"Sapient" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... hold the herring he holds the scales, my sapient brother," cried the fat man. "But I pray you, good youth, to tell us whether you are a learned clerk, and, if so, whether you have studied at ...
— The White Company • Arthur Conan Doyle
... knew what they were. He knew they were the "wilde-honden," very absurdly named by sapient naturalists Hyena venatica or "hunting hyena," and by others, with equal absurdity the "hunting dog." I pronounce these names "absurd," first because the animal in question bears no more resemblance to a hyena than it does ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid
... as to the conduct ladies ought to observe who wished to act with propriety, and as my fair countrywomen are generally willing to listen to good counsel, no matter how remote the period from which it is derived, I cannot resist giving them the benefit of some of the recommendations of the sapient poet to the Parisian belles, some of which are certainly highly commendable. The verses were written by a monk, ...
— How to Enjoy Paris in 1842 • F. Herve
... Swing, sapient young person, walked casually to the window and watched Luke Tweezy cross the street to Calloway's store. Then he returned to Racey's table. Racey turned his tousled head sidewise and whispered from a corner of his mouth, "Help me ...
— The Heart of the Range • William Patterson White
... out yonder (As all sapient people know), Is the land of Wonder-Wander, Whither children love to go; It's their playing, romping, swinging, That give great joy to me While the Dinkey-Bird ...
— A Nonsense Anthology • Collected by Carolyn Wells
... Phellion. Above the door the master of the house had inserted a tablet of white marble, on which, in letters of gold, were read the words, "Aurea mediocritas." Above the sun-dial, affixed to one panel of the facade, he had also caused to be inscribed this sapient ...
— The Lesser Bourgeoisie • Honore de Balzac
... sapient patrician much has been said, and more has been written, respecting our antipodean empire; though I believe the mass of the English people are still as unacquainted with the characteristics of the colony, and the manners of colonial life, ...
— Fern Vale (Volume 1) - or the Queensland Squatter • Colin Munro
... satisfaction of the "fox and the grapes." It was a poor affair! There could, in reality, be no great pleasure in seeing an assembly of old grey-bearded Turks getting drunk on porter and Champagne, and making fools of themselves, however much gratification it might afford the sapient heir to the throne of Bavaria, and his attendant crowd ...
— Journal of a Visit to Constantinople and Some of the Greek Islands in the Spring and Summer of 1833 • John Auldjo
... for Henry. He had meant to tell Sir George casually that he had taken advantage of his enforced leisure to write a book. 'Taken advantage of his enforced leisure' was the precise phrase which Henry had in mind to use. But, when he found himself in the strenuous, stern, staid, sapient and rational atmosphere of Powells, he felt with a shock of perception that in rattling off Love in Babylon he had been guilty of one of those charming weaknesses to which great and serious men are sometimes tempted, but of which great and serious men never boast. And ...
— A Great Man - A Frolic • Arnold Bennett
... I rais'd my brow, I spied the master of the sapient throng, Seated amid the philosophic train. Him all admire, all pay him rev'rence due. There Socrates and Plato both I mark'd, Nearest to him in rank; Democritus, Who sets the world at chance, Diogenes, With Heraclitus, and Empedocles, And Anaxagoras, and Thales sage, Zeno, ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri
... insect is commoner, fatter, and fuller-flavoured? It is we stay-at-home British birds that really keep the insects down. I know that insect eggs do not appear in our poor dissected gizzards. How should they? How would you recognize their remains, O sapient sparrow-shooters? But they are there, for all that. Those blessed with eyes can see us hunting for them in the fallen leaves, among the garbage, in the crannies ...
— "Wee Tim'rous Beasties" - Studies of Animal life and Character • Douglas English
... "Well, thou sapient counsellor—but, I tell you beforehand, the chances are ten to one I sha'n't follow ...
— The Kellys and the O'Kellys • Anthony Trollope
... daughter; and both appeared to suit him. The first did not dazzle him; but as to the second, he did not conceal from himself the imperfections of a provincial education which he should have to unmake, but this was no serious objection to his sapient ...
— The Deputy of Arcis • Honore de Balzac
... very few books which offer me harder reading than the Gospels. My difficulties are quite different from those which enabled the learned curiosity of the German mind to achieve one of its most unforgettable triumphs. It is a long while since I, like all other young scholars, enjoyed with all the sapient laboriousness of a fastidious philologist the work of the incomparable Strauss.[5] At that time I was twenty years old: now I am too serious for that sort of thing. What do I care for the contradictions of "tradition"? How can any one call pious ...
— The Antichrist • F. W. Nietzsche
... wrote many of those beautiful earlier pieces, now collected in his works. These early poems were all composed in 1824 and 1825, during his last years in college, and were printed first in a periodical called 'The United States Literary Gazette,' the sapient editor of which magazine once kindly advised the ardent young scholar to give up poetry and buckle down to the study of law! 'No good can come of it,' he said; 'don't let him do such things; make him stick to prose!' ...
— Authors and Friends • Annie Fields
... peered, puzzled, shook its sapient head, shrugged its authoritative shoulders, and sundry criticisms crept into the journals; but the prophet was judged in "his own country"; and home work, according to universal canons, rarely finds favor among home ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... was not a Drouet, interested to praise. There she heard a different voice, with which she argued, pleaded, excused. It was no just and sapient counsellor, in its last analysis. It was only an average little conscience, a thing which represented the world, her past environment, habit, convention, in a confused way. With it, the voice of the people was ...
— Sister Carrie • Theodore Dreiser
... the Act's gearing finds its ordered grooves And circles into full utility? The motion of the honourable gentleman Reminds me aptly of a publican Who should, when malting, mixing, mashing's past, Fermenting, barrelling, and spigoting, Quick taste the brew, and shake his sapient head, And cry in acid voice: The ale is new! Brew old, you varlets; cast this ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... disappeared, another drollery was exhibited, called the "Fool and his Five Sons," the names of the hopeful offspring of the sapient sire being Pickle Herring, Blue Hose, Pepper Hose, Ginger Hose, and Jack Allspice. The humour of this piece, though not particularly refined, seemed to be appreciated by the audience generally, as well as by the monarch, who laughed heartily at ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... precisely as the sapient woman had conjectured. Shortly before nine she took up position against the railings in a dark patch that marked the middle point between two lamps, some doors above 506. No tremor agitated her form; in action this woman ...
— Once Aboard The Lugger • Arthur Stuart-Menteth Hutchinson
... command, she at once returned to her lord, as the holy spirit-messenger of God 2295 bade her, in sapient speech. Thus was Ismael born to Abraham, even when he had [lived] 86 winters in the world. The son grew and flourished, as the angel, the 2300 true minister of peace, had promised to the ...
— Genesis A - Translated from the Old English • Anonymous
... restricted, as yet," replied the Cardinal-Bishop with a sapient smile. "Nor is there any restriction upon the inspiration, political as well as spiritual, which the American Government draws from Rome—an inspiration much more potent, I think, than our Protestant brethren would care ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... would never allow the property of the Church to be touched, and that He who had raised up the Princess Judith for the Hebrews, and Queen Lucretia for the Romans, would keep his most illustrious abbey of Turpenay, and indulged in other equally sapient remarks. But his monks, who—to our shame I confess it—were unbelievers, reproached him with his happy-go-lucky way of looking at things, and declared that, to bring the chariot of Providence to the rescue in time, all the ...
— Droll Stories, Complete - Collected From The Abbeys Of Touraine • Honore de Balzac
... Irish apple-woman in a grimy English town left her basket, with all her stock-in-trade, outside in the street while she went into a church to commune with her heavenly friends; the conversation between a sapient publican, a friendly constable and a group of dubious bona fide travellers—such things were materials for his insight or his fancy or his delightful humour. Often when he returned in the evening full of his day's observations one wished there ...
— Irish Fairy Tales • Edmund Leamy
... pleasure of viewing a "Sapient Dog" who could light lamps, spell, read print or writing, tell the time of day, or day of the month. He could distinguish colors, was a good arithmetician, could discharge a loaded cannon, tell a hidden card in a pack, ...
— Customs and Fashions in Old New England • Alice Morse Earle
... come to something more difficult to analyse than specialisation of work—a specialisation of sentiment, habits and morals, which makes people supremely sapient within a narrow sphere which they have appropriated, and so limited as to be blind in the broad field of ethics which lies outside their special ken. And yet it is through these groups, keen-eyed in one direction, blind in others, that the ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... extract from an equally sapient proposition, published in the Chinese state-papers on the 14th January, 1840; it is headed, Memorial of Toang Wangyen to the emperor, recommending plans for the extermination of barbarians: "Your minister's opinion is this: ...
— The Expedition to Borneo of H.M.S. Dido - For the Suppression of Piracy • Henry Keppel
... riot, And wishing for a little quiet, The sickman raised his head, And said— Gentlemen, I do beseech ye, cease your pother, Nor any more with me your wise heads bother, Scratching your wigs, Like sapient pigs; Whate'er you may decide is my disease, I humbly do conceive a little ease From your infernal noise and chatter. With which I'm dunn'd And nearly stunn'd, Would greatly tend to mend the matter; And if, perforce, I must resign ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 342, November 22, 1828 • Various
... and all the cattle were driven through the smoke and flames. Moreover, every householder had to rekindle the fire on his hearth by means of a light taken from the bonfire. Strange to say, this salutary measure had no effect whatever in staying the cattle-plague, and seven years later the sapient Joh. Koehler himself was burnt as a witch. The farmers, whose pigs and cows had derived no benefit from the need-fire, perhaps assisted as spectators at the burning, and, while they shook their heads, agreed among themselves that it served Joh. Koehler perfectly right.[691] According to a writer ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer
... sapient guardians of the peace perceive that as many have been admitted as can possibly be squeezed into the building, they shut the doors; and the process of distribution goes on until the mass is equalized throughout the edifice; a task of no small difficulty, as ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... of health, and tolerably advanced in life, without any very self-evident heir, was obnoxious to the attentions of three distinct litters of cousins, some one or other of whom was constantly 'baying him.' Lotion, though a sapient man, and somewhat grinding in his practice, did not profess to grind old people young again, and feeling he could do very little for the body corporate, directed his attention to amusing Jackey's mind, and anything in the shape of gossip was ...
— Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour • R. S. Surtees
... lead'st th' oblivious soul astray— Though thou sphere-descended be— Hence away!— Thou mightier Goddess, thou demand'st my lay, 5 Born when earth was seiz'd with cholic; Or as more sapient sages say, What time the Legion diabolic Compell'd their beings to enshrine In bodies vile of herded swine, 10 Precipitate adown the steep With hideous rout were plunging in the deep, And hog and devil mingling grunt and yell Seiz'd on the ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... it was of any one to treat him so. What could be easier for him than to go, as Insie had said to him at least a score of times, and mind his own business, and shake off the dust—or the mud—of his feet at such strangers? But, alas! he had tried it, and could shake nothing, except his sad and sapient head. How deplorably was he altered from the Pet that used to be! Where were now his lofty joys, the pleasure he found in wholesome mischief and wholesale destruction, the high delight of frightening all ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... subjected in almost every instance. 'Nothing by which we can be known.' 'Then I am afraid to undertake the publication.' We presumed timidly to suggest that every writer must have a beginning, and that to refuse to publish for him until he had acquired a name, was to imitate the sapient mother who cautioned her son against going into the water until he could swim. 'An old joke—a regular Joe!' exclaimed our companion, tossing off another bumper. 'Still older than Joe Miller,' was our reply; 'for, if ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... trouble. Trouble it was, though this seems an odd name for the consciousness of a bright enchantment; and the first thing that reason, definitely consulted, told him about the matter was that he had been in love with Angela Vivian any time these three years. This sapient faculty supplied him with further information; only two or three of the items of which, however, it is necessary to reproduce. He had been a great fool—an incredible fool—not to have discovered before this what was the matter with him! Bernard's ...
— Confidence • Henry James
... hermit Peter, to whose sapient heart High Heaven his secrets opens, tells and shews, Your messengers direct can to that part, Where of the prince they shall hear certain news, And learn the way, the manner, and the art To bring him back to these thy warlike crews, That all thy soldiers, wandered and misgone, ...
— Jerusalem Delivered • Torquato Tasso
... was just this letter, mamma, from Mr. Sapient, telling me that the Council won't let me go to University College to share the education that can only be had there at a reasonable cost, because the young men would be demoralized ...
— Laura Secord, the heroine of 1812. - A Drama. And Other Poems. • Sarah Anne Curzon
... I gave I have never seen surpassed anywhere," he complacently recorded in later years. Some one spoke to the elder McAllister of the admirable manner in which his son kept house. "Yes," was the sapient retort. "He keeps everything but ...
— Fifth Avenue • Arthur Bartlett Maurice
... Juan left home with about three pesos' worth of pork, full of many a hopeful expectation. After having wandered through many streets, he noticed that a big horse-fly was following him with an imploring murmur. Imagining that the fly wanted to buy meat, this sapient vender said to it, "Do you want to buy meat?" The fly answered with a "buzzzzz." For Juan this was a sufficient answer: so he left one-third of the pork with the fly, saying that he was coming back again for his pay. Next ...
— Filipino Popular Tales • Dean S. Fansler
... grave, and to leave the record of their inanity behind them in black and white; some stipulating that their clothes or other treasures should be burnt with them, others that their graves should be watched by particular servants, or their monuments crowned with flowers;—sapient end to a life of sapience! 'Of their doings in this world,' said he, 'you may form some idea from their injunctions with reference to the next. These are they who will pay a long price for an entree; ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... Carlotta's needlework. This was undertaken at the sapient instigation of Antoinette, who in her turn, I am sure, neglected the ladle for the scissors, and cast many of her duties upon the silent but sympathetic Stenson. Carlotta herself delighted in these ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... to appear at all, it will be about the expiration of the fifth week, although there will be no absolute security in less than the double number of months," After making these remarks, our author reasons himself into the sapient conclusion, that the poison in all rabid animals resides in the saliva, and does not affect any other secretion. "The knowledge that the virus is confined to the saliva," he opines, "will settle a matter that has been the cause of considerable uneasiness. A cow has been observed to be ...
— Delineations of the Ox Tribe • George Vasey
... them up in a brazen vessel, and cast them into the sea. But James, "our English Solomon," "imported by his book all that were flying about Europe, to plague the country, which was sufficiently plagued already in such a sovereign." This sapient ruler, who, it is said, "taught divinity like a king, and made laws like a priest," in the first year of his reign made it felony to suckle imps, &c. This statute, which was repealed March 24th, 1736, describes ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... in, perceived him cutting a hen's throat with the most heartfelt satisfaction, as he grinned and exclaimed, by way of answer to its screams, "Poor feller! I guess I wouldn't hurt you for de world;" I could not help thinking with Leibnitz, that most sapient of philosophers, that this is the best of all ...
— A Ramble of Six Thousand Miles through the United States of America • S. A. Ferrall
... implies. I have said that "nothing has been for centuries consecrated by public admiration without possessing in a high degree some species of sterling excellence." Does it thence follow that it possesses in the highest degree every species of sterling excellence? "Yet thus," says the sapient reviewer, "he admits the fact against which he mainly argues,—namely, the superiority of these time-honored productions." As if the possession of an abstract excellence of some kind necessarily implied the possession of an incomparable excellence of every ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin
... away less lightsome than he had come, leaving the discomfited misanthrope to the solitude he held so sapient. ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... The sapient Thomas Heywood gravely goes on to inform us, that all these things actually came to pass. Upon Richard III he is equally luminous. ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... would miss her, empty as the house would be without her. Nannie Slade Hunter, though she disapproved, was too deeply engulfed in the real business of life to be much concerned over the vagaries of a just-about-to-be-engaged girl, and Martin Wetherby, coached, Jane knew, by the sapient father of the Teddy-bear, was presently able to translate her exodus into something very soothing to his own piece of mind. Jane could watch his mental processes as easily as she could watch the activities of a goldfish in a glass globe; he was concluding that it was the regular ...
— Jane Journeys On • Ruth Comfort Mitchell
... necessary to repudiate such a condition of mind on the part of the guests at B——, but it may be well to remark that the writer of this sapient paragraph seems to be under the impression that every result of certain forces at present imperfectly understood is supernatural. The assertion that any one who was in the house during Colonel Taylor's tenancy believed in the possibility of the existence of anything ...
— The Alleged Haunting of B—— House • Various
... Miller joke, but one of actual and recent occurrence; although there is a similar story fathered on a sapient civic authority. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 334 Saturday, October 4, 1828 • Various
... live, alas! of heaven-directed mien, Of cultured soul, and sapient eye serene, Who hail thee Man!—the pilgrim of a day, Spouse of the worm, and brother of the clay, Frail as the leaf in autumn's yellow bower, Dust in the wind, or dew upon the flower, A friendless slave, a child without a sire. * ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various
... spirit may clothe itself in a donkey born in Greece! and so it goes on transfusing itself from clime to clime, in ever new and higher forms, until man is developed. Well, was there ever such stuff concocted before? I almost hear the bray of that donkey, who originated in a flower. And pray, most sapient self! what is nature? It seems now, to me, a form, a mere dead incubus of matter. And could this inert tangible matter, sublimate in its hard, dead bosom, an essence so subtle, as to be freer of the bonds of time and space? ...
— Words of Cheer for the Tempted, the Toiling, and the Sorrowing • T. S. Arthur
... lady was put in close confinement, the whole secret extorted, and the clothes of Bisclaveret duly restored. But when they were brought before him the animal appeared to survey them with listlessness and inattention; and the king had again recourse to his sapient counsellor, by whose advice they were transferred to the royal bed-chamber, where Bisclaveret was left, without witnesses, to effect, if possible, his metamorphosis. In due time the king, attended with two of his barons, repaired to the ...
— The Lay of Marie • Matilda Betham
... Kaiser and my mother's compatriots for their share in that horror going on abroad, I can also pity the hot-headed, imperfect mere man going to war under a carefully incited and fostered misapprehension, and need no longer glorify the cool-headed, sapient policy which so cleverly duped ruler ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... the very time, when the presumption against the revivication of poetry shall have attained the appearance of absolute certainty, to witness a Tenth Avatar of Genius—and to witness its effect, too, upon the sapient personages who had been predicting that it ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... ago"—and although men part reluctantly with favorite—and lucrative—fallacies, and "Faith, fantastic Faith, once wedded fast to some dear falsehood, hugs it to the last," nevertheless this false belief, like so many other sapient pronouncements of human wisdom, must ...
— Valere Aude - Dare to Be Healthy, Or, The Light of Physical Regeneration • Louis Dechmann
... and disappear. If the patient should afterwards prove ungrateful to the good physician, the man of skill can avenge himself very easily by throwing the vervain into water; for as the root absorbs the moisture once more, the tumour will return. The same sapient writer recommends you, if you are troubled with pimples, to watch for a falling star, and then instantly, while the star is still shooting from the sky, to wipe the pimples with a cloth or anything that comes to hand. Just as the star falls from the sky, so the pimples will fall from your body; ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... These sapient specialists, whose intellects were nurtured upon the highest and most abstruse speculations and who could readily account for all the movements of the Deity with a wealth of detail surpassing that of a French police dossier, were utterly and notoriously ...
— The Sceptics of the Old Testament: Job - Koheleth - Agur • Emile Joseph Dillon
... cried Conrad, "have lugged the commander in chief of the cutpurses by the throat, that sapient soothsayer that was playing off his pranks with his match the other day ...
— The Old Man of the Mountain, The Lovecharm and Pietro of Abano - Tales from the German of Tieck • Ludwig Tieck
... that that is the precise reason why they are here, most sapient of second officers? if we hadn't been short-handed the cap'en wouldn't ...
— Picked up at Sea - The Gold Miners of Minturne Creek • J.C. Hutcheson
... nine-tenths of their livelihood, the people of Bundoran object to Protestantism, and the intensity of their antipathy to the Black-mouths has impelled them to quarrel with their bread-and-butter. Of late the question of tolerance has been much discussed. Sapient persons whose assumption is equal to their ignorance of the subject, affect to despise the fears of the scattered Protestant population whose alarm is based on the experience of a lifetime. English Home Rulers who wish to ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... the secret opposition of the minister to this wish of a man who was one of his firmest supporters and most zealous workers. This, of course, brought down an avalanche of suppositions, flooded with the sapient arguments of the two officials, who sent back and forth to each other a wearisome flood of nonsense. ...
— Bureaucracy • Honore de Balzac
... do believe!" said he; "He's only a cow-boy, I dare say!" And with this sapient, but unsatisfactory conclusion, he opened his book, and read aloud, to keep up ...
— The Sketches of Seymour (Illustrated), Complete • Robert Seymour
... "Who, O thou sapient, saintly bird! Thy shouted warnings ever heard Unbleached by fear? The blue-faced blubbering imp, who steals Yon turnips, thinks thee at his ...
— Citation and Examination of William Shakspeare • Walter Savage Landor
... with this, Walchendorf got a Royal Commission appointed to inquire into the value of his astronomical labours. This sapient body reported that his work was not only useless, but noxious; and soon after he was attacked by the populace in the ...
— Pioneers of Science • Oliver Lodge
... Brummel got into the carriage before the Regent, ... (didn't he?) but I persisted in not reading my letter in the presence of my friend. A notice on my punctiliousness may be put down to-night in her 'private diary.' I kept the letter in my hand and only read it with those sapient ends of the fingers which the mesmerists make so much ado about, and which really did seem to touch a little of what was inside. Not all, however, happily for me! Or my friend would have seen in my eyes what ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... occasionally appeared in the political horizon, and had thereby obtained a powerful ascendency in the council, pressed his fat chin into furrows, and his narrow brow into wrinkles, and, with reflection in his little eyes, assured his sapient brethren that "This distinguished stranger was nothing else than a secret envoy of his imperial majesty, who was come into Germany to observe attentively the situation, the comparative strength, ...
— Faustus - his Life, Death, and Doom • Friedrich Maximilian von Klinger
... said Fritz, laughing at this sapient declaration. "However, I assure you, brother mine and most considerate of cooks, I'll not be sorry to have a change of diet from the cold salt pork and biscuit on which we have fared all the ...
— Fritz and Eric - The Brother Crusoes • John Conroy Hutcheson
... massacred. Squabbles ensued, until the citizens of Caracas quietly deposed the chief Colonial authorities, and appointed a Junta Suprema to administer affairs in the name of Ferdinand VII. Intelligence of this step, however, was received with great alarm by the sapient Junta of Cadiz, and a proclamation was launched, on the 31st of August, 1810, declaring the Province of Caracas in a state of rigorous blockade. A war of manifestoes ensued, until the Provinces became enlightened as to their own importance and strength, ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 3, No. 16, February, 1859 • Various
... and bargain with me," said Gotzkowsky with a hoarse laugh. "You take me for a chapman, who measures out his life and services by the yard; and you wish to pay me for mine by the same measure. Go, most sapient gentlemen; I carry on a wholesale trade, and do not cut off yards. That I leave to ...
— The Merchant of Berlin - An Historical Novel • L. Muhlbach
... direction of which puzzled me, it being in a hand I was not accustomed to see. Evidently, it was neither from you nor Mary Taylor, my only correspondents. Having opened and read it, it proved to be a declaration of attachment and proposal of matrimony, expressed in the ardent language of the sapient young Irishman! Well! thought I, I have heard of love at first sight, but this beats all. I leave you to guess what my answer would be, convinced that you will not do me the injustice of guessing wrong. When we meet I'll show you the letter. I hope you are laughing heartily. This is not like one ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... three or four feathers of a pheasant's tail are stuck, apparently with no ulterior purpose than that of ornament; but beside the bunch of ribbands there is also fixed a piece of wolf's skin, to give strength to the jaded animal, for, remarks the sapient Pliny, "a wolf's skin attached to a horse's neck will render him proof against all weariness." Personally, we should think a little more consideration and some elementary knowledge of farriery would have been of more service to the ill-used beasts round Naples than the ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... said another sapient of the same profession—"Robin Oig is no the lad to leave any of them, without tying Saint Mungo's knot on their tails, and that will put to her speed the best witch that ever flew over Dimayet ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume X, No. 280, Saturday, October 27, 1827. • Various
... roaming; Lean are the kine; the bees never humming; Milking-folds void; to the kiln no meat coming; Gaunt every steed; no pert sparrows strumming; Long the night till the dawn; but a glimpse is the gloaming. Sapient Cynfelyn, this was thy summing; "Prudence is Man's surest guide, by ...
— A Celtic Psaltery • Alfred Perceval Graves
... like a fool, Sally," cried the sapient waiter. "Don't you see that his dress is military? Look at his black cap, with its long bag and great feather, and the monstrous sword at his side; look at them, and then if you can, say I am mistaken in deciding that he is some great Russian commander,—most ...
— Thaddeus of Warsaw • Jane Porter
... the MAN whose school was the University, whose Alma Mater was Oxonia herself. We do not cut our wise teeth in a day; some people, indeed, are so unfortunate as never to cut them at all; at the best, two months is but a brief space in which to get through this sapient teething operation, a short time in which to graft our cutting on the tree of Wisdom, more especially when the tender plant happens to be a Verdant Green. The golden age is past when the full-formed goddess of Wisdom sprang from the brain of Jove complete in ...
— The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green • Cuthbert Bede
... to this sapient observation. His lordship, however, who seemed to feel that he had started upon a wrong principle, if not a disagreeable ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... extraordinary sagacity of this Animal, supercedes the necessity of puffing advertisements or exaggerated bills—that the Sapient Dog is a great curiosity, the Proprietor feels no hesitation in affirming, that his feats of activity are more various and pleasing than any preceding exhibition of a similar nature, all of which will be made manifest to every spectator, by his dexterity ...
— The Olden Time Series, Vol. 4: Quaint and Curious Advertisements • Henry M. Brooks
... streets of Charleston, rows of greedy vultures, with sapient look, sit on the parapets of the houses, watching for offal. These birds are great blessings in warm climates, and in Carolina a fine of ten dollars is inflicted for wantonly destroying them. They appeared to be quite conscious of their privileges, ...
— An Englishman's Travels in America - His Observations Of Life And Manners In The Free And Slave States • John Benwell
... Pine, or Palme, Then voluble and bold, now hid, now seen Among thick-wov'n Arborets and Flours Imborderd on each Bank, the hand of Eve: Spot more delicious then those Gardens feign'd Or of reviv'd Adonis, or renownd 440 Alcinous, host of old Laertes Son, Or that, not Mystic, where the Sapient King Held dalliance with his faire Egyptian Spouse. Much hee the Place admir'd, the Person more. As one who long in populous City pent, Where Houses thick and Sewers annoy the Aire, Forth issuing on a Summers Morn, to breathe Among the pleasant ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... with the sapient reflection that it's a terrible thing to be in love, even if only ...
— The Fortune Hunter • Louis Joseph Vance
... above-board. The prospectors would point out the most likely spots to try for diamonds, the Ovampo boys would be set to work, and almost invariably they found diamonds. Occasionally one or other of the "experts" would suggest a different spot, and usually these sapient individuals would justify their reputation by finding diamonds also ...
— A Rip Van Winkle Of The Kalahari - Seven Tales of South-West Africa • Frederick Cornell
... reform the stage. Gods! o'er those boards shall Folly rear her head, Where Garrick trod, and Kemble lives to tread? On those shall Farce display Buffoonery's mask, And Hook conceal his heroes in a cask? Shall sapient managers new scenes produce From Cherry, Skeffington, and Mother Goose? While Shakspeare, Otway, Massinger, forgot, On stalls must moulder, or in closets rot? Lo! with what pomp the daily prints proclaim, The rival candidates for attic fame! In grim array though ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Volume I, Number 1 • Stephen Cullen Carpenter
... 3. de sapient: qui avaris paedagogis pueros alendos dant, vel clausos in coenobiis jejunare simul et sapere, nihil aliud agunt, nisi ut sint vel non sine stultitia eruditi, vel ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... pleasure to meet you again! Permit me to paraphrase your most sound advice, and remind you that pistol-shots are apt to attract undesirable attention. It wouldn't be wise for you to bring the police about our ears. I believe that in substance such was your sapient counsel to me in the cabin of the Alethea; was it not?... And you, sir!"—fixing Brentwick with a cold unfriendly eye. "You animated fossil, what d'you mean by telling me to go to the devil?... But let that pass; I hold no grudge. ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance
... offering such extensive service; none of the other corps having volunteered to go farther than their military district, Wilts, Hants, and Dorset. One of these wiseacres exclaimed, in very boisterous language, against accepting the offer, and for this sapient reason—"because," as he said, "two hundred men out of one parish had volunteered to march to any part of the kingdom to hazard their lives in the defence of their country, provided they were commanded by an officer of their own choice; ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 2 • Henry Hunt
... 'But look here, I say; how about the dog and the horse in your argument? They've got no prehensile organ that ever I heard of, and yet they're universally allowed to be the cleverest and most intelligent of all earthly quadrupeds.' True, O most sapient and courteous objector. I grant it you at once. But observe the difference. The cleverness of the horse and the dog is acquired, not original. It has probably arisen in the course of their long hereditary intercourse and companionship with man, ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... perverse and foolish," said the goldsmith, as he poured out the tea. "When the voice of Experience and the voice of Wisdom say, 'Eschew cards, abjure dice, avoid men with lumps on their necks and revolvers in their pockets,' sapient Youth says, 'The old man's goin' dotty.' But we shall see. Youth's innings will come, and I bet a fiver—no, no, what am I thinking of?—I stake my honour that Youth's middle stump gets ...
— The Tale of Timber Town • Alfred Grace
... mean exactly to starve, I fear I must even venture on the Jew.—Not bad, by Long—Mem: Dancing Jews in sauce capital—mention that to young G——, of the Tenth." The business of mastication arrested for a moment the sapient remarks of the Impayable, until our notice was again attracted by his leaping from his chair, and cutting divers capers around the room, which, if they did honour to his agility, harmonized but ill with the precisian starchness of his habiliments, the order whereof was grievously derange ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 335 - Vol. 12, No. 335, October 11, 1828 • Various
... writer and statesman may not have selected the supposed best authorities for his dates, but the sapient critic indulges in a strange admixture of misconception. However, Egyptian chronology is not fully agreed upon, even Manetho and Herodotus differ some 120 years as to the time of Sesostris, and Bishop Warburton, we read, was highly indignant with a scholar, ...
— Chess History and Reminiscences • H. E. Bird
... Morals and minuets, virtue and her stays, And tell-tale powder—all have had their days. The ball begins—the honours of the house First duly done by daughter or by spouse, Some potentate—or royal or serene— With Kent's gay grace, or sapient Glo'ster's mien, Leads forth the ready dame, whose rising flush Might once have been mistaken for a blush, From where the garb just leaves the bosom free, That spot where hearts were once supposed to be; Round all the confines of the yielded waist, The stranger's hand may wander ...
— English Satires • Various
... unconsidered: it is their privilege, in common with that of certain others—lightnesses that froth upon the surface of society. Moreover, let me remind your worship's classicality that no one of mortals is sapient at all times. Item, that if friend Flaccus be not a calumniator, even the rigid virtue of the antiquer Cato delighted in so stimulant a vanity as wine hot. So give the colt his head, and let it go: remembering always that this same colt, as straying without a responsible rider, is indeed ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... the damsel; "but I think from this on I shall have no need of any prompting, and I shall bring my true story safe into port, and here it is. The king my father, who was called Tinacrio the Sapient, was very learned in what they call magic arts, and became aware by his craft that my mother, who was called Queen Jaramilla, was to die before he did, and that soon after he too was to depart this ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... practical airships—not gas-bags which could only be dragged slowly against a moderate wind, but flying machines which conquered the wind and used it as a bird does—had been submitted to the War Office during the last six or seven years, and had been pooh-poohed or pigeon-holed by some sapient permanent official—and now the penalty of stupidity and neglect had to ...
— The World Peril of 1910 • George Griffith
... the sapient waiting-maid; "I'll spread a kercher on this fragment of antiquity: ye'r ladyship can sit there free from any disturbance. I can see as well from this high mound as from the castle, or church-steeple, my lady; it is ...
— The Buccaneer - A Tale • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... The Northern papers announce the capture of Wilmington. No doubt the city has fallen, although the sapient dignitaries of this government deem it a matter of policy to withhold such intelligence from the people and the army. And wherefore, since the enemy's papers have a circulation here—at least their items of news are ...
— A Rebel War Clerk's Diary at the Confederate States Capital • John Beauchamp Jones
... which I do not exactly comprehend, myself, I have introduced a wheel within a wheel, a letter within a letter, a play within a play, after the manner of the old dramatists; and I beg you to make a note that the foregoing admonitions and most sapient counsels are not addressed to you. You are something of a philosopher; but you are not, like Mr. Stephen Duck, "something of a philosopher and something of a poet"; for I do not believe, O fortunate youth, that you ever invoked the ten ladies minus one in your ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... obliged to entertain the world with a few of her eccentricities some day or other; the ghost of poor Ralph Wewitzer cries loudly for revenge. The sapient police knight, when he secured the box of letters for his patroness, little suspected that they had all been previously copied by lieutenant Terence O'Farellan of the king's own. A mighty inquisitive sort of a personage, who will try his art to do her justice, ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... harp, flageolet, and first violin, had prudently abstained from drinking—at their own expense, and had reserved their thirstiness for the benefit of the bibicals of the "founder of the feast," and, consequently, had only attained that peculiar state of sapient freshness which invariably characterises quadrille bands after supper, and had, therefore, overlooked the rapid obfuscation of their more imprudent companion in their earnest ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, October 30, 1841 • Various
... blackberry wine as the short cut from poverty to prosperity in Ireland, the scheme being parallel to Mr. Gladstone's famous remedy of jam, this sapient "B.O.N." says:— ...
— About Ireland • E. Lynn Linton
... the sapient public, and, being well disposed to be duped, the whole job is complete. Practise away, worthies, and ye shall see with what open eyes and wide gullet I am ready to admire ...
— The Headsman - The Abbaye des Vignerons • James Fenimore Cooper
... but to give us to understand, in consequence, that all the hotels are furnished in the same way, and that bonbons, extraits, &c. are not to be procured, is like the proceeding of the Hon. Frederick de Roos, R. N. who affirms, in his sapient work on the United States, that all the inhabitants in Philadelphia take tea on the steps before their doors in summer evenings, because, forsooth, he saw a family sitting on those of the house in which they lived, in order to ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... your finger into a bird's nest," observed Elsie, with a sapient shake of the head. "The eggs always addle if you do, or the young birds refuse to hatch out; and of course in the case of turtle-doves it would be all the more so. 'Lay low, Bre'r Fox,' and wait for what happens. It all promises ...
— In the High Valley - Being the fifth and last volume of the Katy Did series • Susan Coolidge |
