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Illiterate   Listen
adjective
Illiterate  adj.  Unable to read or write; ignorant of letters or books; unlettered; uninstructed; uneducated; as, an illiterate man, or people.
Synonyms: Ignorant; untaught; unlearned; unlettered; unscholary. See Ignorant.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Illiterate" Quotes from Famous Books



... Mehetabel was so precocious that at the age of eight she could read the Greek Testament in the original; that she was from her earliest youth emotional and sentimental; that despite her intellectual tastes and attainments she gave her hand to an illiterate journeyman plumber and glazier; and that when the fruit of this union lay dying by her side she insisted on dictating to her husband a poem afterward published under the moving caption of "A Mother's Address to Her Dying Infant." Another of her poems, by the way, is significantly ...
— Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters • H. Addington Bruce

... expenditure of strength may be seen in the attempt of an illiterate laborer to sign his name. He grips the pen as though it were a crowbar, and puts forth enough strength to handle a twenty-pound weight. Learning to dance, or to skate, or to row a boat, is usually accompanied in the beginning by ...
— The Psychology of Singing - A Rational Method of Voice Culture Based on a Scientific Analysis of All Systems, Ancient and Modern • David C. Taylor

... emigrant proved an active source of ill-will and discontent. The favoured occupant of place and power was not at all inclined to conciliate his Canadian rival, or to give up the title to mental superiority which he derived from birth and education; and he too often treated his illiterate, but sagacious political opponent, with a contempt which his practical knowledge and experience did not merit. It was a miserable state of things; and I believe that most large towns in the province bore, in these respects, a striking ...
— Life in the Clearings versus the Bush • Susanna Moodie

... late noble owner, George, first Duke of Buckingham, was stabbed by Felton; Worcester House, at one time occupied by Lord Chancellor Clarendon; and Essex House, situated near St. Clement Danes, the town residence of Arthur Capel, Earl of Essex, "a sober, wise, judicious, and pondering person, not illiterate beyond the rate of most noblemen ...
— Royalty Restored - or, London under Charles II. • J. Fitzgerald Molloy

... right to select large female souls as Biography or Painting has; and to pick out a selfish, shallow, illiterate creature, with nothing but beauty, and bestow three enormous volumes on her, is to make a perverse selection, beauty being, after all, rarer in women than wit, sense, and goodness. It is as false and ignoble in art, as to marry a pretty face without heart and ...
— The Woman-Hater • Charles Reade

... little neighbouring school The young woman, however, persisted in her design. She possessed certain elevated instincts which made her take a great pride in surrounding herself with accomplished children; moreover, she felt that her sons must never remain as illiterate as her husband, if she wished to see them become prominent men. She fancied them all three in Paris in high positions, which she did not clearly define. When Rougon consented, and the three youngsters ...
— The Fortune of the Rougons • Emile Zola

... into French, and which were fragments of a most ancient ecclesiastical process. He has believed that nothing would be more amusing than the actual resurrection of this antique affair, wherein shines forth the illiterate simplicity of the good old times. Now, then, give ear. This is the order in which were the manuscripts, of which the author has made use in his own fashion, because the ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 2 • Honore de Balzac

... shall! One thing puzzles me about you, Sergeant. I don't think I've mentioned it before. Sometimes you speak almost like an educated man; at others your speech is, well, illiterate." ...
— The Secret of the Tower • Hope, Anthony

... beyond men, can probably conjecture and [1152]foretell many things; they can cause and cure most diseases, deceive our senses; they have excellent skill in all Arts and Sciences; and that the most illiterate devil is Quovis homine scientior (more knowing than any man), as [1153]Cicogna maintains out of others. They know the virtues of herbs, plants, stones, minerals, &c.; of all creatures, birds, beasts, the ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior

... of my readers have associated to any extent with the people in the rural districts, especially those of American or Dutch-American descent, they, no doubt, have observed that a great many of the older and more illiterate ones among them are very superstitious, being implicit believers in signs, charms, apparitions, etc.; and most of them, also, entertain the opinion that the moon exerts an occult influence over many things of vital importance to the residents ...
— From Wealth to Poverty • Austin Potter

... sigh, feathered his oar, and never spoke another word till we came alongside. I did not regret his taciturnity, for I was always more amused with my own thoughts, than in conversing with illiterate people. ...
— Frank Mildmay • Captain Frederick Marryat

... elected that year. But for this exception the Democrats would have made a clean sweep of the city. If the editor had not charged me with being illiterate I would neither have been nominated nor elected. When I appeared before audiences in the "swell end" of town and wrote my lessons on my little slate, I gained their sympathy. They believed in fair play. And I found ...
— The Iron Puddler • James J. Davis

... apparition, though the logical inference would have been, that the body which required planks to transport it, could scarcely be classed with anything of the world of spirits. The links in arguments, however, are seldom respected by the illiterate and vulgar, who jump to their conclusions, in cases of the marvellous, much as politicians find an expression of the common mind in the prepared opinions of the few who speak for them, totally disregarding the dissenting silence of the million. While the men were first comparing their opinions on ...
— Jack Tier or The Florida Reef • James Fenimore Cooper

... all the essential features which mark the character of this extraordinary epidemic, it is proper I should state that the opponents of Jansenism concur in bringing against the convulsionists the charge that many of them were not only ignorant and illiterate girls, but persons of bad character, occasionally of notoriously immoral habits; nay, that some of them justified the vicious courses in which they indulged by declaring these to be a representation of a religious tendency, emblematic of that degradation ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various

... complimentary about his Majesty's ship Pleiades being one of the very few ships in the Service whose captain still maintained so ancient and honoured a custom, the discontinuance of which could only be advocated by common, illiterate persons—such as ...
— The Ebbing Of The Tide - South Sea Stories - 1896 • Louis Becke

... the use of small instead of capital letters in the words 'La Tortue' on the paper, I observed, in the beginning, that the first letter of the whole sentence—the 'p' in 'puni'—was a small one. Clearly, the writer was an illiterate man, and it was at once plain that he may have made the same ...
— Martin Hewitt, Investigator • Arthur Morrison

... to the west, the stars were shining in the cloudless sky, dimmed a little in brightness by the faint silvery veil of moisture in the air. The man's soul grew very tender as he stood waiting for his bride. He was rough, illiterate, yet there was something fine about him after all, a kind of simplicity and a ...
— Other Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland

... period of very slow progress. The people who were in power believed that "progress" was a very undesirable invention of the Evil One and ought to be discouraged, and as they hap-pened to occupy the seats of the mighty, it was easy to enforce their will upon the patient serfs and the illiterate knights. Here and there a few brave souls sometimes ventured forth into the forbidden region of science, but they fared badly and were considered lucky when they escaped with their lives and a ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon

... Illiterate, you gloss the Sacred Law, And still your tongue uninjured find? The midday sun with steadfast eye you saw, And are not straightway stricken blind? You thrust your hand into the blazing fire, And draw it forth, unscathed and sound? ...
— The Little Clay Cart - Mrcchakatika • (Attributed To) King Shudraka

... printers I found poorly qualified for their business. Bradford had not been bred to it, and was very illiterate; and Keimer, though something of a scholar, was a mere compositor, knowing nothing of presswork. He had been one of the French prophets, and could act their enthusiastic agitations. At this time he did not profess ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry

... "Weir of Hermiston," was known as the "hanging judge"—the Judge Jeffreys of Scotland; but he was a sound judge. He argued a point in a colloquial style, asking a question, and himself supplying the answer in his clear, abrupt manner. But he was illiterate, and without the least desire for refined enjoyment, holding in disdain natures less coarse than his own; he shocked the feelings of those even of an age which had less decorum than prevailed in that which succeeded, and would not be ...
— Law and Laughter • George Alexander Morton

... (except to write fair Latin prose?). "What we now call 'culture' certainly did not enter into the 'curriculum,' nor 'English,' nor modern languages, nor 'literature.'" {17a} Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps says that "removed prematurely from school, residing with illiterate relatives in a bookless neighbourhood, thrown into the midst of occupations adverse to scholastic progress—it is difficult to believe that when he first left Stratford he was not all but destitute of polished accomplishments." {17b} Mr. Greenwood adds the apprenticeship ...
— Shakespeare, Bacon and the Great Unknown • Andrew Lang

... 3, 79) to any work that is studied, do not stagger Prof. Muller at all. Grantha he takes to mean simply a composition, and this may be handed down to posterity by oral communication. Hence, we must believe that Panini was illiterate; but yet composed the most elaborate and scientific system of grammar ever known; recorded its 3,996 rules only upon the molecular quicksands of his "cerebral cineritious matter," and handed them over to his disciples by atmospheric vibration, i.e., oral teaching! Of course, nothing ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various

... already stood the shock of three of this man's particular visits, besides my share in his more general ones; and find it is impossible I should ever endure him. He has but a very ordinary share of understanding; is very illiterate; knows nothing but the value of estates, and how to improve them, and what belongs to land-jobbing and husbandry. Yet I am as one stupid, I think. They have begun so cruelly with me, that I have not spirit enough to assert my ...
— Clarissa, Volume 1 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson

... seem the better. To what would the world, to what would England, come, if this habit of regarding all novelty as sophistry, of making the very ability and learning bestowed upon a doctrine an objection to the receipt of that doctrine, were to become general? "Ignorance and illiterate presumption," he says, "which is yet but our disease, will turn at length into our very constitution, and prove the hectic evil of this age." He hoped better of the Parliament; he hoped that they would not overlook the necessity of a change of the ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson

... little scraps of Latin, sometimes running into a distich, are frequent signs of a certain classical proclivity of the writer. Any one who should infer, from the good man's arbitrary mode of spelling many words, that he was an illiterate person, would be grievously mistaken, in his ignorance of the universal characteristic and license of that age in that matter. The Queen herself was by no means so good a "speller," by our standard, as was Adam Winthrop. The extraordinary way in which letters were then left ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various

... They met a war party of Indians, and having plied them with liquor, watched one of their mad dances round the camp-fire. In another place they came on a straggling settlement of Germans, dull, patient, and illiterate, strangely unfit for the life of the wilderness. All these things, as well as the progress of their work and their various resting-places, Washington noted down briefly but methodically in a diary, showing in these rough notes the first evidences of that ...
— George Washington, Vol. I • Henry Cabot Lodge

... proofs laid down, by their prophets. And this, it must be now acknowledged, they wanted; and, certainly, the wise and learned of the Jewish nation, might be allowed to have understood their sacred books upon the subject, as well, at least, if not better, than the illiterate apostles, who manifestly put new interpretations upon them, and those, confessedly, not agreeable to the obvious and literal meaning of those books; but contrary to the sense of the Jewish nation. And for this scepticism they might plead the example of the apostles themselves, who, at first, ...
— The Grounds of Christianity Examined by Comparing The New Testament with the Old • George Bethune English

... once. If you went back it's just possible that into the fellow's dull mind might steal a ghost of suspicion. I'm ready to take my turn now, though I hate the damned inactivity. I am a presumed illiterate. I struggle over the printed page—and with me loafing in his office he would chat away ...
— A Pagan of the Hills • Charles Neville Buck

... many attributes of chivalry, we incline towards the erroneous view that it was confined entirely to the upper classes. That the manuscript volumes of the romantic tales which were so eagerly purchased and treasured by the educated classes could never possibly come into the hands of the rude illiterate peasants is a fallacious argument. Scanty indeed would be our folk-lore had it all been transmitted graphically. Chaucer bears evidence of the widespread popularity of these ...
— The Book-Hunter at Home • P. B. M. Allan

... The judge who sentenced me informed me—and the world at large—that he deemed it expedient to 'make an example' of me—only he put it more legally—as an educated young woman, of apparent refinement, who had committed a crime connected generally with illiterate and ignorant ...
— Afterwards • Kathlyn Rhodes

... illiterate, the Belgians are giving much attention to schools these times. Even while they were guests of France, with their government located at Havre, they established twenty-four schools for the children and a single woman had more than five thousand pupils under her care ...
— Birdseye Views of Far Lands • James T. Nichols

... sometimes does. These stories, ranging from the noble romance of Palamon and Arcite to the rude intrigues of Clerk Nicholas,—the one fitted to draw tears down the cheeks of noble ladies and gentlemen; the other to convulse with laughter the midriffs of illiterate clowns,—give one an idea of the astonishing range of Chaucer's powers. He can suit himself to every company, make himself at home in every circumstance of life; can mingle in tournaments where beauty is leaning from balconies, ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith

... powder, and puts it over burning charcoal. In a short time it changes colour; the lead becomes yellow, and is found to be converted into excellent gold: the iron becomes white, and is found to be pure silver. Delisle is altogether an illiterate person. M. de St. Auban endeavoured to teach him to read and write, but he profited very little by his lessons. He is unpolite, fantastic, and a dreamer, and acts by ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay

... Accomplished men. Infant prodigies. A widow with eight sons and one daughter. Primitive laundering, but generous patrons. The bloomer costume appropriate for overland journey. Dances in barroom. Unwilling female partners. Some illiterate immigrants. Many intelligent and well-bred women. The journey back to Indian Bar. The tame frog in the rancho barroom. The dining-table a bed at night. Elation of the author on arriving at her own ...
— The Shirley Letters from California Mines in 1851-52 • Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe

... were necessary to express a particular business they are to discourse on." And this invention would certainly have taken place, to the great ease as well as health of the subject, if the women, in conjunction with the vulgar and illiterate, had not threatened to raise a rebellion unless they might be allowed the liberty to speak with their tongues, after the manner of their forefathers; such constant irreconcilable enemies to science are the common people. However, ...
— Gulliver's Travels - into several remote nations of the world • Jonathan Swift

... a stubborn struggle had been going on between Lepailleur and his wife with respect to Antonin. While the farmer had grown more and more exasperated with his son's idleness and life of low debauchery in Paris, the latter had supported her boy with all the obstinacy of an illiterate woman, who was possessed of a blind faith in his fine handwriting, and felt convinced that if he did not succeed in life it was simply because he was refused the money necessary for that purpose. In spite of her sordid avarice in some matters, ...
— Fruitfulness - Fecondite • Emile Zola

... of a philosophical or literary nature, which Latin was adapted to express. The educated public was extremely small, and foreign travel altogether beyond the reach of all but the very few. The overwhelming mass of the people were illiterate, and fast tied to their native spot by lack of pence, lack of communications, and the general ...
— International Language - Past, Present and Future: With Specimens of Esperanto and Grammar • Walter J. Clark

... Five-Year Mandate of regeneration. The petition, like everything else, had found its way into Don Jose's hands. He had showed to Mrs. Gould these pages of dirty-greyish rough paper (perhaps looted in some village store), covered with the crabbed, illiterate handwriting of the old padre, carried off from his hut by the side of a mud-walled church to be the secretary of the dreaded Salteador. They had both bent in the lamplight of the Gould drawing-room ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad

... floors and some with none; some with a tiny window and some without; some have doors and some haven't. Very few have desks; in most there are but slab benches. But worse than the school house and its surroundings is the illiterate, immoral teacher who attempts to teach the children. As for church organizations they are numerous, and a large majority are church members; but alas for the Christianity taught and practiced. Religion and morality are divorced. ...
— American Missionary, Volume 43, No. 1, January, 1889 • Various

... theory of the origin of society, of the social contract, and of a cure for all social evils by a return to a state of nature, had, as we all know now, no more relation to fact than the dreams of an illiterate drunkard; but they were not without value as a vague and symbolical expression of certain evils from which the France of his day was suffering. As a child, I was told a story of an old woman in Devonshire who, describing what was apparently some form of dyspepsia, said that "her ...
— A Critical Examination of Socialism • William Hurrell Mallock

... art revived, as we know, the almost lost idea of beauty, and the serious and successful pursuit of it. Cardinal Antonelli,[461] speaking to me about the education of the common people in Rome, said that they were illiterate, indeed, but whoever mingled with them at any public show, and heard them pass judgment on the beauty or ugliness of what came before them,—"e brutto," "e bello,"—would find that their judgment agreed admirably, in general, ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold

... wide-spread political and social disease—indications of an approaching catastrophe destined to end a civilization which, having rejected orthodoxy, had cast aside authority, given the force of law to the whimsies of illiterate majorities, and accepted, as the voice of God, the voice of unthinking mobs, blind to their own interests and utterly incapable of working out their own good. It was evident that he regarded Russia as representing among the nations the idea of Heaven-given ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White

... marriage; it did me good to see her, Loudon, and to see that needle going, going, and to say 'All this hurry, Jim, is just to marry you!' I couldn't believe it; it was so like some blame' fairy story. To think of those old tin-type times about turned my head; I was so unrefined then, and so illiterate, and so lonesome; and here I am in clover, and I'm blamed if I can see what I've done to ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne

... advance very greatly depend upon how far the educated Indian is in sympathy with and capable of fairly representing the illiterate masses. The old assumption that the interests of the ryot must be confided to official hands is strenuously denied by modern educated Indians. They claim that the European official must by his lack of imagination and comparative lack of skill in tongues be gravely handicapped in ...
— India, Old and New • Sir Valentine Chirol

... Persons of high Birth, Knights, and others of Heroick Spirit and exalted Nature. I can easily imagine, how, in a credulous, ignorant Age, this might be swallow'd and generally receiv'd for Truth; nor is it more difficult to conceive, how illiterate Men and rude Warriours, altogether unacquainted with Human Nature, should be so far imposed upon by such Assertions, as to be fully persuaded, that they were really posses'd of; and actually animated by such a Principle, constantly ascribing to the Force and Influence of it ...
— An Enquiry into the Origin of Honour, and the Usefulness of Christianity in War • Bernard Mandeville

... him with the weapons of reform—failing, as a rule, to accomplish anything. Aldermen and legislators are his creatures. His web is out in all directions: he holds this man's mortgage, knows that man's guilty secret, discovers the other's weakness and takes advantage of it. He is cynically illiterate and contemptuous of the respectable classes. If need be he can resort to outrageous violence to gain his ends. And yet, though the reflective novelists have all condemned him for half a century, he sits fast in ordinary fiction, where he is tolerated with the amused ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren

... style—oh! what a picture I would draw for you! But unfortunately, as you are aware, I'm an illiterate person. The woman I am expecting, and who has kept me now more than a hour continually starting and looking at the door, loves me—but how I love her I fancy even your ...
— The Diary of a Superfluous Man and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev

... as Haldimand said, 'mechanics, only removed from one situation to practise their trade in another.' Major Van Alstine, it appears, was a blacksmith before he came to Canada. That many of the Loyalists were illiterate is evident from the testimony of the Rev. William Smart, a Presbyterian clergyman who came to Upper Canada in 1811: 'There were but few of the U. E. Loyalists who possessed a complete education. He was personally acquainted with many, ...
— The United Empire Loyalists - A Chronicle of the Great Migration - Volume 13 (of 32) in the series Chronicles of Canada • W. Stewart Wallace

... retaliated with statements no less base and worthless, exhibiting Jackson as a military butcher and utterly illiterate, and publishing documents assailing his marriage, the chastity of his wife, and the execution of six militiamen convicted of mutiny. Thurlow Weed, who conducted the Adams campaign in the western part of the State, indulged in no personal attacks upon Jackson or his wife, refusing ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander

... that impatience characteristic of the illiterate for modern methods of communication. "Pwhat ...
— The Brass Bowl • Louis Joseph Vance

... people conversing, or of orators, or of singing, and sometimes instrumental music. None of these were objects made by savages; these people probably traded with some fairly high civilization. They were not illiterate; he found printed matter, indicating the use of some phonetic alphabet, and paper pamphlets containing printed reproductions of photographs as ...
— Flight From Tomorrow • Henry Beam Piper

... what I just said about the loves and friendships of illiterate persons,—that is, of the human race, with a few exceptions here and there. I like books,—I was born and bred among them, and have the easy feeling, when I get into their presence, that a stable-boy has among horses. I don't think I undervalue them either as companions or as instructors. ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... and illiterate," said T. B., slipping the medallion into his pocket, and locking away the dossier in one of the drawers of ...
— The Secret House • Edgar Wallace

... emerged from a district which at that time was traversed by few people; perhaps only by some illiterate Mexican adventurers, though it had once been settled by a thrifty people whose stage of culture was that of the Pueblo Indians of to-day, and who had vanished, nobody knows how many centuries ago. Over it all hovered a distinct ...
— Unknown Mexico, Volume 1 (of 2) • Carl Lumholtz

... anyone reads it!"—she answered—"But what are we to read? If low-minded and illiterate scavengers are employed to write for the newspapers instead of well-educated men, we must put up with the mud the scavengers collect. We know well enough that every journal is more or less a calendar of lies,—all the same we cannot blind ourselves to the great change ...
— The Secret Power • Marie Corelli

... apologist frankly declares that to young members of Parliament who spoke of public virtue and patriotism he would reply "you will soon come off that and grow wiser," the autocrat enamoured of power who could brook no colleague within measurable distance, the man of coarse habits and illiterate tastes, above all the man who induced his countrymen to place money before honour, and whose administration even an admirer describes as one of unparalleled stagnation—such a man must have roused intense antagonism in Fielding's generous ...
— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden

... citizens? I think you will find, in investigating this subject, that every solid argument is against the extraordinary court, and that every one in its favor is specious only. It is a transfer from a judicature of learning and integrity, to one, the greatness of which is both illiterate and unprincipled. Yet such is the force of prejudice with some, and of the want of reflection in others, that many of our constitutions have copied this absurdity, without suspecting it to be one. I am glad to hear that our new constitution is pretty ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson

... to consider the patronage of authors as any part of his duty, and the tradition which made him consider writing poetry as a proper accomplishment is dying out. Since that time our aristocracy as such has been normally illiterate. Peers—Byron, for example—have occasionally written books; and more than one person of quality has, like Fox, kept up the interest in classical literature which he acquired at a public school, and added a charm to his parliamentary oratory. The great man, too, as I have said, could ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen

... Scriptures were allowed in Prussia, except an ordained clergyman was present. At the close we sang another hymn, and then the master of the house prayed. Whilst he prayed, my feeling was something like this: "I could not pray as well, though I am much more learned than this illiterate man." The whole made a deep impression on me. I was happy; though, if I had been asked why I was happy, I could not have ...
— The Life of Trust: Being a Narrative of the Lord's Dealings With George Mueller • George Mueller

... general were famous for their learning, he denied the imputation, and defied him to prove it from their works — 'The Scots (said he) have a slight tincture of letters, with which they make a parade among people who are more illiterate than themselves; but they may be said to float on the surface of science, and they have made very small advances in the useful arts.' 'At least (cried Tabby), all the world allows that the Scots behaved ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett

... strongly contrasted with the fellow-sufferer with whom his name is indelibly associated. "His person," writes a contemporary, "was very plain, his shape clumsy, but his make strong: and he had no marks of the polite gentleman about him. He was illiterate in respect of his birth; but rather from a total want of application to letters, than want of ability."[351] His manners are said to have been natural, if not courtly; his countenance only inferior in its ungainliness to that of Lovat, but, ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745 - Volume III. • Mrs. Thomson

... polished taste, the patron of the fine arts in a degree transcending all example of his own or the previous age, and as a man of general literature so much beyond his contemporaries, except Cicero, that he looked down even upon the brilliant Sylla as an illiterate person—to class such a man with the race of furious destroyers exulting in the desolations they spread is to err not by an individual trait, but by the whole genus. The Attilas and the Tamerlanes, ...
— "De Bello Gallico" and Other Commentaries • Caius Julius Caesar

... acquired knowledge were necessary to qualify men for the sacred function, and enable them to discharge the duties of it with honour and success, they associated on purpose to prevent deluded mechanics, and illiterate novices from creeping into the pulpit, to the disgrace of the character, and the injury of religion. In different parts of the province, persons of this stamp had appeared, who cried down all establishments, ...
— An Historical Account Of The Rise And Progress Of The Colonies Of South Carolina And Georgia, Volume 2 • Alexander Hewatt

... disposition to live in forced dissimulation, and he felt that he could do no good either for himself or for his country, which was then overrun with Spaniards and scourged by petty tyrants; and with the lower orders sunk in ignorance, and the upper classes illiterate, uncultivated, and corrupt, the mission of Giordano Bruno was impossible. "Altiora Peto" was Bruno's motto, and to realize it he had gone forth with the pilgrim's staff in his hand, sometimes covered with the cowl of the monk, at others wearing the simple ...
— The Heroic Enthusiasts,(1 of 2) (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno

... Spanish pilots or navigators among the first discoverers of the St. Lawrence may be readily supposed, and what more natural than that those who first visited the gulf should call the interior of the country El Canada from the typographical appearance of the opening to it, the custom of illiterate navigators naming places from events and ...
— Famous Firesides of French Canada • Mary Wilson Alloway

... unbelievable if it were not true! He was so gross, so tubby, so manifestly over-fed, whereas her mother had ever been elegant and bien soignee. But he had shown kindness to her in his domineering way. He was not quite so illiterate as his accent and his general air of uncouthness seemed to imply. In his speech, the broad vowels of the Lancashire dialect were grafted on to the clipped staccato of a Cockney. He would scoff at anyone who told him that knives and forks had ...
— The Stowaway Girl • Louis Tracy

... cent, just as it would in school. Men are only boys. As soon as the fellows got it into their heads we were trying to work out a republic in a jail, they were possessed by it. I wish you could see the letters that were sent in to the paper. You couldn't publish 'em, some of 'em. Too illiterate. But they showed you what was inside the fellows. Sometimes they were ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown

... lend its sanction to race mania, but it is only "science" as it is understood by very illiterate people that does anything of the sort—"scientists'" science, in fact. What science has to tell about "The Races of Man" will be found compactly set forth by Doctor J. Deinker, in the book published under that title. ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells

... itself to my mind. I ask myself: am I, or am I not, as capable of writing my sentiments, so as to be understood by a rational man, as those plain illiterate men who wrote the gospels? And yet if my words are so wrested by logical twisticisms (if I may be allowed to use that expression) so as to mean what never entered my heart, and all this with apparent serious candor too, what may have been the fate of the writings of the evangelists? ...
— A Series of Letters In Defence of Divine Revelation • Hosea Ballou

... works of religion or law or in any but modern profane literature, an invocation to Civa. But he is no more a patron of literature than is Ganeca, or in other words, Civaism is not more literary than is Ganecaism. In a literary country no religion is so illiterate as Civaism, no writings are so inane as are those in his honor. There is no poem, no religious literary monument, no Pur[a]na even, dedicated to Civa, that has any literary merit. All that is readable in sectarian literature, the best Pur[a]nas, the Divine ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins

... Conspiracy to respectability and editorial law, but when he sent the manuscript on to the Quarterly, the editor of the Quarterly also refused it. The literary standard of the two Quarterlies was not so high as to suggest that the article was illiterate beyond the power of an active and willing editor to redeem it. Adams had no choice but to realize that he had to deal in 1870 with the same old English character of 1860, and the same inability in himself to understand it. As usual, ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams

... them. All of you must be aware that there are some kinds of music which have the remarkable effect upon you, of lifting you higher than you can rise by your own unassisted effort. Even the songs of illiterate Christian bodies do have some effect upon them, in raising them to a higher level, although they possess little of the true quality of the mantra. In Theosophy you find all these things dealt with scientifically—a mass of knowledge, ...
— London Lectures of 1907 • Annie Besant

... the physical expression of life everywhere. The leaves on the tree respond to the slightest breeze. The muscles of your face, the light of your eyes, should respond to the slightest change of feeling. Emerson says: "Every man that I meet is my superior in some way. In that I learn of him." Illiterate Italians make gestures so wonderful and beautiful that Booth or Barrett might have sat at their feet and been instructed. Open your eyes. Emerson says again: "We are immersed in beauty, but our eyes have no clear vision." Toss this book ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein

... library, keep the movement well before the public. The necessity of the library, its great value to the community, should be urged by the local press, from the platform, and in personal talk. Include in your canvass all citizens, irrespective of creed, business, or politics; whether educated or illiterate. Enlist the support of teachers, and through them interest children and parents. Literary, art, social, and scientific societies, Chautauqua circles, local clubs of all kinds should be ...
— A Library Primer • John Cotton Dana

... however, there has been a sudden and most alarming change, and I have just received no less than a dozen notices from tenants desirous of giving up their habitations at once. Here they are!' And he handed me a bundle of letters, for the most part written in the scrawling hand of the illiterate. 'If you look,' he went on, 'you will see that none of them give any reason for leaving. It is merely—"We CANNOT POSSIBLY stay here any longer," or "We MUST give up possession IMMEDIATELY," which they have done, and in every instance before ...
— Byways of Ghost-Land • Elliott O'Donnell

... inns, the aspiring vil[a]o, the peasant who complains bitterly of the ways of God, the lavrador with his plough who did not forget his prayers and was charitable to tramps but skimped his tithes, the illiterate but not unmalicious beir[a]o shepherd who had led a hard life and whose chief offence was to have stolen grapes from time to time, the devout bootmaker who had industriously robbed the people during thirty ...
— Four Plays of Gil Vicente • Gil Vicente

... emancipation. It never had been a colony, there was no creole class, and the only indigenous population—the "jibaros," the mixed descendants of Indians, negroes, and Spaniards—were too poor, too illiterate, too ignorant of everything concerning the outside world to look with anything but suspicion upon the invitations of the insurgents of Colombia and Venezuela to join them or imitate their example. They, nor the great majority of the ...
— The History of Puerto Rico - From the Spanish Discovery to the American Occupation • R.A. Van Middeldyk

... Karens, Ko San Ye stands forth as a unique figure of intense interest. He has been called the "Moody" of Burma. He is absolutely illiterate. When about thirty years old, he lost his wife and his only child; and finding no comfort in his ancestral demonolatry, he turned to Buddhism for relief and retired to a mountain retreat and became known and esteemed among his people as a devout ascetic and a holy ...
— India, Its Life and Thought • John P. Jones

... write, and the first form in which his history was committed to paper was from dictation. The person who took down the words as he spoke them, one of his fellow-servants, was but imperfectly educated himself, so that it may be imagined that the result of the narrative of one illiterate person being written down by another was that the style was not likely to aspire to any very high degree of literary merit. Still, to preserve the peculiar character of the book, it has been thought better to leave it as far as possible in its original shape: some emendations have perforce ...
— The Autobiography of Sergeant William Lawrence - A Hero of the Peninsular and Waterloo Campaigns • William Lawrence

... was denounced as degrading and insulting. A larger class of Southerners who joined with measured alacrity the armies of defense were the small farmers of the hills and poorer eastern counties; but the "sand-hillers" and "crackers," the illiterate and neglected by-products of the planter counties, were not minded to volunteer, though under pressure they became good soldiers because they dreaded the prospect of hordes of free negroes in the South more than they did the guns of the North. ...
— Expansion and Conflict • William E. Dodd

... at war for Pitt, which he will certainly have, unless the French King should happen to have the nomination; and then I fear, as much obliged as that court is to my Lord Cobham and his nephews, they would be so partial as to prefer some illiterate nephew of Cardinal Tencin's, who never heard of Leonidas or the ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole

... girl's affections are bestowed naturally in her own class, and the disconsolate urban discovers that a wide divergence of feelings and sympathies, a gulf not to be voluntarily bridged over, lies between the man of the world and the illiterate peasant; that the results of habit are not lightly to be got rid of; and that a happiness which lies below us in the social scale may be as unattainable as higher prizes. The relations of the romantic and dreamy Olenin to his barbaric neighbors are finely portrayed. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, November, 1878 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various

... For miles around, every road, lane, by-path, shortcut and trail, is a familiar way to him. His practice, he declares, has well-nigh ruined him financially, and totally wrecked his temper. He can curse a man and cry over a baby; and he would go as far and work as hard for the illiterate and penniless backwoodsman in his cabin home as for the president of the Bank of Corinth or even ...
— The Calling Of Dan Matthews • Harold Bell Wright

... secretary in the foreign office, and attached to the service of Voevoda (field marshal), Prince Dolgoruky, in 1666-1667. Among other things, he points out that the "women of the kingdom of Moscow are illiterate," and deduces the conclusion that the chief cause of all contemporary troubles in the kingdom is excessive ignorance. He declares, "We must learn from foreigners, and send our children abroad for instruction"—precisely Peter the Great's policy, it ...
— A Survey of Russian Literature, with Selections • Isabel Florence Hapgood

... her chair in graceful quietude, was to him like a script in an unknown language, or even more simply mysterious, like any writing to the illiterate. As far as women went he was altogether uninstructed and he had not the gift of intuition which is fostered in the days of youth by dreams and visions, exercises of the heart fitting it for the encounters of a world, in which love itself rests as much on antagonism ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad

... praiseworthy than to pass a competitive examination or to compose a poem of inimitable brilliance, and where one wearing gilt buttons and an emblem in his hat proves upon ingratiating approach not to be a powerful official but a covetous and illiterate slave of inferior rank? Thus, through their own narrow-minded inconsistencies, even the most ceremoniously-proficient may at times present an ill-balanced attitude. This, without reproach to himself, concerns the inward cause whereby ...
— The Mirror of Kong Ho • Ernest Bramah

... generally to be seen upon Snow-hill (as yet Skinner's-street was not), between the hours of ten and eleven in the morning, studying a volume of Lardner. I own this to have been a strain of abstraction beyond my reach. I used to admire how he sidled along, keeping clear of secular contacts. An illiterate encounter with a porter's knot, or a bread basket, would have quickly put to flight all the theology I am master of, and have left me worse than indifferent to ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb

... being reduced to beggary. I had no profession, nor any means of subsistence till a profession could be secured; at least no adequate means, unless by retiring to some humble garret, and confining myself to the society of the illiterate, the boorish, and the brutal, between whose habits and mine there was no congeniality. The very day before, Olivia, ecstatic vision, had risen in full view of my delighted hopes, and, forgetting the tormenting distance which malignant ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft

... alarmed by visionary terrors, and yet he was manifestly afraid to sleep in the house. I was sufficiently acquainted with his type to comprehend there must be some real cause driving him to retreat to the negro cabins for rest. He was a rough of the Southwest, illiterate of course, but a practical fellow, and, without doubt, a gun-fighter. He had been employed because of these very characteristics, and it would require surely a very real ...
— Gordon Craig - Soldier of Fortune • Randall Parrish

... the request of the Board of Agriculture, voted to Joseph Elkington a reward of L1000, for his valuable discoveries in the drainage of land. Joseph Elkington was a Warwickshire farmer, and Mr. Gisborne says he was a man of considerable genius, but he had the misfortune to be illiterate. His discovery had created such a sensation in the agricultural world, that it was thought important to record its details; and, as Elkington's health was extremely precarious, the Board resolved to send ...
— Farm drainage • Henry Flagg French

... a letter as ever I read!" she exclaimed, throwing aside the poor little sheet of cheap note-paper with its illiterate gratitude. "Oh, here's something from Lady Susan—pooh! Another baby. What do I care about her babies! Not one word about Dyce—not ...
— Our Friend the Charlatan • George Gissing

... will tell you something much more interesting! It turns out that both you and my husband were fooled by this girl! Betsy takes it on herself, but that is only to annoy me. It was an illiterate peasant girl who fooled you, and you believed it all. There were no mediumistic phenomena last night; it was she (pointing to TANYA) who ...
— Redemption and Two Other Plays • Leo Tolstoy et al

... period nearly eighty years of age, and so wholly illiterate that he could neither read nor write; yet such was the general estimation of his wisdom and abilities, that the young sultan, on entrusting to him the ensigns of office, voluntarily pledged himself to leave entirely at ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various

... over can read and write total population: 82% male: 87% female: 77% note: over two-thirds of the world's 785 million illiterate adults are found in only eight countries (India, China, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Indonesia, and Egypt); of all the illiterate adults in the world, two-thirds are women; extremely low literacy rates are ...
— The 2005 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency

... toilette. It was generally three before Miss Burney was at liberty. Then she had two hours at her own disposal. To these hours we owe great part of her Diary. At five she had to attend her colleague, Madame Schwellenberg, a hateful old toadeater, as illiterate as a chambermaid, as proud as a whole German Chapter, rude, peevish, unable to bear solitude, unable to conduct herself with common decency in society. With this delightful associate, Frances Burney had to dine, and pass the evening. ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... face; no story is too silly, no falsehood too glaring, for them to believe and to retail, in fullest confidence of its truth. Gross ignorance is one of their characteristics; they are superstitious, credulous, illiterate, to an almost incredible extent. Clement considers that "the Lord continually proves to us that there shall be a future resurrection" by the following "fact," among others: "Let us consider that wonderful sign which takes ...
— The Freethinker's Text Book, Part II. - Christianity: Its Evidences, Its Origin, Its Morality, Its History • Annie Besant

... this, however, did not shake the faith of Lady Tichborne. Then he gave accounts of himself which did not in the least tally with the facts of Roger's life. He said he was born in Dorsetshire, whereas Roger was born in Paris; he accounted for being an illiterate man by saying that he had suffered greatly in childhood from St. Vitus's dance, which had interfered with his studies. "My son," says Lady Tichborne, in reply, "never had St. Vitus's dance." When asked if he had not been in the army, he replied, "Yes," but that ...
— Celebrated Claimants from Perkin Warbeck to Arthur Orton • Anonymous

... doddering, too vacant to be vicious, too doltish to do amiss, does not exist as a type in England. What does exist in every corner of the country is a peasantry speaking a patois that is often of varying inflections, but is always full of racy poetry, illiterate and yet possessed of a vast oral literature, sharing brains with other classes more equally than education, humorous, nimble-witted; clear-sighted, astute, cynical, not too virtuous, and having a lofty, contempt for the wiseacres ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine

... that the character is capable of interesting. Many times we willingly absent ourselves from actual society to pass an evening in the company of a fictitious personage of a class with which we never associate in actual life. Perhaps in the actual world we would never bother to converse with illiterate provincial people; and yet we may not feel it a waste of time and energy to meet them in the pages of "Middlemarch." For my own part, I have always, in actual life, avoided meeting the sort of people that appear in ...
— A Manual of the Art of Fiction • Clayton Hamilton

... further design appears in their great triumphing, and rejoycing when any illiterate person hath gained any reputation for a Cure performed, especially where Physicians have been concerned, though the Patients neglect or obstinateness, have been the sole cause of this non-performance, and by their continued detraction from Physicians, and applauding themselves, ...
— A Short View of the Frauds and Abuses Committed by Apothecaries • Christopher Merrett

... George Bentinck,[13] who took the trouble. Besides, his fortune consists in great measure of wool, he lives in the country, is well versed in rural affairs and the business of the quarter sessions, has a certain calibre of understanding, is prejudiced, narrow-minded, illiterate, and ignorant, good-looking, good-humoured, and unaffected, tedious, prolix, unassuming, and a duke. There would not have been so much to say about him if they had not excited an idea in the minds of some people of making him Prime Minister and successor ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William - IV, Volume 1 (of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville

... doctors found conversion a much more pleasant and profitable business than they had anticipated; for they one after another declared their conviction of their errors, and their willingness to receive baptism. The example of these learned persons was soon followed by great numbers of their illiterate disciples, insomuch that no less than four thousand are said to have presented themselves in one day for baptism; and Ximenes, unable to administer the rite to each individually, was obliged to adopt the expedient familiar to the Christian missionaries, ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V2 • William H. Prescott

... muttered, as he turned the letter over to see if by chance Miss Grant had written a line anywhere; then, laying it on one side, he took up carelessly a square business-like envelope, addressed to him in a scrawly, illiterate fist. The letter that he took out of it was a strange jewel to repose in so rude a casket. It also was from Kuryong—from Ellen Harriott, who had taken the precaution of addressing it in a feigned hand so that the postmaster and postmistress at Kiley's Crossing, who handled all station ...
— An Outback Marriage • Andrew Barton Paterson

... should imagine, to leave room for aliens and strangers. He has been again burlesqued for us rending himself in rhyme, and stretched on straw groaning elegiacs to Mary in heaven. All this is mere sensationalism provided for illiterate readers. We have the poem, ...
— Robert Burns - Famous Scots Series • Gabriel Setoun

... lethargic, the imagination languid or irregular. Fully to apprehend this important truth, let us attempt, in an improved society, to calculate the immense distance between the man of learning and the illiterate peasant. The former, by reading and reflection, multiplies his own experience, and lives in distant ages and remote countries; whilst the latter, rooted to a single spot, and confined to a few years of existence, surpasses but very little ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon

... appearance and illiterate in speech, but his manner impressed Harry in an extraordinary manner. It was direct and wonderfully convincing. The boy recognized at once a mind that would steer straight ...
— The Guns of Bull Run - A Story of the Civil War's Eve • Joseph A. Altsheler

... In this churchyard is a tombstone on which is engraved only the letters of the alphabet and the simple numerals. The story goes, that he who lies below, an illiterate inhabitant of the village in the last century, whose name, I believe, is now forgotten, being very anxious that, after death, a tombstone should be erected to perpetuate his memory, and being fearful that his relatives might neglect to do so, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 216, December 17, 1853 • Various

... manner of making the confession, it must be remembered that the direction that it should be made in the name of all those that are minded to come to the Holy Communion, was worded at a time when a considerable proportion of the communicants were too illiterate to follow such a piece of devotion by the use of a book. It was therefore essential that their leader should say it slowly and audibly, if they were to join in it at all. It cannot be said that this reason has wholly disappeared now; while even for persons ...
— Ritual Conformity - Interpretations of the Rubrics of the Prayer-Book • Unknown

... that the Baron du Guenic was illiterate as a peasant. He could read, write, and do some little ciphering; he knew the military art and heraldry, but, excepting always his prayer-book, he had not read three volumes in the course of his life. His clothing, which ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac

... any one spoke falsely in his presence, for he saw the devil, as it were, leaping and exulting upon the tongue of the liar. If he looked on a book faultily or falsely written, or containing a false passage, although wholly illiterate, he would point out the place with his finger. Being questioned how he could gain such knowledge, he said that he was directed by the demon's finger to the place. In the same manner, entering into the dormitory of a monastery, he indicated ...
— The Itinerary of Archibishop Baldwin through Wales • Giraldus Cambrensis

... commenced in the reign of Charles I. The Puritans had the pulpit on their side, and found it a powerful instrument. The Cavaliers had the song writers on theirs, and found them equally effective. And the song and ballad writers of that day were not always illiterate versifiers. Some of them were the choicest wits and most accomplished gentlemen of the nation. As they could not reach the ears of their countrymen by the printed book, the pamphlet, or the newspaper, nor mount the pulpit ...
— Cavalier Songs and Ballads of England from 1642 to 1684 • Charles Mackay

... an illiterate man, made here and there slips of scholarship, but he wrote in a clear, vigorous, sensible style, and his works had considerable influence over those to ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton

... the town and continued to spread Raboff's "message." Borykin, the master-carpenter, took employment under a certain Grigorieff, and succeeded in converting all his fellow-workers. Finally Grigorieff's house was turned into a church for the new sect, and an illiterate woman named Vassilisa became their prophetess. Under the influence of the general excitement, she would fall into trances and give extravagant and incomprehensible discourses, while her listeners laughed, danced and wept ecstatically. By degrees the ceremonial grew more ...
— Modern Saints and Seers • Jean Finot

... produced the letter he had found in the cabin of the paralyzed Indian. Colonel Howell, having heard the explanation of the finding of the letter, without any hesitation and evidently without any qualms of conscience, drew out the enclosure. The letter was an illiterate scrawl. ...
— On the Edge of the Arctic - An Aeroplane in Snowland • Harry Lincoln Sayler

... difficult for commentators and have caused so various constructions to be put upon it? It is clear, the professor maintains, that the reference is to pagan rhetors from Gaul whose arrogant presumption, founded on their learning, made them regard with disdain the comparatively illiterate apostle of the Scots. Everyone is familiar with the classic passage of Tacitus wherein he alludes to the harbours of Ireland as being more familiar to continental mariners than those of Britain. We have references moreover to ...
— Lives of SS. Declan and Mochuda • Anonymous

... the Duke of Somerset is printed off too; besides, I should imagine the letter you mention not to be of his own composition, for, though not illiterate, he certainly could not write any thing like classic Latin.(925) I may, too, possibly, have inclusively mentioned the very letter; I have not Ascham's book, to see from what copy the letter was taken, but probably from one of those which I have ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole

... the manner of the nomination and the location of the candidate, the man himself is one of the most improper and incompetent that could be selected. Naturally dull and stupid; extremely illiterate; indecisive to a degree that would be incredible to one who did not know him; pusillanimous, and, of course, hypocritical; has no opinion on any subject, and will be always under the government of the worst men; pretends, as ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis

... knowledge requires neither Learned Education, or great Study, to the attaining of it, appears in that the first Christians were mean and illiterate People; to which part of Mankind the Gospel may rather be thought to have had a more especial regard than that they are any way excluded from the Benefits thereof by incapacity in them to receive it. In the Apostles Days there were not many Wise who were call'd, and he ...
— Occasional Thoughts in Reference to a Vertuous or Christian life • Lady Damaris Masham

... Byzantine architects. See his Note sur la Construction des Voutes sans cintrage pendant la Periode byzantine (Annales des Ponts et Chausees, 1876, second period, vol. xii.). See also Mr. FERGUSSON'S account of the erection of a huge stone dome without centering of any kind, by an illiterate Maltese builder, at Mousta, near Valetta (Handbook of Architecture, Second Edition, ...
— A History of Art in Chaldaea & Assyria, v. 1 • Georges Perrot

... the boy, as a long letter written next day to his father and mother clearly shows. He went to the house of the printer, where he did not receive the warm welcome he had expected. Deborah Franklin was a fat, hard-working, illiterate, economical housewife. She had a great pride in her husband, but had fallen hopelessly behind him. She regarded with awe and slight understanding the accomplishments of his virile, restless, on-pushing ...
— In the Days of Poor Richard • Irving Bacheller

... diseased brains. They were evidently living in such a state of visionary fever that nothing henceforth could astonish them. And not only did Pierre notice this among folks of simple, childish minds, illiterate, hallucinated creatures like Raboin, but also among the men of intellect, the men with cultivated brains, the savants like Doctor Bonamy and others. It was incredible. And thus Pierre felt a growing discomfort arising within him, a covert anger which would ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola

... solution. I frequently saw, in the blank leaves of old books, learned books, Bibles of a time when a Bible was very costly, etc., the name of an owner who, by the handwriting and spelling, must have been an illiterate person or a child, followed by the date of the book itself. Accordingly, this uneducated person or young child seemed to be the first owner, which in many cases was not credible. Looking one day at a Barker's[418] ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan

... not merely the sacerdotal dignity which rendered them objects of awe and reverence to the illiterate multitude; the priests were regarded as the depositaries of science and learning; and proved themselves as skilful as they were successful, in cementing their influence by those arts which were best ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian

... She is illiterate, but clever. Her understanding is quick, and her perceptions keen. I think, with education she might have been a remarkable person. She is not particularly masculine in her appearance, and her manners are gentle and ...
— Journal of a Voyage to Brazil - And Residence There During Part of the Years 1821, 1822, 1823 • Maria Graham

... end of 1803 the last remnant was forced off the island. On January 1, 1804, the negro generals proclaimed the island an independent republic under the name of Haiti, one of the island's Indian names. Jean Jacques Dessalines, a rough, illiterate negro, but of indefatigable energy, was made governor for life, with dictatorial powers. One of his first acts was to order the extermination of such whites as still remained. Dessalines a year later ...
— Santo Domingo - A Country With A Future • Otto Schoenrich

... depositions of persons interested in the ruin of the Rajah, others were made by persons who then received pensions from him, the said Hastings; and several of the affidavits were made by persons of mean condition, and so wholly illiterate as not to be able ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VIII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke

... in a large, scrambling, illiterate hand with a signature that might mean anything. That tall capital, shaped like a ...
— Prisoners - Fast Bound In Misery And Iron • Mary Cholmondeley

... solid gold, reached the Spaniards by way of the Isthmus of Darien, and it was not long before an expedition was organized for the conquest of the country. The leader of the band was Francisco Pizarro, an iron-hearted, perfidious, and illiterate adventurer. ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers

... 18. An illiterate patchwork of lifeless and uninteresting scribbling appeared under my byline day after day in the Intelligencer. Not a word, not a thought of my own was left. I was not restrained from protest by the absurd threats of Le ffacase, but prudence dictated not throwing ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore

... canoes arrived at the beach, the darkness of the night was illumined by the light of an immense fire. Ordering his boat's crew (with the intrepid though illiterate William at their head) to keep close and be upon their guard, Boldheart bravely went on, arm in arm with ...
— Holiday Romance • Charles Dickens

... found a relief when she discovered traces of what struck her as insanity—or a morbid desperation, bordering on that dire calamity—in the earlier letters of that ill-fated woman. The answers of Hovey were coarse and illiterate, though they manifested a sufficient desire to obtain the hand of a woman of singular personal attractions, and whose great error he was willing to overlook for the advantage of possessing one every way so much his superior, and who it also appeared ...
— The Deerslayer • James Fenimore Cooper

... of Scotland, the monasteries had their schools and so had the parish churches; there were high schools in the burghs and song schools of remarkable excellence. The light of learning may have waxed dim at times, but it was not from an illiterate land that Scottish scholars carried into Europe all through the Middle Ages the name and fame of their country, any more than it was from a people unversed in the arts of war that Scottish soldiers went abroad to fight foreign battles, giving now a Constable to France, ...
— Scotland's Mark on America • George Fraser Black

... You see this is a Boor, a Boor of the country, an illiterate Boor, and yet the Citizen of good fellows: come, let's provide; a hem, Grass and hay! we are not yet all mortall; we'll live till we die, and be merry, and there's ...
— The Merry Devil • William Shakespeare

... produced a Rev. Seasholes, nor Greece a Senator Bowser. The Imperial City did manage to breed a Brutus and a Cato, but never proved equal to a Culberson. Think of a Texas legislature, composed chiefly of illiterate jabber- whacks who string out the sessions interminably for the sake of the $2 a day—imagine these fellows, each with a large pendulous ear to the earth, listening for the approach of some Pegasus to carry him to Congress—teaching the aesthetics of civilization ...
— Volume 12 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann

... persons committed suicide. These persons were engaged in all kinds of pursuits and came from ALL walks of life. They ranged from social outcasts to society leaders; from poverty stricken unfortunates to persons of great wealth; from illiterate men and women to editors and college professors; from laborers and layman to physicians and ministers. The youngest suicide was a mere infant of five years, the oldest, a centenarian of 106! Among the suicides ...
— Tyranny of God • Joseph Lewis

... is not overcrowded—with capable writers; nor is it likely to be. With incapable amateurs it undoubtedly is. Every walk of life has contributed its share to the thousands who are trying to write photoplays. Hundreds fail because they are both illiterate and totally unfitted for the work. Hundreds more struggle on without a sufficient knowledge of dramatic values and plot building, not knowing precisely what can and what can not be presented successfully in the silent drama. Lacking this knowledge, it ...
— Writing the Photoplay • J. Berg Esenwein and Arthur Leeds

... preparations. Have you not already seen how mind triumphs over matter and have not some of you with only a few months' preparation stood fearless at your post in Mesopotamia and won recognition by your calm collectedness and true heroism? They may say that you are but a small handful, what of the vast illiterate millions? Illiterate in what sense? Have not the ballads of these illiterates rendered into English by our Poet touched profoundly the hearts of the very elect of the West? Have not the stories of their common life appealed to the common ...
— Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose - His Life and Speeches • Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose

... aspired," Mrs. Mesurier would say of Aunt Tipping sometimes to her children; and, while still a child, she had often reproached her with her fondness for gossiping with companions "beneath her." Matilda could never be persuaded to care for books. She was naturally illiterate, and even late in life had a fixed aversion to writing her own letters; whereas, at the age of seven, Mary had been public scrivener for the whole village. But with these regrettable instincts, from the first Matilda had also manifested a whimsical liveliness, an unconquerable lightheartedness ...
— Young Lives • Richard Le Gallienne

... give no idea of the strong impression it made on my mind, though conveyed to it through the medium of an illiterate interpreter, Even in this mangled form, I saw the disjecta membra of a regular and splendid oration." [Footnote: Col. Stone's Life and Times ...
— An account of Sa-Go-Ye-Wat-Ha - Red Jacket and his people, 1750-1830 • John Niles Hubbard

... known among the profession as a "diploma mill." She selected it because the course was easy and the tuition light, though its equipment was a farce and its laboratory too meagre to deserve the name; one of the commercial medical colleges turning out each year by the hundreds, for a few dollars, illiterate graduates, totally unfitted by temperament and education for a profession that calls for the highest and best, sending them out in hordes like licensed murderers to prescribe and operate among the trusting and ...
— The Lady Doc • Caroline Lockhart

... in the room and its occupants with a single glance. The handsome appointments of the office surprised her, for she had expected to see a den. The agent's polite manner and rather elegant appearance disconcerted her, for she had expected to meet a coarse and illiterate boor; and finally, Victor Chupin, who was standing twisting his cap near the fireplace, attired in a blouse and a pair of ragged trousers, fairly alarmed her. Still, no sign of her agitation was perceptible on her countenance. ...
— Baron Trigault's Vengeance - Volume 2 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau

... trial, the prosecuting attorney "admitted that a hearing was withheld until interrogation had produced a confession." In the third and last case of this group, Harris v. South Carolina,[912] the defendant, an illiterate Negro, was apprehended in Tennessee on a Friday on a warrant alleging no more than a theft of a pistol, and taken to South Carolina on a Sunday. Without being informed of the contents of the warrant or of the charge of murder on which he was being held, without arraignment ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin

... the 17-year-old midshipman of the Salamis, is suddenly given the job of going aboard and taking command of the Mercury, an emigrant ship that they find drifting in mid-ocean, all her officers having died in various accidents, and the illiterate bosun and the ship's carpenter knowing full well that they had no idea how to navigate. He takes charge and all appears to be going well, when— But I will not spoil a ...
— Overdue - The Story of a Missing Ship • Harry Collingwood

... apprehended clearly what education is to lead to, and literature to teach. I wish you to see that both well directed moral training and well chosen reading lead to the possession of a power over the ill-guided and illiterate, which is, according to the measure of it, in the truest sense kingly;* conferring indeed the purest kingship that can exist among men. Too many other kingships (however distinguished by visible insignia or ...
— The Art Of Writing & Speaking The English Language - Word-Study and Composition & Rhetoric • Sherwin Cody

... you: he is a sparkling draught in person; probably illiterate, if I may judge from one interruption of my discourse when he sat opposite me, but lettered enough to respect Learning and write out his prescription: I do not ask more of men or of physicians." Dr. Middleton ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... men of letters have developed wonderful feats of memory; and among illiterate persons, by means of points of association, the power of memory has been little short of marvelous. At a large hotel in Saratoga there was at one time a negro whose duty was to take charge of the hats and ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould

... the early ages of society, it was known only in the coarsest and most brilliant hues. A conception and appreciation of delicate harmonies in color is evidence of a superior and refined mentality. If you will notice it, the illiterate of your own land have no taste for or idea of the harmony of color. It is the same with sound. The higher we rise in culture, the more difficult we are to please in music. ...
— Mizora: A Prophecy - A MSS. Found Among the Private Papers of the Princess Vera Zarovitch • Mary E. Bradley

... watching attentively as the skipper tore up form after form, meditatively sucking the chained lead pencil with a view to inspiration between whiles. Captain Gething, as an illiterate, had every sympathy with one involved in the throes of writing, and for some time watched his efforts in respectful silence. After the fifth form had rolled a little crumpled ball on to the ...
— The Skipper's Wooing, and The Brown Man's Servant • W. W. Jacobs

... divination. The habit that the mantis has of first stretching out one fore leg, and then the other, and of preserving such a position for some little time, has also led to the belief among the illiterate that it is in the act, in such cases, of pointing out the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 385, May 19, 1883 • Various

... country; and that there has been an intellectual and literary development within this small circle which partially atones for the stagnation and illiteracy of the mass of the people; and I also know that even the illiterate mass possesses many sterling qualities. But unfortunately in international matters every nation must be judged by the action of its Government. The good people in Colombia apparently made no effort, certainly no successful effort, to cause the Government ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt

... more and no less than a plain horse-thief, a young man of twenty-six, who had been convicted by a jury of stealing a grocer's horse and selling it. The last man was a negro, a tall, shambling, illiterate, nebulous-minded black, who had walked off with an apparently discarded section of lead pipe which he had found in a lumber-yard. His idea was to sell or trade it for a drink. He really did not belong ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser

... symbol that provides excellent material for clues to tricks and mannerisms. It varies in form from a mere v-shaped tick of almost indeterminate character to an ornate thing of loops and flourishes. It is very sparingly employed by illiterate persons, and some educated writers avoid its use under the impression that, like the abbreviation of words, it is vulgar. In a few high-class ladies' schools its use is sternly repressed, and there are many ...
— The Detection of Forgery • Douglas Blackburn

... strong-minded illiterate woman on one side, impressed with a conviction of the justice of her cause; and further stimulated by a deep consciousness of the importance of success to herself and family; and on the other side, a refined mind, delicately alive to the least approximation ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle



Words linked to "Illiterate" :   ignorant, literate, uneducated person, know nothing, functional illiterate, unlettered, illiterate person, uneducated, functionally illiterate, preliterate, analphabet, nonreader, literacy



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