"Marco Polo" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Not many centuries ago the country of northern China was one of the most fertile and beautiful spots in the entire world, and was heavily forested. We know this not only from the old Chinese records, but from the accounts given by the traveler, Marco Polo. He, for instance, mentions that in visiting the provinces of Shansi and Shensi he observed many plantations of mulberry trees. Now there is hardly a single mulberry tree in either of these provinces, and the culture of the silkworm has moved farther south, to regions ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... comparatively modern times, Asia seems to be the home of its descendants. The Tartars have been called the troubadours of Asia—and of Asia in the widest sense of the word—penetrating into the heart of the Caucasus on the west and reaching through the country eastward to the shores of the Yellow Sea. Marco Polo, the celebrated Venetian traveller, and M. Huc, a French missionary to China and Thibet, as well as Spencer, Atkinson, and many others, speak of the wandering bards of Asia. Marco Polo's account of how Jenghiz Kahn, the great Mongol conqueror, sent an expedition composed ...
— Critical & Historical Essays - Lectures delivered at Columbia University • Edward MacDowell
... world, he was in search of a western route to Cathay and India, whence he expected to bring back, if not treasures of gold and gems, intelligence of the wonderful land Marco Polo had described. It was not until long after the discovery of the continents of North and South America, that it was ascertained that a new region, broad as the Atlantic, lay between the ocean and the Indian Sea, as the Pacific was then called. So deep-rooted was this belief that the French colonists ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 6 June 1848 • Various
... twentieth century, to which the uttermost parts of the earth are revealed, and with only the undiscovered poles left to lure us on, we cannot fully appreciate the geographical ignorance of the Middle Ages. The travels of Marco Polo had only lately revealed the wonders of the golden East, and in the West the Pillars of Hercules marked earth's furthest bound. Beyond lay the mare tenebrosum, the Mysterious Sea, girding the level world. England was not then one of the first nations ...
— Old Quebec - The Fortress of New France • Sir Gilbert Parker and Claude Glennon Bryan
... the "Father of Lies"; in the published speeches of Cicero and the biographies of Suetonius; in Tacitus at his best; in Pliny's Natural History; in Hanno's Periplus; in all the early chronicles; in the Lives of the Saints; in Froissart and Sir Thomas Malory; in the travels of Marco Polo; in Olaus Magnus, and Aldrovandus, and Conrad Lycosthenes, with his magnificent Prodigiorum et Ostentorum Chronicon; in the autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini; in the memoirs of Casanova; in Defoe's History of the Plague; ...
— Intentions • Oscar Wilde
... at life from a stationary standpoint. There is a certain lack of the historic sense in all he has written. The ethical assumption that all men are exactly alike permeates his work. In his mind, Socrates, Marco Polo, and General Jackson stand surrounded by the same atmosphere, or rather stand as mere naked characters surrounded by no atmosphere at all. He is probably the last great writer who will fling about classic anecdotes as if they were club gossip. ...
— Emerson and Other Essays • John Jay Chapman
... Paolo Toscanelli, definitely encouraged the conviction Columbus had formed from his reading of Marco Polo's descriptions of Cipango, Cathay, and the Grand Khan, that the lands might be reached by sailing west, and there was doubtless little the ancients had written concerning the existence of islands ...
— Bartholomew de Las Casas; his life, apostolate, and writings • Francis Augustus MacNutt
... of Japanese industrial arts we know but little. We have no record of the kind of furniture which Marco Polo found when he travelled in Japan in the thirteenth century, and until the Jesuit missionaries obtained a footing in the sixteenth century and sent home specimens of native work, there was probably very little of Japanese manufacture which found its way to ...
— Illustrated History of Furniture - From the Earliest to the Present Time • Frederick Litchfield
... Wonder what they're all"—He put back his cigar, mumbling. "Handful of poor blackguards, all upset in their minds, and sweating round. And all the rest tranquil as ever, eh?—the whole country jogging on the same old way, or asleep and dreaming dreams, perhaps, same kind of dreams they had in Marco Polo's day." ...
— Dragon's blood • Henry Milner Rideout
... I saw in any part of China is that of the Sages. In it we were shown tolerably good busts of five hundred of the most famous characters known to Chinese history—all the writers, statesmen, and rulers who have distinguished themselves for thousands of years. Among them, curiously enough, Marco Polo has by some means found a place. Compared with the hideous monsters worshipped in other temples, I regarded this deification of the illustrious dead with sincere satisfaction. No man can erect a house superior to what his rank or station in life ...
— Round the World • Andrew Carnegie
... has lost its meaning, for we now travel by rail, and life is expressed in terms of the railway time-table. As has been said, we leave and arrive at places, but we no longer travel. Consequently we cannot understand the hubbub that Marco Polo must have caused among his townsmen when he swaggered in. He and his crew were bronzed by the sun, were dressed as Tartars, and could speak their native Italian with difficulty. To convince the Venetians of their identity, Marco gave a magnificent entertainment, at ...
— Journeys to Bagdad • Charles S. Brooks
... dynasty of Mongols passed away—their strength sapped by confinement to walled cities because their power was only on the tented field. Ser Marco Polo, that audacious traveller, never tires of telling of the magnificence of the Mongol Khans and their resplendent courts. It requires no Marco Polo to assure us that the thirteenth century of the Far East was immeasurably in advance of the thirteenth century of Europe. ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... in my case, in its original form; for it was not until after I had seen a large portion of the earth, that I became acquainted with the narratives of my predecessors, and recognized my kinship with them. With the ghost of the mercantile Marco Polo, or those of the sharp fellows, Bernier and Tavernier, I do not anticipate much satisfaction, in the next world; but—if they are not too far off—I shall shake hands at once with the old monk Rubruquis, and the ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various
... who had invented this way of causing loud explosions, for, according to Marco Polo, the Tartars have employed it for many centuries to drive away from their encampments the formidable ...
— The Mysterious Island • Jules Verne
... celebrated travellers of the middle ages, was Marco Polo: he, his father, and uncle, after trading for some time in many of the commercial and opulent cities of Lesser Asia, reached the more eastern parts of that continent, as far as the court of the great khan, on the borders of China. For 26 years they were either ...
— Robert Kerr's General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 18 • William Stevenson
... Orientalist, born at Inveresk, Mid-Lothian; was an officer in Bengal Engineers, and engaged in surveys in the East; was president of the Royal Asiatic Society; wrote numerous articles for Asiatic societies; his two great works, "The Book of Marco Polo the Venetian" and the "Anglo-Indian Glossary," known by its other title ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... Marco Polo, the famous traveler of the thirteenth century, makes reference to the burning jets of the Caucasus, and those fires are known to the Russians as continuing in existence since the army of Peter the Great ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 497, July 11, 1885 • Various |
