"Pithy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... more nauseating as the Siege advanced in seriousness, until anything in the nature of news was deemed of necessity a lie. A local scribe, "The Lad," took the romancers severely to task in a series of pithy articles, which the Diamond Fields' Advertiser—domiciled though it was in a glass house—did not scruple to publish. The "lovely liar" was hanged, drawn, and quartered. The "Military critic" was satirised, too; he was the lynx-eyed gentleman ...
— The Siege of Kimberley • T. Phelan
... not unfrequently to make one out for themselves. This style of declamation has been not unaptly called "splendid nonsense," and it was after a display of this sort from Burke, that one of his audience made this pithy exclamation: "It is all very well, but I should like to hear it over again, that I might consider the sense." Burke also dealt in paradoxes occasionally; in short, he will seldom satisfy a careful reader, and his most ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 550, June 2, 1832 • Various
... would they avail, when the chances were fairer for us—the collision more even? When the fight at Moodkee was done, there was not, of the surviving victors, a Queen's soldier or a sepoy who had not already settled to his own satisfaction the whole campaign of the Sutlej, in the pithy but comprehensive conviction, that he should drub the Sikhs whenever he met them. The logician smiles at the vulnerable reasoning; the soldier smiles, too, and feels himself clad in better armour than ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 367, May 1846 • Various
... if there is not something under the surface in Sol Smith's charity sermon? I rather like its pithy style: ...
— Trifles for the Christmas Holidays • H. S. Armstrong
... stood, while the full significance of her refusal ate slowly into his consciousness. Whatever hopes he might have had had been swept away in those few short, pithy sentences. His passion checked, the structure erected by his imagination toppled to ruin, his vanity hurt, he stood before her stripped of the veneer that had made him seem, heretofore, nearly the man he professed ...
— The Two-Gun Man • Charles Alden Seltzer
... he afterward so signally illustrated in act and embodied in maxims of his own that have already been quoted. He did not employ the terminology of the art, which, though possibly pedantic in sound, is invaluable for purposes of discussion; but he expressed its leading principles in pithy, homely phrases of his own, which showed how accurate his grasp of it was. "If once you get in a soldier's rear, he is gone," was probably in part a bit of good-natured chaff at the sister profession; ...
— Admiral Farragut • A. T. Mahan
... often bestowed upon a first effort is as frequently converted into censure on the older offender. My arguments have, however, totally failed, and he remains obdurate and unmoved. Under these circumstances I have yielded; and as, happily for me, the short and pithy direction to the river Thames, in the Critic, "to keep between its banks," has been imitated by my friend, I find all that is required of me is to write my name upon the title and go in peace. Such, he informs me, ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... pithy and patriotic points made by him in that great speech —[July 9, 1861.]—were these: "So long as there was a hope of a peaceful solution, I prayed and implored for Compromise. I have spared no effort for a peaceful ...
— The Great Conspiracy, Complete • John Alexander Logan
... before they grow and become soft and pithy. Seeds may be sown as soon as the ground ...
— Manual of Gardening (Second Edition) • L. H. Bailey
... man named Alexander Kielland, from the little coast-town of Stavanger. There was none of the crudity of a provincial dither in his manners or his appearance. He spoke with a quiet self-possession and a pithy ...
— Tales of Two Countries • Alexander Kielland
... evidence of guilt and that no time should be considered long where the life of a man is in question he was snubbed, just as the Roman lady who was expostulated with for taking her bath in the presence of man slaves asked "An servus homo?" The horrible but pithy dialogue reads: ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 5, 1920 • Various
... through Russia, in one hour and thirty-five minutes, and the sequel of this curious passage of astronomical romance may be appropriately told in the words in which Mr. Pogson replied to Herr Klinkerflues's pithy message. The answer was dated Madras, the 6th of December, and ...
— Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel • Ignatius Donnelly
... up a great gingerbread-colored carriage drawn by a pair of black Flanders mares with tails that swept the ground; and to commemorate the origin of his greatness he had for a crest a fullblown cabbage painted on the pannels, with the pithy motto Alles Kopf that is to say, ALL HEAD; meaning thereby that he had risen ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving
... to Taxila a number of Brahmin ascetics noted for their skill in answering philosophical questions with pithy wisdom. An account of the verbal skirmish is given by Plutarch; Alexander himself framed all ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... dwindle with each day's expenditure, and his family after his death were to be turned into the street, beggars. If each individual were a unit whose interests ended with himself; if generations were like stratified rocks, superposed one on another but not interconnected; if—to quote a pithy phrase, I do not know from whom—"if all men were born orphans and died bachelors," then the right to draw income from the products of permanently productive capital would for most men lose much of ...
— A Critical Examination of Socialism • William Hurrell Mallock
... most pithy criticism of Spenser when he called him the poets' poet. We may fairly leave the allegory on one side, for perhaps, after all, he adopted it only for the reason that it was in fashion, and put it on as he did his ruff, not because it was becoming, but because it was the ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... you do it? That Georgian's cue, it, Compared with your sceptre, is just a mere withy. You quietly front in with that calm "Voluntas," (Expressed for our guidance in epigrams pithy) You hint you can rule us, and guide us, and school us, "All off your own bat," without Clergy or Minister, Giving swift gruel to stage-prank, or duel, Or any thing else ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, November 28, 1891 • Various
... vocabulary is as apt and as extensive for this purpose as that which suffices for the mental or spiritual needs of the bulk of European people, indeed, the capacity for abstracting the general nature and character from the particular experience or emotion into pithy expressions by way of simile or metaphor that admirably convey the perceived generalisation is as highly evolved in the Native as ...
— The Black Man's Place in South Africa • Peter Nielsen
... I have one for thee from Oxford, pithy and apposite, sound and solid, and trimmed up becomingly, as a collar of brawn with a crown of rosemary, or a boar's head with ...
— Citation and Examination of William Shakspeare • Walter Savage Landor
... accomplished. The occasion was extraordinary, and never contemplated—the exigency beyond immediate solution. As James Dows, one of the coolest in judgment and wisest in counsel of the Executive Committee, pertinently described the situation in the pithy remark, "We started in to hunt cayotes, but we've got a grizzly bear on our hands, and we don't know what to do with him." The Executive Committee were not themselves masters of the situation. Behind them, subject to them and ready to obey their commands on ordinary occasions, ...
— The Vigilance Committee of '56 • James O'Meara
... of De Morgan's correspondents. But the name most likely to arrest us is that of Giordano Bruno, the same philosopher, heretic, and martyr whose statue has recently been erected in Rome, to the great horror of the Pope and his prelates in the Old World and in the New. De Morgan's pithy account of him will interest the company: "Giordano Bruno was all paradox. He was, as has been said, a vorticist before Descartes, an optimist before Leibnitz, a Copernican before Galileo. It would be easy to collect a hundred strange opinions of his. He was born about 1550, ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... John Brown's raid into Virginia kindled the ire of the slave-holders to a degree as yet unprecedented, and although his act found few defenders in the Northern States, the heroism with which he met his fate, the pithy correspondence between Gov. Wise and Mrs. Child, the language of Southern senators in dealing with the subject, and the efforts made to ferret out Brown's associates, all tended to strengthen the growing hostility to slavery ...
— Political Recollections - 1840 to 1872 • George W. Julian
... frill, the gills are free from the stem, they never grow down against it, but usually there is a small channel all around the top of the stem, the spores are brown-black, or deep purple black and the stem is solid or slightly pithy. It is said if salt is sprinkled on the gills and they become yellow the mushroom is poisonous, if black, they are wholesome. Sweet oil is ...
— Vaughan's Vegetable Cook Book (4th edition) - How to Cook and Use Rarer Vegetables and Herbs • Anonymous
... pithy chapter in Machiavelli's Prince which treats of cruelty and clemency, and whether it be better to be loved or feared, anticipates the defence of the Terrorists, in the maxim that for a new prince it is impossible to avoid ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3) - Essay 1: Robespierre • John Morley
... we may fairly presume, proceeded from the pithy lecture of Ellen Connor; but the truth was, that the undefinable old squire was the greatest parental coward in the world. In the absence of his daughter he would rant and swear and vapor, strike the ground with his staff, ...
— Willy Reilly - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... taught to use sharp repartee, seasoned with humour, and whatever they said was to be concise and pithy. For Lycurgus, as we have observed, fixed but a small value on a considerable quantity of his iron money; but, on the contrary, the worth of speech was to consist in its being comprised in a few plain words, pregnant with a great deal of sense: and he contrived that by long silence they ...
— Ideal Commonwealths • Various
... which were the only trees of that species in this neighbourhood. These palms are well adapted for canoes, as the bark, or rather the outside wood, is intensely hard for about an inch and a half, beneath which the tree is simply a pithy, stringy substance, that can be rapidly ...
— Ismailia • Samuel W. Baker
... and business-like, the dialogue short and pithy, with considerable interspersion of proverbial phrase, but with, except in case of bad texts, very little obscurity. It is, however, much interspersed also with verses which, like Icelandic verse in general, are alliterative in prosody, and often of the extremest euphuism ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... unpleasant vitality as that. What may have happened to the "stools" after Mabel was married to Sir Hubert, we cannot take it upon us to say. At any rate, we prefer the Scotch poet's description, as somewhat the more pithy, and graphic, and intelligible of the two. The coincidence, however, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844 • Various
... admirable short stories of the sea, very simply told, and placed before the reader in pithy and telling ...
— The Wallypug in London • G. E. Farrow
... hundred and forty four thousand sealed servants of God; (ch. vii. 4.) They are the same in short, as the two witnesses.... They constitute the persecuted church in the wilderness."—I cannot but think the evidence of identity here irresistible; and in the pithy language of the Doctor on another point, I say,—"A man must shut his eyes not to see" the correctness of Mr. Faber's interpretation of this identity. The Doctor's censure of English expositors in one of his notes will too often justly apply to other divines in expounding prophecy:—"They have greatly ...
— Notes On The Apocalypse • David Steele
... attentive ear. But, on this occasion, up to the moment of putting his lips to the old woman's ear, Mr. Dimmesdale, as the great enemy of souls would have it, could recall no text of Scripture, nor aught else, except a brief, pithy, and, as it then appeared to him, unanswerable argument against the immortality of the human soul. The instilment thereof into her mind would probably have caused this aged sister to drop down dead, at once, as by the effect of an intensely poisonous infusion. ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... this was followed, in 1845, by a critical military work of great merit, "The Russo-Turkish Campaign of 1828-29 in European Turkey," which created a deep impression in military circles, and proved of considerable service in the Russo-Turkish campaign of 1877-78. Moltke's pithy and laconic style was founded on the model of his chief, General von Mueffling, his instructor in practical and theoretical tactics, in which the members of the German General Staff are required to ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 2 of 8 • Various
... when already part Of the troops were embarked, the siege to raise, A courier on the spur inspired new heart Into all panters for newspaper praise,[hn] As well as dilettanti in War's art, By his despatches (couched in pithy phrase) Announcing the appointment of that lover of Battles to the command, ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... Perhaps there is a slight falling off in 'Following the Equator'; a trace of fatigue, of weariness, of disenchantment. But the last book of travels has passages as broadly humorous as any of the first; and it proves the author's possession of a pithy shrewdness not to be suspected from a perusal of its earliest predecessor. The first book was the work of a young fellow rejoicing in his own fun and resolved to make his readers laugh with him or at him; the latest book is the work of an older man, who has found that life is ...
— Inquiries and Opinions • Brander Matthews
... element for success in top-working hickory trees. The technique of grafting has been so simplified as to make it fairly easy, and native stocks are usually vigorous. But unless the scions have full vitality success will be limited. They should be plump and not pithy. A limited success is possible with scions of feeble growth, or those subjected to devitalising influences in keeping or handling, but the largest success will be had with well grown scions, cut ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Fifteenth Annual Meeting • Various
... such a turn. I always liked dearly to hear what he had to say about either pictures or books; because without pretending to be a connoisseur, he always spoke his thought, and that was sure to be fresh: very often it was also just and pithy. It was pleasant also to tell him some things he did not know—he listened so kindly, so teachably; unformalized by scruples lest so to bend his bright handsome head, to gather a woman's rather obscure and ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... remark of Herodotus respecting one of the theories which he had heard for explaining the inundation of the Nile by a supposed connexion with the ocean—that the man who carries up his story into the invisible world, passes out of the range of criticism."[2] And he adds the following pithy note:—"Niebuhr puts together all the mythical and genealogical traces, many of them in the highest degree vague and equivocal, of the existence of Pelasgi in various localities; and then, summing up their cumulative effect, asserts, 'not as an hypothesis, but with full historical ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 • Various
... choosing to consort with them, and partly for what I had gained. As having nothing, yet possessing all things; as poor, yet making many rich—the boast of St. Paul, the hope of St. Francis of Assisi! in those pithy antitheses is the summa ...
— The Fool Errant • Maurice Hewlett
... sound?' 'Why did you not the evil shun,' Quoth Towser, 'as you might have done? If you, whose interest was more, Could sleep and leave an open door, Think you that I, a dog at best, Would watch, and lose my precious rest?' This pithy speech had been, in truth, Good logic in a master's mouth; But, coming from a menial's lip, It even lack'd the lawyership To save ...
— The Fables of La Fontaine - A New Edition, With Notes • Jean de La Fontaine
... themselves on the ground, he makes known the object of his coming. I regret I cannot give here his exact answer, for all who read this would wish to know the very words he used on this momentous occasion. No doubt they were, like all he said, terse, pithy, and in such scriptural phrase as was with him so habitual. I know only the substance of what he said, and it was as follows: that the young brave had been killed by one not belonging to the Watauga community; that the murderer had fled, but when apprehended would be dealt with as his crime ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, August, 1885 • Various
... by the inferior landholders and clergy, who usually ornamented their state apartments with hangings of a sort of stamped leather, manufactured in the Netherlands, garnished with trees and aminals executed in copper foil, and with many a pithy sentence of morality, which, although couched in Low Dutch, were perhaps as much attended to in practice as if written in broad Scotch. The whole had somewhat of a gloomy aspect; but the fire, composed of old pitch-barrel staves, blazed merrily up the chimney; the bed was decorated with linen ...
— Bride of Lammermoor • Sir Walter Scott
... community of race, religion, language, and interest, united in a sort of Masonic association, whereof his house became one of the centres of reunion. There, aware of his gentle descent, and impressed with his transcendent abilities; charmed with his conversation—as pithy as it was apt to be impure—his wit, his taste, his information, his judgment; sensible, too, of the excellence of his wines, and luxuriance of his table, around which military officer and civil servant, merchant ...
— The Advocate • Charles Heavysege
... spoken to my confessor about the great anxiety it gave me to find I could not meditate, nor exert my imagination in order to pray. Subjects of prayer which were too extensive were useless to me. Those which were short and pithy ...
— The Autobiography of Madame Guyon • Jeanne Marie Bouvier de La Motte Guyon
... them, along with the dissolution of their ancient state, the knowledge of Himself, the only living and true God, and of Jesus Christ whom He hath sent. 8. I have little more to add on the opinions of Confucius. Many of his sayings are pithy, and display much knowledge of character; but as they are contained in the body of the Work, I will not occupy the space here with a selection of those which have struck myself as most worthy of notice. The fourth Book ...
— THE CHINESE CLASSICS (PROLEGOMENA) • James Legge
... character, must be sacrificed with the pronunciation which one at last consents to alter. And this intolerable demand was made by men and women of education, whose convictions I could not adopt, whose injustice I thought I felt, though I was unable to make it plain to myself. Allusions to the pithy biblical texts were to be forbidden me, as well as the use of the honest-hearted expressions from the Chronicles. I had to forget that I had read the "Kaiser von Geisersberg," and eschew the use of proverbs, which nevertheless, instead of much fiddle-faddle, just hit the nail upon the head,—all ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... manner of pithy sayings, many of them wise, a few of them profound, and not one which is unworthy a second reading. It is to be hoped that he will escape the doubtful honor of being dispersedly set forth in a 'Wit and Wisdom of Thomas Hardy.' Such books are a depressing species of literature and seem chiefly designed ...
— The Bibliotaph - and Other People • Leon H. Vincent
... courage and enterprise can reverse in the actual fight the conditions that beforehand would seem to make defeat inevitable. "Give me plenty of iron in the men, and I don't mind so much about iron in the ships," was a pithy saying of the American Admiral Farragut. There was iron enough in the Austrian sailors, Tegethoff and Petz, to outweigh all the iron in the guns and armour of the Italian admirals, Persano and Albini, ...
— Famous Sea Fights - From Salamis to Tsu-Shima • John Richard Hale
... with opposing the authority of the greatest man of any age, JULIUS CAESAR, of whom Bacon observes, that 'in his book of Apothegms which he collected, we see that he esteemed it more honour to make himself but a pair of tables, to take the wise and pithy words of others, than to have every word of his own to be made ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... the Proverbs is so called because it is such as containeth hard, dark, and pithy sentences of wisdom, by which is taught unto young men knowledge and discretion (1-6). Wherefore this book is not such as discloseth truths by words antecedent or subsequent to the text, so as other scriptures ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... dependence of the citizens upon the Court, etc. etc.,—all these conditions, within which German society and a political organization corresponding thereto developed, are transformed by Heinzen's bluff common sense into a few pithy sayings, the pith of which consists in the assertion that "German princedom" made and ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx
... enjoyed watching it, as it scolded him from a high limb, but he could not delay and he set about his task quickly. Cutting off the end of each quill, he scraped it clean inside and washed the pithy part out. He had seen his father prepare a quill in this ...
— The Adventures of Piang the Moro Jungle Boy - A Book for Young and Old • Florence Partello Stuart
... place where the conversation was a continual attempt at smartness; it must have been most fatiguing. The weak point, indeed, of this public life was the demand it created for conversational display. The greater part of Johnson's pithy sayings were delivered in such a mixed company, and were prepared in sonorous ...
— The Strand District - The Fascination of London • Sir Walter Besant
... he formed the acquaintance of J. E. Hitzig, who came down to Warsaw with the rank of assessor in the administrative college in which Hoffmann held that of councillor. The crust of formal courtesy and commonplaces was broken through by Hitzig's pithy answer, to a question asking his opinion about some newly-arrived colleague, that he was "a man in buckram." The borrowed words of Falstaff banished Hoffmann's reserve, and caused his sombre face to light up with joy and his tongue to pour out ...
— Weird Tales, Vol. II. • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... Christ's College, Cambridge, 'A Ryght Pithy, Pleasaunt, and merie Comedie, intytuled Gammer Gurton's Needle.' The authorship is uncertain, recent investigation having exalted a certain Stevenson into rivalry with the Bishop Still to whom former scholars were content to assign it. Possibly as ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... near, the artillery ceased, the close fight began, and several regiments at once poured in their fire: both sides kept their ground, and hundreds fell at every discharge of musketry. The duke now, in the pithy and familiar language of the soldier, cried out to the Scots, "Ninety-second, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume 13, No. 359, Saturday, March 7, 1829. • Various
... good wit and no lack of humor. Thus it hits the need of the average man and woman, and all others that reckon themselves above the average. The whole book is pervaded by strong and pure moral feeling, and the chapters are well dotted with pithy anecdotes ...
— What a Young Woman Ought to Know • Mary Wood-Allen
... with a ready wit and a lively sense of humour, are among the characteristics of Saadi's masterly compositions. No writer, ancient or modern, European or Asiatic, has excelled, and few have equalled, Saadi in that rare faculty for condensing profound moral truths into short, pithy sentences. For example: ...
— Flowers from a Persian Garden and Other Papers • W. A. Clouston
... took her seat amid warm applause. A number of brief, pithy speeches were made and all dispersed with a hearty Godspeed to the talented lady in ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... death of Pitt, was that of a king who understood his kingly office; and his strict devotion to business, regardless of his own pleasure, could not have been exceeded by a merchant engrossed in lucrative trade. The many pithy and racy sayings recorded of him show an insight into men's characters and the realities of life not unworthy of Dr. Johnson. His simplicity, kindliness, and charity endeared him to his subjects. His undaunted courage and readiness to undertake sole responsibility, not ...
— The Political History of England - Vol XI - From Addington's Administration to the close of William - IV.'s Reign (1801-1837) • George Brodrick
... never have been attempted before." When the change of rulers took place, some of the French inhabitants objected to take the oath of allegiance to the British Crown, and a letter on the subject was sent to Napoleon. His comment was pithy: "I should like to see anybody refuse me the oath of allegiance in any country I ...
— The Life of Captain Matthew Flinders • Ernest Scott
... as the exact phraseology is often important, I shall usually cite the original Icelandic, and (for the benefit of readers unfamiliar with that language) shall also give the Latin version, which has been well made, and quite happily reflects the fresh and pithy vigour of the original. An English translation of all the essential parts may be found in De Costa, Pre-Columbian Discovery of America by the Northmen, 2d ed., Albany, 1890; see also Slafter, Voyages of the Northmen to ...
— The Discovery of America Vol. 1 (of 2) - with some account of Ancient America and the Spanish Conquest • John Fiske
... of the Parsees presents, as usual, an amusing contrast with the highflown rhapsodies of the Moslem; their remarks on the same lady are comprised in the pithy observation—"We should not have taken her for more than twenty-six years of age; but we are told ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various
... and those of his wife and mother-in-law, had all been tolerably short and pithy, written in a straight hand, with the lines very close together. Sometimes the whole letter was contained on a mere scrap of paper. The paper was very yellow, and the ink very brown; some of the sheets were (as Miss Matty made me observe) the old original post, with ...
— Cranford • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... down Hester street and up Chrystie, and down Delancey to where he lived. And there his women folk, a bibulous mother and three dingy sisters, pounced upon him for his wages. And at his confession they shrieked and objurgated him in the pithy rhetoric of the locality. ...
— The Trimmed Lamp • O. Henry
... "you know perfectly well that your style must come to your aid in whatever you try to write. Then your fiction is not so remarkable for plot as for the careful development of character and your pithy remarks. Your powers of epigram would be abundantly brought to the fore in such a subject as Tom asked you to write about. But never mind, my dear, it is your pleasure to duplicate yourself—I do not think it is at ...
— The Time of Roses • L. T. Meade
... everywhere, yet these were only navigable at high tide, and at all other times were impassable marshes. There were but few posts where the enemy were within rifle range, and their occasional attacks at those points were soon stopped by our enforcement of a pithy order from General Hunter, "Give them as good as they send." So that, with every opportunity for being kept on the alert, there was small prospect of serious danger; and all promised an easy life, with only enough of care to make it pleasant. The picket station was ...
— Army Life in a Black Regiment • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... had a unique and pithy way of expressing this reality. He said that soil was not capable of working two jobs at once. You could not expect it to nitrify humus while it was also being required to digest organic matter. That's one reason he thought composting was ...
— Organic Gardener's Composting • Steve Solomon
... was brief and to the point. It opened with a pithy but pungent expression of Don Silvio's opinion of the capacity of a Governor who could permit his city to be captured and held by a handful of English pirates; then proceeded succinctly to refuse to accede to any of those pirates' demands; and wound ...
— The Cruise of the Nonsuch Buccaneer • Harry Collingwood
... lady repeat the following pithy lines, and shall be glad if any of your readers can tell me who is the author, and where ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 35, June 29, 1850 • Various
... 'butterwoman's rate to market', and the 'very false gallop of verses'. It has been advocated, in opposition to the heroic measure, upon the ground that ten syllables lead a man into epithets and other superfluities, while eight syllables compress him into a sensible and pithy gentleman. But the heroic measure laughs at it. So far from compressing, it converts one line into two, and sacrifices everything to the quick and importunate return of the rhyme. With Dryden, compare Gay, even ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... However, as to this honest porter, you must know that when we presented ourselves at the gate yonder, his brain was over-burdened with a speech that had been penned for him, and which proved rather an overmatch for his gigantic faculties. Now this same pithy oration had been indited, like sundry others, by my learned magister, Erasmus Holiday, so I had heard it often enough to remember every line. As soon as I heard him blundering and floundering like a fish upon dry land, through the first verse, and perceived him ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... Among my pleasantest memories of Los Angeles are my visits to Madame Fremont in her pretty red cottage, presented by loving friends. It is a privilege to meet such a clever, versatile woman. Her conversation flashes with epigrams and pithy sayings, and her heart is almost as young as when it was captured by the ...
— A Truthful Woman in Southern California • Kate Sanborn
... They could only in a slight degree appreciate the nautical phraseology in which he had been wont to convey some of his strongest sentiments, and they could not in any degree enter into his feelings when, forgetting for a moment his circumstances, he came out with a pithy forecastle allusion to the politics or the ...
— The Lonely Island - The Refuge of the Mutineers • R.M. Ballantyne
... oblong, and pointed. It is an evergreen, and bears fruits and blossoms all the year round. The fruits are pointed oval pods, six inches long, and contain in five compartments from twenty-five to thirty seeds or kernels, enveloped in a white pithy pulp with a sweet taste. These seeds when dried form the cocoa of commerce, from which the beverage is made and chocolate is manufactured. There are three harvests in the year, when the pods are pulled from the trees and gathered ...
— On the Banks of the Amazon • W.H.G. Kingston
... the way of scientific exposition than those early articles of his on the origin of species. He swept the curve of discussion through the really significant points of the subject, enriched his exposition with profound original remarks and reflections, often summing up in a single pithy sentence an argument which a less compact mind would have spread over pages. But there is one impression made by the book itself which no exposition of it, however luminous, can convey; and that is the impression ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... before you touch the instrument, To learne the order of my fingering, I must begin with rudiments of Art, To teach you gamoth in a briefer sort, More pleasant, pithy, and effectuall, Then hath beene taught by any of my trade, And there it is in ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... your pupil must first have been a little scapegrace. The Spartans were educated in this way; not tied down to books, but obliged to steal their dinners;[17] and did this produce men inferior in understanding? Who does not remember their forcible, pithy sayings? Trained to conquer, they worsted their enemies in every kind of encounter; and the babbling Athenians dreaded their sharp speeches quite as ...
— Emile - or, Concerning Education; Extracts • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... his 'Pilgrim's Progress'— a book full of pithy English idiom. "The common folk had the wit at once to see the worth of Bunyan's masterpiece, and the learned long afterwards followed in the wake of the common ...
— A Brief History of the English Language and Literature, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John Miller Dow Meiklejohn
... is thought that it is enough pleaded before them, and the witnesses have said what they can, one of the judges, with a brief and pithy recapitulation, reciteth to the twelve in sum the arguments of the sergeants of either side, that which the witnesses have declared, and the chief points of the evidence showed in writing, and once ...
— An Essay on the Trial By Jury • Lysander Spooner
... written mostly by paid helpers from short English abstracts. He regarded Latin as the only language worthy of a great work; but the world neglected his Latin to seize upon his English,—marvelous English, terse, pithy, packed with thought, in an age that used endless circumlocutions. The first ten essays, published in 1597, were brief notebook jottings of Bacon's observations. Their success astonished the author, but ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... They took possession of the throne as though they had only been absent on a pleasure excursion, and, ignoring twenty years of parvenu glory, affected to be merely continuing an uninterrupted sovereignty. The pithy remark of Talleyrand, that "they had learned nothing and forgotten nothing," was abundantly verified. Close following in their wake, came hordes of emigrants famished by long exile and clamorous ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 6, April, 1858 • Various
... thirteenth, when already part Of the troops were embark'd, the siege to raise, A courier on the spur inspired new heart Into all panters for newspaper praise, As well as dilettanti in war's art, By his despatches couch'd in pithy phrase; Announcing the appointment of that lover of Battles to the ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... i.e. with the personal pronoun in the dative instead of the accusative case. The expression mi souviene is equivalent to mi ricordo, but is a more elegant form that the latter; and the meaning of the motto will be "I seldom forget,"—a pithy and suggestive sentence, implying as much the memory of a wrong to be avenged as of ...
— Notes and Queries, No. 28. Saturday, May 11, 1850 • Various
... shrubs, and trees which I met with, particularly where any of these occurred to me entirely new), finding myself a little faintish, I had a mind for a sup of ram's-horn juice; so I cut me one, but upon opening it found therein only a pithy pulp, and noways fit to taste. I supposed by this I was too early for the milk, it being three months later the last year when I cut them. Hereon, seeing one upon another shrub, which by its rusty colour I judged might ...
— Life And Adventures Of Peter Wilkins, Vol. I. (of II.) • Robert Paltock
... and if ever I be able, I will deserve it of him. One only thing, as it comes into my mind, let me remember you of, that you consider wherein the Historian excelleth, and that to note: as DION NICAEUS in the searching the secrets of government; TACITUS, in the pithy opening of the venom of wickedness; and ...
— An English Garner - Critical Essays & Literary Fragments • Edited by Professor Arber and Thomas Seccombe
... Place, "Locus communis," was a term used in old rhetoric to represent testimonies or pithy sentences of good authors which might be used for strengthening or adorning a discourse; but said Keckermann, whose Rhetoric was a text-book in the days of James I. and Charles I., "Because it is impossible thus to read through all authors, there are books that give students of eloquence ...
— A Defence of Poesie and Poems • Philip Sidney
... is old. The pithy phrase in the shrewd Roman's mouth was two-edged, and had a sharp point. The enterprise that led to no ...
— The Secret of a Happy Home (1896) • Marion Harland
... has attempted to formulate the relationships between causes and effects without, however, always possessing the specific knowledge essential to accuracy. Pithy statements have always had great appeal to man, as evidenced by the existence of proverbs, maxims, and adages preserved from times of great antiquity. Frequently, however, such statements are not expressive of the truth. ...
— Sound Military Decision • U.s. Naval War College
... obscenities that taint the air and brutalize life elsewhere, were in this quaint old settlement unknown. Sweet thought, pure speech, went hand in hand, clad in nervous, pithy old English, or a "patois" of the French, mellowed and enlarged by their constant use of the liquid Indian tongues, flowing like soft-sounding waters about them, their daily talk came ever welcome ...
— The Romantic Settlement of Lord Selkirk's Colonists - The Pioneers of Manitoba • George Bryce
... brought to Rome, and on account of his wit manumitted by his master; made his mark by composing memoirs and a collection of pithy sayings that appear to have been used as a school-book; ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... well that they were lying, but for the moment he let it pass. He had an idea that Stratton could throw some light on the situation, and leaving the prisoners to digest a few pithy truths, he took the cow-puncher into his private ...
— Shoe-Bar Stratton • Joseph Bushnell Ames
... however, Phocion was pure and patriotic in his motives, and a man of the strictest integrity. It was his unquestioned probity and his peculiar disinterestedness that gave him such influence with the people. As an orator, too, he commanded attention by his striking and pithy brevity. "He knew so well," says GROTE, "on what points to strike, that his telling brevity, strengthened by the weight of character and position, cut through the fine oratory of Demosthenes more ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... civilized nations together. Wherever her temple stands and so long as it is duly honored, there is a foundation for social security, general happiness, and the improvement and progress of our race." Perhaps, however, none of these laudations is so vividly impressive as is the pithy remark of an old English judge that "injustice ...
— Concerning Justice • Lucilius A. Emery
... published a valuable collection of financial essays, entitled The Banker's Commonplace Book, containing Mr. A. B. Johnson's pithy treatise on the Principles of Banking and the Duties of a Banker, Gilbart's Ten Minutes' Advice on Keeping a Bank, with several articles on Bills of Exchange, and a summary of the Banking Laws of Massachusetts. It will prove a useful manual on ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... piece of whity-brown packing-paper, but only over one half of the circumference; the other half is left bare, so that I may watch the Osmia's attempts. Well, the captive insect fiercely attacks this lining, which to its eyes represents the pithy layer of its usual abode; it tears it away by tiny particles and strives to cut itself a road between the cocoon and the glass wall. The males, who are a little smaller, have a better chance of success than the females. Flattening themselves, making themselves thin, slightly ...
— Bramble-bees and Others • J. Henri Fabre
... neglected one thing that she was asked to do, or showed the smallest feeling on the occasion beyond a general sense of dissatisfaction at all things connected with the sea. But of all our sufferers none equalled my poor cousin. Not a word was to be got out of her, but short pithy anathemas against everybody that came near her, everybody that spoke to her, every lurch the ship made, every noise overhead; an expression of pity caused an explosion of wrath, a hope that she was better a wish that she was dead, and an offer of assistance a command to be ...
— Yr Ynys Unyg - The Lonely Island • Julia de Winton
... of good fables,—pithy wisdom, ingenious moral instances, homely illustrations, easy colloquial dialogue; and the ethical teaching has a striking superficial likeness to the common-sense morality of prudence and content, which fables, like proverbs, ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... way to salvation, or between different salutary acts, but indiscriminately postulate for all the illuminating grace of the intellect and the strengthening grace of the will. It follows that to perform salutary acts the justified no less than the unjustified need actual grace. Our Saviour's pithy saying: "Without me you can do nothing,"(348) was not addressed to unbelievers or sinners, but to His Apostles, who were in the ...
— Grace, Actual and Habitual • Joseph Pohle
... a stalk about fifteen feet in height yearly, which, after flowering, grows stalky and brittle, and remains an unsightly thing. The interior is pithy, but after the death of the stalk the pith contracts, and leaves the greater portion of the interior hollow, as we have seen in the case of the cactus branches. How the birds found that these stalks were hollow is a problem not yet solved, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XXI., No. 531, March 6, 1886 • Various
... years. In so small a community, where every one knew every one else, personal, social, and political questions became hopelessly intertwined. The fighting was bitter. 'Forced into a cleft stick, there was nothing left for us but to break it,' was Howe's pithy way of putting the case. Naturally enough, the stick objected to being broken. And as in every war, for one man killed in battle five or six die from other causes connected with the war—bad boots, ...
— The Tribune of Nova Scotia - A Chronicle of Joseph Howe • W. L. (William Lawson) Grant
... kitchen-door bearing before her, with that air of extraordinary importance peculiar to the negro countenance on eventful occasions, a huge brown dish with which she advanced to the head of the table, and with an emphatic bump, answering to the pithy speeches of warriors and statesmen at critical moments, deposited the great Thanksgiving pumpkin pie. Looking proudly around, she simply ...
— Chanticleer - A Thanksgiving Story of the Peabody Family • Cornelius Mathews
... so far as we can reach the reality of his life, was an orator who wielded the apologue with remarkable skill. From a servile condition, he rose, by the force of his genius, to be the counsellor of kings and states. His wisdom was in demand far and wide, and on the most important occasions. The pithy apologues which fell from his lips, which, like the rules of arithmetic, solved the difficult problems of human conduct constantly presented to him, were remembered when the speeches that contained them were forgotten. He seems to have written nothing himself; ...
— The Fables of La Fontaine - A New Edition, With Notes • Jean de La Fontaine
... chivalrous element disappears in the novels of the English who imitated Cervantes. "These English novelists since Richardson's reign," says Heine, "are prosaic natures; to the prudish spirit of their time even pithy descriptions of the life of the common people are repugnant, and we see on yonder side of the Channel those bourgeoisie novels arise, wherein the petty humdrum life of the middle classes is depicted." But Scott appeared, and effected a restoration of the balance in fiction. As ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... full share. The family circle was, quietly, a very lively one; there was no stagnating anywhere. He and Mrs. Caxton had many subjects and interests in common of which they talked freely, and Eleanor was only too glad to listen. There were books and reviews read aloud sometimes, with very pithy discussion of the same; in fact, there was conversation, truly deserving the name; such as Eleanor never listened to before she came to Plassy, and which she enjoyed hugely. Then the walks after natural objects were on the whole frequent; and Mr. Rhys was sure to ask her to go along; ...
— The Old Helmet, Volume II • Susan Warner
... defects. 1st. They were like the wooden part of a bow instead of its string. 2d. They yielded to gravity—kept tending down, down, to the righthand corner more and more. In the use of capitals the writer had taken the copyhead as his model. The style, however, was pithy, and in writing that is the first Christian grace—no, I forgot, it is the ...
— Love Me Little, Love Me Long • Charles Reade
... conversant, as appears from his satires against the Jesuits, in which there is discovered as much learning as wit. In the second volume of the great historical, geographical, and poetical Dictionary, he is stiled the Darling of the Muses, a pithy, sententious, elegant, and smooth writer: "His translations exceed the original, and his invention seems matchless. His satire against the Jesuits is of special note; he may be justly said to have excelled all the satirists of the age." Tho' this compliment ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume II • Theophilus Cibber
... better known in this nation, among Azevedo's work we should be quick to appreciate such a pithy book as the Livro de uma Sogra,—the Book of a Mother-in-Law. And when the literature of these United States is at last (if ever, indeed!) released from the childish, hypocritical, Puritanic inhibitions forced upon it by quasi official societies, we may even relish, from ...
— Brazilian Tales • Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis
... we all remember to have read a pithy string of Maxims by Dr. Franklin; and we are accustomed to admire the pertinence of their wit,—but here their influence too often terminates. Since Franklin's time, the practice of getting into debt has become more and more easy, notwithstanding men have become more wary. Goldsmith, ...
— Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 276 - Volume 10, No. 276, October 6, 1827 • Various
... unhappy dinner at Martindale Castle (which was, he said, a crying of peace when there was no peace, and a dwelling in the tents of sin), he imputed his ejection from his living, with the destruction of some of his most pithy and highly prized volumes of divinity, with the loss of his cap, gown, and band, and a double hogshead of ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... us turn our attention to the left-hand corner. There we see that pithy soldier all in red. Rembrandt, with his intuitive knowledge of chiaroscuro, was not afraid of painting a figure all in red. He knew that the play of light and shade on the colour would help him out. Here part of the red is toned down by a beautiful ...
— Rembrandt • Josef Israels
... is primarily a grave, stately, scholarly mind, but all the deeper on that account in the lustre of his humorous displays. Addison, too, had somewhat of the poet in him, and was capable of tragedy as well as of neat satire and compact characterization. But if we looked for a pithy embodiment of the difference between Irving and Hawthorne, we might call the former a "polite writer," and the latter a profound poet: as, indeed, I have called him in this essay, though with no intent ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... fire." Still repeating the awful words, his voice broken to a terrified whisper, "His rebuke with the flames of fire!" And in particular moods, when the prophets, however sonorous, were inadequate to his need, my uncle would have recourse to his own pithy vocabulary for terms with which to anathematize himself; but these, of course, may not ...
— The Cruise of the Shining Light • Norman Duncan
... acquaintance he has made, he says, "He is a great friend of Elsner's, which in my estimation means much." No doubt Chopin looked up with more respect and thought himself more indebted to Elsner than to Zywny; but that he had a good opinion of both his masters is evident from his pithy reply to the Viennese gentleman who told him that people were astonished at his having learned all he knew at Warsaw: "From Messrs. Zywny and Elsner even the greatest ass ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... oddity may not be directly evident to all, perhaps some of our readers will furnish us with a pithy translation ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 335 - Vol. 12, No. 335, October 11, 1828 • Various
... ready method of dealing with obnoxious authors, as poor Peter Wentworth discovered, who wrote A Pithy Exhortation to Her Majesty for establishing her Successor to the Crown, and for his pains was committed to the Tower, where he pined and died. This work advocated the claims of James VI. of Scotland, and was written in answer ...
— Books Fatal to Their Authors • P. H. Ditchfield
... during this troublous year of 1913. In this year, too, South Africa was visited by a drought which for severity was pronounced to be unprecedented in the knowledge of all the old inhabitants. Remarks — some pithy, some ugly — were made upon the drought by Dutchmen. They all remembered how the God of their fathers used to send them nice soaking rains regularly each spring-time, and that it usually continued to nourish the plants and other of the country's vegetation throughout the summer, ...
— Native Life in South Africa, Before and Since • Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje
... be laid down that short sentences are preferable to long ones. The tendency of the best writers of the present day is towards short, snappy, pithy sentences which rivet the attention of the reader. They adopt as their motto multum in parvo (much in little) and endeavor to pack a great deal in small space. Of course the extreme of brevity is to ...
— How to Speak and Write Correctly • Joseph Devlin
... Espinosa urged the propriety, by every argument which prudence could suggest, of moderating his demands. His claims upon Cuzco, at least, were not to be shaken, and he declared himself ready to peril his life in maintaining them. The licentiate coolly replied by quoting the pithy Castilian proverb, El vencido vencido, y el vencidor perdido; "The vanquished vanquished, ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... dog-chains were exposed to it, and, in a few days, they had a definite sheen. A deal box, facing the wind, lost all its painted bands and in a fortnight was handsomely marked; the hard, knotty fibres being only slightly attacked, whilst the softer, pithy laminae were corroded to a depth of one-eighth of ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... every word of this. In his pithy way, speaking of the distinction between natural and artificial objects, he says himself that if you planted a wooden bed and the wood could still grow, it would grow up, not a bed, ...
— Progress and History • Various
... Abbot terminated the exercise by the Adjutorium nostrum (the Pater Noster is of more recent introduction). Monks who were absent substituted for the Scripture lesson which they had missed, the pithy extract from St. Peter, "Fratres; sobrii estote," which we now read. The whole company of monks and their abbot then proceeded to the chapel where each made his examination of conscience, and at a sign from the abbot, the monks, two by two, in a ...
— The Divine Office • Rev. E. J. Quigley
... of the Poets.—It is for the developing of the best moral and mental qualities in the lads that they are compelled to memorize long passages of the great poets of Hellas. Theoginis, with his pithy admonitions cast in semi-proverb form, the worldly wisdom of Hesiod, and of Phocylides are therefore duly flogged into every Attic schoolboy.[*] But the great text-book dwarfing all others, is Homer,—"the Bible of the Greeks," as later ages will call it. Even in the small ...
— A Day In Old Athens • William Stearns Davis
... for the wages due to him, and without a word waved his hand towards the door. Remonstrance and entreaty, or the assurance that it was a first fault, were alike in vain; a stare, a shrug, and just possibly the pithy injunction, "Go!" was the utmost they ever elicited from the maitre d'hotel; and as their wages were high and always paid to the day, a practice by no means common in great households in those times, the cases of delinquency were few, and M. Boulederouloue's ...
— The King's Warrant - A Story of Old and New France • Alfred H. Engelbach
... till he came to THE POINT—which he thus approached:—"I now come, however, to considerations which induce me, without hesitation, humbly to advise your lordships to reverse this judgment." He was brief but pithy in ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 349, November, 1844 • Various
... said in his heart that there is no God;' but the fool hath not said in his heart that there is no sorrow,—pithy and most profound sentence; intimating the irrefragable claim that binds men to the Father. And when the chain tightens, the children are closer drawn together. But to your wish: I will remember it. And when my cousin returns, ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... said the maid, giving pithy verbal expression to the ragged state of her nerves as she cut the stalks of the beautiful flowers which came daily without name or message. The dog's method of expressing himself was somewhat more violent; it consisted of the sudden seizure between his great teeth of ...
— The Hawk of Egypt • Joan Conquest
... fool you must be," was the courteous and conciliatory reply to the countess. When the late Duke of York consulted him, he stood whistling with his hands in his pockets; and the duke said, "I suppose you know who I am." The uncourtly reply was, "Suppose I do, what of that?" His pithy advice was, "Cut off the supplies, as the Duke of Wellington did in his campaigns, and the enemy will leave the citadel." When he was consulted for lameness following disease or accidents, he seldom either listened to the patient or made any inquiries, but would walk about the room, imitating ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, - Issue 493, June 11, 1831 • Various
... that the Chinians be altogether destitute of other artes. For, as touching morall philosophy, all those books are fraught with the precepts thereof, which, for their instructions sake, are alwayes conuersant in the hands of the foresayd students, wherein such graue and pithy sentences are set downe, that, in men void of the light of the Gospell, more can not be desired. [Sidenote: Naturall philosophy.] They haue books also that intreat of things and causes naturall, but herein it is to be supposed, that aswell their books as ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of - The English Nation, Vol. 11 • Richard Hakluyt
... began the wyttie discourse of his Euphues, whose works, surely in respect of his singular eloquence and brave composition of apt words and sentences, let the learned examine and make tryall thereof, through all the parts of Rethoricke, in fitte phrases, in pithy sentences, in galant tropes, in flowing speeche, in plaine sense, and surely in my judgment, I think he wyll yeelde him that verdict which Quintillian giveth of both the best orators Demosthenes and Tully, that from the one, nothing may be taken away, to the other nothing may be added[13]." After ...
— John Lyly • John Dover Wilson
... thick as a lucifer match, is split into four strips. The workman then takes a strip in his left hand, and, with his thumb on the back and his forefinger on the edge, draws the strips up and down against the knife blade until the soft pithy parts are cut away, and what remains has become fine enough for the next process. The cases are made on pointed cylindrical pieces of wood almost a couple of feet long. A pin is stuck into the center of the end of the cylinder, and ...
— The Former Philippines thru Foreign Eyes • Fedor Jagor; Tomas de Comyn; Chas. Wilkes; Rudolf Virchow.
... taken as a whole, I know not any poetic epistles to be compared with them. They are just the letters in which one friend might unbosom himself to another without the least artifice or disguise. And the broad Doric is so pithy, so powerful, so aptly fitted to the thought, that not even Horace himself has surpassed it in "curious felicity." Often, when harvests were failing and the world going against him, he found his solace in pouring forth in rhyme his feelings to some trusted friend. As he says in one of ...
— Robert Burns • Principal Shairp
... and at the weathercock on the top of the market house you look in there. A local fisherman was coming out, and in reply to the inevitable question as to the state of the river, he said, "Weel, she's awa' again." Pithy and characteristic, and full of information was this. It was a verdict—You may fish, but shall fish in vain this day. The Tweed ...
— Lines in Pleasant Places - Being the Aftermath of an Old Angler • William Senior
... description of it, which will be given in due course), it may be well to say a few words upon the principles which have guided the writer in his treatment of the subject. These cannot be better expressed than in a very pithy sentence uttered by Professor Willis at the meeting of the Archaeological Institute at this very place in 1861. "In all investigations of this nature, I am of opinion that it is requisite to ascertain first whether there exist any contemporary documents ...
— The Cathedral Church of Peterborough - A Description Of Its Fabric And A Brief History Of The Episcopal See • W.D. Sweeting
... sufficiently recognise the truth of Walt Whitman's pithy saying, "I am not all contained between my hat and my boots," and forget the two-fold nature of the "I AM," that it is at once both the manifested and the unmanifested, the universal and the individual. By losing sight of this truth we surround ourselves with limitations; we see ...
— The Hidden Power - And Other Papers upon Mental Science • Thomas Troward
... be marking down something with his pen in that book, even when some of the most learned men, as Coleman and Selden, were delivering their long and learned orations, and all he was writing was for the most part his pithy ejaculations to God, writing these words; Da lucem, Domine; Da lucem! When these learned men had ended their oration, the Moderator proposed who should give an answer to their discourse; they all generally voted Mr Gillespie to be the person. He ...
— The Works of Mr. George Gillespie (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Gillespie
... Basilica, the Amphitheatre, which is in a perfect state of preservation, and more elliptical in form than any of those I have yet seen, and the School of Eloquence, where R** mounted the rostrum, and gave us an oration extempore, equally pithy, classical and comical. About sunset we got into the carriages, and ...
— The Diary of an Ennuyee • Anna Brownell Jameson
... speeches. Congressman James G. Maguire spoke for those individual Democrats who believed in woman suffrage, among whom he was always a staunch advocate. Miss Anthony was cheered to the echo and it seemed as if the audience could not get enough of her bright, pithy remarks, as she ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 2 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... set up a great gingerbread-colored carriage, drawn by a pair of black Flanders mares with tails that swept the ground; and to commemorate the origin of his greatness he had for his crest a full-blown cabbage painted on the panels, with the pithy motto, ALLES KOPF, that is to say, ALL HEAD, meaning thereby that he had risen ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... implies a total wreck, with the loss of all hands. If a ship carries away any of her important spars, or, on entering her port, strikes heavily against a pier, whereby serious damage is occasioned, the accident is duly registered in this pithy chronicle of Lloyd's. Nevertheless, as we glance up and down the columns, it is no exaggeration to say, that two-thirds of the accidents recorded are of the most serious description. We are unable to say to what degree this register of Lloyd's ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal - Volume XVII., No 423, New Series. February 7th, 1852 • Various
... one, conceded to be useful. He has preached from the White House many doctrines; but among them he has left impressed on the American mind the one great truth of economic justice couched in the pithy and stinging phrase 'the square deal.' The task of making reform respectable in a commercialized world, and of giving the national a slogan in a phrase, is greater than the man who performed it ...
— The Attempted Assassination of ex-President Theodore Roosevelt • Oliver Remey
... during the past week, and the event was now commemorated by a dirge in which the children's shrill treble was supported by the majority of the congregation. The sermon also took up the moral of life and death. It was short and pithy; perhaps it was familiar, and none the less useful for that. Mr. Forbes was not concerned to lead his people into new ways; he believed the old were better. Work and pray, fear God and keep His commandments, love your neighbor, and meddle not with those who are given to change,—these ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr
... hear nothing at a short distance than at a long one—sat 'Old Maxum', as he was familiarly called, his real patronymic remaining a mystery to most persons. A fine philological sense discerns in this cognomen an indication that the pauper patriarch had once been considered pithy and sententious in his speech; but now the weight of ninety-five years lay heavy on his tongue as well as in his ears, and he sat before the clergyman with protruded chin, and munching mouth, and eyes that seemed to look ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot
... kept up his habit of jotting down in his note-books and his correspondence all he saw and heard, Baillie's Letters and Journals (first properly edited by Mr. David Laing in 1842) are among the most graphic books of contemporary memoir to be found in any language. His faculty of narration in his pithy native Scotch is nothing short of genius. Whenever we have an account from Baillie of anything he saw or was present at, it is worth all other accounts put together for accuracy and vividness. So in his account of Stratford's trial; ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... imagination of him that hears, that he should have something else to do, than to think of words. The way of speaking that I love, is natural and plain, the same in writing as in speaking, and a sinewy and muscular way of expressing a man's self, short and pithy, not so elegant and artificial as prompt ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... quit Lechee till the following day, and pressed them strongly to remain with him for the day, which, however, not all his solicitations nor importunities could induce them to accede to. After some trifling conversation, and a long and pithy harangue from a Fellata, they took their leave of him and his people, and instantly made their way back to the water side, where they waited in the grass hut for the appearance of the canoe men, with whom the chief had promised to supply them. After a considerable ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... to the meeting with a pithy discourse on the sacredness of human life, the weaknesses and dangers of circumstantial evidence, and the rights of the accused wherever doubt arose. Then she plunged into the evidence, stripping off the superfluous and striving to confine herself ...
— A Daughter of the Snows • Jack London
... value is found chiefly in the pulp, and the fruit which has not a due proportion of pulp and flesh seems to be insipid and tasteless. Again, the division into many small cells is often connected with a large and pithy placenta and unevenness in maturity and coloring, which faults often more than overbalance any advantage from small cells and thick flesh. The size and character of the placenta ...
— Tomato Culture: A Practical Treatise on the Tomato • William Warner Tracy
... Captain Tugwell, in his pithy style, was wont to divide all human life into two distinctive tenses—the long-pipe time and the short-pipe time. The long-pipe time was of ease and leisure, comfort in the way of hot victuals and cool pots, the stretching of legs without strain of muscle, and ...
— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore
... potters. There's been borrowing and speculation. The masters don't stick to one business as they used to do. I can tell that much. Half the valley may be 'playing' before two months are out." Parload delivered himself of this unusually long speech in his most pithy ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... cruisers—St. Paul, St. Louis, Harvard, and Yale—and the fast naval cruiser Minneapolis before the mouth of the harbor. The number of these ships shows the importance attached to the duty. It was necessary to allow largely for the chapter of accidents; for, to apply a pithy saying of the Chief of the Naval Bureau of Equipment,—"the only way to have coal enough is to have too much,"—the only way to assemble ships enough when things grow critical, is to send more than barely enough. All those that received their orders proceeded ...
— Lessons of the war with Spain and other articles • Alfred T. Mahan
... have carefully examined these Meditations, and are fain to confess that we admire them very much. They are short, succinct, pithy, always to the point, ...
— The Formation of Christendom, Volume VI - The Holy See and the Wandering of the Nations, from St. Leo I to St. Gregory I • Thomas W. (Thomas William) Allies
... writings to the pampered palates of literary epicures, I might have availed myself of the obscurity that overshadows the infant years of our city, to introduce a thousand pleasing fictions. But I have scrupulously discarded many a pithy tale and marvelous adventure, whereby the drowsy ear of summer indolence might be enthralled; jealously maintaining that fidelity, gravity, and dignity which should ever distinguish the historian. "For a writer of this class," observes an elegant critic, "must sustain the character ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... only readers. Its curse in common use is an incredible left-handed wordiness; but in the hands of a man like Pratt it is succinct as Latin, compact of long rolling polysyllables and little and often pithy particles, and for beauty of sound a dream. Listen, I quote from Pratt - this is good Samoan, ...
— Vailima Letters • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the average comedy, in which the wit of a single sentence of Chesterfield suffices to carry an act. His man-of-the-world philosophy is as old as the Proverbs of Solomon, but will always be fresh and true, and enjoyable at any age, thanks to his pithy expression, his unfailing common sense, his sparkling wit and charming humor. This latter gift shows in the seeming lapses from his rigid rule requiring absolute elegance of expression at all times, when an unexpected coarseness, ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... soldiers who should despise toil and danger and prefer death to military dishonor. Reading and writing were untaught, and the art of rhetoric was despised. Spartan brevity was a proverb, whence our word laconic (from Laconia), implying a concise and pithy mode of expression. Boys were taught to respond in the fewest words possible. At the public tables they were not permitted to speak until questioned: they sat "silent as statues." As Plutarch puts it, "Lycurgus was for having the money bulky, ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers |
