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More "Mote" Quotes from Famous Books



... he will not persevere."[178] For milder language than this, many of the Reformers had been branded as "traitors," "disaffected," and "republicans," by the very person who now gave utterance to it. The beam in one's own eye is so much harder to perceive than the mote in ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent

... that this is the case, from the mote that floats in the sunbeam to multiple stars revolving round each other, are we willing to carry our principles to their consequences, and recognize a like operation of law among living as among lifeless things, in the organic as well as the inorganic world? ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 5, November, 1863 • Various

... bewte dyscry fayne wolde I Affter the sentence off myne auctowre, Butte I pray yowe of thys grette labowre I mote at ...
— Early Theories of Translation • Flora Ross Amos

... but the least of real as opposed to 'ideal', the least speck of positive existence, even though it were but the mote in a sun beam, into the sciential 'contemplamen' or theorem, and it ceases to be science. 'Ratio desinit esse pura ratio et fit discursus, stat subter et fit [Greek: hypothetikon]:—non superstat'. The 'Nous' is bound to a rock, the immovable firmness of which is indissolubly ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge

... brimmed with every costly wine, And all that mote to luxury invite. Without a sigh he left to cross the brine, And traverse Paynim shores, and pass earth's ...
— The Loving Ballad of Lord Bateman • Charles Dickens and William Makepeace Thackeray

... what to do: the outrage sore Avenged he has not, nor his pain allaid: What was a mote is now a beam; so sore It prest him; on his heart so heavy weighed. So plain is what was little known before, He fears that it will shortly be displaid. At first, he haply might have hid his woe; Which Rumour now throughout ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto

... have run through it without sticking. I can prove some facts about travelling by a story or two. There are certain principles to be assumed,—such as these:—He who is carried by horses must deal with rogues.—To-day's dinner subtends a larger visual angle than yesterday's revolution. A mote in my eye is bigger to me than the biggest of Dr. Gould's private planets.—Every traveller is a self-taught entomologist.—Old jokes are dynamometers of mental tension; an old joke tells better among friends travelling than at home,—which shows that their ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various

... and reprove without discouraging. Oh, for more of the heart of Christ! Take care, brother, how you speak of another's fault. Ere you know, you may be in the same or deeper condemnation. Very significantly does the Master say that the man that sees a mote in his brother's eye, usually has a rafter in his own eye! One of the two unpardonable sins of ...
— Days of Heaven Upon Earth • Rev. A. B. Simpson

... of the question. The orb we know as the sun is centre of a system of worlds of which our earth is almost the most insignificant; yet great as is the sun when compared to the little bit of matter on which we dwell and have our being, it is itself but a mote, as it were, in the beam of the Universe. Formerly this sun was thought to be fixed and immovable, but the progress of science demonstrated that while the earth moves around this luminary, the latter is moving with mighty velocity in ...
— Marvels of Modern Science • Paul Severing

... Queensferry diligence, was in no hurry to face the wrath of the public. She served her customer quietly in the shop below, ascended the stairs, and when at last on the level of the street, she looked about, wiped her spectacles as if a mote upon them might have caused her to overlook so minute an object as an omnibus, and exclaimed, "Did ever anybody see the like ...
— Red Cap Tales - Stolen from the Treasure Chest of the Wizard of the North • Samuel Rutherford Crockett

... felt—even to blindness, and, also, to the receiving of his sight. He was sincere. He suffered long as a bold defender of the Christian religion, and died a martyr's death at last. Let us work on, suffer on, hope on, "hope in death," and live forever! So mote ...
— The Christian Foundation, June, 1880

... the body of a perfect man," said he. "In the days when our State was powerful and great, when men and not dogs ruled at Mandakan, no man might be Dakoon save him who was clear of mote or beam; of true bone and body, like a high-bred yearling got from a perfect stud. But two such are there that I have seen in Mandakan to-day, and they are ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... m. heap, mass. morabito hermitage. morador m. inhabitant. morder to bite. moribundo dying. morir to die. morisco Moorish. morito, -a (dim. of moro). moro, -a Moorish, Moor. morrion m. helmet. mortaja shroud. mortero mortar (ordnance). mostrar to show. mote m. nickname. motin m. disturbance. motivo motive. mover to move. movimiento movement. mozo, -a young person; m. waiter. muchacho, -a boy, girl. muchedumbre f. multitude. mucho much. mudar to change. mudo mute, silent. muelle ...
— Novelas Cortas • Pedro Antonio de Alarcon

... There's a mote in my eye or a blot on the page, And I cannot tell of the joyful greeting; You may take it for granted and I will engage, There were kisses and tears at the strange, glad meeting; For aye since the birth of the swift-winged years, In the desert drear, in the field of clover, In the cot, and the ...
— Legends of the Northwest • Hanford Lennox Gordon

... hill, the boasted seat Of studious Peace and mild Philosophy, Indignant murmurs mote be ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... he ordered the innocent slain. Beware of false prophets, Mr. Parris. They are more to be dreaded than the protean devil of which you speak. Be sure that you remove the beam from your own eye, before you try to see the mote in the eye of ...
— The Witch of Salem - or Credulity Run Mad • John R. Musick

... mete," &c., is found in the Talmud of Babylon (Sanhedrim fol. 100, Sotah, chapter 4, 7, 8,9.) "With whatsoever measure any one metes it shall be measured to him. So also the original of that expression of "Cast out the beam out of thine own eye, and then thou shalt see clearly to cast the mote out of thy brother's eye is to be ...
— The Grounds of Christianity Examined by Comparing The New Testament with the Old • George Bethune English

... day when a boat Went curtsying over the billow, I marked her course till a dancing mote, She faded out on the moonlit foam, And I stayed behind in the dear-loved home; And my thoughts all day were about the boat, And ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 1 (of 4) • Various

... that that big blue field up there, empty by day and with such crowds of little faint dots in it all night, was the real thing—the big, final, and important thing—and that they and their churches and popes and pyramids and nations should just dance about it for millions of years like a mote in a sunbeam, hurt their feelings at first. But it did them good. It started them looking Up, and looking the ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee

... she had grown up under influences that had combined to foster the most complete and tyrannical selfishness—exercised in a pretty, winning sort of way, but rooted and grounded in her very life. So indeed was Ruth's; but she, of course, did not know that, though she had clear vision for the mote in Flossy's eyes. ...
— Four Girls at Chautauqua • Pansy

... his sour, pasty visage turned sourer. It was the one possibility that disturbed him—the only fly in the amber—the only mote that troubled his clairvoyance. Also, he was the only man among the three who didn't think a thing was certain to happen merely because he wanted ...
— The Dark Star • Robert W. Chambers

... horror as to make us doubt whether it is not our manifest duty to endeavor at least to show our disapproval of the deed and our sympathy with those who have suffered by it. The cases must be extreme in which such a course is justifiable. There must be no effort made to remove the mote from our brother's eye if we refuse to remove the beam from our own. But in extreme cases action may be justifiable and proper. What form the action shall take must depend upon the circumstances of the ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt

... a par with the privileged and inacessible. I, for one, want to play my role in the world; hence I must have a distinguished title. It is true I also stand in need of wealth, and by means of a skilful arrangement I have secured both. The mote in my Jewish eye appearing to my aristocratic relatives like a very large beam, I have yielded and renounced the title of a Princess von Reuss; but, in spite of that, I remain a princess and retain the title of highness. The prince, ...
— LOUISA OF PRUSSIA AND HER TIMES • Louise Muhlbach

... keenest intellect; I would rather learn for myself. To persuade the heart, the will, the action, is alone worth the full energy of a man. His strength is first for his own, then for his neighbour's manhood. He must first pluck out the beam out of his own eye, then the mote out of his brother's—if indeed the mote in his brother's be more than the projection of the beam in his own. To make a man happy as a lark, might be to do him grievous wrong: to make a man wake, rise, look up, turn, is worth the life and ...
— Unspoken Sermons - Series I., II., and II. • George MacDonald

... creature mote she bee; Whether a creature or a goddesse graced With heavenly gifts from heven first enraced? But what so sure she was, she worthy was To be the fourth with those three other placed, Yet she was certes but a countrey lasse; Yet she all other countrey ...
— A Biography of Edmund Spenser • John W. Hales

... severance shaft; * Ah who shall patient bear such parting throe? And dart of Death struck down amid the tribe * The age's pearl that Morn saw brightest show: I cried the while his case took speech and said:—* Would Heaven, my son, Death mote his doom foreslow! Which be the readiest road wi' thee to meet * My Son! for whom I would my soul bestow? If sun I call him no! the sun cloth set; * If moon I call him, wane the moons; Ah no! O sad mischance o' thee, O doom of days, * Thy place none other love ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton

... germs at random float, Fall on no fostering home, and die Back to mere elements; every mote Was framed for ...
— Ionica • William Cory (AKA William Johnson)

... her golden nets: nobles, and princes, and poets, and soldiers—she swept them in far and wide. She had her empire; why must she seek out a man who had but his art and his youth, and steal those? Women are so insatiate, look you; though they held all the world, they would not rest if one mote in the air swam in sunshine, free of them! It was the first year I touched triumph that I saw her. They began for the first time to speak of me; it was the little painting of Cigarette, as a child of the army, that did it. Ah, God! I thought myself already so famous! Well, ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]

... height. Men were long in accepting the proofs of the relative insignificance of the earth; they were more quickly convinced of the comparative littleness of the solar system; and now the evidence assails their reason that what they had regarded as the universe is only one mote gleaming ...
— Curiosities of the Sky • Garrett Serviss

... dear fellow, how often must I explain to you your confusions? Orthodox sentiment and stereotyped emotion master you. And then your temperament! You are really incapable of rational judgments. Cerberus? Pshaw! A flash expiring, a mote of fading sparkle, a dim-pulsing and dying organism—pouf! a snap of the fingers, a puff of breath, what would you? A pawn in the game of life. Not even a problem. There is no problem in a stillborn babe, nor in a dead child. They never arrived. Nor ...
— Moon-Face and Other Stories • Jack London

... is it her wont to communicate directly with the upper world. In her slow and solemn sleep-weighted tones, she tells him that the Norns spin into their coil the visions of her illuminated sleep. Why does he not consult them? Or why, she asks, when that counsel is rejected, why does he not, still mote aptly, consult Bruennhilde, wise child of Wotan ...
— The Wagnerian Romances • Gertrude Hall

... sorry she was for him; and how strange that she of all people should be the only one in whom he confided. What secret sorrow could it be that depressed him? Perhaps he, too, had lost his mother. Or could it be something still mote terrible? How glad she would be if ...
— Tales of Two Countries • Alexander Kielland

... (in the role of a labourer behind a hedge on the Brighton road): "'Oo are you a-gettin' at? Do you see any mote in my eye? If you want to know the time, ...
— Mr. Punch Awheel - The Humours of Motoring and Cycling • J. A. Hammerton

... actually appraised me as being as heavy as my mate, or even heavier? Surely he must be wrong in his judgments. The point was that I woefully was wrong in mine. How true it is that we who would pluck the mote from behind a fellow being's waistcoat so rarely take note of the beam ...
— One Third Off • Irvin S. Cobb

... in itself, a fourth part the value of Ireland; (for Bishop Burnet says, it is not above a fortieth part in value, to the rest of Britain) and with respect to the profit that England gains from hence, not the forty thousandth part. Although I must confess, that a mote in the eye, or a thorn in the side, is more dangerous and painful than a beam, or ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. VI; The Drapier's Letters • Jonathan Swift

... world mote stonde, And hath done sithen it began, And shall while there is any man, And that ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand

... striking expressions, such as (II Tim. ii. 4): "No man holding knighthood to God, wlappith himself with worldli nedes;" and many of the best-known phrases in our present Bible originated with him; e.g., "the beame and the mote," "the depe thingis of God," "strait is the gate and narewe is the waye," "no but a man schall be born againe," "the cuppe of blessing which ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various

... pride and vanity, to avoid in their own case that which they condemn so harshly elsewhere. But tolerant people are just the opposite, and claim for themselves the same indulgence that they extend to others—hanc veniam damus petimusque vicissim. It is all very well for the Bible to talk about the mote in another's eye and the beam in one's own. The nature of the eye is to look not at itself but at other things; and therefore to observe and blame faults in another is a very suitable way of becoming conscious of one's own. We require a looking-glass for ...
— Counsels and Maxims - From The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer

... a most melodious sound, Of all that mote delight a daintie eare, Such as attonce might not on living ground, Save in this paradise, be heard elsewhere: Right hard it was for wight which did it heare, To read what manner musicke that mote bee; For all that pleasing is to living eare Was there consorted in one harmonee; ...
— Flowers and Flower-Gardens • David Lester Richardson

... freely, and shall cheerfully grant reviewers, critics, and readers, the same privilege. I send forth this book with a pure desire that it may do good. Amen, so mote it be. ...
— The Lost Ten Tribes, and 1882 • Joseph Wild

... made a word and said: "Why paceth the fool up and down our hall, doing nothing, even as the Ravens flap croaking about the crags, abiding the war-mote and the ...
— The Story of the Glittering Plain - or the Land of Living Men • William Morris

... wing, Makes merry chirpings in its grassy nest, Inspirited with dew to leap and sing:— So let us also live, eternal King! Partakers of the green and pleasant earth:— Pity it is to slay the meanest thing, That, like a mote, shines in the smile of mirth:— Enough there is ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood

... into the manor. Parallel transformation of the township, in some of its features, into the parish. The court leet and the vestry-meeting. The New England town-meeting a revival of the ancient mark-mote. ...
— American Political Ideas Viewed From The Standpoint Of Universal History • John Fiske

... whether we go on with or without the other newspapers. We will do justice and say what is true, regardless of popularity. We detest hypocrisy; and we have no disposition to make a mountain out of a molehill, or to see a mote in the eye of Lola Montez, and not discover a beam in the eye of Fanny Elssler, or of any of the ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham

... towering in all his height. Then, like a wind that hushes, gazed and saw Down, down, far down upon the untroubled green A shepherd-boy that swung a little sling. Goliath shut his lids to drive that mote, Which vexed the eastern azure of his eye, Out of his vision; and stared down again. Yet stood the youth there, ruddy in the flare Of his vast shield, nor spake, nor quailed, gazed up, As one might scan a mountain to be scaled. Then, as it were, a voice unearthly still ...
— Collected Poems 1901-1918 in Two Volumes - Volume I. • Walter de la Mare

... then thou shalt possess, No mortal tongue can them declare: All earthly joys, compared with this, are less Than smallest mote to the world so fair. Then is not that man blest That must enjoy this rest? Full happy is that guest Invited to this feast, that ever, that ever ...
— The Sources and Analogues of 'A Midsummer-night's Dream' • Compiled by Frank Sidgwick

... and the great prevalence of comicality in popular views taken of life and of death, of incident and of character, of evil and of good, are, in reality, signs of the times. These straws, so thick upon the wind, and so injuriously mote-like to the visual organs, are flying forward before a storm. As symptoms of changing nationality, and of a disposition to make fun of all things ancient and honourable, and wise, and mighty, and religious, they serve to evidence a state of the universal mind ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper

... it "a new adaptation from the New Testament." He and a charming "she" sit waiting their turn at the Hofrath's door. He is looking into her eyes and she into his. "Really I don't see the slightest mote in your eyes," says she. "No, but I can see the ...
— In Bohemia with Du Maurier - The First Of A Series Of Reminiscences • Felix Moscheles

... dere God, xuld I now rave? An old man may nevyr thryff With a yonge wyff, so God me save! Nay, nay, sere, lett bene, Xuld I now in age begynne to dote, If I here chyde she wolde clowte my cote, Blere myn ey, and pyke out a mote, And thus oftyn ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne

... failing through all those dreadful days of enforced waiting and suspense. For I was determined not to intrude my suggestions, valuable as I considered them, till all hope was gone of his being righted by the judgment of those who would not lightly endure the interference of such an insignificant mote in the great scheme ...
— The Woman in the Alcove • Anna Katharine Green

... from the eye: Take a horse-hair and double it, leaving a loop. If the object can be seen, lay the loop over it, close the eye, and the mote will come out as the hair is withdrawn. If the irritating object cannot be seen, raise the lid of the eye as high as possible and place the loop as far as you can, close the eye and roll the ball around a few times, draw ...
— The Whitehouse Cookbook (1887) - The Whole Comprising A Comprehensive Cyclopedia Of Information For - The Home • Mrs. F.L. Gillette

... dimly, to be sure, this mote of life and light; but before it is a vast evolution, Dane, on the pinnacle of which are to be found men and women, Hester Stebbins, ...
— The Kempton-Wace Letters • Jack London

... mind thee for many a season How we met in the high voice of Hilda. Right fain I go forth to the spear-mote Being fitted for every encounter. There Cormac's gay shield from his clutches I clave with the bane of the bucklers, For he scorned in the battle to seek me If we set not ...
— The Life and Death of Cormac the Skald • Unknown

... marking the happy accord of Peace—Goodfellowship—Mirth!!! These be verily the "Central Powers," which RUDINI might have referred to when he said,—"Our Alliance, firmly and sincerely maintained, will assure the Peace of Europe for a long time to come." So mote it be! Let us toast ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, July 11, 1891 • Various

... two, the Indian was much the finest relic of human powers, though he was less uneasy and more stationary than the black. But the propensity to see the mote in the eye of his friend, while he forgot the beam in his own, was a long-established and well-known weakness of Jaaf, and its present exhibition caused everybody to smile. I was delighted with the beaming, laughing eyes of Mary Warren in ...
— The Redskins; or, Indian and Injin, Volume 1. - Being the Conclusion of the Littlepage Manuscripts • James Fenimore Cooper

... the arms of a goodly oak-tree There was of Swine a large company. They were making a rude repast, Grunting as they crunch'd the mast. Then they trotted away: for the wind blew high— 5 One acorn they left, ne more mote you spy, Next came a Raven, who lik'd not such folly: He belong'd, I believe, to ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge

... him, once for all, that he was not to be trusted. He held aloof from Jim and he was scantily civil to Dick Thomas, whose friendship rang false. He pushed the work ahead while the air was still alive with swirls of mote-like snowflakes, and himself bore the brunt of it just to dull that gnawing self-disgust which made his ...
— The Uphill Climb • B. M. Bower

... help others, I felt, because she had first helped herself, had tackled the mote in her own eye, from the time when she had gone down to the harbor to get her roots, as she called it. She was a wonderful manager, our budget was carefully worked out. And she had herself so well in hand she could ...
— The Harbor • Ernest Poole

... reached out and shoved Rip, sweeping him through space like a dust mote. He clutched his propulsion tube with both hands and fought to hold ...
— Rip Foster Rides the Gray Planet • Blake Savage

... derived the courage to confess this, he knew not, and neither the blow from her fan, nor the warning exclamation of the nurse: "Just look at the boy!" sobered him. Nay, his sparkling eyes sought hers still mote frequently as he ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... what may this mean, that we be thus healed, and right now we were at the point of dying? I wot full well, said Sir Ector, what it is; it is an holy vessel that is borne by a maiden, and therein is part of the holy blood of our Lord Jesu Christ, blessed mote he be. But it may not be seen, said Sir Ector, but if it be by a perfect man. So God me help, said Sir Percivale, I saw a damosel, as me thought, all in white, with a vessel in both her hands, and forthwithal ...
— Le Morte D'Arthur, Volume II (of II) - King Arthur and of his Noble Knights of the Round Table • Thomas Malory

... ready to break the offender's head. The individual that suffers a single adverse word immediately proceeds to abuse and slander in the extreme his opponent. In short, an angry heart knows no moderation and cannot equally repay, but must make of a splinter, even a mote, a great beam, or must fan a tiny spark into a volcano of flame, by retaliating with reviling and cursing. Yet it will not admit that it does wrong. It would, if possible, actually murder the offender, thus committing a greater wrong than it ...
— Epistle Sermons, Vol. III - Trinity Sunday to Advent • Martin Luther

... hadde cast aboone betwene the man and the wife, at the worste waye they myght be deuorsed, but now that remedie is past, euen till death depart you he must nedes be thy husbande, and thou hys wyfe, xan. Il mote they thryue & thei that taken away that liberty from vs Eulalia. Beware what thou sayest, it was christes act. Xan. I can euil beleue that Eula. It is none otherwyse, now it is beste that eyther of you one beyng with an other, ...
— A Merry Dialogue Declaringe the Properties of Shrowde Shrews and Honest Wives • Desiderius Erasmus

... Ruth came to pass a hundred (31) years after Othniel's reign. Conditions in Palestine were of such a nature that if a judge said to a man, "Remove the mote from thine eye," his reply was, "Do thou remove the beam from thine own." (32) To chastise the Israelites God sent down them one of the ten seasons of famine which He had ordained, as disciplinary measures for mankind, ...
— THE LEGENDS OF THE JEWS VOLUME IV BIBLE TIMES AND CHARACTERS - FROM THE EXODUS TO THE DEATH OF MOSES • BY LOUIS GINZBERG

... from his coat. Then from far off a winged vessel came, Swift as a swallow, subtle as a flame: I know not what it bore of freight or host, But white it was as an avenging ghost. It levelled strong Euphrates in its course; Supreme yet weightless as an idle mote It seemed to tame the waters without force Till not a murmur swelled or billow beat: Lo, as the purple shadow swept the sands, The prudent crocodile rose on his feet And shed appropriate tears and wrung ...
— Poems • Christina G. Rossetti

... laid his rod on th' ocean stream, And this o'erhanging wood-top nods Like golden helms of drowsy gods. Methinks that now I'll stretch for rest, With eyelids sloping toward the west; That, through their half transparencies, The rosy radiance passed and strained, Of mote and vapor duly drained, I may believe, in hollow bliss, My rest in the empyrean is. Watch thou; and when up comes the moon, Atowards her turn me; and then, boon, Thyself compose, 'neath wavering leaves That hang these branched, majestic eaves: That so, with self-imposed deceit, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various

... mote, on earth or air, Will speed and gleam, down later days. And like a secret pilgrim fare By eager and ...
— Georgian Poetry 1911-12 • Various

... loghynge. 340 Vp go[th] [th]e sayl(:) [th]ey sayle[th] faste: Arthour owt of sy[gh]t ys paste. [Th]e ferst lond [th]at he gan Meete, and lands at Forso[th]e hyt was Bareflete; 344 Barfleet. Ther he gan vp furst aryve. Now welle Mote Arthour spede & thryve; God speed him! And [th]at hys saule spede [th]e better, Lat eche man sey a ...
— Arthur, Copied And Edited From The Marquis of Bath's MS • Frederick J. Furnivall

... shrunk, even yet, from deliberately putting that great thing in her eye, agonized already by the presence of a mote. ...
— A Summer in Leslie Goldthwaite's Life. • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney

... "When you 've set in one spot's long's I hev, p'raps you'll hev the use o' your faculties! Men folks has more 'n one way o' gettin' married, 'specially when they 're ashamed of it. ... Well, I vow, there's the little Hobson girls comin' out o' the door this minute, 'n' they 're all dressed up, and Mote don't seem to ...
— The Village Watch-Tower • (AKA Kate Douglas Riggs) Kate Douglas Wiggin

... weight, while others seem to be not larger than pebbles, or even than grains of sand. Yet, insignificant as these bodies may seem, the sun does not disdain to undertake their control. Each particle, whether it be as small as the mote in a sunbeam or as mighty as the planet Jupiter, must perforce trace out its path around the sun in conformity with ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball

... SHANDY," said Mrs. WADMAN, holding up her cambric handkerchief to her left eye, as she approached the door of my Uncle TOBY'S Sentry-Box—"a mote, or sand, or small fly, or something, I know not what, has got into this eye of mine. The Gardener declares it is one of those Green Flies which are the pest of this Distressful Country. I refuse to believe that. There never was, never will, never can, never shall be any Green in my eye. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, April 22, 1893 • Various

... see what difference two figures on horseback against the southern sky-line could possibly make to the shimmer of purple above the plains, or the fragrance of prairie-roses lining the trail. It seems to me the lonely call of the meadow-lark high overhead—a mote in a sea of blue—or the drumming and chirruping of feathered creatures through the green, could not have sounded less musical, if I had not been a lover. But that, too, is only an opinion; for one glimpse of the forms before me brought ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut

... Seer; but that would have been too direct; the devil works in a more cunning way. He let him see and seek the true and the good; but while the young man was contemplating them, the evil spirit blew one mote after another into each of his eyes; and such a proceeding would be hurtful even to the best sight. Then the fiend blew upon the motes, so that they became beams; and the eyes were destroyed, and the Seer stood like a blind man in the wide world, and had no faith in it: he ...
— What the Moon Saw: and Other Tales • Hans Christian Andersen

... closet in the middle of eight squares latticed; about and at the top of every square was a desk lodged to set books on, &c. The garde robe in the castle was exceeding fair, and so were the gardens within the mote and the orchards without; and in the orchards were mounts opere topiario writhen about with degrees like turnings of a cockle-shell, to come to top ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin

... germs up your sleeve now, or, more likely, on your back, and I wouldn't let you go into my hog pen for a $2000 note. I'm so well quarantined that I don't much fear contagion; but there's always danger from infected dust. The wind blows it about, and any mote may be an automobile for a whole colony of bacteria, which may decide to picnic in my piggery. This dry weather is bad for us, and if we get heavy winds from off the ridge, I'm going to whistle ...
— The Fat of the Land - The Story of an American Farm • John Williams Streeter

... When Hymenaeos shall her lotte dispose. And, little booke, it is to her you runne. And sisters eight, for they, in soothe, are nine; And in their bowere baske as in the suunne, And beare Maid Marion's love to Catherine, Who is her gossipe, and she is her pette; And nought mote save us from a wrath condign, If you, my booke, should haplessly forgette, Nor bended knees, I trow, nor ...
— Fables of John Gay - (Somewhat Altered) • John Gay

... Alas! I then have chid away my friend: He hath a stern look, but a gentle heart. Let him come back, that his compassion may Give life to yours. Hub. Come, boy, prepare yourself. Arth. Is there no remedy? Hub. None, but to lose your eyes. Arth. O, Heaven! that there were but a mote in yours, A grain, a dust, a gnat, a meandering hair, Any annoyance in that precious sense! Then, feeling what small things are boisterous there, Your vile intent must needs seem horrible. Hub. Is this your promise? ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick

... and only earth phenomena, yet the benefaction of the sun is as if it shone for us alone. It is as great as if this were the case, and yet the fraction of his light and heat that actually falls upon this mote of a world adrift in sidereal space is so infinitely small that it could hardly be computed by numbers. In our religion we appropriate God to ourselves in the same way, but he knows us not in this private and particular way, ...
— Under the Maples • John Burroughs

... either Mr Gomez or Hernandez. Them two shud be contented, seein' as they're more after the weemen than the money, an' nobody as I know o' carin' to cut 'em out there. It's true him I refer to hez come into the thing at the 'leventh hour, as ye may say—after 'twar all planned. But he mote a gied us trouble by stannin' apart. Tharfore, I say, let's take him in on ...
— The Flag of Distress - A Story of the South Sea • Mayne Reid

... doubt," began the other. But Coey came to her sister's assistance with a Biblical allusion to the mote and the beam, and Bluebell saw that if personalities were to be avoided, they had better go downstairs at once. So the party of ladies passed a quiet sleepy evening,—Mrs. Rolleston mentally resolving not to encourage those girls about ...
— Bluebell - A Novel • Mrs. George Croft Huddleston

... that ye be not judged. For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged, and with what measure ye mete it shall be measured unto you. And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye? Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me cast out the mote out of thine eye, and lo, the beam is in thine own eye? Thou hypocrite, cast out first the beam out of thine own eye and then ...
— Mystic Christianity • Yogi Ramacharaka

... first the hot fermentation and unwholesome secrecy of the population crowded into large cities, each mote in the misery lighter, as an individual soul, than a dead leaf, but becoming oppressive and infectious each to his neighbour, in the smoking mass of decay. The resulting modes of mental ruin and distress are continually new; and in a certain ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin

... not, do not, my brethren, keep these sacred thoughts of Christ's companionship in sorrow, for the larger trials of life. If the mote in the eye be large enough to annoy you, it is large enough to bring out His sympathy; and if the grief be too small for Him to compassionate and share, it is too small for you to be troubled by it. If you are ashamed to apply that ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren

... I brenne wit[h] feruence & hete Wit[h]yn myn herte I mote compleyne of colde And by excesse thoug[h] I swelte and swete Me to compleyne god wote I am not bolde Vnto no wight, ner one word vnfolde Of al my peyne, allas the hard stounde The hotter that I brenne, ...
— The Temple of Glass • John Lydgate

... truth and right, grievously would they all fall short,—and we, too, with them. Judged by the human standard of progressive development and gradual growth,—the only standard to which the man of the beam can venture, unrebuked, to bring the man with the mote,—we shall find much in them all to sadden us, and much, also, in which we can ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various

... at the centre of the universe. And the doubtful guilt or possible integrity of other people, appearances, self-evident facts, the testimony of her own senses,—even Hollingsworth's self-accusation, had he volunteered it,—would have weighed not the value of a mote of thistledown on the other side. So secure was she of his right, that she never thought of comparing it with another's wrong, but left the ...
— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... was made a tun, And when he should therein be done, He lept out upon the brench (brink) And said, 'Churl! wilt thou me drench? The devil of hell mote fetche thee! I am too much (big) ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 1 (of 2) - With an Introduction upon Ancient Humour • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange

... clearly,—that to him a true life was one of full development rather than self-restraint? that he was deaf to the higher tone in a cry of voluntary suffering for truth's sake than in the fullest flow of spontaneous harmony? I do not plead his cause. I only want to show you the mote in my brother's eye: then you can see clearly to take ...
— Life in the Iron-Mills • Rebecca Harding Davis

... begemming the bewildering blue Unless one has the eyes to see him. Think How we two stand upon the brink Of nothing! Here's a globe, whereto we trust, No larger than the smallest speck of dust Or mote in the sunbeam is to that sun's self, And we are like dead leaves in autumn's whil Of ...
— Household Gods • Aleister Crowley

... blunder in the twilight, Mrs. Dyer has too much good sense to be jealous for a mere effect of imperfect optics. But don't try to write the Lord's Prayer, Creed, and Ten Commandments, in the compass of a halfpenny; nor run after a midge or a mote to catch it; and leave off hunting for needles in bushels of hay, for all these things strain the eyes. The snow is six feet deep in some parts here. I must put on jack-boots to get at the post-office with this. It ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb

... sister was fair Canacee, That was the learnedst lady in her days, Well seem in every science that mote be, And every secret work of nature's ways, In witty riddles, and in wise soothsays, In power of herbs and tunes of beasts ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various

... a God at all, He must be omnipresent in space. Beyond the last Stars He must be, as He is here. There can be no mote that peoples the sunbeams, no little cell of life that the microscope discovers in the seed-sporule of a moss, ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike

... they heard a most melodious sound Of all that mote delight a daintie eare, Such as att once might not on living ground, Save in this paradise, be heard elsewhere: Right hard it was for wight which did it heare, To read what manner musicke that mote bee, For all that pleasing is to living eare ...
— Penshurst Castle - In the Days of Sir Philip Sidney • Emma Marshall

... the swifter will he go Through the pale, scattered asphodels, Down mote-hung dusk of olive dells, To where the ancient basins throw Fleet threads of blue and trembling zones Of gold upon ...
— Gloucester Moors and Other Poems • William Vaughn Moody

... shrine could not be brought out to the mote-stead when we did you homage; they say it ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VIII (of X) - Continental Europe II. • Various

... common doings, not to say his oddities, by principles drawn from a source far too sacred to be practically regarded, was too preposterous to have ever become even a notion to her. Henceforth, however, it was a mote to trouble her mind's eye, a mote she did not get rid of until it began to turn to a glimmer of light. I need hardly add that Gibbie waited ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald

... alle your observaunces, But it a sely fewe poyntes be; Ne no-thing asketh so grete attendaunces As doth youre lay, and that knowe alle ye; 340 But that is not the worste, as mote I thee; But, tolde I yow the worste poynt, I leve, Al seyde I sooth, ye wolden at ...
— Troilus and Criseyde • Geoffrey Chaucer

... think then that with envy, malice, and all uncharitableness at your heart, you are certain of Heaven? For shame! Pluck the mote from ...
— Eugene Aram, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... foes Clorinda sallied out, And many a baron bold was by her side, Within the postern stood Argantes stout To rescue her, if ill mote her betide: With speeches brave she cheered her warlike rout, And with bold words them heartened as they ride, "Let us by some brave act," quoth she, "this day Of Asia's hopes the ...
— Jerusalem Delivered • Torquato Tasso

... the mother of Paul Marvell. She was an inherent part of his life; the inner disruption had not resulted in any outward upheaval. And with the sense of inevitableness there came a sudden wave of pity. Poor Undine! She was what the gods had made her—a creature of skin-deep reactions, a mote in the beam of pleasure. He had no desire to "preach down" such heart as she had—he felt only a stronger wish to reach it, teach it, move it to something of the pity that filled his own. They were fellow-victims in the noyade of marriage, but if they ceased to struggle perhaps the drowning ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton

... them! well, that's queer: it may stop a man drinking, because he can get no mote out of it. However, as you please, gentlemen; here's to drink my health, bad manners to you," said McShane, throwing the bottle ...
— The Poacher - Joseph Rushbrook • Frederick Marryat

... were at once more real and more magnificent. Crimsons and blues, purples and greens, yellows and violets, blazed with that ancient majesty which only lives to-day in the peal of a great organ, the call of a silver trumpet, or the proud roll of drums. Out of the gorgeous pageant mote-ridden rays issued like messengers, to badge the cold grey stone with tender images and set a smile upon the face of stateliness. "Such old, old panes," says someone. "Six hundred years and more. How wonderful!" Pardon me, but I have seen them, and it is not wonderful ...
— Jonah and Co. • Dornford Yates

... a philosophy of life which gives us something to think about aside from the narrative. He had a profound insight of human nature, and in telling the simplest story was sure to slip in some nugget of wisdom or humor: "What wol nat be mote need be left," "For three may keep counsel if twain be away," "The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne," "Ful wys is he that can ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long

... reason, said the king, I swear, so mote I thee:[91] My horse is better than thy mare, And that thou ...
— The Book of Brave Old Ballads • Unknown

... powers to flow Upon the aforesaid mortals here below? And how, indeed, to this far distant ball Can he impart his energy at all?— How pierce the ether deeps profound, The sun and globes that whirl around? A mote might turn his potent ray For ever from its earthward way. Will find, it, then, in starry cope, The makers of the horoscope? The war[24] with which all Europe's now afflicted— Deserves it not by them to've been predicted? Yet ...
— The Fables of La Fontaine - A New Edition, With Notes • Jean de La Fontaine

... within, he thought: "Tradition, handed down for hours and hours, Tells that our globe, this quivering crystal world, Is slowly dying. What if, seconds hence When I am very old, yon shimmering doom Comes drawing down and down, till all things end?" Then with a wizen smirk he proudly felt No other mote of God had ever gained Such giant ...
— Little Masterpieces of American Wit and Humor - Volume I • Various

... what worries me most," interposed Madaline. "It is the fact—the solemn fact," and she rolled her round eyes as if expecting a mote to sail out on a tear—"that not one of our troop has done anything big enough to ...
— The Girl Scout Pioneers - or Winning the First B. C. • Lillian C Garis

... had the place to ourselves. But then Feth sees few visitors at any season. Sixteen miles from a station is its salvation. True, there is Mote Abbey hard by—a fine old place with an ancient deer-park and deep, rolling woods. Ruins, too, we had heard. A roofless quire, a few grass-grown yards of cloister and the like. Only the Abbot's kitchen was at all preserved. There's irony for you. We were going to see them before ...
— The Brother of Daphne • Dornford Yates

... them, and even disliked the place because of them. His father was one whom a mote in his brother's eye repelled. The son suffered for this in twenty ways—one of which was that a single spot in the landscape was to him enough to destroy ...
— Wilfrid Cumbermede • George MacDonald

... cruel to deny him the grave's dearest privilege, peace and quiet. Amen! Amen! with all my heart to thy benediction and prayer, O priest! as, aspersing his lifeless remains with holy-water, thou sayest, Requiescat! So mote it be! Requiescat! Requiescat! Requiescat ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 74, December, 1863 • Various

... they were aldermen in right of their estates within the City. What powers the Knighten Guild possessed is not easy to define. Besides this, the aristocracy of the City, there were already trade guilds for religious purposes and for feasting—but, as yet, with no powers. The people had their folk mote, or general gathering: their ward mote: and their weekly hustings. We must not seek to define the powers of all these bodies and corporations. They overlapped each other: the aristocratic party was continually innovating while the popular party as continually ...
— The History of London • Walter Besant

... had appeared after a grey morning, and it pleasantly flooded this big living-room whose walls were entirely lined with the mellow backs of books. Here, as host, among his treasures, Swinburne was more than ever attractive. He was as happy as was any mote in the sunshine about him; and the fluttering of his little hands, and feet too, was but as a token of so much felicity. He looked older, it is true, in the strong light. But these added years made only more notable his youngness of heart. An illustrious bibliophile among his books? A birthday ...
— And Even Now - Essays • Max Beerbohm

... my dear friends' door, of my hopes the goal, * Whose sight mote assuage my sorrow and woes of soul: No friends found I there, nor was there another thing * To find, save a corby-crow and an ill-omened owl. And the tongue o' the case to me seemed to say, * 'Indeed This ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton

... by chaunge Of name Caer-Merdin called, they took their way: There the wise Merlin whylome wont (they say) To make his wonne, low underneath the ground In a deep delve, far from the view of day, That of no living wight he mote be found, Whenso he counselled ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch

... world rolls round,—mistrust it not,— Befalls again what once befell; All things return, both sphere and mote, And I shall hear my bluebird's note, And dream the dream of ...
— Poems - Household Edition • Ralph Waldo Emerson

... wonder, of the God with whom he deals? It is God who provides the river and the sea; God who through endless ages has piled stone on stone, crust on crust, and has crumpled the strata of the earth as tissue in His hand. It is God who has bound every mote to the earth-centre; who has sent magnetic currents coursing through the globe, and has made tides and sea-changes, and the trade-winds to blow. It is the God of the Gulf Stream, the Caribbean Sea, the God of the Appalachians, the God of the Himalayas, the God of the ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown

... that they trick and outwit themselves. The one event happeneth to all alike. There is no new thing under the sun, not even that yearned-for bauble of feeble souls—immortality. But he knows, HE knows, standing upright on his two legs unswaying. He is compounded of meat and wine and sparkle, of sun-mote and world-dust, a frail mechanism made to run for a span, to be tinkered at by doctors of divinity and doctors of physic, and to be flung into the scrap-heap at ...
— John Barleycorn • Jack London

... "The mote in the middle distance?" he asked. "Did you ever, my dear, know me to see anything else? I tell you it blocks out everything. It's a cathedral, it's a herd of elephants, it's the whole habitable globe. Oh, it's, ...
— A Christmas Garland • Max Beerbohm

... the prospect of his funeral expences, though a short time before he had been censuring one of his own relations for his parsimonious temper—"Now is it not strange," continued he, "that this man would not remove the beam from his own eye, before he attempted to take the mote out of other peoples?" "Why, so I dare say he would," cried Foote, "if he were sure ...
— The Book of Three Hundred Anecdotes - Historical, Literary, and Humorous—A New Selection • Various

... three years ago, when the king of the whole land brought his folk into our lakeside country, and there held a court and a mote in a fair great meadow anigh to the water. But even as the mote was hallowed, and the Peace of God proclaimed at the blast of the war-horn, came we three woeful ladies clad in black and knelt before the lord king, and prayed him hearken us. And he deemed that we were fair, so he had compassion ...
— The Water of the Wondrous Isles • William Morris

... brat even as I was, You mote have let me bee, I never had come to the kings faire courte, To crave any ...
— Book of Old Ballads • Selected by Beverly Nichols

... or Cheese Mote of a square Figure, six Inches over, and nine Inches deep, full of small Holes for the convenience of letting out the Whey when the Curd is put into it: Then take the Night's Cream, and mix it with the Morning's Milk, and put the Rennet to it to cool. When the Curd is come, take it gently ...
— The Country Housewife and Lady's Director - In the Management of a House, and the Delights and Profits of a Farm • Richard Bradley

... joyousness, the sunshine its warmth. The greenness and beauty round me, which an instant before had filled me with pleasure, seemed on a sudden no more than a grim and cruel jest at my expense, and I an atom perishing unmarked and unnoticed. Yes, an atom, a mote; the bitterness of that feeling I well remember. Then, in no long time—being a soldier—I recovered my coolness, and, retaining the power to think, decided what it ...
— A Gentleman of France • Stanley Weyman

... me, I would—" Maria paused. Suddenly she remembered that she had her secret, and she felt humbled before this other girl whom she was judging. She became conscious to such an extent of the beam in her own eye that she was too blinded to see the mote in that of poor Lily, who, indeed, was not to blame, being simply helpless before her own temperament and ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman

... something rising out of the mists at the far horizon. It was a thread of white vapor. The other rocketship was a speck, a mote, invisible because of its size and distance. This thread of vapor was already 100 miles long, and it expanded to a column of whiteness half a mile across before it seemed to dissipate. It rose and rose, as if ...
— Space Tug • Murray Leinster

... a silencing effect upon him. Your house might be full of skeletons for anything he would ever discover or remember. The beam in his own eye is so big that he cannot see past it to speak about your small mote. 'The inward Christian,' says A Kempis, 'preferreth the care of himself before all other cares. He that diligently attendeth to himself can easily keep silence concerning other men. If thou attendest ...
— Bunyan Characters - Third Series - The Holy War • Alexander Whyte

... his sail-like wings, though heavily he flew, A mote upon the sun's broad face he seemed unto my view: But once I thought I saw him stoop, as if he would alight; 'Twas only a delusive thought, for all ...
— The Universal Reciter - 81 Choice Pieces of Rare Poetical Gems • Various

... increase. We rejoice that "the most prolific missionary field ever opened to any Christian people— right here at our doors," is gaining upon the interest and benevolence of the churches year by year. Never were the friends of the cause mote responsive; never was the work more hopeful. The work enlarges, and the people's faith enlarges. Their gifts to Christ for ...
— American Missionary, Volume 43, No. 5, May, 1889 • Various

... not as a sufficient argument for disputing papal power, but in order to show the perverted opinions of those who strain the gnats, but let elephants go through [Matt. 23:24], who behold the mote in the brother's eye and permit the beams in their own to remain [Matt. 7:3], only to the end that others may be stifled by superfluous and unnecessary things, or at least branded as heretics or by any ...
— Works of Martin Luther - With Introductions and Notes (Volume I) • Martin Luther

... straggling in by twos and threes. Some of the weary dancers had dropped to sleep, still wearing their ball-gowns and slippers and bangles and picture-hats, their faces showing ghastly white and drawn in the mote-ridden sunbeams that fell through the dirty windows. Others were busy doffing Cinderella garments, which rites were performed with astounding frankness in the open spaces of ...
— The Long Day - The Story of a New York Working Girl As Told by Herself • Dorothy Richardson

... thou say to thy brother: Brother, let me cast out the mote that is in thine eye, when thou thyself beholdest not the beam that is in thine own eye? Hypocrite! cast out first the beam out of thine eye, and then thou shalt see clearly to cast out the mote that is in thy ...
— The New Testament of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. • Various

... in the center of the earthwork, burst with a terrible crash, and sent steel splinters and fragments flying in every direction. A rain of dirt followed the rain of steel, and, when the colonel wiped the last mote from his eye, he said ...
— The Guns of Bull Run - A Story of the Civil War's Eve • Joseph A. Altsheler

... worst of all infernal fiends, would never have deigned to serve such a knavish barking cur as this is. He hath not learnt the first precept of philosophy, which is, Know thyself; for whilst he braggeth and boasteth that he can discern the least mote in the eye of another, he is not able to see the huge block that puts out the sight of both his eyes. This is such another Polypragmon as is by Plutarch described. He is of the nature of the Lamian witches, who in foreign places, ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais

... their allegiance to their lawful king, and to prepare the way for his own accession. He proclaimed himself the protector of Lutheranism and endeavoured to win over the bishops to his side. In a national Assembly held at Upsala (The "Upsala-mote" 1593) after a very violent address from the regent against the Catholic Church, the bishops confessed that they had blundered in accepting the liturgy of John III., and the Assembly declared itself strongly in favour of ...
— History of the Catholic Church from the Renaissance to the French • Rev. James MacCaffrey

... of a just judge. He could imagine that Arnold was undergoing "the torments of a mental hell," for the part he had acted in this transaction, but he felt no compunction for his own unjust and uncalled-for severity—he could see the mote in Arnold's eye, but could not discover the beam which was in his own. As regards Arnold he was probably correct. After the death of Andre that renegade issued addresses to the Americans, but he was scorned ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan

... the land of Noua Zembla, toward the East out of the circle Arcticke in the mote temperate Zone, you are to haue regard: for if you finde the soyle planted with people, it is like that in time an ample vent of our warme woollen clothes may be found. [Sidenote: A good consideration.] And if there be no people at all there to be found, then you shall ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of The English Nation v. 4 • Richard Hakluyt

... this small difference and that, new to me and strange. They were in no fashion I could name, and the simple costume the man wore suggested neither period nor country. It might, I thought, be the Happy Future, or Utopia, or the Land of Simple Dreams; an errant mote of memory, Henry James's phrase and story of "The Great Good Place," twinkled across my mind, and passed and left ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells

... reasons for that," said the Baron, who could see the mote in his neighbor's eye, "Mademoiselle d'Avrigny has led a life so very worldly ever since she was a child, so madly fast and lively, that suitors are afraid of her. Jacqueline, thank heaven, has never yet been in what is called the world. She only visits ...
— Jacqueline, v2 • Th. Bentzon (Mme. Blanc)

... difference and that, new to me and strange. They were in no fashion I could name, and the simple costume the man wore suggested neither period nor country. It might, I thought, be the Happy Future, or Utopia, or the Land of Simple Dreams; an errant mote of memory, Henry James's phrase and story of "The Great Good Place," twinkled across my mind, and passed ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells

... agonizing over the pitiful condition of the Armenians under Moslem rule, but has nothing to say anent her own awful record in India. It were well for John Bull to get the beam out of his own eye before making frantic swipes at the mote in the optic of the Moslem. The oppression of the children of Israel by the Egyptian Pharaohs, the Babylonian king and Roman emperors were as nothing compared to that suffered by the patient Bengalese at the hands of Great Britain. The history of every barbarous prince of the Orient, in ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann

... to represent the present, into a lower series of similar fractions, and the actual present which you arrest measures now but the thirty-six-millionth of an hour; and so by infinite declensions the true and very present, in which only we live and enjoy, will vanish into a mote of a mote, distinguishable only by a heavenly vision. Therefore the present, which only man possesses, offers less capacity for his footing than the slenderest film that ever spider twisted from her womb. ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various

... stopped you might have heard a mouse Squeak, such a death-like hush sealed up the old Mote House. But when the mass of man sank meek upon his knees, While Tab, alongside, wheezed a hoarse "Do hang us, please!" Why, then the waters rose, no eye but ran with tears, Hearts heaved, heads thumped, until, paying all past arrears Of pity and sorrow, at last a regular scream outbroke ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke

... Doctor," said the Idiot. "I sort of like Bill and I'll bet the University Intelligence Office will get him a job in forty-eight hours. A man who is willing to mote or Edit has an adaptability that ought to ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume IX (of X) • Various

... hand reached out and shoved Rip, sweeping him through space like a dust mote. He clutched his propulsion tube with both hands and ...
— Rip Foster Rides the Gray Planet • Blake Savage

... careful breathing and exploring of body sensations, Cully realized he could move. He flexed an arm; a mote of gold sand sifted upward in the dark water. It had a pleasant color, in contrast with the ominous shades of the sea. In a few moments, he had struggled to a sitting position, delighting in the curtain of glittering metal grains whirling around him ...
— Cully • Jack Egan

... whit as great when our view is contracted and bounded by near objects as when it is extended to larger and remoter. For it being impossible that one MINIMUM VISIBILE should obscure or keep out of sight mote than one other, it is a plain consequence that when my view is on all sides bounded by the walls of my study see just as many visible points as I could, in case that by the removal of the study-walls and all other obstructions, I had a full ...
— An Essay Towards a New Theory of Vision • George Berkeley

... him! Perhaps this, was one of them—letting him disgrace himself! If he could but be made ashamed of himself there would be hope! And in the meantime she must get the beam out of her own eye, that she might see to take the mote or the beam, whichever it might be, out of Corney's! Again she fell upon her knees, and prayed God to enable her. Corney was her brother, and must for ever be her brother, were he the worst thief under the sun! God would see to their honor or disgrace; what she had to do was to ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald

... In precisely the same spirit, England, who was grasping at all the world, protested, with the most edifying devotion to the claims of justice and humanity, against the ambitious spirit of Russia. The "beam" did not exclude the vision of the "mote." Catharine, offended by the opposition of England, retaliated by entering into a treaty of commerce with France, which deprived England of an important part of the ...
— The Empire of Russia • John S. C. Abbott

... everybody knew Alderman Cute was a Justice! Oh dear, so active a Justice always! Who such a mote of brightness in ...
— A Budget of Christmas Tales by Charles Dickens and Others • Various

... more likely, on your back, and I wouldn't let you go into my hog pen for a $2000 note. I'm so well quarantined that I don't much fear contagion; but there's always danger from infected dust. The wind blows it about, and any mote may be an automobile for a whole colony of bacteria, which may decide to picnic in my piggery. This dry weather is bad for us, and if we get heavy winds from off the ridge, I'm ...
— The Fat of the Land - The Story of an American Farm • John Williams Streeter

... the world mote stonde, And hath done sithen it began, And shall while there is any man, And that ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand

... and your flickering planet A mote that flecks your sun, that faint white star; Yet, in my magic pools, I still can scan it; For I have ways ...
— Watchers of the Sky • Alfred Noyes

... more welcome,' sayd Robyn, 'So ever mote I the! Fyll of the best wyne,' sayd Robyn, 'This monke shall drynke ...
— Ballads of Robin Hood and other Outlaws - Popular Ballads of the Olden Times - Fourth Series • Frank Sidgwick

... gra mote Tauro. Compare the sketches PI. CXVI-CXVIII. So long as it is im- possible to identify the situation of Calindra it is most difficult to decide with any certainty which peak of the Taurus is here meant; and I greatly regret that I had ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci

... seein' as they're more after the weemen than the money, an' nobody as I know o' carin' to cut 'em out there. It's true him I refer to hez come into the thing at the 'leventh hour, as ye may say—after 'twar all planned. But he mote a gied us trouble by stannin' apart. Tharfore, I say, let's take him in on ...
— The Flag of Distress - A Story of the South Sea • Mayne Reid

... who shamed * A wand of the willow by Zephyr befanned: I lavisht upon her mine heritage, * And spent like a nobleman puissant and grand: Then to sell her compelled, my sorrow increased; * The parting was sore but I mote not gainstand: Now as soon as the crier had called her, there bid * A wicked old fellow, a fiery brand: So I raged with a rage that I could not restrain, * And snatched her from out of his hireling's hand; When the angry curmudgeon made ready for blows, ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton

... any one member of it. If she had seen anything wrong in Jemima, Ruth loved her so much that she would have told her of it in private; and with many doubts, how far she was the one to pull out the mote from any one's eye, even in the most tender manner;—she would have had to conquer reluctance before she could have done even this; but there was something undefinably repugnant to her in the manner of acting which Mr Bradshaw had proposed, and she determined not to accept the invitations which ...
— Ruth • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell

... temporarily blinded by the excess of light which emanates from St. John, who proceeds to examine him in regard to Charity. His answers are greeted by the heavenly chorus with the chant "Holy, holy, holy," in which Beatrice joins, ere she clears the last mote away from Dante's eyes and thus enables him to see more plainly than ever. Our poet now perceives a fourth spirit, in whom he recognizes Adam, father of mankind, who retells the story of Eden, adding that, 4232 years after creation, Christ delivered ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber

... of real as opposed to 'ideal', the least speck of positive existence, even though it were but the mote in a sun beam, into the sciential 'contemplamen' or theorem, and it ceases to be science. 'Ratio desinit esse pura ratio et fit discursus, stat subter et fit [Greek: hypothetikon]:—non superstat'. The 'Nous' is bound to ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge

... time Ruth had been less than a mote in the eye of Uncle Jabez. She was merely an annoyance to the miller at that time. Since then, however, she had many and many a time proved a blessing to him. Nor did Jabez Potter refuse to ...
— Ruth Fielding on the St. Lawrence - The Queer Old Man of the Thousand Islands • Alice B. Emerson

... that it was an excellent compromise!" answered the lawyer soulfully. "There's something in the Bible, isn't there, about pulling the mote out of your own eye before attempting to remove the beam from ...
— By Advice of Counsel • Arthur Train

... that a young slave girl was recently hanged at New Orleans for the crime of striking and abusing her mistress. The religious press of the north has not, so far as we are aware, made any comments upon this execution. It is too busy pulling the mote out of the eye of the heathen, to notice the beam in our nominal Christianity at home. Yet this case, viewed in all its aspects, is an atrocity which has (God be thanked) no parallel in heathen lands. It is a ...
— American Scenes, and Christian Slavery - A Recent Tour of Four Thousand Miles in the United States • Ebenezer Davies

... fragment, scrap, crumb; mite, ace, scintilla, particle, whit, iota, tittle, grain, atom, jot, molecule, speck, mote. ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming

... 5 A.M. we dropped anchor in Keppel Bay, but had to wait for the tide to rise. We landed in the course of the morning in the 'Gleam,' the 'Flash,' and the 'Mote,' and made quite a large party, with dogs, monkey, and photographic apparatus. We found a convenient little landing-place, and looked over the telegraph station and post-office, which are mainly managed by the wife of the signalman, ...
— The Last Voyage - to India and Australia, in the 'Sunbeam' • Lady (Annie Allnutt) Brassey

... incongruously enough, in quite a modern fashion, rather shabbily, and I daresay rather mannishly. There were leather arm-chairs and settles, all a good deal worn, and stout tables littered with books and periodicals. The narrow windows let in thin slants of mote-filled sunshine, vortices of gold-dust; and on the faded carpet, by the door, lay a bright parallelogram, warming to life its dim old colours. The rest of the room seemed twilit. Someone had been too wise to defeat that good oak ...
— The Lady Paramount • Henry Harland

... language than this, many of the Reformers had been branded as "traitors," "disaffected," and "republicans," by the very person who now gave utterance to it. The beam in one's own eye is so much harder to perceive than the mote in ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent

... in the House of Lords and the much more perfect kind that is seen in the House of Commons. After a while, as cities and boroughs grew in importance, they sent representative burghers to the shire-mote. There were two presiding officers; one was the ealdorman, who was now appointed by the king; the other was the shire-reeve (i.e. "sheriff"), who was still elected by the people and generally held ...
— Civil Government in the United States Considered with - Some Reference to Its Origins • John Fiske

... Madame de la Baudraye, "London is the capital of trade and speculation and the centre of government. The aristocracy hold a 'mote' there for sixty days only; it gives and takes the passwords of the day, looks in on the legislative cookery, reviews the girls to marry, the carriages to be sold, exchanges greetings, and is away again; and is so far from amusing, that it cannot bear ...
— Parisians in the Country - The Illustrious Gaudissart, and The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac

... second, at the same time planting my straw as before, a straw sticking out nearly a centimetre. (.39 inch.—Translator's Note.) What will the Bee do? Will she, who is scrupulous in ridding the home of the least mote of dust, extract this beam, which would certainly prove the larva's undoing by interfering with its growth? She could, for just now we saw her drag out and throw away, at ...
— The Mason-bees • J. Henri Fabre

... then, and sneer? From out your own eye pull the mote; A pretty thing for you to jeer! Haven't you, too, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 487 - Vol. 17, No. 487. Saturday, April 30, 1831 • Various

... all the swifter will he go Through the pale, scattered asphodels, Down mote-hung dusk of olive dells, To where the ancient basins throw Fleet threads of blue and trembling zones Of gold upon ...
— Gloucester Moors and Other Poems • William Vaughn Moody

... an old wife in that place, A little beside the fire, Which William had found of charity Mor-e than seven year; Up she rose, and walked full still, Evil mote she speed therefore: For she had not set no foot on ...
— A Bundle of Ballads • Various

... to my dear friends' door, of my hopes the goal, * Whose sight mote assuage my sorrow and woes of soul: No friends found I there, nor was there another thing * To find, save a corby-crow and an ill-omened owl. And the tongue o' the case to me seemed to say, * 'Indeed ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton

... were reading no ordinary book. He uses many striking expressions, such as (II Tim. ii. 4): "No man holding knighthood to God, wlappith himself with worldli nedes;" and many of the best-known phrases in our present Bible originated with him; e.g., "the beame and the mote," "the depe thingis of God," "strait is the gate and narewe is the waye," "no but a man schall be born againe," "the cuppe of blessing ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various

... Avynoun thexperience Therof hath yove an evidence, Of that men sen hem so divided. And yit the cause is noght decided; Bot it is seid and evere schal, Betwen tuo Stoles lyth the fal, Whan that men wenen best to sitte: In holy cherche of such a slitte Is for to rewe un to ous alle; God grante it mote wel befalle 340 Towardes him which hath the trowthe. Bot ofte is sen that mochel slowthe, Whan men ben drunken of the cuppe, Doth mochel harm, whan fyr is uppe, Bot if somwho the flamme stanche; And so to speke upon this branche, Which proud Envie hath mad to springe, Of Scisme, causeth ...
— Confessio Amantis - Tales of the Seven Deadly Sins, 1330-1408 A.D. • John Gower

... wapentacks, the tithings into hundreds, and the hundreds into tenths. Each division had a court subordinate to those that were superior, the highest in each shire being the shire-gemot, or folck-mote, which was held twice a year, and in which the bishop or his deputy, and the ealderman, or his viceregent, the sheriff, presided. See Seldon on the Titles of Honor; Speman's Glossary, ad. noviss. Squires on the Government of the English Saxons. ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler

... campaign plain, Lays open all the little worms that creep; In men, as in a rough-grown grove, remain Cave-keeping evils that obscurely sleep: Through crystal walls each little mote will peep: Though men can cover crimes with bold stern looks, Poor women's faces are their ...
— The Rape of Lucrece • William Shakespeare [Clark edition]

... forked hill, the boasted seat Of studious Peace and mild Philosophy, Indignant murmurs mote be heard to threat.—WEST. ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Book IV • Edward Bulwer Lytton

... and even disliked the place because of them. His father was one whom a mote in his brother's eye repelled. The son suffered for this in twenty ways—one of which was that a single spot in the landscape was to him enough to destroy the loveliness of ...
— Wilfrid Cumbermede • George MacDonald

... pasture lay, And not a shadowe mote be seene, Save where full fyve good miles away The steeple tower'd from out the greene; And lo! the great bell farre and wide Was heard in all the country ...
— Poems Every Child Should Know - The What-Every-Child-Should-Know-Library • Various

... paucity; fewness &c (small number) 103; meanness, insignificance (unimportance) 643; mediocrity, moderation. small quantity, modicum, trace, hint, minimum; vanishing point; material point, atom, particle, molecule, corpuscle, point, speck, dot, mote, jot, iota, ace; minutiae, details; look, thought, idea, soupcon, dab, dight^, whit, tittle, shade, shadow; spark, scintilla, gleam; touch, cast; grain, scruple, granule, globule, minim, sup, sip, sop, spice, drop, droplet, sprinkling, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget

... Peace—Goodfellowship—Mirth!!! These be verily the "Central Powers," which RUDINI might have referred to when he said,—"Our Alliance, firmly and sincerely maintained, will assure the Peace of Europe for a long time to come." So mote it be! Let us toast ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, July 11, 1891 • Various

... awful Night, Yspreaden roun ilk warrihour wight, Ye glasse of chivalrie; But nothing daunt, he kept his course, As well as mote his sorry hors, Farre to ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. V, May, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... simply a high-spirited and happy youth, full of energy and of apparently normal desires and intentions. He had that sort of genius which can be long asleep in the dark, while its possessor dances, like a mote, in sunshine. ...
— Tongues of Conscience • Robert Smythe Hichens

... the friar, "on with the cloak of the abbot of Doubleflask. I appoint thee my clerk: thou art here duly elected in full mote." ...
— Maid Marian • Thomas Love Peacock

... panting intellect before me brings, Sunk my weak sight before their dazzling load. Hence, whatsoe'er I spoke of her or wrote, Who, at God's right, returns me now her prayers, Is in that infinite abyss a mote: For style beyond the genius never dares; Thus, though upon the sun man fix his sight, He seeth less as ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch

... for any community to spend precious energy upon even a just finding of fault with another. The thing is, to trim the lamp and clean the glass of our own, that it may be a light to the world. It is just the same with communities as with individuals. The community which casts if it be but the mote out of its own eye, does the best thing it can for the beam in its neighbor's. For my part, I confess that, so far as the clergy form and represent the Church of England, it is and has for a long time been doing its best—not its worst, thank ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald

... shell struck squarely in the center of the earthwork, burst with a terrible crash, and sent steel splinters and fragments flying in every direction. A rain of dirt followed the rain of steel, and, when the colonel wiped the last mote from his eye, he said triumphantly ...
— The Guns of Bull Run - A Story of the Civil War's Eve • Joseph A. Altsheler

... to greater height. Men were long in accepting the proofs of the relative insignificance of the earth; they were more quickly convinced of the comparative littleness of the solar system; and now the evidence assails their reason that what they had regarded as the universe is only one mote gleaming ...
— Curiosities of the Sky • Garrett Serviss

... circumstance. On prejudiced or unsupported judgment the Master set His disapproval. "Judge not, that ye be not judged," He admonished, for, according to one's own standard of judging others, shall he himself be judged. The man who is always ready to correct his brother's faults, to remove the mote from his neighbor's eye so that that neighbor may see things as the interested and interfering friend would have him see, was denounced as a hypocrite. What was the speck in his neighbor's vision to the obscuring ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage

... And every mote, on earth or air, Will speed and gleam, down later days. And like a secret pilgrim fare By ...
— Georgian Poetry 1911-12 • Various

... other cheek—that sentence which Celsus found so vulgar—did no one smile, then, at the idea of anybody ever dreaming of such an act (Matt. 5:39)? Nor at the picture of the kind brother taking a mote from his brother's eye, with a whole baulk of timber in his own (Matt. 7:5)? Nor at the suggestion of doing two miles of forced labour when only one was demanded (Matt. 5:41)? Nor when he suggested ...
— The Jesus of History • T. R. Glover

... not see what difference two figures on horseback against the southern sky-line could possibly make to the shimmer of purple above the plains, or the fragrance of prairie-roses lining the trail. It seems to me the lonely call of the meadow-lark high overhead—a mote in a sea of blue—or the drumming and chirruping of feathered creatures through the green, could not have sounded less musical, if I had not been a lover. But that, too, is only an opinion; for one glimpse of the forms before me brought peace ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut

... what creature mote she bee; Whether a creature or a goddesse graced With heavenly gifts from heven first enraced? But what so sure she was, she worthy was To be the fourth with those three other placed, Yet she was certes but a countrey lasse; ...
— A Biography of Edmund Spenser • John W. Hales

... don't care a straw whether we go on with or without the other newspapers. We will do justice and say what is true, regardless of popularity. We detest hypocrisy; and we have no disposition to make a mountain out of a molehill, or to see a mote in the eye of Lola Montez, and not discover a beam in the eye of Fanny Elssler, or of any of the other great dancers ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham

... hand to gather one of the taller branches, a mote, a bit of bark—some hateful thing—falls into Molly's right eye. Instant agony is the result. Tears stream from the offended pupil; the other eye joins in the general tribulation; and Molly, standing in the centre of the grass-plot, ...
— Molly Bawn • Margaret Wolfe Hamilton

... other folks we faults can spy, And blame the mote that dims their eye; Each little speck and blemish find: To our ...
— Favourite Fables in Prose and Verse • Various

... shown, not his defects, of which we are too conscious, but his merits, to which we are too blind. And The Egoist[19] is a satire; so much must be allowed; but it is a satire of a singular quality, which tells you nothing of that obvious mote, which is engaged from first to last with that invisible beam. It is yourself that is hunted down; these are your own faults that are dragged into the day and numbered, with lingering relish, with cruel cunning and precision. A young friend of Mr. Meredith's (as I have the story) ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson

... won't laugh any mote. Come back, and you needn't climb. You can stay underneath and pick up while ...
— Gypsy's Cousin Joy • Elizabeth Stuart Phelps

... globe, this quivering crystal world, Is slowly dying. What if, seconds hence When I am very old, yon shimmering doom Comes drawing down and down, till all things end?" Then with a wizen smirk he proudly felt No other mote of God had ever gained Such ...
— Little Masterpieces of American Wit and Humor - Volume I • Various

... short time before he had been censuring one of his own relations for his parsimonious temper—"Now is it not strange," continued he, "that this man would not remove the beam from his own eye, before he attempted to take the mote out of other peoples?" "Why, so I dare say he would," cried Foote, "if he were sure of selling ...
— The Book of Three Hundred Anecdotes - Historical, Literary, and Humorous—A New Selection • Various

... Swift as a swallow, subtle as a flame: I know not what it bore of freight or host, But white it was as an avenging ghost. It levelled strong Euphrates in its course; Supreme yet weightless as an idle mote It seemed to tame the waters without force Till not a murmur swelled or billow beat: Lo, as the purple shadow swept the sands, The prudent crocodile rose on his feet And shed appropriate tears ...
— Poems • Christina G. Rossetti

... a tree. hist, hush! bowl, a vessel. hissed, did hiss. boll, a pod. paws, the feet of beasts. nose, part of the face. pause, a stop. knows, does know. faun, a sylvan god. mote, a particle. fawn, a young deer. moat, a ditch. pride, vanity. toled, allured. pried, did pry. told, did tell. wain, a wagon. tolled, did toll. wane, to decrease. rein, part of a bridle. see, to behold. rain, falling ...
— McGuffey's Eclectic Spelling Book • W. H. McGuffey

... shrewd eyes. Hume had no means of knowing how much money she possessed, but he did know that she had paid out ten thousand dollars in cash. He knew also that she was a woman. In his eyes, never clearsighted from the mote of conceit and the dust of arrogant superiority, a woman was a fool. He needed money, he wanted money, her money as well as another's. He had gone far already in the project that would make him a rich man if it succeeded; he was going further. If litigation now were to raise ...
— The Short Cut • Jackson Gregory

... fair Canacee, That was the learnedst lady in her days, Well seem in every science that mote be, And every secret work of nature's ways, In witty riddles, and in wise soothsays, In power of herbs and tunes of ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various

... 395) the account of the Balcreggan hoard which he had contributed to the Scotsman (my Report for 1913, p. 11). Mr. A. O. Curle (p. 161) records the discovery and exploration of a vitrified fort at the Mote of Mark near Dalbeattie (Kirkcudbright), and the discovery in it of two clearly Roman potsherds. The main body of the finds made here seem to belong to the ninth century; whether any of them can be earlier than has been thought, I am not competent ...
— Roman Britain in 1914 • F. Haverfield

... Edgcumbes I should like and Lady Lyttelton, but Garrick does not tempt me at all. I have no taste for his perpetual buffoonery, and am sick of his endless expectation of flattery; but you who charge me with making a long visit to Lord and Lady Ossory,—you do not see the mote in your own eye; at least I am sure Lady Ailesbury does not see that in hers. I could not obtain a single day from her all last year, and with difficulty got her to give me a few hours this. There ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole

... body of a perfect man," said he. "In the days when our State was powerful and great, when men and not dogs ruled at Mandakan, no man might be Dakoon save him who was clear of mote or beam; of true bone and body, like a high-bred yearling got from a perfect stud. But two such are there that I have seen in Mandakan to-day, and they are thyself and mine ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... been well described as preeminently "the man of the town meeting,"—Samuel Adams. The limitations of this great man, as well as his powers, were those which belonged to him as chief among the men of English race who have swayed society through the medium of the ancient folk mote. At this time he was believed by many to be hostile to the new Constitution, and his influence in Massachusetts was still greater than that of any other man. Besides this, it was thought that the governor, John Hancock, was half-hearted in his support of the ...
— The Critical Period of American History • John Fiske

... in,' I rored; when suddenly there rose A magick form before my dazzled eyes: 'Or do I wake,' I asked myself 'or doze'? Or hath an angel come in mortal guise'? So wondered I; but nothing mote surmise; Only I gazed upon that lovely face, In reverence yblent with mute surprise: Sure never yet was seen such wondrous grace, Since Adam first began to run his ...
— Sagittulae, Random Verses • E. W. Bowling

... the shore! While Julius frown'd the bloody monster dead, Who brought the world in his great rival's head. This sever'd head and trunk shall join once more, Tho' realms now rise between, and oceans roar. The trumpet's sound each fragrant mote shall hear, Or fix'd in earth, or if afloat in air, Obey the signal wafted in the wind, And not one sleeping atom lag behind. So swarming bees, that on a summer's day In airy rings, and wild meanders play, Charm'd with the brazen sound, their ...
— The Poetical Works of Edward Young, Volume 2 • Edward Young

... up, and turned from the charmer into the path of right! There came into her heart a longing that Ludwell Cary should see the matter truly. He should have done so that afternoon in the cedar wood; where was the black mote that kept the vision out? She was suddenly aware—and it came to her with a dizzying strangeness—that there was in her own soul that reference of matters to the bar of Cary's idea, thought, and judgment which, that day in the cedar wood, she had ...
— Lewis Rand • Mary Johnston

... spake also a parable unto them, Can the blind guide the blind? shall they not both fall into a pit? 40 The disciple is not above his teacher: but every one when he is perfected shall be as his teacher. 41 And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye? 42 Or how canst thou say to thy brother, Brother, let me cast out the mote that is in thine eye, when thou thyself ...
— The Gospel of Luke, An Exposition • Charles R. Erdman

... dislike the behavior of those persons who, when people are unfortunate, say: "I told you so—getting punished—served him right." If those I-told-you-so's got their desert they would long ago have been pitched over the battlements. The mote in their neighbor's eyes—so small that it takes a microscope to find it—gives them more trouble than the beam which obscures their own optics. With air sometimes supercilious and sometimes Pharisaical, and always ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage

... small, shiny nut-coal. The draughts were put on, and in five minutes the coals were red. In these five minutes the stove and the mantel were dusted, the hearth brushed up, and there was neither chip nor mote to tell the tale. It was not like an Irish fire, that reaches out into the middle of the room with its volcanic margin of ...
— We Girls: A Home Story • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney

... or faded, hung so low over his narrow forehead, that it wholly concealed it, and touched his bushy, snow-white brows. The eyes under them needed to be taken on trust, they were so well concealed, but when they peered through the narrow chink between the rows of lashes, not even a mote escaped them. Ulrich was shaping an arrow, and meantime asking the coal-burner numerous questions, and when the latter prepared to answer, the boy laughed heartily, for before Hangemarx could speak, he was obliged to straighten his crooked mouth by ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... The Eagle is king of the birds!" sang all the others; but, no! Way, way above the Eagle flew another bird, so tiny that he looked like nothing but a mote, floating in the sunlight. It was the little brown bird that sings alone in the hedges, and had no name then. He had hidden himself in the Eagle's feathers and had been carried up with him until he wanted ...
— Tell Me Another Story - The Book of Story Programs • Carolyn Sherwin Bailey

... specks that I could find among well ground Vermilion and Red-lead, seem'd to be a Red mass, compounded of a multitude of less and less motes, which sticking together, compos'd a bulk, not one thousand thousandth part of the smallest visible sand or mote. ...
— Micrographia • Robert Hooke

... myself freely, and shall cheerfully grant reviewers, critics, and readers, the same privilege. I send forth this book with a pure desire that it may do good. Amen, so mote it be. ...
— The Lost Ten Tribes, and 1882 • Joseph Wild

... wolde I Affter the sentence off myne auctowre, Butte I pray yowe of thys grette labowre I mote at thys tyme ...
— Early Theories of Translation • Flora Ross Amos

... delectable—a most glorious season. We, who are fond of basking as a lizard, and whose inward spirit dances and exults like a very mote in the sun-beam, always hail its approach with rapture; but our anticipations of bright and serene days—of blue, cloudless, and transparent skies—of shadows the deeper from intensity of surrounding light—of yellow corn-fields, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 12, Issue 346, December 13, 1828 • Various

... will, of one mind,—that one mind is everywhere active.—"All things proceed out of the same spirit, and all things conspire with it." While a man seeks good ends, nature helps him; when he seeks other ends, his being shrinks, "he becomes less and less, a mote, a point, until absolute badness is absolute death."—"When he says 'I ought;' when love warms him; when he chooses, warned from on high, the good and great deed; then deep melodies wander through ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes

... must not be allowed to embarrass or prevent a treaty of peace. If it violated a trifling article of the Golden Bull, that was no sin against the Holy Ghost, and God could show the Protestants, for a mote like this in the eyes of their enemies, whole beams in their own. It must needs be an intolerable burden to the Elector's conscience if war were to arise in consequence,—a war which might 'well end in rending the Empire asunder and ...
— Life of Luther • Julius Koestlin

... the will, the action, is alone worth the full energy of a man. His strength is first for his own, then for his neighbour's manhood. He must first pluck out the beam out of his own eye, then the mote out of his brother's—if indeed the mote in his brother's be more than the projection of the beam in his own. To make a man happy as a lark, might be to do him grievous wrong: to make a man wake, ...
— Unspoken Sermons - Series I., II., and II. • George MacDonald

... xuld I now rave? An old man may nevyr thryff With a yonge wyff, so God me save! Nay, nay, sere, lett bene, Xuld I now in age begynne to dote, If I here chyde she wolde clowte my cote, Blere myn ey, and pyke out a mote, And thus oftyn tymes it ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne

... plain, My eyes Meet yours that mean— With your cheeks and hair— Something more wise, More dark, And far different. Even so the lark Loves dust And nestles in it The minute Before he must Soar in lone flight So far, Like a black star He seems— A mote Of singing dust Afloat Above, That dreams And sheds no light. I know your ...
— Poems • Edward Thomas

... soul's vision, that love like a broad river flowing through the lands, an atmosphere bathing the worlds, the subtile essence and ether of space in which the farthest star pursues its course,—why, then, should it escape me, the mote? Oh, when the world turned from me, I sought to flee thither! I sighed for the rest there! Wretched, alone, I have wept in the dark and in the light that I might go and fling myself at the heavenly feet. But, do you see? sin has broken down the bridge between God and me. Yet why, then, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various

... the question. The orb we know as the sun is centre of a system of worlds of which our earth is almost the most insignificant; yet great as is the sun when compared to the little bit of matter on which we dwell and have our being, it is itself but a mote, as it were, in the beam of the Universe. Formerly this sun was thought to be fixed and immovable, but the progress of science demonstrated that while the earth moves around this luminary, the latter is moving with mighty velocity in an orbit of its own. Tis the same with all the other ...
— Marvels of Modern Science • Paul Severing

... principles are nearest and most habitual, coming to the elucidation of all minutest matters no less than to that of the greatest,—as those forces which hold the solar system together apply themselves, as on the same level, to a mote wandering in the air; and because to these masters first principles, through all their changes of seeming, through all their ranging by analogy up and down, are never disguised, but are always near and clear and sure, they can admit the action of all modifying principles without ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... he saw Fair Annet wex pale, And marvelit what mote bee; But when he saw her dear heart's blude, A' wood-wroth ...
— A Collection of Ballads • Andrew Lang

... is always applied when people, with pretence of friendship, do you an ill turn, as one licking a mote out of your eye ...
— The Proverbs of Scotland • Alexander Hislop

... mights unto the working that our good Lord stirreth us to, rejoicing and thanking inwardly. And sometimes for plenteousness it breaketh out with voice and saith: Good Lord! great thanks be to Thee: blessed mote Thou be." ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge

... ensconced himself snugly in a corner. The sun had appeared after a grey morning, and it pleasantly flooded this big living-room whose walls were entirely lined with the mellow backs of books. Here, as host, among his treasures, Swinburne was more than ever attractive. He was as happy as was any mote in the sunshine about him; and the fluttering of his little hands, and feet too, was but as a token of so much felicity. He looked older, it is true, in the strong light. But these added years made only more notable his youngness ...
— And Even Now - Essays • Max Beerbohm

... your courtesy, That ye ne arrettee it nought my villainy, Though that I plainly speak in this mattere, To tellen you her words, and eke her chere: Ne though I speak her words properly, For this ye knowen as well as I, Who shall tellen a tale after a man, He mote rehearse as nye as ever he can: Everich word of it been in his charge, All speke he, never so rudely, ne large. Or else he mote tellen his tale untrue, Or feine things, or find words new: He may not spare, although he were his brother, ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol II - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden

... and quite a considerable strip of blue sky could be seen from the window, and the mote-laden sun-rays that streamed in encouraged Hulda to grow better. She was soon up and about again, but the doctor said her system was thoroughly upset and she aught to have sea air. But that, of course, was impossible now. Hulda ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill

... I advise thee thus faithfully maintaining thy principles and doing thy duty, I would have thee very careful of either judging or reproving others; for it takes a long time to get the beam out of our own eye, before we can see clearly to take the mote out of our brother's eye. There is for one young in years, much greater safety in preaching to others by example, than in word, or doing what is done in an upright, manly spirit, 'unto the Lord, and ...
— Elizabeth Fry • Mrs. E. R. Pitman

... a sobering and a saddening and a silencing effect upon him. Your house might be full of skeletons for anything he would ever discover or remember. The beam in his own eye is so big that he cannot see past it to speak about your small mote. 'The inward Christian,' says A Kempis, 'preferreth the care of himself before all other cares. He that diligently attendeth to himself can easily keep silence concerning other men. If thou attendest unto God and unto thyself, thou wilt be but little ...
— Bunyan Characters - Third Series - The Holy War • Alexander Whyte

... road to Faerie, O there are many sights to see,— Small woodland folk may one discern Housekeeping under leaf and fern, And little tunnels in the grass Where caravans of goblins pass, And airy corsair-craft that float On wings transparent as a mote,— All sorts of curious things can be Upon the ...
— Days of the Discoverers • L. Lamprey

... if we admit that this is the case, from the mote that floats in the sunbeam to multiple stars revolving round each other, are we willing to carry our principles to their consequences, and recognize a like operation of law among living as among lifeless things, in the organic as well as the inorganic world? What testimony does ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 5, November, 1863 • Various

... is a God at all, He must be omnipresent in space. Beyond the last Stars He must be, as He is here. There can be no mote that peoples the sunbeams, no little cell of life that the microscope discovers in the seed-sporule of a ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike

... boy, in going among the savages at this hour, and letting himself fall into their hands like a deer that tumbles into a pit," growled the old man, perceiving as usual the mote in his neighbor's eyes, while he overlooked the beam in his own; "if he is left to pay for his stupidity with his own flesh, he can ...
— The Deerslayer • James Fenimore Cooper

... towers a study called Paradise, where was a closet in the middle of eight squares latticed; about and at the top of every square was a desk lodged to set books on, &c. The garde robe in the castle was exceeding fair, and so were the gardens within the mote and the orchards without; and in the orchards were mounts opere topiario writhen about with degrees like turnings of a cockle-shell, to come to top ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin

... my friend finishes his brief explanation of the conditions with the application of the whole. "Hold on"; that is the ABC, the Alpha and Omega of it. So mote it be. Still, saying it is one thing, doing it another. My steel-centred Hardy I know pretty well, and have no fear, though it is small by comparison with the full-sized greenhearts to which my attendant is accustomed, and I can see that he distrusts it. Of the line ...
— Lines in Pleasant Places - Being the Aftermath of an Old Angler • William Senior

... about to say mote when SCANTLEBURY once more coveys up his ears. TENCH suddenly makes a demonstration with the minute-book. A sense of having been engaged in the unusual comes over all of them, and one by one they resume their seats. EDGAR alone remains ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... Campedene should be quit of toll, and that if any free burgess of Campedene should come into the lord's amerciament he should be quit for 12d. unless he should shed blood or do felony. Probably Earl Ralph also granted the town a portman-mote, for the account of a skirmish in 1273 between the men of the town and the county mentions a bailiff and implies the existence of some sort of municipal government. In 1605 Campedene was incorporated, but it never returned representatives to parliament. Camden ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various

... opinion, either in print or elsewhere. In scribbling myself, it was necessary for me to find fault, and I fixed upon the trite charge of immorality, because I could discover no other, and was so perfectly qualified in the innocence of my heart, to "pluck that mote from my neighbour's eye." ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron

... flew into his eye, and lodged there so firmly that all his efforts to remove it were in vain. In a little while, the eye became quite painful, and he was obliged to keep it closed. A kind-looking gentleman, who sat near him, noticed his trouble, and offered to assist him in removing the mote; but it was so small that he could not find it. He advised Oscar not to rub the inflamed organ, and told him he thought the moisture of the eye would soon wash out the intruder, if left to itself. Oscar tried to follow this advice, but the pain and irritation did not subside, ...
— Oscar - The Boy Who Had His Own Way • Walter Aimwell

... fluttering of the Storm-god's heart,— An instant's palpitation Through all its arteries of fire! One common blood runs down life's myriad veins, From Archangelic Hierarchs who float Broad-winged in the God-glory, to the mote That trembles with a braided dance In the warm sunset's vivid glance; And one great Heart that boundless flow sustains! In all the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various

... to this. But she had her own thoughts. It was plain enough to her mind, that her friend had only herself to blame, for the annoyance she suffered. After witnessing one or two mote petty contentions with the domestic, Fanny went away, her friend promising, at her particular request, to come and spend a day with her ...
— Trials and Confessions of a Housekeeper • T. S. Arthur

... me to be too much influenced by the suspicions and calumnies thrown out by foreign journals—English, Prussian, Austrian, and others—which traduce the Emperor's motives in diplomacy, as they traduced them in the war. A prejudice in the eye is as fatal to sight as mote and beam together. And there are things abroad worse than ...
— What I Remember, Volume 2 • Thomas Adolphus Trollope

... thing we note among these New Englanders was their town-meetings, derived from the ancient folk-mote, in which they elected their magistrates, and imposed upon themselves the necessary taxes for schools, highways, and officers of the law. They formed self-governed communities, who selected for rulers their ablest and fittest men, marked for their integrity and intelligence,—grave, austere, unselfish, ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XI • John Lord

... a large Moorish arch of horse-shoe shape, the enormous white halo opening in front of them. They walked on, keeping their faces to the moon, smiling with wonder and a little rapture, until once mote the little lane curved wilfully, and they were walking north. Helena observed three cottages crouching under the hill and under trees to cover themselves from the ...
— The Trespasser • D.H. Lawrence

... mocking-bird turned his head from side to side, then lifting his full throat he poured forth again his incomparable, superb, infinitely versatile melody, fixing his glittering eye on the moon, and heeding the futilely ambitious worldling no mote. ...
— The Moonshiners At Hoho-Hebee Falls - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)

... tree, or what are the streams to the fountain! Thy fountain is defiled; yea, a defiler, and so that which maketh thy whole self, with thy works unclean in God's sight. But Pharisee, how comes it to pass, that the poor Publican is now such a mote in thine eye, that thou canst not forbear, but must accuse him before the judgment of God: for in that thou sayest, "that thou art not even as this Publican," thou bringest in an accusation, a charge, a bill against him. What has he done? Has he concealed any of thy righteousness, or ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan

... brothers, if Christ to-day were to command, 'Let him who is without sin cast the first stone,' look into your own hearts and answer me, how many of you would dare to lift a hand? How many of you have taken the beam out of your own eye before attempting to pluck the mote out of your brother's? O ye pharisaical ones, who stand in the public places and thank God that you are not as other men, beware, beware. The condemnation that surely and inevitably shall fall upon you is not the judgment of Jesus Christ. It is not the sentence of the Father. It is your own self-condemnation, ...
— The Uncalled - A Novel • Paul Laurence Dunbar

... have plucked out the eyes of this Seer; but that would have been too direct; the devil works in a more cunning way. He let him see and seek the true and the good; but while the young man was contemplating them, the evil spirit blew one mote after another into each of his eyes; and such a proceeding would be hurtful even to the best sight. Then the fiend blew upon the motes, so that they became beams; and the eyes were destroyed, and the Seer stood like a blind man in the wide world, and had no faith in it: he lost his good opinion of ...
— What the Moon Saw: and Other Tales • Hans Christian Andersen

... to none other wight, Complain I, for ye be my lady dere; I am sorry now that ye be light, For, certes, ye now make me heavy chere; Me were as lefe be laid upon a bere, For which unto your mercy thus I crie, Be heavy againe, or els mote I die. ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton

... Young Betty {21} doth he flee! Light as the mote that daunceth in the beam, He liveth only in man's present e'e; His life a flash, his memory a dream, Oblivious down he drops in Lethe's stream. Yet what are they, the learned and the great? Awhile of longer wonderment the theme! Who shall presume ...
— Rejected Addresses: or, The New Theatrum Poetarum • James and Horace Smith

... of no explanation. "Oh yes, quite parvarted; not a word of truth in it; there never is when England is consarned. There is no beam in an Englishman's eye; no not a smell of one; he has pulled it out long ago; that's the reason he can see the mote in other folks's so plain. Oh, of course it ain't true; it's a Yankee invention; it's a hickory ham ...
— The Attache - or, Sam Slick in England, Complete • Thomas Chandler Haliburton

... crowds of murmuring men he hied, With working lips and swinging stride, And gleaming eyes and brow bent down; Out of the great gate of the town He hastened ever and passed on, And ere the darkness came, was gone, A mote beyond the ...
— Alcyone • Archibald Lampman

... are. They have a polarized phraseology for saying these things, but it comes to precisely that. To which it may be answered, in the first place, that we have good authority for saying that even babes and sucklings know something; and, in the second, that, if there is a mote or so to be removed from our premises, the courts and councils of the last few years have found beams enough in some other quarters to build a church that would hold all the good people in Boston and have sticks enough left to make a bonfire for ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 19, May, 1859 • Various

... they call the sun over here which they show occasionally, but it looks more like a boiled turnip than it does like its American namesake. Yet they cheer us with the assurance that there will be real sunshine here by-and-by. So mote it be! ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley

... Thou my Sun, my selfishness destroy, Thy atmosphere of Love be all my joy; Thy Presence be my sunshine ever bright, My soul the little mote that lives ...
— Daily Strength for Daily Needs • Mary W. Tileston

... excellent a subject,—seeking to be Mary before it has laboured with Martha. If our Lord will have a soul to be Mary, even on the first day, there is nothing to be afraid of; but we must not be self-invited guests, as I think I said on another occasion. [10] This little mote of want of humility, though in appearance a mere nothing, does a great deal of harm to those who ...
— The Life of St. Teresa of Jesus • Teresa of Avila

... which no man could pass without hewing a way. But before it is told whereto Wildlake's Way led, it must be said that on the east side of the ghyll, where it first began just over the Portway, the hill's brow was clear of wood for a certain space, and there, overlooking all the Dale, was the Mote-stead of the Dalesmen, marked out by a great ring of stones, amidst of which was the mound for the Judges and the Altar of the Gods before it. And this was the holy place of the men of the Dale and of other folk whereof ...
— The Roots of the Mountains • William Morris

... speak'st as I would have thee speak; And mark how I unsay my words again. An honourable grave is more esteemed Than the polluted closet of a king; The greater man, the greater is the thing, Be it good or bad, that he shall undertake; An unreputed mote, flying in the sun, Presents a greater substance than it is; The freshest summer's day doth soonest taint The loathed carrion that it seems to kiss; Deep are the blows made with a mighty axe; That sin doth ten times aggravate itself That is committed in a holy place; An evil deed, ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne

... we had the place to ourselves. But then Feth sees few visitors at any season. Sixteen miles from a station is its salvation. True, there is Mote Abbey hard by—a fine old place with an ancient deer-park and deep, rolling woods. Ruins, too, we had heard. A roofless quire, a few grass-grown yards of cloister and the like. Only the Abbot's kitchen was at all ...
— The Brother of Daphne • Dornford Yates

... I would—" Maria paused. Suddenly she remembered that she had her secret, and she felt humbled before this other girl whom she was judging. She became conscious to such an extent of the beam in her own eye that she was too blinded to see the mote in that of poor Lily, who, indeed, was not to blame, being simply helpless before her own temperament and her ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman

... of magnifying and aggravating the faults of others; raising any small miscarriage into a heinous crime, any slender defect into an odious vice, and any common infirmity into a strange enormity; turning a small "mote in the eye" of our neighbour into a huge "beam," a little dimple in his face into a monstrous wen. This is plainly slander, at least in degree, and according to the surplusage whereby the censure doth exceed the fault. As he that, upon the score of a ...
— Sermons on Evil-Speaking • Isaac Barrow

... myriad germs at random float, Fall on no fostering home, and die Back to mere elements; every mote Was framed for ...
— Ionica • William Cory (AKA William Johnson)

... or, in his absence, the gerefa, (sheriff,) and sometimes both the earl and the gerefa, presided at the schyre-mote (county court); the gerefa (sheriff) usually alone presided at the mote (meeting or court) of the hundred. In the cities and towns which were not within any peculiar jurisdiction, there was held, at regular stated intervals, a burgh ...
— An Essay on the Trial By Jury • Lysander Spooner

... hovering. It shrank. It was rising in an absolutely vertical line. It dwindled to the size of a basketball and then an apple. Then to the size of a pea. And then that pea diminished until the spaceship from Krim, Walden, Cetis, Rigel and the Nearer Rim had become the size of a dust mote and then could not be seen at all. But one knew that it was going on to Lohala and Tralee and Famagusta ...
— The Pirates of Ersatz • Murray Leinster

... so fayr and bright Velut maris stella, Brighter than the day is light, Parens et puella; I crie to thee, thou see to me, Levedy, preye thi Sone for me, Tam pia, That I mote ...
— Our Lady Saint Mary • J. G. H. Barry

... days in spring wherein advance seems as passive as is the progress of a log down the race of a spring freshet. Then there are other days wherein it seems that every mote must feel to the full its sentient life, and its swelling towards development or fulfilment. On a day like the latter, everything and everybody bestirs. The dust motes spin in whirling columns, the gnats dance for their lives their dance of death before the wayfarer. ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman

... you know, who'll gang up and doon the land talkin' o' humanity. But they'll no be kind to the wife, and their weans will run and hide awa' when they come home. There's many a man has keen een for the mote in his neighbor's eye who canna see the beam in his own— that's as true to-day as when it was said first twa ...
— Between You and Me • Sir Harry Lauder

... him to have done, and met him on their habitual ground of frankness and reality as if he had not left it. He got to telling her all his steps with his patent-right man, who seemed to be growing mote and more slippery, and who presently developed a demand for funds. Then she gave him some very shrewd, practical advice, and told him to go right into the hotel office and telegraph to his father while she was putting on ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... stands open to a telling tu quoque by means of a selection of gems from British books and pamphlets of the type of those from which I have made my gleanings? Is it a case of the mote and the beam? I think we may be pretty confident that it is not. I doubt whether the literature of the world can show a parallel to the amazing outburst of tribal arrogance, unrestrained and unashamed, of which these pages contain but a few scattered specimens. In the extracts from ...
— Gems (?) of German Thought • Various

... would raise a rage that mote * Make spittle choke me, sticking in my throat) His pardoner, and pardon his offense, * Fearing lest I should live ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 4 • Richard F. Burton

... compleat Bridges to enter the City. To prevent which, the Besieged intended to have made another Ditch out of their Works, so that the Wheels falling therein, the Bridge would have fallen too short of their Breastworks into their wet Mote, and so ...
— Characters from 17th Century Histories and Chronicles • Various

... previous instructedness as the case calls for, would quite avail to understand him; or he may open his eyes to the fact and be trying hard to overcome it: but on which supposition is he led to confirm another in his unintelligibility? By the proverbial tenderness of the eye with the mote for the eye with the beam? If that beam were just such another mote—then one might sympathize and feel no such inconvenience—but, because I have written a 'Sordello,' do I turn to just its double, Sordello ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett

... travelling by a story or two. There are certain principles to be assumed,—such as these:- He who is carried by horses must deal with rogues.—To- day's dinner subtends a larger visual angle than yesterday's revolution. A mote in my eye is bigger to me than the biggest of Dr. Gould's private planets.—Every traveller is a self-taught entomologist.—Old jokes are dynamometers of mental tension; an old joke tells better among friends travelling than at home,—which shows that their minds are in a state of diminished, ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes

... in the regions of eternal twilight, revolutions, of which history has been silent, in the mysterious depths of Asia, outpourings of human rivets along the sides of the Altai mountains, convulsions up-heaving r mote realms and unknown dynasties, shock after shock throb bing throughout the barbarian world and dying upon the edge of civilization, vast throes which shake the earth as precursory pangs to the birth of a new empire—as dying symptoms of the proud but effete realm which called ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... certainly more beautiful than I ever dreamed of a woman's being. If she continues, I do not know what perfect thing she will become. She is too exquisite for common use. I wonder her husband is not jealous of every mote in the air, of rain and wind, of every day that passes over her head,—since each must now bear some charm from her ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, No. 38, December, 1860 • Various

... been to me. How fathomless thy joys,—how rapturously has my soul bounded forth upon the upward paths! To him who forever renews his youth in the clear fount of Nature, how exquisite is the mere happiness TO BE! Farewell, ye lamps of heaven, and ye million tribes, the Populace of Air. Not a mote in the beam, not an herb on the mountain, not a pebble on the shore, not a seed far-blown into the wilderness, but contributed to the lore that sought in all the true principle of life, the Beautiful, the Joyous, the Immortal. To others, a land, a city, a hearth, ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton

... Ascapard was made a tun, And when he should therein be done, He lept out upon the brench (brink) And said, 'Churl! wilt thou me drench? The devil of hell mote fetche thee! I am too much ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 1 (of 2) - With an Introduction upon Ancient Humour • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange

... divided, under the presidency of an alderman. These divisions were afterwards called wards, and were analogous to the corresponding division of the shire into hundreds. In each ward was held a court-leet, or ward-mote, dating from the time of Alfred, though the actual institution of wards by that name is no later than the reign of Edward I. Civil causes, in London at least, were tried before a peculiar tribunal, the president of which was probably the ...
— The Corporation of London: Its Rights and Privileges • William Ferneley Allen

... Reddings took it amiss, and would have a mote with us Goldings to talk of booting. By ill-luck we yea-said that for the saving of the city's peace. But what betid? We met in our Gild-hall, and there befell the talk between us; and in that talk certain words could not be hidden, though they were none too seemly nor too meek. And the said words ...
— The Wood Beyond the World • William Morris

... Bethmann-Hollweg saw the mote of Greater-Serbianism in Serbia's eye, but he was peculiarly anxious not to perceive the beam of Pan-Germanism which has blinded Germany's vision for a generation, and is the one and only cause for the rapid increase in ...
— What Germany Thinks - The War as Germans see it • Thomas F. A. Smith

... seeming to acquire strength in the upper air levels. The sun flashed on its wings as it wheeled; then the distant bird swept westward into a long straight course, flying steadily until it vanished like a mote ...
— In Secret • Robert W. Chambers

... Salvation is to proceed, "Jerusalem, a quiet habitation;" the Eternity of it, "a tabernacle that shall not be taken down," &c. The Saviour of it, "the Lord, their Judge, their Lawgiver, their King, he will save us;" the Salvation, "the Lord shall be to them as a broad mote of swift waters," &c. the condition of their Enemies, "their tacklings are loose, their masts weake, the lame shal take the spoil of them." The condition of the Saved, "The Inhabitants shall not say, I am sick:" ...
— Leviathan • Thomas Hobbes

... institute, originate, start, found. Belief, faith, persuasion, conviction, tenet, creed. Belittle, decry, depreciate, disparage. Bind, secure, fetter, shackle, gyve. Bit, jot, mite, particle, grain, atom, speck, mote, whit, iota, tittle, scintilla. Bluff, blunt, outspoken, downright, brusk, curt, crusty. Boast, brag, vaunt, vapor, gasconade. Body, corpse, remains, relics, carcass, cadaver, corpus. Bombastic, sophomoric, turgid, tumid, grandiose, grandiloquent, magniloquent. Boorish, churlish, loutish, clownish, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor

... the natives, we had the place to ourselves. But then Feth sees few visitors at any season. Sixteen miles from a station is its salvation. True, there is Mote Abbey hard by—a fine old place with an ancient deer-park and deep, rolling woods. Ruins, too, we had heard. A roofless quire, a few grass-grown yards of cloister and the like. Only the Abbot's kitchen was at all preserved. There's irony for you. We were going to see them ...
— The Brother of Daphne • Dornford Yates

... the mote of another, so long as the beam is left in the eye, and the sin unjudged in the life, None can cleanse the stain, who is not willing to take the form of a servant, and go down with bare knees upon the floor. None is able to restore those that are overtaken in a fault, who do not count themselves ...
— Love to the Uttermost - Expositions of John XIII.-XXI. • F. B. Meyer

... who gathered round him, in the murmured growl that monastic obedience just kept within bounds, very emphatic counsel of refusal. On the other hand there was the alderman pleading for the old privileges of the town—for security of justice in its own town-mote, for freedom of sale in its market, for just provisions to enforce the recovery of debts—the simple, efficient liberty that stood written in the parchment with the heavy seals—the seals of Anselm and Ording and ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green

... there were a mote in yours, A grain, a dust, a gnat, a wandering hair, Any annoyance in that precious sense! Then, feeling what small things are boist'rous there, Your vile intent must needs ...
— The Canadian Elocutionist • Anna Kelsey Howard

... as a sufficient argument for disputing papal power, but in order to show the perverted opinions of those who strain the gnats, but let elephants go through [Matt. 23:24], who behold the mote in the brother's eye and permit the beams in their own to remain [Matt. 7:3], only to the end that others may be stifled by superfluous and unnecessary things, or at least branded as heretics or by any other epithet that occurs to them. One of than is this delicate, ...
— Works of Martin Luther - With Introductions and Notes (Volume I) • Martin Luther

... meant Is plain, My eyes Meet yours that mean— With your cheeks and hair— Something more wise, More dark, And far different. Even so the lark Loves dust And nestles in it The minute Before he must Soar in lone flight So far, Like a black star He seems— A mote Of singing dust Afloat Above, That dreams And sheds no light. I know your lust ...
— Poems • Edward Thomas

... woods thence-forth in haste she went, To seek for herbes that mote him remedy; For she of herbes had great intendiment, Taught of the Nymph which from her infancy, Had nursed her in true nobility: There whether it divine Tobacco were, Or Panachae, or Polygony, She found and brought ...
— Tobacco; Its History, Varieties, Culture, Manufacture and Commerce • E. R. Billings

... lardery, and kitchen. In one of the towers a study called Paradise, where was a closet in the middle of eight squares latticed; about and at the top of every square was a desk lodged to set books on, &c. The garde robe in the castle was exceeding fair, and so were the gardens within the mote and the orchards without; and in the orchards were mounts opere topiario writhen about with degrees like turnings of a cockle-shell, to ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin

... His family was of prodigious antiquity; seven successive barons had already flourished on this spot when a younger son of the house accompanied his neighbor the Duke of Normandy in his descent on England, and was rewarded by a grant of English land, on which he dug a mote and built a chateau, and called it Beaurepaire (the worthy Saxons turned this into Borreper without delay). Since that day more than twenty gentlemen of the same lineage had held in turn the original chateau and lands, and handed them down to ...
— White Lies • Charles Reade

... and shoved Rip, sweeping him through space like a dust mote. He clutched his propulsion tube with both hands and ...
— Rip Foster Rides the Gray Planet • Blake Savage

... was like a razor-blade wrapped in panne-velvet. It took you out of yourself. It reminded you that you were only an infinitely small atom in the immensity of a crowded big world, and that even your big world was merely a microscopic little mote lost amid its uncounted millions of sister-motes in the infinitudes of ...
— The Prairie Mother • Arthur Stringer

... unsupported judgment the Master set His disapproval. "Judge not, that ye be not judged," He admonished, for, according to one's own standard of judging others, shall he himself be judged. The man who is always ready to correct his brother's faults, to remove the mote from his neighbor's eye so that that neighbor may see things as the interested and interfering friend would have him see, was denounced as a hypocrite. What was the speck in his neighbor's vision to the obscuring beam in his own eye? Have the centuries between the days of Christ and our own time ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage

... flapped his sail-like wings, though heavily he flew, A mote upon the sun's broad face he seemed unto my view: But once I thought I saw him stoop, as if he would alight; 'Twas only a delusive thought, ...
— The Universal Reciter - 81 Choice Pieces of Rare Poetical Gems • Various

... furnished, incongruously enough, in quite a modern fashion, rather shabbily, and I daresay rather mannishly. There were leather arm-chairs and settles, all a good deal worn, and stout tables littered with books and periodicals. The narrow windows let in thin slants of mote-filled sunshine, vortices of gold-dust; and on the faded carpet, by the door, lay a bright parallelogram, warming to life its dim old colours. The rest of the room seemed twilit. Someone had been too wise to defeat that good oak panelling by hanging ...
— The Lady Paramount • Henry Harland

... clasps of diamond, lucid, clear of the mote; Clasp me the large at the waist, and clasp me the small ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various

... man to go home with me, I would—" Maria paused. Suddenly she remembered that she had her secret, and she felt humbled before this other girl whom she was judging. She became conscious to such an extent of the beam in her own eye that she was too blinded to see the mote in that of poor Lily, who, indeed, was not to blame, being simply helpless before her own temperament ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman

... get to the board, and the feast which hath been stayed this while; and I pray you let it be as merry as if there were no striving and unpeace betwixt us and the winning of peace. But to-morrow we will hallow-in the Mote, and my earl and my barons and good men shall give counsel, and then shall it be that the hand shall do what ...
— Child Christopher • William Morris

... admit that this is the case, from the mote that floats in the sunbeam to multiple stars revolving round each other, are we willing to carry our principles to their consequences, and recognize a like operation of law among living as among lifeless things, in the organic as well as the inorganic ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 5, November, 1863 • Various

... be sure, this mote of life and light; but before it is a vast evolution, Dane, on the pinnacle of which are to be found men and women, Hester ...
— The Kempton-Wace Letters • Jack London

... that variation important in the woman's shrewd eyes. Hume had no means of knowing how much money she possessed, but he did know that she had paid out ten thousand dollars in cash. He knew also that she was a woman. In his eyes, never clearsighted from the mote of conceit and the dust of arrogant superiority, a woman was a fool. He needed money, he wanted money, her money as well as another's. He had gone far already in the project that would make him a rich man if it succeeded; he was going further. If litigation now were to ...
— The Short Cut • Jackson Gregory

... husbands and adorers at their sides, Beaudenord could hear his people called without a pang of mortification. In the second place, he rejoiced in the full complement of limbs; he was whole and sound, had no mote in his eyes, no false hair, no artificial calves; he was neither knock-kneed nor bandy-legged, his dorsal column was straight, his waist slender, his hands white and shapely. His hair was black; he was of a complexion neither ...
— The Firm of Nucingen • Honore de Balzac

... requirement, but "sweet peace" was, she says, as she records the sacrifice, the result of thus acknowledging her gracious Lord. "This step," she continues, "appears to me to involve the greatest of all possible mental reduction, but I reverently believe it was necessary for me, and mote, perhaps on my own account than on account of others; for, without this bond, and the necessary baptisms attending this vocation, I should have been in danger of turning back, and perhaps altogether losing the little spiritual life which has been mercifully ...
— Memoir and Diary of John Yeardley, Minister of the Gospel • John Yeardley

... thought quietly for five minutes. It was not her way to take things excitedly. The coolness of poise that Billy so admired never deserted her in time of emergency. She realized that she herself was no more than a mote caught up in this tangled, nonunderstandable ...
— The Valley of the Moon • Jack London

... against reason, said the king, I swear, so mote I thee:[91] My horse is better than thy mare, And that thou ...
— The Book of Brave Old Ballads • Unknown

... turn the other cheek—that sentence which Celsus found so vulgar—did no one smile, then, at the idea of anybody ever dreaming of such an act (Matt. 5:39)? Nor at the picture of the kind brother taking a mote from his brother's eye, with a whole baulk of timber in his own (Matt. 7:5)? Nor at the suggestion of doing two miles of forced labour when only one was demanded (Matt. 5:41)? Nor when he suggested that anxiety about food and clothing was a mark of the Gentiles (Matt. ...
— The Jesus of History • T. R. Glover

... to gather one of the taller branches, a mote, a bit of bark—some hateful thing—falls into Molly's right eye. Instant agony is the result. Tears stream from the offended pupil; the other eye joins in the general tribulation; and Molly, standing in the centre of the grass-plot, with her handkerchief pressed ...
— Molly Bawn • Margaret Wolfe Hamilton

... were fair for Cobden to buy up land from owners whom he thought unconscious of its proper, value, it was fair enough for my Russian Jew to give credit to his farmers. Kelmar, if he was unconscious of the beam in his own eye, was at least silent in the matter of his brother's mote. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... just finding of fault with another. The thing is, to trim the lamp and clean the glass of our own, that it may be a light to the world. It is just the same with communities as with individuals. The community which casts if it be but the mote out of its own eye, does the best thing it can for the beam in its neighbor's. For my part, I confess that, so far as the clergy form and represent the Church of England, it is and has for a long time been doing its ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald

... assignation approached. Endeavouring, however, to persuade herself that this strange conduct arose from a feeling of excitement or nervousness natural under the circumstances, Julia used a hundred kind words and tender gestures to reassure and support her companion. But the mote she consoled or admonished, the more agitated Virginie became, and matters stood in this condition when eleven o'clock arrived. Julia waited at her chamber window, which was not above three feet from the ground without, her hood ...
— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford

... this. But she had her own thoughts. It was plain enough to her mind, that her friend had only herself to blame, for the annoyance she suffered. After witnessing one or two mote petty contentions with the domestic, Fanny went away, her friend promising, at her particular request, to come and spend a day with her ...
— Trials and Confessions of a Housekeeper • T. S. Arthur

... rumors of an intention on the part of France to recognize us. So mote it be! We are preparing, however, to strike hard blows single-banded and unaided, ...
— A Rebel War Clerk's Diary at the Confederate States Capital • John Beauchamp Jones

... of careful breathing and exploring of body sensations, Cully realized he could move. He flexed an arm; a mote of gold sand sifted upward in the dark water. It had a pleasant color, in contrast with the ominous shades of the sea. In a few moments, he had struggled to a sitting position, delighting in the curtain of glittering metal grains whirling ...
— Cully • Jack Egan

... more than fear Thee, And Thy blessed Christ seems near me, With forgiving look, as when He beheld the Magdalen. Well I know that all things move To the spheral rhythm of love,— That to Thee, O Lord of all! Nothing can of chance befall Child and seraph, mote and star, Well Thou knowest what we are Through Thy vast creative plan Looking, from the worm to man, There is pity in Thine eyes, But no hatred nor surprise. Not in blind caprice of will, Not in cunning sleight of skill, Not for show of power, was wrought Nature's marvel in Thy thought. ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier

... will he go Through the pale, scattered asphodels, Down mote-hung dusk of olive dells, To where the ancient basins throw Fleet threads of blue and trembling zones Of gold upon ...
— Gloucester Moors and Other Poems • William Vaughn Moody

... be other than they are? All's in its place, from mote to star. The thistledown that flits and flies Could drift no hair-breadth otherwise. What is, must be; with rhythmic laws All Nature chimes, Effect and Cause. The sand-grain and the sun obey — What ho! the World's all right, ...
— Rhymes of a Rolling Stone • Robert W. Service

... And he spake also a parable unto them, Can the blind guide the blind? shall they not both fall into a pit? 40 The disciple is not above his teacher: but every one when he is perfected shall be as his teacher. 41 And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye? 42 Or how canst thou say to thy brother, Brother, let me cast out the mote that is in thine eye, when thou thyself beholdest not the beam that is in thine own eye? Thou hypocrite, cast out first ...
— The Gospel of Luke, An Exposition • Charles R. Erdman

... nigh-broken, my nature unmanned: He bought me a handmaid, a sweeting who shamed * A wand of the willow by Zephyr befanned: I lavisht upon her mine heritage, * And spent like a nobleman puissant and grand: Then to sell her compelled, my sorrow increased; * The parting was sore but I mote not gainstand: Now as soon as the crier had called her, there bid * A wicked old fellow, a fiery brand: So I raged with a rage that I could not restrain, * And snatched her from out of his hireling's hand; When the angry curmudgeon made ready for blows, * ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton

... diversas flores; 5 En la cuja gruesa lanza, Con recamado pendon, Y una cifra a ver se alcanza, Que es de desesperacion, O a lo menos de venganza. 10 En el arzon de la silla Ancho escudo reverbera Con blasones de Castilla, Y el mote dice a la orilla: Nunca mi espada venciera. 15 Era el caballo galan, El bruto mas generoso, De mas gallardo ademan: Cabos negros, y brioso, Muy tostado, y alazan, 20 Larga cola recogida En las piernas ...
— Modern Spanish Lyrics • Various

... adaptation from the New Testament." He and a charming "she" sit waiting their turn at the Hofrath's door. He is looking into her eyes and she into his. "Really I don't see the slightest mote in your eyes," says she. "No, but I can see the ...
— In Bohemia with Du Maurier - The First Of A Series Of Reminiscences • Felix Moscheles

... out of the mists at the far horizon. It was a thread of white vapor. The other rocketship was a speck, a mote, invisible because of its size and distance. This thread of vapor was already 100 miles long, and it expanded to a column of whiteness half a mile across before it seemed to dissipate. It rose and rose, as if following something which sped upward. It ...
— Space Tug • Murray Leinster

... blessed joys which then thou shalt possess, No mortal tongue can them declare: All earthly joys, compared with this, are less Than smallest mote to the world so fair. Then is not that man blest That must enjoy this rest? Full happy is that guest Invited to this feast, that ever, that ever Endureth ...
— The Sources and Analogues of 'A Midsummer-night's Dream' • Compiled by Frank Sidgwick

... He uses many striking expressions, such as (II Tim. ii. 4): "No man holding knighthood to God, wlappith himself with worldli nedes;" and many of the best-known phrases in our present Bible originated with him; e.g., "the beame and the mote," "the depe thingis of God," "strait is the gate and narewe is the waye," "no but a man schall be born againe," "the cuppe of blessing which ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various

... stern look, but a gentle heart. Let him come back, that his compassion may Give life to yours. Hub. Come, boy, prepare yourself. Arth. Is there no remedy? Hub. None, but to lose your eyes. Arth. O, Heaven! that there were but a mote in yours, A grain, a dust, a gnat, a meandering hair, Any annoyance in that precious sense! Then, feeling what small things are boisterous there, Your vile intent must needs seem horrible. Hub. Is this your promise? Go to, hold your tongue. Arth. Hubert, the ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick

... most melodious sound, Of all that mote delight a daintie eare, Such as attonce might not on living ground, Save in this paradise, be heard elsewhere: Right hard it was for wight which did it heare, To read what manner musicke that mote bee; For all that pleasing is to living eare Was there consorted in one harmonee; ...
— Flowers and Flower-Gardens • David Lester Richardson

... clasps of diamonds, lucid, clear of the mote, Clasp me the large at the waist, and clasp me the ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 8 • Various

... Merlin, whilom wont (they say), To make his wonne low underneath the ground, In a deep delve far from the view of day, That of no living wight he mote be found, Whenso he counselled with his sprites ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay

... my cheek to the cabin side To feel the weight of his giant hands— A speck, a fly in the blasting tide Of streaming, pitiless, icy sands; A single heart with its feeble beat— A mouse in the lion's throat— A swimmer at sea—a sunbeam's mote In the grasp of a tempest of hail ...
— A Little Norsk; Or, Ol' Pap's Flaxen • Hamlin Garland

... shepherds brat even as I was, You mote have let me bee, I never had come to the kings faire courte, To crave ...
— Book of Old Ballads • Selected by Beverly Nichols

... think. Death is strange only because we do not think enough. God must breathe. Life is the exhalation, death the inhalation of deity. He breathes out, and the Universe flames forth with all her wings—her suns and clusters of suns—down to her mote-like earth, the butterfly of space, trimmed with its gaudy seasons, and nourishing on its back the ...
— Semiramis and Other Plays - Semiramis, Carlotta And The Poet • Olive Tilford Dargan

... ye abhomynable savours causid by ye kepig of ye kenell in ye mote and ye diches there, and i especiall by sethig of ye houndes mete wt roten bones, and vnclenly keping of ye houdes, wherof moche people is anoyed, soo yt when the wynde is in any poyte of the northe, all the fowle stynke is blowen ouer the citee. ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 37. Saturday, July 13, 1850 • Various

... live in stone mansions who throw stones. If there is a mote in the neighbor's eye, perhaps there is a very large piece of timber in your own. Great zeal in belaboring the neighbor for his faults will not lessen your own, nor make you appear an angel of light before God when you ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton

... the behavior of those persons who, when people are unfortunate, say: "I told you so—getting punished—served him right." If those I-told-you-so's got their desert they would long ago have been pitched over the battlements. The mote in their neighbor's eyes—so small that it takes a microscope to find it—gives them more trouble than the beam which obscures their own optics. With air sometimes supercilious and sometimes Pharisaical, and always ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage

... the courage to confess this, he knew not, and neither the blow from her fan, nor the warning exclamation of the nurse: "Just look at the boy!" sobered him. Nay, his sparkling eyes sought hers still mote frequently as ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... my selfishness destroy, Thy atmosphere of Love be all my joy; Thy Presence be my sunshine ever bright, My soul the little mote that ...
— Daily Strength for Daily Needs • Mary W. Tileston

... by a Baynton, about perhaps Henry the Fifth. Here was a noble old-fashioned house, with a mote about it and drawbridge, and strong high walles embatteled. They did consist of a layer of freestone and a layer of flints, squared or headed; two towers faced the south, one the east, the other the west end. After the garrison was gonn the mote was filled up, about ...
— The Natural History of Wiltshire • John Aubrey

... wanted and needed was a man to rule and suffer for the common weal. Arthur was not a thing "enskied and sainted;" rather a wholesome man, whose duty lay in working for men. Sir Percivale became a monk; other knights returned no mote, thus spilling the best blood of the table round. Meantime the king's enemies multiplied, and these visionaries decimated the ranks of opposition to the wrong; but come what would, King Arthur served. An appeal to him for help found answer, though treasons plotted at his back. As to his ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle

... their foes Clorinda sallied out, And many a baron bold was by her side, Within the postern stood Argantes stout To rescue her, if ill mote her betide: With speeches brave she cheered her warlike rout, And with bold words them heartened as they ride, "Let us by some brave act," quoth she, "this day Of Asia's hopes ...
— Jerusalem Delivered • Torquato Tasso

... winged vessel came, Swift as a swallow, subtle as a flame: I know not what it bore of freight or host, But white it was as an avenging ghost. It levelled strong Euphrates in its course; Supreme yet weightless as an idle mote It seemed to tame the waters without force Till not a murmur swelled or billow beat: Lo, as the purple shadow swept the sands, The prudent crocodile rose on his feet And shed appropriate tears and ...
— Poems • Christina G. Rossetti

... in London is—London. No man understands himself as an infinitesimal until he has been a drop in that ocean, a grain of sand on that sea-margin, a mote in its sunbeam, or the fog or smoke which stands for it; in plainer phrase, ...
— Our Hundred Days in Europe • Oliver Wendell Holmes

... sire." lord." "Compaignon ou amye, "Felawe or frende, Vous soies le bien venus." Ye be welcome." 36 "Que faictes vous? comment vous "What do ye? how is it with est?" you?" "Bien; que bien vous aies." "Well; that well mote ye haue." "Ou aues este si longement? "Where haue ye ben ...
— Dialogues in French and English • William Caxton

... wilt mind thee for many a season How we met in the high voice of Hilda. Right fain I go forth to the spear-mote Being fitted for every encounter. There Cormac's gay shield from his clutches I clave with the bane of the bucklers, For he scorned in the battle to seek me If we set not ...
— The Life and Death of Cormac the Skald • Unknown

... your{e} mouthe ye vse now{er} to squyrt, nor spowt; be not gapyng{e} nor ganyng{e}, ne w{i}t{h} y mouth to powt lik not w{i}t{h} y tong{e} in a disch, amote to haue owt. Be not rasche ne recheles, it is not ...
— Early English Meals and Manners • Various

... to have my head clear. Stimulated nerves are not to be depended upon, and the brain that has wine in it is never a sure guide. A surgeon must see at the point of his instrument; and if there be a mote or any obscurity in his mental vision, his hand, instead of working ...
— Danger - or Wounded in the House of a Friend • T. S. Arthur

... the more welcome,' sayd Robyn, 'So ever mote I the! Fyll of the best wyne,' sayd Robyn, 'This ...
— Ballads of Robin Hood and other Outlaws - Popular Ballads of the Olden Times - Fourth Series • Frank Sidgwick

... doth heal," She answered, "my dear Destiny, Chose me in marriage bond to seal; Unfit, He graced me regally, From your world's woe come into weal. He called me of His courtesy: 'Come hither to me, my lover leal, For mote nor spot is none in thee.' He gave me my might and great beauty; He washed my weeds in His blood so red, And crowned me, forever clean to be, And clothed ...
— The Pearl • Sophie Jewett

... were aldermen in right of their estates within the City. What powers the Knighten Guild possessed is not easy to define. Besides this, the aristocracy of the City, there were already trade guilds for religious purposes and for feasting—but, as yet, with no powers. The people had their folk mote, or general gathering: their ward mote: and their weekly hustings. We must not seek to define the powers of all these bodies and corporations. They overlapped each other: the aristocratic party was continually innovating while the popular party as continually resisted. In many ...
— The History of London • Walter Besant

... itself, a fourth part the value of Ireland; (for Bishop Burnet says, it is not above a fortieth part in value, to the rest of Britain) and with respect to the profit that England gains from hence, not the forty thousandth part. Although I must confess, that a mote in the eye, or a thorn in the side, is more dangerous and painful than a beam, or a ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. VI; The Drapier's Letters • Jonathan Swift

... Lo the nations! as a drop from a bucket, And as dust on a balance are they reckoned. Lo the isles! as a mote he uplifteth, And Lebanon is not enough for fuel, And its wild beasts for a burnt-offering. All the nations are as nothing before him, They are reckoned by ...
— The Makers and Teachers of Judaism • Charles Foster Kent

... the eternal throne Of stars begemming the bewildering blue Unless one has the eyes to see him. Think How we two stand upon the brink Of nothing! Here's a globe, whereto we trust, No larger than the smallest speck of dust Or mote in the sunbeam is to that sun's self, And we are like dead leaves in autumn's whil Of ...
— Household Gods • Aleister Crowley

... do not see what difference two figures on horseback against the southern sky-line could possibly make to the shimmer of purple above the plains, or the fragrance of prairie-roses lining the trail. It seems to me the lonely call of the meadow-lark high overhead—a mote in a sea of blue—or the drumming and chirruping of feathered creatures through the green, could not have sounded less musical, if I had not been a lover. But that, too, is only an opinion; for one glimpse ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut

... is that of magnifying and aggravating the faults of others; raising any small miscarriage into a heinous crime, any slender defect into an odious vice, and any common infirmity into a strange enormity; turning a small "mote in the eye" of our neighbour into a huge "beam," a little dimple in his face into a monstrous wen. This is plainly slander, at least in degree, and according to the surplusage whereby the censure doth exceed the fault. As he that, upon ...
— Sermons on Evil-Speaking • Isaac Barrow

... Captain SHANDY," said Mrs. WADMAN, holding up her cambric handkerchief to her left eye, as she approached the door of my Uncle TOBY'S Sentry-Box—"a mote, or sand, or small fly, or something, I know not what, has got into this eye of mine. The Gardener declares it is one of those Green Flies which are the pest of this Distressful Country. I refuse to believe that. There ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, April 22, 1893 • Various

... fellow, how often must I explain to you your confusions? Orthodox sentiment and stereotyped emotion master you. And then your temperament! You are really incapable of rational judgments. Cerberus? Pshaw! A flash expiring, a mote of fading sparkle, a dim-pulsing and dying organism—pouf! a snap of the fingers, a puff of breath, what would you? A pawn in the game of life. Not even a problem. There is no problem in a stillborn babe, nor in a ...
— Moon-Face and Other Stories • Jack London

... had almost entered, suddenly something shot towards him in the air; a flash, as it were, as if some object had crossed the streak, and was rendered visible for the tenth of a second, like a mote in the sunbeams. At the same instant of time, the horse, which he had pressed to go faster, put his foot into a rut or hole, and stumbled, and Felix was flung so far forward that he only saved himself from being thrown by clinging to his ...
— After London - Wild England • Richard Jefferies

... whatever the governor may say there's no answer, any more than to 'get out of my house' and 'what do you want with my wife?' and then, as for that about the stone and the pitcher, a blind man could see that. So that he 'who sees the mote in another's eye had need to see the beam in his own,' that it be not said of himself, 'the dead woman was frightened at the one with her throat cut;' and your worship knows well that 'the fool knows more in his own house than ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

... however, was obstinate, and would not start. Hank added insult to injury, at least in the opinion of Uncle Ezra, by laughing at the efforts of the lieutenant. And finally when the motor did consent to "mote," it went so slowly that not enough momentum could be obtained to make the airship rise. It simply ...
— Dick Hamilton's Airship - or, A Young Millionaire in the Clouds • Howard R. Garis

... great folk-mote called, and the same matter was laid before all the people, and none said aught against it, whereas no man was ready to name another to that charge and rule, even had it been ...
— Child Christopher • William Morris

... experience dight: Three maidens who borrowed the bloom of the dawn * Making hearts of their lovers in sorriest plight. They were hidden from eyes of the prier and spy * Who slept and their modesty mote not affright; So they opened whatever lay hid in their hearts * And in frolicsome fun began verse to indite. Quoth one fair coquette with her amorous grace * Whose teeth for the sweet of her speech flashed bright:— Would he come to my bed during sleep 'twere delight * But a visit on ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 7 • Richard F. Burton

... or shield, in the hands of the creative Logos, by whom the Father made all things, in one of the earlier frescoes of the Campo Santo at Pisa. How different from this childish dream is our own conception of nature, with its unlimited space, its innumerable suns, and the earth but a mote in the beam; how different the strange new awe, or superstition, with which it fills our minds! "The silence of those infinite spaces," [42] says Pascal, contemplating a starlight night, the silence of those infinite spaces terrifies ...
— The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater

... she added with a sigh of relief. "Now to see if it will operate. But first I think we'd better see if we can push ourselves off with the oars and boat hook," for Betty, knowing that the best of motors may not "mote" at times, carried a pair of long sweeps by which the Gem could laboriously be propelled in case of a break-down. There was also a long hooked ...
— The Outdoor Girls in Florida - Or, Wintering in the Sunny South • Laura Lee Hope

... happiness had been perfect. Literally and truly there was not a cloud, not a mote in her sunshine. She had everything—the love of her husband, great wealth, extraordinary beauty, perfect health, an untroubled mind, friends, position—everything. God had been good to her, beyond all dreams and all deserving. ...
— The Pit • Frank Norris

... have a polarized phraseology for saying these things, but it comes to precisely that. To which it may be answered, in the first place, that we have good authority for saying that even babes and sucklings know something; and, in the second, that, if there is a mote or so to be removed from our premises, the courts and councils of the last few years have found beams enough in some other quarters to build a church that would hold all the good people in Boston and have sticks enough left to make a bonfire for ...
— The Professor at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr.)

... flashes from the gloomiest cloud, so does mirthfulness frequently proceed from a heart susceptible of the deepest melancholy. Many and true are the simple tales of Irish life which could prove this. Many a fair laughing girl who has danced in happiness, light as a mote in the sunbeam, has been suddenly left in darkness, bowed down in youth and beauty to the grave, and though the little circle of which she was the centre may have been disturbed by her untimely life, yet in brief space, except to a few yearning and stricken hearts who could ...
— Lha Dhu; Or, The Dark Day - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton

... made their comparisons, and formed their conclusions, with the same deference to self-esteem, and the same submission to hope, as had been apparent among their competitors. It would seem to be a law of nature that men should thus flatter themselves, and perceive the mote in the eye of their neighbour, while the beam ...
— The Sea Lions - The Lost Sealers • James Fenimore Cooper

... fractions, and the actual present which you arrest measures now but the thirty-six-millionth of an hour; and so by infinite declensions the true and very present, in which only we live and enjoy, will vanish into a mote of a mote, distinguishable only by a heavenly vision. Therefore the present, which only man possesses, offers less capacity for his footing than the slenderest film that ever spider twisted from her womb. Therefore ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various

... I can prove some facts about travelling by a story or two. There are certain principles to be assumed,—such as these:—He who is carried by horses must deal with rogues.—To-day's dinner subtends a larger visual angle than yesterday's revolution. A mote in my eye is bigger to me than the biggest of Dr. Gould's private planets.—Every traveller is a self-taught entomologist.—Old jokes are dynamometers of mental tension; an old joke tells better among friends travelling ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various

... seemed like the pant of an animal athirst, laid down at a well and drinking; and the well proved quite full, gloriously clear; it rose up munificently of its own impulse; I saw the sun through its gush, and not a mote, Lucy, no moss, no insect, no atom in the thrice-refined ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte

... over the pitiful condition of the Armenians under Moslem rule, but has nothing to say anent her own awful record in India. It were well for John Bull to get the beam out of his own eye before making frantic swipes at the mote in the optic of the Moslem. The oppression of the children of Israel by the Egyptian Pharaohs, the Babylonian king and Roman emperors were as nothing compared to that suffered by the patient Bengalese at the ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann

... Erivan; And at them both Sir Paridell did loure. So all together stird up strifull stoure, And readie were new battell to darraine. Each one profest to be her paramoure, And vow'd with speare and shield it to maintaine; Ne Judges powre, ne reasons rule, mote them restraine. ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church

... faults, that other men's. We do not care how dim may be This by whose aid our own we see, But, ever anxiously alert That all may have their whole desert, We would melt down the stars and sun In our heart's furnace, to make one Thro' which the enlighten'd world might spy A mote upon a ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor

... he haue you if he may, so mote I thriue, And he biddeth you sende him worde by me, That ye humbly beseech him, ye may his wife be, And that there shall be no let in you nor mistrust, But to be wedded on sunday next if he lust, And biddeth you to looke ...
— Roister Doister - Written, probably also represented, before 1553. Carefully - edited from the unique copy, now at Eton College • Nicholas Udall

... wretch "Inhuman, now to tempt this unknown land "Refuse. The choice by lot is fix'd. The lot "Me sends, and with me sends Polites true; "Eurylochus; and poor Elphenor, fond "Too much of wine; with twice nine comrades mote, "To seek the dome Circean. Thither come; "We at the entrance stand: a thousand wolves, "And bears, and lionesses, with wolves mixt, "Meet us, and terror in our bosoms strike. "But ground for terror none: ...
— The Metamorphoses of Publius Ovidus Naso in English blank verse Vols. I & II • Ovid

... tract of the land of Noua Zembla, toward the East out of the circle Arcticke in the mote temperate Zone, you are to haue regard: for if you finde the soyle planted with people, it is like that in time an ample vent of our warme woollen clothes may be found. [Sidenote: A good consideration.] And if there be no people at all there to be found, then you shall ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of The English Nation v. 4 • Richard Hakluyt

... I felt, because she had first helped herself, had tackled the mote in her own eye, from the time when she had gone down to the harbor to get her roots, as she called it. She was a wonderful manager, our budget was carefully worked out. And she had herself so well in hand she could put herself behind ...
— The Harbor • Ernest Poole

... us, Doctor," said the Idiot. "I sort of like Bill and I'll bet the University Intelligence Office will get him a job in forty-eight hours. A man who is willing to mote or Edit has an adaptability that ought ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume IX (of X) • Various

... the hot fermentation and unwholesome secrecy of the population crowded into large cities, each mote in the misery lighter, as an individual soul, than a dead leaf, but becoming oppressive and infectious each to his neighbor, in the smoking mass of decay. The resulting modes of mental ruin and distress ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin

... ah! leave the little mote Which thou, and thou alone, Mark'st in his eye, and take away The beam that ...
— Heart Utterances at Various Periods of a Chequered Life. • Eliza Paul Kirkbride Gurney

... [th]e sayl(:) [th]ey sayle[th] faste: Arthour owt of sy[gh]t ys paste. [Th]e ferst lond [th]at he gan Meete, and lands at Forso[th]e hyt was Bareflete; 344 Barfleet. Ther he gan vp furst aryve. Now welle Mote Arthour spede & thryve; God speed him! And [th]at hys saule spede [th]e better, Lat eche man ...
— Arthur, Copied And Edited From The Marquis of Bath's MS • Frederick J. Furnivall

... are local and only earth phenomena, yet the benefaction of the sun is as if it shone for us alone. It is as great as if this were the case, and yet the fraction of his light and heat that actually falls upon this mote of a world adrift in sidereal space is so infinitely small that it could hardly be computed by numbers. In our religion we appropriate God to ourselves in the same way, but he knows us not in this private and ...
— Under the Maples • John Burroughs

... judgment, and the true man will welcome it, even if he is to appear a convicted fool. A man's business is to see first that he is not acting the part of a fool, and next, to help any honest people who care about the matter to take heed likewise that they be not offering to pull the mote out of their brother's eye. But there are even societies established and supported by good people for the express purpose of pulling out motes.—'The Mote-Pulling Society!'—That ought to take with a certain ...
— The Seaboard Parish Vol. 3 • George MacDonald

... as much as older men, Lacy," returned the emperor, laying his hand upon his friend's shoulder "But all my sufferings are forgotten in the anticipated joy of the morrow. Let the dead past bury its dead the birth of my happiness is at hand. I shall no mote rest my title to the world's homage upon the station to which I was born. It shall know at last that I am worthy to be the friend of Lacy and of Loudon. All the years that have intervened have never yet ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach

... vanished time, is that of Brown, of the steamer 'Pennsylvania'—the man referred to in a former chapter, whose memory was so good and tiresome. He was a middle-aged, long, slim, bony, smooth-shaven, horse-faced, ignorant, stingy, malicious, snarling, fault hunting, mote-magnifying tyrant. I early got the habit of coming on watch with dread at my heart. No matter how good a time I might have been having with the off-watch below, and no matter how high my spirits might be when I started aloft, my soul became lead ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... minions of unhallowed love The shameless torch of wild desire is lit, Caressed, preferred even to woman's self above, Whose forms for Nature's gentler errors fit All frailties mote excuse save that which they commit. —[MS. ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron

... not what to do: the outrage sore Avenged he has not, nor his pain allaid: What was a mote is now a beam; so sore It prest him; on his heart so heavy weighed. So plain is what was little known before, He fears that it will shortly be displaid. At first, he haply might have hid his woe; Which Rumour now throughout the ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto

... purposely to watch over and find fault with any one member of it. If she had seen anything wrong in Jemima, Ruth loved her so much that she would have told her of it in private; and with many doubts, how far she was the one to pull out the mote from any one's eye, even in the most tender manner;—she would have had to conquer reluctance before she could have done even this; but there was something undefinably repugnant to her in the manner of ...
— Ruth • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell

... simper, then, and sneer? From out your own eye pull the mote; A pretty thing for you to jeer! Haven't you, too, got a ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 487 - Vol. 17, No. 487. Saturday, April 30, 1831 • Various

... he may open his eyes to the fact and be trying hard to overcome it: but on which supposition is he led to confirm another in his unintelligibility? By the proverbial tenderness of the eye with the mote for the eye with the beam? If that beam were just such another mote—then one might sympathize and feel no such inconvenience—but, because I have written a 'Sordello,' do I turn to just its double, Sordello the second, in your books, and so perforce see nothing wrong? 'No'—it ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett

... said nothing and his sour, pasty visage turned sourer. It was the one possibility that disturbed him—the only fly in the amber—the only mote that troubled his clairvoyance. Also, he was the only man among the three who didn't think a thing was certain to happen merely because he ...
— The Dark Star • Robert W. Chambers

... you of your courtesy, That ye ne arrettee it nought my villainy, Though that I plainly speak in this mattere, To tellen you her words, and eke her chere: Ne though I speak her words properly, For this ye knowen as well as I, Who shall tellen a tale after a man, He mote rehearse as nye as ever he can: Everich word of it been in his charge, All speke he, never so rudely, ne large. Or else he mote tellen his tale untrue, Or feine things, or find words new: He may not spare, although he were his brother, He mote as well say o word as another, Christ ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol II - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden

... shaft; * Ah who shall patient bear such parting throe? And dart of Death struck down amid the tribe * The age's pearl that Morn saw brightest show: I cried the while his case took speech and said:—* Would Heaven, my son, Death mote his doom foreslow! Which be the readiest road wi' thee to meet * My Son! for whom I would my soul bestow? If sun I call him no! the sun cloth set; * If moon I call him, wane the moons; Ah no! O sad mischance o' thee, O doom of days, * Thy place none other love ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton

... and amplify itself into mountains of darkness, which exists oftentimes in germs that are imperceptible. An error in human choice, an infirmity in the human will, though it were at first less than a mote, though it should swerve from the right line by an ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey

... and I wouldn't let you go into my hog pen for a $2000 note. I'm so well quarantined that I don't much fear contagion; but there's always danger from infected dust. The wind blows it about, and any mote may be an automobile for a whole colony of bacteria, which may decide to picnic in my piggery. This dry weather is bad for us, and if we get heavy winds from off the ridge, I'm ...
— The Fat of the Land - The Story of an American Farm • John Williams Streeter

... that, new to me and strange. They were in no fashion I could name, and the simple costume the man wore suggested neither period nor country. It might, I thought, be the Happy Future, or Utopia, or the Land of Simple Dreams; an errant mote of memory, Henry James's phrase and story of "The Great Good Place," twinkled across my mind, and passed and left ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells

... fluttering bower, trilling with song, glancing and glowing with the bronze mail of beetles and the softened glory of purple emperors! What a thing it was to examine; how you could look in and discover afresh, and dwell for five minutes at a time on that hollow petal of a flower steeped in honey, on that mote of a ladybird crawling to its ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler

... hastes to swift decay, As ocean sweeps the labored mote away; Whilst self-dependent power can time defy, As rocks resist the ...
— The Right of American Slavery • True Worthy Hoit

... level pasture lay, And not a shadowe mote be seene, Save where full fyve good miles away The steeple towered from out the greene; And lo! the great bell farre and wide Was heard in all the country ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For, Book Two • Various

... grammars, comic hand-books of sciences and arts, and the great prevalence of comicality in popular views taken of life and of death, of incident and of character, of evil and of good, are, in reality, signs of the times. These straws, so thick upon the wind, and so injuriously mote-like to the visual organs, are flying forward before a storm. As symptoms of changing nationality, and of a disposition to make fun of all things ancient and honourable, and wise, and mighty, and religious, they ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper

... old man may nevyr thryff With a yonge wyff, so God me save! Nay, nay, sere, lett bene, Xuld I now in age begynne to dote, If I here chyde she wolde clowte my cote, Blere myn ey, and pyke out a mote, And thus oftyn tymes it ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne

... no fault. That was the one principle at the centre of the universe. And the doubtful guilt or possible integrity of other people, appearances, self-evident facts, the testimony of her own senses,—even Hollingsworth's self-accusation, had he volunteered it,—would have weighed not the value of a mote of thistledown on the other side. So secure was she of his right, that she never thought of comparing it with another's wrong, but ...
— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... fayne wolde I Affter the sentence off myne auctowre, Butte I pray yowe of thys grette labowre I mote at thys ...
— Early Theories of Translation • Flora Ross Amos

... to preach to Protestants about the sin of man-worship! Verily, here we have the parable of the mote and the beam in a twentieth century edition. Catholic teachers would be the last ones, we imagine, whom scrupulous Christians would choose for instructing them regarding the sin of idolatry and ...
— Luther Examined and Reexamined - A Review of Catholic Criticism and a Plea for Revaluation • W. H. T. Dau

... yet the sun knows them not. They are local and only earth phenomena, yet the benefaction of the sun is as if it shone for us alone. It is as great as if this were the case, and yet the fraction of his light and heat that actually falls upon this mote of a world adrift in sidereal space is so infinitely small that it could hardly be computed by numbers. In our religion we appropriate God to ourselves in the same way, but he knows us not in this private and particular way, though we ...
— Under the Maples • John Burroughs

... that they and all who should come to the market of Campedene should be quit of toll, and that if any free burgess of Campedene should come into the lord's amerciament he should be quit for 12d. unless he should shed blood or do felony. Probably Earl Ralph also granted the town a portman-mote, for the account of a skirmish in 1273 between the men of the town and the county mentions a bailiff and implies the existence of some sort of municipal government. In 1605 Campedene was incorporated, but it never ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various

... a perfect man," said he. "In the days when our State was powerful and great, when men and not dogs ruled at Mandakan, no man might be Dakoon save him who was clear of mote or beam; of true bone and body, like a high-bred yearling got from a perfect stud. But two such are there that I have seen in Mandakan to-day, and they are thyself and mine ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... it away for a second, at the same time planting my straw as before, a straw sticking out nearly a centimetre. (.39 inch.—Translator's Note.) What will the Bee do? Will she, who is scrupulous in ridding the home of the least mote of dust, extract this beam, which would certainly prove the larva's undoing by interfering with its growth? She could, for just now we saw her drag out and throw away, at a distance, a ...
— The Mason-bees • J. Henri Fabre

... been less than a mote in the eye of Uncle Jabez. She was merely an annoyance to the miller at that time. Since then, however, she had many and many a time proved a blessing to him. Nor did Jabez Potter refuse to ...
— Ruth Fielding on the St. Lawrence - The Queer Old Man of the Thousand Islands • Alice B. Emerson

... with me, I would—" Maria paused. Suddenly she remembered that she had her secret, and she felt humbled before this other girl whom she was judging. She became conscious to such an extent of the beam in her own eye that she was too blinded to see the mote in that of poor Lily, who, indeed, was not to blame, being simply helpless before her own temperament and ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman

... expressions, such as (II Tim. ii. 4): "No man holding knighthood to God, wlappith himself with worldli nedes;" and many of the best-known phrases in our present Bible originated with him; e.g., "the beame and the mote," "the depe thingis of God," "strait is the gate and narewe is the waye," "no but a man schall be born againe," "the cuppe of blessing which ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various

... energy upon even a just finding of fault with another. The thing is, to trim the lamp and clean the glass of our own, that it may be a light to the world. It is just the same with communities as with individuals. The community which casts if it be but the mote out of its own eye, does the best thing it can for the beam in its neighbor's. For my part, I confess that, so far as the clergy form and represent the Church of England, it is and has for a long time been doing its best—not its worst, ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald

... who all doth heal," She answered, "my dear Destiny, Chose me in marriage bond to seal; Unfit, He graced me regally, From your world's woe come into weal. He called me of His courtesy: 'Come hither to me, my lover leal, For mote nor spot is none in thee.' He gave me my might and great beauty; He washed my weeds in His blood so red, And crowned me, forever clean to be, And clothed me in ...
— The Pearl • Sophie Jewett

... that exists. We don't care a straw whether we go on with or without the other newspapers. We will do justice and say what is true, regardless of popularity. We detest hypocrisy; and we have no disposition to make a mountain out of a molehill, or to see a mote in the eye of Lola Montez, and not discover a beam in the eye of Fanny Elssler, or of any of the other ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham

... nothing to do with floating the new invention, Jack sold out the investments of his own little fortune (all that was left of his mother's money), putting everything at his friend's disposal. Miss Paget was disgusted with him for doing this, and when the motor wouldn't mote and the invention wouldn't float, she just said, ...
— The Motor Maid • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson

... of L20 was at the same time handed to Fitz-Walter's chamberlain to defray the day's expenses. Having mounted his charger, he bids the Mayor to choose a Marshal of the host of the City of London; and this being done, the communal or "mote-bell" is set ringing, and the whole party proceed to the Priory of Holy Trinity at Aldgate. There they dismount, and entering the Priory, concert measures together for the defence of the city. There is one ...
— London and the Kingdom - Volume I • Reginald R. Sharpe

... to make us doubt whether it is not our manifest duty to endeavor at least to show our disapproval of the deed and our sympathy with those who have suffered by it. The cases must be extreme in which such a course is justifiable. There must be no effort made to remove the mote from our brother's eye if we refuse to remove the beam from our own. But in extreme cases action may be justifiable and proper. What form the action shall take must depend upon the circumstances of the case; that is, upon the degree of the atrocity and upon our power to remedy it. The cases in which ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt

... wherupon the world mote stonde, And hath done sithen it began, And shall while there is any man, And that ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand

... swifter will he go Through the pale, scattered asphodels, Down mote-hung dusk of olive dells, To where the ancient basins throw Fleet threads of blue and trembling zones Of ...
— Gloucester Moors and Other Poems • William Vaughn Moody

... Moscow in the time the chevochic had promised. As the same horses were used for the whole journey, it would have been impossible to travel mote quickly. A Russian told me that the Empress Elizabeth had done the ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt

... arrete[26] it nought my villany, Though that I plainly speak in this mattere To tellen you her[27] words, and eke her chere: Ne though I speak her words properly, For this ye knowen as well as I, Who shall tellen a tale after a man, He mote rehearse as nye as ever he can: Everich word of it been in his charge, All speke he never so rudely ne large. Or else he mote tellen his tale untrue, Or feine things, or find words new: He may not spare, altho he ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot

... made a tun, And when he should therein be done, He lept out upon the brench (brink) And said, 'Churl! wilt thou me drench? The devil of hell mote fetche thee! I am too much (big) christened ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 1 (of 2) - With an Introduction upon Ancient Humour • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange

... passing across its surface? At first you imagine they are motes clogging the delicate blood-vessels of the retina; then you wonder if a distant host of falling meteors could have passed. Soon a larger, nearer mote appears; the moon and its craters are forgotten and with a thrill of delight you realise that they are birds—living, flying birds—of all earthly things typical of the most vital life! Migration is at its height, the chirps and twitters which come from the surrounding ...
— The Log of the Sun - A Chronicle of Nature's Year • William Beebe

... but I do not see what difference two figures on horseback against the southern sky-line could possibly make to the shimmer of purple above the plains, or the fragrance of prairie-roses lining the trail. It seems to me the lonely call of the meadow-lark high overhead—a mote in a sea of blue—or the drumming and chirruping of feathered creatures through the green, could not have sounded less musical, if I had not been a lover. But that, too, is only an opinion; for one glimpse of the forms before me brought ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut

... quick-closed door, The approaching steps, my pained heart's fluttering, Thy voice, then Thee! And all the storm and sting Of bygone griefs are passed forevermore, Swept from my life as the resistless wind Scatters the chaff, nor leaves a mote behind. ...
— A Woman's Love Letters • Sophie M. Almon-Hensley

... from the sky to the hills, and the sea; to every blade of grass, to every leaf, to the smallest insect, to the million waves of ocean. Yet this earth itself appears but a mote in that sunbeam by which we are conscious of one narrow streak in the abyss. A beam crosses my silent chamber from the window, and atoms are visible in it; a beam slants between the fir-trees, and particles rise and fall within, and cross ...
— The Story of My Heart • Richard Jefferies

... /[4,66] What mote it be?—It is the knowledge of nature, and the power of its various operations; particularly the skill of reckoning, of weights and measures, of constructing buildings and dwellings of all kinds, and the true manner of forming all things for the use ...
— The Builders - A Story and Study of Masonry • Joseph Fort Newton

... spring always seems to me more perceptible and more impressive in a great town than in the country. One sees less, but one feels more. I was standing near the window—through the double frames of which the morning sun was throwing its mote-flecked beams upon the floor of what seemed to me my intolerably wearisome schoolroom—and working out a long algebraical equation on the blackboard. In one hand I was holding a ragged, long-suffering "Algebra" and in the other a small piece of chalk which had already besmeared ...
— Youth • Leo Tolstoy

... objects from the eye: Take a horse-hair and double it, leaving a loop. If the object can be seen, lay the loop over it, close the eye, and the mote will come out as the hair is withdrawn. If the irritating object cannot be seen, raise the lid of the eye as high as possible and place the loop as far as you can, close the eye and roll the ball around a few times, draw out the hair, and the ...
— The Whitehouse Cookbook (1887) - The Whole Comprising A Comprehensive Cyclopedia Of Information For - The Home • Mrs. F.L. Gillette

... were in no fashion I could name, and the simple costume the man wore suggested neither period nor country. It might, I thought, be the Happy Future, or Utopia, or the Land of Simple Dreams; an errant mote of memory, Henry James's phrase and story of "The Great Good Place," twinkled across my mind, and passed ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells

... "He knows not what to do: the outrage sore Avenged he has not, nor his pain allaid: What was a mote is now a beam; so sore It prest him; on his heart so heavy weighed. So plain is what was little known before, He fears that it will shortly be displaid. At first, he haply might have hid his woe; Which Rumour now throughout ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto

... approached. Endeavouring, however, to persuade herself that this strange conduct arose from a feeling of excitement or nervousness natural under the circumstances, Julia used a hundred kind words and tender gestures to reassure and support her companion. But the mote she consoled or admonished, the more agitated Virginie became, and matters stood in this condition when eleven o'clock arrived. Julia waited at her chamber window, which was not above three feet from the ground without, ...
— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford

... None can remove the mote of another, so long as the beam is left in the eye, and the sin unjudged in the life, None can cleanse the stain, who is not willing to take the form of a servant, and go down with bare knees upon the floor. None is ...
— Love to the Uttermost - Expositions of John XIII.-XXI. • F. B. Meyer

... owners whom he thought unconscious of its proper, value, it was fair enough for my Russian Jew to give credit to his farmers. Kelmar, if he was unconscious of the beam in his own eye, was at least silent in the matter of his brother's mote. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... as I was, You mote have let me bee, I never had come to the kings faire courte, To crave any love ...
— Book of Old Ballads • Selected by Beverly Nichols

... be in a state of beatitude always. What is a mote of dust in another's eye, in yours is a cataract. You are mad at your blindness, and fight the air because ...
— The Morgesons • Elizabeth Stoddard

... silencing effect upon him. Your house might be full of skeletons for anything he would ever discover or remember. The beam in his own eye is so big that he cannot see past it to speak about your small mote. 'The inward Christian,' says A Kempis, 'preferreth the care of himself before all other cares. He that diligently attendeth to himself can easily keep silence concerning other men. If thou attendest unto God and unto thyself, thou wilt be but little moved with what thou seest abroad.' ...
— Bunyan Characters - Third Series - The Holy War • Alexander Whyte

... individual that suffers a single adverse word immediately proceeds to abuse and slander in the extreme his opponent. In short, an angry heart knows no moderation and cannot equally repay, but must make of a splinter, even a mote, a great beam, or must fan a tiny spark into a volcano of flame, by retaliating with reviling and cursing. Yet it will not admit that it does wrong. It would, if possible, actually murder the offender, thus committing a greater wrong ...
— Epistle Sermons, Vol. III - Trinity Sunday to Advent • Martin Luther

... a daye I mote thy worke renew, If to correct and eke to rubbe and scrape, And all is ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin

... their comparisons, and formed their conclusions, with the same deference to self-esteem, and the same submission to hope, as had been apparent among their competitors. It would seem to be a law of nature that men should thus flatter themselves, and perceive the mote in the eye of their neighbour, while the beam ...
— The Sea Lions - The Lost Sealers • James Fenimore Cooper

... proud empire hastes to swift decay, As ocean sweeps the labored mote away; Whilst self-dependent power can time defy, As rocks resist the ...
— The Right of American Slavery • True Worthy Hoit

... wise Merlin, whilom wont (they say), To make his wonne low underneath the ground, In a deep delve far from the view of day, That of no living wight he mote be found, Whenso he counselled with ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay

... wide. She had her empire; why must she seek out a man who had but his art and his youth, and steal those? Women are so insatiate, look you; though they held all the world, they would not rest if one mote in the air swam in sunshine, free of them! It was the first year I touched triumph that I saw her. They began for the first time to speak of me; it was the little painting of Cigarette, as a child of the army, that did it. Ah, God! ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]

... not, that ye be not judged. For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged, and with what measure ye mete it shall be measured unto you. And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye? Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me cast out the mote out of thine eye, and lo, the beam is in thine own eye? Thou hypocrite, ...
— Mystic Christianity • Yogi Ramacharaka

... seem to be not larger than pebbles, or even than grains of sand. Yet, insignificant as these bodies may seem, the sun does not disdain to undertake their control. Each particle, whether it be as small as the mote in a sunbeam or as mighty as the planet Jupiter, must perforce trace out its path around the sun in conformity with the ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball

... he is to appear a convicted fool. A man's business is to see first that he is not acting the part of a fool, and next, to help any honest people who care about the matter to take heed likewise that they be not offering to pull the mote out of their brother's eye. But there are even societies established and supported by good people for the express purpose of pulling out motes.—'The Mote-Pulling Society!'—That ought to take with a certain part ...
— The Seaboard Parish Vol. 3 • George MacDonald

... christened into His church as children, we and our fathers before us, for generations, of the kingdom of God. Ay, my friends, these words, that kingdom, that King, witness this day against this land of England. Not merely against popery, the mote which we are trying to take out of the foreigner's eye, but against Mammon, the beam which we are overlooking in our own. Owe no man anything save love. "Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself." That is the law ...
— Sermons on National Subjects • Charles Kingsley

... well, that's queer: it may stop a man drinking, because he can get no mote out of it. However, as you please, gentlemen; here's to drink my health, bad manners to you," said McShane, throwing the bottle over ...
— The Poacher - Joseph Rushbrook • Frederick Marryat

... admit of no explanation. "Oh yes, quite parvarted; not a word of truth in it; there never is when England is consarned. There is no beam in an Englishman's eye; no not a smell of one; he has pulled it out long ago; that's the reason he can see the mote in other folks's so plain. Oh, of course it ain't true; it's a Yankee invention; it's a hickory ham and ...
— The Attache - or, Sam Slick in England, Complete • Thomas Chandler Haliburton

... lagrimas, todas habreis visto en aquel santo lugar una tumba, una tumba humilde. Antes la componian una piedra tosca y una cruz de palo; la cruz ha desaparecido, y solo queda la piedra. En esa tumba, cuya inscripcion es el mote de mi canto, reposa en paz el ultimo baron de Fortcastell, Teobaldo de Montagut,[1] del cual voy a ...
— Legends, Tales and Poems • Gustavo Adolfo Becquer

... needed was a man to rule and suffer for the common weal. Arthur was not a thing "enskied and sainted;" rather a wholesome man, whose duty lay in working for men. Sir Percivale became a monk; other knights returned no mote, thus spilling the best blood of the table round. Meantime the king's enemies multiplied, and these visionaries decimated the ranks of opposition to the wrong; but come what would, King Arthur served. An appeal to him for help found answer, though treasons plotted at ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle

... some millions of germs up your sleeve now, or, more likely, on your back, and I wouldn't let you go into my hog pen for a $2000 note. I'm so well quarantined that I don't much fear contagion; but there's always danger from infected dust. The wind blows it about, and any mote may be an automobile for a whole colony of bacteria, which may decide to picnic in my piggery. This dry weather is bad for us, and if we get heavy winds from off the ridge, I'm going ...
— The Fat of the Land - The Story of an American Farm • John Williams Streeter

... to see the beam that is in our own eye, and blind us to the mote that is in our brother's. Let us feel our offences with our hands, make them great and bright before us like the sun, make us eat them and drink them for our diet. Blind us to the offences of our beloved, cleanse them from our memories, take them out of our mouths ...
— A Lowden Sabbath Morn • Robert Louis Stevenson

... political issue was pressed temporarily into the background by the sudden demand of the railroad brotherhoods for shorter hours and mote pay, threatening a nation-wide strike if their plea was unheeded. Neither party wished to risk the labor vote by opposing the unions, and the public did not desire a strike, much as it deprecated the attitude of the labor leaders ...
— The United States Since The Civil War • Charles Ramsdell Lingley

... defects, of which we are too conscious, but his merits, to which we are too blind. And "The Egoist" is a satire; so much must be allowed; but it is a satire of a singular quality, which tells you nothing of that obvious mote, which is engaged from first to last with that invisible beam. It is yourself that is hunted down; these are your own faults that are dragged into the day and numbered, with lingering relish, with cruel cunning and precision. A young friend of Mr. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... seize, for the shadow which you could not hold fast if you were to seem to grasp it. Work on at the foundations. Insist on truth and right; put them into all your own life, taking all the beam out of your own eye before demanding—well, we will say the mote, for generosity's sake, and for the holy authority of the word—out ...
— Debate On Woman Suffrage In The Senate Of The United States, - 2d Session, 49th Congress, December 8, 1886, And January 25, 1887 • Henry W. Blair, J.E. Brown, J.N. Dolph, G.G. Vest, Geo. F. Hoar.

... to Goddis pay, With vnitie, peace, rest and charitie. Hee that was here cladde in humanitie, That came from heauen, and styed vp with our nature, Or hee ascended, he gaue to vs cure, And left with vs peace, ageyne striffe and debate, Mote giue vs peace, so well irradicate Here in this world: ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries - of the English Nation, v. 1, Northern Europe • Richard Hakluyt

... laugh any mote. Come back, and you needn't climb. You can stay underneath and pick up while ...
— Gypsy's Cousin Joy • Elizabeth Stuart Phelps

... far off a winged vessel came, Swift as a swallow, subtle as a flame: I know not what it bore of freight or host, But white it was as an avenging ghost. It levelled strong Euphrates in its course; Supreme yet weightless as an idle mote It seemed to tame the waters without force Till not a murmur swelled or billow beat: Lo, as the purple shadow swept the sands, The prudent crocodile rose on his feet And shed appropriate tears and ...
— Poems • Christina G. Rossetti

... distracted, Captain SHANDY," said Mrs. WADMAN, holding up her cambric handkerchief to her left eye, as she approached the door of my Uncle TOBY'S Sentry-Box—"a mote, or sand, or small fly, or something, I know not what, has got into this eye of mine. The Gardener declares it is one of those Green Flies which are the pest of this Distressful Country. I refuse to believe that. There never was, never will, never can, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, April 22, 1893 • Various

... it were, for then might the Sundering Flood have been laid with ice, which never betid. On the morning of Yule day, Osberne and his grandsire and grandam got under way long before daylight, that they might go to the Cloven Mote, and hear the Christmass in the church of Allhallows, which had been builded on the east side of the water to be the church of the Mote; but on the other side of the water was another church like to it in all ways, and under ...
— The Sundering Flood • William Morris

... Knighten Guild possessed is not easy to define. Besides this, the aristocracy of the City, there were already trade guilds for religious purposes and for feasting—but, as yet, with no powers. The people had their folk mote, or general gathering: their ward mote: and their weekly hustings. We must not seek to define the powers of all these bodies and corporations. They overlapped each other: the aristocratic party was continually innovating while the popular party as continually resisted. In ...
— The History of London • Walter Besant

... vanity, to avoid in their own case that which they condemn so harshly elsewhere. But tolerant people are just the opposite, and claim for themselves the same indulgence that they extend to others—hanc veniam damus petimusque vicissim. It is all very well for the Bible to talk about the mote in another's eye and the beam in one's own. The nature of the eye is to look not at itself but at other things; and therefore to observe and blame faults in another is a very suitable way of becoming conscious of one's own. We require a looking-glass ...
— Counsels and Maxims - From The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer

... King Olaf's shrine could not be brought out to the mote-stead when we did you homage; ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VIII (of X) - Continental Europe II. • Various

... Ascending to its higher, Or the quick fluttering of the Storm-god's heart,— An instant's palpitation Through all its arteries of fire! One common blood runs down life's myriad veins, From Archangelic Hierarchs who float Broad-winged in the God-glory, to the mote That trembles with a braided dance In the warm sunset's vivid glance; And one great Heart that boundless flow sustains! In all the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various

... church is the tomb of a Flemish brewer, named Zoctmanns, calling for prayers for his soul; Iden, with a square tower and a stair turret, a village taking its name from that family of which Alexander Iden, slayer of Jack Cade, was a member, its home being at Mote, now non-existent; and Peasmarsh, whose long modest church, crowned by a squat spire, may be again seen, like the swan upon St. Mary's Lake, in the water at the foot of the churchyard. At Peasmarsh was born a poor artificial poet ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas

... But everybody knew Alderman Cute was a Justice! Oh dear, so active a Justice always! Who such a mote of brightness in the public ...
— A Budget of Christmas Tales by Charles Dickens and Others • Various

... imagination often produce those delusions, which Darwin calls hallucinations, and which sometimes terminate in mania. The haughtiness, the melancholy, and the aspiring genius of Leland, were tending to a disordered intellect. Incipient insanity is a mote floating in the understanding, escaping all observation, when the mind is capable of observing itself, but seems a constituent part of the mind itself when that is ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli

... in days of eld Gathered about his throat Such a circlet; no queen e'er held Necklace so clear of mote. ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... sinews of his breast, And the long gush of his swollen arteries pause: And, nodding, wheeled, towering in all his height. Then, like a wind that hushes, gazed and saw Down, down, far down upon the untroubled green A shepherd-boy that swung a little sling. Goliath shut his lids to drive that mote, Which vexed the eastern azure of his eye, Out of his vision; and stared down again. Yet stood the youth there, ruddy in the flare Of his vast shield, nor spake, nor quailed, gazed up, As one might scan a mountain to be scaled. Then, ...
— Collected Poems 1901-1918 in Two Volumes - Volume I. • Walter de la Mare

... other three, The grizeliest beast that ere mote bee Her hede was greate and graye; Scho was bred in Rokebye woode, Ther war few that thither yoode, ...
— Ancient Poems, Ballads and Songs of England • Robert Bell

... by the female side. The breath of her mouth still moves in my hair, and I know that she lied, And I feel her, Bill, sir, inside me—she operates there like a drug. Were it better to live like a beetle, to wear the cast clothes of a slug, Be the louse in the locks of the hangman, the mote in the eye of the bat, Than to live and believe in a woman, who must one day grow aged and fat? You must see it's preposterous, Bill, sir. And yet, how the thought of it clings! I have lived out my time—I have prigged lots of verse—I have kissed (ah, that stings!) Lips that ...
— The Heptalogia • Algernon Charles Swinburne

... sight in London is—London. No man understands himself as an infinitesimal until he has been a drop in that ocean, a grain of sand on that sea-margin, a mote in its sunbeam, or the fog or smoke which stands for it; in plainer phrase, a unit ...
— Our Hundred Days in Europe • Oliver Wendell Holmes

... Manie thought themselues touched with his words, who hauing smelled somewhat of his secret tricks, that whereas he was a most licentious liuer, and an vnchast person of bodie and mind, vet he was so blinded, that he could not perceiue the beame in his own eies, whilest he espied a mote in another mans. Herevpon they grudged, that he should in such wise call other men to accompts for their honest demeanor of life, which could not render any good reckoning of his owne: insomuch that they watched him so narrowlie, ...
— Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland (2 of 6): England (3 of 12) - Henrie I. • Raphael Holinshed

... his pupil's initiation with great alacrity, first teaching him cautiously to open the cabinet door, lest any particles of dust should be dislodged and fix upon his canvas, and advising him never to take up his pencil without sitting motionless a few minutes, till every mote casually floating in the air should be settled. Such instructions were not thrown away upon Watersouchy: he treasured them up, and refined, if possible, upon ...
— A Wanderer in Holland • E. V. Lucas

... Nibelungs and Volsungs, of Sigurd and of Siegfried,—whether we follow the older versions or the mote recent renderings,—there is, as it were, an ever-present but indefinable shadow of coming fate, "a low, inarticulate voice of Doom," foretelling the inevitable. This is but in consonance with the ...
— The Story of Siegfried • James Baldwin

... laughed. Pierre had tried to keep her a good deal to himself, but she had been elusive as a golden mote dancing up and down. She seemed to understand what this sense of appropriating meant, and she did not ...
— A Little Girl in Old Detroit • Amanda Minnie Douglas

... as pride, if I remembered at all, my acquaintances who had gone to the city to attend the oratorios. The nighthawk circled overhead in the sunny afternoons—for I sometimes made a day of it—like a mote in the eye, or in heaven's eye, falling from time to time with a swoop and a sound as if the heavens were rent, torn at last to very rags and tatters, and yet a seamless cope remained; small imps that fill the air and lay their eggs on the ground on bare sand or rocks on the top ...
— The Last Harvest • John Burroughs

... least of real as opposed to 'ideal', the least speck of positive existence, even though it were but the mote in a sun beam, into the sciential 'contemplamen' or theorem, and it ceases to be science. 'Ratio desinit esse pura ratio et fit discursus, stat subter et fit [Greek: hypothetikon]:—non superstat'. The ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge

... than they are? All's in its place, from mote to star. The thistledown that flits and flies Could drift no hair-breadth otherwise. What is, must be; with rhythmic laws All Nature chimes, Effect and Cause. The sand-grain and the sun obey — What ho! the ...
— Rhymes of a Rolling Stone • Robert W. Service

... cloud, so does mirthfulness frequently proceed from a heart susceptible of the deepest melancholy. Many and true are the simple tales of Irish life which could prove this. Many a fair laughing girl who has danced in happiness, light as a mote in the sunbeam, has been suddenly left in darkness, bowed down in youth and beauty to the grave, and though the little circle of which she was the centre may have been disturbed by her untimely life, yet in brief space, except to a few yearning and stricken ...
— Lha Dhu; Or, The Dark Day - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton

... gravity with which Perry contemplated an orgy of indigestion. The universal scheme appeared planned to fulfil the law of a Titanic humour, and his own credulity and Connie's indiscretions showed suddenly to Adams as mere mote-like jests which circled in a general convulsion ...
— The Wheel of Life • Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow

... is a plaintive song, Sung by a suff'ring maid, Telling a tale of wrong, Telling of hope betrayed; Tuned to each changing note, Sorry when he is sad, Blind to his ev'ry mote, Merry when he is glad! Merry when he is glad! Love that no wrong can cure, Love that is always new, That is the love that's pure, That is the love that's true! Love that no wrong can cure, Love that is always ...
— The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan - The 14 Gilbert And Sullivan Plays • William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan

... there came a silly auld carle, An ill death mote he die! For he's awa to Hislinton, Where the Seven Foresters ...
— Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, Vol. II (of 3) • Walter Scott

... ant longe, With frount ant face feir to fonge, With murthes monie mote heo monge, That brid so breme in boure. With lossom eye grete ant gode, With browen blysfol under hode, He that reste him on the Rode, That leflych lyf honoure. ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy

... lower series of similar fractions, and the actual present which you arrest measures now but the thirty-six-millionth of an hour; and so by infinite declensions the true and very present, in which only we live and enjoy, will vanish into a mote of a mote, distinguishable only by a heavenly vision. Therefore the present, which only man possesses, offers less capacity for his footing than the slenderest film that ever spider twisted from her womb. Therefore also even this incalculable shadow from the narrowest ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various

... place the shepheards flocke Lay everie where, their wearie limbs to rest, On everie bush, and everie hollow rocke, 235 Where breathe on them the whistling wind mote best; The whiles the shepheard self, tending his stocke, Sate by the fountaine side, in shade to rest, Where gentle slumbring sleep oppressed him Displaid on ground, ...
— The Poetical Works of Edmund Spenser, Volume 5 • Edmund Spenser

... gather one of the taller branches, a mote, a bit of bark—some hateful thing—falls into Molly's right eye. Instant agony is the result. Tears stream from the offended pupil; the other eye joins in the general tribulation; and Molly, standing in the centre of the grass-plot, with her handkerchief pressed frantically to her ...
— Molly Bawn • Margaret Wolfe Hamilton

... privilege of all the German freemen, the right of judging one another: the lord's steward was only the register. This domestic court, which continued in full vigor for many ages, the Saxons called Hall mote, from the place in which it was held; the Normans, who adopted it, named it a Court-Baron. This court had another department, in which the power of the lord was more absolute. From the most ancient times the German nobility considered ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke

... be whole particles, but the smallest specks that I could find among well ground Vermilion and Red-lead, seem'd to be a Red mass, compounded of a multitude of less and less motes, which sticking together, compos'd a bulk, not one thousand thousandth part of the smallest visible sand or mote. ...
— Micrographia • Robert Hooke

... run through it without sticking. I can prove some facts about travelling by a story or two. There are certain principles to be assumed,—such as these:—He who is carried by horses must deal with rogues.—To-day's dinner subtends a larger visual angle than yesterday's revolution. A mote in my eye is bigger to me than the biggest of Dr. Gould's private planets.—Every traveller is a self-taught entomologist.—Old jokes are dynamometers of mental tension; an old joke tells better among friends travelling than at home,—which ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various

... clod. How can he cause such different powers to flow Upon the aforesaid mortals here below? And how, indeed, to this far distant ball Can he impart his energy at all?— How pierce the ether deeps profound, The sun and globes that whirl around? A mote might turn his potent ray For ever from its earthward way. Will find, it, then, in starry cope, The makers of the horoscope? The war[24] with which all Europe's now afflicted— Deserves it not by them to've been predicted? Yet heard we not a whisper of it, Before it came, ...
— The Fables of La Fontaine - A New Edition, With Notes • Jean de La Fontaine

... God at all, He must be omnipresent in space. Beyond the last Stars He must be, as He is here. There can be no mote that peoples the sunbeams, no little cell of life that the microscope discovers in the seed-sporule of a moss, but He ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike

... should not be considered a fool for not speaking English. She then said that the young women had been taking a walk together, and that they were much in each other's company for the sake of conversation, and no wonder, as the poor simpletons could not speak a word of Welsh. I thought of the beam and mote mentioned in Scripture, and then cast a glance of compassion on the two poor young women. For a moment I fancied myself in the times of Owen Glendower, and that I saw two females, whom his marauders had carried off from Cheshire or Shropshire to ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow

... the Confederate lines too strong to be taken by assault," said he; "and while McClellan waits for reenforcements, there will be nothing to prevent the Confederates from being reenforced; so mote it be." ...
— Who Goes There? • Blackwood Ketcham Benson

... seek us out with loving eagerness, As seeks the weeping infant for the breast. And here with aliens thou didst choose to dwell, Year in, year out, in deepest sympathy; And here thou buildest thee an holy cell; And so the peaceful years went gliding by. But ah! what living thing mote yet avoid Death's dreary summons?—And thine hour did sound When all the friends on whom thine heart relied Slept on strange pillows on the mossy ground. So, while the moon lit up Kasuga's crest, O'er ...
— Japanese Literature - Including Selections from Genji Monogatari and Classical - Poetry and Drama of Japan • Various

... the distant smoke once more, and kept close to the western shore where they were in the shadow of the wooded heights, their canoe but a mote upon the surface of the water. In so small a vessel and almost level with its waves, they saw the lake as one cannot see it from above, its splendid expanse stretching away from north to south, until it sank under the horizon, while the Green Mountains ...
— The Hunters of the Hills • Joseph Altsheler

... once more drooped; the mocking-bird turned his head from side to side, then lifting his full throat he poured forth again his incomparable, superb, infinitely versatile melody, fixing his glittering eye on the moon, and heeding the futilely ambitious worldling no mote. ...
— The Moonshiners At Hoho-Hebee Falls - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)

... O heaven!—that there were a mote in yours, A grain, a dust, a gnat, a wandering hair, Any annoyance in that precious sense! Then, feeling what small things are boist'rous there, Your vile intent ...
— The Canadian Elocutionist • Anna Kelsey Howard

... therefore,[204] so mote I go; Is that the guise of a trusty page, To play, when he is sent on his ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. II • Robert Dodsley

... speak; And mark how I unsay my words again. An honourable grave is more esteemed Than the polluted closet of a king; The greater man, the greater is the thing, Be it good or bad, that he shall undertake; An unreputed mote, flying in the sun, Presents a greater substance than it is; The freshest summer's day doth soonest taint The loathed carrion that it seems to kiss; Deep are the blows made with a mighty axe; That sin doth ten times aggravate itself That is committed in a ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne

... cobweb in the roof was luminous, flinging streaks of red and violet across the tumbled farm gear in the corner, plows, harrows, hoes, rakes, sugar mills, and making every separate grain in the high bin adjacent, gleam like a mote of precious gold. They tinged the beams, the upright columns, the barricades, where clover and timothy, piled high, held toward the hot incendiary their separate straws for the funeral pile. They bathed the murderer's retreat in beautiful illumination, and while ...
— The Life, Crime and Capture of John Wilkes Booth • George Alfred Townsend

... note among these New Englanders was their town-meetings, derived from the ancient folk-mote, in which they elected their magistrates, and imposed upon themselves the necessary taxes for schools, highways, and officers of the law. They formed self-governed communities, who selected for rulers their ablest and fittest ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XI • John Lord

... sin cast the first stone,' look into your own hearts and answer me, how many of you would dare to lift a hand? How many of you have taken the beam out of your own eye before attempting to pluck the mote out of your brother's? O ye pharisaical ones, who stand in the public places and thank God that you are not as other men, beware, beware. The condemnation that surely and inevitably shall fall upon you is not the judgment of Jesus ...
— The Uncalled - A Novel • Paul Laurence Dunbar

... aid of these numbers we may begin to gain a just appreciation of the doctrine of the human destiny of the universe—the doctrine that all things were made for man. Seen from the sun, the earth dwindles away to a mere speck, a mere dust-mote glistening in his beams. If the reader wishes a more precise valuation, let him hold a page of this book a couple of feet from his eye; then let him consider one of its dots or full stops; that dot is several hundred times larger in surface than is the ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper

... Good; Our message to the world is Liberty; Not the rude freedom of anarchic hordes, But reasoned kindness, whose benignant code Upon the emblazoned walls of history We carved with our good swords, And crimsoned with our blood. Last, from our eye we plucked the obscuring mote, (Not without tears expelled, and sharpest pain,) From swarthy limbs the galling chain With shock on mighty shock we smote, Whereby with clearer gaze we scan The heaven-writ message that we bear for man. Not ours to give, as erst the Genoese, Of ...
— Christopher Columbus and His Monument Columbia • Various

... was an excellent compromise!" answered the lawyer soulfully. "There's something in the Bible, isn't there, about pulling the mote out of your own eye before attempting to remove the beam from ...
— By Advice of Counsel • Arthur Train

... is noght decided; Bot it is seid and evere schal, Betwen tuo Stoles lyth the fal, Whan that men wenen best to sitte: In holy cherche of such a slitte Is for to rewe un to ous alle; God grante it mote wel befalle 340 Towardes him which hath the trowthe. Bot ofte is sen that mochel slowthe, Whan men ben drunken of the cuppe, Doth mochel harm, whan fyr is uppe, Bot if somwho the flamme stanche; And so to speke ...
— Confessio Amantis - Tales of the Seven Deadly Sins, 1330-1408 A.D. • John Gower

... done. Wherefore am I now of one mind with the rest of you. Now meseemeth it were well that these things which we have spoken here, and shall speak, should not be noised abroad openly; nay, at the Folk-mote it would be well that nought be said about the day or the way of our onslaught on Silver-dale, lest the foe take warning and be on their guard. Though, sooth to say, did I deem that if they had word of our intent they of Rose-dale would join themselves to them of Silver-dale, and that we ...
— The Roots of the Mountains • William Morris

... sun slanted low and golden and mote-laden. Bobby suddenly felt a little tired, and more than a little hungry. He descended from the buggy with alacrity. The wetting was forgotten in the home-coming. Only when washing for dinner did he remember with certain self-felicitation that even ...
— The Adventures of Bobby Orde • Stewart Edward White

... go, fresh from teaching Juvenal and Ovid, to declaim at Exeter Hall against poor Peter Dens's well-meaning prurience! Had we not better take the beam out of our own eye before we meddle with the mote in the Jesuit's? ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley

... farmer's wife had come into her heritage, not only of materials, but of the implements of manufacture. She had the small flax wheel which dwelt in the keeping room, where she could sit and spin like a lady of place and condition, and the large woolen wheel standing in the mote-laden air of the garret, through which she walked up and down ...
— The Development of Embroidery in America • Candace Wheeler

... variation, and that variation important in the woman's shrewd eyes. Hume had no means of knowing how much money she possessed, but he did know that she had paid out ten thousand dollars in cash. He knew also that she was a woman. In his eyes, never clearsighted from the mote of conceit and the dust of arrogant superiority, a woman was a fool. He needed money, he wanted money, her money as well as another's. He had gone far already in the project that would make him a rich man if it succeeded; ...
— The Short Cut • Jackson Gregory

... "a new adaptation from the New Testament." He and a charming "she" sit waiting their turn at the Hofrath's door. He is looking into her eyes and she into his. "Really I don't see the slightest mote in your eyes," says she. "No, but I can see the beams in yours," ...
— In Bohemia with Du Maurier - The First Of A Series Of Reminiscences • Felix Moscheles

... of your charyte call to remembraunce The soule of William Caxton first prynter of this boke In latin tonge at Coleyn hymself to avaunce That every well disposyd man may theron loke And John Tate the yonger Joy mote he broke Which late hathe in Englond doo make this paper thynne That now in our Englyssh this boke ...
— Mediaeval Lore from Bartholomew Anglicus • Robert Steele

... of their Soldiery, their Expeditions and manner of Fight. Besides the Dissauvas, spoken of before, who are great Generals, there are other great Captains. As those they call Mote-Ralls; as much as to say, Scribes. Because they keep the Rolls or Registers of certain Companies of Soldiers, each containing 970 Men, who are under their Command. Of these Mote-Ralls, there are four principal. But besides these, there are smaller Commanders over Soldiers; ...
— An Historical Relation Of The Island Ceylon In The East Indies • Robert Knox

... incontinencie. Manie thought themselues touched with his words, who hauing smelled somewhat of his secret tricks, that whereas he was a most licentious liuer, and an vnchast person of bodie and mind, vet he was so blinded, that he could not perceiue the beame in his own eies, whilest he espied a mote in another mans. Herevpon they grudged, that he should in such wise call other men to accompts for their honest demeanor of life, which could not render any good reckoning of his owne: insomuch that they watched him ...
— Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland (2 of 6): England (3 of 12) - Henrie I. • Raphael Holinshed

... His mountain back mote well be said To measure heighth against his head, And lift itself above: Yet spite of all that Nature did To make his uncouth form forbid, This creature ...
— Poetical Works of Johnson, Parnell, Gray, and Smollett - With Memoirs, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Samuel Johnson, Thomas Parnell, Thomas Gray, and Tobias Smollett

... of a labourer behind a hedge on the Brighton road): "'Oo are you a-gettin' at? Do you see any mote in my eye? If you want to know the time, ...
— Mr. Punch Awheel - The Humours of Motoring and Cycling • J. A. Hammerton

... birds that have(n) left their song, While they have suffered cold so strong, In weathers grill [10] and dark to sight, Ben [11] in May for [12] the sun(en) bright So glad(e), that they show in singing That in (t)heir hearts is such liking,[13] That they mote [14] sing(en) and be light. Then doth the nightingale her might To make noise and sing(en) blithe, Then is bussful many sithe,[15] The calandra [16] and the popinjay.[17] Then young(e) folk entend(en)[18] aye For to ...
— Song and Legend From the Middle Ages • William D. McClintock and Porter Lander McClintock

... Betelgeuse to be two hundred and sixty million miles in diameter. That means it would take twenty-seven million of our suns to equal it in bulk. So that this big world of ours, which takes so many weeks to crawl about on the fastest ships and the fastest trains, is really a mote of dust, something smaller than the smallest pin-prick, compared to that far-away sun up there on the shoulder ...
— The Prairie Child • Arthur Stringer

... is our king! The Eagle is king of the birds!" sang all the others; but, no! Way, way above the Eagle flew another bird, so tiny that he looked like nothing but a mote, floating in the sunlight. It was the little brown bird that sings alone in the hedges, and had no name then. He had hidden himself in the Eagle's feathers and had been carried up with him until he wanted to fly on ...
— Tell Me Another Story - The Book of Story Programs • Carolyn Sherwin Bailey

... evident that there is power not ourselves. We did not make this world. We did not put into it even the lowest force, gravitation. It is more than our minds can compass to measure its power. We have no arithmetic to tell its power on every mote in the sunbeam, or flower, or grain-head bowing toward the earth, tree brought down with a crash, or avalanche with thunder. Much less can we measure the power that holds the earth to the sun spite of its measureless centrifugal force. We did not make the ...
— Among the Forces • Henry White Warren

... thoughts and our own actions, that we have first to stand up for the right; our business is not to protect ourselves from our neighbour's wrong, but our neighbour from our wrong. This is to slay evil; the other is to make it multiply. A man who would pull out even a mote from his brother's eye, must first pull out the beam from his own eye, must be righteous against his own selfishness. That is the only way to wound the root of evil. He who teaches his neighbour to insist on his rights, is not a teacher ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald

... bye there are considerable remains of the old port, a mote, by the ruins of which you can easily trace ...
— Charles Philip Yorke, Fourth Earl of Hardwicke, Vice-Admiral R.N. - A Memoir • Lady Biddulph of Ledbury

... the night, as often happened in that northern latitude, had come on cool, and the warmth of the blankets was not unwelcome. Robert knew that he was only a mote in all that vast wilderness, but the contiguity of the Indian village might cause warriors, either arriving or departing, to pass near him. So he was not surprised when he heard footsteps in the bushes not far away, and then the sound of voices. ...
— The Masters of the Peaks - A Story of the Great North Woods • Joseph A. Altsheler

... herself to feel that she had any right to go into the family purposely to watch over and find fault with any one member of it. If she had seen anything wrong in Jemima, Ruth loved her so much that she would have told her of it in private; and with many doubts, how far she was the one to pull out the mote from any one's eye, even in the most tender manner;—she would have had to conquer reluctance before she could have done even this; but there was something undefinably repugnant to her in the manner of acting which Mr Bradshaw had proposed, and she determined not to accept the invitations which ...
— Ruth • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell

... Bridges to enter the City. To prevent which, the Besieged intended to have made another Ditch out of their Works, so that the Wheels falling therein, the Bridge would have fallen too short of their Breastworks into their wet Mote, and ...
— Characters from 17th Century Histories and Chronicles • Various

... rec og nized: known. re flec tion: image. ref uge: shelter. re fused: declined to do. reign ing (rain): ruling. re mote: distant. rest less: eager for change, discontented; unquiet. re store: to return, to give back. roe buck: male deer. runt: an animal unusually ...
— The Child's World - Third Reader • Hetty Browne, Sarah Withers, W.K. Tate

... Or the quick fluttering of the Storm-god's heart,— An instant's palpitation Through all its arteries of fire! One common blood runs down life's myriad veins, From Archangelic Hierarchs who float Broad-winged in the God-glory, to the mote That trembles with a braided dance In the warm sunset's vivid glance; And one great Heart that boundless flow sustains! In all the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various

... if I only sit down by the sea, and think of the waves that kiss other shores thousands of miles away, I am oppressed by a sense of my own littleness. I ask the question whether the God who has such large things in His care, can think of me—a speck on an infinite aggregate of surface—a mote uneasily shifting in the boundless space. I get no hope in this direction; but I look down, and find that the shoulders of all inferior creation are under me, lifting me into the very presence of God. I find that God has been at ...
— Lessons in Life - A Series of Familiar Essays • Timothy Titcomb

... times an equal number. It is every whit as great when our view is contracted and bounded by near objects as when it is extended to larger and remoter. For it being impossible that one MINIMUM VISIBILE should obscure or keep out of sight mote than one other, it is a plain consequence that when my view is on all sides bounded by the walls of my study see just as many visible points as I could, in case that by the removal of the study-walls and all other obstructions, I had a full prospect of the circumjacent fields, ...
— An Essay Towards a New Theory of Vision • George Berkeley

... two bits of hard wood, and a sprinkle of small, shiny nut-coal. The draughts were put on, and in five minutes the coals were red. In these five minutes the stove and the mantel were dusted, the hearth brushed up, and there was neither chip nor mote to tell the tale. It was not like an Irish fire, that reaches out into the middle of the room with its volcanic ...
— We Girls: A Home Story • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney

... hot fermentation and unwholesome secrecy of the population crowded into large cities, each mote in the misery lighter, as an individual soul, than a dead leaf, but becoming oppressive and infectious each to his neighbour, in the smoking mass of decay. The resulting modes of mental ruin and distress are continually ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin

... died, as kings have died, The will of the Lord be done; And he left to the care of his daughter fair, Queen Quendred, an infant son. The daughter gazed at her brother king, Her eye had an evil mote; And then she played with his yellow hair, And patted his infant throat; And then she muster'd a bloody mind, And whisper'd a favour'd slut, While patting the infant monarch's throat, It would not ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XX. No. 556., Saturday, July 7, 1832 • Various

... adj.; littleness &c. (small size) 193; tenuity; paucity; fewness &c (small number) 103; meanness, insignificance (unimportance) 643; mediocrity, moderation. small quantity, modicum, trace, hint, minimum; vanishing point; material point, atom, particle, molecule, corpuscle, point, speck, dot, mote, jot, iota, ace; minutiae, details; look, thought, idea, soupcon, dab, dight[obs3], whit, tittle, shade, shadow; spark, scintilla, gleam; touch, cast; grain, scruple, granule, globule, minim, sup, sip, sop, spice, drop, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget

... possible integrity of other people, appearances, self-evident facts, the testimony of her own senses,—even Hollingsworth's self-accusation, had he volunteered it,—would have weighed not the value of a mote of thistledown on the other side. So secure was she of his right, that she never thought of comparing it with another's wrong, but left ...
— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... of diamonds, lucid, clear of the mote, Clasp me the large at the waist, and clasp me the small at ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 8 • Various

... doubt whether it is not our manifest duty to endeavor at least to show our disapproval of the deed and our sympathy with those who have suffered by it. The cases must be extreme in which such a course is justifiable. There must be no effort made to remove the mote from our brother's eye if we refuse to remove the beam from our own. But in extreme cases action may be justifiable and proper. What form the action shall take must depend upon the circumstances of ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various

... The breath of her mouth still moves in my hair, and I know that she lied, And I feel her, Bill, sir, inside me—she operates there like a drug. Were it better to live like a beetle, to wear the cast clothes of a slug, Be the louse in the locks of the hangman, the mote in the eye of the bat, Than to live and believe in a woman, who must one day grow aged and fat? You must see it's preposterous, Bill, sir. And yet, how the thought of it clings! I have lived out my time—I ...
— The Heptalogia • Algernon Charles Swinburne

... him the grave's dearest privilege, peace and quiet. Amen! Amen! with all my heart to thy benediction and prayer, O priest! as, aspersing his lifeless remains with holy-water, thou sayest, Requiescat! So mote it be! ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 74, December, 1863 • Various

... that the fault rests with men. Again I do not know. Certainly it is much easier and pleasanter to see the mote in our brother's eye than it is to recognise a possible beam as clouding our own sight. One of the worst results of the protection of woman by man is that he has had to bear her sins. Women have grown accustomed to this; they do not ...
— The Truth About Woman • C. Gasquoine Hartley

... merely been temporarily blinded by the excess of light which emanates from St. John, who proceeds to examine him in regard to Charity. His answers are greeted by the heavenly chorus with the chant "Holy, holy, holy," in which Beatrice joins, ere she clears the last mote away from Dante's eyes and thus enables him to see more plainly than ever. Our poet now perceives a fourth spirit, in whom he recognizes Adam, father of mankind, who retells the story of Eden, adding that, ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber

... 40:16, 17] Lo the nations! as a drop from a bucket, And as dust on a balance are they reckoned. Lo the isles! as a mote he uplifteth, And Lebanon is not enough for fuel, And its wild beasts for a burnt-offering. All the nations are as nothing before him, They are reckoned by him as void ...
— The Makers and Teachers of Judaism • Charles Foster Kent

... pith the severance shaft; * Ah who shall patient bear such parting throe? And dart of Death struck down amid the tribe * The age's pearl that Morn saw brightest show: I cried the while his case took speech and said:—* Would Heaven, my son, Death mote his doom foreslow! Which be the readiest road wi' thee to meet * My Son! for whom I would my soul bestow? If sun I call him no! the sun cloth set; * If moon I call him, wane the moons; Ah no! O sad mischance o' thee, O doom of days, * Thy place none other love shall ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton

... dryly. "My dear fellow, how often must I explain to you your confusions? Orthodox sentiment and stereotyped emotion master you. And then your temperament! You are really incapable of rational judgments. Cerberus? Pshaw! A flash expiring, a mote of fading sparkle, a dim-pulsing and dying organism—pouf! a snap of the fingers, a puff of breath, what would you? A pawn in the game of life. Not even a problem. There is no problem in a stillborn babe, nor in a dead ...
— Moon-Face and Other Stories • Jack London

... no hurry to face the wrath of the public. She served her customer quietly in the shop below, ascended the stairs, and when at last on the level of the street, she looked about, wiped her spectacles as if a mote upon them might have caused her to overlook so minute an object as an omnibus, and exclaimed, "Did ever anybody see the like ...
— Red Cap Tales - Stolen from the Treasure Chest of the Wizard of the North • Samuel Rutherford Crockett

... would have nothing to do with floating the new invention, Jack sold out the investments of his own little fortune (all that was left of his mother's money), putting everything at his friend's disposal. Miss Paget was disgusted with him for doing this, and when the motor wouldn't mote and the invention wouldn't float, she just said, "I told ...
— The Motor Maid • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson

... what difference two figures on horseback against the southern sky-line could possibly make to the shimmer of purple above the plains, or the fragrance of prairie-roses lining the trail. It seems to me the lonely call of the meadow-lark high overhead—a mote in a sea of blue—or the drumming and chirruping of feathered creatures through the green, could not have sounded less musical, if I had not been a lover. But that, too, is only an opinion; for one glimpse of the forms before me brought peace into ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut

... native town! whose choking elms each year With eddying dust before their time turn gray, Pining for rain,—to me thy dust is dear; It glorifies the eve of summer day, And when the westering sun half sunken burns, 250 The mote-thick air to deepest orange turns, The westward horseman rides through clouds ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell

... said the king, I swear, so mote I thee:[91] My horse is better than thy mare, And ...
— The Book of Brave Old Ballads • Unknown

... also a parable unto them, Can the blind guide the blind? shall they not both fall into a pit? 40 The disciple is not above his teacher: but every one when he is perfected shall be as his teacher. 41 And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye? 42 Or how canst thou say to thy brother, Brother, let me cast out the mote that is in thine eye, when thou thyself beholdest not the beam that is in thine own eye? ...
— The Gospel of Luke, An Exposition • Charles R. Erdman

... in the wind! I lay my cheek to the cabin side To feel the weight of his giant hands— A speck, a fly in the blasting tide Of streaming, pitiless, icy sands; A single heart with its feeble beat— A mouse in the lion's throat— A swimmer at sea—a sunbeam's mote In the grasp of a tempest ...
— A Little Norsk; Or, Ol' Pap's Flaxen • Hamlin Garland

... for that," said the Baron, who could see the mote in his neighbor's eye, "Mademoiselle d'Avrigny has led a life so very worldly ever since she was a child, so madly fast and lively, that suitors are afraid of her. Jacqueline, thank heaven, has never yet been in what is called the world. ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet

... Against their foes Clorinda sallied out, And many a baron bold was by her side, Within the postern stood Argantes stout To rescue her, if ill mote her betide: With speeches brave she cheered her warlike rout, And with bold words them heartened as they ride, "Let us by some brave act," quoth she, "this day Of Asia's hopes ...
— Jerusalem Delivered • Torquato Tasso

... joys which then thou shalt possess, No mortal tongue can them declare: All earthly joys, compared with this, are less Than smallest mote to the world so fair. Then is not that man blest That must enjoy this rest? Full happy is that guest Invited to this feast, that ever, that ever Endureth and ...
— The Sources and Analogues of 'A Midsummer-night's Dream' • Compiled by Frank Sidgwick

... me the clasps of diamond, lucid, clear of the mote; Clasp me the large at the waist, and clasp me the small ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various

... responded, "it was not of their work in this country I was speaking, but the need of more work in their own. You have very good story in your big book about the 'beam and mote.' Do not the morals of your own country need uplifting before you insist on sending emissaries to turn my people from the teachings of many centuries? Has your religion and system of education proved so infallible for yourselves that you must force it upon others? ...
— The House of the Misty Star - A Romance of Youth and Hope and Love in Old Japan • Fannie Caldwell Macaulay

... born one mile below Bryantsville on the Lexington Pike in Garrard County, and was owned by B.M. Jones. She gives the date of her birth as April 14, 1847. Aunt Harriet's father was Daniel Scott, a slave out of Mote Scott's slave family. Aunt Harriet's mother's name was Amy Jones, slave of Marse Briar Jones, who came from Harrodsburg, Ky. The names of her brothers were Harrison, Daniel, Merida, and Ned; her sisters were Susie and Maria. Miss Patsy, wife of Marse Briar gave Maria ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - From Interviews with Former Slaves - Kentucky Narratives • Works Projects Administration

... "William Foster," was simply a high-spirited and happy youth, full of energy and of apparently normal desires and intentions. He had that sort of genius which can be long asleep in the dark, while its possessor dances, like a mote, in sunshine. ...
— Tongues of Conscience • Robert Smythe Hichens

... wine will do it; but when I operate, I always prefer to have my head clear. Stimulated nerves are not to be depended upon, and the brain that has wine in it is never a sure guide. A surgeon must see at the point of his instrument; and if there be a mote or any obscurity in his mental vision, his hand, instead of working ...
— Danger - or Wounded in the House of a Friend • T. S. Arthur

... Blandamour was Erivan; And at them both Sir Paridell did loure. So all together stird up strifull stoure, And readie were new battell to darraine. Each one profest to be her paramoure, And vow'd with speare and shield it to maintaine; Ne Judges powre, ne reasons rule, mote them restraine. ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church

... or what are the streams to the fountain! Thy fountain is defiled; yea, a defiler, and so that which maketh thy whole self, with thy works unclean in God's sight. But Pharisee, how comes it to pass, that the poor Publican is now such a mote in thine eye, that thou canst not forbear, but must accuse him before the judgment of God: for in that thou sayest, "that thou art not even as this Publican," thou bringest in an accusation, a charge, a bill against him. What has he done? Has he concealed ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan

... King with slow reluctant tread, ascended into the room of death. Sergius Thord stood there,—but his brooding face and bulky form might have been but a mote of dust in a sunbeam for the little heed the stricken monarch took of him. His whole sight, his whole soul were concentrated on the white recumbent statue with the autumn-gold hair, which was couched in front of him, strewn ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli

... objection." Sir Robert went so for as to parody Mr. Duncombe's resolution, by drawing up a similar one against the practice of pairing; and he concluded by recommending that they should take the mote out of their own eye before they made any attempt to extract the mote out of that of another. On a division, the motion was negatived by one hundred and ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan

... a most melodious sound Of all that mote delight a dainty ear; Such as at once might not on living ground, Save in this Paradise, be heard elsewhere: Right hard it was for wight which did it hear, To tell what manner musicke that mote be; For all that pleasing is to living eare ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt

... hour. The wise man will be he who quickest lights his candle; the wisest he who never lets it out. Tomorrow, the next moment, he, a poor, darkened, blurred soul, may need it again to focus the Image better, to take a mote off the lens, to clear the mirror from a breath with which the world ...
— Addresses • Henry Drummond

... materials, but of the implements of manufacture. She had the small flax wheel which dwelt in the keeping room, where she could sit and spin like a lady of place and condition, and the large woolen wheel standing in the mote-laden air of the garret, through which she walked up and down as she ...
— The Development of Embroidery in America • Candace Wheeler

... us for marking the happy accord of Peace—Goodfellowship—Mirth!!! These be verily the "Central Powers," which RUDINI might have referred to when he said,—"Our Alliance, firmly and sincerely maintained, will assure the Peace of Europe for a long time to come." So mote it be! Let us ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, July 11, 1891 • Various

... clenched fist of the Prince of thunder and lightning of his time. German, Japan shall be! he publicly swears before them all. M. Falarique damascenes his sharpest smile; M. Bobinikine double-dimples his puddingest; M. Mytharete rolls a forefinger over his beak; Dr. Bouthoin enlarges his eye on a sunny mote. And such is the masterful effect of a frank diplomacy, that when one party shows his hand, the others find the reverse of concealment in hiding ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... claimed the privilege of all the German freemen, the right of judging one another: the lord's steward was only the register. This domestic court, which continued in full vigor for many ages, the Saxons called Hall mote, from the place in which it was held; the Normans, who adopted it, named it a Court-Baron. This court had another department, in which the power of the lord was more absolute. From the most ancient times the German nobility considered themselves as the natural judges of those ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke

... has found the centre of gravity. I am myself again, as people say. After months of agitation in what seemed to be chaos the lost atom has dropped back to its place in the scheme of things, and even aspires (poor mite!) to do its infinitesimal business intelligently. So might a mote in a sunbeam feel ...
— Old Fires and Profitable Ghosts • A. T. Quiller-Couch

... St. Thomas being killed by the spears of savages; St. Simon being sawn asunder. Near the beginning of the volume is a print of the Blessed Virgin with a sword piercing her body, and surrounded by seven medallions, showing "the seven griefs." The parable of "The mote and the beam" is quaintly depicted by two men standing near together, one with an enormous log of wood, equal in length to a third of his height, projecting unsupported from his own eye, attempting to pull a small bit of straw from the ...
— Little Gidding and its inmates in the Time of King Charles I. - with an account of the Harmonies • J. E. Acland

... the clouds before my soul's vision, that love like a broad river flowing through the lands, an atmosphere bathing the worlds, the subtile essence and ether of space in which the farthest star pursues its course,—why, then, should it escape me, the mote? Oh, when the world turned from me, I sought to flee thither! I sighed for the rest there! Wretched, alone, I have wept in the dark and in the light that I might go and fling myself at the heavenly feet. But, do you see? sin has broken down ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various

... Flemish brewer, named Zoctmanns, calling for prayers for his soul; Iden, with a square tower and a stair turret, a village taking its name from that family of which Alexander Iden, slayer of Jack Cade, was a member, its home being at Mote, now non-existent; and Peasmarsh, whose long modest church, crowned by a squat spire, may be again seen, like the swan upon St. Mary's Lake, in the water at the foot of the churchyard. At Peasmarsh was born a poor ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas

... So much we make of these things, yet the sun knows them not. They are local and only earth phenomena, yet the benefaction of the sun is as if it shone for us alone. It is as great as if this were the case, and yet the fraction of his light and heat that actually falls upon this mote of a world adrift in sidereal space is so infinitely small that it could hardly be computed by numbers. In our religion we appropriate God to ourselves in the same way, but he knows us not in this ...
— Under the Maples • John Burroughs

... minstrel's will! Since shamed full oft by later lyres on earth, Mine dares not call thee from thy sacred hill: Yet there I've wandered by thy vaunted rill; Yes! sighed o'er Delphi's long-deserted shrine Where, save that feeble fountain, all is still; Nor mote my shell awake the weary Nine To grace so plain a ...
— Childe Harold's Pilgrimage • Lord Byron

... contented, seein' as they're more after the weemen than the money, an' nobody as I know o' carin' to cut 'em out there. It's true him I refer to hez come into the thing at the 'leventh hour, as ye may say—after 'twar all planned. But he mote a gied us trouble by stannin' apart. Tharfore, I say, let's take him in on shares ...
— The Flag of Distress - A Story of the South Sea • Mayne Reid

... a flying mote this troublesome idea circled in his brain, ... he must do better in future, he resolved, supposing that any future remained to Him in which to work, . . HE MUST REDEEM THE PAST! ... Here he roused his mental faculties with a start and forced himself to realize ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli

... remark that they considered the procession of the nuptial couch extremely improper. But as the old saying goes—"A man can see the mote in his neighbour's eye when he cannot perceive the beam in his own;" and it struck me that the manner in which marriages are managed among the Europeans who are settled here, is much more unbecoming. It is a rule with the English, that on the day appointed for the marriage, ...
— A Woman's Journey Round the World • Ida Pfeiffer

... possibilities can never be attained either because of spiritual starvation or misdirection? The Church and the Sunday School attempt to furnish a counteracting environment, but it is infrequent and brief. The only power which can render this temporary, religious environment mote effective in influencing character than a harmful, permanent one, is the Divine. A church building or a Sunday School session of itself, can accomplish little, placed over against a home. Methods of grading and ...
— The Unfolding Life • Antoinette Abernethy Lamoreaux

... now, and quite a considerable strip of blue sky could be seen from the window, and the mote-laden sun-rays that streamed in encouraged Hulda to grow better. She was soon up and about again, but the doctor said her system was thoroughly upset and she aught to have sea air. But that, of course, was impossible ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill

... to answer his questions as to my business in the city of Boston; so, holding my breath, I tiptoed out of the door, and the last vision I ever had of him was as he sat there absorbed in some legal problem, bending over his books, the sunlight flooding the mote-filled air of the dusty office, the little bronze horse standing before him on the desk and the branches of the trees outside casting flickering shadows upon the walls and bookcases. Canny old man! He had never ...
— The Confessions of Artemas Quibble • Arthur Train

... almanacs, comic Latin grammars, comic hand-books of sciences and arts, and the great prevalence of comicality in popular views taken of life and of death, of incident and of character, of evil and of good, are, in reality, signs of the times. These straws, so thick upon the wind, and so injuriously mote-like to the visual organs, are flying forward before a storm. As symptoms of changing nationality, and of a disposition to make fun of all things ancient and honourable, and wise, and mighty, and religious, they serve to evidence a state ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper

... the ship. A wild whale swims by the boat. He opens his swallow, and seizes the prophet. It is not to be wondered at that Jonah suffered woe. The prophet is without hope. Cold was his comfort. Jonah was only a mote in the whale's jaws. He entered in by the gills, and by means of one of the intestines of the fish, came into a space as large as a hall. The prophet fixes his feet firmly in the belly of the whale. He searches into every nook of its navel. ...
— Early English Alliterative Poems - in the West-Midland Dialect of the Fourteenth Century • Various

... Alice Chaucer, a kinswoman of the poet, and "for love of her and the commoditie of her landes fell much to dwell in Oxfordshire," and in 1430-40 was busy building a manor-place of "brick and Tymbre and set within a fayre mote," a church, an almshouse, and a school. The manor-place, or "Palace," as it was called, has disappeared, but the almshouse and school remain, witnesses of the munificence of the founders. The poor Duke, favourite minister of Henry VI, was exiled by the Yorkist faction, and ...
— Vanishing England • P. H. Ditchfield

... for certain sure it must have been the fairies that entertained him so well. For there was no house to see anywhere nigh hand, or any building, or barn, or place at all, but only the church and the MOTE (BARROW). There's another odd thing enough that they tell about this same church, that if any person's corpse, that had not a right to be buried in that churchyard, went to be burying there in ...
— Castle Rackrent • Maria Edgeworth

... Art this voice, of mercy bare. "Fool, to my human earth come you, so free, To wreathe with phantom immortality Whoever climbs with passionate lone care That shifting, feverous and shadow stair To Beauty—which is vainer than the sea On furious thirst, or than a mote to Me Who fill yon infinite great Everywhere? Let them alone—my children! they are born To mart and soil and saving commerce o'er Wind, wave and many-fruited continents. And you can feed them but of crumbs and scorn, And futile glory when they are no ...
— Nirvana Days • Cale Young Rice

... Newstead (p. 338), and Dr. Macdonald expands (p. 395) the account of the Balcreggan hoard which he had contributed to the Scotsman (my Report for 1913, p. 11). Mr. A. O. Curle (p. 161) records the discovery and exploration of a vitrified fort at the Mote of Mark near Dalbeattie (Kirkcudbright), and the discovery in it of two clearly Roman potsherds. The main body of the finds made here seem to belong to the ninth century; whether any of them can be earlier than has been thought, I ...
— Roman Britain in 1914 • F. Haverfield

... Altgelt played, And the four strings of his violin Were spinning like bees on a day in Spring. The notes rose into the wide sun-mote Which slanted through the window, They lay like coloured beads a-row, They knocked together and parted, And started to dance, Skipping, tripping, each one slipping Under and over the others so That the polychrome ...
— Men, Women and Ghosts • Amy Lowell

... development rather than self-restraint? that he was deaf to the higher tone in a cry of voluntary suffering for truth's sake than in the fullest flow of spontaneous harmony? I do not plead his cause. I only want to show you the mote in my brother's eye: then you can see clearly ...
— Life in the Iron-Mills • Rebecca Harding Davis

... perhaps some great affliction or disappointment will open his eyes and cause him to see his selfish propensities as they are. In the meantime, let us not forget the beam in our own eyes while we are talking of the mote in our brother's eye. To go back to our subject; you have acknowledged your belief in God and also, I hope, in His Son our ...
— The Old Stone House • Anne March

... of the spheres: So small is every atom, amid yon countless band, That hosts of them were needful to make a grain of sand; They form the lowest step of that brilliant ladder trod, Ascending from the light mote to ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 1 January 1848 • Various

... Evil One, the father of lies. Gladly would the fiend have plucked out the eyes of this Seer; but that would have been too direct; the devil works in a more cunning way. He let him see and seek the true and the good; but while the young man was contemplating them, the evil spirit blew one mote after another into each of his eyes; and such a proceeding would be hurtful even to the best sight. Then the fiend blew upon the motes, so that they became beams; and the eyes were destroyed, and the Seer stood like a blind man ...
— What the Moon Saw: and Other Tales • Hans Christian Andersen

... by mote studious ways endeavoured, and with more unwearied spirit none shall,—that I dare almost aver of myself, as far as life and full license will extend. Neither do I think it shame to covenant with any knowing reader that for some few years yet I may go on trust with him toward the payment ...
— Milton • Mark Pattison

... us to see the beam that is in our own eye, and blind us to the mote that is in our brother's. Let us feel our offences with our hands, make them great and bright before us like the sun, make us eat them and drink them for our diet. Blind us to the offences of our beloved, cleanse them from our ...
— A Lowden Sabbath Morn • Robert Louis Stevenson

... longe, With frount ant face feir to fonge, With murthes monie mote heo monge, That brid so breme in boure. With lossom eye grete ant gode, With browen blysfol under hode, He that reste him on the Rode, That leflych lyf ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy

... the Court was gone, or it would have been the mark for a hurricane of national bullets. It had never been a good eye to see with—had long had the mote in it of Lucifer's pride, Sardanapalus's luxury, and a mole's blindness—but it had dropped out and was gone. The Court, from that exclusive inner circle to its outermost rotten ring of intrigue, corruption, and dissimulation, was all gone together. Royalty was gone; ...
— A Tale of Two Cities - A Story of the French Revolution • Charles Dickens

... this unspeakable greatness, Earth swings like one of the motes which a passing sunbeam illumines. Upon this mote, one fifth of the inhabitants have assumed supreme knowledge and understanding, given them, doubtless, because of their innate superiority. This preferment, also, is theirs by the grace of an ...
— The Spinster Book • Myrtle Reed

... ande gold of great araye, 'I painted and pertred all in pryde, No common Knyght may go so gaye; Chaunge of clothyng every daye, With golden gyrdles great and small, As boysterous as is here at baye; All suche falshed mote nede fell." ...
— A Portraiture of Quakerism, Volume I (of 3) • Thomas Clarkson

... and to lose himself in intentionless plausibilities, she waited with serene patience for him to have done, and met him on their habitual ground of frankness and reality as if he had not left it. He got to telling her all his steps with his patent-right man, who seemed to be growing mote and more slippery, and who presently developed a demand for funds. Then she gave him some very shrewd, practical advice, and told him to go right into the hotel office and telegraph to his father while she was putting on ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... empty by day and with such crowds of little faint dots in it all night, was the real thing—the big, final, and important thing—and that they and their churches and popes and pyramids and nations should just dance about it for millions of years like a mote in a sunbeam, hurt their feelings at first. But it did them good. It started them looking Up, and looking the other way ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee

... against peace, the cheerfulness of the soul in the joy of the services and the fulfilment of the task of praise? Would not the tide of worship cleanse everything, and wash away the small defects of men, like straws in a stream? Was it not the case of the mote and the beam, with the parts reversed—imperfections discerned in others, when he was ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans

... sweeting who shamed * A wand of the willow by Zephyr befanned: I lavisht upon her mine heritage, * And spent like a nobleman puissant and grand: Then to sell her compelled, my sorrow increased; * The parting was sore but I mote not gainstand: Now as soon as the crier had called her, there bid * A wicked old fellow, a fiery brand: So I raged with a rage that I could not restrain, * And snatched her from out of his hireling's hand; When the angry curmudgeon made ready ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton

... hys loghynge. 340 Vp go[th] [th]e sayl(:) [th]ey sayle[th] faste: Arthour owt of sy[gh]t ys paste. [Th]e ferst lond [th]at he gan Meete, and lands at Forso[th]e hyt was Bareflete; 344 Barfleet. Ther he gan vp furst aryve. Now welle Mote Arthour spede & thryve; God speed him! And [th]at hys saule spede [th]e better, Lat eche man sey a Pater ...
— Arthur, Copied And Edited From The Marquis of Bath's MS • Frederick J. Furnivall

... already flourished on this spot when a younger son of the house accompanied his neighbor the Duke of Normandy in his descent on England, and was rewarded by a grant of English land, on which he dug a mote and built a chateau, and called it Beaurepaire (the worthy Saxons turned this into Borreper without delay). Since that day more than twenty gentlemen of the same lineage had held in turn the original chateau and lands, and handed them down to their ...
— White Lies • Charles Reade

... "Yes." But everybody knew Alderman Cute was a Justice! Oh dear, so active a Justice always! Who such a mote of brightness in the public eye, ...
— A Budget of Christmas Tales by Charles Dickens and Others • Various

... exhibited, in proportions far more gigantic, that tendency to swell and amplify itself into mountains of darkness, which exists oftentimes in germs that are imperceptible. An error in human choice, an infirmity in the human will, though it were at first less than a mote, though it should swerve from the right line by an interval less than ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey

... chid away my friend: He hath a stern look, but a gentle heart. Let him come back, that his compassion may Give life to yours. Hub. Come, boy, prepare yourself. Arth. Is there no remedy? Hub. None, but to lose your eyes. Arth. O, Heaven! that there were but a mote in yours, A grain, a dust, a gnat, a meandering hair, Any annoyance in that precious sense! Then, feeling what small things are boisterous there, Your vile intent must needs seem horrible. Hub. Is this your promise? Go to, hold your tongue. Arth. Hubert, the utterance of a brace of ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick

... the wise Merlin, whilom wont (they say,) To make his wonne low underneath the ground, In a deep delve far from the view of day, That of no living wight he mote be found, Whenso he counselled ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay

... to be whole particles, but the smallest specks that I could find among well ground Vermilion and Red-lead, seem'd to be a Red mass, compounded of a multitude of less and less motes, which sticking together, compos'd a bulk, not one thousand thousandth part of the smallest visible sand or mote. ...
— Micrographia • Robert Hooke

... women had been taking a walk together, and that they were much in each other's company for the sake of conversation, and no wonder, as the poor simpletons could not speak a word of Welsh. I thought of the beam and mote mentioned in Scripture, and then cast a glance of compassion on the two poor young women. For a moment I fancied myself in the times of Owen Glendower, and that I saw two females, whom his marauders had carried off from Cheshire or ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow

... the through-stane, that it didna come before our een till e'enow?" said Ochiltree; "for I hae ken'd this auld kirk, man and bairn, for saxty lang years, and I neer noticed it afore; and it's nae sic mote neither, but what ane might see it ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott

... return, and yet he was anxious to see him and tell him, once for all, that he was not to be trusted. He held aloof from Jim and he was scantily civil to Dick Thomas, whose friendship rang false. He pushed the work ahead while the air was still alive with swirls of mote-like snowflakes, and himself bore the brunt of it just to dull that gnawing self-disgust which made his ...
— The Uphill Climb • B. M. Bower

... correct as any other paper that exists. We don't care a straw whether we go on with or without the other newspapers. We will do justice and say what is true, regardless of popularity. We detest hypocrisy; and we have no disposition to make a mountain out of a molehill, or to see a mote in the eye of Lola Montez, and not discover a beam in the eye of Fanny Elssler, or of any of the ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham

... soldiers—she swept them in far and wide. She had her empire; why must she seek out a man who had but his art and his youth, and steal those? Women are so insatiate, look you; though they held all the world, they would not rest if one mote in the air swam in sunshine, free of them! It was the first year I touched triumph that I saw her. They began for the first time to speak of me; it was the little painting of Cigarette, as a child of the army, that did it. Ah, God! I thought myself already so famous! Well, she sent ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]

... substance which you might seize, for the shadow which you could not hold fast if you were to seem to grasp it. Work on at the foundations. Insist on truth and right; put them into all your own life, taking all the beam out of your own eye before demanding—well, we will say the mote, for generosity's sake, and for the holy authority of the word—out ...
— Debate On Woman Suffrage In The Senate Of The United States, - 2d Session, 49th Congress, December 8, 1886, And January 25, 1887 • Henry W. Blair, J.E. Brown, J.N. Dolph, G.G. Vest, Geo. F. Hoar.

... the least of real as opposed to 'ideal', the least speck of positive existence, even though it were but the mote in a sun beam, into the sciential 'contemplamen' or theorem, and it ceases to be science. 'Ratio desinit esse pura ratio et fit discursus, stat subter et fit [Greek: hypothetikon]:—non superstat'. The 'Nous' is bound to a rock, the immovable firmness ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge

... be rational. Let us think. Death is strange only because we do not think enough. God must breathe. Life is the exhalation, death the inhalation of deity. He breathes out, and the Universe flames forth with all her wings—her suns and clusters of suns—down to her mote-like earth, the butterfly of space, trimmed with its gaudy seasons, and nourishing on its back the ...
— Semiramis and Other Plays - Semiramis, Carlotta And The Poet • Olive Tilford Dargan

... up land from owners whom he thought unconscious of its proper, value, it was fair enough for my Russian Jew to give credit to his farmers. Kelmar, if he was unconscious of the beam in his own eye, was at least silent in the matter of his brother's mote. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... it so! And who is he?[23] A soulless clod. How can he cause such different powers to flow Upon the aforesaid mortals here below? And how, indeed, to this far distant ball Can he impart his energy at all?— How pierce the ether deeps profound, The sun and globes that whirl around? A mote might turn his potent ray For ever from its earthward way. Will find, it, then, in starry cope, The makers of the horoscope? The war[24] with which all Europe's now afflicted— Deserves it not by them to've been ...
— The Fables of La Fontaine - A New Edition, With Notes • Jean de La Fontaine

... amber light. O happy hearts, by hearths when wills are meek! We welcome sun that chased away the night. The weeping eyes will not acknowledge hate. When lovers meet forgiven after pain, Tears cleanse the heart and mind of fire and mote, And freshen countenance and bleach the stain. O rain of peace, that washes doubt away, And casts a burden from the heart and home. Sad hearts in joy united on this day; Now buds will bloom again in garden loam. Glad ...
— Clear Crystals • Clara M. Beede

... blue distance—the boundless deep spread afar, till, at the misty edge of vision it bends, in mingling threefold circles, to embrace the globe, the impenetrable below and the infinite above him, how slight and insignificant a creature he seems! like a fly that clings to the ceiling, or a mote that swims in the sunbeam, one of the mere mites of nature, easily lost by the way or a frail figure ready to be crushed by any stroke of the ponderous machinery mid which he moves. When he reflects on his condition—his brief date, ...
— Gifts of Genius - A Miscellany of Prose and Poetry by American Authors • Various

... the two, the Indian was much the finest relic of human powers, though he was less uneasy and more stationary than the black. But the propensity to see the mote in the eye of his friend, while he forgot the beam in his own, was a long-established and well-known weakness of Jaaf, and its present exhibition caused everybody to smile. I was delighted with the ...
— The Redskins; or, Indian and Injin, Volume 1. - Being the Conclusion of the Littlepage Manuscripts • James Fenimore Cooper

... Tufton of "The Mote," near Maidstone, married Mary, the third daughter and co-heiress of Thomas ...
— The Love Letters of Dorothy Osborne to Sir William Temple, 1652-54 • Edward Abbott Parry

... However, I have already whispered to my confidential hole-in-the-ground that nothing but the extremity of old-maid desperation will ever induce me to accept the vocation of a deaconess. Thus do a man's children play hide and seek with the beam in his eye while he practises upon the mote in theirs! But if, some day when the heavens are doubtful between sun and rain, you espy a little ruffled rainbow, propelled by a goose-quill pen, coquetting northward with the retiring clouds, know that 'tis the spirit ...
— The Jessica Letters: An Editor's Romance • Paul Elmer More









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