"Tower of Babel" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... blessings and advantages of having foreign tongues. After leaning his plump little cheek against the window glass in a dreary little way for some minutes, he looked round, and inquired in a general way, and not as if it had any special application, whether she didn't think 'that the tower of Babel was ...
— Harper's Young People, January 13, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... to the usual pictorial representations in children's books of the Tower of Babel. It is a happy simile, and conveys a better idea of the building than chapters of laboured description. Nothing can exceed the grace and lightness of the structure; nothing can be more remarkable than its general appearance. In ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens
... mighty hunter" (Genesis, x, 8), whose game, according to Spenser, was man. Josephus tells us that through pride he built the tower of Babel. ...
— Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Book I • Edmund Spenser
... subsequent period (no matter when, but the biblical record places it at the attempted building of the tower of Babel), there was a secession of a large number of the human race from ...
— The Symbolism of Freemasonry • Albert G. Mackey
... or two later the castle was swarming with workmen; the banging of hammers, the rasp of saws, the spattering of mortar, the crashing of stone and the fumes of charcoal crucibles extended to the remotest recesses; the tower of Babel was being reconstructed in the language of six or eight nations, and everybody was happy. I had no idea there were so many tinsmiths in the world. Every artisan in the town across the river seems to have felt it his duty to come over and ...
— A Fool and His Money • George Barr McCutcheon
... seven-league boots of the fable, which fitted everybody who drew them on, and strides over the universe. How soon, as on the decay of the Roman empire, may all the piles of learning which human endeavours would rear as a tower of Babel to scale the heavens, disappear, leaving but fragments to future generations, as proofs of pre-existent knowledge! Whether we refer to nature or to art, to knowledge or to power, to accumulation or destruction, bounds have been ...
— Newton Forster • Frederick Marryat
... have been on the ground-floor of the Tower of Babel, it was so massively constructed, we were presented to our old schoolmaster; who was one of a group, composed of two or three of the busier sort of magistrates, and some visitors they had brought. He received me, like a man who had formed my mind in bygone ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... hence no more sin on earth, but only hungry people? "Feed us first and then command us to be virtuous!" will be the words written upon the banner lifted against Thee—a banner which shall destroy Thy Church to its very foundations, and in the place of Thy Temple shall raise once more the terrible Tower of Babel; and though its building be left unfinished, as was that of the first one, yet the fact will remain recorded that Thou couldst, but wouldst not, prevent the attempt to build that new tower by accepting the offer, and thus saving mankind a millennium ...
— "The Grand Inquisitor" by Feodor Dostoevsky • Feodor Dostoevsky
... the busy brain is still, as far as this world is concerned, but the work remains, and the builder cannot be forgotten. Now, this world is full of monuments raised by good and bad, some monuments of glory, others of shame. There have been monuments of human pride, like the tower of Babel, and the great city of Nebuchadnezzar, and God who resisteth the proud, has laid them even with the dust. There have been monuments of human wickedness, like Sodom, and like Pompeii, and God, who hateth sin, has buried them beneath the fiery tempest of His wrath. There have been monuments of human ...
— The Life of Duty, v. 2 - A year's plain sermons on the Gospels or Epistles • H. J. Wilmot-Buxton
... bowed down, and grief-stricken. Here were women, with glowing cheeks and sparkling eyes, shouting over their hero king. There, the people wept and moaned; their king had disappeared, was a prisoner, or dead. As at the Tower of Babel, the people spoke in a thousand tongues, and no one listened to another; every one was lost—blinded by his own passionate hopes ...
— Frederick The Great and His Family • L. Muhlbach
... became a Protestant, and the Protestant became a Roman Catholic! Dr. Lancelot Andrewes, chairman of one of the two companies that met at Westminster, was probably the most learned man in England. They said of him that if he had been present at the tower of Babel he could have interpreted for all the tongues present. The only trouble was that the world lacked learning enough to know how learned he was. His company had the first part of the Old Testament, and the simple dignity of the style they used shows how scholarship and simplicity go ...
— The Greatest English Classic A Study of the King James Version of • Cleland Boyd McAfee
... coal-gas, of food cooking, of good and bad tobacco, of wet pavements, of plaster; riches and poverty jostling; romance and reality at war; monoliths of stone and iron; shops, shops; signs, signs; hotels; the tower of Babel; all the nations of the world shouldering one another; Jews and Gentiles, Christians and Turks; jumble, jumble. This is New York. There is nothing American about it; there is nothing English, French, German, Latin or Oriental about ...
— Half a Rogue • Harold MacGrath
... Abraham which was the son of Terah. This Terah was the tenth from Noah in the generation of Shem. Japhet had seven sons and Ham four sons. Out of the generation of Ham Nimrod came, which was a wicked man and cursed in his works, and began to make the tower of Babel which was great and high. And at the making of this tower, God changed the languages, in such wise that no man understood other. For tofore the building of that tower was but one manner speech in all the world, and ...
— Bible Stories and Religious Classics • Philip P. Wells
... just as good a right to maintain, and to complain of, our inarticulate mode of speaking, as we have of theirs—indeed much more—for monkeys speak the same, or nearly the same, language all over the habitable globe, whereas men, ever since the Tower of Babel, have kept chattering, muttering, humming, and hawing, in divers ways and sundry manners, so that one nation is unable to comprehend what another would be at, and the earth groans in vain with vocabularies and dictionaries. That monkeys and men are one and the same ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume XII. F, No. 325, August 2, 1828. • Various
... Rubinstein's sacred opera "The Tower of Babel" given in concert form by the Handel and Haydn Society ...
— Annals of Music in America - A Chronological Record of Significant Musical Events • Henry Charles Lahee
... great city, and a million and a half of people drove, and rode, and bustled, and bargained, and cheated, and throve, in the midst of a din that would have silenced the artillery of Trafalgar, and a mud which, if turned into bricks, would have built the tower of Babel. The citizens were now in possession of the "fumum et opes strepitumque Romae;" but some of the more quietly disposed, though submitting patiently to the "fumum," and by no means displeased with the "opes," thought the "strepitumque" could be dispensed with, and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 53, No. 331, May, 1843 • Various
... swept together by winds into the plain afterwards called "Babil," and were scattered again in the same way (see further D. B. Macdonald in the Jewish Encyclopaedia). A tradition similar to that of the tower of Babel is found in Central America. Xelhua, one of the seven giants rescued from the deluge, built the great pyramid of Cholula in order to storm heaven. The gods, however, destroyed it with fire and confounded the language of the builders. Traces of a somewhat similar story have also ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... mythology, divides with the Tower of Babel the shame, or vain glory, of being presumptuously, and first among great edifices, built with "brick for stone." This was the inscription on ...
— The Ethics of the Dust • John Ruskin
... their hands in despair. The wheel-barrows were easily disposed of—nor was there much greater difficulty with the gigs and shandrydans. But the hackney-coaches stood confoundedly in the way—and a wagon, drawn by four horses, and heaped up to the very sky with beer-barrels, like the Tower of Babel or Babylon, did indeed give us pause—but ere we had leisure to ruminate on the shortness of human life, we broke through between the leaders and the wheels with a crash of leathern breeching, dismounted collars, riven harness, and tumbling of enormous horses ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, - Issue 286, December 8, 1827 • Various
... speculation is, that the Hebrew, which was the original language spoken by Adam, was preserved by the Hebrew people after the confusion of tongues at the building of the Tower of Babel, and thus became the language used by our Redeemer,—the language not of ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... mooted by antiquaries. Mounds of earth were long observed by travellers in Assyria and Babylonia; and one of these, which was formed by a mass of ruined brickwork, was heralded to the world as the remains of the tower of Babel! But the ruins of the great Assyrian capital were for a long time unobserved. For many years had travellers to modern Mosul looked with wondering eyes at gigantic mounds of earth that lay opposite the city. The first traveller who did ...
— How to See the British Museum in Four Visits • W. Blanchard Jerrold
... vain babbling and profane heathenism. He went so far as to say that by learning other languages than our own, we were flying in the face of the Lord's purpose when He had said, at the building of the Tower of Babel, that He would confound their languages so that they should not understand each other's speech. As Brother Robinson was to me, so was I to the quick wits, bright senses, ...
— Cousin Phillis • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... had not much taste, immediately sucked up all the medicines with his proboscis, which occasioned such a variety of effects in his bowels, that it was well he had such a strong constitution, or he must have died of it. His evacuations were so plentiful, that he not only drowned the tower of Babel, near which the apothecary's shop stood, but the current ran fourscore leagues till it came to the sea, and there poisoned so many whales and leviathans, that a pestilence ensued, and lasted three years, nine months and sixteen days. As the elephant was extremely weakened by ...
— Hieroglyphic Tales • Horace Walpole
... for my treasures. There be it that the public shall throng to steep itself in the splendour of possibilities, beholding, under glass, and perhaps in excellent preservation, Penelope's web and the original designs for the Tower of Babel, the draft made by Mr. Asquith for a reformed House of Lords and the notes jotted down by the sometime German Emperor for a proclamation from Versailles to the citizens of Paris. There too shall be the MS. of that fragmentary 'Iphige'nie' ...
— And Even Now - Essays • Max Beerbohm
... somewhere in Ontario, a number of gold plates, eight inches long and seven wide, nearly as thick as tin, fastened together by three rings, and bearing inscriptions, in "Reformed Egyptian," relative to the history of America "from its first settlement by a colony that came from the Tower of Babel at the confusion of tongues, to the beginning of the 5th century of the Christian era." These inscriptions were originally got up by a prophet named Mormon were, as before stated, found by Joseph Smith, were read off by him to a man rejoicing in the name of Oliver ...
— Our Churches and Chapels • Atticus
... that built the Tower of Babel is now in the world-it is the spirit of the devil. The spirit of man never goes upon the clouds; all who think so are Babylonians. The only heaven is on earth. All who are ignorant of truth are Ninevites. The Jews did not crucify Christ- it was the Gentiles. ...
— The Narrative of Sojourner Truth • Sojourner Truth
... will be quite an undertaking to change the orbit," said Deepwaters, "we shall have time meanwhile to absorb or run out all inferior races, so that we shall not make the mistake of extending the Tower of Babel." ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds - A Romance of the Future • John Jacob Astor |
