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More "Pithy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of pithy sayings, many of them wise, a few of them profound, and not one which is unworthy a second reading. It is to be hoped that he will escape the doubtful honor of being dispersedly set forth in a 'Wit and Wisdom of Thomas ...
— The Bibliotaph - and Other People • Leon H. Vincent
... awful words, his voice broken to a terrified whisper, "His rebuke with the flames of fire!" And in particular moods, when the prophets, however sonorous, were inadequate to his need, my uncle would have recourse to his own pithy vocabulary for terms with which to anathematize himself; but these, of course, may not be ...
— The Cruise of the Shining Light • Norman Duncan
... Johnson's written to his spoken utterances is indicative of his divided life. There are moments at which his writing takes the terse, vigorous tone of his talk. In his letters, such as those to Chesterfield and Macpherson and in occasional passages of his pamphlets, we see that he could be pithy enough when he chose to descend from his Latinized abstractions to good concrete English; but that is only when he becomes excited. His face when in repose, we are told, appeared to be almost imbecile; he was constantly sunk in reveries, from which he was only roused by a challenge to conversation. ...
— Samuel Johnson • Leslie Stephen
... bare, for a patch of great sunflowers found moisture enough for their roots somewhere far below, and sent up their great pithy stalks close to the house door, spread their rough leaves, and imitated the sun's disk in their broad, round, yellow flowers. There was an ugly euphorbia too, with its thorny, almost leafless branches and brilliant ...
— Diamond Dyke - The Lone Farm on the Veldt - Story of South African Adventure • George Manville Fenn
... of Trinity, who was then a young man, embodied the best opinion of the time in an excellent pithy letter. He wrote to me that the trial simply established, what every one believed, that "Sir William Wilde was a pithecoid person of extraordinary sensuality and cowardice (funking the witness-box left him without a defender!) and that his wife was a highfalutin' ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 1 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... almost every word of this. In his pithy way, speaking of the distinction between natural and artificial objects, he says himself that if you planted a wooden bed and the wood could still grow, it would grow up, not a bed, ...
— Progress and History • Various
... own that have already been quoted. He did not employ the terminology of the art, which, though possibly pedantic in sound, is invaluable for purposes of discussion; but he expressed its leading principles in pithy, homely phrases of his own, which showed how accurate his grasp of it was. "If once you get in a soldier's rear, he is gone," was probably in part a bit of good-natured chaff at the sister profession; but it sums up in a few words the significance and strategic importance of his course in passing ...
— Admiral Farragut • A. T. Mahan
... do not intermix in thy discourse such a multitude of proverbs as thou wert wont to do; for though proverbs are concise and pithy sentences, thou dost so often drag them in by the head and shoulders that they look more like the ravings of ...
— Wit and Wisdom of Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... again," but something led him happily to infringe the resolution, and then it became, "I will always, if possible, hear Daniel Wilson." Sentences of his were very memorable; for instance, "Nineteen- twentieths of sanctification consist in holy tempers," and, besides exhibiting a pithy force of language, his sermons were prepared with infinite care and labour. When at St. John's, where he had no parochial charge, he selected his text on Monday and carried it about with him, so to speak, all the week, chewing the cud of it as ...
— Pioneers and Founders - or, Recent Workers in the Mission field • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... well repay careful study; they are full of wisdom and of an imaginative philosophy, expressed in pithy and telling form, which continually reminds the reader of ...
— Mysticism in English Literature • Caroline F. E. Spurgeon
... pithy Angelico you can get, boil it very tender, then drain it, and press out all the Water you possibly can, then beat it in a Mortar to as fine a Paste as may be, then rub it through a Sieve; next Day dry it over a Fire, and to every Pound of this Paste take one Pound of ...
— The Art of Confectionary • Edward Lambert
... scions, often fails to select the best scions for grafting. The common mistake made by the beginner in the selection of scions of nut trees, is in selecting the smaller growth. The smaller growth is usually more pithy and lacking in vitality and gives poor results in grafting. Poor scions are usually characterized by pithy wood and a light colored, thin bark. The buds are usually farther apart than they are on good scion wood, though this is not always true, as good scions sometimes have the buds set ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Eleventh Annual Meeting - Washington, D. C. October 7 AND 8, 1920 • Various
... I was presented to every one of any note, and drank tea in the best drawing-rooms the Capital could boast of. So far my step-mother looked happy. I had not been awkward at introductions, nor dull in conversations. I had even made some very pithy remarks where they could do me most service, and knew the name of a historic personage to whom Lady Pendleton alluded vaguely, forgetting his title. I was invaded in my turn on our reception day by all the wealth and beauty of the capital. Great, pompous ...
— The Doctor's Daughter • "Vera"
... the general details of the sport, the Editor of the GUIDE asked him to say a few words to the ball players of the United States through the medium of this publication, and he has graciously consented to do so in the following pithy and straightforward talks: ...
— Spalding's Official Baseball Guide - 1913 • John B. Foster
... diminution in quantity. Winter, with fewer and simpler methods, yet seems to give all her works a finish even more delicate than that of summer, working, as Emerson says of English agriculture, with a pencil, instead of a plough. Or rather, the ploughshare is but concealed; since a pithy old English preacher has said that, "the frost is God's plough, which He drives through every inch of ground in the world, opening each clod, and pulverizing ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 52, February, 1862 • Various
... him with some surprise, being uncertain as to the person referred to by this pithy remark, and Flora glanced at him ...
— Wrecked but not Ruined • R.M. Ballantyne
... mountain which formed their frontier. Here Xenophon, having marshalled the soldiers for attack, with each company of 100 men in single file, instead of marching up the hill in phalanx, or continuous front with only a scanty depth—addressed to them the following pithy encouragement—"Now, fellow-soldiers, these enemies before us are the only impediment that keeps us away from reaching the point at which we have been so long aiming. We must even eat them raw, if in any way we can ...
— The Two Great Retreats of History • George Grote
... the courteous and conciliatory reply to the countess. When the late Duke of York consulted him, he stood whistling with his hands in his pockets; and the duke said, "I suppose you know who I am." The uncourtly reply was, "Suppose I do, what of that?" His pithy advice was, "Cut off the supplies, as the Duke of Wellington did in his campaigns, and the enemy will leave the citadel." When he was consulted for lameness following disease or accidents, he seldom either listened to the patient or made any inquiries, but would ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, - Issue 493, June 11, 1831 • Various
... John Temple's railroads straight through from somewhere or other in Dakota to Catskill Landing, and a funny sight he must have been in his flannel shirt and slouch hat, sprawling his lanky limbs from the platforms of observation cars, drawling out his pithy observations about the civilization which he ...
— Tom Slade at Temple Camp • Percy K. Fitzhugh
... Jugoslavia, and Poland upheld M. Bratiano's contentions in brief, pithy speeches. President Wilson's lengthy rejoinder, delivered with more than ordinary sweetness, deprecated M. Bratiano's comparison of the Allies' proposed intervention with Russia's protection of the Christians ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... known in this nation, among Azevedo's work we should be quick to appreciate such a pithy book as the Livro de uma Sogra,—the Book of a Mother-in-Law. And when the literature of these United States is at last (if ever, indeed!) released from the childish, hypocritical, Puritanic inhibitions forced upon it by quasi official societies, we may ...
— Brazilian Tales • Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis
... The Instruction for Visitors calls the primer "the handbooklet of the children, containing the alphabet, the Lord's Prayer, the Creed, and other prayers." In 1523 Melanchthon had published such a book, entitled "Enchiridion." Thus Enchiridion denotes a book of pithy brevity, an elementary book. The various Church Orders employ the word in a similar ...
— Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church • Friedrich Bente
... the more important that this should be made the occasion of a settlement of the question so unequivocal and positive as effectually to guard against future complication and embarrassment. Now how did the Premier deal with this issue? He disregarded the homely wisdom contained in the pithy bull of Sir Boyle Roche, that "the best way to avoid a dilemma is to meet it plump." He dodged the dilemma. His resolutions, worded with ingenious obscurity, skilfully evaded the important aspect of the controversy, and two of them, the second and third, gave equal consolation ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 50, December, 1861 • Various
... happily discovered that the littler boy's memory was more tenacious of rhyme, so she successfully taught him certain metrical conceits that had been her own to learn in girlhood, beginning with pithy ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... long since, a white-haired man, Pithy of speech, and merry when he would; A genial optimist, who daily drew From what he saw his quaint moralities. Kindly he held communion, though so old, With me a dreaming boy, and taught me much That books tell not, and I ...
— Poems • William Cullen Bryant
... to support the party candidate merely because he was the party candidate. He deluged the community with copies of my letter of acceptance, and three days later overwhelmed the postal service with a batch of circulars embodying a short, pithy description of my personal virtues and talents, interwoven with sound doctrine. Although he confided to me that torchlight organizations were moribund factors in political warfare, he advised me to supply uniforms and torches, and a promise of abundant cigars, ice-cream, and ginger-beer for the ...
— The Opinions of a Philosopher • Robert Grant
... was the only reply to the captain's short but pithy speech. The cheer was feebly answered by the enemy, who from her uncertain movements was evidently puzzled at the apparent change in Sir Sidney Salt's tactics. It seemed to those on board the Pride that contrary ...
— As We Sweep Through The Deep • Gordon Stables
... intendant for the wages due to him, and without a word waved his hand towards the door. Remonstrance and entreaty, or the assurance that it was a first fault, were alike in vain; a stare, a shrug, and just possibly the pithy injunction, "Go!" was the utmost they ever elicited from the maitre d'hotel; and as their wages were high and always paid to the day, a practice by no means common in great households in those times, the cases of delinquency were few, and M. Boulederouloue's staff, like himself, did their ...
— The King's Warrant - A Story of Old and New France • Alfred H. Engelbach
... no one would be surprised to find a recipe against baldness under the title of "The Age of Love." But then "The Age of Love" is an absurd and answerless question. Experience shows that all ages fall in love—and out again; so that, to quote the pithy Bacon again, "a man may have a quarrel to marry when he will." Octogenarians elope, and Mr. Gilbert's elderly baby died a blase old roue ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... State. Titus, the successor of that monarch, manifested equal confidence, and regarded him absolutely as an oracle. Apollonius, who really seems to have been a most sensible politician, wrote the following brief but pithy note to Titus, when the latter modestly refused the crown of victory, after having ...
— The Humbugs of the World • P. T. Barnum
... an Unfortunate Lady' and 'Eloisa to Abelard' must be carefully weighed in this connection. On the other hand, it may well be doubted if he can ever be excelled as a master in satire and kindred semi-prosaic forms. He is supreme in epigrams, the terse statement of pithy truths; his poems have furnished more brief familiar quotations to our language than those of any other writer except Shakspere. For this sort of effect his rimed couplet provided him an unrivalled instrument, and he especially developed its ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... please your majesty, elect to permit a humble admirer to propose a question. As our king, we put our lives and fortunes in your hands. If, therefore, the Eagle, the Vulture, and the Kite, should make a descent upon us, what means would you take for our defense?" This pithy question opened the eyes of the Birds to the weakness of their choice and they ...
— Aesop's Fables - A New Revised Version From Original Sources • Aesop
... know that when we presented ourselves at the gate yonder, his brain was over-burdened with a speech that had been penned for him, and which proved rather an overmatch for his gigantic faculties. Now this same pithy oration had been indited, like sundry others, by my learned magister, Erasmus Holiday, so I had heard it often enough to remember every line. As soon as I heard him blundering and floundering like a fish upon dry land, through the ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... he would know that only one person has once decided to use the word, but he does not reflect, and the effect on him is the same as if a hundred persons had used it independently of each other. The contents-bills, indeed, of the newspapers, which were originally short and pithy merely from considerations of space, have developed in a way which threatens to turn our streets (like the advertisement pages of an American magazine) into a psychological laboratory for the unconscious production of permanent associations. 'Another German Insult,' 'Keir ...
— Human Nature In Politics - Third Edition • Graham Wallas
... instead of rising from his seat and placing a chair, the banker merely bows and points to one. Lawyers, on the contrary, are expected to behave like any other gentlemen; so also physicians. The patient is directed in both cases to relate his grievances in short, pithy sentences; answer all questions clearly; apologise for taking up their time by asking them in turn—in consequence, he must say, of his own ignorance; and then finish by warmly thanking them for the attention they give to his affairs. Authors and ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 462 - Volume 18, New Series, November 6, 1852 • Various
... numerous athletic corps of dramatists, contemporary with Shakespeare and Milton, few have left works pithy enough and so poetically complete as to withstand the wear of time and keep fresh to each successive generation. But if you inspect the long list from which Charles Lamb took his "Specimens," you will find few ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... Hitzig, who came down to Warsaw with the rank of assessor in the administrative college in which Hoffmann held that of councillor. The crust of formal courtesy and commonplaces was broken through by Hitzig's pithy answer, to a question asking his opinion about some newly-arrived colleague, that he was "a man in buckram." The borrowed words of Falstaff banished Hoffmann's reserve, and caused his sombre face to light up with joy and his tongue ...
— Weird Tales, Vol. II. • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... was thought the better course, if it could be accomplished. The occasion was extraordinary, and never contemplated—the exigency beyond immediate solution. As James Dows, one of the coolest in judgment and wisest in counsel of the Executive Committee, pertinently described the situation in the pithy remark, "We started in to hunt cayotes, but we've got a grizzly bear on our hands, and we don't know what to do with him." The Executive Committee were not themselves masters of the situation. Behind ...
— The Vigilance Committee of '56 • James O'Meara
... number of Brahmin ascetics noted for their skill in answering philosophical questions with pithy wisdom. An account of the verbal skirmish is given by Plutarch; Alexander himself framed all ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... anywhere. He and Mrs. Caxton had many subjects and interests in common of which they talked freely, and Eleanor was only too glad to listen. There were books and reviews read aloud sometimes, with very pithy discussion of the same; in fact, there was conversation, truly deserving the name; such as Eleanor never listened to before she came to Plassy, and which she enjoyed hugely. Then the walks after natural objects were on the whole frequent; and Mr. Rhys was sure to ask her to go ...
— The Old Helmet, Volume II • Susan Warner
... Herodotus respecting one of the theories which he had heard for explaining the inundation of the Nile by a supposed connexion with the ocean—that the man who carries up his story into the invisible world, passes out of the range of criticism."[2] And he adds the following pithy note:—"Niebuhr puts together all the mythical and genealogical traces, many of them in the highest degree vague and equivocal, of the existence of Pelasgi in various localities; and then, summing ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 • Various
... falling into sharp and sore sicknesse upon a time slumbered and slept upon his soft pillowe a little season. Unto whose chamber a familiar freend of his resorting to visit him in his sicknes demaunded how he felt himself affected in body. To whom Gorgias Leontinus made this pithy and plausible answeer, "Now Sleep beginneth to deliver me up into the ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... heedlessly ventured and lost. It was then to cover his delinquencies elsewhere, he exposed to sale the estate of Lochalsh; and it was then he was bitterly taught to feel, when his people, without an exception, addressed his Lordship this pithy remonstrance - 'Reside amongst us and we shall pay your debts.' A variety of feelings and facts, unconnected with a difference, might have interposed to counteract this display of devotedness besides ingratitude, but these habits, or his Lordship's reluctance, rendered ...
— History Of The Mackenzies • Alexander Mackenzie
... despicable Poet, as may be seen by his Works, which still live in Fame and Reputation, writing in Heroick verse the Life of King Henry the Seventh, with the Battle of Bosworth; and also the Battle of Crescy and Poietiers, in which he is very pithy and sententious: I shall only give you two instances, the first out of his Battle ...
— The Lives of the Most Famous English Poets (1687) • William Winstanley
... Poor Wilson! he would have gone only half way with Bacon in his famous Apothegm; he would willingly "commit the Beginnings of all actions to Argus with his hundred eyes, and the Ends"—to Centipede, with his hundred legs. "First to watch, and then to speed"—away! would have been his pithy emendation. ...
— Letters From High Latitudes • The Marquess of Dufferin (Lord Dufferin)
... leaves, which are thick like leather, and bearing small knobs like those of the cypress. From these trees hang down many branches into the water, each about the thickness of a walking-stick, smooth, limber, and pithy within, which are overflowed by every tide, and hang as thick as they can stick of oysters, being the only ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. VIII. • Robert Kerr
... actually struck up "God save the King" and followed it by "Rule Britannia, Britannia rules the waves" (I wished at the time she had ruled under the waves as well.) I went back to the room and the Italians were so delighted with my short and pithy speech, that they invited me to dine with them that night and bring two officers with me. When we got down to the square, the mob crowded round us and shook hands with us, and I was afraid that some of ...
— The Great War As I Saw It • Frederick George Scott
... the Will, framed on these instructions, to Lord Byron, the solicitor accompanied some of the clauses with marginal queries, calling the attention of his noble client to points which he considered inexpedient or questionable; and as the short pithy answers to these suggestions are strongly characteristic of their writer, I shall here give one or two of the clauses in full, with the respective ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. II - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... before you touch the instrument, To learne the order of my fingering, I must begin with rudiments of Art, To teach you gamoth in a briefer sort, More pleasant, pithy, and effectuall, Then hath beene taught by any of my trade, And there it is ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... for indulging in conjectures—only time to exchange frowns at his rival and competitor, when a man in undress uniform—a Texan colonel—who acted as chairman of the meeting, mounting upon a table, cried "Silence!" and, after a short pithy speech, proposed that the election of officers should at once proceed. The proposal was seconded, no one objecting; and, without further ...
— The Free Lances - A Romance of the Mexican Valley • Mayne Reid
... me, before I had got possession of the facts which soon after appeared in the "London Magazine," he wrote in my album the following sententious and pithy apothegm, which, of course, only went to show the marvellous power of adaptation to circumstances which would naturally characterize the man, if his story were true. It was in this way his dupes reasoned. If he sealed a letter with a wafer, and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 106, August, 1866 • Various
... get old Chrome to drop that herd and come back to you," he moaned, "but it was useless. He wouldn't have let me come—only to get him something to eat. Damn this having to fight Indians under office soldiers anyhow!" And with this pithy protest on his blue lips ...
— Under Fire • Charles King
... who employs practical lettering will be grateful for 'Alphabets, Old and New.' Mr. Day has written a scholarly and pithy introduction, and contributes some beautiful alphabets of his own design."—The ...
— Art in Needlework - A Book about Embroidery • Lewis F. Day
... suddenly during this troublous year of 1913. In this year, too, South Africa was visited by a drought which for severity was pronounced to be unprecedented in the knowledge of all the old inhabitants. Remarks — some pithy, some ugly — were made upon the drought by Dutchmen. They all remembered how the God of their fathers used to send them nice soaking rains regularly each spring-time, and that it usually continued to nourish the plants and other of the country's vegetation throughout the summer, and ...
— Native Life in South Africa, Before and Since • Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje
... upon a first effort is as frequently converted into censure on the older offender. My arguments have, however, totally failed, and he remains obdurate and unmoved. Under these circumstances I have yielded; and as, happily for me, the short and pithy direction to the river Thames, in the Critic, "to keep between its banks," has been imitated by my friend, I find all that is required of me is to write my name upon the title and go in peace. Such, he informs me, ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... Annie's hand with his cold nose, but hurrying away, though she would fain have patted him. Success to your search, Fidelity! And there sits a great yellow cat upon a window-sill, a very corpulent and comfortable cat, gazing at this transitory world, with owl's eyes, and making pithy comments, doubtless, or what appear such, to the silly beast. O sage puss, make room for me beside you, and we will ...
— Little Annie's Ramble (From "Twice Told Tales") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... discourse, and other real expressions of true Christian love. The next day they went on board, and their friends with them, where truly doleful was the sight of that sad and mournful parting, to hear what sighs and sobs and prayers did sound amongst them; what tears did gush from every eye, and pithy speeches pierced each other's heart, that sundry of the Dutch strangers that stood on the Key as spectators could not refrain from tears. But the tide (which stays for no man) calling them away, that were thus loth ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... going of the boys were our chief events. We packed for them when they went away. We wrote long letters to them, and received brief but pithy replies. We spoke on their behalf when they wanted clothes or pocket-money. We knew exactly how to bring the news of good marks in school and increased subscriptions to cricket to bear in effective combination upon the parental ...
— Six to Sixteen - A Story for Girls • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... has a frill, the gills are free from the stem, they never grow down against it, but usually there is a small channel all around the top of the stem, the spores are brown-black, or deep purple black and the stem is solid or slightly pithy. It is said if salt is sprinkled on the gills and they become yellow the mushroom is poisonous, if black, they are wholesome. Sweet oil is ...
— Vaughan's Vegetable Cook Book (4th edition) - How to Cook and Use Rarer Vegetables and Herbs • Anonymous
... smile upon his countenance during the whole time of my remaining with him. He saw me reject this, and select that; cry "pish" upon one article, and "bravo" upon another—with the same settled complacency of countenance. His responses were short and pithy, and I must add, pleasant: for, having entirely given up all hopes of securing any thing in the shape of a good picture, a good bust, or a genuine illumination from a rich old MS., I confined myself strictly to printed books—and ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Three • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... and to the point. It opened with a pithy but pungent expression of Don Silvio's opinion of the capacity of a Governor who could permit his city to be captured and held by a handful of English pirates; then proceeded succinctly to refuse to ...
— The Cruise of the Nonsuch Buccaneer • Harry Collingwood
... for walls, I have one for thee from Oxford, pithy and apposite, sound and solid, and trimmed up becomingly, as a collar of brawn with a crown of rosemary, or a boar's head with a lemon ...
— Citation and Examination of William Shakspeare • Walter Savage Landor
... left my mother to her interview with Hilda, and betaken myself to the club. It was too early even to hope for a sight of Lucy. There were a number of men in the reading-room discussing the morning leader in that fair-minded and pithy sheet, the Charleston News and Courier, and one of these, eyeing me with a quizzical expression, said: "You look as if ...
— We Three • Gouverneur Morris
... and enjoy the heroic incident in Koerner's short life, when, as he lay wounded on the battle-field, he scribbled his famous "Farewell to Life." Incidents of a similar kind were not at all unusual in our warfare. Our pithy, epigrammatic poems were particularly well suited to the improvisation of a single sentiment. Everybody of any education was either a poet or a poetaster. Not infrequently a marching soldier might be seen to halt, ...
— Bushido, the Soul of Japan • Inazo Nitobe
... perfect. In this verbal sense its most arresting quality is a combination of something haunting and harmonious that flows by like a river or a song, with something else that is compact and pregnant like a pithy saying picked out in rock by the chisel of some pagan philosopher. It is at once a tune that escapes and an inscription that remains. Thus, alone among the reckless and romantic verses that first ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... was very popular among the gentry of the county; attending all the dinners, clubs, races, balls, and other diversions that were given by them, within ten miles of his residence. His sermons were pithy and short; and he always spoke of your half-hour preachers, as illiterate prosers, who did not understand how to condense their thoughts. Twenty minutes were his gauge, though I remember to have heard my father say, ...
— Satanstoe • James Fenimore Cooper
... conversant, as appears from his satires against the Jesuits, in which there is discovered as much learning as wit. In the second volume of the great historical, geographical, and poetical Dictionary, he is stiled the Darling of the Muses, a pithy, sententious, elegant, and smooth writer: "His translations exceed the original, and his invention seems matchless. His satire against the Jesuits is of special note; he may be justly said to have excelled all the satirists of the age." Tho' this compliment in favour of Oldham is certainly too ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume II • Theophilus Cibber
... that same evening, that he had at least pluck enough to send a pithy defiance to his foes, for an insulting letter was received by General Graham, in which Osman, recounting the victories he had gained over Hicks and Baker Pasha, boasted of his having destroyed their armies, and dared the general to ...
— Blue Lights - Hot Work in the Soudan • R.M. Ballantyne
... equally familiar. Instead of skimming Shakespeare, he went down into his depths. Few have written so subtly of Shakespeare's mysterious sonnets. Through all Lanier's productions we trace the influence of his early literary loves; but nowhere do the pithy quaintnesses of the old bards and chroniclers display themselves more effectively — not only in the illustrations, but through the innermost warp and woof of the texture of his ideas and his style — than in some ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... regard among those to whom I was otherwise a stranger—my father's stories from his life including so many names of distant persons that my imagination placed no limit to his acquaintanceship. He was a pithy talker, and his sermons bore marks of his own composition. It is true, they must have been already old when I began to listen to them, and they were no more than a year's supply, so that they recurred as regularly as the Collects. But though this system has been much ridiculed, ...
— Impressions of Theophrastus Such • George Eliot
... followed the short, pithy speech of the Bourgeois. The ladies blushed and praised, the gentlemen cheered and enjoyed in anticipation the renewal of the old hospitalities ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... to graft in the field. I think if you set 10 you get 9 to grow. For scions I go back on two-year wood and oftentimes on three-year wood where there are buds. I don't have trouble at all. With pecans, you have a little more difficulty, because the wood is more pithy inside and doesn't grow ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 43rd Annual Meeting - Rockport, Indiana, August 25, 26 and 27, 1952 • Various
... 'muck-raking' in the United States a National one, conceded to be useful. He has preached from the White House many doctrines; but among them he has left impressed on the American mind the one great truth of economic justice couched in the pithy and stinging phrase 'the square deal.' The task of making reform respectable in a commercialized world, and of giving the Nation a slogan in a phrase, is greater than the man who performed it ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... his aides-de-camp. As the foe came near, the artillery ceased, the close fight began, and several regiments at once poured in their fire: both sides kept their ground, and hundreds fell at every discharge of musketry. The duke now, in the pithy and familiar language of the soldier, cried out to the Scots, "Ninety-second, you must ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume 13, No. 359, Saturday, March 7, 1829. • Various
... fashion, richly gilt, was drawn by a pair of milk-white horses, and followed and attended by hundreds of men clad in pure white. It was preceded by two other chariots; in the first sat the high-priest, reading short, pithy aphorisms and precepts from the sacred books; in the other followed the full brothers of the deceased. A strip of silver cloth, six inches wide, attached to the urn, was loosely extended to the seats of the royal mourners in this second chariot, and thence to the chariot ...
— The English Governess At The Siamese Court • Anna Harriette Leonowens
... Pithy paragraphs on a wide range of subjects, not one of which but will be found to contain some terse, sparkling truth worthy of thought and attention. A spare ten minutes devoted to such ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Vol. II, No. 6, March, 1885 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... words into sentences and paragraphs gives clearness and strength. To attain a clear and pithy style, it may be necessary to cut down, to rearrange, and to rewrite whole passages of an essay. Gibbon wrote his 'Memoirs' six times, and the first chapter of his 'History' three times. Beginners are always slow to prune ...
— The Verbalist • Thomas Embly Osmun, (AKA Alfred Ayres)
... had said the maid, giving pithy verbal expression to the ragged state of her nerves as she cut the stalks of the beautiful flowers which came daily without name or message. The dog's method of expressing himself was somewhat more violent; it consisted of the sudden seizure between his great teeth of the posterior ...
— The Hawk of Egypt • Joan Conquest
... approach the leaves. The head contains, like all other palms, a soft spike, about the hardness of the core of the cabbage. This, when boiled, resembles the asparagus, or kale, and, uncooked, it makes an excellent salad. The interior of the tree is full of useless pithy matter. It is therefore split into four or more parts, the softer portion being cut away, and leaving only the outer rind of older wood, which is necessarily hard. These narrow, slightly-curved slabs form the principal ...
— Mark Seaworth • William H.G. Kingston
... against repeating the talk of his elders, by being told on his first entrance, by the eldest man in the company, "Look you, sir; nothing said here goes out there." Indeed no one used more words than needful, so that short, pithy sayings came to be called Laconic. To be a perfect soldier was the great point, so boys were taught that no merit was greater than bearing pain without complaint; and they carried this so far, that a boy who had brought a young wolf into the hall, hidden under his tunic, let it bite him even ...
— Aunt Charlotte's Stories of Greek History • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the wise" accords with the bold conjecture of their origin which the Stagyrite has thrown out, who considered them as the wrecks of an ancient philosophy which had been lost to mankind by the fatal revolutions of all human things, and that those had been saved from the general ruin by their pithy elegance and their diminutive form; like those marine shells found on the tops of mountains, the relics of the Deluge! Even at a later period, the sage of Cheronea prized them among the most solemn mysteries; and Plutarch has described them in ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... the time to spare, and, indeed, he was keen enough to hear the solution of the mystery. A short explanation from David, followed by a few pithy, pertinent questions to Van Sneck, and he was ...
— The Crimson Blind • Fred M. White
... easily in rough as in polished surroundings and often quite as steadily maintained. The testimony of his early companions, along with some fragments of the boy's feeble but sincere attempts at verse, shows that he acquired it young. But a large part of the stories and pithy sayings for which he was famous wherever he went, but of which when their setting is lost it is impossible to recover the enjoyment, were undeniably coarse, and naturally enough this fact was jarring to some of those in America who most revered him. It should not really ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... all of them episodes in the ever-recurring conflict with the Danes—are taken in their connection, and the thread dropped in one year is resumed in the next. Not only is the style in itself concise; it has a sort of nervous severity and pithy rigor. The construction is often antiquated, and suggests at times the freedom of poetry; though this purely historical prose is far removed from poetry in profusion of language." (Ten Brink, Early ...
— Anglo-Saxon Grammar and Exercise Book - with Inflections, Syntax, Selections for Reading, and Glossary • C. Alphonso Smith
... surely bring to a man so placed. And yet it was observed of him that he never spoke of his faith, or entered into arguments with men as to the reasons on which he had based it. He was diligent in preaching,—moral sermons that were short, pithy, and useful. He was never weary in furthering the welfare of his clergymen. His house was open to them and to their wives. The edifice of every church in his diocese was a care to him. He laboured at schools, and was zealous in improving the social comforts of the ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... of rejoinders from Scottish guidwives, and for which I am indebted, as for many other kind communications, to the Rev. Mr. Blair of Dunblane, appear to me as good examples of the peculiar Scottish pithy phraseology which we refer to, as any that I have ...
— Reminiscences of Scottish Life and Character • Edward Bannerman Ramsay
... a pithy saying of Persius, and fits our politicians without a wrinkle,—Magister artis, ingeniique ...
— The Biglow Papers • James Russell Lowell
... task, he may be said to have got to the back of the Oriental mind. He embodied the results of his long experience at times in sweeping and profound generalisations, which covered the whole field of Oriental thought and action, and at others in pithy epigrammatic sayings in which the racy humour, sometimes tinged with a shade of cynical irony, never obscured the deep feeling of sympathy he entertained for everything that was ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... reign, and translated into Greek the Hebrew work of his grandfather Jesus, which is named the Book of Wisdom, or Ecclesiasticus. It is written in imitation of the Proverbs of Solomon; and though its pithy sayings fall far short of the deep wisdom and lofty thoughts which crowd every line of that wonderful work, yet it will always be read with profit and pleasure. In this book we see the earliest example that we now possess of a Jewish ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 10 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... office at Dublin Castle. Sir George quickly detected the superior talents and acquirements of young Smith, and became much attached to him; evincing peculiar satisfaction in conversing with him, and listening to his quaint, exact, pithy answers to questions proposed to him. About this time he was smitten with the love of Lord Byron's poetry, which he devoured with avidity, and his own love of verse-writing revived. He became, indeed, very anxious to excel in poetry. He was soon tired of his official duties, and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCLXXVI. February, 1847. Vol. LXI. • Various
... recognise the truth of Walt Whitman's pithy saying, "I am not all contained between my hat and my boots," and forget the two-fold nature of the "I AM," that it is at once both the manifested and the unmanifested, the universal and the individual. By losing sight of this truth we surround ourselves with limitations; we see only part ...
— The Hidden Power - And Other Papers upon Mental Science • Thomas Troward
... was fond of speaking in public, notwithstanding his debut in that line with the Fifty Amorous Conclusions.Nor does he appear to have been remarkable for his conversation. Manso has left a collection of one hundred of his pithy sayings—a suspicious amount, and unfortunately more than warranting the suspicion; for almost every one of them is traceable to some other man. They come from the Greek and Latin philosophers, and the apothegms of Erasmus. The two following ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Vol. 2 • Leigh Hunt
... of practical truth and a correct understanding of the Bible. Kahnis says of him: "We might indeed call conscientiousness the fundamental virtue of Bengel. Whatever he utters, be it in science, or life, is more mature, more well-weighed, more pithy, more consecrated than most of what his verbose age has uttered. In the great he saw the little, in the little the great." In the present century the church has had recourse to Pietism as its only relief from a devastating Rationalism. Not the ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... gingerbread-colored carriage drawn by a pair of black Flanders mares with tails that swept the ground; and to commemorate the origin of his greatness he had for a crest a fullblown cabbage painted on the pannels, with the pithy motto Alles Kopf that is to say, ALL HEAD; meaning thereby that he had risen by ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving
... horn of abundance, it was still gallant, succulent, droppy, sappy, pithy, lively, always flourishing, always fructifying, full of juice, full of flower, full of fruit, and all manner of delight. I avow God, it would have done one good to have seen him, but I will tell you more of him in the book which I have made of the dignity ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... than any other American to advance the material prosperity of his countrymen. It is said that his widely and faithfully read maxims made Philadelphia and Pennsylvania wealthy, while Poor Richard's pithy sayings, translated into many languages, have had ...
— Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin • Benjamin Franklin
... now threw in a few observations. The doubts and fears of the more cautious and wavering gradually gave way; and it soon became evident that the measure had found too much favor with the council to be resisted. Lyon, with his rough and pithy eloquence, had broken the ice of timidity at the right moment; and he and the originator of the measure, at first the only unhesitating members of the assembly, perceiving the gathering current in its favor, now warmly followed up their advantage; and, within two hours ...
— The Rangers - [Subtitle: The Tory's Daughter] • D. P. Thompson
... well and intelligibly, he wants condensation; and we do not think that his argument has been weakened by being shortened. What he has extended into a volume of nearly five hundred pages, might have been reduced to a pithy essay of one or two hundred, without sacrificing one essential fact, or injuring the strength of any one of his arguments. The art of writing in our times is the art of condensing; and those who cannot condense write only ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... And that pithy chapter in Machiavelli's Prince which treats of cruelty and clemency, and whether it be better to be loved or feared, anticipates the defence of the Terrorists, in the maxim that for a new prince it is impossible to avoid the name of cruel, ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3) - Essay 1: Robespierre • John Morley
... not themselves use slang understand and even appreciate it. The American brand is generally pithy, compact, and expressive, and not always vulgar. Slang is at its worst in contemptuous epithets, and of those the one that is lowest and most offensive seems likely to become a permanent, recognized addition ...
— Stage Confidences • Clara Morris
... as well as some wealth, had imitated the fashion observed by the inferior landholders and clergy, who usually ornamented their state apartments with hangings of a sort of stamped leather, manufactured in the Netherlands, garnished with trees and aminals executed in copper foil, and with many a pithy sentence of morality, which, although couched in Low Dutch, were perhaps as much attended to in practice as if written in broad Scotch. The whole had somewhat of a gloomy aspect; but the fire, composed of old pitch-barrel staves, blazed merrily up the chimney; the bed was decorated with ...
— Bride of Lammermoor • Sir Walter Scott
... tolerated in silence, and at the expense of the very best and quietest lad the village had ever known? Thus, a few days after the widow's departure, the stocks was again the object of midnight desecration: it was bedaubed and bescratched—it was hacked and hewed—it was scrawled all over with pithy lamentations for Lenny, and laconic execrations for tyrants. Night after night new inscriptions appeared, testifying the sarcastic wit and the vindictive sentiment of the parish. And perhaps the stocks ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... more serious demeanor of a statesman. He is calmly objective and conciliatory, as befits his greatness, which is today universally recognized. The longer he speaks the more the peculiar attractions of his way of speaking become manifest. His expression is original and fresh, pithy and robust, honest ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... place and at the lumber yard flew high night and day. He bought newspapers galore and read from them aloud at meals, in the evenings, and before breakfast. Issachar, as usual, talked much and said little. Laban Keeler's comments were pithy and dryly pointed. ...
— The Portygee • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... trahit hos mufa Homo hasta vtris oh, os trahit mufa vitus oho trahit mifas rutis oho, trahis mutis Humo astra hosti oho, fum Charitas. If the pertingent Reader still craves more evidence of the extent of Hariot's friendships, and the universality of his acquirements, let him read the following pithy, quaint, and beautiful tribute paid to him by blind Old Homer's Chapman in 1616. It is found in the Preface to the Reader in the first complete edition of Homer'sworks translated by George Chapman, ...
— Thomas Hariot • Henry Stevens
... literature was provided to meet their new craving, except mischievous broadsheets and worthless doggerel. Hannah More set to work to supply something healthy to amuse, instruct, and edify the new order of readers. She produced regularly every month for three years, three tracts—simple, pithy, vivacious, consisting of stories, ballads, homilies, and prayers. She was sometimes assisted by one of her sisters and two or three friends; but the burden of the work, including heavy correspondence with local committees in almost ...
— Excellent Women • Various
... list of his published works his history of the academy, in four quarto volumes: a wonderful work, whether considered from an historical, psychological, or philosophical point of view. His address on that occasion was masterly, and his conversation at various social functions instructive and pithy. I remember in one of them, especially, his delineation of the characteristics and services of Leibnitz, who was one of the founders of the Royal Academy, and it was perfection in that kind of conversation which is worthy of men claiming ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... in different works by the same author; or a real and strong natural talent for writing will be found conjoined with an extraordinary lack of education and training. An excellent piece of English—pithy, forcible, and even elegant—will often shatter on some simple grammatical reef, such as the use of "as" for "that" ("he did not know as he could"), or of the plural for the singular ("a long ways off"). Mr. James Lane ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... to dwindle with each day's expenditure, and his family after his death were to be turned into the street, beggars. If each individual were a unit whose interests ended with himself; if generations were like stratified rocks, superposed one on another but not interconnected; if—to quote a pithy phrase, I do not know from whom—"if all men were born orphans and died bachelors," then the right to draw income from the products of permanently productive capital would for most men lose much of what now ...
— A Critical Examination of Socialism • William Hurrell Mallock
... clearly accounted for, or altered any judgment except by distinct reasons. As a writer, his style, though wholly without grace, was admirable in its lucidity. He had a singular felicity of illustration, and especially of metaphor, and a rare power of throwing his thoughts into terse and pithy sentences; but his many books, though full of original thinking and in a high degree suggestive to other writers, had always a certain fragmentary and occasional character, which prevented them from taking a place ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... then the other of his great works was condemned, withdrawn from exhibition, and relegated, as a mere wall-picture, to the decoration of the dining-room. Their place was taken by a replica of the original wafered announcement, to which, in particularly large letters, he had added the pithy rubric: 'NO SERVICE.' Meanwhile he had fallen into something as nearly bordering on low spirits as was consistent with his disposition; depressed, at once by the failure of his scheme, the laughable turn of his late interview, and the judicial blindness of the ...
— The Dynamiter • Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny van de Grift Stevenson
... admits of doubt that he submitted to Melanchthon, and got corrected by him, his little treatise against their decree, forbidding the New Testament Scriptures to be used by the laity in the vernacular. It is a very pithy and forcible bit of pleading for the right of the Christian laity to possess and study the Scriptures in their own tongue. This remarkable treatise struck the true key-note in the contest it ushered in, and helped it on to victory—a ...
— The Scottish Reformation - Its Epochs, Episodes, Leaders, and Distinctive Characteristics • Alexander F. Mitchell
... soldiers from the town. Before sunset they had all been withdrawn to the Castle. When the news reached the ears of Parliament there was some talk of reinstating them in the town, but Colonel Barre cut short the discussion with the pithy question, "if the officers agreed in removing the soldiers to Castle William, what minister will dare to ...
— The War of Independence • John Fiske
... vengeance justly due for that unhappy dinner at Martindale Castle (which was, he said, a crying of peace when there was no peace, and a dwelling in the tents of sin), he imputed his ejection from his living, with the destruction of some of his most pithy and highly prized volumes of divinity, with the loss of his cap, gown, and band, and a double hogshead ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... choosing to consort with them, and partly for what I had gained. As having nothing, yet possessing all things; as poor, yet making many rich—the boast of St. Paul, the hope of St. Francis of Assisi! in those pithy antitheses is the ...
— The Fool Errant • Maurice Hewlett
... "This is the first time I have heard it said that our Postilions put on rouge." What he adds, shall be given in his own pithy expression.—"Ou la coquetterie va-t-elle se nicher?" What, however is above stated, was stated from a conviction of its ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume One • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... in Latin, written mostly by paid helpers from short English abstracts. He regarded Latin as the only language worthy of a great work; but the world neglected his Latin to seize upon his English,—marvelous English, terse, pithy, packed with thought, in an age that used endless circumlocutions. The first ten essays, published in 1597, were brief notebook jottings of Bacon's observations. Their success astonished the author, but not till fifteen years later were ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... "failure" of that arrangement been described in these pithy sentences—"Eighty-six years have elapsed since the conclusion of the Treaty of Union between England and Ireland. The two countries do not yet form an united nation. The Irish people are, if not more wretched (for the whole European ...
— Handbook of Home Rule (1887) • W. E. Gladstone et al.
... it was actually there in history and helped to complete the victory of the peasants' cause, partly in order to give a better color to Tell's own act, as being less prompted by selfish considerations. The criticism of Tell's speeches, whether his pithy, epigrammatic sentences in Act I, Scenes 1 and 3, and elsewhere, or his long monologue in Act IV, Scene 3, applies to the whole constitution of the conventional stage with just as much validity against Shakespeare's Julius Caesar and Hamlet as against William Tell. ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. III • Kuno Francke (Editor-in-Chief)
... Wallingford, was as pithy as his own to me. I told him my will was made, on a conviction of its perfect propriety, and assured him it would not be altered in a hurry; I told him the sugars were safe, and let him understand that they were already on their way to Hamburg, whence I hoped, ere long, to ...
— Miles Wallingford - Sequel to "Afloat and Ashore" • James Fenimore Cooper
... judicious readings; extremely attentive to methodical sciences, moderately so as to others; well versed in mathematics and geography; silent, a lover of solitude, whimsical, haughty, excessively prone to egotism, speaking but little, pithy in his answers, quick and severe in repartee, possessed of much self-love, ambitious, and ...
— Heroes of Modern Europe • Alice Birkhead
... says that Mr. Harris, Com. Indian Affairs, had entered into land speculations in Arkansas, which led Mr. Van Buren to call for a report, which, being made, the President returned it with the pithy and laconic endorsement "unsatisfactory," whereupon Mr. H. tendered his resignation. Rumor also says, that Mr. T. Hartley Crawford, of Pennsylvania, is appointed in his stead. This gentleman is represented to be a person of some ability; an old black-letter lawyer, but a man who is ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... and blue drapery with which the early Italians clothed their figures of Christ. But enough of all this. I have seen Trench's Sabbation, and like it much: how do you like those centuries of couplets, which are a German fashion? They are very much in the style of Quarles' Emblems, and other pithy epigrams of that time: only doubtless more artistically polished: perhaps profounder. There were some of the same kind in Blackwood some months ago. My paper is out: and I ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald
... The pithy conciseness of the brackish tongue renders it eminently useful on duty. In some of their sea-phrases the French, our great rivals, use a heap of words more than we are wont to do. An instance is given—supposing a ship of the former met with one ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... those who have not yet nailed their colours to any particular mast. Then comes a grand meeting of the Liberal Students' Association, which is trumped by a dinner of the Undergraduates' Conservative Society. The campaign is then in full swing. Great boards appear at the University gates, on which pithy satires against one or other candidate, parodies on songs, quotations from their speeches, and gaudily painted cartoons are posted. Those who are supposed to be able to feel the pulse of the University move about with ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... reason," went on Caleb Harper, soberly, "an' save fer statin' hit es I goes along I hain't got nuthin' more ter say erbout hit—albeit hit seems ter me a right pithy matter fer young folks ter study erbout. I don't jedgmatically know nothin' erbout yore affairs," he nodded his head toward Maggard. "So fur's I've got any means ter tell, ye mout be independent rich or ye mout not hev nothin' only ther shirt an' pants ye sots thar in ... but thet kin go by, ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... the man who supplies the world with portable wisdom—short, sharp, pithy maxims which it can remember, or, better still, ...
— Little Journeys To The Homes Of Great Teachers • Elbert Hubbard
... those facts especially which lead to general results; and in the few genuine writings which are now extant it is easy to perceive that he has recourse to the simplest language, expresses himself in terms which, though short and pithy, are always precise and perspicuous, and is averse to the introduction of philosophical dogmas. Of the greater part of the writings collected under his name, on the contrary the general character ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... Queen had a ready method of dealing with obnoxious authors, as poor Peter Wentworth discovered, who wrote A Pithy Exhortation to Her Majesty for establishing her Successor to the Crown, and for his pains was committed to the Tower, where he pined and died. This work advocated the claims of James VI. of Scotland, and was written in answer to a pamphlet entitled A Conference ...
— Books Fatal to Their Authors • P. H. Ditchfield
... mantle of allegory. If histories so unlike as those of Hercules and Jesus, can, by a fertile imagination and allegorical interpretations, be brought to the same tally, no line of distinction remains between fact and fancy. As this pithy morsel will not overburthen the mail in passing and repassing between Quincy and Monticello, I send it for your perusal. Perhaps it will satisfy you, as it has me; and may save you the labor of reading twenty-four times its volume. I have said to you that it was written by Tracy; and ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... before sowing it; for scattered broadcast it is usually much too thick." If this proves true, thin out the plants rigorously. This turnip is good for table and stock as long as it is solid and crisp; but it grows pithy toward spring. There are other kinds ...
— The Home Acre • E. P. Roe
... place of the old ones, seeing that dissenters, in their turn, were sometimes as ready as papists, with age, fagot, and excommunication. In 1526, Felix Mants, the anabaptist, is drowned at Zurich, in obedience to Zwingli's pithy formula—'Qui iterum mergit mergatur'. Thus the anabaptists, upon their first appearance, were exposed to the fires of the Church and the water of ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... crown, (expressing, however, doubts on the subject of the challenge to the array,) till he came to THE POINT—which he thus approached:—"I now come, however, to considerations which induce me, without hesitation, humbly to advise your lordships to reverse this judgment." He was brief but pithy in assigning his reasons. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 349, November, 1844 • Various
... made long speeches on religious topics. He said what he had to say, generally, in one pithy sentence, and then left it to carry ...
— One Snowy Night - Long ago at Oxford • Emily Sarah Holt
... evergreen, and bears fruits and blossoms all the year round. The fruits are pointed oval pods, six inches long, and contain in five compartments from twenty-five to thirty seeds or kernels, enveloped in a white pithy pulp with a sweet taste. These seeds when dried form the cocoa of commerce, from which the beverage is made and chocolate is manufactured. There are three harvests in the year, when the pods are pulled from the trees and gathered into baskets. They are then thrown into pits and ...
— On the Banks of the Amazon • W.H.G. Kingston
... The only instrument then mounted at the Observatory was the Transit. I had no Assistant whatever.—A Mr Galbraith of Edinburgh had questioned something in one of my Papers about the Figure of the Earth. I drew up a rather formal answer to it: Whewell saw my draft and drew up a much more pithy one, which I adopted and sent to the Philosophical Magazine.—For comparing our clocks at the upper and lower stations of Dolcoath we had borrowed from the Royal Observatory, Greenwich, six good pocket chronometers: they were still in the care of Mr Sheepshanks. I arranged with him ...
— Autobiography of Sir George Biddell Airy • George Biddell Airy
... fraternity of coachmen know me by tongue as I pass. To be sure, to a mind in sober, serious, street-walking humour, it must bear an appearance of lunacy when one stamps with the hurried pace and fervent shake of the head which strong, pithy poetry excites."[10] I suppose anecdotes of this kind have been oftener told of Scott than of any other English poet. Indeed, Sir Walter, who understood himself well, gives the explanation in one of his diaries:—"I ...
— Sir Walter Scott - (English Men of Letters Series) • Richard H. Hutton
... the other hand, is the commonest vice of style. It is not to be avoided, except in the rarest cases, by those to whom the written use of language is unfamiliar; so that a shepherd who talks pithy, terse sense will be unable to express himself in a letter without having recourse to the Ready Letter-writer—"This comes hoping to find you well, as it also leaves me at present"— and a soldier, without the excuse ...
— Style • Walter Raleigh
... paring down a straight slender stick of aromatic sumac, about three feet long, to the general thickness of less than half an inch, but leaving a head or button at one end. A ring was fashioned from a transverse slice of some hollow or pithy plant, so that it would slide freely up and down the slender wand, but would nob pass over the head. Eagle down was secured to the wooden head and also to the ring. In the dance (paragraph 129) the eagle down on the stick is burned ...
— The Mountain Chant, A Navajo Ceremony • Washington Matthews
... watching it, as it scolded him from a high limb, but he could not delay and he set about his task quickly. Cutting off the end of each quill, he scraped it clean inside and washed the pithy part out. He had seen his father prepare a quill in this way ...
— The Adventures of Piang the Moro Jungle Boy - A Book for Young and Old • Florence Partello Stuart
... less to say than Langholm had been led to expect. He breathed again when he had read the sequence of short but pithy paragraphs. Mrs. Minchin's new name was not given after all, nor that of her adopted district; while Langholm himself only slunk into print as "a well-known novelist who, oddly enough, was among the guests, and eye-witness ...
— The Shadow of the Rope • E. W. Hornung
... An alert, pithy style and a distinct gift of satirical humour such as Clarke had, and developed by a wide range of reading, were just the qualities which are always in request on the keen, aggressive daily press of Australia. One can easily imagine ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne
... turn our attention to the left-hand corner. There we see that pithy soldier all in red. Rembrandt, with his intuitive knowledge of chiaroscuro, was not afraid of painting a figure all in red. He knew that the play of light and shade on the colour would help him out. Here part of the red is toned down by a beautiful soft tint, which ...
— Rembrandt • Josef Israels
... wealth of nations, with his pithy wisdom and quaint sagacity, began with two hundred pounds, and lived to view his mortgages, his statutes, and his judgments so numerous, that it was observed his papers would have made a good map of England. A contemporary dramatist, who copied from life, has opened the chamber of such ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... rubbish," she said; "you know perfectly well that your style must come to your aid in whatever you try to write. Then your fiction is not so remarkable for plot as for the careful development of character and your pithy remarks. Your powers of epigram would be abundantly brought to the fore in such a subject as Tom asked you to write about. But never mind, my dear, it is your pleasure to duplicate yourself—I do not think ...
— The Time of Roses • L. T. Meade
... said Kenneth; 'we are to have some moving tableaux, illustrating certain pithy sayings. Miss Willoughby has mentioned the one we want you for,—"Music hath charms," etc. I think I am to pose as one of the villains. We are divided as to whether it is to be a duel or a cold-blooded murder; but I know my part is ...
— Dwell Deep - or Hilda Thorn's Life Story • Amy Le Feuvre
... ear. But, on this occasion, up to the moment of putting his lips to the old woman's ear, Mr. Dimmesdale, as the great enemy of souls would have it, could recall no text of Scripture, nor aught else, except a brief, pithy, and, as it then appeared to him, unanswerable argument against the immortality of the human soul. The instilment thereof into her mind would probably have caused this aged sister to drop down dead, at once, as by the effect of an intensely poisonous ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... expressions of true christian love. The next day, the wind being faire, they wente aborde, and their freinds with them, where truly dolfull was y^e sight of that sade and mournfull parting; to see what sighs and sobbs and praires did sound amongst them, what tears did gush from every eye, & pithy speeches peirst each harte; that sundry of y^e Dutch strangers y^t stood on y^e key as spectators, could not refraine from tears. Yet comfortable & sweete it was to see shuch lively and true expressions of clear & ...
— Bradford's History of 'Plimoth Plantation' • William Bradford
... inexhaustible supply of firewood. Besides the trees I have mentioned, there is the xanthorea, or grass-tree, a plant which cannot be intelligibly described to those who have never seen it. The stem consists of a tough pithy substance, round which the leaves are formed. These, long and tapering like the rush, are four-sided, and extremely brittle; the base from which they shoot is broad and flat, about the size of a thumb-nail, and very resinous in substance. As the leaves decay annually, ...
— The Bushman - Life in a New Country • Edward Wilson Landor
... reach the heart of a situation with a pithy phrase or reply. On one of the rare occasions when he attended a public dinner he sat at the Metropolitan Club in New York with a group of men representing a variety of interests. He condemned a certain ...
— Charles Frohman: Manager and Man • Isaac Frederick Marcosson and Daniel Frohman
... brought to Rome, and on account of his wit manumitted by his master; made his mark by composing memoirs and a collection of pithy sayings that appear to have been used as a school-book; flourished ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... and other real expressions of true Christian love. The next day they went on board, and their friends with them, where truly doleful was the sight of that sad and mournful parting, to hear what sighs and sobs and prayers did sound amongst them; what tears did gush from every eye, and pithy speeches pierced each other's heart, that sundry of the Dutch strangers that stood on the Key as spectators could not refrain from tears. But the tide (which stays for no man) calling them away, that were ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... and worthless doggerel. Hannah More set to work to supply something healthy to amuse, instruct, and edify the new order of readers. She produced regularly every month for three years, three tracts—simple, pithy, vivacious, consisting of stories, ballads, homilies, and prayers. She was sometimes assisted by one of her sisters and two or three friends; but the burden of the work, including heavy correspondence with local committees in almost ...
— Excellent Women • Various
... of a stately mansion. Our guard was a genuine Irishman, strongly resembling the late actor Power in physiognomy, with the very brogue which Power sometimes gave to his personages. He was a man of pithy speech, communicative, and acquainted apparently with every body, of every class, whom we passed on the road. Besides him we had for fellow-passengers three very intelligent Irishmen, on their way to Dublin. One of them ...
— Letters of a Traveller - Notes of Things Seen in Europe and America • William Cullen Bryant
... from this time the sword leads, and the Koran follows. To this familiar explanation of Mohammedan success, Mr. Carlyle replies with the question: "Mohammedanism triumphed with the sword? But where did it get its sword?" We can now answer that pithy inquiry. The simple, earnest zeal of the original believers built up a power, which then took the sword, and conquered with it. The reward of patient, long-enduring faith is influence; with this influence ambition serves itself for its own purpose. Such is, more or less, ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... the boys were our chief events. We packed for them when they went away. We wrote long letters to them, and received brief but pithy replies. We spoke on their behalf when they wanted clothes or pocket-money. We knew exactly how to bring the news of good marks in school and increased subscriptions to cricket to bear in effective combination upon the parental mind, ...
— Six to Sixteen - A Story for Girls • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... art for walls, I have one for thee from Oxford, pithy and apposite, sound and solid, and trimmed up becomingly, as a collar of brawn with a crown of rosemary, or a boar's head with a lemon in ...
— Citation and Examination of William Shakspeare • Walter Savage Landor
... to it misemployed, I shall content myself with opposing the authority of the greatest man of any age, JULIUS CSAR, of whom Bacon observes, that 'in his book of Apothegms which he collected, we see that he esteemed it more honour to make himself but a pair of tables, to take the wise and pithy words of others, than to have every word of his own to be made an apothegm or ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... all remember to have read a pithy string of Maxims by Dr. Franklin; and we are accustomed to admire the pertinence of their wit,—but here their influence too often terminates. Since Franklin's time, the practice of getting into debt has become more and more easy, notwithstanding ...
— Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 276 - Volume 10, No. 276, October 6, 1827 • Various
... his second satire, is largely autobiographical. It shows, as does The Powers of the Pen, some clever turns of phrases, pithy expressions, and amusing images. It also contains incisive criticism of corruption in the Church, of declining respect for Christianity, and, what seems to Lloyd almost the same thing, of a collapsing class structure. The Church wardens, "uncivil and unbred! / Unlick'd, untaught, un-all-things—but ...
— The Methodist - A Poem • Evan Lloyd
... make an appeal to classes which had neither the leisure nor the training to master this very intricate economic problem. W. H. Harvey's Coin's Financial School was the most widely read campaign document, although hundreds of similar pamphlets and books had an enormous circulation. The pithy and plausible arguments of "Coin" and his ready answers to questions supposedly put by prominent editors, bankers, and university professors, as well as by J. R. Sovereign, master workman of the Knights of Labor, tickled the fancy of thousands of farmers who saw their own plight depicted ...
— The Agrarian Crusade - A Chronicle of the Farmer in Politics • Solon J. Buck
... deeper on that account in the lustre of his humorous displays. Addison, too, had somewhat of the poet in him, and was capable of tragedy as well as of neat satire and compact characterization. But if we looked for a pithy embodiment of the difference between Irving and Hawthorne, we might call the former a "polite writer," and the latter a profound poet: as, indeed, I have called him in this essay, though with no intent to confuse the term with that given to poets who speak in verse. Pathos ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... that he should have something else to do, than to think of words. The way of speaking that I love, is natural and plain, the same in writing as in speaking, and a sinewy and muscular way of expressing a man's self, short and pithy, not so elegant and artificial as prompt ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... explaining the inundation of the Nile by a supposed connexion with the ocean—that the man who carries up his story into the invisible world, passes out of the range of criticism."[2] And he adds the following pithy note:—"Niebuhr puts together all the mythical and genealogical traces, many of them in the highest degree vague and equivocal, of the existence of Pelasgi in various localities; and then, summing ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 • Various
... stood, while the full significance of her refusal ate slowly into his consciousness. Whatever hopes he might have had had been swept away in those few short, pithy sentences. His passion checked, the structure erected by his imagination toppled to ruin, his vanity hurt, he stood before her stripped of the veneer that had made him seem, heretofore, nearly the man he ...
— The Two-Gun Man • Charles Alden Seltzer
... admirable in the way of scientific exposition than those early articles of his on the origin of species. He swept the curve of discussion through the really significant points of the subject, enriched his exposition with profound original remarks and reflections, often summing up in a single pithy sentence an argument which a less compact mind would have spread over pages. But there is one impression made by the book itself which no exposition of it, however luminous, can convey; and that is the impression of the vast amount of labour, both of observation and of thought, implied in its production. ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... had no opportunity for indulging in conjectures—only time to exchange frowns at his rival and competitor, when a man in undress uniform—a Texan colonel—who acted as chairman of the meeting, mounting upon a table, cried "Silence!" and, after a short pithy speech, proposed that the election of officers should at once proceed. The proposal was seconded, no one objecting; and, without further parley, ...
— The Free Lances - A Romance of the Mexican Valley • Mayne Reid
... constitution largely prevails is shown by so many women bringing suits against those who have rejected their votes, under the constitution as it is. Mrs. Spencer's manner is very pleasing, and her speech was pungent and to the point. She closed with the following pithy illustration of the need of ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... is that of Giordano Bruno, the same philosopher, heretic, and martyr whose statue has recently been erected in Rome, to the great horror of the Pope and his prelates in the Old World and in the New. De Morgan's pithy account of him will interest the company: "Giordano Bruno was all paradox. He was, as has been said, a vorticist before Descartes, an optimist before Leibnitz, a Copernican before Galileo. It would ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... with the loss of all hands. If a ship carries away any of her important spars, or, on entering her port, strikes heavily against a pier, whereby serious damage is occasioned, the accident is duly registered in this pithy chronicle of Lloyd's. Nevertheless, as we glance up and down the columns, it is no exaggeration to say, that two-thirds of the accidents recorded are of the most serious description. We are unable to say to what degree this register of Lloyd's can be accepted as a fair index to the tragedies ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal - Volume XVII., No 423, New Series. February 7th, 1852 • Various
... incisive, and brilliant with epigram and point. It contains pithy aphoristic sentences which Burke himself would not have disowned. But these are not its best features: its sustained power of reasoning, its wide sweep of observation and reflection, its elevated ethical and social tone, stamp it as a work of high excellence, and as such we cordially ...
— MacMillan & Co.'s General Catalogue of Works in the Departments of History, Biography, Travels, and Belles Lettres, December, 1869 • Unknown
... Knight's Tale. The tendency toward diffuse expansion, an excess of diluting epithets, which became a feature of eighteenth-century poetry, Dryden has sensibly shunned, and has stuck close to the brisk narrative and pithy descriptions of Chaucer. If the subject in hand be concrete description, as in the Temple of Mars, Dryden is at his best, and surpasses his original; but if the abstract enters, as in the portraiture on the walls, he expands, and when he ...
— Palamon and Arcite • John Dryden
... Henry, there, will translate it And put it in verse and print as he promised To do when it happened. Will he do it? I doubt. He dislikes to dabble with rhyme and with measure. Says that good honest prose is the best and the sweetest If the words be well chosen, short, Saxon, and pithy. And that making of verse is the business of women, Of green boys at school, and of lovers when spooning. But try him. It may be he will. For a lesson Is in it, and that makes it worth telling. The woods have their secrets and sorrows and struggles As well as the cities. You can find in the woods ...
— The Busted Ex-Texan and Other Stories • W. H. H. Murray
... the virtues of good fables,—pithy wisdom, ingenious moral instances, homely illustrations, easy colloquial dialogue; and the ethical teaching has a striking superficial likeness to the common-sense morality of prudence and content, which fables, like proverbs, habitually expound. ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... which they were dashing down so readily must have been hoarded up for such a purpose, at the cost of scanty fare and hard living. Most of them accompanied their gift by a few words of prayer, or by some pithy text anent the treasure which rusteth not, or the lending to the Lord. The town clerk stood by the table giving forth the vouchers for each sum, and the constant clack of his tongue filled the hall, as he read aloud the names and amounts, ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... dinner at Martindale Castle (which was, he said, a crying of peace when there was no peace, and a dwelling in the tents of sin), he imputed his ejection from his living, with the destruction of some of his most pithy and highly prized volumes of divinity, with the loss of his cap, gown, and band, and a double ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... and Poland upheld M. Bratiano's contentions in brief, pithy speeches. President Wilson's lengthy rejoinder, delivered with more than ordinary sweetness, deprecated M. Bratiano's comparison of the Allies' proposed intervention with Russia's protection of the Christians of Turkey, and represented ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... teachings he has done more than any other American to advance the material prosperity of his countrymen. It is said that his widely and faithfully read maxims made Philadelphia and Pennsylvania wealthy, while Poor Richard's pithy sayings, translated into many languages, have had ...
— Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin • Benjamin Franklin
... on important events, but for the latest news and the brightest "stories." The reputation for a newspaper which has been looked upon as pre-eminently desirable is not that it should be regarded by the public as well-informed or as expressing a sound judgment, but as pithy and interesting. The inevitable consequence of this tendency is that the great mass of English daily newspapers have lost their former high place in the estimation of the public as serious and necessary institutions, and have descended to the level of an amusement. The only exceptions that can ...
— Hilaire Belloc - The Man and His Work • C. Creighton Mandell
... of one of our smaller churches in the South, describing the concert of prayer held in behalf of the Association, tells this brief but pithy story about it: "The objects and purposes and work of the American Missionary Association were briefly reviewed at the prayer-meeting, and the prayers in its behalf were fervent and earnest. But we shall not cease, but continue to pray for ...
— American Missionary - Volume 50, No. 3, March, 1896 • Various
... by tapping the fruit stem of the cabo negro palm. The process is very simple. At the time of efflorescence the spadix is cut off and the pithy stem is tapped. This operation lasts from 15 to 30 minutes each day and is continued for from 7 to 14 days. After the tapping the stem must be bent into a downward position. This is effected by inclining it downward every day, a piece of rattan or vine being used to retain it in position. ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan
... the richer, partly for that I had lost in choosing to consort with them, and partly for what I had gained. As having nothing, yet possessing all things; as poor, yet making many rich—the boast of St. Paul, the hope of St. Francis of Assisi! in those pithy antitheses is ...
— The Fool Errant • Maurice Hewlett
... inference which we are inclined to draw is this, that he meant his Council to serve some other purpose than that of a mere Cabinet. Barillon used four or five words which contain, we think, the key of the whole mystery. Mr. Courtenay calls them pithy words; but he does not, if we are right, apprehend their whole force. "Ce sont," said Barillon, "des ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... be made, a full-grown tree is selected just before it is going to flower. It is cut down close to the ground, the leaves and leafstalks cleared away, and a broad strip of the bark taken off the upper side of the trunk. This exposes the pithy matter, which is of a rusty colour near the bottom of the tree, but higher up pure white, about as hard as a dry apple, but with woody fibre running through it about a quarter of an inch apart. This pith is cut or broken down into a coarse powder by means of a tool constructed for ...
— The Malay Archipelago - Volume II. (of II.) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... extraordinary, and never contemplated—the exigency beyond immediate solution. As James Dows, one of the coolest in judgment and wisest in counsel of the Executive Committee, pertinently described the situation in the pithy remark, "We started in to hunt cayotes, but we've got a grizzly bear on our hands, and we don't know what to do with him." The Executive Committee were not themselves masters of the situation. Behind them, subject to them ...
— The Vigilance Committee of '56 • James O'Meara
... thought. And if his style cannot be said to bend gracefully to the variations of his subject, it still bends and does not break. In felicity and originality of epithet, the usual sign of a writer's genuineness of perception, he is excelled by no theologian of the time. He also has that power of pithy and pointed language which so condenses a statement of a fact or principle that it gives forth the diamond sparkle of epigram. The effect of wit is produced while the purpose is the gravest possible: as when he tells some brother religionists, who base their creeds on the hyperboles of Scripture, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 89, March, 1865 • Various
... like that. Hickory is not hard to graft in the field. I think if you set 10 you get 9 to grow. For scions I go back on two-year wood and oftentimes on three-year wood where there are buds. I don't have trouble at all. With pecans, you have a little more difficulty, because the wood is more pithy inside and ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 43rd Annual Meeting - Rockport, Indiana, August 25, 26 and 27, 1952 • Various
... asked to do, or showed the smallest feeling on the occasion beyond a general sense of dissatisfaction at all things connected with the sea. But of all our sufferers none equalled my poor cousin. Not a word was to be got out of her, but short pithy anathemas against everybody that came near her, everybody that spoke to her, every lurch the ship made, every noise overhead; an expression of pity caused an explosion of wrath, a hope that she was better a wish that ...
— Yr Ynys Unyg - The Lonely Island • Julia de Winton
... time to write two long and instructive letters to his old master and good friend, Mr. John Walker of Whitby, which are to be found in Dr. Young's work. They give a rapid glance at the different places visited, with a few pithy remarks as to their peoples and productions; mention the pleasing reception he had from the king, and he alludes to the probability of being despatched on a second voyage with ...
— The Life of Captain James Cook • Arthur Kitson
... applause that followed the short, pithy speech of the Bourgeois. The ladies blushed and praised, the gentlemen cheered and enjoyed in anticipation the renewal of the old hospitalities ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... Hadrian 'Imperator.' And as they stood before his scarcely-finished statue his respect increased for the new visitor to Lochias; for, with earnest frankness, he pointed out to him certain faults, and while praising the merits of the rapidly-executed figure he explained in a few brief and pithy phrases his own conception of the ideal Urania. Then shortly but clearly, he stated his views as to how the plastic artist must deal with the ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... confirm the suspicion, which passed through Lenny's mind with a rapidity wholly disproportionate to the number of lines it costs me to convey it, the boy, now standing right before the stocks, bent down and read that pithy anathema with which it was defaced. And having read it, he repeated it aloud, and Lenny actually saw him smile—such a smile!—so disagreeable and sinister! Lenny had never ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... off his hat and lay it beside him. As soon as he noticed the button, he rose and said, "Friends, if religion consists in a button, I wouldn't give a button for it." Having delivered this short and pithy sermon, he seated himself, and resumed the offending hat with ...
— Isaac T. Hopper • L. Maria Child
... the children attending the State schools should be instructed in the duties of citizenship, and that they should be taught something of the laws under which they lived, and I was commissioned to write a short and pithy statement of the case. It was to be simple enough for intelligent children in the fourth class; 11 or 12—it was to lead from the known to the unknown—it might include the elements of political economy and sociology—it might make use of familiar illustrations from the experience ...
— An Autobiography • Catherine Helen Spence
... earliest days, man has attempted to formulate the relationships between causes and effects without, however, always possessing the specific knowledge essential to accuracy. Pithy statements have always had great appeal to man, as evidenced by the existence of proverbs, maxims, and adages preserved from times of great antiquity. Frequently, however, such statements are not expressive of the truth. Sometimes, again, they state ...
— Sound Military Decision • U.s. Naval War College
... scattered through the historical books. In the Psalms, an anthology of sacred lyrics, the spirit of Hebrew poesy attains to its highest flight. Examples of didactic poetry are the Book of Job, and books like the Proverbs, composed mainly of pithy sayings or gnomes. Nowhere, save in the Psalms, does the spirit of the Hebrew religion and the genius of the people find an expression so grand and moving as in the Prophets, of ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... the pie to the last moment, appeared at the kitchen-door bearing before her, with that air of extraordinary importance peculiar to the negro countenance on eventful occasions, a huge brown dish with which she advanced to the head of the table, and with an emphatic bump, answering to the pithy speeches of warriors and statesmen at critical moments, deposited the great Thanksgiving pumpkin pie. Looking proudly around, ...
— Chanticleer - A Thanksgiving Story of the Peabody Family • Cornelius Mathews
... prominent as the popular. This noble and chivalrous element disappears in the novels of the English who imitated Cervantes. "These English novelists since Richardson's reign," says Heine, "are prosaic natures; to the prudish spirit of their time even pithy descriptions of the life of the common people are repugnant, and we see on yonder side of the Channel those bourgeoisie novels arise, wherein the petty humdrum life of the middle classes is depicted." But Scott appeared, and effected ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... F. Burr, in 1866, to be "a new variety, bouquet not large, but handsome and compact. It is so firm that it remains an unusual length of time without running to seed or becoming pithy." ...
— The Cauliflower • A. A. Crozier
... are stripped off when the grain is hard, and carried in carts to the barns, and placed in corn cribs adapted for the purpose. The grains are taken off the pithy cylinder on which they grow, by being rubbed or scraped on a piece of iron: in America a bayonet (a weapon called by the Yankees Uncle George's toasting fork) is invariably used for the purpose: the cylinder, now bared of its grain, is called the cobb. The delicate leaves by which the ear is ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 384, Saturday, August 8, 1829. • Various
... of a bow instead of its string. 2d. They yielded to gravity—kept tending down, down, to the righthand corner more and more. In the use of capitals the writer had taken the copyhead as his model. The style, however, was pithy, and in writing that is the first Christian grace—no, I forgot, it is the second; ...
— Love Me Little, Love Me Long • Charles Reade
... have probably not long to be here! But, in fine, all shall now withdraw for this day; and meet again, each Order in its separate place, to-morrow morning, for despatch of business. This is the determination of the royal breast: pithy and clear. And herewith King, retinue, Noblesse, majority of Clergy file out, as if the whole matter ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... read prayers, as he always did; with great distinctness and deliberation, so that everybody in the church, young and old, could catch every syllable; and he preached, considerately enough, a very short sermon—pithy, homely, and affectionate. He reminded them that he was then preaching his thirty-first Christmas-day sermon from that pulpit! The service and the sacrament over, none of the congregation moved from their places ...
— Ten Thousand a-Year. Volume 1. • Samuel Warren
... at Christ's College, Cambridge, 'A Ryght Pithy, Pleasaunt, and merie Comedie, intytuled Gammer Gurton's Needle.' The authorship is uncertain, recent investigation having exalted a certain Stevenson into rivalry with the Bishop Still to whom former scholars were content to assign it. Possibly as the ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... works, surely in respect of his singular eloquence and brave composition of apt words and sentences, let the learned examine and make tryall thereof, through all the parts of Rethoricke, in fitte phrases, in pithy sentences, in galant tropes, in flowing speeche, in plaine sense, and surely in my judgment, I think he wyll yeelde him that verdict which Quintillian giveth of both the best orators Demosthenes and Tully, that from ...
— John Lyly • John Dover Wilson
... merit which many good people attribute to them," replied Clifford. "They may be said, in few and pithy words, to have ill served a poor purpose. My impression is, that our wonderfully increased and still increasing facilities of locomotion are destined to bring us around again to the nomadic state. You are aware, my dear sir,—you must have observed it in ...
— The House of the Seven Gables • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... such a vigorous and unpleasant vitality as that. What may have happened to the "stools" after Mabel was married to Sir Hubert, we cannot take it upon us to say. At any rate, we prefer the Scotch poet's description, as somewhat the more pithy, and graphic, and intelligible of the two. The coincidence, however, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844 • Various
... broken to a terrified whisper, "His rebuke with the flames of fire!" And in particular moods, when the prophets, however sonorous, were inadequate to his need, my uncle would have recourse to his own pithy vocabulary for terms with which to anathematize himself; but these, of course, may not ...
— The Cruise of the Shining Light • Norman Duncan
... Trinity, who was then a young man, embodied the best opinion of the time in an excellent pithy letter. He wrote to me that the trial simply established, what every one believed, that "Sir William Wilde was a pithecoid person of extraordinary sensuality and cowardice (funking the witness-box left him without a defender!) and that his wife was a highfalutin' pretentious ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 1 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... however, unwilling for them to quit Lechee till the following day, and pressed them strongly to remain with him for the day, which, however, not all his solicitations nor importunities could induce them to accede to. After some trifling conversation, and a long and pithy harangue from a Fellata, they took their leave of him and his people, and instantly made their way back to the water side, where they waited in the grass hut for the appearance of the canoe men, with whom ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... old temptation came back to wind up with a lecture or quotation. I ransacked all my classics, and met with many a wise and pithy saying, but not one pleased me. I was about to give up the search in despair, when, taking up a certain book, my eye caught a familiar red pencil-mark. "Eureka!" I cried, and I wrote in large ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... went on Caleb Harper, soberly, "an' save fer statin' hit es I goes along I hain't got nuthin' more ter say erbout hit—albeit hit seems ter me a right pithy matter fer young folks ter study erbout. I don't jedgmatically know nothin' erbout yore affairs," he nodded his head toward Maggard. "So fur's I've got any means ter tell, ye mout be independent rich or ye mout not hev nothin' ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... we may fairly presume, proceeded from the pithy lecture of Ellen Connor; but the truth was, that the undefinable old squire was the greatest parental coward in the world. In the absence of his daughter he would rant and swear and vapor, strike the ground with his staff, and give other indications ...
— Willy Reilly - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... true of itself, but the fruit-like acid tomato flavor which most people value is found chiefly in the pulp, and the fruit which has not a due proportion of pulp and flesh seems to be insipid and tasteless. Again, the division into many small cells is often connected with a large and pithy placenta and unevenness in maturity and coloring, which faults often more than overbalance any advantage from small cells and thick flesh. The size and character of the placenta ...
— Tomato Culture: A Practical Treatise on the Tomato • William Warner Tracy
... into censure on the older offender. My arguments have, however, totally failed, and he remains obdurate and unmoved. Under these circumstances I have yielded; and as, happily for me, the short and pithy direction to the river Thames, in the Critic, "to keep between its banks," has been imitated by my friend, I find all that is required of me is to write my name upon the title and go in peace. Such, he informs ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... Moreover, in the vernacular everything would have appeared too direct, too personal, too real, for his taste. He could not do without that thin veil of vagueness, of remoteness, in which everything is wrapped when expressed in Latin. His fastidious mind would have shrunk from the pithy coarseness of a Rabelais, or the ...
— Erasmus and the Age of Reformation • Johan Huizinga
... [Footnote 340: Some pithy remarks on the habitual English attitude toward music may be found in the history of Stanford and Forsyth, page ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... to tell her, and Patty's pencil flew as she scribbled down his terse, pithy sentences. She found herself asking questions too, and enjoying it. For the first time, Patty thought she might rather like politics if she understood them—and they did not seem so hard to understand when a man like Mr. Reefer ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1907 to 1908 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... to the point. It opened with a pithy but pungent expression of Don Silvio's opinion of the capacity of a Governor who could permit his city to be captured and held by a handful of English pirates; then proceeded succinctly to refuse to accede to any of ...
— The Cruise of the Nonsuch Buccaneer • Harry Collingwood
... to the meeting with a pithy discourse on the sacredness of human life, the weaknesses and dangers of circumstantial evidence, and the rights of the accused wherever doubt arose. Then she plunged into the evidence, stripping off the superfluous and ...
— A Daughter of the Snows • Jack London
... of his wife and mother-in-law, had all been tolerably short and pithy, written in a straight hand, with the lines very close together. Sometimes the whole letter was contained on a mere scrap of paper. The paper was very yellow, and the ink very brown; some of the sheets were ...
— Cranford • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... sources, instead of availing himself of the most popular and admired, has groped out his way, and made his most successful researches among the more obscure and intricate, though certainly not the least pithy or pleasant of our writers. Mr. Washington Irvine has culled and transplanted the flowers of modern literature, for the amusement of the general reader: Mr. Lamb has raked among the dust and cobwebs of a more remote ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... 1/4 in. across, in bracted racemes 2 to 8 in. long. Calyx of 4 or 5 rounded persistent sepals, simulating petals; no corolla; 10 short stamens; 10-celled ovary, green, conspicuous; styles curved. Stem: Stout, pithy, erect, branching, reddening toward the end of summer, 4 to 10 ft. tall, from a large, perennial, poisonous root. Leaves: Alternate, petioled, oblong to lance-shaped, tapering at both ends, 8 to 12 in. long. Fruit: Very juicy, dark ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al
... of burials in the parish register Mr Brown made biographical notes, pithy, and quite free from that too flattering note often sounded in epitaphs. ...
— Devon, Its Moorlands, Streams and Coasts • Rosalind Northcote
... thet's a right pithy point ter my manner of thinking! Ye're a right masterful sort of feller, an' ye likes ter plow yore way through life gloryin' in yore strength an' forcin' your will on weaker folks." She paused an instant then added significantly: "But I'm ...
— A Pagan of the Hills • Charles Neville Buck
... his drooping spirits; the other, that Mr Pancks confidentially agreed to pay her, for the occupation of her son's time, at the handsome rate of seven and sixpence per day. The proposal originated with himself, and was couched in the pithy terms, 'If your John is weak enough, ma'am, not to take it, that is no reason why you should be, don't you see? So, quite between ourselves, ma'am, business ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... rhetoric he had small respect; in his opinion, the man who was capable of making a long, florid speech, was fit for little else. His own oratorical efforts were usually brief, pithy, and to the point. For example, here follows a specimen, which the writer heard delivered in Illinois, by a candidate for ...
— Western Characters - or Types of Border Life in the Western States • J. L. McConnel
... Proverbs is so called because it is such as containeth hard, dark, and pithy sentences of wisdom, by which is taught unto young men knowledge and discretion (1-6). Wherefore this book is not such as discloseth truths by words antecedent or subsequent to the text, so as other scriptures generally do, but has its texts or sentences more independent; ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... there were only readers. Its curse in common use is an incredible left-handed wordiness; but in the hands of a man like Pratt it is succinct as Latin, compact of long rolling polysyllables and little and often pithy particles, and for beauty of sound a dream. Listen, I quote from Pratt - this is good Samoan, not ...
— Vailima Letters • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Pithy paragraphs on a wide range of subjects, not one of which but will be found to contain some terse, sparkling truth worthy of thought and attention. A spare ten minutes devoted to such readings can never ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 6 • Various
... not sufficiently recognise the truth of Walt Whitman's pithy saying, "I am not all contained between my hat and my boots," and forget the two-fold nature of the "I AM," that it is at once both the manifested and the unmanifested, the universal and the individual. By losing sight of this truth we surround ourselves with limitations; we see only part of the ...
— The Hidden Power - And Other Papers upon Mental Science • Thomas Troward
... splendidly. I was eloquent, but at the same time concise. My choice of words was superb. I crystallised my ideas into pithy sentences which ...
— Love Among the Chickens • P. G. Wodehouse
... letters, has been confirmed by the judgment of posterity. For the chapter on Pan Tadeusz by George Brandes, than whom there have been few more competent judges of modern European literature, is little more than an expansion of Krasinski's pithy sentences. The cosmopolitan critic echoes the patriotic Pole when he writes: "In Pan Tadeusz Poland possesses the only successful epic our century ...
— Pan Tadeusz • Adam Mickiewicz
... Representatives for their gingerly treatment of the great question, and sending a trumpet-call to the honest, brave, and sincere temperance workers, both men and women, urging them to greater vigilance and closer compact. These, with numerous short and pithy articles, added to all his sermons and lectures on the subject, occupying a much larger space and far more time, will give an idea of the labor of heart and brain bestowed upon this one question, during this one decade. ...
— Personal Recollections of Pardee Butler • Pardee Butler
... commend my writings to the pampered palates of literary epicures, I might have availed myself of the obscurity that overshadows the infant years of our city, to introduce a thousand pleasing fictions. But I have scrupulously discarded many a pithy tale and marvelous adventure, whereby the drowsy ear of summer indolence might be enthralled; jealously maintaining that fidelity, gravity, and dignity which should ever distinguish the historian. "For a writer of this class," observes an elegant ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... to their particular favourite. As a speaker, Colonel Burr was calm and persuasive. He was most remarkable for the power which he possessed of condensation. His appeals, whether to a court or a jury, were sententious and lucid. His speeches, generally, were argumentative, short, and pithy. No flights of fancy, no metaphors, no parade of impassioned sentences, are to be found in them. When employed on the same side of a cause with General Hamilton, it was his uniform practice to permit that gentleman to select his own place in ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis
... approval of the House of Commons should be obtained. I suspect that if, during his active-service days, some Member had proposed a similar restriction on the movements of the Fleet the comments of the gallant Commander himself would have been more pithy than Parliamentary. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, May 28, 1919. • Various
... are related of the prince's conduct throughout the day. One is remarkable as affording an example of those pithy epigrams of the battlefield with which history abounds, accompanied by an act that speaks a fine knowledge of the soldier's heart. On occasion of one peculiarly desperate charge, the prince, hurried on by his ardor, was ...
— Holland - The History of the Netherlands • Thomas Colley Grattan
... ROBERT PEEL was a pithy illustration of the good old Tory creed. He opens his oration with a benevolent and patriotic yearning for the comforts of Parliamentary warmth and ventilation. He moves for papers connected with "the building of the two houses of Parliament, and with the adoption of measures for warming ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... compilation of pithy quotations, selected from a great variety of sources, and alphabetically arranged according to the sentiment. In addition to all the popular quotations in current use, it contains many rare bits of prose and verse not generally found in similar ...
— Slips of Speech • John H. Bechtel
... once heard a lady repeat the following pithy lines, and shall be glad if any of your readers can tell me who is the author, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 35, June 29, 1850 • Various
... "You are pithy at reply, young man; but I know something of Jacob Armitage, and we know," continued he, putting his finger close to some writing opposite the name on the list, "with whom he has been associated, and with whom he has served. ...
— The Children of the New Forest • Captain Marryat
... woods, that is very poisonous. The cap of a true mushroom has a frill, the gills are free from the stem, they never grow down against it, but usually there is a small channel all around the top of the stem, the spores are brown-black, or deep purple black and the stem is solid or slightly pithy. It is said if salt is sprinkled on the gills and they become yellow the mushroom is poisonous, if black, they are wholesome. Sweet oil ...
— Vaughan's Vegetable Cook Book (4th edition) - How to Cook and Use Rarer Vegetables and Herbs • Anonymous
... humble admirer to propose a question. As our king, we put our lives and fortunes in your hands. If, therefore, the Eagle, the Vulture, and the Kite, should make a descent upon us, what means would you take for our defense?" This pithy question opened the eyes of the Birds to the weakness of their choice and ...
— Aesop's Fables - A New Revised Version From Original Sources • Aesop
... vtris oh, os trahit mufa vitus oho trahit mifas rutis oho, trahis mutis Humo astra hosti oho, fum Charitas. If the pertingent Reader still craves more evidence of the extent of Hariot's friendships, and the universality of his acquirements, let him read the following pithy, quaint, and beautiful tribute paid to him by blind Old Homer's Chapman in 1616. It is found in the Preface to the Reader in the first complete edition of Homer'sworks translated by George Chapman, ...
— Thomas Hariot • Henry Stevens
... is the commonest vice of style. It is not to be avoided, except in the rarest cases, by those to whom the written use of language is unfamiliar; so that a shepherd who talks pithy, terse sense will be unable to express himself in a letter without having recourse to the Ready Letter-writer—"This comes hoping to find you well, as it also leaves me at present"— and a soldier, without the excuse of ignorance, will describe a successful advance as having been made against "a ...
— Style • Walter Raleigh
... ships of the line, one frigate of 44 guns, and one of 36. Captain Walton in the Canterbury, with five more ships, had been sent in pursuit of another part of the Spanish fleet. On the 22nd August Sir George received the following pithy despatch from him:— ...
— How Britannia Came to Rule the Waves - Updated to 1900 • W.H.G. Kingston
... in his memory for long after: the sweet-scented garden, and the long low kitchen, with the happy family party gathered round the table; the clumsy efforts of the reticent farmer to make his guest feel at home; the short, pithy remarks made by Mrs. Platt, and the gentle, soft-voiced young mother, with the golden-haired boy, continually asking quaint questions about a soldier's life—all this came back to him with a keen sense of pleasure in after years. He was only a young fellow after all, and was touched ...
— Teddy's Button • Amy Le Feuvre
... it, his father was surprised out of his gravity, and ejaculated the word "d—nation!" with great emphasis, at the same time, flinging his pipe into the fire, and exclaiming by way of sermon to his short and pithy text, ...
— An Old Sailor's Yarns • Nathaniel Ames
... persons who do not themselves use slang understand and even appreciate it. The American brand is generally pithy, compact, and expressive, and not always vulgar. Slang is at its worst in contemptuous epithets, and of those the one that is lowest and most offensive seems likely to become a permanent, recognized addition to the language. No more vulgar term exists than "masher," and it is a distinct comfort ...
— Stage Confidences • Clara Morris
... not bare, for a patch of great sunflowers found moisture enough for their roots somewhere far below, and sent up their great pithy stalks close to the house door, spread their rough leaves, and imitated the sun's disk in their broad, round, yellow flowers. There was an ugly euphorbia too, with its thorny, almost leafless branches and brilliant ...
— Diamond Dyke - The Lone Farm on the Veldt - Story of South African Adventure • George Manville Fenn
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