"Asp" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... them. But my affection for dogs has an understratum of fear. These excellent creatures, so good, so faithful, so devoted, so loving, may go mad at any moment, and then they become more dangerous than a lance-head snake, an asp, a rattlesnake or a cobra capella. This reacts on my love for dogs. Then dogs strike me as a bit uncanny; they have such a searching, intense glance; they sit down in front of you with so questioning a look that it is fairly embarrassing. Goethe disliked that glance of theirs that seems to attempt ...
— My Private Menagerie - from The Works of Theophile Gautier Volume 19 • Theophile Gautier
... us that, under the future reign of the Messiah, the wolf shall dwell with the lamb, the leopard lie down with the kid, the lion eat straw like the ox, and the child play with impunity on the hole of the asp. Isa. 11:6-8. It is possible to conceive of this state of things as effected by a change in the physical nature of all noxious animals. But the writer immediately adds: "They shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain; for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord, ...
— Companion to the Bible • E. P. Barrows
... borrowed by them from Egypt, where for many ages the sun and the moon had been studied in connection with their movements in the zodiac. In that country these serpentine movements were symbolized by the uroeus, or asp, worn upon the crown above the head of every Pharaoh. So closely was the Jewish religion connected with worship of the planetary bodies that Moses is said to have disappeared upon Mount Nebo, a word which shows the mountain to have been sacred to ...
— The Woman's Bible. • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... there dwelt, unknown to Nature, which has no sense of the ridiculous, the soul of a Cleopatra. At the moment she would cheerfully have died of an asp sooner than relinquish the study of Exodus under the eyes of the rector. In the arid stretch of her existence a great passion had flamed, and like most great passions, it was ruthless, destroying, and utterly selfish. She had made butter all day with the ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... human body than on the bodies of serpents and other animals. Now certain incantations are efficacious in checking serpents, or in healing certain other animals: wherefore it is written (Ps. 57:5): "Their madness is according to the likeness of a serpent, like the deaf asp that stoppeth her ears, which will not hear the voice of the charmers, nor of the wizard that charmeth wisely." Therefore it is lawful to wear sacred words as a ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... was raised a gory clot (23) In guise of Asp, sleep-bringing, swollen of neck: Full was the blood and thick the poison drop That were its making; in no other snake More copious held. Greedy of warmth it seeks No frozen world itself, nor haunts the sands Beyond the Nile; yet has our thirst of gain No shame nor limit, and this ...
— Pharsalia; Dramatic Episodes of the Civil Wars • Lucan
... Macdonnell, or Galasp? Those rugged names to our like mouths grow sleek, That would have made Quintilian stare and gasp. Thy age, like ours, O soul of Sir John Cheke, Hated not learning worse than toad or asp, When thou taught'st Cambridge and ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... contemptuous of imperial pow'r, Disease shall chase the phantoms of ambition, May penitence attend thy mournful bed, And wing thy latest pray'r to pitying heav'n! [Exeunt Dem. Asp. with part of ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... come to ask aid, began to exhort him especially to be loyal and offered him pardon in the king's name. God giving force to these words, Durrey changed his intention, and refused to kill the father of his spirit. But the Indian who accompanied him, shutting his ears, like an asp, to the voices of health, seeing that his chief would not do the deed, unsheathed a weapon called igua in those parts, and approached quickly in order to strike the father. But since the chiefs of the village who had come to speak with the prior on a matter of moment, ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume 41 of 55, 1691-1700 • Various
... Uncle Kit; "no doubt they will go to the quaking-asp grove, and we can git 'em to-morrow." So we returned to camp without any elk. But the next morning we went to the quaking-asp thicket, and there, sure enough, we found the same band of elk, and succeeded in killing ...
— Thirty-One Years on the Plains and In the Mountains • William F. Drannan
... for some centuries they've been telling, Crime, like an asp, I'd gladly crush Upon the threshold of my dwelling, But shall not join a purblind rush Of panic-stricken fools to play The oppressor's ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 102, May 7, 1892 • Various
... days' time. This news decided her. On the following day she was found lying dead on a golden couch in royal attire, with her two women lifeless at her feet. The manner of her death was unknown. It was generally believed that she had died by the bite of an asp, which a peasant had brought to her in a basket full of figs. She was 39 years of age at the time of her death. Egypt was made a Roman province. Octavian did not return to Rome till B.C. 29, when he celebrated a threefold triumph ...
— A Smaller History of Rome • William Smith and Eugene Lawrence
... the least philosophic of readers, who hates philosophy 'as toad or asp,' must yet be aware, that, where new growths are not germinating, it is no sort of praise to be free from the throes of growth. Where expansion is hopeless, it is little glory to have escaped distortion. Nor is it any blame that the rich fermentation of grapes should ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey
... a great gateway, leaves the view open to the sky beyond the western edge of the roof, except in the middle, where a life size image of Ra, seated on a huge plinth, towers up, with hawk head and crown of asp and disk. His altar, which stands at his feet, is a single white stone.) Now everybody can see us, nobody will think of listening to us. (He sits down on the bench left by the ...
— Caesar and Cleopatra • George Bernard Shaw
... whisperer,... thou sooty spirit from Tartarus!... I cast thee down, O Tartarean boor,... into the infernal kitchen!... Loathsome cobbler,... dingy collier,... filthy sow (scrofa stercorata),... perfidious boar,... envious crocodile,... malodorous drudge,... wounded basilisk,... rust-colored asp,... swollen toad,... entangled spider,... lousy swineherd (porcarie pedicose),... lowest of the low,... cudgelled ...
— Three Thousand Years of Mental Healing • George Barton Cutten
... groaning, but yet steady—as she uttered her last words—words poured forth like the wild dirges, the fierce death-songs of the old Goths when they died deserted on the bloody battle-field, or were cast bound into deep dungeons, a prey to the viper and the asp. Thus she spoke:— 'I swore to be avenged! while I went forth from Aquileia with the child that was killed and the child that was wounded; while I climbed the high wall in the night-time, and heard the tumult of the beating waves near the bank ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... gorgeously apparelled, though save for the white beneath, her robes were those of a queen rather than of a priestess. About her radiant brow ran a narrow band of gold, whence rose the head of a hooded asp cut out of a single, crimson jewel, beneath which in endless profusion the glorious waving hair flowed down and around, hiding even the folds of ...
— Ayesha - The Further History of She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed • H. Rider Haggard
... dignifying pain - A father's love and mortal's agony With an immortal's patience blending: —Vain The struggle; vain, against the coiling strain And gripe, and deepening of the dragon's grasp, The old man's clench; the long envenomed chain Rivets the living links,—the enormous asp Enforces pang on pang, and ...
— Childe Harold's Pilgrimage • Lord Byron
... her compliments," and went on to thank me, civilly enough, for my attendance the night before, would not give me the trouble to repeat my visit, and inclosed a fee, double the amount of the fee prescribed by custom. I flung the money, as an asp that had stung me, over the high wall, and tore the note into shreds. Having thus idly vented my rage, a dull gnawing sorrow came heavily down upon all other emotions, stifling and replacing them. At the mouth of the lane I halted. ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... buckler, and play at dice and draughts, and give no alms except to their dogs. 'Our places are taken by hawks and hounds, or by that strange creature, woman, from whom we taught our pupils to flee as from an asp or basilisk. This creature, ever jealous and implacable, spies us out in a corner hiding behind some ancient cabinet, and she wrinkles her forehead and laughs us to scorn, and points to us as the only rubbish in the house; and she complains ...
— The Great Book-Collectors • Charles Isaac Elton and Mary Augusta Elton
... accents; 'look! don't you see them?' he cried, pointing to the shapes that seemed to people the room, and trying to push them aside with a restless motion of his hands; 'don't you see them, the lares and lemures? Look, there is Cleopatra with the asp at her breast! That bosom was once beautiful, and see now what a loathsome spectacle death has made it—the very worms recoil from that corruption. See, there is Canidia, the sorceress, who buried the boy alive! Look at her hair flying loose about her head! hair, no, those ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... blooming here and there beside the path, to tempt the thoughtless one to step aside and pluck; but though they are beautiful to the eye, and their fragrance borne to us by the breeze, seems to woo us temptingly, yet, concealed within their leaves is a deadly scorpion or poisonous asp, whose sting is instant death, or some, perhaps, contain a more slow and sluggish poison, that creeps into the mind, and instilling its venom by slow degrees, corrupts the whole. Conscience has well been called the tell tale ...
— Withered Leaves from Memory's Garland • Abigail Stanley Hanna
... a brazen rattle, through the narrow lamina of which, bent like a belt, certain rods passing, produced a sharp triple sound through the vibrating motion of her arm. An oblong vessel, in the shape of a boat, depended from her left hand, on the handle of which, in that part which was conspicuous, an asp raised its erect head and largely swelling neck. And shoes, woven from the leaves of the victorious palm-tree, covered her immortal feet. Such, and so great a goddess, breathing the fragrant odor of the shores of Arabia the happy, deigned thus to ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... Cleopatra was a very favorite one among the Lagides, and of the queens who bore it she who has become famous through Shakespeare (and more lately through Makart) was the seventh, the sister and wife of Ptolemy XIV. Her tragical death from the bite of a viper or asp did not occur until 134 years later than the date of my narrative, which I have placed ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... presently he ascertained that the forest floor was not so level as he had supposed. He had entered a valley or was traversing a wide, gently sloping pass. He went through thickets of juniper, and had to go around clumps of quaking asp. The pines grew larger and farther apart. Cedars and pinyons had been left behind, and he had met with no silver spruces after leaving camp. Probably that point was the height of a divide. There were banks of snow in some of the hollows on the north side. Evidently the snow had very recently ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Campfire Stories • Various
... thorns were the only needles and pins. But from the day of that disastrous experience in the Garden, clothing, and the necessities involved in it, has been the synonym of sorrow for women, and the needle stands as the visible token of disaster, sorrow, and wrong of every order—"the asp upon the ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 21, August, 1891 • Various
... hour fixed, to conduct her away, they found only the dead body of Cleopatra stretched upon her couch, and by her side her two faithful attendants, Iris and Charmion. It is said that she died from the bite of an asp, a venomous Egyptian serpent, which had been secretly conveyed to her concealed in a basket of fruit; but ...
— Historic Tales, Volume 11 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... says Carneades, you were to know that an asp was lying hidden anywhere, and that some one who did not know it was going to sit upon it, whose death would be a gain to you, you would act wickedly if you did not warn him not to sit down. Still, you would not be liable to punishment; for who could prove that you had known? But we are bringing ...
— Cicero's Tusculan Disputations - Also, Treatises On The Nature Of The Gods, And On The Commonwealth • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... lasted for some time, was attributed to a picture which hung at the foot of his, mother's bed, and which she often looked at. It represented a Moor bringing to Cleopatra a basket of flowers, containing the asp by whose bite she destroyed herself. He said that she also told him, "You have a great deal of money about you, but it does not belong to you;" and that he had actually in his pocket two hundred Louis for the Duc de La Valliere. Lastly, he informed us that she said, looking in ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XV. and XVI., Volume 2 • Madame du Hausset, and of an Unknown English Girl and the Princess Lamballe
... heart that Becky Glibbans should never wear gloves for my marriage, I was averse to sending her any at all, but my mother insisted that no exceptions should be made. I secretly took care, however, to mark a pair for her, so much too large, that I am sure she will never put them on. The asp will be not a little vexed at the disappointment. Adieu for a time, and believe that, although your affectionate Rachel Pringle be gone that way in which she hopes you will soon follow, one not less sincerely attached ...
— The Ayrshire Legatees • John Galt
... the calf, and the young lion, and the fatling shall come together, and a little child shall lead them. And the heifer, and the she bear shall feed together, and the lion shall eat straw like the ox. And the suckling shall play upon the hole of the asp; and upon the den of the basilisk shall the new weaned child lay his hand. They shall not hurt, nor destroy in my holy mountain, for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea. And it shall come to pass in that ...
— The Grounds of Christianity Examined by Comparing The New Testament with the Old • George Bethune English
... up the letter, and, with a shudder, thrust it in her bosom, as Cleopatra might have thrust the asp which was to destroy her; then with leaden feet, she crossed the hall and opened the library door, and saw her father standing by the table clutching some papers in one hand, and gesticulating wildly with the other. Dizzily, for there seemed to be ...
— At Love's Cost • Charles Garvice
... future when she, whom her father designated as "Sunshine," should also shed a halo of sunlight around another fireside. But now the illusion was painfully dispelled, for sooner would he have taken the Egyptian asp to his bosom than chosen for a companion one whom he knew to possess ...
— Tempest and Sunshine • Mary J. Holmes
... destroyed their papers, lists of names and other incriminating evidence. The shadow of the approaching catastrophe deepened and spread rapidly around and above them as they watched and waited helplessly under the huge asp of slavery, which enraged and now completely coiled, was about to strike. The stroke fell first on Peter, Rolla, Ned, and Batteau Bennett. The last, although but a boy of eighteen, was one of the most active of the younger leaders of the plot. Vesey was not captured ...
— Right on the Scaffold, or The Martyrs of 1822 - The American Negro Academy. Occasional Papers No. 7 • Archibald H. Grimke
... must, it was always M'Adam's endeavor to betray his enemy into an unworthy expression of feeling. But James Moore, sorely tried as he often was, never gave way. He met the little man's sneers with a quelling silence, looking down on his asp-tongued antagonist with such a contempt flashing from his blue-gray eyes as hurt ...
— Bob, Son of Battle • Alfred Ollivant
... an asp. He knew it was from the descriptions he had read of such creatures, and then the desire to throw it off—as far as he could, came over him, and his nerve ...
— Yussuf the Guide - The Mountain Bandits; Strange Adventure in Asia Minor • George Manville Fenn
... Progressive Front or NPF (includes the Ba'th Party, ASU, Arab Socialist Party, Socialist Unionist Democratic Party, ASP, SCP) [President Bashar al-ASAD]; Arab Socialist Renaissance (Ba'th) Party (governing party) [Bashar al-ASAD, secretary general of the party, and chairman of the National Progressive Front after the death of Hafiz al-ASAD ...
— The 2001 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... beauty, this noblest of all empresses, was marked to be stricken down by the red hand of anarchy, to whose crime, and poison, and danger we open our national ports with an unwisdom which is criminal stupidity, and of which we shall inevitably reap the benefit. America cannot warm the asp of anarchy in her bosom without expecting it ...
— Abroad with the Jimmies • Lilian Bell
... next tried venomous animals, and watched with her own eyes whilst they were applied, one creature to the body of another. This was her daily practice, and she pretty well satisfied herself that nothing was comparable to the bite of the asp, which, without convulsion or groaning, brought on a heavy drowsiness and lethargy, with a gentle sweat on the face, the senses being stupefied by degrees; the patient, in appearance, being sensible of no pain, but rather troubled ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... morning dew-drops, but the silver setting of the past generation; her arms were bare, round, but slender rather than large, in keeping with her lithe round figure. On her wrists she wore bracelets: one was a circlet of enamelled scales; the other looked as if it might have been Cleopatra's asp, with its body turned to gold and its, eyes ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... love!" resumed she. "It is one draught,—a jewel fused in nectar; drink the pearl and bring the asp!" ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... be he in never so great company of men and of people, and busieth to slay him, and passeth all difficulties and spaces of ways, and with wreak of the said death of his mate. And is not let, ne put off, but it be by swift flight, or by waters or rivers. Marcianus saith that the asp grieveth not men of Africa or Moors; for they take their children that they have suspect, and put them to these adders: and if the children be of their kind, this adder grieveth them not, and if they be of other kind, anon they die by venom ...
— Mediaeval Lore from Bartholomew Anglicus • Robert Steele
... the young lion shall feed together; And a little child shall lead them. And the cow and the bear shall make friends; Their young ones shall lie down together; And the lion shall eat straw like the ox. And the sucking child shall play on the hole of the asp, And the weaned child shall stretch out his hand to the serpent's eye. None shall do evil or act corruptly in all my holy mountain, For the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters ...
— Stories of the Prophets - (Before the Exile) • Isaac Landman |
