|
|
|
More "Sordid" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of things reigns supreme which cannot be surpassed by the most corrupt of South American Republics. There the Boer shows his character in its most unpleasant features. Low, sordid, corrupt, his chief magistrate as well as his lowest official readily listens to 'reasons that jingle,' and, like the gentleman in the 'Mikado,' is not averse to 'insults.' He calls his country a republic—it is so in name only. The majority ...
— South Africa and the Transvaal War, Vol. 1 (of 6) - From the Foundation of Cape Colony to the Boer Ultimatum - of 9th Oct. 1899 • Louis Creswicke
... of his efforts the President had the unwitting support of the segregationists, who treated the nation to another sordid racial spectacular. In February 1965 Alabama police jailed Martin Luther King, Jr., and some 2,000 members of his voting rights drive, and a generally outraged nation watched King's later clash with the police over a voting rights ...
— Integration of the Armed Forces, 1940-1965 • Morris J. MacGregor Jr.
... shine with yours in those. Oh, it is the defeats you want where to tell—some one you can take the defeats to, the failures, the lost things; the lamps that are gone out, the hopes that are ashes, the springs that spring no more, the secret sordid things that eat you up, that hedge you all about, that draw you down. Those! To have some one to tell those to! Yes, there's a thought that comes with living: Let who may receive a man's triumphs; to whom a soul ...
— This Freedom • A. S. M. Hutchinson
... magnolia-shaded terraces that crowned the hill—still more hundreds of feet above the densely packed roofs and spires of the city crowded upon the hill's rocky sides. It was like some fine and pure old Greek temple, standing on a romantic headland, far above the murk and toil of sordid striving. But over the symmetrical pile floated a banner that meant to the world all that was signified even by the banners which Greece folded and laid away in eternal ...
— The Red Acorn • John McElroy
... of just pride, a spur to industry, an impulse to honor, and a safeguard to integrity, had now become the catchword of a mendicant—the cant or slang, as it were, of an impostor. He was not ashamed to beg in its name—to ask for whiskey in its name—and to sink, in its name, to the most sordid supplications. ...
— Phelim O'toole's Courtship and Other Stories • William Carleton
... fortifications, from which we had another splendid view. One can readily see how fair and beautiful a place, full of the sweetest harmonies of nature, and filling the human heart with a grateful sense of God's love, has, by the sordid wickedness of man, been perverted into a paradise of the Prince of Darkness, who, knowing too well the weakness and folly of poor erring humanity, lures by every artificial attraction and fascination even the poor pilgrim invalid, who hopefully journeys here to breathe ...
— Fair Italy, the Riviera and Monte Carlo • W. Cope Devereux
... ev'ry sordid passion lull'd to rest, Man knows each gift of nature how to prize: Flies from the storm unto his fair one's breast, And there reposing ...
— Translations of German Poetry in American Magazines 1741-1810 • Edward Ziegler Davis
... none of them so generous and forceful as their long-living and big-hearted sire. Robert, the eldest, a man forty years of age, was his father's right-hand man in financial matters, having a certain hard incisiveness which fitted him for the somewhat sordid details of business life. He was of medium height, of a rather spare build, with a high forehead, slightly inclined to baldness, bright, liquid-blue eyes, an eagle nose, and thin, firm, even lips. He was a man of few ...
— Jennie Gerhardt - A Novel • Theodore Dreiser
... Women (1893, new edition, 1894) is a rather sordid and depressing survey of the life-histories of certain orphaned daughters of a typical Gissing doctor—grave, benign, amiably diffident, terribly afraid of life. 'From the contact of coarse actualities his nature shrank.' After his death one daughter, a fancy-goods shop assistant (no wages), ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing
... checkermen which they had secreted in their pockets, a fact which each one stoutly denied with many weird and rather indelicate vows. I left them engaged in the pleasant game of recrimination, which had to do with stolen golf balls, the holding out of change and kindred sordid subjects. In my weakened condition this display of fraternal depravity so offended my instinctive sense of honor that I was forced to retire behind the protecting pages of a 1913 issue of "The Farmer's Wife Indispensable Companion," where I managed to lose ...
— Biltmore Oswald - The Diary of a Hapless Recruit • J. Thorne Smith, Jr.
... patriotism and judgment, and feeling that he was incapable of deceiving them, they seemed willing, at all times and under all circumstances, to hazard their lives and fortunes in his support. They were generally young men of gallant bearing and disinterested views. No sordid calculations were made by them. No mercenary considerations influenced their conduct. They beheld in Colonel Burr a patriot hero of the revolution, who had commingled with their fathers in the battle-field, and who had perilled every thing ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis
... familiar to be in a city again, whose streets are thronged with people, and resound with the din and bustle of business. It reminds me of the never-ending crowds of London, or the life and tumult of our scarcely less active New York. Although the end may be sordid for which so many are laboring, yet the very sight of so much activity is gratifying. It is peculiarly so to an American. After residing in a foreign land for some time, the peculiarities of our nation are more easily noticed; I find in my countrymen abroad ...
— Views a-foot • J. Bayard Taylor
... that is chargeable against one or all of this group of sincere and stalwart workers, it must be allowed that their power on their countrymen has been largely wielded for good. Particularly is this the case with Ruskin, whose influence has reached and ennobled many a life that, from pressure of sordid circumstances, was in great need of such help as his spirituality of tone, and deeply felt reverential belief in the Giver of all good and Maker of all ...
— Great Britain and Her Queen • Anne E. Keeling
... when we are all like him, when we are all just the same as he is? For you know we are just the same, no better. If we are better, we should have been just the same in his place.... I don't know about you, Lise, but I consider that I have a sordid soul in many ways, and his soul is not sordid; on the contrary, full of fine feeling.... No, Lise, I have no contempt for him. Do you know, Lise, my elder told me once to care for most people exactly as one would for children, and for some of them as one would ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... bare and sordid little room with horror. What strange fate had cast her up there? I asked her, and she told me her story. Guess what ...
— The Broken Road • A. E. W. Mason
... open doorway and, bounding into the road, rolled over and over to my very feet. And, looking down at it, I saw that it was a very ill-used hat, frayed and worn, dented of crown and broken of brim, yet beneath its sordid shabbiness there lurked the dim semblance of what it had once been, for, in the scratched and tarnished buckle, in the jaunty curl of the brim, it still preserved a certain pitiful air of rakishness; wherefore, ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol
... as introducing a sordid element into the conversation, seemed to hurt his feelings. He said he never took money from distinguished strangers; he suggested a souvenir—a diamond scarf pin, a gold snuffbox, some little trifle of that sort by which he could ...
— Three Men on the Bummel • Jerome K. Jerome
... Vespasian was mean: his grandfather had been a private soldier, his father a petty officer of the revenue; [35] his own merit had raised him, in an advanced age, to the empire; but his merit was rather useful than shining, and his virtues were disgraced by a strict and even sordid parsimony. Such a prince consulted his true interest by the association of a son, whose more splendid and amiable character might turn the public attention from the obscure origin, to the future glories, of the Flavian ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... exceedingly. Agatha, on the other hand, having from her childhood heard Uncle John quoted as wisdom and authority incarnate, had begun in her tender years to scoff at him as a pompous and purseproud city merchant, whose sordid mind was unable to cope with her transcendental affairs. She had habitually terrified her mother by ridiculing him with an absolute contempt of which only childhood and extreme ignorance are capable. She had felt humiliated by his kindness to ...
— An Unsocial Socialist • George Bernard Shaw
... could visualize his vision, could see a united world, cleansed of wars, of boundary lines; a world where every man's chance of happiness was the equal of every other man's chance; where wealth and poverty were abolished, from which slums, degradation, starvation, the sordid wickednesses compelled by poverty, should have vanished. She could see a world of peace, ...
— Youth Challenges • Clarence B Kelland
... is found to be generous, disinterested, humane, and friendly. Hear but the sad story of the friendless orphans too credulously trusting all their whole substance into his hands, and he shall appear more sordid, more pitiless and unjust than the injured themselves have bitterness to paint him. Another shall be charitable to the poor, uncharitable in his censures and opinions of all the rest of the world besides: temperate in his appetites, intemperate ...
— Sterne • H.D. Traill
... walled between the This and Now, upon a low and silver throne, and leaned upon its armposts, sadly looking upward toward the sun. Now the Hither Isles are flat and cold and swampy, with drear-drab light and all manner of slimy, creeping things, and piles of dirt and clouds of flying dust and sordid scraping ...
— Darkwater - Voices From Within The Veil • W. E. B. Du Bois
... are of two kinds, the wholly sordid, when money, social position, or some personal aggrandisement has been the motive on one or both sides, without any basis of affection; and the partially-sordid, when these reasons are modified by some existing affection or liking. In this category come the people who marry ...
— Modern marriage and how to bear it • Maud Churton Braby
... his peculiar misfortune that he had never a proper opportunity given him of displaying them. The fact that he was enormously popular was nothing, for many men are popular with not a tithe of the gifts or power which distinguished Robson. The favour of the "general," except in a sordid sense, is not worth much in these days. A proof of this is to be found in the fact that the name of Robson—after the lapse of twenty years—is scarcely known to the ordinary playgoer; but his genius, while he lived, was recognised ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... when others may be beaten down or surrendered. Possibly a man may attain to this, to despise these lower things, as below his natural dignity and the excellency of his spirit. Some may renounce much of that friendship with worldly and temporal things, as being sordid and base, but the enmity gets into this strong and invisible tower of darkness, self love and pride and therefore the apostle John makes this the last and chiefest, the pride of life, 1 John ii. 16. When the lusts of the eyes and ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... the more injurious, for the Danes could not believe that he could turn so suddenly from a friend into an enemy; so easily can some veer from goodwill into hate. I suppose that this man inaugurated the morals of our own day, for we do not account lying and treachery as sinful and sordid. When Huyrwil attacked the southern side of Zealand, Fridleif assailed him in the harbour which was afterwards called by Huyrwil's name. In this battle the soldiers, in their rivalry for glory, engaged with such bravery ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... not descend to questions or details—he would find all out later for himself—but one thing he must know: had she really consented to marry him? If so, she had her own reasons, of course, and desire for himself was not among them; but, somehow, he felt sure they were not sordid or paltry ones. He had always liked dangerous games—the most unbroken polo ponies to train in the country, the freshest horses, the fiercest beasts to stalk and kill—and why not a difficult wife? ...
— The Reason Why • Elinor Glyn
... chimney pots A rag of sunset crumbles gray; Below, fierce radiance hangs in clots O'er the streams that never stay. Shrill and high, newsboys cry The worst of the city's infamy For one more sordid day. ...
— Gloucester Moors and Other Poems • William Vaughn Moody
... up enough to provide for his present needs, even if my treasury be drained to the last twenty-mark piece, and I will have to cut short my charities for the next quarter of a year. But he must not know these sordid details. ...
— Secret Memoirs: The Story of Louise, Crown Princess • Henry W. Fischer
... the pastime and the earnest of a more innocent and homelier age. Nowadays the nosegays are gathered and tied up by sordid hands, chiefly of the most ordinary flowers, and are sold along the Corso, at mean price, yet more than such Venal things are worth. Buying a basketful, you find them miserably wilted, as if they had flown hither and thither through two or three carnival days already; muddy, ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume II. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... long these two diplomats had co-opted themselves into a kind of Secret Cabinet of Europe. It is a strange but profoundly interesting correspondence, both politically and personally. Nothing is too great or too small, too glorious or too mean for their pens. Amid foolish anecdotes and rather sordid love affairs the politics of Europe, and especially of Italy, are dissected and discussed. Leo X. had now plunged into political intrigue. Ferdinand of Spain was in difficulty. France had allied herself with Venice. The Swiss are the Ancient Romans, and may conquer Italy. Then ...
— Machiavelli, Volume I - The Art of War; and The Prince • Niccolo Machiavelli
... of love —of love, pure, devoted, unchangeable, springing from being beloved, and because her feelings were sensitive as the quivering aspen, which trembles at the rustling of an insect's wing. Amongst her suitors there might have been some who were disinterested; but the meanness and sordid objects of many caused her to regard all with suspicion, and there was none among the number to whose voice her bosom responded as the needle turns to the magnet, and frequently from a cause as inexplicable. She had resolved that the man to whom she gave her hand ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Vol. XXIII. • Various
... wandered through Nathan's mind; but he took little time to con them over. He had made a discovery at that moment of more stirring importance and interest. Allowing that Edith Forrester was the prisoner of whom the disguised stranger and his sordid confederate spoke, and there was little reason to doubt it, he had learned, out of their own mouths, the place of her concealment, to discover which was the object of his daring visit to the village. Her prison-house was the wigwam of Wenonga, the chief,—if ...
— Nick of the Woods • Robert M. Bird
... Argus, rung the woods around; With him the youth pursued the goat or fawn, Or traced the mazy leveret o'er the lawn. Now left to man's ingratitude he lay, Unhoused, neglected in the public way; And where on heaps the rich manure was spread, Obscene with reptiles, took his sordid bed. ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer, translated by Alexander Pope
... hour and a half. He got up heavily, and came to his dinner in his overcoat and with his hat on, without uttering a word. His silence in itself had nothing startlingly unusual in this household, hidden in the shades of the sordid street seldom touched by the sun, behind the dim shop with its wares of disreputable rubbish. Only that day Mr Verloc's taciturnity was so obviously thoughtful that the two women were impressed by it. They sat silent themselves, keeping a watchful eye on poor Stevie, lest ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad
... an audience, if corrupt and vitiated, is paltry, is despicable; that to consult its inclinations when at war with sound taste or proper decorum, is to do the work of those who are influenced only by a love of sordid gain, reckless of every pure and elevated feeling—that "the end of all writing is to instruct, the end of all poetry, to instruct by pleasing." This is the difference between the sentiment of the authors and that of the ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... of manners, alike common to Church and laity, the opposite virtues were, as is invariable in such epochs of society, carried by the few purer natures into heroic extremes. "And as gold, the adorner of the world, springs from the sordid bosom of earth, so chastity, the image of gold, rose bright and unsullied from the clay of human ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... retire, His, and that age's temper I admire: The Samnites' chief, as by his fire he sate, With a vast sum of gold on him did wait; 'Return,' said he, 'your gold I nothing weigh, When those who can command it me obey.' This my assertion proves, he may be old, And yet not sordid, who refuses gold. In summer to sit still, or walk, I love, Near a cool fountain, or a shady grove. 620 What can in winter render more delight, Than the high sun at noon, and fire at night? While ...
— Poetical Works of Edmund Waller and Sir John Denham • Edmund Waller; John Denham
... at the present time is being gradually produced which takes it for granted that as a matter of good form young people should not have children for a few years after marriage, and it is becoming a common practice to start married life with sordid and unnatural preparations for a natural act; yet many of these young people, men and women alike, are most anxious to have children, and only seek to know how to prevent them because they believe it to be ...
— Conception Control and Its Effects on the Individual and the Nation • Florence E. Barrett
... the sense of a dumb confusion in America; with a consciousness "of how men, coming out of Europe and given millions of square miles of black fertile land mines and forests, have failed in the challenge given them by fate and have produced out of the stately order of nature only the sordid disorder of man." Out of this ache of confusion comes no lucidity. Sam McPherson is not sure but that he will find parenthood as petty as business was brutal; Beaut McGregor sets his men to marching and their orderly step resounds through the final chapters of his career as here recorded, but ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... heavy smells, the delays and neglect. It is a picture of vivid horror. But the final impression left on me by caring for many hundred wounded men is that of their patience and cheeriness. I think they would resent having a sordid pen picture made of their suffering and letting it go at that. After all, it is their wound: they suffered it for a purpose, and they conquer their bodily pain by will power and the Gallic touch of humor. Suffering borne nobly merits something more ...
— Golden Lads • Arthur Gleason and Helen Hayes Gleason
... his character which have lately come to my knowledge, he seems to have been so hackneyed in villainy, and so lost to all sense of honor and shame, that, while his faculties will enable him to continue his sordid pursuits, there will be no time for remorse." With this single expression of measureless contempt, Washington let Arnold drop from his life. The first shock had touched him to the quick, although it could not shake ...
— George Washington, Vol. I • Henry Cabot Lodge
... knowledge of the world. In after years these two were fated to meet once again, and under circumstances sufficiently tragic; but the story of that meeting does not lie within the scope of this history. To the world Belle is dead, but there is another world of sickness, and sordid unchanging misery and shame, where the lovely face of Sister Agnes moves to and fro like a ray of heaven's own light. There those who would know her ...
— Colonel Quaritch, V.C. - A Tale of Country Life • H. Rider Haggard
... later that the case had been reported to headquarters as false, he was firmly convinced that Gobardhan's magical rites had saved him from ruin, and presented him with a bonus of Rs. 50. Nalini Babu was not long in ascertaining how the land lay. He was exasperated by the sordid wrong-doing which reached his ears and resolved to report it to the District Magistrate. But in the end he kept silent, because Sadhu came to him with tearful eyes, saying that he had already suffered deep humiliation; and if old scandals ...
— Tales of Bengal • S. B. Banerjea
... summed up as respect for ecclesiastics. (26) The spread of this misconception inflamed every worthless fellow with an intense desire to enter holy orders, and thus the love of diffusing God's religion degenerated into sordid avarice and ambition. (27) Every church became a theatre, where orators, instead of church teachers, harangued, caring not to instruct the people, but striving to attract admiration, to bring opponents to public scorn, and to ...
— A Theologico-Political Treatise [Part I] • Benedict de Spinoza
... and I once asked her who the straw was down for, and she said it was for a 'Miss Magdalen Bellairs.' I was in love with her at the moment, if you can call it love. I have dragged myself through all kinds of sordid passions since—we parted." ...
— Prisoners - Fast Bound In Misery And Iron • Mary Cholmondeley
... put a gulf impassable between himself and the sordid love of gain (5) than he, who nobly preferred to be stinted of his dues (6) rather than snatch at the lion's share unjustly? It is a case in point that, being pronounced by the state to be the rightful heir to his brother's (7) wealth, he made over one half ...
— Agesilaus • Xenophon
... infirm, for your inspection; but if you durst have looked nearer, you would not have found Cowardice in the number of his infirmities.—We will try if we cannot redeem him from this universal censure.—Let the venal corporation of authors duck to the golden fool, let them shape their sordid quills to the mercenary ends of unmerited praise, or of baser detraction;—old Jack, though deserted by princes, though censured by an ungrateful world, and persecuted from age to age by Critic and Commentator, and though ...
— Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare • D. Nichol Smith
... kindness as to call them so; for I am satisfied that to prove them either, would but recommend them to their own party. Yet if some will needs make a merit of their infamy, and provoke a legend of their sordid lives, I think they must be gratified at last; and though I will not take the scavenger's employment from him, yet I may be persuaded to point at some men's doors, who have heaps of filth before them. ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Vol. 7 (of 18) - The Duke of Guise; Albion and Albanius; Don Sebastian • John Dryden
... interview? One thing, at least—he had thoroughly demonstrated that the charm once exercised over his imagination by this beautiful woman had completely vanished. He saw her now as she was—heartless, selfish, using her spell of beauty for her own sordid ends. If there had been left a shred of romance in his memory of her, it was now completely shattered. Her coolness, her adroit changing of moods, convinced him she was playing a game. What game? Nothing in her words had revealed its nature, yet the man instinctively ...
— Molly McDonald - A Tale of the Old Frontier • Randall Parrish
... connections among men, as easily broken as mended pottery, get illustration in the mischief-maker who loves to divide men. "A whisperer separateth chief friends." There is keen irony here over the quality of ordinary friendship, as well as condemnation of the tale-bearer and his sordid soul. ...
— Friendship • Hugh Black
... soiled by the touch of actual merchandise. Nothing more squalid than ink ever enters their gates. They traffic with symbols only, and the symbols, no matter what they stand for, are never in themselves sordid. The men who have created these houses seem to have realized that, from their situation and their importance, a special effort toward representative magnificence was their pleasing duty, and to have made the effort with a superb prodigality and an ...
— Your United States - Impressions of a first visit • Arnold Bennett
... sixpence; I will see thee damned first, Wretch! whom no sense of wrongs Can rouse to vengeance! Sordid, unfeeling, ...
— Ten Englishmen of the Nineteenth Century • James Richard Joy
... he was a peculiar character even for the times in which he lived. He shared with his contemporaries the restless spirit of roving and adventure which resulted from the invention of the mariner's compass and the discovery of the New World; but he was neither so sordid nor so rapacious as many of them, for his boyhood reading of romances had evidently fired him with the conceits of the past chivalric period. This imported into his conduct something inflated and something ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... see that even in our sordid times miracles may be wrought by good-will, industry, and skill. Explain to me my good Pontius how you were able to ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... Vicarage was drawn back into its silence and its loneliness. It assumed, more and more, its aspect of half-sinister, half-sordid tragedy. The Vicar's calamity no longer sheltered him. It took its place in the order ...
— The Three Sisters • May Sinclair
... July days came to a close, the pulse of Anzac seemed to quicken. Men went about their work with increased energy, the Cove was busier than ever, and life altogether in that sun-scorched, sordid spot seemed less burdensome. Staff officers walked about with unaccustomed briskness, and made unnaturally long visits to observation points, gazing absorbedly at Turkish terrain. Visible signs there were that the dormant ...
— The Tale of a Trooper • Clutha N. Mackenzie
... presaged, is to be won by the submission of an inchoate State to a form of government subjecting its inhabitants to institutions abhorrent to their souls and fatal to their prosperity, forced upon them at the point of the bowie-knife and the muzzle of the revolver by hordes of sordid barbarians from a hostile soil, their natural and necessary enemies. And the sweet harbinger of this blessed peace, the halcyon which broods over the stormy waves and tells of the calm at hand, is a bribe so cunningly devised that its contrivers firmly believe it will buy up the souls of these ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... of funding debts; but, curiously enough, 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 ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 17, July 23, 1870 • Various
... air seemed to be a person of distinction, a professor perhaps of some university on the continent; and an alderman of London, a relation of the doctor, who had come to introduce the foreigner. The alderman, a man of uncultivated mind and manners, and whom the doctor had been accustomed to see in sordid attire, surrounded with the incumbrances of his trade, was decked out for the occasion in a full-dress suit, with a wig of majestic and voluminous structure. Clarke was, as it appears, so much struck with the whimsical ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... receiving thankfully whatever coarse food might be set before the wayfarer, enduring hunger in silent resignation, taking no thought for the morrow, but busied eternally in the work of snatching souls from Satan and lifting men up from the sordid cares of daily life, of ministering to their infirmities and of bringing to their darkened souls a glimpse of heavenly light" (Lea),—in this way did the early Franciscans and Dominicans win the love and ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson
... should be charitable, because it is a duty and a pleasure. But even as a matter of policy, if you possess no higher incentive, you will find that the liberal man will command patronage, while the sordid, uncharitable miser will ...
— The Art of Money Getting - or, Golden Rules for Making Money • P. T. Barnum
... silent; and "bear my indigence with dignity," as you once said. The insuperable difficulty of Frederic is, that he, the genuine little ray of Veritable and Eternal that was in him, lay imbedded in the putrid Eighteenth Century, such an Ocean of sordid nothingness, shams, and scandalous hypocrisies, as never weltered in the world before; and that in everything I can find yet written or recorded of him, he still, to all intents and purposes, most tragically lies THERE;—and ought not to lie there, if any use ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1834-1872, Vol II. • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... still blew in eddies of sand; dry leaves and stray bits of newspaper danced madly through the air; the high houses near the Segovia Bridge, their narrow windows and galleries hung with tatters, seemed greyer and more sordid than ever when glimpsed through an ...
— The Quest • Pio Baroja
... alone listening to the wind. I said just now that I was thinking of you. I often think of you, Father O'Grady, and envy you your busy parish. If I ever find myself in London I shall go for long tram drives, and however sordid the district I shall view the dim congregation of houses with pleasure and rejoice in the ...
— The Lake • George Moore
... they did without sound bodies, and it must be unnecessary for me to say that the more highly cultured they became the more our race improved. Learning never made poor mothers. Ignorance does that. Do not keep education out of the home. Keep out folly, low desires, sordid ambitions, uncultivated tastes, narrow-mindedness, envy, strife, wastefulness, inordinate pleasures, and every evil thing that comes from an empty, ignorant mind. Keep out the darkness; let in the light. It is not God's way to give ...
— Daybreak: A Romance of an Old World • James Cowan
... Babylonian engineers had to solve was the keeping of the canals free from silt.(1) What the floods, if left unchecked, may do in Mesopotamia, is well illustrated by the decay of the ancient canal-system, which has been the immediate cause of the country's present state of sordid desolation. That the decay was gradual was not the fault of the rivers, but was due to the sound principles on which the old system of control had been evolved through many centuries of labour. At the time of the Moslem conquest the system had already begun to fail. In the fifth century ...
— Legends Of Babylon And Egypt - In Relation To Hebrew Tradition • Leonard W. King
... our warmth, the sun for our light, and the earth for our meat and rest." Related to the work is "Ethics of the Dust" (1865), lectures to little housewives on mineralogy and crystallography, nature's work in crystallization being the text for a diatribe against sordid living. "Sesame and Lilies," which belongs also to this period of the writer's work, consists of three addresses, delivered at Manchester and at Dublin, designed specially for young girls, and treating in the main of good and improving literature. The first of ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIV • John Lord
... the least charm of the extraordinary fascination she had for him lay in her sweet innocence of heart, a fresh innocence that consisted with this gay Romany abandon, and even with a mental experience of the sordid, seamy side of life as comprehensive as that of many a woman twice her age. She had been defrauded out of her childish inheritance of innocence, but, somehow, even in her foul environment the seeds of a rare personal purity had persistently sprung up and flourished. ...
— Bucky O'Connor • William MacLeod Raine
... not the case. The vandalism of the Revolution of 1789 was perpetrated in cold blood. I speak, of course, now of the real authors of it all, at Paris, not of the mere mobs in the provinces, hot with the sordid lust of plunder or with personal spites and rancours—and it was perpetrated for the profit of those who promoted it. The bronzes and brasses and lead and hammered iron of the desecrated churches were turned into money, and the money went into the pockets ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... him love her, truly love her. If he had only meant the love that he swore before they had married! Why had he deceived her? It had all been in his hands, her fate and future; but almost before the bridal flowers had faded, she had come to know two bitter things: that he had married with a sordid mind; that he was incapable of the love which transmutes the half- comprehending, half-developed affection of the maid into the absorbing, understanding, beautiful passion of the woman. She had married not knowing what love and passion were; uncomprehending, and innocent ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... foliage. One could not walk under those trees day after day and year after year through life and not feel their spell upon his heart. "From the old grey trunks that mingled their mighty boughs high in the heaven," to those whose lives lay underneath, in busy and perhaps more or less sordid routine, must inevitably come "the thought of boundless power and inaccessible majesty!" And that is a good thought to keep in the heart. That grove in the midst of that little French town was worth more to it than sewers, more than a daily ...
— The Martial Adventures of Henry and Me • William Allen White
... intolerance of Ruskin: though we shall look as vainly for one word or sign that shall, on the mere ground of intellectual power, energy, and ultimate success, condone the unprincipled ambition of a Frederick, so- called the Great, and exalt him into a hero; or find in the cold heart and mean sordid soul of a Turner an ideal, because one of those strange physiological freaks that now and then startle the world, the artist's temperament and artist's skill, were his beyond those of any man of his age. But as our object here is to attempt placing her before the ...
— The Ethics of George Eliot's Works • John Crombie Brown
... belong to her, she put on the faded blue flannel dressing-gown. Then she walked to the southern window. None of the glories of Oxford were visible from it; only the bare branches of trees through which appeared a huddle of somewhat sordid looking roofs and the unimposing spire of St. Aloysius. With the same air, questioning yet as in a dream, she turned to the western window, which was open. Below, in its wintry dulness, lay the garden of the College, bounded by an old ...
— The Invader - A Novel • Margaret L. Woods
... have given us one perpetual summer, or a perpetual spring, or a uniform co-existence of all the seasons, the fruits being sown, ripening and reaped simultaneously. But not so. He has settled two things so clearly that none, even the most sordid worm that ever wriggled under the clay, showing himself above it as little as possible, can help seeing them. First a fixed order that nothing can change and that proclaims one Lord, one will, one dominion, one plan. The seasons come in regular succession. Every man living knows ...
— The Wesleyan Methodist Pulpit in Malvern • Knowles King
... house, which Crevel regarded as his own, Grindot had tried to compete with Cleretti, in whose hands the Duc d'Herouville had placed Josepha's villa. But Crevel, incapable of understanding art, had, like all sordid souls, wanted to spend a certain sum fixed beforehand. Grindot, fettered by a contract, had found it impossible to embody his ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... him all the knavish chicanery of the lowest pettifogger, together with a wife whom he had purchased of a drayman for twenty pounds; and he soon found means to obtain a dedimus as an acting justice of peace. He is not only a sordid miser in his disposition, but his avarice is mingled with a spirit of despotism, which is truly diabolical. — He is a brutal husband, an unnatural parent, a harsh master, an oppressive landlord, a litigious neighbour, and a partial magistrate. Friends he has none; and in point of hospitality and ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... their home, anigh. And now, seeking her pleasance once again, They came to their own land. But all in vain His care. Silent she was, and oft did grieve, Till Eblis wrathful cried: "Because this Eve Adam holds dear, art mourning? Still dost yearn To mate his sordid soul? Or wouldst thou turn From summer land to Eden walls? "The man Belike, ne'er loved thee. So is it young Eve can His pulses sway. Is she not passing fair? Her fancies wild, it is her daily care To bend beneath his ever fickle will. Red-lipped and soft, she deftly rules ...
— Lilith - The Legend of the First Woman • Ada Langworthy Collier
... the world a little justice too. It is far easier to know and honor a poet when his fame has taken shape in the spotlessness of marble than when the actual man comes staggering before you, besmeared with the sordid stains of his daily life. For my part, I chiefly wonder that his recognition dawned so brightly while he was still living. There must have been something very grand in his immediate presence, some strangely impressive characteristic in his natural behavior, to have caused him ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... doubtless, well worthy that Milton should have commemorated him in a higher strain. Of Fairfax's eminent qualities the sonnet only dwells on two, his personal valour, which had been tried in many fights—he had been three times dangerously wounded in the Yorkshire campaign—and his superiority to sordid interests. Of his generalship, in which he was second to Cromwell only, and of his love of arts and learning, nothing is said, though the last was the passion of his life, for which at forty he renounced ambition. Perhaps ...
— Milton • Mark Pattison
... tranquilly, with his army and his immense booty, despite the attempts of the Duke of Hanover to prevent him, and as soon as he was on this side, had no care but how to terminate the campaign in repose. Thus finished a campaign tolerably brilliant, if the sordid and prodigious gain of the general had not soiled it. Yet that general, on his return, was not less well received by ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... far-off places and people. But instead of the pictures she wished to form, there kept coming before her mind the repulsive photograph which Mrs. Travis had produced. Though she had barely glanced at it, she saw it distinctly—the tawdry costume, the ignoble attitude, the shameless and sordid ...
— The Emancipated • George Gissing
... companionway, met files of still more uneasy diners emerging from the saloon. The grinding jar of the vessel, the heavy smell of food, and the pound of ragtime combined to produce an effect as of some sordid and demoniac orgy—an effect derided by the smug respectability of ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale
... much with us; late and soon, Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers; Little we see in Nature that is ours; We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon! ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... eggs; in short, exposed himself sadly. His friends were much annoyed that he did not give way, as soon as he found that there was no chance of carrying it, and that many Government supporters would vote against it; besides the mortification to the Prince, there was something mean and sordid in squabbling for all the money they could get, and the sum given him is satis superque for ...
— The Greville Memoirs (Second Part) - A Journal of the Reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1852 - (Volume 1 of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... Old Hundred: "that I, you, none of us, go into things now for the sheer exuberance of our bodies and the sheer delight of playing a game. We must have some ulterior motive—usually a sordid one, getting money or downing the other fellow; and most of the time we have to drive our poor, old rackety bodies with a whip. About the time a man begins to vote, he begins to disintegrate. The rest of life is gradual running down, or breaking ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton
... for the great of soul, the ambitious, the imaginative, when circumstances condemn them to life amid dull, uninteresting, drab, and sometimes sordid surroundings. Born to love and be loved, Nan Brent's soul beat against her environment even as a wild bird, captured and loosed in a room, beats against the window-pane. From the moment she had felt within her the vague ...
— Kindred of the Dust • Peter B. Kyne
... a man, who could not spell, and did not care to read—who had the habits and the cunning of a boor: whose aim in life was pettifogging: who never had a taste, or emotion, or enjoyment, but what was sordid and foul; and yet he had rank, and honours, and power, somehow: and was a dignitary of the land, and a pillar of the state. He was high sheriff, and rode in a golden coach. Great ministers and statesmen courted him; and in Vanity Fair he had a higher place than ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... and again, he leaned his head against the partition and burst into tears. Sordid and coarse as his nature was, he really loved his daughter. All the heart he had was in ...
— After Dark • Wilkie Collins
... warning which is given to them by parents and masters is made in a wrong form, and partly because there is not that constant joy and romance in their daily lives in comparison with which temptation, when it comes, will appear sordid and unworthy. In the second place, there is an atmosphere in the houses of tolerance towards these practices, accompanied by constant discussion, sometimes open, sometimes secret, which encourages ...
— The School and the World • Victor Gollancz and David Somervell
... occasional glimpses as he caught of the play were delightful; Mr. Trimmer was a genius; the Traders' Club a fascinating introduction to a new life; Starlett and Allstyne a joyous relief to him after the sordid cares of business. In a word, Agnes ...
— The Making of Bobby Burnit - Being a Record of the Adventures of a Live American Young Man • George Randolph Chester
... not my niece with those sordid beings, man,' said the Chevalier, angrily. 'Here is your price'—tossing a heavy purse on the table—'and as much more shall await you when you bring me sure intelligence where to find my niece. You understand; and mark, not one ...
— The Chaplet of Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Railer!—peace. Think not thyself, Although thus eloquent, alone exempt From obligation not to slander Kings. 300 I deem thee most contemptible, the worst Of Agamemnon's followers to the war; Presume not then to take the names revered Of Sovereigns on thy sordid lips, to asperse Their sacred character, and to appoint 305 The Greeks a time when they shall voyage home. How soon, how late, with what success at last We shall return, we know not: but because Achaia's heroes numerous spoils allot To Agamemnon, Leader of the host, ...
— The Iliad of Homer - Translated into English Blank Verse • Homer
... pleasure to its dregs, And now, grown old, must pay the penalty In wrinkles and uncourted loneliness; The widow, who, but newly desolate, Would grasp a hand, then start to find it gone; The spendthrift and the sordid usurer, Who knew no sentiment save lust for gold; The bloated drunkard, sinking 'neath the weight Of wassail inclination dissolute; The youth, who, following his baleful steps, Reeled for the first time from intemperance; And she who had forgot her covenant, ...
— Mountain idylls, and Other Poems • Alfred Castner King
... best to write it. What I might have said to you in the garden would have been halting at best. How could I speak it all with your clear eyes upon me—all the sordid history of those years which are best buried, but whose ghosts to-night have ...
— Contrary Mary • Temple Bailey
... virtue being thus broken down, Nero gave a loose to appetites that were not only sordid, but inhuman. There was a sort of odd contrast in his disposition: for while he practised cruelties sufficient to make the mind shudder with horror, he was fond of those amusing arts which soften and refine the heart. He was particularly addicted, even from childhood, to music, ...
— Pinnock's Improved Edition of Dr. Goldsmith's History of Rome • Oliver Goldsmith
... profit and the grossest sensual indulgence, and lets his own flesh and blood perish if they require of him to budge a hand-breadth from his egoistic standpoint. Foma, who is not built for a merchant, and who, while ambitious of command, is too magnanimous for the sordid business of a tradesman, has to give in. And the children of his triumphant guardian can only escape poverty by ...
— Maxim Gorki • Hans Ostwald
... had become a man in the sordid sense of the word. He had taken his father-in-law sternly in hand, presented the case firmly, and showed him the extent of the sacrifice his worthless life had made necessary. He paid from that day the normal income ...
— The Man Who Wins • Robert Herrick
... experience was fixing itself unalterably in his memory. He caught the pungent reek from the wood-stove, and mingling with it the odor of strong cheap tobacco filled his nostrils again; he was left with the very dregs of sordid shameful things. ...
— The Just and the Unjust • Vaughan Kester
... were neither more nor less than the instinctive struggle of the organism against the ebb of its powers, the clogging of its veins, the limitation of its life. Invariably these revivals followed periods of sordid and restricted living. Men obeyed their base immediate motives until the world grew unendurably bitter. Some disappointment, some thwarting, lit up for them—darkly indeed, but yet enough for indistinct ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... of the hour, in a silk hat and frock coat, with a black bag, and had sat down at his desk and begun to rule the proceedings with an absolutism that no High Court Judge would have attempted. He was autocrat in a small, close, sordid room; but he was autocrat. He had already shown his quality in some indirect collisions with the Marquis of Lechford. The Marquis felt that he could not stomach the exposure of his daughter's corpse in a common mortuary with other corpses ...
— The Pretty Lady • Arnold E. Bennett
... thrust forward its gable on the street. It was two stories high; showed no window, nothing but a door on the lower story and a blind forehead of discoloured wall on the upper; and bore in every feature, the marks of prolonged and sordid negligence. The door, which was equipped with neither bell nor knocker, was blistered and distained. Tramps slouched into the recess and ...
— Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde • ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
... flesh and blood perish if they require of him to budge a hand-breadth from his egoistic standpoint. Foma, who is not built for a merchant, and who, while ambitious of command, is too magnanimous for the sordid business of a tradesman, has to give in. And the children of his triumphant guardian can only escape poverty by ...
— Maxim Gorki • Hans Ostwald
... circumstances, he thought that his friend would agree with him, that what was done there furnished no matter of exultation, either in the act or the example. These soldiers were not citizens, but base, hireling mutineers, and mercenary, sordid deserters, wholly destitute of any honorable principle. Their conduct was one of the fruits of that anarchic spirit from the evils of which a democracy itself was to be resorted to, by those who were the least disposed to that form, as a sort of refuge. It was not an army in corps ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... Temple from the secular world is in flood, the bridge broken down, and the supplementary raft impossible through the swirling current. This untoward event involves a further expedition to Magelang, a sordid town of continuous markets, the Javanese population being of pronounced Hindu type, silent and sad, according to the idiosyncracy of their mysterious ancestors across the sea. The conversational difficulties presented by the Dutch and Malay languages, combined with ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... small sordid tragedy came out in broken snatches, to the last particle. For once in her life Evelyn Desmond spoke the unvarnished truth, adorning nothing, extenuating nothing; and Honour listened in an enigmatical silence—a silence which held even after the last word had been spoken. Evelyn looked ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... keep the legislature in unison with the executive. And with grief and shame it must be acknowledged that his machine was not without effect; that even in this, the birth of our government, some members were found sordid enough to bend their duty, to their interests, and to look after personal rather ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... exhaustive exposition of turbulent and troubled hearts, his heavy sledge-hammer style, his comprehension of the shadowy background of the most ponderous sensuality, are all found at their best in this solemn and sordid and ...
— One Hundred Best Books • John Cowper Powys
... whether Mr. Makely approved of his wife's philosophy or not; I do not believe he thought much about it. The money probably came easily with him, and he let it go easily, as an American likes to do. There is nothing penurious or sordid about this curious people, so fierce in the pursuit of riches. When these are once gained, they seem to have no value to the man who has won them, and he has generally no object in life but to see his ...
— Through the Eye of the Needle - A Romance • W. D. Howells
... make you happy, little lady; kind-hearted, well-meaning, but too much in earnest, too much absorbed in his ideas of right for a world where right's impossible, and every man for himself is the wretched sordid rule of existence. He will overshadow and darken your bright little life, I fear me; not intentionally—he couldn't do that—but by his Quixotic fads and fancies; good fads, honest fads, but fads wholly impracticable in this jarring universe of clashing interests, where he who would ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... a man so great and good, Once more in his home-country stood, Strange that the sordid clowns should show A dull ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... after ages of time, have mastered their natural passions in suppressing self, but they have other heights to scale. But he who conquers a sordid environment; he who rises from a black pool of iniquity; he who finds the Father's Kingdom amidst an uncompromising warfare with sin deserves more credit than he who is favored by circumstances of birth with more congenial surroundings and a ...
— The Planet Mars and its Inhabitants - A Psychic Revelation • Eros Urides and J. L. Kennon
... myself, had not the Holy Ghost long since forbidden me. 1 Pet. 4: 12; 1 John, 3: 13. Nay, verily, notwithstanding that, had the adversary but fastened the supposition of guilt upon me, my long trials might by this time have put it beyond dispute; for I have not hitherto been so sordid, as to stand to a doctrine right or wrong; much less, when so weighty an argument as above eleven years' imprisonment is continually dogging of me to weigh and pause and weigh again the grounds and foundation of those principles for which I thus have ...
— The Riches of Bunyan • Jeremiah Rev. Chaplin
... first visit to Paris is sordid, squalid, miserable to a degree; and I don't know that we can be surprised. When Wagner sailed from Pillau he had not had a single work of any importance performed. Nay, more, he had not written a work of any importance. Die Feen had never been given; Das Liebesverbot had been given—under ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... came from Westphalia. Save a few titles of his works and a few accounts of this pathetic struggle, this is all we know of poor Josse Boutmy and his old wife. Then there is Jacques Buus, who makes various appeals for aid for his increasing family. A refreshing novelty in these annals of sordid poverty is given us of H.J. De Croes, court-organist at Brussels in the eighteenth century, who was forced to make an appeal for charity because the son whom he had sent abroad to study did not return to support his father, but decided to marry ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 1 • Rupert Hughes
... arms upon the window-sill at her side and buried her face on them. The sobs died away and the tears ceased flowing. Then she raised her eyes and stared down into the hot, crowded street far below. She looked upon sordid, cheap, ugly things down there, and she had been looking at paradise such a ...
— From the Housetops • George Barr McCutcheon
... other. He reached the foot of the stairs. The Tocsin had been right; it was a very short flight. He counted the steps—there were eight. Above, facing him, a door was open. The voices were louder now. It was a sordid-looking room, what he could see of it, poverty-stricken in its appearance, intentionally so probably for effect, with no attempt whatever at furnishing. He could see through the doorway to the window ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... white, silent streets and under avenues of snow-laden trees to homes where reigned love and peace and virtue, in the north end and in the foreign colony the festivities in connection with Anka's wedding were drawing to a close in sordid drunken dance and song and ...
— The Foreigner • Ralph Connor
... in "Gil Blas" (a plan as old as Petronius Arbiter, and the "Golden Ass" of Apuleius); but he gives more place to "compassion," so as not to interfere with "generous indignation, which ought to animate the reader against the sordid and vicious disposition of the world." As a contrast to sordid vice, we are to admire "modest merit" in that exemplary orphan, Mr. Random. This gentleman is a North Briton, because only in North Britain can a poor ...
— Adventures among Books • Andrew Lang
... I like to see such. I am of a savage and envious nature,—I like to see these two humbugs which, dividing, as they do, the social empire of this kingdom between them, hate each other naturally, making truce and uniting, for the sordid interests of either. I like to see an old aristocrat, swelling with pride of race, the descendant of illustrious Norman robbers, whose blood has been pure for centuries, and who looks down upon common Englishmen as a free American does ...
— The Book of Snobs • William Makepeace Thackeray
... enable them to check the statements of the expert witnesses. When this was done, the prisoner was brought from the dock and stood beside the table. The judge looked with a curious and not unkindly interest at the handsome, manly fellow who stood charged with a crime so sordid and out of character with his appearance, and I felt, as I noted the look, that Reuben would, at least, be tried fairly on the evidence, without prejudice or even with ...
— The Red Thumb Mark • R. Austin Freeman
... nothing like the hardships they would have to endure later, but it was enough for the present to their unaccustomed minds, and harder because they were doing nothing that seemed worth while—just marching about and doing sordid duties when they were all eager for the fray and to have it over with. They had begun to see that they were going to have to learn to wait and be patient, to obey blindly; they—who never had brooked commands from any one, most of them, not even from ...
— The Search • Grace Livingston Hill
... has "no abstract love for what is low, or what the world calls low." Certainly there is nothing low in his familiars, as he presents them, at least nothing sordid. It may be the result of unconscious idealisation, but his Gypsies have nothing more sordid about them than wild birds have. Mrs. Herne is diabolical, but in a manner that would not be unbecoming to a duchess. Leonora is treacherous, but as an elf is permitted ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... has it succeeded in materializing and binding down to the earth the imagination of men, for which God has made another world (which certain statesmen take but too little into account)—that fair and beautiful world of heart, in which there CAN be nothing selfish or sordid, of which Dulness has forgotten the existence, and which Bigotry has endeavored to shut ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... agreement! how sordid were the motives which led to it! what a profligate disregard of justice and humanity, on the part of those who had solemnly declared the inalienable right of all men to be free and equal, to be a ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... capital of the race, and become fountains of spiritual and moral power. Therefore our whole country may well rejoice with you, that you are auspiciously founding here a worthy seat of learning and piety. Here may young feet, shunning the sordid paths of low desire and worldly ambition, walk humbly in the steps of the illustrious dead—the poets, artists, philosophers and statesmen of the past; here may fresh minds explore new fields and increase the sum of knowledge; here from time ...
— The History Of University Education In Maryland • Bernard Christian Steiner
... takes place to-day," said Caleb, "is with a stern, sordid, grinding man. A hard master to you and me, my dear, for many years. Ugly in his looks, and in his nature. Cold and callous always. Unlike what I have painted him to you in everything, ...
— The Cricket on the Hearth • Charles Dickens
... For weeks now his regular employment had filled Herzl with revulsion. The first reports of the Dreyfus trial, which appeared while he was working on his New Ghetto, therefore made no particular impression on him. It looked like a sordid espionage affair in which a foreign power—before long it was revealed that the foreign power was Germany, acting through Major von Schwartzkoppen—had been buying up through its agent secret documents of the French general staff. An officer ...
— The Jewish State • Theodor Herzl
... intrepid bravery of these men, their intelligence and the bold frankness of their character, free from all that is mean and sordid. Yet for the moment the extreme roughness of their manners half inclines one to forget their heroic qualities. Most of them seem without the least perception of delicacy or propriety, though among them individuals ...
— The Oregon Trail • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... to your country, home, and friends, Die in a sordid strife — You can count your friends on your finger ends In the critical hours of life. Sacrifice all for the family's sake, Bow to their selfish rule! Slave till your big soft heart they break — The heart of ...
— In the Days When the World Was Wide and Other Verses • Henry Lawson
... his pampered train; but this is the calculated cost of state-liveries, of men measured by a standard, for a Hercules in the hall, or an Adonis for the drawing-room; but at those times, when the domestic ceases to be an object in the public eye, he sinks into an object of sordid economy, or of merciless caprice. His personal feelings are recklessly neglected. He sleeps where there is neither light nor air; he is driven when he is already exhausted; he begins the work of midnight, and is confined for hours with men like ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... sordid hands And weighs in tarnished scales. She neither feels, nor understands, And ...
— Last Poems • Laurence Hope
... the hosts of Israel. I suppose he no longer saw the first-line troops, the army in battle array. Instead he saw the base camps, the non-combatant followers of the army, a great deal that was confused and sordid, very little that was glorious or fine. It might conceivably have been possible for him to curse the whole army and cast a blight upon its enterprise, when his eyes rested only on the camp-followers, the baggage trains, the mobs of cattle, ...
— A Padre in France • George A. Birmingham
... notary's as a timid woman; all at once she showed herself a grand, proud, and irritated lady. Never had Jacques Ferrand in his life met with a woman of so much insolent beauty, at once so bold and so noble. Although old, ugly, mean, and sordid, Jacques Ferrand was as capable as any one else of appreciating the style of beauty of Madame de Lucenay. His hatred and his rage against Saint Remy augmented with his admiration of the charming duchess. He thought to himself that this gentleman ...
— The Mysteries of Paris V2 • Eugene Sue
... wished to think well of all the world, rested on that peculiar greeny-brown felt, which surely must have come to its present nondescript hue by the aid of many suns. The whole room looked immediately almost sordid to the poor woman, and she felt no longer anxious for Beatrice to appreciate ...
— The Honorable Miss - A Story of an Old-Fashioned Town • L. T. Meade
... is of French parentage. His father was a worthy old emigrant, who came to this country many years since, and took up his abode in New York. He is represented as a man not much calculated for the sordid struggle of a money-making world, but possessed of a happy temperament, a festivity of imagination, and a simplicity of heart, that made him proof against its rubs and trials. He was an excellent scholar; well acquainted with Latin and Greek, and fond of the modern classics. His ...
— The Adventures of Captain Bonneville - Digested From His Journal • Washington Irving
... large,' says another writer, 'would have been intolerable enough had they been confined to the stronger sex; but, unfortunately, the women of the day were equally carried away by this criminal infatuation. The disgusting influence of this sordid vice was so disastrous to female minds, that they lost their fairest distinction and privileges, together with the blushing honours of modesty. Their high gaming was necessarily accompanied with great losses. If all their resources, regular and irregular, honest and fraudulent, were dissipated, ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume I (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... injuries without opposition and without punishment; would not immorality and unrighteousness increase rather than diminish? Few events rouse and elevate the patriotism and public spirit of a nation so much as a just and patriotic war. It raises the tone of public morality, and destroys the sordid selfishness and degrading submissiveness which so often result from a long-protracted peace. Such was the Dutch war of independence against the Spaniards; such the German war against the aggressions of Louis XIV., and the French war against ...
— Elements of Military Art and Science • Henry Wager Halleck
... round the circle of houses with their brilliant illuminations, he decided, with no anticipation of entertainment, where to dine. A meal is a ceremony of boredom when it has no pleasurable prospect. Indeed, the gratification of any appetite becomes a sordid affair when the mind is stagnant and the body merely asking for its food. But in the last three years, Traill had gone through this same performance a thousand times; a thousand times he had looked out of the little circular window on the top floor of the house ...
— Sally Bishop - A Romance • E. Temple Thurston
... Hugo she lifted her chin, and moved forward a little. She worshipped Victor Hugo with a passion unreflecting and intense, simply because certain detached lines from his poems were the most splendid occupants of her memory, dignifying every painful or sordid souvenir. At last ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... feeling, that, if he pushed the comparison farther, he would reach some such atrocity as that, if the white and shining flower produced in its season again the black bean from which it sprung, so the white and shining soul must once more clothe itself in the same sordid, unpurified body from which it first had sprung. He had a vague glimmer that perhaps his simile was too material, and that this very body was the clay in which the springing, germinating soul was planted to bloom out in heaven, but dared not pursue it unadvised, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various
... orthodox theology, you observe; no denial of the fall,—nor substitution of Bacterian birth for it. Nay, nearly Evangelical theology, in contempt for the human heart; but with deeper than Evangelical humility, acknowledging also what is sordid in its civilisation. ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... voices were, who can say? The last historian of them is not a man credulous of good or moved towards the ideal; yet he is silent, except in a wondering impression of the sacred and the true, before the little Bearnaise in her sabots; and, notwithstanding the many sordid results that have followed and all that sad machinery of expected miracle through which even, repulsive as it must always be, a something breaks forth from time to time which no man can define and account for except in ways more incredible than miracle—so is the rest of the world. ...
— Jeanne d'Arc - Her Life And Death • Mrs.(Margaret) Oliphant
... beauty to ensure the perpetuation of the race, making men and women serve her purpose under the delusion that they are free agents and ministers to their own pleasure. Here were no pomp and circumstance to interpose their false colours before the sordid vista of the future. It lay glaringly before the imagination of the onlookers; and to avoid depths of spiritual depression, they had need to remind themselves of the happy blindness of ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... costumes of princes—have your horses shod with silver—live as luxuriously as a queen—make even Paris wonder at your lavish splendour if you will—though Paris is not easily roused to wonder—but I well know that you have a soul far above all such sordid temptations as these. They would have no weight with you, my noble Isabelle! But there IS a glory that may touch you—that of having conquered Vallombreuse—of leading him captive behind your chariot wheels—of commanding him as your servant, and your slave. Vallombreuse, who has never ...
— Captain Fracasse • Theophile Gautier
... 'To be sure,' said he, 'the longer you stay away from your mother, the more you will grieve her and your other friends; and possibly they are already afflicted at hearing of this foolish expedition you have made.' Notwithstanding all this, and without any hope of softening such a sordid heart, I again renewed the tale of my distress, and asking 'how he thought I could travel above a hundred miles upon one half-crown?' I begged to borrow a single guinea, which I assured him should be repaid with thanks. 'And you know, sir,' said ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various
... their pockets, a fact which each one stoutly denied with many weird and rather indelicate vows. I left them engaged in the pleasant game of recrimination, which had to do with stolen golf balls, the holding out of change and kindred sordid subjects. In my weakened condition this display of fraternal depravity so offended my instinctive sense of honor that I was forced to retire behind the protecting pages of a 1913 issue of "The Farmer's ...
— Biltmore Oswald - The Diary of a Hapless Recruit • J. Thorne Smith, Jr.
... excellent of the earth, and welcoming Christ or his disciples to their tables, to share their comforts, to refine and improve their intercourse; but if they occupy a high station in life, the gay, the dissipated, or the thoughtless—if in an inferior situation, the vulgar, the sordid, the intemperate, and the profane, frequent their dwellings. Religion is in both cases too often treated with ridicule and contempt, vilified as mean-spirited in its principle, and enthusiastic in its pretensions; and the truth of the Gospel treated, as its Author was when ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. II • Francis Augustus Cox
... spacious abode of Lehna Singh had loveliness enough to veil the sordid character of the life that was lived within its walls. Atma had not been ignorant of his kinsman's wealth and importance; but it is one thing to hear of wealth and to ponder in critical mood the fleeting nature of this world's weal, and quite another ...
— Atma - A Romance • Caroline Augusta Frazer
... the bus at the corner, whistling softly into the night. Like a bird her heart rose up and sang, at the lit pageant of London swinging by. Queer, fantastic, most lovely life! Sordid, squalid, grotesque life, bitter as black tea, sour as stale wine! Gloriously funny, brilliant as a flower-bed, bright as a Sitwell street ...
— Dangerous Ages • Rose Macaulay
... a place pleasant enough for the abode of happiness, in spite of its grim history and sordid reputation. The mark of thrift was about it, orchards bloomed upon its fair slopes, its hedges graced the highways like cool, green walls, not a leaf in excess upon them, not a protruding bramble. ...
— The Bondboy • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... A lover is not to be asked his whys! I ask you in return why you like the spire of a cathedral pointing up instead of down; or why the muses lift souls heavenward? Indeed, of all the fine arts granted the human race to lead men's thoughts above the sordid brutalities of living, methinks woman is the finest; for God's own hand fashioned her, and she was the last crowning piece of all His week's doings. The finest arts are the easiest spoiled, as you know very well; and if you demand how Mistress Hortense ...
— Heralds of Empire - Being the Story of One Ramsay Stanhope, Lieutenant to Pierre Radisson in the Northern Fur Trade • Agnes C. Laut
... an indiscretion. Scandal, had there been a romantic cause, and loss of reputation, had there been a great passion to make it more memorable as a sacrifice than a disgrace, would have seemed to her defiant mind something glorious. But here was a mere unbeautiful story—sordid, if misunderstood, and a little silly, if satisfactorily explained. And it could not be satisfactorily explained. Sara knew life too well to encourage herself by supposing that the real truth about her foolish ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... forsaken St. Saviour's for All Souls. She loved the grey old church in the market-place. Set in the midst of that sordid scene of chaffering and grime, St. Saviour's perpetuated for her the ancient beauty and the majesty of her faith. When she desired to forget herself, to sink humbly back into the ages, passive to a superb tradition, she went to St. Saviour's. When she wished to ...
— The Helpmate • May Sinclair
... propulsion of one of the automobiles—that, while you will be responsible for the 'shoving' of Ping, these delicate hands will flick Pong across France. Very good. Let the Press be informed; call forth the ballad-mongers. What would have been a somewhat sordid drive will become a winged flight, ...
— Jonah and Co. • Dornford Yates
... government? What dreams of settlement massacres, of stage robberies, of desperate fights, they may conjure up until the wheezy arrival of the Arizona Eastern locomotive disperses their visions with the blast of sordid actuality! ...
— Arizona's Yesterday - Being the Narrative of John H. Cady, Pioneer • John H. Cady
... your life! upon the rich harvest you have reaped during all these years; the amassed wealth, the gratified ambitions, the almost illimitable power, the adulation and homage,—all so precious to your sordid soul, and for which you have bartered honor, happiness, character, all, in short, that life is worth. Standing, as you do to-night, at the fiftieth milestone on life's journey, I congratulate you upon your recollections of the past, and upon your anticipations for the future, as you descend ...
— That Mainwaring Affair • Maynard Barbour
... give her what repairs she needs— A thorough overhauling; Her sordid crew shall be dismissed, To seek some honest calling. Brave Lincoln soon shall take the helm, On truth and right relying; In calm or storm, in peace or war, He'll keep her ...
— In The Boyhood of Lincoln - A Tale of the Tunker Schoolmaster and the Times of Black Hawk • Hezekiah Butterworth
... bookseller smiled cruelly as he replaced the prayerbook in the drawer, the key of which he turned, and turning toward the two young girls, whose delicate beauty, heightened by their fine toilettes, contrasted so delightfully with the sordid surroundings, he enveloped them with a glance so malicious that they shuddered and instinctively drew nearer one another. Then the bookseller resumed, in a voice hoarser and deeper than ever: "If you wish to spend four hundred francs I have a volume ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... beauty and fragrance of the lily of the valley, he will seek out the gaudy sunflower. If his spirit cannot rise to the plane of Shakespeare and Victor Hugo, he will roam into fields that are less fruitful. The spirit that is rightly attuned lifts him away from the sordid into the realms of the chaste and the glorified; away from the coarse and ugly into the realm of things that are fine and beautiful; and away from the things that are mean and petty into the zone of the big, the true, the noble, and the good. And so with body, mind, and spirit thus doing ...
— The Vitalized School • Francis B. Pearson
... expected or looked for. I confess that, before the war, I was no believer in the great qualities of those who are called "the people." They seemed to me to be living lives either selfish, sometimes brutal, always sordid; or else mean, narrow, and circumscribed by senseless conventions. I believed that society, if it progressed at all, would be forced forward by the few, that the many had not in them the qualities necessary for advance, ...
— Defenders of Democracy • The Militia of Mercy
... to the afflicted, in generosity to the conquered,—forbearing insults, forgiving injuries, overpaying benefits. Full of dignity themselves, they respect dignity in all, but they feel it sacred in the unhappy. But it is then, and basking in the sunshine of unmerited fortune, that low, sordid, ungenerous, and reptile souls swell with their hoarded poisons; it is then that they display their odious splendor, and shine out in the full lustre of their native villany and baseness. It is in that season that no man of sense or honor can be mistaken for one of them. It was in such a ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IV. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... Madoc, "I am indeed interested for thee. Thy heart is ingenuous and sincere; thy misfortune is poignant and affecting. Listen then to my directions. Receive and treasure up this small and sordid root. In its external appearance, it is worthless and despicable; but, Edwin, we must not judge by appearances; that which is most valuable often delights to shroud itself under a coarse and unattractive outside. ...
— Imogen - A Pastoral Romance • William Godwin
... from the evil it only took its courage. Henceforth, if he sins at all, his will be no bold and hazardous villany which, whilst it excites horror, can almost compel respect, but rather the low and sordid crime, the safe and ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard
... important man. To dash about Barbie in a gig, with a big dog walloping behind, his coat-collar high about his ears, and the reek of a meerschaum pipe floating white and blue many yards behind him, jovial and sordid nonsense about home—that had been his ideal. His father, he thought angrily, had encouraged the ideal, and now he forbade it, like the brute he was. From the earth in which he was rooted so deeply his father tore him, to fling him on a world he had forbidden him to ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown
... Morgenstern had prophesied correctly. The news had spread fast enough, and by degrees the country was overrun, and a busy city sprang up not many miles away. They saw it with sorrow, certainly not from sordid motives—for within three months of the night when the old man visited Kopfontein, Dyke and his brother had picked up here and there all they cared to seek—but from a liking for the quiet life and their home ...
— Diamond Dyke - The Lone Farm on the Veldt - Story of South African Adventure • George Manville Fenn
... Betty? I haven't been here since you went away, dear—what was there to bring me? Old Tom would make a cow pasture out of the Garden of Eden, wouldn't he—a beautiful, practical, sordid ...
— The Prodigal Judge • Vaughan Kester
... and doth breathe divinity into the very dust we tread. With love shall life roll gloriously on from year to year, like the voice of some great music that hath power to hold the hearer's heart poised on eagles' wings above the sordid shame ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard
... household in a solitude which to her was ideal. To-night as she wandered up and down her room like a little distraught ghost, all the happy and romantic associations of the home she had loved and cherished for so many years seemed cut down like a sheaf of fair blossoms by a careless reaper,—a sordid and miserable taint was on her life, and she shuddered with mingled fear and grief as she realised that she had not even the simple privilege of ordinary baptism. She was a nameless waif, dependent on the charity of Farmer Jocelyn. True, the old man had grown to love her and ...
— Innocent - Her Fancy and His Fact • Marie Corelli
... memories of her helpfulness in such modest perils as we tempt, of her sweet companionship through long days empty of annoyance—land left behind with its striving crowds, its short views, its idols of the market-place, its sordid worries; the breast flung wide to the horizon, swept by wholesome salt airs, void perhaps, but so beatifically clean! Then it was that we learned her worth, drinking in the knowledge without effort, lulled hour after hour by her whisperings which asked for no answer, by the pulse of her ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... on the summit gazing down, And the earth looked sordid and dull and brown, And neutral-tinted and neutral-souled; And all of life seemed a story told, And the only spot that was bright to see Was a patch of green that had bloomed for me Where a garden lived in a spring long fled, ...
— Cross Roads • Margaret E. Sangster
... well That sordid earth should pass to earth again: In those dark fanes where truth has ceased to dwell, Why should the shrine remain? Deep in the dust let all such pass away; Why should they not?—clay mingles but with clay: Such is dark Manhood's prime, From whose high nature all of Heaven has past, Whose ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, May 1844 - Volume 23, Number 5 • Various
... till sank the sun, Briton and Breton wrought, And Great and Little Britain won The noblest fight ere fought. It was a sailors' victory O'er pride and sordid gain. God grant for ever peace at ...
— Legends & Romances of Brittany • Lewis Spence
... earthly conflict. He must admit that the momentary desire to believe, to take refuge in the timeless, proceeded from a multitude of ignoble motives: from lassitude with the petty and repeated annoyances of existence, quarrels with the laundress, with the waiter, with the landlord; the sordid scramble for money; in a word, from the general spiritual failure of a man approaching forty. He thought of escaping into a monastery somewhat as street girls think of going into a house where they will be free from the dangers of the chase, from worry ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans
... run away during the night. Never had I taken so sudden and violent a dislike to anything as I then and there did to that estancia, where I was an honoured, albeit a compulsory guest. The hot, brilliant morning sunshone down on the discoloured thatch and mud-plastered walls of the sordid-looking building, while all about wherever I cast my eyes they rested on weeds, old bones, broken bottles, and other rubbish—eloquent witnesses of the dirty, idle, thriftless character of the inmates. Meanwhile my sweet, angelic child-wife, with her violet eyes dim with tears, was ...
— The Purple Land • W. H. Hudson
... well-nigh intoxicated with love—my brain could truly swear 'twas Sir Julian; and yet this he flung aside doth confute reason, and I must either ponder upon the this and that in endeavouring to conjoin mental and physical forces to sweet amity or give over that reaching wife's estate hath made of me a sordid fool, as hath it oft made woman heretofore. My senses up until I met one of two at the foot of the stair, I could make affidavit on. The mould of either could well trick the other, providing their heads were as muddled as mine, and in this matter I am ...
— Mistress Penwick • Dutton Payne
... him with the first bit of humor I'd found in many days. "You seem to talk just as though a cultural unit were set above, beyond, and spiritually divorced from anything so sordid as money, position, and the human equivalent of the barnyard pecking order," I told him. "So now let's stop goofing off, and put it into simple terms. You want me to join you willingly, to do your job for you, to advance your program. ...
— Highways in Hiding • George Oliver Smith
... times an upbuilding force and at other times a sinister influence, Gates completely typified a period in American history that, along with much that was heroic and splendid, had much also that was grotesque and sordid. The opera-bouffe performance that laid the foundations of Gates's great industry was in every way characteristic of this period. In 1871 Gates, then a clerk in a hardware store at twenty-five dollars a week, made his first attempt to sell barbed wire in the great cattle countries of the southwestern ...
— The Age of Big Business - Volume 39 in The Chronicles of America Series • Burton J. Hendrick
... away in the life I have described. But I think of myself, too; comforts, luxuries, indulgences, I value highly. Since my father's death I have tasted enough of poverty to know something of its bitterness; and to be doomed to it for life is appalling to me. The sordid cares of narrow means are so distasteful, that I cannot contemplate them with any degree of patience. After a day of exhausting mental effort, to return to a dingy, ill-furnished home,—to relieve professional labors by ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... been wandering upward to the old house rising above her with its sunny windows and its pointed gables. Perhaps, after all the sordid shifts and schemes of her previous existence, she had imagined she might lead an easier and a more respectable life within those walls. Then she looked towards the long green terraces, the valley, and the forest beyond. Her lip trembled, and turning suddenly, she fixed her eyes with burning ...
— The Danvers Jewels, and Sir Charles Danvers • Mary Cholmondeley
... write, I am perhaps freer than ever before from this sordid preoccupation; not by reason of fortunate investments and a plethoric bank balance, but because my needs now are singularly few and inexpensive, and the future—that Damoclean sword of civilised life—no longer stretches out before me, a long and arid expanse demanding provision. This preoccupation ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... am not rich, and yet my wealth Surpasseth human measure; My store untold Is not of gold Nor any sordid treasure. Let this one hoard his earthly pelf, Another court ambition— Not for a throne Would I disown My ...
— John Smith, U.S.A. • Eugene Field
... people of the Philippines have not ceased to deplore from the time of the conquest, by proscribing, under the most severe penalties, the power of trading, as now exercised by the provincial magistrates. The time is come when this struggle between duty and sordid interest ought to end, and reason, as well as enlightened policy, demand that in this respect our legislation should be reformed, in order that the mace of justice, instead of being prostituted in search of lucre, may henceforwards ...
— The Former Philippines thru Foreign Eyes • Fedor Jagor; Tomas de Comyn; Chas. Wilkes; Rudolf Virchow.
... when he sent them forth to preach the kingdom of heaven, seemed to St. Francis to be written in letters of flame. They haunted him waking and sleeping. "The lust of gain in the spirit of Cain!" what had it done for the world or the Church but saturate the one and the other with sordid greed? Mere wealth had not added to the sum of human happiness. Nay, misery was growing; kings fought, and the people bled at every pore. Merchants reared their palaces, and the masses were perishing. Where riches increased, there pride and ungodliness ...
— The Coming of the Friars • Augustus Jessopp
... Perseus, a son of Jupiter, was the first whaleman; and to the eternal honour of our calling be it said, that the first whale attacked by our brotherhood was not killed with any sordid intent. Those were the knightly days of our profession, when we only bore arms to succor the distressed, and not to fill men's lamp-feeders. Every one knows the fine story of Perseus and Andromeda; how the lovely Andromeda, the daughter of a king, was tied to a rock ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... motives, it should do so. That is genuinely constructive work, and will do more to a humane solution of the class struggle than all the jails and state constabularies that ever betrayed the barbarism of the Twentieth Century. It is no wonder that business is such a sordid affair. We have done our best to exclude from it every passionate interest that is capable of lighting up activity with eagerness and joy. "Unbusinesslike" we have called the devotion of craftsmen and scientists. We have actually pretended that the work of extracting ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... was glad when they drove out into the woods again, where the clear sunshine fell and the pines stood against the blazing winter sky motionless as iron trees. Her pleasure in the ride was growing less. To her delicate sense this life was sordid, not picturesque. She wondered how Williams endured it. They arrived at No. 8 just as the men were trailing down the road to work, after eating their dinner. Their gay-colored jackets of Mackinac wool stood out like trumpet notes in the prevailing white and ...
— Other Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... painful to any man of honorable feelings that, whilst a great rival nation is pursuing the ennobling profession of arms, his own should be reproached contemptuously with a sordid dedication to commerce. However, on the one hand, things are not always as they seem; commerce has its ennobling effects, direct or indirect; war its barbarizing degradations. And, on the other hand, the facts even are not exactly as prima facie they were supposed; for the truth ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v2 • Thomas de Quincey
... the novel, it won her instant fame and a small fortune. It was gloomy, pessimistic, excoriating, merciless, drab, sordid, and hideously realistic. Its people hailed from that plebeian end of the vegetable garden devoted to turnips and cabbages. They possessed all the mean vices and weaknesses that detestable humanity has so far begotten. They were all failures and ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... to his feeling of wrath that Nan Archdale should become cognisant of so sordid a tale, there was associated a feeling of shame that he, Coxeter, had overheard what it had not been meant that he ...
— Studies in love and in terror • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... Sordid rooms and vacant courts, Replete in years gone by with beds where statesmen lay; Parched grass and withered banian trees, Where once were halls for song and dance! Spiders' webs the carved pillars intertwine, The green gauze now is also pasted on the straw windows! What about the cosmetic ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... Sidney knew who the girl at 213 —— Avenue was. The paper she held in her hand was hospital paper with the heading torn off. The whole sordid story lay before her: Grace Irving, with her thin face and cropped hair, and the newspaper on the floor ...
— K • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... gratifying the revenge and the love of the people, gained very much upon their affections to his person: the first was, to imprison Ralph Bishop of Durham,[18] who having been raised by the late king from a mean and sordid birth to be his prime confidant and minister, became the chief instrument, as well as contriver, of all his oppressions: the second was, in recalling and restoring Archbishop Anselm, who having been forced ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. X. • Jonathan Swift
... how men, coming out of Europe and given millions of square miles of black fertile land mines and forests, have failed in the challenge given them by fate and have produced out of the stately order of nature only the sordid disorder of man." Out of this ache of confusion comes no lucidity. Sam McPherson is not sure but that he will find parenthood as petty as business was brutal; Beaut McGregor sets his men to marching and their orderly step resounds through the final chapters of his career as here recorded, ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... for any reason whatsoever, whether through lack of opportunity; through hereditary causes; or through repression, or—which occurs more frequently—as a commercial expediency, believing that her person will thus bring more in the matrimonial market—if, as we say, for any reason, however sordid, a woman escapes bodily sex-contact, she is called "chaste" and her ...
— Sex=The Unknown Quantity - The Spiritual Function of Sex • Ali Nomad
... one set more able to cope with the foreign foe, the others far less able. The hunting of the one is carried on with self-restraint, of the others with effrontery. The one can look down with contempt upon maliciousness and sordid love of gain, the other cannot. The very speech and intonation of the one has melody, of the other harshness. And with regard to things divine, the one set know no obstacle to their impiety, the others are of all men the most pious. Indeed ancient ...
— The Sportsman - On Hunting, A Sportsman's Manual, Commonly Called Cynegeticus • Xenophon
... touch had started the life in his veins; the revelation of a wandering searchlight had transformed his sordid world into a palace of delight. He accepted the fact without question. He had no wish to go ...
— The Odds - And Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... trials, gallows hung with thieves, archery with long bow and arbalest—everywhere fighting enough, as in Scott; and, also as in Scott, behind the private drama of true love, intrigue, persecution, the broad picture of society. It is no idealised version of the Middle Ages. The ugly, sordid side of mediaeval life is turned outwards; its dirt, discomfort, ignorance, absurdity, brutality, unreason and insecurity are rendered with crass realism. The burgher is more in evidence than the chevalier. ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... presence silence is the only language that is befitting. In such a presence sound is discord, for such enchantment as it begets cannot be made articulate. Its influence steals into the senses and lifts the spirit up. To defile or despoil such beauty would be to desecrate a shrine. But the sordid man sees in this symphony of color nothing else than a promise of fruit. His response is wholly physical, not spiritual at all. His spiritual sense seems atrophied and he can do nothing but estimate the bushels of fruit. He feels no respect for the beauty before him and it is evident that somewhere ...
— The Reconstructed School • Francis B. Pearson
... an inconsiderable stream; for it had a good deal more than a hundred miles to meander through before it should bear fleets on its bosom, and reflect palaces and towers and Parliament-houses and dingy and sordid piles of various structure, as it rolled to and fro with the tide, dividing London asunder. Not, in truth, that I ever saw any edifice whatever reflected in its turbid breast, when the sylvan stream, as we beheld it now, is swollen ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 48, October, 1861 • Various
... money for money's sake, and accumulated it from the love of accumulation, the case would have been totally different. He might then have been justly despised, and characterized as being of the earth, earthy—incapable of high and generous sentiments and aspirations—sordid, grovelling, and utterly despicable. Sir William Follett had, during twenty years of intense and self-denying toil, succeeded in acquiring an ample fortune, which he disposed of, at his death, justly and generously; and how many hours of exhaustion, both of mind and body, must have been cheered, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 363, January, 1846 • Various
... like many other children who afterwards for want of leisure neglected to compose a Ring or a Tristan. The theatrical life, I feel sure, did not differ greatly from the same life to-day. It is for the most part a sordid, petty existence, one in which one's days, weeks, months and years are frittered away; they pass and there is nothing tangible to show for them. When performances are not over until late, no one rises early; then come the rehearsals; then ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... estimation, hard put to it for suitable companionship in Chicago. She was Eastern-bred-Boston—and familiar in an offhand way with the superior world of London, which she had visited several times. Chicago at its best was to her a sordid commercial mess. She preferred New York or Washington, but she had to live here. Thus she patronized nearly all of those with whom she condescended to associate, using an upward tilt of the head, a tired droop ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... eternal curse. You are unworthy to be, or to be called, parents, for you are devoid of the least spark of that sacred feeling called Parental Love, a feeling which unfortunately in only too many parents is replaced by nothing but the most sordid, most brutal egotism. ...
— Woman - Her Sex and Love Life • William J. Robinson
... so little how to live his own life, exercised a wonderful influence over the lives of others. Sordid as was his career, the man himself was not without beautiful and generous impulses. He loved nature in an age when other men simply studied nature. He liked to look at the clear blue sky, or to admire the soft green fields and shapely trees, ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... at supper, a circumstance which pleased his wife but inspired Marietta with some distrust. She had never felt any sympathy for the brother who was so much older than herself, and who took a view of things which seemed to her sordid, and she did not like to see him sitting in her father's place, often talking of the house as if it were already his, and dictating to her upon matters of conduct as well as upon questions of taste. Everything he said jarred on ...
— Marietta - A Maid of Venice • F. Marion Crawford
... At that period of indigence and simplicity, the municipal museums, though usually kept shut, were always opened to foreigners. One evening an old woman with a candle showed me, for half a lira, the sordid museum of Arezzo, and in it I discovered a painting by Margaritone, a "St. Francis," the pious sadness of which moved me to tears. I was deeply touched, and Margaritone, of Arezzo became from that day my ...
— Penguin Island • Anatole France
... school world, and he had paid a price for it. I reflected acutely that the sense of such differences, such superiorities of quality, always, on the part of the majority—which could include even stupid, sordid headmasters—turn infallibly ...
— The Turn of the Screw • Henry James
... little civil list for your wife and for the requirements of the house and to pay her money as if it were a contribution, in twelve equal portions month by month, has something in it that is a little mean and close, and cannot be agreeable to any but sordid and mistrustful souls. By acting in this way you ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... for our lives; for, though in the gift of the first lord of the treasury, do we not owe them to the King who made him so? Did not the late King make my father an earl, and dismiss him with a pension of 4000 pounds a-year for his life? Could he or we not think these ample rewards? What rapacious sordid wretches must he and we have been, and be, could we entertain such an idea? As far have we all been from thinking him neglected by his country. Did not his country see and know these rewards? and could it think these rewards inadequate? Besides, Sir, great as I hold my father's ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... baker did not cover the mill-horse's eyes he would eat the corn, and take his own wages. So God covers our eyes, by leaving us to sordid thoughts, lest we should think of our own good works, and be puffed ...
— The Hermits • Charles Kingsley
... convicts. Judging from appearance as they sat in the assembly, a few were evidently hard cases, narrow-minded, sordid, ugly. To a number, dame Nature had dealt bountifully on the score of mind, they having noble foreheads, and bright, sparkling eyes, indicative of no small natural ability. One would think that some of these would have shone conspicuously in any of the learned professions, business ...
— The Prison Chaplaincy, And Its Experiences • Hosea Quinby
... she knew. Archie, after his marriage, led entirely by Marion and her ways and desires, never went towards Edinburgh. The wretched old lady soon began to feel herself utterly deserted; and when her anger at this position had driven love out of her heart, she fell an easy prey to the most sordid, miserable, and degrading of passions, the hoarding of money. Nor was it until death opened her eyes that she perceived she ...
— A Knight of the Nets • Amelia E. Barr
... closely into the matter, it may be doubted whether there was any real change, after all, in the sordid, worn-out, worthless and ill-jointed substance of the scarecrow, but merely a spectral illusion and a cunning effect of light and shade, so colored and contrived as to delude the eyes of most men. The miracles of witchcraft seem always to have had a very shallow subtlety ...
— Short Stories of Various Types • Various
... with Emily. Her father was sordid, her mother weak; persons of great wealth and greater selfishness. She was the youngest by many years, and left alone in her father's house. Notwithstanding the want of intelligent sympathy while she was growing up, and the want of all intelligent ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... 'cause his appetite's gone that makes him thin. I wasn't tellin' the truth about that," he stammered desperately; "he's jest hungry." The child's mouth quivered and he hesitated, yet he was determined to tell the whole of the sordid little tragedy now that he had begun. "But spendin' too much time with him when I should be workin' ain't the worst. To-day I done somethin' that mebbe she'll think ain't exac'ly square; an' my mother believes if ...
— Baldy of Nome • Esther Birdsall Darling
... of that sweet passion, 190 That it all sordid basenesse doth expell, And the refyned mynd doth newly fashion Unto a fairer forme, which now doth dwell In his high thought, that would it selfe excell; Which he beholding still with constant sight, 195 Admires the mirrour of ...
— The Poetical Works of Edmund Spenser, Volume 5 • Edmund Spenser
... the Office for the Ninth Hour. It was like a stream of water crossing unexpectedly a dusty way—Mirabilia testimonia tua! In psalm and antiphon, inexhaustibly [10] fresh, the soul seemed to be taking refuge, at that undevout hour, from the sordid languor and the mean business of men's lives, in contemplation of the unfaltering vigour of the divine righteousness, which had still those who sought it, not only watchful in the night but alert in the drowsy afternoon. Yes! there was the sheep astray, sicut ovis ...
— Gaston de Latour: an unfinished romance • Walter Horatio Pater
... to speak to the saintly Lowe thereon. "Useless," interjects the Emperor; "crime, hatred, is his nature. It is necessary to his enjoyment to torture me. He is like the tiger, who tears with his claws the prey whose agonies he takes pleasure in prolonging." The audience then closes and the sordid ...
— The Tragedy of St. Helena • Walter Runciman
... of pretext; it was a war of party, and those who wished to re-establish federalism may have acted with good faith. Now there is neither principle, nor pretext, nor plan, nor the shadow of reason or legality. Disloyalty, hypocrisy, and the most sordid calculation, are all the motives that can be discovered; and those who then affected an ardent desire for the welfare of their country have now thrown aside their masks, and appear in their true colours; and the great mass of the people, who, thus passive and oppressed, allow their ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca
... behind the cambric, was heard to murmur something about a sordid spirit, people whose minds never soared, and old maids who knew nothing of the strength of ...
— It Might Have Been - The Story of the Gunpowder Plot • Emily Sarah Holt
... What sordid Devil prompted her to that? Why, I am known to all the World a Cuckold; The very Boys i'th' street must point at me; But hold, this new Intelligence struck out the old, And made me ...
— The Fatal Jealousie (1673) • Henry Nevil Payne
... least be honestly silent; and "bear my indigence with dignity," as you once said. The insuperable difficulty of Frederic is, that he, the genuine little ray of Veritable and Eternal that was in him, lay imbedded in the putrid Eighteenth Century, such an Ocean of sordid nothingness, shams, and scandalous hypocrisies, as never weltered in the world before; and that in everything I can find yet written or recorded of him, he still, to all intents and purposes, most tragically lies THERE;—and ought not to lie there, if any use is ever to be had of ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1834-1872, Vol II. • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... born, the rich, and the accomplished monsieur du Plessis, had taken for his wife a maid obscurely defended, and with no other dowry than her virtue!—My very affection for you would, in the general opinion, lose all its merit, and pass for sordid interest:—I should be looked upon as the bane of your glory;—as one whose artifices had ensnared you into a forgetfulness of what you owed to yourself and family, and be despised and hated by all who have a regard for you.—This, monsieur, continued she, is what I ...
— The Fortunate Foundlings • Eliza Fowler Haywood
... wind still blew in eddies of sand; dry leaves and stray bits of newspaper danced madly through the air; the high houses near the Segovia Bridge, their narrow windows and galleries hung with tatters, seemed greyer and more sordid than ever when glimpsed through an atmosphere ...
— The Quest • Pio Baroja
Copyright © 2025 Dictionary One.com
|
|
|
