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More "Abasement" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... her cousin's grief and self-abasement touched the tender heart of Catharine, for she was kind and dove-like in her disposition, and loved Louis, with all his faults. Had it not been for the painful consciousness of the grief their unusual ...
— Canadian Crusoes - A Tale of The Rice Lake Plains • Catharine Parr Traill
... wished to signify the return of that family (a resurrection, as it were, from death to life), and the expulsion and abasement of their enemies; or it may have been that many gave it that significance from the subsequent fact of the return of that illustrious house to Florence—so prone is the human intellect to applying every word and act that has come previously, to the events that ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 04 (of 10), Filippino Lippi to Domenico Puligo • Giorgio Vasari
... Europe. But there are hundreds of our own compatriots who are quite as eager tuft-hunters as this poor Arab guide! John Bull dearly loves "a lord," while before "a princess" his soul creeps and grovels in infinite abasement. ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams
... the halls of the emperor Titus himself. There is one in this house, most noble lady, from whom I have long been cruelly separated, and who—what can I say but that if, when I was a free man, she gave me her love, now, in my abasement, she will not fail with that love ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 6, No. 1, July, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... She couldn't say any more. And the father, smiling at her, thought he understood the emotions which tied her tongue, which underlay her fervent good night kiss. But he could never have guessed all the love, gratitude, repentance, self-abasement and high resolves at ...
— Missy • Dana Gatlin
... were no more to be added or subtracted; each had its place and its object, yet they would not coalesce. Now fury against his uncle, now pity for himself, now a poisonous kind of contempt of Jenny. Or, again, a primitive kind of longing for Jenny, a disregard of his uncle, an abasement of himself. The emotions whirled and twisted, and he sat quite still, with his eyes closed, ...
— None Other Gods • Robert Hugh Benson
... personality leads the weaker on by paths which the weaker knows not, upward he leads him, though his steps be slow and vacillating. Humility, in the Christian sense, means this fealty to the higher. It doesn't mean self-abasement, self-depreciation, as it has been understood to mean, by both the Romish and the Protestant Church. Pride, in the Christian sense, is the closing of the doors of the soul ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... answered in a shame-forced gurgle that would have done credit to Jennie Rucker in her worst moments of abasement before the force ...
— Rose of Old Harpeth • Maria Thompson Daviess
... of the baneful domination of priests in India was the abasement and moral degradation of woman, so respected and honored ...
— The New Avatar and The Destiny of the Soul - The Findings of Natural Science Reduced to Practical Studies - in Psychology • Jirah D. Buck
... (see Philo Judaeus); in fact, there is not a single element in the new faith which had not been independently developed by the pagans, many of whom, like Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius, were ripe for the most abject self-abasement.] But this Orientalism fell at first upon unfruitful soil; the Vatican was yet wavering, and Hellenic notions of conduct still survived. It received a further rebuff at the hands of men like Benedict, who set up sounder ideals of holiness, ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... the conduct which she is to pursue; they demand every effort on her part to prevent America from being reduced to the British domination, her commerce, and those sources of wealth being restored to the tyrant of the European seas, the ancient rival of France; but on the contrary, the abasement of this rival, and the establishment of a faithful ally, united by all the ties of gratitude, affection, and the most permanent mutual interests. To those invaluable purposes give me leave to repeat to your Excellency, ...
— The Diplomatic Correspondence of the American Revolution, Vol. IX • Various
... Himself.' And we, if we are His servants, must be ready to give everything, if need be, even our lives also, to the work He calls us to do. We must buy up opportunities with all our might, paying not only time and money, but love, and patience, and self-denial, and self-abasement, and labour, and pains-taking. We cannot be right servants of God or happy servants, and keep back anything. 'Let a man so account of us, as ministers of Christ, and stewards of the mysteries of God;' and let us see that all the grace He gives us we use to the very uttermost for His ...
— What She Could • Susan Warner
... of Pennsylvania charged that the opponents of the bill, were "taking a course for the abasement, depreciation and disuse of silver. The supporters of the bill favor both ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... in so free a communication of them, I must add to what I have hinted in reference to this above, that I find in many of the papers before me very genuine expressions of the deepest humility and self-abasement, which indeed such holy converse with God in prayer and praise does, above all things in the world, tend to inspire and promote. Thus, in one of his letters he says, "I am but as a beast before him." In another he calls himself "a miserable ...
— The Life of Col. James Gardiner - Who Was Slain at the Battle of Prestonpans, September 21, 1745 • P. Doddridge
... instinct for the thought of the vital interdependence of body and soul; but they thought too much of the glowing manifestation of the health and beauty of youth, and viewed the decay and deformity of the human frame too much as a disgrace and an abasement. But here again comes in the largeness of Whitman's presentment, that whatever disasters befall the body, whether through drudgery or battle, disease or sin, they are all parts of a rich and large experience, not necessarily ...
— Escape and Other Essays • Arthur Christopher Benson
... generally signifies one's own person, or belonging to one's own person; but, in self-same, it means very. We have many words beginning with Self, but most of them seem to be compounds rather than derivatives; as, self-love, self-abasement, ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... man, standing in self-abasement and degradation before him, and would have looked longer, in an ineffectual struggle for enlightenment, but that Milly resumed her late position by his side, and attracted his attentive gaze to ...
— The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargin • Charles Dickens
... great Cause should recant in the face of death seems to argue an almost incredible degree of pusillanimity, and suggests that pusillanimity and subservience are the key to his career. Nevertheless, but for that short hour of abasement nobly and humbly retrieved, the general judgment would probably be altogether different. And that breakdown does not appear to have been characteristic. Twice in the reign of Henry he had bowed to the King's judgment, ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... and nowhere more, I think, than on the part of certain persons who had never read a word of him, or assuredly had never spent a shilling on him, and who hung for hours over the other attractions of the newspaper that announced his abasement. So much asperity cheered me a little—seemed to signify that he might really be doing something. On the other hand I had a distinct alarm; some one sent me for some alien reason an American journal (containing frankly more than that source of affliction) in which ...
— Embarrassments • Henry James
... Francis Trent, with his broken-down, cringing, crafty look, thus sueing for a sovereign. For he had the air of a ruined gentleman, not of an ordinary beggar, and the signs of refinement in his face and bearing made his state of abasement and destitution more apparent. But Oliver was not touched by any such sentimental considerations. He looked at first as if he were about to refuse his brother's request; but policy dictated another course. ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... accompanied by the pretty doll, with her baby face, whose office it was to ensnare the licentious Charles. Henrietta was compelled to take her over to England, and, in fact, to chaperone her. For such self-abasement the King had handsomely rewarded the compliant maid-of-honour, promising to give her an estate, and so much per head for each bastard she might have ...
— Political Women, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... among the other German chiefs many who sympathized with him in his indignation at their country's abasement, and many whom private wrongs had stung yet more deeply. There was little difficulty in collecting bold leaders for an attack on the oppressors, and little fear of the population not rising readily at those leaders' call. But to declare open war against Rome and to encounter Varus' army ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 2 • Various
... What!—three days agone to the city I wandered, And watched the ships warped to the Quay of the Merchants; And wondered why folk should be busy and anxious; For bitter my heart was, and life seemed a-waning, With no story told, with sweet longing turned torment, Love turned to abasement, and rest gone for ever. And last night I awoke with a pain piercing through me, And a cry in my ears, and Death passed on before, As one pointing the way, and I rose up sore trembling, And by cloud and by night went ...
— Poems By The Way & Love Is Enough • William Morris
... why I am so kindled in my soul. Who has been like to me? My name travels A hundred seven and twenty languages, My name a ship upon them, trading fear. My unseen power weighs upon the heads Of nations, like the blown abasement given By sedges when they are wretched to the wind. Ay, and the farthest goings of the air Can reach no land my taxes do not labour. The fear of me is the conscience of the world. Ahasuerus is a region ...
— Emblems Of Love • Lascelles Abercrombie
... there to win, Restored to his senses, stood the Anak Finn; In racked self-control the squeezed tears peeping, Scalding the eye with repressed inkeeping. Discipline must be; the scourge is deemed due. But ah for the sickening and strange heart- benumbing, Compassionate abasement in shipmates that view; Such a grand champion shamed there succumbing! "Brown, tie him up."—The cord he brooked: How else?—his arms spread apart—never threaping; No, never he flinched, never sideways he looked, Peeled to the waistband, the marble ...
— John Marr and Other Poems • Herman Melville
... example; the sense of humiliation and abasement is intensified at every step. Or, to take a passage in a very different key of feeling, the same quality is seen in the description of the ...
— Milton • Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh
... Clemens's letter, and assuring him that there had not been the least offence, and entreating him never to think of the matter again. "He said that he was a fool, but he was God's fool," Holmes quoted from the letter, with a true sense of the pathos and the humor of the self-abasement. ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... that lean toward conceit from putting a foot out of bed until the second call. On the other hand, those who are of a self-depreciative nature should get up with the worm and bird. A man of my own acquaintance who was sunk in self-abasement for many years, was roused to a salutary conceit by no ...
— Chimney-Pot Papers • Charles S. Brooks
... was," said he weakly, his shaken mind incapable of comprehending things as they were, his abasement over the breach that he had committed being so profound. She withdrew her hand. When it was gone out of his, he remembered how warm it was with the tide of her young body, and how soft for his own work-roughened fingers ...
— The Bondboy • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... the holy pile were his bones interred, with a degree of pomp and ostentation that little accorded with the lowliness and self-abasement of this man ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... to him and laid her hand tremulously on his shoulder, and looked down at him with piteous, pleading eyes. No Circassian slave, afraid of bowstring and sack, could have entreated her master's clemency with deeper self-abasement. ...
— Vixen, Volume III. • M. E. Braddon
... utterly beyond our power to describe the harrowing state of his sensations on awakening the next morning. Abasement, repentance, remorse, all combined as they were within him, fall far short of what he felt; he was degraded in his own eyes, deprived of self-respect, and stripped of every claim to the confidence of his brother, as ...
— Phelim O'toole's Courtship and Other Stories • William Carleton
... accesses of fury; like most Orientals, he is vainglorious but he can humble himself before the chastening hand of the Almighty; in his better moods he shows a spirit astonishing in one of his country and time—a spirit of real piety, self-condemnation, and self-abasement, which renders him one of the most remarkable ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 4. (of 7): Babylon • George Rawlinson
... am abominable. This life has degraded me, all that was in me, all is crushed out. It is not by pride that I hold out, but by abjectness: there's no dignite dans le malheur. I am humiliated every moment; I endure it all; I got myself into this abasement. This mire has soiled me. I myself have become coarse; I have forgotten what I used to know; I can't speak French any more; I am conscious that I am base and low. I cannot tear myself away from these surroundings, ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: Russian • Various
... magnificent crypt! What works they executed in those days, there!" At San Giorgio Maggiore, where there are a Tintoretto and a Veronese, and four horrible swindling big pictures by Romanino, I discovered to my great dismay that I had in my pocket but five soldi, which I offered with much abasement and many apologies to the sacristan; but he received them as if they had been so many napoleons, prayed me not to speak of embarrassment, and declared that his labors in our behalf had been nothing but pleasure. At Santa Maria in Organo, where are the wonderful intagli of Fra Giovanni da Verona, ...
— Italian Journeys • William Dean Howells
... amazed at it all—the swift interchange of penitence to self-abasement, languor, challenge, suspicion, wrath, and accusation—that he stood dumfounded, not knowing what to think. He heard the flying feet and swirling skirts as Annette raced upstairs. In the drowsy stillness of the ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray
... that not with the degrading condescension of the Duchess of Bedford, but as Power alone should protect Genius, honoured while it honours; her gentle birth recognized; her position elevated; fair fortunes smiling after such rude trials; and all won without servility or abasement. But her ambition having once exhausted itself in a diviner passion, all excitement seemed poor and spiritless compared to the lonely waiting at the humble farm for the voice and step of Hastings. Nay, but for her father's sake, she could almost have loathed ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... imperishable flower, the white unsullied bloom of an Intensely Useless Life," even if it be only a belated cutting from The Green Carnation. William's first boyish passion for a quite cold shop-minx, with its agonies of self-abasement and rarefied desire, is uncannily clever; and the thoroughly unpleasant episode of our William, minx-free, only to be caught in the toils of that insatiable sensualist, Mrs. Daintree, is presented with discreet vigour. There is possibly a moral in the fascinating Marmaduke's ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, March 15, 1916 • Various
... handsome face the conscious self-abasement, and the burning indignation of a hundred women, strong in passion and in pride; and there it hid itself with two white ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... helplessness and omnipotence, ought to be everywhere visible in the religious effusions of a Christian Poet—wonder and awe for the greatness of God, gratitude and love for his goodness, humility and self-abasement for his own unworthiness. Passages may perhaps be found in "The Excursion" expressive of that spirit, but they are few and faint, and somewhat professional, falling not from the Pedlar but from the Pastor. If the mind, in forming its conceptions of divine things, is prouder of its own ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... inadequate to support me; and too surely do I see that time when the same tide will leave me, and recede, perhaps, as far below the mark of truth. I do not say this in the ridiculous affectation of self-abasement and modesty. I have studied myself, and know what ground I occupy; and, however a friend or the world may differ from me in that particular, I stand for my own opinion, in silent resolve, with all the tenaciousness of property. I mention this to you once for all to disburthen my mind, and ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... the flame in her heart? From her we have nothing to gain so—what would you? Her nature was too great to be discreet. She sinned grandly, but the height of her sin made deeper the depths of her soul abasement and her self-torment was too horrible to clothe itself in the tawdry draperies of diplomacy. She bared herself to the whips of the avenging furies, she cowered before the wrath of outraged God, and to her there was no guerdon possible for the shattered chrystal of her girlhood. When her heaven ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... long to tell, and sad to trace, Each step from splendor to disgrace: Enough—no foreign foe could quell Thy soul, till from itself it fell; Yes! self-abasement paved the way ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... observation. Although he had tried to brave it out when the captain first began to speak to him, even his hardened nature had to succumb before the contemptuous looks of the men he had so long bullied, the more especially as they now openly displayed their joy at his abasement. ...
— The White Squall - A Story of the Sargasso Sea • John Conroy Hutcheson
... they, "and no one would have it otherwise. He found it thus in his time. He was ever a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. More than all others had he suffered. It was his glory to be despised and rejected of men. For the greater the abasement the greater the exaltation in the land beyond the river." So day by day they walked in the hardest part of the road. But they spoke often together of a land of pure delight, of sweet fields beyond the swelling floods, and of turf soft as velvet ...
— The Story of the Innumerable Company, and Other Sketches • David Starr Jordan
... Shang dynasty sank into the lowest depths of moral abasement, King Wu, who charged himself with its overthrow, and who subsequently became the first sovereign of the Chou dynasty, offered sacrifices to Almighty God, and also to Mother Earth. "The King of Shang," ...
— Religions of Ancient China • Herbert A. Giles
... about it afterward, besides being extremely unwell; but he had no idea, he explained to Eileen, that anything put into his mouth was not meant to be eaten. He then tendered the clothespin and some mangled brown paper, with an air of profound abasement. After that no further attempts ...
— Scally - The Story of a Perfect Gentleman • Ian Hay
... suddenly returned. "I could have borne everything but that last revelation of the impotence of human reason. Cupples, I have absolutely nothing left to say, except this: you have beaten me. I drink your health in a spirit of self-abasement. And you ...
— The Woman in Black • Edmund Clerihew Bentley
... ages, and amongst all peoples, the spy has been held in marked abhorrence. In the amnesties of war there is for him alone no quarter; in the estimate of social life no toleration; his self-abasement excites contempt, not compassion; his patrons despise while they encourage; and they who stoop to enlist the services shrink with disgust from the moral leprosy covering the servitor. Of such was the witness put forward to corroborate the informer, ...
— Speeches from the Dock, Part I • Various
... footsteps of their great progenitor, the Babylonians and Assyrians became a most pious race, constantly rendering to their gods the glory for everything which they succeeded in bringing to a successful issue. Prayer, supplication, and self-abasement before their gods seem to have been with them a duty and ...
— The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria • Theophilus G. Pinches
... others would only have relinquished through an incapacity to retain it; and that which, had they seen it recorded in an ancient history, men would have regarded as the height of philosophy, they despised when acted under their eyes, as the extremest abasement of imbecility. Yet I compare my lot with that of the great man whom I was expected to equal in ambition, and to whose grandeur I might have succeeded; and am convinced that in this retreat I am more to be envied than he in the plenitude of his power and the height of his renown; yet is not ...
— Devereux, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... operations of infinitude are even more incomprehensible in their minuteness than in their magnitude, and that, therefore, to be always looking from the minute towards the vast, is only a proof of the finite nature of our present capacity. The loftiest intellect may, without abasement, be employed on the minutest domestic detail, and in all probability will perform it better than an inferior one: it is the motive and end of an action which makes it either dignified or mean. In the homely words of ...
— The Young Lady's Mentor - A Guide to the Formation of Character. In a Series of Letters to Her Unknown Friends • A Lady
... length, after more entreaty and self-abasement on my part, she opened the door. The room was dark. We sat down together on the window-seat, and all at once she relaxed and her head fell on my shoulder, and she began weeping again. I held her, the alternating moods still running ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... it was he! I, even I. I thought that he wanted to rid himself of me,' she cried, pouring forth her confession in shame and abasement. 'There! I can hardly bear to tell you in the dark, and how shall I tell him ...
— The Castle Inn • Stanley John Weyman
... to see such days again. He realized that monarchy was essential to peace, and that the price of freedom was violence and disorder. He had no illusions about the senate. Fault and misfortune had reduced them to nerveless servility, a luxury of self-abasement. Their meekness would never inherit the earth. Tacitus pours scorn on the philosophic opponents of the Principate, who while refusing to serve the emperor and pretending to hope for the restoration of the republic, could contribute ...
— Tacitus: The Histories, Volumes I and II • Caius Cornelius Tacitus
... she was getting into bed, she wiped her eyes, then cringed at a gust of perfumery—and realized that she had brought Lily's handkerchief back with her! It was a last abasement: the woman's horrible handkerchief. She burst into hysterical weeping.... The next morning, when she came down to breakfast, her face was haggard with those ravaging tears, and with the fatigue of hating. Even before she had her coffee, she burned the scented scrap of machine-embroidered ...
— The Vehement Flame • Margaret Wade Campbell Deland
... him who had uttered them. For a long time during his novitiate he was oppressed with religious despair. He thought he must have committed that sin against the Holy Spirit which dooms the soul for ever, By degrees that dark cloud cleared away, Anselmo juvante; but deep self-abasement remained. He felt his own salvation insecure, and moreover thought it would be mocking Heaven, should he, the deeply stained, pray for a soul so innocent, comparatively, as Margaret's. So he used to coax good Anselm and another ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... the means by which the soul might be brought back to the knowledge of its immortal destiny. Was it not under the eyes of a harlot that he, himself, had seen the mystery which is God's goodness? and so might he not find that Connie had learned, in the depths of her self-abasement, that the light which surrounds the pleasures of the senses is full of enchantment only for the distant, ...
— The Wheel of Life • Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow
... that was needed: a tactful friend of both parties to put it to Wilkinson simply and in the right way. Wilkinson rose from his abasement. There was a light in his eye that rejoiced the tactful friend; his face had a look of sudden, ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... to occasion this state of mind. His life had been without great troubles, but with many mortifications; he had never been long satisfied with himself or his pursuits, his ardour had only been the prelude to vexation and self-abasement, and in his station in the world there was little incentive to exertion. He had a strong sense of responsibility, with a temperament made up of tenderness, refinement, and inertness, such as shrank ...
— Dynevor Terrace (Vol. I) - or, The Clue of Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... senate also, or rather of the nobility generally, had meanwhile undergone a change. From the very fact of its complete abasement it drew fresh energy. In the coalition of 694 various things had come to light, which were by no means as yet ripe for it. The banishment of Cato and Cicero— which public opinion, however much the regents kept themselves in the background and even professed ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... women, particularly the widows, take off ornaments and almost all dress; their faces are painted white with chalk, their heads are shaven, and they sit crouched on the earth in the house, in the attitude of abasement, the hands resting on the shoulders, palm downwards, not crossed across the breast, unless they ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... But in his self-abasement Frank failed to take into the accounting the stupendous effect which the New York influences and the handling of great affairs had had upon his own character. Day by day he had learned more plainly the lessons of responsibility, of ...
— Katrine • Elinor Macartney Lane
... stood on a different platform from the struggling, conscience-stricken herd. Now he had in very truth been flung neck and crop from the pedestal of his self-esteem; and he lay groaning in the dust of abasement. ...
— The Half-Hearted • John Buchan
... arose with the stern resolve that before the sun had set he would have told this woman of that which so oppressed him; yet each day, after he had dined, he stole furtively away to the hat rack and slouched across the street to his barn, gazing down at his feet with abasement on his soul. "I ain't afeard o' any hoss that ever stood up," said he to himself, "but I can't say a word to that Nory girl, no matter ...
— The Girl at the Halfway House • Emerson Hough
... impelled to buy the tolerance of the whites at any sacrifice. If to live is the first duty of man, as perhaps it is the first instinct, then those who thus stoop to conquer may be right. But is it needful to stoop so low, and if so, where lies the ultimate responsibility for this abasement? ...
— The Negro Problem • Booker T. Washington, et al.
... God. Deacon Phoebe is one trait in a gentleman. Sidney Carton is of the same sort, save that the hero element stands more apparent. His is a larger field, a more attractive background, thus throwing his figure into clearer relief. Deacon Phoebe was the self-abasement of humility, Sidney Carton is the supreme surrender of love; but the end of both is service. There ought to be a gallery in our earth from which men and women might lean and look on nobilities like Sidney Carton. That beatified ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... pitilessly upon the log structure that a faint odor of parching wood mingled with the torrid air within the Fort, yes, for nine long hours the elder prayed, or preached, or recited aloud the deep abasement of the penitential psalms, and the wail of the prophets, proclaiming, yet deprecating, the wrath of ...
— Standish of Standish - A story of the Pilgrims • Jane G. Austin
... spoke of places, too, and of happenings in them, from Westchurch to Constantinople, from a nautch at Singapore to a country fair at Farley Row. But, recurrent through all his wanderings, were allusions, unsparing in revolt and in self-abasement, to a woman whom he had loved and who had dealt very vilely with him, putting some unpardonable shame upon him, and to a man whom he himself had very basely wronged. The name, neither of man nor woman, did Katherine learn.—Madame ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... I'm a beast!" groaned Manley, with the exaggerated self-abasement which so frequently follows close upon the heels of intoxication. "She'll never forgive a thing like that—the best thing I can do is to blow my ...
— Lonesome Land • B. M. Bower
... Grandmamma was beginning to scold us and find fault with us all round. "So much for us children!" he would say. On the whole, however, the impossible pinnacle upon which my childish imagination had placed him had undergone a certain abasement. I still kissed his large white hand with a certain feeling of love and respect, but I also allowed myself to think about him and to criticise his behaviour until involuntarily thoughts occurred to me which alarmed ...
— Boyhood • Leo Tolstoy
... the things of this world, a healing of controversies and animosities, a confession of wrongs, a breaking down before God, and penitent, broken-hearted supplications to Him for pardon and acceptance. It caused self-abasement and prostration of soul, such as we never before witnessed. As God by Joel commanded, when the great day of God should be at hand, it produced a rending of hearts and not of garments, and a turning unto the Lord with fasting, and weeping, and mourning. ...
— The Great Controversy Between Christ and Satan • Ellen G. White
... spoke, the man turned, and strolled slowly past us, with that ineffable insolence which is the other side of the flunkey's insufferable self-abasement. He cast a glance at us as he went by, a withering glance of brazen effrontery. We knew him now, of course: it was that variable star, our old acquaintance, Mr. Higginson ...
— Miss Cayley's Adventures • Grant Allen
... on, for it was one of the paradoxes in Manning's soul that that voice was never silent. Whatever else he was, he was not unscrupulous. Rather, his scruples deepened with his desires; and he could satisfy his most exorbitant ambitions in a profundity of self-abasement. And so now he vowed to Heaven that he would SEEK nothing— no, not by the lifting of a finger or the speaking of a word. But, if something came to him—? He had vowed not to seek; he had not vowed not to take. Might it not be his plain duty ...
— Eminent Victorians • Lytton Strachey
... preferred that Darius should have accepted his help nonchalantly, grimly, thanklessly, as a right. And if through disease, the old man could not cease to be a tyrant with dignity, could not become human without this appalling ceremonial abasement—better that he should have exercised harshness and oppression to the very end! There was probably no phenomenon of human nature that offended Edwin's instincts more than ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... have a price," she smiled bitterly. "Only it is no use offering flowers to pigs! We must treat pigs another way—pigs, and young fools! And fools old enough to know better!" she added with a nod toward Fred, who bowed to her in mock abasement—too ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy
... soul was being lifted up to the courts of heaven, to the presence of the Saviour, by the power of that, fervent and agonizing prayer. The words seemed to find an echo in his own soul. In his deep abasement he rested his wants upon his companion so that he might present them in a ...
— The Martyr of the Catacombs - A Tale of Ancient Rome • Anonymous
... of what seemed to me the sun-lit side of the garden, and shunned the other side for its shadow and its gloom. Failure, disgrace, poverty, sorrow, despair, suffering, tears even, the broken words that come from lips in pain, remorse that makes one walk on thorns, conscience that condemns, self- abasement that punishes, the misery that puts ashes on its head, the anguish that chooses sack-cloth for its raiment and into its own drink puts gall:—all these were things of which I was afraid. And as I ...
— Selected Prose of Oscar Wilde - with a Preface by Robert Ross • Oscar Wilde
... head in supplication, Lowly, penitent, sincere, Worthiest of adoration, God, the Holy One is here!— Here, while through the open casement Gently beams the rising day, While, in contrite self abasement, ...
— Poems of the Heart and Home • Mrs. J.C. Yule (Pamela S. Vining)
... filled his antechamber in order to beg, claim and demand. All of them sought something, and they were almost strangled by the solicitations of their own constituents. They appeared to Sulpice to be rather the commissionaires of universal suffrage than the servants. This abasement before the manipulators of the votes made Vaudrey indignant. He felt that France was becoming by degrees a vast market for favors, a nation in which everyone asked office from those who to keep their own promised everything, and the thought ...
— His Excellency the Minister • Jules Claretie
... King knelt behind the mullah and the whole camp faced Mecca in forehead-in-the-dust abasement there came a strange procession down the midst—not strange to the "Hills," where such sights are common, but strange to that camp and hour. Somebody rose and struck them, and they knelt like the rest; but when prayer ...
— King—of the Khyber Rifles • Talbot Mundy
... no money of their own, were supported in prison by their majas and amigas, females of a certain class, who form friendships with robbers, and whose glory and delight it is to administer to the vanity of these fellows with the wages of their own shame and abasement. These females supplied their cortejos with the snowy linen, washed, perhaps, by their own hands in the waters of the Manzanares, for the display of the Sunday, when they would themselves make their appearance dressed a la maja, and from ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... the love of a woman in its simplicity and strength, and how it gilds all the poor and common things of life and even finds a joy in service! The prouder the woman the more delight does she extract from her self-abasement before her idol. Only not many women can love like Jess, and when they do almost invariably they make some fatal mistake, whereby the wealth of their affection is wasted, or, worse still, becomes a source of misery or ...
— Jess • H. Rider Haggard
... had occurred from my mind, but as soon as I felt able, I sat down, with the whole matter before me, as it were, and deliberately looked it in the face. I think I never felt more inane in my life than when I remembered my folly, as I now regarded it. All that saved me from utter self-abasement was the fact that it had occurred at a time when I was at such a low ebb physically, by reason of illness. I determined to try to forget it, as speedily as possible. But, however keenly I felt the humiliation and folly of my emotion upon that strange night, it ...
— How to Cook Husbands • Elizabeth Strong Worthington
... could still hear her; but after her laugh there came a few moments of overwhelming bitterness that sent her on her knees by the side of the couch in self-abasement. ...
— Phyllis of Philistia • Frank Frankfort Moore
... the breeze, their filmy eyes failing them, gazing for the rain that will not come. And then, from contemplating all that sorrow, the prophet turns to God with a wondrous burst of strangely blended confidence and abasement, penitence and trust, and fuses together the acknowledgment of sin and reliance upon the established and perpetual relation between Israel and God, pleading with Him about His judgments, presenting before Him the ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... most of the advantage given them. They seem to have expected that the picture which they presented of their friend's transparent sincerity and singleness of aim, manifested amid so much pain and self-abasement, would have touched readers more. They miscalculated in supposing that the proofs of so much reality of religious earnestness would carry off the offence of vehement language, which without these proofs might naturally be thought to show mere random violence. At any rate ...
— The Oxford Movement - Twelve Years, 1833-1845 • R.W. Church
... thoughts; and when he recollected the avowed profession of Stevens his shame increased. He felt how shocking it was to intimate to a sworn non-combatant the idea of a personal conflict. To what point of self-abasement his thoughts would have carried him, may only be conjectured; he might have hurried forward to overtake his antagonist with the distinct purpose of making the most ample apology; nay, more, such was the distinct thought which was ...
— Charlemont • W. Gilmore Simms
... changed from man's, and let a beast's heart be given unto him!" Such was the sentence pronounced and executed upon him of Babylon whose pride called for abasement from the Lord. Dr. Mead (Medica Sacra, p. 59) observes that there was known among the ancients a mental disorder called lycanthropy, the victims of which fancied themselves wolves, and went about howling and attacking and tearing sheep and young children (Aetius, Lib. Med. vi., Paul AEgineta, ...
— The Man-Wolf and Other Tales • Emile Erckmann and Alexandre Chatrian
... every aspect of the man. The very clothes he wore, somber, wool-threaded homespun, crudely patched, reminded one of the coarse fabrics that monks affect for their abasement. But one saw, when one remembered the characteristic of the man, that they represented here ...
— The Sleuth of St. James's Square • Melville Davisson Post
... earnest mind, his doctrinal dissertations have at least the merit of sincerity. They were put forth in behalf of what he regarded as truth; and the success which they met with, while it called into exercise his profoundest gratitude, only served to deepen the humility and self-abasement of their author. As the utterance of what a good man believed and felt, as a part of the history of a life remarkable for its consecration to apprehended duty, these writings cannot be without interest even to those who dissent from their arguments ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... beginning of death Lonicer Lord's Day Lord's Prayer Supper Louvaine Love of God required in a bishop Low Mass Luther's coarse language inconsistency indifference to slander lack of love love of peace pride submission to pope zeal for Christ Luther's zeal for the pope writings self-abasement sense of duty master of ...
— Works of Martin Luther - With Introductions and Notes (Volume I) • Martin Luther
... master of Italy. Boethius belonged to an ancient family, which boasted a connection with the legendary glories of the Republic, and was still among the foremost in wealth and dignity in the days of Rome's abasement. His parents dying early, he was brought up by Symmachus, whom the age agreed to regard as of almost saintly character, and afterwards became his son-in-law. His varied gifts, aided by an excellent ...
— The Consolation of Philosophy • Boethius
... one has well said: the horse abases the base, ennobles the noble. Likewise the dog. The theft of a dog to sell for a price had been the abasement worked by Michael on Dag Daughtry. To pay the price out of sheer heart-love that could recognize no price too great to pay, had been the ennoblement of Dag Daughtry which Michael had worked. And as the launch chug-chugged across the ...
— Michael, Brother of Jerry • Jack London
... you abusing God, and praising With mock effacement And false abasement Your own heart's kindness, deeming it amazing That you should do this duty for my sake, Which is His bidding, Nor blame for ridding Himself of me, your neighbour, he who spake hard words, Hard words and drove me forth all sore ...
— The Fairy Changeling and Other Poems • Dora Sigerson
... reasonable, forcible, moderate. He grapples with the medieval prejudices against the Jews in a manner which places his works among the best political pamphlets ever written. Morally, too, his manner is noteworthy. He pleads for Judaism in a spirit equally removed from arrogance and self-abasement. He is dignified in his persuasiveness. He appeals to a sense of justice rather than mercy, yet he writes as one who knows that justice is the rarest and highest quality of human nature; as one who knows that humbly to express ...
— Chapters on Jewish Literature • Israel Abrahams
... little doubtful. Nor was he greatly attracted by the wealth Theresa had inherited from her father, since her mother had gained her share in it by deserting the national cause during the period of Italy's abasement. No doubt there was Theresa's undoubted beauty; but that was evanescent, and the lady already showed signs of a too rapidly ripening maturity. Their romantic engagement could not blot out of his mind ...
— Captain Mansana and Mother's Hands • Bjoernstjerne Bjoernson
... continually at the hospital," wrote Mother Mary of the Incarnation, "in order to help the sick and to make their beds. We do what we can to prevent him and to shield his health, but no eloquence can dissuade him from these acts of self-abasement." ...
— The Makers of Canada: Bishop Laval • A. Leblond de Brumath
... ought to have been corrected before.(193) Further, Celsus argues, if Divinity did descend, that it would not assume so lowly a form as Jesus. The same rigorous logic charges on Christianity the undue elevation of man, as well as the abasement of God. Celsus can neither admit man more than the brutes to be the final cause of the universe; nor allow the possibility of man's nearness to God.(194) His pantheism, destroying the barrier which separates the material from the moral, obliterates the perception of ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... Kalmucks with the regular armies of Russia, and concurrently with nations as fierce and semi-humanized as themselves, besides that they were stung into threefold activity by the furies of mortified pride and military abasement, under the eyes of the Turkish Sultan. The forces, and more especially the artillery, of Russia, were far too overwhelming to permit the thought of a regular opposition in pitched battles, even with a less dilapidated state of their resources than ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... hurting their feelings. The Black and the White mix very quaintly in their ways. Sometimes the White shows in spurts of fierce, childish pride—which is Pride of Race run crooked—and sometimes the Black in still fiercer abasement and humility, half heathenish customs and strange, unaccountable impulses to crime. One of these days, this people— understand they are far lower than the class whence Derozio, the man who imitated Byron, sprung—will turn out a writer ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... others appear like old maids cheapening remnants. Rachel followed in the wake of the matrons, as if in a trance; a curious scent of violets came back from Mrs. Dalloway, mingling with the soft rustling of her skirts, and the tinkling of her chains. As she followed, Rachel thought with supreme self-abasement, taking in the whole course of her life and the lives of all her friends, "She said we lived in a world of our own. It's true. We're ...
— The Voyage Out • Virginia Woolf
... and then to regret that she had recovered from her illness ten years ago, surviving but to witness the abasement of France, she was not, like others, panic-struck at the prospect of invasion, as though this meant the end of their country. "It will pass like a squall over a ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... that God's Love is made manifest as well in a simple soul which does not resist His grace as in one more highly endowed. In fact, the characteristic of love being self-abasement, if all souls resembled the holy Doctors who have illuminated the Church, it seems that God in coming to them would not stoop low enough. But He has created the little child, who knows nothing and can but utter feeble ...
— The Story of a Soul (L'Histoire d'une Ame): The Autobiography of St. Therese of Lisieux • Therese Martin (of Lisieux)
... revelation of Thyself in the flames of the thorn-bush, in the fire of the accursed tree. I bow in amazement and deep abasement at the great sight: Thy Son in the weakness of His human nature, in the fire, burning but not consumed. O my God! in fear and trembling I have yielded myself as a sinner to die like Him. Oh, let the fire consume all that is unholy in me! Let me too know Thee as the God ...
— Holy in Christ - Thoughts on the Calling of God's Children to be Holy as He is Holy • Andrew Murray
... suggestion, he presently drew up a letter or memoir humbly and plaintively stating his case, which the countess undertook to put into the Queen's hands. It was the first of over two hundred notes from him, notes of abasement, beseeching argument, expostulation, and so on, all entrusted to Jeanne. ...
— The Humbugs of the World • P. T. Barnum
... too how I dined alone that evening in a mood between frantic exasperation and utter abasement in the window of the Mediated Universities Club, of which I was a junior member under the undergraduate rule. And I lay awake all night in one of the austere club bedrooms, saying to old Pramley a number of extremely able and penetrating things that had unhappily ...
— The Passionate Friends • Herbert George Wells
... souls that we may have the consciousness of sin, and He wills that we should come with broken and contrite hearts, and like the king of Israel wail out our confessions and supplications—'Have mercy upon me, O God! according to Thy loving-kindness.' But, like him, we should even in our lowliest abasement, when our hearts are bruised, be able to say along with our contrition, 'Open Thou my lips, and my mouth shall show forth Thy praise.' Our sorrows are never so great that they hide our mercies. The sky is never so covered with clouds that neither sun nor stars appear for many ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... are textually given as the best representation of the place occupied, in the history of that time, by the morals and private life of the kings. It would not be right, however, to draw therefrom conclusions as to the abasement of Capetian royalty in the eleventh century, with too great severity. There are irregularities and scandals which the great qualities and the personal glory of princes may cause to be not only excused but even ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume I. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... It required much persuasion on the part of his wife to keep him from describing the whole affair in detail, how abominably he had acted about the check, and how badly he had made her feel. It would make his abasement more complete and lasting in effect, he said, if some one else were to know about it. Ross, like Arethusa, ...
— The Heart of Arethusa • Francis Barton Fox
... that turn the human heart To vanity, which should collect itself In penitence; for a lewd, vicious life, Want and abasement are ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... words he withdrew, and kindly sent Suan back to me, knowing that her soothing ways would help me more than argument. To my mind all things lay in deep confusion and abasement. Overcome with bodily weakness and with bitter self-reproach, I even feared that to ask any questions might show want of gratitude. But a thing of that sort could not always last, and before very long I was quite at home with the history of ...
— Erema - My Father's Sin • R. D. Blackmore
... toleration, and sometimes a genuine hospitality, to which he has no shadow of right nor title, and which, if he were a gentleman, he would not accept if it were voluntarily proffered. It should be said in mitigation that all this delirious abasement in no degree tempers his rancor against the system of which the foreign notable is the flower and fruit. He keeps his servility sweet by preserving it in the salt of vilification. In the character of a blatant blackguard the American snob is so happily disguised that ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce
... was sure she had not ventured it for the protection of Tira. No one had ever told Nan about the man with the devil in him who "looked up kinder droll." But she could see the tide of human emotion had better be turned to the glorification of God than to the abasement of man. Raven, in the swell of it, put his lips ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... Austin, still bear with me, still follow me. O sir, will you not picture that dear lady's life? Her years how few, her error thus irreparable, what henceforth can be her portion but remorse, the consciousness of self-abasement, the shame of knowing that her trust was ill-bestowed? To think of it: this was a queen among women; and this—this is George Austin's work! Sir, let me touch your heart: let me prevail with you to feel ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume XV • Robert Louis Stevenson
... says, “is so visible, that some have conceived that man must have two souls—a simple subject appearing to them incapable of such and so sudden variations; an immeasurable presumption on the one hand, a horrible abasement on the other. In spite of all the miseries which cleave to us, and hold us, as it were, by the throat (nous tiennent à la gorge), there is within us an irrepressible instinct which exalts us. The greatness of man is so visible that it may be deduced from his very misery. His ...
— Pascal • John Tulloch
... youthful blood, and had fallen a victim to fleshly lusts; in that case, however sad, your enlightened conscience would have spoken loudly, and you would have found your way back to the blood which cleanseth us from all sin, to humble confession and self- abasement, to forgiveness and to recommunion with God. It was not this; it was worse. It was that horrid, insidious infidelity, which had already worked in your mind and heart with terrible energy. Far worse, I say, ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... word "white" from the Constitution and thus extend the right of suffrage to all classes of male citizens, placing the men of the State, black and white, foreign and native, ignorant and educated, vicious and virtuous, all alike, above woman's head, gave her a keener sense of her abasement than she had ever felt before. But having neither press nor pulpit to advocate her cause, and fully believing this amendment would pass as a party measure, she used every means within her power to arouse and strengthen the agitation, in the face of the most determined opposition ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... imagine, the pit of utter self-abasement yawned for Winton, and he plunged headlong, holding the bill of fare wrong side up when the waiter asked for his dinner order, and otherwise demeaning himself like a man taken at a hopeless disadvantage. She took pity ...
— A Fool For Love • Francis Lynde
... To abasement at the footstool of this triumphant wickedness, everything venal and sordid in the yet Free States would inevitably and intensely gravitate: commerce seeking customers; manufactures eager for markets; shipping greedy of cargoes and ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 2, No 6, December 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... observations seem to take away something from the dignity of writing, and therefore are never communicated but with hesitation, and a little fear of abasement and contempt. But it must be remembered, that life consists not of a series of illustrious actions, or elegant enjoyments; the greater part of our time passes in compliance with necessities, in the performance of daily duties, in the removal of small inconveniences, in the procurement of ...
— A Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland • Samuel Johnson
... even now, amidst our abasement, and though it dates from that fatal city, is not this reflexion of a noble exultation sufficiently powerful to console us, and to make us proudly hold up our ...
— History of the Expedition to Russia - Undertaken by the Emperor Napoleon in the Year 1812 • Count Philip de Segur
... exertions, and I was gazed on by all as an object of interest and admiration; but if others thought so of me, I thought not so of myself. I retired below to my berth with a loathing and contempt, a self-abasement, which I cannot describe. I felt myself unworthy of the mercy I had received. The disgraceful and vicious course of life I had led, burst upon me with horrible conviction. "Caelo tonantem credidimus Jovem regnare," ...
— Frank Mildmay • Captain Frederick Marryat
... courted demolition. Secretly, I was delighted. She had struck just the right note. He still writhed inwardly, but he made no effort at unconcern. I think he was perfectly willing that she should be a witness of his self-abasement. ...
— Paradise Garden - The Satirical Narrative of a Great Experiment • George Gibbs
... from Duggin's hand to the floor,—with a sound like the first clatter of gravel on a coffin lid; and in abasement absolute he dropped his head; his hands nerveless, his ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... much humility. A mere show of respect for my position will do. We adjutants about the palace are not much given to self-abasement of any sort. There is one catastrophe which may occur. If the old woman is really dying, as they say she is, she may die while we are there. We must then take possession of the person of Selim and carry him off. There will not be much trouble about that. The house is in a lonely place, and ...
— Paul Patoff • F. Marion Crawford
... mistaking her sincerity—it breathed in every tone of her voice. Both Marilla and Mrs. Lynde recognized its unmistakable ring. But the former under-stood in dismay that Anne was actually enjoying her valley of humiliation—was reveling in the thoroughness of her abasement. Where was the wholesome punishment upon which she, Marilla, had plumed herself? Anne had turned it into ...
— Anne Of Green Gables • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... in his isolation, like Marsa in her solitude; and he did not consider himself ridiculously absurd or foolishly romantic, when he remembered that his countrymen, the Hungarians, were the only people, perhaps, who, in the abasement of all Europe before the brutality of triumph and omnipotent pessimism, had preserved their traditions of idealism, chivalry, and faith in the old honor; the Hungarian nationality was also the only one which had conquered its ...
— Prince Zilah, Complete • Jules Claretie
... writing the note that he had written. When dismembered words and phrases from that note came to his mind on the play-ground, the quaver of terror that rose in Piggy's whoop was not dissembled. Sometimes fear froze his vitals, then a flush of self-abasement burned him with its flames. And all the time he knew that the Pratt girl had that note. He almost hoped that an earthquake would swallow her with it before she could deliver it. When Piggy came straggling in, hot, sweaty, and puffing, just as the teacher ...
— The Court of Boyville • William Allen White
... reed. The sense of her loneliness, the knowledge that those about her used her for their own ends—and those the most unworthy—overwhelmed her; and in proportion as she had been proud and self-reliant, was her present abasement. ...
— The Wild Geese • Stanley John Weyman
... those cheerful depths where there is no social or artistic status to maintain; so low as to be expected to do, or attempt to do, whatever might be asked of them, even though failure plunged them, if possible, in deeper depths of abasement. There was nothing beneath them except the Artichokes; and it was seldom, very seldom, ...
— Vesty of the Basins • Sarah P. McLean Greene
... solemn promise before God to love, honour, and obey, daily and hourly violated,—her unjust hatred of her only son,—her want of charity towards others,—all her duties neglected,—swayed only by selfish and malignant passions,—with bitter tears of contrition and self-abasement, she acknowledged that her punishment was just. With streaming eyes, with supplicating hands and bended knees, she implored mercy and forgiveness of Him to whom appeal is never made in vain. Passion's infuriate reign was over—her heart ...
— Newton Forster • Frederick Marryat
... that is what I said: the atrocity of the action carries you beyond contempt, and hence my sincerity. I wished you to know to what a degree I excelled in my art, to extort from you the admission that I was at least original in my abasement, to rank me in your mind on the line of the great good-for-noughts, and to hail me ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... bitter, and he writhed there in the dust, groaning in the agony of his remorse. Little by little his passion spent itself, but still he lay there, yearning mightily for sound of his master's voice or touch of his hand, yet dared he not look up because of his abasement. ...
— Beltane The Smith • Jeffery Farnol
... way;" here he says, "I will instruct thee and teach thee in the way which thou shalt go." There he began with the plaintive cry for mercy; here with a burst of praise celebrating the happiness of the pardoned penitent. There we heard the sobs of a man in the very agony of abasement; here we have the story of their blessed issue. There we had multiplied synonyms for sin, and for the forgiveness which was desired; here it is the many-sided preciousness of forgiveness possessed which runs over in various yet equivalent phrases. ...
— The Life of David - As Reflected in His Psalms • Alexander Maclaren
... we do, the poor soul made this very grove her place of penance. Once a week she had the fortitude to drag herself to the very spot where Griffith had denounced her; and there she would kneel and pray for him and for herself. And certainly, if humility and self-abasement were qualities of the body, here was to be seen their picture; for her way was to set her crucifix up at the foot of a tree; then to bow herself all down, between kneeling and lying, and put her lips meekly to the foot of the crucifix, and so ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 105, July 1866 • Various
... Sunday in the shabby pulpit of the Brookville church; his Pharisaical relations with his people; his utter misunderstanding of their needs. All this proved poignant enough to force the big drops to his forehead.... There were other aspects of himself at which he scarcely dared look in his utter abasement of spirit; those dark hieroglyphics of the beast-self which appear on the whitest soul. He had supposed himself pure and saintly because, forsooth, he had concealed the arena of these primal passions beneath ...
— An Alabaster Box • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman and Florence Morse Kingsley
... like that!" said Rose, Tom's utter self-abasement and humility rousing all her better nature. "Don't you see that it's you who ought to forgive me for the cruel way I've treated you; and if you'd died, Tom, and my wickedness had killed you, how could I have ever ...
— The Village by the River • H. Louisa Bedford
... Their two wants were bread and the shows of the circus; so long as the sportula of their patron, the occasional donative of an emperor, and the ambition of political candidates supplied these wants, they lived in contented abasement, anxious neither for ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar
... infinitude are even more incomprehensible in their minuteness than in their magnitude, and that, therefore, to be always looking from the minute towards the vast, is only a proof of the finite nature of our present capacity. The loftiest intellect may, without abasement, be employed on the minutest domestic detail, and in all probability will perform it better than an inferior one: it is the motive and end of an action which makes it either dignified or mean. In the homely words of ...
— The Young Lady's Mentor - A Guide to the Formation of Character. In a Series of Letters to Her Unknown Friends • A Lady
... fixed on the ground. His face was distorted with pain, and yet he felt it a strange relief to speak. At last he finished. He flung himself back in his chair, exhausted, and waited. He had concealed nothing, and even, in his self-abasement, he had striven to make himself more despicable than he had really been. He was surprised that she did not speak, and at last he raised his eyes. She was not looking at him. Her face was quite white, and she seemed to be ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... the song of Sigurd and the face without a foe, And they sing of the prison's rending and the tyrant laid alow, And the golden thieves' abasement, and the stilling of the churl, And the mocking of the dastard where the chasing edges whirl; And they sing of the outland maidens that thronged round Sigurd's hand, And sung in the streets of the foemen of the war-delivered land; And they tell how the ships of the merchants ...
— The Story of Sigurd the Volsung • William Morris
... were made with great elaborateness. The galleries were filled with the friends, male and female, of pro-slavery Congressmen. The beauty and chivalry of the South were there. They had come to witness the abasement of the great enemy of their most cherished institution. They were to see him driven from the nation's council chamber, a crushed and dishonored man. Not one friendly face looked down upon him as he sat coolly awaiting the ...
— The Abolitionists - Together With Personal Memories Of The Struggle For Human Rights • John F. Hume
... reproaching him, for Rivers, an old friend, had not failed to give him a little spice of his mind; but he was just in that irritable condition where repentance is almost impossible, and when self-abasement only leads a man ...
— A Young Mutineer • Mrs. L. T. Meade
... humble adoration, that, indeed, he could not be happy under it. If either was to serve the other, it was he; he asked nothing better than to put his hands under her feet. But he could neither coax her nor laugh her out of her absorption: she had the will to self-abasement; and she remained unsatisfied, waiting for the ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... failure Paracelsus has done so much, that Festus is converted; and ready to justify both his early belief in his own mission, and the abnormal means by which he has chosen to carry it out. Their positions are reversed, and he combats his friend's self-abasement as he once combated his too great confidence in himself. He grieves over what seems to him the depression of an over-wrought mind, and what he will not regard as due to any deeper cause. But Paracelsus will take no comfort; ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... is the only sure mode of perpetuating freedom. This will compel exertion and generous care for the people from those on the higher seats, and honorable and intelligent allegiance from those below. Then political public life will protect all men from self-abasement in sensual pursuits, from vulgar acts and low greed, by giving the noble ambition of just imperial rule. To elevate the people by teaching loving-kindness and wisdom, with power to him who teaches best: and so to develop the free State from the rough ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... rhetoric of anger and sorrow to express his mortification. His torrents of bitter words, his stamping and cursing, his grimaces and his tears of rage, were a rich feast to those abject natures whose delight is in the agonies of powerful spirits and in the abasement of immortal names. These creatures had now found out a way of galling him to the very quick. In one walk, at least, it had been admitted by envy itself that he was without a living competitor. Since Racine had been laid among the great men whose dust made the holy precinct of Port Royal ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... this also, that God's Love is made manifest as well in a simple soul which does not resist His grace as in one more highly endowed. In fact, the characteristic of love being self-abasement, if all souls resembled the holy Doctors who have illuminated the Church, it seems that God in coming to them would not stoop low enough. But He has created the little child, who knows nothing and can but utter feeble cries, and the poor savage who has only the natural ...
— The Story of a Soul (L'Histoire d'une Ame): The Autobiography of St. Therese of Lisieux • Therese Martin (of Lisieux)
... Yes, dear one—I tell you this in all solemnity, so hearken well unto my words—that though, during these cruel days of our adversity, I have nearly died of distress of soul at the sight of you and your poverty, as well as at the sight of myself and my abasement and helplessness, I yet care less for the hundred roubles which his Excellency has given me than for the fact that he was good enough to take the hand of a wretched drunkard in his own and press it. By that act he restored me to myself. By that act he revived my courage, he made life ...
— Poor Folk • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... condescension of the Duchess of Bedford, but as Power alone should protect Genius, honoured while it honours; her gentle birth recognized; her position elevated; fair fortunes smiling after such rude trials; and all won without servility or abasement. But her ambition having once exhausted itself in a diviner passion, all excitement seemed poor and spiritless compared to the lonely waiting at the humble farm for the voice and step of Hastings. Nay, but for her father's sake, she could almost have loathed the pleasure and the pomp, and the admiration ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... of sin, and He wills that we should come with broken and contrite hearts, and like the king of Israel wail out our confessions and supplications—'Have mercy upon me, O God! according to Thy loving-kindness.' But, like him, we should even in our lowliest abasement, when our hearts are bruised, be able to say along with our contrition, 'Open Thou my lips, and my mouth shall show forth Thy praise.' Our sorrows are never so great that they hide our mercies. The sky is never so covered ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... shamefaced mother on the women's side. It was as if one grandly proud in kneebreeches should be forced to walk abroad in petticoats. Far rather would the disgraced boy have been whacked soundly with the heavy knob of the tithingman's staff; for bodily pain is soon forgotten, while mortifying abasement lingers long. ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle
... to the blackness of my sin, in the lustrous whiteness of His purity, may drive me away from Him, but the deeper knowledge of God manifested in Jesus Christ, the long-suffering, the gentle, loving, pardoning, will send me to Him in all the depth of my self-abasement and in the confidence in His love as covering over my sin and accepting me. Where does the child go when it has transgressed against its mother's word? Into its mother's arms to hide its face upon her bosom near her heart. 'Against Thee, ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... to tell, and sad to trace, Each step from splendor to disgrace: Enough—no foreign foe could quell Thy soul, till from itself it fell; Yes! self-abasement paved the way ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... fraud whom she called father. The young man unfastened the flap of his tent nervously, and took himself in out of the drenching mist, which seemed in some way to have got into his brain. He was angry with himself for his interest in these people, as he styled them in his lofty self-abasement. They were ungrateful, unworthy. His eye fell upon two letters propped up on his table in a manner so conspicuous as to suggest a knowledge of his preoccupation—as if some one were calling him ...
— The Wizard's Daughter and Other Stories • Margaret Collier Graham
... into bed, she wiped her eyes, then cringed at a gust of perfumery—and realized that she had brought Lily's handkerchief back with her! It was a last abasement: the woman's horrible handkerchief. She burst into hysterical weeping.... The next morning, when she came down to breakfast, her face was haggard with those ravaging tears, and with the fatigue of hating. Even before she had ...
— The Vehement Flame • Margaret Wade Campbell Deland
... if example be necessary to perswade them that they will not herein do any thing mis-becoming their Rank, the greatest Ladies amongst us may be assur'd that those of a Condition superior to theirs, have heretofore been so far from thinking it any abasement to them to charge themselves with the instruction of their own Children, that (to their Immortal Honour) they have made it part of their Business to assist to that of other Peoples also, who were likely one day to be of consequence to the ...
— Occasional Thoughts in Reference to a Vertuous or Christian life • Lady Damaris Masham
... wrought of villainy with his cousin-wife and what he had caused her of severance between her and her husband and how he had required her person of her, but she had sought refuge for her chastity against him with Allah (to whom belong honour and glory) and chose abasement rather than obedience to him, despite stress of torture: neither recked she aught of that which he lavished to her of monies and raiment, jewels and ornaments. When the King had made an end of his story, he bade the bystanders ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... House at Togiak stands forlornly on a wind-swept Alaskan spit, while huddled around it a swarm of dirt-covered "igloos" grovel in an ecstacy of abasement. ...
— Pardners • Rex Beach
... every effort on her part to prevent America from being reduced to the British domination, her commerce, and those sources of wealth being restored to the tyrant of the European seas, the ancient rival of France; but on the contrary, the abasement of this rival, and the establishment of a faithful ally, united by all the ties of gratitude, affection, and the most permanent mutual interests. To those invaluable purposes give me leave to repeat to your Excellency, that the decisive measures in ...
— The Diplomatic Correspondence of the American Revolution, Vol. IX • Various
... me, a little earlier perhaps than to them, somewhat more of the true duties and destinies of The Many? Oh, that they could see the depths of my affection to them! Oh, that they could see the shame and self-abasement with which, in rebuking their sins, I confess my own! If they are apt to be flippant and bitter, so was I. If they lust to destroy, without knowing what to build up instead, so did I. If they make an almighty ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... compare both these attitudes with that of "Athos," the Count de la Fere, toward the King. He was lacking in the irresistibly fierce insolence of Bussy and in the abasement of D'Artagnan; it was melancholy, patient, persistent and terrible in its restrained calmness. How narrowly he just escaped true greatness. I would no more cast reproaches upon that noble gentleman than I ...
— The Delicious Vice • Young E. Allison
... cast down my pride with this blow. I was insolent in my arrogance, and the scorn of this man was necessary to my self-abasement. Could I be more humbled or more resigned than I am now? Don Luis is right: I am not worthy of him. However great the efforts I might make, I could not succeed in elevating myself to him and comprehending him, in putting my ...
— Pepita Ximenez • Juan Valera
... a visible air of self-abasement about Lieutenant Weil as he crossed the wide chamber. It was a thing hard to define in words; yet undeniably there was a diffidence and a reluctance manifest in him, as though a sense of guilt wrestled with the man's natural ...
— The Escape of Mr. Trimm - His Plight and other Plights • Irvin S. Cobb
... senses, stood the Anak Finn; In racked self-control the squeezed tears peeping, Scalding the eye with repressed inkeeping. Discipline must be; the scourge is deemed due. But ah for the sickening and strange heart- benumbing, Compassionate abasement in shipmates that view; Such a grand champion shamed there succumbing! "Brown, tie him up."—The cord he brooked: How else?—his arms spread apart—never threaping; No, never he flinched, never sideways he looked, Peeled ...
— John Marr and Other Poems • Herman Melville
... followed, I have only to say that it was the longest day of my life. Innocent as I knew myself to be, certain as I was that the abominable imputation which rested on me must sooner or later be cleared off, there was nevertheless a sense of self-abasement in my mind which instinctively disinclined me to see any of my friends. We often hear (almost invariably, however, from superficial observers) that guilt can look like innocence. I believe it to be infinitely the truer axiom of the two that innocence can look ...
— The Moonstone • Wilkie Collins
... the colonies that loyally adhered to their King; and professed to have been excited to an ecstasy of inexpressible delight and gratitude at the gracious words of the best of kings.[120] Their address presented a curious mixture of professed self-abasement, weakness, isolation, and affliction, with fulsome adulation not surpassed by anything that could have been indited by the most devout loyalist. But this honeymoon of adulation to the restored King was not of long duration; the order of ...
— The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 1 of 2 - From 1620-1816 • Egerton Ryerson
... from utterly understanding me And why I am so kindled in my soul. Who has been like to me? My name travels A hundred seven and twenty languages, My name a ship upon them, trading fear. My unseen power weighs upon the heads Of nations, like the blown abasement given By sedges when they are wretched to the wind. Ay, and the farthest goings of the air Can reach no land my taxes do not labour. The fear of me is the conscience of the world. Ahasuerus is a region large As there is light upon the earth; when dawn With golden duties celebrates the sun, ...
— Emblems Of Love • Lascelles Abercrombie
... in the matter it was an utter detestation of the services and the influence of the Calvinist Chapel in the village, the Little Bethel, presided over by Pastor Prytherch, a fanatical blacksmith, who alternated spells of secret drunkenness and episodes of animalism by orgies of self-abasement, during which he—in half-confessing his own lapses—attributed freely and unrebukedly the same vices to the male half of his overflowing congregation. These out-pourings—"Pechadur truenus wyf i! Arglwydd madden i mi!"—extempore prayers, psalms ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... did not press her for the story of it. Then, you came, and without mincing your words you told the whole brutal truth; and you uttered it with a spirit of brutality and bravado that would be unbelievable under any other circumstances. And when, in your own self-abasement for what you had done, you confessed to the acts of which you were guilty toward Miss Langdon, you received, at Duncan's hands, the blow you so thoroughly merited; I am frank to say to you that, if he had held his ...
— The Last Woman • Ross Beeckman
... She'll take good care of you. And I'll make you a nice hot drink, too. You need it." In the door of the big living-room he turned to her, a look of extreme doubt in his eyes. "By Jove, I bet I do wake up. It can't be true." She laughed plaintively and shook her head in humble self-abasement. "Don't be lonesome. I'll ...
— Master Tales of Mystery, Volume 3 • Collected and Arranged by Francis J. Reynolds
... odious to him by training, instinct, and tradition. To do these things in the character of a traitor was abhorrent to his nature and terrible to his feelings. He had made that sacrifice in a spirit of abasement. He had said to himself bitterly, "I am the only one fit for that dirty work." And he believed this. He was not subtle. His simplicity was such that, though he had no sort of heroic idea of seeking death, the risk, deadly enough, to which he exposed himself, had a sustaining and comforting ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... Arc—that high summons to the English to vacate France, two years past, when she was a lass of seventeen; it had now set down the last ones which she was ever to dictate. Then I broke it. For the pen that had served Joan of Arc could not serve any that would come after her in this earth without abasement. ...
— Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc Volume 2 • Mark Twain
... world up and down, redressing grievances like an Eastern monarch, and rejoicing in the abasement of the evildoer. Nor was the spirit of his adventure bounded by the ocean. More than once he crossed the seas; the Hague knew him, and Amsterdam, though these somnolent cities gave small occasion for the display of his talents. It was from Scilly that he crossed to the Isle of Man, where, ...
— A Book of Scoundrels • Charles Whibley
... Is it so in this church? What means all this tawdriness of color, the crimson, the blue, the gold; what signify these fantastic designs and figures, these monkey-like genuflexions; this wilderness of sign and symbol, this elaborate abasement, this theatrical show of exaltation? This an improvement on the old dignified simplicity? Do you tell me that childishness, and prettiness, and pettiness, are valid substitutes for a genuine, manly modesty ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 8, May 21, 1870 • Various
... characteristic virtues spring. Whereas religion with the English mind is largely an anxiety to be moral, to be right and righteous, to be 'a chosen vessel of the Lord,' religion with the Russian implies a genuine abasement and loss of self, a bowing before the will of Heaven, and true brotherly love. The Western mind rises to greatness by concentrating the will-power in action, by assertion of all its inner force, by shutting out forcibly ...
— A Desperate Character and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... infrequently, too, he would wink at us and make secret signs when Grandmamma was beginning to scold us and find fault with us all round. "So much for us children!" he would say. On the whole, however, the impossible pinnacle upon which my childish imagination had placed him had undergone a certain abasement. I still kissed his large white hand with a certain feeling of love and respect, but I also allowed myself to think about him and to criticise his behaviour until involuntarily thoughts occurred to me which alarmed me by their presence. ...
— Boyhood • Leo Tolstoy
... and Hume seems to have considered his Principles of Morals the most vital of his works. It may be true, as the mordant insight of Mark Pattison suggested, that "those periods in which morals have been represented as the proper study of man, and his only business, have been periods of spiritual abasement and poverty." Certainly no one will be inclined to claim for the eighteenth century the spiritual idealism of the seventeenth, though Law and Bishop Wilson and the Wesleyan revival will make us generalize with caution. But the truth ...
— Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham • Harold J. Laski
... and unheard-of practices, and not only so, but that he who cannot but do right should suffer the stain of suspected guilt to be, as it were, rubbed on and soaked in by many sore and amazing circumstances. And it is a matter of soul-abasement to all that are in the bond of God's holy covenant in this place, that Satan's seat should be amongst them, where he attempts to set up his kingdom in opposition to Christ's kingdom, and to take some of the visible subjects of our Lord Jesus, and use at least their shapes and appearances, ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... sitting at her right hand, serving her with wine. Yes, unhoped-for joy! I touched her dress, I ate her bread. At the end of three hours my life had mingled with her life! That terrible kiss had bound us to each other in a secret which inspired us with mutual shame. A glorious self-abasement took possession of me. I studied to please the count, I fondled the dogs, I would gladly have gratified every desire of the children, I would have brought them hoops and marbles and played horse with them; I was even provoked that they did not already ...
— The Lily of the Valley • Honore de Balzac
... Elizabeth threw themselves at the feet of the officers, and most pathetically, but unavailingly, implored them not to deprive them of their only remaining solace. The queen was compelled to rise and dress in the presence of the wretches who exulted over her abasement. She clasped her daughter for one frantic moment convulsively to her heart, covered her with embraces and kisses, spoke a few words of impassioned tenderness to her sister, and then, as if striving by violence ...
— Maria Antoinette - Makers of History • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott
... which they had contracted in a former state. [8] But the degrees of purity and corruption are almost immeasurable. It might be fairly presumed, that the most sublime and virtuous of human spirits was infused into the offspring of Mary and the Holy Ghost; [9] that his abasement was the result of his voluntary choice; and that the object of his mission was, to purify, not his own, but the sins of the world. On his return to his native skies, he received the immense reward of his obedience; ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon
... yours as well as mine. No other women on earth could have emerged from the hell of force and temptation which once engulfed and still surrounds black women in America with half the modesty and womanliness that they retain. I have always felt like bowing myself before them in all abasement, searching to bring some tribute to these long-suffering victims, these burdened sisters of mine, whom the world, the wise, white world, loves to affront and ridicule and wantonly to insult. I have known the women of many lands and nations,—I have known and seen and lived beside them, but none ...
— Darkwater - Voices From Within The Veil • W. E. B. Du Bois
... celebrated rivalry was destined to endure until the life of one of them had become its sacrifice! So remarkably, too, in this first transaction was contrasted the high preeminence from which the Scottish princess was destined to hurl herself by her own misconduct, with the abasement and comparative insignificance out of which her genius and her good fortune were to be employed in elevating ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... man, and towards Joan in particular his attitude was one of silent wonder. In preference to talking to her, he preferred to stand a little way off and look at her. And if, at these moments, the keen observer could detect any glimmer of expression on his face, that glimmer seemed to express abject abasement before a creation that could produce anything so puzzling, so interesting, so ...
— Roden's Corner • Henry Seton Merriman
... sinkings into God, which they distinguish and express well; but they have not that secret longing to be nothing, like the last class. It is true they desire to be nothing by a certain perceptible annihilation, a deep humility, an abasement under the immense weight of God's greatness. All this is an annihilation in which they dwell without being annihilated. They have the feeling of annihilation without the reality, for the soul is still sustained by its feelings, and this state is more satisfactory ...
— Spiritual Torrents • Jeanne Marie Bouvires de la Mot Guyon
... was a good-hearted as well as good-natured fellow; and the self-abasement of his companion completely got the better of the passing feeling of personal vanity. He regretted the allusion he had made to the other's appearance, and endeavored to express as much, though it was done in the uncouth manner that belonged to the habits and opinions ...
— The Deerslayer • James Fenimore Cooper
... tame personality by ruthless maiming, but teaches it to bear the brunt of adversities erect, like an athlete finely trained. Its very arrogance, its sufficiency, perforce commend it to those whose instinct urges to self-abasement: its lofty disregard of adverse circumstance is medical ...
— Apologia Diffidentis • W. Compton Leith
... my reflections now; and, in my abasement and craving for "the one good thing," I thought of the ...
— She and I, Volume 2 - A Love Story. A Life History. • John Conroy Hutcheson
... must be recollected that the conflict between the powers of the general and state governments was coeval with those governments. Even during the war, the preponderance of the states was obvious; and, in a very few years after peace, the struggle ended in the utter abasement of the general government. Many causes concurred to produce a constitution which was deemed more competent to the preservation of the union, but its adoption was opposed by great numbers; and in some of the large states especially, ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 4 (of 5) • John Marshall
... classes of male citizens, placing the men of the State, black and white, foreign and native, ignorant and educated, vicious and virtuous, all alike, above woman's head, gave her a keener sense of her abasement than she had ever felt before. But having neither press nor pulpit to advocate her cause, and fully believing this amendment would pass as a party measure, she used every means within her power to arouse and strengthen the agitation, in the face of ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... I glad this violent spirit can thus creep; that, like a poisonous serpent, he can thus coil himself, and hide his head in his own narrow circlets; because this stooping, this abasement, gives me hope that ...
— Clarissa, Or The History Of A Young Lady, Volume 8 • Samuel Richardson
... shall perforce fall into Charybdis. (Vide Classical Dictionary. I have lent mine, but I know one was a rock and the other a whirlpool, though I cannot state, with any definiteness, which was which.) I may be as humble and deprecating as I choose, but it will not avail me. A very agony of self-abasement will be no armor against the poisoned shafts which assumed superiority will hurl against me. Yet I press the arrow to my bleeding heart, and calmly reiterate, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various
... the valley of humility. And because he is humble and in need, and because he confesses his need, he makes his plaint to the kindness and mercy of God. He is conscious of the sublimity of God, and of his own abasement. ...
— Light, Life, and Love • W. R. Inge
... with it. She would go back to Norada and tell the whole thing. She had let Fred influence her, but she saw now she couldn't do it. But for the first time he felt that in this one thing she was not sincere. Her grief and abasement had been real enough, but now he ...
— The Breaking Point • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... ducks for a century before we in London ever heard of Canard a la Presse. The Parisian eats a score of little birds we are too proud to mention in our cookery books, and he knows the difference between a mauviette and an alouette. Perhaps the greatest abasement of the Briton, whose ancestors called the French "Froggies" in scorn, comes when his first morning in Paris he orders for breakfast with joyful expectation a dish of the thighs of the little frogs from the vineyards. An Austrian ...
— The Gourmet's Guide to Europe • Algernon Bastard
... such thought crossed Frank's mind. He was just as good a Churchman as ever—why not? Just as fond of his own ideal of what a parish and a Church Service ought to be—why not? But the only thought which did rise in his mind was one of utter self-abasement. ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume II. • Charles Kingsley
... continues to seek business, he must find his employment in lower and still lower grades; and will soon come to verify and illustrate the remark of Lord Bolingbroke, that "the profession of the law, in its nature the noblest and most beneficial to mankind, is in its abuse and abasement, the ...
— An Essay on Professional Ethics - Second Edition • George Sharswood
... fault that I am the victor?" Then within him there thundered a voice, like the voice of the Prophet: "It hath displeased the Lord!"—and he thought of David's transgression, Bathsheba's beautiful face, and his friend in the front of the battle! Shame and confusion of guilt, and abasement and self-condemnation, Overwhelmed him at once; and he cried in the deepest contrition: "It hath displeased the Lord! It is the ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... accused me of being reckless, worldly, and epicurean; ambitious of greatness, and feverishly athirst for the pomps and vanities of life. It seems I had no "devouement," no "recueillement" in my character; no spirit of grace, faith, sacrifice, or self-abasement. Feeling the inutility of answering these charges, I mutely continued the correction of a pile ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... then to regret that she had recovered from her illness ten years ago, surviving but to witness the abasement of France, she was not, like others, panic-struck at the prospect of invasion, as though this meant the end of their country. "It will pass like a squall over ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... physical and moral filth, and the mental abasement, in our great Christian cities, where new churches are constantly built for the worship of God, where Bibles are circulated by the million, and where hundreds of sleek gentlemen flourish on the spoils of philanthropy. Read Mr. Rudyard Kipling's ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (First Series) • George W. Foote
... struck him down to a lower depth of self-abasement. "My poor child," he felt like answering, "the shame of it is that I've never thought of you at all!" But he could only uselessly repeat: "I'll do anything I can ...
— The Reef • Edith Wharton
... full length upon the floor of the convent church, with his lips upon the lowest step of the altar, in an indescribable state of terror, misery, penitence, and self-abasement: through all which struggled gleams of joy ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... have bewailed their error in secret,—to them I appeal to imagine the anguish of self-reproach, the bitterness of humiliation, which stung him in those few moments after his first dishonour. It is the lofty tower that falls with the heaviest crash; it is the stately soul that suffers the deepest abasement; it is the white scutcheon on which the dark stain seems to wear its ...
— Julian Home • Dean Frederic W. Farrar
... sat down, with the whole matter before me, as it were, and deliberately looked it in the face. I think I never felt more inane in my life than when I remembered my folly, as I now regarded it. All that saved me from utter self-abasement was the fact that it had occurred at a time when I was at such a low ebb physically, by reason of illness. I determined to try to forget it, as speedily as possible. But, however keenly I felt the humiliation and folly of my emotion upon that ...
— How to Cook Husbands • Elizabeth Strong Worthington
... the King, who felt a special aversion to such a display of abasement. "Recover your wits, man, and tell me what ...
— A Son of the Immortals • Louis Tracy
... cross-lights, quotation, historical instances, the whole flotsam and jetsam of two minds forced in and in upon the matter in hand from every point of the compass, and from every degree of mental elevation and abasement - these are the material with which talk is fortified, the food on which the talkers thrive. Such argument as is proper to the exercise should still be brief and seizing. Talk should proceed by instances; by the apposite, not the expository. It ...
— Memories and Portraits • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Puritans were made up of two different men, the one all self-abasement, penitence, gratitude, passion, the other proud, calm, inflexible, sagacious. He prostrated himself in the dust before his Maker: but he set his foot on the neck of his king. In his devotional retirement, he prayed with convulsions, and groans, ...
— The Art Of Writing & Speaking The English Language - Word-Study and Composition & Rhetoric • Sherwin Cody
... together thus, he and she, close, close together—whereas Charlotte, though rising there radiantly before her, was really off in some darkness of space that would steep her in solitude and harass her with care. The heart of the Princess swelled, accordingly, even in her abasement; she had kept in tune with the right, and something, certainly, something that might be like a rare flower snatched from an impossible ledge, would, and possibly soon, come of it for her. The right, the right—yes, ...
— The Golden Bowl • Henry James
... Larry continued to gaze at Maggie's slender, trembling figure. But something approaching a miracle—a very human miracle—had just happened. All those doubts, fears, indecisions, unexpressed desires, agonies of self-abasement, which might have delayed their understanding and happiness for weeks and months, had been swept into nothingness by the incisive kindliness of Miss Sherwood. In one minute she had said all they might have said in months; there was nothing ...
— Children of the Whirlwind • Leroy Scott
... that small proprietors, having no means of defence against the strong, were compelled to surrender their allodial title for a feudal one, and do homage to the neighboring lord for the sake of protection. And to such an extent did the abasement of allodial privileges prevail, that it came at length to be recognized as a principle that the feudal arrangement was the only legitimate one; whereupon allodial lands were seized with impunity, and ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 1 January 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... of keen observation, not unmixed with surprise. It might mean one thing; it might mean another; how could I tell? He always impressed me so with his superiority that even in that moment, when my honor and life's happiness were at stake, I was conscious of a feeling of abasement and guiltiness that I dare accuse him to his face. Perhaps, he saw that I was frightened at my own temerity; at all events he was not thrown ...
— The New Penelope and Other Stories and Poems • Frances Fuller Victor
... conventions or hurting their feelings. The Black and the White mix very quaintly in their ways. Sometimes the White shows in spurts of fierce, childish pride—which is Pride of Race run crooked—and sometimes the Black in still fiercer abasement and humility, half heathenish customs and strange, unaccountable impulses to crime. One of these days, this people— understand they are far lower than the class whence Derozio, the man who imitated Byron, sprung—will turn out a writer or a poet; ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... and kindly sent Suan back to me, knowing that her soothing ways would help me more than argument. To my mind all things lay in deep confusion and abasement. Overcome with bodily weakness and with bitter self-reproach, I even feared that to ask any questions might show want of gratitude. But a thing of that sort could not always last, and before very long I was quite at home with ...
— Erema - My Father's Sin • R. D. Blackmore
... the Dutch, who believed in the maxim Divide ut imperes. So, before the next ceremony of homage came around, they sent for the Sultan, pointed out to him the humiliation which he incurred in kneeling before the Susuhunan, and offered to provide him with a means of escaping this abasement. Their offer was as simple as it was ingenious—permission to wear the uniform of a Dutch official. This was by no means as empty an honor as it seemed, as the Sultan was quick to recognize, for one of the tenets of Holland's rule in the Indies is that no one who wears the Dutch ...
— Where the Strange Trails Go Down • E. Alexander Powell
... the instrument at Olmuetz of such a surrender of national honour and national interests as few nations have ever endured with the chances of war still untried. This surrender may, in the actual condition of the Prussian army, have been necessary, but the abasement of it seemed to cling to Manteuffel and to lower all his conceptions of government. Even where the conclusions of his policy were correct they seemed to have been reached by some unworthy process. Like Germany at large, Prussia breathed uneasily under an oppression which was everywhere ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... could only be to correct what God already knew, or rectify what ought to have been corrected before.(193) Further, Celsus argues, if Divinity did descend, that it would not assume so lowly a form as Jesus. The same rigorous logic charges on Christianity the undue elevation of man, as well as the abasement of God. Celsus can neither admit man more than the brutes to be the final cause of the universe; nor allow the possibility of man's nearness to God.(194) His pantheism, destroying the barrier which separates the material from the moral, obliterates the ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... Europe's abasement began when the Barbary Corsairs were recognized as civilized states to be treated with on equal terms: that is to say, when consuls, ambassadors, and royal letters began to arrive at Tunis or Algiers. This period began soon after Doria's disastrous campaign ...
— The Story of the Barbary Corsairs • Stanley Lane-Poole
... in his throat. He looked at her, and he had to hold himself back with an iron hand to keep from rushing to her, from falling at her feet in abasement for the very real doubt and dread that ...
— The Second Honeymoon • Ruby M. Ayres
... planning with a great fortune. She wanted to marry him to money: and if Leonora were to go, if he were left alone, forsaken, then despair—and time, which can do all things—would break his will; and eventually he would succumb, like a victim at the altar, who, in his terror and abasement, does not sense the real significance of ...
— The Torrent - Entre Naranjos • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... magnetized by the spirit of the "wild, sweet thing" who had withstood him at the price of his hand, yearning had once more conquered pride, and again he had returned, again an astonishment to himself. In view of such abasement of his self-love, he had, truth to tell, expected to find Carlisle fully ready for the immediate rejoining of their lives. But perhaps there had lingered in him a doubt of the quality of his reception, born of the manner of their ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... impressed itself on the baby soul. There was English fortitude and courage, the endurance born of faith, and the higher evolution from English obstinacy, but there was for all of them, deep self-distrust and abasement; a sense of worthlessness that intensified with each generation; and a perpetual, unhealthy questioning of every thought and motive. The progress was slow but certain, rising first among the more ...
— Anne Bradstreet and Her Time • Helen Campbell
... get there as quickly as he could, to reach the white man's nadir of abasement and gather the promise of that soothing indifference which comes with the final disintegration of the fibres of conscience. He had ...
— The Ragged Edge • Harold MacGrath
... lifted an accusing arm to heaven. It was as if I had pulled the string of a douche-bath. Heaven flooded the fool with gratuitous tears; and the fool sat in the puddle of them and knew his folly. But heaven at the same time mercifully veiled that figure of abasement: and I will lift but a corner of ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... some special way he sat judging and pitying her. She had hardly lifted her eyes to him twice, yet it was he, intimately he, who responded as if from afar off, to the touch of her infinite solicitude and abasement, the joy and the shame of her love. As he watched and knew, his lips tightened and his face paled with the throb of his own renunciation, he folded his celibate arms in the habit of his brotherhood, and was caught up into a knowledge ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
... emotions of the heart. 3. Wealth may seek us but wisdom must be sought. 4. The race is not to the swift nor the battle to the strong. 5. Occidental manhood springs from self-respect Oriental manhood finds its greatest satisfaction in self-abasement. [Footnote: In this sentence we have a figure of speech called Antithesis, in which things unlike in some particular are set over against each other. Each part shines with its own light and with the light reflected from the other part. Antithesis gives great force to ...
— Higher Lessons in English • Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg
... of every party— 1. Puritans. (80-84.) a. They excited contempt. However b. They were no vulgar fanatics; but c. They derived their peculiarities from their daily contemplation of superior beings and eternal interests. d. Thus the Puritan was made up of two men,—the one all self-abasement, the other all pride. e. Resume of character of Puritans. 2. Heathens were passionate lovers of freedom. (85.) 3. Royalists had individual independence, learning, and polite manners of the Court. B. But he alone fought the battle for the freedom of the mind. (88.) 1. This led him to discard ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster
... remorse. Now, too, that conscious of having fallen in all but the positive commission of the deed, he saw that the unsuspecting American regarded him merely as one whom accident or intrigue had made an unwilling witness of the deadly act of a desperate woman, his feelings were those of profound abasement and ...
— The Canadian Brothers - or The Prophecy Fulfilled • John Richardson
... come from."—"From Scotland," cried Davies, roguishly. "Mr Johnson (said I) I do indeed come from Scotland, but I cannot help it." I am willing to flatter myself that I meant this as light pleasantry to soothe and conciliate him, and not as an humiliating abasement at the expense of my country. But however that might be, this speech was somewhat unlucky; for with that quickness of wit for which he was so remarkable, he {99} seized the expression "come from Scotland," which I used in the sense of being of ...
— A Book of English Prose - Part II, Arranged for Secondary and High Schools • Percy Lubbock
... amongst all peoples, the spy has been held in marked abhorrence. In the amnesties of war there is for him alone no quarter; in the estimate of social life no toleration; his self-abasement excites contempt, not compassion; his patrons despise while they encourage; and they who stoop to enlist the services shrink with disgust from the moral leprosy covering the servitor. Of such was ...
— Speeches from the Dock, Part I • Various
... the beasts hid themselves in their terror so that not one of them was seen again that night. As for the People of the Little Hills, they were now ready to fall down and put dust in their hair in utter abasement, if either Grom or the Chief so much as looked ...
— In the Morning of Time • Charles G. D. Roberts
... to see him again. His next ambition was to be a lawyer; and, to this end, a kindly Uncle Contarine equipped him with fifty pounds for preliminary studies. But on his way to London he was decoyed into gambling, lost every farthing, and came home once more in bitter self-abasement. Having now essayed both divinity and law, his next attempt was physic; and, in 1752, fitted out afresh by his long-suffering uncle, he started for, and succeeded in reaching, Edinburgh. Here more memories survive of his social qualities than of his ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith
... give me the glass—it is so clumsy for you,' he said. He would much rather have had it, and seen her daintily served. But she was silent, pleased with the disparity, with her self-abasement. ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... and purple; that they may ride through our city in chariots triumphing over abrogated law; that there may be no bounds to waste and luxury! So soon as the law shall cease to limit the expenses of the wife, the husband will be powerless to set bounds to them." As the uttermost measure of the abasement to which the women had descended, Cato declared with indignation that they had solicited votes, and he concluded by saying that though he called upon the gods to prosper whatever action should be agreed upon, he thought that on no account ...
— The Story of Rome From the Earliest Times to the End of the Republic • Arthur Gilman
... reared the colossal palaces of the Escorial, and the wondrous Minster of Seville. The creation of such prosperity meant a short-lived reign of luxury and cruelty—the lifting up of an old country for a time—the abasement of a new land. How different the happy and more lasting wealth with which we are able to endow Europe from Canada, when the parent land and the Dominion alike reap equal fruits from a bounteous harvest. Our treasure fleets are now laden with golden grain, and flocks and herds; with riches ...
— Memories of Canada and Scotland - Speeches and Verses • John Douglas Sutherland Campbell
... the ground, or the honored feet, with both his hands, which immediately he lays upon his forehead; and there are occasions of peculiar humiliation which require the profound prostration of the sashtangam, or abasement of the eight members, wherein the suppliant extends himself face downward on the earth, with palms joined above ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... of his predicament, and was enjoying his confusion. All the blood in his body seemed to have mobilised in one concentrated blush, and an agony of abasement, worse than a myriad mice, crept up and down over his soul. And the, as reflection began to assert itself, sheer terror took the place of humiliation. With every minute that passed the train was ...
— Reginald in Russia and Other Sketches • Saki (H.H. Munro)
... series of catastrophes ... especially in the earlier part; secondly, its loss of creative power. As for the first of these, the black death, the famines, the hundred years' war, the free companies, the abasement of the church, the great schism—these things were misfortunes to which our modern time can find no parallel. They came suddenly upon Western Europe and defiled it like a blight.... They have made the mediaeval idea odious ...
— Hilaire Belloc - The Man and His Work • C. Creighton Mandell
... would not have cared to own to himself that he counted on the dulling of his sensibilities: he preferred to indulge the vague hypothesis that extraneous circumstances would somehow efface the blot upon his conscience. In his worst moments of self-abasement he tried to find solace in the thought that Flamel had sanctioned his course. Flamel, at the outset, must have guessed to whom the letters were addressed; yet neither then nor afterward had he hesitated to advise their publication. This ...
— The Touchstone • Edith Wharton
... the egregious fruits of the truce, they said tauntingly to the discomfited Archduke. It had caused a loss of reputation, the very soul of empires, to the crown of Spain. And now, to conclude her abasement, the troops in Flanders had been shaven down with such parsimony as to make the monarch seem a shopkeeper, not a king. One would suppose the obedient Netherlands to be in the heart of Spain rather than outlying provinces surrounded by their deadliest enemies. The heretics ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... native land! There points thy Muse to stranger's eye[cq] The graves of those that cannot die! 'Twere long to tell, and sad to trace, Each step from Splendour to Disgrace; Enough—no foreign foe could quell Thy soul, till from itself it fell; Yet! Self-abasement paved the way 140 To villain-bonds and ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Vol. 3 (of 7) • Lord Byron
... he says, “is so visible, that some have conceived that man must have two souls—a simple subject appearing to them incapable of such and so sudden variations; an immeasurable presumption on the one hand, a horrible abasement on the other. In spite of all the miseries which cleave to us, and hold us, as it were, by the throat (nous tiennent à la gorge), there is within us an irrepressible instinct which exalts us. The greatness of man is so visible that ...
— Pascal • John Tulloch
... It is abasement which directs. Nothing is easier of comprehension. It is he who is below who pulls the strings. No position more convenient. He is the eye, and has the ear. He is the eye of the government; he has the ear of the king. To have the eye of the king is to draw and shut, at one's whim, the bolt ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... stagnation of the last two centuries, after the self-abasement of the people, and the apparent extinction of all spirit of national pride, the French invasion and domination, under the stern rule of Bonaparte, was a rude awakening. Old boundaries were swept aside, old traditions ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... only beginning; 'the wages of sin is death,' and worse than death a long-drawn agony of humiliation and loneliness. Abasement, shame, defeat, fear, inaction, loneliness, yearning—all these she had drunk in her cup of suffering, but in the dregs there remained one ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay
... ideas the Middle Ages viewed the flesh in its representative, woman,—accursed since the days of Eve—as a thing impure. The Virgin, exalted as Virgin more than as Our Lady, far from lifting up the real woman, had caused her abasement, by setting men on the track of a mere scholastic puritanism, where they kept rising higher and higher in subtlety ...
— La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages • Jules Michelet
... indeed a thinly-disguised servitude. The Romans were an imperious as well as an Imperial people, and though in some circumstances they were ready to spare the lives of those who yielded, they required of them a surrender of opinion and an abasement of soul. For the rest of his years, which comprehended the whole of his literary activity, Josephus was not therefore a free man. He acted, spoke, and wrote to order, compelled, whenever called upon, to do the will of his masters. His legal condition was first that of a ...
— Josephus • Norman Bentwich
... pleasure glowed unwontedly within him. He did not answer, he did not give Ahmed Ismail leave to rise from the ground. He sated his eyes and his vanity with the spectacle of the man's abasement. Even his troubled heart ached with a ...
— The Broken Road • A. E. W. Mason
... had learned long before she was twenty, that "forgive me," from a man's lips, indicates the uttermost depths of abasement and devotion. ...
— Old Rose and Silver • Myrtle Reed
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