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More "Meanness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the march the boys bought something to eat or drink. There had been a barrel of cider brought from Mr. Chase's for their especial use, and Fred sold it out to the boys for four cents a glass. This was a piece of extraordinary meanness in him, for his father had intended the cider as a present to the company. The boys did not know this, however, and paid their ...
— Little Grandfather • Sophie May
... homesick, for out of the mountain's very womb brayed a music-box, such as the old-time carousels made use of before the days of electricity and steam. It was being worked by inexpert hands, for the time was something jerky; but it was robbed of its tinny meanness and even majesty by the hugeness of a cavern's roof, as well as by the crashing, swinging march it played— wild -wonderful—invented for lawless hours and ...
— King—of the Khyber Rifles • Talbot Mundy
... has now become the fashion to denigrate them to an equal excess. The traditional figure of the Grand Conde, Olympian and sublime, has been exposed by pitiless documentary evidence. La Bruyere's latest and most learned editor, M. Emile Magne, gives a terrible picture of the Prince's meanness and dirtiness; Harpagon in an ostler's jacket, he calls him, en souquenille. But to dwell on all this is to forget that the great Conde, even in his ugly old age, was haloed by the glory of having been the ...
— Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France • Edmund Gosse
... cheeks were pale with indignation, and asked whether she recognized the tablets as her property; Paula, after convincing herself, replied with a flaming glance of scorn and aversion at Horapollo: "Yes, my lord. It is mine. That base old man has taken it with atrocious meanness from among my things." For an instant her voice failed her; then, turning to ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... hand, had no real interest whatever in anybody's affairs but her own, and combined in the highest degree those qualities of personal extravagance and general meanness which not unfrequently ...
— Six to Sixteen - A Story for Girls • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... that economy consists in saving cheese parings and candle ends, in cutting off two pence from the laundress' bill, and doing all sorts of little, mean, dirty things. Economy is not meanness. The misfortune is also that this class of persons let their economy apply only in one direction. They fancy they are so wonderfully economical in saving a half-penny, where they ought to spend two-pence, that they think they can afford to squander ...
— How to Succeed - or, Stepping-Stones to Fame and Fortune • Orison Swett Marden
... flows from him, and though she is a responsible, she is not a discretional, agent. The table is to correspond with the moderation of the master, and the matron will be scolded or reproved as it varies from the proper medium between meanness and profusion. ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... the whole charge of the books now, I did not see how I could avoid any complicity with the fraud. In fact, I had already discovered it. I felt that I had a duty to perform, and that, if I exposed the junior partner, he, and not I, would be guilty of his fall. Was it meanness, ingratitude, or treachery in me to put Mr. Collingsby on his guard? If I could save Mr. Whippleton, I wished to do so. It was plain that he had come to a realizing sense of his danger, and was persecuting his mother to obtain the ...
— Desk and Debit - or, The Catastrophes of a Clerk • Oliver Optic
... sprung up from the Stall, and have, by patching and heel-piecing Religion and the State, made their Names famous to After-Ages? I can name many, but I shall mention only John of Leyden. Now, I see no Reason, why Meanness of Birth should be an Obstacle to Merit, and I am resolved, as I find a great many Things which ought to be redress'd both in Church and State, if you my Friends will stand by me, to aim at the setting both upright: For you must own, they ...
— A Voyage to Cacklogallinia - With a Description of the Religion, Policy, Customs and Manners of That Country • Captain Samuel Brunt
... or a confirmation to the contrary, all discipline is destroyed by contempt, and the ship's company mutiny, either directly or indirectly. There is an old saying, that all tyrants are cowards; that tyranny is in itself a species of meanness, I acknowledge: but still the saying ought to be modified. If it is asserted that all mean tyrants are cowards, I agree; but I have known in the service most special tyrants, who were not cowards: their tyranny was excessive, ...
— Peter Simple and The Three Cutters, Vol. 1-2 • Frederick Marryat
... of the very flames)—Ver. 491. This was a proverb expressive of the lowest degree of meanness and infamy. When they burned the bodies of the dead, it was the custom of the ancients to throw meat and various articles of food upon the funeral pile, and it was considered the greatest possible affront to tell ...
— The Comedies of Terence - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Notes • Publius Terentius Afer, (AKA) Terence
... when a quarrel was likely to end fatally, men rather hesitated about embarking upon it. The moral tone of the round-up camp seemed to Roosevelt rather high. There was a real regard for truthfulness, a firm insistence on the sanctity of promises, and utter contempt for meanness and cowardice and dishonesty and hypocrisy and the disposition to shirk. The cowpuncher was a potential cattle-owner and good citizen, and if he went wild on occasion it was largely because he was so exuberantly ...
— Roosevelt in the Bad Lands • Hermann Hagedorn
... lie. I remember in 1896 I went to church—that was about the fourth time I had been to church. The preacher began preachin' and I went outdoors and cut the harness off of his mule and broke one of his buggy wheels. I went down in the woods and cut a cow just for meanness. I stole a gun, and I would shoot anytime and anywhere, and nobody bothered me because they was scared to. I stole ...
— Slave Narratives: Arkansas Narratives - Arkansas Narratives, Part 6 • Works Projects Administration
... extrusion, at Charlestown, at Cambridge, of a few chimneys and steeples, straight, sordid tubes of factories and engine-shops, or spare, heavenward finger of the New England meeting-house. There was something inexorable in the poverty of the scene, shameful in the meanness of its details, which gave a collective impression of boards and tin and frozen earth, sheds and rotting piles, railway-lines striding flat across a thoroughfare of puddles, and tracks of the humbler, the universal horse-car, traversing obliquely this path of danger; loose fences, vacant lots, ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. I (of II) • Henry James
... place, and late at night the man comes to his prosaic home, whistling and hilarious, and wonders that the wife is jealous. There are thousands of men who, while not positively immoral, need radical correction of their habits in this direction. It is meanness immeasurable for a man by his behavior to seem to say to his wife: "You can't help yourself, and I will go where I please, and admire whom I please, and I ...
— The Wedding Ring - A Series of Discourses for Husbands and Wives and Those - Contemplating Matrimony • T. De Witt Talmage
... "Run away from him; we'll stake you; skip out for the coast some night." But all these suggestions failed; he said Flint would hunt him down and fetch him back, just for meanness. ...
— A Double Barrelled Detective Story • Mark Twain
... brought to book, was nettled at his own meanness; so he sent Sir Charles's letter to ...
— A Terrible Temptation - A Story of To-Day • Charles Reade
... accommodation in his temper, he would have been still more interesting; but he had been accustomed to give law in the circle of his ordinary acquaintance, and his dread of anything approaching to meanness or servility, rendered his manner somewhat decided and hard. Nothing perhaps was more remarkable among his various attainments, than the fluency and precision and originality of language, when he spoke in company; more particularly as he aimed at purity in his turn of expression, and avoided ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... wife, his helpmate and friend, for the unfortunate woman takes to drink. The faith of the priest holds in this terrible trial. But his misery increases immeasurably. The vice of his wife, his own sick weakness, excite the meanness of the people. Insults have to be borne in silence, tears hidden. At home, the priest's wife has no rest. She has the idea that she can have another son who will take the place of the dead one and be a balm to her broken heart. In her ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky
... assortment of grammatical facts to which he was incapable of giving life. If the Rector of Wych-on-the-Wold was not a great scholar, he was at least able to repair the neglect of, more than the neglect of, the positive damage done to Mark's education by the meanness of Haverton House; moreover, after Mark had been reading with him six months he did find a really first-class scholar in Mr. Ford, the Vicar of Little Fairfield. Mark worked steadily, and existence in Oxfordshire went by without ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie
... Areopagite, that is, one of the senators, there followed neither any hurt to him, nor loss of honor to Dionysius. And for Rome, if Cicero, in his most excellent book "De Natura Deorum," overthrew the national religion of that commonwealth, he was never the further from being consul. But there is a meanness and poorness in modern prudence, not only to the damage of civil government, but of religion itself; for to make a man in matter of religion, which admits not of sensible demonstration (jurare in verba magistri), engage to believe no otherwise than is believed by my lord bishop, ...
— The Commonwealth of Oceana • James Harrington
... and she seemed to see him more clearly than she had ever seen him before,—his foppery, his meanness, his cowardice. ...
— The Sport of the Gods • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... the mischievous intelligence characteristic of children, in whom observation begins with naughtiness. Once she had let them loose upon their aunt, she allowed them to laugh at all her absurdities, her figure, her nose, her dresses, whose meanness, nevertheless, provided their own elegant attire. Thus incited and upheld, the little ones soon arrived at insolence. Mademoiselle de Varandeuil had the quick temper that accompanies kindness of heart. With her the hand, as well as the heart, had a part in the first impulse. And then she shared the ...
— Germinie Lacerteux • Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
... Eden. Girding up His soul's loins with a resolute hand, he thrust The base thought from him: "Nauhaught, be a man Starve, if need be; but, while you live, look out From honest eyes on all men, unashamed. God help me! I am deacon of the church, A baptized, praying Indian! Should I do This secret meanness, even the barken knots Of the old trees would turn to eyes to see it, The birds would tell of it, and all the leaves Whisper above me: 'Nauhaught is a thief!' The sun would know it, and the stars that hide Behind his light would watch me, and at night Follow me with ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... despised. However, charity bindeth us to stifle contemptuous motions of heart, and not to vent them in vilifying expression. Particularly, it is a barbarous practice, out of contempt to reproach persons for natural imperfections, for meanness of condition, for unlucky disasters, for any involuntary defects; this being indeed to reproach mankind, unto which such things are incident; to reproach Providence, from the disposal whereof they do proceed. "Whoso mocketh the poor, despiseth his Maker," saith the wise ...
— Sermons on Evil-Speaking • Isaac Barrow
... always contrives to spend as much money as those who live in a whirl of gaiety. Her bills, therefore, mount up, and, in a moment of unguarded pecuniary prudence, her husband will remonstrate mildly with her upon her extravagance. She will, thereupon, accuse him to her friends of meanness, and avow her determination never again to ask him for money. For a short time she will pay portions of her own bills, but, finding her pin-money insufficient for the purpose, she will sell some jewels, and spend the proceeds ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, May 3, 1890. • Various
... the other, bitterly, "for here are letters addressed to him. I may even take the privilege of reading them tomorrow, for in that way I can perhaps discover some evidence that will force him to stop this ugly business. Oh! the meanness of Robert to strike this cowardly blow at me, his own cousin! He's a ...
— At Whispering Pine Lodge • Lawrence J. Leslie
... the poet a grateful look, snatched up his satchel and ran off to No. 1 Royal Street. Pinchas followed him soon, inwardly upbraiding Reb Shemuel for meanness. He had only as yet had his breakfast for his book. Perhaps it was Simcha's presence that was to blame. She was the Reb's right hand and he did not care to let her know what his left ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... the experiment of riding slow; but his companion, determined not to drop him, slackened his pace, so as to keep close by him. Julian then spurred his horse to a full trot; and was soon satisfied, that the stranger, notwithstanding the meanness of his appearance, was so much better mounted than himself, as to render vain any thought of outriding him. He pulled up his horse to a more reasonable pace, therefore, in a sort of despair. Upon his doing so, ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... uncompromising despotism of Prince Schwarzenberg in Austria. Manteuffel, in whom the Prussian epoch of reaction was symbolised, was not a cruel or a violent Minister; but his rule was stamped with a peculiar and degrading meanness, more irritating to those who suffered under it than harsher wrong. In his hands government was a thing of eavesdropping and espionage, a system of petty persecution, a school of subservience and hypocrisy. He had been the instrument at Olmuetz of such a surrender ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... was jest beautiful about Andy. You've saw me wicked to Andy. I am, and often, for I rile turruble quick, and God forgive me! But when that boy gits at his meanness—yu've seen jest a touch of it—there's scarcely livin' with him. It seems like he got reg'lar inspired. Some days he'll lie—make up big lies to the fust man comes in at the door. They ain't harmless, his lies ain't. Then he'll trick my woman, that's ...
— The Jimmyjohn Boss and Other Stories • Owen Wister
... to talk about this in private, but Demi has spoilt that plan, so I may as well have it out now," said Mr. Bhaer, looking a little stern, as he always did when any meanness or deceit came up ...
— Little Men - Life at Plumfield With Jo's Boys • Louisa May Alcott
... is their meanness; but my aunt, Lady Northmoor, did say perhaps it would be livelier another year, and then we should have had some dancing and deportment lessons. I up and told her I could dance fast enough now, but she said it would not ...
— That Stick • Charlotte M. Yonge
... world," said he, "through many changes of fortune and varieties of humor, I have watched you steadily fall. Fifteen years ago you would have started at a theft. Three years back you would have blenched at the name of murder. Is there any crime, is there any cruelty or meanness, from which you still recoil?—five years from now I shall detect you in the fact! Downward, downward lies your way; nor can anything but death ...
— The Short-story • William Patterson Atkinson
... known that the Fairy People cannot abide meanness. They like to be liberally dealt with when they beg or borrow of the human race; and, on the other hand, to those who come to them in need, they are ...
— Good Stories For Great Holidays - Arranged for Story-Telling and Reading Aloud and for the - Children's Own Reading • Frances Jenkins Olcott
... of summer warms to life the prairie flowers—when the long grass shall wave under the scaffold where repose the mortal remains of the chief's sister—how often will the Dahcotah maidens draw near to contrast the meanness, the treachery, the falsehood of Red Cloud, with the constancy, ...
— Dahcotah - Life and Legends of the Sioux Around Fort Snelling • Mary Eastman
... truth. Haven't I marched and starved and shared my plans with you? If there had been any meanness in you, wouldn't I have found it out? What's more, Benson knows what really happened, and so does Colonel Challoner. How else could Clarke have ...
— The Intriguers • Harold Bindloss
... rest, and so subdued the minds of the rulers in every nation, that hardly any resource presents itself to them, except that of entitling themselves to a contemptuous mercy by a display of their imbecility and meanness. Even in their greatest military efforts, and the greatest display of their fortitude, they seem not to hope, they do not even appear to wish, the extinction of what subsists to their certain ruin. Their ambition is only to be admitted to a more favored ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. V. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... disposed for my poor wants. I have come up to the castle at your order, and to do you pleasure, but not in the hope to get money. I am poor; that it would be useless to deny, for appearances are against me—" here he laughed, his auditors thought in a manner that was forced—"but poverty and meanness are not always inseparable. You have more than suspected to-day that my life is free, and I admit it; but it is a mistake to believe that, because men quit the high-road which some call honesty, in any particular practice, they are without human feeling. I have been useful in saving ...
— The Headsman - The Abbaye des Vignerons • James Fenimore Cooper
... possibly perfection may consist in a certain medium which we have already stepped beyond; but certainly all this refinement is utterly incomprehensible to an uncivilized mind which cannot discriminate the ideas of humility and meanness. We appear to the Sumatrans to have degenerated from the more splendid virtues of our predecessors. Even the richness of their laced suits and the gravity of their perukes attracted a degree of admiration; and I have heard the disuse of the large hoops worn by the ladies pathetically ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... enough to be compelled to hear that her father had been guilty of such meanness as to keep silent, in order that he might profit by the downfall of an innocent man; but when, in addition to this, she was expected to tell that man of how her father had acted, and, as it were, ask pardon for it, the ordeal appeared beyond her strength to ...
— A Countess from Canada - A Story of Life in the Backwoods • Bessie Marchant
... all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion. For most men, it appears to me, are in a strange uncertainty about ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... young nations, and the ethical value of moral institutions, more visible, than in denying the literary and monumental value of the Bible, and the moral influence of Christianity.(535) Infidels who have hated revealed religion as bitterly as Voltaire, have at least not had the meanness or the want of taste to depreciate the literary and moral ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... it a certain amount of weakness—jealousy and uneasiness exist in direct proportion to the amount of the happiness and its extent. Strong souls are neither jealous nor fearful; jealousy is doubt, fear is meanness. Unlimited belief is the principal attribute of a great man. If he is deceived (for strength as well as weakness may make a man a dupe) his contempt will serve him as an axe with which to cut through all. This greatness, however, is the ...
— The Marriage Contract • Honore de Balzac
... enthusiasm. I remember once being thus carried away, and mingled my voice with the rude throats that cheered the passing cortege of royalty. The moment it was past, however, my heart fell, abashed at its own meanness and wickedness. ...
— The Quadroon - Adventures in the Far West • Mayne Reid
... moulding the character hourly and daily, growing with a force that operates every moment. Without this dominating influence, character has no protection, but is constantly liable to fall away before temptation; and every such temptation succumbed to, every act of meanness or dishonesty, however slight, causes self-degradation. It matters not whether the act be successful or not, discovered or concealed; the culprit is no longer the same, but another person; and he is pursued by a secret uneasiness, by self-reproach, or the workings of what we call conscience, ...
— How to Get on in the World - A Ladder to Practical Success • Major A.R. Calhoon
... consequences, to the happiness of mankind. In common, what was in itself evil and vicious was permitted to carry along with it some circumstances of palliation. The Arab was hospitable; the robber brave. We did not necessarily find cruelty associated with fraud, or meanness with injustice. But here the case was far otherwise. It was the prerogative of this detested traffic to separate from evil its concomitant good, and to reconcile discordant mischiefs. It robbed war of its generosity; it deprived peace ...
— The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade by the British Parliament (1808) • Thomas Clarkson
... truth I take to have been this. Marlborough and Godolphin both knew the meanness and credulity of James's character. They knew that he must be ever dealing for partisans; and they might be sure, that if he could hope for support from the General and the Lord-treasurer he must be less solicitous for more impotent supporters. "Is it impossible," said I to the Doctor, ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... proud contempt of her aunt, whose regret at seeing the hoarded treasures of her industry, and the idols of her cleanly notability, exposed to the hands and eyes of the profane vulgar, was subdued by her detestation of the meanness and baseness of those from whom her revered brother ...
— The Loyalists, Vol. 1-3 - An Historical Novel • Jane West
... which looked at a distance like marble is found to be stucco and plaster. Behind Chowringhee are a number of wide streets with similar, but generally smaller houses, each apart, with offices and servants' houses in the enclosure. When entering the city one sees that strange combination of meanness and dirt with grandeur with which travellers in Eastern lands are so familiar. In the neighbourhood of Government House there are a number of shops in the European fashion, but a very large proportion of the ...
— Life and Work in Benares and Kumaon, 1839-1877 • James Kennedy
... him whip 'em heaps of times, and it was 'most allus in the mornin's 'fore they went to wuk. Thar warn't no jailhouse nigh whar us lived and Marse Robert never had no place to lock slaves up when they got too bad, so he just beat the meanness out of 'em. Thar was one slave he never tetched; that was his foreman and his name was Robert too, ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - Volume II. Arkansas Narratives. Part I • Work Projects Administration
... public money, And without bribeworthy service, He acquired, or more properly created, A Ministerial Estate: He was the only person of his time Who could cheat without the mask of honesty, Retain his primeval meanness When possessed of ten thousand a year: And having daily deserved the gibbet for what he did, Was at last condemned for what he could not do. Oh! indignant reader! Think not his life useless to mankind! Providence connived at his execrable designs, To give to ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... his off-hand decrees beyond the reach of contemptuous question. He composed differences among friends and equals with good-natured raillery, but he was as rough as need be when his wrath was roused by meanness and cruelty. We hardly know whether to credit some of the stories, apparently well-attested by living witnesses, of his prodigious muscular powers. He is said to have lifted, at Rutledge's mill, a box of stones weighing over half a ton! It is also related that he could raise ...
— Abraham Lincoln: A History V1 • John G. Nicolay and John Hay
... burdened myself with an animal, possessing no social or political influence whatever. I knew already that the world was governed without wisdom, and I now felt that it was also ruled with extreme meanness. ...
— The Book of the Bush • George Dunderdale
... in all ages, on the cessation of civil war, to grant a general amnesty. No other motive but that of the basest and most barbarous revenge could induce men to express an averseness to so humane and necessary a measure. Next to the cruelty of such a refusal was the meanness of those ...
— The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 2 of 2 - From 1620-1816 • Edgerton Ryerson
... carried good-temper about with him, and yet he could rebuke with a sharpness which surprised me, if there was need. He was curiously tolerant, I used to think, of sensual sins, but in the presence of cruelty or meanness or deliberate deceit he used to explode into the most violent language. I remember a scene which it is almost a terror to me now to recollect, when I was walking with him, and we met a tipsy farmer of a neighbouring village ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... e'en walk then," said Dymock, "nay, I would gladly carry you on my back, rather than descend to the meanness of driving a bargain with a testy old fellow like that; by the bye, Shanty, ...
— Shanty the Blacksmith; A Tale of Other Times • Mrs. Sherwood [AKA: Mrs. Mary Martha Sherwood]
... I forgot it for the moment too," Steele said bitterly. "When I could have had it at once I must go off ranting about his meanness. It was thought of what he had done to you that made me overlook the paper; that set me boiling. Lost ...
— In the Shadow of the Hills • George C. Shedd
... woman's love perform?—My house is managed with a propriety and decorum, unknown in other schools; my boys are well fed, look healthy, and have every proper accommodation; and all this performed with a careful economy, that never descends to meanness. But I have lost my gentle, helpless Anna!—When we sit down to enjoy an hour of repose after the fatigue of the day, I am compelled to listen to what have been her useful (and they are really useful) employments through the day, ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... dry and somewhat scornful inuendo, which lay at the bottom of Mr. Edgerton's seemingly innocent assumption; and the latter took his leave, vexed with himself at having made the unsuccessful application—but still more angry with the meanness of character which he had ...
— Confession • W. Gilmore Simms
... Andrew to get ready for the coming of the Master, not three weeks off at the farthest, and she warned him that the archangel might blow his trumpet at any moment. Then where would he be? she asked in exultation. Human meanness is never so pitiful as when it tries to seize on God's judgments as weapons with which to gratify its own spites. I trust this remark will not be considered as applying only ...
— The End Of The World - A Love Story • Edward Eggleston
... snatched, forbidden thing.' But she suddenly stopped speaking. She had spoiled the remembrance of Frederick's visit to herself by her own cowardice. Of all faults the one she most despised in others was the want of bravery; the meanness of heart which leads to untruth. And here had she been guilty of it! Then came the thought of Mr. Thornton's cognisance of her falsehood. She wondered if she should have minded detection half so much from any one ...
— North and South • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... it surprises me that such proud people as you Americans should condescend to the meanness of borrowing from those whom you affect to despise. Besides, as you never repay us for what you pretend to borrow, I look upon it as a system of robbery. If strangers unfortunately settle among you, their good-nature is taxed to supply your ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... circumstances calculated to give this negative comfort. His maternal uncle enjoyed, indeed, his newly acquired property only a few years after it came into his possession. Partly on account of his cruelty to his relations, partly from a meanness and vulgarity of character, which soon displayed itself in his novel situation, and which, it was believed, had previously kept him in the lowest walks of his profession as a Dublin attorney, he found himself neglected and shunned by ...
— Stories by English Authors: Ireland • Various
... sloping their rifles rightly. We are not on parade, but about business a great deal more serious than that. We are doing our fighting with the Captain looking at us, and that should be a stimulus, a joy and not a terror. Realise God's eye watching you, and sin, and meanness, and negligence, and selfishness, and sensuality, and lust, and passion, and all the other devils that are in you will vanish like ghosts at cockcrow. 'Walk before Me,' and if you feel that I am beside you, you cannot sin. 'Walk before Me, and be ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... wooden machine to that effect erected in some convenient part of the proscenium, which an unsuccessful author should be required to mount, and stand his hour, exposed to the apples and oranges of the pit. This amende honorable would well suit with the meanness of some authors, who in their prologues fairly prostrate their skulls to the audience, and seem to ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... awareness that the world of The Dunciad does in one sense sully epic beauties, at the same time, I think, Harte knew that the epic poems to which The Dunciad continually alludes remain fixed, unsullied polestars; otherwise the reader of the poem would lack a way of measuring the meanness of its characters and principles. The "charms of Parody" in The Dunciad provide a contrast between its dark, fallen world and the undimmed luster of epic realms (p. 10). By using the ambiguous word parody, which in the eighteenth century could mean either ridicule or straight imitation,[23] ...
— An Essay on Satire, Particularly on the Dunciad • Walter Harte
... clear into the first part of October; then the fresher weather renewed my life and strength. All this time there were reports drifting about that the King was going to ransom Joan. I believed these, for I was young and had not yet found out the littleness and meanness of our poor human race, which brags about itself so much, and thinks it is better and higher ...
— Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc Volume 2 • Mark Twain
... of doing or saying anything to her that had the remotest approach to love-making while in circumstances where the poor girl could not get out of his way, however much she might wish to do so, and the meanness, not to say absurdity, of showing anything like a lover's affection for a spirit which could only make itself known through the medium of a brown visage. Hence Lawrence, who was the soul of honour and gallantry, got out of the dilemma by ...
— The Rover of the Andes - A Tale of Adventure on South America • R.M. Ballantyne
... order, I came safely past them and turned up the less-frequented street that held my inn, when at the corner, under the big lamp, a young man with something of a swagger about him, in spite of the meanness of his dress, came out from the shadow of the wall and looked me hard ...
— The O'Ruddy - A Romance • Stephen Crane
... for your guests in as good style as your means and the circumstances of the case will permit, and make no fuss about it. To be unnecessarily sparing shows meanness, and to be extravagantly profuse is absurd as well an ruinous. Probably your visitors know whether your income is large or small and if they do not they will soon learn, on that point, all that it is necessary for them to know. But if any circumstance out of the ordinary course of things should render ...
— How To Behave: A Pocket Manual Of Republican Etiquette, And Guide To Correct Personal Habits • Samuel R Wells
... fur removed from our institutions and constitutions as if they wuz settin' in Jupiter with their legs hangin' off. It wuz galdin' to Uncle Sam and finally he had to stop it. But he didn't do it out of meanness. He jest had to, for of course you know your own ...
— Around the World with Josiah Allen's Wife • Marietta Holley
... curiosity and awaken feeling without the aid of improbable fiction or extravagant adventure. The language is varied in its degree of simplicity, to suit the pieces to different ages, but is throughout neat and correct; and, without the least approach towards vulgarity or meanness, it is adapted with peculiar felicity to the understandings of children. The author's taste, in this class of writing, appears to have been formed on the best models; and the work will not discredit a place on the same shelf with Berquin's Child's Friend, Mrs. Barbauld's Lessons ...
— De Libris: Prose and Verse • Austin Dobson
... carried out by base persons, of whom the queen is the basest, to ruin Strafford; the futility of Strafford's sentimental love of the king, whom he despises while he loves him; Strafford's blustering weakness and blindness when he forces his way into the Parliament House, and the contemptible meanness of Charles. The low intrigues of the Court leave the strongest impression on the mind, not the mighty struggle, not the fate of the Monarchy ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... cheated. She had come to the shop and expressed herself to this effect, in no moderate terms; and Mrs. Bundlecombe, whilst returning the twopence, had made some disparaging remarks on the other lady's manners, meanness, dress, age, and general inferiority. The affront had never been quite forgotten on either side, and it was not without much ruffling of their mental plumage that the two old bodies found themselves established within a few yards of ...
— Name and Fame - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... goes about with a dark lantern peering into out-of-the-way places, ever looking for meanness and things ...
— Dollars and Sense • Col. Wm. C. Hunter
... the worship of relics, Eunapius says: "Whoever wore a black dress was invested with tyrannical power; philosophy and piety to the gods were compelled to retire into secret places, and to dwell in contented poverty and dignified meanness of appearance. The temples were turned into tombs for the adoration of the bones of the basest and most depraved of men, who had suffered the penalty of the law, and whom they made ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... neighbours might have shaken hands with each other from the different sides, and occasionally the space between was traversed by wooden galleries, and thus entirely closed up. The stair, the scale-stair, was not well cleaned; and on entering the house Mannering was struck with the narrowness and meanness of the wainscotted passage. But the library, into which he was shown by an elderly, respectable-looking man-servant, was a complete contrast to these unpromising appearances. It was a well-proportioned room, hung with a portrait or two of Scottish characters of eminence, by Jamieson, ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... Bud laughed furiously. "That bull I imported last fall for three thousand dollars," he went on, turning back to the foreman. "They shot him up and drove off his twenty-five cows from the Coyote Bluff pastures. Dirty spite an' meanness. The white-livered scum!" Then with a fierce oath the usually even-tempered Bud hurled his wrath upon the waiting man. "Gorl darn it, you're standin' around like a barbed wire fence post. What in hell's brought you around now? What they ...
— The Forfeit • Ridgwell Cullum
... well-known how someone had the cunning and meanness to put a man's suit beside her to tempt her to wear this suit again, and with what absurd barbarism this transgression was claimed as a pretext for condemning her to the flames, as if in a warrior girl it was a crime worthy of the fire, to put on breeches instead of a ...
— Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary • Voltaire
... dear sister S.: "When I sometimes offer up supplications with strong crying to God to bring down my spirit into the dust I endeavor calmly to contemplate the infinite majesty of the most high God and my own meanness and wickedness, or else I quietly tell the Lord, who knows the heart, I would give Him all the glory of everything if I could. But the most effectual way I have ever found is to lead away my thoughts from myself and my ...
— Life of Henry Martyn, Missionary to India and Persia, 1781 to 1812 • Sarah J. Rhea
... her place of refuge with the petty question, "Good folks, can you tell when the ravishing is going to begin?" I am sure I shall neither hide myself to avoid applause, which probably no one will think of conferring, nor have the meanness to do anything which can indicate any desire of ravishment. I have seen, when the late Lord Erskine entered the Edinburgh theatre, papers distributed in the boxes to mendicate a round of applause—the natural reward of ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... of that wedding-morning when the air was literally burthened with like fragrance. She was about to see her husband for the first time since that agitating day, to see him thus, crouching as a spy among those delicate plants, her heart beat heavily, she loathed herself for the seeming meanness that had been forced upon her. Yet there was misgiving at her heart—a vague, sickening apprehension that chained ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 2 August 1848 • Various
... aloud. Ray went down the back stairs, swinging an empty millet-bag in his hand. For another five minutes Clara remained standing, to show that she was anxious to get away, while Ada abused her husband, giving detailed accounts of his meanness and neglect. Suddenly ...
— Jonah • Louis Stone
... the other. There are types of Christian men to whom it is more natural to abhor the evil than to cleave to the good; and there are types of character of which the converse is true. We often see men very earnest and entirely sincere in their detestation of meanness and wickedness, but very tepid in their appreciation of goodness. To hate is, unfortunately, more congenial with ordinary characters than to love; and it is more facile to look down on badness than ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... de War de old overseer tried himself in meanness over de slaves as seemingly he tried to be important. One day de slaves caught him and one held him whilst another knocked him in de head and ...
— Slave Narratives, Oklahoma - A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From - Interviews with Former Slaves • Various
... making difficulties about spending that grieved Peter greatly; not because he ever wanted her money now that Estcourt had been restored to its old splendour and set going again for their boy, but because meanness about money in a woman was something he could not comprehend—something repulsive, unfeminine, contrary to her nature as he had always understood it. He left off making the least suggestion about Anna's education or the household arrangements; everything that was done was done of ...
— The Benefactress • Elizabeth Beauchamp
... most deeply loved men of his time. He was of an eminently social temper, although averse to large companies and shy and silent in their presence. "There is no such thing," he once said, "as real conversation but between two persons." He was free from malice, meanness, or jealousy, Pope to the contrary notwithstanding. He was absolutely loyal to his principles and to his friends, in a time when many men changed both with as little compunction as they changed wigs and swords. His personality was singularly winning; his features regular, and full ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... it would be a sorry sight, a friend deserted, with his mouth open, and sus. per aures.—Well, a very short survey of life had convinced me of the absurdity and meanness and insecurity that pervade all human objects, such as wealth, office, power. I was filled with contempt for them, realized that to care for them was to lose all chance of what deserved care, and determined to grovel no more, but fix my gaze upon the ...
— Works, V3 • Lucian of Samosata
... New Zealanders have done, and to claim their ancient rights with tears now unheeded. I can see along the vista of the future, truth and righteousness in Britain's hands, and the inhabitants of New Guinea yet unborn blessing her for her rule; if otherwise, God help the British meanness, for they will rise to pronounce a curse on ...
— Adventures in New Guinea • James Chalmers
... not be maintained. They were followed by a meanness and a descent of the mind into lower levels; the loss of wings; no high speculation. Locke, to whom the meaning of ideas was unknown, became the type of philosophy, and his "understanding" the measure, in all nations, of the English ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... pathetic, human little person, who did what she could to save the poor strayed boys; but rather of ogre kind herself, kissing him as if she would like to put a tooth in him, with loud laughter at his shrinking and indisposition to be caressed. Geoff also felt keenly the meanness of forsaking Theo, and even the pony, who by this time, no doubt, must be very sorry for having thrown him, and very much puzzled how to get home. Would the groom (left behind for the purpose) be able to catch him? All these things much disturbed Geoff's thoughts. ...
— A Country Gentleman and his Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... earnest that his English is badly wrenched in the effort to convey his views, but I give his words very nearly as he wrote them. "What I think and what often I observed is that the Chinese very meanness and sordidness, just exactly what were the Jews. Scatter all round the world, and still they feel very proud of their country, despise the foreigners, close all their sea-ports, would not allow the poor ...
— American Missionary, Volume 43, No. 1, January, 1889 • Various
... with all my heart; and even then they would expect you should have some little estate, or be of some trade. When such poor folks as we are wish to marry, the first thing they ought to think of, is how to live. But without reflecting on the meanness of your birth, and the little fortune you have to recommend you, you aim at the highest pitch of exaltation; and your pretensions are no less than to demand in marriage the daughter of your sovereign, who with one single word ...
— The Arabian Nights - Their Best-known Tales • Unknown
... words:—'Endure, my soul, thou hast endured worse.' Nor must we allow our citizens to receive bribes, or to say, 'Gifts persuade the gods, gifts reverend kings;' or to applaud the ignoble advice of Phoenix to Achilles that he should get money out of the Greeks before he assisted them; or the meanness of Achilles himself in taking gifts from Agamemnon; or his requiring a ransom for the body of Hector; or his cursing of Apollo; or his insolence to the river-god Scamander; or his dedication to the dead Patroclus of ...
— The Republic • Plato
... Frank had not found much satisfaction in the company of his cousin, who inherited the combined meanness of both parents, and appeared to grudge poor Frank every mouthful he ate; but in the sunshine of his present prosperity he was ...
— The Telegraph Boy • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... York" represents a class of publications which has, of late, in many ways, been set before the public with too great liberality. The sole object seems to be to exhibit the "Yankee" character in its traditional deformities of stupidity and meanness,—otherwise denominated simplicity and shrewdness. Mr. Jonathan Slick is in no respect different from the ordinary fabulous Yankee. An illiterate clown he is, who, visiting New York, contrives by vice of impudence, to interfere very seriously ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various
... should be to gratify some particular by livings and revenues here that will also fail, where nothing is to be had, the King himself will be loser, and so will the case be formed here; for such is the poverty and meanness of the people (by reason of the length and coldness of the winters, the difficulty of subduing a wilderness, defect of staple commodity, the want of money, etc.), that if with hard labour men get a subsistence for their families, 'tis as much as the generality are able ...
— The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 1 of 2 - From 1620-1816 • Egerton Ryerson
... Bud, "I wanted to git out of this low-lived, Flat Crick way of livin'. We're a hard set down here, Mr. Hartsook. And I'm gittin' to be one of the hardest of 'em. But I never could git no good out of Bosaw with his whisky and meanness. And I went to the Mount Tabor church concert. I heard a man discussin' baptism, and regeneration, and so on. That didn't seem no cure for me, I went to a revival over at Clifty. Well, 'twarn't no use. First night they was a man that spoke about Jesus Christ ...
— The Hoosier Schoolmaster - A Story of Backwoods Life in Indiana • Edward Eggleston
... bitterness: "some friends would have only judged from what I said, that I chose to give no particular explanation of a circumstance which calls for none—at least to a stranger. You have judged better, and have made me feel, not only the meanness of duplicity, but my own inadequacy to sustain the task of a dissembler. I now tell you distinctly, that that glove is not the fellow, as you have acutely discerned, to the one which I just now produced;—it belongs to a friend yet dearer to me than the ...
— Rob Roy, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... attitudes and actions of imaginative young persons are exalted every moment by the invisible presence of lovers, poets, inspired and inspiring companions. Such as they are we also shall be; when we walk among them and with them, we shall wash our hands of all injustice, meanness, and pretension. Women are as tired as men of our silly civilization, its compliments, restraints, and compromises. They feel the burden of routine as heavily, and keep their elasticity under it as long as we. What they cannot hope to do, a great-hearted man, some lover of theirs, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly , Volume 2, No. 14, December 1858 • Various
... was interested in him and in his story. He swore roundly at the meanness of Jacob Wire and Squire Walker, and ...
— Try Again - or, the Trials and Triumphs of Harry West. A Story for Young Folks • Oliver Optic
... affirmative reply to this question, she was doomed to disappointment. Disgusted with such paltry meanness, Clemence, who had pushed her plate away, unable to partake of the stale food, replied quietly, "I should say they ...
— Clemence - The Schoolmistress of Waveland • Retta Babcock
... Democratic majority into a minority, "deserves," says von Holst, "to be counted among the most meritorious proofs of the sound and honorable feeling of the American nation."[57] But while the administration had thus smirched the inception and the whole character of the war with meanness and dishonor, the generals and the army were winning abundant glory for the national arms. Good strategy achieved a series of brilliant victories, and fortunately for the Whigs General Taylor and General Scott, together with a large proportion of the most distinguished regimental officers, ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. I. • John T. Morse
... London,—a Portuguese by birth, but came to London when a boy. He had few of the moral or external qualities of Jews; for I suppose there is some justice in the obloquy that follows them so closely. He was frugal without meanness, and cautious in his dealings, without extortion. I need not fear to say this, for it ...
— Arthur Mervyn - Or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 • Charles Brockden Brown
... Amphipolis and the Cardian territory, and is even turning Euboea into a hostile post, and advancing to attack Byzantium, it is safe to speak on Philip's behalf. Yea, among these men, some have risen rapidly from poverty to wealth, from meanness and obscurity to repute and honor, while you, on the contrary, have fallen from honor to obscurity, from wealth to indigence. For the riches of a state I consider to be allies, confidence, good-will; of all which you are ...
— The Olynthiacs and the Phillippics of Demosthenes • Demosthenes
... to the restaurant opposite the play-house, where Lemaitre was indulging in monstrous dinners and was usually hilarious with wine. Harel, it must be mentioned, was a very penurious man, who never paid his people when he could postpone it, and whose meanness of soul Lemaitre delighted to excoriate. Often when dining bountifully at his restaurant, the actor being sent for in hot haste with the intelligence that the curtain was just going up, would cry, "Diable! ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Volume 15, No. 89, May, 1875 • Various
... Germany? But, on the other hand, the ropes and myths and knots and hindrances; the thundering waves of the white world beyond beating us back; the scalding breakers of this inner world,—its currents and back eddies—its meanness and smallness—its ...
— Darkwater - Voices From Within The Veil • W. E. B. Du Bois
... schools or for criminals. It brings out of boys all that is evil in their nature and nothing that is good, developing bullying and cruelty, while it is eminently productive of cowardice, lying, and meanness—as I have frequently found when I came to hear the private life of those who defend it as creating "manliness." It was found during the American war that the soldiers who had been most accustomed to beating and to being ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... their ranks. To my eye, they are all wretchedly ill dressed, for they wear the same dark and dirty-looking calicoes which our Scotch maid-servants wear only on week days. This gives to their dress an air of meanness; but here the English ought to consider, that these cotton goods are in France highly valued, and very dear, from their scarcity. Over these dresses they wear (at present) small imitation shawls, of wool, ...
— Travels in France during the years 1814-1815 • Archibald Alison
... after, occurred the death of the ex-King of France, at Claremont. McCarthy sums up his character very tersely, thus: "The clever, unwise, grand, mean old man." Louis Philippe's meanness was in his mercenary and plotting spirit, when a rich man and a king—his grand qualities were his courage and cheerfulness, when ...
— Queen Victoria, her girlhood and womanhood • Grace Greenwood
... child! Beyond all understanding! And, do you know, the calumnies that were spread about us, especially the miserable anonymous letters, all kinds of meanness, it all helped. For each time we found in each other a perfect refuge. He was not so thin-skinned in such matters as I. It was through me that he first came to understand them—how to manage the petty incidents of social ...
— Captain Mansana and Mother's Hands • Bjoernstjerne Bjoernson
... 'but there I fail to follow you. You may, if you please, enact the part of Judas; but if, as I suppose, you recoil from that extremity of meanness, I am, on my side, far too intelligent to leave these lodgings, in which I please myself exceedingly, and from which you lack the power to drive me. No, no, dear sir; here I am, and ...
— The Dynamiter • Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny van de Grift Stevenson
... of the lads that knocked the bark off this country. An' I've got the best bunch of man-hunters you ever did see. I'm not braggin'. I'm tellin' you that my boys will make you look like a plugged nickel if you don't get shet of yore meanness. They're a hell-poppin' bunch of jim-dandies, an' ...
— Oh, You Tex! • William Macleod Raine
... been a very safe principle to go upon in the sixteenth century, but it would most certainly fail in the nineteenth, when one's dearest friends are the most unmitigated book-thieves. But perhaps even the too frequent loss of books is an evil to be preferred to the egoistical meanness of the selfish collector. Balzac gives in his 'Cousin Pons' a vivid delineation of such a person. The hero is a poor drudging music-teacher and orchestra-player, who has invested every franc of his hard-won earnings ...
— The Book-Hunter in London - Historical and Other Studies of Collectors and Collecting • William Roberts
... your money, and less for you, who show the meanness there is in your nature when you speak of Harold Hastings as you have done. Supposing he is poor—suppose he is a painter and a carpenter, and has been what you started to call him—is he less a man for that? A thousand times no, and there is more of true manhood ...
— Tracy Park • Mary Jane Holmes
... hypocrite, or did he in fact fail to see any inconsistency between, his trickery and meanness and his worship of Jehovah? A man may be sincere in his religious worship on Sunday and yet cheat a neighbor on Monday. Analyze carefully ...
— The Making of a Nation - The Beginnings of Israel's History • Charles Foster Kent and Jeremiah Whipple Jenks
... but 'tis as a satisfaction to my own pride, and to myself I am apologising for having been wanting to myself. And hence, I think (out of regard to that personage of ego), I scarce ever could degrade myself to do a meanness. How do men feel whose whole lives (and many men's lives are) are lies, schemes, and subterfuges? What sort of company do they keep when they are alone? Daily in life I watch men whose every smile is an artifice, and every wink is an hypocrisy. ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... foretold; neither shall I fear the fulfilment thereof." (Voelunga Saga, Chap. XXIX.) These words are spoken to Brynhild after she has discovered what she regards as Sigurd's treachery. His words are dictated by a noble resignation to fate, but his very next remark shows a moral meanness not at all in keeping with Morris's conception. Sigurd said: "This my heart would, that thou and I should go into one bed together; even so ...
— The Influence of Old Norse Literature on English Literature • Conrad Hjalmar Nordby
... favour of the principal prisoners for more than one reason. They had been domineering, turbulent fellows all along; they had meditated a crime which would have robbed the settlers of many of the necessaries and all the luxuries of life, and this displayed a meanness of spirit which, they thought, ...
— The Island Queen • R.M. Ballantyne
... had a tongue for gossip, an ear for evil report, an eye for rascals. Every day new suspicions took root in him, while others grew and came to great size and were as hard to conceal as pumpkins. He had meanness enough to equip all he knew, and gave it with a lavish tongue. In his opinion Hillsborough came within one of having as many rascals in it as there were people. He had tried to bring them severally to justice by vain ...
— Darrel of the Blessed Isles • Irving Bacheller
... carried him away, and his hearers went with him like so many straws on the flood, and in the exercise of this great gift the whole man seemed transfigured; abroad, he was a languid, rather slouching priest, who crept about, a picture of delicate humility, but with a shade of meanness; for, religious prejudice apart, it is ignoble to sweep the wall in passing as he did, and eye the ground: but, once in the pulpit, his figure rose and swelled majestically, and seemed to fly over them all like a guardian angel's; his sallow cheek burned, his great Italian ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... a while at a certain parody of devotion, which seemed to strip the wretch of his last claim to manhood. Then followed the brutal instant of extinction, and the paltry dangling of the remains like a broken jumping-jack. He had been prepared for something terrible, not for this tragic meanness. He stood a moment silent, and then - "I denounce this God-defying murder," he shouted; and his father, if he must have disclaimed the sentiment, might have owned the stentorian voice with which ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... to this divine love that we are called. This is the high promise of man's life. We are called away from indifference, from meanness, malice, prejudice and hate. We are called above the earthly loves that come and go, and are unsure. We are called into the deep enduring love of God and man and all creation. Worship is a door into that love. Once ...
— An Interpretation of Friends Worship • N. Jean Toomer
... the Confessor, with the true meanness of a mean spirit, visited his dislike of the once powerful father and sons upon the helpless daughter and sister, his unoffending wife, whom all who saw her (her husband and his monks excepted) loved. He seized rapaciously upon her fortune and her jewels, and allowing her only ...
— A Child's History of England • Charles Dickens
... printer and lieutenant, lay in nothing lower than that which was best in him. It is surely a service sufficient to compensate for many more faults than can be charged against him that wherever there was any latent poetic dissatisfaction with the vulgarity and meanness of ordinary life he gave it expression, and that he has awakened in the PEOPLE lofty emotions which, without him, would have slept. The cultivated critics, and the refined persons who have schrecklich viel gelesen, are not competent to estimate the ...
— Pages from a Journal with Other Papers • Mark Rutherford
... the consequences of his acts, and if they are bad, will resolve to do better another time. The worst sort of deceit is that by which one lets another bear the blame, or in any way suffer, for what one has one's self done. Such meanness happens sometimes, but it is almost too bad ...
— The True Citizen, How To Become One • W. F. Markwick, D. D. and W. A. Smith, A. B.
... spent, leaning mightily on his young friend made his way to the great hall. And as we have recounted, though all were struck by oddness and meanness of the stranger's clothes, yet only Sir Kay made point to taunt him. Yet did he make no answer to these taunts but waited with a great meekness for his turn before the King. And that he should wait ...
— In the Court of King Arthur • Samuel Lowe
... and byways, but for the help of God?—That is a small matter, and a question of common decency; but you must know that without the grace of God and the virtue of His Spirit, there is no impurity, meanness, infamy, drunkenness, blasphemy, or other kind of sin to which man would not ...
— Recollections of My Youth • Ernest Renan
... rendered any such services. {269} For my principle may perhaps be expressed thus. I think that one who has received a kindness ought to remember it all his life; but that the doer of the kindness should forget it once for all; if the former is to behave like a good man, the latter like one free from all meanness. To be always recalling and speaking of one's own benefactions is almost like upbraiding the recipients of them. I will do nothing of the kind, and will not be led into doing so. Whatever be the opinion that has been formed of me in these respects, ...
— The Public Orations of Demosthenes, volume 2 • Demosthenes
... by degrees that this rich, selfish, over-fed, over-pampered, and revoltingly idle landowner, whose sole mental and physical resources were confined to the dinner and card tables, had been capable of a genuine friendship for Malcourt. Self-centred, cautious to the verge of meanness in everything which did not directly concern his own comfort and well-being, he, nevertheless, was totally dependent upon his friends for a full enjoyment of his two amusements; for he hated to dine alone and ...
— The Firing Line • Robert W. Chambers
... assistance. I do not think, that, during the month, we were in bed for one whole night. Two-thirds of these patients were unable to pay a cent. During these years, I learned all of life that it was possible for a human being to learn. I saw nobleness in dens, and meanness in palaces; virtue among prostitutes, and vice among so-called respectable women. I learned to judge human nature correctly; to see goodness where the world found nothing but faults, and also to see faults where the world could see nothing ...
— A Practical Illustration of Woman's Right to Labor - A Letter from Marie E. Zakrzewska, M.D. Late of Berlin, Prussia • Marie E. Zakrzewska
... their class. For this purpose the senior lieutenant of each regiment was the chief of the regimental club, and there was a general chief for the whole army. Offenses against good manners, faults of meanness, or oddity of behavior, were discouraged by admonitions, given privately by the chief, or publicly in the convivial meetings of the club. Moral pressure might be carried so far in an aggravated case, as to cause the culprit to resign his ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... this as an insult to his daughter's memory, and, as the tomb was much smaller than many which had been erected in the cemetery by families to whom the Janseniuses claimed superiority, cited it as an example of the widower's meanness. But by other persons it was so much admired that Trefusis hoped it would ensure the prosperity of its designer. The contrary happened. When the mason attempted to return to his ordinary work he was informed that he had contravened trade usage, and ...
— An Unsocial Socialist • George Bernard Shaw
... a joke to you, but it doesn't to me," he answered shortly. Nor was he able to keep his anger entirely from his voice. "Everything that girl does you think is perfect. Instead of encouraging her in her meanness you ought to help me out." His tones harshened, and he lost the fine edge of his self-control. "I've stood enough ...
— The Sky Line of Spruce • Edison Marshall
... who occupies the lowest stage of the order of menials stands very low indeed. The French created a word on purpose to designate the servants of the aristocracy—they called them lackeys. This word "lackey" served as the strongest expression, when all others were exhausted, to designate human meanness. Under the old French monarchy, to denote by a single expression a low-spirited contemptible fellow, it was usual to say that he had the "soul of a lackey"; the term was enough to convey all that was intended. [Footnote a: If the principal opinions by which men are guided are examined closely ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 2 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... not a very watchful guardian, but it was all the more disagreeable when it spoke. The genuine good temper and habitual self-possession—the calmness without disrespect—the cheerfulness without carelessness—the respectful attention stripped of all meanness or subservience which Lettice managed to preserve in her relations with him—at last made its way quite to his heart, that is to say, to his taste or fancy, for I don't think he had much of a heart. He began to grow quite fond of her, and one day delighted, as much as he surprised Mrs. Melwyn, ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... few localities in France where Law derives from outward appearance the dignity which ought always to accompany it. Yet it surely is, after religion and royalty, the greatest engine of society. Everywhere, even in Paris, the meanness of its surroundings, the wretched arrangement of the courtrooms, their barrenness and want of decoration in the most ornate and showy nation upon earth in the matter of its public monuments, lessens the action of the law's mighty ...
— An Historical Mystery • Honore de Balzac
... manners of their old, with the finery of their new station, they afforded continual subjects for the pity of the sensible, the contempt of the sober, and the laughter of every body. But the folly and meanness of the higher ranks of society were still more disgusting. One instance alone, related by the Duke de St. Simon, will shew the unworthy avarice which infected the whole of society. A man of the name of Andre, without character or education, had, by a series ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... not proposed that there should be a wooden machine to that effect erected in some convenient part of the proscenium, which an unsuccessful author should be required to mount, and stand his hour, exposed to the apples and oranges of the pit. This amende honorable would well suit with the meanness of some authors, who in their prologues fairly prostrate their skulls to the audience, and seem to ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... fact, all the compensations. But luckily I have found the compensations for myself; I just had to find something. Men and women have given me everything that such as I could expect. I have never met with reasonless enmity, never met with meanness, never met with anything more unbearable than natural indifference, from any man or woman. I have been, I may say, a burden and a bore all over the world; I have been an ill and fretful stranger within all men's gates; I have asked much and given nothing; I have never been a friend. ...
— Living Alone • Stella Benson
... bounden duty, then," he observed. "You should recollect that every act of meanness committed by a British officer brings discredit on the cloth. When a man is guilty of a fault, he but increases it if he neglects to make reparation for it. Now, if I get leave for you to accompany me on shore, will you follow my directions?" ...
— Salt Water - The Sea Life and Adventures of Neil D'Arcy the Midshipman • W. H. G. Kingston
... love with them from the very first, and so it must be to the very last. Perhaps you will say that there is nothing in this story either but love. And if so, it is well; for where there is naught else there can surely be no sinning, or wrongdoing, or weakness, or meanness; nor yet anything that is not quite ...
— A Roman Singer • F. Marion Crawford
... I cannot but record the effect of an actual though undesigned experiment, which I prosecuted for upwards of twelve years among you. For the greater part of that time I could expatiate on the meanness of dishonesty, on the villany of falsehood, on the despicable arts of calumny; in a word, upon all those deformities of character which awaken the natural indignation of the human heart against the pests and the disturbers of human society. Now, could I, upon the strength of these warm ...
— The Preacher and His Models - The Yale Lectures on Preaching 1891 • James Stalker
... seven-eighths of the year, perched upon a cane-seated chair in a space as narrow as a lieutenant's cabin on board a man-of-war. Such a man must be able to defy anchylosis of the knee and thigh joints; he must have a soul above meanness, in order to live meanly; must lose all relish for money by dint of handling it. Demand this peculiar specimen of any creed, educational system, school, or institution you please, and select Paris, that city of fiery ordeals and ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne
... downright sinful about carrying their feuding meanness right up to the doorstep of Uncle Al, if it could be said that a man living in a shantyboat ...
— The Mississippi Saucer • Frank Belknap Long
... Abbey which had "existed for more than eight centuries under different forms, in poverty and in wealth, in meanness and in magnificence, in misfortune and success, finally succumbed to the royal will. The day came, and that a drear winter day, when its last mass was sung, its last censer waved, its last congregation bent in rapt and lowly adoration before ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Gloucester [2nd ed.] • H. J. L. J. Masse
... Fetters, schoolboy, was not an inapt description of Fetters, man—mortgage shark, labour contractor and political boss. Bill, seeking official favour, had reported to the Professor of that date some boyish escapade in which his schoolfellows had taken part, and it was in revenge for this meanness that the colonel had chased him ignominiously down Main Street and pilloried him upon the schoolhouse wall. Fetters the man, a Goliath whom no David had yet opposed, had fastened himself upon a weak and disorganised ...
— The Colonel's Dream • Charles W. Chesnutt
... Johnson was the friend of Burke, and he found pleasure in an acquaintance with Wilkes. Nor, in all his admiration for rank and fortune, is there a single element of meanness. The man who wrote the letter to Lord Chesterfield need never fear the charge of abasement. He knew that there was "a remedy in human nature that will keep us safe under every form of government." He defined a courtier in the Idler ...
— Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham • Harold J. Laski
... with a hatred of images; and it was held to be the duty of a prince to impose on his subjects the dictates of his own conscience. But in the outset of an unsettled reign, during ten years of toil and danger, Leo submitted to the meanness of hypocrisy, bowed before the idols which he despised, and satisfied the Roman pontiff with the annual professions of his orthodoxy and zeal. In the reformation of religion, his first steps were moderate and cautious: he assembled a great council ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 5 • Edward Gibbon
... with the stoicism of a Roman of old, "it would be a weakness, it would be a folly, it would be a meanness! If I thus give up the only and last resource which we possess to the uncertain chances of the bad passions of anger and envy, I should never deserve to be forgiven. No, Rosa, no; to-morrow we shall come to a conclusion as to ...
— The Black Tulip • Alexandre Dumas (Pere)
... known, and the necessity I was under of getting a livelihood, made me agree to this proposal, notwithstanding the meanness and hardships that attended it. The day following the tailor brought me a rope. a hatchet, and a short coat, and recommended me to some poor people who gained their bread after the same manner, that they might take me into their company. ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments vol. 1 • Anon.
... library again, drew her to a seat upon his knee, and softly smoothing back the hair from her forehead, said in kind, fatherly tones, "I am not displeased with you, daughter. I understand that it was quite accidental, and I am sure my little girl is entirely above the meanness of intentionally listening to what is evidently not meant for her ear. And in fact, now that I think of it, I am not sorry that you know I did not, and do not now, approve of the treatment you received at that time. Yet that was the first time I had ever mentioned it to any ...
— Elsie's Vacation and After Events • Martha Finley
... have preferred to talk about this in private, but Demi has spoilt that plan, so I may as well have it out now," said Mr. Bhaer, looking a little stern, as he always did when any meanness or ...
— Little Men - Life at Plumfield With Jo's Boys • Louisa May Alcott
... talking to them at these services I always used to try and make them feel that Christ was the fulfilment of all the best things that they admired, that He was their natural hero. I would tell them some story of heroism and meanness contrasted, of courage and cowardice, of noble forgiveness and vile cruelty, and so get them on the side of the angels. Then I would try and spring it upon them that Christ was the Lord of the heroes and the brave men and the noble men, and that He was fighting against all that was mean and ...
— A Student in Arms - Second Series • Donald Hankey
... laughed with satisfaction; the prospect soothed the sting of Elizabeth's "meanness"—which was what he called it, when he did not remember to name it, darkly, "faithlessness." He was so comforted that he had, for the first time in his life, an impulse to confide in his mother; "Elizabeth got provoked at me"— there was a boyish demand for sympathy in ...
— The Iron Woman • Margaret Deland
... that motionless figure, intent on victory and sustaining the weight of imperial anxieties, which yet cannot be quite impassive in presence of a death so devoted. And side by side with this poem of generous enthusiasm is placed the poem of passion reduced to its extreme of meanness, its most contracted form of petty spite and base envy—the Soliloquy in a Spanish Cloister; a grotesque insect, spitting ineffectual poison, is placed under the magnifying-glass of the comic spirit, and is discovered to be—a brother in religion! A noble hatred, transcending personal ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... lives, like beasts of prey, or rather like famishing sailors on a wreck—of the debasement and moral ruin of a people endowed by God with surpassing resources for the attainment of human happiness and human dignity. I cannot be loyal to a system of meanness, terror, and corruption, although it usurp the title and assume the form of a 'government.' So long as such a 'government' presumes to injure and insult me, and those in whose prosperity I am involved, I must offer to it all the resistance in my power. But if I despaired of successful ...
— Speeches from the Dock, Part I • Various
... in their real hideousness. We keep the palliative set for home consumption, and liberally distribute the plain-spoken, ugly set amongst the vices and faults of our friends. The same thing which I call in myself prudence I call in you meanness. The same thing which you call in yourselves generous living, you call in your friend filthy sensualism. That which, to the doer of it, is only righteous indignation, to the onlooker is passionate anger. ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... tell you this, Elsie; pretty gin'rally a mean dog 'll bite if he sees you're afraid of him. The only way to handle that kind is to run straight at him and kick the meanness out of him. The more he barks the harder you ought to kick. If you run away once it 'll be mighty uncomf'table every time you go past that house. But never mind; I cal'late this p'tic'lar pup won't bite; I've pulled his teeth, I guess. What's your plans, now? Goin' to keep on with the ...
— Cap'n Eri • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... tell the empress the whole of this occurrence; she had been too indignant at the duke's meanness to suppress her feelings, and she reproved the duke himself with a severity which can hardly be ...
— The Life of Marie Antoinette, Queen of France • Charles Duke Yonge
... friend in former days, I had guessed nothing of. I saw that very little encouragement would make him a toady—a fawning servitor on the wealthy—and in our old time of friendship I had believed him to be far above all such meanness, but rather of a manly, independent nature that scorned hypocrisy. Thus we are deluded even by our nearest and dearest—and is it well or ill for us, I wonder, when we are at last undeceived? Is not the destruction of illusion ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... classes hastened to the island to witness the sight. For the English were, as they now are, a sight-loving people, who find pleasure in pageants; and then, as at present, they demanded economy; but when economy came, they designated it meanness. ...
— The Buccaneer - A Tale • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... with all due deference to your correspondent's term 'bolt,' that Madame Lola Montez left quietly and unostentatiously.... The attempt to stop her leaving Sydney and prevent her engagement in Melbourne was an exhibition of meanness at which every honest heart must feel disgusted. Alone, in a strange land, without friends or protector, her position as a woman should in itself have saved her from the unmanly abuse heaped upon her and the contemptible attitude manifested by some ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... The only distinction which it is necessary to point out to feeble-minded folk is this: that, in asserting the breadth and depth of that significance which gives to fashion and fortune their tremendous power, we do not indorse the extravagances which often disgrace the one, nor the meanness ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 20, June, 1859 • Various
... quarrels soon between the King and his guest, which led to exhibitions of paltriness and parsimony common to their characters. The King stopped Voltaire's supply of chocolate and sugar, while Voltaire pocketed candle-ends to show his contempt for this meanness! The saying of Frederick that the Frenchman was only an orange, of which, having squeezed the juice, he {161} should throw away the skin, very naturally rankled in the poet to whom ...
— Heroes of Modern Europe • Alice Birkhead
... heroism, for in these days his soul had never soared to a higher region. His companions speak of him as one who had even then peculiarities that drew attention: of a light, tall form—full of elasticity and vigor—ambitious, yet noble in his dispositions, disdaining everything like meanness or deceit. Some would have been apt to regard him as exhibiting many traits of a Christian character; but his susceptible mind had not, at that time, a relish for any higher joy than the refined gaieties of society, and for such pleasures as the song and the dance could yield. He himself regarded ...
— The Biography of Robert Murray M'Cheyne • Andrew A. Bonar
... allow her to be so utterly obedient as formerly. In addition to his imperiousness, he had learned to affix the idea of cleverness to various artifices and subterfuges which utterly revolted her by their meanness. ...
— The Moorland Cottage • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... All London to cross. Never had it seemed longer. And the great city was smitten by a blight. It was not a fog, for one could see clearly a hundred yards ahead. But there was no sky and the air was a queer yellow, almost olive green, in which the main buildings stood out in startling meanness, and the distant ones were providentially obscured. Though it was but little past noon, all the great shops blazed with light, but they illuminated singularly little the yellow murk of the roadway. The interiors ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... doubt, lifts the mind above itself: it gives vigour to sentiment, and energy to expression. Let the topic be a paltry theft, a dry form of pleading, or a petty misdemeanor; will not the orator feel himself cramped and chilled by the meanness of the question? Give him a cause of magnitude, such as bribery in the election of magistrates, a charge for plundering the allies of Rome, or the murder of Roman citizens, how different then his emotions! how sublime each sentiment! what dignity of language! The effect, it ...
— A Dialogue Concerning Oratory, Or The Causes Of Corrupt Eloquence • Cornelius Tacitus
... failure. He had guarded his people from the tomahawk and the scalping-knife. With prescient eye he had foreseen the imperial greatness of the West. Whatever his shortcomings, they had not been those of meanness or timidity. ...
— The Fighting Governor - A Chronicle of Frontenac • Charles W. Colby
... loins with a resolute hand, he thrust The base thought from him: "Nauhaught, be a man Starve, if need be; but, while you live, look out From honest eyes on all men, unashamed. God help me! I am deacon of the church, A baptized, praying Indian! Should I do This secret meanness, even the barken knots Of the old trees would turn to eyes to see it, The birds would tell of it, and all the leaves Whisper above me: 'Nauhaught is a thief!' The sun would know it, and the stars that hide Behind his light would watch me, and at night Follow ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... does she raise in my soul by her proud contempts of me! Never, never, was mortal man's pride so mortified! How does she sink me, even in my own eyes!—'Her heart sincerely repulses me, she says, for my MEANNESS!'—Yet she intends to reap the benefit of what she calls so!—Curse upon her haughtiness, and her meanness, at the same time!—Her haughtiness to me, and her meanness to her own relations; more unworthy of kindred with her, than I can be, ...
— Clarissa, Volume 7 • Samuel Richardson
... was scant half past eight. He looked across to the windows of his office and of one bare third-story sleeping-room over it. Eloquent windows! Their meanness reminded him anew how definitely he had chosen not merely the simple but the solitary life. Yet now he turned toward Royal Street. But at the third or fourth step he faced about toward Chartres. The distance to the courthouse was the same either way, and its entrances ...
— The Flower of the Chapdelaines • George W. Cable
... attacks of the Turks, are not even hinted at. But these galleries are palpably in a state of dilapidation and decay, which implies that the Austrian masters of Venice, though they cannot stoop to the meanness of demolishing or mutilating the memorials of her ancient glories, will be glad to see them silently and gradually perish. The whole Palace has a dreary and by-gone aspect, seeming conscious that either itself or the Austrian ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley
... sacrificing in Druidical rites, there had been art and culture here such as has never been surpassed. India, of splendid pageants, of brave warriors and gallant kings! Alas, how the mighty had fallen! About her, penury, meanness, hypocrisy, uncleanliness, thievery and unbridled passions. . . . What was that? Her heart missed a beat. That pad-pad; that ...
— The Adventures of Kathlyn • Harold MacGrath
... forefathers, and by superstitious awe in times of old. There by publicly sacrificing a man, they begin the horrible solemnity of their barbarous worship. To this grove another sort of reverence is also paid. No one enters it otherwise than bound with ligatures, thence professing his subordination and meanness, and power of the Deity there. If he fall down, he is not permitted to rise or be raised, but grovels along upon the ground. And of all their superstition, this is the drift and tendency; that from this place the nation drew their original, that here God, the ...
— Tacitus on Germany • Tacitus
... she would never in any way acknowledge again, were invited; nor did the knowledge of what it meant cause many of them to decline the questionable honor—which fact carried in it the best justification of which the meanness and insult were capable. Mrs. Wardour accepted for herself and Letty; but in their case Lady Margaret did call, and in person give the invitation. Godfrey positively refused to accompany them. He would not be patronized, he said; ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... of this incongruous description, so as to make them "pull together"? In short, the vessels and the crews are equally contemptible, and the officers, in cases of difficulty, must be sacrificed to the pride and meanness of the Company. My reason for taking notice of the "Bombay Marine" arises from an order lately promulgated, in which the officers of this service were to take rank and precedence with those of the navy. Now, as ...
— Newton Forster • Frederick Marryat
... to me in his vulgar, peasant's way. He doesn't care that he has insulted me, but I've been crying all day. I couldn't love him if he killed me. If he gave me freedom, then I might have some affection for him; but now I'll do everything he doesn't want me to, just for meanness; even if I had wronged him, I wouldn't regret it. I must get even with him some way. I can't fight with him; I ...
— Plays • Alexander Ostrovsky
... mischievous intelligence characteristic of children, in whom observation begins with naughtiness. Once she had let them loose upon their aunt, she allowed them to laugh at all her absurdities, her figure, her nose, her dresses, whose meanness, nevertheless, provided their own elegant attire. Thus incited and upheld, the little ones soon arrived at insolence. Mademoiselle de Varandeuil had the quick temper that accompanies kindness of ...
— Germinie Lacerteux • Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
... all that concerns me, not what the people think. This rule, equally arduous in actual and in intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness. It is the harder because you will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it. It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... crushes it all! A woman may forgive deceit, treachery, desertion,—even the preference given to a rival. She may forgive them and forget them; but I do not think that a woman can forget a blow. And as for forgiveness,—it is not the blow that she cannot forgive, but the meanness of spirit ...
— Can You Forgive Her? • Anthony Trollope
... to fail them that are the saved; but must, as commissioned of God, come down from heaven to do this office for them; they must come, I say, and take the care and charge of our soul, to conduct it safely into Abraham's bosom. It is not our meanness in the world, nor our weakness of faith, that shall hinder this; nor shall the loathsomeness of our diseases make these delicate spirits shy of taking this charge upon them. Lazarus the beggar found this a truth; ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... who had been touched by the noble bearing of the ministers before the King and Council, to defray the expenses of their journey as well as the outlay incurred during their residence in London, which the King, with unspeakable meanness, had failed to discharge. This gift the two brethren courteously and gratefully declined. Since James's accession to the English Throne there had been a great outcry against the Scots on account of the beggarly rabble who crossed the Tweed and came to Court to importune the King for 'auld ...
— Andrew Melville - Famous Scots Series • William Morison
... bold promise to "ask no mercy," he has sought, with incredible cowardice and meanness, to deprive me of all opportunity of being heard in self-defence, first, by excluding from the "International Journal of Ethics" my perfectly reasonable reply to what he himself confesses to have been an "intentionally severe attack," and, secondly, by threatening me through ...
— A Public Appeal for Redress to the Corporation and Overseers of Harvard University - Professor Royce's Libel • Francis Ellingwood Abbot
... they commit every vice. But they who sow the wind shall reap the whirlwind; the revealing day will come when the films of life shall be withdrawn, and the character shall appear faithful as a portrait, and then all the meanness and sliminess shall be seen to have given something to the soul's picture. Oh, be warned against these dreams, all ye young hearts! The indulgence of the imagination is like the sultriness of a summer's day; what began so fair ends with sharp lightnings and thunder. ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... sordid capitalists and miserly landlords don't. I offered the other day to fund all my personal debts, in the shape of a long loan at three per cent, but my creditors did not take kindly to the idea. Such is the sordid meanness which is too sadly characteristic of the merely commercial mind. But to return to our subject, which is, I believe, the ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 17, July 23, 1870 • Various
... son James, will get Oodles of Presents, because you have Been Good. Will you Believe it, Children, that Bad boy Reginald said he didn't Care a Darn and he Kicked three Feet of Veneering off the Piano just for Meanness. Poor James was so sorry for Reginald that he cried for Half an Hour after he Went to Bed that Night. Reginald lay wide Awake until he saw James was Asleep and then he Said if these people think they can Fool me, they are Mistaken. Just then Santa Claus ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VI. (of X.) • Various
... he was ever eager to do for Steward, would Michael do for Kwaque, despite the fact that Kwaque had no touch of meanness or viciousness in him. The point was that Michael had been trained, from his first dawn of consciousness, to differentiate between black men and white men. Black men were always the servants of white men—or such had been his experience; and always they were objects ...
— Michael, Brother of Jerry • Jack London
... feeding on it as they go! I don't want to speak too slightingly of these verbal critics;—how can I, who am so fond of talking about errors and vulgarisms of speech? Only there is a difference between those clerical blunders which almost every man commits, knowing better, and that habitual grossness or meanness of speech which is unendurable to educated persons, from anybody that ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... he looked at them. "You old devils, you're strong enough to play such tricks on green fellows for years to come. You're chock full of meanness!" ...
— One of Ours • Willa Cather
... word have I stumbled? For deceit savours of meanness. Let me amend and seek the charity, the neutral tolerance, of some such word as concealment. For things good and things bad may be concealed, things that people should know and things that concern them not, great secrets of State and the flutterings ...
— The King's Mirror • Anthony Hope
... merchandise, which they knew perfectly well would never be delivered by this monarch, who was as greedy of gain as he was drunken. As a matter of course the natives followed the example of their chief, vied with him in selfishness, greed, and meanness, regarded the English as fair spoil, and fleeced them on ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part III. The Great Explorers of the Nineteenth Century • Jules Verne
... the meanness. The chief carried the pipe of peace. That's like our flag of truce. You never heard of any civilized man shooting another under ...
— The Emigrant Trail • Geraldine Bonner
... of power; but she was forced, by a threatened rising of the Alexandrians, to make her elder son king. Before, however, she would do this she made a treaty with him, which would strongly prove, if anything were still wanting, the vice and meanness of the Egyptian court. It was, that, although married to his sister Cleopatra, of whom he was very fond, he should put her away, and marry his younger sister Selene; because the mother hoped that Selene would be false to her husband's cause, ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 10 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... when the news arrived—taking preparation. Boys are marvellous creatures. Perhaps they will sink below the brutes; perhaps they will attain to a woman's tenderness. Though they despised Rickie, and had suffered under Agnes's meanness, their one thought this term was to be gentle and ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster
... little fists against the granite of her mother's nature. And I fancy that at an early age (she was very mature, mind), Emily came to hate her mother quite earnestly and conscientiously, and, so to speak, without meanness ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... "the head and front of the offence in the other [the Knowlton] case." I find an indignant protest against this odious unfairness in the National Reformer for May 19th: "My 'Law of Population' was used against Mr. Truelove as an aggravation of his offence, passing over the utter meanness—worthy only of Collette—of using against a prisoner a book whose author has never been attacked for writing it—does Mr. Collette, or do the authorities, imagine that the severity shown to Mr. Truelove will in any fashion deter me from continuing the Malthusian ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant
... with atheism, when I saw somewhat of the meanness and selfishness of its protagonists, I began to doubt in the honesty of men. If these, our supposed teachers, are so vile, so mercenary, so false,—why, welcome Juhannam! But the more I doubted in the honesty of men, the more did I believe that ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... impossible for you to enter into the feelings of a man who has been brought up as presumptive heir to a rent-roll of 12,000. You cannot imagine how the mind of a gentleman shrinks from the petty details, the meanness, the vulgarities of trade. You are aware, I presume, that all avenues of ambition except the Church, the Army, and the Legislature, are closed to our class? You cannot imagine—pardon my repeating it— the exclusiveness, ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... his fortune to be divided between the baby Oliver and his mother. He left only a small sum to his older son, because he knew that he was wicked, and did not deserve any. The will declared Oliver should have the money only on condition that he never stain his name with any act of meanness, dishonor, cowardice or wrong. If he did do this, then half the money was to go to the older son. The dying man also wrote a letter to Oliver's mother, telling her that he had made the will and that he was dying; but the older son, who was with him when he died, found the letter and ...
— Tales from Dickens • Charles Dickens and Hallie Erminie Rives
... curious to observe the manner in which the whole establishment, from the highest to the lowest, thought it necessary to demean themselves toward his Grace's confidential secretary; there was no meanness to which they would not stoop to curry favor with me: I could scarcely believe they were Spaniards. I left no stone unturned to be of service to them, without being taken in by their ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII (of X)—Continental Europe I • Various
... limitless? Do we not commonly speak of love as being outworn by offense or neglect? In the compacts which we make with one another in the name of love, do we not specifically name certain offenses as unpardonable? Thus one man will say, "I can forgive anything but meanness," and another says, "no friendship can survive perfidy"; and in the relations between men and women unfaithfulness is held to cancel all bonds, however indissoluble they may seem. Now and again, it is true, some strange voice reaches us, keyed to a different music. Shakespeare, for example, ...
— The Empire of Love • W. J. Dawson
... death upon the gallows seems sweet by comparison. This hatred, of course, is often, and perhaps Almost invariably, quite justified. To be the wife of an ordinary man, indeed, is an experience that must be very hard to bear. The hollowness and vanity of the fellow, his petty meanness and stupidity, his puling sentimentality and credulity, his bombastic air of a cock on a dunghill, his anaesthesia to all whispers and summonings of the spirit, above all, his loathsome clumsiness in amour—all these things must revolt any woman above the ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... question about it," returned the other, bitterly, "for here are letters addressed to him. I may even take the privilege of reading them tomorrow, for in that way I can perhaps discover some evidence that will force him to stop this ugly business. Oh! the meanness of Robert to strike this cowardly blow at me, his own cousin! He's a disgrace to ...
— At Whispering Pine Lodge • Lawrence J. Leslie
... Emma, for all her nominal authority, would not have dared or cared to displace; over them seemed to be spun the protection of something that was like a human cobweb. Decidedly Martha was in the way. It would have been an unworthy meanness to have wished to see the span of that brave old life shortened by a few paltry months, but as the days sped by Emma was conscious that the wish was there, disowned though it might be, lurking at the ...
— Beasts and Super-Beasts • Saki
... that he was so busy in "establishing," but was so cold that it took him a good while to warm up to the general temperature of the meeting. But he did at length; and talked with the Widow Wheeler, and saw all her well-managed children, and felt ashamed of his meanness only ten days before. Deacon Willberate saw his son Ned dancing with Squire Allen's rosy daughter, Matilda,—for the young people cared more for each other than for all the allusions to slavery in all the prayers and sermons too, of the whole world,—and ...
— Two Christmas Celebrations • Theodore Parker
... hair hanging down his back. Thus his cheerful, lively conversation agreed but little with his grave countenance. His dress was that of a fisherman, but as he is, in general, considered a remarkable person—whatever may be thought of the part he performed—so he understood, in spite of the meanness of his attire, by his arrangement and his choice of colors, to give it a peculiarity that stamped it in the memory of his contemporaries. The life of this remarkable man—a nine-days' history—clearly shows us that he possessed wonderful ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various
... was this, that it was at least one generation ahead of the colored heads of our people. We may, if we please, refuse to emigrate, and crouch like spaniels, to lick the hand that beats us; but children's children at the farthest, will have outgrown such pitiful meanness, and will dare to do all that others have dared and done for the sake of freedom and independence. Then all this cowardly cant about the unhealthy climate, the voracious beasts, and venomous reptiles of Africa, will be at a discount, instead ...
— Official Report of the Niger Valley Exploring Party • Martin Robinson Delany
... enjoying only the pleasures of intellect, in all the sufficiency of self, it was a matter of indifference to her what people thought of her. She felt so infinitely above them, looking down like the aeronaut, from a colder, more rarefied atmosphere, upon objects lessened to meanness ...
— Helen and Arthur - or, Miss Thusa's Spinning Wheel • Caroline Lee Hentz
... manly tenderness. In that moment he felt willing to give up every personal pleasure, if he might lift a feather's weight of care from the fragile woman who spoke to him with such sweetness and trust. For there is nothing hopeless save meanness and poverty of nature; and any demand on Edgar Noble's instinct of chivalrous protection ...
— Polly Oliver's Problem • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... perform this act of religion, though evidently exempt from the precept. Being poor herself, she made the offering appointed for the poor: accordingly is this part of the law mentioned by St. Luke,[4] as best agreeing with the meanness of her worldly condition. But her offering, however mean in itself, was made with a perfect heart, which is what God chiefly regards in all that is offered to him. The King of Glory would appear everywhere in the robes of poverty, to point out to us the advantages ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... such a tax would have yielded a large return. Michele, the Venetian, says that many London merchants were worth as much as L60,000 in money; the graziers and the merchants had made fortunes while the people had starved. But either from hatred of the government, or else from meanness of disposition, the money-making classes generally could not be expected to communicate the extent of their possessions. The landowners, truly or falsely, declared that, "for the most part, they received no more rent than they were wont to receive," "yet, paying for everything, ...
— The Reign of Mary Tudor • James Anthony Froude
... be to gratify some particular by livings and revenues here that will also fail, where nothing is to be had, the King himself will be loser, and so will the case be formed here; for such is the poverty and meanness of the people (by reason of the length and coldness of the winters, the difficulty of subduing a wilderness, defect of staple commodity, the want of money, etc.), that if with hard labour men get a subsistence for their families, 'tis as much as the generality are able to do, paying but very ...
— The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 1 of 2 - From 1620-1816 • Egerton Ryerson
... the hatred of four millions of people—the guarding yourselves from universal disaffection by a police; a confidence in the little cunning of Bow Street, when you might rest your security upon the eternal basis of the best feelings: this is the meanness and madness to which nations are reduced when they lose sight of the first elements of justice, without which a country can be no more secure than it can be healthy without air. I sicken at such policy and such men. The fact is, the Ministers ...
— Peter Plymley's Letters and Selected Essays • Sydney Smith
... described to her mother as "perfect nobodies." So Ada and Ruth Royal gradually formed a circle of their own to which gravitated the more snobbish girls, those who fought, openly or covertly, the rule for simple dressing, and those who found in Ada's characteristics of petty meanness, worship of money, and social aspirations a response to similar urgings of their ...
— Betty Gordon at Boarding School - The Treasure of Indian Chasm • Alice Emerson
... door opened and a man unceremoniously walked in, his entrance immediately following a little sullen knock that had made a mockery of asking permission. An ill-looking man, in the worst sense; his face being a mixture of cunning, meanness, and insolence. He shut the door and came with a slow leisurely step into the middle of the room without speaking a word. Mr. Carleton saw the blank change in Fleda's ...
— Queechy • Susan Warner
... now, never asked her to meet him behind the broom bushes. He had ceased to love her, she knew, and although he had never freed her from her promise, Morva had too much common sense to feel bound for ever to a man who had so evidently forgotten her. If sometimes the meanness and selfishness of his conduct dawned upon her mind, the feeling was instantly repressed, and as far as possible banished, in obedience to the instinct of loyalty to Garthowen, which was so strong ...
— Garthowen - A Story of a Welsh Homestead • Allen Raine
... wretchedness and degradation in London than in any other city in the world. Although young and strongly made he was pale, gaunt and haggard, with a look about the eyes and mouth which denoted the habitual drunkard. The meanness of ...
— The Garret and the Garden • R.M. Ballantyne
... Damascus, on my way to the Emir Beshir. As I spoke with confidence, the Sheikh became alarmed, and sent us a few loaves of bread, and some cheese; on my return, I found my guide in the midst of a large assembly of people, abusing them for their meanness. ...
— Travels in Syria and the Holy Land • John Burckhardt
... twin babes that crawl over the grass in the sun, the mother never turning her vigilant eyes from them, The walnut-trunk, the walnut-husks, and the ripening or ripen'd long-round walnuts, The continence of vegetables, birds, animals, The consequent meanness of me should I skulk or find myself indecent, while birds and animals never once skulk or find themselves indecent, The great chastity of paternity, to match the great chastity of maternity, The oath of ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... somewhat of the same way of thinking, in regard to names, with that profound philosopher, Mr. Shandy, the elder, who maintained that some inspired high thoughts and heroic aims, while others entailed irretrievable meanness and vulgarity; insomuch that a man might sink under the insignificance of his name, and be absolutely "Nicodemused into nothing." I have ever, therefore, thought it a great hardship for a man to be obliged to struggle through ...
— Wolfert's Roost and Miscellanies • Washington Irving
... splendor, as these require great wealth to erect them, and perpetual expense to preserve them. For the chain of terraces we find substituted a simple garden, somewhat formally laid out; but redeemed from the charge of meanness by the nobility and size attained by most of its trees; the line of immense cypresses which generally surrounds it in part, and the luxuriance of the vegetation of its flowering shrubs. It has frequently a large entrance gate, well designed, but carelessly executed; sometimes ...
— The Poetry of Architecture • John Ruskin
... to our national pride. Yet this is the least degrading part of the story. The shameless insincerity of the great and noble, the warm assurances of general support which James received, down to the moment of general desertion, indicate a meanness of spirit and a looseness of morality most disgraceful to the age. That the enterprise succeeded, at least that it succeeded without bloodshed or commotion, was principally owing to an act of ungrateful perfidy, such as no soldier had ever before committed, and to those monstrous fictions respecting ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... sex; I am ashamed to tell you all my feelings: I cannot conquer my dislike to Madame Des Roches: she said a thousand obliging things to me, she praised my Rivers; I made her no answer, I even felt tears ready to start; what must she think of me? there is a meanness in my jealousy of her, ...
— The History of Emily Montague • Frances Brooke
... pressure or casual temptation." A higher eulogium, from so rigid a moralist, could not be pronounced on a man whose life was, for many years, unsettled and perplexed; and those only who have experienced the pressure of pecuniary necessities can be aware of the difficulty of resisting meanness, or avoiding vice, if not in the sense in which these terms are usually understood, at least in a sense to which they may as properly be applied—that of refusing to prostitute talents to purposes foreign to the conviction and taste of ...
— The Poetical Works of William Collins - With a Memoir • William Collins
... spoke of the abuse and injustice done to the Bible by those who make it the shelter and apologist for all the wrong, vileness, and sneaking meanness that the world bears up; and closed with a testimony against the cowardice of those time-serving ministers who allow their manhood to be suffocated by a white cravat, and who never publicly take sides with what they see to be a good cause, until "popular ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... and even then they would expect you should have some little estate or fortune, or be of some trade. When such poor folks as we are wish to marry, the first thing they ought to think of, is how to live. But without reflecting on the meanness of your birth, and the little merit and fortune you have to recommend you, you aim at the highest pitch of exaltation; and your pretensions are no less than to demand in marriage the daughter of your sovereign, who with one single word can ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Complete • Anonymous
... lead him. Under ordinary circumstances, we are afraid that Noddy would have joined the ragamuffins and enjoyed the senseless sport as well as any of them; but his own sorrows raised him above this meanness in the present instance, and he passed the boys without a particle of interest ...
— Work and Win - or, Noddy Newman on a Cruise • Oliver Optic
... opened his lips, nor meant to open them. Or he would say: 'Now see, sir, to what a position you are reduced. I will leave you no escape. After exhausting all the resources of fraud and falsehood, during years upon years; after exhibiting a combination of dastardly meanness with ensanguined daring, such as the world has not often witnessed; you have now the hypocrisy to bend the knee before the most degraded of mankind, and to sue and whine and howl for mercy!' Whereat the unfortunate Minor Canon would look, in part indignant and in part perplexed; while his worthy ...
— The Mystery of Edwin Drood • Charles Dickens
... valid arguments against a great-spirited social justice but this—that men will not. Indolence, impurity, greed, injustice, meanness of spirit, the aggressiveness of authority, and above all jealousy—these are the real obstacles that thwart the nobler social aspiration of humanity. There are too many men like The Master-Builder who tried to build higher than any one else, without regard to others, ...
— The Builders - A Story and Study of Masonry • Joseph Fort Newton
... their usual form, seem to bluster with prosperity, but which the loss of a dozen points at whist will reduce to that currish aspect which reminds one of a dog-whip. Mr. Camperdown's countenance, when Lord Fawn and Mr. Eustace left him, had fallen away into this meanness of appearance. He no longer carried himself as a man owning a dog-whip, but rather as the ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope
... and benevolence anticipated the demands of poverty.[I] Every misfortune was relieved, as it were, before it could be felt, without ostentation on the one hand, and without meanness on the other. It was, in short, a society of brethren; every individual of which was equally ready to give, and to receive, what he thought the common right of mankind. So perfect a harmony naturally prevented all those connections ...
— Acadia - or, A Month with the Blue Noses • Frederic S. Cozzens
... my proud thoughts, so far was I from being guilty of intentional meanness in forgiving, at Mr. B.'s interposition, the poor, low, creeping, abject self-mortified, ...
— Pamela (Vol. II.) • Samuel Richardson
... interminable perspective of the East India Dock Road, the great perspective of drab brick walls, of grey pavement, of muddy roadway rumbling dismally with loaded carts and vans lost itself in the distance, imposing and shabby in its spacious meanness of aspect, in its immeasurable poverty of forms, of colouring, of life—under a harsh, unconcerned sky dried by the wind to a clear blue. It had been raining during the night. The sunshine itself seemed poor. From time to time ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
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