"Fakir" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... is no room for variety, for the play of life; all such fretfulness ceases, to be replaced by an all-pervading calm, beautiful, if you like, but lifeless. There is this deadness about any conception of perfection that will always make it an unattainable ideal in life. Those who, like the Indian fakir or the hermits of the Middle Ages, have staked their all on this ideal of perfection, have found it necessary to suppress life in every way possible, the fakirs often remaining motionless for long periods at a time, and one of the mediaeval saints going so far as to live on the top ...
— The Practice and Science Of Drawing • Harold Speed
... whose report is given by Assemani, heard that the church had begun to be occupied by some Christian people. But Barbosa, a few years later, found it half in ruins and in the charge of a Mahomedan Fakir, who kept a ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... I've got a house up in the Bronx, and a bit of land round it. And there's Mrs. Mulholland and four little Mulhollands and me—that's my country and my party and my religion. The rest is off my beat, and I don't give a damn for it. I don't care which fakir gets to be president, or which swindler gets to be rich. Everything works out somehow, and the best any man can do is to mind ...
— The Deluge • David Graham Phillips
... began Pa and I went and sat on the lowest seat near the ring, and the performers guyed Pa for a Hoosier, and the lemonade butchers tried to sell Pa lemonade and peanuts, which was the last hair, until a fakir tried to get Pa to bet on a shell game, and ...
— Peck's Bad Boy With the Cowboys • Hon. Geo. W. Peck
... his utmost skill, but in vain. In the usual time, the woman appeared to be lifeless, and he therefore left her, acknowledging that he could not be of any further service. On his reaching my bungalow, some of my servants stated, that in the neighbourhood a fakir, or wandering mendicant, resided, who could charm away the bites of snakes; and begged, if the doctor had no objection, that they might be permitted to send for him. He answered: 'Yes, of course: if the poor people would feel any consolation by his coming, ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 457 - Volume 18, New Series, October 2, 1852 • Various
... in bed. 'He's a detective employed by the State Medical Society. He's been following you over five counties. He came to me yesterday and we fixed up this scheme to catch you. I guess you won't do any more doctoring around these parts, Mr. Fakir. What was it you said I had, doc?' the mayor laughs, 'compound—well, it wasn't softening of ...
— The Gentle Grafter • O. Henry
... jugglers in Chinatown and among them are numerous fortune-tellers. This kind of pastime is as old as the human race, and you find the man who undertakes to reveal to you the secrets of the future among all peoples. The Orientals are always ready to listen to the "neby" or the necromancer or the fakir or the wandering minstrel, who improvises for you and sings for you the good things which are in store for you. We see this tendency among our own people who would have their destiny pointed out by means of a pack of cards, by the reading of the palm of the ...
— By the Golden Gate • Joseph Carey
... part of my goods I gave to the temple, and yet retained a considerable sum, for I should need money to carry out my quest, and after I had accomplished it I should hand over what remained for the benefit of the poor. I should myself become a fakir. I want you to understand, sahib, that henceforth I had but one object in life, a supreme one, to accomplish, in which nothing must stand in my way, and that what would be in others a crime was but a sacrifice on my part, ...
— Colonel Thorndyke's Secret • G. A. Henty
... travels. "We were able to observe a group of the aborigines at their devotions. Conspicuous was a not ungraceful young female, whose head, ornamented with a plume of feathers, towered above the enclosure in which she was secluded, while an aged fakir, hakem or medicine man pronounced from a loftier ...
— Modern Broods • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... with him, and I was only too glad to accept his invitation, as I believed his knowledge of Bombay might be of great service to me. In this I did not mistake. I told him I wished to ascertain the whereabouts of a Rama Ragobah, who had been something between a rishi and a fakir, and he directed me at once to a fakir named Parinama who, he said, would be able to locate my man, if he were still alive ...
— The Darrow Enigma • Melvin L. Severy
... "It's a pack of lies!" he shouted, advancing toward Kennedy, "a pack of lies! You are a fakir and a blackmailer. I'll have you in jail for this, by God—and you ...
— Master Tales of Mystery, Volume 3 • Collected and Arranged by Francis J. Reynolds
... temple and pagoda will disappear; carvings, images, and Sikh-guarded courts. Long lines of yellow-robed priests will chant their last processional hymn to Buddha, and the smoking incense to waning gods shall be quenched forever. Where Tao rites were celebrated, silence shall fall; where fakir and dervish tortured and immolated their lives, happy children shall play. Instead of the lotos of the Ganges and the Nile, there shall bloom the Rose of Sharon and the Lily of ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... and reigned there very quietly for some months, until, to appease the jealousy of the Turks, Lord Elgin despatched a frigate to dethrone the new sovereign. Afterwards he traversed India in the dress of a fakir. He is ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... to condemn a class even though a majority of that class may be worthy of reproach. Therefore, instead of inveighing against the "song-poem" fakir with sounding periods of denunciation, permit me to state the ...
— Writing for Vaudeville • Brett Page
... study of the Law, pushed to the most insignificant minutiae, and reduced to questions of casuistry, was the only study. This exclusively theological and canonical culture contributed in no respect to refine the intellect. It was something analogous to the barren doctrine of the Mussulman fakir, to that empty science discussed round about the mosques, and which is a great expenditure of time and useless argumentation, by no means calculated to advance the right discipline of the mind. The theological education of the modern clergy, although very dry, gives us no ...
— The Life of Jesus • Ernest Renan
... old hypnotic fakir tricks upon me, Baroudi," she added, pushing up the cushions against the rock behind her. "I know quantities of hysterical European women make fools of themselves out here, but I am not hysterical, ...
— Bella Donna - A Novel • Robert Hichens
... record today by refusing to pay a snake charmer all he wanted and then when he protested I took one of the snakes out of his hands and swung it around my head to the delight of the people. I wanted to show him he was a fakir to want me to pay for what I would do myself. It was a large snake about four feet long. Then my horse and another horse got fighting in the principal street in the city standing up on their hind legs and boxing like men and biting and squealing. ...
— Adventures and Letters • Richard Harding Davis
... "What the Indian fakir does in a cataleptic condition may be duplicated. It is not incredible that they may possess some vegetable extract by which they perform their as yet unexplained feats of prolonged living burial. ...
— The Dream Doctor • Arthur B. Reeve
... of pleasure or pain. His dress consisted of a cloth wrapped round his waist, a scarf over his shoulder, and a turban on his head—the upper part of his body and his legs being completely exposed. The man was a fakir, one of a class of religious fanatics, who, ignorant of a God of love and mercy, believe that holiness can be obtained by practising the most rigid self-denial and the infliction of every ...
— The Young Rajah • W.H.G. Kingston
... he would have given those city people a piece of his mind. He would have told them what he thought of their silly, prattling humbug about the fatherland and about the great honor it was to return home to Marcsa looking like a monkey. If he had the doctor in his clutches now! The fakir had photographed him, not once, but a dozen times, from all sides, after each butchery, as though he had accomplished a miracle, had turned out a wonderful masterpiece. And here Julia, even Julia, his playmate, his neighbor, had ...
— Men in War • Andreas Latzko
... chanced, that one evening he was hastily summoned by a message from the Secretary of the Government, to attend a patient of consequence. "Yet he is, after all, only a Fakir," said the message. "You will find him at the tomb of Cara Razi, the Mahomedan saint and doctor, about one coss from the fort. Enquire for him by the name of Barak el Hadgi. Such a patient promises no fees; but we know how little you care about the pagodas; ...
— The Surgeon's Daughter • Sir Walter Scott
... best of him in the haunted house affair," said Jack. "Guess the professor won't tackle another job like that in hurry," and he silently laughed as he thought of the trick (told of in the first volume) the students played on the fakir when a phonograph was used ...
— Jack Ranger's Western Trip - From Boarding School to Ranch and Range • Clarence Young
... words with a sort of triumph. Like the fakir, he possessed the art of spiritual detachment, which is an attribute of genius. From an intellectual eminence he was surveying his own peril. Colin Camber in the flesh had ceased to exist; he was merely a ...
— Bat Wing • Sax Rohmer
... gone; There lingers Life, though but in one"—[dh] For many a gilded chamber's there, Which Solitude might well forbear;[75] Within that dome as yet Decay Hath slowly worked her cankering way— But gloom is gathered o'er the gate, Nor there the Fakir's self will wait; Nor there will wandering Dervise stay, 340 For Bounty cheers not his delay; Nor there will weary stranger halt To bless the sacred "bread and salt."[di][76] Alike must Wealth and Poverty Pass heedless and unheeded ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Vol. 3 (of 7) • Lord Byron
... about Eastern affairs than any living man. Yes, I mean it. He knows any amount of Eastern dialects; speaks Arabic and Turkish like a native, and has a regular passion for mixing himself up in Eastern matters. He can pass himself off as a Fakir, a Dervish—anything you like. He knows the byways of Eastern cities and Eastern life better than any man I know of, and obtained a great reputation in certain official quarters for discovering plots inimical to British interests. ...
— "The Pomp of Yesterday" • Joseph Hocking
... lanes and streets unabashed, and gathered his knot of disciples from among the crowd of his old comrades, thus giving token of a force having been lying hid in one who seemed capable only of work on week-days and of sleep on Sundays. There is not a Hindu fakir, who swings from a hook in the muscles of his back, or measures with his body a long pilgrimage to Juggernaut; not a Popish devotee, who braves the opinion of society with naked feet, comical garment, and self-imposed "bodily exercise," but demonstrates what a man can and will do, if the mainspring ...
— Parish Papers • Norman Macleod
... supposed war will break out again and the fleet is intended to attack us here. So that we may have the Subah making common cause with the French to crush us. He'll turn against the French then, but that won't save us. On top of that comes a fakir from Murshidabad demanding in the Subah's name that we should stop work on our fortifications; the insolence of the wretch passes all bounds. Mr. Drake properly refused the demand; he said we were repairing our defenses in case ...
— In Clive's Command - A Story of the Fight for India • Herbert Strang
... Christians in the Holy Land, in colours scarce inferior to those employed at the Council of Clermont by the Hermit Peter, when he preached the first Crusade. To find, in a person so reverend and so much revered, the frantic gestures of a mad fakir, induced the Christian knight to pause ere he could resolve to communicate to him certain important matters, which he had in charge from some of ...
— The Talisman • Sir Walter Scott
... Indiman, who stood at his elbow. "A fakir," he growled, disgustedly. "Now, I'll leave it ...
— The Gates of Chance • Van Tassel Sutphen
... dreary little voice, "in India once, when Father and I were going into the mountains for the summer, there was a—there was a sort of fakir at one of the railway stations doing tricks with a crippled tiger-cub—a tiger-cub with a shot-off paw. And when Father wasn't looking I got off the train and went back—and I followed that fakir two days till he just naturally had to sell me the tiger-cub; he couldn't exactly have an Englishwoman ...
— Little Eve Edgarton • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... a blind fakir begging; then ACHMET gave him five paras, although his charity was unseen; neither did he want it to be seen, ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I., No. IV., April, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... for him to accomplish this now was obviously through finding his uncle, the Sheikh Burrachee, and to do this he must follow the course he had pointed out: find a dervish or fakir, and show the ring and parchment. Of course the efficacy of these might all be the delusion of a crazy brain, but he must take his chance of that. It was certain, however, that he would never get the ...
— For Fortune and Glory - A Story of the Soudan War • Lewis Hough
... a chuckle. "Indeed? Well, let me tell you, my boy, no one else does either. The rope is made to go up in the air, so stiffly that the fakir—that is, the Eastern magician—can climb it. Some claim to have seen the fakirs climb up it and vanish from sight, and ...
— Mr. Wicker's Window • Carley Dawson
... celebrated for their "phenomena," and that mesmerism was known and daily practised in China from time immemorial under the name of "gina." In India they fear and hate the very name of the spirits whom the Spiritualists venerate so deeply, yet many an ignorant fakir can perform "miracles" calculated to turn upside-down all the notions of a scientist and to be the despair of the most celebrated of European prestidigitateurs. Many members of the Society have visited India—many were born there and ...
— From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan • Helena Pretrovna Blavatsky
... not be destroyed. You must see to that, as I have done. I gave large gifts to a fakir of great sanctity to declare that a spirit had taken up his abode in the tree, and must on no account be disturbed, though the people might bring offerings and venerate it from below. Should it fall, ...
— The Path to Honour • Sydney C. Grier
... to be seen here shaped like an 8, and erected on the site where a Beluch had been killed. A conical mountain to the south, the Mudonek Ateng, was famous, my camel driver told me, because a Beluch fakir is said to have remained on the top of it for 25 days without food or water. A small stone shelter could be seen on the top of the mountain, which, they say, had been the fakir's abode ...
— Across Coveted Lands - or a Journey from Flushing (Holland) to Calcutta Overland • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... union leaders are not so corrupt as those of America? Are they not? As a matter of fact, the corruption is tenfold greater. The difference is that here it is legalised and respectable. In America the corruption takes the form of a wad of dollar notes pushed into the fakir's hands in a dark corner. In this country our trade union leaders are openly corrupted in the face of day by positions on conciliation boards, Justiceships of the Peace, Cabinet positions" [this is a hit at Mr. John Burns], "and well-paid jobs ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... I venture to make the following observations. In the first place, it is an untenable idea that religiosity or devoutness of spirit is valuable in itself, without reference to the goodness or badness of the dogmatic forms and the practices in which it clothes itself. A fakir would hardly be an estimable figure in our society, merely because his way of living happens to be a manifestation of the religious spirit. If the religious spirit leads to a worthy and beautiful life, if it shows itself in cheerfulness, ...
— On Compromise • John Morley
... it was Marius who was the firebrand and M. Gillenormand who was the bellows. Marius quivered in every limb, he did not know what would happen next, his brain was on fire. He was the priest who beholds all his sacred wafers cast to the winds, the fakir who beholds a passer-by spit upon his idol. It could not be that such things had been uttered in his presence. What was he to do? His father had just been trampled under foot and stamped upon in his presence, but by whom? By his grandfather. How was he to avenge ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... his inspection was swinging a light bamboo cane and smoking a cigarette. He wore a jet black moustache and a jet black speck of a goatee. Moustache and goatee were unmistakably of the variety Andy had seen a circus fakir selling for twenty-five cents, ...
— Andy the Acrobat • Peter T. Harkness
... If I should write anybody a letter from South Clark street, Chicago, the recipient would know I had gone wrong, and was located in the midst of a bad element, and the inference would be that I was the worst fakir, robber, hold-up man or assassin in ...
— Peck's Bad Boy Abroad • George W. Peck
... palm three times with the coin, and began in the monotonous voice and with the expressionless face of the fakir: "You are married. Many years. I see many years. You have not been happy. Monday is your unlucky day. Do not begin anything on Monday. You are thinkin' of takin' a journey—somethin'—some change. It ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... on reaching camp by the appearance of a fakir seated under a tree close to where our tents were pitched. The man was evidently under a vow of silence, which Hindu devotees often make as a penance for sin, or to earn a title to more than a fair share of happiness in a future life. On our addressing ...
— Forty-one years in India - From Subaltern To Commander-In-Chief • Frederick Sleigh Roberts
... A fakir in his Highness's train had stolen these treasures, and carried them to the Princess. "Take the greatest care of these two things," said he; "your fate depends upon them." Then he went away, ...
— Tales of Wonder Every Child Should Know • Various
... me that he had bought medicine from a street fakir and by his direction had followed it with a dose of salts. He saved the bowel movement, washed it in a sieve, and discovered a great number of "gall-stones," which the medicine had so effectively washed from his system. ...
— Outwitting Our Nerves - A Primer of Psychotherapy • Josephine A. Jackson and Helen M. Salisbury
... was a shy and very delicate boy, whose parents took a house at Littlehampton, and with whom he lived. His father was a fire-eating Irish baronet, who might have walked out of the pages of one of Lever's novels. His diet was as meager as that of an Indian fakir, though not otherwise resembling it. It consisted of rum and milk; and his favorite amusement was lying down on his bed and shooting with a pistol at the wick of a lighted candle. His wife—a lady of gentle and somewhat sad demeanor—one day took it into her head to join the Catholic Church; ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock
... while the crowd was howlin' and pinnin' the fakir's tag on him that he began to froth at the mouth and tell how he was comin' down to make mincemeat ...
— Shorty McCabe • Sewell Ford
... this more than usual activity on the part of the hurrying crowds, and for the unmistakable holiday air which Bleecker Street displayed. As far as we could see, lined up on both sides of the curb were the pushcart peddlers, and at every step a sidewalk fakir, ...
— The Long Day - The Story of a New York Working Girl As Told by Herself • Dorothy Richardson
... start," interrupted Loeb. "If you go on that way, we'll never get anywhere. You're a frightful fakir and liar, Feuerstein. You were, seven years ago; of course, the habit's grown on you. Speak out! What do you want? As your lawyer, I must know ...
— The Fortune Hunter • David Graham Phillips
... answered Platzoff. "In my last drashkil-dream, for instance, I believed myself to be an Indian fakir, and I seemed to realise to the full the strange life of one of those strange beings. I was stationed in the shade of a large tree just without the gate of some great city where all who came and went could see me. On the ground, a little way in front of me, was a wooden bowl for the ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 4, April, 1891 • Various
... I love you?" exclaimed Ludwig, with sudden sharpness. "Don't I love you as the fakir loves his Brahma—as the Carthusian loves his Virgin Mary? Don't I ...
— The Nameless Castle • Maurus Jokai
... affectionately. 'What ever put such nonsense in your head? you are so comfortable here with us, and you have your own way, and I never tease you now about going to balls. It is so silly of you trying to make yourself miserable, and living in poky lodgings. You might as well be a fakir, or a dervish, or a Protestant nun, or anything ...
— Uncle Max • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... banyan or buri tree, near Manjee, twenty miles west of Patna, is 375 inches in diameter, the circumference of its shadow at noon measuring 1116 feet. It has sixty stems, or dropped branches that have taken root. Under this tree once sat a naked fakir who had occupied that situation for 25 years; but he did not continue there the whole year, for his vow obliged him to be during the four cold months up to his neck in the water of ...
— Flowers and Flower-Gardens • David Lester Richardson
... wearily, "it is too late. You might as well ask the fakir who has held his arm upright for twenty years, till it has stiffened there, to restore the dry stock by exercise. It is ...
— Questionable Shapes • William Dean Howells
... keenly. Even the cab-horses, on whom he used to look with disdain, eyed him scornfully. Skipper stood it as long as possible and then one day, while the apple fakir was standing on the back step of the cart shouting things at a woman who was leaning half way out of a fourth-story window, he bolted. He distributed that load of apples over four blocks, much to ...
— Horses Nine - Stories of Harness and Saddle • Sewell Ford
... seldom Christmas comes—only once a year; and how soon it is over—a night and a day! If that is the whole of it, it seems not much more durable than the little toys that one buys of a fakir on the street-corner. They run for an hour, and then the spring breaks, and the legs come off, and nothing remains but a ...
— The Spirit of Christmas • Henry Van Dyke
... a Mlle. Lenormand, or a domestic servant like Mme. Fontaine, or again, perhaps it is some half-idiotic negress, some herdsman living among his cattle, who receives the gift of vision; some Hindoo fakir, seated by a pagoda, mortifying the flesh till the spirit gains the mysterious ...
— Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac
... something myself. Remember that old Hindu fellow with a red turban who sat on your front lawn, beneath the palms, and had the women gathered around him in a kind of hypnotic state? He said something like that—I thought him an old fakir at the time. He used a lot of flowery language, but I guess, boiled down, it meant start at the bottom of the ladder. Build yourself up, the way my father did," with a certain wistful ...
— A Man and His Money • Frederic Stewart Isham
... you've said, what Mrs. Cole at the Mountain House told me. She's Mrs. Paula Markham—" his mind went on, "the great fakir of the spook doctors," but his lips stifled the phrase and said after a ...
— The House of Mystery • William Henry Irwin
... combination of the modern fakir plying his trade and the huge black steadily and systematically beckoning toward a stairway partially concealed beyond the curtain, and looking like some giant eunuch of ancient romance, there seemed something which caught and held the public eye and the public wonder; and they crowded about the ...
— Against Odds - A Detective Story • Lawrence L. Lynch
... any race or to any period of history. It is simply innate in every intelligent man, woman, and child that has ever lived, though it is always showing itself in different forms; whether the individual be a Sphinx of Egypt, a Samson of Hebrew lore, an Indian fakir, a Chinese philosopher, a mahatma of Tibet, or a European mathematician ...
— The Canterbury Puzzles - And Other Curious Problems • Henry Ernest Dudeney
... impressed with the wonderful narrative and the unique beauty of the character of our Lord, that he surrendered himself to him as his Saviour and found in him peace and rest. Sometime later he met a Hindu fakir, named Chet Ram, who was earnestly in search of the truth. The Mohammedan convert joyfully told him of his newly found Saviour and gave him his copy of the New Testament that he might find for himself the same ...
— India's Problem Krishna or Christ • John P. Jones
... the old story of 'Jack and the Bean Stalk'; I have seen an old fakir take a bamboo stick, no thicker than his finger, and thrust it down in the ground and start and climb up it, as if it were a tree, and keep on climbing till he was out of sight; and then there would come falling down out of ...
— The Way of a Man • Emerson Hough
... asking about him, and he's a regular fakir," said Roger. "He isn't a doctor at all, although he calls himself one. He puts up a number of medicines and calls them 'Montgomery's Wonderful Cures.' I was told that he used to do quite a business among the ignorant country folks, but lately hardly ...
— Dave Porter and His Rivals - or, The Chums and Foes of Oak Hall • Edward Stratemeyer
... family of his acquaintance there had been transmitted the secret of a drug, capable of altering a man's whole temperament until the antidote was administered. It would turn a coward into a bravo, a miser into a spendthrift, a rake into a fakir. Then, having delivered his manifesto he got up ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan |
