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Indigence   Listen
noun
Indigence  n.  The condition of being indigent; lack of estate, or means of comfortable subsistence; penury; poverty; as, helpless indigence.
Synonyms: Poverty; penury; destitution; want; need; privation; lack. See Poverty.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Indigence" Quotes from Famous Books



... interested themselves in having republished. Hannah Adams had written some valuable works, and was now braiding straw for a living; and Mrs. Josiah Quincy exerted herself to have so talented a woman placed above indigence. She also endeavored to have Miss Edgeworth's "Moral Tales" republished for young people. Scott was beginning to infuse new life with his wonderful tales, which could safely be put in the hands of younger readers. The first decade of the century ...
— A Little Girl in Old Boston • Amanda Millie Douglas

... be asked, mean you stipendiary service? Yes, and forthwith the same arrangement for all, Athenians, that each, taking his dividend from the public, may be what the state requires. Is peace to be had? You are better at home, under no compulsion to act dishonorably from indigence. Is there such an emergency as the present? Better to be a soldier, as you ought, in your country's cause, maintained by those very allowances. Is any one of you beyond the military age? What he now irregularly takes without doing service, ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy

... while he indulged the prejudices of his new subjects, he affected in his dress and manners to maintain the ancient fashion of his country. He grasped with a rapacious, that he might distribute with a liberal hand; his primitive indigence had taught the habits of frugality; the gain of a merchant was not below his attention; and his prisoners were tortured with slow and unfeeling cruelty to force a discovery of their secret treasure. According ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan

... these. Hence the intellectual is indigent of the intelligible, as of its proper object of desire; and the intelligible is in want of the intellectual, because it wishes to be the intelligible of it. Both also are indigent of either, since the possession is always accompanied with indigence, in the same manner as the world is always present with matter. Hence a certain indigence is naturally coessentiallized with intellect, so that it cannot be the most proper principle. Shall we, therefore, in the next place, direct our attention to the ...
— Introduction to the Philosophy and Writings of Plato • Thomas Taylor

... prices, that it was a period of excessive misery among the mass of the people and the tenants, a time in which a few might have become rich, while the many were crushed down into hopeless and almost permanent indigence." And yet the facts are such as to compel him, when speaking of the Restoration, to point out that[110:1]—"the labourers, as far as the will went, were better off under the rule of the Saints than under that of ...
— The Digger Movement in the Days of the Commonwealth • Lewis H. Berens

... person, who now made his appearance, was a shrunken, trembling, coughing old gentleman; his small, bent, distorted form was wrapped in a fur cloak which, somewhat tattered, permitted a soiled and faded under-dress to make itself perceptible, giving to the old man the appearance of indigence and slovenliness. Nothing, not even the face, or the thin and meagre hands he extended to his servants, was neat and cleanly; nothing about him shone but his eyes, those gray, piercing eyes with their fiery side-glances and their now kind and now sly and subtle ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach

... it is currently reported that Napoleon was the son of General Paoli; and that Louis and Jerome were the sons of the Marquis de Marbeuf, governor of the island. The conduct of the Marquis to the family of Bonaparte, then in the utmost indigence, would sanction a belief in this account; he protected the whole family, but particularly the sons, and he caused Napoleon to be placed at the Military School of Brienne, where he supplied him with money. This money was never spent among ...
— Travels in France during the years 1814-1815 • Archibald Alison

... love I lavished, Nor e'er to soar my pinions balanced, Though wing'd perchance no humble height to fly. Thou, Dread Invisible, who from on high Look'st down upon this suffering erring head, Oh, be thy succour to my frailty sped, And with thy grace my indigence supply! My life in storms and warfare doom'd to spend, Harbour'd in peace that life may I resign: It's course though idle, pious be its end! Oh, for the few brief days, which yet are mine, And for their close, thy guiding hand ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch

... summon him to answer for insubordination. Winchelsea was very unwilling to go to Rome; but Edward seized his temporalities, banished eighty monks for giving him support, and finally exiled him. He died in indigence at Rome. ...
— Cameos from English History, from Rollo to Edward II • Charlotte Mary Yonge

... servants in his mansion; as cultivators they owe him corvees and, in certain places, three times a week. But, according to both law and custom, he is obliged "to see that they are educated, to succor them in indigence, and, as far as possible, to provide them with the means of support." Accordingly he is charged with the duties of the government of which he enjoys the advantages, and, under the heavy hand which curbs them, but which sustains them, we do ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine

... in the scale of rank, by so much more do they benefit under the force of contrast with the men of their own level. A young man of that class, however noble in appearance, is somewhat degraded in the eyes of women, by the necessity which his indigence imposes of working under a master; but a beautiful young woman, in the very poorest family, unless she enters upon a life of domestic servitude, (in which case her labors are light, suited to her sex, ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey

... advantages which they could not do in England. The town is certainly more alive than it was when Dr Johnson visited it in the last century; he declared that one of the streets was lost, and that in those that remained there was "the silence and solitude of inactive indigence and gloomy depopulation." We thought it a very picturesque-looking place, and should have remained there longer had the wind not changed and induced us to put ...
— A Yacht Voyage Round England • W.H.G. Kingston

... Almanach de Gotha and began (for the minimum sum of fifty dollars a pedigree) to reveal to these eager people the chain of links that connected them with royalty. Thus, in a period of time the brevity of which is incredible, this young man passed from complete indigence to a wife and four automobiles, or an automobile and four wives—I don't remember which he had the four of. There was so much royal blood about that it had spilled into several rival organizations, each bitterly warring with the other; but my Aunt assured me that her ...
— Lady Baltimore • Owen Wister

... feeble and could not work. And so we fell into debt for rent and, ere long, for the commonest necessities of life. In vain I struggled to redeem myself; the time of my prosperity had not come and I only sank deeper and deeper into debt and finally into indigence. A baby came. Our landlord was kind and allowed us to stay for two weeks under the roof for whose protection we could not pay; but at the end of that time we were asked to leave; and I found myself ...
— The House in the Mist • Anna Katharine Green

... of a marbil stoon, For ther is nouthir licour nor moisture; An ernest grote, whan it is dronke and goon, Bargeyn of marchauntys stant in aventure. My purs and I be callyd to the lure Off indigence, our stuff leyd in morgage; But ye, my lord, may al our soor recure, With a receyt of plate, and ...
— A Chronicle of London from 1089 to 1483 • Anonymous

... rhapsodies at the patriarchal age of 88! They will show you the trees under which he was wont to rest, the sunny views he loved, the very stones on which he sat; they will tell you anecdotes of his poverty—of an indigence such as we can scarcely credit. During the last months he was often thankful for a crust of bread, in exchange for which he would bring a sack of acorns, self-collected, to feed the giver's pigs. Destitution of this kind, brought ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas

... new telescope it was too poor to provide it a suitable place. Therefore a dome was erected on the roof, which disturbed the symmetry of the Grecian architecture. The telescope does good service under the dome; but it is a sign of the indigence of the academy. When I reflect on the progress made by other institutions, I am astonished at the march of events. Twenty years after the founding of Abbot Academy, the little settlement at Chicago had not been heard of at Andover. When Rev. Dr. Joel Hawes received ...
— The New England Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, February, 1886. - The Bay State Monthly, Volume 4, No. 2, February, 1886. • Various

... its foundation. Most of those very meritorious citizens have paid the debt of nature and gone to repose. It is believed that among the survivors there are some not provided for by existing laws, who are reduced to indigence and even to real distress. These men have a claim on the gratitude of their country, and it will do honor to their country to provide for them. The lapse of a few years more and the opportunity will be forever ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various

... Pancho's indigence and infatuation have a romantic origin. This old, shabby-looking object before me was at one time a well-to-do planter, and held a high position among merchants. One fatal day he became enamoured ...
— The Pearl of the Antilles, or An Artist in Cuba • Walter Goodman

... the following terms, in a letter to Count de Grammont. "He was a philosopher equally removed from superstition and impiety; a voluptuary who had no less aversion from debauchery than inclination for pleasure: a man who had never felt the pressure of indigence, and who had never been in possession of affluence: he lived in a condition despised by those who have everything, envied by those who have nothing, and relished by those who make their reason the foundation of their happiness. When he was young he hated profusion, being ...
— The Memoirs of Count Grammont, Complete • Anthony Hamilton

... The one fair, with large, blue, melancholy eyes, and a profile of angelic pureness; the other a lively brunette, with round and rosy cheeks, pretty black eyes, a charming picture of youth and gayety, a rare and touching example of happiness in indigence, of virtue in destitution, and of ...
— The Mysteries of Paris V2 • Eugene Sue

... people are not apt to reason clearly or justly on the causes which have brought them to indigence. They feel their wretchedness and reach out for a victim. And the law-making power usually happens to be that victim. As the distress of the South increased, the belief that Federal legislation was responsible for it increased likewise. The ...
— William Lloyd Garrison - The Abolitionist • Archibald H. Grimke

... gentlewoman born, the wisdom of whose years, her faithful services, and good management, make her a much greater merit in this family, than I can pretend to have! And shall I return, in the day of my power, insult and haughtiness for the kindness and benevolence I received from her in that of my indigence!—Indeed, I won't forgive you, my dear Mrs. Jervis, if I think you capable of looking upon me in any other light than as your daughter; for you have been a mother to me, when the absence of my own could not afford me the comfort ...
— Pamela (Vol. II.) • Samuel Richardson

... most is accumulated. And what is the soil or climate where experience has not uniformly proved that the voluntary flow of heaped-up plenty, bursting from the weight of its own rich luxuriance, has ever run with a more copious stream of revenue than could be squeezed from the dry husks of oppressed indigence by the straining of all the politic machinery ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. II. (of 12) • Edmund Burke

... melancholy to reflect, that Johnson and Savage were sometimes in such extreme indigence,* that they could not pay for a lodging; so that they have wandered together whole nights in the streets. Yet in these almost incredible scenes of distress, we may suppose that Savage mentioned many of the anecdotes with which Johnson afterwards enriched ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell

... and that there were five hundred thousand phalanges on the globe, the jury would have accorded a sum of 2,500,000 francs; Jacquart would not have been compelled to die in a state bordering on indigence, after having ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 349, November, 1844 • Various

... undoing of the soul. The poverty and wretchedness; the low bodily state of the slum dweller, have, at least, as much to do with making him the sot he often is as his intemperance has in bringing him to indigence and misery. Criminality, we are beginning to see, may be partly a vice, partly the result of bad economic and social laws, and partly a disease inherited with life itself. The same may be said of many forms of sin which do not, perhaps, come within the scope of the law courts of the land. ...
— The Message and the Man: - Some Essentials of Effective Preaching • J. Dodd Jackson

... Trouble's genuine tone: 'My pretty Maid, if happiness you seek, May disappointment never fade your cheek!— Your's be the joy;—yet, feel another's woe; O leave some little, gift before you go.' His words struck home; and back she turn'd again, (The ready friend of indigence and pain,) To banish hunger from his shatter'd frame; And close behind her, lo, the Miller, came, With Jug in hand, and cried, 'GEORGE, why such haste? Here, take a draught; and let that Soldier taste.' ...
— Rural Tales, Ballads, and Songs • Robert Bloomfield

... see before you the widow of Marat. I do not come here to ask your favors, such as cupidity would covet, or even such as would relieve indigence—Marat's widow needs no more than a tomb. Before arriving at that happy termination to my existence, however, I come to ask that justice may be done in respect to the reports recently put forth in this body ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard

... stern and sterile path, in the most transient pursuit of the pleasures of sense. Inflexibly honest, rigidly austere,—in his moral character his bitterest enemies could detect no flaw,—poor, even to indigence, he had invariably refused all overtures of the government; thrice imprisoned and heavily fined for his doctrines, no fear of a future, no remembrance of the past punishment could ever silence his bitter eloquence or moderate the passion of his distempered zeal; kindly, ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... The differences characteristic of poverty, indigence, managing to live, fortune and wealth, cleverly treated by von Justi, Staatswirthschaft, I, p. 449, seq. Rau, Lehrbuch I, 76, seq., establishes the following gradation: privation and wretchedness, poverty, indigence, "getting on," comfort, wealth, superfluity. L. Say ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher

... although they were built about Eighteen Hundred Fifty. The intent was to supply a home for working people that was sanitary, wholesome and complete, at a rental of exact cost. Peabody expected that his example would be imitated by the rich men of the nobility, and that squalor and indigence would soon become ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard

... the sight of laborious indigence so affecting and so respectable, that it renders dissipation peculiarly contemptible, and doubles the odium of extravagance: every time Cecilia saw this poor family, her aversion to the conduct and the principles of Mr Harrel encreased, while her delicacy of shocking or shaming him diminished, ...
— Cecilia Volume 1 • Frances Burney

... on the contrary, competitors—and as the fact that there had been free competition would be held by all classes to absolve them from any responsibility as to each other's welfare—it would inevitably result that the weaker orders should fall into indigence, degradation, ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 6, No. 1, July, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various

... enlarge on this delicate subject. Permit me only to submit to your majesty's consideration, whether his long imprisonment, and the confiscation of his estates, and the indigence and dispersion of his family, and the painful anxieties incident to all these circumstances, do not form an assemblage of sufferings which recommend him to the mediation of humanity? Allow me, sir, on this ...
— Washington and the American Republic, Vol. 3. • Benson J. Lossing

... of others, is denied the liberty to use the sources of happiness within his reach, he will not fail to find this enviable existence, if he escape the positive evils of life, the great sources of physical and mental suffering—such as indigence, disease, and the unkindness, worthlessness, or premature loss of objects of affection. The main stress of the problem lies, therefore, in the contest with these calamities, from which it is a rare good fortune entirely to escape; which, as things now are, cannot be obviated, and ...
— Utilitarianism • John Stuart Mill

... be a stain upon the justice of the Country, if one whom truth and time must rank among its greatest Benefactors, shall be stricken down and permitted to die in indigence by the interested and unworthy efforts thus made to ...
— Obed Hussey - Who, of All Inventors, Made Bread Cheap • Various

... merely by the will of the weakest, and generally the worst man in the society, becomes the most foolish and capricious thing, at the same time that it is the most terrible and destructive that well can be conceived. In a despotism, the principal person finds that, let the want, misery, and indigence of his subjects be what they will, he can yet possess abundantly of everything to gratify his most insatiable wishes. He does more. He finds that these gratifications increase in proportion to the wretchedness and slavery of his subjects. Thus encouraged both by passion ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. I. (of 12) • Edmund Burke

... much more probable that extreme poverty and hopeless indigence, the frequent experience of direful famines, and the scenes of misery and calamity occasioned by them, acting on minds whose affections are not very powerful, induce this unnatural crime which common custom has encouraged, and which is not prohibited by positive law. That this is the ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow

... of Roughham, in the county of Suffolk, bart.) died at the Angel Inn, Islington, by poison. A card, which he was seen to write a few hours before his death, contained the following words:—"Descended from an ancient and honourable family, I have, for fifteen years past, suffered more indigence than ever gentleman before submitted to. I am neglected by my acquaintance, traduced by my enemies, and insulted by the vulgar." Beneath ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 365 • Various

... Massieu, "What is laziness or idleness?" "It is a disgust from useful occupation; a disinclination to do anything; from which result indigence, want of cleanliness and misery, disease of body and the contempt of others." In writing this answer the gestures and looks of Massieu were in perfect accordance with the ideas that might be supposed to exist with him and the words he was writing. When he ...
— Anecdotes & Incidents of the Deaf and Dumb • W. R. Roe

... nothing to arouse energy by opposition, and everything without and within to sap the very life of the soul. Childe Roland is himself hopeless and almost heartless; the plain to which the leering cripple had pointed and over which he rides is created in the utter indigence of nature—a very nightmare of poverty and mean repulsiveness. And yet he endures the test, and halts only when he faces the Dark Tower and blows the blast upon his horn. Browning was wise to carry his romance no further; the one moment of action is enough; it ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden

... to Phoebe, as she sat reading the inscription, that it might have been pleasanter to the decayed gentlewomen in question not to have their indigence quite so openly proclaimed to the world, even though coupled with good birth and quality, and redounding to the fame of Mistress Perpetua Furnival. But Phoebe had not much time to meditate; for the door of the first little house opened, and down the gravel walk, ...
— The Maidens' Lodge - None of Self and All of Thee, (In the Reign of Queen Anne) • Emily Sarah Holt

... which, like other sharers of the plunder of rebellion, he was afterwards obliged to return. Two thousand pounds, which he had placed in the excise-office, were also lost. There is yet no reason to believe that he was ever reduced to indigence. His wants, being few, were competently supplied. He sold his library before his death, and left his family fifteen hundred pounds, on which his widow laid hold, and only gave one hundred to each of ...
— Lives of the Poets, Vol. 1 • Samuel Johnson

... common, that the public tables became an aristocratic instead of a democratic institution. Aristotle, in later times, makes it an objection to the ephoral government that poor men were chosen ephors, and that their venality arose from their indigence—a moral proof that poverty in Sparta must have been more common than has generally been supposed [142];—men of property would not have chosen their judges and dictators in paupers. Land was held and cultivated by the Helots, who ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... watch-springs. The sixteenth century produced a race of artists peculiar in their feeling for material beauty, but normal, coming as they do at the foot of the hills, in their technical proficiency and aesthetic indigence. Craft holds the candle that betrays the bareness of the cupboard. The aesthetic significance of form is feebly and impurely felt, the power of creating it is lost almost; but finer descriptions have rarely been painted. They knew how to paint in the sixteenth century: ...
— Art • Clive Bell

... long ago succeeded the ephemeral prosperity which marked the first years of his installation at Srignan, and that period of plenty was followed by a period of difficulty, almost of indigence. His class- books, which had succeeded marvellously, and from which the royalties had quickly attained to nearly 640 pounds sterling, which was the average figure for nearly ten years, were then no longer in vogue. Already the times had changed. France was in the ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros

... of fortune are avoidable only by practice of the sternest indigence: human foresight cannot provide against the envy of the gods and the tireless machinations of Fate. The widening circle of prosperity grows weaker as it spreads until the antagonistic forces which it ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 8 - Epigrams, On With the Dance, Negligible Tales • Ambrose Bierce

... conjecture that the habitual discontent that preyed upon his mind, and embittered his life, especially the latter part of it, communicated itself to me. I was educated in the belief that the world is blind to merit, continually suffers superior virtue to linger in indigence and neglect, and is therefore an odious, unjust, ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft

... story, like all others of the nobility of his parentage, is at utter variance with the subsequent events of his life, his long struggles with indigence and obscurity, and the difficulties he endured from the want of family connections. How can it be believed, says Bossi, that this same man, who, in his most cruel adversities was incessantly taunted by his enemies with the obscurity of his birth, should not reply to this ...
— The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (Vol. II) • Washington Irving

... 1675, however, these friendly relations were disturbed by a southward movement of some of the northern Indians. Large bodies of the warlike Senecas, pressing upon the Susquehannocks at the head of the Chesapeake Bay, were driving them down into Maryland and Virginia. Here their indigence and their restlessness became a menace to the whites and an element of disturbance to their relations with ...
— Virginia under the Stuarts 1607-1688 • Thomas J. Wertenbaker

... At the call of indigence or avarice the master of a family could dispose of his children or his slaves. But the condition of the slave was far more advantageous, since he regained by the first manumission his alienated freedom: the son was again restored to his unnatural father; he might ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 4 • Various

... and heterogeneous throng, One might discern all stages and degrees, From wealth and power to helpless indigence; Extravagance to trenchant penury, And all extremes of want and misery. Some blest by wealth, some cursed by poverty; Some in positions neutral to them both; Some wore a gaunt and ill-conditioned look Which told its tale of lack of nourishment; While others showed that irritated air Which speaks ...
— Mountain idylls, and Other Poems • Alfred Castner King

... Peveril looked at this apparatus with some surprise; and again turning his eyes attentively upon his travelling companion, Ganlesse, he could not help discovering (by the aid of imagination, perhaps), that though insignificant in person, plain in features, and dressed like one in indigence, there lurked still about his person and manners, that indefinable ease of manner which belongs only to men of birth and quality, or to those who are in the constant habit of frequenting the best company. His companion, whom he called Will Smith, although ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott

... should be entailed as that families should never fall into contempt, and as much left free as to give them all the advantages of property in case of any emergency. 'If (said he,) the nobility are suffered to sink into indigence[312], they of course become corrupt; they are ready to do whatever the king chooses; therefore it is fit they should be kept from becoming poor, unless it is fixed that when they fall below a certain standard of wealth they shall lose their peerages[313]. We know the ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell

... can't tell till I encounter him; and then, uncle, when I have an old gentleman by the hand, who has been disabled in his country's service, and is struggling to support his motherless child, a poor relation, and a faithful servant, in honorable indigence, impulse will supply me with words to express ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey

... elaborate presentation, in singsong verse, of his own undeserved indigence and the brutality of employers, and ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes

... Erected at his own charge A Building and Colonnade For the convenience of those Persons Who, in this renowned Mart, Might carry on the Commerce of the World; Adding thereto, for the relief of Indigence, And for the advancement of Literature and Science, An Almshouse and a College of Lecturers; The City of London aiding him; Queen Elizabeth favouring the design, And, when the work was complete, Opening it in person, with a ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury

... action.'—Reflect upon this, my dear, and see how it agrees with the declaration you have made to your aunt and sister, that you would not resume your estate, were you to be turned out of doors, and reduced to indigence and want. Their very fears that you will resume, point out to you the necessity of resuming upon ...
— Clarissa, Volume 2 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson

... holds forth the emptiness of the creature in its own bosom, that cannot be satiated within, but must come forth to seek happiness. Nay, even the greatest perfection of the creature speaks out the creature's own self indigence most, because its happiness is the removal from itself unto another, even unto ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning

... peasant would reject, and clumps about in wooden shoes, which the English laborer would regard with horror; but this, according to statements which I have heard, and am inclined to trust, arises, generally speaking, not so much from indigence as from self-denying frugality, pushed to an extreme. The French peasant is the possessor of property, and has a passion, almost a mania, for acquisition. He saves money and subscribes to government loans, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 105, July 1866 • Various

... people in awe, I mean to infer that such strenuous asserters of their independence, whom the flattering pens of Ovid and Horace represent as formidable even to Augustus, and preferring death to the loss of their liberties,[Y] favoured by the natural strength and indigence of their country, were not very likely to be so far subdued by any foreign power inferior to the Roman, as to suffer any considerable revolution in their customs and language: for as to the irruptions of the Goths, Vandals, and Lombards, in the fifth and sixth centuries, besides a profound ...
— Account of the Romansh Language - In a Letter to Sir John Pringle, Bart. P. R. S. • Joseph Planta, Esq. F. R. S.

... advocated provision against old age, etc.: the writer declares all private provision un-Christian. After decent maintenance and relief of family claims of indigence, he holds that all the rest is to go to the "Benefit Society," of which he draws up the rules, in technical form, with chapters of "Officers," "Contributors" etc., from the Acts of the Apostles, etc., and some of the early ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan

... day more out of tune," growled the general, as he looked up to the old, yellow dial, and ran his eye over the cords which supported the weights. Then glancing around the room, he saw everywhere age, decay, and indigence. There was an old divan, with a patched, faded covering of silk, and a grandfather's arm-chair near it, the cushion of which the general knew, by the long years of experience, to be hard as a stone. A round table stood near the divan, covered with a shabby woollen cover, to hide the much-thumbed, ...
— Old Fritz and the New Era • Louise Muhlbach

... all the public revenue, very nearly, goes to people whose income perishes with themselves. To begin with those who collect the taxes, custom-house officers, excise men, collectors, and clerks of every rank and demonination sic, there is not one in ten who does not die in indigence; and if he leaves a family, he leaves ...
— An Inquiry into the Permanent Causes of the Decline and Fall of Powerful and Wealthy Nations. • William Playfair

... perceive was known by report to Eratosthenes and some other Greeks, and which they call Orcynia), and settled there. Which nation to this time retains its position in those settlements, and has a very high character for justice and military merit: now also they continue in the same scarcity, indigence, hardihood, as the Germans, and use the same food and dress; but their proximity to the Province and knowledge of commodities from countries beyond the sea supplies to the Gauls many things tending to luxury as well ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various

... as that of the bullfrog, or bittern by the solitary pools; he, unseen of men, croaks harsh thunder, and that alone continually,—of indignation, suspicion, incurable sorrow. The People are sinking towards ruin, near starvation itself: 'My dear friends,' cries he, 'your indigence is not the fruit of vices nor of idleness, you have a right to life, as good as Louis XVI., or the happiest of the century. What man can say he has a right to dine, when you have no bread?' (Ami ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle

... weather-stained brick, was immediately at the end of High Street, where a diverging branch from that thoroughfare ran round to the low-lying Durnover lanes; so that the precincts of the bridge formed the merging point of respectability and indigence. The second bridge, of stone, was further out on the highway—in fact, fairly in the meadows, though still within the ...
— The Mayor of Casterbridge • Thomas Hardy

... consumption of goods remains and is carried on by the wife and children. The man of the household also can do something in this direction, and indeed, he commonly does; but with a still lower descent into the levels of indigence—along the margin of the slums—the man, and presently also the children, virtually cease to consume valuable goods for appearances, and the woman remains virtually the sole exponent of the household's pecuniary decency. No class ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen

... physician; in which capacity I succeeded tolerably well, till my servants decamped in the night with my baggage, and left me in the condition of Adam. In short, I have travelled over the greatest part of Europe, as a beggar, pilgrim, priest, soldier, gamester, and quack; and felt the extremes of indigence and opulence, with the inclemency of weather in all its vicissitudes. I have learned that the characters of mankind are everywhere the same; that common sense and honesty bear an infinitely small proportion to folly and vice; and that life is ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett

... suggestion that the family of Castaing were in a state of indigence. He showed that his father had an income of 10,000 francs, while his two brothers were holding good positions, one as an officer in the army, the other as a government official. The mistress of Castaing he represented as enjoying an income of 5,000 francs. He protested against the quantity ...
— A Book of Remarkable Criminals • H. B. Irving

... struggle for existence; but everything that he as an individual learns and does with this end in view has nothing whatever to do with culture. This latter only takes its beginning in a sphere that lies far above the world of necessity, indigence, and struggle for existence. The question now is to what extent a man values his ego in comparison with other egos, how much of his strength he uses up in the endeavour to earn his living. Many a one, by stoically confining his needs within a narrow compass, ...
— On the Future of our Educational Institutions • Friedrich Nietzsche

... it reaches the simple, rhythmic prose of the passage quoted above, but generally it is somewhat abrupt and a little toneless. But now and again we find the 'unexpected splendour' in which Addison is wanting, in phrases like 'a covered indigence, a magnificent poverty', [Footnote: Spectator 114.] or in the sparkling antitheses of Sir Roger's description of his ancestors. [Footnote: Spectator 109.] Yet Steele's claim on our admiration rests not on the quality of his style, but, as Mr. John Forster has said, on 'the soul of ...
— The Coverley Papers • Various

... puts them in your lot for the correction of selfishness," said Bessie laughing. "I believe if we all helped the need that belongs to us by kindred or service, there would be little misery of indigence in the world, and little superfluity of riches even amongst the richest. That must have been the original reading of the old saw that sayeth, 'Charity should begin ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr

... they would be seized and taken before a magistrate, to be punished for being homeless and without food. Many of them do not dread this punishment, but will seek to deserve it by more criminal conditions than enforced indigence and helpless hunger. They will break street-lamps and tradesmen's windows, to get a month's imprisonment, with food, and rest, and shelter for that period. Others, and the majority, have a prouder spirit. They will escape a prison, with the help of God. Their number is very ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2 No 4, October, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... Alfred was entirely overwhelmed, and obliged to drive before the storm of his fortune. He fled in disguise into a fastness in the Isle of Athelney, where he remained four months in the lowest state of indigence, supported by an heroic humility, and that spirit of piety which neither adverse fortune nor prosperity could overcome. It is much to be lamented that a character so formed to interest all men, involved in reverses of fortune that make the most ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke

... incapable of receiving the clerical character. James might enjoy the thought that he had reduced many of them from a situation in which they were surrounded by comforts, and had before them the fairest professional prospects, to hopeless indigence. ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... her well- known place on Calvary, and subject her once more to the salutary action of interior tribulation. She felt again as if suddenly deprived of all the Divine gifts and favours, and reduced to the very extreme of spiritual indigence. Her natural talents and capabilities seemed paralysed; desolation overwhelmed her, temptations to anger, antipathy and even despair pressed on her. The last, especially, became so importunate, that she seemed to herself sometimes on the very brink of the dread ...
— The Life of the Venerable Mother Mary of the Incarnation • "A Religious of the Ursuline Community"

... Industry reduced to Indigence, broken-spirited, and in the Workhouse: or, endeavouring to preserve independence, lingering in despair, committing suicide, ...
— Bygone Punishments • William Andrews

... love of music is naturally connected a taste for poetry; and, fortunately for the poets of Africa, they are in a great measure exempted from that neglect and indigence, which, in more polished countries, commonly attend the votaries of the Muses. They consist of two classes; the most numerous are the singing men, called Jilli kea, mentioned in a former part of my narrative. One or more of these may be found in every town. They ...
— Life and Travels of Mungo Park in Central Africa • Mungo Park

... same year Charleston was reduced to ashes. A large portion of its inhabitants passed, in one day, from prosperity to indigence. Under the pressure of this misfortune, the legislature applied to parliament for aid; and that body, with a liberality reflecting honour on its members, voted twenty thousand pounds, to ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 1 (of 5) • John Marshall

... far off than he; And in my fancy I would trace A lady with an angel's face, That made devotion simply debt, Till sick with envy and regret, And wicked grief that God should e'er Make women, and not make them fair. That me might love me more because Another in his memory was, And that my indigence might be To him what Baby's was to me, The chief of charms, who could have thought? But God's wise way is to give nought Till we with asking it are tired; And when, indeed, the change desired Comes, lest we give ourselves the praise, It comes by Providence, not ...
— The Victories of Love - and Other Poems • Coventry Patmore

... increase in size; but her piercing black eyes lost none of their fire, while her tongue wagged more abusively when her temper was roused. John Quincy Adams described her as going about "like a virago-errant in enchanted armor, redeeming herself from the cramps of indigence by the notoriety of her eccentricities and the forced currency ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore

... was the son of a warrant officer. He did not contract this disease until he had been sent out to the West Indies, where it swept away hundreds. He had now been long in the service, with little or no chance of promotion. He had suffered from indigence, from reflections upon his humble birth, from sarcasms on his appearance. Every contumely had been heaped upon him at one time or another, in the ships in which he served; among a crowd he had found himself desolate—and now, although ...
— Mr. Midshipman Easy • Captain Frederick Marryat

... involved all theatrical enterprise, they were acknowledged to stand at the head of their profession.[12] Taylor lived through the Commonwealth, and Lowin far into the reign of Charles the Second, ultimately reaching his ninety-third year. Their last days were passed in indigence, and Lowin when an octogenarian was reduced to keeping the inn of the "Three Pigeons," ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee

... indigence, and this isolation in the midst of Paris, Lisbeth relished with delight. And besides, she foresaw that the first passion would rob her of her slave. Sometimes she even blamed herself because her own tyranny and reproaches had compelled the poetic youth to become so great an artist of ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac

... them, teaching them, inspiring them to be good, devoting his whole thought to their welfare, Pestalozzi, who was described as "either a good-natured fool, or a poor devil, who was compelled, by indigence, to perform the menial office of schoolmaster," began a work that ...
— History of Education • Levi Seeley

... studded with superb groves of oak. The freshness and beauty of this spot, which Nature seemed to have taken pleasure in adorning and enriching with her most precious gifts, contrasted, in a striking manner, with the indigence and uncleanliness of its inhabitants; and I regretted that it had not fallen to the lot of civilized men. I was wrong no doubt: it is just that those should be most favored by their common mother, who are least disposed to pervert her gifts, or to give the preference to advantages which are factitious, ...
— Narrative of a Voyage to the Northwest Coast of America in the years 1811, 1812, 1813, and 1814 or the First American Settlement on the Pacific • Gabriel Franchere

... incapable of industry, and who, from the natural ferocity of their manners, indulged themselves in committing violence, even beyond what was requisite to supply their necessities. The English themselves, reduced to the most extreme indigence by these continued depredations, had shaken off all bands of government; and those who had been plundered today, betook themselves next day to a like disorderly life, and, from despair, joined the robbers in pillaging and ruining their fellow-citizens. These were the evils for which ...
— The History of England, Volume I • David Hume

... WILLIAM that bears it, takes it into his possession, and whom only it concerns. Oh what a valiant faculty is HOPE, that in a mortal subject, and in a moment, makes nothing of usurping infinity, immensity, eternity, and of supplying her master's indigence, at her pleasure, with all things that he can imagine or desire. And this Pierre or William, what is it but a sound, when all is done, ("What's in a name?") or three or four dashes ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon

... it. In spite of the improvements and additions which were making to the Norland estate, and in spite of its owner having once been within some thousand pounds of being obliged to sell out at a loss, nothing gave any symptom of that indigence which he had tried to infer from it; no poverty of any kind, except of conversation, appeared; but there, the deficiency was considerable. John Dashwood had not much to say for himself that was worth hearing, and his wife had still less. But there was no peculiar disgrace in ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen

... myself a more perfect example of indigence than I now exhibited. There was no being in the city on whose kindness I had any claim. Money I had none, and what I then wore comprised my whole stock of movables. I had just lost my shoes, and this loss rendered my stockings of no use. My dignity remonstrated against a barefoot ...
— Arthur Mervyn - Or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 • Charles Brockden Brown

... has never been either able to raise the wages of curates or to sink those of laborers to the degree that was intended, because it has never been able to hinder either the one from being willing to accept of less than the legal allowance, on account of the indigence of their situation and the multitude of their competitors, or the other from receiving more, on account of the contrary competition of those who expected to derive either profit or ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • John Stuart Mill

... eunuch at the Command of Petronilla, and the usual body of male and female slaves. Some score of glebe-bound peasants cultivated the large estate for their lord's behoof. Notwithstanding the distress that had fallen upon the Roman nobility, many of whom were sunk into indigence, the chief of the Anicii still controlled large means; and the disposal of these possessions at his death was matter of interest to many persons—not least to the clergy of Rome, who found in the dying man's sister a piously tenacious advocate. Children had been ...
— Veranilda • George Gissing

... to themselves. It is not for weak beings, who enter into a composition with guilt, and cover selfishness and cowardice with the name of prudence. It is not for corrupt wretches, who rise from the bed of debauchery, or from the mire of indigence, to feast their eyes upon the blood that streams from the scaffold. It is the portion of a people who delight in humanity, practice justice, despise their flatterers, and respect the truth. While you are not such a people, ...
— Madame Roland, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott

... thought of so incredible a thing confuses me," I managed to reply. "But tell me if in your piety and wisdom you really stripped yourself of all your property in order to obey the gods and get the benefit of indigence." ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce • Ambrose Bierce

... this indigence continues, all unions or relations constructed between Man and Woman are constructed in indigence, and can produce only ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli

... upon them within recent years. Here, an old widow was mourning the loss of a son who had gone to the deep-sea fishing and would never return: his bright young life had been swallowed up in the insatiable ocean, and she was left lamenting in her indigence. There, it was a father who had been engulfed in the roost; or again, the illness of a mother had cast a blight for years upon this other household. Sometimes I have seen two old people, all their sons dead, living a kind of ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes

... world will have compassion upon us, and will generously give us all that is necessary for our subsistence; but if we swerve from holy poverty, the world will shun us; the illicit means which we might take for avoiding indigence, would only make us feel it the more." Is not such a discourse sufficient to show us, that St. Francis had great talents and judgment, joined to great knowledge of the practice ...
— The Life and Legends of Saint Francis of Assisi • Father Candide Chalippe

... the act is remarkable: "forasmuch as oftentimes it is seen, that when any lord is called to high estate, and hath not convenient livelyhood to support the same dignity, it induceth great poverty and indigence, and causeth oftentimes great extortion, embracery, and maintenance to be had; to the great trouble of all such countries where such estate shall happen to be: ...
— Commentaries on the Laws of England - Book the First • William Blackstone

... 1704 begins a second era in Addison's life, which extends to the summer of 1710, when his age was thirty-eight. This was the first term of his official career; and though very barren of literary performance, it not only raised him from indigence, but settled definitely his position as a public man. His correspondence shows that, while on the continent, he had been admitted to confidential intimacy by diplomatists and men of rank; immediately on his return he was ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... astonishing amount of the sums raised for the support of one description of the poor may be concluded the extent and greatness of that oppression, whose effects have rendered it possible for the few to afford so much, and have shown us that such a multitude of our brothers exist in even helpless indigence. Your Lordship tells us that the science of civil government has received all the perfection of which it is capable. For my part, I am more enthusiastic. The sorrow I feel from the contemplation of this melancholy picture ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth

... seventies James Ollerenshaw had been a young-old man of nearly thirty. He had had a stepbrother, much older and much poorer than himself, and the stepbrother had died, leaving a daughter, named Susan, almost, but not quite, in a state of indigence. The stepbrother and James had not been on terms of effusive cordiality. But James was perfectly ready to look after Susan, his stepniece. Susan, aged seventeen years, was, however, not perfectly ready to be looked after. She had a little money, and she earned a little (by painting asters on toilet ...
— Helen with the High Hand (2nd ed.) • Arnold Bennett

... poem in a state remote from indigence, where he was roused to exertion by the example of several contemporary poets; and what must have animated him beyond every other consideration, he wrote both at the desire, and under the patronage of the emperor and his minister ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus

... be a violation of that principle to give them food or shelter? Must not every loyal and just man wish to see them, in the words of the famous Golden Bull, 'always poor and necessitous, and for ever accompanied by the infamy of the father, languishing in continued indigence, and finding their punishment in living, and their relief in dying?' If the widowed mother should carry the orphan heir of her unfortunate husband to the gate of any man who himself touched with the sad vicissitude of human affairs, might feel a compassionate reverence for the ...
— Irish Wit and Humor - Anecdote Biography of Swift, Curran, O'Leary and O'Connell • Anonymous

... from banquets, and then the next day, while still suffering from indigestion, gorge themselves again; men who, as they say, have never in their lives seen the sun set or rise, and who, having devoured their patrimony, are reduced to indigence. None of us imagine that debauched men of that sort live pleasantly. You, however, rather mean to speak of refined and elegant bons vivans, men who, by the employment of the most skilful cooks and bakers, and by carefully culling the choicest products of fishermen, ...
— The Academic Questions • M. T. Cicero

... debauched companions of his youth were banished from his presence and his counsels, and forbidden to approach within ten miles of his dwelling. But at the same time we are assured that they were not left in indigence or necessity. Wisdom and virtue became the only recommendations which raised any one to his service, and those who had proved themselves most worthy, under the government of the former monarch, found themselves most readily welcomed ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 1 of 8 • Various

... her, even for the very purpose of enabling him to provide for the parent whose egotistical demands on his filial attention tended to confine him to a desert, in which both were starving in hopeless and helpless indigence. ...
— Chronicles of the Canongate • Sir Walter Scott

... perforce unfaithful, due to their illusions concerning other estimable persons. How can that be punished that one is forced to?" On Berlin conditions, the English Ambassador, Lord Malmsbury, wrote in 1772: "Total corruption of morals pervades both sexes of all classes, whereto must be added the indigence, caused, partly through the taxes imposed by the present King, partly through the love of luxury that they took from his grandfather. The men lead a life of excesses with limited means, while the women are harpies, wholly bereft of shame. They yield themselves to him who pays best. Tenderness ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel

... reasons which influenced me then, will influence me now,' said Rose firmly. 'If I ever owed a strict and rigid duty to her, whose goodness saved me from a life of indigence and suffering, when should I ever feel it, as I should to-night? It is a struggle,' said Rose, 'but one I am proud to make; it is a pang, but ...
— Oliver Twist • Charles Dickens

... the terrible gulf of pauperism. He refers to Colquhoun's account of the twenty thousand people who rose every morning in London without knowing how they were to be supported; and observes that 'when indigence does not produce overt acts of vice, it palsies every virtue.'[250] The temptations to which the poor man is exposed, and the sense of injustice due to an ignorance of the true cause of misery, tend to 'sour ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen

... into misery and intrigue, before he acquired celebrity. Dispositions become weakened and stained by such a struggle with the difficulties of life in the dregs of great corrupted cities. Rousseau had paraded his indigence and his reveries in the bosom of nature; and as its consideration calms and purifies everything he quitted it a philosopher. Brissot had dragged his misery and vanity into the heart of Paris and of London, and ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine

... listen to their vile language, you hear their oaths and revolting expressions: to go to these Megeres is often to encounter brigands and assassins: what a spectacle! It is the deformity of vice in the rags of indigence. ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter

... Club on a pleasure trip to Manitou, a summer resort that nestles in a canon at the base of Mount Rosa. Before the party was comfortably settled in the hotel, Field was approached by a poor woman who had lost her husband, and who poured into his ear a sad tale of indigence and sorrow. He became immediately interested, and at once set about devising means for her relief. As his purse was as lean as her own and his companions were not overburdened with the means to get back to Denver, ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson

... therefore I, perhaps, have never yet felt all the malignity with which a reproach, edged with the appellation of old maid, swells some of those hearts in which it is infixed. I was not condemned in my youth to solitude, either by indigence or deformity, nor passed the earlier part of life without the flattery of courtship, and the joys of triumph. I have danced the round of gaiety amidst the murmurs of envy, and gratulations of applause; been attended from ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson

... and who swear for fame. Behold the schools in which plebeian minds, Once simple, are initiated in arts Which some may practise with politer grace, But none with readier skill! 'Tis here they learn The road that leads from competence and peace To indigence and rapine; till at last Society, grown weary of the load, Shakes her encumbered lap, and casts them out. But censure profits little. Vain the attempt To advertise in verse a public pest, That, like the filth with which the peasant feeds ...
— The Task and Other Poems • William Cowper

... torture, sorrow, grief; misery, affliction, adversity, disaster, calamity, misfortune; straits, poverty, destitution, indigence. ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming

... by which I might emancipate my mind, through abstracting it from the body, would not serve my end. I should still need money to devote myself to certain experiments. But for that, I would accept the outward indigence of a sage possessed of both heaven and heart. A man need only never stoop, to remain lofty in poverty. He who struggles and endures, while marching on to a glorious end, presents a noble spectacle; but who can have the strength ...
— Louis Lambert • Honore de Balzac

... our newsman is some new illustration of the uncertainty of life, some illustration of its vicissitudes and fluctuations. Mindful of this permanent lesson, some members of the trade originated this society, which affords them assistance in time of sickness and indigence. The subscription is infinitesimal. It amounts annually to five shillings. Looking at the returns before me, the progress of the society would seem to be slow, but it has only been slow for the best of all reasons, that it has been sure. The pensions ...
— Speeches: Literary and Social • Charles Dickens

... around him, to prepare and stimulate his ambition for the lofty career of political action that awaited him at home. In truth, if we may judge from the letters written during his English residence, or the biographical fragments that occur in his other correspondence, he seems, beyond his personal indigence, to have had no other enduring interest but that of public affairs. His mind broods over the tragic epochs of English history with a fascinating and curious sympathy: there is an evident faith in a coming drama of ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various

... "The Dun," where we would have the Castle of Carelessness, the Drawbridge of Credit, Sir Novelty Fashion's expedition against the City of Tailors, &c., &c." There is a good deal of this coquetry with indigence ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 5 November 1848 • Various

... the same opinion, citoyen Gamelin, you will join me in demanding, at the next assembly, that the Committee of Benevolence concert measures with the Military Committee to succour the families that are in indigence and have ...
— The Gods are Athirst • Anatole France

... that they have prepared for the human soul a future state of reward or punishment." The Imperial pontiff inculcates, in the most persuasive language, the duties of benevolence and hospitality; exhorts his inferior clergy to recommend the universal practice of those virtues; promises to assist their indigence from the public treasury; and declares his resolution of establishing hospitals in every city, where the poor should be received without any invidious distinction of country or of religion. Julian beheld with envy the wise and ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon

... the Confucian doctrine, says it is contrary to filial piety to refuse a lucrative post by which to relieve the indigence of one's aged parents.[19] This form of sin, however, is rare in China as in ...
— The Problem of China • Bertrand Russell

... safe in giving him a quarter and dismissing him without further questioning. I always noticed that these circular letters, when written in the vernacular, were remarkable for their beautiful caligraphy and grammatical inaccuracy, and that they all seem to have been written by the same hand. Perhaps indigence exercises a peculiar and equal effect upon ...
— Urban Sketches • Bret Harte

... transferring himself to another state. Secondly, when that which he deprives himself of, though it be required for the decencies of life, can nevertheless easily be recovered, so that he does not suffer extreme inconvenience. Thirdly, when he is in presence of extreme indigence in an individual, or great need on the part of the common weal. For in such cases it would seem praiseworthy to forego the requirements of one's station, in order to provide for a ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas

... mistaken pride of ancestry, have never experienced the celestial rapture: they have never been amalgamated with society, are strangers to poverty themselves, and cannot comprehend its operation upon others; born and moving in a sphere where the chilling blasts of indigence never penetrate, or the clouds of adversity appal, they have no conception of the more delightful gratification which springs from the source of all earthly happiness, the pleasure and ability of administering to the wants and comforts of our ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle

... forbear to enlarge on this delicate subject. Permit me only to submit to your Majesty's consideration whether his long imprisonment and the confiscation of his estates, and the indigence and dispersement of his family, and the painful anxieties incident to all these circumstances, do not form an assemblage of sufferings which recommend him to the mediation of humanity? Allow me, Sir, to be its organ on this occasion; and to entreat that he may be ...
— Lafayette • Martha Foote Crow

... tax and keep houses for the purpose of gaming. These will effectually suppress it. Everywhere else they are entitled to the game, and will keep close watch that it runs into no other net. Let this tax be appropriated to the support of an institution where, in disease and indigence, its victims may find support and relief. Make it public, that all may see and know its habitues, and who may feel the reforming influence of public opinion. For, at last, this is the only power by which the morals of a community are preserved. ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks

... virtuous part of the community I am shunned as the pest and bane of social enjoyment. In short, I am debarred from every kind of happiness. If I look back, I recoil with horror from the black catalogue of vices which have stained my past life, and reduced me to indigence and contempt. If I look forward, I shudder at the prospects which my foreboding mind presents to view both in this and a coming world. This is a deplorable, yet just, picture of myself. How totally the reverse ...
— The Coquette - The History of Eliza Wharton • Hannah Webster Foster

... that he had done so; but if so, no such objection is now made by him—or by me. My idea is that a child should be allowed to consult her own heart, and to indulge her own choice, provided that in doing so she does not prepare for herself a life of indigence, which must be a life of misery; and of course providing also that there be no strong ...
— The Claverings • Anthony Trollope

... as master of a vessel trading to the colonies. While he resided in the vicinity of Rotherhithe, his avocations obliging him to go early into the city and return late, he frequently saw deserted infants exposed to the inclemencies of the seasons, and through the indigence or cruelty of their parents left to casual relief, or untimely death. This naturally excited his compassion, and led him to project the establishment of an hospital for the reception of exposed and deserted young children; in which humane design he laboured more than seventeen ...
— The Works of William Hogarth: In a Series of Engravings - With Descriptions, and a Comment on Their Moral Tendency • John Trusler

... tyrant of Crema. After a short time the Colleoni brothers found means to assassinate him also; therefore Bartolommeo alone, a child of whom no heed was taken, remained to be his father's avenger. He and his mother lived together in great indigence at Solza, until the lad felt strong enough to enter the service of one of the numerous petty Lombard princes, and to make himself if possible a captain of adventure. His name alone was a sufficient introduction, and the Duchy of Milan, dismembered upon the death of Gian Maria Visconti, was ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds

... and where a common sympathy and hearty co-operation lighten the burdens of each, is a very different poverty, different in kind, different in influence and effect, from that conscious and humiliating indigence which is every day forced to contrast itself with neighboring wealth on which it feels a sense of grinding dependence. The poverty of the frontier is indeed no poverty. It is but the beginning of wealth, and ...
— Hidden Treasures - Why Some Succeed While Others Fail • Harry A. Lewis

... secured a friend, by whom a man may obtain that which he wants, they leave to friendship a mean and, indeed, if I may so speak, anything but respectable origin, when they make her to be born of indigence and want; were this the case, then in proportion as a man judged that there were the least resources in himself, precisely in that degree would he be best qualified for friendship, whereas the fact is far otherwise. For just as a man has most confidence in ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume II (of X) - Rome • Various

... CROKER, Esq., late Secretary to the Admiralty, author of the "New Whig Guide," &c., &c., who, from having been considered one of the first wits of his day, is now reduced to a state of unforeseen comic indigence. It is earnestly hoped that this appeal will not be made in vain, and that, by the liberal contributions of the facetious, he will be restored to his former affluence in jokes, and that by such means he may be able to continue his contributions to the "Quarterly Review," ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various

... kind. But the weak have grave misgivings of possible errors in justice. Besides, these vagabond families are very easily scared. The accusation against the Comprachicos was that they traded in other people's children. But the promiscuousness caused by poverty and indigence is such that at times it might have been difficult for a father and mother to prove a child ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo

... injuring the orchards, destroying the fruit-trees, and damaging the sponges, which had proved hitherto a source of profit. The hurricane, too, was followed by repeated droughts, and the inhabitants of the out-islands were reduced to indigence and want, a condition which is still, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various

... a hopeless idler; he had been born to leisure and was wedded to indigence, therefore he saw a good deal of the girl on her visits. He listened to her stories of the children, he admired her new and stylish clothes, he watched her develop under the influence of her surroundings. Inasmuch as ...
— Laughing Bill Hyde and Other Stories • Rex Beach

... their country. A supernatural alacrity seemed to animate them, when they accompanied their husbands into distant countries, and even when they immured themselves with them in the fetid ships into which they were inhumanly crowded. Reduced to the most frightful indigence, they were seen to beg bread for themselves and families. Among those who were nurtured in the lap of opulence, many passed suddenly from the most delicate and the most elegant style of living, to the rudest toils, and to the ...
— Reminiscences of the Military Life and Sufferings of Col. Timothy Bigelow, Commander of the Fifteenth Regiment of the Massachusetts Line in the Continental Army, during the War of the Revolution • Charles Hersey

... it to you, you imps, that I will!" he screamed at the boys, seeming to direct his course towards them, and taking a circuit round me, he stepped on to the sidewalk. This old man creates surprise on the Arbata by his great age, his weakness, and his indigence. Here he was a cheery laboring-man returning from ...
— The Moscow Census - From "What to do?" • Lyof N. Tolstoi

... place hi the financial world. Families who had lived in opulence found themselves suddenly reduced to indigence. Schemers who had been reveling in the delusion of princely fortune found their estates vanishing into thin air. Those who had any property remaining sought to secure it against reverses. Cautious persons ...
— The Crayon Papers • Washington Irving

... born at Glasgow on the 19th January 1800. His parents being in circumstances of indigence, he was sent to labour in a factory so early as his eighth year. A limited attendance at school he supplemented by devoting his intervals of toil to self-instruction. He began to contribute verses to the public journals in his eighteenth year, and soon after composed a series of ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume VI - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various

... be strong, and robust, and hale, and in spite of his indigence always clean and attractive. Tact and intelligence, and a power of swift repartee, are necessary to him. His conscience must be clear as the sun. He must sleep purely, and wake still more purely. To abuse and insult he must be as insensible as a stone, ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar



Words linked to "Indigence" :   poorness, penury, pauperization, beggary, poverty, pauperism, impoverishment, need



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