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More "Sordid" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... still more culpable; he has held up to the admiration of posterity, and what is worse, to the imitation of succeeding princes, a man whose nearest approach to wisdom was mean cunning; and has raised into a legislator, a sanguinary, sordid, and trembling usurper. Henry was a tyrannic husband, and ungrateful master; he cheated as well as oppressed his subjects,(30) bartered the honour of the nation for foreign gold, and cut off every branch ...
— Historic Doubts on the Life and Reign of King Richard the Third • Horace Walpole
... enduring dead; Thou canst not soar where he is sitting now. Dust to the dust: but the pure spirit shall flow 5 Back to the burning fountain whence it came, A portion of the Eternal, which must glow Through time and change, unquenchably the same, Whilst thy cold embers choke the sordid ...
— Adonais • Shelley
... him; it was so men dream of home-coming, without sensible displacement of a life going on in it, lovely and secure, as a bark slips into some still pool to its moorings. He yielded himself naturally to the impersonal intimacy of her welcome and all the sordid ways of his life led up ...
— The Lovely Lady • Mary Austin
... of hatred against the sordid avarice of the Jews was continually kept up by ballads which were sung, and legends which were related, in the public streets of the cities and in the cottages of the villages—ballads and legends in which usurers were depicted in hideous colours (Fig. 366). The most celebrated of these popular ...
— Manners, Custom and Dress During the Middle Ages and During the Renaissance Period • Paul Lacroix
... Sicilian command. Gylippus was a man who, to the national bravery and military skill of a Spartan, united political sagacity that was worthy of his great fellow-countryman Brasidas; but his merits were debased by mean and sordid vice; and his is one of the cases in which history has been austerely just, and where little or no fame has been accorded to the successful but venal soldier. But for the purpose for which he was required in Sicily, an abler man could not have been found in Lacedaemon. ...
— The Fifteen Decisive Battles of The World From Marathon to Waterloo • Sir Edward Creasy, M.A.
... mould with the spade." "The earth," he adds elsewhere, "especially if fresh, has a certain magnetism in it, by which it attracts the salt, power, or virtue (call it either) which gives it life, and is the logic of all the labor and stir we keep about it, to sustain us; all dungings and other sordid temperings being but the vicars succedaneous to this improvement." Moreover, this being one of those "worn-out and exhausted lay fields which enjoy their sabbath," had perchance, as Sir Kenelm Digby thinks likely, attracted "vital spirits" from the air. I ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... now his regular employment had filled Herzl with revulsion. The first reports of the Dreyfus trial, which appeared while he was working on his New Ghetto, therefore made no particular impression on him. It looked like a sordid espionage affair in which a foreign power—before long it was revealed that the foreign power was Germany, acting through Major von Schwartzkoppen—had been buying up through its agent secret documents of the French general ...
— The Jewish State • Theodor Herzl
... on a thin hand, and certainly there was nothing sordid, nothing mean, in the eyes which looked so kindly at his companion. It was not perhaps a strong face, nor yet quite a weak one; rather it indicated an over-sensitive, brooding nature. "You will not always be a Candy Man," he said. "I have made Miss ...
— The Little Red Chimney - Being the Love Story of a Candy Man • Mary Finley Leonard
... were making their way through white, silent streets and under avenues of snow-laden trees to homes where reigned love and peace and virtue, in the north end and in the foreign colony the festivities in connection with Anka's wedding were drawing to a close in sordid drunken dance and song ...
— The Foreigner • Ralph Connor
... have they been addressed with such intelligence and tact. The few who have not approached them with sordid rapacity, but from love to them, as men, and souls to be redeemed, have most frequently been persons intellectually too narrow, too straightly bound in sects or opinions, to throw themselves into the character or position of the Indians, or impart to them anything ...
— Summer on the Lakes, in 1843 • S.M. Fuller
... the story. By what incidents does the author show the unselfish devotion of the old musician for his pet? Was his pet winning or lovable? Why did the old man care so much for it? Is the picture of the old man dignified or sordid? ...
— Short Stories and Selections for Use in the Secondary Schools • Emilie Kip Baker
... substitute; afterwards, one of them, laying aside his modesty, nominating some one, in an instant a much greater clamour arose; while some denied all knowledge of him, others objected to him at one time on account of flagitious conduct, at another time on account of his humble birth, his sordid circumstances, and the disgraceful nature of his trade and occupation. The same occurred with increased vehemence with respect to the second and third senators, so that it was evident that they were dissatisfied with the senator himself, ...
— The History of Rome; Books Nine to Twenty-Six • Titus Livius
... long to quote in full. He shows that this wanton and brutal defacement of Nature, this annihilation of the natural resources that should be part of the National capital of our children and children's children, this destruction of so much that is beautiful and grand, goes hand in hand with the sordid selfishness which is responsible for so very much of the misery of our civilization. The movement for the conservation of our natural resources, for the protection of our forests and of the wild life of the woods, the mountains and the coasts, is essentially a democratic ...
— Supplement to Animal Sanctuaries in Labrador • William Wood
... "the world goes forward through the heart rather than through the head. Happiness, to my mind, is emotional, not mental. And the movie has brought happiness to millions whose lives were formerly drab and sordid. I love to go into these little halls in out-of-the-way places, and see the men, women, and children packed there of an evening. Theatrical companies never reached the villages, and the men had no place but the saloon, the women no place but the kitchen ...
— Laugh and Live • Douglas Fairbanks
... From tenement sordid, from cheerless room, From bonds of toil, from care and annoy, From gable and roof's o'er-hanging gloom, From crowded alley and narrow street, And from the churches' awe-breathing night, All now have come forth into ...
— Faust Part 1 • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
... Can that with sordid selfishness His wide-expanded heart impress, Whose consciousness is loving; Who, giving life to all he spies, His joyous being multiplies, ...
— The Sylphs of the Season with Other Poems • Washington Allston
... the workmen to fair trial by providing of bail and legal defence. The first case that I bailed out was that of Lewis Lyons, sent to gaol for two months with hard labour by Mr. Saunders, of the Thames Police Court. Oh, the weary, sickening waiting in the court for "my prisoner," the sordid vice, the revolting details of human depravity to which my unwilling eyes and ears were witnesses. I carried Lyons off in triumph, and the Middlesex magistrates quashed the conviction, the evidence being pronounced by them to ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant
... usages afflicted my new sensitiveness. Not that I am peculiarly alert to beauty, nor claim superior perception—I am no artist, either by virtue of vision or power of expression—but that a certain stagnant obtuseness, a kind of sordid and conservative veneration of the ugly that the English favour, distressed and even tortured me in a way I had never realized formerly. They were so proud to live without perception. An artist was a curiosity, not a leader, far less a ...
— The Garden of Survival • Algernon Blackwood
... the things I hated during my lifetime have disappeared now—the crowding, the competition, the sordid self-interest, the bigotry, intolerance, prejudice. The anti-social aspects of society are gone. There is only the human race, living much closer to the concept of Utopia than I ever dreamed possible. You and the other ...
— This Crowded Earth • Robert Bloch
... assembly as an apostate liberal. "Surely," he said in his speech from the throne, "so great a meanness cannot enter your hearts, as once to suspect his Majesty's gracious regard of you, and performance with you, once you affix yourselves upon his grace." His object in this appeal was the sordid and commonplace one—to obtain more money without rendering value for it. He accordingly carried through four whole subsidies of 50,000 pounds sterling each in the session of 1634; and two additional subsidies of the same amount at the opening of the next session. The Parliament, having thus ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee
... years! It could never have flowed into the common and cold channel of ordinary affairs! It could never have been mingled with the petty cares and the low objects with which the loves of all who live long together in this sordid and most earthly earth are sooner or later blended! We could not have spared to others an atom of the great wealth of our affection. We were misers of every coin in that boundless treasury. It would have pierced me to the soul to have seen Isora smile upon another. I know not even, ...
— Devereux, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... and judgment, and feeling that he was incapable of deceiving them, they seemed willing, at all times and under all circumstances, to hazard their lives and fortunes in his support. They were generally young men of gallant bearing and disinterested views. No sordid calculations were made by them. No mercenary considerations influenced their conduct. They beheld in Colonel Burr a patriot hero of the revolution, who had commingled with their fathers in the battle-field, and who had perilled every thing in his country's cause. Such were his friends, and ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis
... not missed her, in terms so frank, so sweet, so confident of his inevitable answer, that all the enchantment of their delightful intimacy surged back in one quick tremor of happiness, washing from his heart and soul the clinging, sordid, evil things which were creeping closer, closer to torment ...
— The Younger Set • Robert W. Chambers
... dreams come true. Ah me! I hope he is not mistaken! What dreams of empires we have all put away, what air-castles we have seen melt and vanish because of the cost! A place where one may build and plant and renew by the processes of thought alone, unchecked by acreage boundaries or any sordid limitations of ways and means! I cannot think of a better or more reasonable hereafter than that. We get a glimpse of it here in the play of children—little children who perhaps have left the ...
— Dwellers in Arcady - The Story of an Abandoned Farm • Albert Bigelow Paine
... chancellor, dispensed justice, repressed the power of the nobles, encouraged and rewarded literary men, and endowed colleges. He was the most magnificent and the most powerful subject that England has ever seen. Even nobles were proud to join his train of dependants. There was nothing sordid or vulgar, however, in all his ostentation. Henry took pleasure in his pomp, for it was a reflection of the greatness of his ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... straggled on again, and in five minutes the place was deserted. As I looked around, I was surprised to see that even Godfrey had departed. There was something depressing about the jumble of chairs and tables, the litter of paper on the grass—something sordid, as of a banquet-hall deserted by ...
— The Gloved Hand • Burton E. Stevenson
... mule and a sturdy youth walking in the dust, his hand upon the beast's shoulder. With their serene and joy-illumined faces they somehow suggested the holy family, symbolical of all that was divine in a sordid world. ...
— Down the Mother Lode • Vivia Hemphill
... confidant, during the recent weeks of her approach to motherhood. He had learned to know the fineness of the man, the reverent housing he gave to his ideals, the care he lavished on their betterment; and just so surely he also knew the sordid selfishness of the woman, her lack of any ideals beyond the petty ones concerning food and raiment and mere personal advancement, her ruthless disregard of all that related to her husband's individual or professional welfare. ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... has deserted us, except, perhaps, La Plume. He is sordid; and I dismiss him. As for Clerveaux and his thousands, they have been weak, but not, perhaps, wicked. They may be recovered. I take the blame of their weakness upon myself. Would that I ...
— The Hour and the Man - An Historical Romance • Harriet Martineau
... law provided that a conviction must be grounded upon the oaths of two witnesses, it was needful for him, in order to the carrying on his intended mischief, to find out an associate who might be both sordid enough for such an employment and vicious enough to ...
— The History of Thomas Ellwood Written by Himself • Thomas Ellwood
... hot September day, Milly got back to the little box of a house on West Laurence Avenue, home seemed unendurably sordid and mean, stifling. Her father was sitting on the stoop in his shirt-sleeves, and had eased his feet by pushing off his shoes. Discipline had grown lax in Milly's absence. Her first sensation of revolt came ...
— One Woman's Life • Robert Herrick
... lost for want of contributing in time for its defence, and pleaded poverty to their generous emperor when he went from house to house to persuade them; and yet when the Turks took it, the prodigious immense wealth they found in it, made them wonder at the sordid temper ...
— An Essay Upon Projects • Daniel Defoe
... "Vain thought thou entertainest; The undiscerning life which made them sordid Now makes them unto ...
— Divine Comedy, Longfellow's Translation, Hell • Dante Alighieri
... the Night, merciful alone of all things to the ugly, draws her veil across its sordid features will it, as some fond old nurse, sought out in after years, open wide its arms to welcome me. Then the teeming life it now shelters, hushed for a time within its walls, the flickering flare from the "King of Prussia" opposite extinguished, ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... touched her. Isabel had gone through a great deal that day, but, with the cruel and sordid history of Hyde's married life fresh in her mind, none of the material horrors at Wancote had produced in her such a shuddering recoil as now. His wife had not been dead six months! ...
— Nightfall • Anthony Pryde
... disgustedly. "This sordid, sodden passion of yours love! Love lives only where there is sympathy, and respect, and mutual understanding. Do you mean to tell me that you have any respect for this woman? You know well you haven't a bit more respect ...
— A Fool There Was • Porter Emerson Browne
... right. Ten thousand weaknesses and absurdities might have been detected in the breasts of both; ten thousand vanities additional, possibly, in the breast of the woman. But the hard wrathful and sordid nature that had wrung as much work out of them as could be got in their best days, for as little money as could be paid to hurry on their worst, had never been so warped but that it knew their moral straightness and respected it. In its own despite, ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... his plea against the world, let us try to do the world a little justice too. It is far easier to know and honor a poet when his fame has taken shape in the spotlessness of marble, than when the actual man comes staggering before you, besmeared with the sordid stains of his daily life. For my part, I chiefly wonder that his recognition dawned as brightly as it did while he was still living. There must have been something very grand in his immediate presence, some strangely impressive characteristic in his natural behavior, to have caused him ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... products. He cannot get along by occasional recourse to paid critics or readers; he must himself have some idea what he is about. One partner, at least, in the firm, must be a man of culture. All must understand enough to appreciate their position, and know that he who, for his sordid aims, circulates poisonous trash amid a great and growing people, and makes it almost impossible for those whom Heaven has appointed as its instructors to do their office, are the worst of traitors, ...
— At Home And Abroad - Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... school-house and the two churches at one end, many saloons en route, and the gray rock dump and the chimneys and shaft-towers of the mine at the other, carried a ribbon of brightness through the sordid place. Women came to the doors to smile at the handsome young gentleman who took his hat off as if they were ladies; children ran by his side, and he knocked their caps over their eyes and talked nonsense to them, and swung on whistling. But at night, alone ...
— The Courage of the Commonplace • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... yet gentle government. The education must go on through youth, and must introduce him to industry not as drudgery but as fine achievement. So of every phase of humanity. The criminal is to be met not with mere penalty but with remedial treatment. In the sordid quarter must be planted a settlement which shall radiate true neighborhood. The state must be so ordered as best to promote the material good and the essential manhood of its citizens. The church must serve some distinct purpose—of ethical guidance, ...
— The Chief End of Man • George S. Merriam
... Sordid rooms and vacant courts, Replete in years gone by with beds where statesmen lay; Parched grass and withered banian trees, Where once were halls for song and dance! Spiders' webs the carved pillars intertwine, The green gauze now is also pasted on the straw windows! What ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... world of art a new gospel, a black gospel, a gospel in which everything is to be inverted and distorted. Whatsoever things are hideous, whatsoever things are of evil report, whatsoever things are sordid: if there be any unhealthiness or any ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster
... Ireland with a machine even more efficient than Grattan's Parliament. If so, we have every reason to suppose that within twenty years we shall have a richer Ireland, with a far greater taxable capacity. For can we doubt that the alchemy of liberty will here, too, even in this sordid realm of finance, repeat ...
— Home Rule - Second Edition • Harold Spender
... I got home from the inquest that I found old Isaac's basket waiting. I am not a crying woman, but I could hardly see my mother's picture for tears.—Well, after all, that is not the Brice story. I am not writing the sordid tragedy ...
— The Case of Jennie Brice • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... Nevertheless, we are again puzzled, when we attempt to realise the personality of a man whose imagination could soar to the mystical and philosophical conception of "Seraphita," which is full of religious poetry, and who yet had the power in "Cesar Birotteau" to invest prosaic and even sordid details with absolute verisimilitude, or in the "Contes Drolatiques" would write, in Old French, stories of Rabelaisian breadth and humour. The only solution of these contradictions is that, partly perhaps by reason of great physical strength, certainly because of an ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... nothing, going over in her mind all that had passed, suffering the pain of it. And she had loved him once! Those mystic moonlight meetings, his young arms about her, his lips against hers—oh, she had loved him! And then had come the commonplace, the everyday, sordid side of it, he the accepted lover, high in Lady Linden's favour, which meant the gradual awakening from a dream, ...
— The Imaginary Marriage • Henry St. John Cooper
... and their hymn to Labor was the only sound that broke the brooding silence. The room was scrupulously clean and tidy, and the inmates, wearing the regulation uniform of blue-striped homespun, appeared comparatively neat; but sordid, sullen, repulsively coarse and brutish were many of the countenances bent over the daily task, and now and then swift, furtive glances from downcast eyes betrayed ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... it is a sordid tale? Mate, I know a certain spot in this Land of Blossoms, where only foreigners are laid to rest, which bears testimony to a hundred of its kind—strange and pitiful destinies begun with high and brilliant hopes in their native ...
— The Lady and Sada San - A Sequel to The Lady of the Decoration • Frances Little
... came to an unlovely dreary-looking little village named Chilmorton. It was an exceptionally hot June day and I was consumed with thirst: never had I wanted tea so badly. Small gritstone-built houses and cottages of a somewhat sordid aspect stood on either side of the street, but there was no shop of any kind and not a living creature could I see. It was like a village of the dead or sleeping. At the top of the street I came to the church standing in the middle of its church yard with the public-house for ...
— A Traveller in Little Things • W. H. Hudson
... examined and appraised (assuming for the moment that we can indeed appraise without possessing ultimate norms) the cardinal question still waits for answer: To what are all these goods instrumental? What kind of life is best? What is it that permits man, with all his faults, his sordid appetites, his meannesses and gross dishonors, to hold his head erect as one yet worthy of the tribute implied in the fact that we ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... encourage me," he said, shaking his head. "It would be a dreadful thing if I should get sordid, you know. I'm not apt to stop half way in anything; and I'm awfully in earnest now about ...
— The Other Girls • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... cellars, and gradually the shelling crept up towards us. Slowly a solemn dread which soon moulded into a sordid fear took possession of my being. In a flash I began to devise a philosophy of death for my chances were fading with every crash. I took out my pocketbook, containing some letters from my mother and some personal things, and put them on one of the beams, so that, being in ...
— "Crumps", The Plain Story of a Canadian Who Went • Louis Keene
... had been thrown upon London streets, their vices and debauchery, by a sordid and rapacious mother. What the younger girl was then, the elder had been once; and what the elder then was, the younger must soon become. A melancholy prospect, but how surely to be realised; a tragic drama, but how often acted! Turn to the prisons and ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... of the world; Holy Sepulchre restored to Christianity, heathen converted, second coming of Christ; and decides that he himself is the man appointed by God and promised by the Prophets to perform these works. Good Heavens! in what an entirely dark and sordid stupor is our Christopher now sunk—a veritable slough and quag of stupor out of which, if he does not manage to flounder himself, no human hand ...
— Christopher Columbus, Complete • Filson Young
... simmered down into the materialist, the extraordinary to have become merged in the ordinary, for he found his famous ally no longer studying the beauties of Nature, but giving his whole attention to the sordid commonplaces of man. He was standing before a glaringly printed bill, one of many that were tacked upon the walls, which set forth in amazing pictures and double-leaded type the wonders that were to be seen daily and nightly at Olympia, where, for ...
— Cleek, the Master Detective • Thomas W. Hanshew
... imputation be retorted on those who wrongfully appropriate their neighbours' goods and put to death those who have done no wrong. These are they who cause our adversaries to grow and multiply, and who in very truth are traitors, not to their friends only, but to themselves, spurred on by sordid ...
— Hellenica • Xenophon
... have been made to speak, who could have revealed a rivalry concerning her betwixt the slayer and your brother. For the affair in which Peter Godolphin met his death was a pitifully, shamefully sordid one ...
— The Sea-Hawk • Raphael Sabatini
... the notary's as a timid woman; all at once she showed herself a grand, proud, and irritated lady. Never had Jacques Ferrand in his life met with a woman of so much insolent beauty, at once so bold and so noble. Although old, ugly, mean, and sordid, Jacques Ferrand was as capable as any one else of appreciating the style of beauty of Madame de Lucenay. His hatred and his rage against Saint Remy augmented with his admiration of the charming duchess. He thought to himself that this gentleman forger, who had almost kneeled ...
— The Mysteries of Paris V2 • Eugene Sue
... orthodox theology, you observe; no denial of the fall,—nor substitution of Bacterian birth for it. Nay, nearly Evangelical theology, in contempt for the human heart; but with deeper than Evangelical humility, acknowledging also what is sordid ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... witness and faithful servant was now gone for a soldier. In addition to all this, poor Mr. Bumpkin could not help recalling the happiness of his past life, his early struggles, his rigid self-denial, his pleasure as the modest savings accumulated—not so much occasioned by the sordid desire of wealth, as the nobler wish to be independent. Then there was Mrs. Bumpkin, who naturally crossed his mind at this miserable moment in his existence—at home by herself—faithful, hardworking woman, ...
— The Humourous Story of Farmer Bumpkin's Lawsuit • Richard Harris
... hint of the aristocrat in Lemuel Shackford's sordid life and person that no one suspected him of even self-esteem. He went as meanly dressed as a tramp, and as careless of contemporary criticism; yet clear down in his liver, or somewhere in his anatomy, he nourished an ...
— The Stillwater Tragedy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... genius with a sordid soul, whom a romantic spirit of adventure and a devouring thirst of gain equally stimulated to activity, had unexpectedly found his advancement at court impeded, after the first steps, usually accounted the most difficult, had been speedily and fortunately surmounted. Several conspiring ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... as well as the social passions of our nature into the firmest bands of a peaceable and orderly intercourse; they change the sources of discord into principles of quiet; they discipline the most ungovernable, they refine the grossest, and they exalt the most sordid propensities; so that they become the perpetual fountain of all that strengthens, and preserves, and adorns society; they sustain the individual, and they perpetuate the race. Around these institutions all ...
— A Discourse on the Study of the Law of Nature and Nations • James Mackintosh
... bothers you—it is What-will-people-think? An exploded theory, nothing more." Then she smiled at her sister winsomely. "You positively are the sweetest thing, Winnie. And your Burton I absolutely love. And your babies are the most irresistible angels that ever came to bless and—enliven—a sordid world. But you are a family by yourselves. You are used to doing what you want, and when you want, and how you want. I would be an awful nuisance. When Burton would incline to a quiet evening, I should have a party. When you and he would like to slip off to a movie, you ...
— Eve to the Rescue • Ethel Hueston
... a traffic in the human species, called Negroes, was introduced into England; which is one of the most odious and unnatural branches of trade the sordid and avaricious mind of mortals ever invented. It had indeed been carried on before this period by Genoese traders, who bought a patent from Charles the fifth, containing an exclusive right of carrying Negroes from the Portuguese settlements in Africa, to America and the West Indies; but ...
— An Historical Account Of The Rise And Progress Of The Colonies Of South Carolina And Georgia, Volume 1 • Alexander Hewatt
... yet none does it willingly, since it is both ridiculous and foolish for any to give themselves the trouble to make ready an ill dinner at home, when there is a much more plentiful one made ready for him so near hand. All the uneasy and sordid services about these halls are performed by their slaves; but the dressing and cooking their meat, and the ordering their tables, belong only to the women, all those of every family taking it by turns. They sit at three or more tables, according to ...
— Ideal Commonwealths • Various
... discomfort from the foundation to the chimney-tops; everywhere a pinching, narrow habit, scanty meals, and an air of sluttishness and dirt. In the first room there is a birth, in another a death, in a third a sordid drinking-bout, and the detective and the Bible-reader cross upon the stairs. High words are audible from dwelling to dwelling, and children have a strange experience from the first; only a robust soul, you ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... now plainly see must be abandoned as hopeless, in the case of Michael Vanstone's son. The father's habits of speculation had been the pivot on which the whole machinery of her meditated conspiracy had been constructed to turn. No such vantage-ground was discoverable in the doubly sordid character of the son. Noel Vanstone was invulnerable on the very point which had presented itself in his father ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... obloquy, caricature, burlesque, critical refutation and personal detraction follow unsparingly upon every expression, for instance, of his belief that romantic fiction is the highest form of fiction, and that the base, sordid, photographic, commonplace school of Tolstoy, Tourguenief, Zola, Hardy, and James, are unworthy a moment's comparison with the school of Rider Haggard. All this ought certainly to unmake the author in question, and strew his disjecta membra wide over the realm of oblivion. ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... that desecrated stair had struck my fancy; it seemed that all the water-supply of the city and all the soap in the State would scarce suffice to cleanse it, it had been so long a clearing-house of dingy secrets and a factory of sordid fraud. And now the corner was untenanted; some judge, like a careful housewife, had knocked down the web; and the bloated spider was scuttling elsewhere after new victims. I had of late (as I have said) insensibly taken sides ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of accepting one of the dazzling offers which repeatedly reached him from Russia, from America, from Vienna, Berlin, Leipzig, and other places. But he only saw in them lures to tempt him into degrading his art by commercial speculation with all its paraphernalia of advertisement and other sordid abominations. Never once did his courage falter; no thought of any concession, however small, however seemingly reasonable, which he held to be dishonourable to his art ever found a place in his mind. The surrender of Die Walkuere ...
— Wagner's Tristan und Isolde • George Ainslie Hight
... saviours of the world. As the visible world is sustained by the invisible, so men, through all their trials and sins and sordid vocations, are nourished by the beautiful visions of their solitary dreamers. Humanity cannot forget its dreamers; it cannot let their ideals fade and die; it lives in them; it knows them as they realities which it shall ...
— As a Man Thinketh • James Allen
... you get? Washington is a well-ordered community with a high moral tone—it is said to have fewer scandals than any city in the country—and there is no sordid commercial atmosphere to lower it. It is the great city of leisure in everything but legislation and paying calls; so it seems to me that it would be the last place to fondle in its bosom ninety distinguished ...
— Senator North • Gertrude Atherton
... intellectual refinement, are entitled to treat such men as Cobden, Bright, and Acland, with profound contempt, and dislike the notion of personal contact or collision with them, as representatives of the foulest state of ill feeling that can be generated in the worst manufacturing regions—of sordid avarice, selfishness, envy, and malignity; but they are active—ever up and doing, and steadily applying themselves, with palatable topics, to the corruption of the hearts of the working classes. So, unless the persons to whom we allude choose to cast aside their morbid ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXIX. January, 1844. Vol. LV. • Various
... if opponents you be, for the extreme kindness with which you have heard me. I have spoken, and I must speak in very strong terms of the acts done by my opponents. I will never say that they did it from passion; I will never say that they did it from a sordid love of office; I have no right to use such words; I have no right to entertain such sentiments; I repudiate and abjure them; I give them credit for patriotic motives—I give them credit for those patriotic motives which ...
— Successful Methods of Public Speaking • Grenville Kleiser
... for me might show Its sordid faith and selfish gloom, Yet 'mid life's wilderness to know For me that sweet flower shed its bloom, Was joy, was solace:—thou art gone— And hope forsook me, when the stone Sank darkly o'er ...
— The Life of Mansie Wauch - Tailor in Dalkeith, written by himself • David Macbeth Moir
... believe I should never have discovered had I not endeavored to take the place of the public towards him, and judge of him as I have seen them judge of others: I mean an apparent frigidity of manner which I feared the world would consider as the evidence of a cold and sordid heart. ...
— Discourse of the Life and Character of the Hon. Littleton Waller Tazewell • Hugh Blair Grigsby
... which "require no attendance at all." In March 1805 Lord Hardwicke, successor to Cornwallis, complained that his funds were so embarrassed by the various claims that the Irish Civil List had only L150 in hand.[571] These sordid bargainings cannot be said to amount to wholesale corruption, and did not much exceed those which usually were needed to carry an important Bill through that Parliament. On the whole Pitt and his colleagues might reflect with satisfaction that the use of bribes served to cleanse the political life ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... acceptation of the term means a man in such a moneyed position that he can place his wife considerably above that of her friends, so far as money goes. And that is a very good thing too, so far as it goes. But to be rich is not everything! The merely sordid, the entirely uneducated can rise to this height, but surely to make a good match one's husband should be the possessor of something more than money. He should be cultured, refined, intelligent, and therefore the girl who wishes to mate with him, should take care to be cultured ...
— How to Marry Well • Mrs. Hungerford
... however, were always satisfying, and even the sordid surroundings of the home were gilded by the warmth and glow of his imagination. Some day, somewhere he seemed to feel, there was a place for him to fill in the hearts of men. Vague stirrings told him of great future events which ...
— The Underworld - The Story of Robert Sinclair, Miner • James C. Welsh
... is nothing which makes us realize the magical rapidity of growth so much as to look from this steel city and to see the woods close by. For instead of being surrounded by the sordid congestion of an industrial center, the Fore River Shipyard is in the ...
— The Old Coast Road - From Boston to Plymouth • Agnes Rothery
... world is too much with us; late and soon, Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers: Little we see in nature that is ours; We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon! This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon; The Winds that will be howling at all hours And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers; For this, for every thing, we are out of tune; It moves us not—Great God! I'd rather be A Pagan ...
— Poems In Two Volumes, Vol. 1 • William Wordsworth
... her lips quiver; saw the tears start to her eyes. He knew that his association with the daughter of the landlord of the Thorn and Thistle was coarsening him, making him have lower standards of life, making everything poorer, more sordid. Whenever he was with Alice he wanted to be better and truer, and she always made him ashamed of ...
— Tommy • Joseph Hocking
... very ugly street in the ugliest outskirts of the town; he had to take a long walk through desolate districts (brick-yard, sordid pasture, degenerate village) before he could refresh his eyes with the rural scenery which was so great a joy to him as almost to be a necessity. The immediate vicinage offered nothing but monotone of grimy, lower middle-class dwellings, occasionally relieved by a public-house. ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... Eikonoclastes, despiser of sacred images—and thou, Urbanus, dweller in the sordid city. Forbear this adventure ...
— The Phoenix and the Carpet • E. Nesbit
... draped his nondescript uniform. Later events followed—his elder, vanished brother bullying him; the brief romance of his sister's courtship; the high, strident voice of his mother, that had always reminded him of her angry red nose—events familiar, sordid, unlovely, but now they seemed all of a piece of desirable, melancholy happiness; they endowed with a hitherto unsuspected value every board of the rough footing of the Makimmon dwelling, every rood of the poor, rocky soil, the weedy ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... phrase, but you will help us to let in the light. Remember," he went on, "that there may be moments of discouragement. Much of the material we have to use, the people we have to influence, the way we have to travel, may seem sordid, but the light is shining there all the time, Tallente. We are ...
— Nobody's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... sluggishness of soul, and made her alive to a feeling of trust and support, a frame of mind ever repenting, ever striving onwards. Thus she went bravely through the very class of trials that she would once have thought merely lowering, inglorious, and devoid of poetry. What would have been in itself sordid, gained a sweetness from the light of love and duty, and never in all her dreamy ease had she been as cheerful and lighthearted as in the midst of hardship and rigid economy. Her equable temper and calm composure came to her aid; and where a more nervous and excitable woman would have preyed ...
— Dynevor Terrace (Vol. II) • Charlotte M. Yonge
... assured by Mr. Leslie Stephen that his father, Sir James Stephen, was employed at the time to make careful inquiry, and that he and other eminent lawyers came to the conclusion that it was one long tissue of lies or hallucinations. The subject is sufficiently sordid, and indeed almost redundant in any biography of the Brontes; but it is of moment, because Charlotte Bronte and her sisters were so thoroughly persuaded that a woman was at the bottom of their brother's ruin; and this belief Charlotte impressed upon all the friends who were ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... life on the full tide of an enthusiasm that did not begin to ebb till near the close of his first semester. He lived in a new world, one removed a million miles from the sordid one through which he had fought his way so many years. All the idealism of his nature went out in awe and veneration for his college. It stood for something he could not phrase, something spiritually fine and intellectually strong. When he thought of the noble ...
— The Vision Spendid • William MacLeod Raine
... to strike me sometimes that old Lenman was just like one of his own melons—the pale-fleshed English kind. His life, apathetic and motionless, hung in a net of gold, in an equable warm ventilated atmosphere, high above sordid earthly worries. The cardinal rule of his existence was not to let himself be 'worried.'... I remember his advising me to try it myself, one day when I spoke to him about Kate's bad health, and her need ...
— The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton, Part 1 (of 10) • Edith Wharton
... unsuspected state of affluence. Espinosa must home with Gregorio. Gregorio's wife would be charmed to renew his acquaintance, and to hear from his own lips of his improved and prosperous state. Gregorio would take no refusal, and in the end Espinosa, yielding to his insistence, went with him to the sordid quarter where Gregorio ...
— The Historical Nights Entertainment, Second Series • Rafael Sabatini
... the mart where Selfishness For Fame ephemeral strives, and sordid gain; Thy ill-requited toil till thou hadst earned The right to raise thy potent voice within A nation's forum, facing all the world; And then, achievement such as few have known, A mighty people placing in thy hand A sceptre ...
— The Poets' Lincoln - Tributes in Verse to the Martyred President • Various
... language that is befitting. In such a presence sound is discord, for such enchantment as it begets cannot be made articulate. Its influence steals into the senses and lifts the spirit up. To defile or despoil such beauty would be to desecrate a shrine. But the sordid man sees in this symphony of color nothing else than a promise of fruit. His response is wholly physical, not spiritual at all. His spiritual sense seems atrophied and he can do nothing but estimate the bushels of fruit. He ...
— The Reconstructed School • Francis B. Pearson
... quiet life in the Sunshine and Monte Cristo began to grow in sweetness beside this sordid and gilded existence in the Apollo. The massive portals and towering masonry which at first had been as a solid foundation for genuine respectability began to seem gloomy and overpowering, and lacking in the true home spirit we had found elsewhere. The smartly ...
— The Van Dwellers - A Strenuous Quest for a Home • Albert Bigelow Paine
... Reason and intelligence had their say. He knew he had become morbid, sick, rancorous, base, obsessed with this iniquity and his passion to stamp on it, as if it were a venomous serpent. He would have liked to do some magnificent and awful deed, that would show this little, narrow, sordid world at home the truth, and burn forever on their memories the spirit of a soldier. He had made a sacrifice that few understood. He had no reward except a consciousness that grew more luminous and glorious in its lonely light as time went on. He had endured the uttermost ...
— The Day of the Beast • Zane Grey
... decrepit hireling' (ib. p. 472); and as 'one of the subordinate crew whom to name is to stigmatize' (ib. ii. 5). In his Memoirs of the Reign of George III, iv. 297, he says:—'With a lumber of learning and some strong parts Johnson was an odious and mean character. His manners were sordid, supercilious, and brutal; his style ridiculously bombastic and vicious, and, in one word, with all the pedantry he had all the gigantic littleness ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 4 (of 6) • Boswell
... New York that Autumn, it was no longer as a young man with eyes aflame with hope and expectation and face alight with enthusiasm. The eager recruit had changed to the veteran. He had had experience of a world where men lived and died for the most sordid of all rewards—money, ...
— Gordon Keith • Thomas Nelson Page
... will be hinted, if not plainly asserted; and she knows it. And that being so, is it difficult to understand why she should refuse to allow you to be publicly associated with her? To run the risk of dragging your honourable name into the sordid transactions of the police-court or the Old Bailey? To invest it, perhaps, with ...
— The Vanishing Man • R. Austin Freeman
... any heroic action is difficult to manage; and the sublime sacrifice of her pride and all the conventional proprieties which Marcia had made in giving herself to Bartley was inevitably tried by the same sordid tests that every married life is ...
— A Modern Instance • William Dean Howells
... wholly foreign and out of place there. Now it is a soft voice and courteous manners in a slum; again it is a longing for a life of freedom and equality in a member of a royal family that has known nothing but sordid slavery for centuries. Or, in the petty conventionality of a prosperous middle- or upper-class community you come upon one who dreams—perhaps vaguely but still longingly—of an existence where love and ideas shall elevate and glorify life. In spite of her training, in spite ...
— The Price She Paid • David Graham Phillips
... even write to-night," said Elsie. "Everything looks so sordid and miserable, and the town here is ...
— Mr. Hogarth's Will • Catherine Helen Spence
... but the philanthropist erects his dams everywhere to stem the foul torrents and turn them aside. The Infidel plants unbelief with reckless hand far and wide, but the Christian scatters the "Word" broadcast over the land. The sordid shipowner strews the coast with wreck and murdered fellow-creatures; but, thank God, the righteous shipowner—along with other like-minded men—sends forth a fleet of lifeboats from almost every ...
— Saved by the Lifeboat • R.M. Ballantyne
... to. This mean lord had been dreaming overnight of a silver bason and cup, and when Timon's servant was announced his sordid mind suggested to him that this was surely a making out of his dream, and that Timon had sent him such a present. But when he understood the truth of the matter, and that Timon wanted money, the quality of his faint and ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... nicknamed Salinator, and condemned by "the majesty" of the people! He had formerly done his duty to the country, but the salter was now his reward! He retired from Rome, let his beard grow, and by his sordid dress and melancholy air evinced his acute sensibility. The Romans at length wanted the salter to command the army—as an injured man, he refused—but he was told that he should bear the caprice of the Roman people with the tenderness ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... set poor Dreyfus free, the due amends to make, Regain the public confidence by owning their mistake, And cease for popularity by sordid means to bid? These are the things they might have done; but ...
— Lyra Frivola • A. D. Godley
... the next morning a changed creature from the one who had fallen asleep in my trundle-bed. In a single hour I had awakened to the sharp sense of contrast, to the knowledge that all ways of life were not confined to the sordid circle in which I lived. Outside the poverty, the ugliness, the narrow streets, rose the spiked wall of the enchanted garden; and when I shut my eyes tight, I could see still the half-bared elms arching against ...
— The Romance of a Plain Man • Ellen Glasgow
... was very stout, her face was red and her voice loud. But there was something real about Lily. And she was fond of children. She liked me. She went out of her lazy way to teach me wisdom—oh, yes, it was wisdom," in answer to Spence's horrified exclamation, "hard, sordid wisdom, the only wisdom which would have helped me through the back alleys of those days. I am unspeakably grateful to Lily. She spared me much, and once she saved me—I can't tell you about ...
— The Window-Gazer • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... the flotsam and jetsam cast up by our sea of troubles. Until then I did not realise how many carcases, fragments of broken weapons, empty cartridge cases, broken bottles, torn clothing, and a hundred other things were lying about. It was a sordid picture. Presently the British Minister, in his capacity of commander-in-chief and protector of the other Ministers, came out and took his seat by the side of his guest, an interpreter standing beside ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... just remarks from the modern improvements of that country, both in arts and agriculture, where premiums obtained long before they were heard of with us. The manners of the wild natives, their superstitions, their prejudices, their sordid way of life, will extort from him many useful reflections. He should also take with him an able draughtsman, for he must by no means pass over the noble castles and seats, the extensive and picturesque lakes and waterfalls, and the lofty stupendous mountains, so little known, and ...
— The Natural History of Selborne, Vol. 1 • Gilbert White
... as he read out loudly, in place of the expected sonnet, these words: "Quinine prepared by Cuminat at Serrieres"! And then our feeling toward Serrieres grew much less warm. Yet I am not sure that Cuminat was moved only by the sordid wish to advertise at our expense his preparation of quinine. I am disposed to credit him in part with a helpful desire to check the fever rising in the blood of our boat-load of Southerners who each moment—as they slid down that hill-side of a river—were taking ...
— The Christmas Kalends of Provence - And Some Other Provencal Festivals • Thomas A. Janvier
... Hungarian wine were freely indulged in, followed by punch. The host was highly complimented; but with these praises were mingled energetic reproaches on the doubtful whiteness of the napery, General Dorsenne excusing himself on the score of the ill-humor and sordid economy of the concierge, who was a fit exponent of the scant courtesy shown by the princess. "That is unendurable!" cried the joyous guests in chorus. "This hostess who so completely ignores us must be called to order. Come, M——, take pen and paper and write ...
— The Private Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Constant
... this is the calculated cost of state-liveries, of men measured by a standard, for a Hercules in the hall, or an Adonis for the drawing-room; but at those times, when the domestic ceases to be an object in the public eye, he sinks into an object of sordid economy, or of merciless caprice. His personal feelings are recklessly neglected. He sleeps where there is neither light nor air; he is driven when he is already exhausted; he begins the work of midnight, and is confined for hours with ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... overhead. The prospect alarmed me, for it seemed to me that this was not a likely world for adventures; nor was I reassured by the sight of the town, whose one long street of low, old-fashioned houses struck me as being mean and sordid. I was conscious that the place had an unpleasant smell, and I was already driven to thinking of my pocket-money and my play-box—agreeable thoughts which I had made up my mind in the train to reserve carefully for possible hours of unhappiness. But the low roof of the omnibus was like ...
— The Ghost Ship • Richard Middleton
... the day stole into Mrs. Procter's heart. She breathed in the invigorating air deeply. Cares seemed to fall from her. Materialities were banished into the background. She looked at her children as they went singing down the road. She had meant to bind them to sordid tasks within four walls when a jewel of a day beckoned to all! She visualized her house clean and in perfect order, but the children cross, she herself irritable and tired out, and wondering a little ...
— Suzanna Stirs the Fire • Emily Calvin Blake
... sank the sun, Briton and Breton wrought, And Great and Little Britain won The noblest fight ere fought. It was a sailors' victory O'er pride and sordid gain. God grant for ever peace at sea Between ...
— Legends & Romances of Brittany • Lewis Spence
... lives; for, though in the gift of the first lord of the treasury, do we not owe them to the King who made him so? Did not the late King make my father an earl, and dismiss him with a pension of 4000 pounds a-year for his life? Could he or we not think these ample rewards? What rapacious sordid wretches must he and we have been, and be, could we entertain such an idea? As far have we all been from thinking him neglected by his country. Did not his country see and know these rewards? and could it think these rewards inadequate? Besides, Sir, great as ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... and the drama have a similar stimulating and refining influence when they are not debauched by a sordid commercialism. They strengthen the noblest impulses, stir the blood to worthy deeds by their rhythmic or pictorial influence, unite individual hearts in worship or play, throb in unison with the sentiments that through all time have swayed human life. Often they have catered ...
— Society - Its Origin and Development • Henry Kalloch Rowe
... his chamber was poverty-stricken, but as his poverty was noble, his garret was neat. The den upon which his eye now rested was abject, dirty, fetid, pestiferous, mean, sordid. The only furniture consisted of a straw chair, an infirm table, some old bits of crockery, and in two of the corners, two indescribable pallets; all the light was furnished by a dormer window of four panes, draped with spiders' webs. Through this aperture there penetrated just enough ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... rightful heirs from their succession; and all the wealth being centered upon a few, the generality were poor and miserable. Honorable pursuits, for which there was no longer leisure, were neglected; and the state was filled with sordid business, and with hatred and envy of the rich. There did not remain above seven hundred of the old Spartan families, of which perhaps one hundred might have estates in land, the rest were destitute alike of wealth and of honor, were tardy ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... and on the stage especially reality stinks in our nostrils. The poor are vulgar, and in our franker moments we confess our wish to have nothing to do with them. The middle classes are sordid; we have enough of them in real life, and no desire to observe their doings at the theatre, particularly when we wear our evening clothes. But when a dramatist presents duchesses to our admiring eyes, we feel at last in our element; we watch the acts of persons whom ...
— The Land of The Blessed Virgin; Sketches and Impressions in Andalusia • William Somerset Maugham
... the appointment, godfather," he lied, "and I have a superstition against toasts." He had no wish to remain. He was angry with Aline for her smiling reception of M. de La Tour d'Azyr and the sordid bargain he saw her set on making. He was suffering from the ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini
... Discord sordid Interest breeds! Oh! that I had shar'd a levell'd State of Life, With quiet humble Maids, exempt from Pride, And Thoughts of Worldly Dross that marr their Joys, In Any Sphere, but a Distinguished Heiress, To raise me Envy, and oppose my Love. Fortune, Fortune, Why did you ...
— The Fine Lady's Airs (1709) • Thomas Baker
... over the loss of his uncle. Sigurd had been as a father to him, had lifted him up out of his sordid life of thraldom and raised him to his present high position in the favour of the court. And now he was dead and there was an end of all his ...
— Olaf the Glorious - A Story of the Viking Age • Robert Leighton
... sense of desire, of greed, of all the baser passions, was profound: he had the terrible logic of animalism. Love-making, drunkenness, cheating, quarreling, the mere idleness of sitting drowsily in a chair, the gross life of the farmyard and the fields, civic dissensions, the sordid provincial dance of the seven deadly sins, he saw in the same direct, unilluminating way as the Dutch painters; finding, indeed, no beauty in any of these things, but getting his beauty in the deft arrangement of them, in the mere act of placing them in a picture. ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... Philosophy, coming forth therefrom as a champion in defence of a much misunderstood class. This ingenious work, entitled "Alchemy and the Alchemists," published in 1857, was written to prove that the alchemists were not foolish seekers for sordid gold, nor vain believers in the elixir of life, but philosophers of deep thought and high aims, who, in days when a man dared not say his soul was his own, veiled in mystic language, perfectly understood by each other, theological ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 97, November, 1865 • Various
... unsophisticated mind could descry beauty in the form of a hill, and grandeur in the foam of the wave, and elegance in the weeping birch, as it dipped its now almost leafless boughs in the mountain stream. These simple pleasures, unknown alike to the sordid mind and vitiated taste, are ever exquisitely enjoyed by the refined yet unsophisticated child ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier
... of the world. His little mountain-side had been almost an Olympus, over the edge of which he saw, smiling, the bolts hurled in the valleys of man below. Had his ten years of renunciation, of thought, of devotion to an ideal, of living scorn of a sordid world, been in vain? Up from the world had come to him the youngest and beautifulest—fairer than Edith—one and three-seventh times lovelier than the seven-years-served Rachel. So the hermit ...
— Options • O. Henry
... slightest suspicion of using his great office to acquire wealth. They say we are rude and vulgar; but Mr. McKinley was as courteous and as gentle as the most fastidious could wish. They say we are ignorant of all but the most sordid affairs; but he was thoroughly educated, and probably there are not half a dozen statesmen in Europe who know as much of his country as he knew of theirs. They point with a sneer at the divorce laws of some of our States, and infer therefrom the direst ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 4 of 8 • Various
... round that bare and sordid little room with horror. What strange fate had cast her up there? I asked her, and she told me her story. ...
— The Broken Road • A. E. W. Mason
... adventure. One night, he had a dream of dalliance in sleep and told his mother, who rejoiced and told his father, saying, 'Fain would I find him a wife, for he is now apt for marriage.' Quoth Khalid, 'He is so foul of favour and withal so evil of odour, so sordid and churlish, that no woman would accept of him.' And she answered, 'We will buy him a slave- girl.' So it befell, for the accomplishment of that which God the Most High had decreed, that the Amir and his son went down, on the same day as Jaafer and Alaeddin, ...
— The Book Of The Thousand Nights And One Night, Volume III • Anonymous
... story was, in its pathetic limitations of plans and hopes, it did not seem to her intolerable, or sordid, or depressing, as it once would have seemed. Just as she possessed somewhere in herself a new strength to endure whatever misfortune might come to her, so she had an instinctive feeling of how others ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... no flowers on it because of the day, and see the Paymaster snuff above his tepid second day's broth, and hear the Cornal snort because the mince-collops his toothless-ness demanded on other days of the week were not available to-day, would be, somehow, to bring a sordid, unable, drab and weary world close up on a vision of joy and beauty. He felt it in his flesh, in some flutter of the breast It was better to be out here in the sun among the chattering people, to have nothing between him and Glen Shira but a straight sweep of wind-blown highway. From the steps ...
— Gilian The Dreamer - His Fancy, His Love and Adventure • Neil Munro
... also, in the great distress they were in, rush into the very same houses two or three times in one and the same day. Moreover, their hunger was so intolerable, that it obliged them to chew every thing, while they gathered such things as the most sordid animals would not touch, and endured to eat them; nor did they at length abstain from girdles and shoes; and the very leather which belonged to their shields they pulled off and gnawed: the very wisps of old hay became food to some; and some gathered up fibres, ...
— The Wars of the Jews or History of the Destruction of Jerusalem • Flavius Josephus
... sits Bogle, cold, sordid, slow, smouldering, and takes your money. Behind a mountain of toothpicks he makes your change, files your check, and ejects at you, like a toad, a word about the weather. Beyond a corroboration of his meteorological statement you would better not venture. You are not Bogle's friend; you are ...
— The Four Million • O. Henry
... dissoluteness of manners, alike common to Church and laity, the opposite virtues were, as is invariable in such epochs of society, carried by the few purer natures into heroic extremes. "And as gold, the adorner of the world, springs from the sordid bosom of earth, so chastity, the image of gold, rose bright and unsullied from the clay of ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... man so great and good, Once more in his home-country stood, Strange that the sordid clowns should show A dull desire to have ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... deprecated as an intellectual black sheep who was likely at any moment to disgrace the flock by bleating in meter. The Tennessee Fraysers were a practical folk—not practical in the popular sense of devotion to sordid pursuits, but having a robust contempt for any qualities unfitting a man for ...
— Can Such Things Be? • Ambrose Bierce
... before he had hardened his heart; those that the second spirit had shown were scenes in the lives of people who do something for others and enjoy themselves in the true Christmas spirit; those that the last spirit had shown were the sordid scenes which would be sure to come if he did not change his attitude toward life. The last scenes shown him by the third spirit furnish a ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: Literature • Ontario Ministry of Education
... Under the sordid circumstances of her life it was quite possible that he was the first presentable man she had ever met, and the thought that she had set out with the primitive instincts and methods of a Romany girl to take him by fair means or foul roused in him a wild desire to ...
— The Opened Shutters • Clara Louise Burnham
... not fear the judgment of history. They have often, in my opinion, misconceived the true interests of their country, but they have been faithful to those interests as they understood them, and have proved themselves notably superior to sordid personal aims. These gifts and virtues are not common, but still rarer is it to see such gifts and virtues cursed with the doom of futility. The influence of the Irish political leaders has neither advanced ...
— Ireland In The New Century • Horace Plunkett
... presently, but not here; I really could not do it in surroundings like these. I've tried everything, even to money-making, but that is the worst and most unsatisfactory process of the lot. There is nothing so sordid as that." ...
— The Mystery of the Four Fingers • Fred M. White
... cure—and acquire it much more quickly—under some hard-working practitioner among the East-End poor of London; and that, as he very truly pointed out, was the great desideratum in such a case as Dick's, far outweighing the extra hard work and the sordid surroundings to which Mrs Maitland had at first so strenuously objected. Moreover, Dick agreed with the solicitor; and in the end the maternal objections were overcome, careful enquiries were instituted, ...
— The Adventures of Dick Maitland - A Tale of Unknown Africa • Harry Collingwood
... of Jesus, purest Heart, A Shrine of holiness Thou art; Cleanse Thou, my heart, so sordid cold, And stained ...
— The St. Gregory Hymnal and Catholic Choir Book • Various
... the modern improvements of that country, both in arts and agriculture, where premiums obtained long before they were heard of with us. The manners of the wild natives, their superstitions, their prejudices, their sordid way of life, will extort from him many useful reflections. He should also take with him an able draughtsman: for he must by no means pass over the noble castles and seats, the extensive and picturesque lakes and water-falls, and the lofty stupendous ...
— The Natural History of Selborne • Gilbert White
... Nevada and the ocean. It was a scene of peaceful beauty, well fitted to call forth the adoration of man to the great and good Creator. Doubtless there were some whose hearts rose that night above the sordid thoughts of gain and gold; but few such were recognisable by their fellow-men, compared with the numerous votaries of ...
— The Golden Dream - Adventures in the Far West • R.M. Ballantyne
... the brightness of your youth fading away in the life I have described. But I think of myself, too; comforts, luxuries, indulgences, I value highly. Since my father's death I have tasted enough of poverty to know something of its bitterness; and to be doomed to it for life is appalling to me. The sordid cares of narrow means are so distasteful, that I cannot contemplate them with any degree of patience. After a day of exhausting mental effort, to return to a dingy, ill-furnished home,—to relieve professional labors by calculations about the gas-bill or the butcher's ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... integrity, had now become the catchword of a mendicant—the cant or slang, as it were, of an impostor. He was not ashamed to beg in its name—to ask for whiskey in its name—and to sink, in its name, to the most sordid supplications. ...
— Phelim O'toole's Courtship and Other Stories • William Carleton
... with lurid tragic touches, of society in the French capital in the early decades of the nineteenth century. The leading character in this story is, of course, Old Goriot, and the passion which dominates him is that of paternity. In the picture which Balzac draws of Parisian life, from the sordid boarding-house to the luxurious mansions of the gilded aristocracy in the days of the Bourbon Restoration, the author exhibits that tendency to over-description for which he was criticised by his ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol. I • Various
... have passed to that bourne whence no traveller returns? Answer me: Are not theirs the loftiest names inscribed on your marble catalogues of the nations?" He let his voice out startlingly and shouted: "CREEPS there a creature of the earth with spirit so sordid as to doubt it, to doubt who heads those gilded rolls! If there be, then I say to him, 'Beware!' For the names I see written above me to-day on the immemorial canopy of heaven begin with that of the spotless knight, the unsceptred and uncrowned king, ...
— In the Arena - Stories of Political Life • Booth Tarkington
... apparently, with the assistance of a knife and fork. A candle stood in an empty soda-water bottle on each side of the looking-glass, and there was no other light. On the floor a pair of stays, old and soiled, sprawled with unconcern. The place looked sordid and miserable, and Hilda sitting in the middle of it, still in the yellow wig and painted face of Mrs. Halliday, all wrong at that range, gave it a note of false artifice, violent and grievous. Stephen stood ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
... interlude amid the sordid cares of driving the workmen along! I am getting terribly tired ...
— Juliana Horatia Ewing And Her Books • Horatia K. F. Eden
... beggar!" Cried Pollnitz; "always demanding more than one is willing to accord you. Learn from your noble master that there is nothing more pitiful, more sordid than gold, and that those only are truly noble, who serve others for honor's sake, and ...
— Frederick The Great and His Family • L. Muhlbach
... his ends. As we have already said, Duffel had taken a fancy to Miss Mandeville, with whom he was better pleased than with any other lady of his acquaintance. He called his passion love, but it was too sordid and selfish to be worthy of a name so sacred. More than once he called to see Eveline, and though she treated him civilly, he saw plainly that she had an aversion for his society, and that it cost her an effort to treat him with politeness, even though it was formal; so, as we were saying, he ...
— Eveline Mandeville - The Horse Thief Rival • Alvin Addison
... with honest work and tears and pleasure! A broad, good world to live and work in, to suffer or die, if God so willed it,—God, the good! She entered the vast, dingy factory; the woollen dust, the clammy air of copperas were easier to breathe in; the cramped, sordid office, the work, mere trifles to laugh at; and she bent over the ledger with its hard lines in earnest good-will, through the slow creeping hours of the long day. She noticed that the unfortunate chicken was making its heart glad over a piece of fresh ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 49, November, 1861 • Various
... for one kind of labour, and full encouragement for one kind of talents, is fraud and discouragement to others. Many of the great offices have much duty to do, and much expense of representation to maintain. A secretary of state, for instance, must not appear sordid in the eyes of the ministers of other nations; neither ought our ministers abroad to appear contemptible in the courts where they reside. In all offices of duty, there is, almost necessarily, a great neglect of all domestic affairs. A person in ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... dusty plain, and so presently came to the old frontier fort. Here, then, was civilization—the stage coach, the new telegraph wire, men and women, weekly or daily touch with the world, that prying curiosity regarding the affairs of others which we call news. To me it seemed tawdry, sordid, worthless, after that which I had left. The noise seemed insupportable, the food distasteful. I could tolerate no roof, and in my own ragged robes slept on the ...
— The Way of a Man • Emerson Hough
... unsanctified and unholy. It was a monstrous tragedy, this union, presented on a stage of ashes over a volcano. (Unions in polite society, where forms are observed, laws obeyed and customs followed, but where the moving impulse is sordid, where the marriage is for money or for social position, do they, too, not drift toward mutual hate and abhorrence, to divorce or death? I only ask the question. There may be more Georges and Hippolytes in the world than we care to admit). When at last he ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... why he did this. Until he met Mrs. Clarke near the British Embassy he had scarcely been aware how sordid and ugly and common under its small ostentations Hughes's Hotel was. She made him see the dreariness of his surroundings, although she had never seen them; she made him again aware of things. That she was able to affect him strongly, although he did not ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... Nay, verily, that notwithstanding, had the adversary but fastened the supposition of guilt upon me, my long trials might by this time have put it beyond dispute; for I have not hitherto been so sordid, as to stand to a doctrine right or wrong; much less when so weighty an argument as above eleven years' imprisonment, is continually dogging of me to weigh and pause, and pause again, the grounds and foundation ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... workmen to fair trial by providing of bail and legal defence. The first case that I bailed out was that of Lewis Lyons, sent to gaol for two months with hard labour by Mr. Saunders, of the Thames Police Court. Oh, the weary, sickening waiting in the court for "my prisoner," the sordid vice, the revolting details of human depravity to which my unwilling eyes and ears were witnesses. I carried Lyons off in triumph, and the Middlesex magistrates quashed the conviction, the evidence being pronounced by them to be "confusing, contradictory, and worthless." ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant
... some portion of sorrow or suffering to temper the happiness I have enjoyed, and teach me the much-required lesson, that "here we have no abiding place". I have lived to see bright hopes fade—high and noble aspirations fall to the ground, checked 23by the sordid policy of worldly men—and the proud hearts which gave them birth become gradually debased to the level of those around them, or break in the unequal struggle—and these things have pained me. I have beheld those dear to me stretched upon the bed ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... heap of forgotten finery: had she lately lived among more prosperous surroundings, she might have glanced contemptuously at this collection of tawdry flummery; but, if her sordid struggles to make both ends meet had taught her nothing else, they had given her a keen sympathy for all forms of endeavour, however humble, to escape, if only for a crowded hour, from the debasing round of uncongenial toil. Consequently, she looked with soft eyes at the pile of unclaimed ...
— Sparrows - The Story of an Unprotected Girl • Horace W. C. Newte
... me, lady, I have learned in good time To save myself misery—you, sordid crime. I will garner the love that so lately was thine For one who can give me a love true as mine; But learn ere we part, Edith, peerless and fair, Uncle John has just died and has left me ...
— The Poetical Works of Mrs. Leprohon (Mrs. R.E. Mullins) • Rosanna Eleanor Leprohon
... to come from princes and all princes from slaves. But fortune has turned all things topsy-turvy, in a long story of revolutions. It is most certain that our beginning had nothing before it, and our ancestors were some of them splendid, others sordid, as it happened. We have lost the memorials of our extraction; and, in truth, it matters not whence we come, but whither we go. Nor is it any more to our honor the glory of our predecessors, than it is to their shame the wickedness of their posterity. We are all of us composed of the same elements; ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... flash his gloom departed. He was gay, desperate, and free of all hampering doubts. In such a mood Nella-Rose lost all fear of him and walked by his side as complacently as if the one minister in her sordid little world had with all his strange authority said his sacred ...
— The Man Thou Gavest • Harriet T. Comstock
... natural enemy Peter Smallbones are not all equally well contrived, and they become a little wearisome by repetition; but a general atmosphere of diablerie is very effectively produced by their means. Some such element of unreality is absolutely demanded to relieve the sordid and brutal details by which the main plot is worked out; and it must be admitted that in certain passages—the death-struggle between Smallbones and the lieutenant's mother, the discovery of the woman's body, and the descriptions of kisses between Corporal Van Spitter and the Frau Vandersloosh—Marryat's ...
— Snarleyyow • Captain Frederick Marryat
... shall avoid us. We will dog you now through life—not by lies or subterfuges, as you say, but openly and honestly. It is YOU who need to slink and cower, not we. The prosecutor need not descend to the sordid shifts of ...
— Hilda Wade - A Woman With Tenacity Of Purpose • Grant Allen
... Bey, who said, "While the soul is in my mouth this country shall never be given to the Russian; when I die, I can no longer help it." The Circassian chieftain's blunt honesty and simple love of truth, his freedom from sordid selfishness and detestation of unmanly indulgences, give to his manners that stamp of heroism which all men admire in a Sickingen or a Cid. Even his vices, his hatred of an enemy, his contempt for a foreigner, his jealousy of rivals, his implacable love of revenge, have in them a dash of barbaric ...
— Life of Schamyl - And Narrative of the Circassian War of Independence Against Russia • John Milton Mackie
... thus joyfully presaged, is to be won by the submission of an inchoate State to a form of government subjecting its inhabitants to institutions abhorrent to their souls and fatal to their prosperity, forced upon them at the point of the bowie-knife and the muzzle of the revolver by hordes of sordid barbarians from a hostile soil, their natural and necessary enemies. And the sweet harbinger of this blessed peace, the halcyon which broods over the stormy waves and tells of the calm at hand, is a bribe so cunningly devised that its contrivers firmly believe ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... home, and heard our people say such fine things of the power, glory, magnificence, and trade of the Chinese; because, as far as I saw, they appeared to be a contemptible herd or crowd of ignorant, sordid slaves, subjected to a government qualified only to rule such a people; and were not its distance inconceivably, great from Muscovy, and that empire in a manner as rude, impotent, and ill governed as they, ...
— The Further Adventures of Robinson Crusoe • Daniel Defoe
... into the court, and occasionally an old woman, or bustling, shabbily-dressed man would shuffle across the pavement; the faces at the windows seemed altogether sordid and every-day faces, so that I came to regard the quarters of the abbe, notwithstanding the quaint-fashioned windows and dim stairway, and suspicious quiet, a very matter of fact, and so, ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various
... learning something of history, of philosophy, of art and beauty. They liked it. They felt they were hearing something worth while, as indeed they were, and they forgot all about Angelo and the unfortunate Crocedoro in their admiration for Mr. Tutt, who had lifted them out of the dingy sordid courtroom into the sunlight of the Golden Age. And as he led them through Greek and Roman literature, through the early English poets, through Shakespeare and the King James version, down to John Galsworthy and Rupert Brooke, he brought something that ...
— Tutt and Mr. Tutt • Arthur Train
... me. In our operations against the Chinese murder-group two years before, we had had an ally in the enemy's camp—Karamaneh, the beautiful slave, whose presence in those happenings of the past had coloured the sometimes sordid drama with the opulence of old Arabia; who had seemed a fitting figure for the romances of Bagdad during the Caliphate—Karamaneh, whom I had thought sincere, whose inscrutable Eastern soul I had presumed, fatuously, to have laid bare ...
— The Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer
... two characteristic peculiarities of any Californian assemblage in 1856,—it was quick to take a hint, and generous to the point of prodigality in its response to any charitable appeal. No matter how sordid or avaricious the individual, he could not resist the infection of sympathy. I doubled the points of my handkerchief into a bag, dropped a coin into it, and, without a word, passed it to the judge. He quietly added a twenty-dollar gold-piece, and passed it to the next. When it was returned to me, ...
— Tales of the Argonauts • Bret Harte
... ten-league boots, saw them out of town a week later in a cheap but sparkling new roadster, saw them through the chaotic unintelligible Bronx, then over a wide murky district which alternated cheerless blue-green wastes with suburbs of tremendous and sordid activity. They left New York at eleven and it was well past a hot and beatific noon when ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... humanity, and the tears that spring from their breasts are those which 'sacred pity has engendered.' They are a mixed multitude melted Into sympathy by remote, imaginary events, not a combination cemented by petty views, and sordid, selfish prejudices. ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... assimilate his fact, and he himself feeling, that, if he pushed the comparison farther, he would reach some such atrocity as that, if the white and shining flower produced in its season again the black bean from which it sprung, so the white and shining soul must once more clothe itself in the same sordid, unpurified body from which it first had sprung. He had a vague glimmer that perhaps his simile was too material, and that this very body was the clay in which the springing, germinating soul was planted to bloom out in heaven, but dared not pursue it unadvised, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various
... had been ennobled by the King was charged against her as evidence that the source of her deeds were sordid self-seeking. She answered that she had not asked this grace of the King; it was his ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... trader believes that Trade, in its ideal, is generous and beautiful. It is the reality that he makes of it, by the way in which he does it, that seems to him sordid. ...
— Heart's-ease • Phillips Brooks
... reproach of the first irregular wish: and the purpose immediately appears to be disingenious and cruel, by which the tender hope of ineffable affection would be disappointed, the placid confidence of unsuspected simplicity abased, and the peace even of virtue endangered by the most sordid infidelity, and the ...
— The Young Gentleman and Lady's Monitor, and English Teacher's Assistant • John Hamilton Moore
... Christopher gave a gasp of astonishment. It stretched out before him in the sunset light a wide expanse of green land, with stately clumps of trees and long vistas of avenues that led nowhere. It was like some jewel in the wide circling belt of trees. It was so strange a contrast to the sordid country without, that the effect was amazing. Christopher looked round involuntarily to see by what passage he had passed from that unpleasing world to this ...
— Christopher Hibbault, Roadmaker • Marguerite Bryant
... happiness, turned to look at Adelaide and her mother, and saw that they were tremulous with pleasure and delight at their little trick. He felt himself mean, sordid, a fool; he longed to punish himself, to rend his heart. A few tears rose to his eyes; by an irresistible impulse he sprang up, clasped Adelaide in his arms, pressed her to his heart, and stole a kiss; then with the ...
— The Purse • Honore de Balzac
... intrepid bravery of these men, their intelligence and the bold frankness of their character, free from all that is mean and sordid. Yet for the moment the extreme roughness of their manners half inclines one to forget their heroic qualities. Most of them seem without the least perception of delicacy or propriety, though among them individuals may be found in whose manners there is a plain courtesy, ...
— The Oregon Trail • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... day stole into Mrs. Procter's heart. She breathed in the invigorating air deeply. Cares seemed to fall from her. Materialities were banished into the background. She looked at her children as they went singing down the road. She had meant to bind them to sordid tasks within four walls when a jewel of a day beckoned to all! She visualized her house clean and in perfect order, but the children cross, she herself irritable and tired out, and wondering a little bit about the meaning of things. Was it worth while to let inflexible rules ...
— Suzanna Stirs the Fire • Emily Calvin Blake
... that the Speaker, Sir John Trevor, had in the preceding session received from the City a thousand guineas for expediting a local bill. This discovery gave great satisfaction to the Whigs, who had always hated Trevor, and was not unpleasing to many of the Tories. During six busy sessions his sordid rapacity had made him an object of general aversion. The legitimate emoluments of his post amounted to about four thousand a year; but it was believed that he had made at least ten thousand a year. [572] His profligacy and insolence united had been too much ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... unmercifully savage. And yet there shone through all these conflictingly peculiar eccentricities a humorous kind of religion which belonged exclusively to themselves, but which gave their characteristics a touch of sublimity. We have travelled far since those days of aboriginal stupidity and sordid blood-sucking. The contrast between the comforts and conditions of life at sea then and now cannot be imagined. We may only talk of it; we can never truly estimate the change. I do not draw attention to the comparison ...
— The Shellback's Progress - In the Nineteenth Century • Walter Runciman
... myself in a quarter of London into which I had never hitherto penetrated. The streets were narrow, and, as if to be in keeping with the general air of gloom, the shops were small and their wares of a peculiarly sordid nature. ...
— A Bid for Fortune - or Dr. Nikola's Vendetta • Guy Boothby
... station. Working to the same end is the spirit which is leading many manufacturers to place their establishments in the country, where they can control the mode of life of the employees and their families. Against the growth of the factory towns with their sordid conditions, we may with pleasure set these rural workshops where the capitalists are doing the best they can to better the mode of living of the people who are under their charge. In this good work it may ...
— Domesticated Animals - Their Relation to Man and to his Advancement in Civilization • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler
... about to tread upon our faces—yours and mine. Wickson as much as told me so. He was very kind—for an oligarch. He offered to reinstate me in the university. What do you think of that? He, Wickson, a sordid money-grabber, has the power to determine whether I shall or shall not teach in the university of the state. But he offered me even better than that—offered to make me president of some great college of physical sciences that is being planned—the Oligarchy ...
— The Iron Heel • Jack London
... olive. In the Pythian, of laurel. In the Nemaean, of green parsley;(113) and in the Isthmian, of the same herb dried. The institutors of these games wished that it should be implied from hence, that honour alone, and not mean and sordid interest, ought to be the motive of great actions. Of what were men not capable, accustomed to act solely from so glorious a principle! We have seen in the Persian war,(114) that Tigranes, one of the most considerable captains in the army of Xerxes, having heard the prizes in the ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... God that His human children should live and toil in such dens, such deserts, such dark places of the earth? Lot him ask himself: Can they live and toil there without contracting a probably diseased habit of body; without contracting a certainly dull, weary, sordid habit of mind, which craves for any pleasure, however brutal, to escape from its own stupidity and emptiness? When I run through, by rail, certain parts of the iron-producing country—streets of furnaces, ...
— Sanitary and Social Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... city, why does he invariably give it the feminine gender? Why is this so, even though the city be named for a man, or for a masculine saint? And why is it so in the case of commonplace cities, commercial cities, and ugly, sordid cities? It is not difficult to understand why a beautiful, sparkling city, like Washington or Paris, suggests a handsome woman, richly gowned and bedecked with jewels, but it is hard to understand why some ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... to say too little. I do not mean that the prevailing temper in the village was sordid, bitter, cruel, like that, say, of the Norman peasantry in De Maupassant's short stories. In by far the greater majority the people have usually seemed to me at the worst a little suspicious, a little callous, a little undemonstrative, and at the best ...
— Change in the Village • (AKA George Bourne) George Sturt
... not hinder its lasting longer than bees-wax. Some of this wax was sent to Paris to {179} a factor of Louisiana, who set so low a price upon it as to discourage the planters from sowing any more. The sordid avarice of this factor has done a service to the islands, where it gives a higher price ...
— History of Louisisana • Le Page Du Pratz
... unfledged hearts! Transformation for these grubs! Give us animation, inspiration, joy, faith! Give us enlivening, lightsome airs, to which our souls shall, on a sudden, begin to dance, keeping step with the angels! What else is worth having? Each one of these sordid sons of men—is he not a new-born Apollo, who waits only for the ambrosia from Olympus, to spring forth in divineness of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... the most degrading of all influences to preside over its opinions. At no time should money be ever ranked as more than a means, and he who lives as if the acquisition of property were the sole end of his existence, betrays the dominion of the most sordid, base, and grovelling motive that life offers;" and ascribing it to the institutions, he says, "In one respect our institutions have disappointed us all: they have not wrought out for us that elevation of character which is the most precious, and, in truth, the only ...
— Diary in America, Series Two • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... there are, all around us. It describes the largest class of homes, we may believe. And who can estimate their influence over these busy tides of action, all day long? That world of traffic, that world of toil, that looks so hard and gross and sordid,—is it not transformed somewhat, does it not grow beautiful even, when you think how many of its energies have their spring by the infant's cradle and the mother's chair? And what lights, what shadows, unseen by ...
— Humanity in the City • E. H. Chapin
... girl's parents have to furnish, with the bride, a considerable dowry, whose size is directly related to the affluence of the boy's family, or to his education and prospects in life. The bickerings which take place in this matter are most unseemly; and the marriage compact is degraded into a sordid, mercenary transaction. Fathers of girls involve themselves in debts which they can never clear, in order to marry their darlings to sons of high families of good connection. It is this difficulty of marrying daughters, save at an intolerable ...
— India, Its Life and Thought • John P. Jones
... year by year, its fame increases, till it looks back with contempt on the days when it was a mere upright waterproof. Local guide-books pander more and more slavishly to its pride; leader-writers in need of a pathetic metaphor are more and more frequently supplied by it. If there be any sordid question of clearing it away to make room for something else, the ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... other chamber music. As a man he had all the worst faults of a genius. The vast sums of money which he accumulated were gambled away. His whole life was disgraced by unbridled sensuality coupled with sordid avarice. This explains in a measure Paganini's inferior rank as a composer. Famous are his variations on the tune "God Save the King," his "Studies," his twenty variations on "Il Carnevale di Venezia," and the concert allegro ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson
... descends. And what does everybody exclaim afterwards? Simply, "Why there's nothing for HARE to do in it. We thought we should see him again, and that he would come out all right at last." That's the feeling. They can't bear the idea of their favourite first-class Comedian being a sordid, swindling old villain, unless the character be exceptionally amusing. Lady Bountiful might be termed "A bald piece," because ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100, March 21, 1891 • Various
... the sordid desire of the vulgar, Hereward," answered the Follower, with assumed superiority, "who are contented to enjoy life, lacking distinction; whereas we, on the other hand, we of choicer quality, who form ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... of the world's pink-sheet extras about "Getting to the Top" and "Forging to the Front." Too often they are the sordid story of a few scrambling over the heads of the weaker ones. Sometimes they are the story of one pig crowding the other pigs out of the trough and ...
— The University of Hard Knocks • Ralph Parlette
... to be served by any other man. You will be my lord and my servant, good will be to me whatsoever you will do to me, nor shall I ever be lady of the empire, if you be not lord of it. A poor, dark, and sordid place will be to me more splendid than all these halls, when you shall be together with me. If I have you and see you, I shall be lady of all the wealth in the world, and the whole world will be mine. And if the thing is done wisely, never will ...
— Cliges: A Romance • Chretien de Troyes
... what many had anticipated, perhaps, and Cornish was looking forward with undisguised pleasure to the moment when he could rid himself of these persons whom Joan had gaily designated as "rather gruesome," and whom he frankly recognized as sordid and uninteresting. He did not even look, as Joan had looked, to the wives and children who were to follow as likely to ...
— Roden's Corner • Henry Seton Merriman
... maw of the great avaricious, The cold scheming brain of a commerce run mad— A commerce all-grasping and sordid and vicious; For this are we martyred, for this ...
— Over the Top With the Third Australian Division • G. P. Cuttriss
... almost an Olympus, over the edge of which he saw, smiling, the bolts hurled in the valleys of man below. Had his ten years of renunciation, of thought, of devotion to an ideal, of living scorn of a sordid world, been in vain? Up from the world had come to him the youngest and beautifulest—fairer than Edith—one and three-seventh times lovelier than the seven-years-served Rachel. So the ...
— Options • O. Henry
... the chairman. No absolute harm was done, but the revelation of the shameful conditions of affairs in a Raad of which so much good was expected did as much as anything could do to destroy all hope. It was a painful exhibition, and the sordid details which came to light, the unblushing attempts to levy blackmail on those who were threatened with pillage by would-be concessionaires, the shameless conduct of Raad members fighting as hirelings to impose a fresh burden on their own ...
— The Transvaal from Within - A Private Record of Public Affairs • J. P. Fitzpatrick
... never hath enough; He feeds on all alike; and, wild or tame, He's but a cannibal. He burns, destroys, And scatters death to sate his morbid lust For empty fame. But when the love of gain Hath struck its roots in his vile, sordid heart,— Each gen'rous impulse chill'd,—like vampire, now, He sucks the life-blood of his friends or foes Until he viler grows than savage beast. And when, at length, stretch'd on his bed of death, And powerless, ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... "intellectuals" seemed to bring a breeze from out of doors into the close, sordid, vitiated air of the Chamber. They stood for the thought of the world outside—the idea fatherless, unsponsored, the aspiration of the great masses—a breath of fresh air in the sick-room of a chronic ...
— The Torrent - Entre Naranjos • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... son of Jupiter, was the first whaleman; and to the eternal honour of our calling be it said, that the first whale attacked by our brotherhood was not killed with any sordid intent. Those were the knightly days of our profession, when we only bore arms to succor the distressed, and not to fill men's lamp-feeders. Every one knows the fine story of Perseus and Andromeda; how the lovely Andromeda, the daughter of a king, was tied to a rock on the sea-coast, ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... against the life of the rebel leader and heretic at the instigation of the Spanish government, and with the knowledge of Parma. Religious fanaticism, loyalty to the legitimate sovereign, together with the more sordid motive of pecuniary reward, made many eager to undertake the murderous commission. It was made the easier from the fact that the prince always refused to surround himself with guards or to take any special ...
— History of Holland • George Edmundson
... is of some interest to us, says the Building News, to know how the poor are housed in the city of Paris, which contains, more than any city in the world, the opposite poles of luxurious magnificence and of sordid, bestial poverty. The statistics of the Parisian working classes in the way of lodgings are not of an encouraging nature, and reflect great discredit on the powers that be, who can be stern enough in the case of any political question, but are blind to the spectacle of fellow creatures living the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 401, September 8, 1883 • Various
... capable of appreciating, though powerless to supply. And yet Roeschen, with her beautiful verses, her nonchalant toilets and her poetic sympathy for improprieties which, in practice, she was careful to shun, might be even more fitted than her sister to lift and ennoble a sordid American soul. It only remained to be considered whether Gretchen, who could grow enthusiastic over the decline of one cent in the price of butter, might not, after all, be a more kindred nature, and therefore suit him ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 10 • Various
... linked to its prosecution. And I remembered that my father had often spoken to gentlemen visiting our house in New York, of the unhappiness that the discussion of the abolition of this trade had occasioned in Liverpool; that the struggle between sordid interest and humanity had made sad havoc at the fire-sides of the merchants; estranged sons from sires; and even separated husband from wife. And my thoughts reverted to my father's friend, the good and great Roscoe, the intrepid enemy ...
— Redburn. His First Voyage • Herman Melville
... the street, when Molly woke with a great start out of this sleep of exhaustion. Her heart beating with heavy strokes, she sat up in bed and gazed upon her surroundings with startled eyes. What was this strange feeling of oppression, of terror? Why was she in this sordid little room? Why was her hair cut short? Ah, my God! memory returned upon her all too swiftly. It was for to-day—to-day; and she was perhaps too late. She might never ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... and his contract differed from that ordinarily made by the members of a newspaper staff in that he was paid by the year, though in monthly instalments. Kittrell knew that he had broken his contract on grounds which the sordid law would not see or recognize and the average court think absurd, and that the Telegraph might legally refuse to pay him at all. He hoped the Telegraph would do this! But it did not; on the contrary, he received the next day ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... glow, ran cold. He felt the bully's blows on his own skin, his romance turning suddenly sordid. But he recovered his courage. He, too, had muscles. "But I thought he just missed seeing me ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... you. You are without compassion, pity, charity or grace. Your code is that of winning all, the code of greed! Listen to me. You doubtless look down on me as a camp woman, and with a certain amount of scorn! But knowing what I am, I should far rather be what I am, the owner of the High Light, a sordid den, than to be you, the owner of the Rattler, the man ...
— The Plunderer • Roy Norton
... suddenly sick and dizzy. The targets which had meant so much to him, taking on a lustre as if they were jewels in his crown of pride, and passports to a military future, became gray and sordid. He hated them, he hated everything they stood for, and, seeing the eyes of Marian and her father fixed upon the Colonel, he surreptitiously dropped them to the floor, pushing them farther out of sight beneath the ...
— Where the Souls of Men are Calling • Credo Harris
... likely to commit so sordid a crime as that with which he is charged? No prospect of gain could hold out any temptation to Lord Cochrane to put in hazard ...
— The Trial of Charles Random de Berenger, Sir Thomas Cochrane, • William Brodie Gurney
... their advisers everywhere. It is not high ideals of life but bitter experience of inability to make a living on the mainland which has brought immigrants to Hokkaido. As time goes on, the rural and industrial development may have a less sordid look.[274] At present the visitor who lacks time to penetrate into the fastnesses of Hokkaido and enjoy its natural beauties brings away the unhappy impression which is presented by a view of man's first assault on ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott
... should happen to get to you when you are sitting by the fire and doing nothing, or when you are gaping at the window, may they not be very proper flaps, to put you in mind that you might employ your time much better? I knew once a very covetous, sordid fellow, who used frequently to say, "Take care of the pence; for the pounds will take care of themselves." This was a just and sensible reflection in a miser. I recommend to you to take care of the minutes; for hours will take care of themselves. I am very sure, that many people lose two ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... and her word is law. I'm afraid he's hardly the man to make you happy, little lady; kind-hearted, well-meaning, but too much in earnest, too much absorbed in his ideas of right for a world where right's impossible, and every man for himself is the wretched sordid rule of existence. He will overshadow and darken your bright little life, I fear me; not intentionally—he couldn't do that—but by his Quixotic fads and fancies; good fads, honest fads, but fads wholly ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... virtue of his name and of his wealth and, if he would be bold, by virtue of his intellect, was able to live in some noble and distinguished way—he passed his time with banalities that were half sordid and half humorous. These things had their place. Youth might find them not unfruitful of experience. They degraded ...
— The Indian Lily and Other Stories • Hermann Sudermann
... Russia beyond the common bond of humanity that should connect the whole human race, I am forced to admit, with all my hatred of despotic institutions, that they are not always a sure indication of an illiberal and insincere spirit on the part of the rulers, or of a base, sordid, and groveling spirit on that of the subjects. It is a matter of regret, calculated to shake our faith in the beneficial effects of a high order of intelligence among men, that the course of England and France, since the commencement of our difficulties, presents a very unfavorable ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... as she said these words, to lay her hand upon his shoulder. He suffered it to rest there, in his exultation; and the whole mean, abject, sordid, pitiful soul of the man, looked at her, for the moment, through ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... neglected by the high, and cheated by the low? I sometimes resolve to print my book at my own expense, and, like the Sibyl, double the price; and sometimes am tempted, in emulation of Raleigh, to throw it into the fire, and leave this sordid generation to the curses of posterity. Tell me, dear Idler, ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... again and again, he leaned his head against the partition and burst into tears. Sordid and coarse as his nature was, he really loved his daughter. All the heart he had was in his ...
— After Dark • Wilkie Collins
... at one end and facing it, rows of benches. On the platform I arranged the altar, with the silk Union Jack as a frontal and with cross and lighted candles for ornaments. It looked bright and church-like amid the sordid surroundings. We had several celebrations of the Holy Communion, the first being at six a.m. A large number of officers and men came to perform their Easter duties. A strange solemnity prevailed. It was the first Easter spent away from home; it was the last Easter that most of those gallant ...
— The Great War As I Saw It • Frederick George Scott
... a moment of wonderful excitement. One could almost hear the thrill which stirred from their throats. Across the empty street, straight towards the window behind which the doomed man lay, Sabatini walked, strangest of figures amidst those sordid surroundings, in his evening clothes, thin black overcoat, and glossy silk hat. Step by step he approached the door. He was about three yards from the curbstone when the window behind which Isaac was crouching was suddenly smashed, ...
— The Lighted Way • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... whose vanity I have not pleased by selling him the spoils of another? Old Sapor, proud as he was, was more than once in the grasp of Isaac. There! it is in this case—down, you see, in the most secret part of my pack—but who would look for wealth under this sordid covering? as who, lady, for a soul within this shriveled and shattered body? yet is there one there. In such outside, both of body and bag, is my safety. Who cares to stop the poor man, or hold parley with him? None ...
— Aurelian - or, Rome in the Third Century • William Ware
... disentangled from its ligaments, and flowed in waving ringlets about her snowy, panting bosom. Exhausted with continual agitation, and particularly with the last struggle, she seemed ready to faint, but was quickly restored by the assiduity of these sordid grooms. ...
— Damon and Delia - A Tale • William Godwin
... knew that I loved him, and that I was melting with desire to comfort him. I thought of his life. A sordid, harsh, and meagre life it must have been. And I thought of his father, who had lied and stolen for him and been worked to death. And he himself had gone into the mills when he was ten! All my heart seemed bursting with desire to fold my ...
— The Iron Heel • Jack London
... that her husband abducted her when betrothed elsewhere. She can hardly be blamed for this, since she was a mere child at the time: but as she grew up, she developed a character quite worthy of the scoundrel to whom she was linked. To personal profligacy she added sordid avarice, and a positive incapacity for telling the truth. To these delightful persons the poor little Scottish maidens, Margaret and Isabel, were consigned. At what age Marjory joined them in England is doubtful: but it does not appear that ...
— Earl Hubert's Daughter - The Polishing of the Pearl - A Tale of the 13th Century • Emily Sarah Holt
... disquisition, harangue, diatribe, tirade, screed, philippic, invective, rhapsody, plea. Spruce, natty, dapper, smart, chic. Stale, musty, frowzy, mildewed, fetid, rancid, rank. Steep, precipitous, abrupt. Stingy, close, miserly, niggardly, parsimonious, penurious, sordid, Storm, tempest, whirlwind, hurricane, tornado, cyclone, typhoon Straight, perpendicular, vertical, plumb, erect, upright. Strange, singular, peculiar, odd, queer, quaint, outlandish. Strong, stout, robust, sturdy, stalwart, powerful. Stupid, dull, obtuse, stolid, doltish, sluggish, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... unsatisfactory, and he did not attempt anything of the sort again. Following on the days of Dickens, the novel began to contract, to subordinate characterisation to story and description to drama; considerations of a sordid nature, I am told, had to do with that; something about a guinea and a half and six shillings with which we will not concern ourselves—but I rejoice to see many signs to-day that that phase of narrowing and restriction is over, and that there is every encouragement ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... disgusted with the sordid meanness of that impenitent thief, deserted from the schooner. The whole episode takes about three pages of his autobiography. Nothing to speak of; but as I looked them over, the curious confirmation of the few casual words heard in my early youth evoked ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... dear name With the least word or hint of blame. Who else shall discommend her choice, I giving it my hearty voice? Wed me? Ah, never near her come The knowledge of the narrow home! Far fly from her dear face, that shows The sunshine lovelier than the rose, The sordid gravity they wear Who poverty's base burthen bear! (And all are poor who come to miss Their custom, though a crown be this.) My hope was, that the wheels of fate, For my exceeding need, might wait, And she, unseen amidst all eyes, Move sightless, till I sought the prize, With honour, in ...
— The Victories of Love - and Other Poems • Coventry Patmore
... the houses of the court officials also lay on this belt, and here also was an institution of which we have no parallel in modern times. The term "Strangers' Home" amongst us suggests a mean appearance and sordid surroundings, but this was a palace where all strangers who might come to the city were entertained as long as they might choose to stay—being treated all the time as guests of the Government. The detached houses of the inhabitants ...
— The Story of Atlantis and the Lost Lemuria • W. Scott-Elliot
... worthless, but, having obtained possession of such things, the less discerning had almost invariably awakened to the fact that, in his hands, values increased, and methods of remunerative disposition, being sought, were found. Nothing remained unutilisable. The practical, sordid, uneducated little man developed the power to create demand for his own supplies. If he was betrayed into an error, he quickly retrieved it. He could live upon nothing and consequently could travel anywhere ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... case that may be taken as a characteristic type of Lapland lycanthropy in all its grim and sordid ...
— Werwolves • Elliott O'Donnell
... of that sweet passion, 190 That it all sordid basenesse doth expell, And the refyned mynd doth newly fashion Unto a fairer forme, which now doth dwell In his high thought, that would it selfe excell; Which he beholding still with constant sight, 195 Admires the ...
— The Poetical Works of Edmund Spenser, Volume 5 • Edmund Spenser
... know and really he did not care, and, indeed, it was better that the affair should be left in vague and incomplete outline. It was probably commonplace enough, had one only known, and sordid too, perhaps. But to-night was just such a night as that other. He would go to the Cove and find his romance where he had left it twenty years ago. It was the hour in Pendragon when shops are closing and young men and maidens walk out. There were a great many people in the street; ...
— The Wooden Horse • Hugh Walpole
... little civil list for your wife and for the requirements of the house and to pay her money as if it were a contribution, in twelve equal portions month by month, has something in it that is a little mean and close, and cannot be agreeable to any but sordid and mistrustful souls. By acting in this way you ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part II. • Honore de Balzac
... to. This mean lord had been dreaming over-night of a silver bason and cup, and when Timon's servant was announced, his sordid mind suggested to him that this was surely a making out of his dream, and that Timon had sent him such a present: but when he understood the truth of the matter, and that Timon wanted money, the quality of his faint and watery friendship shewed itself, ...
— Books for Children - The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 3 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... to make up his losses, he became partner in a printing enterprise which failed in 1827, leaving him still more embarrassed financially, but endowed with a fund of experience which he turned to rich account as a novelist. Henceforth the sordid world of debt, bankruptcy, usury, and speculation had no mystery for him, and he laid it bare in novel after novel, utilizing also the knowledge he had gained of the law, and even pressing into service the technicalities ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... practical mother and daughter did not suffice to keep within the limits they dreaded to overpass. Mrs. Liddell's pen became more than ever essential to the maintenance of the household, while the younger widow considered herself a martyr to the most sordid, the most unnecessary stinginess. ...
— A Crooked Path - A Novel • Mrs. Alexander
... transactions with the aristocracy, and if Lord George was one of his victims seven years before 1856, the miscreant had had plenty of time to harden his conscience in working his foul plots against others whom it was his sordid interest to destroy. ...
— The Portland Peerage Romance • Charles J. Archard
... forth in ungovernable passion. "This is the extent of your devotion, then! These your narrow calculations and sordid reckonings! You, the one soul in whom I trusted, the one friend I had in the world capable of appreciating me! Oh, shame on such ingratitude! Oh, miserable me, doomed ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 2 • Various
... and rust of the tiles, the red, brown, and greenish mosses of the gutters, and lower down the more vivid colors of geraniums and pansies in flower-pots under the white dimity curtains which hid the small panes of garret windows; yet every sordid detail touched and transfigured with the poetry and romance of youth ...
— Tales of Trail and Town • Bret Harte
... terror. There was an exquisite poison in the air. I had a passion for sensations.... Well, one evening about seven o'clock, I determined to go out in search of some adventure. I felt that this grey, monstrous London of ours, with its myriads of people, its sordid sinners, and its splendid sins, as you once phrased it, must have something in store for me. I fancied a thousand things. The mere danger gave me a sense of delight. I remembered what you had said to me on that wonderful evening when we first dined ...
— The Picture of Dorian Gray • Oscar Wilde
... special correspondents in general, it would never do to have been at Samarkand without seeing Tamerlane's tomb, our arba returned to the southwest, and drew up near the mosque of Gour Emir, close to the Russian town. What a sordid neighborhood, what a heap of mud huts and straw huts, what an agglomeration of miserable hovels ...
— The Adventures of a Special Correspondent • Jules Verne
... sordid things, what was there that she could do to eke out her pitiful little living? For live she must, since she was here in this bleak world and it seemed to be expected of her. Keep boarders? Yes, if there were any to keep; but in this town there were few who boarded. There was nothing to ...
— Cloudy Jewel • Grace Livingston Hill
... not either sad, or odd, or inexplicable. What did she remember? A train of trifles that seemed to have been enough to fill all her life; the arrival of the nervous and badly-dressed recruits at the wharf, their embarkation, their last staring and pathetic look at France, the stormy voyage, the sordid illness of almost everyone on board, the approach long after sundown to the small and unknown town, of which it was impossible to see anything clearly, the marshalling of the recruits pale with sickness, ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... placed between possibilities of grace and possibilities even of indecency. It is not hard to write a graceful tale, it is easy to write a loose story; it is extremely difficult to write a story that may by a stroke of the pen be either beautiful or merely sordid. But Thackeray manipulates the keys of the tale so that 'it moves like music,' an extremely apt metaphor, where harmonies can be made disharmonies by a ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... solitude which to her was ideal. To-night as she wandered up and down her room like a little distraught ghost, all the happy and romantic associations of the home she had loved and cherished for so many years seemed cut down like a sheaf of fair blossoms by a careless reaper,—a sordid and miserable taint was on her life, and she shuddered with mingled fear and grief as she realised that she had not even the simple privilege of ordinary baptism. She was a nameless waif, dependent on the charity of Farmer Jocelyn. True, the old man had grown to love her and she had ...
— Innocent - Her Fancy and His Fact • Marie Corelli
... plainness as if they were lit up by streaks of fire from the Pit. I have come through the Valley of the Shadow into which I ventured with a light heart, and those who know me might point and say what was said of a giant: "There is the man who has been in hell." It was true. Through the dim and sordid inferno, I moved as in a trance for awhile, and that is what makes me so keen to warn those who fancy they are safe; that is what makes me so discontented with the peculiar ethical conceptions of a society which bows down before the concocter ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... born for this, to extend our proprietary rights over this world and make of it a marketable commodity? When our whole mind is bent only upon making use of this world it loses for us its true value. We make it cheap by our sordid desires; and thus to the end of our days we only try to feed upon it and miss its truth, just like the greedy child who tears leaves from a precious book and tries to ...
— Sadhana - The Realisation of Life • Rabindranath Tagore
... singing of the Office for the Ninth Hour. It was like a stream of water crossing unexpectedly a dusty way—Mirabilia testimonia tua! In psalm and antiphon, inexhaustibly [10] fresh, the soul seemed to be taking refuge, at that undevout hour, from the sordid languor and the mean business of men's lives, in contemplation of the unfaltering vigour of the divine righteousness, which had still those who sought it, not only watchful in the night but alert in ...
— Gaston de Latour: an unfinished romance • Walter Horatio Pater
... terrible logic of animalism. Love-making, drunkenness, cheating, quarreling, the mere idleness of sitting drowsily in a chair, the gross life of the farmyard and the fields, civic dissensions, the sordid provincial dance of the seven deadly sins, he saw in the same direct, unilluminating way as the Dutch painters; finding, indeed, no beauty in any of these things, but getting his beauty in the deft arrangement of them, in the mere ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... all that was sinful, the preacher resumed: "I do not hesitate for a moment to condemn show life and all who are aware of its iniquity that engage in it. The circus, the theatre, the actors therein, the proprietors, those who, for sordid gain, place these terrible temptations before our young people." Alfred felt himself sinking in the pew. "I do not hesitate to condemn the theatre as one of the broadest roads that leads to destruction. ...
— Watch Yourself Go By • Al. G. Field
... Dinah," he said, and in his voice was a quiver half-quizzical yet strangely charged with emotion, "did you ever seriously imagine that I should allow a sordid little detail like that to come between us? Surely Eustace knew better ...
— Greatheart • Ethel M. Dell
... possible. He must learn that socialism deals with what is, not with what ought to be; and that the material with which it deals is the "clay of the common road," the warm human, fallible and frail, sordid and petty, absurd and contradictory, even grotesque, and yet, withal, shot through with flashes and glimmerings of something finer and God-like, with here and there sweetnesses of service and unselfishness, ...
— War of the Classes • Jack London
... may be shown what to do, and have strength to do it. I have had my own share of money troubles, and would never try to belittle them in my own case or in the case of others. They are very hard and sordid, and far- reaching. There was a time in my life when money seemed in the background of every thought, and I could not get away from it; but I have learnt to trust instead of worrying, and that's the great lesson of life. It isn't ...
— The Fortunes of the Farrells • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... day, which the farmers refused to grant, and the men struck. The agitation spread all over England, and was often conducted unwisely and with a bitter spirit, but the labourer was embittered by generations of sordid misery. Very reluctantly the farmers gave way, and generally speaking wages went up during the agitation to 14s. or 15s. a week, though Arch himself admits that even during the height of it they were often only 11s. and 12s. With the bad times, ...
— A Short History of English Agriculture • W. H. R. Curtler
... attention. Avarice was his master passion; and the sudden idea that there might be treasure in the iron box, which, unwitting of such a thought at the time, he had consigned to Wallace, first bound him a sordid slave. His murmurs for having allowed the box to leave his possession, gave the alarm which caused the disasters at Ellerslie, and his own immediate arrest. He was then sent a prisoner to Cressingham at Stirling; but in his way thither ...
— The Scottish Chiefs • Miss Jane Porter
... asked favors of the country-folk, or if they had, they had paid generously for what they had received. To go now among them saying, "I have something to sell," carried a sting. There had been nothing practical in Randy's education. He had no equipment with which to meet the sordid questions ...
— The Trumpeter Swan • Temple Bailey
... drummed pleasantly with his plump, shining hand on the table beside him. The sweet mellowness which had been Mr. Walker's aim for years, lay on his soul. The world grew more misty and golden every moment, and in this sunkissed, nebulous haze, his fancy roamed free, released from sordid cares—by Mr. Walker's potent spell. It was a good world—a good world of true friends, no enemies, no contradiction of sinners or other disagreeable people, nothing but ease, praise, power, success, glorious old world, without any hereafter, or any day of accounting. Tears of enthusiasm ...
— Purple Springs • Nellie L. McClung
... that in the past inspired me, And with songs of love hast fired me; Go thou now to dull repose, For today in sordid prose I must earn the gold ...
— Lineage, Life, and Labors of Jose Rizal, Philippine Patriot • Austin Craig
... while belated revellers and travellers were making their way through white, silent streets and under avenues of snow-laden trees to homes where reigned love and peace and virtue, in the north end and in the foreign colony the festivities in connection with Anka's wedding were drawing to a close in sordid drunken dance and song and ...
— The Foreigner • Ralph Connor
... her pleasance once again, They came to their own land. But all in vain His care. Silent she was, and oft did grieve, Till Eblis wrathful cried: "Because this Eve Adam holds dear, art mourning? Still dost yearn To mate his sordid soul? Or wouldst thou turn From summer land to Eden walls? "The man Belike, ne'er loved thee. So is it young Eve can His pulses sway. Is she not passing fair? Her fancies wild, it is her daily care To bend ...
— Lilith - The Legend of the First Woman • Ada Langworthy Collier
... not yet completely forsaken St. Saviour's for All Souls. She loved the grey old church in the market-place. Set in the midst of that sordid scene of chaffering and grime, St. Saviour's perpetuated for her the ancient beauty and the majesty of her faith. When she desired to forget herself, to sink humbly back into the ages, passive to a superb tradition, she went to St. Saviour's. When she wished to be stirred and ...
— The Helpmate • May Sinclair
... probably from a similarity in their circumstances and situation, operating on the general principles of human nature. Placed alike in a happy medium; between savage life, properly so called, and the refinements of polished society, they are found equally exempt from the sordid corporeal distresses and sanguinary passions of the former state, and from the artificial necessities, the restraints, and solicitudes of the latter."—"In those inventions and arts, which, varying the enjoyments, add considerably ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 13 • Robert Kerr
... the folly of allowing money cares and ambitions to preoccupy him. She sincerely sympathized with him in his disappointments, but she could not understand his willingness to sacrifice sentiment and affection to sordid cares. "It appears to me absurd," she told him, "to waste life in preparing to live." Not one of the least of her trials was that she was at this time often forced to see a man who was Imlay's friend or partner in Paris, and who seems to have aided ...
— Mary Wollstonecraft • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
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