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More "Disfigure" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... will not delight in counting up the outbreaks of petty spite and childish vanity which disfigure a noble character of purity and self-devotion. Still less need we presume to speculate what Julian would have done if he had returned in triumph from the Persian war. His bitterness might have hardened into a renegade's malice, or it might have melted at our Master's ...
— The Arian Controversy • H. M. Gwatkin
... a birthmark, and if found upon the neck or shoulders where it is likely to disfigure, it may be removed by the high-frequency spark, or by surgery, in the same way as warts. Never tamper with moles. Leave them alone or turn ...
— The Mother and Her Child • William S. Sadler
... my life, I tell you true; 180 I have not breathed almost since I did see it. He cries for you, and vows, if he can take you, To scorch your face and to disfigure you. [Cry within. Hark, hark! I hear him, ...
— The Comedy of Errors - The Works of William Shakespeare [Cambridge Edition] [9 vols.] • William Shakespeare
... blockhead;" "anilia instrumenta" are "his old woman's accoutrements;" and "repetito munere Bacchi" is conveyed to the sense of the reader as, "they return again to their bottle, and take the other glass." These are but a specimen of the blemishes which disfigure the most literal of the English translations ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Copious Notes - and Explanations • Publius Ovidius Naso
... when subjected to heat, it might become porous. The whole was then heated until the wax or wood disappeared. The mold was then ready for use. The great advantage of this method was that there were no projecting lines of junction to disfigure the complete implement. This seems to have been the most common method employed. This explains the fact, that we seldom find any two bronze objects exactly similar to one another. Any impression left on the wax model would be faithfully ...
— The Prehistoric World - Vanished Races • E. A. Allen
... place which Notes to a poet's works should occupy, there is no doubt that numerous and lengthy ones—however valuable, or even necessary, by way of illustration,—disfigure the printed page; and some prefer that they should be thrown all together at the end of each volume, or at the close of a series; such as—in Wordsworth's case—"The River Duddon," "Ecclesiastical ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth - Volume 1 of 8 • Edited by William Knight
... chronic disease of the skin, characterised by the tuberculous eruptions which eat into the skin, particularly of the face, and disfigure it. ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... not finish. He saw that his mother understood that Drusilla had gone away. Mr. Bartlett spoke to his wife. "I heard this morning that you had returned to stay for a day. I'm afraid the tents and the children will still disfigure ...
— Suzanna Stirs the Fire • Emily Calvin Blake
... together with a full sketch of Buddhistic ethics and ontology (Hardy, pp. 460, 387). The most famous of the Northern books, the Lotus of the Law and the Lalita Vistara, give a good idea of the extravagance and supernaturalism that already have begun to disfigure the purer faith. According to Kern, who has translated the former work again (after Burnouf), the whole intent of the Lotus is to represent Buddha as the supreme, eternal God. The works, treating of piety, philosophy, and philanthropy, contain ancient elements, but in general ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... personality. His own features would then become scarcely recognizable, he could force the strangest metamorphoses upon them, but while mimicking the ugly and grotesque, he never lost his own native grace. Grimace was never carried far enough to disfigure him; his gayety was so much the more piquant because he always restrained it within the limits of perfect good taste, holding at a suspicious distance all that could wound the most fastidious delicacy. ...
— Life of Chopin • Franz Liszt
... extraordinary look of fear disfigure his face," he continued, "and following the direction of his eyes I saw a lean brown arm with a thin hand as delicate as a woman's wriggle forward from beneath the wall of the tent towards ...
— Witness For The Defense • A.E.W. Mason
... it is a little unused apse, concealed from the rest of the interior by a wall. Unimportant windows built with distinctly utilitarian purpose successfully light this small, simple room, and no kindly shadow hides its bareness or diminishes the unhappy effect of the paintings which disfigure the walls. The Cathedral's exterior is so surrounded by irregular old houses that the traveller had discovered it with some difficulty. It has little that is worthy of description, and after having entered by a conspicuously poor Renaissance portal only to go out under an uninteresting ...
— Cathedrals and Cloisters of the South of France, Volume 1 • Elise Whitlock Rose
... together. There was nothing to do but to bring out the scissors and cut the beard, whereby a small part of it was lost. When the dwarf saw that he screamed out: 'Is that civil, you toadstool, to disfigure a man's face? Was it not enough to clip off the end of my beard? Now you have cut off the best part of it. I cannot let myself be seen by my people. I wish you had been made to run the soles off your shoes!' Then ...
— Grimms' Fairy Tales • The Brothers Grimm
... and the logic of her conception and exposition." Imbert, who has written a biographical sketch of her, says: "The talent of Augusta Holmes is absolutely virile, and nowhere in her works do you find the little affectations which too often disfigure the works of women. With her, nobility of thought and sentiment take first place. She worships the beautiful, and her Muse has sung only subjects that are worthy of being sung. She is masterly in her ease, and all the resources of orchestration are ...
— Woman's Work in Music • Arthur Elson
... order to prevent their affording shelter to the enemy. My friend had once visited Paris, and had been struck by the beauty of these woods. Apparently he thought that, even for their own salvation, the French had no right to disfigure scenes of beauty that had delighted the eyes ...
— Memoirs of Sir Wemyss Reid 1842-1885 • Stuart J. Reid, ed.
... yourself out of the window or upon the pikes of my retainers. Two hours of life are always two hours. A great many things may turn up in even as little a while as that. And, besides, if I understand her appearance, my niece has still something to say to you. You will not disfigure your last hours by a want ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 4 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... a man writes because he cannot help writing; the irrepressible effluence of his secret being on every thing in sympathy with it,—a kind of flowering of the soul amid the warmth and the light of nature. I am no poet, I exclaimed, and I will not disfigure Mr. ...
— Lectures on Art • Washington Allston
... did find out why I awakened from general anesthetic with two breasts, but I have since supposed that due to my tender age the surgeon was reluctant to disfigure me without at least asking me for permission, or giving me some time to prepare psychologically. When I came out of anesthesia he told me that the lump was malignant, and that he had removed it, and that he needed ...
— How and When to Be Your Own Doctor • Dr. Isabelle A. Moser with Steve Solomon
... windows, the girls and women having heavy shocks of unkempt hair shading their great black eyes, high cheek-bones, and disfigured mouths and chins, which last are tattooed in blue dye of some sort. The males tattoo the whole face elaborately, but the women disfigure themselves thus only about the mouth and chin. It is most amusing to see them meet one another and rub noses, which is the Maori mode of salutation. This race has some very peculiar habits: they never eat salt; they have no fixed industry, and no idea of time or ...
— Foot-prints of Travel - or, Journeyings in Many Lands • Maturin M. Ballou
... to a degree. Nothing in the world can disfigure a woman more successfully than an unbecoming hat and a cheap black veil, which imparts a dingy, leaden tint to the complexion. I had every reason to be satisfied with my disguise that afternoon, but I wasn't. Not a bit! I felt cross, and ...
— The Lady of the Basement Flat • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... added Anne. "No, children, you haven't wept enough to permanently disfigure your charming faces. If the boys had not appeared we might now be weeping in a melancholy row. I had no idea that Jessica's secret was to be ...
— Grace Harlowe's Return to Overton Campus • Jessie Graham Flower
... sylvan knolls with which their wide levels highly cultivated are interspersed, cottages, single or in groups, are frequent, of an architecture always admirably suited to the scenery, because in a style suggested not by taste or fancy, which so often disfigure nature to produce the picturesque, but resorted to for sake of the uses and conveniences of in-door life, to weather-fend it in storms, and in calm to give it the enjoyment of sunshine. Many of these dwellings are not what are properly called cottages, but Statesmen's houses, of ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... force lying beyond his grasp, lately against belief founded on religious instinct and on tradition, and now against evidence engendered by realities and by the agency of the testing process. Consequently, obliged to forbid the testing process, to falsify things, to disfigure the reality, to deny the evidence, to lie daily and each day more outrageously,[6266] to accumulate glaring acts so as to impose silence, to arouse by this silence and by these lies[6267] the attention ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 6 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 2 (of 2) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... be sure they may; and egad, serve your best thoughts as gypsies do stolen children,—disfigure them to make them ...
— The Redemption of David Corson • Charles Frederic Goss
... admonish us to lament that the vices of government should pervert the direction and tarnish the lustre of those bright talents and exalted endowments for which the favored soils that produced them have been so justly celebrated. From the disorders that disfigure the annals of those republics the advocates of despotism have drawn arguments, not only against the forms of republican government, but against the very principles of civil liberty. They have decried all free ...
— The Federalist Papers
... upon the Boswellian plan, had been unearthed among the ruins of Herculaneum. You will interpret what I am writing, liberally. With respect to the light which such a discovery might throw upon Roman manners, there would be reasons to desire it: but I should dread to disfigure the beautiful ideal of the memories of those illustrious persons with incongruous features, and to sully the imaginative purity of their classical works with gross and trivial recollections. The least weighty objection ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... picturesque at the formation of a new Cabinet—'Home Secretary and Abbot of Westminster, the Right Hon. Mr. So-and-So.' The first duty of the Abbot will be to appoint a Royal Commission to consider the removal of hideous monuments which disfigure the edifice: nothing prior to 1700 coming under its consideration. A small tablet would recall what has been taken away. Herbert Spencer's claim to a statue would be duly considered, and, I hope, by a unanimous vote some of ...
— Masques & Phases • Robert Ross
... very regular and pleasing. His expression is habitually melancholy and strikingly wary and timid. In spite of his homeless nomadic life he generally appears well nourished and clean, and he seems less subject to sores and to the skin diseases which so often disfigure the other peoples, especially the Muruts, Kayans, and ...
— The Pagan Tribes of Borneo • Charles Hose and William McDougall
... me," the dog replied, "that there's something else to do; His ears look rather too long for me, and how do they look to you?" The man cried out: "Oh, spare my ears! God fashioned them as you see, And if you apply your knife to them, you'll surely disfigure me." ...
— The Dog's Book of Verse • Various
... should anger his captors into doing him some injury that might lessen his powers of thought or action, and the girl, seeing that no immediate gain could be had from speech, dreaded to be smitten on the mouth in a way that might disfigure her in her lover's eyes. Only at times, when a wind would blow the smoke and flame aside, she looked across the camp-fire into the young man's face, and in the look and in the smile of the steady lips he read not only ...
— Earth's Enigmas - A Volume of Stories • Charles G. D. Roberts
... and more gentle scenes for the decoration of their homes. Flower-gatherers and dancing-girls, harvest festivals and religious processions, appealed to their minds far more than the endless and monotonous succession of horrors with which the Mesopotamian monarchs delighted to disfigure their walls; and even the dangers of the bull-ring, as seen on the Knossian frescoes, are mild and gentle when compared with the abominations where Teumman has his head sawed off with a short dagger, and other unfortunates are flayed alive, or have ...
— The Sea-Kings of Crete • James Baikie
... the marks of mourning with which these people disfigure themselves, such as bloody temples, their heads deprived of most of the hair, and, which was worse, almost all of them with the loss of some of their fingers. Several fine boys, not above six years of age, had lost both their little fingers; and some of the men had parted with ...
— The Eventful History Of The Mutiny And Piratical Seizure - Of H.M.S. Bounty: Its Cause And Consequences • Sir John Barrow
... wonders they achieved, would still wind her thick golden braids in a classical coil, so that her head in profile brought up to the beholder's mind a vision of an antique statue. Rare was her taste; no clashing colors or absurd puffs and furbelows were ever allowed to disfigure her graceful form, and thus her appearance always charmed the artistic eye, although many of her schoolmates called her "odd" and "quakerish." Sibyl had already obtained her little triumphs. An artist of world-wide fame had asked permission to paint her head in profile, as a study, and whenever ...
— The Old Stone House • Anne March
... and planted in the soil of his original baseness. He has been accused and acquitted of a treacherous murder; and has since boastfully owned it, which inclines me to suppose him innocent. His daughter is defaced by his erroneous cruelty, for it was his wife he had intended to disfigure, and, in the darkness of the night and the frenzy of coco-brandy, fastened on the wrong victim. The wife has since fled and harbours in the bush with natives; and the husband still demands from deaf ears ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... extremely sorry to put a ball through your head, Captain Passford, not only because it would disfigure a handsome face, but because you may be of great use to me," replied ...
— Stand By The Union - SERIES: The Blue and the Gray—Afloat • Oliver Optic
... analogous functions, but his writings display a correct knowledge of the anatomy of certain parts of the body such as the joints and the brain. This defective knowledge of anatomy gave rise to fanciful views on physiology, which, among much that is admirable, disfigure ...
— Outlines of Greek and Roman Medicine • James Sands Elliott
... for business purposes, which must soon take place even if there be no change in the character of business, conducted with a little system and uniformity. The streets themselves have been made so fine that it will require some moral courage—a thing for which Washington is not noted—to disfigure them by the hideous jumbles that accorded so well with the old ways. Such splendid monstrosities as the Treasury—as a whole, the worst public building in the city, although good in parts, so situated that one must go down stairs from Pennsylvania Avenue to get into the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 11, No. 24, March, 1873 • Various
... and dilapidated, but in picturesque keeping with the building. The gate hung loosely on its hinges, just opposite an old-fashioned porch, that shot over the front door, much after the fashion of that hideous thing called a poke, with which English women disfigure their pretty travelling bonnets and ...
— The Old Homestead • Ann S. Stephens
... and, crying out, ran to assist Alcibiades. When he began to study, he obeyed all his other masters fairly well, but refused to learn upon the flute, as a sordid thing, and not becoming a free citizen; saying, that to play on the lute or the harp does not in any way disfigure a man's body or face, but one is hardly to be known by the most intimate friends, when playing on the flute. Besides, one who plays on the harp may speak or sing at the same time; but the use of the flute stops the mouth, intercepts the ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... the same of the charge of Untruthfulness, and select it from the rest, not because it is more formidable but because it is more serious. Like the rest, it may disfigure me for a time, but it will not stain: Archbishop Whately used to say, "Throw dirt enough, and some will stick;" well, will stick, but not, will stain. I think he used to mean "stain," and I do not agree with him. Some ...
— Apologia Pro Vita Sua • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... possession of me. Wasn't it enough to maim and disfigure poor Tamplin, why cook him to death—I'd shut off that cock. I fought with it, but it wouldn't close, and I called Dennis to ...
— Danger Signals • John A. Hill and Jasper Ewing Brady
... the time of which we are writing. His true name was Henry W. Shaw, and he was a genuine, smiling philosopher, who might have built up a more permanent and serious reputation had he not been induced to disfigure his maxims with ridiculous spelling in order to popularize them and make them bring a living price. It did not matter much with Nasby's work. An assumed illiteracy belonged with the side of life which he presented; but it is pathetic now ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... enhances the beauty of the ground tenfold, and might well be universally imitated. He has caused the fences around the lots to be removed, and the boundaries to be marked by sunken stone posts, one at each corner, which just suffice for the purpose, but do not disfigure the scene. This change has given to the ground the harmony and pleasantness of a park. The monuments, too, are remarkable for their variety, moderation, and good taste. There is very little, if any, of that ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 118, August, 1867 • Various
... Compromise, had finished as a serial in the March Artiste of the same year. In Balzac's tale—the one of the novels that contains most real pathos—the Colonel, who is a Count of the Empire, is left for dead on the battlefield of Eylau, with wounds that disfigure him dreadfully. Rescued, and sojourning for a long while in German hospitals, he ultimately returns to France, but only to find his wife, who believes him dead, married to another nobleman. Treated as an imposter ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... am sure, and it was very kind in you to take it off their hands; but now it is paid for, it can't make much difference whether you disfigure ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... sight, is a friend to benevolence. Although a rigorous investigation has been invited, it is well that there is no need to run through the rash assertions, the groundless accusations, and the virulent invectives that disfigure the speeches of this never-silent Member. All these things, offensive to moderate men, are too much to the taste of many of Mr. Brougham's partizans in Westmoreland. But I call upon those who relish ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... discipline.' Consequently they must be made a warning to others. It is for the interest of the masters (at least they believe it to be) to put upon such slaves iron collars and chains, to brand and crop them; to disfigure, lacerate, starve and torture them—in a word, to inflict upon them such vengeance as shall strike terror into the other slaves. To this class may be added the incorrigibly thievish and indolent; it would be for the interest of the masters ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... he says "who disfigure their bodies with hideous paintings, eat nothing but loam for some three months, when the height of the Orinoco cuts them off from the turtles which form their ordinary food. Some monks say they mix earth with the fat of crocodiles' ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part 2. The Great Navigators of the Eighteenth Century • Jules Verne
... about King Charles II., asking in Parliament “whether the king’s pleasure lay in the men or women players” at the theatres. He wounded several of his assailants, but had his own nose cut to the bone; in consequence of which “The Coventry Act” was passed in 1671, making it felony to maim or disfigure a person, and refusing to allow the king to pardon the offenders. A later owner was Sir William Kite, Bart., who ran through a large fortune, and sold Halstead and Stixwould to Lord Anson, the distinguished navigator, and Lord High Admiral of England; some of whose exploits ...
— Records of Woodhall Spa and Neighbourhood - Historical, Anecdotal, Physiographical, and Archaeological, with Other Matter • J. Conway Walter
... those. Bateese may use his fists, but I shall use those, so that I shall not disfigure him permanently. His face is none too ...
— The Flaming Forest • James Oliver Curwood
... referred to the editor of The Daily Times as "that little villain, Raymond;" and replying to an offensive charge against him by The Evening Post, he began with, "You lie, villain, wilfully, wickedly, basely lie." Other passages at arms like these occasionally enlivened, if they did not disfigure, the editorial columns of The Tribune, over which Greeley exercised a personal censorship which, in later years, he found it necessary to relax. He was sincerely and ardently devoted to the cause of Protection, ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 4 of 8 • Various
... anthropoid apes to the Jockey Club. As to the grosser and ruder shapes taken by the diversions of the pioneers, we will let Mr. Herndon speak—their contemporary annalist and ardent panegyrist: "These men could shave a horse's mane and tail, paint, disfigure, and offer it for sale to the owner. They could hoop up in a hogshead a drunken man, they themselves being drunk, put in and nail fast the head, and roll the man down hill a hundred feet or more. They could ...
— Abraham Lincoln: A History V1 • John G. Nicolay and John Hay
... the ground, and two eyes are supposed to be left upon each spur. But I have watched the cultivators during the process, and observed the usual neglect; sometimes the spurs were shaved off completely, without a bud for next year's shoot, and at others too many buds were left, that would weaken and disfigure the parent stem. The instrument for pruning was similar to a very small reaping-hook, with a handle about a foot in length, and the delicate operation was conducted with a rapidity that rendered the necessary care impossible. After the clearing of the refuse ...
— Cyprus, as I Saw it in 1879 • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... is the great American anomaly. Judged by his rights on paper his citizenship is indisputable, but judged by his rights in fact it is full of mutilations and amputations which disfigure it almost beyond recognition. One-half of it appears in the light clothed with fragments of his rights, and the other half is in eclipse, exposed naked to biting cold and bitter wrong. He appeals to good men and true in the South and in the North and ...
— The Ballotless Victim of One-Party Governments - The American Negro Academy, Occasional Papers No. 16 • Archibald H. Grimke
... like her better and better, and after a while commenced himself to feel that it would be a pity to disfigure such a pretty mouth. He became interested; perhaps he could do something, something in the way of a crown or bridge. "Let's look at that again," he said, picking up his mirror. He began to study the situation very carefully, really desiring ...
— McTeague • Frank Norris
... had not wept Art of speaking on politics tersely Death within which welcomed a death without Dignity of sulking so seductive to the wounded spirit of man Grief of an ill-fortuned passion of his youth He lost the art of observing himself Immense wealth and native obtuseness combine to disfigure us Infallibility of our august mother Inflicted no foretaste of her coming subjection to him Love's a selfish business one has work in hand No man has a firm foothold who pretends to it Silence and such signs are like revelations ...
— Quotations from the Works of George Meredith • David Widger
... own genius, not my skill, That produces this effect; For, without it, I suspect, Would my voice sound harsh and shrill, And my lute's strings should be broken With a just and wholesome rigour, For presuming to disfigure What thy words so well have spoken. Whither wert thou ...
— The Two Lovers of Heaven: Chrysanthus and Daria - A Drama of Early Christian Rome • Pedro Calderon de la Barca
... disfigure your beauty, Madame; I desire that," was the vicomte's mocking retort. "Now, my friends, if you all would see la belle France again! But mind; the man who strikes the Chevalier a fatal blow shall by my own ...
— The Grey Cloak • Harold MacGrath
... fast, be not as the hypocrites, of a sad countenance: for they disfigure their faces, that they may appear unto men to fast. Verily I say unto you, They have their reward. But thou, when thou fastest, anoint thine head, and wash thy face, that thou appear not unto men to fast, but unto thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father, which ...
— The Book of Common Prayer - and The Scottish Liturgy • Church of England
... said on this subject; but, to the wise, a word is sufficient. And it would ill become one who is endeavouring to recommend conciseness, to disfigure that ...
— Gifts of Genius - A Miscellany of Prose and Poetry by American Authors • Various
... do disfigure orange and mango trees with their "nests," and they have the temper of furies; but they wage war on many of the insects which bother plants, and clear away insect carrion, and carrion, in fact, of all sorts. This ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... is utilized for quarrying and lime-burning to such an extent, that it has almost the appearance of a northern manufacturing district," but it is a consolation, on the authority of Sir A. C. Ramsay, to know that "man cannot permanently disfigure nature!" ...
— A Week's Tramp in Dickens-Land • William R. Hughes
... with the prosaic task of taking in a cargo of oil, used as the ship's fuel. We steam into a wooded bay, beneath a hill covered with the brown atap bungalows of European colonists. Colossal oil-tanks, painted red, disfigure the shore. Each tank holds 4,000 tons of oil, 30,000 tons per month being the usual export. Kerosene taints the air, but is considered to be innocuous, and to drive away the curse of mosquitos. The unimaginable and ferocious heat makes every ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... to her room, her first impulse was to cry, but knowing that would disfigure her still more, she bathed her burning face and neck, brushed out her curls, threw on a simple muslin dress, and started for the parlor, of which Durward and Carrie were at that moment the only occupants. As she was passing the outer door, she observed upon ...
— 'Lena Rivers • Mary J. Holmes
... buildings are in ruins. The Ganges here and there undermines the foundations, and palaces and temples sink into the soft earth or fall entirely down. Miserable little huts are in some places built upon these ruins, and disfigure the fine appearance of the town, for even the ...
— A Woman's Journey Round the World • Ida Pfeiffer
... strives for a clear vision of things as they are—for justice and fairness; his effort is to get free from himself, so that he may in no way disfigure that which he wishes to understand or reproduce. His superiority to the common herd lies in this effort, even when its success is only partial. He distrusts his own senses, he sifts his own impressions, by returning upon them from different sides and at different times, ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... occupied the best suite of rooms in the house, used the furniture as his own; and, though upon private motives he abstained from doing all the injury which his situation authorized, (so as in particular to have spread his fine military maps upon the floor, rather than disfigure the decorated walls by nails,) still he claimed credit, if not services of requital, for all such instances of forbearance. Here were grievances enough; but, in addition to these, the comte's official appointments drew upon him a weight of daily business, which kept the house in ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... me is the critic whose humility keeps pace with his acuteness, who leads me gently where he has himself trodden patiently and observantly, and does not attempt to disfigure and ravage the regions which he has not been able to desire to explore. The man who will show me unsuspected connections, secret paths of thought, who will teach me how to extend my view, how I may pass quietly from the known to the unknown; ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... be kept alive by these neglected attentions; yet if men and women took half as much pains to dress habitually neat, as they do to ornament, or rather to disfigure their persons, much would be done towards the attainment of purity of mind. But women only dress to gratify men of gallantry; for the lover is always best pleased with the simple garb that sits close ...
— A Vindication of the Rights of Woman - Title: Vindication of the Rights of Women • Mary Wollstonecraft [Godwin]
... ago, half in jest and half in earnest; he had horrified her beyond expression by telling her how he would punish a wife if he were the husband she deceived. With a grim, lurid smile he remembered the penalty. He had said he would not kill; he would disfigure the woman frightfully and permit her to live as a moral example to other wives. Slitting her mouth from ear to ear or cutting off her nose—these were two of the penalties he would inflict. He now felt less brutal. He might kill, but he would not disfigure. For an hour he sat and wondered ...
— Jane Cable • George Barr McCutcheon
... designed, are at least curious, and the following is another of somewhat a different kind:—"Steal! (says Sir Fretful) to be sure they may; and egad, serve your best thoughts as gipsies do stolen children, disfigure them, to make 'em pass for their own." [Footnote: This simile was again made use of by him in a speech upon Mr. Pitt's India Bill, which he declared to be "nothing more than a bad plagiarism on Mr. Fox's, disfigured, indeed, as gipsies do stolen children, in order to make them ...
— Memoirs of the Life of the Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan V1 • Thomas Moore
... praise and appreciation is surely genuine. Varchi's enthusiastic comment on the sonnets xxx, xxxi, and lii, published to men of letters, taste, and learning in Florence and all Italy, is the strongest vindication of their innocence against editors and scholars who in various ways have attempted to disfigure or to misconstrue them. ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... spite of its imposing name, was no bigger than an inland river, only the hosts of rainbow jelly-fish reminding us that we were threading a highway of ocean. There is no rise and fall of tide in these regions to disfigure the shore with mud. Here was a shelving gravel bank; there a bed of whispering rushes; there again young birch trees growing to the very brink, each wearing a stocking of bright moss and setting its foot firmly in among golden ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... Armenia, have till within these few years been occasionally acted as carnival farces, and have always been very successful. The plot of the Jodelle, which belongs to Don Francisco de Roxas, is excellent; the style and the additions of Scarron have not been able altogether to disfigure it. All that is coarse, nauseous, and repugnant to taste, belongs to the French writer of the age of Louis XIV., who in his day was not without celebrity; for the Spanish work is throughout characterized ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... of thoughts intruded themselves on me at once, passing hastily through my brain, intercepting and overshadowing each other, and resembling those fogs which in mountainous countries are wont to descend in obscure volumes, and disfigure or obliterate the usual marks by which the traveller steers his course through the wilds. The dark and undefined idea of danger arising to my father from the machinations of such a man as Rashleigh Osbaldistone—the half declaration of love that I had offered ...
— Rob Roy, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... operation of blowing and pushing together is repeated the result will be to lengthen the bulb into a uniform cylinder, as shown in b, Fig. 10. Otherwise the result will be a series of bulbs, as in c, Fig. 10, separated by thickened ridges which will be almost impossible of removal later and will disfigure the final bulb. This operation of heating, blowing and pushing together is repeated several times, until the cylinder becomes as long as can be conveniently handled (about 1-1/4 inches to 1-1/2 inches). If more glass is needed than is then contained in the cylinder, ...
— Laboratory Manual of Glass-Blowing • Francis C. Frary
... advertising purposes, and the police have full powers over the exhibition of indecent or other objectionable advertisements. The Societe pour la protection des paysages, founded in 1901, has for one of its objects the prevention of advertisements which disfigure the scenery or ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... aware what his son had done on his return from Godalming, whither he had betaken himself to a fair, then he was furious. He stormed at Iver for daring to disfigure the sign-board, and at his wife for suffering him ...
— The Broom-Squire • S. (Sabine) Baring-Gould
... believes that vanity is the fundamental motive of amateur performances. It may be that this is not wholly true, and that the real impulse is the elementary instinct for dressing-up. Savages, we know, have a craving for strange costumes which enable them to disguise and even disfigure their persons. Children delight in dressing up. Possibly one of the great joys of the amateur lies in the fact that he has an opportunity of wearing clothes pertinent to somebody else, and, if he be a male, is ...
— Our Stage and Its Critics • "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette"
... wonderfully beautiful: there is no doubt of it. Such beauty as they have never seen here in their lives! Fanciful extravagances in dress, and atrocious hair-dressing, cannot disfigure her; and by Jove! she has tried both. And one has only to imagine that woman dressed and "coiffeed," as she might be, to conceive such a triumph as London has not witnessed for the century! And I do long for such a triumph. If my lord would only invite us here, were it but for a week! We should ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... comparatively uninteresting work of sawing up the trunk, and disposing in an orderly manner of the branches. He also took great pains to cut his trees as close to the ground as possible, so as not to sacrifice the good timber at the butt, or leave a tall or ragged stump to disfigure the ground afterwards. ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... caring to disturb his musings. He sat still, looking over his own broad fields, not thinking of them as his, however, not calculating the expense of the new saw-mill, with which he had been threatening to disfigure Carson's brook, just at the point where its waters fell into the pond. He was looking far-away to the distant hills, where the dim haze was deepening into purple, hiding the mountain tops beyond. But it could ...
— Janet's Love and Service • Margaret M Robertson
... told without offence to any one now living. I have a notion that I have seen this story of mine told somewhere, with a change of names and circumstances that spoil it, after the fashion of the people "who steal other folks' stories and disfigure them, as gipsies do ...
— What I Remember, Volume 2 • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... Mrs. Frost's sons, and was relieved by the sight of the young people returning across the lawn—Fitzjocelyn with his ash stick, but owing a good deal of support to Mary's firm, well-knit arm. They showed well together: even lameness could not disfigure the grace of his leisurely movements; and the bright changefulness and delicacy of his face contrasted well with the placid nobleness of her composed expression, while her complexion was heightened and her eyes lighted by exercise, so that she was almost ...
— Dynevor Terrace (Vol. I) - or, The Clue of Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... critics, how is it to be accounted for? Now, on ordinary occasions, we do not feel ourselves called upon to institute any such inquiry,—as indeed very seldom would it be practicable to do. Unbounded licence of transcription, flagrant carelessness, arbitrary interpolations, omissions without number, disfigure those two ancient MSS. in every page. We seldom trouble ourselves to inquire into the history of their obliquities. But the case is of course materially changed when so many of the oldest of the Fathers and all the oldest Versions seem to be at one with Codexes B and [Symbol: Aleph]. ...
— The Causes of the Corruption of the Traditional Text of the Holy Gospels • John Burgon
... see not, and have ears and hear not; ye who are as the hypocrites of sad countenances, and disfigure your faces that ye may seem unto men to fast; learn healthy cheerfulness, and mild contentment, from the deaf, and dumb, and blind! Self-elected saints with gloomy brows, this sightless, earless, voiceless child may teach you lessons you will do well to follow. Let ...
— American Notes for General Circulation • Charles Dickens
... combat, and had eagerly risked his life in resisting the desperate raids made against his tribe, or in pushing invasions among others of his own race. Unlike many of his own people, he never was vain enough to wear the scalp-lock, nor did he disfigure his face with paint. When he went upon the warpath his enemies speedily found it out, without any such ...
— Deerfoot in The Mountains • Edward S. Ellis
... industrial revolution 160 years ago. The cancer of industrialism has begun to mortify, and the end is in sight. Within 200 years, it may be—for we must allow for backwashes and cross-currents which will retard the flow of the stream—the hideous new towns which disfigure our landscape may have disappeared, and their sites may have been reclaimed for the plough. Humanitarian legislation, so far from arresting this movement, is more likely to accelerate it, and the same may be said of the insatiate greed of our new masters. It is indeed instructive ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... means held herself superior to the obligation of dress, and of the pleasant little artificial graces belonging to high civilization. Some of her evening dresses were elegant, the colors harmonizing, and the style picturesque and becoming. If she had the good taste not to disfigure her classically-shaped head, or to load herself with flashy ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... the use of his legs.' And the man would bring back word: 'The doctor hopes he may, miss; but his left eye is gone for ever.' It is not everybody that can tumble discreetly. Now you, I fancy, would only disfigure yourself." ...
— Orley Farm • Anthony Trollope
... perfection is of brief duration. Very soon the little "pear" becomes covered with gnarled excrescences, black and twisted, which disfigure it like so many warts. Part of the surface, which is otherwise intact, disappears under a shapeless mass. The origin of these knotted excrescences completely deceived me at first. I suspected some cryptogamic vegetation, some Spheriaecaea, for example, recognisable ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre
... short petticoat constitute the chief dress of the women, who also wear gaiters like the men. Their hair, which is of jet-black colour, they suffer to grow to its natural length; but they do not pierce their noses, nor disfigure their ears. In winter both the men and women, in order to guard against cold, wrap themselves in blue rugs, which they always carry with them, and which form an essential part ...
— Travels in North America, From Modern Writers • William Bingley
... of the choir are closets, some of which are used as vestries by the singing-men: modern staircases have been constructed, leading to the galleries erected above, and which disfigure the view into the aisles. These closets are fronted, next the aisles, by open screens of oak, some of which are of excellent carving, and more elaborate than others. In the centre of the choir stands a desk for the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 13, No. 355., Saturday, February 7, 1829 • Various
... whip, or of wage-slaves, one step higher, under fear of want. Long ages wherein hunting and fighting were the only manly occupations, have left their heavy impress. The predacious instinct and the combative instinct weigh down and disfigure our economic development. What Veblen calls "the instinct of workmanship" grows on, slowly and irresistably; but the malign features of our industrial life are distinctively androcentric: the desire to get, of the hunter; interfering with the desire to give, of the mother; ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... you going to say, my dear? But, dear, dear, what a pity it is that you should go and disfigure yourselves like this! What would your poor father ...
— Glyn Severn's Schooldays • George Manville Fenn
... they have been deformed by the devil, but not begotten: or that they are real devils with a human body either simulated or purloined. For if the devil, by divine permission, may take possession of the whole man and change his mind, is it strange that he may disfigure also his body, causing men to ...
— Commentary on Genesis, Vol. II - Luther on Sin and the Flood • Martin Luther
... don't they cut their own children's ears into points to make them look sharp? Why don't they cut the end off their noses to make them look plucky? One would be just as sensible as the other. What right have they to torment and disfigure God's creatures?" ...
— Black Beauty • Anna Sewell
... him were not bad enough, I go and maim the poor beggar: blind him temporarily—permanently, if he is not taken care of—and disfigure him beyond all description. Honestly, Patty, you never saw ...
— New Faces • Myra Kelly
... the man in the moon. First, in the Midsummer Night's Dream, Act iii. Scene 1, Quince the carpenter gives directions for the performance of Pyramus and Thisby, who "meet by moonlight," and says, "One must come in with a bush of thorns and a lanthorn, and say he comes to disfigure, or to present, the person of Moonshine." Then in Act v. the player of that part says, "All that I have to say is, to tell you that the lanthorn is the moon; I, the man in the moon; this thorn-bush, my thorn-bush; and this dog, my dog." And, secondly, in the Tempest, Act ii., Scene 2, Caliban ...
— Moon Lore • Timothy Harley
... confused heap of beauties, without order or symmetry, and a plot whereon nothing but seeds, nor nothing perfect or formed is to be found; and a production loaded with many unprofitable things which ought to be retrenched, and which choak and disfigure those which deserve to be preserved? Mr. Pope will pardon me if I here oppose those comparisons, which to me appear very false, and entirely contrary to what the greatest of ancient, and modern ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753),Vol. V. • Theophilus Cibber
... a real and very terrible threat. What is to prevent these people, whoever they are, from attacking me—sending me some infernal machine in the disguise of a box or package, which, as soon as I open it, might burn or blind or otherwise disfigure me so that my life would be ruined?" She rose and glanced at herself in the mirror which hung over the mantel. Already there were deep circles of anxiety beneath her eyes, while the lines of her face, usually sweet and placid, were ...
— The Film of Fear • Arnold Fredericks
... obstruct the Lord Mayor, sword-bearer, and chaplain; to despise the authority of the sheriffs; and to hold the court of aldermen as nought; but not on any account, in case the fulness of time should bring a general rising of 'prentices, to damage or in any way disfigure Temple Bar, which was strictly constitutional and always to be approached with reverence. Having gone over these several heads with great eloquence and force, and having further informed the novice that this society had its origin in his own teeming brain, stimulated by a swelling sense of wrong ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens
... of our archdeacon's mind must not astonish us; it has been the growth of centuries of church ascendancy; and though some fungi now disfigure the tree, though there be much dead wood, for how much good fruit have not we to be thankful? Who, without remorse, can batter down the dead branches of an old oak, now useless, but, ah! still so beautiful, or drag out the fragments of the ancient forest, ...
— The Warden • Anthony Trollope
... and order in Mojada County, and schoolbooks, and all the whiskey you wanted, and the Government built its own battleships instead of collecting nickels from the school children to do it with. And, as I say, there was law and order instead of enactments and restrictions such as disfigure our umpire state to-day. We had our office at Bildad, the county seat, from which we emerged forth on necessary occasions to soothe whatever fracases and unrest that ...
— Sixes and Sevens • O. Henry
... comparable to this state of affairs had been known in the previous history of warfare, unless we take such a case as that of a nineteenth century warship attacking some large savage or barbaric settlement, or one of those naval bombardments that disfigure the history of Great Britain in the late eighteenth century. Then, indeed, there had been cruelties and destruction that faintly foreshadowed the horrors of the aerial war. Moreover, before the twentieth century the world had had but one experience, and that a comparatively light ...
— The War in the Air • Herbert George Wells
... At this sight he stood motionless, and had not power to utter one word. "Ganem," said the favourite, "there is no time to be lost; if you love me, put on the habit of one of your slaves immediately, and disfigure your face and arms with soot. Then put some of these dishes on your head; you may be taken for a servant belonging to the eating house, and they will let you pass. If they happen to ask you where the master of the house is, answer, without any hesitation, that he is within." ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Complete • Anonymous
... with us, it has been so lowered, as to sink every other qualification in the single one of turning faultless periods; and a gentleman possessing this, has been adjudged fully capable of purging the annals of Spain and her quondam colonies, from the mass of modern fable and forgery which now disfigure them. Incapable of submitting Cortez' statement to the test, he assumes it to be true, even in those parts where it is impossible. Unable to detect the counterfeit in Diaz—he pronounces him the 'child of nature,' but does not on the testimony of this ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various
... is not long, my Antony, since, with these hands, I buried thee. Alas! they were then free, but thy Cleopatra is now a prisoner, attended by guard, lest, in the transports of her grief, she should disfigure this captive body, which is reserved to adorn the triumph over thee. These are the last offerings, the last honors she can pay thee; for she is now to be conveyed to a distant country. Nothing could part us while we lived, but in death we are to be divided. Thou, though a Roman, liest buried ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... will the rabble not thy words recall, And like to mud, flung from the grutter deep, Will they not sore disfigure and ...
— 'A Comedy of Errors' in Seven Acts • Spokeshave (AKA Old Fogy)
... secluded dell of evergreens, cedar, hemlock, and pine, enlivened by a few deciduous trees. Through this dell there is a road-track leading to a fine cleared farm, the green pastures of which were rendered more pleasing by the absence of the odious stumps that disfigure the clearings in this part of the country. A pretty bright stream flows through the low meadow that lies at the foot of the hill, which you descend suddenly close by a small grist-mill that is worked by the waters, just where they meet the rapids ...
— The Backwoods of Canada • Catharine Parr Traill
... United States and Mexico and prophesying various results. Neither Pico nor Castro looked amiable. The Governor had arrived in the morning to find that the General had allowed pasquinades representing his Excellency in no complimentary light to disfigure the streets of Monterey. Castro, when taken to task, had replied haughtily that it was the Governor's place to look after his own dignity; he, the Commandante-General of the army of the Californias, had more important matters to attend to. The ...
— The Splendid Idle Forties - Stories of Old California • Gertrude Atherton
... themselves for being the pests of society by spending all their spare time in firing at targets. They boasted that they could hit an opponent in any part of his body they pleased, and made up their minds before the encounter began whether they should kill him, disable, or disfigure him for life—lay him on a bed of suffering for a twelvemonth, ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... contrivance was probably never invented since the world was created than the system of carrying wires overhead through the magnificent streets and cities in America. They spend thousands upon thousands of pounds in beautifying their cities with very fine buildings, and then they disfigure them all by carrying down the pavements the most villainous-looking telegraph posts that ever were constructed. The practice is carried to such an extent, that down Broadway in New York there are no less than six distinct ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 481, March 21, 1885 • Various
... this act was so consistently clever and right and effective that more ambitious dramatists might study it with advantage. Another point—though the piece was artistically vulgar, it was not vulgar otherwise. It contained no slightest trace of the outrageous salacity and sottishness which disfigure the great majority of successful musical comedies. It was an honest entertainment. But to me its chief value and interest lay in the fact that while watching it I felt that I was really in New York, and not in Vienna, Paris, ...
— Your United States - Impressions of a first visit • Arnold Bennett
... thy fortune, child, in wicked London town; nor import, as they tell me thou art doing fast, the ugly fashions of that London town, clumsy copies of Parisian cockneydom, into thy Highland home; nor give up the healthful and graceful, free and modest dress of thy mother and thy mother's mother, to disfigure the little kirk on Sabbath days with crinoline and corset, high-heeled boots, and other ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... enthymeme, copula, concrete, and such-like logical terms are all very well from a professor to his students in a lecture room, but introduced into ordinary conversation in company they are altogether out of place. No one with good taste, unless he has fearfully forgotten it, will disfigure his talk with them, however pure and efficient a logician he ...
— Talkers - With Illustrations • John Bate
... was a desperate race, in which life and death, nay, worse than death, was at stake. His indefatigable exertions afforded him a respite from the thought of his terrible pursuer. We can only regard with respectful compassion the outbreaks of misanthropic spleen which often disfigure his correspondence from this period of deepening twilight, relieved by a brief interval of brightness. It is especially woman who is the object of his bitterest objurgation. The venerable mutabile ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... they teach they often teach amiss. Some doctrines they exaggerate, and others they maim. Some they caricature, distort, or pervert. And many add to the Gospel inventions of their own, or foolish traditions received from their fathers; and the truth is hid under a mass of error. Many conceal and disfigure the truth by putting it in an antiquated and outlandish dress. The language of many theologians, like the Latin of the Romish Church, is, to vast numbers, a dead language,—an unknown tongue. There are hundreds of words and phrases used by preachers and religious ...
— Modern Skepticism: A Journey Through the Land of Doubt and Back Again - A Life Story • Joseph Barker
... again, you cruel thing, that beyond the commonest civilities nothing has passed! You talk of admiration. What am I to do? If people are so silly as to indulge the sentiment, is it my fault? What am I to do, I ask you? Would you wish me to shave my head and black my face, or disfigure myself with a burn, or a scald, or something of that sort? I dare say you would, Peggotty. I dare say ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... Hippocrates, the most dangerous maladies are they that disfigure the countenance), with a roaring and terrible voice, very often against those that are but newly come from nurse, and there they are lamed and spoiled with blows, whilst our justice takes no cognisance of it, as if these maims and ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... him as the apple of his eye; and little wonder—the qualities which, we doubt not, nay, we trust, disfigure that amiable youth in the minds of our gentle readers—his pride, his carelessness for the bodily or mental sufferings of others—all these things were nought to the Norman noble, he loved to see his son stark and fierce, and smiled as he heard of deeds which ...
— The Rival Heirs being the Third and Last Chronicle of Aescendune • A. D. Crake
... means of conveyance crowded out the old-fashioned saddle and pillion, and the trotting horse superseded the once fashionable but quickly despised pacer, that the great stretches of horse-sheds were built which now surround and disfigure all our country churches. These sheds protect, of course, both horse and carriage from wind and rain. Few churches had horse-sheds until after the War of the Revolution, and some not until after the War of 1812. In 1796 the Longmeadow Church ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle
... Venus. The natives of Libra are tall and well made, elegant in person, round-faced and ruddy, but plain-featured and 'inclined to eruptions that disfigure the face when old; they' (the natives) 'are of sweet disposition, just and upright in dealing.' It governs the lumbar regions, and reigns over Austria, Alsace, Savoy, Portugal, Livonia, India, Ethiopia, Lisbon, ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... spread the adjectives thickly on her finest tartines, and decorated them with a variety of her most pompous epithets. It was an infringement of the copyright of the passages of declamation that disfigure Corinne; but Louise grew so much the greater in her own eyes as she talked, that she loved the Benjamin who inspired her eloquence the more for it. She counseled him to take a bold step and renounce his patronymic for the noble name of Rubempre; he need ...
— Two Poets - Lost Illusions Part I • Honore de Balzac
... No trace of passion on my face?—No sign Of ugly humours, doubts, or fears, or aught That may disfigure God's intelligence? I have a grievous charge against you, sir, That may involve your life; and if you doubt The candour of my judgment, choose your time: Shall I arraign ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: Francesca da Rimini • George Henry Boker
... it as an Indian would, using grass instead of thread. It is much more complete than mine, for the green stitches ornament the white bark, but the black ones disfigure it. I should know a man made your ...
— Moods • Louisa May Alcott
... overridden your will and obliterated your true self. It is inconceivable that this can be your real, your abiding determination. You cannot have thrown aside all shame, all love, all fidelity, all truth. If you did, you would dishonour and disfigure humanity. There can be no truth left in the world if you are false, if you are capable of descending to this depth of abandonment, of breaking such holy oaths, of crushing my heart. Then there is nothing more under the sun in which a ...
— Immortal Memories • Clement Shorter
... the man who wants to abolish sex. He believes in spirit. He is timid and womanly, his mind is pure and inexpressibly shocked at the carnal desires which disfigure the otherwise fair picture of humanity. Love, marriage, procreation, cannot these be purged from the base and degrading obsessions of sex? By abstinence, by concentration, we may eliminate them. Surely the story of the Fall ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... branch of the tree, said, "Good dervish, I want to have some talk with you: but your whiskers prevent my understanding what you say: and if you will consent, I will cut off some part of them and of your eye-brows, which disfigure you so much that you look more like ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Complete • Anonymous
... far as they are natural, and universal, make no difference between one man and another, and can never be the object of blame. It is only when the disposition gives a PROPENSITY to any of these disagreeable passions, that they disfigure the character, and by giving uneasiness, convey the sentiment of ...
— An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals • David Hume
... hempen suspenders, and hanged himself with them to the top of the door-jamb. So Holdria found him in the morning, and the imbecile's cry of horror soon brought the manager. Huerlin's face was just a little bluer than usual, but it was impossible to disfigure it very much. ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... could make a so-called mask, and in consequence have ignored the essential qualification, strength. A cheaply made, inferior quality of mask is much worse than no protection at all, for a broken wire, or one that will not stand the force of the ball without caving in, is liable to disfigure a player for life. Our trade-marked masks are made of the very best hard wire, plated to prevent rusting, and well trimmed, and every one is a thorough face protector. We make them in four ...
— Spalding's Baseball Guide and Official League Book for 1889 • edited by Henry Chadwick
... it I want to add that, at Mrs. Ascott's suggestion—which really is my own idea—I have decided not to build all those Rhine castles, which useless notion, if I am not mistaken, originated with you. I don't want to disfigure my beautiful wilderness. Mrs. Ascott and I had a very plain talk with Hamil and we forced him to agree with us that the less he did to improve my place the better for the place. He seemed to take it good-humouredly. He left yesterday to look over Mrs. ...
— The Firing Line • Robert W. Chambers
... was the reverse of a careless or ready writer. He weighed every sentence: if in all his works, from Sartor to the Reminiscences, you pencil-mark the most suggestive passages you disfigure the whole book. His opinions will continue to be tossed to and fro; but as an artist he continually grows. He was, let us grant, though a powerful, a one-sided historian, a twisted though in some aspects a great moralist; but he was, in every sense, a ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... assert, that there is plenty of subject afforded by Irish character and Irish life honourable to the land, pleasing to the narrator, and sufficiently attractive to the reader, without the unwholesome exaggerations of crime which too often disfigure the fictions which pass under the title of "Irish," alike offensive to truth as to taste—alike injurious both for private and ...
— Handy Andy, Vol. 2 - A Tale of Irish Life • Samuel Lover
... things; on the contrary, all the perceptions both of the senses and the mind bear reference to man and not to the Universe, and the human mind resembles these uneven mirrors which impart their own properties to different objects, from which rays are emitted and distort and disfigure them. ...
— Manhood of Humanity. • Alfred Korzybski
... retreated inside the gate where I had pails of water ready for them to drink. They were a sorry-looking lot. It was a hot day. They were covered with dirt, and you know the ill-fitting uniform of the French common soldier would disfigure into trampdom the best-looking man in ...
— A Hilltop on the Marne • Mildred Aldrich
... guild of scholars would here use his privilege to call attention to some abuses in words and phrases,—abuses which are not only prevalent in the spoken and written speech of the many, but which disfigure, occasionally, the pages, even of good writers. These are not errors that betoken or lead to general final corruption, and the great Anglo-Saxo-Norman race is many centuries distant from the period when it may be expected to show signs of that decadence which, visible ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... commendation we may have bestowed on M. Dumas in the early part of this paper. While we fully exonerate his writings from the charge of grossness, and recognise the absence of those immoral and pernicious tendencies which disfigure the works of many gifted French writers of the day, we would yet gladly see him abstain from the somewhat too Decameronian incidents and narratives with which he occasionally varies his pages. That he is quite independent of such meretricious aids, is rendered evident by his entire avoidance ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 55, No. 340, February, 1844 • Various
... a calmer season to demand judges himself, and to give an account of his designs and of his conduct. The commissioners tried to induce him to submit, quoting the example of the ancient Roman generals. "We are always mistaken in our quotations," he replied; "and we disfigure Roman history by taking as an excuse for our crimes the example of their virtues. The Romans did not kill Tarquin; the Romans had a well ordered republic and good laws; they had neither a Jacobin club nor a revolutionary tribunal. We live ...
— History of the French Revolution from 1789 to 1814 • F. A. M. Mignet
... passed! You talk of admiration. What am I to do? If people are so silly as to indulge the sentiment, is it my fault? What am I to do, I ask you? Would you wish me to shave my head and black my face, or disfigure myself with a burn, or a scald, or something of that sort? I dare say you would, Peggotty. I dare ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... not long, my Antony, since, with these hands, I buried thee. Alas! they were then free, but thy Cleopatra is now a prisoner, attended by guard, lest, in the transports of her grief, she should disfigure this captive body, which is reserved to adorn the triumph over thee. These are the last offerings, the last honors she can pay thee; for she is now to be conveyed to a distant country. Nothing could part us while we lived, but ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... talent which instantaneously depicted their whole personality. His own features would then become scarcely recognizable, he could force the strangest metamorphoses upon them, but while mimicking the ugly and grotesque, he never lost his own native grace. Grimace was never carried far enough to disfigure him; his gayety was so much the more piquant because he always restrained it within the limits of perfect good taste, holding at a suspicious distance all that could wound the most fastidious delicacy. He never ...
— Life of Chopin • Franz Liszt
... under the leadership of Aksakoff, instead of leading forward with the great liberal movement that came after the Crimean War, resulting finally in the emancipation of the serfs, would lead backward to the stagnant hours of medieval Russia. Then there were no German words to disfigure the Russian language! Then there were no German divisions of rank among the officials to strangle life by their formality. No, none of these, nor the disturbing importations of Peter; in Aksakoff's variation of the gospel, the Russians are the "beyond men" and need them not. Thus before Peter's ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... that I do not know whether simplicity belongs to nature or art is that fashion is as strong to pervert and disfigure in savage nations as it is in civilized. It runs to as much eccentricity in hair-dressing and ornament in the costume of the jingling belles of Nootka and the maidens of Nubia as in any court or coterie which we aspire to imitate. The only difference is that remote ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... glorious model of the age. Men sailed no longer to Paphos, to Cnidus or Cythera, to the presence of the goddess Venus: her sacred rites were neglected, her images stood uncrowned, the cold ashes were left to disfigure her forsaken altars. It was to a maiden that men's prayers were offered, to a human countenance they looked, in propitiating so great a godhead: when the girl went forth in the morning they strewed flowers on her way, and the victims proper to that unseen goddess ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume One • Walter Horatio Pater
... Anne. "No, children, you haven't wept enough to permanently disfigure your charming faces. If the boys had not appeared we might now be weeping in a melancholy row. I had no idea that Jessica's secret was to be ...
— Grace Harlowe's Return to Overton Campus • Jessie Graham Flower
... these beautiful buildings are in ruins. The Ganges here and there undermines the foundations, and palaces and temples sink into the soft earth or fall entirely down. Miserable little huts are in some places built upon these ruins, and disfigure the fine appearance of the town, for even the ruins themselves ...
— A Woman's Journey Round the World • Ida Pfeiffer
... who wants to abolish sex. He believes in spirit. He is timid and womanly, his mind is pure and inexpressibly shocked at the carnal desires which disfigure the otherwise fair picture of humanity. Love, marriage, procreation, cannot these be purged from the base and degrading obsessions of sex? By abstinence, by concentration, we may eliminate them. Surely the story of the Fall makes it quite clear that we were never meant to perpetuate such gross ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... is a piece of impertinence, as long as one chooses to write in the form of a play, and is generally the result of one's own inability to produce anything striking and affecting in that way.' And it is precisely upon the stage that such faults of construction as those which disfigure Beddoes' tragedies matter least. An audience, whose attention is held and delighted by a succession of striking incidents clothed in splendid speech, neither cares nor knows whether the effect of the whole, as a whole, is worthy ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... The religious basis of government was not so much that people put their trust in princes, as that they did not put their trust in any child of man. It was so with all the ugly institutions which disfigure human history. Torture and slavery were never talked of as good things; they were always talked of as necessary evils. A pagan spoke of one man owning ten slaves just as a modern business man speaks of one merchant sacking ten clerks: "It's ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... ass's ears; The whiche vice he hid, as best he might, Full subtlely from every man's sight, That, save his wife, there knew of it no mo'; He lov'd her most, and trusted her also; He prayed her, that to no creature She woulde tellen of his disfigure. She swore him, nay, for all the world to win, She would not do that villainy or sin, To make her husband have so foul a name: She would not tell it for her owen shame. But natheless her thoughte that she died, That she so longe should a counsel hide; Her thought it swell'd so sore about her heart ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer
... volley of peculiarly southern oaths, with which we cannot disfigure our page, even in deference to the necessity of painting a correct picture of the scene we have described. Tom had a vein of humor in his composition, which has already displayed itself in some of the rough experiences of his career; and when he saw the ...
— The Soldier Boy; or, Tom Somers in the Army - A Story of the Great Rebellion • Oliver Optic
... an extraordinary look of fear disfigure his face," he continued, "and following the direction of his eyes I saw a lean brown arm with a thin hand as delicate as a woman's wriggle forward from beneath the wall of the tent ...
— Witness For The Defense • A.E.W. Mason
... she said, "before I began to disfigure myself with rouge and ill-dressed hair, was remarkable. Anna failed in her painting, our money was gone, and she was forced to earn her own living. She came to London, and tried several ...
— Anna the Adventuress • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... invidious, to enumerate the evils of which, in the opinion of many of our fellow-citizens, this error of the sages who framed the Constitution may have been the source and the bitter fruits which we are still to gather from it if it continues to disfigure our system. It may be observed, however, as a general remark, that republics can commit no greater error than to adopt or continue any feature in their systems of government which may be calculated to create or increase the lover ...
— U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses • Various
... but more hardy in cooler climates. It grows from Portugal to Greece, and from Algeria to Dalmatia, but its area has been much extended by cultivation. Under favorable conditions it attains large dimensions, but its exploitation for resin and turpentine tends to diminish its size and disfigure its habit (Mathieu, Fl. Forest, ed. 4, 611). Its rapid growth, strong root-system, and its ability to thrive on poor sandy soil, have led to the employment of this species for the forestation ...
— The Genus Pinus • George Russell Shaw
... the only seats provided. Even as late as the fourteenth century it does not appear that many churches had pews, but in the fifteenth they became general. The hideous monstrosities of post-Reformation times did not then disfigure our churches. The pews were low open seats made of oak, sometimes carved at the back, and panelled, with the ends higher than the rest, and often richly carved. Many rich men left money in their wills for the ...
— English Villages • P. H. Ditchfield
... discrepance in the sounds of words, and the grammatical structure of sentences. The Ojibwa has this advantage, considered as the material of future improvement; it is entirely homogeneous, and admits of philosophical principles being carried out, with very few, if any, of those exceptions which so disfigure English grammar, and present such appalling obstacles to foreigners in ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... not your fault at all, Mr. Bathurst; I put a great deal more on than you said, but I was so anxious to disfigure myself that I was determined to do it thoroughly; but it is nothing to what it was. As you see, my lips are getting all right again, and the sores are a good deal better than they were; I suppose they will leave scars, but that won't ...
— Rujub, the Juggler • G. A. Henty
... resolved to have a cathedral, and she gave the designing of it to a man void of taste, who has built a hideous erection on the quay in what he is pleased to call Byzantine style. I am quite sure any Byzantine architect would cheerfully have jumped into the Bosphorus rather than disfigure a city with such a structure as ...
— In Troubadour-Land - A Ramble in Provence and Languedoc • S. Baring-Gould
... often teach amiss. Some doctrines they exaggerate, and others they maim. Some they caricature, distort, or pervert. And many add to the Gospel inventions of their own, or foolish traditions received from their fathers; and the truth is hid under a mass of error. Many conceal and disfigure the truth by putting it in an antiquated and outlandish dress. The language of many theologians, like the Latin of the Romish Church, is, to vast numbers, a dead language,—an unknown tongue. There are hundreds of words and phrases used by preachers and ...
— Modern Skepticism: A Journey Through the Land of Doubt and Back Again - A Life Story • Joseph Barker
... affording shelter to the enemy. My friend had once visited Paris, and had been struck by the beauty of these woods. Apparently he thought that, even for their own salvation, the French had no right to disfigure scenes of beauty that had delighted the eyes of ...
— Memoirs of Sir Wemyss Reid 1842-1885 • Stuart J. Reid, ed.
... in the soil of his original baseness. He has been accused and acquitted of a treacherous murder; and has since boastfully owned it, which inclines me to suppose him innocent. His daughter is defaced by his erroneous cruelty, for it was his wife he had intended to disfigure, and in the darkness of the night and the frenzy of coco- brandy, fastened on the wrong victim. The wife has since fled and harbours in the bush with natives; and the husband still demands from deaf ears ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... sophistry has not warped it. It follows from this, that religions vary, are changed, and may be falsified until the primitive meaning is lost. But whatever may be the faith and the rites of religions—whether fanaticism disfigure them or fetichism make a caricature of them, whether politicians use them as an ally, or the traces of the apostolate fade beneath the materialism of speculation,—there will always remain at the bottom, religion: ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... represent the very matter itself to the soul, as that which in itself is worthy of all acceptation, and needs no human eloquence to commend it. Painting doth spoil native beauty. External ornaments would disfigure some things that are of themselves proportioned and lovely, therefore the Lord chooses a plain and simple style which is foolishness to the world, but in these swaddling clothes of the scriptures, and this poor cottage the child Jesus, the Lord of heaven and earth, is contained. There is ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... Alcibiades. When he began to study, he obeyed all his other masters fairly well, but refused to learn upon the flute, as a thing unbecoming a free citizen; saying that to play upon the lute or the harp does not in any way disfigure a man's body or face, but one is hardly to be known by his most intimate friends, when playing on the flute. Besides, one who plays on the harp may speak or sing at the same time; but the use of the flute stops the mouth, intercepts the voice, and prevents all articulation. ...
— The Boys' and Girls' Plutarch - Being Parts of The "Lives" of Plutarch • Plutarch
... And we are children of the King of kings, we are washed and clothed by Him, and the more our garments are fitted for our future station, the fairer are our inward persons; the more do we feel annoyed and grieved by any foul spot, which could sully their purity and disfigure their beauty. My young readers remember this, and smile no more at sin; aye, and shun carefully its stains that would pollute you, and when they do alight upon you, remember whose blood alone it is can purge away ...
— Brotherly Love - Shewing That As Merely Human It May Not Always Be Depended Upon • Mrs. Sherwood
... early stage in the disgraceful abandonment of the Holy City; this of Catherine treats of the outcome of that great wrong. "Yet the wound will be healed," wrote Dante; "(though it cannot be otherwise than that the scar and brand of infamy will have burned with fire upon the Apostolic See and will disfigure her for whom heaven and earth had been reserved)—if ye who were the authors of this transgression will all with one accord fight manfully for the Bride of Christ, for the Throne of the Bride which is Rome, for our Italy, and that I may speak more fully, for the whole commonwealth ...
— Letters of Catherine Benincasa • Catherine Benincasa
... risked his life in resisting the desperate raids made against his tribe, or in pushing invasions among others of his own race. Unlike many of his own people, he never was vain enough to wear the scalp-lock, nor did he disfigure his face with paint. When he went upon the warpath his enemies speedily found it out, without any such ...
— Deerfoot in The Mountains • Edward S. Ellis
... the idea of "the mathematical infinite" into metaphysical speculation, especially by Kant and Hamilton, with the design, it would seem, of transforming the idea of infinity into a sensuous conception, has generated innumerable paralogisms which disfigure the pages of their philosophical writings. This procedure is grounded in the common fallacy of supposing that infinity and quantity are compatible attributes, and susceptible of mathematical synthesis. This insidious ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... stood by the rose-bush, very tired, and older than her years, but she looked remarkably handsome; pallor and heavy eyelids did not disfigure her as they ...
— The Halo • Bettina von Hutten
... Mrs. Gosnold assented coolly. "I felt quite sure of that in the beginning. You never could believe a word Adele said from the time she was able to talk. Even if the truth would have served as well and with less trouble, she was sure to disfigure it beyond identification. And Walter's just as bad. But you, my dear, will never make a good liar; the first words we spoke together I saw your eyes wince, and knew you were tormented by something on your conscience. ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance
... assume a hunted look. This seemed to be a man who had known both drawing-room and nature; who must have turned quietly and deliberately to nature as the better part. The wrinkles on his face were not those of the social smile, which so disfigure the faces of women when the smile is no longer wanted. They ...
— The Velvet Glove • Henry Seton Merriman
... who can enjoy life after such an event deserves not to have lived at all. Nor does he any more deserve to live who looks contentedly upon abuses that disgrace, and cruelties that dishonor, and scenes of misery and destitution and brutalization that disfigure his country; or sordid meanness and ignoble revenges that make her a by-word and a scoff among all generous nations; and does not endeavor to remedy or ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... overpowering luxuriance of the landscape loses its oppressiveness, the hills assume more rounded forms, and from the general obscurity, the palms, a tree made for moonlight, stand out in soft distinctness. At such a time we forget the foul crimes which disfigure the past, and the vices which degrade the present of this fair land, and can easily imagine ourselves in the garden where the yet unfallen progenitors of mankind walked under a firmament 'glowing with living sapphires,' and together hymned the praises of their Creator. Daylight ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. IV. October, 1863, No. IV. - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... not caring to disturb his musings. He sat still, looking over his own broad fields, not thinking of them as his, however, not calculating the expense of the new saw-mill, with which he had been threatening to disfigure Carson's brook, just at the point where its waters fell into the pond. He was looking far-away to the distant hills, where the dim haze was deepening into purple, hiding the mountain tops beyond. But it could not be hills, nor haze, nor hidden mountain tops, ...
— Janet's Love and Service • Margaret M Robertson
... camp-fire. Crewe dared not address a word to Margaret lest he should anger his captors into doing him some injury that might lessen his powers of thought or action, and the girl, seeing that no immediate gain could be had from speech, dreaded to be smitten on the mouth in a way that might disfigure her in her lover's eyes. Only at times, when a wind would blow the smoke and flame aside, she looked across the camp-fire into the young man's face, and in the look and in the smile of the steady lips he read not only an unswerving ...
— Earth's Enigmas - A Volume of Stories • Charles G. D. Roberts
... many happy days they had spent together; and though the friendship, of course, could never again be what it had been, there was something of it left, at least on Prosper's side. To struggle with this man, strike at his face, try to maim and disfigure him, roll over and over on the ground with him, like two dogs tearing each other,—the thought was hateful. His gorge rose at it. He would never do it, unless to save his life. Then? Well, then, God must be ...
— The Ruling Passion • Henry van Dyke
... have made it as an Indian would, using grass instead of thread. It is much more complete than mine, for the green stitches ornament the white bark, but the black ones disfigure it. I should know a man made your basket and ...
— Moods • Louisa May Alcott
... unto the fellow: Now praise God that he hath thus mercifullie preserv'd thee, and see thou ever make much of this kinde woman that so friendly saves thy life. With that the Fellow viewing her and seeing a great skarre in her face, which did greatlie disfigure her, a long nose, thin lips and of a sowre complexion, hee said unto the Hangman: On (my good friend) doe thy duty: Ile none of ...
— A Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. II • Various
... that when erect he had not a little the appearance of a beer-barrel on skids. His face, that infallible index of the mind, presented a vast expanse, unfurrowed by any of those lines and angles which disfigure the human countenance with what is termed expression. Two small gray eyes twinkled feebly in the midst, like two stars of lesser magnitude in a hazy firmament, and his full-fed cheeks, which seemed to have taken toll of everything ...
— Washington Irving • Charles Dudley Warner
... and he was really skilful in it. The whole art of it consisted in preserving the general appearance of the sentence and its characteristic form while making it say exactly the opposite of what Christophe had meant. Mannheim took far more trouble to disfigure Christophe's articles than he would have done to write them himself: never had he worked so hard. But he enjoyed the result: certain musicians whom Christophe had hitherto pursued with his sarcasms were astounded to see him grow gradually ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... of me. Wasn't it enough to maim and disfigure poor Tamplin, why cook him to death—I'd shut off that cock. I fought with it, but it wouldn't close, and I ...
— Danger Signals • John A. Hill and Jasper Ewing Brady
... building for business purposes, which must soon take place even if there be no change in the character of business, conducted with a little system and uniformity. The streets themselves have been made so fine that it will require some moral courage—a thing for which Washington is not noted—to disfigure them by the hideous jumbles that accorded so well with the old ways. Such splendid monstrosities as the Treasury—as a whole, the worst public building in the city, although good in parts, so situated that one must go down ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 11, No. 24, March, 1873 • Various
... I sincerely admire Lady Lena," I said, as smartly as I could, "the sooner you disfigure yourself with a pair of spectacles, my dear lady, the better. She is very pretty, perfectly unaffected, and, if I may presume to judge, delightfully well-bred ...
— The Guilty River • Wilkie Collins
... notion of the strange theories which have developed themselves respecting this most interesting subject, I must still express my conviction as to the unity of the authorship of the Homeric poems. To deny that many corruptions and interpolations disfigure them, and that the intrusive hand of the poetasters may here and there have inflicted a wound more serious than the negligence of the copyist, would be an absurd and captious assumption, but it is to a higher criticism that we must appeal, if we would either understand ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... to disfigure thus Our prairie garden-land, Let me consort with Cerberus, Be chained to crags precipitous, Or seek an ...
— Poems - Vol. IV • Hattie Howard
... heap of beauties, without order or symmetry, and a plot whereon nothing but seeds, nor nothing perfect or formed is to be found; and a production loaded with many unprofitable things which ought to be retrenched, and which choak and disfigure those which deserve to be preserved? Mr. Pope will pardon me if I here oppose those comparisons, which to me appear very false, and entirely contrary to what the greatest of ancient, ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753),Vol. V. • Theophilus Cibber
... expense. Thus, when cutting peat for fuel, which is often done within the dyke, instead of doing this in parallel lines, leaving a considerable space between them to become a future corn-field, the people cut in every direction, disfigure the ground, and very often form reservoirs for water to accumulate in. The outfield is allowed to remain fallow for one, and sometimes two years in succession, but the infield is generally turned over every year.'** [Vol. ...
— Second Shetland Truck System Report • William Guthrie
... cooerdinated, and robed in all the pomps of language, those high conceptions destined to charm successive generations. Biographers inform us that Crebillon composed in a similar way. And this was, according to several critics, the cause of the incorrectness, of the asperity of style, which disfigure several pieces by that tragic poet. The works of Bailly, and especially the discourses that complete the History of Astronomy, invalidate this explanation. I could also appeal to the elegant and pure productions of that ...
— Biographies of Distinguished Scientific Men • Francois Arago
... do not offer the absurdities with which the mythologies of many ancient nations abound.[Z] The article which makes skill in fishing a virtue worthy of being compensated in the other world, does not disfigure the salutary and consoling dogma of the immortality of the soul, and that of future rewards and punishments, so much as one is at first tempted to think; for if we reflect a little, we shall discover that the skilful fisherman, in laboring for himself, labors also for society; he is a useful ...
— Narrative of a Voyage to the Northwest Coast of America in the years 1811, 1812, 1813, and 1814 or the First American Settlement on the Pacific • Gabriel Franchere
... still friends in the world, and that she must keep up her spirits. She must also endeavour to make herself of little value in the sight of the Barin, her owner. She must feign sickness or foolishness, and disfigure her countenance, or refuse to work; a woman's wit will advise her ...
— Fred Markham in Russia - The Boy Travellers in the Land of the Czar • W. H. G. Kingston
... hir tale al brought was to an ende, Of hire estat and of hir governaunce, Quod Pandarus, 'Now is it tyme I wende; 220 But yet, I seye, aryseth, lat us daunce, And cast your widwes habit to mischaunce: What list yow thus your-self to disfigure, Sith yow is tid thus fair ...
— Troilus and Criseyde • Geoffrey Chaucer
... no means all of the harm done by adenoids. They affect the voice, disfigure the facial expression, interfere with hearing, give rise to night terrors, open the way for serious invasions by disease germs, and, through the development of chronic nasal catarrh, may lead to loss of the ...
— Adenoids: What They Are, How To Recognize Them, What To Do For Them • United States, Public Health Service
... of forgetting himself for a moment. To an unusual extent he sticks to his subject, and makes us think of Burns rather than of Carlyle. The style, though unpolished, is fairly simple and readable, and is free from the breaks, crudities, ejaculations, and general "nodulosities" which disfigure much of his work. (3) Carlyle has an original and interesting theory of biography and criticism. The object of criticism is to show the man himself, his aims, ideals, and outlook on the universe; the object of biography is "to show what and how produced ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... That chaise comes to the end of Rosemary Lane at an early hour to-morrow morning. I take my wife and my niece out to show them the beauties of the neighborhood. We have a picnic hamper with us, which marks our purpose in the public eye. You disfigure yourself in a shawl, bonnet, and veil of Mrs. Wragge's; we turn our backs on York; and away we drive on a pleasure trip for the day—you and I on the front seat, Mrs. Wragge and the hamper behind. Good again. Once on the highroad, what do we do? Drive to the first station ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... be not like the hypocrites, of a sad countenance; for they disfigure their faces that they may appear to men to fast. I tell you truly, they have their reward. [6:17]But when you fast, anoint your head, and wash your face, [6:18]that you may not appear to men to fast, ...
— The New Testament • Various
... I didn't get an eye bunged up," he reflected. "I smart and I ache, but I can see straight, and I don't believe I've received any blow that will disfigure me for the next few days. My, what a steam hammer that fellow is in a fight! I wonder if he really is the son of that hard character ...
— The High School Boys in Summer Camp • H. Irving Hancock
... while, as a woman dries her garment before the household flame, she turns it, by portions, now to and now from the sun heart of fire. Oh joy that all the hideous lacerations and vile gatherings of refuse which the worshippers of mammon disfigure the earth withal, scoring the tale of their coming dismay on the visage of their mother, shall one day lie fathoms deep under the blessed ocean, to be cleansed and remade into holy because lovely forms! ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... and obstruct the Lord Mayor, sword-bearer, and chaplain; to despise the authority of the sheriffs; and to hold the court of aldermen as nought; but not on any account, in case the fulness of time should bring a general rising of 'prentices, to damage or in any way disfigure Temple Bar, which was strictly constitutional and always to be approached with reverence. Having gone over these several heads with great eloquence and force, and having further informed the novice that this society had its origin in his own teeming brain, stimulated by a swelling sense of wrong ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens
... centuries ago, by Carlencas, the writer says: "It is to no great purpose to speak of the Gothick sculptures: for everybody knows that they are the works of a rude art, formed in spite of nature and rules: sad productions of barbrous and dull spirits, which disfigure our old churches." Fie on a Frenchman who could so express himself! We recall the story of how Viollet le Duc made the people of Paris appreciate the wonderful carvings on Notre Dame. All the rage in France was for Greek and Roman remains, and the people ...
— Arts and Crafts in the Middle Ages • Julia De Wolf Addison
... their most striking characteristics, by the way, is a severely simple taste; a uniform freedom from the vulgarities of conception, the exaggerated sentiment, the mawkish nonsense and twaddle, which disfigure such an infinitude of volumes of religious biography and fiction which have been written since. Could such men attain this uniform elevation? Could such men have invented those extraordinary fictions,—the miracles and the parables? Could they, in spite of their gross ignorance, have ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... disposition to sneer at any chivalrous, or elevated feeling, from which few of our ladies are exempt—we shall find it easy to account for the cold, stiff, ungraceful, harsh, and mercenary habits which disfigure, to the astonishment of all foreigners, the patrician class of English society. Nothing, indeed, can be less graceful than the frivolity of an Englishman. Naturally grave, serious, contemplative, if his angry stars have endowed him with enormous wealth, he carries into the pursuit of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... despondency which was figured under the natural idea of a broken heart. The incoherences are gone; the contradictions have vanished; and the gross physical absurdities, which under mistranslation had perplexed the reverential student, no longer disfigure the Scriptures. ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey
... yielding a hide of extraordinary thickness, lined on the inside with blubber, and scantily covered externally with short reddish brown hair, the greatest part of its skin appearing to have been denuded of this clothing by eruptive blotches, such as I presume disfigure a measly hog. Although incomparably larger, the general contour of its body resembled the figure of a seal; its frame being of the same description, though differently moulded. It was considerably more bulky in proportion to its length, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 13 Issue 367 - 25 Apr 1829 • Various
... danger or opposition. One of the ships laid at the wharf, the others a little way out in the stream, with their warps made fast to the wharf. To prevent discovery, we agreed to wear ragged clothes and disfigure ourselves, dressing to resemble Indians as much as possible, smearing our faces with grease and lamp black or soot, and should not have known each other except by our voices. Our most intimate friends among the spectators had not the least knowledge of us. We surely resembled devils from ...
— Tea Leaves • Various
... the clerk in his office used a sort of ivory knife, with a blunt edge, to divide a sheet of paper, which never failed to cut it even, only by requiring a steady hand; whereas, if he should make one of a sharp penknife, the sharpness would make it go often out of the crease, and disfigure the paper." ...
— Books and Authors - Curious Facts and Characteristic Sketches • Anonymous
... that of the new propositions of Augustine to the dogmas handed down to him? Who could further call in question that, in consequence of the reforming impulse in Protestantism, the way was opened up for a conception which does not identify Gospel and dogma, which does not disfigure the latter by changing or paring down its meaning while failing to come up to the former? But the historian who has to describe the formation and changes of dogma can take no part in these developments. It is a task by itself more rich and comprehensive than that of the historian of ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 1 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... picket-fence, old, uneven and dilapidated, but in picturesque keeping with the building. The gate hung loosely on its hinges, just opposite an old-fashioned porch, that shot over the front door, much after the fashion of that hideous thing called a poke, with which English women disfigure their pretty travelling bonnets and protect ...
— The Old Homestead • Ann S. Stephens
... the standard of things; on the contrary, all the perceptions both of the senses and the mind bear reference to man and not to the Universe, and the human mind resembles these uneven mirrors which impart their own properties to different objects, from which rays are emitted and distort and disfigure them. ...
— Manhood of Humanity. • Alfred Korzybski
... word of importance in that verse, 'that they may adorn the doctrine of God our Saviour'. I mean the word, 'Saviour'. I am so glad that is there to meet those who say, 'Ah! you talk about adornments, but I am distressed because I see so many things about me that disfigure and discredit the doctrine'. You feel that you need a power which can give deliverance from the worldly spirit, the light and frivolous disposition, bad tempers, resentments, and other selfish and sinful things which hold you ...
— Standards of Life and Service • T. H. Howard
... he held his peace on purpose; he didn't want any outsiders; he thought their little party just right. Mr. Dosson's place in the scheme of Providence was to "go" with Delia while he himself "went" with Francie, and nothing would have induced George Flack to disfigure that equation. The young man was professionally so occupied with other people's affairs that it should doubtless be mentioned to his praise that he still managed to have affairs—or at least an affair—of ...
— The Reverberator • Henry James
... of Armenia, have till within these few years been occasionally acted as carnival farces, and have always been very successful. The plot of the Jodelle, which belongs to Don Francisco de Roxas, is excellent; the style and the additions of Scarron have not been able altogether to disfigure it. All that is coarse, nauseous, and repugnant to taste, belongs to the French writer of the age of Louis XIV., who in his day was not without celebrity; for the Spanish work is throughout characterized by a spirit of tenderness. The burlesque tone, which in many languages may be tolerated, ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... had the whole of India, and the hill-districts, besides, in their pockets. He saw their faces, and, quietly though he stood and impassive as he looked, he was possessed with a longing to behold them within reach, so that he might strike them and disfigure them for ever. Now it was Violet Oliver as she descended the steps into the great courtyard of the Fort, dainty and provoking from the arched slipper upon her foot to the soft perfection of her hair. He saw her caught into the twilight swirl of pale white faces and so pass from ...
— The Broken Road • A. E. W. Mason
... admitted that in protesting against hypocrisy he has occasionally been led beyond the limits prescribed by good taste. He is at times abusive of those who differ from him. This, with other offences against decorum, which here and there disfigure his pages, can only be condoned by an appeal to the general tone of his writing, which is reverential. Burns had a firm faith in a Supreme Being, not as a vague mysterious Power; but as the Arbiter of human life. Amid the vicissitudes ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... hair naturally curled and short, which they shave into several forms, and dye it also of divers colours—viz., red, white, and yellow. They have broad round faces, with great bottle-noses, yet agreeable enough till they disfigure them by painting, and by wearing great things through their noses as big as a man's thumb, and about four inches long. These are run clear through both nostrils, one end coming out by one cheek-bone, and the other ...
— Early Australian Voyages • John Pinkerton
... Flower-gatherers and dancing-girls, harvest festivals and religious processions, appealed to their minds far more than the endless and monotonous succession of horrors with which the Mesopotamian monarchs delighted to disfigure their walls; and even the dangers of the bull-ring, as seen on the Knossian frescoes, are mild and gentle when compared with the abominations where Teumman has his head sawed off with a short dagger, and other unfortunates are flayed alive, or ...
— The Sea-Kings of Crete • James Baikie
... vehicle moved, than the bad woman, whose name was La Chouette (Screech-Owl), cried, 'I have got some vitriol; I am going to wash the face of La Goualeuse, to disfigure her.'" ...
— The Mysteries of Paris V2 • Eugene Sue
... usurper, and one who had diverted the current of a grand national movement to selfish and personal objects, Cromwell was and will be called a tyrant; but not in the more obvious sense of the word. Such are the misleading statements which disfigure the History of England in its most important chapter. They mislead by more than a simple error of fact: those, which I have noticed last, involve a moral anachronism; for they convey images of cruelty and barbarism such as could not co-exist with the national civilization at that time; and whosoever ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey
... out of the window or upon the pikes of my retainers. Two hours of life are always two hours. A great many things may turn up in even as little a while as that. And, besides, if I understand her appearance, my niece has still something to say to you. You will not disfigure your last hours by a want of politeness to ...
— New Arabian Nights • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of the extended plain stretched its beautiful borders to the deepening woods. All nature smiled; all seemed in harmony and peace but the breast of man. He who was made lord of this paradise awoke to disturb its repose, to disfigure its loveliness! As the thronging legions poured upon the plain, the sheep which had been feeding there, fled scared to the hills; the plover and heath-fowl which nestled in the brakes, rose affrighted ...
— The Scottish Chiefs • Miss Jane Porter
... I think the same of the charge of Untruthfulness, and select it from the rest, not because it is more formidable but because it is more serious. Like the rest, it may disfigure me for a time, but it will not stain: Archbishop Whately used to say, "Throw dirt enough, and some will stick;" well, will stick, but not, will stain. I think he used to mean "stain," and I do not agree with ...
— Apologia Pro Vita Sua • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... mishap appeared to Boxtel of no great consequence. Van Baerle was but a painter, a sort of fool who tried to reproduce and disfigure on canvas the wonders of nature. The painter, he thought, had raised his studio by a story to get better light, and thus far he had only been in the right. Mynheer van Baerle was a painter, as Mynheer Boxtel was a tulip-grower; he wanted ...
— The Black Tulip • Alexandre Dumas (Pere)
... kindness, and the smile was returned by the other; and the blushes with which Miss Mackenzie was always ready at this time, became her very much. As for Mrs. Mackenzie—the very largest curve that shall not be a caricature, and actually disfigure the widow's countenance—a smile so wide and steady, so exceedingly rident, indeed, as almost to be ridiculous, may be drawn upon her buxom face, if the artist chooses to attempt it as it appeared ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... celerity, the clear eye, and the strong hand. Of certain other achievements it would be going too far to say that he was ashamed of them for Newman had never had a stomach for dirty work. He was blessed with a natural impulse to disfigure with a direct, unreasoning blow the comely visage of temptation. And certainly, in no man could a want of integrity have been less excusable. Newman knew the crooked from the straight at a glance, and the former had cost him, first and last, a great many moments of lively ...
— The American • Henry James
... improve her very much, he thought, turning from her with a feeling of relief to Katy, whom nothing could disfigure, and who was now watching the door eagerly for the entrance of her mother. That lady had spent a good deal of time at her toilet, and she came in at last, flurried, fidgety, and very red, both from exercise and the bright-hued ...
— Family Pride - Or, Purified by Suffering • Mary J. Holmes
... between the United States and Mexico and prophesying various results. Neither Pico nor Castro looked amiable. The Governor had arrived in the morning to find that the General had allowed pasquinades representing his Excellency in no complimentary light to disfigure the streets of Monterey. Castro, when taken to task, had replied haughtily that it was the Governor's place to look after his own dignity; he, the Commandante-General of the army of the Californias, had more important matters to attend to. The result had ...
— The Splendid Idle Forties - Stories of Old California • Gertrude Atherton
... of the rocket has passed from our sky, and its stick has fallen quietly enough among the pines of New Jersey, citizens have opportunity for calm reflection. We are not justified, perhaps, in attributing to McClellan all the evils and errors that disfigure his tenure of office. Intellect equal to the position he could not create for himself, and ninety-nine out of one hundred men of average ability would not have descended from his balloon-like elevation with any better ...
— Red-Tape and Pigeon-Hole Generals - As Seen From the Ranks During a Campaign in the Army of the Potomac • William H. Armstrong
... resembling an earthly despot, than the Jehovah of the bible! YET God is visible in his works and ways. "They are fools and without excuse, who say, there is no God." And as far as God appears in the works of creation and providence, he appears as he is. Passion, prejudice, or depravity may disfigure or hide him; but as far as the discoveries which God hath made of himself are received, his ...
— Sermons on Various Important Subjects • Andrew Lee
... frequently exposed in photographers' windows, to the envy of gentlemen gazers. While Thor had once tried to mitigate his features by a beard that had been unsuccessful and had now disappeared, Claude wouldn't disfigure himself by a hair. He was as clean-shaven as a marble Apollo, and ...
— The Side Of The Angels - A Novel • Basil King
... leagued against me." cried she, indignantly. "You are trying your best to disfigure me, and to make me look old before my time. Who ever saw such a ridiculous structure as this headdress, that makes me look like a perambulating castle on a chessboard? Come, another coiffure, and let it not be such a ridiculous ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... the beauty of the ground tenfold, and might well be universally imitated. He has caused the fences around the lots to be removed, and the boundaries to be marked by sunken stone posts, one at each corner, which just suffice for the purpose, but do not disfigure the scene. This change has given to the ground the harmony and pleasantness of a park. The monuments, too, are remarkable for their variety, moderation, and good taste. There is very little, if any, of that hideous ostentation, that mere expenditure of money, which renders Greenwood so melancholy ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 118, August, 1867 • Various
... inspires. It is not the largest of Paul Potter's canvases; but it is, at least, the only one of his great pictures that merits serious attention. The Bear Hunt in the Museum of Amsterdam (supposing it to be authentic), even by ridding it of the retouches which disfigure it, has never been anything else save the extravagance of a young man, the greatest mistake he committed. The Bull is not priced. Estimating it according to the present value of Paul Potter's other ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton
... living and protracted martyrdom, and in some cases even the degradation of our common humanity. Christianity nowhere enjoins the eradication of passions and appetites, but the control of them. It would not mutilate and disfigure the body, for it is a sacred temple, to be made beautiful and attractive. On the other hand the Middle Ages strove to make the body appear repulsive, and the most loathsome forms of misery and disease to be hailed as favorite modes of penance. And as Christ ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VII • John Lord
... her up with sour cream and softening lotions that will not hurt the skin. There, child, go with Patty, who will get thee into something proper. But she is like her mother in this respect, common garb does not disfigure her." ...
— A Little Girl in Old Philadelphia • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... valuable material will tend to increase the prosperity of one of our great national industries, and stimulate commercial enterprise. Works are in progress for manufacturing cement by this improved process, and the author trusts the time is not far distant when the unsightly structures which now disfigure the banks of some of our rivers will be abolished—the present cement kilns, like the windmills once such a common feature of our country, being regarded as curiosities of the past, and cement manufacturers cease to be complained of as causing ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 620, November 19,1887 • Various
... every day and study the numberless interesting objects this establishment contains. The long promenades are formed by picturesque trees and shrubs which have been collected from every clime; the immense number of labels, as one approaches more closely, rather disfigure the display of flowers, but as usefulness is the object, it is impossible otherwise than to approve the extreme order and regularity with which every plant, according to its genus, is classified, affording a most delectable treat to a regular botanist. This arrangement ...
— How to Enjoy Paris in 1842 • F. Herve
... which they undoubtedly possess. "They are ingenious, but puerile; flowing, but not sufficiently correct." ——The best way of convincing the antiquarian reader of the merit of these compositions, would be to disfigure them with old spelling; as perhaps the most complete confutation of the advocates for the authenticity of what are called Rowley's poems would be to exhibit an edition of them in modern orthography. —Let us only apply ...
— Cursory Observations on the Poems Attributed to Thomas Rowley (1782) • Edmond Malone
... constitution, a mind trammelled by routine, a violent temper, an abrupt manner, and using language imperious and offensive to all who approached him. Such was the caricature of this unfortunate prince. It was necessary to disfigure him in order to make the nation ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... to this state of affairs had been known in the previous history of warfare, unless we take such a case as that of a nineteenth century warship attacking some large savage or barbaric settlement, or one of those naval bombardments that disfigure the history of Great Britain in the late eighteenth century. Then, indeed, there had been cruelties and destruction that faintly foreshadowed the horrors of the aerial war. Moreover, before the twentieth century the world had had but one experience, and that a ...
— The War in the Air • Herbert George Wells
... side of his chin," he ended, "he's got a little scar, sort of scar you see on German students' faces, only quite small—doesn't disfigure ...
— The Four Faces - A Mystery • William le Queux
... Dream, Act iii. Scene 1, Quince the carpenter gives directions for the performance of Pyramus and Thisby, who "meet by moonlight," and says, "One must come in with a bush of thorns and a lanthorn, and say he comes to disfigure, or to present, the person of Moonshine." Then in Act v. the player of that part says, "All that I have to say is, to tell you that the lanthorn is the moon; I, the man in the moon; this thorn-bush, my thorn-bush; and this dog, my dog." And, secondly, in the Tempest, Act ii., ...
— Moon Lore • Timothy Harley
... confess to no overwhelming admiration as concerns this raucous if meritorious young person; and will even concede that the thought of her becoming my kinswoman rouses in me an inevitable distaste, no less attributable to the discord of her features than to the source of her eligibility to disfigure the peerage—that being her father's lucrative transactions in Pork, which I find indigestible ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... blood spirt from the wounds, and cover the floor, and I saw that the snake's eyes grew more brilliant than ever, and that he was gradually bringing his head on a level with the face of his antagonist, as though to bite and disfigure his countenance. ...
— The Gold Hunter's Adventures - Or, Life in Australia • William H. Thomes
... ladies. It resulted that on Monday morning they were nervous and impatient, alternating between fits of giggling delight in the interchange of fond reminiscences, and the crossness which is pretty sure to disfigure human behavior from want of sleep. But ordinarily Bartley got on very well with them. In spite of the assumption of equality between all classes in Equity, they stood in secret awe of his personal splendor, and the tradition of his achievements ...
— A Modern Instance • William Dean Howells
... to say, my dear? But, dear, dear, what a pity it is that you should go and disfigure yourselves like this! What would your poor father ...
— Glyn Severn's Schooldays • George Manville Fenn
... divine no less than his soul, and he vindicates the "flesh" from the attacks made on human character by certain forms of Christianity. The body, according to Nachmanides, is, with all its functions, the work of God, and therefore perfect. "It is only sin and neglect that disfigure God's creatures." In another of his books, "The Law of Man," Nachmanides writes of suffering and death. He offers an antidote to pessimism, for he boldly asserts that pain and suffering in themselves are "a service of God, leading man to ponder on his end and reflect about his destiny." Nachmanides ...
— Chapters on Jewish Literature • Israel Abrahams
... as they are natural, and universal, make no difference between one man and another, and can never be the object of blame. It is only when the disposition gives a PROPENSITY to any of these disagreeable passions, that they disfigure the character, and by giving uneasiness, convey the sentiment of disapprobation ...
— An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals • David Hume
... that it is to this class of literature that it belongs. Having said this, however, it must be added that poetry of the second order has seldom risen to higher heights of power. The faults already admitted disfigure it here and there. We have "moon blasted Madness when he yells at midnight;" we read of "eye-starting wretches and rapture-trembling seraphim," and the really striking image of Ruin, the "old hag, unconquerable, ...
— English Men of Letters: Coleridge • H. D. Traill
... place is anxious to produce what is usually known as an immediate effect, and therefore he proceeds to plant large evergreens, covering his grounds with great unsightly trees. In almost every case of this kind the lower limbs are apt to die, and thus greatly disfigure the symmetry of the trees. Young, healthy plants, when carefully taken up and as properly replanted, are never subject to this disfigurement, and are almost ...
— The Home Acre • E. P. Roe
... Washington, she by no means held herself superior to the obligation of dress, and of the pleasant little artificial graces belonging to high civilization. Some of her evening dresses were elegant, the colors harmonizing, and the style picturesque and becoming. If she had the good taste not to disfigure her classically-shaped head, or to load herself with flashy jewelry, so ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... great changes of climate, and as the inclination of the axis of the earth to the plane of its orbit is about the same as that of the axis of Mars, we believe we would have equally violent changes were it not for the fortunate distribution of land and water on our planet. All those narrow seas which disfigure our surface in your eyes, are in reality vast rivers, which are constantly bearing the water from one part of the globe to another. The warm water of the equatorial regions is carried to the cold countries ...
— Daybreak: A Romance of an Old World • James Cowan
... in both tunnels gave excellent results, as far as smoothness of finish was concerned, but, owing to the imperviousness of the steel, small air holes were formed in the surface, though not in sufficient numbers or size to cause trouble or disfigure the work ...
— Transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers, vol. LXVIII, Sept. 1910 - The Bergen Hill Tunnels. Paper No. 1154 • F. Lavis
... remained flushed and wild-eyed as we had known her, but as the years passed she became afflicted with a shaking palsy which made her nervous nod continuous instead of occasional. Her hands were so uncertain that she could no longer disfigure china, poor woman! As the couple grew older, they quarrelled more and more often about the ultimate disposition of their 'property.' A new law was passed in the state, securing the surviving wife a third of her husband's estate under all conditions. Cutter was tormented by the fear that Mrs. Cutter ...
— My Antonia • Willa Cather
... of brick-work, and their heaps of refuse matter from the furnace, which seems to be the only kind of stuff which Nature cannot take back to herself and resolve into the elements, when man has thrown it aside. These hillocks of waste and effete mineral always disfigure the neighborhood of iron-mongering towns, and, even after a considerable antiquity, are hardly made ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... it is with no artful flattery to disfigure it. May I bring it in person? The post-rider's bag is too ...
— The Loyalist - A Story of the American Revolution • James Francis Barrett
... so that one of the combatants is frequently found dead. (12. Layard, 'Annals and Magazine of Natural History,' vol. xiv. 1854, p. 63.) An Indian partridge (Ortygornis gularis), the male of which is furnished with strong and sharp spurs, is so quarrelsome "that the scars of former fights disfigure the breast of almost every bird you kill." (13. Jerdon, 'Birds of India,' vol. iii. ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... But why do you make yourself so picturesque? Why not disguise yourself, disfigure yourself, anything ...
— The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan - The 14 Gilbert And Sullivan Plays • William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan
... and women. His tendency to bombast. His attempts at fairy imagery. His incomparable reasonings in verse. His art of producing rich effects by familiar words. Catholicity of his literary creed. Causes of the exaggeration which disfigure his panegyrics. Character of his Hind and Panther. And of his Absalom and Achitophel. Compared with Juvenal. What he would probably have accomplished in an epic poem. Compared ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... pictures of the fashionable society of Brighthelmstone are distinguished by a force and vivacity of satire which she has rarely surpassed. it is true that in both "The Wanderer" and "Camilla" we meet with occasional touches of that peculiar extravagance of style which disfigure, the "Memoirs of Dr. Burney," but these passages, in the novels, are SO comparatively inoffensive, and so nearly forgotten in the general power and charm of the story that we scarcely care to instance them ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 1 • Madame D'Arblay
... the woman kindled the brand of purpose: for when it was knowne, that the king would see hir, Ethelwold willed hir in no wise to trim vp hir selfe, but rather to disfigure hir in fowle garments, and some euil fauored attire, that hir natiue beautie should not appeare: but she perceiuing how the matter went, of spite set out hir selfe to the vttermost, so that the king vpon the first sight of hir, became so farre inamored of ...
— Chronicles (1 of 6): The Historie of England (6 of 8) - The Sixt Booke of the Historie of England • Raphael Holinshed
... reason or to divine revelation, it will be allowed that they do not offer the absurdities with which the mythologies of many ancient nations abound.[Z] The article which makes skill in fishing a virtue worthy of being compensated in the other world, does not disfigure the salutary and consoling dogma of the immortality of the soul, and that of future rewards and punishments, so much as one is at first tempted to think; for if we reflect a little, we shall discover that the skilful fisherman, ...
— Narrative of a Voyage to the Northwest Coast of America in the years 1811, 1812, 1813, and 1814 or the First American Settlement on the Pacific • Gabriel Franchere
... scornfully, thus. This exasperates the savages, and they attack us with volleys of sucked oranges and half-eaten pippins." "And you retire?" "Without doubt, if I am sober; for orange will stain silk, and an apple may disfigure a feature." ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... straining to keep up appearances, no haunting terror of what the neighbours might think. The petty cares and worries concerning matters not worth a moment's thought, the mean desires and fears with which we disfigure ourselves, fell from them. There came to them broader thought, a wider charity, a deeper pity. Their love grew greater even than their needs, overflowing towards at things. Sometimes, recalling these months, it has seemed to me that we make a mistake seeking to keep Death, ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... shipbuilders and shipowners.... The book is beautifully printed on good paper, and its appearance does credit to the publishers; the work of translation has been remarkably well done, the language bearing none of those irritating traces of Teutonism which disfigure so many English versions ...
— The Dyeing of Cotton Fabrics - A Practical Handbook for the Dyer and Student • Franklin Beech
... pausing in her work, and giving her one of her slow glances, "I'm glad you're better; I never heard such distressing sobs. It's a great pity for you to cry so much, for you disfigure yourself; but I wish now that you are here you'd sit still, for I'd like to sketch you with that woebegone look. I never saw such a perfect ideal of ...
— Red Rose and Tiger Lily - or, In a Wider World • L. T. Meade
... fumitory," said the young man, pulling a piece at random in the reckless way in which men do disfigure forest flower-beds. "It isn't strictly indigenous, but it is naturalized in many places, and you must have seen it before, ...
— Brothers of Pity and Other Tales of Beasts and Men • Juliana Horatia Gatty Ewing
... portico. But nature is not always obedient to man; the vines and palm-trees do not prosper in their new location, and now the long flexible branches of the one, and the broad leaves of the other, droop half withered above the grotto, which they disfigure ...
— The Solitary of Juan Fernandez, or The Real Robinson Crusoe • Joseph Xavier Saintine
... took possession of me. Wasn't it enough to maim and disfigure poor Tamplin, why cook him to death—I'd shut off that cock. I fought with it, but it wouldn't close, and I ...
— Danger Signals • John A. Hill and Jasper Ewing Brady
... the minor Caroline poets; but it is far more noticeable in drama, and resulted in the production, by some of the playwrights of the transition period under Charles I. and Charles II., of some of the most amorphous botches in the way of style that disfigure English literature. ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... can only be kept alive by these neglected attentions; yet if men and women took half as much pains to dress habitually neat, as they do to ornament, or rather to disfigure their persons, much would be done towards the attainment of purity of mind. But women only dress to gratify men of gallantry; for the lover is always best pleased with the simple garb that sits close to the shape. There is an impertinence ...
— A Vindication of the Rights of Woman - Title: Vindication of the Rights of Women • Mary Wollstonecraft [Godwin]
... had about him, and having tied his horse to a branch of the tree, said, "Good dervish, I want to have some talk with you, but your hair prevents my understanding what you say, and if you will consent, I will cut off some part of it and of your eyebrows, which disfigure you so much that you look more like a bear than ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments • Anonymous
... to resign, and promised in a calmer season to demand judges himself, and to give an account of his designs and of his conduct. The commissioners tried to induce him to submit, quoting the example of the ancient Roman generals. "We are always mistaken in our quotations," he replied; "and we disfigure Roman history by taking as an excuse for our crimes the example of their virtues. The Romans did not kill Tarquin; the Romans had a well ordered republic and good laws; they had neither a Jacobin club nor a revolutionary ...
— History of the French Revolution from 1789 to 1814 • F. A. M. Mignet
... grand vizier, with the civil magistrate at the head of them. At this sight he stood motionless, and had not power to utter one word. "Ganem," said the favourite, "there is no time to be lost; if you love me, put on the habit of one of your slaves immediately, and disfigure your face and arms with soot. Then put some of these dishes on your head; you may be taken for a servant belonging to the eating house, and they will let you pass. If they happen to ask you where the master of the house is, answer, without ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments vol. 1 • Anon.
... years been occasionally acted as carnival farces, and have always been very successful. The plot of the Jodelle, which belongs to Don Francisco de Roxas, is excellent; the style and the additions of Scarron have not been able altogether to disfigure it. All that is coarse, nauseous, and repugnant to taste, belongs to the French writer of the age of Louis XIV., who in his day was not without celebrity; for the Spanish work is throughout characterized by a spirit of tenderness. The burlesque tone, which in many languages may be tolerated, ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... that merit which they undoubtedly possess. "They are ingenious, but puerile; flowing, but not sufficiently correct." ——The best way of convincing the antiquarian reader of the merit of these compositions, would be to disfigure them with old spelling; as perhaps the most complete confutation of the advocates for the authenticity of what are called Rowley's poems would be to exhibit an edition of them in modern orthography. —Let us only apply this very simple test,— "handy-dandy let them ...
— Cursory Observations on the Poems Attributed to Thomas Rowley (1782) • Edmond Malone
... money to assist his researches. Four volumes in quarto were at length published! Vella had the adroitness to change the Arabic MSS. he possessed, which entirely related to Mahomet, to matters relative to Sicily; he bestowed several weeks' labour to disfigure the whole, altering page for page, line for line, and word for word, but interspersed numberless dots, strokes, and flourishes; so that when he published a fac-simile, every one admired the learning ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... one of the most celebrated passages in modern poetry, a passage not easily to be surpassed for its majesty and tenderness, and for a beauty which even those tiresome allusions to the classics, that give a faded air to so much of the poetry of the sixteenth century, cannot seriously disfigure nor obscure. ...
— The Life of Columbus • Arthur Helps
... plain to a degree. Nothing in the world can disfigure a woman more successfully than an unbecoming hat and a cheap black veil, which imparts a dingy, leaden tint to the complexion. I had every reason to be satisfied with my disguise that afternoon, but I wasn't. Not a bit! I felt ...
— The Lady of the Basement Flat • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... their whole personality. His own features would then become scarcely recognizable, he could force the strangest metamorphoses upon them, but while mimicking the ugly and grotesque, he never lost his own native grace. Grimace was never carried far enough to disfigure him; his gayety was so much the more piquant because he always restrained it within the limits of perfect good taste, holding at a suspicious distance all that could wound the most fastidious delicacy. He never made use of an inelegant word, even in the moments ...
— Life of Chopin • Franz Liszt
... qualifications of the delight which an historian feels while engaged in the details of those grateful episodes which frequently reward his progress through musty chronicles, to find himself suddenly arrested in his narrative by some of those rude interruptions by which violence and injustice disfigure so frequently, in the march of history, the beauty of its portraits. One of these occurs to us in this connection. Our Huguenot settlers on the Santee were not long suffered to pursue a career of unbroken prosperity. The very fact that they prospered— that, in the ...
— The Life of Francis Marion • William Gilmore Simms
... engineering. The Bible tells us "King Uzziah built towers at the gates of Jerusalem, and at the turning of the wall, and fortified them." We may note in passing that the buttresses, battlements, and bartizans with which our modern architects ornament or disfigure churches, peaceful dwellings, and public buildings, are copied from the early ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 841, February 13, 1892 • Various
... instead of adding to the universal harmony of His creation, make monsters of ourselves, moral blots upon the beautiful face of His world? It were idle for Him to give us the knowledge of His will and then to stand by and let us disfigure His fairest designs; to bid us do what is right, and then let us do wrong without exacting redress or atonement. If He is wise, He must not only lay down the law, but He must also enforce it; He must make it our highest interest to keep His law, to do the right; so that ...
— Moral Principles and Medical Practice - The Basis of Medical Jurisprudence • Charles Coppens
... "do a little glacier work" (it sounds like embroidery, but means scrambling perilously over ice), our taste for unwholesome—or, in other words, seasoned—food. When I am reproved by English acquaintances for the "Americanisms" which disfigure my speech and proclaim my nationality, I cannot well defend myself by asserting that I read the same Bible as they do,—for maybe, ...
— Americans and Others • Agnes Repplier
... the improper application of strong caustics to this passage by incompetent and ignorant surgeons. Every person has observed the contraction of tissue caused by a severe burn, which often produces such a distortion of the injured part as to disfigure the body for life. A similar result is produced when the neck of the womb is burned with strong caustics. The tissues are destroyed, and, as the parts heal, the deeper-seated tissues firmly contract, forming a ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... individuals. The press, moreover, is the guardian of social, political, and religious morality. The greatest as well as the most trifling affairs which conduce to the well-being and comfort of the multitude are eagerly canvassed. The faults and vices which disfigure and disgrace even the most advanced forms of civilization are unshrinkingly laid bare, and the proper remedies prescribed. The political conduct of nations and of public men is carefully scrutinized, and every false step that they may make is immediately ...
— The Continental Monthly, Volume V. Issue I • Various
... that they have been deformed by the devil, but not begotten: or that they are real devils with a human body either simulated or purloined. For if the devil, by divine permission, may take possession of the whole man and change his mind, is it strange that he may disfigure also his body, causing men to be ...
— Commentary on Genesis, Vol. II - Luther on Sin and the Flood • Martin Luther
... a new Cabinet—'Home Secretary and Abbot of Westminster, the Right Hon. Mr. So-and-So.' The first duty of the Abbot will be to appoint a Royal Commission to consider the removal of hideous monuments which disfigure the edifice: nothing prior to 1700 coming under its consideration. A small tablet would recall what has been taken away. Herbert Spencer's claim to a statue would be duly considered, and, I hope, by a unanimous vote some of the other glaring gaps would be filled up. ...
— Masques & Phases • Robert Ross
... purposes, which must soon take place even if there be no change in the character of business, conducted with a little system and uniformity. The streets themselves have been made so fine that it will require some moral courage—a thing for which Washington is not noted—to disfigure them by the hideous jumbles that accorded so well with the old ways. Such splendid monstrosities as the Treasury—as a whole, the worst public building in the city, although good in parts, so situated that one must go down stairs from Pennsylvania Avenue to get into the grand north entrance, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 11, No. 24, March, 1873 • Various
... applied it to extort either confession or evidence debased themselves to the level of the Holy Inquisitors. Froude did not, I grieve to say, stop at an apology for the rack. In a passage which must always disfigure his book he thus describes the fate of Antony Babington and those who suffered with him in 1586. "They were all hanged but for a moment, according to the letter of the sentence, taken down while the susceptibility of agony was still unimpaired, ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... the exhibition of indecent or other objectionable advertisements. The Societe pour la protection des paysages, founded in 1901, has for one of its objects the prevention of advertisements which disfigure the scenery or ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... opinionated and contentious; can they make him wise? They exhaust the mind by a certain jejune and barren subtlety, without fertilizing or inspiring it. By their stammering and by the stains of their impure style they disfigure theology which had been enriched and adorned by the eloquence of the ancients. They involve everything whilst trying to resolve everything.' 'Scotist', with Erasmus, became a handy epithet for all schoolmen, nay, for everything superannuated and antiquated. He would rather lose ...
— Erasmus and the Age of Reformation • Johan Huizinga
... the form of these tales. Doubtless Osiris and Sit did not escape unscathed out of the hands of the theologians; but even if sacerdotal interference spoiled the legend concerning them, it did not altogether disfigure it. Here and there in it is still noticeable a sincerity of feeling and liveliness of imagination such as are never found in those of Shu and of Sibu. This arises from the fact that the functions of these gods left ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 1 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... of stakes and flaming pyres; she spread the adjectives thickly on her finest tartines, and decorated them with a variety of her most pompous epithets. It was an infringement of the copyright of the passages of declamation that disfigure Corinne; but Louise grew so much the greater in her own eyes as she talked, that she loved the Benjamin who inspired her eloquence the more for it. She counseled him to take a bold step and renounce his patronymic for ...
— Two Poets - Lost Illusions Part I • Honore de Balzac
... and a short petticoat constitute the chief dress of the women, who also wear gaiters like the men. Their hair, which is of jet-black colour, they suffer to grow to its natural length; but they do not pierce their noses, nor disfigure their ears. In winter both the men and women, in order to guard against cold, wrap themselves in blue rugs, which they always carry with them, and which form an essential part of ...
— Travels in North America, From Modern Writers • William Bingley
... taking in their canoes their wives and children, cooking-pots, and sleeping-mats. When they reach a good game district, they erect temporary huts on the bank, and there dry the meat they have killed. They are rather a comely-looking race, with very black smooth skins, and never disfigure themselves with the frightful ornaments of some of the other tribes. The chief declined to sell a harpoon, because they could not now get the milola bark from the coast on account of Mariano's war. He expressed some doubts about our being children of the same Almighty Father, remarking ...
— A Popular Account of Dr. Livingstone's Expedition to the Zambesi and Its Tributaries • David Livingstone
... Poonans, Pakatans, Sians, and Ukits, the latter of whom are acknowledged to be the wildest of the human race yet met with in Borneo. Of these tribes, all with the exception of the Ukits are tattooed, unlike the Dyaks, who look upon the practice with contempt, and say that they have no need to disfigure their faces to frighten their enemies. A curious mixture of the Dyak and Malay races are the Milanoes. These occupy the sea-coast and Oya, Muka, and Bintulu rivers. The custom (similar to that of the Indians on the Mosquito shore) of flattening ...
— On the Equator • Harry de Windt
... barriers in order to prevent their affording shelter to the enemy. My friend had once visited Paris, and had been struck by the beauty of these woods. Apparently he thought that, even for their own salvation, the French had no right to disfigure scenes of beauty that had delighted the eyes of ...
— Memoirs of Sir Wemyss Reid 1842-1885 • Stuart J. Reid, ed.
... annually on this object, I believe, something at the rate of L2000 a month! The marble used is of an unusually soft nature, hence its decay and cost of repair. But these constant patchings certainly disfigure and spoil the beauty of the surface architecture, especially at the Eastern end, and afford a convincing instance of how a man may mar his own object ...
— Fair Italy, the Riviera and Monte Carlo • W. Cope Devereux
... new-comers was a man who particularly interested me: his name was Jung, the same who afterwards became known under the name of Stilling. In spite of an antiquated dress, his form had something delicate about it, with a certain sturdiness. A bag-wig did not disfigure his significant and pleasing countenance. His voice was mild, without being soft and weak: it became even melodious and powerful as soon as his ardor was roused, which was very easily done. On becoming better ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... me." cried she, indignantly. "You are trying your best to disfigure me, and to make me look old before my time. Who ever saw such a ridiculous structure as this headdress, that makes me look like a perambulating castle on a chessboard? Come, another coiffure, and let it not be such a ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... towns to blow down, the order must come from me, gentlemen. But we will let that matter rest until I get my army," rejoined the general, rubbing his eyes, and continuing to disfigure his face by mixing the colors with which ...
— The Life and Adventures of Maj. Roger Sherman Potter • "Pheleg Van Trusedale"
... prefers a deep, rich, loamy soil near water, but grows in almost any situation; of more rapid growth than almost any other native tree, and formerly planted freely in ornamental grounds and on streets, but fungous diseases disfigure it so seriously, and the late frosts so often kill the young leaves that it is now seldom obtainable in nurseries; usually propagated from seed. The European plane, now largely grown in some nurseries, is ...
— Handbook of the Trees of New England • Lorin Low Dame
... to put a ball through your head, Captain Passford, not only because it would disfigure a handsome face, but because you may be of great use to ...
— Stand By The Union - SERIES: The Blue and the Gray—Afloat • Oliver Optic
... would be useless, and perhaps invidious, to enumerate the evils of which, in the opinion of many of our fellow-citizens, this error of the sages who framed the Constitution may have been the source and the bitter fruits which we are still to gather from it if it continues to disfigure our system. It may be observed, however, as a general remark, that republics can commit no greater error than to adopt or continue any feature in their systems of government which may be calculated to ...
— Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Harrison • James D. Richardson
... as much as possible to cultivate the effect of reason on this feeling. But we must beware lest by falsely extolling this moral determining principle as a spring, making its source lie in particular feelings of pleasure (which are in fact only results), we degrade and disfigure the true genuine spring, the law itself, by putting as it were a false foil upon it. Respect, not pleasure or enjoyment of happiness, is something for which it is not possible that reason should have any antecedent feeling as its foundation ...
— The Critique of Practical Reason • Immanuel Kant
... look of fear disfigure his face," he continued, "and following the direction of his eyes I saw a lean brown arm with a thin hand as delicate as a woman's wriggle forward from beneath the wall of the tent ...
— Witness For The Defense • A.E.W. Mason
... you have not put on your corset; a cold in the head wouldn't oblige you to disfigure your waist and wear half a dozen petticoats, nor hide your hands in these old gloves, and your pretty feet in those hideous shoes, nor dress ...
— Modeste Mignon • Honore de Balzac
... Certain of his own compositions, such as the more effective fragments from the Romeo and Juliet Symphony, again made a particular impression on me, it is true; but I was now more consciously awake to the curious weaknesses which disfigure even the finest conceptions of this extraordinary musician than on those earlier occasions, when I only had a sense of general discomfort adequate to the magnitude ...
— My Life, Volume II • Richard Wagner
... jest and half in earnest; he had horrified her beyond expression by telling her how he would punish a wife if he were the husband she deceived. With a grim, lurid smile he remembered the penalty. He had said he would not kill; he would disfigure the woman frightfully and permit her to live as a moral example to other wives. Slitting her mouth from ear to ear or cutting off her nose—these were two of the penalties he would inflict. He now felt less brutal. He might kill, but he would not disfigure. For an ...
— Jane Cable • George Barr McCutcheon
... as in those other mechanicall artes) be not well tempered, or not well layd, or be vused in excesse, or neuer so litle disordered or misplaced, they not onely giue it no maner of grace at all, but rather do disfigure that stuffe and spill the whole workmanship taking away all bewtie and good liking from it, no lesse then if the crimson tainte, which should be laid vpon a Ladies lips, or right in the center of her cheekes should by some ouersight or mishap be applied to her forhead or chinne, it would make ...
— The Arte of English Poesie • George Puttenham
... welcomed a death without Dignity of sulking so seductive to the wounded spirit of man Grief of an ill-fortuned passion of his youth He lost the art of observing himself Immense wealth and native obtuseness combine to disfigure us Infallibility of our august mother Inflicted no foretaste of her coming subjection to him Love's a selfish business one has work in hand No man has a firm foothold who pretends to it Silence and such signs are like revelations in black night The defensive is perilous policy in ...
— Quotations from the Works of George Meredith • David Widger
... volume for the press, Bailey's text has been carefully revised, and clerical errors have been corrected, but the liberty has not been taken of altering his language, even to the extent of removing the coarsenesses of expression which disfigure the book and in which he exaggerates the plain speaking of the original. Literary feeling is jealous, no doubt justly, on ...
— Colloquies of Erasmus, Volume I. • Erasmus
... from our sky, and its stick has fallen quietly enough among the pines of New Jersey, citizens have opportunity for calm reflection. We are not justified, perhaps, in attributing to McClellan all the evils and errors that disfigure his tenure of office. Intellect equal to the position he could not create for himself, and ninety-nine out of one hundred men of average ability would not have descended from his balloon-like elevation ...
— Red-Tape and Pigeon-Hole Generals - As Seen From the Ranks During a Campaign in the Army of the Potomac • William H. Armstrong
... the defects of an age when civilization was still struggling with the remains of barbarism, it is to foster no spirit of vain exultation: it is rather to turn with increased pleasure from those stains which disfigure the picture, to the contemplation of the more prominent and brilliant figures which occupy the fore-ground. We remember that upon times thus backward in many of the refinements of life, and scarcely yet freed from ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, April 1844 - Volume 23, Number 4 • Various
... he did not repeat; nor was there any possible deviation from truth which he did not make, with so much of passion, I am glad to add, as to save him from the suspicion of intentional aberration. But the Senator touches nothing which he does not disfigure—with error, sometimes of principle, sometimes of fact. He shows an incapacity of accuracy, whether in stating the Constitution, or in stating the law, whether in the details of statistics or the diversions of scholarship. He cannot ope his mouth, but out there flies ...
— American Eloquence, Volume III. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1897) • Various
... overdone, for nature. The usual amount of common-place remarks were made, too, on the lucky diversity that was to be found in tastes, and on the happy necessity there existed of all being able to find the means to please themselves. But these were no more than the moral blotches that usually disfigure human commendation. The sentiment and the sympathies of the mass were powerfully and irresistibly enlisted in favor of the unknown maiden—feelings that were very unequivocally manifested as she drew nearer the estrade, walking timidly ...
— The Headsman - The Abbaye des Vignerons • James Fenimore Cooper
... I'm about it I want to add that, at Mrs. Ascott's suggestion—which really is my own idea—I have decided not to build all those Rhine castles, which useless notion, if I am not mistaken, originated with you. I don't want to disfigure my beautiful wilderness. Mrs. Ascott and I had a very plain talk with Hamil and we forced him to agree with us that the less he did to improve my place the better for the place. He seemed to take it good-humouredly. He left yesterday to look over Mrs. Ascott's place and plan for her ...
— The Firing Line • Robert W. Chambers
... there is no doubt of it. Such beauty as they have never seen here in their lives! Fanciful extravagances in dress, and atrocious hair-dressing, cannot disfigure her; and by Jove! she has tried both. And one has only to imagine that woman dressed and "coiffeed," as she might be, to conceive such a triumph as London has not witnessed for the century! And I do long for such a triumph. If my lord would only invite us here, were it ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... spoil. Deceit, deception, double-dealing, duplicity, chicanery, guile, treachery. Deceptive, deceitful, misleading, fallacious, fraudulent. Decorate, adorn, ornament, embellish, deck, bedeck, garnish, bedizen, beautify. Decorous, demure, sedate, sober, staid, prim, proper. Deface, disfigure, mar, mutilate. Defect, fault, imperfection, disfigurement, blemish, flaw. Delay, defer, postpone, procrastinate. Demoralize, deprave, debase, corrupt, vitiate. Deportment, demeanor, bearing, port, mien. Deprive, divest, dispossess, strip, despoil. Despise, contemn, scorn, disdain. ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... As a child I ate these raw in quantities, as did also most of my young friends, but they will be found the better for cooking. They are particularly good and large in the early spring. The inmost bark also has food value, but one must disfigure the tree to get that, ...
— Scouting For Girls, Official Handbook of the Girl Scouts • Girl Scouts
... which may be owing to the scarcity of proper materials; for all the colours which they brought to sell in bladders, were in very small quantities. Upon the whole, I have no where seen savages who take more pains than these people do, to ornament, or rather to disfigure, their persons. ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 16 • Robert Kerr
... no doubt that the Irish take better care of their children than the parents of similar position in either England or Scotland. Cases of cruelty, which so constantly disfigure the police courts in both the latter countries, are very rarely heard in ...
— The Reminiscences of an Irish Land Agent • S.M. Hussey
... school by the vigour of her harmony, her clearness, and the logic of her conception and exposition." Imbert, who has written a biographical sketch of her, says: "The talent of Augusta Holmes is absolutely virile, and nowhere in her works do you find the little affectations which too often disfigure the works of women. With her, nobility of thought and sentiment take first place. She worships the beautiful, and her Muse has sung only subjects that are worthy of being sung. She is masterly in her ease, and all the resources of ...
— Woman's Work in Music • Arthur Elson
... verse, 'that they may adorn the doctrine of God our Saviour'. I mean the word, 'Saviour'. I am so glad that is there to meet those who say, 'Ah! you talk about adornments, but I am distressed because I see so many things about me that disfigure and discredit the doctrine'. You feel that you need a power which can give deliverance from the worldly spirit, the light and frivolous disposition, bad tempers, resentments, and other selfish and sinful things which hold you more or less in bondage; but in that beautiful word, ...
— Standards of Life and Service • T. H. Howard
... music, and bold as they could be in their exercises (it was a Lacedaemonian who, at Olympia, for the first time threw aside the heavy girdle and ran naked to the goal) forbade all that was likely to disfigure the body. Though we must not suppose all ties of nature rent asunder, nor all connexion between parents and children in those genial, retired houses at an end in very early life, it was yet a strictly public education ...
— Plato and Platonism • Walter Horatio Pater
... is also a birthmark, and if found upon the neck or shoulders where it is likely to disfigure, it may be removed by the high-frequency spark, or by surgery, in the same way as warts. Never tamper with moles. Leave them alone or turn them over ...
— The Mother and Her Child • William S. Sadler
... dishonest. Could your mother or your father have been untruthful? Here you are, so hungry and starved that you are dying for love. Where did you get all that capacity for loving? You didn't inherit it from hardened, heartless people, who would disfigure you and purposely leave you to die, that's one sure thing. You once told me of saving your big bullfrog from a rattlesnake. You knew you risked a horrible death when you did it. Yet you will spend miserable years torturing yourself with the idea that your own mother might have cut off that ...
— Freckles • Gene Stratton-Porter
... the objects (idealism, scepticism, and so on), or anthropological discussions on prejudices, their causes and remedies: this attempt, on the part of these authors, only shows their ignorance of the peculiar nature of logical science. We do not enlarge but disfigure the sciences when we lose sight of their respective limits and allow them to run into one another. Now logic is enclosed within limits which admit of perfectly clear definition; it is a science which has for ...
— The Critique of Pure Reason • Immanuel Kant
... the guild of scholars would here use his privilege to call attention to some abuses in words and phrases,—abuses which are not only prevalent in the spoken and written speech of the many, but which disfigure, occasionally, the pages, even of good writers. These are not errors that betoken or lead to general final corruption, and the great Anglo-Saxo-Norman race is many centuries distant from the period when it may be expected to show signs of that decadence which, visible at first in the waning moral ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... back empty-handed. That was most kind of him, but it was none of Gaydon's business. The King was ill at ease and looked as though he had not slept a wink the livelong night. Well, swollen eyes and a patched pallid face disfigure all men at times, and in any case they were none ...
— Clementina • A.E.W. Mason
... Mayor, sword-bearer, and chaplain; to despise the authority of the sheriffs; and to hold the court of aldermen as nought; but not on any account, in case the fulness of time should bring a general rising of 'prentices, to damage or in any way disfigure Temple Bar, which was strictly constitutional and always to be approached with reverence. Having gone over these several heads with great eloquence and force, and having further informed the novice that ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens
... Simultaneously he discerns his own existence and marks off the inner region of his dreams. And it behooves him not to obliterate these discoveries. By trying to give his mind false points of attachment in nature he would disfigure not only nature but also that reason which is so much the ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... of Aksakoff, instead of leading forward with the great liberal movement that came after the Crimean War, resulting finally in the emancipation of the serfs, would lead backward to the stagnant hours of medieval Russia. Then there were no German words to disfigure the Russian language! Then there were no German divisions of rank among the officials to strangle life by their formality. No, none of these, nor the disturbing importations of Peter; in Aksakoff's variation of the gospel, the Russians are ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... said unto the fellow: Now praise God that he hath thus mercifullie preserv'd thee, and see thou ever make much of this kinde woman that so friendly saves thy life. With that the Fellow viewing her and seeing a great skarre in her face, which did greatlie disfigure her, a long nose, thin lips and of a sowre complexion, hee said unto the Hangman: On (my good friend) doe thy duty: Ile none of her." ...
— A Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. II • Various
... rattle. Then came some good passages, which confounded me only the more. Then, "God save the King," which announced the British victory. Anon followed some marches, with the occasional bang of the bass drum to "disfigure or present" the distant cannon; and then there was a pause, and the people began to get up. I was confounded, looked towards the orchestra, and they were moving away; and I discovered I had heard the whole—alas! the day. What ...
— Early Letters of George Wm. Curtis • G. W. Curtis, ed. George Willis Cooke
... not allow himself to remain idle many minutes. The fractured front of the craft being immovably fixed in the bank, he leaned his head over the side and washed the paint from his face. He disliked to disfigure himself in that fashion, though he always carried the stuff with him, to be used in such an emergency as has ...
— The Lost Trail - I • Edward S. Ellis
... tells its readers, "if we strike out the first person of Robert's speeches, ay, out of his whole career, they become a rope untwisted," &c. &c. &c. This excited old lady is evidently anxious to disfigure the head of the government, by scratching ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... had their faces so crushed and wounded by the stones that they have become frightful. I have aroused them from their state of unconsciousness, cured their wounds but left the hideous scars to disfigure them. I have deprived them of all their rich clothing and dressed them like peasants and I married them at once to two brutal ostlers whom I commissioned to beat and maltreat them until their wicked hearts are changed—and this I ...
— Old French Fairy Tales • Comtesse de Segur
... every time. That's the sort of hairpins we are—all wool and a yard wide. Now, ladies and gents, while it is not designed that the pleasure of this evening be marred by any special formalities, any such unnatural restrictions as disfigure such functions in the effete East [applause], and while I am only too anxious to exclaim with the poet, 'On with the dance, let joy be unconfined' [great applause], yet it must be remembered that this high-toned ...
— Bob Hampton of Placer • Randall Parrish
... in the course of time, it had to be sent to the wash-tub, and then, behold, all the little lovely harps followed the example of the harp that "once through Tara's hall the soul of music shed," and disappeared! Only vague, dirty, yellow reminders of their beauty remained, not to decorate, but to disfigure ...
— Painted Windows • Elia W. Peattie
... Belles Lettres in France nearly two centuries ago, by Carlencas, the writer says: "It is to no great purpose to speak of the Gothick sculptures: for everybody knows that they are the works of a rude art, formed in spite of nature and rules: sad productions of barbrous and dull spirits, which disfigure our old churches." Fie on a Frenchman who could so express himself! We recall the story of how Viollet le Duc made the people of Paris appreciate the wonderful carvings on Notre Dame. All the rage in France was for Greek and Roman remains, and ...
— Arts and Crafts in the Middle Ages • Julia De Wolf Addison
... exaggerate, and others they maim. Some they caricature, distort, or pervert. And many add to the Gospel inventions of their own, or foolish traditions received from their fathers; and the truth is hid under a mass of error. Many conceal and disfigure the truth by putting it in an antiquated and outlandish dress. The language of many theologians, like the Latin of the Romish Church, is, to vast numbers, a dead language,—an unknown tongue. There ...
— Modern Skepticism: A Journey Through the Land of Doubt and Back Again - A Life Story • Joseph Barker
... the Professor, and cast a furtive deprecating glance back at Mary. "Wait! I tell you it's no use; you can hurt yourself and disfigure yourself and weaken and impair your body, but not the life! Not the life! I tell you—it's no good!" He flung out a long arm and his great forefinger pointed at Smith imperatively. "I'll have you back," he said. "I'll have you back. You're ...
— The Second Class Passenger • Perceval Gibbon
... It is only for a moment that some one has overridden your will and obliterated your true self. It is inconceivable that this can be your real, your abiding determination. You cannot have thrown aside all shame, all love, all fidelity, all truth. If you did, you would dishonour and disfigure humanity. There can be no truth left in the world if you are false, if you are capable of descending to this depth of abandonment, of breaking such holy oaths, of crushing my heart. Then there is nothing more under the sun in which ...
— Immortal Memories • Clement Shorter
... sustain; so that when erect he had not a little the appearance of a beer-barrel on skids. His face, that infallible index of the mind, presented a vast expanse, unfurrowed by any of those lines and angles which disfigure the human countenance with what is termed expression. Two small gray eyes twinkled feebly in the midst, like two stars of lesser magnitude in a hazy firmament, and his full-fed cheeks, which seemed to have ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... recommended as restorations for faded writing, but these should be avoided as far as possible, as they are liable to stain, disfigure the paper, and in the end make matters materially worse. Familiarity with particular handwritings after some practice will enable the reader to make out otherwise unintelligible words without any other assistant than ...
— Disputed Handwriting • Jerome B. Lavay
... sure they may; and, egad, serve your best thoughts as gypsies do stolen children,—disfigure them to make ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett
... his captors into doing him some injury that might lessen his powers of thought or action, and the girl, seeing that no immediate gain could be had from speech, dreaded to be smitten on the mouth in a way that might disfigure her in her lover's eyes. Only at times, when a wind would blow the smoke and flame aside, she looked across the camp-fire into the young man's face, and in the look and in the smile of the steady lips he read not only an unswerving courage, but also a confidence in his own resourceful protection, ...
— Earth's Enigmas - A Volume of Stories • Charles G. D. Roberts
... "pingue ingenium" is a circumlocution for "a blockhead;" "anilia instrumenta" are "his old woman's accoutrements;" and "repetito munere Bacchi" is conveyed to the sense of the reader as, "they return again to their bottle, and take the other glass." These are but a specimen of the blemishes which disfigure the most literal of the English translations of ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Copious Notes - and Explanations • Publius Ovidius Naso
... for the present; but the writer believes that his principal character has grown wiser and better since he was first introduced to the reader. He has made mistakes of judgment, but whatever of example and inspiration he may impart to the reader will be that of a true and noble boy, with no vices to disfigure his character, and no low aims to lead him from "the straight and ...
— Up the River - or, Yachting on the Mississippi • Oliver Optic
... nothing could be extracted from him. When closely questioned or otherwise interfered with, then old Con-stair Lo-vair would show that his long cruel penance had not yet banished the devil from his heart. A terrible wrath would disfigure his countenance and kindle his eyes with demoniac fire; and in sharp ringing tones, that wounded like strokes, he would pour forth a torrent of words in his unknown language, doubtless invoking every imaginable curse on ...
— Far Away and Long Ago • W. H. Hudson
... has been graduated from college without the loss of his front teeth or an eye. He has a few scars, which will not permanently disfigure him; and though he halts slightly as the result of a strained tendon in the calf of one of his legs, Dr. Meredith assures us that this is chiefly a nervous symptom, which will pass off presently. ...
— The Opinions of a Philosopher • Robert Grant
... one wide sheet unintersected by hedges, tends to keep up the illusion, which the rivers have little tendency to dispel; for, though they have cut their way down immense depths to their present beds through this soft alluvial deposit, the traveller no sooner emerges from the hideous ravines, which disfigure their banks, than he loses all trace of them. Their course is unmarked by trees, large shrubs, or any of the signs which mark the course of rivers in ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... with a bush of Thorns and a lanthorn, and say he comes in to disfigure, or to present, ...
— The plant-lore & garden-craft of Shakespeare • Henry Nicholson Ellacombe
... unlicked cub^; rudis indigestaque moles [Lat.]; disorder &c 59; deformity &c 243. disfigurement, defacement; mutilation; deforming. chaos, randomness (disorder) 59. [taking form from surroundings] fluid &c 333. V. deface [Destroy form], disfigure, deform, mutilate, truncate; derange &c 61; blemish, mar. Adj. shapeless, amorphous, formless; unformed, unhewn^, unfashioned^, unshaped, unshapen; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... claim a certain pre-eminence in the long list of hapless victims, who made up the literary hecatomb of the Johnsonian era. Without the grosser elements, which enter into their methods of living and disfigure their character, the abject squalor of vulgar surroundings, the love for pot-houses and low companionships, the utter disregard for personal respect, he otherwise underwent all the pain, the want and uncertainty of their impoverished ...
— Donahoe's Magazine, Volume 15, No. 1, January 1886 • Various
... rude square, traced out in bits of red brick alternating with fragments of broken china; the whole bounded by a little bank of dust. The water-man from the well-curb put in a plea for the small architect, saying that it was only the play of a baby and did not much disfigure ...
— Indian Tales • Rudyard Kipling
... utmost kindness, and the smile was returned by the other; and the blushes with which Miss Mackenzie was always ready at this time, became her very much. As for Mrs. Mackenzie—the very largest curve that shall not be a caricature, and actually disfigure the widow's countenance—a smile so wide and steady, so exceedingly rident, indeed, as almost to be ridiculous, may be drawn upon her buxom face, if the artist chooses to attempt it as it appeared during the whole of this summer evening, before dinner came (when people ordinarily ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... had the pleasure of seeing the two nymphs eat like starving savages, and drink still better. When the Hermitage had done its work the Astrodi proposed that we should cast off the clothes which disfigure nature. ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
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