"Omnivorous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... given to few, and thanks to his skill in it, Sir Thomas reminds us strongly of the two illustrious brothers Shandy combined in one person. To the exquisite kindliness and simplicity of Uncle Toby he unites the omnivorous intellectual appetite and the humorous pedantry of the head of the family. The resemblance, indeed, may not be quite fortuitous. Though it does not appear that Sterne, amidst his multifarious pilferings, laid hands upon Sir Thomas Browne, ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... man—or was supposed to be. He had spent five years in schools, and nine years in colleges and universities; he had given the scholars of the world full opportunity to guide him to whatever was of importance. Also, he had been an omnivorous reader upon his own impulse; and here he was, at the end of it all—practically ignorant that this ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... would otherwise make the atmosphere intolerable. They perform their office both within doors and without. Frequently, the "drivers," as they are called, enter houses in myriads, and, penetrating to the minutest recesses, destroy everything that their omnivorous appetite can render eatable. Whatever has the principle of decay in it, is got rid of at once. All vermin meet their fate from these destroyers. Food, clothing, necessaries, superfluities, mere trash, and valuable property, are alike in ...
— Journal of an African Cruiser • Horatio Bridge
... dark eyes as she awaited my answer. I was conscious that Mrs. Smith didn't like me for some reason or other, and I was anxious to propitiate her. I was pretty certain she thought me a boresome prig, and I determined I'd prove I wasn't. My confession of an omnivorous appetite for all sorts of story-books had the desired effect; and when I confessed further, that I liked best of all a real, tender, sentimental love-story, ...
— The Long Day - The Story of a New York Working Girl As Told by Herself • Dorothy Richardson
... to publish a mad confession of his mad faults, and to attempt a new sort of glory from bringing hardily to light the obscure and vulgar vices which we know may sometimes be blended with eminent talents. He has not observed on the nature of vanity who does not know that it is omnivorous,—that it has no choice in its food,—that it is fond to talk even of its own faults and vices, as what will excite surprise and draw attention, and what will pass at worst for ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IV. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... Jerdon it is nocturnal, arboreal, and omnivorous, eating small animals, birds, insects, fruit and plants; more wild than viverrine animals in general, but easily tamed. Its howl is loud. In an illustration I have of one of these animals, it is drawn with white patches ...
— Natural History of the Mammalia of India and Ceylon • Robert A. Sterndale
... not having read enough and of therefore being secretly inferior to more omnivorous readers. She did not think Rachel read much, but Rachel was different. Rachel was an artist and had ideas. Mary respected artists and was always sarcastic toward them. It usually made them talk a ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht
... influence of a sordid home life. It is a good thing, morally, to get hold of such boys at an early age and to win their interest in and attendance at the library rather than at places of low resort. To withhold a boy's card may also be considered a doubtful punishment— driving the young omnivorous reader to the patronage of the "underground travelling library" with its secret stations and patrons. Before suspension or expulsion is resorted to, the librarian should clearly distinguish between thoughtless exuberance of spirits and downright maliciousness. ...
— Library Work with Children • Alice I. Hazeltine
... first issue in the wilderness; already she had learned this lesson. Her eyes glanced about the walls. There were two or three sacks, perhaps filled with provisions, hanging from the ceiling, safely out of the reach of the omnivorous pack-rats that often wreak such havoc in unoccupied cabins. But further than this the ...
— The Snowshoe Trail • Edison Marshall
... Afthen slowly, "were men such as you are. They descended from a primeval omnivorous mammal very closely related to your race. Evidently the tendency of evolution on any planet is approximately the same ...
— Invaders from the Infinite • John Wood Campbell
... upon the self-styled Doctor. But in order to make assurance still more certain, we threw out vague hints to him that the portrait of Maria Vanrenen might really be elsewhere, and even suggested in his hearing that it might not improbably have got into the hands of that omnivorous collector, Sir J. H. Tomlinson. But the vendor was proof against all such attempts to decry his goods. He had the effrontery to brush away the documentary evidence, and to declare that Sir J. H. Tomlinson (one of the most learned and astute picture-buyers ...
— An African Millionaire - Episodes in the Life of the Illustrious Colonel Clay • Grant Allen
... and small, but armed with quite solid teeth adapted to his diet, a diet consisting of almost anything any creature had ever considered edible. Like most successful forms of intelligent life, Gresth Gkae was omnivorous. An intelligent form of life is necessarily adaptable, and adaptation meant being able to eat ...
— The Ultimate Weapon • John Wood Campbell
... now summon the shade of another departed victim—Fitzpatrick Smart, Esq. He, too, through a long life, had been a vigilant and enthusiastic collector, but after a totally different fashion. He was far from omnivorous. He had a principle of selection peculiar and separate from all other's, as was his own individuality from other men's. You could not classify his library according to any of the accepted nomenclatures ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... speech of this kilted critic. If it were possible to retain the elasticity and adjustableness of the mind till the end of life, new authors would perhaps fix our attention as much as the old. But only a limited number of articulate-speaking men, such as the omnivorous Professor Saintsbury of Edinburgh, preserve their appetite tireless and intact. The Professor, like a literary Livingstone, can grapple with the most arid and dusty libraries, and is the envy of all scholars; but, alas! the ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... my own egotism," he wrote; "I know my omnivorous lines, and must not write any less." He was not disconcerted by any failure of art, or any propriety, ...
— Escape and Other Essays • Arthur Christopher Benson
... cased with horn. It manages with its flexible upper lip to tear away the leaves and to pick up the water-melons and gourds which it finds when it goes forth at night in search of food. However, it is in no way particular, being almost as omnivorous as the hog. Its senses of smell and hearing are very acute. Its eyes, though, are small and its ears short. Its voice is a shrill kind of whistle, such as one would not expect to proceed from an animal of such massive bulk. It is ...
— On the Banks of the Amazon • W.H.G. Kingston
... the store there is an omniscient, omnipresent, and omnivorous person carrying always a mileage book and a red necktie, and referred to as a "buyer." The destinies of the girls in his department who live on (see Bureau of Victual Statistics)—so much per ...
— Options • O. Henry
... animals may be judged by the formation of their teeth; those of the bear declare its omnivorous propensities— ...
— Wild Beasts and their Ways • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... the most omnivorous song composer that ever lived. He could hardly see a poem—good, bad, or indifferent, without being at once seized by a passionate desire to set it to music. He sometimes wrote half a dozen or more songs in one day, and some of them originated ...
— Chopin and Other Musical Essays • Henry T. Finck
... Scotland, in 1795. He was the eldest son of a farmer. After a partial education at home, he entered the University of Edinburgh, where he was noted for his attainments in mathematics, and for his omnivorous reading. After leaving the university he became a teacher in a private family, and began to study for the ministry, a plan which ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... bearing indeed there was nothing of the monk or recluse. The brightness and freedom of the New Learning seemed incarnate in the young scholar with his gay talk, his winsomeness of manner, his reckless epigrams, his passionate love of music, his omnivorous reading, his paradoxical speculations, his gibes at monks, his schoolboy fervour of liberty. But events were soon to prove that beneath this sunny nature lay a stern inflexibility of conscientious resolve. The Florentine scholars ...
— History of the English People, Volume III (of 8) - The Parliament, 1399-1461; The Monarchy 1461-1540 • John Richard Green
... at the Babu's command of English until he learned that the man was an omnivorous reader, and in his leisure at Calcutta had spent many an hour in poring over such literature as his master's scanty library afforded, the works of Mr. Samuel Johnson and Mr. Henry Fielding ...
— In Clive's Command - A Story of the Fight for India • Herbert Strang
... by George Vasari, and greatly enlarged by Francis I, who succeeded to the Grand Duchy in 1574, the gallery owed most perhaps to the Cardinal, afterwards Ferdinand I, who constructed the Tribuna, and to Cardinal Leopold, an omnivorous collector, who died in 1675. But all the Medici princes added to the rarities in the various cabinets, drawing largely upon the Villa Medici at Rome for this purpose, and the last of them, John Gaston (1723-1737), was one of the most liberal as regards the freedom ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... bosom cover such depravity? Alas, yes! I have no doubt his breast was redder at that very moment with the blood of my raspberries. On the whole, he is a doubtful friend in the garden. He makes his dessert of all kinds of berries, and is not averse from early pears. But when we remember how omnivorous he is, eating his own weight in an incredibly short time, and that Nature seems exhaustless in her invention of new insects hostile to vegetation, perhaps we may reckon that he does more good than harm. For my own part, ...
— My Garden Acquaintance • James Russell Lowell
... to afford it shelter and quarters commensurate with its intrinsic value and wealth of associations. So far in his newspaper work Field had little time and less inclination to learn from books. All stories of his being a close and omnivorous student of books, previous to his coming to Chicago, are not consistent with the facts. He was learning all about humanity by constant attrition with mankind. He was taking in knowledge of the human passions ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... ready to send off to a magazine. If it won't bore you to listen to it, I'll read it aloud and let you judge whether it has any interest in it or not. An audience of schoolgirls ought to be severe critics. As a rule they're omnivorous readers of fiction. If you turn it down I ...
— The Jolliest School of All • Angela Brazil
... is a huge omnivorous Toad Grim squatting on a twilight road. He catcheth all that Circumstance Hath tossed to him. He curseth all who upward ...
— The Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... five cash, and the Chinaman strikes a balance in his mind and sees more nourishment in one bowl of rice than in three eggs. Of meat there is pork—pork in plenty, and pork only. Pigs and dogs are the scavengers of China. None of the carnivora are more omnivorous than the Chinese. "A Chinaman has the most unscrupulous stomach in the world," says Meadows; "he will eat anything from the root to the leaf, and from the hide to the entrails." He will not even despise ...
— An Australian in China - Being the Narrative of a Quiet Journey Across China to Burma • George Ernest Morrison
... premolars, and two above, with three below, are molars, but these teeth in bears have flatter crowns and more rounded tubercles than those of dogs, and the sectorial teeth are much less blade-like, this style of tooth being better adapted to their omnivorous food habits. Bears, furthermore, have five digits on each foot and are plantigrade, while dogs have but four toes behind and are digitigrade. These differences are less marked in some of the smaller arctoids, which may have as few as thirty-two ...
— American Big Game in Its Haunts • Various
... Ben was the next question of importance. He was fond of books, an omnivorous reader, in fact, a very fair scholar, and, with a certain amount of push, could have graduated the year before. He really was not longing ...
— A Little Girl in Old New York • Amanda Millie Douglas
... under each pleasant breeze of feeling. Nay, I can even imagine—perhaps somewhat captiously—that after marriage, feeling would become a habit, a rich and holy habit certainly, but yet a habit, which weakens the omnivorous grasp of the affections, and schools one to a unity of emotion that doubts and ignores the promptness and variety of ...
— Dream Life - A Fable Of The Seasons • Donald G. Mitchell
... dozen kinds of wine, each (I presume) very good, but altogether (I should suppose) calculated to remind the drinker of his head on rising in the morning. The cloth was now removed and after-grace sung by a choir, for even with two prayers this sort of omnivorous feasting at night is not quite healthy. I trust there is no presumption involved in the invocation of a blessing on such indulgences, yet I could imagine that an omission of one of the prayers might be excused if half the dinner ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley
... which of yore had detested the army. Thanks to the teachings of Fichte and the still deeper lessons of adversity, the mind of Germany was now ranged on the side of national independence and against an omnivorous imperialism. ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... Richard Rawlinson were, probably, the most omnivorous collectors of the earlier part of the last century. Everything in the shape of a book was welcomed. The former (1681-1725), whose 'C. & P.' (collated and perfect) appears on the frontispiece, title-page, ...
— The Book-Hunter in London - Historical and Other Studies of Collectors and Collecting • William Roberts
... as their inferiors, and treated us accordingly. They had a literature of their own, and many of the men, even the common soldiers, were omnivorous readers. Every two weeks a dust-covered trooper would trot his jaded mount into the post and deliver a bulging sack of mail at headquarters. The next day he would be away again upon a fresh horse toward ...
— The Lost Continent • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... thus, not from ambition, nor altogether from principle, but from an immense craving for mental labor, which had become second nature to him. His great omnivorous, hungry intellect must have constant food,—new languages, new statistics, new historical investigations, new scientific discoveries, new systems of Scriptural exegesis. He did not for a day in the year nor an hour in the day make rest a matter of principle, nor did he ever indulge in it ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... querulous tones of the confirmed invalid. "I've 'suffered the pangs of three several deaths,' as Shakespeare says, because you left the door part way open the last time you went to the 'cyclopedia." For twenty years Joel had been an omnivorous reader, and his speech bristled with quotations gathered from his favorite volumes, and generally tagged with the author's name. The quotations were not always apt, but they helped to confirm the village of Clematis ...
— Other People's Business - The Romantic Career of the Practical Miss Dale • Harriet L. Smith
... with this fantastic story is that it lacks artistic measure and objective plausibility. Immermann, omnivorous reader that he was, wrote this part of his book, not from life, but from other books. And even granting that he carried out his plan with a reasonable degree of cleverness, the average reader is not sufficiently acquainted with Kerner and Platen and their long line of queer contemporaries ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... acquainted with him I learned that Gladstone was an omnivorous reader; that he ordered his books by the cart-load, and that his home in Hawarden literally overflowed with books. He made a practice, I was told, of overhauling his library once in so often and of weeding out such volumes as he did not ...
— The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac • Eugene Field
... forefathers' worship have crept back into favour by hiding themselves in the voluminous draperies of History or Art. Our appetite for shows is omnivorous, and we don't object to a shrine if it has a Gothic moulding sufficiently "cute," or a Byzantine roof, or some other attraction—are we not pilgrims of Art?—though if called upon to define our roof or moulding many of us might be considerably ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III, March 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... betrays a womanly instinct for the supernatural: and without being imbued with any love of dogmas, breathes an unmistakable atmosphere of purity and religious trust. The study of this subject can not be recommended to the weak-minded and timorous, but an omnivorous digestion may find a wholesome exercise of its capacity in Mrs. Crowe's ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... road crossed is about 4600 feet above the sea, or a little higher than the Brenner Pass in the Tyrol. But there grain grows and orchards bear fruit, while here, under the parallel of 62 deg., nearly all vegetation ceases, and even the omnivorous northern sheep can find no pasturage. Before and behind you lie wastes of naked grey mountains, relieved only by the snow-patches on their summits. I have seen as desolate tracts of wilderness in the south made beautiful by the lovely hues which they took from the air; but Nature has no such tender ...
— Northern Travel - Summer and Winter Pictures of Sweden, Denmark and Lapland • Bayard Taylor
... pursued the courses in medicine and philosophy, but a fact of even more consequence than his proficiency in his regular work was his persistent study of languages and his omnivorous reading. He was associated with the other Filipinos who were working in a somewhat spectacular way, misdirected rather than led by what may be styled the Spanish liberals, for more considerate treatment of the Philippines. But while he was ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... you, turn in what direction you may; and the green covert, the shady lane, the barks of columned beeches and speckled birches, of gnarled oaks and rugged elms—no longer the mysterious haunts of nymphs and dryads, who have been driven far away by the omnivorous demon of the shop—are all invaded by Puff, and subdued to the office of his ministering spirits. Puff, in short, is the monster megatherium of modern society, who runs rampaging about the world, his broad back in the air, and his nose on the ground, playing all sorts of ludicrous ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 434 - Volume 17, New Series, April 24, 1852 • Various
... or a science, and bring to me all the particulars. Telling them fixed them in his own memory, which was the most tenacious and ready I have ever known; he enjoyed my clear perception as to their relative value, and I classified them in my own way. As he was omnivorous, and of great mental activity, while my mind was intense, though rapid in its movements, and could only give itself to a few things of its own accord, I traversed on the wings of his effort large demesnes that would otherwise have remained quite ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... no factory in Bologna or Frankfort, or any other possible birthplace of the real article, could rival this amazing, this funny, tree in fertility. Its product was just a trifle large, save for the omnivorous lover of sausage; but in other respects it was a faithful copy of the original—unless, indeed, the first sausage-maker borrowed the idea from the tree, instead of the other way about. These vegetable sausages ...
— Ladies-In-Waiting • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... general. Even the voracious and ubiquitous Colorado Beetle manifests no taste for this plant, although it has had abundant opportunity to test its edible qualities. To the credit of insects generally, be it said, they are not omnivorous. ...
— The Peanut Plant - Its Cultivation And Uses • B. W. Jones
... find among a savage nation; but little else can be expected, for they are nearly naked, and endure the scorching heat of the day and the chills of the night in that condition. Add to this that they are absolutely omnivorous. Indigestion, rheumatism, opthalmia are the prevailing diseases.... Many very bad cases were brought to me, sometimes, when traveling, my wagon was quite besieged by their blind and halt and lame. What a mighty effect would be produced if one of the seventy disciples ...
— The Personal Life Of David Livingstone • William Garden Blaikie
... altogether so exactly like a small common wasp of the genus Odynerus, that Mr. Bates informs us he was afraid to take it out of his net with his fingers for fear of being stung. Had Mr. Bates's taste for insects been less omnivorous than it was, the beetle's disguise might have saved it from his pin, as it had no doubt often done from the beak of hungry birds. A larger insect, Sphecomorpha chalybea, is exactly like one of the large metallic blue wasps, and like them has the abdomen ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - The Naturalist as Interpreter and Seer • Various
... tribes of Veddahs. They are the most degraded, or rather least civilised of all the people of Ceylon. They are divided into Rock Veddahs, Village Veddahs, and Coast Veddahs. This man belongs to the first, who are the most barbarous of all. They are omnivorous, eating carrion or anything that comes in their way— roots, or fish, or wild honey, or any animals they can catch; but their favourite food is monkeys and lizards. They live either in caves and nooks in rocks, or on platforms among the boughs of trees. They hunt the deer with bows and ...
— My First Voyage to Southern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston
... bottle, a disposition to ride anything that could by any exercise of the liveliest fancy be made to assume equine proportions, a propensity to blacken his venerable white hair with ink and coal dust, and an omnivorous appetite which did not stop at chalk, clay, or cinders, were peculiarities not calculated to excite respect. In fact, he would seem to have become demoralized, and when, after a prolonged absence the other day, he was finally discovered ...
— Urban Sketches • Bret Harte
... She was an omnivorous and most intelligent reader, and a friend that never failed. Matthew Arnold was very fond of her, and she of him; Laura Lyttelton, who was nearly forty years her junior, loved her dearly and never felt the bar of years; ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... feasible amendment of it. The sin of such gossip—if it be a sin—is one that all the preaching in the world will never extirpate from country towns, where the range of talk is by the necessity of the case exceedingly limited. In the city, curiosity has an omnivorous maw by reason of position, and finds such variety to feed upon that it is rarely—except in the case of great political or public scandal—personal in its attentions; and what we too freely reckon a perverted and impertinent country taste is but an ordinary appetite of humanity, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 90, April, 1865 • Various
... fatal; we must not complain, but look forward to a good result. Still, in travelling through this country, I could not but be struck with the force of a symbol. Wherever the hog comes, the rattlesnake disappears; the omnivorous traveller, safe in its stupidity, willingly and easily makes a meal of the most dangerous of reptiles, and one whom the Indian looks on with a mystic awe. Even so the white settler pursues the Indian, and ...
— Summer on the Lakes, in 1843 • S.M. Fuller
... ancient habits of life still survived, who still believed in the gods, who were contented to follow the wholesome round of honest labor. The numbers of such citizens were fast dwindling away before the omnivorous appetite of the rich for territorial aggrandizement. To rescue the land from the monopolists, to renovate the old independent yeomanry, to prevent the free population of Italy, out of which the legions had ...
— Caesar: A Sketch • James Anthony Froude
... American, but I should never have guessed it by his speech, which was the purest Cape Cod, and I reckon myself a good taster of dialects. Nor was he less Americanized in all his thoughts and feelings, a singular proof of the ease with which our omnivorous country assimilates foreign matter, provided it be Protestant, for he was a man ere he became an American citizen. He used to walk the deck with his hands in his pockets, in seeming abstraction, but nothing escaped his eyes. How he saw I could never make ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VIII (of X) • Various
... pretext, and to such a mind a pretext was readily forthcoming. Had not the English dogs fortified their settlement without his permission? Had they not afforded shelter to some victim flying from his omnivorous rapacity? These were pretexts good enough to serve the insane brain of Surajah Dowlah. He attacked Fort William with an overwhelming force; the English traders, unwarlike, timorous, and deserted by their leaders, made little or no resistance; the madman had Fort ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume II (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... Then Kshatriyas also betake themselves to the practice of religious acts. In the Kali age, the Brahmanas also abstain from sacrifices and the study of the Vedas, are divested of their staff and deer-skin, and in respect of food become omnivorous. And, O son, the Brahmanas in that age also abstain from prayers and meditation while the Sudras betake themselves to these! The course of the world looketh contrary, and indeed, these are the signs that foreshadow the Universal Destruction. And, O lord ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa Bk. 3 Pt. 2 • Translated by Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... She was an omnivorous reader. The only rule she ever thought of breaking, was to rise in the dead of night, when the house was still, and taking a secreted candle, lock herself in the bathroom—which had an outside window to give back no tell-tale ...
— Blue Bonnet in Boston - or, Boarding-School Days at Miss North's • Caroline E. Jacobs
... intellectual interests and equipment he presented a striking contrast to the brainlessness of the average musician. His tastes were singularly varied and catholic. An omnivorous reader of poetry, an inquisitive delver in the byways of mediaeval literature, an authority in mythological detail, he was at the same time keenly interested in contemporary affairs. He read, and discussed with eagerness and acumen, scientific, economic, and historical deliverances; and he enjoyed ...
— Edward MacDowell • Lawrence Gilman
... circumstances are noteworthy. Again and again it has been charged that this grand scheme was bodily stolen from the papers of his great predecessors, one in particular, of whom more must be said in the sequel. Napoleon was a student and an omnivorous reader, he knew what others had done and written; but the achievement which launched him on his career was due to the use of his own senses, to his own assimilation and adaptation of other men's experiences and theories, which had ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... confidants, it mattered little to him whether they feared or respected him, or were hypocritically obsequious, after the fashion of the weaker. His studies, at all events, profited by this lack of distraction. Already his two years of desultory and omnivorous reading had given him a facile familiarity with many things, which left him utterly free of the timidity, awkwardness, or non-interest of a beginner. His usually reserved manner, which had been lack ...
— A Waif of the Plains • Bret Harte
... one thing, there is none left for the other thing. And so with Vance Corliss. Scholarly lucubrations and healthy exercises during his college days had consumed all the energy his normal digestion extracted from a wholesome omnivorous diet. When he did discover a bit of surplus energy, he worked it off in the society of his mother and of the conventional minds and prim teas she surrounded herself with. Result: A very nice young man, of whom no maid's mother need ever be in trepidation; ...
— A Daughter of the Snows • Jack London
... Seward, at Auburn; Gerrit Smith's family at Peterboro; Beriah Green's at Whitesboro, with the Sedgwicks and Mays, and Matilda Joslyn Gage at Syracuse. Although Mrs. Gage was surrounded with a family of small children for years, yet she was always a student, an omnivorous reader and liberal thinker, and her pen was ever at work answering the attacks on the woman movement in the county and State journals. In the village of Manlius, where she lived some time after her marriage, she was the sole representative of this unpopular ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... breath. Of this Elizabethan chronicle the first part is the more literal and prosaic in its steady servility to actual record and registered fact: the bitterest enemy of poetic or dramatic fiction, from William Prynne to Thomas Carlyle, might well exempt from his else omnivorous appetite of censure so humble an example of such obsequious and unambitious fidelity. Of fiction or imagination there is indeed next to none. In Thomas Drue's play of "The Duchess of Suffolk," formerly and plausibly misattributed to Heywood, part ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... fowls; pigeons, teal, ortolans, plovers, snipes like those in Europe; but others, entirely unlike European birds, would fill a volume. Insects are very numerous. I have seen about twelve sorts of grylli, or grasshoppers and crickets. Ants are the most omnivorous of all insects; we have eight or ten sorts very numerous. The termes, or white ants, destroy everything on which they fasten; they will eat through an oak chest in a day or two and devour all its contents. Butterflies are not so numerous as in ...
— The Life of William Carey • George Smith
... himself as through the wrong end of a telescope. Fanny went into the sitting-room and shut the door with a bang. Amabel did not look up from her book. She was reading a library book much beyond her years, and sniffing pathetically with her cold. Amabel had begun to discover an omnivorous taste for books, which stuck at nothing. She understood not more than half of what she read, but seemed to relish it ...
— The Portion of Labor • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... rich, natural soil. Intermeddling as he did with all knowledge, he must necessarily have been but an amateur in many of the subjects into which he rushed with such generous eagerness. But none the less is the example of all but omnivorous acquisitiveness of everything that was to be known, a protest, very needful in these days, against the possible evils of an excessive specialising which the very progress of knowledge in all departments seems to make inevitable. I do not need to speak, either, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... becomes mere enjoyment or pleasure, largely concerned with amusement and self-indulgence of various sorts, it becomes parasitic, robbing life of its strength and flavor and preventing its development and full growth. It is insidious in its deterioration and omnivorous in its appetite. It tends to habits that undermine and to the appropriation of a preponderating share of the valueless things of life. The danger is in the unrestrained appetite, in intemperance that becomes habit. Pleasure ...
— A Backward Glance at Eighty • Charles A. Murdock
... navigation, will be the future industry of the Siberian coast populations. Cetacea, fishes, molluscs, and other marine organisms are cast up in such quantities along both sides of Bering Strait that the bears and other omnivorous creatures have here become very choice as to their food. But on some parts of the coast in the Chukchi country whales are never stranded, and since the arrival of the Russians certain species threaten to disappear altogether. The Rhytina stelleri, a species of walrus formerly frequenting ...
— Russia - As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Various
... by the Israelites; not only from living with those people, but because they were unclean animals. They are still viewed in that light by Brahmins and Mussulmans, who only rear them to sell to Christians, or to make scavengers of them, for, in a domestic state, they are omnivorous. The dislike of the latter to them was once very serviceable to me; for when we were bivouacking close to a Mahommedan village, the people, and the priests thronged around us, so as to be extremely troublesome; and the only way in which we could keep them at a ...
— Anecdotes of the Habits and Instinct of Animals • R. Lee
... smiled, a certain satirical smile, intensely irritating to his sister's temper (which she called her nerves), and which it was rather fortunate she did not see. He was perfectly alive to the omnivorous quality of his sister's vanity, and perfectly aware that it had on many occasions led her into a fool's paradise, whence she had been ejected into the waste regions of disappointment and bitterness of spirit. He had been quite ...
— Run to Earth - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... time. They were "The Man who was Dead," by Thomas H. Knight and "Monsters of Moyen," by Arthur J. Burks. For Mr. Knight there is no hope. To him I can only say "Stop trying to write and get a job." I am a rapid and omnivorous reader, but never have I read a story so utterly bad as his. ...
— Astounding Stories, February, 1931 • Various
... Country of True Love. Mrs. Behn, an omnivorous reader of romances, was thinking of the celebrated Carte de Tendre (Loveland), to be found in Mlle. de Scuderi's Clelie (1654, Vol. I, p. 399), and reproduced in the English folio edition of 1678. This fantastic map, which ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume IV. • Aphra Behn
... proves itself a nuisance about the houses where it is as omnivorous an eater as is its far-removed cousin, the house rat. The gopher is one of the mammals whose mark is more often seen than the creature itself. It lives like the mole in underground burrows, coming to the surface only to push up the dirt that it ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
... taffeta that wrapped her flat waist and chest like a calyx and suddenly bloomed into the full inverted petals of a skirt; upon Mr. Lester Goldmark, his long body barely knitted yet to man's estate, and his complexion almost clear, standing omnivorous, omnipotent, omnipresent, his hair so well brushed that it lay like black japanning, a white carnation at his silk lapel, and his smile slightly projected by a rush of very white teeth to the very front. Next in line, Mrs. Coblenz, the red of a fervent ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... present respectable papers would not be able to compete with these predatory publications, and would be compelled to forego that extent of information which was then so accurately given. We should have the newspaper press"—mark this, ye omnivorous readers of to-day, who commence with The Times, adjourn to the Telegraph, peruse the pages of the Morning Post, wander through the columns of the Daily News, and finish off with the express edition of the Globe or Evening Standard, reserving your Saturday ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... indulgent never beyond the dictates of perfect simplicity and sobriety. Proficient in all branches of housekeeping, her apparel was mostly of her own making. Good literature was a passion with her, and while never an omnivorous reader, she had a natural instinct for the best in language. A spirit of indomitable independence, courage and persistence in purpose characterized her from childhood. She must think her own thoughts, and mark out and follow her ...
— Memories of Jane Cunningham Croly, "Jenny June" • Various
... than that, he has a onelegged disposition. His whole ego, his entire spirit is changed. No longer a twolegged creature, reduced, he is another—warped, if you like—being. To come to the immediate point of the grass: if you engender an omnivorous capacity you ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... cultivate the land, and live almost exclusively by hunting and fishing. They are men of very robust constitution; but ill-looking, savage, vindictive, and passionately fond of fermented liquors. They are omnivorous animals in the highest degree; and therefore the other Indians, who consider them as barbarians, have a common saying, nothing is so loathsome but that an Ottomac will eat it. While the waters of the Orinoco and its tributary streams are low, the Ottomacs subsist ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V2 • Alexander von Humboldt
... though a man who keeps a Journal soon becomes its victim; at least that seems to have been the case with Thoreau. He lived for that Journal, he read for it, he walked for it; it was like a hungry, omnivorous monster that constantly called for more. He transcribed to its pages from the books he read, he filled it with interminable accounts of the commonplace things he saw in his walks, tedious and minute descriptions ...
— The Last Harvest • John Burroughs
... means a new one. Scaliger says, as quoted by omnivorous old Burton: "Nequaquam, nos homines sumus sed partes hominis." The old illustration of this used to be found in pin-making. It took twenty different workmen to make a pin, beginning with drawing the wire and ending with sticking in the paper. Each expert, skilled in one small performance ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... obscene or terrible—takes a fresh start in the Passionals of Lucas Cranach, and can be traced in England through her Rebellion and Restoration up to the very confines of the eighteenth century. Why, we have to ask, even granting that William Hogarth's "monster Caricatura" is thus omnivorous and omnipresent, does he tower aloft in some countries and under some conditions to the majesty of a new art, and in others dwindle down ...
— The Eighteenth Century in English Caricature • Selwyn Brinton
... who thought for themselves. James, a son of the first James, was a teacher for a time, and in his later years did all the conveyancing in the neighborhood, such as the writing of deeds and wills. He was an omnivorous reader, and, like Silas Wegg, was inclined to "drop into poetry." Some of his efforts in this direction on local happening caught the ear and had the ring that stirred the emotions. Titus, the only grandson ...
— The Chignecto Isthmus And Its First Settlers • Howard Trueman
... the Colony by that time. Multiplying, they provided able assistance during the early seventeenth century in thoroughly clearing away the undergrowth, preparatory to cutting down trees and grubbing stumps. Joseph Ham, in the colony by 1633, resorted to these omnivorous quadrupeds in clearing his land. He lived in the New Poquoson area where growth of all kinds is lush. The region, which has its name from the Indian term for lowlands, had afforded the Kecoughtan Indians a rich hunting-ground. Midst tall pines, oak, walnut, cedar, wild cherry, locust, ...
— Domestic Life in Virginia in the Seventeenth Century - Jamestown 350th Anniversary Historical Booklet Number 17 • Annie Lash Jester
... South Australian Institute was a treasure to the family. I recollect a newcomer being astonished at my sister Mary having read Macaulay's History. "Why, it was only just out when I left England," said he. "Well, it did not take longer to come out than you did," was her reply. We were all omnivorous readers, and the old-fashioned accomplishment of reading aloud was cultivated by both brothers and sisters. I was the only one who could translate French at sight, thanks to Miss Phin's giving me so much ...
— An Autobiography • Catherine Helen Spence
... Nations, Paley's Evidences of Christianity, Locke on the Human Understanding, and a long row of the dramatists of the seventeenth century. I burrowed into all these with zeal, and acquired in very early childhood an omnivorous appetite for books which has never ...
— Recollections • David Christie Murray
... prone to lose sight of perfidy in magnitude and to say, when he hears all the facts: "At least these rascals hunt big game." I wish to say here that such distinction is undeserved. The "System" is omnivorous. Its insatiable maw yawns as greedily for the ten-cent pieces of the people as for the thousands of the larger investor. It is as avid and relentless in devising ant-traps as elephant-snares. There fell into my hands recently certain valuable documents in the meanest of contemporary ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson
... weeks renewing his former brief acquaintance with Paris. In the daytime he haunted the libraries and picture galleries. He had become an omnivorous reader, and the world of possibilities that were opened to him in this seat of culture and learning fairly appalled him when he contemplated the very infinitesimal crumb of the sum total of human knowledge that a single individual might hope to acquire even ...
— The Return of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... live in such a rambling mansion. It has become a national monument. On the days when it is open we revisit it with admiration; and those chambers and garden walks re-echo to us the clear dogmas and savoury diction of the sage—omnivorous, artless, loquacious—whose ...
— Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy - Five Essays • George Santayana
... considerably smaller than the last species. It is truly omnivorous, and will eat even bread; and I was assured that it materially injures the potato crops in Chiloe, by stocking up the roots when first planted. Of all the carrion-feeders it is generally the last which leaves the skeleton of a dead animal, ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin
... ever-changing litter of tattered books, with a card above which announced that any volume therein could be purchased for the identical sum which I carried in my pocket. As I approached it a combat ever raged betwixt the hunger of a youthful body and that of an inquiring and omnivorous mind. Five times out of six the animal won. But when the mental prevailed, then there was an entrancing five minutes' digging among out-of-date almanacs, volumes of Scotch theology, and tables of logarithms, until one found something which made it all ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... was an omnivorous reader. Everything was fish that came to the dragnet of this New Hampshire boy—from "Sinbad" to "Milton's Paradise Lost," which was read before he was eleven ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1 • Various
... come upon the rotting ribs of a wreck on the beach. Its distance from the tide line, its position, and its deep imbedding of sand, showed that it was of ancient origin. An omnivorous reader of all that pertained to the history of California, Jenny had in fancy often sailed the seas in one of those mysterious treasure-ships that had skirted the coast in bygone days, and she at once settled in her mind that her discovery was none other than a castaway Philippine galleon. Partly ...
— Colonel Starbottle's Client and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... Man, is omnivorous. Specialization tends to lead any race up a blind alley, and dietary restrictions are a particularly pernicious form of specialization. A lion would starve to death in a wheat field. A horse would perish in a butcher shop full of steaks. A man will survive as long as there's something ...
— Anything You Can Do ... • Gordon Randall Garrett
... that direction were freely confessed. From my father, whose studious habits in life had made him not only eminent at the bar but profoundly conversant with general literature, he had inherited a taste for reading, and it was this omnivorous passion for books that led my brother to say that his education had only begun when he fancied that it had left off. In boyhood he contracted that fascinating but highly injurious habit of reading in bed, which he subsequently extolled with ...
— A Little Book of Western Verse • Eugene Field
... of prey, infesting all habitable parts of the globe, from Greeland's spicy mountains to India's moral strand. The popular name (wolfman) is incorrect, for the creature is of the cat kind. The woman is lithe and graceful in its movement, especially the American variety (felis pugnans), is omnivorous and can be taught not ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... books named were perused before the age of fifteen. Making allowance for the fact that most of the poet's autobiographic sketches are emphatically "Dichtang und Wahrheit," we can believe that he was an omnivorous reader—"I read eating, read in bed, read when no one else reads"—and, having a memory only less retentive than Macaulay's, acquired so much general information as to be suspected of picking it up from Reviews. He himself declares that he never read a Review till he was ...
— Byron • John Nichol
... Browning confessed,—'I should be wiser if I had not read half as much;' while old Hobbes, of Malmesbury, caustically remarked,—'If I had read as much as other men I should know as little.' It may serve as a hint to the omnivorous college student. Cardinal Mezzofanti knew, it is said, more than a hundred languages. What came of it all? A eulogy on one Emanuele da Ponte. He never said anything in all the languages he spoke! What constitutes the life of an intellectual jelly-fish? Even the ...
— The History of Dartmouth College • Baxter Perry Smith
... and historian, b. in New York, s. of William I. who had emigrated from Scotland. He was in his youth delicate, and his education was somewhat desultory, but his f. had a fine library, of which he had the run, and he was an omnivorous reader. In 1799 he entered a law office, but a threatening of consumption led to his going, in 1804, on a European tour in search of health. On his return in 1806 he was admitted to the Bar. He did not, however, prosecute ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... thing, that is the kind of thing they like). This she did let slip. Generally, throughout all the centuries, she kept up a pretence of thinking history the greatest of all the arts. She always held her head high among her Sisters. It was only on the sly that she was an omnivorous reader of dramatic and lyric poetry. She watched with keen interest the earliest developments of the prose romance in southern Europe; and after the publication of "Clarissa Harlowe" she spent practically ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm
... South in 1916. The peanut is rich in the richest of foods, some 50 per cent. of oil and 30 per cent. of protein. The latter can be worked up into meat substitutes that will make the vegetarian cease to envy his omnivorous neighbor. Thanks largely to the chemist who has opened these new fields of usefulness, the peanut-raiser got $1.25 a bushel in 1917 instead of the 30 cents that he ...
— Creative Chemistry - Descriptive of Recent Achievements in the Chemical Industries • Edwin E. Slosson
... it became my duty to warn a girl of eleven, who was an omnivorous reader of romances, that such reading was in all probability hastening her development, and she would become a woman in bodily functions while she ought yet to be a child. Her indications of approaching womanhood were very apparent. ...
— What a Young Woman Ought to Know • Mary Wood-Allen
... apparently newly set out; there were holes indefinitely waiting for others. These were often, throughout Andalusia, covered to their first fork with cones of earth; and we remained in the dramatic superstition that this was to protect them against the omnivorous hunger of the goats, till we were told that it was to save their roots from being loosened by the wind. The orchards filled the level foregrounds and the hilly backgrounds to the vanishing-points of the mountainous perspectives; but when I say this I mean ...
— Familiar Spanish Travels • W. D. Howells
... reader in the sense of being omnivorous in her choice of books, but she became a very good one. She always had a solid book in hand, and some standard work of fiction also; but she read both with the utmost deliberation, and with intellect ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... the books in question appear to be very rare. It is doubtful if the omnivorous British Museum has swallowed a complete set; certainly at the Art Library of South Kensington Museum, where, if anywhere, we might expect to find Sir Henry Cole ...
— Children's Books and Their Illustrators • Gleeson White
... their speech, the nitre of their wit. When morbid, it gives that rabid and epileptic tendency which sometimes shows itself in Victor Hugo. In this great writer, however, it more frequently takes the form of an aboriginal fierceness and hunger that glares and bristles, and is insatiable and omnivorous. ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... hinted, reckon Madame Rosalie's ménage among the pleasant things that reconciled us to a longer stay than we intended in the rude capital of Gallura; but, at least, she supplied us in her own person with a fund of amusement. My companion, who had the happy gift for a traveller of being almost omnivorous, used to laugh heartily at my vain attempts to extract something edible from the meagre carte offered by Madame. Her replies parrying my demands, and uttered with amazing volubility, in shrill tones and a patois almost unintelligible, invariably ended to this effect:—“Signore, my house is not ...
— Rambles in the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia - with Notices of their History, Antiquities, and Present Condition. • Thomas Forester
... books. Denied the advantages of early scholastic training, he was, from the beginning, an omnivorous reader. He cared little for the allurements and excitement of society. At the age of seventeen, he joined the Methodist Episcopal Church, and was soon after licensed to preach. For four years he rode the circuit, enduring all the ...
— Something of Men I Have Known - With Some Papers of a General Nature, Political, Historical, and Retrospective • Adlai E. Stevenson
... as omnivorous as the Crow or Blue Jay, without their sense of humor, and whenever opportunity offers will attack and eat smaller birds, especially the defenseless young. His own meet with the like fate, a fox squirrel having been seen to emerge from a hole in a large dead ...
— Birds Illustrated by Color Photography [December, 1897], Vol 2. No 6. • Various
... them. Indeed, the reason why self-trained men so often surpass men who are trained by others in the effectiveness and success of their reading, is that they know for what they read and study, and have definite aims and wishes in all their dealings with books. The omnivorous and indiscriminate reader, who is at the same time a listless and passive reader, however ardent is his curiosity, can never be a reader of the most ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... recover'd. All these years I was down Long Island more or less every summer, now east, now west, sometimes months at a stretch. At 16, 17, and so on, was fond of debating societies, and had an active membership with them, off and on, in Brooklyn and one or two country towns on the island. A most omnivorous novel-reader, these and later years, devour'd everything I could get. Fond of the theatre, also, in New York, went whenever I could—sometimes ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... change seems to come over his half-ideal character. The lover becomes the student—the student of the thirteenth century—struggling painfully against difficulties, eager and hot after knowledge, wasting eyesight and stinting sleep, subtle, inquisitive, active-minded and sanguine, but omnivorous, overflowing with dialectical forms, loose in premise and ostentatiously rigid in syllogism, fettered by the refinements of half-awakened taste and the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... are omnivorous. The food is plentiful and people believe in generous living. They put upon their tables at each meal enough variety for a whole day and the custom is to eat some of each. Some breakfasts are heavy enough for dinners. Three heavy meals a day are common. ...
— Maintaining Health • R. L. Alsaker
... derived from the writings of the ancients. The Legatio Babylonica, consisting of three reports to the Spanish sovereigns, to which addenda were later made, contains a mass of historical and geographical facts, of which Europeans were ignorant; nothing escaped the ambassador's omnivorous curiosity and discerning scrutiny, during what proved to be a veritable voyage of discovery. He treats of the flora and fauna of the country; he studied and noted the characteristics of the great life-giver of Egypt—the Nile. The Mamelukes engaged his particular attention, though ...
— De Orbe Novo, Volume 1 (of 2) - The Eight Decades of Peter Martyr D'Anghera • Trans. by Francis Augustus MacNutt
... ornaments, as they lay upon the ground, were broken with sledge-hammers, hewn with axes, trampled, torn; and beaten into shreds. A troop of harlots, snatching waxen tapers from the altars, stood around the destroyers and lighted them at their work. Nothing escaped their omnivorous rage. They desecrated seventy chapels, forced open all the chests of treasure, covered their own squalid attire with the gorgeous robes of the ecclesiastics, broke the sacred bread, poured out the sacramental wine into golden chalices, quaffing huge draughts to the beggars' health; burned all ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... colloquially brevetted Doctor, a distinction which, for convenience, will be observed when it is necessary to mention him. He had become known to Nelson while serving in the same capacity with Sir Hyde Parker, and had been found very useful in the negotiations at Copenhagen. An accomplished linguist and an omnivorous reader, Dr. Scott was doubly useful. Upon him devolved the translating of all despatches and letters, not only from, but to, foreign courts and officials; for Nelson made a point of sending with all such papers a copy in the language of the ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. II. (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... he removed to "merry Islington," then a country village, though now swallowed up in omnivorous London. He went there for the benefit of country air, his health being injured by literary application and confinement, and to be near his chief employer, Mr. Newbery, who resided in the Canonbury House. In this neighborhood he used to take his solitary rambles, ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving |
