"Verbose" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... a superstructure raised on that basis: the composition of both is the same, i.e. the parts, which they have in common, follow in the same order. The same may be said of the Constantinopolitan liturgy, commonly attributed to S. Chrysostom, of that of the Armenian church, and of the florid and verbose composition in use among the Nestorians of Mesopotamia. So that the liturgy of Antioch, commonly attributed to S. James, appears to be the basis of all the oriental liturgies". Tracts for the Times, N. 63. The author then proceeds to state the grounds ...
— The Ceremonies of the Holy-Week at Rome • Charles Michael Baggs
... 'generous'. Many, however, fall under the 'alias' rule, as 'ingenious', 'odious', while those which have i in the penultimate run the two last syllables into one, as 'pernicious', 'religious', 'vicious'. A few late introductions, coming straight from the Latin, retained the Latin stress, as 'morose', 'verbose'. ...
— Society for Pure English Tract 4 - The Pronunciation of English Words Derived from the Latin • John Sargeaunt
... of all the principal authors, who had died within a century of the present time; and, in this revision, paid no sort of regard to the reputation they had acquired — Milton was harsh and prosaic; Dryden, languid and verbose; Butler and Swift without humour; Congreve, without wit; and Pope destitute of any sort of poetical merit — As for his contemporaries, he could not bear to hear one of them mentioned with any degree of applause — They ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... book with reluctance. It is verbose and dull, but it has led us along the path of American renown; it recites a story which, however awkwardly told, can never fall coldly on an American ear. It has, besides, given us an opportunity, of which we have gladly availed ourselves, to make some ...
— The Atlantic Monthly , Volume 2, No. 14, December 1858 • Various
... though, in general, a verbose and affected poet, has told this story with unusual simplicity: it is rather given here for being much esteemed by the public, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith
... of the works of Homer. Plato had banished Homer from his ideal state. Why should not Caligula? He was with difficulty restrained from doing the like for Vergil and Livy. The former, he said, was a man of little learning and less wit;[23] the latter was verbose and careless. Even when he attempted to encourage literature, his eccentricity carried him to such extremes that the competitors shrank in horror from entering the lists. He instituted a contest ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... of articles and stipulations, long papers of rules and restrictions which were considered a necessary part of fine tapestry weaving. These papers are tiresome to read—the constitution of many a nation or a state is far less verbose. They give the impression that the craft of tapestry weaving is beset with every sort of small deceit, so protection must be the arrangement between master and worker, and between the factory and the great ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee
... sequel of her discourse more clear to him; her meaning faded again into the agreeable vague, and he simply felt her presence, tasted her voice. Yet the act of reflexion was not suspended; he found himself rejoicing that she was so weak in argument, so inevitably verbose. The idea that she was brilliant, that she counted as a factor only because the public mind was in a muddle, was not an humiliation but a delight to him; it was a proof that her apostleship was all nonsense, the most ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. II (of II) • Henry James
... a Vapouring, Verbose Varmit of a Vulgar Villainous Vagabond, who Very Verdantly Ventured on a Versatile, Veteran, Valueless Velocipede to Visit the Viceroy of Venice, instead of Visiting ...
— Cole's Funny Picture Book No. 1 • Edward William Cole
... what they had to do, which was not much, and of what they had to say, which was a great deal too much; for the piece would be far more tolerable if considerably shorn of its unfair proportions. The translator seems to have followed the verbose text of his original with minute fidelity, except where the idioms bothered him; and although the bills declare it is adapted by Mr. Charles Selby to the English stage, the thing is as essentially French as it is when performed at the Palais Royal, except where the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, August 14, 1841 • Various
... European makes voluntary gratuities to the natives, he is considered a fool—they entertain a contempt for him, which develops into intolerable impertinence. If the native comes to borrow, lend him a little less than he asks for, after a verbose preamble; if one at once lent, or gave, the full value requested, he would continue to invent a host of pressing necessities, until one's patience was exhausted. He seldom restores the loan of anything voluntarily. ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... cause why many people were so silent. It was common to hear that a man was afraid to hear himself talk. By reducing therefore the signs of speech, a stimulus would be given to the reserved and a curb imposed upon the verbose. ...
— A Romantic Young Lady • Robert Grant
... the man continued, humbly enough, "I am afraid our calling, however, is apt to make us a trifle verbose. If you will allow me, I will put what I have to say in as few ...
— My Strangest Case • Guy Boothby
... and One Quarter Hours, or Contes Tartares, have as little of the Tartar as those above mentioned of the Chinese, but if somewhat verbose, they are not wholly devoid of literary quality. The substance is, as in nearly all these cases, Arabian Nights rehashed; but the hashing is not seldom done secundum artem, and they have, with the Les ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... was Nan who furnished the greater part of the composition. Mrs. Challoner was rather verbose and descriptive in her style. Nan cut down her sentences ruthlessly, and so pruned and simplified the whole epistle that her mother failed to trace her own handiwork: and at the last she added a postscript in ...
— Not Like Other Girls • Rosa N. Carey
... there was any particular gift in Mr. Chadband's piling verbose flights of stairs, one upon another, after this fashion. But this can only be received as a proof of their determination to persecute, since it must be within everybody's experience that the Chadband style of oratory is widely received and ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... advice to inexperienced collectors. Avoid the jolie edition printed at Paris by F. A. Didot, par ordre de monseigneur le comte d'Artois, in 1781. It is the very worst specimen of editorship. Avoid also the London edition of 1792. The preface is a piratical pasticcio; the verbose notes are from the most accessible books; the portraits, very unequal in point of execution, I believe to be chiefly copies of prints—not d'apres des tableaux originaux. The most desirable editions are, 1. The edition of 1760; 2. That ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 219, January 7, 1854 • Various
... dominie. If there was any class of men whom Sir Walter could not away with, it was the race of schoolmasters, "black cattle" whom he neither trusted nor respected. But he could make or invent exceptions, as in the uncomplaining and kindly usher of the verbose Cleishbotham. Once launched in his legend, with the shooting of the Popinjay, he never falters. The gallant, dauntless, overbearing Bothwell, the dour Burley, the handful of Preachers, representing every current of opinion in the Covenant, the awful figure of Habakkuk Mucklewrath, ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... inflate; launch out, branch out; rant. maunder, prose; harp upon &c (repeat) 104; dwell on, insist upon. digress, ramble, battre la campagne [Fr.], beat about the bush, perorate, spin a long yarn, protract; spin out, swell out, draw out; battologize^. Adj. diffuse, profuse; wordy, verbose, largiloquent^, copious, exuberant, pleonastic, lengthy; longsome^, long-winded, longspun^, long drawn out; spun out, protracted, prolix, prosing, maundering; circumlocutory, periphrastic, ambagious^, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... He and Breckenridge looked over them, and, after some side conversation, he handed one of the papers to me. It was in Reagan's handwriting, and began with a long preamble and terms, so general and verbose, that I said they were inadmissible. Then recalling the conversation of Mr. Lincoln, at City Point, I sat down at the table, and wrote off the terms, which I thought concisely expressed his views and ...
— The Memoirs of General W. T. Sherman, Complete • William T. Sherman
... and to yet greater length, the verbose but earnest advocate. But in truth he might have been more concise, less eloquence would have sufficed had not the idle hours of a sea voyage thrown open a wider door for its display. Lempriere was ready to promise anything on the joy of the long-wished ...
— St George's Cross • H. G. Keene
... merely of sonnets but of madrigals, sestines, canzons, and other attempts after Italian masters. The style, both verbal and poetical, needs chastising in places, and Barnes's expression in particular is sometimes obscure. He is sometimes comic when he wishes to be passionate, and frequently verbose when he wishes to be expressive. But the fire, the full-bloodedness, the poetical virility, of the poems is extraordinary. A kind of intoxication of the eternal-feminine seems to have seized the poet to an extent not otherwise to be paralleled in the group, except in Sidney; while Sidney's ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... share and more; but neither he nor we were anxious to climb with heavy packs on our backs, in the rarefied air of elevations several thousand feet higher than Mont Blanc. The argument with the Indians was long and verbose and the offerings of money and goods were made more and more generous. All was in vain. We finally came to realize that whatever supplies and provisions were carried up Coropuna would have to be borne on our own shoulders. That evening the top of the truncated dome, which was just ...
— Inca Land - Explorations in the Highlands of Peru • Hiram Bingham
... things of which we would know more. Yet what do we find about them? Save in meagre or verbose pamphlets, nothing. To be sure, there was a book written which claimed to be about Buffalo, but a microscopic examination would fail to find in it anything worth knowing about the history of this community. The author of that book, William Ketchum, had the audacity to ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 5, May, 1884 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... principal specimen is that of Don Roderic, a fabulous account of the reign of King Roderic, the conquest of the country by the Moors, and the first attempts to recover it in the beginning of the eighth century. The style is heavy and verbose, although upon it Southey has founded much of his beautiful poem of "Roderic, the last of the Goths." This chronicle of Don Roderic, which was little more than a romance of chivalry, marks the transition to those romantic fictions that had already begun to inundate ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... departments; nor was he particularly hidebound by respect for the laws of evidence. When he knew a thing, he knew it; then he either acted or did not act, as the circumstances might dictate. And when the deed was done or left undone, and was quite beyond the reach of criticism, he would send in a verbose, voluminous report, written out in several colored inks, on all the special forms he could get hold of. The heads of departments would be too busy for the next twelvemonth trying to get the form of the report straightened out to be able to give any attention to the details of it; and then it ...
— Rung Ho! • Talbot Mundy
... affirmation, just as most of us hide our cowardly submission to monotony under some word like duty, loyalty, conscience. If you have ever been an office-holder or been close to officials, you must surely have been appalled by the grim way in which committee-meetings, verbose reports, flamboyant speeches, requests, and delegations hold the statesman in a mind-destroying grasp. Perhaps this is the reason why it has been necessary to retire Theodore Roosevelt from public life every now and then in order to give him a chance to learn something ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... officer was fitted by nature as well as by training for the work to which he happily turned his hand. Possessed of a charming style; precise and clear instead of verbose; completely conscious of what he intends to convey and perfectly competent to convey it; and dowered with a perspicacious breadth of view which dwells on all that is important and passes over all that is irrelevant, ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. II. (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... thick, closely-printed volumes. These cover every department of medicine, anatomy, physiology, pathology, medical theory, therapeutics, as well as clinical medicine and surgery. In style they are verbose and heavy and very frequently polemical. They are saturated with a teleology which, at times, becomes excessively tedious. In the anatomical works, masses of teleological explanation dilute the account of often imperfectly described ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... appeared; but not with the powerful apparatus of a protecting magistrate, to rescue those who had survived the slaughter of the first day: nothing of this. On the 3rd of September, (that is, the day after the commencement of the massacre,[3]) he writes a long, elaborate, verbose epistle to the Assembly, in which, after magnifying, according to the bon-ton of the Revolution, his own integrity, humanity, courage, and patriotism, he first directly justifies all the bloody proceedings of the 10th of August. He considers the slaughter of that ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. V. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... challenge to fight a duel to one Col. Anglesea, at present a resident of this county. You can take my warrant in your own hands and read it with your own eyes, if you wish to do so, young gentleman," said the mild, old officer, handing the verbose document to which he so ...
— Her Mother's Secret • Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... the right to rule, to legislate, to go to Congress, and to take the Presidential chair. On this point hear Miss Muloch. "Who that ever listened for two hours to the verbose confused inanities of a ladies' committee, would immediately go and give his vote for a Female House of Congress, or of Commons? or who, on the receipt of a lady's letter of business,—I speak of the average,—would henceforth desire to have our ...
— The True Woman • Justin D. Fulton
... translations, popular and vernacular, from (Professor Antoine) Galland's delightful abbreviation and adaptation (A.D. 1704), in no wise represent the eastern original. The best and latest, the Rev. Mr. Foster's, which is diffuse and verbose, and Mr. G. Moir Bussey's, which is a re- correction, abound in gallicisms of style and idiom; and one and all degrade a chef d'oeuvre of the highest anthropological and ethnographical interest and importance to a mere fairy book, a nice present ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... that variety of subjects may gratify the taste, I trust, Reader, you will take it in good part; provided that my brevity be a fair return for such a favour: of which, that {my} praises may not be verbose, listen to the reason why you ought to deny the covetous, {and} even to offer to the modest that for which ...
— The Fables of Phdrus - Literally translated into English prose with notes • Phaedrus |
