"Fictitious" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... respecting this cause which so deeply interests us—which we seek with so much ardour, we have recourse to our imagination; this, disturbed with alarm, enervated by fear, becomes a suspicious, a fallacious guide: we create chimeras, fictitious causes, to whom we give the credit, to whom we ascribe the honour of those phenomena by which we have been so much alarmed. It is to this disposition of the human mind that must be attributed, as will be seen ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 1 • Baron D'Holbach
... observations, comes nearer the earth than the [Symbol: Sun] and is again eftsoons aloft in Jupiter's orb; and [3088]other sufficient reasons, far above the moon: exploding in the meantime that element of fire, those fictitious first watery movers, those heavens I mean above the firmament, which Delrio, Lodovicus Imola, Patricius, and many of the fathers affirm; those monstrous orbs of eccentrics, and Eccentre Epicycles deserentes. Which howsoever Ptolemy, Alhasen, ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... European in America. But we may derive some faint notion of them from analogy. France was formerly a country in which numerous distinctions of rank existed, that had been created by the legislation. Nothing can be more fictitious than a purely legal inferiority; nothing more contrary to the instinct of mankind than these permanent divisions which had been established between beings evidently similar. Nevertheless these divisions subsisted for ages; they still subsist in many places; and on ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... adventures of the real Jonathan, so far as we know them, are not much like those of the fictitious. True, the real Jonathan's married life was unhappy, though his quarrel with his wife did not follow so hard upon his wedding as the quarrel of Fielding's hero and the chaste Laetitia. Not until a year from his marriage did the real Jonathan separate ...
— The History of the Life of the Late Mr. Jonathan Wild the Great • Henry Fielding
... to His mind in that awful hour as if they were His own. This is utterly unscriptural. Where is the single text from which it can be, except by force, extracted? Besides this, it is fanciful and sentimental; and again it is dangerous, for it represents the whole Atonement as a fictitious and shadowy transaction. There is a mental state in which men have felt the burthen of sins which they did not commit. There have been cases in which men have been mysteriously excruciated with the thought of having committed the unpardonable sin. But to represent ...
— Sermons Preached at Brighton - Third Series • Frederick W. Robertson
... she composed the little book which bears the title of Mary, a Fiction. A considerable part of this story consists, with certain modifications, of the incidents of her own friendship with Fanny. All the events that do not relate to that subject are fictitious. ...
— Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman • William Godwin
... a large Western paper, who enclosed a clipping from his last review for my perusal. It treated, not of "The Gates Ajar" just then, but of a magazine story in "Harper's," the "Century," or wherever. The story was told in the first person fictitious, and ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. VI., No. 6, May, 1896 • Various
... to bring history within the limits of evidence. In early life he exploded the story of Peter the Hermit and his influence on the Crusades, and in the same capacity it was he who exposed the fabrication of the queen's letters. Indeed he was so sturdy a critic that he scorned to read the fictitious Hardenberg, although the work contains good material. He more than shared the unspiritual temper of the school, and fearing alike the materialistic and the religious basis of history, he insisted on confining it to affairs of state. Having a better ...
— Lectures on the French Revolution • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... himself dared not lay his hand on the liberty of the British Press; and so we find Mr Pasquin reappearing under the guise, or in the company, of the Champion and Censor of Great Britain, otherwise one Captain Hercules Vinegar, a truculent avenger of wrong and exponent of virtue, in whose fictitious name a political, literary, and didactic newspaper entered the field of party politics on November 15, 1739. The paper, under the title of the Champion, was issued three times a week, and consisted of one ...
— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden
... Spirit's proceedings is given in Bye-Gones, Vol. ii, p. 179, and the writer's fictitious ...
— Welsh Folk-Lore - a Collection of the Folk-Tales and Legends of North Wales • Elias Owen
... it was, his aversion to religion, in the sense usually attached to the term, was of the same kind with that of Lucretius: he regarded it with the feelings due not to a mere mental delusion, but to a great moral evil. He looked upon it as the greatest enemy of morality: first, by setting up fictitious excellences—belief in creeds, devotional feelings, and ceremonies, not connected with the good of human-kind—and causing these to be accepted as substitutes for genuine virtues: but above all, by radically vitiating the standard of morals; ...
— Autobiography • John Stuart Mill
... it in a fictitious transaction," said the cadi, relenting. "Suppose—I'll tell you what I'll do. I'll sell you all that snow in ...
— Best Short Stories • Various
... somewhat conventionally Saxon names of William Tompkins and John Johnson. These gentlemen set forth, in terms vaguer than can be reproduced, that her object in coming to America was to get money to go back to Italy; and the whole document had so fictitious an air that it made us doubt even the nationality of the bearer; but we were put to shame by the decent joy she manifested in an Italian salutation. There was no longer a question of imposture in anybody's mind; we gladly paid ...
— Suburban Sketches • W.D. Howells
... Masonry is an imputed Satanism, and as to any actual Devil-Worship he reproduces as true the clever story of Aut Diabolus aut Nihil, which appeared originally in "Blackwood's Magazine," and has since been reprinted by its author, who states, what most people know already, that it is entirely fictitious. ...
— Devil-Worship in France - or The Question of Lucifer • Arthur Edward Waite
... Cain narrated his fictitious disasters, but said nothing about his wound, the neglect of which would certainly have occasioned his death a very few days after he appeared at the trial, had he not fallen by ...
— The Pirate and The Three Cutters • Frederick Marryat
... resolution to warn his ally never to say one word more about his fictitious past than was wrung by cross-examination, the distinguished-looking Austrian shook ...
— Count Bunker • J. Storer Clouston
... only their being there that kept Dean from making a scene. There was nothing in his manner toward her now of the obsequious chauffeur. While she admitted to herself that there was no longer the necessity for his continuing in his fictitious character she strongly resented his loverlike jealousy for her welfare and welcomed the chief's return, for she saw from his face, as he came running up to the car, that he had received some sort of news that had ...
— The Apartment Next Door • William Andrew Johnston
... land were located under fictitious boundaries, and not only the Continental soldiers, but also the States and the United States were thus swindled by these officers, who had been long honored ...
— School History of North Carolina • John W. Moore
... eagerly in the affirmative. He was terribly embarrassed under his fictitious name, and shrank before the honest, open gaze of the young artist, and his mental disturbance was completed by seeing in one corner of the room the picture covered with a green cloth, which Tantaine had alluded to. It was evident that the old villain had told the truth, and that his ...
— The Champdoce Mystery • Emile Gaboriau
... letter for a few days, till I knew whether it was in my power to give you satisfaction. Upon inquiry, and having conversed with some who could inform me, I find it would be very difficult to obtain so peremptory an order for dismissing fictitious invalids (as I think they may properly be called), as you seem to think the state of the case requires; by any interposition of mine, quite impossible. Very difficult I am told it would be to get ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... expressly assert, that in which it consists is not the same. And as consistently with themselves they cannot, so I think it appears they do not mean that the person is really the same, but only that he is so in a fictitious sense; in such a sense only as they assert—for this they do assert—that any number of persons whatever may be the same person. The bare unfolding of this notion, and laying it thus naked and open, seems ...
— Life and Habit • Samuel Butler
... understand that. You know the worst now, and you have nothing more to anticipate. I have no right to inquire into your personal feelings, but I should say that you cared very little for your mother, and less for your brother, and that hitherto you had been animated by a sort of fictitious sense of responsibility. That has ceased, and you feel like ...
— Paul Patoff • F. Marion Crawford
... have one that will. I quote that great authority, William Makepeace Thackeray, who tells us in Vanity Fair that a novelist is supposed to know everything, and am I not treating the subject as a novelist, using for the most part fictitious names and places to shield from public ridicule the good people whose judgment may seem weak, and actions exaggerated, in the temperature of cold type scanned by prudent, judicial-minded readers? Icebergs will boil under certain conditions. Human beings, I find, ...
— Cupid's Middleman • Edward B. Lent
... paper-credit, on whose foundation the deluded province built its visionary fabric of great wealth, was not only useless, but prejudicial with respect to the community. Paper-money in such large quantities is the bane of commerce, a kind of fictitious wealth, making men by high founding language imagine they are worth thousands and millions, while a ship's load of it would not procure for the country a regiment of auxiliary troops in time of war, nor ...
— An Historical Account Of The Rise And Progress Of The Colonies Of South Carolina And Georgia, Volume 2 • Alexander Hewatt
... dear, South America!" came flatly upon her announcement. It lacked the upward ring, and his eye did not kindle, his voice did not warm. He himself felt the fictitious inflection, for he added hastily, with happier effect: "It's a wonderful chance, dearest, isn't it?" His voice by then had gained in heartiness, and his smile, always worshipful when turned on her, contained this time something of apology. So close were they, though, in thought, spoken or ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... He took to the post-office a packet of 114 letters, which he said were "ship letters," from the "Mary and Jane." He received the postage, and signed the receipt "W. Johnstone." The letters were fictitious. The case was fully proved, and he received sentence of death. He was respited for a fortnight, and afterwards during the pleasure of the Prince Regent. He was struck off the list of retired {574} rear-admirals. ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 189, June 11, 1853 • Various
... deal of each other, and every Sunday after church the mothers walked home together and the young people followed behind. Ralph spoke of his ill-health, and Kate pitied him, and when he complimented her on her beautiful hair she blushed with pleasure. For much as she had revelled in fictitious sentiment, she had somehow never thought of seeking it in nature, and how that she had found a lover, the critical sense was not strong enough in her to lead her to compare reality with imagination. She accepted Ralph as unsuspectingly as she hitherto accepted the tawdry poetry of her ...
— A Mummer's Wife • George Moore
... to Nick, there were many among the detectives who had been detailed upon the case who insisted that there was no such person as Hobo Harry. It was their belief that the name was merely a fictitious one, to which the hoboes, one and all, ...
— A Woman at Bay - A Fiend in Skirts • Nicholas Carter
... shews how little credit is to be paid to Ctesias. The whole account of the fleet of ships built in Bactria, and carried upon camels to the Indus, is a childish forgery. How can we suppose, that there were no woods to construct such vessels, but in the most inland regions of Asia? The story of the fictitious elephants, made out of the hides of black oxen, which put to flight the real elephants, is another silly fable. Megasthenes, who wrote of India, would not allow that Semiramis was ever in those [922]parts. Arrian seems to speak of it as a groundless [923]surmise. Her building of Babylon ...
— A New System; or, an Analysis of Antient Mythology. Volume II. (of VI.) • Jacob Bryant
... was the impression made on the mind of Frances by the society which she was in the habit of seeing and hearing, that she began to write little fictitious narratives as soon as she could use her pen with ease, which, as we have said, was not very early. Her sisters were amused by her stories; but Dr. Burney knew nothing of their existence; and in another quarter her literary propensities met with serious discouragement. When she was fifteen, ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... marriage contract, in which the young man arrogates to himself all kinds of fictitious titles of nobility, has been read to the assembled company (composed, say, of the elite of the noble immigrants at the time of the French Revolution), there is heard suddenly the pipe of the bear-leader, who enters the garden with his prancing beast. Angered by this trivial diversion, ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... as to extend over ten pages of the volume. It ends with a reiteration of the wholly false manner in which this story had been obtained. So bold an appropriation of the narrative, with a provenience entirely new and as fictitious as the story itself, and its bodily inclusion by an editor in a work of recognized merit, where it is between two ...
— The Isle Of Pines (1668) - and, An Essay in Bibliography by W. C. Ford • Henry Neville
... mutual attachment was never relinquished. Wiser than her stepbrother, she knew that a house divided against itself must fall; she therefore approved, forcefully if without conviction, of his every word and deed. Such approval did him good. It created a fictitious self-esteem. And this was really rather unfortunate, since self-esteem, by giving him a sense of importance and consequence in the world, rendered him a good deal more objectionable to his fellow-creatures than he need ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... so sad, indeed, for they want the reality of sadness; but quite as perplexing, and generally less satisfactory. What novelist, what Fielding, what Scott, what George Sand, or Sue, or Duncan, can impart an interest to the last chapter of his fictitious history? Promises of two children and superhuman happiness are of no avail, nor assurance of extreme respectability carried to an age far exceeding that usually allotted to mortals. The sorrows of our heroes and heroines, they are you delight, oh public! their sorrows, ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... the veranda. I knew the rocky trail that climbed the mountain to the springs, twisting between giant boulders. I knew the arid garden, deep in the wayside dust, with its hurriedly planted tropical plants, already withering in the dry autumn sunshine, and washed into fictitious freshness, night and morning by the hydraulic irrigating-hose. I knew, too, the cool, reposeful night winds that swept down from invisible snow-crests beyond, with the hanging out of monstrous stars, that too often failed to bring repose to the feverish guests. ...
— Stories in Light and Shadow • Bret Harte
... duties"; the minute and nerve-destroying precision of their housekeeping; their unnecessary overloading of themselves with tasks futile and fictitious; the determination to "appear" a little better than their neighbors, and, above all, to have their children (their one or two children) particularly spick and span; the long catalogue of folly into which our high-geared, modern civilization has led our women, and through no ...
— The Young Man and the World • Albert J. Beveridge
... mode: you don't want Verdi in one of Beethoven's symphonies; you don't want Mozart in Rossini's operas. No art ever has lived that was not the genuine product of the era in which it appeared; no art ever can live that is not such a product: it may, perchance, have a temporary or fictitious success, but it can neither really and truly exert an influence at the moment of its highest triumph, nor afterwards remain a power among men, unless it reflect the spirit of the epoch, unless it show the very age and body of the time his ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... cloth, and many were in skins of wild animals, with their heads fantastically ornamented with the horns of goats or antelopes. The sorcerers were an important element. These rascals, who are the curse of the country, were, as usual, in a curious masquerade with fictitious beards manufactured with a number of bushy ...
— Ismailia • Samuel W. Baker
... presided, were never furnished by the supernumeraries of Drury or Covent-garden. They were as classical, in their way, as Macready's Roman mob. Then there was no make-believe puffing of empty pipes, and fictitious drinking of small-beer for punch; every nose among the audience could appreciate the genuineness of both liquor and tobacco; and the hearty encore which the song, with its stentorian chorus, was honoured with, gave all the parties ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... shades are deepened, And I doff my hat and gloves, No sweet bird is there to "cheep and Twitter twenty million loves:" No dark-ringleted canaries Sing to me of "hungry foam;" No imaginary "Marys" Call fictitious "cattle home." ...
— Verses and Translations • C. S. C.
... as at the time no public record of proceedings was kept and Parliament did not allow the press the liberty it now possesses—all being as it were clouded in mysterious awe—these reports of debates were eagerly sought after. To evade the law, a fictitious name was given the speaker, or his initials used in such a way that the individual could be easily recognized ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... on his bicycle off the scene of the one real melodrama of a life spent in inventing fictitious ones; and if you ask what he had to show for his part in it, you may get your answer one day from his work. Not from the masterpiece which he used to talk over with Mrs. Steel, for it will never be written; not from ...
— The Shadow of the Rope • E. W. Hornung
... is known in Japan about the history of the Japanese waltzing mice, but I am sorry to say that the results are wholly negative. I cannot find any account of the origin of this freak, either authentic or fictitious, and, strange as it may seem to you, no study of the mice in a modern sense has been made, so you may consider the literature on the mouse in the Japanese language as absolutely nil." In explanation of this somewhat surprising ignorance of ...
— The Dancing Mouse - A Study in Animal Behavior • Robert M. Yerkes
... permission of his will, or out of sight of that aesthetic self-culture, that development, which really seems to have been his prevailing passion. A strong histrionic vein mixes, too, with his more imaginative mental qualities, and perpetually reveals itself in his assumption of fictitious characters, in his desire for producing "situations" in his daily life, and in his conscious "effects" upon those whom he sought ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... me ... back from England to Philadelphia." If the remark referred to an affection for Miss Read, it was probably no more trustworthy than are most such allegations made when lapsing years have given a fictitious coloring to a remote past. If indeed Franklin's profligacy and his readiness to marry any girl financially eligible were symptoms attendant upon his being in love, it somewhat taxes the imagination to fancy how he would have conducted ...
— Benjamin Franklin • John Torrey Morse, Jr.
... object lesson of real youth Sears' fictitious imitation seemed cheap and shoddy. He leaned heavily upon his cane as he hobbled ...
— Fair Harbor • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... spread almost automatically and quite invariably from camp to hostile camp, so that what is believed on one side largely affects belief on the other, is one of the fixed data on which much depends. The issue openly of fictitious orders, cancelled by cypher messages, is another available means of throwing a cloud over what is being done. The art lies in applying these well-known principles to the particular case to be dealt with. ...
— History of the War in South Africa 1899-1902 v. 1 (of 4) - Compiled by Direction of His Majesty's Government • Frederick Maurice
... performed by the bones of one Arnold a man of their sect who had been dead sixteen years, and they also accused the good religious who exposed their impostures of heresy. Such is the mode adopted by certain sectarians; they endeavored to establish their false doctrine by fictitious miracles; while they insolently refused credence to those which the Catholic Church admitted as certain; and all have sufficient audacity to treat as heretics the orthodox who prove them to be ...
— The Life and Legends of Saint Francis of Assisi • Father Candide Chalippe
... glass could fall on his face. It had changed as his voice had now changed, and she saw that she was looking at the man who in those other days of stress and trial had posed as "Gaston Merode," brother to the fictitious ...
— Cleek, the Master Detective • Thomas W. Hanshew
... never pleased in being moved at the distress of a tragedy, without a cool reflection that though these fictitious personages were so unhappy, yet he himself was perfectly at ease and in safety. The ingenious author of the Reflections Critiques sur la Poesie et sur la Peinture accounts for it by the general delight which the mind takes in its own activity, and the abhorrence it feels ...
— Poetical Works of Akenside - [Edited by George Gilfillan] • Mark Akenside
... credit to that entire separation of the two modes of feeling, moral and religious, which encounters us frequently in the middle ages, and constantly in the Pagan world? Surely a fact like this, learned from historical testimony, has a value of its own, other and greater than any fictitious representation which an artist might supply. But even this fictitious representation, as we have said, would grow null and void if not upheld by the independent testimony of history; the past would become the attendant shadow ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • Various
... nation. What was it to me? Why should I care for customs and conventionalities which I at heart despised, even outside the levelling influence of love? But under that influence, less did I care to respect them. In the eyes of Love, rank loses its fictitious charm—titles seem trivial things. For me, Beauty ...
— The Quadroon - Adventures in the Far West • Mayne Reid
... This fictitious gaiety and good-humour, though it baffled his hope of extorting from her an acknowledgment of which he might have taken immediate advantage, nevertheless encouraged him to observe, as the chariot passed along the Strand, that the night was far advanced; ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... affection. Our mightiest feelings, are always those which remain most unspoken. The most intense lovers and the greatest poets have generally, I think, written very little personal love-poetry, while they have shown in fictitious characters a knowledge of the passion too painfully intimate to be spoken of in the ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... who suppose this infinitive to be "governed by another verb, understood: as, 'He desired nothing more than to see his friends;' that is, 'than he desired to see,' &c."—Ingersoll's Gram., p. 244; Weld's Abridged, 124. But obvious as is the ambiguity of this fictitious example, in all its forms, not one of these five critics perceived the fault at all. Again, in their remark above cited, Ingersoll, Fisk, and Merchant, put a comma before the preposition "after," and thus make the phrase, "after a comparison," describe the place of the infinitive. But Murray ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... fictitious characters alone is committed the task of representing the spirit of the age. The Roman emperor, Honorius, and the Gothic king, Alaric, mix but little personally in the business of the story—only appearing in such events, and acting under ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... a short fictitious narrative placed (thrown) beside something which it is intended ...
— Orthography - As Outlined in the State Course of Study for Illinois • Elmer W. Cavins
... been given under protest, and that its primary intention has been to deal with those well-meaning critics who believe that Chesterton can write fiction, in the ordinary sense of the word. His own excellent definition of fictitious narrative (in The Victorian Age in Literature) is that essentially "the story is told . . . for the sake of some study of the difference between human beings." This alone is enough to exculpate him of the charge of writing novels. ...
— G. K. Chesterton, A Critical Study • Julius West
... that there is not a fictitious name nor place in the whole volume; but that names and places are literally given, and that every transaction therein described ...
— My Bondage and My Freedom • Frederick Douglass
... to be won by gentle means; and I began to despair of success, so much as to give over all attempts that way, when I was told she was in custody of an officer of the compter, on account of some debts she had contracted:—on this your uncle put it into my head to charge her with several actions in fictitious names; so that being incapable of procuring bail, and going to be carried to prison, when I sent a person to her with an offer to discharge her from all her present incumbrances, on condition she gave up the contract, which I assured her, at the same time, she would ...
— Life's Progress Through The Passions - Or, The Adventures of Natura • Eliza Fowler Haywood
... relegated the realities of moral discipline and goodness to a secondary and subordinate place,—as a mere sequel to follow, almost mechanically and of course, on an act or feeling which had nothing moral in it,—which substituted a fictitious and imputed righteousness for an inherent and infused and real one, seemed to him to confound the eternal foundations of right and wrong, and to be a blasphemy against all that was true ...
— The Oxford Movement - Twelve Years, 1833-1845 • R.W. Church
... garden-gate, upon which he set off alone as fast as his legs would carry him; and being pursued, was not overtaken until he was through the Lawn House Archway, when he was still going on at full speed—I can't conceive where. Being brought back in triumph, he made a number of fictitious starts, for the sake of being overtaken again, and we made a regular game of it. At last, when he and Ally had run away, instead of running after them, we came into the garden, shut the gate, and crouched down on the ground. Presently we heard them come back and say to each other ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 1 (of 3), 1833-1856 • Charles Dickens
... to the laws of life, not of death, nor to the fiction of the poets, however beautiful it may be. But can the fictitious be beautiful? Is there no beauty in the stern truth of life, in the mighty work of its wise laws, which subjects to itself with great disinterestedness the movements of the heavenly luminaries, as well as the restless linking of the tiny creatures ...
— The Crushed Flower and Other Stories • Leonid Andreyev
... characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is ...
— Anything You Can Do ... • Gordon Randall Garrett
... literature as it is intolerable for the purposes of history.' 'It hinders,' he goes on, 'it hinders us from seeing more than one single point, the culminating and exceptional point; the summary, fictitious and arbitrary, of a thought and of a work. It substitutes a halo for a physiognomy, it puts a statue where there was once a man, and hiding from us all trace of the labour, the attempts, the weaknesses, the failures, it claims not study but veneration; it does not show us how the thing ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... ensnare the Christians. This enchantress, decked out with all the charms beauty and toilet can bestow, soon appears in the Christian camp, where, falling at Godfrey's feet, she proceeds to relate a tale of fictitious wrongs, claiming to be heiress of the city of Damascus, whence she has been ejected, and vowing if she could only secure the aid of a few knights she would soon recover her realm. In return for such aid as she implores from the Christians, she promises to ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... which great issues might depend. Then, placing the Regency in her hands was an unchecked temptation, and must be counted as one of Napoleon's great mistakes. Imbued with an abundant share of Austrian predilection, and occupying a mechanical or fictitious position towards France and its ruler, and in view of her subsequent conduct, it is a reasonable assumption that during the Regency she conveyed important information of military movements and intentions to the Austrian Court, which it was not slow to take advantage ...
— The Tragedy of St. Helena • Walter Runciman
... did Luther continue this medieval fiction of God's nature and character, he had also always in mind a fictitious and constructed "man." Man for him is a being devoid of "merit," a creature whose personal {12} goodness in and of itself is of no value. Even Faith itself, by which salvation is received, is not an attitude or function of man's own will ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... with the Vindictives in a way that was entirely unostentatious, but that burned his bridges. He pressed forward the organization of a new State government in Louisiana under Federal auspices. He wrote to Michael Hahn, the newly chosen governor of this somewhat fictitious State: "I congratulate you on having fixed your name in history as the first Free State ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... individual, and still more so for a nation, to lose the illusions of youth, if not of innocence, and to awake to the knowledge of an unbeautiful reality, bereft of all fictitious adornment. When, however, the naked truth can be discovered—and that is seldom the case—it must be faced; if the national or individual mind cannot receive it, the fault lies with the immaturity or morbid condition of the former, not with ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... students of Michael Angelo is nevertheless inestimable. We read now for the first time what the greatest man of the sixteenth century actually wrote, and are able to enter, without the interference of a fictitious veil, into the shrine of his own thought and feeling. His sonnets form the best commentary on Michael Angelo's solitary life and on his sublime ideal of art. This reflection has guided me in the choice of those now offered ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... does not mean a coloured person; any one born in the West Indies of pure white parents is a Creole); they certainly seemed to get drunk more than was necessary, yet the impression left on one's mind was not unlike that produced by the purely fictitious Ireland of Charles Lever's novels: one continual round of junketing, feasting, and practical jokes; and what gave the pictures additional piquancy was the knowledge that death was all the while peeping round the corner, and that Yellow Jack might at any moment touch ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton
... that some of these discourses are purely fictitious. He may have reported the substance of others correctly, but it is clear from the internal evidence that he has preserved no more than the substance. His own peculiar habits of thought and expression are everywhere discernible. Individual and national peculiarities are seldom to be traced ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 2 (of 4) - Contributions To The Edinburgh Review • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... the ladies[257] were going away, Dr. Johnson would stand up. He insisted that politeness was of great consequence in society. 'It is, (said he,) fictitious benevolence[258]. It supplies the place of it amongst those who see each other only in publick, or but little. Depend upon it, the want of it never fails to produce something disagreeable to one or other. I have always applied to good breeding, ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... lapse into wickedness. Sarah did not wonder at this in the least. Had she been a great lady, she would have done the same. She began to coquet with this seductive fellow, and to hint to him that she had too much knowledge of the world to set a fictitious value upon virtue. He mistook her artfulness for innocence, and thought he had made a conquest. Moreover, the girl was pretty, and when dressed properly, would look well. Only one obstacle stood in the way of their loves—the dashing ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... when had the Commander held closer the affection of his troops than in that ill-starred campaign into Maryland, which left the moral victory of a superb fight in McClellan's hands? No, the charm lay deeper still, beyond all the fictitious aids of fortune—somewhere in that serene and noble presence he had met one evening as the gray dusk closed, riding alone on an old road between level fields. After this it was always as a high figure against a low horizon that he had seen the ...
— The Battle Ground • Ellen Glasgow
... though the descent becomes sharper as the hills approach the coast. Viewed from the sea-board the outline of the chain is on either side sharply defined, and forms a prominent and shapely feature in the landscape. From the low-lying central flats of the county the Mendips have a quite fictitious impressiveness. Nowhere does their altitude reach 1100 ft., and their ridge-like summit is nothing but an extended plateau, in places from 2 to 3 m. wide. They have, however, even on the top a certain picturesqueness, for the undulating tableland is relieved by copses, and diversified ...
— Somerset • G.W. Wade and J.H. Wade
... pictures of shepherd life presented in the faded copies of Theocritus and Virgil that had so long satisfied the English readers of poetry. There was no unreality in Goldsmith's design. They were not fictitious and "lucrative" tears that he shed. For his object was to portray an English rural village in its ideality—rural loveliness—enshrining rural innocence and joy—and to show how man's vices, invading it from the outside, might bring all to ruin. Crabbe's purpose was different. ...
— Crabbe, (George) - English Men of Letters Series • Alfred Ainger
... alone presided in his tongue, a steadiness of conduct the more to be commended, as no man had stronger likings or aversions. His veracity was, indeed, from the most trivial to the most solemn occasions, strict, even to severity; he scorned to embellish a story with fictitious circumstances, which, he used to say, took off from its real value. "A story," says Johnson, "should be a specimen of life and manners; but if the surrounding circumstances are false, as it is no more a representation of reality, it is no longer ...
— Anecdotes of the late Samuel Johnson, LL.D. - during the last twenty years of his life • Hester Lynch Piozzi
... of guarding against the discovery of friends or employers, and enhancing the interest of an assumed character, by attaching a high-sounding name to its representative, these geniuses assume fictitious names, which are not the least amusing part of the play-bill of a private theatre. Belville, Melville, Treville, Berkeley, Randolph, Byron, St. Clair, and so forth, are among the humblest; and the less imposing titles of Jenkins, Walker, Thomson, Barker, Solomons, ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... who is good is happy. Let the loud Artillery of heaven break through a cloud, And dart its thunder at him, he'll remain Unmoved, and nobler comfort entertain, In welcoming the approach of death, than Vice E'er found in her fictitious paradise. Time mocks our youth, and (while we number past Delights, and raise our appetite to taste Ensuing) brings us to unflatter'd age, Where we are left to satisfy the rage Of threat'ning death: pomp, beauty, wealth, ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... sentiments or human actions; we place it with the fairest and the noblest progeny which judgment propagates by conjunction with learning; but Othello is the vigorous and vivacious offspring of observation impregnated by genius. Cato affords a splendid exhibition of artificial and fictitious manners, and delivers just and noble sentiments, in diction easy, elevated, and harmonious, but its hopes and fears communicate no vibration to the heart; the composition refers us only to the writer; we pronounce the name of Cato, but we ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume V: Miscellaneous Pieces • Samuel Johnson
... in plumes of fictitious greatness, and might have played princess in disguise if I had had time; but I had only two deaths in the old theater—this man up stairs, and the man without clothes, who lay alone in that back room, and after the amputation ...
— Half a Century • Jane Grey Cannon Swisshelm
... through his devices, and had suspected his intentions? Would they not, in that case, have realised that our suspicions were aroused? and might they not have merely feigned to have fallen into Joe's trap, and have confided to him a purely fictitious statement of their plans, concocted for the express purpose of throwing us off our guard and leading us astray? Taking into account the deep guile that had prompted them to adopt and consistently ...
— The Cruise of the "Esmeralda" • Harry Collingwood
... Should a sharp line be put between the two, as though the one class, with the period it belonged to, were characterized by the errors and anachronisms of its history; the other by simplicity and accuracy; the one, by books written under fictitious names; the other, by the power to distinguish truth from falsehood or by honesty of purpose? Should the one be a sign of the want of truthfulness and discernment; the other, of religious simplicity? Can this aggregation of the Apocrypha over against ...
— The Canon of the Bible • Samuel Davidson
... actual in our present social condition, maintained throughout its pages. Such a relation is manifested, in very various ways, in every novel of distinguished excellence. The object of all alike is the same—to exhibit and establish, by means of a narrative more or less fictitious, the really true and enduring elements in the complicated or contradictory phenomena of a period or a character. The poetic truthfulness of the immortal Don Quixote lies not so much in the absurdities of an effete ...
— Debit and Credit - Translated from the German of Gustav Freytag • Gustav Freytag
... distinctions of rank, she talked freely and wisely on many topics, and proved herself in manner and conversation the peer of the first woman in England. Mrs. Mott did not manifest the slightest restraint or embarrassment during that marked social occasion. No fictitious superiority ever oppressed her, neither did she descend in familiar surroundings from her natural dignity, but always maintained the perfect equilibrium of respect ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... obliged if you or any of your correspondents will inform me who were the writers in Knight's Quarterly Magazine, bearing the following fictitious signatures:—1. Marmaduke Villars; 2. Davenant Cecil; 3. Tristram Merton; 4. Irvine Montagu; 5. Gerard Montgomery; 6. Henry Baldwin; 7. Joseph Haller; 8. Peter Ellis; 9. Paterson Aymer; 10. Eustace Heron; 11. Edward ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 223, February 4, 1854 • Various
... so many visitors to the scene that it is no news to say that the account of the water-slide is fictitious. This word is deliberately chosen instead of 'exaggerated,' which is often applied to Mr Blackmore's picture of the fall; for he was not describing scenery—he was setting a scene in his novel, and there was no reason why he should be bound to inches, or even feet! And this argument ...
— Devon, Its Moorlands, Streams and Coasts • Rosalind Northcote
... Californians by unconscious absorption, and put both of them into his tales alive." That is, perhaps, the final comment. Much could be urged against Harte's stories: the glamor they throw over the life they depict is largely fictitious; their pathetic endings are obviously stylized; their technique is overwhelmingly derivative. Nevertheless, so excellent a critic as Chesterton maintained that "There are more than nine hundred and ninety-nine excellent reasons which we could all have for admiring the work of ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... and his auditors, and excepting the adventures of the chair, which form the machinery of the work, nothing in the ensuing pages can be termed fictitious. The author, it is true, has sometimes assumed the license of filling up the outline of history with details for which he has none but imaginative authority, but which, he hopes, do not violate nor give a false coloring to the truth. He believes that, in this respect, his ...
— Grandfather's Chair • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... entertained them on the screen. Then in Great Britain the exhibitors came to realize that the added interest that would come of having the various artists known to the public by name would mean an increase in the box-office receipts, and they began to give out fictitious names for such favorites as Mary Pickford, Florence Turner, and Mary Fuller. This opened the eyes of some of the manufacturers to the wisdom of giving on the films the names of the players as well as the names of the characters represented by them, and the Edison studio, ...
— Writing the Photoplay • J. Berg Esenwein and Arthur Leeds
... despicable was the condition of a coward, in those times of general heroism, that death itself appeared the more preferable choice. Nay, such was the rage of fighting for women, that it became customary for those who could not be honored with the decision of their real quarrels, to create fictitious ones concerning them, in order to create also ...
— Sketches of the Fair Sex, in All Parts of the World • Anonymous
... who write in my Way (whatever View they may set out with) can, in the Prosecution of their Works, forbear to dress their fictitious Characters in the real Ornaments themselves have ...
— Life And Adventures Of Peter Wilkins, Vol. I. (of II.) • Robert Paltock
... and are agreeably united to our bodies, and that, when they are separated, they are from all parts carried together into the air, and from thence return to second generations. And what hinders but that [Greek omitted] twentieth should intimate that this was not a true story, but only probable and fictitious [Greek omitted], and that the lot fell casually [Greek omitted]. For Plato always toucheth upon three causes, he being the first and chiefest philosopher that knew how fate accords with fortune, and how our free-will is mixed and complicated with both. And now he hath admirably discovered ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... scenery suggested to the imagination by some of its details or those of the "Pilgrim's Progress." Sindbad the Sailor carrying the Old Man of the Sea; Giant Despair scowling from a make-believe window in a fictitious castle of eroded sandstone; a roc with wings eighty feet long, poising on a giddy pinnacle to pounce upon an elephant; pilgrim Christian advancing with sword and buckler against a demon guarding some rocky portal, would have excited ...
— Overland • John William De Forest
... profile of the bewigged old lady to her handsome young kinsman's. Deena regretted both the likeness and the relationship; it made her uncomfortable to know that Stephen was the nephew of this worldly-minded old lady, with her fictitious standards and her enormous riches; it seemed to place a barrier between them and to lift him out of the simplicity ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905 • Various
... look at the old passenger lists of the steamships; but this time we went further back. We knew that the simple ruse of a fictitious name would cover Hume completely; but it seemed the only thing to do, and we set at it systematically. In the records of the steamer Baltic of the Netherlands Steamship Company for the year 1897, we ...
— Ashton-Kirk, Investigator • John T. McIntyre
... true sequence of events practically in all particulars save in respect to the character of the Tenderfoot. He is in one sense fictitious; in another sense real. He is real in that he is the apotheosis of many tenderfeet, and that everything he does in this narrative he has done at one time or another in the author's experience. He is fictitious in the sense that ...
— The Mountains • Stewart Edward White
... Hainault, and her pranks, they are to be found in Monstrelet of old, and now in Barante; though justice to her and Queen Isabeau compels me to state that the incident of the ring is wholly fictitious. Of the trial of Walter Stewart no record is preserved save that he was accused of 'roborica.' James Kennedy was the first great benefactor to learning in Scotland, and founder of her earliest University, having been ...
— The Caged Lion • Charlotte M. Yonge
... hard-earned dollar finds its way into some visionary scheme; is invested in some fictitious, widely advertised enterprise, with agents on every hand offering ...
— Plain Facts • G. A. Bauman
... century. Robertson says "it seems now to be a received opinion (founded as far as I know, on no good evidence) that Careri was never out of Italy, and that his famous Giro del Mondo is an account of a fictitious voyage." Note 150, History of America. The most specific charges against Careri relate to his account of his experiences in China. See Prevost's Histoire des Voyages, v, pp. 469-70. His description of the Philippines and of the voyage to Acapulco is full of details ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1803 • Emma Helen Blair
... about "to kalon,"[*] like that precious canting Maltravers, whom we all of us have read about and pitied; or die whitewashed saints, like poor "Biss Dadsy" in "Oliver Twist." No, my dear madam, you and your daughters have no right to admire and sympathise with any such persons, fictitious or real: you ought to be made cordially to detest, scorn, loathe, abhor, and abominate all people of this kidney. Men of genius like those whose works we have above alluded to, have no business to make these characters interesting or agreeable; ...
— Catherine: A Story • William Makepeace Thackeray
... extraneous matter be introduced.—And now, gentlemen, that we are once more in order, I would wish to have some gentleman speak upon the question, whether, as associated to carry on a joint-stock trade in fictitious narrative, in prose and verse, we ought not to be incorporated by Act of Parliament? What say you, gentlemen, to the proposal? Vis unita fortior, is ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott
... of them affecting any principle, but only the legal technicalities of the case—the causes for which the dispensation was granted, such as his own (p. 209) desire, and the political necessity for the marriage were fictitious; he had himself protested against the marriage, and so forth. For himself, his own conviction was ample sanction; he knew he was living in sin with Catherine because his children had all died but one, and that was a manifest token ...
— Henry VIII. • A. F. Pollard
... of the legal-tender act as makes these notes receivable for debts contracted after a date to be fixed in the act itself, say not later than the 1st of January, 1877. We should then have quotations at real values, not fictitious ones. Gold would no longer be at a premium, but currency at a discount. A healthy reaction would set in at once, and with it a desire to make the currency equal to what it purports to be. The merchants, ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... buildings and houses for the past three months," he said quietly, "and he has been so clever that I will defy you to trace one of them. All his hiring has been done through various lawyers he has employed, and they are all taken in fictitious names." ...
— The Green Rust • Edgar Wallace
... a ward on the train all by myself. I didn't care for that train much, it stopped and started with such jolts, otherwise it was quite comfy, and all the orderlies came in and out on fictitious errands to have a look and try and get me anything I wanted. The consequence was I had no less than three teas, two lots of strawberries, and a pile of books and periodicals I could never hope to read! I had had lunch on board when we arrived at one o'clock, before I was taken off. The ...
— Fanny Goes to War • Pat Beauchamp
... catch fire from a spark more quickly than Caroline's imagination from these few words of the old housekeeper. "Did he say that, good dame? God bless you, and bless him for those words!" Her eyes filled with tears at the thought of his tenderness, which, although half fictitious, she ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... feeling, but at the same time in a steady and fearless voice. The effect on her hearers was overpowering. Not a scornful eye, not a sneering lip remained when she had finished, but sobs and tears burst from those who had for long years known little other than fictitious weeping. Each took the offered tract, each returned with warmth the kind pressure of her hand as she parted from them; and as she remounted her horse, one voice was heard to say, "Poor thing! God bless her!" ...
— Amos Huntingdon • T.P. Wilson
... these two principles of authority mutually supported each other. But when by the various divisions and mixtures of property, a man's superior came to live at a distance from him, and could no longer give him shelter or countenance, the tie gradually became more fictitious than real: new connections from vicinity or other causes were formed: protection was sought by voluntary services and attachment: the appearance of valor spirit, abilities in any great man, extended his interest very far, and if the sovereign were deficient in these qualities, he was no less, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part B. - From Henry III. to Richard III. • David Hume
... treasures of Asiatic wealth and power. It ought to be stated, however, in justice to the poet, that, in narrating these imaginary exploits, he had sufficient delicacy to represent Philip and the Persian monarch by fictitious names. ...
— Alexander the Great - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... 'sensation' at Burlington House. And to one of us it is 'poor Fielding'; and to another Fielding is merely gross, immoral, and dull; and to most the story of that last journey to Lisbon is unknown, and Thackeray's dream of Fielding—a novelist's presentment of a purely fictitious character—is the Fielding who designed and built and finished for eternity. Which is to be pitied? The artist of Amelia and Jonathan Wild, the creator of the Westerns and Parson Adams and Colonel Bath? or we the whippersnappers ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... but it was only one instance of an organised campaign of bruiting abroad invented stories of lawlessness in Ireland which constitutes the deliberate policy of the "carrion crows," whose action Mr. Birrell so justly reprobated, and of which the most flagrant instances were the purely fictitious plots to blow up the Exhibition in Dublin; an outrage at Drumdoe, which on investigation proved to be the work of residents in the house which was supposed to be attacked, and the allegation of a dynamite outrage at Clonroe, in County Cork, which the police reported had never occurred. ...
— Ireland and the Home Rule Movement • Michael F. J. McDonnell
... that I should not vanish inexplicably. I had to be visible with Margaret in London just as much as possible; we went to restaurants, we visited the theatre; we could even contemplate the possibility of my presence at the wedding. For that, however, we had schemed a weekend visit to Wales, and a fictitious sprained ankle at the last moment which would justify ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... in combating speculative theology was driven to combat speculative philosophy, because he perceived in speculation the last support of theology, because he had to force the theologians to retreat from fictitious science to crude, repugnant faith, so religious doubt drove Bayle into doubts of the metaphysics which supported this faith. Consequently he subjected metaphysics in its entire historical evolution to criticism. He became its historian in order to write ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx
... on which occasion the former's ball passed through the latter's hat) having detected a discrepancy between his name (assuming he was the person he represented himself to be and not sailing under false colours after having boxed the compass on the strict q.t. somewhere) and the fictitious addressee of the missive which made him nourish some suspicions of our friend's bona fides nevertheless it reminded him in a way of a longcherished plan he meant to one day realise some Wednesday or Saturday of travelling ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... story, or to write a romance, or anything of the kind. I might be willing to relate some curious matters that have come to my knowledge, arranging them in a collective form, so that they would probably pass with most readers for fictitious, and perhaps excite very much the same kind of interest they would if genuine fictions. I don't remember much about the "last war"; but I suppose both of us may recollect the illumination when peace was declared ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 27, January, 1860 • Various
... readers of the MIRROR, perhaps, have hitherto been only acquainted with the fictitious part of Fair Rosamond's history. The few subjoined facts, relative to the eventful life of that lady, may be implicitly relied on, as they are very carefully gleaned ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 12, Issue 327, August 16, 1828 • Various
... rocks which abounded here (though there were also large patches of clear sand) were nearly all pure coral, in great variety. Red coral was abundant; and even the pink coral, to which fashion was just then giving a fictitious value, was there by the ton. This interested her, and so did some beautiful shells that lay sparkling. The time passed swiftly; and she was still busy in her researches, when suddenly it darkened a little, and, looking back, she saw a white ...
— Foul Play • Charles Reade
... composer. Most readers will have heard of Chopin's touching request to be buried by the side of Bellini. Loath though I am to discredit so charming a story, duty compels me to state that it is wholly fictitious. Chopin's liking for Bellini and his music, how ever, was true and real enough. Hiller relates that he rarely saw him so deeply moved as at a performance of Norma, which they attended together, and that in the finale of the second act, in which Rubini seemed to sing tears, Chopin had ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... a certain town, which for many reasons it will be prudent to refrain from mentioning, and to which I will assign no fictitious name, there is one anciently common to most towns, great or small: to wit, a workhouse; and in this workhouse was born; on a day and date which I need not trouble myself to repeat, inasmuch as it can be of no possible consequence to the reader, in this stage of ...
— Oliver Twist • Charles Dickens
... judgment is pronounced. It pained him to see these ministers of the Eternal Justice thus led away by trivial happenings, and their attention distracted from the main issue. For what, in God's name, did he and his sentimental love-carrollings amount to, this pretty fellow of a player, this fictitious hero of the modern, Neapolitan, operatic stage? Weighed in the balances, he and his whole occupation and calling were lighter, surely, than vanity itself? Rightly considered, he and his singing were but as a spangle, as some glittering trifle of tinsel, upon ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... out all at once in Essex, one thousand miles from where the spark is said to have fallen. But if really taken from the Raleigh Register, who is the narrator, and is the name subscribed real, or is it as fictitious as the paper itself? It appeals, too, to an original book, which is burnt, to Mr. Alexander, who is dead, to a joint letter from Caswell, Hughes, and Hooper, all dead, to a copy sent to the dead Caswell, and another sent to Doctor Williamson, ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... harvest season, in spite of the autumn rains that filled the swamps and made the roads almost impassable, in the face of the driving snows of winter, through the melting ice of the spring, and again through the following summer and autumn, the great revival held on. No fictitious means were employed to stir the emotions of the people or to kindle excitement among them. There were neither special sermons nor revival hymns. The old doctrines were proclaimed, but proclaimed with a fullness and power unknown at other times. The old psalms were sung, but sung perhaps as they ...
— The Man From Glengarry - A Tale Of The Ottawa • Ralph Connor
... man was wounded, and two horses were killed. On preparing the morning's meal, however, a number of cups, knives, and other articles were missing, which had, doubtless, been carried off by the fictitious elk, during the slumber of the very sagacious sentinel. As the Indians had gone off in the direction which the trappers had intended to travel, the latter changed their route, and pushed forward rapidly ...
— The Adventures of Captain Bonneville - Digested From His Journal • Washington Irving
... phraseology of Jeremiah and Ezekiel are distinctly present [ HNNY MBY) R(h ], but detached expressions of an original type also occur,—which, it is true, are then constantly repeated, e.g. (CWN W(ZWB. Names, too, like Jehu ben Hanani, are certainly not fictitious: we are not so far advanced as in Chronicles. Cf. 1Samuel ii. 27 seq.; ...
— Prolegomena to the History of Israel • Julius Wellhausen
... experiments, in "guessing" the name of objects, the child guessed correctly six out of fourteen. She then guessed correctly the name of small objects held in the hands of one of the committee—five times out of six. She guessed fictitious names chosen by the committee—five out of ten, at the first trial. The committee then tested her by writing down the name of some object in the house, fixed at random, and then, after all had thought intently of the thing, they sent for the child and bade her try to find the ...
— Clairvoyance and Occult Powers • Swami Panchadasi
... was in full swing the currency was debased almost out of recognition, and before the death of Edward VI. prices are rendered so fictitious by inflation that they are useless for our purpose. It is only with the currency of Elizabeth that they became true measures of value ...
— The Historic Thames • Hilaire Belloc
... delivered under such conditions, in case it admits even the smallest amount of falsehood, not only bestows no praise on its subject but defeats its own ends. The knowledge of the hearers, not agreeing with the fictitious declaration, takes refuge in truth, where it quickly finds satisfaction and learns as well what the statement ought to have been; and then, comparing the two, detects the difference. Stating only the truth, therefore, I ...
— Dio's Rome • Cassius Dio
... picture of society as its setting. Every human being can now be made a slave; man-stealing, woman-stealing, child-stealing, give the motives for the strangest turns of destiny. Already Ulysses in his fictitious tale of the previous Book has become a maker of the novelette; but Eumaeus tells a true tale of his own life, it has no disguise; he knows his past, he is aware of his origin. Thus he is an example, showing ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider |
