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Neophyte   /nˈiəfˌaɪt/   Listen
Neophyte

noun
1.
A plant that is found in an area where it had not been recorded previously.
2.
Any new participant in some activity.  Synonyms: entrant, fledgeling, fledgling, freshman, newbie, newcomer, starter.
3.
A new convert being taught the principles of Christianity by a catechist.  Synonym: catechumen.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Neophyte" Quotes from Famous Books



... sputter, gripping his fish and pip-pipping his exultation. Away he goes in low heavy flight to the nest. The mother circles over him a moment to be sure he is not overloaded; then she goes back with the other neophyte and ranges back and ...
— Wood Folk at School • William J. Long

... gleam of covert enjoyment on his sombre countenance, as the hot-stuff, the cards, and the pipes were produced, an hour or two before supper,—a meal we always had hot and comfortable. This covert satisfaction, however, was not exhibited without certain misgiving looks, as if the neophyte in these innocent enjoyments distrusted his right to possess his share. I remember in particular, when my mother laid two or three new, clean packs of cards on the table, that Jason cast a stealthy glance over ...
— Satanstoe • James Fenimore Cooper

... difficult matter in this instance, on account of the character of the other offender. She styled my attitude hypocritical, because I parleyed with the enemy. Even assuming that there was no flirtation between us,—of which she was by no means convinced,—what right, she asked, had I, as a neophyte of recent standing, to be on terms of intimacy with the arch advocate of the school of thought most opposed to that which ...
— A Romantic Young Lady • Robert Grant

... secure his education, that he should adopt a bread-winning profession, yielded, not to any urgent appeals or dogged display of resolution, but to the proof given by his labors that he was choosing more wisely for himself. Cuvier, without any request or expectation, resigned to the neophyte who, after following in his footsteps, was outstripping him in certain lines, drawings and notes prepared for his own use. Humboldt, at a critical moment, saved him from the necessity for abandoning his projects by an unsolicited loan, supplemented by many further acts of ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885 • Various

... as it is outside the lotus, and does not settle down in its heart to drink of the honey. As soon as it tastes of the honey all buzzing is at an end. Similarly all noise of discussion ceases when the soul of the neophyte begins to drink the nectar of Divine Love, at the lotus ...
— Cosmic Consciousness • Ali Nomad

... neophytes, ranged in order, as a class, with their backs considerately placed against a screen, had begun, in rotation, to read the exercises which they had not written, even then, each Bencher, true to the great lazy principle of the whole proceeding, stopped each neophyte before he had stammered through his first line, and bowed to him, and told him politely that he was a barrister from that moment. This was all the ceremony. It was followed by a social supper, and by the presentation, in accordance with ancient custom, of a pound of sweetmeats and a bottle of ...
— The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices • Charles Dickens

... went on Mr. Hazen, "there was, as I told you, a young neophyte by the name of Thomas Watson. Tom had not found his niche in life. He had tried being a clerk, a bookkeeper, and a carpenter and none of these several occupations had seemed to fit him. Then one fortunate ...
— Ted and the Telephone • Sara Ware Bassett

... from Maybelle and a tightly-rolled manuscript tied with blue baby-ribbon. In the note she said that she thought it would be so romantic to "write up her own wedding—recalling the dear, dead days when she was a neophyte in letters." We handed the manuscript to Miss Larrabee, from whom, as she read, came snorts: "'Drawing-room!' Huh! 'Music-room.' Heavens to Betsy! 'Peculiar style of beauty!' Oh, joy! 'Looked like a wood-nymph in the morn.' ...
— In Our Town • William Allen White

... that of the dark ages, then contained scarce a single enactment, and not a single stringent enactment, imposing any penalty on Papists as such. On our side of Saint George's Channel every priest who received a neophyte into the bosom of the Church of Rome was liable to be hanged, drawn, and quartered. On the other side he incurred no such danger. A Jesuit who landed at Dover took his life in his hand; but he walked the streets of Dublin in security. Here no man could hold office, or even earn his livelihood as ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... in Arguing with him. When a Man gets to be a confirmed Joiner he is not Happy unless he can get into an unlighted Room two or three Nights a Week, and wallop the Neophyte with a Stuffed Club, and walk him into a Tub of Water, and otherwise Impress him with the Solemnity of ...
— More Fables • George Ade

... young girl such vantage-ground in society and in life as a mother,—a sensible, amiable, brilliant, and commanding woman. Under the shelter of such a mother's wing, the neophyte is safe. This mother will attract to herself the wittiest and the wisest. The young girl can see society in its best phases, without being herself drawn out into its glare. She forms her own style on the purest models. She gains confidence, without losing modesty. Familiar with wisdom, ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton

... quite a line of such godsends to the neophyte in the kitchen, the popularity of which is reflected in a steadily rising divorce-rate," Tipton said. "They advertise very extensively, including half an hour of tear-jerking drama on a national hookup during soap-opera time. Your client, the former Gladys Farrand, ...
— Murder in the Gunroom • Henry Beam Piper

... Le Breton's insidious influence. At the same time that Berkeley was engaged in partially converting Ernest, Ernest was engaged in the counter process of partially converting Berkeley. To say the truth, the conversion was not a very difficult matter to effect; the neophyte had in him implicitly already the chief saving doctrines of the socialistic faith, or, if one must put it conversely, the germs of the disease were constitutionally implanted in his system, and only needed a little external encouragement ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen

... hurry up!" said the unfeeling Bickley, "or you will be late for your appointment and put your would-be neophyte ...
— When the World Shook - Being an Account of the Great Adventure of Bastin, Bickley and Arbuthnot • H. Rider Haggard

... and could not overtake their old mistress, so she herself alighted from her chair to volunteer her services. She was about to hastily press forward and support her, when, by a strange accident, a young Taoist neophyte, of twelve or thirteen years of age, who held a case containing scissors, with which he had been snuffing the candles burning in the various places, just seized the opportunity to run out and hide himself, when he unawares rushed, head foremost, into ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin

... displeasure as Dick skipped back with him to the company. He remembered his own delight three months before, even with the haunting thoughts of his mother's reproaches to dampen his ardor, and he was soon dazzling the neophyte with the wonders that were just ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan

... multitude, of the governor, and of the soldiers fell chiefly upon Sanctus, a deacon of Vienne; upon Maturus, a neophyte still, but already a valiant champion of Christ; upon Attalus also, born at Pergamus, but who hath ever been one of the pillars of our Church; upon Blandina, lastly, in whom Christ hath made it appear that persons who seem vile and despised ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various

... thee true, my noble neophyte; my little gram maticaster, he does: it shall never put thee to thy mathematics, metaphysics, philosophy, and I know not what supposed Suficiencies; if thou canst but have the patience to plod enough, talk, and make a noise enough, be impudent ...
— The Poetaster - Or, His Arraignment • Ben Jonson

... of the part in a play which represents the downfall of a virtuous person, the setting forth of the passions of love and hatred, must in time produce a powerful effect on the mind of a young woman, and there is danger that the neophyte on the stage will be contaminated with the base things of life before strength of character is developed. The Chinese are to be commended in this respect, whatever their motive in excluding their women from the stage. The reproduction of Greek plays, in some of our universities, ...
— By the Golden Gate • Joseph Carey

... offered him as a pattern for "doing up," to that of the unfortunate employer who, while showing John how to handle valuable china carefully, had the misfortune to drop a plate himself—an accident which was followed by the prompt breaking of another by the neophyte, with the addition of "Oh, hellee!" in ...
— Under the Redwoods • Bret Harte

... moment of taking orders, but his dread of appearing in public conspired with the good sense which lay beneath his excessive sensibility to put a veto on the design. He, however, exercised the zeal of a neophyte in proselytism to a greater extent than his own judgment and good taste approved when his enthusiasm ...
— Cowper • Goldwin Smith

... supported, and directed, and perpetually set upon your feet, by the hand of some one else. The air besides, as it is supplied to you by the busy millers on the platform, closes the eustachian tubes and keeps the neophyte perpetually swallowing, till his throat is grown so dry that he can swallow no longer. And for all these reasons—although I had a fine, dizzy, muddle-headed joy in my surroundings, and longed, and tried, and always failed, to lay hands on the fish that darted here and there about me, swift as ...
— A Book of English Prose - Part II, Arranged for Secondary and High Schools • Percy Lubbock

... The neophyte in Christian Science acts like a diseased physique,—being too fast or too slow. He is inclined to do either too much or too little. In healing and teaching the student has not yet achieved the entire ...
— Retrospection and Introspection • Mary Baker Eddy

... occultists scrupulously refrain from so doing. In fact, among the highest teachers, it is a condition imposed upon the pupil that he shall refrain from exhibitions of his developing powers among the uninitiated public. "The Neophyte is bound over to the most inviolable secrecy as to everything connected with his entrance and further progress in the schools. In Asia, in the same way, the chela, or pupil of occultism, no sooner becomes ...
— A Series of Lessons in Gnani Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka

... Enth. (selecting a table with great care). Always like to be near the stove, and out of the draught. (The prettiest Waitress approaches, and greets him with a sacerdotal sweetness, as one of the Faith, while to the Neophyte—whom she detects, at a glance, as still without the pale—she is severely tolerant.) Now, what are you going to have? [Passing him the bill ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 103, December 17, 1892 • Various

... on what might almost be considered terms of affection with Venus. And he was, moreover, presently quite fearless in the presence of Saturn, quite unabashed beneath the glittering eye of Mercury. Then, as the neophyte growing bold by familiarity with the circle of the great ones, he ventured on his first prophecy, a discreet and even humble forecast of the weather. He predicted a heavy fall of snow for a certain evening, and so distrusted his own prediction ...
— The Prophet of Berkeley Square • Robert Hichens

... the lucid harmonies of choir and transepts like a flower unfolding. In the one the mind is tuned to inner meditation and religious awe; in the other the worshipper passes into a temple of the clear explicit faith—as an initiated neophyte might be received into the meaning ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds

... trumps; Westlake, polishing epigrams under his eyelids; Henry Wilmers, who timed an anecdote to strike as the passing hour without freezing the current; Sullivan Smith, smoked, cured and ready to flavour; Percy Dacier, pleasant listener, measured speaker; and young Arthur Rhodes, the neophyte of the hostess's training; of whom she had said to Emma, 'The dear boy very kindly serves to frank an unlicenced widow'; and whom she prompted and made her utmost of, with her natural tact. These she mixed and leavened. The talk was on high levels ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... every movement of the child in the pew, dreading some patent and open impropriety which should bring scandal on her government! This was the more to be feared, as the first effort to initiate the youthful neophyte in the decorums of the sanctuary had proved anything but a success,—insomuch that Zephaniah Pennel had been obliged to carry him out from the church; therefore, poor Mrs. Pennel was thankful every Sunday when she got her little charge home without ...
— The Pearl of Orr's Island - A Story of the Coast of Maine • Harriet Beecher Stowe

... But the transfer of Karma is not altogether foreign to Brahmanic thought, for it is held that a wife may share in her husband's Karma nor is it wholly unknown to Sinhalese Buddhism.[11] After thus deliberately rejecting all personal success and selfish aims, the neophyte makes a vow (pranidhana) to acquire enlightenment for the good of all beings and not to swerve from the rules of life and faith requisite for this end. He is then a "son of Buddha," a phrase which is merely a natural metaphor for ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot

... Mr. Leigh Hunt and his simple neophyte.—If any one should be bold enough to purchase this 'Poetic Romance,' and so much more patient, than ourselves, as to get beyond the first book, and so much more fortunate as to find a meaning, we entreat him to make us acquainted with his success; we shall then return to the task ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney

... is—shall I say?—almost probable that you will be disappointed with him, at any rate partially. You will have expected more joy in him than you have received. I have referred in a previous chapter to the feeling of disappointment which often comes from first contacts with the classics. The neophyte is apt to find them—I may as well out with the word—dull. You may have found Lamb less diverting, less interesting, than you hoped. You may have had to whip yourself up again and again to the effort of reading him. In brief, Lamb has not, for you, justified his terrific reputation. If a classic ...
— Literary Taste: How to Form It • Arnold Bennett

... soul, good Theos, if thy wits thus wander at sight of a witching, marble nymph illumed by electric glamours, what will become of thee when thou art face to face with living, breathing loveliness! Come, thou hotheaded neophyte! thou shalt not waste thy passion on images of ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli

... permutations and combinations! By the evening, I had nearly mastered my subject. When the bell rang, at seven, to summon us to the common meal at the principal's table, I went downstairs puffed up with the joys of the newly initiated neophyte. I was escorted on my way by a, b and c, intertwined ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre

... had she left for two days unanswered letters which were to her as Sibylline leaves to some unquiet neophyte yearning for solutions to enigmas suggested whether by the world without or by the soul within. For six days Madame de Grantmesnil's letter remained unanswered, unread, neglected, thrust out of sight; just ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... attached to your person, was, in fact, most valuable to us. But, with the ardor peculiar to any neophyte who wishes to distinguish himself, he pushed his zeal too far and thwarted my plans by permitting himself, on his own initiative, to strike you ...
— The Hollow Needle • Maurice Leblanc

... it seemed to implant an incorrupt seed of manliness, and to create in its disciples that saner mood which holds in equal aversion a Heliogabalus and a Simeon Stylites. So persuaded, I could join with the fervour of a neophyte in the Stoic's profession: "Good and evil are in choice alone, and there is no cause of sorrowing save in my own errant and wilful desires. When these shall have been overcome, I shall possess my soul ...
— Apologia Diffidentis • W. Compton Leith

... elderly, grey-haired man with the six-bar dollar-mark insignia of a business executive on his purple tunic. He had been standing nearby, and at the mention of asteroid Z-40 had looked up alertly. He glided to the two with a frown on his forehead, and spoke a few curt words to the neophyte, who slunk away. ...
— The Planetoid of Peril • Paul Ernst

... perceived that the spirited action of this "argument," as Field styled it, practically ends with the first act, a fault which the veriest neophyte in the art of libretto writing knows is fatal. But the most interesting feature of this opera in embryo is the list of songs which Field had planned ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson

... and eloquent of speech, elude the hold of the earnest spirit longing for truth; disappointment and impatience grow on the humblest and most reverent mind, and escaping from the multitude of vain words, the neophyte finds in one chapter of a Book forgotten in that babblement, a light to his way and a support to his steps, which, following and trusting, he knows will lead him ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson

... as a brother, — which among all these unhappy bifurcations, so cheery, so unambitious, so purely contented, so apt to be the guide, philosopher, and friend of boyhood as he? What wonder that at times, when the neophyte in life begins to realise that all these desirable accomplishments have had to be surrendered one by one in the process of developing a Mind, the course of fitting out a Lord of Creation, he is wont — not knowing the extent of the kingdom to which he is ...
— Pagan Papers • Kenneth Grahame

... with folded circulars and advertising cards, into pasteboard boxes. At the far end of this room a pungent, high-spiced scent, as of a pickle-kitchen with a fortified odor underlying it, greeted the unaccustomed nose of the neophyte. ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams

... looked as bleak and stormy as it did to the children of Lir. We had no mind to be swallowed up in Brecain's Caldron, where the grandson of Niall and the Nine Hostages sank with his fifty curraghs, so we took a day of golf at the Ballycastle links. Salemina, who is a neophyte, found a forlorn lady driving and putting about by herself, and they made a match just to increase the interest of the game. There was but one boy in evidence, and the versatile Benella offered to caddie for them, leaving the more ...
— Penelope's Irish Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin

... assoluta recalled the famous brava-a-a-a of Lablache on her first evening at her Majesty's Opera-house in London, which satisfied England that she was a great singer, and confirmed her career. To the audience her friendly interest seemed the impulse of her kindly heart for a young neophyte in this profession. ...
— From the Easy Chair, vol. 1 • George William Curtis

... Now the neophyte needs the introduction of a trusted sponsor before he can win admission to the club-house of the exclusive Circle of Friends of Humanity; but Lanyard's knock secured him prompt and unquestioned right of way. The unfortunate fact is, he was ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance

... it should begin life free from the taint of superstition. It should not be christened, it should be named, in the Name of Reason. But they could not break loose from the idea of baptism. They poured a bottle of water on the shivering nape of the poor little neophyte, and its frail life went out in its first ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay

... half shyly in a glass on his table a wonderful thought occurred to him. Was not the episode of last night a special providence? Was not that young girl, wayward and childlike, a mere neophyte in her idolatrous religion, as yet unsteeped in sloth and ignorance, presented to him as a brand to be snatched from the burning? Was not this the opportunity of conversion he had longed for—this the chance of exercising ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte

... the lady's very first essay in a canoe, nevertheless she succeeded admirably in her effort, for it is far easier to learn a little of paddling than a little of rowing, as every neophyte can ...
— The Voyage Alone in the Yawl "Rob Roy" • John MacGregor

... to these two, almost exclusively, that he is indebted for all that he knows, and for all that he can know, of the philosophic system which is taught in the institution. All its mysteries and its dogmas, which constitute its philosophy, are intrusted for communication to the neophyte, sometimes to one, sometimes to the other of these two methods of instruction, and sometimes to both of them combined. The Freemason has no way of reaching any of the esoteric teachings of the Order except through the medium of ...
— The Symbolism of Freemasonry • Albert G. Mackey

... fraternity, sharing the privileges of that fraternity, and, to a certain extent, its duties. He is at first a junior member, it is true. Among his duties, therefore, will be obedience to some of the senior members, and respect to all. But none the less is he a neophyte member of a corporation which extends back hundreds of years perhaps,—he is a co-proprietor of its honors and privileges, is responsible for their preservation, and is, from the first, inoculated ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 45, July, 1861 • Various

... and reforming attitude and strict orthodoxy, without any admixture of mystical slackness in faith or conduct. Each order is distinguished by a peculiar garb. Candidates for admission have to pass through a noviciate, more or less lengthy. First comes the 'ahd, or initial covenant, in which the neophyte or mur[i]d, "seeker," repents of his past sins and takes the sheikh of the order he enters as his guide (murshid) for the future. He then enters upon a course of instruction and discipline, called ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various

... matter, a curious phenomenon to investigate would be, the process by which the untonsured neophyte is converted into the bonneted doctor; the progress and stages of his mind in the different phases of the practice; how he begins by deceiving himself, to end in deceiving others; the first uninquiring ignorance; the gradual admission of ideas, what he is taught ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 69, February 22, 1851 • Various

... mortal hatred, "I will have the book when your collection is sold after your death." And he kept his word. The fever of gambling is not absent from the auction-room, and people "bid jealous" as they sometimes "ride jealous" in the hunting-field. Yet, the neophyte, if he strolls by chance into a sale-room, will be surprised at the spectacle. The chamber has the look of a rather seedy "hell." The crowd round the auctioneer's box contains many persons so dingy and Semitic, that at Monte Carlo they would be refused admittance; while, in Germany, ...
— The Library • Andrew Lang

... the departure of Portola and his party, Sunday, July 16, Padre Serra felt that the glorious moment for which he had so long prayed had at length arrived. The mission bells were unpacked and hung on a tree, and a neophyte, or converted Indian, whom he had brought with him from the peninsula, was appointed to ring them. As the sweet tones sounded on the clear air, all the party who were able gathered about the padre, who stood lifting the cross of Christ on high. All joined ...
— History of California • Helen Elliott Bandini

... See, in his | waywardness How his fist | doubles; Thus pugi |-listical, Daring life's | troubles: Strange that the | neophyte Enters ex |-istence In such an | attitude, Feigning ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown

... him by trials, and rewards him at the last by blessing his union with the maiden. The trials of silence, secrecy, and hardihood in passing through the dread elements of fire and water were ancient literary materials; they may be found in the account of the initiation of a neophyte into the mysteries of Isis in Apuleius's "Metamorphoses; or, The Golden Ass," a romance written in the second century. By placing the scene of the opera in Egypt, the belief of Freemasons that their order originated in that unspeakably ancient land was humored, while the use of some of its symbolism ...
— A Book of Operas - Their Histories, Their Plots, and Their Music • Henry Edward Krehbiel

... eternal,—gwoaning and solitawy despair! And you, Yellowplush, would penetwate these mystewies; you would waise the awful veil, and stand in the twemendous Pwesence. Beware, as you value your peace, beware! Withdraw, wash Neophyte! For heaven's sake! O for heaven's sake!'—Here he looked round with agony;—'give me a glass of bwandy-and-water, for this clawet is beginning to disagwee with me.'" It was thus that Thackeray began that vein of satire ...
— Thackeray • Anthony Trollope

... instant Achilles entered the black marble hall at the same door by which he had left it, and came up to his neophyte, as the ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott

... ascribed several different representations of the Last Judgment. He derived the inspiration of the subject directly from Orcagna's fresco in Santa Maria Novella, only Fra Angelico has created a paradise too exclusively modelled on the monastic life. "His ideal," writes Reymond, "is a young neophyte entirely absorbed in prayer—a contemplative being who has renounced earthly life, abdicating his qualities as a man to dream of nothing but the future life. Orcagna, on the contrary, dreams of an ideal in which human life triumphs in all its fulness, and ...
— Fra Angelico • J. B. Supino

... to you, can boast, that never since I was of years of discretion (counting new style, beginning at thirteen, of course)—never have I lost a friend, a sincere friend—never, for this irrefragable reason—since that nonage, never was I such a neophyte as to fancy I had found that lusus natures, ...
— Helen • Maria Edgeworth

... beautiful. As they rode towards the theatre, Lord Dalgarno endeavoured to discover his friend's opinion of the company to which he had introduced him, and to combat the exceptions which he might suppose him to have taken. "And wherefore lookest thou sad," he said, "my pensive neophyte? Sage son of the Alma Mater of Low-Dutch learning, what aileth thee? Is the leaf of the living world which we have turned over in company, less fairly written than thou hadst been taught to expect? Be comforted, and pass over one little blot or two; thou wilt be doomed to read through many a page, ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott

... tends to produce a flutter of excitement and expectation. Magnificent staircases, dim perspectives of frescoes and carvings, the glorious hall of Apollo, rooms with mosaic pavements, antique vases, countless spoils of art, dazzle the eye of the neophyte, and prepare the mind for some grand enchantment. Then opens on one the grand hall of paintings arranged by schools, the works of each artist by themselves, a ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe

... delightful months. Never before had neophyte lived so entirely for the happiness of others. He was all love, consumed by the passion of his apostolate. The sight of the poor wretches whom he visited, the men without work, the women, the children without bread, filled him with a keener and keener conviction that ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola

... gospel: love of outdoors, Playing the Game, loyalty to friends. She had the neophyte's shock of discovery that, outside of tracts, conservatives do not tremble and find no answer when an iconoclast turns on them, but retort with agility ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis

... part of their functions to keep their converts in hostility to the English, and that their credit with the civil powers depended on their success in doing so. The same holds true of the priests of the mission villages in Canada. They avoided all that might impair the warlike spirit of the neophyte, and they were well aware that in savages the warlike spirit is mainly dependent on native ferocity. They taught temperance, conjugal fidelity, devotion to the rites of their religion, and submission to the priest; but they left the savage a savage still. In spite of the ...
— Count Frontenac and New France under Louis XIV • Francis Parkman

... potent? May he, or may he not, reasonably hope to be cast away upon a desert island, or turned to such diminutive proportions that he can live on equal terms with his lead soldiery, and go a cruise in his own toy-schooner? Surely all these are practical questions to a neophyte entering upon life with a view to play. Precision upon such a point, the child can understand. But if you merely ask him of his past behaviour, as to who threw such a stone, for instance, or struck such and such a match; or whether he had looked into a parcel or gone by a forbidden path,—why, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... vivacity sank into a breathless hush, and she sat intent in her corner of their baignoire, with the gaze of a neophyte about to be initiated into the sacred mysteries. Darrow placed himself behind her, that he might catch her profile between himself and the stage. He was touched by the youthful seriousness of her expression. In spite of the experiences she must have had, and ...
— The Reef • Edith Wharton

... The whistle which the neophyte here gave seemed to give great dissatisfaction to all of the trappers present. One ...
— The Life and Adventures of Kit Carson, the Nestor of the Rocky Mountains, from Facts Narrated by Himself • De Witt C. Peters

... walk a little way," he said. And she went along by his side, through the Common, feeling a neophyte's excitement in the freemasonry, the contempt for petty conventions of this newly achieved doctrine of brotherhood. "I will give you things to read, you ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... to memory the progress of the youthful Napoleon. Here we see him at his mother's knee; then in the time of his school days; then in Paris and Valence; then as a neophyte author, quite absurd in his dreams; then on garrison duty, and then swept away with the tides of the oncoming revolution. In the smoke of the South his slender figure is seen here and there until he emerges at Toulon. In his character of Jacobin he becomes a general in the army at ...
— The Arena - Volume 18, No. 92, July, 1897 • Various

... tried their agility and strength, in severe fasts of several days' duration, and in mimic combats, which, although the weapons were blunted, were always attended with wounds, and sometimes with death. During this trial, which lasted thirty days, the royal neophyte fared no better than his comrades, sleeping on the bare ground, going unshod, and wearing a mean attire, - a mode of life, it was supposed, which might tend to inspire him with more sympathy with the destitute. With all this show of impartiality, ...
— The History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William H. Prescott

... unconsciously asserted his own individuality and taken upon his younger shoulders not only a poet's keen appreciation of that life, but its actual responsibilities and half-childish burdens, he never suspected. He had fondly believed that he was a neophyte in their ways, a novice in their charming faith and indolent creed, and they had encouraged it; now their renunciation of that faith could only be an excuse for a renunciation of him. The poetry that had for ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte

... apparent injustice of vicarious atonement, the student is well aware that the whole of this sanguinary metaphor is drawn really from the Pagan rites of Mithra, where the neophyte was actually placed under a bull at the ceremony of the TAUROBOLIUM, and was drenched, through a grating, with the blood of the slaughtered animal. Such reminiscences of the more brutal side of Paganism are not helpful to the thoughtful and sensitive modern mind. But what is always ...
— The Vital Message • Arthur Conan Doyle

... boldly, like a good-natured despot, determined to reform, study and rearrange everything; and a victim to the feverish and glorious zeal of a neophyte, he was a little surprised to encounter, at the very outset, the obstinate resistance of routine, ignorance, and the unyielding mechanism of that vast machine, ...
— His Excellency the Minister • Jules Claretie

... be called to his deathbed, and begged to be baptized. Great was the surprise of the missionary to find him as well acquainted with the truths of religion as he was anxious to receive the sacrament of regeneration. A few moments later the good priest beheld his neophyte expire, expressing the most ...
— Pius IX. And His Time • The Rev. AEneas MacDonell

... entered into all Ronald's projects, albeit some of them appeared too wild and high-reaching to be easy of accomplishment; beheld how readily the paternal hand was stretched out to soften the ordeals through which the neophyte must inevitably pass, and was moved by the touching frankness with which the noble-minded parent repeatedly congratulated himself that he had not permitted his own predilections to force Ronald into a field of action repugnant ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie

... taken, was, I believe, the purpose of those responsible for the original of the present MS. "They began from the base upwards that the building might unite them to their companions"—souls that in aeonian bliss beheld the Face of God unveiled. Into this building plan the Neophyte was initiated to give thereto his soul and body as a willing oblation and sacrifice. It seems a reasonable suggestion to offer that this document consists of a series of meditations and spiritual exercises given to the candidate before one of the inner "initiations" or ...
— The Gnosis of the Light • F. Lamplugh

... Know, my pretty neophyte, that happiness, married happiness especially, does not come from being loved, but from loving. What says ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various

... statements might provoke a doubt upon this point. We cite a single example. Speaking of M. Sainte-Beuve's temporary connection with the Saint-Simonians, he says: "For a brief season he appears to have felt some of the zeal of a neophyte, speaking the speech and talking the vague nonsense of his new friends. But soon his native good-sense seems to have perceived that the whole thing was only a fevered dream of a diseased age." Now the reviewer, if he knows anything of the doctrines in question, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various

... Freedmen's Pledge": "To defend and perpetuate freedom and the Union, I pledge my life, my fortune, and my sacred honor. So help me God!" "John Brown's Body" was then sung, the president charged the members in a long speech concerning the principles of the order, and the marshal instructed the neophyte in the signs. To pass one's self as a Leaguer, the "Four L's" had to be given: (1) with right hand raised to heaven, thumb and third finger touching ends over palm, pronounce "Liberty"; (2) bring the hand ...
— The Sequel of Appomattox - A Chronicle of the Reunion of the States, Volume 32 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Walter Lynwood Fleming

... [orig. from British public-school and military slang variant of 'new boy'] A Usenet neophyte. This term surfaced in the {newsgroup} talk.bizarre but is now in wide use. Criteria for being considered a newbie vary wildly; a person can be called a newbie in one newsgroup while remaining a respected regular in another. The label 'newbie' ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0

... great man—the hero of many a famous story in every lawyer's office in London—appeared to fascinate the boy. He placed himself in front of Sergeant Cuff, and put his hands behind him, after the approved fashion of a neophyte who is examined in ...
— The Moonstone • Wilkie Collins

... Hunt and his simple neophyte. If any one should be bold enough to purchase this Poetic Romance, and so much more patient than ourselves as to get beyond the first book, and so much more fortunate as to find a meaning, we entreat him to make us acquainted with his success. We shall then return to the task ...
— Adonais • Shelley

... de Gery, suddenly relieved of all his anxieties as a new-comer, a petitioner, a neophyte, did not stir for fear of waking from a dream, the Nabob added in a ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet

... who stood erect on the deck and waved his flying helmet with the proud air of a neophyte hunter planting his foot on the body of his first ...
— Eagles of the Sky - With Jack Ralston Along the Air Lanes • Ambrose Newcomb

... stratification of my new home, where the excellent principles of high thinking and plain living were highly recommended for all who could not reverse the precept, struck me, a neophyte, as for all the world like that of a cathedral town in England, except that these visiting patrons of religion and learning were treated with a reverence and respect found only in America. Surely it must have amused them, had they ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer

... talking, of course, during the card-playing: at the end of it Mr. Roscorla found he had only lost half a sovereign. Then everybody adjourned to a snug little smoking-room, to which only members were admitted. This, to the neophyte, was the pleasantest part of the evening. He seemed to hear of everything that was going on in London, and a good deal more besides. He was behind the scenes of all the commercial, social and political performances which were causing ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various

... would I give a silver rose with my benediction on it, to know of a certainty what became of those poor creatures the abbates. The initiatory rite of Mohammedanism is most diabolically malicious. According to the canons of our Catholic Church, it disqualifies the neophyte for holy orders, without going so far as adapting him to the choir of the pontifical chapel. ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor

... raised suddenly above all the anxieties of a newcomer, of one who solicits a favour, of a neophyte, did not move for fear of awaking ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet

... subtract fourteen from two hundred and sixty-two and then to ascertain that one hundred and twenty-four would be precisely half of the remainder. It was all being done, as I have remarked, with the gentlest considering kindness, with no hint of that bitterness which the neophyte had shown himself to be fearing in the lady. Was she not kindness itself? Was she not, in truth, just a shade too kind? Surely there was a purr to her voice, odd, unwonted; and surely her pupil already cringed under ...
— Ma Pettengill • Harry Leon Wilson

... though 't is not greatly in my way. Haply He might take it amiss if I went," muttered Jones looking about him uneasily, while Carver regarded his hopeless neophyte with divine compassion, and Elder Brewster prayed long and fervently that not only the children should be fed, but that the dogs might eat of the crumbs that fell from the table, and that in the end even the sons of Belial might be forgiven their blindness and hardness of heart, and receive ...
— Standish of Standish - A story of the Pilgrims • Jane G. Austin

... of witchcraft in his own parish. He averred that miracles were wrought in Boston. Cotton Mather does not seem to have been bloodthirsty, though he was more anxious to protect his vanity than his parishioners, and his bewitched neophyte, profiting by his cautions, was afflicted by veiled spectres. The imposture was promptly exposed to ridicule by one who was designated as "a malignant, calumnious, and reproachful man, a coal from hell." It was the uncultured, but rational, Robert Calef. Cotton Mather wrote and spoke much on the ...
— The Witch of Salem - or Credulity Run Mad • John R. Musick

... cadet in a neo-judo hold that no neophyte, however skilled or strong could break. He dragged the struggling Hanlon up to the rostrum and, with his elbow, ...
— Man of Many Minds • E. Everett Evans

... embodiment. That he was not reluctant to avail himself of social opportunities was made manifest by the fact that he never refused an invitation. He appeared upon any spot to which hospitality bade him, and unashamedly placed himself on record as a neophyte upon almost all occasions. His well-cut clothes began in time to wear more the air of garments belonging to him, but his hat made itself remarked by its trick of getting pushed back on his head or tilted on side, ...
— T. Tembarom • Frances Hodgson Burnett

... beautiful flower was to become to him the principal cause of bitter sorrow. Poor, grand Cardinal! It was the final trial of his life, the supremely bitter drop in his chalice, to assist at the disenchantment which followed so closely upon the blissful intoxication of his gentle neophyte's first initiation. To whom, if not to him, should she have gone to ask counsel, in all the tormenting doubts which she at once began to have in her feelings with regard to ...
— Cosmopolis, Complete • Paul Bourget

... To-morrow, and for drowned Leander's sake To Anteros its fireless lip shall plight. Aye, waft the unspoken vow: yet dawn's first light On ebbing storm and life twice ebb'd must break; While 'neath no sunrise, by the Avernian Lake, Lo where Love walks, Death's pallid neophyte. ...
— The House of Life • Dante Gabriel Rossetti

... sculptor—is not to be passed over if we are to make any estimate of his art. He, it is related, always becomes enraged at the word "inspiration," enraged at the common notion that fire descends from heaven upon the head of the favoured neophyte of art. Rodin believes in but one inspiration—nature. He swears he does not invent, but copies nature. He despises improvisation, has contemptuous words for "fatal facility," and, being a slow-moving, ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker

... doubted his opinion. But with all the ardour of a neophyte and the pride of an apt learner I was at that time ...
— The Mirror of the Sea • Joseph Conrad

... body and about my heart" (here I understood that the speaker was alluding to his initiation as a witch-doctor which generally includes, or used to include, the finding of a snake in a river that coils itself about the neophyte). "About my body and in my heart thou hast dwelt from that sun to this, giving me wisdom and good and evil counsel, and that which thou hast counselled, I have done. Now I return thee whence thou camest, there to await ...
— Finished • H. Rider Haggard

... priest, though curiously enough he began this career by eloping, as we are assured by Ramsay of Ochtertyre, with a Roman Catholic actress. His father followed the pair to London, and there, it would seem, prevailed on the erratic neophyte to abandon his fair partner, whose existence would certainly have been a fatal barrier to the proposed priesthood. At least, like his friend Gibbon of later days, if he sighed as a lover, he obeyed ...
— James Boswell - Famous Scots Series • William Keith Leask

... to be endued with attributes should, in the first instance, be practised, for, O ruler of Mithila, if the breath (that is inhaled and suspended) be exhaled without mentally reflecting the while upon a definite image (furnished by a limited mantra), the wind in the neophyte's system will increase to his great injury.[1658] In the first Yama of the night, twelve ways of holding the breath are recommended. After sleep, in the last Yama of the night, other twelve ways of doing the same have been laid down. Without ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown

... his cigar round in his mouth for some seconds, directing his gaze straight into the eyes of this unusual neophyte; but the Prince supported his scrutiny with ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 4 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... he trembled upon the threshold of such a search. He was like the neophyte of some veiled religion, who, after long years of arduous labour and painful preparation, is at length conducted to the doors of its holy of holies, and left to enter there alone. What will he find beyond them? The secret he longed to learn, the seal and confirmation of his hard-won ...
— Stella Fregelius • H. Rider Haggard

... which has perhaps had something to do with confusing the neophyte. It is this: Sulphitism and Bromidism are, symbolically, the two halves of a circle, and their extremes meet. One may be so extremely bromidic that one becomes, at a leap, sulphitic, and vice versa. ...
— Are You A Bromide? • Gelett Burgess

... forest; and it was here, about sunset, that they came across an aged lama—but they called him a bonze—sitting cross-legged above a mysterious chart held down by stones, which he was explaining to a young man, evidently a neophyte, of singular, though unwashen, beauty. The striped umbrella had been sighted half a march away, and Kim had suggested a halt till it came up ...
— Kim • Rudyard Kipling

... in answer to his neophyte's half fearful question. Fitly underlined and sufficiently spaced, it was a statement calculated to awe, if only by its mendacity. I wonder if that chapter of Bulwer's would impress one now as it used to do then. It were better, perhaps, not ...
— The Book-Bills of Narcissus - An Account Rendered by Richard Le Gallienne • Le Gallienne, Richard

... Sardanapalus, and the Two Foscari, were the fruits of his "self-denying ordinance to dramatize, like the Greeks ... striking passages of history" (letter to Murray, July 14, 1821, Letters, 1901, v. 323). The mood was destined to pass, but for a while the neophyte was spell-bound. ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron

... status quo ante bellum, they could not do it. 'When an epoch is finished,' as Armand Carrel once wrote, 'the mould is broken, it cannot be made again.' All that can be done is to gather up the fragments, and to use them wisely in a new construction. An Indian neophyte came one day to the mission, shouting: 'Moses, Isaiah, Abraham, Christ, John the Baptist!' When out of breath, the brethren asked him what he meant. 'I mean a glass of cider.' If the peace party were as frank as the Indian, they would tell us that their ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, Issue 2, February, 1864 • Various

... vision, the infinite Hierophant directs the call to be answered by Death, the speechless and solemn steward of the celestial Mysteries. He comes, pushes the curtain aside, leads the awe struck initiate in, takes the blinding bandage of the body from his soul; and straightway the trembling neophyte receives light in the midst of that innumerable Fraternity of Immortals over whom the Supreme Author ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger

... Padamo. They would have resisted the attacks of the natives, if, instead of leaving them isolated and solely to the control of the soldiery, they had been formed into communities, and governed like the villages of neophyte Indians. ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V2 • Alexander von Humboldt

... was more successful, and it was here that the assurance of literary ability, so dear to the heart of the neophyte, first came to him. Dr. Watts's "imitation" of the Psalms, incomplete and inappropriate in many respects, was then the only version within reach of the Puritan churches, and in 1785 the Congregational Association of Connecticut ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 26, July 1880. • Various

... occur to her to examine the letter, to look at it critically as a profession of love? Her whole soul was possessed by the fact that a fuller life was opening before her: she was a neophyte about to enter on a higher grade of initiation. She was going to have room for the energies which stirred uneasily under the dimness and pressure of her own ignorance and the petty peremptoriness of the ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot

... beats in the same period of time, whether we have given it a long journey or a short one to perform; and also whether we have added to or taken from its mass. But now we enter upon altogether new relations with our little neophyte, and find that we have reached the ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 457 - Volume 18, New Series, October 2, 1852 • Various

... and then plunged into his first public-house. How shall he ask for his liquor? "I will take a glass of ale, if you please, Miss," seems tame for a Blade. It may be useful to know a more suitable formula. Just at present, we may assure the Blade neophyte, it is all the rage to ask for "Two of swipes, ducky." Go in boldly, bang down your money as loudly as possible, and shout that out at the top of your voice. If it is a barman, though, you had better not say "ducky." The slang will, we can assure ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells

... was a swift, confirming swoon. Up through the gates they bore her Christalan, Dressed in the garments of the neophyte, That erst were spotless white, but then were soiled, Bedraggled and dust-stained. His golden hair A matted mass, of sunny curls unkempt,— And yet how beautiful he was withal! Into the hall they brought and laid him down, While Agathar gave thanks, from her despair, That death had not yet conquered ...
— Under King Constantine • Katrina Trask

... speak tearfully to the end of his life—to his own sins and unworthiness. However, this first experience in convert-making was fortunately not prophetic, for though it is true that many months elapsed before a single neophyte was gained for the mission, and though more serious troubles were still to come, in the course of the next few years a number of the aborigines, both children and ...
— The Famous Missions of California • William Henry Hudson

... one of extreme solicitude, deepening by degrees into disappointment and disenchantment. He abated no jot or tittle of his demands upon human frailty. He kept the spiritual cord drawn tight; the Biblical bearing-rein was incessantly busy, jerking into position the head of the dejected neophyte. That young soul, removed from the Father's personal inspection, began to blossom forth crudely and irregularly enough, into new provinces of thought, through fresh layers of experience. To the painful mentor at home in the West, ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse

... The neophyte in speculators' creeds and customs may amuse himself, however, with reminiscences like the preceding only in a sense of that proud historic retrospect which concerns past radiant records of "the street." He may, if so minded, con other pages of its noble archives, and dazzle his young ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various

... general, and friends in particular, will say to our labours. Some authors, I am told, profess an oyster-like indifference upon this subject; for my own part, I hardly believe in their sincerity. Others may acquire it from habit; but, in my poor opinion, a neophyte like myself must be for a long time incapable ...
— The Surgeon's Daughter • Sir Walter Scott

... say, to find themselves together. Godeschal, who had served his apprenticeship under Maitre Derville, was not the sort of clerk to allow the precious tradition of the "welcome" to be lost. This "welcome" is a breakfast which every neophyte must give to the "ancients" of the ...
— A Start in Life • Honore de Balzac

... very well-known fact, one with which Bulwer Lytton dealt with great power, that an intolerable sadness is the very first experience of the neophyte in Occultism. A sense of blankness falls upon him which makes the world a waste, and life a vain exertion. This follows his first serious contemplation of the abstract. In gazing, or even in attempting to gaze, on the ineffable mystery of his ...
— Light On The Path and Through the Gates of Gold • Mabel Collins

... avenged. We went in silence from the temple, and passed through the city ways. First came those who clear the path, then my father Amenemhat in all his priestly robes, and the wand of cedar in his hand. Then, clad in pure linen, I, the neophyte, followed alone; and after me the white-robed priests, holding aloft banners and emblems of the Gods. Next came those who bear the sacred boat, and after them the singers and the mourners; while, stretching as far as the eye could reach, all the people marched, clad in melancholy black because Osiris ...
— Cleopatra • H. Rider Haggard

... be inferred that argument and casuistry held prominent place in the curriculum of instruction. In the story of Mahindo, and the conversion of the island to Buddhism, the following display of logical acumen is ostentatiously paraded as evidence of the highly cultivated intellect of the neophyte king.[1] ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent

... that also a homage thou wouldst reject?" With these words, she crossed her arms meekly on her bosom, and inclined lowlily before him. Nor did her humility seem unwomanly or abject, nor that of mistress to lover, of slave to master, but rather of a child to its guardian, of a neophyte of the old religion to her priest. Zanoni's brow was melancholy and thoughtful. He looked at her with a strange expression of kindness, of sorrow, yet of tender affection, in his eyes; but his lips were stern, and his voice cold, as ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton

... N. learner, scholar, student, pupil; apprentice, prentice^, journeyman; articled clerk; beginner, tyro, amateur, rank amateur; abecedarian, alphabetarian^; alumnus, eleve [Fr.]. recruit, raw recruit, novice, neophyte, inceptor^, catechumen, probationer; seminarian, chela, fellow-commoner; debutant. [apprentice medical doctors] intern; resident. schoolboy; fresh, freshman, frosh; junior soph^, junior; senior soph^, senior; sophister^, sophomore; questionist^. [college and university ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget

... so?" asked St. Guenole. "And what then do you believe that baptism really is? Baptism is the process of regeneration by which man is born of water and of the spirit, for having entered the water covered with crimes, he goes out of it a neophyte, a new creature, abounding in the fruits of righteousness; baptism is the seed of immortality; baptism is the pledge of the resurrection; baptism is the burying with Christ in His death and participation in His departure from ...
— Penguin Island • Anatole France

... this sort is like a neophyte who has at last become a veteran, has accustomed his mind to shot and shell and his legs to lengthy marches. When the monster's hold on him is still uncertain, and it is not yet known which will have the better of it, they roll over and over, alternately victor ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac

... the red-hot poker, or any other instrument of torture, would have been out of place. But in the Greek mysteries, just as in those of South Africans, Red Indians, and Australians, the disgusting practice of bedaubing the neophyte with dirt and clay was preserved. We have nothing quite like that in modern initiations. Except at Sparta, Greeks dropped the tortures inflicted on boys and girls in the initiations superintended by the cruel Artemis. {33} But Greek mysteries retained the ...
— Custom and Myth • Andrew Lang

... English missionaries who converted the Tahitians to the Christian faith the Arioi adherent was the chief barrier, the fiercest opponent, and, when won over, the most enthusiastic neophyte. In that is found the secret of the society's strength. It embraced all the imaginative, active, ambitious Tahitians, to whom it gave opportunities to display varied talents, to form close friendships, to rise in rank, to meet on evener ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien

... chaplain saw this, and with the earl's permission lodged the neophyte in a chamber adjacent to his own "cell," where he gave himself up to his beloved books, only varying the monotony by an occasional stroll with his friend Hubert, who never turned his back upon his former friend, and endured much chaffing and ...
— The House of Walderne - A Tale of the Cloister and the Forest in the Days of the Barons' Wars • A. D. Crake

... the safe consignment of this young woman and her boxes. When once you have really bent to the helpless you are caught; there is no such steel trap, and it holds you fast. My rather grim Abigail was a neophyte in foreign travel, though doubtless cunning enough at her trade, which I inferred to be that of making up those prodigious chignons worn mainly by English ladies. Her mistress had gone on a mule over the mountains to Cadenabbia, ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James

... about in every direction, breaking away bark, and lifting stones with all the ardor of a neophyte in entomology. Since meeting with the coral-serpent, he took precautions which gave me confidence; for it is quite uncertain how a reptile or any other creature may behave when it is disturbed. The child suddenly called out to me; he ...
— Adventures of a Young Naturalist • Lucien Biart

... swallowed up in that colossal game, and at its close the Nabob, who had started it to forget his fears in the caprices of luck, after extraordinary alternations, somersaults of fortune calculated to make a neophyte's hair turn white, withdrew with winnings of five hundred thousand francs. They said five millions on the boulevard the next day, and every one cried shame, especially the Messager, which gave up three-quarters ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet

... of the bush is oppressive, but a short sojourn is sufficient to accustom a neophyte to the new scene, and he speedily becomes ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris

... well for ladies to admit at once that they cannot drive as far as the men. But otherwise the man's game and the lady's game are the same in principle and in practice. As for the manner in which to play, I have not a single special piece of instruction to offer, and can only refer the lady neophyte to the previous pages, in which I have set forth as well as I am able the precise method in which each of the many strokes in golf should be played. I have merely to insist that they shall not deviate from these methods in one or two ...
— The Complete Golfer [1905] • Harry Vardon

... intercourse with his brother officers and their ladies—it was all a grave disappointment to him. His illusions were gone, though it was but a couple of years since he had donned the bright, showy, glittering dragoon uniform, so attractive to the neophyte. He was thinking of home, of his dear, patient, loving mother, whose constant preoccupation he was; of his lovely, self-denying sisters, whose dowry was fast going while he was himself enjoying himself in the "king's service." Was he? Was he "enjoying" himself? Was this—this hollow, ...
— A Little Garrison - A Realistic Novel of German Army Life of To-day • Fritz von der Kyrburg

... growing love had enlightened his eyes to see into her heart, and enabled him thus to use an ordinary human language for the embodiment of common-sense ideas; whereas the speech of the pastor contained such an admixture of technicalities as to be unintelligible to the neophyte. ...
— Stephen Archer and Other Tales • George MacDonald

... other guests seemed struck by his look of attention. "My dear Vivaldi," said this gentleman, laying down a fossil, and fixing his gaze on Odo while he addressed the Professor, "why use such superannuated formulas in introducing a neophyte to a study designed to subvert the very foundations of the Mosaic cosmogony? I take it the Cavaliere is one of us, since he is here this evening: why, then, permit him to stray even for a moment in the labyrinth of ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton

... themselves under the banners of the Faith. Their zeal ran high. They would take no refusal. Membertou was for war on all who would not turn Christian. A living skeleton was seen crawling from hut to hut in search of the priest and his saving waters; while another neophyte, at the point of death, asked anxiously whether, in the realms of bliss to which he was bound, pies were to be had comparable to those with which the French ...
— Pioneers Of France In The New World • Francis Parkman, Jr.

... for that something above wealth which the bewildered rich man only discovers the existence of when he has struggled to the highest pinnacle of advancement in his own way, began to seize this wealthy neophyte. To be sure, in this first essay, the company which he assembled in his fine rooms in Portland Place, to see all his fine things and celebrate his glory, was not a fine company, but they afforded more gratification to Mr. Copperhead than if they had been ever so fine. They were ...
— Phoebe, Junior • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant

... he took snuff from his waistcoat pocket, who was in the way of expressing a grave conviction that it was possible to make a capital living at Roulette, so long as you stuck to the colours, and avoided the Scylla of the numbers and the Charybdis of the Zero. By degrees, then, the shyness of the neophyte wears off. Perhaps in the course of his descent of Avernus, a revulsion of feeling takes place, and, horror-struck and ashamed, he rushes out of the Kursaal, determined to enter its portals no more. Then he temporizes; remembers that there is a capital reading-room, ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume I (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz

... The neophyte was lured from her new-won altar. Cold to her knees was the barren stone of the shrine; and she ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis

... of General Booth. Not Christianity alone, but Hindu and Moslem history testify to this necessity. The Hindu who is drawn to the spiritual life must find a guru who can not only teach its laws but also give its atmosphere; and must accept his discipline in a spirit of obedience. The S[u]fi neophyte is directed to place himself in the hands of his sheikh "as a corpse in the hands of the washer"; and all the great saints of Islam have been the inspiring centres of more ...
— The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day • Evelyn Underhill

... of Catholicism was going down. Mary Stuart was not more tortured by Elizabeth's emissaries, than was Althea by these clever ministers. But the ill-fated Queen, nursed from childhood in the faith, was not more unwaveringly firm than was this six-days' neophyte. ...
— Hubert's Wife - A Story for You • Minnie Mary Lee

... again, while some of our evidence is somewhat unreliable, practically every shred of extant testimony indicates an extreme liveliness and vivacity. In the rhetoricians frequent warning is issued to the forensic neophyte to avoid the unrestraint of theatrical gesticulation. Cicero says (De Or. I. 59. 251): "Nemo suaserit studiosis dicendi adulescentibus in gestu discendo histrionum more elaborare." Quintilian echoes (I. 11. 3): "Ne gestus quidem omnis ac motus a comediis ...
— The Dramatic Values in Plautus • Wilton Wallace Blancke

... atmosphere of secrecy abroad. Each family of children, working in the retirement of its particular corner, would shriek, 'Oh, don't come!' and hide small objects under pinafores and tables when Mary, Rhoda, Edith, or Helen appeared. The neophyte in charge was always in the attitude of a surprised hen, extending her great apron to its utmost area as a screen to hide these wonderful preparations. Edith's group was slaving over Helen's gift, Rhoda's over Edith's, and so on, while all the groups ...
— Marm Lisa • Kate Douglas Wiggin

... despises one of the State judgeships easily at his hand. As his star mounts, his young neophyte, Maxime Valois, shares his toils and enjoys his training. Under his guidance he launches out on the sea of that professional legal activity, which is ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage

... that a priest once presented to Saint Teresa a young girl who wished to become a Carmelite nun, and who, according to him, had angelic qualities. Saint Teresa, accepting the neophyte, replied: "See, my father, our Lord has given this maiden devotion, but she has no judgment, and never will have any; and she will always be ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori

... a Catholic. He accepted with all the fervour of a neophyte the principle of submission to Holy Church. But in place of the official intellectualist apologetic, which an Englishman may study to great advantage in the remarkably able series of manuals issued by the Jesuits of Stonyhurst, he substituted a philosophy of experience which is certainly ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge

... as only the dreamer and the visionary can, lost from first to last, seemingly unloved in the ways boys think they want to be loved; that is, the shy longing boy, afraid of all things, and mostly of himself, in the period just this side of sex revelation. He is the neophyte—the homeless, pathetic Peter, perplexed with the strangeness of things real and temporal—vision and memory counting for all there is of reality to him, with life itself a thing as yet untasted. Who shall forget (who has a love for real expression) ...
— Adventures in the Arts - Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets • Marsden Hartley

... officer of a forlorn hope; provost of an academy, bath-keeper, horse jockey, peddler of satirical news and Holland gazettes; he had more than once pretended to be a Protestant, feigning conversion to the Catholic faith in order to secure the fifty crowns that M. Pelisson paid each neophyte as the price of conversion. This cheat discovered, the chevalier was condemned to the lash and to prison. He suffered the lash, escaped from prison, disguised himself by means of an immense shade over his eye, girded himself with a formidable sword with which he ambled about, then embraced ...
— A Romance of the West Indies • Eugene Sue

... little change to Asia Minor, Greece, and Rome, the names of local gods being substituted for those of Osiris and Isis. The Grecian or Eleusinian Mysteries, established 1800 B.C., represented Demeter and Persephone, and depicted the death of Dionysius with stately ritual which led the neophyte from death into life and immortality. They taught the unity of God, the immutable necessity of morality, and a life after death, investing initiates with signs and passwords by which they could know each other in the dark as well as in the light. The Mithraic or ...
— The Builders - A Story and Study of Masonry • Joseph Fort Newton

... center of the clearing, and while they worked they chanted weird hymns in the ancient tongue of that lost continent that lies at the bottom of the Atlantic. They knew not the meanings of the words they mouthed; they but repeated the ritual that had been handed down from preceptor to neophyte since that long-gone day when the ancestors of the Piltdown man still swung by their tails in the humid jungles ...
— Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... they believe them worthy they do not inquire about their means; and a fund is annually set apart by the trustees to pay the passage of poor families whom they have determined to take in. Usually a neophyte enters on probation for two years, signing an obligation to labor faithfully, to conduct himself according to the society's regulations, and ...
— The Communistic Societies of the United States • Charles Nordhoff

... starved himself almost to death, and often sallied into the streets, mounted on stones, and, waving his hat to invite the passers-by, began to preach in a strange jargon of mingled Castilian and Tuscan. The Theatines were among the most zealous and rigid of men; but to this enthusiastic neophyte their discipline seemed lax, and their movements sluggish; for his own mind, naturally passionate and imaginative, had passed through a training which had given to all its peculiarities a morbid intensity and energy. In his early life he had been the very prototype of the hero ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay



Words linked to "Neophyte" :   enlistee, tiro, entrant, initiate, educatee, flora, recruit, tyro, pupil, plant life, beginner, plant, starter, student, novice



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