"Simian" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... that breathes and feels is paramount. Personally, I have never found the slightest difficulty in accepting our near relationship to the apes. On the contrary, every monkey I meet—and I have specially cultivated their acquaintance—reminds me sharply of the simian origin ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... apparently two or three families of anthropoid apes, that seemed, so far as Holt had been able to judge—for they were extremely shy and cunning, and therefore difficult of approach—to be several degrees nearer to man, both in structure and intelligence, than any other members of the Simian family that had been discovered in ...
— The Angel of the Revolution - A Tale of the Coming Terror • George Griffith
... the playing of "the officers on board and some of the ladies" with the boy, "as they would play with a monkey," is evidently a suggestion of Mr. Froude's own soul, as well as the resemblance to the simian tribe which he makes out from the frolics of the lad. Verily, it requires an eye rendered more than microscopic by prejudice to discern the difference between the gambols of juveniles of any colour under similar conditions. It is true that it might just be the difference between ...
— West Indian Fables by James Anthony Froude Explained by J. J. Thomas • J. J. (John Jacob) Thomas
... "George" a long farewell! Ah! muffle if you please their passing bell! Only one thought can cheer us in the least; "No doubt the stock will shortly be increased." Thanks, Daily News! Wipe, childhood, the wet eye, And Apedom for dead kin soften the Simian sigh! ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101. October 10, 1891 • Various
... table with both hands, sat listening intently. From the room behind me, the opium-room, whose entrance was less than two paces from where we sat, came a sound of dragging and tapping! Slowly, cautiously, I began to turn my head; when a sudden outburst of simian chattering from the fan-tan players drowned that ...
— The Hand Of Fu-Manchu - Being a New Phase in the Activities of Fu-Manchu, the Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer
... that they explain the well-known violence and imbecility of crowds. The crowd, as a crowd, performs acts that many of its members, as individuals, would never be guilty of. Its average intelligence is very low; it is inflammatory, vicious, idiotic, almost simian. Crowds, properly worked up by skilful demagogues, are ready to believe ...
— Damn! - A Book of Calumny • Henry Louis Mencken
... prince of the night-spirits. In the international fable of "Reynard the Fox," a she-monkey on the eve of the trial by battle suggests the stratagem that turns the scales against the superior strength of the wolf Isegrim. The mens aequa in arduis is, indeed, a simian characteristic. Monkeys never have their wits more completely about them than in the moment of a sudden danger, and a higher development of the same faculty distinguishes the Caucasian from all rival races, even from the sharp-witted Semites. After the conquest of Algiers the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, October 1885 • Various
... gray bunch; more intent on investigation than on attack. The monkey did not wait for him. With an incredibly agile leap, he was on the spattered window curtains and swarming up to the rod at the top. There he squatted, well out of reach; grimacing horribly and chattering in simian wrath. ...
— Further Adventures of Lad • Albert Payson Terhune
... man was standing beside them. He was shabbily dressed, his own features were wizened, almost simian, and by his friendly and fatuous smile Janet recognized one of the harmless ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... particularly were out of all proportion to his stature, being so long that his hands hung down on either side of him when he stood erect, like the paws of some giant ape. Altogether, there was something decidedly simian about his appearance his squat nose with hairy, open nostrils, and the general hirsuteness of the man, his bushy eyebrows, the tufts of black hair on his cheekbones and on the backs of his big, spade like hands. And there was that in his eyes, dark and courageous beneath ...
— The Man with the Clubfoot • Valentine Williams
... scientific investigators, those who know how to doubt, but the fanatics of rationalism, and observe with what gross brutality they speak of faith. Vogt considered it probable that the cranial structure of the Apostles was of a pronounced simian character; of the indecencies of Haeckel, that supreme incomprehender, there is no need to speak, nor yet of those of Buechner; even Virchow is not free from them. And others work with more subtilty. There are people who ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... given to cultivating strange notions about himself. He is humiliated by his simian ancestry, and tries to deny his animal nature, to persuade himself that he is not limited by its weaknesses nor concerned in its fate. And this impulse may be harmless, when it is genuine. But what are we to say when we see the formulas of heroic self-deception made use of by unheroic self-indulgence? ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair
... against woman, the vague feeling that she has been allowed to get on too fast, to get out of control, that she has slipped into too large activities while the good man slept, has come upon us at the very time when Scandinavia and Germany and England are getting rid of their simian chivalry. It is notorious that America, which once was the progressive nation, has been for a generation in a comatose state in the matter of social ideas. It is high time that our college women should stand solid against the blind ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V • Ida Husted Harper
... heeds him and listens to caution. He then assures his protege that things are to be made more easy for him; that, as a kindred spirit, he will no longer be expected to make sublime masterpieces, but that his work must be one of two kinds—either the imitation of reality to the point of simian mimicry, in idylls or gentle and humorous satires, or the free copying of the best-known and most famous classical works, albeit with shamefast concessions to the taste of the age. For, although he may only be able to appreciate slavish copying or accurate portraiture of the present, still ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... pig-tail Celestial, O barbarous bestial, Abominable Chinee! Simian fellow man, Primitive yellow man, Joshian devotee! Shoe-and-cigar machine, Oleomargarine You are, and butter are we— Fat of the land are we, Salt of the earth; In God's image planned to be— Noble in birth! You, on the contrary, Modeled upon very Different lines indeed, Show in conspicuous, Base ...
— Black Beetles in Amber • Ambrose Bierce
... his mouth. A grin of pure happiness had drawn up the upper lip; at sight of his prostrate master, the lower one was rolling outward in a sudden wave of pure pity. Beside the cot, he halted and stood looking down at Weldon with eyes which, for the moment, transformed his lazy, jolly, simian face into a species of nobility. Lying back on his pillow, Weldon waited for him to speak, waited with an odd, restless beating of the heart for which he was wholly at a loss ...
— On the Firing Line • Anna Chapin Ray and Hamilton Brock Fuller
... easily into regarding its privileges as common rights that I fear the plea which the SIMIAN LEAGUE repeats in this pamphlet will still sound strange in the ears of many, though the work of the League has been increasingly successful and has reached yearly a wider circle of the educated public since its foundation by Lady Wayne in 1902. We desire to place before ...
— On Something • H. Belloc
... his eyes violently lifted. To those who see in a man a perpetual kinship to that animal kingdom of which he is supreme, there was something undeniably anthropoidal about Abrahm Kantor, a certain simian width between the eyes and long, rather agile hands ...
— O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 • Various
... in spite of receding gums, her mouth was tightly stretched semicircular-wise around them, and the lips had become a long, very long, expressionless line, shaded into prominence, as in a drawing, by a multitude of lines up and down, from chin and nose;—a Simian jaw, remindful of the Descent of Man. All the accumulated hand-to-mouth wisdom of generations of peasantry seemed to lurk behind the old woman's quick eyes; to be ...
— A Poor Man's House • Stephen Sydney Reynolds
... own views in regard to this great problem. He tells us how the idea of a natural descent of man gradually grew up in his mind. It was especially the assertions of Owen in regard to the total difference between the human and the simian brain that called forth strong dissent from the great anatomist Huxley, and he easily succeeded in showing that Owen's supposed differences had no real existence; he even established, on the basis of his own anatomical investigations, the proposition that the anatomical differences between ...
— Evolution in Modern Thought • Ernst Haeckel
... There was at that time a "Besides" in the Little Red Doctor's sorrowful heart which bulked too large to admit of any rivalry. "Nevertheless," I added, "you needn't be so scornful about the simian type in woman. It's a concentrated peril to mankind. I've seen trouble caused in this world by kitten faces, by pure, classic faces, by ox-eyed-Juno faces, by vivid blond faces, by dreamy, poetic faces, by ...
— From a Bench in Our Square • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... Must begin at the creation, When the world was in formation, And come down to its cremation, In the final consummation Of the old world's final spasm: He must study protoplasm, And bridge over every chasm In the origin of species, Ere the monkey wore the breeches, Or the Simian tribe began To ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford
... Grace George, evaporated in a sad farce, or comedy, entitled "A Case of Frenzied Finance." We had been flattering ourselves that we had discovered a new "outlook," and we came a bad cropper. The simian antics of an impossible bell boy, in an impossible hotel, and his maneuvers in the arena of finance, were the "motive" of this extremely invertebrate contribution. There was an "Arizona Copper King"; there was his daughter; there was a gentleman from "Tombstone, Ariz.," ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 6, July 1905 • Various
... men contemptible, only practising your coquetries upon them for your own amusement, quite indifferent whether your shafts hit or go astray. We could bear the ordeal, for we should know very well that circumstances must vindicate us. We are, after all, superior to even the highest simian types, and our poor fascinations shine by comparison with those of even the most intelligent baboon; so we should be certain that, in spite of your opinion of us, you would go on making yourself beautiful ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, November, 1878 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... bluish-gray light poured but through which nothing could be clearly seen from where he stood. The Operator sat on a high, one-legged stool. His head was drawn into his shoulders, which were crumpled things of birdlike bones. His head was bald on top but the fringe was long and wild. He had big simian ears set at right angles to his head and the light shone through them, not pink but yellowish. There was an aureole of fine hairs about them which gave them the appearance of angel's wings. With enlarged hands at ...
— In the Control Tower • Will Mohler
... taken as a model by Samuel Smiles). One thinks of him sometimes as a sort of Deacon Brodie, sometimes as the most innocent sinner who ever lived. For, though he was brutal and snobbish and self-seeking and simian, he had a pious and a merry and a grateful heart. He felt that God had created the world for the pleasure of Samuel Pepys, and had no doubt ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... grandfather—and there is a—" Arthur stopped short. He remembered that "Simeon" was his father's father; perhaps his father might not see the joke. "That is," he explained, "she was looking for a name, and I thought of 'simian,' naturally, and that, of ...
— The Second Generation • David Graham Phillips
... the stage should be a room with the fourth wall removed; Degas preferred the key-hole through which we seem to peep upon the privacy of his ugly females bathing or combing their hair or sleeping, lounging, yawning, quarrelling, and walking. The simian and frog-like gestures and sprawling attitudes are far from arousing amiable sensations. These poor, tired women, hard-working laundresses, shopgirls, are not alluring, though they are not as hideous as the women of Cezanne or Edvard Muench; but the veracity of the "human document" (overworked ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... off, with a border of a darker color. He looked like an overworked Christy minstrel with the briefest of intervals between his performances. There were black rims in the orbits of his eyes, as if he gazed feebly out of unglazed spectacles, which heightened his simian resemblance, already grotesquely exaggerated by what appeared to be repeated and spasmodic experiments in dyeing his gray hair. Without the slightest notice of Lance, he inflicted his protesting and querulous presence ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte
... and wholesale consignments of soft-soap darkening the sun as they hurtled hither and yon through the shrinking atmosphere. A man dropping suddenly in from Mars with a Nicaraguan canal scheme for the consideration of Uncle Sam would have supposed this simian hubbub and anserine to-do meant nothing less than a new epocha for the universe, it being undecided whether it should be auriferous or argentiferous—an age of gold or a cycle of silver. Now that the costly "function" has funked itself into howling farce, an uncomfortable failure, ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... small berry-like eyes and shone in her white teeth, would have been repulsive. She was short and stout. In her scant drapery and unrestrained freedom she was hardly statuesque, and her more unstudied attitudes were marred by a simian habit of softly scratching her left ankle with the toes of her right foot, ...
— Mrs. Skaggs's Husbands and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... hardness of the ice itself. His strength of mind and of body seemed suddenly to quadruple itself. His determination was that of the battering-ram, blind, deaf, resistless. The ugly set of his face became all the more ugly, the contorted eyes flashing, the great jaw all but simian. He appeared physically larger. It was no longer a man; it was a giant, an ogre, a colossal jotun hurling ice-blocks, fighting out a battle unspeakable, in the dawn of the world, ...
— A Man's Woman • Frank Norris
... modelled by priestly hands; the lips weak and vain rather than cruel; a quibbling mouth that would have snapped at verbal errors like a lizard catching flies, but had never learned the shape of a round yes or no. One of the Duke's hands rested on the head of a dwarf, a simian creature with pearl ear-rings and fantastic dress; the other turned the pages of a ...
— Crucial Instances • Edith Wharton
... profit a man tho' he have the soul of a god Sunk in the form of a beast, with a senseless simian face— What can the world perceive of the subtler inward grace Breathing upon the dust of the coarse clay clod? What knows the world of me—the Me that is prisoned within— Seeing only the self that sickens its sensitive eyes— How can it ...
— The Path of Dreams - Poems • Leigh Gordon Giltner
... pongo; gorilla, chimpanzee, orang-outang, baboon, troglodyte. Associated Words: simian, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... reasonably close to human stature and appearance, allowing for the fact that their ancestry had been canine instead of simian. They had, of course, longer and narrower jaws than we have, ...
— Lone Star Planet • Henry Beam Piper and John Joseph McGuire
... autumn he set to work to make good his promise of demonstrating the existence in the simian brain of the structures alleged to be exclusively human. The result was seen in his papers "On the Zoological Relations of Man with the Lower Animals" ("Natural History Review" 1861 pages 67-68); "On the Brain of Ateles Paniscus," ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley
... simian, pongo; gorilla, chimpanzee, orang-outang, baboon, troglodyte. Associated ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... and done with. The lover sees nothing as it is. Life is distorted between jealousy and admiration, and the plain teaching of common-sense is as little understood as the conditions of the fourth dimension or the poetic aspirations of the Simian tongue. The adored is not a real person; the happiness anticipated is not practical nor practicable. Both are on all-fours with the substantiality of a cloud and the serviceable roadway of a rainbow. ...
— The Idler, Volume III., Issue XIII., February 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly. Edited By Jerome K. Jerome & Robert Barr • Various
... was in a highly excited state of mind and thought the simian was upon him again. Just then, the driver of the machine found a cleared space ahead and started for it. He started so quickly that Hiram was thrown from the running board, dropped to the hard pavement, and there stumbled against and ...
— Owen Clancy's Happy Trail - or, The Motor Wizard in California • Burt L. Standish
... the word-using animal, the animal of artifice and reason, and the only possible "return to Nature" for him—if we scrutinize the phrase—would be a return to the scratching, promiscuous, arboreal simian. To rebel against instinct, to rebel against limitation, to evade, to trip up, and at last to close with and grapple and conquer the forces that dominate him, is the fundamental being of man. And from the very outset of his existence, from the instant of his ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... a consideration of simian mental traits of very different character. Another male orang, named Dohong, of the same age and intellectual caste as Rajah, developed a faculty for mechanics and invention which not only challenged our admiration, but also created much work for our carpenters. He discovered, ...
— The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals • William T. Hornaday
... see these same faces at Donnybrook Fair. These large-mouthed, short-nosed, rosy-cheeked peasant-girls are called Dolores and Catalina, but they might be called Bridget and Kathleen. These strapping fellows, with long simian upper lips, with brown leggings and patched, mud-colored overcoats, who are leaping and swinging their cudgels in that Pyrrhic round are as good Tipperary boys as ever mobbed an agent or pounded, twenty to one, a landlord to death. The same unquestioning, fervent ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... of a simian acuteness that had led him to discover poor Rita's secret before she herself was fully aware of its existence. She, however, was rapidly making the interesting discovery, and feared that between the ribbon, ...
— A Forest Hearth: A Romance of Indiana in the Thirties • Charles Major
... Neanderthal two or three years before—a cranium which has ever since been famous as the Neanderthal skull, the type specimen of what modern zoologists are disposed to regard as a distinct species of man, Homo neanderthalensis. Like others of the same type since discovered at Spy, it is singularly simian in character—low-arched, with receding forehead and enormous, protuberant eyebrows. When it was first exhibited to the scientists at Berlin by Dr. Fuhlrott, in 1857, its human character was doubted by some of the witnesses; of that, however, ...
— A History of Science, Volume 3(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... Age. Its abnormal and ape-like Characters. Fossil Human Skull of the Engis Cave near Liege. Professor Huxley's Description of these Skulls. Comparison of each, with extreme Varieties of the native Australian Race. Range of Capacity in the Human and Simian Brains. Skull from Borreby in Denmark. Conclusions of Professor Huxley. Bearing of the peculiar Characters of the Neanderthal Skull on the ...
— The Antiquity of Man • Charles Lyell
... theory and died several days later of internal injuries. Smokey nursed him, while Jimmy and the organ-grinder worked harder and raised enough money to get a doctor. The doctor was indignant when he found that his patient was of the Simian persuasion. But that's a story by itself. You ought to hear Jimmy tell it. You'd find yourself laughing on only ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Stories • Various
... old man suddenly appeared, how or from where nobody had observed He was dirty and in every way disreputable in appearance, looking like an animated mummy, bearing a long rifle on his shoulder, and walking with the somewhat halting activity of a very old, yet vivacious and energetic simian. Of course it was Oncle Jason, "Oncle Jazon sui generis," as Father Beret ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson |
