visionless dabbler in science, presumes to speak authoritatively of human nature. The greater the mental charlatan, the more definite his insistence on the wickedness and weaknesses of human nature. Yet, how can any one speak of it today, with every soul in a prison, with every heart fettered, ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman
... want religious fanatics on my staff,' he would sneer. 'If I ever meet your charlatan guru, I shall give him some ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... 'balcony', 'baldachin', 'balustrade', 'bandit', 'bravo', 'bust' (it was 'busto' as first used in English, and therefore from the Italian, not from the French), 'cameo', 'canto', 'caricature', 'carnival', 'cartoon', 'charlatan', 'concert', 'conversazione', 'cupola', 'ditto', 'doge', 'domino'{17}, 'felucca', 'fresco', 'gazette', 'generalissimo', 'gondola', 'gonfalon', 'grotto', ('grotta' is the earliest form in which we have it in ...
— English Past and Present • Richard Chenevix Trench
... a fellow named Paolo Giovio, Bishop of Nocera, a charlatan and a wretched dabbler in necromancy and something of an alchemist, who has lately written the life of another Pope's son—Cesare Borgia, who lived nigh upon half a century ago, and who did more than any man to consolidate the States of the Church, ...
— The Strolling Saint • Raphael Sabatini
... school. Bononcini's career in England came to an end very suddenly. It was discovered that a madrigal brought out by him was pirated from another Italian composer; whereupon Bononcini left England, humiliated to the dust, and finally died obscure and alone, the victim of a charlatan alchemist, who succeeded in obtaining all ...
— The Great German Composers • George T. Ferris
... had more the appearance of a prosperous tradesman than of an artist; but he carried on with O'Brien, whose French was perfect, an argument on the merits of Cezanne. To one he was a great master and to the other an impudent charlatan. Each hotly repeated his opinion, as though the mere fact of saying the same thing several times made ...
— The Magician • Somerset Maugham
... Sphinx. In his primal brain—nearer nature than our own—the directness of a child mingles with the profoundest cunning. He believes easily in powers of light and darkness, yet is a sceptic all the while. Stirling knew this; but he could not know just when, if ever, the young charlatan Cheschapah would succeed in cheating the older chiefs; just when, if ever, he would strike the chord of their superstition. Till then they would reason that the white man was more comfortable as a friend than as a foe, that ...
— Red Men and White • Owen Wister
... discourse on this occasion; but I know that sort of man always has a leaning to the Abimelech and Jedediahs of biblical history; solely, I believe, because the names have a sonorous roll with them that is pleasant in the mouth of the charlatan. ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... brings terror into his slumbers, he knew little more of the history, topography, and art-treasures of Paris than the flock he shepherded. He must have dealt out paralyzing information. The Britons and the Germans seemed not to heed; but now and then the American school-marms unmasked the charlatan. On such occasions his unfaltering impudence reached heights truly sublime. The sharp-witted ladies looked in his eyes, forgot their wrongs, and, if he had told them that the Eiffel Tower had ...
— The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol • William J. Locke
... hardly necessary to say that the sublime within us was instantly killed. It would be fortunate, indeed, for the afflicted, if the specific of this charlatan St. George were half as destructive to the intestinal dragons he promises to destroy. Then we turned away to the glen down which the torrent plunged. And there, at the foot of the fall, in the midst of the boiling water, the foam, and spray, rose a tall crag crowned with silver birch, and hung ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various
... course this was silly traditional repeating of superstitious old words. There was no shelter; there could be none in this life. No one could show her the path, because there was no path; and anyone who pretended to show it was only a charlatan who traded on moments of ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... of me as a charlatan who contrives to amuse a few idle people," he said. "I don't complain of that; my present position leads necessarily to misinterpretation of myself and my motives. Still, I may at least say that I am the victim of a sincere avowal of my belief in a great science. ...
— Little Novels • Wilkie Collins
... lean and wan, They've seen it all before, They know they'll see the charlatan But twice or three ...
— The Bab Ballads • W. S. Gilbert
... a second; he knew that in asking anything further he ran the risk of being mistaken for a charlatan, but this seemed now his only chance of getting back to her. They were speeding out through the Fenway, but the driver had now slowed down to await further orders. The man would drop him anywhere he said, but even supposing he brought him back to the vicinity of the house, ...
— The Web of the Golden Spider • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... not much; you are wise; not in vain have you suffered. That little you ask, I think, can be granted. But remember, not in a day, nor a week, nor perhaps a month, but sooner or later; I say not exactly when, for I am neither prophet nor charlatan. Still, if, according to the directions in your box there, you take my medicine steadily, without assigning an especial day, near or remote, to discontinue it, then may you calmly look for some eventual result of good. But again I say, ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... Princess herself is dabbling. So we have on the scene not only (as the reader sees at once, though some rather clumsy efforts are made to hide it) the resuscitated Albert, who passes as a certain Trismegistus, not only the historical charlatan Saint-Germain, but another charlatan at this time not at all historical (seeing that the whole story ends in 1760, and he never left Palermo till nine years later), Cagliostro. Even at Spandau Consuelo herself is not ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... "a charlatan believer in mesmeric influence," plied his trade in early Manhattan. He seems to have belonged to that vast army of persons who seriously believe their own teachings even when they know them to be preposterous. Perkins made a specialty of yellow fever, and insisted that he could cure it by hypnotism. ...
— Greenwich Village • Anna Alice Chapin
... your usual grace and agility; but this time it shall be for the sake of the famous witch who is said to belong to this place." The words were hardly out of his mouth, when the matron of the hospital, an old woman, who seemed upwards of seventy, screamed out, "Rogue, charlatan, swindler, there is no witch here. If you mean Camacha, she has paid the penalty of her sin, and is where God only knows; if you mean me, you juggling cheat, I am no witch, and never was one in my life; and if I ever ...
— The Exemplary Novels of Cervantes • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... DREAM the rest;—nay, viewed from this standpoint, it is open to question whether you ever went to the Field of Ardath at all, but merely DREAMED you did! You see how admirably I can, with little trouble, disprove the whole story, and make myself out to be the veriest charlatan and trickster that ever duped his credulous fellow-man! How do you like my practical dissection of your ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... Plato! you have paved the way, With your confounded fantasies, to more Immoral conduct by the fancied sway Your system feigns o'er the controulless core Of human hearts, than all the long array Of poets and romancers:—You 're a bore, A charlatan, a coxcomb—and have been, At best, ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... A thaumaturgus of our days, unless of an extreme simplicity, like that manifested by certain stigmatists of Germany, is odious; for he performs miracles without believing in them; and is a mere charlatan. But, if we take a Francis d'Assisi, the question becomes altogether different; the series of miracles attending the origin of the order of St. Francis, far from offending us, affords us real pleasure. The founder ...
— The Life of Jesus • Ernest Renan
... that no man Has ever read and never will, And put to scorn the charlatan Who botanizes of her still. He kept his knowledge sweet and clean, And questioned not of why and what; And never drew a line between What's known and ...
— Poems • Madison Cawein
... submitted himself to a long and severe training, at once physical, mental, and spiritual. What precisely this training had been, or where undergone, no one seemed to know,—for he never spoke of it, as, indeed, he betrayed no single other characteristic of the charlatan,—but the fact that it had involved a total disappearance from the world for five years, and that after he returned and began his singular practice no one ever dreamed of applying to him the so easily acquired epithet of quack, spoke much for the ...
— Three John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... poem of late instead of early origin in Browning's poetical career, we should probably have received no such open prophecy as this. The scholar of the Renaissance, half-genius, half-charlatan, would have casuistically defended or apologised for his errors, and through the wreathing mists of sophistry would have shot forth ever and anon ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... indeed if American industry presents any figure quite as astonishing and variegated as that of John W. Gates, the man who educated farmers all over the world to the use of wire fencing. Half charlatan, half enthusiast, speculator, gambler, a man who created great enterprises and who also destroyed them, at times an upbuilding force and at other times a sinister influence, Gates completely typified a period in American history that, along with much ...
— The Age of Big Business - Volume 39 in The Chronicles of America Series • Burton J. Hendrick
... you should go and set up a brand-new one—an ugly anachronism besides,' retorted the squire. 'However, you and I have no common ground—never had. I say know, you say feel. Where is the difference, after all, between you and any charlatan of the lot? Well, how ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... country somehow troubles, And so our cities receive them; Nor one of your make-believe Spanish grandees, Who ply our daughters with lies and candies, Until the poor girls believe them. No, he was no such charlatan— Count de Hoboken Flash-in-the-pan, Full of gasconade and bravado— But a regular, rich Don Rataplan, Santa Claus de la Muscovado, Senor Grandissimo Bastinado. His was the rental of half Havana And all Matanzas; and Santa Anna, Rich as he was, could hardly hold A candle to light ...
— Little Masterpieces of American Wit and Humor - Volume I • Various
... can see, one man's result is as good as another's, and thus the object is as far off as ever. We may be sure that until there is an intelligent and rational public, able to distinguish between the speculations of the charlatan and the researches of the investigator, the present state of things will continue. What we want is so wide a diffusion of scientific ideas that there shall be a class of men engaged in studying economic problems for their own sake, and an intelligent public able to judge what ...
— Side-lights on Astronomy and Kindred Fields of Popular Science • Simon Newcomb
... implies that a man has got decently through college, and then survived three years. But if a man was originally placed in a position beyond his deserts, the mere lapse of time may have only made him the more dangerous charlatan. If he showed no sign of military aptitude in six months, a probation of three years may have been more costly, but not more conclusive. Add to this the fact that each successive year of the war has seen all officers more carefully ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... that Rousseau were the equivocal pernicious influence, half-priest, half-pandar, half-charlatan, half-prophet of a world-disintegrating orgy of sentiment, should I for one, I am tempted to ask, close the gates of our ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... hos dokein ten apo ton huper ta hola charin to haima to heautes stazein en ekeino to poterio dia tes epikleseos autou, kai huperimeiresthai tous parontas ex ekeinou geusasthai tou pomatos, hina kai eis autous epombrese he dia tou magou toutou kleizomene charis.] Marcus was indeed a charlatan; but religious charlatanry afterwards became very earnest, and was certainly taken earnestly by many adherents of Marcus. The transubstantiation idea, in reference to the elements in the mysteries, is also plainly expressed in the Excerpt. ex. Theodot. ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 1 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... brilliant and profitable practice at the bar to guide this unfortunate country out of bankruptcy and dishonour into prosperity and every promise of a great and honourable future. Pray let the matter rest there for the present. If Mr. Hamilton be really a liar and a charlatan, rest assured he will betray himself before any great harm is done. Every man is his own worst enemy. I was deeply interested in what you were saying when we entered this room. Where did you say you purchased those lily bulbs? My garden is sadly ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... think Mr. W—— any authority upon any subject. I consider him a perfect specimen of a charlatan, and his opinions with regard to slavery and the abolitionists are particularly little worthy of credit in my mind, because he used America precisely as an actor would, to make money wherever he could ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... was laughing, but he controlled himself to ask, "And had the fellow no progressive doctrine, no steps of belief, no logical formulation of his claims? He couldn't have been merely a dunder-headed, impudent charlatan, who expected to convince by the miracles ...
— The Leatherwood God • William Dean Howells
... by the influence of the audience on the writer are many. First of all comes a fault far enough removed from the characteristic vices of the charlatan—to wit, sheer timidity and weakness. There is a kind of stage-fright that seizes on a man when he takes pen in hand to address an unknown body of hearers, no less than when he stands up to deliver himself ...
— Style • Walter Raleigh
... (poking him in the ribs) Away, you charlatan! I reckon you have killed more people than I have ...
— The Stepmother, A Drama in Five Acts • Honore De Balzac
... still more strange. The positive religions keep man from going astray; it is these which render the supernatural definite and precise;[5110] "he had better catch it there than pick it up at Mademoiselle Lenormand's, or with some fortune-teller or a passing charlatan." An established religion ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 6 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 2 (of 2) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... standing some time in the midst of a pouring rain, and without any prospect of an answer, the regent grew impatient, and sent word to Trolle that he could offer no other terms than those already offered. The charlatan then threw off the mask. He replied that he placed implicit confidence in Christiern, and was in no hurry for a parley. Any time within six weeks would do. At this announcement the regent had nothing for it but to withdraw. Drenched to the ...
— The Swedish Revolution Under Gustavus Vasa • Paul Barron Watson
... foreigner with stars. Naturalism I wore round my neck, Romanticism was pinned over the heart, Symbolism I carried like a toy revolver in my waistcoat pocket, to be used on an emergency. I do not judge whether I was charlatan or genius, I merely state that I found all—actors, managers, editors, publishers, docile and ready to listen to me. The world may be wicked, cruel, and stupid, but it is patient; on this point I will not be gainsaid, it is patient; I know what I am talking about; I maintain ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... There was never such another impatient and inconsiderate creature upon the globe as yourself. It would be unpardonably rude in us to send the man away, if he is a charlatan, without letting him see me. Have him up, by all means, and let us hear what priggish nonsense he has to say. He will feel the easier when ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... then eighty-six years old, and in the forty-ninth year of office, was dismissed without apology from his post of Surveyor of Public Works. The German Court, hostile to all who had served the Stuarts, appointed in his place a poor pretender, named Benson. This charlatan—now only remembered by a line in the "Dunciad," which ridicules the singular vanity of a man who erected a monument to Milton, in Westminster Abbey, and crowded the marble with his own titles—was ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... right. You wrote the book. But, in any case, I should be more of a charlatan than I ...
— Not George Washington - An Autobiographical Novel • P. G. Wodehouse
... all Christendom with his peculiar philosophy, his revolutionary methods of treating diseases, and his unparalleled success in curing them. A man who was to be remembered in after-time by some as the father of modern chemistry and the founder of modern medicine; by others as madman, charlatan, impostor; and by still others as a combination of all these. This soft-cheeked, effeminate, woman-hating man, whose very sex has been questioned, was Theophrastus von Hohenheim, better known as ...
— A History of Science, Volume 2(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... some simple chemical experiments and conjuring tricks, and had a store of what sounded to ignorant people profound teaching about deep mysteries, and gave forth enigmatical utterances about his own greatness. An accomplished charlatan will leave much to be inferred from nods and hints, and his admirers will generally spin even more out of them than he meant. So the Samaritans bettered Simon's 'some great one' into 'that power of God which is called great,' and saw in him ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... common charlatan; she had strength of a sort, though where it came from who could say? Moreover, for all kinds of secret reasons of her own, she desired to keep in her grip this boy Godfrey, who had shown himself to be so wonderful a medium or clairvoyant. To her he meant strength and fortune; ...
— Love Eternal • H. Rider Haggard
... known, vast, and almost impenetrable forest, successfully defy capture. But the fact of there being pseudo-wer-leopards by no means disposes of the fact that there are genuine ones, any more than the fact that there are charlatan palmists precludes the possibility of there being bona fide palmists; and I am inclined to believe lycanthropy exists in certain parts of West Africa (i.e., where primitive conditions are most in evidence), ...
— Werwolves • Elliott O'Donnell
... our new Centennial let us eschew the political charlatan, and bring forward our statesmen to serve and govern a people, who, to become a unit of strength, must ever bear in mind the words of the great southern statesman, who said he knew "no north, no south, no east, no west; but ...
— Voyage of The Paper Canoe • N. H. Bishop
... remained, and who constituted the great majority of the membership, had quieted down, the president remarked that the interruption which they had just experienced was quite in line with all the other proceedings of the disturbers of public tranquillity who, under the lead of a crazy American charlatan, were trying to deceive the ignorant multitude. But they would find themselves seriously in error if they imagined that their absurd ideas were going to be ...
— The Second Deluge • Garrett P. Serviss
... the possibility of seeing into futurity, nor a cloud of witnesses from our modern philosophers, attesting the truth of the phenomena of somnambulism, but only observe that this very Academy of Paris, which in 1784 anathematised Mesmer as a quack, a cheat, and a charlatan or fool, and which in conjunction with all the academies of Europe (that of Berlin alone excepted) reviled his doctrines and insulted all who upheld them, as witches had been reviled in preceding centuries, and compelled Mesmer himself to fly for protection ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V1 • William Mienhold
... danger whatever, I give you my word. You are always timid, Clarke, always; but you know my history. I have devoted myself to transcendental medicine for the last twenty years. I have heard myself called quack and charlatan and impostor, but all the while I knew I was on the right path. Five years ago I reached the goal, and since then every day has been a preparation for ...
— The House of Souls • Arthur Machen |
