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More "Prate" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... churchyard, a Cambridge scholar, and none of the soberest neither, inquired what the meaning of that concourse of people was (it being a week-day); and being told that one Bunyan, a tinker, was to preach there, he gave a lad twopence to hold his horse, saying he was resolved to hear the tinker prate; and so he went into the church to hear him. But God met him there by His ministry, so that he came out much changed; and would by his good will hear none but the tinker for a long time after, he himself becoming a very ...
— The Life of John Bunyan • Edmund Venables
... Prate not of thy repentance. But believe The spark divine dwells in thee: let it grow. That which the upreaching spirit can achieve The grand and all-creative forces know; They will assist and strengthen as the light Lifts up the acorn to the oak tree's ...
— Poems of Passion • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... then went those pretty babes, Rejoicing at that tide, Rejoicing with a merry mind They should on cock-horse ride. They prate and prattle pleasantly, As they ride on the way, To those that should their butchers be And work their ...
— English Fairy Tales • Flora Annie Steel
... he forbears to prate of the life he gave me. But am I not reminded of the oppressive gift every time he dares to contradict me? Would I endure his interference as I do; would I be shouldered and butted at, by him; would I permit his opinion to be asked, or ...
— Anna St. Ives • Thomas Holcroft
... immediate danger in China seems, so far as I can judge, to be that the anti-foreign feeling, which is undoubtedly intense especially in the south of the Empire, may come to a head any day and prematurely explode. The nincompoops and quidnuncs and newspaper men ravenous for copy who prate about a "yellow peril" may, in this latter fact, find some slight excuse for their blatant lucubrations. There is no real "yellow peril." Poor old China, which has been so long slumbering, is just rousing herself and making arrangements for defence against ...
— The Empire of the East • H. B. Montgomery
... to stand and work for the principles it claimed to have for its foundation. Be it said to the credit of each society, sect and organization, they all responded heartily and co-operated with Penloe and Stella in helping forward the grand reform; for they saw it was useless to prate about love, purity, justice and freedom, with woman debarred by law from her legal and political rights and tolerating a social custom which excited the worst passions and bred prurient curiosity. It was a grand and glorious sight, such as the world had not witnessed before, to see ...
— A California Girl • Edward Eldridge
... fiend pricks thee now?' 'Aha!' said I, 'henceforth I have no cause To bid thee speak, thou cursed traitor thou! I'll shame thee, bearing truth of thee to men.' 'Away!' he answered: 'what thou wilt, relate: But, shouldst thou get from hence with breath again, Mention him too so ready with his prate." ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... Jaw," says Captain Night. "I shall be thirstier anon from listening to your prate. Will you hurry now, Gadfly, or is the sun to sink before ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 1 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... broad Atlantic Comes scornful menace? it is naught to thee— 'Tis but the jealous raving, wild and frantic, Of those who would, but never can, be free;— Who, slaves to selfish passions bold ambition, Hold up their shackled arms in heaven's broad light, And prate of freedom, boast their high position, And strive to turn to ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various
... human life is so overflowing with woe and pain and misery, it seems to me a narrow dilettanteism or downright charlatanism to devote one's self to petty or bizarre problems which can have no relation to human happiness, and to prate of self-satisfaction and self-expression. One can have all the self-expression one wants while ...
— Woman - Her Sex and Love Life • William J. Robinson
... his cloak up to his mouth, 'the night grows cold; I cannot stay here while you prate to that blind girl: come, let her follow you home, if you wish to ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... a great deal, Davy. My wits are nothing to yours. You'll shoot ahead of all your old friends, my boy, some day. But there's one thing you know nothing about—absolutely nothing—and you prate as if you did. Perhaps you must turn Christian before you do. I don't know. At least, so long as you're not a Christian you won't know what we mean by it—what the Bible means by it. ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... cant!" said Julian, starting from his seat, aroused by his hypocritical prate into unwonted intolerance; and he suddenly observed, by the cowering attitude which Hazlet assumed, that the worthy youth was afraid of receiving at his head the water-bottle, on which Julian's hand was ...
— Julian Home • Dean Frederic W. Farrar
... are swarming with haggard slaves. We declare that to be President of the United States is the most honorable office a man can hold, and our elected candidates (except when they have the splendid self-abnegating courage of a Cleveland!) wade to Washington through a perfect bog of venal promises. We prate of our democratic institutions, and forget that free trade is one of the first proofs of a free people, and that protected industries are the feudalism of manufacture. We sneer at the corruption of a Jeffreys or a Marlborough in the past, and concede ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 20, July, 1891 • Various
... you know all I have endured. To me, earth has been a hell—not the place of flames and torments of which your divines prate, but the true hell—that of the conscience and the soul. I, too, a man whose whole nature was athirst for truth. I sought it first among its professors; there I found that they who, too idle or too weak to demonstrate their creed, took ...
— Olive - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik, (AKA Dinah Maria Mulock)
... whan Memnon made warre for Darius agaynste Alexander, he harde one of his souldyours crake and speake many yll wordes agaynst Alexander; wherfore he rapte hym on the pate with a iauelynge, sayenge: I hyred the to fyght agaynste Alexandre, and not to crake and prate. ...
— Shakespeare Jest-Books; - Reprints of the Early and Very Rare Jest-Books Supposed - to Have Been Used by Shakespeare • Unknown
... great notice of the little boys. He dilated their hearts, and set them a prating; and was pleased with their prate. The doctor, who had never seen him before in the company of children, applauded him for his vivacity, and condescending talk to them. The tenderest father in the world, he said, could not have ...
— The History of Sir Charles Grandison, Volume 4 (of 7) • Samuel Richardson
... Fynnett is here, and desires to be my bedfellow to-night. So I shall not have an opportunity to sit down with that seriousness and attention which the subjects of yours require. For she is all prate, you know, and loves to set me a prating; yet comes upon a very grave occasion—to procure my mother to go with her to her grandmother Larking, who has long been bed-ridden; and at last has taken it into ...
— Clarissa, Volume 2 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... "Prate not to me, but depart from this tent," said the Grand Master; "the Marquis shall not confess this morning, unless it be to me, for I ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education
... become a nation that may defy every foe but that most dangerous of all foes, herself, destined to a majestic future if she will shun the excess and perversion of the principles that made her great, prate less about the enemies of the past and strive more against the enemies of the present, resist the mob and the demagogue as she resisted Parliament and King, rally her powers from the race for gold and the delirium of prosperity to make firm the foundations on which that prosperity ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... God of war himself were dead, Forgotten, rusting on his iron hills, Rotting on some wild shore with ribs of wreck, Or like an old-world mammoth bulked in ice, Not to be molten out.' And roughly spake My father, 'Tut, you know them not, the girls. Boy, when I hear you prate I almost think That idiot legend credible. Look you, Sir! Man is the hunter; woman is his game: The sleek and shining creatures of the chase, We hunt them for the beauty of their skins; They love us ...
— The Princess • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... Let women-folk prate as they will of a boy Who is heedless of knickers and shirt; I hold that the badge of a young fellow's joy Are cheeks that are covered with dirt. So I look for him nightly to greet me that way, His joys and misfortunes to tell, ...
— The Path to Home • Edgar A. Guest
... wits or witlings pass'd my days, To spread about the itch of verse and praise; Nor like a puppy, daggled through the town, To fetch and carry sing-song up and down; Nor at rehearsals sweat, and mouth'd, and cried, With handkerchief and orange at my side; But sick of fops, and poetry, and prate, To Bufo left ...
— The Poetical Works Of Alexander Pope, Vol. 1 • Alexander Pope et al
... companions-in-arms in the service of the French king, and I came over from Ireland especially to take a dying message and a token from my father to the Earl. That is all you need know about that; but I would have you leave off your prate of your friend the Earl of Westport, for I understand full well you couldn't distinguish between him and a church door, although 'tis scandalously little you know of church doors. So we will stop there on that point. Then I will go on to the next point. The next point is that I am going ...
— The O'Ruddy - A Romance • Stephen Crane
... other similar neighbourhoods—supplied a striking answer to those futile theorists who prate of the equality of mankind, for the inhabitants instinctively formed themselves into groups, the more superior types drawing together, separating themselves from the inferior, and rising naturally to the top, while the others gathered themselves into distinct classes, grading downwards, ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell
... wedding, woman? Can't folk have scones and bannocks and singing-hinnies, But you must prate of weddings—you, and all! ...
— Krindlesyke • Wilfrid Wilson Gibson
... prate comfortable blasphemies, scientific or other; natural selection or the inscrutable decrees of God. Whereas this was manifestly a Hobson's selection, most unnatural and forced, to choose want of all ...
— Copper Streak Trail • Eugene Manlove Rhodes
... told, not a moment cou'd rest; While the OWL her brain rummag'd, (now quite on th' alert,) [p 21] For a few scraps of learning, by way of dessert: But the PEACOCK had no inclination to wait, And the PARROT was still more impatient to prate: So the Poem was read, and the OWL vow'd she never Had heard any Verses she thought ...
— The Peacock and Parrot, on their Tour to Discover the Author of "The Peacock At Home" • Unknown
... protectively over their people. Perhaps the Milovka study-house boasted even Cabbalists starving themselves into celestial visions and graduating for the Divine kiss. How infinitely restful after the Milovka market-place! No more, for that day at least, would he prate of Self-Defence and the ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... bring this vulgar scoundrel to the dust, but at what a price! The convict's dress now worn by his brother would soon be worn by him. And what solace would it be then that the same suit would be worn by the impostor also? Yet why prate of solace in a matter like this? What alternative was left to him? In what quarter of the sky was the light dawning for him? He was traveling toward the deepening night, and the day of ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine
... aggressively burst into a guffaw of derisive laughter. "Miss Loomis is just one of those admirable women," said he, "that empty-headed idiots prate about. I wish other people had half her sense." A luckless way of essaying the defence of the absent, for it reflected ...
— Under Fire • Charles King
... glowing roof cast over Hell, and if you were here, you might see the fire on the farther side of your walls kindling, to burn you down into Hell." Some mocked them, others threatened to stone them unless they ceased their unmannerly prate; but some few asked, "whither shall we fly?" "Hither," said the watchman, "fly hither to your lawful king, who yet offers you pardon through us, if you return to your obedience, and abandon the rebel Belial ...
— The Sleeping Bard - or, Visions of the World, Death, and Hell • Ellis Wynne
... themselves in dark Holes, Closets, Beds, &c. We are all for Humour, Gallantry, Conversation, and Courtship, and shou'dn't endure the chief Lady in the Play a Mute, or to say very little, as 'twas agreeable to them: Our amorous Sparks love to hear the pretty Rogues prate, snap up their Gallants, and Repartee upon 'em on all sides. We shou'dn't like to have a Lady marry'd without knowing whether she gives her consent or no, (a Custom among the Romans) but wou'd be for hearing all the Courtship, all the rare and fine ...
— Prefaces to Terence's Comedies and Plautus's Comedies (1694) • Lawrence Echard
... fortune. There, at least; is one who deserves what he will get. For once I shall not be sorry to see a lad get on, who has been brought up in the school of adversity. But, pshaw! he will be like all the rest. Prosperity will turn his brain. Already he begins to prate of his ancestors. . . . Poor humanity he almost made me laugh. . . . But it is mother Gerdy who surprises me most. A woman to whom I would have given absolution without waiting to hear her confess. When I think that I was on the point of proposing ...
— The Widow Lerouge - The Lerouge Case • Emile Gaboriau
... "Thou dost prate like an ass, For were I to bend my bow, I could send a dart quite thro' thy proud heart, Before thou couldst strike me ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V3 • Charles H. Sylvester
... the bitter heart of hate, Smote England, now nineteen dark years ago, As when the tide's full wrath in seaward flow Smites and bears back the swimmer. Fraud and fate Were leagued against her: fear was fain to prate Of honour in dishonour, pride brought low, And humbleness whence holiness must grow, And greatness born of shame ...
— A Channel Passage and Other Poems - Taken from The Collected Poetical Works of Algernon Charles - Swinburne—Vol VI • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... when he is there but sit and growl; let him come out as I do, and bark. The world," added he, "is chiefly unjust and ungenerous in this, that all are ready to encourage a man who once talks of leaving it, and few things do really provoke me more than to hear people prate of retirement, when they have neither skill to discern their own motives, or penetration to estimate the consequences. But while a fellow is active to gain either power or wealth," continued he, "everybody produces some hindrance to his advancement, some sage remark, or some ...
— Anecdotes of the late Samuel Johnson, LL.D. - during the last twenty years of his life • Hester Lynch Piozzi
... welcome business, welcome strife, Welcome the cares, the thorns of life, The visage wan, the purblind sight, The toil by day, the lamp by night, The tedious forms, the solemn prate, The pert dispute, the dull debate, The drowsy bench, the babbling hall,— For thee, ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... afflict us prate Of Plasters unsurpassable, and hate To Cut a corn—ah cut, and let the Plaster go, Nor murmur if ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... the next fifty years, at the climate, the country, and the people; to drawl out her maudlin regrets for olive groves, and pout for the Bay of Naples; to talk of her loves; exhibit a cameo or a crucifix, (the parting pledge of some inamorato, probably since hanged), prate papistry, and profess liberalism; pronounce the Roman holidays "charming things," and long to see the carnival, and the worship of the Virgin together, imported to relieve the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... think upon Some other pleasures: these to me are none. Why do I prate Of women, that are things against my fate! I never mean to wed That torture to my bed: My Muse is she My love shall be. Let clowns get wealth and heirs: when I am gone And that great bugbear, grisly Death, Shall ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... But why prate history, why evoke phantoms of the past, when we can gaze on this exquisitely concrete thing—this glad and simple creature of Hokusai? Let us emulate his calm, enjoy his enjoyment as he sprawls before us—pinguis, ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... coats-of-arms; to resent the friendly advances of your baker's wife, and the lady of your butcher, (you being yourself a cobbler's daughter); to talk much of the "old families" and of your aristocratic foreign friends; to despise labour; to prate of "good society;" to travesty and parody, in every conceivable way, a society which we know only in books and by the superficial observation of foreign travel, which arises out of a social organization entirely unknown to us, and which is opposed to our fundamental and essential principles; ...
— The Potiphar Papers • George William Curtis
... now elate, His grinning Rival 'gan to prate. Oh, fie! my friends; upon my word, You're too severe: he should be heard; For Mind can ne'er to glory reach, Without the usual aid of speech. If thus howe'er, you seal his doom, What hope have I unknown to Rome? But since the truth be your dominion, ...
— The Sylphs of the Season with Other Poems • Washington Allston
... in his face as he walks the streets, but then they have done with him; and a man may live an age in their country without hearing a dozen words from them. But of all the people I ever saw, heaven defend me from the French! With their damned prate and civilities, and doing the honour of their nation to strangers (as they are pleased to call it), but indeed setting forth their own vanity; they are so troublesome, that I had infinitely rather pass my life with the Hottentots than set my foot in ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding
... and balance are so rare that they are hardly to be found in perfection among the sons of men. The very fact of his greatness made his failings all the more dangerous and unfortunate. To be blinded by the splendor of his fame and the lustre of his achievements and prate about the sin of belittling a great man is the falsest philosophy and the meanest cant. The only thing worth having, in history as in life, is truth; and we do wrong to our past, to ourselves, and to our posterity if we do not strive ...
— Daniel Webster • Henry Cabot Lodge
... Prate as we may of the triumphant march of Anglo-Saxon liberty, rarely has it received impetus from the masses. Was it not rather the work of the squires and gentlemen? Very truly does M. Taine say, "These three syllables, as used ...
— Bushido, the Soul of Japan • Inazo Nitobe
... instinct would she prate, And of the rising from the dead, As hers by right of full-accomplish'd Fate; And at the last ...
— The Early Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson • Tennyson
... not a passion, demanding rage or religious fervour, or patriotic enthusiasm, for its inspiration. It was the very law of their life, the essential spirit in them. They were unconscious of it as a man is unconscious of breathing, unless diseased. Their honour was not a thing to talk about. To prate about the honour of the army or the honour of England was like talking about the honour of their mother. It is not done. And yet, as Mark Antony said, "They were all honourable men," and there seemed an austerity of virtue ...
— The Soul of the War • Philip Gibbs
... irrefutable truths would show how utterly unworthy and false are the vulgar taunts which attribute "treason" to those who, in the late secession of the Southern States, were loyal to the only sovereign entitled to their allegiance, and which still more absurdly prate of the violation of oaths to support "the Government," an oath which nobody ever could have been legally required to take, and which must have been ignorantly confounded with the prescribed oath to ...
— The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government • Jefferson Davis
... that he had done well by Maestro Diego. Plainly the quick wit of the lad betokened good blood, let him prate ever so surely on ...
— The Flute of the Gods • Marah Ellis Ryan
... then?" he was thinking. "What clergyman could raise his voice against my rule? Ah! Their 'high principles' they prate of so eloquently, their crack-brained economics, their rebellions and their strikes—the dogs!—would soon bow down before that power! Men have starved for stiff-necked opposition's sake, and still may do so—but with my hand at the throat of the world, with the world's very life-breath ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England
... in a hoarse cry, half fury, half contempt. "What is fear?—I know not the thing, nor the word!—Go, prate of fear to Cicero, and he will ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 1 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... gave these Sages four, Above the buried Emperor; It was no foolish women's prate That held them thus ...
— A Celtic Psaltery • Alfred Perceval Graves
... had wrought. But, lest his offspring should her fate partake, Spite of the immortal mixture in his make, He ripped her womb, and set the child at large, 120 And gave him to the centaur Chiron's charge: Then in his fury blacked the raven o'er, And bid him prate in his white ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... my Spirit of Cant, A second-hand suit, but a "shplendid fit," As a Jew would assure me—but then I sha'nt. His work is to preach the humbug which passes For gospel among the "down-trodden masses;" And to prate of the "wrongs and indignities," which Are heaped on their ...
— Nothing to Say - A Slight Slap at Mobocratic Snobbery, Which Has 'Nothing - to Do' with 'Nothing to Wear' • QK Philander Doesticks
... "What heart can bear Such slanders false, devised by hate and spite? Or with stayed patience, reproaches hear, And not revenge by battle or by fight? The Norway Prince hath bought his folly dear, But who with words could stay the angry knight? A fool is he that comes to preach or prate When men with swords their right ...
— Jerusalem Delivered • Torquato Tasso
... tinsel! why we see The old mark of rouge upon your cheeks. You prate of nature! you are he That spilt his ...
— The Suppressed Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... upon the countenance of the chancellor as he replied—"Such friendship, my lord, as is consistent with perpetual strife—open and concealed—shall, if it please you, subsist between us. Pardon me, but we prate a silly jargon when we talk of private friendship ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... man clasped his hands, looked upwards, and said, "O God, I thank thee—he will live. Hush, hush, my sweet one, thou must not prate;" and he retired on tiptoe, and I heard him mutter triumphantly, as he walked away, ...
— Jacob Faithful • Captain Frederick Marryat
... men were surrounded by in their daily lives and avocations. The houses[61] and oratories of noble and burgess were rich with ivories exquisitely carved, with sculptures and paintings, tapestry and enamels: the very utensils of common domestic use were beautiful. Men did not prate of art: they wrought in love and simplicity. The very word art, as denoting a product of human activity different from the ordinary daily tasks of men, was unknown. If painting was an art, even so was carpentry. A mason was an artist: so was a shoemaker. Astronomy and grammar were arts: ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... they all sat at the table, began to groan and quake gradually until at length the whole bench shook. Then rising up she began to pray, shrieking so that she could be heard as far as the river. This done, she was quickly in the dish, and her mouth began immediately to prate worldly and common talk in which she was not the least ready. When the meal was finished, Ephraim obtained a horse for himself and his wife, and we followed him on foot, carrying our travelling bags. Our host took us to the path, and Ephraim's servant was to ...
— Journal of Jasper Danckaerts, 1679-1680 • Jasper Danckaerts
... behoove Americans to stand on inviolate shores and prate of the wickedness of wrath. Moreover, this evil is not to be exorcised by a pious wish for it not to be. It is. And there is every excuse under the arch of ...
— In the Claws of the German Eagle • Albert Rhys Williams
... devilish necromancies of vicious women and viler men, if he remembered his father's character, and his father's death? No; memory must be a blank, and we, who suffered with our royal master, are fools to prate of ingratitude or neglect, since the son who can forget such a father may well forget his father's servants and friends. But we will not talk of public matters in the first hour of our greeting. Nor need I prate of the King, since ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... the hearts of cowards who prate, Afraid to dare or spend, The doctrine of a narrower state More easy to defend; Not this the watchword of our sires, Who breathed with ocean's breath, Not this our spirit's ancient fires, Which naught could quench ...
— The Ontario Readers: Fourth Book • Various
... But the earl has a will of his own. He is a master worth serving though. And there is my lady Elizabeth and my lady Mary—not to mention my lord Herbert!—But,' he concluded, rubbing his injured knee with both hands, 'why do I prate of them ...
— St. George and St. Michael • George MacDonald
... what god or demon? 290 With new kings rise new altars. But, proceed; You are sent to prate your master's will, ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... there's the mystery! God knows how else you could have come, unless you are a modern Ganymede. Where then's your aquiline steed, sir? We have no neighbours here—none to stare, and pry, and prate, and slander." ...
— Henry Brocken - His Travels and Adventures in the Rich, Strange, Scarce-Imaginable Regions of Romance • Walter J. de la Mare
... later, John Adams, speaking of a conversation with Arbuthnot, a Boston physician, says: "He began to prate upon the presumption of philosophy in erecting iron rods to draw the lightning from the clouds. He railed and foamed against the points and the presumption that erected them. He talked of presuming upon God, as ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... it To let truth shape like that!—I also said That when my arms were round him I forgot That I was not his mother. So spoke I, But oh me,—I remembered it too well!— He was a lovely child; in his fond prate His father's voice was eloquent. One might say I am well punished ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... Travelers. We love to hear them prate and drivel and lie. We can tell them the moment we see them. They always throw out a few feelers; they never cast themselves adrift till they have sounded every individual and know that he has not traveled. Then they open their throttle valves, and how they do ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... sixteen years' study, compare one of our college Latinists, who has thrown away so much time in nothing but learning to speak. The world is nothing but babble; and I hardly ever yet saw that man who did not rather prate too much, than speak too little. And yet half of our age is embezzled this way: we are kept four or five years to learn words only, and to tack them together into clauses; as many more to form them into a long discourse, divided into four or five parts; and other five ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... are the rabbins. The sublimest passages of the Scriptures they shamefully corrupt. As a case in point, they prate concerning Enoch that, while he was good and righteous, he very much inclined toward carnal desires. God, therefore, out of pity, prevented his sinning and perishing through death. Is not this, I pray you, a shocking ...
— Commentary on Genesis, Vol. II - Luther on Sin and the Flood • Martin Luther
... score less three; so about was SHE - The maiden I wronged in Peninsular days . . . You may prate of your prowess in lusty times, But as years gnaw inward you blink your bays, And see too ...
— Wessex Poems and Other Verses • Thomas Hardy
... you going, by your theoretical treatises on philosophy, to make me learn the practical part of it, and prate upon learning while I am supporting ...
— Devereux, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... laugh to hear the Fools prate about Preheminence: They would all fain be Masters, and yet they know they are but all my Servants; they make their Boast, of this and that, and talk of their great gains: and forget that I rule the Roast, and that both their ...
— The London-Bawd: With Her Character and Life - Discovering the Various and Subtle Intrigues of Lewd Women • Anonymous
... expression. But Arschot swore that no man had the right to take precedence of him in the council of state, and that the appointment of this or any Spaniard was a violation of the charters of the provinces and of the promises of his Majesty. As if it were for the nobles of the obedient provinces to prate of charters and of oaths! Their brethren under the banner of the republic had been teaching Philip for a whole generation how they could deal with the privileges of freemen and with the perjury of tyrants. ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... fools prate!" responded Clementine, with an angelic smile. "I do not trouble myself to explain my affection for poor Fougas, but I love him very much, that's certain. I love him as a father, as a brother, if you prefer it, for he is almost as ...
— The Man With The Broken Ear • Edmond About
... gods, I grow a talker!"[637] Let us prate. The next of perils, though I place it sternest, Is when, without regard to Church or State, A wife makes or takes love in upright earnest. Abroad, such things decide few women's fate— (Such, early Traveller! is the truth thou learnest)— But ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... (aside). With his innocent prate He will awake my mercy which lies dead. (Aloud.) Read this, ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 102, February 6, 1892 • Various
... family, without a quarrel in the world, but set at variance bv thieves and tricksters, maim and mangle and kill each other with fractricidal hands, which ought to have been clasped in friendship and brotherhood. Yet these hireling priests, who consecrate the banners of war, dare to prate that God is a loving father and that we are all his children. What monstrous absurdity! What disgusting hypocrisy I Surely the parent of mankind, instead of allowing his ministers to mouth his name ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (First Series) • George W. Foote
... threats of the scholars were renewed, and further intimations of violence were exhibited. Again the peas rattled upon the hands and faces of the halberdiers, till their ears tingled with pain. "Prate to us of the king's favorites," cried one of the foremost of the scholars, a youth decorated with a paper collar: "they may rule within the precincts of the Louvre, but not within the walls of the university. Maugre-bleu! We hold them cheap enough. We heed not the idle bark of these full-fed ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... Izdubar will seek The cool enchantment of the cove, and slake His thirst with its sweet waters bubbling pure, Where Love has spread for him her sweetest lure, The maids expectant listening, watch and wait His coming; oft in ecstacies they prate O'er his surprise, and softly sport and splash The limpid waves around, that glowing flash Like heaps of snowy pearls lung to the light By Hea's[1] hands, his Zir-ri[2] to delight. And now upon the rock each ...
— Babylonian and Assyrian Literature • Anonymous
... perchance, you know, Is second hand; I write as folks dictate; A Mrs. B. tells Mr. So-and-So Th' extent of some-one's personal estate; He in his turn the same again will prate; A Mr. C. has struck his little wife Is the last movement worthy to relate, 'Tis now affirmed he took away her life, In the next terrace where th' appalling tale ...
— The Minstrel - A Collection of Poems • Lennox Amott
... cheater's coin; when all the kings that promise peace while they swell their armouries and armies; when all the statesmen that chatter of the people's weal as they steal up to the locked casket where coronets are kept; when all the men who talk of "glory," and prate of an "idea" that they may stretch their nation's boundary, and filch their neighbour's province—when all these are no longer in the land, and no more looked on with favour, then I will believe your cry that you hate the toys which ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... referring to the one person in half a million to whom Art is anything more than a name. Dismissing the countless hordes who have absolutely never heard the word, and confining attention to the few thousands scattered about Europe and America who prate of it, how many of even these do you think it really influences, entering into their lives, refining, broadening them? Watch the faces of the thin but conscientious crowd streaming wearily through ...
— Tea-table Talk • Jerome K. Jerome
... rushing behind him, and, by a rapidly conceived flank movement, giving Joseph a good sound kick. "How does the head of the family like the foot of the family? Don't ever prate of accidents ...
— Mr. Bonaparte of Corsica • John Kendrick Bangs
... shillelagh on any or no occasion. God forbid Scotland should retrograde towards such a state—much better that the Deil, as in Burns's song, danced away with the whole excisemen in the country. We do not want to hear her prate of her number of millions of men, and her old military exploits. We had better remain in union with England, even at the risk of becoming a subordinate species of Northumberland, as far as national consequence is ...
— Political Pamphlets • George Saintsbury
... you want to prate such nonsense as that to these folks for? They won't need any kind of fertilizers in this country for twenty years. You'd better be resting instead of shooting such useless stuff as ...
— The Wind Before the Dawn • Dell H. Munger
... alone has looked on Beauty bare. Let all who prate of Beauty hold their peace, And lay them prone upon the earth and cease To ponder on themselves, the while they stare At nothing, intricately drawn nowhere In shapes of shifting lineage; let geese Gabble and hiss, but ...
— American Poetry, 1922 - A Miscellany • Edna St. Vincent Millay
... should I set you on? Even for my love then, I beseech you, sir, To seek him out, and lest he prate of me To put your knife into him ere he come forth: Meseems this were not such wild work ...
— Chastelard, a Tragedy • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... And dost thou prate of all that man shall do? Canst thou, who hast but plagues, presume to be Glad in his gladness that comes after thee? Will his strength slay thy worm in Hell? Go to: Cover thy ...
— The House of Life • Dante Gabriel Rossetti
... singularity is, that when I say that Freedom is of God, and Slavery is of the devil, I mean just what I say. My fanaticism is, that I insist on the American people abolishing Slavery, or ceasing to prate of the rights of man. My hardihood is, in measuring them by their own standard, and convicting them out ...
— No Compromise with Slavery - An Address Delivered to the Broadway Tabernacle, New York • William Lloyd Garrison
... it was to a dear, stupid lot of old marketwomen and overworked men and mischievous children. Oratory is a collaboration—let him wax eloquent about the precession of the equinoxes, and prate of Plato and Pythagoras if he wished—no one could understand him! Rome is wise—the crystallized experience of centuries is hers. Responsibility tames a man—marriage, political office, churchly preferment—read history and note how these things have dulled the bright blade of revolution ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... How did he prate against wedlock! how did he strut about as a wit and a smart! and what a wit and a smart did all the boys and girls of our family (myself among the rest, then an urchin) think him, for the airs he gave himself?—Marry! No, not for the world; what man of sense would bear the ...
— Clarissa, Volume 4 (of 9) - History Of A Young Lady • Samuel Richardson
... feel, can you be so shallow as to dream that I feel nothing? What is your love for Tom Faggus? What is your love for your baby (pretty darling as he is) to compare with such a love as for ever dwells with me? Because I do not prate of it; because it is beyond me, not only to express, but even form to my own heart in thoughts; because I do not shape my face, and would scorn to play to it, as a thing of acting, and lay it out before you, are you fools enough to think—" but ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... Sirs, I prate and prate, And never have I said what brought me here. Sirs, if you want a boat to-morrow morn, I'm bold to say there's ne'er a ...
— Poems by Jean Ingelow, In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Jean Ingelow
... will force me to write a book about Italy myself, to give them 'the loud lie.' They prate about assassination; what is it but the origin of duelling—and 'a wild justice,' as Lord Bacon calls it? It is the fount of the modern point of honour in what the laws can't or won't reach. Every man is liable to it more or less, ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. IV - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... and have something, therefore, for which to live. I have not—my heart can know no change. It is no longer under the guidance of reason. It is quite ungovernable now. There was a time when—but why prate of this?—it is too late to think of, and only maddens me the more. Besides, it makes not anything with you, and would detain you without a purpose. Linger no longer, Dillon—speed to the west, and, at some future day, perhaps ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... scanty weal, except * To while away the time in chat and prate: Then shun their intimacy, save it be * To win thee lore, or ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 4 • Richard F. Burton
... Newspapers might prate about wealth till commonplace print was exhausted, but as matter of habit, few Americans envied the very rich for anything the most of them got out of money. New York might occasionally fear them, but more often laughed or sneered at them, and never showed ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... are poor. For the activity, the push, the vigor of our modern life, his substitute is a life aimless and unbroken. And so we have to say to communists what George Eliot might have said: Be not blinded by the passions of the moment, but when you prate about your own wrongs and the sufferings of your offspring, take heed lest in the long run you make a worse time of it for your own generation, and leave a bad ...
— The Altruist in Politics • Benjamin Cardozo
... school-room table, on the drawing-room bookshelf, or beneath the pillow of the most gently nurtured of our daughters. "This," the reviewer went on, "is high praise, especially in these days when we are deafened by the loud-voiced clamor of self-styled 'artists.' We would warn the young men who prate so persistently of style and literature, construction and prose harmonies, that we believe the English reading public will have none of them. Harmless amusement, a gentle flow of domestic interest, a faithful reproduction of the open and manly ...
— The Hill of Dreams • Arthur Machen
... Harz country, who was a preacher at one of the churches, took the lead; and he was certainly the most important and most dangerous personage among them. He accounted the civil authorities, with their rights, no more as Christians than he did the clergy and the hierarchy; and began already to prate of universal equality and communism. This novel and exciting doctrine soon won adherents, and propagated the 'spirit of revelation.' Already disturbances were brewing. But the magistrates took vigorous and timely measures. Storch, Stubner, ...
— Life of Luther • Julius Koestlin
... hands of Peter, half dead at his hotel, where he will be laid out, with all his marvelous masculine virtues, for a week at least. Now do not waste your arguments on these prigs from Union College. Take each, in turn, the ten-miles' circuit on 'Old Boney' and they'll have no breath left to prate of woman's inferiority. You might argue with them all day, and you could not make them feel so small as I made that popinjay feel in one hour. I knew 'Old Boney' would keep up with me, if he died for it, and that my escort could neither stop nor dismount, except by throwing himself ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... but that it is the only adequate method. Critics exclusively trained in classics or in mathematics, who have never determined a scientific fact in their lives by induction from experiment or observation, prate learnedly about Mr. Darwin's method, which is not inductive enough, not Baconian enough, forsooth, for them. But even if practical acquaintance with the process of scientific investigation is denied them, ...
— Darwiniana • Thomas Henry Huxley
... perhaps they have never exchanged a word, in the silly belief they are raising themselves in the estimation of their auditors. It is an odd conceit, yet it prevails with the would-be fast young men of the present day. To hear some of these mollycoddles prate one who was not acquainted with their weaknesses would imagine these chaps were on intimate terms with players—who, as a rule, are slow to cultivate new acquaintances, attend strictly to their own business, and do not particularly ...
— A Pirate of Parts • Richard Neville
... kind, Holding us at vantage still, Our sumptuous indigence, O barren mound, thy plenties fill! We fool and prate; Thou art silent and sedate. To myriad kinds and times one sense The constant mountain doth dispense; Shedding on all its snows and leaves, One joy it joys, one grief it grieves. Thou seest, O watchman tall, Our towns and races grow and fall, And imagest the stable good For which we all our lifetime ...
— Poems - Household Edition • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... day foraging. They killed and salted a number of beeves, and routed out much salt fish and Indian corn, "as much as we could stow away." They also took a number of poultry, which the Spaniards were fattening in coops; and nearly a hundred tame parrots, "yellow and red," which "would prate very prettily." In short they heaped their decks with hen-coops, parrot-cages, quarters of beef, casks of salt fish, and baskets full of maize. In this state, the ships lay at anchor, with their men loafing ...
— On the Spanish Main - Or, Some English forays on the Isthmus of Darien. • John Masefield
... and his fortune. There, at least; is one who deserves what he will get. For once I shall not be sorry to see a lad get on, who has been brought up in the school of adversity. But, pshaw! he will be like all the rest. Prosperity will turn his brain. Already he begins to prate of his ancestors. . . . Poor humanity he almost made me laugh. . . . But it is mother Gerdy who surprises me most. A woman to whom I would have given absolution without waiting to hear her confess. When I think that I was on the point ...
— The Widow Lerouge - The Lerouge Case • Emile Gaboriau
... you prate to me?' said Redgauntlet, bending his brows. 'I, sir, transact my own business; you, I am told, act by a ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott
... to action, and not amuse them with words. With such a one, after fifteen or sixteen years' study, compare one of our college Latinists, who has thrown away so much time in nothing but learning to speak. The world is nothing but babble; and I hardly ever yet saw that man who did not rather prate too much, than speak too little. And yet half of our age is embezzled this way: we are kept four or five years to learn words only, and to tack them together into clauses; as many more to form them into ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... who saw the deed, Detesting the vexatious breed, Bespoke him thus: "When coxcombs prate, They kindle wrath, contempt, or hate; Thy teasing tongue, had judgment tied, Thou hadst not like a ...
— Favourite Fables in Prose and Verse • Various
... handiwork. Why shouldn't you look at it? You can tell the world all about it afterwards, if you choose. Nobody would believe you. If they did believe you, they would like me all the better for it. I know the age better than you do, though you will prate about it so tediously. Come, I tell you. You have chattered enough about corruption. Now you shall look ...
— The Picture of Dorian Gray • Oscar Wilde
... the balls and the races A lonely companionless elf, And the ladies bestow all their graces On others less grey than myself; While the talk goes around I'm a dumb one 'Midst youngsters that chatter and prate, And they call me 'the Man who was Someone Way ...
— The Man from Snowy River • Andrew Barton 'Banjo' Paterson
... danger to the fruit of their womb and to themselves, rather than not to fast when the others fast. They make a matter of conscience where there is none, and where there is matter of conscience they make none. This is all the fault of the preachers, because they continually prate of fasting, and never point out its true use, limit, fruit, cause and purpose. So also the sick should be allowed to eat and to drink every day whatever they wish. In brief, where the wantonness of the flesh ceases, there every reason for fasting, watching, laboring, eating ...
— Works of Martin Luther - With Introductions and Notes (Volume I) • Martin Luther
... forces, ruined their far-flung lines of communication, and have so consolidated my position that I have now made open capture of the main roving factor. The latter is you, young man. A very disturbing influence and so very necessary to the conduct of this private war. You prate of my attitude, Mr. Cornell. You claim that such an attitude must be defeated. Yet as you stand there mouthing platitudes, we are preparing to make a frontal assault upon their main base at Homestead. We've waged our war of attrition; ...
— Highways in Hiding • George Oliver Smith
... flock together. The robin sings to his ruddy mate, And the chattering jays, in the winter weather, To prate and gossip will congregate; And the cawing crows on the autumn heather, Like evil omens, will flock together, In extra-session, for high debate; And the lass will slip from a doting mother To hang with her lad on the garden gate. Birds of a feather will flock together,— ...
— Legends of the Northwest • Hanford Lennox Gordon
... "One should not prate of one's duty, of course," she agreed. "Not that you do—far from it. But, as I was ...
— Cap'n Warren's Wards • Joseph C. Lincoln
... their complaints before the Church; to hold for heathen all who are cast out of the Church; and that nevertheless so many men for so many centuries should not know where the Church is or who belong to it! This much only they prate in the darkness, that wherever the Church is, only Saints and persons destined for heaven are contained in it. Hence it follows that whoever wishes to withdraw himself from the authority of his ecclesiastical superior has only to persuade himself ...
— Ten Reasons Proposed to His Adversaries for Disputation in the Name • Edmund Campion
... marriage contracts shall be mere bills of sale, making a husband the proprietor of his wife, as his bona fide property; and suppose husbands should herd their wives in droves for the market as beasts of burden, or for the brothel as victims of lust, and then prate about their inviolable legal property, and deny the power of the legislature, which stamped them property, to undo its own wrong, and secure to wives by law the rights of human beings. Would such cant about "legal rights" ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... They tell me your ancestral Protestantisms are fast breaking down. Your churches are turning into concert and lecture rooms. Catholicism is growing among you,—science gaining on the quack-medicines! But there—there—I'll not prate. Forgive me. This has been a fascinating half-hour. Only, take care! I have seen you a Catholic once, ...
— Eleanor • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... truths would show how utterly unworthy and false are the vulgar taunts which attribute "treason" to those who, in the late secession of the Southern States, were loyal to the only sovereign entitled to their allegiance, and which still more absurdly prate of the violation of oaths to support "the Government," an oath which nobody ever could have been legally required to take, and which must have been ignorantly confounded with the prescribed oath to ...
— The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government • Jefferson Davis
... love stale instead of fresh, withered better than blooming, excellence in the abstract rather than the palpable. With their idle prate of feminine intellect, and a grotto nymph, and a mother of Gracchi! Why, he must think me dazed with admiration of him to talk to me! One listens, you know. And he is one of the men who cast a ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... fear these happy days when we Can loll in cooling shades while others toil For us, on stipends which like widow's mite Are small: will in the future disappear. These men who prate of slavery in these isles Do know full well that witness false they bear. We buy not souls and on the record place Their names among the chattels which we own, But their life's labor for a certain sum ...
— 'A Comedy of Errors' in Seven Acts • Spokeshave (AKA Old Fogy)
... in darkness; Thought will not work except in Silence; neither will Virtue work except in Secrecy. Let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth! Neither shalt thou prate even to thy own heart of "those secrets known to all." Is not Shame (Schaam) the soil of all Virtue, of all good manners and good morals? Like other plants, Virtue will not grow unless its root be hidden, buried from the eye of the sun. Let the ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... you on? Even for my love then, I beseech you, sir, To seek him out, and lest he prate of me To put your knife into him ere he come forth: Meseems this were not ...
— Chastelard, a Tragedy • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... in perfection among the sons of men. The very fact of his greatness made his failings all the more dangerous and unfortunate. To be blinded by the splendor of his fame and the lustre of his achievements and prate about the sin of belittling a great man is the falsest philosophy and the meanest cant. The only thing worth having, in history as in life, is truth; and we do wrong to our past, to ourselves, and to our posterity if we do ...
— Daniel Webster • Henry Cabot Lodge
... loved all children and simple-minded people, and the very babies in Concord knew and loved him. "Incorrigible spouting Yankee" he called himself; but he was rather a silent man in reality, and did not care to talk excepting when he had somewhat to say. He did not prate eternally of silence, as Carlyle did, while wreaking himself upon speech in the most frantically vehement manner all his days, but he knew when and how to be silent. The glimpses he gives of Mrs. Emerson, ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... time I've squandered o'er the history: A contradiction thus complete Is always for the wise, no less than fools, a mystery. The art is old and new, for verily All ages have been taught the matter,— By Three and One, and One and Three, Error instead of Truth to scatter. They prate and teach, and no one interferes; All from the fellowship of fools are shrinking. Man usually believes, if only words he hears, That also with them ...
— Faust • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
... this,—you who preach the gospel of man's pre-eminence;—you who prate of God and know nothing whatsoever about Him! The horse, dog, cat,—even the wild animals, whose vices, perchance, pale beside your own, may go to Heaven before you. The Supreme Architect is neither a Nero, nor a Stuart, nor a clown. He will recompense all who ...
— Animal Ghosts - Or, Animal Hauntings and the Hereafter • Elliott O'Donnell
... herders, unshaved and hairy, Whose old tongues are never weary, Just outside my chamber-door Prate of sheep ...
— Letters of a Woman Homesteader • Elinore Pruitt Stewart
... say? "Sind the ould fool away." I'm disturbin' your rest wid my prate; There's Minister FISH, to consult if I wish, Who attinds to all matthers of state. An' Cuba, she too, wid her hulabaloo, May just as well bundle an' go; You won't hear us now, wid our murtherin row, You'll sleep it out whether or no! Arrah what ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 2, April 9, 1870 • Various
... the scholars were renewed, and further intimations of violence were exhibited. Again the peas rattled upon the hands and faces of the halberdiers, till their ears tingled with pain. "Prate to us of the king's favorites," cried one of the foremost of the scholars, a youth decorated with a paper collar: "they may rule within the precincts of the Louvre, but not within the walls of the university. Maugre-bleu! We ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... that house; there was a burial-ground scooped in the hill-side. And who was there to interfere? Perhaps no one knew there had been a death till the year was out. What if a woman went mad? That happened anywhere. People below might prate of murder, or suicide, or slow poison; there was nobody to whom it was vital enough to open the question seriously; and then they feared the Raynier with an uncanny fear, as people fear a catamount in the woods, or the goblin of ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 2 • Various
... "And prate of spelling and reading as if they were the cardinal virtues?" returned his sullen companion. "By my halidame, I have two fair daughters at home who will lack husbands, I trow, for they can only spin and be chaste,—two maidenly gifts out of bloom ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... only twenty in London. Nor is Chicago the leading city in crime, since it is only seventh on the list, which is headed by four Southern cities, and San Francisco and Los Angeles. In view of such a terrible condition of affairs, it seems ridiculous to prate of the protection society ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman
... bold Robin Hood, 'Thou dost prate like an ass, For, were I to bend my bow, I could send a dart quite through thy proud heart, Before thou couldst strike ...
— Young Folks Treasury, Volume 2 (of 12) • Various
... For if the king of gods can be Full oft in need of recreation,— Who rules the world,—right well may I, Who serve him in that high relation: Amuse me, then, before you fly.' Our cackler, pleased, at quickest rate Of this and that began to prate. Not he of whom old Flaccus writes, The most impertinent of wights, Or any babbler, for that matter, Could more incontinently chatter. At last she offer'd to make known— A better spy had never flown— All things, whatever she might see, In travelling ...
— The Fables of La Fontaine - A New Edition, With Notes • Jean de La Fontaine
... figges deuour any hooke baited for them. He is not fit to trauell, that cannot with the Candians liue on serpents, make nourishing foode euen of poyson. Rats and mice engender by licking one another, he must licke, he must croutch, he must cogge, lye and prate, that either in the Court or a forraine Countrey will engender and come to preferment. Bee his feature what it will, if he be faire spoken he winneth frends: Nonformosus erat, sed erat facundus Vlysses; Vlysses the long traueller was not amiable, but eloquent. Some alleadge, ...
— The Vnfortunate Traveller, or The Life Of Jack Wilton - With An Essay On The Life And Writings Of Thomas Nash By Edmund Gosse • Thomas Nash
... attributes of man, and whose mission seems but destruction to his race, and deadly enmity to his country. The Times, who in these days of victory and triumph of Union arms, would "steal the livery of heaven to serve the devil in," and prate of its devotion to the Union, furnishes us some information it were well for good citizens to know, and which we will presume is (unlike most statements ...
— The Great North-Western Conspiracy In All Its Startling Details • I. Windslow Ayer
... her sons, And in the horrid phalanx dare to move, 'Tis but the tender fierceness of the dove, Pecking the hand that hovers o'er her mate: In softness as in firmness far above Remoter females, famed for sickening prate; Her mind is nobler sure, ...
— Childe Harold's Pilgrimage • Lord Byron
... the Bolsheviks have been compelled to travel a long way from the ideals which originally inspired the revolution. But the situation is so desperate that they could not be blamed if their measures were successful. In a shipwreck all hands must turn to, and it would be ridiculous to prate of individual liberty. The most distressing feature of the situation is that these stern laws seem to have produced so little effect. Perhaps in the course of years Russia might become self-supporting without help from ...
— The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism • Bertrand Russell
... pretty babes, Rejoicing at that tide, Rejoicing with a merry mind They should on cock-horse ride. They prate and prattle pleasantly, As they ride on the way, To those that should their butchers be And work their ...
— English Fairy Tales • Flora Annie Steel
... every stroke, is a matter for cheers, derisive or otherwise. The Rev. Septimus need not prate of golden days gone by. Boys at heart never change. And the atmosphere is so charged with electricity that a ...
— The Hill - A Romance of Friendship • Horace Annesley Vachell
... answered, "I am Queen of Khem and Pharaoh's wife, but never Pharaoh's love. Honour! Why dost thou prate to me of honour? Like Nile in flood, my love hath burst the bulwark of my honour, and I mark not where custom set it. For all around the waters seethe and foam, and on them, like a broken lily, floats the wreck of my lost honour. Talk not to ...
— The World's Desire • H. Rider Haggard and Andrew Lang
... The preachers prate of fallen man And choirs repeat the chant, While unco' guid with unction urge Repression of the joys that surge, And jail for those who can't. The poor deluded duds forget That something drew the sting When Adam tiptoed to his fall, ...
— The Eye of Zeitoon • Talbot Mundy
... intelligently performed by some capable young male; where the young women receive evening calls from young men concerning whose presence in the parlor mamma in the nursery and papa at the "office"—poor, overworked papa!—give themselves precious little trouble,—this prate of ball-room opportunity is singularly and engagingly idiotic. The worthy people who hold such language may justly boast themselves superior to reason and impregnable to light. The only effective reply to these creatures would be a cuffing, the well meant objections ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 8 - Epigrams, On With the Dance, Negligible Tales • Ambrose Bierce
... Of what god or demon? 290 With new kings rise new altars. But, proceed; You are sent to prate your master's will, and not Reply ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... everywhere; and even the dark days of Dixie proved no exception to the rule. It was not unusual to hear prate of the vast benefits derived from the blockade; of the energy, resource and production, expressed under its cruel constriction! Such optimists—equally at fault as were their pessimistic opponents—pointed proudly to the powder-mills, blast-furnaces, foundries and rolling-mills, springing up on ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... peace! 'Tis not your turne to prate yet; lust and impudens I know still goe togeather.[126] Shewes it well In one thats of thy yeares and gravity, That ought to bee in lyfe and government To others an example, nowe to doate So neere the grave! to walke before his dooer With a younge ...
— A Collection Of Old English Plays, Vol. IV. • Editor: A.H. Bullen
... after the death of a tenant in tail without issue." "Spoke like a true disciple of Geber," cries Ferret. "No, sir," replied Mr. Clarke, "Counsellor Caper is in the conveyancing way—I was clerk to Serjeant Croker." "Ay, now you may set up for yourself," resumed the other; "for you can prate as unintelligibly ...
— The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves • Tobias Smollett
... anger And why you prate thus: I have found your melancholy: Ye all want mony, and you are liberal Captains, And in this want will talk a little desperately: Here's gold, come share; I love a brave Commander: And be not peevish, do as Caesar does: He's merry with ...
— The False One • Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher
... blindly prating what the gurus prate, But to love, as God hath loved them, all things, be they small or great; And true bliss is when a sane mind doth a healthy body fill; And true knowledge is the knowing what is good and what ...
— Indian Poetry • Edwin Arnold
... Why prate of peace? when, warriors all, We clank in harness into hall, And ever bare upon the board Lies the necessary sword. 1319 ROBERT ...
— Handy Dictionary of Poetical Quotations • Various
... avocations. The houses[61] and oratories of noble and burgess were rich with ivories exquisitely carved, with sculptures and paintings, tapestry and enamels: the very utensils of common domestic use were beautiful. Men did not prate of art: they wrought in love and simplicity. The very word art, as denoting a product of human activity different from the ordinary daily tasks of men, was unknown. If painting was an art, even so ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... mutilation: and if this suffice not, Unleash the sword and fire, that in their thirst They may lick up that scum of schismatics. I laugh at those weak rebels who, desiring 235 What we possess, still prate of Christian peace, As if those dreadful arbitrating messengers Which play the part of God 'twixt right and wrong, Should be let loose against the innocent sleep Of templed cities and the smiling fields, 240 ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... elate, His grinning Rival 'gan to prate. Oh, fie! my friends; upon my word, You're too severe: he should be heard; For Mind can ne'er to glory reach, Without the usual aid of speech. If thus howe'er, you seal his doom, What hope have I unknown to Rome? But since the truth be ...
— The Sylphs of the Season with Other Poems • Washington Allston
... to him, with his innocent prate He will awake my mercy, which lies dead; Therefore I will ...
— Characters of Shakespeare's Plays • William Hazlitt
... accustomed to read, and to reflect upon what she read, and to apply it to the purpose for which it is valuable, viz. in enlarging her mind and cultivating her taste; but she had never been accustomed to prate, or quote, or sit down for the express purpose of displaying her acquirements; and she began to tremble at hearing authors' names "familiar in their mouths as household words;" but Grizzy, strong in ignorance, was no wise daunted. True, she heard what she could not ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier
... ruling hierarchy. And as he, witnessing for truth and freedom, steadfastly and defiantly opposed oppression, so those who catch his spirit today will do as he did and will realise as duty—"While wrong is wrong let no man prate of peace!" ...
— The Higher Powers of Mind and Spirit • Ralph Waldo Trine
... earth, Hear not my steps, which way they walk, for fear Thy very stones prate of my whereabout, And take the present horror from the time Which now suits ...
— A Dish Of Orts • George MacDonald
... who have not a stupid inflexibility of self-confidence must be liable to under a marked change of external conditions. In a life where the experience was so tumultuously mixed as it must have been in the Prate's, what a possibility was opened for a change of self-judgment, when, instead of eyes that venerated and knees that knelt, instead of a great work on its way to accomplishment, and in its prosperity stamping ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... other pleasures: these to me are none. Why do I prate Of women, that are things against my fate! I never mean to wed That torture to my bed: My Muse is she My love shall be. Let clowns get wealth and heirs: when I am gone And that great bugbear, grisly Death, ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 3 (of 4) • Various
... Memnon made warre for Darius agaynste Alexander, he harde one of his souldyours crake and speake many yll wordes agaynst Alexander; wherfore he rapte hym on the pate with a iauelynge, sayenge: I hyred the to fyght agaynste Alexandre, and not to crake and prate. ...
— Shakespeare Jest-Books; - Reprints of the Early and Very Rare Jest-Books Supposed - to Have Been Used by Shakespeare • Unknown
... Robin Hood, "Thou dost prate like an ass, For were I to bend my bow, I could send a dart quite thro' thy proud heart, Before thou couldst strike ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V3 • Charles H. Sylvester
... gods, I grow a talker!' Let us prate. The next of perils, though I place it sternest, Is when, without regard to 'church or state,' A wife makes or takes love in upright earnest. Abroad, such things decide few women's fate— (Such, early traveller! is the truth thou learnest)— ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... Meantime we prate comfortable blasphemies, scientific or other; natural selection or the inscrutable decrees of God. Whereas this was manifestly a Hobson's selection, most unnatural and forced, to choose want of all that makes life sweet and dear; to choose gaunt babes, ...
— Copper Streak Trail • Eugene Manlove Rhodes
... insolent enemies? It was all very fine for the archduke, who knew nothing of war, they declared, who had no hope of children, who longed only for a life of inglorious ease, such as he could have had as archbishop, to prate of peace and thus to compromise the dignity of the realm. On the contrary by making proper use of the Netherlands, the repose and grandeur of the monarchy would be secured, even should the war ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... us, after this, of a steady and systematic mind! Prate to us of the love of liberty, of self-dignity! Where are such things to be found in their reality, on their trial, if not in the scenes and the nation ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... heaps provokes them forth. If then this world, which holds all nations, Suffers itself such alterations, That not this mighty massy frame, Nor any part of it can claim One certain course, why should man prate, Or censure the designs of Fate? Why from frail honours, and goods lent Should he expect things permanent? Since 'tis enacted by Divine decree That nothing mortal ...
— Poems of Henry Vaughan, Silurist, Volume II • Henry Vaughan
... each one under the influence of his or her own controlling Soul, to higher and ever higher perception and attainment. The great majority of the world's inhabitants live with less consciousness of this Spirit than flies or worms—they build up religions in which they prate of God and immortality as children prattle, without the smallest effort to understand either,—and at the Change which they call death, they pass out of this life without having taken the trouble to discover, acknowledge or use the greatest gift ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... "All this parrot-prate, I suppose, is only intended to vex me," cried the warrior king, who always considered himself, and very naturally, a person of such consequence as ever to be uppermost in the thoughts and minds of others. "If thou must tell a ...
— Vikram and the Vampire • Sir Richard F. Burton
... not then to say 'Tis others' fault, nor foolishly upbraid The lot thyself for thine own self hast made. Say not the world's askew! with idle prate Of never-ending grief the hour grows late. Strike off my head! with many a tear he cries, And might, in sooth, draw tears ...
— Japanese Literature - Including Selections from Genji Monogatari and Classical - Poetry and Drama of Japan • Various
... can't chuse but laugh to hear the Fools prate about Preheminence: They would all fain be Masters, and yet they know they are but all my Servants; they make their Boast, of this and that, and talk of their great gains: and forget that I rule the Roast, and that both their gains and their very being here, depends ...
— The London-Bawd: With Her Character and Life - Discovering the Various and Subtle Intrigues of Lewd Women • Anonymous
... question, and a clever speaker can make his side dwarf the other. And of course no party could exist five minutes unless it had some good in it. There are several admirable principles in the Populist creed; there are enough windy theories to upset the Constitution of which they prate; and, by the way, the more wrong-headed a would-be statesman is the more hysterically does he plead for the Constitution. As to the other Senator—I sympathize as deeply with the farmer as any man, and I hoped against hope for the success of the bimetallic envoys; but the ...
— Senator North • Gertrude Atherton
... woman started, alarmed at the word. "Nay, but of course not. 'Tis nothing to prate about: come along home," said she harshly, pushing the child. Ditte was unaccustomed to be spoken to in this manner, and ...
— Ditte: Girl Alive! • Martin Andersen Nexo
... Buss. Hence! prate no more! Or, by thy villans bloud, thou prat'st thy last! A barbarous groome grudge at his masters bountie! But since I know he would as much abhorre His hinde should argue what he gives his friend, 220 Take that, Sir, for ...
— Bussy D'Ambois and The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois • George Chapman
... better days, and that when a man is mysterious, and falls into the sear and yellow leaf, ma'am, without that which should accompany old age, sir, one has a right to suspect that some time or other, he has done something or other, ma'am, which makes him fear lest the very stones prate of his whereabout, sir. And you did not deny, ma'am, that the mystery was suspicious; but you said, with uncommon good sense, that it was nothing to me what Mr. Waife had once been, so long as he was ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Doctrine, were called Academiques; The followers of Aristotle, Peripatetiques, from the Walk hee taught in; and those that Zeno taught, Stoiques, from the Stoa: as if we should denominate men from More-fields, from Pauls-Church, and from the Exchange, because they meet there often, to prate and loyter. ...
— Leviathan • Thomas Hobbes
... pure, absolute One, sundered from all two-ness and in whom we must eternally sink from nothingness to nothingness."[16] God, the Godhead, is thus the absolute "Dark," "the nameless Nothing," an empty God, a characterless Infinite. "Why dost thou prate of God," Eckhart says, "whatever thou sayest of Him is untrue!" The rapt soul at the end of his road, at the top of the hill, only knows that every finite account is false and that the only adequate word is an ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... they prate of you and me, As the two gifts they want, Say Classic lore and Cookery Are things for which they pant; Believe me, my dear Heptarchy, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, September 17, 1892 • Various
... idle qualms, This shrinking backwards at the bugbear conscience; In early life I heard the phantom nam'd, And the grave sages prate of moral sense Presiding in the bosom of the just; Or planting thongs about the guilty heart. Bound by these shackles, long my lab'ring mind, Obscurely trod the lower walks of life, In hopes by honesty my bread to gain; ...
— The Group - A Farce • Mercy Warren
... those from whom they should not be expected; nowhere more so than among those who are debarred from hope. The great captains of industry so-called, themselves blown full of pride of circumstance, prate often of the inefficiencies of human cattle; yet continually the wonder remains that these same cattle continue to do that which their conscience tells them is right for them to do, and to do it for the sake of the doing. ...
— The Law of the Land • Emerson Hough
... stormy scream as she sails by— As that poor bird flies home, nor knows his loss, So Rustum knew not his own loss, but stood Over his dying son, and knew him not. But, with a cold incredulous voice, he said:— "What prate is this of fathers and revenge? The mighty Rustum never had a son." And, with a failing voice, Sohrab replied:— "Ah yes, he had! and that lost son am I. Surely the news will one day reach his ear, Reach Rustum, where ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 6 • Charles H. Sylvester
... preached now, it was to a dear, stupid lot of old marketwomen and overworked men and mischievous children. Oratory is a collaboration—let him wax eloquent about the precession of the equinoxes, and prate of Plato and Pythagoras if he wished—no one could understand him! Rome is wise—the crystallized experience of centuries is hers. Responsibility tames a man—marriage, political office, churchly preferment—read history and note how these ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... Blueskin. "Take my life, if you're so disposed. You're welcome to it. And let's see if either of these women, who prate of their love for you, will ...
— Jack Sheppard - A Romance • William Harrison Ainsworth
... I graunte it; but does his grave majestie looke like a lorde of that mettall? Come, come, be not seveare; let us prate whylst they whysper. ...
— A Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. III • Various
... men hath scanty weal, except * To while away the time in chat and prate: Then shun their intimacy, save it be * To win thee lore, or better ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 4 • Richard F. Burton
... joy, and nothing heeds Time past or time to come, but fills all needs With present kindness. She would laugh and talk, Take arms, suffer embraces, even walk The terrace 'neath the eyes of all her fate, And seem to heed what they might show or prate, As if her whole heart's heart were in this house And not at fearful odds and perilous. And should one speak of Paris, as to say, "Would that our lord might see thee go so gay About his house!" Gently she'd bend her head Down to her breast ...
— Helen Redeemed and Other Poems • Maurice Hewlett
... said Diabolus, 'that there be spies continually walking up and down the town of Mansoul, and let them have power to suppress and destroy any that they shall perceive to be plotting against us, or that shall prate of what by Shaddai and ...
— The Holy War • John Bunyan
... immutable, the right to contract marriage must always remain. For where nature does not change, that ordinance also with which God has endowed nature does not change, and cannot be removed by human laws. Therefore it is ridiculous for the adversaries to prate that marriage was commanded in the beginning, but is not now. This is the same as if they would say: Formerly, when men were born, they brought with them sex; now they do not. Formerly, when they were born, they brought with them natural right, now they do not. No craftsman ...
— The Apology of the Augsburg Confession • Philip Melanchthon
... Why prate of social status, class, or rank when earth Is common tenting-ground, the heritage of all mankind? Except in purity is there no royal birth, No true nobility but nobleness of ...
— Poems - Vol. IV • Hattie Howard
... throne a spider swings And snares the people for the kings: "Luther is dead; old quarrels pass; The stake's black scars are healed with grass"; So dreamers prate;—did man e'er live Saw priest or woman yet forgive? But Luther's broom is left, and eyes Peep o'er their creeds to where it lies. Spin, spin, Clotho, spin! Lachesis, twist! and Atropos, sever! In the shadow, year out, year in, The silent headsman ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various
... fool me!" cried Laura indignantly. "What you've got you're welcome to, but for Heaven's sake don't prate around here about loyalty and honesty. I'm sick ...
— The Easiest Way - A Story of Metropolitan Life • Eugene Walter and Arthur Hornblow
... in aftertimes will say of you "He loved her"—while of me what will they say? Not that I loved you more than just in play, For fashion's sake as idle women do. Even let them prate; who know not what we knew Of love and parting in exceeding pain, Of parting hopeless here to meet again, Hopeless on earth, and heaven is out of view. But by my heart of love laid bare to you, My love ...
— Poems • Christina G. Rossetti
... N. loquacity, loquaciousness; talkativeness &c adj.; garrulity; multiloquence^, much speaking. jaw; gabble; jabber, chatter; prate, prattle, cackle, clack; twaddle, twattle, rattle; caquet^, caquetterie [Fr.]; blabber, bavardage^, bibble-babble^, gibble-gabble^; small talk &c (converse) 588. fluency, flippancy, volubility, flowing, tongue; flow of words; flux de bouche [Fr.], flux de mots [Fr.]; copia ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... hawthorn shade, And sweep so gallant by! With all their banners bravely spread, And all their armour flashing high, Saint George might waken from the dead, To see fair England's standards fly." "Stint in thy prate," quoth Blount, "thou'dst best, And listen to our lord's behest." With kindling brow Lord Marmion said - "This instant be our band arrayed; The river must be quickly crossed, That we may join Lord Surrey's host. If fight King James—as well I trust That fight he will, and fight he must, The Lady ...
— Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field • Walter Scott
... experienced great devotion and most attentive service on the part of natives, and they are deserving of the kindest and most considerate treatment; but it has often made me indignant to hear people, who have had little or no experience of living in the midst of a native population, prate of the rights of our "black brothers," and argue as if the latter thought, judged, amused themselves, or, in short, behaved, as the white men do, who have the advantage of hundreds ...
— South African Memories - Social, Warlike & Sporting From Diaries Written At The Time • Lady Sarah Wilson
... Atlantic Comes scornful menace? it is naught to thee— 'Tis but the jealous raving, wild and frantic, Of those who would, but never can, be free;— Who, slaves to selfish passions bold ambition, Hold up their shackled arms in heaven's broad light, And prate of freedom, boast their high position, And strive to turn to interest ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various
... up the dogs," said Little John; "Fryer, at my bidding be." "Whose man art thou," said the curtail fryer, "Come here to prate to me!" ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... Lord above! "My child, with pray'rs invoke his love, "The Almighty never errs?" "O, mother! mother! idle prate, "Can he be anxious for my fate, ...
— Translations of German Poetry in American Magazines 1741-1810 • Edward Ziegler Davis
... never do! When you Yankees make grave charges, you forget to clothe them with style and dignity: they are things of much importance in government matters, and then it never comes to much for small men to prate against powerful bodies pursuing ...
— The Adventures of My Cousin Smooth • Timothy Templeton
... does the real dirty work? If all is for the best, so then must the component parts of all (each and every) be for the best. In short we can do no wrong in this best of worlds. Oh, what grim, weak-minded nonsense they prate and preach! ...
— We Three • Gouverneur Morris
... to Naples? Keep in Tunis, And let Sebastian wake! Say, this were death That now hath seized them; why, they were no worse Than now they are. There be[407-63] that can rule Naples As well as he that sleeps; lords that can prate As amply and unnecessarily As this Gonzalo: I myself could make A chough[407-64] of as deep chat.[407-65] O, that you bore The mind that I do! what a sleep were this For your advancement! Do you ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 8 • Charles H. Sylvester
... I come from doing to talking? The hardest part for a Souldier to play is to prate well; our Tongues are Fifes, Drums, Petronels, Muskets, Culverin and Canon; these are our Roarers; the Clockes which wee goe by are our hands: thus we reckon tenne, our swords strike eleven, and when steele targets of proofe ...
— Old English Plays, Vol. I - A Collection of Old English Plays • Various
... what you are talking about? Do you prate of patience, and waiting, and hope in the future to a man who has no future—to a man whose days are numbered, and who feels the creeping chills of death stealing over him every day as he sits beside his wretched hearth, or labours through his daily drudgery? I can live as I have always ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... same, With nothing to be hoped for? Is not a soul athirst a joyous thing? Where lies content to him whose eye doth rest on higher things? What satiation can compare to hope? Yet who among the satisfied hath need of hope? What can he hope for if he's satisfied? 'Tis but conceit, and nothing more, to prate of satisfaction! God spare the day when I am satisfied! I do not want the earth, Yet nothing less will leave me quite content; And once 'tis mine, I'm very sure you'll find me ...
— Cobwebs from a Library Corner • John Kendrick Bangs
... used to prate of plates and prints And "quick developers" before, In spite of not unfrequent hints That these in time become a bore; But then this photographic craze Seemed little but a foolish fad, While now its very latest phase Appears to ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, August 20, 1892 • Various
... conceit in few verses: for this Epigramme is but an inscription or writting made as it were vpon a table, or in a windowe, or vpon the wall or mantel of a chimney in some place of common resort, where it was allowed euery man might come, or be sitting to chat and prate, as now in our tauernes and common tabling houses, where many merry heades meete, and scrible with ynke with chalke, or with a cole such matters as they would euery man should know, & descant vpon. Afterward the same came to be put ...
— The Arte of English Poesie • George Puttenham
... he was going away, but the Princess held him back, and said: "Trouble me not with your prate, old man, nor mock my grief; I know Bova Korolevich; he is young and handsome, but you ...
— The Russian Garland - being Russian Falk Tales • Various
... faces,' sooth, The old ones prate of!—Bah, what is't they want? 'Some one to work for me, when I am old; Some one to follow me unto my grave; Some one—for me!' Yes, yes. There is not one Old huddler-by-the-fire would shift his seat To a cold corner, if it might bring back All of the Children ...
— The Piper • Josephine Preston Peabody
... or that—let them mind their homes and their children.' But the restless women who do these things have generally no homes or children to mind; what is the use of preaching the sacredness of motherhood when you will not allow them to be mothers? To what end prate of the duties of wifehood when you do not ask them ...
— Modern marriage and how to bear it • Maud Churton Braby
... were cut from the skins of beasts and had to be sewn with backbone sinews. Because you despise fine clothes, and because you have seen me only decked out as fan-girl, you think I am useless. Bah, Deucalion! Never let people prate to me about your perfection. You know less about a woman than a ...
— The Lost Continent • C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne
... the trust I placed in you, sirrah?' he rejoined, in a terrible voice; and stooping still farther forward he probed me with his eyes. 'You who prate of trust and confidence, who received your life on parole, and but for your promise to me would have been carrion this month past, answer me that? What of the trust I ...
— Under the Red Robe • Stanley Weyman
... Gallantry, Conversation, and Courtship, and shou'dn't endure the chief Lady in the Play a Mute, or to say very little, as 'twas agreeable to them: Our amorous Sparks love to hear the pretty Rogues prate, snap up their Gallants, and Repartee upon 'em on all sides. We shou'dn't like to have a Lady marry'd without knowing whether she gives her consent or no, (a Custom among the Romans) but wou'd be for hearing all the Courtship, all the rare and fine things that Lovers can say to each other. ...
— Prefaces to Terence's Comedies and Plautus's Comedies (1694) • Lawrence Echard
... her, he checked his horse and swung himself to the ground. "Thank God I've passed the boundary!" he exclaimed over his shoulder to the others. "Ride on, my lads, ride on! Don't prate of the claims of hospitality to me. My foot is on my neighbours' heath; I'm host to ...
— The Battle Ground • Ellen Glasgow
... he cried, "what doth this fellow prate of? ... Past love? ... Thou profane boaster! ... how darest thou speak of love to ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... took all of Mrs. Prate's stairway in two moderate leaps and was at her side instantly. A moment of explanation consoled the troubled looking woman for the appearance of a stranger in Dr. Belford's stead, and then on tip toe they ...
— Honor Edgeworth • Vera
... the scheme which was startling. He believed that "the North would not refuse so just a demand if the South should unitedly ask it." Jefferson Davis did not join in the movement, but expressed a hearty contempt for those "who prate of the inhumanity and sinfulness of ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... never prate about the harsh words that may or may not be uttered by inferior men. Persons that have earned respect for themselves, even if they are able to retaliate, remember not the acts of hostility done by their ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Part 2 • Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa
... so! Confounded be your strife! And perish ye, with your audacious prate! Presumptuous vassals, are you not ashamed With this immodest clamorous outrage To trouble and disturb the king and us? And you, my lords, methinks you do not well To bear with their perverse objections; Much less to ...
— King Henry VI, First Part • William Shakespeare [Aldus edition]
... the neighbourhood Lenski as a good match received,— Such is the country custom good; All mothers their sweet girls believed Suitable for this semi-Russian. He enters: rapidly discussion Shifts, tacks about, until they prate The sorrows of a single state. Perchance where Dunia pours out tea The young proprietor we find; To Dunia then they whisper: Mind! And a guitar produced we see, And Heavens! warbled forth we hear: Come to my golden ...
— Eugene Oneguine [Onegin] - A Romance of Russian Life in Verse • Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin
... his shop, to retire from business, and for some time he had been thinking of going to see Sidonie, in order to interest her in his new schemes. That was not the time, therefore, to make disagreeable scenes, to prate about paternal authority and conjugal honor. As for Madame Chebe, being somewhat less confident than before of her daughter's virtue, she took refuge in the most profound silence. The poor woman wished that she were deaf and blind—that she never ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... rounded with a pipe and tabor, two empties and a brass tray. Yet the semblance of the thing is there and this often deceives the very elect. Around every art studio are found the young men in velveteen who smoke infinite cigarettes, and throw off opinions about this great man and that, and prate prosaically in blase monotone of the Beautiful. Sometimes these young persons give lectures on "Art as I Have Found It"; but do not be deceived by this—the art that lives is probably being produced by small, shy, red-headed men who work ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Musicians • Elbert Hubbard
... of your own nose. But, if you called me out of hell merely for this chit-chat, permit me to return for ever. I have long known your inclination to prate about that which ...
— Faustus - his Life, Death, and Doom • Friedrich Maximilian von Klinger
... believer in the ballot over there; and so arrives at his conclusions on the subject of secret voting—and then, all these return to this "down-trodden," "aristocracy- ridden," "effete old kingdom," and prate about the glorious way in which their several theories work across the ocean—not one of them having resided long enough beneath the stars and stripes to be able to judge of the truth of what they allege, as they are ...
— She and I, Volume 2 - A Love Story. A Life History. • John Conroy Hutcheson
... thou art a pretty fellow to prate about sallying forth at midnight to do good to thy fellow creatures!—Here we find thee, within an hour after thy departure from thy home, on an 'errand of mercy,' embraced in the soft arms of a pretty ...
— City Crimes - or Life in New York and Boston • Greenhorn
... Thou liest, thou fiend! Not unawares The sinner swallows Satan's bait, Nor pits conceal'd nor hidden snares Seeks blindly; wherefore dost thou prate ...
— Poems • Adam Lindsay Gordon
... the epilogue, by rule, Should come and turn it all to ridicule; Should tell the ladies that the tragic bards, Who prate of Virtue and her vast rewards, Are all in jest, and only fools should heed 'em; For all wise women flock to mother Needham. This is the method epilogues pursue, But we to-night in everything are new. Our author then, in jest ...
— Miscellanies, Volume 2 (from Works, Volume 12) • Henry Fielding
... multitude to do evil. My singularity is, that when I say that Freedom is of God, and Slavery is of the devil, I mean just what I say. My fanaticism is, that I insist on the American people abolishing Slavery, or ceasing to prate of the rights of man. My hardihood is, in measuring them by their own standard, and convicting them out of ...
— No Compromise with Slavery - An Address Delivered to the Broadway Tabernacle, New York • William Lloyd Garrison
... me last year, I know," she said to herself, recalling some of the dances and the good-night leave-takings at that time. "It's because he is so put upon by everybody now. What with Juan Can in one bed sending for him to prate to him about the sheep, and Senor Felipe in another sending for him to fiddle him to sleep, and all the care of the sheep, it's a wonder he's not out of his mind altogether. But I'll find a chance, or make ...
— Ramona • Helen Hunt Jackson
... collecting money. Some ministers, no doubt the majority of them, talk about holding on to the old landmarks and being orthodox for the very reason that to make a move implies labour, which they are not willing to give, hence they prate about orthodoxy and landmarks as a pretext to cover over their indifference. He is the most orthodox who searches after the truth and keeps up with the age. "Prove all things, hold fast that which is good," says Paul. These pretended followers of Paul say: "Prove ...
— The Lost Ten Tribes, and 1882 • Joseph Wild
... the country, and the people; to drawl out her maudlin regrets for olive groves, and pout for the Bay of Naples; to talk of her loves; exhibit a cameo or a crucifix, (the parting pledge of some inamorato, probably since hanged), prate papistry, and profess liberalism; pronounce the Roman holidays "charming things," and long to see the carnival, and the worship of the Virgin together, imported to relieve ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... only my father and tutor are angry sometimes, and only Miss Lucy there gives herself airs about my being busy, for all she can sit idle by a well-side the whole day, when she has a handsome young gentleman to prate with. I have known her do so twenty times, if you will ...
— Bride of Lammermoor • Sir Walter Scott
... us to prate of old-world castes when it is a part of our national creed that any one among us may rise as high as the best of us, provided he can grow the wings wherewith to soar. That little speech which almost broke ...
— Cicely and Other Stories • Annie Fellows Johnston
... What is Antiochus, that he should prate Of peace to me, who am a fugitive? To-day he shall be lifted up; to-morrow Shall not be found, because he is returned Unto his dust; his thought has come to nothing. There is no peace between ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... "Let the fools prate!" responded Clementine, with an angelic smile. "I do not trouble myself to explain my affection for poor Fougas, but I love him very much, that's certain. I love him as a father, as a brother, if you prefer it, for he is almost as ...
— The Man With The Broken Ear • Edmond About
... of tinsel! why we see The old mark of rouge upon your cheeks. You prate of nature! you are he That spilt his life about ...
— The Suppressed Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... ourselves with the magic of words. When menaced by some exceptionally monstrous form of the tyranny of numbers we have closed our eyes and murmured, "Liberty." When armed Anarchists threaten to quench the fires of civilization in a sea of blood we prate of the protective power ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce
... has looked on Beauty bare. Let all who prate of Beauty hold their peace, And lay them prone upon the earth and cease To ponder on themselves, the while they stare At nothing, intricately drawn nowhere In shapes of shifting lineage; let geese Gabble and hiss, but heroes seek release From dusty ...
— American Poetry, 1922 - A Miscellany • Edna St. Vincent Millay
... itch of verse and praise; Nor like a puppy, daggled through the town, To fetch and carry sing-song up and down; Nor at rehearsals sweat, and mouth'd, and cried, With handkerchief and orange at my side; But sick of fops, and poetry, and prate, To Bufo left the ...
— The Poetical Works Of Alexander Pope, Vol. 1 • Alexander Pope et al
... of the Household! Men may prate Of their ways "intense" and Italianate,— They may soar on their wings of sense, and float To the au dela and the dim remote,— Till the last sun sink in the last-lit West, 'Tis the Art at the Door that will please the best; To the end of Time 'twill ...
— Collected Poems - In Two Volumes, Vol. II • Austin Dobson
... her to accept such a proposition as mine, especially after all that has happened, and still prate of 'sacred honor.'" ...
— What Can She Do? • Edward Payson Roe
... danger, and the devil far fled. By the very reason of their security they are overcome of the devil and their own flesh, and fall unawares from the Gospel. They have just enough connection with it to be able to prate of it, boasting themselves Christians but giving no indication of ...
— Epistle Sermons, Vol. III - Trinity Sunday to Advent • Martin Luther
... "Idomeneus, why dost thou prate endlessly?[755] Those high-prancing mares run over the vast plain afar. Neither art thou so much the youngest amongst the Greeks, nor do thine eyes see most sharply from thy head: but thou art always prating with words. Nor is it at all necessary for ...
— The Iliad of Homer (1873) • Homer
... came to him as he sat and mused, showed white men, the men of the Anglo-Saxon blood, tireless, restless, working. Only when men of other races, dark-skinned, dark-haired, and dark-eyed, passed his mental vision, was there the stillness of lazy rest; and Marmot was pleased, for he loved to prate of the Anglo-Saxon and the work they had done, and would do, for the ...
— Colonial Born - A tale of the Queensland bush • G. Firth Scott
... write to you, you said, frequently and copiously: you did not mean, I suppose, that I should always be scribbling, but I cannot help it. I can do nothing but converse with you. When present, my prate is incessant; when absent, I can prate to you with as little intermission; for the pen, used so carelessly and thoughtlessly as I use ...
— Jane Talbot • Charles Brockden Brown
... professing to experiment upon pure metal, at least to see that it was not mere dross they were casting into the crucible. Plainly, however, they despise any such nice distinctions. The most earnest prayer and the emptiest ceremonial prate are both alike to them. What sort of a process they imagine prayer to be may be at once perceived from the sort of trials to which they desire to ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... looked on Beauty bare. Let all who prate of Beauty hold their peace, And lay them prone upon the earth and cease To ponder on themselves, the while they stare At nothing, intricately drawn nowhere In shapes of shifting lineage; let geese Gabble and hiss, but heroes ...
— American Poetry, 1922 - A Miscellany • Edna St. Vincent Millay
... so about was SHE - The maiden I wronged in Peninsular days . . . You may prate of your prowess in lusty times, But as years gnaw inward you blink your bays, And see too well ...
— Wessex Poems and Other Verses • Thomas Hardy
... best," the lawyer said; "On your commands I wait." "Be silent, sir," says Brentford, "A plague upon your prate! Come take your pen and paper, And ...
— Successful Recitations • Various
... "They prate of God! Believe it, fellow-creature, There's no such bugbear: all was made by Nature. We know all came of nothing, and shall pass Into the same condition once it was By Nature's power, and that they grossly lie That say ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... Though thus in arms they emulate her sons, And in the horrid phalanx dare to move, 'Tis but the tender fierceness of the dove, Pecking the hand that hovers o'er her mate: In softness as in firmness far above Remoter females, famed for sickening prate; Her mind is nobler sure, her charms ...
— Childe Harold's Pilgrimage • Lord Byron
... men who prate about Bibliolatry, and labor to lower men's estimate of the Bible. They may spare their breath. The people who idolize the Bible too much are creatures of their own imagination only, and not living men and women. People may love ...
— Modern Skepticism: A Journey Through the Land of Doubt and Back Again - A Life Story • Joseph Barker
... thy dogs, said Little John, Friar, at my bidding thee; Whose man art thou, said the curtal friar, That comes here to prate to me? ...
— The Book of Brave Old Ballads • Unknown
... shouted Judge Harlin. "A nice lot to prate about law and order, and ready to do murder yourselves! That is what you are preparing to do! Murder! As cold-blooded a murder as ...
— With Hoops of Steel • Florence Finch Kelly
... human traits, nowhere more so than among those from whom they should not be expected; nowhere more so than among those who are debarred from hope. The great captains of industry so-called, themselves blown full of pride of circumstance, prate often of the inefficiencies of human cattle; yet continually the wonder remains that these same cattle continue to do that which their conscience tells them is right for them to do, and to do it for the sake of the doing. ...
— The Law of the Land • Emerson Hough
... preach the gospel of man's pre-eminence;—you who prate of God and know nothing whatsoever about Him! The horse, dog, cat,—even the wild animals, whose vices, perchance, pale beside your own, may go to Heaven before you. The Supreme Architect is neither a Nero, nor a Stuart, nor a clown. He will recompense all who deserve ...
— Animal Ghosts - Or, Animal Hauntings and the Hereafter • Elliott O'Donnell
... writting made as it were vpon a table, or in a windowe, or vpon the wall or mantel of a chimney in some place of common resort, where it was allowed euery man might come, or be sitting to chat and prate, as now in our tauernes and common tabling houses, where many merry heades meete, and scrible with ynke with chalke, or with a cole such matters as they would euery man should know, & descant vpon. Afterward the same came to be put in paper and in bookes, and vsed as ordinarie missiues, ...
— The Arte of English Poesie • George Puttenham
... should be tied By trustful faith and free affection. If ours be mutual love and pride, Who's going to "sever the connection"? Let plotters scheme, and pedants prate, They will not pick our true love's true lock Whilst truth and justice arm the State With ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., August 23, 1890. • Various
... might prate about wealth till commonplace print was exhausted, but as matter of habit, few Americans envied the very rich for anything the most of them got out of money. New York might occasionally fear them, but more ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... unshaved and hairy, Whose old tongues are never weary, Just outside my chamber-door Prate of sheep ...
— Letters of a Woman Homesteader • Elinore Pruitt Stewart
... Minor, and are now almost in sight of Europe. The camp-fire is extinguished; the tent is furled. We are no longer happy nomads, masquerading in Moslem garb. We shall soon become prosaic Christians, and meekly hold out our wrists for the handcuffs of Civilization. Ah, prate as we will of the progress of the race, we are but forging additional fetters, unless we preserve that healthy physical development, those pure pleasures of mere animal existence, which are now only to be found among our semi-barbaric brethren. Our progress is nervous, ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor
... me to write a book about Italy myself, to give them 'the loud lie.' They prate about assassination; what is it but the origin of duelling—and 'a wild justice,' as Lord Bacon calls it? It is the fount of the modern point of honour in what the laws can't or won't reach. Every man is liable to it more or less, according ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. IV - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... You prate of duty and honor, of a patriot's glorious death, Of love of country, heroic deeds—nay, for shame's sake, spare your breath! Pray, what have you done for your country? Whose was the blood that was shed In the hellish warfare that served your ends? ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various
... it seems to me ridiculously inconsistent for gentlemen upon this floor to prate so much about a republican form of government, and rise here and offer resolution after resolution about the Monroe doctrine and the downtrodden Mexicans, while they force upon the people of this District ...
— History of the Thirty-Ninth Congress of the United States • Wiliam H. Barnes
... fashions from all Europe brought. 'T was in those days an honest grace would hold Till an hot pudding grew at heart a-cold, And men had better stomachs for religion, Than now for capon, turkey-cock, or pigeon; When honest sisters met to pray, not prate, About their own and not their neighbors' state, During Plain Dealing's reign, that worthy stud Of the ancient planter-race ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... not blindly prating what the gurus prate, But to love, as God hath loved them, all things, be they small or great; And true bliss is when a sane mind doth a healthy body fill; And true knowledge is the knowing what is ...
— Indian Poetry • Edwin Arnold
... even the dark days of Dixie proved no exception to the rule. It was not unusual to hear prate of the vast benefits derived from the blockade; of the energy, resource and production, expressed under its cruel constriction! Such optimists—equally at fault as were their pessimistic opponents—pointed proudly to the powder-mills, blast-furnaces, foundries ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... angry heaps provokes them forth. If then this world, which holds all nations, Suffers itself such alterations, That not this mighty massy frame, Nor any part of it can claim One certain course, why should man prate, Or censure the designs of Fate? Why from frail honours, and goods lent Should he expect things permanent? Since 'tis enacted by Divine decree That nothing ...
— Poems of Henry Vaughan, Silurist, Volume II • Henry Vaughan
... about the sugar prate! They do not care one dump About the blacks and their sad state— Just please to ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, July 24, 1841 • Various
... went those pretty babes, Rejoicing at that tide, Rejoicing with a merry mind They should on cock-horse ride. They prate and prattle pleasantly, As they ride on the way, To those that should their butchers be And work ...
— English Fairy Tales • Flora Annie Steel
... have guessed, and this I have heard men say, And this they wrote that another man wrote of a carl in Norroway." —"Ye have read, ye have felt, ye have guessed, good lack! Ye have hampered Heaven's Gate; There's little room between the stars in idleness to prate! O none may reach by hired speech of neighbour, priest, and kin Through borrowed deed to God's good meed that lies so fair within; Get hence, get hence to the Lord of Wrong, for doom has yet to run, And. . .the faith that ye share with ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... with the evil eye, do you suppose that I wish you here to bring all the ills you prate of upon my head? I say that I am afraid of you. Why, for your sake, once, years ago, I made a vow to the Blessed Virgin that, whatever I worked on men, I would never again lift a hand against a woman. To that oath I look to help me at the last, for I have kept it sacredly, ...
— Lysbeth - A Tale Of The Dutch • H. Rider Haggard
... the stern answer. "To come here and prate to me of my dead father's dissoluteness and of an ancient quarrel between him and yours, to bleat of my trumped-up course of piracy and my own ways of life as a just cause why I may not wed your ...
— The Sea-Hawk • Raphael Sabatini
... breast, A mansion suited well to such a guest, Immortal, unimpair'd, she rears her head, And damns alike the living and the dead. Oft have I known thee, Hogarth, weak and vain, Thyself the idol of thy awkward strain, Through the dull measure of a summer's day, In phrase most vile, prate long, long hours away, 460 Whilst friends with friends, all gaping sit, and gaze, To hear a Hogarth babble Hogarth's praise. But if athwart thee Interruption came, And mention'd with respect some ancient's name, Some ancient's name who, in the days of yore, The crown ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill
... my life, if you're so disposed. You're welcome to it. And let's see if either of these women, who prate of their love for ...
— Jack Sheppard - A Romance • William Harrison Ainsworth
... many moons, Here dwelling voiceless by the voiceful sea, Thou hast not set thy thoughts to paltry tunes In song or sonnet. Them these golden noons Oppress not with their beauty; they could prate, Even while a prophet read the solemn runes On which is hanging some imperial fate. How know they, these good gossips, what to thee The ocean and its wanderers may have brought? How know they, in their busy vacancy, ...
— Poems of Henry Timrod • Henry Timrod
... or demon? 290 With new kings rise new altars. But, proceed; You are sent to prate your master's will, ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... and firm-set earth, Hear not my steps, which way they walk, for fear Thy very stones prate of my whereabout. ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett
... Voice, its owner, fat red arms akimbo, blocking up the doorway, "Nick, me useless man! ye kin prate t' me 'bout arrestin' hoboes. I tell ye right now—that hobo that was a-bummin' roun' here t'other mornin's got nothin' on you ...
— The Luck of the Mounted - A Tale of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police • Ralph S. Kendall
... thou to seduce me then with words that have no meaning? Parrots so can learn to prate, our speech by pieces gleaning: Nurses teach their children so about ...
— Lyrics from the Song-Books of the Elizabethan Age • Various
... the muttering tone, A proper mixture of the squeak and groan; No borrow'd grace of action, must be seen, The slightest motion would displease the dean. Whilst every staring graduate would prate, Against ...
— Fugitive Pieces • George Gordon Noel Byron
... such questions, but disdained to answer them. He knew who he was, and what his grandfather had been, and he never cared a—short word—what sort of stuff long tongues might prate of him. Barbarous broad-drawlers, murderers of his Majesty's English, could they even pronounce the name of an officer highly distinguished for many years in both of the royal services? That was his description, and the Yorkshire ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... latter city, while only twenty in London. Nor is Chicago the leading city in crime, since it is only seventh on the list, which is headed by four Southern cities, and San Francisco and Los Angeles. In view of such a terrible condition of affairs, it seems ridiculous to prate of the protection society ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman
... moral instinct would she prate, And of the rising from the dead, As hers by right of full-accomplish'd Fate; And at ...
— The Early Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson • Tennyson
... the universal old age pension did not satisfy him. That, however, is beside our present discussion. I am writing now only of the sort of property that Socialism would destroy, and to show how little benefit or safety it brings to the small owner now. The unthinking rich prate "thrift" to the poor, and grow richer by a half-judicious, half-unconscious absorption of the resultant savings; that, in brief, is the grim humour of our present ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells
... when all the kings that promise peace while they swell their armouries and armies; when all the statesmen that chatter of the people's weal as they steal up to the locked casket where coronets are kept; when all the men who talk of "glory," and prate of an "idea" that they may stretch their nation's boundary, and filch their neighbour's province—when all these are no longer in the land, and no more looked on with favour, then I will believe your cry that you hate the ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... the sear and yellow leaf, ma'am, without that which should accompany old age, sir, one has a right to suspect that some time or other, he has done something or other, ma'am, which makes him fear lest the very stones prate of his whereabout, sir. And you did not deny, ma'am, that the mystery was suspicious; but you said, with uncommon good sense, that it was nothing to me what Mr. Waife had once been, so long as he was of use to me at that ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... those, whether men or women, whether strangers or kinsfolk, from whose religion he disagrees. 'It is not ancient impressions only,' said Pascal, 'which are capable of abusing us. The charm of novelty has the same power.' The prate of new-born scepticism may be as tiresome and as odious as the cant of gray orthodoxy. Religious discussion is not to be foisted upon us at every turn either by defenders or assailants. All we plead for is that when the opportunity meets the freethinker full in front, ...
— On Compromise • John Morley
... continue to sit there; who or what, then, is to follow? "Free Parliament," right of election, constitutional formulas of one sort or the other—the thing is a hungry fact coming on us, which we must answer or be devoured by it! And who are you that prate of constitutional formulas, rights of Parliament? You have had to kill your king, to make pride's purges, to expel and banish by the law of the stronger whosoever would not let your cause prosper: there are but fifty or threescore of ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various
... intrigues of Metternich: at present, the opportunity is gone by; and he would every where proclaim me for a suspicious tyrant, who had sacrificed him without any cause. Go to him: say nothing to him of Montron or Bresson; let him prate at his ease, and bring me a full ...
— Memoirs of the Private Life, Return, and Reign of Napoleon in 1815, Vol. II • Pierre Antoine Edouard Fleury de Chaboulon
... except in darkness; Thought will not work except in Silence; neither will Virtue work except in Secrecy. Let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth! Neither shalt thou prate even to thy own heart of "those secrets known to all." Is not Shame (Schaam) the soil of all Virtue, of all good manners and good morals? Like other plants, Virtue will not grow unless its root be hidden, buried from the eye of the sun. Let the sun shine on it, nay ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... a true disciple of Geber," cries Ferret. "No, sir," replied Mr. Clarke, "Counsellor Caper is in the conveyancing way—I was clerk to Serjeant Croker." "Ay, now you may set up for yourself," resumed the other; "for you can prate as unintelligibly as the ...
— The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves • Tobias Smollett
... Rue du Mail—"Commission-Exportation"—had a very definite idea. He wished to give up his shop, to retire from business, and for some time he had been thinking of going to see Sidonie, in order to interest her in his new schemes. That was not the time, therefore, to make disagreeable scenes, to prate about paternal authority and conjugal honor. As for Madame Chebe, being somewhat less confident than before of her daughter's virtue, she took refuge in the most profound silence. The poor woman wished that she were deaf and blind—that ...
— Fromont and Risler, Complete • Alphonse Daudet
... take it and thee! I never heard a man yet begin to prate of his conscience, but I knew that he was about to do something more ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... what the priest may prate, But to love, as God hath loved them, all things, be they small or great; And true bliss is when a sane mind doth a healthy body fill; And true knowledge is the knowing what is good and ...
— Hindu Literature • Epiphanius Wilson
... chastize you, and wt a ton[131] do ye ever think for to make a man, Sir; no, I promise you no. [He killed Kincairnes father by boyling the antimonian cup, which ought only to seep in.][132] Inter bonos bene agier.[133] When any plead a prate[134] and all denied it, I know the man, yet neminem nominabo, Honest Cicero hes ...
— Publications of the Scottish History Society, Vol. 36 • Sir John Lauder
... cackle, gabble, murmur, prattle, blurt, chat, gossip, palaver, tattle, blurt out, chatter, jabber, prate, twaddle. ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... and prate fatuously that "there were giants in those days," ignorant of the thoroughly attested fact, that the average stature of the European races has increased some four inches since the days of the Crusaders, as shown by the fact that the common British ...
— Preventable Diseases • Woods Hutchinson
... the Deluge, for instance, is an old wives' story, and the economy of times and seasons a human fabrication:—when Astronomical and Mechanical Science strut up to the Throne whereon sits the Ancient of Days,—prate to Him, (the first Author of Law,) about the "supremacy of Law,"—and tell Him to His face that His miracles are things impossible:—when Physiology insinuates that Mankind cannot be descended from one primval ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon
... more angry because he would begin explaining and apologizing, first at the levee and then at the drawing-room; and he reprehended him very sharply at both places. An explanation afterwards took place through Lord Camden, to whom he said that he was angry because de Saumarez would prate at the levee, when he told him that it was not a proper place for ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. III • Charles C. F. Greville
... to be found in perfection among the sons of men. The very fact of his greatness made his failings all the more dangerous and unfortunate. To be blinded by the splendor of his fame and the lustre of his achievements and prate about the sin of belittling a great man is the falsest philosophy and the meanest cant. The only thing worth having, in history as in life, is truth; and we do wrong to our past, to ourselves, and to our posterity if we do not strive to render simple justice ...
— Daniel Webster • Henry Cabot Lodge
... every footstep he prints upon the turf or gravel of his garden—when he abstains from every sort of animal food—and, above all, when he abstains from his great pursuit of torturing his fellow men—then let him prate, if he will, ...
— Warwick Woodlands - Things as they Were There Twenty Years Ago • Henry William Herbert (AKA Frank Forester)
... was fond enough of me last year, I know," she said to herself, recalling some of the dances and the good-night leave-takings at that time. "It's because he is so put upon by everybody now. What with Juan Can in one bed sending for him to prate to him about the sheep, and Senor Felipe in another sending for him to fiddle him to sleep, and all the care of the sheep, it's a wonder he's not out of his mind altogether. But I'll find a chance, or make one, before this day's sun sets. If I can once get a half-hour with him, I'm not afraid ...
— Ramona • Helen Hunt Jackson
... and going through our performance without caring a rush for the Lord Chamberlain or the Middlesex magistrates, must convince all who know us, that we are for a thoroughly free trade in theatricals; but, nevertheless, we think the Great Unactables talk egregious nonsense when they prate about the possibility of their efforts working "a beneficial alteration in a law which presses so fatally on dramatic genius." We think their tom-foolery more likely to induce restrictions that may prevent others from exposing their mental imbecility, than to encourage ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... well to preach and prate of law: Methinks, my haughty lords of Padua, If ye are hurt in pocket or estate, So much as makes your monstrous revenues Less by the value of one ferry toll, Ye do not wait the tedious law's delay With such sweet patience as ...
— The Duchess of Padua • Oscar Wilde
... Wifeless, childless, living solitary, dying alone, unregretled, unmourned. What is the wickedness you are plotting? Your father is dead, you can do him neither good nor harm. This girl is alive. She loves you. Love her. Let the canting hypocrites prate as they will." ...
— The Manxman - A Novel - 1895 • Hall Caine
... "Hold your prate and listen to me. The next time you look at a public-house say to yourself, Peter Crawley, that is not a public-house to you—it is a hospital, a workhouse, for a dunghill—for if you go in there John Meadows, that is your friend, will be ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade
... significance, without knowing yourself. Shall you permit it to bind you for your whole life? Shall you allow it to make us both miserable for all time? No, Ada, love, that eternal, undying right of the human heart, must have its own. Men prate of guilt, others of destiny. It is destiny which is beckoning us to-day, and we must follow after. A feeble ...
— The Northern Light • E. Werner
... evil. My singularity is, that when I say that Freedom is of God, and Slavery is of the devil, I mean just what I say. My fanaticism is, that I insist on the American people abolishing Slavery, or ceasing to prate of the rights of man. My hardihood is, in measuring them by their own standard, and convicting them out of ...
— No Compromise with Slavery - An Address Delivered to the Broadway Tabernacle, New York • William Lloyd Garrison
... manacles; or romping girl Bounced, leapt, and pawed the air; or mumbling sire, A scare-crow pattern of old age dressed up In all the tatters of infirmity All loosely put together, hobbled in, 425 Stumping upon a cane with which he smites, From time to time, the solid boards, and makes them Prate somewhat loudly of the whereabout [W] Of one so overloaded with his years. But what of this! the laugh, the grin, grimace, 430 The antics striving to outstrip each other, Were all received, the least of them not lost, With ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth
... "But when they prate of you and me, As the two gifts they want, Say Classic lore and Cookery Are things for which they pant; Believe me, my dear Heptarchy, They ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, September 17, 1892 • Various
... weal, except * To while away the time in chat and prate: Then shun their intimacy, save it be * To win thee lore, or better ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 4 • Richard F. Burton
... and by day. If he is your doctor, he is more trouble to you than your disease: if he is on board ship with you, he disgusts you more than sea-sickness; if he praises you, he is more fulsome than blame. It is more pleasure associating with bad men who have tact than with good men who prate. Nestor indeed in Sophocles' Play, trying by his words to soothe exasperated Ajax, ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... angry with my mayds for letting in watermen, and I know not who, anybody that they are acquainted with, into my kitchen to talk and prate with them, which I will not endure. Then out and by coach to my Lord Treasurer's, who continues still very ill, then to Sir Ph. Warwicke's house, and there did a little business about my Tangier tallies, ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... no gratitude, none of the nobler attributes of man, and whose mission seems but destruction to his race, and deadly enmity to his country. The Times, who in these days of victory and triumph of Union arms, would "steal the livery of heaven to serve the devil in," and prate of its devotion to the Union, furnishes us some information it were well for good citizens to know, and which we will presume is (unlike most statements in ...
— The Great North-Western Conspiracy In All Its Startling Details • I. Windslow Ayer
... I can guess well enough how learnedly he would prate, and how little he could do. But I will not object to his visit, if it satisfies you that, since I should die under the hands of the doctors, I may be permitted to indulge my own whim in placing ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... brass tray. Yet the semblance of the thing is there and this often deceives the very elect. Around every art studio are found the young men in velveteen who smoke infinite cigarettes, and throw off opinions about this great man and that, and prate prosaically in blase monotone of the Beautiful. Sometimes these young persons give lectures on "Art as I Have Found It"; but do not be deceived by this—the art that lives is probably being produced by small, shy, red-headed men who work on a top floor, and whom you can only find with the ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Musicians • Elbert Hubbard
... boast much of their doctrine, but theirs is not the Word of truth whereby men are made children of God. They teach naught, and know naught, about how we are to be born God's children through faith. They prate much about the works done by us in ...
— Epistle Sermons, Vol. II - Epiphany, Easter and Pentecost • Martin Luther
... procure the slightest gratification, should it not impress the thinking mind with amazement, how much of fortitude and patience the honest poor display in the exercise of self-denial! Oh! ye prosperous! prate of the uses of adversity as poetically as you please, we who are obliged to learn of them by bitter experience would greatly prefer a ...
— From the Darkness Cometh the Light, or Struggles for Freedom • Lucy A. Delaney
... shall that Claribell Measure vs backe to Naples? keepe in Tunis, And let Sebastian wake. Say, this were death That now hath seiz'd them, why they were no worse Then now they are: There be that can rule Naples As well as he that sleepes: Lords, that can prate As amply, and vnnecessarily As this Gonzallo: I my selfe could make A Chough of as deepe chat: O, that you bore The minde that I do; what a sleepe were this For your aduancement? ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... I placed in you, sirrah?' he rejoined, in a terrible voice; and stooping still farther forward he probed me with his eyes. 'You who prate of trust and confidence, who received your life on parole, and but for your promise to me would have been carrion this month past, answer me that? What of the ...
— Under the Red Robe • Stanley Weyman
... swore that no man had the right to take precedence of him in the council of state, and that the appointment of this or any Spaniard was a violation of the charters of the provinces and of the promises of his Majesty. As if it were for the nobles of the obedient provinces to prate of charters and of oaths! Their brethren under the banner of the republic had been teaching Philip for a whole generation how they could deal with the privileges of freemen and with the perjury of tyrants. It was late in the ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... adopted is not only rigorously in accordance with the canons of scientific logic, but that it is the only adequate method. Critics exclusively trained in classics or in mathematics, who have never determined a scientific fact in their lives by induction from experiment or observation, prate learnedly about Mr. Darwin's method, which is not inductive enough, not Baconian enough, forsooth, for them. But even if practical acquaintance with the process of scientific investigation is denied them, they may learn, by the ...
— Darwiniana • Thomas Henry Huxley
... blunts the faculties of man—-that because vainglory finds no vent in words, creatures supplied with eyes have been unable to detect a fault so gross and obvious. If a small spoiled dog were suddenly to be endowed with speech, he would prate interminably, and still about himself; when we had friends, we should be forced to lock him in a garret; and what with his whining jealousies and his foible for falsehood, in a year's time he would ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... transcendent Being and superessential Nothingness. Concerning this St Augustine says: the best thing that man can say about God is to be able to be silent about Him, from the wisdom of his inner judgement. Therefore be silent and prate not about God, for whenever thou dost prate about God, thou liest, and committest sin. If thou wilt be without sin, prate not about God. Thou canst understand nought about God, for He is above all understanding. A master saith: If I had a ...
— Light, Life, and Love • W. R. Inge
... a pretty fellow to prate about sallying forth at midnight to do good to thy fellow creatures!—Here we find thee, within an hour after thy departure from thy home, on an 'errand of mercy,' embraced in the soft arms of a pretty wanton, and revelling in the delights of voluptuousness. We might have ...
— City Crimes - or Life in New York and Boston • Greenhorn
... as well to put the best face on the matter; and, besides, I have never been able, all the days of me, to hide my light under a bushel, as the clerks prate about. ...
— Red Axe • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... beneficence, and close the ear to the wail of distress and the cry of suffering; to eulogize the intelligence of the people, and plot to deceive and betray them by means of their ignorance and simplicity; to prate of purity, and peculate; of honor, and basely abandon a sinking cause; of disinterestedness, and sell one's vote for place and power, are hypocrisies as common as they are infamous and disgraceful. To steal the livery of the Court ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... together prate, O'er punch or tea, of this or that, What silly poor unmeaning chat Does all their talk engross! A nobler theme employs my lays, And thus my honest voice I raise In well-deserved strains to praise The worthy Man ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel , Volume I. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... who are you that talk to me of dishonour?—you that come straying here out of the night with your cicisbeo at your heels? You, with the dew on you and your dress bedraggled, arrive straight from companioning in the woods and prate to me of shame—of the blood of the Colonne!" He smote a hand on the table and spat forth a string of vile names upon her, mixed with curses; abominable words before which she drew back cowering, yet less (I think) ...
— Sir John Constantine • Prosper Paleologus Constantine
... "What dost prate about?" he asked, still speaking roughly for he was wroth with her and hated to see the gaping crowd of young, empty-headed fools congregating round him and this persistent suppliant hanging round his ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... art not of those niggard souls, who deem That poesy is but to jingle words, To string sweet sorrows for apologies To hide the barrenness of unfurnished hearts, To prate about the surfaces of things, And make more thread-bare what was quite worn out: Our common thoughts are deepest, and to give Such beauteous tones to these, as needs must take Men's hearts their captives to the end of time, So that who hath not the choice gift ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, February 1844 - Volume 23, Number 2 • Various
... back again Brought the late-ejected devil with a score more in his train,— That's for you to judge. Reprieval I procured, at any rate. Ugh—the memory of that minute's fear makes gooseflesh rise! Why prate Longer? You've my story, there's your instance: ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... still than Edward's: Depart ye by the Scotch or English gate— Both shall be opened. Lade your beasts of burden— Take all you have—your food, your filthy gold, Your wives, your children, parents, and yourselves! Go to our Scottish king, and prate of courage! Or go to ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume XXIV. • Revised by Alexander Leighton
... thousand brothers, Could not, with all their quantity of love Make up my sum: And, if thou prate of mountains, let them throw Millions of acres on us, till our ground Singeing his pate against the burning zone Make Ossa like ...
— Shakspere, Personal Recollections • John A. Joyce
... multepova. Powerless senpotenca. Practical praktika. Practice (custom) kutimo. Practice praktiko, kutimo, uzado. Practise praktiki. Prairie herbejo. Praise lauxdi. Prank petoleco—ajxo. Prate babili. Prattle babili. Pray (religious) pregxi. Pray (to request) peti. Prayer pregxo. Prayer-book pregxlibro. Preach prediki. Preacher predikisto. Preaching predikado. Preamble antauxparolo. Prebendary kanoniko. Precarious duba, necerta. Precaution ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... "Nowadays we prate less priggishly about honor because it is no longer a word with a single meaning." He paused a moment, then went on in a climax of vehemence. "From this moment on your New England code and my inherited chivalry may be hanged on ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... shall we die?" asked Ghek. "Your people prate of the just laws of Manator, and yet you would slay three strangers without telling them of what ...
— The Chessmen of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... will drive me to desperation. I should like you to have my disease, and then we should see if you would prate as you do. Ah! here is ...
— The Imaginary Invalid - Le Malade Imaginaire • Moliere
... in the day, Hogan, for you and me to prate of honour?" asked Crispin bitterly, yet with averted gaze. "God knows my honour is as like honour as a beggar's rags are like unto a cloak of ermine. What signifies another splash, another rent in that which is tattered beyond all semblance ...
— The Tavern Knight • Rafael Sabatini
... Tricked for a part of woe and somber-drest. "Lo, who art thou," they ask, "that thou shouldst fret To find, forsooth, one single heart undone? The page thou turnest there is purple-wet With blood that gushed from Caesar overthrown! Lo, who art thou to prate of sorrow?" Yet, This little woe, it ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. 31, No. 1, May 1908 • Various
... who prate hypocritically about keeping their daughters' minds pure; and then abuse a girl's ignorance, in order to sell her to ruin. Let them keep her mind pure, in heaven's name; but let them consider themselves all the more bound in honour to use on her behalf the experience in which ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume II. • Charles Kingsley
... to be hoped for? Is not a soul athirst a joyous thing? Where lies content to him whose eye doth rest on higher things? What satiation can compare to hope? Yet who among the satisfied hath need of hope? What can he hope for if he's satisfied? 'Tis but conceit, and nothing more, to prate of satisfaction! God spare the day when I am satisfied! I do not want the earth, Yet nothing less will leave me quite content; And once 'tis mine, I'm very sure you'll find me roaming ...
— Cobwebs from a Library Corner • John Kendrick Bangs
... peace, old man! Neither good nor ill wilt thou ever prate of mortal more, for I've drawn thy sting. Once thou wert kind to me; twice, in return, did I steal for thee, and once took a beating from thy shoulders. But thou wert more loyal to thy master than thou wert friend to me—and in a matter such as this, I take no chances. As ...
— Nicanor - Teller of Tales - A Story of Roman Britain • C. Bryson Taylor
... saw the deed, Detesting the vexatious breed, Bespoke him thus: "When coxcombs prate, They kindle wrath, contempt, or hate; Thy teasing tongue, had judgment tied, Thou hadst not like ...
— Favourite Fables in Prose and Verse • Various
... which takes longer, and, accordingly, the nights are long. Such is the doctrine drawn from Holy Scripture, says Cosmas, and as for the vain blasphemers who pretend that the earth is a round ball, the Lord hath stultified them for their sins until they impudently prate of Antipodes, where trees grow downward and rain falls upward. As for such nonsense, the worthy Cosmas cannot ...
— The Discovery of America Vol. 1 (of 2) - with some account of Ancient America and the Spanish Conquest • John Fiske
... have edgtooles I graunte it; but does his grave majestie looke like a lorde of that mettall? Come, come, be not seveare; let us prate whylst ...
— A Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. III • Various
... secret triumph now elate, His grinning Rival 'gan to prate. Oh, fie! my friends; upon my word, You're too severe: he should be heard; For Mind can ne'er to glory reach, Without the usual aid of speech. If thus howe'er, you seal his doom, What hope have I unknown to Rome? But since the truth ...
— The Sylphs of the Season with Other Poems • Washington Allston
... much gall in it To let truth shape like that!—I also said That when my arms were round him I forgot That I was not his mother. So spoke I, But oh me,—I remembered it too well!— He was a lovely child; in his fond prate His father's voice was eloquent. One might say I am well punished for my ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... cried, "what doth this fellow prate of? ... Past love? ... Thou profane boaster! ... how darest thou speak of love to ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... would be a different thing indeed! Justice wears a sword, because she is of gentle birth. Work-people with axes must not prate of rights, or a prison will be their next one. Your right is to be disdained, young man, because you were not born a gentleman; and your duty is to receive scorn with your hat off. You like it, probably, because your father did. But come ...
— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore
... utter scoundrel, after all? Have you no honour left? Is there nothing in you to which a woman can appeal? You talk of being human! You prate of your man's nature! And in the same breath you threaten an innocent girl with public infamy, if she will not disgrace herself of her own free will! Is that your love? Did I give you mine for that? Shame on you! And shame on ...
— The White Sister • F. Marion Crawford
... witty Fetches, or hiding themselves in dark Holes, Closets, Beds, &c. We are all for Humour, Gallantry, Conversation, and Courtship, and shou'dn't endure the chief Lady in the Play a Mute, or to say very little, as 'twas agreeable to them: Our amorous Sparks love to hear the pretty Rogues prate, snap up their Gallants, and Repartee upon 'em on all sides. We shou'dn't like to have a Lady marry'd without knowing whether she gives her consent or no, (a Custom among the Romans) but wou'd be for hearing all the Courtship, all the rare and fine things that Lovers can say ...
— Prefaces to Terence's Comedies and Plautus's Comedies (1694) • Lawrence Echard
... shoot the pheasant, but it costs too much And does not tend to decimate the Dutch; Your duty plainly then before you stands, Conscription is the law for seagirt lands; Prate not of freedom! Since I learned to shoot I itch to ...
— Poems: New and Old • Henry Newbolt
... the countenance of the chancellor as he replied—"Such friendship, my lord, as is consistent with perpetual strife—open and concealed—shall, if it please you, subsist between us. Pardon me, but we prate a silly jargon when we talk of private friendship and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... Church as to the pillar of truth; to lay all their complaints before the Church; to hold for heathen all who are cast out of the Church; and that nevertheless so many men for so many centuries should not know where the Church is or who belong to it! This much only they prate in the darkness, that wherever the Church is, only Saints and persons destined for heaven are contained in it. Hence it follows that whoever wishes to withdraw himself from the authority of his ecclesiastical superior has only to persuade himself that the priest has fallen into ...
— Ten Reasons Proposed to His Adversaries for Disputation in the Name • Edmund Campion
... Hould your prate! Be still, Paddy! Tear an' ages, Molly Blake, don't be holding me that way; let us hear his reverence. Put him up on the barrel. Haven't you got a chair for the priest? Run, and bring a table out of Mat Haley's. Here, Father—here, your reverence; take care, will you,—you'll have ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 2 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... the Bunions that afflict us prate Of Plasters unsurpassable, and hate To Cut a corn—ah cut, and let the Plaster go, Nor murmur if the Solace come ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... who is the greater villain, you or I? You, who prate of your birth, rank and position in life, and propose a murder, or I, making no pretensions whatever, I that have committed a murder at the instigation of one of your class, in the hope of reward? ...
— Venus in Boston; - A Romance of City Life • George Thompson
... happiness, Alas! for human sorrow; Our Yesterday is nothingness, What else will be our Morrow? Still Beauty must be stealing hearts, And Knavery stealing purses; Still Cooks must live by making tarts, And Wits by making verses; While Sages prate and Courts debate, The same Stars set and shine; And the World, as it roll'd through Twenty-eight, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 351 - Volume 13, Saturday, January 10, 1829 • Various
... moreover,' said Diabolus, 'that there be spies continually walking up and down the town of Mansoul, and let them have power to suppress and destroy any that they shall perceive to be plotting against us, or that shall prate of what by Shaddai and ...
— The Holy War • John Bunyan
... against love?" Helen demanded, almost fiercely. "A sister may prate about them, Philippa. A wife couldn't. I'd sacrifice every principle I ever had, every scrap of self-respect, myself and all that belongs to me, to ...
— The Zeppelin's Passenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... half way," said the man Ruffo, meaning well. "I may have mistaken the driver. They cannot take hold of a river, how should they? Water slips through your fingers. Where it was set running in the beginning of the world, there it will go on running till the crack of doom. Let them look; let them prate; they can't ...
— The Waters of Edera • Louise de la Rame, a.k.a. Ouida
... of aversion are the rabbins. The sublimest passages of the Scriptures they shamefully corrupt. As a case in point, they prate concerning Enoch that, while he was good and righteous, he very much inclined toward carnal desires. God, therefore, out of pity, prevented his sinning and perishing through death. Is not this, I pray you, a shocking corruption of the text before us? ...
— Commentary on Genesis, Vol. II - Luther on Sin and the Flood • Martin Luther
... above! "My child, with pray'rs invoke his love, "The Almighty never errs?" "O, mother! mother! idle prate, "Can he be anxious for my fate, "Who never ...
— Translations of German Poetry in American Magazines 1741-1810 • Edward Ziegler Davis
... hardly courteous," replied Aymer, "and therefore scarce angels in disguise, even though you prate of the clouds. So if you wish to measure blades I shall not balk you. Nathless," as he slowly freed his own weapon, "it is a quarrel not ...
— Beatrix of Clare • John Reed Scott
... shore showers and fills with its rain our streams. And this, of a truth, I know—no fancy it is of mine: who holds mean his kith and kin, the meanest of men is he! And surely a foolish tongue, when rules not its idle prate discretion, but shows men where thou dwellest with ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... determined soul. Gifts count for nothing; will alone is great; All things give way before it soon or late. What obstacle can stay the mighty force Of the sea-seeking river in its course, Or cause the ascending orb of day to wait? Each well-born soul must win what it deserves. Let the fool prate of luck. The fortunate Is he whose earnest purpose never swerves, Whose slightest action or inaction serves The one great ...
— An Iron Will • Orison Swett Marden
... exclamations of wonder, they are remarks half-sceptically addressed. When a child says, "Why is grass green?" he half implies. "Is it really green, or is it just taking me in?" And we solemnly begin to prate about chlorophyll. Oh, imbeciles, ...
— Fantasia of the Unconscious • D. H. Lawrence
... die. I bore it, and still live; and it is so much harder for me, because I have to bear it all alone. You have your religion to help you, Margie. Surely that will bear you up! I have heard all you pious people prate enough of its service in time of trouble to ...
— The Fatal Glove • Clara Augusta Jones Trask
... die?" asked Ghek. "Your people prate of the just laws of Manator, and yet you would slay three strangers without telling them of what crime they ...
— The Chessmen of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... was going away, but the Princess held him back, and said: "Trouble me not with your prate, old man, nor mock my grief; I know Bova Korolevich; he is young and handsome, but you are old ...
— The Russian Garland - being Russian Falk Tales • Various
... rare that they are hardly to be found in perfection among the sons of men. The very fact of his greatness made his failings all the more dangerous and unfortunate. To be blinded by the splendor of his fame and the lustre of his achievements and prate about the sin of belittling a great man is the falsest philosophy and the meanest cant. The only thing worth having, in history as in life, is truth; and we do wrong to our past, to ourselves, and to our posterity if ...
— Daniel Webster • Henry Cabot Lodge
... principles of Masonic beneficence, and close the ear to the wail of distress and the cry of suffering; to eulogize the intelligence of the people, and plot to deceive and betray them by means of their ignorance and simplicity; to prate of purity, and peculate; of honor, and basely abandon a sinking cause; of disinterestedness, and sell one's vote for place and power, are hypocrisies as common as they are infamous and disgraceful. To ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... Claribel, Measure us back[407-62] to Naples? Keep in Tunis, And let Sebastian wake! Say, this were death That now hath seized them; why, they were no worse Than now they are. There be[407-63] that can rule Naples As well as he that sleeps; lords that can prate As amply and unnecessarily As this Gonzalo: I myself could make A chough[407-64] of as deep chat.[407-65] O, that you bore The mind that I do! what a sleep were this For your advancement! Do you ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 8 • Charles H. Sylvester
... that shall be told, he was sorry that it had ever passed his lips. Still in the boat Sir Geoffrey applauded him, saying that his lady's melancholy had grown beyond all bearing, and that she did little but prate to him about his will and what colour of marble he ...
— Red Eve • H. Rider Haggard
... god or demon? 290 With new kings rise new altars. But, proceed; You are sent to prate your master's will, and not Reply ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... pranks and ceremonies and entertainments; I have not time. I must wed her at once. Canst thou not see, under the circumstances, scandal-mongers will make eyes and prate of wrong for me thus to have a young maid here alone?" Now indeed this thought had not occurred to Constance in just this way; but now it struck her with a mighty force, and she shot at him a piercing glance through the ...
— Mistress Penwick • Dutton Payne
... a difference, lad," Cross pointed out, setting down the tankard of beer from which he had been drinking. "You talk sometimes that white-livered stuff about not hitting a man back if he wants to hit you, and you drag in your conscience, and prate about all men being brothers, and that sort of twaddle. A full-blooded Englishman don't like it, because we are all of us out to protect what we've got, any way and anyhow. But that doesn't alter the fact that there's something wrong in the world when ...
— The Devil's Paw • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... better man, and have something, therefore, for which to live. I have not—my heart can know no change. It is no longer under the guidance of reason. It is quite ungovernable now. There was a time when—but why prate of this?—it is too late to think of, and only maddens me the more. Besides, it makes not anything with you, and would detain you without a purpose. Linger no longer, Dillon—speed to the west, and, at some future day, ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... And this they wrote that another man wrote of a carl in Norroway." —"Ye have read, ye have felt, ye have guessed, good lack! Ye have hampered Heaven's Gate; There's little room between the stars in idleness to prate! O none may reach by hired speech of neighbour, priest, and kin Through borrowed deed to God's good meed that lies so fair within; Get hence, get hence to the Lord of Wrong, for doom has yet to run, And. . .the ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... tireless, restless, working. Only when men of other races, dark-skinned, dark-haired, and dark-eyed, passed his mental vision, was there the stillness of lazy rest; and Marmot was pleased, for he loved to prate of the Anglo-Saxon and the work they had done, and would do, for the ...
— Colonial Born - A tale of the Queensland bush • G. Firth Scott
... yet!' Sir George retorted fiercely. 'And I warn you that any one who lays a hand on me shall rue it. God, man!' he continued, horror in his voice, 'cannot you understand that while you prate here they are carrying her off, and that time ...
— The Castle Inn • Stanley John Weyman
... They prate and prattle pleasantly While riding on the way, To those their wicked uncle hired, These ...
— My First Picture Book - With Thirty-six Pages of Pictures Printed in Colours by Kronheim • Joseph Martin Kronheim
... You may prate of the fervour of Phoebus Of days that are calm and serene, When a tint as of teak is imposed on the cheek That is commonly pallid (when clean); But we have a taste that's aesthetic; Mere sunshine seems vulgar and crude, As we gather to gaze with artistic ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, August 19th, 1914 • Various
... of all fare?" Finn cried. "Strong drink, if it be too freely supplied, Or the prate of ...
— Ulf Van Yern - and Other Ballads • Thomas J. Wise
... fate partake, Spite of the immortal mixture in his make, He ripped her womb, and set the child at large, 120 And gave him to the centaur Chiron's charge: Then in his fury blacked the raven o'er, And bid him prate in his white plumes ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... a bowl that shall be quaff'd To loyalty's devotion, And here's to fortune that shall waft Your ship across the ocean, And here's a smile for those who prate Of Davy Jones's locker, And here's a pray'r in every ...
— John Smith, U.S.A. • Eugene Field
... is Antiochus, that he should prate Of peace to me, who am a fugitive? To-day he shall be lifted up; to-morrow Shall not be found, because he is returned Unto his dust; his thought has come to nothing. There is no peace between us, nor can be, Until this banner floats upon ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... couldst thou sit and hear This demon prate in upper air— Deeds horrible to maiden ear. Begone, thou spokest. Over-head The startled fiend his pinion spread, ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 1 July 1848 • Various
... spider swings And snares the people for the kings: "Luther is dead; old quarrels pass; The stake's black scars are healed with grass"; So dreamers prate;—did man e'er live Saw priest or woman yet forgive? But Luther's broom is left, and eyes Peep o'er their creeds to where it lies. Spin, spin, Clotho, spin! Lachesis, twist! and Atropos, sever! In the shadow, year out, year in, The ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various
... nothing else, is, for awhile at least, the king's highway of progress. Here, in England, too many painters and writers dwell dispersed, unshielded, among the intelligent bourgeois. These, when they are not merely indifferent, prate to him about the lofty aims and moral influence of art. And this is the lad's ruin. For art is, first of all and last of all, a trade. The love of words and not a desire to publish new discoveries, the love of form and not a novel reading of historical ...
— Across The Plains • Robert Louis Stevenson
... gained by Pat's being up with the pike and shillelagh on any or no occasion. God forbid Scotland should retrograde towards such a state—much better that the Deil, as in Burns's song, danced away with the whole excisemen in the country. We do not want to hear her prate of her number of millions of men, and her old military exploits. We had better remain in union with England, even at the risk of becoming a subordinate species of Northumberland, as far as national consequence is concerned, ...
— Political Pamphlets • George Saintsbury
... pardonable to imagine that a friend, a kind and apprehensive, though not the closest friend, is listening to our talk; and then, a native reserve being thawed by this genial consciousness, we may prate of the circumstances that lie around us, and even of ourself, but still keep the inmost Me behind its veil. To this extent, and within these limits, an author, methinks, may be autobiographical, without violating either the ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... there, it carries him through all difficulties as if they did not exist; every one of them has been foreseen and encountered in advance. Let no one come and prate about luck and chance. Amundsen's luck is that of the strong man ...
— The South Pole, Volumes 1 and 2 • Roald Amundsen
... they have never exchanged a word, in the silly belief they are raising themselves in the estimation of their auditors. It is an odd conceit, yet it prevails with the would-be fast young men of the present day. To hear some of these mollycoddles prate one who was not acquainted with their weaknesses would imagine these chaps were on intimate terms with players—who, as a rule, are slow to cultivate new acquaintances, attend strictly to their own business, ...
— A Pirate of Parts • Richard Neville
... own nose. But, if you called me out of hell merely for this chit-chat, permit me to return for ever. I have long known your inclination to prate about that which you ...
— Faustus - his Life, Death, and Doom • Friedrich Maximilian von Klinger
... Hood, "Thou dost prate like an ass, For were I to bend my bow, I could send a dart quite thro' thy proud heart, Before thou ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V3 • Charles H. Sylvester
... formed for all the witching arts of love: Though thus in arms they emulate her sons, And in the horrid phalanx dare to move, 'Tis but the tender fierceness of the dove, Pecking the hand that hovers o'er her mate: In softness as in firmness far above Remoter females, famed for sickening prate; Her mind is nobler sure, ...
— Childe Harold's Pilgrimage • Lord Byron
... patience, and be trew. This play was never liked, unlesse by few That brought their judgements with um, for of late First the infection, then the common prate Of common people, have such customes got Either to silence plaies, or like them not. Under the last of which this interlude, Had falne for ever prest downe by the rude That like a torrent which the moist south feedes, Drowne's both before him the ripe corne and weedes. Had not ...
— The Faithful Shepherdess - The Works of Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher (Vol. 2 of 10). • Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher
... those niggard souls, who deem That poesy is but to jingle words, To string sweet sorrows for apologies To hide the barrenness of unfurnished hearts, To prate about the surfaces of things, And make more thread-bare what was quite worn out: Our common thoughts are deepest, and to give Such beauteous tones to these, as needs must take Men's hearts their captives to the end of time, So that who hath not the choice gift of words Takes these into ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, February 1844 - Volume 23, Number 2 • Various
... woman? Can't folk have scones and bannocks and singing-hinnies, But you must prate of ...
— Krindlesyke • Wilfrid Wilson Gibson
... up, Sanford! You drive me frantic! You prate the same foolishness. over and over! I don't want to hear any more about it. You said you had spoken the last word on the subject, now stop it! I, too, have said my final say. I shall do as I please, and I shall not consider ...
— Raspberry Jam • Carolyn Wells
... we purely and simply have no choice to do as we list. This privilege is called license, not liberty. We have certain rights as men, but we have duties, too, as creatures, and it ill-becomes us to prate about our rights, or the duties of others towards us, while we ignore the obligations we are under towards others and our first duty which is to God. Our boasted independence consists precisely in this: that we owe to Him not only the origin of our nature, ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton
... becomes you well to prate of confidence and affection, who have ceased to think of your own wife, and have eyes alone for ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... living solitary, dying alone, unregretled, unmourned. What is the wickedness you are plotting? Your father is dead, you can do him neither good nor harm. This girl is alive. She loves you. Love her. Let the canting hypocrites prate as they will." ...
— The Manxman - A Novel - 1895 • Hall Caine
... to me about knowing," said the other, rather contemptuously. "Sure I gev in to you that he has a power o' prate, and the gift o' the gab, and all to that. I own to you that he has the-o-ry, and che-mis-thery, but he hasn't the craps. Now, the man that has the craps is ...
— Stories of Comedy • Various
... lad about bein' weak-kneed after you have shown the courage he has within the past four an' twenty hours. You an' your mutinous comrades prate loudly of bravery when there is no enemy in sight; but I'll lay odds that not one out of an hundred like you would dare go alone ...
— The Minute Boys of the Mohawk Valley • James Otis
... and avocations. The houses[61] and oratories of noble and burgess were rich with ivories exquisitely carved, with sculptures and paintings, tapestry and enamels: the very utensils of common domestic use were beautiful. Men did not prate of art: they wrought in love and simplicity. The very word art, as denoting a product of human activity different from the ordinary daily tasks of men, was unknown. If painting was an art, even so was carpentry. A mason was an artist: so was a shoemaker. Astronomy ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... these superfluities signify, but that the venter of them doth little skill the use of speech, or the rule of conversation, but meaneth to sputter and prate anything without judgment or wit; that his invention is very barren, his fancy beggarly, craving the aid of any stuff to relieve it? One would think a man of sense should grudge to lend his ear, ...
— Sermons on Evil-Speaking • Isaac Barrow
... since natural right is immutable, the right to contract marriage must always remain. For where nature does not change, that ordinance also with which God has endowed nature does not change, and cannot be removed by human laws. Therefore it is ridiculous for the adversaries to prate that marriage was commanded in the beginning, but is not now. This is the same as if they would say: Formerly, when men were born, they brought with them sex; now they do not. Formerly, when they were born, they brought with them natural right, now they do not. No craftsman (Faber) ...
— The Apology of the Augsburg Confession • Philip Melanchthon
... paws through the long nights of winter?—The panther would teach them savage cruelty and a speedy step, and the deer would counsel them to fly from the pursuit of a snail, or a land-tortoise, or the cry of a wren, or the prate of a jackdaw; the fox might teach them cunning, and the dog sagacity, and the wild cat nimbleness, and the antelope fleetness, and the wolf courage, and the owl an insight into my ways. But there must be a being to repress the insolence, and controul the rage, of the more savage ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 2 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones
... sight of Europe. The camp-fire is extinguished; the tent is furled. We are no longer happy nomads, masquerading in Moslem garb. We shall soon become prosaic Christians, and meekly hold out our wrists for the handcuffs of Civilization. Ah, prate as we will of the progress of the race, we are but forging additional fetters, unless we preserve that healthy physical development, those pure pleasures of mere animal existence, which are now only to be found among our semi-barbaric brethren. Our progress ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor
... children and simple-minded people, and the very babies in Concord knew and loved him. "Incorrigible spouting Yankee" he called himself; but he was rather a silent man in reality, and did not care to talk excepting when he had somewhat to say. He did not prate eternally of silence, as Carlyle did, while wreaking himself upon speech in the most frantically vehement manner all his days, but he knew when and how to be silent. The glimpses he gives of Mrs. Emerson, in the long correspondence with Carlyle, are all of the most pleasing nature, and his home ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... and after a little further chat, Captain Bouchier asked me for the honour of my hand, but I had previously resolved not to dance, and therefore declined his offer. But he took, of the sudden, a fancy to prate with me, and therefore budged not ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 1 • Madame D'Arblay
... curses me by all his gods. 'You think that you, now, I daresay, May push whatever stops your way, When you are to Maecenas bound!' Sweet, sweet, as honey is the sound, I won't deny, of that last speech, But then no sooner do I reach The dusky Esquiline, than straight Buzz, buzz around me runs the prate Of people pestering me with cares, All about other men's affairs. 'To-morrow, Roscius bade me state, He trusts you'll be in court by eight!' 'The scriveners, worthy Quintus, pray, You'll not forget they meet to-day, Upon a point both grave and new, One touching the whole ...
— Horace • Theodore Martin
... by this Congress is more menacing than merely a return to the past—bad as that would be. Our resplendent economic autocracy does not want to return to that individualism of which they prate, even though the advantages under that system went to the ruthless and the strong. They realize that in thirty-four months we have built up new instruments of public power. In the hands of a people's Government this power is wholesome and proper. But in the hands ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... fast when the others fast. They make a matter of conscience where there is none, and where there is matter of conscience they make none. This is all the fault of the preachers, because they continually prate of fasting, and never point out its true use, limit, fruit, cause and purpose. So also the sick should be allowed to eat and to drink every day whatever they wish. In brief, where the wantonness of the flesh ceases, ...
— Works of Martin Luther - With Introductions and Notes (Volume I) • Martin Luther
... think we'll quit the place, When Doll hangs out a newer face? Nail'd to her window full in sight All Christian people to invite. Or stop and light at Chloe's head, With scraps and leavings to be fed? Then, Chloe, still go on to prate Of thirty-six and thirty-eight; Pursue your trade of scandal-picking, Your hints that Stella is no chicken; Your innuendoes, when you tell us, That Stella loves to talk with fellows: But let me warn you ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift
... (of attorney) konfidatesto. Powerful multepova. Powerless senpotenca. Practical praktika. Practice (custom) kutimo. Practice praktiko, kutimo, uzado. Practise praktiki. Prairie herbejo. Praise lauxdi. Prank petoleco—ajxo. Prate babili. Prattle babili. Pray (religious) pregxi. Pray (to request) peti. Prayer pregxo. Prayer-book pregxlibro. Preach prediki. Preacher predikisto. Preaching predikado. Preamble antauxparolo. Prebendary kanoniko. Precarious ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... Alas, I fear these happy days when we Can loll in cooling shades while others toil For us, on stipends which like widow's mite Are small: will in the future disappear. These men who prate of slavery in these isles Do know full well that witness false they bear. We buy not souls and on the record place Their names among the chattels which we own, But their life's labor for a certain ...
— 'A Comedy of Errors' in Seven Acts • Spokeshave (AKA Old Fogy)
... mayhap you knew it. If not—why prate about it? It's on my own feet I must stand and not on my father's. If I am of any use you will find it out fast enough, father or no father; if I'm not 'twere best you ...
— The Story of Wool • Sara Ware Bassett
... puppy, daggled through the town, To fetch and carry sing-song up and down; Nor at rehearsals sweat, and mouth'd, and cried, With handkerchief and orange at my side; But sick of fops, and poetry, and prate, To Bufo left the whole ...
— The Poetical Works Of Alexander Pope, Vol. 1 • Alexander Pope et al
... Heaven's name in vain," cried Alan. "Who stood by while it was doing? Whose firmer hand lent aid to the murderer's trembling efforts? Whose pressure stifled her thrilling screams, and choked her cries for mercy? Yours—yours; and now you prate to me of pity—you, the slayer of the ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... significance and worth of the great facts of nature are interpreted and stated. "Complement of human kind, having us at vantage still, our sumptuous indigence, oh, barren mound, thy plenties fill! We fool and prate; thou art silent and sedate. To myriad kinds and times one sense the constant mountain doth dispense; shedding on all its snows and leaves, one joy it joys, one grief it grieves. Thou seest, oh, watchman tall, our towns and races grow and fall, and imagest the ...
— Confessions and Criticisms • Julian Hawthorne
... yet, however, ere he learned so to love goodness as to forget its beauty. To him who is good, goodness has ceased to be either object or abstraction; it is in him—a thirst to give; a solemn, quiet passion to bless; a delight in beholding well-being. Ah, how we dream and prate of love, until the holy fire of the true divine love, the love that God kindles in a man toward his fellows, burns the ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald
... not only rigorously in accordance with the canons of scientific logic, but that it is the only adequate method. Critics exclusively trained in classics or in mathematics, who have never determined a scientific fact in their lives by induction from experiment or observation, prate learnedly about Mr. Darwin's method, which is not inductive enough, not Baconian enough, forsooth, for them. But even if practical acquaintance with the process of scientific investigation is denied ...
— The Origin of Species - From 'The Westminster Review', April 1860 • Thomas H. Huxley
... church, that understands somewhat besides English: shall I not think that he understands that better? Must I (out of courtship to his Worship and Understanding; and because, perhaps, I am to dine with him) prate abundance of such stuff, which, I must needs know, nobody understands, or that will be the better for it but ...
— An English Garner - Critical Essays & Literary Fragments • Edited by Professor Arber and Thomas Seccombe
... good master," he said suavely, "do ye not waste your breath in speaking thus loudly. I understand that your sentiments towards me do not partake of that Christian charity of which ye and yours do prate at times so loudly. But I'll not detain you. Doubtless worthy Mistress Lambert will be awaiting you, or is it the sick mare down Minster way that hath first claim on your amiability? I'll ...
— The Nest of the Sparrowhawk • Baroness Orczy
... answered. "You, woman with the evil eye, do you suppose that I wish you here to bring all the ills you prate of upon my head? I say that I am afraid of you. Why, for your sake, once, years ago, I made a vow to the Blessed Virgin that, whatever I worked on men, I would never again lift a hand against a woman. To that oath I look to help me at ...
— Lysbeth - A Tale Of The Dutch • H. Rider Haggard
... that wavering of belief concerning his own impressions and motives which most human beings who have not a stupid inflexibility of self-confidence must be liable to under a marked change of external conditions. In a life where the experience was so tumultuously mixed as it must have been in the Prate's, what a possibility was opened for a change of self-judgment, when, instead of eyes that venerated and knees that knelt, instead of a great work on its way to accomplishment, and in its prosperity stamping the agent as a chosen instrument, there came the hooting and the spitting and the curses ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... parrot-prate, I suppose, is only intended to vex me," cried the warrior king, who always considered himself, and very naturally, a person of such consequence as ever to be uppermost in the thoughts and minds of others. "If thou must tell a tale, then tell one, Vampire! or else ...
— Vikram and the Vampire • Sir Richard F. Burton
... dissensions needed help from England against the savage on their borders have become a nation that may defy every foe but that most dangerous of all foes, herself, destined to a majestic future if she will shun the excess and perversion of the principles that made her great, prate less about the enemies of the past and strive more against the enemies of the present, resist the mob and the demagogue as she resisted Parliament and King, rally her powers from the race for gold and the delirium of prosperity ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... athirst a joyous thing? Where lies content to him whose eye doth rest on higher things? What satiation can compare to hope? Yet who among the satisfied hath need of hope? What can he hope for if he's satisfied? 'Tis but conceit, and nothing more, to prate of satisfaction! God spare the day when I am satisfied! I do not want the earth, Yet nothing less will leave me quite content; And once 'tis mine, I'm very sure you'll find me roaming off ...
— Cobwebs from a Library Corner • John Kendrick Bangs
... man - that because vain glory finds no vent in words, creatures supplied with eyes have been unable to detect a fault so gross and obvious. If a small spoiled dog were suddenly to be endowed with speech, he would prate interminably, and still about himself; when we had friends, we should be forced to lock him in a garret; and what with his whining jealousies and his foible for falsehood, in a year's time he would have gone far to weary out our love. I was about to compare him to Sir Willoughby Patterne, ...
— Memories and Portraits • Robert Louis Stevenson
... not blindly prating what the priest may prate, But to love, as God hath loved them, all things, be they small or great; And true bliss is when a sane mind doth a healthy body fill; And true knowledge is the knowing what is good ...
— Hindu Literature • Epiphanius Wilson
... dean craze creed tribe drone bean shape steep brine stone bead state sleek spire probe beam crape fleet bride shore lean fume smite blame clear mope spume spite flame drear mold fluke quite slate blear tore flume whine spade spear robe dure spine prate ...
— McGuffey's Eclectic Spelling Book • W. H. McGuffey
... about the usher, and Firth thought that though it was not wise in Hugh to prate about Crofton on the top of the coach, it was worse to sit by and listen without warning, unless the listener meant to hold his own tongue. But he fancied the usher had since heard something which ...
— The Crofton Boys • Harriet Martineau
... sound for the ancient heights! Clouds of the earth-born battle cloak The heaven that our fathers held from of old; And we—shall we prate to their sons of the gain In gold or bread? Through yonder smoke The heights that never were won with gold Wait, still bright with their old red stain, For the thousand chariots of God again, And the steel that swept thro' a hundred fights ...
— The Lord of Misrule - And Other Poems • Alfred Noyes
... — N. loquacity, loquaciousness; talkativeness &c adj.; garrulity; multiloquence^, much speaking. jaw; gabble; jabber, chatter; prate, prattle, cackle, clack; twaddle, twattle, rattle; caquet^, caquetterie [Fr.]; blabber, bavardage^, bibble-babble^, gibble-gabble^; small talk &c (converse) 588. fluency, flippancy, volubility, flowing, tongue; flow of words; flux de bouche [Fr.], flux ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... end thy lonely road, All for thy task and toward thy God, Thy footsteps day by day. That evil must exist, we prate, And wisely leave it to its ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, October, 1877, Vol. XX. No. 118 • Various
... seek The cool enchantment of the cove, and slake His thirst with its sweet waters bubbling pure, Where Love has spread for him her sweetest lure, The maids expectant listening, watch and wait His coming; oft in ecstacies they prate O'er his surprise, and softly sport and splash The limpid waves around, that glowing flash Like heaps of snowy pearls lung to the light By Hea's[1] hands, his Zir-ri[2] to delight. And now upon the rock each maid reclines, While Ishtar's form beneath them brightly shines; Beside the fountain ...
— Babylonian and Assyrian Literature • Anonymous
... tell me that. But give me some food, and then I'll prate with you as long as you please. At present I am starving. Four-and-twenty hours have elapsed since I last ...
— The Bravo of Venice - A Romance • M. G. Lewis
... prime lot of jackasses we Americans are!" he continued. "We talk of liberty and demand license; we prate of democracy and ...
— Cappy Ricks Retires • Peter B. Kyne
... tenses and moods of that amiable passion? But, my good friend, you have all this time spoke nothing but the paltry gossip which simpletons repeat from play-books and romances, till they give mere cant a real and powerful influence over their minds. Boys and girls prate themselves into love; and when their love is like to fall asleep, they prate and tease themselves into jealousy. But you and I, Frank, are rational beings, and neither silly nor idle enough to talk ourselves into any other relation than that of plain honest disinterested friendship. ...
— Rob Roy, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... courteous," replied Aymer, "and therefore scarce angels in disguise, even though you prate of the clouds. So if you wish to measure blades I shall not balk you. Nathless," as he slowly freed his own weapon, "it is a quarrel not ...
— Beatrix of Clare • John Reed Scott
... somewhat aggressively burst into a guffaw of derisive laughter. "Miss Loomis is just one of those admirable women," said he, "that empty-headed idiots prate about. I wish other people had half her sense." A luckless way of essaying the defence of the absent, for it reflected on ...
— Under Fire • Charles King
... when they prate of you and me, As the two gifts they want, Say Classic lore and Cookery Are things for which they pant; Believe me, my dear Heptarchy, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, September 17, 1892 • Various
... H.,—The date of my postscript "will prate to you of my whereabouts." We anchored between the Seven Towers and the Seraglio on the 13th, and yesterday settled ashore. [3] The ambassador [4] is laid up; but the secretary [5] does the honours ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Letters and Journals, Vol. 1 • Lord Byron, Edited by Rowland E. Prothero
... deficiency; while the good Count wished heartily within himself that his companion had been safely in bed with the enchanted Princess of Zulichium. She performed, right or wrong, the part of a panegyrist of the Normans, until at length the Count, tired of hearing her prate of she knew not exactly what, broke ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... far and wide, without inter- ruption, for so many years? Hold thy peace: to do otherwise, is to tell the foot to see, and the hand to speak. Britain has rulers, and she has watchmen: why dost thou incline thyself thus uselessly to prate?" She has such, I say, not too many, perhaps, but surely not too few: but, because they are bent down and pressed beneath so heavy a burden, they have not time allowed them to take breath. My senses, therefore, as if feeling a portion of my debt and obligation, preoccupied themselves ...
— On The Ruin of Britain (De Excidio Britanniae) • Gildas
... says a beau, And sneers at some ill-natured wit below; But faith, if we should tell but half we know, There's many a spruce young fellow in this place, Wou'd never presume to show his face; Women are not so weak, what e'er men prate; How many tip-top beaux have had the fate, T'enjoy from mama's secrets their estate! Who, if her early folly had made known, Had rid behind the coach that's ...
— The Palmy Days of Nance Oldfield • Edward Robins
... and his daughter, died of grief and mortification, almost penniless. And the Ducal widow is as poor as the mother—and three children to bring up! Children of the royal blood of Saxony, children sanctioned by the Church of which they prate so much, for there is no doubt that the pair married ...
— Secret Memoirs: The Story of Louise, Crown Princess • Henry W. Fischer
... verses: for this Epigramme is but an inscription or writting made as it were vpon a table, or in a windowe, or vpon the wall or mantel of a chimney in some place of common resort, where it was allowed euery man might come, or be sitting to chat and prate, as now in our tauernes and common tabling houses, where many merry heades meete, and scrible with ynke with chalke, or with a cole such matters as they would euery man should know, & descant vpon. Afterward the same came to be put in paper and in bookes, and vsed as ordinarie ...
— The Arte of English Poesie • George Puttenham
... none of the nobler attributes of man, and whose mission seems but destruction to his race, and deadly enmity to his country. The Times, who in these days of victory and triumph of Union arms, would "steal the livery of heaven to serve the devil in," and prate of its devotion to the Union, furnishes us some information it were well for good citizens to know, and which we will presume is (unlike most statements in that ...
— The Great North-Western Conspiracy In All Its Startling Details • I. Windslow Ayer
... long black veil is furled. Even the face of Heaven itself seems lost Behind a veil. It takes a fervent soul In these tense times To visualise a God so long defamed By insolent lips, that send out prayers, and prate Of God's collaboration in dark deeds, So foul they put to shame the ...
— Hello, Boys! • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... me too wrought the same Alcimedon A pair of cups, and round the handles wreathed Pliant acanthus, Orpheus in the midst, The forests following in his wake; nor yet Have I set lip to them, but lay them by. Matched with a heifer, who would prate ...
— The Bucolics and Eclogues • Virgil
... I go to the balls and the races A lonely companionless elf, And the ladies bestow all their graces On others less grey than myself; While the talk goes around I'm a dumb one 'Midst youngsters that chatter and prate, And they call me 'the Man who was Someone Way back in ...
— The Man from Snowy River • Andrew Barton 'Banjo' Paterson
... is there and this often deceives the very elect. Around every art studio are found the young men in velveteen who smoke infinite cigarettes, and throw off opinions about this great man and that, and prate prosaically in blase monotone of the Beautiful. Sometimes these young persons give lectures on "Art as I Have Found It"; but do not be deceived by this—the art that lives is probably being produced by small, shy, red-headed ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Musicians • Elbert Hubbard
... No. The most efficient murderer, a Macedonian boy. "I must civilize," he says. So he starts into his neighbor's country with forty thousand fighters at his back. Does Persia yield its banner? No. Then crush it. Does Thebes resist? Then burn it to the ground. Do the women prate of freedom? Load them with slave chains. What? Do they still hold out? Then slaughter the swine. And as men watch him wading through seas of blood, riding roughshod over prostrate lives and dead hopes and shattered empires, the blind age cries out, ...
— Prize Orations of the Intercollegiate Peace Association • Intercollegiate Peace Association
... they are not conscious of any such painstaking; it remains therefore to be the business of their childhood. And surely the great and multiplied labour of framing abstract notions will be found a hard task for that tender age. Is it not a hard thing to imagine that a couple of children cannot prate together of their sugar-plums and rattles and the rest of their little trinkets, till they have first tacked together numberless inconsistencies, and so framed in their minds ABSTRACT GENERAL IDEAS, and annexed them to every common name they make ...
— A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge • George Berkeley
... three; so about was SHE - The maiden I wronged in Peninsular days . . . You may prate of your prowess in lusty times, But as years gnaw inward you blink your bays, And see ...
— Wessex Poems and Other Verses • Thomas Hardy
... fops and fools together prate, O'er punch or tea, of this or that, What silly poor unmeaning chat Does all their talk engross! A nobler theme employs my lays, And thus my honest voice I raise In well-deserved strains to praise The worthy ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel , Volume I. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... and dreamers are not your last word in America. They tell me your ancestral Protestantisms are fast breaking down. Your churches are turning into concert and lecture rooms. Catholicism is growing among you,—science gaining on the quack-medicines! But there—there—I'll not prate. Forgive me. This has been a fascinating half-hour. Only, take care! I have seen you a Catholic once, for ...
— Eleanor • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... men of the Grenadier Guards ceased to be objects of admiration, and the War Office would have howled with exquisite torture at sight of their hair and clothes. Speak of wrapping clothes around head or body to keep out the dust? It is sheer nonsense to prate so. Why it is hard enough to gape and gasp and catch a mouthful of sanded breath, without that added worry. There is nothing for it, but to grin and bear it and get through with the swallowing of that proverbial peck of dust in a life-time, ...
— Khartoum Campaign, 1898 - or the Re-Conquest of the Soudan • Bennet Burleigh
... blood:—gaze on the self-same skies Do all your hosts adore the Deities we own? Nay, from your very midst come errors widely sown. Ibere for chief support on erring men relies Yet, what himself may do, to others he denies. What! Francion favor error! This is idle prate: He who from irreligion thoroughly purged the state! Who brought the worship back to altars in decay; Who built the temples up that in their ashes lay; True son of them, who, spite of all thy fathers' feats, Replaced my reverend priests upon their holy seats! 'Twixt Francion and ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume V. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... mothers who prate hypocritically about keeping their daughters' minds pure; and then abuse a girl's ignorance, in order to sell her to ruin. Let them keep her mind pure, in heaven's name; but let them consider themselves all the more ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume II. • Charles Kingsley
... Patriarchs yet hovered protectively over their people. Perhaps the Milovka study-house boasted even Cabbalists starving themselves into celestial visions and graduating for the Divine kiss. How infinitely restful after the Milovka market-place! No more, for that day at least, would he prate of ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... Lord, among other worse crimes, The whole was no more than a lie of The Times. It is monstrous, my Lord! in a civilis'd state That such Newspaper rogues should have license to prate. 90 Indeed printing in general—but for the taxes, Is in theory false and pernicious in praxis! You and I, and your Cousin, and Abb Sieyes, And all the great Statesmen that live in these days, Are agreed that no nation secure is from vi'lence ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... Art of the Household! Men may prate Of their ways "intense" and Italianate,— They may soar on their wings of sense, and float To the au dela and the dim remote,— Till the last sun sink in the last-lit West, 'Tis the Art at the Door ...
— Collected Poems - In Two Volumes, Vol. II • Austin Dobson
... Farmer Crouder, "Began to prate of corn; "And we found out they talk'd the louder, "The oftner pass'd ...
— Wild Flowers - Or, Pastoral and Local Poetry • Robert Bloomfield
... course no party could exist five minutes unless it had some good in it. There are several admirable principles in the Populist creed; there are enough windy theories to upset the Constitution of which they prate; and, by the way, the more wrong-headed a would-be statesman is the more hysterically does he plead for the Constitution. As to the other Senator—I sympathize as deeply with the farmer as any man, ...
— Senator North • Gertrude Atherton
... relations between the Duke and his daughter, died of grief and mortification, almost penniless. And the Ducal widow is as poor as the mother—and three children to bring up! Children of the royal blood of Saxony, children sanctioned by the Church of which they prate so much, for there is no doubt that the ...
— Secret Memoirs: The Story of Louise, Crown Princess • Henry W. Fischer
... our young men go abroad, it is no longer for clothes, nor to seek new laws in wretched printing shops, nor to study eloquence in the cafes of Paris. For now Napoleon, a clever man and a swift, gives us no time to prate or to search for new fashions. Now there is the thunder of arms, and the hearts of us old men exult that the renown of the Poles is spreading so widely throughout the world; glory is ours already, and so we shall soon again have our Republic. From laurels always springs ...
— Pan Tadeusz • Adam Mickiewicz
... Club, with his noddle full of new fangled notions about government, the clearest object of which is to establish the tail upon the head; a fellow who leaves you the statutes and law of old England, to prate of Rome and Greece—sees the Areopagus in Westminster-Hall, and takes old Noll for a Roman consul—Adad, he is like to prove a dictator amongst them instead. Never mind—d—n ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott
... combination and balance are so rare that they are hardly to be found in perfection among the sons of men. The very fact of his greatness made his failings all the more dangerous and unfortunate. To be blinded by the splendor of his fame and the lustre of his achievements and prate about the sin of belittling a great man is the falsest philosophy and the meanest cant. The only thing worth having, in history as in life, is truth; and we do wrong to our past, to ourselves, and to our posterity if we do not strive ...
— Daniel Webster • Henry Cabot Lodge
... man. I am a methodical man. Method is the thing, after all. But there are no people I more heartily despise than your eccentric fools who prate about method without understanding it; attending strictly to its letter, and violating its spirit. These fellows are always doing the most out-of-the-way things in what they call an orderly manner. Now here, I conceive, is a positive paradox. True method appertains to the ordinary and ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... faithfulness and loyalty are general human traits, nowhere more so than among those from whom they should not be expected; nowhere more so than among those who are debarred from hope. The great captains of industry so-called, themselves blown full of pride of circumstance, prate often of the inefficiencies of human cattle; yet continually the wonder remains that these same cattle continue to do that which their conscience tells them is right for them to do, and to do it for the sake of the doing. The lives of all of us are daily put in charge of beings ...
— The Law of the Land • Emerson Hough
... 'Aha!' said I, 'henceforth I have no cause To bid thee speak, thou cursed traitor thou! I'll shame thee, bearing truth of thee to men.' 'Away!' he answered: 'what thou wilt, relate: But, shouldst thou get from hence with breath again, Mention him too so ready with his prate." ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... if they did not fear this, they would restore Universal Suffrage. By clinging with desperate tenacity to the Restrictive law of May 31st, they virtually confess that their hopes of success involve the continued exclusion of Three Millions of adult Frenchmen from the Registry of Voters. When they prate, therefore, of the people's desire for Revision, the Republican retort is ready and conclusive—"Repeal the law of May 31st, and we can then tell what the people really desire. But so long as you maintain that law, you confess that you dare not abide ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley
... scholar, and none of the soberest of 'em neither, enquired what the meaning of that concourse of people was, it being upon the week day, and being told, That one Bunyan, a tinker, was to preach there, he gave a boy twopence to hold his horse, saying, He was resolved to hear the tinker prate; and so went into the church to hear him. But God met with him there by his ministry, so that he came out much changed, and would, by his good will, hear none but the tinker for a long time after, he himself becoming a very eminent preacher in that ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... the Conspirator in a hoarse cry, half fury, half contempt. "What is fear?—I know not the thing, nor the word!—Go, prate of fear to Cicero, and he ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 1 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... They drew me forth, and spite of me . . . enough! These buy and sell our pictures, take and give, 50 Count them for garniture and household-stuff, And where they live needs must our pictures live And see their faces, listen to their prate, Partakers of their daily pettiness, Discussed of—"This I love, or this I hate, This likes me more, and this affects me less!" Wherefore I chose my portion. If at whiles My heart sinks, as monotonous I paint These endless cloisters ...
— Men and Women • Robert Browning
... the sick man. "Silence your senseless prate! They will neither eat nor drink here. Tell the coachman that there are excellent accommodations at the Hurdlestone Arms for himself and his horses. But first see to your mistress—she is in a swoon. Carry her ...
— Mark Hurdlestone - Or, The Two Brothers • Susanna Moodie
... fervour, or patriotic enthusiasm, for its inspiration. It was the very law of their life, the essential spirit in them. They were unconscious of it as a man is unconscious of breathing, unless diseased. Their honour was not a thing to talk about. To prate about the honour of the army or the honour of England was like talking about the honour of their mother. It is not done. And yet, as Mark Antony said, "They were all honourable men," and there seemed an austerity of virtue ...
— The Soul of the War • Philip Gibbs
... confident I am Thy life is one of very little ease; Albeit men mock thee with their similes, And prate of being "happy as a clam!" What though thy shell protects thy fragile head From the sharp bailiffs of the briny sea? Thy valves are, sure, no safety-valves to thee, While rakes are free to desecrate thy bed, And bear thee off,—as foemen take their spoil,— Far ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... America. They tell me your ancestral Protestantisms are fast breaking down. Your churches are turning into concert and lecture rooms. Catholicism is growing among you,—science gaining on the quack-medicines! But there—there—I'll not prate. Forgive me. This has been a fascinating half-hour. Only, take care! I have seen you a Catholic once, for ...
— Eleanor • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... their borders have become a nation that may defy every foe but that most dangerous of all foes, herself, destined to a majestic future if she will shun the excess and perversion of the principles that made her great, prate less about the enemies of the past and strive more against the enemies of the present, resist the mob and the demagogue as she resisted Parliament and King, rally her powers from the race for gold and the delirium of prosperity ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... restless women who do these things have generally no homes or children to mind; what is the use of preaching the sacredness of motherhood when you will not allow them to be mothers? To what end prate of the duties of wifehood when you do not ask ...
— Modern marriage and how to bear it • Maud Churton Braby
... goods have been sold away to Phrygia and fair Meonia, for the hand of Jove has been laid heavily upon us. Now, therefore, that the son of scheming Saturn has vouchsafed me to win glory here and to hem the Achaeans in at their ships, prate no more in this fool's wise among the people. You will have no man with you; it shall not be; do all of you as I now say;—take your suppers in your companies throughout the host, and keep your watches and be wakeful every man of ...
— The Iliad • Homer
... I hear infidelity prate of the horrors of slavery and defend a Godless theory of the State, I remember that those who had it in its purity did not regard the slave as a man. When I read the story of slavery and hear an exponent of free thought say, "The doctrine ...
— The World's Great Sermons, Volume 10 (of 10) • Various
... performed rites of those, whether men or women, whether strangers or kinsfolk, from whose religion he disagrees. 'It is not ancient impressions only,' said Pascal, 'which are capable of abusing us. The charm of novelty has the same power.' The prate of new-born scepticism may be as tiresome and as odious as the cant of gray orthodoxy. Religious discussion is not to be foisted upon us at every turn either by defenders or assailants. All we plead for is that when the opportunity meets the freethinker full in front, ...
— On Compromise • John Morley
... and false are the vulgar taunts which attribute "treason" to those who, in the late secession of the Southern States, were loyal to the only sovereign entitled to their allegiance, and which still more absurdly prate of the violation of oaths to support "the Government," an oath which nobody ever could have been legally required to take, and which must have been ignorantly confounded with the prescribed ...
— The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government • Jefferson Davis
... brought her to my best ward, instead of merely suggesting it and giving up when she said no. If you had followed your heart, you would have choked the name and amount out of her and paid that devilish debt. You walk away in a case like that, and then have the nerve to come here and prate to me about following your heart. I'll wager my last dollar your heart is sore because you were not allowed to help her; but on the proposition that you followed its promptings I wouldn't stake a penny. That's ...
— The Harvester • Gene Stratton Porter
... Rose, smiling, "is, I admit, an irresistible pretension to favour, and Dame Gillian shall presently attend you.—But take my advice, lady—keep her to her bales and her mails, and let her not prate to you ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott
... Shakspeare. We have been obliged to criticise Shakspeare, and this criticism of him. Dryden measures himself with Juvenal, Lucretius, and Virgil. We, somewhat violently perhaps—with a gentle violence—construe a translation into a criticism, and prate too of those immortals. Glorious John modernizes Father Geoffrey; and to try what capacity of palate you have for the enjoyment of English poetry some four or five centuries old, we spread our board with a feast of veritable Chaucer. Yet not ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various
... fight? Woo't teare thy selfe? Woo't drinke vp Esile, eate a Crocodile?[6] Ile doo't. Dost thou come heere to whine; [Sidenote: doost come] To outface me with leaping in her Graue? Be[8] buried quicke with her, and so will I. And if thou prate of Mountaines; let them throw Millions of Akers on vs; till our ground Sindging his pate against the burning Zone, [Sidenote: 262] Make Ossa like a wart. Nay, and thoul't mouth, Ile rant as well ...
— The Tragedie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark - A Study with the Text of the Folio of 1623 • George MacDonald
... and he will defend the right. My crime is, that I will not go with the multitude to do evil. My singularity is, that when I say that Freedom is of God, and Slavery is of the devil, I mean just what I say. My fanaticism is, that I insist on the American people abolishing Slavery, or ceasing to prate of the rights of man. My hardihood is, in measuring them by their own standard, and convicting them out of ...
— No Compromise with Slavery - An Address Delivered to the Broadway Tabernacle, New York • William Lloyd Garrison
... to tell them what I was going to say to my romantic young friend. The days of chivalry are not gone. Let me remark that this assertion does not apply to the blatant, nigger-driving article that whilom flourished in Dixie, for that is about 'played out,' though they still rant and prate about the 'flower of chivalry.' At Fort Lafayette, there is an herbarium of choice specimens (rather faded and seedy) of that curious 'yarb;' and at the old Alton Penitentiary, and at Camp Douglas, Chicago, ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various
... Americans to stand on inviolate shores and prate of the wickedness of wrath. Moreover, this evil is not to be exorcised by a pious wish for it not to be. It is. And there is every excuse under the arch of heaven for ...
— In the Claws of the German Eagle • Albert Rhys Williams
... know nothing about this business, my hurler. You're a day before the fair. They're not married yet—but it's as good—so hould your prate about it till the knot's tied—then trumpet it through the town if ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... force me to write a book about Italy myself, to give them 'the loud lie.' They prate about assassination; what is it but the origin of duelling—and 'a wild justice,' as Lord Bacon calls it? It is the fount of the modern point of honour in what the laws can't or won't reach. Every man is liable to it more or less, according to circumstances or place. For instance, ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. IV - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... The Huns are thundering toward the citadel; They prate of Culture but their path is Hell; Their light is darkness, and the bloody sword They wield and worship is their only Lord. O land where reason stands secure on right, O land where freedom is the source of light, ...
— The Poems of Henry Van Dyke • Henry Van Dyke
... the psalmist saith, And half my course is well-nigh run; I've had my flout at dusty death, I've had my whack of feast and fun. I've mocked at those who prate and preach; I've laughed with any man alive; But now with sobered heart I reach The Great Divide ...
— Rhymes of a Rolling Stone • Robert W. Service
... scoundrels, leading scoundrelly lives, drunken, profligate, dissolute, low; as scoundrels will be. They don't quote Plato, like Eugene Aram; or live like gentlemen, and sing the pleasantest ballads in the world, like jolly Dick Turpin; or prate eternally about "to kalon,"[*] like that precious canting Maltravers, whom we all of us have read about and pitied; or die whitewashed saints, like poor "Biss Dadsy" in "Oliver Twist." No, my dear madam, you and your daughters have no right to admire and sympathise with any such persons, fictitious ...
— Catherine: A Story • William Makepeace Thackeray
... hadn't come up against that confounded artist-fellow! That had upset him, most absurdly. A half good-looking sort of fellow: a fellow who could prate with a certain brio; not unlikely to make something of a figure in the eyes of a girl ...
— The Emancipated • George Gissing
... Pratinas, who in fact considered precautions that were necessary to take among so blundering and thick-witted people as the Latins, almost superfluous. He muttered to himself, "I wouldn't dare to do this in Alexandria,—prate of a murder,—" and then ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis
... those who ask that they, too, may have a share in that abundance which is the common birthright of all. Do the political bully, the grafter, the tout, know the meaning of love? No; but they can be taught. Oh, not by the hypocritical millionaire pietists who prate their glib platitudes to their Sunday Bible classes, and return to their luxurious homes to order the slaughter of starving women and babes! They, like their poor victims, are deep under the spell of that ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... stage, Tricked for a part of woe and somber-drest. "Lo, who art thou," they ask, "that thou shouldst fret To find, forsooth, one single heart undone? The page thou turnest there is purple-wet With blood that gushed from Caesar overthrown! Lo, who art thou to prate of sorrow?" Yet, This little woe, it is my ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. 31, No. 1, May 1908 • Various
... traveller; "I know every step of the Caucasus. I have been where your serpents climb not, your tigers cannot mount, your eagles cannot fly. Make way, comrade: thy threshold is not on God's high-road, and I have no time to prate with thee." ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXIX. - March, 1843, Vol. LIII. • Various
... me, You shall have time to prate. My Lord Brachiano— Alas! I make but repetition Of what is ordinary and Rialto talk, And ballated, and would be play'd a' th' stage, But that vice many times finds such loud friends, That preachers are charm'd silent. You, gentlemen, Flamineo and Marcello, The Court hath nothing ...
— The White Devil • John Webster
... he came to disclose to me the intrigues of Metternich: at present, the opportunity is gone by; and he would every where proclaim me for a suspicious tyrant, who had sacrificed him without any cause. Go to him: say nothing to him of Montron or Bresson; let him prate at his ease, and bring me a full ...
— Memoirs of the Private Life, Return, and Reign of Napoleon in 1815, Vol. II • Pierre Antoine Edouard Fleury de Chaboulon
... this vulgar scoundrel to the dust, but at what a price! The convict's dress now worn by his brother would soon be worn by him. And what solace would it be then that the same suit would be worn by the impostor also? Yet why prate of solace in a matter like this? What alternative was left to him? In what quarter of the sky was the light dawning for him? He was traveling toward the deepening night, and the day of his ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine
... to secure good appointments and assume leading parts, and to be elected members of the venerable Westminster Assembly! They had not even had the courage to go to New England, though some of them had talked of doing so! And then their prate of this emigration to New England, which they had themselves declined, as the greatest undertaking for the sake of pure Religion, next to Abraham's migration out of his own country, that the world had ever seen! Why, the emigration to New England was no such great affair after all! There had been ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... retire from business, and for some time he had been thinking of going to see Sidonie, in order to interest her in his new schemes. That was not the time, therefore, to make disagreeable scenes, to prate about paternal authority and conjugal honor. As for Madame Chebe, being somewhat less confident than before of her daughter's virtue, she took refuge in the most profound silence. The poor woman wished that she were deaf and blind—that she never ...
— Fromont and Risler, Complete • Alphonse Daudet
... you are not flush of capital just now; but I have a little in my pocket, and can work for more. If you are not too proud to borrow a trifle from me now, I sha'n't be too proud to have it back again when you get rich. Don't let me prate, for I am rough and unhandy at it; but give me your hand like an honest man, and say, "Sebastian, I will do as you ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 343, May 1844 • Various
... stroke, is a matter for cheers, derisive or otherwise. The Rev. Septimus need not prate of golden days gone by. Boys at heart never change. And the atmosphere is so charged with electricity that a ...
— The Hill - A Romance of Friendship • Horace Annesley Vachell
... the world was not worthy of his labours. "What? Expose my noble work (things he had conceived but not done) to the prate and pettiness of the common buyers who hang it on their walls! No, I will rather paint the same monotonous round of Virgin, Child, and Saints in the quiet church, in the sanctuary's gloom. No merchant then ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... the woman who murmured of love and despair—she who believed in innocence and loyalty, is buried in the Tiber. She whom you rescued thence has received the baptism of shame; and you, Count Podstadsky, were her sponsor. You taught me the art of lying and deceiving, and now you prate to me of ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... intermarried with one another until the stock is worthless, and impotent for any further achievement. For here, you know, we have the best blood in America, and —for utilitarian purposes—that means the worst blood. Ah, we may prate of our superiority to the rest of the world,—and God knows, we do!—but, at bottom, we are worthless. We are worn out, I tell you! we are effete and stunted in brain and will-power, and the very desire of ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... my father were old friends and companions-in-arms in the service of the French king, and I came over from Ireland especially to take a dying message and a token from my father to the Earl. That is all you need know about that; but I would have you leave off your prate of your friend the Earl of Westport, for I understand full well you couldn't distinguish between him and a church door, although 'tis scandalously little you know of church doors. So we will stop there on that point. Then I will go on to the next point. The next ...
— The O'Ruddy - A Romance • Stephen Crane
... thou thing! Thou hast done a worthy deed, and earned the price Of blood, and they who use thee will reward thee. But thou wert sent to watch, and not to prate, As thou said'st even now—then do thine office, But let it be in silence, as behoves thee, Since, though thy prisoner, ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... gabble, murmur, prattle, blurt, chat, gossip, palaver, tattle, blurt out, chatter, jabber, prate, twaddle. ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... went these pretty babes, Rejoicing at that tide, Rejoicing with a merry mind, They should on cock-horse ride. They prate and prattle pleasantly, As they rode on the way, To those that should their butchers be, And work their ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 1 (of 4) • Various
... want you? Why you no helps me to? Upon my live. All trees have very deal bear. A throat's ill. You shall catch cold one's. You make grins. Will some mutton? Will you fat or slight? Will you this? Will you a bon? You not make who to babble. You not make that to prate all day's work. You interompt me. You mistake you self heavily. You ...
— English as she is spoke - or, A jest in sober earnest • Jose da Fonseca
... blood, as a matter of course! You may talk of iron, and prate of force; But, after all, and do what you can, The best—and cheapest—machine is Man! Wealth knows it well, and the hucksters feel 'Tis safer to trust them to sinew than steel. With a bit of brain, and a conscience, behind, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, October 4, 1890 • Various
... inscription or writting made as it were vpon a table, or in a windowe, or vpon the wall or mantel of a chimney in some place of common resort, where it was allowed euery man might come, or be sitting to chat and prate, as now in our tauernes and common tabling houses, where many merry heades meete, and scrible with ynke with chalke, or with a cole such matters as they would euery man should know, & descant vpon. Afterward the same came to ...
— The Arte of English Poesie • George Puttenham
... in vain," cried Alan. "Who stood by while it was doing? Whose firmer hand lent aid to the murderer's trembling efforts? Whose pressure stifled her thrilling screams, and choked her cries for mercy? Yours—yours; and now you prate to me of pity—you, the slayer of ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... Dog, who saw the deed, Detesting the vexatious breed, Bespoke him thus: "When coxcombs prate, They kindle wrath, contempt, or hate; Thy teasing tongue, had judgment tied, Thou hadst ...
— Favourite Fables in Prose and Verse • Various
... the glittering water falling from her tresses like golden stars; but never have I read an untruth in her pages. There is good intelligence between her and some on board; and, trust me, she knows the paths of the ocean too well, ever to steer a wrong course. But we prate like gossiping river-men.—Wilt see the Skimmer of ...
— The Water-Witch or, The Skimmer of the Seas • James Fenimore Cooper
... busy woman," Nancy groaned, "and I've hammered my finger to a pulp, trying to open this crate, while you perch on a broken step-ladder and prate to me of legacies. The saucers to these cups may be in here, and I can't wait to find out. I'm perfectly crazy about this ware. It's ...
— Outside Inn • Ethel M. Kelley
... with the canons of scientific logic, but that it is the only adequate method. Critics exclusively trained in classics or in mathematics, who have never determined a scientific fact in their lives by induction from experiment or observation, prate learnedly about Mr. Darwin's method, which is not inductive enough, not Baconian enough, forsooth, for them. But even if practical acquaintance with the process of scientific investigation is denied them, they may learn, by the perusal of Mr. Mill's admirable chapter "On ...
— Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews • Thomas Henry Huxley
... fault if I do not practise enough; for, of free will, I would do little else, only my father and tutor are angry sometimes, and only Miss Lucy there gives herself airs about my being busy, for all she can sit idle by a well-side the whole day, when she has a handsome young gentleman to prate with. I have known her do so twenty times, if you will ...
— Bride of Lammermoor • Sir Walter Scott
... of the scholars were renewed, and further intimations of violence were exhibited. Again the peas rattled upon the hands and faces of the halberdiers, till their ears tingled with pain. "Prate to us of the king's favorites," cried one of the foremost of the scholars, a youth decorated with a paper collar: "they may rule within the precincts of the Louvre, but not within the walls of the university. Maugre-bleu! We hold them cheap enough. We heed not the idle ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... with the period of military failures and diplomatic slights. Let Napoleon III., they said in effect, imitate the policy of his uncle, who, as long as he dazzled France by triumphs, could afford to laugh at the efforts of constitution-mongers. The big towns might prate of liberty; but what France wanted was glory and strong government. Such were their pleas: there was much in the past history of France to support them. The responsible advisers of the Emperor determined to take a stronger tone in foreign affairs, ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... geology be correct, was not always thus a watering-place; but seems, for a long period, to have been a place under water. The very stones prate of Neptune's whereabouts in days of langsyne. No one who has seen what heaps of rounded pebbles are gleaned from the corn-fields, or become familiar with the copious remains of fresh water shells and insects, which are kneaded into the calcareous ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 365, March, 1846 • Various
... sugar prate! They do not care one dump About the blacks and their sad state— Just ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, July 24, 1841 • Various
... trust I placed in you, sirrah?' he rejoined, in a terrible voice; and stooping still farther forward he probed me with his eyes. 'You who prate of trust and confidence, who received your life on parole, and but for your promise to me would have been carrion this month past, answer me that? What of the ...
— Under the Red Robe • Stanley Weyman
... rate; For then, thank God, I shall not have to wait Much longer for the sheaves that I have sown. The devil only knows what I have done, But here I am, and here are six or eight Good friends, who most ingenuously prate About my songs to such and ...
— The Children of the Night • Edwin Arlington Robinson
... the playhouses which multiply around us like weeds sown in the rank soil of human frailty, what justification you make to yourselves when you are alone in the watches of the night, and your conscience saith, 'What went ye out for to see?' You will then complain of the bitterness of life, and prate of the refining influences of music; of the help to spiritual-mindedness given by the exhibition on the public stage of mockeries of God's world, wherein some pitiful temporal triumph of simulated virtue in the last act is the apology for the vicious ...
— The Irrational Knot - Being the Second Novel of His Nonage • George Bernard Shaw
... showed white men, the men of the Anglo-Saxon blood, tireless, restless, working. Only when men of other races, dark-skinned, dark-haired, and dark-eyed, passed his mental vision, was there the stillness of lazy rest; and Marmot was pleased, for he loved to prate of the Anglo-Saxon and the work they had done, and would do, for the world that gave ...
— Colonial Born - A tale of the Queensland bush • G. Firth Scott
... who deserves what he will get. For once I shall not be sorry to see a lad get on, who has been brought up in the school of adversity. But, pshaw! he will be like all the rest. Prosperity will turn his brain. Already he begins to prate of his ancestors. . . . Poor humanity he almost made me laugh. . . . But it is mother Gerdy who surprises me most. A woman to whom I would have given absolution without waiting to hear her confess. When I think that I was on the point of ...
— The Widow Lerouge - The Lerouge Case • Emile Gaboriau
... earliest pretending breaks down quickly. What, after all, is the sum of those doings in the shrub-house? What would Pippa gain, were she in truth great haughty Ottima? She would but "give abundant cause for prate." Ottima, bold, confident, and not fully aware, can face that out, but Pippa knows, more closely than the woman rich ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... old ones prate of!—Bah, what is't they want? 'Some one to work for me, when I am old; Some one to follow me unto my grave; Some one—for me!' Yes, yes. There is not one Old huddler-by-the-fire would shift his seat To a cold corner, if it might bring back All of ...
— The Piper • Josephine Preston Peabody
... declare that to be President of the United States is the most honorable office a man can hold, and our elected candidates (except when they have the splendid self-abnegating courage of a Cleveland!) wade to Washington through a perfect bog of venal promises. We prate of our democratic institutions, and forget that free trade is one of the first proofs of a free people, and that protected industries are the feudalism of manufacture. We sneer at the corruption of a Jeffreys or ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 20, July, 1891 • Various
... language blunts the faculties of man—that because vainglory finds no vent in words, creatures supplied with eyes have been unable to detect a fault so gross and obvious. If a small spoiled dog were suddenly to be endowed with speech, he would prate interminably, and still about himself; when we had friends, we should be forced to lock him in a garret; and what with his whining jealousies and his foible for falsehood, in a year's time he would have gone far to weary out our love. I was about to compare him to Sir Willoughby ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... John Adams, speaking of a conversation with Arbuthnot, a Boston physician, says: "He began to prate upon the presumption of philosophy in erecting iron rods to draw the lightning from the clouds. He railed and foamed against the points and the presumption that erected them. He talked of presuming upon God, as Peter attempted to walk ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... gods can be Full oft in need of recreation,— Who rules the world,—right well may I, Who serve him in that high relation: Amuse me, then, before you fly.' Our cackler, pleased, at quickest rate Of this and that began to prate. Not he of whom old Flaccus writes, The most impertinent of wights, Or any babbler, for that matter, Could more incontinently chatter. At last she offer'd to make known— A better spy had never flown— All things, whatever she might see, In travelling ...
— The Fables of La Fontaine - A New Edition, With Notes • Jean de La Fontaine
... first at the levee and then at the drawing-room; and he reprehended him very sharply at both places. An explanation afterwards took place through Lord Camden, to whom he said that he was angry because de Saumarez would prate at the levee, when he told him that it was not a proper ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. III • Charles C. F. Greville
... "You prate of respect due the Majesty. There's nothing to induce feelings of that sort. Round me there is naught but weakness, hypocrisy, pettiness. I see shame and thievery stalking side by side in these gilded halls—gilded for show, but ...
— Secret Memoirs: The Story of Louise, Crown Princess • Henry W. Fischer
... konfidatesto. Powerful multepova. Powerless senpotenca. Practical praktika. Practice (custom) kutimo. Practice praktiko, kutimo, uzado. Practise praktiki. Prairie herbejo. Praise lauxdi. Prank petoleco—ajxo. Prate babili. Prattle babili. Pray (religious) pregxi. Pray (to request) peti. Prayer pregxo. Prayer-book pregxlibro. Preach prediki. Preacher predikisto. Preaching predikado. Preamble antauxparolo. ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... confronting him with an anger before which he recoiled, appalled. "Do you dare to stand there and prate of honour—you? Do you forget why he stood his trial? Do you forget why he is dying, and can you not see the vile thing that you are doing in arguing flight, that you talk of honour thus, and deny his claim to it? Mon Dieu! Your effrontery stifles ...
— The Trampling of the Lilies • Rafael Sabatini
... seems to me ridiculously inconsistent for gentlemen upon this floor to prate so much about a republican form of government, and rise here and offer resolution after resolution about the Monroe doctrine and the downtrodden Mexicans, while they force upon the people of this District a government not of their own choice, ...
— History of the Thirty-Ninth Congress of the United States • Wiliam H. Barnes
... in everlasting robes This democrat is dressed, Then prate about "preferment" And "station" and ...
— Poems: Three Series, Complete • Emily Dickinson
... real. They know what is right. Besides, consult the grand thermometer of opinion, the price of the funds: on the 17th Brumaire at 11 francs, on the 20th at 16 and to-day at 21. In such a state of things I may let the Jacobins prate as they like. But let them not talk too ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... is considered how much of sacrifice the poverty-stricken must bear in order to procure the slightest gratification, should it not impress the thinking mind with amazement, how much of fortitude and patience the honest poor display in the exercise of self-denial! Oh! ye prosperous! prate of the uses of adversity as poetically as you please, we who are obliged to learn of them by bitter experience would greatly prefer a change ...
— From the Darkness Cometh the Light, or Struggles for Freedom • Lucy A. Delaney
... not say, and we'll see if I don't succeed in organizing a little crusade against you." And animated by the sound of his own words, his anger came back to him, and in a louder and ever louder voice he continued: "Ah! you prate of the scandal that would be created by my resistance to your demands. That's your system; but, with me, it won't succeed. You threaten me with a law-suit; very good. I'll take it upon myself to enlighten Paris, for ...
— Baron Trigault's Vengeance - Volume 2 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau
... beneath the inevitable diminutive—Flossie; or he will build up painfully, inch by inch, a barrier against the name's corroding action. He will boast of his biceps, flexing them the while. He will brag about cold baths. He will prate of chest measurements; regard golf with contempt; and speak of the ...
— Gigolo • Edna Ferber
... brought. 'T was in those days an honest grace would hold Till an hot pudding grew at heart a-cold, And men had better stomachs for religion, Than now for capon, turkey-cock, or pigeon; When honest sisters met to pray, not prate, About their own and not their neighbors' state, During Plain Dealing's reign, that worthy stud Of the ancient ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... most human beings who have not a stupid inflexibility of self-confidence must be liable to under a marked change of external conditions. In a life where the experience was so tumultuously mixed as it must have been in the Prate's, what a possibility was opened for a change of self-judgment, when, instead of eyes that venerated and knees that knelt, instead of a great work on its way to accomplishment, and in its prosperity stamping ...
— Romola • George Eliot
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