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Pabulum   Listen
noun
pabulum  n.  
1.
The means of nutriment to animals or plants; food; nourishment.
Synonyms: comestible, edible, eatable, victual, victuals.
2.
Hence: That which feeds or sustains, such as fuel for a fire; especially, That upon which the mind or soul is nourished; intellectual sustenance; as, intellectual pabulum.
Synonyms: food for thought, intellectual nourishment.
3.
Trite or simplistic writing, sentiments, etc.; pablum (3).






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Pabulum" Quotes from Famous Books



... During this period Hegel's views, consciously or unconsciously, penetrated the different sciences, and saturated popular literature and the daily press from which the ordinary so-called cultured classes derive their mental pabulum. But this victory down the whole line was only preliminary to a conflict within ...
— Feuerbach: The roots of the socialist philosophy • Frederick Engels

... can vouch that the presence of some persons affected her as a pabulum vitae, while, if left with certain others or alone, she was sure ...
— Summer on the Lakes, in 1843 • S.M. Fuller

... every sentence and every paragraph with a climax, might be a very perfect bit of mosaic, but would want the glow and movement of a living mind. Monotony would settle on it like a paralysing frost. A series of sentences in which every phrase was a distinct thought, would no more serve as pabulum for the mind, than portable soup freed from all the fibrous tissues of meat and vegetable would serve as food for the body. Animals perish from hunger in the presence of pure albumen; and minds would lapse into idiocy in the presence of unadulterated ...
— The Principles of Success in Literature • George Henry Lewes

... well to remember that in nature putrefactive ferments must go on to an extent rarely imitated or followed in the laboratory. As a rule, the pabulum in which the saprophytic organisms are provided and "cultured" is infusions, or extracts of meat carefully filtered, and, if vegetable matter is used, extracts of fruit, treated with equal care, and if needful neutralized, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 643, April 28, 1888 • Various

... after the spirit leaves the body. It is the "similacrum" of the body, and is often mistaken for the immortal part, the enfranchised spirit. But the spirit is generally unawakened and can only grow with the pabulum of spiritual influence, in harmony with spiritual law. It is this that complicates this life and retards the at-one-ment of the greatest of all trinities; body, soul and spirit, the natural three in one. The soul element is the bequest of the parents—especially of the mother—to their progeny. ...
— Insights and Heresies Pertaining to the Evolution of the Soul • Anna Bishop Scofield

... regarded as lacking value in themselves; their worth lay in their promise of being men and women; and if, owing to ill health, this promise was very doubtful, they were put aside. For education they were given that mental pabulum that was considered valuable to the adult; and their tastes, habits, and manners were judged ...
— How To Study and Teaching How To Study • F. M. McMurry

... Savannah, and our Nations did not arrive until after supper. It used to be said by certain scoffers that if a discussion of political questions came up in the afternoon of one of those days of disappointment, we readers were mum; but in the late evening, after having digested our political pabulum, we were ready to join issue with any antagonist. Indeed, each of us might have used the words of James Russell Lowell, written while he was traveling on the Continent and visiting many places where The Nation could not ...
— Historical Essays • James Ford Rhodes

... begirt by men in whose veins there flows the blood of martyrs, who have been slowly nurtured upon such stately doctrines as are their daily food, who actually believe in God as a living participator in the affairs of time, whose mental pabulum has been Thomas Boston and Samuel Rutherford and Philip Doddridge, and who have used these worthies but as helps to climb that unpinnacled hill of the Eternal Word—when you get such men as these, multiplied a hundredfold by the stern consciousness of a religious trust, if ...
— St. Cuthbert's • Robert E. Knowles

... consist in Latin continued, with Greek added, and in the acquisition through these tongues, and otherwise, of a knowledge of all the useful Sciences and Arts. Here, indeed, Milton's utilitarian bent, his determination to substitute a pabulum of real knowledge for the studies then customary in schools, asserts itself most conspicuously. Here it is that he approaches most to Comenius in the substance, though with a difference in the manner. For what were the books he would exercise his pupils on at this stage, i.e. ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson

... l. 411. The seeds in their natural state fall on the surface of the earth, and having absorbed some moisture the root shoots itself downwards into the earth and the plume rises in air. Thus each endeavouring to seek its proper pabulum directed by a vegetable irritability similar to that of the lacteal system and to ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin

... chiefly necessary for the nourishment of Lady Lufton—the only food absolutely necessary. She was not aware of this herself, nor probably would those who knew her best have so spoken of her. They would have declared that family pride was her daily pabulum, and she herself would have said so too, calling it, however, by some less offensive name. Her son's honour, and the honour of her house!—of those she would have spoken as the things dearest to her in this world. And this was partly true, for had her son been dishonoured, she would have sunk with ...
— Framley Parsonage • Anthony Trollope

... peninsula, Islam is accepted and practised in all degrees of purity, from the orthodox worship, conducted in the grand and beautiful mosques of Delhi and Agra, to the grovelling, superstitious, heathenish ceremonies which obtain among, and which constitute the religious pabulum of, the masses of Islam in remote villages and in ...
— India, Its Life and Thought • John P. Jones

... sketches on the boards. The advertisement was drawn up in an ingenious and witty style, and consequently the Romans formed a favourable preconception of Musso's enterprise; but independently of this they would in their longing to still their dramatic hunger have greedily snatched at any the poorest pabulum of this description. The interior arrangements of the theatre, or rather of the small booth, did not say much for the pecuniary resources of the enterprising manager. There was no orchestra, nor were there boxes. Instead, a gallery was put up at the back, where ...
— Weird Tales. Vol. I • E. T. A. Hoffmann

... indifference and good nature became a shield for the Machiavellian editors who now began to write not for the benefit of America but for the benefit of Germany. Political scandals, odious comparisons of American and German methods, and adroit criticisms of American ways were the daily pabulum fed to the German reader, who was left with the impression that everything in the United States was wrong, while everything in Germany was right. Before the United States entered the Great War, there was a most remarkable unanimity of expression among these German ...
— Our Foreigners - A Chronicle of Americans in the Making • Samuel P. Orth

... a writer! Happy M. Hugo! Your fancies crossed the ocean, and, transmitted into a new tongue, whiled away the dreary hours of the old soldiers of Lee, at Petersburg! Thus, that history of "The Wretched," was the pabulum of the South in 1864; and as the French title had been retained on the backs of the pamphlets, the soldiers, little familiar with the Gallic pronunciation, called the book "Lees Miserables!" Then another step was taken. It was no longer ...
— Mohun, or, The Last Days of Lee • John Esten Cooke

... in which the almond, hazel, walnut, cocoa-nut, and such others would be considered as having relationship, at least in their power of secreting a crisp and sweet substance which is not wood, nor bark, nor pulp, nor seed-pabulum reducible to softness by boiling;—but quite separate substance, for which I do not know that there at present exists any botanical name,—of which, hitherto, I find no general account, and can only myself give so much, on reflection, as that it is crisp and ...
— Proserpina, Volume 1 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin

... intended by the Supreme Being to affect mankind in any way, unless we admit that the spiritual and religious necessities of mankind, and, in fact, the very constitution itself of human spirit, are entirely different from what they have been in the ages gone by, and require not only a different pabulum, but also a different mode of dealing at the hands of the Almighty: in a word, that the very ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 5, November, 1863 • Various

... the contemplation of these sixty stately folios, embracing about a thousand pages each, would be a most healthy exercise for the men of this age. This is the halcyon period of primers, introductions, handbooks, manuals. "Knowledge made Easy" is the cry on every side. We take our mental pabulum just as we take Liebig's essence of beef, in a very concentrated form, or as hom[oe]opathists imbibe their medicine, in the shape of globules. I do not desire, however, to say one word against such publications. The great scholars of the seventeenth century, the Bollandists, Casaubon, ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various

... quomodo hc eluceat veritatis et candoris prstantia. Iumenta non habemus prterquam equos et boues: His gramina et foenum (nisi vbi foeni inopia obrepit) pabulum, aqua potum prbet. At hi ipsi scriptores fatentur, Islandos piscibus, butyro, carnibus, tum bubulis, tum ouillis, etiam frumento, licet pauco et aduentitio viuere. Non igitur cibum habent cum brutis communem, quod tamen ijdem his verbis ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries - of the English Nation, v. 1, Northern Europe • Richard Hakluyt

... inductive fits and our deductive fits, our arrangements according to the letter and according to the spirit, our conclusions drawn from logic secundum artem and from absurdity and the character of the arguer. This heterogeneous mass of considerations forms the mental pabulum with which we feed our minds. How that pabulum becomes amalgamated, reduced to uniformity and turned into the growth of complete opinion we can no more tell than we can say when, how and where food becomes flesh and blood. All we ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler

... was a romanticist and fed his brain on pabulum from the pen of Mr. Fergus Hume and other ingenious concocters of peripatetic mystery, wondered as he gave his horse a meaning lash with his whip—a tribute to the beauty of the fare—"Wot the dickens she was h'up to, with 'er big eyes ...
— The Halo • Bettina von Hutten

... eas spectans, tantum quantum sat est. 49 At illa quanti sunt, animum tamquam emeritis stipendiis libidinis ambitionis, contentionum inimicitiarum, cupiditatum omnium secum esse secumque, ut dicitur, vivere! Si vero habet aliquod tamquam pabulum studi atque doctrinae, nihil est otiosa senectute iucundius. Videbamus in studio dimetiendi paene caeli atque terrae Gallum familiarem patris tui, Scipio. Quotiens ilium lux noctu aliquid describere ingressum, quotiens ...
— Cato Maior de Senectute • Marcus Tullius Cicero

... of invertebrate subtleties, strained metaphysics and coarse naturalistic studies. A sublimated dime novel like "Treasure Island" came at the psychologic moment; the year before "The New Arabian Nights" had offered the same sort of pabulum, but had been practically overlooked. Readers were only too glad to turn from people with a past to people of the past, or to people of the present whose ways were ways of pleasantness. Stevenson substituted a lively, normal interest in life for plotlessness ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton

... mental pabulum of these two men consisted of an offended nasal comment extended through the years upon the institution—army, business, or poorhouse—which kept them alive, and toward their immediate superior in that institution. Until that very morning the institution ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald

... his own thoughts by the hour together. It may be that he will smoke; but after awhile his cigar will come to an end. He sits on, however, certainly patient, and apparently contented. It may be that he chews, but if so, he does it with motionless jaws, and so slow a mastication of the pabulum upon which he feeds, that his employment in this respect only disturbs the absolute quiet of the circle when, at certain long, distant intervals, he deposits the secretion of his tobacco in an ornamental utensil which ...
— Volume 2 • Anthony Trollope

... on such a night, what must not the conflagration have been, fed by such pabulum—as Sir Robert himself would have said—as that on which it glutted its fiery and consuming appetite. We have said that the offices and dwelling-house ran parallel with each other, and such was the fact. What appeared singular, and not without the possibility of ...
— Willy Reilly - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton

... philosophy which is rational is of all knowledges, to the most wits, the least delightful, and seemeth but a net of subtlety and spinosity. For as it was truly said, that knowledge is pabulum animi; so in the nature of men's appetite to this food most men are of the taste and stomach of the Israelites in the desert, that would fain have returned ad ollas carnium, and were weary of manna; which, though it were celestial, yet seemed less nutritive and comfortable. So generally men ...
— The Advancement of Learning • Francis Bacon

... that he had studied most and thought upon most deeply. To many people in his station the Bible, and perhaps Burns, are the only books of any vital literary merit that they read, feeding themselves, for the rest, on the draff of country newspapers, and the very instructive but not very palatable pabulum of some cheap educational series. This was Robert's position. All day long he had dreamed of the Hebrew stories, and his head had been full of Hebrew poetry and Gospel ethics; until they had struck deep ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson

... versions of classical stories, which formed the imaginative pabulum of the age, and in readapting older plays, the poet was gaining that skill and power which were to produce his ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee

... Trypho emeritus,' and as 'one of the honestest men living, to whom, as a bookseller, learning is under considerable obligations.' Beloe, in his 'Sexagenarian,' states that at Tom Payne's and at Peter Elmsley's, in the Strand, 'a wandering scholar in search of pabulum might be almost certain of meeting Cracherode, George Steevens, Malone, Wyndham, Lord Stormont, Sir John Hawkins, Lord Spencer, Porson, Burney, Thomas Grenville, Wakefield, Dean Dampier, King of Mansfield Street, Towneley, Colonel Stanley,' and ...
— The Book-Hunter in London - Historical and Other Studies of Collectors and Collecting • William Roberts

... handed down by him. During that time, only the logical treatises existed among the Latins; and of these the best parts were neglected. Historical importance attaches to a small circle of them known as the Old Logic (vectus logica), which were the pabulum of abstract thought for five dreary centuries. These consisted of the two treatises or chapters of Aristotle called the "Categories," and the "De Interpretatione," or the Theory of Propositions; and of a book of Porphyry the Neo-Platonist, ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain

... hollowness was upon him again. His life there reminded him of a gaudy drop-scene, let down before an empty stage; a painted sham, with darkness and vacuity behind. At bottom, none of these distinctions and successes meant anything to him; not a scrap of mental pabulum could be got from them: rather would he have chosen to be poor and a nobody among people whose thoughts flew to meet his half-way. And there was also another side to it. Stingy though the years ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson

... those who have laboured in kindred “fields of literature.” Indeed, we do not so much blame the editors of such books as we blame the public, whose coarse and vulgar mouth is always agape for such pabulum. The writer of this review possesses an old circulating-library copy of a book containing some letters of Coleridge. One page, and one only, is greatly disfigured by thumb marks. It is the page on which appears, not some precious hint as to the conclusion of ‘Christabel,’ but a domestic missive of ...
— Old Familiar Faces • Theodore Watts-Dunton

... gluttony &c. 957. [eating specific foods] hippophagy[obs3], ichthyophagy[obs3]. [CAUSEDBY:appetite &c. 865]. mouth, jaws, mandible, mazard[obs3], chops. drinking &c. v.; potation, draught, libation; carousal &c. (amusement) 840; drunkenness &c. 959. food, pabulum; aliment, nourishment, nutriment; sustenance, sustentation, sustention; nurture, subsistence, provender, corn, feed, fodder, provision, ration, keep, commons, board; commissariat &c. (provision) 637; prey, forage, pasture, pasturage; fare, cheer; diet, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus

... case my literary taste was decidedly detrimental to me. Before one has arrived at a discriminating age, he cannot sit down to every sort of literary pabulum regardless of consequences. Many parents seem to think the "Crack-went-the-ranger's-rifle-and-down-came-another-Redskin" literature the only kind to be placed on the forbidden shelf. The inspiration to go out and shoot pesky Indians is healthy and commendable as compared with much other ...
— Confessions of a Neurasthenic • William Taylor Marrs

... author's style or explain our own enjoyment seems of secondary and small importance. However that may be, we state frankly our own conviction that the detailed study and analysis of a few standard works—which is the only literary pabulum given to many young people in our schools—bears the same relation to true literature that theology bears to religion, or psychology to friendship. One is a more or less unwelcome mental discipline; the other is the joy ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long

... pellucid compared with the hypothesis of Pangenesis—still more when we remember that this complex germ, which is a lion or a horse in small—itself the elaboration of aeons of Evolution—can replicate itself with ease and rapidity, reproducing in adjacent pabulum a "cosmos" which differs in degree, not in kind, from that described in the story of the Six Days. Yet the more we look into it, the more clear is it that Pangenesis (and not Polarigenesis or Perigenesis) is the inevitable outcome ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell

... the land when its king is a child'; but thrice woe to it, when its teacher is a child. Alas! for the world, when the pabulum of her youthful visions and anticipations of learning have become meat for men, the prescribed provision for that nature in which man must live, or 'cease to be,' amid the sober realities ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon

... vitality. In this way conditions formerly believed to be the causes of disease are now recognized as playing their part in predisposing to the action of the true causal agent, viz. the bacterium. In health the blood and internal tissues are bacterium-free; after death they offer a most suitable pabulum for various bacteria; but between these two extremes lie states of varying liability to infection. It is also probable that in a state of health organisms do gain entrance to the blood from time to time and are rapidly killed off. The ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various

... it also to good, if I be able. Eulogies, dyslogies, in which one finds no features of one's own natural face, are easily dealt with; easily left unread, as stuff for lighting fires, such is the insipidity, the wearisome nonentity of pabulum like that: but here is another sort of matter! "The beautifulest piece of criticism I have read for many a day," says every one that speaks of it. May the gods forgive you!—I have purchased a copy for three shillings, and sent it ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1834-1872, Vol II. • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson

... not every man put some generous consideration for others into his business-transactions? Has an honorable publisher no aim but to print that which will sell best? Has he no regard to the character of his house? Has he no desire to furnish a nourishing pabulum and a healthful inspiration to the mind of his country? In the employment of labor and the giving of wages do men generally quite forget the workman, and think only of the work and its profit? This does not happen to accord with our observation of human nature. We think there is a large ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various

... powers to get through with them. They were the relics of a past age, survivors of obsolete controversies that had found their way into the country in its infancy; and though the age that delighted in such mental pabulum had passed away, these literary pioneers held their ground because the time had not arrived for the people to feel the necessity of cultivating the mind as well as providing for the wants of the body. Seneca says: "Leisure without books is the sepulchre of the ...
— Life in Canada Fifty Years Ago • Canniff Haight

... seems to be nothing more than a thoughtful method of expressing all things, even to trifles, was the great loneliness to which the ancient poets and philosophers were attached? I think (though I have not your talent for quoting) that Cicero calls the consideratio naturae, the pabulum animi; and the mind which, in solitude, is confined necessarily to a few objects, meditates more closely upon those it embraces: the habit of this meditation enters and pervades the system, and whatever afterwards emanates from it is tinctured with the thoughtful ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... style worthy of the American metropolis, and the reception which the public gave to the work afforded convincing proof of the eagerness for a change from the stale list which had so long constituted its operatic pabulum. The house was crowded from floor to ceiling, and the audience, having assembled for the enjoyment of an unusual pleasure, was soon wrought into an extremely impressionable state, which the striking pictures, ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel

... rebel internally against the patronizing manner of the steward's wife; but he waited, like Bridau, for some word which might give him his cue; one of those words "de singe a dauphin" which artists, cruel, born-observers of the ridiculous—the pabulum of their pencils—seize with such avidity. Meantime Estelle's clumsy hands and feet struck their eyes, and presently a word, or phrase or two, betrayed her past, and quite out of keeping with the elegance of her dress, made the two young fellows aware of their prey. A single glance at each other ...
— A Start in Life • Honore de Balzac

... and success go hand in hand, and it was natural he should not know in what spirit Miss Chancellor listened to him. Being aware that she was a woman of culture his desire was simply to supply her with the pabulum that she would expect. She thought him very inferior; she had heard he was intensely bright, but there was probably some mistake; there couldn't be any danger for Verena from a mind that took merely a gossip's view of great tendencies. Besides, he wasn't half educated, and it was her ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. I (of II) • Henry James

... with inexhaustible calamity is the renunciation of instinct, as it concerns our physical nature; arithmetic cannot enumerate, nor reason perhaps suspect, the multitudinous sources of disease in civilized life. Even common water, that apparently innoxious pabulum, when corrupted by the filth of populous cities, is a deadly and insidious destroyer. (Lambe's "Reports on Cancer".) Who can wonder that all the inducements held out by God Himself in the Bible to virtue should have been vainer than a nurse's tale; and that those dogmas, by which He has there excited ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley

... One thing you may depend on, that whatever you extract from that mine will be worth having, indigenous treasure, current wherever Hindoo thought is moving, very different from the foreign-flavoured pabulum with which your English smattering instructor charges his feeding bottle. The exercise gives Ragunath an opportunity of digressing into some traditional incident of Maratha history which escaped the researches of Mr. Grant Duff, ...
— Behind the Bungalow • EHA

... But this cannot be done. The people will ever seek that reading which is most congenial to their present tastes and habits, and there will ever be found a legion of those who are eager to supply this sort of mental pabulum—if it can be so called—for the sake of the golden equivalent. For these reasons, the literature of the common people must ever follow, not lead, their civilization; it must continue to be the outward and visible sign of their progress, instead of the inward and spiritual ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... originality. His stock of striking things on the side of truth was soon expended; notoriety had meanwhile become as essential to his comfort as ardent spirits to that of the dram-drinker, or his pernicious drug to that of the inveterate opium-eater; and so, to procure the supply of the unwholesome pabulum, without which he could not continue to exist, he launched into a perilous ocean of heterodoxy and extravagance, and made shipwreck of his faith. His originality formed but the crooked wanderings of a journeyer ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller

... porch—he was a moment ago—presumably in renewed quest of that favorite pabulum more delectable than rowen clover, the splintered cribbings from the legs of a certain pine bench, which, up to date, he has lowered about three inches—a process in which he has considered average rather than symmetry, or the comfort of the ...
— My Studio Neighbors • William Hamilton Gibson

... vulnerable. Two years ago, from a lot of about one thousand Corean chestnuts in which there had been up to that time no blight, I grafted scions on American stump sprouts and about 50 per cent of those grafts blighted in the next year, showing that the American chestnut sap offers a pabulum attractive to the Diaporthe, and that is a fact of collateral value in getting our negative ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association, Report of the Proceedings at the Third Annual Meeting • Northern Nut Growers Association

... which he let fall. Speculative thinkers have generally been light feeders, eschewing stimulants, both solid and liquid, and preferring mild food and water for drink. Those who lead an interior life sedentary and contemplative need not gross pabulum, but would find their inward joy at the contemplation and discovery of truth seriously qualified and deadened by it. Spare fast is the companion of the ecstatic moods of a high truth-seeker such as Newton, Malebranche, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various

... a young lady at school, considering that the word "eat" was too vulgar for refined ears, is said to have substituted the following: "To insert nutritious pabulum into the denticulated orifice below the nasal protuberance, which, being masticated, peregrinates through the cartilaginous cavities of the larynx, and is finally domiciliated in the receptacle for ...
— Talkers - With Illustrations • John Bate

... to themselves. Nor is it at all so easy to counteract as to confute them. A masterly confutation of the part of their works truly their own may, from its subject, be a very unreadable book: it can have but the insinuated poison to deal with, unmixed with the palatable pabulum in which the poison has been conveyed; and mere treatises on poisons, whether moral or medical, are rarely works of a very delectable order. It seems to be on this principle that there exists no confutation of ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller

... four years old who prefers age and experience to a tartlet and some sweets must be an unnatural product. But the Brontes seem to have had no childhood; unlimited discussion of debates, long walks without any playfellows, the free perusal of Methodist magazines, this is the pabulum of their infancy. Years after, when they asked some school-children to tea, the clergyman's young daughters had to ask their little scholars to teach them how to play. It was the first time they had ever cared ...
— Emily Bront • A. Mary F. (Agnes Mary Frances) Robinson

... for Mr. Slope that Dr. Trefoil had died in the autumn. Those caterers for our morning repast, the staff of "The Jupiter," had been sorely put to it for the last month to find a sufficiency of proper pabulum. Just then there was no talk of a new American president. No wonderful tragedies had occurred on railway trains in Georgia, or elsewhere. There was a dearth of broken banks, and a dead dean with the necessity for a live one was a godsend. Had Dr. ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope

... dawning, and there is still some hope for the world. Men of sense and morality are coming forward: they dedicate their minds to this service—those practical minds whence will be extracted the only true pabulum for the growing intellect. It is to minds of this stamp—so truly the antipodes of all that is youthful, spontaneous, and child-like, (in a word: frivolous,) that we must look for those solid works which, in the Millennium that is coming, will perfectly supplant what may be termed, without levity, ...
— Punchinello Vol. 1, No. 21, August 20, 1870 • Various

... "Poor pabulum for pride when the first love is found Last also! and, so far from realizing gain, Each step aside just proves divergency in vain. The wanderer brings home no profit from his quest Beyond the sad surmise that keeping house were best Could ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones

... had for many years made its weekly appearance every Saturday morning, that its fashionable clientele might appease their jaded appetites on the Sabbath day by nibbling at its spicy pabulum. But, though the Ames reception had fallen on a Saturday night, the following Friday morning found the columns of the Era still awaiting a report of the notable affair. For Haynerd's hand seemed paralyzed. Whenever ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking

... in late suppers, and in various forms of sense gratification because you enjoy more thoroughly the higher pleasures. You will serve your friends with delicate food, simply and daintily prepared, and seasoned with that wit and wisdom which remain as a permanent mental pabulum. You will make them feel that when you come to visit them you come not to get something to eat, but to enjoy them, to receive from them the inspiration which they can give. We often treat our friends as if we thought they came as beggars for physical ...
— What a Young Woman Ought to Know • Mary Wood-Allen

... low branches, ready to sweep us and our belongings into the deep swirling water. The shades closed in like the walls of the Italian's dungeon; until our eyes grew to it, the blackness of Erebus weighed upon our spirits; perspiration poured from our brows, and in this watery mangrove-lane the pabulum vitae seemed to be wanting. After forcing a passage through three vile "gates," the sheet-lightning announced a second tornado. We sighed for more vivid flashes, but after twenty minutes they dimmed and died away, ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton

... title-page of Vanity Fair. About this time began his connection with Punch, in which much of his best work appeared. Looking back at our old friend as he used to come out from week to week at this time, we can hardly boast that we used to recognise how good the literary pabulum was that was then given for our consumption. We have to admit that the ordinary reader, as the ordinary picture-seer, requires to be guided by a name. We are moved to absolute admiration by a Raphael or a Hobbema, but hardly till we have learned the name of the painter, or, at any rate, the manner ...
— Thackeray • Anthony Trollope

... Simms's War Poems of the South, and a thumbed copy of Father Ryan. But add to these the Bible, the Book of Common Prayer, and the Imitation of Christ, and it doesn't make such a bad showing. It's astonishing how soothing the companionship of women fed upon this pabulum can be, when the things of the world are of necessity set aside for a space, and the simpler things of ...
— A Woman Named Smith • Marie Conway Oemler

... than in events themselves Love for open air and facts Low opinion of human nature Man abstracted, faintly contemptuous of other forms of life One's got to draw the line." "Ah!" said Cecilia; "where?" Pabulum of varying theories of future life Pass out of the country of the understanding of the young People do miss things when they are old! Perversity which she found so conspicuous in her servants Placed beyond the realms of want, who speculated in ideas ...
— Quotations from the Works of John Galsworthy • David Widger

... habit of the shallow scientist to plume himself on the more accurate theories which have been provided f, by the progress of knowledge and of science, and then, having been fed with a limited historical pabulum, to turn and talk lightly, and with an air of the most superior condescension, of the weakness and follies of those but for whose patient labors our modern theories would probably be non-existent." If it had not been for Mesmer ...
— Complete Hypnotism: Mesmerism, Mind-Reading and Spiritualism • A. Alpheus

... they first ate and read in it, they conceived and began to embody the idea of developing the hollow into a house. Foraging long ago in their father's library for mental pabulum, they had come upon Belzoni's quarto, and had read, with the avidity of imaginative boys, the tale of his discoveries, taking especial delight in his explorations of the tombs of the kings in the rocks of Beban el Malook: these it was ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald

... nipple of the soul. And fortunate they who are not artificially suckled, who know this hour no matter how brief, who get their nipple at the right time. If they do not, no pabulum ever after, will their indurated tissues assimilate. Do you wonder why the world is full of crusty souls? and why to them this infant hour, this suckling while, is so repugnant? But we must not intrude more of such remarks about mankind. Whether rightly ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani

... thousand people in our town go to bed on this kind of mental pabulum, as do country-town dwellers all over the United States, and although we do not claim that it is helpful, we do contend that it does not hurt them. Certainly by poking mild fun at the shams—the town pharisees—we make ...
— In Our Town • William Allen White

... 2. Maximam in gignendis morbis vim obtinet, pabulum, materiamque morbi suggerens: nam nec ab aere, nec a perturbationibus, vel aliis evidentibus causis morbi sunt, nisi consentiat corporis praeparatio, et humorum constitutio. Ut semel dicam, una gula est omnium morborum mater, etiamsi alius est ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior

... her, and thence Donal gained a duty—that of finding suitable pabulum for the two. He was not widely read in light literature, and it made necessary not a little exploration ...
— Donal Grant • George MacDonald

... out sleighing most afternoons, and Bluebell was thrown on nursery and school-room for companionship—insipid pabulum to the vanity of a young lady in her first glimpse of conquest, and who believed she had stricken down a quarry worthy of her bow. Having nothing to distract her, she considered the problem exhaustively from morning till night, and, if she were not in love with him ...
— Bluebell - A Novel • Mrs. George Croft Huddleston

... The 'longshoreman—yes, and the dock-rat, he's Down upon Socrates. And what'll Induce us to read Aristotle? We shall fail in Our duty to Galen. No tutor henceforward shall rack us To construe old Horatius Flaccus. We have but a wretched opinion Of Mr. Justinian. In our classical pabulum mix we've no wee sop Of AEsop. Our balance of intellect asks for no ballast From Sallust. With feminine scorn no fair Vassar-bred lass at us Shall smile if we own that we cannot read Tacitus. No admirer shall ever ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various

... imitation of the rhythm caught from Pope. This led her to the delighted study of Greek, that she might read its records at first hand; and Greek drew her into Latin, and from this atmosphere of classic lore, which, after all, is just as interesting to the average child as is the (too usual) juvenile pabulum, she drew her interest in thought and dream. The idyllic solitude in which she lived fostered all these mental excursions. "I had my fits of Pope and Byron and Coleridge," she has related, "and read Greek as hard under the trees as some of your Oxonians in ...
— The Brownings - Their Life and Art • Lilian Whiting

... selection of the untruths published in the French press during the war has been reproduced by the Paris journal, Bonsoir. It contains abundant pabulum for the cynic and valuable data for the psychologist. The example might be followed in Great Britain. The title is: "Anthologie du Bourrage de Crane." It began in the month ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon

... each time she talked with him, it seemed less possible to put a philosophical ticket upon him. "He's not Buddhist, Vedantist, neo-Platonist," she declared, deeply puzzled. Somehow she did not attract from him, as did Vina Nettleton, the rare pabulum which would have proved him just a Christian. Finally, from fragments brought by Vina, the Grey One, and David Cairns, she hit upon a name for him that would do, even if intended a trifle ironically ...
— Fate Knocks at the Door - A Novel • Will Levington Comfort

... religion, because while the teachings of the great sage lay at the bottom of the system, yet it is not true since the early seventeenth century, that the thinking men of Japan have been satisfied with only the original simple ethical rules of the ancient master. Though they have craved a richer mental pabulum, yet they have enjoyed less the study of the original text, than acquaintance with the commentaries and communion with the great philosophical exponents, of the master. What, then, we ask, are the features of the developed philosophy, which, imported from China, served the Japanese Samurai ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis

... terribly apt to usurp the throne within when once God is dethroned. Then indulgence feeds passion, and deeper draughts become necessary in order to produce the same effects, and cravings, once allowed free play, grow in ravenousness, while their pabulum steadily loses its power to satisfy. The experience of the undevout sensualist is but too faithful a type of that of all undevout livers, in the failure of delights to delight and of acquisitions to enrich, and in the bondage, often to nothing more worthy to be obeyed than mere habit, ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... the depths of its teaching, heartily prized as that was by no less a man than Milton, are seldom explored. But it would be a labour of months to set out the known and imagined sources of the knowledge and spiritual pabulum of the man who laid every mental region so under contribution, that he has been claimed by almost every profession as having been at one time or another a student of its peculiar science, so marvellously ...
— A Dish Of Orts • George MacDonald

... mendicants and starving? Where, but in that dear Lord, who Himself will supply all our needs, and will minister to us peace, because for will and conscience and intellect and affections and desires He supplies the pabulum that they require, and gives more than enough ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... possess the power of assimilating from the nutritious matters they absorb the peculiar pabulum which each organ of the body demands for the development and sustenance. The brain, for instance, selects that part which it requires, the heart the material necessary for its growth and preservation, and so on with the liver, the lungs, ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce

... manducation^, rumination; gluttony &c 957. [eating specific foods] hippophagy^, ichthyophagy^. [Eating anatomy:] (appetite) &c 865; mouth, jaws, mandible, mazard^, gob [Slang], chops. drinking &c v.; potation, draught, libation; carousal &c (amusement) 840; drunkenness &c 959. food, pabulum; aliment, nourishment, nutriment; sustenance, sustentation, sustention; nurture, subsistence, provender, corn, feed, fodder, provision, ration, keep, commons, board; commissariat &c (provision) 637; prey, forage, pasture, pasturage; fare, cheer; diet, dietary; regimen; belly ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget

... dish of lampreys quickly stew, And cook them with a turn, For that's his favorite pabulum ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume IV. (of X.) • Various

... et Libyes, asperi incultique, quis cibus erat caro ferina atque humi pabulum, uti pecoribus. Hi neque moribus neque lege aut imperio cujusquam regebantur; vagi, palantes, qua nox coegerat, sedes habebant. Sed postquam in Hispania Hercules, sicuti Afri putant, interiit, exercitus ejus, compositus ex variis gentibus, amisso duce ac passim multis sibi quisque imperium ...
— De Bello Catilinario et Jugurthino • Caius Sallustii Crispi (Sallustius)

... that he is advanced a grade beyond the student in secondary school. There is too often a tendency to underestimate the intellectual capabilities of the collegian and to feed him so simple and scanty a mental pabulum that he becomes as a child and thinks as a child. Of course the author appreciates the fact that most college instructors of history piece out the elementary textbooks by means of assignments of collateral reading in large standard treatises. All too frequently, however, such ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes

... higher growth—the unnatural cultivated man. Lovers of literature are accustomed to say that they find certain works "helpful" to them; and doubtless, being all intellect, they are right. But we, the less highly developed, are compounded of two natures, and while this spiritual pabulum sustains one, the other and larger nature is starved; for the larger nature is earthly, and draws its sustenance from the earth. I must look at a leaf, or smell the sod, or touch a rough pebble, or hear some natural sound, if only the chirp of a cricket, or feel the sun or wind or rain on my ...
— Birds in Town and Village • W. H. Hudson

... surrender her personal preferences and to regard the matter entirely from the man's point of view. This self-abasement was, largely, the result of the girl's natural instincts where her affections were concerned; these had been reinforced by the sentimental pabulum which enters so much into the fiction that is devoured by girls of Mavis' age and habit of thought. She argued how it would be criminally selfish of her to presume on his boyish attachment of the old days, which might lead him to believe ...
— Sparrows - The Story of an Unprotected Girl • Horace W. C. Newte



Words linked to "Pabulum" :   edible, victuals, comestible, tuck, eatable, victual



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