"Theophrastus" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... his conclusions, and thus he awakes to the vigorous exercise of all his powers. These physical conditions must develop a hardy, vigorous, prudent, and temperate race; and such, unquestionably, were the Greeks. "Theophrastus, and other authors, amply attest the observant and industrious agriculture prevalent in Greece. The culture of the vine and olive appears to have been particularly elaborate and the many different accidents of soil, level, and exposure which ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... Here is no tedious uniformity to fatigue the eye, nor rugged asperities to disgust it; but ceaseless variety of colouring among the plants, while the caerulean willow, the yellow walnut, the gloomy beech, and silver theophrastus, seem scattered by the open hand of lavish Nature over a landscape of respectable extent, uniting that sublimity which a wide expanse always conveys to the mind, with that distinctness so desired by the eye; ...
— Observations and Reflections Made in the Course of a Journey through France, Italy, and Germany, Vol. I • Hester Lynch Piozzi
... aspects without these prejudices. And hence it is that Seneca observes, wood most expos'd to the winds to be the most strong and solid, and that therefore Chiron made Achilles's spear of a mountain-tree; and of those the best, which grow thin, not much shelter'd from the north. Again, Theophrastus seems to have special regard to places; exemplifying in many of Greece, which exceeded others for good timber, as doubtless do our oaks in the Forest of Dean all others of England: And much certainly there may reasonably be attributed ...
— Sylva, Vol. 1 (of 2) - Or A Discourse of Forest Trees • John Evelyn
... out of a round-about paper written by a satirist of Greece about the time of Ezra and Nehemiah in Jerusalem. You will easily remark the difference of tone between the seriousness and pathos of the Hebrew prophet and the light and chaffing touch of Theophrastus. "The Flatterer is a person," says that satirist of Greek society, "who will say to you as he walks with you, 'Do you observe how people are looking at you? This happens to no man in Athens but to ...
— Bunyan Characters (Second Series) • Alexander Whyte
... unfashionable peculiarity of accent, has induced many of the misguided natives of Ireland to affect what they imagine to be the English pronunciation. They are seldom successful in this attempt, for they generally overdo the business. We are told by Theophrastus, that a barbarian, who had taken some pains to attain the true Attic dialect, was discovered to be a foreigner by his speaking the Attic dialect with a greater degree of precision and purity than was ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. IV • Maria Edgeworth
... work, and, in a word, of as much care and attendance as if they were continually sick. It was certainly an extraordinary thing to have brought about such a result as this, but a greater yet to have taken away from wealth, as Theophrastus observes, not merely the property of being coveted, but its very nature of being wealth. For the rich, being obliged to go to the same table with the poor, could not make use of or enjoy their abundance, nor so much as please their vanity by looking at or displaying it. So that the common proverb, ...
— The Boys' and Girls' Plutarch - Being Parts of The "Lives" of Plutarch • Plutarch
... in later times much of this more frivolous superstition passed away—although Theophrastus speaks of such lesser omens with the same witty disdain as that with which the Spectator ridicules our fears at the upsetting of a salt-cellar, or the appearance of a winding-sheet in a candle,—yet, in the more interesting period of Greece, these popular credulities were not disdained by the ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Meteorol., ii. 1, 14; Pseudo-Aristotle, De Mirab. Auscult., p. 106; Theophrastus, Historia plantarum, iv. 7 Jornandes, De rebus Geticis, apud Muratori, tom. i.p. 191; according to Strabo (iii. 2, Sec. 7) tunny fish were caught in abundance in the ocean west of Spain, and were highly valued for the table on account of their fatness which was ...
— The Discovery of America Vol. 1 (of 2) - with some account of Ancient America and the Spanish Conquest • John Fiske
... frequently mentioned in The Nights; and the "Bloody Sweat" is well-known by name. The disease is rare and few have seen it whilst it has a certain quasi-supernatural sound from the "Agony and bloody sweat" in the Garden of Gethsemane. But the exudation of blood from the skin was described by Theophrastus and Aristotle and lastly by Lucan ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... exemplification of what the ancients meant by superstition is to be found in the lively and dramatic words of Aristotle's great pupil, Theophrastus. ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... a man illustrious by his genius, by his style, and by his knowledge of men, I mean La Bruyere, who died of apoplexy at Versailles, after having surpassed Theophrastus in his own manner, and after painting, in the new characters, the men of our days in a manner inimitable. He was besides a very honest man, of excellent breeding, simple, very disinterested, and without anything ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XIV., His Court and The Regency, Complete • Duc de Saint-Simon
... chrysos], gold, and [Greek: kolla], glue) was applied by Theophrastus and other ancient writers to materials used in soldering gold, one of which, from the island of Cyprus, may have been identical with the mineral now known by this name. Borax, which is used for this purpose, has also ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... of them, but was fitter to appear on the parade, than in the field; and, accordingly, he rather pleased and entertained the Athenians, than inflamed their passions; and marched forth into the dust and heat of the Forum, not from a weather-beaten tent, but from the shady recesses of Theophrastus, a man of consummate erudition. He was the first who relaxed the force of Eloquence, and gave her a soft and tender air: and he rather chose to be agreeable, as indeed he was, than great and striking; ...
— Cicero's Brutus or History of Famous Orators; also His Orator, or Accomplished Speaker. • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... diplomacy—the political extension of business—mechanical devices have lost the surprise reaction and resentment which they originally set up. As a competitor with human labor they have established themselves as its fit survivor. The prophesy of Theophrastus Such seems to have been already fulfilled, and any new machine added to those already in power in the Parliament of Machines can scarcely add to the worker's sense of his own impotency. The business valuations which were evolved out of craftsmanship and which were further ...
— Creative Impulse in Industry - A Proposition for Educators • Helen Marot
... Don't they say that Theophrastus lived to his hundred and seventh year, and did n't he complain of the shortness of life? At eighty a man has had just about time to get warmly settled in his nest. Do you suppose he doesn't enjoy the quiet of that resting-place? No more haggard responsibility to keep him awake nights,—unless ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... rouse the recollections of poor Raoul. The persistent servant went on to relate that Guiche had just invented a new game of lottery, and was teaching it to the ladies. Raoul, opening his large eyes, like the absent man in Theophrastus, had made no answer, but his sadness had increased by it two shades. With his head hanging down, his limbs relaxed, his mouth half open for the escape of his sighs, Raoul remained, thus forgotten, in the antechamber, when all at once a lady's robe passed, rubbing against the ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas
... in his garden; Zeno looks like a divinity in his porch; the restless Aristotle, on the other side of the city, as if in antagonism to Plato, is walking his pupils off their legs in his Lyceum by the Ilyssus. Our student has determined on entering himself as a disciple of Theophrastus, a teacher of marvellous popularity, who has brought together two thousand pupils from all parts of the world. He himself is of Lesbos; for masters, as well as students, come hither from all regions of the earth,—as befits a ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... When La Bruyere, distracted with misgivings about his "Caracteres," had made up his mind to get an introduction to Boileau, and to ask the advice of that mighty censor, Boileau wrote to Racine (May 19, 1687), "Maximilian has been out to Auteuil to see me and has read me parts of his Theophrastus." Nicknames were the order of the day, and the critic called his new friend "Maximilian," although his real name was Jean, because he wrote "Maximes." There is no other country than France where the maker of maxims has stamped a deep ...
— Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France • Edmund Gosse
... and himself—if that thought had ever occurred to him, he would have rejected it as foolish. He would have thought that the more he showed his poverty, the more he would be pitied—the worst mistake a poor cousin can commit. According to Theophrastus, the partridge of Paphlagonia has two hearts; so have most men: it is the common mistake of the unlucky to knock at the ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... of what the ancients meant by superstition is to be found in the lively and dramatic words of Aristotle's great pupil Theophrastus. ...
— Scientific Essays and Lectures • Charles Kingsley
... that of Theophrastus Brown, And its organ was the finest and the biggest in the town, And the chorus—all the papers favorably commented on it, For 'twas said each female member had a ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For, Book Two • Various
... became a part of the older Anthesteria after the invention of comedy, and that even then the old custom was kept up. In Athenus we find[17l] the Page 71 Samian Lynceus sojourning in Athens and commiserated as passing his time listening to the lectures of Theophrastus and seeing the Lenaea and Chytri, in contrast to the lavish Macedonian feasts of his correspondent. The latter in the same connection says[172] that certain men, probably players, who had filled a part in Athens at the Chytri, came in to amuse the guests. The marriage which ...
— The American Journal of Archaeology, 1893-1 • Various
... Ages ago Theophrastus called an entirely different plant by this same scientific name, derived from dodeka twelve, and theos gods; and although our plant is native of a land unknown to the ancients, the fanciful Linnaeus imagined he saw in the flowers of its umbel a little congress ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al
... on another, the minds of Barbarians who have left us no psychological documents. 'Be sure I have made no fantastic Carthage,' he says proudly, pointing to his documents; Ammianus Marcellinus, who has furnished him with 'the exact form of a door'; the Bible and Theophrastus, from which he obtains his perfumes and his precious stones; Gresenius, from whom he gets his Punic names; the Memoires de l'Academie des Inscriptions. 'As for the temple of Tanit, I am sure of having reconstructed it as it was, with the treatise ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... The Crathis.—Ver. 315. Crathis and Sybaris were streams of Calabria, flowing into the sea, near Crotona. Euripides and Strabo tell the same story of the river Crathis. Pliny the Elder, in his thirty-second Book, says— 'Theophrastus tells us that Crathis, a river of the Thurians, produces whiteness, whereas the Sybaris causes blackness, in sheep and cattle. Men, too, are sensible of this difference; for those who drink of the Sybaris, become more swarthy ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Copious Notes - and Explanations • Publius Ovidius Naso
... twenty-seven years of age when her first translation appeared, thirty-three when the first of these magazine articles appeared, thirty-eight at the publication of her first story, and fifty-nine when she finished "Theophrastus Such." Two years after she died, at the age of sixty-one. So that George Eliot's literary life covered a period ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... Aristotelian form was better adapted to Cicero's purposes than the Platonic; the progress of the argument was less interrupted, and thus better opportunity for a symmetrical development of the theme was afforded. Then, too, the former was more popular. The style of Aristotle[27] had been imitated by Theophrastus and many other writers down to Cicero's time, while that of Plato ...
— Cato Maior de Senectute • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... daily grind, to say nothing of having filled our lungs with comparatively fresh air, and having taken a little exercise. Best of all, we have started a new set of associations; we have paved the way for new acquaintances, Linnaeus, Gray, Dioscorides and Theophrastus, to say nothing of our friend so-and-so whom we always thought rather tiresome but with whom we now have something in common. We shall take up our daily grind to-morrow with a new zest for having forgotten it for a few hours, and find ...
— Why Worry? • George Lincoln Walton, M.D.
... obstetrics; on the eye; on the pulse, which he properly referred to contractions of the heart. He was aware of the existence of the lacteals, and their anatomical relation to the mesenteric glands. Erasistratus, his colleague, was a pupil of Theophrastus and Chrysippus: he, too, cultivated anatomy. He described the structure of the heart, its connexions with the arteries and veins, but fell into the mistake that the former vessels were for the conveyance of air, ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... of nature [120] which so greatly influence what man does; together with certain impressive metaphysical and moral ideas, a sort of popular scholastic philosophy, or as if it were the virtues and vices Aristotle defines, or the characters of Theophrastus, translated into stone. Above all, it is to be observed that as a result of this spirit, this "free" spirit, in it, art has at last become personal. The artist, as such, appears at Amiens, as elsewhere, in the thirteenth ...
— Miscellaneous Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... affirmed of this Pythagoras, that he took a great many of the laws of the Jews into his own philosophy. Nor was our nation unknown of old to several of the Grecian cities, and indeed was thought worthy of imitation by some of them. This is declared by Theophrastus, in his writings concerning laws; for he says that "the laws of the Tyrians forbid men to swear foreign oaths." Among which he enumerates some others, and particularly that called Corban: which oath can only be found among the Jews, and declares what a man may call "A thing ...
— Against Apion • Flavius Josephus
... Parisian of the bourgeoisie, appointed preceptor in history to the grandson of the great Conde, saw with the keen eyes of a disenchanted observer the spectacle of seventeenth-century society. In 1688, appended to his translation of the Characters of Theophrastus, appeared his only important work, Les Caracteres ou les Moeurs de ce Siecle; revised and enlarged editions followed, until the ninth was published in 1696. "I restore to the public," he wrote, "what the public lent me." In a ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... works passed through many vicissitudes. At the death of the philosopher they were bequeathed to Theophrastus, who continued chief of the Peripatetic school for thirty-five years. Theophrastus left them, with his own works, to a philosophical friend and pupil, Neleus, who conveyed them from Athens to his residence at Scepsis, in Asia Minor. ...
— Fathers of Biology • Charles McRae
... animal kingdom his pupil, Theophrastus, did in some measure for the vegetable kingdom. Theophrastus, however, was much less a classifier than his master, and his work on botany, called The Natural History of Development, pays comparatively slight attention to theoretical ...
— A History of Science, Volume 1(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... influence of rites and ceremonies, fully believed in Epimenides as an inspired prophet during the past, but towards those who preferred claims to supernatural power in his own day, he was not so easy of faith: he, as well as Euripides and Theophrastus, treated with indifference, and even with contempt, the Orpheotelestae of the later times, who advertised themselves as possessing the same patent knowledge of ceremonial rites, and the same means of guiding the will of the gods, as Epimenides had wielded before ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 • Various
... sympathy with the horror of that mother tree in Palestine which was compelled to furnish materials for the cross. Neither would it in this case be any objection, if a passage were produced from Solinus or Theophrastus, implying that the aspen tree had always shivered—for the tree might presumably be penetrated by remote presentiments, as well as by remote remembrances. In so vast a case the obscure sympathy should stretch, Janus-like, each way. And an objection of the same ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... possibly Epistola Valerii ad Rifinum de uxore non ducenda, attributed to Walter Mapes; it is a short treatise of about eight folios; it is printed in Cam. Soc. xvi. 77. Theofraste: Aureolus liber de Nuptiis, by one Theophrastus. ...
— Old English Libraries, The Making, Collection, and Use of Books • Ernest A. Savage
... 10. Theophrastus, in his comparison of bad acts—such a comparison as one would make in accordance with the common notions of mankind—says, like a true philosopher, that the offences which are committed through desire ...
— The Thoughts Of The Emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus • Marcus Aurelius
... philosophers, first noted down the known facts on this subject in his work On Meteors. His theories and deductions were necessarily erroneous, but he struck the foundation of all science, the collection of known facts. Theophrastus, one of his pupils, made a compilation of prognostics concerning rain, wind and storm, and there investigation ceased for ages. For nearly two thousand years the citizens of the world rose every morning ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 17, - No. 97, January, 1876 • Various
... inherited from his father, we have our familiar term, 'bombast.' Readers interested in the known facts concerning the "master-mind, the thinker, the explorer, the creator," the forerunner of Mesmer and even of Darwin and Wallace, who began life with the sounding appellation "Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus ab Hohenheim," should consult Browning's own learned appendical note, and Mr. Berdoe's interesting essay in the ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... and many remarks of the ancients as to the moist and cold climate seem strange to us. Pliny praises the chestnuts of Tarentum; I question whether the tree could survive the hot climate of to-day. Nobody could induce "splendid beeches" to grow in the lowlands of Latium, yet Theophrastus, a botanist, says that they were drawn from this region for shipbuilding purposes. This gradual desiccation has probably gone on for long ages; so Signor Cavara has discovered old trunks of white fir in districts of the Apennines where such a plant ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... Antipater about Alexander, said, "that he ought not to think highly of himself because he had many subjects, for anyone who had right notions about the gods was entitled to think quite as highly of himself." And Zeno, observing that Theophrastus was admired for the number of his pupils,[264] said, "His choir is, I admit, larger than mine, but ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... Celia'—'Drink to me only with thine eyes,' which would still be famous without the exquisitely appropriate music that has come down to us from Jonson's own time, and which are no less beautiful because they consist largely of ideas culled from the Greek philosopher Theophrastus. In all his poems, however, Jonson aims consistently at the classical virtues of clearness, brevity, proportion, finish, and ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... the outrages on taste. We are told the Athenians were also merciless critics in such matters. Nay, there is a famous anecdote perpetually cited as an illustration of Athenian delicacy in matters of pronunciation, that Theophrastus was known to be a foreigner even by a herbseller. People who wonder at every thing recorded of the Greeks, will regard us probably as reckless iconoclasts if we break that by a stone flung from common sense; ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... more monstrous and incredible: so is it of any philosophy reported entire, and dismembered by articles. Neither do I exclude opinions of latter times to be likewise represented in this calendar of sects of philosophy, as that of Theophrastus Paracelsus, eloquently reduced into an harmony by the pen of Severinus the Dane; and that of Tilesius, and his scholar Donius, being as a pastoral philosophy, full of sense, but of no great depth; and that ...
— The Advancement of Learning • Francis Bacon |
