"Blindness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... enter; hear The wish too strong for words to name; That in this blindness of the frame My Ghost may feel ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang
... much rubbish and filth around us, and the sight of the Ophthalmic Hospital of the English Knights of Saint John, standing in the beauty of cleanness and order beside the road, did our eyes good. Blindness is one of the common afflictions of the people of Palestine. Neglect and ignorance and dirt and the plague of crawling flies spread the germs of disease from eye to eye, and the people submit to it with pathetic and irritating fatalism. It is hard to persuade these poor souls ...
— Out-of-Doors in the Holy Land - Impressions of Travel in Body and Spirit • Henry Van Dyke
... characteristic of my habits at that day, got to love me as a brother or comrade. It is not easy to describe the affection of an attached slave, which has blended with it the pride of a partisan, the solicitude of a parent, and the blindness of a lover. I do think Neb had more gratification in believing himself particularly belonging to Master Miles, than I ever had in any quality or thing I could call my own. Neb, moreover liked a vagrant life, and greatly encouraged Rupert and myself in idleness, and a desultory ...
— Afloat And Ashore • James Fenimore Cooper
... punishes it, by directly answering the prayer that is profanely uttered. J. H. was a notorious swearer. He had a singular habit of calling on God to curse his eyes. After some years, this awful imprecation was verified. He was afflicted with a disease in his eyes, which terminated in total blindness. This so affected his general system, that he gradually sunk under it, and went to give up his account. A number of similar cases, some of them still more awful, you will find in the tract ...
— Anecdotes for Boys • Harvey Newcomb
... being somewhat learned in men, my father; and now the gods have smitten my brother with madness that he should try to slay me, and myself with blindness that I should, unknowingly, order the death of one I loved most. Look, my father, I join you in your mourning, with black robes and ashes; I come to weep with you at the feet of Fate—you whose love for me has lost you a son, and to offer ...
— The Lion's Brood • Duffield Osborne
... troublesome enough. On the 22nd February accordingly snow-spectacles were distributed to all the men, an indispensable precaution, as I have before stated, in Arctic journeys. Many of the Chukches were also attacked with snow-blindness somewhat later in the season, and were very desirous of obtaining from us blue-coloured spectacles. Johnsen even stated that one of the hares he ...
— The Voyage of the Vega round Asia and Europe, Volume I and Volume II • A.E. Nordenskieold
... you see—in all that, there is nothing whatever to bring me forward again. My fatal mistake last year, I think now, lay in my accepting what she gave me—accepting it so readily, so graspingly even. That was my fault, my blindness, and—it was as unjust to her—as it was hopeless for myself. For hers is a nature"—his eyes came back to his friend; his voice took a new force and energy—"which, in love at any rate, will give all or nothing—and will never be happy itself, or bring happiness, till it gives all. That is what ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... star;— Nor see those happy eyes The leaves that withering droop and fall, Nor hear, when, from its northern hall, The neighboring winter sighs; Or, if they see, the shortening days But seem to them to close in kindness; For longer joys, in lengthening nights, They thank the heaven in blindness. ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... uncomfortable. She was even on the borders of making the unpleasant discovery that the business of life—and that not only for North Pole expeditions, African explorers, pyramid-inspectors, and such like, but for every man and woman born into the blindness of the planet—is to discover; after which discovery there is little more comfort to be had of the sort with which Helen was chiefly conversant. But she escaped for the time after a very simple and primitive fashion, although it ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald
... and ash and thorn, By the rowan tree, This was done ere we were born: Kith nor kin are we Of the folk whose blindness Shut you out with scathe and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, January 7, 1914 • Various
... first spoken to Barclay of the impending strike, was reproduced almost word for word, as well as that on the occasion when McGrath had been present, and therefrom the "Record" went on to deduce that not even Peter Rathbawne, with all his obstinacy, all his blindness to the welfare of his employees, was responsible for their present destitution in the same sense as was the Lieutenant-Governor, who might have avoided the strike by a conciliatory word, and who, instead, ...
— The Lieutenant-Governor • Guy Wetmore Carryl
... veranda with a closed book on his knee, and, as it were, looked out upon his solitude, as if the fact of Captain Whalley's blindness had opened his eyes to his own. There were many sorts of heartaches and troubles, and there was no place where they could not find a man out. And he felt ashamed, as though he had for six years behaved like a ...
— End of the Tether • Joseph Conrad
... poured from him, not as through the lips alone but from his very eyes and nostrils. That the girl was first of all a fool and damned was but a trivial part of the cry—of the explosion of his whole year's mistaken or half-mistaken inferences and smothered indignation. With equal flatness and blindness he accused her of rejoicing in the death of Kincaid: the noblest captain (he ramped on) that ever led a battery; kindest friend that ever ruled a camp; gayest, hottest, daringest fighter of Shiloh's field; fiercest for man's purity that ...
— Kincaid's Battery • George W. Cable
... it?" she asked. "She chatted on—quite cheerfully as I remember it. And I—I stumbled round and fell into a chair, cold and trembly and sick with the awful horror of blindness, for the first time in my life. I thought I had imagined before what it was to be blind—just by shutting my eyes for a second. But as I sat there in the blackness, and listened to that girl chatter, and realized that it had never occurred to her to light a lamp—then ...
— Seven Keys to Baldpate • Earl Derr Biggers
... terrible calamity, to grope in total darkness through this world; never to look upon the bright sky, the green fields; never to see the faces of loved ones; but what was it in comparison to the loss of a soul? I would rather have my eyes plucked out of my head and go down to my grave in total blindness ...
— Moody's Anecdotes And Illustrations - Related in his Revival Work by the Great Evangilist • Dwight L. Moody
... their sides, and padded stumps in their sleeves, and a sick child hired to carry a cup for them. There were some who had no legs, and pushed themselves upon a wheeled platform—some who had been favored with blindness, and were led by pretty little dogs. Some less fortunate had mutilated themselves or burned themselves, or had brought horrible sores upon themselves with chemicals; you might suddenly encounter upon the street a man holding ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair
... characters (one kind of color-blindness, hemophilia, one kind of night-blindness, atrophy of the optic nerve, and a few ...
— Applied Eugenics • Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill Johnson
... What prepossession, what blindness, must it be to compare the son of Sophroniscus to the Son of Mary! What an infinite disproportion there is between them! Socrates, dying without pain or ignominy, easily supported his character to the last; and if his death, however ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... Jacobins of 1792. The offer of a restored imperial dignity in Germany was declined by the Emperor of Austria at the instance of his Minister. With characteristic sense of present difficulties, and blindness to the great forces which really contained their solution, Metternich argued that the minor princes would only be driven into the arms of the foreigner by the establishment of any supreme German Power. They would probably desert Napoleon if the ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... mother, Joanna, died, crazed and of a broken heart, from the indifference, perfidy, and neglect of her husband, Philip, Archduke of Austria. Her story reads like a novelist's plot, and reasonably too; for every fiction of woman's fidelity in love and boundlessness and blindness of affection is borrowed from living woman's conduct. Woman originates heroic episodes, her love surviving the wildest winter of cruelty and neglect, as if a flower prevailed against an Arctic climate, despite the month-long night and severity of frosts, and ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... was with the little old man, who was so wise and great about everything else, and so foolish about his own boy. In the blindness of his love he robbed his boy of ...
— The University of Hard Knocks • Ralph Parlette
... turned toward the fire, he perceived the cause of his mishap: he had overslept himself and it was nearly out. By the way in which it was scattered abroad and the smouldering of the fur which was about his throat and arms, he guessed that in his blindness and instinctive desire for warmth, he had thrown himself upon its ashes. Having gathered what remained of it together, he flung on more fuel and set to work to chafe his extremities, restoring circulation. He was too chilled to think of attempting ...
— Murder Point - A Tale of Keewatin • Coningsby Dawson
... form. The hawk-like figure and markings of the cuckoo serve only to accentuate the disparity, which is perhaps greatest when the parent is the hedge-sparrow—so plainly-coloured a bird, so shy and secretive in its habits. One never ceases to be amazed at the blindness of the parental instinct in so intelligent a creature as a bird in a case of this kind. Some idea of how blind it is may be formed by imagining a case in widely separated types of our own species, which would be a parallel ...
— Birds in Town and Village • W. H. Hudson
... blindness, whispered Babbalanja to Media, "My lord, methinks this Pani must be a poor guide. In his journeys inland, his little child leads him; why not, ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. II (of 2) • Herman Melville
... glittering ice-field, by the caves of the lost Dordogne, Ung, a maker of pictures, fell to his scribing on bone Even to mammoth editions. Gaily he whistled and sung, Blessing his tribe for their blindness. Heed ye the ...
— Verses 1889-1896 • Rudyard Kipling
... it be heeded as the facts of inheritance are better known by all, is, Keep Fit for Parenthood. The sins of youth, so often sins of ignorance, carelessness, and unbridled passion, which doom childhood to blindness, to congenital deficiency of all kinds, to permanent twist of mental powers, or to lack of ability to meet life's demands—these sins of youth will be less in evidence when education is fitted to life's full responsibilities ...
— The Family and it's Members • Anna Garlin Spencer
... my deepest wants, lead me to it; and should I not obey them? There is no room to harbor a doubt about it. My friends will look upon it with astonishment, and probably use the common epithets, delusion, fanaticism, and blindness. But so I wish to appear to minds like theirs; otherwise this would be unsatisfactory to me. Men call that superstition which they have not the feeling to appreciate, and that fanaticism which they have not the spiritual ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott
... appeased even by Lucille's representation that it was only to gratify and not to impoverish her parents. "And thou, too, canst leave me!" he said, in that plaintive voice which had made his first charm to Lucille's heart. "It is a double blindness!" ...
— The Pilgrims Of The Rhine • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... beguile the soul with damnable doctrines, that swerve from faith and godliness, 'They have chosen their own ways,' saith God, 'and their soul delighteth in their abominations. I also will choose their delusions, and will bring their fears upon them' (Isa 66:3,4). I will smite them with blindness, and hardness of heart, and failing of eyes; and will also suffer the tempter to tempt and affect his hellish designs upon them. 'God shall send them strong delusion, that they should believe a lie: that they all might be damned who believed not the truth, but had pleasure in ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... what need had Schmettau of haste? The terms had not yet got signature, perfection of settlement on every point; nor were they at all well kept, when they did! Considerable flurry, temporary blindness, needless hurry, and neglect of symptoms and precautions, must be imputed to poor Schmettau; whose troubles began from this moment, and went on increasing. The Austrians are already besetting Elbe Bridge, rooting up the herring-bone balks; and approaching our Block-house,—sooner than ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... standard by which to measure what licenses they took in versification,—the one in his translations, the other in his poems. The unmanageable verses in Milton are very few, and all of them occur in works printed after his blindness had lessened the chances of supervision and increased those of error. There are only two, indeed, which seem to me wholly indigestible ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... one has come to my time of life, to sit and speculate on the singular mental blindness of mortal man, such as that which kept Nat unaware of the real, rock-bottom reason why he was working so hard on the Beech Street house. I daresay the young idiot thought his motives as much selfish as anything else—told himself that he wanted a comfortable home—and this was his ...
— The Fortune Hunter • Louis Joseph Vance
... so often she took For pure love in the simple repose of its purity— Her own heart thus lull'd to a fatal security! Ha! would he deceive her again by this kindness? Had she been, then, O fool! in her innocent blindness, The sport of transparent illusion? ah folly! And that feeling, so tranquil, so happy, so holy, She had taken, till then, in the heart, not alone Of her husband, but also, indeed, in her own, For true love, nothing else, after all, did it prove But a friendship profanely familiar? ...
— Lucile • Owen Meredith
... been particular enough to let it be known, where he composed the last verse of a poem first. With some artists the writing is a mere copying from memory of what is completely elaborated in the whole or in long passages: Milton wrote thus, through a habit made necessary by his blindness; and so Mozart, whose incessant labors trained his genius in the paths of musical learning, or brought learning to be its slave, till his first conceptions were often beyond the reach of elaboration, and remained so clear in his own mind that he could venture to ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 20, June, 1859 • Various
... went to Ferdinand's house—I am very inquisitive—and I found there your letters, madame; I took from among them those which would convince even the blindness of my father, for they ...
— The Stepmother, A Drama in Five Acts • Honore De Balzac
... of the beauty of the object of the poet's affections (cf. xxi. liii. lxviii.) and descriptions of the effects of absence in intensifying devotion (cf. xlviii. l. cxiii.) There are many reflections on the nocturnal torments of a lover (cf. xxvii. xxviii. xliii. lxi.) and on his blindness to the beauty of spring or summer when he is separated from his love (cf. xcvii. xcviii.) At times a youth is rebuked for sensual indulgences; he has sought and won the favour of the poet's mistress in the poet's absence, but the poet is ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... wake, and mourn for the many nights that had stolen past him at the gaming-table; sometimes, would seem to hear, upon the melancholy wind, the old songs of the minstrels; sometimes, would dream, in his blindness, of the light and glitter of the Norman Court. Many and many a time, he groped back, in his fancy, to Jerusalem, where he had fought so well; or, at the head of his brave companions, bowed his ...
— A Child's History of England • Charles Dickens
... Borella became "cold and a backslider," and an eye disease nearly blinded him. "The Lord cured my blindness, physical and spiritual, and I promist him then that I would serve him the rest of my life," and he did it with the virility and sternness of an Old ...
— The Kirk on Rutgers Farm • Frederick Bruckbauer
... of its apparition, Swann, who was no more able now to see it than if it had belonged to a world of ultra-violet light, who experienced something like the refreshing sense of a metamorphosis in the momentary blindness with which he had been struck as he approached it, Swann felt that it was present, like a protective goddess, a confidant of his love, who, so as to be able to come to him through the crowd, and to draw ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... Clausel for several weeks, until he declared that it would take 50,000 men three months to crush the mountaineers.[312] Above all, Wellington was known to be mustering a formidable force on the Portuguese borders. In truth, Napoleon seems long to have been afflicted with political colour blindness in Spanish affairs. Even now he only dimly saw the ridiculous falsity of his brother's position—a parvenu among the proudest nobility in the world, a bankrupt King called upon to keep up regal pomp before a ceremonious race, a benevolent ruler forced to levy heavy loans ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... excite our admiration, and awaken our hopes.... But the blood of our brothers of America shall not have flowed in vain. Their energy, their union in action, their courage will serve as an example to the proletariat of Europe. But would that this flowing of noble blood prove once again the blindness of those who amuse the people with the plaything of parliamentarism when the powder magazine is ready to take fire, unknown to them, at the ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter
... "Christmas" (1859); the opera "Robin Hood" (1860); the masque "Freya's Gift" and opera "Jessy Lea" (1863); and the operas "She Stoops to Conquer," "The Soldier's Legacy," and "Helvellyn" (1864). About the last year his sight, which had been impaired for many years, failed. His blindness did not however diminish his activity. He still served as professor in the Royal Academy, and dictated compositions,—indeed some of his best works were composed during this time of affliction. In 1873 appeared his oratorio, ...
— The Standard Oratorios - Their Stories, Their Music, And Their Composers • George P. Upton
... deeper nature, with its tranquil brightness, untroubled by passing storms, was unprepared for the shallow violence which swept over him, leaving no visible trace of its passage. No, she could not understand him—she could only hope that after they were married the blindness would pass from her love, and she would attain that completer knowledge for which she was striving so patiently. The transforming miracle of marriage, she trusted, would reveal this mystery, ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... the Night Coming with recovered sight— From the bliss of blindness free, That's what ...
— Shapes of Clay • Ambrose Bierce
... doctor called a halt and gave orders. "Spectacles at once," he said, "or I shall be having cases of snow-blindness ...
— Steve Young • George Manville Fenn
... and the lens or cornea caused by trauma or eye surgery or as a complication of glaucoma or cataracts; may cause blindness ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... vase of roses into the loggia and stayed there a few moments to listen to the voices of the night, moved by the regret of losing in the blindness of sleep the hours that pass under so beautiful a sky. How strange is the harmony between the song of the fountains and the murmur of the sea! The cypresses seemed to be the pillars of the firmament; the stars shining just above them tipped their ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... must so much the rather be assumed, that they, too, form a portion of the genus here represented by the blind and deaf; and the more so that it is just Isaiah who so frequently speaks of spiritual blindness and deafness; comp. chap. xxix. 18: "And in that day (in the time of the future salvation, when the Lord of the Church shall have put to shame the pusillanimity and timidity of His people), the deaf hear the words of the book, and the eyes of the blind see out ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions. Vol. 2 • Ernst Hengstenberg
... into a life of day-dreams, common enough among inactive clever people, but dangerous to the indulger, as all things are that distort the mental vision. At the point at which the play begins the day-dream has brought him to the pitch of blindness necessary for effective impact ...
— William Shakespeare • John Masefield
... after all, accept every tyrant, so long as they are allowed to keep their snouts in the mess, Napoleon has done right. Let him gag them, the rabble, and exterminate them—this will never be too much for their hatred of right, their cowardice, their incapacity, and their blindness." ...
— Bouvard and Pecuchet - A Tragi-comic Novel of Bourgeois Life • Gustave Flaubert
... sitting in darkness while the spring sun struck a million sparkles from a world yet locked in winter. The wind chilled his back, and he spread his hands to the camp blaze. In the torment of snow-blindness he wondered whether Tonty was treading these white wastes, seeking him, or lying dead of Indian wounds under the snow crust. The talk of the other snow-blinded men, sitting about or stretched with their feet to the fire, was lost on his ear. Yet his one faithful servant, who went with him on all ...
— Heroes of the Middle West - The French • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... to settle down and make music about him in his own home, letting people come there to hear it, instead of carrying it to them by road and river. For he was growing an old man, and it was not so easy to travel in his blindness as it used to be. Besides, the black wolf was also growing gray, and needed rest after these long years ...
— The Book of Saints and Friendly Beasts • Abbie Farwell Brown
... them aright, His presence would ever Afford us delight; But the third hand he has Is a very unkind hand, For this ogre's real name Is Little Behind Hand. Little Behind Hand Is tyrant indeed, From which we would have Mankind ever freed. Little Behind Hand Can seldom find work, For he stumbles in blindness And gropes in the dark, He is sullen and mean, Near-sighted and sour, Ruin and trouble 'Bout him constantly lower. Drive him off! Drive him off! Ere he fasten on you His fangs of destruction, The pestilent dew That he breathes on his victim To deaden the sense Of his presence and power, ...
— Our Profession and Other Poems • Jared Barhite
... the privy purse, and so far from lessening the taxes, would not even have been added to them, but served only as pocket money to the crown. The more I reflect on this matter, the more I am satisfied at the blindness and ill policy of my countrymen, whose wisdom seems to operate without discernment, and their ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... Providence that has given his chosen people into such keeping as the Lord Oliver's! Truly may he be likened to the chariots and horsemen of Israel—to the blessed Zerubbabel, who restored the true worship, which the Jews in their blindness had cast from them; to Joshua, whom the Lord appointed as a scourge to the wicked Canaanites; to Moses, who gave both spiritual help and carnal food to those that needed; to Gideon; to Elijah; to David; to Hezekiah; to the most wise Solomon; to all the ...
— The Buccaneer - A Tale • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... that nation were sent over at one time to be provided for; non-residence and pluralities were carried to an enormous height; Mansel, the king's chaplain, is computed to have held at once seven hundred ecclesiastical livings; and the abuses became so evident as to be palpable to the blindness of superstition itself. The people, entering into associations, rose against the Italian clergy; pillaged their barns; wasted their lands; insulted the persons of such of them as they found in the kingdom [o]; and when the justices made inquiry ...
— The History of England, Volume I • David Hume
... carriage which was waiting close to him, doubtless the Minister's carriage, and not caring who might see him. He breathed more freely; his indignation was beginning to cool down and turn to sorrow, and a desire to weep for the sad blindness of the world. Then he began to feel so lonely, so bitterly lonely. Only she, the partner of his past errors, had watched, had discovered, had acted. Only through her had he been able to hold his own with ...
— The Saint • Antonio Fogazzaro
... lifelong friend, wrote to another, "The noblest eye that God ever made is darkened: the eye so privileged that it may in truth be said to have seen more wonderful things and made others to see more wonderful things, than were ever seen before." But blindness could not subdue him any more than it could John Milton. He had others look through the telescope and tell him what they saw and then he would foretell what they would ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... help'd him to remove the prejudices of Education, that even that were sufficient; because, he that never doubts will never weigh things aright, and he that does not do that will never see, hut remain in Blindness and Confusion. ...
— The Improvement of Human Reason - Exhibited in the Life of Hai Ebn Yokdhan • Ibn Tufail
... my friendship," she replied; and as she spoke the words, her heart contracted with a spasm which was almost that of terror of the unknown purpose to which she felt, with a kind of superstitious blindness, that she was pledged. Fate had offered her this one good thing, and she must put it from her because she waited in absolute ignorance—for what? For love it might be, and yet her woman's instinct taught her that the only love which endures ...
— The Wheel of Life • Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow
... proceed beyond these simple ideas we have from sensation and reflection and dive further into the nature of things, we fall presently into darkness and obscurity, perplexedness and difficulties, and can discover nothing further but our own blindness and ignorance. But whichever of these complex ideas be clearest, that of body, or immaterial spirit, this is evident, that the simple ideas that make them up are no other than what we have received from sensation or reflection: and so is it of all our other ...
— An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume I. - MDCXC, Based on the 2nd Edition, Books I. and II. (of 4) • John Locke
... 32 Neither will the Lord God suffer that the Gentiles shall forever remain in that awful state of blindness, which thou beholdest they are in, because of the plain and most precious parts of the gospel of the Lamb which have been kept back by that abominable church, whose formation ...
— The Book Of Mormon - An Account Written By The Hand Of Mormon Upon Plates Taken - From The Plates Of Nephi • Anonymous
... German by birth; a few, the most dangerous, were native Americans, although they were Germans at heart. Everywhere, in the most unexpected places, these German agents were found, always busily carrying out their orders with regular German blindness, and never questioning or knowing anything about the hideous acts of their superiors. The German machine was, in short, like a huge wheel, with the brains at ...
— Winning a Cause - World War Stories • John Gilbert Thompson and Inez Bigwood
... poor girl threw herself on her knees before her father, beseeching him to protect her. But he pushed her back, and reproached her for slandering the most honorable and most inoffensive of men. Blindness could go no farther. ...
— The Clique of Gold • Emile Gaboriau
... grows. Insistence upon the impossible means delay in achieving the possible, exactly as, on the other hand, the stubborn defense alike of what is good and what is bad in the existing system, the resolute effort to obstruct any attempt at betterment, betrays blindness to the historic truth that wise evolution is the ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... blindness, that the great things were the easiest to do, but now I see that drudgery is an inseparable part of everything worth while, and the more worth while it is, the more ...
— Master of the Vineyard • Myrtle Reed
... short one. Happy enough were the parents to see their dear children back again, and Johnny quite cured of his blindness. ...
— The Nursery, December 1873, Vol. XIV. No. 6 • Various
... Rev. E. P——— was threatened with total blindness. A week after the father had been informed of this, the child died; and, in the mean while, his feelings had become so much the more interested in the child, from its threatened blindness, that it was infinitely harder to give ...
— Passages From The American Notebooks, Volume 1 • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... bright city stand, 'Tis but the mist o'er its dividing stream, That wraps the glory of its glitt'ring strand, Its radiant skies, and mountains silvery gleam; Oh, often in the blindness of our fate We wander very near ...
— Poems • Marietta Holley
... recalled nor recovered, was abroad on the winds of the world. His honesty, as he viewed it with Kate, was the very element of that menace: to the degree that he saw at moments, as to their final impulse or their final remedy, the need to bury in the dark blindness of each other's arms the knowledge of each other that ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume II • Henry James
... word for it; Pew's anger rose so high at these objections; till at last, his passion completely taking the upper hand, he struck at them right and left in his blindness, and his stick sounded ...
— Treasure Island • Robert Louis Stevenson
... necessities which flow from these natures. But Socrates did not conclusively define either the meaning of life or the form of perfect knowledge. He testified to the necessity of some such truths, and his testimony demonstrated both the blindness of his contemporaries and also his ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... conscience, "that he is doing to another what from another he would be loth to suffer." How deep are Thy ways, O God, Thou only great, that sittest silent on high and by an unwearied law dispensing penal blindness to lawless desires. In quest of the fame of eloquence, a man standing before a human judge, surrounded by a human throng, declaiming against his enemy with fiercest hatred, will take heed most watchfully, ...
— The Confessions of Saint Augustine • Saint Augustine
... "Certainly—his color-blindness. I confess, I'm puzzled. How could anyone else know it when Rogers himself didn't know it? That's what I should like to have explained. Perhaps there's only one man or woman in the world who could know—well, ...
— The Holladay Case - A Tale • Burton E. Stevenson
... Prince Ernest could be cool and sagacious in repairing what his imprudence or blindness had left to occur: that he must have enlightened his daughter as to her actual position, and was most dexterously and devilishly flattering her worldly good sense by letting it struggle and grow, instead of opposing ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... chafes and jibs and strikes out as he does nowhere else. Now, when any unhappy man or woman wakens up to discover how different life is now to be from what it once promised to become, let them know that all their past blindness, and precipitancy, and all the painful results of all that, may yet be made to work together for good. In your patience with one another, says our Lord, you will make a conquest of your adverse lot, and of your souls to the bargain. Say to yourselves, therefore, that ...
— Bunyan Characters - First Series • Alexander Whyte
... what he meant by that. No romance. How splendidly he had led that day! She had almost worshipped him. What blindness! What distortion! Was it really the same man standing there with those bright, doubting eyes, with grey already in his hair? Yes, romance was over! And she sat silent, looking out into the street—that little old street into which she looked day and night. A figure passed out there, ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... old misanthrope, "I'm too old now! And Hugh has failed me! Nothing from him. This sair blow cuts off the last hope! And no educated men of Thibet ever travel! Blindness—blindness everywhere!" he babbled on, while above him, two women, in an agonized leave-taking, were silently sobbing in each other's arms, while the happy Swiss servant made her boxes. Nadine Johnstone's utter wretchedness gave her no sense of a loss by the hand ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage
... all alike are dust And ashes in His sight. Is it not meet For those who bear His discipline, to say I bow submissive to the chastening Hand That smites my inmost soul? Oh teach me that Which through my blindness I have failed to see, For I have sinn'd, but will offend no more. Say, is it right, Oh Job, for thee to hold Thyself superior to the All-Perfect Mind? If thou art righteous what giv'st thou to Him Who ...
— Man of Uz, and Other Poems • Lydia Howard Sigourney
... Singular blindness! Mr. Buchanan lived for several years, as American ambassador, in England. It is to be presumed that while there he used his eyes, and possibly his brains. He must have noticed occasionally, at least, in his walks through ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... Englishwoman's need of upholding the illusion of prematrimonial purity in both husband and wife, and though I recognized that she had a perfect right to this way of thinking, yet it annoyed me and I preferred Emmy's ingenuous or assumed blindness. ...
— The Bride of Dreams • Frederik van Eeden
... Trevor approached—it could hardly be said he rode up to— the spring before mentioned, where he passed the footprints in stupid blindness. ...
— Twice Bought • R.M. Ballantyne
... a temporary DIMNESS OF SIGHT, attended with a Swimming or Uneasiness in the Head, by external Application to the Forehead; and is a promising Medicine in that Sort of Blindness called a GUTTA SERENA, and in Beginning CATARACTS, in which Cases it should be taken inwardly, as well as applied to the ...
— An Account of the Extraordinary Medicinal Fluid, called Aether. • Matthew Turner
... Greek; and then, from this, let them draw what conclusion they please. As for the loves of Pygmalion and of those other rascals no more worthy to be men, cited as proof of the nobility of the art, they know not what to answer, if, from a very great blindness of intellect and from a licentiousness unbridled beyond all natural bounds, there can be made a proof of nobility. As for the man, whosoever he was, alleged by the sculptors to have made sculpture of gold and painting of silver, they are agreed that if he had given as much sign of judgment ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Volume 1, Cimabue to Agnolo Gaddi • Giorgio Vasari
... hypocrites we have been. Our numerous passions, the complexities of our desires, the tenacity of their grasp, and the pleasant gentleness of its touch explain an infinity of temptations followed by wilful successes in blindness, all of which are nothing less ...
— Moral Principles and Medical Practice - The Basis of Medical Jurisprudence • Charles Coppens
... God. But what motives can we have to sacrifice our reason to a being, who makes us only useless presents, which he does not intend us to use? What confidence can we put in a God, who, according to our divines themselves, is malicious enough to harden the heart, to strike with blindness, to lay snares for us, to lead us into temptation? In fine, what confidence can we put in the ministers of this God, who, to guide us more conveniently, commands ...
— Good Sense - 1772 • Paul Henri Thiry, Baron D'Holbach
... rattling out the decayed wood and the debris of squirrel nests and owl lairs. In several cases these creatures themselves were disturbed, the lively squirrels to run chattering up the higher branches, the owls lumbering away into the forest, bumping against the trees in their blindness, and hooting mournfully at the disturbers of their peace. All this time Crow Wing continued with an unmoved face. Not an interstice in the roots of the trees escaped his eye and to Enoch, who could not imagine what he was looking for, his actions seemed without reason. But he knew better ...
— With Ethan Allen at Ticonderoga • W. Bert Foster
... eighteenth century in a new light and from a new standpoint, which he exhibits with singular skill and power. We could only wish that he had been a little less zealous on behalf of its novelty. His accents are almost querulous as he complains of historical predecessors for their blindness to what in plain truth we have always supposed that they discerned quite as clearly as he discerns it himself. 'Our historians,' he says, 'miss the true point of view in describing the eighteenth century. ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 9: The Expansion of England • John Morley
... Though most blind persons either naturally possess or soon acquire an ear for music, there are yet numbers who, from the want of it or from some other cause, never make any proficiency as performers on an instrument. Blindness, too, is often accompanied with some other disability, which disqualifies its victims for learning such trades as they might otherwise be taught. Hence many, rather than remain in the workhouse, take to grinding music in the streets. ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 430 - Volume 17, New Series, March 27, 1852 • Various
... Thus hailed on all hands as the one pre-eminently good man who had been associated with the Soudan, Gordon addressed himself to the hard task he had undertaken, which had been rendered almost hopeless of achievement by the lapse of time, past errors, and the blindness of those who should have ...
— The Life of Gordon, Volume II • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... prodigy and crime, When they killed him in his pity, When they killed him in his prime Of clemency and calm— When with yearning he was filled To redeem the evil-willed, And, though conqueror, be kind; But they killed him in his kindness, In their madness and their blindness, And they killed ...
— Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War • Herman Melville
... say that," I interrupted; "you shall not dare to say that in my presence. It is sheer slander, that you have caught up from some malignant British review, and, like all other serpents, you are venomous in proportion to your blindness! I am vexed with you, that you will not see with the clear, discerning eyes ...
— Sea and Shore - A Sequel to "Miriam's Memoirs" • Mrs. Catharine A. Warfield
... asked me," said Mr. Metcalfe, "to go with him to Chichester, to see the cathedral, and I told him I would certainly go if he pleased; but why I cannot imagine, for how shall a blind man see a cathedral?" "I believe," quoth I [i.e. Miss Burney] "his blindness is as much the effect of absence as of infirmity, for he sees wonderfully at times."' Ib. p. 174. For Johnson's eyesight, see ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 4 (of 6) • Boswell
... and his four brethren, of Sainte Aldegonde, of Olden-Barneveldt, of Duplessis-Mornay, La Noue, Coligny, of Luther, Melancthon, and Calvin, Walsingham, Sidney, Raleigh, Queen Elizabeth, of Michael Montaigne, and William Shakspeare. It was not an age of blindness, but of glorious light. If the man whom the Maker of the Universe had permitted to be born to such boundless functions, chose to put out his own eyes that he might grope along his great pathway of duty in perpetual darkness, by his ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... year passed away. Cristobal's mother only prayed now that her boy might suffer less: she had ceased to pray for the healing of his blindness. ...
— Fairy Book • Sophie May
... reports of such organizations now, fifty years after, must be touched by the lofty faith and the burning zeal which impelled many of these educational missionaries; but he must also be astonished by their ignorance of the negro and their blindness to actual conditions. They went with an ideal negro in their minds, and at first, they treated the negro as though he were their ideal of what a negro ought to be. The phases through which the majority of these teachers went were enthusiasm, doubt, disillusionment, and despair. Some ...
— The New South - A Chronicle Of Social And Industrial Evolution • Holland Thompson
... dare to do it. We have Fortitude enough to maintain it. This is our Business. The Nations may reap honest Advantages from it. If they have not Wisdom enough to discern in Season, they will regret their own Blindness hereafter. We will dispose ...
— The Original Writings of Samuel Adams, Volume 4 • Samuel Adams
... rational; habit encourages to practice one thing, but theory may induce to think another. Now, little credence as so unenlightened so illiberal an integer as I give to an equalization in the rights of man, certainly on many accounts my blindness gives less to the rights of women with man, and very far less to those rights over man: it might be inconvenient to be specific as to reason; but the working of an ultra-republican scheme, in which females should ballot as well as males, would briefly illustrate ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... sight, knowing he was doing wrong, for he would not understand that we were his friends, willing to help and love him. Oh, may all boys who read this seek earnestly to believe that Jesus is their very best Friend, and He only can remove their self-will and blindness of heart! ...
— God's Answers - A Record Of Miss Annie Macpherson's Work at the - Home of Industry, Spitalfields, London, and in Canada • Clara M. S. Lowe
... study. Of course there are occasionally brilliant successes in life where a man has been worthless as a student when a boy. To take these exceptions as examples would be as unsafe as it would be to advocate blindness because some blind men have won undying honor by triumphing over their physical infirmity and accomplishing great results in the world. I am no advocate of senseless and excessive cramming in studies, but a boy should work, and should work hard, at his lessons—in the ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes
... Spirits of their wives, and introduced them to each visitor in turn; fathers have taken round their daughters, and I have seen widows sob in the arms of their dead husbands. Testimony, such as this, staggers me. Have I been smitten with color-blindness? Before me, as far as I can detect, stands the very Medium herself, in shape, size, form, and feature true to a line, and yet, one after another, honest men and women at my side, within ten minutes of each other, assert that she is the absolute ...
— Preliminary Report of the Commission Appointed by the University • The Seybert Commission
... of his trouble and of his intentions, the good lady told him of her strong desire to hear a celebrated preacher at a neighbouring church on the Sunday evening, but said that in her partial blindness and weakness, she was afraid to venture, unless he would have the extreme goodness, as she said, to take care of her. He saw that she wished it so much that he had not the heart to refuse, and he recollected likewise ...
— Chantry House • Charlotte M. Yonge
... occasion indecision did the work of indolence. Unwittingly, the despot was assisting the efforts of the liberator. Viglius saw the position of matters with his customary keenness, and wondered at the blindness of Hopper and Philip. At the last gasp of a life, which neither learning nor the accumulation of worldly prizes and worldly pelf could redeem from intrinsic baseness, the sagacious but not venerable old man saw that a chasm was daily widening; ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... sky my head, Rain-deluged and wind buffeted; And many a thousand miles I crossed, And corners turned—love's labor lost, Till, Lady, to your isle of sun I came, not hoping, and like one Snatched out of blindness, rubbed my eyes, And hailed ...
— The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson for Boys and Girls • Jacqueline M. Overton
... man's fate to fall into the society of ruffians, remote from the protection of laws and government; what conduct must he embrace in that melancholy situation? He sees such a desperate rapaciousness prevail; such a disregard to equity, such contempt of order, such stupid blindness to future consequences, as must immediately have the most tragical conclusion, and must terminate in destruction to the greater number, and in a total dissolution of society to the rest. He, meanwhile, can have no other expedient than ...
— An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals • David Hume
... any decision in favor of war would be a leap in the dark, an act of inconceivable political blindness. It would be, to adopt a rough, but inevitable, term, a ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 3, June, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... said, "in the eye! in the eye!" He was shrieking and holding both hands frantically over his left eye. This time it might be serious, might have injured the eye-ball. Those swing-boards were deadly. Marise snatched up the screaming child and carried him into the kitchen, terrible perspectives of blindness hag-riding her imagination; saying to herself with one breath, "It's probably nothing," and in the next seeing Mark groping his way about the world with a cane, all his ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... complete. There was one influence she feared for the child and still secretly combated; that was my lord's; and half unconsciously, half in a wilful blindness, she continued to undermine her husband with his son. As long as Archie remained silent, she did so ruthlessly, with a single eye to heaven and the child's salvation; but the day came when Archie spoke. It was 1801, and Archie ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... matter settled, John went off and fought the Lithuanians again—he called it a crusade—and came home from that campaign without the sight of one eye, which he had lost through illness, a loss which soon led to complete blindness but not to any disinclination to go out anywhere and fight anyone. Father John must have been a considerable nuisance in the family. In the meantime Margaret added her mite to the general gaiety of nations by falling in love with Louis of ...
— From a Terrace in Prague • Lieut.-Col. B. Granville Baker
... in foreign lands. The sacred defense of the homeland—well and good. But if there was no offensive war there would be defensive war. Defensive war has the same infamous cause as the offensive war which provoked it; why do we not confess it? We persist, through blindness or duplicity, in cutting the question in two, as if it were too great. All fallacies are possible when one speculates on morsels of truth. But Earth only bears one single ...
— Light • Henri Barbusse
... world, but there is a gradual change in it either into heaven or into hell), were moved by new joy at being alive, saying that they had not believed that it would be so. But they greatly wondered that they should have lived in such ignorance and blindness about the state of their life after death; and especially that the man of the church should be in such ignorance and blindness, when above all others in the whole world he might be clearly enlightened in regard to these things.{1} Then they began to see the cause of that blindness and ...
— Heaven and its Wonders and Hell • Emanuel Swedenborg
... visual sensations include those of color and those of a general sensibility to light. Proof of the existence of these types of sensation is found in color blindness, a defect which renders the individual unable to distinguish certain colors when he is still able to see objects. Color sensations are the results of light waves of different lengths acting on the retina. While the method by which waves of one length produce one kind of sensation and those of ...
— Physiology and Hygiene for Secondary Schools • Francis M. Walters, A.M.
... may not tell thee just now," said the old knight, "only this—that I have been bidden to make it known to thee that thy father hath an enemy full as powerful as my Lord the Earl himself, and that through that enemy all his ill-fortune—his blindness and everything—hath come. Moreover, did this enemy know where thy father lieth, he ...
— Men of Iron • Ernie Howard Pyle
... the method of the critical school must be used tentatively and without dogmatism. Moreover, we must always remember that the critical student comes to his task with assumptions which are oftentimes more potent with him from his very blindness to their existence. Assumption in scientific investigation is inevitable. Suppose a critic to be markedly under the influence of some evolutionary hypothesis. Suppose him to believe that the formula which ...
— Understanding the Scriptures • Francis McConnell
... nearing, curious, Thou dim, uncertain spectre—bringest thou life or death? Strength, weakness, blindness, more paralysis and heavier? Or placid skies and sun? Wilt stir the waters yet? Or haply cut me short for good? Or leave me here as now, Dull, parrot-like and old, with crack'd ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... this?' said Sikes; backing the inquiry with a very common imprecation concerning the most beautiful of human features: which, if it were heard above, only once out of every fifty thousand times that it is uttered below, would render blindness as common a disorder as measles: 'what do you mean by it? Burn my body! Do you know who you are, ...
— Oliver Twist • Charles Dickens
... recollections. The subdued sound of soft words rang around him, but his thoughts were lost, now in the contemplation of the past sweetness and strife of Carimata days, now in the uneasy wonder at the failure of his judgment; at the fatal blindness of accident that had caused him, many years ago, to rescue a half-starved runaway from a Dutch ship in Samarang roads. How he had liked the man: his assurance, his push, his desire to get on, his conceited good-humour and his selfish eloquence. He had liked his very faults—those faults ...
— An Outcast of the Islands • Joseph Conrad |
