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Shatter   Listen
verb
Shatter  v. t.  (past & past part. shattered; pres. part. shattering)  
1.
To break at once into many pieces; to dash, burst, or part violently into fragments; to rend into splinters; as, an explosion shatters a rock or a bomb; too much steam shatters a boiler; an oak is shattered by lightning. "A monarchy was shattered to pieces, and divided amongst revolted subjects."
2.
To disorder; to derange; to render unsound; as, to be shattered in intellect; his constitution was shattered; his hopes were shattered. "A man of a loose, volatile, and shattered humor."
3.
To scatter about. (Obs.) "Shatter your leaves before the mellowing year."






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Shatter" Quotes from Famous Books



... principles, new plans of action; it had passed through the ordeal of war, and held its ground amidst flashing swords and the smoke of battle; it had survived the shocks of division, disappointment, and failure; treachery, incapacity and open hostility had failed to shatter it; and it grew apace in strength, influence, and resources. At home Fenianism, while losing little in numerical strength, had declined in effectiveness, in prestige, in discipline, and in organization. Its leaders had been swept into the prisons, and though men perhaps as resolute stepped ...
— Speeches from the Dock, Part I • Various

... a great invalid. The shock to his nervous system, the dragging out of those interminable hours in the lonely chamber, and the strain upon his physical powers by the absence of nutriment for seven long days and nights, had all combined to shatter a constitution once robust. He is now greatly improved in health, and has been recommended by his doctors to try a winter in the ...
— The Haunted Chamber - A Novel • "The Duchess"

... impossible task to overthrow a few English colonies in America of whose King their own was the patron and the paymaster. The world of high politics has never been conspicuous for its knowledge of human nature. A strong blow from a strong arm would, it was believed both at Versailles and Quebec, shatter forever a weak rival and give France the prize of North America. Officers in Canada talked loftily of the ease with which France might master all the English colonies. The Canadians, it was said, were ...
— The Conquest of New France - A Chronicle of the Colonial Wars, Volume 10 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • George M. Wrong

... hot death To shatter limbs! pulp, tear, blast Beloved soldiers who love rough life and breath Not less for dying faithful to ...
— Georgian Poetry 1916-17 - Edited by Sir Edward Howard Marsh • Various

... all triumphant; the example of the sublime moral that teaches us with what mysterious beauty and immortal holiness the Creator has endowed our human nature when hallowed by our human affections! You alone suffice to shatter into dust the haughty creeds of the Misanthrope and Pharisee! And your fidelity to my erring self has taught me ever to love, to serve, to compassionate, to respect the community of God's creatures to which—noble and elevated though ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Book XI • Edward Bulwer Lytton

... another. The atmosphere between them was electric. And the darkness of a calm and delicious night was falling. Could she not obey her instinct, and in one bright word, one word laden with the invitation and acquiescence of femininity, atone for her sin against him? Could she not shatter the images of Rose and Milly, who loved her after their hard fashion, but who would never thank her for her watchful affection—would ...
— Leonora • Arnold Bennett

... resolution, that Madeline wished him to break! The power she possessed over him seemed exactly in proportion to his impregnability to every one else. The surface on which the diamond cuts its easy way, will yield to no more ignoble instrument; it is easy to shatter it, but by only one substance can it be impressed. And in this instance Aram had but one secret and strong cause to prevent his yielding to Madeline's wishes;—if he remained at the house this night, how could he well avoid ...
— Eugene Aram, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... Extravagance saileth 'mid glitter and show, As if fortune's rich tide never ebbed in its flow; But see her at night when her gold-light is spent, When her anchor is lost, and her silken sails rent; When the wave of destruction her shatter'd side drinks, And the billows—ha! ha!—laugh and shout as she sinks. No! give us Content, as life's channel we steer. While our Pilot is Caution, there's little ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. 1, No. 2, July 8, 1850 • Various

... sword, O Mighty Warrior, for thou shalt need it more where it will avail to some purpose—shatter it not against senseless metal which yields better to the lightest finger touch of one ...
— The Gods of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... He reminded the Padishah that, in the dungeons of the Knights, true believers were languishing; that on the rowers' benches of the galleys of "the Religion" Moslems were being flogged like dogs. In a furious peroration he concluded: "It is only thy invincible sword which can shatter the chains of these unfortunates, whose cries are rising to heaven and afflicting the ears of the Prophet of God: the son is demanding his father, the wife her husband and her children. All, therefore, wait upon thee, upon thy justice, ...
— Sea-Wolves of the Mediterranean • E. Hamilton Currey

... general views, in other men and in other communities. It is that spirit which inspires into them a new, a pernicious, a desolating activity. Constituted as France was ten years ago, it was not in that France to shake, to shatter, and to overwhelm Europe in the manner that we behold. A sure destruction impends over those infatuated princes, who, in the conflict with this new and unheard-of power, proceed as if they were engaged in a war ...
— Political Pamphlets • George Saintsbury

... frightened her, she could equally little deny. So it came about that once again, as Mary and her satellite Laura silently waited at table, and as Theresa very audibly gobbled food in and words out, Damaris shrank within herself seeming to hear a shrill sweet whistling and the shatter of loose pebbles and shifting shingle under Faircloth's ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet

... p. 56. "As through the falling glooms Pensive I stray."—Ib., p. 80. "They, sportive, wheel; or, sailing down the stream, Are snatch'd immediate by the quick-eyed trout."—Ib., p. 82. "Incessant still you flow."—Ib., p. 91. "The shatter'd clouds Tumultuous rove, the interminable sky Sublimer swells."—Ib., p. 116. In order to determine, in difficult cases, whether an adjective or an adverb is required, the learner should carefully attend to the definitions of these parts of speech, and consider ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown

... imagine no place more calculated to quickly shatter the nerves and break the health of a human being than one of those foul, suffocating tunnels ...
— Through Canal-Land in a Canadian Canoe • Vincent Hughes

... imbrown'd; Fled each fair form, and mute each melting sound, The raven croaks forlorn on naked spray: And, hark! the river, bursting every mound, Down the vale thunders, and with wasteful sway Uproots the grove, and rolls the shatter'd ...
— The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer - With Lives, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Rev. George Gilfillan [Ed.]

... said young man was severely caressed by the elements, and tipped over in such a way as to shatter the right leg, just below the gambrel joint. I therefore started out to deliver a few lectures for his benefit, and in so doing have made a 4,000 mile trip over the Northern Pacific railway, and the Oregon River ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye

... confronted with an economic affliction of great proportions. We suffer from the longest and one of the worst sustained inflations in our national history. It distorts our economic decisions, penalizes thrift, and crushes the struggling young and the fixed-income elderly alike. It threatens to shatter the lives of millions of ...
— United States Presidents' Inaugural Speeches - From Washington to George W. Bush • Various

... forma form. formacion f. formation. formal genuine, serious, grave. formar to form. formalidad f. seriousness. fortificar to strengthen, fortify. fosforico phosphoric, phosphorescent. fracasar to shatter. fracturar to break. fragmento fragment. fraile friar; frailuco (bad) friar. francachela revelry, intemperance. frances, -a French. Francia France. Francisco Francis. francmason freemason. frase f. phrase, ...
— Novelas Cortas • Pedro Antonio de Alarcon

... To shatter at a single blow the most venerable of the routine precedents, the sensational thing chose for its colliding point with orderly system one of the oldest and most conservative of the city's banks: the Bayou State Security. At ten o'clock, following the precise habit ...
— The Price • Francis Lynde

... command, that I was born to serve; I knew that by a rare conjuncture the hand had found the tool; and from the first I was confident, as I am confident to-day, that no hereditary trifler has the power to shatter that alliance." ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... and antagonisms will advance the reign of love at most only a very little, only so far as it will simplify and make plain certain issues. It may very possibly not advance the reign of love at all, but rather shatter the order we have. Socialism, as I conceive it, and as I have presented it in my book, "New Worlds for Old," seeks to change economic arrangements only by the way, as an aspect and outcome of a great change, a change in the spirit and method of ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells

... he flies, On sounding pinions through the skies. I can pursue the Lord of Light Uprising from the eastern height, And reach him ere his course be sped With burning beams engarlanded. I will dry up the mighty main, Shatter the rocks and rend the plain. O'er earth and ocean will I bound, And every flower that grows on ground, And bloom of climbing plants shall show Strewn on the ground, the way I go, Bright as the lustrous path that lies Athwart the region ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI

... as deeply as ever man was loved. Oh that he knew my heart! He would not then shatter his image there. He would not trifle with a spirit formed for intense, yielding, passionate love, but rigid as steel and cold as ice when its freedom is touched. He should have known me better before linking his fate ...
— After the Storm • T. S. Arthur

... word that is foe to ambition, An enemy ambushed to shatter your will; Its prey is forever the man with a mission And bows but to courage and patience and skill. Hate it, with hatred that's deep and undying, For once it is welcomed 'twill break any man; Whatever the goal you are seeking, ...
— A Heap o' Livin' • Edgar A. Guest

... universe appears to be the very incarnation of injustice. The constellations as they come into manifestation shatter the heavens with their titanic combats; it is the vampirism of the greatest among them that creates the suns, thus inaugurating egoism from the very beginning. Everywhere on earth is heard the cry of pain, a never-ending struggle; sacrifice is everywhere, ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal

... perpetual joy and delight of the courts of the Salamancan schools, sound in body, discreet, patient under heat or cold, hunger or thirst, with all the qualifications requisite to make a knight-errant's squire! But heaven forbid that, to gratify my own inclination, I should shake or shatter this pillar of letters and vessel of the sciences, and cut down this towering palm of the fair and liberal arts. Let this new Samson remain in his own country, and, bringing honour to it, bring honour at the same time on the grey ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

... beautiful serenity of this autumn sky, and remember that my deed has loosened an immortal soul from its clay, and hurled it, unprepared, into its Maker's presence. My conscience would rebuke my hand, should it willfully shatter the sculptor's marble wrought into human shape, or deface the artist's ideal pictured upon canvas, or destroy aught that is beautiful and costly of man's ingenuity and labor. And yet these I might replace with emptying ...
— Fort Lafayette or, Love and Secession • Benjamin Wood

... as might herald the crack of doom. There was a brightness greater than the brilliance of the sun. And then there was a wrenching, heaving shock. Then there was blackness. Baird was flung across the radar room, and Diane cried out, and he careened against a wall and heard glass shatter. He called: ...
— The Aliens • Murray Leinster

... have wept, I have supplicated; I sigh, I threaten. Sighs and threats are alike vain. She will not perceive that on my displeasure hangs the happy or sad condition of the whole world, and that if Psyche dies, if Psyche be not mine, I am no longer "Love". Yes! I shall break my bow, shatter my arrows; I shall even extinguish my sacred flame, and leave all nature to pine to death; or if I deign to wound a few more hearts with these golden shafts that arrest my sway, I shall wound you all above in behalf of mortals, while I shall hurl against them ...
— Psyche • Moliere

... on the authenticity of the Gospels. He is "perfectly clear" as to the fourth Gospel being a forgery; again for reasons which he alone has discovered. [46] Paul is the first inventor of Christian dogma, without any doubt or hesitation. But the undoubted results of modern science ... shatter to pieces the whole fabric. It is as certain as that 2 2 4 that the world was not created in ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell

... at least, fall from such a height, that I shall shatter myself in falling." Then giving himself a shake, as though to escape from himself, "Whence came you," ...
— The Man in the Iron Mask • Alexandre Dumas, Pere

... stroke the strongest of the Masai spears, the head of which was nearly five inches broad. He then showed to the astonished warriors the still undamaged sword-blade. 'So do our simes cut,' he said, 'when used in righteous battle; but beware of drawing them in pillage or murder, for they will then shatter in your hands as glass and bring evil upon your heads.' We then gave them a friendly salute, and they were ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka

... than his years: a thin, shuffling, pallid invalid, with a face of mingled sanctity and viciousness. If the old man lied, and had not been in prison all these years, he must have had misery far worse, for neither vice nor poverty alone could so shatter a human being. The son's pity seemed to look down from a great height upon the contemptible figure with the beautiful white hair and the abominable mouth. This compassion kept him from becoming hard, but it would also preserve him to hourly sacrifice—Prometheus chained to his rock. In the short ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... whether he had been too bold in this utterance. But she was all, he perceived, for broad-mindness, and he stirred himself (and incidentally his tea) to still more liberality of expression. He said the state of the poor was appalling, simply appalling; that there were times when he wanted to shatter the whole system, "only," he said, turning to me appealingly, "What have we got to ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells

... hadn't any assurance within him of the force to assuage an indignation he understood though he couldn't feel it. That was another of the levelling powers of age. You couldn't key your emotions up to the point where they might shatter something or perhaps really do some good. It wasn't only that you hadn't the blood and breath. It also didn't seem worth while. He was angry, in a measure, with the hidden woman he couldn't get at to bid ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown

... a word, with merely a gesture and a glance—thrown my whole life into the crucible of passion? Why did I exult in the tremendous and impetuous act, like a martyr, and also like a girl? Was I playing with my existence as an infant plays with a precious bibelot that a careless touch may shatter? Why was I so fiercely, madly, drunkenly happy when ...
— Sacred And Profane Love • E. Arnold Bennett

... know! You will not have to shatter my mocking dreams—they are already gone. But you may be sure that I, too, have been dreaming of a knight who was to lay a kingdom at my feet and talk to me of flowers and love—Olof, I want to be your wife! Here is my hand! But this much I must tell you: that you ...
— Master Olof - A Drama in Five Acts • August Strindberg

... is no insignificant sidelight on the history of this circle and this period to recall that the subversive theories of Copernicus,—far as even he was from anticipating how a Kepler and a Newton should one day shatter the "Crystalline Spheres," and relegate to the dustheap of antiquity the "Epicycles," to which he still clung,—had their only generous hearing from influential churchmen of Rome. Luther recoiled from them as the blasphemies of "an ...
— Holbein • Beatrice Fortescue

... blinded him. He was possessed by the tragic fear that she was acting a dream; presently she would awake—and shatter the universe. His dominance ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... been reached—sensuousness seems to flow into eternity, voluptuousness would shatter the world to pieces and create a new relationship of things. Before this poem all ecstasies of sensuousness masquerading as cosmic emotion are dull and timid. The transcendent symbols of Catholicism ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka

... it is against us that he comes," Morcar said, "and unless the winds shatter his fleet we shall hear of him before long. But he may land anywhere from the border of Scotland to the Humber, and it is useless our trying to hinder him along so great a line. He may delay his ...
— Wulf the Saxon - A Story of the Norman Conquest • G. A. Henty

... contradictions upon immaterial matters. For example, the four accounts of the resurrection differ in detail, and there is no orthodox learned lawyer who dutifully accepts all four versions who could not shatter the evidence if he dealt with it in the course of his profession. These details are immaterial to the spirit of the message. It is not common sense to suppose that every item is inspired, or that we have to make no allowance ...
— The Vital Message • Arthur Conan Doyle

... treacherous twigs, Ta wheer he chonc'd ta stray, The bird his fastened feathers leaves, Then gladly flies away. His shatter'd wings he sooin renews, Of traps he is aware; Fer by experience he is wise, An' ...
— Revised Edition of Poems • William Wright

... Heave thy wet head up from the monstrous sea; Advance thy trident high as to the clouds, And with a not to be repeated blow, Dash the sin-freighted ship of that rash man! And thou, old iron-sceptred Eolus, Shatter the bars of thine enclosed winds; Unhinge the doors of thy great kennel house, And 'twixt the azure and the roaring deep Cry out thy whole inflated Strongyle— Cry ruin on that man! But wherefore, thus, Do I invoke the speedy desolation Of any mighty magisterial soul, Whose will is weaponed ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various

... in the battle, to deliver a final knock-out blow. But this hope failed, even if it failed by a little. Our artillery, mighty as it undoubtedly was, was not mighty enough yet to destroy the enemy's defences and to shatter his power of resistance. Alas, it was a blow that could never be repeated again with such ...
— Q.6.a and Other places - Recollections of 1916, 1917 and 1918 • Francis Buckley

... gigantic wave carried inwards by the tide, his turbulent emotion seemed suddenly to shatter itself against a rock of self-control. Was it a call from the boatmen below? a distant scrunching of feet upon the gravel?—who knows, perhaps only a sigh in the midnight air, a ghostly summons from the land of dreams ...
— The Elusive Pimpernel • Baroness Emmuska Orczy

... Fothering, small stones, etc., had made its way in, and lodged between the Timbers, which had stopped the Water from forcing its way in in great Quantities. Part of the Sheathing was gone from under the Larboard bow, part of the False Kiel was gone, and the remainder in such a Shatter'd Condition that we should be much better off if it was gone also; her Forefoot and some part of her Main Kiel was also damaged, but not Materially. What damage she may have received abaft we could not see, but believe not much, as the Ship ...
— Captain Cook's Journal During the First Voyage Round the World • James Cook

... report seemed to shatter the whole scene. Its echoes were mixed with the scattering of the horrified beavers as they rushed for the water—with the short screech of the lynx, as it bounced into the air and fell back on its side, ...
— The House in the Water - A Book of Animal Stories • Charles G. D. Roberts

... dotted in many parts with crossed stakes which mark the oyster-beds, and lined on this side with a variety of shipping moored at quays. From some of these vessels, early next morning, sounded suddenly a furious cannonade, which threatened to shatter the windows of the hotel; I found it was in honour of the Queen of Italy, whose festa fell on that day. This barbarous uproar must have sounded even to the Calabrian heights; it struck me as more meaningless in its deafening ...
— By the Ionian Sea - Notes of a Ramble in Southern Italy • George Gissing

... rage alternated with periods of cold and numbing despair, but as day succeeded day the desire to be near her grew until it could no longer be denied. He dared not again attempt to force himself into her presence, lest she should be angry and shatter irrevocably the hope to which he still clung with desperation. But he might without fear of disaster be nearer to her for a time. He hired a bicycle, and after dark had fallen that evening he rode out to the lane, and leaving his machine on the road, walked to ...
— The Pit Prop Syndicate • Freeman Wills Crofts

... nameless. She had told me herself that she loved me with that pure all-human love, out of which springs all other love. Her shuddering, her uneasiness, when I confessed my full love to her, were still incomprehensible to me, but it could no longer shatter my faith in our love. Why should we desire to understand all that takes place in other human natures, when there is so much that is incomprehensible in our own? After all, it is the inconceivable which generally ...
— Memories • Max Muller

... free &c (liberate) 750. sunder, divide, subdivide, sever, dissever, abscind^; circumcise; cut; incide^, incise; saw, snip, nib, nip, cleave, rive, rend, slit, split, splinter, chip, crack, snap, break, tear, burst; rend &c, rend asunder, rend in twain; wrench, rupture, shatter, shiver, cranch^, crunch, craunch^, chop; cut up, rip up; hack, hew, slash; whittle; haggle, hackle, discind^, lacerate, scamble^, mangle, gash, hash, slice. cut up, carve, dissect, anatomize; dislimb^; take to pieces, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget

... of lightning which came down the mainmast seemed to shake and shatter the brig, and the hands forward were terribly startled by the shock. Then the sail they were setting was torn in pieces. The mate who had worked vigorously and courageously, saw that all they had done was useless. ...
— The Coming Wave - The Hidden Treasure of High Rock • Oliver Optic

... never known a mother's love, and his father's death was the first blow that helped to shatter his early notions of felicity. The cloud that overshadowed him at that time was very dark, and he received no sympathy worth mentioning from his only relative, ...
— Jeff Benson, or the Young Coastguardsman • R.M. Ballantyne

... of the great proportion of artillery the Germans employ is to beat down the resistance of their enemy by concentrated and prolonged fire, to shatter their nerves with high explosives, before the infantry attack is launched. They seem to have relied on doing this with us, but they have not done so, though it has taken them several costly experiments to ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol 1, Issue 4, January 23, 1915 • Various

... forward at the object of this universal gaze would have sufficed to shatter both hypotheses. Here was neither a court of justice nor a tombola. It was instead the closing session of the annual Nedahma Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, and the Bishop was about to read out ...
— The Damnation of Theron Ware • Harold Frederic

... men, form! Stand in good order to 'meet the storm'— Form, men, form! Sacred to us is our native land! Shrivelled for aye be each traitor hand Lifted to shatter so bright a band— ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 3 No 3, March 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... course of the main Havasu Canyon. Cushing counted forty-four knots in his buckskin fringe from the village to the exit, each knot denoting an abrupt curve or angle in the winding canyons. The Topocobya Trail descends a sheer cliff of stupendous majesty, and the Wallapai Trail is enough to shatter the nervous system of any but the most experienced; but the Hopi Trail ascent out of the Canyon is different, in that, in several places, it passes through narrow clefts, with ponderous, overhanging rocks, the whole course barely wide enough to permit a laden mule to get through with its pack. ...
— The Grand Canyon of Arizona: How to See It, • George Wharton James

... do pitchy, 'tis my pride Vor Jenny Hine to reaeke my zide, An' zee her fling her reaeke, an' reach So vur, an' teaeke in sich a streech; An' I don't shatter hay, an' meaeke Mwore work than needs vor Jenny's reaeke. I'd sooner zee the weaeles' high rows Lik' hedges up above my nose, Than have light work myzelf, an' vind Poor Jeaene a-beaet an' left behind; ...
— Poems of Rural Life in the Dorset Dialect • William Barnes

... destroy'd The beautiful world With violent blow; 'Tis shiver'd! 'tis shatter'd! The fragments abroad by a demigod scatter'd! Now we sweep The wrecks into nothingness! Fondly we weep The beauty that's gone! Thou, 'mongst the sons of earth, Lofty and mighty one, Build it once more! In thine own bosom the lost world restore! Now with unclouded ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke

... (for in Turin the thermometer stood at 31 day after day) I intended to write you a nice letter of thanks. A pious intention, wasn't it? But who could have guessed that I was not only going back to a cooler clime, but into the most ghastly weather, weather that threatened to shatter my health! Winter and summer in senseless alternation; twenty-six avalanches in the thaw; and now we have just had eight days of rain with the sky almost always grey—this is enough to account for my profound nervous exhaustion, together with the return of my old ailments. I don't think I can ever ...
— How to Write Letters (Formerly The Book of Letters) - A Complete Guide to Correct Business and Personal Correspondence • Mary Owens Crowther

... and shrugged his shoulders. "It's all a question of motives," he said indifferently. "I don't want to shatter your idol; I only want to save you from counting too ...
— The Lion and the Unicorn and Other Stories • Richard Harding Davis

... instance. A single soldier may have all the will and purpose to whip an army, but he doesn't do it. And a man may have all the will and purpose to whip the world, walk over it rough-shod, shoulder it out of his way as you'd like to do, but he doesn't do it. And of course we do not shatter our ideals ourselves—always: a thousand things outside ourselves do that for us. And what reason had you to say that you would have what you wanted? Your wishes are not infallible. ...
— The Choir Invisible • James Lane Allen

... woman—ah, that woman was his wife—had been for many years to him the type of what women must always be when stripped of the veneer of society's restraints. Janetta had of late shaken his conviction on this point; it was reserved for Margaret Adair to shatter it ...
— A True Friend - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant

... Love, could you and I with fate conspire To mend this sorry scheme of things entire, Would we not shatter it to bits, and then Remould it nearer to ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James

... Love! could thou and I with Fate conspire To grasp this sorry Scheme of Things entire, Would not we shatter it to bits—and then Re-mould it nearer to the ...
— Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam • Omar Khayyam

... last flight the haughty eagle flew, Then tore, with bloody beak, the fatal plain; Pierced with the shafts of banded nations through, Ambition's life, and labours, all were vain— He wears the shatter'd links of ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. III - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore

... wasted places of the land, Charr'd skeletons of cities, circling walls Of Roman might, and towers that shatter'd stand Of that lost world survivors, forth she calls Her new creation:—O'er the land is wrought The happy villagedom by English tribes From Elbe and Baltic brought; Red kine light up with life the ravaged plain; The forest glooms are pierced; ...
— The Visions of England - Lyrics on leading men and events in English History • Francis T. Palgrave

... indulged in the luxury of drashkil-smoking oftener than once a week. His constitution was delicate, and a too frequent use of so dangerous a drug would have tended to shatter still further his already enfeebled health. Besides, as he said, he wished to keep it as a luxury, and not, by a too frequent indulgence in it, to take off the fine edge of enjoyment and render it commonplace. Ducie had several subsequent opportunities of witnessing the ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 4, April, 1891 • Various

... than words. It must not be forgotten, too, that these great achievements of the progressive women of to-day have been accomplished against the opposition of a large number of their own sex—who, while they are out in the world's arena fighting against progress for their sisters, still shatter the ear-drum with their incongruous war-cry, "Woman's place is in the home!" here: We were attending the Republican state nominating convention at Mitchell—Miss Anthony, Mrs. Catt, other leaders, and myself—having been told ...
— The Story of a Pioneer - With The Collaboration Of Elizabeth Jordan • Anna Howard Shaw

... the stars anew, Shatter the heavens with a song; Immortal in my love for you, Because I ...
— The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke • Rupert Brooke

... neither man nor devils, if so be as they don't take him by surprise. — Indeed, he was once so flurried by an operition, that he had like to have sounded. — He made believe as if it had been the ould edmiral; but the old edmiral could not have made his air to stand on end,, and his teeth to shatter; but he said so in prudence, that the ladies mought not be afear'd. Miss Liddy has been puny, and like to go into a decline — I doubt her pore art is too tinder — but the got's-fey has set her on her legs again. — You nows got's-fey ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett

... Strickland was a passion to create beauty. It gave him no peace. It urged him hither and thither. He was eternally a pilgrim, haunted by a divine nostalgia, and the demon within him was ruthless. There are men whose desire for truth is so great that to attain it they will shatter the very foundation of their world. Of such was Strickland, only beauty with him took the place of truth. I could only feel for him a ...
— The Moon and Sixpence • W. Somerset Maugham

... from heat or show'r, Its roots a moss-grown seat became; Its leaves would strew the maiden's bow'r, Its bark was shatter'd with ...
— Memoirs of the Life of the Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan V1 • Thomas Moore

... irritable, and unfair to the nephew who was lame like her horrible brother and like herself. She thought him invertebrate and conventional. She was envious of his happiness. She did not trouble to understand his art. She longed to shatter him, but knowing as she did that the human thunderbolt often rebounds and strikes the wielder, she ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster

... confessed to you. Yes. It is true that I was cruel to you—deliberately. I did want to hurt you. And do you know why? I wanted to shatter that Olympian serenity of yours. You were too strong, too self-confident. You had the air of a being that nothing could hurt. You ...
— King Arthur's Socks and Other Village Plays • Floyd Dell

... Delos in compassion offered her a precarious shelter. There she became the mother of two children—the poor creature! Just the seventh part of my mother joy! Who can deny that I am fortunate? Who will doubt that I shall remain happy? Fortune would have a hard time if she undertook to shatter my happiness. Take this or that one from my treasured children; but when would the number of them dwindle to the sickly two of Latona? Away with your sacrifices! Take the laurel out of your hair. Go back to your homes and let me ...
— Famous Tales of Fact and Fancy - Myths and Legends of the Nations of the World Retold for Boys and Girls • Various

... thou the son of Tamburlaine, And fear'st to die, or with a [121] curtle-axe To hew thy flesh, and make a gaping wound? Hast thou beheld a peal of ordnance strike A ring of pikes, mingled with shot and horse, [122] Whose shatter'd limbs, being toss'd as high as heaven, Hang in the air as thick as sunny motes, And canst thou, coward, stand in fear of death? Hast thou not seen my horsemen charge the foe, Shot through the arms, cut overthwart the hands, Dying their lances with their streaming blood, And yet at night ...
— Tamburlaine the Great, Part II. • Christopher Marlowe

... goddess. It gave me the keenest torture to think that she would soon be the wife of old Griffith Hawke. I knew that she was as far out of my reach as the stars above, and yet I felt that I should love her passionately all my life—that the memory of her sweet face would shatter all the joys of existence ...
— The Cryptogram - A Story of Northwest Canada • William Murray Graydon

... in the office. Both men were thinking hard. Wimperley, beginning to be resigned, had, in a burst of revolt, visualized Riggs and Stoughton as those most likely to help with the barricade which Clark was already beginning to shatter, and Clark, his face as imperturbable as ever, marveled not at all at his own influence, but was busy reviewing the strategic moves which were to convert the two for whom he waited. Presently they entered, shook hands with a certain stiffness and sat down. A glance at Clark revealed the reason for ...
— The Rapids • Alan Sullivan

... a minor mountain against the sky. He drove furiously. Beyond it. He had seen the highway system from twenty miles height, and ten, and five. From somewhere near here stolen weather rockets had gone billowing skyward with explosive war heads to shatter ...
— The Hate Disease • William Fitzgerald Jenkins

... 'Tis thine to perish on th' ensanguin'd plain. And now the youth the forceful pebble slung Philistia trembled as it whizz'd along: In his dread forehead, where the helmet ends, Just o'er the brows the well-aim'd stone descends, It pierc'd the skull, and shatter'd all the brain, Prone on his face he tumbled to the plain: Goliath's fall no smaller terror yields Than riving thunders in aerial fields: The soul still ling'red in its lov'd abode, Till conq'ring David o'er the giant strode: Goliath's ...
— Religious and Moral Poems • Phillis Wheatley

... officer. Ten minutes later, thanks to arrangements made in advance, a launch was bearing him and his chief to the shore, where a motor car was waiting. It is barely a dozen miles from the wharf at Singapore to Woodlands, the ferry station opposite Johore, and the driver had orders to shatter the speed laws. A waiting launch streaked across the two miles of channel which separates the island from the mainland and drew up alongside the quay at Johore, where another car was waiting. The roads are excellent in the sultanate, ...
— Where the Strange Trails Go Down • E. Alexander Powell

... supernaturally to know and understand everything. And, oh, he means so much to me, to us all, for it is he, more than any one else, who has saved us from—from what we were. And he loves us. It would shatter his faith, ruin all that his life has meant to him, and—and we cannot bring him grief and sorrow like that. Oh, what can we do! What can we do! We cannot stop—and we cannot go on! We cannot stay here even if we returned ...
— The Miracle Man • Frank L. Packard

... dear. You were frightfully ill for a while, Sophy." Her face paled. "So ill that The Author fled, because he wouldn't stay in the house and see—what we expected to see. He said it would permanently shatter his nerves. But he has wired ...
— A Woman Named Smith • Marie Conway Oemler

... in a little while. She stayed in her room, attended by the entertaining Miss Noakes, who struggled manfully, so to speak, in her efforts to shatter the depression that surrounded the young girl like ...
— The Rose in the Ring • George Barr McCutcheon

... contemporaries and their fortunes. He finally mentioned with dogged daring the Bartletts whom she had known well; they had been exceedingly kind to Phil, he said. Her manner was so provokingly indifferent that he was at the point of bringing Kirkwood into the picture in a last effort to shatter her unconcern. She bit a bon-bon in two, made a grimace of dissatisfaction, and tossed the remaining half ...
— Otherwise Phyllis • Meredith Nicholson

... Belfast says, "You are sometimes asked whether you propose to resist the English army? I reply that even if this Government had the wickedness (which, on the whole, I believe), it is wholly lacking in the nerve required to give an order which in my deliberate judgment would shatter for years the civilization of these islands." If the Government does not have the nerve to employ its troops, "It will be for the moon-lighters and the cattle-maimers to conquer Ulster themselves, and it will be for you to show whether you ...
— Humanly Speaking • Samuel McChord Crothers

... slowly from west to east. Before long thousands of carriages would roll along its line with the speed of birds, to enrich the powerful, shatter the poor, spread new customs and manners, multiply crime...all this is called 'the advancement of civilization'. But Slimak knew nothing of civilization and its boons, and therefore looked upon this ...
— Selected Polish Tales • Various

... laws held guiltless—could not shatter the tie. That he, blinded by hope, had hoped to remake a life already made, and had dared to masquerade before his own soul as a man free to come, to go, and free to love, could not alter what had been done. Back, far back of ...
— The Younger Set • Robert W. Chambers

... through which they had risen they saw the glaring flame of the Gorm. As they looked, its regular pulsations turned irregular: it leaped and splashed as though it was a stormy, choppy sea. Then it gave one final mighty heave, and the universe seemed to shatter beneath them. The "walls" of the shaft collapsed about them and they were enswathed in a ...
— Pirates of the Gorm • Nat Schachner

... Monitor and other papers, the chosen or self-appointed champions of vested interests, were almost openly in revolt; in Harley's mind their course amounted to the same thing; they printed in their news columns many things derogatory to Grayson, and likely to shatter public faith in his judgment, and in nearly all of them appeared signed contributions from members of the wealthy faction led by the Honorable Mr. Goodnight, attacking every speech made by the candidate, and intimating that he was ...
— The Candidate - A Political Romance • Joseph Alexander Altsheler

... with a deep sigh, "we can breathe easier. A man can put one of these pills in a little vial of water, place the vial in his vest-pocket, go to Trafalgar Square, take the pill from the vial, throw it in the middle of the Square, and it will shatter everything within the four-mile radius, he himself having the glorious privilege of suffering instant martyrdom for the cause. People have told me that this is a drawback to my invention, but I am inclined to differ with them. The one who uses this must make up his ...
— The Face And The Mask • Robert Barr

... matters; and it is because they believe this that the soldiers are looking forward with confidence and eagerness to the third and last attempt—for the sands at Ladysmith have run down very low—to shatter ...
— London to Ladysmith via Pretoria • Winston Spencer Churchill

... which others' right denies, But march against the citadel of wrong. A glorious army this, that finds allies Wherever God hath built the heart of man With attributes that to Himself belong; By Him ordained to crown what He began, And shatter despotism, which is the ...
— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore

... Lansing, "any ass can shatter them with his hind heels, so why should he? If he must be an ass, let him be an original ...
— A Young Man in a Hurry - and Other Short Stories • Robert W. Chambers

... the history of the world. As to being out of harm's way, the standard at his masthead drew the hottest of the fire upon him. The San Martin's timbers were of oak and a foot thick, but the shot, he said, went through them enough to shatter a rock. Her deck was a slaughterhouse; half his company were killed or wounded, and no more would have been heard or seen of the San Martin or her commander had not Oquendo and De Leyva pushed in to the rescue and enabled him to creep away under their ...
— English Seamen in the Sixteenth Century - Lectures Delivered at Oxford Easter Terms 1893-4 • James Anthony Froude

... nearly all covered with dark fir-groves, and overshadow the whole breadth of the narrow lake, the water seems quite dark, and almost black. This lake is dangerous to navigate on account of the many rocks rising perpendicularly out of the water, which, in a storm, shatter a boat dashed against them to pieces, and the passengers would find an inevitable grave in the deep waters. We had a flesh and a favourable breeze, which blew us quickly to our destination. One of the rocks on the coast has a very ...
— Visit to Iceland - and the Scandinavian North • Ida Pfeiffer

... NOBODY KNEW, that to act therefore was to blunder, that to talk was to confess; and that the man who acted slowly and steadfastly and above all silently, had the best chance of winning through. Meanwhile one fed the men. Now by this same strategy he hoped to shatter those mysterious unknowns of the Central European command. Delhi might talk of a great flank march through Holland, with all the British submarines and hydroplanes and torpedo craft pouring up the Rhine in support of it; Viard might crave for brilliance with the motor bicycles, aeroplanes, ...
— The World Set Free • Herbert George Wells

... and walked sorrowfully home to my lodgings. On my way I mused much upon my little Eastern friend and the sympathetic grasp of his imagination. But a burden lay heavy on my heart—something I would fain have told him but which I could not bear to mention. I could not find it in my heart to shatter the airy castle of his fancy. For my life has been secluded and lonely and I have known no love like that of my ideal friend. Yet I have a haunting recollection of a certain huge bundle of washing that I sent to him about a year ago. I had been absent from ...
— Literary Lapses • Stephen Leacock

... found, consisted of an old shatter'd press, and one small, worn-out font of English, which he was then using himself, composing an Elegy on Aquilla Rose, before mentioned, an ingenious young man, of excellent character, much respected ...
— Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin • Benjamin Franklin

... of all squires, Thro' bogs and thro' briers, Where a cow would be startled, I'm in spite of my heart led; And, say what I will, Haul'd up every hill; Till, daggled and tatter'd, My spirits quite shatter'd, I return home at night, And fast, out of spite: For I'd rather be dead, Than it e'er should be said, I was better for him, In stomach or limb. But now to my diet; No eating in quiet, He's still finding fault, Too sour or too salt: The wing of a chick I hardly can pick: But trash ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift

... seats at a small table, and in mutual silence loaded and lighted their pipes. Sime, in common with many young and enthusiastic medical men, had theories—theories of that revolutionary sort which only harsh experience can shatter. Secretly he was disposed to ascribe all the ills to which flesh is heir primarily to a disordered nervous system. It was evident that Cairn's mind persistently ran along a particular groove; something lay back of all this erratic talk; he had clearly invested the Mask ...
— Brood of the Witch-Queen • Sax Rohmer

... if a man lives who could do them; but women live who do them. Now his sudden coming, and the train of stirring events that accompanied it, his danger and hers, his words and her enjoyment of his presence, had all worked together to shatter her self-control; and the strange dream, heightening the emotion which was its own cause, left her with no conscious desire save to be near Mr. Rassendyll, and scarcely with a fear except for his safety. As they journeyed her talk was all ...
— Rupert of Hentzau - From The Memoirs of Fritz Von Tarlenheim: The Sequel to - The Prisoner of Zenda • Anthony Hope

... they begin to move, they moan and groan in melancholy tones which are subversive of all comfort; and as they continue on their courses they puff and bluster, and are forever threatening to burst and shatter themselves to pieces. There they lie, in a continuous line nearly a mile in length, along the levee of St. Louis, dirty, dingy, and now, alas! mute. They have ceased to groan and puff, and, if this war be continued for six months longer, will become rotten ...
— Volume 2 • Anthony Trollope

... and glisten. The air is laden, moist, and warm With the dying tempest's breath; And, as I walk the lonely strand With sea-weed strewn, my forehead fanned By wet salt-winds, I watch the breakers, Furious sporting, tossed and tumbling, Shatter here with a dreadful rumbling— Watch, and muse, and vainly listen To the inarticulate mumbling Of the hoary-headed deep; For who may tell me what it saith, Muttering, moaning as ...
— Dreams and Days: Poems • George Parsons Lathrop

... most part rising higher than the Females, and frequently falling and flapping them with their Wings, which produces a noise that one may hear a great way; from whence it happens that their Quill-Feathers are commonly broken or shatter'd. These are almost like the Pigeon call'd the Tumbler; the difference chiefly is, that the Tumbler is something smaller, and in its flight will turn itself backward over its Head. The diversity of colours in the ...
— The Country Housewife and Lady's Director - In the Management of a House, and the Delights and Profits of a Farm • Richard Bradley

... should we have any fear whatever,—fear even for the nation, as is many times expressed? God is behind His world, in love and with infinite care and watchfulness working out his great and almighty plans; and whatever plans men may devise, He will when the time is ripe either frustrate and shatter, or aid and push through to their most perfect culmination,—frustrate and shatter if contrary to, aid and actualize if ...
— What All The World's A-Seeking • Ralph Waldo Trine

... the world would come to an end! He even went so far as to describe the scene of destruction, when all the elements would be put in motion to destroy mankind, when volcanoes would deluge the land with liquid fire, and earthquakes shake and shatter the world ...
— Jack in the Forecastle • John Sherburne Sleeper

... understood my condition, I determined incontinently to die with all the glory possible. Another more fortunate than I would have succeeded a hundred times already. But I'm bewitched; I am impervious alike to bullets and balls; even the swords seem to fear to shatter themselves upon my skin. Yet I never miss an opportunity; that you must see, after what occurred at dinner. Well, we are going to fight. I'll expose myself like a maniac, giving my adversary all the advantages, but it will avail me nothing. Though he shoot at fifteen ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas, pere

... moral life a perceptible stroke of palsy. In reference to the question, Can ephemera have a moral law? Richter reasons as follows: "Suppose a statue besouled for two days. If on the first day you should shatter it, and thus rob it of one day's life, would you be guilty of murder? One can injure only an immortal." 9 The sophistry appears when we rectify the conclusion thus: one can inflict an immortal injury only on an immortal being. In fact, it would appear to ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger

... his sound and powerful judgment took in the position of Europe: France, exhausted by the lingering decay of her government and in travail with new and confused elements which had as yet no strength but to shatter and destroy; Spain, lured on by France and then abandoned by her; England, disturbed at home by parliamentary agitation, favorably disposed to the court of Russia and for a long while allied to Frederick; Sweden and Denmark, in the throes of serious events; there was nothing to oppose ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume VI. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot

... Lyric Love. But it is also the last upon which her spirit left any notable trace. With his usual extraordinary recuperative power, Browning re-moulded the mental universe which her love had seemed to complete, and her death momentarily to shatter, into a new, lesser completeness. He lived in the world, and frankly "liked earth's way," enjoying the new gifts of friendship and of fame which the years brought in rich measure. The little knot of critics whose praise even of Men and Women ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford

... were some interesting rumors afloat about our friend's conquests after your departure from Limasito. He'd be an expert porch-climber if his practice in gaining access to certain balconies on certain back streets counted for anything. I could have told you before, but I did not want to shatter your illusions ...
— The Fifth Ace • Douglas Grant

... by the congestion in this area of the pack is producing a scene of absolute chaos. The floes grind stupendously, throw up great ridges, and shatter one another mercilessly. The ridges, or hedgerows, marking the pressure-lines that border the fast- diminishing pieces of smooth floe-ice, are enormous. The ice moves majestically, irresistibly. Human effort is not futile, but man ...
— South! • Sir Ernest Shackleton

... packet, I received a letter from my youngest son. Among a number of other kind things, it contained words like the following: "Father, dear, when you get to England, don't dream that by any breath of yours, or by any paper balls that you can fire, you can ever shatter or shake the eternal foundations on which Christianity rests." Words like those from a dear good son could not but have a ...
— Modern Skepticism: A Journey Through the Land of Doubt and Back Again - A Life Story • Joseph Barker

... exert his will power, change completely his mental and physical habits and his surroundings. Occupation, changed habits, taking in of confidence, faith and courage thoughts—these changes are necessary to the victim of melancholia, or he will shatter on the danger rocks and go ...
— Evening Round Up - More Good Stuff Like Pep • William Crosbie Hunter

... there will be no power of seeking a haven of security. That must be sought and found in seasons of comparative peace. Though the agonized soul may finally, through the waves of sorrow, make its way into the ark, its long previous struggles, and its after harrowing doubts and fears, will shatter it nearly to pieces before it finds a final refuge. It may, indeed, by the free grace of God, be saved at the last, but during the remainder of its earthly pilgrimage there is no hope for it of ...
— The Young Lady's Mentor - A Guide to the Formation of Character. In a Series of Letters to Her Unknown Friends • A Lady

... pretensions to infallibility set up, not by the ancient Hebrew writings themselves, but by the ecclesiastical champions and friends from whom they may well pray to be delivered, thus shatter themselves against the rock of natural knowledge, in respect of the two most important of all events, the origin of things and the palingenesis of terrestrial life, what historical credit dare any serious thinker attach to the narratives of the fabrication of Eve, of the Fall, of the commerce between ...
— Lectures and Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley

... any real contact with Christ and His Gospel is to reveal a man to himself, to shatter his delusive estimates of what he is, and to pull down about his ears the lofty fortress in which he has ensconced himself. It seems strange work for what calls itself a Gospel to begin by forcing a man to cry out with sobs and tears, ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... the mask is down, and forth you stand Known for a King whose word is no great matter, A traitor proved, for every honest hand To strike and shatter. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, August 19th, 1914 • Various

... receptions. His sister, Sarah Perry, subsequently Mrs. R. S. Rodgers, was an early friend of mine. The elegant Major Alexander S. Macomb, who was his father's namesake and aide, on entering Mrs. Belmont's drawing-room was unfortunate enough to brush against a handsome vase and completely shatter it. It was generally conceded that his hostess was conscious of the disaster, but "was mistress of herself though China fall" and appeared entirely unconscious of the mishap. Some months later at the house of Lady Cunard (Mary McEvers), a similar accident ...
— As I Remember - Recollections of American Society during the Nineteenth Century • Marian Gouverneur

... cathedrals of Europe put together" (General von Disfurth in Hamburger Nachrichten). "Thus is fulfilled the well-known prophecy of Heine: 'When once that restraining talisman, the Cross, is broken ... Thor, with his colossal hammer, will leap up, and with it shatter into fragments the Gothic cathedrals'" (Religion and Philosophy in ...
— Raemaekers' Cartoons - With Accompanying Notes by Well-known English Writers • Louis Raemaekers

... flat to the front, as in England; the roofs are steeper-pitched; even a hill farm will have a massy, square, cold and permanent appearance. English houses, in comparison, have the look of cardboard toys, such as a puff might shatter. And to this the Scotchman never becomes used. His eye can never rest consciously on one of these brick houses - rickles of brick, as he might call them - or on one of these flat-chested streets, but he is instantly reminded where he is, and instantly travels back in fancy to his home. ...
— Memories and Portraits • Robert Louis Stevenson

... not yet recognized any danger which they thought sufficient to deter them from farther progress; but if the ice and the bottom were coming together, what could they do? It was possible, by means of explosives they carried, to shatter the ice above them; but action of this kind had not been contemplated unless they should find themselves at the pole and still shut in by ice. They did not wish to get out into the open air at the point where they found themselves; ...
— The Great Stone of Sardis • Frank R. Stockton

... that lessen'd still their little store, And starved even Hunger till he wrung no more; The varying frowns and favours of the deep, That now almost engulphs, then leaves to creep With crazy oar and shatter'd strength along The tide, that yields reluctant to the strong; Th' incessant fever of that arid thirst Which welcomes, as a well, the clouds that burst Above their naked bones, and feels delight In the cold drenching of the stormy night, And from the outspread canvas gladly wrings ...
— The Eventful History Of The Mutiny And Piratical Seizure - Of H.M.S. Bounty: Its Cause And Consequences • Sir John Barrow

... be contended for was a high one. Alexander's complete success would tear from Henry's grasp the first city of Christendom, now sinking exhausted into his hands, and would place France in the power of the Holy League and at the feet of Philip. Another Ivry would shatter the confederacy, and carry the king in triumph to his capital and his ancestral throne. On the approach of the combined armies under Parma and Mayenne, the king had found himself most reluctantly compelled to suspend the ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... upon the instrument for striking that, blow, led him to suppose Mr. Sowerby might be meditating on the extent of the young lady's fortune. He talked randomly of money, in a way to shatter Nataly's conception of him. He talked of City affairs at table, as it had been his practice to shun the doing; and hit the resounding note on mines, which have risen in the market like the crest of a serpent, casting a certain ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... compositors, who were also crooked, ten dollars per man to hold their mouths shut till the morning, with the result that from editors and sub-editors and reporters and compositors the news went seething forth in a flood that the Erie Auriferous Consolidated was going to shatter into fragments like the bursting of a dynamite bomb. It rushed with a thousand whispering tongues from street to street till it filled the corridors of the law courts and the lobbies of the offices, and till every honest man ...
— Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich • Stephen Leacock

... dismayed by apprehensions of the octroi which we felt sure awaited us. We recalled the behavior of the amiable officer of Valladolid who bumped our baggage about on the roof of our omnibus, and we thought that in Madrid such an officer could not do less than shatter our boxes and scatter their contents in the streaming street. What was then our surprise, our joy, to find that in Madrid there was no octroi at all, and that the amiable mozos who took our things hardly knew what we meant when we asked for it. At Madrid they scarcely ...
— Familiar Spanish Travels • W. D. Howells

... Shatter the shrine that chokes the living spring. Scorn hatred, scorn regret, Dig deep and deeper yet, Leave not the quest for ...
— Poems: New and Old • Henry Newbolt

... the nature of man to shatter every mirror that does not exhibit to him what he wishes ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett

... and tell the raciest stories; they hear of the death of people about their own age, or even younger, not as if it was a grisly warning, but with a simple childlike pleasure at having outlived some one else; and when a draught might puff them out like a guttering candle, or a bit of a stumble shatter them like so much glass, their old hearts keep sound and unaffrighted, and they go on, bubbling with laughter, through years of man's age compared to which the valley at Balaklava was as safe and peaceful as ...
— Virginibus Puerisque • Robert Louis Stevenson

... O ye Laurels, and once more Ye Myrtles brown, with Ivy never-sear, I com to pluck your Berries harsh and crude, And with forc'd fingers rude, Shatter your leaves before the mellowing year. Bitter constraint, and sad occasion dear, Compels me to disturb your season due: For Lycidas is dead, dead ere his prime Young Lycidas, and hath not left his peer: ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton

... was then. The moral passion has taken my destructiveness in hand and directed it to moral ends. I have become a reformer, and, like all reformers, an iconoclast. I no longer break cucumber frames and burn gorse bushes: I shatter creeds and ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw

... with satisfaction, and perhaps with a slight inclination to make my grandparents envious of them, that he had suddenly become as charming as he could possibly be, and was never out of their house. My grandfather would not care to shatter their pleasant illusion, but would look at my grandmother, as he hummed the ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust

... Further, every cavalry soldier has a sword and a dagger. But the rest, who form the light-armed troops, carry a metal cudgel. For if the foe cannot pierce their metal for pistols and cannot make swords, they attack him with clubs, shatter and overthrow him. Two chains of six spans length hang from the club, and at the end of these are iron balls, and when these aimed at the enemy they surround his neck and drag him to the ground; and in order that they may be able to use the club more easily, they do not ...
— Ideal Commonwealths • Various

... with it died not less than three times as many of the foe. And then the Com-Pub fleet came on. Most of the original force remained; surely enough to devastate an undefended nation, to shatter its cities and butcher its people; to slaughter its men and enslave its women and leave a shambles and smoking ash-heaps where the very backbone of resistance to ...
— Invasion • William Fitzgerald Jenkins

... would come during an interval of silence to a position on the road not ten feet from a darkened, camouflaged howitzer just as it would shatter the air with a deafening crash. The suddenness and unexpectedness of the detonation would make the marchers start and jump involuntarily. Upon such occasions, the gun crews would laugh heartily and indulge in good ...
— "And they thought we wouldn't fight" • Floyd Gibbons

... auction" a three-sided mirror—once the property of a great buck in the Sixth. The Duffer had got it cheap, but he never used it. The lower boys remarked to each other that Duff didn't dare to look in it, because what he would see must not only break his heart but shatter the glass. Generally, it hung, folded up, close to the window, and the Duffer said that it would come in handy ...
— The Hill - A Romance of Friendship • Horace Annesley Vachell

... expected nothing but that the entire structure would collapse like a card-house and shatter down in ruins that would be ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England

... ghastly remains fearful each instant that I should find the dainty skull that would shatter my happiness for life; but though I searched diligently, picking up every one of the twenty-odd skulls, I found none that was the skull of a creature but slightly removed from the ape. Hope, then, still lived. For another three days I searched north and ...
— The Land That Time Forgot • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... believe you, captain," I went on in a tone of some sarcasm. "Oh I do believe you! Let's forge ahead! There are no obstacles for us! Let's shatter this Ice Bank! Let's blow it up, and if it still resists, let's put wings on the Nautilus ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne

... across the trampled battle-field Unchallenged still, but wary, did they pass, By many a broken spear or shatter'd shield That in Fate's hour appointed faithless was: Only the heron cried from the morass By Xanthus' side, and ravens, and the grey Wolves left their feasting in the tangled grass, Grudging; and loiter'd, ...
— Helen of Troy • Andrew Lang

... grave and wept. For he loved his dead and felt it to be a tragic pity that the greed of money, and the fever of travel, and the petty ambitions of men whose place was in the great cities where such ambitions were born, should shatter forever the holy calm of those who had suffered so much on earth. He had known many of them in life, for he was very old; and although he believed, like all good Catholics, in heaven and purgatory and hell, yet he always saw his friends as he had buried them, peacefully asleep ...
— The Bell in the Fog and Other Stories • Gertrude Atherton

... you were not already plighted. If she had come down to say good-by it would have been much less significant. But the rose, the red, red rose! It wouldn't be a bad idea to stick it in an envelope and mail it to the girl you were telling me about—the one who sent you forth to shatter kingdoms. I guess that would jostle her a little, particularly if you were to enclose a line telling her that it had fallen to your ...
— Blacksheep! Blacksheep! • Meredith Nicholson

... make Mr. Jacks memorable as a satirist. It brings philosophy down from the air, like a peaceful thunderbolt, to shatter the vain illusions we entertain of our material success and our civilised strides forward. The fact that when you have begun to read the book you may experience some difficulty in knowing how to take it is in the book's ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton

... out counts for even more than the system itself. Once place a firm, self-confident man with the centralising spirit strong within him at the head of affairs, and he will often, without any apparent change, go far to shatter any system, however carefully it may have been devised, to encourage decentralisation. Such a man was Napoleon. Every conceivable subject bearing on the government of his fellow-men was, as M. Taine says, "classified and ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring

... from his seat and move to any part of the room as the whim seized him. In time, of course, all this was changed; but it was several days before the boy learned so to conduct himself that he did not shatter to atoms the peace and ...
— Just David • Eleanor H. Porter

... "retrogression into idolatry." There was certainly a good deal of unrest in the country during the period of the ex-monk's ascendency; no less than 13,783 persons had been banished to Siberia, and 3,756 executed at his orders. Yet nothing, it seemed, could shatter his position when, with appalling suddenness, a thunderbolt descended. Nobody knows to this day what took place. It was something Russian; some scandal in the Highest Spheres which may see the light of day, centuries hence, when the Imperial Archives are disclosed as ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas

... obstacle in the way of securing a form of society which your inclinations prefer,' and then, that first obstacle destroyed, cry, 'Halt! I go with you no further; I will not help you to piece together the life I have induced you to shatter; I will not aid you to substitute for the society that pained you the society that would please; I leave you, struggling, bewildered, maddened, in the midst of chaos within and without you'? Shall a fellow-being do this, and vanish with a ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... her had changed. In everything that he said or did, he now seemed pathetically anxious to please her, and even this was encouraging. She didn't tell Considine what had happened. She knew very well that he would consider the incident trivial and, in a few words, shatter her illusion of its significance. And this fear proved that she was not so very sure that ...
— The Tragic Bride • Francis Brett Young

... quill. Lieutenant Derby turned the searchlight of fun on the stiff formalities of army posts, on the raw conditions of alkali journalism and on the solemn humbugs of frontier politics. James Russell Lowell used dialect for dynamite to blow the front off hypocrisy or to shatter the cotton commercialism in which the New England conscience was encysted. Robert H. Newell, mirth-maker and mystic, satirized military ignorance and pinchbeck bluster to an immortality of contempt. Bret Harte in verse and story touched the parallels of tragedy and ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various

... hope—and recognised in the address the curious hand of her landlord. It contained a week's notice to quit. The tenancy of the flat was weekly. This was the last blow. All the invisible powers of London were conspiring together to shatter the profession. What in the name of the Holy Virgin had come over the astounding, incomprehensible city? Then there was a ring at the bell. Marthe? No, Marthe would never ring; she had a key and she would creep in. A lover? ...
— The Pretty Lady • Arnold E. Bennett

... they could see, and smile, and speak, but no tender touch of palm, or breath of love, or thrill of quickened heart-beat could be felt between. How many times had Allan Dunlop been tempted to outstretch his hand and shatter this glassy surface! It were easily done but at the price of possible sharp pain and aching wounds, and the greater horror of seeing the sweet grieving face on the other side shrink away from him, startled by the shock. No, he would bide his time. And ...
— An Algonquin Maiden - A Romance of the Early Days of Upper Canada • G. Mercer Adam

... rain, the rain! The rain is approaching; The dance-hall is murky, The great hall of Lono. 5 Listen! its mountain walls Are stunned with the clatter, As when in October, Heaven's thunderbolts shatter. Then follows Welehu, 10 The month of the Pleiads. Scanty the work then done, Save as one's driven. Spur comes with the sun, When day has arisen. 15 Now comes the Heaven-born; The whole land doth shake, As with an earthquake; Sleep quits then ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson

... the strongest of the Estates of Scotland, richer than any of the others, and possessing almost all the political ability of the time: on the side of England a new, scarcely recognised, but powerful influence, which was soon to attain almost complete mastery in Scotland and shatter that Church to pieces. In the beginning of James's reign this new power was but beginning to swell in the silent bosom of the country, showing here and there in a trial for heresy and in the startling fires of execution which cut off the first martyrs for the reformed faith. But there is no evidence ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant

... you, captain," I went on in a tone of some sarcasm. "Oh I do believe you! Let's forge ahead! There are no obstacles for us! Let's shatter this Ice Bank! Let's blow it up, and if it still resists, let's put wings on the ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne

... French must break through the thin lines audaciously thrust into that almost open plain on the flank of their line of march. But Alvensleben and his men held their ground with a dogged will that nothing could shatter. In one sense their audacity saved them. Bazaine for a long time could not believe that a single corps would throw itself against one of the two roads by which his great army was about to retreat. He believed that the northern road might also be in danger, ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose

... must be because the answer is worth the hard work: his Word and Spirit can interpret all his involved and mystical answers. Think with a clear head, not with any pre-formed judgment, with a heart emptied of all but a willingness to read his meaning aright, be that meaning to shatter your hopes or to give bountifully your desire—with a sincere and abiding determination to take it, come what may, and you will understand as plainly as you are understanding me. Try it and see. I have tried and I know. There may be a wound for you somewhere, but oh, ...
— Miss Prudence - A Story of Two Girls' Lives. • Jennie Maria (Drinkwater) Conklin

... shield asunder, and shatter sign and boss, Unmeet for peasant-wedded arms, your knightly knee across. And pull me down your castle from top to basement wall, And let your plough trace furrows in ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier

... breaking his heart with despair, and to this day regards Great Britain's entrance into the war as a mistake. Sir Edward Grey was agonizing to avert war; but Mr. Lloyd George was among the first to see this war as the opportunity of a nobler civilization. Destroy German militarism, shatter the Prussian tradition, sweep away dynastic autocracies, and what a world would result for ...
— The Mirrors of Downing Street - Some Political Reflections by a Gentleman with a Duster • Harold Begbie

... with the propeller would shatter it, Tema cut the switch—the propeller stopped, the motor died, and utter silence, in the midst of an utter absence of vibration, possessed the comfortable little cabin. It was hard to believe. The cabin was a breath of home. It was a home. And it was being swallowed by some ...
— Lords of the Stratosphere • Arthur J. Burks

... cave. But rather look - Ah, that the woman tattler had not sought, Of all the Gods to let her secret fly, Hermes, after the thirteen songful months! Prompting the Dexterous to work his arts, And shatter earth's delirious holiday, Then first, as where the fountain runs a stream, Resolving to composure on its throbs. But see her in the Seasons through that year; That one glad year and the fair opening month. Had never our Great Mother such sweet face! War with her, gentle war with her, each day Her ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... determined that it threatened thus brutally any voice that would disturb it. Their duty, then, was evident: to fling all the forces of their lives, and by all social and political means, right against this inertness, and shatter it if they could. To Mr. Chase, the course of things gave the larger political work; to my father, the larger social. His diary records how amazed he was, when he returned to Philadelphia, at his former blindness, and how thankful to the spirit of love that had touched and cleansed his eyes ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still

... balanced on the top of his own wall, which was higher than his neighbour's and not very strong, an enormous stone, more than enough to fill a wagon, which threatened to fall at the slightest shaking of the wall and to shatter the roof, ceilings, webs, and looms of his neighbour, who, terrified by this danger, ran to Sandro, but was answered in his very own words—namely, that he both could and would do whatever he pleased in his own house. Nor could he get any other answer out of him, so that he was forced ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 3 (of 10), Filarete and Simone to Mantegna • Giorgio Vasari

... pondus, a weight) is to beat with a heavy, and pommel with a blunt, instrument. To batter and to bruise refer to the results of beating; that is battered which is broken or defaced by repeated blows on the surface (compare synonyms for SHATTER); that is bruised which has suffered even one severe contusion. The metaphorical sense of beat, however, so far preponderates that one may be very badly bruised and battered, and yet not be said ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald

... in the course of a few days created a veritable whirlwind of false reports, hoping by that means to shatter or stifle all manifestations of patriotic feeling, and prepare Russia ...
— The Minister of Evil - The Secret History of Rasputin's Betrayal of Russia • William Le Queux

... want you to see the truth and face it. Your idealism is admirable, permanent, and shatter-proof; but your starry-eyed schoolgirl's mawkishness is none of the three. You'll have to grow up, some day. In my opinion, forcing yourself to give up one of your hardest-held ideals—virginity—merely because of the utter bilge that those idiot head-shrinkers stuffed ...
— The Galaxy Primes • Edward Elmer Smith

... burns to see The spot of thy nativity; His ardent fancy can restore Thy castle's turrets, now no more; See the tall plumes of victory wave, And call old valour from the grave; Twang the strong bow, and point the lance, That pierc'd the shatter'd hosts of France, When Europe, in the days of yore, Shook at ...
— The Banks of Wye • Robert Bloomfield

... door flashed Maximilian's escutcheon, his archducal arms grafted on the torso of his new imperial estate. There were the winged griffins with absurd scrolls for tails. They had voracious claws, had these droll beasts of prey, and they clutched at an oval frame ruthlessly, as though to shatter it and get at a certain bird within. Poor bird, his shelter looked very fragile, and he about to be smothered under an enormous diadem as under an extinguisher. He was none other than the Mexican eagle perched on his own ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle

... hideous man who wielded a big axe of copper and carried a bow longer than any I had seen in that land. Hooking the axe to his belt, he set an arrow on the bow and let drive at me. It sped true and struck me full upon the breast, only to shatter on the good French mail, which copper could ...
— The Virgin of the Sun • H. R. Haggard



Words linked to "Shatter" :   burst, shattering, bust, break



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