"Thomas More" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... about 1526 or 1527, when he must have been thirty-one or thirty-two years of age, and repaired to Chelsea to the house of Sir Thomas More, to whom the painter brought a letter of introduction, and still better credentials in the present, from Erasmus to More, of the portrait of Erasmus, painted by Hans Holbein. There are so many portraits and copies of portraits ...
— The Old Masters and Their Pictures - For the Use of Schools and Learners in Art • Sarah Tytler
... unmolested, he devoted himself for five years to social and historical research. He returned to France in 1839 and in the following year published his Voyage en Icarie, a book that at once took its place by the side of Sir Thomas More's Utopia. Cabet pictured in his volume an ideal society where plenty should be a substitute for poverty and equality a remedy for class egoism. So great was the cogency of his writing that Icaria became more than a mere vision to hundreds ...
— Our Foreigners - A Chronicle of Americans in the Making • Samuel P. Orth
... for many years Rector of Welwyn; his son was visited there by Boswell and Dr. Johnson. Macaulay was at school at Aspenden. John Scott, the Quaker poet, lived at Amwell; Lee, the dramatist, was born at Hatfield. Skelton probably stayed at Ashridge just before the Dissolution of the Monasteries; Sir Thomas More lived awhile at Gobions, North Mimms. Cowper was born at Berkhampstead. The county has been immortalised by Walton and Lamb ...
— Hertfordshire • Herbert W Tompkins
... probably have been shorter than it was, for the work is, with all its humour, a very bitter satire against both the Roman Church and the Calvinistic. Rabelais is one of the very great French writers and humourists whose work is closely connected with English literature. But what he borrowed from Sir Thomas More, he generously repaid to Shakespeare, Swift, and Sterne. The famous Abbey of Thelema is inspired by More's "Utopia"; on the other hand, Shakespeare's praise of debt is taken from the speech of Panurge—the most humorous character in French literature, ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VII • Various
... punish the flesh, which was adopted as a compensation for long penitential fasts. Three thousand lashes, with the recital of thirty psalms, were a redemption of a canonical penance of one year's continuance. Sir Thomas More, St. Francis of Sales, and others, testify that such means of mortification are great helps to tame the flesh, and inure it to the labors of penance; also to remove a hardness of heart and spiritual dryness, and to soften the soul into compunction. But ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... description, full of puns and comic songs, and they had had a fair success, but my best piece had been a treatment of English history during the Reformation period, in the course of which I had introduced Cranmer, Sir Thomas More, Henry the Eighth, Catherine of Arragon, and Thomas Cromwell (in his youth better known as the Malleus Monachorum), and had made them dance a break-down. I had also dramatised "The Pilgrim's Progress" for a Christmas Pantomime, and made an important scene of Vanity Fair, ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... complex and incomprehensible aggregations of humanity as the United States of America or the British Empire. Humanly speaking, they both are impossible. Antecedently to experience the Constitution of Utopia as expounded by Sir Thomas More would be much more probable. It has a certain rational coherence. If it existed at all it would hang together, being made out of whole cloth. But how does the British Empire hold together? It seems to be made of shreds and patches. It ...
— Humanly Speaking • Samuel McChord Crothers
... Sir Thomas More advised an author, who had sent him his manuscript to read, "to put it in rhyme." Which being done, Sir Thomas said, "Yea, marry, now it is somewhat, for now it is rhyme; before it was neither ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett
... the positive ideals of the socialist Utopias have been sufficiently lauded by scores of writers from Sir Thomas More to Bellamy and Mr. H. G. Wells. What it is desired to emphasize here is the "negative and destructive" (from the standpoint of the established order) aspects of socialist ideals; for it is the Nihilism of Socialism ...
— Socialism: Positive and Negative • Robert Rives La Monte
... for example, the worst, or the best, of the Stuarts; and Louis the Sixteenth, of the Bourbons? Look, again, at the fate of Sir Thomas More, Bishop Fisher, and the hapless monks of the Charterhouse. Were they sinners above all who upheld the Romish system in England? Were they not rather among the righteous men who ought to have saved it, if it could have been ...
— Westminster Sermons - with a Preface • Charles Kingsley
... and all find genuine pleasure in that. In Utopia life is given to be a joy. No advantage is taken of the weak or the unfortunate. Twentieth-century dreams of social justice are not more vivid and absorbing than Sir Thomas More's. It is pleasant to think that the Roman Catholic church in 1886 added to her list of saints this lovable man, "martyr to faith ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... solemn than the thought of death, except its actual presence; but Theramenes was light-hearted when the hemlock bowl was presented to him, and drinking it off could not, as he threw out the dregs, resist exclaiming "To the health of the lovely Critias."[23] Sir Thomas More was jocose upon the scaffold. Baron Goerz, when being led to death, said to his cook—"It's all over now, my friend, you will never cook me a good supper again." The poet Kleist, who was killed in the battle of Kunersdorf, was seized with a violent fit of laughter just before he expired, when ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... am answering your questions correctly. Sir Thomas More professed to describe Utopia, which means No-place, and mentions a river Waterless. Don't look so desperately lofty. I will show you the book, if you are so incorrigibly stupid." He passed his arm round her as he spoke, and kept ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... "vaulter's sombersault?" Did he never hear of any little plunderer, climbing a wall, o'erreaching himself to pluck an apple, and falling on the other side, into the hands of the gardener? "By like," says Sir Thomas More, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 201, September 3, 1853 • Various
... embrace; More may be said to have represented the highest aim and effort of the 'new learning' in England. He is the flower of our Renaissance in genius, wisdom, and beauty of nature. 'When ever,' says Erasmus in a famous passage, 'did Nature mould a character more gentle, endearing, and happy, than Thomas More's?' ...
— The Visions of England - Lyrics on leading men and events in English History • Francis T. Palgrave
... and smells delicious. 12. Lord Darnley turned out a dissolute and insolent husband. 13. In the fable of the Discontented Pendulum, the weights hung speechless. 14. The brightness and freedom of the New Learning seemed incarnate in the young and scholarly Sir Thomas More. 15. Sir Philip Sidney lived and died the darling of the Court, and the gentleman ...
— Higher Lessons in English • Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg
... essays. Southey was as assailable as Mill. His political economy is a mere muddle; his political views are obviously distorted by accidental prejudices; and the whole book is desultory and disjointed. In a dialogue with the ghost of Sir Thomas More, he takes the opportunity of introducing descriptions of scenery, literary digressions, and quaint illustrations from his vast stores of reading to the confusion of all definite arrangement. Southey is in the awkward position of a dogmatist defending a compromise. ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... higher minds are much more akin than they are different: genius is of all ages, and there is perhaps more uniformity in excellence than in mediocrity. The sublimer intelligences of mankind—Plato, Dante, Sir Thomas More—meet in a higher sphere above the ordinary ways of men; they understand one another from afar, notwithstanding the interval which separates them. They are 'the spectators of all time and of all existence;' their works live for ever; and there is nothing to prevent ...
— Sophist • Plato
... part of the original revelation. It is difficult, impossible, to imagine, I grant;—but how is it difficult to believe? Yet Macaulay thought it so difficult to believe, that he had need of a believer in it of talents as eminent as Sir Thomas More, before he could bring himself to conceive that the Catholics of an enlightened age could resist "the overwhelming force of the argument against it." "Sir Thomas More," he says, "is one of the choice specimens of wisdom and virtue; and the doctrine ...
— Apologia Pro Vita Sua • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... is certainly not the cause of the Goodwin Sands, and the connection supposed to exist between them seems to have first occurred to some 'aged peasant' of Kent examined before Sir Thomas More as to the origin of the Goodwin Sands. But, as Captain Montagu Burrows, R.N., mentions in his most interesting book on the Cinque Ports, Tenterden Steeple was not built till 1462, and 'was not in the ...
— Heroes of the Goodwin Sands • Thomas Stanley Treanor
... religion has always been above all things; that they have always sacrificed to it whatever is dear to man on earth. They all seem to feel as instinctively and deeply as the thoroughly cultivated and superior mind of Thomas More did, that eternal things are infinitely superior to whatever is temporal, and that a wise man ought to give up every thing rather than ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... front is good; and a chapel, connected by two or three arches, which let the garden appear through, has a pretty effect; but the inside of the mansion is bad, and ill-furnished. Except a famous picture of Sir Thomas More's family, the portraits are rubbish, though celebrated. I am told that the Speaker, who really had a fine collection, made his peace by presenting them to Cornbury, where they were well known, till the Duke of Marlborough ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... are aware of the transitions and fluctuation, which our language experienced in the intermediate space comprised between Chaucer and Sir Thomas More; and still greater between Robert of Gloucester, 1278, and John Trevisa, or his contemporary Wickliffe, who died 1384, know, to a certainty, that the writers enumerated by Chatterton, without surmounting a physical impossibility, could not ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... Phrisia, Canterians, in Spayne Queene Elisabeth the wyfe of Fardinandus, out of whose familye there haue come forthe verye manye womenne bothe merueylouselye well learned and verteouse. Emong the englishe men, it greued not the ryght worshypful Thomas More, although beyng much occupyed in the kynges matters, to be a teacher to hys wyfe, daughters, and sonne, fyrste in vertue, and after to knowledge of Greke and Latine. Verely this ought to be done in those that we haue ...
— The Education of Children • Desiderius Erasmus
... marriage may be happy; nay, must be infallibly so. The union between two converted hearts is necessarily sweet and unutterable; without this there is no security." The new home consecrated by prayer—daily prayer—will become what that beautiful home of Sir Thomas More was—"a school and ...
— The Wedding Day - The Service—The Marriage Certificate—Words of Counsel • John Fletcher Hurst
... {5} marked by some towering leader, around whom other contemporary writers may be grouped. In Great Britain the several and successive periods might thus be well designated by such authors as Geoffrey Chaucer or John Wiclif, Thomas More or Henry Howard, Edmund Spenser or Sir Walter Raleigh, William Shakspere or Francis Bacon, John Milton or Jeremy Taylor, John Dryden or John Locke, Joseph Addison or Joseph Butler, Samuel Johnson or Oliver Goldsmith, William Cowper or John Wesley, Walter ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... orders expressly prohibiting the posthumous publication of his legal MSS., lest the sanctity of his name should be abused, to the destruction of those laws, of which he had been long the venerable and living image. An advocate of the present day need not absolutely withdraw (as Sir Thomas More is reported to have prudently done for a time) from his profession, because the crown had taken umbrage at his discharge of a public duty. It is, however, flattery and self-delusion to imagine that the lust of power and the weaknesses of human ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 332, September 20, 1828 • Various
... carefully circulated in Ireland that he had been beheaded, and that the destruction of the whole family was even then impending. Nor was there anything very improbable in this statement. The English King had already inaugurated his sanguinary career. One of the most eminent English laymen, Sir Thomas More, and one of her best ecclesiastics, Bishop Fisher, had been accused and beheaded, to satisfy the royal caprice. When the King's tutor and his chancellor had been sacrificed, who could hope ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack
... was over, and he had determined to remain loyal to his principles, Thomas More walked cheerfully to the block. His wife called him a fool for staying in a dark, damp, filthy prison when he might have his liberty by merely renouncing his doctrines, as some of the bishops had ...
— Architects of Fate - or, Steps to Success and Power • Orison Swett Marden
... necessity for change. Great names which in the ultimate challenge refused to destroy and helped to preserve—the greatest is that of Erasmus; great names which even appear in the roll of that of the Catholic martyrs—the blessed Thomas More is the greatest of these—must here be counted with the names of men like the narrow Calvin on the one hand, the large Rabelais upon the other. Not one ardent mind in the first half of the sixteenth century but ...
— Europe and the Faith - "Sine auctoritate nulla vita" • Hilaire Belloc
... Arden married John Middleton, son of Sir John Middleton, of Stockeld Park, co. Yorkshire ("Visitation of Essex," 1588). She afterwards became the second wife of Sir Thomas More, and her arms may be seen on the Chelsea tomb—Ermine a fesse chequy (Notes and Queries, 4th Series, iv. 61; ...
— Shakespeare's Family • Mrs. C. C. Stopes
... 286. 342.).—Sir Thomas More details in his Dialoge, with his usual quaintness, the attributes and merits of many saints, male and female, highly esteemed in his day, and, amongst others, makes special mention of St. Uncumber, whose proper name, it appears, was Wylgeforte. ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 53. Saturday, November 2, 1850 • Various
... announcement, he said, "After all, life has something serious in it. It cannot be all a Comic History of Humanity. Some men would, I believe, write the Comic Sermon on the Mount. Think of a Comic History of England! The drollery of Alfred! the fun of Sir Thomas More in the Tower! the farce of his daughter begging the dead head, and clasping it in her coffin, on her bosom! Surely the world will be sick of this blasphemy!" "The Comic History of England" appeared, notwithstanding, and was followed afterwards by the "Comic History ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... seem, however, to have extended themselves westward, and to have become tolerably numerous, in the earlier society of the sixteenth century, for Sir Thomas More, in a letter to his friend Dean Colet, speaking of a late walk in Westminster and of the various temptations to expenditure and dissipation which the neighbourhood then afforded, remarks: "Whithersoever ...
— Old Cookery Books and Ancient Cuisine • William Carew Hazlitt
... of history which is the occasion of this allusion is given in the quaint old English of Sir Thomas More, who thus describes the entrance to the Council of the terrible "Protector," from whom nothing good or sacred could be protected. He came "fyrste about IX of the clocke, saluting them curtesly, and excusing himself ...
— Success With Small Fruits • E. P. Roe
... proceeded from very different Motives, the Consciousness of a well-spent Life, and the prospect of a happy Eternity. If the ingenious Author above mentioned was so pleased with Gaiety of Humour in a dying Man, he might have found a much nobler Instance of it in our Countryman Sir Thomas More. ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... sense in which he uses words so wide as this. The philosophy which begins in pride, and concludes in malice, is indeed a fountain—though not the fountain—of woes, to mankind. But true philosophy such as Fenelon's or Sir Thomas More's, is a ...
— Love's Meinie - Three Lectures on Greek and English Birds • John Ruskin
... Life of Sir Thomas More, by William Roper, and his Letters to Margaret Roper and others. Edited, with Introduction and Notes, ...
— Horace • William Tuckwell
... way by more than one good-natured wayfarer, she reached the quiet, but shabby Chelsea street where Ferrier lived. The fog had drifted towards the river, and in the lamplight Agnes Barlow was not long in finding a large open door, above which was inscribed: "The Thomas More Studios." ...
— Studies in love and in terror • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... Thomas More] "not come begging for the clergy from purgatory, with his supplication of souls—nor the poor soul and proctor been there with his bloody bishop Christen catte, so far conjured into his ...
— Notes & Queries 1849.12.15 • Various
... to my mind, a deeper interest in the book than that which arises from its good-humoured flagellation of Persian peccadilloes. Just as no one who is unacquainted with the history and leading figures of the period can properly appreciate Sir Thomas More's "Utopia," or "Gulliver's Travels," so no one who has not sojourned in Persia, and devoted considerable study to contemporary events, can form any idea of the extent to which "Hajji Baba" is a picture of actual personages, and a record of veritable facts. It ...
— The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan • James Morier
... With letters to and from his famous daughter, Margaret Roper. Frontispiece, Portrait of Sir Thomas More, after Holbein. ...
— Sappho: One Hundred Lyrics • Bliss Carman
... almost contemptuously. That did not prevent Lady Anne from being one of the fairest and loveliest women of Old England. And, besides, much as she inclined to the new doctrine, she did us essential good service, for she it was who bore the blame of Thomas More's death. Since he had not approved her marriage with the king, she hated him, as the king hated him because he would not take the oath of supremacy. Henry, however, would have spared him, for, at that time, he still possessed some respect for learning and virtue, and ...
— Henry VIII And His Court • Louise Muhlbach
... true hero, after his capture, that he was worth more for hanging than any other purpose, reminds one, by its combination of wit, wisdom, and self-devotion, of Sir Thomas More. ...
— Autobiography • John Stuart Mill
... year 1500, while visiting Sir Thomas More in Eng-land, he took a few weeks off and wrote a funny little book, called the "Praise of Folly," in which he attacked the monks and their credulous followers with that most dangerous of all weapons, humor. The booklet was the ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon
... regarded as the 'captain' ('arhchegoz') or leader of a goodly band of followers; for in the Republic is to be found the original of Cicero's De Republica, of St. Augustine's City of God, of the Utopia of Sir Thomas More, and of the numerous other imaginary States which are framed upon the same model. The extent to which Aristotle or the Aristotelian school were indebted to him in the Politics has been little recognised, ...
— The Republic • Plato
... transubstantiation; that is, according to him, in the most ineffable nonsense. There is no certainty that men will not believe to the end of time the doctrines which imposed upon so able a man as Sir Thomas More. Not only, that is, have men been hitherto wandering in a labyrinth without a clue, but there is no chance that any clue will ever be found. The doctrine, so familiar to our generation, of laws of intellectual development, never even occurs to him. The ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... few minutes longer about Sir Thomas More, and Cromwell told the other what a quiet life the ex-Chancellor had led since his resignation of office, of his house at Chelsea, and the like, and of the decision that he had apparently come to not to mix ...
— The King's Achievement • Robert Hugh Benson
... so empty of causes, that Sir Thomas More could live in Chelsea, and yet very sufficiently discharge that office; and coming one day home by ten of the clock, whereas he was wont to stay until eleven or twelve, his lady came down to see whether he was sick or not; to whom ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 236, May 6, 1854 • Various
... in itself, is an indication of the changing public opinion, as is the fact that such legislation has already been enacted in two states, which are only now putting into action the recommendation made centuries ago by such social philosophers as Plato and Sir Thomas More. A sense of justice outraged by the wanton destruction of new-born children, may in time unite with that ardent tide of rising enthusiasm for the nurture of the young, until the old barriers of silence and inaction, ...
— A New Conscience And An Ancient Evil • Jane Addams
... the least terrible of these punishments, and perhaps the most common of all, was that of scourging demons out of the body of a lunatic. This method commended itself even to the judgment of so thoughtful and kindly a personage as Sir Thomas More, and as late as the sixteenth century. But if the disease continued, as it naturally would after such treatment, the authorities frequently felt justified in driving ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... of the word 'touch' is now obsolete. It refers to touching the seal on a deed, called sealing it; a solemn, deliberate pledge to keep close to your covenants. 'I keep touch with my promise.' Sir Thomas More.—Ed. ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... one Gerhard; conceived a disgust for monkish life during six years' residence in a monastery at Steyn; wandered through Europe and amassed stores of learning at various universities; visited Oxford in 1489, and formed a lifelong friendship with Sir Thomas More; was for some years professor of Divinity and Greek at Cambridge; edited the first Greek Testament; settled finally at Basel, whence he exercised a remarkable influence over European thought by the wit and tone of his writings, notably ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... Sir Thomas More, the King's Treasurer and Privy Councillor, sat in his garden at Chelsea above Westminster. He was correcting proofs, for he was a great scholar, and wrote on all the controversial questions of the day, religious and political, though he was essentially a man of peace, living in this suburb ...
— Historical Miniatures • August Strindberg
... Jews are especially condemned. . . . Our only hope is in God's grace." Lefevre's works opened up a new world to the theologians of the time. Erasmus's friend Beatus Rhenanus wrote that the richness of the Quintuplex Psalter made him poor. Thomas More said that English students owed him much. Luther used the two works of the Frenchman as the texts for his early lectures. From them he drew very heavily; indeed it was doubtless Lefevre who first suggested to him the formula of his ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... would have been gratified beyond measure, by the profound conversations of Grotius and Father Petau: but what a treat must it have been, to have assisted with one, two, or three good listeners, at the conversations between Erasmus and Sir Thomas More! ...
— The Life of Hugo Grotius • Charles Butler
... were met at St. George's Bar in Southwark by John Melborne,(1088) the mayor, accompanied by the high officers of the city, clothed in gowns of "pewke," each with a chain of gold about his neck.(1089) A "proposicioun" or address was made by Sir Thomas More, now under-treasurer of England, who was afterwards presented by the City with the sum of L10 towards a velvet gown,(1090) whilst other speeches made in the course of the procession were composed by Master Lilly,(1091) of Euphues ...
— London and the Kingdom - Volume I • Reginald R. Sharpe
... no doubt that many of those older writers who were "Socialists before Socialism," Plato, for instance, and Sir Thomas More, did very roundly abolish private property altogether. They were extreme Communists, and so were many of the earlier Socialists; in More's Utopia, doors might not be fastened, they stood open; one hadn't even a private room. These earlier writers wished to insist upon the need ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells
... which a different feeling would have harmonized better. Byron represents it as rising in extreme grief: it is, however, I suspect, greatly more common in extreme danger; and all the instances which the poet himself gives in his note—Sir Thomas More on the scaffold, Anne Boleyn in the Tower, and those victims of the French Revolution "with whom it became a fashion to leave some mot as a legacy"—were all jokers rather in circumstances of desperate and hopeless peril than of sorrow. It is, ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... a collection of portraits of illustrious individuals connected with the University, by Holbein, Vandyke, Kneller, Reynolds, Wilkie, and others. Among these are Henry VIII., the Earl of Surrey, and Sir Thomas More, by Holbein. Among the sculptures are a bust of the Duke of Wellington by Chantrey, and a brass statue of the Earl of Pembroke, Chancellor of the University from 1616 to 1630, which is said to have been executed ...
— Rides on Railways • Samuel Sidney
... caused by her declaration that should Henry persist in his intention of divorcing Catherine he "should no longer be king of this realm ... and should die a villain's death." Even such men as Fisher, bishop of Rochester, and Sir Thomas More, corresponded with Barton. On his return from France in 1532 Henry passed through Canterbury and is said to have allowed the nun to force herself into his presence, when she made an attempt to terrify him into abandoning ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... people to be ill educated, and their manners to be corrupted from their infancy, and then punish them for those crimes to which their first education disposed them—you first make thieves and then punish them.—SIR THOMAS MORE. ...
— Many Thoughts of Many Minds - A Treasury of Quotations from the Literature of Every Land and Every Age • Various
... accessory of the unpitying guillotine. Ay, sir, it was a judicial tribunal in England, surrounded by all the forms of law, which sanctioned every despotic caprice of Henry the Eighth, from the unjust divorce of his queen, to the beheading of Sir Thomas More; which lighted the fires of persecution that glowed at Oxford and Smithfield, over the cinders of Latimer, Ridley, and John Rogers; which, after elaborate argument, upheld the fatal tyranny of ship-money against the patriotic resistance of Hampden; which, ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... safe up, but for my coming down I can shift for myself," were the last words of Sir Thomas More when ascending the scaffold. ...
— The Handy Cyclopedia of Things Worth Knowing - A Manual of Ready Reference • Joseph Triemens
... subject of a work attributed to Sir Thomas More, and which almost certainly derives much of its information from Archbishop Morton. Whatever its historical worth may be, it is remarkable in its English form as the first historical work of any literary value which we possess written in our modern prose. The "Letters and Papers of ...
— History of the English People, Volume III (of 8) - The Parliament, 1399-1461; The Monarchy 1461-1540 • John Richard Green
... quartan fever, Which doth of physic make a mockery, The gout it cures, and helps ill breaths for ever, Whether the cause in teeth or stomach be; And though ill breaths were by it but confounded, Yet that vild[529] medicine it doth far excel, Which by Sir Thomas More[530] hath been propounded, For this is thought a gentleman-like smell. O, that I were one of these mountebanks Which praise their oils and powders which they sell! 30 My customers would give me coin with thanks; I for this ware, ...
— The Works of Christopher Marlowe, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Christopher Marlowe
... function of the Thames in the magnificent life of that village. The secret residence of Turner in Chelsea, under the strange alias of Admiral Booth, excited George's admiration; he liked the idea of hidden retreats and splendid, fanciful pseudonyms. But the master-figure of Chelsea for George was Sir Thomas More. He could see Sir Thomas More walking in his majestic garden by the river with the King's arm round his neck, and Holbein close by, and respectful august prelates and a nagging wife in the background. And he ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
... revolted him: but suffering to affect him must have been present to his sense. Was Henry VIII. gratuitously cruel? That does not appear. He took no pleasure for itself in shedding blood, and avoided being a witness of it. Had he been obliged to look on whilst Anne Boleyn and Sir Thomas More were bleeding, he probably would have spared them. He sacrificed them to his impulses from mere selfish indifference. With their wives and mistresses Henry VIII. and George IV. were governed by the same self-indulgent despotism—the same ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 545, May 5, 1832 • Various
... and entered into a long discourse, which Master Silas would at sundry times have interrupted, but that Sir Thomas more than once frowned upon him, even as he had frowned heretofore on young Will, who thus began ...
— Citation and Examination of William Shakspeare • Walter Savage Landor
... Catharine Mowbray. Their tomb is in the church too—that big carved monument in the side chapel. They had seven children—five sons and two daughters. The eldest son, Sir Godfrey Courtenay, married a relation of Sir Thomas More. Her name is mentioned in one of the ...
— The Manor House School • Angela Brazil
... of the Reformation (1509-1558). Classical, Theological, and Miscellaneous Literature: Sir Thomas More and others. Poetry: Skelton, Surrey, and Sackville; the Drama.—2. The Age of Spenser, Shakespeare, Bacon, and Milton (1558-1660). Scholastic and Ecclesiastical Literature. Translations of the Bible: Hooker, Andrews, Donne. Hall, Taylor, Baxter; other Prose Writers: Fuller, Cudworth, ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... objected, 'Thus have numberless reformers spoken and written, since the days of Sir Thomas More; and what has been proposed to mankind as a panacea for all suffering has always proved to be Utopian.' And I am willing to admit that the dread of being classed with the legion of authors of Utopian romances at first filled my mind with not a few qualms ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka
... Utopia Russia has given to the world to stand beside Plato's, or Sir Thomas More's or Morris's or Bellamy's. This was the dream ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... Ireland?—of an ejectment, where the wretched families turned out are obliged to sell their little all, and forced in a few days either to steal or go about begging? And yet the description which I have read is a description of England, by Sir Thomas More—a description of the England of his day.[200] And lest it should be considered highly coloured or fanciful, let it be recollected that there are accounts written by magistrates, in which it is stated that in every county there were 200 or 300 persons who lived by thieving—who went about, ...
— The History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847 (3rd ed.) (1902) - With Notices Of Earlier Irish Famines • John O'Rourke
... of Greeks and Romans, the most famous of his many writings, he took occasion to paint an Ideal Commonwealth as the conception of Lycurgus, the half mythical or all mythical Solon of Sparta. To Plutarch's Life of Lycurgus, as well as to Plato, Thomas More and others have been indebted for some part of the shaping of their ...
— Ideal Commonwealths • Various
... pleasaunt worke of the beste state of a publyque weale, and of the newe yle called Utopia: written in Latin by Syr Thomas More knyght, and translated into Englyshe by Raphe Robynson Citizein and Goldsmythe of London, at the procurement, and earnest request of George Tadlowe Citizein and Haberdassher of the same Citie. London. 1551. [Title-page and ...
— Roister Doister - Written, probably also represented, before 1553. Carefully - edited from the unique copy, now at Eton College • Nicholas Udall
... would tally precisely with what Ben Jonson tells us in his 'Discoveries,' under the head Dominus Verulamius, that 'his language (where he could spare or pass by a jest) was nobly censorious.' Sir Thomas More had the same proneness to merriment, a coincidence the more striking as both these great men were Lord Chancellors. A comic stroke of this description would have been highly attractive to a mind so constituted, ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 3, No. 16, February, 1859 • Various
... hero makes his appearance to use his great money-club to fell direr monsters than those which Hercules encountered, and by the creation of a city at once great, beautiful, and healthy to realize the conception of the Utopia and the dream of Sir Thomas More. Or take a parallel instance from the country. Those who have watched the issues of the co-operative system as applied to agriculture believe they see in it the future solution of two of our greatest social difficulties—those, we mean, which spring from the increasing ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... literature. His other plays, besides the two first named, were Eufemia di Messina; Iginia di Asti; Leoniero da Dordona, already named as having been thought out at Spielberg; his Gismonda; l'Erodiade; Ester d'Engaddi; Corradino; and a play upon Sir Thomas More. He wrote also poems, Cantiche, of which the best are Eligi e Valfrido and Egilde; and, in his last years, a religious manual on ...
— My Ten Years' Imprisonment • Silvio Pellico
... the fashion of writing lives of men of letters had not yet arisen. The art of biography could hardly be said to be even in its infancy, for the most notable early examples, such as the lives of Wolsey by Cavendish and of Sir Thomas More by his son-in-law in the sixteenth century, and Walton's handful in the seventeenth, are far from what the present age regards as scientific biography. The preservation of official records makes it possible for the modern scholar to reconstruct with considerable fullness ...
— The Facts About Shakespeare • William Allan Nielson
... originally written in English, such as the works of that very great philosopher Roger Bacon, of whom this isle ought to be prouder than it is. To this rule, however, I have been constrained to make a few exceptions. Sir Thomas More's Utopia was written in Latin, but one does not easily conceive a library to be complete without it. And could one exclude Sir Isaac Newton's Principia, the masterpiece of the greatest physicist that the world has ever seen? The law ...
— Literary Taste: How to Form It • Arnold Bennett
... advantages of Ireland. Surprising, indeed, that a policy, such as we have been describing, should not have converted the whole country into a perfect Atlantis of happiness—should not have made it like the imaginary island of Sir Thomas More, where 'tota insula velut una familia est!'—most stubborn, truly, and ungrateful, must that people be, upon whom, up to the very hour in which I write, such a long and unvarying course of penal laws, confiscations, and Insurrection Acts has been tried, without making them in the least degree ...
— Peter Plymley's Letters and Selected Essays • Sydney Smith
... truism to say that the "social question," the question how best to organize society, is as old as society itself. Great thinkers all down the ages, from Plato to Sir Thomas More, from More to Jean Jacques Rousseau, from Rousseau to Saint Simon, Fourier, Louis Blanc, Lassalle, and Karl Marx, have devoted their attention to it. The French Revolutionists tried to solve it, and the revolutionary ...
— William of Germany • Stanley Shaw
... writers since Wycliffe had translated the Bible. Surrey and Wyatt have deserved to live, while a crowd of poets, as ambitious as they, and not incapable of occasional force and sweetness, have been forgotten. Sir Thomas More, Roger Ascham, Tyndale, the translator of the New Testament, Bishop Latimer, the writers of many state documents, and the framers, either by translation or composition, of the offices of the English Prayer Book, showed that they understood the power of the English ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church
... of French works, Froissart, Mandeville, two French Bibles, a French Livy and Caesar, with the most popular romances; in English, there were the Polychronicon, Cambrensis, Lyttleton's Tenures, Sir Thomas More's book on Pilgrimages, and several romances. Moreover, there were copies of the Psalter of Cashel, a book of Irish chronicles, lives of St. Beraghan, St. Fiech and St. Finian, with various religious tracts, and romantic tales. This was, perhaps, the most extensive ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee
... recur to the aid of analogy. Suppose a life of Sir Thomas More by his son-in-law, or a life of Lord Bacon by his chaplain; that a part of the records of the Court of Chancery belonging to these periods were lost; that in Roper's or in Rawley's biographical work there were preserved a series of dicta and judgments ...
— Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit etc. • by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... short account of his life here will not be disagreable to the readers, especially as all Biographers of the Poets before me have taken notice of him, and ranked him amongst the number of Bards. Sir Thomas More was born in Milk-street, London, A.D. 1480. He was son to Sir John More, Knight, and one of the Justices of the King's-Bench, a man held in the highest esteem at that time for his knowledge in the law and his integrity in the administration ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume I. • Theophilus Cibber
... Reformers and the Life of Sir Thomas More, written by William Roper, are my other authorities, though I touched somewhat unwillingly on ground already lighted up by Miss Manning in her Household ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... fiction, essay, criticism, and poetry. Count Tolstoy, however, has shown us that a novel may be an essay rather than a story. No less a writer than Swift used the medium of fiction for his most brilliant criticism of life; his fables, apart from their satire, are often mere essays. Plato, Sir Thomas More, William Morris, and Mr. H. G. Wells have not disdained to transmit their philosophy under the domino of romance or myth. Some of the greatest poets—Ruskin and Pater for example—have chosen prose for their instrument of expression. If that theory is true of literature—and ...
— Masques & Phases • Robert Ross
... most ingenious and amusing Essay, entitled "Comments on Sterne," which excited a good deal of interest at the time of its publication. This discovery may be considered, in some measure, as the result of the BIBLIOMANIA. In my edition of Sir Thomas More's Utopia, a suggestion is thrown out that even Burton may have been an imitator of Boisatuau [Transcriber's Note: Boiastuau]: ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... one gets many a glimpse of famous characters in interesting relations. Erasmus says that Sir Thomas More, "adolescens, comoediolas et scripsit et egit," and while a page with Archbishop Moreton, as plays were going on in the palace during the Christmas holidays, he would often, showing his schoolboy accomplishment, step on the stage without previous notice, and exhibit a part of his ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer
... as deeply. Hall's authorities among French writers were Monstrelet, Bouchet, Mayer, Argentan, Gile Corozet, and the annals of France and Aquitaine—and of English writers, Fabyan, Caxton, John Harding, Sir Thomas More, Basset, Balantyne, and the Chronicle ...
— Joan of Arc • Ronald Sutherland Gower
... Bible into English was made. No English Bible of earlier date than the fourteenth century has ever been found. But translations, even of the whole Bible, older than Wcyliffe's are, by at least two eminent witnesses, said to have existed. "As for olde translacions, before Wycliffe's time," says Sir Thomas More, "they remain lawful and be in some folkes handes." "The hole byble," he declares (Dyalogues, p. 138, ed. 1530), "was long before Wycliffe's days, by vertuous and well learned men, translated into the English tong." And Cranmer, in his prologue to the second edition ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... sixteenth century Erasmus gave a new impulse in England to the study of Latin and Greek, and Sir Thomas More in his "Utopia" (wherein he imagines an ideal commonwealth with community of property), unconsciously gave birth to a word (utopia), which has ever since been used to designate ...
— The Interdependence of Literature • Georgina Pell Curtis
... She stole up to her room, and taking up one of her best-beloved books, "The Household of Sir Thomas More," lost herself for a while in the noble sorrows of Margaret Roper. But even this could not hold her long in her restless frame of mind, so she went downstairs again, and out into the soft, golden September ...
— Queen Hildegarde • Laura Elizabeth Howe Richards
... to be aware of the fact, that Mr. Owen has not originated a single new idea in his whole book, but has simply put forward the notions of Rousseau, Voltaire, Condorcet, Plato, Sir Thomas More, &c., in other language. His merit consists in this, and no small merit it is, that he has collated the ideas of these philosophers—arranged them in a tangible shape, and has devoted time and money to assist ...
— A Ramble of Six Thousand Miles through the United States of America • S. A. Ferrall
... Reformation, it was mostly because he could not resist the temptation to laugh at the clergy. He wrote a very characteristic Work entitled "The Praise of Folly," "Encomium Moriae" (a play on the name of Sir Thomas More), in which he maintains a sort of paradox, setting forth the value and advantages of folly, i.e., of indulging the light fancies and errors of imagination. With much humorous illustration he enumerates a great many conceits, and includes among them jests, but his main argument ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 1 (of 2) - With an Introduction upon Ancient Humour • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... gorgeous temple of Baal. Nor did the celebrated classical example of Antigone more forcibly illustrate the persevering fortitude of passive heroism and enduring love in woman's gentle bosom, than did the interesting, lovely Constantia. Like the renowned daughter of Sir Thomas More, "she seemed to have forgotten herself, being ravished with the entire love of her dear father," and fearful of danger only as it pointed at him. She turned her eyes upon the court with a boldness unusual to their general expression, to see if in any of their faces she could trace the lineaments ...
— The Loyalists, Vol. 1-3 - An Historical Novel • Jane West
... Hill, June 23rd, 1535. He had nearly reached the age of four score years. The Pope, to spite Henry VIII., had sent the prelate a cardinal's hat, but the aged bishop had suffered death before it reached this country. Sir Thomas More was executed on July 6th, 1535. Like his friend Fisher, he refused submission to the Statute of Succession and to the King's Supremacy. The devotion of Margaret Roper to her father, Sir Thomas More, forms an attractive feature in the life story ...
— Bygone Punishments • William Andrews
... dismantling of our nature do the few words which Roper, Sir Thomas More's son-in-law, relates, convey! He had seen Henry VIII. walking round the chancellor's garden at Chelsea, with his arm round his neck; he could not help congratulating him on being the object of so much kindness. "I thank our lord, I find his grace my very good lord indeed; and I believe he doth ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 323, July 19, 1828 • Various
... the old masters contains some valuable specimens of early Flemish art, and some extremely interesting historical portraits, the gem of the collection being a wonderfully fine portrait by Holbein of Sir Thomas More. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. July, 1878. • Various
... Roper and Sir Thomas More. Agnes and William Wirt. Mary and John Evelyn. Theodosia and Aaron Burr. Maria and Richard Edgeworth. Madame de Stael and Necker. ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... growing up in the place of war and theology, meant the dawn of material prosperity, of the rule of law, and of a new intelligence diffused through the opinions and industries of men. Of this there is no better exposition than Sir Thomas More's "Utopia." More was a devout Catholic. He wore a hair shirt next his skin; he flogged himself; he gave his life for a theological principle. But he was also a Christian in a wider sense. He appreciated the importance to men of peace and ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... Church, and they had learnt to believe that the pope is the father bishop of the west, though he had sometimes taken more power than he ought, and no king could ever be the same as a patriarch or father bishop. So they refused, and Henry cut off the heads of two of the best—Bishop Fisher and Sir Thomas More— though they had been his great friends. Sir Thomas More's good daughter Margaret, came and kissed him on his way to be executed; and afterwards, when his head was placed on a spike on London Bridge, she came by night in a boat and took ...
— Young Folks' History of England • Charlotte M. Yonge
... to me. And who, think you, should that stranger turn out to be? Nothing less than the Nephew of the late Abbe Rive. His name was MORENAS. His countenance was somewhat like that which Sir Thomas More describes the hero of his Utopia to have had. It was hard, swarthy, and severe. He seemed in every respect to be "a travelled man." But his manners and voice were mild and conciliating. "Some one had told him that I had written ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Two • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... Belinda Black, and her children were Potty Black and Sir Thomas More Black, this last being a creature of noble mien and ...
— A Woman Named Smith • Marie Conway Oemler
... in the most excellent determination of goodness, what philosopher's counsel can so readily direct a prince as the feigned Cyrus in Xenophon? Or a virtuous man in all fortunes, as AEneas in Virgil? Or a whole commonwealth, as the way of Sir Thomas More's Utopia? I say the way, because where Sir Thomas More erred, it was the fault of the man, and not of the poet; for that way of patterning a commonwealth was most absolute, though he, perchance, hath not so absolutely performed it. For the question is, whether the feigned image of poetry, or the ...
— A Defence of Poesie and Poems • Philip Sidney
... to sign an oath of allegiance to Henry, and to Elizabeth as his successor, and to acknowledge the supremacy of the king in church and state. This resulted in the death of some prominent men in the realm, among them Sir Thomas More. In the preamble of the oath prescribed by law, the legality of the king's marriage with Anne was asserted, thus implying that his former marriage with Catharine was unlawful. More was willing to declare his allegiance to the infant Elizabeth, as the king's successor, but his conscience would ...
— A Short History of Monks and Monasteries • Alfred Wesley Wishart |
