"Infinitive" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Here the infinitive "To take" might be understood, at first look, as the subject of "Would buffet"; but it depends on "putting", etc., and the subject relative "that" is suppressed: "an argument {that} would ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... commandment. We should gently scan, not only our brother man, but our brother author. The aesthete of to-day, however, will look kindly on adultery, but show all the harshness of a Pilgrim Father in his condemnation of a split infinitive. I cannot see the logic of this. If irregular and commonplace people have the right to exist, surely irregular and commonplace books have a right to exist by ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... your notice. As old Villotte says—from whose work I first contrived to pick up the rudiments of Armenian—'Est verborum transitivorum, quorum infinitivus—' but I forgot, you don't understand Latin. He says there are certain transitive verbs, whose infinitive is in outsaniel; the preterite in outsi; the imperative in one; for example—parghatsout-saniem, ...
— The Romany Rye • George Borrow
... sorry Mr. Leonard has not given the name of this critic; but have a notion it must be Mr. Andrew Lang, though I am sure he is innocent of the split infinitive quoted above. It really ought to be Mr. Lang, if only for the humor of the means by which Mr. Leonard proposes to silence him. "I am confident," says he, "that the voice of the great dog-loving public in this country would ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... to put it that way because Scandinavian grammar is not a strong point with me, and my knowledge of the verbs is as yet limited to the present tense of the infinitive mood. Besides, this was no time to ...
— Diary of a Pilgrimage • Jerome K. Jerome
... parts of speech aside from nouns may be subjects of verbs and so other parts of speech as subjects of the principal verb of the lead may be placed at the beginning of the lead. An infinitive with its object and modifier may occupy the first line as subject ...
— Newspaper Reporting and Correspondence - A Manual for Reporters, Correspondents, and Students of - Newspaper Writing • Grant Milnor Hyde
... newspaper devoted a whole page to the coming event. Adjective was piled on adjective, split infinitive on split infinitive. The dinner was to be given in the ballroom of the hotel.... The bank accounts of the assembled guests would total $400,000,000.... The terrapin had been specially imported from Baltimore.... The decorations were to be magnificent beyond the wildest dream.... ...
— Cupid's Understudy • Edward Salisbury Field
... sphere only to the eyes; it is a foreshortening of infinitude that it may enter our sight; there is no imagining of a limit to it; it is a sphere only in this, that in no one direction can we come nearer to its circumference than in another. This infinitive sphere, I say then, or, if you like it better, this spheric infinitude, is the only figure, image, emblem, symbol, fit to begin us to know God; it is an idea incomprehensible; we can only believe ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... prize for the best split infinitive has been awarded to the framer of the new administrative code of the state of Washington, ...
— The So-called Human Race • Bert Leston Taylor
... yet not inappreciative of form, and accustomed to recommend much good literature to his countrymen. He took an eager interest in a large variety of subjects, from Celtic poetry and the fauna and flora of many regions to simplified spelling and the split infinitive. ...
— Four Americans - Roosevelt, Hawthorne, Emerson, Whitman • Henry A. Beers
... historic infinitive (Ibid, 89. 1 Consul, uti statuerat, oppida castellaque munita adire, partim vi, alia metu aut praemia ostentando avortere ab hostibus), but the reduction of some of these ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... from Walter Pater. Charlotte Bronte's Maternal Great Aunt. A New Catholic History of England. The Genius of Shakespeare. Correspondence:—The Mendelian Hypothesis; The Split Infinitive; ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... you that nothing that you say will be taken down by the reporters, so you needn't bother about a split infinitive or two. Talk about anything you like, how you like. Well, I'll give you a start. Which do you enjoy more a week-end here or at ...
— The Red House Mystery • A. A. Milne
... to wish" is said in two senses. First, as though it were one word, and the infinitive of "I-do-not-wish." Consequently just as when I say "I do not wish to read," the sense is, "I wish not to read"; so "not to wish to read" is the same as "to wish not to read," and in this sense "not to wish" implies involuntariness. Secondly it is taken as a sentence: and then no act ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I-II (Pars Prima Secundae) - From the Complete American Edition • Saint Thomas Aquinas
... of these sciences) afford principles, which seem full of absurdity and contradiction. No priestly dogmas, invented on purpose to tame and subdue the rebellious reason of mankind, ever shocked common sense more than the doctrine of the infinitive divisibility of extension, with its consequences; as they are pompously displayed by all geometricians and metaphysicians, with a kind of triumph and exultation. A real quantity, infinitely less than any finite quantity, containing ...
— An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding • David Hume et al
... course. He merely said that he was only making game of me. But if there's any one thing that I can do better than another," went on the Itinerant Tinker, after another embarrassing pause, "it's piecing together a split infinitive. Would you like me to ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume V. (of X.) • Various
... anxious to go." Anxious should not be followed by an infinitive. Anxiety is contemplative; eagerness, alert ...
— Write It Right - A Little Blacklist of Literary Faults • Ambrose Bierce
... be indemnified for the loss which He suffered by Israel (comp. ver. 4), it is obvious that we must not explain: "that my salvation be," but: "that thou mayest be my salvation;" for it is only when He is the salvation that such an indemnification is spoken of Moreover, the Infinitive with [Hebrew: l] can here not well be understood otherwise than in the preceding clause. The servant of God is the personal salvation of the Lord for the heathen world; comp. chap. xlii. 6, and, in the chapter under consideration, ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions. Vol. 2 • Ernst Hengstenberg
... "use definitions" sometimes given at this age are usually of slightly better quality than those given in year V. Younger children more often use the infinitive form, "to play with" (doll), "to drive" (horse), "to eat on" (table), etc. Use definitions of this year more often begin with "they," or "what"; as, "they go up in it" (balloon), "they kick ...
— The Measurement of Intelligence • Lewis Madison Terman
... this passage nor in B ii.171 nor in B xx.121 do we think that the aorist infinitive after a verb of saying can bear a future sense. The aorist infinitive after [Greek] (ii.280, vii.76) is hardly an argument in its favour; the infinitive there is in fact a noun ...
— DONE INTO ENGLISH PROSE • S. H. BUTCHER, M.A.
... when we're not talking about the new negligees we're making and the gorgeous tea-gowns we're going to have when we're married, we rescue the poor and think we're dreadfully advanced, but does it do any good to just talk?—Dear me, I split that poor infinitive right down ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... stretching himself, with a yawn. It never struck him that Fenn could be in any serious trouble. Fenn was a prefect; and when the headmaster sent for a prefect, it was generally to tell him that he had got a split infinitive in his English ...
— The Head of Kay's • P. G. Wodehouse
... Fletcher should never cross her t's; then the tails of her letters are so long that they go into the line below them, which looks so slovenly, and shows that her writing must have bean very much neglected. I also know another fair neighbor of ours who actually puts 'for' before the infinitive mood, and flourishes her large letters like copperplate capitals that are only fit to appear ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... singular number in n[3]. I will set down a number of instances, in which han is used for the present or past time singular of the v. Have; only premising, that han, being an abbreviation of haven, is never used by any ancient writer except in the present time plural and the infinitive mode. ...
— The Rowley Poems • Thomas Chatterton
... perhaps, but still in just the language which he would have used naturally in describing the event to his wife or friend? Simply stated, it would have been far more solemn and impressive than this turgid, insincere account with its large words, its forced note of tragedy and its split infinitive. Let me put beneath it another description ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume I (of X) - Greece • Various
... third very fertile source of doubt is the fact that Hebrew verbs in the indicative mood lack the present, the past imperfect, the pluperfect, the future perfect, and other tenses most frequently employed in other languages; in the imperative and infinitive moods they are wanting in all except the present, and a subjunctive mood does not exist. (104) Now, although all these defects in moods and tenses may be supplied by certain fundamental rules of the language with ease and even elegance, the ancient writers evidently ...
— A Theologico-Political Treatise [Part II] • Benedict de Spinoza
... a or an is sometimes represented by idn (earlier un), one. This is rare, especially in late Cornish. A similar indefinite article is common in Breton. Occasionally idn or un was used, as in Breton, with a verbal noun (or infinitive), to form what in English would be a present participle. Yn un scolchye, skulking, lit. in a skulking (Passion, 74, 2), yn un garme, shouting, crying out, lit. in a shouting (Passion, 168, 1), yn un fystyne, ...
— A Handbook of the Cornish Language - chiefly in its latest stages with some account of its history and literature • Henry Jenner
... of Moses in Gen. 2: 3, where, according to the Hebrew in which he wrote, speaking of the creation of all things, he gives us this idea, "Which God created to make." See marginal reading, Gen. 2: 3. Hebrew scholars tell me this is the correct reading. The word, rendered, "and made," is in the infinitive mood, and hence should read, "to make;" also, that the word rendered, "created" is the proper term by which to indicate the producing cause. This, then, is the thought presented by both of our witnesses, ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, - Volume I, No. 9. September, 1880 • Various
... order in which such sounds are now repeated in the West, is the original order in which they existed in our language, and that our more polished mode of expressing them is a new and perhaps a corrupt enunciation. Another peculiarity is that of joining the letter y at the end of some verbs in the infinitive mood, as well as to parts of different conjugations, thus, "I can't sewy, nursy, reapy, to sawy, to sewy, to nursy, &c. A further peculiarity is the love of vowel sound, and opening out monosyllables of our polished dialect into ...
— The Dialect of the West of England Particularly Somersetshire • James Jennings
... ideals are ours. He is busied with the same problems of ethics, of aesthetics, of style, even of grammar. I had not been three days in New York when I found myself plunged in a hot discussion of the "split infinitive," in which I was ranged with two Americans against a recreant Briton who defended the collocation. "It is a mistake to regard it is an Americanism," said one of the Americans. "It is as old as the English language, or at least as ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... public opinion. Now you, Mr. Forbes, would never dream of putting your money into a investment without full and careful inquiry into the history and scope of the proposed undertaking, while our young friend here would snort furiously at a split infinitive or a false rhyme, yet, when I submit the vital problem of the sort of coffee you imbibe— the very essence and nutriment of your brains and bodies— you hear the kind ...
— Number Seventeen • Louis Tracy
... thing before him. By focusing thereon certain ideas with which he is perfectly familiar, as rind, flesh, seed, etc., he interprets the strange thing as a kind of fruit. In the same way, when the student is first presented in school with an example of the infinitive, he brings to bear upon the vague presentation various ideas already contained within his experience through his previous study of the noun and the verb. To the extent also to which he possesses and is able to recall these necessary old ideas, will he ...
— Ontario Normal School Manuals: Science of Education • Ontario Ministry of Education
... said Francesca, "has split an infinitive, but he probably did it under the orders of the ...
— Punch, or The London Charivari, Vol. 153, November 7, 1917 • Various
... a hundred different ones about a hundred different things. Here in this office we're dead against the split infinitive and the Honest Laboring Man. We don't believe he's honest and we've got our grave doubts as to his laboring. Yet one of our editorial writers is an out-and-out Socialist and makes fiery speeches advising the proletariat to rise and grab the reins ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams |
