"Prescriptive" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... two they hesitated. Lisle had, straining his new authority to the utmost, asked them a very hard thing, for in their regard some degree of luxury was less an accidental favor than a prescriptive right. Then Bella took up a long garment and with a little resolute ...
— The Long Portage • Harold Bindloss
... of these men lived when men "had not had time to forget" the difficulties of government: we have forgotten them altogether. We reckon as the basis of our culture upon an amount of order, of tacit obedience, of prescriptive governability, which these philosophers hoped to get as a principal result of their culture; we take without thought as a datum what they hunted as ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... to the youngsters at a farthing the puff. Albert when under age had instituted the puff, and when over it had organized the tariff. By the puff-a-farthing method the cigarettes could not be confiscated, for they belonged only to those who had a prescriptive right to them, while the puffers, with a little cunning, were able ...
— Boy Woodburn - A Story of the Sussex Downs • Alfred Ollivant
... which he might think proper to pay, must have been imputed by all parties to the lingering superstitions of custom, to involuntary habit, to court dissimulation, or to the decencies of external form, and the prescriptive reverence of ancient names. But neither senate nor people could enforce their claims, whatever they might happen to be. Their sanction and ratifying vote might be worth having, as consecrating what was already secure, and conciliating the scruples of the weak ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... on it by the last Abbess, and every direct male heir expires punctually on his twenty-first birthday. The actual agency is a poisoned ring concealed in the frame of a portrait of the malevolent Abbess and is in the custody of the Otway family, who enjoy a prescriptive if nebulous right to be stewards of the property. Just how or why the Otways—noble fellows, we are given to understand—carry out the deceased Abbess's nefarious wishes with such precision and despatch is not explained. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, April 23, 1919 • Various
... no such thing as rank and station which impose a sort of prescriptive style on people of certain income. The consequence is that all sorts of furniture and belongings, which in the Old World have a recognized relation to certain possibilities of income, and which require certain other accessories to make them ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... where half the income is consumed in the expenses of administration, it sinks to less than half a dollar. This low rate in Prussia and other German states is partly explained by the fact that a considerable proportion of the annual product of the wood is either conceded to persons claiming prescriptive rights, or sold, at a very small price, to the poor. Taking into account the capital invested in forest-land, and adding interest upon it, Pressler calculates that a pine wood, managed with a view ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... in danger of being led into any profound or fanciful speculations by the ignorant painters of the later schools of art. In their "Nativities," the ox and ass are not, indeed, omitted; they must be present by religious and prescriptive usage; but they are to be made picturesque, as if they were in the stable by right, and as if it were only a stable, not a temple hallowed to a diviner significance. The ass, instead of looking devoutly into the cradle, ...
— Legends of the Madonna • Mrs. Jameson
... man knows this when he signs the ship's articles. It is a part of the contract. Yet there has grown up in merchant vessels a series of customs, which have become a well-understood system, and have somewhat the force of prescriptive law. To be sure, all power is in the captain, and the officers hold their authority only during his will, and the men are liable to be called upon for any service; yet, by breaking in upon these usages, many difficulties have occurred on board ship, and even come into courts of justice, which ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... creatures, he had nevertheless ordained that as Dictator he should go scot-free. To have declined to pay for his absinthe or choucroute would have closed the Cafe Delphine in a student's face. He had a prescriptive right to the table under the lee of Madame Boin's counter, and the peg behind him was sacred to his green hat. To the students he was a mystery. No one knew where he lived, how he subsisted, what he had been. Various rumours filled ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... be under the necessity of advising with them, nor, according to an opinion long and ostentatiously proclaimed, was he in these early days under the smallest obligation to follow their advice after it had been given. This, however, was merely the prescriptive view, and it derived no sanction from the Constitutional Act itself, which incidentally refers to the Executive Council as being appointed "within such Province, for the affairs thereof." On the other hand, the Executive Councillors themselves ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... it may, here was a roomful. Not only Aunt Roxy and Aunt Ruey, who by a prescriptive right presided over all the births, deaths, and marriages of the neighborhood, but there was Captain Kittridge, a long, dry, weather-beaten old sea-captain, who sat as if tied in a double bow-knot, with his little fussy old wife, with a great Leghorn ...
— The Pearl of Orr's Island - A Story of the Coast of Maine • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... the procession commenced. First was raised on high the standard of the Dominican Order of Monks, for the Dominican Order were the founders of the Inquisition, and claimed this privilege, by prescriptive right. After the banner the monks themselves followed, in two lines. And what was the motto of their banner? "Justitia et Misericordia!" Then followed the culprits, to the number of three hundred, each with his godfather by his side, and his large wax candle lighted ...
— The Phantom Ship • Captain Frederick Marryat
... neither crops nor land. The dream of his exuberant life was to be a horse breeder, for which profession he had neither the capital nor the brains. His social and convivial instincts ever haled him townward, and a well-worn chair in Downey's bar-room was by prescriptive right the town seat of William Kenna, Esq., of the Township of Opulenta. Bill had three other good qualities besides his mighty fists. He was true to his friends, he was kind to the poor and he had great respect for his "wurd as a mahn." If he gave his "wurd as a mahn" ...
— The Preacher of Cedar Mountain - A Tale of the Open Country • Ernest Thompson Seton
... artist of that day possessed. He was a pupil of Paul Delaroche, and the German blood he had from his father gave him an imaginative element which the Englishman in him liberated entirely from the German prescriptive limitations, while there was just enough of the German poet in him to give his design a sentiment which was entirely lacking in the English figure painting of that day. He painted in both oil and water-color, with a facility of design I have never known surpassed, making ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... established church; but their zeal never makes them lose sight of the spoil of ignorance, which rapacious priests of superstitious memory have scraped together. No, wise in their generation, they venerate the prescriptive right of possession, as a strong hold, and still let the sluggish bell tingle to prayers, as during the days, when the elevation of the host was supposed to atone for the sins of the people, lest one reformation should lead to another, and the spirit kill the letter. These Romish customs have the ...
— A Vindication of the Rights of Woman - Title: Vindication of the Rights of Women • Mary Wollstonecraft [Godwin]
... the soft twilight of an eastern clime. Scarcely, therefore, had the reflective Franz walked a hundred steps beneath the interior porticoes of the ruin, than, abandoning Albert to the guides (who would by no means yield their prescriptive right of carrying their victims through the routine regularly laid down, and as regularly followed by them, but dragged the unconscious visitor to the various objects with a pertinacity that admitted of no appeal, beginning, as a matter of course, with the Lions' Den, and finishing ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... little novelty, to pay a fifty-times-repeated visit (where our individual faces would be as well known to the warden as those of his own charges) to the lions in the Tower, to whose levee, by courtesy immemorial, we had a prescriptive ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... between three and four miles when that prescriptive comfort and relief to wanderers in woods—a distant light—broke at last upon her searching eyes. It was so very small as to be almost sinister to a stranger, but to her it was what she sought. She pushed forward, and the dim outline of a ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... is about to do. "Go ye therefore into the highways,"—the public places of resort, as well the city's streets as the roads that traverse the country,—"and as many as ye shall find, bid to the marriage." In the first instance the invitation was limited to the class who had a prescriptive right to appear at court; when these by their perversity had excluded themselves, the king in his sovereignty extended the invitation generally to the common people,—to persons who previously possessed no right of admission, but who obtained the right then and ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... night to the club, and was surprised to find his seat occupied by a tall dark-browed man, who smoked a meerschaum of prodigious size in solemn silence. Numerous hints were thrown out to the stranger that the seat had by prescriptive right and ancient custom become the property of my uncle; he either did not or would not understand them, and continued to keep his possession of the leather-backed chair with the most imperturbable sang-froid. My uncle in despair took another seat, and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... take down the company's dam for the benefit of agriculture. An old saw-mill, which can only run a few days in a Spring freshet, often swamps a half-township of land, because somebody's great-grandfather had a prescriptive right to flow, when lands were of no value, and ...
— Farm drainage • Henry Flagg French
... now generally acknowledged to be the most cosmopolitan of modern times; and a native of this country, all things being equal, is likely to form a less prescriptive idea of other nations than the inhabitants of countries whose neighborhood and history unite to bequeathe and perpetuate certain fixed notions. Before the frequent intercourse now existing between Europe ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... vol. iii. p. 459, &c.—Manso observes that this division was conducted not in a violent and irregular, but in a legal and orderly, manner. The Barbarian, who could not show a title of grant from the officers of Theodoric appointed for the purpose, or a prescriptive right of thirty years, in case he had obtained the property before the Ostrogothic conquest, was ejected from the estate. He conceives that estates too small to bear division paid a third of their produce.—Geschichte des ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon |
