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Sir Thomas More   /sər tˈɑməs mɔr/   Listen
Sir Thomas More

noun
1.
English statesman who opposed Henry VIII's divorce from Catherine of Aragon and was imprisoned and beheaded; recalled for his concept of Utopia, the ideal state.  Synonyms: More, Thomas More.






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"Sir Thomas More" Quotes from Famous Books



... 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 and ...
— Citation and Examination of William Shakspeare • Walter Savage Landor

... for a moment, then reached down a book of biographies, writing of a popular colour, not above Thyrza's understanding. It contained a life of Sir Thomas More, or rather a pleasant story founded upon his life, with much about his ...
— Thyrza • George Gissing

... London, with my Lord of Winchester," [Bishop Gardiner] answered Philippa. "Nay, so far from priesthood that he is now on the eve of his wedding, unto one Mrs Mary Roper [daughter of the well-known Margaret Roper], grand-daughter of Sir Thomas More." ...
— Robin Tremain - A Story of the Marian Persecution • Emily Sarah Holt

... with a little chapel attached to it in a road in Chelsea where some Frenchwomen, who were exiled from their own country, have come to dwell. It is built on Sir Thomas More's garden, and it possesses within its boundaries the mulberry tree under which the chancellor was sitting when they came to fetch him to the Tower. It is a poor little house with very poor inmates, and a poor little chapel. But in that chapel night and ...
— Great Possessions • Mrs. Wilfrid Ward

... [223] {265} In Sir Thomas More, for instance, on the scaffold, and Anne Boleyn, in the Tower, when, grasping her neck, she remarked, that it "was too slender to trouble the headsman much." During one part of the French Revolution, it became ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Vol. 3 (of 7) • Lord Byron

... scheme of human life for us; he has introduced his description of them and their projects by some account of the previous speculations, of a kindred nature indeed, but conducted in a very different spirit, of Plato, Sir Thomas More, and others; and he has accompanied the whole with observations of his own, which bear the impress of a masculine understanding, a candid judgment, and a sound, healthy condition of the moral sentiments. The French Academy has distinguished the work by according to ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 349, November, 1844 • Various

... of Sir Thomas More, by William Roper, and his Letters to Margaret Roper and others. Edited, with Introduction and Notes, by ...
— Horace • William Tuckwell

... which moulds a dream without becoming its object. If facts are required to prove the possibility of combining weighty performances in literature with full and independent employment, the works of Cicero and Xenophon among the ancients; of Sir Thomas More, Bacon, Baxter, or to refer at once to later and contemporary instances, Darwin and Roscoe, are at once decisive of ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge

... proclamations the force of laws. In the action of the two Houses the Crown seemed to have discovered a means of carrying its power into regions from which a bare despotism has often had to shrink. Henry might have dared single-handed to break with Rome or to send Sir Thomas More to the block. But without Parliament to back him he could hardly have ventured on such an enormous confiscation of property as was involved in the suppression of the monasteries or on such changes in the national religion as were brought about by the Ten ...
— History of the English People - Volume 4 (of 8) • John Richard Green

... that among the manuscripts are some things of Sir Thomas More. I beg you to pass an hour in looking on them, and procure a transcript of the ten or twenty first lines of each, to be compared with what I have; that I may know whether they are yet ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill

... below As such "Masters Shallow," well could go; And where we shall all both low and high, Embalmed in mud, as forgotten lie As already doth Graham of Netherby! But that boy, that boy!—there's a tale I know, Which in talking of him comes apropos. Sir Thomas More had an only son, And a foolish lad was that only one, And Sir Thomas said one day to his wife, "My dear, I can't but wish you joy. "For you prayed for a boy, and you now have a boy, "Who'll continue a boy to the end ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al

... to observe, however, what Sir Thomas More says of it, and nobody will question that Sir Thomas More was a good Catholic and a competent witness. 'These epistles,' he says, 'are the delight of everyone. The wise enjoy the wit; the blockheads of monks take them seriously, and believe that they have been written to do them honour. When we laugh, ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude

... I 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 ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans

... 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 ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells

... able now, methinks, Out of a fortitude of soul I feel, To endure more miseries, and greater far, Than my weak-hearted enemies dare offer. What news abroad? Crom. The heaviest, and the worst, Is your displeasure with the king. Wol. God bless him! Crom. The next is, that Sir Thomas More is chosen Lord chancellor in your place. Wol. That's somewhat sudden: But he's a learned man. May he continue Long in his highness' favor, and do justice For truth's sake and his conscience; that his bones, When he has run his course, and sleeps in blessings, May have a tomb of ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey

... residence of Mr. Wykeham Martin and contains many valuable antiquities. Also near the eastern border of the Weald is Tenterden, famous for its church-steeple, which Bishop Latimer has invested with a good story. The bishop in a sermon said that Sir Thomas More was once sent into Kent to learn the cause of the Goodwin Sands and the obstructions to Sandwich Haven. He summoned various persons of experience, and among others there "came in before him an olde man with a white head, and one that was thought to be ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook

... the difficulty resolved itself by force, and it was wrenched by a stronger arm from a grasp too feeble to retain it. The consent of the nation was avowed, even in the authoritative language of a statute,[109] as essential to the legitimacy of a sovereign's title; and Sir Thomas More, on examination by the Solicitor-General, declared as his opinion that parliament had power to depose kings if it so pleased.[110] So many uncertainties on a point so vital had occasioned fearful episodes in English history; the most fearful ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude

... place on that spot since Sir William Wallace's day and how his benign head (most every bump on it good ones) wuz put up there a mark for the insultin' jeers of the populace, and it made me feel bad and sorry for Helen, his last wife, she that wuz Helen Mar. But Sir Thomas More's head wuz nailed up in the same place, and the Bishop of Rochester's and lots ...
— Around the World with Josiah Allen's Wife • Marietta Holley

... learning 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

... 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 in writings known ...
— Hertfordshire • Herbert W Tompkins

... singular book, "The Broad Stone of Honour," was first published in 1822, and repeatedly afterwards in greatly enlarged form. In its final edition it consists of four books entitled respectively "Godefridus," "Tancredus," "Morus" (Sir Thomas More), and "Orlandus," after four representative paladins of Christian chivalry. The title of the whole work was suggested by the fortress of Ehrenbreitstein, the "Gibraltar of the Rhine." Like Fouque, Digby was ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers

... see me safe up, but for my coming down I can shift for myself," were the last words of Sir Thomas More ...
— The Handy Cyclopedia of Things Worth Knowing - A Manual of Ready Reference • Joseph Triemens

... some writers who are chiefly interesting in themselves, and some whom chance and the agreement of men have picked out as symbols and convenient indications of some particular group or temperament of opinions. To the latter it is that Sir Thomas More belongs. An age and a type of mind have found in him and his Utopia a figurehead and a token; and pleasant and honourable as his personality and household present themselves to the modern reader, it is doubtful if they would ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells

... whatever nature it is, is not sufficiently representative. The men who work upon the road, day in day out, have not sufficient opportunity of saying, in open meeting of their fellow citizens, where their particular trade shoe pinches. It is, as old Sir Thomas More said very truly, the matter of the rich legislating for the poor, which ...
— Memoir and Letters of Francis W. Newman • Giberne Sieveking

... panels, which completely cover the walls, still bear the marks of the famous portraits that once adorned them. Charles I. and Henry Prince of Wales, by Cornelius Jansen; Queen Henrietta Maria, by Vandyke; Sir Thomas More and his family, by Holbein; Speaker Lenthall, the former owner of the house; and many other fine pictures hung here in former times. The staircase is a fine broad one, ...
— A Cotswold Village • J. Arthur Gibbs

... in the New Atlantis?" returned the Altrurian. "Yes; it is astonishing how well Bacon in that book, and Sir Thomas More in his Utopia, have divined certain phases of ...
— A Traveler from Altruria: Romance • W. D. Howells

... 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 from a ...
— Rides on Railways • Samuel Sidney

... a good debating Budget speech, of which Sir John Lambert wrote "In Tea, Domine, spero," and I replied: "Since the time of Sir Thomas More all these profane 'good things' ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, Vol. 2 • Stephen Gwynn

... death of Sir Thomas More, Foxe undertook to collect all the traditional gossip afloat concerning the Chancellor's alleged treatment of John Tewkesbury and James Bainham, for heresy. Tewkesbury was a leather-seller of London, and Foxe says that he was sent ...
— Studies from Court and Cloister • J.M. Stone

... method in which he went to work, compel us to seek an independent origin, and to look for some other translator less immediately under Wyclif's influence. The freedom with which the Bible admittedly circulated for many years, and the well-known allusion by Sir Thomas More to an English translation untouched by any taint of heresy, point also in the same direction. That the second version is really only a revision of the first can hardly be adduced as a strong argument on the other side. The ethics of literary acknowledgment were not appreciated ...
— Fifteenth Century Prose and Verse • Various

... interprets it, all poets are mad, a company of bitter satirists, detractors, or else parasitical applauders: and what is poetry itself, but as Austin holds, Vinum erroris ab ebriis doctoribus propinatum? You may give that censure of them in general, which Sir Thomas More once did of Germanus ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior

... "there is much strange opinion in it near to the opinions of Boheme; I pray God keep that book out of England." [Sidenote: January 21, 1521] Wolsey himself, biassed perhaps by his ambition for the tiara, labored to suppress the heresy. Most important of all, Sir Thomas More was promptly and decisively alienated. {283} It was More, according to Henry VIII, who "by subtle, sinister slights unnaturally procured and provoked him" to write against the heretic. His Defence of the Seven Sacraments, ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith

... the chancery 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 ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 236, May 6, 1854 • Various

... persecutors whom Sewel presents to us with any qualifying remark as to a previous more humane temper. Sole, too, in escaping the doom of sudden death which the historian solemnly records in the cases of the rest. So that even if we had not the eminent example of Marcus Aurelius and Sir Thomas More, we might still infer from this that it is no less possible for the man of enlightened ability and culture, than for the ignorant bigot, to find himself, almost of necessity, a chief instrument of religious coercion. Doubtless this ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop

... gift of prophecy and power of miracles. Having denounced the doom of speedy death against Henry VIII. for his marriage with Anne Boleyn, the prophetess was attainted in Parliament, and executed with her accomplices. Her imposture was for a time so successful, that even Sir Thomas More was disposed to be a believer.] or whether she dwelt upon the general duty which was incumbent on all Catholics of the time, and the pressure of which she felt ...
— The Abbot • Sir Walter Scott

... general interest still belongs to the name of Pico della Mirandola, [36] whose life, written by his nephew Francis, seemed worthy, for some touch of sweetness in it, to be translated out of the original Latin by Sir Thomas More, that great lover of Italian culture, among whose works the life of Pico, Earl of Mirandola, and a great lord of Italy, as he calls him, may still be read, in ...
— The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater

... contact with the most innocently wild, secluded, and apparently happy state of things imaginable—a real Utopia, such as Sir Thomas More dreamt not of, being actually here, with no trace of abortive politics or irritating ordinance. Here was contentment in the savage wilderness—communion with Nature in all her unstained purity and beauty. One thought of the many men of mind who ...
— Through the Mackenzie Basin - A Narrative of the Athabasca and Peace River Treaty Expedition of 1899 • Charles Mair

... 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 that he had been from them so long, saieing merily that he had been a slepe that ...
— Success With Small Fruits • E. P. Roe

... have had to meet their death. They have done so generally with becoming manliness. Even though they may have been rebels against the powers of the day, their memories have been made green because they have fallen like brave men. Sir Thomas More, who was no rebel, died well, and crowned a good life by his manner of leaving it. Thomas Cromwell submitted to the axe without a complaint. Lady Jane Grey, when on the scaffold, yielded nothing in manliness to the others. Cranmer ...
— Life of Cicero - Volume One • Anthony Trollope

... of our day, which also does the same. Tyndale, in his translation nearly three hundred and seventy-five years ago, made the same translation of this word; but Julia Smith did not know that and never saw his translation. This word "charity" was one of the words that Sir Thomas More, Lord Chancellor of England, charged Tyndale with mistranslating. The other two words were "priest" and "church," Tyndale calling priests "seniors," and church, "congregation." Both Julia Smith and the revised version call them ...
— The Woman's Bible. • Elizabeth Cady Stanton

... to be 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

... piece of military execution, I must for the present leave the reader to consider with himself, whether indeed it be less Kingly, or more savage, to strike an uncivil soldier on the head with one's own battle-axe, than, for instance, to strike a person like Sir Thomas More on the neck with an executioner's,—using for the mechanism, and as it were guillotine bar and rope to the blow—the manageable forms of National Law, and the gracefully twined intervention of a polite group of noblemen ...
— Our Fathers Have Told Us - Part I. The Bible of Amiens • John Ruskin

... and wittie worke, of the best state of a publique weale, and of the new yle, called Utopia: written in Latine, by the right worthie and famous Sir Thomas More knyght, and translated into Englishe by RAPHE ROBYNSON, sometime fellowe of Corpus Christi College in Oxford, and nowe by him at this seconde edition newlie perused and corrected, and also with diuers notes in the margent augmented. ...
— Roister Doister - Written, probably also represented, before 1553. Carefully - edited from the unique copy, now at Eton College • Nicholas Udall

... James's Palace Promenade in the Mall Suggested Improvements Pimlico The Ty-bourn Isle of St. Peter's Chelsea Ranelagh Chelsea Buns —— Hospital Villany of War Invalid without Arms A Centenarian Securities of Peace Caesar's Ford The Botanic Garden Don Saltero's Sir Thomas More Sir Hans Sloane Battersea Waste of Public Wealth Cupidity of Trade Insufficiency of Wealth Mr. Brunel's Saw Mills —— Shoe Manufactory Evils of Machinery Lord Bolingbroke's House York House An American Aloe Reflections ...
— A Morning's Walk from London to Kew • Richard Phillips

... poets each in his degree, this seems unreasonable and even incomprehensible; but to me it is very real; and all literature which assumes to treat our lives as if Christianity did not exist lacks that satisfactory quality which one finds in Dante, in Calderon, in Sir Thomas More, and in Shakespeare. It is possible that the prevalence of doubt in modern poetry is the cause of its lack of gaiety. There is a modern belief that gaiety went out of fashion when Pan died or disappeared into hidden haunts. This is not true. The Greeks were gay at times and joyous at times, ...
— Confessions of a Book-Lover • Maurice Francis Egan

... second title is an Annual of Literature and the Fine Arts, and from the choice of its illustrations, deservedly so. Thus, among the painters, who have furnished subjects for the engravers, we have Holbein, Claude, and Primaticcio; and two from Sir Thomas Lawrence. The engraving from Holbein, Sir Thomas More and his Family,—is a novelty in an Annual, and is beautifully executed by Ensom. It has all the quaintness of the great master, whose pictures may be called the mosaic of painting. The Autumnal Evening, engraved by Dean, after Claude, is not so successful; although ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 344 (Supplementary Issue) • Various

... 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

... assume, though they may not always assert, that the sexual products are excretions, to be dealt with summarily like other excretions. That is an ancient view and it was accepted by such wise philosophers of old times as Montaigne and Sir Thomas More. It had, moreover, the hearty support of so eminent a theological authority as Luther, who on this ground preached early marriage to men and women alike. It is still a popular view, sometimes expressed in the crudest terms, and often by people who, not following Luther's ...
— Little Essays of Love and Virtue • Havelock Ellis

... the Speaker. The 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 ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole

... of Philosophy, and Saint Thomas's Summa; 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 ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee

... is the 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 ...
— History of the English People, Volume III (of 8) - The Parliament, 1399-1461; The Monarchy 1461-1540 • John Richard Green

... stepping-stone to the unconditional headship of the Church, he regarded it as his own fault. He refused submission, and put himself in communication with the Imperialists with a view to effective intervention. Sir Thomas More, the most modern and original mind among the men of his time, showed greater caution. He admitted the right of Parliament to determine the succession, and made no struggle for Mary Tudor, as he had made none for her mother. He did not openly contest the royal supremacy until after sentence. ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton

... there was no treason in Hayward's Henry IV, but 'very much felony', because Hayward 'had stolen many of his sentences and conceits out of Cornelius Tacitus' (Apophthegms, 58). Hayward and Bacon had a precursor in the author of The History of King Richard the Thirde, generally attributed to Sir Thomas More, and printed in the collection of his works published in 1557. It was known to the chroniclers, but it did not affect the writing of history. Nor did George Cavendish's Life and Death of Thomas Wolsey, which they likewise ...
— Characters from 17th Century Histories and Chronicles • Various

... courage, he made a very just distinction between constitutional courage and courage from reflection. "Sir Thomas More," said he, "would not probably have mounted a breach so well as a sergeant who had never thought of death. But a sergeant would not on a scaffold have shewn the calm resolution ...
— Boswell's Correspondence with the Honourable Andrew Erskine, and His Journal of a Tour to Corsica • James Boswell

... growing up to crush in its iron grasp all States save its own, Plato withdraws his eyes from the world, to open them in his dreamy "Atlantis." Just in the grimmest period of English history, with the axe hanging over his head, Sir Thomas More gives you his "Utopia." Just when the world is to be the theatre of a new Sesostris, the sages of France tell you that the age is too enlightened for war, that man is henceforth to be governed by pure reason, and live ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... his place in English literature to his pure, vigorous English prose. John Tindal and Sir Thomas More, his predecessors, had perhaps equaled him in the flexible and simple use of his native tongue, but they had not surpassed him. The usage of the time was still to write works of importance in Latin, and Ascham was master of a good Ciceronian Latin style. It ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner

... "Sir Thomas More (when a student on his travels) is said to have puzzled a pragmatic professor at Bruges, who gave a universal challenge to dispute with any person in any science: in omni scibili, et de quolibet ente. Upon which ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 76, April 12, 1851 • Various

... of London, on the N. of the Thames; famous for its hospital for old and disabled soldiers, and the place of residence of sundry literary celebrities, among others Sir Thomas More, ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood

... Macbeth is called to denounce life as "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury," and "signifying nothing." Macbeth must be shunned by the reformer as the monk repels the visits of Satan in the desert. He must share the hopefulness of Sir Thomas More. Utopia is possible here, now, and everywhere, though execution is likely to be the penalty of too close application ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby

... ii., pp. 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

... [82] Sir Thomas More's portrait at the age of fifty was painted by Hans Holbein; it is now in the Frick Collection, New York. Two portrait drawings of him by Holbein are in the Royal Library at Windsor Castle. See also ...
— Erasmus and the Age of Reformation • Johan Huizinga

... 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

... Barry. Residence of Dr. Isaac Watts. Prison of Lady Mary Grey. Studio of Thomas Gainsborough. Tomb of John Kyrle. Tomb of William Hogarth. Grave of Izaak Walton. Grave of William Penn. Monument of Wren. Grave of Lady Rachel Russel. Edgeworthstown. Garden of Sir Thomas More. Esher—Residence of Jane Porter. Grave of Sir Richard Lovelace. Grave of Grace Aguilar. Dwelling of Edmund Burke. Remains of Clarendon House. Flaxman's Monument. Village of Eyam. Monument of Edward Bird, R.A. Grave of Mrs. ...
— The Manual of Heraldry; Fifth Edition • Anonymous

... perhaps, no more disposed to punish a man for expounding the fundamental principles of philosophic anarchism than was the Russian autocracy in our own day when it tolerated Tolstoy. It was not for writing Utopia that Sir Thomas More lost his head. But the book is quite unflinching in its application of principle, and its attacks on monarchy are as uncompromising as those for which Paine was outlawed. The preface calmly discusses the possibility of prosecution, issues what is in effect a quiet ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford

... Printing. Caxton. Contemporary History. Skelton. Wyatt. Surrey. Sir Thomas More. Utopia, and other Works. ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee

... No wife, no children had he, and the thinkers of all civilized nations are his posterity, and are tinged with his mind. How many great men Nature is incessantly sending up out of night, to be his men,—Platonists! the Alexandrians, a constellation of genius; the Elizabethans, not less; Sir Thomas More, Henry More, John Hales, John Smith, Lord Bacon, Jeremy Taylor, Ralph Cudworth, Sydenham, Thomas Taylor; Marcilius Ficinus, and Picus Mirandola. Calvinism is in his Phaedo: Christianity is in it. Mahometanism draws all ...
— Representative Men • Ralph Waldo Emerson

... with Salisbury, who could speak but not write, and Northampton, who could write but not speak, thought Bacon eminent both as a speaker and a writer. Ben Jonson, passing in review the more famous names of his own and the preceding age, from Sir Thomas More to Sir Philip Sidney, Hooker, Essex, and Raleigh, places Bacon without a rival at the head of the company as the man who had "fulfilled all numbers," and "stood as the mark and [Greek: akme] of our language." ...
— Bacon - English Men Of Letters, Edited By John Morley • Richard William Church

... especially eloquent in preaching reform. The writings of Erasmus had great vogue in England. John Colet (1467?-1519), a famous dean of St. Paul's cathedral in London, was a keen reformer who disapproved of auricular confession and of the celibacy of the clergy. Sir Thomas More (1478-1535), one of the greatest minds of the century, thought the monks were lazy and indolent, and the whole body of churchmen in need of an intellectual betterment. But neither Colet nor More had any intention ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes

... 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

... "Utopia"—an imaginary island, represented by Sir Thomas More, in a work called "Utopia," as enjoying the greatest perfection in ...
— New Word-Analysis - Or, School Etymology of English Derivative Words • William Swinton

... what he conceives to be necessary for the state: political, legislative or judicial reforms, even when loudly demanded, and favored by authority, are hard to be effected, and not seldom generations come and go without effecting them. The republics of Plato, Sir Thomas More, Campanella, Harrington, as the communities of Robert Owen and M. Cabet, remain Utopias, not solely because intrinsically absurd, though so in fact, but chiefly because they are innovations, have no support in experience, and require for their realization the modes of thought, habits, manners, ...
— The American Republic: Its Constitution, Tendencies, and Destiny • A. O. Brownson

... 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 ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle

... keep back an enemy. In this way Sir Thomas Wyatt in 1557 was kept out of London. Before this drawbridge stood a tower on the battlements of which were placed the heads of traitors and criminals. The heads of Sir William Wallace, Jack Cade, Sir Thomas More and many others were stuck up here. On the Southwark side ...
— The History of London • Walter Besant

... meaning 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

... is said to be the only wit that the people of Rome had equalled to their empire. Ingenium par imperio. We have had many, and in their several ages (to take in but the former seculum) Sir Thomas More, the elder Wiat, Henry Earl of Surrey, Chaloner, Smith, Eliot, B. Gardiner, were for their times admirable; and the more, because they began eloquence with us. Sir Nicolas Bacon was singular, and almost alone, in the beginning of Queen Elizabeth's time. Sir Philip Sidney and Mr. Hooker (in ...
— Discoveries and Some Poems • Ben Jonson

... 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 ...
— The History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847 (3rd ed.) (1902) - With Notices Of Earlier Irish Famines • John O'Rourke

... inscribed with some characters that looked like Hebrew. I had seen this before in Mr. Mayer's collection in Liverpool. The mediaeval and English relics, however, interested me more,—such as the golden and enamelled George worn by Sir Thomas More; or the embroidered shirt of Charles I.,—the very one, I presume, which he wore at his execution. There are no blood-marks on it, it being very nicely washed and folded. The texture of the linen cloth—if linen it be—is coarser than any peasant would wear at this day, ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... the state enacts indicates a fact in human nature; that is all. We must in ourselves see the necessary reason of every fact,—see how it could and must be. So stand before every public and private work; before an oration of Burke, before a victory of Napoleon, before a martyrdom of Sir Thomas More, of Sidney, of Marmaduke Robinson; before a French Reign of Terror, and a Salem hanging of witches; before a fanatic Revival and the Animal Magnetism in Paris, or in Providence. We assume that we under like influence should be alike ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson

... has taken form as "Christian Socialism" among men of strong religious natures, in various religious denominations. Great secular dreamers—Plato in his "Republic," Sir Thomas More, in his "Utopia," Edward Bellamy, in "Looking Backward," William Morris, in "News from Nowhere," and others—have painted beautiful pictures of ideal economic states from which all of the great evils and problems of our ...
— Modern Economic Problems - Economics Vol. II • Frank Albert Fetter

... April, 1535, after a trial lasting two[66] days, the three Carthusians and Father Richard Reynolds were condemned to be drawn, hanged, and quartered. On their way to the scaffold they passed their fellow-prisoner, Sir Thomas More, who saw them from his prison cell. "Lo, dost thou not see, Meg," he said to his daughter Margaret, "that these blessed fathers be now as cheerfully going to their death as bridegrooms to their marriage." When the scaffold was reached Father ...
— Memorials of Old London - Volume I • Various

... Shakespeare, 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 ...
— The Facts About Shakespeare • William Allan Nielson

... idea of the 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 ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 323, July 19, 1828 • Various

... 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 could see Sir Thomas More taking his barge for the ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett

... 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

... moral than Jeremiah, Ruskin is superior to Isaiah; Ingersoll, the Atheist, is a nobler moralist and a better man than Moses; Plato and Marcus Aurelius are wiser than Solomon; Sir Thomas More, Herbert Spencer, Thoreau, Matthew Arnold, and Emerson are worth more to us than all ...
— God and my Neighbour • Robert Blatchford

... "none hath better wit than Quipsome Hal, when he chooseth to be in earnest. In very deed, as I have heard Sir Thomas More say, it needeth a wise man to be fool ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte M. Yonge

... 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 ...
— The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan • James Morier

... supremacy. All persons suspected of disloyalty were required 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 ...
— A Short History of Monks and Monasteries • Alfred Wesley Wishart

... told of him by Sir Thomas More, how he convicted an impostor who claimed to have been born blind, but to have received sight at St. Alban's shrine, by asking him the colour of the garments that the duke himself and others were wearing; all these questions were correctly answered by the beggar, ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Saint Albans - With an Account of the Fabric & a Short History of the Abbey • Thomas Perkins

... 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 ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman

... of course, to the well-known story of Margaret Roper, the daughter of Sir Thomas More, who is said to have taken his head when he was executed and preserved it ...
— The Early Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson • Tennyson

... language, and each rendering went through several editions. Another delusion which French men of letters cherished, not only during Shakespeare's lifetime, but through three or four generations after his death, was that Sir Thomas More, Sir Philip Sidney, and the father of Lord Chancellor Bacon were the greatest authors which England had begotten or was likely to beget. French enthusiasm for the suggestive irony of More's Latin romance of Utopia outran that of his fellow-countrymen. A French translation anticipated the ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee

... book language. "What will you have? Will you resume your apprenticeship under Goethe, or shall we canter to Canterbury with Chaucer? Grand old Dan Chaucer! Or, shall we study magical philosophy with Roger Bacon—the Friar, the Admirable Doctor? or read good Sir Thomas More? What would Sir Thomas have said if he could have thought that he would be admired by two such people as you and I, in the woods of America, in the nineteenth century? But you do not want books! Ah! my brave friend, you are not well. Come into ...
— The End Of The World - A Love Story • Edward Eggleston

... long been dead, and is turned to dust. He always was as dry as dust, even when he was alive, but he was a great man. But the famous Englishman, Sir Thomas More, wrote more engagingly; and does he not tell us, in his "Utopia," that any nation's holding unused a piece of ground needed for the nourishment of other people is a ...
— A Handbook of Ethical Theory • George Stuart Fullerton

... (1497?-1580?).—Dramatist and epigrammatist, is believed to have been b. at North Mimms, Herts. He was a friend of Sir Thomas More, and through him gained the favour of Henry VIII., and was at the Court of Edward VI. and Mary, for whom, as a young Princess, he had a great regard. Being a supporter of the old religion, he enjoyed her favour, but on the accession of Elizabeth, he left the country, ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin

... circles in England, Flanders, and Germany. He had lived for some time in England and knew that there were men there with wealth who would employ a good painter to paint their portraits if they could find one. Erasmus himself sat to Holbein, and sent the finished portrait as a present to his friend Sir Thomas More, ...
— The Book of Art for Young People • Agnes Conway



Words linked to "Sir Thomas More" :   author, statesman, national leader, solon, writer



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