"Thomas More" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... With letters to and from his famous daughter, Margaret Roper. Frontispiece, Portrait of Sir Thomas More, after Holbein. ...
— Sappho: One Hundred Lyrics • Bliss Carman
... 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 orphans' tears wept ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... for many years Rector of Welwyn; his son was visited there by Boswell and Dr. Johnson. 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 ...
— Hertfordshire • Herbert W Tompkins
... first edition, is apparent from two circumstances. The first is, that he has given you a quotation from his copy as follows:—"And as for M. More, whom the verity most offendeth, and doth but mocke it," whereas the original edition has, "And as for M. Mocke," &c., and Sir Thomas More notices this mockage of his name in his reply. The next is, that his copy contains "Crowley's Epistle to the Reader," which does not appear in any edition of an earlier date than 1551. When first attached to this treatise, the epistle ...
— Notes and Queries 1850.04.06 • Various
... pleasaunt worke of the beste state of a publyque weale, and of the newe yle called Utopia: written in Latin by Syr Thomas More knyght, and translated into Englyshe by Raphe Robynson Citizein and Goldsmythe of London, at the procurement, and earnest request of George Tadlowe Citizein and Haberdassher of the same Citie. London. 1551. ...
— Roister Doister - Written, probably also represented, before 1553. Carefully - edited from the unique copy, now at Eton College • Nicholas Udall
... combined freedom and realism with which recent or even contemporary history was habitually treated on the stage during the last years of the reign of Queen Elizabeth. The noblest poem known to me of this peculiar kind is the play of "Sir Thomas More," first printed by Mr. Dyce in 1844 for the Shakespeare Society: the worst must almost certainly be that "Chronicle History of Thomas Lord Cromwell" which the infallible verdict of German intuition has discovered to be "not only unquestionably Shakespeare's, but worthy to be classed ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... 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 ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... Utopia Russia has given to the world to stand beside Plato's, or Sir Thomas More's or Morris's or Bellamy's. This was ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... place in the world of a hundred years hence. But all higher minds are much more akin than they are different: genius is of all ages, and there is perhaps more uniformity in excellence than in mediocrity. The sublimer intelligences of mankind—Plato, Dante, Sir Thomas More—meet in a higher sphere above the ordinary ways of men; they understand one another from afar, notwithstanding the interval which separates them. They are 'the spectators of all time and of all existence;' their works live for ever; and there is nothing ...
— Sophist • Plato
... gave a new impulse in England to the study of Latin and Greek, and Sir Thomas More in his "Utopia" (wherein he imagines an ideal commonwealth with community of property), unconsciously gave birth to a word (utopia), which has ever since been used ...
— The Interdependence of Literature • Georgina Pell Curtis
... withdraw or to withhold from any one anything that is exclusively his. These seeming truisms are indeed diametrically opposed to a theory which enters on its list of friends names no less illustrious than those of Plato, Sir Thomas More, Bentham, and Mill. Still, whoever, undeterred by so formidable an array of adverse authorities, is prepared to accept the description of rights of which they form part, will have no difficulty in framing a theory ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... shorter religious and polemical works a catalogue is given in vol. vi. of the Clarendon Press edition of his History, and in Lowndes's Bibliographer's Manual. The following translations deserve to be mentioned:—Utopia, written in Latin by Sir Thomas More, Chancellor of England: translated into English (1685); A Relation of the Death of the Primitive Persecutors, written originally in Latin, by L.C.F. Lactantius: Englished by Gilbert Burnet, D.D., to which he hath made a large preface ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... Invention of Printing. Caxton. Contemporary History. Skelton. Wyatt. Surrey. Sir Thomas More. Utopia, and other ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... and it may be that in one or other of these Rastell printed the undated edition of Linacre's Grammar, which bears the address, 'ye sowth side of paulys.' But in 1520 he moved to 'the Mermayd at Powlys gate next to chepe syde.' There he printed The Pastyme of People, and Sir Thomas More's Supplicacyon of Souls, besides several interludes and two remarkable jest-books, The Twelve mery gestys of one called Edith and A Hundred Mery Talys. The last named became one of the most popular books of the time, but only ...
— A Short History of English Printing, 1476-1898 • Henry R. Plomer
... gross words (verba nuda et praetextata) in speaking of very gross things. He makes two daring quotations, one from Piso's Annals and the other from Sallust, to show that he had good precedent; and he cites Herodotus, Seneca, Suetonius, Plutarch, Erasmus, Thomas More, Clement of Alexandria, Arnobius, Lactantlas, Eusebius, and the Bible itself, as examples occasionally of the very reverse of a squeamish euphemism. Of even greater interest is a passage in which he foresees the charges of cruelty, ruthlessness, and breach of literary etiquette, ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... translated Thucydides; Queen Elizabeth translated Boethius. The mention of women in this connection suggests how widely the impulse was diffused. Richard Hyrde says of the translation of Erasmus's Treatise on the Lord's Prayer, made by Margaret Roper, the daughter of Sir Thomas More, "And as for the translation thereof, I dare be bold to say it, that whoso list and well can confer and examine the translation with the original, he shall not fail to find that she hath showed herself ...
— Early Theories of Translation • Flora Ross Amos
... 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 published. The ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... author of the First Part of King Henry VI. borrowed so largely, sinned as deeply. Hall's authorities among French writers were Monstrelet, Bouchet, Mayer, Argentan, Gile Corozet, and the annals of France and Aquitaine—and of English writers, Fabyan, Caxton, John Harding, Sir Thomas More, Basset, Balantyne, and ...
— Joan of Arc • Ronald Sutherland Gower
... Belinda Black, and her children were Potty Black and Sir Thomas More Black, this last being a creature of noble mien and a meditative ...
— A Woman Named Smith • Marie Conway Oemler
... walls late in the fifteenth century, had been the most stately mansion in the city, and had had a succession of famous tenants. When Sir John Crosby left it for his splendid tomb in the Church of St Helen's, it was for a time the palace of Richard, Duke of Gloucester, in which, to quote Sir Thomas More, "he lodged himself, and little by little all folks drew unto him, so that the Protector's Court was crowded and King Henry's left desolate"; and it was in one of its magnificent rooms that Richard was offered, and was pleased to ...
— Love Romances of the Aristocracy • Thornton Hall
... of the most celebrated of those men who have undertaken to produce a new 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 ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 349, November, 1844 • Various
... with a soprasalto; or with what Donne calls a "vaulter's sombersault?" Did he never hear of any little plunderer, climbing a wall, o'erreaching himself to pluck an apple, and falling on the other side, into the hands of the gardener? "By like," says Sir Thomas More, "the manne ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 201, September 3, 1853 • Various
... of the Execution of Thomas Cranmer: MS. Harleian, 422. Another account gives among the causes which Cole mentioned, that "it seemed meet, according to the law of equality, that, as the death of the Duke of Northumberland of late made even with Sir Thomas More, Chancellor, that died for the Church, so there should be one that should make even with Fisher, Bishop of Rochester; and because that Ridley, Hooper, and Ferrars were not able to make even with that man, it seemed that Cranmer should be joined ...
— The Reign of Mary Tudor • James Anthony Froude
... shoulders almost contemptuously. That did not prevent Lady Anne from being one of the fairest and loveliest women of Old England. And, besides, much as she inclined to the new doctrine, she did us essential good service, for she it was who bore the blame of Thomas More's death. Since he had not approved her marriage with the king, she hated him, as the king hated him because he would not take the oath of supremacy. Henry, however, would have spared him, for, at that time, he still ...
— Henry VIII And His Court • Louise Muhlbach
... realization. It is strange that no financial hero makes his appearance to use his great money-club to fell direr monsters than those which Hercules encountered, and by the creation of a city at once great, beautiful, and healthy to realize the conception of the Utopia and the dream of Sir Thomas More. Or take a parallel instance from the country. Those who have watched the issues of the co-operative system as applied to agriculture believe they see in it the future solution of two of our greatest social difficulties—those, ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... serious-minded party who objected to a tone of levity in some portions of the Sketches, I can only say that it is a part of my religion to look well after the cheerfulnesses of life, and let the dismals shift for themselves; believing, with good Sir Thomas More, that it is wise to "be merrie ...
— Hospital Sketches • Louisa May Alcott
... 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 his allegiance to the infant Elizabeth, ...
— A Short History of Monks and Monasteries • Alfred Wesley Wishart
... sincere esteem and affection of Madame Necker. She, laboriously anxious about the duties politeness requires from the mistress of a house, went so far as to write down in her tablets "To recompliment M. Thomas more strongly on the song of France in his poem of Pierre le Grand." She paid him more precious homage when she wrote to him: "We were united in our youth in every honorable way; let us be more than ever united now when ripe age, which diminishes the vivacity ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume VI. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... represented the highest aim and effort of the 'new learning' in England. He is the flower of our Renaissance in genius, wisdom, and beauty of nature. 'When ever,' says Erasmus in a famous passage, 'did Nature mould a character more gentle, endearing, and happy, than Thomas More's?' ...
— The Visions of England - Lyrics on leading men and events in English History • Francis T. Palgrave
... 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 ...
— Apologia Pro Vita Sua • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... 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 Handbook of Ethical Theory • George Stuart Fullerton
... of 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 ...
— The Facts About Shakespeare • William Allan Nielson
... of June 24, 1672. Addison says:—'The end of a man's life is often compared to the winding up of a well-written play, where the principal persons still act in character, whatever the fate is which they undergo.... That innocent mirth which had been so conspicuous in Sir Thomas More's life did not forsake him to the last. His death was of a piece with his life. There was nothing in it new, forced, or affected.' The Spectator, No. 349. Young also thought, or ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... excellent determination of goodness, what philosopher's counsel can so readily direct a prince as the feigned Cyrus in Xenophon? Or a virtuous man in all fortunes, as AEneas in Virgil? Or a whole commonwealth, as the way of Sir Thomas More's Utopia? I say the way, because where Sir Thomas More erred, it was the fault of the man, and not of the poet; for that way of patterning a commonwealth was most absolute, though he, perchance, hath not so absolutely ...
— A Defence of Poesie and Poems • Philip Sidney
... tradition, basing themselves on old-fashioned physiology, 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 example, ...
— Little Essays of Love and Virtue • Havelock Ellis
... as the 'captain' ('arhchegoz') or leader of a goodly band of followers; for in the Republic is to be found the original of Cicero's De Republica, of St. Augustine's City of God, of the Utopia of Sir Thomas More, and of the numerous other imaginary States which are framed upon the same model. The extent to which Aristotle or the Aristotelian school were indebted to him in the Politics has been little recognised, and the recognition is the more necessary because it is not made by Aristotle himself. ...
— The Republic • Plato
... Jonson, near Charing-cross. Spenser died at an inn, where he put up on his arrival from Ireland, in King-street, Westminster—the same which runs at the back of Parliament-street to the Abbey. Sir Thomas More lived at Chelsea. Addison lived and died in Holland House, Kensington, now the residence of the accomplished nobleman who takes his title from it. In Brook-street, Grosvenor-square, lived Handel; and in Bentinck-street, Manchester-square, Gibbon. We have omitted to mention that ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 393, October 10, 1829 • Various
... the Life of Sir Thomas More, written by William Roper, are my other authorities, though I touched somewhat unwillingly on ground already lighted up by Miss Manning in her Household of ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... the toss, and Captain Hartley led off with a question on the mediaeval prototypes of Thomas More's 'Utopia.' Brooks of Yale made a snappy reply, and by a dashing string of three questions on the authorship of 'Ralph Roister-Doister,' the sources of Chaucer's 'Nonne's Preeste's Tale,' and the exact site of the Globe Theatre, carried the fight into the enemy's territory. ...
— The Patient Observer - And His Friends • Simeon Strunsky
... marked by some towering leader, around whom other contemporary writers may be grouped. In Great Britain the several and successive periods might thus be well designated by such authors as Geoffrey Chaucer or John Wiclif, Thomas More or Henry Howard, Edmund Spenser or Sir Walter Raleigh, William Shakspere or Francis Bacon, John Milton or Jeremy Taylor, John Dryden or John Locke, Joseph Addison or Joseph Butler, Samuel Johnson ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... of Chelsea at a point in the eastern boundary in the Pimlico Road, we have on the right-hand side Holbein Place, a modern street so named in honour of the great painter, who was a frequent visitor at Sir Thomas More's house in Chelsea. Holbein Place curves to the west, and finally ...
— Chelsea - The Fascination of London • G. E. (Geraldine Edith) Mitton
... changed; a kind of antique primness, which had no taint of cockney stiffness, pervaded the scene. One might have expected to see Sir Thomas More or Lord Bacon emerge from the massive gothic porch, and stroll with slow step and meditative aspect towards the stone sun-dial that stood in the centre of that square rose-garden. The whole place had an air of doublet and ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... it was almost seven before they met. It was at last decided, with the consent of the Cardinal, that instead of a strong watch being set, which might irritate, all citizens should be warned to keep their servants within doors on the dreaded day. The Recorder and Sir Thomas More, of the King's Privy Council, came to the Guildhall, at a quarter to nine p.m., and desired the aldermen to send to every ward, forbidding citizens' servants to go out from seven p.m. that day to nine a.m. ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... work by which he will retain his place in European literature. His other plays, besides the two first named, were Eufemia di Messina; Iginia di Asti; Leoniero da Dordona, already named as having been thought out at Spielberg; his Gismonda; l'Erodiade; Ester d'Engaddi; Corradino; and a play upon Sir Thomas More. He wrote also poems, Cantiche, of which the best are Eligi e Valfrido and Egilde; and, in his last years, a religious manual on ...
— My Ten Years' Imprisonment • Silvio Pellico
... 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 continued ...
— Citation and Examination of William Shakspeare • Walter Savage Landor
... [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 a fashion to leave some "mot" as a legacy; ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Vol. 3 (of 7) • Lord Byron
... interval between Machiavelli and the system of natural law of Grotius, the Netherlander (1625: De Jure Belli et Pacis), belong the socialistic ideal state of the Englishman, Thomas More (De Optimo Reipublicae Statu deque Nova Insula Utopia, 1516), the political theory of the Frenchman, Jean Bodin (Six Livres de la Republique, 1577, Latin 1584; also a philosophico-historical treatise, Methodus ad Facilem Historiarum Cognitionem, ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... other Drummond's Ascent of Man. There were other books on a quaintly carved shelf, under the picture which had been turned to the wall. He ran over the titles. There were a number of French novels, Ely's Socialism, Sir Thomas More's Utopia, St. Pierre's Paul and Virginia, and a dozen other volumes; there were Balzac and Hugo, and Dante's Divine Comedy. Amid this array, like a black sheep lost among the angels, was a finger-worn and faded little volume bearing the name ...
— Flower of the North • James Oliver Curwood
... scarcely have understood, might be termed persecution. But the spirit of persecution in Plato, unlike that of modern religious bodies, arises out of the desire to enforce a true and simple form of religion, and is directed against the superstitions which tend to degrade mankind. Sir Thomas More, in his Utopia, is in favour of tolerating all except the intolerant, though he would not promote to high offices those who disbelieved in the immortality of the soul. Plato has not advanced quite so far as this in the path of toleration. But in judging of his enlightenment, ...
— Laws • Plato
... them. They were all inflamed with a vital necessity for change. Great names which in the ultimate challenge refused to destroy and helped to preserve—the greatest is that of Erasmus; great names which even appear in the roll of that of the Catholic martyrs—the blessed Thomas More is the greatest of these—must here be counted with the names of men like the narrow Calvin on the one hand, the large Rabelais upon the other. Not one ardent mind in the first half of the sixteenth century but ...
— Europe and the Faith - "Sine auctoritate nulla vita" • Hilaire Belloc
... certainly not the cause of the Goodwin Sands, and the connection supposed to exist between them seems to have first occurred to some 'aged peasant' of Kent examined before Sir Thomas More as to the origin of the Goodwin Sands. But, as Captain Montagu Burrows, R.N., mentions in his most interesting book on the Cinque Ports, Tenterden Steeple was not built till 1462, and 'was not in the popular adage connected with the Goodwin Sands, but with Sandwich ...
— Heroes of the Goodwin Sands • Thomas Stanley Treanor
... Most readers will remember the distinction which Sir W. Scott represents Louis XI. (with great appreciation of that monarch's character), as drawing between an oath taken on a false piece and one taken on a piece of the true cross. Sir Thomas More, a very devout believer in relics, says ("Works," p. 119), that Luther wished, in a sermon of his, that he had in his hand all the pieces of the Holy Cross; and said that if he so had, he would throw them there as never sun should shine on them:—and for what ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... Julius Caesar, Octavius, Charlemagne, the Emperor Charles V, Queen Elizabeth, Cromwell, Louis XIV, the elder Pitt, Frederick the Great, and Napoleon; and among the non-political Roger Bacon, Erasmus, Luther, Sir Thomas More, Isaac Newton, Faraday, and Darwin. The Elizabethan age had for him a magnetic attraction, because of the Queen with her enigmatical personality, marvellous statecraft and capacity for inspiring devotion, and of the brilliant galaxy of great men, statesmen and sailors, ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... father, who in hys pore prayers forgetteth none of you all, nor your babes, nor your nources, nor your good husbandes, nor your good husbandes shrewde wyues, nor your fathers shrewde wyfe neither, nor our other frendes. And thus fare ye hartely well for lacke of paper. THOMAS MORE, knight."—Johnson's ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... 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 ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude
... the phrase "the tale of a tub" (which was familiarly known in Sir Thomas More's time) had reference to the tub ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 204, September 24, 1853 • Various
... a boy all his life, like Sir Thomas More's son!' said Louis, coolly and simply, but with a twinkle in the corner of his eye, as if he said it on purpose to be provoking; and Mrs. Frost interposed by asking where the cousins had met, and whether they had known ...
— Dynevor Terrace (Vol. I) - or, The Clue of Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... more 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 ...
— God and my Neighbour • Robert Blatchford
... nothing better could be hoped for; because, I believe, it may pass for a universal rule, that in every diocese governed by bishops of the Whig species, the clergy (especially the poorer sort) are under double discipline, and the laity left to themselves. The opinion of Sir Thomas More, which he produces to prove the ill consequences or insignificancy of Convocations, advances no such thing, but says, "if the clergy assembled often, and might act as other assemblies of clergy in Christendom, much good might have come: ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. III.: Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Vol. I. • Jonathan Swift
... Southey was as assailable as Mill. His political economy is a mere muddle; his political views are obviously distorted by accidental prejudices; and the whole book is desultory and disjointed. In a dialogue with the ghost of Sir Thomas More, he takes the opportunity of introducing descriptions of scenery, literary digressions, and quaint illustrations from his vast stores of reading to the confusion of all definite arrangement. Southey is in the awkward position of a dogmatist defending a compromise. An Anglican claiming infallibility ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... learning, and many other pleasures besides the practice of the virtues. This double praise is further enhanced by the two patterns that you have proposed to yourself to follow, the one furnished you by the court, the other by your family. I mean our illustrious queen Mary, and your noble grandfather, Thomas More—a man whose virtues go to raise England above all ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various
... he hates all the big names of the eighties and nineties. Then I think I remarked that science was disgracefully under-endowed, and confessed I'd had to take to more profitable courses. 'The fact of it is,' I said, 'I'm the new playwright, Thomas More. Perhaps you've heard—?' Well, you ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... harmonized better. Byron represents it as rising in extreme grief: it is, however, I suspect, greatly more common in extreme danger; and all the instances which the poet himself gives in his note—Sir Thomas More on the scaffold, Anne Boleyn in the Tower, and those victims of the French Revolution "with whom it became a fashion to leave some mot as a legacy"—were all jokers rather in circumstances of desperate and hopeless peril ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... each other; and Caesar freely confessed to me, "that the greatest actions of his own life were not equal, by many degrees, to the glory of taking it away." I had the honour to have much conversation with Brutus; and was told, "that his ancestor Junius, Socrates, Epaminondas, Cato the younger, Sir Thomas More, and himself were perpetually together:" a sextumvirate, to which all the ages of the ...
— Gulliver's Travels - into several remote nations of the world • Jonathan Swift
... hesitate to stand forth the unpitying accessory of the unpitying guillotine. Ay, sir, it was a judicial tribunal in England, surrounded by all the forms of law, which sanctioned every despotic caprice of Henry the Eighth, from the unjust divorce of his queen, to the beheading of Sir Thomas More; which lighted the fires of persecution that glowed at Oxford and Smithfield, over the cinders of Latimer, Ridley, and John Rogers; which, after elaborate argument, upheld the fatal tyranny of ship-money against the patriotic resistance of Hampden; ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... and then no doubt led by the cities of the West—the ones furthest from Boston—there will be a Renaissance of European intelligence in this great daughter of Europe such as will astonish even Paris itself. But this event, as Sir Thomas More says so sadly of his Utopia, is rather to be ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... for the return of Tyndale to his native shores from Antwerp, and he declared that he was "very joyous to have his realm destitute of such a person." The Practice of Prelates was partly written in answer to the Dialogue of Sir Thomas More, who was commissioned to combat the "pernicious and heretical" works of the "impious enemies of the Church." Tyndale wrote also a bitter Answer to the Dialogue, and this drew forth from More his abusive and scurrilous Confutation, which did little credit to the writer or to the ...
— Books Fatal to Their Authors • P. H. Ditchfield
... hero, after his capture, that he was worth more for hanging than any other purpose, reminds one, by its combination of wit, wisdom, and self-devotion, of Sir Thomas More. ...
— Autobiography • John Stuart Mill
... father bishop of the west, though he had sometimes taken more power than he ought, and no king could ever be the same as a patriarch or father bishop. So they refused, and Henry cut off the heads of two of the best—Bishop Fisher and Sir Thomas More— though they had been his great friends. Sir Thomas More's good daughter Margaret, came and kissed him on his way to be executed; and afterwards, when his head was placed on a spike on London Bridge, she came by night in a boat and took it home in ...
— Young Folks' History of England • Charlotte M. Yonge
... 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
... of 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
... 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
... the Luxembourg. The gallery devoted to the old masters contains some valuable specimens of early Flemish art, and some extremely interesting historical portraits, the gem of the collection being a wonderfully fine portrait by Holbein of Sir Thomas More. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. July, 1878. • Various
... be seen. The room itself is a very large and well-proportioned one; the oak 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 ...
— A Cotswold Village • J. Arthur Gibbs
... he was descended of the family of the famous and learned Sir Thomas More, sometime Lord Chancellor of England: as also, from that worthy and laborious Judge Rastall, who left posterity the vast Statutes of the Law of ...
— Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions - Together with Death's Duel • John Donne
... books of whatever tendency are so cast forth upon the waters to sink or swim at hazard. I acknowledge, friend, your present muttering, Utopian! Arcadian! Formosan! to be not ill-founded: the sketch is a hasty one; but though it may have somewhat in common with the vagaries of Sir Thomas More, Sir Philip Sidney, and that king in impudence, George Psalmanazar, still I stand upon this ground, that many an ill-used author wants protection, and that society, for its own sake as well as his, ought to supply a court for literary reputation. Some poor man the ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... in 1534, having given too ready a credence to the 'revelations' of Elizabeth Barton, 'the nun of Kent,' he was attainted of misprision of treason, and soon afterwards, on his refusal to acknowledge the King's supremacy and the validity of his marriage with Anne Boleyn, was committed with Sir Thomas More to the Tower. During his imprisonment Pope Paul III. created him a cardinal, an act which greatly increased the irritation of the King against him, and on the 22nd of June 1535 Fisher was beheaded ...
— English Book Collectors • William Younger Fletcher
... that Popanilla resembles Swift's "Tale of a Tub," or Sir Thomas More's "Utopia," would be an advantageous comparison for our modern voyager, but it would not sufficiently illustrate the character of his work, since the latter books are so much less read than talked of. Swift wrote "for the universal improvement of mankind," but Popanilla ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 322, July 12, 1828 • Various
... be objected, 'Thus have numberless reformers spoken and written, since the days of Sir Thomas More; and what has been proposed to mankind as a panacea for all suffering has always proved to be Utopian.' And I am willing to admit that the dread of being classed with the legion of authors of Utopian romances at first ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka
... communications limit us now, and every facilitation of locomotion widens not only our potential, but our habitual range. Not only this, but we change our habitations with a growing frequency and facility; to Sir Thomas More we should seem a breed of nomads. That old fixity was of necessity and not of choice, it was a mere phase in the development of civilisation, a trick of rooting man learnt for a time from his new-found ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... connection with government, and all the influence which office could bestow, rather than deny their principles, or aid in doing wrong. Yet I never heard them called either idiots or over-scrupulous. Sir Thomas More need never have mounted the scaffold, had he only consented to take the oath of supremacy. He had only to tell a lie with solemnity, as we are asked to do, and he might not only have saved his life, but, as the trimmers of his day would have told him, ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... 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 my very good lord indeed; and I believe he doth ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 323, July 19, 1828 • Various
... or set them to sing or "play music." He had an affection for all who truly served him, and his daughters' nurse is as affectionately mentioned in his letters when from home as they are themselves. "Thomas More sendeth greeting to his most dear daughters Margaret, Elizabeth and Cecily; and to Margaret Giggs as dear to him as if she were his own," are his words in one letter; and his valued and trustworthy domestics appear in the family pictures of the ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 1, August 1850 - of Literature, Science and Art. • Various
... becomes the opinion of a small minority, of a strong minority, of a majority of mankind. Thus, the great progress goes on, till schoolboys laugh at the jargon which imposed on Bacon, till country rectors condemn the illiberality and intolerance of Sir Thomas More. ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... 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
... before this event, the opening of the Liverpool and Manchester railway, which showed how machinery would abbreviate space as it had SIR THOMAS MORE, OR COLLOQUIES ON THE PROGRESS OF SOCIETY (1829). There we see the effect of the new force on his imagination. "Steam," he says, "will govern the world next,... and shake it too before its empire is established." The biographer of Nelson devotes a whole conversation to the subject ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... ignominious an accident, which was indeed to be deprecated, but which might have happened to the most innocent of mankind. Then would she set forth some illustrious example, which her reading easily furnished, of a Phocion or a Socrates unjustly condemned; of a Raleigh or a Sir Thomas More, to whom late posterity had done justice; and by soothing my fancy with some such agreeable parallel, she would make me almost to triumph in my disgrace, and ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... unmolested, he devoted himself for five years to social and historical research. He returned to France in 1839 and in the following year published his Voyage en Icarie, a book that at once took its place by the side of Sir Thomas More's Utopia. Cabet pictured in his volume an ideal society where plenty should be a substitute for poverty and equality a remedy for class egoism. So great was the cogency of his writing that Icaria became more than a mere vision to hundreds ...
— Our Foreigners - A Chronicle of Americans in the Making • Samuel P. Orth
... uncertain. A still earlier play, a tragedy in Latin called Richardus Tertius, also told the story. Shakespeare's chief source was, however, Holinshed's Chronicles, which learned the tradition of Richard's wickedness from a life of that king written in Henry VII's time, and ascribed to Sir Thomas More. In the Chronicles was but a bare outline of the character which ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken
... 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 ...
— Memorials of Old London - Volume I • Various
... earlier date than the fourteenth century has ever been found. But translations, even of the whole Bible, older than Wcyliffe's are, by at least two eminent witnesses, said to have existed. "As for olde translacions, before Wycliffe's time," says Sir Thomas More, "they remain lawful and be in some folkes handes." "The hole byble," he declares (Dyalogues, p. 138, ed. 1530), "was long before Wycliffe's days, by vertuous and well learned men, translated into the English tong." And Cranmer, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... 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 used for ...
— Characters from 17th Century Histories and Chronicles • Various
... story 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, who forgot ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Saint Albans - With an Account of the Fabric & a Short History of the Abbey • Thomas Perkins
... purchased in 1712 by Sir Hans Sloane, after which it passed to the Cadogans. The memorials which crowd the picturesque church and churchyard of St Luke near the river, commonly known as the Old Church, to a great extent epitomize the history of Chelsea. Such are those of Sir Thomas More (d. 1535); Lord Bray, lord of the manor (1539), his father and son; Lady Jane Guyldeford, duchess of Northumberland, who died "at her maner of Chelse" in 1555; Lord and Lady Dacre (1594-1595); Sir ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various
... daughters kissed each other; and he became seated between them in the taxi. The most unobservant of men, he parted from them in the hall without having perceived anything except that they were rather silent; and, going to his study, he took up a Life of Sir Thomas More. There was a passage therein which he itched to show George Laird, who ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... recollecting that this was a necessary and essential part of the design. Nor is it strange that Steele, who was perhaps not very well acquainted with the history of literature, should have misconceived the nature of the publication, when we learn from an epistle of Sir Thomas More to Erasmus, that some of the stupid theologasters themselves, who were held up to ridicule, received it with approbation as ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 38, Saturday, July 20, 1850 • Various
... of his many writings, he took occasion to paint an Ideal Commonwealth as the conception of Lycurgus, the half mythical or all mythical Solon of Sparta. To Plutarch's Life of Lycurgus, as well as to Plato, Thomas More and others have been indebted for some part of the shaping of ...
— Ideal Commonwealths • Various
... year 1509 a handsome youth of eighteen came to the throne, the hopes of England ran high. His intelligence, his frank, genial manners, his sympathy with the "new learning," won all classes. Erasmus in his hopes of purifying the Church, and Sir Thomas More in his "Utopian" dreams for politics and society, felt that a friend had come to the throne in ...
— The Evolution of an Empire • Mary Parmele
... took up his residence in England, where he fell under the influence of Owen's agitation and became a convert to his Socialistic views. During this time of exile, too, he became acquainted with the "Utopia" of Sir Thomas More and was fascinated by it. The idea of writing a similar work of fiction to propagate his Socialist belief impressed itself upon his mind, and he wrote "a philosophical and social romance," entitled "Voyage to Icaria," which was published soon after his return to ...
— Socialism - A Summary and Interpretation of Socialist Principles • John Spargo
... 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
... 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 we possess written in our modern prose. The ...
— History of the English People, Volume III (of 8) - The Parliament, 1399-1461; The Monarchy 1461-1540 • John Richard Green
... they had of men; the head of Sir Thomas More, the head of Montrose, were exposed to mockery in public places, the ashes of Jeanne d'Arc were thrown into the river, Gordon's body lies unknown; but their honour is eternal in human memory. It was really for honour that Sir Thomas More suffered; ...
— The Red Book of Heroes • Leonora Blanche Lang
... Letters Series); Kittredge, Chaucer and His Poetry (Harvard University Press); Pollard, Chaucer Primer; Lounsbury, Studies in Chaucer; Lowell's essay in My Study Windows; essay by Hazlitt, in Lectures on the English Poets; Jusserand, Piers Plowman; Roper, Life of Sir Thomas More. ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... Sir Thomas More, Lord Chancellor, and one of England's worthiest sons, was one of the most upright of judges, at a time when so much could not be said of every one. It is recorded of him, that on one occasion a person who wished ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... 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
... circumstance that so great a man as Bacon rejected the theory of Galileo with scorn; for Bacon had not all the means of arriving at a sound conclusion.{HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS} But when we reflect that Sir Thomas More was ready to die for the doctrine of Transubstantiation, we cannot but feel some doubt whether the doctrine of Transubstantiation may not triumph over all opposition. More was a man of eminent talents. He had all the information on the subject that we have, ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... Sir Thomas More's Utopia was written in 1516, with its well-known passage describing contemporary enclosures in terms similar to those used in the statutes of thirty years before, and complaining that ...
— The Enclosures in England - An Economic Reconstruction • Harriett Bradley
... to us to find that for them religion has always been above all things; that they have always sacrificed to it whatever is dear to man on earth. They all seem to feel as instinctively and deeply as the thoroughly cultivated and superior mind of Thomas More did, that eternal things are infinitely superior to whatever is temporal, and that a wise man ought to give up every thing rather than be faithless ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... perpetuation of our freedom, Lafayette found the most perfect form of government. He wished to add nothing to it. He would gladly have abstracted nothing from it. Instead of the imaginary Republic of Plato, or the Utopia of Sir Thomas More, he took a practical existing model in actual operation here, and never attempted or wished more than to apply it faithfully ...
— Successful Methods of Public Speaking • Grenville Kleiser
... one gets many a glimpse of famous characters in interesting relations. Erasmus says that Sir Thomas More, "adolescens, comoediolas et scripsit et egit," and while a page with Archbishop Moreton, as plays were going on in the palace during the Christmas holidays, he would often, showing his schoolboy accomplishment, step on the stage without previous notice, and exhibit ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer |
