"Cubit" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... observers have made the remark that men of civilized nations who live in a degraded social state do actually approach to the physical type of inferior races. However this may be, it is quite certain, that as no man can by taking thought add a cubit to his stature, so no man can by taking thought make his skull brachycephalic or dolichocephalic. But the language which a man speaks does depend upon his will; he can by taking thought make his speech Romance or Teutonic. No doubt he has in most cases practically no choice in the matter. ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... method almost to ridicule when He said, "Which of you by taking thought can add a cubit to his stature?" Put down that method ...
— Addresses • Henry Drummond
... and when the workmen had raised their structures a cubit in the daytime, two cubits more were added in the night. Vathek fancied that even invisible matter showed a forwardness to subserve his designs, and his pride arrived at its height when, having ascended for the first time ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol. I • Various
... it within and without with pitch. And this is the fashion which thou shalt make it of: The length of the ark shall be three hundred cubits, the breadth of it fifty cubits, and the height of it thirty cubits. A window shalt thou make to the ark, and in a cubit shalt thou finish it above; and the door of the ark shalt thou set in the side thereof; with lower, second, and third stories shalt thou make it. And, behold, I, even I, do bring a flood of waters upon the earth, to destroy all flesh, wherein is ...
— The Antediluvian World • Ignatius Donnelly
... Gridley. He had come on an inquisitor's errand, his heart secure, as he thought, against all blandishments, his will steeled to break down all resistance. He had come armed with an instrument of torture worse than the thumb-screw, worse than the pulleys which attempt the miracle of adding a cubit to the stature, worse than the brazier of live coals brought close to the naked soles of the feet,—an instrument which, instead of trifling with the nerves, would clutch all the nerve-centres and the heart itself in its gripe, and hold them until it got its answer, if the white lips had life ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... present age, than it was at the earliest period of the world. How many hours of the day, and how many days of the wasted year, do some females devote to the improvement of their persons! Impossible as it has ever been, and ever will be found, to make one hair black or white, to add one cubit to the stature, to bend one untractable feature into the admired curve to which common consent attributes grace and loveliness; the impossible transformation is nevertheless attempted. The treasures of opulence are exhausted; the more valuable possession of health is often sacrificed ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. I • Francis Augustus Cox
... struggle to be a lady? Was it not rather one of those things which are settled for one externally, as are the colour of one's hair and the size of one's bones, and which should be taken or left alone, as Providence may have directed? "One cannot add a cubit to one's height, nor yet make oneself a lady;" that was the nature of Miss Mackenzie's argument ...
— Miss Mackenzie • Anthony Trollope
... of their hands enough, scantly enough, to keep breath within their stunted bodies. "All the traffic can bear!"—a brazen rule. Of such sage policy the result can be seen in the wizened and undersized submerged of London; of nearer than London. Man, by not taking thought, has taken a cubit from his stature. ...
— Copper Streak Trail • Eugene Manlove Rhodes
... we discovered of irritating the aristocratic type of steam launch, was to mistake them for a beanfeast, and ask them if they were Messrs. Cubit's lot or the Bermondsey Good Templars, and could they lend ...
— Three Men in a Boa • Jerome K. Jerome
... about six a.m., and then go indoors till dark again. This fortnight is the hottest time. To-day the drop falls into the Nile at its source, and it will now rise fast and cool the country. It has risen one cubit, and the water is green; next month it will be blood colour. My cough has been a little troublesome again, I suppose from the Simoom. The tooth does not ache now. Alhamdulillah! for I rather dreaded the muzeyinn ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon
... advancement; and, when grace is begun, it is sweet to grow in grace. If we had power to add cubit by cubit to our stature, we should have far to grow ere our head should strike the heavens; and in bearing meekly, and acting righteously, and living purely, we have room enough to expand: it will be long ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... themselves, how much more will the earth feed you who can help yourselves, because God has given you understanding and prudence? But as for anxiety, fretting, repining, complaining to God, 'Why hast Thou made me thus?' what use in that? 'Which of you by taking thought can add one cubit to his stature?' Will all the fretting and anxiety in the world make you one foot or one inch taller than you are? Will it make you stronger, wiser, more able to help yourself? You are what you are: you can do what ...
— Sermons for the Times • Charles Kingsley
... (stelechos,) the 'holding part' of a tree, that which is like a handle to all its branches; 'stock' is another form in which it has come down to us: with some notion of its being the mother of branches: thus, when Athena's olive was burnt by the Persians, two days after, a shoot a cubit long had sprung ...
— Proserpina, Volume 1 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin
... a very good house, belonging to a very great person. Colonel Morley had procured an invitation for Lionel, and said, "Go; you should be seen there." Colonel Morley had passed the age of growing into society: no such cares for the morrow could add a cubit to his conventional stature. One amongst a group of other young men by the doorway, Lionel beheld Darrell, who had arrived before him, listening to a very handsome young lady, with an attention quite as earnest as that which had gratified the superior mind of the well-educated ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... wonderful place, and in my way thither saw fishes of 100 and 200 cubits long, that occasion more fear than hurt; for they are so timorous, that they will fly upon the rattling of two sticks or boards. I saw likewise other fish about a cubit in length, ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Complete • Anonymous
... a certain strange beast about the bignesse of a sea-horse, being of colour blacke or brownish: it hath the cheeks of a Boare, the tayle of an Elephant, and hornes above a cubit long, which are moveable upon his head at his owne pleasure like eares; now standing one way, and anone moving another way, as he needeth in fighting with other Beastes, for they stand not stiffe but bend flexibly, and when he fighteth he always stretcheth out the one, and holdeth ...
— The Book-Hunter at Home • P. B. M. Allan
... The Abhayagiri dagoba at Anarajapoora, built B.C. 89, was originally 180 cubits high, which, taking the Ceylon cubit at 2 feet 3 inches, would be equal to 405 feet. The dome was hemispherical, and described with a radius of 180 feet, giving a circumference of 1130 feet. The summit of this stupendous work was therefore fifty feet higher than St. Paul's, ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... f. The gar contained twelve cubits, so that the vessel would have measured 120 cubits each way; taking the Babylonian cubit, on the basis of Gudea's scale, at 495 mm. (cf. Thureau-Dangin, Journal Asiatique, Dix. Ser., t. XIII, 1909, pp. 79 ff., 97), this would give a length, breadth, and height of nearly ...
— Legends Of Babylon And Egypt - In Relation To Hebrew Tradition • Leonard W. King
... Columbus on his second voyage alludes to another method of using the herb. They make a powder of the leaves, which "they take through a cane half a cubit long; one end of this they place in the nose, and the other upon the powder, and so draw it up, ...
— Tobacco; Its History, Varieties, Culture, Manufacture and Commerce • E. R. Billings
... lucid amber casts a golden gleam, With various coloured light the pavement shone, And all on fire appeared the glowing throne; The dome's high arch reflects the mingled blaze, And forms a rainbow of alternate rays. When on the Goddess first I cast my sight, Scarce seemed her stature of a cubit's height; But swelled to larger size the more I gazed, Till to the roof her towering front she raised; With her the Temple every moment grew, And ampler vistas opened to my view: Upward the columns shoot, the roofs ascend, And arches widen, and long ...
— MacMillan's Reading Books - Book V • Anonymous
... the first place, that Ravaillac had no accomplices; and in the second, that if he had any, they were in no way connected with the fire of 1618. Two other very plausible explanations exist: First, the great flaming star, a foot broad, and a cubit high, which fell from heaven, as every one knows, upon the law courts, after midnight on the seventh ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... or combination of gases, possesses weight; some persons who have been taught that the air exerts a pressure of 14.7 lb. per square inch, cannot, however, be got to realize the fact that a cubit foot of air at the same pressure and at a temperature of 62 deg. weighs the thirteenth part of a pound, or over one ounce; 13.141 cubic feet of air weigh one pound. In round numbers 30,000 cubic feet of air weigh one ton; this is a useful figure to remember, ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 360, November 25, 1882 • Various
... could I indeed measure the motion of a body how long it were, and in how long space it could come from this place to that, without measuring the time in which it is moved? This same time then, how do I measure? do we by a shorter time measure a longer, as by the space of a cubit, the space of a rood? for so indeed we seem by the space of a short syllable, to measure the space of a long syllable, and to say that this is double the other. Thus measure we the spaces of stanzas, by ...
— The Confessions of Saint Augustine • Saint Augustine
... whose every cubit Seems to cry out, "How shall that Claribel Measure us back to Naples? Keep in Tunis, 250 And let Sebastian wake." Say, this were death That now hath seized them; why, they were no worse Than now they are. There be that ...
— The Tempest - The Works of William Shakespeare [Cambridge Edition] [9 vols.] • William Shakespeare
... his bodily prowess; and by bringing his intellectual pretensions boldly into a line with his physical accomplishments, he, indeed, presents a very formidable front to the sceptic or the scoffer. Take a cubit from his stature, and his whole manner resolves itself into an impertinence. But with that addition, he overcrows the town, browbeats their prejudices, and bullies them out of their senses, and is not afraid of being contradicted by any one less than himself. ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... words. When I compare them with the general tone of Free Soil men in Congress, I distrust the atmosphere of Washington and of politics. These men move about, Sauls and Goliaths among us, taller by many a cubit. There they lose port and stature. Mr. Sumner's speech in the Senate unsays no part of his Faneuil Hall pledge. But, though discussing the same topic, no one would gather from any word or argument that the speaker ever took such ground as ...
— American Eloquence, Volume II. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1896) • Various
... wilds of air! Freely as an angel fair Thou dost leave the solid earth, Man is bound to from his birth Scarce a cubit from the grass Springs the foot of lightest lass— Thou upon a cloud can'st leap, And o'er broadest rivers sweep, Climb up heaven's steepest height, Fluttering, twinkling, in the light, Soaring, singing, till, sweet bird, Thou art neither ...
— Flowers and Flower-Gardens • David Lester Richardson
... food, and the body than raiment? (26)Behold the birds of the air, that they sow not, nor reap, nor gather into barns; and your heavenly Father feeds them. Are ye not much better than they? (27)And which of you by taking thought can add one cubit to his stature[6:27]? (28)And why take ye thought for raiment? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow. They toil not, nor spin; (29)and I say to you, that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. (30)And if ...
— The New Testament of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. • Various
... for food, among which are sheep having tails of sixteen pounds weight, very fat and good; their head and neck black, and all the rest of their bodies white. There are also sheep all over white, whose tails are a cubit long, and hang down like a large cluster of grapes, with great flaps of skin hanging from their throats. The bulls and cows likewise have dewlaps hanging down almost to the ground. There are also certain kine having horns like to those ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VII • Robert Kerr
... know—as clearly, as precisely, as a man can know—that Beatrice Cenci was not "guilty" as certain recently-discovered documents "prove" her, but that the Shelley version of the affair, though a guess, is the correct one. It is possible, by taking thought, to add one cubit—or say a hand, or a dactyl—to your stature; you may develop powers slightly—very slightly, but distinctly, both in kind and degree—in advance of those of the mass who live in or about the same cycle of time in which you live. But it is only when the powers to which ...
— Prince Zaleski • M.P. Shiel
... Zu-lai [3], And the cypresses of Hsin-fu [3], Were cut down and measured, With the cubit line and the eight cubits' line. The projecting beams of pine were made very large; The grand inner apartments rose vast. Splendid look the new temples, The work of Hsi-sze, Very wide and large, Answering to the expectations of ...
— The Shih King • James Legge
... body, what ye shall put on. Is not the life more than meat, and the body than raiment? Behold the fowls of the air: for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your Heavenly Father feedeth them. Are ye not much better than they? Which of you by taking thought can add one cubit unto his stature? And why take ye thought for raiment? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they toil not, neither do they spin: And yet I say unto you, That even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. Wherefore, if God so clothe the grass of the field, which ...
— In His Image • William Jennings Bryan
... or Somali club, resembles the Kafir "Tonga." It is a knobstick about a cubit long, made of some hard wood: the head is rounded on the inside, and the outside is cut to an edge. In quarrels, it is considered a harmless weapon, and is often thrown at the opponent and wielded viciously enough where the spear point would carefully be directed at the buckler. ...
— First footsteps in East Africa • Richard F. Burton
... a rigid, but familiar, rule of diet, exercise and rest; and Eric's attention began to wander. As well bid him add a cubit to his stature! He wondered how much ...
— The Education of Eric Lane • Stephen McKenna
... endeavoured partly to explain this in the text of the tenth Lecture: here, it is only necessary for the reader to know that the Greater Pthah more or less represents the formative power of order and measurement: he always stands on a four-square pedestal, 'the Egyptian cubit, metaphorically used as the hieroglyphic for truth;' his limbs are bound together, to signify fixed stability, as of a pillar; he has a measuring-rod in his hand; and at Philae, is represented as holding an egg on a potter's wheel; but I do not know if this symbol occurs ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... shore, where are many tall poplar trees and willows. Beach there thy ship on the shore of ocean, and go thyself to the dwelling of Hades.[Footnote: Ha'-des] There is a certain rock, and near to it meet two streams, the river of fire, and the river of wailing. Dig there a trench; it shall be a cubit [Footnote: cubit, a foot and a half] long and a, cubit broad; pour out therein a drink-offering to the dead; and sprinkle white barley thereon. And as thou doest these things, entreat the dead, and promise that when thou shalt come again to Ithaca, thou wilt offer a barren heifer, even the best ...
— The Story Of The Odyssey • The Rev. Alfred J. Church
... face darkened. "I did not speak, I did not think, of handles to his name. I find no good in them, but only means for deceiving and deluding the world. Such honours as might make him baronet, or duke, would add not a cubit to his stature. If he had such a thing by right" —his voice hardened, his eyes grew angry once again—"I would wish it ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... let them go into my tank. The most strange thing that ever struck me in connexion with this event, was, that the fish did not fall helter skelter, everywhere, or 'here and there;' but they fell in a straight line, not more than a cubit in breadth." Another shower is said to have taken place at a village near Allahabad, in the month of May. About noon, the wind being in the west, and a few distant clouds visible, a blast of high wind came on, accompanied with so much dust as to change the tint of the atmosphere to a reddish hue. ...
— The Rain Cloud - or, An Account of the Nature, Properties, Dangers and Uses of Rain • Anonymous
... blossoms are past. A brief space, and the same crowds that flocked to the cherry turn to the wistaria. Gardens are devoted to the plants, and the populace greatly given to the gardens. There they go to sit and gaze at the grape-like clusters of pale purple flowers that hang more than a cubit long over the wooden trellis, and grow daily down toward their own reflections in the pond beneath, vying with one another in Narcissus-like endeavor. And the people, as they sip their tea on the veranda opposite, behold a doubled delight, the flower ...
— The Soul of the Far East • Percival Lowell
... consciousness of the body, and there was therefore no reaction from it of those feelings of weakness and need which, to such a man as Cosmo, soon reveal the fact that he is not lord of his body, that he cannot add to it one cubit, or make one hair white or black, and must therefore leave the care of it to him who made it, he had to learn in other ways that his castle of stone was God's also. His truth and humility and love had not yet reached to the quickening of the idea of ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... gazed upon her, she chanced to look up and caught sight of me whereupon her face changed and she said to her women, 'Sing ye till I come back to you.' Then, taking up a knife half a cubit long, she made towards me, crying, 'There is no Majesty and there is no Might save in Allah, the Glorious the Great!' Now when I saw this, I well-nigh lost my wits but, whenas she drew near me and face met face, the knife dropped from her hand, and she exclaimed, 'Glory to Him who changeth men's ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 9 • Richard F. Burton
... order to obtain it. (184) The cross was tall enough for Haman and his ten sons to be hanged upon it. It was planted three cubits deep in the ground, each of the victims required three cubits space in length, one cubit space was left vacant between the feet of the one above and the head of the one below, and the youngest son, Vaizatha, had his feet four cubits from the ground as he ...
— THE LEGENDS OF THE JEWS VOLUME IV BIBLE TIMES AND CHARACTERS - FROM THE EXODUS TO THE DEATH OF MOSES • BY LOUIS GINZBERG
... near a century before the conquest, an injunction that the one measure, which was kept at Winchester, should be observed throughout the realm. Most nations have regulated the standard of measures of length by comparison with the parts of the human body; as the palm, the hand, the span, the foot, the cubit, the ell, (ulna, or arm) the pace, and the fathom. But, as these are of different dimensions in men of different proportions, our antient historians[r] inform us, that a new standard of longitudinal measure was ascertained by king Henry the first; who commanded that the ulna ...
— Commentaries on the Laws of England - Book the First • William Blackstone
... how useful this gift became in old age was seen when, being almost incapable of moving his legs, and with body half paralysed, he was nevertheless enabled to accompany a procession for the length of two miles on foot, walking, to the stupefaction of thousands of spectators, at about a cubit's height above the street, on air; after the fashion of those Hindu gods whose feet—so the pagans fable—are too ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... clinging to it in a kind of smudgy weakness, as if it were afraid to come out like a man and stand the inspection of my eye. How often have I squandered paint upon the ungrateful object without adding a cubit to its stature! It refused to look like flesh and blood, but resembled rather some half-made creature flung on the passive canvas in a liquid state, with its edges running over into the background. There are a good many of these people in literature, too,—heroes ...
— Penelope's Irish Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... Varro doing!" cried Decius suddenly, and the three turned at his voice. A nodding forest of crests, red and black, rising a cubit above the uncovered helmets of the legionaries, seemed to fill the eastern plain and extend almost to where the Adriatic beat upon the shingle. "Look at his front! Look at how closely the maniples are crushed together! Gods! they are ...
— The Lion's Brood • Duffield Osborne
... Plants, herbs, and trees shall bend beneath [the weight of] their produce. The goddess Rennet (the Harvest goddess) shall be at the head of everything, and every product shall increase a hundred thousandfold, according to the cubit of the year.[2] The people shall be filled, verily to their hearts' desire, yea, everyone. Want shall cease, and the emptiness of the granaries shall come to an end. The Land of Mera (i.e. Egypt) shall be one cultivated land, the districts shall be yellow with crops ...
— The Literature of the Ancient Egyptians • E. A. Wallis Budge
... be for a very short and witty discovery, let it be upon that of St. Matthew vi. 27. Which of you, by taking thought, can add one cubit unto his stature? The discovery is this, that "whilst the disciples were taking thought for a cubit; CHRIST takes them down a ...
— An English Garner - Critical Essays & Literary Fragments • Edited by Professor Arber and Thomas Seccombe |
