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Poorness   Listen
noun
Poorness  n.  The quality or state of being poor (in any of the senses of the adjective).






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Poorness" Quotes from Famous Books



... had seen her, in Venice, on a great occasion, as the centre itself of the splendid Piazza: he had seen her there, on a still greater one, in his own poor rooms, which yet had consorted with her, having state and ancientry even in their poorness; but Mrs. Condrip's interior, even by this best view of it and though not flagrantly mean, showed itself as a setting almost grotesquely inapt. Pale, grave and charming, she affected him at once as a distinguished stranger—a stranger to ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume II • Henry James

... second child of his parents. The first dying in infancy through the poorness of Madame Balzac's milk, he was sent to a house on the outskirts of the town and suckled by a foster-mother. His sister Laure, a year younger than himself, was submitted to the same treatment, and the two children remained away from home until they were four ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton

... (soaps containing medicines) are also best let alone. They are only fit to be used on the advice of a doctor. Most of them are out and out humbugs, and make up for their richness in drugs by their poorness in good, pure fat and alkali. Moreover, what may suit one particular diseased condition of the skin is quite as likely to be injurious as helpful to another. Any drug which has the power of curing disease is almost certain to be irritating to a healthy skin; and nothing can be put into a soap beyond ...
— A Handbook of Health • Woods Hutchinson

... Peter and St. Paul at the ends. Above in the pediment are a Virgin and Child with kneeling angels. Besides the innovation of the enlarged frieze, which reminds one of a door in the Certosa near Pavia, the clumsiness of the mouldings and the comparative poorness of the sculpture, though the figures are much better than any previously worked by native artists, suggest that the designer ...
— Portuguese Architecture • Walter Crum Watson

... and there, as we went along. It was fishing on the wing. And when we pitched our tents in a hurry at nightfall on the low shore of Lac Sale, among the bushes where firewood was scarce and there were no sapins for the beds, we were comforted for the poorness of the camp-ground by the ...
— Little Rivers - A Book Of Essays In Profitable Idleness • Henry van Dyke

... that came out more and more with every word he said and with the particular way he said it, and Maisie could feel his monitress stiffen almost with anguish against the increase of his spell and then hurl herself as a desperate defence from it into the quite confessed poorness of violence, of iteration. "You're afraid of her—afraid, afraid, afraid! Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear!" Mrs. Wix wailed it with a high quaver, then broke down into a long shudder of helplessness and woe. The next minute she had flung herself again on the lean ...
— What Maisie Knew • Henry James

... exhausted cinders, as if he had been trying to use the unfortunate 'Waif of the Moorland' to eke out his last fire. Moreover, the proprietor of the Politician told Colonel Mohun of having remonstrated with him on the exceeding weakness and poorness of the 'Constantia' poetry, 'which,' as that indignant personage added, 'was evidently done merely as a lure to the unfortunate ...
— The Two Sides of the Shield • Charlotte M. Yonge

... childish and unphilosophical set of impulses that has led the theologians of nearly every faith to claim infinite qualities for their deity. One has to remember the poorness of the mental and moral quality of the churchmen of the third, fourth, and fifth centuries who saddled Christendom with its characteristic dogmas, and the extreme poverty and confusion of the circle of ideas within which they thought. Many of these makers of Christianity, like Saint Ambrose ...
— God The Invisible King • Herbert George Wells

... Gold is strangely mingled with Dross in most of his Pieces. He fell too much into the low Taste of the Age he liv'd in, which delighted in miserable Puns, low Wit, and affected sententious Maxims; and what is most unpardonable in him, he has interspersed his noblest Productions with this Poorness of Thought. This I have shewn in my Remarks on this Play. Yet, notwithstanding the Defects I have pointed out, it is, I think, beyond Dispute, that there is much less of this in Hamlet than in any of his Plays; and that the Language in the Whole, is much more pure, and much more free from Obscurity ...
— Some Remarks on the Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, Written by Mr. William Shakespeare (1736) • Anonymous

... the south shore of Botany Bay. I thought the other natives seemed to make her an object of their merriment. In general, indeed almost universally, the limbs of these people were small; of most of them the arms, legs, and thighs were thin. This, no doubt, is owing to the poorness of their living, which is chiefly on fish; otherwise the fineness of the climate, co-operating with the exercise which they take, might have rendered them more muscular. Those who live on the sea-coast depend entirely on fish for their sustenance; while the few who dwell in the woods ...
— An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, Vol. 1 • David Collins

... We have nothing to do with the latter, but we almost as infrequently meet the former. The longer we deal with "bad men,'' the more inclined are we to see the very summit of devilment as the result of need and friendlessness, weakness, foolishness, flightiness, and just simple, real, human poorness of spirit. Now, what we find so redistributed in the course of years, we often find crushed together and fallen apart in a short time. Today the prisoner seems to us the most dreadful criminal; in a few days, we have calmed down, have learned to know ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden

... eye, and looked crestfallen, and when afterwards she gave a mute inquiring address, shook her head impatiently. It was plain that she had failed, and was too much pained and shamed by his poorness of spirit to be able as ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge

... strikes us in these poor Girondins; their fatal shortness of vision; nay fatal poorness of character, for that is the root of it. They are as strangers to the People they would govern; to the thing they have come to work in. Formulas, Philosophies, Respectabilities, what has been written in Books, and admitted by the Cultivated Classes; this ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle

... said the other, opening the door into the parlor, which had an air of refinement about it in spite of its utter poorness. ...
— Grace Harlowe's Plebe Year at High School - The Merry Doings of the Oakdale Freshmen Girls • Jessie Graham Flower

... is the character of the woods within reach of the coast rains, much more conspicuous is the want of trees and the poorness of those scattered here and there on the great interior plateau. In the desert region, that is to say, the Karroo, the northern part of Cape Colony to the Orange River, western Bechuanaland, and the German territories of Namaqualand and Damaraland, there are hardly ...
— Impressions of South Africa • James Bryce



Words linked to "Poorness" :   sparsity, abstemiousness, impoverishment, meagerness, scantiness, need, thinness, deprivation, insufficiency, penury, low quality, financial condition, privation, want, neediness, barrenness, inadequacy, impecuniousness, penuriousness, pennilessness, aridity, indigence, poverty, wateriness, scantness, fruitlessness, exiguity, meagreness, pauperism



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