"Nettle" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... be an ass, Tom," said East, catching hold of him; "you know me well enough by this time; my bark's worse than my bite. You can't expect to ride your new crotchet without anybody's trying to stick a nettle under his tail and make him kick you off—especially as we shall all have to go on foot still. But now sit down, and let's go over it again. I'll be as ...
— Tom Brown's Schooldays • Thomas Hughes
... way to the oaken door that was for ever double-barred, in that small hall which led to the apartments of Amaryllis' corps of artists, Philadelphus met Salome, the actress. He would have passed her without a word, but the woman, armed with the nettle of a small triumph over the man who held her in contempt, could not forbear piercing him as ...
— The City of Delight - A Love Drama of the Siege and Fall of Jerusalem • Elizabeth Miller
... Cassius that he spoke best extempore, that he stood more obliged to fortune than to his own diligence; that it was an advantage to him to be interrupted in speaking, and that his adversaries were afraid to nettle him, lest his anger should redouble his eloquence. I know, experimentally, the disposition of nature so impatient of tedious and elaborate premeditation, that if it do not go frankly and gaily to work, it can perform nothing to purpose. We say of some compositions ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... throws himself into any enterprise sure of success will often succeed just because he was sure he would. The world's history is full of instances where men, with every odds against them, have plucked the flower safety out of the nettle danger, just because they trusted in their star, or their luck, or their destiny. We all know how a very crude faith turned a horde of wild Arabs into a conquering army, that in a century dominated the world from Damascus to Seville. The truth that is in 'Christian Science' is that many ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... they fall amid brambles, And sting their toes on the nettle-tops, Till, after a thousand scratches and scrambles, They wipe their brows and the ...
— Songs from Books • Rudyard Kipling
... is the fashion of this world, even in angling! The old manuals with their precise instruction for trimming and painting trout-rods eighteen feet long, and their painful description of "oyntments" made of nettle-juice, fish-hawk oil, camphor, cat's fat, or assafoedita, (supposed to allure the fish,) are altogether behind the age. Many of the flies described by Charles Cotton and Thomas Barker seem to have gone out of style among ...
— Fisherman's Luck • Henry van Dyke
... more trying in misfortune than the ill-judged advice of well-meaning friends. There is no nettle that stings like it. To expect Hawthorne to become a literary genius, and at the same time to develop the peculiar faculties of a commercial traveller or a curb-stone broker, was unreasonable. In the ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... antagonism and by compliance. Let him not cease an instant to be himself. The only joy I have in his being mine, is that the not mine is mine. I hate, where I looked for a manly furtherance, or at least a manly resistance, to find a mush of concession. Better be a nettle in the side of your friend than his echo. The condition which high friendship demands is ability to do without it. That high office requires great and sublime parts. There must be very two, before there can be very one. Let it be an alliance of two large, formidable natures, ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... that liketh not his entertainment, namely his seat, his ground, his keeper, or the manner of his setting, comith up thick and rough in leaves, very like unto a nettle; and will be much bitten with a little black flye, who, also, will not do harme unto good hoppes, who if she leave the leaf as full of holes as a nettle, yet she seldome proceedeth to the utter destruction of the Hoppe; where the garden ...
— Grain and Chaff from an English Manor • Arthur H. Savory
... by a Nettle. He ran home and told his mother, saying: "Although it pains me so much, I did but touch it ever so gently." "That was just it," said his mother, "which caused it to sting you. The next time you touch a Nettle, grasp it boldly, ...
— Aesop's Fables - A New Revised Version From Original Sources • Aesop
... is a nettle that makes you smart, Then why do you wear it next your heart? And if it be none of these, say I, Ah, why do you sit ...
— The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan - The 14 Gilbert And Sullivan Plays • William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan
... are also subject to attacks of urticaria or "hives" (nettle-rash), from these and other ...
— Preventable Diseases • Woods Hutchinson
... Fig. 14. The edges are like the teeth of a saw. This is called the serrate leaf. The rose and the common nettle have ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: Exploring the Island • Roger Thompson Finlay
... be when the loom is still And my soul is sad as an autumn hill, But how to tell the blessed time When my heart is one glowing prayer of rhyme! Think on the humming afternoon Within some busy wood in June, When nettle patches, drunk with the sun, Are fiery outposts of the shade; While gnats keep up a dizzy reel, And the grasshopper, perched upon his blade, Loud drones his fairy threshing-wheel:— Hour when some poet-wit might feign The drowsy ...
— English Poems • Richard Le Gallienne
... of the rusty gum: a stunted or middle-sized tree, which grew in great abundance on the ranges. We passed a fine large but dry Casuarina creek, coming from the westward, with a broad sandy bed. A large tree, with dark green broad lanceolate stinging leaves, grew on its banks; it resembled the nettle tree, but belonged to neither of the two species growing in the bushes of the ...
— Journal of an Overland Expedition in Australia • Ludwig Leichhardt
... a sportsman can't overcome"—and no sooner had he uttered these encouraging words, than he made a spring, and came 'close-legged' upon the opposite bank; unfortunately, however, he lost his balance, and fell plump upon a huge stinging nettle, which would have been a treat to any ...
— The Sketches of Seymour (Illustrated), Complete • Robert Seymour
... Constitution? Not the least. The whole affair was like one of those alarms in a country-town which begin with the rumor of ten cases of confluent small-pox and end with the discovery that the doctor has been called to a case of nettle-rash at Deacon Scudder's. But sober men, who loved the Union in a quiet way, without advertising it in the newspapers, and who were willing to sacrifice everything to the Constitution but the rights it was intended to protect, began to fear that the alarmists might create the disease which they kept ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... at last the window faded from his sight, and he became insensible to what was going on around him, he was still conscious of that peculiar irritation, that prickled and itched and stung and burned, till he dreamed that he was travelling through a stinging-nettle wood that led up to a square window, through which a fierce-looking Turk armed with pistols and dagger crept to come and ...
— Yussuf the Guide - The Mountain Bandits; Strange Adventure in Asia Minor • George Manville Fenn
... reading too many exciting books, Mr. Beale," she said, "I confess I have never regarded Doctor van Heerden as a possible suitor, and if I thought he was I should be immensely flattered. But may I suggest to you that there are other ways of winning a girl than by giving her nettle-rash!" ...
— The Green Rust • Edgar Wallace
... behind with her when returning in the evening from our labors; why the tones of her voice made my heartstrings thrill like an AEolian harp; and particularly, why my pulse beat such a furious rattan, when I looked and fingered over her little hand to pick out the cruel nettle-stings and thistles. Thus with me began love and poetry, which at times have been my only, and till within the last twelve months, ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... continued a little on the east, where it rose into a higher, ivy-covered mass. Within this again was another, less obvious line, similar in plan, and also covered with unchecked growth: within that the uneven surface of the ground was thickly encumbered with rank weeds, beds of thistle, beds of nettle, and a plenitude of bramble and gorse; in one place towards the eastern mass of overgrown wall, a great clump of gorse had grown to such a height and thickness as to form an impenetrable screen. And, ...
— Ravensdene Court • J. S. (Joseph Smith) Fletcher
... one could have waded almost right across it, were it not for pot-holes here and there—ten-feet traps—and great beds of rotten coral, into which one would sink as into brushwood, to say nothing of the nettle coral that stings like a bed of nettles. There were also other dangers. Tropical shallows are full of wild surprises in the ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... particular nature,—and he does not call it any hard names at all from his scientific platform; indeed in the vocabulary of the Naturalist we are told, that these names are omitted, 'for we call a nettle but a nettle, and the faults of fools their folly,'—that exclusive good he finds both passive and active, and this also is one of those primary distinctions which 'is formed in all things,' and so too is the subdivision ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... take a book from the shelf, you got an impression of a physique in perfect because unconscious harmony with its environment. If, on the contrary, you watched but so much as the nervous, uncertain hand of the other woman, you would know here was one who had spent her years in alternately grasping the nettle and letting it go—reaping only stings in life's fair fields. Easy for any one seeing her in these days (though she wasn't thirty-six) to share Mrs. Freddy's incredulous astonishment at hearing from Haycroft the night before that Janet Levering had been 'the beauty ...
— The Convert • Elizabeth Robins
... would gain favour by delivering the letters: on the other side, if Basterga retained power to harm, it was not he who had taken the letters, nor he who would be exposed to the first blast of vengeance—but the girl. The blame for her, the credit for him! From the nettle danger his wits had plucked the flower safety. But for his fears he could have chuckled; and then he heard her leave the room, and relock the door. With a gasp of relief, he retired a pace or two, and waited, ...
— The Long Night • Stanley Weyman
... decree, and given it for Roper, by a divition of fifty-three against twenty-three torrys, who were resolute enough to appear in a good cause, being forsaken by their brethren, who were afraid to be caled favourers of Poperie. I long to hear what my uncle will say to this news. If he be well, it will nettle him in spite of resignation. Gibson writes word they are at Doway; but he does not know when my uncle will sett forwards. I do not know where to wish him: for I really don't know how he is. For in one letter Gibson writes, he tells me my ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745 - Volume III. • Mrs. Thomson
... entire confraternity of his hearers sometimes. He said one Sunday "None of you are ower much to be trusted—none of us are ower good, are we? A, bless ya, I sometimes think if I were to lay my head on a deacon's breast—one of our own lot—may be there would be a nettle in't or summut at sooart." He is partial to long "Oh's," and "Ah's" and solemn breathings; and sometimes tells you more by a look or a subdued, calmly-moulded groan than by dozens of sentences. He spices his sermons considerably ...
— Our Churches and Chapels • Atticus
... creator created me; But of nine-formed faculties, Of the Fruit of fruits, Of the fruit of primordial God; Of primroses and mountain flowers, Of the blooms of trees and shrubs, Of Earth, of an earthly course, When I became,— Of the blooms of the nettle, Of the foam of the Ninth Wave. I was enchanted by Math Before I became immortal. I was enchanted by Gwydion, The purifier of Brython, Of Eurwys, of Euron, Of Euron, of Modron,— Of Five Battalions of Initiates, High Teachers, the children ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... country road it is a good plan to make cuts with your stick at weeds, etc., in the hedges, always using the true edge, i.e. if aiming at a certain part of a bramble or nettle, to cut at it, just as though you were using a sabre. By this sort of practice, which, by the way, is to be deprecated in a young plantation or in a friend's garden, you may greatly increase the accuracy of ...
— Broad-Sword and Single-Stick • R. G. Allanson-Winn
... the Promised Land That flows with Freedom's honey and milk; But 't was they won it, sword in hand, Making the nettle danger soft for us as silk.[7] 235 We welcome back our bravest and our best;— Ah me! not all! some come not with the rest, Who went forth brave and bright as any here! I strive to mix some gladness with my strain, But the sad strings complain, ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell
... each of the books on the table in their turns, in the summary language of presumptuous ignorance, "Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments—milk and water! Moore's Travels—hasty pudding! La Bruyere—nettle porridge! This is what you were at when I came in, was it not?" said she, taking up a book[8] in which she saw Belinda's mark: "Against Inconsistency in our Expectations. Poor thing! who bored you with ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. III - Belinda • Maria Edgeworth
... while his mistress was away, and he showed her the hospital garden he had made close by, in which were cabbage, nettle, and mignonette plants for the butterflies, flowering herbs for the bees, chick-weed and hemp for the birds, catnip for the pussies, and plenty of room left for whatever other patients might need. In the afternoon, while Nelly did her task at lint-picking, ...
— Junior Classics, V6 • Various
... exhibited by the leaflets of the sensitive plants, or the stamens of the barberry, but to much more widely spread, and at the same time, more subtle and hidden, manifestions of vegetable contractility. You are doubtless aware that the common nettle owes its stinging property to the innumerable stiff and needle-like, though exquisitely delicate, hairs which cover its surface. Each stinging-needle tapers from a broad base to a slender summit, which, though rounded at the end, is of such microscopic ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... of the bite, the sensation was sharp enough to deserve the name of pain; and this continued for five or six minutes more, but not so forcibly. I might compare it with the sensation produced by the stinging-nettle. A whitish tumefaction almost immediately surrounded the two pricks; and the circumference, within a radius of about an inch, was coloured an erysipelas red, accompanied by a very slight swelling. ...
— More Hunting Wasps • J. Henri Fabre |
