"Omnivorous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Exquisite Exonerate Approximate Insinuate Resurgence Insurrection Rapture Exasperate Complacent Dimension Commensurate Preclude Cloister Turnpike Travesty Atone Incarnate Charnal Etiquette Rejuvenate Eradicate Quiet Requiem Acquiesce Ambidextrous Inoculate Divulge Proper Appropriate Omnivorous Voracious Devour Escritoire Mordant Remorse Miser Hilarious Exhilarate Rudiment Erudite Mark Marquis Libel Libretto Vague Vagabond Extravagant Souse ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... have quoted from the speech of this kilted critic. If it were possible to retain the elasticity and adjustableness of the mind till the end of life, new authors would perhaps fix our attention as much as the old. But only a limited number of articulate-speaking men, such as the omnivorous Professor Saintsbury of Edinburgh, preserve their appetite tireless and intact. The Professor, like a literary Livingstone, can grapple with the most arid and dusty libraries, and is the envy of all scholars; but, alas! the majority of us have to take something less than ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... hundred Boston rockers. On learning this fact, the Church (Brigham) graciously accepts fifty for its own purposes.—Being founded upon a rock, it does not care, in its collective capacity, to sit upon rockers, but has an immense series of warehouses, omnivorous and eupeptic, which swallow all manner of tithes, from grain and horseshoes to the less stable commodities of fresh fish and melons, assimilating them by admirable processes into coin of the realm. These warehouses are in the Church (Brigham's own private) inclosure.—If success in my cabinet-making ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various
... apparatus for nutrition to our own; especially the bear, who, with the monkey, is the animal most nearly resembling man, seeing that he has feet like ours, with scarcely any tail, while the monkey has our hands, without specifying any other points of resemblance. Like ourselves, too, the bear is omnivorous; that is to say, it eats everything, vegetables and fruit as well as meat; and nature, which has given it our diet, has furnished it with molars almost exactly like our own. Its canine teeth alone differ from ours: they are more prominent even than those of the quadrumana; ...
— The History of a Mouthful of Bread - And its effect on the organization of men and animals • Jean Mace
... legs. This habit will account for the callosities already mentioned. In this posture it digs up the ground, extracting therefrom the roots and bulbs (of which its food is supposed entirely to consist); for, fierce and hideous as its aspect may be, the wart-hog is less omnivorous than several other ...
— Quadrupeds, What They Are and Where Found - A Book of Zoology for Boys • Mayne Reid
... Patient Fancy was received with great applause. A hint from Brome, more than a hint from Moliere, much wit, vivacity, and cleverness make up this admirable comedy. Throughout the whole of her career it is amply evident that Mrs. Behn, an omnivorous reader, kept in constant touch with and profited by the French literature and theatre of her day. The debt of the English stage to France at this period is a fact often not sufficiently acknowledged, but one ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. I (of 6) • Aphra Behn
... with a shade of reproach in her tone. "What an omnivorous appetite this Eysvogel business possesses! Ullmann Nutzel said lately: 'Wherever one wants to buy, the bird—[vogel]—has been ahead and snapped up everything in Venice and Milan. And the young one is even sharper at a ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... supernatural: and without being imbued with any love of dogmas, breathes an unmistakable atmosphere of purity and religious trust. The study of this subject can not be recommended to the weak-minded and timorous, but an omnivorous digestion may find a wholesome exercise of its capacity in Mrs. ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... thing to do. All he wanted, it seemed to him, was a pretext, and to such a mind a pretext was readily forthcoming. Had not the English dogs fortified their settlement without his permission? Had they not afforded shelter to some victim flying from his omnivorous rapacity? These were pretexts good enough to serve the insane brain of Surajah Dowlah. He attacked Fort William with an overwhelming force; the English traders, unwarlike, timorous, and deserted by their ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume II (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... this atmosphere of grasping contention and human exhalations the daylight filtered through a window that was manifestly dirty. The jury sat in a double pew to the left of the judge, looking as uncomfortable as frogs that have fallen into an ash-pit, and in the witness-box lied the would-be omnivorous Dass, under cross-examination.... ...
— The World Set Free • Herbert George Wells
... great reader in the sense of being omnivorous in her choice of books, but she became a very good one. She always had a solid book in hand, and some standard work of fiction also; but she read both with the utmost deliberation, and with intellect clear and senses unaffected ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... of True Love. Mrs. Behn, an omnivorous reader of romances, was thinking of the celebrated Carte de Tendre (Loveland), to be found in Mlle. de Scuderi's Clelie (1654, Vol. I, p. 399), and reproduced in the English folio edition of 1678. This fantastic map, which is said to have been suggested ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume IV. • Aphra Behn
... following weeks renewing his former brief acquaintance with Paris. In the daytime he haunted the libraries and picture galleries. He had become an omnivorous reader, and the world of possibilities that were opened to him in this seat of culture and learning fairly appalled him when he contemplated the very infinitesimal crumb of the sum total of human knowledge ...
— The Return of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... fantastic, sometimes obscene or terrible—takes a fresh start in the Passionals of Lucas Cranach, and can be traced in England through her Rebellion and Restoration up to the very confines of the eighteenth century. Why, we have to ask, even granting that William Hogarth's "monster Caricatura" is thus omnivorous and omnipresent, does he tower aloft in some countries and under some conditions to the majesty of a new art, and in others dwindle down ...
— The Eighteenth Century in English Caricature • Selwyn Brinton
... the correction was justified, since it is a regrettable fact that the taxi-cab driver's wife made "Hermione" rhyme with "bone," and laid no stress on the second syllable. Strong in her superior knowledge, for she was an omnivorous reader of fiction—and Greek names were fashionable last November—she passed ...
— One Wonderful Night - A Romance of New York • Louis Tracy
... and Richard Rawlinson were, probably, the most omnivorous collectors of the earlier part of the last century. Everything in the shape of a book was welcomed. The former (1681-1725), whose 'C. & P.' (collated and perfect) appears on the frontispiece, title-page, ...
— The Book-Hunter in London - Historical and Other Studies of Collectors and Collecting • William Roberts
... had been an omnivorous reader—there were numerous examples of youths left, like him, to the care of distant relatives, or step-parents, or utter strangers. Their experiences, generally speaking, had not been cheerful ...
— The Portygee • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... fatal; we must not complain, but look forward to a good result. Still, in travelling through this country, I could not but be struck with the force of a symbol. Wherever the hog comes, the rattlesnake disappears; the omnivorous traveller, safe in its stupidity, willingly and easily makes a meal of the most dangerous of reptiles, and one which the Indian looks on with a mystic awe. Even so the white settler pursues the Indian, and is ...
— At Home And Abroad - Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... The South Australian Institute was a treasure to the family. I recollect a newcomer being astonished at my sister Mary having read Macaulay's History. "Why, it was only just out when I left England," said he. "Well, it did not take longer to come out than you did," was her reply. We were all omnivorous readers, and the old-fashioned accomplishment of reading aloud was cultivated by both brothers and sisters. I was the only one who could translate French at sight, thanks to Miss Phin's giving me so much of Racine and Moliere and other good French authors ...
— An Autobiography • Catherine Helen Spence
... there was nothing of the monk or recluse. The brightness and freedom of the New Learning seemed incarnate in the young scholar with his gay talk, his winsomeness of manner, his reckless epigrams, his passionate love of music, his omnivorous reading, his paradoxical speculations, his gibes at monks, his schoolboy fervour of liberty. But events were soon to prove that beneath this sunny nature lay a stern inflexibility of conscientious resolve. The Florentine scholars ...
— History of the English People, Volume III (of 8) - The Parliament, 1399-1461; The Monarchy 1461-1540 • John Richard Green
... forefathers' worship have crept back into favour by hiding themselves in the voluminous draperies of History or Art. Our appetite for shows is omnivorous, and we don't object to a shrine if it has a Gothic moulding sufficiently "cute," or a Byzantine roof, or some other attraction—are we not pilgrims of Art?—though if called upon to define our roof or moulding many of us might be considerably nonplussed, taking ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III, March 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... rambling mansion. It has become a national monument. On the days when it is open we revisit it with admiration; and those chambers and garden walks re-echo to us the clear dogmas and savoury diction of the sage—omnivorous, artless, ...
— Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy - Five Essays • George Santayana
... Bickley, was a person of a quite different character. Like Bastin, he was learned, but his tendencies faced another way. If Bastin's omnivorous throat could swallow a camel, especially a theological camel, Bickley's would strain at the smallest gnat, especially a theological gnat. The very best and most upright of men, yet he believed in nothing that he could not taste, ...
— When the World Shook - Being an Account of the Great Adventure of Bastin, Bickley and Arbuthnot • H. Rider Haggard
... student now concerns himself with, the more he will somehow ultimately realize; and if he aims at none in particular, he will very likely hit most of them. Thus aimlessness, so far as relations of study to life are concerned, is put at a premium, and students are directly encouraged to be omnivorous absorbers ...
— How To Study and Teaching How To Study • F. M. McMurry
... studies and entered William and Mary College with advanced standing at the age of eighteen. Many stories are told of his precocity and ability, all of which tend to forecast the later man of catholic tastes, omnivorous interest, and extensive but superficial knowledge; he was a strange combination of natural aristocrat and theoretical democrat, of philosopher and practical politician. After having been a student in the law ...
— The Fathers of the Constitution - Volume 13 in The Chronicles Of America Series • Max Farrand
... with Ben was the next question of importance. He was fond of books, an omnivorous reader, in fact, a very fair scholar, and, with a certain amount of push, could have graduated the year before. He really ...
— A Little Girl in Old New York • Amanda Millie Douglas
... made a thorough study of such classics as were available in his day, and we have seen how he employed them in his novel and in his plays. But the classics formed only a small section of the books digested by this omnivorous reader. If he could not read Spanish, French, or Italian, he devoured and assimilated the numerous translations from those languages into English, Guevara indeed being his chief inspiration. Nor did he neglect the literature of his own land. Few books we may suppose, which had been published ...
— John Lyly • John Dover Wilson
... us, we don't care if eventually we have to capitulate. We have ceased to reason or to calculate. We are in the don't-care mood. How long this will last with so impulsive a people it is impossible to say. Our stomachs have become omnivorous; they digest anything now; and even if in the end they be invited to digest the leek, as we shall not be called upon to eat this vegetable either to-morrow or the next day, we don't care. The cold is terrible, and the absence of firewood ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... rich feast out of it; the old sailor in his delight told the doctor. He, however, was not in the least surprised; he knew that in the north of America the horses make fish their main article of food, and what a herbivorous horse could content himself with would certainly satisfy an omnivorous dog. ...
— The Voyages and Adventures of Captain Hatteras • Jules Verne
... my own egotism, Know my omnivorous lines and must not write any less, And would fetch you whoever you are ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... the thought of the learned reader, who knows that young women could not be strulbrugs; since the true strulbrug was one who, from base fear of dying, had lingered on into an old age, omnivorous of every genial or vital impulse. The strulbrug of Swift (and Swift, being his horrid creator, ought to understand his own horrid creation) was a wreck, a shell, that had been burned hollow, and cancered by the fierce furnace of life. His clockwork was gone, or carious; only some miserable fragment ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... retaining a sort of primacy amongst them. She also retained, in the incidents of her history and in the characters of many of her great men, a colour which seems partly Elizabethan. Her Jefferson, with his omnivorous culture, his love of music and the arts, his proficiency at the same time in sports and bodily exercises, suggests something of the graceful versatility of men like Essex and Raleigh, and we shall see her in her last agony produce a soldier about whose high chivalry and ...
— A History of the United States • Cecil Chesterton
... serious thought of devoting his life to literature, his talents in that direction were freely confessed. From my father, whose studious habits in life had made him not only eminent at the bar but profoundly conversant with general literature, he had inherited a taste for reading, and it was this omnivorous passion for books that led my brother to say that his education had only begun when he fancied that it had left off. In boyhood he contracted that fascinating but highly injurious habit of reading in bed, which he subsequently extolled with great fervor; and ...
— A Little Book of Western Verse • Eugene Field
... child, a little girl, who was safely in charge of a nurse and maid at all times, and she was invariably the picturesque center of a group of admirers recruited from every capital of the civilized world. Letty Gerald was a talented woman, beautiful, graceful, artistic, a writer of verse, an omnivorous reader, a student of art, and a sincere and ardent admirer of ...
— Jennie Gerhardt - A Novel • Theodore Dreiser
... height, and had a splendid girth and circumference of shade; but no factory in Bologna or Frankfort, or any other possible birthplace of the real article, could rival this amazing, this funny, tree in fertility. Its product was just a trifle large, save for the omnivorous lover of sausage; but in other respects it was a faithful copy of the original—unless, indeed, the first sausage-maker borrowed the idea from the tree, instead of the other way about. These vegetable sausages ...
— Ladies-In-Waiting • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... seen disdainful remarks on those critics who, however warily, admire a considerable number of authors, as though they were coarse and omnivorous persons, unfit to rank with the delicates who can only relish one or two things in literature. But this is a foolish mistake. "One to one" is not "cursedly confined" in the relation of book and reader; and a man need not be ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... man who keeps a Journal soon becomes its victim; at least that seems to have been the case with Thoreau. He lived for that Journal, he read for it, he walked for it; it was like a hungry, omnivorous monster that constantly called for more. He transcribed to its pages from the books he read, he filled it with interminable accounts of the commonplace things he saw in his walks, tedious and minute descriptions of everything in wood, field, and swamp. There are whole pages of the Latin names ...
— The Last Harvest • John Burroughs
... itself a nuisance about the houses where it is as omnivorous an eater as is its far-removed cousin, the house rat. The gopher is one of the mammals whose mark is more often seen than the creature itself. It lives like the mole in underground burrows, coming to the surface only to push up the dirt that it has ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
... animals of my acquaintance is better fed, not even the deer, amid abundance of sweet herbs and shrubs, or the mountain sheep, or omnivorous bears. His food consists of grass-seeds, berries, hazel-nuts, chinquapins, and the nuts and seeds of all the coniferous trees without exception,—Pine, Fir, Spruce, Libocedrus, Juniper, and Sequoia,—he is fond of them all, and they all agree with ...
— The Mountains of California • John Muir
... in food and drink, fastidious in all her tastes and personal habits, indulgent never beyond the dictates of perfect simplicity and sobriety. Proficient in all branches of housekeeping, her apparel was mostly of her own making. Good literature was a passion with her, and while never an omnivorous reader, she had a natural instinct for the best in language. A spirit of indomitable independence, courage and persistence in purpose characterized her from childhood. She must think her own thoughts, and ...
— Memories of Jane Cunningham Croly, "Jenny June" • Various
... a certain satirical smile, intensely irritating to his sister's temper (which she called her nerves), and which it was rather fortunate she did not see. He was perfectly alive to the omnivorous quality of his sister's vanity, and perfectly aware that it had on many occasions led her into a fool's paradise, whence she had been ejected into the waste regions of disappointment and bitterness of spirit. He had been quite willing that she ...
— Run to Earth - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... The black bears are omnivorous. They will eat fish, flesh, fowl, and vegetables. They are fond of all kinds of berries and sweet fruits. They "go crazed" after honey, climbing bee-trees and robbing the nests. They dig for roots—such as groundnuts and ...
— The Boy Hunters • Captain Mayne Reid
... fifty years, I see myself as a boy, whose education has been interrupted, and who, intellectually, was left, for some years, altogether to his own devices. At that time, I was a voracious and omnivorous reader; a dreamer and speculator of the first water, well endowed with that splendid courage in attacking any and every subject, which is the blessed compensation of youth and inexperience. Among the books and essays, on all sorts of topics from metaphysics ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... the store there is an omniscient, omnipresent, and omnivorous person carrying always a mileage book and a red necktie, and referred to as a "buyer." The destinies of the girls in his department who live on (see Bureau of Victual Statistics)—so much per ...
— Options • O. Henry
... as omnivorous as the Crow or Blue Jay, without their sense of humor, and whenever opportunity offers will attack and eat smaller birds, especially the defenseless young. His own meet with the like fate, a fox squirrel having been seen to emerge from a hole in a large dead ...
— Birds Illustrated by Color Photography [December, 1897], Vol 2. No 6. • Various
... is omnivorous, and can subsist either on animal or vegetable food—an arrangement which fits him to dwell in any part of the habitable globe,—yet he is subject, with regard to the actual material of his diet, in ...
— The Church of England Magazine - Volume 10, No. 263, January 9, 1841 • Various
... found it, and tells us that the great part of the books named were perused before the age of fifteen. Making allowance for the fact that most of the poet's autobiographic sketches are emphatically "Dichtang und Wahrheit," we can believe that he was an omnivorous reader—"I read eating, read in bed, read when no one else reads"—and, having a memory only less retentive than Macaulay's, acquired so much general information as to be suspected of picking it up from Reviews. He himself declares that he never read a Review till ...
— Byron • John Nichol
... of gravity with a log chain, set a double-barreled bear trap in the donjon-keep of his hennery nor tie a brace of pessimistic bull-dogs in his melon patch, for the nigger preacher had not yet arrived with his adjustable morals and omnivorous mouth. No female committees of uncertain age invaded his place of business and buncoed him out of a double saw-buck for the benefit of a pastor who would expend it seeing what Parkhurst saw and feeling ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... student—the student of the thirteenth century—struggling painfully against difficulties, eager and hot after knowledge, wasting eyesight and stinting sleep, subtle, inquisitive, active-minded and sanguine, but omnivorous, overflowing with dialectical forms, loose in premise and ostentatiously rigid in syllogism, fettered by the refinements of half-awakened taste and the mannerisms of ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... ground under a bush in the dense jungle, are dull brownish white and nearly three inches long. The chicks are sometimes domesticated, but even when born in captivity, it is said they are difficult to tame and soon wander away. The birds are omnivorous, feeding on insects, grubs, reptiles, flower buds, young shoots, ...
— Camps and Trails in China - A Narrative of Exploration, Adventure, and Sport in Little-Known China • Roy Chapman Andrews and Yvette Borup Andrews
... Travel begins with the part partly translated by Dr. King: Crapulia, named from Crapula, is the Land of Inebriate Excess, and its two provinces, Pamphagonia and Yvronia, mean by their names the provinces of Omnivorous Gluttony and Drunkenness. Dr. King has translated six chapters, and begun the seventh, which is upon the wars of the Pamphagonians, to which they march forth armed with spits and two-pronged forks and heavy ribs of beef. In their free city, ...
— Ideal Commonwealths • Various
... have just examined appears to be formed of earth, kneaded up with a kind of gum which the insect secretes. In the subterranean passages of a termite's nest there are arches which seem to be composed of morsels of wood stuck together by some sticky matter. These insects are omnivorous, and, like ants, take care to lay ...
— Adventures of a Young Naturalist • Lucien Biart
... altogether so exactly like a small common wasp of the genus Odynerus, that Mr. Bates informs us he was afraid to take it out of his net with his fingers for fear of being stung. Had Mr. Bates's taste for insects been less omnivorous than it was, the beetle's disguise might have saved it from his pin, as it had no doubt often done from the beak of hungry birds. A larger insect, Sphecomorpha chalybea, is exactly like one of the large metallic blue wasps, ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - The Naturalist as Interpreter and Seer • Various
... prey, infesting all habitable parts of the globe, from Greeland's spicy mountains to India's moral strand. The popular name (wolfman) is incorrect, for the creature is of the cat kind. The woman is lithe and graceful in its movement, especially the American variety (felis pugnans), is omnivorous and can be taught ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... own egotism," he wrote; "I know my omnivorous lines, and must not write any less." He was not disconcerted by any failure of art, or any propriety, or ...
— Escape and Other Essays • Arthur Christopher Benson
... acted as a heavy drag and bar upon progress in Geography among the Arabs, notwithstanding its early promise among them, and in spite of the application to its furtherance of the great intellects of some (such as Abu Rihan al-Biruni), and of the indefatigable spirit of travel and omnivorous curiosity of others (such ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... anatomist," said Mr Jenkison, "and cannot decide where doctors disagree; in the meantime, I conclude that man is omnivorous, and on that conclusion ...
— Headlong Hall • Thomas Love Peacock
... most omnivorous song composer that ever lived. He could hardly see a poem—good, bad, or indifferent, without being at once seized by a passionate desire to set it to music. He sometimes wrote half a dozen or more songs in one day, and some of them originated under the most peculiar ...
— Chopin and Other Musical Essays • Henry T. Finck
... She was an omnivorous and most intelligent reader, and a friend that never failed. Matthew Arnold was very fond of her, and she of him; Laura Lyttelton, who was nearly forty years her junior, loved her dearly and never felt the bar of years; the Master owed much to her ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... carved from metal. These are his tidbits, but he will take most anything alive that is small enough for him to swallow, and when in winter he retires to the warmer layers of water next the pond bottom, his omnivorous appetite in a large measure goes with him. Hence the fishermen use many varieties of small fish for bait, all with ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard
... matter of food and warmth is the first issue in the wilderness; already she had learned this lesson. Her eyes glanced about the walls. There were two or three sacks, perhaps filled with provisions, hanging from the ceiling, safely out of the reach of the omnivorous pack-rats that often wreak such havoc in unoccupied cabins. But further than this the place ...
— The Snowshoe Trail • Edison Marshall
... man of twenty-seven—Robert Clive. At the age of eighteen, Clive had entered the employ of the English East India Company as a clerk at Madras. His restless and discontented spirit found relief, at times, in omnivorous reading; at other times he grew despondent. More than once he planned to take his own life. During the War of the Austrian Succession, he had resigned his civil post and entered the army. The hazards of military life were more to his liking, ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... which was in direct proportion to the crudity which his formulations reached. The complexity and number of his theories when going about his work was tremendous, which could be partially accounted for by his omnivorous reading. He read all sorts of historical, occult, scientific and philosophical works, the material of which he absorbed only in so far as he could weave it into the fabric of his depraved speculations. This colored ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... the books in question appear to be very rare. It is doubtful if the omnivorous British Museum has swallowed a complete set; certainly at the Art Library of South Kensington Museum, where, if anywhere, we might expect to find Sir Henry Cole completely represented, many ...
— Children's Books and Their Illustrators • Gleeson White
... quarter of an hour they were placed on the rude table, and the three persons sat down—Verty laughing, the old woman smiling at him, the pedlar sullen and omnivorous. ...
— The Last of the Foresters • John Esten Cooke
... Lieutenant Rondelys; but we never managed to find it: perhaps it had evaporated; perhaps the does had drunk it all up, before they, too, had been made to vanish, before the German invader—or inside him; for he was fond of French venison, as well as of French clocks! He was a most omnivorous person. ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... out for these distingue foreigners, Helene! You're an heiress, you know," said Octavie, who was an omnivorous newspaper reader. ...
— The Music Master - Novelized from the Play • Charles Klein
... of attainment which enriched the rich, natural soil. Intermeddling as he did with all knowledge, he must necessarily have been but an amateur in many of the subjects into which he rushed with such generous eagerness. But none the less is the example of all but omnivorous acquisitiveness of everything that was to be known, a protest, very needful in these days, against the possible evils of an excessive specialising which the very progress of knowledge in all departments seems to make ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... of literature, as booksellers invariably were in the good days when every town had its bookshop. From his childhood Johnson had to struggle against physical deformity and disease and the consequent disinclination to hard work. He prepared for the university, partly in the schools, but largely by omnivorous reading in his father's shop, and when he entered Oxford he had read more classical authors than had most of the graduates. Before finishing his course he had to leave the university on account of his poverty, and ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... and a jester in the same breath. Of this Elizabethan chronicle the first part is the more literal and prosaic in its steady servility to actual record and registered fact: the bitterest enemy of poetic or dramatic fiction, from William Prynne to Thomas Carlyle, might well exempt from his else omnivorous appetite of censure so humble an example of such obsequious and unambitious fidelity. Of fiction or imagination there is indeed next to none. In Thomas Drue's play of "The Duchess of Suffolk," formerly and plausibly misattributed to Heywood, part ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... statues, images, pictures, ornaments, as they lay upon the ground, were broken with sledge-hammers, hewn with axes, trampled, torn; and beaten into shreds. A troop of harlots, snatching waxen tapers from the altars, stood around the destroyers and lighted them at their work. Nothing escaped their omnivorous rage. They desecrated seventy chapels, forced open all the chests of treasure, covered their own squalid attire with the gorgeous robes of the ecclesiastics, broke the sacred bread, poured out the ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... case it became my duty to warn a girl of eleven, who was an omnivorous reader of romances, that such reading was in all probability hastening her development, and she would become a woman in bodily functions while she ought yet to be a child. Her indications of approaching womanhood were very apparent. By becoming impressed ...
— What a Young Woman Ought to Know • Mary Wood-Allen
... cultivate the land, and live almost exclusively by hunting and fishing. They are men of very robust constitution; but ill-looking, savage, vindictive, and passionately fond of fermented liquors. They are omnivorous animals in the highest degree; and therefore the other Indians, who consider them as barbarians, have a common saying, nothing is so loathsome but that an Ottomac will eat it. While the waters of the Orinoco and its tributary streams are low, the Ottomacs subsist on fish and turtles. ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V2 • Alexander von Humboldt
... courage can battle against them. And below—in the slums and factories, what will be going on? The survival of a race of stunted toilers, with great resisting power to infection, contagion and fatigue, omnivorous as rats.... ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells
... of the young man of twenty-eight, who seemed to M. Scherer to have the world at his feet. What were the chief qualities of mind and heart which Amiel brought back with him from Berlin? In the first place, an omnivorous desire to know: "Amiel," says M. Scherer, "read everything." In the second, an extraordinary power of sustained and concentrated thought, and a passionate, almost a religious, delight in the exercise of his power. Knowledge, science, stirred in him no mere ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... was an omnivorous reader, eager for every form of literature and every description of knowledge—whether clearly comprehended or not—which the beloved printed page has to give. An eagerness, it may be noted, not infrequently productive of collisions with Theresa, and at this ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... friends. Here I meet with pleasant society and a hearty welcome. I am passionately fond of music, have an excellent piano, and can hear the best concerts in Europe. I go to all good plays. I am a good chess player. Lastly, I am an omnivorous reader. You will allow that my resources for passing ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... condescension in its air; when Ailie held out her hand, it ran on its two legs, and being eager in its affections, it held out its arms in order to be caught up. As to food, that monkey was not particular. It seemed to be omnivorous. Certain it is that it never refused anything, but more than once it was observed quietly to throw away things that it did not relish. Once, in an unguarded moment, it accepted and chewed a small piece of tobacco; after which it made a variety of entirely new faces, and became ...
— The Red Eric • R.M. Ballantyne
... than that, he has a onelegged disposition. His whole ego, his entire spirit is changed. No longer a twolegged creature, reduced, he is another—warped, if you like—being. To come to the immediate point of the grass: if you engender an omnivorous capacity ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... began Zezdon Afthen slowly, "were men such as you are. They descended from a primeval omnivorous mammal very closely related to your race. Evidently the tendency of evolution on any planet is approximately the ...
— Invaders from the Infinite • John Wood Campbell
... shelves. I remember The Wealth of Nations, Paley's Evidences of Christianity, Locke on the Human Understanding, and a long row of the dramatists of the seventeenth century. I burrowed into all these with zeal, and acquired in very early childhood an omnivorous appetite for books ...
— Recollections • David Christie Murray
... be. He had spent five years in schools, and nine years in colleges and universities; he had given the scholars of the world full opportunity to guide him to whatever was of importance. Also, he had been an omnivorous reader upon his own impulse; and here he was, at the end of it all—practically ignorant that this ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... found nothing save science engrossing enough to make him oblivious of his constant ill-health, Huxley never lost his keen delight in literature and art. He was a rapid and omnivorous reader, devouring everything from a fairy tale to a blue book, and tearing the heart out of a book at express speed. With this went a love of great and beautiful poetry and of prose expression that ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley - A Character Sketch • Leonard Huxley
... call the bird or beast that feeds on both animal and vegetable foods?" was the next question. The teacher anticipated "Omnivorous" this time, but it did not come. There was silence for a little. Then a boy, who evidently had been ruminating, responded ...
— Children's Rhymes, Children's Games, Children's Songs, Children's Stories - A Book for Bairns and Big Folk • Robert Ford
... which are domestic in a broad, national sense; not of any of our home institutions, 'peculiar' or otherwise; not of politics in any shape, nor of railroads and canals, nor of interstate relations, reconstructions, amnesty; not even of the omnivorous question, The War, do I propose to treat under the head of 'Our Domestic Affairs;' but of a subject which, though scarcely ever discussed except flippantly, and with unworthy levity, in that broad arena of public journalism in which ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 3, September 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... it was, with two rows of small iron tables in front, and at one of these we would seat ourselves. Behind us in the window was a long glass tank of gold fish, into which from time to time a huge cat would reach an omnivorous paw. Often from within the cafe we would hear Russian folk songs played on balalaikas by a group of Russian students there. And between the songs a low hubbub rose, in French and many other tongues, for here were French and Germans, English and Bohemians, Russians ...
— The Harbor • Ernest Poole
... hold of such boys at an early age and to win their interest in and attendance at the library rather than at places of low resort. To withhold a boy's card may also be considered a doubtful punishment— driving the young omnivorous reader to the patronage of the "underground travelling library" with its secret stations and patrons. Before suspension or expulsion is resorted to, the librarian should clearly distinguish between thoughtless exuberance of spirits and downright maliciousness. "If we only had a boys' ...
— Library Work with Children • Alice I. Hazeltine
... is a veteran of 1870, and was for a long time a prisoner at Konigsburg. He likes nothing better than to rest a bit on a big stone at my gate and talk of 1870. Like all Frenchmen of his type he is wonderfully intelligent, full of humor, and an omnivorous reader. Almost every day he has a bit of old newspaper in his pocket out of which he reads to la dame Americaine as he calls me, not being able to pronounce my name. It is usually something illuminating about the Germans, when it is not something prophetic. It is wonderful ...
— A Hilltop on the Marne • Mildred Aldrich
... rabies, yet you couldn't be too careful with a dog bite. A dog bite might be injurious in all sorts of ways—particularly Sultan's bite. He was, they had to confess, a dog without refinement, a coarse-minded omnivorous dog. Both the elder ladies insisted upon regarding Benham's wound as clear evidence of some gallant rescue of Amanda from imminent danger—"she's always so RECKLESS with those dogs," as though Amanda was ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... to a soda-water bottle, a disposition to ride anything that could by any exercise of the liveliest fancy be made to assume equine proportions, a propensity to blacken his venerable white hair with ink and coal dust, and an omnivorous appetite which did not stop at chalk, clay, or cinders, were peculiarities not calculated to excite respect. In fact, he would seem to have become demoralized, and when, after a prolonged absence the other day, he was finally discovered standing upon the front steps addressing a group of delighted ...
— Urban Sketches • Bret Harte
... childhood Paul Jones had been a voracious and an omnivorous reader. He read with amazing rapidity. The first book he enjoyed whole-heartedly was Mabel Dearmer's "Noah's Ark Geography," one of the best children's books written in the past twenty years. He read and re-read this book as a little boy and used to talk lovingly of Kit and his friends, Jum-Jum ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... the natives, also eats birds and their eggs, small mammals and reptiles, and is said to devour large animals when found dead, though it does not attempt to kill them for food. The young gorilla which was kept in captivity at Berlin became quite omnivorous in ...
— Man And His Ancestor - A Study In Evolution • Charles Morris
... desert; most of the contributors to those yearly volumes, which took up such pretentious positions on the centre table, have shrunk into entire oblivion, or, at best, hold their place in literature by a scrap or two in some omnivorous collection. ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... cantankerous old brute," said the Duke of Stone with candor, "but he chanced to be an omnivorous novel-reader. Nothing was too sentimental for him in his ...
— T. Tembarom • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... learned to read he was an eager and an omnivorous reader, and could, from his eighth year, pass happy hours with a book, any book so long as ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson • Margaret Moyes Black
... Mrs. Seward, at Auburn; Gerrit Smith's family at Peterboro; Beriah Green's at Whitesboro, with the Sedgwicks and Mays, and Matilda Joslyn Gage at Syracuse. Although Mrs. Gage was surrounded with a family of small children for years, yet she was always a student, an omnivorous reader and liberal thinker, and her pen was ever at work answering the attacks on the woman movement in the county and State journals. In the village of Manlius, where she lived some time after her marriage, she was the sole representative of this unpopular reform. When walking ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... Omnivorous children who are addicted to birch-chewing prefer these tender yellow-green leaves tinged with red, when newly put forth in June—"Youngsters" rural New Englanders call them then. In some sections a kind of tea is steeped from the leaves, which also ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al
... little disposition to scud off under each pleasant breeze of feeling. Nay, I can even imagine—perhaps somewhat captiously—that after marriage, feeling would become a habit, a rich and holy habit certainly, but yet a habit, which weakens the omnivorous grasp of the affections, and schools one to a unity of emotion that doubts and ignores the promptness and variety of impulse ...
— Dream Life - A Fable Of The Seasons • Donald G. Mitchell
... crossed is about 4600 feet above the sea, or a little higher than the Brenner Pass in the Tyrol. But there grain grows and orchards bear fruit, while here, under the parallel of 62 deg., nearly all vegetation ceases, and even the omnivorous northern sheep can find no pasturage. Before and behind you lie wastes of naked grey mountains, relieved only by the snow-patches on their summits. I have seen as desolate tracts of wilderness in the south made ...
— Northern Travel - Summer and Winter Pictures of Sweden, Denmark and Lapland • Bayard Taylor
... of their jaws," replied Cortlandt, "I should say they are omnivorous, and would doubtless prefer meat to what they are eating now. Something seems to have gone wrong with the animal creation ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds - A Romance of the Future • John Jacob Astor
... many kinds. The typical modern worker is, in his production, a very narrow specialist, but in his consumption he is far less a specialist than was the rude hunter who was able to enjoy only the few goods which he himself produced. The modern worker's tastes are omnivorous, for he has developed an immense variety of wants and, through social organization, he has acquired the means of ...
— Essentials of Economic Theory - As Applied to Modern Problems of Industry and Public Policy • John Bates Clark
... charge of atheism comes from the unbelieving Bayle, whose omnivorous mind, like the anaconda, assisted its enormous deglutition with a poisonous saliva of its own, and whose negative temper makes the "Dictionnaire Historique" more Morgue ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... STANLEY," proceeded Mr. PUNCH, "said to the banqueting Fishmongers, 'I am an omnivorous reader whenever an opportunity presents itself.' It presents itself here and now. Take, Illustrious Trio, the greatest gift that even PUNCH can bestow upon ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari Volume 98, January 4, 1890 • Various
... traditional; the Cafe Anglais is infested with English; and at Very's, which is otherwise a meritorious establishment, one's digestion is disturbed by the sight of omnivorous provincials, who drink champagne with the roti, and eat ...
— In the Days of My Youth • Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards
... to lose sight of perfidy in magnitude and to say, when he hears all the facts: "At least these rascals hunt big game." I wish to say here that such distinction is undeserved. The "System" is omnivorous. Its insatiable maw yawns as greedily for the ten-cent pieces of the people as for the thousands of the larger investor. It is as avid and relentless in devising ant-traps as elephant-snares. There fell into my hands recently certain ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson
... of books was a subject Hendry was very willing to shake his head over, but he never showed any desire to take off the lid. Jess, however, was more curious; indeed, she would have been an omnivorous devourer of books had it not been for her conviction that reading was idling. Until I found her out she never allowed to me that Leeby brought her my books one at a time. Some of them were novels, and Jess took about ten minutes ...
— A Window in Thrums • J. M. Barrie
... previously made acquainted with its contents and had discussed Egyptian funeral rites and modes of sepulture with the author, for it was to Feydeau that he dedicated his novel when it was published in book form by Hachette in 1858. An omnivorous reader, Gautier had no doubt also perused the far more important works of Champollion, the decipherer of the inscriptions on the Rosetta stone, who first gave the learned world the key to the mysterious Egyptian hieroglyphic alphabet. ...
— The Works of Theophile Gautier, Volume 5 - The Romance of a Mummy and Egypt • Theophile Gautier
... upon the self-styled Doctor. But in order to make assurance still more certain, we threw out vague hints to him that the portrait of Maria Vanrenen might really be elsewhere, and even suggested in his hearing that it might not improbably have got into the hands of that omnivorous collector, Sir J. H. Tomlinson. But the vendor was proof against all such attempts to decry his goods. He had the effrontery to brush away the documentary evidence, and to declare that Sir J. H. Tomlinson (one of the most learned and astute picture-buyers in England) had been smartly imposed upon ...
— An African Millionaire - Episodes in the Life of the Illustrious Colonel Clay • Grant Allen
... Grolier, however, and his fair imitators, as a rule, bought only the books of their own day, giving them distinction by the handsome liveries which they made them don. Our English collectors have more often been of the omnivorous type, and though Lords Lumley and Arundel in the sixteenth century cannot, even when their forces are joined, stand up against De Thou, in Sir Robert Cotton, Harley, Thomas Rawlinson, Lord Spencer, Heber, Grenville, and Sir Thomas Phillips (and the list might be doubled without much ...
— English Embroidered Bookbindings • Cyril James Humphries Davenport
... student, Lanier was an omnivorous reader in the wide fields of English literature, sharing his tastes with some of his companions who with him lived in "an atmosphere of ardent and loyal friendship." "I can recall," says Mr. T. F. Newell, his classmate and room-mate,* "those Attic nights, for they are ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... of 1762 he removed to "merry Islington," then a country village, though now swallowed up in omnivorous London. He went there for the benefit of country air, his health being injured by literary application and confinement, and to be near his chief employer, Mr. Newbery, who resided in the Canonbury House. In this neighborhood he used to take his solitary ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... with the Flavian amphitheatre at Rome, while the gladiators sang their Ave Caesar! we gain at once a measure for the differences between Greek and Latin taste. In spiritual matters, again, Rome, as distinguished from Hellas, was omnivorous. The cosmopolitan receptivity of Roman sympathies, absorbing Egypt and the Orient wholesale, is as characteristic as the exclusiveness of the Greeks, their sensitive anxiety about the [Greek: ethos]. We feel that it was in a Roman rather than a Greek atmosphere, where no middle term of art existed ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... always conscious of not having read enough and of therefore being secretly inferior to more omnivorous readers. She did not think Rachel read much, but Rachel was different. Rachel was an artist and had ideas. Mary respected artists and was always sarcastic toward them. It usually made them talk a lot—particularly male artists—and thus enabled ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht
... at one time evil talk was prevalent among the boys, his perfect purity of mind and power of creating innocent amusement destroyed the habit, without estranging the other lads from him. He took many of his stories from books not read by them, for he was an omnivorous reader, taking special delight in poetry, loving nothing better than a solitary walk with Spenser's "Faerie Queen" in his hand, and often himself composing verses above the average for so young ...
— Pioneers and Founders - or, Recent Workers in the Mission field • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... with Mr. William Kirby, and her departure had forced her younger sister into the front rank of domestic combatants. At Mount Music, where once the milk and honey had flowed with effortless abundance, each year brought increasing stress. The rents grew less, the expenses greater, that large and omnivorous item, known as "keeping up the place," was as exacting as ever, the minor problems of household existence more acute. There had been a time when the Mount Music tenants had vied with one another in the provision of sons ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross
... Ape Pygmies or Orang-Outang fighting the Cranes, this, I think, may be easily enough made out, by what I have already observed; for this wild Man I dissected was Carnivorous, and it may be Omnivorous, at least as much as Man is; for it would eat any thing that was brought to the Table. And if it was not their Hunger that drove them to it, their Wantonness, it may be, would make them apt enough to rob the Cranes ...
— A Philological Essay Concerning the Pygmies of the Ancients • Edward Tyson
... time to time in learned periodicals like "Archaeologia," the "Archaeological Journal," the "Antiquary," etc., where, being sandwiched between others of another character, they have been lost to all but antiquarian experts of omnivorous appetite. Assuredly, the average educated Englishman will not go in quest of them, but it may be thought he will esteem the opportunity, here offered, of gaining enlightenment, if not in the full and perfect sense which might have been possible, had life been less brief and art not quite ...
— The Customs of Old England • F. J. Snell
... separated that Quin's thoughts left the disturbing events of the day and flew to something more pleasing. For two weeks now he had had to content himself with chance interviews with Eleanor, meager diet for a person with an omnivorous appetite; but to-night there was the prospect for a long, uninterrupted evening. Since the day of Miss Enid's wedding he had found her perplexed and absent-minded; but the fact that she always had a smile for him, and that nothing was seen or heard ...
— Quin • Alice Hegan Rice
... Though fairly omnivorous in his tastes, the big muskrat, like all his tribe, was so content with his lilies, flag-root, and clams, that he was not generally regarded as a foe by the birds and other small people of the wilderness. He was too well fed to ...
— The Watchers of the Trails - A Book of Animal Life • Charles G. D. Roberts
... Teufelsdroeckh has nevertheless contrived to take-in a well-nigh boundless extent of field; at least, the boundaries too often lie quite beyond our horizon. Selection being indispensable, we shall here glance-over his First Part only in the most cursory manner. This First Part is, no doubt, distinguished by omnivorous learning, and utmost patience and fairness: at the same time, in its results and delineations, it is much more likely to interest the Compilers of some Library of General, Entertaining, Useful, or even Useless Knowledge ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... of omnivorous readers, the position of authors has decidedly improved. We no longer see the half-starved poets bartering their sonnets for a meal; learned scholars pining in Newgate; nor is "half the pay of a scavenger" [Footnote: A remark of Granger—vide Calamities of Authors, ...
— Books Fatal to Their Authors • P. H. Ditchfield
... and twelve I was an omnivorous reader. My literary bill-of-fare was far-reaching; I read everything. The family almanacs came in for a careful review. After reading the harrowing details of diseases, which could only be removed by the timely use of somebody's dope, I always thought: "That's just ...
— Confessions of a Neurasthenic • William Taylor Marrs
... Anthropophagi who devour dozens of us, the old, the young, the tender, the tough, the plump, the lean, the ugly, the beautiful: there's no escape, and one after another, as our fate is, we disappear down their omnivorous maws. Look at Lady Ogresham! We all remember, last year, how she served poor Tom Kydd: seized upon him, devoured him, picked his bones, and flung them away. Now it is Ned Suckling she has got into her den. He lies under her great eyes, ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... thus, not from ambition, nor altogether from principle, but from an immense craving for mental labor, which had become second nature to him. His great omnivorous, hungry intellect must have constant food,—new languages, new statistics, new historical investigations, new scientific discoveries, new systems of Scriptural exegesis. He did not for a day in ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... parasite, which develops itself in the social body alongside of its legal organizations. Its growth insensibly increases, attracting to itself the substance of the others, employing them for its own ends, substituting itself for them, acting by and for itself alone, a sort of omnivorous outgrowth the encroachment of which is irresistible, not only because circumstances and the working of the Constitution nourish it, but also because its germ, deposited at a great depth, is a living portion of ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 2 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 1 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... height,—so large, that, when the creature is swimming on the surface, a strong side-wind will sometimes blow it over. It is a blue-fish on a big scale, or a Semmes in the sea, hungry as famine, fierce as plague, dainty as a Roman epicure, yet omnivorous as time. The seal is its South-Down mutton, the tongue of the whale its venison; for whenever its numbers are sufficient, it will attack this huge cetacean, and torture him till he submits and gives a horrible feast ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865 • Various
... food." He seems to be a vegetarian? Good. But is not the question of how much food we ought to eat equally urgent whether we are vegetarian or omnivorous? I think it is. I do not think that the chief cause of our illnesses to-day is taking wrong or unsuitable food. In my opinion we are ill mainly because we take suitable food too often and because we take too much of it. My answer to the question, therefore—"How Much Should We Eat?—A Warning"—turns ...
— The Healthy Life, Vol. V, Nos. 24-28 - The Independent Health Magazine • Various
... little goddesses; where plucky little widows perform their little suttees for defunct little husbands, grilling on little funeral piles; where mangy little Pariah dogs defile the little dinners of little high-caste folks, by stealing hungry little sniffs from sacred little pots; where omnivorous little adjutant-birds gobble up little glass bottles, and bones, and little dead cats, and little old slippers, and bits of little bricks, in front of little shops in little bazaars; where vociferous little circars are driving little bargains with obese little banyans, and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 5, March, 1858 • Various
... jungles, he rambles out at night in search of roots, fruits, large earthworms, or anything else that he can find, being, like his domesticated brethren, omnivorous. He is a terrible enemy to the pack, and has cost me several good dogs within the last few years. Without first-rate seizers it would be impossible to kill him with the knife without being ripped, as he invariably turns ...
— Eight Years' Wandering in Ceylon • Samuel White Baker
... Vicksburg but one year, after which I was employed as a cake-baker's assistant and bread-wagon driver. A short time before this I was a house-boy in the city. I was, at the time of my employment in the bakery, an omnivorous reader of the newspapers, and, in fact, of all kinds of literature; but my hours of labor at both places were so long and incessant that I found it almost impossible to do any reading during my ...
— Tuskegee & Its People: Their Ideals and Achievements • Various
... remnant of one of the tribes of Veddahs. They are the most degraded, or rather least civilised of all the people of Ceylon. They are divided into Rock Veddahs, Village Veddahs, and Coast Veddahs. This man belongs to the first, who are the most barbarous of all. They are omnivorous, eating carrion or anything that comes in their way— roots, or fish, or wild honey, or any animals they can catch; but their favourite food is monkeys and lizards. They live either in caves and nooks in rocks, or on platforms among the boughs of trees. They hunt the deer with bows and arrows, ...
— My First Voyage to Southern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston
... shade of another departed victim—Fitzpatrick Smart, Esq. He, too, through a long life, had been a vigilant and enthusiastic collector, but after a totally different fashion. He was far from omnivorous. He had a principle of selection peculiar and separate from all other's, as was his own individuality from other men's. You could not classify his library according to any of the accepted nomenclatures peculiar to the initiated. He was not a ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... my birth, with this unhallowed tongue, Thy hopes, thy dangers, I perchance had sung; But who shall sing, in brutal disregard Of all the essentials of the "native bard"? Lake, sea, shore, prairie, forest, mountain, fall, His eye omnivorous must devour them all; The tallest summits and the broadest tides His foot must compass with its giant strides, Where Ocean thunders, where Missouri rolls, And tread at once the tropics and the poles; His food all forms ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... s. of William I. who had emigrated from Scotland. He was in his youth delicate, and his education was somewhat desultory, but his f. had a fine library, of which he had the run, and he was an omnivorous reader. In 1799 he entered a law office, but a threatening of consumption led to his going, in 1804, on a European tour in search of health. On his return in 1806 he was admitted to the Bar. He did not, however, prosecute law, but joined his brothers in business ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... and the Chinaman strikes a balance in his mind and sees more nourishment in one bowl of rice than in three eggs. Of meat there is pork—pork in plenty, and pork only. Pigs and dogs are the scavengers of China. None of the carnivora are more omnivorous than the Chinese. "A Chinaman has the most unscrupulous stomach in the world," says Meadows; "he will eat anything from the root to the leaf, and from the hide to the entrails." He will not even despise the flesh of dog ...
— An Australian in China - Being the Narrative of a Quiet Journey Across China to Burma • George Ernest Morrison
... I am alive for ever more." "Jesus has conquered death and all its powers." Never more will it sit on a transient throne. Its power is broken, its "sting" has lost its poison, there isn't a boast left in its apparently omnivorous mouth! "Where's thy victory, O grave?" And here is the gospel for me—"Because I live ye shall ...
— My Daily Meditation for the Circling Year • John Henry Jowett
... The sin of such gossip—if it be a sin—is one that all the preaching in the world will never extirpate from country towns, where the range of talk is by the necessity of the case exceedingly limited. In the city, curiosity has an omnivorous maw by reason of position, and finds such variety to feed upon that it is rarely—except in the case of great political or public scandal—personal in its attentions; and what we too freely reckon a perverted and impertinent country taste is but an ordinary appetite of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 90, April, 1865 • Various
... Grand Tour. Founded by Cosimo I, built originally by George Vasari, and greatly enlarged by Francis I, who succeeded to the Grand Duchy in 1574, the gallery owed most perhaps to the Cardinal, afterwards Ferdinand I, who constructed the Tribuna, and to Cardinal Leopold, an omnivorous collector, who died in 1675. But all the Medici princes added to the rarities in the various cabinets, drawing largely upon the Villa Medici at Rome for this purpose, and the last of them, John Gaston (1723-1737), was one of the most liberal as regards the freedom ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... Bundelcund called Kunjurs who were in the habit, as he was informed by the Bramins, of "catching lizards, scorpions, snakes, and foxes," which, if it is meant that they use them for food, is analogous to the omnivorous propensities of the gipsies. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 341, March, 1844, Vol. 55 • Various
... the interest of the grand-stand for a longer period than watching your child dallying with the dripping delights of an "all-day sucker." These little babies have the digestion of an ostrich and his omnivorous appetite. Suckled at their mothers' breasts until they are two or even three years old, when they are weaned they at once graduate into the bill-of-fare of the adult. Walrus-hide is about as uncompromising as elephant-hide, and an inch thick. You see little chaps of three and four ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron
... pursued the courses in medicine and philosophy, but a fact of even more consequence than his proficiency in his regular work was his persistent study of languages and his omnivorous reading. He was associated with the other Filipinos who were working in a somewhat spectacular way, misdirected rather than led by what may be styled the Spanish liberals, for more considerate treatment of the Philippines. ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... pony which threw her,—special, I mean, since the accident,—regarding him as in some sense the angel which had driven her out of paradise into a better world. If ever he got loose, and Connie was anywhere about, he was sure to find her: he was an omnivorous animal, and she had always something he would eat when his favorite apples were unattainable. More than once she had been roused from her sleep on the lawn by the lips and the breath of Sprite upon her face; but, although one painful sign of her weakness was, that she ...
— The Vicar's Daughter • George MacDonald
... London, Richerand, Marc, etc.,—that the structure of man resembles closely that of the monkey race; and hence objects to the conclusion to which some of these men have arrived (by jumping over, as it were), that man is an omnivorous animal. He freely allows—I use his own words—"that man does approximate more closely to the frugivorous animals than to any others, in physical organization." But then he insists that the conclusion which ought to ...
— Vegetable Diet: As Sanctioned by Medical Men, and by Experience in All Ages • William Andrus Alcott
... his books. Denied the advantages of early scholastic training, he was, from the beginning, an omnivorous reader. He cared little for the allurements and excitement of society. At the age of seventeen, he joined the Methodist Episcopal Church, and was soon after licensed to preach. For four years he rode the circuit, ...
— Something of Men I Have Known - With Some Papers of a General Nature, Political, Historical, and Retrospective • Adlai E. Stevenson
... as being from boyhood a book-worm and a day-dreamer. He remained through life an omnivorous, though unsystematic, reader. He was helpless in practical affairs, and his native indolence and procrastination were increased by his indulgence in the opium habit. On his return to England, in 1800, he went to reside at Keswick, in the Lake Country, ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... Omnivorous enough to devour greedily tigers, dogs, rats, frogs, insects, and other sorts of food, unpopular elsewhere, they are distinguished by their ornaments as well. The under-lip is the part which they perforate, and wherein they wear their usual pins; besides which they fasten a large lump of ...
— The Ethnology of the British Colonies and Dependencies • Robert Gordon Latham
... distribution, it may be doubted whether the largest sales of novels recorded in the last half century have surpassed those of the most trumpery trash of the "Minerva Press" period—the last decade of the eighteenth and the first of the nineteenth century. For the main novel-public is quite omnivorous, and almost absolutely uncritical of what it devours. The admirable though certainly fortunate Scot who "could never remember drinking bad whisky" might be echoed, if they had the wit, by not a few persons who never seem to read a bad novel, ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... in the querulous tones of the confirmed invalid. "I've 'suffered the pangs of three several deaths,' as Shakespeare says, because you left the door part way open the last time you went to the 'cyclopedia." For twenty years Joel had been an omnivorous reader, and his speech bristled with quotations gathered from his favorite volumes, and generally tagged with the author's name. The quotations were not always apt, but they helped to confirm ...
— Other People's Business - The Romantic Career of the Practical Miss Dale • Harriet L. Smith
... command "Thou shalt unconditionally do something, unconditionally refrain from something", in short, "Thou shalt". This need tries to satisfy itself and to fill its form with a content, according to its strength, impatience, and eagerness, it at once seizes as an omnivorous appetite with little selection, and accepts whatever is shouted into its ear by all sorts of commanders—parents, teachers, laws, class prejudices, or public opinion. The extraordinary limitation of human development, ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... wholly change their character. It seems to me that the way to learn how to manage fowls successfully is to observe their habits and modes of life when left to themselves. In summer, when they have a range, we find them eating grass, seeds, insects, etc. In short, they are omnivorous. In winter, when they can't get these things, they are often fed one or two kinds of grain continuously. Now, from their very nature, they need in winter all the kinds of food that they instinctively select when foraging for themselves—fresh vegetables, meat, and varieties of seeds or grain. We ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe
... us, and then took his leave. May a stranger's benediction rest upon him! He is a most pleasant man; rather, I imagine, a virtuoso than an antiquary; for he seemed to value the Queen of Otaheite's bag as highly as Queen Mary's embroidered quilt, and to have an omnivorous appetite for everything strange and rare. Would that we could fill up his shelves and drawers (if there are any vacant spaces left) with the choicest trifles that have dropped out of Time's carpet-bag, or give him the carpet-bag itself, to take out ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... These may be taken for the same purpose that some birds, especially of the gallinaceous order, swallow bits of gravel. Dr Von Baer concludes, from an analysis of all the published accounts, that the walrus is omnivorous.[149] A specimen that died at St Petersburg was fed on oatmeal mixed with turnips or other vegetables; and the little fellow, who lately died in the Regent's Park, seems to have been fed by the ...
— Heads and Tales • Various
... she did let slip. Generally, throughout all the centuries, she kept up a pretence of thinking history the greatest of all the arts. She always held her head high among her Sisters. It was only on the sly that she was an omnivorous reader of dramatic and lyric poetry. She watched with keen interest the earliest developments of the prose romance in southern Europe; and after the publication of "Clarissa Harlowe" she spent practically all her time in reading novels. It was not until the Spring of the year 1863 that ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm
... omnivorous. All that is edible is subjected to his vast appetite, a thing which causes gustatory powers proportionate to the use he has to make of them. The apparatus of taste is a rare perfection of man and we have only to see him use it to be satisfied ...
— The Physiology of Taste • Brillat Savarin
... he kissed me on the cheek and set off for school as fast as his legs could carry him. Oh, Love, omnivorous Love, that sparest neither the dotard leaning on his staff nor the boy with pantaloons buttoning on his jacket—omnipotent Love, that, after parents and teachers have failed, in one instant can make Billy try to become ...
— Masterpieces Of American Wit And Humor • Thomas L. Masson (Editor) |
