"Swinish" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... her eyes furtively toward the adversary, an appraising glance, as if to judge his gullibility. The brutish passion of the man showed in the pendulous lower lip, thrust forward a little, in the swinish lifting of the wide-flaring nostrils, in the humid glowing of the inflamed eyes. A nausea of disgust swept over her. She fought it down. Then, with hypocrisy that amazed herself, she met his ardent stare boldly, though with a pretense of timidity. She spoke with a hesitant, ...
— Heart of the Blue Ridge • Waldron Baily
... statement that "the crowd rent the air with their shouts," his printer made the line read "the crowd rent the air with their snouts." However, this error was a natural one, since it occurs in the "Catechism of the Swinish Multitude." Royalty only are privileged when it comes to the matter of blundering. When Louis XIV. was a boy he one day spoke of "un carosse"; he should have said "une carosse," but he was king, and having changed the ...
— The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac • Eugene Field
... ignorant, sensual, swinish, base, brute, imbruted, sottish, unintellectual, beastly, carnal, insensible, stolid, unspiritual, ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... isn't their swinish cowardice astonishing? Look here, I will show you something! There are all the stones they have thrown through my windows. Just look at them! I'm hanged if there are more than two decently large bits of hard stone in the whole heap; the rest are nothing but gravel—wretched little things. ...
— An Enemy of the People • Henrik Ibsen
... some degree be classed in categories of bird and beast, one like the eagle, another like the bear, some swinish, some elephantine, some boldly leonine, unquestionably Red Perris must be likened to the cat tribe. To some the comparison would have seemed most opportune, having seen him in restless action; but the same ...
— Alcatraz • Max Brand
... prove to herself her own power for evil. And he asked himself with horror: what is this impulse towards dirtiness, which is in the majority of human beings—this desire to besmirch the purity of themselves and others,—these swinish souls, who take a delight in rolling in filth, and are happy when not one inch of their ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... ingrained in the literature of ancient Greece. In the Odyssey we read about the fair-haired goddess Circe, decoying the companions of Odysseus with her sweet voice, giving them drugs and potions, making them the victims of swinish indulgence of their appetites. When Odysseus comes to their rescue she tries to allure him too, saying, "Nay, then, pat up your blade within its sheath, and let us now approach our bed that there we too may join in love and learn to trust each other." Later on Odysseus ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... were divided in choice between Switzerland and Tuscany, and I gave my vote for Pisa, as nearer the Mediterranean, which I love for the sake of the shores which it washes, and for my young recollections of 1809. Switzerland is a curst selfish, swinish country of brutes, placed in the most romantic region of the world. I never could bear the inhabitants, and still less their English visiters; for which reason, after writing for some information about houses, upon hearing that there ...
— Life of Lord Byron, With His Letters And Journals, Vol. 5 (of 6) • (Lord Byron) George Gordon Byron
... lewdly-pampered Luxury 770 Now heaps upon some few with vast excess, Nature's full blessings would be well dispensed In unsuperfluous even proportions, And she no whit encumbered with her store; And then the Giver would be better thanked, His praise due paid: for swinish gluttony Ne'er looks to Heaven amidst his gorgeous feast, But with besotted base ingratitude Crams, and blasphemes his Feeder. Shall I go on? Or have I said enow? To him that dares 780 Arm his profane tongue with ...
— Milton's Comus • John Milton
... gods came back, drunk and debauched with their long exile under the earth, and the garden-god assumed the throne of the Holy of Holies. Alexander, Caesar, Lucrezia, the threefold divinity, might be shown as a painter has shown one of them on the wall of one of his own chapels: a swinish portent in papal garments, kneeling, bloated, thinking of Lucrezia, with fingers folded over the purple of his rings. Or the family might have been shown as Rossetti, in one of the loveliest, most cruel, and most significant of his pictures, has shown it: a light, laughing masquerade ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... might serve to remind Americans how France got rid of royalty; might evoke a hoarse growl from the many-headed monster; might cause some "dangerous demagogue" to stir—perchance a Danton! Fit patron saint for our own plutocracy is this swinish king, once called Bien aime, the Well-beloved; but after some thirty years of Bradley-Martinism, named Ame de boue—A soul of mud! How much our super-select society resembles the Madame DuBarrys, the Duc d'Aiguillons and Abbe Terrays, who made the court of Louis a byword and a reproach, his reign ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... the air with hungry wails - "Reward us, ere we think or write! Without your Gold mere Knowledge fails To sate the swinish appetite!" ...
— Phantasmagoria and Other Poems • Lewis Carroll
... whom his victory gave a respite. The first communication of this nature which he received was from the Turkish sultan, who, as soon as the invasion of Egypt was known, had called upon "all true believers to take arms against those swinish infidels the French, that they might deliver these blessed habitations from their accursed hands;" and who had ordered his "pashas to turn night into day in their efforts to take vengeance." The present of "his imperial majesty, the powerful, formidable, ...
— The Life of Horatio Lord Nelson • Robert Southey
... Nebuchadnezzar Turned out with his swinish kin Creeps in like a baneful vision At the Babylonian din; We have stilled the tongue of our Daniel Lest sudden he rise and cry: "Behold! thy kingdom is numbered; ...
— Pan and Aeolus: Poems • Charles Hamilton Musgrove
... whether a man sees history from above or from below. Burke saw it from the comfortable altitude of the Whig aristocracy to which he had allied himself. The revolutionary school saw its inverse, from the standpoint of the "swinish multitude" (an angry indiscretion of Burke's) for whom it had worked to less advantage. Paine was a man of the people, and Godwin belonged by birth to the dissenting community for whom history had been chiefly ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford
... occur in several passages,—e.g. parocheteuein logois; ta men os tithemena ta d os paratithemena; oinos kolazomenos upo nephontos eterou theou; the plays on the word nomos nou dianome, ode etara: fourthly, there is a foolish extravagance of language in other passages,—'the swinish ignorance of arithmetic;' 'the justice and suitableness of the discourse on laws;' over-emphasis; 'best of Greeks,' said of all the Greeks, and the like: fifthly, poor and insipid illustrations are also common: sixthly, we may observe an excessive use of climax and hyperbole, ...
— Laws • Plato
... be known to do any thing, never do it. A man may play the fool in the drifts of a desert, but every grain of sand shall seem to see. He may be a solitary eater, but he cannot keep his foolish counsel. A broken complexion, a swinish look, ungenerous acts and the want of due knowledge,—all blab. Can a cook, a Chiffinch, an Iachimo be mistaken for Zeno or Paul? Confucius exclaimed,—"How can a man be concealed? How can a man ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... clothing, and the rough humanity of its bodily form, had woven into it—into its movements, into the expression of its countenance, into its whole presence—some now irresistible suggestion of a hog, a swinish taint, the ...
— The Island of Doctor Moreau • H. G. Wells
... star and by the tapir and Serikoai,—which is another story, told by the Arawaks, to this effect: The bride of Serikoai was seduced by the tapir god, who had first aroused her curiosity and interest by his attentions, and had finally won her love by promising to put off his swinish shape and reveal himself as a finer being than her husband. If only she would follow him to the edge of the earth, where the sky comes down, she would see that he was a god. The poor husband was crippled by the wife, that he might ...
— Myths & Legends of our New Possessions & Protectorate • Charles M. Skinner
... omit any reference to the literal meaning of this word. The context seems to show that, by its reference to night as the season for drunken orgies. Temperance is moderation in regard not only to the evil and swinish sin of drunkenness, which is so manifestly contrary to all Christian integrity and nobility of character, but in regard to the far more subtle temptation of another form of sensual indulgence—gluttony. The Christian ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... on the floor and was instantly asleep, embracing the canvas bag in both arms. Every man in the crew was in a somewhat similar condition, saving Hovey, with his gray-blue, steady eyes, and Cochrane, with his glittering, shifty black. These two watched the rest descend toward swinish unconsciousness; they saw, and waited coolly, and now and then glanced at each other with faint smiles ...
— Harrigan • Max Brand
... now rectified. Two or three small insertions have also been made from a quarto copy corrected by Mr. Burke himself. From the same source something more has been drawn in the shape of notes, to which are subscribed his initials. Of this number is the explanation of that celebrated phrase, "the swinish multitude": an explanation which was uniformly given by him to his friends, in conversation on the subject. But another note will probably interest the reader still more, as being strongly expressive of that parental affection which formed so amiable a feature in the character of Mr. Burke. ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. I. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... more public-spirited, a more noble-minded, a more disinterested set of men than those who had promised to vote for him, never existed on earth; each darkly hinted his suspicions that the electors in the opposite interest had certain swinish and besotted infirmities which rendered them unfit for the exercise of the important duties they were called upon to discharge. Fizkin expressed his readiness to do anything he was wanted: Slumkey, his determination to do nothing ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... conversation. Not that she wished to end it—not that she was sorry to see Hope Wayne again and to talk with her—not that she wanted or cared for any thing in particular, no, not even for her lord and master, who burst into the room with an oath, as usual, and with his small, swinish ...
— Trumps • George William Curtis
... fresh shame and horror when I contrasted this ghastly calmness of pale ice and the brightness of the holy stars looking down upon it, with our swinish revelry in the cabin, and I thought with loathing of the drunken ribaldry of the pirate and my own tipsy songs piercing the ear of the mighty spirit of this solitude. The exercise improved my spirits; I stepped the length of the little raised deck briskly, my thoughts very busy. ...
— The Frozen Pirate • W. Clark Russell
... its ignorance, those pleasures and interests for real and abiding things. Caught in the flames of fleshly lusts, and burning with anguish, it sees not the pure and peaceful beauty of Truth. Feeding upon the swinish husks of error and self-delusion, it is shut out from the mansion ...
— The Way of Peace • James Allen
... gladly, at those moments, he would have welcomed centuries of a material hell, to escape from the more awful spiritual hell within him,—to buy back that pearl of innocence which he had cast recklessly to be trampled under the feet of his own swinish passions! But, no; that which was done could never be undone,— never, to all eternity. And more than once, as he wandered restlessly from one room to another, the barrels of his pistols seemed to glitter with a cold, devilish smile, ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... brainless mob! swinish mob!" cried the stranger, when he at length stood beside the cart upon which the monster was still rending its hapless victim; "whither are ye running, and pressing, and crowding, and what are ye come to see? Know ye not that in Mexico ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various |
