"Farrago" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Hotel" at Nuneaton has been identified as the "Red Lion" in her novel, where Mr. Dempster, over his third glass of brandy and water, would overwhelm a disputant who had beaten him in argument, with some such tirade as: "I don't care a straw, sir, either for you or your encyclopaedia; a farrago of false information picked up in a cargo of waste paper. Will you tell me, sir, that I don't know the origin of Presbyterianism? I, sir, a man known through the county; while you, sir, are ignored by the very fleas that infest the miserable ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... blocks in sinister dispersal, devouring or devoured, has its apostles and advocates. But the theorists, the men of spurious knowledge, will in vain have heaped up their farrago of quibbles and arguments, their fallacies drawn from so-called precedents or from so-called economic and ethnic necessity; for the simple, brutal and magnificent cry of life renders useless the efforts they make to galvanize and erect doctrines which cannot ...
— Light • Henri Barbusse
... with a long farrago, but his voice was inaudible in the shuffling tramp of so many feet. He seemed to understand that the young man had failed to catch his meaning, for he gesticulated like a semaphore; there was one gesture in particular that he repeated several times, extending his ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... these were not confessions of the sort James desired. 'Farrago istius veteratoris' was the description applied to them by Wilson in his classical moments. 'Mountebank's stuff' he called them when writing for less classical eyes than the King's. Naunton affected to despise ...
— Sir Walter Ralegh - A Biography • William Stebbing
... surpass the other in value, the result of presenting both to the bankers may show that the more modest cheque is worth its full five pounds, whereas the other is only so much waste paper. The description of Paradise may be a glittering farrago; the description of the landscape may be full of sweet rural images: the one having a glare of gaslight and Vauxhall splendour; the other having the scent ...
— The Principles of Success in Literature • George Henry Lewes
... and parcel of the inner life of the race perhaps as long as their laws and language had; and your Celt runs by nature to religion, or even to religiosity,—ultra-religion. Is it likely that, while he kept his laws and language, he let his religion go? And when it was not an arbitrary farrago of dogmas, like some we might mention; but a philosophy of the soul so vivid that he counted death little more to fuss ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... some kind: the whining cant of love, except in real passion, and by a masterly hand, is to me as insufferable as the preaching cant of old Father Smeaton, whig-minister at Kilmaurs. Darts, flames, cupids, loves, graces, and all that farrago, are just a Mauchline * * * * ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... easy for us to understand how such a farrago of absurdity, profanity, and indecency could ever have been gravely produced in a so-called court of justice in England as a state paper—a bill of indictment against a body of noblemen and gentlemen; against an order that for two hundred years ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... fact, almost to the kingdom of the Inane. The beautiful simplicity of Bible truths has often become so perverted—so overloaded by the vain works (and words) of man's device—as barely to escape total extinction. Witness 'repentance'; in what a farrago of endless absurdities and palpable contradictions has this word (and, more unfortunately still, the thing itself along with it) been enveloped! According to the 'divines,' what does it not signify? Its composition, ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... exclaimed, "Surely you don't think I would use the public and my poor cousin so ill. No, I am doing him and the public the greatest possible service. Just when he is going to leave us, when the writing-box is packed, I will step up to him, and tell him the truth. I will show him what a farrago of nonsense he has collected as materials for his quarto; and convince him at once how utterly unfit he is to write a book, at least a book on Irish affairs. Won't this be deserving well of my country and ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. IV • Maria Edgeworth
... In all this farrago, she never gives the reader an atom of information worth the paper which she blots. We have no additional lights on character, public life, national feeling, or national advancement. All is as vapid as the "Academy of Compliments," and as well known as "Lindley Murray's ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... the beginning, as nearly as we can fix it, of that reform which has introduced plain water-dressings in the place of the farrago of external applications which had been a source of profit to apothecaries and disgrace to art from, and before, the time when Pliny complained of them. A young surgeon who was at Sudley Church, laboring among the wounded of Bull Run, ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... I were sure it were true! What you did, while engaged in the serious teaching of history, was to indulge in a farrago of nonsense, obvious as such to any child, and damage not only your own standing with your class but the standing of Blanley College as well. Doctor Chalmers, if this were the first incident of the kind it would be bad enough, but it isn't. You've done things like this before, and I've warned ...
— The Edge of the Knife • Henry Beam Piper
... they had not been free to select the opera. It was "La Traviata"; and there was not much food for their hungry souls in this farrago of artificiality and sham sentiment. They shut their eyes and tried to enjoy the music, forgetting the gallant young men of fashion and their fascinating mistresses. But even the music, it seemed, was tainted; or could it be, Thyrsis wondered, that he could no longer lose ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... MSS., the block books, and works printed upon vellum. This room is connected with another, at right angles, (if I remember well) which receives the more valuable works of the fifteenth century—the number of which latter, alone, are said to amount to nearly twenty thousand. In such a farrago, there must necessarily be an abundance of trash. These, however, are how under a strict assortment, or classification; and I think that I saw not fewer than half a dozen assistants, under the direction of M. Bernhard, hard at work in the execution ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Three • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... the eccentric being who had established himself in such an unsatisfactory dwelling-place? Mr Holt's story I had only dimly understood,—it struck me that it would require a deal of understanding. It was more like a farrago of nonsense, an outcome of delirium, than a plain statement of solid facts. To tell the truth, Sydney had taken it more seriously than I expected. He seemed to see something in it which I emphatically did not. What was double ...
— The Beetle - A Mystery • Richard Marsh
... part in the conversation, still sat silently smoking. Owen was listening to this pitiable farrago with feelings of contempt and wonder. Were they all hopelessly stupid? Had their intelligence never developed beyond the childhood stage? Or was ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell
... you, gentleman,' he said, with a mixture of irony and contempt, 'for the interest you take in my private history. I should have thought it had been as little to the taste as it is to the honour of some of you to listen to such a farrago ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... And so the farrago of unrelated memories continued to rise vocal on Skipper's lips to the heave of his body and the beat of his arms, while Jerry, crouched against the side of the bunk mourned and mourned his grief and inability to be of help. All that was occurring was beyond him. He knew no more of poker ...
— Jerry of the Islands • Jack London
... and to places many more. And many other gorgeous tables, too, "Fishing vessels at New York," for one, listing the "trips" brought into this port by the Stranger, the Sarah O'Neal, the Nourmahal, a farrago of charming sounds, and a valuable tale ...
— Walking-Stick Papers • Robert Cortes Holliday
... it possible?" answered Reb Shemuel. "A Jew who has the Law from Sinai, the Law that will never be changed, to whom God has given a sensible religion and common-sense, how can such a person believe in the farrago of nonsense that makes up the worship of the Christians! No Jew has ever apostatized except to fill his purse or his stomach or to avoid persecution. 'Getting grace' they call it in English; but with ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... respiration continue to be stimulated into action, and the other internal senses of hunger, thirst, and lust, are not only occasionally excited in our sleep, but their irritative motions are succeeded by their usual sensations, and make a part of the farrago of our dreams. These sensations of the want of air, of hunger, thirst, and lust, in our dreams, contribute to prove, that the nerves of the external senses are also alive and excitable in our sleep; but as the stimuli of external objects ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. I - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... begin to philosophise; should the General come in I cannot say it. You know the day after to-morrow is the General's seventy-sixth birthday. I had intended the celebration to be a brilliant affair; but when I hear of wrong tracks, changes, and such farrago, I begin to fear all ...
— Major Frank • A. L. G. Bosboom-Toussaint
... A hypocritical farrago of this character always prefaced one of Germaine's tales, so that I hardly ever interrupted the rogue when he became fluent about social theories, but waited patiently, in confidence that I was shortly to be entertained with ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer
... course the very rigidity of the Japanese policy, which has given it its strength, makes it incapable of adjusting itself to Socialism and Trade Unionism, which are vigorously persecuted by the Government. And on the other hand Socialism and Trade Unionism cannot accept Mikado-worship and the whole farrago of myth upon which the Japanese State depends.[55] There is therefore a likelihood, some twenty or thirty years hence—assuming a peaceful and prosperous development in the meantime—of a very bitter class conflict between the proletarians on the one side and ...
— The Problem of China • Bertrand Russell
... seems to have been a great author, and the literary oracle of the district over which he presided, and exercised the above-named important functions. His magnum opus appears to have been his Miscellany; a farrago of prose and verse, which, to distinguish it from the herd of books bearing that title, is yclept, par excellence, Brett's Miscellany. When Mr. Brett commenced to enlighten the world, and when his candle was snuffed out, I know not. My volume of the above ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 214, December 3, 1853 • Various
... pen in despair. The poor old man was mad. He had poured out the wildest farrago without sense, coherence, ...
— In Luck at Last • Walter Besant
... man is in earnest), must get into his heart at last; and then his trade is ruined. A little more politics and Plato, and the natural disappears altogether from Mr. Bulwer's writings: the individual man becomes as undistinguishable amidst the farrago of philosophy in which he has chosen to envelope himself, as a cutlet in the sauces of a French cook. The idiosyncracy of the mutton perishes under the effects of the adjuncts: even so the moralising, which may be compared to the mushrooms, of Mr. Bulwer's style; the poetising, which ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... have been a great deal too tempting a subject for romancers of any kind to have kept their hands off. If you read the apocryphal gospels you will see how eager they are to lay hold of any point in the true gospels, and spin a whole farrago of rubbish round about it. And do you think they could ever have let this incident alone without spoiling it by expanding it, and putting all manner of vulgarities into their story about it? But the men who told the story were telling simple facts, and when they ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren |
