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More "Detraction" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the book, not only that the greatness of his achievement and its enduring influence upon the progress of knowledge have won him a place beside our Harvey; but, still more, that, like Harvey, he has lived long enough to outlast detraction and opposition, and to see the stone that the builders rejected become the head-stone of ...
— Darwiniana • Thomas Henry Huxley
... marriages from mercenary motives produce unhappiness, that different men are virtuous in different degrees, that advice is generally ineffectual, that adversity has its uses, that fame is liable to suffer from detraction;—these and a host of other such maxims are of the kind upon which no genius and no depth of feeling can confer a momentary interest. Here and there, indeed, the pompous utterance invests them with an unlucky air of absurdity. 'Let no man ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... after Tennyson's birth he was saluted a great poet by that unanimous acclamation which includes mere clamour. Fifty further years, and his centenary was marked by a new detraction. It is sometimes difficult to distinguish the obscure but not unmajestic law of change from the sorry custom of reaction. Change hastes not and rests not, reaction beats to and fro, flickering about the moving mind of the world. ...
— Hearts of Controversy • Alice Meynell
... character, if public opinion had been different? But it is in truth of base extraction, and ungenerous qualities, springing from selfishness and vanity, and low ambition; by these it subsists, and thrives, and acts; and envy, and jealousy, and detraction, and hatred, and variance, are its too faithful and natural associates. It is, to say the best of it, a root which bears fruits of a poisonous as well as of a beneficial quality. If it sometimes stimulates to great and generous ...
— A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, in the Middle and Higher Classes in this Country, Contrasted with Real Christianity. • William Wilberforce
... fresh and elastic at an age when most women's activities are growing either slack or febrile. He knew what was said about her; for, popular as she was, there had always been a faint undercurrent of detraction. When she had appeared in New York, nine or ten years earlier, as the pretty Mrs. Haskett whom Gus Varick had unearthed somewhere—was it in Pittsburgh or Utica?—society, while promptly accepting her, had reserved the right to cast a doubt on its own discrimination. ...
— The Descent of Man and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... party-spirit, when it rages in its full violence, exerts itself in civil war and bloodshed; and when it is under its greatest restraints naturally breaks out in falsehood, detraction, calumny, and a partial administration of justice. In a word, it fills a nation with spleen and rancour, and extinguishes all the seeds of good-nature, ...
— The Coverley Papers • Various
... soldiers are a helpin' him onward, they are a cuttin' down the trees so's he can get through 'em and dash at the enemy. You see as you look on him that he will get through it all. No envy, nor detraction, nor jealousy, no such low underbrush full of crawlin' reptiles, nor no high solid trees, no danger of any sort can keep him back. His big brave, generous heart is sot on helpin' ...
— Samantha at Saratoga • Marietta Holley
... Sir Artegall is beset by the hags Envy and Detraction, who are so angry with him for freeing Irena that they not only attack him themselves, but turn loose upon him the Blatant Beast (Slander). Although Talus begs to annihilate this infamous trio with his dreaded flail, Artegall decrees they shall ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... 1791 and 1797 Mary Wollstonecraft was to write one of the books which belong to the spiritual foundations of the next century, to taste fame and detraction, to know the joys of love and maternity, and to experience a misery and wrong which made life itself an unendurable shame. A later chapter will attempt an estimate of the ideas and personality of this brilliant and courageous woman. A few sentences must suffice here to recall the bare facts of ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford
... enough, that truth possesses some inherent vitality and power that give it an assured prevalence over falsehood; that a good name cannot be permanently defiled and irreparably ruined by detraction, but, like a star, shines all the brighter for the shadow through which it is seen; that justice cannot be stayed by injustice; that vice is powerless against virtue. I could quote from their great writers hundreds of utterances affirmative of these propositions. One of their poets, for ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce • Ambrose Bierce
... busy, in these promiscuous and multitudinous residences there are so many who have nothing to do, and that always makes mischief. They gather in each other's rooms and spend hours in consultation about others. If they had to walk a half mile before they got to the willing ear of some listener to detraction they would get out of breath before reaching there, and not feel in full glow of animosity or slander, or might, because of the distance, not go at all. But rooms 20, 21, 22, 23, 24 and 25 are on the same corridor, and ...
— The Wedding Ring - A Series of Discourses for Husbands and Wives and Those - Contemplating Matrimony • T. De Witt Talmage
... Carthage is so illustrious a city that it were an honour to her that a philosopher should beg to be thus rewarded, but I wished the boon you have bestowed on me to have its full value with no taint of detraction, to suffer no loss of grace by any petition on my part, in a word to be wholly disinterested. For he that begs pays so heavily, and so large is the price that he to whom the petition is addressed receives, that, where the necessaries of life are concerned, one had rather ...
— The Apologia and Florida of Apuleius of Madaura • Lucius Apuleius
... was offered him in his own university, and he owed such preferment as he had (it was never very great) to a chance opportunity of preaching at St. Paul's and a recommendation to Laud. That prelate—to whom all the infinite malignity of political and sectarian detraction has not been able to deny the title of an encourager, as few men have encouraged them, of learning and piety—took Taylor under his protection, made him his chaplain, and procured him incorporation at Oxford, a fellowship at All Souls, and finally the rectory ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... you stand forth? This detraction through years For my people has made me an oaf, Hides my poetry's fount in the fog of its fleers, So it merely a pool of self-worship appears; Like a clumsy troll I Am contemned with affront, Whom all "cultured" folk fly, Or yet gather to hunt, ...
— Poems and Songs • Bjornstjerne Bjornson
... contented gardener—to prune, to strengthen, to engraft, and one by one to remove from its leaves and fresh shoots the slug and 355 the caterpillar. But far be it from us to undervalue with light and senseless detraction the conscientious hardihood of our predecessors, or even to condemn in them that vehemence, to which the blessings it won for us leave us now neither temptation nor pretext. We antedate the feelings, in order ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... and the tone of the city as a whole has been changing for the worse. The once magnificent upper estuary, as we have seen, is afflicted with complex and ugly pollution that shuts it off from the pleasant use it might otherwise sustain, and makes it a detraction from the Federal splendor along its northern shore rather than the enhancement it used to be. In places like the Alexandria and Georgetown waterfronts, industrial dilapidation on the shorelines more appropriately matches that pollution in mood, and on the Virginia ...
— The Nation's River - The Department of the Interior Official Report on the Potomac • United States Department of the Interior
... individual producer. Moreover, along with each individual producer, are a number of others, whose productive powers and actual yield also are unknown to him. Each strives, with all the means at his command—cheap prices, advertisements, long credit, drummers, also secret and crafty detraction of the quality of the goods of his competitor, the last of which is a measure that flourishes particularly at critical moments—to drive all other competitors from the field. Production is wholly left to accident and to the judgment of individuals. Accident often is ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel
... Mr. Gladstone was, first and foremost, a great Christian man. Yes; and there was the secret, as I have already said, not of his merely political eminence, but of the universal reverence which a nation expresses to-day. All detraction is silenced, and all calumnies have dropped away, as filth from the white wings of a swan as it soars, and with one voice the Empire and the world confess that he was a great and a ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... sacred, inner temple Of each soul's unseen communion, We should gather, we should garner, Many lessons full of profit, Lessons long and full of wisdom. We should see the struggling victim In the toils of the ensnarer; See the troubled spirit writhing 'Neath the lashings of detraction; See the burdened nature groaning 'Mid the polished shafts of envy; See the sinner's cunning malice, In the act of human torture; See the Christian's anxious fightings, Foes without, and fears within him. All ...
— The Song of Lancaster, Kentucky - to the statesmen, soldiers, and citizens of Garrard County. • Eugenia Dunlap Potts
... peerless pair danced a gauntlet. On each side admiration and detraction buzzed all ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... deprive me of those enjoyments, social and domestic, which my time of life required, and to which my circumstances entitled me; and a vigorous execution of the duties must inevitably expose me to the resentment of disappointed and designing men, and to the calumny and detraction of the envious and malicious. I was therefore determined not to engage in so arduous an undertaking. But the solicitations of my friends, acquaintance, and fellow citizens, a full conviction of the necessity, that some person should commence the work of reformation ...
— The Diplomatic Correspondence of the American Revolution, Vol. XI • Various
... statue, "may regard me with envy; but I despise the world, particularly the critics who have dared to laugh at me. (Groans.) The object of my ambition is attained—I am now the equal and representative of Shakspere—detraction cannot wither the laurels that shadow my brows—Finis coronat opus!—I have done. To-morrow I retire into private life; but though fortune has made me great, she has not made me proud, and I shall be always happy to shake hands with ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... I have no pleasure in their conversation. I have myself no gratification in uttering detraction, and therefore ...
— Memoirs of the Life of the Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan V1 • Thomas Moore
... mysteries of love. Besides walking in truth, he takes notice, that to be raised with Christ in glory, we must also do his will, keep all his commandments, and love whatever he loved; refraining from all fraud, avarice, detraction, and rash judgment; repaying evil with good, forgiving and showing mercy to others that we ourselves may find mercy. "These things," says he, "I write to you on justice, because you incited me; for neither I, nor any other like me, can attain to the wisdom of the blessed and glorious ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... disgrace to be insane, and the feeling of chagrin at discovering disease of the brain in a relative is another absurdity. Avoidance of insanity should be studied with as much devotion as avoidance of tuberculosis. Yet there should be no detraction from the fact that the heredity is strong. No one should be allowed to marry who has been insane, for the offspring of the ...
— The Home Medical Library, Volume II (of VI) • Various
... that is to say, by detraction which frightens virtue. Envy must be represented with the hands raised to heaven in contempt, because if she could she would use her power against God. Make her face covered with a goodly mark; show her as wounded in the eye by a palm-branch, and wounded in the ear by laurel ...
— Thoughts on Art and Life • Leonardo da Vinci
... appeared as well in books as in more ephemeral publications, and upon both sides, and even between writers on the same side. On every hand there has been a most deplorable impeachment of motive, accompanied by a detraction of character by imputation which is quite shocking. Petty personal slights have been insinuated as the ultimate cause of an expression of opinion upon an important literary question, and testimony has been impeached and judgment disparaged by covert allegations ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... she, to detraction's desperation, And wedded unto one she had loved well— A man known in the councils of the nation, Cool, and quite English, imperturbable, Though apt to act with fire upon occasion, Proud of himself and her: the world could ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... her a sore heart and all the patient self-denial of her sex. To be welcome to Griffith she had to speak to him of her rival, and to speak well of her. She tried talking of herself and her attachment; he yawned in her face: she tried smooth detraction and innuendo; he fired up directly, and defended her of whose conduct he had been complaining the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... theology, a thing they value far above Christ—and at the same time to crush me, whom they consider as having some influence on the revival of studies. The whole affair was conducted with such clamourings, wild talk, trickery, detraction and cunning that, had I not been present and witnessed, nay, felt all this, I should never have taken any man's word for it that theologians could act so madly. You would have thought it some mortal plague. And yet the poison of this evil beginning with a few has spread ...
— Erasmus and the Age of Reformation • Johan Huizinga
... and Frontenac himself had often just reason to retort them. He wrote to Ponchartrain: "If you will not be so good as to look closely into the true state of things here, I shall always be exposed to detraction, and forced to make new apologies, which is very hard for a person so full of zeal and uprightness as I am. My secretary, who is going to France, will tell you all the ugly intrigues used to defeat my plans for the service of the king, and the growth of the colony. I have ...
— Count Frontenac and New France under Louis XIV • Francis Parkman
... character we have been taught to admire and venerate; they may even point out spots, which we can not disprove, in that sun of glorious brightness which shed its beneficent rays over a century of darkness—but this we know, that whatever may be the force of detraction, his fame has been steadily increasing, even on the admission of his slanderers, for three centuries, and that he now shines as a fixed star in the constellation of the great lights of modern times, not only because he succeeded in crossing the ocean when once ...
— Christopher Columbus and His Monument Columbia • Various
... should be necessary, by allotting a separate dissertation to each, for I have leisure enough to do so, whatever time it may take up. But the principle of every uneasiness is the same, though they may appear under different names. For envy is an uneasiness; so are emulation, detraction, anguish, sorrow, sadness, tribulation, lamentation, vexation, grief, trouble, affliction, and despair. The Stoics define all these different feelings, and all those words which I have mentioned belong to different things, and do not, as they seem, express the same ideas; but they are to a certain ...
— The Academic Questions • M. T. Cicero
... their object, amid obloquy, neglect, and suffering, to the final triumph; of which final triumph other men reaped the substantial reward, leaving to the discoverer the barren glory of his achievement,—and that glory obscured by detraction. Columbus is the representative man of that illustrious order. We trust to be able to show that Charles Goodyear is entitled to a place in it. Whether we consider the prodigious and unforeseen importance of his discovery, or his scarcely paralleled devotion to his object, in the face ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton
... to entertain a conversation for two hours, without approaching the confines of evil speaking. In my own case, for instance, brute as I am, I see that with every fourth phrase I utter, words full of malice and detraction come to my tongue like flies to wine. I therefore say again that doing and speaking evil are things we inherit from our first parents, and suck in with our mother's milk. This is manifest in the fact, that hardly is a boy out of swaddling clothes before he lifts ...
— The Exemplary Novels of Cervantes • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... but idle; no respect of kindred, but common; no apparel, but natural; no manuring of lands, no use of wine, corn, or metal. The very words that import lying, falsehood, treason, dissimulation, covetousness, envy, detraction, and passion, were never heard of amongst them. How dissonant would he find his imaginary ...
— Montaigne and Shakspere • John M. Robertson
... Marlborough's character[15] hath been so variously drawn, and is indeed of so mixed a nature in itself, that it is hard to pronounce on either side, without the suspicion of flattery or detraction. I shall say nothing of his military accomplishments, which the opposite reports, of his friends and enemies among the soldiers, have rendered[26] problematical: but if he be among those who delight in war, it is agreed to be not for the reasons common with other generals. Those maligners who ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. X. • Jonathan Swift
... view. True enough; what confidence was there to be placed in Laxton's words? And if Mason had circumvented him; as was alleged, of course there was a very good reason for detraction. ...
— Off-Hand Sketches - a Little Dashed with Humor • T. S. Arthur
... calumny and detraction; that I may abhor deceit, and avoid lying, envy and fraud, flattery, hatred, malice and ingratitude. Help ...
— Little Journeys To the Homes of the Great, Volume 3 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... establishing her cause on the solid rock of principles! How often have they clung to some plausible chimera which seemed to serve their cause, and nursed an artificial ignorance where they feared the discoveries of an impertinent curiosity! As ingenious in detraction as in silence and dissimulation, have they not too often answered imputations which they could not disprove with accusations which they could not prove, till the slanders they had invented rivalled in number and intensity the slanders which had been invented against them? For such men principles ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... me soon.' And the king gave him the only horse he had. And seizing the yoke of the car himself, the king began to draw it. And as he did so, he said, 'There is now nothing for the Brahmanas.' The king had given away, it is true, but he had done so with detraction. And for that speech of his, he shall have to fall down from heaven. And after the Rishi had said so, of the two that remained, one asked, 'Who amongst us two shall fall down?' And the Rishi answered, 'Vasumanas.' ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... of detraction and slander. Proofs. Shakspeare. Burns the poet. Self-knowledge, how much to be desired. Reference to the work of Mrs. Opie—to our ...
— The Young Woman's Guide • William A. Alcott
... depend for their comfort upon the admiration of others are subject to frequent disappointment. Somebody will criticise their appearance, or surpass them in brilliancy, or will receive more attention. Oh! the jealousy, and detraction, and heart-burnings of those who move in this ...
— The Abominations of Modern Society • Rev. T. De Witt Talmage
... the Southern States. He came among them, an invalid, advised by his physician to resort to this clime for the restoration of his health; as an American citizen, he had not expected that his right to come here would be questioned; as a stranger, or if not entirely so, known mainly by the detraction which the ardent advocacy of the rights of the South had brought upon him, he had supposed that neither his coming nor his going would attract attention. But his anticipations had proved erroneous. The polite, the manly, elevated men, lifted ...
— Speeches of the Honorable Jefferson Davis 1858 • Hon. Jefferson Davis
... land, with the snows of more than seventy winters lying lightly and gracefully upon his head. There stood Wilson, never more fitly in his place than here; for of the many who have interposed to shield the memory of Burns from detraction, he had spoken with the most generous spirit and collected purpose, and came now to rejoice in the common triumph. There, too, were Alison, the sound and strong historian; Chambers, whose delicate generosity to the relatives of Burns, independently of the services he has rendered to our national ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844 • Various
... honour? a word. What is in that word honour; what is that honour? air. A trim reckoning! Who hath it? he that died o' Wednesday. Doth he feel it? no. Doth he hear it? no. 'T is insensible, then? yea, to the dead. But will it not live with the living? no. Why? detraction will not suffer it. Therefore I 'll none of it. Honour is a mere scutcheon. And so ends ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett
... always was the man on the job. It was his name that appeared in the newspapers, it was his name that headed the list of the junior officers mentioned for distinguished conduct. Standish had followed his career with an admiration and a joy that was without taint of envy or detraction. He gloried in Aintree, he delighted to know the army held such a man. He was grateful to Aintree for upholding the traditions of a profession to which he himself gave all the devotion of a fanatic. He made a god of him. This was the attitude of mind ...
— The Lost Road • Richard Harding Davis
... almost the whole world, and assailed by almost every tongue, and pen, and press, you have fearlessly and manfully stood by me, with unsurpassed zeal and undiminished friendship. When I felt as if I should sink beneath the storm of abuse and detraction, which was violently raging around me, I have found myself upheld and sustained by your encouraging voices and approving smiles. I have doubtless, committed many faults and indiscretions, over which ...
— Walker's Appeal, with a Brief Sketch of His Life - And Also Garnet's Address to the Slaves of the United States of America • David Walker and Henry Highland Garnet
... differ from high authority, I have not a thought of detraction. None can venerate the NESTORS in science who have enriched its annals, more than I, and though we reverse their judgments, their errors are confessedly our indispensable ...
— New and Original Theories of the Great Physical Forces • Henry Raymond Rogers
... one-sided, and fixes on faults, which it magnifies, passing by virtues. Carrion flies that buzz with a sickening hum of satisfaction over sores, and prefer corruption to soundness, are as good judges of meat as such critics are of character. That Mephistophelean spirit of detraction has wide scope in this day. Literature and politics, as well as social life with its rivalries, are infested by it, and it finds its way into the church and threatens us all. The race of fault-finders we have always with us, blind as moles to beauties and goodness, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... exposed to the tooth of detraction; vilifed; hopelessly in the wrong; superseded in the consideration ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... it did not fail. Revolutions have a habit of succeeding, when the time comes for them. The revolutionary forefathers were opposed to the form of government in their day. They were denounced, they were condemned. But they had the moral courage to stand erect and defy all the storms of detraction; and that is why they are in history, and that is why the great respectable majority of their day sleep in forgotten graves. The world does not know ...
— The Debs Decision • Scott Nearing
... arms: Sylvius, nostrae aetatis medicorum decus, as Vesalius calls him, wrote furious letters, and later spoke of him as a madman (vaesanus). The younger men were with him and he had many friends, but he had aroused a roaring tide of detraction against which he protested a few years later in his work on the "China-root," which is full of details about the "Fabrica." In a fit of temper he threw his notes on Galen and other MSS. in the fire. No sadder page exists in medical writings than the one in which Vesalius tells of ...
— The Evolution of Modern Medicine • William Osler
... say that you had purified her of ALL stains of her past—but there may be one that remains. And THAT in most people's eyes would be no detraction. You look puzzled, Miss Nott—but I am coming to the explanation and the end of my story. A ship of war was sent to the island to punish the mutineers and pirates, for such they were, but they could not be found. ...
— By Shore and Sedge • Bret Harte
... accomplishments—and graces are so to be envied as those that circumstances rudely hindered the development of. All of which shows what a charitable and good-tempered world it is, notwithstanding its reputation for cynicism and detraction. ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... let us put on concord, being humble, temperate; free from all whispering and detraction; and justified by our ...
— The Forbidden Gospels and Epistles, Complete • Archbishop Wake
... followed, and before the end of the autumn Richard entertained some dozen of the rank and file, all together, paying their railway fares and housing them from Saturday to Monday. These men, be it noted in passing, distinguished themselves from that day onwards by unsparing detraction whenever the name of Mutimer came up in private talk, though, of course, they were the loudest in applause when platform reference to their leader demanded it. Besides the expressly invited, there was naturally no lack of visitors ...
— Demos • George Gissing
... Through camps and cities, &c. In highly figurative language, this stanza pictures the passage of Urania from 'her secret paradise' to the death-chamber of Adonais in Rome, as if the spiritual essence and external form of the goddess were wounded by the uncongenial atmosphere of human malice and detraction through which she has to pass. The whole description is spiritualized from ...
— Adonais • Shelley
... poverty; no contracts, no succession, no dividences; no occupation, but idle; no respect of kindred, but common; no apparel, but natural; no manuring of lands; no use of wine, corn, or metal. The very words that import lying, falsehood, treason, dissimulation, covetousness, envy, detraction, and pardon were ...
— Tolstoy on Shakespeare - A Critical Essay on Shakespeare • Leo Tolstoy
... help remarking, that young women do not always carefully distinguish between running into the error of detraction, and its opposite extreme of indiscriminate applause. This proceeds from the false idea they entertain, that the direct contrary to what is wrong must be right. Thus the dread of being only suspected of one fault makes them actually ...
— Essays on Various Subjects - Principally Designed for Young Ladies • Hannah More
... themselves Stewards to the Poor, and that in a future State they are accountable for every Doit lavish'd in Equipage or superfluous Dishes. Their Tables are not nicely, but plentifully served, and always open to the honest Needy. At Court, as I have learn'd, there is neither Envy nor Detraction, no one undermines another, nor intercepts the Prince's Bounty or Favour by slandrous Reports; and neither Interest, Riches, nor Quality, but Merit only recommends the Candidate to a Post: A Bribe was never heard of there; which, together with the exact Justice practised, is the Reason ...
— A Voyage to Cacklogallinia - With a Description of the Religion, Policy, Customs and Manners of That Country • Captain Samuel Brunt
... least so in its general spirit. The stories which are told about distinguished people generally run in a channel coincident with the facts of their character. On the other hand, with regard to evil reports, it is safe always to allow something for the natural propensity to detraction and slander, which is one of the most undoubted facts of human ...
— Sunny Memories Of Foreign Lands, Volume 1 (of 2) • Harriet Elizabeth (Beecher) Stowe
... My favourite author, Morhof, has spoken 'comme un brave homme' upon the difficulty of literary enterprizes, and the facility and venom of detraction: I support his assertion 'totis viribus'; and to beg to speak in the same person with himself. 'Non ignotum mihi est, quantae molis opus humeris meis incumbat. Oceanum enim ingressus sum, in quo portum invenire difficile est, naufragii periculum a syrtibus ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... of pride that they cannot endure that any but themselves should be set forth for excellent; so that when they hear one justly praised they will either seek to dismount his virtues, or, if they be like a clear light, they will stab him with a but of detraction; as if there were something yet so foul as did obnubilate even his brightest glory. When their tongue cannot justly condemn him, they will leave him suspected ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou
... Repartees, and Bon-Mots, With too many secrets that all the world knows: Old Anecdotes came on the tapis, new drest, And season'd with Satire, to give them a zest. But the COUNTESS was shock'd! and declar'd with much feeling, [p 17] "She hated the faults of her neighbour revealing. Detraction, of late, had been full of employment, And truly, some folks knew no other enjoyment. 'Twas said, tho' for her part, she thought it quite cruel, That Monsieur LE COQ had been kill'd in a duel. The Hedge-SPARROW publicly swore ...
— The Peacock and Parrot, on their Tour to Discover the Author of "The Peacock At Home" • Unknown
... clerk / writeth in this wise Rebukynge the vice / of vyle detraccion [Sidenote: rebukes the vice of detraction,] What man it be / that of custom & guyse 164 Hurteth with tunge / or by foule colusi[o]n Thabsente / weyue ye for that abusio[n] Suche a detractour / from the table [Sidenote: and bids you turn all backbiters ...
— Caxton's Book of Curtesye • Frederick J. Furnivall
... not easily come by. Both in the comprehensiveness of their charges and in the slashing hatred which informs them (however feeble the verse), One Epistle and The Blatant Beast offer as fair a sample as any two such pamphlets can of the calumny, detraction, and critical misunderstanding Pope endured, for the most part patiently, from the publication of his Essay on Criticism to the year of his death. "Welcome for thee, fair Virtue! all the past," (Epistle to Arbuthnot, l. 358) he exclaimed in his ...
— Two Poems Against Pope - One Epistle to Mr. A. Pope and the Blatant Beast • Leonard Welsted
... bloody countenance. The mossy walls, often scraped, the mossified pavement, the greenish tombs of marble under the maples and firs, showed the effect of shade, solitude, and humidity upon all things of brick in this climate, where wood was already rising into favor as building material, but to the detraction of picturesqueness and all the appearance ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend
... friends, companions, e'en from youth: A thousand times he's served me, and I joy That he can walk the streets without annoy: Yet 'tis a puzzle, I confess, to me How from that same affair he got off free." Here is the poison-bag of malice, here The gall of fell detraction, pure and sheer: And these, I'swear, if man such pledge may give, My pen and heart shall ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace
... others, enmity, and hostility against those who do not favor them, envy, hatred, and revenge, and from these fierceness and cruelty; and in respect to the Divine they are denial and consequent contempt, derision, and detraction of the holy things of the church; and after death, when man becomes a spirit, these evils are changed to anger and hatred against these holy things (see above, n. 562). And as these evils breathe forth continually the ...
— Heaven and its Wonders and Hell • Emanuel Swedenborg
... inside of one of his legs without injury to the other was because the fighter was blessed with a pair of bow-legs that couldn't have stopped the proverbial pig in the proverbial alley. In addition to this decided detraction from his manly beauty, he was short, squatty, thick-necked, a nose of the variety commonly known as a stub, and a couple of little eyes that had a constant twinkle, half-shrewd and half-humorous, ...
— S.O.S. Stand to! • Reginald Grant
... as good authorities, in my estimation, as Mr. Dilke or the editor of the Spectator, and I would not under any circumstances, or for any opprobrium, regard with shame what my friends had approved—none but a coward would let the detraction of an enemy outweigh the encouragement of a friend. You must not, therefore, fulfil your threat of being less communicative in future; you ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... of and whose couches are Spintries; whose thrift is usurie, meales gluttonie, exercise cousenage, whose valour bragardrie, Astolpheidas, or Rodomontadas, or if it come to action, crueltie; whose communication is Atheisme, contention, detraction, or Paillardise, most of lewdness, seld of vertue, never of charitie; whose spare-time is vanitie or villanie: yet will I not deale by them, as they doe by others. I like not reproofe where it pertaines not ...
— Shakespeare's Lost Years in London, 1586-1592 • Arthur Acheson
... This solution would be less ideal than the other, but Greece would be wise to reconcile herself to it, as Italy has reconciled herself to the incorporation of Corsica in France; for by submitting frankly to this detraction from her national unity she would give her brethren in the Sporades the best opportunity of developing their national individuality untrammelled under a friendly ...
— The Balkans - A History Of Bulgaria—Serbia—Greece—Rumania—Turkey • Nevill Forbes, Arnold J. Toynbee, D. Mitrany, D.G. Hogarth
... which, in the British Isles, has been lavished upon his scientific importance is being followed abroad by what may be an unnecessary amount of detraction. This is always the worst of setting up a man on too high a pinnacle; some one has to undertake the ungrateful task of pulling him down again. Justus von Liebig addressed himself to this task with some vigour in his Reden und Abhandlung ...
— Pioneers of Science • Oliver Lodge
... him who must see many years, I praise the life which slips away Out of the light and mutely; which avoids Fame, and her less fair followers, envy, strife, Stupid detraction, jealousy, cabal, Insincere praises; which descends The quiet ...
— Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... that our ancestors transmitted orally, in lines composed by the bards, the memorable sayings and deeds which they wished to hand down to generations after them. How far they were worthy of credit, and how far they were subject to the vices of flattery or detraction we cannot tell, but we may be sure that those who were accounted great in these ancient times were anxious to have their doughty deeds immortalised, and perhaps were as sensitive to the tone of public criticism thus represented as is the statesman or warrior of to-day. What would ...
— Chronicles of Strathearn • Various
... enjoy ourselves, and eat heartily. Now let us be Epicures. We have nothing to do with Superciliousness. Farewell Care, let all Ill-will and Detraction be banished. Let us be ...
— Colloquies of Erasmus, Volume I. • Erasmus
... in their Absence, the Words in which you described the one must give you an Idea of the other. They were hardly distinguishable, you would think, when they were apart, tho' extremely different when together. What made their Enmity the more entertaining to all the rest of their Sex was, that in Detraction from each other neither could fall upon Terms which did not hit herself as much as her Adversary. Their Nights grew restless with Meditation of new Dresses to outvie each other, and inventing new Devices to recal Admirers, who observed the Charms of the one ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... and exalted by imagination;" this is very ambitious, but not very intelligible. He speaks of Wilkie attracting the attention of admirers and detractors. It is very absurd to consider criticism that is not always favourable, detraction. The following passage is well put. "We constantly hear the ignorant advising a student to study the great book of nature, without being biassed by what has been done by other painters; it is as absurd ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXVIII. February, 1843. Vol. LIII. • Various
... hopeless. If I presume to speak of foibles to-day, you will understand that I do so because, lightly though I may talk to you at times, I have a real sense of the responsibilities of this Chair. I worship great learning, which they had: I loathe flippant detraction of what is great; I have usually a heart for men-against-odds and the unpopular cause. But these very valiant fighters had, one and all, some very obvious foibles: and because, in the hour of success, these foibles came to infect the whole teaching of English in ...
— On The Art of Reading • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... Detraction, twin-sister of Envy, was all the while pointing out defects in friends and neighbors. He saw their faults and hard peculiarities; but rarely their good qualities. Then Doubt and Distrust crept in through the unguarded door, and soon after their entrance Markland ...
— All's for the Best • T. S. Arthur
... not especially addictated to this kind, of locomotive prayer, collect together in various knots through the chapel, and amuse themselves by auditing or narrating anecdotes, discussing policy, or detraction; and in case it be summer, and the day of a fine texture, they scatter themselves into little crowds on the chapel-green, or lie at their length upon the grass in listless groups, giving way to ...
— The Ned M'Keown Stories - Traits And Stories Of The Irish Peasantry, The Works of - William Carleton, Volume Three • William Carleton
... poetic temperament, and, in fact, exhausting all that poetic vein which, properly applied, might have produced epics; these and many more traits set forth in his biography bring forth his character in its true light, dispel those clouds which malice and detraction may at times have cast over it, and leave it in the full ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... his usual Wednesday lecture at the neighbouring "college for young ladies;" where, blooming misses—in addition to their curriculum of "accomplishments" and "all the 'ologies"—were taught the noble art of family multiplication, domestic division, male detraction, feminine sedition, and, ...
— She and I, Volume 2 - A Love Story. A Life History. • John Conroy Hutcheson
... of blood "Has Ajax shed since first our host he join'd: "In all these years, his body still remains "Unwounded. Yet on this why should I dwell, "If he must boast, that for the Argive fleet "He fought alone 'gainst Jupiter and Troy? "He fought, I grant it; no malignant spite "Shall move detraction from his valiant deeds. "But let him not the common rites of more "Monopolize; let him to each allow "The honor which they claim. Patroclus, fear'd "In great Pelides' semblance, backward drove "All Troy and Troy's protector from the ships, "Then ...
— The Metamorphoses of Publius Ovidus Naso in English blank verse Vols. I & II • Ovid
... which her soul possess, Are but the ground of unmade happiness; The rude material: wisdom add to this, Wisdom, the sole artificer of bliss; She from herself, if so compell'd by need, Of thin content can draw the subtle thread; But (no detraction to her sacred skill) If she can work in gold, 'tis better still. If Tullia had been blest with half her sense, None could too much admire her excellence: But since she can make error shine so bright, She thinks it vulgar to defend the right. With understanding she is quite o'errun; And by too great ...
— The Poetical Works of Edward Young, Volume 2 • Edward Young
... I send, With this let your collection end. Thus I consign you down to fame A character to praise or blame: And if the whole may pass for true, Contented rest, you have your due. Give future time the satisfaction, To leave one handle for detraction. ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift
... hitherto undescribed and unexpressed, in scenery, manners, morals, that all may be wells from which he may be the first to drink. Yet it cannot be expected—for it has passed to a proverb that escape from persecution and detraction can never and nowhere be the lot of literature—that there will not be many instances, even in America, where every attempt on the part of gifted writers (and young writers especially, who are commonly regarded with eyes of invidious ...
— Lippincott's Magazine. Vol. XII, No. 33. December, 1873. • Various
... seems strange that a pleasing degree of three or four fingers of respectful familiarity should fill a man up and give him the panegyrics so bad. For he has them, the worst way—any one can see that. A man who is perfectly at himself does not throw cold detraction at people's architectural productions and picturesque surroundings, and let on that what he prefers is a Dubbonese dust-storm and a pleasing degree of respectful familiarity, No, these are old, old symptoms; and when they appear ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... the waistcoat, it fitted him very ill, being infinitely too big for him; and the cap was so heavy that it made his head ache. Thus these cloathes, which perhaps (as they presented the idea of their misery more sensibly to the people's eyes) brought him more envy, hatred, and detraction, than all his deeper impositions and more real advantages, afforded very little use or honour to the wearer; nay, could scarce serve to amuse his own vanity when this was cool enough to reflect with the least seriousness. And, should I speak in ...
— The History of the Life of the Late Mr. Jonathan Wild the Great • Henry Fielding
... of his nature are conspicuous in almost every incident of his career. He fought for a principle as desperately as other men fight for life. The storm of detraction through which he went never once shook the almost haughty independence of his conduct, or swerved him in the slightest from the course he had chosen. The only thing to which he unquestioningly submitted was the truth. His loyalty ...
— James Fenimore Cooper - American Men of Letters • Thomas R. Lounsbury
... him to succeed as a statesman, but he displayed the same fortitude under apparent disaster and courage at unexpected crises when he found himself again passing "the wilderness," darkened, not with the smoke of battle, but with detraction and denunciation. Again, in the old spirit he exclaimed, "I will fight it out on this line if ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... Dervise, with his venerable Beard, and pointed Bonnet: You are discreet, and yet not mistrustful; you are easy, but not weak; you are beneficent with Discretion; you love your Friends, and create yourself no Enemies. Your most sprightly Flights borrow no Graces from Detraction; you never speak a misbecoming Word, nor do an ill-natur'd Action, tho' 'tis always in your Power. In a Word, your Soul is as spotless as your Person. You have, moreover, a little Fund of Philosophy, which gives me just Grounds to hope that you'll relish ...
— Zadig - Or, The Book of Fate • Voltaire
... as when she approached him with the wine, and her voice as she tendered him the cup; and he acknowledged to himself again all the sympathy she manifested for him, and manifested so plainly that words were unnecessary, and so sweetly that words would have been but a detraction. The vision was exceeding pleasant, but upon his turning to Malluch, it ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... detraction, however, from the excellence of the Avignonese climate. This is the wind denominated the Vent de Bize. The peculiar situation of Avignon, at the mouth of a long avenue of mountains, gives rise to this wind: it collects in the narrow ...
— Travels through the South of France and the Interior of Provinces of Provence and Languedoc in the Years 1807 and 1808 • Lt-Col. Pinkney
... through so much abuse, and none, I am confident, ever bore up against its virulence with more nobleness of spirit, with a steady perseverance in the pursuit of the sublimest of human professions. He has travelled on heedless of the sneers, the ridicule, or the detraction of his enemies, and he has arrived at that point where the lustre of his works will not fail to illuminate the dark regions of barbarism and distaste long after their bright author has ceased ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Samuel F. B. Morse
... else contrarious were these two: The one a man upon whose laureled brow Gray hairs were growing! glory ever new Shall circle him in after years as now; For spent detraction may not disavow The world of knowledge with the wit combined, The elastic force no burden e'er could bow, The various talents and the single mind, Which give him moral power and mastery ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... long as fifty eyes await the turn Of yours to forestall its yet half-formed wish, I'll proffer my assistance you'll not need— When every tongue is praising you, I'll join The praisers' chorus—when you're hemmed about With lives between you and detraction—lives To be laid down if a rude voice, rash eye, Rough hand should violate the sacred ring Their worship throws about you,—then indeed, Who'll stand up for you stout as I?" If so We said, and so we did,—not Mildred there Would be unworthy to behold us both, But we should be unworthy, ...
— A Blot In The 'Scutcheon • Robert Browning
... political canvass. It was a charge of which there was not only no proof or probability, but which was in itself wholly impossible to be true. No man of common information ever believed a syllable of it. Yet it was of that class of falsehoods which, by continued repetition, through all the organs of detraction and abuse, are capable of misleading those who are already far misled, and of further fanning passion already kindling into flame. Doubtless it served in its day, and in greater or less degree, the end designed by it. ...
— Public Speaking • Irvah Lester Winter
... to my madrigal! Far from all sounds of all the strife, That murmur through the walks of life; From grief, inquietude, and fears, From scenes of riot, or of tears; From passions, cankering day by day, That wear the inmost heart away; From pale Detraction's envious spite, That worries where it fears to bite; From mad Ambition's worldly chase, Come, and in this shady place, Be thine Contentment's humble joys, And a life that makes no noise, Save when fancy, musing long, Turns to ...
— The Poetical Works of William Lisle Bowles, Vol. 1 • William Lisle Bowles
... the passers by the enemy at the gate; it is also a debt which his honour and a respectful regard for the good opinion of his fellows compel the author to repay. The man who is feeble enough silently to suffer detraction and calumny at the hands of some sciolist or Halb-bildung sheltering his miserable individuality under the shadow (may it never be less!) of " King We," simply sins against himself as the Arabs say and offends good manners by holding out a premium to wanton aggression and injurious doing. ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... them of great importance. If he opposes them, on the contrary, and still more, if he has authority enough to be able to thwart them, neither the most acknowledged probity, nor the highest rank, nor the greatest public services, can protect him from the most infamous abuse and detraction, from personal insults, nor sometimes from real danger, arising from the insolent outrage ...
— An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations • Adam Smith
... very fierce contest before the people, characterized by lavish detraction and personal abuse—one of the most bitter, prolonged, and memorable in the history of the State —and the question of making Illinois permanently a Slave State was put to rest by a majority of about two thousand ...
— Fifty Years of Public Service • Shelby M. Cullom
... papers commented according to their party bias, but so far as the candidate was concerned there was lack of the material of criticism. If he had achieved little for praise he had achieved nothing for detraction. There was no inconsistent public utterance, no doubtful transaction, no scandalous paper to bring forward to his detriment. When the fact that he was but twenty-eight years of age had been exhausted in elaborate ridicule, ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan
... cue and entered upon a vein of flattery, she would have been extremely voluble—for villages can vie with cities in adulation as well as in detraction—but she was interrupted by ...
— The Woman-Hater • Charles Reade
... no advantage gained to the argument by supposing two Beings, rather than one Being of a mixed nature. The facts lead to this supposition just as naturally as to the hypothesis of two principles. The existence of the evil Being is as much a detraction from the power of the good one, as if we only at once suppose the latter to be of limited power, and that he prefers making and supporting creatures who suffer much less than they enjoy, to making no creatures at all. The supposition that he made them as happy as ...
— The Fallen Star; and, A Dissertation on the Origin of Evil • E. L. Bulwer; and, Lord Brougham
... generosity, or a love of justice, might induce to lay open their purses to his assistance in ascertaining his right, have, by themselves and their numerous emissaries, employed all the arts of calumny, slander, and detraction against him, by traducing his cause, vilifying his person, and most basely and cruelly tearing his character to pieces, by a thousand misrepresentations, purposely invented and industriously propagated in all places of resort, which ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... candidate, Garfield steadily grew in popular favor. He was met with a storm of detraction at the very hour of his nomination, and it continued with increasing volume and momentum until the close ...
— Hidden Treasures - Why Some Succeed While Others Fail • Harry A. Lewis
... passion is that! How it hunts down him it hates, and how surely it shuts the door of salvation against him who harbours it! Forgive us our debts, the resentful man says in his prayer, as we forgive our debtors. And detraction,—how some men's ink-horns are filled with detraction for ink, and how it drops from their tongue like poison! At their every word a reputation dies. Life and all its opportunities of doing good and having good done to us is laid like a bag of treasure ...
— Bunyan Characters - First Series • Alexander Whyte
... the wind, drank from the Ganges' stream, controlled himself with bitter fasts—but all! far short of moral rectitude. For though a man inure himself to live as any brute, he is not on that account a vessel of the righteous law; whilst he who breaks the laws of right behavior invites detraction, and is one no virtuous man can love; his heart is ever filled with boding fear, his evil name pursues him as a shadow. Having neither profit nor advantage in this world, how can he in the next world reap content? Therefore the wise man ought to practise pure behavior; passing through ...
— Sacred Books of the East • Various
... and eccentric perhaps, has a good sprinkling of learning and humour in his conversation and anecdote, from having lived so long amongst the eminent men of his day, such as Johnson, Foote, Garrick, and such like. But his conversation is sadly disgusting, from his tone of irony and detraction conveyed in a cunning sort of way and directed constantly against the Edinburgh Review, Walter Scott (who is a 'poor ignorant boy, and no poet,' and never wrote a five-feet line in his life), ...
— A Publisher and His Friends • Samuel Smiles
... Laura's morbid self-communing was renewed. At night the day's contribution of detraction, innuendo and malicious conjecture would be canvassed in her mind, and then she would drift into a course of thinking. As her thoughts ran on, the indignant tears would spring to her eyes, and she would ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 2. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... her song of man's nature and life as it is, on her lips—will you have of her, only the minister to your physical luxuries and baser wants? Be it so: but in the name of that truth which is able to survive ages of misunderstanding and detraction, in the name of that honor which is armed with arts of self-delivery and tradition, that will enable it to live again, 'though all the earth o'erwhelm it to men's eyes,' while this Book of the Advancemement of Learning stands, do not charge on ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... labour more than others to enable me to retain it. You must not be guided by the opinions and judgments of the present generation only, but of those to come also: and yet the latter will be a more candid judgment, for it will not be influenced by detraction and malice. Finally, you should think of this—that you are not seeking glory for yourself alone (and even if that were the case, you still ought not to be careless of it, especially as you had determined to consecrate the memory of your name by the most splendid monuments), but you have to share ...
— The Letters of Cicero, Volume 1 - The Whole Extant Correspodence in Chronological Order • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... had served in the campaign about Philadelphia but had been blocked in his extravagant demands for promotion; so he turned for redress to Gates, the star in the north. A malignant campaign followed in detraction of Washington. He had, it was said, worn out his men by useless marches; with an army three times as numerous as that of Howe, he had gained no victory; there was high fighting quality in the American army if properly led, but Washington ...
— Washington and his Comrades in Arms - A Chronicle of the War of Independence • George Wrong
... it seems that its daughters are unfittingly assigned by Gregory (Moral. xxxi, 45), who says that from envy arise "hatred, tale-bearing, detraction, joy at our neighbor's misfortunes, and grief for his prosperity." For joy at our neighbor's misfortunes and grief for his prosperity seem to be the same as envy, as appears from what has been said above (A. 3). Therefore these should not be assigned ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... has not the gypsy-brightness and vagrant charm of Dekker's, her wild soft glances and flashing smiles and fading traces of tears; she is no giddy girl, but a strong woman with fine irregular features, large and luminous eyes, broad intelligent forehead, eyebrows so thick and close together that detraction might call her beetle-browed, powerful mouth and chin, fine contralto voice (with an occasional stammer), expression alternately repellent and attractive, but always striking and sincere. No one has ever found her lovely; but there are times when she has a fascination of her own ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... name. The particular tribute, which in the pages that follow it is desired to pay to him, consists in the careful examination of just those actions and just those qualities of his upon which candid detraction has in fact fastened, or on which candid admiration has pronounced ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... American. Both smelled powder as the aides-de-camp of their chiefs; both rose rapidly from grade to grade, and from rank to rank, until they stood at the top; both labored at the end under the burden of criticism and detraction; and both met their death through a mistake, and fell like ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 6 of 8 • Various
... a variety of circumstances, and especially from the change in your honour's conduct towards me, that some person, as well inclined to detract, but better skilled in the art of detraction than the author of the above stupid scandal, has made free with my character. For I can not suppose, that malice so absurd, so barefaced, so diametrically opposite to truth, to common policy, and, in short, to everything but villany, as the above ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 2 (of 5) • John Marshall
... "The election has placed our President beyond the pale of human envy or human harm, as he is above the pale of human ambition. Henceforth all men will come to see him as we have seen him—a true, loyal, patient, patriotic, and benevolent man. Having no longer any motive to malign or injure him, detraction will cease, and Abraham Lincoln will take his place with Washington and Franklin and Jefferson and Adams and Jackson—among the benefactors of the country ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne
... perhaps, be some satisfaction to show the young writer, that the most celebrated ancients have been as rudely subjected to the tyranny of criticism as the moderns. Detraction has ever poured the "waters ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... of some newspapers, but not of mine,' I answered. 'But I will do this: I will print your article separately, and furnish you with as many copies as you want, and you can distribute them where you please, but I will not lumber my columns with detraction, and insult patrons to whom I am pledged to furnish a good paper for their families.' The party did not accept my proposition, ...
— From Boyhood to Manhood • William M. Thayer
... miserable associations cluster around this instrument of popular power. I know that the arena in which it stands is trodden into mire by the feet of reckless ambition and selfish greed. The wire-pulling and the bribing, the pitiful truckling and the grotesque compromises, the exaggeration and the detraction, the melo-dramatic issues and the sham patriotism, the party watch-words and the party nick-names, the schemes of the few paraded as the will of the many, the elevation of men whose only worth is in the votes they command—vile men, whose hands you would not grasp ...
— Humanity in the City • E. H. Chapin
... "But say, does it not strike you as most extraordinary that artists, the very men, that is to say, who beyond all others devote themselves to ideal aims and efforts, are particularly ready to yield to the basest impulses; envy, detraction, and—" ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... with far more licentiousness than has ever yet been traced to Pope? Pope lived in the public eye from his youth upwards; he had all the dunces of his own time for his enemies, and, I am sorry to say, some, who have not the apology of dulness for detraction, since his death; and yet to what do all their accumulated hints and charges amount?—to an equivocal liaison with Martha Blount, which might arise as much from his infirmities as from his passions; to a hopeless flirtation with Lady Mary W. Montagu; to ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... sham courage. I was morally a coward, and could not possibly face the evil spirit of detraction. Therefore, the morning found me feverish in body and faint in spirit. I kept out of sight of my boarders, except Mr. Seabrook, who looked into the kitchen with a sympathizing face, and inquired very kindly after Bennie, ...
— The New Penelope and Other Stories and Poems • Frances Fuller Victor
... author himself to be disbelieved, that the extravagant praises bestowed upon him may be justified? "Superlative commendation," says Dillwyn, "is near akin to detraction." (See his Reflections, p. 22.) Let him, therefore, who will charge detraction upon me, first understand wherein it consists. I shall criticise, freely, both the works of the living, and the doctrines of those who, to us, live only in their works; and if any man dislike this freedom, let him rebuke it, showing ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... on social and cheerful minds, can only give rise to the most painful impression. Why paint a dark and odious disposition which, devoid of all human sympathy, feeds its vanity in a cold contempt and derision of everything, and solely occupies itself in aimless detraction? Why exhibit such a moral deformity, which could hardly be tolerated even in Tragedy, for the mere purpose of producing domestic ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... and detraction," says Boerhaave, "are sparks, which if you do not blow them, will go out of themselves."—Murphy's Johnston, Vol. ...
— Journals of Travels in Assam, Burma, Bhootan, Afghanistan and The - Neighbouring Countries • William Griffith
... natural in manner, never putting himself forward, patient under the most hostile criticism which did not impugn his personal veracity. Although the malice of Freeman did once provoke him to a retort the more deadly because it was restrained, he suffered in silence all the detraction which followed the reminiscences and the biography of Carlyle. His temper was singularly placable, and he bore no malice. His father and his eldest brother had not treated him wisely or kindly. But neither of Hurrell Froude nor of the Archdeacon did he ever speak except with admiration ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... more perilously, Raleigh. Crites, like Asper-Macilente in "Every Man Out of His Humour," is Jonson's self-complaisant portrait of himself, the just, wholly admirable, and judicious scholar, holding his head high above the pack of the yelping curs of envy and detraction, but careless of their puny attacks on his perfections with only ...
— Cynthia's Revels • Ben Jonson
... weak decorative elements, and lack tracery and glass of a decorative quality, an obvious detraction in any great architectural work. The south transept shows indications of four successive periods of construction, and contains the best glass in the church; ...
— The Cathedrals of Northern France • Francis Miltoun
... of man does not suffer the least detraction from his inability to effect his benevolent purpose. "Things must take will for deed," as Browning tells us. David is not at all distressed by the consciousness ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones
... and returned to Pisa. This circumstance was duly reported to Father Rocco by his correspondent at Florence; but, whether he was too much occupied among the statues, or whether it was one result of his cautious resolution never to expose himself unnecessarily to so much as the breath of detraction, he made no attempt to see Nanina, or even to justify himself toward her by writing her a letter. All his mornings continued to be spent alone in the studio, and all his afternoons to be occupied by his clerical duties, until the day before the masked ...
— After Dark • Wilkie Collins
... pair of glasses which were no detraction from her very good looks, and remarked, with the serenity of ...
— Madame Delphine • George W. Cable
... to retrieve their mistake. His action left nothing to be desired in resolution or readiness. It is true that Rodney discussed the matter with his flag-captain, Walter Young, and that rumor attributed the merit of the decision to the latter; but this sort of detraction is of too common occurrence to affect opinion. Sir Gilbert Blane, Physician to the Fleet, gives the following account: "When it was close upon sunset, it became a question whether the chase should be continued. After some discussion between the ...
— The Major Operations of the Navies in the War of American Independence • A. T. Mahan
... lessened by their unceremonious mode of departure from it; and it is to these, the mass of whom are familiarly known in the journals of this country, that we owe the most insidious, because the best informed, detraction of us. Macmillan's Magazine did us sterling service through the papers of Edward Dicey, the best literary feuilletonist in England; and Professor Newman, J. Stuart Mill, and others, gave us the limited influence of the Westminster Review. ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... or other, he seemed full of business. He was all complacent bustle about nothing. He left off inveighing against Sir Charles. And, indeed, if you are one of those weak spirits to whom censure is intolerable, there is a cheap and easy way to moderate the rancor of detraction—you have only to die. Let me comfort genius in particular ...
— A Terrible Temptation - A Story of To-Day • Charles Reade
... some forty or fifty feet between the house at the stern and the forecastle, which rose considerably higher; a low bulwark was surmounted by a heavy rail supported upon turned posts painted white. Everything, in spite of the captain's boastful detraction, was in perfect trim, at least to landfolk's eyes. "Now come into the cabin," said the captain. He gave Lydia's traps, as he called them, in charge of a boy, while he led the way below, by a narrow stairway, warning Lydia and her grandfather to look out for their heads as they followed. "There!" ...
— The Lady of the Aroostook • W. D. Howells
... this voyage, the sight of gold placed the fame and advantage of the enterprizes and discoveries of Don Henry beyond the reach of prejudice and detraction, and the former murmurings and discontents against his proceedings were changed into admiration and applause. In 1443 Nuno Tristan was again sent out, with orders to prosecute, the discovery of a coast which now seemed so likely to prove advantageous to the commerce of Portugal. He now doubled ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. II • Robert Kerr
... allusion in one of Milton's sonnets, "On the detraction which followed upon his writing ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... reputation for skill in handling barbaric potentates, he knew how to make the most of it, both abroad and in Whitehall. On rejoining his regiment, too, after some of his triumphant expeditions, he was careful to bear himself with a modesty that took the point from detraction, assuring, as it did, his brother-officers that they would have done as well as he, had ...
— The Street Called Straight • Basil King
... present, nor too censorious upon the absent; and the cups such only as raised the conversation of the night, without disturbing the business of the morrow. He had not yet experienced the disadvantages attendant on such society, or learned how soon literary eminence becomes the object of detraction, of envy, of injury, even from those who can best feel its merit, if they are discouraged by dissipated habits from emulating its flight, or hardened by perverted feeling against loving ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott
... scornful pride! nor with malignant aim Belie the voice of consecrated fame, Thy subtlest arts, the pious to debate. End, with strict justice, in thy own disgrace. How weak were friendship could she shake with dread Of thy detraction 'gainst her worthies dead! No! such detraction makes her zeal more just To every claim of their yet speaking dust. Save me, good heaven! and all whom I regard, (Or hasty muse, or irritable bard,) Save us, good heaven! in mild ...
— Poems on Serious and Sacred Subjects - Printed only as Private Tokens of Regard, for the Particular - Friends of the Author • William Hayley
... majestick and great at the same time, that no man ever looked upon him without veneration, and a kind of tacit submission to the superiority of his genius.... He was never soured by calumny and detraction, nor ever thought it necessary to confute them; "for they are sparks," said he, "which, if you do not blow them, will go out of themselves."... He was not to be overawed or depressed by the presence, frowns, or insolence of great men; but persisted, ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 4 (of 6) • Boswell
... September, and was received by the ministry, and the people in general, with those marks of esteem and veneration which were due to his long services and signal success; but he was still persecuted with a spirit of envy and detraction. Philip king of Spain, alarmed at the reduction of Gibraltar, sent the marquis de Villadarias with an army to retake it. The siege lasted four months, during which the prince of Hesse exhibited many shining proofs of courage and ability. The place was supplied with men and ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... often a whole Train of Railers of each Side tire their Horses in setting Matters right which they have said during the War between the Parties; and a whole Circle of Acquaintance are put into a thousand pleasing Passions and Sentiments, instead of the Pangs of Anger, Envy, Detraction, and Malice. ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... Christians would neither admit that they worshipped more gods than one because of the Greeks, nor deny the divinity of Christ because of the Jews. They dreaded to be polytheistic; equally did they dread the least apparent detraction from the power and importance of their Saviour. They were forced into the theory of the Trinity by the necessity of those contrary assertions, and they had to make it a mystery protected by curses to save it from a reductio ...
— God The Invisible King • Herbert George Wells
... never grated for an instant on his high ideal. Her temper also was the sweetest in the world, eminent as her generous spirit. She spoke of others with so much kindness, and never indulged in that spirit of detraction or that love of personal gossip which Tancred had frankly told her he abhorred. Somehow or other it seemed that their tastes ...
— Tancred - Or, The New Crusade • Benjamin Disraeli
... only the law and the prophets, but the very life and spirit of the Gospel too: "Whatsoever ye would that men should do unto you, do ye even so unto them." Which rule, that we may all duly observe, by throwing aside all scandal and detraction, all spite and rancour, all rudeness and contempt, all rage and violence, and whatever tends to make conversation and commerce either uneasy, or troublesome, may the God of peace grant for ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IV: - Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Volume II • Jonathan Swift
... says, "may seem not worthy of analysis, far less of refutation; but, as Sydney Smith remarked, 'In a country surrounded by dikes, a rat may inundate a province'; and it is the long-continued gnawing of the tooth of detraction, that, at a momentous crisis, let in the cold flood at last upon the nation's heart, and quenched its traditional love." The eighth chapter depicts the views and characterizes the qualities of the Northern European authors who have travelled ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865 • Various
... as pure as the chaste morning's breath, When from the Night's cold arms it creeps away, Were clothed in words. —Sir J. Suckling—Detraction Execrated ...
— Eugene Aram, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... we should dissent from. The State Register may do the same. All the "Woman's Rights" women claim is fair play and truthful criticism. They object, however, to any misstatements. They are willing to fall before truth, but not before detraction. The State Register will please notice and ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... professions and occupations to which men can devote themselves, there is such a thing as com petition: and wherever there is competition, there will be the temptation to envy, jealousy, and detraction, as regards a man's competitors: and so there will be the need of that labour and exertion which lie in resolutely trampling that temptation down. You are quite certain, rny friend, as you go on through life, to ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... to pieces, his thought vanishes, the world disappears from him like a dream at morning. On what a spider thread is hung our individual existence! Fragility, appearance, nothingness. If it were for our powers of self-detraction and forgetfulness, all the fairy world which surrounds and draws us would seem to us but a broken spectre in the darkness, an empty appearance, a fleeting hallucination. Appeared—disappeared—there is the whole history of a man, or of a ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... State, above all as senator from South Carolina, he gained lasting renown. His life was eminently pure, his career exceptional, his fame established beyond the reach of calumny, beyond the power of detraction. ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... stated anything which he did not firmly believe to be the fact." Remarkable testimony this, concerning a great politician. From Disraeli, who would perhaps be less drawn to this qualification of a statesman, comes this word of praise, with many of detraction: "Nature had combined in Sir Robert Peel many admirable parts. In him a physical frame incapable of fatigue was united with an understanding equally vigorous and flexible. He was gifted with the faculty of method in the highest degree, and with great powers of application, which ...
— Ten Englishmen of the Nineteenth Century • James Richard Joy
... a sore heart and all the patient self-denial of her sex. To be welcome to Griffith she had to speak to him of her rival, and to speak well of her. She tried talking of herself and her attachment; he yawned in her face: she tried smooth detraction and innuendo; he fired up directly, and defended her of whose conduct he had been ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... Hebrides, Oct. 1 1773. Bentley shewed prudence in his silence. 'He was right,' Johnson said, 'not to answer; for, in his hazardous method of writing, he could not but be often enough wrong.' Boswell's Hebrides, Sept. 10, 1773. 'Boerhaave was never soured by calumny and detraction, nor ever thought it necessary to confute them; "for they are sparks," said he, "which, if you do not blow them, will go out of themselves."' Johnson's Works, vi. 288. Swift, in his Lines ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... clutching child from his nurse's arms with an iteration grimly discountenanced, in respect to their contents, by the glass doors of high cabinets. Something clearly beatific in this new relation had, moreover, without doubt, confirmed for him the sense that none of his silent answers to public detraction, to local vulgarity, had ever been so legitimately straight as the mere element of attitude—reduce it, he said, to that—in his easy weeks at Fawns. The element of attitude was all he wanted of these weeks, and he was enjoying it on the spot, even more than ...
— The Golden Bowl • Henry James
... means to cure herself, do you know,' said Mr. Pilgrim, whose goodwill towards Janet was just now quite above that temperate point at which he could indulge his feminine patients with a little judicious detraction. 'I feel sure she has not taken any stimulants all through her husband's illness; and she has been constantly in the way of them. I can see she sometimes suffers a good deal of depression for want of them—it shows all the more resolution in her. ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot
... to, but up to a certain point is natural and legitimate. A perfect friendship would not have room for such grudging sympathy, but would rejoice more for the other's success than for his own. The envious, jealous man never can be a friend. His mean spirit of detraction and insinuating ill-will kills friendship at its birth. Plutarch records a witty remark about Plistarchus, who was told that a notorious railer had spoken well of him. "I'll lay my life," said he, "somebody has told him I am dead, ...
— Friendship • Hugh Black
... with false infamy, that is to say, by detraction which frightens virtue. Envy must be represented with the hands raised to heaven in contempt, because if she could she would use her power against God. Make her face covered with a goodly mark; show her as wounded in the eye by a palm-branch, and wounded in the ear by laurel ...
— Thoughts on Art and Life • Leonardo da Vinci
... brilliantly, yet with an undercurrent of tragedy—the tragedy of homeless wanderers. Because they represent life, because they are true to life, because they depict life with a wonderful union of realism and beauty, they will, in spite of critical detraction, live as long as the Bach fugues, the Beethoven sonatas ...
— The Pianolist - A Guide for Pianola Players • Gustav Kobb
... had wholly changed its nature and character, if public opinion had been different? But it is in truth of base extraction, and ungenerous qualities, springing from selfishness and vanity, and low ambition; by these it subsists, and thrives, and acts; and envy, and jealousy, and detraction, and hatred, and variance, are its too faithful and natural associates. It is, to say the best of it, a root which bears fruits of a poisonous as well as of a beneficial quality. If it sometimes stimulates ...
— A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, in the Middle and Higher Classes in this Country, Contrasted with Real Christianity. • William Wilberforce
... learning and humour in his conversation and anecdote, from having lived so long amongst the eminent men of his day, such as Johnson, Foote, Garrick, and such like. But his conversation is sadly disgusting, from his tone of irony and detraction conveyed in a cunning sort of way and directed constantly against the Edinburgh Review, Walter Scott (who is a 'poor ignorant boy, and no poet,' and never wrote a five-feet line in his life), ...
— A Publisher and His Friends • Samuel Smiles
... distresses, and not among the last to feel and acknowledge your merits; as I have ever considered my own military reputation as inseparably connected with that of the army; as my heart has ever expanded with joy when I have heard its praises, and my indignation has arisen when the mouth of detraction has been opened against it, it can scarcely be supposed, at this last stage of the war, that I am indifferent to its interests. But how are they to be promoted? The way is plain, says the anonymous addresser. 'If war continues, remove into the ...
— Washington and the American Republic, Vol. 3. • Benson J. Lossing
... a very fierce contest before the people, characterized by lavish detraction and personal abuse—one of the most bitter, prolonged, and memorable in the history of the State —and the question of making Illinois permanently a Slave State was put to rest by a majority of about two thousand votes. The census of 1850 ...
— Fifty Years of Public Service • Shelby M. Cullom
... enough in this fallen world of ours, that meddling gossips must needs poison the few pure springs of enjoyment and peace? Not the hatred of the Theban brothers could more thoroughly accomplish this fiendish design than the whisper of detraction, the sneer of malice, or the fatal innuendo of envious, low-bred tattlers. Human life is shielded by the bulwark of legal provisions, and most earthly possessions are similarly protected; but there are assassins whom the judicial ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... here related. He died at a good old age, having seen his three-score years and ten, leaving behind him, in addition to a very ample estate, not only a good character, which means neither more nor less than what "the neighbours," amid their ignorance, envy, love of detraction, jealousy and other similar qualities, might think proper to say of him, but the odour of a well-spent life, in which he struggled hard to live more in favour with God, than in favour with man. It was remarked in him, for the last forty ...
— The Crater • James Fenimore Cooper
... included provisions which the chivalry of later ages might have been proud of. It was a wild, but not wholly an ungentle time. An unprovoked affront was regarded as a grave moral offence; and severe punishments were ordained, not only for detraction, but for a word, though uttered in jest, which brought a blush on the cheek of a listener. Yet an injury a hundred years old could meet no forgiveness, and the life of man was war! It was not that laws were wanting; a code, minute in its justice, had proportioned a penalty ...
— The Legends of Saint Patrick • Aubrey de Vere
... cannot help remarking, that young women do not always carefully distinguish between running into the error of detraction, and its opposite extreme of indiscriminate applause. This proceeds from the false idea they entertain, that the direct contrary to what is wrong must be right. Thus the dread of being only suspected ...
— Essays on Various Subjects - Principally Designed for Young Ladies • Hannah More
... some central facts of theology who can exactly draw out the distinction between 'reconciliation,' 'propitiation,' 'atonement,' as used in the New Testament; of Church history, who can trace the difference between a 'schism' and a 'heresy.' One who has learned to discriminate between 'detraction' and 'slander,' as Barrow has done before him, [Footnote: 'Slander involveth an imputation of falsehood, but detraction may be couched in truth, and clothed in fair language. It is a poison often infused in sweet liquor, and ministered in ...
— On the Study of Words • Richard C Trench
... my boundless gratitude for the honour which you have conferred unasked. True, Carthage is so illustrious a city that it were an honour to her that a philosopher should beg to be thus rewarded, but I wished the boon you have bestowed on me to have its full value with no taint of detraction, to suffer no loss of grace by any petition on my part, in a word to be wholly disinterested. For he that begs pays so heavily, and so large is the price that he to whom the petition is addressed receives, that, where the necessaries ...
— The Apologia and Florida of Apuleius of Madaura • Lucius Apuleius
... just to others; quand on sent, on reflechit rarement. Such strange vicissitudes of temper—such opposite extremes of thinking and feeling, written down at the moment, without noticing the intervening links of circumstances and impressions which led to them, would appear like detraction, if they should meet the eye of any indifferent person—but I think I have taken sufficient precautions against the possibility of such an exposure, and the only eyes which will ever glance over this blotted page, when the hand that writes ...
— The Diary of an Ennuyee • Anna Brownell Jameson
... interval between 1791 and 1797 Mary Wollstonecraft was to write one of the books which belong to the spiritual foundations of the next century, to taste fame and detraction, to know the joys of love and maternity, and to experience a misery and wrong which made life itself an unendurable shame. A later chapter will attempt an estimate of the ideas and personality of this brilliant and courageous woman. ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford
... appeared in the newspapers, it was his name that headed the list of the junior officers mentioned for distinguished conduct. Standish had followed his career with an admiration and a joy that was without taint of envy or detraction. He gloried in Aintree, he delighted to know the army held such a man. He was grateful to Aintree for upholding the traditions of a profession to which he himself gave all the devotion of a fanatic. He made a god of ...
— The Lost Road • Richard Harding Davis
... with each individual producer, are a number of others, whose productive powers and actual yield also are unknown to him. Each strives, with all the means at his command—cheap prices, advertisements, long credit, drummers, also secret and crafty detraction of the quality of the goods of his competitor, the last of which is a measure that flourishes particularly at critical moments—to drive all other competitors from the field. Production is wholly left to accident and to the judgment of individuals. Accident often is ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel
... ingredient, however, is an apparently judicious caution in presence of that which one happens to be incapable of, together with detraction of that which one would like to accomplish one's self. It is sad, above all things, to find a man so powerful and capable as Robert Schumann concerned in this confusion, and in the end to see his name inscribed on the banner of the new fraternity. The misfortune ...
— On Conducting (Ueber das Dirigiren): - A Treatise on Style in the Execution of Classical Music • Richard Wagner (translated by Edward Dannreuther)
... agitation made penal. There were northerners quite ready to grant these demands. Rage against abolitionism, much of it, if possible, even more unreasoning, prevailed at the North. Garrison says that he found here "contempt more bitter, detraction more relentless, prejudice more stubborn, and apathy more frozen than among slave-owners themselves." The Church, politics, business—all interests save righteousness—seemed to bow to the false god. Of all utterances against abolitionism, those of clergymen and ...
— History of the United States, Volume 3 (of 6) • E. Benjamin Andrews
... he resided at court, tasting the sweets and bitters of ambition—the caresses of a powerful king, and a still more powerful cardinal—mingled with the envious intrigues and malicious detraction of jealous rivals. Poussin loved not such a life; his free spirit languished, his noble heart was pained; and in 1642, he requested and obtained leave to visit Italy, promising, however, ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 462 - Volume 18, New Series, November 6, 1852 • Various
... intelligent and so gentle; the only person who understood him, and never grated for an instant on his high ideal. Her temper also was the sweetest in the world, eminent as her generous spirit. She spoke of others with so much kindness, and never indulged in that spirit of detraction or that love of personal gossip which Tancred had frankly told her he abhorred. Somehow or other it seemed that their tastes agreed ...
— Tancred - Or, The New Crusade • Benjamin Disraeli
... there is a criticism to make of Mr. Bruce's book, it is that it displays a lack of personal investigation and experimentation, and bears throughout the ear-marks of a literary compilation. But this is, after all, not a serious detraction from a work of this character,—which is, as I have said ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... medicorum decus, as Vesalius calls him, wrote furious letters, and later spoke of him as a madman (vaesanus). The younger men were with him and he had many friends, but he had aroused a roaring tide of detraction against which he protested a few years later in his work on the "China-root," which is full of details about the "Fabrica." In a fit of temper he threw his notes on Galen and other MSS. in the fire. No sadder page exists in medical writings than the one in which Vesalius ...
— The Evolution of Modern Medicine • William Osler
... presume to speak of foibles to-day, you will understand that I do so because, lightly though I may talk to you at times, I have a real sense of the responsibilities of this Chair. I worship great learning, which they had: I loathe flippant detraction of what is great; I have usually a heart for men-against-odds and the unpopular cause. But these very valiant fighters had, one and all, some very obvious foibles: and because, in the hour of success, these foibles came to ...
— On The Art of Reading • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... own, madam, I have no pleasure in their conversation. I have myself no gratification in uttering detraction, and therefore none ...
— Memoirs of the Life of the Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan V1 • Thomas Moore
... preferment as he had (it was never very great) to a chance opportunity of preaching at St. Paul's and a recommendation to Laud. That prelate—to whom all the infinite malignity of political and sectarian detraction has not been able to deny the title of an encourager, as few men have encouraged them, of learning and piety—took Taylor under his protection, made him his chaplain, and procured him incorporation at Oxford, a fellowship ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... Stewards to the Poor, and that in a future State they are accountable for every Doit lavish'd in Equipage or superfluous Dishes. Their Tables are not nicely, but plentifully served, and always open to the honest Needy. At Court, as I have learn'd, there is neither Envy nor Detraction, no one undermines another, nor intercepts the Prince's Bounty or Favour by slandrous Reports; and neither Interest, Riches, nor Quality, but Merit only recommends the Candidate to a Post: A Bribe was never heard of there; which, ...
— A Voyage to Cacklogallinia - With a Description of the Religion, Policy, Customs and Manners of That Country • Captain Samuel Brunt
... believe, singularly enough, that truth possesses some inherent vitality and power that give it an assured prevalence over falsehood; that a good name cannot be permanently defiled and irreparably ruined by detraction, but, like a star, shines all the brighter for the shadow through which it is seen; that justice cannot be stayed by injustice; that vice is powerless against virtue. I could quote from their great writers hundreds of utterances affirmative of these propositions. One of their ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce • Ambrose Bierce
... exhausting all that poetic vein which, properly applied, might have produced epics; these and many more traits set forth in his biography bring forth his character in its true light, dispel those clouds which malice and detraction may at times have cast over it, and leave it in the full effulgence of its ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... the verdict which I myself had to defray, from no very abundant means, was such that if Mr. Mackenzie had made as much clear profit by his press during the whole time he has employed it in the work of detraction, he would not have found it necessary to leave the concern, and abandon it to his creditors." To which statement it may be added that a gentleman now living in Toronto distinctly remembers hearing Mr. Jarvis say that his own contribution to the fund was precisely ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... you, Blackwood, I shall never speak to you again." His habit was to refer to death with eager frankness, and as though he were in love with it, without in the least showing any lack of alertness or detraction from the hazardous objects he had set himself to fulfil. His faith in the powerful aid of the Omnipotent was as unvarying in his sphere of warfare as was Cromwell's when he had the stern realities of human unruliness to steady and chastise. Nelson, like the ...
— Drake, Nelson and Napoleon • Walter Runciman
... contracts, no succession, no dividences; no occupation, but idle; no respect of kindred, but common; no apparel, but natural; no manuring of lands; no use of wine, corn, or metal. The very words that import lying, falsehood, treason, dissimulation, covetousness, envy, detraction, and pardon were ...
— Tolstoy on Shakespeare - A Critical Essay on Shakespeare • Leo Tolstoy
... gave him the only horse he had. And seizing the yoke of the car himself, the king began to draw it. And as he did so, he said, 'There is now nothing for the Brahmanas.' The king had given away, it is true, but he had done so with detraction. And for that speech of his, he shall have to fall down from heaven. And after the Rishi had said so, of the two that remained, one asked, 'Who amongst us two shall fall down?' And the Rishi answered, 'Vasumanas.' And the enquirer asked, 'For what reason?' And Narada said, ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... of the latter, and after noticing his benevolence to the poor, during the whole course of his long life, proceeds:—"One great feature in the character of Lord Kames, besides his literary talents, and his public spirit, was a remarkable innocency of mind. He not only never indulged in detraction, but when any species of scandal was exhibited in his company, he either remained silent, or endeavoured to give a turn to the conversation. As natural consequences of this amiable disposition, he never meddled with politics, even when politics ...
— On the Portraits of English Authors on Gardening, • Samuel Felton
... say, does it not strike you as most extraordinary that artists, the very men, that is to say, who beyond all others devote themselves to ideal aims and efforts, are particularly ready to yield to the basest impulses; envy, detraction, and—" ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... faults, which it magnifies, passing by virtues. Carrion flies that buzz with a sickening hum of satisfaction over sores, and prefer corruption to soundness, are as good judges of meat as such critics are of character. That Mephistophelean spirit of detraction has wide scope in this day. Literature and politics, as well as social life with its rivalries, are infested by it, and it finds its way into the church and threatens us all. The race of fault-finders we have always with us, blind as moles to beauties ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... and the corporate life, not by the intensive culture of purely solitary effort. It is for those who believe in the spiritual life to take full advantage now of this social suggestibility of man; though without any detraction from the prime importance of the personal spiritual life. Therefore, join up with somebody, find fellowship; whether it be in a church or society, or among a few like-minded friends. Draw together for ...
— The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day • Evelyn Underhill
... amidst the general applause the voice of detraction made itself heard. The defenders of Londonderry were men of two nations and of two religions. During the siege, hatred of the Irishry had held together all Saxons; and hatred of Popery had held together all Protestants. But, when the danger ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... a moment; then said Sir Mortimer, slowly: "I remember now—there was a Thomas Baldry, master of the Speedwell. Well, it was a sorry business that day! If from that muck of blood and horror was born Detraction—" ...
— Sir Mortimer • Mary Johnston
... advised by his physician to resort to this clime for the restoration of his health; as an American citizen, he had not expected that his right to come here would be questioned; as a stranger, or if not entirely so, known mainly by the detraction which the ardent advocacy of the rights of the South had brought upon him, he had supposed that neither his coming nor his going would attract attention. But his anticipations had proved erroneous. The polite, the manly, elevated men, lifted above the barbarism which ...
— Speeches of the Honorable Jefferson Davis 1858 • Hon. Jefferson Davis
... cavalry leaders—Murat, the Frenchman, and Custer, the American. Both smelled powder as the aides-de-camp of their chiefs; both rose rapidly from grade to grade, and from rank to rank, until they stood at the top; both labored at the end under the burden of criticism and detraction; and both met their death through a mistake, and fell like ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 6 of 8 • Various
... perilously, Raleigh. Crites, like Asper-Macilente in "Every Man Out of His Humour," is Jonson's self-complaisant portrait of himself, the just, wholly admirable, and judicious scholar, holding his head high above the pack of the yelping curs of envy and detraction, but careless of their puny attacks on his perfections with only too ...
— Every Man In His Humour • Ben Jonson
... that, unfortunately, I must be my own scribe, and not done by myself, they will be all but lost; or perhaps (as has been too often the case already) furnish feathers for the caps of others; some for this purpose, and some to plume the arrows of detraction, to be let fly against the luckless bird from whom they had ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various
... ill Of me—her tongue is never still: Yet may I die, but 'gainst her will, She loves me, spite of her detraction. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 380, June, 1847 • Various
... pure love of our neighbour Upon bearing with one another Upon fraternal correction Upon finding excuses for the faults of our fellow-men Upon not judging others Upon judging ourselves Upon slander and detraction Upon hasty judgments Upon ridiculing one's neighbour Upon contradicting others Upon loving our enemies Upon forgiving our enemies Upon the virtue of condescension How he adapted himself to times, places and circumstances Upon ...
— The Spirit of St. Francis de Sales • Jean Pierre Camus
... from high authority, I have not a thought of detraction. None can venerate the NESTORS in science who have enriched its annals, more than I, and though we reverse their judgments, their errors are confessedly our indispensable ...
— New and Original Theories of the Great Physical Forces • Henry Raymond Rogers
... Bridport's social life. People hinted that Mr. Legg was not the meek and mild spirit of ancient opinion and that Nelly knew it; but this suggestion may be held no more than the penalty of fame—an activity of the baser sort, who ever drop vinegar of detraction into the oil ...
— The Spinners • Eden Phillpotts
... truth? Who has not exerted an ingenious discernment to ascertain how much of the generous feeling depicted was only for mental amusement, a mere speculation; how much had really become incorporated with the habitual acts of life? Detraction is never idle in such cases; it seizes eagerly upon the foibles, the neglect, the faults of those who have been degraded by any weakness: alas, it omits nothing! It chases its prey, it accumulates facts only to distort ...
— Life of Chopin • Franz Liszt
... eye. It was spacious and handsome, with a stretch of some forty or fifty feet between the house at the stern and the forecastle, which rose considerably higher; a low bulwark was surmounted by a heavy rail supported upon turned posts painted white. Everything, in spite of the captain's boastful detraction, was in perfect trim, at least to landfolk's eyes. "Now come into the cabin," said the captain. He gave Lydia's traps, as he called them, in charge of a boy, while he led the way below, by a narrow stairway, ...
— The Lady of the Aroostook • W. D. Howells
... the inside of one of his legs without injury to the other was because the fighter was blessed with a pair of bow-legs that couldn't have stopped the proverbial pig in the proverbial alley. In addition to this decided detraction from his manly beauty, he was short, squatty, thick-necked, a nose of the variety commonly known as a stub, and a couple of little eyes that had a constant twinkle, half-shrewd and half-humorous, the whole ...
— S.O.S. Stand to! • Reginald Grant
... Even envy and detraction could not lessen his grandeur nor tarnish the lustre of his name.... Scarce an organ of public opinion in the country, no matter what party or what interest it represented, has not laid its wreath of praise on the tomb of this great Canadian. And far beyond his own country ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson
... never was said of another man than Smith could say of himself, but he believed it, as also did many of his comrades, we must suppose. He suffered detraction enough, but he suffered also abundant eulogy both in verse and prose. Among his eulogists, of course, is not the factious Captain Ratcliffe. In the English Colonial State papers, edited by Mr. Noel Sainsbury, is a note, dated Jamestown, October 4, 1609, ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... surgery, then? No. What is honor? A word. What is that word, honor? Air. A trim reckoning! Who hath it? He that died o' Wednesday. Doth he feel it? No. Doth he hear it? No. Is it insensible, then? Yea, to the dead. But will it not live with the living? No. Why? Detraction ...
— Strange Visitors • Henry J. Horn
... accepted must deprive me of those enjoyments, social and domestic, which my time of life required, and to which my circumstances entitled me; and a vigorous execution of the duties must inevitably expose me to the resentment of disappointed and designing men, and to the calumny and detraction of the envious and malicious. I was therefore determined not to engage in so arduous an undertaking. But the solicitations of my friends, acquaintance, and fellow citizens, a full conviction of the necessity, that some ...
— The Diplomatic Correspondence of the American Revolution, Vol. XI • Various
... the lot of men of genius to suffer from the envenomed shafts of calumny and detraction. The reputation of James Hogg has thus bled. Much has been said to his prejudice by those who understood not the simple nature of his character, and were incapable of forming an estimate of the principles of his life. ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... Railers of each Side tire their Horses in setting Matters right which they have said during the War between the Parties; and a whole Circle of Acquaintance are put into a thousand pleasing Passions and Sentiments, instead of the Pangs of Anger, Envy, Detraction, ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... and, in fact, up to the present moment, there was, and is, a most fierce and bitter outcry, and detraction loud and low, against General McClellan, accusing him of sloth, imbecility, cowardice, treasonable purposes, and, in short, utterly denying his ability as a soldier, and questioning his integrity as a man. Nor was this to be wondered ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... escaped calumny. The few scandals caused by some of her early indiscretions were soon dissipated, and she lived down all unpleasant rumors. She, indeed, seemed to possess some talisman, as potent as the magic ring that bewitched King Charlemagne, by whose spell she disarmed envy and silenced detraction. This attaching power she exercised on every person who came within the sphere of her influence. Even the gossiping Duchess D'Abrantes has only words of respectful admiration for her. The preconceived prejudices ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... will be a long time before that is entirely lost, but five-story office buildings, automobiles in the afternoon parade, steaks or ham and eggs at an eight or nine o'clock breakfast, and all kinds of indescribable hats in place of dainty and graceful mantillas, seem to me a detraction, like bay-windows and porticos added to an old ...
— Cuba, Old and New • Albert Gardner Robinson
... writeth in this wise Rebukynge the vice / of vyle detraccion [Sidenote: rebukes the vice of detraction,] What man it be / that of custom & guyse 164 Hurteth with tunge / or by foule colusi[o]n Thabsente / weyue ye for that abusio[n] Suche a detractour / from the table [Sidenote: and bids you turn all backbiters from the table] As vnworthy / ...
— Caxton's Book of Curtesye • Frederick J. Furnivall
... with words of consolation, encouragement, and advice. He rules in a little world, and the scales of justice must be balanced evenly in his hands. He should go in and out before his scholars free from partiality or prejudice; indifferent to the voice of envy or detraction; shunning evil and emulous of good; patient of inquiries in the hours of duty; filled with the spirit of industry in his moments of leisure; gathering up and spreading before his pupils the choicest gems of literature, ...
— Thoughts on Educational Topics and Institutions • George S. Boutwell
... may refrain from calumny and detraction; that I may abhor deceit, and avoid lying, envy and fraud, flattery, hatred, malice and ...
— Little Journeys To the Homes of the Great, Volume 3 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... trades, which will amount to three hundred millions more, making thirty-six millions of dollars a year for twenty-five years, with insurance of peace all that time, and it is impossible to look at the question a second time. I am aware that at the end of about sixteen years, a gradual detraction from this sum will commence, from the gradual diminution of breeders, and go on during the remaining nine years. Calculate this deduction, and it is still impossible to look at the enterprise a second ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... and violence. These complaints still continued; but the fault was not all on one side, and Frontenac himself had often just reason to retort them. He wrote to Ponchartrain: "If you will not be so good as to look closely into the true state of things here, I shall always be exposed to detraction, and forced to make new apologies, which is very hard for a person so full of zeal and uprightness as I am. My secretary, who is going to France, will tell you all the ugly intrigues used to defeat my plans for the service of the king, and the growth of the colony. I have long tried ...
— Count Frontenac and New France under Louis XIV • Francis Parkman
... his censor elsewhere describes as his habit of "giving a kick" to many men and things. There is no more unpleasant feature of the Noctes than the apparent inability of the writer to refrain from sly "kicks" even at the objects of his greatest veneration. A kind of mania of detraction seizes him at times, a mania which some of his admirers have more kindly than wisely endeavoured to shuffle off as a humorous dramatic touch intentionally administered to him by his Eidolon North. The most disgraceful, perhaps the only really disgraceful, instance of this is the ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... "Calumny and detraction," says Boerhaave, "are sparks, which if you do not blow them, will go out of themselves."—Murphy's Johnston, ...
— Journals of Travels in Assam, Burma, Bhootan, Afghanistan and The - Neighbouring Countries • William Griffith
... Christ has compared it to a net in which there are both good and bad fishes, Matt. 13, 47. It is, verily, a true saying, namely, that there is no remedy against the attacks of the slanderer. Nothing can be spoken with such care that it can escape detraction. For this reason we have added the Eighth Article, lest any one might think that we separate the wicked and hypocrites from the outward fellowship of the Church, or that we deny efficacy to Sacraments administered by ...
— The Apology of the Augsburg Confession • Philip Melanchthon
... like this! not mine the task, From flattering friends to tear the hateful mask; Let keener bards delight in Satire's sting, My Fancy soars not on Detraction's wing: 80 Once, and but once, she aim'd a deadly blow, To hurl Defiance on a secret Foe; But when that foe, from feeling or from shame, The cause unknown, yet still to me the same, Warn'd by some friendly hint, perchance, ...
— Byron's Poetical Works, Vol. 1 • Byron
... countenance. The mossy walls, often scraped, the mossified pavement, the greenish tombs of marble under the maples and firs, showed the effect of shade, solitude, and humidity upon all things of brick in this climate, where wood was already rising into favor as building material, but to the detraction of picturesqueness and all the appearance ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend
... some satisfaction to show the young writer, that the most celebrated ancients have been as rudely subjected to the tyranny of criticism as the moderns. Detraction has ever poured the "waters ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... Johnson. A correct edition of his works must, therefore, be an acceptable contribution to the mass of national literature. That the present edition has, perhaps, fairer claims on public approbation than most preceding ones, we feel ourselves justified in asserting, without envious detraction of those who have gone before us. It has been our wish and diligent endeavour to give as accurate a text as possible, to which we have subjoined notes, where elucidation seemed to be required. They ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... troublesome preferment than return void of a title. But now, when he finds himself desperately crossed, and at once spoiled both of advancement and hope, both of fruition and possibility, all his desire is turned into rage, his thirst is now only of revenge, his tongue sounds of nothing but detraction and slander. Now the place he fought for is base, his rival unworthy, his adversary injurious, officers corrupt, court infectious; and how well is he that may be his own man, his own master, that may live ...
— Character Writings of the 17th Century • Various
... will you stand forth? This detraction through years For my people has made me an oaf, Hides my poetry's fount in the fog of its fleers, So it merely a pool of self-worship appears; Like a clumsy troll I Am contemned with affront, Whom all "cultured" folk ...
— Poems and Songs • Bjornstjerne Bjornson
... disparagement contained in the remarks of General Halleck it is quite likely that he merely meant to say that the troops hurriedly collected at Harrisburg were untried, and therefore ought not to be entrusted with any critical service. But the words, as they stand, carry with them a sweeping detraction and are nothing less than calumnious. The Brooklyn Twenty-Third—or rather the Division, taken as a whole, with which it was incorporated—has only to point to its record as given very imperfectly in the following History, and especially to the farewell orders of General Meade, and of the commander ...
— Our campaign around Gettysburg • John Lockwood
... discover faults which derogate from the character we have been taught to admire and venerate; they may even point out spots, which we can not disprove, in that sun of glorious brightness which shed its beneficent rays over a century of darkness—but this we know, that whatever may be the force of detraction, his fame has been steadily increasing, even on the admission of his slanderers, for three centuries, and that he now shines as a fixed star in the constellation of the great lights of modern times, ...
— Christopher Columbus and His Monument Columbia • Various
... people for that; and, therefore, I am left at a loss to understand the motive, unless it be that deep-rooted hate which makes you blind to your own interest when that interest is weighed in the balance with the denunciation and detraction of ...
— The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government • Jefferson Davis
... not wanting, according to the testimony of the witness who, on his own account, certainly did not object to chronicle detraction of every kind. "The speech was admired, except by Brougham, who appeared in a considerable state of excitement. He said to Peel (whom he was standing near, and with whom he was not in the habit of communicating), '"amelioration;" ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen V.1. • Sarah Tytler
... like a stage-coach, in which anyone who would pay had a right to a place, my answer was, that I would print the piece separately if desired, and the author might have as many copies as he pleased to distribute himself, but that I would not take upon me to spread his detraction; and that, having contracted with my subscribers to furnish them with what might be either useful or entertaining, I could not fill their papers with private altercation, in which they had no concern, without doing them manifest injustice. Now, ...
— Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin • Benjamin Franklin
... (unworthy the denomination of Poesy) no eye can inspect it without a prodigious amazement; the abuses being so gross and deliberate, that it seems rather a Capital or National Libel, than personal exposures, in order to an infamous detraction. For how does he character the King, but as a broad figure of scandalous inclinations, or contriv'd unto such irregularities, as renders him rather the property of Parasites and Vice, than suitable to the accomplishment of so ...
— Anti-Achitophel (1682) - Three Verse Replies to Absalom and Achitophel by John Dryden • Elkanah Settle et al.
... here I send, With this let your collection end. Thus I consign you down to fame A character to praise or blame: And if the whole may pass for true, Contented rest, you have your due. Give future time the satisfaction, To leave one handle for detraction. ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift
... be bringing such tales to me, a priest?" he asked. "Denis Quirk is a man who goes to his duties; not by any means a saint, but a good, honest Catholic. Tell the next man or woman who speaks about it that scandal and detraction are steps in the ladder down to the devil's kingdom. There are more souls lost that way than you ...
— Grey Town - An Australian Story • Gerald Baldwin
... of prosperity to awaken envy and excite detraction, it is certainly the lot of misfortune to atone for a multitude of faults. San Domingo had been the very hot-bed of sedition against Columbus in the day of his power; he had been hurried from it in ignominious chains, amidst the ...
— The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (Vol. II) • Washington Irving
... necessary credit or capital, and the result was, the realization of princely fortunes, and the enriching even the nation itself. On the expiration of their partnership, Arkwright went on by himself at Cromford, and the Strutts for themselves at Belper. A spirit of detraction would make it appear that Arkwright stole the invention of another, but Mr. William Strutt, who knew him well, and is a competent judge on such subjects, assured me that Arkwright was a man of very superior ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 365 • Various
... to the tooth of detraction; vilifed; hopelessly in the wrong; superseded in the consideration and ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... contrary proposition. The Christians would neither admit that they worshipped more gods than one because of the Greeks, nor deny the divinity of Christ because of the Jews. They dreaded to be polytheistic; equally did they dread the least apparent detraction from the power and importance of their Saviour. They were forced into the theory of the Trinity by the necessity of those contrary assertions, and they had to make it a mystery protected by curses to save it from a reductio ad absurdam. The entire history of ...
— God The Invisible King • Herbert George Wells
... dividences; no occupation, but idle; no respect of kindred, but common; no apparel, but natural; no manuring of lands; no use of wine, corn, or metal: the very words that import lying, falsehood, treason, dissimulation, covetousness, envy, detraction, and pardon, ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... had purified her of ALL stains of her past—but there may be one that remains. And THAT in most people's eyes would be no detraction. You look puzzled, Miss Nott—but I am coming to the explanation and the end of my story. A ship of war was sent to the island to punish the mutineers and pirates, for such they were, but they could not be found. A private ...
— By Shore and Sedge • Bret Harte
... expressed by nemo me impure lacessit which impels to answering in presence of the passers by the enemy at the gate; it is also a debt which his honour and a respectful regard for the good opinion of his fellows compel the author to repay. The man who is feeble enough silently to suffer detraction and calumny at the hands of some sciolist or Halb-bildung sheltering his miserable individuality under the shadow (may it never be less!) of " King We," simply sins against himself as the Arabs say and offends good manners by holding out ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... noble emotions had been a fine factor in the equipment of every worthy human being, a fine factor that had its less amiable aspect in a usually harmless hostility to strange people, and a usually harmless detraction of strange lands. But with the wild rush of change in the pace, scope, materials, scale, and possibilities of human life that then occurred, the old boundaries, the old seclusions and separations were violently broken down. All the old settled mental habits and traditions of men found themselves ...
— The War in the Air • Herbert George Wells
... great truth or doctrine but has had to fight its way to public recognition in the face of detraction, calumny, and persecution. ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... accomplishment, of a given end; and felt an inward and profound respect for everything that was beyond his reach, which manifested itself, not in manly efforts to attain the forbidden fruit, but rather in a spirit of opposition and detraction, that only betrayed, through its jealousy, the existence of the feeling, which jealousy, however, he affected to conceal under an intense regard for popular rights, since he was apt to aver it was quite intolerable that any man should ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... rages in its full violence, exerts itself in civil war and bloodshed; and when it is under its greatest restraints naturally breaks out in falsehood, detraction, calumny, and a partial administration of justice. In a word, it fills a nation with spleen and rancour, and extinguishes all the seeds of ...
— The Coverley Papers • Various
... man is safe from detraction. We hear an excellent account of you from every quarter but this one. My visit will probably turn to ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade
... I'd serve you while you're fit to serve yourself: So long as fifty eyes await the turn Of yours to forestall its yet half-formed wish, I'll proffer my assistance you'll not need— When every tongue is praising you, I'll join The praisers' chorus—when you're hemmed about With lives between you and detraction—lives To be laid down if a rude voice, rash eye, Rough hand should violate the sacred ring Their worship throws about you,—then indeed, Who'll stand up for you stout as I?" If so We said, and so we did,—not Mildred there Would be unworthy to behold us both, But we should be unworthy, both of ...
— A Blot In The 'Scutcheon • Robert Browning
... while he was yet a helpless and powerless refugee, within Turkish hospitality. But when the people were gathering around him in free countries, shoulder to shoulder—when even the hearts of statesmen began to open to him, and hope dawned in the Hungarian sky once more, then it was these arrows of detraction darkened the air, shot from the Court of the French Usurper, or from the pensioners of autocratic bounty. Your patient labours and forbearance in your country's cause, while thus assailed, have won for you, sir, our sincere respect, and another ...
— Select Speeches of Kossuth • Kossuth
... rich; and by a few, some lady of quality incog. Many, however, asserted, that her jewels were glass; her gold, tinsel, and her glittering ornaments, beads sewed upon pasteboard. Nevertheless, in the very face of this shameful detraction, to her delightful little soirees flocked the best families in the town, (there were not many,) the heads of houses, (scarcely room had they in her mansion for their bodies,) and many a, fellow, senior and junior, of many a college ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 13 Issue 364 - 4 Apr 1829 • Various
... noble gifts; it is difficult to think ill of a man who can carry oratory for a glorious object to such heights of splendour. It may seem a duty to some to darken his character with detraction, but his inspiring words remain supreme and unsullied and will still live when such faults as may be truly laid to his charge are long forgotten. To fight for a great cause, Antony, is rightly to use great ...
— The Glory of English Prose - Letters to My Grandson • Stephen Coleridge
... and when she went out into the world the next day, it was with his every word ringing in her ears, as they had rung ever since: the sceptic comment at every feast, the ironical laughter behind every door, the whispered detraction in ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... circle of detraction widened, until there was scarcely a friend or acquaintance of Mrs. Comegys, near or remote, who had not heard of her having cheated a dry goods dealer out of several yards of lawn. Three, it had first been alleged; but the most common version of the story made it fifteen or twenty. Meantime, ...
— Heart-Histories and Life-Pictures • T. S. Arthur
... distinguished people generally run in a channel coincident with the facts of their character. On the other hand, with regard to evil reports, it is safe always to allow something for the natural propensity to detraction and slander, which is one of the most undoubted facts of ...
— Sunny Memories Of Foreign Lands, Volume 1 (of 2) • Harriet Elizabeth (Beecher) Stowe
... establishment of our position among the great powers of the earth, and our relief from all future aggressions, encroachments, and annoyances of the mother country. From the day when our independence was declared, America has been an eyesore to all the leading Governments of Europe—the object of detraction and bitter hostility, of envy, hatred, and malice, and all uncharitableness. And though these feelings have been partially concealed under the cloak of studied politeness and false, hollow-hearted friendship, occasions enough have been given for them to break forth in sufficient intensity to establish ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 2, August, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... which I greatly hate is the detraction of Brahmanas; without doubt, if the Brahmanas are worshipped, I regard myself worshipped. All superior Brahmanas should always be saluted with reverence, after feeding them with hospitality. One should reverence one's own feet also (in ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... applied even more disparaging terms to the lady in question, therefore the visitors were puzzled at his show of rabid resentment; the most they could make out of it was that he claimed the right of disparagement as a personal and exclusive privilege, and considered detraction out of the lips of another a trespass upon his intimate private affairs, an aspersion and an insult. The wife of a man's bosom, he averred, was sacred; any creature who breathed disrespect of her ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach
... of perfection I spake not ill of any creature, how little soever it might be. I scrupulously avoided all approaches to detraction. I had this rule ever present with me, that I was not to wish, nor assent to, nor say such things of any person whatsoever, that I would not have them say of me. And as time went on, I succeeded in persuading ...
— Santa Teresa - an Appreciation: with some of the best passages of the Saint's Writings • Alexander Whyte
... distinct Rights. Actions, by directing those in general, and particular, to the Honour of the Deity and Welfare of the Community: Expression, by the penal Interdiction of prophane Cursing and Swearing, Obscenity, Scurrility, Calumny, and Detraction, yet with a full Indulgence of proper Satire against such as merited popular Reprehension, or Contempt; the Satirist's Pen in those Days being as much dreaded, or rather more so, than the Magistrate's Rod, and consequently as diligently avoided by ...
— An Essay on the Antient and Modern State of Ireland • Henry Brooke
... the subject of constant detraction, satire, and ridicule by the newspaper press. This is because it is not understood, and it may be because it is mainly a female accomplishment: the few men who chew gum may be supposed to do so by reason of gallantry. There might be no more sympathy with it in the press ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... After this, let detraction do its worst; for if this be not his, it deserves to be. For my part, I declare for distributive justice; and from this, and what follows, he certainly deserves those advantages, which he acknowledges to have received from ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. II • Edited by Walter Scott
... This should strike detraction dumb, I propose also to publish a selection of congratulations from other Continental potentates, but of this, as SHAKSPEARE says, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, August 16, 1890 • Various
... congratulate the venerated author of the book, not only that the greatness of his achievement and its enduring influence upon the progress of knowledge have won him a place beside Harvey, but, still more, that, like Harvey, he has lived long enough to outlast detraction and opposition, and to see the stone that the builders rejected become the head-stone of ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume I, No. 8, August, 1880 • Various
... that always makes mischief. They gather in each other's rooms and spend hours in consultation about others. If they had to walk a half mile before they got to the willing ear of some listener to detraction they would get out of breath before reaching there, and not feel in full glow of animosity or slander, or might, because of the distance, not go at all. But rooms 20, 21, 22, 23, 24 and 25 are on the same corridor, and when one carrion crow goes "Caw! Caw!" all the other crows hear it ...
— The Wedding Ring - A Series of Discourses for Husbands and Wives and Those - Contemplating Matrimony • T. De Witt Talmage
... Journal also duly reached me, and this morning I received the Spectator. The critique in the Spectator gives that view of the book which will naturally be taken by a certain class of minds; I shall expect it to be followed by other notices of a similar nature. The way to detraction has been pointed out, and will probably be pursued. Most future notices will in all likelihood have a reflection of the Spectator in them. I fear this turn of opinion will not improve the demand for the ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... ever yet been traced to Pope? Pope lived in the public eye from his youth upwards; he had all the dunces of his own time for his enemies, and, I am sorry to say, some, who have not the apology of dulness for detraction, since his death; and yet to what do all their accumulated hints and charges amount?—to an equivocal liaison with Martha Blount, which might arise as much from his infirmities as from his passions; ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... education. That which, with more reason, I admire, is that being so absolute a courtier, you have not forgot either the ties of friendship, or the practice of generosity. In my little experience of a court, (which, I confess, I desire not to improve) I have found in it much of interest, and more of detraction: Few men there have that assurance of a friend, as not to be made ridiculous by him when they are absent. There are a middling sort of courtiers, who become happy by their want of wit; but they supply that want by an excess of malice to those who have it. And there is ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Volume 4 (of 18) - Almanzor And Almahide, Marriage-a-la-Mode, The Assignation • John Dryden
... place to enter into petty theological questions in a comparatively trivial work such as this—to inquire, for instance, into the question whether it may not be as possible to be damned for detraction as to be damned for adultery; but we may at least believe that Lady Purbeck spent her later years in contrition for the past and ...
— The Curious Case of Lady Purbeck - A Scandal of the XVIIth Century • Thomas Longueville
... not know whether it is a detraction from Andreas's worth to mention that another characteristic of his was the habit of awaking us in the still watches of the night, for the purpose of imparting his views on recondite phases of the great Eastern question. But how trivial were such peccadilloes in a man who was so resolute not to ...
— The Idler, Volume III., Issue XIII., February 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly. Edited By Jerome K. Jerome & Robert Barr • Various
... a la Jonquiere et Bigot, 8 Fev. 1752. See Appendix A. In spite of Piquet's self-laudation, and in spite also of the detraction of the author of the Memoires sur le Canada, 1749-1760, there can be no doubt of his practical capacity and his fertility of resource. Duquesne, when governor of the colony, highly praises "ses talents et son activite pour le ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... unseen communion, We should gather, we should garner, Many lessons full of profit, Lessons long and full of wisdom. We should see the struggling victim In the toils of the ensnarer; See the troubled spirit writhing 'Neath the lashings of detraction; See the burdened nature groaning 'Mid the polished shafts of envy; See the sinner's cunning malice, In the act of human torture; See the Christian's anxious fightings, Foes without, and fears within him. All these lessons we should garner From each spirit's veiled communion. Change ...
— The Song of Lancaster, Kentucky - to the statesmen, soldiers, and citizens of Garrard County. • Eugenia Dunlap Potts
... the cups such only as raised the conversation of the night, without disturbing the business of the morrow. He had not yet experienced the disadvantages attendant on such society, or learned how soon literary eminence becomes the object of detraction, of envy, of injury, even from those who can best feel its merit, if they are discouraged by dissipated habits from emulating its flight, or hardened by perverted feeling ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott
... dislike of America was not lessened by their unceremonious mode of departure from it; and it is to these, the mass of whom are familiarly known in the journals of this country, that we owe the most insidious, because the best informed, detraction of us. Macmillan's Magazine did us sterling service through the papers of Edward Dicey, the best literary feuilletonist in England; and Professor Newman, J. Stuart Mill, and others, gave us the limited influence of the Westminster ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... no respect of kindred, but common; no apparel, but natural; no manuring of lands, no use of wine, corn, or metal. The very words that import lying, falsehood, treason, dissimulation, covetousness, envy, detraction, and passion, were never heard of amongst them. How dissonant would he find his imaginary commonwealth from ...
— Montaigne and Shakspere • John M. Robertson
... dissemble.—There were however others, who, from motives and feelings not honourable to them, dissemblers even in Unitarianism, who sought every opportunity of defaming him, and attempted to strip him of his virtues, and of his genius, by calumny and detraction. In this, however, they were foiled. On the other hand, the party more inclined to favour fanaticism, were so indiscreet in their praise as to become in their turn equally injurious to his character, and verified the old adage, that indiscreet ...
— The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - 1838 • James Gillman
... seemed deserted by almost the whole world, and assailed by almost every tongue, and pen, and press, you have fearlessly and manfully stood by me, with unsurpassed zeal and undiminished friendship. When I felt as if I should sink beneath the storm of abuse and detraction, which was violently raging around me, I have found myself upheld and sustained by your encouraging voices and approving smiles. I have doubtless, committed many faults and indiscretions, over which you have thrown the broad mantle of your charity. ...
— Walker's Appeal, with a Brief Sketch of His Life - And Also Garnet's Address to the Slaves of the United States of America • David Walker and Henry Highland Garnet
... guid luck hit you, And 'mang her favourites admit you! If e'er Detraction shore to smit you, May nane believe him! And ony deil that thinks to get you, Good ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... just as painters heighten the effect of their pictures by the combination of light and shade, so by censure abuse detraction and ridicule of the opposite virtues secretly praise and foment the actual vices of those they flatter. Thus they censure modesty as merely rustic behaviour in the company of profligates, and greedy people, and villains, and such as have got ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... strutting gait, Were but thy mother noble; since, being naught, So stiff thou stand'st for him who is nothing now, And swear'st we came not as commanders here Of all the Achaean navy, nor of thee; But Aias sailed, thou say'st, with absolute right. Must we endure detraction from a slave? What was the man thou noisest here so proudly? Have I not set my foot as firm and far? Or stood his valour unaccompanied In all this host? High cause have we to rue That prize-encounter for Pelides' ...
— The Seven Plays in English Verse • Sophocles
... might better have gone straight ahead, Nick! You will come to be estimated for exactly what you are worth. If a fool, no amount of newspaper or magazine puffery can set you up; and if you are useful, no amount of newspaper or magazine detraction can keep you down. For every position there are twenty aspirants; only one man can get it; forthwith the other nineteen are on the offensive. People are silly enough to think that they can build themselves up with the bricks they ...
— Around The Tea-Table • T. De Witt Talmage
... and ephemeral, and copies are now rare and not easily come by. Both in the comprehensiveness of their charges and in the slashing hatred which informs them (however feeble the verse), One Epistle and The Blatant Beast offer as fair a sample as any two such pamphlets can of the calumny, detraction, and critical misunderstanding Pope endured, for the most part patiently, from the publication of his Essay on Criticism to the year of his death. "Welcome for thee, fair Virtue! all the past," (Epistle to Arbuthnot, l. 358) he exclaimed in ...
— Two Poems Against Pope - One Epistle to Mr. A. Pope and the Blatant Beast • Leonard Welsted
... which it stands is trodden into mire by the feet of reckless ambition and selfish greed. The wire-pulling and the bribing, the pitiful truckling and the grotesque compromises, the exaggeration and the detraction, the melo-dramatic issues and the sham patriotism, the party watch-words and the party nick-names, the schemes of the few paraded as the will of the many, the elevation of men whose only worth is in the votes they command—vile men, whose hands you would ...
— Humanity in the City • E. H. Chapin
... This circumstance was duly reported to Father Rocco by his correspondent at Florence; but, whether he was too much occupied among the statues, or whether it was one result of his cautious resolution never to expose himself unnecessarily to so much as the breath of detraction, he made no attempt to see Nanina, or even to justify himself toward her by writing her a letter. All his mornings continued to be spent alone in the studio, and all his afternoons to be occupied by his clerical duties, until the day before the ...
— After Dark • Wilkie Collins
... hostility against those who do not favor them, envy, hatred, and revenge, and from these fierceness and cruelty; and in respect to the Divine they are denial and consequent contempt, derision, and detraction of the holy things of the church; and after death, when man becomes a spirit, these evils are changed to anger and hatred against these holy things (see above, n. 562). And as these evils breathe forth continually the destruction and murder of those whom ...
— Heaven and its Wonders and Hell • Emanuel Swedenborg
... flashing smiles and fading traces of tears; she is no giddy girl, but a strong woman with fine irregular features, large and luminous eyes, broad intelligent forehead, eyebrows so thick and close together that detraction might call her beetle-browed, powerful mouth and chin, fine contralto voice (with an occasional stammer), expression alternately repellent and attractive, but always striking and sincere. No one has ever found her lovely; but there are times when she ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... rule of Christian duty, on which hangs, not only the law and the prophets, but the very life and spirit of the Gospel too: "Whatsoever ye would that men should do unto you, do ye even so unto them." Which rule, that we may all duly observe, by throwing aside all scandal and detraction, all spite and rancour, all rudeness and contempt, all rage and violence, and whatever tends to make conversation and commerce either uneasy, or troublesome, may the God of peace grant for Jesus ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IV: - Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Volume II • Jonathan Swift
... and rejoycing when any illiterate person hath gained any reputation for a Cure performed, especially where Physicians have been concerned, though the Patients neglect or obstinateness, have been the sole cause of this non-performance, and by their continued detraction from Physicians, and applauding themselves, hoping by the former, that people will think such Mountebanks able to do better Cures then learned Physicians, and then they can easily insinuate themselves superior to such Mountebanks, and consequently to Physicians. By the latter, ...
— A Short View of the Frauds and Abuses Committed by Apothecaries • Christopher Merrett
... much is there in your magnificent country, hitherto undescribed and unexpressed, in scenery, manners, morals, that all may be wells from which he may be the first to drink. Yet it cannot be expected—for it has passed to a proverb that escape from persecution and detraction can never and nowhere be the lot of literature—that there will not be many instances, even in America, where every attempt on the part of gifted writers (and young writers especially, who are commonly regarded with ...
— Lippincott's Magazine. Vol. XII, No. 33. December, 1873. • Various
... Conservative, incorporated in one paper with the 'Morning Herald,' so that a column of news was printed side by side with one of a jocular character, and these two together devoted without principle to the support of a party, the attack of Whiggism, and an unblushing detraction of the character of one of our princesses, you can form some idea of what 'John Bull' was in those days. There is, however, a difference: 'Punch' attacks public characters, and ridicules public events; 'John Bull' dragged ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton
... the Iliads (1611 ) denounces without mentioning any name 'a certain envious windsucker that hovers up and down, laboriously engrossing all the air with his luxurious ambition, and buzzing into every ear my detraction.' It is suggested that Chapman here retaliated on Shakespeare for his references to him as his rival in the sonnets; but it is out of the question that Chapman, were he the rival, should have termed ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... wound you; and we were all so anxious to shield you from every misgiving on your mother's account. Some actresses have brought opprobrium upon the profession, which certainly is rather dangerous, and subjects women to suspicion and detraction; but let me assure you, Regina, that there have been very noble, lovely, good ladies who made their bread exactly as your mother makes hers. There is no more brilliant, enviable, or stainless record among gifted women than that of Mrs. Siddons'; or to come down to the present ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... improvement in moral character can dispense with the crises referred to, we cannot rightly magnify the definite transactions at conversion or cleansing, or any other remarkable point of religious life, to the detraction of spiritual growth. Each aspect of the truth, as I have already said, is the counterpart of the other, and must be viewed in ...
— Standards of Life and Service • T. H. Howard
... the sagacious and well-ordered inferences of which must be candidly admitted, that a claim for superiority of discernment over Nelson has been made for its writer. It must be remembered, however, not as a matter of invidious detraction from one man, but in simple justice to the other, whose insight and belief had taken form in such wonderful work, that Nelson also had fully believed that the enemy, if they left the Mediterranean, would proceed to Ireland; and further, and yet more particularly, ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. II. (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... telling criticism of that work in the Analectic Magazine, to which Caldwell replied in 1816. To finish the story, there is to be found in the Port Folio of 1820, page 153, an article on S. S. Smith, with portrait, which is as ample in praise of the essay as Caldwell was liberal in detraction. Caldwell resigned his editorship in 1816. In the next month Oliver Oldschool the Fourth made his appearance in the person of John ...
— The Philadelphia Magazines and their Contributors 1741-1850 • Albert Smyth
... something which no man can define, but which "fires the Southern heart" with wonderful facility. Comparison with the negro was still more to his disadvantage, since he had "sinned against light and knowledge," while they did not even know their own "best friends." And so the tide of detraction ebbed and flowed while Hesden was absent, his destination unknown, his return a matter of conjecture, and his purpose ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee
... opportunity of venting long secreted venom. This has appeared as well in books as in more ephemeral publications, and upon both sides, and even between writers on the same side. On every hand there has been a most deplorable impeachment of motive, accompanied by a detraction of character by imputation which is quite shocking. Petty personal slights have been insinuated as the ultimate cause of an expression of opinion upon an important literary question, and testimony has been ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... wind, drank from the Ganges' stream, controlled himself with bitter fasts—but all! far short of moral rectitude. For though a man inure himself to live as any brute, he is not on that account a vessel of the righteous law; whilst he who breaks the laws of right behavior invites detraction, and is one no virtuous man can love; his heart is ever filled with boding fear, his evil name pursues him as a shadow. Having neither profit nor advantage in this world, how can he in the next world reap content? Therefore the wise man ought to practise pure ...
— Sacred Books of the East • Various
... Mr. Dale? Had either of us ever hinted at the subject? Never! And yet my father was the first to cast suspicions and make insinuations, for I understood his unjust taunt. Sheep's clothing, indeed! Detraction was the surest way to make me love him; for if there was any one under the sun whose sentiments were noble and unselfish, whose motives were manly and disinterested, I believed it was Roger Dale. Why had my father spoken ...
— A Romantic Young Lady • Robert Grant
... has been said of the abundance in which fish are found in the harbours of New South Wales that it looks like detraction to oppose a contradiction. Some share of knowledge may, however, be supposed to belong to experience. Many a night have I toiled (in the times of distress) on the public service, from four o'clock in the afternoon until eight o'clock ...
— A Complete Account of the Settlement at Port Jackson • Watkin Tench
... Enmities he had none. If ever he had suffered injuries they were forgiven, forgotten, and buried out of sight. Even in the controversies where his strongest convictions were involved, he steadily abstained from bitterness, violence, and detraction. "Fiery hatred and malice," he said, with perfect truth, "are what I detest, and would always allay or ...
— Matthew Arnold • G. W. E. Russell
... of his life, and at the cost of great privation in his own person, and that of his wife and children, he unfurled the blood-stained banner of the cross, and never allowed it to trail beneath his feet through the long years of "border ruffianism," and the dark days of detraction and misrepresentation. He was the man for the hour; while on the one hand he was not forgetful of the obligations resting upon him to his family—he laid the foundation for a happy home—on the other hand, he was always ready, both in season and out of season, at home and abroad, to preach ...
— Personal Recollections of Pardee Butler • Pardee Butler
... town I saw Mr. Sheridan, whose manner had lost nothing of its interesting attention. He continued to visit me very frequently, and always gave me the most friendly counsel. He knew that I was not properly protected by Mr. Robinson, but he was too generous to build his gratification on the detraction of another. The happiest moments I then knew were passed in the society of this distinguished being. He saw me ill-bestowed upon a man who neither loved nor valued me; he lamented my destiny, but with such delicate propriety ...
— Beaux and Belles of England • Mary Robinson
... the allusion in one of Milton's sonnets, "On the detraction which followed upon his writing ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
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