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Phrase   Listen
noun
Phrase  n.  
1.
A brief expression, sometimes a single word, but usually two or more words forming an expression by themselves, or being a portion of a sentence; as, an adverbial phrase. ""Convey" the wise it call. "Steal!" foh! a fico for the phrase."
2.
A short, pithy expression; especially, one which is often employed; a peculiar or idiomatic turn of speech; as, to err is human.
3.
A mode or form of speech; the manner or style in which any one expreses himself; diction; expression. "Phrases of the hearth." "Thou speak'st In better phrase and matter than thou didst."
4.
(Mus.) A short clause or portion of a period. Note: A composition consists first of sentences, or periods; these are subdivided into sections, and these into phrases.
Phrase book, a book of idiomatic phrases.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Phrase" Quotes from Famous Books



... moon at its full? The Greeks of old called it lampouris, meaning, the bright-tailed. Science employs the same term: it calls it the lantern-bearer, Lampyris noctiluca, Lin. In this case the common name is inferior to the scientific phrase, which, when translated, becomes ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre

... you into my confidence, my dear sir," he said, "to show that I know you to be stating an untruth. The Countess, on the contrary, is, to use a vulgar phrase, in it up to the neck. Thanks to the amazing imbecility of the Berlin police, I was not informed of your brief stay at the Bendler-Strasse, even after they were called in by the invalid American gentleman ...
— The Man with the Clubfoot • Valentine Williams

... latest heroine of the Baroness Von Hutten. Maria has the air of having been contracted for, while that fastidious overseer who lurks at the elbow of every honest craftsman, condemning this or that phrase, readjusting the other faulty piece of construction, has frankly abandoned the contractor. Maria was the daughter of an artist cadger (name of Drello), friend of the great and seller of their autograph letters, whereby ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, July 1, 1914 • Various

... 'quickening spell:' the first (as Polonius says) 'is a vile phrase,' and means nothing, besides being commonplace and Rosa-Matildaish."—Letter to Murray, April 11, 1814, ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Vol. 3 (of 7) • Lord Byron

... called 'boss;' why should it be? it is a word as well as another. Nay, I have even felt something like excitement when listening to political speeches, in which frequent mention was made of 'the great State of Pennsylvania.' Well, it is a great State, or the phrase has no meaning in any application. Will not this early life of the New World some day be studied with reverence and enthusiasm? I try to ...
— Thyrza • George Gissing

... is really our fear of criticism." There is nothing trivial or false about the critical and ethical views which Miss Cleveland gives bravely, although they are not invariably rendered with the felicity and pointed phrase which come from a careful selection of words and symbols. She is a little dazzled by the flowers and fruitage of a fancy which most of us are compelled to curb and prune to meet the requisitions of time and space. These papers ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, September, 1885 • Various

... laugh inwardly and go away to my studio to listen to the Divine voice dictating fresh pictures to me. For five years in Italy I had studied closely and worked unremittingly, keeping myself for my art alone and existing only in it. My teachers had called me industrious. Another phrase which always must make an artist laugh ...
— Five Nights • Victoria Cross

... he. "But of course I understand your point of view about education, which is that of times past, when 'the struggle for life,' as men used to phrase it (i.e., the struggle for a slave's rations on one side, and for a bouncing share of the slave- holders' privilege on the other), pinched 'education' for most people into a niggardly dole of not very accurate information; something to be swallowed by the beginner in the art of living whether he ...
— News from Nowhere - or An Epoch of Rest, being some chapters from A Utopian Romance • William Morris

... just used the expression 'accidental case.' This is a significant phrase; we often hear it. Well, not long since everyone was talking and reading about that terrible murder of six people on the part of a—young fellow, and of the extraordinary speech of the counsel for the defence, who observed that in the poverty-stricken condition of the criminal it ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky

... my dear Boswell," said I. "But you are, of course, familiar with the phrase 'Stone walls do ...
— The Enchanted Typewriter • John Kendrick Bangs

... kingdom of God." Take, for examples, these words of a Mr. Nakanishi. "It is the glory of mankind that Jesus lived. Much that Christ taught will never decay. Did Christ's teaching come from man, or from above man? Every word, every phrase, of Christ should influence us. In the Four Gospels, the noblest and wisest morality of the world appears. So simple is it, so easily understood and applied. 'Love God and love man,' as central principles, suffice to regenerate society and lead men to heaven. Christ's character and teachings ...
— Religion in Japan • George A. Cobbold, B.A.

... Banneker took a second thought. Why should he? His statement had been definite. Anyway, he could be called up on the morrow. Dining hastily and in deep, period-building thought, Banneker returned to the office, locked himself in, and with his own hand drafted the editorial built on that phrase of petty and terrific import: "Junior Masters called me ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams

... I have changed my condition, as the phrase goes; but neither my heart nor my affections to you, Miss Gourlay. Pray sit down on this sofa. Your ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton

... however," Heidel said, savoring the moment, "that we should have one final toast before we proceed." He lifted his glass. "May the receiver of the fifth bullet go straight to hell. I phrase that literally, gentlemen," he said, laughing. ...
— The Eyes Have It • James McKimmey

... and peace to thy soul, Rob Burns! When I want to express a sentiment which I feel strongly, I find the phrase in Shakespeare—or thee. The blockheads talk of my being like Shakespeare—not ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott

... character delivering the monologue. In other words, if you are writing a pure monologue, do not, just because it is humorous, drag in a gag [1] or a point [2] that is not in character or that does not fit the subject. Make every turn of phrase and every word fit not only the character but also ...
— Writing for Vaudeville • Brett Page

... dwelling of Dame Wilson. The dame was a respected servant in a most respectable family, which she quitted only on her marriage with a man of character and industry, and of that peculiar universality of genius which forms what is called, in country phrase, a handy fellow. His death, which happened about ten years ago, made quite a gap ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VI. • Various

... is an evident play on words in this passage. The original reads: "Que le auian hecho papa o papilla y que con el les auian querido dar papillas." "Papilla" is the diminutive of "papa"—meaning "pope," or "pap"; and the phrase dar papilla is used to mean "deceiving by ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume XXV, 1635-36 • Various

... made up of businessmen and gentlemen, which comes to much the same, since a gentleman is only a businessman in the second or some later generation. Except for the slightly odious suggestion carried by the phrase, one might aptly say that the gentleman, in this bearing, is only a businessman gone ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen

... of such distress were that the natives of the Upper country would frequently refuse to sell us any thing for our dirty colored piastres of Egypt, and the Pasha would allow nobody to steal but himself. "Steal" a fico for the phrase. The wise "convey it call," says ancient Pistol, an old soldier who had seen hard times ...
— A Narrative of the Expedition to Dongola and Sennaar • George Bethune English

... truth and made the speaker no more prominent than he had to be as the living voice of God. His prayers were unlike any the people had heard before. They were often broken, even once or twice they had been actually ungrammatical in a phrase or two. When had Henry Maxwell so far forgotten himself in a prayer as to make a mistake of that sort? He knew that he had often taken as much pride in the diction and delivery of his prayers as of his sermons. Was it possible he now so abhorred the elegant refinement of a ...
— In His Steps • Charles M. Sheldon

... to Mrs. Bingham that its maker was mistress of her art. Mrs. Bingham, although she could not entirely desert the linendraper's wife, whose husband was a good customer for brandy, had some of her clothes made in London when she stayed with her sister in town, and, to use her own phrase, "knew what ...
— Pages from a Journal with Other Papers • Mark Rutherford

... in one phrase. German expansion is not to be tolerated. It can only be a threat to or attained at the expense of British interests. Those interests being world-wide, with the seas for their raiment nay, with the earth for their footstool—it follows that wherever Germany may turn for ...
— The Crime Against Europe - A Possible Outcome of the War of 1914 • Roger Casement

... has raged continuously and with uninterrupted success for the Allied Armies. The Kaiser Battle has become the Battle of Liberation. The French bore the initial burden of the attack, but since August 8 "hundreds of thousands of unbeaten Tommies," to quote the phrase of a French military expert, have entered into action in a succession of attacks started one after the other all the way up to Flanders. Rawlinson, Home, and Byng have carried on the hammer work begun by Mangin, Gouraud, and Debeney. Peronne has been recovered, ...
— Mr. Punch's History of the Great War • Punch

... sprightly and elegant life, inherits, with the beautiful family Domain, no inconsiderable share of that love of literature, which distinguished his venerable grandfather, the Bishop of Carlisle. He one day observed to me, of Dr. Johnson, in a felicity of phrase, 'There is a blunt dignity about ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell

... General Pershing returns from the battlefields of Europe universally acclaimed a model of military efficiency and wearing so many medals that alongside him John Philip Sousa, by contrast, looks absolutely nude. His friends project him into the political arena and the result is summed in a phrase—"Lafayette, he ain't there!" Unavailing efforts are made by a rebellious and unreconciled few of us to find a presidential candidate willing to run on a platform of but four planks, namely: Wines, ales, liquors and cigars. ...
— One Third Off • Irvin S. Cobb

... from that day forth—from the very beginning, I mean—he had a natural horror of going BENEATH a cliff, and he liked to get as high up as he could, so as to be perfectly sure there was nobody at all anywhere above to hurt him." And then she went on to describe in short but graphic phrase how he loved to return to the place of his son's accident, and to stand for hours on lonely sites overlooking the spot, and especially on a crag which was ...
— Michael's Crag • Grant Allen

... of art—in the literal meaning of the phrase and not merely by a metaphor. It is true that works of art are made by individuals, civilization by a society. But what work of art is there in which the individual artist owes nothing to others? And a civilization, the work of countless individuals ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various

... he said, though, beyond a telling phrase or two,—one line in particular which would stick in ...
— Lonesome Land • B. M. Bower

... victory of Navarino was loudly denounced by opposition, it being supposed to indicate that the Duke of Wellington's cabinet abandoned the line of Mr. Canning's policy. In the lords the Duke of Richmond especially fixed a quarrel on the phrase "ancient ally:" contending that the sultan could not be termed in any correct sense of the word an ally of this country at all, and much less an "ancient ally." He disapproved still more of the epithet "untoward," as applied in the speech to the battle ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan

... extent, already known in Christendom, and that of Madagascar, which resembles that of the east coast of Africa, apart from a few species not particularly remarkable or numerous, was also well-known to Europeans. These beasts, of which, to use the old Norman phrase of "Master Nicole Le Fevre, avait pourtraye les facons," must have struck him as very peculiar indeed when he refers to them as "utterly unknown in Christendom," and we know well that no other country can boast of a fauna so essentially different to that of any ...
— The History of Australian Exploration from 1788 to 1888 • Ernest Favenc

... Algonquin magi, May have reclined "sub tegmine fagi;" For when across the Sapper's Bridge, The prospect was a fine beech ridge, And "Gibson's corner," in old time, For squirrel hunting was most prime, "Prime" is a somewhat slangy phrase For these high philologic days, And in connexion, be it stated, With a spot to science dedicated. J.H.P. Gibson's astral lecture Will place this fact beyond conjecture. Bound that old spot now thronged by all, ...
— Recollections of Bytown and Its Old Inhabitants • William Pittman Lett

... yearly revenue to the sum of forty shillings sterling, or six pounds as money goeth in our times. Some are of the opinion, by Cap. 2 Rich. 2 Ann. 20, that they are the same which the Frenchmen call varlets, but, as that phrase is used in my time, it is very unlikely to be so. The truth is that the word is derived from the Saxon term, Zeoman, or Geoman, which signifieth (as I have read) a settled or staid man, such I mean as, being married ...
— Chronicle and Romance (The Harvard Classics Series) • Jean Froissart, Thomas Malory, Raphael Holinshed

... and gave it to the servitor, "and to the palace. There have my scribe draw up a prayer to the Pharaoh, craving for me the mastership over the Israelite, Rachel,—for household service." The fan-bearer laughed. "Forget not, this latter phrase, else the Pharaoh might fancy I would take her to wife. Haste thee! and bring back Nak and Hebset with thee to row the boat back, and help thee fetch her. She may have a lover who might make trouble for thee alone. ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller

... apiece—on de dock." He launched into a wild description of the New World African Colony. He pictured a life of ease in which each charter member of the colony who believed in heaven would be reluctant to trade heaven for a stevedore's career. He added the time phrase which was the essence of the whole affair. "You meets me heah tomorr' mawnin' at six o'clock. Ah leads you to de boat whah you sees how fas' kin' you git de freight aboa'd. So as yo' gits de wages yo' labour ...
— Lady Luck • Hugh Wiley

... leads to marriage is thus apt to be the product of a wider experience, and to be based on a more intimate knowledge. The sentimental may cry fie on so clear-sighted a Cupid, but the sensible cannot but rejoice over anything that tends to the undoing of the phrase "lottery ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead

... overtoil; namely, the magnificent ease with which all is done when it is successfully done. For there are one or two drawings of this time which are not done easily. Turner had in these set himself to do a fine thing to exhibit his powers; in the common phrase, to excel himself; so sure as he does this, the work is a failure. The worst drawings that have ever come from his hands are some of this second period, on which he has spent much time and laborious thought; drawings filled with incident ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin

... Heaven. This lad told about a "free speech fight" in a far Western city, and how the chief of police had led the clubbing, and how they had got back at him. "We bumped him off all right," said "Strawberry"; it was a favourite phrase of his—whenever anybody got in his way, he "bumped him off". And then "Flathead Joe", who came from the Indian country, was moved to emulation, and told how he had put dynamite under the supports of a mine-breaker, and the whole works had slid down a slope into ...
— Jimmie Higgins • Upton Sinclair

... specimens of conch shells and fine coral which they had brought home from their voyages in lumber-laden ships. Mrs. Todd had told me all our neighbor's history. They had been girls together, and, to use her own phrase, had "both seen trouble till they knew the best and worst on 't." I could see the sorrowful, large figure of Mrs. Todd as I stood at the window. She made a break in the procession by walking slowly ...
— The Country of the Pointed Firs • Sarah Orne Jewett

... the east of Europe. This fact, together with the position of the mark with regard to Germany in general and to Bavaria in particular, accounts for the name Oesterreich (Austria), i.e. east empire or realm, a word first used in a charter of 996, where the phrase in regione vulgari nomine Ostarrichi occurs. The development of this small mark into the Austro-Hungarian monarchy was a slow and gradual process, and falls into two main divisions, which almost coincide with the periods during which the dynasties of Babenberg and Habsburg have ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various

... unexpected, two qualities are indispensable: in the first place an intellect which, even in the midst of this intense obscurity, is not without some traces of inner light, which lead to the truth, and then the courage to follow this faint light. The first is figuratively expressed by the French phrase coup d'oeil. The other is resolution. As the battle is the feature in War to which attention was originally chiefly directed, and as time and space are important elements in it, more particularly when cavalry with their rapid decisions were the chief ...
— On War • Carl von Clausewitz

... Son of Man," she said. "Oh! there is no other phrase. The Saviour of the world, as that paper says. I knew Him in my heart as soon as I saw Him—as we all did—as soon as He stood there holding the rail. It was like a glory round his head. I understand ...
— Lord of the World • Robert Hugh Benson

... artificial aids in her battle against decay, he hurled the tremendous power of his personality, and ugliness became at once as insignificant as immorality in his life. "One can't judge him by the standards of other men," thought Gabriella, using a remembered phrase of Fifty-seventh Street. ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow

... but there are regions where Hospitality is reckoned before Consistency, and as soon as the old squire learned that General Keith's son was with the surveying party, even though it was, to use a common phrase, "comin' interferin'" with that country, he rode over to their camp and invited Gordon and his "friends" to be his guests as long as they should remain ...
— Gordon Keith • Thomas Nelson Page

... retreated to the city, and, meeting with Hipparchus, rushed upon him, wounded, and slew him. Aristogiton turned to fly—he escaped the guards, but was afterward seized, and "not mildly treated" [240] by the tyrant. Such is the phrase of Thucydides, which, if we may take the interpretation of Justin and the later writers, means that, contrary to the law, he was put to the torture [241]. Harmodius was slain upon the spot. The news of his brother's ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... accomplish its end only gradually. Notoriously outrageous schedules of the Payne-Aldrich Act, such as that dealing with wool, were heavily reduced, and the general purport of the bill is perhaps expressed in the phrase of Professor Taussig, that it was "the beginning of a policy of much moderated protection." It went through the House without much difficulty, passing on May 8, and then it struck the Senate committee rooms, from which no tariff bill had ever emerged quite as innocent as it entered. The ...
— Woodrow Wilson's Administration and Achievements • Frank B. Lord and James William Bryan

... Malibran, she modified the original phrase of Bellini, so as to let her voice descend to the tenor G, when, by a rapid transition, she struck the G above the treble stave, springing over ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe

... no pleasure must be admitted without profit? And must we be angry with our delight, unless hired to endure it? Perhaps we may have reason to be ashamed of ointments and purple vests, because so costly and expensive, and to look upon them as (in the barbarian's phrase) treacherous garments and deceitful odors; but these natural smells and colors are pure and simple as fruits themselves, and without expense or the curiosity of art. And I appeal to any one, whether it is not absurd to receive ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch

... story had, in Browning's phrase, "grown old along with me," but for the forethought of Messrs. Smith, Elder and Co., in limiting its serial flow to twelve numbers of The Cornhill Magazine As it is, I have added a few chapters; but a hundred and fifty episodes remain unwritten, with the ...
— Sir John Constantine • Prosper Paleologus Constantine

... into separate compartments by the interposition of wooden barriers, extended the whole length of the terrace of twenty- seven houses. And these were all precisely alike, with white wood and stucco "enrichments," as the technical phrase has it. Cheap stained and leaded glass adorned the upper panels of the twenty-seven front doors, which were approached by twenty-seven flights of steps—thus securing a measure of light and air to the twenty-seven basements. The front doors were set in couples, alternating with ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet

... that the Deity is "the sole Operant" (Religious Musings) is indeed far too bold: may easily be misconstrued into Spinosism; and, therefore, though it is susceptible of a pious and justifiable interpretation, I should by no means now use such a phrase. I was very young when I wrote that poem, and my religious feelings were more settled than ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle

... a few words, are the different stages of the quarrel; and the parts are so intimately and necessarily connected with each other as to admit of no separation. A person, to use a trite phrase, must be a Whig or a Tory in a lump. His feelings, as a man, may be wounded; his charity, as a Christian, may be moved; but his political principles must go through all the cases on one side or the other. He cannot be a Whig in this stage, and a Tory in that. If he says he is ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine

... bodkin, as they did on the other substances we have noticed. The stylus was made sharp at one end to write with, and blunt and broad at the other, to efface and correct easily: hence the phrase vertere stylum, to turn the stylus, was used to express blotting out. But the Romans forbad the use of this sharp instrument, from the circumstance of many persons having used them as daggers. A schoolmaster ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli

... bring me here to see their miserable place, where I should find none of those luxuries to which I had been accustomed, but he promised me a good old-fashioned Milanese welcome instead. This is a phrase of which the Milanese are very fond, but as they put it into practice it becomes them well. They are generally most worthy and hospitable people, and contrast favourably with ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt

... moving hastily away, when she was suddenly, in nautical phrase, 'brought to' by a subdued shriek ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens

... maps into his pocket, Deck ordered his men on the return, the prisoners to ride behind himself and Life, with the five sharpshooters in the rear. He felt that he had gained sufficient information to warrant his return. To use an old phrase, "the cat was out of the bag," and it would not be long before General Bragg would bring out his troops from Chattanooga and vicinity to do the Army of the ...
— An Undivided Union • Oliver Optic

... the head of religion. Rome fully shared the enthusiasm which was awakened throughout Italy by the entrance of the Piedmontese troops into Lombardy, and by the announcement by Charles Albert that he had drawn the sword in the sacred cause of Italian independence. His proclamation, in the stilted phrase common to such state papers, declared that he relied upon "the assistance of that God who is visibly with us; of that God who has given Pius IX to Italy; of that God who, by such wondrous impulses, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 17 • Charles Francis Horne

... school books. In her earliest novel she uses very little conversation, clearly finding the indirect form of narrative easier. Sometimes, in the more highly wrought passages of description, she slips unawares into a more daring phrase, e.g. in Udolpho, the track of blood "glared" upon the stairs, where the word suggests not the actual appearance of the bloodstain, but rather its effect on Emily's inflamed and disordered imagination. Dickens might have chosen the word deliberately in this connection, ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead

... out now! Ambrose's head was more in Sir Thomas's books than in real life at all times, or he would long ago have inferred something—from the jackdaw's favourite phrase—from Giles's modes of haunting his steps, and making him the bearer of small tokens—an orange, a simnel cake, a bag of walnuts or almonds to Mistress Aldonza, and of the smiles, blushes, and thanks with which she greeted them. Nay, had she not burst into tears ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte Mary Yonge

... stopped at Lowell to change horses, a female wished to secure a place onward. We were already, as the phrase is, more than full; we had nine persons, and two children, which are made to go for nothing, except in the way-bill. Our saucy driver opened the door, and addressing two men, who, with us, would have ...
— Diary in America, Series Two • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)

... paragraph 5: deleted closing quotes after "confracti mundi rudera:" — the phrase is not quoted, and the ...
— Headlong Hall • Thomas Love Peacock

... may also be interpolated here as to the underground work done in New York for the first Edison station. It refers to the "man higher up," although the phrase had not been coined in those days of lower public morality. That a corporation should be "held up" was accepted philosophically by the corporation as one of the unavoidable incidents of its business; and if the corporation "got back" by securing some privilege without paying for ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin

... uncomfortably, and Davies compassed a wonderful German phrase to the effect that 'it might come in useful'. Happily the matter went no farther, for the position was a strained one at the best, and would not bear lengthening. The launch went alongside, and the invaders evacuated British soil, looking, ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers

... afterwards he assumed an appearance of decency: in his own phrase, he whitened himself, having a desire to obtain the censorship, an office of honour and some profit in the college; but, when the election came, the preference was given to Mr. Foulkes, his junior: the same, I suppose, that joined with Freind in an edition ...
— Lives of the Poets, Vol. 1 • Samuel Johnson

... It is necessary to begin at the beginning. From the first Burton took up his work at Damascus with "pinioned arms," to use his own phrase. In other words, he started with a prejudice against him. Lord Derby (then Lord Stanley), as we know, gave him the appointment; but before it was confirmed Lord Clarendon succeeded Lord Stanley at the Foreign Office, and in ...
— The Romance of Isabel Lady Burton Volume II • Isabel Lady Burton & W. H. Wilkins

... saying among seamen who were employed in the Baltic trade that if the North Sea were to dry up it would resemble a green field, because of the quantity of green steamers that had perished there. Perhaps the phrase was merely a picturesque figure of speech, as the North Sea makes no distinction as to the claim it has on its victims, and the colour of paint does neither attract nor repel its favour. Notwithstanding the startling evidence which proved that ...
— Windjammers and Sea Tramps • Walter Runciman

... his twenty years' friendship with Varvara Petrovna he used regularly, three or four times a year, to sink into a state of "patriotic grief," as it was called among us, or rather really into an attack of spleen, but our estimable Varvara Petrovna preferred the former phrase. Of late years his grief had begun to be not only patriotic, but at times alcoholic too; but Varvara Petrovna's alertness succeeded in keeping him all his life from trivial inclinations. And he needed some one to look after him indeed, for he sometimes behaved very oddly: in the midst ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky

... upon herself, and became busied with the refreshments laid out for him. He came in immediately, and advanced towards her with the same eager phrase, "Don't go, Leslie," and he grasped her gown lightly. She sat down while he ate ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler

... fine old man who has followed a flock these fifty years, and will, I have no doubt, carry his crook for yet another ten. Not only is he a "good shepherd," in the sense in which Caleb uses that phrase, with a more intimate knowledge of sheep and all the ailments they are subject to than I have found in any other, but he is also a truly religious man, one that "walks with God." He told me this story of a sheep-dog he owned when head-shepherd on a large farm on the Dorsetshire border ...
— A Shepherd's Life • W. H. Hudson

... thinking powers, and which were doubly requisite for a nature in which the creative imagination was predominant over all the other mental faculties, great as these other faculties were. And, even as poet, he suffered from this omission: since the involutions and overlappings of thought and phrase, which occur in his earlier and again in his latest works, must have been partly due to his never learning to follow the processes of more normally constituted minds. It would be a great error to suppose that they ever arose from the absence of a meaning clearly felt, ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr

... points in the study of the advanced combined hypnotism—it is probably always criminal—which are worthy of notice. One is that the operators generally, or always—(observation is difficult)—repeat a phrase or its most important words. The first saying of the word is barely noticeable. The repetition forces the word to the ...
— Inferences from Haunted Houses and Haunted Men • John Harris

... securest; this resulted in types of shiftlessness if not wickedness, which have not yet been duly studied, and which would make the fortune of some novelist who cared to do a fresh thing. There is also a sentimentality, or pseudo-emotionality (I have not the right phrase for it), which awaits full recognition in fiction. This efflorescence from the dust of systems and creeds, carried into natures left vacant by the ancestral doctrine, has scarcely been noticed by the painters of New England manners. ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... were dismounted and taken "ashore," to borrow a nautical phrase. These were set up in strategic positions before the liner, and full supplies of ammunition both blank and ...
— The Flying Legion • George Allan England

... possession. But, why? I ask you, why? What was the good of it all? What object was served? To begin with, the boy had absconded with somebody else's fox, or with somebody's else fox, which is undoubtedly the way a compiler of school readers would phrase it. This, right at the beginning, makes the morality of the transaction highly dubious. In the second place, he showed poor taste. If he was going to swipe something, why should he not have swiped a chicken or something else ...
— A Plea for Old Cap Collier • Irvin S. Cobb

... 1845, but is well worthy of being preserved, not only for its antiquarian interest, as being the earliest account of Devonshire, its agriculture and its industries, but also for the pleasure of its quaint turns of phrase, the ponderous classic authorities which he marshals to support a simple fact—and there are indeed some strange wild-fowl among his authorities—and above all for a gentle and unobtrusive humour which seasons all the ...
— Lynton and Lynmouth - A Pageant of Cliff & Moorland • John Presland

... magnificent poem, in a passage which brands the procedure of certain hypocrites, their oratorical precautions, and their involved conversations, wherein the mind obscures the light it throws and honeyed speech dilutes the venom of intentions. The phrase, says Monsieur Le Breton, in his well-reasoned book on Balzac, is that of a man who was conversant with the patient analysis, the conscientious and minute realism of this great painter of English ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton

... lawyer, quizzically, "you needn't eat me up. I'm sure you didn't do it on purpose. If you had,—to use a Hibernian phrase,—you never would have done it. I've seen it tried before. To tell you the truth, after I'd come back from Bremerton, that was the one thing I was afraid of—that you mightn't get along ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... mockery of justice, assizes were held upon them after they had suffered. For these acts of tyranny, see Johnston, p. 374, 414, 39, 93. The memory of Dunbar's legal proceedings at Jedburgh, are preserved in the proverbial phrase, Jeddart Justice, which signifies, trial after execution. By this rigour though sternly and unconscientiously exercised the border marauders were, in the course of years, either reclaimed or exterminated; though nearly a century elapsed ere their manners ...
— Minstrelsy of the Scottish border (3rd ed) (1 of 3) • Walter Scott

... the phrase: "The Provisional Government declares that the Provisional Government of France is the ...
— The Memoirs of Victor Hugo • Victor Hugo

... precocious manner of the Jewish child, inquired with another elaborate bow if Wilhelmine would care to hear his voice. She begged him to let her hear the seraphim sing. The boy caught the note of irony in her phrase; flushing deeply, he laid aside his guitar and would have run away had not Wilhelmine, with her easy self-indulgent kindness of heart to those who did not get in her way, called him back and propitiated him with smiling reassurances. The boy seated himself near her and sang. His voice was deliciously ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay

... proposed by Hobbes to the Royal Society on the duplication of the cube, which might have come to the ears of Buckingham as well as to those of the court,[3] or perhaps to the triple confederacy of Essex, Halifax, and Sunderland.[4] But to the Restoration reader the phrase "Three-fold Might" would rather have suggested the Triple Alliance, to which Dryden reverts in The Medal (lines 65-68) when he claims that Shaftesbury, "thus fram'd for ill, ... loos'd our Triple ...
— Anti-Achitophel (1682) - Three Verse Replies to Absalom and Achitophel by John Dryden • Elkanah Settle et al.

... phrase do zanu ho baithna denotes a mode of sitting peculiar, more especially, to the Persians. It consists in kneeling down and sitting back on one's heels, a posture the very reverse of easy, at least, so it appears to us good ...
— Bagh O Bahar, Or Tales of the Four Darweshes • Mir Amman of Dihli

... conscious of an effect of disappointment. She was nobody that he knew, even by reputation. She was simply a young girl, barely out of her teens—if as old as that phrase would signify. He wondered what she had found in him to make her think him worth so long a study; and looked ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance

... too busy with her nursery to leave Cardiff, where this autumn little Richard was joined by a baby sister, who received the name of Elizabeth after the Dowager Lady. But the infant was not many weeks old, when, to use the beautiful phrase of the chroniclers, she "journeyed to the Lord." She was taken away from the evil ...
— The White Rose of Langley - A Story of the Olden Time • Emily Sarah Holt

... which have certain common interests and certain co-operative activities, and which band themselves together in response to their interests and in pursuance of these activities. It is this organic structure of society to which Hobson applies the phrase "the federal units which society presents." ("Work and Wealth." J.A. Hobson. Macmillan. 1914. ...
— The Next Step - A Plan for Economic World Federation • Scott Nearing

... softly flings them out, one by one, like dandelion seeds upon swiftly-sliding water, one is being continually startled into sharp arrested attention, as if—in the silence that follows their utterance—somebody, as the phrase goes, "stepped ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys

... interfere, or to claim satisfaction as for the breach of a Treaty engagement. By the Treaty of Kainardjie (1774) the Sultan had indeed bound himself "to protect the Christian religion and its Churches"; but this phrase was too indistinct to create specific matter of Treaty-obligation; and if it had given to Russia any general right of interference on behalf of members of the Greek Church, it would have given it the same right in behalf of all the Roman Catholics ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe

... last week, was haled before Sir PETER EDLIN—been a character in some play of SHAKSPEARE'S, to whom the Bard had given these words to utter—"And this is what you call trial by Jury! Why they are not fit to try shoemakers!" what voluminous suggestions and explanations of the meaning of this phrase would not the learned Commentators have written! What emendations, alterations, or amendments of the text would not have been proposed! Perhaps, some hundreds of years hence, this dark saying of HILDA DAWSON'S will engage the close attention of some ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 104, January 21, 1893 • Various

... day I left Chelsea for good (that's a genteel phrase), and am got into Suffolk Street. I dined to-day at our Society, and we are adjourned for a month, because most of us go into the country: we dined at Lord Keeper's with young Harcourt, and Lord Keeper was forced ...
— The Journal to Stella • Jonathan Swift

... to give him his correct name—Frederick Palmer, was, as he declared with such emphasis, a man who had indeed "seen better days," as the phrase is. Now that he was invested in fair-looking clothes, and was graced with a clean collar and a smooth-shaven face, he actually might have passed for a person in fairly well-to-do circumstances. For the part ...
— The Girl Aviators' Sky Cruise • Margaret Burnham

... country fellow to puzzle me so much. And yet, was he a simple-hearted country fellow? City bred he certainly was not; but his manner, in spite of his awkwardness, had an indescribable air of refinement. Now and then, too, he dropped a word or a phrase that showed his familiarity with unexpected lines of reading. "The other day," said Curtis, with the slightest elevation of eyebrow, "he had the cheek to correct my Latin for me." In short, Quite So was a ...
— Modern Prose And Poetry; For Secondary Schools - Edited With Notes, Study Helps, And Reading Lists • Various

... when, according to their appropriate phrase, they "tumbled" over the side of the coper into their boat. As they bade the Dutchman good night they observed that he was looking "black as thunder" ...
— The Lively Poll - A Tale of the North Sea • R.M. Ballantyne

... rights as this had come to be looked on with deep distrust by a large part of the French nation. Ideas of independence and of the abstract rights of man had struck deep root. It was felt that land should be owned absolutely,—by allodial possession, as the phrase is. The feudal services, in fact, were often more onerous to those who paid them than they were beneficial to those who received them. It was time that they should be abolished. Those which were purely honorific, although ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell

... three philosophies antecedent to Plato, we might say, that if Heraclitus taught the doctrine of progress, and the Eleatics that of rest, so, in such quaint phrase as Vaughan's, Pythagoreanism ...
— Plato and Platonism • Walter Horatio Pater

... Heigho! what a phrase! These clear and precise expressions, that throw so much light on the gloom of the situation, are these yours, Felix Pyat? Did the Commune say "Pyat Lux!" Or were they yours, Pierre Denis? Or yours, Vermorel? I particularly admire the double ...
— Paris under the Commune • John Leighton

... beginning he had shown her that he disapproved of her fundamentally. She was the "type of woman he hated!" Night and day that curt little phrase had bitten into her thoughts, stinging her with its ...
— The Lamp of Fate • Margaret Pedler

... imagine it to have any relation of distance; but all beyond it is one uniform space or expansion, wherein the mind finds no variety, no marks. For to say that the world is somewhere, means no more than that it does exist; this, though a phrase borrowed from place, signifying only its existence, not location: and when one can find out, and frame in his mind, clearly and distinctly the place of the universe, he will be able to tell us whether it moves or stands still in the undistinguishable inane of infinite ...
— An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume I. - MDCXC, Based on the 2nd Edition, Books I. and II. (of 4) • John Locke

... not hidden from her and that the blush might be for her recognition only; yet he was occupied with the most hopeful interpretations when the curtain rose. A moment after its rising Valerie heard him softly ejaculate, "I say!" She could have echoed the helplessly rudimentary, phrase. She, too, gazed, in a stupor of delight; a primitive emotion in it. The white creature standing there before them, with her forward poise, her downcast yet upgazing face, was her child. Valerie, since her return to her home, had given little time to analysis of her own feeling, the stress of ...
— A Fountain Sealed • Anne Douglas Sedgwick

... conflict"—for we accept Mr. Seward's much-denounced phrase in all the breadth of meaning he ever meant to give it—is to take place in the South itself; because the Slave System is one of those fearful blunders in political economy which are sure, sooner or later, to work their own retribution. The inevitable tendency of slavery is to concentrate in a ...
— The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V - Political Essays • James Russell Lowell

... read out the remainder of your lord's letter, and slip not this opportunity to receive what satisfaction all that are present shall be able to give you. The command of the king of Ethiopia, says Niloxenus, is no more and no less than (to use Archilochus's phrase) a broken scytale; that is, the meaning is inscrutable and cannot be found out. But your master Amasis was more mild and polite in his queries; for he commanded him only to resolve him what was most ancient, most beautiful, greatest, wisest, most common, and withal, what was most profitable, ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch

... nothing any longer," said Beale, slipping off from the end of the table. "I merely make a statement of fact. I do not think he has any designs on you, within the conventional meaning of that phrase, indeed, I think he wants to marry you—what do you think ...
— The Green Rust • Edgar Wallace

... had given him breadth and experience; but though Gilbert was willing to concede that experience teaches, he was equally assured that she does not pay bills. Now he was a free man, and master of his profession. He used the last phrase modestly; he was ready and anxious to make the mastery more complete, and at the same time to win a name for himself and a home and a fortune ...
— Treasure Valley • Marian Keith

... to every civilized country upon earth. We have been reading of a hundred thousand armed men encamped in the suburbs of Belleville and Montmartre, with cannon and mitrailleuses, uttering through their organs, threats which leave no doubt that the meaning of this movement is—as some of them boldly phrase it,—a war of the poor against the rich. There is no mistaking what that means. This madness has been stopped for the time, we are told, principally (as was to be expected), by the superior common sense ...
— All Saints' Day and Other Sermons • Charles Kingsley

... wonderful change in the expression of her face arrested him. Her eye had fallen on the round visage of Jacky, and a beaming smile now lighted up and beautified the countenance which had so recently been distorted with passion. Uttering some unintelligible phrase in Gaelic, she held out her skinny arms towards the child, as if entreating him to come to her. Strange to say, Jacky did not run away or scream with fright as she approached him and took him in ...
— Freaks on the Fells - Three Months' Rustication • R.M. Ballantyne

... "gentle." Here he makes the distinction between the donna and the donna gentile. The word is used with a signification similar to that which it has in our own early literature, and fuller than that which it now retains. It refers both to race, as in the phrase "of gentle birth," and to the qualities of character. "Gentleness means the same as nobleness," says Dante, in the Convito; "and by nobleness is meant the perfection of its own nature in anything." Tratt. iv. c. ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 3, No. 16, February, 1859 • Various

... to the curious resemblance in this phrase to our more civilised "laughing in the sleeve," while we point out that the prime minister, although of necessity a man of war, was by nature a man of peace. Indeed his name, Teyma, which signifies peace, had been given him because of ...
— The Giant of the North - Pokings Round the Pole • R.M. Ballantyne

... himself and restrained his rage, and, bowing with icy politeness to Isabelle, who, trembling in every limb, had edged nearer to her friends, he made his way out of the room; turning, however, at the threshold to say, with peculiar emphasis, "Au revoir, mademoiselle!"—a very simple phrase certainly, but replete with significance of a very terrible and threatening nature from the way in which it was spoken. His face was so expressive of evil passions as he said it that Isabelle shuddered, and felt a violent spasm of fear pass over her, even though the presence of ...
— Captain Fracasse • Theophile Gautier

... quite sure, I am not the heroic person you tried to make me believe I was. I have found myself out, Keith; and just in time before making a terrible blunder. I am very glad that it is myself I have to blame. I have got very little resolution. 'Unstable as water'—that is the phrase: perhaps I should not like other people to apply it to me; but I am quite ready to apply it to myself; for I know it to be true; and it would be a great pity if any one's life were made miserable through my fault. Of ...
— Macleod of Dare • William Black

... Relief. By outdoor relief we mean relief given to the poor outside of an institution. Usually, outdoor relief refers simply to the public relief of dependents outside of institutions, but we shall use the phrase to cover both public and private relief. It is evident from what has already been said that the class of persons to whom this form of relief is appropriate are those in temporary distress, whose condition of dependence is not a permanent one and, therefore, usually those whose condition is due ...
— Sociology and Modern Social Problems • Charles A. Ellwood

... He placed a finger on a column in the Kicker. "This article about the Cattlemen's Association is a hummer—if I may be allowed the phrase. A straight, manly citation of the facts. It ought ...
— The Coming of the Law • Charles Alden Seltzer

... began to speak. Mr. Townlinson was impressed by the fact that it was at once unmistakably evident that whatsoever her reason for coming, she had not presented herself to ask irrelevant or unreasonable questions. Lady Anstruthers, she explained without superfluous phrase, had no definite knowledge of her husband's whereabouts, and it had seemed possible that Messrs. Townlinson & Sheppard might have received some information more recent that her own. The impersonal framing of this inquiry struck Mr. Townlinson as being in remarkably ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett

... cast upon men like Reynolds, Meade, Couch, Sedgwick, Slocum, Howard, Hancock, Humphreys, Sykes, Warren, Birney, Whipple, Wright, Griffin, and many others equally gallant. To call it ungenerous, is a mild phrase. It certainly does open the door to unsparing criticism. Hooker also concisely stated his military rule of action: "Throughout the Rebellion I have acted on the principle that if I had as large a force as the enemy, I had no apprehensions of the result of an encounter." ...
— The Campaign of Chancellorsville • Theodore A. Dodge

... the phrase in answer to the chairman's tentative suggestion that the tracing of the line could, perhaps, be altered in deference to the prejudices of the Sulaco landowners. The chief engineer believed that the obstinacy ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad

... lighting. "That's what Calliope use' to call 'em," she explained; "'I will plant in the wilderness the cedar,' you know—in the Bible." And I did recall the phrase on Calliope's lips, as if it were the theme ...
— Friendship Village • Zona Gale

... bivouac again, for a few hours,—'has no Camp, only waits three hours,' is Archenholtz's phrase: but I suppose the meaning is, Waits till the several Columns, by their calculated routes, have all got together; and till the latest in arriving has had 'three hours' of rest,—the earliest having perhaps gone on march again, in the interim? There are 20 miles farther, ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle

... possible future of the college, and anticipated the time when coming generations would tell how certain contemplated changes had been accomplished during the reign of "the Good Queen Victoria." The phrase was accentuated by an oratorical swing; and when it was given, the tremendous burst of enthusiasm showed that they who listened felt the great historian had chosen the right epithet, and that he intended it in the sense that, as some monarchs are called "Great" and ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 6 of 8 • Various

... His phrase to the Revenue officers on landing: "I have nothing to declare except my genius," turned the limelight full upon him and excited comment and discussion all over the country. But the fuglemen of his caste whose praise had brought him to the front in England were almost ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 1 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris

... dealing, and that argument, if it implies moral failure in the persons concerned, has little if any genuine foundation in fact. Mr. Devas, in that very remarkable book, The Key to the World's Progress, gives us the useful phrase "post-Christians." These people are really pagans living in the Christian era, retaining many of the excellent qualities which they owe neither to Nature nor to paganism, but to the inheritance—perhaps involuntary and unrecognised—of the influences of Christianity. Many of these ...
— Science and Morals and Other Essays • Bertram Coghill Alan Windle

... custom of our history to use the phrase the "new world" to mark the discoveries of Columbus and the treasure-hunt of a Cortes or a Pizarro. But what of that? The America that they annexed to Europe was merely a new domain added to a world already ...
— The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice • Stephen Leacock

... not make that tapping noise, Miss Frisby," said the sufferer querulously. "I cannot think. Otie, dear, can't you suggest a good phrase? You ought to be able to, being ...
— The Little Warrior - (U.K. Title: Jill the Reckless) • P. G. Wodehouse

... Polsue, and it did not please her at all. Her own bow-window enfiladed the Bank entrance (as well as that of the Three Pilchards by the Quay-head), and so gave her a marked advantage over her friend. To speak in military phrase, her conjectures upon other folks' business were fed by ...
— Nicky-Nan, Reservist • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (Q)

... more of the same sort, sir." And, casting about for another phrase with which to humour him, I took the first that came to my tongue; leaning my arms on the table (for I had finished eating), I said with a smile, "Well, what say you to this? This is something to know, isn't it? Je viens, ...
— Simon Dale • Anthony Hope

... not a tenant on the estate had any certain knowledge of how much land he held. There had been no survey of the property for years. 'It will be made up to you,' was Gill's phrase about everything. 'What matters if you have an acre more or an acre less?' Neither had any one a lease, nor, indeed, a writing of any kind. Gill settled that on the 25th March and 25th September a certain sum was to be forthcoming, and that was all. When 'the lord' wanted them, ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever

... Lectures, lies in the ideal values of which it is the bearer, not in its mere existence as a more refined kind of fact. Idealism is most satisfactorily defined as the interpretation of the world according to a scale of value, or, in Plato's phrase, by the Idea of the Good. The highest values in this scale are absolute, eternal, and super-individual, and lower values are assigned their place in virtue of their correspondence to or participation in these absolute values. I agree with Muensterberg that the conditional ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge

... figure was the first to speak. He was a grey-haired, broad-shouldered man, of the type which, in Tuscan phrase, is moulded with the fist and polished with the pickaxe; but the self-important gravity which had written itself out in the deep lines about his brow and mouth seemed intended to correct any contemptuous inferences from the hasty workmanship which Nature had bestowed on his exterior. He had ...
— Romola • George Eliot

... each of us has a definite amount of human nature, some of it high, some of it low, or, to phrase it differently, some of it animal, some of it spiritual. We can repress one part, and then we become either a saint or a sinner; the better way is to be both saint and sinner, to look life straight in the face, condemning no one, judging ...
— A Dominie in Doubt • A. S. Neill

... us the valuable phrase "a niche of organic opportunity." Such a phrase would have borne a different sense in non-evolutionary thought. In that thought, the opportunity was an opportunity for the Creative Power, and Design appeared in the preparation of the ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others

... under my feet, sir, before this, if I had thought it worth the attention?" Nevertheless, as there was nothing on which the Judge prided himself more than on his invariable civility to ladies ("the courtly Judge" was his favorite phrase in writing up a local notice of any affair at which he had been present), Strong, having possession of the school-house key, was able to put Miss Northrop into possession on Monday morning without opposition. ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 9 • Various

... remarkable man, for a king; and he was also a remarkable man for a savage. He was a mere kinglet and of little or no consequence at the time of Captain Cook's arrival in 1788; but about four years afterward he conceived the idea of enlarging his sphere of influence. That is a courteous modern phrase which means robbing your neighbor—for your neighbor's benefit; and the great theater of its benevolences is Africa. Kamehameha went to war, and in the course of ten years he whipped out all the other ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... concerned now only with the play as Da Ponte and Mozart gave it to us. In the dramatic terminology of the eighteenth century "Don Giovanni" was a dramma giocoso; in the better sense of the phrase, a playful drama—a lyric comedy. Da Ponte conceived it as such, but Mozart gave it so tragical a turn by the awful solemnity with which he infused the scene of the libertine's punishment that already in his day it was felt that the last scene as written and composed ...
— A Book of Operas - Their Histories, Their Plots, and Their Music • Henry Edward Krehbiel

... reached it by a detour through Cambridge and Blossom streets. Even then the mob pressed upon the heels of the horses as they drew up before the portals of the old prison, which shut not an instant too soon upon the editor of the Liberator, who was saved from a frightful fate to use a Biblical phrase but by the ...
— William Lloyd Garrison - The Abolitionist • Archibald H. Grimke

... at once put the hand up to the mouth to signify that it must not be spoken. It is thus often very difficult to find out the names of particular natives, and strangers would make many mistakes, imagining that they were putting down the name, when in reality they were marking some phrase, signifying that his name could not be mentioned by the one applied to. They have no objection to meet each other after the ceremony, nor do they decline speaking, but there is this peculiarity in their conduct that if one gives food, or any thing else to the ...
— Journals Of Expeditions Of Discovery Into Central • Edward John Eyre

... poor old soul in a phrase that might have seemed comic if it hadn't been so infinitely profound and touching. "Ah, Madame, even if there isn't anything left, it will be our village ...
— With Those Who Wait • Frances Wilson Huard

... front, and nothing for people to do but exchange rumors and wait for the clash to come. I strolled round the old square and through some of the winding streets. One window was filled with tricolor sashes carrying the phrase: "Long live our dear Belgium! May ...
— Antwerp to Gallipoli - A Year of the War on Many Fronts—and Behind Them • Arthur Ruhl

... idea what putting on something that attracts the electric fluid is in fact, you cannot be sure that harm will not be done, not only to the person in fault, but to those about him too. As in the Scriptural phrase, doing what is of evil omen is 'like one that letteth out water.' He cannot tell what are the consequences of his act, who will share them, or how ...
— Physics and Politics, or, Thoughts on the application of the principles of "natural selection" and "inheritance" to political society • Walter Bagehot

... before placing himself in the surgeon's hands, "in a fortnight I shall be at your Majesty's feet or with your august father." He had succumbed. M. Turgot spoke to M. de Maurepas of the Duke of St. Germain. "Propose him to the king," said the minister, adding his favorite phrase ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume VI. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot

... verse, falls into two halves, and a well-marked caesura divides each line, or verse, into two equally accented parts. And the half-lines can be further resolved into two halves, each containing a single accented word or phrase. This is proved by tablet Spartali ii, 265A, where the scribe writes his lines and spaces the words in such a way as to show the subdivision of ...
— The Babylonian Legends of the Creation • British Museum

... Death of Joseph Rodman Drake.—These manly lines have yielded another phrase to the world's memory. Hardly any quotation is more hackneyed than the last two verses of the first stanza. Drake was a young poet, the intimate friend and literary co-laborer of Halleck, who died September, 1820, ...
— The Golden Treasury of American Songs and Lyrics • Various

... French phrase of packaged cheese, "in the envelope." Similar to English packet and our process. Raw natural cheese the French refer to frankly as nu, ...
— The Complete Book of Cheese • Robert Carlton Brown

... courage enough to volunteer to mention this to my father. He came to the conclusion that everyday Bengali would hardly do to approach him with. So he concocted and delivered himself of an archaic phrase with such meticulous precision that my father must have felt our study of the Bengali language had gone a bit too far and was in danger of over-reaching itself. So the next morning, when according to our wont our table had been placed in the south verandah, the blackboard hung ...
— My Reminiscences • Rabindranath Tagore

... an odd speech, and she was struck by the turn of the phrase, which expressed more strength than doubt of power to do anything ...
— Casa Braccio, Volumes 1 and 2 (of 2) • F. Marion Crawford

... no right to expect that attentive perusal, without which, confined, as I have been, to the narrow limits of a Preface, my meaning cannot be thoroughly understood, I am anxious to give an exact notion of the sense in which the phrase poetic diction has been used; and for this purpose, a few words shall here be added, concerning the origin and characteristics of the phraseology, which I have ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth

... mooted, nor subsequently. What sort of life she was really looking forward to upon the island for which we were about to search I do not believe that even she herself could have explained. Probably her philosophy might have been expressed in the phrase: "Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof". She soon discovered, however, that the future would not permit itself to be shelved in this offhand fashion; there were certain problems that persisted in thrusting themselves upon her notice with increasing frequency, and ...
— Overdue - The Story of a Missing Ship • Harry Collingwood

... did you state flatly that "instinct suffices for the animals"? And, second, with great reluctance and with overwhelming humility, because of my youth, I suggest that you do not know exactly what you do mean by that phrase "the simple law of association." Your trouble, I repeat, is with definitions. You have grasped that man performs what is called abstract reasoning, you have made a definition of abstract reason, ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London

... That there could have been no greater difficulty or impropriety in proceeding, if it should afterwards be rendered necessary by her coming to England, against "our gracious Queen Caroline," than against "the Princess of Wales," prayed for the preceding Sunday. As to the phrase of "gracious," it is a mere title of honour attached to the station, and far less objectionable than "most religious," which Charles II. was the first sovereign who assumed, and which produces little ...
— Memoirs of the Court of George IV. 1820-1830 (Vol 1) - From the Original Family Documents • Duke of Buckingham and Chandos

... wide awake. Everything else around him was behaving in a normal way. The mountain was solid beneath him, the sunlight streamed down as before. Yet there was the bird, unmistakably before him, undeniably studying its book and speaking to itself. David's mind caught hold of a phrase and repeated it over and over again: "What on earth? What on earth?" But of course there was no answer to that question. And he might have lain hidden there all day, staring out at the bird and marveling, had it not been for a bee ...
— David and the Phoenix • Edward Ormondroyd

... no." There it was again, that awful phrase. He was certain he had not intended to utter it. She must be thinking him a perfect lunatic. "I don't ...
— A Man of Means • P. G. Wodehouse and C. H. Bovill

... as soon as he began to grow celebrated—his admirers had found out the resemblance between him and the Great Stone Face; and so much were they struck by it, that throughout the country this distinguished gentleman was known by the name of Old Stony Phiz. The phrase was considered as giving a highly favorable aspect to his political prospects; for, as is likewise the case with the Popedom, nobody ever becomes President without taking a name ...
— Bible Stories and Religious Classics • Philip P. Wells

... and Taylor had returned an answer that his postchaise should come for us this day. While we sat at breakfast, Dr. Johnson received a letter by the post, which seemed to agitate him very much. When he had read it, he exclaimed, 'One of the most dreadful things that has happened in my time.' The phrase my time, like the word age, is usually understood to refer to an event of a publick or general nature. I imagined something like an assassination of the King—like a gunpowder plot carried into execution—or like another fire of London. ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell

... flourish, or whether it shall die and perish. This is what Mr. Darwin has drawn attention to, and called the "STRUGGLE FOR EXISTENCE"; and I have taken this simple case of a plant because some people imagine that the phrase seems to imply a ...
— The Conditions Of Existence As Affecting The Perpetuation Of Living Beings • Thomas H. Huxley

... is its all in all. But the more we study Marlowe's other principal figures, the more convinced we become of his absorption in them while they are in the making. With Tamburlaine he himself grows terrible and glorious; the spirit of pride and conquest colours every phrase, speech and description, so that, as we have pointed out, the character of Tamburlaine is masterfully consistent and attuned to the purpose of the play. It is better, then, to examine the character of Faustus, as revealed in his desires, requests, and prominent actions, and ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne

... the sound footing that it lacked in earlier days, and which has permitted our learning to go on step by step in a safe way up the heights to which it has climbed. All explanations of Nature begin with the work of the imagination. In common phrase, they all are guesses which have at first but little value, and only attain importance in proportion as they are verified by long-continued criticism, which has for its object to see whether the facts accord with the theory. It is in this effort to secure proof that modern science has gathered ...
— Outlines of the Earth's History - A Popular Study in Physiography • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler

... and perhaps the most remarkable thing about the whole transaction, was that while we were looking politically upon a new heaven and a new earth,—for the vast change in our moral and economic condition might justify so audacious a phrase,—when there was scarcely a man on the continent who had not greatly shifted his point of view in a dozen years, there was so little change in Mr. Lincoln. The same hatred of slavery, the same sympathy with the slave, the same consideration for the slaveholder ...
— Abraham Lincoln: A History V1 • John G. Nicolay and John Hay

... to say that one must not recognize the meaning and the need of law-making by statute; of law made by the people themselves to suit present conditions. "There should be a law about it," is the popular phrase—commonly there is a law about it, and the best of all law, because tested by time and experience; only, the people do not realize this, and their power and practice of immediate legislation is not only the great event ...
— Popular Law-making • Frederic Jesup Stimson

... and lonely, washed by the rain in the damp grass plat. How sad, yet how expressive is the scriptural phrase for indicating death! "He shall return to his house no more, neither shall his place know him any more." And this is what all our homes are coming to; our buying, our planting, our building, our marrying and giving in marriage, our ...
— Sunny Memories Of Foreign Lands, Volume 1 (of 2) • Harriet Elizabeth (Beecher) Stowe



Words linked to "Phrase" :   melodic phrase, couch, idiom, turn of phrase, phrase book, melodic line, idiomatic expression, saltation, construction, head word, prepositional phrase, pronominal, nominal, ask, phrasal, noun phrase, catch phrase, response, dancing, passage, dogmatise, out of whack, arrange, tune, air, put, phrasing, terpsichore, ruralism, give voice, lexicalise, show, locution, order, in the lurch, express, like clockwork, formularize, frame, set up, saying, qualifier, modifier, pronominal phrase, catchphrase



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