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Liken   /lˈaɪkən/   Listen
Liken

verb
(past & past part. likened; pres. part. likening)
1.
Consider or describe as similar, equal, or analogous.  Synonyms: compare, equate.  "You cannot equate success in financial matters with greed"






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Liken" Quotes from Famous Books



... with all the importance of a Bechamel, a Felix, the maitre-d'hotel of Cardinal Fesch with his two turbots, or luckless Vatel who fell upon his sword and died because he had no turbot at all; or even, rising in the grandeur of the comparison, we may liken her to Domitian, who, weary of persecuting Christians, one day called the Roman Senate together to decide with him upon the sauce with which another historic turbot ...
— Standish of Standish - A story of the Pilgrims • Jane G. Austin

... strong, and its clean and shapely bole impresses the beholder as a joining of gently outcurving columns, ample in strength and of an elegance belonging to itself alone. If I may dare to compare man-made architectural forms with the trees that graced the garden of Eden, I would liken the American elm (it is also the water elm and the white elm, and botanically Ulmus Americana) to the Grecian types, combining stability with elegance, rather than to the more rugged works of the Goths. Yet the free swing of the elm's wide-spreading branches inevitably suggests ...
— Getting Acquainted with the Trees • J. Horace McFarland

... closely on chairs on the small space of stage before it, were some thirty gentlemen, and two or three ladies. In the centre of these, in a desk or pulpit covered with red baize, was the presiding minister. The kind of rostrum he occupied will be very well understood, if I liken it to a boarded-up fireplace turned towards the audience, with a gentleman in a black surtout standing in the stove and leaning forward over ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens

... by a bell, which I never can liken to any other than a dustman's, and can hardly find a spot whereto parasols and smart forage-caps ...
— Impressions of America - During the years 1833, 1834 and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Tyrone Power

... then will ye liken God, And what likeness place beside him? An image! a craftsman cast it, And a smelter o'erlays it with gold. He who is too poor to do this Chooses a tree that is not decayed, Seeks for himself a skilled craftsman, To set up an image that ...
— The Makers and Teachers of Judaism • Charles Foster Kent

... possession of the Kingdom of God." Here, as Professor Boutroux[33] points out, "Jacob Boehme learnt from the mystics what it means to possess God. One must take care, so these masters [p.106] teach, not to liken the possession of God to the possession of anything material. God is spirit, i.e. for the man who understands the meaning of the term, a generating power previous to all essence, even the divine. God is spirit, i.e. pure will, both infinite and free, with the realisation ...
— An Interpretation of Rudolf Eucken's Philosophy • W. Tudor Jones

... little fellow of seven inches, but mere size was nothing, the color was the thing. And that was indeed golden. I can liken it to nothing more accurately than the twenty-dollar gold-piece, the same satin finish, the same pale yellow. The fish was fairly molten. It did not glitter in gaudy burnishment, as does our aquarium gold-fish, for example, but gleamed and melted and glowed as ...
— The Mountains • Stewart Edward White

... Jean Stein," said he, "that you know not better than to liken your sister to such as young Boullin—a very good young man in his way, I have no doubt. You should remember there is a ...
— La Vendee • Anthony Trollope

... built in many strange and differing fashions, and again unbuilt: piled high, to give me height; twisted low, in a vain endeavor to liken me to the Greeks; curled, plaited, frizzed, and again unfrizzed. I institute a searching and critical examination of my wardrobe, rejecting this and that; holding one color against my cheek, to see whether my pallor will be ...
— Nancy - A Novel • Rhoda Broughton

... never took a minute's sleep for as much as two days, and nights. It was at Newport and we wouldn't trust hired nurses. One afternoon he had a fit, and jumped up and run out on the portico of the hotel with nothing in the world on and the wind a blowing liken ice and we after him scared to death; and when the ladies and gentlemen saw that he had a fit, every lady scattered for her room and not a gentleman lifted his hand to help, the wretches! Well after that his life hung by a thread for as much as ten days, and the minute he was ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 4. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner

... more birds of that kind in all the world but it alone. And truly that is a great miracle of God, and men may well liken that bird unto God; because that there is no God but one, and also that our Lord arose from death to life the third day. This bird men see oftentime flying in the countries; and he is not much greater than an eagle. And he hath a crest of feathers upon his head more great than the ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume 19 - Travel and Adventure • Various

... to the same honour. The conversation was of a lively and dissolute cast, a tone encouraged by the Prince, as if designing to counterbalance the gravity of his morals in the morning, which Ramorny, who was read in old chronicles, had the boldness to liken to ...
— The Fair Maid of Perth • Sir Walter Scott

... himself the undivided honor of the scalps—the trophies of victory—taken by his own hand in battle. For, colored though he was, with a nose inclining neither to the Roman nor Grecian, our hero showed that he cherished a genuine, therefore jealous, love of glory. In this respect, we may liken the Fighting Nigger to such godlike specimens of our race as Alexander the Great; to Napoleon the Great; or, perhaps more fitly still, to Mumbo Jumbo the Great, the far-famed giant-king ...
— Burl • Morrison Heady

... can I liken her smiling Upon me, her kneeling lover, How it leaped from her lips to her eyelids, And dimpled her wholly over, Till her outstretched hands smiled also, And I almost seemed to see The very heart of her mother Sending sun through her ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell

... not harrow your sensibilities by a complete and detailed recital of the nerve-racking adventures that immediately succeeded. I may only liken my state of mind to that so graphically described in the well-known and popular story of the uxoricide, Bluebeard, wherein it is told how the vigilant Anne stood on the outer ramparts straining her eyes in the direction ...
— Fibble, D. D. • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb

... Arthurs' nine show up well, particularly Raymond and Weir, who have springs in their feet and arms like whips. Altogether Arthurs' varsity is a strangely assorted, a wonderfully chosen group of players. We might liken them to the mechanism of a fine watch, with Ward as the mainspring, and the others with big or little parts to perform, but each dependent upon the other. ...
— The Young Pitcher • Zane Grey

... he only shifted it to his right hand. He never had a chance to strike again with it; for in that same instant Rayburn swung his revolver at arm's-length through the air and brought it down on his head with a sound so muffled and so hollow that I can liken it only to the staving-in of the head of a full cask. For a moment, while Rayburn drew back to strike again, the Indian's body swayed heavily; and then all his muscles relaxed, and he fell heavily and limply to the ground—while his brains spurted out from the ghastly trench ...
— The Aztec Treasure-House • Thomas Allibone Janvier

... Daughters which art thou? For to that family Thee must I liken. Art thou, may be, one of the gray-born? One eye only, and but one tooth Using still alternately? One of the Graiae art thou? Darest thou, Horror, Thus beside beauty, Or to the searching glance Phoebus' unveil thee? Nathless step ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke

... material; like Green, he looks upon man's moral activity as an appearance—what Green calls a reproduction—of this eternal reality. But under this general agreement there lies a world of difference. He refuses, by the use of the term self-consciousness, to liken his Absolute to the personality of man, and he brings out the consequence, which in Green is more or less concealed, that the evil equally with the good in man and in the world are appearances of ...
— Recent Tendencies in Ethics • William Ritchie Sorley

... subject in which you specialise is a narrow one, you may be overwhelmed by the magnitude of the task. Take heed that you do not undertake more than you have time or opportunity to complete; or else, embarking upon a labour of Hercules you may liken yourself to Sisyphus. Mazzuchelli began 'Gli Scrittori d'Italia,' but succeeded in finishing only the first two letters of the alphabet. The temptation to leave behind us some great work by which our name will become in time a household ...
— The Book-Hunter at Home • P. B. M. Allan

... know mushrooms. He will soon be ordering them for breakfast. He may even come, like certain tribes mentioned in the Encyclopaedia, to eat nothing else! And by that time he may have come to know Little Bethel. And if he comes to know it, he may come to like it. He will still liken it to a mushroom. But we shall be able to tell, by the way he says it, that he means that it is very good. We shall see at once that Mr. Chesterton likes mushrooms. At present, however, the stern fact ...
— Mushrooms on the Moor • Frank Boreham

... old leaves is droppin' (not to make any allusion, of course, to any shrivellin' of proper respect), then I come forward, madam, not to take the place of anybody else, but jest as the nateral consequence of the seasons, which everybody ought to expect; even such as you, madam, which I may liken to a hemlock-spruce which keeps straight on in the same general line of appearance without no reference to the fall of the year, nor winter nor summer. And so, Mrs. Himes, I come here to-day to ...
— A Chosen Few - Short Stories • Frank R. Stockton

... of the Izdubar epic. The name has been translated "Divine Offspring," but in later times lost all signification, being corrupted into TAMMUZ. In some Accadian hymns he is invoked as "the Shepherd, the lord Dumuzi, the lover of Ishtar." Well could a nomadic and pastoral people poetically liken the sun to a shepherd, whose flocks were the fleecy clouds as they speed across the vast plains of heaven or the bright, innumerable stars. This comparison, as pretty as it is natural, kept its hold in all ages and nations on the popular fancy, ...
— Chaldea - From the Earliest Times to the Rise of Assyria • Znade A. Ragozin

... this seemed hard, and prompted Hirst to make the caustic remark that the animals had been fed. Their silence, he said, reminded him of the silence in the lion-house when each beast holds a lump of raw meat in its paws. He went on, stimulated by this comparison, to liken some to hippopotamuses, some to canary birds, some to swine, some to parrots, and some to loathsome reptiles curled round the half-decayed bodies of sheep. The intermittent sounds—now a cough, now a horrible wheezing or throat-clearing, now a little patter of conversation—were just, he ...
— The Voyage Out • Virginia Woolf



Words linked to "Liken" :   compare, study, consider, equate



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