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More "Abasement" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... come, most blessed Father, and in all abasement beseech you to put to your hand, if it is possible, and impose a curb to those flatterers who are enemies of peace, while they pretend peace. But there is no reason, most blessed Father, why any one should assume that I am to utter a recantation, unless he prefers to involve the case ...
— Concerning Christian Liberty - With Letter Of Martin Luther To Pope Leo X. • Martin Luther
... dismemberment of his kingdom.[474] It is doubtful if Wolsey himself desired the fulfilment of so preposterous and iniquitous a scheme. It is certain that Charles was in no mood to abet it. He had no wish to extract profit for England out of the abasement of Francis, to see Henry King of France, or lord of any French provinces. He had no intention of even performing his part (p. 167) of the Treaty of Windsor. He had pledged himself to marry the Princess Mary, and the splendour of that match may ...
— Henry VIII. • A. F. Pollard
... image is without form or comeliness,—rejects all outward graces, seemingly glories in abasement and deformity, fearing only to attribute to Matter some value ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various
... consolation, even while she read and re-read them with a devouring eagerness. She never paused to ask herself why this was. She avoided any investigation into her feeling for Horace. It was enough that, in spite of all the self-accusation and self-abasement which she carried in her heart, this being who knew the very worst of her could still think her worthy of kindness and respect. When she thought of this she felt as if she could go on her knees ...
— A Manifest Destiny • Julia Magruder
... or 'omnino indignus', or any other positive self-abasement before God, I can understand; but how an express avowal of unworthiness, comparatively superlative, can consist with the Job-like integrity and sincerity of profession especially required in a solemn ...
— The Literary Remains Of Samuel Taylor Coleridge • Edited By Henry Nelson Coleridge
... could still hear her; but after her laugh there came a few moments of overwhelming bitterness that sent her on her knees by the side of the couch in self-abasement. ...
— Phyllis of Philistia • Frank Frankfort Moore
... weapon, but, floating gently to her feet, allowed himself to be landed as though it were a pleasure. Only miserable casuists will ask whether this was fair play on Madeleine's part; whether flattery so gross cost her conscience no twinge, and whether any woman can without self-abasement be guilty of such shameless falsehood. She, however, scorned the idea of falsehood. She would have defended herself by saying that she had not so much praised Ratcliffe as depreciated Webster, and that she was honest in her opinion of the old-fashioned American oratory. But she could ...
— Democracy An American Novel • Henry Adams
... of self-help, of individualism, of every form of conscious industry and energy. It is the only liberalism which has the smallest chance of success in Scotland. The liberalism of Mr. Jenkins is the liberalism of state aid, of self-abasement, of incapacity and indolence'; and leads straight to sentimental communism. According to a 'working man' who writes to the paper, Mr. Jenkins virtually proposes that the industrious part of the working classes are to support the children ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... of catastrophes ... especially in the earlier part; secondly, its loss of creative power. As for the first of these, the black death, the famines, the hundred years' war, the free companies, the abasement of the church, the great schism—these things were misfortunes to which our modern time can find no parallel. They came suddenly upon Western Europe and defiled it like a blight.... They have made the mediaeval idea odious to ...
— Hilaire Belloc - The Man and His Work • C. Creighton Mandell
... Grandmamma was beginning to scold us and find fault with us all round. "So much for us children!" he would say. On the whole, however, the impossible pinnacle upon which my childish imagination had placed him had undergone a certain abasement. I still kissed his large white hand with a certain feeling of love and respect, but I also allowed myself to think about him and to criticise his behaviour until involuntarily thoughts occurred to me which alarmed me by their presence. Never shall I forget one incident in particular ...
— Boyhood • Leo Tolstoy
... and rapture, with chill of self-abasement. When, years ago, he saw Irene in the dress of ceremony, she seemed to him peerlessly radiant; but it was the beauty and the dignity of one still girlish. What he now beheld was the exquisite fulfilment of that bright promise. He ...
— The Crown of Life • George Gissing
... with others, like the gad-fly pursuing poor Io, never allows a moment's repose in the green pastures of success, but goads them constantly up the rocky sides of endeavor. It is not that they love flattery, but that they need approbation as a counterpoise to the dark moments of self-abasement and as a ...
— Worldly Ways and Byways • Eliot Gregory
... is the love of a woman in its simplicity and strength, and how it gilds all the poor and common things of life and even finds a joy in service! The prouder the woman the more delight does she extract from her self-abasement before her idol. Only not many women can love like Jess, and when they do almost invariably they make some fatal mistake, whereby the wealth of their affection is wasted, or, worse still, becomes a source of misery or shame ...
— Jess • H. Rider Haggard
... port side of the quarter-deck stole glances at the strange group—the stately, solemn, still man; the ragged creature before him, who looked in his face without fear or anxiety, and with just as little presumption; and the wildly excited panther, whose fierce bounding alternated with cringing abasement of his beautiful person, accompanied by loving sweeps of ...
— A Rough Shaking • George MacDonald
... and princesses are too common, and the position of a good many of them is a little doubtful. Nor was he greatly attracted by the wealth Theresa had inherited from her father, since her mother had gained her share in it by deserting the national cause during the period of Italy's abasement. No doubt there was Theresa's undoubted beauty; but that was evanescent, and the lady already showed signs of a too rapidly ripening maturity. Their romantic engagement could not blot out of his mind the memory of the long humiliation she had compelled ...
— Captain Mansana and Mother's Hands • Bjoernstjerne Bjoernson
... rather, I think, it was a pang of self-reproach—a consciousness of having acted unwisely, though for the best; perhaps, too, the stubbornness of the heart she had ruled once—so strong and proud even in its abasement—was congenial to her own besetting sin: she liked the fierce threat better than the cool sarcasm. At any rate, she answered more gently than she had ...
— Guy Livingstone; - or, 'Thorough' • George A. Lawrence
... over a society perverted in its opinions as in its tastes; to those who know the deplorable facility with which error is spread and the tenacity with which it clings to our poor mind. Error, moreover, owes to our abasement which it flatters and crushes, the privilege of freedom from contradiction, and it is only in regard to truth that the minds of men are divided ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... those cheerful depths where there is no social or artistic status to maintain; so low as to be expected to do, or attempt to do, whatever might be asked of them, even though failure plunged them, if possible, in deeper depths of abasement. There was nothing beneath them except the Artichokes; and it was seldom, very seldom, an ...
— Vesty of the Basins • Sarah P. McLean Greene
... bring to nought the glory of those who think themselves something but are in truth nothing.' (10) And remember, ladies, that without the grace of God there is no good at all in man, just as there is no temptation that with His assistance may not be overcome. This is shown by the abasement of the man who was accounted just, and the exaltation of her whom men were willing to deem a wicked sinner. Thus are verified Our Lord's words, 'Whosoever exalteth himself shall be abased; and he that humbleth himself shall ...
— The Tales Of The Heptameron, Vol. III. (of V.) • Margaret, Queen Of Navarre
... The moisture sprang to his eyes as he did so. He had caught a glimpse of the face on the pillow and the changes made in a week were very apparent. Always erect, his father had towered above them then even in his self-abasement, but he looked now as though twenty years, instead of a few days, had passed over his stately head and bowed his incomparable figure. And not that alone. His expression was different. Had Oliver not seen him in his old likeness for that ...
— Dark Hollow • Anna Katharine Green
... while equally fervent, does not give one the same idea of self-abasement in the sight of the Almighty. It would be unfair to compare him to that other personage of the parable, namely, the Pharisee, for the latter was obviously lacking in sincerity; but at the same time, William in his moments ...
— The Secret Memoirs of the Courts of Europe: William II, Germany; Francis Joseph, Austria-Hungary, Volume I. (of 2) • Mme. La Marquise de Fontenoy
... realized that monarchy was essential to peace, and that the price of freedom was violence and disorder. He had no illusions about the senate. Fault and misfortune had reduced them to nerveless servility, a luxury of self-abasement. Their meekness would never inherit the earth. Tacitus pours scorn on the philosophic opponents of the Principate, who while refusing to serve the emperor and pretending to hope for the restoration of the republic, could contribute nothing ...
— Tacitus: The Histories, Volumes I and II • Caius Cornelius Tacitus
... strength for nothing more; yet at the end, before life left him, one strange last change came over him. Both his rough passion and the terrible abasement of defeat seemed to leave him, and his face became again the face of a well-bred, self-controlled man. There was a helpless effort at a shrug of his shoulders, a scornful slight smile on his lips, and a look of recognition, almost of friendliness, almost of humor, ...
— The Indiscretion of the Duchess • Anthony Hope
... office of burser for them, to cast up their accounts; to overlook the scouring of their plate; and to lay a list thereof, with a few specimens, before those who fight the fight of the Lord, that his Saints, seeing the abasement of the proud and the chastisement of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXVIII. February, 1843. Vol. LIII. • Various
... on the Sabbath and on Lecture days were sometimes painfully varied, though scarcely interrupted, by a very distressing and harrowing custom of public abasement and self-abnegation, which prevailed for many years in the nervously religious colonies. It was not an enforced punishment, but a voluntary one. Men and women who had committed crimes or misdemeanors, and who had sincerely repented of their ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle
... when an austere and just Providence, in its march along the inscrutable way, brings our hearts to the test of their own unreason. Which of us has not been tried by irrational awe, fear, pride, abasement, exultation? And such moments remain marked by indelible physical impressions, standing out of the ghostly level of memory like rocks out of the sea, like towers on a plain. I had many of these unforgettable emotions—the profound horror of Don Balthasar's death; the first floating of the boat, ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... was much attached to herself, and trusted to this rather than to anything else. She saw also that his conceit was not very profound, and that his fits of self-abasement were as extreme as his exaltation had been. His impulsiveness and sanguine trustfulness in anyone who smiled pleasantly at him, or indeed was not absolutely unkind to him, made her more anxious about him than any other point in his character; ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... perswade them that they will not herein do any thing mis-becoming their Rank, the greatest Ladies amongst us may be assur'd that those of a Condition superior to theirs, have heretofore been so far from thinking it any abasement to them to charge themselves with the instruction of their own Children, that (to their Immortal Honour) they have made it part of their Business to assist to that of other Peoples also, who were likely one day to be of consequence to the Common-wealth. ...
— Occasional Thoughts in Reference to a Vertuous or Christian life • Lady Damaris Masham
... and animation to his cheeks, and though his eyes were bright their expression was more natural than it had been for many days. He was in one of the strangest humours which can have sway over that unconsciously humorous animal, man. In the midst of the deepest self-abasement his heart was overflowing with joy. The combination of sorrow and happiness is a rare one, not found every day, but the condition of experiencing both at the same time and in the highest degree ...
— Sant' Ilario • F. Marion Crawford
... of my pain. When he repeated his order I found its accomplishment no longer repulsive. One of the few pleasurable memories this intimacy, extending over years, has left for me is that moment of abject abasement to one who, with no warmth of feeling, had yet once had sufficient energy to be ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... and without, utter humiliation, self-accusation, and abasement filled his soul. Jim sank to the ground by the little girl, and wept ...
— The Preacher of Cedar Mountain - A Tale of the Open Country • Ernest Thompson Seton
... it was for doing this that the New Brunswick House of Assembly, the city and county of St. John and the county of York actually grovelled in the dust before this despotic governor, thus approving of all his acts. Such abasement and subserviency to an unconstitutional governor was certain to bring its own punishment, and it came much sooner than any one could have anticipated. On Christmas Day of the same year the Hon. William Franklin Odell, who had been provincial secretary for thirty-two years, died at Fredericton. ...
— Wilmot and Tilley • James Hannay
... occasions I have sometimes been startled by a subtle, fiendish suggestion inciting me to show him the contrary by a seeming encouragement of Hargrave's advances; but such ideas are banished in a moment with horror and self-abasement; and then I hate him tenfold more than ever for having brought me to this!—God pardon me for it and all my sinful thoughts! Instead of being humbled and purified by my afflictions, I feel that they are turning my nature into gall. This must be my fault as much as theirs that wrong ...
— The Tenant of Wildfell Hall • Anne Bronte
... that the girl would find relief in self-abasement, so he relaxed his arms, and she sank to her knees upon the dungeon floor. She wept softly for a moment, and then throwing back her head with her old impulsive manner looked up into ...
— Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall • Charles Major
... revolt, but mainly by a base and abject surrender to the Pope and the King of Spain. Nay, so low did they stoop as to send ambassadors to the Emperor offering to become his tributaries, and to write letters to the Pope, full of submission and servility, in order to move his compassion. To such abasement were they brought in four days' time by what was in reality only a half-defeat. For on their flight after the battle of Vaila only about a half of their forces were engaged, and one of their two provedditori escaped to Verona with five and ...
— Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livius • Niccolo Machiavelli
... prosperity. I can't look him in the face. If I yielded to my natural impulse, I should cry out, "Strike me! spit at me! show you hate me!—anything but that terrible humiliation of yourself before me!" That's how I feel. The abasement of which he isn't sensible affects me on his behalf. I give money with what delicacy I can. If I am obliged to refuse, I mutter apologies and hurry away with burning cheeks. ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... Gods no say in this? Think you they be won over by a kiss— Here the Queen, she, the unwearied aid Of all our striving, Pallas the war-maid? Have they not vowed, and will ye scant their hate, Havoc on Ilios from gate to gate, And for her towers abasement to the dust? Behold, O King, lust shall be paid with lust, And treachery with treachery, and for blood Blood shall be shed. Therefore let loose the flood Of our pent passion; break her gates in, raze The walls of her, ...
— Helen Redeemed and Other Poems • Maurice Hewlett
... between them was almost fantastic so strongly did the arrogance of the one emphasize the deep abasement of the other. Dacre was of large build and inclined to stoutness. He had the ruddy complexion of the English country squire. He moved with the ...
— The Lamp in the Desert • Ethel M. Dell
... solace to their consciences, one of my vocation has not to learn. Our chief task is to show the delusion of those, who, while condemning their own sins by words of confession and self-abasement, make a merit of humility; but, Doge of Venice, there is still a virtue in the sacred rite I have this evening been required to perform, which can overcome the mounting of the most exalted spirit. Many attempt to deceive themselves at the confessional, ...
— The Bravo • J. Fenimore Cooper
... it. It was easy enough after the habit was formed. Twentieth-century civilization is decently peaceable, and it isn't especially difficult to dodge the personal collisions. I have succeeded in dodging them, for the greater part, paying the price in humiliation and self-abasement as I went along. God, Stuart, you don't know what that means!—the degradation; the hot and cold chills of self-loathing; the sickening misery of having your own soul turn upon you to rend and tear you ...
— The Taming of Red Butte Western • Francis Lynde
... by their priests with some good orthodox doctrine, as to divine appointment on the subject. Indeed, the case of these islanders is one in which the necessary effect of that consciousness of impotence and self-abasement, is scarcely in any degree counteracted by other principles. We see it literally exemplifying the description of ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 13 • Robert Kerr
... Europe's abasement began when the Barbary Corsairs were recognized as civilized states to be treated with on equal terms: that is to say, when consuls, ambassadors, and royal letters began to arrive at Tunis or Algiers. This period began soon after Doria's disastrous ...
— The Story of the Barbary Corsairs • Stanley Lane-Poole
... graceful. They are capable of enduring great fatigue, and the privation of food and drink, and bear exposure to the tropical sun for hours with no covering for the head, without being in the least affected. Their bearing evinces entire subjection and abasement, and they shun and distrust the whites. They do not manifest the cheerfulness of the negro slave, but maintain an expression of indifference, and are destitute of all curiosity or ambition. These peculiarities are doubtless the results ...
— The Mayas, the Sources of Their History / Dr. Le Plongeon in Yucatan, His Account of Discoveries • Stephen Salisbury, Jr.
... corner of creation, and there reduced to an atom, man sinks to nothingness in this infinity of worlds. But a second thought corrects the impression. These vast contemplations are well calculated to inspire awe, but not abasement. Mind and matter are incommensurable. An immortal soul, even while clothed in "this muddy vesture of decay," is in the eye of God and reason, a purer essence than the brightest sun that lights the depths of heaven. The organized human eye, ...
— The Uses of Astronomy - An Oration Delivered at Albany on the 28th of July, 1856 • Edward Everett
... town which he wished to pay before his departure. She observed him carefully for a time, and saw the human heart in all its nakedness. Balthazar had dwindled from his true self. The consciousness of his abasement, and the isolation of his life in the pursuit of science made him timid and childish in all matters not connected with his favorite occupations. His daughter awed him; the remembrance of her past devotion, of the energy she had displayed, of the ...
— The Alkahest • Honore de Balzac
... prove subservient and truckling to the hand by which it is fed has been proved groundless. Of course there have been time-servers in the American ministry, as in every other; but flagrant instances of the abasement of a whole body of clergy before the power that holds the purse and controls promotion are to be sought in the old countries rather than the new. Even selfish motives would operate against this temptation, since it has often been demonstrated that the ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... on she thought, "There is real greatness in that man." He was great even in his behaviour. No apologies, no explanations, no abasement, no violence, and not even the slightest tremor of the frame holding that bold and perplexed soul. She knew that for certain because her fingers were resting lightly on Lingard's arm while she walked slowly by his side as though he were taking her down ...
— The Rescue • Joseph Conrad
... the footsteps of their great progenitor, the Babylonians and Assyrians became a most pious race, constantly rendering to their gods the glory for everything which they succeeded in bringing to a successful issue. Prayer, supplication, and self-abasement before their gods seem to have been with them a ...
— The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria • Theophilus G. Pinches
... celebrated than three-fourths of the princesses of Europe. But there are hundreds of our own compatriots who are quite as eager tuft-hunters as this poor Arab guide! John Bull dearly loves "a lord," while before "a princess" his soul creeps and grovels in infinite abasement. ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams
... the fact that he was in the presence of a most superior person. The man was tall and gaunt, self-contained—a little aloof—he asked for nothing, and realized his own worth. He commanded respect because he respected himself—there was neither abnegation, apology nor abasement in his manner. Once I saw him walking in the Strand, and I noticed that the pedestrians instinctively made way, although probably not one out of a thousand had any idea who he was. No one ever affronted him, nor ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... of any attachment towards him. The Scottish generals would enter into no confidence with him; and still treated him with distant ceremony and feigned respect. And every proposal which they made him tended further to his abasement and to ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part E. - From Charles I. to Cromwell • David Hume
... His self-abasement was abject, yet several hours had passed before he attempted to carry out this design. It was the time of Evensong when he reached the church, and the brothers were singing their ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... it wasn't true, I hope no harm is done, it is only his incorrigible——' Oh, to hear that woman's voice in that deep abasement! Lyon had no nefarious plan, no conscious wish to practise upon her shame or her loyalty; but he did say to himself that he should like to bring her round to feel that there would have been more dignity in a union with a ...
— A London Life; The Patagonia; The Liar; Mrs. Temperly • Henry James
... to this degree of disorder and abasement, that a noble people had been dragged downwards in the course of years, sinking constantly deeper, abandoning, one by one, its guarantees, losing its titles to the esteem of other nations, approaching the abyss, seeing the hour draw nigh in which to rise would be ...
— The Uprising of a Great People • Count Agenor de Gasparin
... begun, by an effect already operating, to be a part of her knowledge. He saw, and it stirred him, that she hadn't come to judge him; had come rather, so far as she might dare, to pity. This showed him her own abasement—that, at any rate, of grief; and made him feel with a rush of friendliness that he liked to be with her. The rush had quickened when she met his ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume II • Henry James
... Francois Bigot, you never wore me next your heart, although you said so! You wear the lady of Beaumanoir next your heart. You have opened your heart to her after pledging it to me! If I was the pearl of price, you have adorned her with it—my abasement is her glory!" Angelique's tall, straight figure stood up, magnified with fury ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... nobleman, a colonel of the guard, was to be exposed in the pillory for three days. These were terrible and startling events. Not a trace of exultation was upon the gloomy faces of the multitude: this abasement of two men of illustrious birth to an equality with boors, seemed an invasion of the conservative principles of society. It was an ugly dream—the people could not realize it. They must go to the spot where the sentence ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... to have disclosed unexpected depths of hypocrisy and speciousness where all had seemed solidity. He felt almost afraid to form a conjecture on the weather, or the time, or the fruit-promise, so great was his self-abasement. ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... that, now that he did see that she was lost in love of him, there came to him, not sorrow and humility and abasement, but something else that he struggled in vain against—something entirely strange and new, that, had he analysed it, he would have found to be petulance and irritation and resentment and ungentleness. The sudden selfish prompting mastered him before he was ...
— Widdershins • Oliver Onions
... Greek civilisation was the problem of freedom, the realisation of self-dependence and self-determination. In the pursuit of these ends Greece garnered conclusions which are the undying possessions of the world. If to the graces of self-abasement, meekness and charity it remained a stranger, it gave a new worth to the individual, and showed that without the virtues of wisdom, courage, steadfastness and justice man could not attain to ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... little one must be to pass through it, it being nothing else but death to self! But when we have passed through it, what enlargement do we find! David said, (Psalm 18:19) "He brought me forth into a large place." And it was through humiliation and abasement that ...
— The Autobiography of Madame Guyon • Jeanne Marie Bouvier de La Motte Guyon
... with such a mixed feeling of anger, chagrin, self-abasement, and apprehension as they ...
— The Wedge of Gold • C. C. Goodwin
... the things that turn the human heart To vanity, which should collect itself In penitence; for a lewd, vicious life, Want and abasement are the ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... flattered himself that the reprimand he had addressed to Reginald that afternoon would move his hearer to self- abasement or penitence, he had sadly miscalculated the power of ...
— Reginald Cruden - A Tale of City Life • Talbot Baines Reed
... alternative routes He sought to find, before He resigned Himself to opening the path by His blood. Since His death there is "a new and living way" for those who know Him, which stretches from the lowest point of their abasement to the very peak of God's holiness. Up that way they can pass by repentance and trust, and down it the mercy of God hastens to meet and lead them. They are forever delivered from the sense of exclusion from God; the way lies ...
— Some Christian Convictions - A Practical Restatement in Terms of Present-Day Thinking • Henry Sloane Coffin
... shall end." Yes, dear one—I tell you this in all solemnity, so hearken well unto my words—that though, during these cruel days of our adversity, I have nearly died of distress of soul at the sight of you and your poverty, as well as at the sight of myself and my abasement and helplessness, I yet care less for the hundred roubles which his Excellency has given me than for the fact that he was good enough to take the hand of a wretched drunkard in his own and press it. By that act he restored me to myself. By that act he revived ...
— Poor Folk • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... he had started hot foot for Tower Hill. He had not been that way since the day of his examination—the finest day of his life—the day of his overweening pride. It was very different now. He would not have called the Queen his cousin, still, but this time it was from a sense of profound abasement. He didn't think himself good enough for anybody's kinship. He envied the purple-nosed old cab-drivers on the stand, the boot-black boys at the edge of the pavement, the two large bobbies pacing slowly along the Tower Gardens railings in the consciousness of their infallible might, and the ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... sideling nigher to his companion, and producing his tablets with an air in which exultation struggled, strangely, with an affectation of self-abasement. "No, no, Ellen, I am any thing but unfortunate. Unless, indeed, a man may be so called, whose fortune is made, whose fame may be said to be established for ever, whose name will go down to posterity with that of ...
— The Prairie • J. Fenimore Cooper
... Classical Dictionary. I have lent mine, but I know one was a rock and the other a whirlpool, though I cannot state, with any definiteness, which was which.) I may be as humble and deprecating as I choose, but it will not avail me. A very agony of self-abasement will be no armor against the poisoned shafts which assumed superiority will hurl against me. Yet I press the arrow to my bleeding heart, and calmly ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various
... ego that hates danger and shrinks from hurt and death, that longs for home, and would welcome the end of the war on any terms; and also the stronger personality of the soldier who can tolerate but one end to this war, cost what that may—the victory of liberty and justice, and the utter abasement ...
— A Student in Arms - Second Series • Donald Hankey
... she was getting into bed, she wiped her eyes, then cringed at a gust of perfumery—and realized that she had brought Lily's handkerchief back with her! It was a last abasement: the woman's horrible handkerchief. She burst into hysterical weeping.... The next morning, when she came down to breakfast, her face was haggard with those ravaging tears, and with the fatigue of hating. Even before she ...
— The Vehement Flame • Margaret Wade Campbell Deland
... case, the want of unity amongst so many subdivisions that were independent states, might be pleaded as an excuse. Pitiable weakness there was in both cases; and "to be weak is to be miserable;" but degradation by degradation, universal abasement of the national energies, as an effect through wilful abasement as a cause; this miserable spectacle has been exhibited in mellow maturity by no Christian nations but those of Spain and Portugal. Both have degenerated into nations of poltrons, and from what ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... and amongst all peoples, the spy has been held in marked abhorrence. In the amnesties of war there is for him alone no quarter; in the estimate of social life no toleration; his self-abasement excites contempt, not compassion; his patrons despise while they encourage; and they who stoop to enlist the services shrink with disgust from the moral leprosy covering the servitor. Of such was the witness ...
— Speeches from the Dock, Part I • Various
... moreover, that to readers unfamiliar with the peculiarities of professing Christians, whether Puritans or of other denomination, the expressions of humility and self-abasement which Cromwell frequently makes use of have appeared to be plain symptoms of hypocrisy. They are nothing but the habits of the sect. Such expressions are supposed to have been employed to blind men to his ambitious projects, to shelter him from the jealous scrutiny of rivals and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various
... one day said to his friend Hephaestion, that "the business of eating and drinking compelled him to remember, and with a sense of abasement, his mortal nature, although he was ...
— The Scottish Chiefs • Miss Jane Porter
... growing prosperity of the South should require it; their emissaries abroad in every salon have been vowing that manumission of their slaves would soon follow recognition; and it was their rage at failure after such wretched abasement and unprincipled inconsistency which, very naturally, provoked the present ire of the South against England and France. They, the proud, chivalrous Southrons, who had daringly rushed to battle as slave lords, after eating abundant dirt as prospective ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. VI, June, 1862 - Devoted To Literature and National Policy • Various
... of the latter. The stronger personality leads the weaker on by paths which the weaker knows not, upward he leads him, though his steps be slow and vacillating. Humility, in the Christian sense, means this fealty to the higher. It doesn't mean self-abasement, self-depreciation, as it has been understood to mean, by both the Romish and the Protestant Church. Pride, in the Christian sense, is the closing of the doors of the soul to a great ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... nice people indeed. That was just it, she said. Did he suspect her of yearning to throw herself in the way of nice people on the day of her abasement? If he chose to ignore her sentiments in the matter, he might at least consider his own interests. Had he forgotten that John Quincy Burton was chairman of the board of trustees of the college? Would the head of the department ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... be noted, in passing, that the studied abasement of the Tiers Etat had already begun to bear some fruit that should have alarmed every patriotic heart. It was, as we have seen, impossible to obtain good French infantry except from Gascony and some other border provinces. The place that should have been held by natives was filled ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... more entreaty and self-abasement on my part, she opened the door. The room was dark. We sat down together on the window-seat, and all at once she relaxed and her head fell on my shoulder, and she began weeping again. I held her, the alternating ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... he presently drew up a letter or memoir humbly and plaintively stating his case, which the countess undertook to put into the Queen's hands. It was the first of over two hundred notes from him, notes of abasement, beseeching argument, expostulation, and so on, all entrusted to Jeanne. She ...
— The Humbugs of the World • P. T. Barnum
... sudden change has taken place in you?"—"Because for an hour I forgot my proper worth," Radbot's daughter continues violently, "do you think that I am fit only to crawl before you? I will take measures to wipe out my abasement. That which is due to me I am determined to receive!"—"Woe's me!" complains Elsa, "Was I duped by your feigning, when you stole to me last night with your pretended grief? And do you now haughtily demand precedence of me, you, the wife ...
— The Wagnerian Romances • Gertrude Hall
... after Max Schurz's affair, he felt he had already touched the lowest depths of degradation. He knew now that he had touched a still lower one. Oh! horrible abyss of self-abasement!—he had taken the blood-money. And yet, it was to save Dot's life! Herbert was right, after all: quite right. Yes, yes, all hope was gone: ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... tell where I come from.'—'From Scotland,' cried Davies roguishly. 'Mr. Johnson, (said I) I do indeed come from Scotland, but I cannot help it[1157].' I am willing to flatter myself that I meant this as light pleasantry to sooth and conciliate him, and not as an humiliating abasement at the expence of my country. But however that might be, this speech was somewhat unlucky; for with that quickness of wit for which he was so remarkable, he seized the expression 'come from Scotland,' which I used in the sense of being of that country; and, as if I had said that I ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... bitter, and he writhed there in the dust, groaning in the agony of his remorse. Little by little his passion spent itself, but still he lay there, yearning mightily for sound of his master's voice or touch of his hand, yet dared he not look up because of his abasement. ...
— Beltane The Smith • Jeffery Farnol
... make his escape in time, was taken captive; and found that his dignity, which procured him no regard from the Spanish soldiers, did but draw on him the insolent mockery of the German, who, being generally attached to the Lutheran principles, were pleased to gratify their animosity by the abasement ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part C. - From Henry VII. to Mary • David Hume
... We will give you everything and ask for nothing. We do not expect true and enduring love. Do not be constant or generous or even kind. We know that we shall suffer. But, none the less, in our sorrow there will be sweetness, and even in our abasement we shall feel a ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... seemed to doubt if they had ever truly given themselves to Jesus; and old and young now declared, weeping, that their only desire was to obtain peace and rest in their souls, and to be enabled to live in the undisturbed enjoyment of the Saviour. With their emotions of love were mixed deep shame and abasement, that they had not before perceived their true happiness; but by their lifeless profession, and inconsistent conduct, had crucified the Saviour afresh, and put him to ...
— The Moravians in Labrador • Anonymous
... undercurrent of hatred and revolt. This is particularly observable in the leaders of the movement; women who in the tumult of their aspirations, and their passionate yearnings towards the new ideal, and the memory of the abasement their sex have been in the past, and are still being in the present, subjected to, forget the laws of life, and with virulent virtue and protest condemn love—that is to say, love in the sense of sexual intercourse—and proclaim a higher mission for woman than to be the mother of men: and an adjuvant, ...
— Muslin • George Moore
... in my soul. Who has been like to me? My name travels A hundred seven and twenty languages, My name a ship upon them, trading fear. My unseen power weighs upon the heads Of nations, like the blown abasement given By sedges when they are wretched to the wind. Ay, and the farthest goings of the air Can reach no land my taxes do not labour. The fear of me is the conscience of the world. Ahasuerus is a region large As there is light upon the earth; when dawn ...
— Emblems Of Love • Lascelles Abercrombie
... did not do all that out of love to you; but he wished to make you come out of light into darkness; and from an exalted state to degradation; from glory to abasement; from joy to sorrow; and from rest to fasting ...
— First Book of Adam and Eve • Rutherford Platt
... thus it is— For ever thus, addressed with awe. I ne'er Can see a smile, unless in some broad banquet's Intoxicating glare, when the buffoons 440 Have gorged themselves up to equality, Or I have quaffed me down to their abasement. Myrrha, I can hear all these things, these names, Lord—King—Sire—Monarch—nay, time was I prized them; That is, I suffered them—from slaves and nobles; But when they falter from the lips I love, ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... space, to silence the ticking of time, so that eternity may speak, and vistas of infinity be revealed—that is the purport of their existence, and in hope of attaining to that consummation they submit themselves with deliberate resolve to the utmost anguish and abasement that the body ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson
... walk of our daily experience. This I have observed myself in the perturbing effect which a sudden death, a grievous accident, or in recent years the declaration of war, has exercised upon all except the most lethargic or the most determined minds. Secondly, he experienced the profound self-abasement or mental annihilation caused by the near conception of a being of a superior order. In the presence of an existence wearing, indeed, the human form, but of attributes widely different from and superior to his own, ...
— The Lost Stradivarius • John Meade Falkner
... how I dined alone that evening in a mood between frantic exasperation and utter abasement in the window of the Mediated Universities Club, of which I was a junior member under the undergraduate rule. And I lay awake all night in one of the austere club bedrooms, saying to old Pramley a number of extremely able and penetrating things that had unhappily ...
— The Passionate Friends • Herbert George Wells
... gathered that there was something on her mind besides a mere desire to win money. As if money could matter to HER! No, she had some end in view, and there were circumstances at which I could guess, but which I did not know for certain. True, the slavery and abasement in which she held me might have given me (such things often do so) the power to question her with abrupt directness (seeing that, inasmuch as I figured in her eyes as a mere slave and nonentity, she could not very well have taken offence at any rude curiosity); but ...
— The Gambler • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... carry her to the taxicab, to his abasement he felt her hands press him away. He thought she had not yet recovered, that she believed herself still in the grasp of the madman. He set her on her feet and looked ...
— The Perils of Pauline • Charles Goddard
... lass of seventeen; it had now set down the last ones which she was ever to dictate. Then I broke it. For the pen that had served Joan of Arc could not serve any that would come after her in this earth without abasement. ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... down on him, paining his bleared and puffy eyes. The contrast between his own lump of a body, drink-dazed, dull-throbbing, and the warm, bright day came in on him with a sudden sinking of the heart, a sense of degradation and personal abasement. He realized, however obscurely, that he was an eyesore in nature, a blotch on the surface of the world, an offence to the sweet-breathing heavens. And that bright silence was so strange and still; he could ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown
... long before she was twenty, that "forgive me," from a man's lips, indicates the uttermost depths of abasement and devotion. ...
— Old Rose and Silver • Myrtle Reed
... their most secret thoughts, the miracles they saw her perform, and the admirable tenour of her life, in which the most active virtues were combined with the deepest humility, and supernatural favours received with the most profound self-abasement, were to them a warrant of the genuineness of her revelations, the substance of which, condensed and reduced into a series of rules, are to this day observed by the Oblates of Tor ...
— The Life of St. Frances of Rome, and Others • Georgiana Fullerton
... struck him down to a lower depth of self-abasement. "My poor child," he felt like answering, "the shame of it is that I've never thought of you at all!" But he could only uselessly repeat: "I'll do anything I can ...
— The Reef • Edith Wharton
... advantage in such a career as he had planned. He felt this still, even in the act of noting his own bewilderment—felt it the more in contrast to the odd unconsciousness of Mr. Spence's attitude, of the incredible candour of his self-abasement and self-abandonment. It was clear that Mr. Spence was not troubled by the repercussion of his actions in the consciousness of others; and this looked like a weakness—unless it were, instead, a great ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... were simply to grovel in the dust before him it should be done. If humiliation would suffice,—or any self-abasement that were possible to me! But I should be false if I said that I look forward to any such possibility. How can he wish to have me back again after what he has said and done? I am his wife, and he has disgraced ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope
... What joy I took in the thought that, though he knew it not, nor could come to know it, I Lazzaro Biancomonte, whom he had abused and whose spirit he had broken—was become a tool to expedite the work of abasement and destruction that was ripening for him. And realizing all this, that letter I vowed to Heaven I would carry, suffering no obstacle to daunt me, suffering nothing to turn me from ...
— The Shame of Motley • Raphael Sabatini
... he! I, even I. I thought that he wanted to rid himself of me,' she cried, pouring forth her confession in shame and abasement. 'There! I can hardly bear to tell you in the dark, and how shall I tell him in ...
— The Castle Inn • Stanley John Weyman
... into French, and several editions were sold in Paris.[Footnote: Recueil des loix constitutives. Constitutions des treize Etats Unis de l'Amerique. Franklin to Samuel Cooper, May 1, 1777. Works vi. 96.] The people that adored King Louis could cry out for the abasement of King George. A few prudent heads in high places were shaken at the thought of assisting rebellion. The Emperor Joseph II., brother-in-law to the king of France, was not quite the only man whose business it was to ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... little heart broken boy, weeping by the outstretched form of a dead mother, then bravely, nobly trudging a hundred miles to obtain her Christian burial. I see this motherless lad growing to manhood amid the scenes that seem to lead to nothing but abasement; no teachers; no books; no chart, except his own untutored mind; no compass, except his own undisciplined will; no light, save light from Heaven; yet, like the caravel of Columbus, struggling on and on through the trough of the sea, always toward the destined land. I see the full-grown man, ...
— America First - Patriotic Readings • Various
... flower, the white unsullied bloom of an Intensely Useless Life," even if it be only a belated cutting from The Green Carnation. William's first boyish passion for a quite cold shop-minx, with its agonies of self-abasement and rarefied desire, is uncannily clever; and the thoroughly unpleasant episode of our William, minx-free, only to be caught in the toils of that insatiable sensualist, Mrs. Daintree, is presented with discreet vigour. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, March 15, 1916 • Various
... changed from man's, and let a beast's heart be given unto him!" Such was the sentence pronounced and executed upon him of Babylon whose pride called for abasement from the Lord. Dr. Mead (Medica Sacra, p. 59) observes that there was known among the ancients a mental disorder called lycanthropy, the victims of which fancied themselves wolves, and went about howling and attacking ...
— The Man-Wolf and Other Tales • Emile Erckmann and Alexandre Chatrian
... that God's Love is made manifest as well in a simple soul which does not resist His grace as in one more highly endowed. In fact, the characteristic of love being self-abasement, if all souls resembled the holy Doctors who have illuminated the Church, it seems that God in coming to them would not stoop low enough. But He has created the little child, who knows nothing and can but utter feeble cries, and the poor savage who has only the natural law to guide him, and ...
— The Story of a Soul (L'Histoire d'une Ame): The Autobiography of St. Therese of Lisieux • Therese Martin (of Lisieux)
... then, of Easter Eve must surely be one of profound sorrow and humiliation. We ought to be bowed to the very earth with self- abasement by the thought that we have been, so many times in the past, untrue to ...
— Gloria Crucis - addresses delivered in Lichfield Cathedral Holy Week and Good Friday, 1907 • J. H. Beibitz
... Bradley. It was square and papered in grey-white with fluted columns of the Corinthian order of architecture, and that touch of history and romance did not fail of its effect on the country boys fresh from the barn-yard and the corn-rows. It added to their fear and self-abasement, as they rolled their slow eyes around and upward. The audience consisted mainly of the pupils arranged according to classes, the girls on the left and the boys on the right. In addition, some of the towns-people, who loved oratory, or were specially ...
— A Spoil of Office - A Story of the Modern West • Hamlin Garland
... to see the man cringe in abasement and contrition. But the heavy jaw thrust forth in truculent defiance; hate blazed forth from the deep-set eyes; the florid features were empurpled with rage. He made as if to reply, but turned away from the withering scorn in ...
— Astounding Stories, July, 1931 • Various
... fauns' heads, deep cushions, silver dancing girls! Love! She had a sudden sense of deep abasement. What was she, herself, but just a feast for a man's senses? Her home, what but a place like this? Miss Daphne Wing was back again. Gyp looked at her husband's face while she was dancing. His lips! How was it ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... restoring and adorning buildings. That election, then, brought consolation to many men of talent, and infused a potent and heaven-sent breath of life in those ingenious but timid spirits who had sunk into abasement; and they, thus revived, afterwards executed the beautiful works that we see at the present day. And first, having been set to work at the commission of His Holiness, Antonio straightway reconstructed a court ...
— Lives of the most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 06 (of 10) Fra Giocondo to Niccolo Soggi • Giorgio Vasari
... is nothing to be frightened at. This is a manly world we live in. Our reverence is good for nothing if it does not begin with self-respect. Occidental manhood springs from that as its basis; Oriental manhood finds the greatest satisfaction in self-abasement. There is no use in trying to graft the tropical palm upon the Northern pine. The same divine forces underlie the growth of both, but leaf and flower and fruit must follow the law of race, of soil, of climate. Whether ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... like theirs, which had caught inspiration from the heroes and martyrs of liberty,—good right arms, like theirs, which wielded the implements of war as readily as the implements of labor, all scouted the very thought of such unutterable abasement. By the patriotism which abhors treason, by the fortitude which endures privation, by the intrepidity which faces death, they proved themselves worthy of the great continent they inhabit by showing themselves capable of upholding the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 93, July, 1865 • Various
... first began to speak to him, even his hardened nature had to succumb before the contemptuous looks of the men he had so long bullied, the more especially as they now openly displayed their joy at his abasement. ...
— The White Squall - A Story of the Sargasso Sea • John Conroy Hutcheson
... sank upon the divan. Never had he been challenged so. With his own people he had ever been used to cringing and abasement, and he had played the tyrant, and struck hard and cruelly, and he had been feared; but here, behind David's courteous attitude, there was a scathing arraignment of his conduct which took no count ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... surprise. It might mean one thing; it might mean another; how could I tell? He always impressed me so with his superiority that even in that moment, when my honor and life's happiness were at stake, I was conscious of a feeling of abasement and guiltiness that I dare accuse him to his face. Perhaps, he saw that I was frightened at my own temerity; at all events he was not ...
— The New Penelope and Other Stories and Poems • Frances Fuller Victor
... Puritan was made up of two different men, the one all self-abasement, penitence, gratitude, passion, the other proud, calm, inflexible, sagacious. He prostrated himself in the dust before his Maker; but he set his foot on the neck of his king. In his devotional retirement, he prayed with convulsions, and groans, and tears. ...
— Elementary Guide to Literary Criticism • F. V. N. Painter
... Maggie saw nothing of Martin's weaknesses, his suspicions and dreads, his temper and self-abasement. The nobility that Martin had in him was true nobility, his very weaknesses came from his sharp consciousness of what purity and self-sacrifice and asceticism really were, and that they were indeed ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... incapacity to retain it; and that which, had they seen it recorded in an ancient history, men would have regarded as the height of philosophy, they despised when acted under their eyes, as the extremest abasement of imbecility. Yet I compare my lot with that of the great man whom I was expected to equal in ambition, and to whose grandeur I might have succeeded; and am convinced that in this retreat I am more to be envied than he in the plenitude of his power and the height of his renown; yet is not ...
— Devereux, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... told us, was the symbolic figure of the incoming tide of Europe's rebirth in the sixteenth century. Rabelais, the priest, physician, and compounder of a new fish sauce, held that life is its own justification, and need not be lived in doleful self-abasement. Do what you wish, enjoy life, be interested in a thousand things, feel a perpetual inquisitive delight in all the details of human affairs! The gospel of exuberance—that is Rabelais. Is ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... "whom do you bring to triumph over me in my abasement? For shame, Jerry! Is this the act of a loving and affectionate Bo'sun, the Bo'sun of my innocent childhood? Oh, ...
— The Amateur Gentleman • Jeffery Farnol et al
... deduce their development from the English culture of Art, one must use the same processes as in proving Cromwell to have been called up by the loyalty of Englishmen. They towered the higher from contempt for the abasement around them. If there was greatness in measure in English Art, it was greatness subjected to tradition and conventionalism. The three artists we have just named were the only great freemen, in the realm of Art England had known down to the close of the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 4, February, 1858 • Various
... the girl, dropping on her knees, not so much, however, as it appeared, from abasement of spirit, as to bring her lips nearer to Edith's ear, that she might speak in a lower voice. "I know, from what they say, you are a great lady, and that you once had many people to wait upon you; and now you are in the wild woods, among strangers, and none about you but men." Edith replied ...
— Nick of the Woods • Robert M. Bird
... fought, he had sacrificed, he had killed, he had endured for the human nature which in his savage youth he had betrayed. Yet out of his supreme and endless striving to undo, to make reparation, to give his life, to find God, had come, it seemed to Wade in his abasement, only ...
— The Mysterious Rider • Zane Grey
... abasement which directs. Nothing is easier of comprehension. It is he who is below who pulls the strings. No position more convenient. He is the eye, and has the ear. He is the eye of the government; he has the ear of the king. To have the eye of the king is to draw and shut, at one's whim, ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... multiplied adulation, with all the glory and ravishing delights of the world, as it were, forced upon him, to see him thus assailed with the savage execrations of all those vile things who exult in the fall of everything that is great, and the abasement of everything that is noble, was indeed a spectacle which might have silenced malice and ...
— Venetia • Benjamin Disraeli
... praiseworthy exertions, and I was gazed on by all as an object of interest and admiration; but if others thought so of me, I thought not so of myself. I retired below to my berth with a loathing and contempt, a self-abasement, which I cannot describe. I felt myself unworthy of the mercy I had received. The disgraceful and vicious course of life I had led, burst upon me with horrible conviction. "Caelo tonantem credidimus Jovem ...
— Frank Mildmay • Captain Frederick Marryat
... reached those cheerful depths where there is no social or artistic status to maintain; so low as to be expected to do, or attempt to do, whatever might be asked of them, even though failure plunged them, if possible, in deeper depths of abasement. There was nothing beneath them except the Artichokes; and it was seldom, very seldom, an ...
— Vesty of the Basins • Sarah P. McLean Greene
... days agone to the city I wandered, And watched the ships warped to the Quay of the Merchants; And wondered why folk should be busy and anxious; For bitter my heart was, and life seemed a-waning, With no story told, with sweet longing turned torment, Love turned to abasement, and rest gone for ever. And last night I awoke with a pain piercing through me, And a cry in my ears, and Death passed on before, As one pointing the way, and I rose up sore trembling, And by cloud and by night went before ...
— Poems By The Way & Love Is Enough • William Morris
... is never as bouyant as the new recruit, in his dress parade. We humor children, and call on men to labor. Few, comparatively, get to the place where they prefer hard labor; to endure desolation of heart; to seek self in nothing; to see all loved but himself; to see others exalted but only abasement for self; to "endure hardness as a good soldier; to lay on the ground; to eat hard tack; to make long, weary marches; footsore and still fight on; to suffer traveling over rocks and thorns; to endure the loss of all things." I will take this last for mine. 'Tis the best, Oh my God, give me this! ...
— The Use and Need of the Life of Carry A. Nation • Carry A. Nation
... house-to-house canvass has always seemed to me (and not least clearly when I was the candidate) to sink beneath the level of humanity. To beg for votes, as if they were alms or broken victuals, is a form of mendicancy which is incompatible with common self-respect, and yet it is a self-abasement which thirty years ago custom imperatively demanded. "If my vote ain't worth calling for, I suppose it ain't worth 'aving" was the formula in which the elector ...
— Fifteen Chapters of Autobiography • George William Erskine Russell
... solemnity, so hearken well unto my words—that though, during these cruel days of our adversity, I have nearly died of distress of soul at the sight of you and your poverty, as well as at the sight of myself and my abasement and helplessness, I yet care less for the hundred roubles which his Excellency has given me than for the fact that he was good enough to take the hand of a wretched drunkard in his own and press it. By that act he restored me to ...
— Poor Folk • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... suffering the sword to touch the ground after passing through the animal's neck; the swine were slain with lances. Athletic games among the people succeeded, and the Doge and his Senators attacked and destroyed, with staves, several lightly built wooden castles, to symbolize the abasement of the feudal power before the Republic. As the centuries advanced this part of the ceremony, together with the slaughter of the swine, was disused; in which fact Mr. Ruskin sees evidence of a corrupt disdain ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... deep abasement of grief, blazed up a fierce and fiery anger. She started from her recumbent position, and began to walk wildly up and down the floor, beating her hands together, and ...
— Cruel As The Grave • Mrs. Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... great fatigue, and the privation of food and drink, and bear exposure to the tropical sun for hours with no covering for the head, without being in the least affected. Their bearing evinces entire subjection and abasement, and they shun and distrust the whites. They do not manifest the cheerfulness of the negro slave, but maintain an expression of indifference, and are destitute of all curiosity or ambition. These peculiarities are doubtless the results of the treatment ...
— The Mayas, the Sources of Their History / Dr. Le Plongeon in Yucatan, His Account of Discoveries • Stephen Salisbury, Jr.
... which one has had no part in making—'The sea is His, and He made it, and His hands prepared the dry land. O come, let us worship and fall down, and kneel before the Lord our Maker'—it's that exactly—a sense of joyful abasement in the presence of something great and infinitely beautiful. I do wish that were more clearly stated and understood and believed. Religion, as we know it in its technical sense, is so faint-hearted about it all! ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... good people, who had been accustomed so long to repeat mechanically their Oriental hyperboles of self-abasement, to hear their worthy minister maintaining that the dignified attitude of the old Patriarch, insisting on what was reasonable and fair with reference to his fellow-creatures, was really much more respectful ...
— Elsie Venner • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... he was much attached to herself, and trusted to this rather than to anything else. She saw also that his conceit was not very profound, and that his fits of self-abasement were as extreme as his exaltation had been. His impulsiveness and sanguine trustfulness in anyone who smiled pleasantly at him, or indeed was not absolutely unkind to him, made her more anxious about him than any other point in his character; she saw clearly that he would have ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... she read and re-read them with a devouring eagerness. She never paused to ask herself why this was. She avoided any investigation into her feeling for Horace. It was enough that, in spite of all the self-accusation and self-abasement which she carried in her heart, this being who knew the very worst of her could still think her worthy of kindness and respect. When she thought of this she felt as if she could go on her knees ...
— A Manifest Destiny • Julia Magruder
... hitherto unknown paths, nor made new roads, he has himself nevertheless passed through terrible experiences; he has been a prey to profound sorrows and doubts, and in spite of all, he has kept his love for the people intact, and deeply pities their ignorance and abasement. His work constantly recalls to our minds the theory that the cultivated classes are in debt to the people for the education which they have received at the people's expense. This is the great moral principle which governs the conscience of the Russian "intellectuals." It is in ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky
... of his predicament, and was enjoying his confusion. All the blood in his body seemed to have mobilised in one concentrated blush, and an agony of abasement, worse than a myriad mice, crept up and down over his soul. And the, as reflection began to assert itself, sheer terror took the place of humiliation. With every minute that passed the train was rushing nearer to the crowded and bustling terminus where dozens of prying eyes would be ...
— Reginald in Russia and Other Sketches • Saki (H.H. Munro)
... through a disregard for its possession which others would only have relinquished through an incapacity to retain it; and that which, had they seen it recorded in an ancient history, men would have regarded as the height of philosophy, they despised when acted under their eyes, as the extremest abasement of imbecility. Yet I compare my lot with that of the great man whom I was expected to equal in ambition, and to whose grandeur I might have succeeded; and am convinced that in this retreat I am more to be envied than ...
— Devereux, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... things that turn the human heart To vanity, which should collect itself In penitence; for a lewd, vicious life, Want and abasement are ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... this. He crushed her to him, and lifted her arms round his neck, and fell to kissing her with all the starved hunger of his lonely loveless years on the ranges. She was not proof against this. It lifted her out of her weakness, of her abasement to a response that swept away all fears, doubts, troubles. For the moment, at ...
— Valley of Wild Horses • Zane Grey
... lead. There is nothing to be frightened at. This is a manly world we live in. Our reverence is good for nothing if it does not begin with self-respect. Occidental manhood springs from that as its basis; Oriental manhood finds the greatest satisfaction in self-abasement. There is no use in trying to graft the tropical palm upon the Northern pine. The same divine forces underlie the growth of both, but leaf and flower and fruit must follow the law of race, of soil, of climate. Whether the questions which assail ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... a name, Lieutenant Bray. This is not self-abasement; it is not the parading of misfortune. It is because you have made the mistake of loving me. If you care less for me now than you did before, you will spread ...
— Jane Cable • George Barr McCutcheon
... extend the right of suffrage to all classes of male citizens, placing the men of the State, black and white, foreign and native, ignorant and educated, vicious and virtuous, all alike, above woman's head, gave her a keener sense of her abasement than she had ever felt before. But having neither press nor pulpit to advocate her cause, and fully believing this amendment would pass as a party measure, she used every means within her power to arouse and strengthen the agitation, in the face of the ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... nothing extraordinary in Cavalieri, Cecchino, Febo, or Perini, except their singularity of youth and grace, good parts and beauty. The vulgar are offended when an illustrious man pays homage to these qualities, forgetful of Shakespeare's self-abasement before Mr. W.H. and of Languet's prostration at the feet of Sidney. In the case of Michelangelo, we may find a solution of this problem, I think, in one of his sonnets. He says, writing a poem belonging very probably to the series ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... width, and leaving a track of smoldering, winking, red stems and stumps behind it. And all the beasts hid themselves in their terror so that not one of them was seen again that night. As for the People of the Little Hills, they were now ready to fall down and put dust in their hair in utter abasement, if either Grom or the Chief so much as ...
— In the Morning of Time • Charles G. D. Roberts
... practice that; while if self-assertion seems best, then we should assert ourselves. The abominable doctrine taught in the pulpit, the press, in books and elsewhere, is that the whole duty of women is self-abasement and self-sacrifice. I do not believe subjection is woman's duty any more than it is the duty of a man to be under subjection to another man or to many men. Women have the right of independence, of conscience, of will ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... least the merit of sincerity. They were put forth in behalf of what he regarded as truth; and the success which they met with, while it called into exercise his profoundest gratitude, only served to deepen the humility and self-abasement of their author. As the utterance of what a good man believed and felt, as a part of the history of a life remarkable for its consecration to apprehended duty, these writings cannot be without interest even to those ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... recognized that the image had crumbled in her shrine, but the brave heart of her did not flinch. Very tenderly she veiled the ruin. The element of worship had vanished in that single instant of revelation; but her love remained, and it shone out to him like a beacon as he knelt there in abasement by her side. ...
— The Bars of Iron • Ethel May Dell
... has cast down my pride with this blow. I was insolent in my arrogance, and the scorn of this man was necessary to my self-abasement. Could I be more humbled or more resigned than I am now? Don Luis is right: I am not worthy of him. However great the efforts I might make, I could not succeed in elevating myself to him and comprehending him, in putting my spirit into perfect communication with his. I am a rude ...
— Pepita Ximenez • Juan Valera
... cross-lights, quotation, historical instances, the whole flotsam and jetsam of two minds forced in and in upon the matter in hand from every point of the compass, and from every degree of mental elevation and abasement—these are the material with which talk is fortified, the food on which the talkers thrive. Such argument as is proper to the exercise should still be brief and seizing. Talk should proceed by instances; ...
— The Pocket R.L.S. - Being Favourite Passages from the Works of Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... but, floating gently to her feet, allowed himself to be landed as though it were a pleasure. Only miserable casuists will ask whether this was fair play on Madeleine's part; whether flattery so gross cost her conscience no twinge, and whether any woman can without self-abasement be guilty of such shameless falsehood. She, however, scorned the idea of falsehood. She would have defended herself by saying that she had not so much praised Ratcliffe as depreciated Webster, and that she was honest in her opinion of the old-fashioned American oratory. But she could not deny that ...
— Democracy An American Novel • Henry Adams
... monstrous perversion of ideas the Middle Ages viewed the flesh in its representative, woman,—accursed since the days of Eve—as a thing impure. The Virgin, exalted as Virgin more than as Our Lady, far from lifting up the real woman, had caused her abasement, by setting men on the track of a mere scholastic puritanism, where they kept rising higher and higher in subtlety ...
— La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages • Jules Michelet
... you go from my presence never to return. Hold! not just yet, I have a parting word to say before you leave. I confess, with self-abasement, that I once loved you, and with deep humiliation, amounting to agony, that that love was the cause of my ruin. The vail is now torn from my eyes, and I behold you as you are, a corrupted, debased, unfeeling demon, in the human form; and I would not even touch you with ...
— Ellen Walton - The Villain and His Victims • Alvin Addison
... chain with which he was binding himself and making his dishonour secure; for when Lothario was doing most to dishonour him he told him he was most honoured; and thus each step that Camilla descended towards the depths of her abasement, she mounted, in his opinion, towards the summit of ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... with wandering eyes and unengaged gestures; but the step of the stranger does not disturb those who kneel on the pavement of St. Mark's; and hardly a moment passes, from early morning to sunset, in which we may not see some half-veiled figure enter beneath the Arabian porch, cast itself into long abasement on the floor of the temple, and then rising slowly with more confirmed step, and with a passionate kiss and clasp of the arms given to the feet of the crucifix, by which the lamps burn always in the northern aisle, leave ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume II (of 3) • John Ruskin
... has been for myself, Miss Mollie, not for my people. What am I to my race? Aye," he continued, with a glance at his withered limbs, "to the least one of them not—not—" He covered his face with his hands and bowed his head in the self-abasement which hopeless ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee
... beg, what do you suppose is my feeling? I am ashamed in the sense of my own prosperity. I can't look him in the face. If I yielded to my natural impulse, I should cry out, "Strike me! spit at me! show you hate me!—anything but that terrible humiliation of yourself before me!" That's how I feel. The abasement of which he isn't sensible affects me on his behalf. I give money with what delicacy I can. If I am obliged to refuse, I mutter apologies and hurry away with burning cheeks. ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... length breaks under him." Trent's smile suddenly returned. "I could have borne everything but that last revelation of the impotence of human reason. Cupples, I have absolutely nothing left to say, except this: you have beaten me. I drink your health in a spirit of self-abasement. And you shall pay for ...
— The Woman in Black • Edmund Clerihew Bentley
... no surprise. It must be recollected that the conflict between the powers of the general and state governments was coeval with those governments. Even during the war, the preponderance of the states was obvious; and, in a very few years after peace, the struggle ended in the utter abasement of the general government. Many causes concurred to produce a constitution which was deemed more competent to the preservation of the union, but its adoption was opposed by great numbers; and in some of the large states especially, its enemies soon ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 4 (of 5) • John Marshall
... one's own person, or belonging to one's own person; but, in self-same, it means very. We have many words beginning with Self, but most of them seem to be compounds rather than derivatives; as, self-love, self-abasement, self-abuse, self-affairs, ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... But in his self-abasement Frank failed to take into the accounting the stupendous effect which the New York influences and the handling of great affairs had had upon his own character. Day by day he had learned more plainly ...
— Katrine • Elinor Macartney Lane
... species every day,—in the Quartier Latin young Frenchmen come in contact with it every night,—and without that sense of self-abasement or disgust evoked by similar association in the United States. The line of demarcation that separates respectability from shame is not rigidly drawn in Paris; in the Quartier Latin, where the youth of France and, to a considerable extent, of the whole world are prepared for earth and heaven, ...
— Mlle. Fouchette - A Novel of French Life • Charles Theodore Murray
... knowledge of your real designs. You are certainly deceiving yourself at this instant. In the first place, the relation of that madness—no, poor child, not wickedness—but if you tell it to him, it is a wilful and unnecessary self-abasement. If he is to be your husband, unburden your heart at once. Otherwise, why? why? You are but working up a scene, provoking needless excesses: you are storing misery in retrospect, or wretchedness to be endured. Had you the habit ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... in a shame-forced gurgle that would have done credit to Jennie Rucker in her worst moments of abasement before ...
— Rose of Old Harpeth • Maria Thompson Daviess
... sincerity—it breathed in every tone of her voice. Both Marilla and Mrs. Lynde recognized its unmistakable ring. But the former under-stood in dismay that Anne was actually enjoying her valley of humiliation—was reveling in the thoroughness of her abasement. Where was the wholesome punishment upon which she, Marilla, had plumed herself? Anne had turned it into a species ...
— Anne Of Green Gables • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... a philosophical race—the English: Bacon represents an ATTACK on the philosophical spirit generally, Hobbes, Hume, and Locke, an abasement, and a depreciation of the idea of a "philosopher" for more than a century. It was AGAINST Hume that Kant uprose and raised himself; it was Locke of whom Schelling RIGHTLY said, "JE MEPRISE LOCKE"; in the struggle against the English mechanical ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... betray the fact. His smile was set, and not only curved the lips but filled the large, lustreless eyes. Tarling gave him a rapid survey and drew his own conclusions. The man was a born lackey, plump of face, bald of head, and bent of shoulder, as though he lived in a perpetual gesture of abasement. ...
— The Daffodil Mystery • Edgar Wallace
... favor, he is treated with kindly toleration, and sometimes a genuine hospitality, to which he has no shadow of right nor title, and which, if he were a gentleman, he would not accept if it were voluntarily proffered. It should be said in mitigation that all this delirious abasement in no degree tempers his rancor against the system of which the foreign notable is the flower and fruit. He keeps his servility sweet by preserving it in the salt of vilification. In the character of a blatant blackguard the American snob is so happily disguised that he does ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce
... could hear the thunder of the explosion which destroyed a dreadnought! It was a dangerous game he was playing, and yet, to accede to Vard's proposal meant the loss of Alsace-Lorraine, meant the eventual abasement of the Hohenzollerns, the rise of socialism. No, he could not consent; he had not the power to consent; he had his instructions, precise and clear, from the Emperor himself. At any cost, that power must ...
— The Destroyer - A Tale of International Intrigue • Burton Egbert Stevenson
... was rising in Letty's breast. There was something in this mingling of self-abasement with an extraordinary moral richness and dignity, in these eyes, these hands that would have so gladly caught and clasped her own, which began almost to intimidate her. She broke out again, so as to hold her ...
— Sir George Tressady, Vol. II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Madeline revolved in mind, this letter was one reason for Stewart's headstrong, long-continued abasement. It had been received too late—after he had squandered the money that would have meant so much to mother and sister. Be that as it might, Madeline immediately sent a bank-draft to Stewart's sister with a letter explaining that the money was drawn ...
— The Light of Western Stars • Zane Grey
... every aspect of the man. The very clothes he wore, somber, wool-threaded homespun, crudely patched, reminded one of the coarse fabrics that monks affect for their abasement. But one saw, when one remembered the characteristic of the man, that they represented here ...
— The Sleuth of St. James's Square • Melville Davisson Post
... her actual words. She was accustomed, in moments of moral stress, to a quick lifting of her heart and mind for help and insight toward the highest that she knew, and she felt herself pray now, "Help me to be true, to her, for her." The prayer seemed to raise her from some threatened abasement, and from her regained height she spoke with a sense of assured revelation. "We can't have things by merely wanting, them. To gain anything we must work for it. You left us. We didn't shut you out. You were different.—You ...
— A Fountain Sealed • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... the most filthy rags; women, particularly the widows, take off ornaments and almost all dress; their faces are painted white with chalk, their heads are shaven, and they sit crouched on the earth in the house, in the attitude of abasement, the hands resting on the shoulders, palm downwards, not crossed across the breast, unless they are ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... crushing low! And as a vanquished soldier yields his sword To one who lifts him from the bloody earth, Even so, Beloved, I at last record, Here ends my strife. If thou invite me forth, I rise above abasement at the word. Make thy love ...
— Sonnets from the Portuguese • Browning, Elizabeth Barrett
... marks of his high dignity; put on the poor habit, and, with bare feet, join the religious in the regular exercises, in order to imitate their evangelical life!" A lively and enlightened faith, a solid and fervent piety, and a superior mind, convinced him that since the time of the abasement of the Son of God, humiliation is honorable, and adds to the splendor of the highest dignities; a truth which is not understood by persons of little faith, by the proud, the indevout, and ...
— The Life and Legends of Saint Francis of Assisi • Father Candide Chalippe
... to talk and feel thus, and I don't believe that God approves of it," I said, indignantly. "He gives us self-respect, and commands us to cherish it. Such abasement is unworthy of Christian souls. It is very bitter to die, as young as we are; but, if we have done our best to serve Him, we need—we ought not to be afraid ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... that she had been crying. Tears burn hottest and leave plainest trace in eyes where they come most seldom. The younger girl could not guess the tumult of emotion the other had undergone during her absence, the utter depths of self-abasement she had fathomed, for the sight of Helen and her fresh young beauty had roused in the adventuress a very tempest of bitterness and jealousy. Whether Helen Chester were guilty or innocent, how could Glenister hesitate between them? Cherry had asked herself. Now she stared at her ...
— The Spoilers • Rex Beach
... employment in lower and still lower grades; and will soon come to verify and illustrate the remark of Lord Bolingbroke, that "the profession of the law, in its nature the noblest and most beneficial to mankind, is in its abuse and abasement, the most sordid ...
— An Essay on Professional Ethics - Second Edition • George Sharswood
... see the man cringe in abasement and contrition. But the heavy jaw thrust forth in truculent defiance; hate blazed forth from the deep-set eyes; the florid features were empurpled with rage. He made as if to reply, but turned away from the withering ...
— Astounding Stories, July, 1931 • Various
... to take away something from the dignity of writing, and therefore are never communicated but with hesitation, and a little fear of abasement and contempt. But it must be remembered, that life consists not of a series of illustrious actions, or elegant enjoyments; the greater part of our time passes in compliance with necessities, in the performance of daily duties, in the removal of small inconveniences, in the ...
— A Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland • Samuel Johnson
... merchant had had heavy losses and could not meet his liabilities, he would place the lock of his door outside, reversing it, and sit in the veranda with a piece of sackcloth over him. Or he wrapped round him the floor-carpet of his room. When he had displayed these signs of ruin and self-abasement his creditors would not sue him, but he would never be able ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume II • R. V. Russell
... experience proves to be contrary to the fact and truth; but even if these statements were all truth instead of being foully slanderous and absolutely false, we, of all men, have ourselves to blame, ourselves to tax, and ourselves to punish, at least for the self abasement, for we have been the very causes of corrupting the ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... has always condemned himself," rejoined Herriot, with an air of deep self-abasement. "But I thank God for giving me the means, and the will, for making ample restitution to such as remain of my injured brother's family, or of my own. Harry, I am that uncle. I am the erring ...
— The Rangers - [Subtitle: The Tory's Daughter] • D. P. Thompson
... the highest and holiest he knew. In his heart was a subtle temptation, the voice of very love bidding him cast himself at her feet and sue but for the grace of so much human kindness as would make life without her endurable. He remembered the self-abasement which had come upon him when he tried to tell her of his love; the offering had seemed so gross, so unworthy to be brought before her. Would it not be the same now? He dreaded her power to protect herself, the secret might of purity which ...
— A Life's Morning • George Gissing
... and in the modesty of their own self-abasement, they had fixed on the twentieth place, or thereabouts, for Heathcote, and about the twenty-fifth for Dick. Alas! the singles grew into the teens, and the teens into the twenties, and the twenties into the thirties before the break came. After eighteen every one knew that the removes were exhausted, ...
— Follow My leader - The Boys of Templeton • Talbot Baines Reed
... forced to walk abroad in petticoats. Far rather would the disgraced boy have been whacked soundly with the heavy knob of the tithingman's staff; for bodily pain is soon forgotten, while mortifying abasement ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle
... like it. To lie, to deceive, to circumvent even the basest of mankind was odious to him. It was odious to him by training, instinct, and tradition. To do these things in the character of a traitor was abhorrent to his nature and terrible to his feelings. He had made that sacrifice in a spirit of abasement. He had said to himself bitterly, "I am the only one fit for that dirty work." And he believed this. He was not subtle. His simplicity was such that, though he had no sort of heroic idea of seeking death, the risk, deadly enough, to which he ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... "Well, mother, I yesterday engaged myself as substitute in the Spahis," [*] added the young man, lowering his eyes with a certain feeling of shame, for even he was unconscious of the sublimity of his self- abasement. "I thought my body was my own, and that I might sell it. I yesterday took the place of another. I sold myself for more than I thought I was worth," he added, attempting to smile; "I ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... Bigot, you never wore me next your heart, although you said so! You wear the lady of Beaumanoir next your heart. You have opened your heart to her after pledging it to me! If I was the pearl of price, you have adorned her with it—my abasement is her glory!" Angelique's tall, straight figure stood up, magnified with fury as ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... man turned, and strolled slowly past us, with that ineffable insolence which is the other side of the flunkey's insufferable self-abasement. He cast a glance at us as he went by, a withering glance of brazen effrontery. We knew him now, of course: it was that variable star, our old acquaintance, Mr. Higginson ...
— Miss Cayley's Adventures • Grant Allen
... woman with the flame in her heart? From her we have nothing to gain so—what would you? Her nature was too great to be discreet. She sinned grandly, but the height of her sin made deeper the depths of her soul abasement and her self-torment was too horrible to clothe itself in the tawdry draperies of diplomacy. She bared herself to the whips of the avenging furies, she cowered before the wrath of outraged God, and to her there was no guerdon possible for ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... village, and there was no likelihood of encountering him on the street in the evening, Dr. Gilbert Allen experienced a feeling of relief. Every time he met the man's disdainful gaze, the remembrance of his accusation returned, and with it a feeling of self-abasement. He longed to vindicate himself, to put it beyond the range of possibility that any man could say he had been dishonest. But that meant a great sacrifice, one that Gilbert was not yet prepared ...
— Treasure Valley • Marian Keith
... of Great Britain from the proud elevation on which it had been placed by the talents and enterprise of her former warriors and statesmen. No longer dreaded by her enemies, her servants were fast losing the confidence of self-respect. In this mortifying abasement, the colonists, though innocent of her imbecility, and too humble to be the agents of her blunders, were but the natural participators. They had recently seen a chosen army from that country, which, reverencing as a mother, they had blindly ...
— The Last of the Mohicans • James Fenimore Cooper
... Jenkins. Mr. Stephen's liberalism is the liberalism of self-help, of individualism, of every form of conscious industry and energy. It is the only liberalism which has the smallest chance of success in Scotland. The liberalism of Mr. Jenkins is the liberalism of state aid, of self-abasement, of incapacity and indolence'; and leads straight to sentimental communism. According to a 'working man' who writes to the paper, Mr. Jenkins virtually proposes that the industrious part of the working classes are to support ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... Link Ferris had treated the girl as though he were unworthy to breathe the same air as herself. He had been pathetically eager to concede any and every mooted point to her, with a servile abasement which had roused her contempt, even while it had gratified her ...
— His Dog • Albert Payson Terhune
... with the regular armies of Russia, and concurrently with nations as fierce and semi-humanized as themselves, besides that they were stung into threefold activity by the furies of mortified pride and military abasement, under the eyes of the Turkish Sultan. The forces, and more especially the artillery, of Russia, were far too overwhelming to permit the thought of a regular opposition in pitched battles, even with a less ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... for calm as she had appeared during the interview her emotions were running full tide. Love Ed Sorenson? Marry him? She groped for and dropped into a wicker chair, her head sinking in shame and self-abasement. Never—never! ...
— In the Shadow of the Hills • George C. Shedd
... form of that breaking down, just as what I call Salvation is its widest, most extensive form. We cast aside our reserves, our secrecies, our defences; we open ourselves; touches that would be intolerable from common people become a mystery of delight, acts of self-abasement and self-sacrifice are charged with symbolical pleasure. We cannot tell which of us is me, which you. Our imprisoned egoism looks out through this window, forgets its walls, and is for those brief moments released ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells
... reprobation which all the proscribed, on returning to France, had aroused and disseminated against the memory of Richelieu. This feeling was universal—among the great families he had decimated or despoiled;—in the Church, too firmly repressed not to be unmindful of its abasement;—in the Parliament, strictly confined to its judicial functions, and aspiring to break through such narrow limits. The same feeling was still alive in the Queen's bosom, who could not have forgotten the deep humiliation to which Richelieu had subjected her, and the fate ...
— Political Women (Vol. 1 of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... seeking a king. But she had thought to greet him coming out of the gray church, and it was with a start of surprise that she saw the glittering figure crouched in an attitude of woe upon the fallen column, and recognized in that image of abasement the Prince of Naples, the young lord of Sicily. Swiftly, but with the stately grace of those who of old time moved and allured in the streets of Rome when the feast of Flora was towards, she passed through the thick grasses to the column and the King. She knew it was he by his ...
— The Proud Prince • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... there, and that is why, in the effort to resist our pessimism, we must turn away both from the purchasers and from the vendors of ricordi. The ricordi that we prefer are gathered best where the gondola glides—best of all on the noble waterway that begins in its glory at the Salute and ends in its abasement at the railway station. It is, however, the cockneyfied Piazzetta (forgive me, shade of St. Theodore—has not a brand new cafe begun to glare there, electrically, this very year?) that introduces us most directly to the great picture by which the Grand Canal works its first spell, ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... again. She couldn't go through with it. She would go back to Norada and tell the whole thing. She had let Fred influence her, but she saw now she couldn't do it. But for the first time he felt that in this one thing she was not sincere. Her grief and abasement had been real enough, but now he felt ...
— The Breaking Point • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... creation, and there reduced to an atom, man sinks to nothingness in this infinity of worlds. But a second thought corrects the impression. These vast contemplations are well calculated to inspire awe, but not abasement. Mind and matter are incommensurable. An immortal soul, even while clothed in "this muddy vesture of decay," is in the eye of God and reason, a purer essence than the brightest sun that lights the depths ...
— The Uses of Astronomy - An Oration Delivered at Albany on the 28th of July, 1856 • Edward Everett
... torpor and stagnation of the last two centuries, after the self-abasement of the people, and the apparent extinction of all spirit of national pride, the French invasion and domination, under the stern rule of Bonaparte, was a rude awakening. Old boundaries were swept aside, old traditions were disregarded, ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... that there were no influences tending at moments to drag him down—an abasement from which he escaped only because he was up so high. We have seen that Basil Dashwood could affect him at times as a chunk of wood tied to his ankle—this through the circumstance that he made Miriam's famous conditions, ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... obscure,—seemed to win, by the homage of posterity, the rewards that attend the deceivers of their time. By a superb arrogance of generalization, she transferred into private life, and the rule of commonplace actions, the policy that, to the abasement of honour, has so often triumphed in the guidance of States. Therefore, betimes, the whole frame of society was changed to her eye, from the calm aspect it wears to those who live united with their kind; she viewed all seemings with suspicion; and before she had entered the world, ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... followed, I have only to say that it was the longest day of my life. Innocent as I knew myself to be, certain as I was that the abominable imputation which rested on me must sooner or later be cleared off, there was nevertheless a sense of self-abasement in my mind which instinctively disinclined me to see any of my friends. We often hear (almost invariably, however, from superficial observers) that guilt can look like innocence. I believe it to be infinitely ...
— The Moonstone • Wilkie Collins
... strong that he immediately replied he should like an order for the play. My friend the editor certainly thought that was rather a strong case; but he said that during his many years of experience he had witnessed an incurable amount of self-prostration and abasement having no outer object, and that almost invariably on the part of people who could well ...
— Speeches: Literary and Social • Charles Dickens
... looked at the man, standing in self-abasement and degradation before him, and would have looked longer, in an ineffectual struggle for enlightenment, but that Milly resumed her late position by his side, and attracted his attentive gaze to her ...
— The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargin • Charles Dickens
... faculties for "large discourse, looking before and after," capable of so much design, respectability, and happiness, even in its present short stage, and entering on an endless career, is seen in the abasement of snatching, as its utmost reach of purpose, at the low amusements, blended with vices, of each passing day; and cursing its privations and tasks, and often also the sharers of those privations, and the exactors ...
— An Essay on the Evils of Popular Ignorance • John Foster
... own land of the Heavenly Dynasty is proverbially elaborate," I said, with a gesture of self-abasement, "but in comparison with yours it may be regarded as an undeviating walk when opposed to a stately and many-figured dance. Among the company of the really excessively select (in which must ever be included the one whom ...
— The Mirror of Kong Ho • Ernest Bramah
... worshipful magistrate flattered himself that the reprimand he had addressed to Reginald that afternoon would move his hearer to self- abasement or penitence, he had sadly miscalculated the power of his ...
— Reginald Cruden - A Tale of City Life • Talbot Baines Reed
... hers. In them there was a renewal of his yesterday's promise, abasement, regret. Harmony met him ...
— The Street of Seven Stars • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... raging wave of humiliation, swept through his mind, and left nothing there but a personal sense of undeserved abasement. Why should he be mixed up with such a horrid exposure! It annihilated all the advantages of his well-ordered past, by a truth effective and unjust like a calumny—and the past was wasted. Its failure was disclosed—a distinct failure, on ...
— Tales of Unrest • Joseph Conrad
... she would have done had the man himself intruded. But she could not stem so easily the wave of self disgust that swept her back from this other man, a prince of Europe. And when she smothered that self-abasement, it was a matter of will. She recalled her interview with the Sphinx in the Tuileries. She recalled her country, and the empire she meant to win, a gift to France, worthy of Napoleon, of the Great Napoleon. Then her will became as a master outside of self, and horrid in its iron cruelty. ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... Philo Judaeus); in fact, there is not a single element in the new faith which had not been independently developed by the pagans, many of whom, like Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius, were ripe for the most abject self-abasement.] But this Orientalism fell at first upon unfruitful soil; the Vatican was yet wavering, and Hellenic notions of conduct still survived. It received a further rebuff at the hands of men like Benedict, who set up sounder ideals of holiness, introducing a gleam of ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... enjoyment; sad and bitter memories had consumed his manhood: but pride had been left him still; and he had dared in his secret heart to say, "I can defy Fate!" Now the bolt had fallen; Pride was shattered into fragments, Self-abasement was his companion, Shame sat upon his prostrate soul. The Future had no hope left in store. Nothing was left for him but ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... no more the same, I know not how to sing, I waken naught but grief. Disquieting dreams trouble my nights. They show me my people face to face.... They show me my people in all its abasement, with all its unprobed wounds. They reveal to me the iniquity that is the source ...
— The Renascence of Hebrew Literature (1743-1885) • Nahum Slouschz
... has well said: the horse abases the base, ennobles the noble. Likewise the dog. The theft of a dog to sell for a price had been the abasement worked by Michael on Dag Daughtry. To pay the price out of sheer heart-love that could recognize no price too great to pay, had been the ennoblement of Dag Daughtry which Michael had worked. And as the launch chug-chugged across the quiet harbour under the southern ...
— Michael, Brother of Jerry • Jack London
... energy of mind which enabled me to excel. In his rivalry he might have been supposed actuated solely by a whimsical desire to thwart, astonish, or mortify myself; although there were times when I could not help observing, with a feeling made up of wonder, abasement, and pique, that he mingled with his injuries, his insults, or his contradictions, a certain most inappropriate, and assuredly most unwelcome affectionateness of manner. I could only conceive this singular behavior to arise from ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... silly songs and smiles, the faculty of amusing him now that he has dropped drinking, and must feed his lower senses in some manner. I impute no more—no more than frivolity and waste of time, the abasement of ...
— Ringfield - A Novel • Susie Frances Harrison
... was that Germinie's abasement and degradation began to be visible in her personal appearance, to make her stupid and slovenly. A sort of drowsiness came over her ideas. She was no longer keen and prompt of apprehension. What she ...
— Germinie Lacerteux • Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
... them I appeal to imagine the anguish of self-reproach, the bitterness of humiliation, which stung him in those few moments after his first dishonour. It is the lofty tower that falls with the heaviest crash; it is the stately soul that suffers the deepest abasement; it is the white scutcheon on which the dark stain seems to wear ...
— Julian Home • Dean Frederic W. Farrar
... in such pernicious and unheard-of practices, and not only so, but that he who cannot but do right should suffer the stain of suspected guilt to be, as it were, rubbed on and soaked in by many sore and amazing circumstances. And it is a matter of soul-abasement to all that are in the bond of God's holy covenant in this place, that Satan's seat should be amongst them, where he attempts to set up his kingdom in opposition to Christ's kingdom, and to take some of the visible subjects of our Lord Jesus, and use at least their shapes and appearances, ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... greater, I think, than should be from distance of years, as she was the wife of a gentleman; and as the appearance of every thing about her, as well house as dress, carries the marks of such good circumstances, as require not abasement. ...
— Clarissa, Volume 4 (of 9) - History Of A Young Lady • Samuel Richardson
... full length upon the floor of the convent church, with his lips upon the lowest step of the altar, in an indescribable state of terror, misery, penitence, and self-abasement; through all of which struggled gleams of joy that ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VII • Various
... the intervention of Our Lady. Some fifty years after their defeat the Bohemians erected a church and monastery to St. Mary on the White Mountain. You may see this church, looking somewhat dilapidated—I should say ashamed of itself—as it stands there a monument to the Bohemian nation's self-abasement. ...
— From a Terrace in Prague • Lieut.-Col. B. Granville Baker
... her cousin's power. She could not modulate out the key of self-abasement in which she had started. Neither of them referred again to her suggestion that she should speak to George and settle the matter, whatever it ...
— A Room With A View • E. M. Forster
... I was," said he weakly, his shaken mind incapable of comprehending things as they were, his abasement over the breach that he had committed being so profound. She withdrew her hand. When it was gone out of his, he remembered how warm it was with the tide of her young body, and how soft for his own work-roughened ...
— The Bondboy • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... which they had contracted in a former state. [8] But the degrees of purity and corruption are almost immeasurable. It might be fairly presumed, that the most sublime and virtuous of human spirits was infused into the offspring of Mary and the Holy Ghost; [9] that his abasement was the result of his voluntary choice; and that the object of his mission was, to purify, not his own, but the sins of the world. On his return to his native skies, he received the immense reward of his obedience; the everlasting ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon
... violent as passion entered into it, and nothing so transient, so enervating, corroding, and damaging both to the intellectual powers and the capacity for permanent enjoyment; and nothing so repulsive either in its details, its self-centred egotistical exaltation, and the self-abasement which arrives with that final sense of satiety which she perceived to be inevitable. That part of her nature had never been roused into active life, partly because it was not naturally strong, but also because the more refined and delicately sensuous appreciation of beauty in life, which is so ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... answer he burst into a mad passion of tears. Never had Ray witnessed such self-abasement. Never had he seen such awful remorse. It was an hour, nearly, before he could calm him sufficiently to extract from him his story, and it amounted practically ...
— Marion's Faith. • Charles King
... case of all females:—the female always overcomes the male by her stillness. Stillness may be considered (a sort of) abasement. ...
— Tao Teh King • Lao-Tze
... series of catastrophes ... especially in the earlier part; secondly, its loss of creative power. As for the first of these, the black death, the famines, the hundred years' war, the free companies, the abasement of the church, the great schism—these things were misfortunes to which our modern time can find no parallel. They came suddenly upon Western Europe and defiled it like a blight.... They have made the mediaeval idea odious to every half-instructed man ...
— Hilaire Belloc - The Man and His Work • C. Creighton Mandell
... and epicurean; ambitious of greatness, and feverishly athirst for the pomps and vanities of life. It seems I had no "devouement," no "recueillement" in my character; no spirit of grace, faith, sacrifice, or self-abasement. Feeling the inutility of answering these charges, I mutely continued the correction of ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... the child was making jokes at my expense but for the extreme purity and candour of her gaze. Incredible that there should exist an abasement profounder than my own. I have hidden my tunic and breeches in my hold-all. I dare not own to ...
— A Journal of Impressions in Belgium • May Sinclair
... getting down on her hands and knees to inspect the carpet? The truth is there is not one point of sympathy between Martha and myself, not one. One would think that our love to Ernest would furnish it. But her love aims at the abasement of his character and mine at its elevation. She thinks I should bow down to and worship him, jump up and offer him my chair when he comes in, feed him with every unwholesome dainty he fancies, and feel myself honored by his acceptance of these services. I ...
— Stepping Heavenward • Mrs. E. Prentiss
... for her to suffer, there was at least nothing left for her to be or do—no choice between sackcloth and ashes and the livery of sin. The beatified penitents of the early Christian Church spoke another lesson—spoke divinely of hope for the fallen, hope without self- abasement or defiance. We, in these days, acknowledge no such saints; we have even done our best to dethrone Mary Magdalene; but we have martyrs—"by the pang without the palm"—and one, at least, among these who has not died without lifting up a voice of eloquent ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... going mad. It was not as if one woman represented the flesh and the other the spirit. Then I might have seen the way to a decision. But both had the large nature that comprises all. I could not exalt one in any way to the abasement of the other. All my inherited traditions, prejudices, predilections, all my training ranged me on the side of Eleanor. I was clamouring for the real. Was she not the incarnation of the real? Her very ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke
... overlooking the blackness of ocean. There then, lifting his hands, to his mother he urg'd his petition:— "Since I was born of thee, mother, with fewness of days for my fore-doom, Surely Olympian Zeus, who is heard in the thunder of AEther, Owed me in honour to live; but to-day he decrees my abasement. Open contempt is my portion—for now wide-ruling Atreides Tramples upon me himself, and has seiz'd and possesses my guerdon." Thus amid tears did he speak, and the mother majestical heard him, Sitting afar in the deep by ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 367, May 1846 • Various
... self-control the squeezed tears peeping, Scalding the eye with repressed inkeeping. Discipline must be; the scourge is deemed due. But ah for the sickening and strange heart- benumbing, Compassionate abasement in shipmates that view; Such a grand champion shamed there succumbing! "Brown, tie him up."—The cord he brooked: How else?—his arms spread apart—never threaping; No, never he flinched, never sideways he looked, Peeled to the waistband, the marble flesh ...
— John Marr and Other Poems • Herman Melville
... Father, and in all abasement beseech you to put to your hand, if it is possible, and impose a curb to those flatterers who are enemies of peace, while they pretend peace. But there is no reason, most blessed Father, why any one should assume that I am to utter a ...
— Concerning Christian Liberty - With Letter Of Martin Luther To Pope Leo X. • Martin Luther
... equally fervent, does not give one the same idea of self-abasement in the sight of the Almighty. It would be unfair to compare him to that other personage of the parable, namely, the Pharisee, for the latter was obviously lacking in sincerity; but at the same time, William in his moments of ...
— The Secret Memoirs of the Courts of Europe: William II, Germany; Francis Joseph, Austria-Hungary, Volume I. (of 2) • Mme. La Marquise de Fontenoy
... had its place and its object, yet they would not coalesce. Now fury against his uncle, now pity for himself, now a poisonous kind of contempt of Jenny. Or, again, a primitive kind of longing for Jenny, a disregard of his uncle, an abasement of himself. The emotions whirled and twisted, and he sat quite still, with his eyes closed, ...
— None Other Gods • Robert Hugh Benson
... he was disarmed, Laramie was not through with Stone. Sullen and obdurate, he was ordered to face away, while Bradley from behind searched his pockets. And the crown of his abasement was reached when Bradley drew from a hip pocket a full flask of whisky. The material advantage of the find was not great, but the tactical advantage was enormous. Behind Stone, Bradley silently but jeeringly held it up as an exhibit for ...
— Laramie Holds the Range • Frank H. Spearman
... of the reiterated examples of poets in the delirium of the frenzy of attachment or in the abasement of rejection invoking ardent sympathetic constellations or the frigidity of ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... indeed. That was just it, she said. Did he suspect her of yearning to throw herself in the way of nice people on the day of her abasement? If he chose to ignore her sentiments in the matter, he might at least consider his own interests. Had he forgotten that John Quincy Burton was chairman of the board of trustees of the college? Would the head of the department of classical languages acquire merit in Mr. Burton's eyes through ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... he saw for the first time the self-abasement he had dreaded, yet perhaps expected, to see there before. For in her first question to him there had been no real doubt of him; it had been the natural humility of wounded love that cries out, expecting ...
— The Testing of Diana Mallory • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... of Jerusalem; but who without abasement can inhabit with infidels? Then Hagion Oras, the Holy Hill, occurred to me; the same argument applied against it as against return to the convent of Irene-I would be in reach of the Emperor's displeasure. One ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 1 • Lew. Wallace
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