"Tower of Babel" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... quarto holds five hundred pages), Has given a sample from the vasty version Of his new system[4] to perplex the sages; 'T is poetry-at least by his assertion, And may appear so when the dog-star rages— And he who understands it would be able To add a story to the Tower of Babel. ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... the stories of Genesis and Exodus, and of Messianic prophecies in the guise of Sibylline oracles. The Sibyl, whom the superstitions of the time revered as an inspired seeress of prehistoric ages, was made to recite the building of the tower of Babel, or the virtues of Abraham, and again to prophesy the day when the heathen nations should be wiped out, and the God of Israel be the God of all the world. Although the fabrication of oracles is not entirely defensible, it is unnecessary to see, ...
— Philo-Judaeus of Alexandria • Norman Bentwich
... carts; shouting, pushing, hurrying, rushing, digging, streaming, pell-mell; the smell of coal-gas, of food cooking, of good and bad tobacco, of wet pavements, of plaster; riches and poverty jostling; romance and reality at war; monoliths of stone and iron; shops, shops; signs, signs; hotels; the tower of Babel; all the nations of the world shouldering one another; Jews and Gentiles, Christians and Turks; jumble, jumble. This is New York. There is nothing American about it; there is nothing English, French, German, Latin or Oriental about ...
— Half a Rogue • Harold MacGrath
... various scholars have reproduced, in a more or less perfect form, from the legendary tablets, the Chaldaean account of the Creation of the World, of an ancestral Paradise and the Tree of Life with its angel guardians, of the Deluge, and of the Tower of Babel. [Footnote: Consult especially George Smith's The Chaldaean Account of Genesis; see also Records of the Past, Vol. ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... must commence again. At this moment intellect has seized upon the seven-league boots of the fable, which fitted everybody who drew them on, and strides over the universe. How soon, as on the decay of the Roman empire, may all the piles of learning which human endeavours would rear as a tower of Babel to scale the heavens, disappear, leaving but fragments to future generations, as proofs of pre-existent knowledge! Whether we refer to nature or to art, to knowledge or to power, to accumulation or ...
— Newton Forster • Frederick Marryat
... most from two, to all which they have at present: by which means we may see the state of languages at different periods of the world, even such as they must have been ages before the building of the tower of Babel; which knowledge will, it is presumed, throw great light on the ancient history of the world, since men must, in the composition of words, have ever made allusion to things already known, and such as might serve to explain the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 360, October 1845 • Various
... Grand. Ojen was there with his two close-cropped poets. He was speaking about his latest prose poems: "A Sleeping City," "Poppies," "The Tower of Babel." Imagine the Tower of Babel—its architecture! And with a nervous gesture he drew a spiral in ...
— Shallow Soil • Knut Hamsun
... and your mother are to sail in a few weeks threw me into the seventh heaven of happiness,—I am already on the seventh floor of a pension with not much more of an elevator than the tower of Babel had. Mamma and Papa brought me here and installed me and then shot off to Turkey, Papa like a comet and Mamma like the tail of one, to finish up the bridge that has kept them so busy ...
— Molly Brown's Orchard Home • Nell Speed
... calendar, and some of his descendants still reside in the town of Teopisca, where they are known as Votans. He is sometimes referred to as Lord of the Sacred Drum, and he is said to have seen the great wall (which must have been the Tower of Babel), and to have divided this land among the Indians, and given to ...
— Nagualism - A Study in Native American Folk-lore and History • Daniel G. Brinton
... the winter of 1831-32, the remnant of the population fled to the mountains, and Lady Hester, whose hospitality was always open to the distressed, declares that for three years her house was like the Tower of Babel. In 1832 Lamartine paid a visit to Joon, which he has described in his Voyage en Orient. He seems to have been graciously received, though his hostess candidly informed him that she had never heard his name before. He explained, rather to her amusement, that he had written verses which ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston
... behind me, and go into the fishing boats for her. I love her, sir, as you never can love any woman. Do you think I would have given Maggie a heartache, or let Maggie slip beyond my ken, for all the honor and glory in the world, or for a pulpit as high as the Tower of Babel?" ...
— A Daughter of Fife • Amelia Edith Barr
... motionless, bowed down, and grief-stricken. Here were women, with glowing cheeks and sparkling eyes, shouting over their hero king. There, the people wept and moaned; their king had disappeared, was a prisoner, or dead. As at the Tower of Babel, the people spoke in a thousand tongues, and no one listened to another; every one was lost—blinded by his ...
— Frederick The Great and His Family • L. Muhlbach
... Giordani, and—and—and (I really can't name any other); I do not remember a man amongst them whom I ever wished to see twice, except, perhaps, Mezzophanti, who is a Monster of Languages, the Briareus of parts of speech, a walking Polyglott, and more—who ought to have existed at the time of the Tower of Babel as universal Interpreter. He is, indeed, a Marvel, —unassuming also. I tried him in all the tongues of which I have a single oath (or adjuration to the Gods against Postboys, Savages, Tartars, boatmen, sailors, pilots, Gondoliers, Muleteers, Cameldrivers, ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron
... prehistoric races of America. They told me that the book speaks of the arrival of three races in America. The first landing was made at Guaymas in Sonora, the people being fugitives from the divine wrath that destroyed the Tower of Babel. They were killed. The second race landed in New England, coming from Jerusalem; and the third, also coming from Jerusalem, landed ...
— Unknown Mexico, Volume 1 (of 2) • Carl Lumholtz
... Tower of Babel! It wasn't in the same class as that row. Twenty men trying to talk all at once!" growled Jerry, ...
— The Outdoor Chums After Big Game - Or, Perilous Adventures in the Wilderness • Captain Quincy Allen
... "the temple of the foundation of heaven and earth," held the first place. This building is called by Nebuchadnezzar "the temple-tower of Babylon," and may better be regarded as the site of the Biblical "Tower of Babel" than the traditional foundation, E-zida, "the everlasting temple," in Borsippa (the Birs Nimroud)—notwithstanding that Borsippa was called the "second Babylon," and its temple-tower ...
— The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria • Theophilus G. Pinches
... blamed for mistiness of doctrine. Aristotle is contrasted, greatly to his disadvantage, with Bacon. "Volumes of Aristotelian philosophy have been written which, if piled one upon another, would have equalled the Tower of Babel in Height, and far exceeded it in Confusion." But to Bacon "we are indebted for an almost daily extension of our knowledge of the laws of nature in the outward world; and the same modest and cautious spirit of enquiry, extended to Moral Philosophy, will probably give us clear, ...
— Sydney Smith • George W. E. Russell
... Russians are born with split tongues and can give cards and spades to any talking crow that ever lived; while the Swiss lag but little behind them in linguistic aptitude. It seemed such a pity that this man was not alive when the hands knocked off work on the Tower of Babel; he could have put the job through without extending himself. No matter what the nationality of a guest might be—and the guests were of many nationalities—he could talk with that guest in his own language ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... are confusion of tongues, incessant activity, indefatigable labor, eager competition of all humanity, refuge promised to intelligence, a new Flood against an overflow of barbarians. It is the second tower of Babel of the ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... to say any thing respecting the introduction of death into the world, the continual interventions of spiritual agencies in the course of events, the offices of angels and devils, the expected conflagration of the earth, the tower of Babel, the confusion of tongues, the dispersion of mankind, the interpretation of natural phenomena, as eclipses, the rainbow, etc. Above all, I abstain from commenting on the Patristic conceptions of the Almighty; they are too ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper
... that God and immortality did not exist, he would at once have become an atheist and a socialist. For socialism is not merely the labor question, it is before all things the atheistic question, the question of the form taken by atheism to-day, the question of the tower of Babel built without God, not to mount to heaven from earth but to set up heaven on earth. Alyosha would have found it strange and impossible to go on living as before. It is written: "Give all that thou hast to the poor and follow Me, if thou ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... first and then command us to be virtuous!" will be the words written upon the banner lifted against Thee—a banner which shall destroy Thy Church to its very foundations, and in the place of Thy Temple shall raise once more the terrible Tower of Babel; and though its building be left unfinished, as was that of the first one, yet the fact will remain recorded that Thou couldst, but wouldst not, prevent the attempt to build that new tower by accepting the offer, and thus saving mankind a millennium of useless suffering on ...
— "The Grand Inquisitor" by Feodor Dostoevsky • Feodor Dostoevsky
... the art of thinking have drawn up for our instruction. These rules may be good enough as servants, but we have let them become the worst of masters, forgetting that philosophy is made for man, not man for philosophy. Logic has been the true Tower of Babel, which we have thought to build so that we might climb up into the heavens, and have no more miracle, but see God and live—nor has confusion of tongues failed to follow on our presumption. Truly St. Paul said well that the just shall live by faith; and the question "By what ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler
... listening to the horrible jargon for some time, I could easily believe the story which poor William Maginn used to tell with such unction, of the origin of the Welsh language. It was to this effect.—When the Tower of Babel was being built, the workmen all spoke one tongue. Just at the very instant when the "confusion" occurred, a mason, trowel in hand, called for a brick. This his assistant was so long in handing to him, that he incontinently ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 5, March, 1858 • Various
... pyramids. It would suggest houses built by mammoths out of mountains; the cities reared by elephants in their own elephantine school of architecture. And New York does recall the most famous of all sky-scrapers—the tower of Babel. She recalls it none the less because there is no doubt about the confusion of tongues. But in truth the very reverse is true of most of the buildings in America. I had no sooner passed out into the suburbs of New York on the way to Boston than I began to see something else quite ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... and the hold which it took upon the minds of men; and this condition of things may furnish us a solution of the legends which have come down to us of their efforts to perpetuate their learning on pillars, and also an explanation of that other legend of the Tower of Babel, which, as I will show hereafter, was common to both continents, and in which they sought to build a tower high ...
— The Antediluvian World • Ignatius Donnelly
... Terpsichore Hints for the Family High and Low Church Hints upon High Art Hints to Car Conductors Hints for Those Who Will Take Them Hints for the Census High Notes by our Musical Critic Hiram Green at Saratoga Hiram Green at the Tower of Babel Hiram Green on the Chinese Hiram Green Experience as an Editor Hiram Green writes to Napoleon Hiram Green on Jersey Musquitoes Hiram Green at the Female Convention Hiram Green on Base Ball Hiram Green among the Fat men Hiram Green to Napoleon Hiram Green in Wall ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 26, September 24, 1870 • Various
... marvellous exhibition of what the human intellect, when all its powers are concentrated upon a single object, is capable of achieving. It seemed to me, as I looked at the performance, that if all the races of men, who had been stricken asunder at the foot of the Tower of Babel by the miracle which made the tongues of each to speak a language unknown to the others, could be brought together again at the foot of the same tower, with all the advantages which thousands of years of education had in the ...
— Edison's Conquest of Mars • Garrett Putman Serviss
... tutor, and worked hard, and read a great deal, and talked it con amore; but few persons would believe how slowly I learned it, and with what incredible labour. How often have I cursed up hill and down dale, the Tower of Babel, which first brought the curse of languages upon the world! And what did I ever have to do with that Tower? Had I lived in those days, I would never have laid hand to the work in merry, sunny, lazy Babylon, nor contributed a brick ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... of furniture, properly speaking, although it was littered with many household effects which had no business in a bedroom. It was, indeed, used as a storehouse for such wares as the proprietor of the shop only offered to a chosen few. The atmosphere of the room must have been a very Tower of Babel, where strange foreign bacilli from all parts of the world rose up and wrangled ...
— Roden's Corner • Henry Seton Merriman
... fellow-travelers, who can never decide what nation we belong to. Johan talks Danish to me; we talk French to the governess, German to the valet, Italian to my maid, and English alternately. I think we would have puzzled the builders of the tower of Babel at that confusing moment when they all ...
— The Sunny Side of Diplomatic Life, 1875-1912 • Lillie DeHegermann-Lindencrone
... more than a national hatred, they were a national dislike of foreigners, a dislike that had its probable origin in the Tower of Babel. But this was not the only reason of the incessant French wars—there was a question of policy. France began to be a nation, and 'a true patriotic applause hailed the later victory of Agincourt.' France had become something ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke |
