"Literal" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... still more striking beauty about the saying, if we give the full literal meaning to the word 'strength.' It is used by our translators, I suppose, in a somewhat archaic and peculiar signification, namely, that of a stronghold. At all events the Hebrew means a fortress, a place where men may live safe and secure; and if we take that ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... finished the chapter, reading it aloud. And here I quote, from the published Journal of the late Chief Justice, an entry, written immediately after the meeting, and bearing unmistakable evidence that it is almost a literal ...
— Our American Holidays: Lincoln's Birthday • Various
... thus leaves the way open to say that life must have originated by just such a literal creation as is recorded in the first ...
— The Church, the Schools and Evolution • J. E. (Judson Eber) Conant
... planter gave no more heed to the pedigree of his slaves than he did to that of his cattle; all alike were bought and sold in the open market, and neither one nor the other had any rights or privileges apart from the will of their owners. The cabin of the slave family was, in a very literal sense, what its name implied—a cabin and nothing more. The household was not supposed to need more than one room; the furniture was, of course, as rude as the hovel itself, and, though the apartment would be well ventilated, glass windows were not considered necessary. A pallet on the ...
— From Slave to College President - Being the Life Story of Booker T. Washington • Godfrey Holden Pike
... "Ovidius utroque lascivior" and he could not have given a terser or more comprehensive criticism. Of all Latin poets, not excepting even Plautus, Ovid possesses in the highest degree the gift of facility. His words probably express the literal truth, when he says— ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... predispositions, tastes, inclinations, etc. All that goes to make up that which we call "Character" is the workings of the Law of Karma. There is no such thing as Chance. Nothing ever "happens." All is regulated by the Law of Cause and Effect or Karma. As a man sows so shall he reap, in a literal sense. You are what you are to-day, by reason of what you were in your last life. And in your next life you will be what you are making of yourself to-day. You are your own judge, and executioner—your own bestower of rewards. ...
— A Series of Lessons in Gnani Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... a position to vouch for them from personal knowledge, any more than I am in a position to personally vouch for the invasion of England by William of Normandy. But they rest on as good evidence as most other private events of sixty-odd years ago, and there is no reason for doubting their literal truth. With regard to the supernatural element, I am free to confess that I am not able to accept it in entirety. This is not because I question the veracity of those who vouch for the alleged facts, but because I have not received those facts at first hand, and because I am not very ready ...
— The Gerrard Street Mystery and Other Weird Tales • John Charles Dent
... communistic principles. The Christians shared all things; those who had property realised it, and pooled the proceeds in a common fund, which was distributed to individual members as need arose. It is impossible not to recognise in this action consistent and literal obedience to the teaching of Jesus. The disciples had followed Jesus to the end of his journey in Jerusalem; they were waiting for his manifestation in glory, and sold all that they had and gave to the poor. But in terms of ...
— Landmarks in the History of Early Christianity • Kirsopp Lake
... thereto relating, as compared with their exact completions in Josephus's history; upon which completions, as Dr. Whitby well observes, Annot. on Matthew 24:2, no small part of the evidence for the truth of the Christian religion does depend; and as I have step by step compared them together in my Literal Accomplishment of Scripture Prophecies. The reader is to observe further, that the true reason why I have so seldom taken notice of those completions in the course of these notes, notwithstanding their being so very ...
— The Wars of the Jews or History of the Destruction of Jerusalem • Flavius Josephus
... remains of which are to be seen in many places. In the grass itself, and round the edge of these groups so artistically assorted by the hand of Nature, lies slyly hidden the "wait-a-bit" bush,[49] according to the literal translation from the Dutch, whose thorny entanglements no one ...
— South African Memories - Social, Warlike & Sporting From Diaries Written At The Time • Lady Sarah Wilson
... was a ringer," continued the Captain as he helped himself to another layer of waffles. "Wonder if Clemmie took what you said about launching out as literal?" ...
— Captain Pott's Minister • Francis L. Cooper
... offered to me there was extended with equal warmth to little Mabel, who soon arrived, a most forlorn little maiden. She was only three years old, and she had not seen me for some weeks; her passion of delight was pitiful; she clung to me, in literal fashion, for weeks afterwards, and screamed if she lost sight of me for a moment; it was long before she got over the separation and the terror of her lonely journey from Sibsey and London in charge only of the guard. But she was a "winsome wee thing", and ...
— Autobiographical Sketches • Annie Besant
... Jesus comfort his friends who are left? As we read over the story of the sorrow of the Bethany home we find the answer to our question. You say, "He brought back their dead, thus comforting them with the literal undoing of the work of death and grief. If only he would do this now, in every case where love cries to him, that would be comfort indeed." But we must remember that the return of Lazarus to his home was only a temporary restoration. He came back to the old ...
— Personal Friendships of Jesus • J. R. Miller
... thought is the fulness." Lewes paraphrases it, "for the highest degree of organization gives the highest degree of thought." The difference is intentional, since Lewes himself criticises the translation of Ritter. Ritter's translation is certainly the more literal, but the fact that such diversity is possible suggests one of the chief elements of uncertainty that hamper our interpretation of the thought of antiquity. Unfortunately, the mind of the commentator has usually been directed towards such subtleties, rather than towards ...
— A History of Science, Volume 1(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... eighteenth century that music began to be cultivated as an art in America.[391:1] Up to that time "the service of song in the house of the Lord" had consisted, in most worshiping assemblies on this continent, in the singing of rude literal versifications of the Psalms and other Scriptures to some eight or ten old tunes handed down by tradition, and variously sung in various congregations, as modified by local practice. The coming in of "singing by rule" was nearly coincident with the introduction of Watts's psalms and hymns, and ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... the Jewish religion, it will be remembered that the tree appears mysteriously connected with the beginning of life and is interwoven with the first ideas of human action and experience. The literal sense, however, of the allegory in Genesis concerning the woman, the tree, and the serpent, and its meaning as generally accepted by laymen and the uneducated among the priesthood, has little in common with its true significance as understood by ...
— The God-Idea of the Ancients - or Sex in Religion • Eliza Burt Gamble
... proofs taken out of the Old Testament, and urged in the New, being sometimes not to be found in the Old, nor urged in the New, according to the literal and obvious sense, which they appear to bear in their supposed places in the Old, and, therefore, not proofs according to the rules of interpretation established by reason, and acted upon in interpreting ...
— The Grounds of Christianity Examined by Comparing The New Testament with the Old • George Bethune English
... spite of his keen observation, never thought for a moment of the true state of the case. He was a very literal unimaginative man, and having once learned to regard Brian as an old family friend and as his doctor, he never dreamed of regarding him in the light of his daughter's lover. Also, as is not unfrequently the case when a man has only one child, ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... unrelated and indefinite to be spoken of as forming a school, seem to stretch out a hand on one side to those who think that all is legend, asking them to accept a historical basis; on the other side they say to their fellow Christians that there is a growing danger lest, in clinging to a literal and unique meaning, which cannot be defended before the increasing knowledge of the day, the spiritual meaning should be entirely lost. There is a danger of losing "the story of the Christ," with that thought of the Christ which has been the support and inspiration ...
— Esoteric Christianity, or The Lesser Mysteries • Annie Besant
... infallible; we desire only to be told on what evidence that great and awful fact concerning it properly rests. It would seem, indeed, as if instinct had been wiser than argument—as if it had been felt that nothing short of this literal and close inspiration could preserve the facts on which Christianity depends. The history of the early world is a history everywhere of marvels. The legendary literature of every nation upon earth tells ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... with the personages, is anything but choice. There is (barring a possible double meaning or two) nothing of the kind generally known as licentious; it is the merely foul and dirty language of common folk at all times, introduced, not with humorous extravagance in the Rabelaisian fashion, but with literal realism. If there had been a little less of this, the piece would have been much improved; but even as it is, it is a capital example of farce, just as Ralph Roister Doister is of a rather rudimentary kind of ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... or the ut of the Latin. Nee eme vitzn, nap hibe, I see that you are lax; Nee aguteran, Domincotze amo misa ea vitzaca, I know that you have not heard mass Sunday; where vitzaca or vitzcauh is passive perfect, and the literal rendering is, I know, on Sunday your mass was not heard. I desire that you may live here, Nee eme iuide cteo naqum, in which cteo is an active perfect participle, and the verb naqum, I desire, ever requires this construction. The verb queem, I command, is peculiar likewise ...
— Grammatical Sketch of the Heve Language - Shea's Library Of American Linguistics. Volume III. • Buckingham Smith
... to recognise two systems of ideas, two bodies of symbols and superstitions altogether distinct—in a word, two religions: the one altogether sensible, derived from the adoration of natural phenomena, and by its forms, as well as by its literal development, reminding us of the polytheism of the Greeks; the other founded upon a material pantheism, metaphysical, mysterious, sacerdotal, and presenting the most astonishing conformity with the religions of the East. That last has received the name of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 348 • Various
... he lived for, his literal daily bread. I suppose what would be prosperity to him would be miserably insufficient for some other people. I wonder how we can help being conscious, in the midst of our comforts and pleasures, of the lives which are being starved to death in more ...
— Deephaven and Selected Stories & Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett
... The literal interpretation of [bli makom] is, there is "no place" clean of defilement; but the word [makom] being used to designate God (see above, chapter II, n. 35), suggests the interpretation, "without mention of the name ...
— Pirke Avot - Sayings of the Jewish Fathers • Traditional Text
... tradition, as the author says in a prefatory letter addressed to Joseph ibn Aknin, his favorite disciple. He believes that even those to whom the book appeals are often puzzled and confused by the apparent inconsistencies between the literal interpretation of the Bible and the evidence of reason, that they do not know whether to take Scriptural expressions as symbolic or allegoric, or to accept them in their literal meaning, and that they fall a prey to doubt, and long for a guide. Maimonides is prepared ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... them orders quietly, which must have been to search the house and grounds for Monsieur de Pepicot. As we returned to the hall, the Count questioned me, watching me sharply the while. I was perfectly safe in telling the literal truth, though not all of it: how Monsieur de Pepicot was a stranger to me, how I had never spoken to him before yesterday, how I knew nothing of his business, and so forth. Of course I said nothing of his midnight walk or of having conversed with him at all after going to ...
— The Bright Face of Danger • Robert Neilson Stephens
... really had a good deal in it. I had been in New York, and knew the length of Broadway; and at the recollection, felt flattered by the thought of being conveyed in an open chariot drawn by four or even eight horses, with nodding plumes, (literal ones for the horses,—only metaphorical ones for me,) past those stately buildings fluttering with handkerchiefs, and through streets black with people thronging to see the man who had solved the riddle of Africa. And then ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... troubling themselves very little whether the meaning is exact or not. One's translation is sure to be full of gross blunders, but the supreme blunder is that of translating at all when one is trying to catch not a fact but a feeling. If translate one must, we had best begin by trying to be literal, under protest that it matters not a straw whether we succeed. Twelfth-century art was not precise; still less "precieuse," like Moliere's ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... W. S. Dugdale. Another version of great merit, of both the Purgatorio and Paradiso, is that of Mr. A. J. Butler. It is accompanied by a scholarly and valuable comment, and I owe much to Mr. Butler's work. But through what seems to me occasional excess of literal fidelity his English is now and then somewhat crabbed. "He overacts the office of an interpreter," I cite again from Howell, "who doth enslave himself too strictly to words or phrases. One may be so over-punctual in words that he may mar ...
— The Divine Comedy, Volume 1, Hell [The Inferno] • Dante Alighieri
... the early bird that gets, or is bound to get, the worm. I mean it in a literal sense. Our people go to business at a much earlier hour and go home much later. There is quite a number of them in your line of ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... expected from the Liberator Czar was not forthcoming, and the democracy they hoped for was far from being realized, they became desperate, and determined to demand their rights by force. The peasants, too, sobering up from the intoxication, the figurative as well as the literal, caused by the vodka drunk in honor of their newly-acquired volyushka (sweet liberty), discovered that the emancipation ukase of the czar had been craftily intercepted by the bureaucrats, and their dream of owning the land they had hitherto cultivated as serfs would never come true. Russia was rife ...
— The Haskalah Movement in Russia • Jacob S. Raisin
... beginning God created,' but a more literal and spiritual rendering would make the pivotal statement, 'God creates.' Now we know there can be no beginning or end to Omnipotence, hence there must be a continuous creating, and thus the term 'beginning' could only refer to the manifestation of what had already been ...
— The Right Knock - A Story • Helen Van-Anderson
... the soul. And a victory really won over a sensual sin is already a challenge sounded to our most spiritual sin. And it is this discovery that has given to fasting the place it has held in all the original, resolute, and aggressive ages of the Church. With little or nothing in their Lord's literal teaching to make His people fast, they have been so bent on their own spiritual deliverance, and they have heard and read so much about the deliverances both of body and of soul that have been attained by fasting and its accompaniments, that they have taken to it in their despair, ...
— Bunyan Characters - Third Series - The Holy War • Alexander Whyte
... one to detect and sniff gastronomic possibilities in the humblest materials. Joseph Bourgogne looked the cook. His phiz gave us faith in him; eyes small and discriminating; nose upturned, nostrils expanded and receptive; mouth saucy in the literal sense. His voice, moreover, was a cook's,—thick in articulation, dulcet in tone. He spoke as if he deemed that a throat was created for better uses than laboriously manufacturing words,—as if the object of a mouth were to receive tribute, not to give commands,—as if that pink stalactite, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... the first line springs in part from the fact that the custom is not elsewhere spoken of. The second line may pass. The third defies literal translation. It means 'no long tongues thrust out like the tongue of a thirsty Apulian bitch'. But the omission of all mention both of 'protrusion' and of the 'dog days' makes the Latin almost ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... We cannot always press the words of the Lord to their utmost literal meaning. I suppose He used language a great deal as we do, to be taken at its face value, and not screwed and pressed and tortured into literal exactness until all the spirit is taken out of it? But these words sound ...
— The First Soprano • Mary Hitchcock
... shown himself far and away the ablest of the opposition Senators. He had as much intellect as any of them; and he had what theorists, such as he, usually lack, skill at "grand tactics"—the management of men in the mass. His one weakness—and that, from my standpoint, a great one—was a literal belief in democratic institutions and in the inspiring but in practice pernicious principle of exact ...
— The Plum Tree • David Graham Phillips
... volume, a considerable number of notes are introduced. These notes the compiler had some hesitation in inserting, from a feeling that many of them were mere literal explanations or illustrations, conveying generally but a very poor idea of the deeper meaning which the proverbs themselves are capable of yielding; and also in deference to opinions which have been expressed ...
— The Proverbs of Scotland • Alexander Hislop
... from among literal hundreds and thousands, and they were cared for far more tenderly than the masters cared for themselves. There was a reason in it, for upon their speed and endurance depended the life of the outlaw. Moreover, the policy of Jim Boone was ...
— Riders of the Silences • John Frederick
... distinguished medical director in that department, equally distinguished for the success with which he has led forward the musical education of New England, trained a corps of buglers to converse with each other by long and short bugle-notes, and thus to carry information with literal accuracy from point to point at any distance within which the tones of a bugle could be heard. It will readily be seen that there are many occasions in military affairs when such means of conversation might prove of inestimable value. Mr. Tuttle, the astronomer, on duty in the same campaign, ...
— The Man Without a Country and Other Tales • Edward E. Hale
... but the whole drawing lacks that individual something which we call Style. In the Lalanne drawings we see foliage convincingly represented by means of the mere outlines and a few subtle strokes of the pen. There is no attempt at the literal rendering of natural objects in detail, all is accomplished by suggestion: and while I do not wish to be understood as insisting upon such a severely simple style, much less upon the purist theory that the function ...
— Pen Drawing - An Illustrated Treatise • Charles Maginnis
... when he was in her visible presence; but now he thought he understood her better than he had ever done then. He had, he felt, not grasped the inner meaning of much that she said. Words might convey but little in their literal sense and yet give to a sympathetic listener an insight into the depths of the speaker's nature, or hint at a thought too finely spun ...
— Vane of the Timberlands • Harold Bindloss
... the Christian life be charity, gentleness, forgiveness, non-resistance to evil, then all war is a violation of the faith. The question is not unimportant. It is not a subject which you can toy with, or put aside as having no immediate bearing on life and duty. If the literal application of the teaching of Christ to social and political life be impossible, then the rationalists are right when they urge us to drop a religion which we profess on Sunday and repudiate on Monday. If the ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... contracts his hands, &c. 'Thallus manus contrahit, tu patronos.' The pun is (a) bad and (b) untranslatable into reasonably good English. The literal meaning is 'Thallus contracts his hands, ...
— The Apologia and Florida of Apuleius of Madaura • Lucius Apuleius
... I haven't upset his blamed theology," Reed objected. "I'm sound enough; I wouldn't upset a mouse. Ask Ramsdell if I've ever argued against his belief in the literal greening apple, 'a wee bit hunripe, sir,' upon ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... taste and execution, that the Dean expressed a desire to have them translated into English. Dr. Gore told him that the author, a Mr. Macgowran, lived at a little distance, and that he would be proud to furnish a literal translation of his own composition either in Latin or English, for he was well skilled in both languages. Mr. Gore accordingly sent for the bard, the Laureate of the Plains, as he called himself, who came immediately. "I am very well pleased," said the Dean, "with your composition. The ...
— Irish Wit and Humor - Anecdote Biography of Swift, Curran, O'Leary and O'Connell • Anonymous
... asuspicion aroused by the substitution of German customs and motif and word-play, together with contemporary literary allusion, allusion to literary mediocrities and obscurities, of such a nature as to preclude the possibility of the book's being a literal translation ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer
... said No—which was the literal truth—but then it would not have been the whole truth, for they knew quite well that Dolly had been milked, and also who had done it. And their mother had always taught them that to make a person believe a lie is nearly as bad as telling him one. ...
— The Adventures of A Brownie - As Told to My Child by Miss Mulock • Miss Mulock
... dissent from that view. So far as Poetry attempts to improve on truth in that way, so far it abandons truth, and is false to itself. Even literal facts, exactly as they were, a great poet will prefer whenever he can get them. Shakespeare in the historical plays is studious, wherever possible, to give the very words which he finds to have been used; and it shows how wisely he was guided in this, that those magnificent speeches of Wolsey ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... these days, Letitia," said Billy, with the greatest innocence of mien and expression, a manner he always uses in speaking to Letitia's rather literal directness and in which he delights greatly. "They undress. You are unclothed enough as to ankles and if you roll the sleeves of your tennis shirt to your shoulders, take off your collar and tuck in the ...
— The Heart's Kingdom • Maria Thompson Daviess
... love of God. In this state a man can distinguish truth from falsehood, pure gold from base metal, in matters of belief; he can see the connexion of the various dogmas, and their harmony with reason; and in reading Scripture he can penetrate beneath the literal to the spiritual meaning. But when Clement speaks of reason or knowledge, he does not mean merely intellectual training. "He who would enter the shrine must be pure," he says, "and purity is to think holy things." And again, "The more a man loves, the more deeply ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... the while Karl Steinmetz was storming in his guttural English at the door, upbraiding hired waiters for their stupidity in accepting two literal facts literally. The one fact was that they were forbidden to admit any one without a ticket; the second fact being that tickets were not to be obtained at the price of either one or the other of the two great motives ...
— The Sowers • Henry Seton Merriman
... Biblical criticism, have been largely accepted among the most educated clergy. Very few of them would now deny the antiquity of the world, the antiquity of man, or the antiquity of death, or would maintain that the Mosaic cosmogony was a true and literal account of the origin of the globe and of man, or would very strenuously argue either for the Mosaic authorship or the infallibility of ...
— The Map of Life - Conduct and Character • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... rather a nice cottage when it's launched," said the Captain, pointing to a building in process of erection, which stood so close to the edge of the Thames that its being launched seemed as much a literal allusion ...
— Rivers of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... find an explanation unnecessary, for to a fool everything is right, and he finds no difficulty anywhere. And if a really wise man reads them, there will be but two ways in which he will consider them. If he takes them in their literal sense and thinks them bad, he will say, This is foolishness, and in so doing he says nothing at all against the foundation of the faith." The School of Shammai, who lived before Christ, and the School ...
— Hebrew Literature
... borrow from all science, and from every phase of nature, the associations and images which he wants; and he showed that those images and associations did not lose their poetry by being expressed with the most literal reality. ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... the bull by the horns in a literal as well as figurative sense, the lad began gradually to develop into that terrible embodiment of unrest—a boy. He exhibited no very marked peculiarities up to this time to distinguish him from other youths; but just grew into the conglomerate mass of good, bad and indifferent ...
— Sword and Pen - Ventures and Adventures of Willard Glazier • John Algernon Owens
... definite repetitions on various degrees of the scale.[18] For an elaborate example of Transposition nothing can surpass the opening movement of Cesar Franck's D Minor Symphony, the entire first part of which consists of a literal repetition in F minor of what has been previously announced in ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... part of this little fracas is the denial of his Lordship, as to pilfering the thoughts and fancies of others; for it so happens, that the first passage of The Bride of Abydos, the poem in question, is almost a literal and unacknowledged translation from Goethe, which was pointed out in some of the periodicals soon after the ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... to keep within the license accorded to them, we must compel the prisoners to accept whatever injustice or outrage the unrestrained despots of the ranges have the whim to inflict upon them. There are desperate revolts at times—desperate in the literal sense, since they have no hope of relief in them, but only the tragic rage against tyranny which will sometimes blaze up in victims—and on the other hand there are officials who will resign their positions rather than connive at abuses. But every means is taken to ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... "The literal meaning of the word is 'cultivable land.' As to its appropriateness, you can judge for yourselves. I do not know who bestowed upon it this misfit of a name, but it must have been a hardy explorer, who did it in a ...
— Doctor Jones' Picnic • S. E. Chapman
... took the oath required of them, and the king at once displayed the utmost zeal in exacting literal performance of the ordinances contained in the Book of the Law. His first step was to purify the temple: Hilkiah and his priests overthrew all the idols contained in it, and all the objects that had been fashioned in honour of strange gods—the ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 8 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... good Mademoiselle Cormon," which, from the lips of the beaux esprits of society, means that she was as ignorant as a carp, and rather a poor fool; but many persons of her own calibre took the remark in its literal sense, ...
— An Old Maid • Honore de Balzac
... in contact with them. But that individuals, and even families, of extraordinary stature and strength existed in the earliest ages cannot be denied, except by those who regard the narrative of Scripture as equally fabulous with the fictions of the poets; although the statements are literal and exact, occur in a variety of incidental notices, and are confirmed by discoveries related by authors of ...
— Rambles in the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia - with Notices of their History, Antiquities, and Present Condition. • Thomas Forester
... seizing her plump hand, pressed it to his lips with all the violence of real transport. The nymph, whose passions nature had filled to the brim, could not hear such a rhapsody unmoved. Being an utter stranger to addresses of this kind, she understood every word of it in the literal acceptation; she believed implicitly in the truth of the encomiums he had bestowed, and thought it reasonable he should be rewarded for the justice he had done to her qualifications, which had hitherto been almost altogether ...
— The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, Complete • Tobias Smollett
... consciousness. And if the fugitive elements want to venture forth they must be correspondingly disguised, in order to pass the censor. Freud calls this disguising or paraphrasing process the dream disfigurement. The literal is thereby displaced by the figurative, an allusion intimated through a nebulous atmosphere. Thus, in the following example, an unconscious death wish is exhibited. In the examination of a lady's dream it struck me that the motive of ...
— Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts • Herbert Silberer
... political picture was a joking, profligate, careless king, nominally absolute—the heads of great houses paying court to, but in reality governing, that king, whilst revelling with him on the plunder of a nation, and a set of crouching, grovelling vassals (the literal meaning of vassal is a wretch), who, after allowing themselves to be horsewhipped, would take a bone if flung to them, and be grateful; so that in love with mummery, though he knew what Christianity was, no wonder he admired such a church as that ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... Hellenic influence. The Hindu astronomical terminology reveals the same relationship to western thought, for Var[a]ha-Mihira (6th century A.D.), a contemporary of [A]ryabha[t.]a, entitled a work of his the B[r.]hat-Sa[m.]hit[a], a literal translation of [Greek: megale suntaxis] of Ptolemy;[306] and in various ways is this interchange of ideas apparent.[307] It could not have been at all unusual for the ancient Greeks to go to India, ...
— The Hindu-Arabic Numerals • David Eugene Smith
... obscenities of Zola, whereat Ouida protested that they were alike in their complacent preoccupation with mere filth. The Frenchman is the sounder critic, it must be said, for while d'Annunzio frequently parallels some of the most unclean—in the literal, not the moral sense—scenes and incidents in Zola, his attitude about sex is as unlike Zola's as that of the late W. D. Howells. Only in "Nana" did Zola describe the life and emotions of a woman whose whole life is given up to love, and then, as we know, he chose a singularly ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... not have been right to break up the company. When Don Quixote, carried away by his feelings like a Sicilian facchino, came to the assistance of Don Gayferos by drawing his sword and attacking the Moorish puppets, he broke up Master Peter's company in a very literal sense, and had to pay four and a half reals for King Marsilio of Saragossa and five and a quarter for the Emperor Carlo Magno; but it is not clear how large or how splendid ...
— Diversions in Sicily • H. Festing Jones
... if you had told him so; but it is a literal fact that he almost never addressed his daughter save in the ironical form. Whenever he addressed her he gave her pleasure; but she had to cut her pleasure out of the piece, as it were. There were portions left over, light remnants ...
— Washington Square • Henry James
... day in the Nineteenth century that one comes in contact with a human being who has had to submit to the "ordeal by fire" in this literal mediaeval fashion; who has endured perils, insults, physical privations and torments, coupled with intense and ceaseless anxiety for years; and this in extreme youth before the troubles and difficulties of life have more gradually and gently taught the lessons of endurance ...
— The Idler Magazine, Vol III. May 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... completely his own way. He was too robustly original to "transcribe" well, and his bold emphatic speech, curbed to the task of reproducing the choice and pregnant sobriety of Attic style, is apt to eliminate everything but the sobriety. The "transcribed" Greek is often yet flatter than "literal" versions of Greek verse are wont to be, and when Browning speaks in his own person the style recovers itself with a sudden and vehement bound, like a noble wild creature abruptly released from restraint. Among the finest of these ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... a treasure of Greek learning: history and fable, philosophy and grammar, were alike at his command; and he read the poems of Homer in the schools of Florence. It was from his explanation that Boccace composed [* and transcribed a literal prose version of the Iliad and Odyssey, which satisfied the thirst of his friend Petrarch, and which, perhaps, in the succeeding century, was clandestinely used by Laurentius Valla, the Latin interpreter. It was from his narratives that the same Boccace collected the materials for his treatise ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... those of the original letters. But it is not surprising that, after the lapse of so long an interval, Napoleon's memory should somewhat have failed him. However, it will not, I presume, be deemed unimportant if I present to the reader literal copies of this correspondence; together with the explanation of some curious circumstances ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... boiled, I made porridge and coffee; and that, beyond the literal drawing of water, and the preparation of kindling, which it would be hyperbolical to call the hewing of wood, ended my domestic duties for the day. Thenceforth my wife laboured single-handed in the palace, and I lay ...
— The Silverado Squatters • Robert Louis Stevenson
... time, moreover, in trying to bring within the four corners of his definition some uses of the terms of beauty, which are really only applied to objects by way of analogy, and are not meant to predicate the beautiful in any literal or scientific sense. ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... toisi epesi poieon}: "even in the verses which he composed," in which he might be expected as a poet to go somewhat beyond the literal truth.] ...
— The History Of Herodotus - Volume 1(of 2) • Herodotus
... the excitement of ineffable and horrid joy, they whip him round the circle, that he may expose each part of his body to the flame, while the other part is fanned by the cool air, that he may thus undergo the literal operation of slow roasting. During this abhorrent process, the children fill the circle in convulsions of laughter; and the women begin to thrust their burning torches into his body, lacerating the quick of the ...
— The First White Man of the West • Timothy Flint
... In other places it was necessary to omit or to condense passages. Wherever this is done attention is called to it in the notes. The chief omission is a portion of the section on dialects. Otherwise the translation is practically literal. Additional bibliography of psychological and criminological works likely to be generally ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... with the STORY OF SIEGFRIED, still another version of the time-honored legend. The story as I shall tell it you is not in all respects a literal rendering of the ancient myth; but I have taken the liberty to change and recast such portions of it as I have deemed advisable. Sometimes I have drawn materials from one version of the story, sometimes from another, and sometimes largely from my own imagination alone. Nor shall I be accused of ...
— The Story of Siegfried • James Baldwin
... speak to him with diffidence. Courtiers, submissive in the presence of their sovereign, are only the more ready to caricature him; with little good breeding, they called those answers they so much dreaded, Les coups de boutoir du Roi.—[The literal meaning of the phrase "coup de boutoir," is a thrust from the ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... mischiefs, its foulness. In one shape or another it meets us at every turn; it is never absent; it is the motive and stimulant of the whole activity of the poem. The picture of life held up before us is the literal ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church
... particular eviction was not in strict conformity with the landlord's right. Mr. Morley offered to consider the question of right, and added that what was much wanted in Ireland was 'a strict and scrupulous and literal spirit of legality.' Later on the same evening, Mr. Dillon made a vigorous appeal to the Chief Secretary not to give the aid of armed force to carry out evictions. Mr. Morley responded with alacrity. 'I for one am ...
— The Quarterly Review, Volume 162, No. 324, April, 1886 • Various
... is well to use the word "informal" in the invitation, that guests may not put themselves to inconvenience as regards dress. It must be remembered that this term is too often misleading in its nature, and many a sensitive guest has been seriously annoyed by finding herself, after a too literal interpretation of the "informal" character of the entertainment, in a crowd of gay butterflies, a misuse of the word that ...
— Social Life - or, The Manners and Customs of Polite Society • Maud C. Cooke
... dull serving folk," she said to those nearest her. "One cannot pay for wit with wages and livery. They can but obey the literal word. Sir John, leaving me in haste this morning, I forgot a question I would have asked, and sent ...
— A Lady of Quality • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... support the Constitution. But he believed that the Constitution should be interpreted in the light of the Declaration of Independence, so as to be the law of life to a great, powerful and free people. To this principle of interpretation, all strict or narrow criticism, founded on its literal meaning, must yield. ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... it's in mine mouf," answered literal Demi, putting out his tongue, with a chocolate drop on it, thinking she alluded ...
— Little Women • Louisa May Alcott
... passengers. No second cabin, but plenty of steerage. She sailed, you remember, from Naples. He had been doing some work, some very important work, in the Aquarium. The only other person of consequence—I am speaking in the most literal and un-snobbish sense—in the first cabin, was Benson. No" (with a lifted hand), "don't interrupt me. Benson, as we all know, was an international figure. But Benson was getting old. His son could be trusted to carry on the House of Benson. In fact, every one suspected that the son ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... his own, during the undertaking; but it is probable that these examinations were the result rather of the contradictory versions already existing, than of a desire to make a perfect transcript of the original. And in those days, what is called literal translation was less cultivated than at present. If something like the general sense could be decorated with the easy gracefulness of a practised poet; if the charms of metrical cadence and a pleasing fluency could be made consistent ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... terms 'increase' and 'diffusion' should receive literal interpretation in accordance with the evident intention of the testator; that such terms being logically distinct, the two purposes mentioned in the bequest were to be kept in view in the organization of the institution; that the increase of ...
— Something of Men I Have Known - With Some Papers of a General Nature, Political, Historical, and Retrospective • Adlai E. Stevenson
... code is founded on that of Austria. The civil code is a localized modification of the Code Napoleon. The first translation of the latter code was almost literal, and made without reference to the manners and historical antecedents of Servia: some of the blunders in it were laughable:—Hypotheque was translated as if it had been Apotheke, and made out to be a depot of drugs! When the translator was asked for the reason of this extraordinary ...
— Servia, Youngest Member of the European Family • Andrew Archibald Paton
... your readers oblige me by giving me either a literal or poetical translation of the following lines, taken from Foulis, Rom. Treasons, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 190, June 18, 1853 • Various
... the Body. Intelligent people who are also reverent and good, in their anxiety to be faithful to the letter of dogma as well as to its spirit, prefer to cling to these words rather than confess, what is quite certain, that an absolutely literal sense was attached to these words by the framers of them; they were scientifically ignorant of the fact that matter is disintegrated and disseminated so rigorously that there may be component particles of a hundred of his predecessors in one human body now existent. No symbolical interpretation ...
— Memoirs of Arthur Hamilton, B. A. Of Trinity College, Cambridge • Arthur Christopher Benson
... Swiss scenery until he can place himself front to front with one of those mighty crags, in broad daylight, with no "effect" to aid him, and work it out, boss by boss, only with such conventionality as its infinitude renders unavoidable. We have seen that a literal facsimile is impossible, just as a literal facsimile of the carving of an entire cathedral front is impossible. But it is as vain to endeavor to give any conception of an Alpine cliff without minuteness of detail, and ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... of the Italian subject Cerruti against the Republic of Colombia, differences arose between the parties to the arbitration in regard to the scope and extension of the award, of which certain articles were contested by Colombia, while Italy claimed their literal fulfillment. The award having been made by the President of the United States, as an act of friendly consideration and with the sole view to an impartial composition of the matter in dispute, I could not but feel deep concern at such a miscarriage, and while unable to accept ...
— Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents • William McKinley
... into existence with the establishment of the American Union—the one founded on the sovereignty of the States and the continuance of slavery was espoused by the hot-blooded citizens of the South; the other, upon the literal construction of the Declaration of Independence, that "all men are created free and equal," and the supremacy of the general government over States Rights, and this was the slogan of the cool, calculating, but equally brave people ...
— History of Kershaw's Brigade • D. Augustus Dickert
... of fortune that fixed Ann Arbor as the location of the University of Michigan. A literal interpretation of history may suggest that politics and speculation had their share in the selection of the site, but these factors might have operated quite as easily in favor of some other Michigan village. The fact remains ...
— The University of Michigan • Wilfred Shaw
... "Heptameron," Crebillon fils, or of matter-of-fact Monsieur le Docteur Maitre Rabelais,—works which, more or less, carry a moral instruction in every tale, which, like the tales of the "Malice of Women," in the unexpurged edition of the literal translation of the "Arabian Nights," contains much more of practical moral lessons, even if in the flowery and warm, spiced language of the Orient, than any supposed nastiness, on account of which they are classed among ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... inward man, And outward, like a clan and clan, Have always been at daggers-drawing, And one another clapper-clawing. 80 Not that they really cuff, or fence, But in a Spiritual Mystick sense; Which to mistake, and make 'em squabble In literal fray's abominable. 'Tis heathenish, in frequent use 85 With Pagans and apostate Jews, To offer sacrifice of bridewells, Like modern Indians to their idols; And mongrel Christians of our times, That expiate less with greater crimes, 90 And call the foul abomination, Contrition and mortification. ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler
... of his civilisation, the glory that was Greece. The credit of such random compilations as that which "E.S.S." and Mr. George Allen have just effected is quite secure. It is the pure, pedantic, literal editions, the complete works of this author or that author which are forgotten. It is such books as this that have revolutionised the destiny of the world. Great things like Christianity or Platonism have never ...
— Varied Types • G. K. Chesterton
... The literal meaning of the generic name is "Milk Flower." The title with such a pleasing reference was given by Linnaeus. The specific name—meaning white—may, for two reasons, seem unnecessary; first, because milk ...
— Hardy Perennials and Old Fashioned Flowers - Describing the Most Desirable Plants, for Borders, - Rockeries, and Shrubberies. • John Wood
... brings with him when he tells us the impossible. And then his style, in its ardent and luminous simplicity, flexible to every bend of the spirit which it clothes with flesh, helps him in the idiomatic translation of dreams. The visions of Swedenborg are literal translations of the imagination, and need to be retranslated. Coleridge is equally faithful to the thing seen and to the laws of that new world into which he ...
— Poems of Coleridge • Coleridge, ed Arthur Symons
... its prayers." This caution is intended as a reply to a sagacious critic who censures the description, because it is not an exact and prosaic inventory of the characteristics of the Lake of Como!—When Melnotte, for instance, talks of birds "that syllable the name of Pauline" (by the way, a literal translation from an Italian poet), he is not thinking of ornithology, but probably of the Arabian Nights. He is venting the extravagant, but natural, enthusiasm of ...
— The Lady of Lyons - or Love and Pride • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... more treasures than were ever dreamed of in ancient Golconda. There was everything the soldier's heart might desire, from gun grease and cigarette paper down to wine and provisions; the whole stored away in a literal honey-comb of shelves and drawers with which the ...
— With Those Who Wait • Frances Wilson Huard |
